Daily Dose

From The British Essayists, Volume 10, edited by Rev. Robert Lynam

HEREBY

"I hereby therefore give the genteel part of the learned world to understand, that every thought which is agreeable to nature, and expressed in language suitable to it, is written with ease."

From Guardian #12, Wednesday, March 25, 1713, by Richard Steele.

A Very Short Christmas Dinner

Christmas dinner at what the Fathers used to call "the Parakeet" was a grim business even back in the day. Not one of 'em could cook so much as toast, what with women to look after them all their lives -- before they had their troubles. Brother Morris got himself a copy of that Joy of Cooking finally from his friend in Chicago. Studied that book like he was back at seminary. Didn't do too bad, that first year, but for the Jello-salads that wouldn't set in the heat. The desert's not kind to that kind of thing. (This is probably the last picture they let Father Brian take before they found his collection in the laundry room and confiscated his cameras.)

Daily Dose

From Mother Ireland: A Memoir, by Edna O'Brien

B & B

"Born and bred in a townland that bordered on other townlands of equal indistinctiveness."

From Chapter 2, My Home Town

Another Very Short Christmas Story

"They sent me up that ladder with the damned bell," Carrie told us later, "wasn't my idea." The photographer from the Yuma Sun always denied he'd done any such thing. However she got there, everybody agreed after about just the two things: 1) Carrie looked real pretty when they printed the picture in the paper, and 2) the additional weight took poor Emmet and the ladder down hard into parking lot. The girl didn't end up with a scratch on her. "Of course it was sweet Lou Hudson who got the worst of it," Carrie said, "when Mrs. Hudson saw that damned picture in the paper and put two and two together. Next thing I knew, that crazy lady drove her Buick through the display window, I was out of a job, and Lou stopped paying the note on my car and I had to move out of the trailer. That," she used to laugh, "was a pretty shitty Christmas all 'round!"

Daily Dose

From The Time of the Doves, by Merce Rodoreda, translated by David Rosenthal

SOMETIMES

"Sometimes I'd heard people say, 'That person's like a cork,' but I never understood what they meant. To me a cork was a stopper. If I couldn't get it back in the bottle after I'd opened it I'd trim it down with a knife. Like sharpening a pencil. And the cork would squeak. It was hard to cut because it wasn't hard or soft. And finally I understood what they meant when they said, 'That person's like a cork...' Because I was like a cork myself. Not because I was born that way but because I had to force myself to be like a cork to keep going because if instead of being a cork with a heart of stone I'd been like before, made of flesh that hurts when you pinch it, I'd never have gotten across such a high, narrow, long bridge."

From page 138

A Very Short Christmas Story

Grandma Mona kept the liquor under the kitchen sink, "where the kids know not to get into things." That was the idea, anyway. Every year she set up her Christmas village on the end-table by the big chair. Her cigarettes lived under the church. When she wasn't smoking, which wasn't often, she'd put her ashtray under there too. The kids still talk about the cloud that hung over the pine trees, and the ring from her high-ball on the mirrored skating rink. The year the older boys got into the Jameson was the same Christmas Mona finally burned the church down. "You had to laugh," she told Father Michael when he visited her in the hospital, "I was trying to get the coffee down their necks, so I didn't notice a thing until the curtains went. Funny little bastards, falling all over the kitchen, I'll admit that much, but I'll miss that chair."

Daily Dose

From The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin

TURN ON YOUR SIDE AND BEAR THE DAY TO ME

Turn on your side and bear the day to me
Beloved, sceptre-struck, immured
In the glass wall of sleep. Slowly
Uncloud the borealis of your eye
And show your iceberg secrets, your midnight prizes
To the green-eyed world and to me. Sin
Coils upward into thin air when you awaken
And again morning announces amnesty over
The serpent-kingdomed bed. Your mother
Watched with as dove an eye the unforgivable night
Sigh backward into innocence when you
Set a bright monument in her amorous sea.
Look down, Undine, on the trident that struck
Sons from the rock of vanity. Turn in the world
Sceptre-struck, spellbound, beloved,
Turn in the world and bear the day to me.

-- George Barker