Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

261

If you have salal growing in your yard, you are fortunate. If there is a Western red cedar or hemlock there as well, you are indeed blessed.

260

We are all riding on a cross-country bus. When we get on, it is very crowded, and for a long while we travel across rivers, along flatlands, up hills and mountainsides, then down to the plains again, and nobody gets off, the bus doesn’t stop, and days and nights, years and decades, pass seamlessly.

Then the bus begins to make stops in villages, at crossroads, several times in the same city. People get off, one by one. Soon the bus is nearly empty.

Now it is your turn, next mine. The bus never stops for long and when it is finally empty, or so we are told by the driver, it will begin to fill up again with even more people.

How young and varied they all are!

 
Nicole . . . who?

259

Okay, so maybe I was unfair to Nicole yesterday, when I reflected on bloodlines of her and Tom, and how such beautiful people had proved unable to reproduce and had to resort to adoption--which in many ways is much easier than having children the normal, old-fashioned way, even if they were able to.

And is divorce any easier emotionally on an adopted child than on one born in a moment of--shall we call it--lust? I doubt it.

Nicole is one of the premier beauties of our time. In the movie "Dead Calm" the camera played lovingly on her face in a wide variety of carefully chosen lighting conditions, all to her advantage, and to the movie (and Sam Neill's) disadvantage. And she is no doubt lovely, lovely to look at. Whether or not she can act is beside the point, when you look like that.

Nicole can act and chooses plainness and even studied ugliness in "The Hours," when she plays Virginia Woolf-- a commanding role and demanding presence. Who would have  recognized Nicole, if the program notes hadn't identified her? And who among us did not murmur, early into the flick, "Oh, come on. That can't be Nicole." And to her venerable credit, never once did she betray the undeniable fact that she is
.  .   . beautiful.

I only ask, Can an unattractive woman ever be cast in the role of a beautiful one? If so, how is it done? I know millions of women who would buy into the process.

258

The camera sure loves her, Nicole Kidman. And her ex-hubby, Tom Cruise. A couple of cute kids. I sure wish they'd get back together and have  more kids.

Think of those genes!

If you don't know who he is, read no further

257

The following is an exercise in MS Word 2003’s Speech Recognition Dictation application. The poem is Robert Frost’s “Stopping By The Woods On a Snowy Evening"--in case you don't immediately recognize it, and I promise you won't:

"And stopping by the wayside is selling even “once these are the things I’m no is houses in the village so he will not see the stopping here to watch his was the law was still little horse was thinking clear to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake and RTC evening of the year he gives his hardest bills issued to ask if there is some mistake the only other sound asleep of EC winded down the flight the woods are lovely dark and deep that I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep"

And for those who might fault me, rather than MS, I point out that, yes, I did train Windows Speech Recognition.

Repeatedly and carefully.

Shame on you, Bill Gates. I know you and your staff have been working on this for years. But to market it in such . . . shape is near criminal.

Criminal? Yes, because money is involved. And deception.

Poet William Stafford

256

We have quoted him before, and he remains one of our Pacific Northwest favorite poets, though a decade dead. In his son's fine biography, Early Morning, Kim refers to him lovingly as "a kind of porcupine turned inside out: outwardly personable, congenial, hospitable, a good and easy friend, but inwardly bristling with pointed questions." [page 245] He continues by saying that, in the words of Sir Philip Sydney, a poet should think like a philosopher "but speak in the common idiom."

Kim quotes briefly from his father's poem, "Faux Pas":

In the jungle where you live wild animals will snarl at night,/and you will love the sound, its definite "Here I am."

Nice, whot?