Revisions of Home, Stones and Stars

Hi Carole, 

The www.Extralove.com site remains down, but Curt was able to retrieve a portion of text from a backup.

Below is a poem you wrote to Donna when her first husband died.

Untitled Revisions of home. Books on the mantel. Chair of ten years. Dust, the old thumbprints. Not unusual, this life after death. What connects all things: either habit, the daily routine that binds two people when one is gone Or an energy the survivor sits with in a dark corner talking; the spirit struggling to live through all it had known, until even these pieces of furniture seem drained, no longer practical? Answers never come. Accomplishment the acceptance of this fact – then the slow beginning of nothing familiar, changes that had never stopped coming, distance and its evidence – until like a dream of a woman being pulled back, unable to continue running, the memory rolls over gently, lifeless. Carole Leslie Marcus, 1977 Stones Dedicated to sons Joshua and Daniel Abril Either tumbled or thrown, they must learn how to fall without breaking. For them, there is always that falling, that breaking down, that struggle of a born-backward growth from boulders to stones. But first they must learn how to skid water three leaps at a time, how to assimilate as chalk on someone’s sidewalk, and how to lie, still as stones, on an old woman’s patio collecting soot and dust. While once they held the weight of the world on the tips of their shoulders, they have settled, lump backed, in community corners, waiting to turn into sand, and in that way be blown toward oblivion through the fingers of children. Carole Leslie Marcus Before Stars Before there were stars night was an eyeless staring with nowhere to look leading into, unmapped by any chart and always losing itself. Because of this, women were born, formed from the faces of candles, gasoline lanterns, or kerosene lights, with nothing to see looking onto, and which night knew nothing about from its distance. Then came their flames rising like points from their blind spots, forming stars, which night looking out of was seen seeing women. Carole Leslie Marcus Books Your books on the front porch resound of you, poetry, fertile sparse pages, all come inside. I select for your children the practical: dictionaries, a thesaurus, books about Einstein and seashells How proud you’d be as they leave for college two brothers together, you and I sisters instead We too once trounced to school, an inspiring  universe, hand in hand,  to renew ourselves in each other Listen! I hear you reading, your diction perfect,  like royalty even as your world caves in Then your children off on bicycles, or maybe worse, with questionable buddies While you struggle against the blinding white  of day, trampled bones, renegade blood  unleashed The assaults upon you unyielding, cherished echoes of family undone Bright possibilities pushed aside, until near end you find yourself again, effervescent, aglow And then you were gone, died so suddenly, and I am left with only half of myself. Hope Marcus 12 August 2003 Searching Your dawning silhouette spreads like a river through my  slotted window blinds opened each night  so the morning will find you. You come not from the obscure, disguised as footprints  along the waters edge, or as imprints on a moist grassy lawn. But from brightening horizons, your brilliance camouflaged in  sunrise and sunsets,hues of pink and orange that I cannot touch  or embrace as I comb wispy plains for a trace of you. A whisper, a breath before you again dissipate into  invisible dimensions now closed to me even though  we always travelled together to the end of our worlds. Hope Marcus, Nov. 2002

Extralove.com site is down

Hi Carole,

Have been having wondeful dreams about you. Playful. 

Unfortunately, www.extralove.com is down, a godaddy, the hosting service, problem that was supposed to have been fixed by now.

I tthink, i sincrerely hope, I have a copy of the graphics in the older computer, but haven't a clue how to actually restore the site, the software way, way beyond me now.

Love you bunches.

Mother's Day. May 10, 2020

Mother's Day 2020 

'Scary to Go to Work':

White House Races to Contain Virus in Its Ranks

By Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman

• May 10, 2020
  Updated 9:24 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is racing to contain an outbreak of the coronavirus inside the White House, as some senior officials believe that the disease is already spreading rapidly through the warren of cramped offices that make up the three floors of the West Wing.

Three top officials leading the government’s coronavirus response have begun two weeks of self-quarantine after two members of the White House staff — one of President Trump’s personal valets and Katie Miller, the spokeswoman for Vice President Mike Pence — tested positive. But others who came into contact with Ms. Miller and the valet are continuing to report to work at the White House.

“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Mr. Hassett said he wore a mask at times at the White House, but conceded that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”

He added: “It’s a small, crowded place. It’s, you know, it’s a little bit risky. But you have to do it because you have to serve your country.”

May 8, 2020. Celeste and Miguel. Outside.
Sideyard Mother's Day short stop by visit.
Wonderful seeing them!

Article excerpt below also from the New York Times

Cases soar past four million worldwide, and cautionary reopening tales emerge.

Worldwide, the officially reported number of coronavirus cases has soared above four million people across 177 countries, and more than a quarter million people have died, according to a New York Times database.

For many reasons, the numbers are almost certainly drastic undercounts, but tracking reports regionally and from specific countries can reveal trends, like uneven outbreaks in the U.S., the rising crisis in Russia and the ebbing of Italy’s disaster.

At the same time, small new outbreaks and other warning signs have been detected in countries that had been successful in containing the virus, presenting a cautionary tale as nations around the world debate whether to restart their economies.

China, the country where the outbreak began, began to to reopen weeks ago after reports of new cases slowed to a relative trickle. It now ranks behind 10 other countries, including Brazil, the U.K. and Iran, in its official count of cases.

Drive-by Birthday

Saw first drive-by birthday party at Coral Reef Park, was so eerie and sad. A lovely day, the sun in the sky gently falling, mellow yellow covering benches and trees and grassland, and a line of cars, waving ballons. 

Peopleless.

Passover, 2020

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Hi Carole,

Perhaps more ickiness than love, frightening.  A break with streaming from the MET Eugene Onegin. Superb opera!!!!

Positively crazy times here, topsy-turvey. Your kids OK ... 

From space.com, relating to test to prove string theory:

Axion particles are believed to have incredibly low masses, potentially ranging from a millionth of the mass of an electron down to zero mass. The team also looked for signs of "axion-like particles," which are a broader class of ultra-low-mass particles with similar properties to axions, according to the statement. 

Additionally, these ultra-low-mass particles may sometimes convert into photons — the particles that make up light — when they pass through magnetic fields. In turn, photons may also convert into axions under certain conditions. Both scenarios depend on the mass of the particles and how easily they can make the conversion, also known as convertibility, according to the statement. 

Love you.

NERF vs Captain Hook and Peter Pan

NERF gun vs Captain Hook and Peter Pan
February 20, 2020

The Xbox broke, 
twenty-year-old tube TV flickered.
Playing ensued. 

Miguel 15, William 9.

Stumped

Carole, I am so positively stumped without you... found your copy of Journeys in Wonderland, maybe transition(s) in it... hints? Is third person, easily changed to first. But alternative realities? I am so stuck!


WORKING COPY. Possibe closing to chapter one, ot not. 

Reflecting on that day, what also remained with me was Carolee’s full-heartedness, her kindness. It was my kid sister who ignored the splatter, timidly tippy-toed toward Mom, the glide of her feet inaudible. It was she, the youngest, who'd tugged at Mom’s bathrobe and wrapped her arms around her waist. Not me, Leslie, chickenshit, nearly wetting myself. Myrna had cleared out early on. It was the last born, seven-year-old Carolee who stepped up. 

As I said, my knowing, having already lived that timeline didn’t interfere with its happening.  And if it had turned out another way, who could say where Carolee and I would have ended up?  Our sisterhood wasn’t cut short then. Not that I had reason to think it might have although the stream of distancing might have been mangled somehow. Or I’d remember differently. However in all honesty, how could anyone forget something like that?  Still, you had to consider especially in light of Carolee’s proclivity, and her penchant for ventriloquism, throwing her voice like a time-space slingshot that would call out from faraway places. 

That day remained our secret, because Carolee made it so. Her reach then and in future years evidenced by her whimsy, the way she’d expand mythologies, explore the hidden power of inanimate things, extend them, make them malleable, turn them inside out. And suddenly — whoosh — a new beginning appeared bright and alluring renewed by a fresh perspective, her words transmuting the order of the universe. 

And now, in this present, both Carolee and her prequel, Sophie, no longer with me, I am hearing Carolee’s revelry from a yonder, feeling her prodding: her insistence: quit-ya-belly-aching, get a moving girl, you’ve a job at hand.  You must complete the story we began but could not finish together. 

***

Exhalation

Stories by  Ted Chiang, one titled The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling ....

January 3, 2020. Carole's Birthday

My dearest sister, Carole.

In Memory of Carole Leslie Marcus
1950 - 2002

This blog entry first created using 2017 computer... The look is different, font size smaller in previous posts. Pictures of your boys — grown men now! Both images from December, 2019.

Danny, spreading tahini on bread with bananas

Joshua and yours truly

www.Extralove.com