Sunday, April 22, 2007

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

I am behind on everything: email (whose bright idea was it to sign up on a couple of high-volume listservs, AND about seventy bajillion different National Poetry Month "get a poem a day in your email!" dealies? I realized today I had so much crap in my inbox that I'd actually missed some real, sent-only-to-me emails. Eek!), house cleaning, reading, writing, submissions, NaPoWriMo (I think I'm two days behind on that now and I may just throw in the towel) ... everything.

Today my poetry group met out at the home of one of our members. Helen lives way out in the country, so we all gathered at Tonia's house and rode out together in Deborah's lovely Prius. On the way out there we saw a large wild turkey flying along beside the road and then it crossed in front of us and landed on the other side of the road. It wasn't flying very high, maybe three or four feet -- turkeys are not particularly aerodynamic. It actually looked rather like a vulture that had swallowed a basketball. I wouldn't have recognized it as a turkey until it landed, if someone hadn't pointed it out to me. And now I'm thinking about that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where Les Nessman finds out that turkeys can't fly. Well, apparently they can. Sort of.

I've been poking around trying to find out if by chance there might be any poetry readings or anything else vaguely literary going on in South Bend the week I'll be up there for my mom's surgery. So far, no dice. It's probably just as well, as I imagine I'll be booked fairly solid with the caretaking stuff.

I've also been reading Mark Doty's newest memoir, Dog Years, and really loving it. I am a sucker for good animal stories anyway, plus I like Doty's memoirs in general. I'm slowing down as I get close to the end, because I know it's going to get really sad pretty soon.

It's Little 500 Weekend here in Bloomington (aka "The World's Greatest College Weekend" aka "most sane people over the age of 25 or so stay as far away from campus as possible all weekend"). The Little 500 is the bike race made famous in the movie Breaking Away, which I really need to get around to owning. That movie came out just a few months before I arrived here as a dewy-eyed freshman, so I went to see it in the theater all excited that there was a whole movie about the place where I was going to be spending the next four years of my life. Little did I know, then, that I'd be spending at least the next 28 years here. Yes, I have lived here for almost thirty years. God, I'm old.

6 comments:

Garbo said...

Breaking Away captures Bloomington landmarks now long gone -- Sully's Oaken Bucket, the Betty Jean Shop, and so on. One shot of the courthouse square shows Tovey's Shoes, which had a giant clock embedded into the wall. That's the building where Janet Wampler and I got stuck on the roof after the trapdoor locked behind us. We climbed down an amazingly unsafe fire-escape ladder, which swung out into the air like a prop from a Buster Keaton novie. There's a lot more to that story, but now that Tovey's Shoes is gone, the story's hard to tell unless someone can get a sense of how tall that building was. I'm so glad that its memory is preserved in Breaking Away.

Kelli Russell Agodon - Book of Kells said...

Anne--

RE: I'm two days behind on that now and I may just throw in the towel
***I ended up three days behind due to the National Poetry Month Knockdown Series--seriously, must we have poetry SO intensely for 30 days then a year of a wander? But I digress...;-)
Don't give up on the NaPoMoWri, I caught up on my three and have to do one today. I'll stick it out if you do!

It will be interesting to read these poems in May as I'm just writing them then it's off to the "In Process" folder. I hardly remember what I've written. It's sort of like speed-dating, who was that man with the salt & pepper hair? Oh that must be my poem from April 5th.

Happy writing!
Kel

Pamela Johnson Parker said...

I am That Person who is older than you! I was married the year that movie came out (or hit rural Kentucky, anyway)--I saw it on my honeymoon. My best friend had just moved to Bloomington that year to work in, of all places, the libary and start her masters degree.

I still love the movie (want to upgrade it to a DVD), have a different husband --and would love to find my best friend...She's MIA somewhere.

Sorry--just had a senior moment when you mentioned Breaking Away.

Montgomery Maxton said...

im jealous you made doty; i keep missing his events.

i lived in cincinnati for 24 years and to this day have not seen an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati

RJGibson said...

Flying turkeys are at best startling and at worst frightening. I thought one wasn't going to clear my car's roof as I drove to work a couple of years ago.

Lyle Daggett said...

My impression has always been (though I've never researched this) that wild turkeys can fly, at least a little, however domesticated turkeys (i.e. the ones on farms) can't much.

I love the WKRP turkey episode. Another of my favorites is the one where one of the WKRP people, while wearing a fish costume (for some kind of promotion for the station), gets into a fistfight, and then a wrestling match on the floor, with someone from rival station wearing a pig costume.

This past weekend I read that a 3 disk DVD set of WKRP episodes has just been released (or is maybe just about to be), *however,* much of the rock music has been deleted from the episodes, replaced by generic background music, and a few scenes here and there have also been edited out. Apparently it has to do with the cost of obtaining rights to the songs -- when the show was first on TV, DVDs didn't exist and nobody thought to secure rights to re-use the songs.

I'm also behind in the writing-a-poem-a-day thing, though still working at it.