“Peace, prosperity, liberty and morals
have an intimate connection.”

- Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes the girls call me "Poppi". I think it started when we were in Italy a couple of years ago and the phrase, "Gelato, Poppi!" was so cosmopolitan -- and effective. As they have gotten older, calling me Poppi is an affectionate endearment in so many ways that "Great Hairy Thunderer" isn't. And today Poppi is just about popping his buttons.

I wrote last week about the Mall Diva's debut with her friend Casii at The Black Sheep's Open Mic Night. Last night they hit another open stage, this time at the Dunn Brothers coffee shop over on Grand in St. Paul. Whereas the first outing was for teens, the Dunn Bros. stage is a long-standing, bi-weekly event for a pretty much adult audience. There are a lot of Old Folkie types there, including one guy who looked like the ghost of Tom Joad but with even less meat on his bones, and another guy who relished the opportunity to stand on a stage with a guitar and a microphone and drop high-decibel f-bombs -- not because he was outraged, but simply because he enjoyed it, I think. The girls more than held their own, singing the same three songs they sang previously, and engaging the audience which featured a lot of bright, smiling faces and bobbing heads. One guy was even moved to sing along with them as they sang, "It is well, it is well, with my soul."

I remember the first time my wife and I heard the young Diva sing in public. It was for a Christmas program when she was in second grade. Neither her mother or I have a lick of singing ability and we weren't expecting any in our progeny so when Faith told us she had a "solo" we figured she meant a speaking part. Lo and behold -- or should I say, "Hark!" -- she sang! My wife and I were flabbergasted. Never had we dared expect such a blessing! She later showed herself to be a quick study musically as well, once picking out a tune by ear on the piano even before she had had lessons. Later, when she had been taking lessons for a year, she played a recital with such skill and élan that others thought she'd been studying for year. To see her and Casii taking such confident and polished steps on a public stage is nearly enough to make me burst.

But that's not all. As Tiger Lilly posted on Saturday, she just won a short-story writing contest sponsored by the Dakota County libraries. The contest was to write a ghost-story or thriller (the deadline was Halloween) and she took time off from the novel (or novels) she's already writing to knock out something that came to mind. As with her sister, I was stunned with the result.

Stunned, but not surprised, if that's possible. I've given her writing assignments in the past, and we've seen her skills posting here on this blog but those were all things I asked her to write or some inspired silliness for public consumption. True, there were the series of "Larry the Guinea Pig" books she wrote when she was little, and she's let me peak before at some of her work in progress that was pretty impressive, but she didn't let her mother or I see this short story before she turned it in. Naturally, I expected her to win a prize because I figured she could out-write people her age, but when I read her entry after she posted it here I was awed at how skilled and mature her writing was.

If you haven't followed the link from her Saturday post you really need to do so. This is not a cute story that a teen-ager would write with the literary equivalent of "like" and "you know" phrasing or heavy-handed prose and awkward symbolism. The story grabs you from the first, one-sentence paragraph and she shows a lot of writerly techniques in phrasing and repetition that you would expect to see -- if at all -- in an older, more experienced writer. It is also, definitely, a "chiller" which I wouldn't expect from my sweet little angel, but I can definitely pick up on some of the bent from the "Dead Like Me" TV series we've been laughing at lately.

Seeing such a polished, fully-formed story was amazing even with my high expectations for her. It's both exciting and motivating to see this from her. I know she's been pounding away, doing at least 1700 words a day, as part of the National Novel Writing Month event and I figure if she's going to be doing this level of work I'm going to have to raise my own game or cede the writing title in the family to her. Either that or perhaps change the name of this blog to "The Night and Day Writers"!

Wednesday's Writer's Almanac featured a poem by Bruce Taylor entitled "Middle-Aged Men, Leaning." It begins:

They lean on rakes.
It's late, it is evening
already inside their houses.

The children are gone.
Their wives are on the phone
talking softly to someone else.

This frost, this early Fall
upon their minds, a small
measure of patience and regard

as if the twilight world
in bright papery pieces
diminished so and thus.

It caught my attention because my fingers and palms are still sore from all the yard work we did last weekend; yard work that had me leaning on rakes and shovels as well as standing on ladders, wrangling in brush piles and wrestling with awnings. It was a lot of hard, dirty work but we were blessed with an extended stretch of early September at the end of October, giving us the time we desperately needed to get the yard ready to host the Mall Diva's upcoming nuptials in the spring.

While Tiger Lilly, my wife and I worked on the gardens the Mall Diva and Ben cleared out the four flower beds in front of the house and planted tulip bulbs, happy in the thought of the rewards for their labor regardless of whatever hardships and depradations should be visited upon these by the winter, the squirrels or the administration.

A long, cold season may be ahead but there's so much promise on the other side of it. I've lived through many a winter now and quite a few temporal seasons of hope and change -- some of which even almost worked. I take any and all forecasts with as many grains of salt as I'll eventually pour on my sidewalk in the months ahead, but one thing I know for certain is that the head of my government has decreed that seedtime and harvest shall not cease as long as the earth remains.

As posted here earlier, last Thursday night was Open Mic Night at The Black Sheep coffee cafe and we went to watch and listen as the Mall Diva and her lifelong friend and musical partner, Casii, made their public debut. It was an interesting evening sponsored by the city of South St. Paul as an activity for the youth. The performances were all pretty good, but what I noticed most was the differences in attitude between the performers.

The first singer was a young man who is likely too young to remember Corey Hart, yet he was wearing sunglasses at night all the same. He was a beefy guy with a delicate voice reminiscent of Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay. He did a couple of original compositions and some covers but all of the song selections were of disaffected angst that spoke of a misery too deep for anyone who hasn't, say, been audited. Even his take on Green Day's "I Hope You Had the Time of Your Life" had irony dripping off of it ... and right into my chai latte.

Another performer was a young woman who read her poetry from a spiral-bound notebook (I couldn't tell if it had hearts on it, but I suspect not). She stood in a way that announced she had "issues" even before reading her work that featured lines about brains splattered on windows and hamsters committing suicide. The girl prefaced some of her reading by saying her poems use a lot of symbolism and she hoped we "got it." Not a problem, as it was about as subtle as a manhole cover in a salami sandwich.

The young folks were good, and I know that it sounds as if I'm mocking them. Well, I am mocking them I guess, but it's more in recognition of my own artistic self-absorption when I was their age (I'd rather listen to Vogon poetry without sedation than go back and read my old, old stuff). Perhaps it's because, while we may suffer a lot of pain when we're young, we don't have a lot of years of experience to put that pain in perspective.

Or maybe it's just what is fashionable now.

When the Diva and Casii took their turn, however, it was a completely different attitude — and I say that completely acknowledging my proud-parent bias. They did two high-spirited and funny original songs (including, if you can believe it, a highly symbolic one about a hamster) plus their own take on the old hymn, "It Is Well With My Soul." They were warm and upbeat, engaging with the audience even though they did without the microphone. With their voices, and in a relatively small room, they didn't need a mic. In fact, they were nearly able to drown out the "whacka-whacka-whacka" of the espresso machine behind the counter. As with the other performers, they wanted the audience to feel what they felt; the difference is that they were having fun.


Photo from RaymondPhotographic.com.

I can think of a number of reasons why that might be, but I think the main one is "the perspicacity of hope".