164/365 James

Or Jamie? Alter egos, alternate
currents, alternative since your early 20s

bike trip across America: on a one-speed.
Father of two, wife of one, third-born strongman

with talents for palming basketballs, painting cetacea.
Your art graces our walls, your boyhood bedroom-door,

galleries in cities/counties/countries: jungles
of the mind.

163/365 Alice

Second daughter-in-law, married third son,
ready for a steady artist, planning for a beautiful family.
You got both.

"You'll like her," said Rita, recognizing a curly-haired kindred,
mother of spirited daughters, sweet-smiling sons.
We've got both.

Admired, familiar, clever-smart, rapid-fire
compassion tinged with outraged insistence:
you've got it all.

162/365 Courtney

With serious aplomb and naivete,
you
prepare handouts, posters, give-aways
to entice visitors to our club's table,
listening to what folks don't say,
sometimes making mistakes, always making
others feel comfortable and heard.
Anytime I need something done and
can explain what that is,
you
do it, amazingly well.

161/365 Chase

Buzz cut, gopher cheeks brown as grocery bags, close-set eyes
blue as newspaper: favorite lunch, grilled-cheese-and-tomato-soup

at our tiny table after playing Fort
in the lilacs, Legos in the basement.

After your mother died, your father moved you to
private school, we lost track. What've you grown up into?

160/365 Amy T

Artist in big metals, big objects, big statements,
laughing effortlessly, mightily at yourself and
other pretensions. Hilarity comes readily
at any card table, garage party, backyard
gathering, joking until each reaches ease.
Fully fringed eyes, coal black and bitter, warmed
by the dimples framing your grin: always present.

159/365 Cuba

Rita's biggest sister, substitute mother, you chuckled
through many Christmas dinners, Bud speedily
burbling blessings, you slowly hearing all nephews,
great- and regular, from near-and-far.

Cherubic as a possum or hedgehog, your padded lap a
haven for two granddaughters. Visiting at the
kitchen-table, your detailed, historical conversation:
now finished.

158/365 Ricki

Quiet freckles and soft graying hair, a crooked
smile with crinkled eyes: kind-and-gentle soul
with a genuine interest, genuinely interesting
life and life-view. Zach and Katie both testaments
to a generous mothering, calm yet concerned,
paying attention to their individuality: I too
felt that attentiveness in our conversation.

157/365 Laurel

To be married in June, who knew? Almost everyone
but me, it seems, so my "congratulations" is late.

Stalwart employee, suffering much whiny
laziness from students and instructors alike
(more the later than the former, perhaps).

Your skill with tech writing needs nurturing,
attention paid to your significant talent.

156/365 Pat F

We talked after Katrina, you organizing
a campus-wide book drive for New Orleans
libraries: I'd forwarded email, you took
up the cause.

Energetic, you found boxes, packers,
volunteered yourself as deliverer.
But this good work ended, called off
on technicalities.

We miss your cheery blond face, your
healthy "of course!"ness.

155/365 Cris

Women's music some say, stories
and female sighs, insights,
loves to light the way.

Santa Fe concert wasn't earth-changing as I'd
expected, but sing-alongs moved
listeners to "changer and changed."

Signing CDs later, your hard-jawed felt-tip pen
bit into the plastic I presented: memory for me,
obligation for you?

154/365 Ann S

First teaching gig at Fosston, you seemed
hippie-ish and stodgy simultaneously, a perfect
English major combination.

You served me my first tea in china cups, discussing
Thoreau passages from blue-bound volumes
on brick-and-board bookcase.

Brief stay in the nunnery, then off to California: I'm glad we still write.

153/365 Ann B

Left-handed pitcher for our favorite
opponents, you dip low and long to
release the shallow-arcing softball.

Ready to swing at most-anything, a grin
white and wide as your Arctic, you hit
as well as run, even in your sixth decade.

Maker of history,
advocate for girls,
model for late-bloomers.

152/365 Anne B

"Annie Softball"

Reed-thin and quick, you played infield with a
casual intensity accompanied by a sly sense of
humor, especially over a pitcher of beer.

Kind to children, you tossed softballs over-and-over
so they could practice swinging, grinning with every
twirling entropy of the bat: sort of like your life?

151/365 Bud F

Bristle-brush flat-top, gray as granite but
softer, your haircut made my six-year-old hand
want to whisker across it. Watching your morning

living-room calisthenics while pretending to sleep,
I saw that burpies/squat-thrusts occurred in places
other than elementary school gyms.

Talented with your hands, making anything from
Kabooberator to fireplace; talented with your
head, chuckling and humming over the newspaper.

My five-pound walleye at nine, caught with
you at Knutson Dam, recorded for downtown's
Fishing Contest as "Bud's Fishing Service":

good Grandpa.

150/365 Anna B

Dried-apple wrinkled face, button-black eyes I
remember most, and you in cotton dresses and
slip-skinned cottony hands, mottled with
plum stains and veins. A gravel-ly laughing voice.

How could your bedroom be behind a
curtain? I always wondered while
sitting on the mohair-velvet couch, seen-
but-not-heard as we were taught.

149/365 Dave J

Perhaps you taught geometry because size
does matter: of angles, lines, dimensions
and
heights, hands, thumbnails transparent as
fish scales, polished shoes small as perch.

Wispy peach hair, matching moustache, you
asked me, last to finish an exam, was I
"trying to get them all right?" Um . . .
Yes . . . ?

148/365 Jim

Slow-speaking math mind, chalk-whited pants-pockets,
you revealed you'd planned an engineering major
until finding your skill at explaining to
dorm-mates their calculus homework: our win.

Soft-smiling classroom pacer, dropping broken chalk
from hand-to-hand like the idea-prompt it was, you
walked us through algebra-proofs-trig-calc-of-sorts:
the best FHS had to offer.

147/365 Berniece

You kept me a benchwarmer, where I belonged,
learning to set by following your repetitious
regimen: over-and-over-and-over-and-over.

Serious coach, serious athlete
when females had to fight for every
hour of practice time, dollar for uniforms,
minute of respect and legitimacy.

Thanks for your meticulous convictions, hard-
eyed insistence, clench-jawed intensity.

146/365 Dodie

Energetic, fun, you taught tennis
lessons to youngsters -- me among
them, you a whopping three
years older, therefore expert.

Puffy-eyed blond, funny and brash, you created
a party around you, but I never knew why you and
funny-too brother lived with your grandmother:
small-town stories never told.

145/365 Andrea

Sky-blond social-work student,
you shook my hand leaving our last
class, first student to do so, ever.

Passionate outbursts in class, tempered
later as classmates joined, showed your
unwavering commitment to social justice:

good-but-narrow, widening weekly to take
another plunge into the shallows, seeking
depth in yourself and others.

144/365 April

In center field, Northeast, chatting
rather than catching, a New York
Jew, not softball player, joked and
told stories while waiting for fly balls.

Invited to join bookclub: thought you'd enjoy,
provide comic relief, but bookclub didn't
want healing, so disbanded. Do you still
play clarinet in Freedom Band?

143/365 Barbara A

Twenty years ago you provided a job, baby-in-a-basket
afternoons, calling public radio members:
telemarketing that we convinced ourselves wasn't, exactly.

Today, you drive pledge drives:
at least that's how I hear it.

Last conversation half-a-decade ago:
garden-level Park Slope, you "appreciating"
grown-up baby and me keeping other B company.

142/365 Barbara S

Decades back both part-time contingent
workers at M-State, neither ready
to sign on forever. Yet

you've managed to make a
place there, taking courses: first
studio art, letting grammar-school Zoe

paint big canvas; then/now English-PhD,
making more progress than your
professors know what to do

with: big-brained gal.

141/365 Barbara A

A tender intrepid: teacher, mother/wife, humorer.
You know what you're doing in the classroom
where reading's changed over the years;
in the family that's grown wider, the next
generation moving closer; in the marriage
where the mate tends outward, looking for bigger
stages, more audiences: you see and understand.