Julie's 48x365

326/365 Craig

2010-05-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

Sitting on the freezer when it was "slow"
you read The Princess Bride outloud while
I razor-scraped the grill, thin-sliced tomatoes,
soda-washed the pickle buckets

Palest in your family, eyelashes like duck
down, skin pink as pale raw hamburger, you
raved about the Honda Accord: my
introduction to un-American-made

325/365 Randy C.

2010-04-30T22:47:00.001-07:00

Mud-pasted boots, brown as barn straw
blue jeans dirtier than my mother's rags

two plaid shirts: cotton for coolness, wool for warmth
crusty-gray smudges under each ear

tangled black hair, shaved up back, flopped bangs front
over watery-blue eyes

First grade: your smell, I learned, was
the deep reek of poverty

324/365 Ken

2010-04-29T20:35:00.001-07:00

Egg-eyed "boyfriend"
for about three minutes,
balded like your dad

Junior-high double "dates"
my first love (your best friend)
my best friend (your first wife)

Flat cokes, popcorn at the Lesdan
to keep them company

easily breaking up when
her boyfriend moved

you stepped in: place-holder,
too-early father, faithless
ne-er-do-well charmer

323/365 Mary Ann

2010-04-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

Knitted yellow poncho, I recognized, was
New for first-year at The College of ~
Excited to be "in the cities" on your own
Where all the cool kids
Played Simon and Garfunkle, ate Carbone's, and drank.
Another small-town girl, brown-eyed roommate, we
Managed to cohabitate yet not come friends

321/365 Donna B

2010-04-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

Shaped like a tea cozy
pince-nezed in nifty tortiseshell
tutored students officially and colleagues unofficially

Still work at Metro
and live in girlhood homestead
eating every dinner with Mother and the cats

Nearly five angry feet of
the university's steadfast team, thorning
the side of Administrative Follies and Initiatives

320/365 Rosella

2010-04-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

Stringency:
posture tilted back
spine thrust up
like Julia Child's
helmeted with
bronze-silver wig
curled into meringue,
untouchable

Insistence:
dress correctly to
cook correctly, girls only
in skirts

Resistence:
I kept apron-drawer
culottes, changing from jeans,
saying to your averted gaze,
"There. Now I won't
cook like a boy."

319/365 Dewey

2010-04-24T15:42:00.000-07:00

Raggedy Dutch-boy bangs
gray-pink cheeks
you chucked crabapples
hard, your two trees
for the whole neighborhood

Fighting on the tire swing, your
cut-offs yanked down, faded-denim
cheeks, exposed -- I ran

home but came back to finish
our "haunted house": blindfold
neighbor kids feeling jello
brains, spaghetti intestines,
peeled-green-grape eyeballs

318/365 Angie B

2010-04-23T21:32:00.001-07:00

Adult student with authority issues, prodigious intelligence,
unemployed spouse, three rascally children, full-time job, a secret:

under blond-bleach hair, temple-high and hidden,
faint trace of electrodes, instrumental for your health, therapy
as shocking in its effectiveness as it was for me to read about

Composition One: unity achieved successfully

317/365 Sandy

2010-04-22T20:09:00.001-07:00

Tall, tanned, younger than I, neighbor whose eyeglasses
thickened black-lashed blues, making direct eye-contact
rare and fragmented. Only daughter, loud laugher, frequent
visitor that summer of breath-blown plastic pool, pink
two-pieces with tired elastic, splashing heavily as a boy,
running home to the scratch-voiced bark of a house-bound mother.

316/365 Harwood

2009-12-01T21:51:00.001-08:00

A cast-iron dutch oven dug
up in your attic still roasts granola
in my kitchen: why did you pass it along?

Not the new-
wife's style?

Too Amish-y for your
chinoed professorial pose?

Out-dated technology since you'd found
silicon, networks, bits, bytes?

Still useful, still used:
after all
recipes are technical writing.

315/365 Joan

2009-10-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

We noticed your chin, a point
on a heart-shaped face full of
freckles somewhere hidden
as were your
eye smiles
that
might indicate
connection to the boy
friend you cultivated and
fed -- or did he feed you? Didn't
matter in the clapboard house
full of English majors & lovers.

314/365 Hilda

2009-10-24T23:35:00.001-07:00

First Wisconsinite
hair coarse as cornmeal, a fluffy corona to frame
dough-soft cheeks, squeak-squint smiles, eyes

tiny as buds
you roomed with a broad-faced Midwesterner and her
full-bodied almost-lover, sharing heat bills, treading

carefully
across tenant-scratched wood floors on
second story, your story never quite or fully understood

313/365 Sr. Chrysostom

2009-10-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Hall monitor
tall as a hall tree
narrow as a hall tree
white-haired
wide-browed, long
distance, inches
between
nose tip and
lip top
often pursed
but not in
anger or
disapproval:
maybe just
slight displeasure
at living with
teenagers
listening
to commonplace
music, laughter,
TV shows:
dorm
nun.

312/365 Mr. V

2009-10-21T21:49:00.000-07:00

Science is curious
Experimentation, you
Thought, taught, tried:
Unaware that junior-high
Students would
Undermine your shaggy-eyebrowed
Pedagogy by
Finding alternatives
Or paying attention to
Ridiculous data, like
Falling leaves, gravity,
And rock-and-roll
Influences on
Lizards. Now I
Understand your attempts to
Revise the unexamined
Ennui we were used to.

311/365 Julie T

2009-10-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

Lucky sixth-grader, handing out
lunchtime milk to us
little
kids

At age seven, I wanted similar glory
probably because we shared a name
you had power

we were neighbors
you were kind (extra cookie sometimes
or
no tattling when I pitched my
half-full carton of plastic-y milk
while you watched)

310/365 Kay V

2009-10-08T20:59:00.001-07:00

Late-night yard games
Spud Kick-the-Can Spotlight
neighborhood kids ran green through
summers, humid and dewy, in
your backyard but never
house, where at least
a brother and mother lived,
mystery to us Catholic kids with families
like small sports teams, sprouting at
puberty into our own privacy

309/365 Kay L

2009-09-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Hitting balls at diggers,
repeating motions from

cage-to-aide-to-arm,
a volley of offense

to teach body
memory, automatic
dive-and-roll

for the ball just
out of reach

Your hair never moved
jaw tight as wire

eyes black as referees'
stripes, only later did

your hair turn
white as my own
mother's.

308/365 Jim H.

2009-09-13T16:13:00.001-07:00

Kindergarten: you drew eyelashes on your crayoned self-portrait, but
boys don't have eyelashes I knew at five.

Sixth-grade: you said something that drew from me a slap
across your pale-pink cheek, my first and only.

Adulthood: not at class reunions, what has become of
your milky-skinned black-curled head?

307/365 Mrs. Gilbertson

2009-09-09T21:59:00.001-07:00

Isn't even your name anymore, having
divorced, remarried: not so usual in
our town. But you were/are unusual,
strong-jawed English major, blue eyes tiny
as buttons deeply set in your
pale-freckled skin, hair teased into a
wasp net, thinly brown and banged.
Serious about literature: I copied that.

Thank you.

306/365 Davich

2009-09-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

Broom-sized mustache, non-Scandinavian nose

big as your personality as you bounced

white-sneakered from gym stage to court

holding forth with constant motion

tossing basketballs against

walls, wrestling mats, backboards, kids' heads

nervy energy a feature of an assistant coach

wired to tease kids from

seventh to twelfth grade, ready-or-not

305/365 Addy

2009-09-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

Good friend's first
raved-about grandchild: whip-smart, bird-thin, face wide
as a garden, eyes brown as earth,
not shy with adults,
determined to vamp in
dresses with beads
and feather boas,
using every
gift from Grandma,
her best legacy,
telling us all your
energetic opinion
right until the end

304/365 Jack

2009-09-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

Uncle
almost more now than in
the half-known past of half-siblings
and mystery

Generous spirit of likability
spread over me in blue-eyed chuckles
finger-splays and head-nods: full attention.

What binds us is story
not even a shared story: it unravels
in your ninth decade
my father's eighth

not
too
late

303/365 Stacy S

2009-08-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

An out-of-the-blue phone call
prepped by an almost mutual friend
led to thirty minutes of conversation

Talk your strong suit, the communication
racket yours too as you charged ahead
toward meaningful work in this new city

Three evenings listening to piano music
once with another almost-mutual friend:
you're on your way.

302/365 Ruth

2009-08-27T00:41:00.000-07:00

Red
Sure

but it's the tiny chiclet teeth that endear
eyes big as milk duds but warmer and wiser
hair Twizzler strands, but golden

scarves-jackets-skirts with flounce
knees just covered, neck well-wrapped as if
channeling Dickens
for your students, as committed to their
learning as you are to
yours

301/365 Leslie

2009-05-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

Long
taupe
hair
sloped
nose
bent
teeth

Did having
a magician for
a father lead to
life on the stage?

Or basement tap-shoe steps
knees knocking in
bruised rhythm.

Warning,
feigned
what
you
feared

deeply
enough
to move to

UtahNewMexico
desert
marriage
and
religion:

the highest wire
act

300/365 Adrienne

2009-04-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

teacher
teller
listener
liar

poet who changed my
life

a slim paper chapbook
"some notes on lying"
felt too
close to truth for
comfort

seeing what's not/there
showing what can/not be

freckled wrinkles
gnarled knuckles

honoring the cultivated brain
the cared-for body, the
imagination big enough for beautiful
anger

299/365 Ron

2009-04-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

Hopefully talking
to me since first grade
principal's nephew
secretary's son

sharp-nosed and short-haired
spectacled since birth
ferret-lipped giggles
sound worse than they were

my escort for our
graduation walk
exit from our past
entrance not quite set

timid greeting each
reunion, sacred or
secular, graveled
or carpeted, feet
shuffling with the risk

298/365 Fred M

2009-04-24T17:17:00.001-07:00

Home-made pizza maker, frequent visitor (resident?) at the
white two-story, wide-laughingly mustached and
skinny as a runner: of course you're now
notable for your long-distance streak, 25-plus
years and counting, as many years as it's been since
the battered oven in the rented house in the college town.

297/365 Anne A

2009-04-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

Eating at Eli's, your first weeks at the new
job, smilingly gray-sweatered and hungry,
our topic children: your two, my two,
so I assumed we're both birth
mothers: um, no. You educated me more in
that slight minute than I'd been in years of
WGST classrooms: feminist pedagogy, indeed.

296/365 Gordy

2009-04-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

Crewcut bristled, a porcine crown for
a purple-cheeked bully with a heart of gold

or

at least when it came to the
neighborhood girls who were still

a

bit scared of you: alley boundary
not enough to convince us you

wouldn't push/pull/yank/punch
us to be your friend, audience, spectator

295/365 Greg/Beaner

2009-04-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

Living across the street with you sister, her
husband, kids, dog after your father died: what ever
happened to your mom?

Short, spit-spikey hair, sandy
as brown sugar, matching wide-mouthed
skin, green eyes big as eggs. You died soon after high
school: don't even know how. Or why.

294/365 Greg A

2009-04-10T22:32:00.000-07:00

Who knew those ears flung
themselves out, wide as Prince
Charles's, fun as handles or sails,
emerging after YMCA power-walks
regular as Saturn's orbit

Favorite first-grade teacher, then tech
expert, only Senor from Bismark, ND,
among Senoritas from Costa Rica,
Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Spain,
locales less far-flung than the Saloon

293/365 George

2009-03-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

Fringed bald pate, Zeus-like and sandy,
suited to Latin prof in a women's
college: double-jointed splayed fingers
explained declensions over-and-over.

Shuffle-suited, crumb-bearded,
couldn't remember which Julie
was which even after two years.

Once I argued for a grade switch,
B+ to A-
you agreed:
logical to the end.

292/365 John B

2009-03-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Vietnam your fertile field, plowed for poems
with varied acclaim, recognized expertise

Read my tentative sophomore work, marveled that
one good poem could be among awful
ones: a student's plight you may've forgotten

Housesitter you once hired invited me over for
dinner: your rice-filled futon skinned my elbows

291/365 Jack

2009-03-22T22:02:00.000-07:00

Left-center fielder who caught my
bobbled centerfield fly: you live that moment

more fully than any academic one we
may've shared (department meetings?)

"I still have the trophy we won," you always
say and I say, "Me, too!" too

English majors prouder of intramural softball
championship than articles, books, awards

290/365 Amy K

2009-03-20T22:58:00.001-07:00

Abe's the third
after Olivia
Jack now ten,
shocking us
both. The ease
with which you navigate
profession and motherhood shows
calmly on your face, eyebrows no
longer arched with worry, forehead
less lined than a decade ago.
Congratulations on your success-and-
word-filled life, a model for any
Midwesterner.

289/365 Lillian

2009-03-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

Southerner, finally back south, your tenure
up north left a lasting impression: serious
scholarship taking students seriously.

Second generation beginning to fill your
screen, grandkids and grad students moving
out into the wide world of words.

Steadily blond, consistently gracious,
persistently updating learning
about new technologies: you keep up.

288/365 Jeff S

2009-03-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

Shortest boy in the neighborhood
you grew into nearly six feet of
bristle-haired coach, the gap between
your front teeth just proof of
enough humor for middle-schoolers.

Late night almost-dark, playing
Kick the Can, Capture the Flag
SPUD: all preparation for football games
and homecoming escorts in high school.

287/365 Mike R

2009-03-09T21:10:00.000-07:00

Long-armed,
long-fingered
a basketball
in your
hands looked
natural, the
logical place
for orange-dimpled
leather to be.

Loping downcourt
shoulders up
chin in
jaw open
for air
as you
caught the
pass, swiveled-and-tossed
sweat slinging
from blond
bangs: basket.

Later your
daughter: same
hip-forward
moves downcourt:
legacy in limbs.

286/365 Kim C

2009-02-19T23:56:00.001-08:00

Quiet strength in an
oldest child

only daughter of a
mother-of-steel you

learned well to shift
between father-humor

and mother-wit, skills you
brought to
the court as setter-hitter-utility

equine-thighed and
low-to-the-ground you moved more
quickly in

four-two than most do
in five-one:

coaching your own daughter
to greatness.

285/365 Char

2009-02-17T22:46:00.001-08:00

Tag-along to volleyball, you brought height and fight,
a sensible energy, a humor-filled management style
that led us to victory using sophisticated new offense.

Later at the bar, your deep pockets made you popular,
but they weren't the only thing: generous spirit and
good-natured teasing, Polish self-deprecation all helped.

284/365 Maria

2009-02-15T23:15:00.001-08:00

In Mother's Writing Group twenty
years ago, you wrote about losing

sexual desire after your first
child's birth, asking the rest

of us if we'd experienced
the same: unfortunately no -- or

perhaps fortunately for
all of us. Finding like-minded

peers has always been your
need and struggle: still is.

283/365 Lisa A

2009-02-11T23:18:00.000-08:00

A decenter-er of spaces, some deserving,
some not: like our "feminist pedagogy"

class, where decentering authority meant it's
absence or the centering of suspect

marginal voices that didn't know what
they were talking about. Strong commitment

to your commitments: worthy of
admiration, but difficult to learn from you.

282/365 Randy

2009-02-10T20:09:00.000-08:00

The other high-school "most likely
to succeed" designee, you won the
Bausch & Lomb scholarship: most deserving
and perhaps the propellant to a career
in science, lately digging in
Mumbai -- or was it Dubai -- either a
long way for a plump country boy, cousin
to half-a-dozen others less traveled.

281/365 Terry S

2009-02-09T21:52:00.000-08:00

Flash-faced grin under a salt-and-pepper
mustache, hair swept across brow like a

snowdrift but warmer, helpful in a principal.
Your college roommate taught at Penn

State, so you gave advice about my
grad-school trip across country:

"Things're expensive on the Ohio tollway: two
dollars for orange juice!" Still heeded.

280/365 Jackie Z

2009-02-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

TAing for you: a minefield, a privilege:
never sure what's next, but happy to be considered
competent and intelligent: these things not automatic.

With tilting amble, perm-fluffed head, you'd think your
way down the halls, unaware of disdain and ridicule,
anger and jealousy: heading a department on the brink.

279/365 Karen-Louise

2009-02-04T21:23:00.000-08:00

Bishkek brought us together, intrepid traveler you
who wrote less-than-impressive prose, despite your
profession "journalist" then, now another
incarnation based on assisting others, sharing
expertise, collecting information to be used and re-
used. We both made a good try at friendship, but
too few values in common: except travel.

278/365 Megan J

2009-02-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

Was it the late 80s when we
kid-swapped, trading toddlers for
free afternoons of beading, grading,
working with fewer interruptions.

Was it the promise or the prodding that
forced your move from city to extreme
country, so rural the New York Times didn't
exist, asparagus beds rose up instead.

277/365 Helen&Nia

2009-02-01T20:55:00.000-08:00

Softball teammates
for years now
hard to believe
a time
before
the lanky
right-fielder
and spring-legged
short-stop
(left-fielder)

How many dogs have shared your home? Otto still
rides high in memory, front seat, team bench.

Together in
suburbs and health,
for richer
or job-loss,
through better and
worse . . . to
best

276/365 Helen L

2009-01-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

Philosopher distance
was the space across which
you taught and talked: not an

unmanageable span,
but a cool tanned-arm-stretch,
the shake of your
chin-level hair

punctuation

to the pause as you
imagined appropriate
responses to students' simple
understanding or misunderstanding,

helping us reach
toward a way-of-knowing
not-only-all cerebral.

275/365 Helen Y

2009-01-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

You and Mel anchored our end of the block
old-timers who remembered streetcars and
a full-service corner grocery.

Your lifelong feud with Marge-across-the-alley
threatened my relationship with her as you sought
an ally.

Setting another example, you swept
the sidewalk nearly every morning, up earlier
than dawn.

274/365 Stacy H

2009-01-27T21:56:00.001-08:00

Elfin landlady, handy gal, prof:
eyes crinkle wisely as you
relay Stefan's questions about a
thermostat, garage opener, mail.

Plaid cowboy shirt: costume? comfy
rejection of an Edina girlhood? the way
to mix-up the nuns and students and siblings
who expect a straighter arrow, un-narrow
searcher who'll find
it.

273/365 Ralph R

2009-01-26T23:20:00.001-08:00

Landlords, naturally, can be less friendly
less accommodating than you, easy

occupant of our four-square brick duplex
tender of arborvitae and shoveled walks
weekend refinisher of all wood floors

Lawnmowing your science, not easy
with a wild flowerchild garden
climbing fences, not heeding your need
for order, composure, control

272/365 Lisa F

2009-01-25T21:40:00.000-08:00

fronds unfurl
fiddleheads
fingertips
on cotton on ivory
live things they are

copper creases
cupped palms
shining hair
an areola a nimbus
light things they are

map of small towns
scattered wide
varying browns
undulating hills
some with grain some with peaks
linked things they are

271/365 Helen

2009-01-19T21:20:00.000-08:00

Hippie-haired and Birkenstock-shod, you work best
when least constrained, a way I recognize:

committee work easy to critique, even to agree, but
hard to complete. The classroom is a better space, students say,

so I'll learn from your curriculum, both technical writing
and environmental literature: sharing shared subjects.

270/365 Mrs. Ferden

2009-01-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

Piano lessons

Avocado green carpeting
couch chairs matching

face of brown-paper wrinkling
even at 35, eyebrows arching

pencil evenly drawing
eyes up from teeth overlapping
edged by coffee's staining

Rushing
before one recital, caught wearing

two different earrings:
you introduced the evening's

performances by telling
the audience, laughing

269/365 Toni

2009-01-15T23:03:00.000-08:00

Daughter could set any pass, any corner
of the court: agility and grace, slender slipping

into the gap between hitters, skills she must've
learned from you, skillful caterer and server

readying food-and-drink for the masses
Exceptional openness, gracious friendliness,

staffing concession stands, hosting sleep-overs
for volleyball teammates: Good Mom

268/365 Pam M

2009-01-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

Good=hearted, good=humored, good with
words as well as box scores

Sitting on metal bleachers for
daughters' games, you filled me in
on a bit of other=parent gossip,
friendly not wicked

Another word=girl, bookish in
Grand Forks: parents settling in northern Minnesota
connections to another generation, the kids' benefit

267/365 Bob&Marie

2009-01-13T21:28:00.000-08:00

You stored my dime-store bookshelf
in your garage for months, boxes of
books, old files, boots for the
off-season, a few LPs, teapot.

You taught me teaching, thesis
writing, getting work done
with two children: a proud profession,
even in a small town-and-gown
village, smaller than your
own home neighborhood.

266/365 Alan

2009-01-12T20:26:00.000-08:00

Thick-necked, bulb-lipped
perhaps all wrestlers are so.
Big personality for a small
town, shouts on main street
meant no prom date for you
or me.

Now a
blue-eyed blunderbuss, freckles like
sugar crystals, master electrician like
Al, sharing story about former
high-school beauty's air conditioner:
endangering your livelihood.

265/365 Allen

2009-01-11T21:15:00.000-08:00

Neighbor nephew visiting summers
from "The Cities"
moustache at fourteen

Dark silky hair, eyes blue as stones
nose long as your cousin's
skin just as pale

We went to movies, mostly, that
summer "Jaws" was popular, its
sudden frights jolting girls
into boys' arms, both laughing
embarrassed yet happy

264/365 Kitty

2009-01-10T20:07:00.000-08:00

Grad school
natural intellect
languages came
easily, even
body language

Were you
really Jewish
from California
almost orphaned
or were
such origins
exaggerated
as I
was told
much later

Chicken soup
with black
pepper you
made once
to cure
my cold
and warm
your hands
for dinners
by candlelight

263/365 Annie

2009-01-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Orphaned at eight, you said,
although father still lived
soon with new wife who
liked her own children best

Battered blonde, still clearly
beautiful when smiling, black
lashes plush and lowered, hiding
violet irises, violent memories

Near a year we spent as
volleyball teammates and after,
cigarette smoke lingering

262/365 Kathy W

2009-01-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

Were you 52 yesterday? Springy setter with a
Virginia drawl, team-player whose ego edged
up against ability, never quite matching.

Sandy-haired blue eyes, gravel-voiced and
grinning, big-hearted beach bum, landing in
Minnesota for love, bringing the party to each
new kitchen, firepit, double-jetted hot-tub:
optimistic as a new-minted penny.

261/365 Mark D

2009-01-07T21:36:00.000-08:00

Finals week, last month, hallway crossing:
wraith-thin in thick, baggy sweatpants
familiar dark-gray vest. All I managed was
"Hey, there" and smile as
you turned towards the men's room.

You died last night.

Smart curmudgeon, irascible
liberal arts guy I respected and tangled with,
alert to your intelligence and commitment
to old-fashioned virtues:
self-respect
hard work
purposefulness
excellence
integrity

You thought students capable of these
certainly
exhibited them yourself,
even as you groused about
institutional innovations and
the shenanigans of our current
late-capitalistic educational enterprise.

Almost never smiled, yet seven years kept
a hallway bulletin board restocked with
historical cartoons, satirical images
showing continuous human folly.

I'll miss
: uncompromising dismissal of stupidity
: unwavering certainty
: quietly scathing critique
: scowl
: you.

260/365 Rick O

2009-01-06T23:39:00.000-08:00

Thin-nosed thin friend,
you remind me
that I used
your washing machine
about twenty-three years
ago, the time
incarnate in your
young co-worker, kid
you think of
highly: thank you.

Accidental neighbor, only
other male guest
at a departure
luncheon fixed by
a priest who'd've
liked to've shepherded
us-both.

259/365 Andreas

2009-01-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Speaking German to children
seemed natural to you

Thus you shifted gears
when our kids visited,

hanging out while parents
were in grad school

Studying languages, managing departmental
politics: none of these

things has changed or
diminished, even as a

huge death has defined
what's become your life:

father-mother-son-survivor

258/365 Ginny

2009-01-01T19:34:00.000-08:00

Thin as a Q-tip
silver short hair
you played second
base in waist-high
jeans, cotton turtleneck.
We'd compare our
older kids as you
came up to bat, almost
always base-hit. Later, we
crossed paths as you
parented a younger one,
meeting another
mother for consultations,
concerts, adult time.
Serendipity.

257/365 Rowena&Nanette

2008-12-31T23:49:00.001-08:00

Wiry duo, fiercely coupled,
Scottish Fulbrights landing
in Happy Valley: not exactly the
America of TV movies.

But you made the best of it:
formidable squash players
yet generous teachers for
student-players of all ages.

One quick to laugh, horse-like
and accented, the other flashing
black eyes in appreciation.

256/365 Jodi

2008-12-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

Daughters thick as thieves, sharing initial
initials for all of elementary school.

During sleepover prep, we drank coffee and
shared histories: family dynamics, college
expectations, husband foibles (fondly, of course).

Daughters parted, but our friendship stuck,
slowing only because the occasion of
pick-up--drop-off meant no more easy crossings.

255/365 Judy S

2008-12-29T22:59:00.000-08:00

Our kids near-same ages, we shared
child-minding and conversation:

You met your husband at summer camp,
sharing German just one way you connected:

Told me, too, of affairs, grad-school plans,
new recipes, old boyfriends, new Montessori
program for your middle child, only son:

I still make your spaghetti pie.

254/365 Becky

2008-12-26T23:15:00.001-08:00

My first farm visit was
your first-grade
birthday: I'd been told
not by you
your dad had a pig farm.

I imagined pigs in tidy rows
light straw like Wilbur.

I never saw the barn
but your entire family's
orderliness suggests that
what I knew from fiction
must-indeed be fact.

252/365 Dawn K

2008-12-18T23:20:00.000-08:00

Sharing an efficiency in
Staten Island, we battled
cockroaches in the kitchen
(really a closet with
a stove), suffered the
silence of the landlord
("super" as they say
in New York). You
stayed after my green
station-wagon departure, succeeding in
one Big City, then
City of Brotherly Love.

251/365 Pat C

2008-12-17T20:23:00.000-08:00

King-sized bed:
two twin box-springs
with a single expanse of
mattress
filled almost
the entire room, just
a dresser
and shelf with winter sweaters.

Such plenty!

Impressive corraling of space,
time, material world:
invitation to any
sweet young femme with a
brain and a few
bucks: you're finally there.

250/365 Mara

2008-12-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

Farm House
unlikely coupling
potlucks with Jews
(Do you walk on
campus? you asked.)

Jersey Shore
unknowingly drinking
Bob's expensive wine
(And you didn't even
finish it? he yelled.)

JFK Airport
desperately departing
post-doc to Zurich
(next life phase obviously
bumping into a future
we couldn't plan to share)

249/365 Rayome

2008-12-15T21:57:00.001-08:00

Sixth desk from teacher's, that
grade we rotated seats, signaling
challenges for
us to meet, like art-appreciation we
all learned from a pompadoured florist, father to no
student, elegant organist for mysterious congregation
and dweller in an apartment like no
teacher I knew. Once, you said we were
alike.

248/365 Linda C

2008-12-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

Why in your
later life do
you want to teach
again?

Junior High Music was it last time?
Junior College English this time?

You must be competent but
undecided, easy to work
with but perhaps not for?

Or other way around?
Oddly, sharing offices
doesn't help one
find answers.

247/365 Nes

2008-12-13T14:39:00.001-08:00

Big as the basketball you love,
your heart's hidden beneath.

Orange as the basketball you love,
your hair's hanging behind.

Finding humor everywhere:
granddaughter's antics, Laura's
admonitions, patients' aches and
pains, golfing buddies' chunks
and mulligans, The College of's
new name (old one'd been
good enough for us, goddammit!).

246/365 Lori

2008-12-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

How long at that piano? You
play it like a friend, a
long-time companion, utensil
familiar as a cutting
board, a wrench: hands like
tools cut music out of
ivory, harmonies from
rectangles of wreckage.
Whiskey, coffee, cigarette
voice, a history of performing
for crowds small and medium:
your people.

245/365 Doreen

2008-12-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

Three weeks abroad,
Moldova
Ukraine
we listened to liars
doctors, lawyers, professionals:
your Russian came
in handy, and your
calm interpretation of
falsity: you made it work.

Sharing food, scripts, clean
laundry, restrooms in Moscow
airport: bonding over
discomfort and digressions,
shashlik and hiking:
Thanks for your
expertise.

244/365 Mary L

2008-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

Who advises whom? One question
when age span is less than a
generation. Another question when
one's a newcomer, no matter the
topoi. Your tall, wide,

hands-off manner makes sense but
wasn't especially useful, although
the outcome has been, perhaps,
the same: success in the
eye of the beholder.

243/365 Jenni

2008-12-07T22:40:00.000-08:00

Big heart, managing a big
job but you're thriving
with the challenge, pleasures
of being a boss.
Of sorts.
Thinking first of students,
then faculty, finally those
administrators who boss
you: for whom do you work,
exactly,
in this higher-education field?
Soil science never felt this messy,
did it?

242/365 Lisa G

2008-12-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

Second person I think of when
reading of SPAM, Austin's delicacy

Our common experience of outsiderness at The
College of: study-abroad, serious students
of literature, you perhaps more:
spine-straight bangs above freckled nose
eyes light green, trimmed with coal-black lashes

Which part of California do you now call home?

241/365 Jane E

2008-12-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Poet who pleases my ex
pleases me because she
appreciates the push and
slide of poems that don't
rhyme, don't fit with a
professional's buttoned-up
downtown meeting, don't
require audience or applause,
just craft and teacher and
serious reader, perhaps time
in another country: gifts
to those we've loved.

240/365 Brock

2008-12-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

Bad boy, it's true,
but a lot more:
you see words as things,
ideas as words.

You see trouble, it's true,
make plenty (two
episodes this semester
of blue-black eyes).

But your black-haired
generosity in workshop
helps others take their own
writing seriously: class
outlaw has done so, too.

239/365 Dee

2008-12-01T19:10:00.000-08:00

Helper.
Double-helper.

Your sensible-shoes-style
radicalism
radiates through the
writing center,
meeting-and-greeting
a tie-dye bunch of
needy students
who listen to steady
intelligence from
a weedy-haired lady.

Grinning but not
smiling, you nod at
ridiculous questions
from faculty members
who've forgotten
keys
schedules
books
pens
again and again.

Double-helper.
Helper.

238/365 Orsay

2008-11-29T09:26:00.000-08:00

First Turk I ever met,
first owned the Honda
I now drive: mint green, pristine,
Padmini's hand-me-down.

Your narrow-browned presence,
quiet, thick-eyebrowed,
gracing Shahid dinners even in
Atherton Hall, residence of
far-flung grad students sharing
simple friend-love-food.

Your tender heart still beats:
his memory alive
- differently -
in us both.

237/365 Ellen B

2008-11-27T20:37:00.000-08:00

Intelligence in search of its object.

A certain kind of uncertainty,
familiar, frustrating, hidden from
all but a mother, perhaps.

Competence comes from somewhere, often
unknown, impatience from somewhere
else, perhaps a result of the search
for meaning, friendship, peers.

When junior editor becomes senior
editor, what happens next?

236/365 Anne H

2008-11-26T09:50:00.000-08:00

Spaghetti carbonara
will always be your dish:

eggy-cheesy-pasta made
right before my eyes

heavy pottery plates
table plain wood
without a cloth

Nothing in your house matched:
wood chairs just cousins,
not mates

First time I realized
the aesthetic
as mine: or perhaps
kiss at evening's end
also infuenced

235/365 Rachel

2008-11-24T21:43:00.000-08:00

Pre-school teacher who
loved Stefan, with
crinkled eyes smiling
at his "tender-hearted"
toddlerness.

Babysitter briefly, but
interested in our
bookshelves full of
objects you didn't
understand.

Sometime you married:
oddly we missed
the ceremony, gifts
of primary-colored glass
mixing bowls still
in our cupboards
now two decades
later.

234/365 Lisa

2008-11-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

From Longville,
a long
way from
home you
came to
care for
other children,
snaggle-toothed
hippie from a
generation past:
married Carlton
before knowing
his secrets,
Oliver the result,
brown-eyed serious
boy with hair
as blond as
his "Lucy in
the Sky" mother.
Both my kids
loved your
smiling anarchy.

233/365 Lise

2008-11-22T18:58:00.000-08:00

Unflappable
approachable
able to leap small
idiocies in a single
burst of dark-eyebrowed
laughter, head thrown
back in genuine glee,
ordering the next
martini or gin
and tonic as
reliable
absorbable.

What's a Wisconsin
twin doing loftily
in Minneapolis, its
skyline both backdrop
and promise, your
achievements widely known?

232/365 Ellen

2008-11-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

Blank-faced blonde once loved
by Susie, you were

married in fact, until
some fateful Angela.

Learned sign language as
a result, now your working-words,

evidently enough to make
the mortgage in Midway.

Tall and ambling through
rooms, gyms, doorways

slightly surprised, amused,
as if you'd never ambled before.

231/365 Kathleen G

2008-11-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

A wise voice, granny-garbed,
tidy, quiet hands nodding with

the rock of striped socks:
Just the few questions

needed to begin an answer,
long, many-volumed,

registering jangled truths
in press-board panelled office.

Years later, echoed conversations,
gray hair changed from

hippie-length to smart bob, tucked
behind ears that hear.

230/365 LeeAnn(s)

2008-11-17T21:02:00.000-08:00

Always
Blondes,
Created or
Destined to be so.
Energetic
Females, ready to
Go away from
Home,
Interested in
Jogging
Kids
Las Vegas
Motherhood
New things
Obtained at
Patina:
Quirky gifts,
Reading material,
Soft
Towels,
Unique objects
Viewed by other
Women who are as
Xcited as
You to drink
Zinfandel.

229/365 Malachi

2008-11-16T21:32:00.000-08:00

Curly-topped faux-hawk on a squirrely
six-almost-seven-year-old, wide-jawed
smile sweet as a Pez dispenser, offers

honest "No thank you" to beverage,
plays "Twinkle Twinkle" on violin.
Weekend school friend to Jane whose secret

party was well attended by friends
and babysitters, not noticing
spies both caramel-colored and blondie.

228/365 Andres

2008-11-15T08:56:00.000-08:00

Lantern-jawed charmer who shifts gears
nearly effortlessly between
corporate fast-lane and classical referents:

what's the story, though, with your
journey across continents, languages, brief
stop in the groves of lowly academe?

Experiment, perhaps, or a hideout
from pressures both moral and material,
room to exercise transgressions: Mary?

227/365 Paul M

2008-11-11T17:28:00.000-08:00

Cousin long unknown
half-way across the continent:
forgotten shared great-grandmother

as real as life,
distant
now in death to us,

as we imagined
when
we might've

first realized you'd
met then married my professor, coincidence
that seemed almost

taboo in all but fiction: avocation
of hers, yours,
ours.

226/365 Cooper's SuperValu Lady

2008-11-10T20:16:00.000-08:00

In produce aisle, you asked about pomegranates:
What are those things?
Inside, are they like oranges or apples?
Does red mean ripe or not?

You bent your head up from quilted
green torso, near-dowager's hump,
to converse about high fructose corn syrup,
to alert me about blueberries from Argentina.

225/365 Bud

2008-11-09T23:36:00.000-08:00

Sleek as an otter or
seal or sea lion,

black coat brightens
white at your chest crest,

heraldry in whorling hair.

Head big as a Nikon:
certain regal bearing.

Legs like bows for arrows,
bouncy with anxious spring

and muscled eagerness, the
perpetual dance between

nature and nurture.