Endings bring beginings!

Celebrating a birthday with Margaritas and butterscotch sundaes...and tacos!

String Theory

Ronald Wallace

"String Theory" by Ronald Wallace from For Dear Life. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. 

I have to believe a Beethoven
string quartet is not unlike
the elliptical music of gossip:
one violin excited
to pass its small story along
to the next violin and the next
until, finally, come full circle,
the whole conversation is changed.

And I have to believe such music
is at work at the deep heart of things,
that under the protons and electrons,
behind the bosons and quarks,
with their bonds and strange attractors,
these strings, these tiny vibrations,
abuzz with their big ideas,
are filling the universe with gossip,
the unsung art of small talk

that, not unlike busybody Beethoven,
keeps us forever together, even
when everything’s flying apart.

Yesterday I celebrated completion of 74 years of revolutions around the sun on this sweet planet earth.  So today I start another one, and my beginning of the day was a bit different than most days.  

I drove over to the doctor's office (just 2 blocks) without having a thing to eat or drink...or taking my medicines.  Yep, it was vampire blood draw time for labs to tell the doctor what's going on inside me. I could have walked, except for that fasting part, I wasn't sure walking back up the hill to come home was a good idea.

I learned that the phlebotomists who have you make a fist are changing your potassium reading probably, because flexing a muscle there will increase the potassium in your blood, so sayeth my doctor.

And I got a free cup of coffee when I left.  That was a nice reward.  At this age my veins are pretty hard to find, and though she used a tinier needle than in the past, once she got it inside my skin she had to root around a bunch to finally get it into the vein.  Interestingly enough, I could watch that needle with about a half inch of metal under my skin, moving around and not causing any sensation at all.  The prick through the alcohol-ridden skin was the only pain I'd felt.  So as I sat there pumping the red stuff into 4 little vials, I didn't have any more pain.

Another beginning is that I'm about to start a sculpture in clay.  Usually I make functional things that might sell at the tailgate market during the season up till Christmas.  That's a good supplement to my income, or at least it pays for my studio hours and clay purchases.  But I don't usually make sculptural things until after Christmas and the winter months.  However, I want to have a new Gaia sculpture.  My last one broke her arm, and she didn't survive the move.  So this one is already in my mind's eye, and just waiting to be formed.

I will go in for my annual physical on Friday and find out the lab results.  Oh boy.  Not looking forward to some of them.  But that's what getting older brings.  I'm just glad I'm still getting older, rather than the alternative!