And to think that we saw it on Pasqual Street!

Before we were asked to do social isolation, before we were asked to limit trips to essentials, before we were told to stay home, a friend and I visited the Huntington Gardens, which are very close to the Los Angeles Arboretum. The Arboretum is home to a whole lotta peafowl. They come and beg if you're having a picnic. If there's a concert performance, they sing along, especially with the women (a peacock's cry sounds like someone's yelling "HELP!"). And, they visit the neighbors. As we drove back to my friend's home, we spotted about 15 in someone's front yard. And we witnessed the above spectacle. Note the slant and scrabble of their legs as they corner.

Quotes of the week

TV screen of empty bar whose proprietor is watching an old French movie

Tiny new potatoes

Overheard after a performance of the Messiah, singalong:

"Wrinkles and laxity are wrinkles and laxity."

"I am a living, breathing, walking, talking potato."

It's ART, for heaven's sake, not widgets

There is a new practice I've noticed among editors using the submission manager Submittable. No complaints about Submittable, by the way. It seems to be a good engine for organizing and tracking the hundreds of submissions editors of a given journal might receive during an open reading period. That part is fine. Lately, though, editors of said journals have taken to using only Submittable to advise writers of the writers' submission status. No emails. Not even a tacky and insensitive form email. (See:  Co-Axial Reply to a Snippy Form Letter, http://www.riddledwitharrows.com/issue-1-4-toc/poetry/#reject) Just a change in  status, of which no notice sent to the writer, so you have to check in at Submittable to find out if there is any news. 

A paying market is a rare place. I understand the economic realities of publishing poetry; supply/demand comes to mind. But it is art, and it's hand-made, so to speak, and we folk who work on writing it give a lot of time and devotion to bringing it forth. And not only is poetry art, we write it essentially for the love of it, for free. How dreadfully hard can it be to send out an individual email to the rejected writer? or the accepted one, for that matter? Just two months ago, I nearly missed an acceptance from  B O D Y, a very cool venue that is open to some of my weirder productions. And these editors are extraordinarily gracious and supportive. They paid me the compliment of rejecting an earlier submission by telling me that the work wasn't as good as my best work, so they weren't going to take it. And they were right!

So OK. I've incorporated checking my Submittable account into my daily routine. But I do miss the one-to-one notifications, and I do not find the new efficiency an improvement. 

Something completely different...

.for my blog is trying out products and reporting on them. Paperless Post contacted me, praised my blog and its appearance (OK, I'm susceptible, all right?), and offered me free coin to try out the site and post about it by today. So, now it's today, and here I go.

Paperless Post is dedicated to flyers and invitations--announcements, if you will--for events. There are also cards, filed under occasions and events, and I had to bat around for a bit to determine this. I'm always rather dense about new sites, so it is to the credit of their interface that I managed to find my way around.

You get many choices in pleasant styles--nothing too edgy, nothing too stodgy--and different levels of formality. Attractive contemporary designs. You may feel decision fatigue setting in, so remember:  Perfection is the enemy of the good. I had a good time trying out different combinations.

I was able to assemble a pretty and unique card for my friend, and, thanks to the magic of multiple windows, able to send it to her in good time. The site also links up with your address book, so really I didn't need to have resorted to multiple windows. I have mixed feelings about this, but we've been trading convenience for privacy for years, so why balk here?

Thank you, Helen Chuchak, for sending this my way. It makes a good addition to the other options in my repertory.

They can be found at this URL

https://www.paperlesspost.com

The movies in my head

No really suitable photo for this post. This morning, for the first time since my husband's death, I got back to my old style of dreaming. To wit: longish, detailed, complicated but coherent plots, featuring a mixture of real people, celebrities, and previously unknown people, doing improbable or metaphorically interesting activities. Walter called them three-reelers, and I could always help him fall asleep by telling him a dream (or made-up dream) in a monotone. Or I could just share them and entertain him. Like the time I attended a book signing of George Clooney, who had just published a book of poetry entitled "I'm Just Like You, Only Cooler." George knew my writing buddy Judith Terzi. I couldn't find any pants that didn't have cat hair on them.

But back to our sheep. This morning I slept well and long enough, and woke retaining this dream. Excellent, I thought, stretching, Walter will love this. And then I realized that he was gone, and would never get to laugh and exclaim over this dream. And my dear friend and former analyst Meredith Mitchell had died in 2017. And I don't know anyone--anyone--who has the right combination of intimacy and psychological interest to appreciate this dream. This is the first time in literally 50 years that I've had nowhere to take a dream. I collapse a little bit inside, then a little more.

One of the many hard things about losing my beloved husband Walter is that I can no longer share new experiences or old memories. Inspired by my friend Diane Schifrin, who created a page on Pinterest for her late father, I have established such a page on Facebook. The URL below does not create a link, but you can paste it into your browser.

https://www.facebook.com/Walter-Would-Have-Liked-This-107536047325019/

If you like, visit to see what he used to like and might have liked now. You might like those things too.

Walter had been a photographer since his early 20s, when he took up photography to take advantage of the air-conditioned dark room at his Army base in Bixby, Arizona. He got a big kick out of the sillier composition errors, such as trees or fountains or flower arrangements growing out of people's heads.

Hail, kindred spirit!

I had a fine piece of serendipity today. I'd gone for a walk in our local botanical garden, which features native plants and plant communities of the Southwest. There is a particular oak tree that must be more than 300 years old. Its sign proclaims it to be the Majestic Oak, and indeed it is, although Walter and I always rebelled against the un-ironic name and called it "the pretty big oak." It is one of the places where I left some of his ashes, discreetly of course, to become part of the tree.

As I continued my walk, I found myself putting words together about it. Ooo, a keeper! But bizarrely, I had set out without anything to write with or on or in, and I couldn't find the Notes app on my phone. Despite rising heat, I hustled over to the gift shop. "Hello!" I said to the young man behind the counter. "Could you give me a scrap of paper and something to write with?" "That's a nice 'hello'," he said, and handed me both. I jotted down what I had, noting as I wrote where it needed some work. "I totally understand," he said; "I'm a writer, and I'm never without," and showed me his moleskine journal and pen. Turns out he writes YA fiction, and was impressed (!!) that I write poetry. Well, I was impressed that he can come up with plots, which I could not do if my life depended on it. We talked Craft for a while, particularly the Surrealists' tricks for jump-starting inspiration. We exchanged our information, recommended readings to each other. I suggested Richard Garcia and Matthea Harvey for prose poems.

Hail, Avery! Long may you bring the right words to paper!