I read that somewhere recently…
Them’s words to live by.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Maybe you wonder how I can spend
so much time in this corner booth…
It’s easy, really, I have nowhere else I need to be,
this place is nicer than my place,
and I see people here,
years ago I met my friend here
almost every day,
I miss his cheerful contemplation
of so many things.
I’m alone now,
but not lonely,
I think about the times of my life
and the people I shared it with,
we shared good times in this booth,
and we shared the sadness we couldn’t avoid,
it’s a comfort being here,
the waitress knows my name, of course,
and she knows what I like to eat…
I didn’t think I would become
the old man in the corner booth.
You don’t think you’re going to be like me.
March 26, 2023
Inspired by “Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant”
by Billy Collins, as published in “Poem of the Day,” August 21, 2022,
by Poetry Foundation
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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Beowulf describing the wounded dragon, Grendel
Beowulf, p. 65
Seamus Heaney, trans.
New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2000
Beowulf, the Old English epic poem, was written more than a thousand years ago. No one knows who wrote it.
He or she had a way with words.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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The African Queen (1951, rated PG, 105 minutes) was an adventure film when adventure had more to do with intrepid characters and the right thing and joie de vivre than with car chases and bullets flying every which way.
Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart won an Oscar for Best Actor) kindly offers to take Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress) on a boat ride—in his broken down scow (The African Queen) on an unforgiving river in German East Africa in 1914.
Rose, the unworldly widow of a missionary, learns to manhandle the tiller, pours all the gin overboard, and generally civilizes Charlie quite enough. That scrufty bon vivant teaches her about pluck, honor, and kicking the old boiler to keep the boat going.
They risk their lives for the war effort by sinking the German warship, and they decide to get married. Ain’t love grand?
Even if you saw the movie long ago, try it again.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Flaunting, I walk upright in the wind,
the windward shoulder braced against…
it looks like nothing,
but it feels…
I will not stop, but damn!
these lurching strides in softer sand,
I lean toward the firmer band
halfway up this draining slope,
I am not a shuffler!
I say it.
This pace is good…
It’s good enough for now.
Fleet Beach
Chatham, Cape Cod, MA
June 5, 2000
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Temple Grandin (b1947)
Foreword by Oliver Sacks
New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1995, 2nd ed. 2006
270 pages
Thinking in Pictures is a calmly important book.
Probably you don’t know much about autism. Temple Grandin knows a lot, and she can teach you about the people who live lives that are different from yours. Really.
“Different, but not less.” That’s what her science teacher said about her.
She writes in a reserved tone, offering a grand sweep of what was known about autism in the mid 1990s and again in the mid 2000s. She talks about the high points and the low points of the rocky road of her life.
Temple Grandin talks with precocious understanding about animals. You’ll learn from this element as well.
I re-learned this very sobering truth: nearly everyone doesn’t experience the world the same way I do.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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