Tag Archives: All Things Girl

Sunday Brunch: Heroes, Villains, and Loss – Excerpt

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reflectionthroughabugle_by_markcoffey_via_istockphoto

Reflection Through a Bugle by Mark Coffee via iStockPhoto.com – Click to embiggen

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Earlier this week, I found out that a good writing buddy lost his battle to cancer a few months ago. He was a veteran, and an amazing writer, and so I talked a lot about him.

Excerpt:

Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh — Falls the night.

Like many people, however, especially those of us with family, friends, or loved ones serving in the military, “Taps” has a more emotional context. It’s the bugle call you hear at funerals, and once you’ve heard it in that setting you never lost that connection. For me, the tears come, mostly for my grandfather, but for a string of others as well, from the very first note.

This weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, “Taps” is playing on an infinite loop in my head.

Why? Because I found out recently that a dear friend, a military veteran who survived a tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, then a year in Kabul with the National Guard, lost his last battle, one with that insidious enemy we call “cancer,” in February.

His name was Mike Greene, but I knew him best by the handle he used on OpenDiary (an early blogging platform that existed before LiveJournal or Blogger): WarriorPoet.

You can read the entire post here: http://allthingsgirl.com/2013/05/sunday-brunch-heroes-villains-and-loss/.

Got Verse?

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Vintage Typewriter

Vintage Typewriter | Credit: MorgueFile.com | Click to embiggen

From my Sunday Brunch column at All Things Girl:

April is National Poetry Month, at least in the USA, and the eighteenth is the day we’re supposed to acknowledge the poems we carry in our pockets. Most of my clothes don’t even have pockets, and the only poetry I write is not for public consumption, but I’ve loved poetry since I was young enough to embrace A.A. Milne (he wrote SO much more than just Winnie the Pooh) and eschew Dr. Seuss (sorry but his silly sing-song-y stuff does nothing for me), so I thought I’d chat about that today.

Click to read the rest of Nostalgic Verses (Or Marmalade, Shadows, Silverstein, and Shakespeare)

Lamplight is the word of the day….

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CherryBlossom-and-Lamps-by-mstroz-via-istockphoto

It’s time for Sunday Brunch at All Things Girl, and today I wrote about lamplight.

Here’s an excerpt:

I remain convinced that the only thing that would improve my house would not be replacing the cabinets or rebuilding the decorative lintel over the front door, but adding a lamp post in the center of my lawn. We have a corner lot, so a light at the center point would shine as a soft, comforting beacon no matter the direction of approach.

Streetlamps aside, my favorite days are what one of my aunts named for me: lamp-lit days. These are the days like this morning, where even hours after sunrise, the sky is shrouded in a cool mist that softens the light and deepens the shadows, making it absolutely necessary to interact with the world from within the protective circle of light from a lamp.

Oh, we have overhead lighting, of course, but somehow to use such glaring brightness would seem a sacrilege.

Click through for the complete post.

Media Monday: Ben Bailey at the DC Improv

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I’ve been working on (well, actually, they’re done now, I’m waiting for the response) interview questions for Ben Bailey (host of the Discovery Channel’s Cash Cab), for the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of All Things Girl, and as a part of my research, I’ve been watching videos of his stand-up act.

I’m sharing a video of him (ganked from YouTube, of course), for this week’s Media Monday, because it made me laugh. He does go a bit blue, though, so it’s definitely NSFW (not safe for work), or children.