Loose Leaf Notes

I’m not unemployed
but I have no income
I have a very unpopular job:
I write poetry

_________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. I’ve never been a Florence Nightingale type. I’m more of a Jerry Seinfeld.

2. I’ve done years of therapy. I use dreams to inform me and write poetry as case notes.

3. I’ve never been a Mother Theresa type. More of a nutty professor.

4. My life is like a library book / being read to the end / where the plot thickens / and all fines are forgiven / There is no spoiler / to heaven’s cliff hanger / I trust the author / and write my own chapter -Read Cliffhanger in its entirety HERE.

5. Frank Kafka on writing: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”  Franz Kafka

6. “Kafka’s Hat: With the rain falling / surgically against the roof, / I ate a dish of ice cream / that looked like Kafka’s hat. / It was a dish of ice cream / tasting like an operating table / with the patient staring / up at the ceiling.” Richard Brautigan

7. Heard on a Psychedelics Today and long covid podcast: “Not only patients with long covid but anyone suffering with a chronic neuropathic condition – those neuro networks get really strong because that patient is practicing those symptoms every day.

8. Me (who deals with a non-covid long haul post viral syndrome) to Joe, who recently broke his toe: “are you still practicing that your toe hurts?”

9. Now that a phone call is just a tap away, I don’t know anyone’s phone number in my head, except my own because I often have to call it from my landline to find my phone.

10. I’ve been very interested in how Milkweed goes from this.

11. To this: making seed pods.

12. Does it grow corn? Yes, and weeds.

13. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”   Isaac Asi

________Thirteen Thursday 

I told all my friends
that my idea of hell
is exercising in a pool
with a bunch of old ladies
lifting pool noodles in unison

But I love to swim
I do the breast stroke
slow and solo
like water ballet
I make my own way
up and down the lap lane

I once won a competition
for the best breast stroke
at the Hull Yacht Club
when I was ten

It was the same day I lost
my birthday wrist watch
and the bathing cap prize
that I never wore
was no consolation

My earliest idea of heaven
was playing paper dolls
and eating candy
But even then I knew
that could become boring

It might have been the same year
I accepted that Santa wasn’t real
the same year I secretly
said to myself “I hate God”
just to see what would happen

Nothing happened
I learned my mind was mine
and no one could see into it
that my soul was original
and no one could own or control it

Later I learned that I wasn’t a sinner
Heaven wasn’t a red lollipop
Death’s not a popularity contest
for separating best from the worst

My life is like a library book
being read to the end
where the plot thickens
and all fines are forgiven

There is no spoiler
to heaven’s cliff hanger
I trust the author
and write my own chapter

I wake and sleep
I end where I start
I lean into the parts
that feel true
A familiar love
A mystery let loose

Slow and solo
I yield to unknowing
to the holy unfolding
where consciousness isn’t
mine alone

__________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United 

1. While in Bethany Beach Delaware for Joe’s family reunion, I learned how to play Wordle, saw dolphins and had clean fingernails for the first time all summer (from swimming in the pool and not gardening).

 2. Joe’s 95-year-old mom started our Scrabble game with the word BEACH on a double word score.

3. She won. I had to skip a turn because I had no vowels on my rack or vowels on the board to work off.  Then, I got stuck with a Q at the end of the game, which means minus 10 points from my score.

4. I never got in the ocean because it was too cold for me, but I got lots of pool swimming in.

5. We stayed at three different places (sister’s houses and a hotel) for the week, and I had three bathing suits that I was always trying to dry off.

6. I never got in the ocean the week before when I was visiting my hometown of Hull, Massachusetts either, but I got close. See HERE. 

7. At Bethany, Joe’s mom got a celebrity greeting when she made it down to the beach one day.

8. As far as I know, she’s the last in the line of her generation.

9. I didn’t play cornhole but I did get to play with a couple of babies.

 10. I also saw the best fireworks of my life.

11. I named a few of them, as is my tradition. The only name I remember now was “beets in a blender.” I don’t think this is that.

12. Thanks Angie for treating us to this great meal on the Boardwalk, and to Barb and Rose for some sweet meals at the house.

13. Now it’s back to the pool life in Floyd, a garden full of weeds and playing Scrabble with my Floyd friends. More on the Bethany Beach week HERE. 

_______Thirteen Thursday

I turn in your direction
like a flower turns to the sun
I look for you
when I forget what it means
to be a flower

When you forget too
I lean on time
to stand up straight
I hold onto the memory
of the garden

I’m always looking
in your absence
for a recognizable sign
for a poem that enjoys the summer
that trusts the winter
that turns its tender bloom
into fruit

_____Colleen Redman /Poets and Storytellers United

1. Here at Bethany Beach, we went to a restaurant to eat dinner last night and there was line (see above).

2. The night before, we went to another restaurant to get some fish tacos and had an entertaining view of below.

3. They want to eat too.

4. After seeing Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy 30th Anniversary Tour at The Merriweather Pavilion, I can’t get this song out my head all week.

5. Another day, another pool.

6. And a pool party.

7. Is sufficient a mutant plural of efficient?

8. The origins of the corn hole game are vastly unknown. Originally corn was utilized more often as a weight rather than a food because of its abundance. The game began its popularity in the midwestern states comprised mostly of farmland because, you guessed it, more corn. However, the game Cornhole emerged as a favorite pastime in Cincinnati about 15 years ago and soon spread like wildfire to back yard barbecues, beaches, breweries, and campgrounds across the United States. Cornhole has become so popular that the American Cornhole Organization’s World Championships of Cornhole X have even received airtime on ESPN… More HERE. 

9. Another day another beach.

10. We didn’t see kites like we did in 2006 but we did see dolphins.

11. I call this ‘Carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders,” taken after learning the news about the Supreme Court ruling overthrowing the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law, the very thing our founders were afraid of, which is why they created checks and balances that the court just removed in Trump v United States.

12. Because of #11 I don’t want to celebrate July 4th this year, but if I see fireworks I won’t look away.

13. I call this “We’re running out of time.”
______Thirteen Thursday

It was a beautiful night to see Sarah McLachlan at the DC Merriweather Post Pavilion with our good friends Greg and Laura.

Our drinks were cold and our seats were lawn green on the grassy knoll.

We were in good company with a mix of fans who sang along to her songs. I think our group started the dancing.

By the near end of the show EVERYONE was dancing.

We found Greg’s daughters, exchanged some hugs and got a better view…

where the dancing and sing-along resumed.

She played my two favorites right off the top: Building a Mystery and I Will Remember You.

She built the mystery by playing some new songs before playing the whole of Fumbling Toward Ecstasy.

I knew what song was coming next because she sang them in the order of the album that we had played over and over in the 90s.

I will remember you. Will you remember me? We played it at my brother Jim’s funeral memorial in 2001 and it got everyone crying.

Some of the songs choked me up, but none as much as her new song Gravity, which she wrote for her daughter who has struggled with anxiety and rage. She came on the stage at the end and mother and daughter embraced. Listen HERE.

It surely was a night to remember!

1. I call the below Wavy Gravy.

2. And below is Nantasket Beach from the Nantasket Beach Resort Penthouse.

3. When I stayed with my sister in Massachusetts we swam in her community pool. One day we went and it was closed, so we went into the community rec room to ask about it. A guy who was happily playing pool told us ‘this pool is open.’

4. So we went to my brother Joey’s pool ten minutes away.

5. At the Temple of Sacred Mirrors visionary art museum in the Hudson Valley NY, where we stopped on our way to Massachusetts, I took this picture and told Joe I liked it, saying “It’s called ‘Window in the Door.’

6. After noting that the Temple was in Willkill near Platterkill, I looked up why there were so many places with kill in their names and discovered that ‘kill’ is a term that comes from the Middle Dutch word “kille,” meaning “riverbed” or “water channel,” and is found in areas with heavy Dutch influence like the Hudson and Delaware Valleys.

7. It was a joyful reunion of first cousins-once-removed that we never knew we had, until DNA results at Ancestry dot com revealed our mutual history. The meet-up was a lively one with several conversations going on at once. Someone joked to the waitress that it was a board meeting, and I imagine we were entertaining to the other diners there on a golf tournament day. We compared notes and resemblances and told WWII stories…  More from Finding Your Roots: The Redman Version HERE.

8. After our stay in Massachusetts and in my hometown of Hull, we headed to D.C. to visit friends and for a Sarah Mclachlan concert. We took I-95, the route that I lost 5 years of my life on when I had to drive it years ago, which was part of the reason I stopped driving non-locally.

9. I laid low and shook a leg / I took a detour and started over /When I hit a nerve in a dizzy spin / I said, “No one will ever / take my car keys away / I’ll gladly turn them in” – Read The Curve Ball in its entirety HERE.

10. Anyone that knows me knows why I posted this picture on Facebook. You can’t get whole belly fried clams in Virginia or anywhere in the South. It got over 100 likes and comments, so far.

11. A-Street Pier, right near where our family home used to be, is the best place to see the sunset.

12. My brother Joey and I where the only ones who followed the instructions for an ugly face shoot at our dinner together in Hull.

13. Standing on the moon / With nothing else to do / A lovely view of heaven / But I’d rather be with you… I just added THIS song to my final playlist. I saw Jerry Garcia play it a few months before he died.

___________Thirteen Thursday

It was a joyful meeting of first cousins-once-removed that we never knew we had, until DNA results at Ancestry dot com revealed our mutual history. 

The meet-up was a lively one with several conversations going on at once. Someone joked to the waitress that it was a board meeting, and I imagine we were entertaining to the other diners there on a golf tournament day.

We compared notes and resemblances and told WWII stories. We were all amazed at how much my father (the youngest of 11 Redmans) looked like our cousins’ biological father, the undisclosed child of my father’s brother John B. (Jackie) who died in the Philippines as a POW during the brutal Bataan Death March.

That’s my cousin Bill holding a picture of John B., his biological grandfather, who was my father’s brother and my uncle who died before I was born.  Bill and his siblings are heartened in the knowledge that their father was raised by his mother and her husband’s loving family, their family. They had no idea that their father’s father was actually a Redman. Neither did the Redmans. A few of us heard a whispered story in the mid-80s that John B may have fathered a child, and then we discovered our matched DNA about a year ago and both sides of the family have been putting the stories and pieces together since.

Another twist to the story was that my grandfather’s father, Charles Redman, was really Oscar Lundquist. He stowed away on ship from Stockholm Sweden to America as a teenager, and when a shipmate name Charles Redman died he took over his job and papers and entered the U.S. as Charles Redman. My last name should have been Lundquist!

After lunch, we went to the Redman family home in North Quincy where John B, my father and the rest of the 11 Redman siblings were raised. It was a grand old house before the last of the Redman family died and the house was sold and then fell into disrepair.

The Redman family home was just blocks from Wollaston Beach.

It feels good to know that the Redmans and Bill’s family were friends. We have the old pictures that show those connections. We miss them all.

Thanks to my cousin Patty, the master geology sleuth who couldn’t make it to the meet-up, and to my cousin Gerry (far left above) who toured us around and, like Patty and I, had some oral history pieces of the puzzle to add. Thanks also to Joe who took some great pictures.

On our way to Boston to visit family we stopped at an upstate NY Airbnb in WallKill near Platterkill. I kid you not.

We stayed in Wallkill to break up the road trip from Virginia to Massachusetts and because we wanted to visit the Entheon, a psychedelic temple in Hudson Valley.

Entheon is home to the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and houses three floors of the visionary art of Alex and Allison Grey.

The Sacred Mirrors series was created over a ten-year period between 1979 and 1988 and was originally inspired by LSD visions that the couple shared.

Alex, whose work frequently focuses on human anatomy, including the energy body, worked as a medical illustrator at one time and also taught anatomy and figure sculpture at New York University in the past.

The bulk of Allison’s work revolves around a secret writing, consisting of “an alphabet of 20 letters for an untranslatable, unproduceable language.

There were surprises around every corner. Even the bathrooms exhibited art of other visionary artists.

I spent a lot of time in this room, filled with Alex’s self-portraits that he chronicled from the age of 5.

They outlined a dark depression that was lifted when Alex and Allison met and they began their psychedelic journeys of spiritual connection and creativity together.

The couple also engaged in performance art and Alex is known for his collaborative posters for the band Tool.

“The name Entheon means a place to discover the God within, and it perfectly encapsulates the sanctuary’s mission to inspire visitors to explore the deeper dimensions of their being and the interconnectedness of all life.”

1. I won an album in a raffle at the Ballad Swap at the Old Marshall Jail.

  2. And I didn’t get locked up. More HERE.

3. Although he’s not a ballad singer, My son Josh, owner of the Old Marshall Jail Hotel and Ballad Swap host, performed Rocky Racoon at the Old Swap, saying that it met all the ballad criteria, a death, an unfaithful woman and the bible. It was also a tribute to me and his growing up  years in Floyd.

4. Funny that song came around just when we’ve been dealing with racoons living under our porch and seeming oblivious to us.

5. “I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England… I live now when we fuss if our computer can’t bring us everything we want instantly. We deny time.  We don’t want to do anything with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time you deny space. After all, it’s a continuum—which separates us.  So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us. I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live.” – Ursula K. LeGuin

6. Speaking of wild things, I saw the above along a creek when we stopped to eat on our ride home from Asheville/Marshall. I had never seen anything like it (or them) before.  When I got home I noticed that my friend Mara had posted one just like it. She called it ebony jewelwing, a species of broad-winged damselfly.

7. “I wake up, and my mind splices my current awareness to my previous awareness, which preceded my nodding off. Subjectively, I lack awareness of sleeping, unless I was dreaming and remember the dream. Watching Chalmers doze, and ruminating over these exchanges with Emily, my idea for eternal consciousness came to me. If mind emerged once in the cosmos, I thought, it will surely, over the course of eternity, emerge again. When it does, perhaps in some sense this new consciousness will be spliced together with the old consciousness, as if the intervening darkness never existed. So consciousness is subjectively if not objectively eternal.” From A Super-Simple, Non-Quantum Theory of Eternal Consciousness

8. I lost my balance in a poker game / while practicing to fold / Everyone was playing with a 52-card deck / while I was playing with 30 / on a good day – Read Curve Ball in its entity HERE. 

9. What could be better than to check out a book on Stonehenge under an Andrew Wyeth print, next to an old school red dial phone? -Read my Floyd press story about the opening of Floyd’s new independent book store, The Book House HERE.

10. Best flower shot this week, early milkweed.

11. Best dance party.

12. Sometimes we have to pause our weekly Scrabble games to celebrate a friend’s birthday

13. Best sign.

______Thirteen Thursday

“I spent five years transforming this building from the oldest operational jail in the entire state of North Carolina into what you see today,” Josh Copus (my son) said at the June Ballad Swap. Josh is a potter/artist and owner of the Old Marshall Jail, a boutique hotel bar and restaurant that is curated with Marshall history and installations of community bricks embedded with names and stories.

“That whole time my motivation was this thing that we’re doing here now,” Josh said. He spoke about turning something that was previously connected to trauma into something beautiful, saying that in his most challenging days working on the jail, he told himself, “There will be a day when this place is full of people having fun, being merry, eating and drinking.”

A ballad is a song that narrates a story in short stanzas. Traditionally they’re sung without musical accompaniment and are typically of unknown authorship, having been passed on orally from one generation to the next. The Ballad Swap night at OMJ’s Zadies Restaurant takes place the second Wednesday of each month at 6 pm.

Hanging out with Sheila Kay Adams, one of the best-known ballad singers in North Carolina, and her nest of birds, was a treat. I had heard her perform nine years ago at the Floyd Country Store (listen HERE). She was teacher to Elizabeth LaPrelle, who once co-hosted the Country Store’s Floyd Radio Show, and she has taught songs to some of our locals, like Ash Devine.

Wikipedia says this about Sheila: A seventh-generation ballad singer, storyteller, and claw-hammer banjo player, Sheila Kay Adams was born and raised in the Sodom Laurel community of Madison County, North Carolina, an area renowned for its unbroken tradition of unaccompanied singing of traditional southern Appalachian ballads that dates back to the early Scots/Irish and English Settlers in the mid-17th century… She made a musical appearance in the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans, and was a technical advisor and singing coach for the movie Songcatcher.

And above is Josh and Donna Ray Norton, second cousin to Sheila Kay Adams, explaining how they met and how the Ballad Swap at the OMJ’s restaurant began. It’s a wild 2-part story!

Donna and the OMJ Ballad Song Swap were recently featured in Oxford American magazine with a great write-up HERE.  She dedicated one of her songs, Wings of an Angel, to Rob Amberg, a local photographer who has documented Sodom, the Madison County mountain community scene where the ballad song scene has been concentrated and where Donna and Sheila and their kin are from.

I don’t remember ever getting so many goosebumps back to back. The songs reach deep.

Another really BIG highlight was when my son Josh, who is not one of the ballad singers, shared his version of a ballad that was dedicated to me and about growing up in Floyd County.

“It has all the components of a ballad. There’s a death, an unfaithful woman, a bible,” he said, and then surprised everyone till they caught on and sang along.

Ballads can be heart wrenching, but they can also be bawdy and some are downright funny.  Donna and Sheila’s daughter Melanie Rice Penland closed out the evening with a rousing traditional song that had some great ad-libbed lines.

Note: Two albums of old Ballad Songs are in the works, The Marshall Sessions and The Jail  Sessions, which will be available for sale at Ballad Swaps and at nestofsingingbirds.com.