The Sky May Be Falling… But You Are Not the Sky

[Video: Rosemary Clooney sings “Swinging on a Star.” See the note at the end of this post for some background about the song.]

From whiskey river (highlighted portion):

Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen

When the evening newscast leads to despair,
when my Facebook feed raises my blood pressure,
when I can’t listen to NPR anymore,
I turn to the sky, blooming like chicory,
its dearth of clouds, its vast blue endlessness.
The trees are turning copper, gold, bronze,
fired by the October sun, and the bees
are going for broke, drunk on fermenting
apples. I turn to my skillet, cast iron
you can count on, glug some olive oil,
sizzle some onions, adding garlic at the end
to prevent bitterness. My husband,
that sweet man, enters the room, asks
what’s for dinner, says it smells good.
He could live on garlic and onions
slowly turning to gold. The water
is boiling, so I throw in some peppers,
halved, cored, and seeded, let them bob
in the salty water until they’re soft.
To the soffrito, I add ground beef, chili
powder, cumin, dried oregano, tomato sauce,
mashed cannellinis; simmer for a while.
Then I stir in more white beans, stuff the hearts
of the peppers, drape them with cheese and tuck
the pan in the oven’s mouth. Let the terrible
politicians practice / their terrible politics.
At my kitchen table, all will be fed. I turn
the radio to a classical station, maybe Vivaldi.
All we have are these moments: the golden trees,
the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness
will not overtake us.

(Barbara Crooker [source])

Not from whiskey river:

I can enjoy feeling melancholy, and there is a good deal of satisfaction about being thoroughly miserable; but nobody likes a fit of the blues. Nevertheless, everybody has them; notwithstanding which, nobody can tell why. There is no accounting for them. You are just as likely to have one on the day after you have come into a large fortune as on the day after you have left your new silk umbrella in the train.

(Jerome K. Jerome [source])

…and:

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.

(D.H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Sometimes, When the Light

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

“I just don’t understand, Piglet,” said Pooh.

“What’s that, old pal?”

“Well, why do we have to have Mondays? They’re just so… unnecessary.”

Piglet mused on the question for a moment, his tiny ears wobbling up and down with concentration as he thought.

“Well,” he said, after some consideration. “I suppose, that if we didn’t have Mondays…well, Fridays wouldn’t be so ruddy marvellous, would they?”

“Oh Piglet,” said Pooh. “You really are the Best Pig of Greatest Brain that I have ever met. Now, can we go and celebrate the marvellousness of Fridays with gin and takeaway?”

“Too bloody right we can,” said Piglet. “Too bloody right.”

(Kathryn Wallace [source: nothing canonical — her Web site appears to be down — but I found it here])

__________

About “Swinging on a Star”: The song is credited to the songwriting team of Jimmy Van Heusen (lyrics) and Johnny Burke (music), but as is often the case there’s a story behind its creation… Van Heusen, Burke, and Bing Crosby had worked together for many years, on one project or another. Among them: Crosby’s 1944 film, Going My Way — which as filming neared completion needed just one more song. One evening, Van Heusen and Burke were dining at the Crosby house (the three men had become close friends) when Crosby’s son Gary, aged nine or ten at the time, started complaining about having to go to school the next day. Crosby supposedly admonished him this way: “Well, if you don’t go to school, you might grow up to be a mule.” The line so delighted Van Heusen that with Burke, he just spun it out to full length. (It even fit well with the scene in the film they were working on.) Both “Swinging on a Star” and the film’s title song were nominated for Oscars — but it was the “silly” one, not “Going My Way,” which won. How about that?

Crosby’s recordings of the song were big hits, and plenty of them can be found at YouTube, Spotify, and the other usual places. But this perky video of Rosemary Clooney singing it on her selft-titled1956 variety show was too good for me not to use here.

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