Long, interesting day. .Diane and I started it by taking a barefoot run with the dogs.. about 2 miles in 33 degree weather. it felt really cool.. but by  the end, our feet were totally numb. It does feel more fun and more natural.. you can run faster as well.. it’s hell on the laundry  though.. our socks are filthy from the inside when we put them on at the end of our runs.

I had a really long and really interesting day at work.. not a minute free.. when I finally could break free. I headed down towards Boston for dinner with my folks. I got here aroud 9 pm which was plenty of time for sushi at Oga.. I love eating sushi with my folks.. I remember eating sushi whit them when the very idea of eating uncooked fish was saacriligious.. no oneelse I knew in 1970’s Texas  ate sushi in the early  70s.. 

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.