MsTiara’s Thoughts

It’s raining and it’s pouring and I wish that I was snoring… Okay, okay, so it’s not very original or insightful or pretty much anything else. But it does describe the day here, raining, gloomy, stormy, floods and pretty dang ugly. Sigh, I thought it was supposed to be summer.

I am in a bit of a dilemma, my contract is due to end in November and I had conversations yesterday afternoon for a job offer that is feasible. But, I really do detest Dallas and the company doesn’t have very much to offer me as an employee. At this moment in time, I just want to head to my house and curl up in my bed with Ober and spend a month doing absolutely nothing but sleeping.

Ooooh, but Good News is that my house will have the final remodeling pieces done by the time I am home in November! The kitchen is being finished off and the final flooring being ran into the spare bedroom. I am now working out the decorating options for the spare bedroom and what I really want to do with it.

As I continue to watch the rain pour, I am getting a bit concerned for my flight out tomorrow night and wondering if I am going to be facing an evening in the airport watching Cancelled flash across the flight board.

Ah well, back to the world of work.

Beauty
by Tony Hoagland

When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.

After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror,
sucking in her stomach and standing straight,
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,

but I could see her pause inside that moment
as the knowledge spread across her face
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time,
a little knobby.

I’m probably the only one in the whole world
who actually remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,

spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill
which was her specialty,

while some football player named Johnny
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.

Or how she spent the next decade of her life
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.

Then one day her time of prettiness
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women
in the magazines and on the streets
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,

walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it–

It was spring. Season when the young
buttercups and daisies climb up on the
mulched bodies of their forebears
to wave their flags in the parade.

My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head
as if she was throwing something out,

something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.

Never say ‘No’ to adventures

Always say ‘Yes’,

Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.

Ian Fleming, Author of:

James Bond and

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang