Notes from The Shrine 2: Like It or Lump It

~ johnbrandall

Bob was talking today.  We were at the lunch table and I was telling my dad about getting a dentist appointment set up for him.

“What’d you say about a weapon?” asked Bob.  

I wasn’t sure what he might have heard so I said my dad and I were talking about teeth.  Then I was telling dad about taking mom back to the dealer so she could pick up her car once it had been serviced.  New brakes.  I guess it really doesn’t take that long.

Bob mused on driving, which he said he hadn’t been doing “for about a year now.”  I asked him what kind of car he had.  Or maybe, I wondered aloud, did he have a truck.  He laughed at that idea.

“No,” he said, he never had a truck.  “But who knows once the kids get their foot in there.”

“You never had a truck as part of your job?” I asked.  “Getting up on those poles?”

“That job,” he answered, “was a real pain in the ass.”

Bob was a lineman.  He worked for what then was called Union Electric.  He has spoken fondly about his job in prior conversations so I took this expression of displeasure as a reference to one specific job, some beef or failure or disappointment he must have had out in the field one week...


Click here for the full journal entry...

Notes from The Shrine 1 

~ johnbrandall

Early May 2024

My dad slowly wheeling himself away, his feet pulling, scraping along.

“Yeah, he walked him,” says a woman with glasses, another resident.  “We were down in our house.”

Mass is on the TV, in the common room of this nursing home.  Lunchmate Bob is singing along with the hymn, just the notes.

“Soft smell, the all cough coughs,” says the woman with glasses.  I do not remember her ever saying anything before.  But I do recognize her, she must eat in the assisted dining room.

“They were asking for the Christmas Day,” she says.  “I never heard that one before. Least they’ll give it to the other Christmas.  Have fun.  We had a little.”

She trails off.  I can’t follow the meaning of her words but hers is a musical nonsense language.  Lyrical and sporadic, like a strange bird.

“I throw ye in the class now!”

“Hmm?” asks Bob in reply, thinking maybe she is talking to him.

Lillian, another resident, rocks back and forth in her wheelchair.  She’s spoken to me a few times, thinks maybe I am one of hers.  A lunch will be served in the main Dammert dining room, Dammert being the name of this place, this wing of the retirement community, the last stop on the route, the end of the line.

Bob has gotten an early start on his lunch.  Someone has gotten him a bag of cookies.  Maybe his wife, who lives over in the apartments, independent.  

“I call on the on-derin,” says the woman with glasses.  

“Yeah, hmmm,” says Bob, “Mm-hmm.”

She holds her hands tight, clenched and clawed, thumb to index finger, pill-rolling.

“Hmm?” says Bob, “I can’t hear you.”

The Mayor’s mom is also a resident here.  Helen.  She fell recently, landed on her head.  She looks pretty beat up, a gash on her forehead, dark red, purple, dried blood.

“Thank you,” says Bob.  

Later, at lunch, he turns to me and holds up just the top half of a hamburger bun.  

“This is nothin but bread,” he says, and I can’t disagree.

For most of this year, I have been visiting my dad at a nursing home near Belleville, IL. Dammert, the place he's in, is the skilled care wing of a retirement community at Our Lady of the Snows Shrine. I have kept a journal during many of these visits. It is time for me to begin to type up these Shrine journals. They will not be posted in chronological order. I didn't take many photos early on so some of the photos might be redundant.


Newville 108

~ johnbrandall

It helps to think of it as a city.  The beginning
Of a city, a little town blooming loud around you.
You’re in the middle of it, side-central flower.
There are creeks that run with the sound of
Crying babies.  This is perfectly normal.
This is how cities are made—first with eggs
On a fervent bed of moss.  Purple moss, 
Why not.  Becomes purple gutter, your neighbor
Waving hello, he sees you as part of the
Landscaping, the living city.  There is applause for
The show just getting out.  Bow.  Take a bow,
On your deck, the sun is shining, a bus rolls
By, one of the many odorless buses, to
The next city, from the last one, the way storm drains
Drain.  It’s all taken care of.  The baseball team has
A star pitcher, from this town, from next door.  He
Would have been you, you could have been him.
Glove on, ball coming in, caught, reach into
The glove, pull out the ball and read the name on it.
It’s the name of this town, the town you made,
That grew up all around you, so quietly you didn’t
Even notice.

This poem originally ran in the seventh edition of the Under Review in the winter of 2023. You can see the poem as it appears on their site here. I thank them for recognizing my work. You can see the list of my other published work here.

Updated Impact Report

~ johnbrandall

I’m no good for stock tips,
and I’m lacking of ladder.
But I love the half-acre
blanket I’ll sleep on tonight,
bee’s clover soft like
sunlight beneath.

Cloud sandwich,
thin blue meat of sky.

No salida.  Por supuesto.  
Necesito construir la presa.
The reservoir, the dam.

At the end of the avenue, the river
goes underground, becomes
the aquifer that filled a million years ago.

I promise I’ll sip slowly.

This poem originally appeared in the Red Rock Review. It was printed in their Fall 2022 issue, which does not appear to be available for purchase. But you can see a digital copy here. I thank them for publishing this poem.


Scrub Notes, Bird Notes: Tucson, June 2024

~ johnbrandall

I. Intro: getting there
II. Other trip expenses, so far:
III. Bird notes
IV. We did what we did when we did it
V. Firmament
VI. Scrub notes
VII. Brittlebush and the voice of a bird
VIII. A room in the desert
IX. Birdsong notes
X. It left when we rained

I. Intro: getting there

Find me at the fairgrounds, it's as good a place as any, in whichever county you may seat. Quilt-mart. Family-style catfish. Steel, brown, breaking. Stave, stave off. Hot week, water down, the sun is stronger than we think. Strong corn, striped grass, green green.

Cosign for sonic coins. This is where we got run off the road last time, remember? Walk the river, find the seam, undo the enigma. Tapes in storage, do they still speak? The smell of gold I know only from a dream. Rusted rocking horse moving oil along the line. Flat Kansas, open air. Raw emotion, sudden ocean, pay dirt mining away...



Find the full post here...

Tijuana 2024: San Diego, Camp Scrawl, Pack Notes.

~ johnbrandall

What follows is an account of my recent trip into Tijuana, Mexico with a group of 36 other people mostly associated with BurlPres, a church in the Bay Area. While in Tijuana, we were camped out east of town for five nights. Together we built a basic but sturdy house for a family in need. The second half of the post comprises my Pack Notes, which functions as an alternative way of recounting the trip as I unpack all of what I brought back with me... Read the full travelogue here...

Alimentary Manifesto 15

~ johnbrandall

  1. Forget food
  2. I renounce food and all its treason
  3. Food is not my commander
  4. I refuse to schedule my day around food
  5. I'm really not that hungry
  6. Thanks, I ate once already
  7. I had watermelon and loved it
  8. Heat that up on the dashboard
  9. Make the same thing over and over
  10. Order triple and hunker down
  11. Less food is more life
  12. I could eat more if I drank less
  13. But I don't want to drink less
  14. Fine, I'll eat whatever
  15. But only if it's perfectly cooked!

The Madness of Mowing

~ johnbrandall

Yes, it is all going to be cut. But it doesn't all need to be, it shouldn't all be cut at once.

Divide a plot of grass, whether it be a yard, a lawn, a property, a park, a field into three pieces. Cut one-third of it every week such that every blade of grass is cut every three weeks. In the meantime, two parts rest, regenerate, fill in, save the pollinators, waft gently in the breeze, retain rain or dew that might otherwise more easily run or burn away.

Make lanes. Use these paths as ways to get into, alongside what might have gotten too long. Shoot the clippings onto the parts that were cut a week or two before; there's room for them there, the mower will always be able to breathe...


An account of two trips to Farm, late summer 2023...

Tijuana Pack Notes 2023

~ johnbrandall

Since 2018, I have taken an annual trip to Tijuana, Mexico by way of San Diego to help build a small house for a family in need of a place to call their own.   I say annual but of course the trip did not occur in 2020 or in 2021.  In San Diego I meet up with a group from the San Francisco area who are mostly all members of the same church.  The church has been doing the trip for a few decades.  My wife’s sister was married to a pastor at the church, which is how I found my way to the trip.

After meeting in San Diego, we rent vans and make our way across the border at Otay Mesa.  We proceed from there to a campground run by a not-for-profit called Amor that hosts groups like ours.  The campground is on the eastern outskirts of Tijuana, on the road toward Tecate.  We set up tents at the campground; we hire a local team of cooks to provide food for us for the five nights we are there.  

I have written an account of the trip each of the four times I’ve done it.  After the trip, I take account of my packing.  Did I bring what I needed?  What did I bring that I didn’t use?  It’s a challenging trip to pack for because everyone working on the house is supposed to bring a few basic tools.  After including clothes, tools, and some camping gear, my pack gets pretty heavy.  Which is why I take a close look at what I choose to lug around with me as I make the trip from St. Louis to San Diego and then to Tijuana and back.  These are my pack notes, with each item getting its own bullet-point breakdown.

/\\.

Tonic water bottle (10 oz, plastic).  I used it extensively, initially as a water bottle in the airport.  I brought it empty in my carry-on as I went through security.  I filled it from water fountains or water stations in the airports.  The Elkay brand bottle-filling stations have become close to ubiquitous in airports nowadays: Lambert, DFW, San Diego...


Unpack the full pack list here...