My Lovesong to Eliot

Having just read my sister-in-law's blog about her favorite poem, I find that I have to copy her. Initially, I tend to be a fairly lazy reader--it takes a really compelling story or very interesting characters to get me to read "lyrical" prose. And poetry? I don't think I've read much since I graduated from college 15 years ago. But there is one poem that I do remember. And return to again and again. It is very famous; I studied it in high school, and in both my American and English Literature classes (those darn expatriots).
"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
It has lines like:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned, and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-end of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

and

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After all the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say, "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say, "That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all."

I don't mean to be melodramatic, but I have occasionally sensed this emptiness and uselessness and impotence in my life. (I think it's called being human.) In general, I am happy and feel great, but there are times when I feel so misunderstood and incapable of articulation and simply invisible. This poem just seems to capture all those sentiments and the absurdities that accompany them.

Horseshoes, Hand Grenades and Nuclear War

I had to make some Emeril's Essence today to put on our ribeye steaks for Valentine's Day. All was going well, till I had to put in 1 tablespoon of black pepper. I have a magic pepper mill, you see. It's doesn't take too terribly long to grind a quarter teaspoon. But when you try to work up to a whole teaspoon, it seems like no matter how hard or long you turn it, you never reach the teaspoon. It's as if it knows that an important milestone is coming up and it doesn't want to reach it. So I had husband twist the mill for a while. And we went in spurts, dumping it out every quarter teaspoon or so and measuring the pepper. And I'm not kidding you, by ten minutes later we had increased the size of the pepper granules but we still hadn't reached the tablespoon mark. However, I decided that in the matter of measuring pepper, almost is good enough.

Last Friday was the sixth-grade dance. I have a bruise on my arm from pinching myself so I wouldn't CRY when the music started and Janey ran off to do the line dance with all the other kids. It was the same song that Beulah had danced with her class to three years ago. And I tend to get emotional when I watch performances anyway, but I was just overwhelmed with feeling like my little girl is growing up. She was one of the few girls who wasn't wearing makeup but she had a good time.