Donna is Home for a belated Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Christmas

After more than six hours of ZOOM calls, Donna is home. The last thing I was working on was Psalm 46:10, which reads, "Be still and know that I am God." I think its too much like Rilke, but it precedes him. I explained to her that from that a Rabbi wrote, "The way to know God is theough stillness." which is Theology. Then from the theology I explained how my concern was literature and what I wrote was, "He suddenly felt a stillness come over him with the realization of what had happened and what it meant to him. He wondered, questioning whether this stillness, in the present form that was felt by him, was in some way a way of knowing God, open to the conjecture of what the ways of God were." With the Psalm I was looking at the rituals concerned with wearing a prayer shawl, after a rainbow,and studying the Torah where rituals are offered because the Lord our GOD is Blessed and ruler of the universe and the ritual is seen as being derived from a commandment. Our ninth Thanksgiving together was late, but our ninth Chanukah and ninth Christmas together should be our biggest, COVID 19 notwithstanding. The joke is that when we were first dating we bought a particular type of cheese. Its been repackaged and is now in the gourmet ailse, so our cheese this year costs more than a nights worth of shrimp. I just found it romantic after nine years. Donna said something fascinating in the hospital, that she would pray as a test, soshe prayed for, dinner just to find out if it would be answered, so now that she's home were are going to spread the turkey out over the weekend for a thanksgiving twice as big. I added a lobster claw to some lobster and macaroni and cheese. I made sure there were Chanakah cookies here for the minute she walked in the door and I her a dozen roses when I picked her up. Donna did have COVID 19 and was in fact hospitalized with something related and asked for prayer often. Our tenth anniversary of living together in her apartment will come during the summer.

Donna read a poem by Emily Dickinson over Zoom today

Altogether, Donna and I have spent over three hours on ZOOM. This afternoon she read a poem by Emily Dickinson. She speeded up the pace during the middle of it. She reminisced a little about things I might have neglected to blog about, one being when we found fourty dollars in the shopping plaza and she attributed it to the spirit of a then recently deceased neighbor, who would have wished her well on finding it. I still owe that much to a church member who replaced a similar amount when we lost it in the subway machine. I told her I would give him at least twenty of it next time we are there after covid- its been a couple years now, so we might have to get him something instead. Here is the poem.

My Fifty Eighth Birthday

Thank you, Donna

Donna and I appear in Online Poetry Course with Professors from Harvard and UPenn On Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead"

My Online Classes

Donna and I appear in an online course on Poetry with Professors from UPenn and Harvard University

Donna and I were invited to the home of Harvard Poetry Professor Lisa New, our arriving an hour early, for our second close reading with Al Filreis, Professor of Poetry at UPenn. Thank you Donna for a wonderful evening.

Fwd: Donna in highschool

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Donna McLaughlin <donnamclaughlin211@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Subject: Donna in highschool
To: scottlordnovelist@gmail.com

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Scott Lord <http://scottlord.blogspot.com>

Scott Lord <http://garboseastrom.blogspot.com>

Donna as a Seventies Teenager in New Jersey

Our visitor before the first January Snowfall