Rosie's in Monterey

Every view of Monterey is entertaining. This blip is from the place where we ate breakfast. All day we just hugged the H2O. In the morning we watched -- the waves, the dozens of people outfitted in scuba gear learning to dive, and the folks walking their dogs.

Stopped middle afternoon for a cup of coffee and a cookie in a bookstore and purchased the book Valentines: poems by Ted Kooser.

Then watched a group of friends and family (strangers to us) gather for a wedding to begin at Lover's Point Park. My sis arrived late afternoon after two days of driving from Portland, Oregon. The three of us ate Italian dinner, yum!

John Steinbeck helped to make this geography famous. In the book Cannery Row, he wrote, "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses."

Maybe Monterey is not so much anymore what Steinbeck wrote--the sardines are gone and the whore houses--but what remains is lots of history, the working wharf, and the panoramic view. The old blends with the new so that we cannot detect the dividing line.

That's the end of this week of blipping--when the United States of America inaugurated a new president into office.

Rosie, aka Carol

*Ted Kooser's book (from the book jacket) -- in 1986 he wrote "Pocket Poem" and sent the tender, thoughtful composition to fifty women friends, starting an annual tradition that would persist for the next twenty-one years. Printed on postcards, the poems were mailed to a list of recipients that eventually grew to more than 2,500 women all over the United States. Valentines collects Kooser's twenty-two years of Valentine's Day Poems. Kooser's Valentine poems encompass all the facets of the holiday: the traditional hearts and candy, the brilliance and purity of love, the quiet beauty of friendship, and the bitter-sweetness of longing. Some of the poems use the word valentine, others do not, but there is never any doubt as to the purpose of Kooser's creations.

Ted Kooser, Presidential Professor of the University of Nebraska, is former U.S. poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.