APRIL IS POETRY MONTH

SOMEWHERE A TREE

Spring's metamorphosis

Inevitable

Insistent

Somewhere a tree

Sleeping Beauty

Still, awakes

She hesitates

She yearns

She waits, she wants

Her diffidence

Dissolves

Desire undenied

She drops

Her torpid mantel

And

Hope

Springs

Anew

Keep it real! And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn

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A MONTH IN JAPAN – TOKYO, NOVEMBER 5 - 6, 2025

November 5, 2025 – Shibuya, Daikanyama, and Shinjuku The Lonely Planet Pocket Guide to Tokyo "Walk Shibuya" describes Shibuya. Thanks to its iconic intersection, Shibuya serves as a kind of visual shorthand for Tokyo in the global imagination. The thrumming crowds, glowing lights and giant video screens that you associate with the city? They’re all here – and turned up to the max. Shibuya is a center for youth culture, and particularly fashion, music and nightlife; it’s among the best places in the city for clubbing [Me: "Oh, to be 20 again!"], live music and shopping….To the west are the hip residential enclaves of Daikanyama and Naka-Meguro; these neighborhoods …can give you an alternative image of life in the capital – one that’s low-rise and low-key (but still very Tokyo). Shibuya Station We took the Chiyoda Line from Nezu Station a few blocks from our apartment, transferred to the Hamzomon Line at Otemachi Station, and got off at ...

A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAKUB AND MARYA

I recently assembled 15 photo albums from literally thousands of color prints my husband and I had amassed since the 1980s, as well as a handful of black and white prints left to us by our respective families and dating back to the 1930s. Among the photos I inherited from my father, was a photo (above) of Cousin Andy Sova, Cousin Irene Sova, my father Steve Kalata, and Cousin Emil Sova taken in Garfield, New Jersey, in 1925. The photo, like a Proustian madeleine, sent me to a file of raw genealogical research materials on my paternal grandparents my mother had compiled in the early 1990s, before her death in 1995. I have her files here in Berlin. In those files I found a few notes, some funeral cards, and several documents about my father and his parents, as well as my own notes from research on my father’s family I’d done in 2016 through ancestry.com . It was all ultimately pretty sketchy and inconclusive on who, what, where, and when, but there were a few...

ORONTEA DEL POGGIO IMPERIALE APRIL 8, 2008 – APRIL 8, 2026

PEDIGREE Her official name, as registered in the Associazione Nazionale Felina Italiana , was Orontea del Poggio Imperiale. She was a Chocolate Point Birman (Sacred Cat of Burma in English, Heilige Birma in German, and Sacro di Birmania in Italian). Like so many cats, Orontea had numerous other, unofficial names: Téa for short, T! for shorter, Mamma T One Time, The Meisterin, Beauty Queen (which she was), Devil Kitty, Marlon’s Girl, Sweetie Girl, Beauty Girl, and Best One (except for the other two kitties). POGGIBONSI Téa was born in a litter of four at Poggio Imperiale, a cattery in Stefania’s home in Poggibonsi, a Tuscan hill town between Florence and Siena. Téa ’s mother Galy was a Blue Point Birman also born in Italy, and her father Fiorucci was a Chocolate Point Birman born in Sweden. According to the Italian Feline Association, cats born in 2008 were required to have names beginning with O. Stefania named this litter after o...

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