Hi, I've been enjoying this site for a couple weeks now very much, been hesitant to explore beyond the one poetry section since that's been overwhelming with so many challenging things to read, think about, discuss etc., but now I see this area, and it's a slow night at the old PC bar & grill, so let me introduce myself to you, same as I introduced myself year ago on a cold slow night at the bar to the fellow employee who is now my wife.

We have two 14-year-olds and a 7-year-old, all of course incredibly fabulous and fascinating. I won't bore you with the details. Been writing most of my already very long-seeming 55 years, teaching English here and there for a long time, part-time since the kids came as I have the home portfolio in our family. Used to have 25 acres in the White Mountains of N.H., but now since Jo conked me on the head and dragged me out of the hills and civilized me, I grow as much and as wild of a garden as I can into a few precious patches of earth here in N.J. The town code inspector is a regular visitor. She leaves summonses requiring me to cut the "weeds," but when she comes and I ask her to name the plants that she's referring to, she just mumbles something vague and goes away, as she has no idea what any of the plants are! Okay, so that's the evil in me. It's not much, but I get a kick out of it.

My favorite books are all of Steinbeck and Baum from childhood. The scene at the end of Grapes (as I recall it) where Rosasharn suckles the dying vagrant in the barn...I've still never read anything like it. But if I had to reincarnate with just one book, I'd make sure it was Paradise Lost. To Kill a Mockingbird. Hundred Years of Solitude. I just now finished A Very Wanted Man, a new and quite different John LeCarre--excellent. Poems? Howl changed me. John Ashbery did something to me. Frost stays in me. Rilke slays me. The whole Anglo-Saxon canon. The whole classical Chinese canon. WC Williams. Plath. Bishop.

You see? I'm old, as my kids are overfond of saying. (Jo tried a new doc recently, from China originally; after Jo told the new doc the 4 or 5 things that bothered her, the doc just said "You old!") Old, and I find life slow and satisfying generally--and long. I've lived various and varied lives already and expect a few more before I'm done, but currently I'm in a very mellow place, watching the plants and humans grow with a dose of benign neglect to both. Basta. Goodnight!

100 Years and no counting backward.

Tom, thanks for the thoughtful introduction. Good to have you.

Thanks for welcome, Jay. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I think this community is extaordinary. Tom

We're glad to have you Tom - sorry for the belated welcome - (thought it was the least I could do after the whole hijacking incident)  lol

xo Michelle

Yep--the man's a writer, for sure.   It's oozing out your pores!  Fine introduction.
Lynne