2nd Descent a Puppet Show "A Little Summer Puppet Show."

SECOND DESCENT
TREASURE FOUND: A SEASONAL PUPPET SHOW!!           note: Images to follow

"A LITTLE SUMMER PUPPET SHOW!"

     Back down to the basement...moving stuff around....

Jim's books on the table.. there are so many more in other hidden bookshelves downstairs, out in the garage....and all my stuff...but somehow all this finding of puppet shows and those times I performed for 2 or 10 or 30 people leads back to him.
My Texas, Railroad Worker, Poet Dad.....who loved to tell stories and jokes and muse on the lives of those he met....and who memorized poems that he recited even when memory has left out the back door and Dementia had moved in.....

     and this task is also about my Jungian dreamer of a mother who taught me to journal and value the Inner Life
"Allow your Outer life to relax so You Can Focus on Your Inner Life... she said so wisely...and in reading her typed differentiation of the four functions..Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation..I can see that I am dealing with my difficult sensation function by cleaning..and making order....not sure that I will find the wholeness that Jung speaks of..but if I keep at it..I may have a clean basement eventually....

     I move stuff around..fill a garbage bag with junk and then reach for the old plastic bag with my former address fading out....

Reaching in, I find an old puppet show I made eons ago.....its so old and it is so apropo of this time..of last summer..of this cold weather now..of all that we suffer through and enjoy here in Minnesota...

The inspiration for this little show came from a little bag I found that had a clear plastic window in it.  Aha!! I thought!! It's a PUPPET SHOW IN A BAG!!!!  and so I quickly fashioned a puppet show based on summer and winter. I fashioned the small pieces quickly out of my ink pen and watercolors....puppet shows are easy and quik!! sometimes...aaargh cleaning a basement...very slow and arduous...

So anyway.. I fashioned the pieces and taped them on so I would stick the pieces down into the bag...and you see it through the clear window!! Voila!!


and thus I performed it...showing summer heat...cooling breezes...air conditioning....swimming and svitzing... ( the Yiddish word for sweating....as Leo Rosten says..." Yiddish has more Vitamins than other Languages!!!) and then moving to other images of winter....and so on..

I performed it in the moment to various friends...they laughed..I carried it around and then it was forgotten in the busyness of life...and it was forgotten...

only to be retrieved last week...
I changed the pieces around....and switched the order so that the " story" begins with winter and ends with summer....like some kind of Remembered Relief....its THIRTEEN degrees out as I write this..

and I performed it this past sunday for some friends.....4 to be exact..they looked and laughed..
and now it is on the end of my dining room table..I ll carry it around again and make people laugh...maybe the front desk dental clerk I just spoke to at the end of my block needs a laugh.. I stopped in there to chat and warm up before my walk around the block...her husband is in a lot of undiagnosed pain...maybe she needs a laugh...or the people I will see later today at work..maybe they need a laugh...PUPPET SHOW IN A BAG!!!
yeah...we can laugh because the weather is so unrelenting here and so hard to take

and we tend to live for summer...but maybe I am changing my attitude around and I am living for Hibernation and Writing and Musing and The True Life of Memoir as lived out through Cleaning My Basement and Handling All the Pieces of My Past, one by one and remembering and writing...Throwing out what needs to be thrown...keeping what needs to be kept...selling what needs to be sold...giving away what needs to be given away...and remembering..allowing this process to recount my life..allowing the deep muse of Persephone to guide me... deeper..deeper...into the mysterious land of my past as revealed in my basement.

                             
     and it does all lead back to my dad Jim...who wrote on his manual typewriter every day....he wrote out poems he loved....wrote up his daily musings  and then xeroxed numerous copies....and sent them far and wide...who modeled for me the importance of telling stories...whether at a party...or typed out manually and sent to friends ...yes from his heavenly realm I continue the DNA that is in me..to type out a daily story and to send it out far and wide..and to keep telling stories..whenever I can...even a simple tale of the seasons that uses a paper bag for a stage!!