Dinkytown, where Bob Dylan lived for a while, is an old campus market area adjacent to the University of Minnesota. My parents & grandparents on both sides have lived near here for about a century and a half. Ever since the riverboat captain father of Jessie Ophelia and Cleopatra Desdemona Lawrence settled here, & Jessie married my great-grandpa George P. Gould, and Judge W.E. Hale's daughter, poet & songwriter
Helen Hale, married Shephard Alcide Ainsworth, who worked for
Pillsbury & died suddenly of pneumonia, but not before fathering Florence Ainsworth (born to patriotic songwriter Helen on the 4th of July, 1900) who married Jessie & George P.'s son Edward Gould, who had 3 sons and a daughter, the youngest son & daughter being twins, John & Mary Gould, John Gould being my father (who married
Mary Ravlin, youngest daughter of another very local neighborhood River Road family, the Ravlins, which is
another story entirely) - John Gould, my father, now in hospice & lying very quietly, not eating anything to speak of, drinking juice, receiving lots of visitors, becoming skin & bones very quietly & peacefully, in his old neighborhood, being attended to by his oldest son, that being me, & many others...
I
learned today that ordinary meandering rivers (like the Mississippi) cover the average distance of a straight line from source to delta multiplied by
pi (3.14.15...). I took a walk along the Mississippi this afternoon, traversing the old portage route (back to the Ojibwa) through the U of M campus (my father's & grandfather's alma mater)... everything about life seemed infinitely incomprehensible, insoluble, labyrinthine, & inexplicable to me as I walked along. I felt stymied, incompetent, incapable, stunned, knocked back temporarily like Walt Whitman in
Leaves of Grass... but maybe that's all a regular element of International Pi Day...
Happy Pi Day. Happy Ides of March, too.
http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2005/06/you-want-meaning-drummer-boy-try-to.html
