Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the splendid table.

And you know, I just want to tell you that our show is a great place to come to for some holiday sanity.

We're getting cooking help from amazing people this holiday season,

including Chef Kristen Kish, Errik Kephere, co-book authors, Jocelyn Jelk Adams, Dan Pelosi, and Amy Felon.

We have cooking, eating, and gifting ideas for anyone you're going to have at your table.

But listen to the splendid table, wherever you get your podcast.

Talk to you soon. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown.

We are lucky to hear in a poem, one piece of wisdom to carry into our day.

Today's poem yields so many spoken from the protective spirit and love of a father and husband.

It is a poem that is relentless in its simple truths,

and thus life affirming at every turn.

Deaf Letter Number 2 by Sean Thomas Doherty I'm not sure where I left it in the fruit owl beside the avocados and the kiwis on the ledge of

a quarry bank three decades ago. I lost my life when she left goes every country song.

When my dog died, when my beer ran out, this life, as if tied to a string.

The tradition says it is not the maker, but the Marionettes who control the strings.

But if you listen, you can hear the maker.

Simply touches them now and then.

The way a mallet and the piano will touch a piano string and make a note, a vibration

sast the noodle that shutters the body. My wife points out, but if it is us who hold the strings of our

fate, what if we pull them too hard? What if we pull them too hard?

What if we snap them and lose our connection?

...