Simple pleasures

“Sssshhh; we need to use our inside voices,” I caution my students primly as we leave the sunlit campus courtyard to head back inside the building.

This is met with a burst of raucous laughter from my twenty- and thirtysomething students before we settle into a tasteful silence as we enter the hallways. Our decorum lasts mere seconds before we break into fresh merriment. They’re a witty group, and no one is exempt from the gentle barbs  … including the professor. (Lest anyone think we are using the fine weather as an excuse to goof off, I will add that the students have been sharing with one another their rough drafts for a final project, and the fresh air and green space helped to sharpen their mental faculties. Their comments on their classmates’ work are detailed, respectful and astute.)

“This is the best English class I have ever had,” Kaytlyn chuckles. “I’ve been telling everyone they need to try to get you as their teacher.”

I live for simple pleasures like this. A day warm enough to hold class outside, laughing loudly enough to disturb everyone  in the classrooms inside. An afternoon at the farmer’s market, chatting with the rosy-cheeked, suspendered Amish (Mennonite?) vendor about the absence of GMOs in the food he gives his chickens. And he shows me their picture: fat, glossy and smug, strutting around among patches of bright emerald-green grass. A simple meal of fresh, local, organic food in season. And a tree so beautiful on my afternoon walk it takes my breath away.

Spring took forever to get here, but today made it worth the wait. Well worth it.

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Never the Twain shall meet

“I can’t stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people. I see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death.” – From a letter written by Mark Twain

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m saying it now:

Samuel, Samuel, Samuel. Sometimes you need to know when to shut up.

This from someone who has been a lifelong fan of Mark Twain’s writings and pithy sayings. I love his books. I love his short stories. I love his little bon mots that have been duly passed down by generations of admirers.

Come see the softer side of Twain

I love repeating his famous bits of wisdom like this one:  “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

And of course, this oft-repeated classic: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

There are even times when he borders on lyricism and beauty. His book Adam’s Diary, a little gem that in my opinion gets far too little attention, ends with this tender line about Eve:  “Wherever she was, there was Eden.”

Aaaaahhhh.

But spare me the venom

Sometimes, however,  Twain can be a little too much like the MTV character Daria.

For those who aren’t familiar, Daria is an animated TV series created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn for the teen-to-young-adult audience of MTV. The series features Daria Morgendorffer,  a sharp, acid-tongued and decidedly antisocial teenager whose wry observations about the people around her expose the follies and hypocrisies of popular culture and suburban life.

At first, her relentless cynicism is entertaining and makes her sound edgy and sharp, maybe a little smarter than the rest of us. But after a while, you just want to smack her and tell her to get over herself. Knee-jerk cynicism isn’t really any more intelligent than rank sentimentality … and given the choice, I’d rather be friends with a sentimental fool.

In praise of happy endings

I say this because Twain’s scathing dismissal of Nathaniel Hawthorne feels particularly harsh to someone who, as a teenager, found redemption and hope in Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. Like his main character Hester Prynne, I felt publicly branded and stigmatized for sins that  were of other people’s making. The oppressive condemnation and ostracism from self-righteous Christians that I experienced in small (and small-minded) backwater towns felt remarkably similar to that of the Puritans in Hawthorne’s tale. 

The novel ends with a happy ending of sorts:  evil is exposed, the guilty are punished, and the heroine finds genuine forgiveness and peace … and even a measure of respect from the townspeople who once shunned her.

It was good news for me

Maybe a worldly man of Twain’s maturity and experience could see where that story was headed. But to a 15-year-old girl who could barely hold her head up for all the shame that was heaped on her, it was a revelation of astounding proportions that a respected man of letters and man of God might actually be on the side of the tainted woman.

So with all due respect to Twain’s undeniable wit, given the choice between a sharp-tongued cynic or a compassionate if sentimental fool, I’ll take the sentimental fool any day, hands down.

Because if we writers truly have the power to shape the world around us, then I want to be on the side of the ones who offer mercy and hope. Seems to me that’s a much happier ending.

And when you get right down to it, don’t we all, deep down, want happy endings?

Poem for April 25

For today’s Writer’s Digest prompt, Robert Lee Brewer invites us to take the phrase “Everyone (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of a poem, and then, write the poem. Possible titles he suggests: “Everyone Thinks I’m Crazy,” “Everyone Knows the World Is Round,” “Everyone Needs to Leave Me Alone,” or whatever it is that everyone is doing (or not doing).

Here’s my response. It was the first idea that popped into my head, so I just decided to go with it and see where it went.

everyone lived in an ugly cow town

everyone lived in an ugly cow town

(with dull unthinking so many knows down)

birth youth age death

they shouted their  isms they flung their hate

 

women and men (and children too)

circled the wagons to keep not-us out

they oiled their other they drove out their strange

city suburb village grange

 

some people guessed (but only a few

and down they forgot as upward they grew

age death birth youth)

that no one remembered untruth by untruth

 

late by never and why by why not

she always remembered yet never forgot

rake by august and heaven by hell

was anyone’s way to talk but untell

 

somebodies married their no ones-but-him

they nothinged their chatting they danced their undid

(sleep wake work and then) they

said their farewells and unstood by the door

 

stars rain sun moon

(and only the chaff can seem to explain

how no one remembers and many regret

with dull unthinking so many knows down)

 

one day nobody died i guess

(and nobody wept to unmourn the unloss)

all were too busy to stop for a look

nothing by nothing by hook or by crook

 

shallow by shallow and none too deep

and less by less they undream when asleep

someone and no one betwixt by between

and nothing at all can appear if it’s seen.

 

women and men (both worth and unworth)

youth age death birth

unreaped as unsown, they unplayed their game

sun moon stars rain

 

 

We all know someone like this

“For today’s [poetry] prompt,” writes Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest, “write an auto poem. Auto could mean automobile, automatic, automaton, or any number of possibilities.”

My offering today is a senryu. A senryu, as Brewer defines it, is like a haiku with fewer restrictions and different subject matter. It’s a 3-line poem with a traditional 5/7/5 syllable (or sound) pattern, and the poem typically deals with the human condition. “In fact,” Brewer observes, “many people who claim to write haiku are already writing senryu.”

Guilty as charged.

Autocracy

In his rule of one

No one else has any say.

“My way or highway.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem for April 23

Today’s poetry prompt from Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest is a Two-for-Tuesday prompt. “In fact,” he writes, “this is one I include with every challenge.” Here are the options he offers:

• Write a love poem.
• Write an anti-love poem.

And mine is a single poem that does both.

’Twas The Beast Killed Beauty

Last night she dreamed she was in love with King Kong.

A big hulking brute of a beast he was,

Who petted and scorned her by turns.

He built her a shelter of sorts in the air,

Perched high on his haunches where no one could reach her.

He made it of sticks and mud and promises,

The ephemeral flora of the forest.

And from the outside

And from the ground

And from a distance

It looked solid enough.

 

Inside was all she needed:

A bed, a mop, a stove,

And one tiny window to let some outside light filter in,

But none of hers out.

And although he often squeezed her too tight,

And, truth be told, it did scare her some

When he pounded his chest or threw things,

She was

 

Happy.

 

No, really.

 

‘Till one day he lowered his great hairy hindquarters

To reach for some low-lying fruit,

Where, finding her feet on solid earth,

She tremblingly crept toward the palm-shaded window

And leaning her elbows upon the sill,

Stood looking and looking out.

 

 

Poem for April 22

For today’s prompt, Robert Lee Brewer suggests writing a complex poem. “Complex is a complex word,” he explains, “that can refer to mental state, apartments, difficulty of a situation, and so many other complex situations.”

My response:

Tête–à-tête

She thinks she is manic-depressive, she says, using

The language of a generation ago to describe

What I saw every day:

The bursts of creativity, the beautiful melodies,

Whole programs taking shape in a single flash of insight.

These she juxtaposed among the late nights she dragged me out of bed

She said to shore her up

But really just to pull me down and down into her nightmare realm.

 

Did she have a choice?

I say she did.

 

There were those lucid moments when she knew,

When she could see the wreckage in her wake,

But it was too easy to make it someone else’s choice:

Her husband, her friends, her family all gave her the easy out

(And themselves, too, no doubt),

All said she could not help herself,

And therefore I must.

 

Which left me with a choice:

To follow suit, or to chart a different course.

I preferred Plan B,

Which despite its many pitfalls and uncertainties,

Has mostly worked out rather well.

 

Especially for her granddaughters.

 

She pauses, fork poised with the next bite,

Waiting for … what? I’m not sure. Disbelief? Evidence to the contrary?

Reassurance that she is fine

And everyone else is nuts? Yes. Probably that one. That was always my job.

But instead I laugh, my years of anger and misery long since passed.

 

“No,” I say, meaning yes.

“Do tell.”

 

 

Poem for April 20

For today’s poem, my usual source at Writer’s Digest challenges us to write a beyond poem. “The poem could be beyond human comprehension,” Robert Lee Brewer writes. “It could be from the great beyond. It could be from beyond–another city, country, planet, solar system, dimension, etc. Don’t be afraid to go above and beyond with it.”

For my offering, I am reconstructing from memory a poem I wrote in third grade as a school assignment. My teacher was so impressed (I believe she used the word “precocious” several times), she had the principal read it over the loudspeaker. My mother was so unimpressed she immediately threw it away. I’ve tried to be faithful to the original as I wrote it; however, with the passage of time, some of the lines have faded from memory. I’ve had to reconstruct those as best I could. Others, however, are recorded here exactly as I wrote them.

A few people may wonder how a third-grade child could possibly possess such a vocabulary. Here’s the quick answer: I come from a long line of educators, I read constantly as a child while my classmates were busily developing their athletic and social skills, and I was always the classic bookworm: painfully shy, slightly nerdy, and infinitely more savvy about how to diagram a sentence than how to hang upside down by the knees on the monkey bars.

That’s how.

First, then, the assignment, which probably every school child in America has done at some point: First we read the famous poem “Nancy Hanks” by Rosemary Benet. Then we read the response by Julius Silberger. Our assignment was to write our own response to Nancy Hanks. Mine, titled “Beyond Your Wildest Dreams,” appears immediately below.

Nancy Hanks

Rosemary Benet

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

 

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

 

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

 

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

 

*  *  *

A Reply to Nancy Hanks

Julius Silberger

 

Yes, Nancy Hanks,
The news we will tell
Of your Abe
Whom you loved so well.
You asked first,
“Where’s my son?”
He lives in the heart
Of everyone.

 

 *  *  *

And here was mine:

 

Beyond Your Wildest Dreams*

 Ann Louise Graham, age 8

 

If indeed Nancy Hanks were among us today,

What news would I give her? What words would I say?

That her son grew up tall, and he learned how to read,

And his work saw a nation’s oppressed people freed.

“What’s happened to Abe?” Nancy asks. “What’s he done?”

He’s a lasting example to most everyone.

With his words on our lips, in our minds and our hearts,

His ideal never falters, nor ever departs.

You questioned us, Nancy, for news of your son.

Yes, Abe Lincoln got on, Nancy Hanks. He got on.

 

*a reconstruction

 

Much ado about something

“All this for one man?” the headline on the Facebook post screams, making its disapproval clear.

The headline is superimposed over a montage of photos taken from the manhunt in Boston organized to apprehend Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the second of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, April 15. The other suspect , Tsarnaev’s older brother Tamerlan, was shot to death by police on Thursday.

The message is obvious. Why is Boston spending so much money to catch one man whose whereabouts have been narrowed to a relatively targeted area?

Of course, the post has drawn the usual rash of heated comments from people who are quick to be suspicious of any organized effort that appears to be costing the taxpayers money.

But for what it’s worth, here’s my take:

No. All this fuss is not being made for one man. If it were, I would agree that it’s a little out of proportion.

But it’s not being done for him. It’s being done for some 600,000 people.

That would be the estimated population of Boston.

 

 

 

You can’t make this stuff up

In today’s headlines, we have this little gem from The Huffington Post:

New Hampshire Republican lawmaker Peter Hansen drew outrage from his own party when he sent out an email to his colleagues on the official legislative electronic mailing list earlier this month in which he referred to women as (and here I am quoting him directly) “vagina’s.”

Here’s the direct quote:

What could possibly be missing from those factual tales of successful retreat in VT, Germany, and the bowels of Amsterdam? Why children and vagina’s of course. While the tales relate the actions of a solitary male the outcome cannot relate to similar situations where children and women and mothers are the potential victims.

Am I outraged too? You’d better believe it. I am shocked and appalled. Everyone knows you don’t form a plural by adding apostrophe “s.”

On the other hand, it does sort of figure. After all, this is probably only one of the countless ways in which he daily proves himself to be an utter ignoramus.

Almost famous

Sometimes opportunity doesn’t exactly knock. Sometimes it just rings the doorbell and runs away again before you can answer.

I was pleasantly surprised late one recent afternoon when I received an email from HuffPost Live, the online news network of the Hufffington Post. They were doing a segment on scent-related technology, and I was being invited as as a guest. If you check way back to the early mists of time on this web site, you’ll see that one of my early posts about a year-and-a-half ago was about the untimely demise of my sense of smell (anosmia) after an accidental encounter with white vinegar.

Don’t ask. You can go read it if you really want the gory details. It’s in the November 2011 archive.

Out of the blue

Still, that brief blog written shortly after the vinegar incident is the only thing I’ve ever written about it. I’ve given the matter little thought since then; certainly I’ve never pretended to be any sort of expert on the subject.

So the email came out of the blue as far as I was concerned, and I had to do a bit of a scramble just to remember when, exactly, I had written about it. I couldn’t remember what I’d said, either, so I had to print out the post so that I could read it over and highlight passages I thought might interest them.

I was a little apprehensive waiting for the appointed time of the live segment, hoping that the conversation wouldn’t stray too far from the two or three catchy phrases I wanted to share with the listening audience.

But I was ready. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the breakneck pace of our high-tech information age, it’s that the fast-paced world of journalism has no time for expert guests to hem and haw while they try to figure out their main idea. If someone needs a quote from you, he or she needs it now. Right now. Not five minutes from now, when you’ve had time to think about it. Right now as in right this second.

Ready … set … no go

Therefore, I had my key phrases highlighted, my main ideas memorized, by laptop camera poised at just the right angle to de-emphasize my double chin.

Then I waited.

The appointed time came and went–the featured speakers were introduced one by one–the lively conversation began, and I sat poised in front of the camera, smiling, waiting for a call that never came.

Was I disappointed? Sure I was. But there was a slight sense of relief as the discussion unfolded and I quickly realized I simply had never thought about the subject in the same detail as had the selected guests. Two were scientists who specialized in the olfactory system. Two were authors who had written entire books about  anosmia compared to my meager 727-and-some words. The fifth guest was an artist with an entirely different perspective.

Don’t get me wrong. I would have done my level best to be articulate and interesting, and certainly I would have welcomed the exposure. We writers are grateful for any chance we can get to promote our work. But the selected guests were simply more immersed in the subject than I was, and therefore they were better for that particular segment.

It’s all good

Still, I am proud that something about my work stood out enough for the staff at HuffPost Live to consider me worth inviting. That feels like a pretty decent feather in my cap.

Meanwhile, I do have a host of subjects about which I have written extensively. Migraine, for instance, or sibling violence, or bullying, or sexual assault. Those are my areas of expertise. And someday, I hope some enterprising journalist will need an expert source on one of those areas, will comb the existing blogs and find something in my words that’s worth a second  look, and come calling for my opinion.

And I won’t have to re-read anything I’ve written, and I won’t need a moment to collect my thoughts, because it’s all in my head.

When that happens–when opportunity gives my door a good solid knock–I’ll be ready.