The Circle

Memories of Kents Hill for my Fiftieth Reunion

2011-08-20T10:54:00.001-07:00

Memories of Mr. Dunn and Mr. Fosse

by Connie Hanson, Class of 1961

When I think of Kents Hill I think first of Mr. Dunn. I think especially of how he would stop individual students when he happened to meet them walking and ask them their opinion about something, usually something to do with school. Mr. Dunn was always trying to improve things for the school at large and he was always directly involved in everything going on. Once I saw him resign as coach of the boy’s hockey team because they had behaved badly with another team. They hung their heads in shame and took the lesson to heart--he had that kind of effect on the students and I am sure on all the faculty too. He had a wonderful hearty laugh, he really enjoyed giving each student his report card (in those days his inferred hers as well), and every year when your birthday came around, he baked a cake for you himself, for you and your entire floor to enjoy at his house in his living room. He took the entire student body--minus the day students--out into the street one dark night in the Fall of ‘58 to watch Sputnik go by overhead in the sky; and he always had interesting people come and give us lectures--one was an arctic explorer; another a parent of one of our classmates who was also an author. He made it possible for me to tour the state briefly with Margaret Chase Smith, and some of my classmates with Candidate John Kennedy. You had the feeling he really cared what you thought and how you felt about the school.

But when I think of the Kents Hill faculty, I think of Mr. Fosse first--he has stayed with me my entire life. In his rare ability to discuss ideas fluently and in context of whatever we were studying, he woke us to a level of awareness of the world which required our whole intellectual effort to respond to it adequately--each to his best effort.

When I first heard about him it was in the Fall of 1958, when I was still a Sophomore--he taught the Juniors. One of the boys was hollering “MOBY RICHARD!” and waving at Mr. Fosse way across the lawn in front of Sampson. I asked someone “What’s that?” It was explained that Mr. Fosse, whose first name was Richard, always taught his students Moby Dick. I just remember that both the student and Mr. Fosse, way off in the distance, were laughing. I began to see how popular he was among the students who had him. I was delighted when he recruited me to help paint sets for the play he was directing that year.

He was not a tall man, but rather broad-shouldered and heavy set, with a huge head and wonderful intelligent eyes. His hair was dark and just starting to turn gray at his temples, and he wore it a little long, at least two inches behind his ears. He gave the impression of being and indeed was a supreme intellectual. He was not an athlete--when he went for and dropped the ball in left field at the faculty game in the Spring my senior year everyone booed, but somehow lovingly. Everyone did love him. He had a Master’s degree from Yale in music and would improvise on the hymns we sang in the chapel everyday at 10:30 on the organ after Mr. Dunn told us stories about the old days at Kents Hill. I would go up afterwards and tell him how much I enjoyed it. Eventually, I had him for a teacher.

When I came to Kents Hill as a fourteen year old in 1958, I was a very bookish, shy, and athletic; but I did not think of myself as particularly intelligent. It is true that the 97 I got in Mr. Dunklee’s geometry class made me realize I must be smart in some things, but I still didn’t seem to be able to get to the places everyone else seemed to be getting to at the same time they did. When Mom Sickles said to me when I was late once “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about (new expression to me), except that I was in left field again somehow. All that changed in my Junior year when I got Mr. Fosse for a teacher. He talked about IDEAS, and I became very, very interested. I did NOT day-dream in his classes--I listened, I heard, I thought, I wrote--I got A’s for what I wrote, A over C- that is. Mr. Fosse gave us Content over Form for grades--my form was not good (spelling, punctuation), but what I had to say was, according to him, very good.

I can remember whole lectures of his verbatim--the common root for “genius, ingenious, ingenuous”--Huckleberry Finn was all three of these and a picaresque hero too. Epic protagonists go on quests by water (he brought in The Odyssey, The Aeneid)--was Huckleberry Finn an epic protagonist? Then we read Moby Dick--not all of it, but assigned chapters to read and think about and write--took weeks and weeks to do it. What was the meaning of these short chapters like “Brit,” and “The Try-works”--? These were little allegories, metaphors--Mr. Fosse introduced me to metaphors. He read Moby Dick aloud to us, brought up the differences in prose and poetry, talked about Moby Dick’s narrative opening, its metaphysical middle, pointed out the play-like quality of some chapters, how like a Shakespearian fool Pip was. He talked about Shakespeare’s influence on Melville, and assigned us all intensive close-reading assignments in Moby Dick. When school was over at 12:36 we had lunch. After lunch we had a time when we could do any activity and then sports. Mr. Fosse and Mr. Higgins invited some of us to read and study Oedipus Rex--just for fun --in the building we used for art and movies, and where all the lectures were. I soaked it all up like a sponge. I couldn’t get enough of it.

People noticed I got an A figuring out these chapters Mr. Fosse assigned us. People asked me what the meaning was of such and such a chapter and asked me to write it down for them. Soon I was ghost-writing essays for some of Mr. Fosse’s other students. This gave me a great boost in the ego. We studied The Tempest and Mr. Fosse gave me a nickname--Ariel. One day he sent me in the mail a poem by Hermann Melville called “Art,” beautifully illuminated (he was a master illuminator):

ART

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.

We graduated, and Mr. Fosse went around congratulating us: “You done good!”-- he was always very witty. But within months after graduation we got news that Mr. Fosse had died suddenly, of leukemia--he was only thirty-nine. Hundreds came to his service at Kents Hill, and each one of us had a story about how fundamentally he had affected us in giving us insight into our own hitherto unrealized capabilities. Every one of us remembered how he had told us that if he were to be killed in a random car accident that it should not be considered “tragic”-- tragic was a specific literary term used for and only to be applied to GREAT people--in literature, presumably. We all agreed he had been totally wrong--his truly was a tragic loss, because he truly was a great person, and we all knew it.

Mr. Fosse stayed with me always. As a junior in college in 1967 I wrote about Shakespeare’s influence on Moby Dick. For my Master’s thesis in 1976 I found common metaphors in Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Japanese Noh play Nishikigi, Bob Dylan’s lyrics, and John Donne’s poetry. When I wrote my dissertation for my doctorate in 1994, I looked for metaphors, similes, and analogies in elementary science textbooks and trade books. How often I have wished that I could have shared my poetry with him through the years; I imagined always how proud he would be of me, knowing how he introduced me to the language of poetry in the first place. Another thing--he had often wished that college students would engage in political activities instead of just in fraternity house pantie raids--which was all that happened in colleges back in his day. He died in 1961, and later during the anti-war and civil rights demonstrations of the late Sixties I realized his dream had come true, and felt the great irony of his having never seen it.

Sonnets for Julia

2011-06-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Julia Budenz, a wonderful poet whose epic The Gardens of Flora Baum will be published soon, was once so taken with Petrarch's Sonnet 107, she wrote 15 sonnets in response to it, using his rhyme scheme and line endings. In honor of her, after she died last December, I decided to compose fifteen myself, in honor of her, using the same rhyme scheme and rhymes as she had used. Hers are to be found here:

http://www.poetryporch.com/jbsonnets.html

Mine all derive from one day, that of her memorial service, March 7th, 2011, when all her friends and colleagues met at Harvard to remember her. Among these friends of Julia is Frederick Turner, to whom many of my sonnets are addressed, as her death precluded the three of us having met together for the first time, our friendship having been based in large part on correspondence alone.

Julia was a great classicist, scholar, and poet, and had once been a nun and whose forays into considerations of atheism, all in poetry, ought to be considered by theologians. She was an authority of the highest order on the letters of Cicero and Julius Caesar, she translated Newton for Harvard's Science department, and she always read Homer and Virgil, and all other classical authors in the original. Her father was Louis Budenz, once editor of the Daily Worker who re-embraced Catholicism in the 50s.

She is greatly missed, and I wish she could have read these sonnets of mine, because she was an exceptionally perceptive reader as well as writer, and she would have learned not only more about me (mine are autobiographical to a large degree), but also about how much I revered her in every way.
******************************

SONNETS

If I begin my sentence with a sigh,

Recalling I am one who also ran

Against another woman, or a man;

Who keeps her secrets deep where none may pry,

Yet once I lay as any girl may lie,

Her back to earth before the marriage ban,

And stroked the eyes on peacock feather fans:

In dreams I’d carry others when I’d fly

And dared to fire the try works of my heart.

I could have conned a lion with my rage;

I would have had to love the one I’d choose.

But mateless procreation’s left me sage,

And I have turned my passion into art,

And all my seaside chanties into blues.

I ran into a closet in the door

Into the pub: my errant molecule,

The gene for error, jesting to be cruel,

Had come upon the scene to prep me for

An aftershock of truth, fate I could pour

Into a glass of cider, barren mule

Of fertile aptitude, my genes all pooled;

And yet my poetry, you said, could soar.

Time passed in paradise pub oh, so slow:

It was so very long since I had sung;

I’d had to pour the curds out from the whey;

So long, so long ago the lowest rung

Of that long ladder first had felt my toe.

This day you brought your bellows into play.

III Part A

Deny the throaty wooing frog its croak

And swells the sacred lake with fetid air;

All swallows turn to creeping vile things there,

Each tiny mushroom boasts it is an oak.

The prescient tenure of an inside joke

Belies the jokester’s sigh of pure despair;

And last year’s straw man, smoldering at fair

Bursts into flame in clouds of golden smoke.

Love stoked my fire but briefly, darkly,

Then piled my tender parts in one vast pie,

Just as the fair-ground’s buds were flowering.

I was a girl and never questioned why.

High arching fireworks smelled fragrant, sparkly,

Their spiraling embers arcing and showering.

III Part B

When Dylan asks, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

When Daniel stands inside the lion’s lair—

These two I use, the better to compare

The fool and hero, thereby to invoke

Unlikely kinship with the common doke.

Around a hero burns a sheen of air

That seems uncommon stuff, unique and rare—

You knew the man was special when he spoke.

But I allude to features figured darkly

Against an ancient Fifties drive-in sky.

Across the screen lights flicker—towering,

Stalking or being stalked until he dies,

My weary cowboy hero stands out starkly:

Others, heads down, are talking, cowering.

Inside my coat my ten was ready, stowed.

I reached, while subway wheels, shrill shrieks and grinds

Behind my back with jostling shoves combined:

The screen before me blinked with squares that glowed.

It was my ancient subway line I rode,

With tendered tokens of the current kind,

If I could make the slot and ten align.

Outside the exit (Harvard/Church) it snowed.

The ticket charged, its change came on its way;

Five dollars fell into the trough, glass-grooved,

And I was filled with poignant, sudden longing

For childhood’s free change: so my hand had moved

Inside the phone booth well on summer days,

Its nickels, dimes, quarters endlessly thronging.

Sure you’d take me for a red-hot hottie:

I wrote, “You’ll have to stoke me for a while:”

The play on words sufficed to make me smile.

Yes, I know I’m your own paparazzi

For your daffy grin and cool karate.

But I’m a sprinter, and you demand the mile;

Our letters are locked away in our files,

And the cane I sent you, not quite knotty

Enough for you to really take to bed.

For all my ardent prayer, paraffin

Of early light, necessity recruits

The best of me, meek harbinger of sin,

Oil of wee hours, votive for the dead:

Children we are, of beauty and the brute.

George Harrison’s Sun, and Dylan’s Blue Moon

Played soft at our reverie’s midnight ball,

Played loud in memory’s total recall,

The day we met at the pub at high noon.

Twenty-two years to remember a tune;

Twenty-four years to give birth to them all;

The house at auction, the auctioneer’s call;

Divorce to decipher marriage’s rune:

Time it takes to learn and to know,

Before the glory finally trumps duty,

Before the trusted turns complicitous.

Before new order from chaos may grow,

Before the blanch of love blushes beauty,

The face of God must show ubiquitous.

VII

A river flowed through Cambridge streets, its glow

Endowed us all with Julia’s second sight,

For Julia’s ghost had joined us in the night:

Like Marley’s chain, Fred’s briefcase slid on snow,

His steps first hurrying, then going slow;

It was the dark phase of the moon--no light

Was shining down, yet all around was bright.

Then Ruby asked how her poem should go.

But Charon nee Ruby had taken the helm

When Julia embarked upon his boat; all

Heard Charon’s voice in the shimmering air.

Who but the dying may enter that realm?

Julia herself heard the dire query fall;

She told Ruby how it would end, and where.

VIII

There is a lift you reach the top floor with—

Its rise is vertical, not like the sun,

But rather like a cartridge in a gun:

It’s how you quickly climb the monolith.

I might have stayed and got a goodnight kiss

Goodbye, from my best friend’s hero’s son—

What was I thinking, after so much fun?

Either way, kiss or lift, I somehow missed

The chance to spend a minute more with you,

To speak of missing Joe and share the shame

Of misread rites, and murmur low “the horror!”

I drifted off in space the way ghosts do,

And hobbled up the stairs a little lame,

Glad to know my escort up was Flora.

She brought us to a table in the round—

I borrowed and wore my daughter’s black boots;

You wore, as promised, your asbestos suit;

For all who needed one, a chair was found.

The restaurant itself was underground,

Where Julia surely would look for tree roots,

Or from a fistful of good friends recruit

Those who would welcome her ghost to sit down.

We failed, it seems, at quiet devotion;

Our egos intact, we stood and took bows;

Malbec was ordered; we filled our glasses.

We talked, we waked, just short of commotion;

We did all, in fact, but curse and carouse—

Then silence fell, as when a ghost passes.

The Harvard dons sang Julia’s last chorus;

They plucked the ancient strings of her city,

Her Cambridge, Rome—but none sang of Clytie,

A sort of Grecian Isis or Horus.

But Julia kept the tale in Flora’s trust.

The words she wrote, devoid of self pity,

Those words of ironic nobility,

Those not sent to Joe—she kept just for us.

Golden Apollo made Clytie’s heart ache.

Her ever abundant throes of pure love

Left unrequited, she soon learned the part

The heliotropic blue flowers take,

Turning their heads to Apollo above,

Giving her passion and love to her art.

In this repository, nave of bone,

This fabled Roman catacomb, we three

Have vowed to meet, just Julia, you, and me;

The reason why is ken to us alone.

In youth we grappled with a common koan

In which our god was named in trinity,

Or else in none, or else humanity.

In separate search, each for Rosetta stones,

We found each other, staring at the wall

Of Plato’s cave, where truth is shadow-plied;

And in our poetry, our form of choice,

We formed a holy order named “The Fall;”

Then vowed to meet again, again rejoice

Our koan’s lost root on love alone relied.

XII

What binds us in its universal arc?

Humanity, if not identity:

We all, in shells, hear sounds of rushing sea.

Though some must bear the indelible mark

Of angels; or beasts, gotten in the dark,

Avoiding touch in common apathy,

Exchanging boon of love for sympathy.

Yet all from watery birth must still embark

On travels tempered in their joy or ire;

And this—the kiss— the pounding of the heart,

The sound of its summoning, lyrical.

What is in ashes, long-remembered fire,

Is in the young love, and in the old art,

And in each others’eyes, lost heaven’s hell.

XIII

My eyes were open. There your Paradise

Confirmed what listening ears could barely hear:

Each morning when I lift my blinds and peer

Out east--those trees, that sky, all greet my eyes.

Ama, vide, veni oh! God replies.

Slide down my banister, run up my stairs:

Thank me for what the good greb cycle bears?

It bears for all an astonishing prize.

All the passed moments like porters bore fruit:

You gave me O’Brien—oh, with such joy!

Until you spoke of synchronicity,

Stunned me with lessons you’d learned as a boy,

Shook me with envy right down to my root:

You and Mei Lin, Survival, felicity.

XIV

In principio I have been a nun,

Though I have given birth to nine in all;

And Julia, Sister too—we heard the call

Alike, and felt our other selves undone

In presence of Homer, Yeats, Rilke, and Donne;

Found stained glass windows inside our cell wall

Time travel machines to Avon and Gaul;

In Ovid’s own prelapsarian sun,

Followed the road to the edge of the West.

The photos we took, all a bit grainy--

Especially that one, that still life of God.

We captured that image, we thought, the best

Inside our children’s smiles; else in brainy,

Zany poetry; or else in the sod.

You watched the faithful soldiers of our state

File off to war: you saw a Rome unending;

In roses’ pale demise glimpsed yours impending,

Sought shelter inside Flora’s garden gate.

There life in running rills did not abate,

But filled with teeming rivers, tree trunks bending,

Alive with wind of yours and Flora’s rending.

You bore these wondrous things without a mate,

Without your lover’s soft caress--the tree

Where you could carve your runes inside its core,

Would rise above the temple he had razed.

You sang a solemn, clear-voiced liturgy

Against your stained glassed panes, where rain still pours,

And left us with your poetry, amazed.

The moral imperatives for making paths (bring on the pink champagne)

2011-04-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

We had a blizzard yesterday on April Fool's Day. The picture below is proof it's so and no joke. Today I went out to take pictures of it for posterity, and most importantly shovel a path through it. This reminded me I almost didn't write that thing I thought about while I was out shoveling way back at the beginning of the winter, that shoveling snow is a noble act of charity for others and ought to be celebrated, maybe with Snow Shoveler's Day, on which everyone sends their own much appreciated snow shoveler a bottle of pink champagne--make sure it's in the Spring sometime, long after there's even the slightest chance of another blizzard, such as the one we got yesterday--see photo:

Well darn it all, I see in this blog format only half the picture shows. It may be just as well, since that can be symbolic of something which is only half appreciated. There you see the clumps of snow the shoveler has hoven out, huffing and puffing and remembering her mother's ominous comments of long ago when she told her people were always having heart attacks doing that. Long ago I learned my mother was always right, so that is why I probably have a worried furrow in my forehead while I shovel, though I know I carry the low risk genes for said heart attack and eat plenty of Omego3, you bet, anyway.

But back to the subject of shoveling paths being altruistic behavior of the most emu-la-table kind ever. If you see someone shoveling a path you ought to think about making paths for somebody yourself. It's a good thing to do. Do you know why? Because if you don't the person has to stagger through maybe one or two or three steps into deep, deep snow and then collapse in a heap and find themselves unable to move--clearly if the snow is not deep enough to do this to you, you should just forget doing it at all--this is the kind of snow a priori it is agreed it's important to shovel or else you will be in deep trouble.

Path shoveling is definitely for yourself, yes, but it's also a very nice thing to do for others who might follow after you. It is removing the dangerous obstacles from your path and from that of others who might decide to go in a similar direction for some reason. Paths are broadly generalizable too--paths made over rivers are called bridges and prevent drowning in rapid currents and deep depths, paths made through mine fields are extremely altruistically made and prevent death and dismemberment. This seems far afield from paths through the snow, but only someone who has not tried to cross a field of snow and fallen and has been unable to get up and has started to freeze to death while immobilized would think this. Paths not only provide free easy, comfortable transport through thickly imposed walls of snow, jungle, rock, water, buried explosives, or other obstacles of the impervious and dangerous kind, but they save lives and are made by others at considerable expense of time and energy. There--I've said it: making a path for others and for oneself is a morally sound and admirable activity. It deserves a day of it own in recognition of its noblity on every level...Bring on the pink champagne somebody!

What happens when you get older? Surviving the tsunami of free time

2011-03-11T06:51:00.001-08:00

Well, it depends on your circumstances, but until age 62 I was still in the traces--supporting a family, working full time, fitting in the creative stuff around that--mental capacity very good. Then, against my will (laid off by my thrifty governor) I retired. Simultaneously my youngest went off to college and I got a pension. I realized I was free to pursue all creativity in unrestricted time--to make a long story short, this emerged as a problem, not a benefit. I found having responsibility to others (job, family) had structured my life in a way that allowed creativity to flow, whereas no restrictions were baffling. I reverted to focusing on housework! (wrote a poem about that)--short-term memory goes at this age, so the need to focus is paramount. After 42 years being externally structured by responsibility I have had to re-learn how to handle free time. I would say finding really concrete projects helps, keeping connected with people who are like yourself, keeping moving physically--to the limit really--and not languishing in the past too much is all important to keeping happy. The old body finally begins to show signs of wearing out--you just can't move as fast (I was a sprinter once), and mentally you need to do things you truly get motivated to do. When you are younger all of this happens naturally. You have to work at it when you are older. You ask the best questions!

Here is that poem about reverting to housework after the Tsunami of free time hit:

LAMENT OF HESTIA'S SLAVE

I am bound to Hestia--am her slave:
Every day she binds me to her service.
I wonder where my muse has gone.

For when I come to write, I sweep instead,
No holy words, no light and confession--
And when you come to the end of confession,
It cannot be long to the end of ends.
Venerable poets would say, wouldn't they,
The task to write a poem is holy?

But Hestia will not let me go and write.
Someone of sufficient stature must
Be made to sweep the house in endless hours:
She turns to me. I fear these twilight beings
Who walk in shades of truth and beauty here
Won't come to whisper in my ear again.

"Here-- take this" she says, and holds me out the broom.
"Prepare their rooms for them. They've traveled far
And need a night of peace and quiet now.
Perhaps their dreams will drift on down to you
While you are sleeping on the hearth--now go."

Poets long must toil, I know,
Never-ending days and nights,
Keeping house for Hestia's guests.
I am bound to Hestia, am her slave:
Every day she binds me to her service.
Oh, how I want my muse to come again! (6/4/10)

The Echo

2011-03-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

THE ECHO

Heeding your call I try to devise

A delicious repast in a shady vale

Enduring, refractive and sung to a lyre.

Who would you be then? My images lost,

I’d call you by name, and then take your hand

Along by the ocean, down a long winding path;

Indeed like good luck, wrapped up in a caul

Of a newborn babe full of howls and yells

Left on the doorstep, the throne in crisis,

Exhumed from the oyster, a pearl of chance.

My pencil point pen would sooth the parched throat

With floes of impending devotion,

Its sand and mud flats would banish the flagrance

From minds remiss of design and then bloom,

While flares of brilliant hues exterminate

Throughout all fields of sloth, the call

Of despondency: the long lost jetsam

Washed ashore, deriding mortality

Resting in the sun of the breaking morn.

March 5, 2011

Julia Budenz , the poet--a commentary and eulogy

2011-02-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

THE GARDENS OF FLORA BAUM, An epic poem in five books by Julia Budenz, (May 23, 1934-December 11, 2010).

The Gardens of Flora Baum is after all a poem, not a sequence or series or collection of poems, though she did tell me once with a smile, it does have a plot. This characterization of her poem is essential, the poet tells us. She builds by analogy that which melds into something inimitable, the voice of human thought itself. This voice speaks with a kind of disembodied ambiance which serves as a means of transportation for the poet, or of communication between the poet and the reader. One thing Flora Baum communicates about Julia is that becoming worthy as a poet is what the poet becomes in death:

They said,
Be humble please.
Think not of castles, banquets, gardens, fables
Where gleaming marble pillars are grand trees,
Polished mohoganies posh picnic tables.
Flora, sorry, you are seedy.
We regret to tell you,
Your best plot is weedy.
And if she could not market you, they said,
Could not sell you,
You must be worthy to be dead.
(The Gardens of Flora Baum, Book Four, Part Three, Section Six: Fugaceae, Diary of Flora Baum, Publish or Perish, February 25, 2003, p. 9)

She works in questions and answers. It is the life of the mind her poem celebrates. Sometimes the answer explains the question, sometimes the reverse is true. She understands the interplay of microcosms and macrocosms and the meaninglessness of size and number, the nothingness and fullness of God, of the world, of the mindful and mindless alike. She creates the world of which Flora is god, and the world in which Flora the god sees each of her sparrows falling: that is the nature of her poem.

Is this an explanation? There is a whole
That is a part. There is a part
That is the whole. I speak not just of the world,
Not just of the others, but (Can there be no candor?
Do I shift from the albumen to the vitellus?
Do I slide from the sun to the candle?
Do I merge the nocturne with the aubade?
Before she reached the sempervirent redwoods
Did she apprehend the nondescript plummage
Of the common bushtits as diagnostic?
Discern--distant-- the white calf blue
As the moon? Did she blink at a blaze
Or at a bleak bleaching, did she blush
Or blanch or was she blind?)
I speak of the self as the mind.
(Excerpt from The Gardens of Flora BaumBook Three: Rome, PartOne, Urbiculture, 7. Exile, p. 384)

She understood that without the mind, nothing is comprehended and yet the world still exists. The mind she explores transcends mind and exists apart from it, just as Flora exists apart from her gardens, in the same way God may be considered to exist, at least in metaphor, apart from or together with his creation, whether it be the world in which we exist or the world which exists in us. She forms, and is formed and informed by her poetry, and her genius lies in the utter integrity of that. The poem is about desire she tells us, but the poem too is desired. She sang of the poem and it sang of her, Flora Julia of the Tiber. Flora lives and so Julia lives, who gave her life; so The Gardens of Flora Baum is her surviving child. The question of whether it is God's, Julia's, or Flora's life her poem addresses or which she lives, she found both mysterious and moot. She knew she had a mind, and used it fully, but the price of this was self-sacrifice. She sings of this, her sacrifice. To her it seems predestined:

I too have been sacrificed.
I too have been loved.
I too mingle with mortal and immortal,
Live with human and divine.
For did not Auos come in golden sandals?
Or did not Auos come in golden sandals?
Was it Artemis, Aphrodite, Apollo, Zeus
Who gave me age, required of me the zoic,
Acing and zeroing, from A to Z?
Others loved me. Yes, I have been loved.
I myself have sacrificed myself.
(Excerpt from The Gardens of Flora Baum, Book Four, Part Three, Section Six: Fugaceae, Diary of Flora Baum, March 7, 2003, p.21.)

She understood our mortal state, its nature, the fall. It was Flora Baum she feared would perish, not Julia Budenz. She said, "It is not the poet that matters, but the poem." She might as well have said it is not God that matters but his creation--and we are his creation, and beauty its substance if we see truly she seemed to imply --she endeavored always to see truly. We publish our beauty to one another, uphold each other in our fall with it. She wanted very much to do that for others, meaning us, with her poem. She was suffused with the spirit of sacrifice in writing her poetry, undoing and suffusing her own atheistic stance with her own most Christ-like motives.
She delighted in milking the change of just one word in a phrase to
produce a whole new meaning in the next. It was repetition and
reiteration which like the world slowly evolves into new meaning,
analogy on every level in tandem.

We step among the falling flakes of snow.
We step upon the fallen freights of snow
We step between the falling and the fallen.
We fear to fall. Will each keep each from falling?
Are we, we each, we two, we twain,
Are we, are we then, she and I?
Are we, are we then, you and I?
Are we, are we not, I and I?
(Excerpt from The Gardens of Flora Baum, Book Four, Part Three,
Section Six: Fugaceae, Diary of Flora Baum, March 13, 2003, p.31).

But nothing makes her (the poet or God) more accessible and human than this wonderful self portrait. It seems to have been a lecture or faculty social or both she attended which provided her its mirror:

Into the worldly world
I went after absence,
Abjuring absence,
Prescient of departure,
And listened to the lecture.
It was the intellectuals' worldly world.
It was no demi-world but universal,
A universe, the university.
It had been a half-absence perhaps
Or perhaps a whole.
It was a semi-presence perhaps
Or possibly less.
I half chatted.
I wholly
Engulfed strawberries, large, no, enormous, crimson, no, mauve,
Large mauve strawberries,
Hard fauve cheeses, and soft beige pates,
And the hard-brown-edged and soft-white-centered
Fresh thick disks of bread.
And, as everyone left,
From the plastic glass as from a glass goblet I gobbled,
I gulped, the white wine's crowning golds
With the gusto of a ghost.
(Excerpt from The Gardens of Flora Baum, Book Four, Part Three, Section Six: Fugaceae, Diary of Flora Baum, March 12, 2003, p.28).

Hardly a ghost was Julia Budenz, though she haunted Rome and other places she had been, including outside and in her garden with her beloved trees. And yes, she speaks with the gusto of a ghost. Invisible, silent, except to those who read her poem; very visible and audible to those who do.

Stevie and Joey: A Tale of two kitties

2010-09-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

When my old mother cat Camillia, daughter of Emily the original mother cat, gave birth to what would be two of her very last four kittens, I named them "Stevie" and "Joey." One, Stevie, was very sociable and the other, Joey, very independent. At first they were friends and played together as kittens will, but when they turned adolescent their fights became more and more intense. Joey would disappear for days; Stevie took over the yard. Then we had to go to Milwaukee and live with my daughter and son-in-law, which required neutering everybody. Stevie was around, Joey wasn't, so Stevie got neutered and Joey didn't. Joey never did turn up for our departure--he'd been gone for a week when we left for Milwaukee. I thought we would never see him again.

Over the next five months Stevie became an indoor cat. He lived in a house full of other dogs and cats and lost his shyness of strangers and became fully domesticated. When we returned March 30th, the snow still on the ground, there was Joey waiting for us! He had grown into an enormous, muscle-bound tomcat with a big head and a slowly swishing tail and yellow eyes that watched us all from a distance, ready to dart for cover. He must have lived in the empty house's cellar all winter. He looked very healthy and fit. I will not mention details of the ensuing encounters between the two brother cats and former litter-mates, only conclude Stevie became terrified of Joey, who was twice his size, and would go to any extent to avoid him, and Joey would go near nobody but me and Cheena, his dearly beloved and well remembered surrogate mother. Camillia eyed Stevie and Joey equally with the same cool eye of the eminently ordained matriarch and treated them both the same, with tolerant disdain. Cheena loved them both, but especially Joey.

Joey prowls around and lets me feed him now. He comes in through my window in the wee hours of the morning and eats the cat food I have there for him. He appears to be leading a very successful life (one can only imagine)for miles around, for he disappears for days at a time. I do celebrate his life. As for Stevie, he has the house and garden but he is always on the watch for his bigger, more muscly, more natural brother, and is cautious about where he goes at all times.

2010-09-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

CHIMNEY-SWEEP

I forgot to tell you the chimney-sweep is coming.
He'll scrape the inside where the stuff accumulates,
And warn us not to burn a fire too slow and cold
When the weather's such and such,
And how every now and then we'd best to let it roar
And burn out chunks of stuff we'd best not have in there.
Let it be hot as hell now and then, he'll repeat
For it's the best thing of all he knows,
How the stuff builds up and ignites when you're least looking,
And there goes your chimney.
I called him up and he's coming over.
I'll let him put back the pipe I've had apart this year.

WELCOME MAT

2010-09-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

I

There the limbs are spread to welcome in the light
But I'll not spread my arms for you, or wait
A single extra second for your face
To turn and look for one lost lingering trace
Of love on mine. Instead you'll find there hate
And loathing for a heart so cold and tight
And hard it never once would let me in;
But let my virtue languish into sin
Where courage, faith, forgiveness and their kin
Were locked inside the box beside my bed
To keep as souvenirs until I'm dead
And all the trees with light on them turn red.
You can keep your love, if you call it that,
This endless treading on my welcome mat.

I am a man more sinned against than sinning

2010-09-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

"A King is supposed to have all that he needs without having to worry about anything in his late years. Yet King Lear, in Act 3, Scene 2, cried out pitifully: "I am a man / More sinned against than sinning." Although Lear has made a huge mistake in the first scene of the play in dividing up his kingdom and banishing his two dearest people, the sins his two other ungrateful daughters have done him is far greater than the extent of Lear's wrongs."

I don't know who wrote this, but I give full credit to the person on directessays.com who did because they put it well, King Lear's dilemma, which I have often related to my own. I once, or maybe twice, and possibly thrice have felt more sinned against than sinning. It is not the reason I picked this play as the one I love the best, but I do too have daughters, and though it was originally The Fool I identified with in this play (and he disappears in Act Three), there have been times I have identified with many more of the characters--Cordelia, Kent, even Goneril and Regan--especially when my aged, alienated and alienating father came to live with me--even the messengers. A mother is often the messenger.

Anyway, it is Lear himself I seemed to be echoing this morning as I explained to one daughter in reference to another, that there was a time when I too definitely felt "more sinned against than sinning." In my family the Stoic way, swallowing the drama of the emotional traumas that beset us all--see William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: the ancient art of stoic joy, rather than "working it through," is often how we deal with disillusionment and hurt, and loss of innocence, rather than picking the scab of painful memory and keeping it current. Yes, surely I too did once feel much more the victim, the one more sinned against than sinning.

What is required of one who would move on, when one has been more sinned against than sinning, is to think of it as being beyond the realm of what one has control of, and not letting it concern you ("God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.") As the author of the above book cited, William Irvine, wrote me recently in a letter exchange, the AAA prayer is basically based on Stoic principles, accepting rather than continually regurgitating the fact that "I have been a man more sinned against than sinning." We are all victims in this life of that which we cannot control, and deciding those things which we cannot control (past, present, future trauma) are simply not of our concern may be our best way of all of viewing them. "Spun of pain and sorrow bought/Death is but an ugly thought" I wrote once in a poem when I was sixteen, trying to deal with the death of my grandmother. So too, perhaps, are the thoughts that we have been more sinned against than sinning--just thoughts that need not be beleaguered.

To commit or not: excerpt from a letter to a friend on inertia

2010-09-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

I have found that the time after the struggle of keeping life and limb alive, my own and my children's, has been most difficult. Apparently I have needed that struggle as a context for creativity, and finding it gone has precluded to some extent new creations. So when I hear you say you are getting ready to or are in the process of or have indeed found a way to slough off commitments (as Julia might say), I think of King Lear and who loves me best, and wonder about the nature of commitments. I believe I do have mine still, and that creation itself is needed to feed commitment, and vise versa. I would love to read a new epic with Saladin and King Richard as CEOs by you, and even more find myself writing a new epic about the story of my ancestors--and finish the painting, and finish a half-dozen other projects mouldering about in their neatly filed dusty piles.

Comical considerations: town embezzlers and their punishment

2010-06-12T04:57:00.000-07:00

Almost comical it is how every few years, every now and then, some local selectman is found dealing drugs with a known dealer, or some assistant town clerk is found to have embezzled as much money as anyone else might have earned in a lifetime, that being all the money the town had had in its till. The District Attorney is notified and off he or she goes to arrest the culprit; and then he or she, the culprit, goes to court, and presumably is punished somehow.

It is not really known by me what eventually happens to these people. Do they get a large fine (not paid with town takings) and six months in prison? My son once corrected me about describing prison, when it was jail he was talking about--heaven forbid the guilty embezzler has only to go to jail, if jail is all my son holds it up to be, much more pleasant than not, apparently.

Something worse must be provided as punishment for the crime of embezzlement. Maybe there ought to mandated, instead of jail, a counseling process for the depraved one, a group session with other defunct town government officials, all of them local people gone bad who had cheated their own neighbors out of their hard-earned money for their own private gain.

How did that FEEL, Dr, Phil would ask them. How does it make you FEEL to quietly deflect a few dollars here and there from the main town revenue flow into your own bank account?? YOU--an esteemed selectmen, a reputable, retired drug store merchant who has been considered FOR YEARS a leader of the other selectman, involved in local issues, active in solving local problems--??...... meeting with A KNOWN DRUG DEALER in the wee hours of the morning, exchanging what turns out to be town money--money entrusted to you by the VERY CITIZENS who employed and trusted you? What sort of mind were you IN when you let yourself think only of yourself and NOT of the public trust? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING??

Dr. Phil would demand to know these things of the ashamed, condemned, and court-assigned support-group attendees slumped in their chairs in a circle in his interactive, televised public forum--a sort of latter day in-stocks situation to say the least. Each condemned person would be forced to reveal his inner thoughts and how now with reborn hope he or she could move on and try to apply some of the skills he or she had learned in the group amongst others of his or her ilk in reforming his or her wearily depraved ways......

And these people in the court-mandated support group--fellow felons and/or civil criminals arrayed in a circle and made to equally to confess the thoughts, and more importantly, the feelings associated with the robbing of the town till--would be like a group of friendly, supportive brothers and sisters and friends, siblings in crime. Would that really be punishment adequate for stealing the royal seal and running off with it to Baruba? I say no. And just jail and a fine is out too.

Anything, I think, must be a better punishment than just jail, which, according to my son, can be an okay place indeed! My son claims he experienced clear unbroken good dreams for three nights straight while he had to be in jail once for not paying a fine--and wouldn't mind going back. In fact, he told me with an expression of tender reminiscence on his face, one of the guards had invited him to a party right after he got out, and they had gone on out together into the evening to have a good old time that very moment. We would not want our embezzling assistant clerk out partying and having good dreams would we? Clearly a short jail term cannot be sufficient punishment for such dishonesty and disingenuity: indeed, might not said jail experience encourage more of the same?

I am for the support group, yes, but also a short prison term. Three months in prison--just long enough for PTSD to set in and establish a pattern of psychological instability leading to a future disability check might suffice as punishment both to the criminal and the society which nourished him. That, and a fine. Prison and a fine are of course the least of the punishment. The worst by far, and the most enduring,is the support group.

In prison, which is the one with the tiny room and the clanging doors and the impenetrable grimness of aspect and hopeless daily dreariness, the condemned man or woman would have BAD dreams--probably about not getting away with the rainy day fund after eleven successful years of doing so while even best friends never knew. Worse still, probably no more yearly visits to Baruba. But the special combination of support group, counseling with Dr. Phil, and a short prison term seem.....appropriate.

Perhaps, indeed, these people are destined to do this for our public amusement. And of course, not funny to consider--or maybe funnier, depending on who you are--there are those who are still at this moment getting away with it, our poor dishonest fellow human beings who, though currently content and successful so far at their dark, secret doings, remain at imminent risk of being suddenly arrested and inserted into a support group for life. It would seem quite a deterrent, wouldn't it?

Hestia's Slave--a lament

2010-06-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

Right or Wrong; Creationistically enriched curriculum espression and history

2010-05-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

The phrase "right or wrong?" may denote the question of accuracy. Are the facts right? Are they wrong, not true to the "real" situations, the facts of circumstance in time and in geography--do they have a factual existence in this world? Do you have those facts right or wrong?

But are you going to teach just the facts?

The traditional teaching of history in its highest standard tries to be right in this sense. But the phrase "right or wrong?"also connotes the question of morality: is it right or wrong, what is written about a given history of America? We all heard about the changes in the words in the history texts in Texas, and the man who promoted those changes. He is viewing history in another light, one in which right or wrong has nothing to do with facts or accuracy of portraying history. He does not care for history that is right or wrong in fact only. He wants to teach children more than the facts.

Are our children to be informed or saved? I thought there was supposed to be a separation of church and state. In one part of our country we want to teach factual history in school; in another, we want to teach the same history we teach in church in school. What deos the church teach? An organized view of the world which reflects specific cultural views belonging to the people who share that view, the facts be damned. Do you know which part of the country you're in? Is your history right? Or is it wrong? It depends on where you live.

I am reminded I am a self-defined textbook language specialist. Maybe I should present at a conference in the Land of the Enemy. When it comes to textbooks, I know what's right or wrong.

The right history--a private matter.

2010-05-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

There is a man in the news who charges academia is leftist, and right wing perspectives are not being taught, so maybe teachers in teacher's colleges are being taught to teach our children a history (let alone science) which is not "right". Creationism is the right wing's version of science, and the scientific method, discovering evolution, decidedly leftist. But this man is going beyond science into history. What is, I would like to know, Creationism's view not only of science but of history? Is it the same scripture which explains, explicates and venerates both or what? What is history in the Creationistic view and why should it have anything to do with Other interpretations (promoted by left-wingers according to this interviewee)--of history? All histories are stories we know. But why, I ask why, does the right wing explanation have to be the "right" one? That's what this man says it is, and he fears it is not being taught in the schools because it is leftist, and therefore, apparently, "wrong."

Not being taught in schools? Can there be a "right" (is there a moral imperative involved?) perspective of science and history? One is a method and what that method produces, one is a story, produced by a human mind out of chaotic, disparate parts we call "facts." What has "right" to do with this collective story carved out of time or the portrait of natural disclosure? The rightness or wrongness is in the learner's and the teacher's domain, and conveyed as in a conduit, via their relationship, as it turns out, social--so is the nature of good pedagogy I am convinced. The teacher and student need to know each other and speak to each other in order for education to occur. As Dewey concurred, all learning is social.

In an age which says "right" is relative anyway (that would be the leftist view), why are we arguing about what is taught in school?

The facts M'am, just the content. Reading, writing, arithmetic get us to them, but human nature, simple natural cognitive growth, gets us to question them, the facts which constitute the produce of science and history. It is "right" that we teach in school (as Robert Frost articulated) reading and writing and math, the "right" interpretation of the facts being left to each individual who learns these skills. The tutelage of a teacher or teachers one's parents hires to guide one in making a story of history and glimpsing the dazzling mysteries of science, both in all their beauty and what it portends--this might well be the form schools take in the future: parents who want their children to study history and science, and after that art, theology and philosophy hire a tutor or team of tutors, reading, writing and arithmetic being taught in public school until they master it. The rest is a private matter, as nature ordains.

Poem about reparation (I think)

2010-04-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

OVERDUE

I have sorely neglected you my friend,
Cut you out of my will, stopped the letters
Between us by stopping the ones on my end.
How have you been all this time?

Has your penchant for beauty flagged?
Has your rage subsided or vanished?
Have all your photographs been tagged?
Do you still compose in rhyme?

I am languishing here in fetters it seems,
All my better dreams seem banished
To after thoughts and day dreams.
I am caught in the clutter and grime

Of sorting through pennies for silver collection,
Facing the ancestors, aping my betters,
Making repairs--there's natural selection:
Can sweeping be some sort of crime?

But still my garden remains for me
My dearest, deepest sanctuary.
Here I'm always on the mend,
Here my photographs are tagged,
Here are all my better dreams
Sorted out in perfect collection.
Here all comes together for me.

The Being of Being

2010-03-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

In his recent blog Being and Heidegger Frederick Turner questions the existence of "being," seeing poetry does well in China where the verb to be does not exist. One response to him was by someone who questioned the motives of professors in college who won't accept papers written with to be, or "helper" verbs as we used to call them. I wrote:

Professors who are not accepting papers with to be verbs in them are just trying to be followers of scripts given to them forty years ago which in essence stated all to-be verbs must be suspect, because we want our language to be expedient, and not necessarily merely human. To be or not to be, Hamlet couldn’t decide; but he meant live or die, or both and surely more too. Can being stand for everything, and when missing from a language stand for nothing? Its absence from language is only slightly limiting on reality--that which exists in a human being's mind.

BEING

Being human is to be human
But are human beings to be
Or to just have been, forever amen?
I am that I am that I am
By any tense just was just for then
And only then, and not again.

Observation on myself in the 3rd person 1973

2010-02-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

After that she learned to steward her supply of otherworldly emotions, learned how not to spend them wantonly at the slightest sight of something beautiful. She cultivated a certain stirring calm and peaceful feeling within which she alone could enjoy moments of inexpressible exuberance. Still, she never ceased wanting to share a vision of beauty with someone, only discovered a better way of waiting until she could have it. She pledged herself to an appointment in the future, building on the contingencies with her past, learning from them she told herself, always preparing. The security blanket she wove for herself out of these caccooned her through a cyclical passing of seasons patterned in pain and lose: her home, her marriage, two of her children, several of her best friends. She not only survived, she very nearly succeeded in bringing the future so close she could see it and feel it all around her.

Haiti

2010-01-18T08:49:00.002-08:00

HAITI

You were the place I chose to make my book
Be about--love in Haiti, not in Maine.
I went to you in a traveler's handbook,
Studied all your flowers, soups, and history,
Studied your Iron Market, Port-au-Prince
Where all my characters, or most of them,
Walked, picked wildflowers, bought art
From native artists, fell in love with love.
Though I really, really never went there,
I know your white streets, and mixes
Of races, all shades of humanity.

Your forests were abundant then, it said,
My handbook did, which in the cold winter
Of Fryeburg, Maine I read, then wrote of you.
Haiti with its long road to The Citadel--
I had my lovers picnic in its shade,
The trip by mule they took up to it--
It was a lovely country, my handbook said.
The people all made music, grew coffee,
Worshipped voodoo gods, were gracious, and poor.

Now your forests are gone to help your own
Cook breakfast in the morning, your concrete
Is weak and crumbling. Now your harbors
Are sickened with fish-thickened sewage,
Your shores have become the dump of the world --
And this was before your earthquake came.

Haiti, home to all who know and love her,
I bow to your heart and perseverance
And wonder at your long endurance.
And if your tale of woe is our own warning
Let it teach our Haitian hearts to sow
The seeds of love upon your shores
Where once again a paradise might grow.

Can anyone tell me what this poem means?

2009-11-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

STRANGE RUE

Marinated with your rue, and intellectual
Two, not one in primacy, that being gorilla,
I fall into our morning evening ritual
And with my teeth tug out the flotilla.
Oh you make me tow a heavy line,
With cashmere sweaters, invisible cloaks--
I nightly imbibe your stash of French wine,
Morning tea; the aura Earl Grey tea evokes
Encircles my head as well as my nose,
Bringing in the yacht of dream to woo me.
Your garden produce, promises of rose
With walks in hand and travel on the sea
Are things I both desire and need:
I respond to them as water to a seed.

Time and the world

2009-11-04T06:13:00.000-08:00

Time is anything but constant. Only the arbitrary measures of clocks make it seem so, and all our cyclical calendars plod on against the rising and falling of the sun--that alone seems constant. When I was very young it seemed to me the world was more than up to date. It seemed full of things which were perfected, being passed on to me, given into my care. I had to learn how to fit in with them, and that seemed natural. But when these things which filled the world into which I was born were no longer made, some of them, and other things in their place were invented, time began to speed up and the perfection of the world began to fray a little, and its imperfections began to show. Eras which then seem to have occurred eons and eons ago when I was little slowly came closer and closer to my own era. Now I think 'Why, Shakespeare lived almost yesterday!' And once when I was very small I was shocked to learn he had lived only four or five hundred years before the present time; I thought it was a thousand years. Experience warps time perception, and clocks and calendars try to keep it constant. Time, it turns out, is highly personal.

In the No Direction Home cd release, the liner notes Dylan (my age) remembers hearing about Elvis joining the army. It was a big deal, he is right remembering it. It was a huge media event. In 1958 or 59, whenever it was--maybe earlier?--I was a young teenager, fourteen or younger. Maybe Dylan was sixteen. There were fewer events in those days but they stirred much more excitement than anything the news can now. Now we hear of the three wars we are in regularly, climate change, diet, regulations, emotions, sports, from a million different sources through multiple devices--and none of it is as exciting as Elvis getting drafted was to everyone listening to radio or tv back then. Imagine--for Dylan and me back in 1958 or '59, yet to come was the Vietnam War, the assassination of the president, integration, plastic everywhere, the war on poverty, support groups, supervised children, rock concerts, gay rights, the decline of baseball, the rise of football, warmer weather in the winter. The world I lived in still sold Dr. Lyon's tooth powder, had no malls and no safety awareness or mission statements in schools. Women's rights were assumed synonymous with human rights only by the upper (meaning educated) classes. There was just the war with Communism (later they called it the cold war)--Russia and China were the enemy. The catching of the Spy Plane U2 over Russia made much bigger news than anything does today. Today the universe of news is like a bang, bang crash crash movie, filled up with constant violent drama which has little effect on the listener and beholder in its too constant bombardment: over time it dulls the senses and the sensibilities. The meaningful things in our lives are not the ones reported, but the ones we personally respond to.

The mystery of Ignorance

2009-11-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

Ignorance may be paradoxically applied in one important universal sense. We are all profoundly ignorant of each other--and yet profoundly knowing too. We each individually see, and all universally recognize, the patterns of human behavior when we see them in each other. Our individual particular manifestation of common humanity is unique--God's gift to himself--us! Or vice versa. The knowing and not knowing each other's uniqueness is as important as knowing and not knowing each other's universality.

It is a mystery!

Which George?? (You are nuts!)

2009-10-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

In the last blog I've confused George Eliot with George Sand--it was George Sand, not George Eliot, who was in love with Chopin? But both Georges were women writing under pseudonyms, and both were novelists. In the beginning I was ignorant totally and didn't know the works of either. A well read friend reminded me Eliot had an affair with Chopin, but she was wrong and didn't know it so I believed her--we were both very ignorant.

Then another friend told me the truth--it was Sand, the French writer, who had the affair with Chopin.

Then another friend, smarting probably from the trouncing I'd recently given him in English, leaped into action: was I STUPID? It was SAND NOT ELIOT!! he yelled in email at me, and cited wikipedia as to the novelists' thirty some year (??) gap in age and generation. Then he dismissed my excuses about the two Georges both being novelists, and my having read none of them (and only having seen a movie once about one of them having an affair with Chopin!) Would I connect him with Chopin just because his name was George--in that case George Bush might be connected with Chopin?

I thought about our different kinds of ignorance. Mine, first, the profound. The second, from the friend who misinformed me--nearly as ignorant as I was. The third kind of ignorance, that exhibited by my second friend, never for a moment shaking it (my ignorance) in my face. Here it is, the correction nicely couched in his reading history, his own ignorance highlighted:

"One thing I should mention is that Chopin did not have an affair with George Eliot. It was with George Sand, the French novelist, whom I've never read. Have you? And have you read Middlemarch? It's up there in my top five of all time. I've got to get back to her and read Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda."

The fourth kind of ignorance was the worse kind, exhibited by the third friend. Only the exchange itself explains how bad it was:

HIM: George Eliot? did you mean George Sand?

ME: No, George Eliot --Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss,Silas Marner. I did confuse them in my blog though, since my friend told me George Eliot and Chopin were an item--it was George Sand and Chopin she meant.

HIM: you could not mean George Elliot and Chopin...it is George Sand and Chopin torid love affair on Mallorca....you wrote: No, George Eliot --Mill on the Floss etc...
I saw masterpiece Theater version of Middlemarch...my what a depressing story...but powerful, wonder how he would read...but I am into maragaret Atwood now and Updike and Coetzee...

ME: Yes! George Sand not George Eliot with Chopin! That's what I said in my last letter, guess you didn't read it to the end, here's a copy--

"No, George Eliot --Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner. I did confuse them in my blog though, since my friend told me George Eliot and Chopin were an item--it was George Sand and Chopin she meant."

Like George Sand, George Eliot was a woman too (Mary Ann Evans?
something like that)--one of the greats.

HIM: yes both are greats, but only one had an affair with Chopin...

i KNOW THAT YOUR FRIEND TOLD YOU THAT, BUT HOW COULD ANYONE THINK THAT?
MY POINT IS YOUR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN RIGHT OFF...

Eliot was involved with George Henry Lewes who was a married man.
she died in 1880,,,....

George Sand was four years old when George elliot died....

Chopin was born in 1837....37 years after Eliot's death....

so how can anyone associate them? because their names were George....well what not say George Bush was involved with Chopin too.

ME: Oh dear, of COURSE they would be mixed up! Both 19th century
female novelists whose pseudonym is George? You are nuts

(He then sent me, separately, a link to WIKIPEDIA about George Sand, so I'd see when she was born and all.)

There you have four different aspects of ignorance--and two examples of how those who are in the know handle that fact with other people. Some, ignoring the fact that everyone is ignorant about something, make a big deal of what they know. Others, exhibiting wisdom and lovely manners (which are, you know, meant to put others at ease--of this I am not ignorant) put you in proper relation with your ignorance, as in the case of the second friend. The first friend? The one who first misinformed me George Eliot and Chopin were an item? She is less ignorant than I, being my younger twin, and I too remember that movie, in which the Ms. Sand went off arm and arm with Mr. Chopin. She at least had read Silas Marner in high school, as I had not.

Now I am glorying in the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch. I have finally discovered a character in a novel to which I can totally relate--Dorothea. I am amazed that I am only now discovering George Eliot. Should I read something by George Sand, of whom I am terribly ignorant? I don't think I will, since reading Wikipedia about her has made me more aware of her reputation as a personality than as an author. Unlike her reputation as the lover of Chopin, Sand's reputation as a writer has not lasted the test of time.

Wouldn't it have been funny if Jane Austen wrote under the name George?

**********Appendum--photograph of my great, great grandmother Mary (Polly) Freemen, a contemporary of George Eliot. She was born seven years before Eliot and lived ten years longer than she did. From what I have read of what she wrote (she too was a fine writer), she had much in common with Dorothea in Middlemarch.

Silas Marner, or the virtue of leaving your door open

2009-09-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

I finally read Silas Marner! I was supposed to have read it in high school (everyone else did), but I happened to have been provided by Providence (a major theme in Silas Marner) with a remarkable, memorable great teacher who taught Moby Dick instead. This is not to say the one is better than the other, though Silas Marner is not Moby Dick, and to be fair, Moby Dick is no Silas Marner. But both are great! One of the themes of Silas Marner is that things will work out after a while, and it so happens that having been assigned Moby Dick instead of Silas Marner did work out extraordinarily well--my wonderful teacher assigned me the task of writing about all the metaphors and symbols and other figures in Moby Dick that I could find, and I was so enthused about it that I came to get hooked on finding them everywhere--and throughout my lifetime.

Ergo: When I worked on my BA I wrote about Shakespeare's influence on Moby Dick,and how Pip in Moby Dick was analogous to the Fool in King Lear, and Lear analogous to Captain Ahab. When I worked on my MA I assigned myself the task of writing about all the metaphors and symbols and other figures in King Lear, Bob Dylan's lyrics, and the Japanese Noh play Nishikigi. When I worked on my doctorate I assigned myself the task of writing about all the metaphors and symbols and other figures in nationally distributed 4th to 8th grade science trade books and textbooks. I had one friend who knew me most of that whole time who found it remarkable that I had written about metaphor for so long--and it all began with my wonderful teacher assigning us Moby Dick instead of Silas Marner.

My wonderful teacher at Kents Hill, Mr. Fosse, may have been remiss about assigning me Moby Dick instead of Silas Marner, but he certainly knew how to make assignments that lasted for a lifetime. He told us his colleagues mocked him for trying to teach Moby Dick to high school students, but I for one greatly profited from it. For one thing, I discovered a lot of the other kids were coming to me for help writing their papers on what the different chapters in Moby Dick meant. I actually had ideas about it while many of them didn't have a clue. This in turn helped me realize, along with getting an A+ in geometry, that I must not be retarded! I was sure I was, because I didn't have very good grades and I never seemed to know how to be anywhere on time like the other kids (B minus average, 41st in a class of 76). So the fact they came to me for help interpreting Moby Dick helped me see I must not be retarded ....(this was years before "self-esteem" popped up)--years later I realized the bad grades and the geographical disorientation were due to all the reading and thinking I was doing nonstop to the neglect of everything else; plus I was near-sighted. They did not call it ADHD then--more likely, absent-minded professor-like (I was always and still am, reading about five books at once.) Only I wasn't a professor yet then, I just thought and acted like one. So they didn't and I didn't know what was my problem--I logically concluded I must be retarded. So you see being assigned Moby Dick was a very good thing for me--I did get an A in that class--and so did many others, due to my insights and the papers they turned in written by me (I didn't mind--it made me feel not stupid you see).

Fifty years passed. Finally I read Silas Marner!

As I started to read it, I thought wow! How did I miss this for so long? Of course as an English major (anthrolology, my first love, not being offered in the only college which accepted me) I knew all about it , and knew about George Eliot too--and Middlemarch, and Mill on the Floss. My own mother loved Mill on the Floss and gave it to me once for a birthday present--I dropped it after a few pages. I emailed my friend (who naturally was assigned it in high school along with everyone else) and she reminded me how George Eliot and Frederick Chopin (another of my great loves) had been an item, and the movie I saw about that all came back to me.

Silas Marner takes place in a mythical place where good things happen to you because you leave your door unlocked and where if a two year old child of a young drug addict wanders into your livingroom after its mother has passed out and died not far away outside your unlocked door, you get to keep it and adopt it and raise it to happy adulthood, no questions asked, no adoption papers to make out or anything. It is definitely my kind of book. Immediately I identified with Silas Marner! For one thing, he is way too trusting--something my mother was always telling me, though I didn't believe her (I was defiantly trusting of all others); and, like Silas Marner, I too am near-sighted. Like him I enjoy the sight of my gold coins (various and unnamed), and his story of redemption by providence is mine too. I have hope, you see, because I leave my door open too.....

Silas Marner's faith in providence and in his fellow man is redeemed by the theft (quite beyond his control though he enables it by leaving his door open) of what his narrower focus must be until a greater one arrives--also enabled by him--when a child wanders in through his open door. This has happened to me a great number of times, and continues to happen. To date I have nine children and who knows how many more are about to arrive, for isn't my door still open?

Read it! It's wonderful! Especially if you had to read it in high school. Re-reading it after having lived a while will only make it better--and you'll "get it" this time ever so much more. In a way, Silas Marner was the child that wandered in my door of late, bringing with it so much light on the progress of my days and the content of my character. Some call it providence, some fate. I am beginning to believe in it, just as my narrow scope on life has widened so far as to now being able to detect the feelings of those who live in the mythical land across the wide Atlantic.

Remember to leave some matches behind

2009-09-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

REMEMBER TO LEAVE SOME MATCHES BEHIND (a villanelle for September)

Remember to leave some matches behind
When your fire has burned to ember;
Someone will find them and mind.

If you lifted high a glass of wine
When came a time to remember,
Remember to leave some matches behind.

This eternal journey you travel blind
Bears no debris but dark November;
Someone will find them and mind.

As this eternal bend must end or wind,
Regardless the cold of December,
Remember to leave some matches behind

I say this to one who is one of a kind
Yet of our old race full member --
Someone will find them and mind.

And if you grow no grain to grind
By harvest time September,
Someone will find them and mind;
Remember to leave some matches behind.

The Silence of the Ma'ms

2009-09-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

The Silence of the M'ams

I heard something good on the national news the other night--some, if not all, of the Ma'ms are soon going to be silenced! "Ma'ms," to be distinguished from "lambs," who are generally emblematic of innocence itself, are anything but innocent and deserve silencing, in fact if you ask me it's been a long time coming, this silencing legislation the GPIC (Good People In Congress) have decided to enact. Long ago, various members of my family, including myself, began receiving phone calls from this or that banking conglomerant or credit card group reminding us of exactly how much we owed on this or that loan-- commercial, educational or other--detailing to the cent and to the day exactly how much and how long we were, or had been, or would be overdue by said amount, and asking us if we wouldn't like immediately to schedule a payment on same.....????

The conversation was always polite enough--indeed it always ended with a "Ma'm" on the other end, as in: "...we realize you are in dire circumstances Ma'm, and you were laid off, how unfortunate M'am, and we do realize you are now on a pension Ma'm, and that your means are extremely limited M'am, and M'am we do realize you have raised nine children, but when you first agreed to the conditions of this loan, M'am, surely you did re-a-lize that re-spon-si-bi-li-ty upon which you were entering M'am, did you not M'am? (silence--the best tactic).....M'am?... MA'M???????" (click) This is how we came to call them "Ma'ms," the polite but agonizingly persistent and forgetful (they call again the next day as though they never, ever talked to you just the day before, and you have to explain all over again!!) progenitors and perpetuators and advancers and continuators of these calls, represented by the poor M'am employees with the Southern or Indian accents hired to do the big bosses' dirty work.....Now it's routine: "Oh, that call? No, just ignore it. Let it ring. I'm sure it's just a Ma'm..."

And now NBC's Brian Williams has made me feel as though I must have had a senior moment and forgotten I had signed up for a Ma'm support group (MA? Twelve steps to not hanging up on Ma'ms?), because here he is on the 6:30 news asking me: "You know those annoying, life-interrupting calls we all get day in and day out from agencies--usually from the credit card industry or a bank--reminding us it is URGENT we call them back??".....? (Yes, yes I answer inwardly, fervently wringing my hands and glancing at my cell phone..........) And then....

He says the M'ams are to be silenced! (This is almost BETTER than the movie!) Someone in the legislature has written a law and now it is to be enacted! Some good person noticed that it was annoying and disturbing and distracting people too much and maybe even offending their Bill of Rights or breaking some Constitutional Amendment that until now M'ams thought did not apply to them. Well! We'll just see about that!

Yes indeedy! Of course I will not believe it until my cell phone--set with the special ring for M'ams--ceases to ring, but I am hopeful! Yes, I am.

:-)

Meanwhile I have just noticed that a little meanness brings out the worse in everybody--even in a saintly sort of person such as myself. Call it a little too many M'ams for too long....something like that.

Anyway, thirteen days ago (as of this writing) I was charged $3870.00 for unpaid, overdue charges on my PHONE bill and was summarily (if erroneously) disconnected. You will realize of course, if you read about the M'ams (above), I rarely if ever even use the phone, much less ring up an unpaid bill on it. How then did I even know I was disconnected?--because they do leave on the 911 access, you see, and a dial tone that gets you to it. It is true I would never have known at all that I was disconnected except for the fact that I receive my internet access over it.

Internet--whole different story. Hate phone, loooove internet. You write on it, not talk. Ma'ms may be instantly deleted if and when they get your email address.

So that morning, thirteen days ago, I found I had no internet! This sent the blood pounding in my ears and my breath coming in stops and starts and long exhaustive, anxious sighs! After all, I had 62 moves on 62 games waiting on chessworld for me to make a move, and no holiday assigned! My rating was going to plummet like a hawk as my opponents watched my games time-out, one after another, while they merrily claimed wins on me, and time ticked on. I was disconnected??? This couldn't be happening to me!!

It was true I would have to speak to a M'am about this, but after all my granddaughters, aged nine and twelve and probably expecting at least a little internet access after swimming and tennis, were about to arrive for a week's stay. I got myself in proactive mode (hard for me since mothers of nine are generally reactive to the nth degree) and called to find out what the problem was--wasn't it true I always have my bank automatically send them $20 a month whatever the balance? So I called the M'am. That is when I found out I owed the $3780--approximately one third of my annual income--for "some long-distance calls in April, M'am," and got to really huffing and puffing with anxiety and disbelief. Was I the victim of fraud? What else could be the explanation? But no, it turned out quite unexpectedly. The phone company was in the wrong!

Here is what happened. I spent last winter with one of my daughters to share the heating bill, closed down the house, turned off all the ultilities, including the phone, for a period of five months. Arrived back April 1st and found I must have left my modem (through which I get high speech internet access) at my daughter's house (I called, she couldn't find it either). So I called the phone company, changed my billing address back to normal, and asked them to send me another modem. It should arrive in three days they said, why not use dial-up until it does?--they gave me a dial-up number. Alas, the modem did NOT arrive in three days. I had to make a call and be a M'am myself and ask them for it again--it arrived about twenty days after that first call. I got my fast internet again and all went well for a month or two--then again my internet would not connect! This time it was my computer's logic board--again I used dial-up with the number they had given me for about ten days. During this whole time I did not receive a bill, even though I had changed my address back! But that's okay--I was sending $20 a month anyway just to cover whatever, right?

To make a long story short, the number they had given me for dial-up was not a free number--it was a long-distance number! $3870 worth of long distance calls I was making, apparently, just to get that temporary slow dial-up access to the internet--and of course I had used this (supposedly) free dial-up number non-stop. Well, the phone company M'ams bent over backwards to apologize. None of that $3870 bill was my fault (I knew that), and in fact, when the dust settled they actually owed me $7.00--that sounded about right too. They would terminate the whole account and start up the new one right away. How would that be Ma'm? Would that be better?

That was six days ago. And yesterday--five days in waiting for reconnection it hit me--I'm still not connected to the internet--and I'm getting used to it!! Enough of this!! I called up the phone company!

*I* was the M'am!

I asked why I wasn't connected yet, and detailed the exact duration of the interrupted service to the second. They pleaded (if in a ma'mish way) with me! They said it was something technical, and described it to me in detail. I listened, I drummed my fingers, and I said okay: I was polite. I did not say M'am--but I will not say I was not tempted to do so......

Today, I called again. Again--just as though I had never, ever heard about all the technical difficulties they were experiencing--I asked why was I not yet connected to the internet???

And I almost added "M'am"

I silenced myself though. It must have been my conscience. One must silence the M'ams after all, because after all, one act of meanness (or a thousand) does not--or ought not to--engender another. Not if the world is ever to be straightened out. No indeed--all the Ma'ms must be silenced. For if paradise is the place we would find the world to be if only we followed beauty's guide, surely we are straight on course. What could be more beautiful than the silence of the M'ams?

Uncommon Sense

2009-06-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

One learns to listen to the meaning of language, when one has been instructed in language endlessly. Does it conduct the owner of education, imagination and a sense of humor? Does it demand scientific scrutiny and historical relevance? As a child I learned these things early, to listen to the speech of others, for the family was already in the fold. My mother might correct my usage all her life, but my language was a priori at least equal to if not superior to that of all others outside the family, in her view—and it was her view which held the family standard. She was not particularly scientific in method, if wholly so in attitude, and so sometimes I saw her logic as lacking, for I was wholly scientific both in method and attitude. It is not conducive to common sense, such an upbringing, in such a family.

One learns very early to admire the humorous, the “wit” which is the family humor, the understatement, the ironic. And yet my mother screamed herself with laughter into sanity all her life. She depended on humor, the ability to see the funny and absurd and the ridiculous to see her through the worst of circumstances. Common sense does not enter in; common sense might have dictated a melt-down. But my mother's uncommon sense was well developed toward an always available window of opportunity framed by laughter. It relieved her and with it she rose above an abusive, corrosive undependable outer world of trouble. She rose newly strengthened by it, for rarely was it not followed by solid plans of self-intervention and, ultimately, victory over all foes, these being, mainly, people with no imagination, whose sense and knowledge were merely conventional. Imagination itself is not conducive to common sense and when common sense becomes merely conventional, then it becomes the foe. Uncommon sense is much more interesting, for one, than common sense. It is also never in danger of becoming merely conventional.

My grandfather was of that tribe which has always lived among men admired by all the other tribes, currently coined a “whisperer.” My mother thought that birds and cats and all sorts of animals “knew”
things. Of course this was not scientifically viable, and I snickered at her. Yet she had a father who, in spite of being an eminent scientist, talked to animals; and I myself admit to having had a grounded robin chick hop right into my lap once. Common sense tells you a dog knows what you're thinking. Uncommon sense tells you you know what the dog is thinking. We have, as a family, the latter kind.

A well-educated person reveals himself in language--the purpose he puts it to, not just the way it is put. My mother revealed to me a remarkable compassion for others when she over-looked the ill-constructed syntax of a given respect-deserving outsider and focused on his sense of humor and his good common sense. Those with uncommon sense always look up to and respect those with common sense, and my mother's uncommon sense was superior. She had a keen eye to the essential human being beneath the trappings of style, even such verbal accouterments as those which had been garnered in a language-poor upbringing. My mother could forgive, and willingly did so consistently, poor language usage in the mouth of a person who had sterling integrity, fierce protectiveness, loyalty and—always—common sense. She loved carpenters. I guess she found they exuded common sense, and she found they shared the same sense of humor, uncommon as it was.

Common sense would have told her she and carpenters weren't likely to find the same things funny. But uncommon sense, of which our family has plenty, she had in spades. I thought I was the only one with common sense—me and Grandma Ruggli, my grandfather's mother-in-law. Now she had common sense. You could, and can, see it in her wrinkles. I can see, using my magic mirror (rendered magic by its frequent disuse) that I am slowly turning into my great grandmother, wrinkles and all. But the common sense? I somehow doubt it will come in time for it to cause my bodily demise to have no meaning. Such thoughts invariably render me melancholy; but it passes. Uncommon sense, of which I have much, tells me that in a hundred years I will have a descendant turning into me.

The use of uncommon sense is that one keeps in touch with one's remote ancestors and one's remote descendants. Common sense says that it's all over when it's all over. Common sense says dust to dust. Uncommon sense, such as my family believes in, says death is only bodily, the family lives forever, and with it the stories and language which feature it forever. The family is uncommonly featured in the kind of sense which makes sense to my family, and my family only. Not quite. We're not that exclusive. Not when it comes to marriage.

We're always noticing others—people who exude a certain humorous imaginative approach to life and looping them in matrimonially. Uncommon sense must be perpetuated. Uncommon sense says you marry someone you love. Common sense dictates you fall in love with someone who understands where you're coming from, family wise. (Does he talk to the animals? Is he not lazy? Hard-working? Is he thoughtful of others? NOT conventional, I hope—the worst is to be conventional in my family.) Most importantly, is he prepared to go script-less into the conversation of the night? (Does he speak well? Is he educated?) Why be in love with somebody else? Makes sense. But which kind?

Uncommon sense says you marry the person you fall in love with. With any luck, you might fall in love with someone your family would approve of, that being someone who, though lacking in common sense, is still imaginative and creative. Good luck thus becomes an indispensable component of one's own destiny package. To someone without common sense, luck redeems all; indeed is all that's left for hope after uncommon wisdom speaks. Someone with common sense doesn't need luck (he has sense).

When it comes to discovering lovers of an ilk, uncommon sense is always sending members of our family messages during the courting process. I have a daughter who calls the messenger of her own uncommon sense her “Stupid Friend.” Stupid is a good way of describing uncommon sense. Common sense would make you never stupid, ever.

Common sense is much to be wanted, for it's the fortress of the ages, the sign of common wisdom. Uncommon wisdom has to be family grown. I strive ever toward the former, having been given so much of the latter.

Norman Lear's religious tolerance, Stoicism, Obama, and the coming generation

2009-06-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

I heard Norman Lear interviewed today, and was startled to hear him say several things I think of as essentially Stoic. In particular, that each individual has his or her own theism--whether it be monotheistic, polytheistic, atheistic or whatever--to address. Each of us must determine that relationship for ourselves. In Norman Lear's eyes (http://normanlear.com/spirit_8.html) this is what has determined whether or not he has lived a purposeful life; for other individuals, he stresses, it may or may not be the same--that is none of his concern. Particularly he makes it clear how others address their religious concerns is none of his concern. Religious unconcern is the basis for his religious tolerance, in fact, the result of his belief that divine struggles are personal, not collective; they reside in each of us, and it is not the individual's proper place to determine what the religious beliefs of others should or should not be.

It is a typically Stoic position; both Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (http://www.bartleby.com/2/3/14.html) and Epictetus (http://www.ptypes.com/enchiridion.html) express similar beliefs. Simplicius, historian of Alexander the Great, records in Epictetus's Enchiridion ("handbook"): "...and if it relates to anything which is not in our power, be ready to say, that it does not concern you." Lear cites American forefathers Jefferson and Madison as progenitors of his views. He calls their thought "secular humanism." He writes:

"That is, with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and most of the nation's other founders, I believe that whether one is theist or atheist is irrelevant to civil purpose. Jefferson: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.” Madison: “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, profess and observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” In other words, some of my—and America's—best friends are secular humanists.

George Long, who translated Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus at the end of the 19th century, and who taught at Jefferson's University of Virginia, discusses at length in his introductions to these works by these two philosophers (Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) the long tradition of Stoic thought in history:

"From the time of Zeno to Simplicius, a period of about nine hundred years, the Stoic Philosophy formed the characters of some of the best and greatest men."

How did Stoic thought come down to Norman Lear? Most educated men of Madison and Jefferson's generation had read these works by Epictetus and Antoninus; they were an important part of the "core curriculum" of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, carried through since the Renaissance's great Classical revival. Norman Lear read and agreed with Madison and Jefferson, but really Madison and Jefferson were channeling Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and he agreed with them. Many of us today agree with them. We are, perhaps, Neo-Stoics and don't realize it. Obama surely is, and anyone who has heard or read his views on religious toleration knows it (http://theframeproblem.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/barack-obamas-speech-on-religion-in-america/).

I think maybe this kind of tolerance is what is catching the imagination of those in our current generation who say they are not religious, but are spiritual; or say they are personally atheistic but don't mind others believing what they want(whatever floats your spiritual boat); inclusive, accepting of diversity, not exclusive. They are in this secular humanistic, Stoic tradition so well expressed in Norman Lear's personal philosophy. I think the age of Lear and the NeoStoics has found its time. Our world communicates so well now, we all might as well think of ourselves as seated at the same table. And we all know we shouldn't be discussing the religion, sex, and politics of each other --it is none of our concern!--but respect each others' differences of opinion in all matters religious, sexual, and political.

As Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Meditations,VIII, 56)puts it, be tolerant of other's free will to opine as they will:

"To my own free will the free will of my neighbor is just as indifferent as his poor breath and flesh. For though we are made especially for the sake of one another, still the ruling power of each of us has its own office..."

Tolerance and Robert Greenleaf Leavitt

2009-05-30T06:27:00.002-07:00

This is a parable, as told by me, channeling Robert Greenleaf Leavitt.

A dog would not understand why you weed, yanking out and killing things he only sometimes eats. He doesn't understand the principle we weed by, to kill some so other chosen ones can thrive. But he doesn't object to the yanking, he just lays there watching or perhaps takes a nap. This is tolerance of what you cannot understand. One who bows his head to the floor to worship God is not always understood by the one who must imbibe or ingest his God instead. But both may tolerate one another by understanding the common need each has to relate to his divinity in some way, whether by imbibing or by bowing. Both are like dogs supining in the sun while the humans are doing their strange thing weeding, just laying there practicing tolerance.

This is my understanding of how Robert Greenleaf Leavitt perceived tolerance. He kept a Koran in his library and wrote about the similarities among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought often. He was also according to my mother able to read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, so he must have thought about common concepts rooted in words the different religions shared. He focused on commonalities, not differences (citing always "do unto others" as a common adage among religions); and communication (citing how animals and humans could and did communicate.)

To him, a botanist, diversity itself might have suggested ecological health. But he was more than a botanist, he was also one who "talked to the animals." They communicated with him, and he with them; conceivably he learned much from them about tolerance--especially from dogs, horses and crows. He was always looking for commonalities between and among species as between and among religions. Hence my mother was raised in an atmosphere of proactive tolerance of differences between and among species and religions (though not politics--I trace this to the influence of Ida my grandmother.)

I think my children will find it is true of their own beliefs, such a strong traditional way of thinking about religious tolerance has existed in our family culture for so long-- along with a certain zeal (so currently manifest in our own Erika) for truth and justice. "Honest, scholarly, retiring" our family is declared in the town history. They were also highly tolerant people. Amos Blazo "attended no religious services," (though ministers of various denominations "were always welcome in his home");his father had come to America an apostate priest. His son married a woman raised by the Shakers. Their son Robert Blazo was a freewill Baptist, but even more that that he was a Stoic, which I know not only from his love letters to his fiance, but through the love of the classics he passed on down to his daughter Susan, whose son Robert Greenleaf Leavitt was, he whose childhood collection of birds' eggs, among everything else of his, has come to me personally.

By the time it came down to me through my mother from my grandfather, I was too trusting according to my mother. But I call it tolerance, that finding of differences in others as being okay, and focusing instead on commonalities amongst others; and I am happy to walk in my grandfather's shoes, whatever my mother may have said. It would be like Robert Greenleaf Leavitt to speak in terms of dogs or horses, and so I tried to do myself (above), in honor of his wonderful view on life he has passed on to us, his descendants, of tolerance, in which I have been lucky enough to have been steeped for a lifetime.

Time traveling with Star Trek

2009-05-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

I saw Star Trek last night and saw my life pass before my eyes. I went to places never gone to before....For instance, before my very eyes young James T. Kirk turned into my son Stevie (!) Then there was Spock, and he turned into Stevie's younger brother and arch enemy Joey (!) My son Johnny was right next to me watching the movie with me, so I whispered these things in his ear when they occurred to me. He must know what I meant I thought, having been regularly placed between his two big brothers in the back seat of the car whenever we went anywhere to keep them from killing each other, but he only nodded knowingly. Maybe he didn't want to be interrupted by major flash backs going on in my head while I was watching the movie? I fell quiet.

It was the preview that had started the time travel for me-- Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard. I didn't care about the angels and demons part (ho-hum) but Ron Howard sure got my attention! Suddenly I was remembering watching Ron Howard as a young mother of two young children way back in the Sixties. Ron Howard was then just a small boy on The Andy Griffeth Show named "Opie"--who would have dreamed that this Opie would someday grow up and direct a movie?? Next thing I knew my mind took a quantum leap (warp speed) forward, and I remembered seeing Caccoon in the Eighties, and thinking Oh! ...he's all grown up now, and is a great director! I leaned over to tell Johnny all this stuff and then changed my mind. We wouldn't see Star Trek at all if I kept reminiscing.

But anyway, Star Trek was another series I loved to watch back then about the same time as I was watching The Andy Griffeth Show, and I was so disappointed when I heard they were going to cancel it after only three seasons. Nothing could possibly have made me realize then that it would not be cancelled, but instead recalled by popular acclaim and more amazingly, go on decade after decade to spawn many, many movies in its wake while actors aged and grew paunchy and finally had to be replaced, while Trekkies multiplied faster than Tribbles. Who would have guessed?

It was more than half the joy of the movie! I began to remember all the Star Treks going back forty years and more, and when I saw Leonard Nimoy's Old Spock confronting his Young Spock self it might as well have been me confronting my own young self when we all were so young and so unknowing of the future. The unknowingness of the future is what makes it later so astounding when the past is looked back upon from it, you see. No one knows now what is going to make a splash in the world in the future at all! Example--looking back you know Elvis Presley made a big splash--his fame is utterly universal. But I remember when Pat Boone and Elvis Presley were absolutely tied as to who was best in the private polls of me and my friends, and we were the ones deciding. Fats Domino was pretty good too--how could you decide? Of course now Pat Boone is best remembered for his white bucks (I had some), and Fats Domino is revered as he should be for his wonderful irreverent piano-playing and lyrics--but Elvis has evolved into this great mythical cult hero god who has been spotted hundreds of times walking the earth--just like the Greek heroes and gods of old did--decades after his death, still wooing women and giving little private showings to the Chosen few lucky enough to have run into him. Who would have guessed?

When you see something over and over again for hundreds of episodes (which you don't realize are going to be famous some day) the way I saw Star Trek in its original setting, the moves all become familiar. The way Captain Kirk sits in the captain's chair defines him; the way Spock and Kirk sort of stand there leaning toward each other facing you, having a little conference deciding what to do next--that's just what they do. As I was going into this movie (Star Trek 2009) I was thinking there was something that was just a little staged about the original they could never capture today in the age of specially effected realism, and something a little like Saturday Night Live about the way Spock and Kirk and the others--Scottie, Bones, Chekov, Sulu, Uhura--were with each other. They were clearly having fun--poking fun at themselves and getting into their characters in a wonderfully funny way.

But I was wrong to think they wouldn't, couldn't capture that! Star Trek 2009 does poke fun at Star Trek 1966! Young Kirk sits in the captain's chair, posed just as he did all those hundreds of times forty years ago, thinking, posturing, looking captainly...along comes young Spock (now he's the captain in this movie!) and says "Outta the chair!" It is hilarious! And at the end, the two together facing the movie audience, conferring with each other about what to do.....they captured it perfectly!

And another thing. They were the original Crew Diversity before it was a concept--this was the world of the future and we knew it had no money in it and was totally integrated as to both race and intergalactic species--which was the way we envisioned a new enlightened world being. The only thing I didn't like was the outfits the girls had to wear--they reminded me too much of Play Boy Club outfits I had seen in magazines! Oh well, you can't have everything, and Captain Kirk had to hit on someone, and girls in feministic outfits (whatever they were--braless maybe) wouldn't have fit the bill. They were still in the future, feminists were, you see. Uhura was the first maybe; she was strong and part of the crew. But she still had the old made-for-men-to-look-at outfit.

Oh Star Trek! What times revisited! What time travel!! I must see it again!

An essay on war and play

2009-05-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

How I loved playing war on the circle as a child! Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, Americans and Germans ("No! It's the Russians now, Stupid, not the Germans!" ); booby traps, forts, ambushes, secret codes and well-laid plans, them against us. We played all over the neighborhood and in the woods. I imagined myself a marine crawling through the jungle thickets with a knife in my teeth. I loved being the lookout and spy on the enemy camp hidden behind a tree or bushes where they couldn't see me, bringing back to my side all the information. I loved bringing prisoners back to keep in jail too and was good at it. I would jump out from behind a tree or down from a limb or out from under a bridge and grab 'em and bring 'em in.

Some say war is necessary, that out of its great destruction always comes something good, something new, something symbolic, something delivered to men, like a gift after the fact, a better perspective on things. But are bolts of lightning necessary for making burning embers? There must be a better way to strike a match. I want to know from an ecological perspective what specific need large scale destruction of life serves.

Is war like some play we are putting on for ourselves which some of us just must attend or life wouldn't be worth living? An entrenched, intractable collective and subconscious belief in its innate and intrinsic worthwhilessness must be keeping it legal, for we do honor war as we honor nothing else in all our institutions. We call it sacrifice--sacred giving of life for a greater good. But what greater good would this be? Try to look at it scientifically.

It must be something more than burning embers which comes of war to make me believe it is needed and necessary for the world to proceed in a natural way, in the natural order of things. Somehow it has been included in the natural order of things, along with natural enemies pestilence and famine, and death. War is one of the four horses of the Apocalypse, which is itself a false paradigm: the fourth horseman, death, results from the other three and is not merely their fellow. Indeed death, which may be caused by spurious effect, and thereafter known as destiny or fate or providence, comes from the three horsemen of the Apocalypse and all the other horsemen too. Contrariwise, death may cause as well as be caused by the others. Cause and effect in nature are integral components of the same time space continuum--so much for destiny. Ask Frederick Turner about the time continuum's integrity (http://frederickturnerpoet.com/).

I am not talking about how we get as a species to the point of obliterating war along with disease and hunger, though this might seem an honorable ambition for mankind; I only want to establish that war is not necessary to our well-being as a natural occurrence built into the moral fiber of any ecosystem our species would need in order to sustain itself.. If the good of war, for example, is in the removal of excess population (read Dickens on this), then let us find a better way to control our excess. We do not need hunger, disease and war to keep us in check, because tsunamis, earthquakes and forest fires provide us plenty of relief in that area. We could, if we wanted, manage all kinds of beneficent exterminations short of war's infinitely more brutal, providence-fraught umbrella. Why do we regard the holocaust with horror and call World War II the good war ? They are twins of the same mother. Why is force of coercion given such respectability, why such honor delivered to its members, dead, live and maimed ? It is always said they had to go to war, because "a job" had to be done, someone had to do it and these honored few answered the call. Heed it well, need is expressed. But what need, I want to know.

'O reason not the need!' King Lear says wearily to Regan when she asks him what need he has of even one of his old comrades of war, his fellow veterans, now drunken and disabled and dependent on him as he is on them for his veracity, his identity as warrior. They can tell him who he is. " ...Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is as cheap as beast's." And of course by man he meant woman too.

Perhaps I am being Regan and do not see what need this seemingly superfluous gathering of old men in the comradery of remembering of life defined by death and love actually serves. Do we war then for love? Could we not then, should we not, play at war instead somehow? The way I did when I was little in my neighborhood in the Fifties?

Somehow we must get excessive population under control (I say tie it to credit), make war illegal, and transform it into play. Surely play is necessary to our well-being, a natural occurrence built into the moral fiber of any cultural ecosystem our species would need in order to sustain itself naturally. Cannot play, work, love and creation become the new four horsemen of the apocalypse, forces to bring low the evil rulers of the old world? It is in the name of reasoned necessity I declare it so.

The Doctorate--Part Two

2009-05-16T03:31:00.000-07:00

I thought I was getting the degree to make myself more employable, period; but the degree itself was the least I got out of the doctorate. Even the jobs which inevitably ensued from acquiring it paled beside the real effects of what eventually came of actually doing it. It was a period of rejuvenation for me. I would go to school tired to death from teaching and housework and come home hours later completely refreshed and ready to change the world with new ideas. And I think this was because I was so happy that my "invisible" experience teaching was finally becoming visible to everybody.

The graduate-level courses I was taking did not phase me in the least because there was little I didn't already know about education, either in practice or theory. And this was specifically because, beginning with Donna and Erika in Duxbury way back in 1979, and continuing with their little brothers and sisters in Fryeburg and Monroe through 1989, I had been annually teaching, developing curricula, researching resources, administering assessments, and evaluating programs quarterly in an on-going process (grades one through eight) for eight years straight, topping it off with two more years in Islesboro in the public school system (grades seven through twelve). It was as though I had been in hard training for this particular doctoral-level degree for a decade and now I could finally just sit there and take it all in--and then take it to a higher level still.

Few realize what goes into implementing a home education program, but the superintendents who supervised my programs certainly did. It may as well as not have existed at all for purposes of finding teaching jobs; no more than raising nine children over a period of forty-two years qualifies you for credit in Child Development courses, or running a household for almost half a century earns any practicum credit in a Home Economics degree whatsoever. And this was a pity, because home education at my house went on all year long, day after day, with no breaks for holidays and summer vacation. But academia has its own milestones to pass, and schools hire (and states certify) teachers who have passed courses in college, not teachers who have mastered the same skills doing the same thing at home. I had, by 1976, two degrees in English, a minor in history, and was certified to teach science, history, and English in the secondary schools; in addition, I had had three years teaching in college (1969-1972). Yet I had little chance of being hired because I had "no experience" --teaching at home did not count, and my college-teaching experience was seventeen years old. To make it worse, one superintendent told me he had decided he couldn't even hire me as a substitute, because this would interfere with my home education program, wouldn't it? It had been very discouraging to me to realize that the very practice which was giving my children (to my mind) a superior education was the very thing which was preventing me from finding work to support them.....

Now all of that was changed. I was back in the system--"visible" again, so to speak--going to school with the well-defined objective of making myself employable again. What I didn't realize when I began was that the home education experience my children would be having while I got the doctorate would be greatly enhanced by it--and it by them.

I had always found raising children and attending college highly compatible, complementary activities. It didn't matter what I studied, I could always relate what I was learning to something about my children. Once, studying for my B.A, degree in Portland in 1968 (at what was to become USM), I used Evie and Rachael as case studies in an undergraduate course in philosophy I was taking. For example, I could see that Evie's dialogues (aged five) at home with me and her sister were those of a Continental Rationalist, and Rachael's (aged three) those of a British Empiricist. Accordingly I inserted pieces of our dialogues with each other into my term paper to make my points. To my surprise and delight, the professor got it!....and I got an A.

Now, twenty-one years later, I again found my children perfect case studies for my courses! I got permission from the professor to study my own children's use of The Writing Process as a formal class in my home education writing class. My five children (Margaret, Andrea, Johnny, Joey, and Stevie) ranged in age from three up to thirteen; they, and I with them, sat around the kitchen table and wrote.

From a board at the University of Maine I copied the three questions we used to critique what we wrote. These were: " What did you like best about it? What part didn't you understand? What would you like to hear more about?" Was Margaret (only three at the time) included? She was the best part! Unable to read or write, Margaret scribbled out her entire stories and then read them back to us each time it was her turn (usually a continuation of the story about a little girl in a bear's cave--we all loved her stories!) Then, just like the rest of us, she would ask everyone at the table in turn the three questions (" What did you like best about it? What part didn't you understand? What would you like to hear more about?") and get feedback. We evaluated each other's work and built up portfolios which in turn were turned in by me to the professor at semester's end.

The real result was not, of course, just the A I received for the course (the children cheered), but substantial practice for my children (my students) in writing and critiquing of writing, as a community of writers within a family of writers, practice which continued in this form for the next ten years (until 1998) as long as I had anyone home to teach. I could, at this point, relate multiple long term results of those five years of my life and its effect upon my children and their respective educations. But since we have glimpsed that of Margaret at three, it might be instructive to glimpse her resume at twenty-two, and use her example as representative of the rest. Leaving much out, it includes not only a B.A. in English from UNH, (3.6 GPA in the major), but also the fact that she is an unpaid senior online editor of mugglenet.com, author of numerous fanfiction stories online, even more offline, has worked in her university's Writing Center assisting other students with their writing assignments, and has had an editorial internship with Heinemann. As far as I know, she's written something every day since she was three, which is for the non-math people among you, no less than 6,935 days of writing. I repeat, the example of Margaret's growth as a writer is just one among many lasting, long-term results of that period of time when I worked (I thought) for a degree merely in order to become employable again.

It is hard to separate the mother student from the mother teacher in my mind. I am sure I was a better mother as well, because I was both a student and a teacher myself during those five years. Often it seems to me that the by-product of something one undertakes in life both outlasts and outbests the original undertaking's most treasured purpose by far--and that's the part (most mysteriously) which had not been planned for at all!

Growing up in racially segregated Virginia in the Fifties

2009-05-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

No one ever talked to me about racial prejudice that I can remember before we moved to Charlottesville in 1949, but Virginia was below the Mason Dixon line, and although I was only five and a half at the time, I can still remember clearly my first experiences with it--not with prejudice, but with the result of prejudice so deep and so amassed throughout a whole population it had become law ("Jim Crow" I found out later these laws were called, which I still think is a strange name for a law.)

I myself of course was not in the least prejudiced--there were no "colored people" (the term used by polite whites for blacks in those days) in Morrisville, that I had ever met anyway, none at all in Maine that I knew of, and the first black people I ever saw were in Washington D.C. sitting in a big crowds on the stoops of buildings we were passing by on our way down to Virginia on a hot, hot day. I remember hearing my mother and grandmother talking about the terrible conditions of the buildings where the people sat as we drove by--their tones were sympathetic for the people I could tell. "Terrible" was my mother's term, which I already knew was her favorite term and the one she used for anything which she thought was wrong. But we drove on.

It rained in torrents on the way down. We were in our old Plymouth, the one before the gray '51 Dodge my mother bought which lasted us the whole time we were in Charlottesville. The windshield wipers kept stopping on the Plymouth and my brother, who always sat next to my mother in the passenger's seat when we went on long trips, had to keep reaching out the window and nudging them into action again so my mother could see. "I can't see!" she would say with great alarm and out he would reach and get them going again. I recently saw a 1948 Plymouth and it all came back, that memory. But we made it to Charlottesville. My brother must have been about twelve, my mother forty-one, and my grandmother seventy-seven. My grandmother and I always rode in the back seat when we all went somewhere together, especially when we drove to Maine every Summer and back to Virginia again every Fall.

In my family going to the movies was something we all loved to do, and so right away after arriving and moving in we went to the movies at the Paramount theater in downtown Charlottesville. We parked along a side street next to the theater and went to the box office to get our tickets. Oh oh! Something was wrong! The lady wouldn't give us our tickets--she kept pointing up the street and telling my mother we couldn't come in! She said something else to my mother I couldn't hear and then my mother said "Oh! I'm sorry!" and told us (my brother and grandmother and me, all waiting expectantly) that the entrance for white people (that was us) was around front--this was the entrance to the BALCONY where only Colored People could go--and we were not colored. I was SO disappointed! I really did want to sit in the balcony, since I'd never sat in one before. We went around to the front and sure enough, there was another box office with another lady (white) selling other tickets to the same movie. So we got our tickets and went in and sat down. I looked way, way back and up and sure enough there was the coveted balcony with lots of people in it--black people. I still wanted to sit up there, but it just wasn't allowed. And that was my first experience with Jim Crow.

But soon enough I got to know and see lots of "colored people." Mr. Gardner came and worked for us every Sunday--he was black. After my brother went off to live at Christchurch School on the Rappahanock River, there was only my mother, my grandmother and myself at home, so I imagine he was hired to do any heavy work that a father would otherwise do. One day he and my grandmother made soap in the back yard with the fat my grandmother saved from cooking. This saved fat gave my mother occasion to observe to me that "Germans never throw anything away!" --referring to my grandmother's ethnicity (German and Swiss). I suppose this is a sort of prejudice--to this day I still think of all Germans as being very thrifty like my grandmother and never throwing anything away.

Anyway, she and Mr. Gardner, who was a very tall, thin man while my grandmother was rather short and stout (though still taller than I was), were mixing fat and lye together in the back yard in a metal garbage can--the kind my friends and I used the lids of (for shields) when we were sword fighting--I was watching intently. They were getting along famously. They were laughing and talking together the whole time. He would always have to repeat whatever he said to her about three times before she understood him, because he had such a thick, strong Southern accent that sometimes even I couldn't understand what he was saying and would have to say "what?" to him until I got it. He was a very patient man and kept repeating what he said more slowly and more distinctly each time until we got it. I think he must have had a lot of funny stories to share with his family and friends about this family of Yankees he was working for.

Back to the soap-making: they put ashes into it after the lye and fat was mixed enough, and then poured the whole strange mixture (after warning me not to touch the lye because it would burn me...?) into a large cardboard box in layers. Each layer of soap was covered with a sheet of newspaper, in this case the funnies from the Sunday paper, The Daily Progress. (I loved the funnies, even before I could read, so I watched with even more interest.) Then this was all allowed to solidify and the newspaper peeled off and the soap cut in squares with a knife--I watched the whole process, deeply impressed. The very best part was that the funnies came off on the soap and we had soap with the funnies on it!

Mr. Gardner's first name was William, but both my mother and grandmother always addressed him respectfully as Mr. Gardner. My mother told me that the other six days of the week he worked as a janitor at the University of Virginia hospital. "How hard he works, just imagine!" she said to me once with great respect in her voice. "He works every minute to support his family!" His son was just graduating from high school at the time she said this to me, and she also made a point of telling me Mr. Gardner was very proud of his son for doing that. I could tell she admired Mr. Gardner in every way. Later on during the Sixties when the civil rights movement was getting underway I used to imagine that Mr. Gardner's son had joined the Black Panthers now, because his father had worked every single day of the week somewhere, either at the hospital or with us, to support his family, and I thought probably his son must have resented that just a little, not to ever get to see his own father. And of course I sympathized. I never got to see my own father either (my parents were divorced), but at least I got to see Mr. Gardner one day a week, while his own kids never did apparently.

Mr. Gardner wasn't the only black person who worked in the neighborhood. There was a nice black lady who took care of the baby of the family next door, and whenever I got on the bus there were lots of people who would be either arriving for or leaving from work on the circle, though none of them lived there, all black people who lived somewhere else ( or so I supposed--I didn't really know or give it much thought). Riding the bus was something we children liked to do for fun--ride the bus on its entire route and end up back home again; our mothers always let us do this. My mother told me when she was little she used to do the same thing with her friends on the trolleys all over Trenton.

Anyway, one day I wanted to ride at the back of the bus, and so I did. But all the black people who were sitting back there (I had begun to notice they always sat back there!) kept staring at me and moving over to make room for me--or away from me and not looking at me. I couldn't understand why--I wasn't doing anything wrong. I told my mother about it and she told me that there was a law that said that only Colored People were supposed to sit back there, no whites--and I was white. Well, she might have warned me not to try and sit back there in the first place. Once again I had run into Jim Crow!

We went to the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church in Charlottesville--it was about the only time I ever wore a dress, even though Betsy Glancy (my arch enemy in school) used to say I shouldn't wear dungarees or pants to school, but instead should be "a little lady." Ugh! I hated that expression and told my mother what she said. My mother just laughed at the expression, and looked a little haughty, and said "How silly!" and sniffed! She was on my side always; she didn't mind if I wore dungarees every day and played with the boys, and neither did Betsy Hennemann's mother. Betsy was my best friend on the circle. We played football and baseball with the boys all the time, no problem. Our mothers were educated and liberated I realized later--the two went hand in hand. Indeed, Betsy ended up becoming a lawyer after being a stock broker for a while. We both made fun of Betty Ann Rex, my arch enemy on the circle and Betsy's next door neighbor.

Betty Ann Rex always wore a dress--and she hated me. She pushed me to the other half of the street, or tried to, whenever she could (it was her side of the road she said). But I was always stronger and could push her back. Her family had a "family council" every Sunday to decide what they were going to do that week, and she and her sister had regular chores to do like polish the floor with floor wax and hang out the laundry "just so." Betsy and I sneered at her ways and laughed behind her back--our families did things like talk politics and read books, not get serious about waxing the floor and deciding when a first date could happen.

Years later, in our forties, Betsy and I talked on the phone and still we could make each other laugh talking about Betty Ann Rex! Betty Ann Rex did play the piano really well; and she had a television (in my family you were supposed to read); so I would always try to be nice so she would let me watch I Love Lucy week nights or Walt Disney or Lassie on Sunday nights. It was hard though (being nice.) This was class prejudice Betsy and I were practicing against Betty Ann Rex and she against us, but we didn't realize it; and when my mother and I laughed at Betsy Glancy's expecting me to be a little lady, we were being feministic in our attitude, but we didn't realize it. These ways of speaking had no such names in those days. Prejudice was prejudice and it had no classifications, people didn't point it out and talk about it. It was just practiced.

But anyway, to church I did wear a dress, much as I disliked it, year after year. And one night, the year after I came back from going out west with my mother, when I was twelve, I wore a really beautiful skirt to church in which to go Christmas caroling. I actually liked it! It was made of satin and had sequins on it. It even was my least favorite color--pink--and still I didn't mind. (Perhaps I was just beginning to think of boys in a different light.) So I arrived for caroling with other kids in the Unitarian Church, decked out in this beautiful skirt and very happy. But when we left to go caroling, instead of going down the street --the church was on Rugby Road, near the University--we were all herded into cars and taken to a place I had never been or seen before.

I was so surprised! It was a place which had mud on the ground, it was very, very dark there, and there were lots of shacks all crowded together in a strange, jumbled, disconnected way --think Slum Dog Millionaire. The shacks were not much taller than I was I noticed, and people were milling around us in the dark where we couldn't see them, not really coming up close to us.

Then I noticed all the people were black--colored people! We lined up and we sang, while my squined, satin skirt, which was below my knees as skirts were in those days, got really muddy all around the bottom. Of course I didn't care much about that. I just was surprised to see where we were and what it looked like there. We sang Silent Night and We Three Kings and Away in a Manger--all the songs I knew well--but in a place I had never even imagined existed before. It was dark, there were no electric lights, it was muddy, and people were holding candles, the only lights around. It was purely surreal. When we finished singing we heard claps, and "thank you, " and "Merry Christmas"--that was all; and then we drove back to the church, and my mother picked me up, and I told her all about it. She too was surprised and didn't know what to say. I don't remember ever wearing that skirt again. Maybe it was ruined in the mud.

Where that place in Charlottesville was, I do not know. I have come to realize gradually that all cities have such places in them where people live in shacks and tents and boxes on the city's perimeter, or near its dump, and the bigger the city is, the more likely you are to find one. This one must have been Charlottesville's. Two years later in 1958 when we moved back to Maine and I went to live at Kents Hill, I heard on the radio about the segregation laws in Virginia being repealed and I read an article in a magazine (Look? Life?) about Lane High School being integrated--Lane was the school I had gone to for the eighth and ninth grade. There were young people my age interviewed in that article who talked about how glad they were about the new integration laws. And I thought "I bet they were!" I was thinking that now Lane High School, which had the state's worst football team, would now get the black kids' high school's football players: Burley High School, the black high school in Charlottesville, were state football champions! Lane High was definitely benefitting.

But I also thought "Of course! Why not? No big deal!" It was a generation thing, much like gay marriage is now among the young--a non-issue. I also thought of my church and the caroling I had done in 1956, and realized I had been part of the change that had come to Virginia. I had no inkling at that point that a major Civil Rights movement was to come. I just knew that I agreed with the new law that made the schools the same.

Years later I saw a documentary of Bobby Kennedy encountering really hungry black families in shacks in the country down south, and being really disturbed by it. I remembered seeing such places and people myself, black people who looked ragged and discouraged standing outside of falling-down shacks; I saw them while riding in the car with my mother to go horse-back riding on the weekends on the outskirts of Charlottesville. I remembered Bobby and Teddy both went to UVA for law school, and I remember thinking that maybe, like me, they hadn't really looked into --just at--the lives of the black people who lived on the outskirts of town in the country. It must have made Bobby Kennedy feel good that he was actually in a position, as Attorney General, to do something about it.

My mother of course thought it (integration) was all part of a sinister Communist plot devised in Moscow to bring our country to its knees, this undermining of the rights of states to decide for themselves whether or not they would be integrated. "Separate but equal" schools were alright with her --in principle. She did not seem to connect the lives of black people she actually knew--people she liked and respected--with these new integration laws. But I did. I was part of a generation just coming to age which would throw out all sorts of things which were to us non-issues in judging others--war, race, religion, straight sex, conventional clothing, music, art, education, or English erudition. These things mattered to our parents and other adults--but not to us. There was a generation gap. It wouldn't be long before we would say so, and rather loudly.

The year I graduated from high school (1961), the Sixties generation was still in high school, all the boys had crew cuts, and the girls all strove to look "clean-cut." But we had had our eyes and, more importantly, our minds opened already just watching older people being intolerant. The major prejudice of the future--PCism, in which you had to be tolerant or you were not tolerated--was still in the future. In 1961 the Beatles were getting popular in Liverpool and Germany, Bob Dylan was writing "The Times They are A-Changin'," and Barack Obama was just being born.

Slowly, over the next four decades, even my own mother's prejudices were worn down and discarded. The Soviet Union self-destructed in 1989, and I was so glad she was alive (82 at the time) to see it. "Wonderful!" she breathed with a sincere breath of relief! How hard she had fought all her life, even spying without pay for the FBI, against the Communists for the sake of her country! But for me, her real changes were reflected in the way she accepted my friendships with actual black people, the way she came to feel the Vietnam War was all wrong, and the way, eventually, she actually saw black people as her equals, personally. I know this became true because sometime in the Seventies, maybe the Eighties, she reported to me she had met a young professional black woman in some sort of job situation, and "She spoke just beautifully!" I can hear her repeat it again to me, her amazement and admiration very evident in her voice. "She was very well spoken, and very well educated!" And again she repeated, almost in disbelief, "...she spoke just beautifully--and she had beautiful manners!"

It was an observation on class. For my mother, class had nothing whatsoever to do with money, but everything to do with language, education, manners, considerations of others, and moral rectitude. If I were ever to bring up a prospective boyfriend, her first question would always be "Does he speak well? Where did he go to school?" This young black woman she had met had clearly won her deepest respect and admiration, for she had proved herself on a par with herself! That was an almost unfathomable thought for me--few were on par with my mother, at least in her eyes, and it was always evident to me in her body language exactly what she thought of people in these terms--acceptable or not acceptable. For me, it was more profound change than the Iron Curtain crumbling, my mother reaching that point. I am so sad she did not live to see and listen to Obama.

Famous people I have dreamed of, seen, or written to

2009-05-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

Famous people you meet in dreams don't really count, but if they did mine are heavy with political figures. Sometime in my twenties I met Teddy Roosevelt in a dream, and upon meeting him (he was flirting with me) I said "I remember you! You're the one that said 'speak softly but carry a big stick,' aren't you?" That was all. Another night (all these dreams seemed packed into a single week) I found myself hanging out with all the Kennedy women, kind of an entourage following Jack, Bobby and Ted around. It felt like being some Kennedy's significant other, because there they were and there I was, you know? That was it, unfortunately. But the best one of all, really the best, was the night I dreamed I met Henry Kissinger. I was introduced to him in the dining room (in the house in Parsonsfield), and as he bowed and reached for my hand, his hand slightly grazed my breast.....suddenly we were in the southwest bedroom upstairs (my bedroom). And then, facing each other, we began to take turns singing Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower." I began "...There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief. There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief..." Kissinger took up the refrain without missing a beat: "Business men they drink my wine, plowmen did my earth. None of of them along the line know what any of it is worth..." --we definitely connected. But that was it for that dream.

Bob Dylan dreams also abounded. I was always meeting him behind the curtain between sets back stage, sharing my poetry with him, he'd be sharing his with me, what he'd written lately. Once we were out in the parking lot behind the auditorium riding bikes around. I always had a great time with Bob Dylan. Dreams of my friend Frederick Turner, whom I've never met in real life but only corresponded with, and who is not ubiquitously famous but academically so, surfaced similarly. Once in a dream he and I were out behind the Carnegie building on the University of Maine campus in Orono; Carnegie is the art and used to be the music building too. It was where I spent most of my time while my mother was going to summer school when I was little trying out all the instruments in the practice rooms and looking at all the art in progress and on exhibit. In the dream Fred and I were sitting on a stone bench side by side talking, and we were sort of leaning toward each other, our heads touching. The odd thing was that Fred had a head (though I knew he was Fred, as you do in dreams know such things) with a great crest on it, exactly like Australipithicus robustus--and he had not the gracile jaw of homo Sapien, but the huge chomping jaws (which would go with the crest of course) of robustus too! I wrote Fred about this and he said it made perfect sense, and alluded to his poem in April Wind "The Angry Man," a beastly alter ego of himself.

But dreams are not reality. In real life, one of the most famous person I have ever set eyes on was probably Louis Armstrong--it was probably 1955 0r '56 in Charlottesville, Virginia at UVA. My brother Robert took me to see him, and I was in the crowd getting pushed around, everyone talking, and suddenly the lights dimmed and a bunch of people pushed by us--"that's him! That's Satchmo!" my bother said in my ear over the roar of the crowd. I looked up to see Louis Armstrong about three or four feet away, passing right by us with the other musicians on his way to the stage. Everybody was cheering and clapping wildly--I had no idea who he was--I must have been 12 or 13, my brother was the one who was into jazz, not me. I was listening to Elvis and Pat Boone and Fats Domino at that stage. Anyway, once he was up on stage we stood so near I could see him really well. And the thing I noticed was that his lip went in in one place and out at another in a sort of circle whenever he took his horn away from his mouth--his horn fit to his mouth perfectly. And his cheeks puffed out like grapefruits were in them when he played! Yes, he could really play, and he was always sweating so much while he was playing he had to keep taking out his white handkerchief and wiping his brow with it. I had no idea he was so famous.

One day on Rugby Road my brother pointed to a man walking down the street (this was at the University of Virginia--Rugby Rd. runs right into it) and said "Look! There's William Faulkner!" I didn't know who William Faulkner was either, but later I learned he had given lectures there, and later I took my brother's advice and read some of his books--The River (experimental), and most recently As I Lay Dying, which I think is an amazing book. At that age I was into movies and had a habit of seeing the movie and then, in order to get more out of it, reading the book. Hence I did run into Faulkner after I saw Paul Newman in "The Long, Hot Summer"--my brother told me it was based on the Snopes Trilogy, whatever that was, and I tracked it down and read it. I liked the movie better--it had Paul Newman in it. Other books I read when I was twelve or thirteen because I had seen the movies were: Tea and Sympathy (Deborah Kerr), The Rainmaker (Burt Lancaster, Katherine Hepburn), War and Peace (Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda), Ten Angry Men (Henry Fonda), Night of the Kiawa Moon, a short story I found in an old Saturday Evening Post, the basis for The Unforgiven (Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn), Oliver Twist (Alec Guiness), Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier). If the movie came out in 1956-58 and I liked it, I read the book. So anyway, I saw the actual guy who wrote the book the movie with Paul Newman in it was based on. I would rather have seen Paul Newman, but it's all in your perspective at the time. The name William Faulkner meant nothing to me, but my eyes did behold him.

Then there are the correspondences with famous people who you do not know are famous at the time you are corresponding with them. Thus it was I wrote to and was written back to by Oliver Sacks without being aware in the least that he was the guy Robin Williams was playing along side Robert DiNiro in the movie "Awakenings," which I had of course seen--this was in my fifties I think, not too long ago. Anyway, I was reading a letter in Harpers from this guy Oliver Sacks (??? didn't know him from the man in the moon) and he was talking about how his whole family was into swimming in a big way--his father and himself. So that made me think of my mother and my grandfather (Robert Greenleaf Leavitt), how they would swim twice a day and never think anything of it. I wrote Oliver Sacks all about our family's swimming too, and even sent him pictures of me and my mother in our swim suits, several. And he so kindly wrote back, a nice long letter, returning the photographs too as he knew they were precious to me, and that was that. But then I told Evie I wrote to him and she screamed in amazement and delight and told me who he was, and then sent me his wonderful book Island of the Color Blind, and another one I can't remember now. Oh! He was the guy the Robin Williams character was based on?? So there it is.

I also didn't think much of it that I had a letter from Mrs. Joseph McCarthy (to my mother and grandmother) thanking them for their nice letter to her upon McCarthy's death. I gave these letters (from Sacks and Mrs. McCarthy) to Evie. It can be disconcerting when you are fourteen or fifteen and everyone in the world seems to be hating the person your own mother and grandmother thinks is wonderful, and I am ambivalent still about the whole era. Talk about a divided America. Supporting Joseph McCarthy then was sort of like supporting Rush Limbaugh now. I also have many letters from Herbert Philbrick to my mother--she wanted to be, and actually was, it appears now, a spy (though unpaid) for the FBI! Last of her letters, she was working on getting paid. She was spying on the good leftist members of World Fellowship in Conway, New Hampshire, because their leader, Mr. Willard Uphaus, would not give the membership list up to the House Unamerican Activities Committe ruled by McCarthy. My mother was convinced there were TWO Willard Uphauses, and while one was running World Fellowship in New Hampshire, the other was being a courier of messages to and from Moscow; and the FBI believed it! Maybe my mother saw and liked too many spy thrillers. Her spying consisted of listening to speakers at World Fellowship (with me) talk about how wonderful Fidel Castro and Raul were, then later taking down license plate numbers in the World Fellowship parking lot and then speeding home looking over her shoulder--it was very fun and exciting. One day I went rowing with a boy at Wold Fellowship and I agreed with everything he said! I didn't tell my mother.

I did get to see Bob Dylan up close. I saw him in the first appearance of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and--due to exceptional karma (another story)--got a front row center seat, with only 400 people in the audience, in Plymouth, Mass. Even better, I was invited by a friend to go to the party where he would be the next night at the Plimouth Plantation (the friend worked at the plantation so had an in with the people there)--I took Donna and Erika. This would have been 1974-75. But Dylan did not arrive. Then I heard he had had a falling out with a guy in the parking lot and had left in his van. Then I remembered, as I drove into the parking lot and pulled up, and heard my own van die (electrical system again), there was this big van next to me pulling out. That must have been Dylan! But anyway, I went to the party and Allen Ginsburg was there! They were making a movie for Dylan, and they interviewed me and took pictures of Donna and Erika dancing with Allen Ginsburg, and in fact filmed the whole party all night long. Later I heard that Dylan himself did all the editing for the three-hour-long movie he made from that. And so you see Dylan must have heard and seen me answering those questions the camera man was asking me (a HUGE movie camera it was!), and must have seen Donna and Erika dancing with Allen Ginsburg. Now, what do you call it when a famous person like Dylan sees you, instead of you seeing the famous person? Isn't that a whole different category?

The 11+ Exam: Dialogue on children, community, and war

2009-05-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, identified only as F-- wrote me this in response to my description of the circle, the neighborhood I grew up in. He wrote:

Lovely memory. But I remember as the son of a poor beginning lecturer at Manchester University, living in a working-class neighborhood where everything was also out in the street, the dark side of community. When I aced the 11+, the old Brit exam that separated kids forever into white-and blue-collars, a bunch of the kids I'd begun to get to know waited for me and beat me up. So the basic ground rules have to be good or community turns into tribalism and witch hunt. The silent neighborhoods are a sad compromise.

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To which I responded:

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That 11+ exam I have pondered for decades--it's one of those things you learn about early and that is discussed a lot over here, especially in educational circles. Surely I would have failed it--though perhaps not. Though I spent my whole time in school day-dreaming, I was well instructed at home in everything which was considered important (history, literature, Latin, grammar--everything but math, and that I could do on my own). Maybe I would have aced it too.

I remember once all the kids ganged up on one boy (working class, despite the class system being supposedly nonexistent over here) and were pelting him with icy snowballs, and I (heroic class) took his side, though they were all friends of mine, and I was prominent among them, all boys--we, the pelted and I, remained friends always. It is indeed the ground rules that need to be understood, and those boys that beat you up probably understood them well. Now was the only time in their lifetime they would get the jump on you, I bet the underlying rationale was, condoned by their parents, but obviously not by yours--and you were the sacrificial lamb. I am thinking the 11+ exam is an example of the adult world interfering with that of children, justified with bias and abstract rationale having nothing to do with the relations among children and everything to do with what adults thought "best" for all concerned.

Just about that time (I was eleven exactly at the time you were, remember) Little League was invented over here, and all my friends (boys) joined. I remember looking at them through a chain-link fence--they were all sitting in a row on a bench with uniforms on and looking up and listening to an adult who was looking down on them and lecturing them. I felt so sorry for them! For one thing, they wouldn't have me, and I was the best batter and first baseman--and fastest runner-- in the neighborhood! (I had just heard girls weren't allowed--I couldn't believe it--that was really stupid of them, I thought) And for another thing, they had to sit there instead of getting up and playing! It was all wrong.

I do think the interference of adults in childhood's self-rule in community began what has ended in obesity and all sorts of other aberrations of human psychological development. My own kids agree with me, and tell me about fellow college students who are unsupervised for the first time in their lives. The lack of community in this age reflects, I think, a fossilization of habits, including habits of thought, which have outgrown the environment they were first spawned in. I love the way facebook (etc) is becoming the new community--youth will have an out!

As for the phenomenon of WAR--please explain its necessity to a STATE to me. Isn't it the height of wrong-thinking, force? (I was raised by a hawk and during this this last war struggled to justify it on your account ("If F-- concurs with Cheney, I must be missing something....) I struggled with it the way Robert Frost struggles with his dualities always. I want your thoughts on why it is ever justified. Isn't it something we as a species, given what we are, we can and should rise above? Isn't that the essential Christian message?

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To which F-- replied:

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How wise you are about children, ground rules, and adult interference! But I think children are capable of cruelty on their own, too. Even if one doesn't believe in the Fall, or believes as I do that the Fall is the same as the creation itself, and started in the Big Bang, and is indeed a happy fall in the long run--freedom still implies that people can and do choose to do bad things.

Which also, when it comes down to it, is the only justification there could be for war. You went to war with snowballs when the working class kid was being pelted. One consequence of those boys ganging up on me--and two other incidents, one where like you I took the side of a Jewish kid who was being picked on, the other when I defended my younger brother B-- who got into trouble with some yahoos--was that I ended up preparing myself by martial arts to be able to defend myself and others, and since that time have never been bothered physically by anyone.

The Iraq war was a bitter trial for me. As you were being loyal to me, I was being loyal to B--, who was out there fighting. Although at first it seemed to be justifiable, as halting the atrocities of Saddam Hussein against his own people and other nations, I came to see it as a mistake on balance. Despite the fact that it looks as if our basic war aims are going to be realized--an elected government in Iraq, a sort of ally in a very dangerous part of the world instead of a bitter enemy, one possible source of WMDs eliminated--we lost far more than we gained and we got pushed into actions and justifications that were unworthy of our ideals. And many people died, and as a citizen and voter I have their blood on my hands, and have had to confess it.

But if we had stopped Hitler in 1933, maybe we would have saved 8 million Jews and tens of millions of other Europeans. Rwanda. Darfur. Do we have their blood on our hands too?

Perhaps this mortal condition is precisely the one where nobody has clean hands. Maybe the seeking of perfect cleanness, of perfect justification, is itself one of the great drivers of murder. Think of the Chosen People and the abomination of Canaan, that must be cleansed. The Crusades. Or ethnic cleansing. Or the purifying Holocaust, that would lead Europe back to its blond innocent heroic noble blue-eyed guiltless condition of Dasein. Or the noble ideals of the Gulag. If we accept that we are dirty and try to do the decent thing, knowing that whatever we do is going to have foul consequences, we may be less in danger of committing really huge crimes.

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I just thought it was a mighty interesting exchange!

The Doctorate--part one

2009-05-05T07:07:00.001-07:00

Of course it did not strike, like lightning. The boat had a leak, and had had one for a long, long time, and the water was rising, and we were all going to drown if I did nothing. It was a long slow process and the conclusion, the doctorate, was the only logical conclusion. Here is how it began (while the bailing went on ceaselessly, year after year, as it had at that point for almost ten years).

I was in high gear from the minute Margaret was born--and had been for the nine months prior. I knew this would be my last time getting pregnant (a necessity beyond explanation, but a necessity nevertheless); and I knew nothing would change unless I got a job and somehow got more income in-coming. As much as Margaret was a necessity to me, the next order of business--income generation--was foremost on my mind. But I knew from having tried over and over to get a job in the local schools that chances of that happening were slim (Fryeburg would not have me because, they told me, I was home-educating, in short too busy to hire--even for a substitute! They made that decision for me). My references from the last time I worked were nine years old--too old to get a job in my profession, despite my Master's degree. The only solution to this, short of getting a job as a chambermaid or selling my novel (finshed in 1983), was going back to school and getting another degree--not because I needed more education, but because I needed current references and current skills--and educational loans to live on! School I could do.

So even while newly pregnant with Margaret, I enrolled in the Spring of 1987 in "Developmental Education: birth to five," a course in Special Education in the School of Lifetime Learning in Conway, an extension of the University of New Hampshire. I wrote a paper on Andrea's speech development--great course. That Spring of course I was also very actively involved in getting Donna and Erika into the colleges of their choice--Colby and Dartmouth. My plan was to get a second master's in Special Education, because all the schools had ads in the paper for Special Ed teachers--it was a very practical plan. I could have taught Special Ed of course without a degree beautifully, but state laws required certification--I had no courses in Special Ed, just English Literature, with a specialization in Elizabethan drama. I was in a pragmatic mode and my degrees didn't help me solve my problems.

That summer, after I had Margaret, and after Donna and Erika were happily looking forward to the fall term in the colleges of their choice, I took two more courses at the University of Maine in Gorham (USM), and enrolled in a degree program leading to a master's in Special Ed. Plan A was this: I would apply to teaching jobs while starting a new Master's degree. If I did not get a teaching job I would (Plan B) take a job as a Chambermaid and write The Great American Novel (and work on the second master's and take care of Margaret, Andrea, Johnny, Joey, and Stevie. Because Donna and Erika were going off to college! This last part made me very, very happy, because Donna was going to Colby! And Erika was going to Dartmouth! They were neatly stepping off the sinking boat into a brand new life!)

But surprise, surprise!! I got a teaching job!! I couldn't believe it! On the way to the interview, with Donna and Erika to take care of Margaret while I had the interview (on Islesboro), Donna read me Catcher in the Rye! I was to be an English, reading, and geography teacher for all the high school students grades 7 through 12 on Islesboro. I was hired! The house had to be sold, and we had to move to Islesboro, because teachers had to live on the island. I was saved! For the time being. Let me review: I had a baby, sold the house in Fryeburg, bought the house in Monroe, took two courses in Special Ed at USM, found a house to rent in Islesboro, filed FAFSAs, drove Donna and Erika off to the colleges of their choice, argued with Financial Aid Officers, and started a job teaching in Islesboro. That was just that summer.

To make a long story short and sweet, I had one very successful year on Islesboro. I wrote and got a State of Maine Innovative Classroom Grant ("Operation Microcosm") which brought the school $5000's worth of video editing equipment for the children to do all kinds of research with a video camera. The principal liked me and rehired me. The kids liked me and I was happy. It mattered not the boat was still leaking. Best of all I met Andii Pendleton--it was also the year I met Michiko, and began writing Frederick Turner. Donna and Erika survived their Freshman year and all looked well--it was 1988.

The next year everything changed. The New Principal Mr. D-- (as the Victorians would say) did NOT like me, he did NOT let the kids use the equipment the grant had bought us, and by school's end three teachers did NOT have their contracts renewed, including myself and a science teacher who had been teaching there at least twenty years (he had the kids build a cidar press themselves--I thought he was great.) Mr. D--did not have to say why he was not renewing my contract, because no reason had to be given for not renewing the contract of a teacher who had taught in the system less than two years--you could just let them go. Andii Pendleton was peeved (at Mr. D--) but I was beyond peevement. I was in a state of shock. I had two children in college and five children at home, a newly acquired house in Monroe which had to be fixed up (water, electricity, everything) before it could be lived in, and no job and no income. By FALL I had to have something in place! And there was no way I could get another job teaching when my contract had not been renewed--I just knew it, despite my successful first year. What was I to do???

I had an idea! I would at least continue with my master's in Special Ed and we would live on educational loans! (I had just realized that these were available--more income than I'd had in years!) But there was just one problem: there was no Master's Degree in Special Ed offered in Orono at the University of Maine, and I wanted a degree which would deliver a teaching job when I got through with it. I already had a master's in English--and there was no doctorate in English offered! I looked at the catalogue. There was a degree offered in Orono which I did not have yet and which would lead to references and to work--a doctorate in Literacy Education. And meanwhile, I'd start my poetry-writing business "The Muse"--which is how I got into Glamour Magazine (but that's another blog).

And that's how it "suddenly" struck me to get a doctorate. I applied, got accepted, and began my five year program. Which did, in the end, lead to jobs and yes, even a pension. The boat still had a leak, but I at least had a plan on how to keep on bailing for a few more years yet and keep all of us from drowning.

Can two be easier than one? And how could that be?

2009-05-04T08:03:00.000-07:00

What was it like to have Rachael after Eve?

Before Eve, I knew nothing about babies--what they looked and acted like, what their behavior was apt to be like in any given situation, what you did with them. I knew only what my own mother had done with me from a certain age on, but I couldn't remember back to when I was a baby! There were just two of us, my brother Robert and myself, in my family, and on the circle in Charlottesville where I grew up, there were many, many small children, but none which I really spent any time with. I hung out with my own gang, who were all my own age naturally. Babies were a total unknown, except for the one and only time I saw one breast-feeding at South Apartments.

These apartments were old World War II army barracks at the University of Maine in Orono, complete with ice chests, where summer students with families lived. It was where we lived every summer while my mother was going to summer school. In those days children wandered all over the place freely, and one day I wandered into the open door of a nearby apartment and saw a woman sitting there nursing her baby! She let me stand there and watch, fascinated, without much of an exchange of words until I had had enough and went back outside to play. I was probably eight or nine. I told my mother about it and she told me how the first time she saw a baby breast-feeding she had run and told her mother "Mother! The baby is eating Mrs. B--"--and we laughed so much. Then she told me when she was a small child riding the trolleys in Trenton when she lived on Model Ave., women often nursed their babies right there in front of everyone, nobody minded. My mother always shared her own experiences with me like this when I would share mine with her, and in this way over time I learned that all the babies in our family had always been nursed (not given "those terrible formulas" ), and that my mother always had wanted to have "at least" six children herself; and that Grandma Ruggli had had twelve children, and my grandmother (who lived with us) was one of them; and so on. But of course hearsay is not knowledge.

So naturally when it had come time to have Evie, I was not at all worried really about the birth itself. I was sure I could do it. I was very muscular and very confidant about my ability to do anything physical because I had always succeeded in anything I had ever tried that was athletic--and I was very, very strong. But I was terrified of not being able to change diapers!! That is how inexperienced I was.

I did not have time for postpartem blues or anything like that--I was concentrating on the diapers! (Real anxiety!!)...I was only nineteen after all--but, amazingly I rose to the challenge. Somehow I mastered the diaper-pin. Then I discovered it (being a mother) had nothing to do with diaper-pins and things like that. It's what you did with the baby that counted! Evie made being a new mother easy--she was the brightest, happiest little baby! And I spent every minute with her--every single minute. We walked and talked and learned names of flowers and discussed things (I didn't know how to talk to babies, so I talked to her the way I talked to other people and she naturally just talked right back). We went berry-picking, and swimming, and looked at trees in the woods and birds and insects. We drew pictures together, and watched tv together and discussed what we saw. She made up a song for a puppet on a puppet show on tv we always watched, and I sent it in and the puppet sang it, and she loved it! We went out in the sun every day and watched the rain together when it rained--we read books! "Ten little animals" was her favorite book. (This was all by the time she was two). She got sick with the flu once and it scared me to death but she recovered so I recovered.

Then I got pregnant again! I was twenty-one by now. I was no longer worried about the diapers, but I simply could NOT IMAGINE how I could possibly fit another baby into my day!!!! How could there possibly be room????

It seemed like a miracle. Somehow there was room for one more! Somehow, this new little baby, who looked at the world so calmly and yet alertly with her big brown eyes, looking and looking and tracking it all with her left hand leading, joined in it all effortlessly. She too talked and walked, and drew pictures, and sang songs, and made jokes, and ate berries and laughed at the world and noticed everything. It was not harder, it was not! It was somehow..... easier. And why was this? I did not really know, because it was just a feeling. Maybe it was that I was not so fiercely focused on the one, but instead was forced by love, and love's faithful attendants--curiosity, interest, and fascination--to focus on them both. I found, strangely enough, neither one of them seemed to be suffering for lack of the single focus; they seemed to thrive on the sharing of attention and discovered, finally, how entertaining each could be to the other. Fun! Even without me! Maybe I was learning, without realizing it just what good attention to a baby should be--not too little, not too much. Just right!

How I met N-- in D--in 197-- and spawned Obama

2009-05-03T05:25:00.000-07:00

My daughter sent me some questions she wants answered pronto, so I better get going before I get swept into my daily addiction, on-line chess and (growingly) facebook--ah, the lure of socializing on-line! The following, please remember, occurs back in the dawn of time--1975 BC (Before Computers).

The Three questions were...."I want to know about your friendship with N-- B--. I want to know about what it was like to have Rachael after Eve. I want to know about when the idea of getting a doctorate struck you!" I will attempt the first one first (for once).

You will notice I have the protected the identity of my dearest and best friend N--B-- in the Victorian way, by replacing most of the letters in my friend's name with a dash. I have had direct access to the ways of Victorians. My Grandmother, who raised me along with my mother (a two woman household) was a Victorian, and of course I have read a good many (that's a Victorian phrase "good many") Victorian novels. The thing about Victorians is that they are very private--they cultivate secrets. They do NOT discuss sex or "our business"--I understood what sex was, but I never did understand what "our business" was, and why my friends would ever ask about it--why would they ask about something which I myself could not even imagine in the slightest? It is a secret within a secret this hush-hush stuff of the Victorians. Computer security systems have nothing on the Victorians. In Victorian novels , for some reason, the authors always protect the people they write about by replacing actual times and places with periods or dashes. Graham Greene, a writer I have just discovered (where has he been all my life?) had a father who must have been born the same year as my grandmother. He is always poking fun at them--and in fact their whole secrecy, privacy thing. In "The Root of All Evil" he writes "The events happened in 189--, as they say in old Russian novel, in the small market town of B--." So it happened that I met N.B in 197-- in the small seaside town of D-- , specifically in the vicinity of H--C--.

Or so we (she and I) remember. We met at Marie's--everyone went there, the little local coffee shop in D--. Marie was from some Balkan country (Che--? Yu--?), and every Christmas she would send her relatives back home lots of presents--there wasn't any war over there yet, the Soviet Union was still together, and Mr. Dexter's 1961 prophetic history lessons at KH on the Balkans ("They are always having wars in the Balkans") hadn't yet materialized (they would in the 90s).

Anyway, all the young people went there (to Marie's in 1975)--and one morning N-- and I began talking and found out immediately that we were just alike! We were 30 and 32 respectively and both felt really old! We both had experienced the Sixties and were really sad about how it had all gone downhill since then! We were both recently divorced, custody-case-fatigued mothers of young children, we both came from old professional families from Maine and New Hampshire with mothers who were arch conservatives, we were both now managing any way we could to support our children who were in the same grade --wait at minute!! What was the name of the teacher?? Hadn't we seen each other before? "That's where I've seen you!!" we yelled happily in unison (at Marie's it was okay to yell)--we had been the only mothers who had responded to our childrens' invitations to parents to come into school and help out with their projects. In fact, our children were already friends! N-- was an artist, I was a writer, we both played violin--and both of us loved, who else....Bob Dylan! It was quite an exciting meeting. We were indeed very, very much alike. We soon were over at each other's houses all the time and shared the same friends (Jimmy Fiddle, whose last name need not be dashed because we called him that--it's his violin I have now while he has mine--he was learning how to fix them, and mine stayed unfixed so he let me keep his; John G--, Steve W--, Bruce P--, David P--, etc etc. etc.). Later, when I moved from D-- to Fr-- Maine, we kept in touch, though sometimes it was several years (and in one case a whole decade) before we'd actually get together again in person. Always it was the same thing--it was as though just minutes had passed whenever we saw each other! We simply took up the conversation where we'd left off and compared events in our lives. Miraculously we always found we had experienced the very same events! And this was the beginning of when we began calling each other "twinny," which continues to this day. It wasn't just that both of us had left feet that turned in (we must be related!) We also noticed a pattern which had begun way back in D--. Our life experiences, always identical, always turned out positively for me--and negatively for her! For example, when I applied for permission in D-- to homeschool my children, the Superintendent beamed and said yes! But when N-- applied--same application and everything--he said no! And computers--naturally we had acquired them at the same time; but she would have a pc and I would have a mac. When mine broke down, mine would get fixed or replaced; when her's broke down, it wouldn't! It just wasn't fair, we concurred--at some point we must join our forces and balance out our karma input-output and correct this flaw in our celestial fate design. We are still working on that. Of course, her children loved me, and mine loved her--we are not surprised.

Any more questions? Glad to answer....(Yes, we were both amazed and perplexed when we discovered it was Ronald Reagan who gave us single mothers the power to go after dead-beat husbands in court in the 80s............hmmmmmmmmmmmm). We have been best friends and twinnies now, N-- and I, for almost forty years. (Yikes!)

Oh! one more thing! You know how all things are related to the Alpha and the Obama? Here's another. Each generation, it is said, produces its own president. Well, when it came time for us, The Sixties generation, to produce a president, we had Clinton and Bush. Noway Hozay!! One was Deceitful, the other totally lacking in the values we gave the world. Now you must know that Obama's mother, if you have read his book, was one of us--she had Obama in '61, the year I graduated from high school, and I had my first child two years later. Like N. and I, Obama's mom raised her child with the all the values N-- and I believed in and STILL DO!!! Obama's mother, N--, and I might all have met at Marie's at H--C-- in D-- in 197-- and realized we were triplets. Our generation believed in teaching our children well, and OBAMA is our generation's gift to the world! Crosby, Stills and Nash said it best:

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

What is a community?

2009-04-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

Greenleaf Lane--it was very alive! Every day it teemed with children in the streets and on the lawns and running in and out of their own and other people's houses. The first day I got there I went out on the road in front of my house and with at least twenty other children rode my bike--which I had just learned to ride--up and down the little hill that led away from the circle of houses which was called Greenleaf Lane. I had just moved from Morrisville, Pennsylvania, which was nothing like this, swarming with children. It had been a much quieter street, and we had moved when I was five in the Fall to Charlottesville so my mother could go to the University of Virginia. It was 1949. Anyway, that first day I rode my bike proudly up the hill and down, as well as any of them could. And every time I saw another kid I didn't know and who didn't know me I would say or he would say "What's your name?" And I would say "Mimi. What's yours?" It went on and on like that, and I had to be dragged in for supper. I made all the friends I would ever need that day. That was a community.

...the streets were teeming with children, and grown-ups and teenagers came out to shovel and talk, and old people hobbled around or yelled at you to get out of their yard, or invited you into their houses, and kids went sledding or built forts of snow and threw snowballs at each other and yelled, and were, as all children then were, unsupervised. Where have all the people gone, long time passing?

Read "The Land of the False Houses"--chapter One

2009-04-26T08:27:00.001-07:00

The Land of the false Houses

This must be the land of the false houses. Here I am walking into the sun with Cheena my dog down the alleyway, the better to get the vitamin D, the better to feel the pleasure of sun on skin, though Marcus Aurelius would say you shouldn't seek after pleasure, only a just and useful life. But I am living in Milwaukee in a suburb, and no one is around. It's the proverbial ghost town. Obama talks about it in his books. People sleep here and live here after work, but there is no community here. Above all he considers communities and seeks after the mystery of what it is that makes them alive. This is, I know, suburban. But long ago I lived in what my mother then referred to as a suburbia, though I didn't notice much her saying it then. It was a neighborhood cut out of the woods not far from the University and Rugby Rd. in Charlottesville, Virginia. Greenleaf Lane--it was very alive! Every day it teemed with children in the streets and on the lawns and running in and out of their own and other people's houses. The first day I got there I went out on the road in front of my house and with at least twenty other children rode my bike--which I had just learned to ride--up and down the little hill that led away from the circle of houses which was called Greenleaf Lane. I had just moved from Morrisville, Pennsylvania, which was nothing like this, swarming with children. It had been a much quieter street, and we had moved when I was five in the Fall to Charlottesville so my mother could go to the University of Virginia. It was 1949. Anyway, that first day I rode my bike proudly up the hill and down, as well as any of them could. And every time I saw another kid I didn't know and who didn't know me I would say or he would say "What's your name?" And I would say "Mimi. What's yours?" It went on and on like that, and I had to be dragged in for supper. I made all the friends I would ever need that day. That was a community. Of course I didn't have a name for it then, I just enjoyed it. It was not like this, this suburb of Milwaukee where I was walking the alleyway in the sun. It was deadly quiet, as the expression goes. The false houses popped into my mind. Maybe these were the false houses.

Every summer from Charlottesville, as we had before from Morrisville I suppose though I can't remember that so well, we'd all get in the car with our stuff and drive to Maine, back to Parsonsfield, and for part of the summer to Orono, where my mother would go to the University of Maine Summer School, and then back to Parsonsfield, and then back to Charlottesville for the school year--hers and mine--while my Grandmother stayed at home and my brother was off at Christchurch school on the Rappahanock River. This went on for years, but one year when I was visiting my Aunt Clara in Duxbury, Massachusetts--I must have been about nine--I stayed with Aunt Clara at her house and went to St. Margaret's Camp for Girls as a day camper for a few weeks. And I so wanted to stay overnight with the other campers that they let me go to camp the next summer.

That summer was wonderful, because we had Sister Marion in charge of us. But the next Summer it was another sister--a really bad, mean one who you could tell didn't like us. At this camp, which was a high Episcopal camp at a convent, the campers had to pray and cross themselves and go to chapel and have Bible study classes, and in between we played. We prayed and played--we went swimming in the ocean and had some organized games, but mostly we just ran around entertaining ourselves until the next prayer session. We prayed after we got out of bed, before breakfast and after breakfast--ditto lunch and supper. And we prayed at the chapel and genuflected twice coming and going at the vesper services every evening. And I think we prayed, mid-morning, at our Bible study too, maybe to start and end the session. All of this involved kneeling, and crossing ourselves and, when appropriate, as in approaching an altar or the Mother Superior (who smiled at us beatifically) genuflecting. All three of these things had to be taught to me, as I had been raised as a Unitarian and knew nothing but the Lord's prayer. I did learn how to do them all, though the crossing of myself I invariably got wrong.

Nevertheless, I did like the Bible study, because in those days they didn't have print-out sheets as they would today to fill in. Instead we would all sit in a circle and the sister would read from passage of scripture and then ask us what we thought it meant. With Sister Marion the first summer I had no trouble--I can't even remember what we studied, only that I was happy enough. But when the other sister, whose name I can't for the life of me remember, led the session I instantly got into trouble. I must have been eleven by then. Instead of scripture she started reading us other religious stuff. One thing was about the trinity. It was like this three leaf clover here she said, the father, son, and holy ghost. I had been raised in a very scientific family who didn't believe in ghosts and didn't allow me to believe in them either ("Nonsense!" said my grandmother. "Hocus pocus!" said my mother.) But I did not say anything to the sister about that. Instead I suddenly had an idea! And raised my hand. "What about a four-leaf clover?" I asked. Immediately the sister got very annoyed with me! And I felt quite betrayed and embarrassed because not only did she not answer me and went on as though I had said something wrong, but it was a new experience for me. Every thing I ever said, or question I asked, in my family, was always responded to with great interest--my opinions were honored!--and always discussions went on about ideas and things I had said or done or had observed--never was I simply made to be quiet while my question went unanswered. School of course you had to be quiet but this was different--we weren't in school--and I did wonder about a four leaf clover! Now, today, I might say well, the fourth leaf is the element of luck or circumstance which even in the great process of evolution works as strongly as, or along with natural selection to affect change. But back then I just felt humiliated. And then the Sister went on to read us some story about "hell" or somewhere, where there were "false houses" with "false flowers" and "false trees." Now I had been raised in a family which did not believe in hell, and did not allow me to believe in it either ("just a metaphor for suffering" my mother said; "only holy-rollers believe in that!" my grandmother sniffed. "No such thing!) But I did not say anything about that to the sister. I had another idea! I raised my hand. "What are they made of if they are false?" I asked. This time she was clearly angry, and told me to stop asking questions. (!!!)

I did tell my mother about this last encounter and the first, the false houses and the fourth leaf of the clover. She laughed as she always did, and dismissed the behavior of the sister as humorous (though I didn't see the humor) and sympathized with me--she always sympathized with me. She understood what I meant. If they were "false" what were they made of?? What isn't real in other words? What could a false flower or tree or house be made of? It didn't make sense.

So here in the ghost town (though I am not allowed still to believe in ghosts, though string theory tempts me now and then) of Milwaukee, walking my dog in a long straight alleyway between endless rows of garages behind houses, I am wondering if these are the false houses she was referring to--it could be hell here. The houses are all empty, or if anyone is in them, no one comes out of them. All the house are large enough, not too large, and each is a little different from the rest, but all look somehow the same, and they are all in endless, endless rows, squished together a little too closely. The trees are the same too, all the same species--what is it? Some midwestern breed I dare not guess at. My grandfather would know, botanist. Though I never knew him, I know of him so deeply I know he would know what kind, and would approve of my stating my ignorance rather than pronouncing something something without really knowing what it really was. The trees are all the same height, as the houses are the same height, and they must all be the same age, the trees and the houses, all dating back to the Golden Age of Suburbia, when the streets were teeming with children, and grown-ups and teenagers came out to shovel and talk, and old people hobbled around or yelled at you to get out of their yard, or invited you into their houses, and kids went sledding or built forts of snow and threw snowballs at each other and yelled, and were, as all children then were, unsupervised. Where have all the people gone, long time passing?

Like the Weaver's song, the houses were all made of ticky-tacky and they are all in a row. All I can hear now is dogs barking distantly. Sometimes, but rarely, birds? There is no community here, only sleepers who must wake early and go to jobs someplace else. And children go to school at this time of day (noon), but later they still won't be out and about playing. There is no community here. Is the only kind of community left the kind someone else organizes and you join? Where is the kind you find yourself in, and it is you and the others in it that organize it? The only kind of trees here are the ones someone has planted all equi-distant endlessly along the straight sidewalks down the straight or slightly curving level street--and I think of how my father, a landscape architect whose trees the Statue of Liberty stands in, would always tell me that trees and houses should not be symmetrically set out, that they must somehow come to look almost as good as nature would arrange it, in fractals he meant, though he didn't say that and I learned about fractals much later myself. Someone has laid out these houses and these trees--trees with no older ones and no younger ones all about them, but all of a generation--symmetrically. Not as they would not be found in nature; not, perhaps therefore, beautiful. Is it how they are laid out that is false? false trees, false houses--nobody home, everyone at work or school, not working or learning or playing where they live, as they might in a real community. Hmmm....this could be hell. I wonder if the shades (ghosts?) of my mother and grandmother are hearing me say that? Would they agree? I think they might. Especially if I explain that the lives of the people who sleep in these houses experience a kind of suffering because they have no community. Isn't everyone born to enjoy a community like the one I found myself in suddenly in 1949? Such places are heavenly; such places as this are hellish--what is this ghost town? This slightly run-down, apart at the seams, too symmetrical ghost town?

Obama was saying something like that reflecting on the isolated lives of the very wealthy. One of the people he wrote about mourned the loss of his childhood community too, remembering the carts the unsupervised (free) children made with old crates and discarded roller skates. Why does it have to be like this now, here, the land of the false trees and false houses and suffering, lonely lives, lacking community. What makes them lack it? Where does it go and how does it turn into something like this? Like him, I want to get at what makes a community thrive. I want to find out what the false houses, and trees, and flowers are made of --and get rid of it.

Origin of The Circle

2009-04-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of calling this blog--the Atlas bearing my story on his shoulders--"Greenleaf Lane," or "Parsonsfield," or "Ataraxian Access," even "Shed Chamber Press" or "Pilgrim's Base Camp," but none seemed right. I suddenly remembered that 1506 Greenleaf Lane in Charlottesville Virginia was on what we kids called "the circle, " because Greenleaf Lane was a circle. I will be talking a lot about the world I lived in there, and so what could be more specific and more universal than The Circle? Sounds as though it could cleverly mean more than it seems to mean and therefore offer delectable deconstructive delights. I wonder how many more blogs are similarly named"The Circle"? Probably, 15, 738 or something.

I hope you comment in any capacity here. I will be trying to write down all the findings of a lifetime with the idea of amusing you in the process.

(What? You think I should name this site "Atlas"?)