When I was nine, shortly after my little brother was born, I started writing rhyming verse. It was very bad, as one might expect. My parents, both of them English teachers, let me know that it was very bad. I was crushed. It is hard to be up against all of English literature at an early age. There are many teachers of writing and English who believe that harsh criticism is appropriate for anyone who imagines they want to write, basically to keep the riff-raff out.
But people who unkindly discourage a child's doggerel, honestly, shouldn't their license to parent be revoked? Ah yes, we don't actually require any certifications of aptitude for prospective parents, do we. In postindustrial society parenting is one of the last folk arts! unqualified, uncertified, unprofessional! Unlike poetry.
(As I write this, desparate parents are abandoning their children to the State of Nebraska, which has promised to take care of them, while the lawmakers hurry to revise the loophole in the law that meant only to take in infants from those unable or unprepared for parenthood.)
My career as a playwright began even earlier and has come to even less, to this point at any rate. But I digress.
At fourteen I discovered the rhyming dictionary section at the back of my Webster's dictionary. We were living on Center Street in Whitewater, during one of those periods of months when my brother Chris lived with us and went to school with me. I perused the rhyme schemes and picked a lengthy entry full of likely words to construct a rhymed, rhythmic, free verse, with a great many short lines. Chris informed me it was pretty bad. I thought a lot of his opinion, which seemed far more refined than my own, and was discouraged.
After that I confined my involvement with poetry to reading. We had a poetry section in the Introduction to Literature that was one of my ninth grade English classes (an introduction, as though we'd never met). I read more of the text than the assignments, as was my custom. That was how I discovered e. e. cummings. The journal I had started, during boring stretches of classtime and other odd moments, lost not only punctuation and capitalization but even paragraphing.
My mother had heaps of fat poetry textbooks in her office at the university, that had been given to her by textbook publishers' representatives, in hopes that she would order them for her classes, with titles like Poetry and Introduction to Poetry and even Live Poetry. So I took them and read them right through. More or less. Anything that didn't lose my attention after the first few lines, I continued reading. So eventually I read very widely among the briefer, more frequently anthologized poets.
While we were in San Diego, my mother had heaps of feminist periodicals in her office. These were publishing quite a lot of poetry at that time, as there was something of a poetry boom in the women's movement, of both confessional and political bent. As I leafed through the newsprint pages, I found some that I quite liked. There's poetry in all our hearts, though we've been taught otherwise. I began typing out copies of them for myself, as writing out copies by hand or typer was at the time the only way to make single copies. I acquired an old Underwood manual typewriter for this purpose, that had something wrong with the shift key so that the capital letters were slightly dropped. It was some time before I began using paper that wasn't scrap, discarded ditto sheets.
The next year when I went to college, I took the poetry textbooks with me. I marked my favorites with oak leaves, pressed between the pages of these tomes -- some are still there. The stacks of Memorial Library were open, and I found more of e. e. cummings in my wanderings. I had a better typewriter, and copied out some of my selections over again on clean paper, and had by this time started numbering the sheets. I continued collecting poetry, from songwriters and miscellaneous sources, anything that struck my fancy, for more than a hundred pages.
Poetry was not something that I could do, though. Not merely me. The way art classes had convinced me that I was hopelessly uncreative, my schooling had managed to inoculate me against the possibility of writing something of the kind myself. However talented I might have thought myself as a child, I was unanointed by any recognition. By the time I got out of college in fact I wasn't even reading anymore -- not even the textbooks.
For better or worse, that wore off. I got a job in civil service, and then several other kinds of jobs, and moved several times, and began to think again that I could write, although what I might write was always a question. I had no contacts of any kind with the publishing world -- except my mother, who had published several scholarly books. Like I say, no actual contacts. Another decade went by. I married, and had a child. And then I found fandom, where people read books, and fanwriting, or it found me: drafted me, picked my name literally out of a hat, and honored me.
When I wrote my Guest of Honor speech for that convention I was at the same time up to my nose in public readings and writing activities with The Writers Place, which was a sort of local arts nonprofit that sponsored classes and had an office, classroom, reading space. I had taken a class there in writing fiction -- what is called mainstream fiction, not genre fiction -- and our class continued to meet as a writing group afterwards for many months. I was writing Raymond Carver type stories, grim realism, which was the dominant style of the dwindling mainstream of the time. One of the people in the class (a colleague of my dad's at the English Department in Whitewater actually) one evening after our meeting took me for a good time to a bar, for an open-mike poetry reading, which was a new thing.
We paused in the entry, at the door. Lights twinkled in the dark like Christmas. Someone was reading aloud inside, and as though it were a concert, we didn't want to interrupt them with our entrance. That was early days with the Cheap At Any Price Poets, where not-very-harsh criticism was given with tongue in cheek: poems scored on a ten-point scale like Olympic skating, by randomly chosen judges. We stepped in as the crowd was applauding.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Sunday School
The longest stretch of Sunday school I had was probably when we lived in Binghamton, although now I think it may have lasted only a few weeks. I had friend named Brenda, and our friendship had progressed to the intimacy of staying overnight, and staying over on Saturday inevitably led to attending Sunday school with her the next morning. My parents were likely to sleep in on Sundays if at all possible, and did not object to me being dropped off afterwards.
Brenda was a pale, skinny girl, with a tendency to look a bit gray under the eyes. We were at that age around ten when the bones start lengthening, and the slender begin to look downright sticklike. She had pale brown hair, what we politely called ash blonde, that curled up on the ends in a fashion that in those days required elaborate preparations with rollers, making her head rather larger and her slenderness more apparent. This was the chief thing she was ridiculed for, the other children in our class being as unkind as any at that age. I had an assortment of such characteristics too, with braces, and having glasses and being "smart" were the marks of Cain that we shared. Our friendship was a refuge for both of us.
While I don't recall her house I recall the church vividly. The Sunday school was in the basement, a crowded room with white-wrapped heating pipes. I was greatly impressed with the way some of the children had learned to recite the books of the Bible (Ezra-Nehemiah-Esther-Job!) in an ongoing competition. (First and second Kings! first and second Chronicles!) You could see the list at the beginning of the book, and it seemed quite formidable to me. As it was a Presbyterian church we had history lessons from a book on the Adventures of John Knox, which were very exciting, set in Scotland, with many persecutions and narrow escapes. Being the kind of child I was, I always finished the assigned reading quickly and went on to read the earlier sections I had missed, about the corruption of the Catholic church, Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door, and ahead, to John Calvin.
Brenda's mother must have been rather appalled at the lack of any church whatsoever in my life, because soon I was going to choir practice with her too, on a weeknight. This did not last long. Easter was coming up, and at the point we were supposed to be getting choir robes, the choir director seemed to have noticed that I was not strictly speaking a member of the church, and neither were my parents. A terrible scene ensued, that simply consisted of me being pointed out as not belonging there, and all the other children staring at me. Then Brenda's mother arrived to pick us up, and words were quietly exchanged. Perhaps the lack of Christian charity in turning away a child who has come to church thus on her own was pointed out.
So I was not allowed to march down the aisle with the rest of the choir on Palm Sunday, as we had been practicing. I did get to watch the pageantry from the right-hand balcony -- it was one of those Colonial buildings with balconies on each side of the altar. Right balcony if you are standing at the door, left balcony if you are at the altar. It was something of a relief to me, actually, as I had felt ill-prepared for the performance. The songs were not at all familiar to me and Brenda was the only other kid I knew there.
But I do not recall attending the Easter service at that church. Brenda and her family were suddenly too busy.
Jesus loves the little children,
all the little children of the world.
Whether yellow, black or white,
we are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Brenda was a pale, skinny girl, with a tendency to look a bit gray under the eyes. We were at that age around ten when the bones start lengthening, and the slender begin to look downright sticklike. She had pale brown hair, what we politely called ash blonde, that curled up on the ends in a fashion that in those days required elaborate preparations with rollers, making her head rather larger and her slenderness more apparent. This was the chief thing she was ridiculed for, the other children in our class being as unkind as any at that age. I had an assortment of such characteristics too, with braces, and having glasses and being "smart" were the marks of Cain that we shared. Our friendship was a refuge for both of us.
While I don't recall her house I recall the church vividly. The Sunday school was in the basement, a crowded room with white-wrapped heating pipes. I was greatly impressed with the way some of the children had learned to recite the books of the Bible (Ezra-Nehemiah-Esther-Job!) in an ongoing competition. (First and second Kings! first and second Chronicles!) You could see the list at the beginning of the book, and it seemed quite formidable to me. As it was a Presbyterian church we had history lessons from a book on the Adventures of John Knox, which were very exciting, set in Scotland, with many persecutions and narrow escapes. Being the kind of child I was, I always finished the assigned reading quickly and went on to read the earlier sections I had missed, about the corruption of the Catholic church, Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door, and ahead, to John Calvin.
Brenda's mother must have been rather appalled at the lack of any church whatsoever in my life, because soon I was going to choir practice with her too, on a weeknight. This did not last long. Easter was coming up, and at the point we were supposed to be getting choir robes, the choir director seemed to have noticed that I was not strictly speaking a member of the church, and neither were my parents. A terrible scene ensued, that simply consisted of me being pointed out as not belonging there, and all the other children staring at me. Then Brenda's mother arrived to pick us up, and words were quietly exchanged. Perhaps the lack of Christian charity in turning away a child who has come to church thus on her own was pointed out.
So I was not allowed to march down the aisle with the rest of the choir on Palm Sunday, as we had been practicing. I did get to watch the pageantry from the right-hand balcony -- it was one of those Colonial buildings with balconies on each side of the altar. Right balcony if you are standing at the door, left balcony if you are at the altar. It was something of a relief to me, actually, as I had felt ill-prepared for the performance. The songs were not at all familiar to me and Brenda was the only other kid I knew there.
But I do not recall attending the Easter service at that church. Brenda and her family were suddenly too busy.
Jesus loves the little children,
all the little children of the world.
Whether yellow, black or white,
we are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
A peripatetic, picaresque childhood
I have just had to go read a couple chapters of Anne Lamott's book on writing and life, Bird by Bird, because this whole life of mine has just turned into such a monumentally unscalable mountain of memories. There are details that I have left out of these brief summaries, like the pink sparkly zippered purse I had in third grade that I lost down the storm sewer at the bus stop with my house key in it, or the list of churches I went to, which is short enough that I can actually remember almost every time I went; and there are big things like my grandma's house in Midwest City, which was so full of stuff you could hardly walk through the living room. It was one of those houses that came to have narrow aisles through all the furniture and knickknacks and piles of treasure. My life has been like that and now I am trying to find the aisles and maybe widen them out a bit so we can move around here.
So just to get a grand overview of the general sweep of the fractal mountain before us, remember that I was born in Oklahoma, and by the time I was eighteen the tale of how I had come to Wisconsin had gotten long enough that I was able to entertain a table full of strangers with the narrative at Thanksgiving dinner.
As an infant I lived on Mallard Drive in Del City, Oklahoma, which is outside of Oklahoma City where my mom and dad had grown up and gone to high school. But then after a couple of years my mom Elsie took me to Corpus Christi, Texas, and when we came back to Oklahoma she started to grad school in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. We lived in grad student housing, in a neighborhood called the pre-fabs, because they were pre-fabricated wartime housing units that were all white with peeling paint that we kids liked to chip off of the walls -- like peeling a sunburn -- which probably had a lot of lead in it. First we were in G-18, where we had an upright piano, that was left behind when we went to live in A-23 (I think it was 23) which was on the other end and several rows down, where my new dad George moved in with us. He was in grad school in English too. I went briefly to the kindergarten on campus, which I recall as a big room full of excellent toys and other children, where I learned The Eensy-Weensy Spider.
But then upon gaining a doctorate, George got a teaching job in Boston, and we traveled by train to Boston, Massachusetts. That first summer for a while we lived in a basement-level sublet of one of the old row houses on Massachusetts Avenue in the Back Bay. Then we moved to the suburb of Newton, and my parents took the MTA into the city every day, where he taught English at BU and she worked at Ginn & Co as a textbook editor. I went to first grade at Beethoven School, and then we moved to a different neighborhood and I went to second grade at Cabot School. And then George interviewed and got a different job, a better position, at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, so we moved there, and I went to third grade at Alexander Hamilton School and to fourth and fifth grade at Thomas Jefferson School.
Then my mother got her doctorate, and they both interviewed at the MLA and both were hired by the English Department of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. So we moved to Wisconsin. I went to sixth grade at Lincoln School, and then to seventh grade at Franklin Junior High School, which was possibly the most miserable year of my life as far as school went. We moved from a two-bedroom flat on the outskirts of town to a large rambling bungalow-style duplex in the downtown, on Center Street, and then we stayed there for three years in a row, which was the longest I had ever lived in the same place in my life. For eighth grade I got out of the public school and was admitted to the campus school, Roseman Elementary. But the next year my classmates and I were all dumped in with the general population at Whitewater High School. We were the peak year of the Baby Boom, and the entire four years of classes made a student body of around 800. I kept up with the French I had learned at Roseman, and went to a French summer lycee in Switzerland that the high school French teacher recruited a few of us for, and by tenth grade I started to have a group of friends, some of whom I actually still know.
But then my mother got a position in English and Women's Studies at San Diego State College in California and we moved to San Diego, taking me and my little brother with her. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment near campus. I went to Crawford High School there for about a month, and missed my friends terribly, and then I went to a private "free" school called Abraxas School, which was not nearly as well-organized at that time as it became later. After a few months, we moved to a big duplex bungalow-style house off 30th Street just north of the barrio, when my mother's boyfriend and his son came to live with us. I spent a month at the winter holidays back in Whitewater, crashing with one friend's family after another. When I got back to San Diego, it developed that Abraxas was kind of closing down, so I took the SATs and typed up a high school transcript for myself and applied to a couple of colleges in California, and a couple of colleges in Wisconsin, where my dad George was still living.
And so I came to matriculate at the UW-Madison, in 1972, at age seventeen. The first year I found myself a single room in an off-campus dorm, and the next summer I moved into a housing co-op. My boyfriend there took me to that Thanksgiving dinner where I was telling my travels.
But the story goes on. I was rather in the habit of moving house every year by that time. Doesn't everybody?
So just to get a grand overview of the general sweep of the fractal mountain before us, remember that I was born in Oklahoma, and by the time I was eighteen the tale of how I had come to Wisconsin had gotten long enough that I was able to entertain a table full of strangers with the narrative at Thanksgiving dinner.
As an infant I lived on Mallard Drive in Del City, Oklahoma, which is outside of Oklahoma City where my mom and dad had grown up and gone to high school. But then after a couple of years my mom Elsie took me to Corpus Christi, Texas, and when we came back to Oklahoma she started to grad school in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. We lived in grad student housing, in a neighborhood called the pre-fabs, because they were pre-fabricated wartime housing units that were all white with peeling paint that we kids liked to chip off of the walls -- like peeling a sunburn -- which probably had a lot of lead in it. First we were in G-18, where we had an upright piano, that was left behind when we went to live in A-23 (I think it was 23) which was on the other end and several rows down, where my new dad George moved in with us. He was in grad school in English too. I went briefly to the kindergarten on campus, which I recall as a big room full of excellent toys and other children, where I learned The Eensy-Weensy Spider.
But then upon gaining a doctorate, George got a teaching job in Boston, and we traveled by train to Boston, Massachusetts. That first summer for a while we lived in a basement-level sublet of one of the old row houses on Massachusetts Avenue in the Back Bay. Then we moved to the suburb of Newton, and my parents took the MTA into the city every day, where he taught English at BU and she worked at Ginn & Co as a textbook editor. I went to first grade at Beethoven School, and then we moved to a different neighborhood and I went to second grade at Cabot School. And then George interviewed and got a different job, a better position, at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, so we moved there, and I went to third grade at Alexander Hamilton School and to fourth and fifth grade at Thomas Jefferson School.
Then my mother got her doctorate, and they both interviewed at the MLA and both were hired by the English Department of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. So we moved to Wisconsin. I went to sixth grade at Lincoln School, and then to seventh grade at Franklin Junior High School, which was possibly the most miserable year of my life as far as school went. We moved from a two-bedroom flat on the outskirts of town to a large rambling bungalow-style duplex in the downtown, on Center Street, and then we stayed there for three years in a row, which was the longest I had ever lived in the same place in my life. For eighth grade I got out of the public school and was admitted to the campus school, Roseman Elementary. But the next year my classmates and I were all dumped in with the general population at Whitewater High School. We were the peak year of the Baby Boom, and the entire four years of classes made a student body of around 800. I kept up with the French I had learned at Roseman, and went to a French summer lycee in Switzerland that the high school French teacher recruited a few of us for, and by tenth grade I started to have a group of friends, some of whom I actually still know.
But then my mother got a position in English and Women's Studies at San Diego State College in California and we moved to San Diego, taking me and my little brother with her. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment near campus. I went to Crawford High School there for about a month, and missed my friends terribly, and then I went to a private "free" school called Abraxas School, which was not nearly as well-organized at that time as it became later. After a few months, we moved to a big duplex bungalow-style house off 30th Street just north of the barrio, when my mother's boyfriend and his son came to live with us. I spent a month at the winter holidays back in Whitewater, crashing with one friend's family after another. When I got back to San Diego, it developed that Abraxas was kind of closing down, so I took the SATs and typed up a high school transcript for myself and applied to a couple of colleges in California, and a couple of colleges in Wisconsin, where my dad George was still living.
And so I came to matriculate at the UW-Madison, in 1972, at age seventeen. The first year I found myself a single room in an off-campus dorm, and the next summer I moved into a housing co-op. My boyfriend there took me to that Thanksgiving dinner where I was telling my travels.
But the story goes on. I was rather in the habit of moving house every year by that time. Doesn't everybody?
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Audacity of hope
Today I am just going to write my words. I went into the coffee shop this morning, and as usual the baristas asked me how I am doing, and I had been thinking about it. I have been continuing a little overwrought emotionally, after holding my hopes in check for so many months before Obama's election, and carefully, right up through election night, not saying anything prematurely prideful that might attract the attention of vengeful gods. Last week I may even have privately promised any stray Powers that I will to go to church, if only this just wouldn't be screwed up. Less than a year ago I was enough of a cynic to say, No Way In Hell; now hell's done froze over, and we gots ice skates all around.
"I have been waiting for this election for forty years," I told them. "I'm like, just a minute, where am I? what happened?" How could it have taken my country so long to join me, here in the future, where my hair has gone gray with waiting?
Joe laughed, which is why I always talk to him. "Yeah, it's about time."
"Darn right," I said. That seemed a little mild. "Fucking-A right," I said, feeling like the foul-mouthed college student inside, and he laughed.
The first election I had any involvement with was Johnson's election over Goldwater in 1964. We were living on Grand Boulevard in Binghamton, and I had made a small poster for my wall from some news photo of the two candidates. It was a contest against a Republican party that was allied to the John Birch Society, most unrepentantly bigoted, and at the time ancient news stories about historical Klan lynchings were being unearthed and published in anthologies as sensational paperbacks alongside shocking material on mass murderers, so the horrors of Jim Crow were no longer concealed by the polity. Johnson had been carrying on the Democratic legacy of the mysteriously martyred Kennedy, legislation that would be called The Great Society. When Johnson won, the term landslide was used. I had no idea it would be so rare in the future. I decorated my poster with hurrahs for our side.
It is curious that a mere four years later, Johnson had become a symbol of the System, held responsible for the war in Vietnam, and just another of the old white men who ruled the world. He was compared to Andrew Johnson, the president who had been impeached while in office after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Hah! We had no idea how much worse a president could be.
I was in eighth grade during the 1968 election, and my parents were both Dangerously Radical Professors. I made posters for the Socialist Workers Party who were active on campus, at the campus elementary school I was going to, presumably lobbying the voting students who occasional walked our hallways. On one of them I used a clipping of a famous photo of a dead baby in Vietnam ("Q. and babies? A. and babies") which was actually torn down. The primaries of course had started while I was still in seventh grade, but they held far less interest than they do today. My issue was the war, although I held a growing cynicism about the general raping and pillaging of the earth and world domination of my country's military-industrial complex. I was a hold-out against the two-party system, which naturally dominated the polling amongst the eighth grade. It was a remarkably comfortable class: I was not particularly ostracized or humiliated for being such an oddball. Either that, or by that time I was rather used to it.
The disasters of Nixon's administration and the continuing Viet Nam War would dominate the political landscape during my years in high school and college.
In the fall of 1972 I was still just seventeen. The first election I was able to vote in was the next spring midterm election, in which Paul Soglin was first elected mayor of Madison. I took that as a hopeful sign, and understood clearly that I would very seldom in the future have the person I had voted for actually win office. I also voted for local character Eddie Ben Elson for State Superintent of Public Instruction, whose platform was to abolish compulsory education, a cause I could get behind, given my experience. Of course he never won any public office. Later he ran for Judge (he was a lawyer) with the slogan, Live And Let Live. It made a stunning poster.
"I have been waiting for this election for forty years," I told them. "I'm like, just a minute, where am I? what happened?" How could it have taken my country so long to join me, here in the future, where my hair has gone gray with waiting?
Joe laughed, which is why I always talk to him. "Yeah, it's about time."
"Darn right," I said. That seemed a little mild. "Fucking-A right," I said, feeling like the foul-mouthed college student inside, and he laughed.
The first election I had any involvement with was Johnson's election over Goldwater in 1964. We were living on Grand Boulevard in Binghamton, and I had made a small poster for my wall from some news photo of the two candidates. It was a contest against a Republican party that was allied to the John Birch Society, most unrepentantly bigoted, and at the time ancient news stories about historical Klan lynchings were being unearthed and published in anthologies as sensational paperbacks alongside shocking material on mass murderers, so the horrors of Jim Crow were no longer concealed by the polity. Johnson had been carrying on the Democratic legacy of the mysteriously martyred Kennedy, legislation that would be called The Great Society. When Johnson won, the term landslide was used. I had no idea it would be so rare in the future. I decorated my poster with hurrahs for our side.
It is curious that a mere four years later, Johnson had become a symbol of the System, held responsible for the war in Vietnam, and just another of the old white men who ruled the world. He was compared to Andrew Johnson, the president who had been impeached while in office after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Hah! We had no idea how much worse a president could be.
I was in eighth grade during the 1968 election, and my parents were both Dangerously Radical Professors. I made posters for the Socialist Workers Party who were active on campus, at the campus elementary school I was going to, presumably lobbying the voting students who occasional walked our hallways. On one of them I used a clipping of a famous photo of a dead baby in Vietnam ("Q. and babies? A. and babies") which was actually torn down. The primaries of course had started while I was still in seventh grade, but they held far less interest than they do today. My issue was the war, although I held a growing cynicism about the general raping and pillaging of the earth and world domination of my country's military-industrial complex. I was a hold-out against the two-party system, which naturally dominated the polling amongst the eighth grade. It was a remarkably comfortable class: I was not particularly ostracized or humiliated for being such an oddball. Either that, or by that time I was rather used to it.
The disasters of Nixon's administration and the continuing Viet Nam War would dominate the political landscape during my years in high school and college.
In the fall of 1972 I was still just seventeen. The first election I was able to vote in was the next spring midterm election, in which Paul Soglin was first elected mayor of Madison. I took that as a hopeful sign, and understood clearly that I would very seldom in the future have the person I had voted for actually win office. I also voted for local character Eddie Ben Elson for State Superintent of Public Instruction, whose platform was to abolish compulsory education, a cause I could get behind, given my experience. Of course he never won any public office. Later he ran for Judge (he was a lawyer) with the slogan, Live And Let Live. It made a stunning poster.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Aren't we nearly there?
So it was in the summer of 1966 that we arrived in Whitewater, Wisconsin. The summer had started, no doubt, with yet another bout of sorting through everything and packing it into a moving van; then a drive from Binghamton through the southern tier of New York State (Oleanna? Erie?) to Ohio, possible overnight stop in Akron with old academic friends from OU, Holiday Inns across country, until we could stay with kinfolk in Oklahoma, although exactly which iteration of this experience was that year is now vanishing into the proverbial mists of memory. But finally north, possibly through Iowa City it occurs to me, where my parents had other friends from university. And thus to Wisconsin.
As one drives north out of the flat prairie, Wisconsin becomes all green rolling hills, with neat farmsteads, barns and cornfields, and cows, for the most part black and white. Many cows, and at that time not so much of other types of livestock -- occasional pigs or sheep or horses. But mostly cows. Holsteins. The highway curves through a continuous panorama of picturesque pastoral scenic beauty. And all the time we were getting closer to where we would soon be living. At midsummer the corn is tall and green.
We stayed overnight, several I think, at a Holiday Inn in Janesville, about twenty miles from Whitewater. My parents went on to scout the situation and find housing. The roads of this area would later become familiar to me, but the ten miles off the interstate, north to Milton, turn right, and another ten miles to Whitewater, took a breathtakingly long time to travel. My brother with me in the back seat of the gray VW was just three, and I was eleven.
The Whitewater we arrived in had a Main Street lined with yellowy cream brick Victorian homes, and a campus in part just as old, with the oldest building Old Main standing at the top of a hill up a dignified drive off of Main Street. It was an old land-grant college, and in the mid-sixties was just getting a lot of brand-new boxy international-style buildings to accommodate the growing student body. The first offices my parents were given were in the basement of Old Main, which did not bode well for the respect the English Department was held in; but before the school year had started, they had moved to the fourth floor of brand-new Heide Hall. Both of them were working in the English Department, my mother specializing in Victorian Literature and my dad in Medieval Literature and Linguistics. The chair of the department, who had hired them, was Jack Heide, who died within weeks of our arrival in a housefire in his home, and thus had the new humanities building named after him. But I had met him only briefly on our arrival.
The other connection we had in town was with a family that lived out in the burgeoning suburb of new ranch houses on the west side of town, who my parents had also known in graduate school in English at OU. We visited their house for a cook-out, and admired the massive strawberry planting that took up most of their back yard. This was a vision of the possible middle-class splendor: a suburban ranch house, and tenure-track positions.
The wife of that family was a musician, a cellist, who gave my parents a reference to a violin teacher for me in town. By this time I had my own violin, a $20 student violin purchased in a second-hand store in Ann Arbor. The new teacher was even more bohemian than I might have expected, the wife of an art professor at the university, who tied back her long hair with athletic socks. She was appalled at my lack of knowledge of scales or keys, or vibrato technique, and set about diagnosing what I could play. It was grueling for me to be such a disappointment to her. The violin as I practiced began to sound to me like a sick cat, and I gave up entirely after a couple of lessons. Eventually the cellist was given the violin to sell.
The apartment we moved into was a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a large new red brick building on Tratt Street, a couple of blocks from the campus. At some point my half-brother Chris joined us, for most of the year I was in sixth grade, and he and I roomed together, with bunk beds, Chris on the upper. On the wall above his bed we had a poster of the famous castle in Germany built by the mad king. My little brother had an end of my parents' room, divided off with metal bookcases. It was a building of standard design, with a galley kitchen off the entry way, bathroom, two bedrooms, and both the hallway and kitchen opening onto a large living-dining room, with linoleum flooring on the kitchen end and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting in the rest.
As one drives north out of the flat prairie, Wisconsin becomes all green rolling hills, with neat farmsteads, barns and cornfields, and cows, for the most part black and white. Many cows, and at that time not so much of other types of livestock -- occasional pigs or sheep or horses. But mostly cows. Holsteins. The highway curves through a continuous panorama of picturesque pastoral scenic beauty. And all the time we were getting closer to where we would soon be living. At midsummer the corn is tall and green.
We stayed overnight, several I think, at a Holiday Inn in Janesville, about twenty miles from Whitewater. My parents went on to scout the situation and find housing. The roads of this area would later become familiar to me, but the ten miles off the interstate, north to Milton, turn right, and another ten miles to Whitewater, took a breathtakingly long time to travel. My brother with me in the back seat of the gray VW was just three, and I was eleven.
The Whitewater we arrived in had a Main Street lined with yellowy cream brick Victorian homes, and a campus in part just as old, with the oldest building Old Main standing at the top of a hill up a dignified drive off of Main Street. It was an old land-grant college, and in the mid-sixties was just getting a lot of brand-new boxy international-style buildings to accommodate the growing student body. The first offices my parents were given were in the basement of Old Main, which did not bode well for the respect the English Department was held in; but before the school year had started, they had moved to the fourth floor of brand-new Heide Hall. Both of them were working in the English Department, my mother specializing in Victorian Literature and my dad in Medieval Literature and Linguistics. The chair of the department, who had hired them, was Jack Heide, who died within weeks of our arrival in a housefire in his home, and thus had the new humanities building named after him. But I had met him only briefly on our arrival.
The other connection we had in town was with a family that lived out in the burgeoning suburb of new ranch houses on the west side of town, who my parents had also known in graduate school in English at OU. We visited their house for a cook-out, and admired the massive strawberry planting that took up most of their back yard. This was a vision of the possible middle-class splendor: a suburban ranch house, and tenure-track positions.
The wife of that family was a musician, a cellist, who gave my parents a reference to a violin teacher for me in town. By this time I had my own violin, a $20 student violin purchased in a second-hand store in Ann Arbor. The new teacher was even more bohemian than I might have expected, the wife of an art professor at the university, who tied back her long hair with athletic socks. She was appalled at my lack of knowledge of scales or keys, or vibrato technique, and set about diagnosing what I could play. It was grueling for me to be such a disappointment to her. The violin as I practiced began to sound to me like a sick cat, and I gave up entirely after a couple of lessons. Eventually the cellist was given the violin to sell.
The apartment we moved into was a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a large new red brick building on Tratt Street, a couple of blocks from the campus. At some point my half-brother Chris joined us, for most of the year I was in sixth grade, and he and I roomed together, with bunk beds, Chris on the upper. On the wall above his bed we had a poster of the famous castle in Germany built by the mad king. My little brother had an end of my parents' room, divided off with metal bookcases. It was a building of standard design, with a galley kitchen off the entry way, bathroom, two bedrooms, and both the hallway and kitchen opening onto a large living-dining room, with linoleum flooring on the kitchen end and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting in the rest.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
16 Grand Boulevard
In the fall of 1964 I started fourth grade at Thomas Jefferson School, and in 1965 I was there for fifth grade as well. We still lived in Binghamton, New York, but we had moved house again, for reasons unknown to me, to an old prairie-style duplex at 16 Grand Boulevard. One year we lived upstairs, and the next year -- maybe the landlady moved out -- we moved downstairs. Or maybe it was downstairs and then upstairs, but I think not. The house had dark wood trim, and some interesting old furnishings, like the dining room display cabinet with curved glass doors that seemed very classy to me.
There was never enough shelving for all the books. Thousands of books. My dad began to acquire black industrial metal shelving units (years before high tech became any kind of style), from the Sears catalog I think, and let me help him assemble them. This was a step up from the grad-student bricks and boards shelving. He had a taste for avant-garde design well beyond any professors' salary. The butterfly chair got a wild sixties orange floral print stitched over the black canvas. He disassembled he dining room chairs we had acquired in 1961, covered their beige plastic seats with squares of bright blue-green prints using a staple gun, spray-painted the metal legs and back supports white, and reassembled them thus transformed. The round formica table that came with them had its legs replaced with short ones, to make a coffee table. For a larger dining table he attached legs to a hollow-core door from the lumberyard. There was another coffeetable he constructed from a narrower door. He took me not only to bookstores but to haunt Scandinavian modern design stores. In Ann Arbor no doubt on sale he had purchased a set of Dansk stainless tableware. So our humble functional furniture accumulated through the moves, beyond the minimal box springs, mattresses and metal bedsteads required.
At Grand Boulevard I had a middle bedroom, off the dining room, and a double bed as my parents had purchased a new one for themselves. Pigeons cooed under the eaves. I had a desk and small dresser that had been purchased unfinished (Sears again) when I was in first grade and painted light blue. In Binghamton I also acquired from some second-hand source a dark wood deco-style vanity, with a tall mirror between two small cabinets, and a large trunk. Eventually these things were painted. We were continually slapping coats of white paint over our new habitations. My mother constructed simple curtains for each room from lengths of fabric, with simple sleeves run over standard curtain rods. The long windows of these old houses required a lot of measuring before we went off to the fabric store.
This was a roomy house, that my little brother learned to walk in, emptying and and crawling through the kitchen cupboards. At that early age he had the nickname Zoopy. In those days egg cartons were constructed of folded cardboard with dividers inserted to divide the trays into rectangular compartments, and he tore these cardboard dividers in half and collected them by the hundreds, calling them "dibs", a word he had mysteriously come up with himself. His bedroom was in the back of the house, behind my parents' room.
My mother was still at home, working as an editor on galleys that she was still getting from Ginn. I learned quite a bit about copyediting by observing the red ink marks she made on these. I also collected the galleys (which were printed in very long columns, not yet paginated), cut them into lengths and pasted them into scrapbooks to make my own editions. She was working on an eighth grade reading textbook at this point, an anthology of stories that greatly impressed me, like "The Most Dangerous Game", Leacock's "The Night the Bed Fell", and as a sample of drama, "Twelve Angry Men."
At the same time she was occupying herself with a spasm of domesticity. She sewed clothing for me as well as for herself, collected recipes and learned to bake yeast bread. She and George had collaborated on making a simple cocktail dress for her from an elaborately embroidered kimono he had brought back from his service in the Far East, and the scraps from this were also used to make clothes for my cousin's Barbie. For Christmas she sewed a whole set of clothing from the doll pattern collection included in the envelope, which went off to my cousin. I have no idea what happened to the silk dress, or the rest of the scraps. I got the pattern, and began to teach myself how to sew, using the old black Singer portable she had always had. The doll pattern gave basic procedural instructions, but I could read and follow instructions for the full-size patterns too, and began to take more interest in what was available in the fabric stores.
My dad took a big part in housekeeping, which was unusual at that time, as well as with cooking and childcare. I still associate the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast with memories of him running the vacuum cleaner, a Eureka canister vacuum.
My fourth grade teacher was named Mrs Houlihan. At some point in the year she had us cramming for the Iowa Basics, which are achievement tests still given nationwide to fourth-graders; and it must have been after we had already covered quite a bit of material, because for a while she had us outlining a chapter from our Social Studies textbook every night as homework. It began with the Pacific Northwest (60 inches of rainfall per year) and went on to describe the lives of children in different parts of the U.S. I was keeping up with this work, barely, and there was much indignant discussion among the class, surreptitiously, about how impossible it was. My parents agreed that cramming for such a test was not the point of the test at all. So one afternoon I left on her desk a carefully-composed note suggesting that this was too much work -- and boy did I catch hell the next morning. I walked in, and "boy are you in trouble" my classmates informed me.
The teacher walked in, and first I was in trouble for not having signed the note. (As though there were any doubt who had written it, whether from the evidence of handwriting or my fellows having already given me up.) First she humiliated me in front of the class. Then she took me out in the hall, cast more aspersions on my character and made me cry. Then she took me to the principal's office. There was not much more trouble you could get into in those days, short of being beaten. The principal, who I saw on that one occasion only, showed me a shelf of large books and asked paternally if I knew what a curriculum was, and explained how important it was for the teachers to follow the curriculum. I promised fervently never to obstruct the pursuit of a curriculum again.
This was the same teacher that I got into an argument with when I asserted that apricots were not the same thing as dried peaches. I was pretty sure they were a different fruit, not that I had ever seen or had any. She was drawing a parallel between prunes and plums, grapes and raisins. I was attempting to make a point of information, which was clearly a mistake. She was a bit of a battleaxe. I always liked my teachers, though, so it was fairly painful when they apparently didn't like me.
This was the same teacher who hit Joseph Barr on the head with his dictionary, when she found him reading it behind the raised desk lid instead of paying attention in class. Probably looking up naughty words, knowing him. Joseph Barr was a big boy -- actually not any larger than the rest of us, but one year older was a big deal at the time -- who had been held back a year to repeat the grade.
OMG, this means that this was the same year that I got in another nine kinds of hell from my classmates when the girls were all taken off to see a health film (courtesy of the Kimberly Clark corporation) on Becoming A Woman. "The fun is just beginning!" It was a great secret, that had involved all the girls taking home sealed envelopes explaining to our parents what was up, because it required their signed permission. Times being what they were, the boys were mystified, except for Joseph Barr, who teased me into revealing that the subject of our private girls' lesson was Growing Up. He apparently already knew the word menstration, or something close. This made me a traitor to the girls, because this subject was of such acute embarrassment all around.
I still have in a collage the front page of the little booklet we were given, "Growing Up and Liking It", with the photo of the perky girl in a flip hairdo. Let me not even begin on the stringent procedures required for hair care in those bad old days. It is a subject my hairdresser and I have fun with. Oh, okay: the brush rollers. The hair picks. Trying to sleep on them. The dryers, which cost money, or the putting a big scarf over your head full of curlers and going out as though no one could tell what was under there while your hair air-dried. The permanent wave that would make the set stay in your hair for more than a single day. My mother was going through the whole rigamarole. Fortunately all that was about to change. I had a babysitter who set my hair one night, and it produced nowhere near a big enough improvement in my personal appearance to make me want to go through all that regularly. I already had braces, and glasses. Like Ugly Betty, only it was not considered in any way cute or a joke: it was just ugliness.
The next year I was at the same school, in Miss Jablonsky's class. Miss Jablonsky was a nice pretty young teacher, with blonde hair she wore in a chignon, a French upswept thingy. Unfortunately Miss Jablonsky was in an auto accident in the middle of the year, a fairly serious one, and we spent several winter months in the care of Mrs Tyler, who opened the windows every day for calisthenics by our desks while she played the record "Chicken Fat". A quasi-military ditty, Go you chicken fat! go away! go, you chicken fat! go! with push-ups and so forth. I was informed by a classmate that Mrs Tyler not only had favorites, but I was not one of them. What? what did I do?
Well, I did not win any flashcard competitions in math. This was a common educational technique, and maybe still is in places: making a competition out of simple drills. Two students compete to answer the card first, the one who loses sits down, eliminated, and the other continues on to the next student's desk for more fun. General cheering, commentary and verbal mayhem encouraged. I hated flashcards on the times tables. But I was still winning spelling bees.
There was never enough shelving for all the books. Thousands of books. My dad began to acquire black industrial metal shelving units (years before high tech became any kind of style), from the Sears catalog I think, and let me help him assemble them. This was a step up from the grad-student bricks and boards shelving. He had a taste for avant-garde design well beyond any professors' salary. The butterfly chair got a wild sixties orange floral print stitched over the black canvas. He disassembled he dining room chairs we had acquired in 1961, covered their beige plastic seats with squares of bright blue-green prints using a staple gun, spray-painted the metal legs and back supports white, and reassembled them thus transformed. The round formica table that came with them had its legs replaced with short ones, to make a coffee table. For a larger dining table he attached legs to a hollow-core door from the lumberyard. There was another coffeetable he constructed from a narrower door. He took me not only to bookstores but to haunt Scandinavian modern design stores. In Ann Arbor no doubt on sale he had purchased a set of Dansk stainless tableware. So our humble functional furniture accumulated through the moves, beyond the minimal box springs, mattresses and metal bedsteads required.
At Grand Boulevard I had a middle bedroom, off the dining room, and a double bed as my parents had purchased a new one for themselves. Pigeons cooed under the eaves. I had a desk and small dresser that had been purchased unfinished (Sears again) when I was in first grade and painted light blue. In Binghamton I also acquired from some second-hand source a dark wood deco-style vanity, with a tall mirror between two small cabinets, and a large trunk. Eventually these things were painted. We were continually slapping coats of white paint over our new habitations. My mother constructed simple curtains for each room from lengths of fabric, with simple sleeves run over standard curtain rods. The long windows of these old houses required a lot of measuring before we went off to the fabric store.
This was a roomy house, that my little brother learned to walk in, emptying and and crawling through the kitchen cupboards. At that early age he had the nickname Zoopy. In those days egg cartons were constructed of folded cardboard with dividers inserted to divide the trays into rectangular compartments, and he tore these cardboard dividers in half and collected them by the hundreds, calling them "dibs", a word he had mysteriously come up with himself. His bedroom was in the back of the house, behind my parents' room.
My mother was still at home, working as an editor on galleys that she was still getting from Ginn. I learned quite a bit about copyediting by observing the red ink marks she made on these. I also collected the galleys (which were printed in very long columns, not yet paginated), cut them into lengths and pasted them into scrapbooks to make my own editions. She was working on an eighth grade reading textbook at this point, an anthology of stories that greatly impressed me, like "The Most Dangerous Game", Leacock's "The Night the Bed Fell", and as a sample of drama, "Twelve Angry Men."
At the same time she was occupying herself with a spasm of domesticity. She sewed clothing for me as well as for herself, collected recipes and learned to bake yeast bread. She and George had collaborated on making a simple cocktail dress for her from an elaborately embroidered kimono he had brought back from his service in the Far East, and the scraps from this were also used to make clothes for my cousin's Barbie. For Christmas she sewed a whole set of clothing from the doll pattern collection included in the envelope, which went off to my cousin. I have no idea what happened to the silk dress, or the rest of the scraps. I got the pattern, and began to teach myself how to sew, using the old black Singer portable she had always had. The doll pattern gave basic procedural instructions, but I could read and follow instructions for the full-size patterns too, and began to take more interest in what was available in the fabric stores.
My dad took a big part in housekeeping, which was unusual at that time, as well as with cooking and childcare. I still associate the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast with memories of him running the vacuum cleaner, a Eureka canister vacuum.
My fourth grade teacher was named Mrs Houlihan. At some point in the year she had us cramming for the Iowa Basics, which are achievement tests still given nationwide to fourth-graders; and it must have been after we had already covered quite a bit of material, because for a while she had us outlining a chapter from our Social Studies textbook every night as homework. It began with the Pacific Northwest (60 inches of rainfall per year) and went on to describe the lives of children in different parts of the U.S. I was keeping up with this work, barely, and there was much indignant discussion among the class, surreptitiously, about how impossible it was. My parents agreed that cramming for such a test was not the point of the test at all. So one afternoon I left on her desk a carefully-composed note suggesting that this was too much work -- and boy did I catch hell the next morning. I walked in, and "boy are you in trouble" my classmates informed me.
The teacher walked in, and first I was in trouble for not having signed the note. (As though there were any doubt who had written it, whether from the evidence of handwriting or my fellows having already given me up.) First she humiliated me in front of the class. Then she took me out in the hall, cast more aspersions on my character and made me cry. Then she took me to the principal's office. There was not much more trouble you could get into in those days, short of being beaten. The principal, who I saw on that one occasion only, showed me a shelf of large books and asked paternally if I knew what a curriculum was, and explained how important it was for the teachers to follow the curriculum. I promised fervently never to obstruct the pursuit of a curriculum again.
This was the same teacher that I got into an argument with when I asserted that apricots were not the same thing as dried peaches. I was pretty sure they were a different fruit, not that I had ever seen or had any. She was drawing a parallel between prunes and plums, grapes and raisins. I was attempting to make a point of information, which was clearly a mistake. She was a bit of a battleaxe. I always liked my teachers, though, so it was fairly painful when they apparently didn't like me.
This was the same teacher who hit Joseph Barr on the head with his dictionary, when she found him reading it behind the raised desk lid instead of paying attention in class. Probably looking up naughty words, knowing him. Joseph Barr was a big boy -- actually not any larger than the rest of us, but one year older was a big deal at the time -- who had been held back a year to repeat the grade.
OMG, this means that this was the same year that I got in another nine kinds of hell from my classmates when the girls were all taken off to see a health film (courtesy of the Kimberly Clark corporation) on Becoming A Woman. "The fun is just beginning!" It was a great secret, that had involved all the girls taking home sealed envelopes explaining to our parents what was up, because it required their signed permission. Times being what they were, the boys were mystified, except for Joseph Barr, who teased me into revealing that the subject of our private girls' lesson was Growing Up. He apparently already knew the word menstration, or something close. This made me a traitor to the girls, because this subject was of such acute embarrassment all around.
I still have in a collage the front page of the little booklet we were given, "Growing Up and Liking It", with the photo of the perky girl in a flip hairdo. Let me not even begin on the stringent procedures required for hair care in those bad old days. It is a subject my hairdresser and I have fun with. Oh, okay: the brush rollers. The hair picks. Trying to sleep on them. The dryers, which cost money, or the putting a big scarf over your head full of curlers and going out as though no one could tell what was under there while your hair air-dried. The permanent wave that would make the set stay in your hair for more than a single day. My mother was going through the whole rigamarole. Fortunately all that was about to change. I had a babysitter who set my hair one night, and it produced nowhere near a big enough improvement in my personal appearance to make me want to go through all that regularly. I already had braces, and glasses. Like Ugly Betty, only it was not considered in any way cute or a joke: it was just ugliness.
The next year I was at the same school, in Miss Jablonsky's class. Miss Jablonsky was a nice pretty young teacher, with blonde hair she wore in a chignon, a French upswept thingy. Unfortunately Miss Jablonsky was in an auto accident in the middle of the year, a fairly serious one, and we spent several winter months in the care of Mrs Tyler, who opened the windows every day for calisthenics by our desks while she played the record "Chicken Fat". A quasi-military ditty, Go you chicken fat! go away! go, you chicken fat! go! with push-ups and so forth. I was informed by a classmate that Mrs Tyler not only had favorites, but I was not one of them. What? what did I do?
Well, I did not win any flashcard competitions in math. This was a common educational technique, and maybe still is in places: making a competition out of simple drills. Two students compete to answer the card first, the one who loses sits down, eliminated, and the other continues on to the next student's desk for more fun. General cheering, commentary and verbal mayhem encouraged. I hated flashcards on the times tables. But I was still winning spelling bees.
Monday, November 03, 2008
What I did on my summer vacation
The summers from third to sixth grade (1963-66) are a little mixed in my mind. This was the period of time when my mother was going to Oklahoma each summer to work on her doctorate from OU, and my dad being also on the academic calendar, we had other activities scheduled too. Since we had family in that part of the country, I spent a fair amount of time with my maternal grandmother and my aunt's family as well.
So there was one year when I started school in Norman, Oklahoma, went for a week or several, and then traveled with the family back to Binghamton to start school again in yet another new classroom. In Norman I had a plaid-patterned metal lunchbox, and a blue canvas bookbag like the college kids carried, which I wore holes in by dragging it bouncing down the sidewalk on the way to the rendezvous where I was getting picked up. By this time I was horse-mad, played at galloping around the school grounds with another girl who was likewise hooked, and also reading the Misty of Chincoteague series. Our family wasn't actually staying in Norman, though, so that must have been the summer when the day included a commute on the interstate to and from Norman to my grandmother's house in Midwest City, outside of OKC, where she was back together with my granddad Mike. I spent part of one summer there, too, writing ironic pastiches of Dick and Jane stories in my grandmother's back sunroom, which was under construction when my brother Geoff was a toddler, so that must have been after my granddad finished the addition.
Another year I had stayed for some weeks with my aunt and uncle in Wichita. My cousin Kathy and I had always been friends and we had lots of adventures, and then when her school year started I went along for a couple weeks in some grade school in Wichita. My aunt and uncle were both actually working days, as I recall, but my cousin was a year older and we were apparently old enough to look after ourselves during the day that summer. (This was something my mother and aunt would assume as they had been on their own at six and eight.) My cousin and I had known each other forever, and she had always lived in the same fifties aqua-colored ranch house in Wichita, and had all the toys I could possibly envy -- the easy-bake oven, the stuffed panda, the toy piano, the spring horse, the swing set, the barbie dream house -- not to mention the Siamese cat. My aunt had recently redecorated the house, with pop art paint and a few pieces of super modern furniture, so Kathy and I spent quite some time that summer drawing elevations and planning our own remodeling, and then composing an elaborate fantasy of having a whole mansion's worth of servants stuffed into that little house and where they would stay and what their duties would be (this was mostly my cousin's idea, possibly from reading Jane Austen, because I knew nothing of butlers or tweenstair maids). We also explored the house upside-down, with the help of a mirror, pretending it was upside-down like the house of Mrs Piggle-Wiggle, one of my own literary favorites.
Then I went back to Binghamton for the main part of the school year, once college classes were in session again, and my dad was teaching there. It seems like those must have been fourth and fifth grade. But perhaps Wichita was before the third grade, as I seem to have been so young, and so extraordinarily disoriented by the move from Massachusetts to New York; and the summer with my dad's mother Alice was the next summer.
Our next cross-country move, when I started sixth grade in yet another new school system, was included in the summer of 1966, when my mother finally got the doctorate and started as an Assistant Professor of English at UW-Whitewater, Wisconsin.
But those summers also included a summer school session when my dad studied in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and another in New York City. (He was studying Arabic at one, and the Noh drama at the other, possibly in that order.) In Ann Arbor we lived in a grad student housing complex, in an upstairs apartment of standard red brick four-unit buildings, with a playground located in the large grassy yard the buildings centered on. My little brother was a toddler there, and enlivened the summer by getting hit in the forehead by a flying wooden swing, which possibly involved emergency stitches although I don't recall going along for the event. There was quite a troop of kids living in those houses, of course, and one evening during a wide-ranging game of tag someone knocked over a grill stored by the back entry of a building that disturbed a colony of hornets, wasps, maybe German yellow-jackets, and I was one of the unfortunates who was chased by far too many of the insects. I was bitten twelve times, mostly on the face and neck, and when there was simply nothing to be done about the pain went on in tears to practice my violin for the usual half-hour.
While we were in Michigan, we also did some family-vacation type things. We went to the Kellogg's plant in Battle Creek, and toured the factory. We went to Dearborn, Michigan, and looked at every blessed thing in the Henry Ford Museum, which has one of the largest automotive collections around, and at every house in nearby Greenfield Village, which was my first encounter with this kind of re-creation and reconstruction of historic buildings. I believe they had some Thomas Edison buildings there... remind me to check my postcard collection.
There was a bookstore that my dad took me to in Ann Arbor, that had a rack of the recently re-issued Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, which he remembered from his boyhood and recommended to me. I studied the offerings, and managed to acquire not nearly enough of them. I learned to check the science fiction racks when we went to any bookstores. Ace Books were putting out not only the Tarzan series, but Burroughs' the Venus and Pellucidar series, with sensational Frank Frazetta or Roy Krenkel covers, and Ballentine was putting out slightly larger parallel editions of the Tarzan books and the complete John Carter of Mars series, although their cover art was not nearly as interesting to me; this was during a period of time when the copyright for the books was apparently in dispute, having possibly fallen briefly into the public domain.
Whenever it was we went to New York City, I was already immersed in Burroughs. In New York we stayed at a hotel for a while, the Atlantic, and I well recall curling up in an armchair, devouring whatever latest Burroughs I had acquired; and then we got a summer sublet, somewhere in midtown maybe. The idea that we were living in someone else's flat was somewhat lost on me, as we always lived in rental housing. My half-brother Chris joined us for part of this time, and we amused ourselves drawing with a set of colored pencils we found in the big desk, and we discovered they would magically make more intense colors when combined with water: now I know these were expensive watercolor pencils, and we sharpened our way through the set with abandon.
But there was a lot to see and go to in New York too. My parents even sprung for some theater tickets for me too, for some of the things they went to see, like A Girl in My Soup and some off-Broadway revues. I saw Everyman being played as street theater in Greenwich Village. My dad took me particularly to the Metropolitan Museum, more than once I think, because the Egyptian exhibits at the entrance became familiar to me; and to the Guggenheim, which was more interesting to me as a building at that point than for anything it had in it. We took a series of busses north to The Cloisters, to see the famous unicorn tapestry, and I was blown away at the idea of the whole building having been taken apart in Europe, labeled, shipped, and reassembled. There was a doll and toy museum, and who knows what else. We walked around the city a lot, and went to a lot of bookstores, because that was what we always did.
So there was one year when I started school in Norman, Oklahoma, went for a week or several, and then traveled with the family back to Binghamton to start school again in yet another new classroom. In Norman I had a plaid-patterned metal lunchbox, and a blue canvas bookbag like the college kids carried, which I wore holes in by dragging it bouncing down the sidewalk on the way to the rendezvous where I was getting picked up. By this time I was horse-mad, played at galloping around the school grounds with another girl who was likewise hooked, and also reading the Misty of Chincoteague series. Our family wasn't actually staying in Norman, though, so that must have been the summer when the day included a commute on the interstate to and from Norman to my grandmother's house in Midwest City, outside of OKC, where she was back together with my granddad Mike. I spent part of one summer there, too, writing ironic pastiches of Dick and Jane stories in my grandmother's back sunroom, which was under construction when my brother Geoff was a toddler, so that must have been after my granddad finished the addition.
Another year I had stayed for some weeks with my aunt and uncle in Wichita. My cousin Kathy and I had always been friends and we had lots of adventures, and then when her school year started I went along for a couple weeks in some grade school in Wichita. My aunt and uncle were both actually working days, as I recall, but my cousin was a year older and we were apparently old enough to look after ourselves during the day that summer. (This was something my mother and aunt would assume as they had been on their own at six and eight.) My cousin and I had known each other forever, and she had always lived in the same fifties aqua-colored ranch house in Wichita, and had all the toys I could possibly envy -- the easy-bake oven, the stuffed panda, the toy piano, the spring horse, the swing set, the barbie dream house -- not to mention the Siamese cat. My aunt had recently redecorated the house, with pop art paint and a few pieces of super modern furniture, so Kathy and I spent quite some time that summer drawing elevations and planning our own remodeling, and then composing an elaborate fantasy of having a whole mansion's worth of servants stuffed into that little house and where they would stay and what their duties would be (this was mostly my cousin's idea, possibly from reading Jane Austen, because I knew nothing of butlers or tweenstair maids). We also explored the house upside-down, with the help of a mirror, pretending it was upside-down like the house of Mrs Piggle-Wiggle, one of my own literary favorites.
Then I went back to Binghamton for the main part of the school year, once college classes were in session again, and my dad was teaching there. It seems like those must have been fourth and fifth grade. But perhaps Wichita was before the third grade, as I seem to have been so young, and so extraordinarily disoriented by the move from Massachusetts to New York; and the summer with my dad's mother Alice was the next summer.
Our next cross-country move, when I started sixth grade in yet another new school system, was included in the summer of 1966, when my mother finally got the doctorate and started as an Assistant Professor of English at UW-Whitewater, Wisconsin.
But those summers also included a summer school session when my dad studied in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and another in New York City. (He was studying Arabic at one, and the Noh drama at the other, possibly in that order.) In Ann Arbor we lived in a grad student housing complex, in an upstairs apartment of standard red brick four-unit buildings, with a playground located in the large grassy yard the buildings centered on. My little brother was a toddler there, and enlivened the summer by getting hit in the forehead by a flying wooden swing, which possibly involved emergency stitches although I don't recall going along for the event. There was quite a troop of kids living in those houses, of course, and one evening during a wide-ranging game of tag someone knocked over a grill stored by the back entry of a building that disturbed a colony of hornets, wasps, maybe German yellow-jackets, and I was one of the unfortunates who was chased by far too many of the insects. I was bitten twelve times, mostly on the face and neck, and when there was simply nothing to be done about the pain went on in tears to practice my violin for the usual half-hour.
While we were in Michigan, we also did some family-vacation type things. We went to the Kellogg's plant in Battle Creek, and toured the factory. We went to Dearborn, Michigan, and looked at every blessed thing in the Henry Ford Museum, which has one of the largest automotive collections around, and at every house in nearby Greenfield Village, which was my first encounter with this kind of re-creation and reconstruction of historic buildings. I believe they had some Thomas Edison buildings there... remind me to check my postcard collection.
There was a bookstore that my dad took me to in Ann Arbor, that had a rack of the recently re-issued Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, which he remembered from his boyhood and recommended to me. I studied the offerings, and managed to acquire not nearly enough of them. I learned to check the science fiction racks when we went to any bookstores. Ace Books were putting out not only the Tarzan series, but Burroughs' the Venus and Pellucidar series, with sensational Frank Frazetta or Roy Krenkel covers, and Ballentine was putting out slightly larger parallel editions of the Tarzan books and the complete John Carter of Mars series, although their cover art was not nearly as interesting to me; this was during a period of time when the copyright for the books was apparently in dispute, having possibly fallen briefly into the public domain.
Whenever it was we went to New York City, I was already immersed in Burroughs. In New York we stayed at a hotel for a while, the Atlantic, and I well recall curling up in an armchair, devouring whatever latest Burroughs I had acquired; and then we got a summer sublet, somewhere in midtown maybe. The idea that we were living in someone else's flat was somewhat lost on me, as we always lived in rental housing. My half-brother Chris joined us for part of this time, and we amused ourselves drawing with a set of colored pencils we found in the big desk, and we discovered they would magically make more intense colors when combined with water: now I know these were expensive watercolor pencils, and we sharpened our way through the set with abandon.
But there was a lot to see and go to in New York too. My parents even sprung for some theater tickets for me too, for some of the things they went to see, like A Girl in My Soup and some off-Broadway revues. I saw Everyman being played as street theater in Greenwich Village. My dad took me particularly to the Metropolitan Museum, more than once I think, because the Egyptian exhibits at the entrance became familiar to me; and to the Guggenheim, which was more interesting to me as a building at that point than for anything it had in it. We took a series of busses north to The Cloisters, to see the famous unicorn tapestry, and I was blown away at the idea of the whole building having been taken apart in Europe, labeled, shipped, and reassembled. There was a doll and toy museum, and who knows what else. We walked around the city a lot, and went to a lot of bookstores, because that was what we always did.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Third grade at Alexander Hamilton School
In the fall of 1963 I started third grade. This has always been a handy memory hook for me, for my life through the sixties. We had moved to Binghamton, in southern New York State not far from the Pennsylvania border, where my dad had an Assistant Professorship at Harpur College. My mother was staying home to take care of my newborn brother, with a little copyediting work on the side from her former employers at Ginn & Co. Our first house there was a gray-blue saltbox in a fairly new subdivision, at 11 Giles Street.
So much occurred in the course of that year that it seems a year could hardly accommodate it.
I had to take the bus to school, by a route I did not at all understand, to Alexander Hamilton School. My teacher was a small kindly older lady, named Mrs Benkovic. Of that classroom I recall ransacking it for books, and reading even the textbooks we were not studying, so that Dick and Jane as well as Tom, Betty and Susan became familiar to me.
One day each week, I think it was Friday, the class constituted itself as a Reading Club with a strange formulaic recitation to open the weekly program of someone's book report. The elected President of the club chanted, "The meeting of the Room Something (203) Book Club will now come to order, the Secretary will read the minutes of the last meeting." Then the Secretary would read a longer boilerplate report on the last dated meeting, and a motion to accept the report would be made and seconded; all of these events constituting the report for the following week. The book report read by whichever student had been volunteered for the task was clearly only a pretense for the exercise of Robert's Rules of Order.
I don't recall getting out of the classroom much. Recesses were not much fun for me, although skipping rope was still as common of an activity as it had been in Newton. There were new rhymes to learn, and new customs. I was once again the New Kid.
This was the class where I learned something of local history, by copying it neatly from the blackboard where the teacher had written out the text. It struck me as a peculiarly old-fashioned method of learning. Binghamton was named after a Mr James Bingham, who arrived to settle at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Monongahela Rivers with a Mr Cole, no first name apparently recorded.
Another feature of Friday afternoon was art class, with the art teacher arriving in our classroom to conduct her lesson. It was on one of those afternoons that the janitor entered the room, and whispered to Mrs Benkovic, who then called the class to attention from our noisy art activity (something involving construction paper) to announce that the President had been shot. This was sobering. Who was the President? why was this important? A few minutes later she announced that the President was dead. We were dismissed from school an hour early that day. On the bus all the discussion was of what had happened, and what it meant.
Over the next week of course I found out all about the Kennedy assassination. We all learned how to spell the word, for one thing, which was a prize word with much plainer import than the longest word we learned to spell (which was antidisestablishmentarianism). I started collecting news clippings from the paper about the Kennedys, the family, the photographs, the funeral events, and pasting them into a loose-leaf scrapbook. The children were much of an age with us, and Caroline Kennedy was of course greatly admired, John-John greatly pitied, and Jackie Kennedy the glamorous young widow.
In the house I recall my room was upstairs, a sunny room, where I must have had a friend over to play, because I recall the ponytail Barbie I had. I spent several days reading Uncle Tom's Cabin all in a single marathon in that room, over several days when I was sick with a cold. In the warmer weather we played outside, and the friend I had found in the neighborhood (I am thinking her name was possibly Debbie) had a large family around the corner. We had a long stretch of making mud pies in the back yard, lining them up on the rudimentary back porch. That year I also acquired a blue bicycle, probably at Christmas, and learned to ride it once the snow was gone. This was the kind of neighborhood where a pack of kids roamed around, and when the boys played war the girls were allowed to play as nurses. This mostly involved them evading us, and sneaking around the houses to surprise each other with noises of shooting and explosions and occasionally dying horribly, according to protocols the girls were not involved with.
One of the boys in my class, Kevin, lived down the block the other way and across the street, much too far off to be a regular part of our group, although he was on the same bus. Another of the boys in my class, Paul Z, who I had a bit of a crush on and chased around the school building unrelentingly that spring, was the son of my orthodontist. I was soon to have serious braces enter my life, to correct an overbite, although the full horror of the headbrace didn't come into play for another year or two.
This school system had a string program, which my parents allowed me to participate in, I think beginning in that year. The next year, for fourth and fifth grade, we moved again and I was at another school, Thomas Jefferson, but the string program remained, and the string teacher I think may have been the same instructor at both schools. I had a violin hired for $5 the semester from the school, and free small-group lessons, which I got out of class once a week to attend. We were learning what must have been an avant-garde method called the Bornoff method. Fun for Fiddle Fingers: we learned the hand positions on the neck, and how to read and play music from the staff, and the names of the notes, but nothing of key signatures or scales.
Missing class was never a problem for me, as I was still consistently turning in papers early that received grades of 90-100% correct, Excellent, Very Good, gold stars and such, really quite boringly consistent, with Extra Credit assignments too when these were available. My mistakes were of only academic interest to me, you might say. Clearly my teachers were unable to provide me with much of a challenge.
So much occurred in the course of that year that it seems a year could hardly accommodate it.
I had to take the bus to school, by a route I did not at all understand, to Alexander Hamilton School. My teacher was a small kindly older lady, named Mrs Benkovic. Of that classroom I recall ransacking it for books, and reading even the textbooks we were not studying, so that Dick and Jane as well as Tom, Betty and Susan became familiar to me.
One day each week, I think it was Friday, the class constituted itself as a Reading Club with a strange formulaic recitation to open the weekly program of someone's book report. The elected President of the club chanted, "The meeting of the Room Something (203) Book Club will now come to order, the Secretary will read the minutes of the last meeting." Then the Secretary would read a longer boilerplate report on the last dated meeting, and a motion to accept the report would be made and seconded; all of these events constituting the report for the following week. The book report read by whichever student had been volunteered for the task was clearly only a pretense for the exercise of Robert's Rules of Order.
I don't recall getting out of the classroom much. Recesses were not much fun for me, although skipping rope was still as common of an activity as it had been in Newton. There were new rhymes to learn, and new customs. I was once again the New Kid.
This was the class where I learned something of local history, by copying it neatly from the blackboard where the teacher had written out the text. It struck me as a peculiarly old-fashioned method of learning. Binghamton was named after a Mr James Bingham, who arrived to settle at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Monongahela Rivers with a Mr Cole, no first name apparently recorded.
Another feature of Friday afternoon was art class, with the art teacher arriving in our classroom to conduct her lesson. It was on one of those afternoons that the janitor entered the room, and whispered to Mrs Benkovic, who then called the class to attention from our noisy art activity (something involving construction paper) to announce that the President had been shot. This was sobering. Who was the President? why was this important? A few minutes later she announced that the President was dead. We were dismissed from school an hour early that day. On the bus all the discussion was of what had happened, and what it meant.
Over the next week of course I found out all about the Kennedy assassination. We all learned how to spell the word, for one thing, which was a prize word with much plainer import than the longest word we learned to spell (which was antidisestablishmentarianism). I started collecting news clippings from the paper about the Kennedys, the family, the photographs, the funeral events, and pasting them into a loose-leaf scrapbook. The children were much of an age with us, and Caroline Kennedy was of course greatly admired, John-John greatly pitied, and Jackie Kennedy the glamorous young widow.
In the house I recall my room was upstairs, a sunny room, where I must have had a friend over to play, because I recall the ponytail Barbie I had. I spent several days reading Uncle Tom's Cabin all in a single marathon in that room, over several days when I was sick with a cold. In the warmer weather we played outside, and the friend I had found in the neighborhood (I am thinking her name was possibly Debbie) had a large family around the corner. We had a long stretch of making mud pies in the back yard, lining them up on the rudimentary back porch. That year I also acquired a blue bicycle, probably at Christmas, and learned to ride it once the snow was gone. This was the kind of neighborhood where a pack of kids roamed around, and when the boys played war the girls were allowed to play as nurses. This mostly involved them evading us, and sneaking around the houses to surprise each other with noises of shooting and explosions and occasionally dying horribly, according to protocols the girls were not involved with.
One of the boys in my class, Kevin, lived down the block the other way and across the street, much too far off to be a regular part of our group, although he was on the same bus. Another of the boys in my class, Paul Z, who I had a bit of a crush on and chased around the school building unrelentingly that spring, was the son of my orthodontist. I was soon to have serious braces enter my life, to correct an overbite, although the full horror of the headbrace didn't come into play for another year or two.
This school system had a string program, which my parents allowed me to participate in, I think beginning in that year. The next year, for fourth and fifth grade, we moved again and I was at another school, Thomas Jefferson, but the string program remained, and the string teacher I think may have been the same instructor at both schools. I had a violin hired for $5 the semester from the school, and free small-group lessons, which I got out of class once a week to attend. We were learning what must have been an avant-garde method called the Bornoff method. Fun for Fiddle Fingers: we learned the hand positions on the neck, and how to read and play music from the staff, and the names of the notes, but nothing of key signatures or scales.
Missing class was never a problem for me, as I was still consistently turning in papers early that received grades of 90-100% correct, Excellent, Very Good, gold stars and such, really quite boringly consistent, with Extra Credit assignments too when these were available. My mistakes were of only academic interest to me, you might say. Clearly my teachers were unable to provide me with much of a challenge.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Where was I? & Bluejacket
A time passed, and now it seems,
everybody having those dreams.
Everyone can see hisself
walking around with no one else.
I'm going to back up a bit here and explain, which bit? how I got to Wisconsin from Boston? or how I got to Boston from Oklahoma? Not all at the same time, please. This is actually a Boston-to-Oklahoma piece. We did all this more than once, with variations.
I had a teenage babysitter in the neighborhood, but I was not allowed to cross Cabot Street except with the school crossing guard to go to school. There was a lot for my parents to do in the evening in Boston. I gave this babysitter a hard way to go one night, and ended up weeping in her arms and best of friends.
On Cabot Street my mother became hugely pregnant. And when I say hugely, she was originally due in like March, which was obviously a mistake, because my little brother did not arrive (all nine pounds and ten ounces) until the end of May. That was 1963.
We spent a lot of time in VW showrooms, when the price of a VW bug was $1195. I read all the brochures. At some point in that spring our family purchased an anthracite-gray VW, although my father could not drive it. He was a bit of a backseat driver, though, always pointing out to my mother the sound of the engine revving when it was time to shift to a higher gear. It was of course a standard shift, the kind with a clutch, which perhaps needs to be made explicit. He also had seatbelts installed, with giant bolts and shiny metal fixtures attaching them to the frame of the vehicle, which was (unlike the clutch) a big deal at that time. He was that kind of forward-thinking man.
By the end of second grade I had a friend who lived down the block. It is possible her name was Jennie, but I could be mistaken on that. She had a swingset in her back yard, like my cousin's, and we practiced swinging as high as the bar. She taught me "Hook's Tango" from some musical production of Peter Pan that I not seen and still haven't. And then at the end of the school year, we were moving, and I would not see her any more.
We packed everything for the summer into the VW, which was an interesting exercise as the trunk in the VW (you may or may not recall) is under the front hood. We had a luggage rack on the top too. The air-cooled engine is under a tiny little panel in the back. Everything else, and I mean everything, because we had acquired thousands of books in the second-hand bookstores of Boston, went into a Mayflower moving van. And we drove (me in the back, with my brand-new little brother in his carseat) off to the west.
At the time the width of the State of Massachusetts seemed quite wide, a long distance to me. Then there was the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We stayed in Holiday Inns, and I ate fried chicken at every dinner stop. We crossed the Mississippi on a huge bridge, with the map on my lap, and at St Louis we found our way through the city to meet my grandma Verdy at her office job. She was living separate from my granddad at that time.
That left the width of Missouri, which has a fine interstate highway, and a bit of Oklahoma, for the next day's drive. Outside of Tulsa we got off the freeway, and drove up and down increasingly small and dusty red roads to find Bluejacket, Oklahoma, which was not much more than a crossroads, and then its rural Route 2, in the late afternoon, to my dad's mother's ranch. Are we there yet? Turning to cross the cattle guard, a long drive up to the house. The drive was of red-brown smooth washed pebbles, of strangely irregular shape.
Grandma Alice had married a rancher named Guy Holden, who was not going to be a granddad for me, but kept to himself and sat in his chair in the evenings chewing tobacco and spitting into a metal coffee can. He went out every day to take care of the cattle. Sometimes you could see the animals when they came up into the corral next to the barn, safely on the other side of the wooden fence, or the barbed wire, big red angus type steers. We were not allowed in the fields behind the barn. And they had horses. There was a tall white horse named Topper that Gramma Alice said had retired from the circus. There was a smaller riding horse named Lady and a half-pony named Little Horse. And cats, lots of cats that came around the back door to be fed but weren't allowed indoors. Barn cats.
The kitchen was filled with a long table down the middle, with the range and ovens and the area where my gramma cooked on the north window side. On the other side was a fireplace in the middle of the house that opened into the living room as well. We sat in the row of chairs, with Guy on the end like a proper head of the house, and she doled out pancakes, or dinners, or sugar cookies, like she was feeding a farm crew. The back hallway, along the whole rear of the house from the kitchen to the bathroom, held a big chest freezer, and outdoor gear.
There are photos of my little brother, not yet sitting up, in his bucket seat on that high heavy table. But then they were gone, off to Norman for six weeks or so of the summer, for my mother to work on her dissertation. But I was there, with my half-brother Chris for some part of the summer, in the care of our Gramma Alice. It was heavenly, and if I wasn't already horse-mad I was after.
I was a hopeless city kid though. She smacked me once, grabbing me as I walked behind Lady at the feed trough, "Never walk behind a horse!" and gave me to understand it was a living thing that could be startled and kick you senseless without a thought. Nonetheless I thought of them as something like cars, only way cooler. She saddled up Little Horse for me once, and laughed cruelly afterwards at the daylight that showed between my butt and the saddle when he ran away with me.
Alice had a scary old chicken-coop shack out back where she had a collection of toys, that she had stored there for some charity, to which Chris & I had full access. These were other kids' castoffs, dolls which never interested me much and somewhat used stuffed animals, which were not as interesting to us as the collection of mysteriously elegant empty perfume spray bottles.
She dressed us both in little cut-off striped overalls and teeshirts -- there are photos of us, much the same size, tanned and with cropped hair. There was a tornado shelter in the back yard, its slanted door set into the ground, and roses. The yard was fenced off with barbed wire so the stock couldn't wander in. The gate had a weight on it to make it swing shut, which fascinated me, and we were cautioned not to fool with the well cover between the house and garage, which she could see from the window above the sink. On the other side behind the house was a big garden. Alice showed me peanuts she had pulled from the ground, and we took them inside and roasted them in their shells in the bottom of the stove. Just following her around was pretty interesting. She had an electric organ that she practiced every day, and volunteered to teach me a bit, "one up and two down, it's easy as anything, practically plays itself".
Elsie & George got in a bit of a lather when one of the horses chewed a bit on the VW when they had parked it outside the corral. But the garage already had a big Caddy and Guy's pick-up truck in it.
In the back bedroom she kept her son George's medals from Korea, and for sharpshooting. The vanity was hardly more than a shelf, with a skirt that swung out on arms. On the wall was a print of the Guardian Angel, protecting two little children from the storm, which she explained to me.
We visited again on those annual trips to Oklahoma, and then over the years I stayed in touch with her. She told me once that George had been changed when he went to Korea: quite a different person than the bright hopeful son she sent off. And of course she told us about traveling with the circusses and wild-west shows in her youth.
everybody having those dreams.
Everyone can see hisself
walking around with no one else.
I'm going to back up a bit here and explain, which bit? how I got to Wisconsin from Boston? or how I got to Boston from Oklahoma? Not all at the same time, please. This is actually a Boston-to-Oklahoma piece. We did all this more than once, with variations.
I had a teenage babysitter in the neighborhood, but I was not allowed to cross Cabot Street except with the school crossing guard to go to school. There was a lot for my parents to do in the evening in Boston. I gave this babysitter a hard way to go one night, and ended up weeping in her arms and best of friends.
On Cabot Street my mother became hugely pregnant. And when I say hugely, she was originally due in like March, which was obviously a mistake, because my little brother did not arrive (all nine pounds and ten ounces) until the end of May. That was 1963.
We spent a lot of time in VW showrooms, when the price of a VW bug was $1195. I read all the brochures. At some point in that spring our family purchased an anthracite-gray VW, although my father could not drive it. He was a bit of a backseat driver, though, always pointing out to my mother the sound of the engine revving when it was time to shift to a higher gear. It was of course a standard shift, the kind with a clutch, which perhaps needs to be made explicit. He also had seatbelts installed, with giant bolts and shiny metal fixtures attaching them to the frame of the vehicle, which was (unlike the clutch) a big deal at that time. He was that kind of forward-thinking man.
By the end of second grade I had a friend who lived down the block. It is possible her name was Jennie, but I could be mistaken on that. She had a swingset in her back yard, like my cousin's, and we practiced swinging as high as the bar. She taught me "Hook's Tango" from some musical production of Peter Pan that I not seen and still haven't. And then at the end of the school year, we were moving, and I would not see her any more.
We packed everything for the summer into the VW, which was an interesting exercise as the trunk in the VW (you may or may not recall) is under the front hood. We had a luggage rack on the top too. The air-cooled engine is under a tiny little panel in the back. Everything else, and I mean everything, because we had acquired thousands of books in the second-hand bookstores of Boston, went into a Mayflower moving van. And we drove (me in the back, with my brand-new little brother in his carseat) off to the west.
At the time the width of the State of Massachusetts seemed quite wide, a long distance to me. Then there was the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We stayed in Holiday Inns, and I ate fried chicken at every dinner stop. We crossed the Mississippi on a huge bridge, with the map on my lap, and at St Louis we found our way through the city to meet my grandma Verdy at her office job. She was living separate from my granddad at that time.
That left the width of Missouri, which has a fine interstate highway, and a bit of Oklahoma, for the next day's drive. Outside of Tulsa we got off the freeway, and drove up and down increasingly small and dusty red roads to find Bluejacket, Oklahoma, which was not much more than a crossroads, and then its rural Route 2, in the late afternoon, to my dad's mother's ranch. Are we there yet? Turning to cross the cattle guard, a long drive up to the house. The drive was of red-brown smooth washed pebbles, of strangely irregular shape.
Grandma Alice had married a rancher named Guy Holden, who was not going to be a granddad for me, but kept to himself and sat in his chair in the evenings chewing tobacco and spitting into a metal coffee can. He went out every day to take care of the cattle. Sometimes you could see the animals when they came up into the corral next to the barn, safely on the other side of the wooden fence, or the barbed wire, big red angus type steers. We were not allowed in the fields behind the barn. And they had horses. There was a tall white horse named Topper that Gramma Alice said had retired from the circus. There was a smaller riding horse named Lady and a half-pony named Little Horse. And cats, lots of cats that came around the back door to be fed but weren't allowed indoors. Barn cats.
The kitchen was filled with a long table down the middle, with the range and ovens and the area where my gramma cooked on the north window side. On the other side was a fireplace in the middle of the house that opened into the living room as well. We sat in the row of chairs, with Guy on the end like a proper head of the house, and she doled out pancakes, or dinners, or sugar cookies, like she was feeding a farm crew. The back hallway, along the whole rear of the house from the kitchen to the bathroom, held a big chest freezer, and outdoor gear.
There are photos of my little brother, not yet sitting up, in his bucket seat on that high heavy table. But then they were gone, off to Norman for six weeks or so of the summer, for my mother to work on her dissertation. But I was there, with my half-brother Chris for some part of the summer, in the care of our Gramma Alice. It was heavenly, and if I wasn't already horse-mad I was after.
I was a hopeless city kid though. She smacked me once, grabbing me as I walked behind Lady at the feed trough, "Never walk behind a horse!" and gave me to understand it was a living thing that could be startled and kick you senseless without a thought. Nonetheless I thought of them as something like cars, only way cooler. She saddled up Little Horse for me once, and laughed cruelly afterwards at the daylight that showed between my butt and the saddle when he ran away with me.
Alice had a scary old chicken-coop shack out back where she had a collection of toys, that she had stored there for some charity, to which Chris & I had full access. These were other kids' castoffs, dolls which never interested me much and somewhat used stuffed animals, which were not as interesting to us as the collection of mysteriously elegant empty perfume spray bottles.
She dressed us both in little cut-off striped overalls and teeshirts -- there are photos of us, much the same size, tanned and with cropped hair. There was a tornado shelter in the back yard, its slanted door set into the ground, and roses. The yard was fenced off with barbed wire so the stock couldn't wander in. The gate had a weight on it to make it swing shut, which fascinated me, and we were cautioned not to fool with the well cover between the house and garage, which she could see from the window above the sink. On the other side behind the house was a big garden. Alice showed me peanuts she had pulled from the ground, and we took them inside and roasted them in their shells in the bottom of the stove. Just following her around was pretty interesting. She had an electric organ that she practiced every day, and volunteered to teach me a bit, "one up and two down, it's easy as anything, practically plays itself".
Elsie & George got in a bit of a lather when one of the horses chewed a bit on the VW when they had parked it outside the corral. But the garage already had a big Caddy and Guy's pick-up truck in it.
In the back bedroom she kept her son George's medals from Korea, and for sharpshooting. The vanity was hardly more than a shelf, with a skirt that swung out on arms. On the wall was a print of the Guardian Angel, protecting two little children from the storm, which she explained to me.
We visited again on those annual trips to Oklahoma, and then over the years I stayed in touch with her. She told me once that George had been changed when he went to Korea: quite a different person than the bright hopeful son she sent off. And of course she told us about traveling with the circusses and wild-west shows in her youth.
Friday, April 18, 2008
It's History
One of my old friends is researching in History on the campus unrest of the early seventies, which curiously enough was when we were in high school together, and many of us were faculty brats. My dad was actually one of those radical professors who was suspended from classes, for supposedly making trouble, and then there was a big hoo-hah in court and a faculty committee investigation, where he and three others (the Four) were eventually exonerated. Of course the students were quite capable of making trouble without any help from the faculty at all.
I haven't seen or talked to my dad George in some years, since my brother was here briefly a while back and we all had lunch. I suggested to my friend the Historian that she is probably better off contacting him very professional-like, rather than as an old friend of mine, because I have no clue how he is doing except what I hear from my friend Barb, who is the Significant Other of one of the other Four, and they see each other socially from time to time. Over the years I have come to understand that his divorce from my mother was acrimonious, to say the least, which would explain why he prefers no reminders of that part of his life. I saw him occasionally in my twenties when I was visiting my Cuban family across the street, but since then our contacts have been scarcer; and he has never met my husband or son.
But this all got me thinking, so a couple days ago I tried phoning. I was on my walk, thinkin about all this stuff, and I had the number on my cellphone (having thought about this before) and tried it. Walked along nearly to the zoo letting it ring. No answer.
Then I tried Directory Assistance -- first time I have done that with the cellphone, but finally the 411 number has sunk into the aged little grey cells. I had been phoning the wrong number. His listed number is d'oh! a number I learned in college, and obviously misplaced. The old high school home phone number is apparently stuck in my memory for the duration; I wonder how I could get dibs on it, a very old number from a small town exchange like Whitewater. Then maybe place a call to, like, 1970.
No answer at that number either. I had time to think about what I'd say if I got an answering machine. No problem with what I'd say if I got HIM, how is he doing? etc but heaven forbid I should sound like an idiot on an answering machine. The people at Directory Assistance were surprisingly easy to get information from -- at least I have the address right.
This reminds me I have some striking black and white photos of his house when it was newly risen from the dirt of the cornfield, and all moderne white plastic furniture. I did actually stay with him briefly back then, when I was in town, from time to time, and my BFF and I took these photos. How did we get in?? No don't tell me... the key was... under the mat?
I haven't seen or talked to my dad George in some years, since my brother was here briefly a while back and we all had lunch. I suggested to my friend the Historian that she is probably better off contacting him very professional-like, rather than as an old friend of mine, because I have no clue how he is doing except what I hear from my friend Barb, who is the Significant Other of one of the other Four, and they see each other socially from time to time. Over the years I have come to understand that his divorce from my mother was acrimonious, to say the least, which would explain why he prefers no reminders of that part of his life. I saw him occasionally in my twenties when I was visiting my Cuban family across the street, but since then our contacts have been scarcer; and he has never met my husband or son.
But this all got me thinking, so a couple days ago I tried phoning. I was on my walk, thinkin about all this stuff, and I had the number on my cellphone (having thought about this before) and tried it. Walked along nearly to the zoo letting it ring. No answer.
Then I tried Directory Assistance -- first time I have done that with the cellphone, but finally the 411 number has sunk into the aged little grey cells. I had been phoning the wrong number. His listed number is d'oh! a number I learned in college, and obviously misplaced. The old high school home phone number is apparently stuck in my memory for the duration; I wonder how I could get dibs on it, a very old number from a small town exchange like Whitewater. Then maybe place a call to, like, 1970.
No answer at that number either. I had time to think about what I'd say if I got an answering machine. No problem with what I'd say if I got HIM, how is he doing? etc but heaven forbid I should sound like an idiot on an answering machine. The people at Directory Assistance were surprisingly easy to get information from -- at least I have the address right.
This reminds me I have some striking black and white photos of his house when it was newly risen from the dirt of the cornfield, and all moderne white plastic furniture. I did actually stay with him briefly back then, when I was in town, from time to time, and my BFF and I took these photos. How did we get in?? No don't tell me... the key was... under the mat?
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
We's arteests
I live for my fanmail. I write a lot of stuff for very limited distribution and don't care who reads it. That is the nature and magic of writing. All you gotta do to join is to read it.If I had ever worked out how to make a living at writing, or someone had already invented that wheel and just told me about it, maybe I would be doing that. Teaching is the only day job most artists can muster that directly relates; marketing one's work is another whole study; and the competition of academia is not always nurturing to some artists. Arteests. Some of the best poets I know are cab drivers, or housewives, or run for mayor.
Book arts (single handwrit copies) is pretty much where I live, in a professional sense. "Spoken words fly away, but the written word remains." Notebooks, have I got notebooks. Catherine kept them for me in an Annie Green Springs box in her attic when I moved to Miami, but now I have got them in a file cabinet. One folder of correspondence is still labeled "High School Madness." And a bookcase, or twelve.
Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook had her protagonist's life divided into separate colored notebooks until like separate personalities they were all integrated into The Golden Notebook. But I digress.
I was going to write a novel. Before I was so rudely interrupted. But then there was too much material. It was going to be about how some kids tried to help each other grow up.
A time passed, and now it seems, everybody is having these dreams. (Bob Dylan said that, in "Talking World War Three Blues". Also:) I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours. I like movies where the line between fantasy and reality is a teensy bit smudged. Everyone has their own version. That's postmodernism.
Book arts (single handwrit copies) is pretty much where I live, in a professional sense. "Spoken words fly away, but the written word remains." Notebooks, have I got notebooks. Catherine kept them for me in an Annie Green Springs box in her attic when I moved to Miami, but now I have got them in a file cabinet. One folder of correspondence is still labeled "High School Madness." And a bookcase, or twelve.
Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook had her protagonist's life divided into separate colored notebooks until like separate personalities they were all integrated into The Golden Notebook. But I digress.
I was going to write a novel. Before I was so rudely interrupted. But then there was too much material. It was going to be about how some kids tried to help each other grow up.
A time passed, and now it seems, everybody is having these dreams. (Bob Dylan said that, in "Talking World War Three Blues". Also:) I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours. I like movies where the line between fantasy and reality is a teensy bit smudged. Everyone has their own version. That's postmodernism.
The last gift of time
Lately I am in constant email correspondence with a crowd of these old friends from high school, The Group. Our Gang. It is a great pleasure to share friendship over such a very long time. It is a very present joy to find oneself in some quarters liked and esteemed, however improbable that may still strike some of us. Let us not let pleasant memories rob us of attention to where we are now. Our journeys between then and now are wandering roads. One has quite enough of bringing new people up to speed. It is an unusual privilege to bring old friends up to speed, with whom one has shared experiences half a lifetime past.
On my walk yesterday I was thinking that perhaps for all of us those times were brighter in memory than in experience. For some of us it was particularly dark, but nostalgia flattens the shadows. Memory is a tricksy hobbit.
Janet still asks me (sometimes just in my head) Why? why hold on to all that load of memory? and sometimes I think well, it's useful. Partly useful. Partly useful, mostly dead? But the useful part cannot be separated from the difficult painful part.
I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time; Life Beyond Sixty (just studying up in advance ya know) and she describes being an old person who is peculiarly unafflicted with memory. I am just getting on to a funnier chapter in which she points out, not how boring old people's memories are to young people (and sometimes to other old people, she has already done that), but how young people are better sources of information than they are audiences. Like when you need advice on using your cellphone, or good music that isn't forty years old. Or reminding. Whatever.
On my walk yesterday I was thinking that perhaps for all of us those times were brighter in memory than in experience. For some of us it was particularly dark, but nostalgia flattens the shadows. Memory is a tricksy hobbit.
Janet still asks me (sometimes just in my head) Why? why hold on to all that load of memory? and sometimes I think well, it's useful. Partly useful. Partly useful, mostly dead? But the useful part cannot be separated from the difficult painful part.
I've been reading Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time; Life Beyond Sixty (just studying up in advance ya know) and she describes being an old person who is peculiarly unafflicted with memory. I am just getting on to a funnier chapter in which she points out, not how boring old people's memories are to young people (and sometimes to other old people, she has already done that), but how young people are better sources of information than they are audiences. Like when you need advice on using your cellphone, or good music that isn't forty years old. Or reminding. Whatever.
Scarred for life?
Renewed contact with more of my friends from high school has got a lot of old content surfacing, even more than before.
I only attended two years of Whitewater High School, then moved to San Diego, and if the truth be known, got into college the next year on the strength of excellent test scores and some very credible looking transcript forms that my free school handed out to be filled in, just before it was taken over and totally restructured by a reputable educator who just happened to be living at our house -- who took much better care of my brother's education thereafter. If you put a big gold notary sticker on one of those pre-printed diploma things and get a couple people to sign, it looks just like you graduated with all pomp and circumstance. But I never have.
First I tried the gargantuan Crawford high school in San Diego, which worked for about a month. And then there was the free school, Abraxas, still operating under the same new management in Poway. It had totalled something like fifteen different schools for me by that point. I had to get a B.S. in Elementary Education to figure it all out. There wasn't any Science to it at all.
Not that a liberal education isn't a very fine thing indeed. The lack of graduation robes and tassel has surely scarred me for life!
I only attended two years of Whitewater High School, then moved to San Diego, and if the truth be known, got into college the next year on the strength of excellent test scores and some very credible looking transcript forms that my free school handed out to be filled in, just before it was taken over and totally restructured by a reputable educator who just happened to be living at our house -- who took much better care of my brother's education thereafter. If you put a big gold notary sticker on one of those pre-printed diploma things and get a couple people to sign, it looks just like you graduated with all pomp and circumstance. But I never have.
First I tried the gargantuan Crawford high school in San Diego, which worked for about a month. And then there was the free school, Abraxas, still operating under the same new management in Poway. It had totalled something like fifteen different schools for me by that point. I had to get a B.S. in Elementary Education to figure it all out. There wasn't any Science to it at all.
Not that a liberal education isn't a very fine thing indeed. The lack of graduation robes and tassel has surely scarred me for life!
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Giant Rat of Sumatra
Janet had a good question last weekend.
Why do I remember all this stuff? Because, I told her, I have lots of hooks to hang the memories on. But why would I want to remember all this stuff? she asked. As you do.
Because it is my life. My world, my only one, as the poet said; and if I do not testify to its reality, there is no one else to tell the tale. How many times have I summarized the story thus far? If I should tag and index all my journals, the various summaries would require a meta-entry of their own.
Although, like the tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, perhaps it cannot yet be told.
My world my only one, whom I must love,
if I so hard persist and pursue
to become a happy man with you
just you, with only you, my obsession,
and I cannot imagine
another possibility than to make
such idle passes at my only world.
But you are coy, you make it hard
(as if we hardly knew each other)
even to declare my honorable intentions
and then you tell me, "Take it easy, guy!"
This I despise
and kick a rock along the road in rage.
I am beforehand disappointed
and late at night I end up sobbing
on the shoulder of my only one my world
for here you are -- where else would you be?
"Whisper to me." What word must I whisper,
lovely, and what flower shall I bring?
where must I stand and wait to catch you in the mood?
(Paul Goodman)
Why do I remember all this stuff? Because, I told her, I have lots of hooks to hang the memories on. But why would I want to remember all this stuff? she asked. As you do.
Because it is my life. My world, my only one, as the poet said; and if I do not testify to its reality, there is no one else to tell the tale. How many times have I summarized the story thus far? If I should tag and index all my journals, the various summaries would require a meta-entry of their own.
Although, like the tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, perhaps it cannot yet be told.
My world my only one, whom I must love,
if I so hard persist and pursue
to become a happy man with you
just you, with only you, my obsession,
and I cannot imagine
another possibility than to make
such idle passes at my only world.
But you are coy, you make it hard
(as if we hardly knew each other)
even to declare my honorable intentions
and then you tell me, "Take it easy, guy!"
This I despise
and kick a rock along the road in rage.
I am beforehand disappointed
and late at night I end up sobbing
on the shoulder of my only one my world
for here you are -- where else would you be?
"Whisper to me." What word must I whisper,
lovely, and what flower shall I bring?
where must I stand and wait to catch you in the mood?
(Paul Goodman)
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Depth versus Breadth
Each year was like that, eventful and full of changes, although the classrooms in the many various schools I went to were more similar than one might expect, with their blackboards and various vintages of desks, and friezes of capital and small letters on green lined cardboard around the top of the room. When I was eighteen, my courses at the university were required to fulfill both Depth (major field of study) and Breadth (liberal arts) requirements. The story I told the historian on Thanksgiving when I was eighteen was the whole sprawling summary, in which the details in depth are lost. But the changes were regular and rhythmic enough to hang a great deal of memory from.
So I could list the houses I lived in, or the schools I went to, like the warp threads strung on the loom of memory; and then find more events associated with those places, in fractal detail, as I consider each trivial item. As the shuttle passes across the established width of the weaving, it carries the weft threads which each contribute another line of pattern.
So I could list the houses I lived in, or the schools I went to, like the warp threads strung on the loom of memory; and then find more events associated with those places, in fractal detail, as I consider each trivial item. As the shuttle passes across the established width of the weaving, it carries the weft threads which each contribute another line of pattern.
7-Up
One of my Oldest Friends has proposed that we watch the movie 49-Up, which came out a few years ago (check!) and then to review our own lives, bringing together our accounts in some fashion. This documentary began a series of interviews with a number of British subjects, who were filmed every seven years throughout their lives to follow them through what turned out to be very interesting times. So we might compare our experiences at seven, fourteen, twenty-one, etc, and see what we learn. I am not too sure about fourteen myself – that will require some research to anchor the year to events as I recall them, what we call timebinding. But seven I find already well-equipped with memory hooks.
When I turned seven we were living at 41-B Beaconwood Road, which is right off of Beacon Street, the same Beacon Street that runs all the way into downtown Boston. But we were out in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, in a side-by-side ranch-style duplex on a cul-de-sac. It was located about a mile from the Newton Highlands stop on the MTA. My room had a piece of linoleum to cover the floor, a desk and chest of drawers that were purchased unfinished and painted pale blue.
Bozo the Clown, who had a popular children’s television show, was reputed to live in one of the nondescript houses across and further down the street.
My parents worked every day in the city, my mother as a textbook editor at Ginn & Company, my father as an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. The MTA was a trolley out where we boarded the train, and still is, the stations little open shelters beside the train tracks, that becomes a subway somewhere in past Brookline into the heart of the city, where the cars screech into underground ceramic-tiled stations. The noise was horrendous. But in downtown Boston we might visit the Garden, where the swan boats floated magically on a pond, or the Commons. Most likely we would visit bookshops. It seemed possible that I visited every second-hand bookshop in Boston and Cambridge, as my parents were both students of English literature on the prowl for books. My mother spent her commutes reading British Victoriana toward her dissertation, including the complete works of an author named Israel Zangwill that she would later get an entire book out of.
I expected that I would be a teacher and writer like my mother. My parents said when I grew up I could be a Cliffie, and go to Radcliffe, and iron my hair.
That summer is most likely the one that we went on a number of vacation road trips. Our family had no car at that time, and thus depended entirely on public transit and on friends who did have cars for trips further afield. (It is also most likely that my mother was working throughout the summer.) My mother had a friend from Ginn named Ardis Osborne who took us on a family visit to New Hampshire and Vermont (not really much of a drive by Midwestern standards). We went to a sharp rocky beach on the cold North Atlantic, that was quite different from what I had been led in southern Texas to expect of a beach. We saw Walden Pond, and the Minute Man statue dedicated to “the shot heard round the world”. We visited Fruitlands, the farm where Louisa May Alcott lived when her father Bronson Alcott was devising a utopian community.
I spent a number of weeks in a summer school, where the children spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in an auditorium waiting for the busses to their neighborhood. I was in a class that was introduced to some colorful little wooden blocks, that had clear mathematical relations to one another in their lengths, although I was the only one in the class that apparently was able to grasp this fact. It was quite literally graspable, as much of the New Math curriculum of the time required, and the rods were still in use years later when I went to the School of Education (but rather expensive apparatus I expect). But I digress.
In the fall we moved to another house in Newton, nearer the Newton Centre stop, on Cabot Street. I went to second grade at the Cabot School, a few blocks away. Miss Robertson was the teacher (not Robinson like the Swiss family, but Robertson, get that right!). It was discovered I could win spelling bees, acing even hard words from the fourth-grade list like "kitchen". The classroom had a piano and a record player in it, and Miss R taught us to sing quite a number of Peter, Paul & Mary songs off their album. We learned "Puff the Magic Dragon", "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and "If I Had a Hammer", but I will spare you the recitation. She also taught us a song about the Titanic, probably in preparation for the visit to our class of a very old lady who actually remembered the sinking of the Titanic – not that she had survived it, but she remembered the event.
There was a ship Titanic that sailed the ocean blue, and they thought they’d built a ship that the water could never go through! It was on the maiden trip, when the iceberg hit the ship, it was sad when the great ship went down. Long chorus of It was sad boys sad. The next verse contained non-historical material concerning the establishment of class relations on board, but concluded So they put the poor below, and they were the first to go. It was sad….
I was already reading better than any of the reading groups in the class, so for reading period they sent me down the echoing empty hallway to a special program in another classroom. The class there had free access to shelves of books, and the program was to read as you pleased. I took in a favorite book on Florence Nightingale, and lost it there.
Despite my peculiarities – my name was always cause for comment, It’s a boy’s name – I eventually began to find friends in the neighborhood. Marjorie had dark brown curls and lived in a very grand house, farther up the hill, where they had a black maid that I caught a glimpse of on one of my few visits. While I was still not sure what she meant by a black person, Marjorie confided in me that they were a different kind of people, who smelled funny. I cannot recall whether she mentioned that her own family was Jewish, although in retrospect that is quite clear to me.
I think it was that Christmas that my half-brother Christopher came to stay with us. Chris was very dear to me, although we were not strictly speaking related as he was my stepfather’s son from a previous marriage, and lived with his mother, but we had known each other since we were four and I put up with a lot from kids who made fun of such a thing as a half-brother when I told them I had one. We did not have a Christmas tree, but Chris and I made one in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper, lying on the floor in the hallway by the stairs as I recall, as that was the only floorspace big enough to work in. It was a very tall, narrow tree, two rolls wide, but not really very satisfactory as Christmas trees go. The wallpaper had been found in the attic. Other marvelous things were in that attic: a stack of ancient National Geographic magazines; a stamp collection featuring many stamps from someone’s wartime correspondence to Europe and the Far East, that I took with me when we left; a full set of Edwardian-era children’s encyclopedias, that I went about reading from cover to cover.
And then I turned eight, and 1963 began.
When I turned seven we were living at 41-B Beaconwood Road, which is right off of Beacon Street, the same Beacon Street that runs all the way into downtown Boston. But we were out in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, in a side-by-side ranch-style duplex on a cul-de-sac. It was located about a mile from the Newton Highlands stop on the MTA. My room had a piece of linoleum to cover the floor, a desk and chest of drawers that were purchased unfinished and painted pale blue.
Bozo the Clown, who had a popular children’s television show, was reputed to live in one of the nondescript houses across and further down the street.
My parents worked every day in the city, my mother as a textbook editor at Ginn & Company, my father as an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. The MTA was a trolley out where we boarded the train, and still is, the stations little open shelters beside the train tracks, that becomes a subway somewhere in past Brookline into the heart of the city, where the cars screech into underground ceramic-tiled stations. The noise was horrendous. But in downtown Boston we might visit the Garden, where the swan boats floated magically on a pond, or the Commons. Most likely we would visit bookshops. It seemed possible that I visited every second-hand bookshop in Boston and Cambridge, as my parents were both students of English literature on the prowl for books. My mother spent her commutes reading British Victoriana toward her dissertation, including the complete works of an author named Israel Zangwill that she would later get an entire book out of.
I expected that I would be a teacher and writer like my mother. My parents said when I grew up I could be a Cliffie, and go to Radcliffe, and iron my hair.
That summer is most likely the one that we went on a number of vacation road trips. Our family had no car at that time, and thus depended entirely on public transit and on friends who did have cars for trips further afield. (It is also most likely that my mother was working throughout the summer.) My mother had a friend from Ginn named Ardis Osborne who took us on a family visit to New Hampshire and Vermont (not really much of a drive by Midwestern standards). We went to a sharp rocky beach on the cold North Atlantic, that was quite different from what I had been led in southern Texas to expect of a beach. We saw Walden Pond, and the Minute Man statue dedicated to “the shot heard round the world”. We visited Fruitlands, the farm where Louisa May Alcott lived when her father Bronson Alcott was devising a utopian community.
I spent a number of weeks in a summer school, where the children spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in an auditorium waiting for the busses to their neighborhood. I was in a class that was introduced to some colorful little wooden blocks, that had clear mathematical relations to one another in their lengths, although I was the only one in the class that apparently was able to grasp this fact. It was quite literally graspable, as much of the New Math curriculum of the time required, and the rods were still in use years later when I went to the School of Education (but rather expensive apparatus I expect). But I digress.
In the fall we moved to another house in Newton, nearer the Newton Centre stop, on Cabot Street. I went to second grade at the Cabot School, a few blocks away. Miss Robertson was the teacher (not Robinson like the Swiss family, but Robertson, get that right!). It was discovered I could win spelling bees, acing even hard words from the fourth-grade list like "kitchen". The classroom had a piano and a record player in it, and Miss R taught us to sing quite a number of Peter, Paul & Mary songs off their album. We learned "Puff the Magic Dragon", "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and "If I Had a Hammer", but I will spare you the recitation. She also taught us a song about the Titanic, probably in preparation for the visit to our class of a very old lady who actually remembered the sinking of the Titanic – not that she had survived it, but she remembered the event.
There was a ship Titanic that sailed the ocean blue, and they thought they’d built a ship that the water could never go through! It was on the maiden trip, when the iceberg hit the ship, it was sad when the great ship went down. Long chorus of It was sad boys sad. The next verse contained non-historical material concerning the establishment of class relations on board, but concluded So they put the poor below, and they were the first to go. It was sad….
I was already reading better than any of the reading groups in the class, so for reading period they sent me down the echoing empty hallway to a special program in another classroom. The class there had free access to shelves of books, and the program was to read as you pleased. I took in a favorite book on Florence Nightingale, and lost it there.
Despite my peculiarities – my name was always cause for comment, It’s a boy’s name – I eventually began to find friends in the neighborhood. Marjorie had dark brown curls and lived in a very grand house, farther up the hill, where they had a black maid that I caught a glimpse of on one of my few visits. While I was still not sure what she meant by a black person, Marjorie confided in me that they were a different kind of people, who smelled funny. I cannot recall whether she mentioned that her own family was Jewish, although in retrospect that is quite clear to me.
I think it was that Christmas that my half-brother Christopher came to stay with us. Chris was very dear to me, although we were not strictly speaking related as he was my stepfather’s son from a previous marriage, and lived with his mother, but we had known each other since we were four and I put up with a lot from kids who made fun of such a thing as a half-brother when I told them I had one. We did not have a Christmas tree, but Chris and I made one in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper, lying on the floor in the hallway by the stairs as I recall, as that was the only floorspace big enough to work in. It was a very tall, narrow tree, two rolls wide, but not really very satisfactory as Christmas trees go. The wallpaper had been found in the attic. Other marvelous things were in that attic: a stack of ancient National Geographic magazines; a stamp collection featuring many stamps from someone’s wartime correspondence to Europe and the Far East, that I took with me when we left; a full set of Edwardian-era children’s encyclopedias, that I went about reading from cover to cover.
And then I turned eight, and 1963 began.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Basement Studio Space
In another part of the forest, I recall the first basement studio I had. Now that I think about it very hard, it was not years later as it seems at first, but just the following spring, because it was in the house we lived in on Brooks Street for only a few months before moving back to the co-ops. I had dropped out of college, soon after beginning my fourth semester. My second-floor room in the co-op would have green walls and wine-dark drapes.
In that basement on Brooks Street, a very normal dirty utilitarian cement basement, I made an enclosure of second-hand drapes, which I got cheap from St Vincent de Paul, and dyed a rich wine-color in the wringer washer. Two of my roommates got very mad about that, because they were in the habit of washing their nursing home uniforms in that washer every night and had them both dyed pink as a result of my project. But they didn’t actually complain to me about it, but to their boyfriend, who talked to mine, and you can see why we only lived there for a few months with that kind of communication going on. Entire volumes of interesting incident occurred during those few months, approximately February to May.
At the other end of the basement was a shelf full of cardboard boxes, that I was told contained chemistry glassware, and one box of lithium: the kind Mr Roberts in tenth-grade chemistry class donned protective goggles and apron to explode in the black chemistry sink, by putting a little bit of it in water. Explosive lithium. In the basement. Right. The people we were living with, or should I say, the person who organized the house we were living in, also from time to time organized a lab for MDA production – what in later years became MDMA. In my Chemistry for Mankind class we had a mimeographed handout diagramming the chemical structure of MDA, a sort of amphetamine with strong hallucinatory effects, which made for good trips because of the speed. The chemist used to come around to the house in the evenings to watch Kung Fu on the television. I saw him years later at a WisCon, coming down the grand lobby stairway, and he had not changed much. The person who organized the house was nicknamed Milo, as in Milo Minderbinder from the novel Catch-22, and he was full of exploits. Years later, again, as a suburban housewife, I saw his name and photo on the evening news when he was convicted of attempting to poison his wife -- one of the roommates. We had danced at their wedding, and ridden in the limo. Another of the roommates now sells insurance, and I ran into her with considerable astonishment at her father’s retirement party. We did not discuss the house on Brooks Street.
The studio was supposed to be a sewing studio. There was a sewing co-op on State Street,The Silver Thread, and it had given me the bright idea of going into business as a seamstress, sewing hand-made clothing, as I had learned to sew on my mother’s machine and made all kinds of things, clothing and patchworks and stuffed toys. I had a second-hand cabinet machine that my boyfriend Peter bought me, there in that basement. I did in fact use it later to construct about half of the Frostline sleeping bag kit that Peter Rabbit ordered so that we could go hiking the Appalachian Trail or some such (although that never occurred), that then lay packed in two cardboard boxes at various locations for thirty years. Now I have a different machine, a Kenmore portable that I bought for $40 from a friend, and mostly use it for mending and alterations. Last year I finally discarded the unfinished project, which mice had got into at some point, and made pillows from all the sealed coded packets of down and sleeping-bag stuffing.
In that basement on Brooks Street, a very normal dirty utilitarian cement basement, I made an enclosure of second-hand drapes, which I got cheap from St Vincent de Paul, and dyed a rich wine-color in the wringer washer. Two of my roommates got very mad about that, because they were in the habit of washing their nursing home uniforms in that washer every night and had them both dyed pink as a result of my project. But they didn’t actually complain to me about it, but to their boyfriend, who talked to mine, and you can see why we only lived there for a few months with that kind of communication going on. Entire volumes of interesting incident occurred during those few months, approximately February to May.
At the other end of the basement was a shelf full of cardboard boxes, that I was told contained chemistry glassware, and one box of lithium: the kind Mr Roberts in tenth-grade chemistry class donned protective goggles and apron to explode in the black chemistry sink, by putting a little bit of it in water. Explosive lithium. In the basement. Right. The people we were living with, or should I say, the person who organized the house we were living in, also from time to time organized a lab for MDA production – what in later years became MDMA. In my Chemistry for Mankind class we had a mimeographed handout diagramming the chemical structure of MDA, a sort of amphetamine with strong hallucinatory effects, which made for good trips because of the speed. The chemist used to come around to the house in the evenings to watch Kung Fu on the television. I saw him years later at a WisCon, coming down the grand lobby stairway, and he had not changed much. The person who organized the house was nicknamed Milo, as in Milo Minderbinder from the novel Catch-22, and he was full of exploits. Years later, again, as a suburban housewife, I saw his name and photo on the evening news when he was convicted of attempting to poison his wife -- one of the roommates. We had danced at their wedding, and ridden in the limo. Another of the roommates now sells insurance, and I ran into her with considerable astonishment at her father’s retirement party. We did not discuss the house on Brooks Street.
The studio was supposed to be a sewing studio. There was a sewing co-op on State Street,The Silver Thread, and it had given me the bright idea of going into business as a seamstress, sewing hand-made clothing, as I had learned to sew on my mother’s machine and made all kinds of things, clothing and patchworks and stuffed toys. I had a second-hand cabinet machine that my boyfriend Peter bought me, there in that basement. I did in fact use it later to construct about half of the Frostline sleeping bag kit that Peter Rabbit ordered so that we could go hiking the Appalachian Trail or some such (although that never occurred), that then lay packed in two cardboard boxes at various locations for thirty years. Now I have a different machine, a Kenmore portable that I bought for $40 from a friend, and mostly use it for mending and alterations. Last year I finally discarded the unfinished project, which mice had got into at some point, and made pillows from all the sealed coded packets of down and sleeping-bag stuffing.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Design 101
The summer between my first and second year of college, after I had moved from the slab dorm into the co-op house, I took an art class. That is, an Art class, in the Art Department of the UW, the first Design prerequisite class for all the other art classes. Nearly every day I walked up and down State Street to the bunkerlike Humanities Building and went upstairs to a cement classroom without windows. Often it was open so the students could work there on our projects, which was good because my room at the co-op was too small for a desk, although sometimes I worked there on the floor.
The teacher gave us a list of acrylic paints to buy, the primary colors to mix others from, yellow red and blue, with white and black, and then also a tube of purple, because, he explained, you will see it is hard to mix a good purple from red and blue. That was a mystery. It was true, and it still is, although I have since learned that is because the particular red and blue he had us buy do not make as vivid a secondary as certain other reds or blues. We mixed color wheels, or something like that, as we had mostly been doing in primary school art classes with cheap seven-pan boxes of watercolor. We made some geometric designs with related shades of a single color. I painted a very gray impressionistic landscape of the willows overhanging Lake Mendota from the rocks, maybe with ducks; it was so bad I destroyed it soon after. I made a number of collages that I still have.
Collage on purple box
It was not a Drawing class, and as I recall we didn’t do any drawing. Not a painting class either, really, and we didn’t use watercolors or oils or pastels. I’m thinking over all these things because of the reading I’ve done recently on art curricula of the last few centuries, and where my training fits in. My previous art classes had been the kind where the art teacher comes around to the classroom once a week, and tries to get everyone to exhibit their innate genius in the format of some medium and project she has already worked out in detail: crayon drawings with resist, linoleum block printing, papier mache masks, macramé hangings. I had spent one month in a high school art class trying to draw in pencil a still life that seemed to me entirely dead, and the teacher never satisfied with what I had done. But mostly I had avoided art classes because, I thought, I was not enough of an artist.
I guess I took that summer class to test this assumption, as a sort of lark. As larkishness goes it was not much fun. For our final projects I had a fairly weak collage, because I was resisting the part of the lesson where you abandon the original content of the photo or object, and was composing surrealist pastiche from the work of professional photographers and advertising designers. One girl in our class was going to be an Artist, though. I could tell because she had made a large soft sculpture out of dozens of gloves.
The teacher gave us a list of acrylic paints to buy, the primary colors to mix others from, yellow red and blue, with white and black, and then also a tube of purple, because, he explained, you will see it is hard to mix a good purple from red and blue. That was a mystery. It was true, and it still is, although I have since learned that is because the particular red and blue he had us buy do not make as vivid a secondary as certain other reds or blues. We mixed color wheels, or something like that, as we had mostly been doing in primary school art classes with cheap seven-pan boxes of watercolor. We made some geometric designs with related shades of a single color. I painted a very gray impressionistic landscape of the willows overhanging Lake Mendota from the rocks, maybe with ducks; it was so bad I destroyed it soon after. I made a number of collages that I still have.
Collage on purple box
It was not a Drawing class, and as I recall we didn’t do any drawing. Not a painting class either, really, and we didn’t use watercolors or oils or pastels. I’m thinking over all these things because of the reading I’ve done recently on art curricula of the last few centuries, and where my training fits in. My previous art classes had been the kind where the art teacher comes around to the classroom once a week, and tries to get everyone to exhibit their innate genius in the format of some medium and project she has already worked out in detail: crayon drawings with resist, linoleum block printing, papier mache masks, macramé hangings. I had spent one month in a high school art class trying to draw in pencil a still life that seemed to me entirely dead, and the teacher never satisfied with what I had done. But mostly I had avoided art classes because, I thought, I was not enough of an artist.
I guess I took that summer class to test this assumption, as a sort of lark. As larkishness goes it was not much fun. For our final projects I had a fairly weak collage, because I was resisting the part of the lesson where you abandon the original content of the photo or object, and was composing surrealist pastiche from the work of professional photographers and advertising designers. One girl in our class was going to be an Artist, though. I could tell because she had made a large soft sculpture out of dozens of gloves.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Petit digression
It must have been in the spring semester before, the teacher for my second semester of French Lit was a Professeur Smith, and what most amused me to learn from him was how to speak French with a totally flat American accent. His accent horrified me, every lecture. I knew it was getting into my brain. It might spoil my properly rolled glottal R's that I had picked up early enough to get them right. I might not know any grammar at all, but pronunciation was a specialty of the conversational method I had learned in high school.
At thirteen I had joined a class that had been meandering through French instruction for three years, taught by the head of the university foreign language department. Every day for an hour, from the moment M. Durette entered the room, only French was spoken. We watched filmstrips and listened to recordings, ecoutez et repetez, listen and repeat, repeat endlessly, in the darkened room, blinds lowered, our metal desk-chair units banked in two rows on each side of the room, and he explained the illuminated pictures, in voluble French. Within a month I had begun to pick up what he was going on about. Le petit train est arretee a la gare. And curiously, I was able to write French from his dictation and spell rather well immediately.
Then after the charismatic M. Durette, I had two years at Whitewater High School with the dynamic Mme Flanagan, as well as six weeks in summer of European travel with a high school group that she chaperoned. What those teachers gave carried me through a long way. But not much past Professeur Smith.
At thirteen I had joined a class that had been meandering through French instruction for three years, taught by the head of the university foreign language department. Every day for an hour, from the moment M. Durette entered the room, only French was spoken. We watched filmstrips and listened to recordings, ecoutez et repetez, listen and repeat, repeat endlessly, in the darkened room, blinds lowered, our metal desk-chair units banked in two rows on each side of the room, and he explained the illuminated pictures, in voluble French. Within a month I had begun to pick up what he was going on about. Le petit train est arretee a la gare. And curiously, I was able to write French from his dictation and spell rather well immediately.
Then after the charismatic M. Durette, I had two years at Whitewater High School with the dynamic Mme Flanagan, as well as six weeks in summer of European travel with a high school group that she chaperoned. What those teachers gave carried me through a long way. But not much past Professeur Smith.
El Proximo Paso
My son has now just finished his first semester of second year of college, and liked only some of it. He took Chemistry, and Anthropology, and Precalculus, and Psychology, and Spanish 301 -- El Proximo Paso -- because he took lots of Spanish in high school and traveled a bit. He moved into off-campus housing instead of the dorms, and is learning about bachelor squalor and paying bills. What we used to call sophomore year. It continues to surprise me, as it has since he was born, how always I compare his experience to mine and find myself reflecting at every age on the differences between us. It is like having two children, the real one and the ghostly one of my memories.
In my first semester of sophomore year I took Chemistry for Mankind (not for science majors), and Economics, and third-semester French Lit. I took lots of French Lit because I had to take some lit classes and was able to take them all in French, because I had taken French in high school and picked it up quickly and had traveled a bit. But I never lived in the dorms. In my first year at age seventeen I lived in grad student housing on Spring Street, which shocks my son who tells me what a slum that area is now, a single room in a slab of international style private dormitory that was possibly ten by twelve feet including the closet. But I digress. I was talking about the first semester of my sophomore year.
My third semester, following Early & 17th Century, and 18th-19th Century, was 20th Century French Lit. We read L'Etranger by Albert Camus, L'Immoraliste by Andre Gide, Sartre's Les Mouches, some mimeographed copies of selected surrealist poetry, and some Beckett and Genet in Panorama du Theatre Nouveau. We read de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une jeune fille bien rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) and I wrote a three-page biographical paper in bad French that concerned the correspondences (as another poet had it) between my emotional states and the local weather, during my family's move to California when I was in high school.
I had already taken Psychology, which was supposedly my major, a beginning course that had put me off by being all about neurology and visual perception, instead of about symbolism which was what I was more interested in at the time.
So now I have to dig through old notebooks and journals to find what would have filled out my twelve to fifteen class hour credits for that semester. Memory is tricksy. I find that was the semester I also took my first Spanish course.
In my first semester of sophomore year I took Chemistry for Mankind (not for science majors), and Economics, and third-semester French Lit. I took lots of French Lit because I had to take some lit classes and was able to take them all in French, because I had taken French in high school and picked it up quickly and had traveled a bit. But I never lived in the dorms. In my first year at age seventeen I lived in grad student housing on Spring Street, which shocks my son who tells me what a slum that area is now, a single room in a slab of international style private dormitory that was possibly ten by twelve feet including the closet. But I digress. I was talking about the first semester of my sophomore year.
My third semester, following Early & 17th Century, and 18th-19th Century, was 20th Century French Lit. We read L'Etranger by Albert Camus, L'Immoraliste by Andre Gide, Sartre's Les Mouches, some mimeographed copies of selected surrealist poetry, and some Beckett and Genet in Panorama du Theatre Nouveau. We read de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une jeune fille bien rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) and I wrote a three-page biographical paper in bad French that concerned the correspondences (as another poet had it) between my emotional states and the local weather, during my family's move to California when I was in high school.
I had already taken Psychology, which was supposedly my major, a beginning course that had put me off by being all about neurology and visual perception, instead of about symbolism which was what I was more interested in at the time.
So now I have to dig through old notebooks and journals to find what would have filled out my twelve to fifteen class hour credits for that semester. Memory is tricksy. I find that was the semester I also took my first Spanish course.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Forward Into The Past
How we got to Thanksgiving dinner in the historian's house was more than likely on the bus. My boyfriend Peter was a bit of a transit nut. As I later lived in that neighborhood I still remember the routes, either the A or the C that ran south down Mills and out Park Street, but at the time I knew Madison no further south than Regent Street. All the busses still ran down State Street then though, and from Gorham and State we probably took the A bus that went west on Regent to Speedway and out to West Towne. From Regent we walked up Adams Street, which made something of an impression on me, being my second dad’s name and all. The Haygood’s house was and is a Victorian gingerbready sort of house on a corner, with a bay window in the front parlor and a dining room through an archway behind that, large kitchen in back and stairs up the side to the upstairs, like so many others. The family was the kind that collected all their children’s friends and kept them more or less out of trouble. I had been taken up by the children of the comfortable middle class. And a good thing too. This was not the first or the last time I was to wish I had gone to West High School.
It was the first semester of my second year at the UW. I was taking Chemistry For Mankind, and a third semester of French lit, and living at Solveig House, the first co-op house I lived in. It had once been a fraternity, and has since become some kind of fraternity once again, a big Prairie School rooming house at 420 West Gorham. We lived in a large melon-orange colored room at the front of the second floor. Peter had been living way out on the west side, and bicycling in all summer to his job off of State Street on Gorham, so the location was much closer to his work.
My first room at the co-op had been a tiny sectioned-off room upstairs at the rear of the house, with views onto the parking lot and the co-op house next door. It was right next to the bathroom though, and sufficient for my needs. After being invited to dinner in the co-op dining room in the basement, I had moved in that summer, applied a coat of white paint to my walls, and made sunny yellow curtains out of an Indian bedspread, borrowing the use of some friend's sewing machine. Peter’s first room had been on the lower floor, and very little larger than the waterbed he installed in it. He was an early adopter of such technologies.
His work was at a company called Management Data Systems, and without any college training he had more or less taught himself forms design, when his brother-in-law’s company had found itself awash in paper and needed some systematic control. He took me in to his office and showed me his technical pens and drawing board, and the climate-controlled room through the glass where the mainframe computer was housed. This was back in punch-card dinosaur days. The building MDS had remodeled and moved into, he told me, had previously been a dance hall called The Factory, where he and some of his friends had worked, that went bust when Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona and the big concert was cancelled.
It was the first semester of my second year at the UW. I was taking Chemistry For Mankind, and a third semester of French lit, and living at Solveig House, the first co-op house I lived in. It had once been a fraternity, and has since become some kind of fraternity once again, a big Prairie School rooming house at 420 West Gorham. We lived in a large melon-orange colored room at the front of the second floor. Peter had been living way out on the west side, and bicycling in all summer to his job off of State Street on Gorham, so the location was much closer to his work.
My first room at the co-op had been a tiny sectioned-off room upstairs at the rear of the house, with views onto the parking lot and the co-op house next door. It was right next to the bathroom though, and sufficient for my needs. After being invited to dinner in the co-op dining room in the basement, I had moved in that summer, applied a coat of white paint to my walls, and made sunny yellow curtains out of an Indian bedspread, borrowing the use of some friend's sewing machine. Peter’s first room had been on the lower floor, and very little larger than the waterbed he installed in it. He was an early adopter of such technologies.
His work was at a company called Management Data Systems, and without any college training he had more or less taught himself forms design, when his brother-in-law’s company had found itself awash in paper and needed some systematic control. He took me in to his office and showed me his technical pens and drawing board, and the climate-controlled room through the glass where the mainframe computer was housed. This was back in punch-card dinosaur days. The building MDS had remodeled and moved into, he told me, had previously been a dance hall called The Factory, where he and some of his friends had worked, that went bust when Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona and the big concert was cancelled.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
My life has been crowded with incident.
So much so that even now that I have settled down to live in the same town for what is at last more than half my life, one thing leads to another in my thoughts, off in all directions. When I walk past a certain blue house at Grant & Adams, on the shortcut from Park to Monroe St, it reminds me of how I sat after Thanksgiving dinner in that dining room when I was 18, and entertained the party for an eternal moment as the father, a historian, asked me for more detail and prompted me to continue the account I had begun in answer to the simple question of how I had gotten to Madison from my birthplace. When I drive by, I have to hold the memory in reserve. My local hippie boyfriend had taken me to that Thanksgiving dinner with the family of his heart, from his years at West High School. No one had ever listened to me tell the whole thing through, so until then I had only my private grandiose suspicions that I even had a story. My spouse can still be surprised by things I recall, places and events I can tell of that he has never heard.
Likewise, every time I drive past the Shopiere Road exit near Beloit, on the interstate south to Chicago, it reminds me of a colorful story from my far too interesting past, 1983 or so. Once I entertained a friend as we drove back to Madison with the tale, and a few months later on the bus to O’Hare I wrote it all out, but I am still looking for those notes. Oh look! Here they are buried in a 2001-2005 travel notebook, from when I was last on my way to Potlatch in San Francisco. Hyperlink should go here.
Already behind, well into the first week of January 2008, in the middle of my life, and seeming lost in the middle of wood, that Thanksgiving dinner seems as good a mark as any from which to begin. Unlike the Red Queen, I do not run as twice as fast to make progress, but plod along as usual. The nature of my medium will pile each episode onto the last to scroll into a structure like that movie Memento, a series of forward-moving sentences that leads to the beginning of the previous, or last, depending on how you look at it. For the amusement of my friends, I will attempt to recount some of the story of how I arrived here.
Likewise, every time I drive past the Shopiere Road exit near Beloit, on the interstate south to Chicago, it reminds me of a colorful story from my far too interesting past, 1983 or so. Once I entertained a friend as we drove back to Madison with the tale, and a few months later on the bus to O’Hare I wrote it all out, but I am still looking for those notes. Oh look! Here they are buried in a 2001-2005 travel notebook, from when I was last on my way to Potlatch in San Francisco. Hyperlink should go here.
Already behind, well into the first week of January 2008, in the middle of my life, and seeming lost in the middle of wood, that Thanksgiving dinner seems as good a mark as any from which to begin. Unlike the Red Queen, I do not run as twice as fast to make progress, but plod along as usual. The nature of my medium will pile each episode onto the last to scroll into a structure like that movie Memento, a series of forward-moving sentences that leads to the beginning of the previous, or last, depending on how you look at it. For the amusement of my friends, I will attempt to recount some of the story of how I arrived here.
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