One Morning In the Month of May ...

Me and Poetry.

We're starting a new work learning experience that is already starting to torture me: Poetry. If you know me, you know I like poetry. I did a poetry workshop with children.* Anyway, we had our first meeting at lunchtime yesterday and we were asked what our first experience with Poetry was - and for me it was my dad's recitations at the dinner table. "Gunga Din" was probably interesting the first 2,000 times, but it's a long poem and I wanted to go out an play after dinner. Seeing it done by Mr. Magoo made me understand it better, but it was torture after a while. When my dad was elderly, I could recite "The Incident of the French Camp" with him and help him when he faltered. "You know we French stormed Ratisbone ..." - love that poem because of the punchline, "And smiling the boy fell dead." Despite this, I like poetry that tells a story and some rhyme and the tumty-tumty-tum.

But I also like contemporary Word. As you can tell from the March 19 post, my husband and I - a couple of round, very very white, very very middle-class caricatures - attend poetry nights, making the denizens nervous by our pasty-white presence. In all honesty, we can take the strong language, the political and racial backlash, but the religious stuff makes us wince. We have heard poetry so emotionally evocative, so hair-raising, wry, ironic, sad and funny that we exit stunned and amazed by the power and the talent of local people. How dearly I would love to host a salon of these people each week! How rewarding it would be to provide them a safe and stable place to speak their hearts. Even the religious ones.

Anyway, thinking back to early poetry in my life, I recalled having a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses ... and being unable to relate to it. Here I am, subjected to versification at length ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon ..."!) on a regular basis and these gentle poems turn out to be totally unmemorable, except the one about the wooden spoon or shovel and digging in the sand and the sea filling it in - something I could relate to having tried to dig in the sand and having the ocean fill it up and destroy my handiwork.

Four languages later, I find I have accumulated some foreign favorites that I can still recite. My mother's cousin used "Du bist wie eine Blume" as a curse: "Ohhhh, dubistwieineblume!" so that resonated with me. I cultivate white roses with José Martí. I used "Venez a ma jubilé" for the invitation to my 50th birthday party. I have The Oxford Book of French Verse all post-it noted and went back this weekend looking for something appropriate for the "Poetry and Pints" meeting in Second Life and amazed myself that I understood any of the poems (much of it 700 year old French) enough to mark them as a favorite.

The first leg of our adventures in "Poultry" (as I relentlessly like to call it, the same way my sister always talked about "Taco Hell" instead of Taco Bell) will be through the Leaves of Grass section called "Song of Myself." I should withhold my applause until the end, I guess, and post it at the appropriate place (the Staffdevelopomendo blog). This particular work of Whitman was probably thrusting, avant-garde stuff when it was first written, both titillating and evocative, but it's an uphill slog for me now. I can mark bits of it I find pithy or expressive, but the totality of it is wearing me down. I hate being oppressed by something I really love. Bring back the stories and the tumty-tumpty-tum!

*Despite the age limitation I put on the sign-up sheet, my workshop contained children who could not read, much less write poetry, because their doting, idiotic, hare-brained parents [puts hand over heart and tries to calm down] insisted that Their Child was Advanced. I have gotten a call about signing up for workshops for this summer already (in April at the time) from a mom who insisted that her five year old was good with scissors and it would be totally appropriate to leave her in a room filled with older children more capable than the child working on some as yet undescribed project of unknown age-appropriateness. I had one of those kids in a program this winter who ended up sobbing her little heart out. Not in my workshop, lady! I want six year olds minimum! These programs are for school-age kids, not for your "Advanced" pre-schooler/toddler. [Looks under desk for bottle of bourbon - none there. Despair!]

By the Footprints In the Jell-O!

Derby Day upcoming, "I am always remember the day I first meet" the parents of a very good friend of mine. He had won me in my first annual "Win A Marf Contest" by submitting many pages of what he would do with me when I got there, letters of recommendation, and an 8" x 10" glossy. My fingers are drumming the keyboard now as I try to remember why my then boyfriend had not won. I think I recall a letter saying, "If you want to come visit, why don't you just say so?" That was not what I was looking for, but says a lot about that relationship.

My friend had me for a week of my vacation from the library. As a house-warming gift, I brought him a glass mug on which I had had etched "I've Been Sacked By" and the name of his employer. To be fair, he'd argued his way back into the job ... for the satisfaction of quitting. The sentiment, though, was appreciated. This was the first time I spent any extended time with this, one of my best friends. It was definitely the first time I stayed over. I hadn't thought much about that, what it entailed. He was renting a part of a house that had two bedrooms (one occupied by a roommate who was even more slovenly), a bath with a tub, and a kitchen. The kitchen was fairly roomy and had a table with chairs, so it was the social point of the ménage.

His bedroom consisted of a mattress on the floor, and a floor covered in loose change. Apparently, when he undressed at night, the change fell out of his pockets and he never bothered to pick it up. I spent each morning lying next to his slippers and desultorily picking up the coins and putting them in the slippers.

I thought it odd that such a young man would have bedroom slippers until I made note of the state of the floors in the place. Each morning he would rise, attempt to put on coin-laden slippers, swear, pour them out, and go on as if nothing unusual had happened. I asked him about it later and he had apparently not been awake enough to register the addition of the coins.

Slippers were a wise choice. Neither of these guys was big on cleaning and the bathroom had dust woofies in it that were about 3 or 4 feet long. Every zephyr that ran through the house and under the door caused these ephemeral caterpillars to ripple. I had this terror of being in the tub and someone opening a door to the outside, causing a woofie to raise its head over the edge of the tub and attach itself to my wet body. Bleagh bleagh bleagh!!!!

I would stay in bed until I ran out of small change to put in the slippers and then get up and cast about for something to do. The kitchen was a disaster. My friend had tried to make rice the week before and lost tract of time. The rice had burned to the bottom of the pan, and about an inch and a half up. He'd scraped out most of it, but just filled it with water and left it in the sink. That pan was the worst of it. I cleaned all the other dishes and worked assiduously on the rice pan.

I was up early one morning, probably a Sunday, when there was a knock at the door. I opened it and saw this very surprised looking middle-aged couple standing outside. They were his parents. They asked to see him. He was still in bed, so I had to let them in and go get him. This was the awkward part for me. I was going to have to wake him up, which was not an easy task. It was embarrassing for me that he was still slug-abed and his parents had come. I didn't realize until a little bit later that they didn't know I was visiting.

Hearing that his parents were there helped to wake him a bit, but not totally. He had to get up, dump the coins out of his slippers, swear, and get dressed. Eventually, we all sat down at the kitchen table for what I expected to be the typical semi-awkward cross-generational conversation.

My insouscience probably made me come across as a shameless Jezebel. This is nice, I thought, I get to meet his parents, who were a bit younger than mine, but I had always gotten on well with older people. I really had totally the wrong attitude and I'm sure they left thinking the worst of me, little realizing the relative innocence of our relationship. If anything embarrassed me, it was my friend using a credit card to wine and dine me ... which his parents apparently paid for him.

Anyway, we had a wonderful time other than the parental visit. I laughed myself sick quite a few times while he told elephant jokes, which he normally would not consider to be funny. It got to the point where he could just say, "Shoehorn!" to set me off again. We would sit at the kitchen table and talk and just enjoy each other.

He was making brownies one night, and almost proudly showing his self-sufficiency in opening the box and handling the whole deal himself. In an unusual fit of tidiness, he not only threw the box away, but decided the trash can was full, closed up the bag, and took it out to the bin. He was quite carefree in the process, and I started wondering if he had made note of the time or how long the box said they needed to cook. No matter, I was a brownie expert.

His roommate came into the kitchen, having smelled the brownies.
"Wow, brownies! When will they be done?"
"I don't know," my friend said.
"How long are they supposed to cook?"
"Dunno."
"When'd you put 'em in?"
"Don't remember."
"Where's the box?"
"Threw it away."
"Oh." Pause.
"I took it out to the bin."
"Ah."

Soon they were both gathered around the oven door, peering inside.
"How do you know when they're done?"
"I think you put a knife in and see if it comes out clean."

His roommate lost interest and wandered off again. My friend returned to the kitchen table where I was biting my lip and my shoulders shaking.

"Wha-at?" he said.
"You know how you can tell if the brownies are done?" I asked.

He paused and considered it. "By the footprints in the Jell-O?" And I lost it. I was laughing so hard and he kept asking, "No, really - how do you tell?" And somehow, "When they pull away from the sides" sounded even funnier. Okay, you had to have been there.

"No, really. Tell me! How can you tell when the brownies are done?"

Doin' the Dishes

I have learned that older people don't see well. Or hear. This is doing the dishes without my sister, while I was living as an adult (in my 40s) with my parents between jobs.