WOTD 34 - POET

We stopped by our friends’ house the other night, dropping off a few things and gathering a few others. Their triplets were at the kitchen island, pencils in hand, school papers strewn out across the granite like they were designing some sort of academic collage. I leaned over the counter as we talked, one part of my brain glancing at the writings of seven year old boys and another part talking about the quality of vanilla in Mexico. You know how it is when you multi task and the different parts of your brain assigned to the varying categories shift their weight and one thing drops into consciousness almost all of a sudden? My first-position thoughts shifted from vanilla to Luke’s little essay on his trip to Mexico. It soon took my full attention as I read it, charmed right off by his neat handwriting, methodically chiseled across the lined elementary school homework paper. He sat right in front of me, and out of consideration for his privacy, I asked for permission to read it. He nodded his head. I picked up the paper and scanned it, then almost instinctively asked if I could read it aloud to him. Again, he nodded.

“My mom used to read my writings aloud to me when I was little.” I told him.

I lifted the paper in my hands in a rather official sort of way, not too showy, but respectful-like. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he listened to me read, his little head shifted to an angle of pondering, like it was totally new information he was hearing and not something he had created himself not ten minutes before.

Watching the corners of his lips curl up; watching him fight the desire to smile; this was just precious, because I knew what he was feeling. I have felt it before myself.

Fourth grade. Sitting in seat three of row four in Mrs. Euler’s class. Invisible little blonde haired girl. Quiet, dutiful, not at all stellar in any way. I was simply the girl in seat three. Until that day we had to write our first essay. The assignment was to write something about the wind. I decided to write about a Gale wind, having just learned about different kinds of air movement. Using my best handwriting, I copied what I wrote on the grade A paper reserved for special assignments. I signed my name…Corinne Hansen…and set it on Mrs. Euler’s desk.

A few days later Mrs. Euler called me up to her desk while everyone was working on their arithmetic.

“Mr. Parker would like to see you.”

“Right now?” I asked, my voice instantly shaking, my little heart pounding in my chest.

“Yes.”

That’s all she said. She looked down at the papers she was grading and I turned, glanced over at the kids quietly scribbling numbers on their papers, and shuffled out the door into the wide green linoleum covered hallway. Down the stairs, through the glass topped doors and into the first level, I looked up at the wall and turned where the sign poked out, the one that said: Mr. Parker, Principal. I walked into the secretary’s room and told her Mrs. Euler said I needed to see Mr. Parker. Her hands were hovered over the large keyboard of a typewriter, her fingers pouncing rhythmically on the keys, the slap-slap-slapping of her work shocking my senses until it repeated enough to feel familiar and less threatening. She motioned for me to take a seat. I sat there, my knees pressed together, my tennis shoes barely touching the floor, my back not quite hitting the back of the chair. I fiddled with my fingers, wondering what I might have done wrong, and why Mr. Parker needed to see me. Maybe he found out my dad had come home drunk last week and I was in trouble for that. Maybe I wasn’t ready for fourth grade cuz that math stuff still confused me and they decided I needed to be in third grade again. That would not have bothered me, because Mrs. Hobgood, my third grade teacher, loved me. I knew she did. And Mrs. Euler definitely did not.

The door to Mr. Parker’s office creaked open and a kid I didn’t know walked out, his face looking straight down to the ground. I watched him scurry out, then turned my head forward, looking down at the line in the wax where the rooms divided, peeking up very carefully at the open door to the principals office. The secretary stopped typing and leaned over to me.

“Your turn.” She smiled, then went back to her work. I stood, tugged at my skirt, and tiptoed into the doorway, waiting for permission to enter. Mr. Parker sat, bespectacled, at his desk, his receding hairline reflecting the light streaming in through the window. He looked up at me, asked me my name, and told me to take a seat. I sat on the edge of the chair in front of his desk, my hands tucked under my thighs, elbows facing out, eyebrows raised as I shifted my eyes from the floor to his desk and back to the floor. He reached over his desk to a pile of papers, lifted one up, and looked it over. Next thing I knew he laid the paper on his desk top, grabbed the wooden knob of a stamp, then flipped open the inkpad on the corner of his desk. He tapped the stamp against the ink and then hammered it onto the top of the paper. He blew on it briefly, then handed it to me.

“Very nice, Corinne.” He looked me in the eye as he handed me the paper, a sparkle of warmth shot through his glasses, and then he told me to hurry back to class.

I left, smiling at the secretary as I passed by, and scurried up the stairs to the long green hall. There I paused and looked at the paper. In my own handwriting, with my own name at the top, was my essay; A Gale Wind. And stamped in blue ink next to the title was Mr. Parker’s approval : VERY GOOD.

I took the paper home that afternoon and told Mom about my meeting with the principal and how I was really surprised Mrs. Euler gave my writing to Mr. Parker because she hated me and I wondered aloud if every kid had to meet with Mr. Parker about their essays. Mom sat for a minute and looked at the paper, then began to read aloud:

“A gale wind wizzing trough the almost broken branches of the trees makes a whistling sound that nearly stings your ears….” (I can hardly believe I remembered that!) I can hear my mother’s voice reading it to me. When she read, it sounded like poetry. When she read it sounded beautiful, like she loved my words and knew exactly what I meant to say.

Through the coming years my mother read many of my own words aloud to me. Way back…way, way back in the caverns of my memory I can hear the words, lilting and melodic and well paced. So much better than they sounded in my own head when I read them on paper. Thinking back on it, I believe she could have read me a recipe and it would have sounded poetic. She had a powerful voice. Not thunderous, just powerful.

Mom believed I was a poet. And because she believed; I believed.

There is something markedly different in the sound of a word versus the look of a word. Hearing it gives it a second life; a validity. Mom had vinyl recordings of poets reading their own work, and we especially loved Robert Frost’s rumbly throaty readings of Stopping By Woods, The Mending Wall and Swinging Birches. It was her voice that gave life to Where the Red Fern Grows and The Bird’s Christmas Carol on dark winter nights. Mom taught us to love words, well selected, sparingly and carefully used. Poetry, to her, was a form of prayer and we approached it as if it were a piece of divinity.

Maybe my choice to write words destined to be set to music began with this basic belief; words are to be heard not seen. Sadly, it’s probably why I read so slowly as well. I must speak the words in my brain when I read a book. Auditory learner…I think that’s what they call it.

When my kids were growing up Mom bribed them to learn poetry: $5 for the first recital; memorized, appropriately recited, the number of stanzas determined by the age of the child. After that, each recital of the poem earned them a Quarter. She gifted them with their own personal copies of 101 Favorite Poems, her graceful handwriting in the front being cherished today as her arthritic hands no longer flow like they used to.

I learned, when our kids were learning to write, to read their work back to them. I had learned from the master how to make the words sound as they fell off the tongue. A child owns his writing best when he hears it respectfully and lovingly read aloud.

And so I stood in the Harris’ kitchen and read Luke his little essay about his trip to Mexico.

“Very nice, Luke! You are a writer indeed!”

He smiled his little crooked smile, his eyes twinkling as they looked into mine. Perhaps, little boy… perhaps there is a poet in there.

TRAILING

April 2, 2009 trailing

“….Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:….”

(Ode: Intimations of Mortality by W. Wordsworth)

This is the gospel according to my mother. And gratefully, it is the gospel as I understand it, according to my Creator. I am blessed to have the two be comfortably reconciled, so that I did not have to abandon one to be at peace with the other. My mother taught the gospel in whispers. In touch, both tender and disciplinary. She taught it in the way she worked, in the middle of a fishing stream, in the front seat of the car. One of the most beautiful things she has taught me is how to grow; regardless of age, in spite of past mistakes, without reservations that result from pride. I have watched her and learned. She knew, as I know, that the little ones who emerged all wet and quivering, attached to the motherland, came with heaven in their wings. Their infant silence was a gradual forgetting, but I could always see it in their eyes, a far off gaze as if there were something brighter beyond their mother’s face. I see it in our little Ruby, though with her emerging laughter I have noticed her eyes connecting with ours more and more, so that soon the scene of heaven behind all of us will be dark, though no more distant. It has an element of sadness, knowing her heaven home was so recently left; and yet it is also quite lovely to know that she is given to us wholly and without reservation from her first creator. Such an amazing trust!
When our kids were young my mother taught her grandchildren to love well patterned words. Not just the patterns, I suppose, but also the messages in them. Mom understood, and still understands, the natural usefulness of bribery. So she made a deal with her dozen or so kids, and any of their friends who also called her Gram. She paid them to memorize poetry. There were rules, and you better darn well follow them to the tee! These were the rules:
1. You must stand with your shoulders straight and look Gram in the eye.
2. You must accurately recite the name of the poet and title of the poem.
3. You must recite without flaw at least eight lines of an epic poem, for the youngest ones, and as you got older that number increased.
4. You must be able to express your feelings about the poem with sincerity.
If you were able to do that, then Gram gave you five dollars. That’s a goodly sum of money for a six year old. (Heck, that’s a goodly sum for a fifty year old these days!) Thereafter, each time you recited the poem, following all the same rules, you were entitled to a quarter.

Now on Memorial Day we will gather around the graves and Johnny will be able to recite In Flanders Fields for us. Sarah can finish these words: “Between the dark and the daylight, when the light is beginning to lower….” Walk up to any of Gram’s grandchildren and ask them to recite a poem, and surely one will come up like bubbles in Ginger Ale newly opened. It will come rushing to their minds and their hearts at once, and I can almost guarantee you they will, somewhere in the back of their thoughts, be remembering their old Gram. They’ll recall her handing them a crisp five dollar bill, then placing her weathered hands on their cheeks and pulling them into her, kissing their pink lips with hers and saying, finally… “Do you know how much I love you?” and following that, always, with the words “Who’s your best friend?”
If any of my children are perhaps reading this blog, would you mind answering that question? I just want to make sure you know it.
Thank you, mother of my heart and my body, for teaching me to love words. I will hear for eternity your voice speaking the first poetry I ever wrote. You made it sound so much sweeter than it ever really was. Thank you for giving me strong arms to nestle in, with hands that gathered heaven's trailings and tucked them into my blanket. I feel them with me still.