Raindrops in Streetlamplight, possibly Bruce Springsteen live on radio

I’m in bed, striped pants and seafoam sweater
Wondering if to’ve said something’s better,
The day disintegrating in my mind,
Candle-fed, mirror-struck, ticked til I’m dead,

Agonizing over each word so to
Smile on any happy truth that arrives,
Avoiding pain caused by minds divided.
How, why, can you believe in unicorns?

Leave me here in this bed, this house, this dust?
I can’t go to your world, and you know that.
Ascend into the next dimension then.
I’ll be here with my plaid sheets and my book,

Getting to get and getting through the day.
Unfortunately, we’ll be friends til death,
So I have to face the mind divided,
You 6 feet apart hidden by dense text.

You say you’re coming out but there is more:
The skeleton beneath the youthful skin,
The fungal feeding on the fallen oak. 
Don’t tell me what someone else believes.

Tell me about the sister in the grave,
Obsessive thoughts that spring from one dark day,
The aching womb that lost a wanted child,
The husband once the bloom is off the rose,

The constant fear the one you love will die.
There’s enough in life between dawn and dusk.
No gland, breath, or prayer can get me there.
I’ll be here with my glasses and my lamp.

I’ll write down your name in my book of life.
I’ll sing your name in the song for the lost,
No more believing that than anything
But that you friend have always been hiding.

I’m hiding too, and how I treated you,
Believing in your poise, your hair, your school,
Telling friends glamorous lies about you.
Forget about potential dimensions.

Just for this stupid day stay here with me.
Have a drink with me, tell me your story.
Do not control tomorrow or today.
Let me write down that today you and I…

God help me, I cannot accept this now.
I can’t leap forward to where I should be.
It’s time and sorrow easing month by month
And freshened sharp pain fading once again.

I’d rather clocks and turning off the lamp,
Blowing out the candle, and mirror’s dark.

- Tennessee Williams, “Person to Person”

I moved here with a beautiful blue heeler. You know how dogs can get you. He had eyes, these liquid melty eyes. He really saw me. He felt for me, I knew, there was a sympathy there, a pity and fellow feeling just as much as any human I ever met. More, really, when I think about it.

He knew when I was upset. He’d rest his chin on my knee and look at me and his eyebrows would go up and down with concern and curiosity. He listened, his ears swiveling. His ears said just as much as his eyes - smart, most intelligent creature I ever knew. He could tell time. He knew when I was coming home before I knew myself. But not worried about it, not anxious. Incredibly energetic, but not an anxious dog. He ran with joy, flat out across this field here, with an actual smile on his face.

If you’ve ever moved to leave something behind, if you’ve ever had to extricate yourself from a situation, you know it’s different from moving towards something. Say you get a job you’re excited about, or you’re moving for love. You fell in love and sure, you might be leaving behind everyone and everywhere you know, but you’re moving towards something. All your energy is pointed and focused, and it’s like rolling down a hill. It just builds as you go.

Not so when you leave, when you flee, when things are sticky and they stick to you as you go, when things are bad and it weighs you down as you carry what you can, when it’s a sad situation and the sadness travels heavy to the new place.

Even if you know you have to go, or die. Even if you’re also excited because you finally decided to start a new life. Still, it’s hard.

For me, what I was leaving behind was someone I loved and a bad situation.

Simple fact, he was a junkie. But he was a sweet and gentle soul, too. An angel in my life at a time when I needed someone to drag me out of a hole. So I’m not going to talk trash about him. It hurts me the way I know other people saw him, wasted, a user, useless, dead weight, a beggar, a waste.

Actually, he’s the type of person you can only really see up close. He’s not going to shine as you walk by him on the street. But people who knew him, everyone told him their problems. He was always wondering why people treated him as their confidant. I said it’s your way, the way you have, of listening, and your eyes, your trusting, open eyes. People just fall in there like you’d fall into your own bed at the end of a long day. It wasn’t like there was anything bad to fear, and there was no wall up.

I wish he could have put up a wall, actually. People take advantage of a gentle soul like that. He heard things he should not have had to carry. Maybe people sensed that about him that he was a bit tortured. You just can’t tell your problems to someone who seems perfect. Your deepest darkest secrets - if they come out at all - the only way they can escape is in the presence of a gentle-eyed, totally open person whose darkness is spilled out for anyone near enough to see.

And then in that place, in that presence, that’s where it all comes out, whether you meant to let it go or not.

So many people, at the bar or wherever, would shake their head as if coming out of a trance and say I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t mean to get into all that. Didn’t intend to burden you, forget about all that, but enough about me.

It killed me to leave him behind but there came a time when it was clear I couldn’t save him and I chose to save myself.

Early on, when things were good, we rented a little house with our friends. I worked at a restaurant, learning how to hustle for tips. He worked for a landscaping company, came home tanned and tired but happy. We had so much fun just going to new places around town. We’d try anything - the new glow in the dark putt putt, the old batting cages, bowling, karaoke night at the Mexican place up the block. One time we went to a football game, a balloon glow. We went swimming at the river, fishing. Always parties and barbecues.

When things started to get bad, we rented one room in a big, falling down house. We didn’t do anything fun and new, just parties with people we knew.

At the very end, he lived with his mom. This is when I had one foot out the door and she knew it.

I wanted to live with him. I wanted to live my whole life with him. But he wasn’t really there most of the time. It was like I was throwing all my love and trying and caring and worry at a place where he used to be. Still looked like him, those beautiful eyes. I can see him now, his eyes, his smile, his hands. Looked like him still, even thinner, paler, not strong, not coming home from a day weed-whacking and shoveling mulch, muscly and smelling alive like a garden is alive with sun and rain on the dirt. Not that anymore.

You know when someone’s doing to drag you down, and I knew. That song was on a lot back then. “I will go down with this ship” - and I wanted to be that person.

I was really in love, for the first time, and you have that feeling it’s too late to rush into anything because you’re already there, and it’s too soon for regrets because you’re young, but it’s a headlong feeling, a forward motion, rolling down a hill to your love. Of course you want to go down with this ship. That’s what you think love is, back then.

When things start to go bad, that’s when you find out who you really are. It’s scary, when things go bad. There might be a trip to the emergency room. Bail someone out of jail. Fights that spill out the front door onto the street. Scratches. Broken plates. The amazing power you feel when you smash a plate on a tile kitchen floor - there’s nothing like it in all the world. So you can scare yourself too, on top of all the rest.

It’s easy to be sweet when you’re in love, but what about when you have no money and you’re hungry, you’re desperate, you’re itching, sweating, throwing up, getting kicked out again. Now what if someone’s depending on you? Add that to the mix.

Because he was. He was helpless. Us women like to talk about men like they are helpless babies. It makes us feel competent and important. But junkies, though they may be scrappy and resourceful at times, not my guy. He was fairly useless in desperate times.

I guess, in the end, I have found out I’m very practical. I’m not a dreamer. I’m not into talking about the problem. I want to get to work and solve that problem. You never seen anyone get a job as fast as me, when he’s out of work. When I lost my license, I did all the stuff to get it back ASAP, but he was just like, I guess this is my life now. So could I get him his fix? Yeah.

And that’s the problem. I love him, He’s helpless. He’s depending on me. That’s a lot of responsibility for a young person just starting to make their way in the world. I mean, I was clueless about how to cook dinner or what to do when I got sick, and I had to figure it out. And now I’m trying to keep a junkie alive, and I love him.

That’s the problem. I love him but in the end he moved back in with his mom. I think she hated me. Maybe I should have done more. Or maybe she just didn’t like me. But it doesn’t matter. Because when things go bad, where do you go? You go home.

We never broke up, even. Never had that big fight to end it all. No begging and pleading to please come back to me. What happened was…

…I’m trying to keep this brief. It’s really painful to talk about but, I want to talk about him. I want to remember him. It helps me somehow.

So what happened was, I realized, that he’s an addict. I accepted the fact. One Al-Anon meeting, a meeting for people who are like me, love or live with an addict, and I got the concept. You have to accept reality. Like I said, I’m very practical and pragmatic, so it made sense to me right away. And then just like simple math, I got this much gas in the tank, this much time and energy, and I’m only human. And this sweet, beautiful, gentle man is crack to me. And I’m not his heroine.

So just like a math problem, simple arithmetic, it was clear to me that this ship WAS going down, and I was going down with him. Not in theory, out in the future, but currently, now, and had been for some time, maybe since the beginning. Since the first time we moved from the kinda nice place, split a little house with friends, to renting one room in a dump. Since the first time he got fired for not coming to work. Long before my first desperate thought. Long before I got scared.

I realized he’s going down and I’m going down with him.

Think I didn’t try to save him? Why couldn’t I save him? I tried.

I tried and I tried and I never stopped trying. I’m not one for dwelling on the whys, but I will tell you that when I see a problem, I just want to get to fixing things to rights, right away. So believe me, I did everything I knew to do.

But if you live with an addict, you have to be practical too. Don’t tell them where you keep the money. Don’t feed their fears. Don’t fight reality.

So we didn’t fight in the end. There wasn’t much of a person there to fight with, more and more of the time. He knew, in a way. If you’ve ever looked into the eyes of someone you love and know that they know they’re killing themselves… it’s terrifying.

He knew he could die. It’s absolutely terrifying, to look into those beautiful eyes, fall into those gentle eyes, you want to fall headlong like he falls back shooting up.

That’s why I left.

Last good day we had together was August 5th. His friend’s dog had puppies - blue heelers. Let’s go see ‘em, he kept pestering me. He was all fixed up for the moment - an old friend had come to town bearing gifts - and he was being silly and cheerful. Come on, it’s puppies. Who can resist puppies? So we went, holding hands while I drove. It was out a ways, down 159. His friend lived with his aunt and uncle in a little house with a chain link fence and a nice, big kennel with a couple dogs and this litter of blue heeler mix puppies. He wanted to get me a puppy. I could tell he wanted to do something nice for me.

His friend was going to hook him up. Probably for drugs. Probably the aunt and uncle were in on it, and as likely as not, they were trying to do a kindness to one of their own. Sure, we knew this kid his whole life, just about, wants to spoil his sweetheart with a puppy, spread joy. Yeah, we wouldn’t mind a little hookup, cover the mama’s dog chow, flea collar. I’m speculating, now. Just saying it wasn’t a greasy deal. They weren’t preying on us in any way. Just saying, because sometimes people think when drug deals are involved it’s sleazy or fucked up. It can be just as sweet and pure as grandma baking a pie for church supper.

Who doesn’t want a puppy? Of course I wanted a puppy, especially when I held one wiggling and then settling down in my lap. I looked at this puppy’s eyes and I fell in love. I felt his weight on me, warm on my legs, and wanted to take care of him, hold him and sleep with him in my bed. I didn’t have a good living situation then, but I didn’t look that far ahead.

The smiles on everyone’s faces. It was a long time til I saw that much happiness in everyone, the aunt and uncle and their son and my sweet young man. Just taking a puppy, saying “this one,” saying yes, everyone talking, giving puppy advice, I have a crate you can use, take a bag of puppy chow.

We stayed a long time, smoked a little on the patio near the kennel. It was hot, but cooling off. The sun was going down and everyone was happy and chill. When we left, it was sweet, the two of us in the dark, me driving, him with the puppy on his lap, sniffing, chewing his fingers, then just suddenly asleep.

He knew I couldn’t take that puppy back to his house, or to my friend’s house where I was sleeping on the couch. I hadn’t figured out yet that he was moving home and I was going back home too, to stay with my mom. But we drove around like a little family, stopped at a roadside snack shack, got some french fries and chicken fingers, fed a few to the puppy on the picnic table near the counter with the sliding glass windows closed to the warm night and the bugs.

I wanted to go home with him, to have a little home with him and the puppy. He knew I wanted that and he knew it wasn’t happening like that. Maybe he wouldn’t fight for it hard enough. Or maybe he knew if he fought he’d lose. It is possible he wanted to save me the pain of watching him try and fail. I like to think he did me a knowing kindness, the kind only someone who really knows you and really cares can do.

A lot can pass between two people in a long, deep look on a picnic table in the warm dark. Bugs tinking against the lights. Puppy making sleepy sounds on my lap. His eyes said, “what do you want to do?” and my eyes said “want” with a bitter huff, “you know what I want.” His eyes said, “come on, let’s do this” and he stood up and put out his hands for me.

I took him to his mom’s. Then I drove to my mom’s house.

So now you know. It ended with a fizzle. Me whispering goodbye to a ghost. He ODed some time in the next few days, while his friend was still in town. I started looking for places to rent out here. I just knew I had to get away.

I found this spot, started work. Come home after work and let the puppy run.

I know you might want to hear about the worst parts, the fights, the emergency room, the call I got to hear he ODed. But I think I’ve said all anyone needs to hear about him. I want to remember the good parts, those sweet eyes. He loved me. He gave me my puppy.

That dog. He ran. He looked like he was smiling when he ran. He was so fast. He chased bunnies and squirrels and deer. Brought home raccoons and possums. Killed armadillos. And unfortunately, he would not leave my neighbor’s chickens alone. Once he found them, he would head over and check on them. If they were out, he’d catch them. I soon heard from my neighbor - do you know him? He lives in the next farm down the road. Not really a farm anymore. Just his house and some acres left they didn’t sell off, but they still keep chickens.

He was horrible about it. Yelling and screaming at me that he would shoot my dog if he ever saw him again. Well, I guess that wasn’t til the second time. The first time he was upset but he didn’t curse at me. He said, “keep the dog tied up.” And I tried. I really tried. But he got out again and went straight over there.

The next call he threatened to shoot the dog. I said I’d try, I’d really do my best, but please don’t kill my dog. He’s a blue heeler and he’s just following his nature. If you see him again, call me and I’ll come right over. I’ll buy you new chickens. Please don’t shoot him. Just call me.

I heard from him only one more time, just a short conversation. “Got him tied up. Come get your dog.”

Not long after, my sweet puppy died. I can’t prove it but I know my neighbor poisoned him or something. There’s no reason for him to get sick and die so fast like that. I read on the internet about rat poison and antifreeze and other things you would just have around the farm you could mix in with dog chow or peanut butter or anything really, and it sounds like that’s what it could have been. I just don’t know.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But I’ve been bearing it and bearing it.

I’m tired, holding all these stories inside me. And it feels good to talk about him - it hurts, but it keeps him alive.

“All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with fade to black.”

- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (p 148) by Shehan Karunatilaka

A quiet life of duck and cover gets me where 
are these stories that have to be told
flash of scene on dark of eye:

A college apartment, lavender and pale green,
soft arms, hands on a keyboard, pausing, 
asking about one sentence at a time.

A dark, well-furnished apartment in an inn
with a stack of PhD papers, expensive plates,
a troubled blonde fights like she’s cornered, 

smiling over tired eyes. A 26 year old’s funeral
notice appears in the grocery, on Facebook,
and everyone knows but no one says how

she died, only, so sad. And you live with
someone who knows many, is known to many,
who took an IQ test and joined Mensa

at an early age, a skinny white boy 
(who looked just like your little boy)
in the hood he says, of his own volition

mailed the application and got a membership
card in the mail, this person who made
ranch dressing and cut carrots and cucumbers 

today, in place of the lavender and pale green,
in a bright-lit room with cheap plates, who turns asking
while writing sentences, stacking papers, smiling 

with tired eyes, alive.

The last few stories in Notes from the Henhouse are bleak – all aging and loss and

• “blanched” and “parched” “winter grasses”

• color “leached” from the world

• crumbling cliffs

• “mouldering”

• “verdigris”

• “derelict” houses

• “that muddy sea”

• “its forlorn strand”

• “a powerful longing to be done with all this”

• “the erosion of possibility”

• and always the “sea and sky merged, grey into grey.”

There must be something about living that far north.

Elspeth Barker’s story “The Dance,” especially, contrasts the “heaving grey North Sea” where “the sky and sea merged and the rain beat down” with “another sea, peacock blue and peacock green, lapping white sands,” a sun “so bright she could not look straight at it.”

Even there, in Portugal, the smell of “shredded eucalyptus leaves” with the “aura of camphor” gives her “a pang of wintery longing.”

The bliss of romance

And if that weren’t tough enough, next up was to finish In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown. In 1952, she falls in love with Pebble, a Rockerfeller 15 years younger than her. The attraction was immediate. They got engaged, enjoyed “the bliss of romance,” and made plans to wrap up their affairs before their planned 6-month honeymoon sailing “without a final destination or timetable” in Pebble’s boat, the Mandalay.

Margaret went to France to leave her dog (a “cantankerous” Kerry blue) with someone who loved dogs, the manager of the Chateau Barlow, a castle overlooking the French Riviera that had become a mecca for artists, musicians, and writers. While there, she had an appendectomy and was put on two weeks of bed rest, despite Margaret’s fear of blood clots and repeated requests to get up an move around from her and her American physician.

Famous last words

When she was finally being released from the hospital, the nurse asked how she felt: “Margaret pulled back her bedcovers and kicked her leg up can-can style, and said ‘Grand!’ But then, she immediately collapsed.” She died from a blood clot traveling to her brain – an embolism.

She had so many books out to publishers, so many unpublished poems and stories and songs and plans for creative work.

What is biography

Margaret Wise Brown wrote this “in a diary she kept at the time she was falling in love with Michael and contemplating writing a biography of their lives together.” (p 240)

“What is biography, what is there to tell beyond the endearing humanity of one on a scale more intense and larger than others? And the significance – aliveness and honesty in their own years. The Gods, the heroes, the man and his devils. All the long-range back and forth in the shuffle and shuttle of being alive. A preservation of a few of the heights in all the years.

…That is the significance of this biography, one who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us.”

When to die

I’ll be mulling it over for a long time, infused with the length of a generation’s lifetime (The Years) and the sweep of history measured in the rise and fall of empires and thousands-year old records (The Story of China), but I think my takeaway is to die somewhere between the height of love, the peak of promise, and the depths of tired, useless, lonely, depressed, nihilistic old age.

Through the tarnished window,
a fog of snow,
laid by a 12-hour sleet,
breathes itself into being.

Starry-eyed children pluck hats, 
frog legs into snow pants,
and float into nature,
seams bulging against
a hunger that smacks of theater.

Through the fog, an indigo flare
rips like scissors,
like blame waiting no longer
for the singularity.

Willing, later, I see
it's just a blue hat parked
on my younger head,
hunger slaked, coming home, 
with a suitcase and mop, 
for toast and tea.

I wrote this poem during the Leftovers Poetry Festival. This online poetry festival was put on by the new Missouri Poet Laureate, Justin Hamm.

The Poetry Game workshop in which I wrote the poem above was led by Stephanie Kartalopoulos. Everyone in the workshop suggested 3 or so words, collected and displayed to give everyone an interesting word bank to play with, and then we all wrote a poem using some of the words.

It was a snowy day and I wrote about what was happening out my window.

An anthology of American literature open on my desk, the breeze through the window had turned the leaves from Wallace Stevens’ masterpiece “Sunday Morning” to Thomas Wolfe’s short story (and later, chapter 17 of Look Homeward, Angel) “An Angel on the Porch,” so I read it, and more besides, being taken especially with a short poem about fall, “Exeunt” by Richard Willbur, and also by him, “Advice to a Prophet,” a longer poem about end times, likely inspired by the threat of nuclear annihilation but feeling freshly relevant to climate fears.

Everyone is gone. I finally have the house to myself. I eat leftovers and sit in the soft wind, the abundance of flowers glowing under the clouds, the silence sliced by low black vultures and assaulted suddenly by crows. As they think about quieting down, I think about going to see them.

In one of the Richard Wilbur poems I read today, he compares vultures to Noah and asks the sparrow, to whom the poet speaks, to forgive both – “for it is he / Devours death, mocks mutability, / Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.” (the vulture) and “Forgive the hero, you who would have died / Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide / To Ararat, all men are Noah’s sons.” I am still thinking about what this means.

In “Exeunt,” which I love and put to music, I am bothered by one thing - there are no daisies when summer is dying. Not a one. Was he not able to identify flowers, or did he use “daisy” as a generic term? Either way, I object!

“Exeunt” by Richard Wilbur

        Piecemeal the summer dies;
At the field’s edge a daisy lives alone;
	A last shawl of burning lies
	     On a gray field-stone
	     All cries are thin and terse, 
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
	A cricket like a dwindled hearse
	     Crawls from the dry grass.

So, what am I going to do other than look up words (peignoir, pullulation), watch squirrels, birds, the soft doe at the edge of the north woods, and her gentle stepping fawn dissolving into yellowing persimmon leaves, and dream? The crows, taking the air with toothy caws, say it better.

Fall colors come on in drips and dabs.

Resentments build like little fires at the edge of a prairie or encampment hunkering down for the night, half-afraid of being seen.

A bee buzzes too close, here, there, and back, vibrating my ears down to the teeth.

The yellow tickseed – just past peak – is too much against the yellow leaves, the sunflowers.

Clouds like cottony mats of old grayed socks glide to the east.

The breeze is warm, sweet, like dust and cinnamon and ripe fruit.

Close-up of maybe a katydid (or let me know what). Turn up volume to hear the sound it makes.

7pm Now, just parts of an hour later, the air is yellow, the sky blue to the east, a deep evening sky blue with periwinkle clouds, and above, fluffy mauve, and to the west, yellow and pink glazing the blue, stuffing over the blue, graying and gilding the deep sky blue of the sunset.

I am just back from a break to dig up the dwarf spruce I, thinking it’d be a full-sized evergreen to block my view of neighbors, planted in the odd middle between the hammock and redbud and cedars and hickories. Seeing its health yet lack of growth, I realized this summer it was the same as the potted dwarf from Christmases ago, in a metal washtub by the back door. Now, with the metal washtub from the Patel’s post-departure yard sale, I have the matching plant potted up with compost and soil and sand and mulch, well watered in.

The sun dips.

The marigolds glow and the pink thorns of the rose.

The mauve darkens, threatening of dusky hours and, with a little wind, of nighttime rain.

Wasps fly home past the purple grapes, the leaves eaten into lace silhouetted against puffs and batting, now gray, now pink.

Cicadas, crickets, katydids, tell me something I don’t know.

A lone mosquito tries barely, and wins.

I have been thinking about the push and pull between the bohemian values expressed in the creative life and middle class values expressed in family and working life. I hope to release some of the caution and conformity and acquisitiveness and materialism, which I developed as a mother and worker trying to drag my family into middle class comfort, save for retirement, seem normal, and do all the right things.

I admire Elspeth Barker’s motley collection of dogs and birds and – was there a pig? – and children (5!), the mud, the messy house, the bad driving, the joyful embrace of chaos (at least in her writing) that reminds me of a friend of mine, including the whimsy and gentle accepting humor.

Elspeth’s perspective helps me to see how I get caught up in believing the values of people I live near but also reminds me that there are phases in life. (I wrote about Notes from the Henhouse here.)

The Years by Annie Ernaux (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature) does the same with even stronger effect.

“The acquisition of things”

As a post-war teen, the narrator observes the growth of practical consumerism: “people relied on the acquisition of things to build better lives” – gas cookers, electric appliances, plastic utensils.

Before marriage, education is “a weapon of choice against stagnation in a kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency to lose oneself in a man,” an experience of which she is ashamed.

“She feels no desire to marry or have children. Mothering and a life of the mind seem incompatible.”

(When in the next paragraph she says “she is looking for another language,” she sounds just like The Waves, one book among the many referenced in The Years.)

She writes about the increasing materialism, “the increasingly rapid arrival of new things,” and not questioning their usefulness: “they just wanted to possess them,” and “curiosity prevailed over distrust,” as did comfort with novelty.

“By the grace of marriage, they were poor”

As the pages progress, she talks less about college students and young single people and more about young couples who “frequented antique shops, entertained with smoked salmon,” and “lost their tempers with the phone company.” (That was us, fifty years later!)

“Young couples with steady jobs opened bank accounts and took out Cofremca loans to acquire fridges with freezer compartments, dual-fuel ranges, etc. They were surprised to discover that by the grace of marriage, they were poor in the face of all they lacked, the cost of which they’d never guessed, nor the necessity, which now went without saying. Overnight they became adults to whom parents could finally, without fear of rebuke, impart their knowledge of practicalities: saving money, caring for children, washing floors.”

“The family project”

She describes the pride and consuming and abiding concerns of feeding the family, the dwindling desire for the carefree life, the shrinking of life through family and work routines, the “joys of order.”

“Our melancholy at seeing a personal project fade into the distance – painting, writing, or making music – was compensated by the satisfactions of contributing to the family project.”

It comforts me to think of this transition as part of a larger cultural change but also a phase of life, the immediacy of work and family, the distance of adolescence.

“But unlike their mothers…”

“They had never imagined resembling their mothers but were now taking up where the latter had left off. They possessed greater levity, offhandedness fostered by The Second Sex and Monlinex Liberates Woman, but unlike their mothers, they denied the value of things they nevertheless felt obliged to do without knowing why.”

Oh, that one got me. In fact, I felt like my whole life was described and mapped out in this book.

She goes on to describe the “anxiety and fervor” of young couples to show off their materialistic achievements to parents and in-laws, and the satisfaction of having “all that we’d desired, a man, a child, an apartment.”

“No longer entitled to an inner life”

In this transition to adulthood, she rarely has time to write or read:

“In her diary, which she rarely opens, as if it posed a threat to the family unit and she were no longer entitled to an inner life, she writes, ‘I have no ideas at all. I don’t try to explain my life anymore.’”

This is a comment of immense importance to this character, a well-read philosophy major, who thinks about thinking: “In family moments she feels rather than thinks” and defines “real thoughts” as “questions about herself, being and having, existence. Real thoughts plumb the depths of transient sensations, impossible to communicate.” (Again, we think of The Waves.)

Has nothing changed, or are we cycling?

Although she describes the specificity of the late 1960s and 1970s, it fees like she is describing today. I wonder if it’s because that time has been taken to its conclusion or its extreme or as far as it could go, and awakening to that now as a reality of extreme and the backlash presenting as revolutionary is as fresh and new to us as the revolution was post-war children entering adulthood in the 60s and 70s:

• “We saw and heard things we had never seen or heard in our lives, or even thought possible.”

• And “We had to know everything about the planet, the oceans… We had a stake in every struggle… We evaluated systems.”

• Everyone had a right to “speak and be heard. They need only represent a group, a condition, an injustice.”

• And “The shames of yesteryear were no longer valid.”

• And on and on.

This could have been written about now

Again, are these social eras or ages or phases of life? Entering the 70s, “They reviewed the best ways to eat, be born, raise children, treat illnesses… live in harmony…express oneself… A vague and immense desire to create was in the air.”

They also took part in “consumer society” and even those who understood the “dangers of advertising” bought the latest technology “with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends.”

She loses her nostalgia for her student years (now a “time of intellectual gentrification”) as well as her shame and humiliation about childhood.

The story of a generation

So she describes the history of a society more than an individual, and the phases of life are mixed up in the cultural changes, so that as in my own life, I the reader am fooled into thinking first what is will always be, and this is who I am, and then the opening of the mind, the scorning of the older generation’s wisdom and ways, the expansiveness of the world coincide in the development of a generation and a society and truly the world, and then the thinking of the world coincides with the rise of “consumer culture” and materialism of young people building a life and a family, and then the beginnings of the opening up again as children grow up.

In conclusion, highly recommend

This is the best contemporary novel I read in 2025. (I’d say it was the best book I read all year, but I also re-read some classics and some really good non-fiction.) As medicine, this book is good for feeling better about any stage of life.

Speaking of phases of life, next up in books I’m reading will be the bleak ending of two books and the optimal time to die.

Memorizing Poetry

I learn “Twinkle, twinkle little star” has an author! Her name is Jane Taylor (1783-1824) and the poem, written in 1806, is called “The Star” and it has four more stanzas beyond the one we all know. She died at age 40, her mind “teeming with unfulfilled projects.” I am reading the Poetry By Heart website and their beautiful justifications of learning poems by heart.

I think of the poems I have with me forever –

     The Tyger, by William Blake
     Rain, by Edward Thomas
     The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
     If, by Kipling
     Again and Again, by Rilke
     Nos Iremos, by Silvina Ocampo
     
     and other poems I put to music, and the ones I didn’t – 

     Wild Nights! and other Emily Dickinson poems (memorized with Rebecca in Beaufort)
     El Beso by Frederico Baneto (I learned in Spanish class in U City)
     Le Temps a Laisse Son Monteau by Charles d’Orlean (I learned in French class also in U City)
     Shakespeare monologues (I memorized for theater classes at CASA)
     and bits of Romantic poetry from college.

I am grateful for how much is inside me, for those poets who wrote it down, for the teachers who required poems to be memorized (I was aware at times of being the only person to take up the assignment as a welcome challenge and sometimes the only one to complete it), and for the words themselves.

7th Grade Poetry (and how not to explode)

I often feel, with so much wonderful word combinatory quality already in existence, it would be the best use of my time to share these wonderful words. But then, there is also something about self-expression I keep coming back to, something that has nothing to do with quality or longevity or the judgement of others, but only to do with the value of self-expression itself for the individual and for the example that sets to others.

I check the 7^th Grade Poetry website to see if the organization (I briefly worked for) was still running contests. It looks like 2016 is the last year. I read many of the winning poems from that year and, on the one hand, they are not original in idea or word choice or construction, and after all, these are merely the best 13 year olds can produce. (Not only did I do no better at that age but I didn’t have the courage to share, to compete, or even to tell the truth). On the other hand, I was impressed by their courage to express their raw feelings, their unmanaged emotions, the person behind the mask, the mask itself, the universal experience of becoming self-conscious, volatile, ashamed of differences. I was impressed and rather blown away by the force of their feelings, the drama of being 13, the pain and the silliness. My god, if they don’t express themselves…

“Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun / Or fester like a sore - / And then run? / Does it stink like rotten meat? / Or crust and sugar over / like a syrupy sweet? / Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?” – Langston Hughes, a poet born in Missouri!, with “Harlem,” another poem I memorized in U City, which I am grateful for, and grateful to which ever teacher required it.

My Romantic lit professor

I often think of John Olmsted, my Romantic lit professor at Oberlin, telling us about how he read “Annabelle Lee” to his daughter over and over. I saw in the alumni magazine that he died in the past year or so, and I imagine him to have been in his late 50s or early 60s when I was in college, so he must have been sentimental and reminiscing about a special time, a shared closeness, with a daughter grown. I thought of him when I read The Hobbit to the kids, and Zorgamazoo. I imaged “Annabelle Lee” to be an epic poem and admired his commitment, but now, looking it up, it is 6 or 7 stanzas.

Now I pull out the memorial Robert Pierce, Emeritus Professor of English, wrote for the Alumni Magazine about Olmsted (1942-2021) and finally read it.

I see so in fact he was exactly the age I thought, and I see he had two daughters, Vanya and Galya. His wife was Olga Markov-Belaeff, and he grew up in a small town in Canada. By the time I sat in his classroom, he’d been teaching at Oberlin for 30 years.

Pierce says, “He delighted in quoting from one of his student course evaluations: ‘I am told that he is a very good lecturer.’” And he says that love of his wife and children “was a strong remaining consolation to him in the years of decline from Alzheimer’s, that most terrifying ailment to us as a band of intellectual adventurers.”

I remember him, the texture of his voice, bringing Romantic poetry to life, saying “the clouds, the air, the trees, the water,” and all he evoked with those mere words, how it made me feel to want to read the poems again to feel just a portion of what he felt and made me feel – something dreamy, expansive, and deep.

Nothing is Wasted

Nothing is wasted – not the terrible poems of 7^th graders or the seemingly futile efforts of underpaid teachers in crowded classrooms, from “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” to “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Saint Louis exhales
all over itself,
unbuttons its pants, 
and lets out its belly, 
comfortably overhanging
the circling waist, its border.

Its bowed back to the river,
that curving wet spine,
it faces its corn-growing distance.
One seventy, two seventy,
spare tire after tire,
and still the city exhales
cul de sacs and soccer fields,
hospitals and back porches.

The mobile ambitious
breathe in and leave
and years later breathe out and return.
Twenty years pass and they live in the 
same-smelling, sweet-talking, park-laden place
that comforts wonder, discontent, perversity.

Towering trees pin whole families to old suburbs
so that three or four of a clan pass through
one school, and then are called by name to graduate
into the brick permanence of an adulthood answering
       What school did you go to?
and it might take the clan a decade or two to realize
what we all know (or think we do) by the answer. Saint Louis,

 its rivers spreading wide across unleveed ground

 its people easing back into their chairs to smile at strangeness

 its borders brimming the amateur careless cup

Saint Louis, it’s not my fault you are home to me.

Stay through the arc not of triumph but expansion.
We will get fat and stop unlazing our selves for never striving.

____________________________________________________________________

I wrote this poem in September of 2009. I had just moved back to Saint Louis, Missouri, after being mostly gone for 10 years. After college in Ohio, I lived in Boston, South Carolina, and Nashville. I learned a lot about other places and their values. I did not learn any respect for where I was from. I did not hear any praise for my hometown or the larger region. I could tell you a lot of good things about living in Saint Louis, but it was a mixed bag.

Last week, I drove during rush hour through the extreme west end of what might still be called exurbia, past miles of strip malls and big box chains interspersed with housing developments new and old, even some recently cleared farmland making way for the newest freshly bulldozed one. I passed a kid walking on a sidewalk looking at a phone, two Thai restaurants, a 1:1 mattress store to cell phone store ratio, and a high school recently split into two to handle the population growth (as the inner city deletes another neighborhood school due to population loss). I decided hey, all these years went by and shock! No one fixed sprawl! Maybe I will publish this poem after all.

I am not big on striving. I am pro-laziness. I am good with fat of all kinds.

But something got into me when I was away, something that made me distrust Midwest kindness, made me want to jab at complacency, made me really hate westward expansion.

Sprawl – like all problems – is everyone’s problem. There is no avoiding it. I moved to the country to get away from the problems of where I was from, and I keep coming back to the city, like we all do, and driving through its problems to get to its good.

______________________________________________

Check out this cool piece of art made out of a Saint Louis road map, called Sprawl: Spore.

Whereas ghosts are human (or animal) spirits that have not passed on, poltergeist are not clearly of biologic origin, likely never-bodied, never embodying physical matter. In fact, it is important to note, when lights flicker or a door slams or a book falls off a shelf, the poltergeist causes it to move but not by embodying physical objects. In no way does the spirit of the poltergeist enter into the physical matter, any more than your hand would enter into a book as you knock it off a shelf.

We theorize a condensation of spirit energy, condensed and directed, is what allows poltergeist to exert effect upon the physical realm. This theory has become widely accepted since we first proposed it, but it is important to note, it is a theory.

What experiment might be conducted to move theory into fact?

Poltergeist are not trying to get you to move out of your house.

It is a common misconception that poltergeist want to manipulate or influence human behavior. They are malicious, with ill intent, that is true, but the outcome of that intention is not attempts to control or influence. That is one level too far. Humans cannot conceive of a spirit with will and intention but without a desire to control and influence. For humans, those go hand in hand, are difficult to peel apart. For poltergeist, ill will means ill wishes and harmful actions, but this does not extend to the more complex thought process that “if I do this, the human will do that.” For example, the poltergeist does not think, “I will knock the books off the shelf and break the mirrors, then the human will be scared and leave. Then I will have this house to myself.”

A poltergeist does not understand the impulse to be a leader. “Why would a human being want to decide for other people?” the poltergeist might ask. The poltergeist senses the hunger for power but cannot understand power’s allure. It senses the desire to control but cannot understand the appeal of control.

Poltergeist demonstrate a preference for groups of 2-3 humans.

We have observed the poltergeist is drawn to a gathering of two or threes, as solitude is too vast a blank canvas upon which to practice its art. A crowd, it seems to sense, is dynamite – its explosive potential creates static or noise, visual chaos, in which the energetic machinations of the poltergeist would be lost. Its effects are most terrifying, its uncertainty and malevolence amplified, in the presence of more than one, less than four.

Poltergeist can hitch a ride on cowboys and outlaws.

Poltergeist can actually ride on cowboys and outlaws, in essence hitching a ride on the movement of the spirit. Spirits such as poltergeist can move in the spirit realm so as to manifest in physical locations, across various geographical locations, but as with those of us in physical form, sometimes it is easier to catch a ride.

Why cowboys and outlaws? They are generally untethered, in physical fact and in spirit. Their bodies move and relocate more often and at greater speed than farmers, city-dwellers, leaders of men. They are less tethered – heart and soul – to a specific location. Sailors, also, fit the bill.

It is impossible to hitch a ride on a leader, who is tethered to the land, the kingdom, the people – very grounded, they are unable to relocate on a wind or a whim.

Poltergeist can taste the difference.

It is believed that poltergeist have a “taste” for the difference, that they can distinguish easily between an outlaw and a cowboy. The lawless flavor – so to speak – lacks the structures and strictures of legalism. The cowboy adopts and believes in these cast iron railings, but side steps them, effectively opting out of legalism, existing in a world outside or beyond these railings, seemingly respected with a tip of the cap though they may be.

One unanswered question

Is the poltergeist aware of other poltergeist?

If we could answer that, we might learn if they are able to connect will to will, intention to intention, and team up, so to speak.

Ten years later, I wrote a short novel about him. This is how it begins.

A letter from a reader in the mailbox! A clean, crisp envelope evidently handled with all due respect by the mail professionals, and addressed (this always gave him a thrill) to The Wad Wootcher, capital T, capital W, capital W. Always a delight, this letter especially seemed to catch the light of the afternoon sun, just as it was dipping below the roof of the apartment building across the street. He placed it carefully in his coat pocket before tucking the rest of the mail under his arm. He would read this person’s letter, and see into his or her weak and wandering heart, and with the powers of his own mind, he would help this poor soul.

He folded it closed, placed it into its envelope, and under the shadow of his safe brick building took out the key to his home-like efficiency.

The efficiency apartment came with an efficiency kitchen, amenities including a small stove and sink, a few shallow cabinets to hold a pot for warming soups and of course the cans of soup, a counter space too small to roll out a pie crust – admittedly irrelevant since adequate pie crusts he found inexpensive and always available in the freezer section of any major supermarket - but no room for a dishwasher, except the skinny girl he hired to come in once or twice a month, ha ha!

But the kitchen was nothing to him. He filled his cup at the sink, and warmed his soups at the stove, and brought his cup and bowl and spoon to the large wooden table in the big room where he wrote. He had a clunky computer that hummed and buzzed and blinked, and better yet, the most delicious tall stack of fresh, blank paper and wonderfully inky pens that spilled and dripped little blobs of dark blue ink all over the white paper whenever he paused to think – and he was always pausing to think.

When he paused to think (which was often), he looked out the window at the slushy gray street below or at the resolute brick apartment building across the way with its human froth and flurries spilling in and out, and at the changeable and intractable sky from which nothing could be gathered, except precipitation, from which nothing could be learned, except whim.

Thought came and went for Gregory like the people in the apartment – sometimes he was seized with genius like the energetic young man with packages moving in to the third floor, and sometimes he trudged about hacking at a paragraph like the half-toothed woman taking the stairs up from her cheesy basement apartment to stand about and gossip across her belly at anyone walking by. Today, he had no fear of the half-toothed gossip inside him. He had a letter from a reader!

Dear Wad Wootcher,

Thank you for your column on lay and lie. I think I understand. I just have one question. Should I say “I lay down on my bed yesterday?” or “I laid down yesterday?” and I know that “the hen lays the egg,” like you said, but then is it “the hen laid” or “layed” the “egg”??? And please excuse the punctuation in this letter! I know you could just skewer me on it!!

Thanks, your the best

The Hen That Laid the Golden Egg (lol!)

The letter nauseated him, and so he knew that today would be a good day! He selected an especially inky pen and took out a new piece of paper, untouched until now by human hands, and wrote:

Dear Reader,

You were right to write to me. No one has ever needed me more than you. I would like to address your numerous questions, here from the comfort of my home-like accommodations. After I address your considerable deficiencies and psychoses, however, I will have no room left to address your grammar questions. If this troubles you, please address my boss and Editor, Mike Butts. Send a letter to request that he allocate me more column space, because your needs are so great and my word count is so brief.

Fred Thompson, man oh man. I just found out he was on Law and Order. I KNEW he looked familiar! He is also from Tennessee, which is where I am right now. That gives me a warm friendly feeling that allows me to overlook my wonderment of how he could be so jowly and still be a TV star.

Many Americans wonder about Obama’s origins, and thus his loyalty. Frankly, we are too enlightened to worry about whether he has Middle Eastern relatives to whom he is secretly funneling terrorist funds and Cubs t-shirts, because we are enlightened as to him being from Chicago, an American city famous for its disgusting meat packing industry, a city not far from a much more famous city - St. Louis, home to the world-reknowned Arch. But aside from being insanely inspiring and a breath of extremely fresh air, what does Obama really bring to the table? I’m too busy to find out.

Clinton might be from Arkansas but she sure doesn’t sound bumpkin enough for that. I wonder if she is faking accentlessness, since we all know women can’t get away with false-folksiness manifested in a Southern accent if they want to go far in politics. They are already at risk of seeming stupid due to having a high voice and a love of cheating men. She also might be from New York, but she shouldn’t focus on that too much because that just leaves a nasty taste in all our mouths out here in the middle of the country. Wherever she is from, I am just wondering if she has gone through menopause, and how will her hormonal hot flashes affect us, a country at war? And how is it affecting her sex life with master lover Bill Clinton, who you may remember from such presidencies as - oh yeah! The most popular presidency EVER.

Gulliani is unabashedly from New York, which I am totally opposed to. It’s a real shame NYC isn’t a humble island of Amish farmers and craftsmen, living the way God intended, never showing up on the news or producing historical figures or wearing ornaments of vanity such as buttons. It’s not that I blame him for his birthplace, but a President Gulliani would feed the already unbearable NYC pride and self-centeredness. And I have trouble envisioning a Gulliani who can leave behind the NYFD caps, gay parades, and divorces to become to a truly national president who represents the interests of all Americans. If the rumors are true that he is heading a conspiracy to move the capitol from DC to NYC, all I can say is, I support the concentration of financial and political resources onto one tiny yet annoying concrete island. Even if the terrorists aren’t tempted by that tantalizing morsel, global warming will drown that bitch in maybe as few as 25 years!

Will Edwards give Democratic front-runners a run for their money? I think he’s cute but maybe a little on the young side. I’d rather have a president a little past his prime, appearance wise, so that I can concentrate on what he’s saying rather than picturing him naked slathered in lard shooting a bow and arrow. Don’t you agree? It’s like male sports fans watching the female sideline commentators - do they listen? They do not. I don’t blame them. I don’t listen to the men commentators either, especially the ones back at the studio. They are all full of hot air and their enormous bulky bodies all stacked together in a line opining on something utterly beneath my radar just makes me wonder if they are a variation on normal or if steroids played a role, and how do they feel standing next to a normal man, and can they possibly be agile in bed? When all that thinking is thought through, I have totally missed what they were saying about that play, or that game, or that athlete. Frankly, I am none the worse off, and all of us have had a little fun. They got to hear themselves talk and I got to picture them greased up and smelling like bacon. Not a bad deal for all concerned. So the point is, no, Edwards doesn’t stand a chance for another 12 years or so, but I do hope to see him remain on the political arena so that my fantasies can continue unabated.

I found her poetry in the University City Library, so I looked her up.

I noticed the books because they had red covers and gold lettering, and the four thick volumes together took up nearly a foot on the New Release shelf. The title Woman/Years - Volumes I through IV – made me open and start to read.

I noticed the volumes were published locally, by Westgate Press.

Westgate happened to be the name of the neighborhood next to mine.

I liked the poetry I found inside, so back at home, I looked her up in the phone book.

It turned out she was my neighbor.

I called her and asked if I could meet her.

Meeting Judith Saul Stix

I wrote this poem 12-1-2008, shortly after we met.

  Between two snows
  in the brownmelt pause
  I walked to meet her
  because
  I liked her poetry.

  Her house was the one
  I knew it would be,
  half-hidden behind
  a scraggle of tree
  And on a patch of mown grass
  a sculpture I had wondered at
  since childhood.

  I meet the sculptor.
  She hangs my coat.
  Her dog loves how
  I stroke her throat.
  We talk and tears reflecting tears
  She says persist.
  After fifty years
  you might meet a stranger
  to whom you write 
  unknowingly
  your life
  long letter.

  The next morning, white quiet
  deepening louder.
  Again I’m in the whispery powder.
  I listen to it silence me
  and wonder if today we meet
  unspeaking in the frozen snow 
  would we again meltingly
  we 
  know?

Now and More Info

It looks like she moved from her home to a very nice retirement community a few miles away, and continued to be a lovely person, of course. Their picture of her is the face I remember.

https://www.thegatesworth.com/our-stories/judith-stix

I also learned she wrote more than only poetry, and contributed a variety of material to multiple archives, and was an activist back in 1948/49 for the desegregation of Washington University (a couple blocks from where we both lived).

https://uaexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/celebrating-women-washington/students/campus-activists

https://aspace.wustl.edu/repositories/6/resources/409

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/judith-saul-stix-papers-relating-to-bessie-lowenhaupt-13371

https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/archiveComponent/919467805

https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL458471A/Judith_Saul_Stix

https://www.si.edu/object/judith-saul-stix-papers-relating-bessie-lowenhaupt-1961-1982:AAADCD_coll_255251

I’m here to recommend the beautifully written essays and stories by Elspeth Barker, Notes from the Henhouse: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing. Bottom line, if you read no further, read this book.

Her description of her childhood by the Scottish seaside in Ellie and St. Andrews was gorgeous, vivid, and rich. With every noun and verb contributing to the reader’s sensory experience, the writing is in fact dense and grounded and yet the experience of reading is easy and light, so the reader is carried along from rocks on the seashore to cold drafty rooms in a gothic castle turned boarding school, and into her adult life with muddy boots and babies, a little romance and comical dog stories.

I love vocab words!

For just a few examples of the words she uses that give her writing texture and depth and her readers a sensory experience, here are some words I wrote down from her book.

  Coracle
  Apnoeic
  Brogues
  Syce
  Pangolin
  Bilious
  Tidal bore
  Joss
  Cordyceps
  Lintel
  Sacerdotal
  Corvine

Saving the world, one word at a time

I mean, doesn’t that just let you breathe easy knowing someone has been using those words?

All those lovely words aren’t lost to the mass extinction event that is the rapid death of world languages and dramatically shrinking vocabularies within a language.

I know we are all trying to do our part by looking up the definitions of vocab words as we read, but few go so far as to actually use rarely used words. If you’re not going to do it yourself, at least support those who are.

Charming, Original, Bohemian Mom

Writing aside, she’s a delightful person. I enjoy the humor and affection with which she sees her life, her children and animals and neighborhood. I like seeing how her brain works. She leads an unconventional life because, it seems, that’s what she wanted to do.

As shown in the essay “Moments of Truth,” her attitude towards marriage and other conventions was, and still is, original:

“I call all his ladies wives because I think they deserve status. There is no other way to describe a serious relationship producing children, lasting many years… I dislike the word partner. I dislike it very much.”

She is talking here about the man who would become her husband, and more on him later. For now, in this day and age when we lack even the commitment to use the term “life partner” and yet “partners” are everywhere, it’s enough to enjoy her plain opposition.

She had a casual, bohemian attitude towards housekeeping (see book cover image), parenting, money, and marriage.

She didn’t mind not being officially married. Their five kids didn’t even realize their parents were unmarried until they finally got married well into family life together.

She didn’t complain about being poor, and there’s not the merest hint of acquisitiveness or materialism. She tells us she had “no money whatsoever” and was only “interested in babies,” not in a job.

“We didn’t have chats about ‘Let’s have another baby.’ I just got on with it.”

This is what I keep telling anyone who wants to have a baby, but I have yet to convince anyone to just get on with it. With Elspeth’s charm and simple logic, I think she has a good chance.

Poetry and drinking were important. He often read poetry, especially Hopkins and Yeats, out loud to family and friends. “Saturday nights were massive drunken occasions,” she says without a touch of Puritanism.

“That was actually not too easy to handle when the children were small. We were trying to get them to go to bed and they would come down and there were always loads of people around and you were trying to cook them some filthy spaghetti or something. You can imagine. But of course the children get older and it all sorts out.”

Right there, you can see why I love this woman. If the “filthy spaghetti” doesn’t do it for you, then I refer you back to her dislike of the word “partner” and her respect for “wives,” and failing all else, her understated way of getting on with it knowing it all sorts out.

The husband

I gather from her writing that her husband is a well-known poet. I’m not claiming to be informed or knowledgeable about English poets. I was an English major, but in case you’re not much of a reader, I’ll tell you, there’ve been a lot of people writing in English for a few years now. In school, I had to span Beowulf to modern day writers from English-speaking countries all over the world, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and essays. So not knowing a single poet is not at all surprising. My ignorance tells us almost nothing about how famous this person is or how much I would like his poetry, only that he’s less famous than Shakespeare and he’s no Maya Angelou, or otherwise I definitely would have heard of him by middle school.

Regardless, having found Elspeth, I don’t care about him, or if anything, I’m rather hostile to him. More on that later.

Devoted father, sub-optimal husband

She describes him in the essay “Memories of George Barker” as a “devoted father,” which I’m sure is meant to be a compliment, but seeing the standards of parenting have changed, I’m also sure I’m not impressed by his level of parenting. Also, to be fair, I’m primed to be unfavorable. It’s so easy for a man to get called a great dad. I mean, how devoted could he be if he worked and partied and she did all the work to raise the kids? (Not to mention kids by other “wives.”)

On the other hand, it really seems he loved his kids and his kids loved him.

So that’s George Barker as a father. What about as a husband?

“He was not good husband material because he was a poet,” she tells us about George Barker. I think we all know what that means, but still it’s nice that she goes into detail to confirm our stereotypes.

Elspeth says their time together was turbulent, vivid, passionate.

She describes him at the “massive drunken occasions” with “loads of people,” these weekend parties, where George was:

“as usual behaving badly, drunk, dangerous and belligerent.”

What is my actual problem?

Does it bother me that’s he’s famous and she’s not? No, that’s not it. It’s that she sees him as a famous poet and doesn’t rate herself.

Though it doesn’t seem his fame or notoriety were a draw, she may have been drawn to him for his poetry. A good writer can be very alluring to someone who values that sort of thing.

That is why I want to go out of the way to say, I don’t care about him. I care about her.

When you find a person like her, a writer like her, the husband is just an impediment. I see no evidence that he supported her efforts. I do see a lot of descriptions of how she supported him. With them in agreement about children and housekeeping, she bore the children and made the “filthy spaghetti.” She facilitated his parties, both poetry recitations and drunken revelries, and his need to sober up and write poetry on weekdays. It seems she didn’t get much writing in until he was dead.

It’s the fact that he didn’t drink during the week because he had to have a clear mind to write.

“His discipline was rigorous … he wrote every day.”

He couldn’t write with a hangover, so he kept his drunken revelries to the weekends.

It’s that discipline. That’s what bugs me.

Sure, wow, so disciplined. We should all be jealous. But who created that peace and quiet? Who allowed that discipline to be effective? I know a lot of people burning up their vast stores of energy on discipline without such great results, and many times it is because they are going it alone. They don’t have an Elspeth cheering them up, keeping the kids happy, not hassling him about getting a real job.

Caveats and conclusions

I’m sure it was love, because her widowhood is bleak. (More on that later.) And I’m not saying she felt unfairly treated. Maybe it was the times, or maybe it’s just the way of things.

Now if I were one of their five children, I’m sure I would value them both, whatever my feelings about how I was raised. That is also the ridiculous way of things.

Women and their men. Children and their parents.

But I feel defensive of her and her writing, similar to how I felt about Margaret Wise Brown. I want to explain to her that George Barker doesn’t matter. She matters.

Storms came through while we were sleeping. A tornado warning went off at 4am.

It is cool and cloudy. The clouds are moving east.

The breeze shakes drips from the trees, so the sound of wet leaf touching wet leaf thickens with the sound of drips and drops.

Blue jays call from the back woods. A small, fast bumblebee scans the area loudly, like a surveillance chopper, without gathering any pollen. The wind picks up.

The clouds are still thick, but they lighten and lift – cotton batting and whipped cream topped with cobwebs, all layered and flipped upside down sliding across the sky.

One cup of coffee down. I start to feel my mind, as if the lights are coming on in a quiet house, room by room.

Noon

Nothing tends towards fall but the cicadic vibrations in the breeze.

I am sitting on the front porch     squinting in the sun 
At the rattle of brown sticks    shushing of a breath of wind
In the few clinging brown oak leaves
I am sticking my bare legs out   hiking up my skirt
And taking in the sun    like someone’s child
     Virtuously and then greedily

Me squinting at the bright fun
Me shushing the rattling child
Me hiking across the clinging leaves
     And sitting on the breath of sun
Always virtuous at first and then
     headlong
     hedonic
     savoring youth and beauty
                       heedless joy
                       heady sun
    sticking my bare head out
    hiking up whatever arises
    shushing like trees and wind and waves.

This blue I haven’t seen since last February
These birds sound like spring.
Someone tell them juncos are 
     Still in a mixed flock,
    pecking grass seed invisible.

Something bright and very far away
     flashes like a signal through
     a mile of field and forest.
The ground will be cold mud
     because it’s slow to change.
The river still floats ice floes down.
The air changes every minute – 
     There is wind, or no wind.
     The temperature rises all day
     and then falls all night.

My tendencies are cold mud
My failures are ice floes
My mood is the conference of 
     The wind and the sun.
My heart rises all day and falls all night.
My childhood is the ground.
My life is the river.
I sit in the air every minute.

I closed the car door and the car drifted. There was a flow to the water – out across the field and curving – as the road also curved – back to the road. The car was pushed onto land again and the engine – not flooded? – started. With no way forward, I drove back to the town I’d just come through.

It appeared no more than a few buildings against the state highway that ran through it. An intersection with a stop sign. A low brick and white clapboard building that had been built upon section by section through the decades. I saw a light on inside and, a bit desperate after realizing I could not pass through the flood – and had lived! was still alive! – I was bold enough to knock and enter, calling out if anyone was there.

Though the front entrance was empty (an apartment? a motel? a private residence?), I found a man in a cluttered workshop not expecting visitors or customers, but friendly enough, in a weird, unsocialized way. I explained that I was stuck because of the water on the road and needed a place to stay. He offered me a room. I felt uneasy but said, I’ll go get my stuff and move my car.

In so doing, I discovered more buildings just off the road, including some sort of hotel or B&B expecting guests ,and in fact, the lobby was full of people sitting on suitcases and couches and waiting and talking. I asked a couple of women my age (one younger, one older) what was going on. They too were all stuck by the flood, were missing flights, changing plans, unsure what to do. Some looked stressed, some were turning it into a party. It seemed unlikely there’d be any more rooms open, but I said I’d try as soon as someone appeared at the front desk.

Of the two women I was speaking to, the younger woman appeared worried or annoyed about their interrupted travel plans, still young enough to be beautiful without luck and to push the boundaries with no ill effect on her looks. The older woman had short gray hair, the fresh clear skin of a younger woman than her hair suggested, and she appeared deeply grounded, peaceful, and solicitous to her – friend? girlfriend? – while superficially making movements as if to attend to logistics and caretaking.

When I explained my plans, my uncertain plans, they exchanged a look – that look when a couple assesses the other’s evaluation and wordlessly exchanges opinions, and comes to an understanding, though never agreement. It seemed that I was in, that I looked fun, that they were tired, but it had been a shit day and look around the lobby! it was a party! and couldn’t they just make the most of it?

I considered the weird solitary man in his room full of things that needed fixing, expecting me back. I did not trust myself to make a good call, but I’d been planning to trust my gut and here was my chance. He might be a creep or a murderer. There must be a reason everyone was here and not there. This place looked fun. These women wanted me, or something from me – like a contribution of energy towards their forgetting, their elevation and transformation, for a night. And that prickly feeling that maybe I liked them too – liked all these strangers talking loudly, holding drinks and sitting on suitcases, that anything could happen when you were suddenly stranded, when there were no more rooms at the inn, but if you went out and got drunk with strangers and fell asleep wherever you passed out, anything good that you stopped imagining long ago could happen.

Do I really need to practice sharing?

When my parents were growing up, they did not practice sharing. But their generation came up with the idea of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street and expanding kindergarten so that more kids could sit in a circle and learn to take turns. So, being born in 1980, I grew up with sharing during show and tell and watching Cookie Monster share his last cookie.

I hate sharing

Now, I’m reeeeeaaaal in touch with my innate selfishness. I hate eating off the same plate as someone. Just give me my half and let me go eat like a hyena wolfing down a slice of pizza in a corner, back protectively curved around the food. I also don’t like giving gifts. And when it comes to sharing my inner thoughts and creative work, I have to say I’m not a fan.

Jeez, maybe we do need to be taught to share.

My parent’s generation

Whether I turned out okay or not, this is no criticism of my parent’s generation. They grew up in meaner times. My mom tells stories about getting in scrappy fights, knees always scabbed over, outside from dawn to dusk in 1950s dresses, climbing trees. The way she says she fought with her siblings, I picture a caterwauling whirling dervish, arms and legs whipping from the dust cloud like a Peanuts cartoon. Kids on the playground picked on each other’s weaknesses with laser focus (cripple, idiot, etc.) and free-wheeling brutality.

Changing parenting ideas

In some ways, kids are the same. In some places, kids are still growing up just like this.

And it’s not a criticism of my generation. The year I was born is the cutoff between Gen X and Gen Z (later changed to Millennials). Supposedly being on the cusp means you relate to aspects of both but don’t fully fit either generation’s description.

People who grew up around this time were being raised on what I like to think of as a grand experiment. Parenting ideas were changing more quickly than they had at any point in the history of people, and ideas that were just getting up and going in previous generations (like Maria Montessori) suddenly spread quickly, and without a whole lot of science behind it, suddenly it was deemed good to teach children this set of social ideals in this particular way.

Caveats and conclusions

I’m not a social scientist or a historian, so just take this as my opinion based on reading through a Parenting Books Publishing Boom and Mommy Blogs at the Dawn of the Internet, and observation from my own life and what I hear from others:

There were a lot of new parenting ideas and in the gentlest, most well-intentioned way, we were experimented on.

Not sure if you realize how new this all is

Sharing is not new. Practice is pretty old too. But put them together and it sounds kinda new-agey. This experience might be so wide-spread now that you can’t see it, but it used to be a new concept for a kindergarten teacher to say with a gentle voice, “Now class, it’s time to share.” That was something dads rolled their eyes at. We sang “Free to Be You and Me,” a program that swept elementary schools with songs such as “It’s All Right to Cry” and “Tommy Wants a Doll.”

Hippie revolution

This was huge for the grown-up hippies. This was the revolution of love busting into the halls of power. They were finally old enough and powerful enough to make a difference. They may have become more practical and made some compromises, but look, there on the stage a boy is holding a doll. The next generation will be different.

And indeed, the next generation was different

Now there’s social emotional learning embedded throughout my children’s education and there’s a movement to remove it and change social mores yet again. I think it’s really unfair to expect people to turn on a dime, no matter what on an infinite grid of possibilities you want people to believe. But again, I digress.

Practice sharing creative work

Sharing that first draft at work

For each new client, it’s hard to send the first draft. That’s because we haven’t yet learned how to work together. I don’t know their expectations. Sometimes they don’t have experience explaining their needs, and they only know what’s wrong when they see it. I learn how to tailor the writing to what they need and they learn that a bad first draft isn’t a hopeless situation, but just a brief touchpoint for them to give direction.

But over time, even onboarding new clients becomes easier. I learn to set expectations up front, rather than just listen for them. So with anything. If you keep throwing yourself into the fray, you will get used to the fear and you will get better.

“Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway” is the title of a 1987 book by Susan Jeffers, PhD. I never read it but it’s a useful phrase to keep on hand at your first open mic.

My first open mic

My first open mic was as painful as the next nine. I was going to be singing and playing! my own songs! In front of people! Who were looking only at me! And listening!, with often very discerning taste and musical ability. And no matter how much I practiced, I was definitely going to make mistakes.

Music doesn’t come naturally to me like writing. I haven’t been doing it my whole life. I can write the song, get to make all the decisions about how it should sound, how it fits my voice, how to support it with musical instruments, and practice, practice, practice.

But I’m still going to trip up somewhere, and I’m not going to be able to Fred Astaire it. (Read Zadie Smith’s essay about him in Feel Free, “Dance Lessons for Writers.” It seems he made tripping look like a joy, like play, like elevation instead of falling.)

When in a state of total panic, just act normal

Sitting at a table with a drink, listening to the people who go on before me, I’m just trying to breathe and listen and smile and clap. Despite the passing strong emotions, the envy and fear when someone is good, the horror and comfort when someone is worse than you, I smile and clap. My whole goal is to look normal, act normal, stay alive, keep track of my stuff and regulate my alcohol intake and sugar levels so that at exactly the right time I’m not hungry, I’m not drunk, and I’ve got my music and water bottle ready to go.

Walking is hard

The walk to the stage when they call your name is a self-conscious experience, but we’ve all been called to the front of the class before. As with a funeral, it’s good to have something concrete you can do, specific actions to take. Just walk to the front of the room with your water bottle and music and don’t knock into tables and don’t trip. Just make it to the front alive.

I can’t feel my fingers

Okay, now you’re there. You feel insubstantial and yet electrified. You are having an out of body experience. You set up your music and your instrument and adjust your chair and mic. You say hello into the mic. You can not hear yourself the way you normally can, and it feels like you are floating in space. You are talking and later you will not remember what you said.

The sheet music is swimming. You put your hands on the piano. They move in a familiar way but you can’t quite make the connection between what you are doing and the sounds coming as if from very far away. You can’t quite make the connection between the hands and the piano keys and the mic and your voice and the sheet music and the amplifiers and the people’s faces you know are out there but you can’t look because if you lose focus for even a second you will have no idea where you are and there, it just happened - you are lost, still playing and singing, but no idea where you are or how to get back, and you are trying not to speed up but you are thinking the extra flourishes on the chorus are doomed to fail and better not try them and actually maybe let’s wrap this one up because it will be a miracle if you make it to the end alive.

Then it’s over and people clap.

If you’re at a typical open mic, you’ll get to do one or two more. The crazy disembodiment begins again. It feels bad. Then it’s over.

No matter how bad you did, people clap.

One time, I actually stopped in the middle of a song. I was terrified. I knew for certain I was lost and I couldn’t get back. My heart was pounding. I said excuse me and took a sip of water. Or maybe I said I’m having a panic attack. Just a little joke for the crowds.

Why do I torture myself?

Since then, I’ve made a lot of jokes about having a panic attack. No one ever seems to feel sorry for me!

Afterwards, I ask myself why I’m torturing myself. I get a couple compliments and start thinking I should put out a CD! I stay up late super energized and then I sleep fitfully, waking up tortured with memories of my mistakes. The next day I’m a wreck, exhausted from one little tiny open mic.

Let’s go easy on the pop stars

I can see how it would be addictive, riding the highs and lows. In my generation, the older generation’s fears of a changing culture taught us to shame the struggling pop star who ricochets from delusions of grandeur and self-absorbed arrogance to self-abasement and self-destruction.

Now I’m like, I can’t even get up in front of people for 5 minutes without completely falling apart for a week before and after. It seems to me it would take incredible strength and stamina to do that as a professional year round and retain any shred of mental health.

Point being

Sharing at the open mic started hard, and stayed hard, but it’s slightly not as bad as it used to be, and it’s kinda addictive, and it’s satisfying to be able to say I did that scary thing, and honestly, I really am better than I used to be because I did that.

But we’re here to talk about writing

I have less experience sharing creative writing in recent years. I used to write so carelessly and free and send it to my friends for a laugh.

I took a magazine writing class in grad school. I enjoyed it, but my main takeaway was that there was no market for what I wanted to write. Then babies, moves, technical writing jobs led me away from grad school and I did not return.

I took an 8-week fiction workshop and I did lots and lots of creative writing on my own. I panicked right before I turned 30 and thought, if I’m going to write a novel by the time I’m 30 I better hurry up, and dashed off a novel, again feeling careless and free.

I spent a solid 15 years fairly content with my unshared creative life. But then I started to think… What am I doing here? What is the point of this? What happens to all this after I die? Ya know, the usual.

On the off chance I ever figure out where I’m going

I decided I needed some direction, a plan with little things I could chip away at, so in case I ever become a person with direction in life, I would be at a good jumping off point.

If you’re planning to get better at sharing your music, you chip away at sharing your music. You certainly don’t go to one open mic and decide you are a disgrace and your plan is crap. If you’re planning to share your writing, you chip away at sharing your writing.

This is the kind of thinking that makes sense to me, and that’s why I’m here.