Airline Logic

Airline logic makes no sense. Beside the absurdity that a ticket from Cleveland to Buffalo costs twice the price of a ticket to London, it goes like this -- if you leave home and make two stops, okay. If you want to make 3 stops, you either pay for a very expensive one way ticket to one of those locations or fly home first. This means flying from Vegas to Seattle via Cleveland. I don't want to talk about it.

Seattle is the coolest city -- well, it truly is cool in the summer. Especially compared to the hot and dry weather we've been having in the midwest. But, it's also just plain cool. Modern, clean, a cappuccino compared to a shot and a beer town like Cleveland. Michael and I are there to present at an AAIE conference for elementary teachers of international schools. The conference opens with Bonnie Campbell Hill and her friend and mentor Sam. What a delight. Again I am reminded what motivated teachers these international school folks are. We talk education, poetry and during off hours, politics. They are unhampered by the testing fiasco that is crippling our schools here. Fifteen years of testing in Texas has resulted in the lowest SAT scores in the history of that test, and still that state holds itself out as the model. Don't get me started. Friday morning is a packed, writing talk by Regie Routman, who should be at every elementary school teacher's elbow. I suppose her books somewhat serve this purpose, but there is no substitute for hearing her speak.

Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, Delhi, ShanghaiShanghi – these teachers’ name tags read like the travel shelf at Borders. I love to hear their stories – how they went from teaching in Austin, Portland and Pittsburgh to countries I have only read about. Fascinating. Many thanks to Dick and Bonnie for the invitation.

Bright Lights, bright lights

The Las Vegas airport assaults the senses immediately. Ringing of the slots and flashing neon, soaring movie screens advertising shows, the whole place stomping to a we-will-we-will-rock-you beat. Queen returns as a stage show and I meet Michael under the woofers and tweeters. The fact that the cab driver cheats us on the way to the hotel while chatting amicably is an indication of the financial hijinx to come. We check in at the Riviera, which has seen better days, back when the place was still a desert. Tuesday is a day for exploring and we walk up and down the strip, checking out all the fancy hotels, Kelly on the phone coaching us along. Of all the places I’ve been in the world, this has town has never even been a temptation. Here this time for a conference, it is naturally worth exploring, even in (gasp) 115 degree heat. I found it loud, expensive and a pretty outrageous electricity hog. Not nearly as fun as it tries to be, like a never-ending prom. Michael has some luck with black jack and the slots, I have absolutely no luck. Those machines just eat money. My two talks at the conference are on Wednesday and go well. I always worry about presenting on the last day of a conference, especially in a distracting location such at Vegas, but the teachers are in their seats and ready to talk poetry. Quite impressive. That night we do a little more wandering, but are in bed relatively early for our long travel day on Thursday.

Happy Endings

The end of an era – not for Lexington, but for me. Almost. The second to the last Janet Allen Literacy Institute with a team of folks I’ve been working with for 9 years. A community of friends I know I’ll stay in contact with, but not the same as us all hanging out together. The trip was fragmented. I arrived late into Lexington, spoke in the afternoon and immediately left for the airport and another conference in Vegas. It seemed so anticlimactic, as if we need to have a celebration with a cake and wild dancing. A few of us will be going to Anchorage in August, but most of the team will be back in school. Hasty goodbyes to LeeAnn, Steve, Jill and Chris – too short, too quick – like short stepping over rocks, trying to hurry, not being able to slide into long strides of conversation that might actually take us somewhere familiar. I have learned so much from everyone and wouldn’t be who I am today without these institutes and my friends who offered me a sense of community in what is often a solo career. Change is necessary – good even, but hard.

Watching the sunset, flying to Lexington

The past two weeks have flown by faster than this airplane since vacation. Working in the backyard, completing a book proposal, trying lose the same ten pounds and to teach myself power point – all activities in the small confines of home. Very little television, some radio. I’ve been hesitant to let the outside world in. The tragedy in London drew me out of seclusion to watch the news, but only for a short while. Watching won’t help heal the wounds of the city, its people or the hate that’s infected the world.

I am on an airplane headed to Lexington, staring at the cursor wondering if that is a callous remark – I don’t mean it to be. Quite simply, what else can one do except live a peaceful, non-intrusive life? Or try to. Sometimes I get so wound up by listening to political arguments on the radio and television I am paralyzed. Surely that doesn’t help anyone, least of all me.

I remember 9/11 like it was last week. I was standing in the kitchen watching the Today show in the living room. Kelly called and we talked as we watched the second plane hit. A day out of surgery, the dr. had confined me to the house – I confined myself to a chair in the living room and watched urgently every new, painful revelation, crying, channel selector in hand. I don’t know how many times I watched that plane fly into that building and then the two towers melt. I had 5 or 6 surgeries that year, and that one was the longest recovery. I think that is a metaphor for something, but have never figured out what.

I don’t think that experience made me immune to tragedy, it just made me painfully aware of my human limitations. Kind of like the orange and purple stripes of a magnificent sunset.

Wild Strawberries

Mentor is billed as the Rose Capital of the world, named well before the economies of horticulture dictated that it is cheaper to raise roses in South America and fly them up here than raise them in our own backyard. Not only is labor a whole lot less per hour, but no one is quite as finicky about DDT. So while the title still remains on a dilapidated sign on the main drag, there is virtually no sign of the nurseries that used to blanket this area.

Except.

Here and there, along the road sides, at the edges of some lawns, peeking their cheery little berry heads up between sidewalk squares, stubborn and chemical resistant are wild strawberries. Tenacious little things, barely raspberry-sized. I don't know if they are bastardized remnants from the old nurseries or from the wild prairie days. Clearly, no one planted them where they are on purpose. Since their very existence is testament to the fact that they have not been covered with poisons, this morning on my walk I decided to taste one. I rubbed the dust and the hair off, rolling it between my fingers and popped it in my mouth.

I'd like to report that the berry was sweeter than an old memory, but it was not. Not bitter, just not as juicy and flavor-full as the grocery store variety -- ill-defined, like an old sepia photograph of a bygone time. Still, I found it encouraging to find plants resistant to suburbiatosis, one of the most toxic substances to all things wild, still bearing fruit.

Q & A

What's with this word "counter-intuitive"? All of a sudden, it's all over the place. Apply it to Iraq, the schools, the environment -- everyone is explaining what might be best explained as illogical as counter intuitive.

So, yesterday (was it the day before?) I was listening to the radio and some young twenty something was explaining away all organized religion, with particular emphasis on Scientology, as being counter intuitive. Religion, in her mind, is just a bunch of stuff folks made up. She spoke with great certainty.

I think when I was 21 (or was it the year before) I used to be that certain. I remember when Katie was born, I argued with my mother-in-law that I would not have the baby baptised because it was a pagan ritual based on the premise that kids are born in sin and had to be cleansed. Rather, I took a more Wordsworthian Romantic approach, that children are born innocent and the world corrupted them, therefore I was rebelling against infant baptism. I was very certain.

It seems that the longer one lives on the planet, the less one knows for certain, that more questions than answers come with age.

Counter-intuitive.

Oak Island, NC

Eight (was it nine?) hours, multiple traffic jams and pit stops later we pull up to our cottages on Oak Island, NC. Four the past 3 years we’ve been visiting the Outer Banks – and we love the place, but not the traffic. What was once a retreat is now a clogged, vinyl sprawl. We are trying a new location close to my cousin Karen’s home. Our cottages are next door to one another – old fashioned cottages with paneled walls, sand ground decks, rocking chairs and a hose connected to the outside of the house to rinse off the sand. BYO sheets, towels, and kites. Although, bare bones cottaging now includes cable television and automatic dishwashers, the beach feeling was all over us as we sniffed through our digs and claimed beds.

I hesitate to tell anyone where this place is – it is so like the Outer Banks I used to know before it was (gasp) developed. Oak Island is sparcely developed, no high rises or mega cottages that sleep 20 and cost 12,000 a week. The water is warmer, too.

Stephie (aged 4) and Benny (aged 5) learned to ride the waves in tubes this year. Frankie got the worst sunburn. Michael caught some mackerel and we ate it that night for dinner. Max was separated from his love (sigh). Danny and Scottie were wary about the water and the rest of us took turns watching toddlers and riding the waves. The bed didn’t get too sandy to sleep, no one got bug or alligator bit so I guess you could say the entire time was a roaring success.

Messages from the housesitter were that our cat, Spike, disappeared during the week leaving his sister Buffy at loose ends. But when Michael arrived home, he left the back door open for a bit and Spike, like the rest of us, finally came wandering home for a meal.

Ain’t that the way.

Tidepools are for splashing. 

Hallelujah!

Two tired, traveling road poets, one nursing mom of three little ones under 5 (tired by definition), three little ones under 5, one teacher out of school for a whole day (more tiredness), two more little ones under 4, one salesman, one secret service agent, two teenagers (one in love) excused from school early, one large black dog. Four vans, bikes, kayaks, beach chairs, inflatable rings, enough food for a cruise on the trans-siberian railroad, cameras, books, puzzles, umbrellas, fishing poles, buckets and shovels. All loaded in four vans, pulling out of Kelly’s driveway in Purcellville, VA, pausing the caravan to look both ways before we turn right toward the ocean, on the radio the song now made famous again from the movie Shrek. Hallelujah, hallelujah.

Just the act of putting 17 humans (three in diapers) and one dog who thinks he’s human on the road to annual vacation is monumental and worth celebrating. Hallelujah!

Buffy the Beetle Slayer

Living in the house we have Hector, the rat terrier who would roll over in submission for a butterfly, Spike the cat who is all white, deaf and clueless, a lizard who (I have heard) eats crickets raw (some things do not have to be seen to be believed) and Buffy, the fluffy gray and white beetle slayer.

The beetles are an inch and a half long, residents of the backyard, kin to grubs, shiny and black as my dad's old Imperial and positively prehistoric looking. They cling with velcro tenacity to carpet, socks (ohmygod) and little cat feet, which makes them fun playmates for cats, which, it is well known, like to bring their playmates home.

Before anyone considers this a sad story, please note that Buffy does not KILL the beetles. She brings them in the house and plays with them until she gets bored and then abandons them, whereupon they make an immediate beetle line for the back door, retracing Buffy's steps as if they'd dropped breadcrumbs. So far, they have turned up in the laundry room/closet, the bathroom, the bedroom and other places one might otherwise feel safe without shoes. One even attempted to set up camp on my bedside table last night along with all those books I have been meaning to read.

I want to write a letter to Dr. Phil or Redbook -- the headline on the subsequent advisement on the can-this-relationship-be-saved article would read, Can Owner Accept This Cat's New Relationship? Subhead: Will Cat's Clinging Coleoptera Break up this Happy Home?

Did you know that there are more varieties of beetles than there are plants? Why would you? Why would anyone except desperate cat owners scouring the internet at 4 in the morning for answers to a fundamental question . . .

Why do we keep pets anyway?

a poet on the edge

Saudi poet and novelist Ali al-Dimeeni, who has already been in jail for
a year, was sentenced on May 15 to nine years in prison for sowing
dissent, disobeying his rulers and sedition. He had written a letter to
the kingdom's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, calling for
political, economic and social reforms - including parliamentary elections.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-saudi-bard-behind-bars,0,1534164,print.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

One poem fragment:
"In Eilesha, I tamed my loneliness, and on its walls I wrote my verses," he wrote.

"My fellows and I have only called for justice/

Not for violence/

We only want to set up a rule of constitution/

Where men and women are treated equally/

From the dimness of the prison's cell/

My verses will spring like a garden."

I wonder what would have to happen for this to happen in this country? First, poets would have to start writing about subjects other than their own neuroses. Could it be that government oppression actually helps art? That by driving art underground, its edge grows sharper?

I'm not advocating the suppression of free expression, just wondering.

Brian is in the Secret Service, part of the Presidential Detail Emergency Response Team 

Brian

I have told many students and teachers about my son-in-law Brian and how he has to write as part of his job. Often kids (teachers too) dismiss poetry writing as superfulous, and I always remind them of Brian and others who never thought they would grow up to be writers, but then find themselves in jobs where they are required to write reports that say, "I saw what I saw and it looked like this." This kind of writing, capturing images and putting them down on paper is part of what poetry is all about.

Enough students has asked me follow-up questions and emails, I thought you might like to see a picture.

Rolling Thunder

Once a year outlaws gather in the capital -- black leather on harleys, V8s on two wheels roaring down Constitution Avenue to commemorate those whose lives were changed, ended (stolen?) by the Vietnam War. This year there were a reported 300,000 bikes, thunderous to say the least. Some of these bikers carry more than logos and chrome, they carry scars from those days, now more than a generation past. A truck full of white haired nurses from the days before women carried weapons into combat joined in the parade. Men with white hair, touching the wall, tough men whose broad shoulders and chests have slipped to a swelling above the belt, teary. How did they get to be so old?

All of us who lived through those days bear scars from those days – the country, the vets, those of us who experienced the war as an unreal warm up act to Laugh In and Disney. No one came away from it without their trust in government impaired. Some scars naturally ruminate deeper than others. When I told my 30 something hairdresser about my trip to Ho Chi Minh City, she told me about her father. He came home from the war (when she was a toddler) covered in Agent Orange sores on his arms. Those and other less visible sores never healed. Sores that caused him to abuse drugs, his family. Caused a divorce. He died of cancer in his forties. Logic (but not Dupont, of course) would blame his early death on those sores, too. His name, along with so many others, never made it up on the wall – but it should have.

How did they get so old???? Those white-haired men, my peers. Michael’s son Max is studying the Vietnam war in history class. The war of my school years – all of them – is now a history lesson taught in late May. We look at the telephone thick book of 55,000 names of the dead and missing. The deaths span 19 years. If the Iraq war were to go on that long, Benny, Danny and Scottie, my toddler grandsons, two of them playing chase under the trees aside the memorial wall could be drafted to serve. Chilling thought. What we should have learned is that it is a whole lot easier to get into these conflicts than it is to end them.

DC is so crowded with war memorials, we’re running out of room to carve the names and numbers of the dead into granite. Arlington Cemetery is overflowing, too. When there is no more room, will that be the end of it? Would that were so.

Max and me at the Vietnam War memorial wall. 

Listen to the Mocking Bird

“Listen to the Mockingbird” is a song I remember singing in grade school forty years ago growing up in Michigan, not a mockingbird travel destination. Arriving at Kelly’s outside of Leesburg, VA on Friday night around 11:30 PM, I heard mockingbirds for the first time. They are loud – singing their brains out at midnight. Something between a song and a shriek – the punk version of birdsong, they sounded absolutely nothing like the little tune from Mrs. Gustaphson’s class.

Kelly and I took a 2 mile walk, some of it through new areas of construction near their home. Once all this farmland is converted into foundations, walkways, driveways and swimming pools, I wonder what the mockingbirds will have to say about that?

flowers are for picking 

Getting back to basics

Like a weekend at home with Stephanie and Scottie. Katie, their mom lent them to me for Friday night. We went swimming (indoors, it's still in the 40s in OH), poked around in the garden and rode bikes. And did a little science experiment with leather and static electricity (see pic).

Harding High was my last school this year, and whether the weather has caught up with the calendar or not, I'm ready for summer. Way ready. Past ready. It is good to be back home. I worked a little in the garden where I planted some pansies (my mother's favorite flower) next to the rock (too big to swallow, small enough to hold in my stomach) that I brought home from my father's gravesite in Arlington. As I sit here typing, I'm smiling imagining them squabbling out there to one another. Of course their bickering never seemed so amusing when they both were alive.

Home and all its definitions -- could fill books. Has. I thought about writing about working in the garden but have decided to declare a personal moratorium on that subject. A seed is supposed to be the original metaphor and writers/poets have about done it to death.

So no writing from the garden.
Well, until something springs from the fertile soil of my mind. An insignificant sprout, new shoots, blossoms to be plucked for closer examination.
bleh.

Truism: Leather sofas make your hair stand up. 

Warren G. Harding High School

This is a big, old school in Warren, OH scheduled for rennovation. It will be cool for the kids to get a new building, but the antique lover in me feels sad that it is going down. It is the kind of building that would withstand centuries. Even the concrete floors in the restrooms are polished like a glossy dinner plate. It has a theater style auditorium and a vast wood and metal shop. Built in the early part of the last century, it is not equipped for the electrical needs of this generation. It was heartening to hear that alums have mobilized to save the facade of the grand ol' building that will somehow be attached to the new design. I met with classes in the library where we talked about how poetry could be significant in their lives.

Driving to the school down back roads I passed through Amish Country, at one point turning off the radio and opening the windows to smell the country air. It is a proven fact that you can smell better when the radio is off. Wonder why that is.