Do you write politcal poems?

The eighth graders were restless this afternoon. Every poem inspired a volley of verbal fire with the cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left. Not at all sure that I was connecting with any of the 250 of them crowded onto the library floor. Questions and answers went better than the presentation -- thoughtful questions (maybe they were listening?) and then one student from the way back: Do you ever write political poems?

I was immediately transported back to a conversation I'd had at a polite gathering of poets in Cleveland a couple of weeks ago. Professor One was bemoaning the fact that Nikki Giovanni had actually written a poem for the Virginia Tech family. "I call this Polaroid poetry," he haughtily declared. "What she should have done is find a poem from the past and read that one at the memorial." I questioned this as did another poet standing in attendance at his proclamation. Another professor chimed in, "yes, I don't believe in political poetry at all."

My friend said saomething along the lines of "Eh? You kidding?" She was more polite than that, but direct. "No," he continued -- political poems may possibly be written but not until maybe 100 years after the event. It takes that long to get perspective."

One hundred years later? Who cares 100 years later? No wonder so much poetry is seen as irrelevant if that is the academic attitude toward contemporary commentary in the form of poetry.

I questioned professor #1 citing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry on child labor and how that was read in Parliament and helped to change the laws. He looked at me blankly and then he looked over my head to see who else had entered the room. That was the end of the discussion.

Times of crisis (is a massacre a political event?) are exactly the right time to reach for poetry -- to call on our poets to put attempt to put words to the feelings we share. I thought calling on Nikki Giovanni was EXACTLY the right thing to do and that she was able to offer verbal comfort, encircling the wounded with her verse.

Do I write political poems? Yes. And I will continue to do so. In a world where every activity from schools to bees to peace have become political hot potatoes -- how can any writer not be political? In fact, I have a goal. I want to write a poetry book that gets banned in schools for being politically forthright. I'm bored with getting banned for being satanic and anti-familiy values and some of the other goofy things I've been labeled.

Poets are supposed to stir things up. It's a proud tradition that apparently our eighth graders recognize as being important, if not our "scholars."

Washington Post, NCLB, & Charles Waters

Yesterday, I read an article in the Washington Post that said that the Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading initiative at the center of NCLB on allegations of financial conflicts -- meaning people on the committee chose their own programs despite weak or non existant research on the capabilities of those programs (DIBELS among them).

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee."

Also in the course of the article (linked above) is this quote: "Despite the controversy surrounding Reading First's management, the percentage of students in the program who are proficient on fluency tests has risen about 15 percent, Education Department officials said. School districts across the country praise the program."

Eh? Which districts? Those who are too scared of having their funding cut off to be honest? In the libraries and halls of our schools, one hears a different story.

NCLB is criminal on so many different levels, it's hard to narrow it down to just the issue of financial gain for the Reading First comittee. Please see the email I received a couple weeks ago from another poet taking the poetry into schools, Charles Waters.


Sara,
I just had to e-mail you to tell you this story that happened to me on Tuesday. So I'm in the library in the poetry section when I meet this 9th grader who is trying to find "Romeo and Juliet" for a book report that's due by Friday. When I asked him why he waited so long to start doing research on the play he said "She gave us the assignment yesterday." I thought immediately to standardized testing I guessed to myself that the teacher is rushing to get through the curriculum so quickly to get ready for the test that there's no time to actually teach the material thoroughly. The kid told me he tried to read the play but found it all to be "jibber jabber." There was no Spark Notes or No Fear Shakespeare or any books in the library that I felt could help him understand the material better and suggested he go to the librarian for help; but he said she was busy and just pointed him in the direction of where a copy of the play was at. I then suggested going to the bookstore to get the Spark Notes or No Fear books (by this time his father arrived on the scene) and by the look on his face he didn't have either the money or inclination to go Barnes and Noble which was practically across the street to get the book or books needed. I asked the kid (whose name I'm sorry I didn't ask) if they do in fact do standardized testing at his school and he said yes they what's called the F-CAT or something like that and he had to take it soon. If I had had the money I would have bought to books for him myself. I was so frustrated that I needed to rant to someone who would understand this and I thought of you because I'm a loyal reader of your blog and know you've seen these kind of things up close and would understand. I'm mad at our current administration for their ignorance knowing that one of the main causes for this, I'm disappointed in the librarian for not helping this child out more with his problem and I'm highly distressed that this poor teacher is having to rush his or her lesson plans and as a result the students are suffering academically and emotionally, it breaks my heart and I don't know what to do about it. Any thoughts? Thanks for reading my rant, I feel better having wrote it and god bless poetry forever.


All the best,
Charles

sad week

This was such a sad week -- I was in a hotel all last week where the story of the killings at Virginia Tech dominated my room in a constant moan, continuing after I had turned off the news. Even the walls were weeping. So tragic, words fail. And the bloodiest week in Iraq. Too many lives lost without the benefit of commemorative snapshot eulogies on the Today Show.

Wednesday, USA today listed the tragic events young people had witnessed since 1986, captured in exquisite visual detail on their TV screens: Challenger Disaster, Columbine, Tsunami, Katrina, 911 -- it was a formidable list. Missing on the list ENTIRELY was the Iraq War. Missing. Not mentioned. How is that? The one event that has dragged its bulging baggage of death and destruction through the news over (just say) a student's entire middle or high school experience is not worth listing as a tragedy? How is that? Is it too political to even mention that death in a war zone is just as final and just as tragic as death by waves, winds and mad men?

Here in Mentor, the HS is dealing with a home grown crisis. Three students at the HS have committed suicide this semester. Two in the past month. Three young people so stripped of hope that they saw no future in living. 75% of the students called in sick on Friday due to threats of violence at the school promising to make Columbine look like nothing.

How do we nurture our young people and show them hope? Lectures? Counselors? Motivational Speakers and pre-packaged anti-bullying programs? Are the answers buried in statistics in math texts? On multiple choice proficiency tests? Science class is getting a little spooky all by itself what with global warming and all, too scary to look there. Like the Hookies who turned to Nikki Giovanni for consolation, it may be time to come back to poetry -- a place to not only express our feelings, but actually identify them. Poems written by the students themselves, to share and to listen.

I was reminded of what Marilyn Manson said in Bowling for Columbine when asked what he would have said to the shooters if he'd had the chance: "I wouldn't have said anything, I would have listened." Brilliant observation.

I don't think we can lecture kids into hopeful thinking, but maybe we might be able to, with a kind guiding hand providing gentle directional corrections, listen them into it.

Blessings to all who departed this week. The world will miss your voices.

Jack in the Pulpit?

I remember when my daughter Kelly was getting married, her husband to be, Brian, wasn't all that thrilled about going with her to pick out china patterns and such. But he was emphatic about her not going alone because he was afraid he would wake up the day after the honeymoon sleeping on ruffled sheets and eating off of flowered plates. Not that uncommon of a male stance on household decor. In fact, how couples pass the picking out the china phase of marriage might be a reasonable predictor of broken plates to come.

Which was why I read with some wide-eyed surprise in the Chicago Trib. this morning about a glass urinal intended for home installation in the shape of jack-in-the-pulpit flower. I can't imagine any man picking this apparatus out for himself thinking that is the recepticle he wants to address upon returning home from the garage, freeway, or rugby match. Not just an oh-my-gosh moment in a restaurant or sports bar, but installed at home. And that was before I saw the $10,000 price tag.

I am not a man nor an expert on uninals, but I do know what a jack-in-the-pulpit is and I'll never look at one the same way again. They are an endangered flower in my area, but I'm not sure screwing flushable glass scultures of them to the wall is the best route to saving them from extiction.

This accessory was nestled in the silk pillows of an article about some Chicago residents who had just installed a 6,000 foot recreation wing on their house.

Maybe it was the movie we rented last weekend, Turtles Can Fly, about Iraqi children before the start of the war who made a meager living disarming and reselling land mines. Or maybe it was images from Darfur. Or was it the last Oprah show I watched? But something in me shouted that the world is out of whack.

Southeast Primary Intermediate School

First of all -- I LOVE when teachers have kids think of questions for the author in advance. Of course we NEVER stick to the questions on the index cards, but it gets kids to thinking beyond what kind of car do I drive and did it hurt to get my ears pierced. Pre-thinking makes at least some of our discussion time afterthoughts, which tend to make a better learning experience than random thoughts. Although, some of those are fun, too.

Since more than one of the questions had to do with form poems, I have to guess that was a topic of discussion in Mrs. Macejko's class. I love Clint's question and immediately envisioned a haiku sitting atop a limerick at an odd angle, like a jaunty hat. I asked Michael and he said that mixing the two would be like eating corned beef with chop sticks.

My afterthought is this:

The Japanese poem called Haiku
to the Limerick said, "how do you do?"
Each kept its design
then flashed a peace sign.
Both declined to blend in a stew.

Rucker Middle School Lancaster, SC

Ever go looking for one image and find another? I've had that happen countless times with poetry -- I start out writing about one subject and it twists and turns and backflips into something totally different. Photography is supposed to be more straight forward. Point and shoot. Right?

Not when there's a joker in the front row who sneaks his peace sign in front of the delicate heart necklace which was what I thought I was pointing and shooting at. And when I came home and found the necklace missing behind the hand, I said, "shoot!"

But then I got to playing with the photo and though this image isn't what I thought I wanted, it turned out pretty cool. So a grudging (okay, happy) thank you to the joker in the front row at Rucker.

And thanks to the Leigh and the rest of the library staff for the wonderful day. And I made another new acquaintance -- the inn and innkeeper at the Kilburnie Inn at Craig Farm (see link). A splendid, restful restored inn. Southern hospitality at its very best.

More from Fremd

Writing is a team sport. I know we don't mostly think of it that way, but what is a piece of writing without an audience? This realization came back to me as I read at Fremd this week. Tony Romano, one of the English teachers at the school and a very soon (April) to be published novelist told me how he had just about given up on getting published had it not been for the caring support of his writer's group and friends, especially Henry Sampson and Maria Mungai. It reminded me how important those first readers are for any work that I create, how friends and family all have a role in every one of my published (or still in the drawer) pieces.

And then there is the first airing for poetry before a live audience. I took the opportunity at Fremd to read from two unpublished manuscripts I am very excited about. First the book of love poems written with Allan Wolf, working title Informally Yours. Those poems are mostly written in form (sonnets, villanelles, tankas). Then I switched to poems from another manuscript, Could It Happen Here?, poems for teens on serious world topics, rumors spawned by a school shooting, 911, the war in Iraq, genocide, pollution, suicide.

Would the HS kids go for modern sonnets? Would the ironic parts make them smile? Would the tragic poems bring an emotional response? It all seemed to work as I rehearsed the night before, but I did feel a flutter of panic right before I was introduced and was tempted to switch back to the tried and true. But I stuck with the program.

The audience was more than receptive, laughing and silently absorbing. It was an educational, rewarding, affirming experience for me. I came home with marks on the papers -- rhythmic edits I will make based on how the piece flowed off the page and through a microphone. But mostly I came home filled with the patience needed to continue through the submission and waiting part of the publishing equation.

Thanks to all my friends at Fremd. I know the teachers and booster club work hard on this event to bolster the student's writing skills. I hope they know how these events also benefit the writers.

Ted Kooser at Fremd High

He says he was a geek in school -- not athletic or a band member. He thought he would become a poet to make himself stand out, carrying heavy books under his arm to enhance his biceps. He wore costumes. Finally after posing as a poet for some time, he decided he would actually try writing some poems. Now the immediate past U.S.Poet Laureate, we can all be glad that this was one kid who pursued his dream.

At 67 he grew up before television was served with dinner every night as a side dish. He was not distracted by gameboys and American Idol. He worked for over thirty years in the insurance industry, indulging and nurturing his writing habit every morning at 4:30 AM, before work. He is old enough to have over heard stories of the blizzard of 1888 and now to have written about them in short, first person narrative poems. He reads to us his valentines to the world, his snapshots of real life, a sensual poem about an ironing board, a poem with an empty purse. He likes poetry because he is a precise person and a poem is something that he can work to perfection, a piece of writing so tight that not a comma or word can be changed without diminishing the poem's impact.

So many who have achieved so much less have such a greater opinion of themselves. He is a compact man in khakis and a tweed jacket. His eyes are kind and searching, honestly looking for answers to questions. I told him that I love quoting from his book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual in teacher workshops and he smiles and says he's glad. As a human being he is well crafted, like a fine poem. His perspective is deep and rich.

I felt honored to shake the square hand that has produced such fine poetry read today without an extra layer of dramatic interpretation. Pure words recited in a common conversational font.

Surrender?

Okay. I'm still obsessing. (see previous post) It's 4AM. My brain is balled up in a fist and I can't get it to relax.

This weekend Michael and I drove to Indiana University which is not in Indiana, it's in PA. We went to Dr. Lynn Alvine's birthday party -- which was lovely. Had a great dinner then breakfast and drove home. We traveled mostly state routes rather than the interstate, taking us through Youngstown. At one point we drove through just the kind of neighborhood that freeways were designed to help us fly over. Boarded up businesses, vacant homes drooling gutters with windows broken out and curtains flapping in the icy winds. Peeling paint and broken steps, trash for lawns and doors hanging loose -- each a metaphor for what once was secure and now has become unhinged.

This neighborhood is not unique to Youngstown, you can find one painfully like it in any major city, although the departure of jobs has hit NE Ohio hard in the bread basket.

How easily we overlook this evidence of our society's despair and accept it as part of the urban landscape. Abandoned buildings unclaimed by anything natural -- even the ground doesn't want them back. We drive by them on our way to the theater, passing by on our way to share dinners with friends. We look at their gape-toothed facades and hope the buildings are uninhabited, when we think about them at all. Mostly, we just slide past or more frequently fly over.

I am left tonight with the vision of those curtains flapping in surrender and wondering how we can possibly accept the presence of these places as part of us. And hoping (hoping) on this single digit night that all those structures are indeed uninhabited as I unclench and crawl into my warm bed.

Misguided, Misspent

Thirty misspent minutes. Running out the clock until 11PM, Michael and I watched a fraction of a blood dripping, roller coaster crashing, skin burning teen horror movie. Finishing up a couple last rows of knitting, putting the dogs out -- I wasn't really watching, it was just ON. But I couldn't get to sleep with those horrible images in my head. I was obsessing. All the literature says to move if you are sleepless in bed and obsessing. So, I moved to the computer in my office to read the news to clear my brain.

Bombings. 50% chance we cannot save the polar ice caps. Senate fights. Worst mistake in U.S. history. Troops lost to their families. Returning wounded are being neglected at Walter Reed. Even Brittany looked frightening. There was no humorous relief, only one horrifying image compounding the next. And then a story about some misguided IBM employee caught cruising an appropriate web site (he claims) to get images of Vietnam out of his head who is suing his former employer for firing him because he is addicted to the computer. He wants to be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act for his obsessive compulsive disorder. Eh?

And while I shook my head at the silliness of his lawsuit, I plunged into successive games of computer solitaire. One might say -- obsessively -- still trying to clear my head of horrifying images so I could get some sleep.

There is some kind of parallel to be drawn there, but I am too tired to figure it out.

Too cold for gloves?

In Oxford, MI. In the middle of a major blizzard. Cold hands. I stop by the local K Mart to buy gloves. I am more than familiar with K Mart's stock of gloves stock. More than I should be. I bought my first pair of the season (black with fake fur and thinsulate lining) in early December. Lost those right away. Very quick. Even for me. Bought the second pair in late December. (blue with fake fur and thinsulate lining). So I went into K Mart to buy my third pair for the season and there were none. Not only were there no black or blue gloves (with or without fake fur lining) there were no warm gloves, only the little thin things with matching scarves made somewhere in China that doesn't know what mid-western cold is all about. So I crossed over to the men's department. No gloves AT ALL. Finally I found an employee -- usually more rare in large box stores than gloves in July. Or, make that gloves in February.

Where are the gloves?
There are these. (she points to the tissue paper gloves)
No, the gloves you had earlier in the season.
Like, ski gloves?
Yes. Ski gloves.
I just put them away. They are all in the back room in a shopping cart.
And the men's gloves?
All put away.
I know that you have to do what they tell you to do at the main headquarters, but has anyone looked outside? There's a blizzard.
She shrugged, sighed and said she had to make ready for spring goods. She also stepped out of her corporate ordered role and took mercy on my cold hands, leading me to the back room where I found yet another pair of blue gloves lined with fake fur and thinsulate. This time half price.

I felt as if I had rescued them from death row. Where do gloves go when bouquets of sleeveless tops arrive in all their pastel splendor? Well, one pair came back to the hotel with me. Saved, not by a blizzard but by a non-characteristic bout of assertiveness on my part and a little kindness on the part of the woman in the blue smock.

Doesn't it feel good to know we are revamping our schools to adhere to a business model? Like business knows what it is doing. Right. Sometimes it seems I am always working with (mostly) women who are working around some arbitrary, misinformed, ill thought out direction from some administration totally out of touch with the blizzards blowing and drifting about in the real world.

Williamsport, PA

Williamsport, PA is the birthplace of the Little League. Proudly smiling from the trophy case at Jackson Elementary was this snowman made of baseballs, the perfect metaphor for a baseball town in chilly February. I spent two days at Jackson -- one day with the students and one with the teachers. Warm and receptive, it was a great visit.

The day before I visited the kids at Stevens Elementary, and between the two schools, I feel like I made some real friends in Williamsport. Everyone was so nice there -- even the kids bagging groceries. Seriously. It's a great place.

T REX! Sue and Jane

Ben reaches out to grab the teeth of a T Rex at the Cleveland Natural History Museum. As the sign says, looking down the throat of what was probably the largest animal to ever roam the planet isn't something too many did and lived to tell about it during Sue's 20 years. She's traveling with her companion, Jane and stopped off here for a few growls. Last weekend we took the Lufkin branch and this weekend the Weist branch of the family to stand in awe.

Dinosaurs are the original rock stars. They are even older than the Rolling Stones, most have had a lot of work done, have had to resort to performing to recorded music and people still flock to see their bones having only a fantastical memory of how it was back in the day. Having died tragic, mysterious deaths just adds to their legend. They are totally and perpetually cool.

The biggest of the two, Sue, was probably about 20 when she fell into a pile to be discovered millions of years later. Jane was only eleven. Both had broken bones that had healed with lumps and no access to aspirin. Ouch. Below, Danny begins to get a grip how strong those jaws really were.

Beatnik Snow, Man

You can't get much cooler than a snowman in a beret and a yellow leopard shirt stickin' to the grey skies with uplifted arms. No sun? Who needs it.



Came home from South Carolina to find this cat jiving in the front yard, Frankensteined to life by none other than my stepson Frank. Dog food for eyes and half a wry smile, he was just hangin' out gardenside, getting his freeze on and welcoming me home sometime after midnight.

White Knoll Middle School

White Knoll Middle looks like your typical school from the outside. Bell, flag pole, parking lot. You get the picture. But unless and until you go inside, you have no idea what a happenin' place it is.

And these kids, they are alive with poetry, writing, literacy, checking books out of the library and questions! Lots of questions. Questions are good, questions mean students are engaged in learning.

Here's one question that really got me thinking. It was posted to my blog and asked at an assembly: "If you had sons instead of daughters, would you still have written so much poetry?" Wow. I've been tossing that one around in my head for two days, sorting poems in imaginary piles of yes, no, and maybe. And I think the final answer is, yes, for the most part the poems were in me. They were unleashed by watching my children grow up, kind of my letters to them from the kitchen table. BUT, if I had had sons only, some of the topics of the poems might have been different. Boys can be just as upset about getting glasses and braces as girls, but they might be less inclined to want "red hair and ten pounds less of me by Friday." Some of the reoccurring themes of my poems would have been the same -- independence vs wanting to fit in, being honest about feelings and trying to decide what is really true, those themes don't belong to either boys or girls. Those are themes of human existence and of each of us trying to find our best way to live. For me, poetry as helped direct me on my path in life.

Thank you to Ruth Edwards and Nancy for working so hard to prepare the kids. The lesson plan Ruth developed was brilliant and certainly got everyone into investigative reporter mode, which lead to (you guessed it) most excellent questions.

This is truly a special school. After 9/11 the school raised (are you ready?) $500,000 to buy a new firetruck for one that was destroyed in NYC. Can you imagine raising that kind of money? And people think that kids just care about designer tennis shoes. Ha! Posted on the wall is a clipping from People Magazine quoting one student: "'We're all Americans," says 13 year old Chase Hilliard, explaining why he pitched in. "Being up there, you may be Yankees. But you're our Yankees.'" That made me laugh, being a yankee and all. Encased in glass in the lobby is a piece of the destroyed firetruck that White Knoll Middle School students worked so hard to replace. Wiow. It was chilling to see and and a heartening story to hear.

The Dogs Ate My S.O.S. Pads!

This is a picture of Hector (big dog) and Suzi (little dog). They come from totally different hoods. Hector is from East 185th Street in Cleveland and has a lot of what you might call street smarts. For instance, he was homeless and looking for a place to hang out and when he saw a Home Depot he must have thought that that was the place to shop for a new home, because we met when he chose my leg out of all the other shoppers to lay his wet nose against while I was shopping for wingnuts, hence his name: Hector Wing Nut Rodriguez. He is a kind and gentle big brother to Suzi, who came from the other side of the tracks so to speak.

Suzette Creme Fromage is her full name, or Suzi Cream Cheese. (That name came from a Frank Zappa song as a suggestion from Michael and it fits perfectly). Also, Suzi was my mother's name. She has a long pedigree of champions, is only 4 lbs and believes she is not only a princess, but boss of the house and probably the world. Her breed is a papillon. Papillon is french for butterfly and that fits because she has butterfly ears and she thinks she's all that because of them. The word is that this is the type of dog that Marie Antoinette carried with her when she lost her head.

But as a perfect example of how different breeds, from different neighborhoods, indeed different countries, with different pedigrees and expectations do indeed have similar tastes, they conspired against the authority (me) pulled a box from under the cupboard and gleefully started sharing a meal this morning while I was brushing my teeth. All very understandable.

But S.O.S. pads?

Building a tolerace for fruitloops

I don’t think there exists a parent who has ever stood civilly in line at the grocery store who has not (at least) once sworn to abandon some obnoxious, not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, back-talking, self-conscious, can’t plan beyond lunch teenager while at the same time buying Fruitloops. Kick that lazy butt to the curb. Give up on the greedy, destructive self-centeredness. Why parents don’t give into these impulses is a mystery born less out of nobility than resign and exhaustion.

I think, the more one travels to visit the bedrocks of more established societies in places like Europe, China, Japan and the Middle East, one becomes more acutely aware that the USA is very much an adolescent society. We just can’t seem to get control of ourselves, voraciously hungry for more, more, more with no trained eye for where, where, where or how, how, how. Doesn’t matter. The world and its resources were made to serve us. We want what we want and we want it now. America is a spoiled brat that taunts anyone who is different than the Barbie Doll, G.I. Joe, J.D.Rockefeller ideals put in our heads as children.

When I was in treatment for my mother’s alcoholism, the woman who ran the center (whose initials were G.O.D. iconic-ally enough) said that “maturity is being able to accept that everyone is not like you.” In the U.S., we just aren’t there yet. And all these suspicions the collective harbors toward “others” appears to give us a justifiable excuse to bully them, warped as only the adolescent mind can twist reality, free of empathy and consequences. Here we too often see things in strictly black or white, not standing still long enough to see the truth hiding in the dusky shadows between.

But as the myths of adolescence prove to be untrue, so does the myth of “aged to perfection.” Forget it. Older societies are also imperfect. Why? Because they are made up of human beings who are in every way flawed. I have a line in a poem about adolescence that moans, “no one told us, who would settle, who would fly, and who, (and who?) would melt.” As a grandmother I still have not outgrown being annoyed by the fact that NO ONE TELLS US HOW THIS WILL ALL TURN OUT. Not at 15, 25, 35, 45, 55. How maddening is that? No wonder there’s road rage.

Way back when in ‘67, I thought I’d know by now. Surely, by 2007 I’d know. But I don’t. I don’t know which person or country will settle, fly or melt and to borrow from a more recognized and certainly more mature but no less self-centered poet, “it goads me like the goblin bee who will not state its sting.”

Ultimately, all we have is one another. Adolescents are obsessed with appearances; caught sitting next to the wrong person at lunch would be a horror worthy of an internal if not external chain saw massacre. Her table (team, gang, clique, school, town, nation) is the best and it is infuriating that the others exist at all and for SURE she can’t be caught associating with THEM.

But as we mature, knowing that there are other people and other ways doesn’t make us so angry. In fact, it’s pretty cool to travel independently and look through windows tasting of the nourishments prepared by others and then bringing home samples to share, clustered where we are most comfortable, with the ones we hold dear.

Too early in the year to be so far behind

And you know what? Even thought this blog "nags me like the goblin bee that will not state its sting" (thank you emily) I haven't found time to write. I don't even know what to write about first. Maybe first I better go back and catch up on the trip to Croatia, which was amazing. And the visit with friends Kathy and Steve which was rambling and enriching in everyway possible. And then there was the visit to the International School in Zagreb where the kids wrote moving poetry and performed but I didn't have my camera so I don't have any pictures :(.

So, maybe I'll post some pix from Croatia and hope that a few of them tell the story. I'll back date them to try and make sense out of things. But then, jumbled up is usually just as good. Memories are like fruit salad, it really doesn't matter what order you eat them in, just that you savor each bite.

Trieste, Italy and beyond

When we boarded the Croatian Airlines flight from Frankfurt to Zagreb, all these men started boarding who were quite tall, high cheek bones and narrow eyes -- just like Michael, whose grandfather came from Croatia. It was as if we had found his tribe. Cross the border into Italy and genetics takes 6-8 inches off of the men and then places them all on motorbikes with the idle set on breakneck. Trieste also had a Christmas fair, great yarn and the best cocoa that I've ever tasted. I wish we had had more time to explore. Here we are in a coffee shop with our friends Kathy and Steve. I wouldn't say that the cocoa I was drinking was thick, but you could practically stand a spoon up in it.

On our drive up to Trieste, we stopped off to see the tallest Church in Istria, the 18th century Svetog Blaza. The guidebook said that it howed a great collection of religious relics and other treasures. But mostly we stopped there for a viewing of the Vodnjan mummies, the bodies of important dead clergy, displayed in glass cases and supposedly impervious to decomposition. Surreal, but not something one encounters in Toledo. We knocked on the church doors, but no one answered. Finally, someone in the almost deserted square suggested that we try knocking on the door of the home of the priest. He assured us it would be okay, so we ventured down this narrow, cobblestone passageway (I think residents might consider it a road) and knocked. Knocked again. One of the shuttered windows swung open and as if from a coo-coo clock a head emerged. She was barely tall enough to see out the window, but as she shook one arthritic finger it was as if she were saying, "you may not see our dead today." And then she slammed closed the shutter. The priest may live at this address, but clearly she was the one in charge, so we did not see the dead.

On to lunch in Porec, a charming sea side town where we had the best lunch of the trip. Why do we put up with such inferior food in this country? Fast food isn't even worth mentioning, although an outlet exists on every corner. One step above that you have the Applebee equivalents where the food is all prepared in Kansas or somewhere and shipped to be thawed out in less than 20 minutes. And we eat this, when the alternative is food prepared with ingenuity and unimaginable variety at local small eateries. I wasn't once tempted to order a chicken Caesar salad as the lesser of all evils and even though we ate well, I actually lost weight while abroad. We need to get our groceries in order.

I regret not having pasta in Italy, which means I have to go back -- and soon.

Pula, Croatia

Croatia does dark like West Virginia does dark. Real dark. Mountainous dark. Winding two lane roads through total blackness. Dark. So when we finally reached the outskirts of Pula after passing countless exclamation point signs and 20 (you read that right) tunnels en route from the airport in Zagreb, we really felt like we'd accomplished something. Those exclamation point signs have no explanation, by the way. They just appear beside curves and construction sites as if the road is agrees with the travelers and is screaming "Wow" as they pass.

But, then we had to connect with Kathy and Steve who were living in a no number house on a no name street. Thanks to a cell phone connection, we rounded curve after curve on what appeared to us to be a bike lane instead of a road and made one last sharp right hand turn at the church and there they were, standing beside the road wearing their best, warm but shivering Cleveland smiles.

The unfortunate thing was that the house was temporarily out of oil for hot water and this was Sunday and we were still in the same clothing we had left Cleveland in on Friday. But, hey. On vacation, right? We went to the open air fish market the next morning. Pula's main industry is fishing and tourism. Lucky for us we were not there in high tourist season, so we had more of a real life experience. Kathy had managed to master enough Croatian to negotiate our fish and vegetable purchases, so we were fat city that night for dinner. Anybody know what those green pointy thingie's are on the vegetable table?

We also made our initial acquaintance with the town of Pula, which has been a port of some renowned since ancient Roman times. Istria, the little part of Croatia where we were visiting, has alternately been part of Italy, Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, but appears to best like being simply Croatia. You know how in the US if a city building is 50 years young it is labeled too old and often torn down? Not in Europe. To them, recycling is not just a recent fad. They've been conserving and reusing for centuries. We were to discover ancient churches and fortresses, narrow cobblestone streets, all still functioning very nicely without the benefit of vinyl siding or plastic window frames. By far the most amazing site was the remains of a Roman Colosseum.

I have to say something here about Adriatic Blue. We don't do blue justice in Cleveland. Lake Erie blue is too often a tinted shade of gray. This is not photoshopped in anyway, this is the blue that was. Rich as it was enriching.