15 Sentence Portrait

Starlight White

We had been sitting on the unforgiving plank seat of the picnic table for a heart-to-heart when my dad scooped me up and held me, my spindly spine drawing a neat line down his chest. The dusk light turned my fingertips faintly yellow, the color of pollen too stubborn to be washed off in the bath. My stomach was a hard chasm and my throat thick with the warm milk that was supposed to have put me to sleep. Tomorrow was the first day of school and my fingers flexed like a basketball player miming a free-throw shot, ready and nervous to press my freshly sharpened pencils into the mysterious shapes of the ABCs.

All summer I had waited, planned, and dreamed about tomorrow, but not any tomorrow, tomorrow’s tomorrow: it was the evening before my first day of kindergarten at Prairie Hills elementary school. I had to ride the bus alone. My red and black backpack was packed with Big Chief paper and a box of tissues for the classroom. I wanted to be new like my new supplies, a brand new grown up girl instead of the little girl who stayed at home with her mother while the big kids went to school.

My dad pointed toward the lights at the edge of the prairie grass. We watched the fireflies flit freely near the lawn’s limit. My Dad, who must have sat here with his other three daughters and maybe even my brother, breathed gently into my ear. The taste of mint lingered in the air as I absentmindedly ran my tongue across my freshly scrubbed teeth. The stars were cool pinpricks behind my eyes.

Dad told me, “Just scream them out.” My little-girl lips opened wide in a high pitched scream and as the butterfly wings raced toward the stars, soft traces of their wings gathered in the creases of my smile—the starlight white smile I would give the next morning for my new teacher, Mrs. Drew.

(with thanks to Ms.Nic.)

Ted Kooser and Me

Ted Kooser
(click on image to enlarge)

Last night we managed to find our way to the Dowagiac Fine Arts Festival to listen to Ted Kooser read his poems. We were running late, of course. It was only our second trip to Dowagiac and we were unsure of the way. Luckily we had my new favorite toy: a gps device. It shows and tells you where to go. I love pushing its buttons. L. finally had to suggest I might want to enjoy the lovely scenery instead of the virtual fields and lakes.

We had tickets dead center and about halfway back from the podium in the quite posh Dowagiac Central Middle School. Junior High never looked so good.

Ted Kooser turns me on. Wait. Ted Kooser's poetry turns me on. But it is him too. His softly angled face full of stories, ready for a joke, eyes and hands eager to get outside with his notebook calms me into a readiness to gaze into his poems and wait for the pressure of his elegant verse to set off little explosions under my skin.

He is one of those poets who have that power to compel me to pay attention. To observe. To listen. He is not flashy or aggressive. He doesn't demand attention. I just find myself turned inside out when listening to his poems. If he asked me about my deepest secrets, I would tell him with comfort. One of those types.

I am sure not everyone feels this way about Ted. But maybe not.

Maybe it is because I am from Kansas and he is from Nebraska.

L. and I were two of the youngest audience members in the sizable crowd. What an honor. What a shame that more young people (by young, I am thinking 40 or under) didn't come out to hear these words simply spoken with such delight and power.

He read two of my favorites "Beaded Purse" and "Tattoo." I heard "A Washing of Hands" in a new way. He also read a poem about a couple splitting a roast beef sandwich. I can't find it in my copy of "Delights and Shadows", his 2004 book of poems. I want a copy of that poem. Please let me know if you know it.

He read one poem that he had composed that morning. It was a portrait or "snapshot" poem he had written called "Will Work for Food" and depicted a person living in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Kooser makes it his habit to write every morning from 4:30 - 7:00. For something like 30 years he sold insurance and had to find a time to write. After serving as poet laureate of the United States two times, he nevertheless maintains his morning writing routine.

Kooser's poetry starts in observation. He sees insects. He sees his wife washing her hands. He sees stories. He sees humor and pathos. He sees strangers. His poetry does not start in the depths of the Bodleian stacks tangled in linguistic theory. You do not need to read Dante in the original or be able to define "trochaic" to understand and find pleasure in his words. You do not need a PhD. You need to be human. You would be surprised that many are unsure about how to meet this qualification.

Ted Kooser’s poems give me pleasure. They don’t stretch my vocabulary or sting my political correctness. They don’t spur me on to political revolution or social activism. They make me aware of the delicate pleasure of being alive and call me to see the world, really see it. This is a welcome reminder for a girl who gives into the tempation of pushing buttons on a tiny handheld gps device screen instead if seeing the landscape in front of her eyes.

A few Kooser poems:

Selecting A Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.



Tattoo

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

Links:

Ted Kooser's Official Site:
http://www.tedkooser.com/

A list of his published works:

http://www.tedkooser.com/works.html

Weekly Column: American Life in Poetry:

http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis

All you need to know about the Martini and how to pick your gin:

Spirits of The Times

No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis

By ERIC ASIMOV

Published: May 2, 2007

The Times tasting panel sorts out which gins produce classic martinis, which add welcome nuances and which really ought to seek another line of cocktail.

Pilobolus: A Performance Merging Dance and Biology

http://www.ted.com/talks/pilobolus_perform_symbiosis

Married Thoughts

I thought my mother had taken a first step on the long road toward senility. She emailed a few days ago and then followed up with a call to congratulate me on the first anniversary of my marriage. I was sure that this milestone was April 28th.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I still had not completed the dinnerware set on my wedding registry. We had received five settings and I had been taking my sweet time to contemplate whether or not to complete the set or....that was the problem, what was I supposed to do with only five settings? I thought that I had one year to fulfill our registry and receive a 10% discount.

At a certain moment in the past month my brain convinced itself that I still had weeks to make the final porcelain plunge--a sizable chunk of change. April 28th sounded right, felt right. I knew we had the wedding at the end of April.

My husband of now a year plus had publicly declared at the moment we set the date for our wedding that our anniversary would be celebrated on Easter each year. This from a man who proposed on New Year's Eve for obvious economy of memory. Of course I am having none of his desire to conflate public and private party excuses. Perhaps his insistence on Easter as our anniversary warped my own memory.

It didn't help that I picked out and purchased a new necklace for myself in honor of our anniversary three (long) weeks ago while in Budapest. I had the nice lady gift wrap it, of course.

I read my mother's email fully convinced that she had jumped the gun. When she called on the afternoon of the 21st, I politely if bemusedly thanked her for her sincere well-wishes.

A few hours later, as I was sorting bills, I impulsively riffled through my papers and consulted our marriage certificate. There it was: April 21st. I had forgotten the date of my FIRST wedding anniversary.

I decided to have a cup of coffee to contemplate the situation. Midcup I realized that my 10% wedding registry discount was on the line. After several calls, it was determined that the discount was valid for six months only after all. So I am stranded with five place settings. The good news is that they keep wedding registries active forever to better assist you in the pursuit of your wedding dinnerware dreams.

What to conclude? I forgot the date of our wedding nary a year after the event. The only possible conclusion is this: we celebrate our marriage every day and so the official calendar date was clearly anticlimactic. He did bring home roses. And we did pop open a bottle of bubbly and use our wedding flutes. But I had on my sweatpants. And we were in bed, asleep by ten pm.

One year wed, but nearly ten years of shared lives and mutually forgotten anniversaries. A good start.

Looking for the Next Big Thing

Here is is the online version of Notre Dame Magazine's
profile of Prof. Barabasi.

http://www.nd.edu/~ndmag/sp2007/keiger.html

Enjoy!

Writerly Quotes of the Day

"People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around."

--Barbara Kingsolver



"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

--J.K. Rowling

Kafka on the Shore--What do YOU think?

The flight home was uneventful except for the lackluster food on the plane, which was an unfortunate event. On the plane ride I finished re-reading Kafka on the Shore for this month's book club. It is my selection and so I am in charge of the discussion. If you have read it, leave a comment on on this entry for our group to ponder. I am sure that you must have a reaction to its strange world of talking cats and time-dream travel, not to mention steaming udon noodles and bleeding (cat) hearts.

Friday Night in Budapest

Fish Soup at our favorite little place. Tram to the MU Theater. T.E.S.T--a modern dance performed by seven women. The Tram in the wrong direction. A spontaneous choice to get off and go to the New York Cafe, which was recently remodeled. It is stunning--all gilded walls and smart waiters. Our two cakes were priced to match the decor, probably the most expensive cakes in Budapest. But they were very, very good. And the delicous news is that this cafe is open until midnight, filling a crucial time slot for those late night cake cravings. (See the below description from http://www.talkingcities.co.uk.)

Today: Lunch with friends. Dinner with friends. Tomorrow we fly out before the crack of dawn. Back to the States. Back to work. Alas.

New York Café (New York Kávéház)

VII. Erzsébet körút 9-11
Previously shrouded under scaffolding and a dirty black exterior, visitors 'not in the know' would simply pass by the New York Kávéház without discovering the wonderfully lavish neo-Baroque interior of this late 19th-century building. Unfortunately, the café, which was once the haunt of Budapest's most famous poets and playwrights, was rammed unceremoniously by a Russian tank during the 1956 uprising (it also suffered significant bomb damage during WWII). Until recently the resultant structural damage was deemed too costly to repair.

All that changed, however, following the acquisition of the New York Palace (in which the café is housed) by Italian hotel group Boscolo. Having spent in excess of 8 Billion HUF on restoration work alone, the building has now been transformed into a luxury 235 room, five star hotel.