Playing My Ex's Keyboard a Journey Back to First Music

So, as my first husband emptied out the house we were married in after its recent sale, he offered me a keyboard he'd bought his current wife that she no longer wanted. It's a convoluted way to start this story, except to set the emotional context and to get me to the point where I said yes and took it home -- the place that I now call home. I set it up in my dining room -- with its big table and expensive chairs we hardly ever use, and with my relatively new, upright hutch with its glass doors and inside lighting, the hutch that symbolizes, as I've written here before, my perceived ascension to full adult womanhood. It seems right to me to have the keyboard in a room devoted to womanhood; if I had not turned into a heathen and left the church as soon as possible, defying my parents' hopes for me, I might have been the kind of woman who'd play piano (and organ) on Easter Sunday, at prayer meetings, at revival meetings, and at funerals as needed.

So I set the keyboard up there, facing the wall in the northeast corner. For ten years of my childhood -- six to 16, when my mother mercifully agreed I'd learned enough and let me quit -- I took piano lessons from a trio of long-suffering teachers; first delicate young Carol Martz, a dark-eyed beauty in Canton; then a sturdy, intelligent woman named Pat Ramsay who tried to teach me how to improvise hymns in Akron; then sweet Jesse Williamson in Coshocton, a powdery, formal old dame who wore lacy dresses and cried when I played Berceuse. I faced the wall in three different parsonages, banging away on our dark brown Estey and setting the Seth Thomas metronome dutifully at adagio or andante or larghetto depending on the piece. Looking back, I liked it. When I quit I had had enough of my daily hour on the piano bench, but I liked making music, learning the keys, working first the left hand (always awkward and plodding, a slow learner) and my spunky right, then putting them together. I had a good long reach and long fingers. But I wasn't obsessed enough or driven enough to really get every piece down. I showed up in party clothes for a few recitals, an important part of childhood, but performed unreliably positioned somewhere in the middling mediocre.

Nonetheless, sitting down now to the keyboard -- which has only six octaves, not eight -- I've been remarkably soothed and delighted by re-discovering the old patterns. My sheet music, saved over all these years in a dusty box, remains in the attic for now, so I've been playing only hymns, from an ancient Evangelical Hymnal from one of the churches of my childhood. Luckily for my neighbors, I quickly discovered the volume option, and thus I can save them from cringing at my repeated attempts to get the sharps right in "Christ the Lord is Risen to day" (labeled "Worgan 7777 -- the metrics -- with Alleluia, words by the prodigious Charles Wesley, from a 1708 tune) or handle the charming left hand in "Christ Arose," which although it's in the sharp and flat-free key of C still flummoxes me every time.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this re-emergence of an old skill. And the hymns, even to my apostate self, are fun to play. They were, after all, my very first music.

Smells Like Summer

Ahh! Somebody's barbecuing chicken tonight. Walking along Calumet, I could smell it for at least five blocks. Red spiricles are uncurling from the tips of every silver maple and the chickadees are making that earnest LOVEyou LOVEyou call from the rooftops. Can true summer be far behind?

Hard Stuff in Cheboygan

This week I loved my life, even its bedevilments of memory and sadness triggered by retracing old paths. I want to praise the "mutilated world" in the words of Adam Zagajewski, and I am grateful for the blessings of language. Driving the 280 miles north up I-75 on Thursday, I found myself marking treasured mileposts: the three "G's" -- Gladwin, Grayling, Gaylord -- the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the N. Pole, the turnoff for Hartwick Pines, where some of the oldest trees in the country still majestically survive. Then there's the exit for Topinabee and Cheyboygan, where my first husband and I used to get off 75 in our dash for the ferry from Cheyboyan to the property we once owned on Bois Blanc Island. It is hard not to reflect on the past, a past refusing to behave itself, an incorrigible past which sometimes still insists on nosing back into the present.

So, I did not successfully resist the flood of memory from those years. We used to have to leave at about 6:30 a.m. to make a 10:30 ferry, as I recall it. After pounding up the highway at about 90, keeping an eye out for tricky cops in the piney byways, I remember once making it to the parking lot just in time to meet two old friends who were joining us for a camping trip. I see us standing there in the morning dampness trying to catch our breath, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee spiked with whiskey from a green thermos. Man, I was younger then and could get away with such deliberate self-abuse and cherished decadence. I remember the gray water of the Straits, rippling and melancholy, and maybe some mallards or the occasional cormorant gliding up past the pier. I think we liked ourselves standing there in that parking lot enjoying strong drink in the morning, waiting for the ferry. I mourn the passing of that particular self-conscious wildness. I'm healthier now but less interesting to myself -- I suppose that is one of the disadvantages of growing up. Perhaps I simply haven't cultivated enough of a taste for moral and intellectual complexity -- pleasures available to an aging mind as the body retreats from the turbulent exertions of youth.

Now that I think of it, that's the moment I wanted to see again, from all the memories of my trip north -- the four of us huddled in a parking lot in the fresh and evocative Michigan fog, cracking wise, downing slugs of hard stuff, and waiting for the boat that would take us across the Straits to our next adventure.

Big Mac Always Bigger Than This

Last weekend at Interlochen, in a panel titled "Five Things I Know," Keith Taylor said "art is always bigger than our definition of it." The same could be said of the breathtaking Mackinac Bridge. No matter how many times I see this span across the Straits, its splendor always delivers and is hard to capture in pixels. Here it is just this morning from the north side. It was chilly in Bridge View Park at 11 a.m., an hour after I'd left Sault Ste. Marie. Yesterday when I shot up from Flint, there were still piles upon piles of ice chunks in the straits, something I had never seen in my many years as a Down Stater. But remarkably, over night most of them either melted or moved on.

My Buddha Loves Scilla Season

He's sat through months of snow, laughing though it all, but his countenance with the little blue flowers in full bloom under the mulberry tree is especially delightful. Happy Spring!

The Rose or the Melon? Femi Osofisan on Art and Politics

If I am hungry and if everybody around me is hungry, will I grow a rose or a melon?

Nigerian playwright and poet Femi Osofisan offered this question by way of probing the writer's responsibility when he visited my poetry class today at UM - Flint, Osofisan, a Yoruba and one of Africa's foremost writers, is on an extended visit in Flint in a collaboration with UM - Flint's Africana Studies Program and the Flint Public Library. Thanks to Ernest Emenyonu, the Africana Studies director and an Ibo Nigerian, a precious slice of time in Osofisan's schedule was eked out to share with my students in our aerie on the fifth floor of French Hall.

In an earlier talk today, Osofisan noted what he characterized as a dearth of political art in America -- a suspicion of it, in fact; he added that what he does, in plays such as Once Upon Four Robbers or poems such as "Fodder," or "The Announcement" are likely to be considered "propaganda" here. Several of us humbly objected to what felt like a contestable generalization, so in the class, after he'd marvelously sung, chanted, tapped at three Yoruban drums and performed several poems, we asked him to elaborate on his views about political writing.

He asserted he resists the notion of art for arts' sake. He said he understands American writers take for granted the right to create art for itself, but that African artists have never had that luxury.

The literature of his country, he said, has been wrenchingly shaped by suffering, by tyranny, by privation and bloodshed and hunger. Describing how the high hopes of the liberation movements of the Sixties were violently dashed in a new victimization -- the tyranny of black on black in the country after country in the forty years since -- he said, "Writers have not had time to write about the rose. Writers have had to concentrate on speaking for the victims. We have had to worry most of all about surviving." Noting how many of his contemporaries have been killed, jailed, or driven into exile, Osofisan said he is lucky that he has escaped all three of these fates and continues to work, though sometimes quietly and inconspicuously, sometimes deliberately avoiding publishing his work overseas, in his homeland. The result is a fiercely brave body of work, based on circumstances I can scarcely imagine.

It made me think about what Barry Lopez said this weekend in Interlochen. Like Osofisan, Lopez calls for an art that "helps," noted in the entry below. It's a contention that calls for further consideration. I've argued here that the greatest vitality in the Flint poetry community, for example, is in the spoken word world largely peopled by African American writers, and their work is frequently and lustily political, invariably voicing anger and calling for change.

I'm not part of that scene, though I regularly visit, support and appreciate it. But here's my view. I've lived a life of incredible privilege. I have never been hungry. I've never had to choose between the rose and the melon. But I believe it's possible that if ecological collapses continue, I well may have to make that choice in my lifetime. So when I write about the rose, I increasingly find myself writing out of elegy and urgent mindfulness. I mean to say, "See here. This is what we must not lose." The literature of "the rose" is a literature that documents and celebrates possibilities for a life lived in peace and plenty -- a possibility that has been enacted in unparalleled ways -- not perfectly, and not without violence, but with remarkable durability -- in my homeland. It is a possibility we must cherish and believe in while it simultaneously becomes more and more imperiled. We deeply need that vision, that hope, the remembered experience of peace. I will continue writing about the rose. And I ardently hope the literature of the rose does not turn out to be yet another tragic extinction.

Barry Lopez at Interlochen: Facing Down the Barbarians

Before I get to Barry Lopez, though, I want to start with a comment from novelist Jack Driscoll, who's retiring after 33 years at Interlochen Arts Academy, that idyllic incubator of creativity in northern Michigan. Driscoll, author of nine books, said on Friday, "the impulse to write is the impulse to love -- to love humans, to love language, to love the world." While I sometimes suggest to my students that writing is the best revenge, thus exposing my own less evolved attitude, I found Driscoll's contention moving, and a heartfelt and apt description of what's in the air at Interlochen.

I'm freshly back from a conference there called "Between the Lakes: A Symposium for Writers and Educators." Its keynoter was the deeply quiet and reflective Lopez, who arrived a day late after a 27-hour ordeal from Texas thanks to American Airlines. The conference coordinator was Anne Marie Oomen of the Interlochen writing staff, and Driscoll and Michael Delp, another longtime Interlochen teacher, offered readings and discussions. Other writers featured were Keith Taylor from U of M -- Ann Arbor and Patricia McNair and Randy Albers from Columbia College Chicago.

Stories that sustain community -- "the coming of all men into one fate," as Lopez quoted Robert Duncan -- those were the stories that the symposium writers sought to nurture. Lopez recalled an old man from a tribe with a long storytelling tradition instructing him, "if the stories don't help, you're not the storyteller." The storyteller, the old man said, was the person who "creates the atmosphere in which wisdom can develop." And the fate that is to be shared, all voices raised in the gentle spring contours of a rainy Michigan weekend suggested, is to live without destroying the planet -- to live in mindful reverence and active love for our imperiled world.

Lopez said it raises his hackles to be called a "nature writer." "My subject," he said, "is justice" -- attempting to build good relations with other people and with the other elements of the world." The real issue, he said, is community. Looking around him at the many young faces of the Interlochen high school students, many of whom joined in the conference proceedings, he said, "When you meet a genius, you are meeting everybody who ever loved that person, including the animals."

Plaintively, in his keynote address he asked the crucial question, perhaps, of our remaining time on earth: "Who will be the inventors of peace?" Addressing the almost-packed house of Interlochen kids, adult writers and dozens of silver-haired and avidly attentive seniors from nearby towns, he got down to business.

"Your job," Lopez said, "is to make the barbarians irrelevant -- to create beauty that will overpower them." His deep and focused anger at U.S. leaders. minced no words: they are "men who have never grown up," who dominate brutally with ignorant cultural narcissism, who "silence the middle ground with their extremism." "The strong man," he asserted, naming Musharaf, Putin, Bush, "has nothing enlightened to say."

And he concluded with the following gorgeous poem, after which we all walked out into the chilly, rainy April day:

Try To Praise The Mutilated World
Adam Zagajewski


Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.


Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Okay, no more geezer rockers

I'm just writing this because nobody commented about any of my recent posts. Maybe that demented shot of GeezerBoy Keith Richards is scaring you all away.

This is what happens to Boomers, children! We refuse to go quietly into that good night.

Tomorrow, in contrast to last weekend's Flint music orgy, I'm leaving for an interlude in Interlochen, where I'll be pleasantly ensconced with a cadre of geezer poets, headed up by Geezer Elder Poet Barry Lopez. I can't wait. There's nothing scary about that.

Bye for now.

Shine a Light on IMAX

So I admit it -- I'd never been to an IMAX movie. I know, I know, and I've never had an iPod and my cell phone is so old it's got a little antenna on it and I have to keep it taped together to keep the batteries from falling out.

Anyway, what better way to get deflowered, IMAX-ly speaking, than to see the new Scorsese Rolling Stones documentary "Shine a Light."

Imagine Mick Jagger's face about forty feet tall and sixty feet wide.

Imagine zooming in on Keith Richard's weather-beaten clown face, his koal-eyes sparkling, his silly head beads and feathers swinging.

I'm still absorbing the intense effects of the movie -- and what it means to me that Mick Jagger was 63 when this movie was filmed at the Beacon Theater in New York -- at Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party. SIXTY THREE. Still the boy-man boogied as if he was 19, pulling up the shirt on his skinny little torso, shaking his tiny butt. It's bizarre.

And irresistible. And those guys can still ROCK. I imagine kids might find it simply icky to see how old these rockers are. But you can't deny it -- that music is incredible. Still shaking my guts and my bones, two days after wandering, shell-shocked, back out into the sun from the Trillium Cinema.

It was a weekend deluge of oldster musicians -- I'm still ruminating.

Ain't Got No Euros

One of those Flint "backwater" moments.
This morning, in a burst of Monday ambition, I popped out of bed on a hunt for euros. My sister-in-law is going to Italy for her birthday and I thought it would be fun to send her a few euros: I know the exact piazza she'll be hanging out at in Rome, the one right in front of the Pantheon. I wanted her to have a couple of espressos on me.

Called my credit union. NO WAY, NO EUROS.

Called two banks: in addition to sounding incredulous that I wanted some euros, they said I had to order them and there would be a several-day wait.

Called what's supposed to be Flint's best hotel: clueless and apparently lead-poisoned.

I settled for express-mailing her a Franklin in her birthday card. Happy Birthday, Gail!

Earthy Etta James and the Roots Band at Whiting

Ted said to say about Etta James's performance at Whiting Auditorium Friday night, "She takes her diminishments with a certain degree of bumptious grace." He adds (exceptionally glib on this Saturday morning) that those diminishments, including a recent loss of 200 pounds after gastric bypass surgery, didn't seem to affect her rich contralto voice. (We did hear somebody say on the way out, "She's lost some of her range," but what would you expect from a 70-year-old rhythm and blues chanteuse who battled heroin addiction for decades and has been hitting the road since she was 15?)

We were in the third row, just to the left of center, and her aged-ness was at times, as Ted further commented, a bit macabre. Moving clearly pains her, and she sat during much of her performance in a padded chair with a padded armrest on one side. She sometimes leaned back, closing her eyes in a blues trance, and she seemed at those moments both extravagantly ecstatic and startlingly sexual. Of course she has always been unapologetically sexual, bawdy, outrageous in her lascivious tongue wagging and concupiscent remarks. She said, not once but twice, "I've been a clown since I was five years old." But now, coming from an old woman, her stage presence is clownish in a direction unnervingly close to the grotesque: heavily made up face with its big eyes and wide sensual mouth, her legs sometimes spread wide apart, her arthritic, beringed hands sometimes grazing her breasts and sometimes resting right between her thighs. She is a stereotype-busting performance artist of bold and wily innuendo. She's fascinating -- and a bit unsettling -- to watch.

From what I've just said, it might not seem obvious that I'm a huge Etta fan. But I totally am. I couldn't take my eyes off her, and last night she delivered some of the incomparable songs that have made her reputation -- "I'd rather go blind" -- one of her opening numbers -- gave me goosebumps that lasted into the next three songs, for example -- and "I want to ta-ta you baby." Two of the night's most riveting performances were Randy Newman's "You Can Keep Your Hat On" and Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." Damn: the almost all white, almost all LATE middle aged crowd lustily sang along, with her encouragement. This is essentially the same show she's been delivering across the country, including at Carnegie Hall in 2006, where she even reportedly told the same story about going to Walmart with her grandchildren, but who cares -- it's a great show. She'll be performing next at Knoxville, Nashville and Detroit next week.

One other note: the Whiting, in its conscientious, politically correct way, provided surprising frosting for the show: its two deaf interpreters, who got into the sexy songs with remarkable panache. The slim, shaved-headed signer for "You Can Keep Your Hat On," for example, had most of the men in the audience and half the Roots Band watching her as closely as if she was Naja Karamuru stripping in a Boston burlesque house. I don't know how many deaf folks were in the audience, but she put on a memorable show for everyone there.

My husband, riding the high of recovery from an attack of the flu that's been plaguing us all, said, "Etta doesn't have the bawdy she used to." He gets points for this clever remark. But I think her bawdiness, expressed from that creaky body and the still amazing voice, is astonishing.

P.S. Etta's "Roots Band," as expected, was fabulous -- tight, cookin', irresistible. It features two of her sons, Donto and Sammeto. They're hot.

P.P.S. Where was the Flint Journal review of this performance? I scoured through all Sunday sections and came up with nothin'. Is this what we can expect after the departure of Doug Pullen -- a shriveling of local news? I expect so.

Walking into Venial Sins Having to Do with Hair

Sometimes I'm alert to every nuance, checking out every concrete bump, every change in the thawing pads of grass along the sidewalk, every person coming toward me and walking away from me in the distance, every breeze rustling at my collar. Today, though, I walked in to work head ducked down in a meditative trance, my mind raveling around what I hoped to do in class and worrying about Ted, who's recuperating from that damned virus that's grabbed so many others. I didn't even notice how far I'd gone, hardly looking up until I had marched straight through Mott and the Cultural Center and was crossing the Kearsley Street bridge onto campus. I was there and it didn't really matter how I got there, my body invigorated by its half hour of cold spring sun and fresh air.

Yet even after an equally soothing return walk -- this time down Avon to Crapo to Court, entering the neighborhood at Woodlawn Park Drive at mason David Smallidge's sturdy brick signpost -- I feel old and uneasy in the world tonight. My snazzy plans for helping my students move forward with "cause and effect arguments" were foiled by a mid-class tornado drill...no sense in dragging them back in. I just let them go. I wonder if my students even care about any of it. I wonder if they're learning anything. I think they just want to get out of there; the tornado drill was a blessing, a stroke of luck, sweet freedom.

Before that, I embarrassed myself, getting caught telling them a story I'd apparently already told them. It was about how I got kicked out of my parents' house at 18 for listening to the soundtrack to Hair. That was 40 years ago -- this summer, the exuberant musical of my youth will be performed in Central Park to celebrate the anniversary. My students, bored groans unsuccessfully suppressed, reminded me they'd already heard about it. I committed a venial sin, repeating myself, not to mention the possibly mortal sin of evoking my own obviously long gone youth in the present audacity of theirs. How dare I? I'm an old fart. Send me off to the floes, right now. Oh, wait, the floes are almost gone, too. I'm sunk.

"Maneuvers of Some Later Wars"

Here's the poem Grayce Scholt read Saturday that most knocked my socks off. It's in the section titled "In War In Peace" in Bang Go All the Porch Swings.

1. "The War to End War..."

The spinning reels flicker, stop,
biplanes (prop to prop)hang
(nose to nose), enemies (I/du-
you/dich) in fierce repose.
WW eyes are burning!
Ace-high hearts are bold!
Whirrr, the dim projector's turning:
silently we both explode.

II. "The Good War..."

From rubber raft I see
a blue stain sliding:
from broken sub below
your face is riding on the slick:
eyes are open,
lips are loose.
I lean out over you
(tooth to tooth)
of supernatural mile:
our death heads disap-
pear into the smile
of our first kiss.

III. "...hearts and minds..."

We fall across each other
near Saigon in the spring
not unlike lovers
rolling in embrace.
You draw your knife across
my jugular vein, I touch your face:
dying, with my careful gun
I shoot your balls off
one by one.

In Withdrawal from "In Treatment"

What do I do tonight, again, at 9 p.m. when there is no "In Treatment" on HBO? Over the past nine weeks, I've gotten gradually more and more addicted to the innovative five-night-per-week replication of psychologist Paul Weston's practice with sexy Laura, arrogant Alex, hapless teenager Sophie, and the intractably mismatched couple Jake and Amy.

Damn, what a terrific show. To begin with, Gabriel Byrne with his beautifully melancholic face and mournful, melodious Irish brogue is perfection as Weston, the shrink. And the incomparable Dianne Wiest delivers one memorable performance after another as Weston's own longsuffering shrink Gina, to whom he submits every Friday night. Their sessions give us a rare sort of view of how the shrink allows himself to be therapized, how his clients and the chaos of his own personal life twist, torment and challenge him. It is fascinating how he resists Gina's observations and suggestions with truculence matched only by the resistance of his own clients, a delicious dip into the doctor's prickly inability to take his own medicine.

My favorite client was Alex, a black Air Force pilot from the Iraq war played with rich complexity by Blair Underwood. Referred to counseling after he accidentally bombed an elementary school in Iraq, killing dozens of children, Alex denies he feels anything even though he's recovering from a massive heart attack and struggling with severe marital and family disruptions. My favorite "Alex" theme revolved around the lack of a decent cup of coffee in Paul's office: one morning, he delivers a fancy espresso machine he bought on EBay, and generally terrorizes Weston, a tea drinker, with the right way to make a cup of espresso. From then on, he begins each session making himself a tiny cup and drinking it suavely while rampantly resisting Weston's authority and resisting every move toward revelation and insight. Eventually, however, Alex begins to break through; in one of the most riveting half hours of TV drama I've ever seen, he remembers being beaten up after a pickup basketball game, his sneakers stolen, and how his father punished him for crying, making him walk around barefoot for a whole day afterwards.

I have more to say about this, but for now, let me just say it was a terrific series and I'm missing it immensely.

Good Poems, Good Riffs, Good Beans

It was a fine afternoon yesterday in Flint, where Grayce Scholt and I read to an overflow house in the Anteroom of Good Beans. Dan and Bob Gerics alternated with us, soothing our crowd with acoustic riffs, including Dan's own poignant break-up song, and taking us home with his adaptation of Will Shakespeare's "Sigh No More."

Here are a few couplets of Dan's heartbreak song, "You Keep the Bedframe":

If we go online we’ll avoid the lawyer’s fees.
We’ve both got iPods, we won’t fight over CDs.

We are being so goddamn mature.
(Man I sure let you off easy.)
I’ll go pack while you uncork and pour the wine.

I could have screamed and shouted, you could kick me out.
But in the end we’ve got a dog to think about.

Oooh, man, sweet stuff -- you should hear it with the music. Check www.dangerics.com.

Another high point, for me, Grayce's powerful war poems -- dudes and dudettes, we need more of these -- and hers are available in her debut collection "Bang Go All the Porch Swings."

Between sets, I was sitting there thinking, "This is as good as anything else going on in this whole damn state today. This is as good as any poetry reading anywhere," and for some reason I had a rush of fiery....I don't know, vindication about how hard it is for something of value to be recognized. How hard it is for people outside of Flint to know what great things sometimes happen here, when nobody much on the outside is watching, like on a cold, sunny spring day when a bunch of people crowded to get into a little coffee shop on the north end for poetry at 2 in the afternoon, and, I'd like to think, weren't disappointed. Today, that feeling I had came around again and wrenched at me, and I crashed -- a combination of lingering performance endorphins and something like exhaustion from how hard we work here to accomplish our measures of redemption. My Saturday in Flint...a slice, I'm almost certain, of the human condition.

It's "Spin Cycle" Day at Good Beans

If you're a Flintoid, join Grayce Scholt, Patty Warner, Dan and Bob Gerics and me at Good Beans Coffee Shop today for our performance from 2-5 p.m. We plan three "sets" -- there will be food and great company. Buy Grayce's new book or another copy of Night Blind. Stop by Steady Eddy's at the Farmer's Market first for late breakfast or lunch, and then come on by. What better thing to do on this cold spring day? Music, poetry, hanging out? This is Grayce's FIRST ever public performance -- a milestone not to be missed. Good Beans is at the corner of First Avenue and Grand Traverse.

The Blogosphere Further Remembers Dewey Whitwell

I've been very touched by a series of messages from the descendents of Dewey Whitwell -- Christian, Scott and Wanda Bradford -- who saw my post about him and contacted me (See comments under "On Dewey Whitwell's Knee" below.} It's remarkable that through the Internet we have been able to tell these stories in honor of this man who touched many lives.

I was most excited by the post that began "I am your Missy" -- from Dewey's daughter. Through her, I now know that her gun actually was a 20-gauge (pretty impressive for a girl!) and that on their hunting trips, they had picnics of Vienna sausages, cheese and Fig Newtons. Wanda's son Scott, a Methodist minister in Texas, still has the gun, obviously a cherished family keepsake. Like many men of his era, Rev. Whitwell was a "jack of all trades" -- he was, for example, also a beekeeper and devoted fisherman.

Also through "my Missy," I realized again how "relative," so to speak, and interconnected life can be. While I confessed to childhood jealousy of her, her gun and her walks in the woods with her father, she confessed to some envy of me -- I got to sit on her father's lap back then, she notes, and she didn't -- he was gone so much as an evangelist. Ah, childhood is very complicated.

Thank you again, Bradford family, for your affecting memories and comments.

4,000 Dead. For What?

Just heard the news on CNN that four U.S. soldiers were killed today, by grim irony the day of the Christian Resurrection, in Baghdad, taking the American toll officially to 4,000.

For what? For what?

May they rest in peace, despite their sacrifice to an obscene and arrogant mistake.

Solitary Easter Without the Peeps

I keep forgetting how big Easter is in Flint. The first three spots I aimed for on my early afternoon rounds were closed, the streets almost deserted. Odd to think of all the church hoopla going on in various bedecked sanctuaries as I putter along up and down Court and Center in my trusty old Honda: song, flowers and scripture ("Up from the Grave He Arose" used to be my favorite). I liked the sunrise service on Easter Sunday as well: the break in routine, the novelty of getting up before dark for various theatrical and often endearing rituals of resurrection. An exuberant day in the church, to be sure. These, for me, are memories of childhood. The way it is now: alone all day, happy to be peripheral to this Big Moment, theologically speaking. I'm at home with my longstanding retreat from zeal.

So, Adult Easter 2008: writing for several hours. A meandering walk, the crisp air and sky in late afternoon more like Thanksgiving than Easter. Quiet dinner of chicken, salad and a crisp apple. Two phone chats with my husband, who says it's 80 in LA. Long talk with my sister on the phone. The latest episode of "John Adams" on HBO -- excellent. Poor John Adams just didn't cotton to those French. Ben Franklin playing chess in a bathtub with the comtessa. Abigail, meanwhile, plowing, planting and furiously cleaning window panes at midnight, furiously lonely for John Adams. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney are great, as is Tom Wilkinson as the worldly and infuriating Franklin.

A renewing day, even without the banks of lilies, chocolate rabbits and hard boiled eggs.

Old Broads in Our Creative Prime

Don't miss Grayce Scholt (in her first ever live reading, from "Bang Go All the Porch Swings") and I strutting our stuff at Flint's funky Good Beans Coffee Shop next Saturday, March 29. Irrepressible artist Patty Warner will display and sell her Tumble Dry Low Cards and Dan and Bob Gerics will make music. It'll be A Flint Scene.

Love Poem on the Second Day of Spring

The terrible waste of war goes on, it's Good Friday, that darkest day, and some parts of Michigan might be getting a foot of snow. Yet this poem, from the vernal equinox four years ago, still applies. Here's to love embattling darkness.


for Ted

Cruel worlds conspire
against my need for
ease this gloomy day, deaths
piling up on hectoring news,
a frozen rocky orb found circling
the sun beyond Pluto.
We are pecked by circumstance
beyond control; as I write this,
sleety rain swoops down
on struggling tulips, mid-morning
light curtained almost to night. Street
lights blink on again as if winter
decided not to go. In the chilly dark
my day dips down
toward deductions, floods and
rumors of more war. Yet love, you are
the daffodil blooming in snow. You
are my real spring, my lion roaring
against the universe.

Not the Reaper -- This Time

Walking my route, gloomy late afternoon, spring fog rising from the ground. Maybe it was that moody mist that got me in a spooky trance, rounding the long curve on Cadet Street especially, where the mist hovered over the drainage ditch (well, in the Wordsworthian mood I'm in, I'll call it a rivulet), and I wouldn't have been surprised to run into Sherlock Holmes stepping nimbly over potholes somewhere in the pea soup by the nine-hole.

Exactly. Coming out of the parking lot to Sunnyside, ahead of me I saw a hulking figure, all in black, black cape, a head covering (a hood?), standing still. Some sort of stick in hand. Looking at me. My fur -- or my vestigial fur, those hairs along my spine -- stood up.

When the Grim Reaper comes do people have a chance to see him in the distance? Does he stand there waiting while a woman (who as a matter of fact has quite recently and freshly declared she's in her prime) strides forward, taking in big gulps of air? I checked all my body parts. Lungs clear. No chest pain. Digestion fine. Slept well last night. Bones fine, muscles flexing. Quick communique to liver, stomach, pancreas, lymphs, cervix and cerebellum: hey -- you guys okay?

Wouldn't it just figure this would be my day, some regular Tuesday, nondescript March 18, feeling good, checks in the mail, spring on the way -- that would be the day, wouldn't it?

I drew closer, keeping up my pace so as not to appear cowardly. I squinted my nearsighted eyes and plastered on an alpha female smile, trying for "devil may care," so to speak. He looked big: maybe the drizzle exaggerated his girth. He seemed to turn away -- good sign. Then I realized his cane or walking stick or shillelagh or whatever the hell was really a thick, long leash, and at the end of it, sniffed a big loopy hound. Only one hound, not seven. Only a mournful basset, growling melodiously. And the man? A wide-faced smiling fellow with, I think, a small, endearing gap between two teeth. The Grim Reaper, I'm pretty sure, would not beam like this out of a face like a big banana cream pie. His scary cape, actually a fabulous great coat, brightened with a tartan scarf. And his hood -- not a hood, but a handsome black fedora. How stylish. How distinct.

"Her name's Daisy," the gentleman said. "Notice that her tail's wagging."

I could have said, "I'd like to stick around and chat but I thought you were My Death -- so you'll pardon me if I just move along."

Instead I shouted, "She's gorgeous!" which she was, and I trucked out of there.

"Have a nice walk," the neighborly man in the Great Coat called after me.

I'd like to imagine that I disappeared quickly into the mist -- like the reconciled victims in Cold Case -- but I don't think I did. I think he could see me clearly, almost running now, entirely vivified, for at least three blocks.

A Hole in my Socks on the Ides of March

Can't think of a single betrayal tonight. Home alone, done grading, a glass of merlot after lamb chops, little red potatoes and asparagus. Feet up, a tiny hole apparent on the left big toe of my favorite socks -- the ones with dogs on them I bought with my niece on a happy day in Frankenmuth.

Ah, the pleasures of faux Bavaria. That day, as we walked by one of the chicken palaces, a guy who seemed to have had a bit too much lager checked us out and said, "Hey...mother and daughter, right?" I was deeply affected.

So maybe this entry is something about childbearing -- not childbearing. As of Jan. 15, I'm officially "post-menopausal," having had no blood for a year, and now, more. My reproductive years are over.

Of course, I never reproduced. For women like me, who've never had babies, menopause carries, I believe, a somewhat different significance. Never having had children can be a hard disappointment. I remember when I first realized I probably wouldn't ever have kids. I was in my late thirties and I'd just had a miscarriage -- as far as I ever got. I stood in front of my kitchen window, staring out at the trees at that many-paned window of another life, and I couldn't stop crying. It was the first time I faced down one of the major limits of my life. I would not experience childbirth. I would not be a mother.

Perhaps the traitor du jour is my own body.

It's the "not" of it that aches, I suppose. The words that go with it are sad and empty. Barren is one of them. A womb that has never expanded, a womb that has never experienced "quickening." I was never "blessed among women." I will not, at my deathbed, have my children around me, as I once wrongly predicted in one of my Tonga journals. I am likely to die alone, as do we all when it comes down to it. It is what it is.

But those sad years of grieving over what was not to be are mostly over. I am not unhappy. Here it is Saturday night and I'm at ease and at liberty, feeling only a little sad about that hole in my sock, the little damage that reminds me that living has results: hurts and disappointments and yes, betrayals. And the daily discovery that emptiness can be filled up with love. I've had twenty years, since that first day of mourning, to fill up the empty spaces, to cultivate the "what else."

And here is the moment, the present tense, the breath in the now. Gratitude for what is: for what still is. No knife in the back. No cramps, no blood. No kid to keep me awake, no kid to ratify or indict me. No begats to hasten my demise. Just this quiet evening, fingers on keyboard, pixels organizing themselves into various dances at my touch. This, to my retiring womb, feels very lucky indeed on an unlucky day.

On Dewey Whitwell's Knee, I Consider My Second Amendment Rights

Back then an eight-year-old girl not quite at home in a starched cotton dress with a grosgrain sash could climb into the evangelist's lap in the parsonage after the revival meeting, and nobody'd think anything of it. He had Necco wafers in his pants pocket and he handed me a couple and I took them, not my favorite candy but not bad either– such mild chocolate you had to think about it, secular host, dry powder on my tongue, tasting, before the chocolate kicked in, faintly of shoe polish and copper pennies, the stuff in his pockets. He was a robust man with red cheeks and a ready smile, a special guest, and my parents encouraged me to sit on his lap, his preacher suit pants scratching the backs of my thighs. Somehow we got it together, where I'd put my arms, shyly, one around his shoulder, and I can't remember where he put his arms, but it was proper and even a bit absent-minded. He seemed tired after his rousing sermon: being a traveling evangelist was hard work. I got the feeling my parents wanted me to be nice to him to make up for his daughter, just a year or two older than me, who was back home in Tennessee. Memory fails: let's call her Missy. Maybe he'd like to have a little girl sit on his lap to remind him of Missy, so he wouldn't feel so lonely so far away from home.

So I perched there, balanced on his shiny serge lap, and he told me about Missy, blonde curly headed Missy, and how he and Missy liked to do a lot of things together, how one thing they liked to do was go out hunting. Did you ever go hunting, honey? I think even a girl should know her way around a gun. My Missy has her own gun, he said. I gave it to her, a little .22. How he missed walking out into the woods together with her and coming back with a rabbit or two, he said, one that Missy might have shot herself, with Dewey Whitwell's help, of course. A little girl with her own gun? It astounded me. “I'm proud of that little girl,” Dewey Whitwell said as I cast my eyes downward and imagined.

Where were my parents, people horrified of the gun, not far removed from Quaker forebears who refused to have anything to do with killing? Was my mother in the kitchen regretting that gentle instinct to offer Dewey Whitwell my little substitute childlike love? “He's not like us,” she might have whispered, biting her lip, upbraiding herself for setting me up. But it was too late – there I already sat, transfixed on Dewey Whitwell's knee, imagining me in Missy's place, brandishing my own little private weaponry, placed in my pink and eager hands by Daddy Dewey, God's hearty messenger to half the Protestant Midwest. Me walking hand and hand through the Tennessee woods, the TVA booming not far away, the squirrels and rabbits dashing right into our sights. My hand in Dewey's, both of us in flannel jackets, my blue jeans rolled up...Dewey would have taught me how to walk as still as an Indian through the underbrush, and he would have whispered don't make a sound. The cinnamon air, the sweet swampy air – we'd appreciate it all together. I coveted what Missy knew.

Then the story about Missy was over and Dewey Whitwell kind of woke up and looked at who was sitting in his lap, and I was pretty sure he was disappointed to see that it was me, a poor substitute, a plain Ohio girl with straight brown hair in her scratchy church dress, a little girl who read Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins, a little girl who'd never held a gun and whose father felt really bad when he sliced through a snake with his riding mower. Oh, the glamorous Missy, whom I would never be. My embarrassment, my humiliating inadequacy stung: I didn't add up to Missy. Missy with her .22 and her daddy and hushpuppies and rabbit stew out on the porch and men playing banjos at night, Missy picking the chiggers off her blue jeans and accepting Daddy Dewey's praise for her steady hand and silent step. But most of all, I envied Missy's gun.

Fifty years later, after Malcolm X, and after Medger Evers, after Kent State and Jackson State and JFK and MLK and RFK, after Marvin Gaye and John Lennon and Vietnam and Iraq, the world and I have traveled a long, long way from Missy's gun. I'm sitting in conference with an earnest kid whose paper exhorts the government to “stop controlling guns." I listen with weary and conscious pretend dispassion as he says, “really, if teachers had guns maybe Virginia Tech never would have happened. And maybe not NIU either. If teachers just had guns.” He looks at me again as I say nothing. “It's your Second Amendment right,” he says.

I avoid eye contact, taking a breath. “Look at me, young man,” I say. “Do you really want me walking into class with, say, a holster and a six-shooter?” I quickly smile – but I really don't want to make fun of him. This is serious. He smiles wanly back, sure, I suspect, I'm about to launch into proof I'm one of those college liberals. But I don't.

What he doesn't know is that once I sat on Dewey Whitwell's knee, and wanted Missy's gun so badly I wanted out of my own life, and that back then walking in the woods and taking aim at other creatures and bringing them home for dinner was somehow tied to "God's plan" for my life, yet something wild and brave and big, something related to staying out of the eternal fires of hell. Having my own gun and walking in the woods with Dewey Whitwell, "God's plan"– it seemed to be my right, my destiny. But as I was about to learn, my mother the heretic still fretting behind the kitchen door, claiming my Second Amendment rights was one of God's plans, one of many of God's plans, that would thankfully elude me.

Metrics in Late Winter

1. Sometimes, I imagine myself swimming.

2. Crow chicks wheedle over crusty black mud.

3. Silver maples arthritic in March sun.

4. Junk mail on a table meant for feasting.

5. I want my house to be pretty again.

6. Sprouts like green dunce caps fool snow under elms.

7. Walking eyes closed to feel light: am I nuts?

8. Dust on laptop like strewn zirconium.

9. Dead goldfinch on fieldstone a bad omen.

10. Copper bandits worked fast and no one guessed.

Laughs Up Close: Leno at Hermosa Beach

Okay, all you poor frozen chumps in Michigan, listen to this story: I went to HERMOSA BEACH Sunday night with the "commune" -- Teddy R., Dennis B., and my beloved Ted N. Doesn't even the very sound of the name "Hermosa Beach" strike envy into your ice-encrusted Midwestern hearts? I'm almost ashamed to tell this story.

But, I will. We heard that almost every Sunday night, Jay Leno shows up at the Comedy and Magic Club in the aforementioned H.B. and tries out his jokes for the next week on the show. We bought tickets for the 7 p.m. show and as we'd been advised, showed up at 4:30 to be as close to first in line as possible. I had "The Emperor's Children," a fat new novel by Claire Messud,, in my stylish LA shoulder bag, just in case my friends' conversational wit (or mine, let's be fair) failed while waiting for The Man to appear. And bear in mind this was OSCAR night -- would he really give up a night of schmoozing at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood for a roomful of overweight tourists?

Well, yes, as it turned out, he would.

But first, we had to wait in the blessed Sunday afternoon sun outside. There were only five people in front of us -- some overly tanned bleached-blond nurses (we learned) who beat us to first choice tables in the 300-seat venue. That was okay. We got great seats about 10 feet from the stage and ordered our first round of drinks -- a kamikaze for me, of course. Then reasonably decent kalimari appetizers and an edible romaine salad, though Teddy R. complained it was "too white." Then an assortment of raviolis and teriyakis, merely krill to keep us occupied until the first comic, charming Wayne Cotter, stepped out. Hilarious guy, and such a nice kid. And then James Brogan, a native Buckeye (from Cleveland, that rich source of dark humor) whose whole schtick consisted of asking audience members, "Where are you from?" and going from there. "Who's that?" he asked one retired English teacher about the rather dumbfounded geezer beside her. "My live in lover," she shouted happily, and he moved to the next table...

(That's handsome Wayne Cotter on the left)

And then with no fanfare, out stepped Leno, his hair and tie askew as if he'd just clambered off his motorcycle. I laughed so hard the raviolis were doing a tango in my belly. After a 45 minute monologue (a bit stale, frankly, relying weirdly on Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson jokes), he pulled out a little stack of index cards and his glasses in a black case held together with a rubber band. When he pulled off the rubber band and opened the case, the rubber band stuck to his glasses and was still dangling there when he put them on. Interesting offhand remark: He said his wife keeps nagging him, "Honey, you make millions of dollars, you'd think you could have a glasses case that doesn't need a rubber band around it." He seemed like a regular guy, if a bit frenetic. He had a little old-fashioned tape recorder which he clicked on and propped up on a stool, presumably to record our reactions. It was all so low-tech -- I felt right at home.

So, we laughed our asses off as he made jokes about Britney Spears and Hillary Clinton's pantsuits and his Italian childhood, and then he said, "Well, there's probably four or five good ones there," and he tucked his index cards back in his jacket, put away his glasses, picked up the little recorder and disappeared. I finished off the last swig of my kamikaze and my friends and I went out into the fresh air of Hermosa Beach, surprised night had fallen during our two hours of hilarity.

Monday night, I fell asleep before the Leno show, but Ted stayed up for it and said he used about a dozen of those Hermosa Beach gags. And last night, a couple more popped out, and I feel like I was part of something, with my laughs. I never had to crack that novel.

La Luna

My talented young webmaster Shane stopped by to pick something up just as the eclipse last night went into its full glory. He went home and caught the gorgeous lady above. What a relief to savor this beauty on a crisp winter night. Check out Shane's other handiwork at www.gramlingdesign.com. Check out Mother Nature's handiwork again tonight -- no eclipse, but another splendid moon.

Even with Trial Two on the melatonin (didn't stick in my throat this time) my body said "stay awake and watch the moon." It must be something primitive: keep the fire going, see what's happening in the sky. This apparently matters to my subconscious brain.

Tomorrow, full moon over the LA Harbor.

Enough Already, and a Soporific

His visage is sweet and loving and all that, but I've been informed enough is enough with the Mahareshi. I've been swamped and uninspired, probably half-suffocated by SAD...such an appropriate acronym. What a winter! Ten degrees this morning, with lovely, sparkling drips of ice growing down the screen of my big office window. I love this window.



This winter is reassuring, though: a short-term salve for worries about global warming. I keep wondering, is this the last hard winter of my life? I don't feel like complaining. Each day of hard freeze seems like a reprieve.

Trouble sleeping -- part deep-winter angst, part post-menopause, part too much work before LA -- and so yesterday I picked up a little brown vial of melatonin, 500 mcg. I tried melatonin in the 90s during a bad time of life, both parents and a dear friend dying, professional travails, and it worked well until my dreamlife turned on me with frightening nightmares. A dozen years on, I'm ready to try it again.

So I pop the little pill an hour before bedtime, and the damn thing gets stuck in my gullet. No matter how many times I swallow, I can feel it clinging to the left side of my esophagus. I make a cup of (consciously chosen) Sleepytime tea and gulp iit slowly; the bolus is still there, stuck. Who can fall asleep with that going on? Frustrated, I click "sleep" on my bedside radio and trust the monotonous midnight BBC will do the trick, and it does, even its catastrophic catalog about Kenya and Kosovo. At least this night there's news of Obama's latest wins, a remarkable momentum. Daring to hope for change, I finally fall asleep, my last-ditch melatonin eventually melting in my throat.

Goodbye to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Okay, I admit it. Back in about 1975, three or four years into my so-called adult life as a kid reporter in Southern California, I took lessons in transcendental meditation, and at the end of it, I showed up with a bouquet of fresh flowers and some fruit for my one-to-one meeting with a TM leader, passed along a handful of cash, and received a mantra. I can't remember exactly how much I paid. For a while, telling my story, I used to say it cost me $75, but now it seems like it might have been $125. I don't know why I say that -- as time goes by I'm less and less sure about certain specifics -- even finding myself asking "so what?"

Well, I've made fun of myself through the years for "buying a mantra," as I've sometimes disparagingly put it. But when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died this week, apparently in his 90s, I felt a wave of affection for him, for his beautiful face and disarming giggle -- he is a memorable image of a time in the life of my Baby Boomer brothers and sisters and me when we still were having youthful fun, exploring, believing in peace, in some cases still toying with the notion of "free love" and generally still thinking that anything we dreamed of could come true. Other things I remember from that time are listening obsessively to Tom Waits' album Heart of Saturday Night, and hearing about Bruce Springsteen for the first time. One night a bunch of friends and I drank a couple of bottles of Cold Duck -- yes, that was a kind of wine, icky but effective -- and proceeded, half tipsy, to see All the President's Men. I was working the early shift as a copy editor at the Orange Coast Daily Pilot, going in at 5:45 a.m., and I used to shoot out to the track at a local high school to jog three miles on my lunch hour, which was at 10 a.m. As I recall it, I never experienced the slightest insomnia, but I lived my life on a lot of 20-something adrenaline, and I was fitful, always restless. I faithfully meditated, twice a day, for about, well...let's say, three or four months.

But, I confess, I still remember my mantra, and occasionally, in the middle of the night when I can't sleep and the scary realities along with the spectres of old age and death pursue me and interfere with my serenity, sometimes I lie in bed quietly and calm myself by murmuring my mantra, over and over again. It seems to help, and I'm grateful for it.

Where The Energy Is: Versiz and Future

That's Detroit poet Versiz on the left.


I've been ruminating on this claim for a couple of weeks, and now here goes -- this frigid Sunday I'm ready to commit: If you want to know where the real energy is in the poetry scene in Flint, this, without a doubt, is the answer. It's not in the University where I work (and teach creative writing, so I'm commenting about myself). It's not in the small struggling pods of young downtown writers, as admirable as are their efforts. It's in the African American community.

Well, Duh. I"ve understood this for several years now, and I think it's interesting and worth discussing. A dramatic example: A couple of weeks ago I showed up at the Kiva at UM-Flint for "Flint UnPlugged," a poetry event organized by Flint's irrepressible Ed Wilson, aka Future. It was a cold, dark night and I got there a bit late, remembering how most poetry events, perhaps reflecting the phlegmatic state of a lot of the poets I know, along with their constitutional inability to keep to the world's timetables, start late. But Future and his colleagues are pros, and he runs things like a Hollywood mogul. When I arrived the event was already in full stride, every seat taken, the house lights down, somebody from Detroit wailing away at the mic, the crowd loudly cheering her on.

(That's Flint's Ed "Future" Wilson on the right. He's got a great smile, though you can't tell it here.)

I had to sit on the carpeted steps. The Kiva holds 300 people, friends. That's THREE HUNDRED. I can't remember the last time in Flint when 300 people showed up for poetry in Flint, if ever -- even in the Fall of 2006, when former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass came in on a Green Arts visit, we felt lucky to attract about 100 to the same venue.

The show went on for several hours, and an acquaintance of mine said UMF Housekeeping had to scoot the last folks out at 11 p.m. Wilson, a UMF mass communications grad, along with an energetic Flint cadre including local favorite Amber Lakes, recent Red Ink MC Dawn Demps, and UM - Flint Communications Prof. Traci Currie, has been putting together one galvanizing event after another.

The most impressive poet that night, in my view, was Detroit virtuoso Jamaal May, who goes by the nom de mic Versiz. His suite of war poems, in particular, was gripping. Before performing them he said something like, "Where are the war poems?" and chastised the white poetry establishment -- this war's going on and on, he said, and "they're sitting around writing about...I don't know...trees." Ouch -- as a Green Arts teacher, I protest that specific disparagement. More on that later -- nonetheless, his poems were riveting. And he's venturing into putting those poems onto the page, announcing the selection of some of his work recently by Atlanta Review.

Wilson's performance that night is viewable on his myspace page http://www.myspace.com/futurepoetry. He's an amiable egotist , self-declared "handsome dude" with gargantuan talent and heart. He says in one piece I've heard him perform a couple of times, "I learned to love my scars."

"There's more man in my poems," he exuberantly asserts, his arms flying in that curved-hand dance of the hip hoppers, "than society's seen in the past 20 something odd years...I'm gifted."

But he's not just out for himself -- he offers hard critiques of BET, "fools puttin' $10,000 rims on" and a ghetto culture with not enough father love or meaningful support. (In the following quotes I apologize if I don't get everything exactly as he says them -- I transcribed them from the video) "I know how it feels to shape your goals only to have the world shoot through 'em," he declares. "to watch your dreams die on a hotel balcony."

In the same piece, he contends, "The ghetto is full of animals/cannibals that are ruining your home/devouring what you own/dealing death for life."

"So it's hard to smell the roses when you grow up in a world full of problems/with no help tryin' to solve them...it's easier to love the devil at your door." Maybe that's why Wilson and Versiz don't have time to write about trees.

Future's gospel ends with a pledge to "love you to death," and at the Kiva that cold January night in Flint, the audience roared back their approval. If this is where the poetry is these days in Flint, we could do worse.

Snow Day

Wednesday night and Thursday were magical. What a luxury to be snowed in. Today, the world is bit frowzy, chunks of snow dropping off branches and jagged paths cut or blown out through the foot of snow on the sidewalks. People seem to be venturing out into the cold realities again, and I'm about to join them. But I'd prefer to nestle back into my burrow and sleep until spring.

Super Tuesday: Exuberant Democracy

Sitting in the coffee shop at Bishop Airport waiting for foggy daylight after dropping Ted off, I watched CNN on the big screen TV as Hillary Clinton walked into her polling booth in Harlem. She looked good in that stylish chocolate brown suit -- I think the same one she wore for last week's debate. Bill was at her side, but interestingly, kept his back to the cameras. When Hillary went into the booth and pulled the curtains closed, I thought, thank god, she has a moment of solitude. I wondered what she was thinking in there -- a bit of privacy, courtesy of the 232-year-old American tradition, less than a hundred since women got the vote. I felt a little teary-eyed. The fabric of our old republic, so worn and tattered in recent decades, suddenly seems fresh and invigorated. I've never seen such energy, even, as Jon Stewart doubtfully offered last night, a blend of "hope and joy." "I just gotta say," he cracked dyspeptically, "I don't much care for it."

Well, here's another scene for us cynics to chew on: at our goodbye dinner out last night, Ted and I eavesdropped as a couple in a booth behind us talked animatedly about the primaries: a young woman in spiky, highlighted hair offering enthusiastic opinions about McCain's chances, while her companion, a young man, tried to keep up though he didn't seem too sure of all the facts. She covered everything: McCain's views on the war, on abortion, on the economy. Here's the kicker -- did you get it? They were YOUNG! This is big.

What I Learned After Singing in the Bathtub

So I'm in a bubble bath bellowing out the Twelve Days of Christmas while I'm shaving my legs (Ted is arriving tonight) and congratulating myself on being able to remember eleven of the twelve things my true love gave me (my particular true love gives me a lot more than twelve gifts, and there ain't no four calling birds among them, but anyway). So, dripping and bristle-free, I rushed over to the computer, despite having at least 13 better things to do, to Google the lyrics. Oh! Nine Ladies Dancing!

And then, damn you Google, I see that this song is not just a plain old song to warble while bathing, but a veritable scriptural mnemonic. AND, the Nine Ladies Dancing--that I in my lather-fueled yodeling missed--actually signify "the nine Fruits of the Holy Spirit."

And now I know that those are love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and temperance.

Hmm. The world needs those. Here's to the Nine Ladies -- dance on.

Sustainably Scary

Did you ever go to the Farmer's Market and buy beets, trying to eat by the season and be a good earth-friendly mensch, and then you come home and wrap them in foil like the guy recommended, and you bake them at 350 for an hour and when they're done, you slide off the slippery skin and pile butter and salt and pepper on them and think, what a great thing to eat...

And then the next day, going about your natural processes, you see something, well, beet red in your various excrements, and you forget all about that fabulous dinner you had the night before and you think, damn, this is what cancer looks like and your (beet red) blood pressure spikes and you feel the heat of fear come up on your face, and when you look in the mirror, you're kind of blotchy with the adrenaline rush...

And then you remember you are now a sustainable eater and all is well, and then you're so happy everything is all right the whole rest of the day you feel a pulsing sanguine contentment?

Thank you, Frank

Thanks to RPCV friend Bob Forbes for letting me know that the photo below was taken by our Tonga colleague Frank Bevacqua. Thank you, Frank, for this beautiful shot, which really captures something about Debbie Gardner's spirit.

Sad Tonga Memories -- the Debbie Gardner Murder

Isn't that a gorgeous photo? I'm not sure whom to credit for it -- I found it on Google, and I imagine the photographer is somebody I know. So if you're out there, let me know. This beautiful young woman, Debbie Gardner, was murdered by another American in the Kingdom of Tonga on October 14, 1976 -- Oct. 14, by a cruel irony, is the birthdate of the Peace Corps.

And her tragic story is deeply significant in my life, although I barely knew her, not to mention the dozens of others affected by her brutal death and its aftermath. Again tonight "48 Hours" ran the 2005 show about the murder. She was killed by Dennis Priven, a spurned suitor and, obviously, murderously mentally ill young man.

This is the story my novel Night Blind is based on. It was wrenching this cold and snowy January night to see old friend Emile Hons emotionally recall the events of that terrible night and the weeks that followed. It was good once again to see New York journalist Phil Weiss on the scene in Tonga retelling the story in his quest to get a measure of justice for Debbie. It was good to see Rick Nathanson, my fellow volunteer whose job was to be a reporter at the Tonga Chronicle, retell his story, and to see the old photos of him -- a curly-haired and feisty kid who kept stubbornly reporting the story even though Peace Corps wanted him to shut up. The story of how PC Country Director Mary George twisted the facts and unaccountably repeatedly tried to protect Priven doesn't get any more palatable with the years -- how she and Peace Corps Washington responded is still a craven miscarriage of justice, a dark embarrassment. My heart went out to Mike Basile, our assistant country director, as he remembered that awful autumn -- he was put in a terrible position and one feels as if he's never quite come to terms with it.

All through these decades I've contended the Peace Corps is one of the best American programs ever, but delving once again into this story, the doubts come back. The Peace Corps bureaucrats should have been ashamed. As volunteers, we were all so young, so clueless -- we wanted to believe, after Vietnam, after Kent State, after the Detroit riots, after the assassinations, that just one thing from our U.S. of A. could be full of grace. Instead, we got a tragedy and its grievously mishandled aftermath that has stayed with us, demolishing our trust and exacerbating our cynicism. Those of us who lived to tell about it have gone on with our lives. I finally wrote my book, which took me thirty years. And I feel better for it. But it's not how it should have been. Debbie Gardner shouldn't have died. It's a dirty shame.

But, thinking about the show over night, I come back to this blog entry to add further reflections. It would be grossly unfair to let one homicidal volunteer and one bad country director define the whole Peace Corps, which over its 47 years has placed thousands of volunteers into dozens of countries. The Peace Corps' history isn't perfect, but as I noted in my NYC podcast (www.janworth.com), it is an international program with a brain AND a heart, and has had an immensely transformative effect on several generations of young Americans.

Good Read: Identical Strangers

I thoroughly enjoyed Identical Strangers, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein's account of discovering each other at age 35. They were identical twins separated at birth because of a creepy experiment carried out by the then-prestigious Louise Wise adoption agency in New York City and two prominent psychiatrists, Viola Bernard and Peter Neubauer. The kicker, of course, is that neither of them knew they were a twin, not to mention an identical twin -- until Elyse's research in her thirties.

The story is poignantly told in alternating sections by each twin, and for me it was a compelling and suspenseful tale: would they find out why they were separated? How will reuniting affect each of them? How are they similar and different? Will they find their birth mother? What was her story? Why did she surrender them? Who was their father?

Surely there is no plot line more gripping than the loss of mother love, the raw grief and helplessness of an abandoned infant. Add to that separation from one's biological double, the "other" with whom you shared a womb, and the story becomes irresistible.

Both writers and researchers, they intersperse their account with intriguing histories of twins, separated and otherwise. They try to find other separated Louise Wise twins and analyze many fascinating twin studies.

And in the process, their story touches on what it means to be human, what it means to be an individual. There's something here about primal bonding and human loneliness. As others have noted, Elyse, who was kept longer in foster care and then lost her beloved adopted mother when she was only six, seems to have had a harder life, and she pursues bonds with her rediscovered sister more passionately. Paula, who had the luck of a loving and consistent family, went to Wellesley and has a husband and two daughters, eventually welcomed Elyse into her life but not without doubts and resistance. Yet both women tell their stories with remarkable openness. The seductiveness of the discovered link -- that shared DNA, the shared womb -- is the search to be known, to be understood. For Schein and Bernstein, even with their identical chromosomes, the outcome wasn't a perfect fulfillment of the fantasy. But the quest, and the real love that actually did blossom between them, is riveting.

While the Blood Comes Back

Gave a pint of blood for MLK Day today, the first time I've donated my A-pos in decades. It could have been psychological, but I felt a bit light headed afterwards, even after my gulps of Hawaiian punch and cheezits, so I'm stretched out back home, my feet elevated on the Laz-Y-Boy, watching a CSI rerun and looking out the window into the back yard.

And there, abruptly, is a big fat red-tailed hawk, perched on the back of a chair on the porch. No sign of the usual flurry of finches, cardinals, juncos, nuthatches and chickadees. Way to clear the yard, Hawk. I imagine the little birdies all hunkered down, hiding in the bushes and whispering, "shut up, shut up...is he gone yet? Is he gone yet?" He fluffs up and swivels his beautiful head, making me out: he leans in for a better view. I try not to move or make aggravating eye contact from the recliner. After about 20 seconds he lifts off and I breathe again. A light snow starts up, and in a minute or two, the first finch back lands on the feeder -- coast clear. And then a red cardinal in the yew at the window, and then a red-headed woodpecker clambering up the mulberry tree.

Let's just say in the peace of this moment, I feel my blood regenerating, my platelets factory madly manufacturing. I'm glad to be in this world. It's good to be a body among these other bodies, alive in the midst of all this life.

Stand Up Straight for the Ancestors

A couple of months ago, I expressed doubt about the possibility of ancestral messages.

The other day, though, as I walked to work on a brilliantly sunny 25-degree day I was breathing in the fresh air meditatively, enjoying the way my backpack felt bumping slightly against my back. Suddenly I heard my mother's voice distinctly say, "Stand up straight, Janice." I immediately pushed back my shoulders and sucked in my stomach, and as I did I visualized my mother smiling at me. I experienced a moment of piercing love, remembering my mother's many simple and not so simple acts of trying to shape me into a decent, healthy woman. She noticed me, she worried about me, she wanted me to stand up straight. She's been dead, by the way, for 14 years.

It got me thinking. My mother Carol's voice in my head as I strolled along on a winter's day is a kind of immortality. I wonder if her mother told her to stand up straight, and if she sometimes heard her mother's voice and pictured her mother giving her advice long after my grandmother was gone. And if so, could my grandmother Amy have experienced a similar voice from her mother Matilda, and likewise Matilda from her mother Mary Ann, my great great grandmother? Maybe that is how some things get passed along through hundreds of generations.

There's no way of knowing, of course, but it makes me newly open to the idea that some of my thoughts could be the same thoughts that my great-great grandmother had, and that they've landed in me through one patient and loving mother after another. I wonder what else is there. I'm suddenly fond of all those generations of women tending to their children, doing their best to make sure the kids remembered something, anything that would help them be safe in the world and live good lives.

Friday night in My Old Town

I'm in love with my old town tonight, after a desert-dry martini (a once-a-year treat) some decent red wine, a long night of delicious food and four naughty Marlboro Lights at my friends' Dennis and Teddy's house. The drive home in rain-slicked streets, streets I've been driving on for 25 years, past Kettering and the bridge over the Flint River and along Second Street past the bus depot. On my car radio, the BBC, an interview with Stephen Frears, a person I admire...his exceptionally Brit voice a pleasant companion for my careful journey home, my trusty Honda Accord humming along smoothly, my windshield wipers sliding back and forth rhythmically keeping my view of my hometown clear and glistening. I don't know how to explain it; I never thought I'd stay in this often-infuriating town this long, but tonight, after rack of lamb and hours of wonderful conversation and a round of port at Teddy's house, I can't imagine that I could be happier in any other city in the United States of America -- this is my place.

Walked to work and back today for the first time this year, an invigorating half-hour walk both ways. I got to see a DOT crew unloading concrete flower boxes on the Kearsley Street bridge over 475, and I stopped to chat with the workmen and women, whether they wanted to or not, about how nice it was that these boxes were installed on both side sof the street, and how nice it was to look forward to flowers blooming in them in a few months. I may be nearly an old lady and I don't see life in terms of an unlimited future any more. but it is sweet to be happy where I am, right now, in this moment, in my home town, worn out and somehow beautiful old Flint.

Moments of uncomplicated happiness are hard to come by. I celebrate this one with gratitude.

Power Objects

When I laid out a softly woven red Indian throw, pulled two vanilla scented candles out of my backpack and lit them in class tonight, I suspect my students thought their old hippie teacher (whom they're just getting to know) had lost it. But I wanted to create a ritual of respect for "the image," for the magic we make from the objects of our lives.

I'd asked my Intro to Creative Writing students to bring in a personal object -- something that could fit in the hand, something with some significance. For this exercise, adapted from one cooked up by UMF Theater Professor Carolyn Gillespie, each student slipped the chosen object under the coverlet. I turned off the room lights and one by one, we passed around the objects, in silence, allowing each student to touch each of the other students' objects, in the dark. It's a way to gentle the students out of quick visual identification, quick interpretation, earnest left-brain analysis. This low-key ritual slows everybody down. It keeps the words at bay.

A single earring, shaped like dangling skeleton. A buffalo nickel. A mug with a broken handle. A single wooden golf tee. A small spiral bound notebook. A heart necklace. A blue topaz and white gold ring. A simple red and white button. A pair of glasses. A tiny laughing Buddha. Two guitar picks. An infant hospital wrist band.

And after each item had been tenderly passed around and we observed a moment of respectful silence (corny, I know) each student told the story: a first guitar, a gift from a beloved boyfriend who couldn't really afford it, a gift from a cherished mentor, a powerful memory of the birth of a baby, a talisman from the year of a crushing divorce, a necessary aid to vision, a symbol of family love, escape, a coming of age, a turning point. The stories, in all their rich detail and complexity, rolled around the room, each object a trigger, a catalyst, a comfort. It was sweet.

This, I suggested, was a way of thinking about the origin of an image -- how something accompanying us on our journeys through life can become not just any object, but a carrier of particular meaning -- a reminder of something that matters. And then the students tucked their objects away and class was over.

But I was touched, as always, by the evidence of our attachments, how little bits of metal and wood and plastic transform into shorthand for our joys and peak experiences, for what we've suffered and survived and what we hope for. What a remarkable species we are, poignantly clinging to our lucky charms, finding meaning and reassurance wherever we can.

Duende, Dammit

So, Gary Custer made me take a reference to "duende," out of my latest East Village Magazine column draft. He said he didn't know what it was and my husband, kibbutzing in the background, said, "Yeah, me either." Even though I tried to convince these bon vivants that it was one of those words they just HAD to put in their big dictions, so to speak, they didn't budge, and I caved. Yeah, yeah, it was a "readership" issue -- I get it, I get it.

Later, making fun of my pretensions and licking my faux wounds with my students, I discovered none of them--not even the ones who think they know everything--knew what the hell it was either. I came up with "glamorous melancholy," a delicious condition in which we poets love to wallow.

Here's the definition from Wikipedia. As I hastened to tell my vocabulary-challenged buddies, who will jump at any chance to catch me puffing out too big for my britches, it harks back to Federico Garcia Lorca. Friends, we need this word for our dark and gloomy days.

"Federico García Lorca first developed the concept of Duende in a lecture he gave in La Habana in 1930.
There would appear to be something vaguely pagan and even demonic about Duende. Duende is a spirit of art, much the opposite of the Muse.
Where the Muse brings golden inspiration, Duende brings blood. The Muse speaks of life, yet Duende sings of death. Duende is not inspiration, Duende is a struggle, a dark force, having very little to do with outer beauty, a struggle present in the artist's soul, the struggle of knowing that death is imminent. It is this knowledge of death that awaits and the despair that stems from it that produce Duende, and Duende will then color the artist's work with gut-wrenching authenticity, painful hues and tones that produce strong, vibrant art."

So there, isn't that fun? P.S. Happy Birthday, Gary!

Breakfast at Bishop

After a month together, a luxury for us in our conjugal cross-country life, Ted and I had to say goodbye this morning, probably our one hundredth "goodbye" at Bishop Airport. We know that sweet little airport inside and out, our own little Sydney Opera House. Today our route was rainy and dark, the brightening snow long gone in the spooky thaw, and at 7:30 a.m. there still wasn't even a glint of sunrise behind us driving down I-69. At that hour there's rare "rush minute" traffic in Flint, the headlights glaring, and I found it nerve-racking. (By the way, my spellcheck program insists that "nerve-racking" is a proper way to spell this word, not just "nerve-wracking" as I've always spelled it. I guess I owe about a thousand students an apology. Go figure) Anyway, I decided I wanted us to park so I could go in with my husband instead of just dropping him off, and then after our ardent departure hug I figured I'd buy a coffee and a New York Times and wait out the dawn; driving in the dark, especially a rain-slicked dark, wreaks havoc on my night blind eyes.

I'm saying all this to get to that 45-minute wait for solid daylight. When you're in a marriage like mine, where from time to time your beloved is pulled away from you and walks down that long hallway and into the skies for weeks at a time of absence, you get used to these moments of reflection, when you suddenly realize you're alone again. It can be jarring. But I've learned to embrace the comings and goings. You look up from your intense dyad and begin noticing the rest of the world again, seeing it anew. It freshens the spirit.

So I bought a mocha from the friendly coffee guy at the cappucino place, and accepted his jovial offer for an extra shot of espresso. Bought a NY Times at the gift shop and didn't mind when the clerk called me "honey." I think I looked a bit disheveled and might have had some "Hillary Clinton"-style watery eyes.

At a table in the cafe, I stretched out my legs and took a deep breath, then a sip of coffee, and then a good long look at the paper. An editorial by Gloria Steinem, predictably griping about how "women are never front runners." Another by David Brooks, usefully comparing Obama and McCain: "One man celebrates communitarian virtues like unity," he writes, " the other classical virtues like honor." And a bonus by poet Donald Hall, a onetime UM professor and former U.S. poet laureate, describing the scene in New Hampshire on primary day today -- not in the booths, but in his barn, "My barn roof bears a yard of snow, which is beautiful but worrisome. Can a barn built in 1865 withstand the weight?" he asks. It's a good day whenever poets make it to the NY Times editorial page. "On days when it doesn’t snow," he continues," the sun’s brightness bears down from the sky and flares upward from the ground." Settling for Michigan's oatmeal skies, I'm jealous of that sun.

On the cafe's big flat screen TV, CNN reporters interviewed wholesome looking people seemingly enjoying their limelight in some local diner, and then a cut to the midnight voting at tiny Dixville Notch. This is fun -- the most fun of any campaign I can remember.

So, I savored my hour until daylight. I looked outside finally and saw that the pole lights in the parking lot had finally clicked off, a milky blue light seeping through the electronic doors along with the travelers.

I'm "alone" again, but still in an very interesting world.

P.S. At the parking booth, the guy who took my two bucks said it had been an extremely depressing morning already -- about 200 soldiers leaving early today for tours of duty in Iraq. (From tonight's Flint Journal, I see that they were likely from the lst Battalion, 125th Infantry Regiment of the Army National Guard.) "All morning I've been taking money from women crying their eyes out," the parking guy said. Damn. Here's to their safe return. Let's hope we get out of this horrid war before everything and everyone we love is lost.