I learned a lot, working with high-school-age people for a month and a half, and remembered some of what it was like, being 15 or 16. That's probably why when I read the new volume of poetry by Billy Collins--Horoscopes For the Dead--this poem stuck out, for me:
What She Said
When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,
I was like give me a break.
I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.
I was just similar to give me a break.
As I said, I was like give me a break.
I would love to tell you
how I was able to resemble give me a break
without actually being identical to give me a break,
but all I can say is that I sensed
a similarity between me and give me a break.
And that was close enough
at that point in the evening
even if it meant I would fall short
of standing up from the table and screaming
give me a break,
for God's sake will you please give me a break?!
No, for that moment
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows
and the waiter approaching,
I felt the most I could be was like
to a certain degree
give me a break.
This poem's speaker and I are, you know, like, aging! And this is the kind of thinking that can go on inside an aging person's head when she hears a fragment from a 15-year-old girl's conversation. It's not useful. It's certainly no more pretty than the original phrase. And yet it circles around and around in there.
One of the things I notice about the difference between people who age gracefully and are still interesting to talk to, and people who become curmudgeonly and boring is that the first type stay open to new experiences and ways of saying things. They sometimes listen to music they know they might not like, and they occasionally read books that aren't exactly suited to their tastes. They continue to grow intellectually. I want to, like, know what younger people are saying, if only to make fun of it, in the manner of this poem. What about you?
Showing posts with label Billy Collins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Billy Collins. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
The Effort
Working with high school teachers on the spring musical is interesting; I have more respect for what they do and, oddly, even less tolerance.
On the one hand, I admire how these teachers work--I've imitated them by getting myself a loose-leaf binder and a hole punch, so I can keep the papers the kids give me (like their short biographies for the program) in order and as easily accessible as the rehearsal schedule and the sheet music for each song. They are organized people; they come to rehearsal with a plan and God help anyone--even another teacher--who might try to influence that plan once they get going.
On the other hand, I find the teachers rigid and unhearing. It amazes me how patient the kids are with being ordered around and told to sit down and shut up all day and then all evening, too. I know they have some good ideas that are being lost in the chaos of banal chatter that they're shushed for, but I also know that they could easily fritter away the entire two-hour rehearsal chattering, and so being told what to do--told exactly what to see as black, and what as white--is the most expedient kind of guidance for them, even thought it's not the most penetrating.
The experience makes me less snotty, a little less like the speaker of this Billy Collins poem about high school teachers:
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts--
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards--
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
I think this poem is about complication and the kind of incoherence it can cause, and about how high school teachers are often more interested in presenting a coherent point of view than in exploring why it's sometimes so hard to say something "straight out," why we write poetry to trace the almost incomprehensible path of one seam in an infinitude of possibly gold-bearing seams in the great, dark mine that is high school.
"Inarticulate wretches" that we all are, I think we sometimes forget that even people who can't express a point of view well still have one, and we run the rink of bellying through our daily jobs believing that if only everyone would see things the way we do, the world would be a better--or at least a more comprehensible--place.
On the one hand, I admire how these teachers work--I've imitated them by getting myself a loose-leaf binder and a hole punch, so I can keep the papers the kids give me (like their short biographies for the program) in order and as easily accessible as the rehearsal schedule and the sheet music for each song. They are organized people; they come to rehearsal with a plan and God help anyone--even another teacher--who might try to influence that plan once they get going.
On the other hand, I find the teachers rigid and unhearing. It amazes me how patient the kids are with being ordered around and told to sit down and shut up all day and then all evening, too. I know they have some good ideas that are being lost in the chaos of banal chatter that they're shushed for, but I also know that they could easily fritter away the entire two-hour rehearsal chattering, and so being told what to do--told exactly what to see as black, and what as white--is the most expedient kind of guidance for them, even thought it's not the most penetrating.
The experience makes me less snotty, a little less like the speaker of this Billy Collins poem about high school teachers:
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts--
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards--
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
I think this poem is about complication and the kind of incoherence it can cause, and about how high school teachers are often more interested in presenting a coherent point of view than in exploring why it's sometimes so hard to say something "straight out," why we write poetry to trace the almost incomprehensible path of one seam in an infinitude of possibly gold-bearing seams in the great, dark mine that is high school.
"Inarticulate wretches" that we all are, I think we sometimes forget that even people who can't express a point of view well still have one, and we run the rink of bellying through our daily jobs believing that if only everyone would see things the way we do, the world would be a better--or at least a more comprehensible--place.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Story of the Father
I think the hardest thing to do when you're grieving is nothing. It would be so much more satisfying to make a grand gesture, to lash out. Like in "The Story of the Father" by Tony Hoagland:
This is another story that I sometimes think about:
the story of the father
after the funeral of his son the suicide,
going home and burning all the photographs of that dead boy;
standing next to the backyard barbecue,
feeding the pictures to the fire; watching the pale smoke
rise and disappear into the humid Mississippi sky;
aware that he is standing at the edge of some great border,
ignorant that he is hogging all the pain.
How quiet the suburbs are in the middle of an afternoon
when a man is destroying evidence,
breathing in the chemistry of burning Polaroids,
watching the trees over the rickety fence
seem to life and nod in recognition.
Later, he will be surprised
by the anger of his family:
the wife hiding her face in her hands,
the daughter calling him names,
--but for now, he is certain of his act; now
he is like a man destroying a religion,
or hacking at the root of a tree.
Over and over I have arrived here just in time
to watch the father use a rusty piece of wire
to nudge the last photo of the boy
into the orange part of the flame:
the face going brown, the memory undeveloping.
It is not the misbegotten logic of the father;
it is not the pity of the snuffed-out youth;
it is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:
how it moves around inside of him like smoke;
how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside of them forever.
Much has been made of how "accessible" the poetry of Billy Collins is; this poem seems to me similarly easy to enter. Although where you end up might not be where you thought you were going.
This is another story that I sometimes think about:
the story of the father
after the funeral of his son the suicide,
going home and burning all the photographs of that dead boy;
standing next to the backyard barbecue,
feeding the pictures to the fire; watching the pale smoke
rise and disappear into the humid Mississippi sky;
aware that he is standing at the edge of some great border,
ignorant that he is hogging all the pain.
How quiet the suburbs are in the middle of an afternoon
when a man is destroying evidence,
breathing in the chemistry of burning Polaroids,
watching the trees over the rickety fence
seem to life and nod in recognition.
Later, he will be surprised
by the anger of his family:
the wife hiding her face in her hands,
the daughter calling him names,
--but for now, he is certain of his act; now
he is like a man destroying a religion,
or hacking at the root of a tree.
Over and over I have arrived here just in time
to watch the father use a rusty piece of wire
to nudge the last photo of the boy
into the orange part of the flame:
the face going brown, the memory undeveloping.
It is not the misbegotten logic of the father;
it is not the pity of the snuffed-out youth;
it is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:
how it moves around inside of him like smoke;
how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside of them forever.
Much has been made of how "accessible" the poetry of Billy Collins is; this poem seems to me similarly easy to enter. Although where you end up might not be where you thought you were going.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Shoveling Snow with Buddha
This Billy Collins poem is for Andrew, who has been musing on walking meditation and snow shoveling, and who has been getting snowed on already because he lives in the Chicago area. (We aren't getting any of the snow, but we're getting high winds, so I've been making my usual preparations for the almost inevitable power outage later today.)
Shoveling Snow with Buddha
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over the mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling,
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside the generous pocket of his silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck,
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
I feel much more Buddha-like than usual, as I've succumbed to a sinus infection. I'm taking codeine cough syrup at night, which gives me weird dreams but makes me feel tranquil in between the coughing fits that go on every time I awaken. I'm taking another cough medicine during the day when I can; it has a drowsiness warning and I'm not supposed to take it when I might have to drive anywhere. But I haven't been driving much of anywhere. I haven't been doing all the Christmas errands. I haven't even done the laundry that's piling up. I'm just sitting here and reading whatever comes to hand, in a tranquil and oddly silent way, since for a few days I had complete laryngitis and now have only an edge of a voice.
I would like it to be vacation already, so there would be someone home to play cards with! It's interesting to feel such calm at such a busy time of year. Who would like some of my calm? Here. Sit down. Look into my i's.
Shoveling Snow with Buddha
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over the mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling,
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside the generous pocket of his silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck,
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
I feel much more Buddha-like than usual, as I've succumbed to a sinus infection. I'm taking codeine cough syrup at night, which gives me weird dreams but makes me feel tranquil in between the coughing fits that go on every time I awaken. I'm taking another cough medicine during the day when I can; it has a drowsiness warning and I'm not supposed to take it when I might have to drive anywhere. But I haven't been driving much of anywhere. I haven't been doing all the Christmas errands. I haven't even done the laundry that's piling up. I'm just sitting here and reading whatever comes to hand, in a tranquil and oddly silent way, since for a few days I had complete laryngitis and now have only an edge of a voice.
I would like it to be vacation already, so there would be someone home to play cards with! It's interesting to feel such calm at such a busy time of year. Who would like some of my calm? Here. Sit down. Look into my i's.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Bathtub Families
Last night I met--live and in person--an imaginary friend, ReadersGuide, who was in town to visit the local college with her younger daughter. And aside from the initial nervousness about meeting someone I knew only virtually (all of our kids said "mom, you're not supposed to meet people you know from the internet!"), it was delightful. Because we did already know each other. And unlike real-life friends, where there's usually some element of catching up, we could take the conversation up where we'd left off, only in a little more depth and with me racing around saying "see? here's this thing I talk about, right here!"
Meeting someone I knew previously only through the written word made me think of this poem by Billy Collins:
Bathtub Families
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It's enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.
I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn't have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.
Now I can add a mental image of ReadersGuide when I think about her, but meeting her didn't change my picture of her otherwise. Especially for those of us who love language, it can be "better than reality" because you don't have to bother with airline tickets and driving down deer-strewn highways on windy nights and children who get sick when someone is visiting (as Walker did last night). Eating pizza and drinking wine with someone in real life beats the heck out of doing it virtually. But I enjoy all of you imaginary readers who float in the air around my head and into the comments here!
Meeting someone I knew previously only through the written word made me think of this poem by Billy Collins:
Bathtub Families
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It's enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.
I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn't have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.
Now I can add a mental image of ReadersGuide when I think about her, but meeting her didn't change my picture of her otherwise. Especially for those of us who love language, it can be "better than reality" because you don't have to bother with airline tickets and driving down deer-strewn highways on windy nights and children who get sick when someone is visiting (as Walker did last night). Eating pizza and drinking wine with someone in real life beats the heck out of doing it virtually. But I enjoy all of you imaginary readers who float in the air around my head and into the comments here!
Monday, August 10, 2009
Hippos on Holiday
My family likes to go to the movie theater because we turn our cell phones off (well, Ron at least turns his on "vibrate") and get really immersed in the big screen in the dark. But aside from Harry Potter, there haven't been many movies we wanted to see this summer. We're mostly staying home with our Netflix movies and TV on DVD (we finished the seventh season of Scrubs and started in on the third season of Eureka). But it's just not the same as going to the theater. Last night I passed up watching an episode of The Office, which I've found I don't much like, in favor of reading a mystery I'm enjoying very much and will tell you about later this week (The Language of Bees). There's a certain implied snobbism in choosing a book over a tv show, but I think it's a bit subverted when the book is just a mystery novel--which is why I like this poem by Billy Collins:
Hippos on Holiday
is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.
I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
You know, as a reviewer I think it's important to make some distinctions between good and bad. If you pick a movie--or a book--thinking it's going to be good, and you find that it's bad, you should say so. But I do think that some of the most recent furor over "honest" reviews as opposed to "positive" reviews can be boiled down to mean-spiritedness.
What is mean-spiritedness? It's being snotty. It's intimating that because you've noticed stuff in a book or movie that other people haven't, you must be more intelligent. It's doing all the stuff that your least favorite English teacher tried to do to you.
What happens if you bend over backwards to avoid mean-spiritedness? You sound wishy-washy and insipid, as if you like everything because you're incapable of making distinctions.
If you want to enjoy movies, or reading, or even blogging, I think it's a good idea to try to like them on their own terms. If you can't get any enjoyment out of them even when you've really, really tried, then say so. But don't go into a hippo movie with your face all scrunched up ready to be bored, expecting validation for your self-fulfilling prophecy. And don't be so cool and laid-back that you can't express any enthusiasm when you find it's a really good hippo movie.
Have you been able to immerse yourself in a book or movie this summer--been able to drink that enormous coke down with great pleasure and no thought for the morrow?
Hippos on Holiday
is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.
I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
You know, as a reviewer I think it's important to make some distinctions between good and bad. If you pick a movie--or a book--thinking it's going to be good, and you find that it's bad, you should say so. But I do think that some of the most recent furor over "honest" reviews as opposed to "positive" reviews can be boiled down to mean-spiritedness.
What is mean-spiritedness? It's being snotty. It's intimating that because you've noticed stuff in a book or movie that other people haven't, you must be more intelligent. It's doing all the stuff that your least favorite English teacher tried to do to you.
What happens if you bend over backwards to avoid mean-spiritedness? You sound wishy-washy and insipid, as if you like everything because you're incapable of making distinctions.
If you want to enjoy movies, or reading, or even blogging, I think it's a good idea to try to like them on their own terms. If you can't get any enjoyment out of them even when you've really, really tried, then say so. But don't go into a hippo movie with your face all scrunched up ready to be bored, expecting validation for your self-fulfilling prophecy. And don't be so cool and laid-back that you can't express any enthusiasm when you find it's a really good hippo movie.
Have you been able to immerse yourself in a book or movie this summer--been able to drink that enormous coke down with great pleasure and no thought for the morrow?
Friday, July 17, 2009
August in Paris
So finally I found a poem about Paris--"August in Paris" by Billy Collins--as an opening to tell you a little about our recent trip to France. We went in June, because everything I'd read said that Paris starts to close down in July and August. Even then some places were closed on weekends, and it was difficult to find a restaurant on a Monday.
Everywhere we walked, there were people sketching and painting, and sidewalk sellers offering watercolors of famous Parisian scenes, plus small metal models of the Eiffel Tower, old newspapers and magazines featuring events from Paris, and picture postcards. The postcards, of course, are mostly why I was perusing the wares. As I've said here before, I love postcards, and I collected a stack almost 2 inches high by the end of the trip. I mailed them from the U.S. because I didn't want to take the time to buy stamps (despite the fact that a few of the cards I bought in Monaco came pre-stamped, for use in the fifteen minutes it takes to drive through that country).
When our feet got tired from walking through the cobblestone streets of Paris (and my bionic knee is now doing so well that I can walk far enough to make my feet tired!), we would sit on a bench for a while and watch the people walk by. One bench just outside of Notre Dame, on a bridge across the Seine leading to the Latin Quarter, was a particularly good people-watching spot. After reading a "Get Fuzzy" cartoon about European men wearing capri pants just before we left, we counted the number of men we saw wearing capris (by the end of our 12-day stay in Paris and Nice the count was 42). Everyone in Paris, men and women, wears pretty shoes. We saw very few people wearing athletic shoes, and those few were almost certainly American tourists. French men tend to wear very pointy-toed dress shoes, even for bicycling, and French women wear delicate sandals in June, often flats, but sometimes with 2-3 inch heels. We'd guess about the nationality of the people coming towards us based on their shoes and clothing, and then when they passed us and we could hear what language they were speaking, we'd get a pretty good idea about the accuracy of our guesses.
I'd never before been in a country where I didn't speak the language well, so reading and trying to communicate required a depth of concentration I'm not used to. I would savor the words I knew ("Ecoles" means schools) and repeat to myself the words I'd just heard pronounced ("St-Germain" doesn't sound like it does when I read it).
August in Paris
I have stopped here on the rue des Ecoles
just off the boulevard St-Germain
to look over the shoulder of a man
in a flannel shirt and a straw hat
who has set up an easel and a canvas chair
on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle
a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
But where are you, reader,
who have not paused in your walk
to look over my shoulder
to see what I am jotting in this notebook?
Alone in this city,
I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.
But every time I turn around
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the turning of a page.
Art is a public activity in Paris, as is drinking coffee. When we saw people retreating into their walled gardens and behind their shutters, we imagined them heading for private pleasures, opening the box from the patisserie, letting the first pretty shoe drop to the floor, taking off those capri pants one leg at a time.
Reading is so often an introvert's pleasure, and I imagine Parisians take the time to revel in the privacy--the quiet, the immersion, occasionally the catch of the breath. Do you?
Everywhere we walked, there were people sketching and painting, and sidewalk sellers offering watercolors of famous Parisian scenes, plus small metal models of the Eiffel Tower, old newspapers and magazines featuring events from Paris, and picture postcards. The postcards, of course, are mostly why I was perusing the wares. As I've said here before, I love postcards, and I collected a stack almost 2 inches high by the end of the trip. I mailed them from the U.S. because I didn't want to take the time to buy stamps (despite the fact that a few of the cards I bought in Monaco came pre-stamped, for use in the fifteen minutes it takes to drive through that country).
When our feet got tired from walking through the cobblestone streets of Paris (and my bionic knee is now doing so well that I can walk far enough to make my feet tired!), we would sit on a bench for a while and watch the people walk by. One bench just outside of Notre Dame, on a bridge across the Seine leading to the Latin Quarter, was a particularly good people-watching spot. After reading a "Get Fuzzy" cartoon about European men wearing capri pants just before we left, we counted the number of men we saw wearing capris (by the end of our 12-day stay in Paris and Nice the count was 42). Everyone in Paris, men and women, wears pretty shoes. We saw very few people wearing athletic shoes, and those few were almost certainly American tourists. French men tend to wear very pointy-toed dress shoes, even for bicycling, and French women wear delicate sandals in June, often flats, but sometimes with 2-3 inch heels. We'd guess about the nationality of the people coming towards us based on their shoes and clothing, and then when they passed us and we could hear what language they were speaking, we'd get a pretty good idea about the accuracy of our guesses.
I'd never before been in a country where I didn't speak the language well, so reading and trying to communicate required a depth of concentration I'm not used to. I would savor the words I knew ("Ecoles" means schools) and repeat to myself the words I'd just heard pronounced ("St-Germain" doesn't sound like it does when I read it).
August in Paris
I have stopped here on the rue des Ecoles
just off the boulevard St-Germain
to look over the shoulder of a man
in a flannel shirt and a straw hat
who has set up an easel and a canvas chair
on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle
a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
But where are you, reader,
who have not paused in your walk
to look over my shoulder
to see what I am jotting in this notebook?
Alone in this city,
I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.
But every time I turn around
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the turning of a page.
Art is a public activity in Paris, as is drinking coffee. When we saw people retreating into their walled gardens and behind their shutters, we imagined them heading for private pleasures, opening the box from the patisserie, letting the first pretty shoe drop to the floor, taking off those capri pants one leg at a time.
Reading is so often an introvert's pleasure, and I imagine Parisians take the time to revel in the privacy--the quiet, the immersion, occasionally the catch of the breath. Do you?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
On Turning Ten
Last night Walker had a soccer game. He's been running in an odd and unusually clumsy fashion this season, and after every game he complains that his legs--and more recently, his knees--hurt. When he began complaining this week that his left knee hurt especially, I sat up and took notice. As the owner of an artificial left knee and a cat who hurt her left "stifle" (cat knee) this spring, I was, um, let's say "concerned." So we went off to the doctor this morning. The doctor poked the place that hurt, asked Walker how old he is (13), and told us what was wrong. It's a variation on saying "growing pains." Basically, Walker's leg bones have grown faster than his muscles and ligaments, and the ligament that stretches over his knee is having the most trouble keeping up. He taped the knee and told Walker to stop running when it hurts bad enough.
On the way back from the doctor's office, I was thinking of this poem, "On Turning Ten," by Billy Collins:
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never feel so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees, I bleed.
Yeah, the days when a trip to Build-A-Bear-Workshop was fun are past. The "emo" moment when the kids at Walker's middle school were wearing eyeliner and black clothes and quoting lines ridiculously similar to Shelley's "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" is past. What will be next in the build-a-teenager household? Will there be time for adventure in between trips to the grocery and shoe store?
On the way back from the doctor's office, I was thinking of this poem, "On Turning Ten," by Billy Collins:
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never feel so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees, I bleed.
Yeah, the days when a trip to Build-A-Bear-Workshop was fun are past. The "emo" moment when the kids at Walker's middle school were wearing eyeliner and black clothes and quoting lines ridiculously similar to Shelley's "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" is past. What will be next in the build-a-teenager household? Will there be time for adventure in between trips to the grocery and shoe store?
Monday, February 2, 2009
Time to Dream
The powerful sleep lobby has taken me over in the past week, and when I get enough sleep and don't have to wake up in what seems the middle of the night to get the kids off to school (6:30 am), I remember my dreams more. The rule at my house is that you don't tell your dream before breakfast unless you want it to come true, and I've recently told two of mine before breakfast. The first was that we had our existing three cats, plus three new kittens. The second was that we were in Hawaii, on the big island.
Fairly often I dream about doing things with people who, when I wake, I know are dead. Then the rest of the day, I go around thinking about what those people would think if they saw what I was doing. My dead are kind people, so I imagine them having a more-than-mortal capacity to forgive my daily foibles. They're like the dead in this poem, "The Dead" by Susan Mitchell:
At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.
We're more likely to stay up playing a card game called Rage into the night in the dining room, but surely it's the same kind of noise (when my children were babies, we used to say that we could only play "Mildly Irritated" rather than "Rage" because we're loud people). I remember the sound of my parents murmuring to each other in the hall after I'd gone to bed, or the sound of them watching Hawaii 5-0 on the television in their living room. It's a reassuring sound, my daughter says, to hear adults talking after you've gone to bed.
And it's a reassuring feeling, to wake thinking of someone and to imagine that she's looking down on you, in turn. It's like in this poem, also called "The Dead," by Billy Collins:
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
If you're a parent, do you remember waiting for your baby to close his eyes so you could tiptoe out of the room? I remember singing 427 verses of "Froggy Went A-Courting" while my youngest went to sleep. The last 400 verses, of course, were entirely made up. That's a kind of attention that surely endures even after this life is over.
Fairly often I dream about doing things with people who, when I wake, I know are dead. Then the rest of the day, I go around thinking about what those people would think if they saw what I was doing. My dead are kind people, so I imagine them having a more-than-mortal capacity to forgive my daily foibles. They're like the dead in this poem, "The Dead" by Susan Mitchell:
At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.
We're more likely to stay up playing a card game called Rage into the night in the dining room, but surely it's the same kind of noise (when my children were babies, we used to say that we could only play "Mildly Irritated" rather than "Rage" because we're loud people). I remember the sound of my parents murmuring to each other in the hall after I'd gone to bed, or the sound of them watching Hawaii 5-0 on the television in their living room. It's a reassuring sound, my daughter says, to hear adults talking after you've gone to bed.
And it's a reassuring feeling, to wake thinking of someone and to imagine that she's looking down on you, in turn. It's like in this poem, also called "The Dead," by Billy Collins:
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
If you're a parent, do you remember waiting for your baby to close his eyes so you could tiptoe out of the room? I remember singing 427 verses of "Froggy Went A-Courting" while my youngest went to sleep. The last 400 verses, of course, were entirely made up. That's a kind of attention that surely endures even after this life is over.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
A Moment in Teaching
Yesterday I had one of those days in teaching that make it all seem worthwhile...even though that's an illusion in my dead-end adjunct line of work.
At the beginning of the term, I always give my first-year college students this poem by Billy Collins, entitled Introduction to Poetry:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Then we spend the rest of the term arguing about how you can find the "true meaning" of a poem without beating it with the bits of hose acquired in high school. I show them, urge them, provide risk-free ways for them to try something different, grade them down for doing the same old things they're used to, and sometimes, at this point, I fall into despair. But yesterday a lot of them got it. I saw the look of surprise on their faces, and some of the formerly silent students spoke up in class. They've learned how to read something and interpret it for themselves. They're actually paying more attention to the poem than to guessing "what the author meant" or "what the teacher wants." It's such a good moment I want to prolong it. I know it won't last.
Once they've seen it, though, they'll want another glimpse. Just a quick, tentative peek. So yesterday's moment makes me feel that what I've been wearing myself out for has been worth all the trouble.
At the beginning of the term, I always give my first-year college students this poem by Billy Collins, entitled Introduction to Poetry:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Then we spend the rest of the term arguing about how you can find the "true meaning" of a poem without beating it with the bits of hose acquired in high school. I show them, urge them, provide risk-free ways for them to try something different, grade them down for doing the same old things they're used to, and sometimes, at this point, I fall into despair. But yesterday a lot of them got it. I saw the look of surprise on their faces, and some of the formerly silent students spoke up in class. They've learned how to read something and interpret it for themselves. They're actually paying more attention to the poem than to guessing "what the author meant" or "what the teacher wants." It's such a good moment I want to prolong it. I know it won't last.
Once they've seen it, though, they'll want another glimpse. Just a quick, tentative peek. So yesterday's moment makes me feel that what I've been wearing myself out for has been worth all the trouble.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Sheltering Children
My sister-in-law probably wouldn't say that my children are sheltered, but I would. I think all parents shelter their children as much as they can for as long as they can. One of the ways in which my children have been sheltered is that we don't watch tv news much. As Barbara Kingsolver says in her essay "The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In" (in Small Wonder), "people very rarely get killed at our house, and I'm trying to keep it that way." I never even saw any of the 9/11 coverage; it upset my kindergartener, who was home with chicken pox. We do have a rule about movies: sex is okay, but not violence. They can watch Love Actually but not Die Hard.
Is it hypocritical of me to say that I don't believe in willful ignorance and then try to keep my children ignorant of some things? I don't think so. The younger one is almost 12, and the older one is 14 and a half. "As long as I can" is running out. Continuing to shelter them much will just turn into the kind of pointless exercise that this poem by Billy Collins describes:
The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
Since we're all going to shelter our children to some extent, if we can, I think we should show them what we fight wars to defend--the things we love--before they see too much of what we fight wars to destroy.
Is it hypocritical of me to say that I don't believe in willful ignorance and then try to keep my children ignorant of some things? I don't think so. The younger one is almost 12, and the older one is 14 and a half. "As long as I can" is running out. Continuing to shelter them much will just turn into the kind of pointless exercise that this poem by Billy Collins describes:
The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
Since we're all going to shelter our children to some extent, if we can, I think we should show them what we fight wars to defend--the things we love--before they see too much of what we fight wars to destroy.
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