"The Particulars of Peter" by Kelly Conaboy

In the book The Particulars of Peter (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020), author Kelly Conaboy lists the times when she loves to watch Peter her dog: when he's eating, sitting still, choosing a toy, sleeping, and

While he's pounding his front paws on the ground and thrashing his body around upon my return home, seemingly unable to control his indomitable joy.... While he's sniffing a single leaf for a very long time. While he's paused, one paw up, catching a scent in the air like a tiny detective. (89)

That all these particulars of Peter also describe my Brandy -- and Mia before her, back and back through half a century of dogs (see my page Loving Dogs) -- may suggest to an unsympathetic person, you've seen one dog, you've seen 'em all.

There's truth to that. I've been re-reading Montaigne, who was fascinated 450 years ago by his sleeping dog's dreams of chasing rabbits just as Conaboy and I are today. So there's a true corollary: You've met one devoted dog caretaker, you've met us all. So is there some problem with that?

Like Conaboy, we spend money on merchandise and time on activities, all because we do not want to disappoint our dogs. She takes Peter to a dog festival "Woofstock" (32), dance lessons, obedience training, DNA testing, and ghost hunting. Peter generally doesn't seem too excited by these, but Conaboy enjoys interacting with him in these different situations.

Like Conaboy, we shell out monthly for pet insurance. It's worth it to know, when the vet tells her how many thousands of dollars Pete's surgery will cost, that she doesn't have to think about the unthinkable alternative. At least, not yet.

One chapter lays out answers to the inevitable question, "Will My Dog Go to Heaven?" Conaboy interviews theologians who disagree. She quotes the Catholic Catechism's teaching that animals bless us "by their mere existence" and so "they deserve kindness," even as we eat some and wear some (226). She concludes that there's "beauty" in being

...lucky enough to have an ephemeral piece of light as a part of your life, aware of its impermanence from the beginning and loving it wholly anyway. Knowing someone who is only good, and getting to be their caretaker. Letting this dog believe that you are the sun and moon, even though you are just human. Protecting them until you no longer can. (228)

So this document of Peter's particulars, being also a reflection of Brandy's, and Mia's, is a way for Conaboy and me and all of us to cherish and honor our dogs. Only Conaboy makes money on it. "What a scam!" she writes (intro, p. xiii).

Thanks to Suzanne for this book, a Christmas gift. She has known me and my dogs Beau, Luis, and Mia. We've taken long walks to get to know Brandy. She invited me for Christmas with her, tiny Tabby, and tinier Darcy.

Because I do look for any excuse to include photos of Brandy, I add Conaboy's list of Pete's poses that Brandy also performs:

1. Cinnamon roll: Curled, circular, ready to be picked up by a large spatula.
2. Superman: Arms stretched out before him, soaring through a dream.
3. Gossip sphinx: A modified "sphinx," which is when he sits like a sphinx, gossip sphinx finds his head lowered between his paws, perched and ready to hear who did what. (109)

My photos include Brandy in her cinnamon roll/gossip sphinx combo, and also a pose I call "Squirrel Patrol."

Left: Suzanne's little guy Darcy on a day that followed weeks of daily visits to feed him and Tabby, when he decided he could trust me. Now we're best buds.

Cycling America Virtually: Elko, Nevada

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275 miles to Elko, Nevada From Pocatello, Idaho, I completed the 275 miles to reach Humboldt National Park near Elko, Nevada. (I actually ride around Atlanta, but I'm logging miles across America, with photos courtesy of Adobe.)

I connect to Elko, home of the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an event now called plain "Elko" by cowboy cognoscenti. I relate through radio commentator Baxter Black, "cowboy poet and former large animal veterinarian" who provided poems and commentary on NPR for many years. In tribute, here's my poem about an actual experience at the end of my bike ride:

Doggerel

When I had a-pedalled to virtual Elko,
I groaned as I hoisted myself from the saddle.
Unsnapping my helmet, unstrapping shoe Velcro
I came face-to-face with some actual cattle.

This suburban fam'ly had put up a stable.
A calf stared at me with eyes widened and soggy.
I said, "Little dogie, I'd chat, were I able,
but it's late. I'm awaited by my little doggie."

[Photo: Same cows at that fam'ly home, ready for their closeup]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Punching the Air: Teen Poet Imprisoned

Writer Ibi Zoboi and poet-activist Dr. Yusef Salaam collaborated on a young adult novel in poetry, Punching the Air, drawing on Salaam's experience. In 1989, he was one of the five black males in their early teens arrested for the rape and near-fatal beating of "the Central Park Jogger." I remember reading with incredulity -- not enough! -- that bands of feral black boys roamed the city nights looking for white people to assault; "wilding," they supposedly called it. "Wilding" turns out to have been just a reporter's extrapolation from a misunderstanding of one remark by one boy.

Recent movies - a documentary and a drama - tell the story how police jumped to conclusions, how prosecutors bullied the boys into confessions, how the press hyped the crime. During the trial, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad to call for a public lynching. But after more than ten years in prison, all the young men were exonerated and the true culprit, a white man, was imprisoned.

Zoboi and Salaam have refracted the first part of that story, updating it, universalizing it. The protagonist named Amal ("hope" in Arabic) is well-loved, well-read, an artist, but guilty of fighting back when white teens attack him and his friends. A white teenaged boy lies in a coma, and Amal lands in prison. The story is how Amal learns to fight back against the external walls of the prison system and the internal walls of doubt that suffocate his spirit.

Each chapter is a poem with enough in it to reward re-readings, but you don't have to read Punching the Air twice to get the story and the feelings. Sometimes you feel angry, sometimes you ache, sometimes you smile at the sweetness. Often a word in one poem becomes the topic for the next, drawing you from page to page with no pause to look back. But as you read, you'll pick up many strands that tie disparate chapters together. To read Punching the Air a second time is like stepping back to appreciate a mural like the one that Amal wants to paint (130).

I paint with words, too Amal tells us, relating his poetry to his drawings. Many of the poems are titled after works he studied in AP Art History class -- The Thinker, The Watch, The Scream-- though he angered his art teacher by asking whether anyone outside of Europe made art, a fair question. He imagines a Black Mona Lisa and a remix of his favorite painting Guernica to be about him and his friends, with "distorted faces and bodies / in war in war in war", but, like dust in Maya Angelou's poem, "we rise we rise we rise" (353).

The rising of dust is one motif that we see in several poems. Some poems develop the analogy of Amal's prior life with friends and family as "Africa," the court process as "the Middle Passage," and his arrival at prison as the stolen African ancestors' arrival at America (61, elsewhere). He takes hope from the "butterfly effect," i.e., the theory that waves created by a butterfly's wings can have outsized influence on destiny. He longs for super-powers to withstand the bullying and intimidation he experiences in prison. The real walls around him also are a symbol. His few allies in the prison become "walls" to him, and he also makes himself a wall. So drawing his art on walls becomes more than just a pasttime; it's an image for what he can make of his life. In one short poem, one in a series titled "Brotherhood" the metaphor of a wall helps to express a development in his friendship with his "four corners":

Brotherhood VI

And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other.

(338)

I have a personal reason to be especially affected by another theme in the poems -- how others see him. In our school's upper division, a young black man told the Senior class advisor that only one teacher in all his years at the school had ever "seen" him; I was not that teacher. I looked back on my time with him in Middle School, how I managed his oppositional behavior, how I encouraged his talents, how I made corrections with respect -- I wondered, what does "seeing" mean? Then I heard the poet Zoboi read "Clone" from Punching the Air, about how his teachers in fifth grade "watched" him "so hard, so close" after a playground fight "that I thought I was trying to break out of prison." The poem continues

Every dumb s--- I did
they thought it was because of

trouble at home
an absent father
a tired mother
not enough books
not enough vegetables
not enough sleep

They believed those lies about me

and made themselves
a whole other boy
in their minds
and replaced me with him

(56)

Echoing what I read in those newspaper accounts at the time of Dr. Salaam's arrest, Amal develops the idea of how the media sees him and the boy in the coma: "I am ink / He is paper...I am man / He is boy... I am criminal / He is victim...I am black / He is white" (20).

In a later poem, imagining himself on the slave ship, he addresses his tormentors: What do you see when you see me? / The enemy? The inner me? (91). Truly, I don't know -- yet --what I could have done or thought differently regarding that student in my class, but I recognize myself in those teachers, and him in this character.

In Amal's story, there's the art teacher, important for what she taught him, but who also laughed when he said that he wanted to do a whole mural instead of a paper portfolio (130). "I failed the class, and she failed me" (133). But a black woman who teaches creative writing and a guest professor in African garb capture Amal's imagination.

Reading the poems weeks after George Floyd suffocated with a policeman's knee on his neck, I was chagrined to read these two lines repeatedly throughout the book: "There's a stone in my throat / and a brick on my chest" (11, 410, passim).

For all the darkness, there's light here, too. Loving family, friendship in prison, inspiration for art, and a letter from Zenobia, the cute girl he was too timid to talk to in school. He sends her his portrait of her "to let her know that / I saw her / I see her / I remember her" (176). If "time moves you away from me," he writes to her, "I will always remember / you remembering me" (177).

That acrostic poem, each line starting with a letter from Zenobia's name, inspired my kids to write acrostics of their own. Punching the Air is a beautiful book for readers of any age, of any race.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Punching the Air. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2020.

Midnight Atlanta: Layers You Didn't Know Existed

Murder, cops, feds, an investigative reporter, stake-outs, fist fights (baseball bats included) and shoot-outs: Thomas Mullen gives us all those elements for Midnight Atlanta, latest novel in his Darktown series. But the emotional through-line is a love story, as cops black and white in Atlanta, 1956, learn to appreciate and trust each other.

The murder of Arthur Bishop, editor of Atlanta's black-owned newspaper, sets off an investigation that involves many of the high-profile tensions that roiled the country in the mid-1950s. The editor Bishop had traveled to Montgomery. Was he involved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the bus boycott going on then? Bishop had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, as many black leaders had done. At a time of intense Red Scare, was he a blackmailer, or blackmailee? Atlanta's modernization meant destruction of black neighborhoods but also opportunities for the black middle class. Had Bishop fallen afoul of one side or the other in that conflict? Just two years after the notorious acquittal of Emmett Till's killers, has Bishop outraged white supremacists by uncovering love letters from a white woman to the black man she accuses of rape?

Mullen maintains a third-person narrative voice but follows several different characters who are following different threads of the investigation. These are appealing people whose personal development is at least as interesting as the crime story.

Readers of the series will know and love Tommy Smith, the reporter who discovers Bishop's murder. A veteran of World War II and one of Atlanta's first black cops, he hung up his uniform at the end of the previous story, and now he's wondering why. He thinks of his own father home from World War I lynched for wearing his uniform, "an event [Smith] had no memory of, yet it was the defining moment of his life," still "haunting" him (344). He's also having second thoughts about Patrice, a restauranteur who gives him grief when he seems to be seeking a second-night stand. He's getting serious about her at a time that her white clientele are boycotting her for openly supporting desegregation.

Smith's ex-partner Lucius Boggs, upright and uptight, seems to be softening his self-righteousness and hardening his ambitions. Tiny powerhouse Dewey Edwards makes a good new partner for him. When they team up for a potentially dangerous visit to a white private detective in the boonies, Dewey slaps Boggs's shoulder and says, "Oh boy. This gonna be fun" (210). It is!

But Smith's ex-boss Sergeant Joe McInnis has most to learn about his relationships -- to Smith, to the black men he commands, to his family. In the earlier books, we learn that his command of the new black police force was punishment for his uncovering corruption on the all-white police force some years before. Though unhappy with the job, McInnis has been tough but fair. In Midnight Atlanta, he's offered a new position, and, to his own surprise, he asks for time to think about it. The rest of the novel, he's studying his own relationships and beliefs.

We first see him with his teenaged son, trying to explain whether his command of the black force makes him a "n----r-lover." McGinnis responds, "I work with them. We solve problems together"(40). He adds, "They're just folks." In the course of the investigation, McInnis reads Atlanta's black newspaper and reflects

It was like reading dispatches from a different reality.... McInnis had been operating in this other realm for the past seven-plus years, yet to read their perspective on stories he'd heard differenty elsewhere -- or, in most cases, hadn't heard at all -- was a reminder how separate from them he remained. (146)

Meeting people on his beat by lunching at black-owned restaurants, he becomes aware of the "layers" that black people deal with "that he didn't even know existed" (219).

This case puts McInnis on the side of his men against other police and the FBI. When Smith is hospitalized, McInnis brings gruff sympathy and a proposal to work together. He asks Smith to trust him, and is genuinely offended to be doubted (287). Smith points out that McInnis risks retaliation from the department if not from the FBI: "Why bother?"

"For the same reason you're nearly getting yourself killed trying to find out the truth."

Smith wondered if that could be true. Hoped so. Wasn't sure.

[McInnis said], "First the Bureau jerked me around and then they beat up one of my former officers."

Smith doesn't say, "I didn't know you cared," but that's the feeling.

Mullen doesn't make it easy to oppose racism in Atlanta 1956. McInnis's son gets beaten up. A character, Cassie Rakestraw, who has been sympathetic in previous novels, now leads opposition to racial desegregation. McInnis and his wife are ostracized by the PTA. When you fear for the safety of your children, when the value of your dream home plummets if a single black family moves nearby -- can you afford to do what you know is right?

Some other crime novel series have nearly choked on personal miseries and flaws that the authors pile on with the goal of character development. Henning Mankell's Wallander, Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, Ann Cleeves's Perez all became morose, angry, unbearable to read about; sometimes I skipped over Sue Grafton's chapters about Kinsey Millhone's personal life. At least so far, Mullen's characters are developing in ways that make them more appealing and more tightly bonded -- to each other, and to us.

More about Thomas Mullen's Darktown series.

• The first novel in the series had special resonance in the weeks after George Floyd's murder: "It seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction...good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). See "Darktown: Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948" (06/2020)
• "Lightning Men: Dark but not Bleak" (07/2020). The book's title refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: Comedy Turns Tragic

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, movie (2020) and play (1984), is a comedy that flirts with tragedy. Tragedy hits back hard. [Photo: Detroit News]

The story is set in a Chicago recording studio one hot afternoon in 1927. Ma Rainey is (and actually was) a Blues diva, with a retinue of musicians, a servile nephew, and a sulky mistress Dussie Mae. The comedy of it starts with the way the title telegraphs Ma Rainey's basic attitude, Kiss my a--.

Two white men who kiss it throughout the film bend to her ever-more-whimsical whims, all the while telling each other "I know how to handle her." So Ma arrives late? Ok. She rejects their play list? Ok. She wants a Coke? Here you go. The men gape from the recording booth while Viola Davis as "Ma" downs that Coke with gulps of ferocious satisfaction. Her nephew gets to record the intro to her song? He stutters? No problem. While they kowtow, her game is, How Low Can You Go?

Comedy thrives on pairings, and there's a second diva in the group, the new trumpeter Levee, played by Chadwick Bozeman. Before Ma Rainey arrives, the dialogue is all trash-talking among the musicians, Levee calling the others a "jug band." The insults fly with laughter, there's singing, there's some playing, and Levee even dances on his brand-new pointy-toed yellow shoes. It's good-natured fun. When we see Levee flirting with Ma Ranee's girlfriend, we can see, complications will ensue.

So far, so comical.

But Ma Rainey's identity comes from her past. She's "mother" or "queen" of the Blues, though she doesn't take credit. "I don’t sing the blues to feel good. The blues is a way of understanding life," she tells her sideman Cutler. Her imperious manner protects her from the indignities inflicted on a black woman. She tells Cutler that, once they've got her voice on record, the white men will just roll over in bed, zip up their pants, and leave her behind.

Viola Davis, ensconced in padding, layers of make-up, and gold teeth, shows us that Ma keeps her guard up all times. We sense bitterness, loneliness, weariness. Only a couple of times -- cuddling her girlfriend and finishing her song -- does Davis let Ma express joy.

Meanwhile Levee's identity is wrapped up in his future. He's a band-leader-to-be, a star soloist-to-be, a composer who writes lying down while his jokes with the band hit home harder than the players are used to.

Bozeman has a winning smile, but in his eyes we see relentless energy with an edge. He feels like he's stepping into his future now, and he's not letting anyone stand in his way. Those yellow pointy shoes make a good symbol for Levee's ambitions.

During breaks in the recording session, Wilson gives his lead characters stories so well-told that they move the action forward, though we only imagine the scenes. These aren't funny, but painful, eerie, horrific. Levee is the last to tell his story, and Bozeman invests it with such passion that we understand what drives Levee and what makes him dangerous when his identity is threatened.

We've been set up from the start for a face-off of the divas. The tragedy is that the showdown is refereed by the white men in the room who can bank more on Ma's past than on Levee's future.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom comes early in August Wilson's career-long project to dramatize black life in 20th century America, one decade at a time. To give the story its historical context, the film begins with images of Ma Rainey singing for a crowd of black men and women in a tent set up in Georgia woods, then images of the Great Migration north, and more images of Ma Rainey the star on stage in the city.

Denzel Washington, a producer of this film and star of the movie Fences made from another Wilson play, has announced his intention to bring all ten plays to the screen.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Chadwick Bozeman's final work, is dedicated to him.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

• Director: George C. Wolfe
• Writers: Ruben Santiago-Hudson (screenplay by), August Wilson (based on the play written by)
• Viola Davis ... Ma Rainey
• Chadwick Boseman ... Levee, trumpet
• Colman Domingo ... Cutler, trombone
• Glynn Turman ... Toledo, the pianist
• Michael Potts ... Slow Drag, the bass player
• Jeremy Shamos ... Irvin, the agent
• Jonny Coyne ... Sturdyvant, studio owner
• Taylour Paige ... Dussie Mae, girl friend
• Dusan Brown ... Sylvester

The Sabbath: More than a Day Off

At the start of a slender book The Sabbath (1951), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel avers that civilization advances by conquest of spaces. Judaism offers something else, a civilization rooted in time. (The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.)

We commonly say "time is fleeting" but Heschel points out that only things don't last. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem's temple, Jews re-conceived a temple in time, "an insight that made history" (53). Judaism remains; the empire of Romans, supreme conquerors of spaces, passed long ago. Judaism already differed from their neighbors' worship of gods identified with sacred objects, sacred animals, and sacred sites. The burning bush that manifests God to Moses is an image for time: "Though each instant must vanish to open the way to the next one, time itself is not consumed" (100).

Heschel's book is on the reading list of Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension of the Episcopal School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee TN. Our group had just considered the way that Mary's song Magnificat conceives of past and future being already present, as if time were a building or container, not a road. One of our students with close knowledge of Spanish told us that Spanish expressions for time speak of volume, not passage. So I was primed to read the first chapter of this book, "A Palace in Time."

But I got pretty confused pretty quickly. Noting that EfM calls The Sabbath a "prose poem," my EfM co-mentor Susan says that I shouldn't try to find a sustained argument in the book.

Good idea. I came to the book expecting the rabbi to enumerate good things that stem from obedience to the third commandment. I would say a day of rest, with a worship service, is a ritual that solidifies a religious community; is a nice retreat from the pressures of civilization; is good for your mental health; is for (everybody say it together) "recharging your batteries" before the work week. His daughter Susannah Heschel shoots down all of those ideas in her preface, adding that, for her father, "the Sabbath was a complement to building civilization, not a withdrawal from it" (xiii).

Heschel's real mission is to open us up to loving the Sabbath, an "intuition of eternity" (ch. VIII) that crowns the work week. "Work with things in space," he writes, "but be in love with eternity" (48). The book is a grab bag of ways to help us to see the Sabbath.

He cites ancient Rabbis who called the Sabbath both a bride to be loved and a queen to be obeyed (62), and he takes some time to write why we should take the metaphor seriously, but not literally -- which would be idolatry (59). To think of the day as a bride is "not personification of the Sabbath but an exemplification of a divine attribute...God's need for human love" (60).

To me that seems a stretch, but I'm not sure if Heschel's colloquy with rabbis of other centuries is not a sort of scholarly banter, a game. How seriously are we to take a rabbi's statement that telling a falsehood on the Sabbath is impossible, not because lying is forbidden, but because of the nature of the day itself (20)? Heschel relates some weird allegorical stories --such as one about a rabbi who spends 24 years in a cave buried naked in sand up to his head -- and then derives lessons from the stories. As he piles on the lessons, I feel like he's sculpting with smoke.

He mines more solid material when he and the rabbis pick at lines in Scripture. We read that God on the seventh day both "rested" and "finished creation." How could He be said to do both? Heschel and his rabbi friends of ages past offer the ingenious solution that God finished creation by creating the day of rest. That makes the Sabbath, not an absence of work, but a positive presence, the crown of all creation (22). When Exodus 19.1 tells us "on this day" the Hebrews came to Sinai, why doesn't it read "on that day?" Heschel concludes that this day is that day, an everlasting eternal event (98). I'd call it a typo, but I'm glad to see it Heschel's way.

Chapter VII is more poetry than prose, an insider's view of Sabbath liturgy, an appreciation of how chanting from the Psalms and Song of Solomon can affect us.

Just as I was reading Heschel's book, the latest issue of The Atlantic (Jan-Feb 2021) arrived with an article about "the Sunday scaries," an affliction that staff writer Derek Thompson describes as a "flood of anxiety" that we feel "as the weekend winds down." We feel worry about not being prepared for the work week ahead, and guilt for being unproductive. Thompson reviews an anthropologist's recent book about a tribe of hunter-gatherers who seem nonchalant about the future and indifferent to getting ahead of each other. Thompson concludes that anxiety on Sunday is a price we pay for civilization, at least until we can tamp down our need to compete with each other.

Thompson could look closer to home for a solution. His article never mentions church or sabbath.

Heschel's prescription for the Sunday scaries is also his prescription to make Americans truly free and independent. "There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things" (89). He advises, "All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day," not as a day off, but as the day that gives the other six days their meaning.

Let Us Now Praise Bats

Bats possess super-powers. Alone of all mammals, they fly on their own; they emit high-pitched sounds through specially-convoluted nostrils and from the echoes locate with deadly precision erratically-moving targets such as moths; to viruses, they possess immunity that scientists are now trying to understand. And they sleep upside down!

[Information and the photo of the handsome upside-down bat come from "The Virus, the Bats, and Us" by David Quammen in The New York Times, December 11, 2020.]

Bats live as long as 30 years.

Bats spread pollin and seeds necessary to the life-cycle of vegetation from which we derive nourishment, including many fruit trees.   They eat hordes of crop-destroying insects.

A bat of some sort makes one of every five species of mammal on earth.

Bats are accessories to the spooky stories that both frighten and delight children. See in my photo collage two of the batmen I adored in primary school, Adam West as "Batman" and Al Lewis as "Grampa Munster." Another batman, Dracula, is pictured in my appreciation of bat-mospheric art that I posted on Halloween 2017:

This time of year, when our first cold days hammer shut the coffin of summer, before we experience sunlight sparkling on the frost of winter, it's natural to sense what the ancient Celts called a "thinning" between our world and the world of our fears, embodied by those scary monsters.

Bring on the bats, the howling wind, the branches scraping the window, and the ghosts of decades past. (10/2017)

Bats need our help. North America's bats are being wiped out by "white nose disease" caused by a fungus imported from Europe by some tourist spelunker. Immune to rabies and other viruses, bats don't spread them; our species has to invade theirs to catch anything from them. Yet some media figures blame Chinese bats for COVID-19, some misguided communities in the world go on periodic genocidal rampages, and my own neighborhood chat board re-circulates falsities about the little creatures.

The Bible mentions bats only one time. Bats are listed with birds in a list that includes eagles, gulls, and pelicans, all branded with the word "abomination" (Leviticus 11.19). But "abomination" here specifically means "not to be eaten." So I like to think of this as a stricture for the mutual good of Israelites and bats, two of God's chosen species.

Let us cherish -- at a respectful distance -- bats.

O Christmas Ladder

Why decorate a blue A-frame six-foot ladder for Christmas?

• God "has lifted up the humble and meek," sings Mary in the Gospel of Luke. This humble household instrument makes a fine analog, lifted from the cobwebs in my carport, festooned with cards from friends and family, made a beacon of colorful lights to my back-facing neighbors.
• Jacob's vision of angels ascending and descending a "ladder" on their errands to earth is likewise a symbol of what this season is truly about, God's involvement down here with us.
• The ladder is shaped like a Christmas tree.
• The ladder saves $499 - $799, prices that knocked me out when I searched for reusable trees yesterday.

In case you're wondering, to stand Big Boy where others place a star or an angel is no sacrilege. He's a family legacy, symbol of Frisch's restaurants, created in Cincinnati by Dave Frisch, whose daughter Blanche was my aunt, and whose son-in-law was my Uncle Jack Maier, longtime CEO of the business.

Collage: My other DIY decorations, up for twelve days of Christmas (i.e., until Epiphany), clockwise from top left: candles in the window illuminate colorful gift bags; a Christmas landscape on the baby grand, with ornament-tree, reindeer, and a golden tray of Christmas martinis; Charlie Brown sits at a winter-scape painting that my parents bought from a Chicago artist in 1967; "Mom" portrait with stylish Santa hat; Grandmother's decanter, silver tray, and ornaments.

A Boy Who Sees Everything: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time sometimes daydreams of a global pandemic. He is Christopher Boone, 15 years old, aware that he does not read feelings from facial expressions, understand figures of speech, and laugh at jokes as others do. His dream illness spreads like a computer virus with code transmitted by words or facial expressions, even through TV. Soon, the world is left only to people like Christopher, and he's happy to have the streets and candy shops to himself, no one to touch him or to confuse him with emotional demands.

Christopher tells us his dream in one of the chapters that take him away from his own story at moments when he has feelings too strong to handle. Charming, funny, informative, these intersticial chapters concern his interests in math, language, science, and what he has learned about his own mind from his teacher at a school for kids with special needs. Christopher also digresses to tell us about Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes matters because this is Christopher's own detective story. It begins with Christopher's discovery of the neighbor's dog stabbed to death with a pitchfork. The apt title alludes to a famous line of Holmes from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Christopher shares with Holmes "the power of detaching his mind at will"(73).

Christopher emphatically does not admire Holmes's creator Arthur Conan Doyle because the author, yearning to contact his dead son, swallowed the lies of spiritualism (88). Christopher himself rejects afterlife as something made up by people who can't handle death -- although he likes to think of molecules in smoke from his mother's cremation now float in clouds over Africa or Antarctica (33). When Christopher's investigation uncovers lies he has been told, the detective story morphs into an odyssey through the underworld of the London Underground -- a harrowing journey except for a delightful moment when, seeing an escalator for the first time, he laughs.

Christopher shares another trait with Holmes: "I see everything" (140). But this putative super-power is also a liability, the reason why Christopher can't bear new places. He explains

If I am in a place I know, like home, at school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. [For example, one day] someone had graffitied CROW APTOK to lamppost 437 in our street, which is the one outside number 35.

But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bouncing off something and carrying on almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball.

In this passage, we see direct declarative sentences, schoolboy-perfect punctuation, and precise recollection of numbers, elements of the voice that Mark Haddon has created for his narrator.

Haddon's narrative voice is the glory of this novel, for Christopher's emotional detachment is funny and heart-breaking. While the boy cannot always identify his own feelings, we feel for him. He's so vulnerable, sometimes groaning to muffle his own overwhelming perceptions or gripping the Swiss army knife in his pocket when he feels Stranger Danger. Like his hapless father, we want to hold the boy safe. When Christopher's father arrives at the police station to take the boy home, Christopher describes how his father

held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means he loves me. (16)

The boy can work complex math problems in his head, and he can recall everything he sees, but he's clueless in ways that he doesn't understand. We want to shield him from neighbors, cops, and shopkeepers who presume that he's mocking them.

But he's also wise. Seeing an ad urging tourism to "see new things," Christopher opines, "You can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of a solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles." He could think years about the things in just one house, he tells us. "And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new" (178).

Mark Haddon's book, making us think about our world through Christopher's mind, makes us see the world as new. According to Wikipedia, Haddon is "a hard-line atheist." But to an Episcopalian like me, his story draws attention to the wonder of creation, the insidious consequences of sin (of which the death of a dog is just the first sign), the aching need for redemption, and a tearful joy when redemption comes.

[The image is my collage of photos and designs from various productions of the dramatization by Simon Stephens, first produced at England's National Theatre in 2012. They all share the motif of a three-dimensional matrix, an image of Christopher's mind.]

Hopeless or Hope Free? Eric Utne Reads the Times

Hopeless or hope free? Seeing no way forward through climate issues, the founder and namesake of the Utne Reader, an alternative Reader's Digest, describes himself as the latter.

[Photo by Scott Takushi, Pioneer Press]

I heard Eric Utne interviewed on the podcast Climate One about his memoir Far Out Man. The title is both a Boomer equivalent for "awesome, Dude" and a literal translation of his family name.

When the Utne Reader first appeared at my favorite indie bookstore Lemuria (Jackson, MS) in 1984, its headlined articles all excoriated the Reagan Revolution. Though I was intrigued, I didn't touch it, guessing that arguments might shake my faith in my beloved President.

The man Eric Utne turns out to be a gentle soul who abandoned his successful periodical to teach seventh grade awhile, then retire.

Regarding climate and all the other issues on the progressives' catalogue of concerns, Utne sees no room for hope. Now that nearly half the electorate has voted to re-elect a man who shrugged off a quarter-million deaths, he concludes that denial rules; if this crisis can't break the gridlock, no facts, no person, will.

Yet Utne calls himself not hopeless but hope free. If I understand him correctly, someone hopeless has lost only the sort of "positive thinking" that Trump imbibed growing up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale.

Peale's book The Power of Positive Thinking was on my parents' bookshelf, so I understand his idea that you lead best when you exude confidence and enthusiasm. Utne observes that Trump's personal creed seems to be a child's version of Peale's message: that you can make something true simply by repeating it with enough conviction. With money enough to pay a staff of sychophants, that creed has worked for Trump until the election. Ranting to Republican state legislators that the Democrats lost, they cheated, he won, that he just needed to find "some judge" to believe him, he'd never sounded so furiously hopeless.

But what is "hope free?" Though Utne has no hope that his efforts will mitigate the worst effects of global climate change, he makes those efforts anyway. It's the right thing to do, and it's for love of his children and grand-children; hopefulness doesn't enter in.

I would call that acting in faith.

A Dickens Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving may be too early for Scrooge but is certainly a good time for Charles Dickens, especially if you have the chance to see The Personal History of David Copperfield. Director Armando Iannucci,who shares with Simon Blackwell the credit for screenplay, has said that he made David Copperfield's expression of thanksgiving for the characters in his life to be also the director's expression of thanksgiving for Dickens himself.

[Pictured, L to R: Hugh Laurie, kindly demented Mr. Dick, saved by words; Ben Whishaw, despicable Uriah Heep; Dev Patel, title role; Peter Capaldi, chipper con artist Mr. Micawber; Tilda Swinton, high-strung Betsy Trotwood, and, not pictured, Rosalind Eleazar as luminous Agnes.]

Dickens expressed special affection for the story of his eponymous alter-ego, with whom he shares initials, some elements of biography, and a love of words. Though I've not yet read Copperfield, I recognized favorite plot elements and themes from other novels by Dickens that I do know well (Twist, Two Cities, Expectations, Christmas Carol): naive boy, tyrant guardian, a struggle against poverty, time in a brutal work house, memorably despicable villains, and eccentrics galore.

Iannucci makes light work of the numerous twists in the plot, skipping ahead whenever the situation gets too dire. Whatever happens, we see Copperfield writing favorite phrases and descriptions of characters on scraps of paper that he treasures throughout his life, and these words ultimately save him, save a demented friend, and, through the books that he writes, bring him a fortune that he can share in gratitude for the characters who supported and inspired him.

This morning of Thanksgiving Day, I find the whole movie summed up in "The General Thanksgiving" (Episcopal Book of Common Prayer p. 836), which begins "Accept, O Lord, our thanks...":

...for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side.

We thank your for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.

We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

I'll add only one very personal note of thanksgiving for Charles Dickens. When I was somewhere around age 8, for no reason I can think of, Mom told me of a paper she'd had to write in high school about humor in Dickens. Repelled by the poverty and casual cruelty in his stories, she complained to her steady boyfriend that the assignment made no sense. The young man, later my father, helped her to see in Dickens the deliciously snarky descriptions and the playfully apt names. The insight that you can find and enjoy humor even in dark places has leavened my life and my love of literature ever since.

Photo: I'm including this photo just because I'm thankful for this very happy dog Brandy. I took the selfie at the top of the stairs when I returned home from a two-day sojourn in Mississippi for my annual Thanksgiving bicycle ride with friend Jason.

Theology for Breakfast: Violence and Wisdom in Scripture

School loomed when I first opened the August-October issue of Forward Day by Day, as I prepared with mounting anxiety for unprecedented classroom conditions. I clung to a routine that included morning worship from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. That includes reading scriptures appointed for the day with a little homily from Forward.

More confident now -- though I don't manage to get more than a day ahead in planning the details for hybrid in-class/on-line classes -- I still do no work before I've started the coffee, fed Brandy, and enacted morning prayer.

This issue's most striking readings coalesced around a couple of large themes. August's meditations were by Beth Haun, those of September were by Jason Sierra, and Shirin McArthur wrote for October.

Violence in Scripture Haun takes on Judges 5.19-31, one of those passages that make it hard to say, thanks be to God. "Jael assassinates Sisera in what may be the most gruesome act depicted in the Bible, and Deborah and Barak are singing her praises." She finds that all such Biblical stories are "bound by awe and gratitude." She challenges her reader to think what "wonderful deed" God has done in their life recently. It made me take note how, that week, I was grateful for input from colleagues David and Mary Ann for ideas that gave me a breakthrough in my planning.

Haun also takes on Psalms 21.11, one of many passages when a Psalmist goes off into cursing his enemies. She writes, "The wrath of God sounds terrible -- until we have an enemy in our crosshairs." Recalling that Jesus tells us instead to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and never judge, she sighs, "No one ever said following Jesus would be easy."

Reflecting on Paul's saying, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12.21), Haun offers a vision of just how to do that, especially when the consequences of actions can be a mixture of good and bad. Think of evil as "the absence of God," and you no longer have to overcome evil with argument, but "only to announce God's presence." I like to imagine that saying "God is here, now" staves off evil the way a crucifix repels Dracula. Haun asks us, "How will you announce God's presence in your next difficult moment?"

The contrast between gentle Jesus and a rigid Psalmist comes up again when Sierra writes about the Psalmist's boast that he follows a "blameless course" (Psalm 101.2). Sierra observes that the Bible's teaching so much through narrative means that "no directive ... stands untroubled or unquestioned." Even the words of Jesus "cross each other" across the Gospels. Still, there's a path with "signposts," some well within the path and others on the edge.

Dust and Ashes: Job and Sirach The book of Job is so rich in itself that Forward had little to add. There is no umpire between us Job complains to God (Job 9). He asks God, Can you see as a man sees? anticipating the Incarnation (Job 10). If only you would be silent, Job says to his nosy friends, that would be your wisdom (Job 13). On that, Jason Sierra comments that , rather than try to speak for God, "silence is sometimes the better medicine, my presence the only gospel I need to share." The line A mortal...flees like a shadow and does not last (Job 14) corrects Sierra when he feels important; but he also asserts "the story of which we are a part matters -- even our shadows lend movement and life to the forward march of a spectacular universe." The fourth "friend," young Elihu (evidently a late addition to the book) imagines God's sending a "mediator" to "ransom" us from our suffering (Job 32), a miniature theology of salvation, according to the Oxford Study Bible. Noting how Elihu holds back, but gains conviction as he goes, Sierra owns that feeling, and asks "How can we actively invite the unspoken, knowing that God may be seeking to speak to us from unexpected places?" When Job remembers how he was a prominent man of good influence (Job 29), Sierra reminds us not to focus on the great man, but to "understand the world that makes" a Job or an Edison.

Sirach's question The height of heaven, the breadth of the earth, the abyss, and wisdom -- who can search it out? in Ecclesiasticus 1.3 reminds Shirin MacArthur of a surprising view you get when you walk along "Wall Street" in Bryce Canyon, Utah. You can't see it from above, she says, but it towers above you when you hike down the path. Sirach equates wisdom with the abyss because "with both, we cannot grasp the whole [but] only know in part."

Sirach hits home again with another question, How can dust and ashes be proud? Even in life the human body decays." Shirin updates this to cells and atoms, pointing out that our skin cells last only about three weeks. "How can cells and atoms in one body think themselves greater than cells and atoms in another human body, or stone, or tree?"

These readings speak to what the church calls "Ordinary Time," a long stretch of the church calendar that follows Easter and the Ascencion. The readings are all about how we're supposed to soldier on with the Holy Spirit. In this extraordinary time of pandemic and hardened political ill-will, these readings have been a kind of comfort, reminders of how to take death and strife in stride.

Cycling America Virtually: Pocatello, Idaho

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95 miles to Kinport Peak Riding my bike on pavement around Atlanta in relative warmth, I'm marking miles on a map of America. Before now, I've "visited" only places I've been. But, after Jackson Hole, WY, I've struck out to terra non-recognito.

Setting my sights on Reno, Nevada, where my Dad spent the summer of 1968, I've taken a virtual side tour to Pocatello, Idaho. I've never been there, but the map tells me it's in territory of the Niitsitapi tribe, a.k.a. the Blackfeet. Dad spent several months among them when he was doing geological surveys for his PhD in clay minerology. One of my prized possessions as a little boy was an arrowhead from Dad.

[PHOTO: a mash up of a mountain biker's summer shot of Kinport Peak in 2018 and a photo of me that I took in Mississippi last year during my annual Thanksgiving ride with Jason.]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Dementia Diary: To Mom, beautiful as ever at 86...

... from Scott, still cute at 61.

That's the gist of the birthday greeting I passed to Mom today via Laura, with Visiting Angels, who has known Mom for around 5 years, now.

Since I took this selfie with Mom early in the year, I've barely seen her in person. Still, she laughs easily when we talk on the phone or have a pre - arranged - socially - distanced - masked encounter as regulations and reservations allow. She sometimes phones to say that she's in a nice sort of hotel or hospital or something but ready to come home. I remind her that this is her home, that she has Laura visiting her every day for several hours, and that the staff knows Mom's memory is shot. "They know you well," I say. "They've nicknamed you 'Princess.'"

Pause. Then Mom will say, "Well, that's how it should be."

On that note, we end the phone call.

The Brick Bible: A Theological Reflection

[I've been reminded how The Brick Bible stimulated lots of feelings and thoughts when Education for Ministry (EfM) considered it for an exercise in theological reflection. I reprint the article from my EfM Blog.]

For our source for a theological reflection, Erica brought a pair of volumes called "The Brick Bible," old and new testaments. She had never looked inside them, almost dreading what she might find: she knows a boy disturbed by what he sees in these books, though her own sons have impressed adults with their Biblical acumen from recalling incidents illustrated in these volumes. It's "brick" because it's all posed with LEGOS! 

Remembering Bert V. Carter

My brother-in-law Bert's favorite phrase was, "It's very interesting." He was always excited to talk about what he'd read recently and about 1960s TV shows. The Fugitive was probably his favorite, but we could bond best over Star Trek.

[Photo: Bert Carter and my sister Kim Carter treated our mother Frances Smoot and me to lunch every Christmas.]

My sister wrote this tribute:

Lifelong scholar and writer, Bert Verdier Carter, Jr., age 64, passed away on October 28, 2020 at Piedmont Fayette Hospital. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, on April 11, 1956, to the late Bert Verdier Carter, Sr. and Darrell Priester Carter. The Carters were always proud of their son.

Bert graduated from Effingham County High School in 1975 and received a Methodist Scholarship to attend Andrew College where he earned his Associate in Science Degree in 1977. While in college he also worked parttime at the Andrew College Library where he met his future wife, Kim Ann Smoot, who was also working there. Bert and Kim would go on to different colleges, but they would meet most Sundays in Macon to study together. They married August 7, 1982.

Bert went to LaGrange College where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and Master of Science in Education Degree 1980. A hard worker Bert also worked in the Art Department at LaGrange College under the direction of by Mr. John Lawrence. Bert maintained warm, friendly memories of Mr. Lawrence throughout his life. After, graduation, Bert moved his family to Austell, Georgia, where he taught history at Cobb County High School.

[PHOTO: Kim and Bert with niece and nephew Mary Alice and Craig, ca. 2000]

Always reading or writing in his spare time he explored the histories of several covered wooden bridges in the Atlanta area. He and Kim would hike to the bridges to study the bridges and take photographs. Bert included some of these photographs in his 1995 work, Georgia Bridges.

Another hobby of Bert’s was collecting and categorizing articles, historical facts, and his own personal experiences and memories from the 1960s/1970s from all over Georgia. This work was the groundwork for a larger project, Georgia: Past, Present and Future.

Bert worked for 29 years at KCT, off Fulton Industrial Boulevard, Bert worked in several departments including the lab and quality control. It was a difficult job, at times, but Bert made many good and life-long friends of his colleagues and business associates. He had an infectious laugh and enjoyed a good joke but was also serious when he needed to be. He also had an abundance of concern for others and would be willing to help out whenever he could or was asked. Bert will be missed by all who knew and loved him.

The family will receive friends on Monday, November 9, 2020, 5:00 PM – 7:00 Pm at Mowell Funeral Home in Fayetteville.

Cycling America Virtually: Yellowstone National Park

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200 miles into Yellowstone National Park Today I reached Yellowstone National Park where the temperature this morning was 1 degree Fahrenheit; for my virtual tour, I remained in virtual comfort.

My memories of our family trip to Yellowstone in 1967 teach me something about the child brain. I do recall a little that Dad the Geologist wanted me to remember about hot springs, the formation of mountains and the continental divide. I remember a hike with Dad and my sister Kim, cut short when we ran across a mother bear and cubs, about fifteen trees away.

But as my inner world was all witches, vampires, and Batman (10/2017), I recall the Yellowstone "cauldron" more than any other sight. I can recall specific colors and frames from witch-related comic books that I re-read incessantly during the trip -- Wendy the Good Witch and a Bewitched knock-off. And I was most impressed when Dad showed me a bat hanging upside down from the sign of a general store.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the beginning..

Cycling America Virtually: Smoot, Wyoming

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Riding on weekends has been welcome relief from the intensity of hybrid COVIDucation. 520 miles on trails around Atlanta have brought me virtually to Smoot, Wyoming.

Named for my great-uncle Reed Smoot of the neighboring state of Utah, first Mormon senator and member of the Senate's postal service committee, the town in Wyoming promised to take his name if he'd get them a post office.  Except for the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that spread America's Great Depression world-wide, his name has not endured in history.

But the town stands just as it did during our family road trip to Yellowstone in the summer of 1967. My dad Tom Smoot arranged for his dad Dewey Smoot and his mom Harriet Radcliffe Smoot to come east from San Francisco to meet us. We posed pictures in front of that post office, which doubles as Walton's Store, the only business in town. My little brother Todd and I stand with our grandfather Dewey Smoot in one, and then with our sister Kim Ann Smoot, later Kim Carter.

Fifty years later, Nancy Calhoun visited the town on a tour of the West during the first summer of her retirement. With her late husband Ed, an avid photographer, she put together a mini-Michelin guide. "The four city blocks of downtown Smoot contain approximately 100 hardy souls," she wrote, "but Greater Metropolitan Smoot proudly claims almost 300 residents." Many photos follow in her guidebook, including pictures of the two churches, the cemetery, horses, and the one I used for my virtual visit.

I hope you'll check out posts of related interest. These are people and memories that I love.

• I delivered a tribute to Nancy Calhoun, founder of the Walker School's Middle School, on the occasion of her retirement.
• One of Ed Calhoun's most striking photographs features in Framing Memories of Ed Calhoun.
• My childhood memories of our car trip blend with appreciation for James Agee's universal evocation of childhood memories, and of Samuel Barber's musical setting of Agee's words, in my post Summer, Knoxville, 1915 and Wyoming, in a car, 1967.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour.

Cycling America Virtually: Mt.Rushmore SD

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495 miles more to Grand Rapids, SD

From Grand Rapids, it's a day trip to Mt. Rushmore. Mom and Dad stopped there during our cross-country drive in the summer of 1967. (Read about my memories of that trip compared to James Agee's wonderful evocation of early childhood, 07/2017.)  A favorite movie of mine, North by Northwest includes a scene in the burger shop at Mt. Rushmore, shot on location just a few years before I was there. It brings back the memories.

← || → Follow the arrows to see more of the tour.

COVIDucation: Singing a New Song in a Foreign Land

 

"How do we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"  This plaintive question from Psalm 137 resonated when it showed up in the Episcopal Prayer Book's queue of Psalms last Saturday.  I'd just completed my 40th first week of teaching middle school, a week unlike any of the others.    

My song as a teacher has always been one I've believed in deeply: that writing is a process for discovering more about yourself, your world, and your beliefs, while reading enlarges your experience.

The foreign land is school during this pandemic.  Classes meet half as often, twice as long.  Half the kids attend on line a couple days, then on campus a couple days.  The ones on campus lug their bookbags past untouched lockers through a quiet hall where always before there was jostling, locker-slamming, gossip, high-fiving and general hubbub. Students meet just four of their classes one day, four the next, all 85-minutes long. That former hub of social interaction, the restroom, is now limited to occupancy by two.

[PHOTO: My lovely dog Brandy often joins morning prayer. The routine has been a comfort during this odd time; now it's an inspiration, too.]

Re-re-re-scheduling the start of school to reflect Georgia's having America's highest per capita spread of the virus, our leadership team wisely gave the students a day off on Friday, giving teachers time to reflect. What did we get right? What do we need now? I was grateful for the time to reflect. By the end of Friday, I'd had a breakthrough.

As my friend Susan observed, "It's like solving a crossword puzzle." Yes! "Across" is pretty easy - the literature we mete out in 20-page reading assignments every two days; language arts to practice; time for applying techniques in writing.

But "down" has been keeping me up at night. How do you keep kids engaged 85 minutes, half of them socially distanced in cloth face coverings (CFCs or "masks"), half projected on the Active Board?

By 3:30 Friday, I'd found a sort of crossword format for planning, and things clicked into place. I can see what the students need to experience in order to grow as readers and writers. Thanks to our leadership team and our technical staff, I have several options for how to connect on-line learners with the face-to-face ones.

On Saturday morning, after weeks of anxiety and waking up at 2 or 3 AM, I felt OK. I turned again to the Book of Common Prayer for the morning routine of prescribed readings and prayers that have been a comfort in stressful times. Not on the list, Psalm 33 kept bubbling up.

Psalm 33 proclaims, "Sing to the Lord a new song." I literally did, noticing in the Hymnal chants for weekday morning prayer that, as a Sunday singer for 40 years, I'd never had occasion to sing. I was delighted to discover expressive plain chant for "The Venite" and "The Third Song of Isaiah." Sight-reading, I sang at the darkness on that Saturday "Arise, shine, for your light has come." Like a crossword puzzle, the music works across and down. Going "down" through verses long and short, the chant is flexible to allow for length and emphasis, verse by verse -- as my new system is flexible to bend with the needs of the class.

Thank God, I'm feeling better about the year ahead than I have done for months. A colleague said on the work day, "We're all first - year teachers again!" So true: as I did in the first couple years of teaching, I've rolled out of bed as early as 3 AM to prepare lessons for the day; I've crashed as early as 8:30 at day's end.

Coincidentally, the same morning, I broke through on an actual crossword puzzle with the theme "Global Menu," where MousSEATTLE intersected CaraMELROSE. 

For related stories, see my blogposts

• Theology of Crosswords: A Shortz Sermon (03/2010)
• Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design(01/2007)

"1919": Poems Layered with Chicago History

 

"It's hard to explain," I said. The kind woman on the trail could see that I'd pulled my bike over to stand still and cry.

Hard to explain how a poet I don't know, Eve L. Ewing, reading a poem from her new collection 1919 about a racial incident in Chicago during that year could have such an impact on me now listening to NPR one day in June 2020.

PHOTO: 1919. Poems by Eve L. Ewing. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Cover artwork by Brian Dovie Golden, www.briandoviegolden.com

There are so many layers to the work.  You had to hear Ewing explain how the killing of seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams touched off three days of race-specific violence in Chicago, late July 1919. Ewing told interviewer Terry Gross on WHYY's Fresh Air how the young man, cooling off in Lake Michigan, drifted to an area claimed by whites, who threw stones at him and at any blacks who came near. No one knows for sure if a rock struck Eugene unconscious, or if, afraid to come ashore, he exhausted his strength. He drowned.

The background gave immediate power to the poem "Jump / Rope." The poet began

Little Eugene Gene Gene
Sweetest I've seen seen seen
His mama told him him
Them white boys mean mean mean...

She sang the words in the style of ditties that little girls chant when they jump rope together. But she halted, "no, it goes like..." and started over; then she did it again. Each childlike verse comes closer to the harrowing event, closer to what we can imagine of Eugene's own experience:

Sweet sweet baby
Don't make me let you go
Swallow swallow grab the sky
Swallow swallow dark...

How can I explain that, even writing this now, I'm tearing up? The story was sad enough, but the emotion hit hard when the story was filtered through those sing-song lines. The playfulness of the form gets us into the mind of young Eugene, playing in the water, free of care for the invisible line he had crossed.

Ewing didn't have to explain how the title suggests both the child's game of jump rope and the lynchings by noose, so common for so long. Nor could she have known that her book would come out on a wave of current stories of young black adults killed for nothing: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rashard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain.

In the moment that Ewing read her poem, I couldn't sort all these threads of meaning and feeling that constricted my throat. To the helpful woman, I just choked out, "It's hard to explain." When she was gone, I ordered the book.

Ewing's 1919, brief and illustrated, appears to be a simple children's book, but the cover depicts a moment of horror, Eugene's face, half submerged, eyes wide open in distress. Ewing enriches her collection with the layering of history texts and photos, of different voices past and present, and a variety of forms. Each layer reinforces the other. Where the historical note seems dry, her poetry pulls us in; where the verse seems obscure to me, the historical record fills in the back story. For most poems, there's an epigraph, usually taken from the report of community leaders in Chicago in the early 1920s, half of them black, half of them white, commissioned to explain why the incident and the riots happened.

The tense prelude and violent aftermath of Eugene's death are central to the collection. Before that, the first part of the book enlarges on the commission's report about the influx of black families escaping the South since the collapse of Reconstruction. A third part, looking across the intervening decades, includes some poems previously published.

Ewing begins each part of the book with a poem called "Exodus," 1, 5, and 10. She's taking off from the commission's observation that the black migrants to Chicago spoke of their leaving the South in Biblical terms from the exodus of God's chosen people out of slavery into the Promised Land. Ewing plays with the Biblical stories and phrases. In Exodus 1, not the mother of Moses but all young black mothers in the South place their babies in baskets to send them up the river to freedom. Exodus 5 brings God into judgement on the Chicago politician Richard Daly, whose biographer called him the American Pharaoh. In 1919, Daly was member of a gang of white boys who terrorized black neighborhoods in the riots. Exodus 10 takes off from the plague of darkness, reassuring to the black community, fearful to the wicked.

For other poems as well, Ewing fits the form to the subject. A former teacher now covered in offal from working in the stockyard remembers fondly in 26 alphabetical lines how he instilled self-respect with literacy for black children in the South. A domestic worker, silently resenting her employer, speaks to us in short journal entries, all lower-case letters. Ewing gives us banter about "how hot is it" under an ominous title from Langston Hughes: or does it explode, expressing the tension rising during the heat wave of July 1919.  The story of a barricade that black men set up to protect their neighborhoods is told in a poem shaped like that barricade.

An outstanding poem, "James Crawford Speaks," tells of Eugene from the point of view of a black eye-witness, who fired his gun at policemen that arrived on the scene, who was himself shot and killed. "I saw the whites of [Eugene's] eyes," the voice begins,

before he let go the railroad tie
that kept him almost afloat
almost alive, almost able to walk home...

But what's at home for a black boy in Chicago of this time? The boy is "almost nobody, nowhere, gone home / to nothing. Me, too." The poem is very strong, imagining the gun shot as a statement: We are somebody. Black lives matter.

Ewing reminds us of another teenage black boy from Chicago who died violently at the hands of white men, only the poem is gentle and sweet, a vision of what might have been had the boy lived to become an elder in the community. We know the photo of Emmett Till at 14, grinning under his porkpie hat, taken in the year of his gruesome murder. We know the photo of his bludgeoned face in his open casket. Ewing's poem begins, "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store," a gentle old man grinning under his porkpie hat. The poem is a benediction.

Telling a friend about that poem, I cried again. Hard to explain.There are so many layers.

Middle School Teacher Considers "Bored and Brilliant"

The author of Bored and Brilliant distinguishes between the mind that wanders because you're bored with some tedious activity, and the mind that's "bored" because you crave the next "hit" or "like." In one, your mind is free to make up stories about what you might do, what author Manoush Zomorodi calls "autobiographical planning"; in the other, you are tethered to a device that allows others to pull your chain. One kind of boredom is creative; the other kind comes from an appetite ramped up by software engineers to draw our attention back to their products.

The tyranny of messaging isn't new. The Islamic poet Rumi lamented 800 years ago, "I have lived too long where I may be reached." Zomorodi, drawing on experts and on listener responses to her Bored and Brilliant podcasts from NPR, reports references to the phenomenon of boredom as far back as ancient Rome, though Charles Dickens first coined the English word in Bleak House (1853). Others referred to it as "nausea" (Sartre), "idleness" (Kierkegaard), "tamed longing without any particular object" (Schopenhauer), and "the noonday demon" that gave rise to sin according to early church fathers (Zomorodi 16).

In one eye-opening experiment, subjects found more "out of the box" solutions to a problem after 20 minutes of reading aloud a list of phone numbers. The "executive" brain, occupied in executing this tedious task, left the rest of the mind free to daydream.

That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.

[Photo: West Chemicals in Atlanta, where Huff Road meets Ellsworth Industrial Blvd, 1972, site of many years' productive teenage boredom for me.]

Prodded by long-distance runner Peter Sagal, host of NPR's comedy show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, I've unplugged while I'm out on my bike. Before I ever had a smart phone, I wrote plays, songs, comedy sketches, and curriculum for my students during my long rides. That all stopped during the years when I tuned into news, Pandora, and Peter Sagal. Now I use the phone only to record the ideas that have come to me while my body has been engaged in cycling.

Here's another reason to appreciate the Episcopal Church. With experience, we come to know the responses, collects, creeds, and prayers by heart. You can tune in; but much of the time, a line in Scripture or the sermon sends your imagination off on a tangent -- something to write about, or a solution to a classroom problem, or remembrance of someone you need to visit. Suddenly you're bulleting ideas in the bulletin and you miss the cue to stand for the hymn. When the closing prayer sends you out into the world to love and serve the Lord, you're ready!

For this teacher of Middle School English and Drama, the key takeaways are

• To read slowly from a page and to write by hand, requiring the mind to filter material, gets better engagement and retention than electronic substitutes (48-49).
• The way we read screens, hopping around from sentence to picture to hyperlink, prevents us from close reading. Readers who used an eBook reported being just as interested in the story as those who read from paper, but were far less able to identify the order of incidents in the story (47).
• "Priority" is a singular word. Zomorodi cites the idea of Essentialism developed by author Greg McKeown, who shakes his head over a mayor who claimed to have "32 priorities" for her new administration (155). This made me think what English activity has priority: analysis of grammar? appreciation of literature? writing essays? writing fiction? building vocabulary? I see a clear line, now: Everything in the course is feeding the students' store of ideas and references for writing.
• Boredom and silence that is attentive to incidental sounds around you can feed creativity. There's another kind of meditative silence, directed inward, that shuts creativity down.

Zomorodi previews the conclusion of the book early on:

If our children are constantly engaged with bits and bytes of information, what is happening to their ability to imagine, concentrate deeply, reflect on past experiences, decide how to apply those lessons to future goals, and figure out what they want for themselves, their relationships, and life (5)?

That looks to me like a lot of what my kids should be writing about, one way or another, all year. Another assertion by Zomorodi mirrors our school's mission statement: "We crave reflective time; we seek balance; we want a life full of joy and curiosity" (11).

Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: Picador, 2017.