Cycling America, Virtually: Jackson, MS 40 Years Later

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220 miles from Shreveport, LA to Jackson, MS
August 11 to 21 On bike trails around Atlanta, I've totalled up enough miles on my virtual tour of the US to reach Jackson, Mississippi. I remember with gratitude the nurturing I received at Jackson's St. Andrew's Episcopal School where I started teaching fresh from college 40 years ago this month.

The image shows the art classes' mural of Erasmus, chosen by Headmaster David Hicks to exemplify the St. Andrew's ideal of "the Renaissance man," curious, well-read, hardy, and expressive. We moved to a new campus in the 1990s, but the going-away gift from my colleagues was this painting of the old campus that I'd loved, where I'd practically lived for fifteen years. [See a collection from the late artist Miriam Weems. Selfie added, altered by BeFunky.com]

My administrators helped me to find better ways to teach. Principals Dot Kitchings and Berkley Latimer taught me something that I later found echoed in an article about Einstein Not What's Taught, but the Teacher (04/2009). Elegant admissions director Bee Donley lives on in poetry that she published during the last decade of her life: Mostly Ghosts. I learned from colleague Julia Chadwick when we created a "world cultures" curriculum from scratch with her goal to involve the kids in something active every unit. Gebby Lawyer, who became principal in the 1990s, recommended Nancy Atwell's In the Middle, a book that shaped my approach to writing in the second half of my career.

I'm grateful for students who taught me. Adrian and Laura forgave me for mistakes by which I learned a lot: "First Do No Harm": Assessing Students' Writing. When my young student Chris went into the hospital with leukemia, he grew up fast. He and his loving parents helped me to grow up, too: Life After Deaths.

The last time I saw Chris, he knew that I was thinking about studying music with a local composer. He told me I had to do that. Composer James Sclater (11/2015) taught me music, and, as his student, I learned what feedback a student needs for creative work. Spoiler alert: Most of the time, Dr. Sclater gave me neither compliments nor corrections.

Joe and Linda conveyed Episcopal theology through hospitality. They welcomed me to their home and to St. James' Episcopal Church during the years when I taught their daughter Emily and for years after. See An Especially Good Friday (03/2016).

Colleague and friend Jean pushed me all the time -- to learn music, to play Scrabble, to explore Mississippi. She and her boys Ashley and Patrick involved me in their family while I was far from my own.

Steve and Kay, singers in St. James choir and parents to Brad, a great student, welcomed me to their family celebration every Christmas Eve between the services.

Former students of mine have made art from their experiences in Jackson during my time there. Musician Scott Albert Johnson's first album Umbrella Man (10/2007) includes songs about returning to Jackson from a career on the east coast. I appreciate writer Barrett Hathcock's interrelated stories about a young man who graduates from a school much like St. Andrew's, all collected in The Portable Son (07/2013).

Finally, I owe my enthusiasm for bike-riding to Jason, one of my students at St. Andrews. See Thanks to Jason.

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Dementia Diary: Dream a Little Dream

On a rainy day when Mom's faithful Visiting Angel was under the weather, I visited and used my phone to play Pandora's "Frank Sinatra Radio." She loved Frank's recording of "Our Love is Here to Stay," "Young at Heart," and she giggled when I suggested getting out the bathing suit and the Margaritas for "Wave." She enjoyed the lyrics to "Young at Heart."

There was a different quality when we got to these lyrics from Bing Crosby's recording that was a hit when Dad was courting her. Her hand found mine as I crooned along with Bing

While I'm alone
as blue as can be,
dream a little dream of me.

"The Green Knight": A Funny Thing about Honor

You go off on a quest, do some brave deed, and you're set for life: That's "honor?" That's it?

Dev Patel as "Gawain," hero of The Green Knight gives his questioner a look that says, "Uh, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty lame." Then he answers, pretty lamely, "Yes."

Although the Dark Ages are very dark in this film, shot on misty moors and rocky paths through gloomy forests, Patel's Gawain is funny, being more in the dark than anyone. When we first see him, he's a playboy splashed awake by his mistress (Alicia Vikander), unable to find his boots, affectionate and careless.

But he gets caught in a kind of medieval Matrix where everyone he meets, even a fox, is part of a plot devised by a controlling intelligence. His mother is the witch Morgan La Fay (Sarita Choudhury), sister to King Arthur. We see the siblings in a tete-a-tete, evidently conspiring to teach Gawain a lesson. At the king's Christmas banquet, Arthur (Sean Harris) primes his nephew to step up for the honor of knighthood. At the same time, Morgan conjures the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) -- half man, half tree -- to deliver a challenge he can't refuse.

The challenge sounds like a fair fight: you win if you strike a blow against the Green Knight. The catch is, you must meet the Green Knight again a year and a day later, on his own turf, for payback. Seeing all the famous knights avert their eyes, Gawain jumps in. Instead of fighting, the Green Knight lays down his axe and bares his neck. Embarrassed, Gawain asks the crowd, "What am I supposed to do?" Gawain decapitates the knight, maybe to head off the anniversary rematch. To Gawain's dismay, the severed head warns him to keep his promise as the Knight rides away dangling the head in one hand.

Playful touches by the director David Lowery remind us all the way through that, despite the darkness and the threat, this is all a game.

• The title cards try a dozen different medieval-ish fonts and sometimes make ironic comments about the story. For example, we jump ahead one "too quick" year later. "An act of kindness" is anything but -- involving a particularly annoying teenage boy (Barry Keoghan).
• Images of Gawain undercut the idea that "honor" is just a matter of PR. Now famous for his encounter with the Green Knight, Gawain's portrayed in an over-blown heroic pose and also depicted as a foolish puppet who loses his head in a children's show.
• When Gawain accepts hospitality at a manor house, there's a comedy of manners reminiscent of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Lord and Lady (Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander -- who doubles as Gawain's mistress) drag Gawain unwillingly into games that Albee called "Get the Guest" and "Hump the Hostess."
• More images in the manor house make fun of him: His stupid gape-mouthed expression is captured in a camera obscura; he's woven into a tapestry that depicts his host hunting him like a fox.
• When Gawain meets St. Winifred (Erin Kellyman), it's so awkward in a teen-aged way. First, he discovers that he's sleeping in her bed. Then she tells him to retrieve her head from the bottom of a spring. When he observes that it's right there on her neck talking to him, she all but rolls her eyes. She's exasperated when he asks what she'll do for him if he retrieves the head: "Why would you even ask that?"

The comedy ends when Gawain experiences life without honor. As Dev Patel plays him, Gawain has been drained of his vitality. My friend Susan said, "He's lost his soul." Painful to watch, this part of the movie makes us feel the importance of true honor by its absence.

Happily, the director and writers bring the story to a rounded, satisfying finish. Then they step one line beyond that -- leaving us laughing.

Cycling America, Virtually: Shreveport, LA

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235 miles to Centenary College, Shreveport, LA
August 4 to 11

A turning point in your life can be where you decide not to turn. In the summer of 1984, I wrote three essays that anticipated the course I've followed to this day. That makes where I wrote them, Centenary College in Shreveport, a good place on my virtual bike tour of the US to pause for reflection.

In 1984, I faced a decision. Though I'd left Duke with ambitions to write plays, every writing project I started was derivative or didactic, except for this true-to-life and remarkably succinct poem:

This frustrated writer of dramas
has sulked all day long in pajamas.
It isn't that he is
not full of ideas;
it's just that they all are his mama's.

So I took a position at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Jackson, MS, planning to teach for three years and then strike out for New York to make a living as a writer.

In 1984, time to start my writing career, I had qualms, like, what would I eat? And, didn't I actually love teaching the students?

A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me the opportunity to work out those qualms. With other teachers from around the country, I stayed in a dorm at Centenary College and attended Professor Michael L. Hall's seminar Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, and the Personal Essay. In the 17th century, those three writers made the essay an instrument for exploring answers to questions.

For my capstone, I wrote three pieces. Two were essays in the style of Montaigne. "Of Fanatics" wondered if single-minded people annoy us because they're so limited, or because their dedication makes us feel like dilettantes and ditherers. "Of Teaching" compared the ideals of the liberal arts education to the reality of teaching kids who just want to get credit and move on.

The third paper was more fun. Punning on the literal meaning of essayer, "to try," it was "A Trial" in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan with parts for my classmates. At the gate of heaven, with St. Peter the judge, St. Paul accused me of failing to live up to my own ideals. He sounded a lot like my father.

In my defense, my guardian angel said that her client had a dream of being interviewed in Esquire, looking fit in the cover photo and talking sagely about his Pulitzer-prize-winning play, his faith, and his opinions on everything from music to politics. "Is my client false to himself in not trying to realize that dream? or is he in the process of realizing a truer [i.e., more mature] dream?"

The jury of my classmates split. Later, my dad said, "Guilty."

Today, having pedaled 235 miles in seven days, I'm fit and relaxed. From retirement, I look back on 40 years' teaching, during which I wrote a lot: history texts tailored to the needs of kids and curriculum, dozens of plays and songs for students, often written in collaboration with them. I've notes from students who said I taught them to realize that they could write.

Looking back, I feel that I probably had Montaigne in mind when I named this blog "The Word Sanctuary." In retirement, he took sanctuary from active life in a tower on his estate to write his essays on any topic that interested him. His collection won wide readership; my blog has a few dozen readers every day, not counting Russian robots.

In other words: Two roads diverged in Shreveport, LA, and I -- I split the difference.

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

The Olympic Universe: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths

Before fans spoke casually of universes -- Marvel, DC, Star Trek and Wars -- there was an Olympian universe laid out in D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961) with methodical efficiency and loving care. I'm not the only boomer I know for whom the D'Aulaires' lithographs and stories have remained vivid, bedrock for our imaginations in the sixty years since we first saw them. [Image: Ingrid and Edgar Parin D'Aulaires - 12 gods of Olympus, each depicted with a symbol of their godly domain and power]

Ingrid (nee Martins) and her husband Edgar Parin D'Aulaires published their first book in Germany in 1932, but they had settled in New England by the time they published their Greek myths in 1961.

The book is tall and wide, not thick, something a small child can grasp themselves and lose themselves in. The first full page shows the Greek isles with helpful notes under the place names, e.g. "the childhood home of Zeus" and "wild centaurs fled here." On the page opposite, the authors tell us straight up that the Greeks on their lovely islands, "cherish[ing] light and beauty" while their neighbors still worshipped "ugly idols," "creat[ed] their own beautiful, radiant gods."

While the D'Aulaires' book fascinated me as a child on my mother's lap, the authors made room for a small reader's growth. Throughout my childhood, whenever we moved to a new town, locating D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths in an unfamiliar library to re-read was a comforting ritual. I did read other versions of the myths and study Edith Hamilton's grown-up anthology, but at 25, when I was commissioned to write a musical pageant from Greek tales, I turned to the D'Aulaires.

The D'Aulaires stretched a child's vocabulary. Mom and Dad explained words to me, sometimes having to check the pronunciations, and sometimes pointing out that words come from stories, e.g. scary god Pan is the source of "panic." Some illustrations were grand two-page spreads in color, and little cartoons occupied some of the margins, so there were always details to discover. For example, the two robot servants who assist Hephaestus the lame god of metal work are followed by a little robot dog.

The D'Aulaires left subtext that a child could grow into understanding. They convey sexuality in terms that satisfy a child's need to know what's going on without getting too far ahead. For instance, we read that Gaea the Earth felt lonely before Sky "rose over her" and "smiled...twinkling with his countless stars, and they were joined in love. Soon young Earth became Mother Earth...." That made sense to me at age five. The illustration is chaste and sweet -- I love the star-struck smile on Gaea's face and the gentle intensity of Sky's gaze -- but the composition would make a good cover for a steamy romance novel. [Image: Ingrid and Edgar Parin D'Aulaires - Earth and Sky]

From there the D'Aulaires simply trace the ramifications of Earth and Sky's family tree. From the reign of Earth's children the Titans and the peopling of the world, we see the rise of Zeus, his brothers and sisters, and his offspring. Each Olympian gets a couple of pages for an origin story and some characteristic tale. Once the twelve gods are established on Olympus, the D'Aulaires move on to tell about the Olympians' half-god offspring, finishing the book with breezy digests of epic tales concerning Jason's Argonauts and Helen of Troy's war.

For this particular small child, the D'Aulaires presented scary things in forms that made them more interesting than scary. Like many small children, I was scared of spiders, so I was both repelled and fascinated when Athena transforms the arrogant weaver Arachne into an arachnid, punishment for the mockery of Zeus in her tapestry [Image: Arachne and her depiction of Zeus and swan in lecherous pursuit; Athena stands behind.]

Always afraid of death, I found comfort in stories of Hades. Like me, he seems shy and no athlete. He was shrouded in mystery like the ghosts and vampires I always liked, and he seemed to be a decent sort: although he did kidnap Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, he made a fair deal to let his wife visit the surface half the year. I liked the seasons as expressions of her mother's cycles of grief and joy before I learned about orbits and the tilt of the earth. [Image: Hades and Persephone]

There's no sugar-coating the truth at the end of the book: "Everything must come to an end." On a barren landscape, they show fragments of mighty Zeus's statue and his crumbled temple. "The Muses fell silent," but the stories live on in song and the constellations turning above -- a play on the literal meaning of "universe," being a "turning" of the sky-globe. [Image: The final pages of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.]

Accepting this truth, too, was a growing point for me. I remember crying around age eight when the full meaning hit me.

Around that time, I saw the same idea expressed in an episode of that new TV series Star Trek that has been my favorite ever since, in which the god Apollo, last of an extra-terrestrial race, has to accept that earthlings have outgrown their need for the gods. "The one God is enough for us," Captain Kirk says. [Image: Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?" Imposing in stature with a resonant voice enhanced by reverb, actor Michael Forest made an impressive "Apollo." The title is from Shelley's poem about the death of John Keats, whom he likens to the mythical Adonis.]

That the D'Aulaires' tales all connected to the same "universe" may be why this book holds its special place in my imagination. Fairy tales and ghost stories didn't seem to connect the same way. Of course, now "universes" are near-universal for their marketing potential.

I enjoy seeing how the Greek universe intersected with the Star Trek universe, the DC Universe (through Wonder Woman and Shazam), and even the JC (Jesus Christ) Universe: the Acts of the Apostles show Paul and Barnabas being mistaken for Hermes and Zeus at Lystra, and causing a riot at Ephesus, a company town famous for Artemis merch.

James Lapine on Friendship with Stephen Sondheim

Today on NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross asked playwright James Lapine why he didn't write another show with Stephen Sondheim after Passion in 1994. "Are you still friends?" she asked. Lapine was emphatic: Yes. But the two never again found a story that interested both of them the same way. So Lapine directed a stage revue Sondheim on Sondheim and a film documentary Six by Sondheim, and now he has written a book about their first collaboration "to keep him in my life."

The book Putting it Together is on order. Amazon told me that I got one of their last three copies: sorry, everyone. [Photo: Sondheim and Lapine when their show was on Broadway. I saw that production, though not the original cast.]

Meanwhile, the interview today brought some special pleasures to light, or to light again:

• On the time Sondheim took to write his last two songs for Sunday in the Park with George while audiences were hostile: "Do you want it Tuesday, or do you want it to be good?" ("Both" Lapine remembers saying.) Researching this book, Lapine looked through Sondheim's paper work. He found pages and pages of notes that went into a very short song, "Lesson #8."
• On those two songs: "Lesson #8" crystallized the character of second-act "George"; the other, "Children and Art," was "linch-pin" for the whole show. Evidently neither man realized that until they were reviewing the show recently.
• Hearing "Lesson #8" even out of context, we could hear how the short English-textbook phrases "Charles has a ball... Marie has the ball of Charles... Charles misses his ball" morph into the character's realizations about himself: "George misses a lot... George is alone... George has outgrown what he can do"
• On watching Sondheim at work: Lapine hadn't had much contact with musical theatre and remembers being delighted by the process. Sondheim told him, "Let me take care of theme" because things that might sound preachy or corny in dialogue can sound uplifting in song.
• On Sondheim's preparations: Sondheim would present Lapine with options. "It was like being cross-examined by a lawyer," Lapine remembers, because Sondheim was trying to get at the characters who lived in Lapine's head. Eventually, the characters lived in Sondheim's head, too.
• It was a pleasure to hear again what Sondheim wrote when Lapine handed him a draft of Into the Woods with the comment, "There's no way you're going to make an opening number that pulls all of this together." Lapine laughs that the best way to get Steve to do something is to tell him that he won't be able to do it. We also hear the song "Loving You" that saved Passion by opening up the rebarbative character "Fosca" to the audience.

Advance reviews of Lapine's book include Lin-Manuel Miranda's writing that he didn't read the book; he inhaled it. I anticipate something like that.

Read my reflection on Lapine's book. I call it So Much Love in Their Words (09/2021).

See my Stephen Sondheim page, a curated list of links to many, many articles about Sondheim, his themes and craft, his collaborators and comrades, and his shows, including these posts about Sunday:

Sunday, Art, and "Forever" (11/2015) theorizes why so many people find themselves crying midway through Sunday in the Park with George.

The show is key to what I see as Sondheim's Religious Vision (11/2017).

With my fellow arts teachers' thoughtful Sunday-themed retirement gift, the show spoke to me in a new way: Children and Art: Sunday in Retirement with George (05/2021).

Cycling America, Virtually: Midland, TX

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396 miles to the Bush family home, Midland, TX
July 15 to August 3 I'm practically a cousin of former President George W. Bush, because his uncle Scott Pierce was best friend and fraternity brother to my father and my namesake. George H. W. Bush and "Bar" moved into this home in 1951, and my father met them a couple years later when they visited her little brother Scott at the Beta Theta Pi house at Miami University.

That family connection makes Midland a good place for a stop on my virtual bike tour of the United States.

Other blogposts about W.:

• Partners Across Party Lines (08/2012) is my delighted response to The Presidents' Club, about the informal friendships and partnerships among ex-Presidents. George H.W. Bush became friends with Clinton and Obama, and W. considers them "brothers by another mother."
• Reflection on Fiasco (08/2006) concludes that Bush asked the right questions about Iraq and trusted the wrong answers.
• When W. Ruled the World (08/2006) is a more personal response to W. from campaign to second term: for a short while, it looked like W. had been right about everything.

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Dementia Diary: Sudden Clearing

Dementia sometimes acts like the weather. Sometimes Mom clouds up, and sometimes the clouds clear a little.

Mother's granddaughter Mary Alice came by for a visit yesterday. Mary Alice is making last rounds before moving with her husband Jay to a military base overseas. She may not be back for the next three years. The subtext of the visit, for her, was that her grandmother may never know her again.

Mom responded with delight and surprise to the picture of Mary Alice's wedding, although it's been taped to her wall two months. [See My Niece's Wedding (06/2021)] Mom also admired the wedding ring. We talked about moving to Japan. Mom struggled to express what she thought about the courage it takes to move someplace so far away.

Soon, one of the staff came in to take Mom to dinner, and the visit was over.

But Mary Alice said, "Wait," and went back to say something to Mom. As if the sun had come out, Mom was present in a way she had not been before, speaking fluently in a low voice, and I photographed the moment.