Song Sung Blue

Panettone, the sweet holiday bread of Italy

I was doing some pre-Christmas tasks in the kitchen, wrapping a few presents and getting others ready to mail, and finishing step one in the two-day panettone process. I was playing a Neil Diamond CD, not something I normally do; I almost always play classical music, or “churchy” music such as the Gregorian chants, or Bach’s Mass in B-minor, or anything by Bach, when I am alone – but this time, a spate of the holiday blues tinged my activity, and I thought something different might help . . .

I tossed another chunk of butter into the mixer while “Sweet Caroline” began, thinking about how Neil Diamond had revealed a few years ago that he wrote the song with Caroline Kennedy in mind – she was only a child at the time – and I started thinking about how “they,” the media that is, had pounced on it and insinuated errant motives by Neil Diamond for writing a love song to a young girl-child. Whoever came up with the "journalistic" piece had projected his own perverted thinking onto Neil Diamond, I thought – and unbelievably it was repeated in the paper again last week, two years after the initial slander!  I was thinking about this while adding butter to the panettone and watching it assimilate its glossiness into the eggy dough. You must add butter to a panettone dough until it can take no more. The dough must reject the butter before you can honestly say it has had enough – and so you patiently add small chunks of butter until it refuses to assimilate anymore.

Those scoffers out there who get paid per scandal, they don’t know anything about the purity of feeling and the way a single image or thought will take on its own life and make a whole song or verse or story or painting become something you never knew it could become. He wrote the song while thinking of a young girl who had just lost her father in the cruelest way – that’s what I think – and then the song became a thing unto itself, far from the winding road he set out upon, but with enough memory or wits about him to name the song by the inspiration that brought it about, “Sweet Caroline.”  There is so much butter in a panettone that one could think of it as whipped butter and egg yolk held loosely together by flour and sugar, and studded with sweet dried fruits . . . 

I would wager to say that if Mozart were to have revealed that his Symphony #41, the Jupiter Symphony, for example, had been inspired by a young girl’s face which he saw on the streets of Vienna one evening or morning – such an admittance would not have raised doubts about his motives, but rather been a testament to the creative process.

The thoughts about “Sweet Caroline” and Mozart were done, and the butter was creamed divinely into the egg and flour mixture – it finally would take no more – and the silky yellow dough was massaged and rounded with my buttery hands, and tucked into a warmed and greasy bowl – and then another song began while I was scraping up bits of buttery dough from off the counter – “Song Sung Blue.”

Me and you are subject to the blues now and then
But when you take the blues and make a song
You sing them out again . . . Sing them out again

Who knows why things will hit us this way, but from out of nowhere, I felt the song as though he had written it to me, and I began to dance in the kitchen with my hands still full of butter and dough – dancing with a twist too, at least it seemed that way, back and then forward a few steps, a-one and a-two – and there was a bounce in each step, which is not like me, and my arms seemed to feel the beat too and they seemed to be doing the appropriate bends and turns in sync with the feet. I’m not a dancer or singer or musician, and I always felt so awkward when forced into that situation as a young person.  I never felt the holistic movement of body parts with soul parts, fluid with the bone. My bones never bent in the right places, like flailing wooden spoons or clubs – that’s how I always felt when moving my appendages to the beat of music – as though hitting things with wooden spoons. But I didn’t feel that way this time. A strange fluidity came through me and I felt like the bones were curving and softening and flowing with the music, like large flowing ribbons in a ribbon dance – that’s how my bones suddenly felt. So I went with it, this uncharacteristic feeling, and just enjoyed the dance while the music lasted.

Funny thing, but you can sing it with a cry in your voice
And before you know, start to feeling good
You simply got no choice . . .You simply got no choice . . .

The song was over. And I don’t know why, but the dance talent was over now too. The next song was “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” so I stopped and washed my hands, and put away the tape and ribbon I had been using to wrap gifts, and then covered the panettone dough with a linen cloth for its first rising of 3 hours. Panettone means rich and fancy bread in Italian, and it dates to the Middle Ages when its rich ingredients could be afforded only once a year, at Christmas time. It’s baked in a domed cylindrical form . . . toasted, it is wonderful spread with more butter! Traditionally a piece is set aside until February 3, the feast day of Saint Biagio, the protector of the throat . . . and song. 

I fixed a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table, reminiscing about this experience and listening to Neil Diamond sing these words again, as though he had written them just for me and all of those with the blues at Christmas time: 

Winter Squash Nouveau

"Butternut" is a favorite among winter squashes 

My father would harvest winter squash at the end of a gardening season when the tomatoes had been canned and the evenings carried a snap of cold – though the afternoons were still ablaze with heat. He would push the wheelbarrow down to the bottom of the gardening hill – and there, he would silently clamor behind broad leaves and thick vines, ruthlessly snapping tough umbilical cords to free the fruit from its mother plant. The vines were left to wither and feed the ground for the following season.

The harvest would be spread out on the marble slabs of the patio floor.  I used to think he did that to admire the bounty he had grown, but now I know it was for the more practical and scientific reason of allowing the harvested fruits to “ripen” in the autumn sun – that is, to let the natural sugars convert to sweet starches. After several days or a week of such ripening, my father would once again load the harvest into his wheelbarrow and tote it down to the fruit cellar where he placed them on shelves alongside the canned tomatoes.

Before he did that, my mother would ceremoniously cook one or two of the fresh gourds for dinner. I still remember the aroma that would burst forth when she slit the top off one of the gourds – a cousin of the pumpkin after all, though a tamer and less obtrusive variety – its clean spicy scent reminding me of cooler weather on the horizon. She often served meatloaf for dinner that night, topped with a red tomatoey hot sauce – perhaps because of the contrast in color.  She was an artist at heart, after all, and dinner was her task at hand.  In hindsight, I think she very often chose dinner items because of their color potential . . .

Once cooked and mashed, she would coax the pale orange squash into a serving bowl of contrasting color – blue is nice, especially near a browned meatloaf topped with red sauce. She would throw another dollop of butter on the steamy orange peaks, then add a generous shake of black pepper to finish it off . . .

There is something fleeting about the taste of freshly picked winter squash as compared to its brethren that has ripened a few weeks. Now that I know a little bit about wine, I compare it to Beaujolais Nouveau, that first wine of the season that ritually debuts on the third Thursday of November. This un-aged wine is the much anticipated indicator of the quality of the year’s wine harvest.  The wine is purplish-pink, purposely immature, fruity, light and pale . . . and such are the qualities of the first winter squash.

The dark coolness of the fruit cellar, and time, somehow let the squashes grow deeper in color – and certainly sweeter – until by Thanksgiving Day the starches would have reached their peak of sweetness. After the holidays, only a month or two remained for eating winter squash – for it became wizened and starchless by March.  Gourds that had lost their vigor entirely were unceremoniously fed to the compost pile . . . and a new batch of seeds begun.

The most expressive gourds – those with crooked necks and bulbous tails – those squashes found immortality in the oil paintings done by my mother on cold winter days. The nook of a crooked handle might serve as placement for an apple or a handful of dried corn. I saw her do that on many occasions: retrieve an eccentric squash or two from the basement for her creative, expressive needs at the easel before dinnertime . . . yet one more way that winter squash might feed.

The Method:

Peel, seed, and chop winter squash (butternut) into chunks.  Add one inch of water to the pan, bring to a boil and cover.  Simmer until easily pierced with a fork (10 or 15 minutes) . . .

Drain.  Add salt and pepper and a large spoonful of butter.  Mash till creamy.  Place in a pretty bowl of contrasting color, adding one more dollop of butter on top, and a generous smattering of pepper.  

Daniel Boone's Divided Heart

Daniel Boone was a brave man . . .

On his 50th birthday, in 1794, Colonel Daniel Boone saw published the only work in his own words, “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone,” a narrative of his exploits in the Kentucky wilderness spanning nearly 20 years.  However, after a life devoted to trailblazing and making Kentucky fit for habitation and an easy access to western territories, Daniel Boone began to feel “cramped in” by his own efforts – after all, Kentucky by the late 1700s had reached a population of nearly 200,000 people spread over a mere 100,000 square kilometers of land. He observes, "Thus we behold Kentucky, lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field; this region, so favourably distinguished by nature, now become the habitation of civilization.”

. . . and that is why Daniel Boone and his wife Rebecca left their beloved home state and moved farther west in 1799, to a less civilized place called Defiance, Missouri – not to conquer new frontiers, for he was nearly 70 years old by then, but to bask in the privacy of untamed territory and wide open space once again. Other sources say he left because of a nasty dispute about land and property rights. Not being a man to put up with such trivial legalities, he and Rebecca just packed up and left . . . Rebecca died a few years after the move to Missouri, followed by Daniel several years later. They were both buried in a neighboring town called Marthasville, MO. That’s when the real dispute begins . . . 

. . . and his wife Rebecca worked very hard

Kentuckians of the early 1800s knew what they had in their historic pioneer Daniel Boone, though I hardly think they could have foreseen the TV series with Fess Parker which we 20th century children would come to know well (and hum the catchy tune all our lives, if not sing the words as well). Kentuckians began to resent that Missourians had somewhat stolen the glory of what Daniel Boone stood for – the trailblazing legend, his general independent spirit, and all that America had come to stand for.



Daniel Boone's gravesite overlooking the Kentucky River 

 That’s when a few like minded independent Kentuckians went to Missouri one night in 1825 to dig up the bones of Daniel Boone and his wife Rebecca, and to bring them back to Kentucky for a proper burial in their home state. The couple was reinterred in a fine scenic spot overlooking the rambling Kentucky River that runs through the state’s capitol of Frankfort.

Missourians might have been appalled at first, but from what I’ve read they mostly just laughed, saying, “You didn’t even get the right bones – we’ve still got him!” You see, they claim that the plot next to Rebecca was already occupied when Daniel died – and so, the man who didn't like to be cramped in was buried at his wife's feet.

Kentucky says that’s not true – for they gathered up all the bones in the area. A modern day anthropologist declares that the skull buried in the Frankfort plot actually belongs to a large black man. This anthropologist concedes, however, that some other bones in the plot may very well belong to Daniel Boone.

Missouri replies, saying that the heart and brain of Daniel Boone had long since become one with Missouri soil – and no one can steal that.

The monument to Daniel and Rebecca Boone, Frankfort, KY

But Kentucky reminds them that Daniel Boone’s true heart and spirit will always reside in Kentucky! And so, there are two official plots claiming to hold the remains of Daniel Boone . . .

Forevermore . . .

The inner courtyard of Richmond's Poe Museum, dated 1737 

Every time I walk into an old house with creaky floorboards I think of the old man’s beating heart . . . you fancy me mad?  No! It is the author of that story who is mad – Edgar Allan Poe! I say this only because of his story, “The Tell Tale Heart,” which I read when I was a mere child of 10 or 11 years old . . .

Little did I know that one day I would live in the city where Edgar Allan Poe grew up and wrote his first poems and stories. Perhaps he had entered this same building which I now entered, an old stone and brick structure with – yes, I say! – creaky floorboards!  It is the oldest standing building in Richmond, VA, built in 1737, now cramped and stowed away (like the old man's body!) on a busy street in the city’s downtown business district.  This unassuming building, now called the Poe Museum, keeps forevermore the artifacts of Edgar Allan Poe’s life . . . and death.

Poe never actually lived in the old building, but “he probably walked by here a lot,” our tour guide told us. My daughter and I came here on a beautiful sunny day to learn of Poe’s life in Richmond and to witness the just-opened special exhibit, “The Raven, Terror and Death.”

It is downright criminal that I and many other school children grew up thinking that this scary author haled from New England.  He may have been born in Massachusetts (he was), but his transient theatre parents moved to Richmond when he was only two years old. Baltimore takes an unwarranted claim on Poe’s life as well, only because Poe lived there for a paltry three years in adulthood after he married his 13-year-old cousin.  Also, Poe happened to die there on October 7, 1849 – that is, 162 years ago today! – under very dubious circumstances while en route from Richmond to Pennsylvania.  More on this later . . .

 But the only rightful claimant to this author is Richmond, VA, I say!  Though rarely mentioned in biographies (and that’s a mystery to me), Poe grew up in Richmond and lived a good portion of his adult life here too.  Unfortunately, the houses where Poe lived in Richmond have all been demolished . . .

Nevertheless, this city provided all the elements of a grim foundation for Poe’s future instincts in storytelling.  His father promptly abandoned the family once they had moved to Richmond.  His mother died of consumption a year later. The three Poe children were parceled out to various families, one in Baltimore and two in Richmond.  Young Edgar was taken in, though never formally adopted, by the wealthy Allan family of Richmond.  The Allan’s wealth came from tobacco and slaves, as did all Virginia wealth back then.  Thus, he became Edgar Allan Poe.

Though he grew up in wealthy surroundings, he was never to experience the independence of wealth.  John Allan seemingly hated the young Edgar . . . and his wife Francis, though loving, died from consumption when he was still a boy.  Allan sent Edgar to the University of Virginia, but withheld tuition once he got there.  And Poe was soon expelled for drinking and gambling . . .

Back in Richmond, penniless, he came up with the idea of creating a literary journal in which his own stories and poems would be featured.  He charged $5 per issue, which in the early 1800s must have been as outlandish as the stories he wrote.  The office where he wrote and edited this literary journal still stands in downtown Richmond, but is now called “Rouge Gentlemen’s Club” – and it has nothing to do with literary concerns, or even gentlemen, one might say. 

This bust of Poe was stolen and taken to imbibe a few . . .

 There is a bust of Poe in the courtyard of the Poe Museum, which our tour guide said was stolen one night by a person who proceeded to take it to the Rouge Gentlemen’s Club where said-thief bought the marble bust a few drinks, then left it on the bar stool to fend for itself.  An honest bar attendant returned it to the Poe Museum a few weeks later with no hard feelings on either side. This is the kind of tidbit you can only pick up from a guided tour in which you and your daughter are the only two people in attendance.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since we had an hour “to kill” before our tour actually started, my daughter and I went over to nearby Shockoe Hill cemetery where many people in Poe’s life and literary career are buried.

The gravesite of Poe's beloved Jane Stanard, or "Helen"

Jane Stanard is a woman whom Poe loved dearly, though Jane was married and much older than Poe. He was only a teen when she died, and it is said he would visit the grave to weep and wail upon her gravestone.  His poem, “To Helen,” is famously written for her.  They say he changed her name to Helen because “Jane” had little rhythmic value to the budding poet.  In compassion for him, I draped my own body across Jane’s gravestone to feel the cold jutting rock on my cheek just as Poe must have felt it.  I tried not to disturb the wilted red rose someone had placed there.

Across the walkway from Jane, rest Poe’s foster parents, John and Francis Allan.  I imagine Poe coming here to spit (or worse) upon the gravesite of John Allan who ruthlessly left all his wealth to his numerous illegitimate children and not one penny to the poverty-stricken Edgar.

Farther down the way lay the remains of the woman to whom he was engaged twice – Sarah Elmira Royster.  Her wealthy Richmond family did everything in their power to break off the engagement, such as intercepting letters between them while he was in the army, and convincing their daughter he had abandoned her and that she should marry an upstanding Richmonder by the last name of Shelton.  Poe agonized to learn of her marriage to Shelton when he returned to Richmond to marry her.  Many of his poems and short stories include the names Elmira, Lenora, Eleanor, even Annabel Lee – and these are all in tribute to his love, Sarah Elmira.

Our tour guide said there might have been a happy ending to this love affair because the two were engaged a second time about 20 years later, after Sarah Elmira’s husband died.  Her family remained in opposition to the marriage.  That’s when great mystery begins – for Poe died unexpectedly in Baltimore only 10 days before the marriage date. He was found wearing someone else’s clothes and lying face down in a gutter in mental delirium.  He was 40 years old. The word he kept repeating was Reynolds, Reynolds, Reynolds . . . and this is another famous family name in Richmond – think Reynolds Aluminum . . .

The grim mustachioed Poe

Only seven people came to Poe’s funeral, most of those hospital personnel who were needed to carry the casket.  His betrothed was not among them.  Our tour guide told us there are about 30 theories as to how Poe died in Baltimore – everything from rabies to murder.  One of those theories inculcates the brothers of his beloved Sarah Elmira, who may have followed Poe to Baltimore and drugged him.  A movie is coming out in 2012, starring John Cusack as Poe, which will catalog Poe’s life and the many unsolved theories of his death.  I hope John Cusack is not sporting a mustache because our tour guide told us that Poe rarely wore one.  The iconic mustachioed photo of Poe which we all recognize, of which the original is in the Poe Museum, was taken four days after an attempted suicide – and the grimness of it bears little resemblance to his other photos in which he was clean shaven and somewhat “brighter.” Our tour guide explained that this grim photo became famous because Poe’s decrepit sister, who also lived in Richmond, had numerous copies made and forged his signature on each one for sale after his death!

The morning after our tour of the Poe Museum and visit to Shockoe Hill cemetery, I read in our local newspaper that a body with a garbage bag taped over its head had been found in a warehouse just outside the cemetery where my daughter and I had traipsed through the centuries-old knotted pathways looking for traces of the life of Edgar Allan Poe.  Hideous!  as Poe would say.  I sat at my kitchen table pondering such mysteries . . .

Holy Cards

I’ve been looking over an old book of mine, Nonviolent Communication, a Language of Life, which is about how to listen and respond to people without offending them. The big problem with reading this book is the awareness it brings of how important it is to the health of body, mind and spirit to be heard fully and completely and to grant others the same gift – and how rarely that actually happens . . .

Most of us, when we hear a person’s lamentations, we want to dole out advice and solutions like pellets from a shotgun – Shut up, already! we seem to be saying.  That’s violent, according to this book.  Most often, people are seeking empathy and genuine understanding, not advice.  The book states that one of the best things a listener can do is to paraphrase or summarize what the other person has just said – that shows you heard them.

That’s one thing my mother could do well, listen – and on this third anniversary of her death I feel gratitude that I had such an experience as a teenager and beyond – one person who could listen well and not give advice.  I think I heard her say once that she wasn’t smart enough to come up with solutions and advice for other people’s problems. Little did she know that that is exactly the key to being a good listener.  She couldn’t solve anyone’s problems and she didn’t presuppose to try. So she just let them talk – usually while she went about the task of making dinner or canning tomatoes or washing dishes. Then again, maybe she wasn’t really listening at all!

I was surprised to learn, after I was married and had children of my own, that several of my high school friends still made the pilgrimage up the steep hill where we lived in order to “chit-chat” with my mother. She would casually inform me of their visits and of what they were doing in life, and I often wondered why they kept in touch with her but had lost touch with me! At her funeral, one of these old friends said to me, “I’m really going to miss our little talks – with your mother, I mean. She was a good listener.”

When my children were young and I was so busy with the never ending chores of motherhood, which of course left no time for writing, I would make a monthly-or-so phone call to my mother to unburden myself. I knew she understood the frustrations of a thwarted creative impulse because I had witnessed (and heard) her own struggles to pursue creativity in bits and pieces amid the chores of daily life. A few days later I’d get a letter in the mail – not crammed full of advice, but rather in brief acknowledgment of what I’d already said via phone. Then she’d go on to other things about the house or her church or her garden . . .

St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers 

Included in that letter would be a holy card of some designation – St. Jude was a favorite one she frequently sent, for he is the patron saint of lost causes. My family used to laugh about that. But there were other cards she’d send too, perhaps an archangel – Raphael, Michael, or Gabriel – to watch over me and guide me in the ways she did not presuppose to do.  I never knew why she sent me the card of St. Francis de Sales – until recently, when I looked it up. He is the patron saint of writers -- and he is known for his ability to "communicate with gentleness." 

I would put the “holy card of the month” on the refrigerator with a magnet – to remind me that someone had heard me – and that was a good solution.

Ode to Pesto, 1982

(Writing this at the library which just re-opened today, post hurricane) 

This is the fifth day of no power since Hurricane Irene – and while my losses are minimal and replaceable, and I'm grateful for that, I have to say I grieve the loss of my homemade pesto in the freezer more than any of my inconveniences. Basil, its main ingredient, is one of the few things I can grow without the squirrels eating it before harvest time – or before I awake in the morning. This year I went all out – I bought an extra special Romano cheese from Whole Foods Grocery at a price I don’t want to mention – it had just been cut at a Saturday morning "wheel cutting ceremony" of which there was much to-do. I bought organic pine nuts that were similarly priced – maybe more, I think. I always buy good Italian olive oil, so of course I bought more of the same. I found purple garlic which I remembered from my youth because my father used to grow it. I don’t know if purple garlic is better, but it was pricier and there was much nostalgia in buying it anyway. Those are the only five ingredients that make pesto – fresh basil, Romano cheese, garlic, pine nuts, and olive oil – but the dishes that can be made with that simple concoction are endless. 

My pesto recipe dates back to an old Bon Appetite magazine from June 1982, several years before my children were born or even considered – but the means and ways to use it have spawned with each passing year.  I’ve never skipped a year of making and storing pesto since 1982.  I assess that this year’s yield was the best I’ve ever made. 

Pesto pasta, pesto potatoes, minestrone with a dollop of pesto stirred in, pesto-baked salmon, pesto-grilled-everything, and of course pesto butter on homemade sourdough bread – these are some of the foods of which there was never any dissent among my family members at any age from toddlerhood-on-up. We all agreed for just those nights when pesto adorned dinner.

I wanted my pesto to be extra tasty this year for those times when my grown children would come home from faraway places. I wanted the memory of "home-in-agreeability" to reign for them. And I wanted enough of it to serve at all occasions – Thanksgiving, Christmas, random weekends, and all birthdays straight through to St. Patty’s Day when the next seedlings are planted. And so I even bought more basil at the farmers’ market when my own plants had exhausted themselves – more basil to make more pesto.

Now every bit of it, all my neatly stacked containers, rot in the warm dark freezer. The kitchen smells acrid and garlicky when I walk into it. I can’t bring myself to open the freezer door and throw it away yet – though it had thawed entirely two days ago. I’ve crossed the threshold of caring whether the power comes on today – my losses are tallied.

I’m not talking about the price of ingredients, a mere number that follows a dollar sign – that’s not what I tally or grieve. That’s not the value I assign to homemade pesto.  And I realize there are things far more valuable that I have not lost.  But I still think about the extra special effort I put into it this year – early morning treks to obtain quality ingredients – and all for the promise of another season when everyone might come together and agree. Pesto is the taste of agreement.  I wonder if the likes of Irene can understand that.

A woman’s heart is crazy and secretive that way – she’ll do so much and spend too much to implant a thing of value in the subconscious storehouse of memory for those who will never witness the effort or know about it or maybe even care about it . . . only, strangely, sense it by tasting . . . 

The 1982 Recipe:
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves
2 large garlic cloves
½ cup pine nuts
¾ cup freshly grated Romano or Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup olive oil

Grind it all up together in whatever way you choose – mortar and pestle, or blender.  And no, Irene, it's not the same as store-bought.

Strolling a` la Anne Spencer

I receive one poem per day via email from http://www.poets.org/ – which is nice because it’s just one poem, and it’s usually one which I would not come upon through my own devices. Yesterday’s offering was one by Anne Spencer, a contemporary of Langston Hughes and a member of the Harlem Renaissance School of Writers.  She died in 1975.  The poem is called “At the Carnival.”

Poet Anne Spencer's home in Lynchburg, VA

As I read it, I fondly recalled the day a few years ago when I strolled in front of Anne Spencer’s historic landmark home in Lynchburg, VA, and knocked determinedly on the front door to see if a tour was available – then sat on her porch, talked to her neighbors and some gardeners, took a few photos, and . . . finally, left. I happened to be in Lynchburg visiting my daughter who attended college there until her graduation in 2008.

I love going to writers’ homes and taking tours – feeling that certain feeling.  That’s what I like – feeling that certain feeling. Anne Spencer loved gardening, as do many writers.  She even had a little garden house out in the back where she would write.  I imagine she would write for a while, stroll through her rosebushes and do a little pruning work, then go edit some words out, then stroll and prune some more, rewrite . . . that sort of thing.  There were some men working in her back yard the day we were there.  I suppose they had been hired by the historic society to maintain the grounds as Anne Spencer would have liked them.  But they acted as though they had never even heard of Anne Spencer – this was just another job for them, and they were eager to be done.

My daughter was embarrassed of me that day, feeling I had pushed the envelope too far by sitting on Anne Spencer’s porch and talking to gardeners in her back yard. She sat in the car and waited for me impatiently as I strolled the neighborhood looking for someone who knew something about the Anne Spencer home and whether a tour was available.

We finally left the neighborhood and went to an historic cemetery nearby. We walked through a good portion of the cemetery’s 20,000 plots looking for Anne Spencer’s gravesite, but never found it. I later learned she was buried in a newer cemetery a few miles from there. We did learn all about African burial practices, however, and I took a few pictures of the gravesite of the most famous whores in Lynchburg, a mother-daughter team named Agnes and Lizzie Langley. They ran what was called “a sporting house” in Lynchburg during the Civil War era. They say it is uncertain as to whether the Langleys bought the elaborate grave marker with their own money or if their patrons bought it for them:

RIP, Agnes and Lizzie Langley, circa late 1800's

Then we ate some Indian food, perused a used bookstore where I couldn’t find any books by Anne Spencer but found a few other gems, and then drove to Poplar Forest which was Thomas Jefferson’s little-known summer retreat house nestled amongst 5,500 acres of . . . poplar trees. Poplar Forest is a bona fide tourist destination now, but in 2008 it was still in the process of being restored to its architectural authenticity, and we were privilegd and free to wander the house and gardens to observe the restoration in process. Jefferson said he went there "to be a hermit and to read and to entertain his absent friends." 

Thomas Jefferson's silent retreat called Poplar Forest

 Reading “At the Carnival” made me recall the spirit of that day – searching, strolling with my daughter, having fun, eating, finding things we didn’t look for, and not finding things we did look for. It was a carnival of sorts . . . and here are some lines taken from the center part of Spencer's long poem:

 I came incuriously—
Set on no diversion save that my mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.

Starry Starry Plans

Driving home from my son’s college graduation last May, we decided to bail ship from the truck infested interstate to take the older and less traveled road, known as Highway 11, which traverses Virginia from east to west, and continues into Tennessee.

Driving through the gentle and open-armed Shenandoah Valley, we stopped at a small country store because of the sign’s promise of hoop cheese and real ham biscuits. There was some minor construction going on at one end of the store – actually, it was ‘de-construction’ of a sort – the old man who owned the store explained that he had decided to pull off the siding which he put up in the 1950s to ‘modernize’ the store by covering up the original log cabin architecture which dated to the mid-1800’s.  The store had been in the family that long . . .

He didn’t talk about a son or grandson or anyone else taking over the store in the future; he worked alone along the quiet highway with his hoop cheeses and real sorghum molasses, his jars of everything that could be pickled or canned by the nearby Amish women, his bushel baskets of seasonal produce the earth brought forth from nearby Fancy Hill, VA., and his tables full of smoked hams. His pink aged face was alive with plans for the ‘re-modernization’ of his family store – back to the old log cabin work of his ancestors . . . still full of plans.  He said something like that as he cut a wedge of hoop cheese for me, “As long as I’ve still got plans, I figure I’ll never get old.”

All the while he talked, I looked at the table of hams behind me, the hoop cheeses in the background. What voice inside me whispered, starry night?  Suddenly I saw Van Gogh’s famous painting in a table full of hams and hoop cheeses – but the painting had turned pink and red and cheddar instead of blue and green and summery.  If I were a painter – and I wish I were, for there are times when words are tiresome and harsh – I would get out my palette of pinks and lavender-reds and browns, moss greens and silver-greys. . . and I’d paint a table full of swirling hams and call it “Starry Starry Plans.”

August, my least favorite month of the year, is just around the bend.  My own writing plans are on hold until September . . . and my son works long into the night on his plans for a stellar future . . .

Cool Breeze

Abelard and Writer's Block

I think the biggest cause of writer’s block is too much to say, not too little to say. We hear of writers facing a blank page and nothing to say. When I am blocked, it is not that I feel blankness inside, or openness, or silence – it’s that I feel clamor, stuffiness, a scramble of voices all blocked and mired in each others’ push. There’s too much wanting to say . . . therefore I just walk away. Go feed the birds. Check the emails. Wash some clothes . . . much like leaving a noisy billiard parlor.

And this comes from not writing something every day, from ignoring the little things that seem unimportant and unworthy of the paper or the time – saying to myself, this is unimportant – this is just complaining – this has already been said – worst of all, who cares anyway? Letting things build up and get blocked.

                                                                      *  *  *  * 

I think of a book I’ve been reading, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, the twelfth century monk and nun who left a trove of love letters behind when they died. You see, they had had a torrid love affair while he was studying for the priesthood – and she was his precocious student, 21 years his junior, who never intended to take vows herself but just loved learning (from him; he was quite handsome they say). Abelard had been hired by her rich Uncle Fulbert to teach her the scripture in their original languages, Greek and Hebrew. But once the uncle found out about the goings-on under his own roof, he had his henchmen castrate Abelard in his sleep. After much pain and remorse and a lot of secrecy, Abelard took his final vows, but not before ensuring that Heloise would do the same – so they should “forever be together in spirit” – that is to say, so she would be unavailable to any other man (my opinion).

 Then, after each had taken their vows and was embedded in separate monasteries, I suppose the hormonal changes began to set in from the castration.  Abelard ignored her, took a more fatherly tone in his letters, and made little attempt to see her.  That’s when she writes one of her most straightforward, insightful, and beautiful letters to him:

“Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can –“

Did you not love my soul? Was it the flame of lust rather than love that bound you to me? I took the veil for you! Those are her very words, though I’m taking license to extract and scramble them together from several pages of text – a letter that rankles even 900 years later.  She details all her young school girl passion and hope in him.  She reminds him that she even bore his child in secret at age 17 and gave up the baby just so it wouldn’t taint his reputation or stand in the way of his career (vows).  Yet after she took the veil, forever marrying herself to God, as she puts it, he neglected her! “In truth I have done none of this for God but everything for you,” she laments. “Tell me, I say, if you can.”

His reply is a 20-page discourse on female complaining, “. . . a recital of your misery over the wrongs you suffer,” and “your old perpetual complaint against God concerning the manner of our entry into religious life and the cruelty of the act of treachery performed on me.”  This one pivotal letter seems to be the turning point in their relationship.  I know I think differently of Abelard forevermore after reading this letter.

The way I see it, his 20-page letter is nothing but fancy rhetoric meant to act like mirrors that deflect light into crazy patterns on the ceiling. I hope she saw it that way. He never answers the question of ‘why have I been so neglected and forgotten by you.’ Instead, he performs a sleight of hand – he angles the mirrors to cast shadows on Heloise.

After that game-changing letter, she stopped the complaining – but she also stopped writing heartfelt letters. Maybe she got her answer, maybe she believed she was wrong to complain, maybe she just gave up. The female in her was vanquished, just as the male in him had been. “I have set the bridle of your injunction on the words which issue from my unbounded grief,” she writes in reply. That’s it – her letters become short and to the point, mostly questions about how the nuns ought to conduct themselves under the Rule of Saint Benedict which was written for men – the cowls, for example, she writes, “What are we to do about the cowls?”

And then he answers her about the cowls. That becomes their relationship after he had secured her in the convent and told her to stop complaining.

It is difficult to finish the book now that Heloise has been shushed – a shushing which endured even through the two decades she lived after his death at age 63.  I wish she had written something in the privacy of her monastic cell about all that she really felt. We will never know – not because there was nothing to say, but because there was so much – and who would care? she must have thought – and so she walked away from saying it.

The Occasional Virtue

I read a newspaper article entitled “Study: College Kids More Cocky.”  The woman with the credentials to be quoted in such an article is Jean Twenge, author of the book Generation Me and a psychologist at San Diego State University.  She has published a new study concluding that college students “feel far more superior than their elders” – at least 60 percent of incoming freshman rate themselves as above average in all areas, compared to about 39 percent in 1966.  “It’s not just confidence. It’s over confidence – narcissism even,” she says.

“There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing,” she begins.  But, as she sees it, too much self esteem can cause ‘a disconnect’ between self-perception and reality.  The Greeks called it hubris, as I recall from my own college days – and it was the downfall of almost every tragic hero (and more than a few modern day politicians, I might add).

I could have composed such an article myself last week, if someone had been with me to write it down while I was driving – when a very young teenage blonde, way too sexy for her age, made a stupid move in her BMW car while chattering wildly and laughing enthusiastically on her cell phone.  The stupid move put her ahead of me with no apologies or acknowledgment of the life or mishap I had just saved her by not asserting myself and rather deferring to her blind stupidity.  She will never know she was wrong – she will never know what she could have lost or what might have happened.  And so, I felt for just that time like a silent guardian angel who had watched out for her life (and mine) while she plodded along in the insular world of her own self importance – unconscious of me, of others, of danger, of wrong, of cost, of invisible forces to which one ought to be grateful . . .

I possibly saved her life, mine too, and certainly much inconvenience at the least.  Two cars did not collide that day because one of us deferred to the other who was in the wrong. Farther up the road, we two strangers sat side by side in parallel lanes at a stop light, and I looked over to see if the young driver might at least acknowledge the guardian angel who saved her – but she was still swaddled in the bubble wrap of her own private cell phone conversation and the climate control of her car and the slightly tinted glass and probably the stereophonic sound too – protected from intruders like me, immersed, disconnected from reality – just as the author had explained. “A disconnect between self-perception and reality.”

She did not look at me from her controlled environment.  And if she had, she might have been offended by the middle aged intruder trying to make eye contact through her tinted glass. She might have called her mother to report me.  She might have made some awful sign or mean look at me.

I don’t generally speak on cell phones when I’m driving because I’m not confident of my ability to do both without mishap – but I will never shy away from talking aloud to myself.  In those ensuing moments I recounted the young driver I once had been – always two hands grasped firmly on the wheel at 10 and 2 as I’d been taught, my neck and back muscles tense with the knowledge I could die while doing this, a foot and mind always poised to break on a dime if necessary.  I was not confident as a young person – in driving or in any other aspect of life.  The driving analogy might transfer to everything I did as a youth – sure of danger, only myself to blame, poised for sudden stops, and aware that others were probably right and I was probably wrong – always.

There’s a lot to be said for a lack of confidence at times.  I said this aloud to myself as the young blonde driver accelerated to the green light and sped beyond me into the sunset.

My own children were young and growing in self esteem in the late 80’s when Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers told them daily how special and wonderful they were.  I used to think, passing from room to room with a load of laundry or a wet mop or fresh baked snacks from the oven, I used to think, “Wow, no one ever told me that when I was young . . . how nice.” But then in later years I began to notice – and I’m not talking about my own children or their friends because I think that a moderate dose of confidence is a necessary thing and I wish I’d had it, and all that – however, I began to notice an over confidence and false importance and entitlement in some members of their generation.  I could see it regularly in the malls or neighborhood setting or my children’s schools.  They deferred to no one; their kind of confidence seemed to outshine my hard earned variety in every instance – and I began to think that the self esteem inducers had somehow over shot their mark. They had aimed the arrow at healthy self esteem, which needed to be done, but they had somehow landed it in the insular world of narcissism and self importance.

I never talked about it back then because I was afraid I was wrong or just getting old – but after reading this article and seeing the data that confirms my hunch, I’ll say what I’ve been thinking for many years – that Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers might have done well to add this caveat to their daily message:  “. . . and not only are you special and wonderful, but so is everyone else – and don’t forget it!  That’s the part they left out.

Understanding Piles

I devised the strategy of “Piles” last week as a way to inspire me to begin the annual routine of ‘clearing out clutter’ from the house which is a task I am well overdue for doing this year.  Instead of the usual plan of going from room to room to clean out drawers and shelves and closets and such, I decided to jolt myself into it by trickery.  I said, “OK, I am uninspired – so I will tiptoe into the thing by the strategy of piles.  Wherever there is a pile in any room,” I said aloud to myself as I moved from the kitchen table where I have been equally uninspired to write these past few weeks, “I will work through that pile.”  That is, I would dismantle it, shuffle through it, purge it, file it, memorize it, or trash it.  I would confront the stagnant energy that sits there on piles – unread newspaper articles, clippings of things I want to do or places I want to go, scribbled ideas to write about, books and magazines I intend to read, recipes I mean to try, warranties to be mailed, and user’s manuals to be figured out.  But it wasn’t just paper piles weighing me down, I soon found out, but piles of clothes that ought to be mended or ironed or done away with altogether – piles of stuff.

I began to understand Piles as I shuffled through its energy and smelled its mustiness, saw its ghosty offspring (dust balls) scuttle away under beds and heard their flat, stale cries.  We were not so different after all – they too had lost their fizzle, their inspiration, and their drive.  Piles are prostrate things; they have no humph; they prefer corners or shadowy hideaways, never the limelight . . . their only job is to take up space and gather dust unto themselves.  Dust is the embodiment of procrastination . . . and dust will beget more dust . . .

 It’s a wonderful thing to shuffle through old energy and make it stand upright – whether in a file cabinet or between bookends or on a wall – it becomes revitalized that way.  I want to stand upright too, I thought.  And I love tossing things into a trash can that I no longer need – like cleansing the mind of obligations and leaving open space for new ideas to come in. There were piles of recipes that had been limiting me while presiding on the kitchen table where I write – Prince William’s chocolate biscuit cake, real lemon curd, and tea cookies. “The wedding is over,” I said, and tossed them in the trash.  Some promising recipes I filed away in a drawer to be forgotten and perhaps cleaned out next year; at least they are no longer on the kitchen table where their stagnant energy becomes nagging energy every time I sit down to write – pulling at me and draining me.

 I thought the job of dismantling piles might be done in an hour or two, but it took the better part of Memorial Day weekend.  I had been inspired.  My trickery had worked – not only were the piles disrupted, but the books on shelves were sorted, the drawers purged, the closets stirred around and given light, the vitamin cabinet reorganized, the refrigerator and freezer cleaned out, and the birdbaths washed and refilled.  Clothes were thrown into category piles for either donation, or washing, or tossing.  Karen Kingston, the author of at least two feng shui books which I like so well, writes in her monthly e-newsletter, http://www.spaceclearing.com/html/blog/ that we wear only 20 percent of the clothing we keep.  An honest assessment of my own closet and drawers proves her right.

There was one persistent pile, however, that held more energy than the rest; it protested loudly each time I moved it – to the floor near the trash can, to the floor near the recyclables, to the floor near the donations – nothing seemed right.  It was my pile of mostly unread "Poetry" magazines which I had habitually stacked up since early 2009. I kept waiting for the perfect quiet evening to read them with diligence and focus, to digest them.  But that perfect evening (without tiredness) never came.  Having saved the best for last, they had soured.  So I carried them back to the room where I read, spread them out on the floor, shuffled them, stirred them, made them go out of order – and then left them that way, on the floor to breathe, for the rest of the day.  That night, Memorial Day Monday night, I cracked them open, one at a time – not reading every word, but selectively perusing them for the things I liked.  It was the third-to-the-last book I picked up (the July/August 2009 issue) that made my holiday weekend of cleaning and bustle all worthwhile – in it, a poem called, “Poet as Housewife” by Elizabeth Eybers, translated from the Afrikaans by Jacquelyn Pope:

Always a broom leaned against a wall,
meals never on time, if they come at all.

Days without dates through which she moves
empty and stubborn, slightly confused.

Ironing hung dejectedly over a chair,
gestures that come from who-knows-where.

Old letters unanswered, piled together,
papers and pills stuffed deep in a drawer.

Thankful to be part of your heart's great whole
yet devoted to the limits of her own small skull.

O orderly biped, take heed,
leave her alone -- let her read.

A Bode to Squirrels

Frozen-eyed
Squirrel in my garden plot,
I’d throw a rock at you
If the neighbors weren’t watching.

They run across the driveway
Like thieves with loot,
raccoon-eyed squirrels with
Zinnias on their breath.

Askance-eyed
Squirrel in my garden plot –
Your brood is watching
From the owl house you stole.

I know you know, have shown you so,
Without neighbors on my tail
I’ll throw rocks at you.

See Jane Stitch

I’ve caught the Jane Austen bug after so many years of saying I didn’t like her books at all – who wants to read the minutiae of social discourse, I used to think, of which the sole goal is to arrange a “propitious marriage that secures a profitable future . . .”

 It’s as though one pot of money had been given to the British at the beginning of civilization, and Jane Austen’s characters were charged with the job of making sure it flowed into the proper channels via favorable marriages via influential connections via properly honed qualities and tempers. Money is an unwieldy river that needs coaxing and damming up and guidance lest it go astray.  Marriage is the levee.

For the young woman poised on the brink of marriage, time is a blank canvas to be used for long walks of discovery through meadows, daily practice sessions on the pianoforte, daydreaming at the embroidery hoop, social discourse at a ball, lace making and sewing, and much practice in the female art of letter writing.  One Austen heroine spends her time “nicely dressed sitting on a sofa doing some long piece of needlework of little use and no beauty.” Austen’s books chart the meanderings, the twists and turns, and the flood walls encountered by young women as they navigate toward this singular goal.

I did not enjoy Jane’s writing back in my early years as a mother when time was so hurried and my own love of writing was in holding for nearly two decades . . . and every minute was earmarked for something practical such as folding laundry or feeding a sourdough or . . . never mind.  Every minute was earmarked.

 When I read Austen now, however, I no longer resent the young woman’s expanse of time, but rather laud her for it and rest humorously in the suspension of time she endures.  Enjoy it while you can, I say.  I immerse myself in that useless needlepoint – for the supreme pleasure of watching Jane stitch.

In Jane’s world, a visit to a relative 30 miles away was meant to last no less than three weeks and more politely three months.  Her heroine's time was spent in all of the above mentioned ways, adding a broadened social circle that might likely result in a marriage proposal before she returned home.  Letters traveled, giving the news that some rich relative was sick, and by the time it reached his heirs, the old man might be buried.  A fortnight later, when all ‘hopefuls’ had gathered round for the reading of the will, they’d find out which lucky soul had inherited all the wealth (think male and oldest and nephew – nephews seem to inherit quite often in her books).  The rest would go home dejected and anxious as to where one’s resources might be cultivated next.

Refinement, discourse, position, title, civility, eloquence, approbation, disapprobation, means, defilement – these are the words she uses on every page, words that make all the difference in one’s social standing.  The discussions, habits, and carefully observed gestures of her characters, most of them derived from her own circle of friends and relatives, are mulled and cogitated and rehearsed again and again through page after page – and the only plot that underpins all these nuances is for the girl to be married well.  Most of her heroines do so, even as some of them equivocate and consider their losses and gains.

 Jane Austen herself must have thought daily about such losses and gains.  Her own parents would have loved for their aging daughter, nice looking enough, to finally say yes to one of the lucrative suitors who came her way. She did say yes once, just to make everyone happy, but changed her mind the next morning.  If a young woman married well, her entire birth family might be snared from the fate of having to dig their own potatoes (that phrase is spoken by Jane’s mother in the movie, "Becoming Jane").

 It is believed that Jane actually fell in love with a young man once – but he was not an eldest son and she was the seventh child with no stipend to bring to the marriage – therefore the connection was not “sensible.”

 Jane wasn’t thinking straight for her times.  Something in her made her think that marriage ought to be about love.  Some of her heroines have the same problem.  But Jane wasn’t stupid either.  Her own family tottered on the fence of having to dig their own potatoes every day.  Poverty is a real live wretch that lasts forever, maybe even longer than love.  She knew this.  Her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, is all about that internal struggle – the emotional versus the practical.  If only the two could be combined . . . and that’s why Jane wrote books, I’m convinced.

 Most of her heroines do get married off – for both love and money.  It must have satisfied her to make it that way.  But in our author’s real life, neither was to be her fate.  You see, there was another problem, as Jane saw it.  Jane really liked to write – and those real women in her circle, more than a few, either died in childbirth or gave birth year after year as though taunting fate with such a prospect.  There were others who had died in a different sort of way before childbirth took them – that is to say, they died to their girlhood dreams and pleasures.  One favorite niece "died" to the book she had nearly completed writing under Aunt Jane’s encouragement.  There’s no copy in existence, but there is a letter to her Aunt Jane which ‘closes the book’ on writing forevermore – for she was “a wife and mother now.” A letter back from Aunt Jane offers heartfelt condolences.  By that age, already a published author and resigned spinster, Jane must have understood the gravity of those early life decisions she had made unwittingly.

 I haven’t read all of her books yet.  I’ve started those at the beginning of her career when she was prime marriageable age, and I’m working my way chronologically to the one she left unfinished, Sanditon, when she died at age 42.  I hope she has it all figured out by then; many generations of women are counting on her.