Being Ten

In the foggy throes of early morning writing, I tire of my conscious mind-editor telling me to say things a certain way for clarification – clarification, clarification – that’s all she says; and I might may as well call her name her Clara F. Cajun from now on.  Fearfully, I’ve noticed lately of late that Clara the Editor is faster than my morning pencil can write – she’ll edit out a way of saying things before I, the pencil-handler, can get to that spot on the page, making it look like appear as though her words came first and were meant all along to be mine. Once I arrive with my pencil, I have to mark out her fancy, proper way of saying things – and say it my way. Who to trust?
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. . . A ten-year-old child standing in line outside the cafeteria for school lunch – my first day of school in this tiny Western North Carolina town in 1966 – I, from Noo . . . Yowark, as everyone in North Carolina called my home state – and their cruel entertainment from listening to me speak – mocking me in order to solicit waves of laughter from each other . . . taking turns, one and then the other, taking turns running out of line to approach me and ask the leading question, “How old are you?”


School House Steps

 Not understanding at first what they were getting at, and suddenly fearful that fifth graders in the South were not 10 years old as I expected, but rather 9 or 11 (and that would have been a cruel tragedy that my mom hadn’t told me about before we moved there) – and so answering truthfully, having no other ploy at my disposal – truthfully – I always said, “Ten” – and that answer is what brought waves of giggles that swelled into roars of laughter as each scout returned to her spot in line, to the embracing circle of her group – over and over again. I didn’t realize until I heard one of them shout, “She talks proper!” – and then another one, “She’s fancy!” – that it was not what I said, but the way I said ‘ten’, with its short e-vowel sound, that induced such howls of Southern laughter.

The way I said it was not the way they said it – which may as well have had a ‘y’ placed after the ‘t’, making the word look like ‘tyen’ if written on the page, and sounding like a near synonym for ‘tin’ if spoken. If I were to have peanut butter on the roof of my mouth, and charged with the task of getting it off using only my tongue in a backward-to-forward motion, then the sound to come out would be tyen . . . tyen . . . This same equation goes for the word, pen – pyen, pyen . . . which I was to use far more frequently when I stopped being ten.

And so, having endured howls of laughter before and after I understood and deciphered why the fifth-grade lunch line laughed at me – I still had no better answer to give them.  I was ten.

There was a pointy-faced girl named Martha, though everyone called her ‘More-thaa’, and she was the ringleader of this lunch line charade, for I saw her egging on others to take their turn in approaching me, prompting them with the words they should use once they got to me, “Ask her how old she is . . . ” 

One time I saw ‘More-thaa’ perform a pantomine of a movie star reclining on her chaise, holding one side of her head in apparent boredom while looking up to the sky, saying, “I’m t--------n.” – and in place of the vowel sound she gave it a prolonged breathlessness, not even a real vowel!  It was so unlike me – what she did. 

The View from School House Hill

Martha eventually became my best friend in the fifth grade – though not beyond because of a tendency for female backstabbing – who to trust? – and not before I was made to endure many more weeks of life-changing discovery in the differences between North-to-South pronunciations – but this, not nearly so painful and memorable as that accusation of being proper – “like she’s from England,” as I heard one person say.  Even more cruelly, “She’s trying to be fancy” – which implied I was trying to be above them in those mysterious, ever-changing, duplicitous North Carolina mountains, when really I just wanted to be ten . . .

Ms. Robin

I think the Robin is the most forlorn of all the birds. I used to think of robins in terms of “a flock on the front yard” – harbingers of spring, as the old poets used to say – but what I have seen on my front lawn of latter years is the single robin . . . looking for her flock.

She stops upon a feeder or bench or post – and she looks. Last year, when I noticed this, I thought she signaled a flock on the way:  she, the designated scout, as I imagined her, must have arrived from more-southern territories to peruse the environs and by secret transmission to send messages of approbation to the rest of her group – and then to watch and await their arrival.

But her flock never came. That was February of last year – then came March, April – I suppose I lost interest in her for-longings after that.

The robins of my childhood arrived suddenly in great flocks that fed noisily upon bread crumbs I had put out on the front lawn. Who is this single, forlorn robin who perches on the feeder but hardly cares to eat from it? She’d rather watch for the flock that never comes.

In mid-February, other varieties of birds are busy darting, pecking, feeding, and preening themselves for mating season just around the corner. From them, I sense spring on the horizon.  I've read that some people believe Valentine's Day, and the love which it symbolizes, may have originated because of these signals which the birds give us. But Ms. Robin is depressed. She plans for no mate, preens for no season. She is the harbinger of a past century.

She’ll hop a one-quarter turn on the feeder to be sure her group is not coming from that direction – and then hop another quarter-turn to see whether this view might show better news – and once again, the quarter-turn hop – and back to where she began.

There is darkness in her eyes, tiredness from the endless search; her famed and oft-talked-about red breast is a stain she carries in front of her – rust – as though to say, this is what I’ve become.  A relic from ages past.

Day after day, she looks – the moniker, harbinger of spring, no longer her leading role . . . as though she too were looking for that harbinger of spring – where? When? How?

I Rarely Cook Anymore

I’m in recovery – not from cooking per se,
which I've said I enjoyed – but from two decades
of providing cooked foods to growing bellies,
three or four times a day – and twice that,
on holidays;

from that, I’m recovering.

And so, in this occasional silent kitchen,
I have discovered the art
of fermentation – sauerkraut, pickles, kombucha;
kefir, kimchee, and cheese; brines, beers, sourdoughs

from around the world.

I keep these vats and crocks and jars
bundled and stored in warm corner cupboards,
left to breathe on cool attic steps,
in vigil from pantry shelves where children have never climbed;

this is something I must do . . . life at its most elemental . . .
occurring,

growing where no one can see it . . .
readying to the day

. . . for sprouts.


Yogurt, sauerkraut, water kefir, rye sourdough, to name a few



The Sound of Music, Alive!

I’ve finished reading my first book of the new year, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers – by Maria herself – and it is amazing how like “The Sound of Music” it is, which I always thought was a mere fictional, romantic account of a novitiate nun who marries the wealthy widower, Captain von Trapp, and leads his seven children into a singing career and out of their Austrian homeland at the height of Hitler’s reign. Why didn’t anyone tell me, I wondered – during all those teenage years when the movie was popular and I played the album over and over again on our Magnavox stereo at home – why didn’t any adult say to me, Oh, it was true . . . I remember when the von Trapp family singers toured this country during WWII . . . I remember hearing about them on the radio and seeing signs for concert tickets . . . in fact, there was a story about the von Trapp family in a November 1947 edition of Life Magazine . . . why? I didn’t know that, when the movie ends and the von Trapp family leaves Austria, they actually arrived penniless in America, slowly began a family singing career that would take them across America, and ultimately settled in Vermont to become dairy farmers.

I had to read about it in the newspaper only two weeks ago on the occasion of the death of the oldest von Trapp daughter, Agathe, who died suddenly from heart failure at age 97 in Hagerstown, MD after a long career as a kindergarten teacher. She is the eldest daughter portrayed as Liesl in The Sound of Music, and made famous by the song, “I am sixteen going on seventeen . . . “  I was 16 at the height of my album-playing craze, and that song was a favorite. My eyes really widened when I read that Agathe had only recently published a memoir, Memories Before and After the Sound of Music.

I love memoirs by ordinary people whose lives take an unexpected turn of fate – and then spend many years reflecting on it before telling us what they think.  Their own wonder has finally found the words . . .

My plan was to read Agathe’s book (and I will read it next), but my quick research discovered that Maria herself had published a memoir many decades ago, in 1949 – and the first 124 pages of that memoir became (about 15 years later) someone’s inspiration for "The Sound of Music," first a Broadway play and then a movie.  Maria von Trapp sold all the rights to her story for only $9,000 -- with no royalties.

Maria admits in the book she was always a mischievous young person. One day when she was visiting a small chapel with a friend of hers, she playfully pulled the rope to try out the sound of the bell in the steeple. Looking at her friend, she said, “I wish I could become a writer after I’m forty!” She meant it as a joke, but her friend didn’t smile, rather asked Maria if she knew the story of the bell. “Which story?” Maria said.

Her friend replied, “The people say that once in a hundred years it happens if someone rings this bell while pronouncing a wish, that wish, whatever, it may be, will come true, provided the person is unaware of the legend. The people of this valley call it the ‘wishing bell’.”

And surprisingly, Maria only just remembered that incident when she sat down to write the first few pages of her reflections as a middle aged woman living in Vermont . . .

This spirited novitiate Austrian nun (with a tendency for severe headaches while cloistered in the convent) never expected to one day marry a wealthy Captain 25 years her senior – nor to become a stepmother to seven, birth mother to three – nor to leave Austria penniless and to tour America as a singer – nor to become a dairy farmer in Vermont once the family stopped touring. She never meant to write a screenplay of what we now know as "The Sound of Music" – in fact, the book was meant to be a penned therapeutic reflection of her life with Captain Georg von Trapp who had died of lung cancer only a few years after arriving in America. She wrote the memoir instinctively out of both grief and joy – and often reflects on the inability to distinguish between the two. She had now become a dairy farmer, a part-time voice instructor, and a writer – in Vermont – which she says brought her life to full circle because it reminded her very much of her homeland – and of the wish she had once made to be a writer.

Agathe (whom I will always think of as Liesl, forever sixteen going on seventeen . . .) will be buried alongside her father, Captain Georg von Trapp; her stepmother, Maria, who died of heart failure in 1987; and five deceased siblings (another four remain quite alive, in America) at the Trapp Family Lodge (http://www.trappfamily.com/) which is now a ski resort operated by Trapp descendents in Vermont – though it was originally named Cor Unum by Maria, which in Latin means something akin to “being of one heart.”

The Two Lists

Back to my kitchen table for writing after one week in bed, or closely-so – or mostly-so. It was a necessary time after holiday frenzy to get sick and then to regroup, replan, refantasize, review and revise . . . not the way I usually do, or like to do – which is to compose my New Year’s list by careful thought and pen, and in upright position. It was a different kind of list-making this year, different kinds of resolutions – taking place in the heart this time, not so much in the brain, but in the heart . . .

I lay in bed with the flu virus circulating through the brain cells and spinal fluids, even into the bone marrow, keeping my body down and in a death grip – that’s how it felt – like two burly monsters, one on either side, holding me down -- in a death grip. There was something heavy on top of me too – Presence, I called it when trying to explain the feeling to my daughters this week – it was Presence that sat upon me and spoke while the burly guys did the heavy handed work of holding me there – held me till I said . . . what? . . . I said nothing; they did all the talking this time, and not by words. Presence sat upon me till by some osmosis of weight and stealth and time, she made me listen – not with ears and mind, but with heart. The heart gives way, relaxes under such weight; it melts under degrees of heat; it capitulates by force of silence.

I recall a thing that came to me late one night as a bit of consciousness bubbled to the surface: the concept of Two Lists. In my delirium, I thought of lists – the categorization of things, plans, and circumstances, and of how I loved (in my previously healthy lifestyle) to organize my life and daily plans by such visual prompts. But in this case, as illness seared my body, I saw in my mind two lists -- one was titled Serenity, and the other Courage . . .

. . . and I thought of how many things I edged against in my life – and for how many years – things that were not meant to be etched there under Courage for they took only cheap stubbornness and anger to be there – and so I saw them extricated to that other side, Serenity. This is a place I’d have to start visiting in 2011 in order to make peace there; I‘ll have to sit beneath those things as I did beneath those two burly flu virus guys – I’ll have to make my peace with them, relax under their weight, just see by experience if I can still breathe once the peace is made – or not.

And so I started the mental work of moving things over to Serenity – actually, saw them being moved over – all those things that it hadn’t worked to rail against, no matter how long I tried . . .

This all took place in the dark aspects of night – 2:20, 3:36, 4:03 – these are a.m. hours – and each time I was raised into conscious thought I saw the lists had been redrawn or recharted for me. It was a thing going on betwixt the two burly guys as they fought it out over me, wrestled for the heart that still pumped itself feebly in between.  She, Presence, remained calm and on top of me.

I remember one time waking into conscious thought, a profuse sweat and rapid heartbeat enveloping me, and seeing how long and profound that first list had become – Serenity – and how squat and short was the Courage one.

I came out with three gems for the New Year – and those three things I remember – because when I woke to get out of bed sometime in the next day or two, I saw a notecard on which some words had been jotted down in delirious handwriting, a word or two to represent each thought – and I’m glad I found the notecard or I wouldn’t have remembered this experience (a reason to love lists) – they were a surprise to see at all – old friends, a tangible reminder of the two burly guys and Presence who paid me a visit on the cusp of 2011, left a few words – then freed me to go.

The Chatty Pile

I purchased a screech owl image for my Christmas card this year; it is perched on a pine tree branch, set against a backdrop of stars in a dusky blue sky. It seems to be cocking its head with something to say. I take one out of the box this morning, and doubt myself – have I become one of those people who send out an ugly Christmas card? Why did she consciously choose this card from all others on a display rack? That’s what others might think when they open it – one forlorn owl on a bent pine tree branch?

The Christmas card, I think, has gone the way of stationery, the abacus, the dial phone, and good handwriting. I’ve received a few cards so far this year; I might receive a few more – they are hurriedly signed, not annotated with news or good wishes; in one case the card was not signed but rather pre-printed with the names of all four family members.  I received one jaunty email “card” replete with dancing snowman in a Santa Clause suit.

I remember the rainy afternoon when I bought the screech owl card. I felt cheap that day and didn’t want to spend anything at all on a card that no one, I guessed, would bother to look at twice. That’s what I thought as I stood in front of the display of bird-themed cards in my favorite bird-supply store. One box had been mis-priced – or else it was a carryover from last year’s stock – for it was three dollars less than the boxes of cardinal-, woodpecker-, and geese-graced cards. That’s why I chose it – the owl cards cost three dollars less.

I always used to ponder long and hard about the handwritten message I would write on each greeting card, even if only to rephrase the pre-printed message inside. But lately I’ve begun to feel like “one hand a-clapping” – still trying to be personal and chatty in this age when so much more can be updated through email, facebook, twitter, text message, or whatever else. Yes, my owl of the silent night would like to say something new and personal – but she’s been rendered silent by all the up-to-the-minute clamor of the daylight hours.

I remember when my mother would set up the card table in the living room for a week in December in order to methodically work each evening on the Xmas card list – many pages of addresses, saved and refined over many years, written in double columns, front and back, a list folded and refolded to the tearing point – the names and addresses of all those many friends, old neighbors, distant relatives, church members, square dance partners, army buddies, high school friends, etc. Occasionally there would be a name crossed off – and that had meaning too. Also on that card table were several boxes of greeting cards . . . a red pen . . . sheets of postage stamps bearing the Madonna-and-Child image. These stamps were not self-adhesive, but had to be licked. That was my job, as a child, to lick and place the stamp just-so in the upper right hand corner of the envelope – and also to lick the envelope flaps closed.

At that time an envelope could travel for a penny less if its flap were tucked in rather than sealed to its body – and it could only be tucked in legally if no written words other than a signature had been invested inside. And so there were two piles of envelopes on the card table back then, those whose flaps were tucked in because they contained no personal message, and those whose flaps were to be licked shut because they contained a handwritten greeting – a chatty, personal, loving, long, and wishful annual message written in red ink on a separate sheet of tablet paper that was folded and placed inside the card – and that cost one extra penny to mail.

The two stacks towered higher each day on the card table as the annual job of keeping in touch progressed – the chatty pile, I remember, outpacing the other by twice or thrice until it fell over and had to be made into more piles.

Blackwing

The new Palomino Blackwing pencils which became available in October of this year are amazing – a rendition of the defunct original Blackwing 602 by Eberhardt-Faber which was made famous by John Steinbeck when he wrote East of Eden in the early 1950s. Whoever devised these pencils – copycat or new, they are the thing, and I know Steinbeck would approve.

Steinbeck spent two months in preparation and research for the writing of East of Eden – and a good bit of that research went into the pencil he would use. He declared the Blackwing 602 to be "the perfect pencil." He was said to sharpen 60 Blackwing pencils each morning so he didn’t have to stop writing in order to sharpen one over the ambitious six-hour workday. And he had an eccentric rule about how long they would last: “When the metal of the pencil eraser touches my hand, I retire that pencil.” He called the electric pencil sharpener a needless expense, but one he was willing to indulge because it saved his hands for writing.

The slogan on the original pencil is, “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed.”  I miss seeing that slogan on the new Palomino pencil, though it otherwise feels and acts the same as the original which went out of production in 1998. Steinbeck has much to say about the Blackwing in his book, Journal of a Novel, which is a sort of diary of his daily life and thoughts behind the writing of the Eden book. He talks freely about the daily interruptions from friendly callers, carpet cleaners, carpenters, an ex-wife, etc. And he has a lot to say about Blackwings – the speed, the glide, the precision, the hexagonal barrel, the extra length, the no-break points – all praiseworthy and practical reasons to use them. But as I sit to write with my few remaining Blackwing 602s – and now a full box of the new Palomino Blackwings from http://www.pencils.com/ – I wonder if Steinbeck ever brought the pencil to his upper lip, as I do, between paragraphs, to inhale the fragrant California cedar . . .

. . . transporting me to river banks where freshly caught salmon is smoked over embers of cedar and ash – bronzed skin toting planks for the smouldering pile – the rush of freshly fallen water, cascading white over rocks worn smooth by centuries of never ending sound – echoes of the source of all sound – a rhythm of dance, the beat of drums, the hum of cicadas at night . . . that is where my Blackwings take me . . . to that place where sound begins. Was Steinbeck ever there? Is he there now?

But I am brought back too quickly . . . the phone rings . . . the Bradford pear trees need trimming and here is the estimate and the prognosis . . . my phone caller sparks numbers at me, the time he will arrive, the cost . . . the heat pump clicks on, that noisome smell of burnt dust on electric coil . . . I should call to get those cleaned . . . I boil filtered water for tea, thinking about all these things . . . inhaling cedar once again, longing to take flight to that place where writing can begin . . .