Coincidence

 

The past few days, Coincidence has moved in with me.

Yesterday, for example, I wrote here about how when son Steve and I went to the Klondike in 1986, he was 14 and I was 41.

And just a few minutes ago a former student from years ago, Reza Rais (a math whiz), messaged me to see if I knew when that would happen again—what year would it be when we would once again reverse our ages?

I had no idea, so Reza quickly informed me it would be every eleven years since 1986: 52 and 25 in 1997, etc. I was impressed—though also depressed when I realized that I would probably not live to see (m)any more such anniversaries.

This morning our son, Steve, texted us a photo of a white butterfly/moth (?) he had photographed while it was resting on his back porch. It immediately reminded me of Frost’s great sonnet “Design,” which I’d memorized a couple of years ago. I texted him a copy; he liked it. (Link to sonnet.)

But here’s the one that really got me—and needs a little explanation.

Many years ago I began reciting to Joyce a couple of poems on our anniversary. One is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” (Link to Browning.)

The other is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” (Link to sonnet.)

Okay, this morning Joyce had an 8:30 appointment over in Twinsburg, and she is always wary of leaving me alone for any extended period (my wavering, woozy body), so I assured her I would be in “my” chair in the family room, reading, until she got home. I promised.

I’ve been reading the past couple of days Anne Tyler’s 1998 novel, A Patchwork Planet. About 9:15 Joyce had texted me from Twinsburg that she was leaving, and no sooner had she driven in our driveway than I read this in the Tyler book:

“I remember this one sonnet I learned, the first week I was at Renascence. It started out When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes ...” (87).

I almost fell out of my chair—which would be quite an achievement since I was pretty much slumped in the comfy leather thing.

(I told Joyce; she was dazzled, too.)

Of course, the older you get, the more you do, the more you read, the more such experiences you will have. It’s not long before you begin to expect such things.

But I could not have expected this particular one—an allusion to our anniversary sonnet on the page before me the moment she returned from her appointment.

Sourdough Anniversary

 

It was almost exactly thirty-five years ago when our son, Steve (14) and I (41!), stood on Midnight Dome above Dawson City Yukon, center of the Klondike Gold Rush. (Behind us you can see the Yukon River winding off toward the west, and at the left, the much smaller Klondike River flowing into the Yukon.)

We were there because of The Call of the Wild, a book with which I was becoming increasingly obsessed, a book I’d just taught to Steve and his fellow 8th graders back at Harmon School (Aurora, OH). The book, if you don’t know, deals with a dog, Buck, that is taken to the Yukon to serve as a sled dog.

Steve and I had flown from Cleveland to Seattle, from Seattle to Juneau, from Juneau to Skagway, Alaska (where some key scenes in Wild occur), and rented a car to drive the remaining couple of hundred miles to Dawson City via the Klondike Highway (of which a large portion is dirt).

Along the way we saw and photographed a lot of key locations (including some related to my own great-grandfather, Addison Clark Dyer, who had gone on the Rush and filed a claim that earned him enough to put a down payment on what would become the family farm near Milton-Freewater, Oregon).

Before and after that Dawson City jaunt we spent a couple of days in Skagway, where we hit many of the shops. And in one of them we found some packets of dried Yukon sourdough. I bought one.

And it has changed my life.

When we got back to Ohio, I tried it out for the first time—watched it rise (as it is supposed to), then used the directions to mix my first batch of bread.

A dud. (I did something wrong?!?) But I ate every damn molecule of it, anyway.

The next time it was better, and gradually I adapted the bread recipe until it became what it is today, thirty-five years later.

Over the years I’ve added various flours to the starter—some from Lanterman’s Mill (in Youngstown, OH, a mill once owned by Lanterman relatives on my mother’s side of the family), some from Garretts Mill in Garrettsville, Ohio (where my mother taught English at the high school, where my younger brother graduated from that very high school, where I played baseball one golden summer).

My routine for many years was to feed the starter on Saturday night, then get up the next day, separate and save some of the starter for the next time, and begin the baking process with the rest of it.

During that time I also baked sourdough waffles, pancakes, muffins, pizza dough, biscuits. In fact, when my 8th graders were reading Wild, I would take into school one day some small biscuits, enough that every kid could have one.

But as I grew older (okay: old), it became increasingly difficult for me to do all the work the baking required. I had cancer; I had severe balance problems.

And so just about a year ago, I froze the starter, figuring I’d never use it again unless some sort of miracle occurred.

One did.

Joyce, who knew how much I missed that weekly routine, offered to help.

And so I resuscitated the starter (which took some time and patience), and soon we were back at it. Joyce would do a lot of the assembling of ingredients and implements, would help me clean up. I still mixed and kneaded and shaped and baked the dough.

Joyce has helped me avoid all the turning around—an action that has put me on the floor more than once.

I could not do it without her—as I tell her every week.

I now do only the simplest bread recipe, occasional waffles. And that’s it. I just don’t have the stability to do the others.

Our younger grandson was here visiting yesterday; he’s twelve, has just started seventh grade, and has become very interested in sourdough. So ... maybe ...? Our older grandson, Logan (16) loves the loaves, and I give him one every couple of weeks.

So ... thirty-five years have flown by. Our son is now 49, has one son who is two years older than Steve was when he stood with me on Midnight Dome back in August 1986.

Sourdough starter, by the way (when cared for), is immortal. So here’s hoping that it will live on after me, carrying with it some memories of Alaska, Steve, Joyce, and me. I could hope for no greater legacy!

Some rising sourdough bread dough
that is more than ready to shape!

Yesterday’s loaves.

Dyer’s Revenge

What to do on the last day of school?

The first year I taught middle school in Aurora, we had an activity day—outside. It featured a softball game between the 8th grade boys and the faculty. I played third. And a lot of the kids were surprised when I gobbled up a grounder and fired the ball to first. I was only a few years away from thinking I’d have a baseball career. That dream was over, but some fragments of dream-clouds remained, enough to impress some of the kids.

Other years we did other things—wish I could remember.

But my last, oh, decade at Harmon School, I would put on my syllabus for the final marking period the words Dyer’s Revenge for the last day. Kids would ask me what that was (those kids who looked at the syllabus!), and I would reply, ominously, “Just wait and see!”

So—especially that first year—there was some concern about what was going to happen.

There needn’t have been.

After some end-of-the-year wrap-up occurred (returning textbooks, etc.), I would announce that it was time for Dyer’s Revenge. And the room would go silent.

And this is what I did: I would go around the room—in no particular order—and say some things about each eighth grader. Good things. Things I remembered from the year, encouraging things I had to say about every kid.

All praise—no negative criticism.

I thought of things kids had said, what they had written, how they had behaved, what their presence in my room had meant to me, etc. At times I had a hard time preventing my voice from breaking, shattering with emotion. 

You see, by the end of the year I was very close to those kids. A lot of them had been in our 8th Grade Farewell-to-Harmon Show, performed only days before, a show that featured skits, singing, dancing (choreographed by my great colleague, the late Andy Kmetz). Each show ended with the entire cast singing “Bye, Bye, Harmon!” (The tune was “Bye, Bye, Birdie!”)

I wrote the skits and the lyrics, and various musical talents I knew at the school played the piano—including the great band director Gary Brookhart.

Most of us were weeping when the finale ended.

So, anyway, “Dyer’s Revenge” ended up being, really, “Dyer’s Affection for You,” and I never once had any trouble thinking of what to say about every single kid.

That’s the kind of place Harmon School was ...

I Miss Teaching

I do. I miss teaching.

I know that now I am totally incapable of doing it—in a variety of ways. Although I’m a veteran of approximately forty-five years—and although I’ve taught 6th graders through college undergraduates—I know that, physically, the job is beyond me—especially in these Covid years. I so much admire the educators who are working in this viral environment.

But even if I were younger—and had my health from those years—I don’t think I could teach in a public school. And the reason is the same one I had when I retired from public school (the first day I was eligible—mid-January 1997): standardized tests. They have narrowed and constricted the curriculum so that teachers no longer have the liberating academic freedom that I had most of my career. I’ve seen its effect on our grandsons—and it ain’t good.

This is not to say we teachers were wild and crazy then (okay, sometimes we were), but the principals I worked for (and I worked for two wonderful ones at the middle school in Aurora, Ohio: Mike Lenzo and Jerry Brodsky) did their best to hire intelligent and creative people—of all sorts—and let us do what we did best.

Reigning us in now and then. When needed.

But I miss the interactions with kids, the things I learned from them, the things we were able to achieve—together. The plays I wrote (sometimes with them) and directed. The clubs I sponsored. 

Some of those students have become life-long friends—and thanks to Facebook for that.

Even though some of us have drifted (far) apart politically, I never argue with them. I don’t want to lose their friendship. And arguing about Trump or Biden is just not worth it—not to me. Not at my age. Not in my condition. I’d rather argue with the TV set—which, of course, is just about as effective!

Of course, I don’t miss all the paper-grading—and I had a lot (I was an English teacher). I don’t miss lunch duty—though it was sometimes lots of fun. I don’t miss having four classes in a row. I don’t miss having multiple preparations. I don’t miss having 30 kids in a class (or more!). Etc.

But I do miss—once they and I became accustomed to one other—the fun we had, the discoveries we made, the looks on their faces when I introduced them to something they didn’t think they’d like (Shakespeare!) but did. And on and on.

And I really miss the last day of school. We teachers all used to go out to watch the buses depart on the final day—to say good-bye to the kids—and, believe it or not, some of them were weeping.

As were some of us.

Reuben, Reuben ...

 

Don’t bother to ask where this one came from. It just seems that my brain, like a dripping faucet, is dropping memories into my sink of consciousness, where, I’ve discovered, the only way to clean them up is to write about them.

So today (somehow) I began thinking about that old camp song I used to know: “Reuben and Rachel”—remember it?

I didn’t, either—not all of it. But Good Old Google supplied the rest of it for me, though I quickly discovered that there are many varied alterations of the lyrics.

Reuben, Reuben I've been thinking
What a grand world this would be
If the boys were all transported
Far beyond the Northern sea!

Rachael, Rachel I've been thinking
What a grand world this would be
If the girls were all transported
Far beyond the Northern sea!

Oh my goodness gracious, Ruben,
What a sad world this would be,
If the boys were all transported
Far beyond the Northern sea!

Oh my goodness gracious, Rachel,
What a weird world this would be,

If the girls were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea.

As I recall (from church camp?) the girls would sing the first and third verses, the boys the second and fourth. I also recall a kind of competition in volume, especially with the first two verses.

These were the junior high years when not all boys and girls ... got along. Many of us boys wanted to get along, but, especially in the early years, did not want to reveal that to the other boys—or to the girls. And we boys assumed the girls had no interest in us, as well.

(Many of them didn’t, I later learned. Many of us were still pre-pubescent, and many of the girls were more interested in the manly sophomores.)

(By the way, here is a link to some singing of the song—the lyrics are somewhat different because I pasted here the original lyrics and music from 1871–pictured at the top of the page!)

A far older song than I’d thought—but it still continues to contain its original notion, that the world would be a lousy place without, you know, those other people whom we somehow find ... attractive (after we’re through hating them).

As I would discover.

Too Much Reading?

I’m starting to think I read too much—or, perhaps, read too much “serious” fiction. It’s starting to depress me, for much of it shows what inadequate creatures we are. To say the least.

I just today finished a 1988 novel by Anne Tyler (Breathing Lessons) that doesn’t really have in it a single admirable character. The focus is on Maggie, a mother and grandmother; she works as an aide at a nursing home—and loves it. (I guess that’s good!)

But she doesn’t get along with her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law (who has left her son with their infant daughter), and so many others in her life. She just can’t keep her mouth shut—cannot keep from interfering in other people’s lives, etc. Virtually every conversation quickly disintegrates into an argument—usually a bitter one. Doors slam. People go away for years.

Sigh. I’m worn out with grief.

And I wonder as I read Tyler (and others of the principal writers of our day): Are we really as screwed up as we appear to be?

We probably are. Most marriages end in divorce; most families experience fractures of one kind or another; most parents lose touch with their children as they advance (decline?) into adolescence.

When I was teaching at a boarding school, I had weekly “dorm duty.” Supervision. In the days before cell phones. And I would regularly hear boarders engaged in bitter conversations with their parents on the old phones in the hallway, saying things I could not imagine having said to my own parents—not that I didn’t think such things. It’s just, if I had spoken them, I wouldn’t be alive to type these sentences right now.

Of course, “serious” literature often deals with the Dark Side. Hamlet’s family didn’t get along too well—nor did King Lear’s—nor did Othello’s—nor did many of the families in ancient literature.

So you have to dive into comedies to get some relief, recognizing, as you do so, that these stories are dealing with families that aren’t “real.”

A few years ago, teaching at a private school, I decided the juniors should have, as their “summer reading,” Tracy Letts’ recent Pulitzer winner, the play August: Osage County. And as we read it, I realized how well it connected with so many other works we would be reading that year: Hamlet, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, etc. They were all, to one extent or another, about families. Their struggles. Their failures—sometimes their fatal failures. And so we focused that year on families in literature.

So ... solution to my darkness today? Maybe I should go buy a Bugs Bunny comic.

But what if Elmer Fudd actually shoots Bugs this time?

Unswung Porch Swing

We have a nice wooden swing on our front porch (looks kind of like the one in the pic)—big enough for two people. We hardly ever use it—during the initial Covid outbreak some of our family would use it when they visited while we sat at the other end of the porch, a safe distance away.

Twice a year—in fall and in spring—our son and older grandson come up to remove it and replace it (guess which task occurs when?). They store it on our screened/windowed back porch so that the snow doesn’t pile on it in the winter; they bring it out again when it’s safe.

Joyce and I used to do that remove-and-replace job until a few years ago when my instability (physical, not mental!) rendered such a task impossible.

When it’s really windy in the months it’s on the porch, it will sometimes bang against the porch railing nearby. If it’s at night, and I am trying to sleep, I curse. During the day I try to ignore it—though if it’s Nap Time, I curse. Using words my mother probably didn’t know—or at least pretended she didn’t.

Mom didn’t like cursing of any sort. “Hell’s bells!” was about the strongest execration I ever heard emerge from her.

I learned the word execration in an American lit class at Hiram College with Dr. Ravitz. It comes from an account of the crossing of the Mayflower. In William Bradford’s story he tells about a young, ill-tempered seaman who was forever uttering “grievous execrations” aimed at the poor and sickly on board.

My mom, less tolerant than Bradford, once smacked my face when she thought I’d said the word hell when what I’d said was help (I was talking about helping in the kitchen!).

Dad never swore around the house, either. But because he’d been in the Army during WW II and had grown up on a farm, we figured he knew plenty. But restrained himself at home.

My brothers and I? We’re a far different story.

One of the pleasures (for me) of reading/seeing Shakespeare is recognizing the naughty (though out-of-date) words he uses. I’m sure they entertained the groundlings at the Globe, as well.

So somehow I began with a porch swing and swung into Shakespeare and profanity. What a swinger I am, eh?

And how well I know that all stories end up leading to Shakespeare eventually.

Library of America

Sometime ago—last year, after the advent of Covid—we cancelled our long-time subscription to the Library of America.

We’d been subscribers for many years (since its beginning really)—one slipcased volume a month—of classic works in American literature. There are volumes there that you would certainly expect—volumes by Poe, Jack London (!), Philip Roth—and there are others that are ... surprising. (I’ll not mention them—don’t want to offend anyone!)

Anyway, we bought them all. And I read quite a few of them—or used them to check details for something I was writing. Some were books I’d meant to read for a long time—e.g., Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. Others were books I didn’t own in any other format—books by Twain, Crane (a rhyme!), Melville, Faulkner, and others.

Fiction, nonfiction, poetry—they’re all there, and still accumulating in other folks’ homes, a volume a month. 

They feature a chronology of the author’s life (a detailed one), endnotes, and the like. Very useful.

But, as I said, about a year ago, we resigned our membership. I was not doing well medically, and I just wasn’t sure how much more I could read.

We also gave up a lot of magazine subscriptions we’d had for a long, long time (I think I posted earlier about this)—Atlantic, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and numerous others. We also converted our newspaper subscriptions to digital editions. Things were piling up, you see, and I wasn’t reading them. I just didn’t have the energy to do more than I was doing.

That’s something I never understood as a young man—how things ... slip away later on. You have a grip on your life—and then you don’t. It seems you look away for a brief moment—and when you look back again, the world has changed. You have a wife, a son, a daughter-in-law, two grandsons. Many of your relatives, friends, classmates, and even former students are gone.

I startled myself the other day when I posted a picture of a family gathering back in 1957—and only my two brothers and I remain. Gone are our parents, my aunt and uncle, their daughter, my great-grandfather—even the family dog.

And I find myself shuffling down the hall with a walker and sleeping half the day. Visiting doctors more than anyone else.

We no longer go to the movies (we spent years of going once or twice a week)—play productions (we attended frequently)—concerts—restaurants with friends and family. 

Instead, I sit here typing sad words onto a glowing page, words which I will soon send off into an invisible sphere that didn’t exist until I was very near retirement.

I feel more and more like Rip Van Winkle, waking up each day, discovering my dog is gone—as is the life I had been certain was permanent.

Be-Bop Baby

Last night one of those songs from, oh, more than sixty years ago popped up into my brain (like a long-submerged ping pong ball)—and refused to depart until I wrote about it. (Funny thing, that.)

I remembered a few of the lyrics—“she’s the gal for me-e,” etc. But not enough to satisfy me. So ... here I am, the servant of Google, trying to rediscover who performed the song—when it was released—and what the lyrics are.

I just discovered the singer was Ricky Nelson (that was not one of the names I’d thought of), the son of Ozzie and Harriet, the son who became, for a while, a pop star and heartthrob. He looked like a genial Elvis.

The song, written by Pearl Lendhurst (never would have guessed a woman had written the suggestive lyrics—goes to show my daffiness), was released in mid-September 1957 (my year in 8th grade) and reached #3 in America.

Link to a performance by Nelson.

I’m not sure how I felt about Ricky Nelson back in 8th grade. I had really liked the old TV show Ozzie and Harriet (which ran from 1952-1966), but when RN became a favorite of many of the girls, I think my jealousy overcame my fondness for the old show. And maybe I hated him for a while? Could be.

Another, less Darwinian part of myself, liked him. His songs were easy to understand, easy to dance to (even for a less-than-adept dancer like me), and annoyed many adults—which, of course, is a great attraction for the young and the restless.

The song, I recall, was a favorite at our dances and sockhops, and so I must have danced to it countless times throughout my early teens. And during its period of popularity it seemed to have been on the radio about every two or three minutes.

Now ... how about those lyrics?

A Bebop Baby A Bebop Baby*
A Bebop Baby she's the gal for me
She's got plenty of rhythm got plenty of jive
And when we dance I really come alive
My love for her is so tender and sweet
My heart starts pounding every time we meet
My Bebop Baby still in her teens
Just as sweet as she can be
My Bebop Baby in her old blue jeans 
Is the Bebop Baby for me
A Bebop Baby for me
A Bebop Baby A Bebop Baby
A Bebop Baby she's the gal for me
I'm gonna find her tonight
I'm gonna have a time
I want that baby to be mine all mine
A big day is comin' for my baby and me
The day she says she belongs to me
My Bebop Baby still in her teens
Just as sweet as she can be
My Bebop Baby in her old blue jeans 
Is the Bebop Baby for me

The part that got me last night: “still in her teens.”

Hmmm, what did that mean?  And “I’m gonna find her tonight”?

A little creepy?

Or just, you know, Young Love? Of the Innocent sort.

Let’s assume Innocence. That way, no one gets in trouble ... right?

*The record itself says “Be-bop”—the lyrics make a single word of it.

The Old Man Loved the Tribe

 

Lanterman Falls
Mill Creek Park; Youngstown, OH

My great-grandfather Lanterman loved the Cleveland Indians. He had lived on his farm for about 90 years, his farm on Four Mile Run Road in Austintown, Ohio, near Youngstown.

Every night and/or day he would sit at his kitchen table and listen to the radio broadcasts, sipping his coffee—or maybe a touch of his favorite, Old Overholt rye whiskey.

He was related to the Lantermans who operated Lanterman’s Mill down in Mill Creek Park. Years later when the mill was up and running again, I went there, bought some flour, and stirred some into my sourdough starter. So traces of it are still there, I would guess.

We visited his farm a couple of times when I was a kid (his wife had died before I was born). Once I saw him behead a chicken for supper—and it freaked me out, running around without a head! I was actually terrified, but nonetheless ate some for supper.

His son, my great-uncle Bill, a WW I veteran, died in 1951, and his was the first funeral I attended. I was about 7. We sat up close, and I was certain that I saw him breathing in his open casket.

I whirled to my mother, “He’s breathing!” I whispered to her.

“No, he’s not,” she whispered back.

“But Mom ...”

“Shshhhh,” she replied. And so I did.

Later, it got to the point when he couldn’t live on his farm, so, for the nonce, he moved in with us in Hiram, Ohio. Took my room. I was less than happy about that.

Dad would occasionally drop him off at the horse races near Cleveland—he always managed to make a few bucks.

But soon he became too much for us to handle, and he moved to Enid, Oklahoma, to be with his daughter (my grandmother). Soon he was bed-bound and annoyed—and not just about his physical deterioration. He couldn’t get the Tribe games on his radio and had to settle for the Texas League.

And my grandfather Osborn, now and then, had to drive 50 miles north to Kansas to buy his Old Overholt—Oklahoma was “dry” in those years.

He died in 1963, my freshman year in college; he was 96 years old. He always used to say when he got to be 100, he was going to start heading back the other way and find “a rich widow in poor health.”

They shipped his body back to Ohio, and he was buried in Four Mile Run Cemetery, close to his farm. His wife and son are there, too.

Our family attended the service at the funeral home. All I remember is that the man who ran the service recited Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”—a poem I memorized a few years ago in his honor.*

We went back to see the old farm several times. Then, one day, we saw it had been cut up into a duplex. On a later trip it was gone altogether—and a brick apartment building stood not far from the site where I saw a headless chicken running around. No sign that it had ever been a farm.

So many years ago ... yet I remember clearly his love of the Tribe, his loyalty. It was a bond we would share ...

My great-grandfather Lanterman is on the far left.
Dodge Court; Hiram, Ohio, 1957.
Brother Dave is keeping a grip on the collar
of our dog, Sooner.

* Crossing the Bar 

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

What I Sucked at in High School

Not long ago I was laughing with my older grandson (about to commence his junior year in high school) about the classes he will be taking. He’s talented in math and science, and he’ll be in AP courses in those subjects. I told him to name his courses, and I would tell him the grade I would have gotten in high school.

He did.  I said “F” after almost every one—except English (B) and Phys Ed (A).

I can’t say we had the greatest math and science teachers in high school, but that didn’t prohibit quite a few classmates from pursuing those subjects in college and beyond.

But I just didn’t “have it.” I took calculus my freshman year in college, and I did so poorly on one test that my professor—honest to God—wrote on my paper, “Can I help you cry?”

One of our high school science teachers was Forrest “Woody” Miller, whom the school also persuaded to be our baseball coach. He knew about as much about baseball as I did about chemistry.

I was the catcher, and during the pre-game warm-ups I had discovered that Mr. Miller could not hit a grounder to the third baseman—try as he might. So I would throw grounders to him instead. That seemed to satisfy everyone.

My senior year I signed up for chemistry (I’ve told this story before), but quickly changed my mind when Mr. Miller told us to memorize the periodic table for the next day.

I laughed.

“All right, Dyer,” he said. “Write a 500-word essay about why you shouldn’t laugh in chemistry class.”

I couldn’t help it: I laughed again.

“All right,” said Mr. Miller, “a thousand words.”

I did not laugh.

That night I went home and figured out, in the process, that maybe, in college, I should be an English major.

I wrote the whole punishment essay in one 1000-word sentence, all of which was one big digression. “I, Daniel Dyer, born in Enid, Oklahoma, on November 11, 1944, while my dad was overseas for World War II, a war that would see ....” And so on. I ended with this, “... now know that I should not laugh in chemistry class.”

I handed it in the next day—and dropped chemistry.

Signed up for advanced math—and actually did pretty well, considering. (A good teacher that year.)

I wasn’t really worried, you see, because back then I was sure I’d soon be the catcher for the Cleveland Indians (uh, Guardians).

Didn’t work out.

In college, I took the minimum requirements for math and science (you heard about calculus); I also took two courses in biology (liked them) and one in chemistry, where the professor, one of my father’s best friends, gave me a break and gave me a B.

And that was it.

In grad school I had to take a course in statistics, but by then I had learned to work, and I emerged with an A.

Maybe that would have impressed my grandson—after he stopped laughing.

Dwelling on Spelling

 

I was a pretty good speller. But not the best in our classes in the Hiram Schools. We had one teacher, Mr. Peter Hamar, the science teacher, who somehow got assigned to teach us 8th grade English. He seemed ... befuddled by it all, and, as I recall, we did grammar and usage worksheets all week. I don’t remember reading a book for him—or writing a paper. But surely we did?

Every Friday, Mr. Hamar held a spelling bee in his class, and there were no surprises. The same kids were there near the end; the same kids sat down pretty quickly and talked about cars or sports the rest of period. Well ... whispered. Three or four good spellers would outlast me.

I observed the same phenomenon when I began teaching middle school English: The same kids won; the same kids departed early. I remember that the first year I taught, one of my students won the Portage County Spelling Bee. Lots of people congratulated me ... why? I had nothing to do with it!

I also discovered this: Good spelling wasn’t always associated with high intelligence. I had very bright kids who couldn’t spell well, some not-so-bright who could. It had to do, I later learned, with visual memory.

Dictionaries don’t help bad spellers. Often they have no idea where to begin searching. This came brutally clear to me when I had kids writing on computers (late in my career). Spell-check would offer a couple of options, and kids would often call me over and ask which choice they should make!

So I mostly worked on spelling in each kid’s written compositions. They would do revisions after I’d marked the papers, and that’s how I saw improvements.

True, I gave them ten vocabulary words to learn each week; spelling was part of it. But they could misspell all ten words (no one ever did) and still do okay on the quiz—they had to use them in sentences and so on. Not ideal, I know.

Back to Mr. Hamar ... we had English class in the science room, and he always wore a white lab coat. The periodic table was over the blackboard. In the back was an automobile engine. He had a vacuum bell jar and told us that if we put a frog in there and started pumping, the frog would explode.

Now that put some ideas in our sick heads. (Didn’t do it!)

But here’s what a couple of friends and I did do: Someone brought into school a toad he’d caught. We decided we would dissect it for extra science credit. So we subdued it (killed it) with a sedative, spread it out in the pan, pinned its extremities down, and proceeded to start removing things.

Lunchtime arrived. And down we headed to eat with our friends.

When we came back up, a startling sight greeted us: The toad was kicking at the pins that held it; its heart was pounding. We were shocked—but not too much to put it out of its misery.

Haven’t thought of that in years, thank God. Forgive me: I was 13.

Mr. Hamar was a wry, funny man. Maybe in his twenties? Thirties? We didn’t tell him what had happened with the toad. I think we got the extra credit.

And, by the way, I could spell dissect ... a lot of classmates couldn’t.

Why Isn’t This Book Reviewed More Prominently?

Back in mid-June this year I read this new novel by Brian Hall, a writer who pretty much dazzled reviewers with his Fall of Frost (2008), a novel about poet Robert Frost. The research underlying that book is impressive, and I liked it so much that I decided to invite Hall to Western Reserve Academy, where I was teaching at the time, to spend a day with us. April 10, 2010.

He visited classes, gave a speech to the assembled student body, signed books later in the school library (see image at the bottom of this post).

He was great.

Let’s back up a little. Hall had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard (English) and then headed off to ride his bicycle around Eastern Europe. His first book, Stealing from a Deep Place, 1988, was about that trip—from England to Italy.

This was the first of his books (fiction and nonfiction), each as different from the other as dolphins from sharks: Each lives in the ocean, but that’s pretty much the principal similarity.

Following closely was The Dreamers, 1989, his first novel that takes place in Vienna and features an American grad student, doing some research there, who gets involved with a young woman and her son.

Then—The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia, a work of nonfiction whose title and subtitle pretty much tell all.

Next, The Saskiad, 1997, is about a young girl, Saskatoon, 12, who has adventures in her mind and imagines having them with other explorers, like Marco Polo.

Also 1997 (!) was more nonfiction: Madeleine’s World: The Biography of a Three-Year-Old (his own daughter).

In 2003 came the first novel that seemed to catch on with readers and critics, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, fiction about the Lewis & Clark Expedition, fiction that was based on extensive research and earned some prizes, including being selected as the best novel of the year by the Boston Globe and some other papers.

Some more years passed (2008) before Fall of Frost, which earned, as I said, many fine reviews in major newspapers.

And now The Stone Loves the World, 2021, which has not received, in my view, the attention he and it deserve. Not only has Hall shown himself to be a significant writer, but he has written yet another book that’s rich in research, skillfully and imaginatively conceived and written, and important in so many ways.

It’s about a young woman, Mette (a programmer) who disappears, and her mother (Saskia!) goes looking for her—all over the place. We travel through some generations, through states, countries. And we end up in some strange places.

“It reminded him of something he had read years ago, comparing long-married couples to plants with interpenetrating roots" (38).

"Schiller said it: Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain" (221).

"'Of course we humans have enormous brains. We are able to become aware of these genetic tendencies and can choose not to follow them. But most humans don’t seem to enjoy using their brains, or value its use in others’” (399).

A fairly cerebral novel—but SO much worth the effort of reading ...

... and reviewing.

 

“Down in the valley ...”

I hadn’t planned to do a post today. But just now, reading Anne Tyler’s wonderful 1985 novel, The Accidental Tourist (yes, I’ve never read it), I came across this: Our protagonist, musing about San Francisco, thinks this—“...floating on mist like the Emerald City, viewed from one of those streets so high that you really could hang your head over and hear the wind blow” (254).

The final words are from the song “Down in the Valley.” (Link to Burl Ives singing the song.)

And I nearly wept. Here’s why ...

On our family car trips when I was a boy, our father (1913-1999) would always sing that song when we topped a hill and saw a valley below. And when we crossed the state line back into Oklahoma (where we were living), he would lead all of us in singing the title song from the musical Oklahoma!

My father was not just some ordinary singer. He had a wonderful high tenor voice—not just high but a tenor, solid and stable and lovely. (It’s one of his many great qualities I did not inherit!) We have some recordings of him singing Back in the Day: We played his “The Lord’s Prayer” at our son’s wedding (1999), at Dad's own funeral, and my mom’s funeral (2018).

All the Dyers wept.

He was an ordained minister (Disciples of Christ), so we heard him sing in church a lot—both when he was preaching (he often performed a solo—my older brother sometimes on piano), and, later, when he was in the choir.

He was born on a farm in north-central Oregon, and when we went to family reunions, we heard him sing with his (many) brothers and sisters—they all sang wonderfully well.  (Where did that damn gene go!?)

Even when he became infirm, he would sing in the choir at their church in Pittsfield, Mass. (the same church that Melville had attended, the church that poet Richard Wilbur attended).

He couldn’t walk well—couldn’t proceed down the aisle with the other choir members—so when they began their entrance, he would step into his place as they were coming toward him. And then sing like an angel.

One of my fondest memories: When he was lying in the hospital in Pittsfield, near death, several of us were in his room, and one of us said something about the song “The Lassie o’ Mine,” a song he used to sing for Mom.

And, eyes shut in bed, he launched into that song, nailing the high-C at the end. Unwavering, pure, heart-wrenching.  (Link to song; this version ends on a low note ... sigh.)

Need I mention the condition of all the Dyers’ eyes when he finished?

So when I read Anne Tyler’s passage today, I felt myself wing out of the book into the 1950s, into the back seat of the Dyer family car, heading for Oregon, rounding a bend somewhere in, oh, Utah, seeing a valley spread out below us, hearing Dad’s tenor soaring into “Down in the Valley.”

And I had to close Tyler and do this post ...

Vacay, etc.

The other day, a good friend replied to a meme-question on Facebook, something like this: WHAT POPULAR WORD OR EXPRESSION DO YOU NOT LIKE?

“Vacay,” he answered.

That one doesn’t really bother me much, probably because I don’t hear it all that often.

Others do.

Rents, for example, annoys me. Short for parents. I’m not sure why; I guess it just seems (to a grumpy old parent like me) a bit ... dismissive?

Adulting I find kind of amusing—as if it’s something you can elect to do part-time later on. I think that’s probably true. I’ve known a lot of adults (sometimes me!) who act so only occasionally.

Of course, there are those shorthand expressions we use on social media, expressions that have migrated into our speech and writing: LOL, WTF, OMG, etc.

I think about how my mother would have reacted to these invasions of the language she loved. A longtime English teacher, she disdained all of the new terms that I was using in childhood and adolescence—even something as innocuous as cool. For Mom, language was frozen, stored in the freezer, thawed, and used only traditionally. (She corrected me continually.)

And I kind of understand. I don’t like some of what I hear and read these days:

• All right and alright used interchangeably.
• Using one another to refer to two people (instead of each other).
• There are countless others.

But, as I said, language is not frozen. It’s changing all the time, and there’s not a thing we can do about it except rage, rage against the dying of the light, if we so choose.

The difference between who and whom is evanescing.

The difference between will and shall.

The uses of apostrophes.

The uses of semicolons.

And on and on.

But remember: We made all of this up; English has been evolving for a long, long time.

Dickens, for example, used semicolons in ways that I was taught were “wrong.”  Em dashes, too.

Emily Dickinson’s dashes and hyphens and whatevers are a sight to behold.

It’s common now to hear young people say (and write) I graduated college instead of I graduated from college.

And on and on it goes—just as it has ever gone—and just as it ever will.