The Mark of Zora

I posted a note on Facebook today about the birthday of Alice Walker, the novelist and essayist, certainly best known for The Color Purple.  A quick story: When the film came out in 1985, Joyce and I went up to see it in Shaker Square at the Colony Theater, which, at the time, had not yet been chopped up into mini-screening rooms.  The auditorium was full that night; Joyce and I were just about the only Caucasian faces present.  Anyway, remember the moment when Celie (Whoppi Goldberg) is shaving Albert (Danny Glover) with a straight razor out on the porch?  In the dark, Joyce and I heard all these disembodied voices crying out: Cut him!  Cut him!

Anyway, it was Alice Walker who went in search of Zora Neale Hurston's long-forgotten grave in the 1970s and settled on a spot in the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida.  In 1975, MS magazine published Walker's essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," the piece which greatly helped restore Hurston to her rightful place in American letters and culture.

Hurston's Fort Pierce home

In 2007-2008, Western Reserve Academy (where I was teaching) added to the English III curriculum Hurston's most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book I had not read in a long time.  Compounding that ignorance: I knew virtually nothing about Hurston herself (1891-1960).  So in the summer of 2007, Joyce and I went on a Hurston Odyssey, traveling to Eatonville, FL, where she grew up, to Fort Pierce, where she lived her later years in virtual obscurity and where her grave was lost until Walker's hunt for it.  Her Fort Pierce home--now listed as a National Historic Landmark--is a very plain structure (see image).  When she died, those cleaning out her house were burning her papers when a passing policeman saw it, stopped, gathered up what remained, took them home, saved them for posterity.

When we went to the cemetery to see the grave, we couldn't find it--the cemetery.  So we asked a young man mowing his lawn where it was.  He looked at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain, then pointed about twenty feet to our left.  Duh.  It looked like just a big open field.  But once we realized where we were, we did not have trouble finding Hurston's grave.  It was well marked and maintained.

Back in Hudson, I read all of Hurston's published works and the best major biography of her--Valerie Boyd's 2003 Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Zora's politics shifted to the right in her later years (one of the reasons she fell from favor during the Civil Rights era); The Saturday Evening Post had even featured her in a big story in 1951 (see cover).

But Zora was a talent--and quite a personality.  People who knew her reported that when Zora was in the room, you noticed no one else ...

So thanks today to Alice Walker, for finding Zora, for allowing us, once again, to hear her remarkable voice.

A couple of links: http://zoranealehurston.com/

And perhaps her best known essay: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/how.html

A Dickens of a Time

Charles John Huffam Dickens turned 200 yesterday, and there were bicentennial bashes of all sorts here and there (check Google and see!).  Nothing, of course, to rival America's bicentennial in 1976 when the country was awash in red, white, and blue for months before Independence Day.  But impressive, for a writer ...

It's hard nowadays in this electronic age to imagine how popular Dickens was.  He was Harry Potter-popular in the era when transportation and communication were pretty much the same thing. ("I've got news for you, and I'll send it by horseback.")  I read in some of the biographies about the long queues of people outside stores when the latest installment of one of his serialized novels came out.  And here?  Dickens visited us a couple of times, drawing enormous crowds in all the American cities he saw--and received important visitors, literary and otherwise (Poe had a chat with him in Philadelphia).  And hordes of people would wait at the docks for the latest shipment of, oh, Little Dorritt to arrive from England.  Until I saw Potter-mania (for Book 7), I'd never witnessed anything like that for a writer.

I first got to know Dickens through the movies.  An old film of A Christmas Carol scared me sleepless (I was in elementary school) after I saw it on TV--the image of Scrooge scraping dirt away from a gravestone and seeing his own name there terrified me.  But later--in Hiram--the college cinema scheduled a showing of The Pickwick Papers, and my brother Dave and I laughed ourselves sick at the froggy little servant who announced it was dinner time.

But then ... ninth grade ... Adventures in Reading ...   Inside that anthology was an abridged version of Great Expectations, and I simply could not read it.  Mrs. Ruth Browning, our young teacher, was very rigorous about reading--she gave check quizzes almost every day (can you imagine the cruelty!), all/most of which I, uh, sort of, you know, like, failed?  I tried to read it--I really did.  But the sentences were too long; the main character's name--a boy--was Pip, for chrissake.  My eyelids were in full rebellion, dropping like broken window shades after a sentence or two.  (Mind you, this is not so bad as it sounds: remember--Dickens' sentences are long!)

I HATED GREAT EXPECTATIONS!  I HATED CHARLES DICKENS!  I WOULD NEVER AGAIN READ A DAMN WORD THAT SADISTIC BEARDED BASTARD EVER WROTE!

A few years later, I was in an English Lit class at Hiram College.  I read the syllabus with dread.  And with good cause.  There it was--"Charles Dickens.  Great Expectations."

The same evil book by the same satanic writer!  I thought about shifting my major to something else, wondered how badly failing grades on Dickens quizzes would affect my GPA.  Probably wouldn't be good ...  But I couldn't think of any other major that would let me read books with dirty words in them, so I resolved to stick it out.  (I couldn't drop: the Brit Lit survey was a requirement.)

And (remember: it's getting close to Valentine's Day?) I fell in love ... with Charles John Huffam Dickens and Great Expectations.  I loved the book, ate his sentences like snack food, laughed, cried, spilled out just about every emotion I had, like dumping over a lazy susan.

Why?

I guess I was just ready.  I was older (a manly, virile, ripped, sophisticated 19 years old).  I'd read more.  I don't know.  But it clicked.

And I would go on to read all of Dickens, some of them several times.

One memory: When I went with the Aurora High School Marching Band to Disney World (in the late 80s?) as a chaperon, I was reading Bleak House.  It was Memorial Day at Disney, and about 150 degrees, and as crowded as that part of my brain that holds memories of things I regret.  I found a solitary seat at one of the outdoor restaurants and sat there reading Dickens, sipping a Diet Coke.  Ah!  Luxury!  While Disney-hordes swarmed around me.

Okay, another memory: In 1995, the New Yorker published this cartoon with an allusion to The Old Curiosity Shop.  I took it to class one day and asked the kids to write a quick explanation of the joke (I know--sounds a bit cruel and pompous--but I remember trying to be non-threatening about it).  Here are the results (something I wrote awhile ago):

I received 130 answers, all wrong.  Eight-five kids either turned in a blank sheet or a perfunctory I have no clue.  One angry lad wrote, I don’t know, and I don’t care.  Of the forty-five attempted answers none came closer than Little Nell is a character in a book who is sick and needs a doctor.  One wiseacre quipped, The person who is drinking is Little Nell; another offered, The little glass on the counter in Little Nell.  So much for literary immortality

Sinclair Lewis, a.k.a. "Red"--Today's Birthday Boy

It's the birthday of Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), the novelist best known for Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith (which, home with the mumps, I read in high school; coincidentally, it's about a doctor), and Elmer Gantry (my parents agonized, then yielded, and let me see the film about a philandering preacher--can you imagine?!?--when it came to the Hiram College Cinema in 1960, my junior year in high school).

A few years ago, a former Kent State professor of mine, Dr. Sanford Marovitz, told me about a sort of dystopian novel Lewis had written, It Can't Happen Here, 1935, a cautionary tale about a fascist takeover in America--from within.  It's eerie--and some of it reads as if it were cut-and-pasted from today's news.

I never taught a Lewis novel--though my colleague at WRA, Peter Fry, taught Babbitt but was not pleased with the experience.

A coincidence that I will write about another time: Lewis grew up in the same town as Wilfred Hetzel, who used to travel around to schools (he came to Hiram High when I was there) doing exhibitions of basketball-shooting--bouncing balls in, drop-kicking from mid-court, etc.

Hemingway has a vicious caricature of Lewis in Across the River and into the Trees, his novel of WW II.  Lewis had problems with his complexion, and Hemingway lets this Lewis-like guy have it: The scene is in a bar in Italy--"They looked at the man at the third table.  He had a strange face like an over-enlarged, disappointed weasel or ferret.  It looked as pock-marked and as blemished as the mountains of the moon seen through a cheap telescope and, the Colonel thought, it looked like Goebbels' face, if Herr Goebbels had ever been in a plane that burned, and not been able to bail out before the fire reached him.  ... The man looked as though he had been scalped and then the hair replaced" (87).  Nice, eh?

Below is a little account of a visit to Lewis' hometown, Sauk Centre, MN.  It's part of my teaching memoir--not yet published ...

1 July 2006.

            Joyce and I have driven west to Sauk Centre, Minnesota, boyhood home of Sinclair Lewis.  On the way, we stopped in and near Chicago to see some sites related to F. Scott Fitzgerald.  (One of his early loves, Ginevra King, lived on Ridge Road in Lake Forest; her house is still there.)  I’ve just finished Richard Lingeman’s recent biography of Lewis, and for reference I’ve brought along Mark Schorer’s massive 1961 volume about “Red,” as Lewis’ friends called him.  I’m planning to read Lewis’ major novels.  On the recommendation of one of my former Kent State professors, Sanford Marovitz, I’ve already read Lewis’ uneven but powerful It Can’t Happen Here (1935), a novel about a fascist takeover of America—from within.   I read Arrowsmith for the hell of it in high school; I read Main Street and Babbitt years ago.  I’m once again very interested in him.  I want to read and see everything.

            Just off I-94 at the Sauk Centre exit is the “Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center,” a small museum with some remarkable Lewis artifacts—like the urn used to transport his ashes back from Rome, where he died in 1951.  We find it staffed by a bored young woman equipped with an iPod and an attitude.  After we tour the place and take some pictures, I ask the attendant if she attended the local high school.  Well, yes, she just graduated.  And did she read any Sinclair Lewis there?  No, none at all.  She leans toward us.  Lowers her voice.  Some people think he’s a big deal, she confides, but lots of people around here don’t really like him.

            At the museum, we see a photograph of the old stone arch that supported the railroad that once ran through town.  Young Lewis carved his initials under that arch.  I want to find them.  We ask around in town, and at Jitters Java Café the owner calls someone at the historical society who says, yes, the stone arch is still there.  Tells us that the old railroad is now a bike-and-hike trail—the Lake Wobegone Trail!—though the portion we must use, west of town, is not yet paved.  Just walk west on the trail, we’re told.  You’ll find the stone arch.

            It’s a hot, humid day; it’s been a very wet spring and early summer.  We walk on a right-of-way that winds through the woods.  The grass is high; the bugs are attentive and hungry.  We see no stone arch, though we can glimpse, here and there through the dense woods and undergrowth, a stream.  We walk past the point where we know the arch must be, then turn to walk back to the car.  We’ve not found it.

            But on the return I notice that the stream switches sides.  I see it on the right, then on the left.  The stone arch must be beneath us!  (DUH!)  The area is completely overgrown, damp, muddy.  But I grab branches and saplings and lower myself down to the water.  And there the arch is, right below us.  But I cannot go under it, not unless I swim.  The creek is high.  We should have come in late July, early August, when there is no more than a trickle.  I take a few photos to show students.

            Joyce, who reaches for my hand, pulls me toward her.  My joy in this moment is pure.

"Top Ten Grammar Peeves" Redux

I got a nice long note from "Barry G," the originator of the "Top Ten Grammar Peeves"; Barry gently defended himself about affect-effect and plurals with apostrophes, arguing, basically, that these exceptions are rare.  Not so rare, really, but his "peeves" are one reason we need to be careful with words like never and always, both of which are, uh, always questionable in a subject as slippery and protean as a living language.  Not only had Barry G. used never in his plural-peeve, but he'd italicized it.

But I have no real quibbles with Barry G.; he sounds like the kind of guy who would be fun to talk with.  What really interested me were the myriads of responses to his peeves: many, many people weighed in on FB with their own examples of locutions that bothered them.  One of the points that Henry Hitchings made in his wonderful new book The Language Wars is that other people's "errors" really bother us; our own, not so much--in fact, we're often defensive about our own language.  Very understandable.  After all, language is among our most intimate possessions; it is the social clothing we wear even when we are naked.

As I indicated in my earlier post, a number of distinctions and rules my teachers pounded into me have vanished--will and shall, split infinitives--and as a book reviewer I see many writers using hopefully in the way that would have earned me a full-grade penalty in high school.  And just about everyone uses which to refer to an entire clause (I was taught to use it only to refer to single words, never like this--I brought candy to school, which was against the rules--which bugs me).

 Over my forty-five years in the classroom I developed a thicker and thicker skin about it (the other road led to madness).  I watched the rise of alot and alright; recently, I've seen an uptick in the use of single quotation marks instead of double (texting?).  Not many observe the difference between compare with and compare to. And what about that old rule about using a possessive adjective in front of a gerund?  (I don't like your taking my Snickers. Or I don't like you taking my Snickers.) And I'm pretty sure that by the time my grandsons are my age, the apostrophe will be dead--lying in the punctuation graveyard with the interabang (whose life was brief--questionable but definitely exciting).  The health club where I go has Mens over the locker room door ...  And does Womens appear over the women's?  Can't say.  Wouldn't be appropriate to look.

Interabang

Interabang or interrobang: a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. (from Dictionary.com)

Example: "Are you kidding me!?"  The mark never made it onto keyboards (it's not available as an Insert option in MS-Word, either), so we have to put both there--though I was taught never to do that.  Which is annoying ...

"O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!" (Ghost in Hamlet):Teachers, Tests, and American Miseducation

You know those moments in horror films when the Happy Family on Vacation takes a detour that doesn't turn out so well?  They end up in some remote town named Slasherville or Chainsawton, then, much too late, figure out that something is wrong?

We've made the same sort of turn in American education--with consequences that are every bit as deadly. It was the decision we made, late in the last century, that we would equate the value of an education with scores on standardized tests.  The result has been every bit as predicable as a horror film plot: We've ended up in terrible place--and there seems no way out.

Here's what I believe (know?) about how education works.  Most of us remember very little of the specific information we learned in school; we remember it only if we regularly need it for some reason (people in engineering, say, use higher math; by contrast,  I could do none of the problems now that were in my high school math books) or if it has some sort of personal significance for us (a poem that went straight from our eyes to our heart).  Otherwise, specifics go away--and quickly, too.

What we learn in school--in a good school--is to want to learn and how to learn.  (Actually, most of us begin school with the desire to learn--it's what humans do; good schools nurture that; mediocre and bad schools quickly kill it.)   But when test-taking becomes the curriculum, as it has in so many places, then the desire to learn can weaken, fade, die.  And we all suffer the consequences.

Let me tell you about some teachers I had.  None of them ever gave me a standardized test.  (In fact, I never took one till the College Board Exam my junior year in high school.)  None of them had dangling overhead the sword of standardized assessment.  All had that most precious gift for teachers--academic freedom.

Back in Adams Elementary School in Enid, Oklahoma, I had a wonderful fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Stella Rockwell.  We all loved her.  She read to us every day--after recess (if we were "good").  I heard her read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (somewhat bowdlerized, I later learned when I read them again!).  We wrote all the time.  Did reports on books.  Dressed up like historical characters and performed in skits.  We memorized poems.    We played number games.  Did simple science experiments. At times--and this is hard to believe--it was more fun being in her class than it was playing outside .

At Hiram High School (1958-62) I had several good teachers, but the one with the most enduring influence was Mr. Augustus H. Brunelle, who taught me English, Latin, and German.  I was not the most, uh, assiduous student in those days (I was positive I was going to be a professional baseball player in the summer, a Broadway star during the off-season), but Mr. Brunelle, I realized (years later), was an intellectual and professional model for me as I began my own career.  He read everything--and made us read a lot, too; he gave us lots to write about--graded it quickly; he demanded we do our best, was understanding when it was not always forthcoming.

At Hiram College (1962-1966) I had quite a few memorable professors--but two of them, Prof. Abe C. Ravitz and Charles McKinley--were especially influential.  Dr. Ravitz (from whom I took seven courses) was very demanding (we often read a dozen to fifteen novels for his courses), seemed to have read everything published since Gutenberg and Caxton, and brought to the class a cerebral manner and wry wit that just, well, turned me on.  And Dr. McKinley, who taught me everything from freshman English to Ulysses (he succeeded with the former, failed with the latter), remained a life-long friend and supporter.  When he knew I was speaking at WRA, he used to come sit in the balcony and listen--then joke that he'd give me a B+, a grade I earned from him more than once.

In graduate school at KSU--well, Dr. Kenneth Pringle I will always remember because it was in his great class on American Transcendentalism in the summer of 1969 that I met Joyce Coyne, who, in my post-school years, has become my finest teacher.  And Dr. Sanford Marovitz, who taught American literature courses at Kent, was yet another person who showed me that an intellectual life can be an exciting one.

And now I wonder: What would had I have been like if I'd had to suffer through today's brain-numbing curriculum?

And what would those wonderful teachers have been like if they'd had to practice their art in the intellectual vacuum of today?  If Mrs. Rockwell couldn't have let me dress up like Davy Crockett (not on the test), if Mr. Brunelle couldn't have played recordings of Robert Frost (not on the test), if Dr. Ravitz and Dr. McKinley and Dr. Marovitz couldn't have ... 

And what if, in my own career, I could not have taught Shakespeare to my eighth graders (not on the test) or The Diary of Anne Frank (not on the test)?  What if I couldn't have let kids write what they wanted to on Fridays (not on the test)?  Or write plays with me that we would produce (not on the test)? Or perform radio plays over the school PA system (not on the test)?  Or ...

O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!

My Father and Mt. Hood, 1937

In a recent Facebook post, a former student, Matt Weaver, mentioned that he was on Mt. Hood.  That reminded me of my father's story about climbing that mountain, a story he'd told my brothers and me many times.  And then one day--years later--I decided to try to find out if the story were true.  And what I found, I published as on op-ed piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 15 June 1997.  Here's the text of that piece ... 

Note: My father passed away on November 29, 1999.

MY FATHER'S MOUNTAIN

My father was born in 1913 on an Oregon farm.  One of eleven children (the second eldest), he struggled to help support the family when his father died in 1931.  In the depths of the Depression, he worked his way through college.  He served as a U. S. Army chaplain in World War II, then again during the Korean War.  He completed his doctorate after Korea, then spent his life teaching in colleges and universities.  Now 84, he lives in retirement with my mother in Pittsfield, Mass.

When I was a boy, my father several times drove our family back from our home in Oklahoma to his old stomping grounds in the Beaver State.  He enjoyed showing us the little town of Milton-Freewater (where stood the family farm that was lost to the bank in the Depression), the Pendleton Woolen Mill, the Columbia River Gorge, Portland, Crater Lake, the rugged and rocky Pacific Coast.

But the most spectacular sight of all—the favorite of my brothers and me—was Mt. Hood, a somnolent volcano, snow-covered year-round, that towers 11,239 feet about 40 miles east of Portland.  Hood is part of the Cascades, a range that features, among others, Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens.

When there is no industrial haze or cloud deck to obscure the sight, Hood is visible for many miles.  As you drive west on I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge you catch occasional glimpses of it, first as a mere bump on the horizon, then as a massive shoulder of ice and snow.  At other, hazy times you can drive all the way to Portland and not even know a mountain is near.

At Hood River, Ore., you can leave the interstate and take Rte. 35 to a road that ascends the mountain 6000 feet to Timberline Lodge, a rustic log-and-stone structure built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Depression and dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt himself in September 1937.  (The lodge is familiar to movie fans as the setting for Stanley Kubrick's production of Stephen King's "The Shining.")  Timberline is now populated year-round by tourists and hikers and skiers—the latter can be seen navigating its slopes even on August days that approach 100 degrees in Portland.  I remember my boyhood delight in throwing summer snowballs at my brothers.

I do not remember how old I was—rather, how young I was—when Dad first told us that he had once climbed Mt. Hood.  But I was probably not yet 10.  Even today I remember some of the details of my father's story.  He was with a few friends; they underwent no special training, carried with them no special gear.  They climbed and returned in a single day.  Near the top they encountered an unexpected blizzard that so obscured their vision that they nearly stepped off a cliff into thousands of feet of empty space.  And at the summit stood a wooden shack.  Inside was a logbook where they all signed their names.

My father could not climb a mountain now.  A series of strokes has slowed him so severely that a simple set of stairs is struggle enough.  From the living room to the kitchen is a hike up Hood.

I have been back to Timberline a number of times in my adult years.  I breathe deeply the crisp air, buy souvenirs (coffee mugs, postcards, T-shirts, and the like), and I gaze up at the summit that my father once conquered and try to imagine doing so myself one day.

Last summer I was in the gift shop at Timberline and saw something I'd not noticed before: a large black-and-white photograph of the summit, taken in the late 1920s, a bit before my father's climb.  But what grasped my attention was the little shack—just as Dad had described it.  I purchased the photograph, had it framed, and gave it to my father for Christmas.  He promptly hung it on his bedroom wall and now invites all visitors to see the summit of the mountain that he mastered years ago.

Late last winter I began to wonder: Is it possible that the logbooks still exist?  Perhaps even the one my father signed?  Could I acquire a copy of that very page?  I fooled around for a while on the internet until I located a Timberline Lodge home page.  I sent an e-mail inquiry.

On March 4 I received an answer: "Alas, the shack at the top of the mountain was blown away by a typical Northwest storm many years ago.  It is assumed that the book you are looking for blew away with the shack."

Oh well.  I told my dad about the fruitless search and soon forgot about it.

But one day this spring I received a phone call from an enterprising ranger stationed at Mt. Hood National Forest, Jeanne Ahern.  She had seen my e-mail and was intrigued.  She would do some additional searching, would keep in touch.

Again, I filed my hopes away, not expecting much.

She called again.  Did I know what year my father climbed?  Perhaps the specific date?

I did not.  Nor could my father remember.  My mother guessed it was probably in 1936 or 1937.  I speculated that—because of the blizzard—it was either early in the season, or late.  Ranger Ahern thanked me and hung up.

A few days later she called with the news.  They had found his name.  He had reached the summit of Mt. Hood nearly 60 years ago, on August 9, 1937, accompanied by James Earl Ladd, Kenneth C. Hendricks, and L. E. Rinearson—names my father could no longer recall when I asked him about his climb.

A few days later I received in the mail a photocopy of the page he had signed that long ago day.  I took it to Kinko's, re-copied it on sturdy, attractive paper, and had it framed for Father's Day.

And then I wrote long letters of thanks to Ranger Ahern, to her immediate superior, and to Mazamas, the mountaineering club in Portland that maintains the records and whose employees searched through dusty records, name by name, for "Charles Ed. Dyer, Freewater, Ore."

I don't know that I will ever climb Mt. Hood.  My father was 24 when he did it; I am 52.  Although I can jog a few miles without requiring emergency medical assistance, I know I'm not in the kind of condition that Hood demands.

But I would love to stand one day at the summit of that mountain—perhaps with my own son, who, coincidentally, is now 24.  I would sign my name in the logbook, and then I would turn toward the sun and shout my thanks to my father.  And to my mother.  And to Jeanne Ahern, Ranger, Mt. Hood National Forest, who brought into our lives a moment of surpassing joy.

MEMORIZING POEMS, LEARNING BY HEART

At the local health club, I ride an exercise bike most day.  Thirty minutes.  About ten miles.  It's boring.  (I will not note that I ride but get nowhere; I will not add that this is a Metaphor for Life.)  So what do I do to pass the time?  I recite poems I've memorized--silently, not even a mumble.  Mumbles bring the trainers over to transmit complaints from others whose workouts my mumblings have disturbed.  Tell that old guy to shut up!  Things like that.  I have enough poems in my head that I have three different thirty-minute "sets" I do.

Last year, while I was still teaching, I spoke to a school assembly about my memorizing of poems; it was on the occasion of my learning Poem #100 (I now am up to about 115 or so).  Here's the text of that talk (mildly edited for a general audience).  I had a PowerPoint that went with it--but it's not here.  Sorry.

Daniel Dyer

WRA Chapel/Morning Meeting

8 November 2010

By Heart

          The older you get, the more stuff happens.  And most of it, believe me, ain’t all that good.  Yes, the road of later life has detours, potholes, long empty boring stretches, marauding outlaws, bridges out, road-kill (fresh and otherwise), roaming ravenous beasts named Age and Illness, Loss and Dotage.  It’s just … AWESOME!

          But every now and then I pass on this disintegrating road an odd, amusing milestone … and I want to tell you a story about one of them.  It involves that heart up there at the top of the page—and that most beloved homework task of all: memorizing poems.

          I still remember the first poem I ever memorized, back at in Enid, Oklahoma, at Adams Elementary School, in the early 1950s.  But I can’t repeat that poem here in this historic Chapel.  It was a dirty, nasty, filthy little playground rhyme that started out “Fatty, fatty, two by four” and involved a bathroom door.  My smutty little satanic third-grade friends and I thought it was fall-down funny.  But let’s leave that one back in the Sooner State …

          The first poem I had to memorize in school was “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—a.k.a. “The Night Before Christmas."  [Here, I recited some of it.]  I’m sure many of you know some of that one.  For an Adams School Christmas Program I recited it for the parents, many of whom—the whole time—cooed like contented pigeons.

          Later, in high school, there were others, but the only one I’m certain I learned then was A. E. Housman’s “When I Was One and Twenty”: When I was one and twenty, / I heard a wise man say, / Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away ….”

          But by the time I began teaching in the mid-1960s, memorizing was falling out of favor in schools.  A surprise: For centuries, you see, it had been a standard part of the curriculum.  Students in Shakespeare’s day, for example, memorized vast chunks of literature—in Greek and in Latin.  Book were rare, expensive.  Memorizing took their place.  Learning things by heart.

          And did you know that we can trace that expression—learning by heart—back to the ancient belief that the heart was the seat of memory?  Although biology and neuroscience have taught us otherwise, I still like the idea that we keep what we’ve learned—those things we care about—in our hearts.

          Anyway—because memorizing had become “bad” back in the 1960s, I didn’t ever ask my classes to do it, early on.  But—sometime in the mid-1970s I resurrected the idea, and I’m not even really sure why.  But then I started teaching Shakespeare to my eighth graders over in Aurora, and I decided to have them memorize a bit too.  We read The Taming of the Shrew, and I had them learn one of its famous speeches.  “Well come, my Kate ….”

          And soon I was having students memorize other things, too.  I’d come to believe, you see, that truly educated people have some famous words in their heads.  Not that there’s much call to recite something in its entirety these days.  (It’s not likely that a flight attendant, say, is going to summon you up to the microphone and ask you, mid-flight, to entertain your fellow passengers by reciting all of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: As you know, they’d much rather watch Jackass III-D.)  Still … when you know something—by heart—and when hear or see a mention of it later, something goes abuzz in you—like a tuning fork.  And that buzzing gets nearby neurons a-throbbing, and who knows what that can lead to?  Not that it matters—I just like being both sober and buzzed—don’t you?

          The human mind can memorize a stunning amount of material.  Performers could recite all of The Odyssey from memory.  Shakespeare’s leading actor, Richard Burbage, played a different major character in a different play every day, six days a week.  My dad had a university colleague who each Christmas recited from memory all of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—nearly 30,000 words!  And some of you may remember Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451?  At the end of that futuristic novel about the government’s burning of all books, we meet characters who are books—people who live in hiding, people who have memorized entire texts so that they will not die out.

          As many of you know, I still require my English III students to memorize a dozen pieces a year, including all of “To be or not to be” and a number of other things by famous American poets like Emerson and Holmes and Longfellow and Dickinson and friends.

          Well, I’ve always memorized these poems along with my classes.  On the practical side, it makes grading their quizzes much quicker, but I soon discovered that I just plain enjoyed knowing those poems.  I started putting them on little cards, carrying them around in my pockets and backpack to glance at whenever.  I started learning other poems, too—not just the ones I gave my students.  Among them were ones with special significance to me—like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” a poem I remember my grandmother reciting to me more than sixty years ago.

          And so my pile of cards started to grow.  And because I knew I would forget them if I didn’t review them—you retain in memory only those things you want to keep there, the things you work to keep there—I started reciting them in my head several times a week—when I was walking somewhere, or riding the exercise bike, or even driving—hey, it’s safer than texting!

          And then last summer I started to wonder how many I’d learned.  I put all the cards together and counted them.  There were about ninety of them.  Ninety!  I couldn’t believe it.  I was sort of proud of myself, then decided: I wanna know 100.  There’s something about a milestone like that, isn’t there?  A hundred just sounds a lot better than ninety.  Even though it’s not.

          So I went through anthologies looking for poems I really liked—or ones that meant something to me—picked out ten more, started learning them.  And a couple of weeks ago, I finished #100—a couple of those shorter speeches from Hamlet: the one that has “what a piece of work is a man,” the one with “‘tis now the very witching time of night,” the one with “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”  Here’s a list of all of them …

          But when I reached one hundred, I didn’t know quite how to celebrate.  What do I do?  Buy a helium balloon out at Acme?  Post the news on Facebook?  Shoot some video and upload it to YouTube?  Jump on Twitter and Tweet about it?   Rent an airplane to sky-write over Hudson: DYER REACHES 100!  And then … an epiphany: I’ll write a poem about it!  And I’ll make the whole school sit there and listen to it!  Awesome!

          So here goes … and—no!—I don’t know it by heart!

Oh, you can have your Londons,

Your Parises, your Romes,

And you can have your Hudsons, too,

‘Cuz I got all them poems!

Yeah, some of them are sorta short,

But some: enormous tomes—

And I have got a hundred now,

A hundred freakin’ poems.

Now you might think it’s awfully hard

To cram inside your domes

So many lines, so many rhymes,

So many famous poems.

But it doesn’t take an Einstein—

Require a Sherlock Holmes—

It takes no Stephen Hawking, no,

To learn a hundred poems.

(If Dyer can do it, that old man,

Then you can do it, Homes—

Just get a book, and take a look,

And pick some purty poems!)

No, it’s no harder than it is

To drink a drink that foams—

All you need is to decide:

“I wanna learn some poems!”

You copy/paste one on a card—

A sort of mobile home—

You take it with you everywhere,

Your precious little poem.

And soon … like we have Hudson, and

Alaska has its Nome,

And Canada its Winnipeg,

You have got your poem!

 

You then take newer cards along

Wherever your heart roams,

And soon, before you know it,

You’ve got one hundred poems!

Now that I’ve got that hundred,

Perhaps you think I’m done?

But I have got another card—

It’s time for one-oh-one!

Yes, there are strange diseases, and

Some stranger sick syndromes,

And I still suffer from the worst—

Memorizing poems!

But there’s a simple message that

I wish here to impart:

That what you’ve truly learned in life

Lies anchored in your heart.

The ancients knew it; I have learned it—

One of life’s best guides:

An educated mind and heart:

True wisdom there resides.