On the Road Again, Part 2

Guess Which One of Us Is Goofy?

14 June 2013, 9:28 p.m.

We're in our hotel room in South Bend, Indiana, worn and weary but bewildered by all we've been able to do in our week away from Hudson.  I'll not write too much about Joyce's endeavors (that's her story), but in a bit I will mention a few things, just to give you an idea.

But first ... "my" part ...  We left Hudson on Monday morning and headed south and west toward Indianapolis, where we found the two houses where my uncle and aunt (Ronald and Naomi Osborn) lived while he was teaching at Butler Univ.--and then, later, at Christian Theological Seminary.  Their daughter, Virginia (Ginny), an only child, died in a freak auto accident in 1967, driving home on spring break with friends from Stephens College. A driver of another car died in a heart attack, drifted into the path of my cousin's car.  Killed her.  She'd been valedictorian of her class at Indianapolis' Short Ridge High School (the same high school, by the way, that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. attended) and had just completed part of her freshman year at Stephens.  Her death is a horror from which none of us ever really completely recovered--certainly not my aunt and uncle, who'd adored her.

From Indianapolis, we drove into the Spoon River country of Illinois, where we saw two homes once occupied by Edgar Lee Masters (one is open to the public) and visited other sites related to him and his work--including the cemeteries in Petersburg and Lewistown that inspired his powerful work Spoon River Anthology.  We saw his grave, as well.

And then ... off to Iowa, where I wanted to see some places important to my great high school English/Latin/German teacher, Mr. Brunelle.  I'd learned from the 1900 census that he and his family (he was only about six at the time) were living in tiny Miller,

Lutheran Church, Miller, IA

Iowa (my GPS, offended, refused to find such an insignificant place!), where his father was a farmer.  We found Miller all right (the GPS on my iPhone was willing), and chatted with a woman who'd lived there all her life.  She'd not heard of the Brunelles, of course (1900 was awhile ago!), but said if I'd send her more information, she'd find out what she could.  There are only a handful of houses there--a church.  And cornfields sufficient to feed the world.

In Sioux City, Iowa, we found (as I posted on FB the other day), the building that was Sioux City High School--now called "Castle-on-the-Hill Apartments--when Mr. Brunelle was in high school there.  We also found the house where he and his sister lived with their mom, a seamstress at the time, while he was in high school.  Dad had taken off.

We also went to the campus of Morningside College (his alma mater) in Sioux City and saw a couple of buildings that date back to the time of his tenure there.  We drove, as well, to the monument erected to honor Sgt. Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to die on the route.  It was December 1804.  He is buried on a high bluff above the Missouri River near Sioux City, and in the Morningside College yearbook I learned that  when Mr. Brunelle was a student, he liked to run to that monument, dedicated in 1901 (he was seventeen at the time), about two miles away from the Morningside campus.  Mr. Brunelle, the Founding Father of Jogging!

Then commenced "Joyce's part" of the trip--tracing the 1859 trip of John Brown across Iowa, west to east, as Harpers Ferry loomed in the near future.  We visited tiny towns (or town sites--some places are just gone now), saw the worn gravestones of Brown supporters in small cemeteries in vast cornfields, and ... but, as I said, this is her story, so I will let her tell it in her own way, somewhere down the road.  I know she will do some FB posts later.

Joyce and I have been making trips like this since ... well, since our honeymoon in December 1969, when we visited New Orleans so she could do some work on Kate Chopin and--on the way home--Hannibal, Missouri, for the many Mark Twain sites.  We have never taken a "vacation" in the traditional sense; we're always chasing ghosts, delighting in the flashes of phosphorescence they permit us to see.

Spoon River Middle School: 15

Mary Goodwin

           

Free Writing

I am new in this school.

And . . .

You will wonder about my name.  It sounds a little like Mary Godwin who became Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein.

Frankenstein.

I’ll tell you about it in a minute.  But first …

Many people think Frankenstein was the creature.  They are wrong.  Frankenstein was the monster.

Do you understand what I mean by that?  Have you read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein?  Did you know that it has a second title?  A Modern Prometheus.  Do you know who Prometheus was?

Most people who remember him know him as the Greek god who gave fire to human beings—and because of it got into a lot of trouble with Zeus.

But there’s another Prometheus story, the one Mary Shelley was thinking of when she mentioned him in the title of her book.  Using clay, Prometheus created the first men.  The goddess Athena then breathed life into them.  In Greek the word prometheus means forethought, thinking ahead.  That’s an ironic name, isn’t it?  Did Prometheus really think ahead when he disobeyed Zeus, the king of the gods, and created men?

Here’s what happened next: Zeus was so angry at Prometheus that he asked Hephaestus, the fire god, to make another clay creature—a woman.  Her name was Pandora.  Have you heard of Pandora?  Who later opened a jar (not a box) she was told never to open?  And out of that jar flew all the evils and diseases we now have in the world?  Zeus punished Prometheus by making the rest of us miserable.

But not totally miserable.

Because do you know what remained behind in Pandora’s jar?

Hope.  Hope remained in that jar.  And where would we be without hope?

And now I’m back to what I said before: Frankenstein was not the creature; he was the monster.

Victor Frankenstein was a chemistry student, a gifted one.  But he was not a doctor.  Never was.  He was fascinated with life and wanted to create it.  And so he did.  From the parts of dead people he put together a creature that was eight feet tall.  This was bad.  Do you know what was worse?  He never gave the creature a name.  Can you imagine being alive and not having a name?

Victor Frankenstein was horrified by his creature.  It was ugly.  Fearsome.  And so he did something even worse than failing to name his . . . well, his son.  He ran away and abandoned him.  He abandoned his own child.

So that’s what I mean.  Victor Frankenstein was a monster.  He created a living thing.  He never gave it a name.  He ran away from it.  Can you understand, then, what happened next?  The suffering?  The anger?  The revenge?  Even the killing?

I can.

So how do I know so much about Greek myths?  And about Frankenstein?

Oh, there is so much I know, so very much I know.

But I cannot answer your questions.  Not yet.  No, not yet.

Because, you see, I don’t quite trust you.  Not yet.  No, not yet.

Uncle John & John Deere

My uncle John Dyer died in Walla Walla, Washington, two days after my birthday in 2001.  He was eighty-four years old, and he'd lived in the Walla Walla Valley just about all his life--not counting the years he was in the Navy during World War II.  He was the fourth oldest of the seven surviving sons (one, Harry, had died in a childhood accident), about four years younger than my dad.  (There were also three girls in the family.)  They're almost all gone now--just my aunt Elna.

I've been thinking about Uncle John in the past couple of days because we've been driving miles through remote Iowa farm country (northern Iowa), and it seems that every little town has a John Deere dealer--and my uncle John worked for Deere most of his life.  He loved John Deere.  Images were all over his house; he cut the grass at his Walla Walla house with a Deere mower.  He loved to take his nephews down to the dealership where he worked (sales and service) and introduce us to his friends.  I cannot see an image of John Deere anymore without thinking of Uncle John.  (Oh, and we have a John Deere switch plate on one of our upstairs light switches.  Guess where we got it?)

A couple of Uncle John stories ...

• In the summer of 1979, son Steve (age 7) and I drove out to Walla Walla to see some of the ga-jillion Dyers who live in the area.  At a picnic at Uncle John's house, he was telling Steve and me that whatever we needed, he would give us.  Steve piped up: I want $100!  Uncle John pulled out his wallet and held up a hundred.  It was all I could do to keep him from giving it to us.
• During part of his career, he was John Deere's equipment troubleshooter.  When a farmer was having a problem, Uncle John would go solve it.  One day, he said, he got a call that a man had tipped over his combine on a side hill.  Uncle John drove out to take a look, crawled underneath to check for damage, and met--face to face--a rattler that had crawled under to get out of the sun.  What did you do? I asked.  Set a world record in crawling backwards out from under a tipped-over combine, he said.  I didn't ask what the old record had been.
• After my father died, I took some of his ashes out to spread in his beloved Walla Walla Valley.  Uncle John--who would live only two more years himself--drove me out to the site of the old family farm (lost during the Depression) near Milton-Freewater, Oregon, still a farm by the way.  We scattered ashes near a line of old black walnut trees that had been there when he and Dad were little boys.  We were standing there, in tears, reciting the Lord's Prayer together.  No sooner had we finished, than the farmer's sprinkler system kicked on, and we were both soaked and laughing by the time we got back inside the car.
• Driving back home after that, Uncle John drove me through some new housing developments in the Valley.  Why, he asked--rhetorically, would you look at some of the finest farmland in the world and put houses on it?  He shook his head, fed up with what he saw as madness.

What a great man, my uncle John Dyer.  Loved to fish, hunt, laugh until his head nearly exploded.  And John Deere never--never--had a greater champion.

Spoon River Middle School: 14

Omney Voar

Free Writing

I like to eat most any time,

At morning, noon, or night,

And if you try to steal my food,

You’ll wind up in a fight.

There isn’t much that I don’t like,

Not much that I won’t eat.

Dessert’s the very best, of course,

But also good is meat.

Pie I like and pizza too

But not with anchovies,

And I can eat a Brussel sprout

But mushrooms make me sneeze.

The green and yellow foods are not

The kind I like the best

But I will eat them off my plate

Along with all the rest.

At school I like to hide some food

Inside my swollen pack

So when the teacher turns away,

Then I can have a snack.

Yes, other kids know I have food

And sometimes beg for some,

But there’s no way that I will share,

Cuz sharing’s really dumb.

See, no one ever shares with me—

No person in my class—

So all I’d ever give to them

Is bark or twigs or grass.[1]

So kids all stay away from me,

Away from what I eat,

And I can nibble privately

Alone here in my seat.

---

[1] Dear Mr. Stratford.  I do not mean the kind of grass you smoke!

On The Road Again ...

We're off for a few days to see some sites related to family history, literary history, American history.  We drove through Indianapolis yesterday, stopping to see the two homes where my uncle, aunt, and cousin once lived (all three wonderful people, sadly, are gone).  He taught at Christian Theological Seminary (formerly part of Butler University) and spoke at our wedding on 20 December 1969.  (When our anniversary arrives, I will post his remarks.)

Thundershowers chased us across I-70 and up I-74, where we stopped at Crawfordsville, IN, for the night.  Today (Tuesday) we are heading to Lewistown, IL, where poet Edgar Lee Masters grew up (and where he is buried).  We'll see the town, his home, the cemetery he made famous in his Spoon River Anthology--and Spoon River itself (an actual river), which, I've seen on Weather Channel, is swollen with all of this rain.  There's also a museum in his former home in the nearby town of Petersburg, IL--which we will also visit.


Then, it's off to northern Iowa, where I will visit a few sites connected to my old Hiram High School English teacher, Mr. Augustus H. Brunelle, who lived in tiny Miller, IA, when he was only about 6.  We'll zoom then down to Sioux City, where he grew up and went to college (Morningside).  I've been there before but need to see some things I missed the first time.

Afterwards, we'll head down the western edge of Iowa, hit I-80, and gradually move east, following the trail of abolitionist John Brown in 1859, not long before Harpers Ferry.  There are numerous Brown-related stops along the way.

More later!

Spoon River Middle School: 13

Joe Britecote

Free Writing

Some kids swear they never dream.  Maybe they’re liars, I don’t know.  Maybe they dream only things they don’t want anyone else to know about, and so they just swear they never dream.  Sort of like self-defense.

Or maybe their dreams are just boring.  That could explain it, too.  I’ve found that boring kids have boring dreams.  That doesn’t seem fair, does it?  If you’re boring when you’re awake, you at least ought to be exciting when you’re asleep.

We learned in science one year that everyone dreams.  When you’re sleeping, your eyes start fluttering, and that’s when you’re dreaming—like your eyeballs are going crazy trying to see what really isn’t there . . . well, it’s there, it’s just not there, you know?  Sleep-scientists have experimented on people who swore they never had a dream.  The scientists wake these people up when their eyeballs start dancing, and you know what?  Those people, those ones who swore they never dreamed?  They report that they were just having the greatest dream ever …

I bet you’ve heard the one about how if you dream you’re falling (which everyone does) and you hit the ground in your dream, then you die.  Haven’t you heard that one before?  But think about it.  It’s stupid, really.  If you died in your sleep, how would anyone know what you were dreaming about?  I mean, just before you die, do you yell out, “I landed!  I landed!  So now I’m gonna die!”  Sometimes people just don’t think too much.  They just keep passing stories along, like counterfeit money or something.  Never recognizing how fake it is.

Here’s another example of how people don’t think.  Have you ever heard this one?  “If you eat a lot of food just before you go to bed, you’ll have sick dreams.”  That’s not true.  Your food dreams are no more sick than any other dreams.  What happens, see, is that all that food makes you sleep more lightly, you wake up more often, you remember your dreams.  That’s all.  Just think about it.

Sometimes people remember only parts of dreams—or parts of several dreams.  Because, you see, you usually dream more than once.  And they say that if you don’t write down your dream, or tell someone about it, it will go away and you won’t remember it any more.  They’ll fade away, like something you left in the sun too long.  This is pretty true, I guess—at least for most dreams.

But there are some you never forget, not even when you try.  I have that kind all the time.  I’m full of dream stories, as you’ll find out.

Here’s something else you might not know: Other kids come and tell me their dreams.  All the time.  I’ve gotten pretty good at telling what they mean.  But here’s a secret.  I don’t really know what dreams mean.  And I don’t think anyone else does either.

Like an example.  Lots of kids tell me about a dream where they’re naked somewhere, somewhere in public, usually—like in school, or at the mall.  Sometimes they’re really embarrassed, and they run around trying to find clothes to put on, and other people are staring at them like they’re sick or something.  Or they yell stuff at the naked kid.  And start chasing them, even.  But sometimes people don’t even notice the kid is naked.  And the naked kid sits right there in class doing whatever it is they usually do.  Or shopping, or playing baseball, or dancing in the gym.  No big deal.

Now, what are you supposed to think about that?  Here’s there kind of thing I tell kids who tell me their dreams of being naked.  You’re afraid of being naked because you’re afraid of people finding out what you’re really like.  Who you really are.

One time, in the library, when we were supposed to be working on social studies reports, I looked up and saw Jennifer Queen standing beside me.  This has never happened before, except by accident, like in the lunch line or something.

“Can I sit down a minute?” she whispered.  The air around my table completely changed.  Even her breath smelled like perfume.

Maybe I answered her, maybe not.  I was so shook up that it seemed that a guard dog in my throat was not allowing any words to get out.  I made some kind of noise that sounded like both a growl and a bark.  But she sat down anyway.  And I just sort of breathed her in for a while.  And hoped I wasn’t dreaming.

And then she told me about one of her dreams.  She was naked while acting in a school play in front of a big, huge audience.  (I tried like crazy not to imagine that, not right then.  I didn’t want to pass out.)  And everyone in that audience was somebody at school who didn’t like her.  (She didn’t give any names, and I didn’t ask—but I didn’t realize there was anyone who didn’t like Jennifer Queen.  She’s so gorgeous.  Man, who wouldn’t like her?)

Anyway, after she told me her dream, she said, “What does it mean, Joe?  I hear you’re good at knowing what dreams mean.”

I tried to clear my throat.  Did you ever drag a heavy trashcan down the driveway?  Well, that’s what it sounded like.  But I told her what I already said about naked dreams.

And when I did, she got this goofy look on her face, like I’d just told her the meaning of life or something.  She got all red, and then she did something that surprised me so much I nearly fell out of my chair.  She leaned over and kissed me—not on the mouth.  (Too bad for me.)  No, but a kiss, right on the cheek, right in the library, right where some other kids saw it, like Carny Voar, who nearly choked on the cupcake he was eating behind the notebook he propped up so the teacher wouldn’t see him pigging out in class.

And then Jennifer Queen said something that shocked me even more.  She said, “Joe, from now on, you’re my dream boy.”

I sat there in a goofy daze the rest of the period and didn’t bother writing down anything else about the House of Burgesses, which is what I was supposed to be doing.

Later, of course, I realized what she meant by “dream boy,” and I was kind of disappointed.  But I was hoping Jennifer Queen would start having weird dreams every night.  Every single blessed night.

Wonkdom

Today's word-of-the-day on Dictionary.com was wonk, and it reminded me that--years ago--I'd published a little op-ed piece about that word in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Some online searching located the piece from 13 September 1992.  (I was teaching at Harmon Middle School in Aurora in 1992.)  And--here 'tis, fresh from the days when wonk was just entering the public vocabulary:

On The Trail Of The Elusive Wonk, As In, 'Boy, Is That Guy A Wonk!' Why Not Pedant?Defined As "A Person Who Makes An Excessive Use Of Learning."

By DANIEL DYER

POSTED: September 13, 1992

PHILADELPHIA iNQUIRER

I learned a new word this summer. Wonk.

Wonk??

It was during the Democratic National Convention that several network floor reporters used the term to refer to Gov. Clinton, usually appending it to policy, as in "Governor Clinton is a policy wonk."

They acted as if everyone knew the word.

Wonk??

Then I came across the word in print. In an article in the July 27 New Republic, Sidney Blumenthal used it: "Bill Clinton can talk the talk and walk the walk, but he is never quite the perfect wonk."

The following week, Blumenthal's article about Gov. Clinton and Sen. Gore was headlined: "The Wonks."

Although I'd read the word, I didn't really know exactly what it meant.

(It takes no act of supreme cerebration, however, to infer that it is a near-cousin to "nerd" or "geek.")

Being something, I suppose, of a word-wonk, I scurried to The Random House Dictionary of English Language to confirm my suspicion - but found only ''wonky," a British slang word meaning "shaky, or wobbly."

Unfazed, I consulted The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Only a single 1918 usage of the word: "nervous, upset."

Mildly daunted, I tried A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.). Two entries:

* "yellow dog. A term commonly applied by foreigners to the ordinary chinese dog." Surely the network floor reporters and Blumenthal were not calling Clinton a yellow dog? This was an insult more Buchananian, or Gingrichy.

* "a useless seaman; a very inexperienced Naval cadet." Hmmmm. The governor, as I recall, elected not to serve in the military. Wrong definition.

Finally, I consult the Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions which defines "wonk" as "an earnest student."

So, if Gov. Clinton is a "policy wonk", it means he is a serious student of public policy who is excessively fond of talking about it.

But why wonk?

Why not pedant? Defined as "A person who makes an excessive or inappropriate show of learning," pedant is a perfectly serviceable word here - as anyone who heard Clinton's 52-minute acceptance speech can testify.

And "policy pedant" has even more alliterative appeal than "policy wonk."

Ah, but "wonk" carries with it the power of that hard terminal consonant so characteristic of other celebrated four-letter words.

In support of this hypothesis, two other slang dictionaries I consulted agreed that its origin may be "wanker," a 19th century slang word meaning ''masturbator."

I doubt that. Although it is conceivable that wonks, like wankers, provide pleasure only to themselves, I suspect my colleague was right when I asked him if he knew the origin of the word: "Sure," he sighed. "It's know spelled backwards."

Well.

Whatever the origin, the word has now been broadcast into millions of homes, and the governor, previously known as "Slick Willie," may now be called "Willie Wonka" - although, as far as I know, he has no interest in chocolate factories other than consuming massive quantities of their output.

No doubt we will soon see the word used in all wonks of life: Wonkify, crypto-wonk, pseudo-wonk, wonkism, wonkophobia, wonkopolis, wonkdom and wonkicide are just a few the language could accommodate.

Let not this exercise in wonkology end without consideration of two other excellent forms of the word: "wonkette" (a wonk-in-training), and "wonkey" (a Democrat wonk).

Doubtless the final assimilation of "wonk" into our common vocabulary will be the appearance of bumper stickers: HONK IF YOU'RE A WONK!