The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 31

Ten 

Gil and I, of course, had immediately understood the horrors of that gravestone, and that understanding had sent both of us to the ground.

First was the tragic story that the stone told. The wife of S. T. Leon had died in childbirth on 1 February 1851.[i] And her baby had had lived only an hour. Whoever this S. T. Leon was, he must have been devastated—losing his wife, his daughter, all within an hour on the same day.

But there was more. S. T. Leon. The same initials, the same last name, as our school’s custodian. An ancestor?

And finally—I’m not sure what Gil knew (I would find out later), but I was also struck by the baby’s name: Mary W. Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of Mary Godwin (who later married Bysshe Shelley); she, too, died in childbirth (in 1797). And Mary Godwin’s middle name? Wollstonecraft. This was getting weird.

Harriet, of course, knew nothing about the experience that Gil and I had had with Mr. Leon on the day of our detention. Nor did she know about his initials. I hadn’t had a chance to talk with her yet. But she, too, had read the sad short story carved in the sandstone, and as I looked up at her, I saw tears in her eyes.

“That’s so sad,” Harriet said. “That poor man.”

“It is sad,” I said, regaining my feet. “And very creepy, too.”

Harriet looked at me. “Creepy? Why creepy?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. I looked down at Gil, still seated in front of the stone. Without looking at me, he raised his arm—the sign for help. I grabbed his hand—his cold hand—and helped him to his feet. He stood there, pale, his forehead perspiring despite his icy hands, looking at Harriet and me.

“Are you going to introduce me to your friend?” he finally asked.

I’d forgotten. He and Harriet had never met. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Harriet, this is Gil Bysshe. Gil, Harriet Eastbrook.” She smiled.

“I’ve seen you cheer,” he said.

“You have?” She smiled more.

“At the pep rallies,” he added.

Harriet seemed expectant—as if waiting for some kind of praise from Gil, like And you were great, too. But he didn’t say anything else. He just stood there with a sort of crooked look on his face—not sarcastic, though. Friendly.

Gil’s face changed. He was looking behind us. We turned. Ms. Medwin.

“Are you all right?” she asked us.

We said we were.

“Do you have your notes finished?”

We said we did.

“Good—because it’s about time for us to leave.” She gestured back toward the archway, where we could see the rest of the kids were gathering.

Silently, we started moving toward the others.

On the way back to school, Harriet, Gil, and I walked together. The rain had started—more like a steady drizzle. Harriet’s cheerleader friend sort of trailed along a few steps behind us for a little bit, then found another group of people to walk with. Harriet, I knew, would have some explaining to do later on. But she was good at that. Explaining. Getting people to understand. And forgive her.

We took turns, the three of us, showing the others what we’d found on our gravestones. Gil and Harriet were puzzled about the epitaph from the grave I’d taken: He tried—but failed. They, too, wondered what he had tried to do. And Harriet wondered, “What kind of person would put something like that on someone’s else’s grave? Something that will be there forever?”

“Well, I don’t know about ‘forever,’” I said. “Some of the inscriptions are almost gone already—and I could barely even read this one.”

Harriet’s stone was a lot more “normal”—whatever that means. She showed us what she’d written:

Mariana Chabot

Nov. 12, 1819 – Dec. 5, 1889

Daughter, Sister, Mother, Grandmother

“Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky” — Wordsworth

“That one’s pretty good,” said Gil, and I felt Harriet stiffen a little at the word pretty. She, I knew, that it was really good. “Now take a look at this one—another sad one.

Charlene Vivian

July 8, 1804 – July 8, 1822

“Alas, then, she is drown’d?” — Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

“That’s a horribly sad one, too,” said Harriet. “Drowned. At …” She was doing math in her head.

“Eighteen,” I said.

“Eighteen,” echoed Harriet.

“On her birthday,” said Gil.

“What could be worse?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Gil. “It’s kind of a perfect circle, isn’t it?”

---

[i] This is the same day that Mary Shelley died in London.

Broke the Rule, Paid the Price

It's my own fault. I broke my own rule.

RULE: I will not post to Facebook anything of a divisive, political nature--nothing about abortion, civil and gender and sexual rights, Obamacare, Obama, "the war on Christmas," firearms, etc..

(I do write about those things here on my blog now and then, but those are not direct FB posts--a subtle difference between smoking but not inhaling? About what the meaning of is is?)

The other day, though, an old friend posted on FB a question about guns ... and I (not thinking! typing and clicking too fast for my own good!) weighed in with a response that I thought was fairly innocuous. Apparently not.

The next thing I knew, the back-and-forth had morphed into some ad hominem comments about me. So there I stopped--not because I was cowed or defeated or humiliated or had a road-to-Damascus epiphany ( I am wrong!)--but because such exchanges are pointless. And they escalate quickly. On many hot-button issues, we--on both sides of the chasm that divides us--know what we think; we're not about to change our minds. (By the way, the spell-checker on this blog site suggested I replace hominem with Eminem!)

What I'm going to write here is not going to change anyone's mind--it's not really my intent to do so. I think I just want to clarify what I think. I remember that novelist and philosopher William Godwin (Mary Shelley's father) said somewhere (I'm too lazy to go look it up) that he didn't write to declare what he thought; he wrote to figure out what he thought. (This, by the way, is my principal objection to those rigid essay formats we teach kids in school--forcing them to have a thesis and/or an outline even before they begin writing! But that's another divisive issue I'd better not get into--even though I just did.)

I've followed the gun debate a long time. And I really do understand various points of view. My father was a hunter--had a shotgun, two rifles, and a handgun in the house. He'd grown up on a farm in Oregon with multiple siblings, all of whom (well, the men) grew up to be hunters and fishermen. I loved my father; I loved his brothers. They were all responsible gun-owners and did not hold up 7-11s or shoot up shopping malls or movie theaters or schools. In a word: Gun ownership was "normal" in the world I grew up in. And although I'm not a hunter myself, I eat animal flesh and am not about to embrace hypocrisy by saying, with my mouth full of turkey, that I oppose hunting.

Gun proponents like to point out that cars kill more people than guns. True right now--but I just saw a projection that shows the two statistics edging ever closer--and a prediction that gun deaths will surpass automobile deaths by 2015. (Link) But--again--I know all about statistics and damn lies and everyone-has-his/her-own-database thinking. (And I should note here that I'm not all that impressed with arguments that say this is more deadly that that. If anything's deadly, we need to take a long hard look at it and figure out what we can do to make it less deadly. We do so routinely in other arenas: medications, pollution, food quality, etc. It's just plain silly, isn't it, to argue that you have a right to have a poisonous snake in your house because there are more poisonous ones in Arizona?!)

So let's forget the stats a minute--and consider this:

I would be perfectly happy if we regulated firearms as assiduously and responsibly as we do cars.  For example--to drive a car ...

• You need to be of legal age.
• You need a renewable operator's license (which you can obtain only by passing both a written and a practical test).
• You need liability insurance in the event you injure or kill someone while you're driving.
• You must register your car--and renew your license annually. You must display (in Ohio anyway) that license number prominently above the front and back bumper.
• Your car must have safety and environmental-friendly features.
• If you violate traffic laws, you can lose your license--permanently. And, of course, go to jail.

I guess what I'm saying is that it shouldn't be easy to get and keep a firearm. Yes, you have a right to have it--but that right is not absolute (just as all our other rights have limitations on them). And firearm ownership is a right that--like driving a car--comes with enormous responsibilities. Your car can kill if you're careless--or homicidal. So can your gun. So why do we treat the one with great rigor and care? And fight like mad not to regulate the other at all?

I am probably not going to live to see any of this come to pass--definitely is a more accurate word. I'm sixty-nine years old and fighting cancer, a most determined foe. But I would like to think that my grandsons, 4 and 8, could live in a country with leaders who recognize the carnage--and would do something about it other than wax lyrical and weep at schoolchildren's funerals. 

Trashy Movies: Part 2

A couple of days ago I wrote about my life-long fondness for trashy movies. I used the excuse (the first of several to ensue) that I'd grown up with them--that not much else was available when I was a kid in the 1950s. So ... a habit formed. And since I neither smoke nor drink (okay, once upon a time I did), I figure I'm entitled to at least one self-destructive habit?

But there are other reasons for my sitting in movie theaters where I hope I will recognize no one else in the audience (shame, shame, shame on me for being there!): My profession.

Yes, I often went to see a  bad movie because (or so I told myself) my students would be seeing the film, and I always liked being able to talk with my seventh and eighth graders (or, later, high schoolers) about popular films, TV shows, music, celebs. Because I didn't have time during my teaching life to watch a lot of television (and I lost interest in popular music after Woodstock--a topic for another post one of these days), I did the next best thing: subscribed to People magazine and, later, Entertainment Weekly. I read through those magazines each week and earned thereby a sort of idiot's familiarity with popular singers, actors, whatever.

But movies? I've always loved them--always--so on the weekends I would try to see the films that I thought the kids would see--as well as films that Joyce and I knew were more ... worthy. One exception: Neither of us likes horror films, so I have never seen those franchise series films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc. No, films with roaring chainsaws and creepy folks with machetes leaping out from the darkness and supernatural whatevers appearing in mirrors just before they slaughter you--none of that has ever appealed to me ... okay, it scares me. So when my students talked about horror films, I feigned knowledge. (Teachers are very good at that.)

Not that movies about Harry Potter, Bella Swan, et al. are "trashy," but they are films I never would have gone to see if I had not been teaching. (I actually ended up getting hooked on the Potter novels--read them all in a single week that saw me do little else--Joyce was out of town, so I didn't even have to be polite to anyone.)

Here's a story about the first Twilight film (2008). I had read the first novel in the series--just to see what was going on--knowing that most of the young women in my classes had read the books. I recognized right away that I was not the audience for the novels (shouldn't I have know that ahead of time?), and I also read it on my Kindle so that people at Starbucks wouldn't see me reading it and wonder if I were some kind of perv.

On 9 November 2008, Joyce and I went out to Montrose (West Akron) to see the film. The theater soon filled to capacity, and as far as I could tell, I was the only one there with a Y chromosome. Then, just before the lights went down, here came two sheepish high school boys with their dates. I was on the aisle, and when they got close, I stopped them and thanked them for coming. Everyone laughed. (Whew.)

I made the mistake of laughing at a couple of things in the film--one was the early scene in the cafeteria when we see the vampires for the first time. I laughed out loud when I saw them and received for my glee some ferocious shhhhhhing from many young women around me. (Later, I laughed a couple of other times when I "shouldn't" have--and earned the same response.) BTW: There's a funny parody of that cafeteria scene in the SNL database--here's a link.

We saw a couple of the other Twilight films but quit going when I retired in 2011. So ... I don't know about the wedding of Bella and Edward--and all that ensued.

One more: I also went to see the first Kick-Ass film (2010), mostly because I was giving at talk at Western Reserve Academy in January 2011 (about "transformations") and wanted to allude to that film as an example of how transformation is an ingredient in superhero comics and movies. I mentioned the film in only a single sentence--showed a photo of the poster--and got a nice laugh.

See? A trashy movie earned me some points! QED.

SO: REASON/EXCUSE #2 FOR ATTENDING TRASHY MOVIES: HELPING ME COMMUNICATE WITH MY STUDENTS.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 30

Gil and I immediately separated, moving to opposite corners of the cemetery. As I was walking swiftly to the corner I wanted—down by a thick cluster of trees, the darkest place in the entire lot—I turned back a couple of times to watch Gil hurrying off the other way.

I also saw what other kids were doing. Some had stayed as close to the entrance as possible (no need to waste any energy on an English assignment!); others were moving in little groups, together. I saw Harriet and one of the other cheerleaders settle right in the center of the cemetery where they appeared to be taking notes on gravestones that were right next to each other. Harriet saw me looking and gave me the little wave she used when she wanted me to know that she was thinking of me—but didn’t necessarily want whoever she was with to notice—or comment. She was weird now, Harriet, trying to be both popular and loyal to very unpopular me.

In the farthest corner I found an old sandstone grave marker whose inscriptions time and weather had nearly entirely smoothed over. I was barely able to make out the name and other information:

FRANCIS WRIGHT[i]

Sept. 6, 1795 – Dec. 13, 1852

He tried—but failed.

I’m going to confess here that I’d been to this cemetery before and already had done my best to read some of the gravestones. But I’d picked this one because I thought the epitaph was about the strangest I’d seen: He tried—but failed. Tried what? Failed at what? I thought I could have some fun with that idea in my poem.

I quickly copied the information, then looked again over toward Gil, clear across the cemetery. I saw him finish writing something, then move to another stone a few feet to his left. I started walking toward him, then broke into a trot when I saw him staring at the stone, then slumping to the ground, as if he’d fainted.

Other kids saw me hurrying by but didn’t really do anything. A look at me; a look back at their work. They were used to seeing me do weird stuff and had long ago quit wondering about it. I did hear Harriet’s voice as I passed her. “Vickie …?”

As I got closer to Gil, I saw him struggle to a sitting position, where he sat staring at the old stone right in front of him.

I called out to him.

He turned, smiling weakly, his face as pale as paper. “Hi,” he said, his voice matching his face. He sounded as if no breath carried his words.

“Getting a closer look?” I asked him.

“Have you seen this?” He pointed, and as I was reading it, I felt myself slump right beside him.

LEON

Marguerite Damville Leon      Jan. 1, 1818 – Feb. 1, 1851

Beloved Wife of S. T. Leon

“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” — Shakespeare

Mary W. Leon             Feb. 1, 1851

Infant Daughter

“She lived but an hour.”

S. T. Leon        1822 –

A shadow fell over us. I turned and looked. Harriet.

“You two all right?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

---

[i] Once again, Vickie seems to be playing with us. The long-ago feminist Frances Wright was born and died on the exact dates that Vickie records here. She was one of Mary Shelley’s friends, a woman who started a community in Tennessee—Nashoba (near Memphis)—where she tried to teach former slaves (whom she’d purchased) the skills they would need to survive in freedom. Begun in the mid-1820s, it lasted only three years.

Trashy Movies: Part 1

There was one of those "try-this" memes circulating on Facebook the other day--you know the kind: list your favorite books ... how many of these songs can you sing? ... etc. ...?  Well, this one asked participants to check how many of the most popular 75 films (1980-1995) they'd seen. I got 60 (80%, a B-).  Here's a link to the site if you want to try it.

One of my good FB friends completed it, too, got 20/75, and said she was "proud of it."

That made me stop and think ...  My film-going habits are a little ... inconsistent. (The same guy who reads and writes about Shakespeare goes to see Jason Statham movies?!?!) When I now and then "check in" on FB when I'm attending a film, I sometimes get "concerned" messages from FB friends, messages that say something like this: "Why did you go see that?"  Good question--one that Joyce has been asking me for more than forty years. (At trashy movies, she also makes sure I don't tag her--letting her friends know that she, too, is sitting in an auditorium about to watch something inexcusable.)

Well, back to that popular film list: Because the films were "most popular," many of them were sort of (or completely) trashy. And so I asked myself, "Why do you go see so many trashy movies? ... At your age!"

Let's backtrack a little bit through my biography. Most of the films I saw as a kid (1950s) were kind of trashy--principally because Hollywood didn't make many of the other kind. And films from outside the United States we simply called "foreign films" (translation: can't make sense out of them), but they weren't really an issue. Not many (any?) came to the Southwestern towns where I grew up--Enid, Okla., and Amarillo, Tex.

But there was a whole category of films called "B" movies--generally cheap productions with minor Hollywood stars. I loved the B Westerns, though, and often went to see them on Saturdays. In Enid, kids

Johnny Mack Brown

could get into the Saturday matinees for two Royal Crown Cola bottle caps and a dime. There, you'd see a newsreel, some cartoons, and a double-feature, generally cowboy movies ("Horse operas," my dad called them--or "oaters.") Johnny Mack Brown, Rex Allen, Bob Steele, et al.--these were the "stars" of those movies, all of which were filmed on the same back lots in California. You'd see the same scenery in film after film.

When TV became more pervasive, these old B Westerns (and other B movies) became the staples of the non-prime-time TV hours--so I watched them again and again. We got our first TV set in the early 1950s but couldn't use it during our two years in Amarillo (1952-1953) because Amarillo had no TV stations. Enid, though, had one--and could pick up two others in Oklahoma City--on good days.

So ... EXCUSE #1 FOR WATCHING TRASHY MOVIES: I grew up with them; I am ... emotionally attached to them; they are as much a part of me as my fondness for Oklahoma's red dirt (if not for the state's politics). They are like family--not always what you want (or what's good for you), but, you know, you still have to show up at Thanksgiving.


TO BE CONTINUED: MY OTHER REASONS/EXCUSES FOR GOING TO TRASHY MOVIES

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 29

“The old cemetery,” as Ms. Medwin called it, lies near the center of town and is the place where the original settlers of Franconia, Ohio, buried their dead for a few generations. Later, as churches began to form in the community, each created its own cemetery, at first right alongside the church building but then, later, as space became a problem, out on the edge of town in what once had been farmland.

And when that happened, the old cemetery fell into disuse, and it wasn’t until the Franconia Historical Society formed years ago that anyone really paid much attention to it. Oh, the town of Franconia cut the grass, that sort of thing—can’t have something messy and ugly right near the center of town, you know. The Historical Society built a wrought-iron fence around the property and began maintaining the gravesites more carefully. Some of the stones had fallen. Vandals had broken up others. And some had become almost impossible to read because they’d been made of sandstone, which always loses long battles with the weather. The Society also installed an arched wrought-iron gateway to the property, with a sign atop: Franconia Settlers Cemetery. I guess it was too hard to put an apostrophe after the s. Father pointed it out to me even before I knew what an apostrophe is. All the kids just called it “Settlers.”

Our class was excited to go over to Settlers in the middle of a school day—on what the school called a “walking field trip.” Not as much fun as getting on a bus and going somewhere distant—somewhere so far away that it meant a stop on the way home at a fast-food place. Now that, in a seventh grader’s eyes, is a good field trip! Of course, the school was being very careful about field trips now after the one last year to Middle Island in the Ohio River—that trip that featured some horrors that many were still trying to forget.[i]

Still … a “walking field trip” was infinitely better than no field trip. So we were excited, as I’ve said. That morning of 7 November it was dark and foggy—appropriate for a cemetery trip—but not too cold (near 50), though we had to wear wet weather jackets. A little rain in the forecast.[ii]

Ms. Medwin had not told us much about what we were going to do—but we had to bring a notebook and something to write with. So as soon as our earlier classes were over, we hurried to our lockers, got out jackets, put everything away except what she’d told us we’d need, then hurried to the classroom. She took attendance—and off we went.

As I said, Settlers wasn’t too far from the school, and we were all in a pretty excited mood, mostly because we didn’t have to be in class for a while. I felt someone beside me. Looked. Gil.

“What do you think we’re going to do?” he asked.

“Oh, probably just, you know, get in the mood to write something like those Spoon River pieces.”

“I guess,” he said.

I noticed he was having to work a little bit to keep up with me. I slowed—then teased him a little. “I should have brought a wagon to pull you in.”

“A little red one,” he said. “And I could’ve dressed up like a fireman.”

I laughed. He took teasing a lot better than I did.

“Thanks for slowing up a little,” he said. “I’m just a little tired. Didn’t sleep too well.”

“Dreams about Ms. Medwin?” I teased.

“It’s so creepy,” he said, “that you can read my dreams.”

It wasn’t too long before we arrived, and Ms. Medwin had us assemble by the arched entryway. “Now,” she said, “after we’d sort of quieted down, “here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to spread out around the cemetery and find a grave that interests you in some way.”

Some boy said, “Can we dig it up?”

Lots of cries of “Gross!” and “Sick!”

Ms. Medwin looked at him sharply, then softened. “Only if you want extra credit,” she said. And we all laughed.

“So, when you find a grave that interests you,” she said, “I want you to write some things in your notebook about the gravestone—what it looks like, its size, what it says on it. Then,” she went on, “I want you to imagine who that person was. Thinking about the person’s emotions. What did that person love? Or hate? What did he or she achieve? Or fail to achieve? What were the good things in that person’s life? The bad things?”

A raised hand. Ms. Medwin said, “Yes?”

“But we don’t know who the person really was.”

“It doesn’t matter for this assignment,” she said. “Just use your imagination. Create something that makes sense to you.” A pause. “Any more questions?”

There weren’t. So off we went in search of graves.

---

[i] Vickie tells about this trip in the first volume of her Papers.

[ii] Vickie is absolutely right about the weather in the region on 7 November 1995.

The Journey to Richard II: Part 21 (The End!)

Richard II
Shakespeare & Co.; Lenox, MA
July 2013

"Our revels now our ended," says Prospero in The Tempest near the end of Act IV as his plots are about to hatch. And so last summer, in a way, when Joyce and I saw Richard II, our own revels were arriving at an end. When Richard II ended, we would have seen--live, onstage--all of Shakespeare's plays. Joyce, I think, was a little less excited than I--perhaps even a bit reluctant to see the play. She didn't want our revels to end. I understood.

It is an odd feeling, isn't it, finishing everything? Many youngsters, I know, felt a sweet sorrow when they turned the last page of the final Harry Potter novel. And TV viewers grieve at the final episode of a beloved series. Recently, Breaking Bad's terminal (!) episode drew myriads of viewers and pages of commentary in print, lots of coverage in online media. And some will remember the outcry at the end of The Sopranos ... there seemed to be no resolution. 'Zup with that?!

I've had this experience many times with "finishing" writers. As followers of these posts know, I'm an obsessive reader and once I start some writer's books, I almost always read them all. The biggest end-of-the-series "downer" I've felt in recent years came after finishing the forty-seven novels of Anthony Trollope. It took me ten years to read them all, and when I finished the last line of his last (unfinished) novel, The Landleaguers, I wept. No more Trollope ... now what? Well, I went on to Thackeray--finished him. And I'm now working through Tobias Smollett.

But Shakespeare ...

As I posted her some time ago, we saw Richard II at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, not far from where my mom lives, not far from where my brothers own an old farmhouse that they use for summers and weekends (both live in the Boston area). Brother Dave and his wife, Janice, came out to see Richard II, also. Dave, in fact, had known of my quest and had alerted me to the production. (Here's a link to Shakespeare & Co.'s website--they do wonderful productions out in the Berkshires, all year round.)

Joyce and I left Hudson on Thursday, 11 July, for the ten-hour trip to the Lenox area. And on Friday night, 12 July 2013, we saw Richard II, a wonderful production with an amazing performance by Rocco Sisto as the king--one of the best I've ever seen. He humanized the king so powerfully--spoke to the audience as if we were confidantes. At the end, as I noted here last July, Joyce and I stood in the aisle, embracing, weeping. It was over ...

But, of course, it wasn't. We have season tickets to the Great Lakes Theater (they do two Bard plays a year), and we still go to Stratford, Ont., each year for an August orgy of plays at the Stratford Festival (eleven plays in six days--four or five of them by the Bard).

With Shakespeare--with all great writers--it's never really over. I taught Hamlet for ten straight years, and every time, I heard a student say something I hadn't thought of--I noticed something I'd never noticed before. And every director of a Shakespeare play has an opportunity to reinvent the production--there is no "standard way" to mount the plays. Every new production shows me something I hadn't thought of--or even imagined. It's just the damnedest thing ...

It's the same with great books. You should see my teaching copy of The Great Gatsby, so heavily annotated that I could hardly read Fitzgerald's words! Every year I taught it (again, ten years in a row) something new occurred to me--or some perceptive, sensitive student noticed something that I'd missed.

So, no, our revels have not ended. As long as there are great books to read, films and works of art to see, music to hear ... our revels will not end--not until my body says "It's time," or my mind dissolves, then disappears.