But, of course, I didn't really retire ...

April 2008
one of my WRA Eng III classes with writer Brock Clarke

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about my final year at Harmon Middle School (Aurora, Ohio), the finest school that ever was (and still is, from all I've heard). I'd retired in January 1997 certain that I would never teach again.

I was wrong.

As I often am.

At the time (1997) I was already fully submerged in Lake Mary Shelley and was learning everything I could about her, about her family and friends, about Frankenstein and her other books (about which I'd known nothing). I had a literary agent. I was gonna write another YA biography, this one of Mary Shelley. I was gonna ...

But by the spring of 2001 I found myself in a strange, unexpected situation: I missed teaching. What! I could not return to public school, though: I'd let my Ohio certification lapse, and in order to restore it, so declared the State of Ohio, I would have to takes some new courses--several of them. I was indignant when I learned that (especially when I discovered several grammar and usage errors in the official letter telling me I was no longer qualified to teach English in Ohio public schools).

But with the aid of some friends I got back on the faculty of Western Reserve Academy (where I'd taught from 1979-81). Private schools do not have to adhere to Ohio's standards for teacher qualification, so I was golden there (if not in Ohio's eyes). And I enjoyed yet another batch of years--a decade. I retired for the second (and final) time in June 2011.

Teaching at WRA was another variety of wonderful--very different from a public middle school (where I'd labored and loved). I taught eleventh graders--youngsters who were in the final throes of college dreams and applications, of disappointments and thrilling successes.And as I gradually made the transition from 8th graders to 11th graders, I found myself, again, wandering in a forest full of wonders.

Eleventh grade was American literature (plus Hamlet, that great American classic--as I always liked to joke), and American lit was my primary background and love. So each year I took the kids through American literary history (after we'd disposed of the Melancholy Dane--"Good night, sweet prince ..."), from the Pilgrims and Puritans (and the poems of Anne Bradstreet) to a contemporary writer, someone whom I would often find a way (with WRA's splendid help) to bring to school to meet with the kids, who'd read that writer's newest book.

Oh, did I have fun--except with some of the very formulaic writing that the school began to insist more and more that we do. I hated it. There's is a universe of discourse out there--so many ways to write what you're thinking and feeling--but we had to focus on one tiny (and largely passé) way: the five-paragraph essay. But never mind ... I want to be nostalgic right now, not bitter!

The WRA kids were great to me. We laughed often. They tolerated my signs of imminent ... disarray (like my telling at the end of a period an anecdote I'd already told at the beginning--this happened!). I had more fun than I'd had since ... well, since I'd been at Harmon Middle School.

But, as I indicated yesterday, health issues arose, became more insistent I pay attention to them, and so I knew it was time. I wanted to leave while I was still more or less myself--and not some shadow thereof. And so I did.

During the school year, I still see WRA students down at Open Door Coffee, where I hang out, and they are friendly--I've gotten to know a few who come there regularly (occasionally, I get a request for some help with an essay or a literary passage; I'm invariably grateful). I've been invited back up to speak on campus most every year since I left, and that's wonderful, too--a way to introduce myself to a new batch of kids, some of whom I'll later see at Open Door.

I also get other surprises down there now and then--students from Harmon Days who drop in to surprise me. It's just impossible for me to believe that those first seventh graders I taught back in 1966 are now in their sixties and are, like me, grandparents ...  I was 21 when I met some of them; they were 12.

And as this new school year's starting, I'm reminded that my own career began fifty years ago at the Aurora Middle School (as it was then called--before Harmon was built). I think I'll be writing about that next week ...

That End-of-the-Year Smile

I forget where I got this picture. I think a student took it, then sent it to me? It was the spring of 1996, I think (context clues!), and, guessing what I see in the background, I think it's the last day of school, the day when teachers and staff would come outside and wave good-bye to the students. It was always a very emotional time for me. I taught eighth graders the last fifteen years of my career, and they were the oldest kids in the building--Harmon Middle School; Aurora, Ohio. They were usually sad about leaving, emotional. In a way, they were putting childhood behind, heading into high school. They were both excited and somewhat afraid. Anyway, I thought then (and still think) that Harmon was one of the best schools--ever. (Not that I'm biased, mind you.)

The spring of 1996 was an even more moving time for me. I'd already decided that this would be my final full year of teaching. I could retire (30 years' service) in January 1997, and that I did, on the very day I was first eligible. I had miles to go before I slept, you see ...

There was yet another reason for some high emotion at the end of the year. My final dozen years or so some colleagues and I mounted a production--The 8th Grade Farewell-to-Harmon Show. We had a running gag with the title (not a funny gag--but, you know, a gag?): We would attach to the title the eighth graders' year of graduation from high school. So ... this show we'd just done (always near the end of the year) was The 2000th 8th Grade Farewell-to-Harmon Show. Ha, ha.

With earlier classes the gag had been plausible enough (The 95th ...) that I actually had people ask me if there really had been over ninety shows.

The farewell shows were a collection of skits and songs and dances (all about life at Harmon), and I was fortunate--very fortunate--to have the help in later years of my friends Andy Kmetz (the art teacher, a gifted dancer who did all the choreography and so much more) and Gary Brookhart (the band director, who accompanied us on the piano with professional skill and a sensitivity to what kids were capable of).

Anyway, that spring (1996) I had just finished my final show at the middle school--I had done over thirty. And I was awash in emotion. I knew I would never direct a play again. And, indeed, I haven't.

The two girls in the foreground of the picture were involved in that final show. One is a Facebook friend; the other I've lost track of.

I look at the me of 1996, twenty years ago. My beard and hair are dark. My weight is good (an adult-long battle, sometimes won, sometimes lost). I have a faint smile. Excitement mixed with relief and with hope and with being polite for the picture-taker. I'm wearing my "uniform" of my late-career years: polo shirt, slacks.

That smile tells me much more today, too. I was eager to retire for a couple of reasons. For one, I was disgusted by the proficiency-test mania that had already begun to dominate the public school curriculum (it has lasted twenty years--such foolishness); for another, I was eager to get on with my writing life.

In 1995 I'd published a fully annotated edition of The Call of the Wild (Univ. of Okla. Pr.), and in the fall of 1997 I would have two other books--a YA title (Jack London: A Biography, Scholastic; and a paperback edition of Wild--also Univ. of Okla. Pr.). I was certain that other books were in me, that good health was obviously going to last ... I was also writing op-ed pieces for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I had not yet published a single book review.

That changed that very fall when I published my first review in a small publication called Ohio Writer. I would do a few more for them, then, on a friend's recommendation, got a gig with Kirkus Reviews in March 1999, a gig that continues to this day. This year--if all continues--I'll hit review #1400 for Kirkus.  In the spring of 2000 I contacted the Cleveland Plain Dealer about doing reviews for them; in August that year, my first appeared, and I eventually wrote nearly 200 (I think--haven't counted) for them before the paper, having downsized, no longer used freelancers for book reviews but took virtually all of them from the wire services. (My last review appeared in the PD about a year ago.)

I still do one Kirkus book per week, all year long. I have two blogs (this one and Daily Doggerel). I keep writing away at books, publishing them all on Kindle Direct now. Once I got my cancer diagnosis (December 2004) I knew that I could no longer count on the bounties of Time, bounties I'd foolishly thought would last, you know, for ever. So ... no more dickering with traditional publishers. No more time.

That slight smile in June 1996 has, then, another couple of qualities: ignorance, naivete.

But I love the stronger emotion I see there--hope.

I've had twenty more years ... I've tried not to waste them ... I know for certain now that I am fragile, mortal. Of course, I always knew it, but now I know it. There's a difference. And so I will try to work every day until I simply can't--at which time I hope Fate will sweep me quickly, mercifully away. One must not linger after the party's over.

Mom

Going through some old albums today, I found this picture of my mom, Prudence Dyer. On the back of the photo is the date: August 1958.

We were living at the time in Hiram, Ohio (my dad was teaching at Hiram College), and Mom is reclining on her beloved piece of porch furniture which she called her "chaise longue," which, of course, it wasn't. But it was a family joke--we called it, affectionately, the "chaise." Ours was yellow.

Mom is reclining on our porch at 11917 Garfield Road in Hiram, a home we'd just recently bought. In 1966, when Mom and Dad left Hiram to go teach at Drake University, we sold the place to Hiram professor David Fratus and his wife; they are still living there--though, when I see them, I occasionally refer to it as "our house," although the Fratuses have lived there now for fifty years. (I swore to David, when he retired a few years ago, that I would no longer call the place "ours," but I can't help it.)

In August 1958 Mom was already preparing to return to teach high school English at nearby James A. Garfield High School in Garrettsville (three miles away). I can't see what she's reading, but I know it was probably something she was going to teach and/or use in her classes. She was like that, my mom. Her professional life and her private life were intertwined. She loved the Ancient Greeks and--later--would conduct tours for educators. She taught herself Modern Greek.

In the photo--August 1958--Mom is thirty-eight years old; she would turn thirty-nine on September 9. Born in 1919, she'd gone through the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War (Dad had served in the latter two), had brought three sons into the world.

I, the middle child (don't get me started!), was thirteen when I took that picture (you can tell I'd surprised her?), about to enter ninth grade. High school. Latin I. Algebra I. I was kinda scared: I had basically shut down my scholarly self (not that there had ever been too much of that self) in seventh and eighth grade, but now I was in the "college prep" years at Hiram High (go, Huskies!), and I figured I would probably have to do a little school work. Here's the way I looked about that time ... you literally "get the picture," I'm sure.

A little schoolwork? Little is the operative word there. My intellectual ignition took a little while to kick in when I was a boy, a teen.

By August 1958, Mom was already beginning to think she'd like to do ... more. She would return to graduate school, earn her master's and Ph.D., begin her university life at Drake, where, in the 1980s, she would retire. And the folks would move out to Cannon Beach, Ore. (Dad, an Oregonian, adored his home state, felt he was not ever really home unless he was there).

Dad declined over a long period of years--Mom attending to him for much of it--and died in November 1999.

She had some good years right after that, living in her own place in Lenox, Mass., a state where they'd moved when Dad became very dependent on her, on others. My two brothers live near Boston, but they share a summer house only a few miles from Mom and Dad. They both were out there all the time. It's harder for us--we're nearly 600 miles away.

But then her decline began, too, exacerbated by a bad car accident that put her in a neck brace. Soon, she could no longer live on her own, and for some years now she's been residing in a stages-of-care place in Lenox. A few years ago she moved--very reluctantly--from independent to assisted living, though she confesses she now loves the arrangement. She is hanging on--will turn 97 next month. My brothers and I do not want her to have to go to the nursing wing ... but ...

Among the saddest things: Her words are leaving her. This woman--this career English teacher who loved words (and insisted I use them, pronounce them correctly)--now must struggle to say the simplest things. Her brain simply refuses to cooperate with her mouth--her lips, her tongue--and it's often hard to understand what she's saying when I talk with her on the phone.

The most astonishing thing? She laughs about it, says, "You know what I mean." (Often I do.) I picture myself in that situation--I would be hurling things around the room, shoving other residents down the stairs in their walkers ... Which is probably why, when my time comes, they'll be quickly medicating/sedating me. Heavily.

Last week, our son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons were out there to visit her. And Steve (our son) set up this picture of them all outside her residence. Her "chaise" has become a wheelchair. But Mom is smiling. And that, my friends, requires the sort of courage displayed by those doughty defenders of Troy.

Travel Clutter

Anyone who has traveled away from home knows the story. You get home, where Everests of clutter await you--no matter how long you've been gone. A couple of days. A week. Ten years.

As followers here know, we returned from a week in Stratford, Ontario, late Sunday night, Everest glistening in the moonlight. (I don't know if there was moonlight, but I like the image.)

Here are a few of the things that greeted us:

• A pile of newspapers, delivery of which I'd stopped online before we left. Someone didn't get the memo. (A kind neighbor had sort of hidden them on the porch for us so that housebreakers would not see the open invitation the papers' presence issued.)
• Some email I had not been able to answer in Canada because I was away from the material I needed to reply.
• An empty refrigerator. (Meaning: We needed to take a trip to the store. See below.)
• US mail. Yes, we had to go to the Post Office to get it, the Post Office where we stood in a line that moved with glacial "speed." Most mail we get these Internet days is junk, but not this week: A pile of things requiring reply.
• Laundry. (Okay, I'll confess: Joyce does the laundry--I have other household jobs, so don't go getting all Male Chauvinist Pig on me. I still have to dump it all in the hamper, you know? That can be stressful!)
• Voice-mails glowing redly on our phone. True, we get only a few of these nowadays. But there were some. And they required fairly immediate attention.
• Unpacking. Putting unused clothes back in the appropriate drawers. Returning personal hygiene products to their homes in the bathroom (or, as the Canadians call it, the washroom).
• Dealing with things we'd purchased for ourselves, for gifts. Where to put them? How about the dining room table? (Where most of them still lie.)
• Grocery store trip (see above). At the local Acme we zipped our cart into a short check-out line, then, too late, discovered why it was short: A trainee was on the register. Glacier again. Since we were both teachers, we waited (and waited) with perfect pedagogical patience. (Not.)
• And here's a surprise: The clutter in my study, and on my desk, had somehow multiplied in my absence. As if God, disturbed by the clutter on His own desk, had looked around, seen mine, figured I couldn't possibly notice some extra. (I did. But I can't really complain, you know? Considering Where It came from.)

There's more--but I'm getting depressed, thinking about all of what I must do this morning. So I'm stopping. Here and now.

Stratford Sundries, 2016-8

City Hall
Stratford, Ontario
August 1, 2016

 1. One last thought about the production of As You Like It--the one that we didn't care for. That play has always had a special resonance for me--ever since childhood. One of my first "Shakespeare memories" comes from the early 1950s. We were living at 1706 E. Elm Ave. in Enid, Oklahoma, and my dad (who was teaching at Phillips University, RIP, at the time) played Charles the Wrestler in a local production of As You Like It. I was only, oh, nine or ten at the time (interested only in baseball, bikes, and--very secretly--girls), so my parents (probably wisely) did not take me to see it, a decision I regret to this day--and more with every passing day.

I remember my dad, leaving the house in costume--red tights (crafted by my mom from a pair of full-length "long" underwear, dyed red with Rit), posing in a muscle-man stance at the front door, flexing his considerable biceps, the picture of health and vitality and ... well, there was no way he would lose a wrestling match to wussy Orlando, though Shakespeare insisted that he must.

So now ... when I see the play ... see the scenes with Charles ... how can I not think of my dad that Oklahoma day so long, long ago?

Actually, the wrestling scene was one of the best in the Stratford production--though not, of course, as good as that definitive one in 1950s Enid, Oklahoma.

2. On "getaway day" (Sunday) at Stratford, we saw our final production (number 11 this summer!), Ibsen's late play (1896) John Gabriel Borkman, the story of a corrupt banker, out of jail, at home, where neighbors shun him and his wife refuses to speak with him--or even look at him. (The show makes a good pairing, by the way, with All My Sons, which we'd seen just the day before.) The banker's son has come of age and wants to live his own life, not restore the family name (as his mother insists he do). Great performances by everyone, especially by veteran Joseph Ziegler, who played the one former friend who does regularly visit Borkman, who is convinced, by the way, even 8 years after his release, that the bank is going to need him and will one day appear at his door to beg his return. Such is madness and delusion.

Ibsen, in the second half of the script, I think, could have employed some white-out, some scissors, an eraser, or (if he'd lived now) the delete key. Some repetition and what appeared to our modern ears a bit of bombast and excess in the final scenes. No need to state the obvious, Mr. Ibsen. (Isn't it fun to criticize one of the greats?!!?)

3. The play ended about 4:25, and we were in the car and on the road by 4:25:01. Seven hours stretching before us. The ride, though, as always, was terrific fun--talking with Joyce about all we'd seen and experienced. We had a bit of a hang-up at the US border: The authorities gave a thorough search to a van about three vehicles ahead of us ... and there we sat ... watching minutes drip away, extending our ETA by about a half-hour. (BTW: The van ended up being waved through.)

4. 11:30 p.m. We were home. And grateful for another year--our fifteenth in a row--when we could go up there and experience, again, the wonders of that place, the grace and truth on those stages. I'm 71 now, dealing with cancer issues. Physical fragility has become more and more of an issue. Joyce and I have talked--more than once--about our worry that we might not be able to go again. How foolish to plan, said Edna St. Vincent Millay--yet we do it. Confident (?) that what lies ahead will somehow--certainly!--resemble what lies behind. How could it not?

"Hope is the thing with feathers," Miss Emily said. But for me? Hope is making a room reservation in Stratford a year in advance. Which is exactly what I did. The first day we were there.

Stratford Sundries, 2016-7

 Coffee Culture; Stratford, Ont.
12:45 p.m.

1. Well, things were a little different this morning. Normally, on our final day, we check out of the Mercer Hall Inn and drive over to nearby St. Mary’s, a lovely little town with many buildings—including an old Carnegie Library—made from local stone. There’s a back road we like—very rural and evocative. And in St. Mary’s, we hang out at its Coffee Culture—read, eat breakfast, write a little, talk a lot. Well, we checked out just fine—got on the road about 8:30—but our little country back road was closed for construction, and when we got to St. Mary’s Coffee Culture by the more conventional (busy, boring) route, we learned their wireless has been out of commission for days, so I couldn’t write online, couldn’t check things I needed to check.

So, after breakfast (lemon poppyseed muffin for me!) we drove back to Stratford, where we worked awhile at Balzac’s Coffee, then came down to the Stratford Coffee Culture—where the wireless was working!—had a fruit/yogurt smoothie for lunch and did more reading and writing and talking. We have a 2 o’clock matinee down at the Tom Patterson Theatre—Ibsen’s late play John Gabriel Borkman, which neither of us has ever seen.

2. Both of us have seen As You Like It (many, many times), so we were especially disappointed in the production we saw last night at the Festival Theatre. I love that play—full of wisdom and humor and music and some of the most famous lines in the English language (“All the world’s a stage” among them). We’ve seen it set in all sorts of times and places, and last night we were supposed to be in 1980s Newfoundland, though I’m not all that sure why.

The production was infernally “busy”: When we entered, we were greeted with little branches of a fir tree, and during Forest-of-Arden moments we were to hold them aloft; later, we used a clothes pin to affix to them some of the poems that love-sick Antonio posts all over the forest (and Rosalind, coming down the aisle next to me, took mine and commented on it—no, I did not write the dumb thing: Shakespeare did). There were other things that other people in the (smallish) crowd held aloft—stars, glowing embers, etc. The woman who would later (at the very end) appear as Hymen, god of marriage (the are four marriages at the end of the play), served as an interlocutor throughout—heavily miked—and I found her intrusive, superfluous, annoying, humorless (such great qualities in an interlocutor).

The director/producers seemed so intent on making the play busy-busy-busy (and so much fun, right?) that I was bored as I have not been since my third consecutive study hall my senior year in high school. Jaques (who delivers the “All the world’s a stage” speech) was cast as a woman (I have no problem whatsoever with that), but she seemed to be sleepwalking. The Clown was incomprehensible. Many of the other characters were mailing it in, but the postal carriers must have been on strike. The woman who played Rosalind (one of the Bard’s great parts) is verbally gifted but exuded no sexuality (a problem). I did like Antonio (Rosalind’s eventual husband) and a few of the others.

But as I walked back to the room with Joyce, I groused and grumped all the way. How could they do that to such a play? And similar sorts of complaints. The crowd was small for a Saturday night in Stratford in high season, so I’m guessing the word has gotten out. Oh well … We still have Ibsen this afternoon, and I am so very hopeful … I’ll write about it when I get home.

Stratford Sundries, 2016-6

Stratford City Hall
August, 2016 

1. Balzac’s Coffee, 10:30 a.m.

Last evening we took a quick walk down to the Avon  Theatre (rain a threat), where we saw (first time for the both of us) Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, a production we both liked quite a bit.

The story concerns some couples—well off—whose marriages are, let’s say, under some stress. (One of the men is brazenly unfaithful.) Things tangle until intermission; afterward, all the principals end up at a country house for a weekend that proves transformative for most everyone.

It’s more like an operetta than a traditional musical—there are 12 songs in the first half alone. In the second, when Désirée (played by the powerful Yanna McIntosh) began singing “Send in the Clowns” in a low lush voice, I lost it, nearly audibly so, weeping not just for what that song meant at the moment on the stage but for the cumulative effect of this week—and for the other weeks we’ve spent up here the previous fourteen years.

Edna St. Vincent Millay has pointed out how foolish it is to plan (I’ve alluded to this sonnet before—deal with it), and as this week winds down, we realize that fragile, unpredictable health might prevent our return a year hence. As Millay wrote, we humans know “when pain subsides, that is not that, / For worse than that must follow.” Wise woman. Wise woman with a piercing blade.

Anyway, the show was good. Some people sang better than others; some moments were more affecting than others (I mentioned but one). And although not all of the principal implications of the story—that marriage is difficult and can be an impediment to love, that hope and regret often propel our actions, that all is evanescent—apply to our situation, still … we imagine and empathize and sink into the soft ground of the story. And weep. Which I did, all the way back to our room—and beyond.

But it did not rain.

2. This morning, we were up for some of the usual on our final full day at the festival. Coffee-bagel-reading-writing-much talk, all conducted in the silent but heavy presence of the imminent moment when we must load the car and point it toward home.

3. I finished Donald Ray Pollock's new novel, The Heavenly Table, and will do a more elaborate post about it later (after we get home). Not too crazy about it (I'd liked his two earlier books), but things to talk about ...

4. Lunch in our room--soon off to see All My Sons ...

Mercer Hall Inn, 6:15 p.m.

1. A powerful Arthur Miller play (and one of his earliest) is All My Sons, performed by a wonderful cast at the Tom Patterson Theatre--especially by the father (played by Joseph Ziegler--see poster above) and the son (Tim Campbell). Set in 1946, the play deals with the aftermath of WW II. The family has lost one of their two sons (a death whose details we don't discover until virtually the final minutes). The other son has returned, alive but damaged a bit, and is involved in his father's business--over which there is a cloud: Did he knowingly send defective airplane parts whose failure caused the death of over 20 airmen?

Anyway, the play is about ethics and morals, fathers and sons, individuals and other human beings, grief, "moving on" (the mother cannot accept the death of her son), and a host of other complicated issues. Much of it boils down to this: To what extent are we responsible for others? For one another? Arthur Miller's answer is pretty evident.

2. Afterward, we hustled over to the York Street Kitchen for our final supper in Stratford--yummy, as usual. Then we splurged and got some sorbet next door (bad, bad, BAD people do such things!). A few gifts to buy on the way back to the room, where we are now working.

3. In less than an hour we'll take our final long walk this year down to the Festival Theatre to see As You Like It, one of my favorites.

4. And tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow--can't forget Macbeth's mighty words!) we'll check out from the Inn before we see our final show at 2 o'clock (more tomorrow about that) and, about 5 o'clock, point the Prius toward Hudson, Ohio, and jam that accelerator!