A tough few days ...

Mom and her sons, 1950?

... in the near future. Soon, we'll be heading to Massachusetts for the memorial service for my mom, who passed away in her 99th year on March 10. She had been in a long, slow decline, but one quality she held onto until virtually the very end was her sense of humor. She could laugh at the world, laugh at us, laugh at herself. It was a startling trait--a gift, really--one that I'm fairly certain that I won't share when it's my turn to deal with the dying of the light. I--as per the Dylan Thomas poem--will rage, rage ...

I've seen a copy of the service, and it's going to be emotional. Her three sons will speak--as will Joyce. (And whoever else wants to.) Her three grandchildren--Steve, Rick, Bella--will do the readings. And the hymns will dissolve me. They were her favorites. Oh, and leading off? "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," a hymn we've sung at every family funeral for as long as I can remember. If I make it through three syllables I'll be fortunate. (Here's a link to it.)

At Mom's wish, her remains were cremated, and there will be a simple family graveside service for that in the morning--then to St. Stephens Episcopal in Pittsfield, Mass., where she belonged, where she served. Poet Richard Wilbur attended there. So did Melville--very reluctantly so. I wish they were around to sing Mom's praises. One feels ... inadequate at such times.

Afterward--assuming we haven't all dissolved into salt water--there will be a dinner. And we will head back home the following morning.

One good thing about all of this? Our son, Steve, will be traveling with us. And, of course, we'll see family, friends ...

When I get back, I'll post here the remarks I made during the service.

Meanwhile, it's been impossible to keep Mom from inhabiting most of my conscious hours. I'm not complaining. After all--to veer into ClicheLand--I wouldn't be typing these words without ... you know.

And she truly was a wonder--in so many ways. Brilliant, soft-spoken, determined. A gifted educator. Writer (we both would publish pieces in the English Journal, the official organ of the National Council of Teachers of English--that was a thrill for me). Devoted wife of sixty years. A mother who supported the interests of all three of her very different sons. Grandmother. Great-grandmother. And on and on.

And I guess I'll end with this: She was unique. Sure, I met people who shared some of her interests and talents--but no one, ever, who embodied them all--and so gracefully--as she.

Mom & her sons, 2017

101 Books I've Loved--uploading to Kindle Direct!

My latest collection of doggerel (and wolferel) is currently uploading to Kindle Direct and will be available for purchase (2.99--the lowest allowable price!) later today (I'll post on FB when it's in the Kindle Store.) If you have a Kindle device, you can download it; if not, the Kindle app is free and you can use it on any smart phone or tablet.

Below is the Foreword to the volume ...

Foreword

And here we go again!

Once again, I invite you on a journey, this time through 101 books that I’ve loved throughout my life. And I mean throughout my life. Accordingly, you will find here some verses about Dr. Seuss, some about Shakespeare, some about The Story of Ferdinand, some about In Search of Lost Time. Books from boyhood, adolescence, adulthood, dotage—they’re all here. Mixed together like a very inclusive gumbo.

Well, not all books I’ve loved are here, of course. I now read more than 100 books a year, so winnowing this down to 101 total was a bit of a challenge for me. Also a challenge: I wasn’t keeping a list. I just thought of one every day and wrote a quick little piece of doggerel about it. Waited for the next day.

So there was an expected consequence—or, at least, a consequence I should have expected. And maybe I should say consequenceS.

• I left out many writers whose works I’ve long loved. Ben Jonson, Henry Roth, Jonathan Franzen. (I’m blushing already. Don’t make me go on.)

• As the days and weeks (and months!) went on, I also lost track of which books I’d already written about, so—guess what!—I discovered as I was editing these texts that I written two pieces on Brian Hall’s Fall of Frost. I’ve put them now on the same page and have had to write another one—about Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone—to complete the 101 that the title promises. It’s not good to have a title that’s a lie, you know? Does damage to your credibility, right from the get-go.

All of these lines first appeared in my blog (dawnreader@blogspot), and I then linked them to Facebook, where my FB Friends enjoyed scrolling by them with very practiced speed. I have done some light editing—but I’ve not excluded any.

Oh, and you’ll notice there’s a gap in the dates at one point. Health issues.

I’ve also included—as has been my wont in these doggerel publications—two other sections of verse: Desultory Doggerel and Wolferel.

The former are silly poems I wrote quickly and posted on Facebook—poems about animals I saw on the road, dumb things I thought of, memories, fantasies. Pretty much, well, fluff.

In the latter section, Wolferel (a word I’ve proudly coined, by the way—I’m waiting for you, OED!), are lines that are (I hope) beyond Doggerel but (I fear) not quite Poetry. They lie in the demilitarized zone, in the twilight zone (is it night? or day?), in Purgatory … I’m getting excessive. Anyway, they are lines I worked on a bit, lines that (at the time I posted them) I was a bit proud of. As I look at them now, I’m a little less confident. Oh well. I should have learned by now: never look over something you’ve already published! How quickly can pride segue into shame …

Anyway, I hope you enjoy yet another voyage on the good ship Doggerel. I have fun every day, thinking about and writing these. May you enjoy a fraction of that pleasure!

—Daniel Dyer, April 3, 2018 (the ninth birthday of our grandson Carson!)

Sunday Sundries, 182

1. AOTW: Me? For being a day late--and, probably, a dollar short? Aw, let's be generous: No AOTW this week--Easter and all ...

2. I finished one book this week--Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (2018) by Kathryn Harkup. Visitors to this site know that I am somewhat ... obsessed? ... with Mary Shelley, her novel, her other writing, her life, her family, her ... (In fact, in the next month (?) I hope to publish on Kindle Direct the memoir I've been working on since, oh, the Flood: Frankenstein Sundae).

Anyway, my dilatory writing habits have one grim consequence: New books keep coming out, and I sort of have to read them--both to keep up-to-date and to, you know, delay myself some more!

Harkup's book is a mixture of things I already knew (some, very well) and things I didn't know at all. Among the former? The details about Mary Shelley's life, the genesis of her most famous story, etc. Among the latter? The "life science" of her day and how so many things that Victor Frankenstein does while he's creating his creature are, we know now, patently impossible given the technology and understandings of the early 19th century (the book first appeared in 1818). One example: Victor takes months to assemble his creature from parts, but how did he preserve them? (Rot runs rampant in humans, living and dead, of course.)

Anyway, I learned a lot, took lots of notes, will try to weave into my memoir some of what I learned without appearing to be--even more than I already do--a pretentious jerk (a perpetual AOTW!).

3. We're happy that Netflix is now streaming the most recent complete season (No. 6) of Death in Paradise, a series with a predictable chain of events each week--but there is delight in that, at least for us. We love it when the time comes that the Inspector says Round up all the suspects--and, after a subordinate has done this, the Inspector goes around the room eliminating, damning. I know, I know: This is hardly novel. Still love it. (The older I get, the more comfort I find in predictability!)

4. Yesterday, we had a combination of Easter brunch and birthday celebration (for our younger grandson, Carson, who will be 9 tomorrow). Sourdough waffles. Fresh fruit. Lots of laughing. Hearing stories (they just got back from a spring-break week visiting the family of Steve's wife, Melissa, out in Arizona--a visit that allowed them, as well, to hit Disneyland after a bit of a drive). It was exactly a year ago that the older grandson, Logan, now 13, broke his leg--severely--while surfing on a Calif. beach; they returned to the site last week, and he waded into the surf--but did not (wisely! wisely!) take to the board again just yet. He's a brave lad--recovery was long and painful.

Oh, and while they were gone, we "bird-sat" for their parakeet, Jet. Joyce had parakeets throughout her girlhood (and even later, on into our marriage), so she was thrilled to have a feathered friend again. (Birds immediately like her--whereas, they seem to view me and see meal somehow written on me in some avian symbols.)

5. Early Thursday morning, Joyce and I will head out to Massachusetts for my mom's memorial service on April 7. (She died at 98 on March 10.) Will be a wrenching time for all of us ...

6. Last word: a word I liked recently from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from wordsmith.org

metathesis (muh-TATH-uh-sis)

noun:

1. The transposition of letters, sounds, or syllables in a word. Example: aks for ask.

2. In chemistry, double decomposition.

ETYMOLOGY: Via Latin from Greek metatithenai (to transpose), from meta- (among, after) + tithenai (to place). Earliest documented use: 1538.

USAGE: “As Caractacus, Cedric was the heroic British chieftain who rebelled against Roman rule. As Cerdic son of Cymbeline, Cedric by metathesis was the founder of the kingdom of Wessex.”

Philip Howard; Column; The Times (London, UK); Mar 10, 1995.

Spring Things

Spring is officially here, of course. The equinox and all. And there are some signs around here in Hudson, Ohio, that spring is at least considering a return.

Though, this morning, I did have to wear my Damn Winter Coat to the coffee shop. Temps in the mid-20s.

Here are two signs I've noticed the past couple of days:

• Our new sump pump is sighing about, oh, every twenty minutes or so and creating Lake Dyer out in our ivy near the house. I mean, I'm glad that water is not now doing what it did for the first twenty years we lived here--form fetid pools in the basement. But the output from the Sighing Sump is right outside my study window--and, upstairs at night, I can hear it, reminding me of Lake Dyer, and in its sighs I can almost hear a question: What are you going to do about me now?
• The green tips of our day lilies are peeking up through the earth. Testing the air. Measuring the sun. Asking themselves: Dare we?

I would advise them to wait. I know that I would--wait, that is--were I a day lily.

edges of our lilies

I love day lilies, by the way. I've written about them here before--more than once. As I've said, they remind me of summer (my favorite season as a boy--and later, too). Summer vacations from school--as student and, later, as teacher. Gifts that I unwrapped every day with gratitude.

Spring does not delight everyone. Edna St. Vincent Millay has a dark poem about the arrival of spring, a poem that I will paste below. Perhaps spring will read it (surely spring follows this blog!?!) and will effloresce in a fabulous way to demonstrate to Ms. Millay the error of her ways?

BTW: I memorized this one a couple of years ago--and this morning, in the dark, on my walk to the coffee shop, I mumbled it, hoping to coax spring into being a little more ... assertive!

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

"You're not wearing JEANS ...?!"

Which one am I? See bottom of this post for answer!

A little Facebook exchange re: jeans with a friend from Hiram Local Schools days is to blame for this post. He didn't recall that many of us wore jeans to school; I sent him the 7th grade photo from above (fall, 1956) showing that I and some others are wearing them. But I seem to remember that once high school arrived, not too many guys wore them ... or did we? I could check the yearbooks, but I'm too lazy. Instead, I'll just wax wise (?) here.

I should say this before I go on: Now that I'm retired I wear jeans pretty much every day in cooler and cold weather. In warm/hot weather, I shamelessly wear shorts, exposing to the world my 73-year-old legs. (The world, I must admit, is not all that impressed.)

My mother didn't really like jeans; it was, I think, a class thing. And here's a memory that could make you laugh though it still makes me wince.

About, oh, thirty years ago we were all out in Oregon for a family reunion (tens of thousands of Dyers still live out in the Northwest). Joyce, Steve, and I were staying in the same motel (different rooms!) as my parents. One of the events was a picnic at my uncle John's house; lots of Dyers were going to be there.

As the time neared for departure, we emerged from our rooms. I was wearing jeans. Mom looked at me and said, "You're not wearing jeans, are you?" Recall: I was in my forties.

I replied with some weak offering: "Mom, it's a picnic!" Though, to be honest, I don't think my voice at that moment gave the slightest hint of an exclamation mark.

So I slumped and slouched and grouched back into our room, changed into a pair of "real" pants (uttering grievous execrations the while), then went to the picnic, where, of course, all the other men--and many of the women--were wearing jeans.

Mom didn't like shorts, either. And when, later, we would visit her in her stages-of-care place in Lenox, Mass., she would tell me (adorned as I invariably was in shorts or jeans) that the dining hall would not serve me if I were so bedight.*

I never found that to be true. But ... you know moms ...?

Now, of course, my mother has died. March 10, 2018. And as I sit here, typing in my jeans, I wish she would walk in the room and tell me to change into something more appropriate.


*I'm in front, second from the left. Can you tell that we moved to Hiram from Oklahoma only a few weeks earlier?
**an archaic word for dressed--a word I learned in Poe's 1849 poem "Eldorado." This marks the first time I've ever used the word myself!

   Gaily bedight,
   A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
   Had journeyed long,
   Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

   But he grew old,
   This knight so bold,
And o’er his heart a shadow
   Fell as he found
   No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

   And, as his strength
   Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow;
   “Shadow," said he,
   “Where can it be,
This land of Eldorado?”

   “Over the mountains
   Of the moon,
Down the valley of the shadow,
   Ride, boldly ride,"
   The shade replied,--
“If you seek for Eldorado!”

Nature Reminds Me ...

We had a grim experience the other evening, Joyce and I. But let me preface my tale with this: On Friday, March 23, I wrote and posted to FB this bit of doggerel about a near-miss involving four deer that had crossed in front of us on Aurora St., right at the eastern edge of our village of Hudson, Ohio.

Deerly

E. Aurora St.

Hudson, OH

March 23, 2018

6:10 pm

Mere seconds—yes, that is the space

Between delight and frigid fear,

Between enjoying nature’s grace

And hitting four traversing deer.

The parents cross so leisurely—

It seems they’ve crossed this road before.

The adolescents—nervous—flee

As if they’ve seen a carnivore.

But all are safely now across—

They do a deer-dance on the lawn.

They have survived without a loss.

The carnivores drive slowly on.

Okay--those lines about "Mere seconds--yes, that is the space / Between delight and frigid fear ...."

Skip ahead a couple of days to Sunday--the 25th. Joyce and I had driven over to Aurora to get a (Diet!) Coke at McD's and, as is our wont, were driving back to Hudson via Old Mill Road, a lovely very rural way that moves through a bit of Tinker's Creek State Park. We often see wildlife.

We were talking, laughing ... the usual.

A quick cry from Joyce--a heavy thud on the right front part of the car, a deer limping on across the road and into the woods.

I'd not seen it at all until it was too late. There was no Oh, there's a deer--better put on the brakes! Just ... THUD! And the sickening feeling that we'd hurt an animal--perhaps fatally. Joyce had seen it--only for an instant--in the side mirror. There was nothing we could have done. I was not speeding (I never do--angering lots of the Impatient Ones behind us).

And I thought about the improbability of that collision: It could have existed only in a window of a couple of seconds. Any change in our routine--any change in the deer's--would have made his (her) crossing as routine as he'd/she'd surely expected it to be.

But, no ... Time was our enemy at 6:05 p.m., the deer, of course, suffering far more grievously than Joyce or I.

The damage to our car was considerable. We could still drive it, so we limped (as a damaged car does) home, inspected the damage more closely: My (ignorant) guess was that we would have to replace the front bumper, the headlight/turn-signal assembly, part of the right side.

Insurance will pay for it all (watch this space to hear about our consequent rates!), and as I type these words, the car is at the body shop.

Of course, there's no body shop for the deer. Just the strength of its constitution, the gravity of the injuries. Though he was clearly not 100%, he was moving pretty quickly when he crossed on over the road ... so I'm hopeful.

I didn't sleep well on Sunday night. And I was reminded of a sight we saw a few years ago on Interstate 87, northbound between I-84 and I-90, just south of Albany. Traffic was slowing. We saw, creeping by, that someone had hit a deer, now lying in the grass of the median.

A man was in the median, too. I have no idea if he'd been the driver. But he was kneeling beside the deer, stroking the head. Comforting the creature in what surely was its last moments of life.

Brown v. Board & DOD

Linda Brown, 1974 (from New York Times)

The news has been everywhere the past couple of days--as it should have been: the story of the death of Linda Brown, 75, whose name adorns one of our most famous Supreme Court cases--Brown. v. Board of Education, 1954, a case ending school segregation, a case decided by a 9-0 vote. (Link to her obituary.) (Link to full text of the decision.)

When the decision came down in the spring of 1954, I was not yet ten years old, a double-digit age I could not wait for (but I had to wait, of course, until November 11--mark your calendars!).

We were living in Enid, Oklahoma--in the north-central part of the state (only about fifty miles from Kansas, which, by the way was a "wet" state--i.e., you could buy alcohol there; Oklahoma was "dry" then).

Oh, and the schools in Oklahoma were racially segregated. In Enid, Black families almost all lived on the south side of Market St. (now renamed to honor Enid's astronaut, Owen K. Garriott). I grew up in the time of separate drinking fountains, separate public restrooms--you know: You've seen the pictures. Shaken your heads in wonder.

Public parks were segregated; the city buses had signs in the back: Colored. Black patrons were not allowed in the Carnegie Pubic Library, which sent books over to the schools for people to look over and check out.

And there were, of course, separate schools. The black kids went to their own elementary school named for George Washington Carver, to their own high school named for Booker T. Washington. Both schools, of course, were on the other side of Market Street.

As a young boy I never questioned the appropriateness of all this. It was just the way of the world, you know? The only black people I ever saw were in the back of the bus, heading up to the "colored" section of the movie theaters. My elementary school--named for John Adams (who never owned slaves)--was all white in 1954. And 1955. And 1956. The Supreme Court had authorized desegregation with "all deliberate speed"; Enid apparently liked the "deliberate" part.

We moved to Ohio in 1956--to Hiram where my dad would teach at Hiram College, where there were, then, very few black students. There were none in the Hiram Schools when I attended them, grades 7-12.

But I would learn ... oh, would I! I would learn that I'd been living in a perverted world, a world where cruelty was king, where inhumanity reigned among people who called themselves Christian. I could not believe that I'd lived in such a place--that I'd never thought something was wrong.

Years later, by the way, I would learn that my mom, who taught English at Emerson Junior High School in Enid, had taught some of the first black students in that school's history.

Decades later--another lesson. I was back in Enid doing research for a memoir about the Carnegie Library there and about my life as a reader.* I visited those two former black schools--both were community centers at the time. And I visited the Leona Mitchell Southern Heights Heritage Center and Museum, a place dedicated to preserving and displaying the history of African Americans in the region. I was doing some research on the segregated schools. (Link to museum site.)

A kindly employee--a woman who appeared to be about my age--showed me some things, and I told her I'd been born in Enid. She asked me where.

"St. Mary's Hospital."

"Me, too," she said.

We'd connected. Then ...

"But," she said, "black women had to give birth in the boiler room."

We've come a ways in this country--thanks, in part, to courageous families like the Browns. And countless others.

But--as recent events have shown us--we have a long, long, LONG way to go before we can truly realize the dreams of Linda Brown and of the myriads of other Americans who have had to endure unspeakable discrimination since, well, since Jamestown, 1607.


*Turning Pages: A Memoir of Books, Libraries, and Loss (Kindle Direct, 2012).