Dusty

a storm in New South Wales

When I was a kid in Oklahoma in the late 1940s and early 1950s, dust storms still rose up in the west--the sky boiling red with the region's clay soil. I remember one day in elementary school when a particularly ominous one appeared in the sky, and the principal (Miss Hinshawe!) sent us all home for the day. I was wearing my Cub Scout shirt and scarf that day (we must have been scheduled for a meeting?), and I put the scarf around my mouth and nose like a cowboy criminal and staggered home (about a mile) as the gritty red wind pounded me with pellets from the fields west of town.

Next day, in school, dust coated everything: It had sneaked through every crack in the window frames and doors.

So ... a windy introduction to what I wanted to write about today (no, not masks): dust. The other day Joyce was commenting about how we've accumulated a bit of dust during our lockdown, and her comments reminded me of a poem from years ago, from the earliest years of my teaching career (I started teaching seventh graders in the fall of 1966).

It was in a book called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse, edited by Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith and published in 1966. The year I began.

My mother had given me the book back then. For the past ten years she had been teaching English at James A. Garfield High School in Garrettsville, Ohio (three miles from our home in Hiram), and she and Dad had just accepted jobs to teach at Drake University out in Des Moines, Iowa, where their longtime friend Dr. Paul Sharp had assumed the presidency.

Anyway, Mom knew (as I, of course, didn't) that I would need some ... help ... as I commenced my career. And so before they left for the Hawkeye State, she gave me the book you see pictured below (my copy).

Until I plucked the book from the shelf this morning, I knew I had not looked at it in years--decades.  But there were some poems in there I have never forgotten--poems that I knew were in that book. And one of them (by Sydney King Russell, of whom I'd never heard) was about dust--and a woman named Agatha Morley. Here it is ...

Dust

Agatha Morley

All her life

Grumbled at dust

Like a good wife.

Dust on a table,

Dust on a chair,

Dust on a mantel

She couldn’t bear.

She forgave faults

In man and child

But a dusty shelf

Would set her wild.

She bore with sin

Without protest,

But dust thoughts preyed

Upon her rest.

Agatha Morley

Is sleeping sound

Six feet under

The mouldy ground.

Six feet under

The earth she lies

With dust at her feet

And dust in her eyes.

Dust wins, in other words--as if we didn't know!

As I paged through Reflections this morning, I noticed in the Contents that I had circled and/or marked the page numbers of poems I thought the kids would enjoy reading--or hearing. Among them were "Bones" by Walter de la Mare, "Interlude III" by Karl Shapiro, "On a Night of Snow" by Elizabeth Coatsworth, "Fortune" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and "Twin Lakes Hunter" by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950 for The Way West and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of Shane; I remember loving his novel The Big Sky--also a film in 1952; link to some footage; the entire film is on YouTube).

I'm remembering, too (did it happen?), that one early year of my career I had kids buy paperback copies of Reflections. And I know I used some of its poems for years.

I wish I had been better about picking the brains of my parents for teaching ideas--they both were veterans; both surely had lots of good ideas. But I was young and dumb (redundant?) and in my early 20s did not think they could really tell me much of anything that would be useful.

Stupid.

But I did accept Mom's gift of Reflections; I did use it for a number of years; I did not forget it--as Joyce's comment about dust the other day--and my quick reaction to it--certify.