Thanks, Dad ...

At the health club the other day--soaking wet after about twenty-five minutes on the exercise bike--I mumbled to my father, "Thanks, Dad."

Dad, you see, perspired heavily. I remember him back in Enid, Oklahoma. He was in the Air Force Reserves and now and then had to go out to Enid's Vance AFB for meetings or whatever. I remember him in his summer khaki uniform, returning home, with "certain areas" of it dark with sweat.

And that dark, soggy gene he gleefully passed along to me--and I have passed it on to our son and grandsons.

When I was growing up, there were other of my dad's traits that I wished he had passed along. He had been a high-school sprint star in Oregon; I didn't get that gene. When I was in high school, at the "peak" of my athletic prowess (such as it was), I couldn't catch Dad in our little football games out in the side yard--not unless he let me. Which he sometimes did. Which annoyed me even more than when he sprinted away from me toward the goal line.

Dad was also about six feet tall. I peaked at 5'8". In high school, I was sure that if Dad had been more generous, genetically speaking, with his height (and speed), I could have played in the Majors, in the NBA. (Shows what I knew!)

Dad also was muscular--bulging biceps, etc. (Not I.) (See pic atop this post.)

Dad also had curly hair--and did so until the day he died. (Not I. I do still have most of my hair, but it's straight--and very very white now--Santa-Claus white.)

Dad also had a very slow fuse. Was generally genial and amiable and loved to talk with people. I remember, near the end of his life, I rode with him in an ambulance from the hospital to his new "home" in a rehab place. Within thirty seconds he was talking with the young attendant in the ambulance, who'd also been in the military--and on and on they talked until we arrived.

My fuse is shorter; I'm far less ... sociable.

Dad was a ferocious worker. From a large farm family in Oregon. His own father died when Dad was a teen--and Dad went to work to help support the family, survived the Depression, World War II, Korea (though, fortunately for us, he didn't get shipped overseas--just to Amarillo AFB in the Texas Panhandle). He became an ordained minister (Disciples of Christ), and even when he changed his profession to Professor of Education, he still often preached on Sundays, here and there, bringing in a little extra income to help support his wife and three so-grateful sons.

So ... during my boyhood ... he was in the Air Force Reserves, taught at Phillips University, preached on Sundays ...

... and I ...? Never mind.

But, of course, I do want to thank my father for so many things despite his failure to pass along to me his speed, his build, his height, his curly hair, his personality ...

He greeted everyone as an equal--he urged my mom to return to school for a master's degree, for a Ph.D.--he accepted his three very different sons for who they were--he displayed a devotion to his family--he laughed and joked and sang (oh, what a fabulous tenor voice! which, of course, I did not inherit) and teased and loved and loved and loved and loved.

He died on November 30, 1999. He was 86. And oh do I miss him. Even when the perspiration is pouring from me after some mild health-club exertions. Maybe especially then ...

Thanks, Dad ...

Those Who Can't DO ...

Another school year's about to start--without me. And it still feels strange, even though I retired from public schools in January 1997, from Western Reserve Academy in June 2011. For the latter, that's eight years ago, the difference between being a fourth grader and a high-school senior. Geez.

I started teaching seventh graders at the Aurora Middle School (Aurora, Ohio) in the 1966-67 school year. Fifty-three years ago. (Soon, even the arithmetic will be beyond me!) I was twenty-one years old, scared, vastly ignorant about this voyage on which I had embarked.

And then one day I looked up, and we were returning to port, and I had taught thirty years. Go figure.

Last night--for some reason--I started thinking about that old bromide: Those who can't do teach. You know, if you're not good enough to play in a symphony orchestra, you teach music. If you're not good enough to write a novel, you teach English. And on and on.

It's a cliche that has always bothered me, for in my career I have known some supremely talented people who were teaching because they wanted to. Because it was their gift. And they wanted to share it. Throughout my career, I learned as much as I could from those people--stole what I could from them. They initially helped me survive (my first year I had 200 students, three different preparations), then helped me to love my job with a profound intensity.

Later on, I heard a version of that those-who-can't do expression: Those who can't teach, teach teachers.

Of course, there's some truth in that one, too. In my graduate school courses in education, I had profs who wouldn't have lasted five minutes in a middle school classroom. But others--like some of my own colleagues--were wonders. And I learned from them--and stole from them.

And in my pre-slumber mode last night, I imagined other forms of the saying:

• Those who can't teach teachers become administrators.
• Those who can't become administrators become state officials.
• Those who can't do any of the above become U. S. Secretary of Education

And on and on we go ...

In recent weeks I've seen families buying school supplies in Office Depot; my younger grandson showed me a pic of the new backpack and shoes he's got for school; I've seen buses on their practice runs; in front of school buildings I've read the Welcome Back! signs; in the coffee shop I've seen teachers planning and getting ready ...

All of it whirls me back to my own teaching career, of course. The trips to the office-supply stores, the purchase of new slacks and shirts, the lesson-planning (which I always began the first week in August), the fears, the hopes, the optimism, the wonder--all of this (and more!) has flooded over me in recent days and weeks. And part of me would give anything to walk back into a classroom, to learn new names, to try to sneak my way onto the I-like-this-class list of my students, to start working on play productions, to hear a laugh at a joke (a groan at a pun), to see the looks of surprise, to discover the wonder that lies within each child (sometimes near the surface, sometimes not), to ... you know.

But, of course, I can't. Those days are long gone.

The memories are not--and the heartstrings still vibrate when a school bus rolls by ...

Sunday Sundries, 239

1. AOTW: I didn't have a good candidate until about an hour ago--in the grocery-story parking lot. We rolled out of the Acme with our cart of goodies-and-necessaries, but when we got to our parking spot, we saw that the AOTW, in a huge SUV, had pulled up so closely behind us that we could not open our lift-back. That was bad enough; this is worse: He was sitting in his car looking at us! Didn't make a move to remedy the situation--thus, earning AOTW immortality.

2. We have an Acorn TV app on our Amazon Fire TV, and it misbehaved a bit last week. I got on the phone with Amazon, who then transferred me to an Acorn rep. About a half-hour later, after multiple hassles (and many mumbled curses on my end), it worked! And so last night we could resume streaming the latest season of Line of Duty, a British copper show about a unit that specializes in dealing with police corruption. I think it's the fifth season, and we've enjoyed them all--though they do get tense at times.

3. Back in the Old Days (pre-retirement) we had a Friday night routine, Joyce and I: We'd do our grocery shopping, have supper, I'd grade vocab quizzes, then we'd head out to a bookstore to spend some money we didn't have. As bookshops have slowly faded into the sunset, we have done this less and less, but last night we decided to head out to the Books-a-Million near Chapel Hill Mall, and we actually had a pretty good time.

We bought the late Tony Horwitz’s new book (Spying on the South)--he died on May 27 this year while on a book tour for the volume! He was in Washington, DC. He was only 60. (Link to NYT obituary.)

We also bought Anne Tyler's 2018 novel, Clock Dance, because, inexplicably, BAM had a signed first printing for sale! Got to have that, right? Will start reading it soon ...

I bought one other book, too--a copy of Lord of the Flies to donate to the Akron City Schools for summer reading/English classes. I told the clerk the story of how William Golding (Flies was his first book) was teaching at the time he wrote the novel, and he used to put his students to work at their seats--worksheets and such--and he would work on his Flies manuscript up at his desk!

4. I finished just one book this week--but it was a long one--and, for me, a significant one: James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie (1827), which concludes his five-volume set of novels about Natty Bumppo (a.k.a. Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Leatherstocking).

Cooper did not write the novels in the order of Natty's age, but that's how I read them. In this one, Natty is in his late 80s and has moved west, out into the prairies (!), because the advance of "civilization" back in the East has depressed him--the cutting of forests, the slaughter of animals for the fun of it.

He gets involved with quite a cluster of characters in this one--a beekeeper, a pompous intellectual (!), a family of self-absorbed bullies (they come around a bit), a young Pawnee warrior (whom he befriends), and a bunch of "bad" Sioux, who sort of become the Plains version of the "bad" Huron Indians back in the East (where they are contrasted to the "good" Delaware and Mohican tribes).

Well, there are battles with the Sioux--capture by the Sioux (who plan to torture and kill their adversaries)--some heroics by ... Guess Who? ... some sad moments of departure.

In boyhood I had read the story many times in its Classics Illustrated format--but, as I've discovered with the other four novels (which I'd also read in comic-book form), I didn't remember a lot. Just one thing in this one: a buffalo stampede. And, of course, the death of Natty very near the end. He doesn't want to be buried in a cemetery. "Let me sleep where I have lived," he says, "beyond the din of the settlements" (1315, Lib of Amer edition). And so he does.

I'm planning to do a detailed post about all five of the novels, somewhere down the road (soon, soon), but just want to leave you with this. When I was a student at Hiram College (1962-66), I (think I) recall that The Last of the Mohicans was included in our standard Intro to American Lit anthology (Norton). Could this still be true? Having hacked my way through the tall prairie grass of all five of these novels, I wonder: Could undergraduates today read Cooper?

Maybe some of my college-teaching friends could let me know ...

5. We didn't go to the movies this week ... nothing appealed ...

6. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from wordsmith.org

satyagraha (suh-TYAH-gruh-uh, sut-YAH-gru-ha)

noun: The policy of passive nonviolent resistance as a protest against injustice.

ETYMOLOGY: Coined by Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in India’s freedom struggle, from Sanskrit satyagraha, from satyam (truth) + agraha (determination, insistence), ultimately from the Indo-European root ghrebh- (to seize or reach), which also gave us grasp and grab. Earliest documented use: 1920.

USAGE: “Colin Kaepernick is an NFL pariah. His stand for social justice by taking a knee during the national anthem last season as a member of the San Francisco 49ers has left him sitting on his couch as NFL training camps commence this week. “His sideline satyagraha, designed to bring attention to civil rights violations and disparities in treatment from law enforcement in this country, makes him unemployable in a league that frowns upon individuality, and values compliance and conformity from its players.”

     -Christopher L. Gasper; Kaepernick Saga Cuts Against the Grain; Boston Globe (Massachusetts); Jul 23, 2017.

SHOW ME THE PLACE

Having no pride, I have just uploaded to Kindle Direct the latest volume of my doggerel--Show Me The Place, and Other Doggerel and Wolferel. I'll let my FB friends known when it's available for purchase.

The price? $2.99. The lowest Amazon will tolerate.

And if you don't have a Kindle device? You can get the free Kindle app for your phone or tablet. Or you can ignore all of this, a choice that will no doubt be quite popular.

Anyway, here's the introductory material ...

Show Me the Place

And Other Doggerel and Wolferel

(March 4–July 14, 2019)

by

Daniel Dyer

Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Dyer

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover Photo:

Hannibal, Missouri

Boyhood hometown of Mark Twain

July 15, 2004

Photo by the author.

For Chris and Michelle Cozens,

for their friendship, their many kindnesses

Table of Contents

Preface

Show Me the Place

Desultory Doggerel

Wolferel

About the Doggerelist

 

“Show me the place.”

—Duke Senior in As You Like It, 2.1

Preface

One of the first things we learn in our lives: places matter. I still remember, in boyhood, eleven years old, being devastated when I learned we were going to move from our home in Enid, Oklahoma (my birthplace!), to a tiny town—Hiram, Ohio—where my father would teach at Hiram College. I loved Enid—how could we move!

And, years later, I still remember our infant son, arranging things in his crib, his playpen, the tray of his baby chair at the dining table. Arranging his space. Getting things right. You can’t be comfortable until they are, you know? Our places and spaces matter.

Right now, Joyce and I are living in a home we deeply love. It’s more than a hundred years old, and we’ve spent the last twenty-two years (and an uncomfortable amount of money) getting it into the shape we now adore. Bookshelves. Bathrooms. Studies. Comfort zones.

We’re only about a block from town, so we can walk to many of the places we need to go. The coffee shop. The bank. The dentist. A grocery store. A kitchen store. A bookstore … you know.

And I think we both realize that this is the last place we will live until … well, until we can’t.

I often think about how much we love where we are, and I’ll confess that when I think of leaving, I sometimes feel a traitorous tear escaping, traveling a bit down my cheek before I wipe it away and pretend it never happened.

And so it was that I started to think—and write lines—about other places I have loved in my life—places where I spent years, places where I spent only hours. But in all cases they have erected monuments in my memory, occupied apartments in my heart. I can’t forget them—don’t want to forget them. Ever.

A series of doggerel has ensued. In the first section—called “Show Me the Place”—I have reproduced lines that I wrote pretty much every day for my blog, Daily Doggerel. These are light lines—with no pretensions whatsoever. I wrote them quickly—but nonetheless emotionally—to comply with the demands of a daily blog. (I did take one hiatus, occasioned by a visit from the periodic depression I experience, a depression that is one of the dark side-effects of a cancer med I’ve been on for about six years.)

            In this volume there’s there’s also a section called “Desultory Doggerel,” a section that includes pieces—also lighter-than-air—which I quickly wrote about quotidian things and posted on Facebook for my friends to ignore. So … here they are again; ignore them again!

            And then … “Wolferel,” a term I coined a few years ago when I began publishing these volumes of light verse every few months. As I’ve explained before, I used the term “wolferel” to refer to lines that are a wee bit stronger than doggerel—but not strong or agile enough to leap the fence protecting the realm of … Poetry! I’m sure you’ll discover the truth of this distinction when you read some of them. In them you’ll see the differences among a growl, a bark, a roar.

**

            I actually thought I might end this series of Doggerel-and-Wolferel volumes with this one—but then I found myself already at work on another one. So, dear readers, look up now and then—be careful!—for the sky may indeed be falling. And landing on your careless head? Yet another collection of doggerel and wolferel.

*In the Daily Doggerel version I included pictures for most (all?) of the places I wrote about, so a Google search can take you to my blog if you want to see what I was writing about.

http://dailydoggerels.blogspot.com/

—Daniel Dyer

August 8, 2019

"They" Know ...

The other day--for a Facebook post/picture--I copied from Google an image of the Classics Illustrated comic-book version of James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie (1827), the fifth and final volume of Cooper's famous Leatherstocking Tales. (See image atop this post.) As visitors here know, I'm reading all five of them.

And guess what? Ever since the day I copied that image, my FB feed has included, each day, an ad from the used-comic-book seller from whom I "lifted" the image.

The same thing has happened repeatedly with other things--from bakeware to flour products to whatever. The same thing occurs on Amazon: If I even look at something there (a book, a product), guess what pops up later on FB? I sometimes think that I all I need is to pause a few seconds on a FB ad, and I will see it again, in perpetuity.

It's a no-brainer these days to observe that our data are out there. It's just been the next logical step. Years ago, Vance Packard (1914-96) wrote a popular book called The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and in it he says (I am relying on memory now) that television is for one purpose only: to sell things. It's not for entertainment, not for art--not principally; no, it is for those particular things only if the show attracts an audience (i.e., customers). Shows go off the air, almost always, not because they're no good but because they're not attracting a large enough audience.

I thought that idea was kind of cynical when I read that book decades ago. But I was naive. He was absolutely, dead-on right. And were he alive today, he would just smile with satisfaction--not at what has happened but at how what has happened has confirmed his thesis. In spades.

And today's mass and digital media are all about the same thing, of course. I remember seeing a news clip of FB founder Mark Zuckerberg sitting in a Congressional hearing. Some clueless Rep asked him, "Well, how do you make money?"

And Zuckerberg, looking dazed, said what he'd assumed was blindingly obvious to everyone: "Selling ads."*

Yes, Facebook--hell, the entire Internet--is not about "connections" and "unity" and whatever; it's about selling stuff. And every time we post--or copy--we're giving corporations a better idea of who we are, what we like, and then the ads, tailored to our evident interest, come cascading our way.

So ... am I getting off FB?

Probably not. It's so much fun being in touch with folks I long ago would have lost track of: friends from high school, former students, etc. And, for now, it seems worth it to me to see an eerie ad (Didn't I just order something like that?) if I can exchange a few friendly words with someone I taught in 1966.

Besides, I don't buy things I see in ads-tailored-to-me.

Well, not all that often ...


*I'm not positive about his exact words--but this is close. It could be in this video--but I've not watched it.

Tech Change

My father merely smiled--perhaps disdainfully?--as technology accelerated past him. He had not been all that adept, even with the technology of the 1950s and 60s. I remember when we got our first stereo system--with remote speakers (late 1950s)--and he had his good friend and Hiram College colleague, chemistry professor Ed Rosser, come over and hook it up for us. Dad virtually never used it--though the rest of us did.

He never really got the hang of an electric typewriter, and when personal computers began to arrive, Dad didn't bother. My mom, though? She was a different story. She had the first computer in the family (I think), an Apple II, and for a printer she used her IBM Selectric; a colleague had helped her install an "interface."

Mom kept up with computers, fairly well. I bought her a couple--as did my brothers. But gradually--inevitably--her ability to use her laptop slipped away, though it sat on her table in the living room of her assisted living place. See, it seemed to say, I'm still here--and she still knows how to use me. Though she didn't. So ... no more e-mail exchanges with Mom; I had to resort to snail-mail--which, by then, she could not even answer.

But Dad, who'd died on Nov. 30, 1999, had gotten into none of it. As long as he was mobile, he did things the Old Way. An attendant pumped his gas for him; he never used an ATM. Cell phone? Ha! I try to imagine my dad at a grocery-store self-checkout. He would have raised his hands heavenward, called out: Take me now, Lord! Please!

My dear friend and teaching colleague Andy Kmetz (who passed away about a year ago in his late 80s) was also resolutely a non-techie. A cassette tape player was about the extent of it. I tried to convince him to get a smart phone--to get on Facebook and e-mail so that the myriads of former students who adored him could get back in touch. Nah. Wasn't gonna happen. And didn't.

I've tried to keep up over the years, have tried to stay moderately agile on computer and Internet (and with grocery store self-checkouts). But I can already feel things beginning to pull away from me. My grandsons (ages 14 & 10) sail around the Internet with an ease that astonishes me.

But--as Joyce and I have discussed many times--I'm so glad I did not grow up in this world. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, there were only two TV stations, and during the two years we lived in Amarillo, Texas (1952-53: Dad had been called back to active duty during the Korean War and was stationed at Amarillo AFB), we had no TV stations. We listened to radio programs. Read books.

When we moved to Ohio in August 1956, Cleveland had only three stations, and our parents restricted our viewing--as, later, we would do with our own son.

But I know too well the Me of Then: If there had been hundreds of TV "stations" (an archaic word now), if I could have watched every Tribe game (instead of, maybe, one a week--all that was on), if there had been ESPN, if there had been an Internet, I don't think I ever would have read a book.

Isn't it silly that so many of us blame kids for the world we created for them? How can we complain, say, about their smart-phone use when we gave them those phones!

I'm old enough to know that things are not going back. And I don't really want them to. The Internet saves me so much time--every day (how easy now to check facts, to find a spot on a map, to find out who that actor was in The Great Escape, to ... you know). Joyce and I both know what an amazing gift the Internet is for writers.

But now and then (okay, every day) I think about my dad, master of the TV remote (the last technological device he ever bothered to learn), sitting in his chair, perfectly satisfied with a football game, a jar of dry-roasted peanuts, a glass of beer. How could anything possibly be better?

Sunday Sundries, 238

1. AOTW: Once again, I am going to have to go with people who apparently were absent in their driver education class the day the teacher explained how to use an automatic turn signal. It's almost an epidemic around here, this not signaling. I'm old enough that we still learned hand signals in our class (that's right: left arm out the window to let drivers know if you were going left, right, or stopping--image below shows what we learned--and had to show our teacher). I really don't get this new "thing" of not signaling ... are people just too distracted? Or stupid? Or just, fundamentally, AOTWs?

2. I finished just one book this week, the first novel by Ocean Vuong, a young man who has been making his name as a poet--and now as a novelist. One of his poems, "Torso of Air," appeared in the New York Times Magazine on June 24, 2016, and I liked it so much I memorized it:

Torso of Air

Suppose you do change your life.

& the body is more than

a portion of night — sealed

with bruises. Suppose you woke

& found your shadow replaced

by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful

& gone. So you take the knife to the wall

instead. You carve & carve

until a coin of light appears

& you get to look in, at last,

on happiness. The eye

staring back from the other side —

waiting.

An immigrant from Vietnam, Vuong has a gripping command of the English language--as the poem illustrates and as the novel demonstrates even more clearly. That novel--On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)--is (sort of) a letter to the narrator's mother. There are passages of fairly traditional narrative, but throughout there are also very lyrical and even poetic sections. One, for example, begins like this:

Trevor rusted pickup and no license.

Trevor sixteen; blue jeans streaked with deer blood.

Trevor too fast and not enough.

Trevor waving his John Deere cap from the driveway as you ride by on your squeaky Schwinn.

Our narrator has realized that he is gay, and Trevor is his first sexual partner. (There are some fairly graphic moments here.) Trevor is also not particularly happy about this--though is genuinely fond of the narrator, and there is one touching scene when Trevor helps him clean up after a sexual encounter.

Well, I don't want to give away much more. Some dark things happen before all is over.

I wanted to like the novel more than I did. I don't know--it just seemed a little self-conscious to me? At times, trying too hard to impress?

But Vuong is clearly a talent. I'll keep buying his books--prose and poetry--for a while.

3. Last night, Joyce and I drove over to the Cinemark in Cuyahoga Falls to see the new Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which we both liked--a lot. The plot--set in 1969--is about the diminishing career of the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who was a big

star in a TV Western some years back. His stunt double, Brad Pitt, still hangs out with him--drives for him, does chores. They're friends as well as former colleagues.

DiCaprio lives next to a house rented by Roman Polanski, who is living there with his latest gf, actress Sharon Tate. (See where this is headed?)

Anyway, the two stories run in parallel for a while, and then, on a famous night, they intersect. 'Nuff said.

The detail in the film is astonishing. 1969 (which, by the way, is the year Joyce and I met) comes alive in ways that folks who weren't living then will have a hard time grasping, I think. The movie titles on the theater marquees, the music, the clothing styles, the haircuts, the slang, and on and on an on--the details swept both of us back to that time (though, of course, we were living in Kent, Ohio, not Hollywood!).

The film is also populated with characters from the period--actors, directors. And, as is his wont, Tarantino invited into his cast a number of veterans--Bruce Dern, Luke Perry, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Michael Madsen, etc.

There are some lovely and long lingering scenes. On a set, for example, DiCaprio has a long conversation with an 8-yr-old girl (who's also in the cast of the film he's in), and she teaches him a few things about acting--and dedication. (Later, she returns for a very moving moment.)

There are also long takes from films and TV shows he has shot and from the one he is shooting. There's even a what-if? moment: What if he'd gotten the Steve McQueen role in The Great Escape?

I see Tarantino has taken some critical shots because the film is basically about white males, etc. Okay. But he's also created a layered, at times ironic, and powerful film (with a very strong cast) that yanks us back fifty years to see a world that, in some ways, is as ancient and distant as Thebes. And in some ways as relevant as tomorrow.

Link to some video.


4. Final Word--A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from wordsmith.org

teknonymy or teknonymy (tek-NON-uh-mee)

noun: The custom of naming a parent after their child.

ETYMOLOGY: From Greek teknon (child) + -onym (name). Earliest documented use: 1888.

NOTES: If you have ever called your spouse Billy’s Dad or Billy’s Mom, you have practiced teknonymy. When we refer to a parent as a senior, as in Bush Sr. (or, to get fancy, Bush père), we are also doing a kind of teknonymy. It’s just that in some cultures teknonymy is practiced more formally and a parent is renamed after the birth of the first child. There are many reasons for using teknonymy. In some cultures, it’s considered taboo to call certain relations by name (as in the usage example below). Sometimes, it’s convenience. You may not know or remember the names of your child’s friends’ parents, for example, so you resort to teknonymy.

USAGE: “Indeed, the taboo against using personal names is so strong, and the urge to teknonymy so strong, that the child in question can be imaginary. Sim cites with disapproval the example of a young housewife on a TV gameshow being asked to introduce to the audience the gentleman standing beside her. Her reply [meant] ‘This is my husband (the father of our as-yet-unconceived child)’.”

Ho-min Sohn; Korean Language in Culture and Society; University of Hawaii Press; 2006.