The Most Expensive Cups of Coffee--EVER

On Monday evening Joyce and I were in Kent, and we decided to stop at the Starbucks there next to the KSU campus--the place that once was Captain Brady's when we first met back in 1969. We used to take our infant son there for a treat.

When we pulled into the parking lot on Monday, we saw it was full (and there were cars circling the lot, waiting for the next opening). So I did what we generally do in that parking lot--which is often full, especially in the evening when KSU is in session. It's supposed to be a lot dedicated only to the businesses there, but, hey, this is America! Freedom! Park where I want!

So, as I said, I did what we usually do: park illegally (for a few moments) in a space next to a legal space while we race inside, get our coffee, race out, head for home. Our parking in that fashion, by the way, does not inconvenience anyone; we do not block anyone--plenty of room for cars to get by us.

Joyce, for some reason, was not too sure we should do this. She is, of course, far more ethical than I and is uneasy about even my smallest infractions and transgressions. Still, she was somewhat mollified by the thought that it was my turn to pay for the evening coffee.

In we went. Not much of a line. Good.

Then a young woman came up to us. Are you the people with that Prius out in the lot?

We were.

Well, there's a tow truck ...

Coffee forgotten, I headed out to the lot, where I saw, indeed, a young man was hooking up our car to his tow truck. (Insult to injury? The truck had a AAA logo on it; we've been AAA members since our marriage!)

I walked up to him. Uh, this is my car, and--.

He turned around, a sorrowful expression--with some sort of smile as well--on his face. Well, he said, I can unhook it for $45. It would be $90 if I'd hauled it away. Blocking a fire lane, he added with some gravity.

I tried to be genial. We can get a receipt for that?

Sure. Down at the Safety Center.

I had $45 in cash on me--barely. So I paid him; he unhooked us; off he rolled. I decided not to go to the Safety Center, where, I was certain, other problems would surely ensue.

Joyce--bless her loving heart--said nothing even in the same galaxy as I told you so ...

The only good thing? She'd bought the coffee while I was outside dealing with The Gov'ment.

Frankenstein Sundae, 96

—Arna Bontemps (birthplace in Alexandria, Louisiana; home and grave in Nashville)

—Willa Cather (birthplace and sites in Back Creek Valley, near Winchester, West Virginia; sites in and around Red Cloud, Nebraska; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she taught; Grand Manan Island, Nova Scotia, where she had a summer cottage; her grave and other sites in Jaffrey, New Hampshire)—

            —Checking place names for Cather, I find online a story about her birthplace being up for sale; the story originally appeared on 9 March 2010, coincidentally my father’s birthday—he would have been 97. I printed the story, copied the photograph, posted the item on Facebook—

—And so many others: Kate Chopin (home in Cloutierville, Louisiana; relevant streets of New Orleans; Grand Isle, Louisiana (a principal setting of The Awakening), grave in St. Louis and other sites there); Stephen Crane (many sites around Port Jervis, New York, where he grew up; Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he lived with his family; his grave in Hillside, New Jersey); Emily Dickinson (home and grave in Amherst, Massachusetts; her grandfather Samuel once worked at Western Reserve College—now Academy—where I taught; he died here in Hudson, Ohio, in 1838); Ralph Ellison (all his youthful residences in Oklahoma City are gone, but we saw his grave in Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum near Riverside Park in New York City); Ralph Waldo Emerson (home and grave in Concord, Massachusetts; also Concord Bridge, where his poem “Concord Hymn”—with its famous line “the shot heard round the world”—lives on a stone marker)—

            —My students were always moved by the story of Emerson’s despair over the early death of his first wife, Ellen, in 1831, how he walked four miles, each way, to her grave every morning, how, finally, more than a year later, he asked the cemetery caretaker to open her grave; only when he saw her corpse, he believed, could he finally accept her death. “29 March [1832]. I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin,” he wrote in his journal.[1] It was all he could say—

— William Faulkner (home and grave and sites in and around Oxford, Mississippi; we drove and photographed the route described in As I Lay Dying, a book I regularly taught late in my career); F. Scott Fitzgerald (sites in Mobile, Alabama, Zelda’s home; sites in Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois, his girlfriend’s houses; sites in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he grew up; Buffalo and Rochester, New York; his grave in Rockville, Maryland); Robert Frost (homes in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts; grave at Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont, one of the few cemeteries we visited where signposts point toward the author’s grave); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (sites in his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia, which we visited a photographed when I was teaching his memoir, Colored People); Nathaniel Hawthorne (Salem, Lenox, and Concord, Massachusetts; Raymond, Maine; grave in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery); Ernest Hemingway (sites around boyhood home in Oak Park, Illinois; setting of “The Killers” in Summit, Illinois; sites around their summer cottage, “Windemere,” on Walloon Lake in Michigan; sites in Key West, Florida; his home and grave and other sites in Ketchum, Idaho)—

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[1] Library of America edition, 191.

Swings ... Sways ... Whatever: A 50s Memory

Who knows what propels back into consciousness a long-ago memory? Today, reading a book about morality, I found myself thinking about the 1950s song "What Is Love?" performed by The Playmates--no, not those Playmates, the ones created by the late Hugh Hefner.

The Playmates, a popular singing group in the late 1950s and early 1960s, were a trio:Donny Conn, Chic Hetti, Morey Carr--all stage names. Among their (few) hits was "What Is Love?" in July 1959. When that song came out, I had just completed ninth grade--a fairly rough year for me at Hiram High School. I'd decided (well, my parents had decided) that I would take the "college-prep" courses my freshman year. They were not all that remarkable: Latin I (B for the year), Algebra I (B+). As I look at my transcript now, I see that all my course averages my freshman year were varieties of B--even phys ed (why?). Part of the problem was that I was finding it harder and harder to ... concentrate ... on school work. Other concerns had entered my mind.

The next fall, our sock hops and dances often featured "What Is Love?" on the playlist. The lyrics--see below--were bouncy and simple and bright and a bit sexist. (Here's an audio link to the song.)

Sways with a wiggle, with a wiggle when she walks
Sways with a wiggle when she walks
Sways with a wiggle, with a wiggle when she walks
Sways with a wiggle when she walks

What is love? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail
The cutest ponytail that sways with a wiggle when she walks
What is love? Five feet of heaven and the bluest eyes
And what a pretty smile that shows you a dimple when she talks

What is love but a little angel who's makin' me lose my sleep?
And she's always makin' promises that she says she'll keep

What is love? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail
The cutest ponytail that sways with a wiggle when she walks

Shows you a dimple, yes a dimple when she talks
Shows you a dimple when she talks
Shows you a dimple, yes a dimple when she talks
Shows you a dimple when she talks

What is love but a little angel who's making me lose my sleep?
And she's always breakin' promises that she says she'll keep.

What is love? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail
The cutest ponytail that sways with a wiggle when she walks
The cutest ponytail that sways with a wiggle when she walks

Sways with a wiggle, with a wiggle when she walks
Sways with a wiggle when she walks

Fade
Sways with a wiggle, with a wiggle when she walks
Sways with a wiggle when she walks

By the way, I would have bet the house that it was swings with a wiggle, not sways with a wiggle. Oh well. Dotage, you know?

I liked ponytails. Lots of girls had worn them--or close versions of them--throughout my boyhood. So as my perception of the Opposite Sex altered from They're annoying! to Yikes! I began to ... notice things about the girls in my school, things that I'd not really paid much attention to before ... The Change. Things like what was swaying with a wiggle when they walked.

Anyway, I was thinking this morning that The Playmates' answer to "What Is Love?" is kind of primitive, kind of ninth-gradey, really. Yes, ponytails and dimples are nice--but far nicer are empathy, forgiveness, understanding, commitment--words that don't really offer lots of easy rhymes for pop-song lyricists.

Frankenstein Sundae, 95

“Let Us Visit Their Tombs” 

Let us mark the spot …; let us erect a shrine to their memory; let us visit their tombs; let us indulge all the reality we can now have, of a sort of conference with these men, by repairing to the scene which, as far as they are at all on earth, they still inhabit!”

— William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, 1809, pp. 44–45.

On 11 February 1809—daughter Mary had turned 12 only two weeks earlier—Godwin published his Essay on Sepulchres, a pamphlet he printed and distributed at his own expense. (A nineteenth century version of Kindle Direct!) It was a short publication, just 141 small pages, many containing fewer than a hundred words. In Sepulchres, he urged that simple markers be installed over the burial sites over “the illustrious dead”—and that a comprehensive map or atlas be published so that the rest of us could visit those places, could stand in awe and admiration and gratitude. We could, he said, even have “a sort of conference with these men.” (And women?)

“Mr. Dyer, you’re a stalker!”

So declared one of my eighth grade students while I was showing 35-mm slides (am I dating myself?) of one of my visits to the gravesite of a famous author, in this case, Jack London. Okay, I admit I was somewhat interested—okay, obsessed—with London for, oh, fifteen years or so, from about 1982 to 1997. As I’ve already noted. And when I showed my slides—hundreds of them—of London and his world (including several of the gravesite on his ranch in Glen Ellen, California), well, my students were sometimes a little puzzled. Eighth graders are not really good about concealing their feelings, so during those years I could see bemused looks painted brightly on their faces, and comments like “You’re a stalker!” occasionally flapped like startled starlings from the maw of some drop-jawed thirteen-year-old.

But I couldn’t help it. I had to know. During my middle-school career, I practiced my stalker-scholarship only on the principal authors I taught: Shakespeare, Jack London, Anne Frank, Mary Shelley.

Things changed when I started teaching American literature to college-prep juniors at Western Reserve Academy in 2001 and was responsible for the entire American literary pantheon—writers from Anne Bradstreet to Tobias Wolff. As I began my journey, I felt a bit like those early wagon-train pioneers who crossed the endless prairies, only to discover the Rockies, then the desert, and then the Sierra Nevada confronting them. How could I possibly know everything about everyone I was going to teach?  How could I possibly read everything they wrote, not just the texts I taught?  It was impossible.

So I started doing it. My wife, Joyce, I am glad to report, is as mad as I, and soon we were spending all our summer vacations driving to literary sites all over the country, visiting the homes and haunts and graves of writers we taught. A partial list, in alphabetical order, of what we saw—

[to be continued]

Sunday Sundries, 36

1. Another incarnation of the TA (Traffic Asshole) ... You're waiting to get out onto the main road. You're sitting in a mall driveway that has one entrance lane and two exit lanes--one for right-turners, the other for left. You want to turn right, but the TA in front of you is straddling the two turn lanes. No room to get by. Lots of room, though, for creative cursing and crafting of flawless homicide plans.

2. The lead story in today's New York Times Book Review dealt with some recent books about Lincoln--and about his 1865 assassination. The headline: O Captain! Some of my recent WRA students would recognize that--the Walt Whitman poem "O Captain! My Captain!"--one of Whitman's poems about the death of Lincoln. (Link to the entire poem.) Some may remember it, as well, as a poem that figured prominently in Peter Weir's 1989 film Dead Poets Society (with Robin Williams as a charismatic boarding school teacher). Here's a link to an "O Captain!" moment in that film.

Anyway, this morning ... Joyce and I were reading the Times in Open Door Coffee Co. (our new Sunday morning hangout), and when I saw that headline, I started reciting the poem (one of the ones I've memorized)--not loudly; I did not leap upon a table (not that I could anymore!), but softly, to Joyce.

And when I finished (I messed it up a little, had to start over), we started talking about something I've noticed over the years. I have memorized 140 poems (which I rehearse several times every week to keep them in my ever more forgetful brain). But I rarely recite them. Here's why: People don't want to hear them. (Joyce excepted.)

I can't tell you how many times I've launched into something memorized because of the nature of the conversation I'm in, only to see rolling eyes, looks of impatience; some folks even interrupt. So I don't do it much anymore. (Just for Joyce, who loves me and listens.) Even other members of my family don't really want to hear them.

This morning we talked about some reasons people react as they do. She suggested it's like showing family pictures. No one really wants to see them. I mean, others like knowing you have a family, but they don't want to look on your iPhone to see the latest seventy-five images you've stored there. And they don't want to hear about your vacation, either--or see the pictures of it.

I can think of some Darker Reasons, I guess, but I think Joyce is probably right (she usually is).

Although I'm still memorizing them, I release them into the air only rarely these days. Like Christmas. My grandsons and I take turns--at Christmas dinner--reciting stanzas from "A Visit from St. Nicholas." I love it.

3. I'm bemused (not amused) by the capacity for rage we have in this era of social media. Someone with whom you disagree (or someone whom you despise) says something you dislike, and suddenly it's as if he or she has boiled babies and served them with barbecue sauce at a tailgate party. This week, President Obama made a fairly innocuous statement about how many people have performed awful things under the cloak of religion. Here are his words:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Of course people have done such things. Read a little world history. Google "witch trials." Google "Jim Jones." Google "Hale-Bopp Comet and Heaven's Gate." Google "religious atrocities." (I just did: I got 13,000,000 hits.) And on and on and on.

But when the President said that, the social media lit up like the Fourth of July, and his political enemies condemned him in the most ferocious terms. (These folks seem to have an unlimited capacity for outrage.)

The same thing happens on all faces of the flawed political diamond, of course. Mitt Romney mentions the forty-seven percent; Sarah Palin says something odd (again); Mike Huckabee goes off on Beyoncé. The liberals go crazy on Twitter and Facebook ...

One result of this, of course, is that politicians are learning never to speak extemporaneously--to deviate from a very vetted and insipid "script." To do so is to invite waves of opprobrium to wash over you--and perhaps carry you out to sea. Where you will see a ship and cry, "O captain!"

One Eventually Wearies ...

I was a lucky lad. A very lucky lad.

I had parents who loved me (and each other)--got to attend good (if not great) schools--fell into a job I loved (middle school teaching)--met a woman I loved immediately, a woman who, impossibly, loved me back--retired with a decent pension--fell into another job I loved (English at Western Reserve Academy)--retired again (after ten more years).

And I had my health. Throughout boyhood, young manhood, middle age--nothing ever really happened to me besides the usual: a tooth needed filling; I got the flu; bumps and bruises.

Then, as I neared fifty, stuff started happening. I hurt my knee while ascending the Chilkoot Pass in 1993 (it's never really recovered). Then--that bizarre experience with Bell's palsy in October 2003 (I'm mostly recovered, though part of the right side of my face remains numb and disobedient). In the summer of 2004--skin cancer (requiring facial surgery). Late in 2004 I got my prostate cancer diagnosis. Surgery failed; radiation failed; I'm currently on hormone-deprivation therapy--not a cure. A delaying tactic.

I've had some more serious oral surgery. And other stuff seems always to be going wrong, all up and down my body. Of course, I'm seventy now. What else should I expect?

Here's a new one: A few months ago, Joyce and I were on a walk around town (not a "speed" walk--but a brisk one). At an intersection, a driver waved us on, so I broke into a little trot to cross the street and found--to my alarm--that I could not stop. Well, I could have, but it would have meant falling on my face. I eventually staggered to stillness and could only shake my head at the latest chapter in the book of my physical decline. Now I have to be very careful about changing positions. If I've been sitting awhile, I need to stand carefully; if I've been walking quickly, I need to take time to slow down before I stop. Otherwise, dizziness overwhelms, and I have to grab onto something. Or hit the dirt (snow/ice).

Anyway--here's what I'm getting at today: All of these complaints wear you down after a while. Instead of running off to the physician or dentist (or shrink?!), you just say to yourself, I'll deal with this by myself.

One medical/dental professional (ain't tellin' which) has been calling me lately about a follow-up. I just can't do it. Don't want to do it. So I ain't doin' it.

My left knee has gotten worse in recent months, but I'm not doing anything about it (other than being circumspect). I don't want another surgery--or a replacement. I'd rather limp a little.

I know, I know. I should care more than I do. I should run (well, walk slowly) out and get these things looked at--or taken care of (whatever that means).

But I'm just tired of it all.

One eventually wearies ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 94

In recent years, pundits have been lamenting the loss of the neighborhood bookstore in America. In a PBS interview on 21 July 2011, Jeffrey Brown spoke with Slate’s Annie Lowrey. They talked about the emerging eBook markets, the mistakes Border’s made, the changing landscape of literacy. And then this:

BROWN: And their corner bookstore is now gone.

LOWREY: They have fewer and fewer choices in that sense, it is true.

In October 2011, cartoonist Tom Batiuk addressed the issue in his Funky Winkerbean strip. The character named Crazy is about to enter the Village Booksmith when he notices the sign: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS taped to the window. Over several days Crazy has flashbacks to his boyhood when he bought Tarzan books there. But the owner now tells him that a bookstore is now more like an antique shop.

In late January 2012, the New York Times ran a long feature piece—“The Bookstore’s Last Stand” (by Julie Bosman)—about publishers’ worries about the emerging eBook business, the domination of Amazon, the fragility of the country’s final big book chain, Barnes & Noble. Bosman spoke with William J. Lynch, Jr., B&N’s CEO, who said, “Our stores are not going anywhere.” (We’ll see!)

Recent research, by the way, is showing that readers of physical books retain more, are moved more, than are readers of eBooks. And surveys of college students show that they prefer actual books for their classes.[1] Still, it’s unlikely the eBook business will go away. Convenience is a powerful factor in modern life.

I have had several Kindles and use them, mostly, for reading thrillers and other snack-food fare. I have tried to read scholarly books on them but have found I much prefer a physical book for that purpose. I’ve sometimes used Kindle, too, for my book reviewing—not for the new book but for the author’s previous titles. But I find that somehow dissatisfying, too. I’d rather hold an actual text in my hand.

 I realized, of course, that all of this could be just an older man’s preference for older technology. My dad, who died in 1999, for example, didn’t ever use a cellphone, didn’t like the ATM and would always go to the drive-thru—or actually enter the bank—to cash a check or make a deposit. And I can not see my father in an automated check-out line at the grocery store. Even a fresh jar of dry-roasted peanuts (his favorite) was not worth learning some newfangled purchase process.

But William Godwin (1756–1836) lived in a much different time. Newspapers, pamphlets, books, magazines—all flooded London with ink, buried the city in pages. And people read and read and read. He could have never dreamed that the whole enterprise would one day slouch not towards Bethlehem but towards the City of the Dead.

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[1] See: Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (New York: Oxford UP, 2015).