December 4: Softball Team, Pep Band, Peter Thabit Jones, "Elephant Seals," Off the Top of My Head

But he made it a point of telling his son, "Never take your good looks or coloring as something better."  Although many of his son's classmates at Corpus and later high school were black and Spanish-speaking kids, Ives went a step further and encouraged his son to join a Harlem baseball league.  For several years Robert had the distinction of being the only white boy, playing left field, on a softball team called the Harlem Ravens, which made it into third and fourth place in the city two years running.  He eventually had to quit because he was always getting jumped and coming home covered with bruises and with other injuries, about which he never complained but which broke his parents' hearts and tested Ives' convictions.

Among other things, Ives' story is one about the problem of race and poverty in the United States.  Ives is constantly making donations to community centers, and his wife makes a point of substitute teaching in inner-city schools, where she talks to the students about hope and the ability to rise above racial and social limitations.  The Ives family really tries to be color blind, despite the fact that their son is the target of racial violence.

But this post is not about the racial divide in the United States.  It's about sports.  I spent this evening in a high school gym, watching a basketball game.  Now that football season is over, my daughter--who plays in the school pep band--has moved indoors.  It was much more comfortable.  The bleachers were just as ass-numbing, but I did not have to contend with rain or snow or frost on my pumpkins.

My daughter's pep band sounded great.  Loud.  It felt like I was sitting inside a kettle drum.  Lots of thumping and trumpets.  By the time we left, my daughter's ears were ringing, and the kids were underneath the bleachers, combing through the garbage and doing God-knows-what else.

That's what I have for you guys tonight.  Race and basketball games and pep bands.  Tomorrow is my daughter's fifteenth birthday, so I expect lots of sulking and eye-rolling.  Maybe even some stomping and crying.

Saint Marty misses the days when his daughter was five years old.  She actually cried and stomped and sulked a lot less back then.

And now, another memory from Big Sur...

Elephant Seals
(for Carolyn and John)

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

They loll just like an unruly army,
Tired and stressed by their sea-playing day.

A colony of overweight, naked
Colonels; Mirounga augustirostris;

Living logs, oiled-up and stone-rock coloured
Blubber, they huddle like a dying herd

Of couch-size maggots.  They burp and shriek:
A strange pantomime at the ocean's edge.

Gregarious sunbathers now wind-blown;
One flicks up sand, as two others stretch high

And aggressively fawn, a ritual,
As they bite and show their salmon-pink throats.

Some check our presence with doleful eyes,
Others grossly crawl-flap to the water;

One elegantly moves through satin waves;
Several, farther out, head-bob around

Like bald men basking in holiday sun.
A weird sculpture sprawled out on the shore,

Performance art by drunken aliens,
They move and moan, an abandoned lament;

A shipwreck of creatures overlapping
Their woes, they litter the place like loafers.

Part-comic, part-tragic, they lie behind
Big Sur's fast road and the three-seeking cars.

Off the Top of My Head

December 3: The Pamphlet, The Mad Feast, Peter Thabit Jones, "Later," Off the Top of My Head

The pamphlet was resting on his lap the night he and Robert attended the lecture by its author, the two sitting in the back of an auditorium of an Upper East Side school.  The auditorium was full, the crowd largely female, divided into two general groups--rather affluent elderly women who may have had a real craving for an insight into the next world, and much younger, sharp-looking women, college students for the most part, Ives concluded...

At one point, Ives becomes a lecture junkie.  He attends any talk given by spiritualists, reincarnationists, psychic societies, and holy men.  He's searching for answers.  After a near death experience, Ives experiences a mystical vision that he doesn't understand.  Colored winds and spinning suns over Madison Avenue.  Nothing from Ives' past unlocks the meaning of the vision.  So Ives decides to explore any explanation, no matter how ridiculous. Thus, he finds himself in auditoriums, listening to presentations on astral projection and past lives and love in the hereafter.  All in pursuit of truth.

I attended a "lecture" given by a friend of mine this evening.  His new book was just released last month, so the local library invited him to read from it.  Matthew Gavin Frank and The Mad Feast.  Matt is a fantastic performer, and the room was packed.  People were lined up along the back wall. 

Matt teaches in the MFA program at the university.  He teaches graduate classes in creative nonfiction and poetry.  His books get reviewed in Entertainment Weekly and The Paris Review.  Over Christmas break, he's traveling to Greece to participate in a conference.  In the past three years, he's published three books.

It was a good night.  I saw some friends that I hadn't seen in quite a while.  I got to hear Matt tell some really good stories.  The only thing missing was a little alcohol and pizza.

Saint Marty is tired.  And hungry.  Ready for a long winter's nap.

Later

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

Later, at the table,
From a stockpile of old thoughts,
A bundle of dry words
And yesterday's dark news,
A poem catches fire.

Off the Top of My Head

December 2: You Fool, Regrets, Peter Thabit Jones, "Morning Walk"

Walking home, he had even managed to pass a local church without crossing himself, and he had made his way along the largely deserted streets feeling tremendously lonely and thinking, with the sentiment of an abandoned child, how no woman would ever really want him.  At the same time he found himself repeating in a staccato fashion, "You fool, you fool, you fool."

Ives beats himself up after his first failed attempt to connect with his future wife, Annie.  They share a moment together in an art class.  All the other students have taken a break.  Annie, the nude model for the night, admires Ives' drawings of her, and Ives cannot bring himself to ask her out.  He's tongue-tied.

Missed opportunities.  Regrets.  I have a lot of them right now.  I've sort of dug myself into a hole of grading, and I can't quite see my way out at the moment.  I'm tired (exhausted really) and angry with myself for allowing this to happen.  Yes, I've called myself a "fool" many times tonight.

That's all I have tonight.  I'm a tired fool.

Saint Marty wishes he were in a cabin in Big Sur, where his only responsibilities are writing poems and watching sunrises and sunsets.

Morning Walk

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

I stand above the sea,
Like a colossus of Greece,
The sun on my back.
I reach up and almost cup
A lone grey boat in my hand.

I had to shovel snow this morning.  I'm a fool.

December 1: Agitated Hive, Peter Thabit Jones, "Morning Mist"

When they stepped outside together, the snow was already more than six inches high and rising.  A beautiful night, the streets in every direction impassable to traffic.  Hardly anything moved save for the occasional snow plow on the avenue, bus engines whirring, strained, somewhere in the distance, little else.  To the west, over the rooftops, through the immense, agitated hive of falling snow, a kind of violet light puzzled them...

This snowy scene is the first in the book.  It's a beautiful, Norman Rockwellish moment, straight out of an Irving Berlin song.  A little later in the above paragraph, a group of kids show up, having a snowball fight.  It's one child with leukemia away from a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV special.

It rained today in my hometown.  Then it snowed.  A lot.  I was 20 miles away, and those 20 miles, in the Upper Peninsula, are like the difference between Aruba and Anchorage.  In the town where I work and teach, there were puddles and slush at the end of the day.  When I got home this evening, there were several inches of wet, heavy snow in my driveway.  The kind of snow that causes heart attacks.  Not the kind of snow that makes you dream of hearing sleigh bells with every Christmas card you write.

I spent almost 40 minutes shoveling, pushing, and stacking cold, wet, heavy precipitation.  It was like moving cement.  I swore, grunted, muttered.  At one point--as I was saying (loudly) "I hate snow!  I hate winter!"--somebody walked by, staring at me.  I didn't care.  I was d-o-n-e.

By the time I finally got inside, I was drenched in sweat and in a foul mood.  Now, after about an hour, I have calmed down.  A little.  I love Christmas.  Love Christmas stories and Christmas decorations.  One of my favorite Christmas carols is "White Christmas."  I've written an essay about that song.  When I was a kid, I prayed for snow storms.  Snow days were like gifts from God.

Now, I don't get snow days.  A snow storm means that I have to get up an hour early, to shovel my driveway.  It means treacherous driving.  It means back aches and cars in the ditch.  I have turned into an old man when it comes to snow.  I might as well hike my pants up to my armpits and start saying things like "Dag blammit!"

I am going to end this post with another Peter Thabit Jones' poem about Big Sur.  Something full of sun and summer.

Saint Marty isn't ready for winter, dag blammit.

Morning Mist

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

Big Sur smokes in a mist,
The ocean has gone
For a few strange hours,
Until the ancient shroud
Drift, magically lifts,
And the bay glistens
And boils in the sun.

(Sorry--no cartoon tonight.  Blogger is not cooperating.  Please lodge any complaints with the staff of Blogger.  Dag blammit.)