August 2: Poem from "Kyrie," What If, My Neighbor

Poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

If doubts have wintered over in your house,
they won't go out.  The residue in the cupboard
means they've built a nest of your neglect
and fattened in it, and multiply, like mice.
Soft gray velvet scurry on the floor?
The rational cat licks a foot and looks away.
All dread passes--any harm they do
is mostly out of sight, and it's not just
your failure anyway:
                                    a plausible God
is a God of rapture, if not the falcon
at least the small decorous ribbon snake
that slept in the hay against the northern wall.
But look:  what drips like a limp Chinese moustache
at the lips of the cat coming up the cellarstairs?

___________________________________________

We all live with doubts, all our lives.  Because, as Benjamin Franklin noted, the only things that are certain are death and taxes.  Tomorrow is not a guarantee.  Certainly, next year is about as certain as a pandemic.  Last year at this time, I was contemplating choices and alternate realities.  Playing the "what if" game.  What if I had finished my doctorate?  What if I had stuck with computer programming as a career?  What if I had chosen not to live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?  What if I wasn't a poet?  A person could "what if" her/himself to death.

Tonight, a wonderful thing happened on my street.  Something that defies all the "what ifs" in the world.  My neighbor from across the street turned 95-years-old.  She's a wonderful woman, still living by herself, but undergoing some health issues.  Yet, she's still smiling, curious, and obviously in love with life.

My neighbor's daughter and son-in-law arranged a drive by birthday parade for her.  People from my neighbor's church drove by her home at 6 p.m., honking horns, blowing kisses, dropping off birthday cards.  My family and I stood out in the mist and drizzle, shouting "Happy birthday!" to her from our sidewalk.  People came from all over the place.  Some drove over an hour to be a part of the event.

It was a wonderful celebration of a miraculous lady who has defied doubt and lived almost a full century.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

June 25: Tedious, Why I Write, Louise Gluck, "The Couple in the Park"

At first, the job in itself, as an illustrator, was not so hard as tedious, his hours spent with some rather dull assignments. . . 

Ives finally takes a full-time job with the Mannis Advertising Agency when he's a young husband and father.  He realizes he has to give up his artistic ambitions to be a struggling painter for more pragmatic ambitions:  a steady income and health insurance.  It's a choice many artistic people are forced to make.  Not everybody wants to live the life of William Faulkner or Vincent van Gogh.

Many years ago, I realized that I needed to alter my expectations.  I had a pregnant wife and was a part-time book store clerk and adjunct English instructor.  Everything about my life was unstable, transient.  I needed to provide for my family.  Do I sometimes play the game of "what if"?  Of course.  I sometimes feel like an absolute failure in the game of life.

Tonight, my book club met.  We read My One and Only Bomb Shelter, a collection of stories by my friend and colleague, John Smolens.  John is a fantastic writer and one of the most humble, articulate writers I know.  Every time I talk to him, invite him to my house, he reminds me why I write.  John quite matter-of-factly says that writing has saved his life, kept him sane through a lot of difficult times.  Writing helps him understand the world.

I don't have much to add to his answer.  I write because not to write would be something akin to death.  I think any writer would agree with John, including Louise Gluck.

And Saint Marty.

The Couple in the Park

by:  Louise Gluck

A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone.  How does one know?  It is as though a line exists between them, like a line on a playing field.  And yet, in a photograph they might appear a married couple, weary of each other and of the many winters they have endured together.  At another time, they might be strangers about to meet by accident.  She drops her book; stooping to pick it up, she touches, by accident, his hand and her heart springs open like a child's music box.  And out of the box comes a little ballerina made of wood.  I have created this, the man thinks; though she can only whirl in place, still she is a dancer of some kind, not simply a block of wood.  This must explain the puzzling music coming from the trees.

Not really willing to lose an ear for my art just yet...

February 20: Cliques, Catholics, Cadillacs, and Expectations

"You ought to go to a boys' school sometime.  Try it sometime," I said.  "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.  The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together.  Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together.  If you try to have a little intelligent--"

Holden doesn't fit in.   He's not an athlete.  He's not a future entrepreneur of America.  He's not an intellectual (although he is emotionally smart).  He's on the fencing team at Pencey, but he loses the team's foils on the way to a competition.  Although cliques aren't his thing, he seems to have a lot of friends, or people with whom he's friendly.  He's not economically challenged (poor).  He's been kicked out of all the best prep schools on the East Coast.  His brother's a semi-famous writer, and his dad is a lawyer.  Everyone expects Holden to be successful, and he's doing everything he can to not be successful.

I sometimes worry whether I've made wrong choices in my life.  When I started college, I majored in computer science, and I was good at it.  Granted, I wasn't a natural like some of the other people in my programming classes.  There was one guy I knew who wrote computer code for fun.  On a Saturday night, he didn't search for computer porn.  He worked on artificial intelligence.  I didn't fit in with this crowd.  I knew I didn't, but I hung on because my family expected me to be successful.  Graduate and get a mid-level IT job where I spent my time chasing down binary code bugs   I wasn't happy.

In my last semester as an undergraduate, I changed my career plans.  I applied to graduate school in English, and I switched my degree.  Instead of a Bachelor's in computer science, I graduated with a major in English and a minor in computer science and math.  I've never looked back.  Until now.

The last couple weeks of financial worries have made me a little reflective.  I've been playing a game of What-If.  As in, what if I had stuck with computers?  What if I'd moved to California and started programming?  What if I'd created an Internet search engine and called it by some kind of funky name, like "Google"?  What if, what if, what if...

The problem is that I wasn't a natural computer science geek.  I didn't eat, sleep, breathe, and have sex with silicon chips.  My classmates never let poor Rudolph play in any computer games, if you know what I mean.  The girls in my major were only interested in the guys with the biggest...pocket calculators.  I wasn't really interested in being a part of the Turbo Pascal clique.

Writing came naturally to me.  I was good at it.  Other people recognized I was good at it.  Girls read my stories and poems and wanted to talk to me.  English was where I belonged.  And that's where I've stayed.

I wish I could find a way to make more money with my English creds.  About 15 years ago, I had an idea about a series of books about a young orphan boy who attends a school for wizards and battles the most evil wizard who ever lived, but I didn't think anyone would be interested in it.  So here I am, working four jobs, teaching part-time, and cranking out blog posts.

Saint Marty has no regrets, except maybe the wizard book thing.

I don't fit in with any of these people...