June 2: Cool Dad, Janeen Rastall, "Skimming"

I find myself thinking about my daughter still.

As you could probably tell from my last post, she is feeling a little persecuted.  Right now, she is at school, playing in the band for the graduation ceremony.  I was planning on staying to watch, but, as we approached the school, she made it very clear to me that I did not have to stay.  In fact, she practically jumped out of the car as I was braking.

I used to be a cool dad.  Did things that most other dads don't do.  I teach college--cool.  I've published a book of poems--cool.  I taught her and her classmates poetry--cool.  I play keyboard in a band--cool.  Not to mention that fact that I used to direct and perform in plays and musicals--cool and very cool.

So, when did I graduate from cool to decidedly uncool, bordering on benevolent dictator (and sometimes not so benevolent)?  It is difficult for me to pinpoint an exact moment.  I know I haven't really changed much.  Still a poet.  Still play in a band.  Yet, I now have to drop her off approximately two miles away from the entrance to the high school.  (I used to think that was an exaggerated teenager cliche.  It's not.)

My daughter is trying to spread her wings.  I get that.  She has a boyfriend now, a nice kid who attended a reading with me at the university a couple months ago.  I'm fine with that.  She is taking driver's training this summer.  I'm a little less fine with that, but I'm adjusting to the idea.  She now has her own debit card so she can learn to manage her money.  I helped her open the account.

She is growing up.  I understand.

I just want to know when I'm going to be put on the cool shelf again, next to her dance trophies, first pair of pointe shoes, and pretty rocks she found on the shores of Lake Superior.

Because Saint Marty is cool.  Really.  He is.

Skimming

by:  Janeen Rastall

When Superior tosses waterlogged rocks
to the shore,
we do not lift them
like shells to our ears,
listen for their deep-veined stories.
We palm the worn stones,
prod places where the waves have had their way.
We flip them hand to hand,
judge their weight
then toss them back to drown again.

I know cool . . .

June 2: Darning Needle, Chronic Masturbators, Punishments

It is this peculiar stitching motion of the dragonfly's abdomen that earned it the name "darning needle"--parents used to threaten their children by saying that, if the children told lies, dragonflies would hover over their faces as they slept and sew their lips together.  Interestingly, I read that only the great speed at which the egg-laying female dragonfly flies over the water prevents her from being "caught by the surface tension and pulled down."  And at that same great speed the dragonfly I saw that day whirred away, downstream:  a drone, a dot, and then gone.

A terrifying little story to tell kids.  An insect hovering over a naughty child's mouth, stitching lips together as punishment for a white lie, fib, whopper, tattle, deception, fabrication.  That's almost as good as the story I read as a child in a book about Purgatory.  In that book, sinners guilty of telling a lie were forced to swallow mouthfuls of molten lead as penance.  Combining the two punishments (taking in a mouthful of liquid lead and then having your lips stitched closed) would probably have kept me awake for weeks as a kid.  (By the way, you don't really want to know what they do to chronic masturbators in Purgatory, but it was enough to keep me away from the Penthouse under my brother's mattress for a couple months.)

Punishment is a strange thing.  I have learned, in my years as a father, to choose my punishments wisely.  Grounding, for example, is a terrible form of punishment.  It forces parents to spend entire nights/weeks with surly adolescents/teenagers.  The punishers become the punished.  Frankly, I think I'd take molten lead over spending extended periods of time with my sullky, fifteen-year-old daughter.

My wife and I have been having a battle with our daughter these past couple weeks.  This summer, my daughter has been invited to spend the month of July in the state of Washington with my sister, her husband, and kids.  My sister made the invitation without first consulting with my wife or myself first.  For various reasons that I will not discuss here, we have told our daughter that she is not going to Washington this summer.  Of course, she accepted our decision with grace and maturity.  She said, "I understand, father and mother, and I bow to your collective parental wisdom."  NOT.

According to my daughter, we are "ruining her life," and she "is going to be absolutely miserable all summer."  These pronouncements have been accompanied by tears and shouting.  I believe a few doors were slammed, as well.  (Where's a dragonfly when I need one?)  Tonight, she has lapsed into quiet recalcitrance.

Certainly, my daughter is determined to make herself miserable this summer.  And, because we share a house with her and are the cause of her misery, my wife and I will, by association, be miserable as well.  That's our punishment for being responsible parents.

Saint Marty is planning on sleeping with one eye open tonight.

June 1: Spring Awakening, Janeen Rastall, "Hibernation"

I am sitting in my office at the university.  It is almost 7 p.m., and I have two more hours to kill.  My daughter has a dance class until 9 p.m. this evening.  It wasn't so bad when I taught on Wednesday nights.  However, since the end of the semester, I find myself with a whole lot of time on my hands on mid-week nights.

I'm not complaining.  I rarely have alone time.  Usually, I'm working or teaching after I'm done working and teaching.  Not tonight.  I just took a break from my blogging, walked to a window in the building that faces Lake Superior.  Looked down.  Saw a deer standing in a copse of trees.  It muscles were wound tight.  I could tell it was ready to bolt.  Sure enough, a few seconds later, a car came rolling by, and the deer fled.  I barely saw it leave.  It was there one moment, and then it was gone.

Seeing a deer in a relatively populated area is not uncommon in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  On my way to work every morning, I am always alert for the flash of deer in my headlights.  (This habit is a byproduct of a run-in with a Bambi one morning; I totaled my Mercury Sable for which I had just made the final loan payment.)

Yes, we Yoopers live side-by-side with wildlife.  Deer.  Rabbits.  Skunks.  Raccoons.  Bear.  We even identify seasons of the year by animals.  The normal Yooper male, for example, spends a good portion of autumn preparing for November 15:  opening day of deer season.  (Some local school districts even cancel school on this day.)  And then there's the spring awakening of the skunk, when you rise on trash collection morning to find your garbage bags eviscerated on your front lawn, musk still clinging in the air.

One October evening, as I was driving down a dirt road, a black bear came crashing through the trees.  He was on a dead run and didn't even pause to consider the green Geo Metro barreling toward him.  He was huge, shoulders higher than the hood of the car.  If I had been going faster (or been a few feet closer), I would have had a vehicular close encounter of the ursine kind.

That's life in the U. P.  Rabbits in your backyard (sometimes a stray moose, a la Northern Exposure).  Like the animals, Yoopers are very much conditioned by the seasons.  We are active in the spring and summer months.  When the leaves start changing in September, we slow down, prepare for the cold weather.  In winter, we hole up in our houses, where we have stored food to sustain us.  We hibernate and watch The Voice in our caves.

Saint Marty thinks the Poet of the Week knows a little about this subject . . .

Hibernation

by:  Janeen Rastall

At the shoe store,
you slip your sock into the metal sandal
to measure yourself heel to toe.
In the mirror, all you see are feet,
bearers of a hidden weight.

Slide your foot into this mud print,
heel to this heel.
Spread your toes and let your arches drop.
File your nails to fine points.
Shamble from shadow to oak shadow.
Find a tree hollow and scar the bark.

June 1: Spendthrift Genius, John Coltrane, "The Mad Feast"

It is, then, a small world there in the goldfish bow, and a very large one.  Say the nucleus of any atom in the bowl were the size of a cherry pit; its nearest electron wold revolve around it one hundred and seventy-five yards away.  A whirling air in his swim bladder balances the goldfish's weight in the water; his scales overlap, his feathery gills pump and filter; his eyes work, his heart beats, his liver absorbs, his muscles contract in a wave of extending ripples.  The daphnias he eats have eyes and jointed legs. The algae the daphnias eat have green cells stacked like checkers or winding in narrow ribbons like spiral staircases up long columns of emptiness.  And so on diminishingly down.  We have not yet found the dot so small it is uncreated, as it were, like a metal blank, or merely roughed in--and we never shall.  We go down landscape after mobile, sculpture after collage, down to molecular structures like a mob dance in Breughel, down to atoms airy and balanced as a canvas by Klee, down to atomic particles, the heart of the matter, as spirited and wild as any El Greco saints,  And it all works.  "Nature," said Thoreau in his journal, "is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work."  The creator, I would add, churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care.  This is the point.

Dillard loves focusing on the minutia of creation.  Atoms and electrons and algae and dauphnias (which is a small freshwater crustacean used to feed aquarium fish).  The tiniest matter of the universe, for Dillard, holds the key to understanding the universe.  Rather than looking always to the stars to find the face of God, Dillard looks downward and inward.  She finds divinity in the capillaries of a goldfish tail.  Prophetical nature.

I, of course, agree with Dillard.  You only have to look at the fractal landscape of an icicle to know that there's something more at work than frozen water.  The creator, as Dillard says, invests as much genius in snowflakes as black holes.  We are surrounded by extravagant design every day, and Dillard finds great inspiration in it.

I am not a biologist or physicist or naturalist.  I appreciate nature in all of its complexity and beauty, could spend hours watching the breakers of Lake Superior on a stormy November day.  On a daily basis, however, I am indoors a majority of the time, with little exposure to windows.  Therefore, I must glean my daily inspiration from other sources.  Most of time, those sources are writers.

For instance, at the moment, I am rereading a book by a friend and colleague of mine.  It's called The Mad Feast, and it's a collection of essays about food.  No, it's not a cookbook, although it does contain recipes.  Matt, the author, sort of explodes the meaning of food.  For instance, in an essay about Okie Sirloin (barbecued bologna), he contemplates the Dust Bowl, migration, and the evolution of the parking meter.  It's weird and, at times, frustrating to read.  But it excites me, the way, I imagine, listening to John Coltrane excites a jazz musician.  It pushes the boundaries of food writing and travel writing and writing, in general.

Now, will I ever write like Matt?  Probably not.  It's just not me.  However, reading his book gives me license to be weird, attempt things I wouldn't normally attempt.  I have poems to write for an editor.  Poems that are pushing me in an artistic direction that makes me a little uncomfortable.  That's okay.  This is the point of creation, to invest an extravagance of care in the least works.  I need to surrender myself to that extravagance, the way Dillard and my friend, Matt, do. 

Saint Marty is on the prowl for a little spendthrift genius tonight.