Month: October 2002

Every Good Boy Does Fine

Part 3 of David Wagoner’s “Traveling Light :From Collected Poems, 1956-1976” focuses on various aspects of creativity. While I found more poems I liked here than I anticipated (I’m not too fond of artists discussing creativity), my favorite poem was still one entitled “Every Good Boy Does Fine, ” a poem I encountered years ago in an anthology for high school students. It has everything I admire in a poem: simplicity, vivid images, and rich symbols:

Every Good Boy Does Fine

I practiced my cornet in a cold garage
Where I could blast it till the oil in drums
Boomed back; tossed free throws till I couldn’t move my thumbs;
Sprinted through tires, tackling a headless dummy.

In my first contest, playing a wobbly solo,
I blew up in the coda, alone on stage,
And twisting like my hand-tied necktie, saw the judge
Letting my silence dwindle down his scale.

At my first basketball game, gangling away from home
A hundred miles by bus to a dressing room,
Under the showering voice of the coach, I stood in a towel,
Having forgotten shoes, socks, uniform.

In my first football game, the first play under the lights
I intercepted a pass. For seventy yards, I ran
Through music and squeals, surging, lifting my cleats,
Only to be brought down by the safety man.

I took my second chances with less care, but in dreams
I saw the bald judge slumped in the front row,
The coach and team at the doorway, the safety man
Galloping loud at my heels. They watch me now.

You who have always homed your way through passages,
Sat safe on the bench while some came naked to court,
Slipped out of arms to win in the long run,
Consider this poem a failure, sprawling flat on a page.

The delightful irony of this poem title may be what makes it so memorable. This poem rings true to my experiences and even more so to the experiences of my children, probably because their childhood seems so much more vivid to me than my own. First attempts, and often many after that, meet with failure. I can remember my own stage fright when I had a part in my grade school play, a part based on my classroom performance, by the way, not on any desire to expose myself to public ridicule. While outgoing and boisterous in class with people I know, I have always been extremely shy around strangers. I decided from that day on that I never wanted to be on stage again, even though I was convinced to volunteer again in high school. Gradually public speaking became easier, but I have never really felt comfortable in front of an audience.

Luckily I’ve never had the bad experience of forgetting my gym clothes, but you’re not as “preoccupied,” or absent minded, as I am without being unprepared for many an event. I still remember a long hike where I forgot my boots and had to wear sandals on my trek up the mountain. Despite my dreams, I never made my high school football team, but the first time I played in the army I got an elbow to the chin that left me without hearing for a day and a half and stunned enough that I had to leave the game. Still, I was out on the field game after game giving it my best shot, even if I was 40 pounds too light to play on the line. I’ve never regretted it.

When my kids were growing up, I only had a few rules about participating in different activities: if you started something you had to finish it; if you played you had to do your best; and, you could always quit at the end of the season if you wanted to, it was your choice, not mine. As a result, they both seem to have grown up more confident than I ever was and are both willing to risk many things I never would.

All of us are probably haunted by our failures, but the real failures are those who are afraid to take the chances to do what they really want to do. There’s no reason to play football, or participate in one particular activity, but it’s a mistake not to play football or participate in a play simply because you’re afraid you will fail. Failure is less destructive than not giving life a chance.

Needless to say, I don’t consider this poem a failure.

It’s an Up-and-Down World

I had a delightful three days at my daughter’s home in Tacoma except for the exciting two hours I spent at the Emergency Room at Tacoma Hospital.

The weekend started with seeing my daughter and grandson on Friday while Rich was still teaching. Dawn and I walked around and talked for two or three hours before picking up Gavin at the baby sitters. He had been too excited about seeing “Pahtah,” that’s me, to take his afternoon nap so he was pretty excited when we picked him up. He ran the whole way hope, and it’s embarrassing to admit but I had a hard time keeping up with him and then carrying him the last three blocks home. We spent the afternoon playing and watching Shrek, Gavin’s current favorite movie, for a good part of the time.

After dinner, Rich and I went to Home Depot to pick up fence-building supplies, the main reason for this trip. It’s great shopping at Home Depot when you’re spending someone else’s money. I’d already spent my allotted money over the last few days when I picked up a new Hitachi sliding crosscut saw and a Porter-Cable cut-off saw to finish my deck project. But I still had fun helping Rich spend his money, too. After helping to load 10 60lb bags of several 12 foot long 4×4’s and assorted 2×4’s I was more than ready for bed after watching a dance movie starring Vanessa Williams until midnight.

We actually started working on the fence Saturday morning after a leisurely, but filling, breakfast. A bit impatient to get started, I started digging fence post holes at places we’d discussed the night before. I soon remember how seldom I used the muscles that are used for a posthole digger. After digging two holes, I was ready for another challenge, preferably one that used a different set of muscles. Luckily, there were more than enough choices. Moving 60 pound bags of concrete was one of my choices for a while until I decided that those muscles, too, had had enough of a work out. I ended up cutting approximately 100 8 foot long cedar boards in half to create the 4 foot high fence that we were constructing.

I was exhausted by the time I sat down for a delicious vegetarian Indian style dinner. But it was a good feeling having spent a long day helping someone you love a lot. Everything went well and I had even decided to stay a day longer to help work on the fence Sunday. About 8:00, though I suddenly started having trouble breathing. I tried to ignore the discomfort, but took a Benadryl, thinking I was having some sort of allergy attack. About 9:30 I went to bed, thinking I was just tired. I only lay there for a few moments, though, because I couldn’t breathe at all laying down. About 10:00 we, I with Dawn’s urging, decided that I had better go to the emergency room of the hospital since breathing seemed to be an important part of helping the next day.

I was admitted surprisingly fast, put on several recording devices, given an intravenous dose of Benadryl and Prednisone, and inhaler and a breath test, which I appear to have failed the first time around. Within an hour, though, I was feeling much better and had actually regained the ability to breathe. The doctor seemed somewhat hesitant to send me home, but after consulting with another doctor decided that I could go home with several precautionary medicines.

While waiting to be released, another patient was brought in, one who was obviously much sicker than I was, although he was only 17 years old. Apparently he was a diabetic who decided that he preferred to shoot meth rather than take his insulin medication. He complained loudly and profanely over the next hour, and suddenly I was feeling a lot worse than I had felt when I came in an hour before. He complained that the nurses were “hurting him” by putting oxygen in his nose (previous cocaine abuse?), complained that they weren’t giving him enough “pain medication,” though any pain he was feeling now seems to have stemmed from sedating himself from any awareness that he had a body that he should be taking care of. By now, I was considering just walking out of the hospital. I felt way too healthy to be sitting here listening to some 17 year old who seemed intent on killing himself complain about the quality of medical care at a hospital that probably saw far too many cases like this during a long, thankless night.

Sunday, after picking up my Prednisone, Albuterol Inhalation Aersol, and EpiPen 2-pak, to be used in possible extreme emergencies which the doctor told me was not at all unlikely, I spend the rest of the day helping Rich on the fence. Though it still wasn’t finished when I left for home at 5:00, I thought we had gotten a lot done during the day, especially since I hadn’t been too sure the night before that I would even be around the next day.

Irreconcilable Differences

I could blame the fact that my new web site still isn’t entirely up and running on my ISP because they still haven’t gotten MySQL up and running. Of course, that would be a lie because I only recently decided that I needed that capability, and that, too, was really the result of my perfectionism.

Or, I could blame it on the fact that I seem to have developed tendonitis in my thumb, which seems directly related to my constant cutting and pasting over the last two weeks. And despite multiple bandages, most of the skin seems to be worn off the left hand side of my thumb, the side I use to push the lower left button on my Kensington Expert Mouse.

Or, I could blame it on the rapidly approaching winter. Now that the days are getting shorter and the rainy periods are getting longer, all those things I still haven’t finished this summer seem a little more urgent. I still have to put the finishing touches on the deck that I started two years ago. The raised beds that I started two years ago aren’t finished yet, either. Now, the lawn, the lawn will just have to wait another year.

Realistically, though, I can probably blame it on irreconcilable personality differences. First, I tend to be overly ambitious in my plans. As noted in an essay on INTP’s, "The INTP is the architect of a system and leaves it to others to be the builder and the applicator. " Now, it would be fine if I would limit myself to designing the perfect web page. That would make sense. I should leave it to others to carry out my grand plan.

Unfortunately,there’s only one person working on this web site, me. Equally unfortunate is the fact that I tend to be something of a perfectionist, an undesirable quality in a weblogger, where spontaneity is usually emphasized over polish, and certainly undesirable in an INTP who is supposed to lose interest as soon as the plan is completed. It requires a different kind of alphabet soup to actually execute the plan, one who likes to pay attention to details.

There’s no denying that I am beginning to get a little stressed having two sites going, but I’m going to maintain two sites a little longer until I can get the new site looking presentable (who could live with that banner up there, my God), I’ve almost Photoshoped it out, but it, too, is waiting for some last-minute polishing. I only have two months of archives to still move, the first two, and they’re the shortest. (They also have the most mistakes because I was just learning HTML, not that I’m not still learning HTML.)

Anyway, this is just a long way of explaining that I’m about to take off for two days to see my daughter, her husband, and the Gavin. I need a Gavin fix, a rest for my thumb, and any reason possible to get away from these web sites for a few days.

Their Pockets Empty

Section Two of Traveling Light covers some of the best of Wagoner’s non-nature poems written between 1956 and 1976. It’s easy to see why Wagoner doesn’t want to be limited to being a “nature poet,” as there are some fine poems here, though it was much easier for me to settle on a poem because there weren’t nearly as many competing for my favor.

While “The Labors of Thor” and the delightful “This is a Wonderful Poem” caught my attention first, “Bums at Breakfast” was equally fine, and seemed more representative of this section, which focused on the down-and-out, or, at least, the down-and-out in all of us. “Bums at Breakfast” suggests a possible reason why Wagoner, like his fellow poets Richard Hugo and Richard Wright, identifies so strongly with the common man:

Bums at Breakfast

Daily, the bums sat down to eat in our kitchen.
They seemed to be whatever the day was like:
If it was hot or cold, they were hot or cold;
If it was wet, they came in dripping wet.
One left his snowy shoes on the back porch
But his socks stuck to the clean linoleum,
And one, when my mother led him to the sink,
Wrung out his hat instead of washing his hands.

My father said they’d made a mark on the house,
A hobo’s sign on the sidewalk, pointing the way.
I hunted everywhere, but never found it.
It must have said, "It’s only good in the morning-
When the husband’s out." My father knew by heart
Lectures on Thrift and Doggedness,
But he was always either working or sleeping.
My mother didn’t know any advice.

They ate their food politely, with old hands,
Not looking around, and spoke in short, plain answers.
Sometimes they said what they’d been doing lately
Or told us what was wrong; but listening hard,
I broke their language into secret codes:
Their east meant west, their job meant walking and walking,
Their money meant danger, home meant running and hiding,
Their father and mother were different kinds of weather.

Dumbly, I watched them leave by the back door,
Their pockets empty as a ten-year-old’s;
Yet they looked twice as rich, being full of breakfast.
I carried mine like a lump all the way to school.
When I was growing hungry, where would they be?
None ever came twice. Never to lunch or dinner.
They were always starting fresh in the fresh morning.
I dreamed of days that stopped at the beginning.

Luckily, I was too young to experience The Depression, but my mother used to tell me how her mother always left food at the back door for those out of work. When times we’re as hard as that, there was no shame in not holding a job, simply joy when you were lucky enough to have full-time work. And apparently a feeling that you had an obligation, at least among the mothers, to help others in need. Seems like that’s what it used to mean to be a “Christian.”

Perhaps I like this poem so much because it reminds me of my own mother’s concern for others less fortunate than herself and of her life-long commitment to organizations like The Salvation Army. She would never have thought of holding a garage sale to earn money or even taking a tax break for donations. She’s also the one that passed on tales of the Depression and emphasized the need to help others. Though my father shared many of the same beliefs, he, like Waggoner’s father, emphasized thrift, the value of work, and the need to take pride in your work more than the need to help others, though he used to find ways of keeping men working that others would have fired long before.

I suppose I’m less generous than either of my parents were when it comes to giving handouts to “bums,” though I probably devoted more of my life to trying to help people, both as a caseworker and as a teacher. I’ve always respected people for who they are and seldom looked down on others who were less fortunate than I was. I’m not really a Christian but do believe that we are all “God’s children” and equally deserving.

Maybe if I’d been there when my grandmother fed the bums I would have wondered how they spent their day and dreamed of hitting the road, too. Maybe I, too, would have become a Jack Kerouc. As it turns out, though, my family moved so often when I was young that all I wanted to do was settle down in one place and make some life-long friends. You can only stand so many “fresh starts” before you realize you need to stick with something long enough to make a go of it.