The Continuing No Shame Poem of the Week Series Presents "Sliding Away"

Sliding Away
 
(with apologies to Paul Simon)

When I took the old carpet out
Of our computer room
The wooden floors
Needed protecting
And so I got one of those
Vinyl chair pads
And put it under my office chair.
Now I know that in a house like ours
There are few level floors
Plumb walls or perpendicular surfaces.
It's just in the nature of
Older houses to settle and
Be skewed a bit
Or a lot.
Nonetheless
I was surprised when
I sat in the chair and
Rolled backwards.

Paul Simon, you were right:
"The nearer your destination,
The more you're slip slidin' away!"

--Dan Verner

Advice to Writers--Helen Dunmore

1. Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

2. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.

3. Read Keats's letters.

4. Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

5. Learn poems by heart.

6. Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.

7. A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

8. If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.

9. Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love."

Good advice, all of it.--DV

An Historical Artifact of a Local Merchant

I was over at J.E. Rice's Hardware store a while back, talking with Steve, one of the Rice brothers (Chase and Jamie are the other two), whose father established the business 75 years ago. I can always count on the Rices to have exactly what I need and to tell me how to  install it if necessary. And they're always good for an interesting conversation. There's no such thing as a "quick trip to the hardware store" when I go to Rice's.

This time, Steve told me about a ledger book he found in his shed for the accounts of C. C. Leachman, his grandfather, who ran a store at Wellington Crossing of the Southern Railway around the turn of the twentieth century. Wellington today is the name of a road and subdivision in Manassas, but the rails still run where they did over 100 years ago. Leachman traded in all kinds of merchandise, took crops and chickens as barter for goods and was a transfer point for milk from the numerous dairy farms in the area at the time.

I contacted the Manassas Museum to see if they would be interested in looking at this unique artifact, but they are tied up with the sesquicentennial observance of the Second Battle of Manassas in July. After that's all over, I hope they will take time to look at Leachman's  record and perhaps even display it at the museum.

I appreciate Steve making copies of a couple of pages of the ledger so I can share them with BC readers.

The note below the pictures is hard to make out in this image, but it says, "1906--C.C. Leachman holding Sarah Leachman--later married J.E. Rice--1923     C. C. Leachman ran this store and train mail drop.

 

This is a ledger page, with the careful Spenserian script of a bygone era, showing expenses paid to the "Southern Railway Co." for late 1899 and early 1900.

The Biscuit City Chronicles: Kingdoms and Servants

When I was in fourth grade, I learned something that I thought would change my life.  As things  turned out, it didn’t but I thought that it might for a while.  There was a lot to learn in fourth grade back then, and from what my older daughter Amy, a fourth grade teacher, tells me, that hasn’t changed much.  

Virginia is closely studied in the fourth grade, both as it is now and as it used to be.  If you’re like me, you probably remember Virginia as having three regions: Tidewater, Piedmont (that’s us) and Mountain. Now there are five: Coastal Plain (formerly and also known as Tidewater), Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Valley and Ridge, and Appalachian Plateau. This makes a great deal of sense to me, much more sense than having five kingdoms of living things.  

Back in the day we had two: plant and animal. A couple of weird organisms didn’t fit either category or fit both, so you could call them what you wanted.  When my girls were in high school, they scoffed at my outdated world view. They said there were five kingdoms: plant, animal, monera, protista and fungi. I think monera and protista are microscopic, but we could make them animals since they move around and eat. They also are capable of photosynthesis, but that’s just an added bonus for them.  And fungi are clearly plants.  They look like plants and grow like plants.  You don’t see them running around the back yard barking like a real animal.  So two kingdoms are enough.  My extensive research into this matter has revealed that biologists now speak of three “domains”: Eukarya, Archaea and Eubacteria. Eukarya includes plants and animals.  Don’t ask me how. Two kingdoms are enough for me.

Anyhow, the fact that I thought would change my life came from Virginia history. Since Virginia had the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the New World in Jamestown, the study of early Virginia history involved early colonial history. I learned enough about it to know that I would not have wanted to have been a colonial since I am not fond of starvation, disease and assorted massacres. I did learn about indentured servants, where someone would bind themselves to a master for a period of years.  At the end of the time, they would be set free from their indenture.  I had been looking for an idea to describe how I felt treated by my parents.  They had the nerve to expect me to keep my room clean and pick up after myself. That was the extent of my responsibilities, but for some reason I felt put upon. So I began to consider myself an indentured servant.

I tried out my new idea at the dinner table one night. “I’m nothing but an indentured servant,” I announced.

“Me, too,” my brother said in a rare display of fraternal solidarity.

“Why are you an indentured servant?” my mother asked.

“Because all I do is work around here. I can hardly wait until the day I’m free.”

My parents did work very hard, and this proclamation from my mouth struck them as funny.  They started laughing and couldn’t stop. I slunk off to my room where I did not clean it up.

Ron and I determined that we would have to run away to gain our freedom. I was taken by The Boxcar Children, a book about some children who lived in a box car in the woods completely free from any adult interference.  I don’t recall the book mentioning how they fed or clothed themselves.  They just existed in an idyllic daydream, doing what they wanted.  The idea among kids we knew was that you ran away to join the circus. Since there didn’t seem to be any circuses around, we would have to settle for a boxcar, if we could find one. We had heard from some older kids that there were some train tracks ‘way back deep in the woods.  If there were train tracks, there might also be a box car.

We equipped ourselves with what we considered necessary supplies. I “borrowed” the clothes pin bag to carry our stash, and managed to pilfer some matches and candles from the kitchen drawer. I also liberated a can of pork and beans, which was pretty much the limit of my culinary skill then. I took my multiblade Scout knife which my parents had bought me when I joined the Scouts.  They made me promise to not cut my fingers off.  I wasn’t sure what most of the blades were for, but the knife seemed like a good idea. We were ready.

Next week: The story continues with "The Box Car Boys."

Generations

Early one morning last week (about 7:15, to be exact), our daughter Amy called with the news that her car wouldn't start. Since she lives about two miles away and since she is a teacher and expected to show up at school before her students do, an expectation shared by students, parents, the administrators at her school, the community, the School Board, the Commonwealth of Virginia and who knows who else, I said I would come over post haste and see if we could give her little car a jump start. We had to link our jumper cables together to reach from battery to battery, and after some grumbling and sputtering, the car started.

The battery looked like it was original to the car and Amy said it had not been replaced, so I allowed that she probably needed a new battery. I know that the guys on Car Talk believe that fathers don't know what they're talking about when it comes to saying what needs to be done to cars, but they weren't there and I was.

We worked it out that Amy would drive over to our house, leave her car with me and take one of our cars to work. I would have the battery tested and replaced, if necessary.

And so she was off for a day of fun and learning at her school (that's how they like to think of the day's goings on at the school and I don't doubt that it is true), and I drove her car over to Advance Auto where a nice young man tested the battery and said she needed a new one. He installed one and I was back home after 20 minutes.

Trying the radio on the way back I noticed that all the stations were set at 88.5 FM, an unlikely situation since Amy likes a variety of music, most of which I have never heard of. Then it occurred to me that disconnecting the battery had wiped out all her presets and I had no idea of how to reset them. I tried figuring out which stations and music she would like but I had no idea. My knowledge of poplar music dates to about 1985 and goes not further. No wonder I had no idea of what she would like to listen to.

I texted Amy about her lost presets and she wrote back that she didn't mind. I think she did find the selection of ten or so CD's I had in my car amusing, quaint, and "old school"--hits of the '60's, Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, the Eagles, some choral music--and I think she also thought it old school that I was still using CD's.

I saw that Amy had an iPhone cradle on the dashboard of her car and while I do have an iPhone, I have not put any music on it. I have about 400 songs on my computer, but haven't figured out how to put them on my phone. I know having them on the phone would make it easier to carry my tunes, but there's also a degradation of sound with mp3 files as opposed to CD's. I happen to have a Bose sound system in the station wagon (installed by its former owner, my other daughter Alyssa) and it needs a good sound source to take advantage of its capabilities.

So this whole exercise reminded me of the differences in generations and changes in technology, how we adapt to them and how they affect us.

Some things remain the same: daughters still call fathers for help with their cars; fathers still respond gladly and take care of business; and we both enjoy music. And some day--who knows?--I'll be completely up to date with my personal technology.

Poem of the Week: Retired

If I'm retired
(and I seem to be)
Then why are the blocks
On my calendar
So full?

     --Dan Verner

Advice on Writing: Repost of A Writing Teacher Who Writes: A Reflection on National Poetry Month

Laura Tornello does an occasional blog post that is published on the Northern Virginia Writing Project website, generally reflecting on the teaching of writing. Her posts are informative and intriguing. Here she writes about the Poem-a-Day Challenge which a number of Write by the Rails members undertook. I'm here to tell you, cranking out a poem a day is a challenge.

Here's what Laura had to say about the project:

I don’t write poetry. My thoughts come more naturally in prose, and to write poetry is to cut. I’ve never felt comfortable with the process of constructing a poem, and more often than not, I feel like an imposter; I add some vague imagery that may or may not be symbolic, I splice my sentences at odd syntactic places to appear trendy, and ultimately I feel like what I’ve created is just severed prose. Needless to say, National Poetry Month has never been a source of festivity for me. This year, though, towards the end of March, an inexplicable force took hold of me: I would do the April Poem-A-Day Challenge. I would write thirty poems. Just the thought made me flinch, but at that point, my stubbornness wouldn’t let me back down. 

On April 1^st, my pen hovered hesitantly over an expectant blank page and I wrote my first poem. On April 30^th, with an odd twinge of sadness, I wrote my last poem—and over the course of that month, I rediscovered the importance of being a writing teacher who writes.

 I rediscovered the messiness of the writing process. Some of the poems I wrote are pretty terrible. Most of them, I won’t ever visit again. Overall, there are only twelve that I really like, that I would consider revising. I think this is such an important message to convey to my students—that even as someone who writes constantly, I only really like 40% of what I wrote during the month of April.  You have to work your way through a lot of tangled ideas and clumsy phrases to get to some really profound stuff. That’s just the nature of writing.

I rediscovered what it feels like to be completely outside my comfort zone. I had a lot of insecurity about form and style, and at times I felt like a fraud, as if I were wearing a sandwich board that proclaimed “NOT A POET” in large bold letters. About halfway through the month, as I struggled with a particularly uncooperative poem, I had an important realization: This is how some of my students feel when they’re working on papers for my class. I think I forget this sometimes—that just because I’ve read The Great Gatsby 800 times and can write a literary analysis paper in my sleep doesn’t mean that my students feel that same level of comfort. They’re navigating unfamiliar waters too, and I think this realization made me a stronger teacher, and most importantly, a more empathetic one.

Finally, I rediscovered the powerful (and often unexpected) connection between writing and thinking. Giving up control was difficult for me, but I tried to start writing and just let the poem take me where it wanted to. You know, in a non-hippie way—because that previous sentence made it sound like I was lighting incense and eating Kashi during this whole process. But truly, there were moments over the course of the month where I finished a poem, sat back, and thought, “Wow. Where did that come from?” Far too often, students have this perception that writing is the process of taking a fully-formed thought and translating it onto paper. It’s important for them to recognize that writing itself is a means for thinking things through and figuring out what they really want to say.

As I write this, it’s May 1^st, and (I never thought I would utter this phrase), I’m in poetry withdrawal. I still don’t consider myself “a poet,” but I do know two things for certain: everything I wrote in the last month has contributed to my identity as a writer. And everything I wrote in the last month has contributed to my identity as a writing teacher.