When I was a child, my favorite annual activity was to spend a week, sometimes two, being spoiled by my paternal grandmother. She lived in Shreveport, some 325 miles from my home in New Orleans, and part of the thrill of that week was to travel there or back on an airplane by myself. Another kind of thrill was accompanying her as she drove around town in her 1940 Ford, which inevitably broke down somewhere where you wish it hadn’t.
“Stay in the car with the window cracked,” she’d say, as I watched her go knocking on doors until she found a telephone she could use. We’d wait until rescued by a cousin or one of my uncles-in-law. Once we rode in a tow truck.
Perhaps my most vivid memory is Saturday afternoons, when she would sit in her rocker and prepare her Sunday School lesson for the next day. She had a small black-leather binder, where she would write out her lesson in unbelievably small script. She taught a ladies Sunday School class well into her 80s; sometimes she’s also practice her singing or piano solo for the worship service. She was self-taught in music; she couldn’t read a single note.
Those scenes with my grandmother, inevitably rose-colored by time and memory, came to mind as I read The Presence of One Word: Poems by Andrea Potos. I’d enjoyed her previous poetry collection, Two Emilys, and was looking forward to this new one. What I didn’t expect was to be taken on a journey into my own childhood.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Tuesday Readings
Remembering the past – Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.
Your Work Can Outlive You – Spencer Klavan at The Free Press.
Bread and Roses – poem by James Oppenheim at Every Day Poems.
“The Village Blacksmith,” poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
A Sonnet Sampler – New Verse Review.
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