“Your Accent! You Can’t Be from New Orleans!”

When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on. 

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

 

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

 

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Coyote,” poem by Bret Harte – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Elegy: #LeilaAlaoui – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

Alexander Pope’s “To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” – Karen Swallow Prior at The Priory.

 

“Lepanto,” poem by G.K. Chesterton – The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Coleman’s Bed – poem by David Whyte.

Poets and Poems: Emily Patterson and "So Much Tending Remains"

I’ve been a father for 45 years, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you never stop being a parent. How you a parent changes, of course, from a child’s total dependence upon you to increasing independence and ultimately becoming their own person. But, as a parent, you’re always navigating parenthood. 

Emily Patterson began learning this lesson early with the birth of her daughter during the pandemic lockdown year of 2020. She reflects on the first two years of her child’s life in So Much Tending Remains, a collection of 22 poems covering the period from birth to toddlershood. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Oxford University researcher uncovers hidden copy of Shakespeare sonnet – University of Oxford News.

 

Beyond All Words – a love poem by James Tweedie at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“Patrick the Paul of the Gael,” poem by Robert Farren – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

“The Song of Wandering Aengus,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Anniversary Poem – Latie Kalisz at Every Day Poems. 

Sometimes Fiction Imitates Life

You read a book like A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child. 

My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law. 

 

My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth about 1923.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Unravelling the Mystery of Agatha Christie’s Country Retreat – Dean Jobb ay Crime Reads.

 

On Stones: Carving in the granite capital of the world – Ellyn Gaydos at Harper’s Magazine.

 

When I Am Dead, My Dearest, poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Ellie O'Leary and "Breathe Here"

It was likely the poet’s name, but I was well into Breathe Here: Poems by Ellie O’Leary when I realized she wasn’t writing about her childhood in an Irish village. Instead, she was writing about her childhood in a village in Maine. But the sense of being a part of an Irish Catholic family is so strong that I think I can be forgiven. 

O’Leary writes about an array of subjects – illness (her own and others’), wildlife, childhood, and, eventually, Maine. But if there is one predominating theme, is that of loss, and loss in childhood. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Black Flies – poem by David Estringel (H/T: Nigel Kent). 

 

After 10 years, the Orthodox shepherds of Aleppo remain missing – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion.

 

Poetry Prompt: Being a Pilgrim and a Martha Stewart Homemaker – Callie Feyen at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Left behind

After Luke 2:41-47

The annual trip

to the big city,

the annual feast

of Passover,

a custom observed

every year, a ritual

of faith, a ritual

of observance,

a ritual of family,

a loud, noisy, large

group of relatives

traveling, worshipping

together. Amidst

the noise and chaos

of leaving, no one sees

the boy isn’t there,

the boy is left behind,

Frantic parents

return and search,

search for three days,

and on the third day

they find him,

find him in the most

unexpected place,

the temple,

find him among

the teachers,

listening, asking

questions, questions

so profound that 

the boy has amazed

the teachers and

drawn a crowd, 

people there simply

to hear his questions.

 

Photograph by Jaikishan Patel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Just a boy

After Luke 2:39-40 

Just a boy,

twelve years old,

not a child and

not a man, but

beginning 

the transition.

Just a boy,

growing up

in a small town,

carpenter’s son,

a strong boy and,

unusually, a boy

filled with wisdom,

a wise boy, favored

by God.

 

Photograph by Sonnie Hiles via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"A Child's Year" by Chris Yokel

If there is such a poetry genre as “gentle voice,” Chris Yokel may be the master of it. His newest collection, A Child’s Year: Poems, only underscores that. Its 43 poems display a quiet, gentle beauty that force you to stop and consider the world around you.

The poems are organized by seasons. More importantly, they are written with the simplicity of a child’s heart. We experience Lent as a child, we wonder at tragedies like plane crashes as a child, we walk through woods and taste snow like a child. Elements of wonder and subtle amazement permeate the poems and their subjects. 

Consider the mountains, where God “walks the stones in a whirlwind.”

Another World

The mountains are always drawing

us toward worlds unknown—

realms shrouded in mist at the peak of heaven

where God walks the stones

in a whirlwind,

and we long to behold his

face in a cloudbreak

till our souls are shaken

and stripped of all dross,

and we descend with both

a little less, and

a little more than who we were.

Chris Yokel

Yokel has published several books of poetry, including A Year in the Weetamoo Woods, Elements, Sketches, and Sunrise. His poems have appeared in The Curator, Tweetspeak Poetry, The Molehill and other publications. He’s a regular contributor to The Rabbit Room. He has also recorded and released two CDs, “The Rain That Falls” and “The Color and The Light.” Currently teaching writing and literature to college students, he lives in Massachusetts.

Reading A Child’s Year is hearing the admonition to “suffer the little children unto me.” I’m finding licorice again on a shelf in the garage. I watch my father make snow ice cream for the first time. I’m playing hide-and-seek in the woods near my childhood home. And I’m reminded of what it means to have a simple heart.

Related:

My review of Chris Yokel’s A Year in Weetamoo Woods. 

Top photograph by Jordan Whitt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dylan Thomas, Christmas, New Orleans, and Me

I remember my childhood Christmas celebrations by presents and relatives.

The earliest Christmas I recall must have been when I was three. My mother, at her wit’s end by my constant pulling of pots and pans from the shelves, prevailed upon my father to buy a toy set, which was interesting, but not as interesting as the jack-in-the-box my father had searched New York City for, or the Davy Crockett coonskin hat (with faux racoon tail) that was all the rage because of the television series with Fess Parker. The Christmas puppy arrived when I was six. The Lionel model train came when I was seven. The “big boy’s” bike (26-inch wheels) showed up when I was 9. The bb gun came at 10. The last remembered present was a chess set using the characters of Augustan Rome – Augustus for the king, Livia for the queen, and Cicero for the bishop. I still have it.

And the relatives. We lived in New Orleans, my mother’s hometown, and she came from a large family. For years, our suburban ranch home was the place for Christmas dinner, for no other reason that it had a large den that could hold everyone for dinner. My mother would always make the pies and the fruit salad. My father would cook the Christmas turkey and make oyster dressing, which everyone in the family raved about. Except me. I wouldn’t eat it, possibly because I saw what the raw oysters looked like going into it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“River Road” by Charles Martin

It’s a common question asked of authors, and especially authors of fiction: Where do you get your story ideas from? Charles Martin partially answered that question by publishing River Road, a collection of stories from his childhood, teen, and college years.

River Road is the neighborhood where he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not unlike the neighborhood where a lot of us grew up in the 1950s, 1960s, and later. His experiences are more than familiar; his childhood was much like my own and like millions of other boys growing up in America, and especially the American South.

Martin wrote a few of these stories in high school and most of them in college. What emerges from them now is one writer’s beginnings. If you’ve read Martin’s novels, you can find the man in the child by reading these stories.

He writes of playing with a friend in a sandbox and digging a hole intended to each China; how he was caught stealing and the experience of terror while expecting a neighbor to call his mother; his career objective to be a cowboy; how a bully (himself) got unforgettably bullied; the laugh-out-loud experience of a full bladder while your mother is trying on clothes; when a fishing expedition goes awry and a man who doesn’t know how to swim saves a boy who doesn’t know how to swim; the fine art of stealing tangerines from a neighbor’s tree; what chewing tobacco can do to a boy’s stomach; ordering books from the monthly reading club at school, not to actually read the books but to have the most number of books with sports heroes; fishing with his grandfather and how his grandfather cut his hair; when your father is your football game referee and he calls penalties fairly; the theft of his favorite bicycle; and more.

Charles Martin

These stories all describe the commonplace, not unusual experiences of boyhood, with its joys and sorrows, and triumphs and humiliations. They describe growing up and all the stories we live (or live down) to survive to adulthood.

Martin includes “An Open Letter to My Boys,” which should be required reading for all of us, and “Random Rules for Writers,” which includes such advice as “Don’t use eight words when two will do.”

If you read River Road, you will smile and laugh, occasionally cringe in recognition, and shed a tear in memory. In those things, it is much like a Charles Martin novel, an experience to be grateful for.

Related:

Charles Martin talks about River Road.

Send Down the Rainby Charles Martin

Unwritten by Charles Martin

Charles Martin’s Where the River Ends

Charles Martin’s The Mountain Between Us

Charles Martin’s Wrapped in Rain

Crying with Them Crickets

Top photograph: a view from River Road, Jacksonville, Florida.

Finding Eliot in St. Louis

I’ve been reading Young Eliot: From St. Louis to the Waste Land by Robert Crawford, a biography of T.S. Eliot’s life from 1888 to 1922. The period encompasses what are perhaps his greatest and best known works – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Hollow Men; and The Waste Land.  For major works, only Four Quartets lies outside this period.

I knew he was born and raised in St. Louis, where I’ve lived since 1979. But he is something on a non-entity here, this city that continues to celebrate its past (it’s almost a legal requirement to know about the 1904 World’s Fair) while it tries to find new ways to sabotage its future.

Little physical evidence of Eliot remains in the city. There is the house on Westminster Place in the Central West End where his family moved when he was 16. He was only there a year before he headed off to school in the Boston area, first a year at a prep school and then Harvard. And there is a medallion in the sidewalk in front of the place where the house he was born and raised in once stood.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting: Tom Eliot at 13, oil on canvas by his sister Charlotte Eliot.

The Circus: The Last Hurrah of Childhood

I was 12. My soon-to-be-sister-in-law was taking me and her younger sister to the circus. I had been to the circus once before, but had few memories.

This was the Shrine Circus, which came annually to New Orleans and set up in what was then the largest building for shows and exhibitions in the city – the Municipal Auditorium downtown. The auditorium continued to operate until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when it suffered flooding and wind damage. It is currently closed, but at the time I went to the Shrine Circus, that was far into the future.

The auditorium is bounded by North Rampart Street, Basic Street, and Congo Square. In fact, it’s right across North Rampart from the French Quarter. It’s built adjacent to what used to be known as Storyville, New Orleans’ famed red light district where jazz was born. The area is now known as Faubourg Treme, but when I was 12 it was more simply “downtown” – we didn’t have “faubourgs” back then. Downtown was where you went for entertainment; all of the large movie theaters were downtown – the Saenger, the Loew’s State, the Joy, and the RKO Orpheum. In the next few years, much would be swept away in a wave of demographic and social change.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Image by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: Childhood as Prequel

The retired couple next door to our duplex, giving the three-year-old me squares of Kraft fudge (I liked the vanilla flavor better than the chocolate).

My mother holding me as we watched the man from the dog pound take our Boston terrier away. He had mange, which at the time was incurable.

My father coming home from a business trip to New York, with a jack-in-the-box for me.

A vacation with extended family to Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The water tasted (and smelled) like rotten eggs.

Standing in line to get my polio vaccine – a red dot in a sugar cube.

These are some of memories I have from my first seven years of life. Most have to do with family. Our extended family, when it was fully extended, was large – my mother was one of six, and her oldest sister had seven children, so a great deal of my youth was spent going to weddings of what seemed like dozens of cousins. Of all of those weddings we went to, only one ended in divorce.

My father’s family was smaller – he was one of four (it had been five originally, but one sister died as a child). I had four cousins, all of whom were at least 12 years older than I was. For a long time, I was “the kid” on my father’s side of the family. And spoiled appropriately.

My memories of my father’s side are wrapped up in my grandmother – playing hymns on the upright piano, preparing to teach her Sunday School class, me feeding the sheep she kept in her backyard – and my aunts, especially the aunt who lived across the street from my grandmother who made world-class biscuits. And her husband, my uncle, who would let me sit beside him on the back step of the house while he aimed and fired his rifle at any cat that dared to come into his yard.

This was the uncle who introduced me to author James Mitchener. He insisted I had to read The Source, the longest book I had ever read up to that time. He loaned me his copy and said I could take it with me when I ended my Shreveport visit, as long as I returned it after I finished reading it. Which I did.

I was around my mother’s family far more, but it was my father’s family who influenced me the most, who left some of the deepest impressions.

We don’t realize it as children, but these things, good and bad, help shape us in significant ways into the adults we become.

We don’t realize it as children, but these things, good and bad, help shape us in significant ways into the adults we become. 

This is what, I believe, Corrie Ten Boom has in mind in The Hiding Place, when she describes the home life she remembered as a child – the bedroom she shared with her sister, the aunts who lived with them, trips with her father to Amsterdam to meet with watchmakers, her first day of school (when she decided not to go).

In one respect, the childhood she remembered and cherished would not prepare her for the Nazi concentration camps – how could anything prepare a person for that horror?

But it another respect, her childhood did prepare her. Her childhood was where she learned the faith and values that would ultimately sustain her, even as she raved and ranted against God.

William Wordsworth was right:

My heart leaps up when I behold

      A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

      Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

      I could wish my days to be

 Bound each to each by natural piety. (1802)

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. To see other posts on this chapter, “Full Table,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Gustavo Di Nucci via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Fred Chappell’s “River”

It was in the 1980s that a colleague at work who loved Southern writing introduced me to writer and poet Fred Chappell (born in 1936). She recommended, and I read, one of his novels, I Am One of You Forever. I went on to read two of his other novels, Brighten the Corner Where You Are and Look Back All the Green Valley, and one of his collections of short stories, Farewell I’m Bound to Leave You. 

What I had not read was his poetry, and Chappell first established his literary reputation as a poet. He was an English professor at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro for 40 years, retiring in 2004. In 1997, he was appointed North Carolina’s first poet laureate. 

I love Chappell’s stories. They are Southern, yes, but they are about family and history and all the things that used to define Southern culture. When I read his stories, I read my own family history – the characters and places seem real because they are real. 

I stumbled over a copy of one of his poetry collections, River: A Poem, first published in 1975. My copy is a reprint by LSU Press in 2000; I bought it used and it’s certainly been read many times.  

It’s subtitled “A Poem,” and it should be – River is actually one poem with 11 divisions. It is about family, and specifically his grandparents. It was first published when Chappell was 39, so it is something of a middle-aged memory from the 1940s and early 1950s. 

To write these memories down is important; it helps your own children and grandchildren understand where you and they came from, and how those who came before were as much a part of that river as you and they are now. 

The individual poems that form River are too long to cite in full here, but here is an excerpt of one, entitled “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet,” recounting a conversation between Chappell and his grandmother as she was doing exactly that: 

I see her still, unsteadily riding the edge

Of the clawfoot tub, mumbling to her feet,

Musing bloodrust water about her ankles.

Cotton skirt pulled up, displaying bony

Bruised patchy calves that would make you weep. 

Rinds of her soles had darkened, crust-colored—

Not yellow now—like the tough outer belly

Of an adder/ In fourteen hours the most refreshment

She’d given herself was dabbling her feet in the water. 

“You mightn’t’ve liked John-Giles. Everybody knew

He was a mean one, galloping whiskey and bad women

All night. Tried to testify dead drunk

In church one time. That was a ruckus. Later

Came back a War Hero, and all the young men

Took to doing the things he did. And failed.

Finally one of his women’s men shot him.”

“What for?” 

        “Stealing milk through fences…That part

Of Family nobody wants to speak of.

They’d rather talk about fine men, brick houses,

Money. Maybe you ought to know, teach you

Something.” 

       “What do they talk about?” 

                                                 “Generals,

And the damn Civil War, and marriages.

Things you brag about in the front of Bibles…” 

Fred Chapell

Should I say that I have the family Bible from the 19^th century. And there’s this family stuff in the font of it, the “kind of stuff you like to brag about,” and I have a photograph of my great-grandparents, which has a Civil War story behind it? 

The other scenes from River include the poet as a child being lowered down the well by his grandfather, to give it its periodic scrubbing; what it’s like for that young boy to discover one day he’s a grandfather himself; and his grandfather’s river baptism (a Methodist getting baptized like a Baptist, for goodness sakes), among others. 

Reading River is wading and then swimming in that river of family and memory that each of us flows from, becoming and being that river ourselves. 

Photograph of the French Broad River in western North Carolina courtesy of the Visit North Carolina.

The Bookshelf and the Encyclopedias

My first bookcase was a simple affair: four shelves made of boards of pine stained a reddish brown. My father built it one weekend; I would have been nine or ten years old. It held my Golden Book Encyclopedias (purchased one a week by my mother at the A&P grocery store); my Hardy Boys stories (usually placed in the vicinity of my Trixie Belden mysteries); several Tom Swift books; and the books I ordered each month at school through the Scholastic Book Service (oh, my barely contained excitement to see the monthly SBS box sitting by the teacher’s desk).

The first bookcase ended up traveling; it followed me to Texas, and then it followed my wife and me to St. Louis. It was joined for a time by the college student’s need for cheap bookcases (cinder blocks and board, again of pine but unstained), then by the set of three-you-could-buy- fairly-reasonably at the furniture store (the set you knocked together yourself).

Actually, it was followed by several sets of three over the years. Some of those sets have come and gone; others still reside in our basement, holding a host of non-book things. The good bookcases are upstairs, occupying most of one bedroom and part of another. Oh, and there’s that small shelf in still another.

The original bookcase, now more than half a century old, sits in our basement. It’s still just as sturdy as it ever was. It’s never needed repairs. And on its bottom shelf sits that same set of Golden Book Encyclopedias that my mother bought at the A&P. (If you look closely, we can see them in the picture above on the bottom shelf, to the right of my high school “Warrior” yearbooks .) Years ago, when we were visiting my mother in New Orleans, she asked me if I still wanted them. If not, they were headed for the next garage sale. Since the Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden had already walked the plank at one of her garage sales, I took them back to St. Louis.

I suspect that the only reason she didn’t set them out to be sold was that she remembered buying them a volume a week at the A&P, trying to remember which volume to get, occasionally marking it down on her grocery lists, sometimes buying the wrong one and having to return it. Yes, she had a lot invested in those encyclopedias.

The bookshelf they sit in, that bookshelf they first sat in, is a bit worn, sitting rather quietly as it does in the basement. I can still remember watching my father build it. I can still remember my excitement. I can probably imagine my mother’s relief at having a place to put my books.

My father and I did few things together, outside of working at his printing business. The bookshelf project was one of them, even though my participation consisted of watching him. But that was sufficient; he was building it for me.

 

And those encyclopedias – they’ll likely end up eventually as a donation to Good Will, or sitting in a box on the driveway as part of a garage sale. But not in my lifetime. They may be meaningless to my children, but I know what attention and focus my mother brought to their acquisition. Just as I know the effort my father put into that bookcase.

In Finding Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening Your Soul to Rest, Bonnie Gray talks about a bookcase, one she kept in her bedroom until a friend convinced her to move it to the living room. The bookcase represented safety and escape. It blocked memories of bad experiences. Moving it was an act of embracing vulnerability.

And there’s my bookcase, sitting in the basement, holding those encyclopedias, among other things. It’s a reminder of things my parents did for me, ways they recognized that they had this voracious reader in the family and weren’t quite sure what to do with him, but they would at least build him a bookcase to hold his books.