Moving On...

It has been unofficial for a few weeks now, but as of today it is official. This is the last month of my teaching career. I will retire at the end of May.

(There is no rhyme or reason to the placement of pictures below. I just chose a pretty random group of pics from my facebook albums that illustrate my teaching career and inserted 'em wherever they landed.)

It is the toughest decision I have made in a long time. 

I am looking forward to retirement in many ways, but I can’t help but feel sad that I will not greet those two dozen eager little faces next fall. I won’t get to introduce them to Penny and Nick and Ben. I won’t get to walk them across the desktops in our simulation of the ancient discovery of America by Asians across Beringia. I won’t get to lead them on the “Long Trail” ...

... through our school woods or lead them in examining those seventy-odd apples they bring that first week.

 

 I won’t get to teach them those silly songs: “Cut the Cake” and “Evaporation” or teach them to sing Jefferson’s wonderful words “We Hold These Truths...”. I won’t tell them about my ‘Possum friend, ‘Delphis, nor will I give them their first recital of Jabberwocky. 

I have always loved that first week as I get to know them and vice versa. There will be no timid “brown bag reports” from the Castle this fall.

I can’t complain about my final group of homeroom younguns. I have a precious group who made me look awfully good for 2012-2013 as they “excelled” as a group on all five parts of the “The Test That Shall Not Be Named” with not a single failing score. And all three of my  groups managed to improve over their third grade scores by more than 20 points in science and about that much in social studies -- the best growth in Floyd County.

I first joined Floyd County Schools in 1971. I had already taught two years in Putnam County, West Virginia. After two years at McHenry teaching fifth grade, I accepted the additional $400 per year to be assistant principal there, while I continued my classroom duties for four more years. I transferred to Pepperell for one year as a sixth grade teacher before I began my eleven years teaching in the gifted program. What fun I had there as I got to invent my own curriculum along with a close knit group of wonderful teachers.

In 1988 I left teaching for eleven years to chase a dream in private enterprise. 

Then in 1999 I recognized education as my true calling and answered Anita Stewart’s invitation to interview at Armuchee. It has been joy to serve the children of Armuchee for the last fourteen years. 

I have been privileged to work with some of the finest teachers and administrators in the country at this remarkable school. The environmental emphasis at Armuchee fit perfectly with my own educational philosophy, and the environmental education program here helped me develop and refine my philosophy and methods. Together we have created an excellent atmosphere of learning for the children and collegiality among the staff and faculty. I am very proud of what we have wrought at Armuchee during the last decade plus. I will always carry warm memories of the students, parents, teachers, administrators, and other staff members with whom I have worked. 

Despite the current anti-public education climate in Georgia, I hope my cohorts will continue the tradition of environmental education at Armuchee. High stakes testing is not the final indication of educational success, but I must point out that while using environmental methods we have achieved testing results that compare very favorably with those of other schools. Learning in the context of the real world around us really does stick.

I look forward to the opportunity to do occasional volunteer storytelling and nature activities at Armuchee. Those twenty-five beautiful acres and the folks who have peopled them will always be near my heart.

Time for another commitment...

I turned 66 recently -- full social security eligibility -- and am contemplating retirement. This is very hard on me. Part of me abhors the idea of retirement. I love teaching. I love my students. I am thrilled to have captive audience for my silly shenanigans and I relish those "aha!" moments that, after 33 years teaching preteens, I can pretty well predict.

Anyway, I made a commitment in 1971 to Sheila Shaw. I am far from a perfect husband, but I have managed to keep the basics of that commitment and I love her with everything I have. That commitment resulted in promises to Brannon Shaw in 1983 and Lillian Shaw in 1988. My mistakes have been legion in the parenting department, but neither of the girls can doubt my love.

After teaching, with great enjoyment but without a permanent commitment, for 19 years, then taking 11 years off for business efforts, I reentered education, this time, on purpose, in 1999. And, this time,  I made a conscious commitment. Part of that was a commitment to love my students and to find joy in teaching them. I occasionally find myself nose to nose with some little 10-year-old miscreant, but even then I think they know I love them.

Now I face old age. Today my digital buddy, the Questing Parson, gave his goals for old age. I think I can endorse them. I too am determined to keep growing as I "grow old". Time for another commitment.

"I'm Old" by the Questing Parson

Grandpaw Wilkerson & Beulah

Grandpaw Wilkerson & Beulah

(A retelling of Donald Davis's Story, "Rainy Weather")

Grandpaw Wilkerson KNEW his dogs. 

His favorite, late in life, when I knew  him, was Beulah. The Westminster Kennel Club wouldn’t have recognized her lineage, but Grandpaw knew her. She was a descendant of a long line of hounds he’d raised since his boyhood days. He could trace her forebears by name through ten generations of begats. He swore her heart pumped the best hound blood in Alabama. It’d be hard to figure who loved fox hunting better, Tom or Beulah. 

When the big storm of '59 tried to blow Calhoun County Alabama off the map, Daddy and I hurried over to Nances Creek -- just south of what my family still calls Cross Plains, but folks now generally know as Piedmont -- to help Grandpa with the clean-up.

That tornado had barreled through missing the farmhouse, and the church, but it took out the big barn.

Grandpaw had built that barn right after he and Maw Wilkerson got married a good sixty years earlier. The center section was unfloored but both sides had floors of wide rough-sawn boards. The two long floors that had held the tack rooms, and corn crib, and such was all that was left. Folks from the church had already cleared a lot of the mess up, so Daddy and I got after salvaging those big yellow pine boards.

We’d only pulled up and stacked a couple of ‘em when we noticed in the dirt under the boards some old fox tracks that must have been there when the boards had been nailed down sixty years before. Well, about the time we were pulling up the last board on that side, along came Grandpaw with a jug of sweet tea and with Beulah on a leash.

“Paw, come look at this!” Daddy hollered “Fox tracks!”

“Yep, look at that. That fox must’ve trotted right across here the night before we nailed that floor down! Lordy! look at Beulah! I b’lieve that ol’ dog can still smell the critter!” 

Sure enough, Beulah was straining at her leash with her nose in the dirt, a low growl bubbling from her jowls.

With a smile in his eyes, Grandpaw unhitched that leash from the hand-tooled leather collar he'd made her. You should of seen that dog go! Lickety-split down the length of that barn, up and over the sill at the far end,  across the barn lot, sliding under the old slat fence, and into the next pasture. 

There she started zigzagging to beat the band.

“What in the world’s she doin’," I hollered as we followed after her, about as fast as you could expect in the company of an 89 year-old .

“We didn’t clear that field till after the barn was built”, Grandpaw huffed, “She must be dodging all the trees that USED to be there!”

Running straight again through the next field, her trail song washed over the valley like sunlight in the morning. She headed smackdab toward the pond. “Lordy, Grandpaw, y’all  just built that pond a couple of years ago. What’s she gonna do now?!”

Well, I’ll tell you what she did: she plunged nose first into and under that pond, and started clawing her way across the bottom. That trail song was snuffed out briefly, of course, but then air began bubbling to the surface and releasing bits of barks. She ploughed out the other side paused a second or two to shake good and headed up and across the ridge, and by the time we got around the pond and up the rise we’d lost her in the blackberry brambles. Grandpaw reckoned we might as well  head back to the house. 

We didn’t hear from Beulah the next day, or the next. And it was Saturday and Daddy and I had to head back to Ellijay so he could preach Sunday morning.

Weeks went by, we kept going back and forth to clean up at Grandpa’s a day or two every week and Beulah never came back. We thought the ol’ girl was gone for good and we could tell Grandpaw was depressed even though he’d probably never heard that word.

Then the phone rang and it was the New Orleans Police Department. A dog with Grandpaw’s phone number on its tag had broken into the Salvation Army Thrift Store in the French Quarter and “treed” a fifty-year-old, ten-dollar fox-fur coat hanging in the show window. For a hundred dollar fee the dog could be shipped to Anniston on the Southern Crescent. Grandpaw thought about that about ten seconds, then with mischief in his eyes, said he reckoned Maw would like that coat. 

“I’ll wire you twenty bucks to buy the coat and cover shipping costs. Just let old Beulah go. She’ll find a good home.”  And that policeman agreed!

Sure enough, about a week later, here came the mail Jeep crossing the Nance’s Creek bridge toward the farm. Grandpaw grinned wide and called Maw out to get her new coat from the mailman while he grabbed his cane and walked on down the road. By the time he got to the bridge he could already hear that beautiful trail song of his best friend.

And while Maw was greeting the mailman, Beulah was trotting across the bridge nose to the ground, home at last, and still trailing that fox toward the outstreched arms of Thomas Wesley Wilkerson, who, I think I mentioned, KNEW his dogs. 

Oh, by the way,  any similarity between this absolutely true story and a true story called “Rainy Weather” that Donald Davis tells, is purely coincidental. Why, if you can’t trust me on that, what storyteller could you trust? 

-------

Here is a link to a video of my retelling of this story.

Donald Davis includes "Rainy Weather" in his book Barking at a Fox-Fur Coat. He says the story grew out of one of his Uncle Frank's anecdotes. I developed my version of Donald's story recently when I remembered the picture (above) of my Great Great Grandfather Thomas Wesley Wilkerson with his hound. At the time I wrote my version I thought Donald's was a retelling of a traditional tale, like some others of his tales are. I now understand that this story is more of an original work than I thought. I've had a lot of fun telling it and fitting it to my family and a setting more familiar to me, but I know now that Donald Davis deserves full credit for the basic story. 

If you haven't read or heard Donald's stories you need to check them out. My children grew up on Donald Davis stories, and Sheila and I hear him in person often, including every October at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough TN

PTSW: Beautiful Depths

I was struck yesterday, while listening to an NPR interview with a musician, by her declaration of love for sad songs. I can relate. I also count some sad songs among my favorites. And some sad poems. I thought of this one:

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be 

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. 

- John Keats 

Now, I don't doubt that John Keats was feeling a bit down when he set out to write these lines. And given his premature death - only 25! - the poem voices a very legitimate concern. But I have to believe that by the time he reached the depths of that nothingness in the last line he was greatly buoyed by a swelling, even joyful, somethingness we'll call pride of accomplishment. Surely he felt happiness at having written so beautifully his despair.

A Ballad for My Mother

We celebrated my mother's 90th birthday with a party at our church a couple of weeks ago. After each of her seven children had participated in a program to honor her, she thanked everyone and led us in singing this song that she wrote about her own mother. So this week I'd like to share her song as our Poem to Start the Week. I think it's a good song. I would like to record it one of these days. A Ballad for My Motherwritten by Ruth Baird Shaw in 1983  to honor her mother, Ieula Ann Dick Baird. Author's Note: My mother lived to be nearly 89 years old and she had a philosophy of life as a Christian, not to worry about things that "could not be helped" and to take each day as a new beginning. . .  Verse 1 My mother grew old. . . had lines etched in her face    Worked hard all her life. . . with uncommon grace    She lived by the Bible. . . And I'd visit awhile    She taught me her secret. . . of life with a smile She said. .  .   Chorus      Today is the first day    Of the rest of your life.    Don't borrow trouble    With yesterday's strife.    Take time. . . smell the flowers    That's what makes life worth while    Then pick up each new day    And love and a smile!  Verse 2  Widowed while young. . . Mama worked in the mill    Washed on a scrub-board. . . Brought wood up a hill    She sang as she labored. . . to stay out of debt    And taught me this lesson. . . I'll never forget (Chorus)  Verse 3 One day I said, Mama,. . . Your life has been hard    You've buried two babies. . . Out in the church yard    You've known all the heartache of struggling for bread,    She smiled through her tears and these words she said: (Chorus)  Verse 4 Her old fashioned tea cakes. . . We ate the last crumb    Her old fashioned flowers. . . She had a green thumb.    She lived by the Bible. . . each day and each mile    She taught me her secret. . . of life with a smile!        (Chorus)

The Rev. Mr. Young Allen Bailey

Preacher Bailey

I suppose it may have been on my Dad’s first Sunday as pastor at Watkin’s Memorial Methodist Church in Ellijay Georgia that I met Preacher Bailey. You don’t forget meeting the Rev. Mr. Young Allen (Y.A.) Bailey for many reasons but most obviously because of his strange speech. 

I can perfectly mimic his speech  -- for short sentences. That’s about it. He spoke on inhalation rather than exhalation of air. It was a disorder he had developed long before, while serving that church in the forties, and I understood it had caused his early retirement. 

A short jolly man in his fifties, Preacher Bailey was married to a lovely and kind woman, Mary, a teacher, I think. They had lost a teenage son to appendicitis in the forties. Their home, if I remember correctly, was toward the end of a street that ran parallel with Dalton St. Just toward town from the Logan Funeral Home.

Preacher Bailey became a great friend of my father’s. I remember on one occasion driving with Daddy, Preacher Bailey, Al Bruce, and, I think, James Sanders?, to Kentucky for a pastors’ conference. I was a teen at the time and was appalled to have to share a hotel room in Somerset KY with a cacophony of snores emanating from four Methodist preachers.

Occasionally, Rev. Bailey would preach for my Dad at Watkins Memorial. His strange speech somehow enhanced his ability to maintain my attention.

As a member of the congregation he often, according to my memory anyway, would “rest his eyes” while listening to the sermon. I always suspected his brain was resting as well.

I believe I accompanied my Dad to a hospital in Atlanta when Rev. Bailey was sick in the late sixties after we had moved to Rome. 

I don’t know what brought this gentle and kind man to my mind last night, but being me, I typed his name into a search engine - Young Allen Bailey - and up popped his very familiar face, 45 years after his death. 

Do you have memories of Rev. Bailey or Mrs. Bailey you’d share in the comments?

PTSW: Sentimental Moment

Perhaps this poem by Brooklyn's Robert Herson will help my daughters understand me better. I know you are grown, but I also see those shining two- and ten- and sixteen-year-old eyes shining from your faces.

Sentimental Moment 

or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road

Don't fill up on bread  

I say absent-mindedly

The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be

receding a bit, says

Did you really just say that to me?

What he doesn't know

is that when we're walking

together, when we get

to the curb

I sometimes start to reach

for his hand   

- by Robert Hershon

PTSW: Questions at Night

Louis Untermeyer's questions are from his Golden Treasury of Poetry which was a bedside mainstay when my daughters were small. We would sometimes make operettas of the poems in this book which Aunt Wilma had given Sheila, their mother, when more than thrity years before.

Questions at Night

WhyIs the sky?
What starts the thunder overhead?Who makes the crashing noise?Are the angels falling out of bed?Are they breaking all their toys?
Why does the sun go down so soon?Why do the night-clouds crawlHungrily up to the new-laid moonAnd swallow it, shell and all?
If there's a Bear among the stars,As all the people say,Won't he jump over those Pasture-barsAnd drink up the Milky Way?
Does every star that happens to fallTurn into a fire-fly?Can't it ever get back to Heaven at all?And whyIs the sky? 

by Louis Untermeyer

I've had a few questions at night myself over the years. It is interesting to me to think that I was dealing with such basic and terrifying questions as I did at five or six, but I know they happened to me while lying in the back window of our early fifties Chevy, on a starry, starry night, and a cold one, on the long trip between Georgia and Kentucky. Here is a prose poem I wrote about that experience.

Beyond Stars

A Prose Poem

Before seatbelts, infant carseats, and airbags, when I could sometimes drive in my Daddy's lap or ride with the security of his wing my only restraint, Mama and my sisters crowded with us into the long black 'fifty Chevy the one with the wide shelf under a sloping back window for the long drive to Kentucky.
We sang, laughed, argued and slept for three hundred winding miles through the mountains to the bluegrass.
As the sun set on our winter drive, the mountains bled red ice where the road cut the steep slopes. Then the dark wrapped our speeding little world up tight and we slept: the baby in Mama's arms; the toddler in the crook of Daddy's wing; my two older sisters on opposite sides of the big back seat, legs meshed in the middle; my next younger sister curled in a blanket with her arms folded across the warm hump in the floor; and my full length wedged into a private half-chysalis in the back window; young cheek pressed against the waking cold glass.
I didn't look up until I could arrange myself comfortably, a wadded jacket pillow under my head. I closed my eyes; turned them toward the black sky; let them adjust to dark; then peeked into the universe of stars.
A quarter inch of safety glass shielded me from a billion distant hellfires in the wide sky. I refused to avoid the terrible sight. I determined to think beyond the farthest, tiniest light. Then beyond that as far again, and again and beyond that, and beyond that. To the mind of God. And beyond that.
As my head inflated with the terrible expansion of thought I tore my tiny face from the window to the silhouette of my parents against the headlighted pavement rolling toward us and pulled my family around me like a blanket against a private winter.
Later, home in the top bunk, I waked, terrified by a dream of the Milky Way racing toward me like lighted pavement in the dark. I stumbled to my father's lap. He put down the book and held me and I slept.
Who will hold me now?

by Terrell Shaw

I am a crime victim, hear me roar.

I am awake and ranting this morning because...  the same poor wretch who has twice before broken into our house, tried it again a couple of hours ago. He managed to get out without my actually seeing him. I heard him, and I smelled him, but I didn't see him. I honestly wish I could have gotten a shot at him. I would not have had great difficulty pulling the trigger had I gotten a bead on him. Of course I hope I would be responsible enough to know it was the guy and not my daughter or Sheila in my sights -- statistically they are in more danger from my gun than he -- but still I have a Constitutional right to self-protection and would exercise it if I had the chance.

BUT this experience just once again makes me want to scream at the idiots in the NRA who want to set up their straw men and condemn me, the President, "liberals", parents of those babies in Newtown, and other folks who want sensible limits on the types of guns private citizens can use, background checks, and systems to track weapons used in crimes. Otherwise sensible folk among my facebook friends talk of us "confiscating" their guns, "cold dead hands," and other such excremental language.

I am a crime victim who wants the ability to defend my home, even with deadly force, from creeps who would violate it. BUT I ALSO WANT "DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY" and I did not need an assault weapon tonight. I did not need a giant clip. I do not fear a background check. And my ballot is a much better protection against tyranny than any private weapon. If you want to claim an unrestricted right to ANY weapon I don't care to hear your argument: you are, at least in that regard, an ignoramus. Not even Antonin Scalia, the most right wing Supreme Court justice of them all, supports that interpretation of the Second Amendment.

There is too much gun violence in America and we need an adult conversation about ways to reduce it.

Ruth Baird Shaw

We will celebrate my mother's birthday ten days early on February 9th -- this coming Saturday -- with a party at Trinity Methodist Church here in Rome. 2-4 p.m. Y'all come. 

(Edited February 10, 2013: We had a great day celebrating our mother yesterday. Each of the seven siblings took part in the program. Our brother-in-law Chuck Roszel added some heartfelt extemporaneous remarks at the end as well. I sang two songs, "The Love of God" during my remarks, and "Amazing Grace" with the congregation joining in, at the end.  Here are (approximately), my remarks.


My Mother is an amazing woman. 

I’ve always known that.

Ruth Shaw is a very active woman -- creative, determined, dedicated, caring, independent, and sharp as a tack -- who will turn ninety-years-young on February 19. 

And I remember her thirtieth birthday, when I would have been almost six. I thought that sounded sort of old then. 

I remember walking hand in hand with her at about that time down Main Street of little Mackville KY from the Methodist parsonage to the elementary school for my first day of first grade. I remember the comfort of that hand.

And I remember the utter shame of having to walk the long blocks from Fourth Ward Elementary in Griffin GA toward our little parsonage on South Ninth Street carrying a note from Mrs. Giles about my third grade misbehavior. I would have to present that evidence of my black heart to my wonderful mother. I no longer remember the particular sin, but I do remember that I did not want to disappoint Ruth Shaw. 

My mother read to us. I can see the Bible story book in my mind’s eye. One of these days I want to find that book and buy one to have at my house. I loved those stories. Even more I loved the one who read them to us.

I remember Mother walking me and Carol and Debbie down College Street to Griffin’s Hawkes Public Library to load up on Hardy Boy books, and Jim Kjelgaard, and boyhood biographies of Lee and Washington, and such, AND stopping by the bakery nearby for gingerbread men on the way home.

I remember the pride and awe of hearing her singing beautiful harmony with my Daddy --  “The Love of God” --  at a Sunday night service at Midway Methodist. So in honor of that but without the harmony -- unless some of you want to provide it and feel free! -- I’d like to sing that old song.

1. The love of God is greater far

1. Than tongue or pen can ever tell;

1. It goes beyond the highest star,

1. And reaches to the lowest hell;

1. The guilty pair, bowed down with care,

1. God gave His Son to win;

1. His erring child He reconciled,

1. And pardoned from his sin.

• Refrain:

• Oh, love of God, how rich and pure! How measureless and strong!

• It shall forevermore endure—The saints’ and angels’ song.

1. Could we with ink the ocean fill,

1. And were the skies of parchment made,

1. Were every stalk on earth a quill,

1. And every man a scribe by trade;

1. To write the love of God above

1. Would drain the ocean dry;

1. Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

1. Though stretched from sky to sky.

We thought we’d arrived in heaven -- at least I did -- in 1958 when we moved from the modest little parsonage in Griffin to the brick mansion-in-my-eyes at Ellijay. On the day we moved Daddy pulled the car onto the shoulder along Highway 5 as we neared Ellijay to soak in an amazing sight. The white clouds in an azure sky had nestled onto and around the mountains, allowing those magnificent  summits to peek out above them. 

I have many good memories from Ellijay, but a terrifying one occured about 1960. David a toddler decided to spread the ends of a bobby pin and poke them into an electrical outlet. Luckily the circuit he completed was broken when the pin burned in two and dropped to the wooden floor where it burned a permanent record of the event. Mother handed the convulsing David to me to hold while she drove us down Dalton Street toward the doctor’s office. Her calm calmed us then and often since, even when she was the one suffering and we should have been the ones soothing.

Like every Southern family at the time, our extended family members were not unanimously accepting of the tumult of the day. I remember with pride my bashful Mother defending Martin Luther King in some family discussions -- well before it was the popular thing to do.

I could go on and on. 

I love my mother not just for herself, but for those who loved her enough to guide her toward the person she has become. Those include my grandmother Ieula Ann Dick Baird, who as a widow raised her eleventh child to revere the father, Wilson Baird, she lost when she was only nine, to love the God who had guided him, and to love Ieula’s own grandfather, Bogan Mask, who had shown kindness to mistreated slaves and bravely stood for his beliefs as a licensed Methodist exhorter and took in Ieula, her siblings and her widowed, pregnant mother when Charles Ervin Dick died at 35. 

I love her for the the quiet bravery, dedication to duty, and love of God exhibited by her brothers and sisters, and the love of a young husband and his band of precocious, mischievous brothers, gregarious Daddy Shaw, and determined Mama Shaw.

I love her for my inspiring siblings, whom she reined in when needed, but to whom she gave the reins when they were ready.

And of course there are the “lemon fluff” frozen desserts she made in ice trays, snow-cream during our Kentucky days, the cinnamon yeast rolls on Christmas mornings, and the traditional little bottles of Welch’s Grape Juice in our stockings, banana pudding on other special occasions, the cornbread dressing with the big Butterball turkey at Thanksgiving, date-nut cakes on my birthdays... my mouth is watering.

Which brings us to some verse I wrote for Mama many years ago now. 

Dandelions in a Milk Carton

Thank you, Mama, 

For nursing me and diapering me,
for a dry set of sheets when I wet another,
for the Bible story book and Uncle Remus,
for all five sisters and my little brother, 

And all the good eating stuff
Like biscuits from wooden bowls
and datenut cakes and lemon fluff,
and Russian tea and yeast rolls  

For Jesus-loves-the-little-children and Deep-and-Wide,
For walking to school that first day by my side
And for your loving smile when I came in a run
with dandelions in a milk carton for all you’ve done.

I remember with pride how as a widow in her early sixties my mother followed her heart, her calling, and her conscience, despite her bashful nature, to take over my father’s ministry, complete seminary, become an outstanding preacher, and successfully minister to several churches and many hurting people in the years since. Many times this was while she heroically faced one of the most debilitating and painful diseases known to mankind (Trigeminal neuralgia) and its resulting brain surgeries and medications -- and later facial surgery and cancer.

Everyone has always assumed Mother to be younger than her actual age as long as I can remember, and she still seems much younger than what the calendar indicates. I have always believed my Mama the prettiest, smartest, and kindest one around -- and, of course, also the best cook. Still do.

Happy birthday, Mama

PTSW: Paul Revere's Ride

Listen my children!

I get to teach my fourth-graders American History from, I like to say, "The Beginning of Time till the Civil War." The Revolution is my favorite part of that history. The high ideals and noble aims, acute intelligence, and deep historical and philosophical understanding of those men (and a woman or two) who led us into and through those years, are so inspiring. They were mortal. They made mistakes. Some of them held slaves: how they could square that with the ideals they espoused is so hard to understand! But their bravery and democratic fervor cannot be missed. Forty or so examples are the guys who, on April 18, 1775, were ready to risk life and limb to warn their fellow Minutemen that British General Gates had sent troops to take the stored guns at Concord and to try to capture John Hancock and Samuel Adams. The most famous is Paul Revere, but William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, and Joseph Warren probably deserve at-least-equal billing.

Paul Revere’s Ride

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, — "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light, —
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm." 

Then he said good-night, and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somersett, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge, black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide. 

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack-door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore. 

Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade, —
Up the light ladder, slender and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all. 

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still,
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay, —
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats. 

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely, and spectral, and sombre, and still. 

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat. 

It was twelve by the village-clock,
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.

It was one by the village-clock,
When he rode into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon. 

It was two by the village-clock,
When be came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning-breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British regulars fired and fled, —
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load. 

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, —
A cry of defiance, and not of fear, —
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

PTSW: Woodcutter's Song

Woodcutter's Song

I found this poem/song among the comments on storyteller Sheila Kay Adams' Facebook wall. The words are traditional and from the old country -- penned by the famous Mother Goose, they say. It seems a good way to warm the start of a January week. And good advice if you have a woodburning hearth or stove.

Oak logs will warm you well  

That are old and dry  

Logs of pine will sweetly smell   

But the sparks will fly 

Birchs long will burn too fast  

Chestnut scarce at all sir  

Hawthorn logs are good to last  

That are cut well in the fall sir 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Surely you will find  

There´s no compare 

with the hard wood logs  

That´s cut in the winter time 
Holly logs will burn like wax 

You could burn them green  

Elm logs burn like smouldering flax  

With no flame to be seen  

Beech logs for winter time  

Yew logs as well sir  

Green elder logs it is a crime  

For any man to sell sir 

Surely you will find  

There´s no compare 

with the hard wood logs  

That´s cut in the winter time 
Pear logs and apple logs  

They will scent your room  

and cherry logs across the dogs  

They smell like flowers of broom  

But ash logs smooth and grey  

Buy them green or old, sir  

and buy up all that come your way 

They´re worth their weight in gold sir 

- Mother Goose

42 Years!

Forty-two years ago today, Sheila Ann Matthews agreed to spend her life with me! Here's what I wrote about that wonderful day on its thirty-seventh anniversary.

PTSW: The Gift Outright

The first Inauguration I remember watching was in 1961. I remember watching, on our black and white TV, the old poet, Robert Frost, blinded by the sunlight, giving up reading his prepared poem and reciting instead this:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become. 

- Robert Frost

Here is what he had intended to read:

Dedication

Summoning artists to participate

In the august occasions of the state

Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

Today is for my cause a day of days.

And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise

Who was the first to think of such a thing.

This verse that in acknowledgement I bring

Goes back to the beginning of the end

Of what had been for centuries the trend;

A turning point in modern history.

Colonial had been the thing to be

As long as the great issue was to see

What country’d be the one to dominate

By character, by tongue, by native trait,

The new world Christopher Columbus found.

The French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were downed

And counted out. Heroic deeds were done.

Elizabeth the First and England won.

Now came on a new order of the ages

That in the Latin of our founding sages

(Is it not written on the dollar bill

We carry in our purse and pocket still?)

God nodded his approval of as good.

So much those heroes knew and understood,

I mean the great four, Washington,

John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison

So much they saw as consecrated seers

They must have seen ahead what not appears,

They would bring empires down about our ears

And by the example of our Declaration

Make everybody want to be a nation.

And this is no aristocratic joke

At the expense of negligible folk.

We see how seriously the races swarm

In their attempts at sovereignty and form.

They are our wards we think to some extent

For the time being and with their consent,

To teach them how Democracy is meant.

“New order of the ages” did they say?

If it looks none too orderly today,

‘Tis a confusion it was ours to start

So in it have to take courageous part.

No one of honest feeling would approve

A ruler who pretended not to love

A turbulence he had the better of.

Everyone knows the glory of the twain

Who gave America the aeroplane

To ride the whirlwind and the hurricane.

Some poor fool has been saying in his heart

Glory is out of date in life and art.

Our venture in revolution and outlawry

Has justified itself in freedom’s story

Right down to now in glory upon glory.

Come fresh from an election like the last,

The greatest vote a people ever cast,

So close yet sure to be abided by,

It is no miracle our mood is high.

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs

Better than all the stalemate an’s and ifs.

There was the book of profile tales declaring

For the emboldened politicians daring

To break with followers when in the wrong,

A healthy independence of the throng,

A democratic form of right devine

To rule first answerable to high design.

There is a call to life a little sterner,

And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.

Less criticism of the field and court

And more preoccupation with the sport.

It makes the prophet in us all presage

The glory of a next Augustan age

Of a power leading from its strength and pride,

Of young amibition eager to be tried,

Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,

In any game the nations want to play.

A golden age of poetry and power

Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

-Robert Frost

And here is the poem for today - One Today - written and read by Richard Blanco for the Fifty-seventh Presidential Inauguration in American History. His language is efficient, evocative, electric. One today. One sun. One light. One ground. One wind. One sky. One moon. One Country.

One Today

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.
One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.
Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.
One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.
One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,waiting for us to name it—together.