Book Spine Poetry

(Three poems for Tweetspeak’s book spine poetry project. Fun!)

Come look with me.
Picture writing cat stories
between Walden and the whirlwind,
morning and evening,
without consent or contract.

***

The reason why
the well-trained mind,
writing books for young people,
collected ancient Greek novels
on the shores of Silver Lake?
Inside reporting
complex variables and applications.

***

Humor,
a sense of wonder,
the mechanical universe.
The Lord God made them all.

***

Here are the book titles (all of which are in my house) which make the above poems:

Come Look with Me, by Gladys S. Blizzard
Picture Writing, by Anastasia Suen
Cat Stories, by James Herriot
Between Walden and the Whirlwind, by Jean Fleming
Morning and Evening, by Charles Spurgeon
Without Consent or Contract, by Robert William Fogel
The Reason Why, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
The Well-Trained Mind, by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise
Writing Books for Young People, by James Cross Giblin
Collected Ancient Greek Novels, by B.P. Reardon
On the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Inside Reporting, by Tim Harrower
Complex Variables and Applications, by Churchill and Brown
The Value of Humor: The Story of Will Rogers (on the spine, it just says “Humor”), by Spencer Johnson
A Sense of Wonder, by Katherine Paterson
The Mechanical Universe, by Frautschi, Olenick, Apostol and Goodstein
The Lord God Made Them All, by James Herriot

Anonymous

(All photos are part of this set at my Flickr account.)

This is my first opportunity to use the 4000-cubic-inch Kelty backpack they gave me for my birthday. We are always curious about how much our packs weigh, so we weigh them before leaving the house. Charles’s, as usual, comes in heaviest (25% of his body weight), then Derek’s (22%), Titus’s (20%), mine (17%), and Byron’s (13%).

After a two-hour drive we begin at the Venable Trailhead, 9000 feet elevation. By tomorrow we will gain 3000 feet more. The last time we went backpacking at “the Sangres,” it was September, and the wildflowers were already dead. This time, they are at their peak. I wonder at the plants and animals in this wilderness. All creation really does sing His praise.

Of course I know the Columbine, our state flower . . .

. . . and the Aspen, which every Coloradan knows . . .

. . . but, ignorant of birds, bugs and botany, I don’t know what anything else is called up here. I can’t identify them, so these are anonymous beauties. What are the bushes we bushwhack through? What kind of bird makes that two-tone call? Whose are those faces greeting us from the trailside (“Welcome! Welcome to the mountains!”) Are those moth caterpillars that keep greeting us from midair?

What is the name of those little trumpets heralding in unison, “The Lord is good! The Lord is good!”

I don’t know their names. I only know them by where they are; these wildflowers, this ground cover, those birds are the wonders I always see at “the Sangres”—the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

I, too, want to be known by la sangre de Cristo—the blood of Christ. I want the world to identify me by what Jesus has done for me on the cross. I want to be an anonymous beauty, made beautiful by wearing Christ’s righteousness.

If Jesus is known by His scars,
may I be known by His blood, known
by la sangre de Cristo.

Father, I ask again, may it be no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

“He must increase; I must decrease.”
(John 3:30)

(For the Summer Vacation writing project hosted by Charity Singleton. Visit Charity’s place for more community posts!)

Every Day Poems: Like a “Poem-ography”

My friend Jean has a “library gift” (as her husband calls it). She swipes titles from the shelves (some for herself, some to recommend to her husband), and more often than not, they’re good books. This is Jean’s “library gift.”

So whenever she tells me about books she’s reading, I always jot down the titles. In this way I discovered (or more accurately, benefitted from Jean discovering) Anne Fadiman, Kay Redfield Jamison, Jon Hassler’s Simon’s Night, Lisa Terán’s The Hacienda.

My favorite books are often friends’ recommendations. Similarly, one of my favorite parts of any good book is the bibliography. It’s essentially the author’s book recommendations, as if I knew him and he said, “Here’s one you should read.”

Is there a poetry counterpart to a bibliography? Poem-ography, perhaps? This is what I need, and this is what Every Day Poems provides in a daily email. In this way I discovered (or benefitted from Every Day Poems discovering) Paul Willis, Sara Teasdale, Tania Runyan’s “Blessed Are the Peacemakers,” Langston Hughes’s “Harlem Sweeties,” Bradley J. Moore’s “Maddening.”

Every Day Poems is, to me, both a friend with a “poetry gift” and a poem-ography. And they’re good poems.

***

(Posted for “Winner Takes the Chocolate.” See details here.)

The Open Garage Door on Naffa Avenue

From first through third grades I loved everything about school, even the spaghetti served with an ice cream scoop. But I did not love the walk home.

Mr. and Mrs. Franklin didn’t fit in, not in that neighborhood. Rocking chairs, not cars, occupied their garage. Their garage door was always open, and they sat in their chairs, facing out. They called children walking by to come and talk to them. I was one of those children.

Mr. and Mrs. Franklin lived across the street and three houses down from us on Naffa Avenue, Carson, California (Los Angeles County). Whenever I walked home from school, I made sure to walk on the other side of the street. I knew without looking that their garage door was open and Mr. Franklin was giving me that wordless summons: his old, gray head and his old, gray arm simultaneously waving me over in jerking motions. Pretending not to notice, I walked faster, staring at the sidewalk. Just three more houses and I’m home, I thought. But they wouldn’t let me go that easy. Mr. Franklin called out, “Monica! Come here!”

We lived in a subdivision called “Carriage Crest Community,” but the “Community” part didn’t apply. Residents installed thick iron bars over the windows and doors, but the heavy bars, while keeping out potential thieves, also kept out potential friends.

A shy, self-isolating girl in a neighborhood like this, I never wanted to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Franklin. I just wanted to go home where no one would ring the doorbell.

But the Franklins persisted, and I always crossed the street. I stared at the cracks in their driveway while we chatted about nothing memorable. This happened every day.

One Halloween when I was older (around 7th grade), I went trick-or-treating at a tennis friend’s neighborhood (Rancho Palos Verdes—an affluent city where people gave out big chocolates instead of the less expensive lollipops).

The next time I saw Mr. Franklin, he said with a mixture of accusation and sadness, like a child betrayed by his friends, “I waited for you at Halloween. You didn’t come.”

“No, I went to another neighborhood instead.”

“Well, we were waiting for you. We had a one-pound Hershey bar for you.”

Three decades later, I realize that they loved me and I loved them. I miss the Franklins. I want to linger in their garage and get to know them better instead of counting the seconds until I could keep walking home. But, I can’t. They’re gone.

Will they ever know how, in a few short moments after school, they taught me to love my neighbor, to reach out to children around me, to be welcoming and open instead of guarded and afraid?

I’ll never see Mr. and Mrs. Franklin again on this earth. But down the street, there are children coming home from school. I think I’ll wave to them.

***

(In memory and in honor of Stanley and Jean Franklin, for the Community Writing Project hosted by Jennifer Lee to write about an important person from your childhood.)

Second Meeting (Girl with a Broom)

[These words from L.L. Barkat brought back this memory...]

She and I first met at the National Gallery of Art. Immediately I knew we were friends; we had common heart-hues, likenesses in our life palettes. She understands me, I thought. The friendship solidified in our ten-minute encounter, but I did not see her again for three and a half years.

The most visited place in Washington, D.C. is not the Lincoln Memorial, nor any monument or Smithsonian musuem. It is Union Station, its 270 stores and Amtrak and Metro hubs bringing multitudes passing in and passing through.

We had just lived forty hours on a joggety-jiggly train. Our legs, not yet adjusted to unmoving ground, took us into this Union Station with lurches and sideways steps. Signs hung from the ceiling, and we followed their arrows to the food court where we plopped car seat and duffle bags under two adjacent and amazingly unoccupied round metal tables, the kind you would normally find in someone’s backyard deck next to the grill.

The lunch-buying mission was mine and mine alone. Competition breeds the skill to sell, I guess, and the woman selling wraps somehow caught my eye within three seconds after we found our table. A slice of tuna wrap hung precariously on a toothpick at the end of her extended arm. She singled me out and beckoned with quick, downward thrusts of the chin. “Come! Free sample, you take! Come!” I came, took the sample, and returned to our table with a Chicken Caesar, a Chicken Arizona, and chicken-strip kid meals. The other food court vendors never had a chance.

Over this lunch we determined what to see before checking into the Governor House Inn. We stepped out into the gray mid-May D.C. drizzle, and my happy heart drove impatient feet straight to the National Gallery of Art.

I stepped in and first took in the architecture, the floor . . .

. . . the ceiling . . .

Then I looked for her, the friend who made such instant soul-connection three and a half years earlier. Which hall? Which room? My footsteps were quick. As I went, a thought came to me and I asked a security guard, “Is it okay to take pictures?” (Yes!)

Then, I turned a corner through a doorway and found her.

Hello again, friend. I’ve waited long to see you.

I stood very close, looking up. Sunlight from a skylight caused a reflection, so I moved a little left and right, a little closer, a half-step back, so I could see every part. My feet were planted. Standing close, I stared, looking up.

A security guard stepped to my left and warned, “Not too close. Just eight to ten inches.”

“Thank you,” I answered without looking at him, and stepped back.

Ten, fifteen minutes passed. By this time I was crying. So happy.

I took the first picture. My heart was not the only part of me that was rushed, and a sudden brightness reminded me I had forgotten to turn off the flash. I turned it off and took more photos while an elegantly dressed museum visitor approached me from the right. “I don’t think that flash is very good for the painting,” she said, firm and patient.

I turned to her and smiled, patient, too. “Yes, I turned it off,” I explained. “It was an accident.”

Another five minutes, and the security guard came back. “Found a good spot, have you?”

I turned to him, happy that someone noticed my appreciation. “Yes! This is my favorite painting in the whole musuem,” I said, speaking in a kind of hush.

“If you stand in the same spot for a while, we start watching you,” he said.

Well, he was doing his job, after all. I gave no answer.

“Just make sure you don’t get too close. Eight to ten inches.”

A scenario flashed through my mind of several guards coming at me from all sides and taking hold of my upper arms (Come with us, ma’am.) while I cried and made a scene (I just want to look at her!). After that I was more careful. Our meeting will have to be sneaky and clandestine, then. I decided to have fun with this, secret-club style. I took several steps back and even sat on the couch in the middle of the room. I crossed my legs and assumed a nonchalant pose, occasionally glancing at the other paintings. I got up and spent twenty minutes in other parts of the Gallery, then returned. I peeked in at her from the next room. Hi again! I see you!

I had arranged to meet my family in the coat room at 4:30, and it was time. I said goodbye, happy for a second meeting.

We donned our coats, grabbed our luggage, and stepped out. It was no longer raining.

********

(Originally posted for a 2010 book club.)

Related: Mistaken

Linked at Seedlings in Stone:

City Girl, Small Town

(For Dena Dyer’s community writing project on cross-cultural experiences.)

I lived in Israel where pita and bread cost only a few coins, children really did call their dads “Abba,” conversation depth went well below the surface within seconds, the front of a book was with the spine on the right, and no one ate cold cereal for breakfast. Yet this culture shock was nothing compared to my first visit to my husband’s (then fiance’s) hometown: Montrose, Colorado.

I grew up in Carson, California (Los Angeles County). I often sum up my L.A. experience in one word: concrete. I went to 232nd Place Elementary School where the baseball diamond was asphalt and the bases, squares of white paint. (No sliding!) In my world then, strangers were dangerous until proven innocent, and real living happened at Del Amo Mall (at the time, the second biggest shopping mall in the world). To me, “Nature” was a television channel.

In the mid-1990s Montrose had a population of about 10,000. It was considered big (and is still the second biggest city in Colorado’s Western Slope (the part of Colorado west of the Continental Divide)). Charles drove me around town to see all the schools he attended. At one point we stopped at what looked to me exactly like a beatiful, red country house.

“This was Menoken-Colcreek Elementary School,” Charles explained. That house was his school. This means the man I was about to marry actually went to a red, two-room schoolhouse. I had heard of people like that, but I didn’t know they existed this side of Little House on the Prairie days. What surrounded this red, two-room schoolhouse? Grass (not concrete)!

The wonders did not stop there. Traffic lights hung and swung freely from cables instead of being fixed to a huge metal arm extending over the street. We went to Wal-Mart, parked the car, and Charles left the car door unlocked. Inside the store, we actually ran into someone he knew.

What a new world! I realized people around here probably borrow a cup of flour from the neighbor now and then. That kind of thing never happened in L.A. When a new neighbor, new to L.A., asked my mother, “Could I borrow some flower?” my mother stood a while at the door, confused. Then she went out to the backyard. My older sister, wondering why mom wasn’t getting the flour, went to the kitchen for it. My sister and mom arrived at the front door around the same time, facing each other. In my sister’s hands was the flour; in my mom’s, a flower in a pot. All three laughed, including the neighbor.

Back to Montrose. I dreaded having to get our marriage license; I anticipated a long wait in crowded lines at the County Courthouse, complicated and expensive parking, and at least half a day spent. Instead, parking was easy, and we were the only ones in line! At the counter I got yet another shock: the clerk said, “Hi, Charles!” She knew him! Not only that, she had known him since he was a boy. They talked pleasantly about our upcoming marriage and his parents while I—city girl in a small town—stood blinking in amazement.

Seventeen years later, I feel I’ve made some good adjustments. I not only smile at strangers but even start conversations with them. Just last week, I asked the librarian about the brace around her hand and wrist (and since have prayed for her). I once gave a gift of homemade soap to a grocery store cashier named Linda, just because we were talking about lye (which my husband needed for a chemistry experiment but they didn’t sell at that store). I don’t fear my neighbors but even knock on their doors with a plate of cookies. And yes, I have borrowed sugar and eggs.