Ted Enslin, by Ted Wojtasik
Ted Enslin (1925-2011)
by Ted Wojtasik
I knew Ted Enslin for one decade, and in that time he became one of my most memorable and important friends. Each time a good friend or a family member dies, an emptiness opens up within me—no more. With Ted it is no more laughter, no more letters, no more talks, no more poetry. His death is a profound loss.
I first met Ted in the spring of 2000 in a terminal at the Fayetteville, North Carolina, Regional Airport when he flew down to St. Andrews the first time to do a reading for the Writers’ Forum, a weekly event at our university. Whit Griffin and I had gone to pick him up. (Whit was an undergraduate student at St. Andrews at the time and actively involved in the creative writing program.)
Ted had a rather formidable reputation. He had published over 100 books and chapbooks when I first met him and I knew that he was considered an avant-garde poet who wrote highly musical poems. In fact, he had studied musical composition with Nadia Boulanger who recognized his talent for writing and encouraged him to pursue poetry. Ted often said that he considered himself “a composer who happens to use words instead of notes.”
Waiting in the terminal I did not know what to expect that evening. His flight had been seriously delayed; Alison, his wife, had called a colleague worried about him and the delayed flight; and then Ted walked through the gate wearing a pair of jeans, his long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail, a walking stick in hand, a pierced ear, a broad smile, a pair of eyeglasses low on his nose, and a beard—a grand Fireside Poet’s white whiskers. Despite the delayed flight, Ted was in fine mettle and pleased to meet us. That evening the three of us became instantaneous friends.
On the drive back to campus, the conversation ricocheted from magic realism and Alejo Carpentier to mythology in The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, and firewood (Maine winters). Ted was quite impressed that Whit knew that Osage Orange is some of the hottest burning wood in the world. Ted and I also talked about Isak Dinesen. Ted had recently re-read the short story “Sorrow-Acre” and had been musing deeply over it. Fortunately, I had read most of Dinesen’s short stories, the magnificent memoir Out of Africa and a biography about her, so I was familiar with her work and her life. On that 45-minute drive what I remember most is that Dinesen was the most salient topic of conversation. Later, that fall, the St. Andrews Press would publish a chapbook titled Ring, by Ted Enslin, which is a long poem he wrote in response to Dinesen’s “Sorrow-Acre.” The poem had been brewing in his mind on the flight down from Maine and in his conversation on the drive back to campus.
Whit became close friends with Ted and had formally studied with him for one week one summer at his home in Maine. Ever since then Whit would visit him in Maine each year, sometimes twice a year. I also became close friends with Ted and spent numerous memorable occasions with him in Laurinburg, North Carolina; Milbridge, Maine; and the Outer Banks.
One such memorable occasion occurred on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Ted and Denver Butson, another poet and through whom I met Ted, were both at St. Andrews for the week to meet with students to discuss their poetry, to teach a few classes, and to read at the Thursday night Writers’ Forum. I had an 11:00 a.m. class, which was an introduction to creative writing. Ted and Denver were going to be guest lecturers that morning.
Between 9:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. I heard about the airplane attacks on the Twin Towers. At 10:30 a.m. I heard that the North Tower had collapsed. I had lived in New York City, in Chelsea, while getting my MFA at Columbia University, and I used to wake up each morning to the Twin Towers. I kept thinking and saying, “The North Tower collapsed? It collapsed? How is that possible?” I had imagined it plunging sideways over lower Manhattan, not imploding. Then the Pentagon attack. The South Tower collapsing. The crash into the Pennsylvania field. It was sheer pandemonium. Radio. Internet. Television. Telephone. Cell phone. President Bush on Air Force One. All flights canceled and all active flights grounded. Denver lived in Brooklyn with Rhonda (then his girlfriend, now his wife). No one knew if there were going to be more attacks. No one knew what was going on. Denver couldn’t reach Rhonda by cell phone or landline, because the systems were all overwhelmed.
Dazed the three of us walked into my classroom. Some students had not yet heard anything. Ted and Denver talked briefly about poetry and about the tragedy unfolding. And then I canceled class. The president of the university also canceled all classes for the rest of the day.
The three of us went to the Pine Acres Lodge where Ted and Denver were staying. All the rest of the day we sat in Ted’s motel room and watched television while Denver kept trying to reach Rhonda. Eventually, he did, and she was fine but frightened. We really didn’t do anything except stare disbelievingly at the television screen all afternoon and all evening. At one point, for dinner, I drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken to buy a bucket of fried chicken. Part of my life history is that on the day of 9/11 I was with Ted Enslin and Denver Butson in a hotel room in Laurinburg, North Carolina, watching television and eating KFC.
Another memorable occasion happened the first time I visited Ted at his home in Milbridge, Maine, the summer of 2002. I also had the pleasure of meeting his wife Alison. On that visit, I saw and explored his eighteenth-century house. We then walked down the macadam road so many yards. At the start of a grassy lane, Ted pointed out Alison’s potting shed in the woods near the road. We strolled up the grassy lane through some woods and fields to Bloomside, a small A-frame cabin that is his writing studio.
I now had a vivid image of Ted at home in his poetic world in Maine. I could now see him ambling down the road each morning and hiking up the grassy lane to work in his studio. Ted moved to Maine in 1960 and had lived in Washington County ever since—it is difficult to separate Ted from Maine or Maine from Ted, so intertwined had the two become in his work and in his very existence. It is difficult for me to think that his fine intelligence, his poetic sensibility, and his generous nature are no longer part of this world. It is difficult for me to think that this good man is no longer walking up that grassy lane to his studio to write poetry.
Ted had always remained on the margins, literally and figuratively, away from the crowds and away from literary fashion. He was, as Herman Melville would say, an isolato, someone who remains isolated from the world to be able to function in the world. For decades Ted remained alone in his studio writing poetry, and he wrote book after book of poetry. Someone once said that he was the best-known unknown poet of his generation.
He not only wrote poems, but he also wrote letters in that studio. The summer of 2011 I knew something was wrong when I sent him some essays I had written with a brief note and did not receive a letter back from him within a few days. Ted was one of the most prolific letter writers I have ever known. If you sent him a letter, he would respond to it within a few days, and he corresponded with numerous writers, poets, and friends. In that studio he would write poetry, write letters, and listen to his beloved Mozart. That studio and those back fields and woods were his Walden.
In many ways he was similar to Henry David Thoreau in that he was a naturalist who loved the wildness of woods and fields and seas—and he had all three because Milbridge is a village on the Maine coastline. And that is one reason he loved the St. Andrews campus so much. On more than one occasion, he stayed in the Lake House. He enjoyed walking along the cypress swamp and Lake Ansley. He liked the geese, the ducks, the egret, the great blue heron. He could identify each tree and shrub and plant, common name and botanical name. As Thoreau writes in The Maine Woods:
“Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine—who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane—who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it—who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand.”
For 51 years, from 1960 to 2011, the Maine woods have shuddered and heaved a sigh each morning as Ted Enslin stepped on the forest floor to walk to his studio to write poetry.
Author Bio: Dr. Ted Wojtasik, an award-winning writer, holds two terminal degrees: an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in twentieth-century American literature from the University of South Carolina. He is the author of two novels and numerous short stories. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, NC.
That’s the Story of, That’s the Glory of . . . , by Sarah Tucker
Sarah Tucker
“That’s the story of, that’s the glory of…”
I have come to realize that life contains very little of what I imagined it would. I never imagined I would have to sell a textbook back in the middle of a semester. I never imagined my gas light would scream up at me, daily, from a broken down dashboard. Who thought that at nineteen I would know sixty ways to prepare ramen noodles, and four ways to wear clothes before having to break down and use the last of my laundry detergent? I know this lifestyle is common for a college student, but this has been my lifestyle for as long as I can remember.
I have been poor my entire life, but I cannot bring myself to believe that any life has been more fulfilling. There is such a sense of accomplishment after rolling your smoking car down a street and into a parking spot. That sense of accomplishment is enough to cover the dread of having to ride the city bus for the next six months.
At six I found myself curled against my mother in the passenger seat of a Metro, at the edge of a Bi-Lo parking lot. To my six year old naivety it was little different from the trailer park we had just fled from; only here no one would lock me in a bedroom and force me to powerlessly listen to my mother’s screams.
I think innocence is what makes this lifestyle bearable; I think it was innocence that saved me. I saw my mother being dragged across the floor by her hair once, and I had no clue that my home life was any different than the average six year old’s; I only knew that it made my mother cry.
At eleven when my power was disconnected, my mother’s optimism towards roasting stale marshmallows over tea candles was the shield that kept me from losing the idea that I was no different from anyone else. I was thirteen before I realized to a definite extent that my lifestyle was in fact a bit different from most. I was living in a leased townhome with my mother. We had no carpet and could not afford to turn on the gas; we spent two winters on concrete floors with no heat or hot water. It was the January after my thirteenth birthday that it hit me. I was boiling water on my (thank God!) electric stove and carrying it to the tub in order to take a bath when out of nowhere the searing, angry epiphany hit me. “Why am I living this life? What anomaly of the universe placed me in this cold, tungsten lit apartment?”
That anger stayed with me for a long time before it faded to something bittersweet. It stayed with me long enough to kill my grades and ruin relationships; it stayed with me long enough to stain me. I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror and realized that the anger was no longer just inside of me; it had made its way through and discolored the very image of me. That anger essentially turned me into the person I am today. The only difference between then and now being that the stain did finally fade from anger to bitterness; from bitterness to acceptance.
I won’t ever say that this life isn’t trying, that I don’t wake up some mornings worried about how my mother and I will make the eighty seven dollar payment arrangement with the power company. Days like those are the most exhausting; however, it’s an exhaustion that drives me. I’m already so tired, but I know once we get the bill paid, the obstacle overcome, I will be permitted to sleep. Being poor brings out the strongest in people, at least in me. It gives me the determination to survive and the ability to accept the moments when the stuff hits the fan.
My mother and I have been evicted four times in my lifetime. Nothing will ever match the anxiety I felt each time I saw the sheriff arrive to hand over the notice, or came home to find the yellow beacon of bad news taped to my front door. At eleven, at thirteen, at fourteen, and at seventeen, I cried. The idea of having nowhere to go never became easier to live with. Somehow, each time, at the end of ten days my mother and I would have somewhere to call home, for however long.
New Years eve of 2005 I was sitting on the front stoop of my apartment building when I saw a tow truck pull into our parking lot and park behind my mother’s car. I didn’t have to ask any questions; I just knew. I held a finger up to the driver and motioned for him to wait. I stood on the tired legs of my thirteen year old body, and walked in to face my mother, “Their taking our car today, Mom.” I couldn’t help but to cry at that moment too. My mother’s eyes said “I’m sorry” in a million different ways, but no more words were spoken. My mother grabbed my hand, picked up her keys, and together we walked out and handed them over, and together we watched the man drive away with what felt like our only lifeline. We lost two more cars after that, and each time there was nothing to say. I could have been angry, but I couldn’t place blame on my mother. My mother, who worked an all-consuming job, simply to make ends meet.
In August of 2008 we miraculously signed a lease for a two bedroom, one and one half bathroom, carpeted, all electric, townhome. After putting out the money for the deposit and first month’s rent we were broke. My mother sold our car for seventy five dollars to pay for a U-Haul, and we moved our belongings within a matter of three hours. We pulled up outside of our new place and I was home. We moved in two bookshelves, two end tables, one queen sized bed, and a second hand fichus tree. It was everything we owned besides clothing and toiletries. My mother set up the end tables as if they were placed on the two ends of a couch. The bookshelves were placed in our otherwise bare dining room, and the queen size bed in the biggest master bedroom I had ever seen. At fifteen I shared a bed with my mother and a half bald stray cat we had adopted; it was unorthodox, but it was home.
By December we had enough money to buy a cheap futon for the living room. The purchase was made at Big Lots, and I can never forget how happy we were when we brought it home. We devoured the assembly instructions as if they were the first signs of life on a deserted island. We tightened the final bolts and pushed it into place between the two end tables, right where it belonged. Four months later we laughed till we cried as we carried the broken piece of shit to the dumpster.
I am a nineteen year old college student that sold my most important text books in the middle of a semester, simply to put gas in my car. I won’t say that I’m as bad off as I have been. The bills are more commonly paid on time, Christmas exists again, and I sleep in the comfort of a heated apartment instead of a passenger seat. We have long since been evicted from the townhouse I called home, and I now live in a one story matchbox. I haven’t watched a car get repossessed since I was 14, and our current car is in fact, paid off and breaks down consistently every four to six months. My mother and I finally furnished our house in 2009 with secondhand furniture bought at an estate sale for a total of forty dollars, and I can now say that we are sitting pretty, but only while lounging on the couch. I am grateful things aren’t as bad as they have been, but in honesty I would have never known how quickly a month passes without having to wonder where the rent was coming from. Destitution has taught me to appreciate the rainy day, for even the rainy day has a purpose.
What the Gardener Knows, by Brenda Smith
Brenda Smith
What the Gardener Knows
I stand in a cultivated castle garden in Ireland, camera in hand, trying to preserve the moment. Leaning, shadows on leaves, pink more delicate than the inside of a cracked eggshell, the kind from those hens that lay brown speckled eggs. Leaning, not straight, hollyhocks, I think. The gardener knows that he could not make this living thing straight even if he wished it, fervently wished it. Nature and the draw of sunlight has an agenda all their own; scientific laws that govern the leanings of things, the swaying of things, even. All pale pink and feathery and leaning, almost dangerously, the hollyhock. My yearning would be to straighten the stalk for fear of its leaning itself to death, breaking the lifeline that keeps the juices flowing from earth to blossom. But all things die in their time. Whether it’s the real “right” time or not, I can’t consider here, and anyway, who am I to say what is death’s correct hour. Even if I could render that information, I think it would only tear my heart out, knowing of all the what-ifs surrounding each life and soul involved in the balance of the universe. A knowledge too heavy for anyone, even for a gardener. But a gardener is wise enough, at least, to not fret over the leaning of the fragilely pink hollyhocks.
Now there are brother hollyhocks surrounding my cockeyed friend that are straight and tall, but they are not the center of the photo. Straightness is not the draw here—the allure is all crookedness and waving light. Straightness suppresses the shadows and reminds the gardener of something too trained to be itself. He has had enough of that to last a lifetime. Sure, the owner of the garden, knowing virtually nothing of the way of plants, only of the “effect” she desires to impose upon her visitors, has instructed, in the most strict of manners, the design that the gardener was to maintain with his paths and trimmings and, so often, the designs were straight. Straight and narrow. But my flower of choice is pink and leaning, leaning out over its boundary to draw me in.
The foxglove leans, too. But it is a variety of magenta and is speckled, and is not nearly so delicate a color. More bold and in your face and it exudes a confidence in itself that it will endure all the leaning you care to send its way: even errant children with bats or the gales of a hurricane. Of course its confidence is false, what with baseball bats being made of stainless steel these days, and hurricanes blowing down houses of stone. The foxglove has built around its magenta self a false sense of security for sure. But not the hollyhock. That makes its leaning all the more brave.
Farther down the path are two more spires of hollyhocks, wearing a pink even more delicate than the leaner. These two companions are more straight, but then, you see, I’m not a scientist and nothing is really straight, is it? All you need to prove that is some kind of multimillion dollar instrument that measures the hell out of anything sent its way, mili-whatevers of measurement so small that I question the sanity of anyone who spends more than a mili-second worrying about them. And so, in the garden, with the gardener’s mind, I see a few hollyhocks, of the most magnificent fine pink, standing straighter. They told me they did this, on this particular day, just so I would have the leaner in better perspective. Just for the lesson I could wring from it. And now I feel badly about the lesson—the fact that I have to wring it from the stalks. (Sometimes the gardener, at the orders of the owners, is obliged to train them up in the way the owner feels they should go, so that when they are old they will not depart from it. We wouldn’t want an old plant leaning too far out into the path, would we?)
The gardener mourns with me that I should have to heave myself up onto a makeshift stepping rock to peer over the six-foot wall to see the river. All castles have water somewhere around them, it seems, but this garden has walled the water off from view. Now, if you are inside the castle, you can look out of the windows at the river as it glides by. The hollyhocks and I would prefer to have water much closer by, to gaze at, and to lean toward. Let me strain to see over this wall again. Willow trees trail into the water from the low grassy bank and the field is all mowed around them. Someone walks here then? I see a fence around one of the trees. I must ask the gardener what he knows about this, for my limited castle-deprived American mind does not have a clue why a tree must be fenced.
On downstream, if I climb through overgrown hedgerows of the garden’s outer rim, I can see a stone arched bridge over this river. The curved grace of the arch echoes the calm current and the quiet strength of the arch, that marvel of architecture. I wonder how exactly it happened that ancient man discovered the power of the arch. Was it by accident, by repeated scientific experiment, or maybe the gardener just watched a hollyhock bend over without breaking and suggested the construction, offhandedly, to his brother the stonemason?
Time to move on– up the hill and into the formal garden where the array of colors in the arranged beds is mesmerizing, even if the rows are planned by man. As always, I am magnetized toward the lavender bed, rioting out of its border and rendering the most fantastic scent known to mankind. (I realize that, to a hungry man, this scent is rivaled equally by the aroma of a grilling steak, but we are talking of what the gardener knows here, not the cook.) I stand with my camera behind the lavender explosion to capture it in the foreground, and see, that stretching out behind it, beneath carefully carved arches of squared-off shrubbery, is a straight path. It leads off into the heart of the garden, all laid-out in geometric grids, straight lines and such. But what the gardener knows is that in the beds between every carefully planned grid are the blossoming flowers, bursting their colors over the trimmed hedges and toward the path. They lean over the staid bushes meant to contain them. The escapees are pink, pale, and draping blue, using the sawed-off tops of the border shrubs as beds to recline on as they lean out. And they love the gardener for his seeming laxness, I think. They know that if bidden, or if he chooses, the gardener can trim them back, too. Then all will be neat and tidy.
Yet of all the occupations known to man, I think the gardener knows better that any other, that the quest to contain and control, the quest for perfection, is the least able to be attained by those in his profession. For as fast as he trims along one lane of paths, another lane is growing every second. (You know I could prove that if I wanted to invest in one of those multimillion dollar measuring devices used by the scientists. But I think instead I’ll just rely on my eyes as they watched a National Geographic special that featured sped-up nature photography of a flower blooming. Every second those rascals are growing, I tell you.) And so, that being proven, to my satisfaction at least, I come to the truth of what the gardener knows. He knows that nothing can be contained, nothing fully trained, if it is indeed a pure creation of nature. No matter how diligently man attempts to order the natural world around him, total control is impossible. Even partial control is illusive. The gardener knows, however, that he must still try. He knows that he must try, not because the future of his employment depends upon it (even though it does), but because we humans will not be able to survive without the constant battle to beat back nature at its own game of growing every second of every day.
Our survival depends upon it as surely as it depends upon anything. You only have to plant a stand of bamboo in your back yard to prove this to yourself. Every day the little garden of cane will advance toward its goal of taking over the entire mowed surface of your lawn. It is not even satisfied with that, as it demonstrates by insinuating itself into walls and buildings. Some has gotten loose in my own yard, you see, and I half expect it to creep in my bedroom window during a warm summer night and begin to stab holes into my mattress from its fortress under the bed.
Back to the gardener. He knows, too, in his quest for the aesthetically pleasing, that the battle of symmetrical over a leaning asymmetric hollyhock, is all about control. Without trying for control, the beauty of a garden could never be. If all earth was a mass of uncontained chaotic jungle, what is beautiful about an ordered garden could never be appreciated. Without the contrast of chaos, order would have no value. We only value what is hard-fought to obtain. The gardener knows this. The gardener knows this is his job security for all eternity.
The gardener knows that all of nature is a dance between every living atom to survive, to be noticed, to dominate. But in the end, knows the gardener, dominion is as unattainable as the perfect summer breeze, still vivid in the memory, from a random summer day in childhood, when perfection was neither sought nor recognized, but only fifty years later, acknowledged. The mind wants to hold forever this memory of perfection, but every day the thought of the breeze smoothing over a bare arm grows fainter. Control of all things natural is illusive: the hollyhocks we can touch, and the memories that fade no matter how desperately we work to make them stay.
The gardener bends slightly to caress the pinkness of the blossom and a perfect breeze caresses his arm. And the gardener knows, and smiles.
An Afternoon with the Man Who Defeated Backlund, by Matthew Humphries
Matthew Humphries
An Afternoon With the Man Who Defeated Backlund
There may be no city better suited for witnessing the saddening spectacle of aging celebrity than Las Vegas. In addition to being the last American city to care about boxing, Vegas props up the lonely, final relevant acts of many one-time stars. To leave the airport means being bombarded by billboards by half forgotten figures, all now with their new Vegas Act. These are the acts have long been parodied as extravagant and campy, with at least some part of the show taking place on a stool, and they are quintessentially Vegas-ian. As a town where a kid-friendly environment can mix with bare asses on billboards, strict age restrictions and teams of Mexican men passing out baseball card-style ads for prostitutes, no one stops being famous. The big casinos and hotels get the once-huge-and-now-still-pretty-big stars and that magician you once saw on Comedy Central at like 4 in the morning, but the outskirts embrace their celebrity fetish as well. Caeser’s Palace might have Celine Dion, but the casino with the dollar roulette and well-hidden sanitation score isn’t going to miss the chance to wow patrons with celebrity either. Someone is going to sit beside that buffet line at Slots-A-Fun or El Cortez, because in the business of spending money, few things help more than, “Hey, remember that time I was watching you on tv” nostalgia.
This Las Vegas trip got off to a bad start. I flew out with six of my friends, all male and now mostly married. We had gone the year before at roughly the same time (over half of us are public school teachers, to give some idea of the level of debauchery we’re talking about) and now returned savvy pros. Vegas is a place that makes a killing on people overestimating themselves, and now that we knew that, we planned to upend the whole thing with our ten dollar bets and conservative raises. Only we couldn’t get out of the airport.
Our plane to Atlanta was temporarily grounded, which meant we would miss our connecting flight. This would eventually mean spending the night in an Atlanta hotel, armed with absolutely worthless hotel vouchers that apparently were only redeemable at a hotel run by the gate manager’s brother. Despite calling ahead to book two rooms, when we arrived the woman behind the counter told us they had only one room and it had no air conditioner.
“But we do have a fan,” she told us.
These were the final moments of our first leg, ones spent huddled in a hotel lobby at 3 in the morning, ignoring the magician on the hotel’s tv and wondering what the cot situation was and how cool a fan could keep a room of seven guys. We assumed these concerns were anomalies, small bumps at the beginning of an otherwise easy trip, but looking back, it is clear they merely served as preamble.
Long after learning that ‘gambling’ is Frank Luntz-style spin on the term ‘donating’ I found myself waiting in the Las Vegas airport. Literally all of the money I brought with me was gone, and I was once again cursing whatever minor god controlled the airlines. This time, with a clear sky taunting through the giant gate windows, we had been told that our plane had been delayed. My friend Dustin, the only one of us who worked the following morning, found a seat on an earlier flight, but the rest of us were looking at a long wait.
All told, our spirits were not particularly low. Losing in Vegas gives you something to talk about – mistakes made, future strategies, etc. – so my friends and I spent our down time recalling our PG-rated wickedness and failings as our plane landed.
When that finally happened one of the eternally fatigued desk clerks came on his speaker to tell us that after the current passengers deplaned and the workers did a check, we would be able to board. This wouldn’t help any of us who had connecting flights, but it did give everybody some sense of movement.
Now that airline regulations don’t allow anyone without a ticket beyond the security screeners, when people get off a plane that has others waiting to get on, it generally consists of one group of strangers staring at another. No one looks excited or welcoming, and the faces of the first few off typically give some indication of what type of flight. This one did not look good.
The first person off the plane rushed out of the hanger, or rushed as much as his body would allow. He looked hurried, but a mixture of age, ailment, and body kept him from gathering any speed. The man, who had light brown skin, an American flag skullcap, and a sport coat over a t-shirt, looked to be in his 60s, and had the body of an ex-athlete. My first thought was how a man this large could fit in an airplane seat. The man, while no taller, was much larger than me, and I sometimes feel cramped in my cheap seat.
The man moved with stiff limbs, his body leaning into a cane, and a frustrated stewardess came behind him. As he walked ahead of her, I, along with everyone at the gate, began to learn why her face looked so tired.
“Where is my bag?” he shouted. “You will not steal from me.”
(Obviously, memory being what it is, this dialogue is approximate, and truthfully all of what he says should be peppered with as many expletives as you would like. Go ahead and put in 5 or 6, particularly the F-word and its variations. There is really no way to include too many.)
A wheelchair waited on the man, and he continued to shout at the stewardess as he sat.
“You think you can treat me this way? You don’t know who I am. I’m not Osama Bin Laden.” Never a good name to bring up in an airport. “I’m not a terrorist. I don’t deserve this.”
With the volume of his voice, the red-flag words he used, and the fact we stood around together anyway, the man had everyone’s attention. Waiting on a plane can be dreadfully boring, but now we had the chance to befriend our neighbors with snide comments and raised eyebrows.
For at least five minutes, as other passengers slowly emerged from the plane, the man sat in his wheelchair, cursing the airline, its staff, the basic idea of flying. It wasn’t clear why he waited, presumably for his bag or maybe due to a love of shouting, but the more uncomfortable he made people, the louder he became.
Not surprisingly, as the tirade started off on a profane note, it did not take long for homophobia to creep in. While throwing around every variation of the F-word imaginable, he also started loudly commenting on the vest the airline workers wore, the wings on the pilot’s lapel, the tiny Coke cans, all with a homophobic vocabulary that would make a middleschooler proud.
As the rant went on and the crowd grew, some became fed up with the man. One guy, envisioning the kinds of questions his young daughter would ask him later, stepped from the crowd and asked the man to calm down.
The man in the wheelchair swung his cane at him, moving it slowly, like a bat with too many doughnut weights on it, and said one of the two quotes I know I remember correctly.
“Fuck you, buddy,” he shouted and the man retreated, resigned to complain to those around him and hold his hands over his daughter’s ear.
The man’s ranting continued, now with references to Concerned Dad. After another minute or so, perhaps sensing the staleness of his act, everything took a strange turn.
Then he said the second quote I am 100% on.
“And Hulk Hogan is gay.”
My friends and I looked at each other. Hulk Hogan is gay?
The man made sure we did not mistake his words either. He continued on about Hogan, making claims about him, other men, and his daughter, when my friends and I started realizing something.
The age. The size. The hatred of Hulk Hogan. The way he rolled his R’s. Suddenly it hit us.
The Iron Sheik had landed in Las Vegas.
The Iron Sheik, for those who might not know, is perhaps the quintessential pre-Attitude World Wrestling Entertainment villain. Before the days of anti-heroes and what passes for characters, back when one-dimensional caricatures ruled the day, the Iron Sheik angered like few others. He was the anti-Hulk Hogan, at least for a time, before he came down the card to become the anti-Hacksaw Jim Duggan and anti-Sergeant Slaughter. He taught many a young child of the 80s more about the evils of Islamic extremism than any action movie or jingoistic history teacher ever could. That had to be him that Earnest ‘The Cat’ Miller played in The Wrestler, and typically he led the team of villains on Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling. Many remember Andre the Giant, but it was a victory over the Sheik that prompted Gorilla Monsoon to declare “Hulkamania is here!”
The Sheik may not have ushered in the age of racially stereotyped wrestling villains, but you couldn’t have asked for a better example. The Sheik came out with the Iranian flag, berated the American audience, and often teamed with Nikolai Volkoff, a Russian who wore a ushanka and the yellow sword and sickle Communist emblem on his red panties. The Sheik rose to prominence during the Reagan years, when the Ayatollah represented a major enemy in American minds. Along with Homer Simpsons’ ‘Ayatollah Ass-a-holah’ shirt, the Sheik taught me more about US views on Iran than anyone or anything else, and it was only natural for him to clear the way for Hulk Hogan.
In a match that showed Hogan’s mastery of the crowd and limited wrestling skill set, Hogan defeated the Sheik in something like two minutes, Hulking up out of the Camel Clutch and dropping the big leg to take the championship belt.
This still irks the Iron Sheik.
“Who was the champion before Hogan? Who beat Backlund?” the Sheik shouted in the Vegas airport, and we could tell that was something he shouted many times before, sometimes with an audience, sometimes not. That feud stayed with him, shaping his identity to the point that if no one said anything, we likely still would have thought about it. This man, who actually did come from Iran (unlike the Original Sheik, who was from Michigan), could not be seen as anything other than the foil and fool, something that could elicit sympathy, were he not swinging his cane at people and calling them jabronis.
As it were. . .“I am a real American. Fight for the rights of every man…”
Apparently the Iron Sheik has a drinking problem. Surely anyone who has seen his performances on Howard Stern or Opie & Anthony would snicker, “Obviously,” but I had no idea. See, it turns out that on his flight to Las Vegas, the Sheik drank too much, spit on a stewardess, and vomited all over his seat and the one in front of him. He’s a big man. It was a lot of vomit.
Once we finally did get to board I found that I actually had the seat beside the Sheik’s. Dustin would have had the Sheik’s spot, but as it were, the seat remained empty, a tiny flying shrine WWE Hall of Famer.
I don’t know what the nature of his beef with the AirTran people was, but judging from the dozen or so tiny and empty bottles laying beside the escape guide and in-flight magazine in the seat in front of his, I doubt any airline security guy was going to get to the bottom of it.
Wrestling, in its own weird way, works as a perfect proving ground for all sorts of existential questions and ideas. So much of it revolves around definition. To take a step back and try to understand why the spectacle of watching two massive, nearly nude adult men spout soap opera dialogue and then pretend to fight is difficult enough, but to come of age in that world means to address difficult questions in a very real way. What is ‘real’? What is ‘not real’? Is ‘not real’ the same as ‘fake’? Was it fake when the Model Rick Martel sprayed Arrogance in Jake the Snake’s Face? Did the Genius read fake poems? It is because of Ted Dibiasi that I can’t entirely embrace the Occupy Movement: The Million Dollar Man, with his leer jets and Robin Leach associations, is the 1% and his Money Inc. stable remains one of my all-time favorite wrestling factions. I cheered when Irwin R. Shyster tried to repossess the Undertaker’s urn and gasped at the insolence when the valet Virgil slapped Dibiasi. Was that not real?
I don’t know that I ever necessarily thought of wrestling as ‘real,’ and I don’t know that later I thought of it as ‘fake.’ Thinking ‘real’ never entered into my mind until someone posed that it might not be. No one said matches were fixed, at least in the way that some more conspiracy theory minded friends claim the NBA or the Super Bowl is fixed. Because wrestling was fake, not fixed, and once that possibility was raised I skipped over ever consciously believing it was real into some other realm.
But is it fake? Is that word any less wrong than real? Was the Iron Sheik faking it when he fought Hogan? Was he faking it when he shouted at the crowd in the Las Vegas airport?
The truth is that if the Sheik faked it, I participated in the fraud, and in Vegas I wished it could go on. The pathetic sight of him pulling out Olympic medals and cursing Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahan, Bob Backlund and all the people around him almost 30 years after the fact made it all the more apparent that all the faking involved real people in a real world.
Look at them: Doink the Clown is 54 and sometimes still has to put on clown makeup and pretend to fight guys in middle school gyms. The Honkytonk Man still dresses like Elvis. Ravishing Rick Rude, The Bastion Booger, and Bam Bam Bigelow are dead.
And a clearly drunk Iron Sheik shouts homophobic slurs at a group of people who only laugh at him. Someone would stop him at some point, because he did have some place to be. He had autographs to sign, pictures to take. I know. I saw them online when I looked him up later. There he was, sitting by the buffet table at one of the cheap casinos, holding up one finger, never free of the fictions he lived with or realities that interrupted.
BIO: Matthew Humphries lives in Shelby, North Carolina where he teaches American literature and English composition at Gardner-Webb University. In addition to his background in literary studies, he is enrolled in UNC-Charlotte’s Religious Studies graduate program. When Matthew isn’t studying, writing, or teaching, he likes to spend time in his hammock, debating with his dog, Winston, or going on road trips with his wife.
Blessings in Disguise or Ungrateful Hearts? by Heather Crawley
Heather Crawley
Blessings in Disguise or Ungrateful Hearts?
When we are children, we always want more and we want it our way. Children rarely say thank you for the things they receive, and they do not realize the sacrifices people make for them. They are naive in the ways of the world and blind to true blessings. As we grow older, we experience more of the world and suddenly we consider ourselves adults, responsible and independent. But are we really any different than children; have we truly grown up? Gabriel Marquez would argue no, that it is human nature to have childish tendencies. In his intricate story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” subtly subtitled “A Tale for Children,” Marquez attempts to bring light to our constant childish failure in seeing all of the blessings that are right before our eyes.
Marquez conveys this message by telling a story about exactly what the title implies – a very old man with enormous wings. The story starts off in Pelayo’s household, where immediately the reader can sense the family’s despair and misery. It has been raining for three days nonstop and crabs have taken refuge in Pelayo and Elisenda’s home, creating considerable stench and causing their newborn child to fall deathly ill. Pelayo’s family is at rock bottom. Their small house has become a graveyard for crabs; their once beautiful world and beach they live on has become “a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.” With the state Pelayo’s family is in, they see very little hope. All of this changes, however, with one mysterious man, a very old rough looking man with enormous buzzard wings. Although the man’s arrival turns their world sunny and hopeful again, they are oblivious to the blessings they have received, and their hearts are ungrateful and uncaring towards him. This is often the case in the real world as well. We take no notice of our blessings, even when they are staring us in the face.
The first sign of Pelayo and Elisenda being blind to the miracle that has fallen in their backyard is how they respond when the man speaks to them in an “incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice.” Quite quickly, without even making an effort to understand the old man, “they skip over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently conclude that he is a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.” They mark the old man, perhaps because of his unsightly appearance and ungraceful entrance, as a vagabond, with only the oddity of having wings. A neighbor woman, however, labels the man an angel; not an angel who has come to do miracles, but rather an angel who has come to take the life of Pelayo and Elisenda’s sick child. Her advice, “to club him to death,” is perhaps startling to many readers but is received nonchalantly by those who, like Pelayo and Elisenda, no longer trust, believe in, or even perceive the presence of miracles.
Neither the old man’s nor the child’s death ever occurs because soon after the angel’s arrival, the Pelayo family receives their first two blessings. In the middle of the night the rain stops, and that very morning the child awakes a healthy baby. Already, their world is greatly improved. Shortly after these miracles occur and the angel has stirred talk and gained attention throughout the town, Elisenda “gets the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.” Thus, not only have they not given the angel thanks, but they have begun to treat him like a circus attraction. Despite this, the angel continues to be generous and lenient, and in less than a week Pelayo and Elisenda “cram their rooms with money.” Another miracle has happened, but the family does not notice and assume they have received all of this because of their own doing rather than the angel’s blessing. Once again, we see the tendency of human nature through this family. So often when we receive blessings, we think of them as self-obtained, and rather than giving praise to God, we only praise ourselves.
The town soon forgets about the angel, and all of their attention is turned to newer carnival attractions. By this time, Pelayo has made enough money to build “a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs won’t get in during the winter.” Another miracle has occurred, but even with their new fortune, the angel soon becomes in their eyes an even bigger nuisance to the family. Sometime later, after living like an animal with the family, the angel begins to act strangely and grows stiff feathers, until one day he takes flight. The family says no goodbyes or thanks to the angel; instead Elisenda lets out a sigh of relief and “keeps watching until it is no longer possible for her to see him, because then he is no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.”
It is easy to read this story and be amazed at how Pelayo’s family could treat the angel with such disdain after all he does for the family. But if we look at this story on a deeper level, in terms of the metaphor Marquez intended it to be, we are more likely to acknowledge that we often behave in ways very similar to the family. Pelayo’s family behaves like children, naïve to how special the angel truly is and ungrateful for all of their problems being solved. Blessings do not always come dressed in radiant finery and clearly announcing themselves; sometimes they come humbly disguised just as the angel in this story does; but that does not mean they are any less apparent to those inclined to perceive them. Everyone has something to be thankful for, yet we are often too distracted by worldly things and our own self-righteousness to remember how important it is to give thanks for what we have. That is human nature, but it does not have to be that way. If we examine our hearts and lives, we will see all of our flaws as well as the things we have to be thankful for. No blessing should go unnoticed as the angel in “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” does.
Making the Most of Wrinkles, by Shannon Abrams
Shannon Abrams
MAKING THE MOST OF WRINKLES
“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen is a short story that calls attention to the struggles and hardships of a single mother, who remains nameless, and her child, Emily. I was a young single mother and can relate to the narrator of the story. Feelings of guilt and regret plague a mother when she lacks the ideal emotional and financial support for childrearing.
A mother always wants what is best for her child, and the first born is a kind of test. A young mother strives to be perfect and to care for her child as professionals say she should. The narrator in the story reflects, “I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did what the books then said” (par. 6). I did the same with my daughter and felt I could not do enough for her. Like the narrator of the story, I had no financial support for my child and needed to work. Every time I sent Kali to a sitter, she would cry, and it broke my heart. I felt I was going to miss a major milestone in her young life. I did not know anything about how a child’s mind worked, so when I had to send her to her paternal grandparents for a weekend or week, I thought she would not know me when she returned home. Emily’s mother barely recognizes her when she returns from her grandparents’, “When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks” (par. 11). When I read this part of the story, it reminded me of the summer I sent Kali to Ohio to stay with my sister so I could work and go to school. Samara called me a week after Kali arrived to inform me, not so nicely, that my daughter had chickenpox. I felt horrible because my baby was sick, needed me, and I could not be there for her. I cried a lot that summer. My sister, who was not yet a mother, made me feel like a worthless parent. At one point she wanted to take my daughter from me because she felt I could not care for her properly. Kali was my life, and I was doing all I could!
Like Emily in the story, Kali was often sick as a child. She was plagued with ear infections and strep throat. She was seeing her pediatrician at least twice a month. In the small town I am from, young single mothers were rare. People would stare at us when we walked down the street, and while some felt sorry for us, when I would take Kali to the doctor’s, the nurses always looked down on me. They would ask me what I was doing to make my daughter sick and tell me I needed to keep her home from daycare since she caught everything the other children had. They did not realize I had no choice but to send her if I wanted to feed, clothe, and keep a roof over our heads. I was doing it all on my own. Many people do not realize how much a single mother gives up for her child. Many nights I cried myself to sleep wondering if I was going to have enough money to feed my daughter for the next week, if I was going to be able to pay my rent, or if I had enough love in my heart to go on.
The guilt I felt while Kali was growing up was overwhelming. I could not be there for her when she needed me. At times I resented her because, unlike the narrator of “I Stand Here Ironing,” I came from a privileged home and felt I should be doing better for myself and for her. The mother in the story seems to feel the same way, and it shows: “The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: ‘You should smile at Emily more when you look at her’” (par.17). A single mother has a hard time smiling at her child and showing her love when she is worried about rent and where their next meal is coming from. A child can sense her mother’s unhappiness, and it reflects in the child’s demeanor.
Kali and I, like the narrator and Emily, struggled with life; however, we came out better in the end. My daughter saved my life, and I will be ever grateful to her. People always feared for Kali’s future and thought she would end up being a young single mother. Plenty of others her age have, some in similar situations, some not. Instead, at the age of fourteen my daughter published her first poem, and at sixteen she qualified for early graduation but decided to stay in school for the experience. We have been through hell and back together, and that makes our relationship stronger. I am very proud of her and our accomplishments. We grew up together, and because of her, I am a stronger person. The mother in “I Stand Here Ironing” says, “ She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? She will find her way” (par. 52). My daughter found her way, and I could not be more proud. Children are resilient, and when they see how their parent struggles, it makes them stronger. A single mother does not want her child to see the hardships they face, but it is inevitable. One can only hope they learn from it, and, as in my daughter’s case, that the struggle makes them a better person.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 47 trips to carry that many people.
Fire on the Flight Deck, by Wayne Burton
Wayne Burton
FIRE ON THE FLIGHT DECK
On a sunny afternoon in October, 1989, I was serving my third underway period aboard my first ship, the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, operating in the Gulf of Mexico and our mission was to conduct flight operations. The Lexington was the first ship that student Naval Aviators landed on to obtain their carrier qualifications and their inexperience usually provided for some tense moments during landings, especially if being observed by the crew topside, watching the spectacle of these pilots trying to safely land a plane onto a ship that was not only moving forward, but whose deck was rising and falling in rhythm with the sea.
I was working in my assigned space, the forward most part of the ship, the forecastle. The forecastle contained the massive anchor chains, their black links weighing two hundred fifty pounds apiece, stretched across the deck and disappearing to the outside of the hull where thirty ton anchors hung at their ends. The chains wrapped around the wildcats, gear type devices that hoisted and lowered the anchors, measuring four feet in diameter with solid brass tops that we kept polished to a mirrored shine. Everywhere else, all that could be seen was the Navy’s choice of ship color, “haze gray,” with the only contrast being the black non-skid strips on the deck and the white waterline painted on the bulkheads. I was grinding and prepping the deck for priming and painting–a mundane yet required job. Others were around as well, fellow shipmates painting or cleaning and several sailors from the catapults division, whose machinery was located in our space. I remember how much I enjoyed being at sea, the smell of the salt air in my nose and the taste of it on my lips. A constant breeze rushed through the portholes as the ship maintained speed to produce enough wind lift to support the launching and landing of aircraft. The ever present and not so pleasant odor of jet fuel and hydraulic fluids filled the air, and the odor of scorched paint and steel emanated from the orange sparks of my grinder.
As we went about our work, keeping a three football fields length ship maintained and operating efficiently at sea, a call came over the ship’s public address (PA) system…”fire on the flight deck!” Fires aboard a ship at sea are not that uncommon and the entire crew trains and retrains to effectively fight them and keep the ship operational. A fire on a ship is the most dreaded emergency, though, because there is no place to run to or get away from it. The crew either gets it under control, or the ship goes down. When I heard the announcement, I assumed it was probably some spilled jet fuel that ignited on the hot deck, or possibly raw fuel had flashed inside a plane’s exhaust. We got back to work, enjoying the sea breeze but not exactly enjoying the work. Fifteen minutes or so had passed since the “fire on the flight deck” call had gone out, and I was confident the flight deck personnel and crash crews had gotten everything under control. At that moment, the ship’s PA system came to life with electronic tones, a dinging sound that sounded steadily one after the other: ding…ding…ding…ding…ding went on for about ten seconds, and before the verbal announcement even came, we knew the tones meant “general quarters.” General quarters is a call on naval vessels to man battle stations and/or damage control stations. The announcement came, and I headed to my post, a damage control station in the hangar bay.
The scene would have seemed chaotic to the untrained eye, people rushing around, some barking out orders and instructions, and others dragging fire hoses across the deck. The intense smell of jet fuel, more pungent than usual, and smoke filled the air. I knew this was not another training drill like we had rehearsed so many times before. We went about our assigned duties and prepared for our next orders, as word was getting around that this was more than just a “common” fire on the flight deck. My station leader finally gave us an update as to what had happened. He advised that a T-2 Buckeye jet, the first jet that student Naval Aviators fly, had crashed on the flight deck while attempting to land. The pilot and at least four of the ship’s crew were dead, and an unknown number were possibly injured. The fire from the crash had caused the plane’s fuel to ignite and the burning fuel had flowed into the catapult tracks, causing the grease in them to catch fire. The ship was in a serious state of distress, and if the fires were not brought under control, the situation could have gone from bad to “we’re fucked” in a very short amount of time.
Not knowing what the scene looked like on the flight deck, we focused on our tasks at hand, charging fire hoses, donning fire fighting suits and breathing equipment, and preparing for whatever might come next. Water, fire fighting foam, and unburned jet fuel were flooding into the hangar bay from the flight deck above, and we were using push brooms to sweep the liquids, up to three inches deep in places, out the exterior doors and into the sea. We finally received word that the fires were out and any flooding from the fire fighting water was under control. My station leader appointed me and several others to report to the main elevator, the one usually used to move aircraft between the flight deck and hangar bay. We were to stand by and assist with carrying the stretchers that contained the dead and wounded when they were brought down from the flight deck.
I was nineteen years old at that time and had never seen any kind of traumatic or serious injury, other than a broken bone or a bad cut to a finger. As we waited for the elevator to come down, I didn’t know what to expect, nor could I have prepared myself for what I saw. The elevator came down with three stretchers, each of them containing the burnt bodies of our shipmates. The bodies were solid black and covered in ash. Arms and legs were sticking out in contorted and unnatural positions. Facial features were diminished to sunken-in craters, once containing the eyes, and a slight protrusion of what was left of a nose. The expressions, on what was left of their faces, were like they were frozen in time, mouths open as they must have been screaming as they burned to death. It reminded me of a documentary I had watched about the city of Pompeii being destroyed by the volcano and how the people looked that were caught in the lava flow. The worse thing, though, was the smell; a burnt body has a stench that no other smell in the world can replicate. It’s the smell of any decaying body, human or animal, but with an added “sweetness” that is immediately sickening, as though someone sprinkled an array of unknown spices on the body. The smell seems as though it will never vacate the nostrils and one that is never forgotten.
That evening, the mess deck where we ate our meals was as quiet as I had ever heard; all around were shipmates with reddened eyes and tear streaked faces. No one was talking; we really didn’t know what to say, or maybe we just knew there were no words worthy of breaking the silence. Our shipmates–our friends–had been in that same location with us earlier in the day at lunch. They were refilling their drinks, choosing a dessert, or razzing someone about the upcoming evening basketball game in the hangar bay. Just when the silence seemed to be bearing down on us all, the PA crackled and the Captain came on and tried to put some words together for the crew. He started by saying that the Lexington and her crew had suffered a terrible tragedy and loss, and that some of our shipmates were no longer with us. But, his voice started to break, and he couldn’t continue through his tears.
That sunny afternoon in October, 1989 changed my life. The people we lost were not just crewmembers; they were our shipmates and our family at sea. I got a reality check and matured a great deal that day. I realized that graduating from high school the year before, thinking I knew it all, and I was ready to face the world, meant nothing. I was suddenly faced with the realization that this was the real world, or at least the world I had chosen when I enlisted, and it was one in which we could be put in harm’s way at any moment and any one of us could be gone in the blink of an eye. The events of that fateful day not only changed my attitude towards my naval service, but my service to my country as well, and I gained a new appreciation for the phrase, “Freedom Is Not Free”.
A False Start, by Lynn Kahill
Lynn Kahill
A FALSE START
Looking out of the glass as I pass the front door of my house, I can see through the trees the front corner of the cemetery that resides across the road and up a little hill. The cemetery belongs to the church that my family and I attend. For more than twenty years, we have shown up there on Sunday mornings dressed in our best clothes to worship with our neighbors. Some of those twenty plus years have had us not in attendance more than we were. Some years were the opposite. In the very corner of the cemetery that I can see from my front door lie two empty burial plots that belong to my husband and myself. This is where we will one day be interred. Directly beside those plots lie a third grave that already has a stone. On the stone is the name of my infant daughter. She was my third child. Her only firsts in this world would be recorded on this stone. Not her first laugh or her first smile, just the fact of her being. This stone is the only piece of her that I still have.
If anyone had ever asked me to name something that twentieth century poet Robert Frost and I had in common, I would have said nothing. What a laughable concept that this famous man, this brilliant poet and I could ever share any common ground. I would have been wrong. Of Robert Frost’s six children, he and his wife Elinor, would lose two of them. His son would become ill of cholera and die at the age of three, and his daughter Elinor would die in infancy. According to critic Andrea Defusco, “Frost dealt with his grief over Elliott’s death by burying himself in his work–farming and writing. One of the poems from this time is ‘Home Burial’.”
In “Home Burial” Frost presents to the reader a dialog between husband and wife discussing the intricate feelings they each have regarding their recently dead son. The husband and wife have a chance meeting as she is stopped on the stair and looking out a small window upon their child’s grave. The scene through the window is one the husband has never before noticed, and he does not at first realize what his wife is looking at. “‘What is it you see/ From up there always – for I want to know’”(6-7), the husband asks the wife. She refuses to answer him and remains silent, “She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,/Blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see./ But at last he murmured, ‘Oh,’ and again, ‘Oh’” (15-17). The wife’s anger toward her husband then increases because she does not believe that he can understand what she is looking at. He understands that he is looking at his family’s burial plot, “the little graveyard where my people are!” (24) and that she is focusing on “the child’s mound” (31). The two prevalent emotions here are anger and frustration. The wife is angry at her husband for the loss of her child because there is no one else to take her anger out on and because of his apparently minimal experience of grief at the loss of the child. He was the one that was there, and he is the one who dug her child’s grave,
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall. (73-76)
To then add insult to her already injured heart, she hears him idly speak to himself, “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day/Will rot the best birch fence a man can build”(81-82). She cannot understand how he can speak of such trivial matters if he were in as much pain as she is. In her mind he does not love as much as she does because he appears not to care. The husband, on the other hand, is simply frustrated because he does not understand why she cannot acknowledge that she is not the only one who has lost a child. He cannot grasp why her distress runs so deep or why if two people are in love they might be unable to overcome any loss or obstacle in their path together.
While Frost does an excellent job of conveying the emotions of both the husband and the wife, there are further feelings that run deeper than what is apparent on the surface. The wife wishes to leave not only her husband but also the home where her child was most likely conceived, born and died. The very walls and especially the small window practically breathes the absence of her baby. Her husband becomes also her jailer in that he wishes to keep her confined to her childless prison, but he does not see it that way. He sees the home as a solace where they can console each other, not a physical thing that needs escaping. Frost ends the poem, appropriately, with nothing settled. The wife leaves; the husband threatens to bring her back by force.
After my own child died, my arms would literally ache with my yearning to hold her. I could not face her room or any of her things that she would never play with. My tears would not stop at the thought of her being so close by but forever out of my reach. The wife in this poem wishes to flee not just from a husband who cannot possibly understand her physical and emotional pain but from everything that is causing it. In reality there is no fleeing. The pain simply follows you until it becomes smaller and smaller, finally to be a hitchhiker in your thoughts instead of a driver of them.
Walking Where Others Have Walked, by Ted Wojtasik
Ted Wojtastik
WALKING WHERE OTHERS HAVE WALKED
I never knew my maternal grandfather because he was torn and shredded to death in a stone crusher in West Suffield, Connecticut, while working for the Connecticut Quarry Company. The machine was used to make trap rock. Obviously, there was no open casket. The wake took place in the front parlor of his home and my mother, who was 15 years old at the time, remembered that blood had trickled out onto the floor.
When Leone Baroni, my grandfather, left Italy and arrived at Ellis Island on April 6, 1909, he was 21 years old. When he died on September 2, 1931, he was 43 years old. He left behind a wife and six children at the start of the Great Depression. Although I never knew him, I was always aware of his presence. My mother and grandmother would tell me stories about him. We would visit his gravesite annually, if not more, in Saint John’s Cemetery in Middletown, Connecticut.
I have two sepia photographs of him: in one photograph he’s sitting with his firstborn son, my late Uncle Pete, on his lap with my Ruthenian grandmother standing next to him; in the other photograph he’s standing next to my grandmother in their wedding clothes. He was a short man with dark eyes, dark hair, and a dark bushy mustache. Handsome. Not well-educated. I also have an oval-shaped portrait, about the size of a coaster, that used to be attached to his headstone. Over the many years, one day it just fell off, and my mother picked it up and kept it. I now have that portrait in the top drawer of my bedroom bureau.
In 2003, while teaching in Italy, I took a train to visit my Italian relatives (third and fourth cousins) in Castellano, which was my grandfather’s home town—I actually stood in the room where he was born. Castellano is a mountainside village that overlooks the valley and the city of Rovereto. I walked through the village to the church, to a genealogy museum to see the Baroni family tree (I could trace my lineage back to 1577), and to the cemetery. After dinner, these relatives also showed me numerous photographs of my grandfather, some the same ones I have and some I had never seen before. It is a strange sensation to have a family member in your life who was never there.
Later in the semester, I traveled down to Rome. When I stood in front of the marble sculpture of The Faun, by Praxiteles, in the Palazzo Nuovo of the Capitoline Museum, I knew that I was looking at the same art work that Nathaniel Hawthorne had looked at in 1858; in fact, this sculpture inspired him to write what would become his final novel The Marble Faun. I had set out with purpose to find this sculpture when in Rome for my first time. Then the thought occurred that I was also walking through the same halls and the same rooms as he had. I was walking the same floors.
I never used to think about walking where others have walked until I went on a weekend trip in 2005, once again teaching in Italy, to Rovereto to visit the city and to go to a new art museum known as MART (Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto). When I got off the train at the train station, I looked up at Castellano. As I walked to the art museum, through a park, I realized that more than likely my grandfather had also walked these same streets. I was walking in Italy where my grandfather had walked.
After going to the art museum, I sat down on a park bench to think over my grandfather’s early, untimely death and looked up again at Castellano. I was gazing at the landscape, a rather beautiful mountain landscape, that my grandfather had left for a new life in America. Ever since then, I have often thought of walking where others have walked—this thought has been both conscious as well as retrospective and I have thought of writers who have been important to me, as a reader and as a writer.
I have walked along the Malecon in Havana, Cuba, as had Ernest Hemingway. I have walked the sidewalks in London, Britain, as had T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. I have walked the streets in Salem, Massachusetts, as had Nathaniel Hawthorne. I have walked the sidewalks in Greenwich Village in New York, New York, as had Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter. I have walked the paths in Amherst, Massachusetts, as had Emily Dickinson. And, finally, I have walked through the Rose Garden, which has 800 varieties of roses, in Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Connecticut, as had Wallace Stevens.
Sitting on that park bench, in 2005, in Rovereto, Italy, I realized that I shared the same sights, felt the same sun, heard the same language that my grandfather had experienced. There is a connection not only to place but to history and to consciousness and to time itself. There is an overwhelming sensation, as Stanley Kunitz would say, of the world as one continuous tissue
I was where he was. I walked the same village streets as he had. And then I was tumbling and spinning and feeling my skin rip and my bones crunch and my entire body being torn apart, crushed, shredded, brain and blood and muscle and bone and heart, breath and thought collapsing into darkness that is the darkness of God. His fellow workers had to scrape him out of the Cone, a stone crusher, cylindrical with a round opening that the machine gyrates to crush the stone against the outer walls.
Bio:
Ted Wojtasik is the author of two novels, No Strange Fire and Collage, and many short stories published in various literary journals, such as Cold Mountain Review, New Delta Review, and Cairn. His first novel received a Silver Angel Award from Excellence in Media and a gold-starred review and “Editors’ Choice” in Booklist in 1996. His second novel was one of five finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in 2004. He served on the Literature Panel for the National Endowment of the Arts in 2003. His short story “Scars and Frost” received honorable mention in O. Henry Festival Stories 2000, a short story competition, sponsored by Greensboro College in North Carolina. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, North Carolina. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in 20th-century American literature from the University of South Carolina.
