NaPoWriMo #16: family history

So, I'm still behind--by even more, now. I've been tired this week and have had to cut back where I could (sorry, Ruth). But I'm still committed to this, and am not giving up (not yet!)

Today's poem started coming to me when I woke up at 6 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. I've been working at it off and on all morning. It feels like there are still some pieces that may be missing, but I don't know what they are. Maybe a whole other poem? We'll see. But here's the piece that makes sense now.


Gold Rush

In August 1897
my great-great-grandfather
left Seattle aboard the steamer Rosalie
made his way north with the horde
in what he called
“the great race for gold”
by way of Skagway, the Dyea Trail
Sheep Camp, Chilkoot Pass
Lake LeBarge, Yukon River
finally reaching Dawson City
later that October.

He kept a diary, wrote
how he learned the use of gum boots
was to keep his feet not dry, but warm
how he paid 75 cents at Sheep Camp
for a meal of bacon and beans
hot biscuits and coffee
how he missed his son and two daughters
those “dear ones” left behind
how he packed boat lumber on his back
up Chilkoot Pass
rather than pay five cents on the pound
for a packer to do it.

The diary stops after January 11, 1898.

What he didn’t write was
how his wife returned with the children
to her parents in Massachusetts
before the end of 1897
how he worked as a clerk in Dawson
even after staking his claim
how he went south after the gold rush
worked as an architect in California
married again twice
how he mailed the diary
to his youngest daughter
but never saw her again
how he counted the cost
of the load he chose
one he couldn’t pay someone else
to carry.

MLKFC

I may be the wife of one of the most politically incorrect men on the planet. It's not that he goes out of his way to be offensive, or that he's confrontational about it, or that he's a bigot. Rather, he's no respecter of persons--in a quiet, gleefully obstinate refusal to give anyone special treatment, for any reason.

I don't know what's at the root of it (I do have a few theories), but while it embarrassed me a bit for the first few years we were married, I've gotten used to it. I don't even roll my eyes anymore or pretend I don't know him.

Here's an example: at our house, the third Monday in January isn't Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It's MLKFC. That's right, the whole family piles into the car and observes the holiday by going out to fried chicken.

I know, terrible.

Apparently this tradition started a couple years before Jim and I got married, when he and his best friend Matt were having what I'm sure was a cringe-worthy discussion about the holiday. For the first couple years Jim and I were together, I boycotted MLKFC. Jim accused me (and probably rightly so) of being brainwashed by the Seattle School District's progressive liberal agenda (busing, anyone?) and regaled me with reasons why King shouldn't be idolized after a a life riddled with both professional and personal dishonesty. Which is true, but (I think) no reason to devalue the tremendous contribution he made to human rights; our nation's history is fully of deeply flawed individuals who still worked great good for people everywhere.

So Jim and I agreed to disagree. And now, at the risk of being a hypocrite, I go to MLKFC because 1) those buttermilk biscuits are SO good; 2) my kids need to hear another side of the story so they can make up their own minds about the Reverend Dr. King; and 3) let's face it: if I don't have to do the dishes after, I'm there.

NaPoWriMo #10: a challenge

That's what I get for venting about my NaPoWriMo woes on Facebook. One of my oldest friends, Holly, threw down the gauntlet and assigned me to write a sonnet. Oh, it gets better: she assigned me to write a sonnet using the words violet, harbor, stem, drink and absolution. (Did I mention she used to teach college-level English at Purdue?)

This is the first sonnet I've written since the last time I was assigned to write one, which was more than twenty years ago in Mr. Adams' class, my senior year in high school. This one isn't much better, but it does follow all the rules and include all the obligatory words.

I've learned my lesson. No more griping on Facebook.


Sonnet No. 2

Regret is nothing but a rueful brew;
its swill will slake the thirst of self-disdain.
Cold-pressed from grapes of loathing, left to stew,
it soils the soul with livid violet stain.
A better drink, contrition heals the heart,
dissolves away the icy thorns of spite
and in their place humility imparts
a bloom of hope to set transgressions right.
I taste of both the bitter and the sweet,
but absolution stems from only one.
In finally forgiving I’m complete;
I harbor no reproach for what I’ve done.
Each fault’s a jewel, ev’ry flaw a gem
when those mistakes have made me who I am.

Reunion

Every four years, during the year of the presidential election, my mom's family has a reunion over the Fourth of July weekend. We always gather in the tiny cranberry-growing community of Grayland out on the Washington coast.

In the early 1900s, my mom's grandparents, who were itinerant ministers, settled in Grayland. As their family grew, three of their four sons and their one daughter moved away. My mom and her family lived there until the early 1960s, when my grandfather got a job with the US Postal Service in Seattle. Her Uncle Walt, now in his 80s, still lives there, but his two sons David and Francis have taken over his cranberry farm.

When I was little, we used to spend Thanksgivings with Uncle Walt, Aunt Chris, David, Francis, their sister Anne, and lots of other family and friends who gathered in their home. As the oldest in my family, I got the special privilege of riding down with my grandfather and grandmother the night before in their station wagon with the fake wood paneling on the sides. Sometimes (if I had been extra well-behaved) we would stop at McDonald's in Aberdeen for milkshakes.

Grayland was always a magical place for me. Lying awake in Anne's bedroom, hearing the muffled roar of the surf pounding the shore a mile away, I was in another world. Part of it was getting away by myself, part of it was the holiday excitement, but mostly it was the ocean. I enjoyed dinner, visiting with cousins, playing on a zipline in the woods behind the house, but always in the back of my mind, I was waiting for the ocean. Usually we'd bundle up and drive to the beach after we were full of turkey, mashed potatoes, and Aunt Chris's wonderful pies. My parents would turn the five of us loose to run off all our pent up energy looking for sand dollars, moonstones, and glass fishing floats, before herding us into the car for the long drive back to Seattle. It was like heaven, wandering between the gray sky and the gray sand, with the wind and sometimes rain cutting through my coat. It never bothered me; I combed sandy expanses, loaded my pockets with exotic finds to spirit back home.

I think Grayland was the place that made me love the ocean, and I've secretly felt I could never stand to live more than a day's drive from it. Something about it goes down to my core, makes me feel more powerful, alive, wild. When I was landlocked during college in Utah, I always felt vaguely unsettled. Especially when I learned to scuba dive in a small municipal pool; that felt wrong on so many levels.

Last Friday morning Jim and I wrestled our own (much smaller) herd into the car and headed to Grayland. It was wonderful seeing my parents and siblings, as well as reconnecting with extended family who I hadn't seen since the last reunion, when Jimmy was just a toddler. But one of my favorite parts of the whole weekend? The last afternoon, right before we left, as I watched Jimmy discover the ocean for himself. When I asked him if he liked the ocean while we were beachcombing, he got a huge grin and a distinct twinkle in his eyes as he enthused, "Oh, yeah!"

NaPoWriMo #28: jargon

This week's prompt at Read Write Poem is "jargon". In 1999 I enrolled as a history major at the University of Washington and found myself immersed in a field with its own specialized vocabulary. At the same time I was working at the City of Bellevue in their transportation department, and a huge part of my job was to write newsletters to residents about transportation projects being constructed in their neighborhoods. It was a weird time because on the one hand I had to translate very technical engineering jargon into everyday language at about a sixth grade reading level, and in my after hours I was slogging through obtuse terms like "hegemony", "milieu", and "historiography" and learning how to bandy them about in the many, many, many term papers I was required to write.

I felt like my writing had a split personality, and rather than completely compartmentalize, I started to fuse the two styles. Not that I wrote about the hegemony of transportation. Or dumbed down my research projects. Instead, I tried to resist the urge to be as verbose as many of the historians I was reading; I kept my papers as pithy, interesting, descriptive and fluid as possible, using lingo only where appropriate and necessary. I tried to think about writing my papers in such a way that people would actually want to read them, rather than making myself sound stuffy and academic. Mostly this worked (I got excellent grades and one professor in particular gushed about my writing), but my boss did on occasion send back drafts of my newsletters, telling me I needed to tone down the vocabulary.

History’s Failing

I doubt the Aztecs knew
they were falling to
Spain’s inexorable hegemony or
if the curved-helmed conquistadors
were aware of their driving
force in a colonial milieu
that might have shifted opposite
if not shaped by smallpox
what does it matter for
Hernán Cortés Pizarro
Bernal Díaz del Castillo
Francisco López de Gómara
Bernardino de Sahagún
are on more spines than
Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc
Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin
Cuitlahuac and
especially Malintzin
the failing of history is
no terms translate hegemony
into the reality that every one of
Tenochtitlan’s thousand upon
thousand now anonymous casualties
had a face and a name.

A date which will live in infamy

The single thing that fuels my passion for history is seeing how seemingly unrelated events in the past shape the lives of individual people today. That, and I love a good story. Whether or not a war is just, the cost in lives—both lost and permanently changed—is incalculable. But this isn’t a post about war; it’s about how the events at Pearl Harbor 66 years ago today shaped my life. Or rather, made my life possible.

Several years before Jimmy was born, I was up on San Juan Island visiting my grandmother. She told me firsthand the story of how she, born and raised in Boston, and my grandfather, who grew up on the Washington coast, met during World War II. I captured it on tape, but this is the gist of it. She was a Navy nurse stationed on the island of Oahu. One of the patients she cared for was a handsome young navy flier being treated for malaria, who made a pass at her after she gave him a shot of quinine. Apparently this was a big problem for military nurses because many of the men they met, both patients and officers on base, were married men looking for companionship. My grandmother told me about one of the other nurses who was dishonorably discharged when she was caught fraternizing with a married officer.

So when Clark Cottrell, Jr., asked her out, the first thing she did was look up his next of kin to see if his wife was listed. She found the Reverend Clark Cottrell, Sr., and decided it was safe to accept the invitation to dinner. And the rest, as they say….

Johnny tremain

It's a bit late in the game on Independence Day. Most of the day I've been working on projects for Jimmy's big boy bedroom. This morning Jim painted the dresser that I've been nagging him to do for the last week, and so I'm pushing to get all the necessary projects done for the room to be ready this Saturday. For the last little while I've been listening to the fireworks outside and trying to find relief from the heat (it's been 100 degrees here most of the afternoon) as I cut fabric for a bedskirt.

I was going to skip blogging today but then I got thinking about how much I love Independence Day. A lot of that love comes from being a history buff and being fascinated with the American Revolution, how an amalgamation of contradictory personalities came together and wrought such a remarkable chain of events. With a bit of embarassment, I have to admit that my favorite book about the Revolution is actually fictitious (oh, the shame)—but I've loved it since I was a kid and I just can't help myself. If you haven't, I highly recommend that you read Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. It's a great story, imaginitively told, and is one of my all-time faves. That, and it's a much easier read than 1776 (which I also love and highly recommend, but which is hard-core history and not for the easily bored).