SIMPLICITY AND SENSE

This morning in one of my e-mail exchanges with writer friend, Isabel Anders, who lives at Sewanee, we talked about how we wished contemporary life embraced more of the qualities of “simplicity and good sense.” I thought about this pervasive phrase (Isabel’s) for a few moments before going to the shelf where I keep desk copies of books I’ve written and began to re-read GRANDMA’S GOOD WAR; A VERSE RETROSPECTIVE OF THE FORTIES. This thin book captured strong feelings I’ve always had about my childhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana when American life seemed more “simplistic and sensible.”

When I look at the bottom photograph on the front cover of the book and see the scruffy shoes my sister and I are wearing, I remember how sensible people were about their clothing and shoes in that era, with one pair of shoes per person for the entire year …and a whole lot of polishing going on each night! It was also the day of union suits, awful one-piece undergarments with latch backs on the behinds that my grandmother sent to me, wrapped in special brown paper parcels, from Franklinton, Louisiana (and I was forced to wear until I was 11 years old) because she wasn’t sure my mother dressed me warmly.

Our family was one of the smallest families on Birch Street, but I recall that Mrs. Landry, who lived behind us on Walnut Street, would line up seven pairs of shoes on the dining room table each night and begin her work of repairing the day’s wear and tear on shoe leather. She seemed to enjoy this task of helping her offspring put their "best feet forward," and the finished products gleamed considerably more brightly than the shoes in our family. We polished our own, hurrying through the process with our feet perched on a wooden shoeshine box our father had constructed. Judging from the photos on the front cover of GRANDMA’S GOOD WAR, I must have cared less about my shod feet. However, I did care about grades, which you can evaluate from the photo of an old report card that appears on the back cover of the book…and never mind reminding me, as many readers have, that I had one “B” in Arithmetic!

In Baton Rouge, during the forties, we were regarded as city folk, but the city in that time was an overgrown small town, and at noon during the summer, we’d gather around the radio to hear “Orene Mews with the News,” a program that featured notable persons of the week, all of whom we knew personally. Such was the close social life of a city that now has a population in the 100 thousands.

We also spent most of our waking hours playing simple games on the asphalt roads where there were no dirt bikes, three-wheelers, or electronic games – just football, tag, Tin Can, pole vaulting, and, most notably, rubber gun wars for which my father carved handsome wooden guns with clothespins attached to hold the slivers of rubber he had cut from an old inner tube. Our indoor pursuits included eight-person board games as we listened to programs on the old Bendix radio. With regard to the indoor games, one verse that appears in GRANDMA’S GOOD WAR is about those pastimes:

INDOOR GAMES

Our gang waded in city gutters, sailed leaf boats as rain fell,
but sometimes, when lightning struck, went indoors for a spell
to tune in “Let’s Pretend” on the old Bendix,
play checkers, Monopoly, and Pick Up Stix,
long mornings of board games and too much inactivity,
enduring fairy tales while held in indoor captivity,
intermissions by Cream of Wheat, a breakfast food for infants,
waiting for the rain to stop so we could commence
wading in the streets, racing to kick up high splashes,
barefooted, bare-chested, we who usually wore bows and sashes,
until the long whistle of my Dad, standing on the walk,
summoned us to supper and my mother’s nightly talk
about our misbehavior splashing in the street,
even though she preferred her vagabonds to suffer heat
in the out-of-doors so she could lie down and rest
while we had freedom to form gangs, enjoy slugfests.
I was an eleven-year old girl allowed to be that free
until I sprouted breasts and was tackled in a melee,
a blow to my feminine buds sending me to indoor cave,
never again to join in boy games, never again so brave,
forced to listen to “Let’s Pretend,” play games of Monopoly,
to this day, a name I refer to as unbearable Monotony.

HANDS

Hands have always fascinated me, and I attribute powerful healing qualities to them. I also feel that I can tell a lot about a person from the way he or she clasps my own hands during an introduction; I find it difficult to forgive a two-fingered, limp handshake. Some of my “beloveds”’ hands include the trusting, small hands of my children when they were young (more than likely dirty, rather than freshly-washed), the long-fingered hands of many of my musician friends, the rough palms of my father who spent hours gardening during his retirement, and the soft skin on the hands of my mother Dorothy and Godmother Dora, to name a few.

Hands are defined as tools for manipulating the environment, but I call them “nurturing agents.” In one short story, I begin the story with a description of hands: “Loren knew that the way he drew his dad’s hands was important. Hands did all the holding. They picked things up, pushed them away, and pulled them closer. Hands were the biggest part of the picture…”

I often pass signs advertising palm readers along the road here in Cajun country, but I’ve never stopped to investigate, nor have I wanted to pay the price to have someone hold my hand and tell me a story that I could just as well have created. The practice of palm reading really dates back to the Hindus, and the art of interpreting various lines in a person’s palm and foretelling bad and good occurrences in that person’s life deals with the symbols of earth, air, water, and fire. The palm reader can predict much by looking at broadness of palms, finger lengths, and skin colors, and can tell a lot about the person’s heart, head, and life events from scrutinizing the lines in a person’s palm. Palm readers lay claim to being able to determine the degree of vigor and vitality in a person by reading those varied lines.

There’s no conclusive scientific data regarding the accuracy of predictions by palm readers, and I always whiz by roadside signs advertising them and avoid getting my palm read – I’ve experienced enough of life’s vicissitudes to the extent that I don’t want to hear about more about the same misfortunes that might lie ahead. I’ll just observe some positive event like “Hands Day” in June when fraternal benefit societies and volunteer organizations get together to celebrate the GOOD work of many hands.

Famous replicas of hands include the “Praying Hands” painting by Albrecht Durer and the world’s largest praying hands at Oral Roberts University, a 60-ft. high, 30 ton sculpture in bronze. I’ve done my own commemoration of hands by writing many poems about them, including one about my father’s hands, my “first ever” poem to be published in “The American Weave” in 1967:

MY FATHER’S HANDS

Blessed be my father’s hands,
building square and chapped with suffering,
as they move in hills of mint,
combs of honey, hard mortar and wood shavings.
He moves among the rabbits and squirrels,
wood animals caught in finely-built traps,
skinning opossums, killing snakes, shooting hawks
beneath the shadow of a small church spire,
now stopping to drink of anything his cup will hold,
cursing my faithful mother who bobbles behind,
nervous with the noise of his greatness,
he who can turn a seed to black earth
and green leaps out of its mouth,
plane a piece of ribbed wood
and it becomes polished ivory.
As much of earth he knows,
so of design and structure,
the shape of his building
before it becomes.
Work, he says, and work,
and when you wake in the night,
despair shaking your building,
Just sing,
(rudiments – these my father’s rudiments).
When storms enter the sky
and great bells of thunder
shake my mother’s heart,
he sits, feet atop a table
on the rotting screen porch,
rolling a pungent tobacco into withered paper
and flailing his arms at the grey sky,
shouting “Invictus” in drunken crescendo,
heavy with rhetoric
as he bellows the captainship of his soul.
My father’s face is an erosion
beaten upon by his own square German temper,
nose flared as the mast
of his rocky captainship
and eyes that hold a brown softness
incongruous with his other erosions.
Blessed be my father among men,
for he knows work
and earth and growing things,
and shall truly live
with his weather-stripped hands
all his days –
Blessed be his hands.

CALIFORNIA MYSTIQUE

My younger daughter Elizabeth, who lives in southern California, is visiting here during the holidays, and she brings with her memories of visits to California I’ve made during the past 25 years. In the summers of those 25 years, we traveled through diverse landscapes in this Golden State that draws entrepreneurs, people with vision, tourists, and eccentrics – all seeking a feeling that I often experience when we hit the High Desert – one of freedom and abandonment.

Every summer when I traveled to Van Nuys, Lancaster, or Palmdale, the three places Elizabeth has lived, we’d plan a trip up the Central Coast toward the magnificent rocky scenery near Big Sur and Carmel…or to Lake Tahoe…Big Bear…Sequoia National Park…then inland on Hwy. 5 to Fresno and farmland in the San Joaquin Valley. Some treks were made to see my brother and his wife in northern California, and we veered off course to see New Iberian Roseanne Raphael in Berkeley several times, went over to San Francisco and to Muir Woods, stopped in wine country for a little tasting adventure before proceeding to Crescent City. I’d say that we covered the state, except for two colorful spots – the Lassen Volcano area and Death Valley, the latter for which I have a yen to visit during the winter.

My father and mother loved the West and took us on the famous Diddy Wah Diddy trek to L.A. when I was 11 years old. They declared that we’d be gypsies forever, a claim that frightened me at the time, but I began returning to the scene again and again, beginning in the 80’s, drawn to desert expanses, the paradise of ocean and mountain, and the Mediterranean-like climate, the sights of that beautiful blue sea crashing on gray rock.

Once, when riding as a passenger returning to Palmdale from Lake Tahoe, I amused myself by writing 22 poems within a four hr. drive, recording the landscape as I rode. We whizzed through Cartago, Independence, Bridgeport, and Toiyake National Forest, my pen moving with the acceleration of the car, my exhilaration with the landscape unlike any feelings I have had while viewing scenery since that time.

California is a magic place that drew missionaries, Spanish conquistadores, ranchers, miners, and Native Americans. The landscape encourages an easy outdoor lifestyle at beaches, parks, trails, and waysides. Some of my favorite trees grow in California woodlands and on the hillsides: Monterey Pine, eucalyptus, and cotton wood. Then, there are the cormorants and puffins, red-tailed hawks that frequent the cliffs and rocks at Big Sur; the sea otters and gray whales near Carmel. I’ve traveled the 1100 mile western coastline from one end to the other, looking perhaps for the same elusive place to stop and settle as my father and have decided that the feeling of elusiveness keeps alive that which I call “The California Mystique.”

Here’s one of the snippets I wrote on the Lake Tahoe exodus:

NEAR CARTAGO, CA. (population 75)

Salt flats, fields of uncommon snow,
blush at the edges,

brine shrimp wriggling pinkly;
Not a mile from the turn-off to Death Valley

Joshua trees suddenly jut up,
old men with arms linked,

standing too close to one another,
grumbling to the sun.


Note: Painting by my granddaughter, Kimberly Fontenette, age 16.