THE CHOCOLATE CHIP CAPER

For two years I’ve been consistent about blogging in “A Words Worth,” but the last two weeks I’ve been away from my desk, as editors of newspapers often announce when they go on the road. I’ve been on two mercy missions: 1) a return trip to New Iberia for my oldest daughter’s surgery, and 2) a quick trip circling back to Florida where my friend Vickie’s mother, 90, has been ill. Actually, the trips afforded another opportunity to experience civility in action, which I had lamented about being a lost art in two former blogs. Again, the happening occurred in Mississippi, a state that I have concluded is the birthplace of authentic courtesy.

I blogged about an act of civility that occurred in a tire company in Meridian Mississippi a few weeks ago when we were en route to Tennessee. This time we were en route to Louisiana. We had stopped for the night at a Hampton Inn in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and following dinner I went into the lobby to claim a chocolate chip cookie that is always available in the lobby in the early evening. To my consternation, the cookie jar had been emptied. As I turned to leave, the manager appeared at my elbow, shook my hand, and asked if he could assist me. “I always get a chocolate chip cookie at the Hampton,” I said to him. “Someone claimed the last one,” he said as I walked toward the lobby door. “But if you’ll give us fifteen minutes, I’ll have someone deliver a fresh batch to your room.  I waited and waited and finally said some choice words aloud about people who don’t deliver what they promise, yada, yada…(incivility in action!)

The following morning at breakfast, the manager came over to my table and sat down. “How were the cookies?” he asked.

“What cookies,” I asked. His face fell. “You didn’t get them?”  I could tell he was disturbed.

“No, but I didn’t need them,” I said. “I need to lose weight.”

“But you wanted them,” he exclaimed. He began to apologize and suddenly remembered that when they were looking through room numbers to find my room, another Moore was listed as a guest. I laughed. “So someone else was surprised with a bag of cookies,” I said. The manager laughed with me and apologized again for the mistake. He spent ten minutes at my table, and we enjoyed good exchange about Hattiesburg where my mother once attended Mississippi Women’s College before the college became defunct.

As I walked toward my room, I heard someone call my name, and one of the breakfast service women ran up to me. “You need to wait fifteen minutes before you leave,” she said. We have something at the desk for you.” I beamed at her. You guessed it—I picked up eight, freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies on a paper plate, wrapped and ready to go. As I scurried down the sidewalk with my package, the manager opened a side door, stepped out and shook my hand, and wished me well.

My friend with whom I traveled calls this the “Chocolate Cookie Caper” and advised me to blog about this happening to record another act of civility. And, no, I didn’t need those cookies, but they advertised the willingness of the employees at this hotel to serve people well. As I said before, I’ve begun to believe that civility and courtesy are still alive, and they thrive in the heart of the South in old Mississippi.

SPRING BLOOMS

Yesterday, the sun came to The Mountain here at Sewanee, and I spent the day outdoors raking twigs in the front yard, which is really a sea of moss and dead grass. While raking, I spied one lonely yellow daffodil in the woods adjoining the yard and walked over for a closer look–a cluster of flowers bore buds that were near bursting through, and I anticipated them opening in a week or so. However, I looked out of my study window this morning and saw the happy faces on at least ten plants. Later, we went over for a visit with our friend, Anne Boykin, and saw her front yard thick with daffodils that reflected the welcome sunlight.

The sight of these wonderful spring flowers brought to mind the poet William Wordsworth’s lines: “I wandered lonely as a cloud/that floats on high o’er vales and hills/when all at once I saw a crowd,/ a host of golden daffodils.” These golden blooms announce the coming of Easter, a time of resurrection and rebirth in the Christian world, and in many places in the U.S., daffodil festivals are held to celebrate the advent of spring.

Daffodil is a common English name derived from the botanical genus name Narcissus. The ancient Greeks created a legend about this flower in which a vain youth died after he became so enamored of his own reflection that he couldn’t leave the pool and died of starvation and thirst at the edge of the water. The gods turned his remains into the lovely flower, and that tale has persisted since antiquity. The legend became a nomenclature in contemporary psychology; a person who is labeled narcissistic is one who epitomizes self-absorption and self-centeredness. When I see the glorious daffodils every spring, I try to discount the legends and nomenclatures associated with these plants.

We’re warned to beware of the toxicity in daffodil leaves, as all varieties of Narcissus contain the alkaloid poison, lycorine. Last year, school children in Suffolk England became sick after they included a daffodil bulb for zest in a soup they were making in cooking class. The bulb resembles an onion and could be confused with those edible bulbs. However, good press about daffodils tout that Japanese medical practitioners once treated wounds with the narcissus bulb and wheat flour paste. Residents of China with a plot of daffodils that blooms during the Chinese New Year can expect wealth and good fortune throughout the coming year. I prefer the Chinese legend to the Greek version regarding Narcissus.

To a poet, the cluster of daffodils in the yard provides inspiration, and I’m with Wordsworth in extolling their trumpeting beauty, despite the bad press and legends attributed to this spring flower.

POETRY AND PERFORMANCE #2

One of the events I will miss, now that I’m no longer in New Iberia, is the second Evening of Poetry and Performance on April 30 at the A&E Gallery on St. Peter Street.  My friend Darrell Bourque, with whom I read poetry at the First Poetry and Performance Evening, will introduce Ava Leavell Haymon who teaches poetry writing in Baton Rouge and who is also director of a writer’s retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  This poet’s third volume of poetry is entitled WHY THE HOUSE IS MADE OF GINGERBREAD and has been endorsed by Claudia Emerson, Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 2006.  Emerson describes Haymon’s new book as one that has an “insistent version of magical intensity and power.”  I know that the performance will be one that I will regret not having stayed in Teche country to hear.

Claudia Emerson, Haymon’s endorser, has read at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for several years and has been published by the LSU Press in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  In 2008 she read many of her poems from LATE WIFE and received considerable applause for her rendition of “Pitching Horseshoes,” a poignant work about the demise of a marriage in which the husband spends his evenings pitching horseshoes while the wife “alone, washes up the dishes/or watered the garden to the thudding/sound of the horseshoes in the pit...”  Emerson is professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a spot where some of my Greenlaw kinfolk live.  She also holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair of Poetry and is Poet Laureate of Virginia.

The conclusion to Emerson’s reading was a surprise act in which her second spouse, Kent Ippolito, a musician who plays bluegrass, blues and rock, went onstage with a guitar slung around his neck and began playing for Emerson.  She sang one of her poems that reflected the anger she felt about the divorce involving her first husband, the horseshoe pitcher.  The husband/wife act brought down the house, and by the time I got to the University bookstore the following day, every copy of Emerson’s LATE WIFE book of poetry had been sold.

If A&E Gallery continues to sponsor poets, perhaps Emerson and other distinguished poets will appear on the venue.  Brava Paul Schexnayder for providing the space for noteworthy artists and writers to present and perform their art.  New Iberians who attend the readings also appreciate our Louisiana poet laureate, Darrell Bourque, who acts as an emissary for poet luminaries to perform in “The Berry,” otherwise known as New Iberia.