1. One way to look at my previous blog post would be to say I longed for sounds in Kellogg in the present time that would move me to long for a bygone Kellogg. I longed for the experience Basho brings to life in this haiku:
Even in Kyoto --
Hearing the cuckoo's cry --
I long for Kyoto.
My longtime friend Hugh understood my longing and he became a 2026 American version of Basho by writing this haiku:
Snow falling overnight
Surrounding Kellogg in white
Hear sounds of silence.
That's it.
Hugh nailed it.
I might also put it this way:
Even in Kellogg --
I hear the sounds of snow--
I long for Kellogg.
The sound of snow can be its silence.
As snow piles up, especially at night, moments occur when no cars are on the street, people stay home, the plows aren't out yet, and, well, to quote Herman's Hermits, there's a kind of hush, not really all over the world, but certainly all over Kellogg.
I experienced this hush on Mountain View Lane in Spokane. On the Whitworth College campus. In the Washington/Jefferson neighborhood of Eugene. During Winter Storm Jonas in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The snow's silence inspired my longing for Kellogg.
Recently, in Kellogg, heavy, silencing snowstorms have been rare.
I don't remember the year, but we had a silencing storm some time after we moved here in 2017.
I was in Kellogg.
I longed for Kellogg.
I longed for times when the hush of snow drew me out of the house and I'd walk in the quiet of our neighborhood, the quiet of the trail to the high school, and back home again, marveling that for stretches of time the only sound I heard was the crunch of snow underfoot.
By morning, I heard other snow sounds: the scrape of snow shovels, the memorable way snow changed acoustics, magnifying sounds, whether tire chains, snow shovelers taking a break and yakkin' with neighbors about the snow ("Yep! I know. We'll be back out here in an hour or so, shoveling again."), or the first whoops and hollers of snowball fights or neighborhood kids heading off for rounds of sledding.
Most of all, should snow pile up in Kellogg again, I'll long for the days decades ago when I loved the snow, when I was too young to shovel, I didn't have to drive in it, I didn't think about its weight on the garage roof, I was oblivious to the dangers of flooding should Chinook winds turn the snow into fast runoffs feeding swelling rivers.
So, yeah, Hugh, you nailed it.
The silence and the sounds of snow transport me the way the cuckoo's cry transports Basho.
He longs for a long lost Koyoto.
I long for a Kellogg and a child's love for winter I'll never know again.
2. I first taught English Composition at the Univ. of Oregon as a graduate student in the fall of 1981. I taught one section each term of the school year.
I began to grow weary at some point that school year of reading student essays that began "In this fast-paced, every changing world of ours" and decided that I would shift the kind of readings I assigned and the kinds of discussions we had toward what it is in life that endures.
Then, in 1983, Stephen Berg, the editor of American Poetry Review, collected essays he had commissioned from other writers, having asked them to write about who or what influenced them as writers.
I stumbled upon this book at Powell's Books in Portland not long after it came out and its title was perfectly aligned with what I cared most about as an instructor of college students: In Praise of What Persists.
At some point many years later, I gave this book away -- very likely when I undertook a ruthless purge of books when we moved from Eugene to Greenbelt, Maryland in 2014.
Recently, I read or heard something that brought this book of essays back to mind and I discovered that Better World Books had a used copy for sale and it was the best kind of used book: it had been on the shelves of a college library.
I ordered it and it arrived over the weekend.
I immediately went to the Table of Contents and savored the roll call of superb writers who'd contributed to this anthology: my literary father, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Forche, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Tess Gallagher, and others, including David Bradley.
For this book, Bradley wrote "The Faith", a moving account of how his father, a pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, unintentionally taught his son, through a sermon he gave about escaping a forest fire as a young man, that writing is costly. In that sermon, his father revealed vulnerability that no one who knew him had ever seen before.
It cost him.
No longer could others see him as the invulnerable man he had previously presented himself as.
David Bradley writes that when he edits a piece of writing, when he decides what to keep, what to cut, and when he asks himself if he's gone far enough, he asks one question: Does it cost? He goes on and says, "Is it possible that someone reading this might discover something about me that I would rather not have [them] know?" He admits that while he'd like to say that he applies the rigor of this principle of expensiveness to everything he writes, he knows he doesn't. It's an ideal. He sees it as a mark of being not only a good writer, but a good human being.
In this ideal, he has faith.
3. Over the weekend, I read Tess Gallagher's contribution to In Praise of What Persists entitled, "My Father's Love Letters". In just the way I like an essay to be, it's a roaming essay, one tied together by what she concludes about the letters she discovered in the family house, written by her father, during a time, before they were married, that her father and mother were separated by a long geographical distance.
In her roaming, Gallagher writes about how in the previous four years she had fasted once a year, sometimes more often.
As I read about the effects fasting had on her consciousness, her sense of time, her calmness, and other dimensions of her being, I was suddenly thrust back to the summer of 1983.
That summer, I taught Introduction to Literature at Whitworth College in the evenings. I can't remember if that class met from 6-9 or from 7-10, but here's what I do remember.
I included on my course calendar that summer Franz Kafka's story "The Hunger Artist".
The story features a man who starves himself as a work of art. As he fasts, he is on public display and people come to watch the changes in his physical appearance, to revel in how he becomes less and less like them. The hunger artist himself hopes to raise questions in these onlookers about life and death, about mystery.
I didn't know when I put this course together, that a handful of my students would be Muslims. As I remember, they were Gonzaga students who were taking this summer course at Whitworth as a way of earning credits toward their Gonzaga degrees.
In addition, another small contingent of students, also studying at Gonzaga, were Roman Catholics from countries in South and possibly Central Americal. I know the most gregarious of these students was from Venezuela.
Just on the face of it, the first day of class, learning that this class consisted of students from around the world, I was ecstatic -- and all the students in this class picked up on the fact that I felt this way.
Things went great.
Back in 1983, Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting occurred from June 12th to July 29th.
When this class commenced, I had no idea that we were in the early days of Ramadan.
After we'd met a few times, one of the Muslim students approached me and asked if I would change the time we took our break. If we could take our break a little earlier, then he and his Muslim brothers could break their daily fast at the appointed time. Otherwise, they'd have to wait longer and be hungry longer.
That was no problem. We had a shorter first part of class. Those following the dictates of Ramadan could eat earlier and it worked out superbly.
Now, maybe you see where this story is going.
I've never had a teaching experience that was anything like what happened when it was time to read "The Hunger Artist".
The Muslim students were eager to help school the rest of us in the spiritual rewards of fasting: heightened awareness of God (Allah), a deeper sense of reliance on God by giving up reliance on physical nurture, the cultivation of self-discipline, and, among other rewards, the alignment of the spirit, soul, and body toward divine guidance.
Gloriously, of course, the Muslim students were not alone in knowing about the rewards of fasting thanks to the Catholic students who knew a thing or two about self-denial and discipline because of their journeys through the season of Lent.
My best teaching experiences always happened when I faded into the background and my students took over, teaching each other, having discussions that I never could have triggered, and learning from one another.
So one of the Arab students in that class told me early on that he was a Palestinian. At that moment in time, the only image in my mind of a Palestinian was Yasser Arafat. This student did not wear and black and white checkered keffiyeh. He had none of Arafat's scruffy appearance. My understanding of and perceptions of what a Palestinian definitely got larger.
I'm going to say it was November of 1983.
I was on Whitworth's campus well after dark and a heavy November fog blanketed the campus and its numerous pine trees.
I was walking near the library.
Earlier in the summer Intro to Lit class, I had spent quite a bit of time emphasizing a key line from Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".
That foggy night near the library, I suddenly heard the voice of an Arab call out that key line from Frost's poem:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep."
It was the Palestinian student.
Neither one of us troubled this sublime moment with any other words.
I think we acknowledged each other with a wave.
I honestly thought that maybe I should end my life as college instructor right then at age 29.
How could it get any better?
