1. I came home from breakfast at Sam's and had just wrapped up my blogging session when Ed called and invited me to join him and Jake on a trip over Lookout Pass to Saltese, MT. They were going to the Old Montana Bar and Grill to play machines and have some lunch. That sounded fun. They swung by shortly before 10:00 and we yakked our way over the pass and spilled into the bar after about 40 minutes on the road. We played for a little while and then bellied up to the bar where I ate a basket of chicken tenders with cole slaw. A guy I didn't know from the Silver Valley had come in and he and Jake and Ed had tons to talk about and I quietly finished my food along with my last bottle of beer and enjoyed the stories about logging in North Idaho back in the 70s and 80s and kept an ear on the Classic Rock music playing overhead. Of special pleasure to me? Hearing the Kinks perform "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman".
2. Back in Kellogg, I leapt into the Sube and blasted up to the library to pick up a book for Christy. She came over to the house to pick it up and updated me on how she's doing. On Thursday, she'd been to the salon, paid Carol a visit, picked up a new medicine at Yoke's, and drove up to Osburn to see Chris S. She overdid it. She went to bed early in the evening. She was wiped out. It sounds like it'll be a while before Christy has the energy back she's accustomed to and so, in the meantime, she told me she learned a lesson Thursday about trying to do too much -- even if what she did wasn't that much. The good news is that Christy's wound is shrinking, slowly healing, and, while it's coming along slowly, it seems to be on a time table that's natural and, according to the nurses, to be expected.
3. Day to day, I am pretty much focused on what my life in Kellogg involves and do my best not to think much about what's missing from my life that I experienced elsewhere. Today, I was bouncing around on the World Wide Web and clicked on a clip from the Late Show with Steven Colbert featuring Helen Mirren reading aloud a passage from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses", found here. I loved her reading. Suddenly I was realized how much I miss reading poetry and passages from the Old Testament out loud for others. I don't think a lot about what I miss about teaching, but today my mind was flooded with the joy reading poems to my students gave me, especially if I read it well enough to bring the poem alive. This wash of nostalgia gave way to suddenly longing to be back at St. Mary's Episcopal Church as a lector again, reading aloud from the Old Testament about once a month or so. Having opened this floodgate of past pleasures, I let myself ache for a while to be back as a narrator for the Shakespeare Showcase, helping to bring scenes alive, along with Marcee, with brief introductions before actors performed them.
I loved every poem my students and I dove into together, but here are a few I especially loved to read out loud, a few I always looked forward to popping up on the course calendar:
"Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne
"To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell
"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver
Any sonnet by William Shakespeare
"Problems with Hurricanes" by Victor Hernandez Cruz
"Why Can't I Leave You?" by Ai
"A Blessing" by James Wright
Any poem by Richard Hugo
"I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds
And so many more.
Too many to list, poems from all times, from all around the world.
As a teacher who included poems in my syllabus, I suppose I was under some professional obligation to help students come to some understanding of what, in classrooms, is known as the meaning of poems.
As I grew older as a teacher, I regarded a poem's meaning(s) as far less important than hearing the poetry's music and the only way to really hear the poems and feel the emotions of the vowels and consonants and the line lengths and the punctuation was to read the poems aloud, or hear them read.
I felt the same way about reading aloud in church. The music, that is, the poetry of the Scriptures is what animates them for me. The same is true of the liturgy.
I miss sharing in all that poetry with others, whether in school or in Episcopal worship.
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