1. I might not have the details perfectly in order as I write the following, but I'll be in the ball park.
Near the road from Wallace to Burke and near another road from Wallace that climbs Dobson Pass, there are two repositories -- I know the one near Burke is under construction and I'm not sure if the other one is still being built or if it's completed. As part of the clean up of the Silver Valley's Coeur d'Alene River basin, mine waste and other materials from numerous worked out mining sites are being transported to one of these two huge repositories cut out of the hillside so that the waste material can be located in one these areas. Later these repositories will be capped. (If anyone reading this would like to help me with ways to explain this better, please let me know.)
This morning, around 9:30, Ed called me and wondered if I'd like to go on a ride to see the Nine Mile repository and then crawl in his pickup on up to Sunset (a.k.a. Grouse) Peak where the county's emergency service cell towers sit, enjoy the view, and experience some of the nearly impassible roads that Ed used have to navigate when he delivered gravel to the cell towers and performed other driving jobs in the general vicinity of East and West Nine Mile Creek.
I happily accepted Ed's offer and we spent the rest of the morning not only looking, from across a draw, at the work going on at the Nine Mile repository, but creeping up a rocky and rutty narrow road (a.k. a. "goat trail") up to the cell towers where we had a spectacular view of the rugged terrain of our county and beyond.
It was a fascinating and enlightening ride. Ed introduced me to work activity and other aspects of life in Shoshone County that I'd never thought about before and took me on roads I had little way of knowing even existed.
2. Back home, I tuned in to today's Billy Collins poetry broadcast. He opened with a George Bilgere poem that is, for those of us who are a little fussy about language use, a very funny poem -- it's a straightforward, accessible fantasy in which Bilgere imagines a father's four-year-old son in possession of an adult's language and, even in his precociousness, the boy uses a word that so offends the father that he threatens his son with serious consequences if he ever uses that word again.
Want to read this short poem? Just scroll down a ways, past Stu's limerick, and you'll find it.
Billy Collins riffed for a while on Keats and Shelly as a way of preparing to read Galway Kinnell's delightful poem, "Oatmeal", in which he imagines the speaker of his poem being joined for conversation by John Keats as he enjoys his morning oatmeal while Keats eats spoonfuls of porridge. Billy Collins read this poem because years ago it moved him to write a poem of his own describing an imagined encounter with a poet of the past. In "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes", the speaker of Billy Collins' poem doesn't share a bowl of either Ralston Wheat Cereal or Maypo with Emily Dickinson -- no, the speaker slowly, button by button, hook by hook, clip by clip, strap by strap undresses the Belle of Amherst as the poem reaches, inhalation by inhalation and sigh by sigh, its long desired climax.
Billy Collins closed his broadcast with his poem, "Pinup", by taking us into a car mechanic's shop where the poem's speaker is entranced by the calendar on the wall where he sees the drawing of March's fantasy model unable to be decorous while walking her dog, leash in hand, while with the other hand she holds her hat to her head, and her short skirt billows up around her waist.
Billy Collins closed with a deadpan quip: "That's about as sexy as it gets around the Billy Collins Poetry Broadcast."
3. Later, after I let the Billy Collins broadcast sink in, I returned to the episode of the New Yorker podcast I listened to while falling asleep last night and, fully awake, listened to Peter Balakian and Kevin Young's discussion of Theodore Roethke's "In a Dark Time" followed by their exploration of Balakian's superb still life poem, "Eggplant".
After dinner, I was poking around on the World Wide Web and I discovered a podcast called Poem Talk. It's produced at the the Univ. of Pennsylvania, hosted by Al Filreis. (I'd never heard of him.) Each episode features Filreis and three other intellectuals spending about an hour discussing a single poem in the most intellectual ways imaginable, at least for me. In the episode I listened to, the four discussed Robert Frost's famous "Mending Wall". I could not, even if I were to go back to graduate school and seep myself for a hundred years in all the critical theory I missed the first time around, keep up in a conversation with Filreis and his guests. I enjoyed listening to them. I did my best to take in what they were saying, was stimulated by their ruminations, but couldn't tell you in any cogent way what they had to say.
It's no problem.
I have my own ways of diving into poetry. These ways were appropriate for teaching introductory courses to undergraduates. But, for some reason, the ways of thinking, reading, writing, and speaking articulated by Filreis and his guests, just doesn't jive with how my mind works, for better or for worse, and helps explain why I spent my invigorating and most enjoyable career teaching at Lane Community College, not at a university or college that would have required me to have completed my doctoral degree and be conversant with the kind of critical theoretical concepts and language these thinkers engaged in.
When I was younger, had I listened to this podcast, I would have felt a combination of inferiority and resentment. I felt neither tonight. My mind cannot be what it isn't and right now, especially as I've spent so much time exercising my mind as I've been mostly staying home since March, I enjoy how my mind works. Mostly, this enjoyment is private, but last night I talked with Debbie about my mind's limitations and all that I've been enjoying reading, watching, and listening to over the last 4-5 months here at home. I'm also grateful for being able to talk about poetry and movies and books with Diane, Bill, Colette, Bridgit, and Val, and listen to what they're thinking, when we have our ZOOM chats every other Sunday. Lastly, I enjoy the interactions I have with friends growing out of things I write here -- I've loved the email exchanges I've had about poetry and other such things with Dan, Deborah, MaryKay, Bill,Kathleen, and others.
I'm grateful that all of us can stimulate and invigorate each other as people who are intelligent in a general way, who exchange our insights with language that is familiar to us. In other words, I might once have dreamed of entering the intellectual stratosphere, of being as intellectually talented and equipped as others I taught with, took courses from, and engaged through reading. Instead, I steered the life of my mind in other directions, down paths more in keeping with how my mind works, and it's been deeply gratifying. I have bade feeling inferior so long and said goodbye to the resentments of my younger days.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Let us travel down memory lane.
Castor Oil is hard to explain.
Black and White on TV,
Just three channels to see.
And no computers meant only your brain.
Father’s Day
My four-year-old son walked up to me
in his pajamas and said, “Father,
I would like to personally thank you
for bringing me into this world, a world
which,
despite its moments of darkness and
confusion,
is a place of immense wonder, where beauty
and joy are just around the corner.
Being alive
has been extremely impactful for me.”
And I looked at him and said, “Son,
if I ever hear you say ‘impactful’ again
in any context whatsoever,
you can kiss your late night chocolate milk
and tater tots goodbye.”
Which is called “tough love”.
George Bilgere
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