Lewdly Sing Cuckoo

I started reading Elizabeth Janet Gray’s “Adam of the Road,” today. It’s a story of a minstrel’s son who wanders the south of England looking for his missing dog and father (apparently, in that order). It’s an okay book, a Newbery Medal-winner. But a passage from the second chapter really made me spew my chocolate milk out my nose this morning, because it reminded me of something Ridcully said in Terry Pratchett’s “Soul Music.” He was talking about music and expressed his views that it should all be folk music, “proper music with real words... 'Summer is icumen in, lewdly sing cuckoo,' that sort of thing,” he said. Then the first song from the minstrel boy’s lips in Gray’s book is that same line. Just about died laughing.

Little Help

Because my Internet searches have totally failed me, I'm turning to humans for help on this one: I'm trying to find lyrics for a song written or at least popular in 1918-1919 that contains the following phrase: "What shall we be when we aren't what we are?" It's mentioned in one of the closing chapters of Leon Wolff's book, In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. I need it as part of a small constellation of mish-mash I want to include in the repertoire of a character in a novel I'm writing. Any help will be appreciated.

To the one who helps me find what I'm seeking will go an authentic, hand-crafted entry on this blog, suitable for being ignored by the vast, vast majority of this world's inhabitants.

Sesame Street: V For VACUUM

Life is not complete without V for Vacuum on this blog.

Ol’ Town Tonight

Blogger's Note: Another bit of flotsam I thought lost forever. Not sure whether it's good or not. Won't you please tell me?

I saw the happy man again. This time, down by the canal behind K-Mart. He was sitting there idly chucking pebbles into the water and watching the ripples crash and bounce off the sides of the channel. I know not because I asked him but because he was me watching and told me what he was “up to.” He tells me what he’s doing every time I see him. I don’t know what he does when he sees me.

He probably laughs.

He looks like a sailor. A sailor of the era of whalers. I don’t think he’s bad of nature, because people who are that way typically don’t volunteer what they’re doing and why they’re doing it to perfect strangers. A trim brown beard. A thin wool cap. Clothes clean, but well-worn. He slings a back pack and walks in thick boots maybe someone gave him three or four towns back.

Don’t pity me, he said once, when I came out of Dairy Queen guilty with a sack of greasy burgers.

I didn’t pity him.

The burgers were terrible.

Always smiling! Always smiling. In the cold, the heat, the rain, the wind. Sailors have their oilskins, he said once, their jargon and oaths. Taboos and legends and safeguards. He smiles.

Smiles are his life belt, he says.

And I am his Queequeg.

He won’t tell me who he is. "Nobody important, and I’m not bragging," he always said. I think I believed him when he said that.

He doesn’t believe much what I say. Maybe I don’t blame him. What I do and why I do it is much more incomprehensible, he says, that what he does: throwing rocks into a canal, following a crow across a field, walking between the warehouses near the Greyhound depot where the trees grow and grasshoppers snap in the heat as they leap against the sides of the buildings, or talking to a stranger and not being embarrassed that he does these things and calls them good.

Why should I be embarrassed, he asked me once, as he stood on the busy street corner waving at people driving by in their cars. I crouched behind a hedge, and he talked to me as if I were a kitten stuck in the branches.

His name is not Ishmael, and he does not allow me to call him such. Names are pegs people hang you on. I, he said, don’t want to be hung up on anything. Queequeg.

Queequeg, the Strong Follower.

I think he pitied me.

"You went to school for four years to write stories about literal sewers," he says as he tosses rocks into the water. "That boggles my mind."

"These ripples, he says, seem useless to you. You can’t collect them, put them in a scrapbook and take them out to look them over when you want an emotional boost." He tossed another rock. "But I can always make more ripples."

I began to hate him.

He didn’t follow me, but he always knew where I was. Walk to work, go to work. Answer that phone. Maybe you take a picture today, but maybe you’ll just sit at your desk rifling through those files you rifle through every day just to look busy. I can understand that.

"I don’t understand this," he said. "You daydream and wish you were somewhere else. You’re sitting in a field of wildflowers and wish you were home watching television. You go home and watch a documentary on flowers. Then," he laughed, "you have lunch because that’s your time and nobody but yourself is going to waste it by taking it away from you."

I hated his editorials.

Now it’s either you’re dead and can’t do anything that you want or you’re still alive and there’s nothing you want to do. He sang that a lot, smiling at me. He taught me the song, and I sang it, too.

But I didn’t smile.

"Ever want to run away from home when you were a kid?"

Yes, I said. We were sitting on a useless bus bench. Useless because this town does not have buses. He waved idly at passers by, and more waved now than had in the past. He ate a chocolate cone. My strawberry melted on the ground where I dropped it.

"Ever do it?"

Huh?

"No, you never did. You’d be smiling right now." He smiled.

I, I miss a lot of the things I did, I did when I was a kid.

He laughed, leaped from the bench and shouted loud enough a man filling his car at the gas station across the street turned to look.

"So that’s what’s wrong with you!"

He hollered. The man at the gas station gave him the finger.

He sat back down, patting me ever so gently on the head. "Because you miss them, you don’t do them any longer, I suppose."

I stared at my melted cone, ice cream muddied by black asphalt dust.

"You don’t," he said. "That’s clear. You’ve become a full-fledged adult. Congratulations." He picked a bottle cap up off the ground, put it on my lapel and squeezed a nickel into it from the back. The cap stayed on my lapel like a medal. "Congratulations, I say. You’re the most miserable creature on the face of the earth, adult!"

A school bus went by. Kids shrieked and waved their arms out the windows, tossed paper airplanes. Waved at the man. Who waved back.

"You hate it, don’t you."

He didn’t hate work. He didn’t hate society. He didn’t mind making contributions, doing worthwhile things or even helping people out.

"I resent," he says, "that others oblige me to participate when all they really want to do is go away and never come back. You hate obligations. Rake those leaves, then we’ll think about taking your bicycle off the roof. Eat your peas. What happened at that meeting you went to last night? You did go, didn’t you? Stop all that whining or we’ll sell you to the gypsies."

"Best thing my parents told me," he laughed, "was when I was nine and my mother told me she wouldn’t care if I ran away. So I did. When I was 37."

He also resented people who pitied him.

Old ladies wouldn’t let him help carry their groceries just because he didn’t have a name, or an address, and had a beard and was probably only helping her out so he could break into the house later or at least abscond with a bag filled with apples and uncookced macaroni.

"I am naked to the world," he shouted, once again at the bench. He stood on it; I leaned against a phone booth with my back to him. "And the world is not appalled at me," he said. "The world is appalled at its own jealousy."

I could not be jealous. I told him that.

He called me a liar.

"What do you miss most about being a kid, and I want specifics."

I thought a while.

I used to build cities out of cardboard boxes.

"Is that all," he asked. Not mocking.

I made streets. And windows. And cut out little doors. And at night I put candles inside the boxes and squinted my eyes so the lights looked like they were shining out of the windows and through the doors.

"And?"

And then I burned the buildings to the ground.

We walked behind K-Mart, where he began pulling cardboard boxes from a Dumpster. "Lucky lucky," he shouted. He pulled a black marker out of the trash. Here.

He handed me his pocket knife and a cardboard box.

"Make your windows."

Two freight workers stared at us from the dock. It was hot behind the building; the sun reflected off the asphalt and bounced off the walls and oozed out of the Dumpster like a radiator.

"Make your windows."

The freight workers brought the dock manager.

"Make your windows," he said the third time. He showed me his back and addressed our curious audience. "Good evening, gentlemen. Queequeg and I need a few cardboard boxes. I hope you don’t mind. We won’t toss litter about."

The dock manager nodded.

I’d already left the knife where I dropped it and hid in the tall weeds near the street until the happy man left, whistling “Mack the Knife.”

He found me later.

"You found me again, I see. No offense, but I’d like my knife back." He didn’t seem disappointed. Just smiled.

I don't have it, I said.

"But you do," he said. Patted my shoulder, balanced the closed knife on my collarbone.

He led me to his city.

"There are candles inside every box, he said. The dock manager gave them to me. Melted during shipment. He was going to throw them away anyway. I saved him the trouble."

I stared at the boxes, arranged in clusters, squares, rows, lines. "Squint your eyes."

He’d made streets in the dirt.

"Are you squinting?"

I squinted.

City alive with light. I smelled the candle wax burning; occasional flames flickering through the tiny windows. Imagined the squeak, squeak of a worn steak knife through cardboard; the swift strokes with the grain of the waffled fibers, the satisfying saw-saw going across the grain. Dad never had sharp steak knives.

He didn’t need them, Queequeg. He didn’t.

"By the way, here’s a match."

A crumpled wad of newspaper next to a shoebox, on which he’d pasted the name of a grocery store from an advertisement.

"Burn it."

I took the match.

But the police will come.

"Huh," he laughed. "They’re already here."

I dropped the unlit match. A city police cruiser was indeed driving slowly towards us, windows down, headlights on in the orange dusk.

What are you up to this time, Floyd?

The happy man looked sideways at me. Winked.

"We’ve built a town, you see, and Queequeg is going to burn it."

Who?

I waved, feebly. The cops stopped and got out of their car.

The happy man approached them. Smiling.

The older cop shook his head and leaned against the hood of the cruiser. You’re never without a disciple, are you Floyd?

"I hate even the thought, Henry," he said. The officers laughed. "Queequeg is, well, Queequeg, and," he added solemnly, "he is going to burn this city to the ground."

He whistled “Mack the Knife” as the officers’ eyes wandered through his city. The older officer twirled the end of his mustache. The younger one uneasily shuffled his feet.

"You don’t mind, do you?"

I almost choked.

"The weeds here are still green," the happy man said in explanation,"and I’ve a couple of buckets here handy for dipping water out of the canal if the need arises."

My lips were too dry to whistle anything. The happy man offered me another match.

The older officer reached into the car and pulled out a mike. Dispatch , this is 321. We’re going to monitor a controlled burn off Second East.

Dispatch replied in a crackly, far away voice: OK, 321. Have at.

I took the match.

The officers stood by almost eagerly; surveying the cardboard metropolis I was to put aflame. The younger one, no longer nervous, took off his hat and spun it quickly yet idly on his index finger, swiftly, swiftly until it spun off and rolled and lolloped in the dust.

Are you going to burn it?

That was the older officer. He grinned at me. Used to do the same thing when I was a kid. Burned down half the barn, too.

Both chuckled.

I struck the match on the side of my shoe, touched the dancing flame to a wad of paper and stuffed it through a sagging flap of a box the happy man had labeled City Hall. Flames leaped from the roof as three men stood watching in the cooling summer light; orange flames to match the hues smeared on the clouds on the western sky. City Hall burned and ashes fell on the business district, soon aflame. The library. Post office. Restaurants. Schools. Then houses.

Reflections of flames danced on the side of the patrol car as eager officers nudged cardboard boxes closer to the firestorm with their black shoes. Glorious flames and wobbly heat; welcome in odd comparison to the day’s waning heat.

Oh late at night, when we were all in bed.

Ol’ Miss O’Leary left the lantern in the shed.

And when the cow kicked it over, she looked around and said. . .

And from somewhere in the dark near the canal, a familiar but distant voice sang out: "Gonna be a hot time in the ol’ town tonight."

Guy Fawkes is in My Head

My brain -- and perhaps here I should say the brain, meaning the brains of humans in general, not my specific "the brain," lest I sound pompous and arrogant . . . now where was I?

Oh yeah.

The Internet.

The Internet, I believe, is much like the human brain. While we talk about taking trips down memory lane or "visiting" a web site, we haven't indeed gone anywhere except for the collection of neurons inside the skull or the collection of silicon and other elements inside that beige box on the desk. BUt within those carapaces (or at least connected to them via wireless internet) we have a vast world, a Sargasso sea of information, trivia, still shots, video, sound bites and other random bits of flotsam that, when consulted, can become part of a blog entry, a memory, a song. And, as on the Internet, once we get searching in the brain we often stumble upon some other word or image or sound that triggers additional searches until we've been sitting there, staring for hours, not really remembering why we started to remember in the first place but happy, in an odd sense, that the searches and tagging and such worked effectively for dredging up useless but fascinating pieces of information.

Why do I bring this up?

The Fifth of November.

All morning, thinking about the turning of the calendar, I had a snatch of a rhyme going through my head: "Remember, remember, the something of November." My brain kept repeating it over and over as if it were something very, very important. BUt because that's all my brain had on its EZ-Recall Memory Circuit this morning, I had to go to that backup brain -- the Internet -- to find the solution. Here it is:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent

To blow up King and Parli'ment.

Three-score barrels of powder below

To prove old England's overthrow;

By God's providence he was catch'd

With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

I have no idea why this was so important to my brain this morning. But it was. And thanks to Wikipedia (which, at best, should be regarded as an adolescent brain, meaning it does contain a lot of information but most of it is likely inaccurate, misspelled, slanted or otherwise, in some fundamental sense, untrustworthy) I found the answer. And thanks to that long parenthetical phrase, I also had a sentence fragment. But I've fixed that. And a few other typos.

So the turning of the calendar brought to the surface memories of a rhyme made up about Guy Fawkes. I don't know why. I'm not English. I have friends in England, and we may well have discussed Guy Fawkes in some capacity or other, but why the rhyme, or at least the garbled first stanza, should stick in my head today and pop up like a hangnail demanding attention I have no idea. But the itch is now cured.

What I learned today: How to spell carapace.

Terkel Redux

Blogger's Note: Because of my packrat nature, I present here an essay I wrote using Studs Terkel's "The 'Good' War" as a source, for an English class I took about ten years ago or so.

John H. Abbott and Dempsey Travis experienced uniquely different circumstances in dealing with injustice in World War Two America. Travis fought to serve in an army that seemed to fight him every step of the way, simply because he was black. Abbott gritted his teeth in the opposite direction, sticking to a policy of absolute nonparticipation. Though their attitudes and actions may seem to lie on opposite sides of the spectrum, both revealed, in Studs Terkel's book The 'Good' War, the isolational and segregational pressures they felt bearing down on them. Experiences like theirs helped the nation realize the need for reform in social and political attitudes in times to come. It was not coincidence that the Civil Rights movement gained national momentum in the decades following the war, nor is it coincidence that the civil liberties court cases gained greater frequency and prominence after the war as well. Both Travis and Dempsey won moral victories through the injustices they suffered during their wartime 'service'.

John H. Abbot declined to be involved in the war in any way. After he answered a draft questionnaire while at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he was given a 4-E (conscientious objector) classification from his local draft board. "I didn't decide to be a C.O.," he said, "The draft board did. All I put down on my questionnaire was that I wasn't gonna comply with the war effort. I wasn't going to have anything to do with it."(164) Though he disagreed with the classification, he jumped wholeheartedly on the bandwagon of rebellion, since he had often thought, even in his youth, how he would react if he were drafted. His decision was not made on the spur of the moment. Abbott continued his noncompliance, and even began to preach his ideals, through stints at various Selective Service camps for conscientious objectors:

I was talkin' to everybody, tryin' to get 'em to quit work, quit camp. I felt that being in those camps was aiding the war effort. To me, anything you did for the Selective Service System, which is the provider of bodies for the war, was aiding the war effort. The work we did in the camps was called of national importance. We called it work of national impotence. These gasoline stickers for rationing that you had on your windshield had a little note on it: Is this trip really necessary? We'd scratch out "trip" and write "war": Is this war really necessary?(164-5)

He also began developing his cynical attitude towards the war effort, as can be seen in the plays on words he used to describe the war (trip/war, importance/impotence; found in the preceding quotation). He was kicked out of one camp because of his disruptive attitudes.

While on the way from a camp in New Hampshire to one in California, Abbot came face to face with the harsh social repercussions his opinions and attitudes would bring. At the railroad stations en route, women lined up with gifts of food, candy and magazines for soldiers going off to training stations across the country. Abbott soon found out these gifts were not for conscientious objectors:

The train we were on, there were two cars of marine recruits, without uniform, going to San Diego. And one car full of conscientious objectors with no uniforms. So we ended up with a lot of these goodies. When word got around that there were some yellowbellies on the train, the ladies would actually go around and yank us by the arm and say, 'Are you one of those damn yellowbellies? I want my cookies back.' Give me back my apple. Give me back my 'Life', you yellowbelly. They were really irate.(165)

Nearly everyone he met held him in contempt for exercising his right not to fight, so he reciprocated in same. This isolation and abandon of the conscientious objectors seemed to stratify all layers of American life. He even met prejudice while hitchhiking: "Yellow was the word. Oh, I'd go hitchhiking when I had leave. I'd get in a car, pretty soon the man would say, "How come you're not in uniform?" I'd say, "I'm a conscientious objector." He says, "You're what, you yellow bastard you?" Down would go the brakes. Open the door. "Get the hell out of here."(165) One begins to see that even though Abbott held opinions that were against the grain of the majority, he is justified in his attitude of cynicism towards those who treated him as a criminal for his opinions.

Abbot thumbed his nose continually at authority. He simply walked out of the California camp and applied for a job as a gardener at a hospital in Pasadena. "I told the lady [at the hospital] that I left a camp for conscientious objectors and would ultimately be arrested for it. She said, 'Who gives you the authority?' I said, 'I do.'" Abbott even went as far as to tell the FBI where he was. He was eventually arrested and sent to prison in Arizona. He was transported, with other disruptive inmates, to a federal prison in Texas after helping to organize a work strike at the prison in Arizona. Once again, he felt the isolation that his actions brought upon him. "We were segregated," he said. "We were not in the compound with the other inmates. We went to chow in a different section of the dining hall. When we had yard privilege, there were no other prisoners out there. They realized the poison we were spreading."(168-169) Abbott found himself in solitary confinement for most of his prison stay.

Abbot used his segregation as a shield of honor. He never failed to make a point or form a protest at any of the odd turns his wartime life led him to. This obstinance and keen eye for the injust led Abbott to fight for his civil liberties after the war.

The story of Dempsey Travis, however, makes no mention of whether he volunteered or was drafted, neither does it make any allusions to imply that he was a reluctant soldier. Travis was more concerned with the Jim Crow attitude of the Army, which he could not help to notice right away. The troop train to Camp Shenango, Pennsylvania, was segregated. The camp section reserved for blacks had no theater, or post exchange (PX). Their camp section was in an isolated spot, wedged next to a stand of trees. "If you went through the camp as a visitor," Travis related, "you'd never know black soldiers were there, unless they happened to be working on some menial detail."(149)

After attending a movie at a makeshift theater set up in the black camp, Travis and a friend walked into a group of other black soldiers, gathered around a comrade who was beaten when he went into a PX in the regular base to buy a beer. Minutes after, a caravan of white soldiers drove up, surrounded the area and began firing. "Firing, firing, firing, just shooting into the goddamn crowd. Everybody started scrambling like hell." (150) He was severely wounded in the back and leg. He and several other black servicemen were taken to a hospital:

They took us to the ambulance. Two guys were sitting in front. The one says to the driver, "Why we be doin' this to our own soldiers?" Driver says, "Who ever told you niggers were our soldiers? Where I come from" --I detected a southern accent-- "we shoot niggers like we shoot rabbits." This stayed with me. This sound of these two men talking about two disabled black soldiers. Shot not by the enemy but by Americans.(150)

The Army was convinced that Travis was leadership material, so he was put in charge of a troop movement from Pennsylvania to Camp Lee, Virginia, after he was released from the hospital.. En route, the train stopped in Washington, D.C. He left the train to go buy a Coke, and was told to go to a shop that patronized Blacks. "On the train to camp, we looked out of the back of the car and saw the dome of the Capitol. I said, What the hell does that mean? It didn't mean what I read in my civics books at DuSable High."(153)

Upon entering Virginia, Travis (raised in Chicago) ran across the first segregated drinking fountain he'd ever seen. He also noticed German POW's riding in the white sections of the trolley cars, while blacks rode in the back. Even at the camp theater, black servicemen were roped off towards the back of the theater. This segregation really came as a shock to Travis, especially when he noticed what he thought was better respect towards German POW's than to black U.S. servicemen: "I think of two armies, one black, one white. I saw German prisoners free to move about the camp, unlike black soldiers, who were restricted. The Germans walked right into the doggone places like any white American. We were wearin' the same uniform, but we were excluded."(149)

Despite the Army's tainted image, it was making progress in desegregation. With the help of an enthusiastic officer, Major Sloan, Travis was assigned as a clerk in a black PX, and in two months, he was the manager. Soon he was placed at the head of the white soldiers' PX as well. He won an award for having the best managed PX in Maryland. Still, racism clung on. When Sloan wanted a picture and story about Travis and his award run in local papers, his request was refused. He was told the newspaper owners didn't like the thought that a black man could operate a post exchange that well.

Though their stories and attitudes seem different, one can draw similarities between them. Both men show obvious pride in the fact that they stuck to their beliefs. Neither man ever backed down from their stands. Abbott maintained his anti-war, anti-compliance opinions throughout his wartime incarcerations, and maintained them even through the Vietnam conflict. It struck me as somewhat ironic that Terkel included Abbott's story in the section 'Reflections on Machismo,' but after studying the story, I realize it may be a subtle tribute from Terkel to Abbott's stalwartness. Similar to Abbott, Travis continued in his silent fight against army segregation by going back to the same camp where he was shot by white soldiers, and progressing through ranks to sergeant, and manager of a white PX in Maryland. This story was not placed at random in the book, either. Terkel placed it in the section "Neighborhood Boys" perhaps in an attempt to imply that other black soldiers faced, if not to the extreme, at least similar segregational situations.

On the other hand, both men expressed in different ways their reactions to the difficulties they faced. Abbott's attitude was one of continual cynicism. This can best be summed up in his description of World War Two: "Get off those bread lines. Build another bomber for peace. They just changed the slogans. That was the most popular war we had. People sang, danced, drank--whoopee, the war."(163) Travis, however, came out of his wartime experience with a more positive attitude towards himself and his nation. "Those four years in the Army," he said, "are the turning point in my life. I learned something about men. I learned something about racism. I learned something about values. I learned something about myself. I don't think I'd have that experience any other place or time."(156)

Also, both men fought the injustices they faced in different ways. Abbott enlisted the help of the ACLU to have his right to vote, as a felon, restored. He was involved in two cases that went before the Supreme Court as landmark decisions. His attitude in regards to his legal battles is one of haughtiness. "Once in a while a young law student comes up and says," Abbott said, "'It's wonderful to talk to somebody we read about in our textbooks.'"(170) Travis fought simply by enduring injustice until changes were started. Of participation in any civil rights movements he makes no mention, though it is clear in his story that he expresses incredulity at the treatment of black soldiers. Upon returning to Camp Shenango after recovering from his injuries, he discovered that the Army had built a major service center for black servicemen. "It appears you had to kill some guys. There was never an inquiry, to my knowledge."(152)

In regards to the effects of this segregation of blacks, and isolation of nonconformists on the nation as a whole, only a simpleton could deny that they had a staggering effect. Though the civil rights movement had been a sore spot for the nation since the Emancipation Proclamation of the 1860s, I feel that the experiences of many black soldiers in the war helped to galvanize the effort, and point it into a direction that called for action. Perhaps in the light of the war, which at the end was touted as a liberating force that stopped discrimination and slaughter of the Jews, African-Americans found a tactical wedge they could drive into the heart of segregational policies at home. In addition, noncompliance in wartime went from a social aberration to a propaganda force in its own right, one that fought perceived injustices during the turbulent Vietnam period. World War Two had opened the eyes of a nation to the fact that war was an ugly affair, an affair in which it was not particularly easy to discern between black and white, good and bad. Seeds sown in social and political skirmishes fought in war-oriented America sprouted into a social movement that brought the country into a closer conformity with the ideals for which it had fought the war: freedom, equality, and the absence of tyranny. Dempsey Travis and John H. Abbott did their own bit, in different ways and with different attitudes, to fight against the injustices they suffered.

Their experiences were different. One fought to participate in an army that discriminated against him because he was black. The other fought a national attitude that despised him because he was 'yellow'. This fight against intolerance of opinion, started with simple acts experienced by Travis, Abbott, and countless others like them, helped usher in an era of social change that hoped to correct past mistakes, and avoid future conflicts.

A Creative Crossroads

I'm in a conundrum at the moment: I'm wondering which direction in which best to expend my limited writing energy. One has me going this way:

The Dead Boy Boat

Pick 'em up.
Toss 'em in.
In the Dead Boy Boat.
Little boys past their prime.
Little boys run out of time.
On the Dead Boy Boat.
Can't play checkers.
Can't go swimmin'.
Ain't no suffleboard.
You won't be grinnin'.
On the Dead Boy Boat.
Little boys.
Big ones, too.
Come from Illinios.
Or Kalamazoo.
Beanies. Yo-yos.
Teacher's notes.
Marbles. Frogs.
Caps and coats.
Those will be your souvenirs
from the Dead Boy Boat.
Got a Dead Boy?
Chuck him on!
The boat still floats
The Dead Boy Boat.
Ain't no flirtin'.
Wouldn't want the buffet.
On the Dead Boy Boat.

This is a poem I wrote years ago. Haven't written one in ages. Probably because they're all dumb, like this one.

The other side has me going in a different direction, back into the journalistic style of writing that, after ten years in journalism, I discovered I wasn't all that fond of. (There's a third way that keeps me gainfully employed -- technical communication -- which, thankfully, isn't accompanied by the gleeful angst as are these other choices.

So what do I do?

Farewell, Mr. Terkel

It's a rare journalist who will just sit back and let a source just talk -- share stories, laughs, fears, and tears. Studs Terkel was one of those journalists. And he'd let anyone talk, form company presidents and generals to stone masons and newspaper delivery boys. He didn't care a whit about prominence. He not only believed that every person has a story to tell, but that those stories deserved telling.

Terkel, 96, of Chicago, died today, leaving people who enjoyed his unique brand of storytelling -- that brand being stepping back and letting people talk, prompting only when necessary but rarely inserting those prompts into the story -- wishing the news were not so.

I was introduced to Terkel through his most popular work, "The 'Good' War," which focuses on narratives he gathered from participants in nearly every facet imaginable of World War II. Reading Terkel is absolutely like listening to the people he talked to -- he never inserted himself between the storyteller and the reader, no matter how tempting it might have been. For a group of rather callow college kids, most of us reading about the war for the first time, Terkel's approach helped mold the story tellers into real people, rather than caricatures or figments we might learn about through a Hollywood movie.

Here's a wonderful quote from Terkel on how he did his storytelling:

"Who are the best historians? Who are the storytellers? Who lived through the Great Depression of the '30s, World War II that changed the whole psyche and map of the world, a Cold War, Joe McCarthy, Vietnam, the '60s, that's so often put down today and I think was an exhilarating and hopeful period, and, of course, the computer and technology. Who are the best ones to tell the story? Those who've borne witness to it. And they're our storytellers."

I've read a lot about World War II, mostly from historian or military historian standpoints. HEaring stories told by the people who lived them -- through Terkel's work -- really opened my eyes to the fact that events both great and small occurred during the war years. We cheat ourselves in history if we read only the thinnest crust of the complexity that lies underneath. Thanks to Terkel -- and to a father who witnessed the war in Holland as a civilian firsthand -- I've developed a great love and interest in reading about the war. Not because I want to read about the suffering or learn about the good guys or the bad guys, but because these events became real to me. Terkel can take the credit for helping that door open in my life.

Urban Elephants

Blogger's Note: "Urban Elephants" is a story I wrote many years ago, when my then-girlfriend (now my wife) challenged me to write a story with elephants in it. I think it turned out well. I thought it was lost until I started sorting through some old CD files a few weeks ago. Maybe it should have stayed lost. But I kinda like it.



Samantha and Robert often play in the alley behind their house. They scoot the alley gravel aside where it’s loose to make roads for their cars. Sometimes they toss a red and white ball back and forth, or bounce it off their back stoop. Whatever they play, they play quietly and most of the time alone, as their friends couldn’t come out. Their regular jump rope partner Judith has a broken leg plastered up in a bulky cast that won’t be sawed off for another three weeks. Their hide-and-seek counting pro Cecil is at the children's hospital where he'd have to stay until his injuries healed. Amber, their most expert hider and Emily, their most persistent finder are both in Victorville living with their aunt and uncle where the sun and sea air would help heal their broken collarbones. The last can they kicked for Kick the Can caused a ruckus when it clattered between the McClaskey's steel garbage cans. Their neighbor, Old Mrs. Swisher, took in from them only because three young Elephants charged wildly out of the alley onto Fourth Street in their fright at the noise, smashing into Mrs. Swisher's car.

The front yard, fenced high with stout poles and chain link, devoid of flowers and littered with tin cans and a random bone, is forbidden. That’s where the Elephants “get you,” the adults say. The beasts use each front yard on the street as garbage cans, taunting the homeowners to build higher fences as they chew on leaves and branches and every bit of green their trunks can reach. Samantha got caught only once in the front yard, and even though there were no Elephants in sight she got a stern lecture. You're a dreamer, Sam. I see you wander through the house and through the back yard, humming your funny little tunes. You don't pay attention,” her mother said. “And Robert follows you around like a disciple. I don't want to look out that front window and see. . .”

“I know, mother,” Samantha said. “You don't want to see us being. . .”

“Squashed by the Urban Elephants,” they said together.

Samantha folded her arms over the picture she’d drawn: Mother, Robert and herself enjoying a picnic in the front yard free of fences and ablaze in flowers and butterflies. Neighbors wave from windows free from bars, dogs play Frisbee with boys in the street. She did not draw like Robert: great, hulking Elephants – one with a tiny boy perched on its back – smashing cars and perched on houses and the humans cower in their basements.

Something should be said about the Urban Elephants.

The Elephants hide and sleep in cozy dark places in yards, in parks, in garages and in abandoned buildings. When the first few appeared in the neighborhood, Samantha and Mother and most of their neighbors thought they were cute. A novelty. Mother would see one out the front window and call Samantha and Robert over as the creature ambled slowly down the street, stroking parked cars with its trunk, swatting playfully at barking dogs and occasionally stopping to browse on the cherry trees across the street from their house. Then there were two, and three. Mr. Benson gave up on his cherry trees but planted a garden of cabbages, carrots and turnips which he'd offer to the Elephants when they made their rounds. He fed them by hand; one munched as the others playfully snorkeled Mr. Benson's shirt sleeves and hair for their own juicy tidbidts. Once Samantha and Robert were splashing in their kiddie pool in the front yard when four Elephants arrived, nuzzled the children and sucked their pool dry with their dangling noses. Four became twelve, then two dozen, then close to fifty. Mr. Benson bought produce by the truckload from the farmer's market because if some of the older bulls and cows didn't get their share, they'd pull at the shutters on his house and yank leaves off his trees to chew as they waited for their daily morsel. The newer ones were strays, though there were some neighborhoods – like the blocks of houses between the state highway and Cleveland Street – that are favorite places for people looking to dump off their animals.

Some of the Elephants are wild and quite dangerous. They bat at packs of barking dogs until the poor creatures dart yammering through the streets and alleys as the herd thunders after them. They once poked and kicked a police cruiser with two policemen inside until the car was a wreck and the officers so weary with fear Samantha’s mother had to drive them to the station after the Elephants got bored and wandered off. When TV camera crews and the local newspaper reporter showed up the day three Elephants made a mud wallow in the Paredes’ vegetable garden, it took thirteen blasts of an air horn to scare the beasts off and a hook and ladder truck from the fire department to fish the reporters out of a cottonwood tree they’d climbed to avoid the Elephants’ aggressive noses.

The local herd lives in Kate Curley Park four blocks from Samatha’s home. They made mud wallows out of the ponds and smashed the brick bathrooms the city built only five years ago. They rip the leaves off the trees and stuff them into their smelly mouths and tore down the swing set to pile bones of deceased Elephants in its stead.

Boys made sport of dashing by the park on their bicycles. As the boys pedal furiously, the Elephants chase them up the gentle slope of Albion Road where the boys try to reach the slope that leads swiftly to Main Street. A few of the quicker and more intelligent boys made the journey once or twice a week, daring each other to try higher gears as they race away from the pack of Elephants trumpeting at their rear. A few of the dumber boys took them up on their dares and failed to make the summit of Albion. When the Elephants catch the boys – coiling their noses around their waists and lifting them off their bicycle seats – the more aggressive Elephants trample the bicycle to pieces while those with more scientific bents offer the captor trumpeted and grunted advice on where it should toss the boy, wriggling in the trunk and screaming as the other boys either raced off to hide or climbed trees to watch. As the beast prepared for its throw, all the Elephants – and even some adults peeking through curtains or stopped aghast in their cars – stop to watch as the boy flies through the air, hoping his landing will be soft.

Some of the Elephants are so sweet and gentle, the children dare ride them, though they do so when their parents aren't watching. You can stroke their toenails and scratch their hairy bellies with leaf rakes as they burble with pleasure. You can swing on their trunks and tails and hang two or three kids from their tusks. Some are tricksters, though. Bonnie once got an Elephant ride down Third Street but at the dead end the beast plucked her from its back with its serpent nose and tossed her nonchalantly over the Piquet's garage. Samantha had been there that day, part of a troop of cheering children clamoring for their own rides. Bonnie crawled stunned but uninjured from the Piquet’s compost pile and Samantha helped her home.

So the children learned to play in the alleys as adults fenced off their front yards to keep the pests out. Still, the alleys held their danger, as the Elephants weren’t shy in using them. Mostly the Elephants visited the alleys during the morning and evenings, when the sun wasn't so hot.

“Ought to drive the vermin out of the neighborhood,” Lucy Bean said at one of the countless meetings adults had on how to deal with the beasts. As Samantha’s mother – as host – served the coffee, Lucy explained again how she’d lost her blue-ribbon raspberry patch and four stands of rhubarb to the Elephants and how she was set – with pitchfork and garden hose – to lead a posse down to the park to drive the Elephants away.

“I kind of feel sorry for them,” said Jakob Olesen, who lived on the cul-de-sac near the vacant lot where the cow Elephants brought their calves to play. He still fed them – wheelbarrows filled with leftovers from his downtown fruit market served as feeders. “They’ve got the right as God’s creatures to live, same as you, Lucy.” The pair dominated the meeting with their arguments. Lucy left in a huff just before Samantha helped Mother serve the doughnuts.

But most everyone stayed away from the meetings, preferring to stay somewhere in the middle or do what they could to avoid any Elephant-related problems. The Bensons – who live at the bottom of the route the boys use to tease the Elephants – believe rubberizing their roof was as far as they would go in relieving the Elephant’s victims. The Quimbys fish so many children out of their pool they no longer hear the splashes.

“When we were little, we used to go the park,” Samantha said as she scooted gravel aside for Robert, who gleefully pushed his toy milk truck down the tiny road she’d made. “They had a sandbox there where all the kids in the neighborhood would build roads and cities and little parks with even littler roads in them. Sometimes we'd find tiny shells in the sand, and I'd put them all in the back of your dump truck and we'd take them home to show mother.”

“Shut up about that park, Samantha,” her mother grumbled as she hung their clothes out to dry. “I don't want you putting ideas in that kid's head, especially after last week when I caught him in the front yard holding out a handful of grass to that Elephant sticking its foul nose over the fence.” Mother went back inside the house with her laundry basket, leaving only the sound of Mrs. Swisher – whose backyard was opposite her own – trimming her garden hedge with a pair of rusty trimmers.

Mrs. Swisher gasped and let out a quiet shriek as a steel garbage can clattered down the alley and rolled to a stop against her potting shed. Samantha stood straight and still, shielded her eyes from the noon sun and scanned the alley as Robert cowered at her feet.

An Elephant.

Two. Three. “Six Robert, come here ” Samantha grabbed Robert by the arm and left his cars in the alley. They scuttled toward their back door as the herd of Elephants shuffled up the alley.

One older fellow had a mangled bicycle tire dangling from his left ivory. They ambled; knowing the alley was theirs. The lead Elephant grunted, looked casually at the children slowly backwards-marching in the yard and slowed the herd's pace. The Elephants sniffed at a telephone pole and scraped a few leaves off tree branches dangling in their way. They tossed more metal garbage cans and trumpeted at the clatter, then stomped on the plastic ones because they didn’t make enough noise when they were thrown. The leader's trunk batted an electrical wire, sending a chittering squirrel flying through the air. He marched to Mrs. Swisher's rain barrel, uncoiled his nose and drank. His nose dripped water and algae as it wandered into Samantha's yard as Samantha and Robert stood trembling on the back porch.

"Sam," Robert said.

"Shh! Don't move!" Samantha whispered.

The Elephant lurched and drenched the children with a trunk full of green rainwater. The herd grunted in approval as the leader, satisfied with his joke, led them from the alley. Tires squealed and horns honked on Third Street.

Weird Up Your Friends

So, a while back I shared a way in which you can weird up your kids. Now here's one to try on adults:

If someone asks you what your political views are, respond this way: "I am a strict diageotropist." It's something they can't argue with, no matter their political stripe.