Hope is the thing with feathers...reminisces of poetry class

HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;	5
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;	10
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Thanks to the folks at Bartelby.com/verse, I have access to Emily Dickinson. I found her this morning in my Modern Poems anthology (she is a precursor to the moderns, with Walt Whitman, Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins...) This poem was not in the poems anthologized, nor the one I was looking for, I don't know what it was. I'd know it when I saw it.

I need to get a copy of Miss Dickinson's poetry in book form, but for now, the Internet will do. My Modern Poetry class was my sophomore year at Carlow, and Sister Maureen was my professor. She never gave A's, but I got them from her. It was about that time that I realized I needed a harder school. I wish I had gone to see her after I'd graduated. She died...I should find out more about that, maybe. Her class was where I became an English major. I loved dissecting the poems, looking for why THAT word. She taught us that in a poem, every word means something. So you might as well look up every word in the dictionary, because it's possible that the poet did. Nothing is a mistake, nothing is wasted. I was a new Christian, and I loved all the footnotes in Eliot, finding the Bible verses he referred to. I was happiest, on my bed on my room on the tenth floor of Frances Warde Hall, my Bible on one side, my Ellman/O'Clair* on the other. I suppose I had the dictionary out too. I would then go, at night, to the library, and use one of their eight computers to pound out my papers.

My windows didn't have screens. So some days, when I was bored, I would make a paper airplane and fly it out my window. I had never lived that high up. It was the top floor of the dorms, and from my window, I could see forever. Across the river, to the last working steel mill. All of the roofs of Oakland lay before me. I loved that scene, and I have many photographs that I would just take out my window. Maybe I'll find some and scan them for here.

***
Writing this, I realize what a different time that was. Students now sit on their beds with their laptops. No need to go to the library for a PC, they have one right here. No need to touch the paper thin pages of the anthology, the dictionary, the Bible, one can find all the poetry one needs (with commentary) online. I hope there are students like me, though, that prefer the feel of paper. For whom writing is partially a workout of the arm, pages of ink across a pad of paper.

__________
*Ellman and O'Clair were the men who wrote Modern Poems. Mine is the Second Edition, from 1989. By the time the second edition went to press, O'Clair was the "Late Professor Emeritus" from Manhattanville College.

"Did you go to Duquesne?" (a Pittsburgh conversation)

My chiropractor is wearing a Duquesne t-shirt. Now, I know that the other chiropractor at the office DID go to Duquesne, but I have never seen any indication that my guy did. So, like a fool, I ask him. "Did you go to Duquesne?" And he says, no. It was as if I was accusing him of wearing the wrong shirt.

"But you did, right?"
"No, I went to Carlow for two years." I pause. "I dated a guy that went to Duquesne"
"Well, there you have it."
"Actually, I dated two guys that went to Duquesne."

(by the way, if you're not from Pittsburgh, you're probably trying hard to pronounce that French word in your mind. It might be one of the few French words that Pittsburghers pronounce correctly. It's Duke-caine. Like Novocaine. You should see the red squiggles from my spell check.)

his monologue: "My two sisters went to Duquesne. I went to a branch of Penn State. I told my dad maybe college wasn't the right decision for me and he said, you're not going to Duquense! I intended to go to the main campus after two years, but that was right about when I discovered I wanted to be a chiropractor."

my monologue: "I just was wondering, because you'd never worn anything before, and well, everyone wears Pitt* t-shirts and you know they didn't all go to Pitt, but no one seems to wear Duquesne t-shirts unless they went there."

We had a laugh.

(By the way, my spell check thinks that I wanted the word Sequence.)

In other news, it's a good thing I'm getting this sinus surgery, because I have yet another sinus infection. The facial pain is unbelievable. On October 19, I'll have a septology, which means a correction of the deviated septum. Spell check doesn't like septology either. It thinks I want to say Egyptology. Um, no.

In other other news, I take the GRE on Tuesday. Be prepared for a decent verbal score and an abysmal math score. Ayyyy. One of the 10 question quizzes I took yesterday? I got 2 out of 10. I usually get 5 out of 10.

So, if you get alerts on your RSS, I'm alive. I know I've basically abandoned blogging, but I'm still here. Really. Say hi in the comments, will ya?

_______
*the University of Pittsburgh, where I got my Master's degree. Pitt is a Division I school in football and both men's and women's basketball.

on little cat feet...

for C, because I've been thinking about you.

This morning has drifted into the afternoon. So, since I was freezing, lallygagging around in my nightgown, I finally got dressed.

What have you been up to this week, Sarah Louise?

Well, I've been hither and yon, thanks for asking.

The "big snowstorm that wasn't" caused much drama yesterday--I was late to work (10 min.) not because of the roads, but because I kept putting stuff in my "if I have to overnight it" bag. And then mid afternoon the snow turned to rain, the temps went up, and I drove home.

On the way home, I stopped at the State Store for some rum, as I knew I needed a drink (rum and Coke, please!) after an afternoon of working hard and being in the office all by myself. (Alone again, naturally.) (No, it was the snow that made Jane stay home--she lives North, near Zeely, and couldn't get out of her driveway.)

And who was at the front register at the State Store? A woman I had looked up to most of my short career as a bookseller in Pittsburgh at Fox Books. Her name was Dee. I thought, oh, we'll have that conversation as I purchase my $13 bottle ($1 off!) of Bacardi, where are you working now (she'd ask me), as I would look at her hand to see if there was a ring. But just as I was moving toward the registers, a line had formed, and a manager came out of one of those offices you see in stores, where the floor of the office is about two feet above the floor of the store. I demurred that the people ahead of me should go next, but they weren't budging, so I went to his register, this man with pattern balding and some white hair around the back of his head. So he rung me up, and out I went, back into the cold, the rain. And I thought about it, because in my life, my father, the gregarious, never hesitates to reestablish a relationship. But what good would have come from talking to Dee? We were never friends, just colleagues, sometimes competitors. She didn't look like she was happy, and the grumpiness would have been contagious. At one time, a long time ago, I wanted to be her. Keyholder,* she had been, and then Assistant Manager. And while seeing a woman one time after not having seen her for at least five doesn't give me a clear vision (at all!) into her life, at that moment, it was better to just walk away.

(Oh, look, it's snowing!)

I drove home, listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which is amazing, and as soon as I walked in the door of my lovely third floor walk-up, I made a rum & Coke and watched the special features to the movie du jour, Broken English. (Which is wonderful.)

I watched Friends, then did some social-networking a la Twitter, Facebook. And then I went out, to Kelly's house. She was having a party where the main attraction was beer milkshakes. It's from Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. Chocolate ice cream and Guinness? Oh yeah.

The fog, this I don't know what, is a sort of melancholy that has tied me inside even though I should take a walk and start making something for our church dinner (with Steelers game).

This week I've twice had occasion to talk about my life, and how I lived part of it overseas. I actually got to talk to someone who has been to Warsaw and totally laughed that I see it as the most romantic place in the world. I laughed with her, because I know it's crazy too.

I can't seem to get started on where I want to go, so I'll just dive in. The year was 1989. It was October, a month that seems to always be trouble, and now I know why, as it is a difficult month for depressives, waiting for the light to stabilize from fall to winter. I didn't even know I was depressed then. I just knew I needed out. I was a freshman at a small Catholic women's college in Pittsburgh, where all my fellow students were nursing and education majors. I was an English major, one of three slated to graduate in '93. One wasn't talking to me, and the other was a grandmother (as Carlow had many returning "non-traditional" students, students who had either never gotten their degrees before they got married or had delayed graduation after getting married.) My roommate and I weren't exactly getting along, but we weren't talking about why. She moved out after Thanksgiving. I had started visiting the career center on a regular basis, as the woman who ran it had nice comfortable chairs and she listened to me. She was my first counselor, though I didn't realize it at the time, what our relationship was. I actually was a paying client of hers in my mid-twenties, when I worked at Fox Books.

I was lonely, I was homesick, I wasn't meeting people who "got" me. Most of my peers were from Southwestern Pennsylvania who went home to do laundry on the weekends. I was from suburban Maryland, and my parents were six time zones away in Warsaw, Poland. And try as I might, I could not convince them to let me take a semester off. Eventually, I stuck it out, transferred to a school in Maryland after my sophomore year, and graduated in May of 1993.

It hurt me deeply that my parents were so far away. I felt alone, abandoned, and a bit like a motherless child. (Sometimes I feel so reckless and wild--red is the color that I like the best) And it wasn't until my late twenties, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and went to live with my parents for three years, that our relationship was restored.

The myth: some people seem to glide through life, hitting all the stops on the way to adulthood: graduate high school, go to college, get married, have kids, work at a fulfilling job, retire, and become grandparents. (Seem being the operative word, because looks are deceiving.)

I am not one of those gliding people. Am I stuck? No, I don't think so. I'm just taking longer in between stops, and deciding which stops I want to take. Taking a class my freshman year at Carlow on the Four Gospels with women my age and women my mother's age helped me to see that there is not one way to navigate the stops. You miss one? You go back, if you can.

This week I've gone out three nights. I feel an awakening in my heart and mind, a desire to engage in conversations, a desire to be with people, and like a beautiful dream, there are people to be with! It's Winter, but I am finding that there is a Spring happening in my heart.

* * *

Was there ever a time when you took a detour from the linear stops along the way? Was there a time you wanted to but couldn't?*
_______________________
*Keyholder was the next step in the hierarchy at Fox Books: bookseller, then supervisor, then keyholder (who was responsible sometimes for opening the store), then Asst. Mgr, then Manager.

on little cat feet (Carl Sandburg, Fog)
Alone again, naturally (Gilbert O'Sullivan)
Sometimes I feel so reckless and wild (Shawn Colvin, The Story.)

*do you think the questions at the end are dorky? (It's something I'm trying on for size.)