Imagining Scout, All Grown Up

A few years ago, as I read To Kill a Mockingbird again for the first time in many years, I wondered about these characters, about what happens to them as they grow up. This tendency of mine used to drive my graduate school professors crazy. I remember one shaking his head, commenting on my response to Leopold and Molly Bloom, "These characters are fiction. They're not real. They don't exist outside of this book." I had been talking about the two of them surviving their marital crisis and growing old, I think. Interesting that I remember the response of the professor far more vividly than whatever I had been saying to provoke that response.

In a different time period, I might have seen that as a sign to switch into the MFA program. But at the time, the University of South Carolina was in the process of dismantling its Creative Writing program that used to award MAs and Ph.Ds in Creative Writing to transition to an MFA program, so I didn't really see that as an option. Besides, I wanted a job teaching at a small, liberal arts college, and for that dream to come true, I knew I needed the Ph.D.

I learned to muffle my tendency to see characters as real, but as I returned to creative writing, I've found excellent writing prompts. I love imagining what happens to the main characters in fairy tales and myth. I love exploring the minor characters in these tales. I've returned to the literature of my grad school days again and again when I'm stuck for ideas. Often those threads lead me in interesting directions.

I'm afraid my depiction of Scout's future will not be a comfort. I also wonder about the timeline. Could a woman who was a child in the 1930's grow up to get a Theology degree? When did the first woman get advanced degrees in Theology in the twentieth century? A Google search hasn't told me much, so I won't worry about it too much.

Here is the poem. It is scheduled to be included in the collection Afterwords.

Scout at Midlife


Several times a day, Atticus asks,
“Who are you again?”
And lately Scout shudders
to realize she isn’t sure.

Once, she was surrounded
by people happy to help
define her, to shape
her, like red Alabama clay
transformed into a garden.

But now these people are ghosts
who haunt her thoughts.
Dill gone on to marry
Lottie Mae after Scout waited
too long to say yes.
Jem dead in a hunting accident.
Aunt Alexandra and Calpurnia both felled
by the same kind of stroke.

Now, surrounded by the rabid
dogs of self-recrimination and regret,
she has only her Ph.D. in Theology
and memories of an earlier Atticus
to remind her that she once lived
on an intellectual plane.

Atticus asks, “What is it called,
that thing between your foot and the floor?”
Scout thinks about possible answers:
a carpet, a shoe, a sock, a callus.

She looks at her framed credentials as she explains,
once again, the nomenclature
of everyday objects. Sometimes she answers
Atticus’ questions in Hebrew.
Some days, she chooses Aramaic, Latin
some other dead language.

Rejecting a Life of Quiet Desperation

Today is Henry David Thoreau's birthday. Long ago, when I was in high school, I was struck by how many grown up people talked about Thoreau as an influence in their search for a simple life. I sought out Walden, or Life in the Woods, since that was the book they most often mentioned. After 30 pages, I put it down. This book influenced these grown ups? Really? The cost of bean plants could transform a life profoundly in the 20th century?

Now, of course, I realize that many people are influenced by writers without ever having actually read their books. Thoreau has one of those personalities/reputations that affect so many of us. Even today, when I realize that Thoreau wasn't really that cut off from civilization, I feel that pull to leave it all and go back to the woods--or to a sailboat, or to a monastery, or to any place that's a bit more isolated than my current life.

I've also had an opportunity to read more Thoreau. I find his Civil Disobedience to be a far more impressive, important work.

Still, it's probably this quote that influences modern life far more than any other Thoreau quote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Ah, to live deliberately, to have our private lives and our public lives match, to see what's really important. I'm always surprised to realize how many adults do not do this. Many grown ups are just not that introspective, as they live their "lives of quiet desperation," to use another Thoreau quote.

I'm also surprised by how many adults have just accepted what our society tells us should be important, primarily that chase after money. I've been catching up on past blog posts, and thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon for pointing me towards this post by Joshua Becker who encourages us to stop chasing success and start pursuing significance.

One of the things I most miss about late adolescence is that sense that I could do anything: go to college, grad school, a foreign country. I miss that sense of a long life's journey stretching out in front of me, with enough time to do everything I might think about doing.

But now that I'm older, I suspect that vision was just an illusion. Now (and probably then, although I wasn't as aware of it), it seems that every time I choose to do something, several other doors close. The idea of significance might help order my choices.

Some part of me bristles at the idea of pursuing significance, though. There are days I just want to be able to relax, not to feel like my life is slipping away. I want to learn to live more presently in the moment. I want to stop always thinking about the next accomplishment that needs to be done. I want to still the voice in my head that says, "Sure it's great that your individual poem got published, but how are you going to get that book with a spine published and out into the world?"

Maybe I need to return to Thoreau's journal, or better yet, Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere journals. Maybe I need to simplify by focusing on the simple things that give me joy and pleasure: good food, good wine, a poem draft, a poem revision, time with friends, more time in the natural world, less time in front of screens. The journals of creative people remind us that a creative life expands to include all these things, while also questing for significance.

Of Spiders and Mockingbirds

Today is the birthday of E. B. White, probably most famous for writing Charlotte's Web. I remember the shock I felt in grad school, when I realized that one of the guys who wrote the Strunk and White guide was the same White who wrote Charlotte's Web. I'm always impressed by people who can write equally well in different genres, and also by people who write well for both adults and children.

I adored Charlotte's Web. It's probably one of the first books I read over and over again. I loved that the characters pull together against great odds and develop interesting, non-violent ways of resisting their oppression. Of course, I wouldn't have used that language at that time.

Charlotte's Web is why I'm not afraid of spiders. I suspect it's also the reason that I've been drawn to vegetarianism my whole life, although you wouldn't know it by the way I've been eating this week, which saw several days in which I ate meat several times a day.

I haven't gone back to reread Charlotte's Web as an adult. I suspect it would hold up well and hold my interest as an adult reader too.

Today is also the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn't read this book as a child; I read it the summer before 8th grade, the summer I turned 14, and it continues to entrance me. Two summers ago, I reread it, and it holds up well. I've heard tell of young reader today who sees the setting and the characters as totally unlike anything they've encountered, but I still know Southern people with an uncomfortable similarity to some of the uglier aspects of those characters. Even in this Internet age, there are still Southern towns that are sleepy throwbacks to an earlier time.

Somehow, I grew up without ever seeing the movie. I saw it during my last year of grad school. I came in one rainy Saturday to find my husband watching it on network T.V. I plunked myself down and was hooked instantly. I've watched it several times, and I always love it.

Maybe this afternoon I'll watch the movie again. Once again, I'll admire the pluckiness of Scout and admire the integrity of Atticus. I'll yearn for the explorations of my childhood. I'll wonder if any child these days can retain that level of innocence.

I wrote a poem that imagines Scout grown up. I won't post it today, since this post is long; I'll save it for a day this week when I don't have time to write as much. Plus, it's a somewhat depressing poem, and I don't want to post two depressing poems back to back.

Oil Spill Apocalypse

While I was away, one of my poems was posted at the Poets for Living Waters site, a site put up in response to the Gulf Coast oil spill. You can go here to see it if you scroll down; I've also pasted it below.

As you might sense from the title, I seem to be working on a season. The first pantoum I ever wrote was "Alternate Apocalypse," with that same first line. It talked about dealing with the reality of global warming, which wasn't the apocalypse I would have predicted, if you had talked to me in 1985. I expected nuclear war.

As the economy crashed, I wrote a different apocalypse pantoum, also with the same first line, which talked about economic apocalypse.

So, when I saw a call for poetic response to the oil spill, I couldn't resist another pantoum. I expect to keep writing them for the rest of my life. I'm not sure they'd make a good book all by themselves. I worry they'd be so depressing taken together that no one would buy such a book.

Still no oil washing up on our reefs and shores, although I can't help but think it's just a matter of time. The Gulf of Mexico is a big bowl, after all. I'm hoping to be proven wrong--that this potential apocalypse will be one of the apocalypses that I expect but don't ever see materialize.

Alternate Apocalypse #3


We expected mushroom clouds and radiation.
We didn’t anticipate a plume on the ocean floor,
an unstoppable gusher.
We thought we would run out of oil.

We didn’t anticipate a plume on the ocean floor.
We assumed precautions had been taken.
We thought we would run out of oil.
Now we worry the flow will never stop.

We assumed precautions had been taken.
We thought there was an emergency plan.
Now we worry the flow will never stop.
We face a future of oily seas.

We thought there was an emergency plan.
We thought they cared about the environment.
We face a future of oily seas,
a fishless existence our fate.

We thought they cared about the environment.
Now we watch migratory birds slicked with petroleum.
A fishless future our fate,
we cry over lost treasures.

Now we watch migratory birds slicked with petroleum.
We hear the stories of generations living on the water.
We cry over lost treasures,
marine animals, an ecosystem, an ocean, a planet.

We hear the stories of generations living on the water.
All these cultures will evaporate:
marine animals, an ecosystem, an ocean, a planet.
We expected mushroom clouds and radiation.

Singing Along to "Grease" in the Movie Theatre

Last night, we went to a Grease Sing-Along. It's the movie, in a traditional movie theatre, but each time there's a song, the lyrics appear, karaoke style, and the audience sings along. What fun, to be allowed, no encouraged, to sing in the movie theatre. What fun to revisit this movie. Our movie theatre also had an acting troupe who acted out some of the movie, a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I worried I might find it distracting, but I basically couldn't see it. Still, I loved the fact that there are young actors out there who want to do such a thing, to act out a movie that came out years before they were born.

I talked to one woman who said this was the 78th time she had seen this movie in the movie theatre (the only movie she had seen more than Grease was Star Wars). I, on the other hand, haven't seen the movie since it was in movie theatres back in 1978. It seems strange that with cable T.V. and videos and DVDs, that I wouldn't have seen it again, but I haven't.

I had forgotten how full of sex the movie is, and how full of sexual innuendo. When I saw it, the summer before 8th grade, I think that a lot of the sexy stuff flew right over my head. Yes, I had read Judy Blume's Forever, and I had read all those 1970's sex-positive books to help kids learn about their bodies, but the actual act was something I could just barely comprehend. Watching the movie again as an adult, I'm kind of shocked at the treatment of women; I didn't remember that aspect. I thought the movie captured very well that late adolescent stage where humans who are essentially children are making that transition to adulthood, figuring out how to treat each other, how to interact.

I had also forgotten how homosocial the movie is. That scene where the male actors are singing "Greased Lightning"--very sexy, very campy, very male bonding over vehicles.

Very strange too, to see these actors in their younger versions of themselves, to know what's going to happen to them later. The scene where Danny is trying to grope Sandy's bosom, and the knowledge that Olivia Newton-John would later battle breast cancer--it felt so disconcerting to me.

The soundtrack is so singable. I loved being in that theatre, hearing our voices swell above the soundtrack. I have listened to the soundtrack again and again in the 3 decades since the movie came out (on vinyl and CD--no MP3 yet) and have memorized the lyrics. Ah, the joys of repetition.

I also loved going to see this show because our theatre is one of 17 locations in the country where it's being shown. Periodically, I try to do things that I can only do down here, just to remind myself that I really do like living down here. I also try to break my routine of coming home from work and vegging on the sofa whilst watching bad television. Going out on a weeknight made me feel so adult, even if it was to go to a campy version of a movie from my late childhood/early adolescence (real grown ups would go to a wine tasting or something). It was a treat to eat popcorn for dinner while watching a quintessential summer flick.

Now it's back to work. Today is our last day of in-service days before the quarter starts on Monday. I've had lots of days of meetings, and I'm looking forward to a day that's less structured today. Maybe I can get organized a bit more, get readjusted to being back on land, back in the office.

What I Read During My Summer Vacation

First, a confession: I read no poetry on my vacation. For much of my vacation, I didn't have easy access to a computer or the Internet, so I read no blogs, no online journalism, no Wikipedia entries. Yup, it was back to the old-fashioned world of bound books written on paper and The Washington Post in the ink-stained fingers version (to be fair, the newspaper has mostly solved whatever problem it was that used to leave my fingers black after I read it, way back in the 1980's and 1990's).

I read novels. I'm always happy to discover that my attention span hasn't permanently shortened. I am still capable of diving deeply into a big book. It's much easier when I don't have to go to work.

I started off by reading Anna Karenina because I wanted to be free to read more modern novels during my travels. Nothing is worse than a plane yoyage with a book that is less than captivating. I blogged about my Tolstoy reading some weeks ago, so I won't rehash it here.

I decided to start my airline reading with One Day by David Nicholls, since it was the only paperback in my stack. This book takes us through the lives of two characters year by year, but on one day only, July 15. We see the two as they graduate from college and head off into the stormy years of early adulthood. We wonder if they're really right for each other. Occasionally, we see one or both of them in a particularly odious phase, but since it's one day, and by the next chapter a year has passed, we don't have the reader's dilemma of trying to care about characters who are unlovable. Instead, they seem complicated and realistic. It's a great novelistic device, and Nicholls uses it to full effect. There's quite a shocking twist near the end, but I left the book feeling satisfied. Nicholls claims to have been inspired by a several plot twists in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but I haven't had time to go back to think about this.

Next, I decided to tackle the biggest novel in the stack, The Passage by Justin Cronin. You've likely heard of it: an apocalyptic vampire novel, about a government experiment gone awry and the world goes smash. It's the first of a planned trilogy, and I did worry a bit that it would leave me hanging. Happily, that is not the case--the book has a natural ending, while leaving readers like me thirsty for more. As I was reading it, I kept thinking that if I was a graduate student in a department that allowed such topics, I'd love to write about the influences of Stephen King upon this novel. I expected to see echoes of Salem's Lot, King's vampire novel, but I saw more of The Stand. Much of the novel's battle between good and evil takes place in the desert Southwest, which made me wonder how many other apocalyptic depictions of similar battles take place there (King's The Stand does, for example). It's a great book, very literary for those people who like to dissect novels that way, but for those that don't, the literary bits don't slow down the trajectory of the thriller aspects of the novel. It's the longest novel I've read in some time (almost 800 pages), but I zipped right through it.

Next, I read a series of linked short stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I love linked short stories that give me a novelistic reading experience, and Egan is a master here. Great characters, great movement through time and place, and even some experimenting with form (the short story as PowerPoint presentation---I didn't think it could work, but it does).

I read 52 Loaves by William Alexander. I wanted to like this book. I heard the author interviewed on a Diane Rehm Show episode. I've found with many authors, and with this one too, once I've heard them interviewed on NPR shows, I've heard the best parts of the book. Alexander takes many side trips to explore the worlds of yeast, heat, flour, and monasteries. I just didn't care about some of the subjects, like pellagra, enough to want to read about them in detail. Other subjects, like his monastery experience, I'd have liked to hear more about. His decision to bake one loaf of bread using the exact same recipe each week seemed like a hokey device to get him a book deal; I'd have found it more interesting if he experimented more.

Then I turned my attention to The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes. He explores a time during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Science and the Arts (and to a lesser extent, Religion) weren't considered to be mutually exclusive. I'm still reading it and enjoying it immensely. It's a heavier book, and I'm appreciating that heft even more after the fluffiness of 52 Loaves.

Now, of course, it's back to work and the eternal quest to find time to do all the things I want to do, as I'm also putting in 40-50 hours of work each week and resisting the intellectual black hole of television.

Perhaps I read more poetry when I'm not on vacation because it's easier to dip in and out of volumes of poetry (the same reason that I write more poetry than anything else these days). Happily, I have a huge stack of volumes of poetry waiting for me now. More on that as I dive into them.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Well, I’m back from fighting pirates on the Chesapeake Bay—or were we the pirates? When you play with a 4 year old, it’s sometimes hard to tell. I’ve constructed a variety of forts, as much variety as you can have on a 37 foot sailboat. I’ve drawn pictures of monkeys, including a pirate monkey. I’ve written “every letter that exists” (my nephew’s request), which made me reflect on alphabets, and how few of them I can reproduce.

What else did I do? Let me reflect . . .

--I read great books. More on this in a later post. But I’ve had a fabulous time getting lost in fiction, both recently written and a classic.

--I helped prepare dinners for Vacation Bible School kids and helpers. Even though we don’t have an industrial kitchen at my church (weird zoning regulations don’t even allow us to have a regular stove like you’d have at our church), we had a great time.

--I heard the best Barbershop singing in America. My dad is a member of the Alexandria Harmonizers, and they had a huge concert on June 27. Not only did we get to hear them before they went on to place 5th in the International Competition in Philadelphia, we also heard the Westminster Chorus, who went on to win first place. We also heard all sorts of quartets. Great fun!

--I spent a week on my sister’s sailboat, with my spouse, my sister, her husband, and her son (the above-mentioned 4 year old). It’s always fascinating to me to spend time in such a different setting. It makes me think about all the things I think I need, and how living on a sailboat makes me reassess. In terms of clothes, do I really need as many clothes as I have, when I wear the same things week after week? Do I really need gourmet cooking or am I just as happy with simple meals?

--I enjoyed unseasonably cool weather, part of what made the time on the sailboat so enjoyable.

--I had fun with different art forms. My nephew loves to draw and paint, so we spent lots of time doing that. I had forgotten about the blendability of simple crayons. I spent time with the digital camera. I helped transform blankets into forts and movie theatres. We played dress up—sort of. My nephew needed a scabbard for his sword, and we played with different possibilities. We made puppets. Again, great fun.

--Playing with my nephew made me remember my favorite job. The year after undergraduate school, I worked in a summer care program for elementary school children. We went to movies, we had arts and crafts every day, we went to every local park, we read great books, we played outside and inside, and had a great summer. At the time, I made minimum wage with no benefits, which was fine for a summer, but not sustainable for a lifetime. What a shame.

--I watched chunks of The Lion King and Peter Pan, which gave me an opportunity to compare animation styles at opposite ends of the century. I'm not sure which I like better. Both struck me as gorgeous. It's also interesting to me that most children I've seen don't care about seeing a movie from beginning to end. Again, being with my nephew makes me think about narrative in different ways.

--I saw the show Rain at Wolf Trap. I don’t quite know how to explain this experience. The 4 musicians impersonate the Beatles at various points in their careers. There’s also a multi-media show. It was amazing. During parts of the show, we all sang. There I was, in a fabulous national park, as the full moon lit up the night sky, and our voices rose. I expect that when I’m 95 years old and slightly confused, I’ll remember seeing the Beatles, but it will have been this show.

In short, I had a wonderful vacation. I've returned rested and renewed--and plunged right back into a full work day yesterday, meetings and training sessions and no down time at all. I wish I had planned for a softer re-entry. But I'm happy to have had just the kind of vacation that I needed. I'm lucky in all sorts of ways: I have a great family with whom I enjoy spending vacation time, and I have a job waiting for my return, a job which I don't approach with dread.