Friday's Poem

On Collaboration

If you bring an umbrella, I will bring rain.

If you bring a pasture, I’ll be cricket, or cow.

If you bring shoes, I will offer my feet.

If you come with four walls, I’ll have a table, two chairs.

If you plow, I’ll follow with seeds.

If you lay a floor, I will prop palm fronds for a roof.

If you write a letter, I’ll lick the stamp.

If you come with flashcards, I’ll bring my best guesses.

If you have a canvas, I will stretch.

If you read a book, I will dog ear pages.

If only your right leg remains, I’ll hop on my left one.

If you come with nothing, I will throw a vase of clay to keep it in.

Jennifer Wheelock 2009

Hump Day Manners--Trash Talk

It's Wednesday. I think. To be honest, this week Monday felt like I was working on Sunday. By Tuesday I was sure it had to be Friday. But I digress. 

It's Wednesday, and it's trash day. Today's manners post is about not being a jerk to the people who pick up your trash. I was noticing in my neighborhood this morning how people, in general, respond in one of two ways to the men and women who are collecting their rotten banana peels, dog shit, coffee grounds, used tissues, and recycled vodka bottles. They either ignore them altogether, or they act mildly irritated by their intrusion into the neighborhood. Why is this? It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. And you'd be better be glad they do. Anybody in New York during the garbage collectors' strike?

I've always been averse to a hierarchy of treatment toward others. Why should I treat my doctor with respect and my trash collector with disdain? Both offer valuable services. Why should I coo over my hair stylist and tip him lavishly and treat the woman at the dry cleaner with bitter impatience. Oh god, maybe I'm a socialist. Or Danish.

Whatever. I suppose I do have egalitarian tendencies. One of my mother's favorite quotes is, "There but for the grace of God go I." (She's also fond of saying, "If you're too lazy to make the bed, why not just stay in it?") But it's really my father who lives by this creed. He treats everyone--pharmacist to farmer--with the same degree of respect. I worked for a while, when I lived in Hollywood, for a TV celebrity. He used to run out when the garbage collectors rolled up and dole out hundred dollar bills to each of them. And he'd say to me, "No one ever shows appreciation for what they do." Now, I'm not suggesting we all start tipping the trash men. But I do try to remind myself daily that one day I could be the garbage collector, or the waiter, or the person mowing your yard. When I walk through the park, if I speak to my neighbor who owns the local gift shop, I also try to speak to the guy who sleeps on the bench. 

Sure, there are days when I'm rude and impatient. But if it's one of those days, I don't pick favorites. I'm as rude to the banker as I am to store clerk or the garbage collector. 

So spend one day--tomorrow maybe?--paying attention to how you dole out patience and kindness. Do you treat your peers at work with deference and the maintenance workers with indifference? If so, let me introduce you to my dad.

Hump Day Manners

My friend Michele suggested I start a Wednesday advice column on etiquette for the New World. I hate to disappoint her, so today is the first installment. And, in typical fashion, I'm not going to wait for you to ASK me for advice, I'm going to offer it unsolicited. We'll start easy, with just a few behaviors I see regularly that I think--in the interest of living a better life in a better world--should cease and desist:

1. spitting on the sidewalk. Unless you're choking to death on a ball of phlegm or have swallowed a small rodent, wait until you find a toilet, a sink, or an area overgrown with ivy.

2. tossing your cigarette butt onto the ground. It is, apparently a little known fact that cigarette filters are resistant to degradation. They are made from cellulose acetate. They contain the chemicals filtered from the cigarettes, which can leach into our water supplies. And they can start fires. That thing in your car, under the radio? That's an ashtray.

3. waiting until you get up to the drive-through ATM to fill out your deposit slip and count your money. Reasons are self-evident to all but the most self-absorbed.

4. leaving your shopping cart in the middle of the parking space or lot. I mean really. Are you THAT lazy? 

5. not picking up the apples that rolled off the top of the pile onto the grocery store floor when you were fishing for your perfect, unbruised, shiny Red Delicious. Don't make me throw one at your head.

6. talking on your mobile phone while interacting with a store clerk. Okay, I admit to having done this. But it's just so rude. What if the clerk did the same thing? We'd be livid.

7. parking on or over the line and thus taking up two parking spaces instead of one. Your car is just really not THAT special. If you're that worried about door dings, leave it in the garage.

8. showing up empty handed. Do you want to be invited back?

9. not wiping down the gym equipment after you've sweated all over it. Ew. Your mother doesn't work out here.

10. Giving unsolicited advice. OOPS.

For my friend: Friday's poem. Not really Friday. Not really a poem.

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Poem for Friday

This Friday's poem is by Pablo Neruda. It is a nod to the little things that make our lives pleasurable, and tasty. And a nod to the margarita I'll surely have later.

Ode To Salt

This salt
in the saltcellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me,
but
it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those solitudes
when I heard
the voice of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a broken
voice,
a mournful
song.

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.

And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food. Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste infinitude.

Initial Thoughts

As we were unpacking some of her grandmother's ceramic dishes and kitchen platters yesterday, Andrea showed me tiny initials etched into the bottom of each piece. These aren't the ceramicists' initials. The pieces were all signed by the artists who made them. The initials belong to Andrea's grandmother herself, who announced ownership of serving vessels by carving her own initials next to the artists'. If we name and christen yachts, why not gravy boats?

I asked if grandmother had grown up during the Depression. Yes, she had.

Both my mother and father, products of the Great Depression, have a tendency to sign their initials or names on items that belong to them. All of my mother's books--like the high school English Lit textbook she saved and gave to me--have her name written in perfect cursive inside the front covers. My dad once wrote his last name on every golf club head cover in his set, and also on the outside of the bag. He often wrote his name on the underside of baseball cap bills or inside golf hats (to say nothing of his more humorous habit of writing "front" and "back" on the appropriate ends of his golf hats--on the OUTSIDE--so he could put them on quickly and correctly). My sister and brother-in-law gave him an expensive silver lighter one year for his birthday, before he quit smoking. Within minutes of unwrapping it, he was in his workroom etching tiny initials--NTW--into it with a nail. It never occurred to him to have it engraved professionally, much to my sister's chagrin. My mother puts her name on umbrella handles, her initials on magazines she lends to friends. 

So what is this near-obsession with laying claim to things? Maybe it's the consequence of having very little in the first place and working damn hard for what you do have. Whatever the reason, it makes me think: What if we were as eager to initial our thoughts and actions? What if after every human interaction we had to take an indelible marker that writes on air and scribble our monikers on the moment? What if each time I accidentally dinged someone's car door with my own, I had to write my name beside the dent? What if we had to initial mean-spirited thoughts and hang them on our heads, or--if they're about other people--write them down, sign them, and give them to the people about whom we are thinking them? What if every person who walks by a homeless person or zooms past a stray dog on the side of the road had to sign his or her name on the body of the one in need? What if when you're too lazy to return the grocery story cart and you leave it in a parking space, you have to tie a tag around it that bears your signature?

There's something about writing it down--even if only metaphorically--that makes something more real. My mom probably thinks writing her initials on the bottom of a table lamp makes it more "hers." Once when I was teaching college writing, a student in my class muttered "faggot." I don't even remember if it was about a classmate or a character in a book we were reading. But my reaction was to have him--and every student who giggled about it--get out a piece of paper and write down every derogatory term they could think of for races and classes and types of people. Then they had to sign their names and hand it in. I explained that I didn't want terms they used or condoned, just ones they'd heard or seen in the course of their lives. 

They refused at first. They were mortified. They said that writing it down made it permanent and made them feel like they "meant it more" and that if they signed it I would have it in my files and . . . My point exactly.

So, here's to Andrea's grandmother and my parents and the idea of initialing everything--laying claim. While using a Sharpie to sign a coffee mug might be a little silly, I'm going to see what it's like to sign metaphorically everything I do and think for a while. Maybe I'll be a better person.

A Poem for Friday

My friend Mary wrote to me today and said that love is probably the most important thing in the world. Hard to contest that, I suppose. It made me think of one of my favorite poems. This will begin a pattern. From now on, Friday's blog entry will be a poem. Because poetry can help us live a better life in a better America.

Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 
And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 
Yet many a man is making friends with death 
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 
It well may be that in a difficult hour, 
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 
Or nagged by want past resolution's power, 
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 
Or trade the memory of this night for food. 
It well may be. I do not think I would.