Five, seven, and five
And a hat tip to nature.
How hard can it be?
Writing and counting.
These are not what bring the rain.
It’s the clever twist.
How my writing feels:
Strive for orchids; make crabgrass.
Want art? Buy a book.
You can do better.
Show me your greatest haiku.
I will send you art.
I should probably diversify and write about other Librarians I Have Known (and who made me laugh and grow), but I feel like that might be overstepping for people who don’t like their stories splashed around or who might write their own stories someday.
So here is another story about my dad. Apparently I told this story in 2007 when he retired, but that was a whole other blog and platform, so let’s trot it out again.
When I was in grade school, my dad ran a library in northern Illinois. I seem to recall that when he took the job, he was chagrined when the local paper ran an article highlighting the dubious honor of his being the first male library director in the town’s history.
He would be so much more chagrined a few years later.
My dad loved music. He loved booze. He especially loved going to concerts where booze was served. So when I was old enough to stay home by myself, my parents would take advantage of this whenever they heard someone good might be playing in a 50-mile radius. This included school nights.
I don’t remember where they went on this particular school night, but my dad really tied one on. I have unluckily inherited his genes and can tell you that the hangover he had the next morning was bad enough that his eyeballs hurt but not so bad that he could not get out of bed. Like all good troopers, if he was up, he was off to the office.
Too bad for him, he was the first male director in the library’s history, and the library did not have a daytime security guard. So when a … what are we calling vagrants these days? … when an unhinged homeless guy came in and kicked up a fuss, my dad was the macho stud in charge who had to deal with it.
So my dad blearily wandered over to the guy and tried to get him to calm down. But the guy was incoherent and my dad—surprise, surprise—was off his game. In the midst of the altercation, the vagrant started flailing around and somehow managed to clout my dad on the ear. My dad gave up trying to placate the guy and was hustling him out the door and away from the alarmed staff when the cops showed up and took this fellow away to sleep it off in the drunk tank.
My dad came home, told the story with great amusement – not least of all amusement that the guy would probably feel as lousy the next morning as my dad had felt that day. Then my dad took several aspirin for his own hangover and went to bed.
Well, I’d been to the movies. I’d seen TV shows. I knew fights were not a big deal. And Daddy seemed just fine! Imagine my shock, then, when the next day one of the teachers at my grade school came up to me and in hushed tones asked if my father was doing all right, handing me a clipping from the local paper with the headline, “Man Slugs Librarian.”
My poor dad. He was so embarrassed. “I guess I’m glad he smacked me and not [one of the many women] on staff, but jeez, I look like a creampuff!”
I’m pleased to report his ear survived the assault and his ego survived the article, and he didn’t even declare a grudge match against the local homeless population, who went on to spend many more happy years sleeping in the periodicals section and bathing in the library’s public bathrooms. He might have declared a private war with the press, but as far as I know, he never had another article quite like that one to live down!
When I saw that this was a National Day, I chuckled. To me, this phrase is always sarcastic. But apparently this day is using the phrase in earnest.
How many jellybeans in the jar? How many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
I have no idea, and I haven’t seen the jar. Let’s say 2,500 and 250.
What happens when we die? Where do rainbows go?
Not a clue. My wild guess: We become one with the zeitgeist, and so do the rainbows.
Does the dog barking mean that burglars will skip my house? I’ll go with yes: She barks a lot and we have never been burgled.
These days, my unanswerable questions are much more mundane: Why did I come into the kitchen? What appointment am I forgetting? Did I forget to post to social media AGAIN?
Would you like to take a wild guess?
I have a love-hate relationship with gardening.
I love flowers and trees.
I hate picking up sticks and weeding.
I did read a thing once that compared pulling weeds up by the roots to ripping someone’s spine out of their body and letting it dangle between your fingers, which I’m only a little embarrassed to admit made me enjoy it more. Now if they’d only find a similar metaphor for the endless stooping and scooping involved in picking up fallen branches and twigs…
I’m a big bulb person. Tulips are my favorite flower anyway, and I just love that you can plant things in the fall and ignore everything until brilliant colors pop up with no effort for at least a couple spring seasons before you have to dig them up and start again.
I am not good with potted flowers or things that are high maintenance. Total Black Thumb when it comes to that. I also resent annuals. If it doesn’t come back in subsequent years, what is the point? Annuals are for crops. Ornamentals should not require that much effort.
But oh, when I saunter through gardens and parks, I am enchanted. Like so many things, I don’t want to do the work. I want to skip to the good part where things are pretty and smell good. Is that so wrong?
I have to admit, I only decided to blog about this day because Borinqueneers was such a weird word and I’d never heard it.
Turns out the Borinqueneers are the 65th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army. It comes from the indigenous name for Puerto Rico—which fits since it’s Puerto Rican regiment that has been around since the 1900s. It participated in World War I, defending the Panama Canal. The regiment was all over the place during World War II—Africa, France, Germany.
The Korean War is the meatiest part of the history of the Borinqueneers. They were credited with helping the 1st Marine Division get back to Hungnam. It’s a great story, too detailed to tell here. Everything went to hell in 1952, when the officer staff was replaced with “Continental” (white) U.S. officers and cultural problems ensued stemming from moustaches and language barriers, leading to the largest mass court-martial of the war. It took two months for the issue to come to light and government officials to get together and sort everything out. At that point, the sentences were remitted and everyone was pardoned. I think they were all exonerated, but it took a dashed long time.
Over time, the regiment got split up. The 1st battalion joined the 92nd Infantry and served in Global War on Terrorism and the Iraq War. The rest of the regiment is now the Puerto Rican National Guard.
So now I know something I didn’t know before, and I have another topic I want to read up on. Anyone else know more about this and have a good book they recommend?
When I was a tot, I wanted a sibling. Partly because I wanted someone who had no choice but to hang out with me (I was unclear on the concept, obviously), and partly because I wanted my mom and dad to yell at someone who wasn’t me once in a while. (They argued with each other, but that didn’t count because that was always slightly alarming. I wanted someone else to get in my kind of trouble.)
Then I hit grade school and realized that being an only child was pretty awesome. I didn’t have to share a bedroom or toys or clothes, like my friends did. I had the full focus of both my parents, all my grandparents, an uncle, and a bunch of my parents’ friends—which was good and bad, but at least I didn’t get in trouble for things my sibling did. I didn’t have some Tasmanian devil whirling through the house destroying my stuff. I counted myself lucky.
Then my parents went through a real dark spell and I started to regret that I was the only other person in the house. At one point, they contemplated divorce and I thought about how nice it would be to have a sibling to help examine the situation. I had imaginary conversations with a formless being in the bunk bed above me as I drifted off to sleep: “They’re both nuts, right? He’s a jerk. She’s a shrew. How did we turn out so normal? It’s a miracle.”
Eventually my parents sorted out their differences. I hit puberty and the whole tight-knit family unit thing stretched a little. I had friends who treated me like a sister and vice versa. I stopped thinking about it.
Then I met the hubs. Before he proposed, we had a lot of long discussions about whether to have kids, how to raise kids, what if we couldn’t have kids, blah blah blah.
We were old, but we had a kid. Just the one. He was perfect. He was a handful. He was expensive. He was everything, and he was enough.
I asked him if he’d ever wanted a sibling, and his story was similar to mine. “I did, sometimes. Then I saw my friend and her brother. Too loud, too hostile too everything.”
When my dad died, my mom and I spent the next week at her house drinking heavily, looking at photos, and telling stories. It occurred to me then (and has popped to mind intermittently since that time) that when my mom dies, my only recourse for shared memories will be to barge in on my uncle. I am pretty sure his wife would find it hilarious, but it can take a while to crank-start my uncle before the stories start coming, and I honestly don’t know if he or I have that much time left.
So I will probably wish I had a sibling when all that goes down. Assuming our next-gen only child is off living his own life, the hubs will be the stuckee. Anyone want to start a pool on how long he’ll put up with drunken wallering before he takes the path of sanity and flees for the golf course?
As a child of the 70s and 80s, I remember exactly two eight-tracks in my family home, and they were not mine, so I have no idea what they were, only that there were two of them and we could not play them because we did not have a player. It was all vinyl, all the time, except for cassettes that we used to tape things off the radio. We skipped right from albums to CDs, and then I took the next step to digital. My dad was very excited when I gave him an iPod preloaded with a bajllion blues albums.
So instead, I give you my husband’s eight-track memory.
When I was a kid, it was very exciting when we got a new station wagon, and my mom got an 8-track installed in it. It didn’t come with the car, my mom paid extra. She listened to a lot of music, so we did too.
When I was 9 or 10, we took that car from Indiana to Knoxville and then on to Bradenton. This was the trip where, for reasons I can’t recall, we took a different route to Tennessee and my mom let my older brother, who was 16, practice driving. We got to Cincinnati and wound up completely lost. At some point, my mom said, “I think we need to turn around,” and Dale just flipped the car around the moment she said it, without looking or anything. And then he slammed on the brakes because we were inches from a flight of stairs going down to … something. A subway? A river? No idea. But I remember my mom catching her breath and going, “OK, out. I’m going to drive now.”
The rule when my mom drove was that she would pick an album and then the kids as a unit got to pick an album.
So she’d play Johnny Cash.
And then we’d all go, “Play the Beatles.”
We had one Beatles eight-track, Hey Jude. Ten songs. She’d play it.
Then she’d play Charley Pride.
And then we’d all go, “Play the Beatles.”
So do that math. However many albums you can play on that drive—about ten hours—divided by two, that’s how many times we listened to that eight-track. As far as I can recall, it held up just fine. You hear about them wearing out fast, but that one did OK. I was more annoyed by how the tape would cut off in the middle of a song and do that little clicky thing where it changed tracks and then start up again.
I suppose it’s possible we did the same thing for the drive home, but I have no recollection of it. I can’t ever remember trips home. It’s all about the going for me.
I think this is kind of unfair—old writers are the ones who have been beaten down by rejection and need encouragement! But, OK.
I only know one young writer, and he ignores my encouragement, which is probably one of his smarter decisions.
But if he were to listen, here’s what I’d say.
You can excel if you trust yourself and the process.
Your worst writing is still worth doing. Write all the garbage in your head. Transcribe your verbal vomit. Keep a journal and get that first impression of your best and worst moments. It is all valuable. At some point you’ll gain some distance and clarity and you’ll find the diamonds in the dross.
Your experiences matter. Even if you think your life is boring, it is 100 percent worth writing about. Universal experiences are what make the unique ones accessible. Absorb everything that happens to you, even if it’s just hanging around your house. All your senses go into writing. The sight and taste of ice cream, the sound of tinnitus, the smell and feel of puppy fur. You have to force yourself to fully engage in an experience before you can write about it, and then you have to write about it before you forget all the nuance. Keep a journal. Your language will be truer to your emotions, and it will help you when you are writing at a remove and don’t have All the Feels like you did in the moment.
You are probably a better writer than you think, and you can be a better writer than you probably believe. When someone tells you that you have written something good, believe them. When someone offers pointers or suggestions, be receptive. Don’t get mad, get better. You don’t have to take every piece of advice you receive, but a wise person will listen before disregarding.
Don’t give up. I posted a bunch of Churchill quotes yesterday. Here’s something he didn’t say that is often ascribed to him: If you’re going through hell, keep going. It’s good advice. Writing is hard. It takes time, it take focus, it takes persistence and practice.
But it’s worth it!
Churchill is probably my favorite historical figure. I’ve mentioned before that one of my tattoos is “KBO”—that came from him.
Because he was far more eloquent and a much better writer than I can ever hope to be, I’ll let him speak for himself today:
“This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”
‘Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.’
“I have even asked myself, when meditating upon these points, whether you, Mr. Speaker, would admit the word ‘lousy’ as a Parliamentary expression in referring to the Administration, provided, of course, it was not intended in a contemptuous sense but purely as one of factual narration.”
“We cannot afford – we have no right – to look back. We must look forward.”
“I could not live without Champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.”
“You do you worst and we will do our best.”
“A gentleman does not have a ham sandwich without mustard.”
“It is better to be both right and consistent. But if you have to choose—you must choose to be right.”
You guys already know about my love of libraries and librarians. There has to be some kind of irony in the fact that my husband’s first wife was a librarian—and it’s probably only the narrowest twist of fate that she didn’t work for my dad at some point.
I never met her. I have no idea if I would have liked her. (I mean, signs point to no, but never say never, right?)
So today is a day to celebrate all those people who meant so much to me over the years. In celebration of that, I will tell two stories about my dearly departed dad who was my favorite librarian.
In the early days of his career, he got in trouble at the Sherman Oaks library when a snooty Joonyah-Leeeg-type woman came in and imperiously demanded a James Joyce book, The Dubliners. Only she said “Due-Blyners,” as if it were a French surname (duPonts, duBarrys, duBliners). When my dad finally caught on and blurted out “OH! DUHB-LINNERS!” she got very upset that he was “making fun of her” (he wasn’t, but he did when he got home that night), and he got a lecture.
He took this lesson to heart and applied it well throughout his career. He got really good at not speaking when he didn’t have to, and at keeping his eyes firmly locked in one place so they did not roll right out of his head. Although I was aware of this, it wasn’t until after he died that I quite realized how successful he was.
At some point, we inherited a pile of VHS tapes and a VCR. I started going through them to see how many were fuzzy recordings of old Errol Flynn movies and how many were actual family videos. On one of these tapes was a recording of a public access broadcast of my dad fighting a losing battle at some kind of meeting—county commission? City council? I don’t even remember what state this tape was from. (Florida? California?) But rather than skip through it after figuring out what it was, I sat there watching it with the kid, who was probably 16 or so. I was smirking because as I watched, I could see very clearly that my dad was getting more and more irritated and exasperated and really would have been quite happy to tell off this bunch of clods and come home to a glass of scotch. But he kept a lid on it until he was finally dismissed, at which point he thanked them all very nastily for their absolute and utterly predictable incompetence—at which point the kid turns to me in complete shock and goes “Why did he say that?!”
“Because he’s a bad loser? Because he had nothing to lose? What do you mean?”
“But why was he so grumpy? … Wait, you mean he was mad the WHOLE TIME?”
I burst out laughing. “Yes. You couldn’t see that? They weren’t listening to him and it was clear after five minutes that they were not going to do what he was asking, but they also weren’t going to drop it until everyone with a microphone got a chance to bloviate.”
The kid was dumbfounded. I suggested he watch it a few more times to study how to seethe internally while your face is busy Managing the Situation. He declined but did pay me the dubious compliment of saying, “I always thought that was a thing only you did. I didn’t know it ran in the family.”
So be nice to your librarians. No telling what they’re thinking!
Lucien Fewell shot James Clark after he apparently ran off with Lucien's 16-year-old sister. The murder trial that followed featured two Confederate generals and a former Virginia governor. What was the verdict? (also on Amazon.com)
Arwen Adams Bicknell 