The reading in Claremont

It was a nice event, with virtually a full house. Of course, it helps if there aren’t that many chairs to begin with! But I was pleased with the turnout. I read for about twenty to thirty minutes. I knew I needed to wrap it up, though, when I heard some gentle snoring from the audience — my fruit poems were especially soothing to an elderly woman in the second row!

Thanks to all who made it out to Claremont, and especially to Lucia Galloway, whose stellar introduction made me sound like an international superstar (!), and to Marcyn Clements, the event’s organizer, who also took these lovely photographs.

Happy 30th Anniversary to my folks!

 

Well, because I doubt that I will have any time in the next couple of days to post a real post (I’m finishing up sending out the notices for the persona issue of Poemeleon), I thought I’d take just a moment to post this photo from my parents’  April 1978 wedding.

That’s me holding the basket of flowers. I’m six going on seven. The very tall man with his head turned in conversation is Uncle Joe (from the previous post) and the woman at the far left looking into the camera is my Aunt Fox who was just recently here visiting with her husband and two kids (from another previous post). The chapel is on the road up to Mt. Baldy. We recently drove past it, and I remember being surprised that I recognized it after so many years. (Again, I posted something about the chapel during the winter, right after our trip to play in the snow.) And of course, that’s my Dad and my Stepmom in the center, looking toward the camera.

I dredged up some old photographs so I could make a gift for my folks for their anniversary. It’s pretty funny to see what we all looked like back then. I guess I look pretty much the same, except, of course, taller. Usually it’s hard to tell which parent a child looks like the most. In my case, I look a lot like my dad. And from this photo, I can see a resemblance between my youngest son and myself. Some of his facial features are similar to my own at that age, and the hair color, though they’ve both inherited my husband’s physique and slightly darker skin tone. I was already wearing glasses by that age, though for whatever reason I don’t have them in this photo. Maybe I took them off, or maybe they’re on my head (where I usually shoved them), or maybe I was between pairs (I was notorious for losing/breaking/sitting on them, sometimes accidentally, sometimes accidentally on purpose).

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been thirty years. I suppose I have marriage on the brain these days. This was, of course, my dad’s second marriage. Somehow, through the usual for better and for worse -in sickness and in health nonsense, they’ve managed to keep it wired together. I guess sometimes the second time’s the charm.

Anyway, so much for the trip down memory lane. Have a good rest of the weekend, and hope to see some of you at my reading tomorrow! 

Vote for Joe!

My uncle, Joe Zenisek, is up for a Working Wonders award from the Oregon Education Association. Please have a look at the video (at the bottom of this post) and then click here to cast your vote.

He was one of the greatest uncles a kid could ever imagine having — energetic, goofy, and adventurous. We’d sit on the front porch at my grandma’s house in Cleveland and he’d play some kickass banjo and harmonica. We played frisbee in the street, and the one year I was there in winter he took me sledding. I loved the stories about how he and his brothers hitchhiked across the U.S.

It’s probably because I was so fond of him that I payed attention to what he was doing and wanted to follow his lead. When I was really young he worked as a special ed instructor. A few years later he joined the Peace Corps, which meant living abroad in the Phillipines, where he met and married his wife. He sent me letters and gifts — one of my favorites was a big floppy straw hat — and set me up with a pen pal. He’s been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember, and has devoted his life to teaching science, a passion he passed on to son, Serge, who won every local science fair all through high school, moving on to compete in regional and national competitions, for his work with recombinant DNA.

The summer between Serge’s senior year and his first year of college the family went on a backpacking trip. They had just returned home when Serge complained of feeling funny. He then blacked out. He spent the next few months (the time frame is a little fuzzy, and I can’t find any old e-mail from them to corroborate) in ICU, and then recovery. For a while he couldn’t speak, and even lost some of his short term memory function. Joe took the year off from teaching and he and his wife worked 24/7 to assist in Serge’s recovery. As a result, the following year Serge was finally able to begin at Yale. They were in town briefly last year, and we made it a point to have dinner together. My kids think Uncle Joe is the bees knees.

So watch the video and vote for Joe. You don’t have to be a member of OEA or even live in Oregon to vote; I just did. 

Ah, young love, marriage, and the occasional (suppressed) impulse to walk out into traffic.

It’s a little after six a.m. and I’m debating about what to fill this space with today. I missed Earth Day yesterday, but was thrilled to see Gayle’s post about how, when she was a kid, she wrote to then-president Jimmy Carter to ask what she could do about pollution. He sent her a case of garbage bags with Woodsy Owl on them and she used them to clean up the beach near her home.

When I think back, the only high-profile person (and I’m using this term loosely) that I ever wrote to was Shaun Cassidy, asking him to come to dinner. I fully expected him to show up for meat loaf some night. I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even consider writing a letter to the president. I was oblivious to issues that might affect the fate of the planet; instead, I was lusting after an older man.

Well, lust is probably too strong a word.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the biological urge to find a mate starts pretty early. My son Jacob received a flower from a girl yesterday, and he spent the rest of the afternoon wondering why she gave it to him and not one of her girlfriends. He speculated it was because she likes him. She’s the on-again/off-again best friend of the girl he’s had a crush on for a couple of years. Love triangle here we come.

You might find it amusing to know that, thanks to some school friends, he has acquired a few new vocabulary words that I have been reluctant (but ultimately willing) to define for him. And in his travels on the internet, after an internet search for toys, he came back and asked me what a dildo was. That I did not explain. Nor did I even mention the bookmark I deleted. He had been searching for Halloween masks and came across this very odd looking one: latex, with eye holes, and nostril holes, but nothing else. When I looked at the url it was something about fetishes. Curious, I clicked around a bit to see what else he might have looked at. Most of it was fairly tame, but there were a few pages that I found disturbing (I won’t even go into them here, because I don’t want people who are looking for these things to find my blog!), and I’m not easily disturbed. Needless to say, I turned on the parental controls so that hopefully websites like that won’t come up any more.

Ah. Back to the topic of young love. Sometimes we do stupid things when we’re in love. Like, get married. Why would anyone ever want to get married, considering all of the inevitable heartache.
(Yes, call my cynical, but I have come to believe the heartache is inevitable.)

I have a couple of friends (you know who you are) in the midst of divorce. I wish I could say that I have some lake-compound commune where we could all live in perfect harmony (insert seventies coke commercial here), but I don’t. I don’t even have any sage advice. All I can offer is a Scrabble game, and half of my winter omelet from Simple Simon’s. Diversion, and comfort food. It’s not much, but it’s what I currently have to offer.

And you never know — the second time around could be the charm. My dad and his second wife are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary on a Hawaiian cruise as I write this.

Events coming up next Sunday

Just a reminder that I will be the featured reader next Sunday, 2 p.m., at the Claremont Public Library, as part of the Friends of the Claremont Library poetry series. The address is 208 Harvard St., Claremont, CA. I will have pre-order information for my new book, as well as chapbooks for sale.

Also, Poemeleon contributors Lucia Galloway, Judy Kronenfeld, and Ruth Nolan, as well as Rattle editor Timothy Green, are reading at Beyond Baroque next Sunday. It will begin at 4 p.m., so if you have a speedy car you can race from my reading to theirs (I’m considering it). The reading is sponsored by John Amen/The Pedestal Magazine.