"Mildred Howarter" by Leslie Mundwiler

Mildred Howarter

by Leslie Mundwiler

Who were the great? Question from the Taoists,

from India's philosophers. Teacher's questions

once upon a time, in fifth grade.

Mildred Howarter small and fragile, poised

as if always on the tips of her toes.

In sober colour--umber or navy--

contrasted with cream-white skin. Light moustache

I never missed staring at, or the gray

wisps in her black hair, pulled back in a bun.

We drove by her house, white shingles and black

shutters, twice a week, never stopped. What would

any parents have said, in defence of

their right to children and ignorance? I thought

she was dying, so often away from

class, a distant nearness when she was there.

What did I want to be? she asked. War planes

and glory, the classroom preparation

for a grand disappearance, shake of blue

cloth, bang and a puff of smoke. Dreaming to

fly I'd fly to dream. A pilot, I said,

the fantasy flat as soon as spoken.

Wealth didn't rate. Or fame. Her voice low

and quiet, we had to listen. Pasteur, she

told us about, Jonas Salk, Walter Reed.

What did we want to be? No one before

had given this such weight. The world in us.

Flying became something miserable

and selfish. I was ashamed to have cared

so little for what I was to become.

My friend Leslie Mundwiler, who died last November, was born the same year as I (1944), but in the United States. Declining the Vietnam War, he came to Canada in the sixties. He told me it was quite a tussle to squeeze everything he wanted into "Miss Howarter." I imagine the fourth stanza says what he wants to say about the patriotism he was leaving behind when he crossed the line. The contempt he has for the magical death buried in his childhood ambition gives me pause though, as does his contempt a stanza earlier for his parents' "right" to generation and ignorance. For Miss Howarter, he doesn't quite have contempt. A mutual friend of ours suggests maybe he would have done better to query her values too, they adding up to just one more alien intrusion. But we are social beings. Where is a ten-year-old to turn? There was a distance to close things in every direction for young Les, unbridgeable.

(The poem is copied from Miss Howarter's Fifth Grade by Leslie Mundwiler, Highbrow Books, 2013. Naturally I'll delete it if asked to do so by the copyright holder.)

Late breaking news—For a year I've thought of "Mildred Howarter" as a thirty line poem, filling one page in the collection, closing a section. Only now do I discover it continues overleaf; there is a second page to it, another thirty-five lines. No, no! I'm not prepared to adjust!

"Crossing Our Campground" by William Stafford

Crossing Our Campground

by William Stafford

Part of the time when I move it’s for
Bret. On the path my feet nimble along,
avoiding a root, adjusting easily to some
rough place and lightly stepping on.

This is for you, Bret, I think; this
is the way an old man walks who still
stays vigorous and strong, firm, alert,
holding on through the years for you—

The kind of old man you could be,
    or could have been.



Stafford wrote this poem about five years after his son Bret killed himself and just a few months before his own passing in 1993. I find it curiously moving how the role he has developed for himself as a kind of ordinary hero and model for the rest of us, as one who knows the better way, persists despite the catastrophe.

Readers my age (I'm almost seventy) will immediately link the title to Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar." We all took that in school way back when.

(I've copied this poem from The Way It Is, Graywolf Press, 1999. Of course I shall remove it should the copyright holder wish.)

"The Visitation" by Arthur Adamson

The Visitation

Death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore. — Revelation 21:4

by Arthur Adamson

I hear the black wings of mortality beating over my head
I hear hoofbeats in the night   I hear unearthly chords
sometimes it's hard to get up in the morning   especially in January
I'm lying in bed still in my pyjamas thinking
I should get out and do something   something to further history
someone's at the front door   a man and a woman
they are going to try to save me   of course anything is possible
the man tells me God has a message for the world
he reads a passage from Hosea   the two are standing
on my front steps   it's about thirty below
through the door ajar I look at them intently
as the man speaks his gloved finger in the Book
brushes the passage he quotes which is crudely underlined in ink
could these people possibly know something I don't know?
I study them for a clue   they look absolutely ordinary
now it's the women's turn   she tells me about the garden
the tree of knowledge   the serpent   the calamitous fall
outside the sun reverberates in cascades of light
off the snow   it's brilliant enough for an apocalypse
the world is a place of horror   hunger and war
they say   but God is about to change all that
he is going to introduce plenty   joy and peace everlasting
and I am willing to admit that anything is possible
so I thank them   they go   and I wonder   could they have been angels?

from A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing. 2007. Manitoba Writers Guild.


I like this poem a lot, probably because it reads cleanly and has got my bright wintry city in it, as well as promise of the bright comfortable old age I'm hoping for myself. I'm a few years younger than the poet, but we are both retired. Though we never met, we seem to have been at the University of Manitoba in one capacity or another over the same four decades! The poem's got the same kind of religiony stuff I would have picked up as an English student. I doubt if the writer actually got it from the man and woman who came to his door.

The extra spaces are an unpretentious modern touch. At least we would have called it modern half a century ago. I think they work well. The poet has also painted many pleasing pictures in various styles.

(I've copied this poem without seeking permission and will gladly remove it should the copyright holder object. That said, it's a shame how Canadian poets hide their lights under bushels!)

Matins

8:30 AM


First thing in the morning. My depression reminds me that, while I thought of myself as proceeding heroically at every point yesterday, the day was actually painful.

"Going through all those hothouse emotional states!" sneers Mobojobo, which is the name I give my depression. “You call it therapy, but it is not like you're achieving anything. It was painful, and today is going to be just like that again as the process continues -- if we can call it a process.

“I call it hell," continues my dolorous fiend, expert on the underworld as he presumes to be. "You can try to fool yourself all you want, but you're in a terrible way. Everything is terrible."

In response, I say, "Hey, Mobo, let me pick out all the downers with which you’ve seeded your account. You are telling me I do not have the courage to continue. Or you're telling me that I have the courage but its exercise will not lead to anything good etc. etc. “

I will no doubt do silly things and think silly things and be bothered by thinking obsessively about the woman who’s known as Lou some more. That will be a waste of time. And I will be down on myself with what a waste of time that is too, and I will worry about whether I can concentrate on Stewardship Campaign business when the Chair of the Committee and I meet to discuss team captain assignments at 1:30 this afternoon.

On the other hand, I note I have got out of bed. I stood in the hallway and spoke with my daughter for a couple of minutes as she was gathering her books together before leaving for school. She was out the door in good time so she could talk with teachers before class. She was determined to make up for the time she missed yesterday. Actually, she missed only one class, but it was her Advanced Placement English class. I am mildly ambitious for her there.

Just mildly. Some of the things they do in that class are exciting. For example, they reverse engineer professional revisions. They take competent though hardly outstanding bits of literary prose and pull out "special" words that may have been generated during the revision process by the writer. They try to guess what the common garden variety diction of the previous draft would have been. In this way the students are alerted to the world of reading vocabulary, for there are a pile of words we read but don't produce -- like arabesque, I remember arabesque. Tara knew the word from the ballet she took, but in the description of moldings? She probably had never paid attention to moldings before.

The chair she sat in like a burnished throne

I put on the coffee and opened the window to bring the temperature in the apartment down from 23 to 22 or 21. I made my bed. I walked the monthly bank statement that came yesterday to the three-hole punch that lives on top of the old gray filing cabinet at the other end of the living room. Then I brought it back and filed it in the appropriate gray binder, which lives on a shelf beneath the CD player at this end of the room. My apartment is neat enough but, the way I have the furntiture arranged, manoeuvring from one end to the other constitutes significant exercise—for somebody my age anyway.

From the bank statement I note that last month my expenses totalled a little less than $4,000. That includes the $736 Peter and his mother get. About the same amount—about $4000 I mean--came in during the month. It would be great if, now that government pensions are flowing for me, that were going to be the typical situation. I could live off investment income without touching principle. I had not thought that was going to be possible until the kids were through university.

It is not likely to be the typical situation however.

Looking more closely at the bank statement, I see two instalments of the old age security pension have been entered -- one right at the beginning of the period and the other right at the end. That inflates my income for the month by $516. But if we are only running an annual deficit of $6,000 we are in good shape! That's just a hundred bank shares. I got five thousand.

In conclusion, I can scrape along at the bottom of the class to which I was born for another ten years at least.

Amen.

Bottoming Out -- Shakespeare and Chagall

This is an etching Marc Chagall made for A Midsummer Night's Dream back in the 1950s. I love the colours. Apparently Picasso said that, after Matisse's death, only Chagall understood colour. And isn't that a great tree!

My daughter knows the Shakespeare play and filled me in on the details, but I prefer unfettered interpretation.

I see a young woman who finds herself about to marry. A lithesome winged red demon rushes to warn her. "Don't do it. Open your eyes. Your future husband is an ass."

But the young woman thinks, "He isn't really an ass. He only acts like an ass sometimes--like all men. Maybe I can improve him. Anyway, I see from your red colour that you are from Hell, demon. A good girl in white like me doesn't listen to spirits from that place."

Meanwhile, the groom thinks, "Don't I look good in this suit! I borrowed it from my brother."

Is that a fiddler in the green patch to the upper right--one of Chagall's famous rooftop fiddlers? He may be thinking, "Well, a wedding's a wedding, a gig is a gig. It's a living."

On the Surface of the Moon

On the Surface of the Moon

My name is Jay Stober, and I am 65 years old. I live in a town north of Fargo. Yes, we have a lot of winter here.

By trade I am a self therapist. That is, I clock in every morning and, for about eight hours a day, I work at bringing myself into mental well being. I have been doing this now for almost six years. The results are gratifying.

I'm good at my job. To be a good self therapist you may or may not need to be intelligent and knowledgeable, but you will definitely need humility. It has to be the right kind of humility -- humility without contrition. Contrition messes up humility something terrible. Sucks the therapy right out of it. Strive for humility. Forget contrition.

Hey, Jay, this is Anut Kase in Nebraska. Not to compete with North Dakota or anything, but winters aren’t so pleasant in Nebraska either. Great blog may I say! “Humility without contrition” is fantastic.

But can anyone become a self therapist? What's your take on drugs? Are there really neuro-chemical imbalances? How do you handle information glut? Psycho babble. There are so many people out there saying so many things.

Personally, I am at the end of my rope. No time for details, but that’s why I’m writing. What should I do?

The nice thing about being a self therapist is that I don’t have to have answers for other people’s problems. However, I guess I can share experiences. Once, when I was at the end of my rope, I just let it go.

Yeah? Cool! What happened?

This was at the end of the sixties. I went into free fall actually. I was twenty-six at the time. I had been clinging to the end of that rope for more than twenty years. I spun out into a psychotic episode that lasted about five months.

Wow! So? You’re still here. Do you recommend that route? What finally happened?

Well, as the poet writes:

In Beulah some say
the daughters of Albion
weave spaces for men to fall in

Hey, that's pretty! It's Blake isn't it? Sounds like Blake.

It’s Blake. My point is, if you are going to leap into the Void, you might first want to make sure the daughters of Albion are in place to catch you.

I take it you had failed to take that precaution?

The only daughter of Albion I knew back then had memorized all the witch’s speeches from Macbeth. "Double double, toil and trouble."

Oh-oh! Bummer. I think maybe she’s now moved to Nebraska.

It’s true. She’s currently in Lincoln and practicing psychotherapy, if you can imagine. Bald-faced therapy of others too--not the kind I practice. I could give you her address.

Thanks, no.

Anyway, as for what happened, as I say, I went free falling. Finally I landed on the surface of the moon.

Since the surface of the moon and parts of the Dakotas are not all that different, it took me a minute to figure out what had happened. But then I heard a guy from Houston who was radioing me.

"I got good news and bad news,” he said, his voice crackling the way radio voices did in those pre-digital days. “The good news is that you are the seventh man ever to step onto the surface of the moon.”

“What’s your bad news?” I asked.

“The bad news is that they just cut our budget, effective immediately. New administration. The sixties are finished."

I pondered this information.

"Does that mean you can’t tow me home?" I asked.

"It means I am no longer paid to answer your questions," crackled the guy from Houston. "Over and out."

That must have been a bad moment for you, Jay, stranded up there on the moon and no line home. Thanks for sharing.

Hey, wait. There are more prosaic details. Hopitalization, shock therapy, consulting with people... Hello?

Writing in the Cloud

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Friday, February 5, 2010
12:11 PM


Writing in the Cloud

A few days ago I went online to find the source of the expression "writing in the cloud." In the process, I came upon an engaging web page produced by a young woman named Beata Martins.

Beata appears to be a teacher of English as a Second Language. Hey, I used to be a teacher of ESL!

Beata recently cut back her hours of gainful employment so that she can spend more time “writing in the cloud,” that is, develop her writing by posting to her blog and other virtual places short of actually publishing in the traditional manner. (She’s not a hundred percent sure of her talent.)

Wasn't that at least one rationale for my cutting back my hours years ago?

While sitting at the front of her classroom supervising university entrance examinations, Beata sometimes does creative writing exercises. So did I. Her results (“500 Wrong Words”) may be happier than mine...but let me not pick up on every opportunity to sell myself short!

I appreciated a dream Beata shared. She had it just after deciding to teach less, write more.

In this dream, her husband wakes her earlier than usual to share a discovery. He puts his finger to his lips as he moves to the wall and draws aside drapery. Lo, there is a window neither of them previously knew existed. Nothing spooky. The new window opens onto the same garden the two already know and love.

That was enough to move me to write Beata. I told her she was lucky in her husband, and, by the by, gave her the story of my life and hard times.

She replied too.

This experience got me back to working in “the cloud.” I started posting to my blog again after a seven month absence.

It also got me thinking about dreams some more.

As it happened, Eugene Gendlin's Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams came from the library again a day later. I had read it a couple of years ago. This time around, I find I am ready to identify with Gendlin’s characters as parts of myself, piggybacking on their therapy shamelessly. I agonize with them as they move forward—or try to.

So now I’m driving the freeways of Los Angeles with a young high speed courier named James. James came out to California a year ago in the hopes of becoming a star, but so far he hasn’t been able to line up as much as a single audition. Being a high speed courier isn’t just poorly paid, it’s damned stressful. When, if ever, will it be time for James to give up and go back to Kansas?

(The original dream is discussed the book by Gendlin as “Mark’s Dream,” pages 62-68.)