Tag Archives: Michigan

by | December 12, 2012 · 5:30 am

Pearl Diving on My PC

My writing files are a mess.  Unfinished drafts and scraps which feel as if they are done (for now) cohabit my file drawers and banker boxes and teetering stacks.  I can deal with that kind of disorder.  What’s worse is that my writing files on the computer are a mess.  It’s harder for me to find files lost in computer chaos than in room mess.

So I started the long process of organizing my Word and WordPerfect files.  That’s when I found a folder full of old (really old) poems, some published, most not.  I’d forgotten that I had ever written them, but when I re-read them the old feelings came back and I remembered the complete writing process of many.

I’m not sure if this was a positive or negative event.  It seems somehow outside that sort of experience.  There’s a sense of déjà vu, but I also detect new layers in myself–strata added on in the years since I wrote those poems.

Here is one of my forgotten poems, published almost 200 years ago in 13th Moon.  I wrote it when I was  a grad student, newly moved to California from Michigan, feeling as if I’d left behind a part of my life.

Pearl diver in Japan

Pearl diver in Japan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

***

Pearl Diving Off Mikura Jima

Fingers persuading back wind-beaten hair

under the cotton bonnet

of Puritans and infants and Japanese pearl seekers,

she adjusts her jumpsuit,

arches her naked feet,

and waits for the girl going first.  Then she herself swoops

into the gelatinous,

pulsating ocean,

an entity

immune to the pull of the breeze.

*

Remember that dubbed horror movie we couldn’t shake

off–or wouldn’t?  It was when

we thought the world was fun

in its irritated state.

Last week I found myself asking–

I was thinking of mock

ascensions and the superiority of irony–can we be Virgins

again.

*

I want the miracle.

Torrential murmurs from the primordial conch,

Do you believe in magic?

Saying yes–both at once–we knew

it could happen,

the re-entry, the nacre increasing,

radiant as babyskin.

But the horror movie

is a recurrent rerun–

terrifying and allegedly harmless.

*

The Japanese woman returns from the deep and shakes her head,

swings her open, empty hands,

simple kites in the pull of the breeze.

###

Each image in the poem brings back a specific memory for me.  Watching pearl divers on television in my old house.  Reading mock ascensions in Plath.  Finding the spaniel with the ear hematoma.  No, don’t bother going back to look:  he’s there, but you can’t see him.

I’ve asked myself how it’s possible to remember the whole writing process for this poem and some of the others I discovered.  And why it felt important to remember.   I don’t really have an answer, though.

###

Thank you thank you thank you to Elizabeth at The Daily Creative Writer, Olivia Wolfe, and Nathan at manoftheword   for nodding back at my blog (the Very Inspiring Blogger award).  You’re all inspirations to me!

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by | December 10, 2012 · 6:00 am

Kicked Outside

The other day one of my Facebook friends reposted a status: “We had social networking when I was a kid, too.  It was called ‘Outside.’”   Apparently, I wasn’t the only kid who got kicked outside by her mother.

It would start with me switching the channel when Captain Kangaroo was over.  I wanted to watch The Shari Lewis Show because I’d heard other kids talking about it.  But my mother would hear the ending credits and poke her head around the corner from the kitchen.  “Time to go outside.”

“I don’t wanna.  I’m watching TV.”  Shari sang while her faithful sidekick Lambchop was introduced.

My mother walked into the room and turned the dial on the TV.  “Out,” she said.

“Can I just go in my room and make paper dolls?  I won’t make a mess.”

“Absolutely not.  Outside.”  My mother guided me to the door with her hand pushing my bottom.

Michigan weather ran the gamut from sunny to stormy–veering more toward the stormy side–but unless an actual tornado warning had been issued, I had to spend my Saturdays outside our house.  Daddy usually drove his garbage truck on Saturdays, so I would have enjoyed playing in the house, without worrying about his quicksilver temper igniting.  My mother didn’t see it that way.

Almost every house on Trimble Street had one or more kids in it, so very often I’d find a friend not far from my front yard.  We’d play sandbox trucks or army generals.  We’d hammer caps on the driveway.  On our bikes we flew all the way down busy Gull Road or, when those weren’t operational, we walked a mile to the cemetery to lie on graves.  When the sidewalks were snow-covered or patched with rough ice, we trudged in our rubber galoshes, the sides unbuttoned and flapping against our calves as we chatted and munched candy we’d stored like acorns in our snowsuit pockets.

I used to tell my mother that she made me go outside more than the other kids.  My proof was that I didn’t know all the TV programs they did.  I’ve caught up with the shows over the years and they are still the same today that they were then.  Playing, though, has changed, and that I can’t make up.  I guess I ought to thank my mother for kicking me outside.

###

Did you play outside when you were a kid?  Do you think you would be playing outside much if you were growing up today?

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by | November 17, 2012 · 6:00 am

Lake Erie

by guest blogger Wilma Kahn

When I was small, the lake was an omnipresent feature in my life. Large, too large to see it all, it curved into the horizon, so we could view but one small portion of the enormous sloshing drop. Held in the embrace of fragile fingers of land lay tons of water, gallons of waves.

I early developed the notion that I was part of the lake or it a part of me.  I have retained this feeling; and in fact, it has generalized to any large body of water—lake or sea. And I doubt that I am the only person who looks at Lake Michigan’s miraculous blue or the great grey Atlantic and says, “Mine.”

But back to my special lake, the dour, the grey-green, the shallow, the cloud-shrouded Erie.  Lake Erie’s rocks are granite, quartz, and shale; its shells, snail and clam. Its sand is taupe, soft, nonabrasive; its bottom sand or clay; its seaweed velvety green, swaying in the rhythm of the waves.

How did I spend hours and hours outside as a child, fair with reddish hair, without being burned by the sun? Was it the Lake Erie clouds? Or that most of the time I romped in the waves, a freshwater dolphin, a creature of sea? I jumped through the swells in arc after arc, or swam underwater, eyes open, blowing a fine stream of bubbles through my nose and tickling the legs of my friends. We stood on our hands, wheeled through the blue, grabbed gobs of sand, threw them, or let them melt from our hands. We crawled back onto land only after our fingertips had shriveled and our lips turned blue. But on land we shivered and felt heavy as rocks, no longer warmed and buoyed by the lake.

The shore changed each year, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, sometimes rock, sometimes sand, sometimes clay. In years of clay, we children became potters, digging up the dark residue of prehistoric plants, rubbing it on our arms and legs, attracting snapping horseflies. We fashioned cups and bowls and ashtrays for our parents, those huge indolent creatures who sat and smoked while we made art and slapped flies.

Sometimes we built cities of sand along the shore, with houses, roads, bridges, and moats.  Any house could have a pool—dig a few inches and the lake would well up, cool and pure. Stones, reeds, driftwood, sea glass, all lay close at hand for each architect’s use. I know the feel of hand smoothing sand, from crude heap to finished city. And at night, the tide would reclaim it all, suck it—sand, stick, and stone—into the watery matrix, roll it around, and spread it along the shore.

###

Do you consider the place where you grew up a source–or the source–of your creativity?

Aerial view of Grand View Beach on Lake Erie

Wilma Kahn is a writer and writing teacher living in Southwest Michigan. She’s a water baby at heart.

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by | November 3, 2012 · 5:55 am

Elegy for My Cousin

This poem features my dad’s Sunfish sailboat, which we sailed on our little lake in the 60s and early 70s.

The Sunfish on Eagle Lake

Dad bought it used, but only gently so.  We put more miles on that boat in the first summer than it had accumulated with its previous owner.  Dad and I were calm and talked little when we sailed together.  When my best friend and I took it out our goal was to sail past the docks of the boys with the big motorboats.  It was when my cousin Leah came from Chicago to visit that the boat’s potential for capsizing was realized.

***

“Underwater Sisters” was published by Prairie Wolf Press Review in their Fall 2010 issue.

Underwater Sisters

You wanted to switch places with my brother.

I told you how bored you’d be in Michigan,

that we can’t bottle fireflies on July nights,

have to go to  bed during daylight, like Alaska.

You tipped me over ten times to one, the Sunfish

sail dragging me under to a place I could hide

to spook you, but you were never scared of anything.

You knelt on the overturned boat and laughed.

I think you laughed.  Or were you crying?

When Michigan was all underwater with slippery

plants and bullfrogs, snakes even, and my hair

fanned out on the surface, time eroded.

Maybe you harvested a dangerous lakeseed,

put it in your pocket, and forgot it for too long.

Did I not tell you I was kidding, hiding

under the sail, not drowning?

I wrote this poem about my cousin Leah who passed away unexpectedly nine years ago, in September 2003.

With my little cousin Leah

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by | October 31, 2012 · 6:20 am

Story Problems

When I was four, I spent the seven-month Michigan winter playing in our basement.  Dad had built walls in opposite corners, one to create a laundry for Mom and the other for his workshop.  The open area just outside the workshop had become my playroom.  Nothing special designated it as mine. The floor was concrete, which Dad had painted with gray industrial paint.  Scotch tape didn’t hold up my drawings on the cinder block wall, and when I tried to nail a finger-painting to the gritty cement, I wasn’t strong enough and Dad’s hammer was too heavy.  The nail slipped to the floor, my painting torn.

Halloween party in the basement–I am not in the photo as I was too young to be up this late

What my playroom contained were wooden crates of costumes and dolls and books.  These served as portals to my imagination.  With the single light bulbs shining from overhead, and these possessions spread out before me, the room felt cozy and cheerful, no matter that the window up near the board-studded ceiling was blocked by a snow drift.

One day, as I sat cross-legged, engrossed in Little Red Riding Hood, my mother came out of the laundry room and sang me part of an old song:

School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days.
‘Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of a hick’ry stick.

She laughed and said, “I’m glad to see you’re so good at your 3Rs.”

I didn’t understand what she meant, so she explained to me that the basics of a good education were reading, writing, and arithmetic.  I could read and write and liked to add small sums on the notepads Dad brought me home from work.

She was right.  I loved all three subjects.  I couldn’t get enough of my Little Golden Books and each time we went to National grocery store, I begged for one of the 25-cent books with the foil spines.

The power of writing a sentence was already apparent to me.  There was a symmetry to subject-verb-direct object which thrilled me.

And who wouldn’t love to create beautiful numbers out of lines and curves and then find out that 2 + 2 always equals 4?  How serene I felt once I understood that certainty.

Upon starting school, I continued to relish all the subjects we studied.  Science, the partner of math, captivated me in all its forms—meteorology (keeping a temperature log), astrology (creating a scrapbook of the nine planets), biology (growing mold on potatoes).  I was complete, a whole person, half reading/writing and half math/science.

During arithmetic, we were presented with both numerical problems and story problems.  The latter were akin to reading mysteries.  It stands to reason that I would have loved story problems, but herein lies a problem.  A problem related to writing memoir.  No matter how much I think about it, I can’t remember whether I preferred numerical or story problems.  It seems that I ought to know the answer to that, but the experience is long forgotten or disremembered.

Along with the absence of that memory is another mystery.  I don’t know where I lost the math side of me and became identified with only one side, the reading/writing side.  How did something that seemed so fresh and interesting to me as a child become a burden by junior high?  If I could remember how I felt about story problems could I find the answer?

Tristine Rainer, in her book Your Life as Story, gives a variety of tricks to retrieve memories.  Her tricks include:

  1. study photos as “memory sparkers”
  2. listen to music from the time period
  3. re-visit the floor plan of your old home
  4. let your body remember through an action or movement

As I work on my memoir, sometimes I can’t remember important parts of my story, and I use Rainer’s ideas.  For me, internet research into a time period sometimes helps.  So do old television shows, since I am of the first serious TV generation.

If I want to solve the mystery of my dislike of math, maybe I should follow Rainer’s 4th trick and get my hands on an old arithmetic textbook and start solving problems.

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