POETS Day! The Transcendent Shades Cahaba

We spent the last two weekends clearing bramble and mischievous growth. After a miserable bout of mimosa stump clearing, I asked a horticulturalist neighbor about tilling to make way for a flower bed. He warned me off it. There are some seeds—monkey grass was the pertinent one—that lay dormant for years or decades just waiting for an earnest attempt at rose bed preparation and once awakened are up for a drawn-out fight. He recommended we forgo the tilling workout and lay down cardboard, cover it with landscaping fabric, and then toss on mulch in lieu of laboring with a hand tool for untold hours in Alabama heat and humidity.

It’s as if he told me he had a failsafe, side effect free, weight loss miracle and handed me a box of Chips Ahoy. We did what he said.

Gardening turns out to be fun. In addition to our new rose plants (two Chicago, a Tropicana, and one with a missing label but we think it was De la Soul or something), an assortment of bright things inhabiting a broken Big Green Egg that’s now a planter, and some promissory edible flowers from Idaho, we have Lane, my Fresno Chili plant. If you’ve had children you know what it’s like welcoming a Fresno Chili plant into your life. Suddenly there are Epsom salts, 5-10-10 NPK orders, spray bottles, and sitters. It’s intensive, but there are only so many daylight hours.

Do the right thing. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Give your chili plant (or lesser garden thing) proper care. Slip out of work and start the weekend off a few hours before The Man’s scheduled time. Permission? You don’t need that. Not when there are crops to plant. Here’s a little verse to kick start things for you.

***

My high school’s administration decided for us that our senior yearbook would be dedicated to Betty Caldwell. They highjacked our senior fund too. We paid for a modernish sculpture that was supposed to convey the impression of a fish or something. We paid for a plaque bearing “Gift of the Senior Class of 1991” to go with it. My son is now a senior at the same school and in the intervening thirty-three years some cooler head removed the monstrosity from its position near the auditorium entrance and put it… I haven’t seen it. I like to imagine it’s in a “Top Men” basement under the library.

The shame about the administration dedicating in locum alumni is that we didn’t get to dedicate the yearbook to Mrs. Caldwell ourselves, which we would have. Everybody but Barbara loved 11^th grade English and her electives – Southern Lit and Continental Fiction – were always full of kids making Madam Bovary cracks and saying so and so smelled like trees. She was popular because she was fun.

She and the headmaster both spent time in New York as attempted stage actors. It was never clear to me if they knew each other when up there but they both carried a camp reverence when “the theater” was mentioned, despite being pretty irreverent in practice. Caldwell directed a few stage productions and I can remember clearly when she told me, in front of the cast and more importantly my really cute classmate who played Donna, that Bertram Cates was a wholesome character and though of course he desires the girl sexually, “you’re coming across as too eager.”

Upperclassmen warned that she might come into class in character. Birmingham sits in the Cahaba River watershed; the river’s a tributary of the Alabama. Our local feeder branch, of which I live 692 ft. from and pay FEMA accordingly for the privilege despite the absurdity of floodwaters reaching my house, is called Shades Creek. Caldwell would, at least twice a year, peek around the classroom door all doe-eyed, enter the classroom, and teach without breaking character as Shades Cahaba, mispronounced Shah-dez Ca-hay-bah. It was pretty fantastic, and I say that as a jaded old bastard.

Shahdez was guileless and innocent of everything going on in the stories and poems we were assigned. She’s start off with something like, “Did y’all read that about the mean old man with the gun?” and get us to explain why the Misfit did what he did. She got us to play and made whatever story we were supposed to read the night before something we had to explain to our naïve “classmate”; all the world and people on those pages. “Wait. You mean… oh, my. Momma would never let me go to something like that.”

The summer after graduation she was the first teacher that became a person. My friend John and I mowed lawns to save up for college spending money and she gave us $20 every two weeks. She lived a few blocks from the second-best pizza place in town so I don’t know how much actually got saved, but we felt like not-students for the first time when she’d pay us and tease us not to waste it all on beer. We weren’t her problem anymore. To her the transition was old hat, but it was new to us. There was always a crowd around her at alumni events, so it’s not that we were special. She liked people and they her.

Some of 11^th Grade English was taught from Major Writers of America and came to a standstill at points. Part of me thinks Caldwell just liked to say “transcendental.” It’s a great word so I wouldn’t blame her but more time was spent on transcendental chapters of that text than any of the novels on the syllabus.

It’s my age, but I didn’t notice how young Thoreau was when he died. Forty-four was older than my parents, if only by a few years, so filed as grandparent age if I noticed it at all.

I specifically remember reading “Mist” and being told I should take not of the alliteration: “Dew-cloth, dream drapery” and “bittern booms” after “bloom” and “banks.” I can think of poems with showier examples, but here we are decades later and I still remember, so what do I know.

Mist
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.

This next one isn’t in Major Writers but I found it looking around for a quick copy-and-paste version of the above to save me time typing. What an amazing giggle fest this would have kicked off if it had been.

I Was Made Erect and Lone
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

I was made erect and lone,
And within me is the bone;
Still my vision will be clear,
Still my life will not be drear,
To the center all is near.
Where I sit there is my throne.
If age choose to sit apart,
If age choose, give me the start,
Take the sap and leave the heart.

Emerson was the chapter before Thoreau. My dad’s name is Walter, which is decidedly not Waldo. My parents used to have a party every four years the night of the presidential election. It was huge. Most people would drop by on the way home or before dinner but over the course of the night we’d see three hundred or so people. Mom’s collection of memorabilia grew every cycle. She had Kennedy, Anderson, Roosevelt (not the cool one), even a Lincoln campaign pin. There were always a few dozen who stayed until the race was called and concession/acceptance speeches were given. Then came Bush and Gore.

The layout of their house is odd. It was initially designed for another purpose before being converted to its current use. Long story short, there are two doors about twenty feet apart leading from the living room out to the front porch, which is on the back of the house away from the street. It’s odd. Bush and Gore are going late into the evening with no resolution in sight and one of my mom’s friend’s dates is double fisting Scotch and getting drunker by the minute. Also, he keeps calling my dad “Waldo.” None of this is making anyone happy. Sometime around two in the morning it’s close friends and the obnoxious date left. People are leaving and the date says “Waldo, I keep trying to leave but this…” he’s pointing to the tv indecision desk. “I don’t think I can,” to which my dad, visibly exasperated, pointed to his left and right and said “I’ve got two damn doors. I don’t know how I can make it any easier.”

That’s what I think of when I hear “Waldo.” Where’s Waldo, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I hear either and think of that guy and my dad pointing. Emerson Fittipaldi makes me think of Ralph Waldo Emerson makes me think of that twerp, who I later found out my sister threatened to punch earlier in the evening, and my dad pointing. But a small part of me remembers Mrs. Caldwell’s class.

The Rhodora
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

On Being Asked, Whence Is The Flower?

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

I remember not being impressed with Poe and drowning out, not just Caldwell, but every teacher whose lectures I should have been listening to about the man. There’s only so much a great teacher can do. I’m coming around to him late. It was “The Poetic Principle” that caught my eye and drew me in. I wish could recall anything Caldwell had to say about him, because there’s much more to him than I credited.

Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe was edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. The introduction isn’t credited so I’m uncertain. Was it a collaboration? Just Auden? Just Peason? Anyway, possibly Auden writes,

“As the nineteenth century progressed, the destruction of the popular mythographic imagination by popular science and the spread of universal suffrage and the influence of the press made conditions in Europe to approximate more and more closely to the American case, and European writers came to see in Poe the heroic forerunner who had suffered and understood, who had really been what Byron, for instance, never was, the poète maudit, the alienated dandy.”

Here’s one from Major Writers that I probably read for class.

Alone
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

I’m feeling pretty smart about not throwing away that textbook. Oddly enough, a friend was showing me a used book site earlier today. I was going to buy a copy of Norton’s Anthology of English Literature Vol. II later tonight. I was at lunch and put off all the sign-up credit card registration stuff I’d need to create an account. But I found my old copy, one I’d forgotten I had, next to Major Writers of America. Both books are full of notes that need deciphering and underlining that makes no immediate sense. I’m surprised how much came back to me, though.

I’ve indulged myself enough this week and thank you for your patience and I have to attend to something. One of the birds nesting on my floodlights has gotten itself trapped in my screened in porch. My open-door effort to let it out has doubled the number of birds, so now I have a mating pair to shoo out. A leaf blower shouldn’t hurt them, right? They’ve been in storms.

Hope you enjoyed the poems and have a great weekend.