First Birthday: Rite of Passage

I recently attended my grandniece’s first birthday. It occurred to me that sociologists should take a closer look at the first birthday party. It is, after all, a prevalent ritual that involves hours of preparation by adults, for a celebration in honor of a tot who has absolutely no idea what the fuss is all about.  Let’s face it –Baby’s First Birthday Party is really for the Big Guests  in the room. We arrive with expectations.

We expect the one-year-old to be baffled by all the bother. We expect the one-year-old to be able to withstand every cell-phone owner’s command to “Look at me, look at me,” as they multi-task their communication gadgets to seize the moment in each phone’s photo stash. We expect some fussiness from the guest of honor. And we expect a mess. Actually,we demand one, as the first-birthday-child is introduced to Birthday Cake.

My grandniece had her own little cake. a mini-me version of an enchanting Cinderella cake we adults sliced into. A Disney doll, the size of a Barbie doll (I’m talking height here) poked through the middle of a dome-shaped cake - frosted to look like the full skirt of a flouncy ball gown. A short doll and cupcake comprised the guest of honor’s personal confection.

This is when first-birthday-fun really begins. Messy fun, as  a dessert that looks as if it’s been assembled in a Willy Wonka Factory is placed before the child, all sugary and deeply frosted.

Consider, a year ago, same child started on breast milk or formula. Through the months, bland cereals, mushy veggies, and mashed fruits were slowly introduced. Maybe, just maybe, by the time this red-letter day comes to pass, said child has played with (more than eaten) shreds of cheese or carrots.

What’s the child to do with this newfound repast?

I’ve seen child/cake interactions that make barbarians at  Medival banquets look downright reticent. But my grandniece chose to remain as dainty as Cinderella at the Ball. She gazed at the cake, curiously. She looked at us. She repeated this back-and-forth once or twice. Eventually she touched the icing. Just lightly. She was all about being the lady, much like Queen Elizabeth at her Jubilee I expect.

But Queen Elizabeth did not have a gallery of relatives shouting for her to dig in. Nor did an adult take Her Majesty's hand and moosch it through frosting and cake. That was all the one-year-old needed before she began to, let’s say, get at it. At least enough for us to brag that she had accomplished what we all came to see.

Looking forward to the Wrapping Paper Massacre a year from now.

Bradbury's Enduring Voice

Odd, hearing Ray Bradbury died tonight. I was just thinking about him last week. Actually mentioned him in a tribute I gave at a close friend’s retirement dinner. As I planned the speech, I had to look up whether or not he was still living – and he was – last Wednesday. Not this Wednesday.


I was mentioning Bradbury because my retiring friend still taught his book, Fahrenheit 451, to her Sophomore English classes. No one else in the department has taught Bradbury for a very long time. So I thought of  him, among others, when I was thinking about what some of the great writers she taught might say to her, if they could speak to her at the end of her career .


I decided Bradbury would elaborate on something he said in Fahrenheit.


He wrote how everyone leaves something behind. A child or a book, a painting or a garden. I think, in honor of my friend's retirement, Bradbury might have added a retinue of enlightened students to his list.  In the passage he goes on to say,” It doesn't matter what you do so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.” That, Bradbury explained, is the difference between "the lawncutter and the gardener," and in my mind, the lesson plan purveyor and the true teacher.


My point was my friend had done that – left something behind (so  much really) by introducing over 30,000 students, who had passed through her classroom for a semester or two, to the words and wisdom of  Bradbury. . . . . and Thoreau . . . . . and Lee. Her favorites, among others. My friend put all those students in touch with these and other voices of the past. Voices that, in most cases, had existed one day and not the next. Voices that, like Bradbury's - and my friend's - will  endure.

Memorial Day : Postscript

Article first published as Memorial Day Postscript on Technorati.

As usual, I attended a Memorial Day Parade this year. I watched veterans and active servicemen and women march with town officials, school bands, and children’s sports and service groups. But this year I set my gaze longer on the men and women who passed by in military uniform, thanks to a different sort of Memorial Day parade I watched Saturday night – a parade of poems.

Connecticut poets Michael F Lepore and Lisa L. Siedlarz, editor of the Connecticut River Review, shared their published war poems at The Buttonwood Tree to a filled room of friends, neighbors, family, and servicemen. Most of us had driven to Middletown under overcast skies, heavy with the day’s humidity. The heat had settled in the venue too.

 As Lepore, a Vietnam War veteran who lives in Glastonbury, was introduced I watched a thunderstorm break out the window. I felt my forehead, soaking wet, as he spoke of his commission as a lieutenant in the US Naval Dental Corps, having served with the 2^nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, NC, where he was given independent duty at an outlying facility called The Rifle Range. There he saw Marine recruits, coming from basic training at Parris Island (SC), leave for combat duty in Vietnam. “Young men and women intellectually and emotionally unprepared for the guerilla warfare, so different than WWII,” said the bearded poet. His American flag lapel pin marked a striking contrast against the deep browns of his shirt and suit jacket. Yet, he didn’t look as if the heat bothered him as he started to read “Rookie.”


                        Crouched ankle deep in muck

                        the hard part – waiting, knowing

                        the enemy is out there, but not where

                        or how many.

 The poem ends with the young recruit forever changed by “a rippling aria of destruction,” and the view of “his enemy tattered to shreds, a julienne salad.” My attention, drawn away from the room’s temperature, settled onto this veteran’s parting comment that war tallies no winners, “only different degrees of losers.”

Siedlarz, dressed more comfortably in a tank top, acknowledged the veterans in the house and reminded us all that Memorial Day – first called Decoration Day – has been honoring the men and women who died while serving the American military since just after the Civil War.

 I was already familiar with Siedlarz’s debut collection I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, about her brother’s life as a soldier in Afghanistan, published by Clemson University in 2009. Her powerful and varied points of view emerge through three sections: Sister speaks, Brother speaks, and Pictures speak. Three years ago the collection brought the climate, conditions, cause, and calamity of the war to me as no news story could.
 
Siedlarz began with, appropriately, Memorial Day, a poem that compares a hometown USA commemoration of a fallen 20-year-old PFC with her brother’s  regiment’s BBQ “just like ours, burgers, dogs, salads,” in dusty, 100-degree Afghanistan. He had reported the details of the desert celebration in an email.

 Last year Siedlarz, who lives in New Haven, followed I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball with an extended collection: What We Sign Up For: War Poems. She added a What We Don’t See section. When she read, acutely aware of the graphic imagery of her poems, she sometimes stopped to ask the audience, “Are you OK? Should I go on?”  before moving from one poem to another - and then on to her last poem of the night, “Why I Don’t Watch Good Morning America”. This poetically registered complaint against news coverage of the war includes the dichotomies of

          A scroll bar for the number

wounded by roadside bombs, full coverage

only when friendly fire causes death,

or a soldier empties his clip into civilians

because his buddy was snipered.

Boys come home with hostile fire

looped in their minds. News clips gloss over

second and third tours, ignoring families

widowed to this label of freedom.

Wounded, 25,000 and rising.

All of which contributes to why I’ve begun to skip morning news shows myself these days, why I grew accustomed to the heat at the Buttonwood Tree poetry reading, and why I found myself gazing  deeper into the faces of the military who marched in this year’s Memorial Day parade two days later.

A Different Sort of Memorial Day Parade

I almost always attend a Memorial Day parade. Last year I walked to the end of my street and watched a modest assembly of veteran and active servicemen and women pass by, along with town officials, school bands, and a variety of children sports and service groups, honoring the day.
I expect to watch pretty much the same retinue from the same corner in a couple of days – Memorial Day 2012, but tonight I will attend a different sort of parade – a parade of poems – at a Memorial Day reading at The Buttonwood Tree in Middletown, CT.

Yes, you heard right -  a Memorial Day Weekend poetry reading including works by U.S. military veterans and featuring the work of Michael Lepore and Lisa Siedlarz.

I’m familiar with Lisa’s debut collection I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, about her brother’s life as a soldier in Afghanistan, published by Clemson University in 2009. Her powerful and varied points of view emerge through three sections: Sister speaks, Brother speaks, and Pictures speak. The collection brought the climate, conditions, cause, and calamity of the war to me as no news story could.

Last year Lisa followed I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball with What We Sign Up For: War Poems, a continuation of her brother’s experience. In the past she has also facilitated a 16-week writing workshop with Vietnam veterans at the V.A. Hospital in West Haven, CT, and edited an anthology of their writing called A Season of Now. She is continuously active in veterans' causes by participating in public service announcements for Post Traumatic Stress Outreach programs and organizing annual Stockings for Soldiers drives.

I’ve always loved a parade. I expect to be even more moved by tonight’s parade of words, a prelude to which I’ll start ( from the pdf of I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, available online).

Memorial Day by Lisa L. Siedlarz

I.

Down the street from where Private

First Class Lenzi used to shoot

baskets, his nephews untangle

a flagpole rope from the branch

of a White Oak tree.

The boys hear dribbling and whoops

a pick up game on the same courts

where Uncle Joe taught them layups,

free throws. Untying the knot taxes

their six and eight year old fingers.

Morning sun is criminally bright.

The boys secure and hoist the flag

over the newly installed plaque

in memory of the twenty year old pfc.

II.

My brother’s e-mail tells of a BBQ

just like ours, burgers, dogs, salads.

There was music and wiffle ball.

Yes, he writes, its one hundred degrees

dusty as hell, and I played wiffle ball.

They even gave us a special treat

get a load of the picture I’ve attached.

On screen my brother, red faced

and smiling, holds two lobster tails.

Beside him a whole case on ice,

lined up in rows, a mass grave.

Old Glories

Article first published as Old Glories on Technorati.
 

I woke up to a heavy thunderstorm last Memorial Day. The morning news reported a few parades throughout the state had already been cancelled; festivities rerouted to school gymnasiums instead. I figured there’d be no fanfare at the end of my street this holiday.

Distant drumbeats surprised me at ten, echoes as light as the ebbing rain. Since I wasn’t expecting a parade, I wasn’t dressed for a parade. The rat-a-tat-tats grew more distinct as I quickly changed into sneakers, jeans, and a floppy hat to combat a drop or two - which, by then, mostly fell from wet trees. The rain had just about stopped. Skies were getting brighter.

I could see a cluster of parade watchers at the end of my dead end (signed “no outlet” these days). I walked passed my neighbors’ small homes, houses built before the Spanish-American War. The group nodded silent greetings when I reached the corner. One took on the role of designated candy-catcher as the high school marching band blared its fight song before us.

Men and women in uniform passed by, vets in full dress and enlistees in camouflage. A Daisy Girl Scout with an expression as bright as her sky blue tunic came up to me, handed me a silly band in the shape of an unidentifiable animal. Then a Boy Scout in khakis veered from his formation to hand me a flag. A full 10X15 inch Old Glory.

“No thank you,” I said. “I don’t need one.” I already had a flag hanging from my side porch. Drilled the holder in myself, yesterday. Recently, I had felt greater pride in being an American.

But the boy in uniform didn’t know about my flag at home. He looked at me puzzled. Don’t need one? he must have been thinking.Before he could march out another stanza I accepted the banner. I waved it toward him. He looked pleased.

The handful of us at the corner walked home together,after the parade. “You missed half of it,” one said to me.

“No, I saw half of it!” I replied. His wife laughed.

“What am I going to do with this?” He half-heartedly waved the flag he had been handed.

“I’m bringing mine to the cemetery. My father was a veteran,” I said. He looked interested, so I continued. “World War II. My father-in-law too.” My neighbor paused. I was the widow on the street. He didn’t expect me to speak of an in-law.

“My Dad was a telegraph operator in Alaska. Even broke a few codes. And Gramps flew a PBY over Panama. The plane’s engraved on his tombstone“

“Then take this, ” He handed me his banner.

“No. You keep it.I have this," I replied,lifting my flag.

“Put one on your father-in-law’s grave too. Please.”

I took his flag and saluted.“I’d be happy too.”

Read more: http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/old-glories/page-2/#ixzz1O56YBEcp

Sendak's Lessons Go Beyond ABCs

I didn’t grow up reading stories by Maurice Sendak, who died last week. His signature children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, came out when I was in high school. Just before I graduated from college In the Night Kitchen made its controversial debut, featuring a floating tyke whose pjs vanish in a dream, exposing his private parts. The unclad boy then falls into a bowl of batter - and gets half-baked – before he escapes from the oven.

Neither book was typical kiddie-lit fare. Some adults deemed the first too scary. The second, too explicit. Provocative.

Yet, in the mid-eighties, my son and daughter looked forward to spending their reading time with Sendak’s Max and his wild things. And before my children celebrated double-digit birthdays, they were dancing along to the animated television production Really Rosie, based on the four books of Sendak's Nutshell Library.

The Really Rosie series has a Sesame Street feel to it. Alligators All Around teaches the letters of the alphabet, and One was Johnny – how to count. Calendar months are featured in Chicken Soup and Rice. Three very educational texts - none of which, however, come close to conveying the "suitable moral" in Pierre, the fourth book.

Parents know that as sure as February follows January, B follows A, and two follows one, testy toddler personalities can take the place of cooing babies – almost overnight. Pierre is that anti-infant. He doesn’t give a teething dribble about anything - affection, breakfast choices, clowning, or parental reprimands. He makes this very clear by chanting “I don’t care,” ten times over - to Mom and seven times - to Dad, both of whom leave their son alone with his indifference – an indifference a visiting lion finds quite appetizing.

Pierre soon finds himself inside the lion's gut, reconsidering his world view. He pops out after a doctor holds the creature upside-down – and shakes.

Sendak’s stories will continue to lead children to dark dens of forest and mind. But there’s an escape hatch on every oven door, a way out of the wilderness - and even a beast’s belly. The getaways take the “s” out of the scare he is sometimes faulted with putting his young readers through, and get his impish audience to – like Pierre at the end of his tale - care.

Article first published as <a href='http://technorati.com/women/article/sendaks-lessons-go-beyond-the-abcs/'>Sendak's Lessons Go Beyond the ABCs</a> on Technorati.
 

Happier Mother's Day

I woke up today, thinking about my mom, gone three Mother’s Days now. I decided to post her picture  -- in remembrance – on  Facebook -  This way, I knew my cousin network on FB would be reminded of her too.

I uploaded a photo of Mom with Dad, young newlyweds, pre- kids. In it, they look as if they do not have a care in the world.   Then I recalled the message a dear friend emailed me just yesterday. Tagged  flowers , the text read: Had a flashback to your mom today. On our way to Auburn, we saw a lawn with almost no green – it was all those “pretty yellow flowers.”

My friend and his wife live hundreds of miles away from me now. But they had read my memoir last fall and just yesterday they found themselves remembering a story about my mother. I’m sure they were grinning ear-to-ear too.

The story recalls when I was eleven years old and my family uprooted from Brooklyn, NY to northern Connecticut. Mom, experiencing her first burst of spring in New England, went to the local nursery seeking seeds for “those pretty yellow flowers on everybody’s lawn.” Dandelions.

You’re grinning now. Right?

That's just the tip of Mom’s deep-rooted dandelion tale in the memoir, a tale that digs through generations of her Italian background.  Writing the memoir led me to discover the layers of that story. My friend’s email reminded me of the power of memoir, writing immersed in memory. “Full of Grace,” the piece about Mom in Staying Alive: A Love Story had not only made Mom present in my life again, it was making her present in others’ lives too, as spontaneously as on a ride through a suburban neighborhood. This unplanned series of events then made me more glad than sad– for the first time in three years – on Mother’s Day. Ready to celebrate it with my own children.