Remembering Toni Morrison

DUKES FANS:

“If you surrender to the air, you could ride it.” The Song of Solomon

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind — wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”  Beloved

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”                                                                                                                         Beloved

“Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”   Sula

“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be’   Sula  

   I am a reader: I have always been a reader. I don’t know exactly when I learned to read, but I cannot remember a time when I did not read. Comic books, newspaper comics, magazines, books, poems, cereal boxes, street signs, historical markers, advertisements: if it had words in English and it was in my sight, I probably read it. It is and has been one of the most joyous and important parts of my life. I interact with words, and I interact with them in a number of different and meaningful ways. That means, of course, that I love libraries and bookstores: those two institutions have helped me read a hell of a lot of books in my life. Dramas, history books, brochures, mysteries, fantasy, pamphlets, biographies and autobiographies, comedies, and fiction from any and all genres. And I collect quotes, quotes from movies, friends, historical figures, historical sayings, plays and especially from books. I find that authors, especially novelists, often have ways of saying and expressing things that capture me, touch me deeply, and lead me to new realizations. The above five quotes are among my all-time favorite literary quotes. They give me much to reflect upon, and they have been with me for years. And they all come from the mind and vision of one incredible and powerful author: Ms Toni Morrison.

  I have been a fan of Toni Morrison for over 45 years. She has been and is a voice that causes me to pause, to look at something differently or more deeply, and to become more aware of my own expectations, biases, and assumptions. She surprises me, and she helps me look at myself, sometimes even against my own will. She has a way of assembling words in ways that build images, share feelings, evoke scenes, paint landscapes, and allow you to hear the voice and meaning of her characters and what their lives really show. Sula, set mostly in a small Ohio town, was the first of her novels that I read, and the way her narration mixed poetic language, imagination, keen imagery and observation had me stop on page after page to re-read a particular passage again out loud-to hear it and to taste it and to feel it. Her ability to make us deeply feel and know the struggles and choices her two heroines go through in their attempt “to create something else to be” is almost painful. And the ways we are shown how loneliness, anger, and self-doubt, as well as determination, can sometimes be “dangerous” ring true throughout the novel. Sula is a relatively short book: 194 pages. But it seems full and deep.  It is truly a “weighty” book. It was also one of the first novels that had me seriously and deeply connect with female characters, and that opened up a whole new literary world for me.

  Song of Solomon, with its richly and multi-layered, symbolic language and mix of folklore, Biblical references, mysticism, and harsh reality is probably my favorite of all her books. As with all of her works, one of its major themes is identity and how we come to appreciate and learn our various ones. There is also incredible word play in the work, starting with the names of characters and the specific ways each of them speaks, and going on to include irony, puns, and the quiet power of the unsaid. The way Macon Dead discovers he has to look back and down, not only to his cultural past but also to his own childhood while on his quest, resonated with me on many levels. It amazed me that one writer could not only have all of these thoughts and ideas and themes going on in her head, but that she could somehow express them on paper in such a way that they speak to real people and to their real lives. It is one book I truly regret never having had an opportunity to teach.

  But the book which first exposed me to Toni Morrison and helped deepen my own searches for identities wasn’t one she wrote. It wasn’t a novel, and it was not a book of literary criticism and analysis. It was a massively researched and beautifully pulled together scrapbook she helped edit and nurture into being. It was a joyous, painful, celebratory, anger-producing, angry, and proud collection of words, facts, records, and pictures called, The Black Book, that she helped edit and publish in 1974 while she was an editor at Random House. I encountered it at the old Robins Bookstore on 13^th Street, and I had never seen anything like it. It was a trade paperback with a cover that was a collage with pictures of Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Satchel Paige, racist stereotyped advertising labels for products, a Black cowboy with a rifle and saddle, an African bronze sculpture, and the words, “The Black Book” proudly front and center. In time frame it ranged from the pre-Columbian history of Africa and South America to the black movies and music stars of the 1930’s. It also included descriptions of slave whippings, escapes, stories about Black soldiers, pioneer farmers, seamen, athletes, inventors, and scientists, pictures of all black towns in the Midwest:  it was literally a book of just about all that we as a culture have seen, been through and done. As a 24 year- old in 1974 that book sent my ADD and curious mind in a thousand different directions at once, searching and looking at things, reading, researching and listening to hundreds of new things, and increasing my own knowledge and understandings of African-American cultures and experiences. (And, yes-we are way more than just one “culture.”) I wore the pages out of two editions of that book, and I later lost my remaining well-worn one during one of my many moves. But hearing of Toni Morrison’s death On August 5^th took me to the library to take out a copy. And once again it did its magic, reminding of so much about heritage, triumph, struggle, and the incredible, simple resiliency African-Americans, and indeed, all human cultures need to have in order to survive in this world. It is a joy to re-encounter it, and I am joyously working my way through it again. It never gets old.

   There is so much more I could say about Toni Morrison and her importance to United States literature, cultural studies, and intellectual development. She was a prodigious writer: she wrote 11 novels, wrote and/or edited several books of literary criticism and analysis, co-wrote 5 children’s books, and penned numerous articles. She also taught at several colleges and universities including Princeton, Rutgers, Cornell, and the State University of New York. Her output lasted from the 1970’s until now, and several generations of readers, thinkers, writers, and fans got to read, meet, and encounter her ideas.  I cannot begin to catalog the ways in which she has influenced me, She is one of my many inspirations and starting points. So many of her quotes and ideas have become a part of me and how I look at the world. If you are not familiar with her, I encourage you to take the time to encounter her. She is not an easy read by any means. But she is a read that will give you much to think about, will amaze and dazzle you with the power of the written word, and just maybe have you look at the world around you and yourself in different and rewarding ways. She is simply one of the best and most important thinkers and authors it has been my good fortune to read. Rest in Peace, Ms, Morrison. Rest in peace. And thank you, so very much.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia biography of Toni Morrison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison

  

The Toni Morrison Society:

https://www.tonimorrisonsociety.org/

Link to review of The Black Book:

https://www.bookdepository.com/Black-Book-Middleton-Harris/9781400068487

The Magic of "Surprise"

DUKES FANS:

“One of the things that humans have is the wonderful opportunity to encounter surprise. But surprise is not going to track you down or come up to your door, knock, and ask to be let in. You have to be out there in the world among people and places to meet it, and, most importantly, you have to be open to it happening.”   Curtis Williams

“You want to make God laugh? Tell God you have “plans.”   Anonymous 

 

       Many people who know me would probably tell you that I am not a strictly-scheduled person or a person who necessarily thrives on routine. I like to hike and birdwatch following whatever calls to me, walk around the downtowns of cities just following whim and curiosity and what calls to me, and reading about, searching out, and following up on things that just catch my fancy. (My wife once commented that I had never met an historical marker I didn’t love.)  I have always been a curious and multi-active person, and I am ADD. So I can go off in several directions at once instantly, no matter where I am and what I am doing.  At the same time, though, when I do have a routine in some area of my life, I can get pretty hyper-focused on it and a bit miffed if it is disturbed. I am still an early riser after 40 years of teaching, so my morning routine is to be up and out of the house by about 6AM, go up to Chestnut Hill, have some coffee, walk around a bit, and then do something definite-meet some friends for coffee and/or breakfast, go shopping, go to a museum, walk around a specific place, go on a little trip, etc. And last Sunday was a day that I had known what my morning plan was, and I awoke fully ready to embark upon it.

     I got my coffee in Chestnut Hill, met with some friends, went back for another cup of coffee, and then went to catch a train. Most Sundays I like to go to Quaker Meeting for Worship, and I normally go to the 10:30 Germantown Meeting at Coulter and Greene Sts. This was the first Sunday of the month, however, and there is a wonderful First Sunday brunch and blues jam at Jamey’s House of Music in Lansdowne that I love attending. So on those Sundays I train it to 30^th Street Station and catch the Elwyn local, departing at Lansdowne station and walking up to Lansdowne Friends Meeting. It is a ¼ mile from Jamey’s and starts at 10. I have been doing this for some 7 months now, so I know the schedule of the trains and how long it takes me to walk from the station to the meetinghouse. I’ve  got it down; it is now part of my routine.

   Except that for the past two weeks, SEPTA, on weekends and during off peak hours, has been doing track repair on part of the Southwest section of tracks, and they were running shuttle buses from 30^th St to the 49^th Street station and sending the Elwyn local trains on from there. Not only that, but the schedules were now different, and I would not get to Lansdowne before the start of Meeting. POOF! Routine vanished!  (And there may have been some quiet chuckling going on overhead.)

  As I made my way to the shuttle bus I was miffed and trying to calm myself down. I was upset, and I definitely did not like my routine being tossed away. But as the shuttle bus finally left 30^th St and took its slow, winding route through parts of West Philly, something strange began to happen. We went past the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and I remembered that I used to work there for 2 ½ years in the mid-1980’s. Suddenly I was remembering people with whom I used to work, including 2 of whom I am still in touch with to this day. And the bus went by that little campus walkway off 38th Street that led to the Biopond on Penn’s campus where Penny and I would sometimes go bird watching. It also went past Woodland Cemetery, a wonderfully large and immaculately landscaped space where we would hike and regularly see red-headed woodpeckers, ruby crowned kinglets, and cuckoos as well as some incredible tombstones, monuments, and crypts. I used to live in several spots in West Philly, as did Penny and my son, Evan, and the bus passed near those places as well. I used to play with a lot of West Philly musicians who lived near Chester and Baltimore Avenues, and we used to play picnics and gigs in Clark Park, which the bus also traveled past. Somehow I was recalling a whole slew of people, events, scenes and places I had not thought about in literally decades! By the time we got to the 49^th Street Station I had re-connected, at least mentally, to a lot of great times and experiences in my earlier life. And I was-surprise!-happy about it.

   But the morning was not over, and there was more to come. I realized that Meeting would be more than half over by the time I got there, and I do not like to come that late to Meeting for Worship. It is silent worship, and I feel it would make too much of an interruption should I come in more than 10 or 15 minutes late. The Elwyn local continues on to Swarthmore, though, and I suddenly remembered how much I loved that little community. So I thought I would go and re-acquaint myself with some parts of that town.

    There is this wonderful coffeeshop called Hobbs right across from the train station, and, I stopped in there. Blast from the past; I was able to get a bottle of Stewart’s Cream Soda there-Stewarts! With my bottle, I started walking around that side of Swarthmore, remembering times and people and events from years ago. I had played coffeehouses there in the mid-1980’s. I had taught in a summer Upward Bound program for high school students from Chester for three years that took place at the college. I had gone out with a woman from Swarthmore. I had used their simply beautiful library several times. I had always liked the “old English Village” feel of the part of town across from the train station and the college, with its winding streets and Victorian architecture. Sunday was a sunny, beautiful and breezy day; the clouds overhead were stunning and wispy-stretched out with long, shapely curves. So many people of all ages were out and walking about those winding streets. I saw and spoke to a number of families out walking with their kids, including one 2 or 3 year old who was a master tantrum-tosser. He reminded me that when toddlers were upset, their whole bodies are upset: it is a total body experience. I also saw a number of older couples, including one that looked to be in their 80’s holding hands and joking as they walked along. I chatted and exchanged greetings with a number of folks of all different ages and nationalities, and by the time I caught the train back to Lansdowne to go to Jamey’s, I was in a far different frame of mind then I had been some two hours earlier. Surprise had appeared, and it had taken me to places I could not have expected or anticipated, and that I thoroughly enjoyed.

  The jam at Jamey’s was wonderful, as it usually is. The various musicians there were both fun and having fun, including the regularly appearing Carol Moog Dave Rieter, Tony TNT Jones, Jamey Riley, and Toni Washington. The brunch was delicious. But the highlight of that day for me was the magic and power of surprise. Once again it had played an incredibly quiet and powerful role in my life. Had it not appeared as it did, and had I not been open to it, who knows what mood I would have been in when I hit Jamey’s? But surprise carried me through, even in spite of myself. And when that happens, I am in a much better place. Thanks, Surprise; once again you have saved me from myself.

A couple of websites:

 www.hobbscoffe.com           

 http://www.jameyshouseofmusic.com/
 https://www.drinkstewarts.com/

The Magic of Gardens

“Garden as though You will live Forever”

                                      William Kent

 

“The garden suggests there might be a place where humans can meet nature halfway”

                                    Michael Pollan

 

     It is mid-July now, and a big part of me does not like the heat, the humidity, the stickiness, and the need to often take more than one shower a day that this means. But for all of my discomfort in this weather, this is also one of my favorite times of the year. For this is the time when we can get a real sense that we have a place in the universe, and we can come alive to and witness the joy of nature around us. For this is the time the gardens all around us fully came to life and joyously announce their presence.  They reward us with all of their amazing shapes, colors, scents, and  beauty that make us love the world all over again. It is a quietly magical time.

 

  One of the big joys of moving from Germantown to Mt Airy in 1990 was that this house had room for a back garden. My wife loved plants and flowers, and there were pots and window boxes in our Germantown home. But Penny wanted a place where we could have a real garden, with bushes, a variety of flowers, trees, a path, and more. So our back yard in Mt Airy quickly became her place to “play in the dirt.” She was a member of the Horticultural Society, and she got ideas from their flower shows, their magazine and their neighborhood garden projects. When we went on our camping trips and vacation travel, we would always go to an arboretum or a public garden. She would see things, get ideas, bring some of the ideas home to our garden to try them out, and our garden became a lively and wondrous place. We were birders as well, and we hung thistle, suet, and sunflower seed feeders to attract a wide variety of birds. House finches, purple finches, chickadees, nuthatches, hairy and downy woodpeckers, cardinals, starlings, robins, catbirds, titmice, goldfinches and more eventually came to the yard, drawn by the colors and variety of the planting. Sitting in the yard, especially on a summer night around duck and eating BBQ became a magical ritual. Penny called it, “The Show”, and over the years The Show provided countless hours of quiet joy, peace, and spectacle.

 

    Penny kept trying new and different things in the garden, and it changed and expanded over time. Two of the biggest aides to that process came as a result of summer trips we took. In the late 1990’s we would go up to Wellesley island State Park, a park and camping area in upstate New York that is in the St Laurence River on the Canadian border. The park’s nature center was wonderful; they had a “Vouyager” canoe trip outing where one could follow some of the routes French fur trappers took through the area in the 17^th and 18^th century. I am not a great canoer, but as a history teacher this was perfect for me. I had been teaching about this part of North American history for years, and now I could follow in the footsteps of the trappers.it was a great experience. But the real joy of the nature center for us was their large and gorgeous butterfly garden. It was the first one we had been in, and it just blew our minds. It was a huge outdoor garden covered with netting and filled with flowers of all different types of colors, sizes, shapes and scents. The place was filled with hundreds of butterflies of a variety of sizes and colors that were just floating all around us as we walked through the garden. They were flittering just in front of us, occasionally landing on us, and sunning themselves on the tree stumps in the place. It was otherworldly; like being in a living dream. Penny took note of the different type of plants in the garden and asked some of the staff about how to plant and care for them. And when we got back to Philly she put in a number of those plants:Joe Pye weed, bee balm, monarda, a butterfly bush, and more. By July of the next year we were attracting dozens of butterflies, including monarchs, streaks of various colors and sizes, Admirals, swallowtails, and more. We also went to a workshop at Cape May Bird Observatory outisde of Cale May, NJ for a workshop on how to plant a garden to attract more insect pollinators including bees, beetles, moths and certain flies. Again, new plants were added and our garden became a place for more and more avian creatures. The Show was blossoming and expanding. And when we started putting out sugar nectar feeders on May 1^st,  hummingbirds started to arrive by the middle of June. Just about everyone in our section of West Mount Airy gardens, so all the birds and insects could travel from house to house and garden to garden in the neighborhood,delighting the whole area. It was like having a neighborhood nature center.

 

      I am not nearly the gardener Penny was, but I am trying my best, with the help of a neighbor or two, to keep “The Show” intact. The garden had been cut back during Penny’s sickness last year as she could not keep up with the amount of work keeping up a gardens takes.  She was simply too weak. This year I have done some planting, trimming, watering and weeding, and it seems to be working. The variety of birds and butterflies and bees are back, and “The Show’” continues to dazzle and delight. The hummingbirds have not returned this year, though, and that saddens me. The last two winters have been hard on our two butterfly bushes; they are not blooming and are looking the worse for wear. I know they are big attractors for hummers, and I may have to remove and replace them. I have tried different nectar and sugar water formulas in the hummingbird feeders, and I even bought some commercial nectar. Nothing has worked so far.

 

      Still, that garden is a very special and magical place. Most mid-summer nights I am fortunate to be able to spend some time out there experiencing some of what it offers. It was hard for me at this time last year to sit out there and watch the show without Penny. It just seemed too empty and too solemn. It is easier this year, though, and I am glad for that. I can sit out in the back, look at the feeders, and sometimes feel her presence and hear her voice. Or I can just sit in a quiet, watchful silence; we could sit out there quietly and bask in the specialness of that type of place that can bring humans and nature together in such primal and sustaining ways. Thanks, Penny, for bringing The Show to our house and continually adding to it, expanding it, nurturing it and caring for it. I am so grateful for its presence in my life and to have had the opportunity to have known it with you. And thank you, gardeners everywhere, for doing your part to make us more aware of the world around us and enabling us to have a chance to meet nature halfway. That is a treasure, indeed.

.

 

Happy 200th Walt Whitman!

DUKES FANS:

“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” 

“A child said to me, “What is the grass?” How shall I answer

him?”

“I am large. I contain multitudes”

“Not I nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far, It is within reach”

                                                From Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass

  As a kid I loved reading, and I loved reading all sorts of things. My mother used to ban having cereal boxes on the kitchen table during breakfasts because I would be reading the boxes and not paying attention to the other member of the family gathered at the table. But Mom loved that I loved reading, and she supported it. We had encyclopedias Mom provided, and she would regularly asked me what I had read in them that day and to read things to her from them. We also had a young person’s mini encyclopedia called. Childcraft that included volumes on science, geography, folklore, literature and more.. I devoured them, particularly the literature volumes. They were my entry into the worlds of mythology, fiction, drama and poetry. Their influence has stayed with me my entire life.

  I think of that now because this year the nation is celebrating the 200^th birthday of Walt Whitman, a man many consider to be to father of a truly American poetry.  Whitman wasn’t in my Childcraft books, as I recall, but those books made me ready for him. I had memorized several poems in the Childcraft volumes, especially Henry Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride and Hiawatha, and Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman. I loved the rhyme patterns and the descriptive language in these poems; “The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas” from The Highwayman is still one of my favorite lines of poetry. These opened me up to the power and magic of words and some of the ways they could be used. So when, in my high school years, I was encountering new friends in Rittenhouse Square and the coffeehouses to which my music was taking me, I was also ready to encounter new approaches to poetry. I heard and read the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Le Roi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams. I also encountered historically, spiritually, and politically centered poets and modern and surreal poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Ishmael Reed, Kenneth Patchen, Diane di Prima, Audre Lorde, and tons more. The same Philadelphia Free Libraries that fed my insatiable curiosity for music at thi time also fed my appetite for poetry and poets. And as I read more about my favorite poets and their influences, most of them made regular and strong references to the importance of Walt Whitman and especially Leaves of Grass.

   In reading, studying about, and loving the works of all the aforementioned poets, I came over time to better understand Whitman and what he did for and gave to American thought and verse. The directness those poets feature owe a lot to his unflinching looking at himself, the places and people around him and what they not only were, but also what they could mean and be. Whitman was among the first poets to intentionally write in free, unrhymed verse, and I came[JC1]  to see that not rhyming or having a repeated rhythmic pattern in a poem could allow a writer to do and say things in ways that were more emotional, direct, and meaningful. He also delighted in the specialness of the commonplace and the ordinary. He made it clear that if we open a bit and expand our vision and our awareness, simple things, such as a leaf of grass, could “be links to much bigger and larger concepts…could, “contain multitudes.”  He also saw, named and gave space for the role so many emotional and sensual things have in our lives and being, no matter how we might want to downplay, disguise or ignore them. He saw that looking at ourselves and our world straight on and honestly could have immense value. And he wrote in a way that forced us, sometimes lovingly and sometimes intensely, to do just that. Honestly. Directly. Unflinchingly.

  I have read Leaves of Grass several times, and I will read it again this year. It is one of those works that caught me at the same time it mystified and infuriated me. It is a powerful work: one that always intrigues, arouses, confuses, angers, and calls to me. Yes, it took me some time and re-reading to get comfortable with the self-awareness, analysis, and prodding he was doing both with himself and calling on us, his readers, to do in our own lives. But each time I read it, in my twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, it rewarded me in ways I did not expect and could not have imagined at the time.  I expect it will do so again. Happy 200th birthday, Walt. Thank you for giving me the gift of you looking at yourself as one of the guides helping me to look at myself and my world. My enduring thanks to thee, and to your many and continuous offspring.