A Few Lines Written About Lilacs

 

Very early one morning in this past week, Miss Maudie and I did a quiet walk in Bogart Regional Park, one of our favorite places to chase squirrels and dreams and lizards. A half mile in, we came upon a lilac in bloom. (See above photo, shot with an iPhone too early in the morning to capture the soft periwinkle color.)

These trees are portals for me. I cannot draw near them or smell their sweet scent without being transported back to 1983….

During the last summer of my marriage (when my husband was off in China and the kids and I felt like we were on a happy, relaxing vacation for two months), I attended a local writers group where I met a gentleman ten years my senior, a published poet and occasional college professor. I often called him "Prof," but will refer to him here as GK. We became casual friends as he shared his poetry and I shared my essays, and we talked about how our circumstances kept us from writing more. His constraint was that he had returned to Chino to live with and care for his dying mother. My constraint was my failing marriage and the anxiety that came with trying to find a way out of it. I was 29. I had never worked outside the home, had no education beyond a high school diploma and one college-level creative writing class. And I would have four kids to support, should I choose to leave.

One hot, humid summer evening while a thunderstorm was rumbling its way through the city, GK showed up at my door.

“I brought a poem,” he stated, by way of introduction. Then he seated himself in my living room and commenced reading William Wordsworth’s “A Few Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” while I sat on the floor, enthralled. Any avid hiker will understand the inciting depiction of this poem. In it, the poet tells of returning to his birthplace after five years away, only to find the “beauteous forms” of nature—the hills, the trees, the streams, the blooms—are all exactly as he had remembered them. He had left during a time of revolution, a time of political upheaval and turmoil. But upon his return, nature remained static.

I loved it.

“I thought you would appreciate it,” GK said. “You have so much insight….” He went on to gently suggest that I consider studying literature and teaching as a means of supporting myself and my children. “You have so much to share,” he said.

In high school, I had been told that I wasn’t “college material.” But I took this man at his word. Months later, I found the means to separate myself from my husband and upon doing so, I enrolled as a fulltime college student.

The upheaval in my life was monumental, the stress nearly overwhelming. GK called, in the midst of it all, and I told him how I barely slept at night. At the time, he was staying in Cherry Valley, at a large property that overlooked Bogart Regional Park. He invited me to visit, to stay in the guest house and rest for a weekend if I could find a sitter for the kids. I did, then readily accepted—and was so exhausted when I arrived, he took one look at me and suggested I simply lie down and nap in the peace and quiet of the place. When I woke, the little room where I’d slept was filled with a delicious and unfamiliar fragrance. I sat up and discovered on the nightstand a glass jar filled with blossoms.

“They’re lilacs,” GK told me as he brought me a cup of tea. “They grow wild all around here.”

In my second year of college, I was introduced to the work of Walt Whitman. A favorite poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” expresses the poet’s grief at the loss of Abraham Lincoln. The poem always reminded me of GK’s encouragement and care, how with a single poem he had managed to convince me that I had what it took to earn a college degree. In my senior year, I wrote an expository essay on Whitman’s poem, and an English teacher admired my work enough to submit it for Ideas of Order, the literary journal of the university’s humanities department. It was accepted and subsequently published in the journal, a great honor. That accomplishment—for me—is one of my greatest successes as a writer.

I finished my undergrad work in four years, continued a fifth year to earn my teaching credential, and as soon as I began teaching, I began a graduate program in literature, earning my master’s degree two years later.

Amazing what a man can do with a few words and a handful of sweet-smelling flowers.

So when I see lilacs in bloom, I have to stop, as I did this week, Maudie panting at my side, to review the mileposts that marked my path as I moved forward on my journey to becoming the teacher, writer, poet, and, as much as I can be, authentic human that I am today.

With love and gratitude, Prof. You are ever in my heart.

When lilacs....

Yesterday the crows brought a dead rat into the back yard, dropped it on a planter, then spent the day snacking on it. I didn't begrudge them the treat—lately they've been living mostly on a diet of earthworms because the streets and yards are littered with them after it rains, and boy, has it been raining. But the planter they were using as their dining table is going to be where I plant some vegetables in another month, so I didn't want the remnants of that rat to linger. At night, the coyotes and the bobcats often use our street as a wide safe highway between the arroyo and the upper marsh-like area (which is a full on pond right now), so after dark I relocated the rat from my back yard to the street in front of my house. When it was still there this morning, I decided Thomas and I would go for a short walk and relocate him to the rugged area around that "pond." So if any of my neighbors happened to glance outside this morning at 5:45, they would have seen me walking cheerfully along, dog leash in my left hand, dead rat hanging from the right. All in a day's work.

Yesterday was a good day. It has been—finally—a bit warm in the past few days, so just after sunrise (when all danger of large scale predators had passed), I opened the back slider wide to let the cats sit on the patio and dream of flying up to snatch the little bluebirds out of the bird bath. Then I sat down to do some writing. It was a bit breezy, and wafting in on the draft through the house was the sweet scent of peach blossoms from my tree. Oh man... that was a heady scent.

An hour or so later, Thomas and I took a long walk down one of our many country roads (as I like to think of them; they're actually fire roads and access roads Edison uses to maintain the power lines). Fifty yards off the trail, I saw it—a lilac bush in full bloom. A flood of memories rushed back of a kind poet decades ago gathering a fistful of lilac blooms in a canning jar to set beside the bed where I lay in very troubled sleep. I woke to their perfume, and it changed everything. It was that same poet who convinced me that studying literature in college could be a way out of my seemingly dire circumstances. Had he not encouraged me to do so, I would never have discovered Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." So of course, I had to bring some home. My kitchen is filled with their scent this morning.

For the past few days, I've been reading another stellar novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. This one, Say Goodbye for Now, is about two young boys who become united through first a kind act and then a brutal one. The setting is 1959 and one of the issues addressed is the reality of race relations at the time. This book has touched me in deep ways. As I sat on the patio swing in late morning, after the dog walk, reading with the music of my neighbor's back yard fountain as soundtrack, I found myself crying again and again as the struggles of these sweet boys bumped up against the struggles in my own life. Finally I put the book down and dozed in the warm air, my first nap on the swing in over a year.

The great thing about life is that it keeps moving forward. While we welcome winter with its relief from the relentless heat after weeks of cold and darkness, it is always good to feel the warmth of the sun again, to smell the flowers, to see what Nature has been up to while we hibernated. Because growth occurs in the dark times, too, even if we're not aware of it.

This is why I teach poetry to high school students

Because I can teach all the literary devices I want them to learn throughout the year by using poems for examples:

Metaphor in "Dreams" by Langston Hughes:

"For if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."

Repetition in the same poem:

"Hold fast to dreams... Hold fast to dreams...."

Theme (with perhaps a life lesson thrown in):

What is the poet saying here? Don't let go of your dreams or you become, in a sense, crippled, unable to move forward. Is there something important that you want to do in your life? Whatever it is, you can do it. The path to your goal may not proceed in a straight line, but keep that end destination in your sights; you'll get there. How did the poet know this? He lived it.

A more challenging theme in a different poem by Langston Hughes:

"What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"

Point of view and tone in "Bike Ride with Older Boys" by Laura Kasischke.

(I do this one early in the year with my freshmen because I want them to learn that reading a poem is sometimes like unlocking a small cupboard door to find a bit of truth just sitting on the shelf, waiting to be discovered, and to show them that in poetry, titles can be an essential key.)

The first line of the poem is this: "The one I didn't go on."

The next two lines are: "I was thirteen/and they were older."

In this poem I love "My afternoons/were made of time and vinyl" and "I have been given a little gift." We don't know what the gift is until we're nearly finished reading the poem. Some students are mystified by the lines "When I/stand up again, there are bits of glass and gravel/ground into my knees." They ask hesitantly, "What happened? Did she fall off the bike?" Others, when the impact of the narrative hits them, say, "ohhhh" in soft tones, and I know they are moved by it, perhaps even warned by it.

(As an aside here, that 'title as key' concept can also be seen in "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House" by Billy Collins, which never references a gun at all in the poem, but does reference a dog that barks incessantly.)

Some poems should just be fun, so we do "Summer" by Walter Dean Myers, but they're still learning assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme as we go:

"Bugs buzzin from cousin to cousin/juices dripping/running and ripping" and

"Lazy days, daisies lay/beaming and dreaming...."

And there must be classics because, well, if you don't know Frost, you're not American.

"Whose woods these are, I think I know."

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood."

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

Billy Collins is my hero, of course, and sometimes it's fun, especially with high school students, to discuss extended metaphor by reading "Schoolsville."

("Their grades are sewn into their clothes/like references to Hawthorne./The A's stroll along with other A's./The D's honk whenever they pass another D.")

And speaking of classics, we read "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" so that we can discuss the concept of carpe diem, but I introduce it to them by showing them the scene from the movie Dead Poets Society in which Robin Williams as Mr. Keating has one of his new students read the poem.

I follow that by teaching them "O Captain! My Captain!" (because, in my humble opinion, Whitman was the most courageous American poet of his time), and then we watch the heartbreaking scene in Dead Poets in which Keating's students stand upon their desks in deference and respect, each one proclaiming "O captain my captain!"

I have shared tears with some students after such a lesson.

I allow Emily Dickinson to teach them that "hope is the thing with feathers" and also that "I'm nobody" can be a strong statement of defiance for an introvert. 

I teach them "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson toward the end of the school year because I want them to understand how subtle poets can be:

"He was a gentleman from sole to crown/clean favored and imperially slim," but mostly because I want them to fully understand what isolation can do to people, how desperate and alone it can render someone who feels incapable of making a human connection with anyone else. I tell them to consider the folks around them... and who might be suffering despite walking among them as if everything is fine. At fourteen and fifteen, they are still challenged to find empathy and compassion. ("If he killed himself, he's stupid. That's just stupid.") But we work on it. We work on it.

Generally we end the year with Frost's declaration that "Nothing gold can stay" because I want to remind them about that whole "seize the day" attitude and that, while they are perfect—just as they are—life is going to lob some considerably large stones at them, which may alter them. But that's ok. Because "hope springs eternal."