Sorrow's springs are the same

The widow of my writing professor called last night from her home in Joshua Tree. She called this time last year and the year before. We've never met, but since her husband (though she would probably prefer another term) Richard Lee died, she calls. She refers to our holiday card and how pleased she is that she still receives it and asks about our family, our work, our writing. We talk about her late husband, which, I suppose is the reason she calls us. In some way, she is calling him.

Tonight we talked for half an hour. She has finished her memoir about Greenwich Village in the 40s and her time with Georgia O'Keefe and the deKoonings, Franz Kline, Joseph Heller, Joaquim Probst and others. Eventually, she met Dr. Lee (as I called him) there, when he was a student at NYU. They fell in love and moved out here when he got the position at Cal State in 1955. So, in 1981, when I wandered into his classroom clutching my overwritten poems, he had been teaching there for almost 40 years.

Here he is in the CSULB faculty parking lot. The photo was taken by David Barker and featured in Barker's book 12 Poets and Their Cars, published in 1972.

At the end of our conversation, she invited us to visit her and, since I've already thought about how beautiful the desert will be this spring with the rain and all, when I said yes, it didn't feel as if I were lying. It felt like the truth. I hope it is.

Dr. Richard Lee ran the poetry workshop I lingered in at Cal State Long Beach in the early 1980s. He had other, better students than I, including roots rocker and bluesman Dave Alvin. Another talented student was one Kyle Anne Bates who also published in IVC's literary journal, the Ear. (L.T. would remember her and her work, a poem about a UPS delivery person, I believe.)

Dr. Lee (I could never call him Richard) taught me how to read closely and widely and with joy. He loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet who was unafraid of exclamation points and joy. Hopkins would have loved Joshua Tree.

This one is for Dr. Lee:

Spring and Fall - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Somebody Got to Have Some Sense on this Highway

No school today.

I reminded my students last week of this fact. They knew. It's the first week of classes and they know exactly how many holidays to expect. They're counting down already.

It's the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, I said. We didn't always have this holiday, I told them, aware of the fact that for most of them, born this semester circa late 1980s, the holiday always had been. Do something, I said. And then, feeling very old, I added, when I was your age we used to march down to the South African Embassy and sit in and shut it down. You don't have to do that anymore, I added. Some on them smiled. The rest looked a little alarmed. Now that was a great excuse for missing class, I went on. (I couldn't stop myself.) You just told your teacher that you were in jail. I smiled. Widely.

Today at our home, we will read Faith Ringgold's wonderful "My Dream of Martin Luther King" with our little guy and listen to King's speeches on the radio.

This morning's New York Times gave us this holiday offering: Sarah Vowell's "Radical Love Gets a Holiday."

Here's some choice excerpts but you can click on the title above for the whole text. Go ahead. Click.

...Because I am a culturally Christian atheist the same way my atheist Reform friends are culturally Jewish, I look forward to Martin Luther King’s Birthday — when the news momentarily replaces the rants of the faith-based spitfires with clips of what an actually Christlike Christian sounds like — with the kind of fondness with which my pal Ben looks back on the decent, affectionate ideal that was his summer camp.

I have become just another citizen whose only religion is the freedom of religion and as such I patrol the wall of separation between church and state like some jumpy East German guarding Checkpoint Charlie back before Ronald Reagan single-handedly tore it down.

Which is why I am relieved that journalists and voters keep asking Mike Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate, what he meant 10 years ago when he told a meeting of his fellow Baptists, “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.” That is a curiously unconstitutional opinion for someone seeking the job of defending the Constitution, not to mention historically inaccurate considering the mostly deist founders were about as spiritual as the original cast of “Hair.”

But I am also relieved when Mr. Huckabee occasionally blurts out some Sunday School sentiment about how he doesn’t think a poor child should have to sleep in a car. Of course, this whiff of Jesus makes some of his fellow Republicans turn on him as if he’s Michael Dukakis. Because they fear that trying to find the homeless homes translates into raising the taxes they must render unto Caesar.Whoever wins the presidential election this year will be a Christian. (Unless of course it’s that one guy who is a member of a Muslim sleeper cell. Just when you think the electoral process couldn’t get any more stupid....) So the rest of us might as well suck it up and see if we can pick the Christian who is, if incapable of loving his or her enemies, the one who seems least likely to drum up a bunch of extra, new enemies to hate.

In this age of a slower, grubbier mutually assured destruction, when no one’s typed the word “nonviolence” since the typewriter, it’s worth reading Dr. King’s quarrel with the cold war’s MAD ploy. In the “loving your enemies” text he tells a pretty little parable about how one night his brother A. D. drove him to Tennessee. Infuriated by all the other cars’ brights, A. D. vowed to crank his lights and blind the next driver passing by. Dr. King told him not to, that it would just get everybody killed. “Somebody got to have some sense on this highway,” he said.