Hope you enjoyed the recent cross-post from Juke, a great newsletter with a variety of great writers. If not, check it out!
Part one of three: An intro
It’s been a while, yeah?! Hopefully, nothing too important has happened, like the moon hasn’t blocked out the sun or anything.
When I was only near totality, it was plenty. I even rationalized the not-driving 50 minutes to totality, not just by citing the traffic or laughing at the fools stuck on I-75, but by saying that I was meant to witness where I am, where I am. That is, I shouldn’t aim for “better”. I was given 99.3 percent totality and I should testify on that particular ray. That’s a thing I learned from Emerson:
“The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only second to that perfection is the hit classic by Ron Miller and Kenneth Hirsch and made popular via a recording by American singer Charlene:
“I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me.”
So I tried to take a minute and be with me. And be HERE now, which you know, is the idea of this newsletter. You are Here.
Part Two: Eclipse in Verse(ish)
Totality Envy Being in the Now I thought back to the last partial eclipse my baby strapped to my front little crescent shadows on his head This year a little girl bolts from a nearby house, heralding the beginning like Paul Revere We made a fruity drink and called it "Tequila Eclipse" My mom, my sister and me sleeping babies and big kids The sky was blue, then the lights turned on Children kept the countdown going Losing interest in the eerie twilight The sun was a cookie monster cookie then a hint of bright sexy side-boob The kitchen skylight threw shadows and then... I thought of Bette Davis in Dark Victory looking at her hands and wondering where the sun had gone. Glad this is a communal event. I checked off all the boxes: This year the Magnolia bloomed after the final frost but the hedges have a blight and the new Maple tree in the front yard has finally started to sprout its leaves. What will and will not survive each year is a mystery. What have I taken from last year to this? What has been chopped down? I've seen two double rainbows this year - in totality. Will it ever be enough? Am I making myself feel better? I want to be on the right ray. Our victory over the dark must be that we are not afraid.
Part Three: Epilogue/ What I’ve been up to
Heretofore, I was doing a decent job of writing something once a month. I convinced myself that every other month would be equally fine, but instead, it’s just been put off indefinitely.
Even the word bi-monthly sent me on a tangent away from any real writing goals. I found an “argument” online over what bi-monthly meant where several people had forcibly asserted that it meant twice a month. However, it was a unique comments section because when confronted with the idea that bi-weekly meant every two weeks, therefore bi-monthly would be every two months, several people acknowledged that oops, maybe they’d been using it wrong for far too long.
Someone else replied that the term fortnight had been a big help to them later in life. To this, someone posted this scene from So I Married an Axe Murderer, which has to go down as one of my favorite movies to quote. Here’s the scene:
Charlie Mackenzie: Dad, how can you hate "The Colonel"?
Stuart Mackenzie: Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartass!
See students? That’s using a vocabulary word in context!
I admit my writing goals may also have been thrown off by this year’s foray back into teaching English. Each day I find myself trying to expound the glories of precise language on indifferent teenagers who routinely fight over vague text messages that start with “Yo, chat” which apparently means “This is the beginning of a conversation I’ve decided we should have.”
Yo chat, I am much older now than when I started teaching and it is very apparent in the cultural reference rift between us. My own children have provided a few lifelines - I got a mile of respect out of a “skibidi toilet” reference that my 6-year-old had in common with the sophomores. If you don’t know it, trust me, it’s not worth it. Just pick a nightmare of poor, bizarre and scary toilet-head animation mixed with stolen 80s music and no plot, and you have skibidi.
Imagine though, dear readers, me. Me and all of this wit and wisdom (tee-hee), all of the Tommy Boy quotes, the SNL characters that are just flying over the blank stares of the skeptical, 30-second attention spans sitting in this old school building. It turns out that having an old song at the ready for any possible phrase they utter is not cool. Good thing it never was.
Alas, says I. I am set adrift on a lifeboat of language in a sea of apathy.
See? They wouldn’t appreciate that at all.
Bless you, dear readers, all.
We have a family group chat, and “Yo, chat” found it's way in there recently. "Fam" has made an appearance or two as well.
(big sigh)
As for the eclipse, I thought about going somewhere for it--and I wish I had a philosophical reason for staying where I was-- but it all just seemed like a lot of work. Drive to Indiana? On a workday? No thanks. That said, my laziness was rewarded with both a pretty good bit of totality, *and* Air Force One whizzing over my house. The universe sometimes has weird ways of rewarding us.
And I do appreciate your "hanging in there" wackiness. I hope your students have been made to read "Jaberwocky" at super high speed as I was when I was a high school punk. We had to shout every nonsense word. I though it was a blast, so float that upon the "sea of apathy."
Also, ask them to make sense of this poem. I do enjoy your posts, Jodie. Your indomitable spirit is in there. I taught middle school for 10 years, HS for 5 years.
https://westonpparker.substack.com/p/some-poems