Education is…

I wrote a guilt poem a couple days ago. It was a haiku intended for Mother Nature. She was supposed to read it, feel guilty about all this cold weather and give us a break. But Old Girl doubled down and dumped more snow on us. The roads are a slushy mess and we’ve postponed most of our Saturday plans.

Most, but not all. Jesse and Fern have “snuck out” to Velvet Robot to pick up our family’s favorite coffee and tea beverages. They should be home before I finish this blog.

***

I was wrong. I did not finish this blog before they got home because Angelo came downstairs and read “A Dream within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe out loud to me.

This quarter, Angelo’s 6th Grade English teacher reads a poem to his class nearly every day, even when it’s not National Poetry Month. Angelo then shares the poem with me when he gets home from school, but yesterday we didn’t get around to it. This morning, he read it to me twice and then showed it to me. It’s a beauty. I have never read this poem until today. There’s a section in Poe’s second stanza about “grains of golden sand” that “creep through my fingers to the deep.”

"...And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?"
-Edgar Allan Poe

Once again, a poet has taken something sad and written about it in a way that fills me with happiness. Edgar Allan Poe was a genius and I love that Angelo is getting more and more familiar with the “master of macabre.”

***

I have zero poetic memories of my 6th Grade English Class. I remember Mrs. Thompson made us copy words and their definitions from the dictionary and that’s about it. I don’t remember why she made us do that.

What I remember about 6th Grade is that John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II had all been shot. It was the year I started to pay attention to gun violence.

I heard about John Lennon on the local “rock” radio station WZOK when I was getting ready for school. It was the first time I had heard breaking news on the radio. It is still my “favorite” way to receive news.

In March, Ronald Reagan was shot. That’s when I figured out that pull quotes were important business, no matter how insipid. I remember watching the news and learning that president said, “Honey, I forgot to duck” to his first lady and the reporters went nuts. The next day the stupid quote was plastered across the front page of the local newspaper.

Pope John Paul II was shot less than two months after Reagan and it raised the question about who is more important to the world: the president or the pope? That is my first memory of witnessing emotional debates.

I learned a lot in 6th Grade, just not in 6th Grade. Anyway, guess who just walked through the front door, wet with snow but carrying six piping hot beverages that cost more than our monthly electric bill? I’ll be back.

***

Hi! I’m back and sufficiently caffeinated. Several hours have passed since I started this blog. I went outside to take in the scenery and saw this mourning dove perched in the birch. Unlike me, she was completely unfazed by the snow.

I need to work on being unfazed more and also start cooking dinner. But first, a poem. This one is a senryu, similar to a haiku but (hopefully) has a little comedic “punchline.”

snow covered branches
hold the soulful mourning dove
coo-est mom i know

 

Thanks for reading my “educational” blog. -Connie