Important Stuff
Lately, I’ve been spending quality time in my garage. On the shelves along the wall of the third bay are large sturdy blue Rubbermaid storage units and cardboard boxes of books and papers. There were cullings—the flood of ‘86 a heartbreaking omen fomenting an identity crisis. What is left today have become random objects to others’ eyes.
I can’t find three of my best poems written over forty years ago. One is about the little old lady who lives in a shoe, my Mother. One is about Brian, a fourth or fifth grade kid on the run I tutored briefly in a reading clinic in 1981. The third is about a spider I watched from my seat on a toilet in a Mobil gas station at a busy intersection in Pomona one hot Saturday night in 1978. This was just after Bukowski and Tom Waits.
Reflecting on the first few months of writing this newsletter, the innocence, the naïveté, after several years of academic withdrawal, of joyfully rewriting and recording ghosts of songs in Apple Logic, I culled to recall. What did I know about worth communicating? How out of touch had I become? I felt the pull of community service.
Teaching, scholarship, and community service, each an aspect of faculty evaluation at Sacramento State University, motivated me decades ago to consolidate my interests in an ideational network, a cognitive trampoline, giving me legitimate access to academic discourse and to opportunities to give back for the high privilege of teaching in a university. David is right again. There is no higher privilege than being a Professor.
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I’ve been keeping my eye out for a book. I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing remembering a book vividly without knowing its title or author or much of what it was about, just it’s about carefully documenting a child’s crib speech, just it had a nice feel in your hands, the nagging sense, and then finding it or stumbling on it and remembering it all in an explosion, a time-bending uncorking? I can’t find it! The bot is absolutely no help.
While searching for this book I came upon an object I thought was gone. Here’s a photo:
The wooden letters are somewhere in a Ziplock freezer bag. I think we found the puzzle at a toy store. In 1992 we found a rubber picnic table suitable for a one-year-old. She ate snacks and meals there, and we played together with this puzzle. I need not point out the affordances this toy brings to a minirubberpicnic table for a dad with a reading specialist background and a daughter who was humming the melody of the ABC song at six months. Her next big thing was a Magna-Doodle, an Etch-a-Sketch with a wand.
