September 29th, would have been my Dad's 88th birthday if he were still alive. I take this opportunity to share a few short pieces he wrote about his life. These several memories were written in the early 1980s.
A Component of Love Called Melancholy
by Bill Maxine
September 29, 1919 - February 21, 1993
When one examines one's life to see if it has a special meaning it makes one wonder and reflect and not be too sure of where to look. Like a skein of tangled yarn one pulls on certain threads and finds the skein tightening up, and another strand releases, and so on and on.
How I was made and formed causes me to think symbolically of my time: the first summer after World War I - September 29, 1919. I believe I was a promise that was hard to keep. Maintaining my integrity was struggle enough. I never felt threatened from within; and the schools never succeeded in turning me inside out.
My first trauma I do not remember. But I was told I went into very severe convulsions at the attempt to circumcise me. It was my first protest, and I succeeded. But in stopping the knife, it left me with a stammer I carried until I felt sexual love. I mention this so you will have a person in mind as I try to remember experiences just about everyone had.
My father's father was French and in Paris he carried coal up six flight of stairs. This must have been a miserable back-breaking job carrying the black stuff from under to six floors up where it provided light and heat. And in some way he sought a promise and came to America where he found other French in Greenbay, Wisconsin. He found himself surplus and moved to Jamestown, North Dakota where he must have disappeared into the puree of this great melting pot. I marvel at how little I know of my past. My father I remember as a great story teller. Like so many it was all within the American tradition of anecdotes, to tell stories to give themselves a sense of place, jokes on those less fortunate or stupid, and a secret envy of the rich and successful.
It is hard to transpose feelings back to an earlier time without adding wisdom or reflection to a moment vividly recalled. I was six. Though I don't remember feeling six. Our school was a block away from home - Roosevelt Elementary. I don't think in all my life I ever though about it beyond the typical. It was named after a President, some prehistory institutionalized into a building. I wonder if it was for his cure of TB in western North Dakota or his exploits in Cuba that my school was bestowed with his name. Roosevelt died the year I was born.
In my First Grade room the desks were aligned in rows like tombstones or soldiers. Cast iron sides with oak seats and a liftable writing surface. No soft maple or open seating. That came after me.
We were all directed toward the front facing the teacher whose desk was all wood. I wish I would have been aware of it then but school seems to be only a lesson in pointing at letters and learning to count. Mrs. Johnson seems to have taken a findness for me or my vulnerability by bringing me to the front of the class, and setting me on her lap, and having me count the buttons on her bodice.
It was in the Fourth Grade when I noticed Jean Hendrickson. Before this time girls were just other inhabitants of the school yard. She seemed so pretty, just like a princess to me. One time I got close to her and I smelled something akin to musk; which was such a contrast to my grubby hands that had the smell of fingers that scratched and wiped my behind or relieved me in the school urinal, this with left-over lunch smells and school ink from leaky pens.
One day, with great courage and my new ink-o-graph pen that wrote with gren ink, I wrote a love note to her confessing my feelings. I delivered iyt in a terrible way, but the only way that was safe to my fearful heart. I folded it carefully and ran up to her in great speed and said, "Here, half-wit!" and ran off to another part of the school yard where boys played and girls were scarce. Now I stood exposed to her and what she might do.
My God, with her Fourth Grade maturity she could laugh at me or tease me or ignore me. However the next day the verdict came. She walked up to me and gave me a note in green ink. She wrote saying she liked me and would be my friend. Now my anxiety was more than I could handle. So I broke off the relationship of 48 hours and I kept the note and treasured it very much. I don't think I ever spoke to her again. I just went back to be with other boys with smelly hands and the familiar things i could cope with. Sadly I think what might have been and reflect, when it comes to feelings of mine, I haven't made much progress.
When one gets older and wisdom sets in, it fills one with an inner security and another emotion, a component of love called melancholy.
My big brother Eddie's drawer in the dining room buffet, was something of envy to me, a point of passage, a place to keep secret things. Eddie's drawer was full of multi-purpose jack-knives, agate marbles, press clippings of his local heroics as a boy scout, cigarette lighters, and an extra pair of real horse-hide shoelaces, his Boy Scout manual and extra Merit Badges yet to be sewn on.
I thought perhaps that someday I too would have my own drawer. That never happened. My private drawer had to be in my bedroom, hardly a place of public or family envy. For my sister and me, our family consisted of two big brothers and a mother and father - we were sort od "add-ons" that kept the family poor. At any rate my sister Mugs, and I, needed a great deal of love and attention. So according to that great natural law, we received less.
Penetrating virgin prairie
From downside up
From the dark place
Stirring solitary sinuous
Seed root forever perennial
Thrust up into entangled crust
Shoving stirring solitary
Filaments, capilaries, tuberale
The entangled way of sod
A history of nourishment
Spearing shoviong stirring
Through the crust
Spring saffron
A Crocus
A toast
Bottoms Up
A Crocus is
When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.
Stories and Poem written by Willis Henry Maxine. Copyright 2007 D. H. Maxine.
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