Emily Dickinson could not stop for death but could for poetry

How did the Dominican sisters think I could understand an Emily Dickinson poem, "I could not stop for death?"

Sister Miriam Catherine: What is this poem about Mr. Shay?

16-year-old Me: Death, sister.

Sr. MC: What about death?

Me: She could not stop for it.

Sr. MC: Anything else?

Me: There's a carriage.

Sr. MC: Are you a dunderhead, Mr. Shay?

Me: Yes, Sister. Please don't smite me.

There was no smiting on that day. 

I am now smitten with Ms. Dickinson's poetry. I did not, would not, could not understand its full meaning then. I was a kid. She began writing as a youngster but her lifetime of creativity was enormous and almost unknown at the time of her death.

I turn my attention to the poet who became "The Belle of Amherst" on stage but was anything but. Since her death in 1886, Dickinson's reputation has been battled over by family, friends, and biographers. Lyndall Gordon tried to make sense of it all in his biography, "Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds." And Jerome Charyn writes of Dickinson in his 2010 W.W. Norton historical novel, "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." You guess that this is a different kind of look at a literary legend because the cover shows Dickinson's bloomers illuminated by candlelight under her hoop skirt.

I'm only through Charyn's first section but know this is a different look at an American poet who bored high schoolers and even college English majors. 

I now know that I didn't get it when I was young. Why does knowledge come so late in life? 

It's a dangerous time to be woke to literature. Liberal arts majors are being threatened in the U.S., maybe no more so than in Florida where I came of age as a writer. If I can identify a fellowship of dunderheads, it rests in the Florida governor's office. He aims to gut everything I treasure at the University of Florida: The College of Liberal Arts, English majors, arts programs, "wokeness" in general, and the Independent Florida Alligator. As a movie hero of mine once said, "This will not stand, man."

Back to Emily Dickinson. Charyn notes in his intro that he is obsessed with her poetry and has been for decades. His first sentence in the author's note: "She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked and hypnotized from the start, because in her writing she broke every rule."

I returned to her poetry and I know what I was missing. I read and reread "I could not stop for death." I couldn't get enough. I went to the Emily Dickinson Museum web site. I read about her and more of her poetry. 

I laughed when I read this on the museum's online Q&A (thanks AI): 

"Q: Is Amherst close to Boston? A: No, Amherst is not close to Boston. It is located in the western part of Massachusetts, about a 90-minute drive from Boston, which is a significant distance for a quick trip. The two locations are in different regions of the state, with Amherst being further west in Pioneer Valley."

I laughed because when I lived in Boston 1972-73, my woman friend and I hitched regularly to Storrs, Conn., to see friends. The two of us had logged some 7,000 miles the summer of '72 by thumb, ending up in her hometown of Boston. My pal Tommy and I hitched from Boston to Putney, Vt., passing just minutes from Amherst, on our way to get high with friends among the colorful foliage. I spent my career driving Wyoming and Colorado. Significant distance, indeed.

I wish I had gone. I still could. For now, I will finish Charyn's novel and read more Dickinson. I live in memory and imagination. 

Read more about Dickinson's "Secret Life" in upcoming posts.

 

Hospital stories on Nurse Appreciation Day

On the one side, you have Trump and his narcissistic minions.

On the other, you have nurses.

I align myself with nurses. They are on the front lines of the fight against coronavirus. They run toward the danger and, thanks to the Trump administration's incompetence, lack the necessary PPE to keep COVID-19 at bay.

Today is Nurse Appreciation Day and it launches National Nurses Week which ends on Florence Nightingale's birthday on May 12. They should be celebrated everywhere and every time. Mostly nurses are taken for granted until we are gasping for breath with COVID-19 or, in my case, from a heart attack.

I lie in the hospital bed in the ER. I am hooked up to oxygen and poked and prodded by doctors and nurses and techs. Chris is with me so she holds my hand when she can. When she can't and the nurses are tending to me, I feel a strange sense of calm.

I see my mother's face in theirs. She was a nurse from 21 to her early death at 59. Tomorrow, May 7, is her birthday. Happy 95th birthday, Mom. She took care of strangers and she nursed her family. I was born in December of 1950 at Denver's Mercy Hospital. Mom trained there at the tail end of the war thanks to the U.S. Navy and the Sisters of Mercy. She worked there when I was born. Later she joked that she was working the night I was born and took off a few minutes to deliver me and then was back at her job. The truth is that Mom took a week off to chill in the hospital after each birth. It was important the first time out with me. It was even more crucial in the 1960s when she had 5-6 kids at home and needed a break as the new ones arrived.

She could have been the poster child for nurses' week. We came to her for our miseries. As a nursing supervisor at a Florida hospital, staff members came to her to unburden themselves. For awhile, I was both -- son and employee. A university dropout with a low draft lottery number, I figured that I would surf and work as I waited for the inevitable. I worked an as orderly or nursing assistant, now known as Certified Nurse Assistants (CNA). People actually go to school for this now and I'm glad of it. Me and my coworkers got OJT. The nurses were patient and, at times, stern. There were a couple nurses we didn't challenge. We didn't mess with Mom, either, although her management style was more encouragement than stern lectures.

I do admit here and now that sometimes, taking temps and inserting catheters, I was a bit stoned. When my coworkers Jim and Sharon picked me up at  6:45 a.m., a smoke cloud greeted me when I opened the car door. When we abandoned the car for work ten minutes later, the cloud followed us inside. It's a wonder we never were caught. We tried to cover up our shenanigans with after-shave and perfume. One day I heard a nurse proclaim that she always liked Jim to work at her station because he always smelled so good. A blend of Jamaican herb and Hai Karate. I can still smell it 49 years later.

My youthful indiscretions faded at my next job as orderly. I worked the graveyard shift at Shriners' Burns Institute in Boston. It was a serious place. All patients were children under 18 who had sustained bad burns. House fires, electrocutions, accidents, and, yes, child abuse. The staff of nurses and nursing assistants were all young and energetic even at 3 a.m. Some of the NAs were enrolled in nursing school. My girlfriend Sharon (the same Sharon) was making plans to return to school, this time for a nursing degree. I was thrilled when the nursing supervisor brought me into her office one day and offered me a nursing school scholarship paid for by the hospital. I was doing good work, she said. I thanked her and said I would think about it. It felt good to be noticed. I talked about it with Sharon and on long-distance calls with Mom from the corner pizza parlor (we didn't have a phone). But I already knew my answer. My practical side urged me to do it. But I was just beginning to explore my creative side.

I blame it on the Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper. Both were distributed weekly on Boston streets I always snagged both of them and read them from cover to cover before I settled into my daytime sleep. The writing, at turns, was spectacular and sloppy. The subjects tended to revolve around the counterculture which is where I placed myself. Music, books, politics, wacko cults and conspiracy theories. I also liked reading Boston's daily papers. They were in their heyday in 1972 and 1973. Dynamic political coverage and great sports sections. But they ignored most of the topics the Phoenix reveled in.

The alternative press ruined me. I wanted to be a writer. Nursing was a great calling and would provide a steady income. Maybe my girlfriend and I could attend the same nursing school and work at the same Boston hospital..

But I wanted something else. I quit my job, returned to Florida, and went back to school as an English major. Write and teach, teach and write. That was what I wanted to do and that is mainly what I did.

Mom is just one generation of nurses in the family. My grandmother, Florence Green Shay, was an army nurse in World War I and two of my sisters are nurses. Another sister works at a Florida hospice center. I am so glad that nurses are getting their due during this plague. Let's keep them safe and pay them what they deserve. .

Part VI: The Way Mike Worked -- How I Almost Became a Nurse

The five-year-old boy from New Hampshire didn't talk much. He held up his right hand as the nurse dressed his wounds and I stood by to assist. The tiny hand was imprinted with concentric circles and looked as if someone had given the boy a special tattoo, although he was much too young. The reality was much worse. An adult, his mother, had punished the boy by pressing his hand into a hot electric stove burner. Third-degree or "full thickness" burns. The top layer of skin (epidermis) is destroyed as is the bottom layer -- the dermis. So are the nerve endings. Because the epidermis and hair follicles are gone, new skin cannot grow. The burn must be treated and then skin grafts are applied. This boy was a long way from skin grafting.

He would be in the burn unit for awhile, which is OK because everything was paid for. This was a Shriners Burns Institute (now Shriners Hospital for Children's--Boston), supported by millions raised by the guys with funny hats who drive funny cars in your local Fourth of July parade. I lived with my girlfriend Sharon in a walk-up one-bedroom on the poor side of Beacon Hill. It was winter and very cold. I wished I was on a Florida beach where I had been this time last year. I was cold yet fascinated by the work I did and observed as a nursing assistant/orderly at the hospital.

One morning, as I was getting off of work, the head nurse asked to see me. She asked me if I was interested in becoming a nurse. The hospital would pay for my education. I was stunned by the offer. I was torn, too. Just recently this dropout and former marine biology major had decided to go back to school and major in English and become a notable writer or at least one who got his stuff published. What to do? A secure future in the medical field? Insecure future with the other thing? I chose the other thing.

But not before I discussed it with Sharon. She was pondering the same thing, going back to school to major in nursing. Maybe we could go to the same school, University of Connecticut in Storrs, the place where she'd started college three years earlier -- she also was a dropout. Most of the people we knew were dropouts who went on to do interesting things with their lives. The Shriners staff wanted me to go to school in Boston. What to do?

As I pondered, I walked to my graveyard shift at the hospital and Sharon rode the MTA to her graveyard shift job at Deaconess Hospital in the burbs. She looked good in white. She looked good in anything. She told me stories of "rubbers," the guys who rubbed against women on the subway. One day she waited for her train when a young guy emerged half-naked from the shrubbery and began to masturbate in front of her. Those stories made me want to punch somebody, anybody. It made me want to ride with her every morning and every evening, to protect her. She was good at what she did and knew it. I was good at what I did but didn't know it. The die had already been cast. I just didn't know it.

Two years earlier, I had screwed up my chance of a military career. I know now that it was an act of sabotage. My mentors had lined up to promote my brilliant career. I failed them, on purpose. I didn't want to tell them no. Inside, I said no-no-no. Had I also failed myself? I guess, at 22, I didn't know. Here was another opportunity. It looked mighty good to a young man with no prospects.

When the night was slow, I gathered in a break room with the other nursing assistants. We stayed awake by drinking tea and eating chocolate. Some of the others were already in nursing school and spent the time starting IVs on each other. It kind of creeped me out but who was I to judge? I ran blood samples over to the Mass General lab through a spooky underground tunnel. I'm sure that it was well-used during the day. But at night? There was a camera and squawk box at each end. I pushed a button at the Mass General end and someone would eventually come on the line and asked my identity. I was admitted into the hospital basement. I skipped riding up the freight elevator because it smelled like formaldehyde. "That's where they bring up the dead animals, you know, for the med students to practice on. Human corpses, too. The morgue's down in the basement" The graveyard shift guy in the lab liked to pull my chain. At least I think he was pulling my chain.

Some of our young charges died at night. Burns can be horrific. House fires. Electrocutions. Accidents. Burns do terrible things to a body. Third degree burns with lung damage were bad. Very, very bad. Sometimes children are trapped in fires. Old people, too. Not only are their skins less dense, but their lungs are especially vulnerable. Kids' lungs are still developing. Oldsters' lungs are sensitive to everything.

I bugged out of Boston in March. Sharon and I pledged our love and promised to keep in touch. I hitched up to Connecticut a month later to see her and we drove out to the Cape. She came down to Florida in May and we drove to the Keys and camped. By the end of the summer, we were no longer a couple. I went back to school at the local community college. Sharon went to UConn. I sometimes wonder if she became a nurse or something else. What long and winding road did she take? 

Tale of a Wasted Youth, Part One

News comes from afar (OK, I read it on my laptop) about the demise of the Boston Phoenix. The late great alt-weekly was not alt enough for the 2010s. Its wise-ass editorial attitude was no match for multitudes of snarkmeisters on the blogosphere. Its advertising dollars migrated to Craigslist and a whole roster of Boston area web sites.

As is the case with most alternative newspapers, the Phoenix rose out of the sixties counterculture in 1966. Its rock-and-roll soul made it a must-read for a 21-year-old college dropout like me who was trying my luck in the big city. On my way home from my night-shift hospital job, I would drop a quarter in some longhair's palm to claim my weekly copy. It was fat with articles and music listing and bar ads and personals.I would take it back to my shabby walk-up on the cheap side of Beacon Hill (there was such a thing in 1972) and devour it while sipping a pre-Starbucks coffee and scarfing down a few doughnuts. Articles covered local politics, the antiwar movement, music, drugs, food and a 1,001 other topics.

 I'd read a variety of alternative papers during my cross-country travels: Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird, the Village Voice, the Berkeley Barb, and others whose names I can't remember. They were a refreshing change to the stodgy daily papers with their reliance on the 5 Ws and deference to all sides of an issue. Phoenix writers took a stand on the left (or at least the iconclastic) side of most issues which was just fine with me. After a lifetime of Catholic school and two years of college ROTC, I was fairly new to the counterculture. I wanted to roll around in it. I was openly living in sin with a wild Protestant girl namd Sharon, growing my hair long, smoking pot whenever I felt like it and reading alternative weeklies from cover to cover. I was hauling around bedpans at night at a local hospital, but a guy had to make a living. As soon as Sharon and I saved up enough, we were hitting the road again. At least that was the plan.

I lived in Boston from August through March. I read every issue of the Phoenix and its cousin, the Real Paper. I briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a nurse. My boss thought I was pretty good at hauling bedpans and wondered if I'd like to pursue a higher calling of administering enemas and starting IVs. She said the hospital would pay for it.

Unfortunately, the Phoenix was ruining me. I'd always wanted to be a writer but didn't know how to start. First the nuns and then the U.S. Navy said I should major in something practical, something in the sciences. Medicine, for instance. Or marine biology. But after a steady diet of wise-assery courtesy of the Phoenix and then Rolling Stone, I started writing in a journal. I made pithy observations. I recorded snatches of conversation overhead in local bars. I began to chronicle the break-up of my relationship with a wild Protestant girl who wondered why I was spending so much time scribbling in journals. She finally packed up and went back to school at UConn, leaving no forwarding address. I packed up my journals and Phoenix copies and headed back to Florida. It took me awhile to actually publish something. I then started writing feature stories for the Independent Florida Alligator in Gainesville. I free-lanced for some regional and national mags. I graduated and went on to write sports for both Denver dailies and then manage a weekly alternative newspaper called Up the Creek that got its start as an advertising sheet from suburban softball leagues and saloon-sponsored wet T-shirt contests. I wrote a wise-ass column and features about street gangs and local politics and religious cults and sports. I had a small staff of good writers, although they didn't stay around long. It wasn't the Phoenix but, hey, you take what you can get.

I publish short stories and essays in literary magazines. I've written more than my share of press releases and business articles. I've been prog-blogging since 2005. I can't say I have hordes of devoted readers. But I write what I want. I believe it was A.J. Liebling who said this: "The free press belongs to those who own one."  I don't own Blogger but I do lay claim to my little part of the blogosphere. I provide an alternative voice within the Wyoverse. I could fold at any time. But it won't be due to stodginess or lack of advertising. One day, I may just decide to fold up my tent and go home.

Thanks for the memories, Boston Phoenix. I haven't read you regularly in 40 years. But just knowing that you no longer exist makes a hole in the creative universe.

The Fix scores winners and losers at the DNC podium

Chris Cillizza on The Fix at the Washington Post parses the speechifying winners and losers at the DNC at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/09/04/democratic-national-convention-day-one-winners-and-losers/

I liked Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio. I'd vote for his twin brother, too, if I lived in his Texas district. I'd vote for their Mom! Also, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and the First Lady were terrific.

Who were your faves?