So in my never-ending desire for a degree I am slowly whittling away at it by taking night classes. I can't get money for college anymore so it is coming out of my pocket entirely without any assistance. So this semester I'm taking Creative Writing:Poetry. On the side I have been trying to get the university more involved with all things Spiva. I mentioned to my teacher that it would be a cool idea to use our current photography exhibit for an experiment. She jumped on the idea immediately. The students came to see the exhibit and based poems on the photos in the show. Then we had a reading of the poems in the gallery with each photo being displayed behind them on a screen as they read. It was a huge success beyond my greatest hopes! So here is one of the poems I wrote. If you all like it I will post the other two. I'm not sure if people respond to poetry on my space or not.
Inspired by Family of Origin: Skiers
Here they were:
Grandpa with a crew cut,
strong arms and a barrel chest,
the kind of physique you only see in old films
when men were still men.
Grandma thin but healthy,
legs tanned and tight,
wearing a full body swimsuit that shows off all her curves,
back when women were supposed to have curves.
The kodachrome color makes all these memories obscure;
world and past become unreal.
These can’t be my grandparents
they don’t belong to me
they don’t belong to my memory.
Sure they have told me stories of their life,
stories I knew were connected to them.
But it always seemed like they were relating a movie they had seen.
I could never place them in the stories.
Grandpa a puny boy with asthma,
the runt of the family,
the unloved and unfavored son.
When I was younger all the stories were of hardship
and personal glory at overcoming all obstacles of being underestimated.
Stories of outsmarting the smart guys with his sixth grade education.
He once showed me a picture of him as a boy with his brothers.
He pointed at his two older brothers and himself.
“Like stair steps” he said, “I’m the bottom”.
One day all the boys were dreaming of the future
A future away from the poverty and dirt roads.
Harvey was gonna be a doctor,
Warren was gonna be a lawyer,
Grandpa didn’t know what he was gonna be,
but what ever it was, he was gonna be a millionaire.
His brothers laughed and jeered at him.
Grandpa pauses in the telling, smiles slightly and says,
“Yep, they both ended up working for me”
It wasn’t always pride that was showing through,
it was vindication, not only had he survived,
he had shown graciousness in his triumph.
At the age of nine he was plowing a field
a boy, a plow and horse alone in the searing sun.
Having plowed from morning into the early heat of noon,
he took a break and went for a swim in a spring-fed pond.
His oldest brother came along and scolded him
jerking him out of the water and whipping his bare butt with
a blackberry briar.
That brother got a milking pail upside his head later that night.
That brother worked for him and they were close for life.
I have seen other pictures.
Pictures of parties,
everyone with a drink in one hand
and a cigarette in the other.
I recognize the sloppy smiles and half opened eyes
of the half lit.
They never told me stories about these times.
I recognize my Grandpa and Grandma in these cocktail parties.
The top shelf still has dozens of bottles even now
but I have never seen them ever once drink from any of them.
The kodachrome color makes all these memories look staged
from a Hollywood flash-back scene.
This can’t be my grandparents.
2009
Shaun Conroy
Showing posts with label Getting Old. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Getting Old. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2009
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Small Moments that define eternity Part 2
Today I had one of those moments that made me stop for a moment and enjoy the world in which I live. I said at one point that I was going to write about these kinds of events on a daily basis. I made a promise of a sort and broke it. Well my friend Robbie aka Rowboat called me on this so I’ve tried to make a mental note of things on a daily basis.
The fact is if you don’t write it down, these little things will simply disappear from your mind and your experience. I was once an ardent journal keeper and my journal was filled with this stuff. But laziness is a powerful foe in these matters. So I’m writing these little events to remember and hopefully to spark an interest in others doing so as well.
Which brings me to a little pet peeve I have been having lately. There is a lot of laziness out there. I know that people are reading and looking and so on and so forth. The question I have is why aren’t more people commenting? If we were sitting in a room together I think people would have a comment or two. It lends a lot to the “online community” building. It lends itself to discussion and people getting to know each other. Does it take a lot of time and effort to comment on a blog? Come on people; think how much time it takes me to write this dribble. It is also nice to know who is reading and what they think. Call it a writer’s need to hear from his audience. Ok, I’ve sounded off on that.
My friend Jerimy called and asked for some help moving a pool table that he had just got some great deal on. I will be honest; I didn’t want to help move a pool table. Pool tables are the heaviest thing in the world next to pianos and gold. I know I’m a big burly guy, but on the inside I’m really small. What I seem to be I’m not. I’m tough, I’m strong, but really I’m small. I will get in the grit with the best of men, but really I’m small. I also have developed this
obnoxious pulled shoulder that has been persistently painful for about four months now. Sometimes I just want to scream, I’m so tired of it. But men don’t talk about their aches and pains, men just “man up” and do the job.
I showed up a Jerimy’s house to find that the other help that had been enlisted was a guy in a back brace (he fell off of a roof drunk three months ago, being encased in plastic all summer long he had lost 35 pounds), a 14-year-old boy, some other guy and Jerimy. On the way to the house that had the pool table the other guy asked me how heavy I thought the thing might be. I said that I thought it depended on whether it was an antique or not. “Well if it is solid oak and really big I don’t know what we’re going to do” He nodded and seemed to care little about the details. “But you know I’ve seen pool tables that are pretty new being moved with professional equipment and a lot of effort at that”. He turned and looked at me with an expression of genuine dismay. “Pool table? He said it was an entertainment device, I thought he meant entertainment center or some shit”. “Man, he is going to owe me big time”. He turned up the country music and lit a cigarette. Turns out that this guy was Jerimy’s tenant. He was not happy at all. We get the house and some old guy lets us in and we go down to the basement. This guy’s basement is the coolest party pad ever. There is a bar, and a grill with an exhaust vent. We comment on how he must have had a lot of parties there. “No I never had a single party, not one time did I have friends over for a beer, in fact I’ve only played pool on that table a few times with my son”. There was sadness in his voice. “I was always too busy”.
We put the table on its side to take the legs off. Jerimy didn’t
bring a wrench or a ratchet. So we have to ask the old guy if he has one, fortunately he did. After we got the legs off we slid this monstrous thing to the door and then just stared at each other. The pissed off country guy says, “Fellas, I don’t think we have enough nuts here to do this thing”. I was in complete agreement. We were definitely undermanned and this thing was scary-heavy. The old guy stood and watched us and realized that our mutual resolve was fading; he suggested that we lay down some rugs on the threshold and slid the pool table as far as we could. I agreed with that and we did it. There was a lot of discussion going on about how to this and how to that. I finally decided that committee was not going to work and started telling people how it was going to be. Before I insisted otherwise, the consensus was to lift the table on its side, onto the tailgate and then lay it down. I saw true and pain and suffering in this option. It turned out that the pool table was exactly as wide as the bed, so I suggested we turn it back flat and have a guy on each corner and slide it in. Up to this point the old man just looked at us and shook his head. He was relieved, I think, that someone was willing to take charge and do something that wouldn’t kill us. I’m not trying to brag, that isn’t the point. The point is that after the votes are in, someone has to bang the gavel and pronounce judgment. I pronounced it and justice was served.
“What’s your name?” the old guy asked. I told him and he smiled and shook his head. “Spittin’ image of your dad”. I felt a sense of pride in that remark and hoped it ran deeper than my tell tale eyebrows. That is one cool thing about living back in Joplin I guess, you have some history. I asked him how he knew my Dad. He told me that he had gone to school with him and had actually been a year younger than my dad. What? This guy was an old man with white hair and everything. I mean he was spry but damn he was old. How can he be younger than my dad? My dad isn’t old, not that old. My mortality doesn’t really bother me as much as my parents. Being a single guy I think that I feel I need them more than most. They are my rock and anchor. But I will stop there.
So we had to turn the pool behemoth back to a flat position, which meant that two guys had to lift it from the ground while the other two just held it. The fourteen year old was full of beans and trying to prove his nuts so I let him and country guy do the lifting. I’m old enough to know that my nuts want to stay as intact as possible without a rupture. There was a lot of grunting and bursts of breath like in the Olympics when those guys almost blow out their innards picking up tons of weight. This thing was trying to kill us I swear. We got on the truck finally.
Back at Jerimy’s house there was more logistics in getting it off of the truck then I had foreseen, again lots of stupid lifting and grunting. We finally got it into Jerimy’s sunroom and set the damn thing up. Jerimy was grinning a lot and you could see that it was more than a pool table; it was the completion of the house. It is a major thing to have your own pool table! I would only mention in passing that you have to stick the end of your cue through the window if your shooting from the side, but hey that makes it more of a challenge right?
The fact is if you don’t write it down, these little things will simply disappear from your mind and your experience. I was once an ardent journal keeper and my journal was filled with this stuff. But laziness is a powerful foe in these matters. So I’m writing these little events to remember and hopefully to spark an interest in others doing so as well.
Which brings me to a little pet peeve I have been having lately. There is a lot of laziness out there. I know that people are reading and looking and so on and so forth. The question I have is why aren’t more people commenting? If we were sitting in a room together I think people would have a comment or two. It lends a lot to the “online community” building. It lends itself to discussion and people getting to know each other. Does it take a lot of time and effort to comment on a blog? Come on people; think how much time it takes me to write this dribble. It is also nice to know who is reading and what they think. Call it a writer’s need to hear from his audience. Ok, I’ve sounded off on that.
My friend Jerimy called and asked for some help moving a pool table that he had just got some great deal on. I will be honest; I didn’t want to help move a pool table. Pool tables are the heaviest thing in the world next to pianos and gold. I know I’m a big burly guy, but on the inside I’m really small. What I seem to be I’m not. I’m tough, I’m strong, but really I’m small. I will get in the grit with the best of men, but really I’m small. I also have developed this
obnoxious pulled shoulder that has been persistently painful for about four months now. Sometimes I just want to scream, I’m so tired of it. But men don’t talk about their aches and pains, men just “man up” and do the job.
I showed up a Jerimy’s house to find that the other help that had been enlisted was a guy in a back brace (he fell off of a roof drunk three months ago, being encased in plastic all summer long he had lost 35 pounds), a 14-year-old boy, some other guy and Jerimy. On the way to the house that had the pool table the other guy asked me how heavy I thought the thing might be. I said that I thought it depended on whether it was an antique or not. “Well if it is solid oak and really big I don’t know what we’re going to do” He nodded and seemed to care little about the details. “But you know I’ve seen pool tables that are pretty new being moved with professional equipment and a lot of effort at that”. He turned and looked at me with an expression of genuine dismay. “Pool table? He said it was an entertainment device, I thought he meant entertainment center or some shit”. “Man, he is going to owe me big time”. He turned up the country music and lit a cigarette. Turns out that this guy was Jerimy’s tenant. He was not happy at all. We get the house and some old guy lets us in and we go down to the basement. This guy’s basement is the coolest party pad ever. There is a bar, and a grill with an exhaust vent. We comment on how he must have had a lot of parties there. “No I never had a single party, not one time did I have friends over for a beer, in fact I’ve only played pool on that table a few times with my son”. There was sadness in his voice. “I was always too busy”.
We put the table on its side to take the legs off. Jerimy didn’t
bring a wrench or a ratchet. So we have to ask the old guy if he has one, fortunately he did. After we got the legs off we slid this monstrous thing to the door and then just stared at each other. The pissed off country guy says, “Fellas, I don’t think we have enough nuts here to do this thing”. I was in complete agreement. We were definitely undermanned and this thing was scary-heavy. The old guy stood and watched us and realized that our mutual resolve was fading; he suggested that we lay down some rugs on the threshold and slid the pool table as far as we could. I agreed with that and we did it. There was a lot of discussion going on about how to this and how to that. I finally decided that committee was not going to work and started telling people how it was going to be. Before I insisted otherwise, the consensus was to lift the table on its side, onto the tailgate and then lay it down. I saw true and pain and suffering in this option. It turned out that the pool table was exactly as wide as the bed, so I suggested we turn it back flat and have a guy on each corner and slide it in. Up to this point the old man just looked at us and shook his head. He was relieved, I think, that someone was willing to take charge and do something that wouldn’t kill us. I’m not trying to brag, that isn’t the point. The point is that after the votes are in, someone has to bang the gavel and pronounce judgment. I pronounced it and justice was served.
“What’s your name?” the old guy asked. I told him and he smiled and shook his head. “Spittin’ image of your dad”. I felt a sense of pride in that remark and hoped it ran deeper than my tell tale eyebrows. That is one cool thing about living back in Joplin I guess, you have some history. I asked him how he knew my Dad. He told me that he had gone to school with him and had actually been a year younger than my dad. What? This guy was an old man with white hair and everything. I mean he was spry but damn he was old. How can he be younger than my dad? My dad isn’t old, not that old. My mortality doesn’t really bother me as much as my parents. Being a single guy I think that I feel I need them more than most. They are my rock and anchor. But I will stop there.
So we had to turn the pool behemoth back to a flat position, which meant that two guys had to lift it from the ground while the other two just held it. The fourteen year old was full of beans and trying to prove his nuts so I let him and country guy do the lifting. I’m old enough to know that my nuts want to stay as intact as possible without a rupture. There was a lot of grunting and bursts of breath like in the Olympics when those guys almost blow out their innards picking up tons of weight. This thing was trying to kill us I swear. We got on the truck finally.
Back at Jerimy’s house there was more logistics in getting it off of the truck then I had foreseen, again lots of stupid lifting and grunting. We finally got it into Jerimy’s sunroom and set the damn thing up. Jerimy was grinning a lot and you could see that it was more than a pool table; it was the completion of the house. It is a major thing to have your own pool table! I would only mention in passing that you have to stick the end of your cue through the window if your shooting from the side, but hey that makes it more of a challenge right?
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