LENSING EFFECT OF DOWNTOWN MEMORIES

As with any illumination pattern, say the scientists,
some shine brighter than others.
The same with memory.


The lensing effect of light
reflected off a curved rim of any size
collects at a point on the surface--
of coffee in a cup or water in a pool
or even intergalactic rays
of spacetimelight
reflecting off the edge of a galaxy
and focuses and distorts in cusp-curve effect
onto predictable places in spacetime.
So it is with memory.


The relative dimness of some places
is precisely balanced out
by the relative luminosity of other places
with memory balancing the same way
in a Universal Memory Principle
in which some placetimes are recalled brightly
while others remain dimmed or uncollected.


When I think of my hometown
the memories traveling
as timethoughts
focus in lensing effect
on the once living downtown of the 1950s-’60s
concentrating memory rays there
when a vibrant downtown was filled
with the lifelight of people
traveling to town to do business
to ambulate, congregate,
recreate, inebriate
and drink coffee with timelight
in focus on their living surfaces
and bloviate with friends and strangers
on the corners of time
where few remember to stand today.


I might get a haircut and buy the latest comics:
Superman, Batman, Archie
or watch several movies at the State Theater:
Flash Gordon, Red Ryder, Hopalong Cassidy
and eat chess pie at Winnie’s Grill
and shop for toys at the five-and-dimes
and later, as a teen, play pool at Central Pool Hall
hiding from the supposed-to-have-been-working
at the small-town newspaper in my town
which had a real downtown
when its lifelight flourished
for a time.


And in the past-future time of now
my collected, luminous mind-images
of past-light not yet entirely passed
focus in lensing effect
on lifelight memories
flashing in from the edges of the galaxy
onto a downtown
yet remembered.

INTRAMURAL LIFE LESSONS

A matter about which many people intimate in their complaints about schooling is something known as the "hidden curriculum." (Yes, I am returned from three weeks in England--one-week pure travel and two archeologizing in the cold mud at a Roman Fort searching for Hadrian's footprints.)

Usually reference to the hidden curriculum is used in the negative sense; e.g., the Hard Times, undemocratic, classist, sexist, racist, ageist, and particularly today, the sexual-orientationist messages (heteronormativity is rampant in schools; witness the popular teen pronouncement, "That's gay") which reverberate between and around the walls of American schools. And, yes, I am sure that a hidden message is conveyed that war is good for all good children and American democracy. Contra that message, one of my favorite sayings, readily repeated to my students, concerning war, is WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle's pithy observation that, "War is hell." (Later, Pyle was machine-gunned in the head and buried with his helmet and boots on.)

What I am aiming for here is that even though I was a rather indifferent K-12 student myself, there were life-enhancing lessons, conveyed by the hidden curriculum which have informed who I am, and, I suspect, who each of you is today. Hopefully, there were sufficiently positive ones to have pointed you toward a life well lived.

In particular, I am reminded of a teacher of math about whose subject matter I cared less than little. In one of his classes I bargained (actually, I rather presumptuously dictated to him) that I would gladly accept a failing grade for the class, if he would acquiesce in my daily retirement to the school auditorium to sit alone and read (at that time science fiction, historical fiction, etc.). I assessed that I had bargained well.

I did not enjoy Mr. Wilcox's class at all, due to the subject matter. However, my point here is that there was a hidden-curriculum lesson that I learned from him: Respect for adults, respect for teachers, respect for people in general, but especially a great deal of respect for him as a person.

Last week we learned that Mr. Wilcox was given two weeks to two months to live. Here is what I wrote on our class website earlier this (late) morning:

Classmates,

I have recently returned from some travel and read (checking my email at a public library in northeast England) with disquiet the medical update on Mr. Wilcox. I join you in sending an invocation to the Universe on his behalf.

When we saw Mr. Wilcox at the Class gathering, in May, he was manifestly radiant in the way that some people become when their soul is beginning to wing its way to Elsewhere. The Soul knows. His address to the group just before he left now seems in hindsight to have been a subconsciously knowing farewell to a group of people, his students, who have so many fond and appreciative memories of a teacher about whom we all continue to this day to highly respect. Those of us who were fortunate to have been there to see him at the gathering were transfixed by his brave, from-the-heart, talk.

Carl Jung said that, "One looks with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings." This you did, Mr. Jim Wilcox, even long after we left your classroom. And for this, we give thanks.

Mr. Wilcox, my math teacher, taught me little math (not his fault). He DID "teach" me an equation to the 10th-power more valuable. You know what it is.

REMEMBER MARBLER SKIES

My former spouse and I were in 1st-, 4th-, and 5th-grade classes together. In the 5th grade, she won the spelling bee; I won the coveted marble championship. Marbles is such a cerebral sport, requiring the marbler to mentally calculate distances, directions, angles and carom trajectories. It is a strenuous, manly sport, too--crouching in the dirt in the outdoors, at that distant time under scraping-cloud oaks at the Central City [Kentucky] Grade School, in the 1950s, beneath azure Sputnik skies.

Secretively, I was a big reader and would have loved to have won the spelling bee. But, at that time my concept of scholar-athlete was still inchoate. Later, I began to imagine myself to be both--now with a dedicated exercise regimen, caroming marble-thoughts, and orthographically correct written words.

But, wish I could return for a while to the simple times of dirt-crawling, marble-playing, sky-watching boyhood innocence. I would try real, real hard to look around and notice and remember...and remember...oak-scraped skies.

HEADSTONE EDITORIAL

This poem is about my father, Larry L. Stone, who was editor of the Central City, Kentucky, Times-Argus, from 1949 to 1993.

Laconic is a word you taught me
telling me the story of its origins
in Laconia where Spartans
were people of few words
and men of action soldiers
who needed few words to kill.

You wrote your brief epitaph
and summed up a life
as Editor, Soldier, Miner
but a life edited in three words
is written only as an editorial
by an epitaphic editor of headstones.

As a miner your underground stint
before marching off to college
was as concise as your self-definition
but at that time you would not know
about the other two parts of yourself
that would appear in headstone headline.

As soldier during that European war
you bivouacked at the castle with wine keg
so large with dance floor on top
on your way to become soldier-editor
of the Army newspaper
writing terse headlines of battles.

Returned from war you were verbose
as stressed soldier and toasting editor
spewing linotype words of molten metal
not to be proofed until later
when a short life was editorialized
in three-word headstone headline.

As miner of words editorializing soldiers
as soldier battling word demons
but in the end as epitaphic editor
you had the last line
writing your own headline
of stone

GONE TO HEARTS EVERYWHERE

Can anyone here tell me what happened to my ol' friend John?

John lived from 1917 to 22 November 1963 with a great deal of verve and humor and intelligence. I had read his book, Profiles in Courage, in early high school, so I knew that he was an intellectual force, or rather that he himself respected intelligence and the courageous belief that the human mind could devise solutions to problems. John had courage.

He also introduced me, because he read them, to a new author, Ian Fleming and his fictional British spy, James Bond. John had style.

I can tell you where I was that afternoon at around 1 p.m. on a Friday when our school principal announced that John was dead. I was in the Central City [Kentucky] High School library with my girlfriend, Diann Wright. She can tell you that I presciently said to her that we would always remember where we were at that laden moment. Because at that instant, the world changed and we changed. We had to live thereafter in a heavier world feeling vacant without John. John had presence.

Can you tell me where he's gone?

John has gone to hearts everywhere. Those hearts, some of whom cried today, can only hope to emulate his courage, style, and presence.

MARBLES, ORTHOGRAPHY, AND ARROGANCE

She cheated. She must have. Perhaps Mrs. Belcher, our 4th-grade teacher, in an act of premature feminist activism, slipped Bonnie Belle the contested words the night before the 1956-57 Central City [KY] Grade School Spelling Bee. Surely I was sick at home, so the competition was down. Cousin Kirk Stone, later a PhD, and political editor of the Fort Wayne, IN, daily newspaper and later on the U.S. Senate staff of Sen. John Glenn and now professor of communications at Charleston College, came in second. He never forgave Bonnie Belle her luck. Not even Charles Frank Winkler, who would become an oncologist and surgeon, could beat the advantaged competition that day. He must have been preoccupied with his Elvis the Pelvis imitations.

Fifty years later, Bonnie Belle stills gloats over her triumph. Not that I care, but when I saw her last, I wanted to test her orthographic acumen by quizzing her on the word “charlatan.”

One reason I did not win the Spelling Bee was that I was concentrating on the highly coveted school marbles championship. The mental discipline it requires to devise on-the-spot winning marbles strategies is suited for only the most superior exemplars of humanity. Marbles is a cerebral sport. It’s gruelingly physical, too. The kneeling and crawling on the Good Earth and pacing around the marble ring eyeing and calculating all possible trajectories, collisions, and caroms—not to speak of tactics to psyche the competition—is part Zen walking meditation and part bullfight, with the only weapons the brain and opposable thumb and curled index and middle fingers. Marbles is a masculine primal sport.

I won that day and went on to finish runner-up in the county marbles tournament to a boy who went on to win the State championship, in Louisville. I know because my father was in charge of the county championship, for the American Legion, and took the winner to State and then to the Nationals, where the boy finished fourth. In my losing to a marbler who finished fourth in the Nationals--those were my glory days.

I know my loss to a champion marbler at the county championships was due to my concentration wavering that day under Sputnik skies, not for fear of the Russians, but because of the eerie prescience I experienced of one day standing before Bonnie Belle half a century in the future and hearing her declare that spelling is a patrician contest not for those plebeian marblers who sport soiled knees. I want to ask her whether she can spell “haughtiness.”

Mrs. Belcher always liked Bonnie Belle better. I’ll take my marbles and go home.

BOYHOOD BRAVADO

I can only resort to movie images, like West Side Story, to access any schema in which to relate to male adolescence in New York City. I'll have to imagine taking the fast elevator to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, as I have daydreamed since childhood, to look out upon any New York boyhood cityscape of doing and daring. An adolescence in Brooklyn, or in any large American city, was a world away from mine.

Or, was it? Actually, it's archetypically similar: boyhood games of hard-fought competition and daring, whether in the street or field; running/cruising the city or town until near collapse; fights, friendships, and so on. Small town or big city, we were still prototypical American boys with much the same influences and responses--no matter the locale--and the essential characteristics of a boyish and, yes, puerile nature.

Did I tell about the time several of us boys were sitting on the eave of the barn behind ole Mrs. Shelton's house, like a line of crows, gazing down at the distant ground wondering what it would be like to jump off the tall roof? Wasn't this a productive way to spend some boyhood morning? We were having a vigorous Heckle-and-Jeckle discussion about this important topic when my feet suddenly slipped quite cleanly out from under me and I hurtled to the ground and made a perfect, uninjured, landing--by accident! Acting totally self-assured and stouthearted, as if it had all been planned, I swaggered and looked up at the others, who were both amazed and aghast at my apparent bravery, and I called out, "What's keeping you little chickens from jumping?" I played it like I was the most courageous boy since ancient Sparta. I was the Philistine warrior challenging and humiliating the Israelites (before Boy David appeared and Goliath was felled), calling each boy by name--"Pat Franklin, jump, you little chicken!"

This became part of my local reputation--Lee the Daring--even if it came by accident. I wasn't about to say otherwise.