Thursday

23 November 2017

— bare trees in silhouette against salmon sky.

Good Morning All,

The poem in the Day Book today may be my favorite by a relatively obscure poet named Iris Noble. Just for the sake of clarity, she is not the Canadian/American journalist who wrote biographies for teens.

The Iris Noble who wrote today’s poem was born--remarkably enough--in the same Bethesda, Maryland, hospital on the same day as your faithful scribe. I am older than she by a mere 159 minutes. As if that were not remarkable enough, she and her family also moved up from Maryland to Arlington, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1953. I first got to know here that fall when she and I ended up in Miss Griffin’s second grade class at the Parementer School (a “grammar school” back in those days) on Irving Street.

She and I were for our age tall and lanky; she was a lot smarter than I (she could already read!), and she insisted she could hit a baseball better than I. That was not so, and she was not much of an ice hockey player up on the pond ice, but she was in a general sense a more rounded athlete than I, including Dodge Ball and Red Rover. I was better on the jungle-gym (she usually wore pink underpants.)

Given our slightly southern accents and her annoying habit of poking me in the ribs every chance she got (though especially when I reminded her to treat me with respect since I was 159 minutes older than she), our classmates paired us off whether we liked it or not. By sixth grade, there was a fair amount of: Ronny and Iris sitting in a tree / K-i-s-s-i-n-g / First comes love, then comes marriage / Then comes Ronny with the baby carriage.

Fortunately or not, her family and she moved out to Seattle after our sixth grade. At her high school she was her class valedictorian and a merit scholar, who went on to get a Phd. in English literature at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was entitled The Ongoing Dialogue between Miss Dickinson and Mr. Frost). She is still teaching at Chicago University and is a recognized authority on the works of J.D. Salinger. (She met him on a train from Concord, New Hampshire to New York where he was going to play poker with friends. The struck up a friendship, and—though it is not yet generally known—Salinger left instructions in his will for her to see what she could do with his nearly completed novel about Holden’s brother D.B. during the war.)

We have over the years swopped poems (and Christmas cards). She says she likes my poems better than hers, even as I like hers better than mine. Hers, I tell her, are warmer, more deeply understanding of our human flaws, and more forgiving. She thanks me in reply and adds it’s nice to see that an older person has learned something since his bratty grammar school days.

Anyway, today’s poem does not rhyme, but has lots of music in it. Also in today’s Day Book are the opening lines of my favorite baseball novel, and a photograph by each of my kids. What more could I ask?

 

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Thanksgiving Dish-Dryer Girl

Iris Noble

A cheap tea cup drops and clatters

In a restaurant, and I am forty years back,

At our old house under the elms;

Dad and the boys in the living room,

Rumbling television football sounds;

Mom at the sink and I at the drainer,

Laughing about the cat and this and that:

When the heirloom, her mother’s floral

Platter brought in the hope-chest

From the old country, slips from my grip,

Drifts beneath my reach, flips over

Like a porcelain high diver, floats

In slow motion glides and slides,

And shatters on the worn linoleum.

My mother, a sudsy hand pushing

A loose tress behind her ear, kneeling,

Picks the shards from around

Our ankles, saying that ugly old,

Lumbering old thing, thank God, at last,

And pulls me close to kiss dry again

Her mother’s grand-daughter’s eyes.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.P.S. To answer your question: no, of course I certainly did not have a clue when I got up this morning I would be writing an impromptu bio blurb for Iris. (I’m not that crazy!)

P.S. Two selfies of the chilluns: