Category Archives: Memoir

I don’t like to write about myself too often, but a personal blogger can’t avoid it altogether. A few things about family here, too.

Framed

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Dave Bonta

headlines 2

A freshly laundered pillowcase makes headlines. I wake to the bad press.

Without glasses I feel vulnerable but look a little scary. Which makes sense: so often it is the most frightened people who say and do the most frightening things, especially when you get them into large groups: lynching, caucusing, you name it.

Glasses allow me to keep my distance from the world. A couple weeks before Christmas, the frame snapped on my old pair and I had to get new ones. I went to one of these places that offer two for the price of one: great, I thought, I can go twice as long before I have to get another eye exam, by which time I will probably need bifocals. But that’s another story.

A friend with more fashion sense than me showed up to help me pick the two pairs: one a light wire frame similar to what I had before, and the other a hipper style: thick, dark green plastic rectangles around each eye that say I AM WEARING GLASSES. My friend assures me they make me look like an urban architect, but I’ve decided they make me look like someone I’d like to punch in the face. They are, however, made of 100% recycled plastic, so they are figuratively as well as literally green.

So great, I can make a political statement with my choice of eyewear. But the other frames — the ones that do their best to be invisible — make a kind of statement as well. You can bend them completely in half and they won’t break! That’s the kind of politics that actually gets you places in this country. Eventually, of course, they will break, but then I’ll just don the other pair, which by then should be completely out of fashion. Which means I won’t have to spend long hours in front of the mirror practicing an air of urbanity and trying to avoid punching myself in the face.

The optometrist told me I have the eyes of a teenager, whatever that means. I guess it means there’s no medical marijuana in my future.

Hey! I should’ve held out for frames made entirely of hemp.

Posted in Humor, Memoir | 8 Comments

Connection

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 39 of 41 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

Pre-school, we clung to knots
in a long, thick rope
& made our way across the college campus,
orderly as a centipede.
Of our routes or destinations I recall
nothing, I have learned & forgotten
whole languages since then, but
that sense of my place
as node on a travelling rhizome
has stayed with me: I can still feel,
like the final consonant of some forbidden word
the tongue can almost taste,
that fibrous knot.

Posted in Memoir, Poems & poem-like things | Tagged , | Comments Off

Homiletics

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 37 of 41 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

1.
To hold the attention of a Sunday
school class, my brother said
he once had to eat a piece of chalk.
He never said what the lesson was about,
just that the chalk was tasteless
& thoroughly indigestible.

2.
When Borges came to speak
at Penn State, he sat folded
into an easy chair on stage,
still as a lizard on a heat rock.
He quoted Basho to show
that metaphor isn’t essential—
the “ancient pond” haiku.
But as he delivered his pronouncements,
he kept smiling at something
three feet above our heads.
And seeing the smiles pass
across his blind face, we all
began to smile too,
pleased at our proximity
to such a famous solitude,
which we were sure
must’ve been flooded with light.

3.
I’ve kept all the glass ashtrays
from when I used to smoke, lovely
as the windows of a church
in which I can no longer kneel.
Has it really been 12 years?
Borges said: Life is a dream,
to which someone in the audience objected:
That’s a metaphor!
No, he intoned, it’s the truth.
And for some reason
everyone broke out laughing.

Based on this post from August 2009.

Posted in Memoir, Poems & poem-like things | Tagged | Comments Off

Abed

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Even as a kid I never fully believed that sleep would come. I would lie awake waiting suspiciously. But under the covers I found a cozy chill, the warm dark of a toothless maw, the tick of my pulse, a sneeze & an ache, a day home from school, a place to breathe secrets or to weep, farts, fears, oblivion, the occasional breast feather of a goose, & a far-off love whose only unchanging characteristic was a penchant for walking everywhere in bare feet. Her name, I suppose, was Sleep.

Posted in Memoir, Poems & poem-like things | Comments Off

Goal-oriented

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

There’s a black walnut tree beside the driveway that my brothers and I tried to kill one spring evening when we were teenagers and it was just a seedling. Now it drops fat green planetary objects from 50 or even 70 feet up, another one landing on the old cracked tarmac every so often with a heavy thunk, like a worn-out clock that has forgotten how to toll. But the tree’s in the prime of youth; it is I, the one-time would-be assassin, who has turned decrepit. I have a fan in a little cage that I turn on my face in the heat of the summer, and for most of the other three seasons, my bony knees remain cold no matter how many layers I wrap them in. The falling walnuts remind me not of harvest-time and blessings as they should, but of all the projects I’ve abandoned, including love, reproduction, a career, the whole matter of being a useful citizen.

It should be noted that we have plenty of squirrels, so sometimes the walnuts don’t fall on their own; they are pushed. Maybe the squirrels are simply clumsy, and drop the nuts by accident. But I’ve watched them do it, and I have to say I think they relish the sound of a walnut connecting with its unmissable target the earth, like bored kids with a frisbee aiming for the terminal bud of a tree seedling at the edge of the yard, and shouting with triumph when a lucky throw shaves it bald.

Posted in Memoir, Plummer's Hollow | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Typewriting

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 23 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

typewriter by Darwin Bell

photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY-NC license) - click to enlarge

Writing is hardly an innocent act. I remember with what force I had to strike the keys of my dad’s old manual typewriter when I was a kid. How the ribbon would rise to the occasion like someone throwing himself between an assailant and his victim, absorbing the blows. And as the ribbon ran dry, how the type would slowly fade, prompting me to pound the keys harder and harder, pummeling the paper, turning the letters into pale, shallow graves.

The first time I used an electric typewriter, it felt like cheating. It was in 4th or 5th Grade. I was typing up a parody of the movie Jaws — “Lips,” which we would later perform in appropriate costume. One of the kids who’d volunteered to help on the play sat and watched my two-finger typing, studying me closely but not saying a word until I was done. “I think I understand how you’re doing that now,” he said. I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a kind of magic trick.

I took touch typing as an elective in high school, and of course we used nothing but the most modern IBM Selectrics. That was in 1982, I think. But when I started at Penn State two years later, it was nothing but the old manual for me. I figured as long as I had a newish ribbon and a sturdy, erasable bond, that was good enough. And in my own writing, watching a poem take shape letter by letter and word by word… I find myself almost salivating now as I recall the pleasure of that tactile experience. Poems were things that you hammered out by hand, which is perhaps how poets were able to unironically refer to poetry-writing classes as “workshops.” And most lyric poems being fairly short and the look on the page difficult to grasp with too many hand corrections, it was easier to just keep hammering out new drafts. I have a huge file box upstairs filled with nothing but those abandoned prototypes, like the empty larval shells of cicadas. The final drafts sit in a nicer, metal tomb downstairs, beside my writing table. It’s hard to simply throw out a handmade thing.

After we bought the adjacent property here in Plummer’s Hollow in 1992, we had the melancholy task of going through the derelict house where our neighbor Margaret had lived almost until her death the previous year. Among her possessions were three typewriters from her youth in the 1930s or 40s, when she had pursued a secretarial career in New York City. They were huge and black, archaic as ringer washers or Model T Fords. By that time I had switched to a word processor and was happy to have put the typewriter era behind me, so when a friend mentioned he collected typewriters, I passed those machines onto him without a second thought. Now I kind of wish I’d kept one of them as a conversation piece.

Around that same time, I had some people up for a party, and they all had a good laugh at the ancient, hulking, hand-me-down of a PC I was using. It must’ve been at least ten years old! I used WordPerfect 6.0, and only a Courier font because that’s what typing was supposed to look like. A few years later, I finally upgraded and put the old beast out to pasture — literally. I didn’t know then about the heavy metals and other hazardous substances found in circuit boards, cathode ray tubes and the like. So now it sits in a shallow, unmarked grave somewhere out in the goldenrod patch we call a field.


Prompted by Beth’s latest post, “Process,” at the cassandra pages.

Posted in Memoir, Poets and poetry | 18 Comments

Powerless

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Things you can’t do during a power outage if you lack a generator and a mobile device:

  • listen to music
  • listen to the radio
  • process photos
  • work on a podcast
  • post to a blog
  • post to Twitter
  • visit Facebook
  • tend to qarrtsiluni submissions
  • read or answer email
  • revise poems, none of which have a paper backup
  • call or take calls on Skype
  • do laundry
  • cook
  • make tea or coffee
  • run the tap
  • flush the toilet
  • tell the time

Things you can do during a power outage:

  • read a book
  • read a magazine
  • weed the garden
  • write with pen and paper
  • weed the garden some more
  • take pictures
  • go for a walk
  • gather herbs for drying
  • take a nap
  • drink a beer

I am trying to lead an unexciting life and failing miserably. I give thanks to the power company for its periodic lapses, reminding me how far I have yet to go.

Written with pen and paper, 10 August 2011

Posted in Memoir | 9 Comments

Living with wrens: 40 years in Plummer’s Hollow

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Dave Bonta
Carolina wren silhoutte

Carolina wren silhouette

Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle chants the Carolina wren from my front porch, seemingly unfazed by this morning’s rain and gloom. I smile at what I can’t help hearing as irrepressible ebullience, though quite possibly to the wren its song conveys matters of urgency and deep seriousness.

August is the quietest time of the year for birdsong. The neotropical migrant hordes whose songs made the woods ring in May and June are mostly done raising their broods, and many species are in the midst of their molt and lying low. So the Carolina wren’s song is more welcome than ever — especially considering that we didn’t have any of them nesting around the houses this spring, for whatever reason. A couple pairs nested elsewhere in the hollow, Mom said, and are now dispersing, some to breed a second time this season. Which may very well be what my front-porch wren has been so excited about the last couple of days. Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Plummer's Hollow | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Flirting with toxicity

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

green stinkbug on striped maple

As I drank my coffee this morning, an odd, almost repulsive idea occurred to me: wouldn’t it be awesome — or something — to interview people who hate me or my work for an episode of the Woodrat podcast? Continue reading →

Posted in Greatest Hits, Memoir, Pennsylvania, Photos, Wildflowers | Tagged | 50 Comments

Of time travel and coracles

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Time-travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Shortly before I left, I heard a mention on the radio about the effects of jet lag on memory — it sounds worse than marijuana by far. I heeded the advice to expose myself to plenty of sunshine, though (I was fortunate that my visit to Wales and England coincided with an unusually sunny period) and managed to reset my body clock fairly quickly. What I didn’t get used to was the longer day. I would wake up when the blackbirds started singing at dawn and discover that it was only 4:30 in the morning.

Traveling home, of course, I got back the time I lost on the flight over. It was just about the longest morning of my life, starting at midnight when I was en route on the express train from London to the Birmingham airport, continuing for many hours at the airport lounge (I didn’t bother getting a motel room), and then on the flight itself, which left at 9:00, lasted for seven and a half hours, and arrived at noon. I had a window seat at the very back of the plane, and spent much of the time gazing at the tops of clouds from 35,000 feet in a state of mild stupefaction, the combined effect of sleep deprivation, a recently contracted head cold, and the sheer wonder of it all.

The plane was a Boeing 767 and bucked and heaved a lot more than I remembered from my previous intercontinental flights on 747s, and this combined with the wave-like tops of the clouds made it feel almost like a sea voyage. From time to time I’d switch on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me to check our position and verify that we were, in fact, hurtling along at 500 miles per hour. I thought back to my very first day in Wales, when I got a chance to ride in a small, flat-bottomed boat known as a coracle, a version of which the Irish St. Brendan supposedly crossed the North Atlantic in. Thousands of newly hatched mayflies were rising off the river as we took turns trying to pilot the rudderless, slow-going craft against the current.


View on YouTube

The boat had just been made two days before by John and Cathryn Warren, the next-door neighbors to my hosts in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Peter Wakelin (that’s Peter in the coracle after me; Clive’s voice is in the soundtrack, and he did the filming while I took a turn in the thing). I had simply happened to mention that a good friend of mine in the States was crazy about coracles, and asked if they knew where I might see one.

Somehow the unreality of flying across the Atlantic in a few hours was balanced by the unreality of having my desire to see a coracle instantly granted, sitting in it and finding myself unable to go anywhere very quickly except in circles. In fact, at that moment, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to go. Though the ancient ocean-going coracles did probably have rudders (and according to The Voyage of St. Brendan, could be fitted with a sail), their relative unsteerability constituted part of their attraction to Celtic monks, for whom the ideal form of travel involved surrendering to the will of God and going wherever the winds and currents took them. Some of the more God-besotted ones set off without even an oar. I could see their point. Almost everything — trees, wildflowers, birdsong — was new and miraculous to me, and I wanted nothing more than to stop and soak it in.

*

UPDATE (5/19): I’m honored to report that this post has spawned not one, but two responses from my friend Kristin Berkey-Abbott. Check out “Coracles and Communication,” which includes a poem called “Coracle of Prayer,” at her personal blog, and “Coracles and Currents” at Liberation Theology Lutheran.

Posted in Greatest Hits, Memoir, Travel, Video | Tagged , | 38 Comments
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