202. American Youth

I love the youth of America—really the world, but I’ll focus on home. (Having the great privilege of teaching a year in England, I quickly learned that people are really the same wherever you go.) I spent my entire working career investing everything I have in American teenagers and I absolutely love everything about them (including the fact that they grow up and become adults!). Right now my heart aches so much for them because they are living through one of the most terrifying periods of history that is full of anger and fear, so I really can’t let them go just because I’ve retired from teaching. I love the resiliency of young people in spite of society’s constant need to categorize them based on academic test scores. Most kids don’t care one iota about their test scores unless they get something more out of it than societal fear mongering that our country is falling apart and we are failing our youth. Our youth seem to fend very well for themselves. I love that about them.

Young people are alternately suspicious and excited about the adult world. In America we unwittingly encourage that by enticing everyone with alluring ads that make things look far more wonderful than they are and constantly telling our youth that they are too young to engage in such activities. What kids see is a mix of burned out adults strung out on alcohol, tobacco, sex, etc. and they can read through all the garbage of advertising to see the reality, yet sometimes, like all of us, they fall for it. Usually they know exactly why adults tell them they aren’t old enough: because adults are strung out. Youth know the difference between protection and outright lies.

Sure, young people experiment with things and as parents and adults that scares us. We don’t want our kids to be addicts to anything and we shouldn’t. But experimentation leads to knowledge, so our job needs to be guidance, both from experience and a true love for humanity. There is a great deal of joy at all things new with young people, just as there is a great fear of things that are, in the end, meaningless and something that time will eradicate—being bullied because you are different or feeling inadequate because of some feeling that isn’t even real. While all of that joy and fear balled up into one young person is terrifying, it is also inexpressibly beautiful to me and I see its fruition every day when a former student, now an electrician, fixes a light in my home, or a nurse, a former student, helps me with an illness. The beautiful people whom I love are constantly growing up and taking charge. They are America. I am astounded at the beauty and courage of the young people here in my home and very proud to have been a part of their lives in any great or small way.

There’s no doubt that kids in packs can seem sulky, intimidating, and downright frightening as they hang in glowering groups daring you to acknowledge them. Some of them will even seemingly jeer at you. And we will always think today’s kids are worse than when we were kids all while telling stories of horrible things that we did when we were young. The truth is that all that fear of ridicule still resides in us and that kids are the same now as always. The beauty is that they are made of penetrable stuff, that they can see that just as we can, that they are able to move mountains, that they will move mountains. I am enamored of young people. 

201. Scenic Six Park, Potlatch, Idaho

When I started making a list of all the things I really appreciate and love about my country, I started with the big obvious things and after a point I had to get down to the nitty gritty of my daily life to actually explain to myself what it is that makes me tick and appreciate my day to day life that just happens to be in America.

When I moved to Potlatch 29 years ago there was only one little park down below the elementary school, along with a playground that the city and school district jointly shared as what was basically a park. The city acquired land from the Potlatch Corporation (the two, city and company, were originally synonymous) to build a park. The land had an old depot on it that is still there within the newly acquired park land next to Idaho Highway 6. That highway is a scenic byway through the White Pine forests of northern Idaho, so the park was named Scenic 6 Park. The community rallied around that park. It’s a good-sized recreational space for a little town of 800 residents with a walking path along the circumference of the park, just under a mile. There are two baseball/softball fields with lights, a beach volleyball court, a pickle ball court, exercise equipment along the walking path, a disc golf course, a splash pad, and plenty of space. There are also small rental cabins surrounding an RV park that has restrooms, showers, and access to laundry facilities in the depot. The depot also has a full kitchen and group dining area.

This is the park that eventually took the place of the awkward dirt track surrounding the football field and I was the coach who first measured out the distance increments on the walking path. Eventually I gave up coaching track to exclusively focus on cross country and now the park is the place I use for our meets. I go to this park nearly every day to take walks with my wife and son. I have attended community celebrations there, watched little league games there, and ran there. Now there is a pavilion detailing the history of Potlatch near the RV park, so I often direct people there to get an idea of the history of the town and its roll in developing the timber industry of the Northwest. There are trees and benches in the park that have little plaques in memory of the people in the town or classes from the school. There is a little pond that a friend of mine made in honor of his deceased wife and now it also honors his memory after his death. It's filled with gold fish and water lilies and has a little walking bridge to cross it to a small picnic area. When you drive into the park there is a huge flag pole and flag that waves proudly in the breeze and nearby is a memorial for all those who served our country in the military. Just behind that is a little log cabin and privy that honors the pioneers that settled this part of the Palouse well before there was ever a mill town. And, of course, there is a beautiful rose garden beside the walking path and the railroad tracks that is bordered by Iris that bloom beautifully in the late spring. This park now is beginning to have shade from all the trees planted over twenty years ago. I just love this place and how it has become a part of my existence over the past several years.

 

 

200. Poetry

I really love poetry. With poetry you can say hundreds of thousands of things with few words as you evoke images in the minds of readers. I love to read poetry and see what I can of what the author intended. I love to write poetry by just tinkering with thoughts on paper and playing with the words for days on end, perhaps years. While it’s easy to fixate on ideas and images in a poem for a few days it’s also fun to set them aside for a long while and see if you can even remember what the fixation was, see if the poem can bring all of that back or was it as insubstantial as a mist? If it holds some of the ideas you can call it good or you can work with it some more. Poems are living, breathing works of art that gain their life, not from the author alone, but also from the readers. So many poems just wash up on the shore as good as a bit of plastic while others take on new shapes from the beatings of the waves and sand.

American poetry is quite different from other English forms even as it clings to the similarities of the shared language. A favourite poem in Canada may evade any favoritism in the United States, yet another might plant poppies all over the world from Flanders, Belgium to Potlatch, Idaho all because of a Canadian poet who has us weeping for the lost generation of young men over a century ago. That same thing applies to an American poem. Say “Nevermore” anywhere in the English-speaking world and images of ravens will pop into the heads of most of the listeners. All of the practising of writing in England might do nothing for the practicing of writing in the United States, yet it may also bequeath the eternal question, “To be or not to be?” The subtleties of the simple spelling of a word might evoke an accent, a way of seeing things, an Americanism that an American simply won’t notice until it’s pointed out by someone of the same tongue in a foreign land. The lives of the words are made by the lives of the speakers as they write and as they read. It’s truly remarkable, truly beautiful.

I have often written sketchy, bad poems in my journal only to return to a single image that held on to me and caused me to return over and over to the same bad poem just tweaking a word, phrase, or line here or there only to come back and shift it a little more. At the same time that little poem shifts things in me so that I think about something differently than I ever had before. When someone reads a poem and actually hears/sees the poetic presentation their thoughts are likely to change just a little bit as well. Poems do that to people just like the author does it to the poem. The good poems outlive the author and continue to influence others for years, maybe centuries into the future. I’m still being affected by a reclusive woman in Massachusetts who hardly published any of her poems in her lifetime, yet her family had them published after her death and now they are in American high school text books imprinting their images of “Hope is the thing with feathers.” That crazy white-haired dude from New York who traipsed all about the country and mourned bitterly at the assassination of Lincoln, “Oh Captain! my Captain!” still has his voice sounding on Levi’s commercials. And what of the living poets who tweak my thoughts with poems about their Cuban grandmother telling them not to act a certain way? I’m just constantly, daily immersing myself in the lives of poets who are living still, even as the last breaths have expired from their bodies as they left those beautiful little collections of words with me, with us. I simply love poetry.