Start to Finish

I’d like to post today about two things that happen this time of year. One is what I will call The Rankin Bass Conversations, or People on social media and elsewhere enthusiastically discussing mutant reindeer, earnest v. snotty elves, and Gigantic yo-yos and such. (For the Record: Abominable Snowman, thumbs down. Winter Warlock, thumbs up. Winter is The Man.)

The holiday season abounds with Creativity. Herbie’s cosmetic dentistry, Schroeder rocking the house via Vince Guaraldi, a corncob pipe and a button nose. Boston looks beautiful, and did you know every snowflake is unique. Especially Me. And the weather, remember, is Created by the two bitchy sons of Mother Nature, Cold Miser and Heat Miser, who resemble a blue 1960s TV actor and an orange troll doll. But those songs do Rule. You know they do.

The second thing that happens is the end of another semester barreling down on students and professors, itself like a force of nature. And this situation sometimes requires using Creativity to be silly and have some fun, as you float somewhere between This Pile of Papers and That Pile of Papers. And the Island of Misfit Papers…no, ok, sorry.

So I’m borrowing the bratty brothers to create two more opposite, difficult Siblings, called Beginning of Semester and End of Semester, or BEG and END for short. Imagine something jazzy playing.

BEG: Should I accessorize my Look for class today with layered necklaces or a scarf?

END: Clean is the New Black. (Thanks, Leah W of UNH, for this.)

 

BEG: Now that I’ve Prepped for class tomorrow, let me just get the dishes done and everything tidied up.

END: There’s one mug left for Coffee in the morning. OK, yay.

 

BEG: Done grading for the day? Prop up the pillows and read!

END: Done grading for the day? Punch down the pillows and drool.

 

BEG: Student approaches desk. Put on the expression of a goodhearted professor character who will brilliantly help the Oxford police pair solve a complex mystery on the British detective show.

END: Student approaches desk. Put on the expression of any character trying to survive in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 

BEG: Well, good morning! How nice to see you again by the staff lounge coffee urns! How are you? Yes! I know! You also have a great day!

END: You’re blocking the spigot. Move aside. Move. Aside.

 

BEG: A free weekend day with no grading? Make plans. Take a nice little walk. Read a new book.

END: Sudden shocking abundance of free time after submitting course grades? Curl up to read YA fiction you have long since memorized. Decide Harriet the Spy should be APPRECIATED as a Writer rather than MISUNDERSTOOD by a thick-headed world. Sniffle a little. Take multiple obsessive walks. Buy used books you’re too weary to read. Have anxiety. Sniffle a little more. Consume only popcorn and white wine. Stare at things.

 

I BEG your pardon for this. The END.

Hello. My Name Is…

I’ve been thinking about Names this week.

The textbook my students use has tips for Vivid Descriptions that begins with naming, which it says helps readers “visualize…and understand.” We recently compared “a vase of flowers” to “a vase of dandelions,” the latter not only more vivid, but an image that can generate meaning on its own. My students suggested: insulting, broke-but-still-in-love, spontaneous, and others.

A colleague at the historic site showed me a photo of blazing, tomato-paste-red leaves, and asked me sheepishly if they were in fact maple. I thought they were; there are some that ignite like this in early fall. She wanted to post Creatively with them and to be sure of their Name.  Reading Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge’s lively book poemcrazy: freeing your life with words has put back into simple focus how beautiful and rich words are:  Leaf. Flame. Fall. Float. Color. Earth. And names: Oak. Paperbark Maple. Linden. Pagoda Tree. Hawthorne. Elm. (And big thanks to the Boston Public Garden for all the little signs on the trunks!)

More magic name-glitter got sprinkled onto my workday at the site when I met a descendant of someone in the Burial Ground, Dr. Comfort Starr, whose name has always been a Favorite of mine. Having met this woman, I looked him up, and it turns out he was, in fact, a medical man, a “chirgeon.” Not, as I had wondered, a clergyman.  He had the perfect name for either profession, no?

Of course, once one foot is in the Research Rabbit Hole, down you go. I spent part of the afternoon reveling in the names of his many siblings. Puritan names are often wonderfully strange and creative. No offense to William or Judith or even Jehosophat, but some of their names read like a poem-fruit growing on the family tree: Moregifte Starr, Mercy Starr, Suretrust Starr, TruthShallPrevayl Starr, Standwell Starr, Beloved Starr, Joyfull Starr.

They seem to have felt the power of words as names, to witness or even to make real their Values and Aspirations.

On that note, this newly-returned-once-more-and-who-knows-maybe-again-later blog has been renamed. It is now The Creative (Almost) Full-Timer: Finding and Being Creativity in a Brimming-Over World.  My favorite name in the Boston burial grounds has always been Hopestill. Yes. Yes, indeed.

 

Thanks to Jenni, because this began when I said the words, “Yes. Maple.”

 

 

 

The Boats

One of my favorite poems from childhood is Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Where Go the Boats?” from A Child’s Garden of Verses, that bouquet of scenes from an innocent (privileged), tree-shaded England. Here it is:

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating –
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.

Granted, the nursery rhyme world of mean spiders, bleeding mice and sticking your thumb in your food had its place in my life. But I always loved this poem my grandmother taught me because we shared a love of the water, and because, thanks to my grandfather, I am a Master paper boat builder.

As a Creative adult, I still love the poem: isn’t it a beautiful statement of an artist’s faith? I think so. As an undergrad, reading Shelley and Keats’s windswept vistas of eternity, I thought Stevenson stated faith in the Immortality of Art, carrying Our Names down the river of time. Well, he pulled it off. But Artistic Immortality is a yacht with a small guest list and a political agenda. I know now the poem is really an artist’s statement of faith in simple Connection, with another person or the world, through Creativity. The only thing the poem promises, and what it celebrates, is two sets of  hands playing with the boats, and the current between them.

Connection, when it happens, can often surprise you, like walking through unexpected lilac scent across a sidewalk. It surprised me this spring, when one of my classes was doing group work. In a moment of whimsy, I made a paper boat from a spare sheet on the desk, and set it among my notes. My student Ha, with the fabulous river of blue hair, came up to ask me a question and noticed it. Laughing, I told her about my grandfather’s lessons. She suddenly began to tell me how, when she was a little girl in Vietnam, they lived on a narrow street that was deep like a gully. It would flood easily in heavy rain, and she and her brother would sit in the doorway of their house, launching paper boats. The water would recede quickly, stranding their fleet, which settled into soggy, colorful masses of accidental sculpture, and, as Ha put it, “We papier-mached the street!”

This amazing image knocks my socks off. Connection over shared Creativity ensues, both a little breath-taking and wholly ordinary.

The humble request to use her story to write this piece is honored with the response, “I would be honored.” I hope this post will live up to the vivid, lovely story shared with me when another child saw my paper boat and brought it ashore.

For Ha Dang and Ida Schwimmer, and for Aaron Schwimmer, who sailed away June 8, 1985. I’m still making boats, Papa. I still know the poem, Gram.