At assembly one day, Mrs Hanlon, our Elementary headteacher, announced there would be a new violin lunchtime club: girls and boys welcome. Here was my chance to get away from the playground where mocking my name was music to many ears. I needed new sounds other than people laughing at the fun made out of ‘Friday’.
I was attracted by the violin’s elegant body, the horse-hair bow, the curl of the head like the prow of a Homeric ship. A new destiny was awaiting this young Odysseus. That lunch time I went in search of the club and found just girls, staring at me, the only boy. I wondered if it was the wrong door. Nope, right door and no boys - none so brave or bullied. Too late to turn this ship around, I was beckoned in the divinely smiling violin teacher. She gifted me a second hand, chipped violin with the prophecy: take good care of it or you’re out. Raised eyebrow from Miss and every acolyte girl striking the same smirking chord. At home, in my bedroom, my first attempts to play sliced the air. My cringing parents closed my door, and then all the other doors. I tried for a whole weekend, the stained wood a growth under my chin. No growth in ability, just synthetic strings screeching. Then disaster: my yapping brother tumbled into my room, panting about playing outside. My semi-Cerebus relative fell and sat on the violin. In my memory a tragic epic: a crushed caldera of wood, bridge stuck out like a broken tooth, strings twanged open like sprung ribs. In reality there was a small crack, maybe a broken string, but I had to hand it back to the Oracle on Monday. I mumbled apologies, head hung in shame at my failed adventure as Miss glared at me with her cyclopean disappointment. The young sirens giggled - what do you expect from a boy? Medusa gave an orchestral sigh and ordered me to leave. I scuttled away before I turned to stone. Whenever I see someone playing the violin, I wonder if that could have been me, if I had been a little braver or quicker.
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Remembering Elementary School has many mixed memories for me, but I was lucky to have one special protector who motivated me to become a teacher in her nurturing image: my Grade 2 teacher, Mrs Mathewson.
The year leading to Mrs Mathewson is a corrupted film reel of fleeting memories with the occasional clear image. The story begins with hesitation. For the first two weeks of September 1980, my mother tugged me to Stamford Green School. I was a shy, quiet boy, reluctant to leave the company of my only friend: my younger brother who still had a full year at Play School. Going to Reception Class (Kindergarten) felt like being thrown to the wolves. In reality, it was a blur of alphabet songs, basic mathematics, singing around a piano with an elderly female teacher whose name I sadly can’t remember. I have a faint sense of lonely hovering in the playground. Having already learned to read, and with books an easy form of escape, I soared ahead of my peers. This led the school to take an unusual decision: I skipped Year 1 entirely and was dropped into Year 2 and Mrs Mathewson’s class. Being tossed into a class without friends and with peers much bigger and more confident than me was traumatic. I had to be dragged to school again, crying and pleading to go home. Luckily, Mrs Mathewson provided me with one of my first enduring memories: cuddling me in her teacher’s armchair and privately reading with me while the rest of the class busied themselves in lessons that I would eventually catch up with. I spent the next two years with Mrs Mathewson, under her special care - her undersized book-loving favourite who slowly found the words to talk. I’m sure Mrs Mathewson would not have permitted the mockery of my surname that I remember starting in the class after her. A couple of years ago, my mother met Mrs Mathewson in Epsom, our home town. Now a happily retired grandmother, she recognised my mother and quickly recalled me. She was delighted that I had become an Elementary Teacher. I hope to be remembered as fondly as I remember her. One of my fondest memories of summer holidays, my mother and living on the edge of Epsom Common woodlands, is when my mother, brother Cliff and I collected blackberries.
It began with the summer holidays waning and feeling that creeping dread of The Return: to school, routines, early nights, homework - reality and time itself. As the late August sun lazily emptied the evenings, Mum took Cliff and I on a tour of the Common boundary: the borderline between meadows and suburban gardens, where a snaking path took us to scruffy patches of No Man's Land. The best spot was the Ebisham railway embankment: a rarely visited zone of unkempt undergrowth, a scruffy wilderness. In all of these places grew wild patches of nettles, untrimmed grass and weeds, immature trees creaking as they reached for light. Here also we found the Holy Grail of the Common’s edible fruits: the blackberry bushes. Gathering blackberries took patience and dexterity as we plucked the small black jewels from their thorny safes. The thorns themselves were not the problem but rather the trailing limbs that flailed around as the plant spread and grew. These had to be gingerly eased aside or gently pressed down so we could reach in and claim the prize. Care was also needed in tasting the prize. The rule was that gathered berries went into the opaque plastic tub, the same one used year after year, an oddly reassuring cuboid of plastic. A few exploratory bites revealed pulsating white maggots that we spewed out in disgusted learning. At the end of the process, hands bleached with bloody juices and the declining summer sun sighing, we returned home. Mum soaked the blackberries in hot water overnight. The next morning the water’s stained surface looked like the sea after a shipwreck: bobbing on the surface where dead maggots, sometimes still squirming when pressed; sailors with a few remaining breaths. Only when drained, could the real tasting begin. We were given a samples but the majority of the fruit was fated for something far grander: a blackberry crumble pudding. The crunch of biscuit topping over the slab of sugary fruit truly marked the bitter-sweet end of summer. After a long time away, I see Him again in Portland when crossing the Marquam Bridge (built 1966). There’s that the same gasp of disbelief: surely He’s painted on the background, the backdrop of a geological magician’s prop, a copy of Mount Fuji's perfect point. He’s dressed in a year long white silk kimono dangling over a hairy belly of vascular gorges, time-knuckled hill, firs, fast flowing water.
Seen again from a street in White Salmon, Washington (est. 1852) He's now a bent-back Iguanodon's thumb poking time, hitchhiking half a million years. From the back deck of Everybody's Brewing in the High Street He's the tooth of a frosted megalodon biting heaven's breast – four times since the Ice Age he’s torn at the darkening flesh. Now He’s still-jaw and mumbling about the next cataclysmic meal. Long before my white-faced arrival, the Multnomah tribe molded basalt into their myth. Now He’s Wy’east, son of Great Spirit Sahale. He threatens with thunder and strikes lightning spears at Pahto, His rival mountain brave. For the love of La-wa-la-clough, He and the Pahto burn forests and villages, and their feud ends with sundering of The Bridge of the Gods. Enraged at destruction and disgrace, The Great Spirit decides to teach all three mischievous children a lesson. La-wa-la-clough’s not given any chance to protest, she’s just struck dumb. Pahto strikes all three children into unforgiven stone, leaving behind the mountains as memorials. For millennia, Wy'East stares north at his old enemy, now known as Mount Adams; dreaming of his old love, now called Mount St Helens. Her Hellenic face has fractured and fallen, still frail. We choose Him to be in the background of our wedding, to be the natural wonder of our single day that is not even measured in stone or dormant magma. But measured by us with Him as a sharp, ancient, always active point of reference. Then I am back in Portland, five years since I started this observation; a few tides of snow and bird lifespans. He fills the view from the plane window: frighteningly close and massive in his tectonic contours and tone of long-time. When I had poems published in The Peacock Journal, I was asked to add a short definition of ‘beauty’ to accompany the poems. Here are the three definitions.
Beauty 1 - Still On a hill above Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. Winter's leafy waste still carpeting the empty woods. Snowy patches still on the elbows of the Ore Mountains, fending off East Germany. Still colourful the grand Victorian spa hotels in the narrow valley below where mineral-drenched spring waters quench tourists. Above, private jets ferrying rich Russians, beautified, molded bodies. Still luminous moss on the grave stones in Hrbitovni cemetery where three still figures squat, hidden in hoods. Under a leaning yellow willow tree, a Czech woman in a red coat sits still, staring into her Sixties, long black hair like the fine, forlorn branches tickled by cold March fingers. Two boys walk past, just cubs testing strength, elbowing and flicking each other; never still with never-men giggles. Beauty 2 - Refusing to Be Beaten Refusing to be beaten: dwarfed by decades but dressed like a teen in a bright bikini, blonde hair, outrageously large sunglasses. She went up an elevator in a shopping mall while a young couple came down, looked down, noticed, sniggered, whispered about this youthful soul refusing to age appropriately. The aged beauty saw the young couple, knew exactly what they said, what they thought, but carried on going up. She adjusted her glasses and cracked out a reddened smile. Beauty 3 - Just Children Beauty is a brilliantly blue November day that make the roots of winter wither into forgetfulness. The orange and yellow trees in the city park are so brightly colourful you forget the slow death that paints them. The continually falling leaves, filling the air with fluttering action. The leaves on the ground, fossilized in the frost. The sound of laughter: an adult snapping arms at falling trees, being a leaf-eating monster for his toddling son who giggles and runs, all limbs in waving steam-engine motion. The fact that this is a German garden, the father and son are Chinese, and I am an English observer reveals how we are really all just children delighting in the passing world. When you left me, I didn’t panic. Not at first.
There was disbelief and a refusal to accept the truth. I just calmly retried our connection. Something faulty but easily fixed. There are lulls in every relationship. After the tenth try, the worry whipped up inside. You had left me without warning or explanation. What had I done? The silent emptiness gnawed at me. I could no longer check in on you, satisfy my addiction with fidgeting fingertips, use you at my favourite sites, deny that this was an obsession. The loneliness leered at me through buffeting windows, empty sites. I called many times for help from people who have known you longer than me - your friends and mentors. I begged for help, explaining what little I knew of the cause of our break-up. There were a few words of consolation from your so-called-friends, empty promises by people who claim to be experts on how your workings and whereabouts. But they don’t know you like I know you. Too late, I was told, try again tomorrow. The tomorrows mounted up and the same empty promises that you’ll return when you’re ready. A monstrous thought stalked me- you’d never come back. What did you expect me to do? I had to find you somewhere, or someone like you. So yes, I admit, I scoured the neighbourhood and found a free partner elsewhere. We met over coffee. I was just temporary, I promise. Just a short taster to fill your gap. I would’ve paid anything to get you back. I offered money, I made deals with experts, appointments, everything I could to change to get you back and keep me away from my coffee dates and risk of infection. Then on the third day I woke up and an idea slithered out: I could fix you myself and bring you back. It was as simple as changing the cable. Once. Twice. Fingers crossed, mumbled pairs, phone in my hand rubbed like rosary beads. Then you returned in a flurry of lights. There was leaping, cheering. I kissed your plastic body and we were reunited over vacuous emails and fake news sites, full bars and sighing denial. Early July and I am stunned by the emptiness of the air. The cuckoos have gone quiet, have gone. Why didn’t I realise sooner? Too busy locked inside hiding from heatwaves and vengeful evening storms. I suddenly miss his confident bell ringing, his reminder that nature persists despite our best efforts.
He started in early May, an unmistakable nursery rhyme song, complete and faithful. I live in a small village atop a wooded hill outside Lugano in Switzerland. Enough of the woods nestle the apartment blocks and villas to give the cuckoo a choice of stages for his repetitive posturing. When he first sang, I was a boy again, living on the edge of Epsom Common woods where cuckoos were a distant, tree-suffocated sound; a promise of something fleeting and stranger amongst all the wary resident songbirds. Here in Montagnola this African migrant proudly calls a partner in the famous crime: laying eggs in smaller songbird nests, kicking out the existing eggs, fleeing from the scene before the first mother returns to cock a confused head at an outsized egg. An egg that reflects back our own nature for aren’t we being cuckoos to the Earth? They are secretive birds; tricksters afraid to be uncloaked, the confidence scam revealed. I caught a glimpse in late May as he bolted past: part pigeon, part sharp-bodied hawk with a surprisingly large spotted body and short, hurried wings. He fled to the depth of a tree. Throughout May and June, a cuckoo was always nearby whether we were at home, high up in the Alps, on the edge of Italian lakes. Always the same herald of summer from a select number of prominent trees, the song deliberately changing in pitch as the weeks wore on. He was the loudest sound of the evenings, perhaps to keep the lazy evening at bay as Midsummer exposed the moon. Now I sit saddened by the vacuum of noiselessness. He has left with his mate, and their egg will have gifted grieving parents an oversized adoptee. I realise the true message of his song: the fleeting nature of all gifts in life; be aware before it is gone. Throughout the quickly darkening evenings and the reluctantly lit mornings of winter, a tawny owl was our companion. The owl had several regular hooting-spots in the trees that triangulated our block. Never seen, this night-ghost cloaked in the blur of the night and the silhouettes of trees.
When I heard the owl from our third floor concrete tree house, the space around shrunk, turning everything into tree. Time reeled back to boyhood; the thrill of such rare sounds that hinted at something secret and hidden in the woods of childhood. The tawny owl’s hooting is different to what you think you know. It’s not the recognizable ta-wit-ta-woo of storybooks and cartoons. The call is strangely strained and fast, scared, even, scared to reveal the secrets. One unusual February evening, our hooting friend suddenly had a rival. In the darkness he began his normal declarations only to find, a few moments later, a distant reply, a rumour of the trees complaining of dusk. Over the next thirty minutes, the reply grew stronger as the rival male moved in. I lived intensely in between the hoots, hesitating to breath, conscious of the seconds being counted in feathers. Almost exactly at eight, the owls were in competition: a flurry of calls, a race to see who would win to summon that great milky eye from behind the eastern mountains. As suddenly as they started, one stopped, then the other. By eight-thirty there was an odd, exhausted silence and the gloom of adulthood returned. Questions hang in the air and the moon demanded attention. The last owl for the winter was in the Piedmont area of Italy. I opened the window and heard a sad screeching scarring the early March night. Somewhere close on the langhe hills a barn owl was calling, moving, calling, clawing out its night’s territory, terrorizing the vineyards with ghosting wings and merciless beak. On the crests of hills stood illuminated castles and churches, constellations of village lights as if upturned towards a grape-speckled sky. I closed the window, surrendering to the unknowing of the frosting night, grateful to the owls for reminding me of secrets that can still be found. He sings one evening in late June from atop a tree in the village centre of Montagnola, a few wingbeats away from the former home and museum of Nobel prize winning German poet, author, nature lover and painter Hermann Hesse.
The blackbird’s voice is one of clear trills and triumph, of watery music and melody. He sings boldly and beautifully as if there is no such thing as climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, the sixth mass extinction, plastic contamination. He sings and I feel forgiven. Though not the first bird of the famous hymn, he certainly sings as blackbirds have sung for thousands of years. He sings and time is torn away, for it is almost an identical song to the blackbirds of my childhood: those boisterous, proud singers from atop trees where Epsom Common woods fringed a few brief meadows ringed with roads. Every morning and evening, a blackbird sang. One in particular sits conducted into my memory. On the far corner of Braken Path road there was a tall conifer tree, the stage for one especially trembling blackbird. From this perch he broke mornings and molded evenings; his singing was the herald of the day, permission for all other birds to begin. I could hear him as I crossed the meadow to my friend’s house and as we set off on exploratory woodland walks. Always heard long before he was seen, but he could be spotted: a black prophet of happiness with a sunshine yellow bill. He has become a mythical bird who sang all the notes of my endlessly short boyhood summers when there was no future, no fear, no causes for alarm, just time to plan the morning’s adventures. No adulthood, no time passing, no loss. I can still hear him singing, and it’s his genetic cousins that sing here in Montagnola, Switzerland. A slight variation in notes here and there, a more operatic range, perhaps, as suits this region. But he sings and I am reminded, and then I realize how much time has passed with the fracturing mornings and evenings of middle age. I wonder how much time we have left to listen to his songs. I’m one of those people who for years felt uncomfortable smiling, due to disliking the contours of my face. My open smile looks like the Joker with indigestion. I have an added problem: two large, crooked front incisors that have an inverse ‘v’ gap between them. Ugly front teeth need to stay hidden. So why didn’t I have the teeth straightened as a teenager?
In my hometown, Epsom, my N.H.S. dentist was a woman born of a Victorian gothic novel. She took delight in extracting teeth with the largest needles and smallest amount of anaesthetic. So traumatic was some of my experiences of her wrenching out lingering milk teeth, that I dreaded returning to her. I made one last trembling trip around the age of thirteen. The devil dentist told me, with a fiery glint in her eye, that numerous teeth would have to be yanked out and a face-hugging metal brace would have to be applied - while I slept and... at school! I never returned to her dental practise and I didn’t go to any other dentist until my twenties. By then, I just accepted that I was an adult who rarely smiled. Jump forward fifteen or so years and I am in a bar in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong, with my best friend David. I’m chatting to the wife of one of his friends. She asks my opinion about toddlers and learning Chinese, two things I know little about. Perhaps it was the late-night, the sub-tropical heat or the alcohol, but I must have been relaxed...and smiling. This triggered her to tell me that she liked my teeth. My teeth? Yes, the big gaping gap in my teeth means luck in this part of the world. You have lucky teeth! With this revelation ringing in my soul, Dave insisted I send him frequent pictures of me smiling. With his training and my wife’s loving encouragement, the corners slowly lifted. I learned to smile. My open smile still looks like the Joker with acid reflux, but I am not ashamed of my alphabetical teeth anymore. They spell part of who I am, my luck, my story. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
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