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My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

1/31/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read “The Piano Fairy Girl.”
Rebecca Wells
Born January 31, 1953

R. Wells

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fourth post of fifty.

4 Louisiana (1950-52)

I remember little about Louisiana, except that my family lived in a forty-foot trailer in Pineville, located near the air base at Alexandria. I recall cypress knees that my father brought back to Kansas and sanded to a sheen and varnished, using one to make the base of a lamp, the rest surviving as sculpture occupying various places in our tiny house. I recall the Po Boy sandwich my mother adapted by using “French” bread you bought in those aluminum foil wraps (instead of baguettes), shredded roast beef, topped with a mixture of ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. This was as spicy as my parents could tolerate, even as young people. Their Kansas palates didn’t care for the traditional sandwich of fried oysters, vegetables, and coarse Creole mustard. The black-and-white photographs taken by a black box camera tell me more than my memory. There are surviving pictures of my sister, coy and cute, poised beneath a large metal bridge all by her lonesome. Shots of us playing in the dirt outside our trailor. Shots of my handsome soldier father in his uniform.

I later visited New Orleans when as a member of the SMU seminary choir we toured there. I remember wearing the choir stole jauntily around my neck as if it were a scarf. Getting a little tipsy along with the other seminarians as we partied on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. My fellow students grinning as if viewing the real me for the first time. ¶ Louisiana is the eighteenth state. Its centennial was held in 1912, its bicentennial, well, you know. One forgets how long the state has been established, part of the Old World, as it were.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Using Texting as a Metaphor

1/29/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
Anton Chekhov
Born January 29, 1860

A. Chekhov

My Literary World

Iron Horse Literary Review 19.4 Connections, “Like Breadcrumbs, Like Shards,” Lucas Southworth. Lucas Southworth won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, in 2013, for his collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

“Like Breadcrumbs, Like Chards”:

Even though I am gay, came out a long time ago, have been with the same Grady for forty-two years, not until I reached the following sentence on the second page of Southworth's story did I realize I was reading about a gay couple.

“At first glance my husband fills so many gay stereotypes. He’s all muscle, all tank top on the weekends, all styled hair and double-entendre” (4).

Now . . . is my failed perception my fault or the writer’s? I’m willing to accept at least half the responsibility; I was lulled into the hackneyed convention that a husband must be paired with a wife, not another husband. But would it have been too unsophisticated to let the reader know this tidbit a wee bit earlier?

In this story where young marrieds are struggling to become acquainted, the narrator, Mike, often texts his husband Grady—even when they are located in the same dwelling or in the same room. Seriously? Has texting become so ubiquitous that it has seeped into our literary fiction? Must we now work texting into the weft of our stories for them to be real, to be truly au courant? Okay, okay. F. Scott, I’m sure, employed an early phone or two, had a character cable someone that he didn’t love her any longer. I am totally humble and down from my horse. Mike’s texting his husband is a manner in which he attempts both to be close to Grady and yet distant from him at the very same time.

At one point Mike uses an emoji of the Swiss flag (to indicate fidelity?) and in the same text a heart with an arrow shot through it to communicate his feelings. Is this how removed he is from the relationships with his husband, his mother, and mother-in-law, at least what he can find of his feelings?

Southworth purposely keeps the reader at a distance from the character’s feelings—not entirely but enough for us to get the message. We can see the words on the page, or the text on the screen, but I’m not sure we can feel them.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

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Call Me by Your Name, Romance with a Big "R"

1/26/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.
Novala Takemoto
Born January 26, 1968

N. Takemoto

My Book World

Aciman, André. Call Me by Your Name.
New York: Farrar, 2007.

This novel is a romance, both with a capital “r,” the kind that emphasizes subjectivity of the individual, and the small “r” kind, the Harlequin type that you must devour page by page, word by word, until you come to the final sentence of this desperate love affair between two young men.

I found the first half tediously slow. But then I thought, Aciman must want us to be inside the head of the protagonist narrator, Elio. These are the mind and heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t decide who he is whether it’s with regard to sexual orientation or his prodigious musicianship (he transcribes manuscripts from one instrument to another and sells them). His mind belabors everything including the appearance of a young graduate student, Oliver, who comes to live in his family’s Italian villa for the summer of 1983, a tradition Elio’s father, a professor, has begun years before: the summer intern.

Both Elio and Oliver waste half the summer semi-rejecting one another, making love to girls, until finally Elio becomes more aggressive and discovers Oliver has wanted him since they first met. Their first kiss doesn’t occur until page 81. But for a short, intense two weeks they become so close that they almost become one, wearing each other’s clothing, Elio especially in love with a red swim suit of Oliver’s. The very idea of calling each other by their own names—taking the name your parents have given you and calling your lover by that name—is a mental flip the reader must make to understand the depth of their intimacy:

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3).

Aciman carries the development of this intimacy, which in the form of a deep friendship is to last forever, to the very last sentence of the book:

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248).

Through the specificity of this scenario, Aciman reveals a universal story of desire and love. We’ve all been there, and wow, should our lives turn out as exciting as those of the two men characterized in this romance.

NEXT TIME: My Literary World

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My Journey of States-3 Texas

1/24/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.
Molly Ivins
Born August 30, 1944.
Died January 31, 2007

M. Ivins

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the third post of fifty.

3 Texas

My parents related to me that we traveled around Dallas in 1950 using Loop 12, which was subsumed by Dallas city limits long ago. I clearly don’t remember it. My first memorable trip to Texas came in 1968, when my college choir sang at the national meeting which joined the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, making it the United Methodist Church. The trip was in April, and, while those back in Kansas were still experiencing cool temps, we sunned by the pool at the motel where we stayed [photos below]. I remember roses blooming profusely in several locations. Even then I was impressed with Texas’s wealth and opulence, particularly in its churches.

I returned to Dallas in 1970 to attend graduate school at Southern Methodist University. Even then, I often got the feeling I couldn’t begin to enjoy the city without earning a six-figure income. To heighten the disparity even more, SMU was nestled in the heart of the wealthiest part of Dallas. Highland Park United Methodist Church was located across the parking lot from the married student housing in which I lived for two years, yet the one time my wife and I attended services there, no one spoke to us or even extended us a hand. After two years I was only too glad to leave Dallas and serve an internship in the western part of the state. Yes, I moved to Lubbock, and I have lived there since 1972. At that time Lubbock was just what I needed, what my shrink called a quiet corner of the world. I didn’t intend to stay, but I wasn’t sure where to go. I hadn’t liked Dallas, but neither did I wish to return to Kansas. I sensed that living there I would still be subject to my parents’ scrutiny; I wouldn’t grow. Then at twenty-seven I divorced my wife, found a job and a boyfriend, in pretty short order, and Lubbock seemed like the place to be, where we could reside, and so we have. ¶ Ken’s and my retirement from teaching has been predicated on staying in Lubbock, where our home and cars are paid for, and the cost of living is much less than it is in any of the so-called retirement meccas found in the Southwest or in Florida. With the money we save each year, we can travel to almost anywhere in the country or the world for that matter. There is so much more I could have shared about Texas, having lived here forty-seven years, but I'll save it for another time.¶ Texas is the twenty-eighth state. Its centennial was celebrated in 1936 (on the basis of its being a republic, not its 1845 statehood), its sesquicentennial in 1986. It is curious to me that Texas’s and Oklahoma’s statehoods are over seventy years apart, and yet they lie next to one another like siblings.

Trunk Decals and Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2- Oklahoma
3-Texas

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Code Girls Are Brave Women

1/19/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.
Patricia Highsmith
#bornonthisday
January 19, 1921

P. Highsmith

My Book World

Mundy, Liza. Code Girls: The Untold Story
   of the American Women Code Breakers
  of World War II. New York: Hachette,
   2017.

Award-winning author Mundy writes of 11,000 women recruited in the early 1940s to help break codes of Japanese and German intelligence. The Navy recruits from exclusive women’s colleges in the Northeast, and the Army recruits from the ranks of teachers (mostly math but some who teach foreign languages), many of whom are disenchanted with their poor salaries and tough classroom conditions.

“Sworn to secrecy, the women were forbidden from telling anybody what they were doing: not their friends, not their parents, not their family, not their roommates. They were not to let news of their training leak into campus newspapers or disclose it in a letter, not even to their enlisted brother or boyfriend. If pressed, they could say they were studying communications: the routing of ordinary naval messages” (5)

This dictum is one that is repeated throughout the book until the very end. Even as some of these women survive into their nineties, even after the government grants them permission, finally, they are reticent to tell their stories. However, Mundy does a superb job of seeking out these sources, still sharp mentally, and getting their stories down. Mundy also combs written sources to fill out her epic narrative of quiet courage among these women—not only their work lives but their personal lives as well.

The code girls tackle many important difficulties, including the one of German U-boats sinking US ships in the Atlantic (as many as 500 by 1942). The women slowly but methodically solve this problem so that American ships are able to get supplies and matériel to troops in Europe. They are also paramount in intercepting official messages between Japanese and German leaders and confounding their strategies. Because of their unique skills the women make the work look far easier than it is. With a combination of innate ability and extreme dedication they are able to shorten the war and help save lives.

Every man should think about what it would be like to minimize his intellect, to hide what he does for a living, to keep it a secret for almost seventy years—and come to the conclusion that it is not fair. And never again in our history should women be called upon to keep silent in this manner. It’s not only unfair but it cuts in half the sources our country could be using to solve problems. This book is not only a tribute to these particular women but to the idea of women taking their true place in the world as multifaceted individuals.

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction

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My Journey of States-2 Oklahoma

1/17/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph Ellison
Born March 1, 1914
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

R. Ellison

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the second post of fifty.

2 Oklahoma

Oklahoma is the state I traveled through first when I was but a toddler, on the way to Louisiana, where my father was stationed in the Air National Guard for over two years. In time I passed through Oklahoma—north to south, west to east, southwest to northeast, across the panhandle—scores of times, but I never visited anyone, rarely had any business there except to buy gas or stay in a motel, so I wouldn’t have such a long trip to . . . wherever I was headed: Kansas, Texas, Arkansas. ¶ My maternal grandfather, James Brown Richards, did his basic training as a soldier for World War I at Fort Sill in Lawton. The 1918 photographs in the photo gallery below depict a fairly barren place, but now the town has many beautiful tree-lined boulevards, even where the fort remains. After back surgery, I often stayed there as a halfway point between Lubbock, Texas, and Wichita. I would eat at a Chinese restaurant whose name I cannot now recall. ¶ My second trip to Oklahoma came when I was twelve and our church youth drove to visit St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in OKC. I was probably dazzled by the sanctuary at the time, but can recall little of it now. I remember more the dinner afterwards when I ordered fried shrimp. My parents had given me enough money to eat what I wanted . . . I thought. The next day the education director (PG) at the church, who’d been one of the trip sponsors, castigated me for ordering such an extravagant meal when everyone else ate hamburgers and fries. Had I ordered more than I could pay for and the adults had covered for me? Or had the director taken it upon herself to judge me as if she were God? ¶ Oklahoma is a beautiful state, deserves more than a drive-through, particularly the eastern third. Angling northeastward on I-44 in early June, you can see grand rolling hills, even larger ones, the Ouachita Mountains. Unlike the 1930s, when this part of the country suffered great drought, Oklahoma has recently enjoyed anywhere between thirty and fifty inches of rain a year. Verdant stretches of green fields and hedgerows of trees, not to mention veritable forests in the eastern third of the state, as you approach the Ozarks, are eye-popping and inviting. ¶ In 2007, Ken and I, on a trip to Wichita, made a reservation to stay in the Price Tower boutique hotel in Bartlesville. The tower, a Frank Lloyd Wright design, was erected in 1956. The designer had combined what looked like two offices to make one largish hotel room. ¶ The most recent news about Oklahoma is the number of “earthquakes” it has experienced largely, residents assert, because of the practice of fracking by oil companies in the area. The state is also known for one of the last botched executions of a prisoner, when the injection concocted by prison officials did not work properly. ¶ Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in 1907. Proud Oklahomans celebrated their centennial not that long ago.

Photos 1&2: James Richards on right. Photo 3: James Richards

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Award Winner Nails Story

1/15/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
Osip Mandelstam
Born January 15, 1891

O. Mandelstam

My World of Short Fiction

January/February 2018, David Greendonner. “Lionel, for Worse”: This story, winner of the Kenyon Review Short Fiction 2017 competition, is a gem of understatement. Narrated by a woman, she tells of her husband, Lionel, who a month earlier has lost his best friend, Stan. The woman and Lionel discuss how they’d like to have their ashes disposed of someday. While making a trial run on the shore of Lake Michigan of just such a disposition, using ashes from their own hearth, they encounter some high school girls, one of whom says, “I’m so sorry for your loss” (5). The line is both humorous and subtly poignant concerning the man’s true loss.

Profile of author from contributor’s page: "David Greendonner is from Bridgman, Michigan, and is a graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program in fiction. From 2015 to 2017 he was the managing editor of the literary magazine Third Coast" (115).

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States | 2-Oklahoma

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My Journey of States-1 Kansas

1/10/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
William Ralph Inge
Born May 3, 1913, in Independence Township, Kansas.

W. Inge

Introduction

Oceanside, Oregon

With a 2015 visit to Oregon I concluded a life-long tour of the United States—only my first, I hope. The Jespers folk who resided on South Main Street in Wichita were not wealthy, so the only road trips we made were to visit family who lived in other parts of the country. Likewise, as an adult I was a public school teacher with little in the way of discretionary savings, but early on, if I needed to do so I would borrow money to make, for example, my first trip to Hawaii.

1977 Queen's Surf, Author on Right

As I paid back my credit union, month by month, I would recall and cherish favorite scenes from my travels. Upon retiring Ken and I have journeyed out at least twice a year. And so now the list is complete. Some states I only visited once and quite briefly at that. Others I’ve returned to again and again. Yet others I’ve resided in. At any rate, through the years I’ve kept journals, scraps of memorabilia, and photographs, and I would like to share what I’ve enjoyed about our fifty states.

Travel is always a good thing, even if it’s only a few hundred miles away, and the wider your travels take you, the more you may learn about yourself and others. One might think that America is this homogenous mass of people, and, in a way national customs and holidays would imply that it is, but at the same time one must realize that Maine is distinctive from Florida and Arizona and Washington and North Dakota and Kansas and Texas.

I hope to put up at least two posts a week about my visits to all fifty states, a journey I began in the 1950s. Some people who embark on this sort of venture say that one must DO something significant in each state. I do not. One state, Delaware, I passed through as a child in less than an hour, but still I do count it toward my total because I must!

Each post relates anecdotes that make my accounts personal, while also giving short factual information about each state, such as its order of entry into the United States, significant celebrations like centennials, and special events or customs. I am posting personal photographs by way of galleries or slideshows, as well as scans of professional post cards I’ve collected through the years. I hope you will come along for the ride! Share your stories under Comments, your photos at Facebook. I begin with the state where I was born.

1 Kansas

When I was old enough to study geography and scrutinize maps, I realized how isolated the state of Kansas was. In 1957, when it took several days to drive from Wichita to the east coast, I realized an even greater disparity that may not be discernible today. Now you can stay in a Holiday Inn Express in the burg of Garden City, one that’s like thousands of other Holiday Inns, but back then the majority of motels seemed to be individually owned and operated. Back then it appeared that the rest of the country was more established, more sophisticated somehow, than the agrarian state of Kansas. ¶ I later realized the place where I was born and raised profoundly affected who I would be for the rest of my life. My mother, for example, lived on a farm until she went to college and then married my father from New York, whom she called an Easterner, but she never stopped using the word “worsh” whether she was speaking of the laundry, or Worshington DC as if she could not discern the difference—never felt entirely comfortable living in Wichita, a city of 350,000 at the time of her death in 2001. ¶ Even though I left Kansas at the age of twenty-two to attend graduate school in Dallas, Texas, I never stopped considering the little boy buried deep in me, the lad who once played on his grandfather’s discarded tractors and combines, who capered along the crumbling banks of the Arkansas River located a couple of blocks from the home I lived in for over twenty years.

Birthday Tractor 1954

On Grandpa's Tractor, 1955 with Kitty

Whenever I return to the tiny Upchurch cemetery outside Norwich, I am overwhelmed by the sense that I might just belong there with my grandparents, my parents, my sister, and piles of other bones from previous generations. The primordial chant, "Rock Chalk Jayhawk," still gives me chills when I hear it on a ball game on TV. ¶ The school I attended, Southwestern College in Winfield, without a doubt, shaped my life. Sixteen hours of music theory formed the backbone of my music degree. Countless hours of rehearsal at the large Reuter pipe organ in Richardson Auditorium culminated in a senior recital of seven or eight pieces. I still have the scores from which I learned all that music. When I listen to my recital tape, transferred to a CD and my iPod, I shiver to think that I was once that accomplished. Below are from my personal collection of historic travel postcards.

Historical Postcards

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—Oklahoma

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Barcelona Photographs 1 — Fellow Travelers

1/5/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
Brian Tracy
Born January 5, 1944

B. Tracy

Dear Fellow Travelers,

This first installment of my Barcelona Photographs—made during UMC's Seniors Are Special trip in November—is comprised of as many candid shots I could get of our group of thirty-two. In the coming days I'll also post photographs of the region's architecture and its colorful people. Stay tuned!

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction 2018

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My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

4 Louisiana (1950-52)

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

Using Texting as a Metaphor

My Literary World

Call Me by Your Name, Romance with a Big "R"

My Book World

My Journey of States-3 Texas

3 Texas

Trunk Decals and Postcards

Code Girls Are Brave Women

My Book World

My Journey of States-2 Oklahoma

2 Oklahoma

Award Winner Nails Story

My World of Short Fiction

My Journey of States-1 Kansas

Introduction

1 Kansas

Historical Postcards

Barcelona Photographs 1 — Fellow Travelers

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