Writing Inspirations: The Beginning
Nehru jackets in thick, scratchy brown wool. Thirty-two-inch bell bottoms my father wore in the Navy. His double-breasted pea jacket, the warmest jacket I’ve ever worn. A Roaring Twenties-style hip-length top over a pleated skirt that came to mid-thigh, pink and ivory colored with stripes accenting the top’s v-neck. A vintage 1940s brown tween winter coat, large circular buttons holding it snug from its skinny waist to its Peter Pan collar. A full-length winter wool, brown monk’s cloak. A floppy pink felt hat. A tan suede fringe jacket with a 12” beaded swing.
The more I wanted to fit in, the more unique my clothes became in Junior High and High School. No one else wore their father’s Navy pea jacket or a vintage coat at Everett High in 1970, though most of us made statements with our clothing that equaled what was going on in my poetry and those scribbled pages mirrored the questions I had about life and war and the tumultuous world that existed around us.
I knew I wasn’t alone. A lot of my friends wrote poetry or kept journals. Our idols were people like Bob Dylan, whose voice sucked yet his songs spoke so eloquently that no one cared, and Emily Dickinson, who wrote about being alone. We honored those dissident poets unafraid to craft their words into ploughshares: Allan Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer.
Those writers, the epic poems of Ginsburg, the unconventional travel writings of Kerouac, the personal influence Ferlinghetti wielded, and the simply stunning poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks all branded into my brain, upon the DNA of my writing memory, until I could pick their threads out of the tangled cords that have made me a writer.
Brooks said, “I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”
Suddenly, I felt a kinship with someone I had never met, someone I respected as being at the top of her game. Years later, in a college classroom many miles from where I first read Brooks, I found myself swallowed by a powerful flashback, almost unable to continue reciting her work to a room full of doe-eyed, nervous, beginning writers.
We real cool. We
left school. We
lurk late. We
strike straight. We
sing sin. We
thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die Soon.
Ginsburg’s epic poem, howl!, became the title of the literary magazine my colleague, Rhonda Morris, and I started when we taught at Lake City Community College in Florida. I liked to think we were as cutting-edge as he was in our own ways. We were the first to publish an online college literary journal in the Southeast, and the first of any community college. I like to think Ginsburg would have appreciated that.
And when I visited Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights in San Francisco, and saw Kerouac’s scrolled manuscript for On the Road at the American Writer’s Museum in Chicao, I felt as awed as most humans do in the great cathedrals of the world. Oddly enough, I have no words to describe moments like those.
***
I worked during those years: delivered 100 meals a day to patients at the nursing home, then gathered the trays, and cleaned the kitchen afterwards, washing all the dishes, and bleaching the kitchen floor. I was 14 and I made $1.40 per hour. I went home every night smelling like bleach and rotten foot. My white leather nurses’s shoes (that my mother had polished only the day before) bore the brunt of the wear and tear, cracking and splitting. No matter how many times my mother washed the laces and polished that white leather with a sponge-tipped bottle, the shoes were equally disgusting the next time I came home.
My supervisor, a cruel hag who must have hated that soul-stealing place, fired me when I didn’t mop the kitchen to her satisfaction. I’ve never been so happy to lose a job or to have that experience to draw from. I know how my characters feel when they’re bone tired. I’ve never had a job wear me out as much as that one.
As horrible as it was, though, there was a bright light. One of the patients, Jane Wilkinson, a woman in her early sixties, a former English teacher who’d traveled and seemed in much better health than most of the other patients in the home, hired me to handwrite letters to her family. I’d go to her room when I was finished with my job and sit on the chair beside her bed as she dictated to me.
She was the only patient in the home who didn’t have white hair. Hers was barely half an inch long, dark brown, and often stuck up at odd angles. She laughed freely, asked me questions about school or what I was reading, and gave me several books she thought I’d like. One was Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. She was right. I loved Steinbeck, and years later, I’d think of Jane as I taught Steinbeck at the Honors College at the University of Central Florida.
The letters she dictated and I wrote often included stories about her life, depending upon who the letter was for, and those stories transported me far from the putrid-smelling rooms where people never moved out of their beds, never saw family members, never breathed fresh air. She’d sometimes have to say my name in order to retrieve me from my daydreams. On my walks home, I’d think about those stories and wonder if she’d mind if I stole bits and pieces.
When I got fired for not washing the floor with bleach, I went upstairs and told Jane, who hugged me for a moment, then pulled back and said, “I guess I won’t see you anymore, huh?”
Ironically, even though I did continue to visit her, the reason why she dictated those letters to me became clear. Within a couple of months, she was totally blind, and she couldn’t see me anymore.
