When I Was One and Twenty (with apologies to A.E. Housman)

Five years ago in the summer of 2017 I posted my apologetic version of British poet A.E. Housman’s classic poem “When I was One and Twenty” published in 1896 in a collection called A Shropshire Lad. Housman, who was born in 1859 and died in 1936, had partially funded the publication of A Shropshire Lad following a publisher’s rejection. In today’s jargon, we call that self-publishing. The book has been in continuous print since then so somewhere in London a poetry publisher in the last decade of the nineteenth century cursed himself on a Roman British tablet…or on something equally appropriate.

Good news. I have updated my poem from five years ago, but before I wax poetic, I felt it might be helpful to share the original. The following was copied without permission from The Poetry Foundation.

When I Was One-and-Twenty

BY A. E. HOUSMAN

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard a wise man say,

“Give crowns and pounds and guineas

But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies

But keep your fancy free.”

But I was one-and-twenty,

No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard him say again,

“The heart out of the bosom

Was never given in vain;

’Tis paid with sighs a plenty

And sold for endless rue.”

And I am two-and-twenty,

And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

Interesting aside, Wikisneaks reports Housman met a young man named Moses Jackson when he was in St. John’s College at Oxford, developed a homosexual attraction for him which was not returned, and promptly failed his Finals in humiliation. I can personally identify with unrequited love in a college setting but thankfully focused on academics to graduate cum laude. But then, my poetry wasn’t brilliant.

When I was One and Twenty

(With apologies to A.E. Housman)

When I was one and twenty,

My world was make-believe.

A play directed by others

I felt compelled to please.

But now I’m one and seventy,

The play is on the shelf.

No lines to learn, no marks to hit,

The director is myself.

(August, 2017)

Here’s my revised efforts five years later

When I Was One and Twenty (with apologies to A.E. Housman)

When I was one and twenty,

I waited for love to find me

In the depths of a study hall.

But love never came, the nights were long

As youth slipped away in a pall.

But now I’m six and seventy,

The curtain takes a call.

Love came in time, the nights are sublime

Away, long away, from the time in the study hall.

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Okay. Clearly I haven’t captured “brilliant” in the intervening years.

August 4, 2021

1st alert weather x 3

Since last night’s final weather alert on the 6 o’clock evening news called for heavy rain today, I made sure to watch the early morning 1st alert weather on all three local channels before beginning my walk. Carl and I completed our sunrise check of the skimmer basket at the pool and much to our joy found the basket filled with a few leaves but no frogs. Huge relief.

The consensus of the television weather forecasters seemed to be the overcast sky would hold off dumping rain until after 8 a.m. so I sneaked out the back kitchen door at 6:45 under the watchful eye of Carl without disturbing the still sleeping Spike and Charly and, most importantly, Pretty. I knew the ever early riser Carl would guard the door until I returned.

Full disclosure this is the twentieth week of my return to early morning walks after a sabbatical of oh, well, let’s round that off to roughly 13 years. For the forty years of my working life in the numbers world, I rose early every morning and grabbed a dog to go walking with me for half an hour in whatever neighborhood I lived in at the time. The names of the dogs changed over their lifetimes, but I am nothing if not focused on routine which, combined with my love of the outdoors, made the walks a great time to clear my head before being chained to a computer at my desk inside a stuffy office. Five days a week unless weather prohibited.

Following my lengthy walking hiatus, I have now increased the schedule to every day – but no dog due to an unfortunate accident involving Charly earlier this year that resulted in an ambulance ride to a nearby hospital ER. Not really her fault but my concentration isn’t what it used to be – why not limit the distractions.

Speaking of distractions, this morning had a doozy. I started out walking down the incline on the street next to our house, walking downhill always got me started on the right foot (or left, wherever the open road beckoned). Each morning I assessed the progress of the construction of three new houses in the process of being constructed where the wild heavily forested undisturbed lots had been for the past four years and for the first ten weeks of my return to the early morning walks.

Suddenly without checking with me first, three white wooden For Sale signs had been evenly spaced in the ground of the natural area. Who would be interested in buying these out of the way lots on a sleepy street in Lexington County, I thought when I had walked past them in the spring. Within two weeks, SOLD covered all three.

For two months the sounds of huge pine trees falling, shaking the earth as they fell, the whirring of saws cutting them into smaller pieces, the sounds of bulldozers roaring through the undergrowth knocking down everything in sight, and the amazing sight of a massive rock being picked up by a large piece of equipment I now know is an excavator. I watched one Friday afternoon as the excavator picked up the rock, raised it in the air and then dropped it with such force my dogs freaked from the aftershock in our back yard. Pick up, raise, drop. Repeat.

The three lots are now completely razed, brightly colored dirt smoothed on their surface, and this week marked the start of a new phase as the cement blocks used in the foundation were delivered at 8 a.m. Saturday which allowed the new crew of Five Guys to work on the foundations of the first two homes.

Against this backdrop of my worry during my walks over all the natural life whose homes had been destroyed, I passed the third lot under construction this a.m. and made the curve that indicated the first tough climb for me. The sky was overcast as the first alert weathermen promised, no rain so far, but no sunlight either.

I was making my usual excuses for walking slowly up the incline. For example, wasn’t it better to be walking at all really?

Nearing the top of the hill where I usually took my first break, I stopped where I stood. Just ahead of me on the right was a wild boar standing calmly in a driveway with only its square dark back side visible. OMG, I thought. This wild boar has been displaced from the forest down the street where the new homes were under construction. And out of all these houses I walked on the road between since rounding the curve, this wild boar chose an unremarkable driveway for its escape route to somewhere.

My mind raced to the inevitable conclusion that my life was in mortal danger when a woman walked up the driveway from the house and spoke to the wild boar. Come on, Daisy, move your bloomin’ arse. Get back in this house.

Have I mentioned my macular degeneration and or vivid imagination? I thought not. The cute Daisy who I then saw resembled a happy dog of undetermined heritage never looked in my direction.

The weather forecasters can predict rain – but they can’t warn you for crazy.

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Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

August 3, 2021

i’m nobody, who are you?

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you Nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us —

don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

to tell your name the livelong

day

to an admiring bog!

This poem introduced me to Emily Dickinson’s poetry when I was required to memorize lines in elementary school. My dad actually tipped me off to this short piece which he also helped me memorize. It definitely qualifies as poetry, he told me, and was written by one of the best American poets ever. I remember feeling buoyed by his confidence as I recited the poem in class. I also remember the teacher implementing a minimum number of words and lines for the next assignment. No worries – my dad knew enough poems to fit every poetry exercise.

I thought about the frog poem in the early morning hours today when my faithful four-legged companion Carl and I made our daily check of the pool skimmer basket. We check the basket every night after dark thirty and do the re-check by the dawn’s early light. The pool attracts frogs of every size and shape because the water tricks them into believing it is fresh – like an oasis in the desert. Despite the frog log we have provided for the past five summer seasons of our time here, some of the frogs lose their way and opt to swim in the pool with the passion of a Katie Ledecky or Caeleb Dressel.

During several of our recent nocturnal inspections Carl and I have been able to rescue an assortment of the amphibious creatures who have been forced into the eternal swim of the skimmer basket. I am actually able to pull the little ones by reaching down to pull them out with a small iron handle I use to lift the skimmer basket. Carl shares my excitement when he runs around to sniff the stunned frogs but wisely doesn’t disturb them before he runs off to the doggie door, always hoping for a treat following his Coast Guard efforts.

This morning, however, we found a medium sized frog that didn’t survive the deadly chemicals we must use to keep the pool safe for humans. Two legs laid outstretched behind his little body as if to say hey what took you so long? I swam and swam – but “Nobody” did not come.

In South Carolina the summers are hot, hot, humid and hotter. Thunderstorms often strike in the late afternoons, early evenings. The frogs seem to multiply following the rains – their deep guttural sounds from the trees fill the night with the same noises I remember listening to with the windows raised in my home in Texas. The pond behind my grandmother’s house was quite the attraction. Thankfully not so deadly as our pool. But I never went swimming in that pond for as long as we lived in front of it.

Tonight Carl and I will make our rounds with our usual care…holding our breaths for no unhappy surprises.

I’m nobody, who are you? How dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog to tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog.

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Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned. I’m beginning this month with the goal of writing 20 posts during the month of August. I’ve gotten a bit lazy this summer.

August 2, 2021

Imagine. Dream. Believe. Always.

Backpack, pink summer shoes, water bottle, today’s art work and daily report…our granddaughter Ella’s accessories for summer camp today. Imagine. Dream. Believe. Always.

(I wonder how many Olympians had a version of this mantra when they were children?)

“Tube, Tube.” You Tube videos

serious business after nap this afternoon

July 29, 1898. My grandfather George Patton Morris was born in Huntsville, Walker County, Texas. This is a picture of his family except for the eldest son who had already left the farm when this picture was made. George is the little fellow standing to the right of his mother in the bottom row. He was the 9th. of 10 children – seven boys and three girls – born to James W. and Margaret Antonio Moore Morris in their home(s) in Texas. This family portrait looks very similar to many family images I’ve seen at the turn of the century in the early 1900s.

But of course, what makes these people special to me is that I am their descendant. George had three children in his twenties, the youngest was my father. When George was 47 years old, I was born to that son Glenn and his wife Selma.

My grandfather’s family was neither prominent, wealthy, nor even well educated. From what I have found through oral family lore, they weren’t a fun loving group, either; yet they worked hard and somewhere along the way held fast to imagine, dream, believe, always.

I had the greatest good fortune to grow up in Richards, the town where my grandfather had a single chair barber shop – a town less than 30 miles from where he was born, a small town in rural southeast Texas. I learned many lessons from my grandfather in that barber shop – not the least of which was that he loved me without reservation and helped me to imagine, dream, believe in family, always.

My grandfather I called Pa would have been 123 years old today. I wish he could have met Ella James – he would have loved her without reservation, and that’s a gift I will happily pass on to her every chance I get.

Thankfully family isn’t limited to direct ancestry – occasionally we have second chances for broader understandings of the bonds we share with others.

The Fabulous Huss Brothers as I knew them

Pretty and I had a home on Worsham Street in Montgomery, Texas from 2010 – 2014. Montgomery is a town in Texas coincidentally only 18 miles from Richards. We had wonderful loving friends there during a difficult period, and I had grandparent “schooling” from three little boys I called the Fabulous Huss Brothers. Although I haven’t seen them in more than four years, their mother Becky sends me pictures at random moments. This week she sent me several from a canoe trip vacation on the Boundary Waters, including this one that I think is priceless.

l. to r. George (8), Oscar (12), Dwight (10)

From our twenty-two month old granddaughter Ella to my grandfather who would have been more than a century old today to the Huss family on Worsham Street in Texas – nothing means more to me than the people of my past and present who are always…family.

Imagine. Dream. Believe. Always.

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Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

July 29, 2021

going for gold in an inferno of sand in Tokyo while America burns and Europe floods

Pretty follows the Olympics as faithfully as I do the tennis majors; therefore, I also follow the Olympics which apparently are being carried on at least a gazillion channels in U-verse land without an adequate GPS to locate your destination. Thank goodness we finished our Downton Abbey re-runs just in the nick of time before the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch was lit or we might be waiting breathlessly to meet Lady Mary’s final husband.

And yet, here we are in 2021 with our 2020 Olympics. Nothing’s perfect.

Unfortunately, the first event I watched was women’s beach volleyball. Word to the designer of “uniforms” in this event: shame on you. Good grief. These athletes wore bikinis which left nothing to the imagination while they (barefooted) served, set and spiked a multicolored ball on a court made of sand with temperatures of up to 113 degrees, according to the commentator during the game. Now I’m thinking that’s wrong on so many levels. But let’s start with if female athletes must wear outfits reminiscent of the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes to attract fans while they run around on sand that burns their feet, then maybe it’s time to re-think beach volleyball as an Olympic sport.

Speaking of burning sand, the Tokyo heat is mild compared to the fires in the western states of the USA on the North American continent. Nero was spotted tuning his fiddle as firefighters waged their war against the Bootleg fire in Oregon – the largest of 88 large wildfires currently burning in the U.S. – CBS News reported today. Nearly 1.5 million acres have been scorched during this season. New fires ignite due to the drought conditions and heat waves brought about by guess what? Bazinga if you said climate change.

As drought and unprecedented heat waves spark the loss of lives, homes and complacency in the American west, the floods across the proverbial pond on the European continent cause equal devastation of losses never to be recovered in central European countries like Germany and Belgium. The culprit: evil dastardly climate change which seems much more than imaginary to the families who have lost loved ones in addition to their hopes for the future.

Lordy, Lordy – there’s tropical storms (think big wind and lots of rain) swirling near Japan with a Covid pandemic swirling inside the Olympic Village. So far 14 athletes have tested positive according to the official games stats released yesterday.

Somebody STOP me – the weight of disasters is heavier than my weighted blanket which I still use in the summer time when the living is clearly not easy. We send our love to all our followers in cyberspace who are struggling for whatever personal disaster has struck. From our family to yours, we are with you. We wish we could lessen your burdens…until then…

Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

July 26, 2021