Some nights, can’t sleep, I draw up a list,
Of everything I’ve never done wrong.
To look at me now, you might insist
My list could hardly be long,
But I’ve stolen no gnomes from my neighbor’s yard,
Nor struck his dog, backing out my car.
Never ate my way up and down the Loire
On a stranger’s credit card.

I’ve never given a cop the slip,
Stuffed stiffs in a gravel quarry,
Or silenced Cub Scouts on a first camping trip
With an unspeakable ghost story.
Never lifted a vase from a museum foyer,
Or rifled a Turkish tourist’s backpack.
Never cheated at golf. Or slipped out a blackjack
And flattened a patent lawyer.

I never forged a lottery ticket,
Took three on a two-for-one pass,
Or, as a child, toasted a cricket
With a magnifying glass.
I never said “air” to mean “err,” or obstructed
Justice, or defrauded a securities firm.
Never mulcted—so far as I understand the term.
Or unjustly usufructed.

I never swindled a widow of all her stuff
By means of a false deed and title
Or stood up and shouted, My God, that’s enough!
At a nephew’s piano recital.
Never practiced arson, even as a prank,
Brightened church-suppers with off-color jokes,
Concocted an archeological hoax—
Or dumped bleach in a goldfish tank.

Never smoked opium. Or smuggled gold
Across the Panamanian Isthmus.
Never hauled back and knocked a rival out cold,
Or missed a family Christmas.
Never borrowed a book I intended to keep.
. . . My list, once started, continues to grow,
Which is all for the good, but just goes to show
It’s the good who do not sleep.

–Brad Leithauser ]]> http://vermontmornings.com/wordpress/2009/04/21/in-the-middle-of-national-poetry-month/feed/ 0 http://vermontmornings.com/wordpress/2008/05/11/the-lanyard/ http://vermontmornings.com/wordpress/2008/05/11/the-lanyard/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 09:49:23 +0000 admin http://vermontmornings.com/wordpress/?p=115 “The Lanyard”
 
The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
 
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past –
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
 
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
 
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
 
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
 
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift–not the archaic truth
 
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
 
Excerpted from “The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems” by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House.  Thanks to Leora Dowling (www.leoradowling.com) for finding this for us.  And you. 

Leora Dowling is a motivational speaker (www.leoradowling.com) and we went to school together at the University of Hartford. After a quarter-century of going our separate ways, a series of serendipitous events allowed us to reconnect and best of all, I discovered her again right here in Vermont. It’s a funny thing…you turn fifty and all of a sudden important people that have not been part of your life for decades start returning. It’s one of the things that the internet gets right, assuming you want to be found. It’s also part of the process known as middle aging. Trust me on this one, kids. You’ll understand when you get older. (Wow, did I just say that?)

I digress.

In a long phone chat a few weeks back, my conversation with Lee drifted towards television. We both agree, it’s one of the great ‘bads’ of the last fifty years. It may not be inherently evil, but it serves no purpose other than to dull our minds and bodies and dumb down the populace. I don’t spend a lot of time with TV, perhaps an hour a day, unless there’s a Yankee game, Canadiens game or Formula 1 race on. But then Lee staggered me. It was like a 100 mile per hour fastball just under the chin.

“Seinfeld is the worst.”

“What??”

“Seinfeld has done more harm than any other show on television. Ever.”

“C’mon Lee, it’s hysterical. It’s classic comedy!”

I’m paraphrasing here, but you’ll get the gist: “It’s a group of non-grownup grownups who don’t care about anything except themselves. They’re amoral, they’ll do whatever they have to do to get what they want and they will throw their best friends under the bus for the most decrepit of reasons. What is this teaching our children???”

She’s right, dammit.

In subsequent viewings (and there are reruns on all the time), I realized that she’s dead on. This show teaches us to do whatever we need to do to get what we want, when we want. They ARE all amoral, selfish, immature and narcissistic. I no longer can watch the show without being uncomfortable. And that’s fine. It allows me to waste less time in the zombie zone.

So bye-bye Seinfeld, and because Leora lists her television viewing on her website (did I mention www.leoradowling.com??) here, in no particular order and for no other reason that because I can, are the shows I highly recommend:

• Cash Cab, Discovery Channel, weeknights at 6:00 & 6:30. It’s a game show that takes place in a cab in New York City. Ben Bailey is the host/driver/comedian and he’s warm and funny and the characters that climb into his cab are unique and wonderful. Plus, you learn stuff.
• The Rick Mercer Report, CBC, Tuesdays at 8:00 PM. Funny and warm and political and biting and intelligent. BUT…If you have no idea who Stephen Harper is, you won’t get about two-thirds of the references. Your loss.

And because I need to laugh, and I need to laugh often…

• Scrubs, Comedy Central, often. Wellington kept going on and on about how absolutely hysterical this show is and you know what? He’s right. Great characters, great writing, and best of all, EVERY SINGLE SHOW is a lesson offered in living a good, moral life.

I wouldn’t have discovered Scrubs if Ben, my thirteen-year old, hadn’t started watching it before Stewart & Colbert. Thanks Todd, thanks Ben, and thanks Leora. Your skills as a motivational speaker are obviously great.

Scrubs…at seven..on Comedy Central…

All best,

–SN

Here in the North Country, we’ve been dazzled by nearly two feet of fresh powder this week. Even in the dead of night, there’s so much new snow around that the trees, the roads and even the clouds are glowing. And here in the North Country, madness is about to set in.

No, dear reader, this temporary insanity has nothing to do with the need to inch around intersections because the towering glacial walls prevent a clear look into oncoming traffic. It exists separate from the necessity of attaching crampons to our blizzard boots in order to retrieve mail from those boxes not taken out by overtired plow drivers. Full moon? Nope.

Tonight, the Vermont State Youth Hockey Championships begin.

We are a unique subset, we hockey parents. Since October, we have been chauffeuring our future Wayne Gretzkys and Sidney Crosbys to ice arenas all around the state. We share this task with others all across the northern border, Minnesotans and Michaganders and on a MUCH grander scale on their southern border, Albertans and New Brunswickers and just up the road, our Quebecois amigos. We speak in code, talking about poke checks and third lines and the top shelf. We know where to find every good cup of coffee on every winding Green Mountain road. We spend our winter weekends waking up at 5:00 am to make the a two hour trip for a one-hour game. We can get there from here.

We have known for some time that for our Bantam B boys, the tournament would take place across the state in St. Albans. While our thirteen and fourteen-year old future hall of famers are practicing breakouts and one-timers, we’re busy preparing by making banners and signs and hotel reservations. At 7:35 tonight, you will find us in the bleachers at the Collins Perley Arena, a hootin’ and a hollerin’ and rooting our boys onto victory. We have a terrific team that has really come together in the past month, unable to lose even when they were forced to play three games in a day and a half. And we Lyndonvillers are a loud bunch. Our home arena is one of the state’s coldest and even if we don’t howl to stay warm, we’re more passionate than most. It’s the Kingdom way. Hockey parents know of what I speak.

Back in the mid 1980′s, I had the good fortune to work for the Hartford Whalers. I was the arena announcer, that person charged with working the crowd into a frenzy, so that screams and applause would reverberate not only throughout the Civic Center, but would also spill out onto the streets of downtown. It was fun. Lots of fun. But this is more fun. Really. My excitement grows by the minute.

I will keep you updated, and if any Squirt & PeeWee parents are reading, let us know how your teams are doing. I’ve got the contract for the Bantams.

Let the games begin!!

–SN