Living History

Living History

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He was born by lantern light in 1901 and lived to see television, computers, airplanes and rockets to the moon. He endured two world wars, the Depression and, in the end, a certain celebrity. Frank W. Buckles died Sunday on his West Virginia farm. Of the almost five million Americans who served in World War I, he was the last to go. When he died Sunday at age 110, only two survivors of the Great War were left, one in Australia and one in England.

Buckles lied his way into the Army at age 16, and after the war was over, he took typing and short hand and became a purser for a steamship line, traveling the world. World War II was harder on Buckles than World War I — he was a civilian working for a Manila shipping company when the Japanese took him prisoner. He spent three years and two months in captivity.

By 1953 Buckles and his wife had settled down on Gap View farm. The former doughboy drove a tractor past his 100th birthday, had a Facebook page and championed a refurbished World War I monument. He took seriously his responsibility as guardian of the past, but he liked to have fun, too. The secret to longevity, he once said, is, “When you think you’re dying — don’t.”

Reading about Buckles reminds me that the past is all around us. It is in the stories told by our parents and grandparents; it is in quiet roadside monuments and the pages of books. Most of all it is alive within each of us. We may walk through a flat, featureless world, but our minds are full of mountains and valleys, the intricate passageways of all we have been and known. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.”

A Wink and a Smile

A Wink and a Smile

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They were with me all the way to Metro this morning, the moon and Venus. The moon a thin paring, a baby’s fingernail; Venus an emphatic dot above and to the right. Star Date magazine calls them “the most beautiful of all astronomical duos,” and I agree. Clean and simple in the dawn sky, they are twin beacons.

The way they looked this morning reminded me of a wink and a smile. The moon’s lopsided grin rakish and debonair; Venus with its pure eye twinkling. Don’t take the day too seriously, they told me. I’m trying to listen.

Hooray for Hollywood

Hooray for Hollywood

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Once a year (at least!) I know I will stay up late on Sunday night, starting off the work week in a sleep deficit. Once a year I will listen to giddy stars telling us who designed their Size 0 gowns. But it will be worth it every year, too, because no matter how gaudy or self-involved or long they are, the Oscars are for me the original “must-see TV.”

They remind me of the days when there were three networks and the annual airing of “The Wizard of Oz” or Mary Martin’s “Peter Pan” dominated the television calendar. Yes, we were limited, so limited that we read books and made forts in the woods because there was little to keep us inside. But perhaps for that reason the movies seemed even more magical, and tuning in to the annual celebration in their honor became a habit.

In the weeks leading up to the awards ceremony I try to see as many “Best Picture” nominees as I can, a task made more difficult by last year’s decision to increase the number tapped from five to ten. Even though I came nowhere close to seeing them all, I still feel cinema-besotted from my efforts.

Last night’s Oscars ceremony was slightly shorter than usual and not as well hosted. But our favorites won, the “In Memoriam” reminded us who we have lost, and the dresses, well, the dresses are always divine.

The Company of Writers

The Company of Writers

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Today I travel around the Beltway to a little building in Bethesda called the Writer’s Center. I have led essay and non-fiction writing workshops there for almost 10 years, and every time I do I know I’ll be inspired. I will meet lawyers and accountants, caterers and dry cleaners — people from all walks of life with one thing in common — they all have stories to tell.

Sometimes we laugh together; sometimes we cry. But always we learn something about ourselves as writers and as human beings.

Writing is best done alone and in silence, so when writers gather to share their work there is an extra measure of relief and pleasure at being together. It is good to know there are kindred spirits walking this long road.

Drizzly Day

Drizzly Day

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One of my daughters likes the rain; she sends me messages with happy faces on drizzly days. I grew up in what I now realize was a cloudier-than-average part of the country, so I love the sun. But I have come to terms with rain and have come to appreciate its power to inspire. Rainy days give me permission to stay inside, to think and write.

And if the drops should stop for a few minutes, a misty stroll is just the thing to set my mind to spinning. On rainy days I can pretend I’m in the British Isles, just back from a tramp on the moors, shaking my oilskin jacket, stomping my Wellies and pouring myself a cup of strong black tea. And speaking of tea, it’s time for another cup.

A Duet

A Duet

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I was carrying bags of give-away clothes to the end of the driveway, tip-toeing across the ice, when I heard a sound scarce around here lately, the faint “who-who” of a great horned owl. Moments later I heard another, similar call. This one was slightly lower in pitch and seemed to come from farther away.

I stopped what I was doing and listened to the duet. One owl was raspy, staccato, insistent; the other smooth, tawny, intricate. It was dawn and the sky was pink. I was enthralled with the wild sounds, felt my day grow larger and more filled with possibility because of them.

And though I would later read up on these owls and learn that they are some of the only creatures that eat skunks, that they prey on ospreys and falcons and are not only not endangered, but endanger others — this doesn’t change the way I felt hearing the owls’ song. It was if the houses and cars and driveways fell away. What was left was the world of wild things.

In the Margins

In the Margins

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Since we hoard books in our house, it is often likely that when a particular classic is called for in a high school English class, we already have it. Of course it is not a pristine copy; it is usually adorned with such “English majorisms” as “illustrates dichotomy between life in city and life in country” or “example of bildungsroman.” While our children initially balked at taking such tomes to school, they began to see their advantage. There were answers in those margins!

Turns out that other people appreciate marginalia, too. I learned this several years ago when I wrote an article about the rare old books in the Georgetown Law library. And a new exhibit at Chicago’s Newberry Library celebrates “Other People’s Books” with marginal notes by the likes of Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson.

A recent article about the exhibit in the New York Times points out that while it’s possible to annotate electronically, it is not so easy to preserve those digital annotations. So add marginalia to the list of What We Have Lost with E-Books (along with, perhaps, paper cuts and Borders?).

Life on the margins: It may be better than we think.

A Birthday Cake

A Birthday Cake

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Before there was President’s Day there was Washington’s birthday, and it was today. It was my grandmother’s birthday, too, and when we were young and still had cousins, we gathered at the house on North Hanover to celebrate. The cake was the kind of densely, heavily iced ones you don’t see anymore — maybe the ingredients have been outlawed — and my stomach would ache after eating a slice.

It’s funny how you can remember some details from childhood, and I can remember those cakes. Because of the day, they were adorned with a cherry tree and a little axe made of mounded, brightly colored icing.

To a child the idea of a Washington’s birthday cake seemed perfectly natural, but now I think about the confection and the story (which many now consider a fabrication) of our first president chopping down a cherry tree with his little hatchet and then admitting he did so to his angry father. It was a mild transgression, as presidential transgressions go; it was innocent and old-fashioned and as sugary sweet as the icing on those cakes. It was the sort of thing we believed in long ago.

Hard Scrabble

Hard Scrabble

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I’ve been meaning for several weeks to write about a book called Hard Scrabble. It’s by John Graves, a Texas man — and (I was almost afraid to look because he was born in 1920) still a living one, a fact which buoys me, to know that someone like him (he calls himself an “Old Fart,” “OF” or “Head Varmint”) is still with us.

I’d had this book on my “to read” list for months and had hunted for it without success in the several libraries I haunt. Finding no free copies anywhere I was actually driven to purchase it. I’m happy to report that the book was worth every penny I paid for it — and then some.

Hard Scrabble is the name of Graves’ farm, a place that he owns not because he holds the title to it but because he “owns it in his head” — meaning that he’s lived on and worked it for many decades. His writing style is what I would call crunchy — not in the hippie granola sense of that word but meaning that it is full of texture. His surprising word choices and unusual rhythms and phrasing come not from sitting at a desk and looking out a window but from tending bees and building stone houses and finding lost goats. His writing is specific, as all good writing is, but his details are not just observed, they are lived.

And so, when you’re reading Hard Scrabble and you’re clinging to each phrase because there are only a few pages left and you don’t want the book to end, you come across words like these:

” [W]hen past forty — in a period when by rights a man ought to be using what knowledge he has already acquired… did I start consolidating a store of rare knowledge with making a show in carpentry, with fences and humus and stumps and bugs, with the smell of rain on dung and drouthy soil, with how goats bleat when frightened … with fields that are green and why and what flowers the bees work in August in the third smallest county in Texas.”

And then a couple pages later, this:

“It strikes me as more than a possibility that archaism, in times one disagrees with, may touch closer to lasting truth than do the times themselves — that, for instance, the timbre and meaning of various goat-bleats may be at least as much worth learning as the music and mores of the newest wave of youths to arrive at awareness of the eternal steaming turmoil of the human crotch. Therefore, having at least the illusion of choice, one chooses for the moment at any rate isolation and an older way of life.”

It is difficult in the suburbs to choose “isolation and an older way of life.” But reading Hard Scrabble gives me hope that there is truth and beauty in the honest observation of the place one finds one’s self.

Being and Doing

Being and Doing

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I left this morning early on a round of errands: library, post office, gas station, pharmacy, two grocery stores. By 10:15 I am home again, ready to write, edit and read. I wonder if I can summon the mood for creative work. It is true that a day’s first steps can set its tone, and I began this day in efficiency mode.

But I have stumbled upon a cure — poetry podcasts. As I listen to the words read aloud, their cadences chase away the day’s earlier rhythms, fill me instead with iambs and trochees, with the human voice in search of magic.

Inspired by the spoken words, I listen and I write. A day of doing may yet turn out to be a day of being.