Hazy, Hot, and Sunny

6:20

Poet Billy Collins and Roger Rosenblatt at Chautauqua Institution Yesterday

Up at 6:20 despite a restless night, waking, going back to sleep, waking again.  I must have a guilty conscience.  A haze over the lake, the sun burning its way through it, a silent lake, heat looming off in the distance, ready to pounce on our house.  We prepare for it, opening the windows for a few hours, then closing them by 8:00, to keep the house cool.  Yesterday, walking in the house felt like it was air conditioned, the outside, however, felt like walking into a steel mill's blast furnace.  More today no doubt.

Yesterday morning, I decided to go listen to Billy Collins, America's poet, at the CI.  This week essayist and writer Roger Rosenblatt invites a different writer each morning for a discussion.  I have seen Collins before and have enjoyed his understatement, his sense of humor, and his dead pan way of reading his poems.  Clearly, this venue works for both, as they played off each other effortlessly, entertaining and educating the audience for an hour and a half.  Collin's poems are at their best read aloud by him, and they are popular because most people can understand them, even when read aloud.  This defines his poetry as 'acessible', a term he hates because it suggests his poetry is shallow...it is not. I sat outside the ampitheater because I did not have a ticket to get inside.  To avoid the eighteen dollar gate fee, I parked my car at Chautauaqua Estates, rode my bike to the gate, got a library pass (good for three hours), went to the library, returned some books, then listened to the lecture, sitting in the Japanese Garden just out side the hall.  This is a legal way to enter though not in keeping with the 'spirit' of the the CI, I suppose.  But lots of people take advantage of it and if the CI really were bothered by us, they would not allow library users in for three hours.  Collins read about ten of his poems and I have included one of my new favorites from yesterday's readings.  All parents and their teenage children ought to read this each year.  Lovely.

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl by Billy Collins

Do you realize that if you had started

building the Parthenon on the day you were born

you would be all done in only two more years?

Of course, you would have needed lots of help,

so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.

You are loved for simply being yourself.

But did you know at your age Judy Garland

was pulling down $150,000 a picture,

Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,

and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?

No, wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.

Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life

after you come out of your room

and begin to blossom, at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey

was Queen of England when she was only fifteen

but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.

A few centuries later, when he was your age,

Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,

but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,

four operas, and two complete Masses, as a youngster.

But of course that was in Austria at the height

of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?

We think you are special by just being you,

playing with your food and staring into space.

By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

Because of the heat, I spent most of the afternoon inside. finishing John Lanchester's novel CAPITAL and watching Germany lose to Italy 2-0, discouraging as the Turkish player Mesut Ozil disappeared in the match.  For dinner, Evie breaded pork chops, made a cheesy cauliflower dish and with a salad we were set for the evening.   We watched another much ballyhooed Iranian film, THE COLOR OF PARADISE (2000), the story of a single father, his daughters and his blind eight year old son.  The father struggles with the burden of his son, even sending him off on his own to train as a carpenter, but both he and his mother realize it's a way to get rid of the boy.  The star of the film is the mountains, the lush forests, the verdant valleys of rural Iran where the film is set.  We both found the film slow, uninteresting, obvious, especially its attempts at symbolism, like the mother finding a fish floundering in a shallow pool, which she then throws back in the stream. Dah! And it has the usual agonies of the family, usually the guilt stricken father, crying and writhing on the ground.  Tiresome.  It ends with the boy almost drowning, the father saving him, realizing at last his love for his son.  One critic mentioned that he liked this film so much that he watched it five nights in a row.  He must have a large capacity for boredom or nothing to do.