watermelon heaven

Now, if only I could craft my words as masterfully as this artist crafts his watermelons...

It never rains in Southern California

Dude, what are you talking about? It snowed.

valentine for my ex

Words

Oh, the words, the words,
the achingly
beautiful
inadequate
words.

--Terry Hertzler

Kooky Professors

Speaking of kooky poli sci professors and sitting in the front of class, I remember a favorite story from my days at CSUN years ago. My dad, see, was a poli sci prof while I was a coed there. I took two of his classes. Naturally. He was a great prof. No, really, he was. I can remember around registration time, you could hear whispers in the hallways of the poli sci department: Take Beller, he's the best. So, yes, I took his class. We secretly agreed to change my last name for the class, and none of the students knew my undercover identity.

Those were my triathlon days, and my boyfriend and I rode our bikes to campus. I swam at school. One semester I took Poli Sci 156, and swam before class. The chlorine from the pool always made my nose run terribly. It was so annoying, that watery distraction tickling my upper lip, as I would sit in rapt attention to Dr. Beller's colorfully animated lectures, sucking up his profound wisdom like a dry loofah.

At the end of every week, we would always take our suits home to wash the chlorine out. I always wrapped mine in my scratchy white gym towel, and carried it with me tied to my backpack until I got home. During one lecture, my runny nose was particularly pestilent. I was sniffling and snorting and it wasn't doing any good; the water was running like a busted faucet. It was so annoying. Still, I refused to budge from my front-row perch to escape to the hallway, where I might blow the chloriney liquid away for good. Unable to control the leaky Kohler that was my nose, I desperately grabbed my towel and wiped, thus averting a disastrous scene.

That was it. Silly me. Dr. Beller--Dad--in a great show of drama, stopped his lecture mid-sentence, his emphatically gesturing arms suddenly frozen. He made a dramatic, sweeping motion to turn and glare at me. "Good god!" he exclaimed incredulously. "Did you just wipe your nose with that towel?!"

I stared back at him, stunned, my face turning a hot shade of burgundy. The entire class gasped in unison, horrified. "Ohhh! Dr. Bellerrrrr!" they cried. How mean!

I got an "A" in class. And no, I didn't cheat. It was all scan-trons.

Honoring Women and Black History Month

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker is a collection of feminist essays, written very much about black women, but not exclusively -- it is about all women. Powerful is Walker's assertion of what poet Jean Toomer found when he walked through the South many years ago: "he discovered a curious thing: black women whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they were themselves unaware of the richness they held." This seems a curious statement, and yet somehow rings powerfully true.

Walker is a very thoughtful and insightful writer. There is so much packed into these essays, one doesn't even know where to begin. One theme is the enduring resilience and strength of women. Similar to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, Walker examines women's ability to become artists, in this case particularly, black women -- women who were denied, among other indignities, the means to learn to read and write, or express themselves in any way. "How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive," Walker asks, "year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?" Walker refers to Phyllis Wheatley, a black slave of the middle 1700s, who was highly educated and wrote poetry, in reference to Virginia Woolf's essay; how was this slave able to become a writer if she not only had no money or a room of her own, but didn't even own herself? Walker continues with other examples of strong women, most notably her own mother, who ran away at 17 to marry, had eight children, did all the work at home plus labored alongside her husband in the fields.

The strength of women is inherited from their mothers, handed down the line unspoken. All of these women, says Walker, "our mothers and our grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see." This is the strength of women. Walker's works are a valuable contribution to the importance of women, regardless of race or color. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is a must-read for all.

We Real Cool

by Gwendolyn Brooks

THE POOL PLAYERS.

SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433
Click this link and listen to Brooks herself read the poem; it's a great treat, and I say it's required listening.

I Love Art

So, I have this prof, see, for my art history class. I'll call him Dr. D. He's crazy. He's passionate. He teaches art history, political science, and western civ. Go figure. I couldn't imagine taking his poli sci class. He speaks in riddles and metaphor, and when he wants you to write down a word he repeats it exactly three times, his voice rising one octave on each repetition. Like this: "art, art, ARRRT!" It's a lyrical melody I know by heart now. He gestures wildly with his arms, and beats on his chest when he wants to make a point. He gets so feverish as he flails that he knocks his papers or books, or whatever is in front of him, on the floor at least once every class period. I heard his textbooks only last one semester.

He gets in your face. He challenges you with weird questions. He gets so excited he spits. Bummer, because I like to sit in the front. One day he brought donuts for the class, two big greasy-pink boxes. At the end of the lecture he asked if anyone wanted the last three donuts: "I didn't spit on them, I promise," he said. "Well, only once." We roared, only because we knew it was true.

One of his favorite paintings is "The Scream," by Edvard Munch. He likes to open the text, hold it up in front of him, and smack the page where the painting he is discussing is located. One day he did that, he grabbed some poor coed's text off her desk in a moment of passion and, holding it to his chest, smacked the pages until they were crumpled. The poor girl. Yeah, he forgot to give her book back, too. Dr. D gets so excited, he yells, usually directly at one student. No one seems to know quite how to react, and yet he is loved--adored--by his groupies. He takes his groupies, anyone who wants to go, on field trips to see art exhibits and concerts. I'm signed up to go this Saturday.

No one took the three donuts.