Cantankerously Yours
My Wild & Precious Life, 2011 and Beyond
By Wendell Abern
Dear Fellow Spring Chickens,
I recently participated in an annual service entitled, “My Wild & Precious Life,” at River of Grass, the Unitarian Universalist congregation we joined nine years ago. The service is built around Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the question, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
A member from each decade of life (pre-teens, teens, 20s, 30s, etc.) is chosen to talk for four or five minutes, answering the question – and making for a really fun Sunday morning.
I represented the decade of the 70s, and will share with you here some of my observations from that morning, and others just as relevant.
First of all, I have now been a widow for a little more than a year. We were married for 54 years – so now I’ve got to decide what to do with the next 54 years of my life (which I consider the middle third of my total lifespan).
The first thing I’m going to do is change a lot of misconceptions that people have about me. Now I know for a fact that many women out there think of me as just another hardbody. Well, there’s a lot more to me than my bulging biceps and rock-hard abs, so that’s one thing I’ll address right away.
In addition, I have created a list of resolutions for myself. Not New Year’s resolutions … just things I intend to do, and not do, with the rest of my life.
For example: I will not stalk Jennifer Lopez.
I will stalk Halle Berry.
And I think by the time I’m 80, I’ll switch those around.
I will double the times I eat fish to twice a year.
I will cut down the times I eat red meat to twice a day.
As a kind of sub-paragraph to that last resolution, I will continue a decades-long practice of not letting more than three days go by without eating a cheeseburger.
I will not join, frequent or even go near any establishment that begins or ends with the words, “Exercise,” “Diet” or “Health.”
Also … I have always made it a practice to make moral judgments only of people I dislike. I’m going to continue doing that, even though it’s at a great sacrifice. I mean, I am deprived of a lot of good, juicy hypocrisy. And I really miss that business of criticizing someone mercilessly and raking him or her over the coals for something I’m guilty of myself. You know, what’s more fun than that?
Another thing I will definitely not do is succumb to the burgeoning technology that is making of my life one giant headache. No apps. No Blue-Ray. No plasma TV. No kindle. Nothing.
And finally, I will devote the rest of my wild and precious life to keeping alive the names of some writers who influenced me enormously, a few of whom may have been forgotten already.
Like anyone who has tried to write fiction, all of the giants left their imprints on me, from Shakespeare through Hemingway. But a select few influenced me directly. And besides their talent, they all had one thing in common: they thought outside the box … long before the phrase even existed.
Naming them makes quite an eclectic mix of styles and forms: Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken, Ferenc Molnar and Don Marquis.
Nowadays, some might remember the Hungarian playwright, Ferenc Molnar, because his most famous play, “The Play’s the Thing,” still gets staged every year or two by some theatre group.
But few people today have even heard of Don Marquis.
Mr. Marquis was a journalist, humorist, poet, author and playwright who wrote a column for the New York Evening Sun in the early part of the Twentieth Century. And it was in his column, “The Sun Dial,” that he first created the characters, Archy and Mehitabel.
One day, Marquis wrote that he had discovered a giant cockroach in the newspaper’s warehouse, who claimed to be a reincarnated vers libre poet.
The cockroach, Archy by name, wrote free verse poems by jumping off an old typewriter and landing on his head on specific keys to type individual letters. He shared the warehouse with an old cat named Mehitabel, now in her ninth life; in her first life, allegedly, she had been Cleopatra. Archy wrote about Mehitabel frequently.
Being a cockroach, Archy could not reach the capital letter key on the typewriter, so all of his poems were written in lower case with no punctuation marks. Some revealed Marquis’s deliciously caustic wit. He was frequently asked, for example, how Archy could throw the carriage of his typewriter (an act since rendered obsolete with the advent of computers).
Marquis had Archy himself answer the question. I reproduce here, exactly as it appeared in print, his free verse poem, “Back to the Starting Point:”
i see where one of your correspondents
asks how does archy get the carriage on his
typewriter back to the starting point again
when he wants to begin a new line i release
the spring with my left hind leg and butt the
thing over with my head yes i am bald but
my baldness is on the outside of my head not
on the inside like some i could name
A cockroach and a cat. Reincarnations. Talk about thinking outside the box. What a clever way for a poet to get his poems published!
When World War I began, Archy and Mehitabel had already become famous nationwide; by the early ‘30s, Marquis had compiled the poems into a three-volume collection. When I attended the University of Illinois in the early ‘50s, the set was offered as elective reading in several writing courses. I read all three books. So did everyone I knew.
Who has even heard of them now?
Well, some people will remember Don Marquis and Archy and Mehitabel if I have anything to say about it. Seems to me that yanking old names out of the literary remainder pile, and re-presenting them to a whole new generation of readers, just might be the most worthwhile thing I can do with the rest of my wild and precious life. And so, in subsequent issues, I intend to resurrect other forgotten works and/or authors also. It certainly beats learning how to play a new video game.
Cantankerously Yours,
Wendell Abern
Wendell Abern can be reached at dendyabern@comcast.net.