I overtip in restaurants.
I give oversized hugs.
I mangle poems and prayers and Polish surnames…
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-hundred-and-fifty swans.
It’s nine and fifty swans, idiot. Fifty-nine. But that’s just me. My mind is like a game of Chutes & Ladders. And I don’t just mangle Yeats. I mangle Manilow. I mangle simple takeout orders.
I also gulp my soup.
I burp through hymns.
I toggle through TV channels so fast that it drives other people nuts.
By the way, if you get most of your news from John Tesh – and everyone should – you now know the reasons behind pasta’s popularity.
It’s partially the presence of tryptophan, he said in his newsletter the other day. Tryptophan regulates the mood.
Tesh also explained that pasta has B vitamins, which boost serotonin production — a feel-good brain chemical. Plus, the complex carbohydrates stimulate endorphins, my favorite fish.
Old joke. Blame Carrie Fisher.
Tesh explains that researchers found the joy of eating pasta comparable to watching your favorite team win a championship.
My takeaway: Pasta is bourbon.
In other slurpy news, Suzanne relays this terrific recipe for sweet chili Thai salmon, which she recently had with her friends Joanna and Nigel.
“There’s a little packet of goo,” she explains, “and there’s this other little packet of goo. You mix them together. That’s your sauce.”
Turns out the Thai salmon comes from a Hello Fresh kit, a mail-order meal. During the pandemic, they became quite the rage. It’d compare them to the TV dinners of the ’60s, which tasted like the tin they came in.
But I like Hello Fresh meals for their inventiveness. I like them because they are easy. I like them for their goo.
In non-food news, my granddaughter started pre-school the other day. Don’t they grow up fast?
Catty Cakes marched off to class like it was nothing, not a milestone, not a major shift in her universe. To her, it was exciting to sit crisscross apple sauce with a bunch of new pals and learn all about caterpillars.
I mean, sign me up!
I like sitting crisscross apple sauce.
I like my bacon crisp.
I like my martinis bulbous, about the size of Dolly Parton’s wig, with olives for eyes.
But what I really like – more than anything — are read-a-thons.
The other day, I visited a couple of first-grade classrooms. They were honoring Dr. Seuss, and I explained to them that – coincidentally — Dr. Seuss is my primary-care physician (he’s the only doctor who accepts my Medicare plan).
Only the teacher laughed.
Rough room.
“You shouldn’t date till you’re 25,” one first-grader blurted. “Because you could get a sore throat.”
“OK, that’s not funny at all,” I said.
Figures they’d send me off to first grade. It is the lion pit of any elementary program, a jungle, fiendish and scary. Since I worked in newsrooms for 40 years, they thought I could handle it.
So, I read them some Dr. Seuss. As you know, Seuss wrote in trisyllabic meter – ba-ba-BOOM, ba-ba-BOOM. Cat-in-the-HAT. Green-eggs-and-HAM.
It’s like Dave Brubeck to me, these bouncy swinging rhythms. This rich, chewy word feast.
Just think of all the shared moments – the moms, the dads, the PJs, the cozy bedtimes – that Dr. Seuss gave us all. Basically, he taught America to read. Were his playful poems more important than even Yeats’? No question.
You’re off to great places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!
When I finished, I took a few questions:
“Do you write to inform, entertain, or persuade?” one of the first-graders asked.
“Huh?” I burped, and looked at the teacher.
“We’ve been studying different forms of writing,” Mrs. Schiller explained.
“Wait, there’s different forms?” I asked. “Now you tell me?”
At that point, the kids chased me around the room with sticks, which is really the best reaction you could hope for from a bunch of silly first-graders.
I felt blessed. I felt blurred. I felt happy, yappy and cured…
To receive John Tesh’s free newsletter, go to go.tesh.com/newsletter. Meanwhile, the hunt for my own email solutions goes on. Thanks for your patience. If you’re accustomed to receiving the columns through the email, and haven’t been getting them, please find them at Chris Erskine LA | Welcome. Thanks.
Coming Saturday: Remembering a son.
How exciting for Cakes and you that she is embarking on the thrills and chills of group learning! She’s ready. Not sure about you…but thanks for the happy nostalgic reminder of learning to read with my dad when I was four. Thanks to Dr. Seuss, I was well ahead of the curve in kindergarten. And how many children’s books are still fun for adults to read aloud?
First Grade
As good as it gets!
But Kindergarten was the Best‼️
The next years of school; elementary middle high colleges & grad…all downhill!
Love the reference to “The Places . . .”, that was memorized by my very young son. For my 17 month later daughter, it was “Cat You Better Come Home”. Now they’re both off to they’re out-of-the nest homes. (BTW, I like your friend Forrest’s poetry, especially the iambic pentameter sonnet style he uses on occasion.)
Thanks Greg. Yeah, Forrest is my personal poet. Very lucky to enjoy his work here.
I was part of a program called BARK which stood for Beach Animals Reading with Kids. First and second graders would read aloud to my red golden retriever Maggie. Now Maggie was a gentle as her name and would occasionally drift off to sleep as the kids read. “Hey, is Maggie sleeping?” No I would say, she listening intently. Books, kids and dogs, gotta love them.
We should all sleep like a golden retriever.
Chris this is another of your columns that I think should be saved and framed—it’s so YOU. Thanks!
Many years ago, working as a substitute teacher, I sat down one day with the first graders for snack time. At which point, one young scholar began to interview me: “so do you work?” (!) yes, I said, I am a teacher, to which she responded “Oh! where do you teach” ?????
party on ~ ~ ~
I always felt that we would come to Dr. Seuss sooner or later. He’s one of our local heroes, lived and practiced his charming and profoundly healing brand of literary medicine here on The Southwest Coast, and basically wrote true stories about what he saw, felt, and grew to know here. I have always thought many of us learned to think and meme and write from him. The Swans of Coulee? Tweedle de dee. They sail the lea like you and me: calm and free, above the melee of eternity, all that words could ever be…
What took you so long? Because…
Dr. Seuss and Chris—they rhyme
Like a waltz; Suzanne; three-quarter time;
Farewell to Winter’s cold and grime
Here comes Spring and its sweet ‘clime
Of Yeats and Keats; then Summer time:
The G&T, its spritz of lime
Like light to come, green and sublime—
Frost on the glass of love’s enzyme…
Tweedle dum and tweedle dee.
And then there is today, a….
Light Song
It is a brilliant day after rain
On The Southwest Coast, of such immense
Crystalline clarity that sunlight
Has no color, like cold spring water
Or drip ice, or Winter’s thinnest glass—
There seems little here but diamond’s
Infinite depth—an invisible barrier
The air itself presents to the sky
Which is also so pale that it seems
As if its vast blue lense did not exist;
We are in transition, yet again
To the arms of a great love’s intense
Embrace, sleep banished from the silent night’s
Void of dark passion, the chill hauteur
Of Winter’s grand remoteness at last
Breached by light, as up ahead the sounds
Of a florid stirring of crisp air
And heat seed the birds that today fly
Like pepper grains or black stars in dreams
Of all living things, and you want to be kissed;
For such a blaze of new beginnings—
The clock chain flash of the erath’s bright swing—
Is Winter’s last burn to air—then Spring!
This soprano day, you can hear how light sings—
An equinox chorus somewhere in the wings….
Tweedle de dee….
Beautiful, my friend.
Erath ? Earth. Errant accident, per the usual. The image of you reading Seuss to six year olds is priceless; the journal of precocious questions worthy of a stand-up routine. Kids can parody so called adult argot with an uncanny, straight-faced sense of humor missed by many. That teacher must be in stitches much of the time.
Love this – and all meaningful and true. But, not as good as your 9/11 piece, which shall go down as almost as good as the Eagles “Hole in the World”!!!
Bartholomew and the 500 hats was my favorite. Changing the subject: How can you mangle Polish names if you grew up in the Chicago metropolitan area? How can you ask for an order of paczkis for Fat Tuesday?
Why don’t new parents read Dr Seuss to their kids, or just read period. I loved seeing their faces when I really acted out the story! I wish I would have taped that (no video cameras then)!