Am I a Poet, but Don’t Know It?

November 15, 2015PoetryTeri

At a dinner party a few months ago, I was asked by a friend if I was a poet. “No,” I quickly and definitively answered.

And then she queried “How do you know?”

I didn’t speak it, but I thought it: Duh, I think I’d know if I was a poet.

I tried to be pithy in my actual response to her: “Maybe I’m a poet and I don’t even know it.” She rolled her eyes and changed the subject.

But her question stuck with me all these months.

I have over the years tried my hand at poetry. Haven’t we all?

But I was never good at rhyming. The perfect timing of rhyme scheming seemed cheesy to me. Now I recognize that not all poems have to rhyme, but they often flow better when they do.

I wrote a Haiku once, but the three-line rule, totaling 17 syllables throughout seemed forced. And three lines was near impossible for someone like me.

As the self-proclaimed queen of verbiage, the poems I have written over the years have been rather longish. Getting a four-page poem to rhyme and flow would take a fair amount of poetic talent. Or maybe they aren’t poems at all. Maybe they’re super short, short stories.

So here’s my question: Am I a poet?

For those of you who are familiar with my writing style, you know that I can occasionally be sardonically witty. But for the most part, I am supremely morose. I apologize for that. Sort of.

Anyway, I combed through some of my journals and found this entry I felt compelled to share. It was one long rant of a paragraph, so I chopped it up a bit. Perhaps you too have an ex-friend. Perhaps I am a poet after all.

It’s my birthday today
and I’m not thinking about
how I’m going to spend it.
I’m thinking about
my ex-best friend
and how I wish we were
fourteen again
caring only about
boys and clothes,
and listening to
Simon and Garfunkel
while we weep over
life-altering happenings.
First kisses and sweet sixteen’s,
pimples, breakups, and proms,
becoming women,
high school graduation
and leaving for college.
I want my teenage years back,
and my grandmother,
and my dog Raleigh.
I want to sleep out in a tent
in my then still best friend’s backyard
and sneak boys into her house
while everyone is asleep.
And I long to hear her mother’s shrill voice,
ordering us to shape up.
I want to giggle with her
and hang out for hours
in her magazine-perfect bedroom.
But her room is gone
and so is our youth,
and her parents.
And our friendship.
And I wonder what we will share next.
What event might break
the silence.
The thought is unnerving
and scary
so I put it out of my mind.
Instead, I remember
the good times
the old times
when we were young and naïve
with flowers in our pigtails.
Kodak color prints
of the two of us
in teeny weeny bikinis,
with our hair in jumbo curlers.
And then engagements,
marriage, pregnancy,
the miracle of birth,
child-rearing.
I want to remember
everything, even the
bad times,
because we shared them.
Heartbreak, deceit,
misunderstandings,
tough love,
health scares,
divorce, remarriage,
rejection, repudiation,
the golden years,
ex-best friends forever.

A Veterans Cemetery Most Americans Will Never Have the Honor of Visiting

November 11, 2015TravelTeri

World War II was waged on land, on sea, and in the air over several diverse theaters of operation for approximately six years.

But it is the images, photos, movies and film of our soldiers, our heroes, our sons, storming the beaches of Normandy, France that made the most impression on me as a child. The horrific images of bullet-ridden young men collapsing in the water and on the beaches of Normandy are forever seared in my memory.

In August of 1995, I took a trip with my husband to Normandy France to commemorate the 50^th Anniversary of World War II. It was a trip that not many Americans take. Those who do make it to France are mostly too busy whooping it up in Paris, or Cannes on the French Riviera to care about a little region like Normandy.

I will never forget standing on the bluff that foggy, rainy, and bitterly cold day. I imagined that the weather the morning our soldiers stormed those beaches was probably very similar. As I reverently walked along the fog obscured cliffs and looked down at the desolate Omaha Beach, what shocked me the most was their impossible-to-climb steepness—over 1,600 feet.

How could our soldiers have possibly scaled those fearsome and heavily German defended cliffs? History has taught us that sadly, many of those brave young men who stormed the beaches early in the morning of June 6, 1944, lost their lives on that fateful day.

Omaha was the bloodiest of the D-Day beaches, with roughly 2,400 U.S. troops turning up dead, wounded or missing. The rough surf wreaked havoc with the Allied landing craft and only two of the 29 amphibious tanks launched at sea managed to reach the shore.

As I gazed at the choppy waters beyond Omaha Beach, bound at either end by large rocky cliffs, I sadly envisioned those brave young men wading through neck-deep water to a shore many would never reach and who gave all they had for liberty and justice.

Overlooking and looming over the crescent shaped beach behind me lay a peaceful, eerily quiet lawn of thousands of their headstones. The meticulously manicured and immaculate grassy grounds with row upon row of white headstones in perfect alignment was humbling and devastatingly moving.

The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial house the remains of 9,387 of our military dead, most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations.

Three hundred and seven of those interred are “Unknowns.” There are three Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, four women, a father and son, and 33 pairs of brothers. The servicemen and women laid to rest there came from all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

The spine-tingling cemetery overlooks Omaha Beach and its main paths are laid out in the form of a Latin cross. The site of perfectly aligned headstones on the pristine emerald green lawn sent a chill through my body that I can still recall today. Each grave was marked in snow white marble—a Star of David for those of the Jewish faith, a Latin cross for all the others.

Nothing could have prepared me for the emotion I felt as I took in the serenity of the hallowed resting place for those valiant soldiers, the majority of whom were still in their teens, who made the supreme sacrifice for the cause of freedom.

I realized as I stood with my hand over my heart while the national anthem and taps played in the background, that there would never be another place that would evoke such an awe-inspiring and life-changing effect on me. And I will never forget the respect, gratitude and immense feeling of pride I felt to be an American.

In the Garden of the Missing, there was a wall inscribed with 1,557 names. Those heroes who gave their lives in the service of their country but whose remains have never been recovered or if recovered have never been identified.

The following heartbreaking inscription appears on the wall above the names of the missing:

HERE ARE RECORDED THE NAMES OF AMERICANS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY AND WHO SLEEP IN UNKNOWN GRAVES.

THIS IS THEIR MEMORIAL THE WHOLE EARTH THEIR SEPULCHER.

COMRADES IN ARMS WHOSE RESTING PLACE IS KNOWN ONLY TO GOD.

My Grandmother’s Gift

October 31, 2015Family & RelationshipsTeri

While cleaning out my attic many years ago, I found a dusty old box marked “special.” It looked like my handwriting, but a much younger redaction. I opened the carton with genuine excitement, having literally forgotten the contents it held.

It was a patchwork quilt, a birthday gift from my grandmother on my twenty-first birthday. There was a card in the box, with an image of a beautiful yellow rose. I opened the card and the sadness I felt took my breath away. I couldn’t bear to read her words and closed my tear filled eyes, and tried to remember her, as she was that day.

The memory was so loud, I could actually hear the excitement in her voice as she chattered on in her thick French accent, while I ripped apart the meticulously wrapped package. I could almost smell the sweet aroma of the fresh baked cookies she was making for me that day.

My beloved grandmother, my surrogate mother, was a seamstress. And although we had very little money, I always wore gorgeous and elegant clothes. We would pour through the pages of the latest fashion magazines and together picked out the most beautiful designs. “This is made for you,” she would proudly exclaim, tearing page after page out of the magazines. She needed no pattern—every measurement of my body had been devotedly memorized in inches and yards.

She had a job boxing bullets on an assembly line all day—but at night, while others were sleeping, there she was, hunched over her sewing machine, working feverishly to complete something special for me—a dress, coat, suit. Her way of saying “I love you.”

The memories, in flashing snapshots kept coming—one after the other. The sound of her sewing machine, and the gentle humming of her favorite tune. The puppy we picked out when I was five. The clownish self-portrait I painted for her, that she hung so proudly over her bed. The multi-colored sweater coat, I still wear to this day. Her mother’s treasured cameo pin, worn near and dear to my heart. Her fear as she lay dying in my arms.

And now, better late than never, the flashback of the day she proudly presented me with my birthday gift. I struggled to recall my younger self, opening the beautiful card with the single yellow rose and reading the message inside. “A patchwork quilt for your 21 years,” it said.

The quilt was truly magnificent. Handcrafted, full of vibrant colors, large enough for a king size bed. And yes, I recollected thinking that while I thought it was beautiful, I was slightly disappointed in her choice of gifts. At twenty-one, I was moving around a lot and didn’t even have a bed large enough for this patchwork of remnant material.

Remnant material?

A sharp pain spread across the center of my chest. I frantically pulled the quilt from the musty, old box, laid it on the floor, and caressed the hundreds of squares of material lovingly. Why, this was no patchwork quilt of remnant material. This was a pastiche of every dress, suit and article of clothing my grandmother had so laboriously made for me during my first twenty-one years.

A patchwork quilt of me.

The red dotted swiss I wore at a surprise party for my ninth birthday, the hunter green velvet I wore for my sweet sixteen, the lavender satin from my prom dress, the yellow silk jacquard worn on my first job interview.

Overwhelmed, I wrapped myself with her labor of love and cocooned myself in the yards of memories, shivering from the realization of what I had just discovered.

How could I have missed her sentimental intention? How shallow had I been, to think this patchwork of my life was merely remnants of old material?

I cried then for the lost opportunity to embrace her tightly and to express my reverential sense of gratitude to her for preserving my life in this way.

As my tears stained my grandmother’s masterpiece, I spoke out loud, apologizing to my selfless and lonely grandmother for all the time lost, asking her forgiveness for not understanding or appreciating the powerfulness of my heirloom.

Swaddled in my precious gift, still clinging to my birthday card, I was consumed by the heart-wrenching memories that are but a patchwork quilt now.

A Proposal to Solve China’s Gender Imbalance: Share Wives

October 29, 2015InternationalTeri

Translation: “Marry me!” (Cartoon: www.worldpress.org)

In 2011, I wrote an article for Worldpress.org titled “China’s Gender Imbalance” in which I described the possible long-term consequences of China’s one-child policy introduced in 1979.

The result of such draconian family planning? The selective abortion of girls, pressure to abort a pregnancy, and even forced hysterectomies.

I predicted that the large numbers of single Chinese men combined with the scarcity of available women would have future negative ramifications. My forebodings included damage to the mental and physical well-being of men who fail to marry, trafficking of girls to become prostitutes or brides in rural areas, an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, and overall social instability.

The Chinese Academy of Social Science estimates that by 2020, 30 million bachelors will be unable to find a wife in their own country. There are already “bachelor villages,” inhabited primarily by men, scattered across many of China’s poorer regions. The situation has gotten so bad that in some villages men are marrying their first cousins and even their sisters through deals made with relatives. The practice has become so common that some communities are referred to as “incest villages.”

Bottom line is that China’s overpowering preference for boys has put them in a real bind.

In order to negate the ticking bachelor bomb, China has decided to end its decades-long one-child policy. According to a recent statement from the Communist Party, couples will now be allowed to have two children. But that doesn’t solve China’s current gender imbalance.

I would imagine that the wealthy Chinese man can just buy a spouse. Pay the “bride price” and obtain a wife. She’s chattel, and just another commodity like a car, land, or house.

But what’s a poor Chinese man to do?

Seems that Xie Zuoshi, an economics professor at the Zhejing University of Finance and Economics, has the solution—polyandry. One woman, multiple husbands.

Yes, Xie Zuoshi was quoted as saying poor men who cannot find wives should “bundle up to get one to share between themselves.”

Bundling up? Ew. Like, one husband isn’t enough? Sounds like one dysfunctional mess nest to me.

And why do men continue to prey on the poor, uneducated women?

Because they can.