Universal Studios StarWay
The Hanging of the Crane
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Oh fortunate, O happy day,
When a new household finds its place
Among the myriad homes of earth,
Like a new star just sprung to birth,
And rolled on its harmonious way
Into the boundless realms of space!
To Thomas Moore
(Lord Byron)
To Thomas Moore
My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is in1 the sea;
But, before I go, Tom Moore,
Here's a double health to thee!
Here's a sigh to those who
love me,
And a smile to those who
hate;
And, whatever sky's above
me,
Here's a heart for every fate.
Tho2 the ocean roar around
me,
Yet it still shall bear me on;
Tho3 a desert should surround
me,
It hath springs that may
be won.
Were't the last drop in
the well,
As I gasped4 upon the brink,
Ere my fainting spirit fell,
Tis to thee that I would drink.
With that water, as this wine,
The libation I would pour
Should be -peace with thine and mine,
And a health to thee, Tom Moore!
1 Bryon used “on”
2 & 3 Byron used “Though”
4 Byron used “gasp'd”
Lad April
Lad April
April is no lady;
April is a boy,
Wearing torn green trousers
Made of corduroy!
Whistling thru the woodland
Cheerily he goes,
Nothing but the brown dust
covering his toes.
Lad, he cuts a sling shot
Out of tough green wood,
Shoots at all the squirrels
In the neighborhood.
Clambers in the treetops,
Swings across the air,
Never hurts a robin
or a bluebird there.
April goes a-fishing
with a small green rod,
No one else goes with him-
Only, maybe, God.
Kathryn Wood -
Something to Think About
Something to Think About
“Ah!” sighed the World, as he
turned in bed
With a pillow of cloud for
his poor old head
And lowered the roller
shade of Night
And blew out a star that
shone too bright–
“The year is gone with his
toil and strife,
The storm and surge of the
tide of life.
The crazy brawl of the
human breed,
And I’ll rest at last – for
it’s rest I need!”
Down came an elf through the
moonlight pale
From the Milky Way
on a comet’s tail;1
He turned up the lamps
that were burning low
And prodded the World
with a small pink toe.
“Get up!” he cried, “That’s
enough for you!
There’s a heap of things for
a World to do!
“There are wounds to bind,
there’s a map to fix,
There’s a beautiful tangle
of politics,
There are towns to build
there are wheels to
start
There’s a load of crowns
for the junkman’s cart
There’s an ancient fraud in
a
brand new dress,
There are lovely riddles for
men to guess,
There are dreams to dream
There are heights to climb,
And you can’t lie there and
waste your2
time!”
So the World rose up
with a plaintive groan,
Stubbing his toe on a
tumbled throne,
To round the Sun on his
wonted track -
The deep-grooved trail of the
Zodiac,
That way of sorrows and
joys
and aches,
Of noble efforts and fool
mistakes.
But it’s good for the poor
old World, at that;
For a drowsy Planet gets
much too fat.
-
Arthur Guiterman:
A Ballad-Maker’s Pack
New Year,
1919
by Arthur Guiterman
from A Ballad-Maker’s Pack
1 Gramma
left out this stanza between “comet’s tail” and “He turned up”:
His
traveling-bag, in letters clean
Was
marked, “A.D. Nineteen-nineteen.”
2 Guiterman used “my”.
Black Notebook
There’s a small black three-ring notebook Mom kept in one of the cardboard drawers that used to be in Granpa’s basement. When Granpa died Mom brought everything from his house in Denver to our house in San Diego. The cardboard drawers, his digital alarm clock, all the books from the shelves, even an unopened bottle of Canada Dry Club Soda. Everything means everything. There were lamps and vases and sheets and towels and the killer rug , the one that would slip and slide on the hardwood floor sending me skating across the room where Gramma’s hospital bed had been. The rug would fling me into the writing desk on the far wall.
That desk is where the notebook had been until Mom brought it to San Diego and stashed in the cardboard drawer with the crinkly edged black and white photos and the tiny metal cars from an ancient board game and a shaving mug with a stag on the side. I was allowed to take out the photos and the cars and even the mug if I wanted to, but what I loved was the notebook. It smelled old and the yellowed pages were covered in fancy writing. I tried to copy the writing. My left-handed penmanship was improved over the days when all of my J’s were backward but it still wasn’t very good. Gramma had a funny way of making capital N’s that look like the pi sign: two sticks with a hat. Her capital M’s were three sticks with a hat. I’d never seen anything like it.
This wasn’t Gramma’s diary. There were no intimate details scrawled in black ink across these pages. Those pages, if they ever existed, were long gone. The pages of this notebook are filled with poetry. Not her poetry, nothing she’d written herself, no grand window into her soul. This was where she’d copied the works of William Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke, some in part, some in full. She also transcribed a poem by Lydia A Coonley. Ever heard of her? Yeah, me neither. Coonley was a suffragette who published Under the Pines and Other Verses in 1895, her only book. Gramma liked one of them enough to copy it into her notebook. One obscure poem from all the things she read. All these years later I have to wonder how they came together.
This is what I see in my mind’s eye:
Gramma pulled out a chair from the dining table and dragged it over to the writing desk where she’d already lit the wick in the oil lamp and set out her pen and inkwell. Heavy curtains have been drawn, not against prying eyes but the November chill. The inkwell is a glass jar wrapped in leather with a metal lid. The pen is bright black. It has no clip so it rests between the inkwell and the notebook so it won’t roll onto the floor. Under the notebook is a copy of Kipling’s The Years Between that Gramma borrowed from a neighbor. She wants to copy “The Son’s of Martha” but it’s cold and the desk is too far from the fire. Her fingers could get numb before she finishes so she’s chosen one stanza. She arranges a cushion that has been embroidered with violets and sits down opening the book to the page she has marked with a lavender ribbon.
This is how I imagine the black notebook came to be filled. Odds and ends from borrowed books and clippings from magazines reproduced in her hand between these covers.
Maybe it is a window into my mother’s mother. These were things she collected for herself, not to share with others. This black notebook made the journey from Grand Junction to Los Angeles back to Denver. Gramma saved it for at least fifty years until she died in 1977. Granpa never moved it and when he died in 1984 Mom brought it back to California.
Mom gave it to me several years ago along with some recipes and letters and other odds and ends. So now I’m left with these papers to piece together who Gramma was, not through the stories and photos and memories of others, but with what has been left for me to discover on my own.
Miss Elizabeth Smith, Town
addressed to
Miss Elizabeth Smith,
Town
reads
Helen Berryhill
request the
pleasure of your company
Saturday afternoon
June 11th 1911
From two PM to 5 PM
R.S.V.P.
postage
one cent
envelope measures
3.5” x 2.25”
The Pleasure of Your Company
addressed to
Elizabeth Smith
reads
Doris Stapleton requests the
pleasure of your company
tomorrow afternoon from two
to four PM
July 2, 1908
envelope measures
4 x 2.75
Come and play with me
addressed to
Elizabeth Smith
reads
Come and play with me
Tuesday from two o’clock
until five PM
Mary Isabelle Robinson
July 3, 1903 July 3, 1906
envelope measures
3.25” x 2.25”
Ouray Avenue
addressed to
Miss Elizabeth Smith
Ouray Avenue
Grand Junction
Colo.
reads
Doris Elizabeth Stapleton
requests the pleasure
of your company on
Saturday afternoon
July 2, 1904. from
2 to 5 PM
226 White Avenue
envelope measures
3.5” x 2.75”
by the way
Ouray was the chief of the Uncompahgre band of the Ute tribe
from around 1860 until his death in 1880.
Elizabeth Smith
My grandmother, Elizabeth Katherine Smith, was born June 29, 1899, in Grand Junction, a town in Colorado about 250 miles west of Denver. It’s situated on the Colorado River where it meets the Gunnison River, hence the “junction.” The area was originally home to the Ute people with the white farmers moving into the area in the 1880s. So the town wasn’t even twenty years old when Grandma was born.
I never got to know Gramma, not really. She died when I was seven-years-old. By most accounts she was a pretty cool lady. To me she was kinda creepy and just a little annoying. Parkinson’s had confined her to a wheelchair. Her hands shook unless she was reaching for her cup of tea, then they were steady which sort of made my little-kid-self think she might be faking. I know now that’s one of those weird quirks of the disease, steady in some situations with debilitating tremors in others. She also had these crazy black cat eye glasses that, to my adult self look rather awesome but set against her little-old-lady-blue/white hair made her look a little like a muppet. When Gramma and Grampa came to dinner we didn’t get to watch Dick Van Dyke reruns, we watched Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk. A one and a two…
I’m pretty sure she died on St. Patrick’s Day, which was also my best friend Seth’s birthday. Needless to say, St. Patty’s Day has always had a wee bit of a weird connotation for me, especially when you take into consideration that I don’t like beer. I keep trying Guinness thinking that my Irish heritage will kick in. Then I take a sip of the foamy brown slop and that’s that for another two or three years. I think I’m due to try Guinness again in 2015.
About twenty years ago, Mom started giving me things Gramma had saved. Recipes. Some letters and invitations she had received as a child. Poems she had copied by hand. Mom gave me a small black three-ring binder full of these things. Now they are my collection of odds and ends. In looking through it all I’m hoping to learn more about my mother’s mother.
The talented Sarah Swen scanned all of these archival documents, some of them more than a hundred years old, so I can share them instead of stashing them away in a drawer. They are too cool to keep to myself. I’ll be posting them from time to time.
Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Miss Busy Bess Smith
addressed to
Miss Busy Bess Smith
reads
Miss Busy Bess
You are
cordially invited to attend
Kathryn Mahoneys tenth
birthday party.
Wed., July 9th, 1902
From 2 till 5
No, 327,
Pitkin Ave
envelope measures
3.75" x 2.75"
Happy Mother's Day
I have no idea who took these black & white photos in July 1970
at my grandparent's house on Jewell Avenue in Denver.
Love you, Mom. Miss you. Grandma, wish I’d had the chance to know you.
I have no idea who took these black & white photos in July 1970
at my grandparent's house on Jewell Avenue in Denver.
My mom is so beautiful.
