Author Archives: sara holbrook

About sara holbrook

Poet/Author/Educator

June 29, 2005

Q & A

What’s with this word “counter-intuitive”? All of a sudden, it’s all over the place. Apply it to Iraq, the schools, the environment — everyone is explaining what might be best explained as illogical as counter intuitive.

So, yesterday (was it the day before?) I was listening to the radio and some young twenty something was explaining away all organized religion, with particular emphasis on Scientology, as being counter intuitive. Religion, in her mind, is just a bunch of stuff folks made up. She spoke with great certainty.

I think when I was 21 (or was it the year before) I used to be that certain. I remember when Katie was born, I argued with my mother-in-law that I would not have the baby baptised because it was a pagan ritual based on the premise that kids are born in sin and had to be cleansed. Rather, I took a more Wordsworthian Romantic approach, that children are born innocent and the world corrupted them, therefore I was rebelling against infant baptism. I was very certain.

It seems that the longer one lives on the planet, the less one knows for certain, that more questions than answers come with age.

Counter-intuitive.

June 13, 2005

Oak Island, NC

Eight (was it nine?) hours, multiple traffic jams and pit stops later we pull up to our cottages on Oak Island, NC. Four the past 3 years we’ve been visiting the Outer Banks – and we love the place, but not the traffic. What was once a retreat is now a clogged, vinyl sprawl. We are trying a new location close to my cousin Karen’s home. Our cottages are next door to one another – old fashioned cottages with paneled walls, sand ground decks, rocking chairs and a hose connected to the outside of the house to rinse off the sand. BYO sheets, towels, and kites. Although, bare bones cottaging now includes cable television and automatic dishwashers, the beach feeling was all over us as we sniffed through our digs and claimed beds.

I hesitate to tell anyone where this place is – it is so like the Outer Banks I used to know before it was (gasp) developed. Oak Island is sparcely developed, no high rises or mega cottages that sleep 20 and cost 12,000 a week. The water is warmer, too.

Stephie (aged 4) and Benny (aged 5) learned to ride the waves in tubes this year. Frankie got the worst sunburn. Michael caught some mackerel and we ate it that night for dinner. Max was separated from his love (sigh). Danny and Scottie were wary about the water and the rest of us took turns watching toddlers and riding the waves. The bed didn’t get too sandy to sleep, no one got bug or alligator bit so I guess you could say the entire time was a roaring success.

Messages from the housesitter were that our cat, Spike, disappeared during the week leaving his sister Buffy at loose ends. But when Michael arrived home, he left the back door open for a bit and Spike, like the rest of us, finally came wandering home for a meal.

Ain’t that the way.

June 12, 2005

Tidepools are for splashing.

June 12, 2005

Hallelujah!

Two tired, traveling road poets, one nursing mom of three little ones under 5 (tired by definition), three little ones under 5, one teacher out of school for a whole day (more tiredness), two more little ones under 4, one salesman, one secret service agent, two teenagers (one in love) excused from school early, one large black dog. Four vans, bikes, kayaks, beach chairs, inflatable rings, enough food for a cruise on the trans-siberian railroad, cameras, books, puzzles, umbrellas, fishing poles, buckets and shovels. All loaded in four vans, pulling out of Kelly’s driveway in Purcellville, VA, pausing the caravan to look both ways before we turn right toward the ocean, on the radio the song now made famous again from the movie Shrek. Hallelujah, hallelujah.

Just the act of putting 17 humans (three in diapers) and one dog who thinks he’s human on the road to annual vacation is monumental and worth celebrating. Hallelujah!

June 8, 2005

Buffy the Beetle Slayer

Living in the house we have Hector, the rat terrier who would roll over in submission for a butterfly, Spike the cat who is all white, deaf and clueless, a lizard who (I have heard) eats crickets raw (some things do not have to be seen to be believed) and Buffy, the fluffy gray and white beetle slayer.

The beetles are an inch and a half long, residents of the backyard, kin to grubs, shiny and black as my dad’s old Imperial and positively prehistoric looking. They cling with velcro tenacity to carpet, socks (ohmygod) and little cat feet, which makes them fun playmates for cats, which, it is well known, like to bring their playmates home.

Before anyone considers this a sad story, please note that Buffy does not KILL the beetles. She brings them in the house and plays with them until she gets bored and then abandons them, whereupon they make an immediate beetle line for the back door, retracing Buffy’s steps as if they’d dropped breadcrumbs. So far, they have turned up in the laundry room/closet, the bathroom, the bedroom and other places one might otherwise feel safe without shoes. One even attempted to set up camp on my bedside table last night along with all those books I have been meaning to read.

I want to write a letter to Dr. Phil or Redbook — the headline on the subsequent advisement on the can-this-relationship-be-saved article would read, Can Owner Accept This Cat’s New Relationship? Subhead: Will Cat’s Clinging Coleoptera Break up this Happy Home?

Did you know that there are more varieties of beetles than there are plants? Why would you? Why would anyone except desperate cat owners scouring the internet at 4 in the morning for answers to a fundamental question . . .

Why do we keep pets anyway?

May 31, 2005

a poet on the edge

Saudi poet and novelist Ali al-Dimeeni, who has already been in jail for
a year, was sentenced on May 15 to nine years in prison for sowing
dissent, disobeying his rulers and sedition. He had written a letter to
the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, calling for
political, economic and social reforms – including parliamentary elections.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-saudi-bard-behind-bars,0,1534164,print.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

One poem fragment:
“In Eilesha, I tamed my loneliness, and on its walls I wrote my verses,” he wrote.

“My fellows and I have only called for justice/

Not for violence/

We only want to set up a rule of constitution/

Where men and women are treated equally/

From the dimness of the prison’s cell/

My verses will spring like a garden.”

I wonder what would have to happen for this to happen in this country? First, poets would have to start writing about subjects other than their own neuroses. Could it be that government oppression actually helps art? That by driving art underground, its edge grows sharper?

I’m not advocating the suppression of free expression, just wondering.

May 31, 2005

Brian is in the Secret Service, part of the Presidential Detail Emergency Response Team

May 31, 2005

Brian

I have told many students and teachers about my son-in-law Brian and how he has to write as part of his job. Often kids (teachers too) dismiss poetry writing as superfulous, and I always remind them of Brian and others who never thought they would grow up to be writers, but then find themselves in jobs where they are required to write reports that say, “I saw what I saw and it looked like this.” This kind of writing, capturing images and putting them down on paper is part of what poetry is all about.

Enough students has asked me follow-up questions and emails, I thought you might like to see a picture.

May 30, 2005

Rolling Thunder

Once a year outlaws gather in the capital — black leather on harleys, V8s on two wheels roaring down Constitution Avenue to commemorate those whose lives were changed, ended (stolen?) by the Vietnam War. This year there were a reported 300,000 bikes, thunderous to say the least. Some of these bikers carry more than logos and chrome, they carry scars from those days, now more than a generation past. A truck full of white haired nurses from the days before women carried weapons into combat joined in the parade. Men with white hair, touching the wall, tough men whose broad shoulders and chests have slipped to a swelling above the belt, teary. How did they get to be so old?

All of us who lived through those days bear scars from those days – the country, the vets, those of us who experienced the war as an unreal warm up act to Laugh In and Disney. No one came away from it without their trust in government impaired. Some scars naturally ruminate deeper than others. When I told my 30 something hairdresser about my trip to Ho Chi Minh City, she told me about her father. He came home from the war (when she was a toddler) covered in Agent Orange sores on his arms. Those and other less visible sores never healed. Sores that caused him to abuse drugs, his family. Caused a divorce. He died of cancer in his forties. Logic (but not Dupont, of course) would blame his early death on those sores, too. His name, along with so many others, never made it up on the wall – but it should have.

How did they get so old???? Those white-haired men, my peers. Michael’s son Max is studying the Vietnam war in history class. The war of my school years – all of them – is now a history lesson taught in late May. We look at the telephone thick book of 55,000 names of the dead and missing. The deaths span 19 years. If the Iraq war were to go on that long, Benny, Danny and Scottie, my toddler grandsons, two of them playing chase under the trees aside the memorial wall could be drafted to serve. Chilling thought. What we should have learned is that it is a whole lot easier to get into these conflicts than it is to end them.

DC is so crowded with war memorials, we’re running out of room to carve the names and numbers of the dead into granite. Arlington Cemetery is overflowing, too. When there is no more room, will that be the end of it? Would that were so.

May 29, 2005

Max and me at the Vietnam War memorial wall.