I own a truck!

Well, perhaps that’s not quite right. As the old adage says, you don’t own a truck, the truck owns you.

That’s not quite right either. I’ve never heard that adage, and without looking it up, I’m not exactly sure what “adage” means.

And, this isn’t quite the right way to start a blog, using such misleading statements and clearly having a lack of direction. 

And what does “quite” mean? Look at that strange word. It’s an anagram for “quiet” and might be the French spelling for “quit”. 

It is quite a truck though–a red 1994 Ford Ranger XLT with black trim, new tires and brakes, a five-speed manual transmission, and a key without a chip in it. It’s got some rust, the paint has some issues, and parts of it are held in place with duct tape.

XLT, by the way, means “Extra Luxurious Truck” which is confusing, considering the windows and locks are both manual and the interior, at least now, is underwhelming, the bench seats unappealing at best.

I don’t care. I own a truck!

I’ve made my long list of things to do today. All but four of them are “work on the truck”.

Yet I’ve been on vacation. It will be tough to get to lists and things to do. My wife and I spent three full and two partial days at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. The partial days, of course, included the drive down and back. And since I love long drives, we had five full days of vacation.

Wendy found our spot on Airbnb just south of Duck, a condo unit just forty feet off the Currituck Sound, the western side of the island. The no-waves, quiet side. A large picture window looked out on a wooden pier that went some hundred feet into the sound with a covered landing and two adirondack chairs. We spent a good amount of time on those chairs reading and sipping coffee.

The view also caught unobstructed views of sunset. Even with my color deficiency, I was caught off guard. 

All this for $168 per night. Also, three bedrooms, kayaks, bikes, towels, linens, a stand-up paddleboard, washer, dryer, soaking tub, hammock, and large well-furnished kitchen. 

We went for long walks, kayaked, and biked. One morning we took an old sport kite I bought for the kids many years ago for our walk on the beach. A sport kite has two lines, one for each hand, and theoretically allows the kite-flyer to perform amazing tricks and stunts. 

Not this kite-flyer. Mostly the kite twisted in the wind and crashed immediately. Wendy and I spent most of the time untwisting the lines. The kite flew just enough for Wendy to take a short video of the kite suspended in the air.

I wrote a poem about that experience, “My Old Kite“, as well as a poem about the shore itself, “The Banks“. It’s hard not to be inspired when you are next to the ocean, the roar, the wind, the sand and the expanse.

I have been thinking about rhyme and structure in poetry lately, mostly about how much I enjoy using rhyme, assonance, and alliteration. I’ve written much free verse, enough to enjoy that style and feel accomplished with it, but I keep getting drawn into rhyme.

I am in no way an accomplished poet, though. I have published a couple of poems online and one in print, but I don’t submit any right now. I’m using my website as my forum, considering the poetry as a poetry blog, i.e. poetry that is written on a regular schedule of sorts, somewhat quickly, and probably subject to change more than a poem that has been published in a journal or literary magazine. 

An art professor in college defended the style of Jackson Pollock to our class and the idea that anyone could do that, that it wasn’t even art, noting that Pollock was a well-trained and versatile painter who first mastered many styles of painting then chose to paint this way.  

In terms of art and singing, I am less than accomplished–I really can’t produce multiple styles and what I produce is pretty much in my singular lane.

As for blogging, and writing in general, I feel pretty adept at many styles. My blogging choice is shorter paragraphs, longer sentences, figurative language, poetic phrasing, direction that seems to digress yet pulls together, in the end, surprisingly and meaningfully.

One of my favorite poets is Gerard Manley Hopkins. May I suggest the name “Gerard” or “Manley” for your next chance to name a child, a dog, a cat, a fish, or perhaps a truck? Gerard is ranked 634th in popularity and Manley is 4,885th. 

Meet Gerard, my new truck, though perhaps Gerardette as she falls more to the feminine side of the gender spectrum, in my opinion. 

Hopkins came up with sprung rhythm, totally unappreciated in his time, and fairly unappreciated in ours. I simply love it. I wrote “Lantern King” in the style and structure of Hopkins’ “The Windhover”. My favorite poem.

Speaking of sprung, I struggled with the conclusion of “My Old Kite”. As Wendy and I tried to fly the kite, at one point she asked, speaking of my historical ability to fly this particular kite, “Have you ever got it up?”

Michael Scott popularized the phrase, “That’s what she said”, or as many of my former students would write on papers and in the margins of books, “TWSS”. It is crude humor and in the right frame of mind, or in the frame of my mind, and the minds of many, many of us, always funny and seldom appropriate.

I did not say anything at that moment. I wanted to say, “At least four times!”, in reference to our four children together, but it was windy, the ocean was loud, and I chickened out. I might have had to explain it and I really wanted to fly that kite.

Once, in my latter years of teaching middle school, a student asked me, instead of answering my lesson-relevant inquiry as I called on his raised hand, if I had any kids? I quickly said, without thinking, especially without thinking about my audience, “Oh yeah.” 

You should not answer such a question this way unless you want to lose control of a lesson for about five minutes. And if you don’t want your science-teacher cohorts, both sitting in the adjacent office and catching this moment, to LTAO. And if you don’t want that student, and many others, to remember said moment the rest of the year, and I daresay, still to this day, now adults, though of this I’m unsure, having lost touch with almost all of those middle-school students despite social media, despite often wondering how they are doing and if I had the slightest effect on their love of science or well-being throughout middle school, middle school being the worst years of many of our lives, mine included, my own middle-school experience being one of the major reasons I went into teaching, one of those major reasons not being to accidentally say or do wholly ridiculous, inappropriate things that I still laugh about and carry as precious memories of my career as a teacher.

Did I mention I just bought a truck? And the next morning, speaking to my weekly-breakfast mates Mark and Ken, describing pulling duct and electrical tape off of the gear shifter, the mess it made and the black sticky residue that covered my hands, saying, “I had to wash my hands three times while I pulled it off.” 

As the tables near us might have said, “Those rude gentlemen are LTAO.” Which we were. For a few good minutes. For good reason.

Of rhyme and reason, of that poem about flying that kite, although the ending now does not hint at the original one, Wendy’s innocent question, “Have you ever got it up?” and my almost answer, “At least four times!”, that moment was the original ending of the poem, one that I worked and worked but that I just couldn’t fit to the reason of the poem, the more profound conclusion now that last long sentence, “I nod again, my wife

that was, that can be seen in the digital version history of the poem, “I nod again, my wife

Wendy and I talked about that ending. She liked it, as I did, but she questioned “KItsch”.

“It isn’t kitsch,” she said.

“But it kinda is,” I said, “and it has ‘kite’ in it, almost. And the adjective ‘kitsch’ can mean vulgar and inappropriate, which it is, in every sense”. 

“Nope,” she said, correctly, “it doesn’t work.”

“How about, ‘kite-ish?’” I said, “and I call the poem ‘Kitsch’. Or vice-versa?”

“Umm,” she said. “Vice-versa. That’s better.” And we moved on to what we were going to take on our forty-mile bike trip to Corona, the city twenty-ish miles north of Duck, and back.

I reasoned in my head that this ending was a type of anti-poetry, an unexpected twist, like the kite itself, into vulgarity, away from the beautiful failure of attempting to fly that kite, of the AAAA rhyme scheme of the poem, a death to that rhythmic progression, a more natural confluence of life’s contradictory moments, a reference to the other poem I wrote that same day, “The Banks”, where I questioned the continuity of the shoreline and of time itself, that perhaps what appears to be continuous and beautiful is instead many unexpected conversations and activities and sensations and observations, unattached to reason, tethered with whim and lines that spin together, tangling, the kite-flyer and the poet desperately trying to manipulate into flight and yet always failing, in the end, the result but a brief glimpse at reality, and in that way, the perfect ending.

Or, I like both endings and can justify both.

So, since this is my blog, I’m posting both, one titled “My Old Kite” and the other “KItsch”. 

I’ve proven myself enough to break the rules. I know how to follow them, so I choose to break them.

Besides, I own a truck, and an old kite, and memories of the beach and that precious moment with my wife. 

Or should I say, the memories own me.