"You Taught Us Well"—An Homage to Grace Nakamura

Delivered this afternoon at Grace Shinoda Nakamura's Memorial:

Grace and I had an immediate bond. Part of that may have been due to the first thing that she said to me when we met at El Rancho High School in 1975 or '76 when I had returned to teaching after a brief retirement to play music. She said, “I knew your mother and father before you were born,” and she was right. My parents and Grace and Yosh had attended the same church social group for young couples here in Whittier. For most people, that would have warranted a “HMMM” or a “How about that?” But for Grace, and therefore for me, that connection was something special, yet she must have had a million such connections.

Grace Shinoda Nakamura was probably the most enthusiastic person that any of us has ever met. She was a cheerleader for so many things and so many people, but she was more than a mere cheerleader. She was a champion. She championed students. She championed teachers. She championed schools. She championed the Gifted and Talented program. She championed the El Rancho Unified School District. She championed the arts. She championed the environment. She championed integrity. She championed her children and her family. She championed friendship, and so much more.

I must point out, although any one who knew her undoubtedly knows this, she was not merely an enthusiast for the big ideas or concepts, she was a champion of individuals as well. She was filled with encouragement for both the struggling student and the gifted student. She was filled with encouragement for the struggling beginning teacher and the accomplished master teacher. She encouraged and applauded the artistic pursuits of so many, and she shared that enthusiasm with others. Whenever our paths would cross—at a school event, an art event at Hillcrest or the Pomona Fair, or an art showing of one or more of the amazingly talented Nakamura clan, Grace would invariably say, “There's someone here that you have to meet.” I can honestly say that I am a better person for having met her.

I would like to share a poem that I originally wrote for a friend of Grace's and mine, Ralph Jim Kane, who left us much too soon while in the middle of his teaching career. I think it a very fitting homage to Grace as well:

You Taught Us Well

Some seeds burst from blossoms

Like a child's lost kite,

Soaring upon balmy breaths,

Stringless and free.

     Others lie sequestered

     Like a fossilized egg,

     Awaiting Resurrection

     Confidently.

          In the garden of thought,

          Where freedom follows fancy,

          You nurtured both:

          You taught us well.

Some words seek compliance

Like a soldier's orders,

Shouting over every voice,

"Come...follow me!"

     Others whisper shyly

     Like a lover's heartbeat

     Sensing a kindred spirit

     Unconsciously.

          In the field of soul,

          Where duty battles beauty,

          You captured both:

          You taught us well.

Some truths stand there, solid

Like statues in town squares,

Withstanding the elements

Defiantly.

     Others must be sheltered

     Like blossoms pressed in books

     Fading, but not vanishing

     Absolutely.

          In the valley of time,

          Where memory is precious,

          You shared your love:

            You taught us well.

By Tim McMullen 

©1987, amended ©2014

There is a large hole in our hearts that will never be filled, but there is a much greater well in our hearts filled with the fondest memories and gratitude that we were touched by the miracle that was Grace Nakamura. Thank you, Grace, you taught us well.    

Satan, Santa and Stephen Crane

I saw this posted on a friend's FB page today. Normally, I would either "like" or ignore a graphic like this, but for some reason (perhaps the fact that I had just spent the previous hour responding to a comment on another post that I felt deserved a complete response) I felt moved to respond to this.

I get the sentiment, and I agree to a great extent, but I am afraid that it oversimplifies. Being an atheist is okay. Being a smug, arrogant, belligerent, self-righteous prig is not okay, whether you are religious or not.

Sadly, most religions shame themselves not merely with their intolerance of other faiths or points of view, but through practices that demean both the individual and "the other," including waging war against "infidels," "heretics," and "non-believers" in the name of God. Let us not exclude predatory priests, evangelical con artists, genital mutilation and female subjugation, to name but a few "religious" practices that deserve to be shamed, including defiance of science.

Furthermore, I know that it's meant to add levity, but reindeers don't have red, shiny noses, and perpetuating falsehoods and fantasies as anything other than literary fictions, no matter how telling and meaningful they are for the human condition can have dire consequences.

Insisting that the physical laws of nature can be ignored or circumvented has dangerous, real world consequences. Seizing a Holy Book—from whatever religion and regardless of how many times it has been translated and retranslated, collected and collated, reconfigured and re-collated, and no matter what wildly improbable or physically impossible events are claimed to have occurred (remember Leda and the Swan?)—and claiming that said Holy Book must be taken absolutely literally while failing to acknowledge any possible ambiguity or obvious contradictions can have devastating effects on an individual, a society, and our world.

I do not disdain religion nor those who see themselves as either religious or spiritual, and I admire many of the important tenets from many of the world's religions, but I decry those practices and practitioners who advocate the suppression or subjugation of people based on origin, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, or social status.

Stephen Crane wrote:

"And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the heads of the children, even unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me."

Well, then I hate thee, unrighteous picture;
Wicked image, I hate thee;
So, strike with thy vengeance
The heads of those little men
Who come blindly.
It will be a brave thing.

I concur with Crane's analysis. Most read this as a blasphemous attack on God, but it clearly is not. He is not offering a hatred of God; he is stating a hatred for that particularly "unrighteous picture" of God.

As if to explicate this idea, he later wrote:

I stood upon a highway,
And, behold, there came
Many strange peddlers.
To me each one made gestures,
Holding forth little images, saying,
"This is my pattern of God.
Now this is the God I prefer."
But I said, "Hence!
Leave me with mine own,
And take you yours away;
I can't buy of your patterns of God,
The little gods you may rightly prefer."

I believe the "peddlers" are the problem. "To each his own" seems to me to be a very virtuous statement when it comes to religious or spiritual beliefs.

PS: I liked the colors in the clouds, too.

Ants, Antipathy, Antagonism, and The Vinegar Man

After sharing a brief story about feeling sorry for having to kill a fusillade of attacking ants, and then quoting a verse from “Six-Year Drought” by James McMurtry, Craig Bickhardt (Ninety-Mile Wind blog—see “My Blog List” below right) said:

“Sentimentality is wrung out of this and left to evaporate on the parched earth. McMurty’s lines are as hard and pitiless as the Texas plains, and yet they still touch something pulsating with life inside. I bet he sees his struggling ants and sheds no tears for them.

While I hold McMurtry's standard in the highest esteem and wouldn't change a word of it, I suppose I’m just a sucker. I’ve flirted with sentimentality all of my writing life, and maybe I’ve even crossed the line sometimes. The truth is it’s damn hard not to cross it if you feel any pity at all for the world.

Softer art for harder times? Probably won't fly. Yet we must feel something in order to be human. There must be emotion when it is warranted, and there is indeed a perceptible difference between emotion and sentimentality even though it sometimes takes a microscope to see it. After all, it’s our compassion that keeps the human race going, and we don’t want to lose that.

In the writing we can err both ways. On either side of the good, observant narrative there are pitfalls; effusiveness or stolidity. The line between is walked with a cold eye and a warm heart.”



©2009 by Craig Bickhardt

What follows is my comment:

Sentiment in the defense (or pursuit) of art is no vice! Okay, it can be...but I would make the distinction between pathos and bathos—between sentiment and sentimentality—between moving and manipulative. My guess is that for the clever, story-song teller, a certain kind of self-imposed restraint is necessary to prevent a powerful and moving story from becoming a maudlin mess.

Last time I shared my Gogi Grant story, this time I offer one of the earliest poems that I remember being moved by. I found it in a hard cover book of poems "for children" that my parents had bought for me when I was about seven. It had the typical Stevenson poems and those by Edward Lear and Eugene Field, but it also had poems by Thomas Augustine Daly in Italian dialect ("Two 'Mericana Men—about immigrants and stereotyping, and "Leetla' Giorgio Washington" with a clever twist on the cherry tree story) and one of my all-time favorite pieces, "The Vinegar Man" by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. I still use these pieces with my students and have done so for going on forty years.


The Vinegar Man

The crazy old Vinegar Man is dead! He never had missed a day before! 

Somebody went to his tumble-down shed by the Haunted House and forced the door.
There in the litter of his pungent pans, the murky mess of his mixing place,
Deep, sticky spiders and empty cans with the same old frown on his sour old face.

"Vinegar—Vinegar—Vinegar Man!
Face—us—and—chase—us—and—catch—if—you—can!

Pepper for a tongue! Pickle for a nose! 


Stick a pin in him and vinegar flows! 

Glare—at—us—swear—at—us—catch—if—you—can!
Ketchup—and—chow-chow—and—Vinegar Man!"




Nothing but recipes and worthless junk; greasy old records of paid and due;
But down in the depths of a battered trunk, a queer, quaint valentine torn in two.
Red hearts and arrows and silver lace, and a prim, dim, ladylike script that said,
(Oh, Vinegar Man, with the sour old face!) 
"With dearest love, from Ellen to Ned!"




"Steel—us—and—peel—us—and—drown—us—in—brine!
He pickles his heart in” a valentine! 


“Vinegar for blood! Pepper for his tongue!
Stick a pin in him and” once he was young! 


Glare—at—us—swear—at—us—catch—if—you—can!”
"With dearest love" to the Vinegar Man!

Dingy little books of profit and loss (died about Saturday, so they say),
And a queer, quaint valentine torn across…torn, but it never was thrown away! 

"With dearest love from Ellen to Ned" "Old Pepper Tongue! Pickles his heart in brine!" 

The Vinegar Man is a long time dead: he died when he tore his valentine. 




Ruth Comfort Mitchell


Yes, it verges on sentimentality, that little catch in the throat, but the wonderful juxtaposition of the older narrator recalling his own childhood voice and then merging the two into an adult recognition of a tragic life suddenly revealed (a little like Kane's "Rosebud"), stays well on the right side of the line. The complex interplay of internal and end rhyme is also masterful as are the alliteration and the parenthetical caesura (the matter of fact, "died about Saturday”) that pulls it back to the harsh reality.

When I heard Danny O'Keefe's "Valentine Pieces," from his second album, O'Keefe, It evoked a very similar feeling, except that it was written in the first person, and the hurt was more immediate:

"The valentine pieces litter the floor of my room...
I should go get the broom..."

I’d say, keep your art ever to the fore, and the sentiment will take care of itself!

PS: I got so carried away (as usual), I forgot about the ants. I think you have inspired me to make my first posting of one of my short stories on my blog. It is a cautionary tale about a man with feelings about killing ants that are very similar to yours (and whose feelings, of course, mirror my own). I'll let you know when it's posted; you might get a kick out of the "similar minds" experience.
Tim