[gardener]

posted July 20, 2003 11:20 AM *** ** ** ** ** * * ** **
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quote:
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Hell, I think you are attractive sight unseen....because you ride your mtb, and do it alone and love it, and can take care of yourself and are confident and speak your mind. Those things right there are VERY attractive. Too bad I'm not single. And in Little Rock. And a lot younger. And a better mtb rider. And better looking. Aww hell, forget it!
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LOL!!! I know just how you feel brother! In just 4 more years I will be old enough to be these women's dads! We are not necessarily becoming less attractive, just more invisible, and I am not sure which one is worse.
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Jean-Paul Francoeur


And I have detached this exchange of views from "A Girl's Story," as it has become something else. So, in four years J-P will be old enough to be father to a grown woman. And twenty years after that, he'll be old enough to be her grandfather, like me. These are not new sentiments. Below is W. D. Snodgrass's 1957 poem "April Inventory," from his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Heart's Needle. (I taught this poem to 18-year-old-college freshman women when I was a 25-year-old instructor, feeling that "the girls I teach" had in fact "bloomed gradually out of reach.") Yes, some girls still do "turn wives," just as some guys turn husbands.

April Inventory
W. D. Snodgrass

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

Snodgrass, W. D. "April Inventory." Heart's Needle, © 1957, 1959.

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