The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch is the first biography I have read of Poe. I was totally enthralled. Tresch's approach gives us a man of technological and scientific insight, an expert craftsman with the pen, an original thinker, and a relentless worker. And yet, everything was against Poe, he struggled to provide basic needs, and his dreams were always beyond reach. 

Edgar Allan Poe portrait

It is one of the saddest biographies I have ever read. A genius with everything against him, a man who achieved great heights and died with nothing. Had he been born in a different time, would his fate have been happier?

My Grandfather's set of Poe

I first read Poe in my grandfather's 1926 paperback 101 Famous Poems in which I discovered The Raven, The Bells, and To Helen. Then, I discovered a complete set of Poe on gramp's shelves and borrowed the volumes so often, he told me to just keep them. This was almost 57 years ago! 

Like my own grandfather, Poe's father had abandoned his mother and with her death was an orphan. Like my grandfather, Poe was taken to be raised by a family without formal adoption. Like my grandfather, Poe was sent into the world without enough financial support to live on. Like Poe, my grandfather was an engineer, a writer, relentlessly working three jobs to support his family. Unlike my grandfather, Poe had been raised by a wealthy family and had expectations of being supported to continue that lifestyle. Plus, he had inherited the family problem of alcoholism.

Poe embraced two interests: the advancement of a distinct American literature that could rival Europe's, and an interest in science and technology. His classical education, training at West Point, deep reading, and relentless pursuit of financial security and fame was derailed by his inability to handle alcohol, which was almost impossible to avoid in society or business. 

He took on his aunt and cousin as family, his love for both deep and sincere. They starved with him and followed him from home to home. He married his child bride cousin, who died of tuberculosis, perhaps the inspiration for his poem Annabel Lee.

Poe lived in an age when science and pseudoscience and faith clashed. He reacted to the new scientific ideas that precluded purpose and meaning to existence.

Tresch begins and ends with Poe's lecture Eureka! which presented radical ideas that later were seen as foreshadowing current theories accepted in the scientific community. He neither envisioned a universe controlled by a deity, or abandoned by a deity, or once created remained unchanged. His universe was dynamic and evolving. He saw that science had its limits in understanding the human experience and place in the universe.

Poe lived during the rise of the magazine, and he relentlessly wrote articles of every kind, published in magazines such as Graham's Ladies and Gentleman's Magazine; forty years ago I bought an 1841 bound volume in a Maine antique shop which included numerous works by Poe, articles on cryptography and autography (analyzing signatures), The Colloquy of Monos and Una, and the poems Israfel and To Helen.

It was so interesting to read Tresch's comments on these articles and poems. The Colloquy, he comments, includes lines that foretold the future: "Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.[...]now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools." He continues, "Taste along could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life."

With my new insights into Poe, I really must return and reread his work. 

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

My Edgar Allan Poe quilt features a raven and his handwritten Annabel Lee manuscript printed on fabric.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
by John Tresch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub Date June 15, 2021
ISBN: 9780374247850
hardcover $30.00 (USD)

from the publisher

An innovative biography of Edgar Allan Poe—highlighting his fascination and feuds with science.

Decade after decade, Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the most popular American writers. He is beloved around the world for his pioneering detective fiction, tales of horror, and haunting, atmospheric verse. But what if there was another side to the man who wrote “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”?

In The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe’s obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. Even as he composed dazzling works of fiction, he remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era’s most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues. As one newspaper put it, “Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science—not merely a poet—not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.”

Taking us through his early training in mathematics and engineering at West Point and the tumultuous years that followed, Tresch shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered surrounded by science—and that many of his most renowned and imaginative works can best be understood in its company. He cast doubt on perceived certainties even as he hungered for knowledge, and at the end of his life delivered a mind-bending lecture on the origins of the universe that would win the admiration of twentieth-century physicists. Pursuing extraordinary conjectures and a unique aesthetic vision, he remained a figure of explosive contradiction: he gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the era’s scientific fraudsters even as he perpetrated hoaxes himself.

Tracing Poe’s hard and brilliant journey, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is an essential new portrait of a writer whose life is synonymous with mystery and imagination—and an entertaining, erudite tour of the world of American science just as it was beginning to come into its own.

National Poetry Month: Detroit Poetry

For National Poetry Month I purchased poetry books that had been on my 'wish list' for some time. 

I was interested in reading several poets with Detroit roots and who had written about Detroit.

Although I am not a native Detroiter, my family moved to Metro Detroit in 1963 when I was ten. My father found work with Chrysler in Highland Park where he was an experimental mechanic.

The poems in Made in Detroit by Marge Piercy are very accessible. The early poems recall an impoverished childhood: "rummage sales were our malls," "the furnace had been fed coal," "we survived on what no one else wanted." In another poem, she recalls job hunting, warned by her mother, "just don't put down Jew."

Her title poem, Made in Detroit, is forceful in language.

My first lessons were kisses and a hammer.
I was fed with mother's milk and rat poison.
I learned to walk on a tightrope over a pit
where snake's warnings were my rattles.

Her poem Our neverending entanglement struck home, for I had written a similar poems after the death of my mother in 1990.

We mourn our mothers till
we ourselves are out 
of breath. That umbilical cord between us, never
really cut no matter how
hard we tried in adolescence
to sever it.

I was older when I tried to sever the tie to my mother, but always in returning home I felt diminished back into the girl she still saw in me. With her death, I realized I was more tightly bound to her than ever.

I am still reading this book. Learn more about the poet at
https://margepiercy.com/bio

*****

The poems in Philip Levine's book The Last Shift are also accessible, "human centered poetry" as the Forward states. He writes about growing up and working at the Hamtramck Chevy Gear & Axle.

In an article about the book, Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times wrote,

...Levine’s poems — with their pictures of the industrial Midwest animated by despair, yearning and love — suggest a more troubling truth. The working class has always been hard to see because seeing would mean confronting the struggle of their lives, a struggle of race, inequity and inequality.

“I think the writing of a poem is a political act,” Levine told an interviewer in 1974. “The sources of anger are frequently social, and they have to do with the fact that people’s lives are frustrated, they’re lied to, they’re cheated, that there is no equitable handing out of the goods of this world.”

My father never worked on the line, but I had an uncle and cousins who did work in assembly plants in the 1970s and later, and my husband worked as a welder for two summers at the Flint Buick plant during college breaks. Levine captures the experience for an earlier generation.

...Remember
at eighteen, brother, at Cadillac 
Transmission how no one
knew what we were drilling holes into or why except
of course for $3.85
an hour.

More Than You Gave is filled with images that were very real to me."An ordinary Tuesday in ordinary times," he mentions psoriasis, which my mother suffered from. And notes "the teenage Woodward Ave. whores;" one once tried to get into my dad's truck while he was waiting to pick up a work friend. And White Owl cigars, my dad's brand in the 1960s. "It could be worse," he writes, they could work "at Ford Rogue where the young get old fast or die trying."

I recall the obligatory annual school trips to the Rouge River forge, described by Levine:

One spring day 
the whole class went by bus
to the foundry at Ford Rogue 
to see earth melted and
poured like syrup into fire. 

A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One looks back across "2,000 miles and fifty years" and ends,"Oh/to be young and strong and dumb/again in Michigan!" 

And in Godspell he writes, "A lifetime passes/in the blink of an eye/ You look back and think,/That was heaven, so of course it had to end."

And in the final poem, The Last Shift, he sees the Packard Plant in the moonlight, the 1903 Alfred Kahn complex that spread over forty acres. After it closed in 1999, and scrappers stripped it, the Packard Plant came to symbolize Detroit's decay.

Levine was Poet Laureate in 2011. Read more about Levine's poetry and the Gear & Axle factory at https://detroitartsculture.wixsite.com/detroitstudies/chevy-gear-and-axle

*****

The poem I wrote after my mother's death appears below

A Mother's Love

        I had thought, once, that death
would finally free me.
No more hand- me-downs, no more
the worried call to see if I was home safe,
no more being a child.

I was wrong.
For in your dying, mother,
I am imprisoned more deeply than ever.
I am made, finally and again,
completely thine, like the baby
you loved beyond all understanding.

Your continual habit of giving
made me want to shake free.
It is the discomfort of those loved
too dearly to bear.
It is the knowledge of never being
good enough to deserve it.

And so I discover I am not freed,
but bound more tightly in the cord
of your love.

   

Poems to Night by Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Poems to Night is the first time Rilke's Night poems have been published in their entirety, translated in English. In 1916, Rilke presented his friend and fellow writer Rudolph Kassner the twenty-two poems in a handwritten notebook. 

Rilke wrote the poems between January 1913 and February 1914, during the same time he was working on the Duino Elegies, which has been my favorite volume of poetry for over forty years. And of the elegies, the eighth is my favorite; it was dedicated to Kassner.

In the Introduction, Will Stone confesses that the Poems to Night "possess the aura of a clandestine text, and resist any assured interpretation." 

Which is a great relief to me, baffled as I have been by these verses. Each reading further reveals the arc of Rilke's vision, how the poems reflect his basic understanding. The experience of being human and finite, and aware of the vast mystery beyond, is the bedrock of Rilke's poetry.

I read the Poems of Night, and read them again. I  reread portions of Rilke's biography and a fiction novel of his life to understand Rilke at the time he wrote these poems. 

Rilke arouses feelings in me, with certain lines flashing out like neon, and yet to understand his meaning seems to always hover beyond my full grasp. I struggle with the poems, eliciting more from the lines with every reading. His poetry is so unique to his own world view.

There is the theme of alienation, how humans can never fully connect. And how humans are concerned with the temporal and trivial, "seduced" by the world. Above the world is night, the realm of angels, a sacred otherness which we long to encounter and yet "renounce."

The ending lines are powerful.

Lifting one's eyes from the book, from the close and countable lines, to the consummate night outside: O how the compressed feelings scatter like stars, as if a posy of blooms were untied...Everywhere craving for connection and nowhere desire, world too much and earth enough. (Paris, February 1914)~from Poems to Night by Rainer Maria Rilke

Drafts of the Night poems are also presented, along with snippets from his other works that include the theme of Night, and biographical notes on Rilke's life. He was abroad when WWI broke out, unable to return to his Paris apartment. He lost all his manuscripts, books, and personal belongings, including photographs of his family. When he presented the notebook of poems to Kassner, he was in the military working as a clerk.

Poems to Night is a significant addition to Rilke's published works that will interest his legion of readers as well as all lovers of poetry.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Will Stone was the translator for Rilke in Paris, which I reviewed here.

Poems to Night
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Pushkin Press
Pub Date:  March 2, 2021   
ISBN: 9781782275534
price $18.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke - most of which have never before been translated into English

One night I held between my hands
your face. The moon fell upon it.

In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems, meticulously copied out in his own hand, which bore the title "Poems to Night." This cycle of poems which came about in an almost clandestine manner, are now thought to represent one of the key stages of this master poet's development.

Never before translated into English, this collection brings together all Rilke's significant night poems in one volume.

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Catharine Randall

A Heart Lost in Wonder by Catharine Randall is part of the far ranging Library of Religious Biography. Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry is unique and memorable, full of vivid images, but I knew little about his career as a priest or his life and how it affected his poetry.

Hopkins viewed everything through his faith, finding the divine in every tree and mountain.

Hopkins developed a personal and unique philosophy to explain the power of beauty in this world through the lens of faith. The draw of beauty was so powerful, he believed it might eclipse the divine. He would go weeks with his eyes fixated on the ground in self-denial.

Drawn by the traditions of the Catholic church he converted and he believed he was called to the priesthood. 

It seems like the absolute wrong choice that Hopkins would become a Jesuit--in effect, an itinerant teacher. I can personally attest that no one can who has not lived it can fully comprehend the sacrifices of itinerary, to be removed from a place that feeds one and set in a place that kills one's soul.

A perfectionist, he the work of grading papers and teaching wore Hopkins out and allowed no personal time for his poetry or an internal life.

He responded to the beauty of Wales and the rural assignments but the cities with their poverty and ugliness were soul-destroying. He denied himself poetry but rhapsodized in his journals.

Randall's book delves into the theologies that inspired Hopkins and shows how to interpret his poetry through the lens of his faith.  I am not Catholic and I am not deeply familiar with Newman or Loyola but she presents them very well. 

It is very interesting, but difficult to comprehend Hopkin's unique view of poetry. Cooper discusses the poems as vehicles for Hopkins's theology. 

Hopkins suffered a faith crisis in his later life and died an early death.

I enjoyed the book but do not feel I could comprehend it in one reading. It is dense and deserves a deeper study.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins
by Catharine Randall
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Pub Date 28 Jul 2020
ISBN: 9780802877703
paperback $22.00 (USD)

Poems for the Very Young Child: Summer

Today I am sharing summer poems from Poems for the Very Young Child, compiled by Dolores Knippel and illustrated by Mary Ellsworth, Whitman Publishing Co., 1932

Leonard Cohen's Last Book: The Flame

The Flame by Leonard Cohen with Remembrance of Things Past by Nancy A. Bekofske

In the last days of his life, Leonard Cohen prepared his last book, gathering drawings, unpublished material, and the lyrics from his last albums. He was a man who knew he was in his last days and an artist who needed to send out one last envoy to the world. That book has been published as The Flame.

The image on the cover is the burning bush, a green tree surrounded by fire and yet is not burned by the flames. Cohen's "flame burned bright within him to the very end," said Robert Kory, manager and trustee of the Cohen estate, “this book, finished only days before his death, reveals the intensity of his inner fire to all.”

One of the first record albums I bought as an early teen was The Songs of Leonard Cohen. I later bought the songbook. I grew up listening to those songs, singing those songs, strumming chords on my guitar. When an ARC of Cohen's final book The Flame arrived I downloaded the digital album and revisited those songs while opening the book to read.

The Flame with Remembrance of Things Past by Nancy A. Bekofske

As I worked my way through the book I researched Cohen's life and work online. I discovered the poets who he admired and influenced him, including Frederico Garcia Lorca; Cohen even named his daughter Lorca.

The drawings are primarily self-portraits, his face deeply creased and intense, and of women, spiritual imagery, and a few still lifes. Facsimiles of his manuscripts are also included.

The selections are confessional, addressing his personal struggles with depression, relationships, and spiritual meaning. Rhythm is more important than rhyme. The imagery is often very personal, arcane, but also with references to Biblical stories and Jewish history.

The message I gather is this: When love fails to save us and faith fails to bring grace, and the world has become merciless, music and poetry become acts of resistance rebellion. The creative urge engenders the flame that can not be quenched or dimmed by the world.

I received an ARC from the publisher through a Goodreads giveaway.

The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings by Leonard Cohen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date 10/02/2018
$28 hardbound
ISBN: 9780374156060

Remembering 9-11

On the morning of September 11, 2001 my son and I were in the dining room, homeschooling, when my husband called the house from his office. He told me to turn on the television. I asked, what channel? And he said any channel.

Chris and I went into the living room and turned on the television. We saw the World Trade Center tower with smoke coming out of it. And within a few minutes we knew what had happened. And then we saw the plane hit the second tower.

We were riveted all morning and past lunch time, watching the horrors unfold before us. In the early afternoon I went to the local grocery store, just a few blocks away. I felt like I was moving in a dream, detached and groggy. I realized I was in shock.

Our son pulled together his most precious objects into his back pack. His baby blanket. His signed first edition of The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. Mementos. My husband remembered commuting to New York City on a train filled with people who worked in the World Trade Center, and wondered. How many weeks did uncertainty and fear rule? I don't remember. But America changed that day, and we have reeled unmoored ever since.

I wrote a series of poems.

The Day After the World Changed

By Nancy A. Bekofske

September 12, 2001

I awoke in darkness.

What kind of world would I find today?

The taste of dust was in my mouth;

My eyes were red and dry.

The dull rhythm

Of a building’s dance of collapse

Resounded in my ears;

The dance burned into my vision,

Like the sun too long observed,

The slow gathering of downward motion,

Story after story,

Thousand of stories,

Stories that ended that day.

Would I ever again wake

And not wonder,

What kind of world

Will I find today?

Will there be chaos today?

Reversal of fortune, vulnerability?

Bloody War?

Dancing in the sky?

The Slow Dance

A needle pieced an eggshell.

Hell burst out golden red.

A magician’s gathering of slow smoke filled the air.

The war god’s companions, Fear and Panic,

Graced with their presence heroic exploits,

Coupled with shocked incredulity.

I write the reflection of time,

The house of cards raining down,

Raining a civilization into chaos.

Precious papers flew for miles,

Sturdy walls became dust.

Women and men flew like birds.

Their arms became wings,

The air rushing about them

Full of the dust of their lives,

Their world’s residence.

Other became bowels,

The secret heart buried deep.

The incredible beauty of summer sun

High in a blue, empty heaven was

Obscured by unnatural clouds,

Belied truth, for night had fallen in the land,

millions lost in darkness.

Flickering images told the story

Of a slow dance, the timeless, fragile beauty.

All time compressed into a few seconds

As each floor fell into the next,

Beam buckling inward,

Desks and file cabinets and hopes and security

Instantly reduced

To cockroach shells,

Settling into a covering like new snow.

Twisted, broken, the grand dames

Mere rubble, reduced to an essence.

Repeated over and over

This dance craze of the day,

The slow decay of seconds

Etched into the mirror of our eyes.

What We Imagine

Our child is in the white hospital bed.

There are tubes and alien machines surrounding him.

We watch and wait.

There is red blood, vivid on the white sheets

Like a beautiful rose.

No, our child is in the schoolroom,

There is a blinding light;

Wisdom is not so enlightening as this light.

There is a flash of heat.

There is ash.

No, our child is playing with friends.

There is coughing.

There is headache.

Our child goes to bed.

Our child breaks out in death.

No, our child is called.

Our child bravely leaves his only home

His only family.

Our child is trained to kill.

Our child falls, he thinks of home, he thinks no more.

No, our child wakes up in the morning.

Our child sees the rain.

Our child remembers the old life,

The days before fear,

The security of knowing there were those

Who would always protect him.

Our child awakes in the morning.

Our child imagines

There is no one to protect him.

Conversation

They talk of weddings and college.

They talk of jobs and money.

My ears burn in resentment.

I want to talk about death.

I want to talk about how

I became a zombie that day,

Detached from my motions,

A robot moving without a heart.

I want to talk about war

And rumors of war,

And about peace

And the illusion of peace.

I want to talk about the children

And about fear; especially about fear.

How it sleeps with you in your bed,

Nestles into your ear, whispering, whispering

Late into the night.

I want to talk about fear taking residence.

They talk about life.

I want to talk about death

And dancing. The dance of the towers

And the dance of politics

And the dance of death that day,

Surreal and strange, the snow of death,

After the golden red fire of impact.

They talk about money and work,

And I want to talk about the dread

Of war settling into our living rooms

Each morning and evening, visiting

With images of destruction and hate,

Daily becoming less alien,

More familiar and cozy.

Words circle ‘round like a hurricane

Ripping the façade away

Baring the essential passions

Like a bone.

World Trade Center ruins, photo by Spencer Platt

The Spires

Organ-pipe spires, thin and reaching,

Airy and proud.

The remnant backbone of life,

The skeleton of power.

Architecture of hope,

110 stories high,

made of hollow bones and glass,

housing a world’s hope.

Broken spires, still proud and tall

Rising above the chaos below,

Directing vision upward

Like a beacon.

When I consider how our son's life was framed by world events, I shudder. This was not the world I wanted to give my child. I am not ignorant. I know my parents grew up with the atrocities of WWII and lost friends in the war. And my grandparents had the War to End All Wars. My great-grandfather's nephew died in a death march in the Pacific. There is no end to the atrocities and hate we humans can embrace. We are a family bent on fratricide.

And yet somehow I trust that there is also a strain of mercy and compassion that survives, and sometimes even thrives. Stories of sacrifice and courage also came out of 9-11.

There is only one race, the human race, I was taught when I was a girl. The Big Blue Marble photograph of Earth reminds us that we are stewards sharing one miraculous, small Eden.

I continually pray for peace.

"What Sad Creatures We Humans Are"

Nancy and Gary in Darby Parsonage

As progressive liberal Christians who wanted to make a difference, what better place to serve than in the city? We loved the culture, the restaurants, and the history of Philadelphia and did not want to be in some small town or rural church. So when Gary was offered a pastorate at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Darby, PA, just outside the West Philadelphia city line, he accepted.

Mt. Zion UM Church and parsonage. The parsonage was on the
left side where the enclosed porch is.

We were at a disadvantage having transferred into the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. We knew nothing about the churches. No one warned Gary that two pastors had turned down an appointment to Mt. Zion. One pastor later referred to Darby as 'the armpit of Delaware County!'

The church was established by 1836, the parsonage and church dating to around 1900.The parsonage was nestled up to the church with just a cement alley separating the buildings. There was a small patch of grass between the parsonage and the sidewalk and street.

Roasting marshmallows at the fireplace. Nasturtium loved laying in front of the fire. 

It was a large house with deep-set windows, an eat-in kitchen with a pink refrigerator (that broke twice before it was replaced), a formal dining room (that came with a silver plate coffee set used at church functions), a living room with a fireplace, an enclosed sunroom, and three bedrooms and a bath upstairs. The basement laundry area included a working 1930s gas stove and a cedar lined closet. There was no air conditioning. Gary's office was in the parsonage, situated between the house and church over the open alley below.

Gary's home office

The house was so close to the church that many a morning as Gary and I sat at the dining room table eating breakfast in our PJs and robes, Ed Messick would stop at the open window to chat before he went into the church. There was a marked lack of privacy!

Woodland Ave. is one of the oldest roads in America, originally an Indian trail; it became The King's Highway in 1696. It begins at 43rd St in West Philly and runs to the Cobbs Creek Parkway; at the city limit it makes a dog's leg turn to become Main St, where the church was located. At the intersection, several roads led north to Upper Darby and south into the suburbs.

Downtown Darby in 1980, photo by Gary

Darby had been settled by Dutch Quakers, the Meeting House a block away dating to 1682, and was an important stop between Philadelphia and Chester. Many years later I learned that one of my distant ancestor cousins had stopped there while traveling and was married in that church. Darby was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.

The Friends Meeting House was a few blocks away. Photo by Gary.

The library was established in 1743, one of the oldest in America. We were a few blocks from a Colonial-era houses and the 18th c Blue Bell Inn, and down Woodland was early American naturalist John Bartram's home and gardens. Darby Creek was a few blocks away.

The trolley Darby stop--before our time.

A trolley ran down the street day and night, picking up speed as it left the trolley stop on the other side of the church. The trolley line dated to 1858 when horses pulled the cars. The bus stop was across from the trolley stop.

Next to the church was a drug store and apartments, with the trolley stop on it's right.

A drug store was next door to the church; the National Bar was kitty corner at Ninth and Main.  W. C. Fields had been born either at the National when it was the Buttonwood Hotel, or at the Arlington House a block away.

The National Bar was on the corner across from the bus and trolley stops

Across the street from the parsonage was an empty lot, and another was next to the driveway that ran along the parsonage to an ancient garage situated behind the church. A corner store was on the other side of that empty lot.

It was brutally hot when we moved in and there was no air conditioning. I unpacked in shorts and bare feet. The previous pastoral family had several dogs. The rug stunk of urine and was infested with fleas. I had red bite marks all up my legs by the end of the day. The church scheduled the services of both an exterminator and a rug cleaner.

There was a matted acrylic shag carpet and 1950s drapes in tatters. I offered to sew new pinch pleat drapes at cost. There were three kinds of cockroaches, but locals claimed one was just a 'water bug.' Although a monthly exterminator came in, at night when you turned the light on we saw them scurrying.

Drunks would pass out on the steps, which were hidden from view, so when I came home I had to be very careful. The parsonage was a magnet for people looking for handouts. Gary made arrangements with a grocery store and a gas station so needy people could be sent there, with the church footing the bill. One time a lady pushed her way into the parsonage demanding milk money for her kids. Meanwhile, I saw a man walking down the driveway to try the back door, which luckily was locked.

Another time a man insisted on seeing the pastor for money. I sent him into the church where Gary was at a meeting. When he was told they did not give out cash he angrily said he was testing their Christian charity, and showed them a full wallet. When the District Superintendent's wife heard about these stories she insisted the church put in a new door with a peep hole.

The Hostetters came for dinner. Ellen was shocked by where we were living.

Me and Mark and Ellen Hostetter at Darby.
I made the pleated drapes for the living and dining rooms for $80. 

Our folks were not impressed, either. Mom was appalled at the roaches.

Me and Dad at Darby

Gary worked on a demographic study and a proposal for church growth, but it was rejected. Mt. Zion's parishioners had moved into first-line suburbs. They did not trust the Darby neighborhood people and complained they did not want outreach ministries that would bring in people who would 'steal the toilet paper.' They did not want a senior center. They wanted Gary to perform the miracle all pastors are called upon to perform: attract young families.

Drawing made by a JOY class member, the class I helped organize

When we arrived, I was asked to start a young woman's Sunday school class. Using my small group training I helped about eight women organize what I thought was a successful year including a Bible Study, social events, and fundraisers including a bake sale and rummage sale. The teacher was an older woman whose favorite teaching device was to ask, "Why did Jesus come to earth?" with the class expected to answer, "To save our sins." As an English major that made no sense to me. Jesus was, what, collecting sins like postage stamps?

The second year the gals told me that they just wanted to sit and talk about kids and daily life. I was told I had been 'corrupted' by my college education in wanting goals and such. When the teacher stated she resented paying apportionments, money that supported the connected church system, I gathered information on how the money was spent. I not allowed to present the information to the class. The gals became angry when I did not sit with them during a wedding, but I had been told that as the minister's wife I was to help the bride. I left that group to fend for themselves and taught Third Grade Sunday School. I loved working with kids.

The entire youth group consisted of two sisters and one other girl. They met in the parsonage on Sunday evening. After Bible study we let them turn the radio on and dance to Disco music. We were criticized, for the older generation believed that rock and roll was the music of the Devil.

In March 1978 my Adrian roommate Marti visited me after interviewing for a job in Center City Philadelphia. She and Jack were divorcing. 

My last year at Temple I commuted from Darby by trolley to Center City and then took the Broad Street Subway north to Temple. I saw things from those trolley windows I had never seen before. All kinds of people came onto the trolley. I was fascinated. 

My graduation photograph 1978

Me and my folks at my graduation from Temple, 1978

After graduation, my first job was working Christmas Rush at the Strawbridge and Clothier department store in Center City. I was assigned to small electrical appliances. Secret shoppers checked our performance and I won a customer service award. I was told if I stayed on I could eventually become a buyer. I spent much of my pay using my employee discount for Christmas gifts, including buying Gary a shearling coat which he wore for twenty years.

The economy was lousy and I could not find work in anything remotely related to my English major. I ended up in customer service for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in Bala Cynwyd. Two other new employees and I studied together for an agent's license. Mary Lou had dropped out of working on her advanced degree in religion at the University of Pennsylvania. We both loved classical music and books. We became friends, meeting up in Center City for lunch, shopping, and sometimes attending the Arch Street Quaker Meeting.

After passing the agent's license test we shadowed workers to learn how the office operated. This included a stint at the switchboard. Incoming calls were routed to agents or customer service. I was totally flummoxed and apologized to one caller. "Who are you?" he asked. I couldn't remember what the position I was filing was and said, "I'm the call girl." After a moment's silence the man replied, "I didn't know they supplied those in the office."

My job involved taking fifty phone calls a day to make changes to auto and home policies. It was grueling. A previous employee contacted us and told us there was a customer service opening at the insurance agency where she worked. I applied and got the job. It was out on the Main Line, but a coworker lived in West Philadelphia and drove right past our parsonage, so she picked me up on her way to work.

The environment was very conservative; the women on staff made the coffee and picked up the men's mail. My boss was an elderly gent and hated the frizzy perm I got at a posh Center City hair salon. He also hated the Fry cowboy boots which I sometimes wore with a denim skirt. I was fired from the job even though the office was in merger and the man who was to be the new boss had personally interviewed me and liked me, especially since I had an agent's license.

With the frizzy perm that got me fired.

I collected unemployment and looked for a new job. But I kept busy. I was taking classes at the Philadelphia College of Art Saturday School. The teacher had taught at Jane Addams Jr High in Royal Oak, MI where I had attended and she called me "Royal Oak." I had a drawing at an exhibit at the Western Savings Bank downtown. I was teaching myself the recorder. I was researching for a historical novel on the Munster Rebellion which had fascinated me so in Reformation history class.

A drawing project from PCA Saturday School

Also, I was actively trying to publish my poetry. I remember getting a rejection slip saying to send more poems. Parishioners told me I was selfish and instead of looking for work, I should be having children!

The Calling

I think that all the poems
I will ever write
lie somewhere under my heart,
seeds that wait for someone
to come and gently call them out.
They are born
as if I had not labored
like flowing water
from primordial rock.

I was feeling trapped by the role of clergy wife. Expectations were exacting and criticism naturally followed. The parishioners did not understand me, and I met a lot of rejection, as did Gary. I learned it was useless to try to meet expectations; you would fall short.

River Dream

a small flat boat
with wood worn gray
paint long past peeled away
drifting in the water, afloat;

tugging gently at her mooring,
gathers speed, resists not the current,
stretching taught her tether,
by waves is lowered, lifted resurgent.

Reached her limit, caught between
the land’s mastery and river dream
she must decide- to keep her pledge
remain duty-bound at land’s edge,

or break away at river’s calling
a vessel made for ocean sailing.

Wanderlust

The end is all knotted and rotted cords
fraying, displaying yellowed cores.
It is empty pockets, hollowed hopes,
dangling movements, memorized tightropes.
And lovely smiles veneered over sorrow
for gone are yesteryears and frightening the tomorrows.

Ends and beginnings are but
imagined delineations.
Our foresight is stunted,
our hindsight clouded,
we see but darkly thought the thickness of tears.

To turn, to turn away!
My arms ache to embrace a new day.

To leave home’s lamp glow in the window frame
for pale moonlight and soft spring rain;
the friendly kiss and the well-known smile
for a tune sung by a wandering child.

The gap between the lives we had hoped to have and the reality of others' expectations created much unhappiness in our lives. Gary was full of self-doubt and became depressed. Our marriage suffered. I was not fulfilling my dream of writing. I looked into returning to school for a library or reading specialty degree. Gary looked into an Urban Studies degree but for him to return to school meant finding a place to live and an income to live on.

Misery

There is a misery so keen
and clinging
the passing of many days
can not brush it offering
nor many nights efface
it's markings upon the soul.

It makes itself a burrowed home,
a tick beneath the skin.

Seasons pass, yet it pains
whenever robins fly north again
or chilly morns have skies of blue
or April forsythia bloom.

If the dead could be called to rise
from their cold and clammy beds
we would detect, amazed,
a powerful, ancient pain
wild in their blind eyes,
still quivering their voices.

And the memories of the past still troubled me. I avoided thought of my teenage years, especially the time between the suicide of a classmate and my mother's near fatal illness, the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and the heartache over my high school boyfriend. April still made me sad.

Haunting

Spring’s cold rain
received like Holy water.
I am awaiting grace
but first must suffer
the resurrection.
Awoken Lazarus
come to greet me.
Dreadful remembrance!
O bitter return!
I fail.
The rain has melted
my fortress of forgetfulness.
I see arms waving in the air;
he comes.
I bend my knee to await him.
He crowns me with thorns and roses.
Cruel sweetness.
I bleed for his sake.
I wish him away,
I wish him buried forever
that he no longer rise
with the advent of spring.

But there were good things during these years. Gary and I joined a community chorus out of Whitemarsh, PA called The Mastersingers. We performed the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes and Schubert's Mass in A flat. It was a joy to be singing again.

We also joined the Methodist Federation for Social Action. We boycotted Nestles over infant formula being promoted in Third World countries and J. P. Stevens for being anti-union.

Gary was involved in a community group that was fighting the opening of an adult bookstore in Darby and he was involved in the formation of a conference Credit Union. We were at the inaugural meeting of a historical society to preserve the Quaker Meeting House.

I was still sewing my own clothes, including a gray dress with lace collar and cuffs, a robin's egg blue silk dress with lace collar, a swimsuit, and the blouse and red jumper in the photo below. I had even made pleated drapes for the parsonage.

Gary and I around 1978, I had made the dress and blouse.

Gary took up photography, taking classes at The Photography Place in Center City. He set up a darkroom in the parsonage basement. I made him an apron with the words "In The Dark" on it.

Gary took and developed this photo from Reading Terminal

Gary's photo of Reading Terminal

Gary at Longwood Gardens

Nearly every month we went to Longwood Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. Gary would photograph the flowers while I stood by patiently.

Gary's photograph of me at Longwood Gardens, 1977-78

At Longwood Gardens, 1980, with my frizzy hairdo and in a dress I had made.
Photo by Gary.

The summer of 1977, and again in 1978, Gary and I went to the Philadelphia Folk Festival in Schwenksville, PA. A classmate in my folklore class had told me about it. We set up our tent and spent all day and night at the many concerts and workshops. We discovered amazing music. The rest of our years in Philadelphia we attended  Philadelphia Folk Song Society and local coffeehouse concerts. We saw Priscilla Herdman, Jean Redpath, Lou Killian, Silly Wizard, Stan Rogers and his brother Garnet, Pete Seeger, and John Roberts and Tony Barrand.

1978 Philadelphia Folk Festival

We were constantly on the go. We went to the Brandywine Museum, Brandywine State Park, and the Wyeth museum. We saw Coppelia, The Nutcracker, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Met perform Tosca, and P.D.Q. Bach. We went to the theater and saw Leonard Nimoy as Vincent; Liv Ullman in I Remember Mama (a flop musical); Dracula with sets by Edward Gorey; Jean Marsh in Too True to Be Good by Shaw; and Twelfth Night and A Winter's Tale. We saw classic movies at a repertoire movie theater near the University of Pennsylvania. We went on nature walks at Tinicum Preserve and Tyler Arboretum. We even had a picnic on the Schuylkill River. 

We would visit Tinicum during the bird migration. We saw thousands of white egrets in the trees and I wrote a poem.

Specters

A cluster of trees

            jade green fans brush-stroked against

            blue skies dappled with pearly gray clouds

stood lit by a noon-high sun.

Vivid and verdant, richness of growth,

nature's masterwork swathed in movement:

White flight checkering green 

like phantoms

or gathered angels.

Souls in gala celebration

saluting the season.

Egrets, white flames 

Leaping from cool still green,

darting from depths of green

into shadows of  green.

Hovering, alighting.

Eternity's crown,

nimbus of elms.

The miracle of flight

visiting the permanence of roots.

A visit to Historic Fort Mifflin with my dad and brother resulted in another poem.

Old Fort Mifflin

Wide vistas where once colonial soldiers trod,

with its perimeter of aged barracks,

the cool dark recesses of powder houses,

slit windows looking out into summer sun,

history's memory, empty and still

but for voyeurs peering  on the past's leavings.

Nearby the river ran round like a moat,

catchment of brush and reed, crickets

and frogs singing and leaping,

and looking down in contemplation

sitting on its barren branch, a heron.

Unexpectedly, a mechanical roar disturbed

this Eden of river and fort.

Above us hovered a great silver belly

its mass blocking out the sun,

its labored ascent a mystery.

We believed we could have stroked the silver belly,

it hung so low above us.

Machine made holier than all else

diminishing the heron's tandem flight

parallel under the great belly.

Convergent deities of flight

vying for preeminence.

And when the two had flown

we were left godless on the wide vistas

of a wasteland past.

I read over a hundred books a year. I had bought a condensed three-volume set of Samuel Pepys diary which I read every night before bed. I read Rilke, Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Virginia Wolfe, Trollope, Hawthorne, and Peter Mathiessen. I did not like Wuthering Heights; I found it Gothic, disagreeable, and poorly crafted! We went to see author talks with Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, and poets Stephen Spender and Gerald Stern.

Family portrait, with rabbit. The color is badly off as the carpet was green!

Every year we spent two or three weeks camping at Acadia National Park or the White Mountains. One year I sat on the cliffs at the ocean's edge reading Rainer Marie Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Nasturtium had a caretaker who came in to feed and water her and change her litter box, but she hated being alone. She would stomp her feet and avoid us when we returned.

Nasturtium opening her Christmas present

Nasturtium was six years old when her health began to fail. We took her to the University of Pennsylvania Small Animal Clinic where students flocked to learn about geriatric rabbit health. Over several weeks we watched her decline, giving her all the love and medical help we could. Sadly, they could not identify the problem and we finally had to put her to sleep. An autopsy showed complete liver failure. We were told she was 'living on love.'

By this time I was working at Drexel University as secretary in the Upward Bound Program. My boss did not understand why I was crying all day over a rabbit.

Senior photo from Upward Bound student Mark
He signed it, "To Nancy a good friend and a lovely person"

I had applied for work at Drexel University with the idea of studying library science with an employee discount. Because  I had experience working with youth, HR thought I was perfect for Upward Bound, a federal program that helps youth become academically successful, with alumni including Oprah Winfrey, Angela Bassett, Donna Brazile, Patrick Ewing, and Viola Davis.  I was hired to be the office manager at $3.64 an hour.

The kids embraced me as readily as I loved them.

Upward Bound tutors

Drexel University students tutored local high school students to prepare them for college.

Upward Bound Students

I needed to earn the trust of the college student tutors. After following through on my promises to type papers for the students, they began to accept me, with one gal befriending me.

Upward Bound staff, tutors, students

On lunch breaks I went to the Drexel library and took out books on fashion history. Dr. Olshin's inclusion of material culture in our Austen studies had brought a new interest.

After three years at Mt. Zion Gary was very discouraged. We had been through so much over the three years: church conflict, criticism, depression, marriage problems, and the death of our dear Nasturtium. Gary asked for an appointment change. Leaving the ministry seemed impossible without good jobs and no home of our own. We had to trust in the Bishop, and in God.

Gary took this photo of me in the parsonage.
We had many houseplants at this time which thrived.

Late on the evening of May 29 I was in my nightgown when the District Superintendent knocked on the door wanting to give the incoming pastor a tour of the parsonage. I was angry he had not made arrangements ahead of time.

On June 1, 1980 I wrote, "At some point during the evening I heard a siren in a quiet moment and I was transported out of time and looking back upon myself. I saw what sad things we human, anxious creatures are, adrift in life with no meaning, our work inherited from Adam, the continual guest, constructing a meaning every day, each of us needing to create their own [meaning]. All the changes have worn out my gossamer garment and I am left graceless, naked, and vulnerable."

Gary at Darby. 

Gary was first offered an associate pastor position at a large suburban church. The senior pastor said Gary could 'kiss his evenings goodbye.' We knew that would be devastating to our marriage. The rental house the associate pastor usually rented was "seedy and unkempt." We had one car, the trusty orange Super Beetle, but the community was so isolated we would need to buy a second car for my use. The salary wasn't much. And the pastor and congregation were conservative fundamentalists and we were progressive liberals. Gary turned it down. Gary discovered that our District Superintendent had never talked about Gary's goals, gifts, or concerns with the Cabinet.

In early June we were packing and working at Vacation Bible School. I was sorry to leave my Third Graders. One girl especially broke my heart. She was smart and pretty, living in poverty with a single mom who had no resources. I hated leaving kids like that, thinking I could have been an influence.

My folks paid my air fare to return home for my high school class tenth reunion on June 14. I enjoyed seeing my family and old neighbors, going to the Detroit Institute of Art, an Irish concert, and shopping and oil painting with Mom. The reunion was interesting, the old social dynamics still in effect. I felt like a failure for having accomplished so little in comparison.

Reunion photo. I am in the back.

During that trip, while playing cards with my folks and the McNabs, Mom made her old comment that I'd be 'so pretty' if only I lost weight. I had maintained my weight for years because I walked everywhere and skipped meals. But I had put on ten or fifteen pounds since graduation. I said I would like to lose the weight, but that I liked who I was anyway. The next day Mom came to me in tears. She had not realized the message she had been giving me all my life. She had been hurt when her father had told her, "you'd be so pretty if you didn't have such deep eyes." It was a turning point in our relationship.

Back in Darby, on the evening of June 21, 1980 I woke up from sleeping when I heard gun shots. I looked out the window and saw a man with a gun stagger and fall to the ground. I panicked. Gary was on the phone with a parishioner and I wanted to call the police. Soon people were rushing to the scene and the police arrived. The man was taken away by stretcher and the street roped off as a crime scene. A fight between two women over a man had started at the National Bar and ended in his being shot.

It was summer and the next morning during Sunday worship the windows were open. Just as the sermon was to begin, a fire truck arrived to wash the blood off the street. The noise came through the open church windows and Gary had to wait until they were done before he could preach.

A few days later, on June 25, my mom called to tell me that Grandma Ramer had suffered a heart attack that required electric shock but she was recovering.

Gary was offered a dual charge in Kensington, in the inner city of Philadelphia. I had once commented, seeing this area, that I never wanted to live there. There were no trees, no beauty, empty factories, just cement and rowhouses. But when we met the Pastor-Parish Relations committees we really liked them.

I turned in my resignation. I was still considering returning to school for library science, but I knew I could not work full-time and go to school, especially with the move and a new church.

Gary's last Sunday was June 29, a hot and humid day. Mt. Zion did not give us a goodbye--no gifts, no after church party or even a cake at Fellowship Time. The next day Gary and I went to Longwood Gardens. And on July 1 we moved to Allegheny Avenue and B St. in one of the oldest industrial areas in the country, a poor area where the houses were valued at a few thousand dollars.

.