POETRY FEVER

 Dear George, 

 I started taking poetry classes at OLLI in 2015, and I’ve taken them at least once every term since. That amounts to several hundred poems shared with colleagues. I can trace my interest in poetry back to Washington Grade School where we first learned to write in rhyme. Later, as a freshman at Antioch College, I studied poetry more seriously with Professor Judson Jerome who taught me to write in free verse. I was eager to be a literature major, headed for a career in writing, but Jerome convinced me that it wasn’t lucrative so I switched to Psychology. There went my poetry career for roughly 65 years. Nowadays I devote every day to writing and/or revising poems, many of them autobiographical in nature. I was shocked when I was closed out in registration from my Advanced Poetry class this quarter because of size limits, but the instructor let me in anyway. Here is the poem that I brought to the class today. 

Love, 

Dave 

                         Life Puzzles  

Marriage, that most bewildering of journeys 

Two different persons, one single union 

Like ships in a storm 

Or cats and dogs spattting 

How has this anomaly even survived?   

My wife Katja and I, born into alternate worlds 

She from Philadelphia; I, the North Woods  

Friends are mystified, think we’re alien beings 

Yet we’ve stuck together for               

            Sixty-six                         

                        Odd                                   

                                    Years   

My wife came of age on Philly’s Main Line 

A student of classics at the High School for Girls 

French Literature, Balzac and Baudelaire 

Weekend outings to the Philadelphia Art Museum 

Or Wanamaker’s for tea sandwiches and pink lemonade 

The passions of her soul: The Opera, The Symphony 

And following Queen Elizabeth and her royal clan   

Meanwhile             

        my family lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 

A house made of pine in a forest on the river 

Childhood obsessions:             

        Camping at Mason Park             

        Shooting hoops on an icy driveway 

         Trapping otter on the riverbank 

Our family’s yearly highlight:  The U.P. State Fair at Escanaba             

The demolition derby…the freak show…the Country Music Cavalcade 

And,  of course, most thrilling of all: The Green Bay Packers!!!   

So how did we get together?  — such a blur 

But she thought the North Woods romantic 

And I found the Big City EYE-POPPING!   

We’ve attended the opera every summer

Though resistant at the start,              

        I’ve gradually improved  

In August we go to the County Fair 

                which sets my heart thumping 

The goats and the sheep, bloomin’ onions, bumper cars 

My wife loves the rabbits and the ferris wheel

 If not for me, she would have missed out   

I think this must be the secret of long marriages 

Like potluck dinners, each brings different treats to the table

A COCKROACH SAGA

 

Dear George, 

So far 2026 has been mostly trouble at our house. We’ve endured a major winter storm, the death of our beloved dog Iko, my computer crashing and needing replacement, a fender-bender with our CR-V, getting closed out of my poetry class during registration, and Katja’s upcoming surgery. The worst, though, has been our ongoing battle with the cockroaches. They appeared in our kitchen about five or six months ago. For a long time we didn’t do anything about them. I thought of them as tiny little pets who would visit us in the night and play around on the kitchen counter. Then one day our fancy and expensive stove stopped working. The technician came, took it apart, and concluded that the cockroaches had destroyed the electrical system. He shoveled the corpses into a wastebasket and said that the stove would have to be replaced. That was the end of my amusement. I asked Gemini who the best exterminator in town was, and we made an appointment. 

While waiting for the exterminator, I did some investigation. It turns out that cockroaches have been around for about 320 million years. They are among the most adaptable insects, found from the Arctic to the tropics. German cockroaches, the species in our household, are social creatures, capable of transmitting information, recognizing kin, and residing in a common shelter. They eat human food, pet food, garbage, book bindings, soap and toothpaste, paper, cardboard, and fecal matter. Highly dependent on water, they are often found in kitchens and bathrooms. Females carry egg cases which hold about 30 to 40 long, thin eggs. With a life span up to a year, a single female can produce 300 to 400 offspring. Cockroaches are among the hardiest insects. Some can go for a month without food and without air for 45 minutes. Decapitated cockroaches remain active, and the decapitated head can wave its antenna for several hours. 

The exterminator’s pre-visit instructions asked that we remove everything from the kitchen and bathrooms. This was no easy matter since we have been accumulating “stuff” for the last half century. Our kitchen has 42 shelves and 5 drawers. All of them were filled to capacity with boxed and canned food, kitchen utensils, dinnerware, glassware, cleaning supplies, and miscellany. I made five or six trips to the nearby drugstore dumpster and brought home 3 or 4 dozen cardboard boxes. We worked full-time for two days to fill the boxes and move them into the dining room. We could barely move around the dining room once we’d finished. The exterminator came and concluded that we were pretty heavily infested. We signed a contract for six visits over a 12-week period. In fact, he completed his ninth visit last week. Each time the exterminator sprayed and put gel bait in crevices and niches. He put little roach traps all around the kitchen each time, and we could tell how successful the treatment had been. After the first visit there might have been 8 to 10 dead roaches in each trap. Now only 2 or 3 traps have a single dead roach. 

Close to the end, my sense is that the exterminators are going to continue till it’s down to zero. Since the end is in sight, we decided to move our belonging back into the kitchen. Because this involves decisions about rearranging things, it’s taking a lot longer to move back in than it took to move out. We started six days ago, working about four to six hours a day, and we still have a day’s worth left to move. Katja has woken up every morning with an aching back and legs, and I struggle to get out of bed. It is very satisfying though. Because we moved all the remaining boxes out to the foyer, our dining room looks more beautiful than we remember it. The kitchen shelves look back to normal too. Katja says we’re never going to do this again. I agree. All we have to do is keep these unpleasant pests from returning. 

Love,  Dave