My mother and Mrs. Byrd conspired to make me a poet.

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Mama put the first poem I wrote in grade school on the refrigerator. Then she put it aside for a scrapbook. Blue ink in my early cursive script illustrated with an apple tree and a scottie dog. (Oh memory! I went looking for it: Fourth grade, in pencil, tree with blue flowers, no apples, no dog.)

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Mrs. Byrd gave me two gifts. She read Caddie Woodlawn aloud, chapter by chapter, after lunch each day. She required us to put together an anthology of poems. Hence my discovery of the watermelon pickle and Louis Untermeyer’s Rainbow in the Sky. I assigned each poem I chose a category, copied them out by hand, and provided a table of contents.

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They are scattered through a three-ring binder that is one of my treasures, the binder itself military excess. Its blue-gray fabric edges are tattered. It is filled to bursting with poems I copied by hand all the way through high school. (At-home printers were not a thing in the seventies.) The only reason the whole thing isn’t one big pencil smear is that I wrote on only one side of the paper.

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First a group of Spanish poets: Gabriel Zaid’s “La Ofrenda” in Spanish and English, translated by Daniel Hoffman. Juan José Arreola’s “Cervidos” translated by W. S. Merwin long before I knew who he was. Then Aiken, Anderson, Bronte, Cummings, Dickinson, Dunn. . . . At one point I alphabetized it. (God knows why there are two or three separate runs through the alphabet.) The last poems are Maya Angelou’s. Loose in the back are some song lyrics (Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” and “Blowing in the Wind”), a description of Theosophy, quotes about Taoism. . . . Feeling the urge to create a table of contents for the whole collection, I resist.

The collecting continues. I get a half dozen or so poem-a-day emails. If one begs for a rereading or to be shared, I do not run upstairs to see if it’s included in one of my innumerable books of poetry. (A search for older ones in anthologies could take hours.) I send it to the printer. A really fat manila folder of them rests (hides) in my study closet.

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There are so few artifacts of my youth. With my father in the military, so many moves. My first journal, in a similar binder, lost. A vase my father gave me, lost. I have the scrapbooks and poems, so many poems.

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As to the watermelon pickle, I was strolling through the woods here in Aloha, Oregon thinking about my history with poetry. I misremembered one of my first books as Advice on a Watermelon Pickle, a selection of poems by Rod McKuen. By the end of the walk, I had the first word correct.

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Of course, I googled it when I got home. Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle…and Other Modern Verse,  was published in 1966, when I was nine. The title poem was John Tobias’ “Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity.”

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Far above and away

From the softening effects

Of civilization. . . .

 

It certainly was another era. Remember candy cigarettes? Smoking your pencil as if it were one? Grandma canning cucumbers? The first watermelon pickle I ever tasted was during an overnight stay in the home of strangers. We were traveling with a church group to perform a musical, its name forgotten too. My best friend and I snuck out of the bedroom to raid their refrigerator. Such a texture. I vowed never to eat another one.

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…in a jar put up by Felicity,

The summer which maybe never was

Has been captured and preserved.

And when we unscrew the lid

And slice off a piece

And let it linger on our tongue:

Unicorns become possible again.

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Who wouldn’t want a friend named Felicity? When I was young,  Felicity was another name for poetry.