For Gerard Vanderleun, who took a chance and first published this piece in American Digest. Always generous with advice and encouragement, the great writer and editor passed away earlier this year. It’s the Fourth of July again. Every year it comes along a week after my birthday, which seems to be coming sooner every year. For reasons only God knows and doesn't explain.   I’ve been invited to the country club for fireworks, food, and festivities. My daughter comes along, and Johnna's son, who is in town for a visit and always a pleasure to have around. We’re all three food lovers, and the spread at the club is classic American picnic. Hot dogs, hamburgers, and pulled pork barbecue sandwiches. I load up a hot dog with mustard and pickles, Chicago style, and join the celebration.  The setting here is lush and expansive. We unfold our chairs near the tee box of the tenth hole, with a view off down the fairway. A deejay is jamming a nice mix of rock, soul, and country. Children are playing in the grass, adults mingling, women in their sundresses and men in golf shorts and polos, shirts tucked in tight. Rich people watching, I take a seat and pop the cap on a cold beer. The air, even at 8:00 PM, is heavy and dense, the tops of the tall Georgia pines completely still. No breeze at all. Walking back to the buffet, a man is upset with a young employee. Something about the Porta Potties being too far down the fairway and the clubhouse restrooms up too steep a hill. Of course it's not her fault, and she offers to drive him up in a cart but he’s having none of it. The gist of it is he’s just having a bad day and has to share it. But one also gets the feeling this is normal behavior for him. She is at a loss in how to respond, and nothing she says will make a difference anyway. He just needs to vent. About who knows what, really. The walk up is maybe forty yards and I do it in a couple of minutes. It’s well worth it for a little time Read more [...]

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Randall Jarrell - 1914-1965 From The Complete Poems by Randall Jarrell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1969, 1996 by Mrs. Randall Jarrell. Used with permission. Randall Jarrell was born on May 6, 1914 in Nashville. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at Kenyon College, where he met John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, and then at the University of Texas. Jarrell’s first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger (Harcourt, 1942), was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He soon left the Air Corps for the U.S. Army and worked as a control tower operator, an experience which provided much material for his poetry. Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945, while he was still serving in the army, with the publication of his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend (Dial Press, 1945), which bitterly and dramatically documents the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers. Other volumes followed, all characterized by great technical skill, empathy with the lives of others, and an almost painful sensitivity. Following the war, Jarrell accepted a teaching position at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and remained there, except for occasional absences to teach elsewhere, until his death. Jarrell is highly regarded not only as a poet, but also as a peerless literary essayist, and was considered the most astute (and most feared) poetry critic of his generation. Robert Lowell, in an essay published after Jarrell’s death, wrote, “What Jarrell’s inner life Read more [...]