by Fitz | Jul 19, 2019 | Journal
Maybe it is time to be less forgiving. I have rarely agreed with our president, but I held on to the shreds of truth that shore up his arguments: we can’t welcome every immigrant who makes it to our border; we cannot bow to the audacity of corrupt governments in corrupt countries, and we can’t let our democracy morph into a theocracy of liberal dogma.
But his anger seems to have no bounds. His political bravado is predicated on lies, misjudgments and unabashed bigotry. He is, in short, a brooding maniac without bounds. I was once simply embarrassed by him and mortified—yet not afraid—of his megalomania, yet I now doubt he is fit for the office of president. I am late to the game, I know…
I am late to the game because I do believe in the power, progress and ultimate purpose of democracy—to serve and manifest the common will of our country. He was elected because he won. Pure and simple. She didn’t. But he crosses and crisscrosses the moral boundaries imposed upon us and embodied by “our” constitution; and right now, it is not “we the people;” it is an “us against them” revolution—an abnegation of the sacred trust of democracy to lead a diverse coalition of humanity forward to a better tomorrow.
But we are not moving forward. We are fractured schists of angry and myopic ideologies averse to compromise, devoid of any real empathy and impossibly and implacably entrenched in our divisions. He is not solely to blame, but he is the goddamned president whose first and only response is to diminish and denigrate the promise of competing points of view—and, more tellingly, any thoughtful and noble person who calls out his blundering, racist and misogynist bravado.
I am embarrassed by my votive quest to find a quiet and wise response to this maelstrom of inadequacy. I am embarrassed that I have not been chattering like an annoyed grackle whose nest is being torn apart. I am embarrassed for his party whose parochial silence is stunningly devoid of any semblance of originality and temperate vision, but mostly I am embarrassed to say that I am an American living in an un-American time in an un-American place, yet I still love this country more than I can put into words. I know we are not a lost cause because people are literally pouring across our borders—legally and illegally—to find and feast on some small slice of the American dream. There may be a very few who are very bad, but that is an easy game to play—there are bad men everywhere—and he is one of them.
Our insidious him, our president, sees the sinister in any shade of skin, bent of sexuality, or non-conforming prayer that does not mirror the vanity preening in his mirror. He is a bully on the playground, not a steward of our great and imperfect experiment in freedom. If he was in any school, he would spend the better part of every day in detention.
I am writing this because I can and should have done so sooner, and I realize that my pensive thoughts need to put into action. My rusty belts and levers need to be oiled and put into use. Democracy cannot be a passive amusement. Freedom is not a gift with a pretty bow. It is a messy idea we stand beside and fight for. It is an overwrought garden that can easily overwhelm even the most diligent farmer. I love that I am free to disagree, free to engage and free to change. I love that I can write this and my only burden will be a condemnation of my ignorance and a defanging of my intellect. I will not be thrown in jail. I won’t lose my job. I doubt I will even lose those friends who disagree with me vehemently. I will, however, rise tomorrow and go about my day with a blessed commonness surged with a new and motivating purpose—to make sure he is not our next president but merely a tawdry footnote on a messy page of history.
And I won’t go quiet unto that good night.
Our country is better than him.
by Fitz | May 11, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Poetry, Teaching
I am You, and You are me…
Give a damn & figure it out
I feel like one of my students: it’s the night before my big presentation at All-school-meeting, and I still don’t know what I am going to talk about. I just know I am supposed to talk about me…
That’s pretty scary for me because, well, I’m me. At any given time I know myself too well, and at other times I’m like, who is this guy?
I’m the guy whose socks probably don’t match, and one of my socks is on onside out.
I’m the guy whose engine warning light in my van was probably on the whole way to school–and I never noticed.
I’m the guy who forgot to post an assignment on Fenn.org and his students are plotting a revolution and mass protest.
I’m the guy who tries to be a teacher–and so he is…
So, how does one start something like this?
I am John Fitzsimmons, and let me tell you about me…
(No–way to vain and presumptuous)
Hi, I’m Fitz, and I may be old, but I’m slow…
(No–you are not here to hear the truth)
Hi, I am Mr. Fitzsimmons, your new teacher: I just flew in from Chicago and boy my arms are tired…
(Nope… That was funny forty years ago)
Hi… so glad to be here: Last night I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out…
But if you know me, you have heard this all before…
I’m the kid who got grounded if I ever got a B for a grade… Because my mother would think I cheated…
I’m the kid who went to Peabody and Sanborn and CCHS and who warns all you going CCHS next year to wear thick-soled boots to school…so you don’t cut your feet on the broken hearts I left behind.
Not really, because I’m really the shy kid who spent an entire summer after 8th grade trying to find the courage to hold Megan Tassini’s hand–and I never did!
I’m the kid who spent entire dances lurking in the corner of the Hunt Gym fearing that Stairway to Heaven would start, and a whole night would have gone by–and I wouldn’t have asked a single girl to dance…
I’m the kid whose father spray painted his sister’s figure skates black and told me everyone would think they were hockey skates, and I’d walk home in the dark from Greenes Pond, down Plainfield Road to 38 Longfellow road, still wearing my black figure skates…
I lived in and on and through Greenes Pond, Whites Pond, Walden Pond, Warners Pond–The Concord River, The Assabet River, The Sudbury River. I was fish and fisherman, sailor and boat, landmark and explorer–all within this beautiful, precious, magnificent expanse of earth called Concord.
I was an ADD wonder child whose eyes could dart in a thousand directions in a single glance; whose head was built out of dreams; who made sunburned skin a living, breathing whirl and endless dance of motion and adventure…
I was you, and you are me, and our lives are inextricably linked in this adventure called life… We know that nothing gold can stay, so we breath in the best of each day and never let it out.
I was a wrestler and now a wrestling coach. The coach whose only wise words to a wrestler heading out on the mat against a Goliath of a monster–a skinny kid from Fenn facing certain annihilation–and I shrug and say, “do one good thing. Do one good thing and accept defeat with a smile, for you don’t learn anything much from winning, but you learn a lot by trying.”
I was a reluctant, timid student–and now I am a teacher. Go figure… Maybe that’s why I drive my students crazy with answers that are not really answers. I respond to simple questions with things like:
Get through it, get over it. Give a damn and figure it out. It’s your essay not mine. Make it as long as it should be and as short as you can… Give me a pebble and I’ll show you the universe; show me the universe and I’ll give you a pebble… It’s not where you go; it’s how you go… Good writers don’t always make good poets–but good poets always make for great writers…don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
And that list goes on and on because a good question is better than a good answer.
The question I ask myself each day is “Who am I and what should I try to do?”
And that is why my life is shaped and formed, sculpted and forged out of the fire of my mind–a fire that is as bright and intense as it was when I was you–you who are probably dreaming and scheming of what is possible as soon as the old guy finishes his presentation and you can go off to recess.
After 61 years on this planet asking the same question, what then am I?
In short, I am a poet–and everything else are tentacles on the octopus that is my life. So I am also a folksinger, a songwriter, a tinkerer and a maker of meatballs. I’m a father to seven wild and unadorned children, and a husband to a beautiful and forbearing wife. I am everything I ever hoped I could be, and far short of where I still can be. I am you and you are me.
I love teaching, but I equally love the coming summer as much as any of you, for for summer gives me the time to live in the woods of a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire (and also Camp Sewataro in Sudbury were I first met and sang many of you); to swim, fish, sail and hike; to write in my beloved journal and to sing at campfires with piles of weathered, mosquito-bitten kids bunched like starfish on a beach, singing their heads off–even though, technically, starfish don’t have heads…
And so I will end this presentation of me–the immutable me–with the only gift I that is truly me and has never–as in ever–let me down–Song…
by Fitz | Mar 22, 2019 | Journal, Poetry
And shivers its literal timbers.
Cold, wet and pleading,
Scarred by winter winds
And pasty snows,
My small field and patch of woods
Is now a monument
To aging neglect.
Shorn limbs and branches
Hang high and tangled
in the Sugar maples
(Widow makers we called them
Back in my logging days—
But that is a poem
For another day).
Even the last ash is too far gone
And will have to come down.
We already lost (last year)
The towering white pine
To heart-rot and beetles;
The fruit trees never took
To the shade and droughts,
And only the black cherry, neglected
In a sea of blackberry brambles,
Keeps growing unperturbed
In its stoic obedience
To tropism.
Always a lazy poet,
I find something else to do
And stoke the fire inside
And steep another strong coffee:
And tune my old saw
And scrape out the oiled dust
And clean the jets
And sharpen the chain
And lube the bar
And convince myself
The trees, too,
Can wait another day.
by Fitz | Feb 8, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
~The Emperor’s New Clothes, Hans Christian Anderson
It’s kind of weird—and more than a bit arrogant—but I have this separate part of my journal where I keep all my entries that reflect some primitive sort of thoughtfulness and balance–scrabblings that might even represent and resemble honest and real wisdom. I came here to this “journal” because I just finished reading a school email noting that I am “required” to attend the diversity sessions during our winter professional day. I am thinking and hoping that if I put a response in my “Wisdom Journal,” some kind of nuanced and balanced thoughts will come out of it-—but, I doubt it. My stubborn nature will emerge; I will refuse to see the other side; [but then again, the other side will, no doubt, refuse to see mine] so I am left to dig my muddy yankee soles into the slippery ground of this new, emerging spring and battle the elements in another senseless battle of wits.
This is my intellectual dilemma: I simply am not interested in someone—someone not of my choosing—to introduce me to the world (especially his or her world) of affinity groups, gender identity and toxic masculinity. I am not disinterested in the subject, nor is it off the radar of my life; I just object to being forced to listen to a certain person or persons with whom I have no relationship or affinity at all, or, even worse, I know them and have no interest in their point of view, their personal perspectives, or their politicized point of views. I am a curmudgeon at heart; I distrust any self-proclaimed captain barking orders to go hard a’lee and sail unopposed and against my will and wisdom onto a rocky shoal of a sultry, emerging paradigm.
I am in essence being forced against my will to spend a day of my life immersed in a senseless sea of drivel and doggerel, and if I show my reluctance, I will be vilified and labeled a bigoted perpetuator of myopic thought and white privilege. My relatively simple job of teaching 8th and 9th grade English seems dependent on my agreeing to (or at least appearing to agree to) whatever is on the daily agenda of a middle school professional day presented by mid-level intellects empowered by some bandwagon thinking of superior virtue and noble action.
Where is Socrates when you really need him? Where are the colleagues who might agree with me? Who framed the scaffolding of this now urgent pedagogical priority? What, really, is the point? Has my life been so unexamined as to discard my past speculations of right and wrong? Is there some flaw in my life that needs mending? What have I done to deserve this magnanimous flogging? What seer sees so clearly into my soul, my motives, my ruminating and my urgency to curve the bent of my elusive genius and disrupt the path of my hard-wrought, existential narrative?
I hear the refrain that it is only a day—and a day I am paid well to endure. It is a chance to hear new voices, new ideas and new ways of understanding. If that is the case, how different is it from any other day? I am no dolt to conformity; I do not live to reassure my comfortable self. I box my own ears in a continual search for what is ineffably me! The very notion that I need more hands to bandy me about is insult to affront. I am the proverbial horse being dragged to water, yet I am not so thirsty as to drink the potion prepared for me. Find other mares and stallions to follow your mirage.
But, dammit, not me. Give me back the day. My soil is ill-suited to your seed. See clearly and put clothes on your vain emperor. Send me off to ponder and leave me alone.
At the end of the day, let us compare our respective fruits and see whose basket is full.
by Fitz | Jun 8, 2018 | Journal
When I begin to think of myself.
My girded shell squeezing
Oysters in a jar;
My oily viscera
Jammed and joggled
Into impossible places.
My pancreas
Is never where it should be;
My esophagus cut cleanly
Swirls in a diaspora.
My tongue is a trapped
In a tangle of intestines–
My voice gargles and froths.
Even I can’t understand…
Guttural vowels;
Unutterable lisps and yawps;
Chomping embryos
Cannibalize each other:
Pulsing. Mawing.
Insatiable. Frenzy.
When I reach inside the palpable stew
Everything slips from my hand,
And I am left with nothing
But this poem.
