My mother taught me to read when I was three.   When I was in first grade, my teacher was in the middle of a sentence in Tik-Tok of Oz when she was called out of the room.  While she was gone, I got up and finished the chapter out loud because I couldn’t stand being left hanging.    When she came back and asked who’d been playing with her book,  I told her what I’d done but she didn’t believe me until the rest of the class spoke up.   Her reaction wasn’t  surprising since I’d been reading Dick and Jane– those books with about three words to the page and the father with the hat who was always leaving for work—at exactly the same pace as everyone else.   Maybe I thought that was how you were supposed to do it.    Or maybe I didn’t want the other kids to know I could read.   I do know I wanted to pass for normal since by the time I was seven, I was looking up my age group in The Child from Five to Twelve, and if,  for example, the book said the average person my age  liked spinach I’d try to like it.

About that time I started memorizing songs. I’d take Daddy’s original cast LPs of musical comedies to my room and play them over and over until I’d learned all the words to everything on them.   Daddy had pretty much every classic show: South Pacific, Carousel, Kiss Me Kate, Brigadoon.     Somewhere, and I’ve never been able to trace where, I also picked up a lot of jazz tunes.  Then there were the hymns; I knew those because my mother made us go to church.

But with the exception of my favorite A.A. Milne poems, songs were all I memorized until I was in sixth grade.  My teacher that year, a Mrs. Barnette Robinson (in those days no one called teachers by their first names), was trying out something she called R.I.A.    I forget what the letters stood for but it  involved a piece of classical music (example: Finlandia),  a painting (example: Girl Before a Mirror), and a poem, new ones every week.   The poems tended towards the popular more than the selections from other genres, because Mrs. R. had chosen them by asking her friends what their favorites were.   I especially remember  liking “If.”  I took to “Invictus” too, because of the part about being master of my fate and captain of my soul.   Anyhow, at the end of sixth grade we were assigned to memorize and recite a poem for parents’ evening.      Most kids picked something with as few lines as they could get away with but not me.   I chose “The Highwayman” by Alfred, Lord Noyes.   I was willing to overlook Noyes’  odd middle name because being a romantic little girl,  I just loved the story he told.   And the fact that the poem was so long didn’t bother me either because  in the end, it was just another song.

I can still do “The Highwayman,” all the way through.  In fact when I taught Computer Science at the University of Florida—for more years than I care to revisit—I used to recite it to every class. The students could have complained since, looked at narrowly, this wasn’t what they were paying for– but I thought it was worth the risk.   By that time I was a born-again preacher of poetry and “The Highwayman” was exciting enough to cause some of my students who thought it stopped at the classroom door to think again.   Besides, I wanted to show them how, if they’d only memorize what they loved, they could keep it.

When I stood up to recite “The Highwayman” for a roomful of parents in sixth grade, I didn’t miss a beat. And for a long time after that my memory stood me in perfect stead.    But then came the day—I was a sophomore in high school–that  my English teacher, Miss Quick, passed out a test.   At first I felt the usual surge of adrenalin.   But then I looked around the room at Beaver and Brooksie and Church, all writing furiously, and suddenly I didn’t care about the test because what I really wanted, and deeply,came down to two things: to have a nickname and to be allowed to shave my legs.    The thought threw me so completely that when I looked back at my paper nothing on it made sense.   I came up with some random sentences for essays and marked the first letter that came to mind on the quotes.  The result was predictable enough.  When the test came back, I’d made a D.   After that, I began waking in the middle of the night.  What if it happens again?   What if I get to school some day and I don’t know who Hamlet is?   What if all the verses to “Come Thou Almighty King” just go away?   What if I wake up one morning and I’m not here?

And I would tell this child that one Tuesday when she’s long grown she’ll be walking across the Plaza of the Americas.   And when her best friend comes towards her and they stop to talk, she will realize she has forgotten his name. But she will never forget what she really knows.   And some day, years from now, she’ll see her father’s watery eyes fill with tears because she can still sing all the verses to” A Cowboy’s Farewell, ” his favorite of all the songs he ever wrote.   And as long as she lives, when she thinks  “The wind is a torrent of darkness, among the gusty trees,”  the hairs will rise on the back of her neck.

When I give directions, to someone else or just to myself, I usually describe the turns in the air. Sometimes my hand-path ends up resembling the track you have to follow in one of those tilt-boxes if you want to keep your marble from falling in a hole.  If I’m going to take a trip using mapquest or google directions, I do better if I draw the turns ahead of time because to me direction is physical.  When I was a child I used to think of  “right” as going away from my body and “left” as going toward it. I was so literal I remember getting really mixed up when I first found out that north wasn’t towards the sky and south towards the ground.

I think it would be a lot of fun to look into the ways people navigate—stars, scratches in the dirt, cairns, blazes, and so on. I heard on NPR, for instance, that when they’re telling someone how to get to a place,women tend to use landmarks while men use mileages or street names.   I guess that means I’m a woman. Take a right, I used to say, at the Lighthouse Baptist Church—an institution that when it was first set up was called “Hour of Deliverance” and consisted of a tent and services that reputedly included snake handling.  Before there was any church on that corner, I’d tell people to turn at Dr. Healy’s road since Dr. Healy, being the only doctor in that rural area, had put up a little sign pointing toward his house in case someone needed medical attention.  I absolutely never said “Turn right at NW 246th Avenue” which I think, but I’m not sure, is the name the country gave the road when they numbered all rural roads for emergency vehicles.

But a general discussion’s too much for a blog so I’ll settle for telling you a story.   The Christmas season my grand-daughter Ava was five, she found out that if she went around the house holding a sprig of mistletoe over her head, she’d get kisses. Now since Ava likes kisses a LOT, and since the mistletoe gambit was her most sure-fire way so far to get them, she wasn’t about to give up just because her mother threw the mistletoe away after New Year’s— especially not when she knew where it had come from– a wild plum growing at the bottom of the pasture behind her house. So she decided to get more, mistletoe first, then kisses.

She started by drawing herself a map consisting of a wobbly rectangle for the back door, two more or less parallel lines, and a tree with squiggles at the top.   She made a copy for her little sister then tucked one copy into her pants and the other into Lydia’s diaper, and the two of them got ready to set out on the road to high adventure.  First, though, Ava had to tell D’Arcy (her mother), who was sitting on the front porch at the time, where she and Lydia were going.  So she did.  Then she started for the front door.  D’Arcy didn’t get why Ava was going inside.  Wouldn’t it be easier if she just went around the house?     NO, said Ava.  Her map started at the back door, and so would she.

Since this was a time when Ava was demanding adult attention/company pretty much twenty-four seven, D’Arcy was surprised Ava hadn’t demanded she come too.   She was also pleased, because if Ava and Lydia did make it to the plum tree, it would be the farthest from home Ava had ever gone by herself.   She waited until she heard the back door close, then went inside to watch out the window. She been sure the children would turn back.   They didn’t. But every few steps Ava would drop Lydia’s hand to consult the map, then tuck it back in and start off again (to get the point of that, you have to understand that there aren’t any paths in the pasture.)  Finally, Ava seemed to be satisfied they were on the right track and the two of them started decisively marching (and toddling) downhill.   Now, D’Arcy thought all this was sweet—any mother would– but she had her doubts because the mistletoe they’d picked was growing well beyond Ava’s reach, even assuming she could climb the tree. And since Ava, like most five year olds, tended not to be philosophical about defeat, D’Arcy spent the few minutes after she and Lyddy disappeared bracing herself.   But she needn’t have worried. The two of them came triumphantly back, each of them holding a good sprig of mistletoe over her head. Sometimes, fellow babies, maps work.

This week’s guest blogger here at Unstressed is Lola Haskins, who regular readers will remember as the author of both “The Gift” and “To ******* from the Residents of Point Reyes.”

Lola’s ninth collection of poems, Still the Mountain, is forthcoming (Paper Kite Press, 2010). Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA) appeared in 2004 and The Rim Benders (Anhinga) came out in 2001.  Two prose books appeared in 2007:  Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters Press), and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook).

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Review of Boooks, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, and The New York Quarterly.  She adores radio—her work has been broadcast on BBC and NPR—and also particularly relishes collaboration. She has worked with dancers (playing Mata Hari in a full-length ballet whose script she wrote and pseudo-Cindy Sherman in a modern dance piece whose words she also scripted; with musicians (Paul Richards is setting her Forty Four Ambitions for the Piano) with and visual artists (currently collaborating with South Florida painter Derek Gores on a piece due in January, 2010.)

Her most recent collaboration was “Of Air and the Water,” done on Gainesville’s Hippodrome main stage with dance and cello. Lately, she has been writing poems set in the natural world. Her new ambition is to be Florida’s ecstatic nature poet. For more information, please see her website.