A memory: In the house where my brother and I grew up, our parents had a glass coin jar on their bedroom dresser. It was there for years. Whenever my father came home from work, he’d empty the contents of his pockets into that jar. I must have passed it thousands of times as a child, always wondering how long it’d be until he gave my brother and me some of its contents.
Next to it, was a book of poetry by Robert Frost. Occasionally, I’d walk into my parents’ bedroom and my mother would be sitting on the bed reading from it. She never struck me as a lover of poetry, but once, when I asked her what she was reading, she told me to sit down and she recited one of Frost’s most famous poems, “A Mending Wall.” She didn’t explain what the poem was about, and I don’t remember asking her. Like most poetry I heard when I was young, it sounded as if it was written in a foreign language.
Recently, I was rooting around in some old cardboard boxes when this distant shard from the past took hold of me. I found notes I’d taken in a college summer school class. It was a course in American literature with a professor who happened to be a close friend of Robert Frost. The class was at San Francisco State and Frost often stayed at my instructor’s home when he was in town.
By way of introducing Frost’s poetry, our teacher mentioned that during a recent visit from the poet, the two had spent an afternoon hiking around Muir Woods. As they walked, they were having a conversation about who’d be most surprised by the current events of the day: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton? It was 1968, a time of an unpopular war in Vietnam, riots and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Then, as they were chatting, they were interrupted by 30 men and women who came bounding through the trees. Robert Frost and my teacher watched as they leapt and spun across the mossy ground, bodies sweeping through the air. Frost called out and asked who they were. The Bolshoi Ballet from Russia was on tour and performing in San Francisco, and some of the company had decided to visit the redwood forest. Once there, they couldn’t stop themselves from dancing through the woods.
Seeing that this anecdote had elicited the intended affect of charming and capturing the attention of his class, our professor said, “So, let’s read some poetry.”
He read that same poem from my childhood, “The Mending Wall.” I believe that even if poetry is of little interest to many people, its most famous line would ring a bell: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The poem describes two neighbors working together to repair a fallen stone wall that separates their properties. It’s only in this mending that the neighbors come together, for Frost uses the wall as a metaphor for the separation that so often divides us, that keeps us apart, the wall that can exist around our hearts.
From those same class notes that day, I’d copied down a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the professor had written on the board after reading the poem.
“All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
It’s hard to know when we become ourselves, when our character is given birth. Much happens when we’re too young and unaware, but, these sorts of words — from the poem, from Dr. King — about the need to create mutuality among us, took up a permanent, uneraseable residence in my mind. And my heart.
There’s a plaque outside the Burlingame Library, a quote from the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, a winner of the Nobel Prize.
“The problem is not how to wipe out all differences, but how to unite with all differences intact.”
These words speak to me, like the words of Robert Frost and Dr. King urging us to recognize and embrace our own disparate beliefs and desires, and in so doing, animate and honor and protect our deepest values and highest ideals as a people.
Like the myriad of different coins contained within a single glass jar, this is the necessary dream of America, its moral obligation. Its poetry that must be engraved upon all our hearts.
Mike Nagler taught for many years at Cañada College and was a member of the Burlingame Library Board and Foundation
(1) comment
Mike, Anne and David Hinckle very much enjoyed and took to heart your piece.
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