Better Late Than Never
Monday was Columbus Day, and I didn't mention it, but an essay has come to my attention that I think is worthy of belated reprinting. My main personal memory of Columbus Day's past is a speech I once gave at the Duggan Junior High Columbus Day assembly, which I have written about before:
When I was a student at John J. Duggan Junior High School in Springfield I occupied the lowest position in the student class system - the junior high school queer. Everybody is really sexually insecure and confused at that age so one way to prove to yourself and your friends that you're normal is by showing how much you hate the faggot. Fortunately I fell in with some hippies who adopted me as their pet queer and taught me about surviving outside mainstream society and how that was really a superior way to live anyway.
On Columbus Day one year I was picked to read a poem in front of the whole school at the Columbus Day assembly. I read it really dramatically and everyone cheered at the end and the principal Miss Mason congratulated me over the school intercom for the best reading of that poem she had ever heard in her many decades of teaching (so many that my mother also had her as a teacher). Everyone was nicer to me after that, and I realized that people will let you get away with being different and an outsider as long as you entertain them.
Another memory I have is from 5th grade, when I was outside star-gazing after supper on Columbus Day, and with my little telescope and the help of an astronomy book I took out from the Pine Point Library I found the planet Saturn. I was the kind of weird little kid for whom such things were a big deal.
But I doubt that modern kids have many Columbus Day memories, they hardly know what it is anymore, and what they do know is almost all negative.
Roundabout
Mountainview Farm in Easthampton by Greg Saulmon.
Pine Point Community Council Meeting by John Lysak.
The 1979 class of the sadly defunct Technical High School in Springfield is turning their class reunion into a gathering of all Tech graduates.
Distressed art by Beckie Kravetz in the UMass Student Union Gallery.
A painting in the Northampton Brewery.
A painting in the Haymarket Cafe.
Describing the view in the UMass Southwest section..
Rise....
And fly.
Blue Cheer got their name from a street brand of LSD. The band's chief creative force Dickie Peterson died Monday at age 61.
2 comments:
Jeez Tommy, That Blue Rose just reminded me that I accidentally stepped on a Blue Rosebush my Father had planted in memory of my Mother. It died. I replaced it, but it wasn't the "Blue" it should have been. He never forgave me for that. Actually, he never knew how to forgive anyone for anything. He went to Church every Sunday and thought of himself as a Christian. How Sad for him. But he Loved to visit your Mom. Now they are both memories. L.
hey Tommy, nice picture you took of saturn, but I thought it was bigger by about a trillion miles
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