When I was a very small child I had memorized a very long poem and a very boring poem, but it was one that my grandfather loved. It was a poem by William Cullen Bryant. And because it was kind of a bizarre thing for a child who only weighed about 22 pounds to be able to say this multi-paged poem, my grandfather brought me out like a parlor trick at a dinner party, that he and grandmother were having. I remember there were very beautifully dressed people around the living room. I was in my pajamas and he schlepped me in, holding my hand, and asked me to recite this poem, which I did, being an obedient child.
And many years later when I was in college, at Brown, I got a letter from a Philadelphia lawyer telling me that a man named Biddle had died in Philadelphia. Biddle is a very prominent name in Pennsylvania. And this man had been a guest apparently at my grandfather’s dinner party and he had left one half of one percent of his estate to the little girl who had recited “Thanatopsis” in her grandfather’s living room while wearing pajamas with feet. And when my roommate read that, one half of one percent, I remember she laughed and said, “Shake the envelope, a dime is going to fall out.” But it was a substantial amount of money and being a sophomore in college at the time and therefore sophomoric, I spent that money on a pale blue Pontiac car. I dropped out of college and drove my pale blue car to California with a football player.
And that’s my confession, that’s my history as a lover of poetry, how it paid off in the end in a bizarre way.
