Author: tim

Sitting on the porch and reading this time of the year is always an enjoyable pastime. This year the cicadas seem unusually plentiful and almost impossibly loud. I notice there are many more dragon flies this summer compared to previous summers as well.  I am not sure why that is or if it has anything to do with our newly arrived Joro spiders. But listening to the July Flies, what the country folks call cicadas , I am reminded of my fraternal grandmother Dot. The stories I could tell about Dot!….

Anyway she told me years ago that the first day you heard the July flies buzzing was 90 days out from the first frost.  At least that was the conventional wisdom for western North Carolina.

At the time I was an organic gardener tending to square foot plots of lots of different vegetables. I kept a pretty extensive garden log book each year. One cool morning prior to my commute to Atlanta to my programming job, I started the car up. What looked like fog on the windshield turned out to be a light frost. HEY! I remember noting the first July Fly buzzing in the garden log. So back in the house I went, got my log book out and counted the days on the calendar. It was exactly 90 days earlier. Dot had died the previous year. I went back and got in the car again and I had a little shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. 

That was the only year that it worked out to exactly 90 days. In fact other years were off by 2 or 3 weeks either way. But that one year…

So there I was, an 11th grader at Clarke Central, the newly minted merging of Athens High (the white school) and Burney-Harris High (the black school). Sitting in an English class that was boring me to tears. The teacher, whom to me was a boring old lady was in reality probably 20 years younger than my current age.  She handed out an assignment to the class. Write a poem that may or may not rhyme about something in this class that had an impression on you. 

My impression of the class and the teacher led me to write the following:

I can see without looking,

While you look without seeing. 

I can know without knowledge,

While you have knowledge but don’t know.

I know the course of nature,

While you know only what’s taught.

You have the curse of progression,

While I have the gift of thought. 

 I turned in my poem which apparently pissed off the teacher and I suppose it should have. She gave me a C, thereby quashing my budding development as a poet. 

 I never learned much in high school outside of 9 ball and 8 ball at Gandy’s Recreation Center. That’s where I spent a significant amount of the school day so it was solely my fault. I learned a lot more after high school in the US Army, at UGA and graduate school. But the one lesson I learned at Clarke Central was in that English class and the lesson was that almost everything depends on perspective.