Charged to Remember

THE WAY IT IS FOR HIM

He was against forgetting
as much as he was for it.

Jim Bodeen
12 March 2013


















STOP SIGN AT CUSTER AND FAIRBANKS
AVENUES IN MY TOWN KIDDYCORNER
TO GARFIELD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
WHERE MY DAUGHTER TEACHES

Nobody stops at this stop sign.
They drive right on through.
Just like it wasn’t there.
Between the T and the O.
The smiling face of Alfred E. Neumann.
Me worry? What is that?
And the hand with the finger
pointing at the joker. That too.

Of course it’s been tagged

with the gang banger’s

family signature. But nobody stops.
Nobody talks about it.
Until last week, in Tacoma.

A young man who’d just won a scholarship,

he was talking about the day he was jumped out
of his gang in the parking lot of the school
where my daughter teaches. Schools nowadays
go into lockdown practicing for killers

in their schools, expecting the worst.

But this is a story about freedom.

A scholarship. Going to college.

Bumped out of the gang

after the cousin dies in his arms

saying, Go to school.
Last conversation I had
with someone I could call a brother.
This is the lockdown story the school never heard.
We took pictures together,
I asked him about the stop sign.
Alfred E. Neumann, he said,
Yeah, I know that sign.
That was my old neighborhood.
That parking lot. I was bloody and broken.
I dropped to the ground.
I was free. Out of the gang.
I no longer lived in fear.

Jim Bodeen
1 March—9 March 2013

STOP--THE MOVIE THAT STARTS AT THE STOP SIGN

CHARGED TO REMEMBER

Because the State Supreme Court
told lawmakers they must fully fund education,
Republicans want to cut the court in half
and have justices draw straws
to see which ones will go. They say

those salaries will pay for lots of teachers.
Yakima County Sheriff, Ken Irwin                ,
says the American people drew the line
in the 1930s against machine guns
during those bank robberies,

but that’s where the line remains,
he says, defending semi-automatic weapons.
Yesterday my wife and I drove
into the lower valley to visit our old pastor
Harold Sigmar, in his mid-90s. We took

him out for a hamburger and one beer.
He directed us along the Yakima River
and I returned his Bonhoeffer book underlined
and written in margins for his commentary.
I can still make him laugh but frankly

I wasn’t very funny. He moved me
talking of his daughters and their caretaking.
We share four decades plus, and it’s documented.
My friends are mostly hermit scholars,
poets, monks, holy men, odd

only in the way we tell a story. Our job,
such as it is, is to speak truth as we see it,
far, as we are, from power.
Little fictions on our take of things.
We’re given to early rising.

Birdsong out my window right now.
After seeing my old friend, I stopped
at a nursery and bought a tree,
lovely Kousa Dogwood from Korea.
I don’t make anything up.

Jim Bodeen
8 March 2013