Dreamtime

Sam Pickering

Description

Sweeping in and out of real and imagined places, Dreamtime highlights the curious character of an unconventional teacher, writer, traveler, husband, and father as he takes stock of his multifaceted life. Sam Pickering—the inspiration for the main character in Dead Poets Society—guides us on a journey through his reflections on retirement, aging, gardening, and travel. He describes the pleasures of domesticity, summers spent in Nova Scotia, and the joy of sharing a simple life with his wife of almost forty years.

"Life is a tiresome journey," Pickering muses, "and when a man arrives at the end, he is generally out of breath." Although Pickering is now more likely to shuffle than gallop, he isn't yet out of breath, ideas, or ink. The refreshing and reflective substance of these essays shines through a patina of wit in Pickering's characteristically evocative and sincere prose. The separate events depicted in Dreamtime invite the reader into Pickering's personal experiences as well as into his viewpoints on teaching and encounters with former students. In "Spring Pruning," Pickering describes the precarious tumor in his parathyroid and the possibility of cancer affecting his daily life. In a refreshingly honest tone Pickering says, "Moreover the funeral had become a staple of chat, so much so I'd recently mulled having the raucous, insolent ringer on my telephone replaced by the recording of taps."

Appealing to creative writers and readers who enjoy an adventurous account of travels through life, Dreamtime accentuates the lifestyle of a longtime master teacher whose experiences take him from sunny days in the classroom to falling headfirst over a fence after running a half-marathon. Unpredictable, spontaneous, and always enlightening, Pickering's idiosyncratic approach and companionable charm will delight anyone who shares his intoxication with all the surprising treasures that might furnish a life with happiness.

Sujets

• Essays
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• The Other Hand
• Tobacco barn
• That Night
• Flypaper
• I Wish (manhwa)
• Resort wear
• Willow pattern
• Metamucil
• Fig leaf
• Knacker
• Grandparent
• Richard Jefferies
• Amanita
• Nuthatch
• On Writing
• P. G. Wodehouse
• Jerome K. Jerome
• Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
• Amanite

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 05 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611171198
• Langue: English

Extrait

Other Books by Sam Pickering
Essay Collections
A Continuing Education
The Right Distance
May Days
Still Life
Let It Ride
Trespassing
The Blue Caterpillar
Living to Prowl
Deprived of Unhappiness
A Little Fling
The Last Book
The Best of Pickering
Indian Summer
Autumn Spring
Journeys
Travel
Walkabout Year
Waltzing the Magpies
Edinburgh Days
A Tramp's Wallet
Literary Studies
The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785–1850
John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England
Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749–1820
Teaching
Letters to a Teacher
Memoir
A Comfortable Boy
A Happy Book
dreamtime
Sam Pickering

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2011 University of South Carolina
Paperback original edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Pickering, Samuel F., 1941–
Dreamtime : a happy book / Sam Pickering.
    p. cm.
A collection of personal essays.
ISBN 978-1-61117-038-2 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Pickering, Samuel F., 1941– 2. English teachers— United States—Biography. 3. American essays. I. Title.
PE64.P53A3 2011a
814'.3—dc23
2011021256
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following publications in which essays in this volume first appeared: River Teeth and Southwest Review.
Barbara Olds's poem “Promise” is reproduced through her kind permission.
ISBN 978-1-61117-119-8 (ebook)
Contents
Introduction
The End of Term
Research
Resort
Be of Good Cheer
Unsettled
Spring Pruning
Puffing
Post Operative
Everything Can't Be Perfect
Plots
Close Reading
Doing Nothing, Nothing Doing
Fall
Ports of Call
Winter Dreams
Boring
Afterword
Introduction
Last month I dreamed about a family so famously happy that the government commissioned a study of them. “Unearthing the secret of happiness,” the principal investigator said, “would spread blessings around the globe, ending all wars and thus altering the courses of human history and evolution.” Accordingly scientists began the study with great enthusiasm and high expectations. Magnetic resonators thumped. Neurologists scanned, and psychiatrists questioned and probed. Hematologists drained quarts of blood, and biologists sequenced DNA, dividing and subdividing, recombining and multiplying, using machines hidden beneath a mountain in Utah, the devices so secret that aside from the investigators only the Central Intelligence Agency knew they existed. Alas, despite the expenditure of a black hole of money and intellectual efforts so intense that three score researchers collapsed and had to be bused to sanitariums to undergo nerve cures, the study failed to reveal the source of happiness. In dreams, and actually in waking life, knowledge depends as much upon happenstance as it does upon planning and investigation. Two months after the study ended, a plumber flushing a pipe running under the basement of the family's home cracked a slab of granite and discovered the house sat atop a river of nitrous oxide.
Laughing gas has drifted misty across my years, some of the zephyrs, I am afraid, generated by the soiled and the bawdy or, as aficionados of southern barnyards know, by bluegrass marmalade. Most of the gas, however, percolates from my character. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson described “the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner.” I grew up as one of those boys. I've had a fortunate life. Never have want or mood pinched years into frowns. I have been extraordinarily lucky. As rainbows appear only in the sunshine, so my days have been bright. Consequently this is a happy book, perhaps not one that people unable to shake the burden of thinking themselves burdened will enjoy. The matters I recount are uncomplicated, not like the recollection of the girl whose beloved was a dental student and who, when he traveled across the country on a fellowship, pulled one of her molars so he'd have something to remember her by.
My mind resembles flypaper. Clouds of small doings buzz through my days and stick to consciousness. Names pepper my pages, those of turnips and strawberries, for example, yellow Aberdeen and strap-leaf red-top among the first, lady finger and New Jersey scarlet, Peabody and Scotch runner among the second. I like poking about and compiling lists, say, of things found in an old barn: mole traps, a hay fork, bush hooks, the bottom of a churn, a lightning rod, hog scrapers, and, if a person is sharp eyed, a milk jester or lactometer for measuring butterfat. Teeth, declares an old Roman saying, are shrubs, the roots of which dig below the gums deep into the earth. To keep teeth healthy one must feed and water them, and being an amateur gardener, I write much about food and drink. None of the meals I describe are fancy. Last week Vicki and I ate at Panda Express in the food court on the university campus. We split helpings of fried rice, broccoli beef, and black pepper chicken.
My mind works by association, and thinking about peppered chicken reminds me of the ancient definition of man, a biped without a gizzard. Birds, of course, have gizzards, and I write about birds, indeed about the natural world. Instead of leaning on the everlasting arm, as the gospel song puts it, I kneel on the ground, raking through grasses, searching for caterpillars and spiders. Natural matters are more complex than people usually think. Since I teach at a university, I have the leisure to ponder. The definition of man started me thinking about angels. Although angels are bipeds, they have wings, can fly, and from a distance look like birds, convincing me that they have gizzards, albeit since angels confine themselves to a diet of milk and honey, I assume that lack of use has caused the gizzards to atrophy, like the human appendix. Oddities take flight in my essays. In January I read an article about an entrepreneur who, after losing his position on Wall Street, began breeding ducks with four wings, mallards, I think. In greener economic times, the man had spent a year as a broker in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Most of his customers were sheiks, and in order to appeal to them and their interests, the man had become an amateur falconer. In comparison to ducks, falcons are rare and expensive. Because of their two sets of wings, the man's ducks were able to rocket through the air, and once the man taught them to snap their bills together and to pluck small birds from the breeze and rabbits from the ground, the man intended to sell the ducks to sheiks, many of whom needed to economize, their “discretionary funds having been adversely affected by the cascading price of oil.”
Educational doings swell signatures of my pages. I like teaching and students, but classes, and English departments, have changed from what they were forty years ago. Most of my pals, old boys of legend and sometimes scandal, have retired, their places taken by women or “gals,” as the unreconstructed of my generation call them. Most of the women teach well, but they appoint their classrooms differently. “I'll never read another evaluation of my teaching,” my friend Irv Davis said at the beginning of this semester. In an evaluation a student complained that “Mr. Davis never brings baked goods to class.” “What the hell!” Irv exclaimed. “Chocolate-chip cookies, cupcakes, and ovens sweet and fatty with banana bread! These women have a lot to answer for.”
In this book I roam eastern Connecticut and Beaver River, Nova Scotia, where Vicki and I spend summers on farmland her father bought in 1947. Occasionally I wander farther afield, in particular into Mexico and the Caribbean. I meander rather than travel. Youth travels, sucking sulfites out of wineskins and experiencing the ineffable, in the process finding meaning and discovering themselves. Imposing profundity upon hours doesn't interest me, and I have never experienced a crisis of identity. I knew who I was before I clambered from the womb although occasionally when I glimpse myself in the mirror, not something I do much nowadays, I wonder who's the grim, wrinkled stranger glaring at me. I am also a reader, and as I meander wood and field eyes peeled for birds and mushrooms, for whatever swoops into my ken, so I amble libraries, randomly plucking books from shelves, prospecting for glittering nubs of this and that, fool's gold appealing to me more than the twenty-four carat. In the nineteenth century James Vick published a mail-order catalog and sold seeds and plants from a nursery in Rochester, New York. Vick advertised extensively in the American Agriculturalist , testimonials from his customers dominating the advertisements. On January 4, 1864, “George Ford” wrote Vick from Lawrence, Kansas, describing how horticulture protected his family and property from the ravages of war. “Please send me your Catalogue for 1864,” Ford requested.