While we await the arrival this week of the Texan du jour, Ken Starks, there’s another Texan who comes to mind — my fourth grade teacher Miss Berisford. Miss Berisford taught fourth graders at St. Philip’s Catholic School in Annandale, Va., in the 1966-1967 school year. While I was completely smitten by her, I did end up learning a thing or two from her.
One was the “hook ‘em horns” University of Texas hand sign, which she taught everyone on the first day of class. The second thing I remember is having to memorize Robert Frost’s “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening” and Miss Berisford explaining the first line was actually “backwards on purpose.” Frost really is saying “I think I know whose woods these are,” but poetry being what it is, it’s more . . . poetic, I guess . . . to say “whose woods these are, I think I know.”
She explained it a lot better than that.
For those of you wondering how I’m going to tie this into Lindependence, brace yourselves.
Thinking of the Frost poem, having memorized it 41 years ago (and still recalling it to this day), the idea that things can be “backwards on purpose” is not lost on this project. A million things could have gone wrong, but only a couple of things did, and they were corrected creatively with the help of some pretty smart people out there (go ahead and take a bow, you guys and gals). With the couple of minor hurdles cleared as we count down the final week to the first event, this concept is certainly one to keep in mind as things go forward.
Plus there’s the last lines of the poem: But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Indeed.
[Incidentally, if anything, this project has had me working so ragged that one of the "benefits" of working on it is that I've been sleeping a lot better over the last few months. Go figure.]
67 and dark (after all, it’s almost 9), with a heat wave on the way starting tomorrow.
