Fenn Speaks…

by Fitz | May 11, 2020 | Essays, The Crafted Word Blog

I am You, and You are me…

Give a damn & figure it out

     I feel like one of my students: it’s the night before my big presentation at All-school-meeting, and I still don’t know what I am going to talk about. I just know I am supposed to talk about me…

That’s pretty scary for me because, well, I’m me. At any given time I know myself too well, and at other times I’m like, who is this guy? 

I’m the guy whose socks probably don’t match, and one of my socks is on onside out.

I’m the guy whose engine warning light in my van was probably on the whole way to school–and I never noticed.

I’m the guy who forgot to post an assignment on Fenn.org and his students are plotting a revolution and mass protest.

I’m the guy who tries to be a teacher–and so he is…

So, how does one start something like this?

I am John Fitzsimmons, and let me tell you about me…

(No–way to vain and presumptuous)

Hi, I’m Fitz, and I may be old, but I’m slow…
(No–you are not here to hear the truth)

Hi, I am Mr. Fitzsimmons, your new teacher: I just flew in from Chicago and boy my arms are tired…
(Nope… That was funny forty years ago)

Hi… so glad to be here: Last night I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out…

But if you know me, you have heard this all before…

I’m the kid who got grounded if I ever got a B for a grade… Because my mother would think I cheated…

I’m the kid who went to Peabody and Sanborn and CCHS and who warns all you going CCHS next year to wear thick-soled boots to school…so you don’t cut your feet on the broken hearts I left behind.

Not really, because I’m really the shy kid who spent an entire summer after 8th grade trying to find the courage to hold Megan Tassini’s hand–and I never did! 

I’m the kid who spent entire dances lurking in the corner of the Hunt Gym fearing that Stairway to Heaven would start, and a whole night would have gone by–and I wouldn’t have asked a single girl to dance…

I’m the kid whose father spray painted his sister’s figure skates black and told me everyone would think they were hockey skates, and I’d walk home in the dark from Greenes Pond, down Plainfield Road to 38 Longfellow road, still wearing my black figure skates… 

I lived in and on and through Greenes Pond, Whites Pond, Walden Pond, Warners Pond–The Concord River, The Assabet River, The Sudbury River. I was fish and fisherman, sailor and boat, landmark and explorer–all within this beautiful, precious, magnificent  expanse of earth called Concord.

I was an ADD wonder child whose eyes could dart in a thousand directions in a single glance; whose head was built out of dreams; who made sunburned skin a living, breathing whirl and endless dance of motion and adventure…

I was you, and you are me, and our lives are inextricably linked in this adventure called life… We know that nothing gold can stay, so we breath in the best of each day and never let it out.

I was a wrestler and now a wrestling coach. The coach whose only wise words to a wrestler heading out on the mat against a Goliath of a monster–a skinny kid from Fenn facing certain annihilation–and I shrug and say, “do one good thing. Do one good thing and accept defeat with a smile, for you don’t learn anything much from winning, but you learn a lot by trying.”

I was a reluctant, timid student–and now I am a teacher. Go figure… Maybe that’s why I drive my students crazy with answers that are not really answers. I respond to simple questions with things like:

Get through it, get over it. Give a damn and figure it out. It’s your essay not mine. Make it as long as it should be and as short as you can… Give me a pebble and I’ll show you the universe; show me the universe and I’ll give you a pebble… It’s not where you go; it’s how you go… Good writers don’t always make good poets–but good poets always make for great writers…don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. 

And that list goes on and on because a good question is better than a good answer.

The question I ask myself each day is “Who am I and what should I try to do?” 

And that is why my life is shaped and formed, sculpted and forged out of the fire of my mind–a fire that is as bright and intense as it was when I was you–you who are probably dreaming and scheming of what is possible as soon as the old guy finishes his presentation and you can go off to recess. 

After 61 years on this planet asking the same question, what then am I?

In short, I am a poet–and everything else are tentacles on the octopus that is my life. So I am also a folksinger, a songwriter, a tinkerer and a maker of meatballs. I’m a father to seven wild and unadorned children, and a husband to a beautiful and forbearing wife. I am everything I ever hoped I could be, and far short of where I still can be. I am you and you are me.

I love teaching, but I equally love the coming summer as much as any of you, for  for summer gives me the time to live in the woods of a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire (and also Camp Sewataro in Sudbury were I first met and sang many of you); to swim, fish, sail and hike; to write in my beloved journal and to sing at campfires with piles of weathered, mosquito-bitten kids bunched like starfish on a beach, singing their heads off–even though, technically, starfish don’t have heads…

And so I will end this presentation of me–the immutable me–with the only gift I that is truly me and has never–as in ever–let me down–Song…

John Adams and Me

by Fitz | May 5, 2020 | Essays, The Crafted Word Blog

    From the deck of my sister’s house on the Oregon coast, I can see the breakers lumbering in as the heavy morning fog slowly burns away. In true west coast style, I brewed a coffee that is strong and pungent and will guide me through my own morning fog. I was reading until late last night in David McCullough’s book, John Adams. John Adams is an interesting character with whom I feel a marked affinity at every turn in the book (a book which has way too many turns!). Maybe it is my distance right now from New England that creates the affinity. I am certainly not a very political person, but I relate to Adam’s need for, and dedication to, his family, his love of walking the countryside, and his practical working of the earth closest to him—an earth replete with stone walls, fields, orchards, rivers, wood-splitting, and escapes to the sea—but most importantly, his escape to “quill and paper” to better expose his vanities and commonality, and to find a pathway to express the depths of his speculative thinking.

Though he often lived low, he always aimed high, and that is the demon and angel I wrestle with every day. With summer almost over, there is as much undone as done. I feel like a waterbug that has skittered across a great expanse of time and water without breaking below the surface to exploit the riches below. There is no new batch of songs, no folio of poetry, and precious few chapters in Hallows Lake, my own—and only—labored attempt at fiction. I can console myself with ten or twelve decent essays and narratives written in support of the writing communities I oversee during the summer months, but not much creative work, which, ironically, is the strongest suit in my deck of writing cards.

Writing is still the time that is stolen from the day and not the purpose of the day itself. My own purposes and instinctual priorities, like Adam’s, are the myriad responsibilities of the lifestyle I lead, but Adams took his life further, wider, and deeper. As a public figure, Adams was prodded and coerced by the dictates of a needy public and the enormity of the political upheavals of his time, while I am only inspired by a vague sense of my potential and a mysterious need to put words to the narrow confines of my own experiences and my own sense of the world closest to me.

At this juncture in my life, I wonder if that is enough? I wonder if I need to put myself on a larger stage and summon the courage to place my life in front of a larger audience and let the chips fall where they may? A week from today I will be back in the classroom in front of sixty 14 year-old boys who I need to inspire to somehow give a damn about everything I ask them to do. My monologues need to be reinforced by a model of hope and action. Too often it is true that we teach what we do not do ourselves; too often we only build a scale model of our true greatness out of brittle plastic and weak glue that can only weaken over time, and too often we don’t answer the clarion of our own callings, and so we sit, smugly satisfied with the diluted reality of our lives.

What we think is only made real through what we say and do. The waves rolling onto the shore in front of me now are barely perceptible to the boats fishing out of Nehalem Bay. The power of the water is only evident where the water breaks and crashes onto the beach. No one is here in Manzanita content to simply look beyond the horizon. We are here because the sea meets the land in a continual expectation of beauty and awe-inspiring power. We walk the beaches in search of both the detritus and bounty of the sea. If that sea gave us nothing; if we weren’t convinced there was not more to be had here than from the confines of our own yards, we would just have stayed at home and gathered the glory of our own gardens.

I have to set to sea and trawl the infinite stew of what I carry within me, and I have to take myself to where those words curl onto a more public shore. I need to take my garden to the sea and spread my wares upon the waves and let the beachcombers gather what they wish to keep.

It is not the history of John Adams I am after.

It is his unflinching and steady spirit.