Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson

My Literary Fruitcakes

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It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.”

“A Christmas Memory” ~ Truman Capote (1924-1984; American novelist, playwright, screenwriter and actor)

It’s no secret. I love food. I love to cook. I love to bake. And, when it’s fruitcake weather, I love to lose myself in baking fruitcakes.

Yes. Fruitcakes. MAHvelous fruitcakes! Say what? You don’t like fruitcake? No way! I’ll bet that you’ve never had a really good fruitcake. Not to worry. I’m not going to try to turn you into a fruitcake or into a fruitcake lover.

But, hey. Come on. Show me a little respect, too, won’t you? Just stop it right there. Right now. I’ve heard them all, heard them all already, all the fruitcake jokes.

What baffles me is how the ancient, noble, beloved fruitcake became the loathed butt end of some of the worst jokes in the world.

I’m tempted to blame Johnny Carson for them all. Every last one of them. I’m sure, though, that fruitcake jokes didn’t start with him, but his fruitcake joke is, without any doubt in the world, the worst in the annals of baking. Maybe that’s why it’s the most well-known. I’m sure you know it. On his Tonight Show during the 1960s, Carson quipped:

“The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year.”

People keeping sending Carson’s fruitcake joke to each other, year after year, too. Look. I just sent it to you.

And, no doubt, you’ve heard others like this one:

“Why does fruitcake make the perfect gift?

“Because the U.S. Postal Service hasn’t found a way to damage it.”

And who hasn’t heard this one?

“If you don’t like it, use it as a doorstop.”

But it gets worse than any of those dried and false jokes that couldn’t come to life if they were soaked in all the finest brandies in the world! There’s one fruitcake joke that is truly alive and lives year after year in Manitou Springs, Colorado. It comes to life annually during its Great Fruitcake Toss, celebrated since 1996. People pitch fruitcakes. People launch fruitcakes. People toss fruitcakes. And if my post makes you want to pack up your cake and join the people, you still have plenty of time to make arrangements. The next Toss will be on January 28, 2023. No fruitcake? No problem. (Don’t you dare ask for one of mine! You’ve got your nerve.) Rent one at the festival. You can, for one dollar. Go. Go on. Let your fruitcake fly.

That’s quite enough about fruitcake jokes. I’m not certain how I got pulled down that rabbit hole anyway.

My intent was simple and straightforward. It occurred to me that it might be fun to explore fruitcakes in literature. No. No. I don’t mean writers who are fruitcakes. They all are. (Trust me: I know firsthand.) I simply mean literary works about fruitcakes. You don’t even have to like fruitcake to be intrigued by such a hefty intellectual pursuit, especially if you like literature–as I do–and even more especially if you like fruitcake, too, and I do (but only the ones that I bake using my mother’s legendary recipe).

The first literary work involving fruitcake that popped into my mind was Truman Capote’s 1956 autobiographical short story “A Christmas Memory” featured in the pull quote to this post. Even if you haven’t read the short story, I’m betting that you’ve seen a movie version. I’ve seen several, but my favorite is from 1966, featuring Geraldine Page, one of my favorite actresses. (No actress can evoke heartfelt longing and nostalgia with a scrunched face better than she, and she did it at my tearful best in her Trip to Bountiful.)

What popped into my mind next wasn’t a literary work at all. Instead, it was a writer–one of my favorite poets: Emily Dickinson. Though famous and acclaimed today, she was an obscure poet in her lifetime–with only 10 of her poems known to have been published while she was alive–but she was highly regarded as a baker. Her father would only eat bread that she had baked. Recluse though she was, children in Amherst (MA), where she lived from 1830 to 1886 and only left on three occasions, would stand in the yard beneath her bedroom window as she lowered baskets of her freshly baked gingerbread. She was especially known for her black Caribbean Christmas cake. Houghton Library at Harvard University owns Dickinson’s handwritten recipe and the tradition of baking her cake continues today. It is so important that Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip wrote an essay, “Making Black Cake in Combustible Spaces.” She will read it as part of a moderated conversation from Dickinson’s home on December 12, 2022: “The Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute.”

I’ve never made Dickinson’s black cake, but just this past weekend, I baked a Jamaican Black Cake that’s close to hers. My home is still redolent from more than four cups of rum and port that I soaked all the dried fruits in for several weeks before my bake. The cake is a beauty! I will let it age probably until Valentine’s Day 2023. After I taste sweet success, I may reach out to Houghton Library and invite myself to join Team Cake, a group of Houghton bakers who recreate Dickinson’s cake, rigorously adhering to her recipe, and share it with colleagues and friends on Dickinson’s December 10 birthday. Wouldn’t that be a grand culinary adventure. Look out Houghton. Here I come.

The next writer with a fruitcake recipe is none other than Eudora Welty–American short story writer, novelist, and photographer. Her fruitcake is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s a White Fruitcake that sounds similar to mine. (For mine, I use brandy to soak the fruits before baking and to preserve the cakes after baking. If a little brandy is good, a little more is better, especially when it comes to fruitcakes.) Welty redeems herself, though, by adding a cup of bourbon to the batter. She redeems herself further with the note at the end of her recipe:

“From time to time before Christmas you may improve it with a little more bourbon, dribbled over the top to be absorbed and so ripen the cake before cutting. This cake will keep for a good white, in or out of the refrigerator.”

Her fruitcake recipe–given to her by a friend, Mrs. Mosal–was immortalized in the 1971 Symphony League of Jackson cookbook for which Welty wrote the “Foreword,” commenting:

“I often think to make a friend’s fine recipe is to celebrate her once more, and in that cheeriest, most aromatic of places to celebrate in – the home’s kitchen.”

See there. Books give life everlasting to everything, even fruitcakes.

Dare I confess that those three literary fruitcake associations–Welty, Dickinson, and Capote–were the only ones that I knew readily.

I suppose that I could end the post now, but I can’t. Not just yet. If I did, I wouldn’t get to share the fruits of my research.

So let me start by sharing when the word fruitcake was first used as a reference to a type of cake. 1687 is a long time ago, but, candidly, I expected the word to have been coined far earlier. I was a little disappointed. But, anyway, it appeared that year in a heading in J. Shirley’s Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities: 

“Instructions for a gentlewoman in making of marmalade, paste of fruit … fruit-cakes, honey ” (vi. 38).

Since I was perusing the OED already, I decided to see when fruitcake was first used to suggest extreme eccentricity or insanity, as in nutty as a fruitcake.

It was first used in that context on March 5, 1911, in the Chicago Sunday Examiner :

“Isn’t Ethel a sweet girl, as sweet as a piece of cake?”

“Why, I think that she is as nutty as fruit cake” (v. 5/2).

At this point, my research into fruitcakes in literature took a turn that surprised me. Really surprised me.

I browsed “famous short stories about fruitcakes.” No famous ones.

Then I tried “famous poems about fruitcakes.” No famous ones.

In a search of desperation, I tried “famous novels about fruitcakes.” Again, no famous ones.

At last, I tried something straight forward: literary fruitcakes.

O. M. G. What I found left me trembling in my virtual research tracks.

I landed on an article with nearly that exact title: “The Literary Fruitcake” written by Don Webb. It chronicles the literary travels of one specific fruitcake, from its first gifting in 1843 all the way up to its being stolen on Christmas Eve, 1993.

The story line alone is powerful. Imagine. A fruitcake–whether beloved or maligned– deemed important enough to have survived for 150 years, without having been eaten; to have been passed on from one writer to the next; and to have been documented meticulously with every gifting. It is nothing short of amazing. I doubt whether most of us could document our own family lineage that far back with the precision that Webb achieves in his first-person narrative.

Aside from being a story of surviving against all odds, it’s made all the more fascinating simply by the famous writers associated with the cake. They are beyond belief, but they are the very reason I kept reading the narrative. How could I not be aware of the fruitcake associated with so many famous writers?

Well, I was not. So I kept reading. In fact, once I started, I could not stop.

Queen Victoria, it seems, gave the fruitcake to Charles Dickens in 1843 after the first dramatic reading of his A Christmas Carol.

Some years later–in 1865–Bram Stoker stole the cake at a publication party for Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. For years afterwards he showed the cake to friends every now and then. But eventually the spell of the fruitcake novelty wore off.

When Stoker published his Dracula in 1897, he passed the cake on to Arthur Machen (The Great God Pan) who passed it on to Algernon Blackwood (The Willows).

Wouldn’t you agree that this is deliciously fascinating? Yes, indeed. It is captivating. And to think that I still have to share how the cake was passed on through more literary hands for another hundred years.

Not to worry. I’ll speed it up. This fruitcake was old to begin with and it’s getting older by the word. But before speeding things up, let me state–just for the official record–that my interest in this narrative lies not with the fruitcake but rather with its famous literary owners.

After Algernon Blackwood, the fruitcake ended up with Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) who didn’t really want it, but her partner Alice Toklas persuaded her to keep it. It might amuse you to know that it was around this same time that Alice came up with her famous recipe for hashish fudge. It might amuse you even more to know that the “recipe” wasn’t hers after all. When her The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook was about to be published in 1954, the book had empty pages. The publisher added filler recipes, including one for Hashish Fudge submitted by avant-garde artist Brion Gysin. Alice was clueless and had never tested the recipe! Read all about it in the Scientific American. Yes. Scientific American. Whoever says that the humanities don’t matter needs to read “Go Ask Alice: The History of Toklas’ Legendary Hashish Fudge.”

But let’s get back to our famous, traveling literary fruitcake.

Stein gave the cake to Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea) who then passed it on to James Joyce (Ulysses).

When Joyce died, the fruitcake went to Samuel Beckett, prior to the publication of his Waiting for Godot.

Then in 1959, William Burroughs went to Paris to finalize publication plans for his Naked Lunch. While there, he managed to meet with Beckett–his literary hero–for 30 minutes or so. When he left, he wanted a memento and took what he believed to be a brick in the bottom of Beckett’s closet.

As you might have guessed, it wasn’t a brick at all. It was the famed fruitcake. Burroughs gave the cake to Allen Ginsberg (Howl) who gifted Jack Kerouac (On the Road) who passed it on to Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) who traded it to Mary Denning in exchange for her knowledge of Pre-WW II chemistry.

(Dayum! I didn’t know that I could go so fast. Note to myself: Leave out all the nitty, gritty details and hasten the pace every time.)

Don Webb–the narrator of “The Literary Fruitcake”–bought the cake for $150 dollars, took it home to Austin, Texas, and eventually decided to eat it on Christmas Eve, 1993.

Sadly, when he and his wife came home that evening, they discovered that their home had been robbed. The thieves had taken the fruitcake along with other valuables.

The police never located the fruitcake. Over the next few months, though, graffiti began to appear on wall after wall throughout Austin.

And then I read:

“… the driven thief released the intensity of his soul. … We never sought out the writer, for we feared our presence might interfere with his process, but we grew fiercely proud of the words that covered our walls. Soon all of Austin was obscured by the words by the words of perfection:

“‘We, who dwell in the holy shrines, will preserve this treasure unto the ends of time.'”

It was not until then–not until the very end–that I realized: I had been had. I had been had big time.

I could not believe it: I, the English professor who knows fully well–and even warns his students–not to trust first person narrators, especially in first person accounts of fruitcakes passing through the hands of royalty and an incredible number of auspicious British and American writers.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

But it’s okay. It’s really quite okay. I’ve been had many, many times down through the years. Sweet Scorpionic revenge is always mine.

I just made reservations to fly to Manitou Springs, Colorado, so that I can participate in their January 28, 2023, Great Fruitcake Toss. I have reached out to Collin Street Bakery to see whether they will sponsor me.

Here’s what I’m going to do for my Fruitcake Toss Extraordinaire that will make world-wide headlines. I’m going to wrap Duper Don Webb up real tight in all the printed and virtual copies that I can find of his “The Literary Fruitcake.” And then I’m going to give a celebratory “Heave-Ho” as I catapult the nuttiest fruitcake of them all–the author who pulled off the biggest fruitcake heist ever and told the biggest fruitcake joke ever–as far into the thin air as possible.

For once, I’ll let a fruitcake fly with glee.

Writers: Our Forever-Friends

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“Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me…”

Walt Whitman, “Once I Pass’d through a Popular City” (Leaves of Grass, 1855)

Whenever I teach a literature course, I tell my students that aside from celebrating their achievements as they master the course content, I have one special hope for each of them. I want them to find one writer who will be their friend. One writer who will never unfriend them as other friends sometimes do. One writer who will be with them through all the storms of life, for a lifetime. A writer who will be a forever-friend.

What I have in mind is similar to the handful of real-life, forever-friends whom we might have, if we are lucky. It’s never many. At least it has never been many for me. I have perhaps one handful of such friends. All right. Perhaps two handfuls who are in the friends-forever category. With us, we’ve shared so many past experiences that even if we have not seen one another in years, when we reconnect, we pick up magically on the same conversation that we were having when we last met, and we do so without missing a beat. Friends. Forever-friends.

Writers can be our forever-friends, too, with an added bonus. We can have lots and lots of them. As we read more and more, we discover more and more writers who might end up as our friends. We like them. We like what they have to say to us. We like how they inspire us. We like how they make us believe. We like how they make us feel…unalone. We like how they heal our…brokenness. Before long, we want to hang out with them. We can. Whenever we want. For as long as we want.

The great thing about writers who are our forever-friends is that when they pop up unannounced and uninvited, it’s never a problem. We don’t have to clean for them. We don’t have to cook for them. And we don’t have to clear our calendars for them. They can tag along with us just as we are. And they will do just that if we let them.

All that we have to do is be attentive, smile when they arrive, and even smile when they leave, knowing that they will come back to visit us again and again and again.

Their arrival coincides with something that we are experiencing that makes us think of something else. It’s the power of association. Robert Frost captures it best:

“All thought is a feat of association; having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew.”

That’s the beauty of having writers who are forever-friends. Their arrival is based exclusively on what’s right in front of you or something that you’re thinking about. Something that you almost didn’t know you knew.

No doubt, you have your own writers who are your forever-friends, just as I do.

Obviously, I don’t know about yours, but mine visit me multiple times throughout the day, every day without fail. I never know which writers will visit or when. But I go forth daily, confident of being strengthened and girded up by their company.

For example, Walt Whitman shook his silvery locks right in front of me as I was writing this post. I was thinking about the fact that only a snippet of a writer’s work comes to my mind during an association, while all the other details of the work are seemingly long forgotten. Instantly, the lines from Whitman’s “Once I Pass’d through a Popular City” flashed across my mind:

“Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me…”

Here’s another example.

When I met with my Creative Writing class for the first time this semester, I had a slap-stick time promoting this blog. It was nothing more than nonsensical banter aimed at entertaining my students, but they picked up on it.

Not long after I managed to restore myself to a modicum of seriousness, one student raised her hand as if to ask a serious question.

“Professor Kendrick, did you say that you have a blog?”

I started laughing, as did the rest of the class.

A little later on, her hand went up again. I was on to her by then, but I was having far too much fun, so I acknowledged her.

“Professor Kendrick, did you give us the name of your blog?”

(When our laughter died down, my forever-friend Edward Albee paid me a momentary visit. He has chummed me since the 1960s when I was in college and he was a controversial Broadway playwright.)

“Very funny! You know, Caitlin, my hell-bent banter to promote my blog to a brand-new group of students, reminds me of the first line from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.”

In the play, Jerry approaches Peter, a total stranger, sitting on a bench in Central Park.

I’ve been to the zoo. [PETER doesn’t notice.] I said, I’ve been to the zoo. MISTER, I’VE BEEN TO THE ZOO! 

I was thrilled by Albee’s visit, especially since I was able to share it with my class. He came as he did and when he did because of my dogged determination to tell my students–a group of strangers, if you will–all about my blog. In the process, I remembered Jerry’s insistence on telling Peter, a total stranger, that he had been to the zoo.

My students got it. They saw the association with great clarity.

On another occasion, something similar happened at the start of the same class.

As I drove on campus. I was aware–painfully so–that the grassy, undeveloped acreage all around the college was being gobbled up by townhouses.

At the start of class, one of my students shared the same observation.

In that nanosecond, former United States Poet Laureate Phillip Levine appeared. Immediately, I walked to my teacher station, googled his poem “A Story” and flashed it on the screen for students to see as I read it aloud.

It captures perfectly what my students and I had witnessed with pain that morning.

Levine chronicles the life and death of the woods that once surrounded us and ends with a chilling doomsday prophecy:

where are the woods? They had to have been

because the continent was clothed in trees.

We all read that in school and knew it to be true.

Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows

of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes

into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,

there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles

of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.

And right now as I typed the above quotation, Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell popped into my head, chanting a few lines from her “Big Yellow Taxi”:

Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got

Till it’s gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot.

My writers–my forever-friends–visit me far more in my alone times than they do when I am teaching or, for that matter, when I am socializing.

Maybe they appear then because they know that in my alone times friends can add a richness to any moment, even ordinary ones.

Ordinary moments like weed whacking. Somehow, I end up doing that chore on Sunday instead of going to church. That’s no big deal to me. I consider myself Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR). Emily Dickinson must be SBNR, too, because she is always with me on my Sunday morns. Her “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” overpowers the Stihl noise through all the stanzas, rising triumphantly in the final one:

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.

Or sometimes it’s as simple as visitorial moments that occur when reading emails from regular friends who aren’t writers. Recently, a friend who is my age wrote that his hands had grown old. I sensed his sadness and immediately thought of a poem about aging by former United States Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz: “Touch Me.” It includes the poignant lines:

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.

One season only,
and it’s done.

[…]

Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

And then I immediately thought of Ben Speer singing “Time Has Made a Change in Me.” The title alone was touchstone sufficient. And that led me to W. S. Merwin reading his “Yesterday” with the ever-chilling line:

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time

It’s amazing: the rich literary company that embraced me, all because of one single solitary email sent my way!

Sometimes, though, my forever-friends arrive as I try to make sense of all that’s going on in our world. The ongoing COVID pandemic. The invasion of Ukraine. Recent SCOTUS decisions. The January 6 Hearings. Global Warming. Poverty. Food scarcity. Gender inequality. Homophobia. Transphobia. Growing humanitarian conflicts and crises. The 21st anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on America.

Need I go on? Sadly, I could. Gladly, I won’t. It’s far too sobering.

But in those dark moments when I find myself spiritually staggering under the weight of it all, I take strength from William Faulkner’s Nobel Acceptance Speech, delivered in 1950 when the world was staggering under the burden of the Cold War:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? […] I decline to accept the end of man.  […] I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Maybe, just maybe, the need to have writers who are our forever-friends, boils down to nothing more than this. They come regardless of what we are facing. They reassure us that goodness and mercy shall prevail. They remind us to grapple with our soul, to grapple with our spirit.

They come, as Robert Browning came to me just this second, to calm us and anchor us in the full and steadfast belief that despite all the injustices, all the wrongdoings, all the travail, and all the sorrows,

God’s in His Heaven,

All’s right with the world.

Pippa Passes, Song I (1841)

Why an Education Matters | The Softer Side.

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“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s Almanac)

This week I’m thinking about education, far more than usual. The reason is simple. Exactly one week from today, I’ll be meeting a new group of community college students who have decided wisely that getting an education is their best move. With them, I’ll be standing on the brink of now and the future. It’s a new beginning for me and a new beginning for them.

As an educator, my role is to provide students with the knowledge base they need in English, especially American Literature, Appalachian Literature, and Creative Writing.

Aside from equipping them with the needed knowledge base, my goal is to turn them on.

“Turn students on to English? No way!”

“When pigs fly,” someone else squealed.

I understand. I have understood since I started teaching. From the first day that I enter a classroom at the start of a brand-new semester, mine is an uphill battle. But that’s perfectly all right. I love challenges. I have every confidence in the world that by the end of the semester my students will see that language and literature can help them discover their own worlds and the worlds around them. I have every confidence in the world that by the end of the semester my students will see that language and literature matter. “He can inspire a rock to write,” wrote one student in my early teaching career at Laurel Ridge Community College.

Nonetheless, I am aware that I may not have one student who is majoring in English. So, while I am passionate about language and literature and while I know that I can turn my students on to those subjects, I feel an equal responsibility to be passionate about education. I want my students to believe that education–their education–matters.

Sometimes getting them to believe that is an even greater challenge than turning them on to English.

I have to meet that challenge, too, right from the start, because I know that the community college graduation rate nationwide is about 62%.

I celebrate the students who make up that percentage. And I celebrate the 30% of community college students nationwide who transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

Yet, while celebrating all those students, I want to do my best to reach out to the others who might not be part of the 62% graduation rate or the 30% transfer rate unless I convince them that an education–their education–matters.

Why an education matters is abundantly clear to those of us who are educated. Career options. Job security. Expanded earnings. Networking. Professional connections. Increased happiness. Friendships. Better health. Even longevity.

I could include statistics to support those claims. I won’t. Candidly, they don’t do much for me.

And, candidly, when I talk about the practical benefits of an education–and I do–eyes glaze over and my students search for imaginary exits, especially when I start bringing in statistics to support my claims.

On the other hand, when I switch my focus to the softer side of why an education matters–the side that allows me to be personal and passionate–vision returns to glazed eyes and students return to the classroom that they just fancifully exited.

Sometimes–actually almost always–I’ll start the soft-side conversation by asking my students how many of them are the first in their family to go to college.

Usually about one third of their hands go up–a response that’s consistent with national data for community college students.

They seem to take notice when I tell them that I am a first-generation college student, too. They really take notice when I share some personal information about me. Son of a West Virginia coal miner and his wife, a Pilgrim Holiness minister. Grew up with three books in my home—the King James Bible, Webster’s Dictionary, and Sears Roebuck Catalog. Made it to the halls of the Library of Congress, which for 25 years became my home, with more than 20 million books. Then to the halls of Laurel Ridge Community College which for the last 23 years has been my home, where I’ve taught more than 7,000 students. Without being boastful, I want them to hear and see firsthand how an education transformed my life. I want to convince them that an education will transform their lives, too.

They get turned on more when I tell them that with an education they can go anywhere because they will be experts in their field. These days, I seem to have more and more students in health sciences, so I make a point of emphasizing that they can go wherever their credentials are recognized. Their eyes light up when I talk about the option of being a traveling nurse or a traveling surgical technologist. Their eyes really light up when I talk about the bonuses and salary increases that go hand in hand with adventuresome, free travel.

I remind them as well that an education empowers them to become their own knowledge navigators. I share with them what Robert Frost once wrote: “We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in High School. Once we have learned to read the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us” (“Poetry and School,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1951). Frost, of course, is talking about developing critical reading skills and critical thinking skills, both at the heart of all education.

Or perhaps I help them understand that an education matters because books matter. Emily Dickinson says it best: “There is no frigate like a book / To take us lands away.”

Some days I emphasize that an education matters because it emboldens you to follow your passion. I share with them my own undergraduate struggles as English, Pre-Law, and Pre-Med messed around with my head. One day, after switching majors several times, I allowed my passion to take hold of my heart. From that point forward, English prevailed.

Or what about the notion that an education enables us to be anchored and hopeful amidst the storms of life that are certain to come our way? I’m thinking again about Robert Frost and his poem “One Step Backward Taken.” The speaker in the poem is shaken by a universal crisis, “But with one step backward taken / I saved myself from going. / A world torn loose went by me. / Then the rain stopped and the blowing, / And the sun came out to dry me.”

And how about this one that I like to use when students wonder whether an education is worth the cost, especially as their student loans grow larger and larger. I remind them that an education is one of their best investments. No one can take it away, ever. Perhaps even better is the way that the investment keeps on growing through lifelong learning.

Those are just a few of the “soft” reasons why an education matters to me. They are the ones that are on my mind this week as I anticipate next week’s new beginnings.

There’s one more, though, that’s always on my mind. It’s the University of South Carolina’s motto surrounding the seal on my doctoral class ring. It’s a quote from Ovid, “Emollit Mores Nec Sinit Esse Feros,” which translates to “Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel.”

The Story of Angel Falls

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

from “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

This is a story about a weeping pine.

But it’s not just any story. It can’t be just any story, because this isn’t just any weeping pine.

This weeping pine is a special weeping pine. It’s one of a kind. It’s unique.

I bought it about four months ago. Actually, I bought it on March 17. In case you’re wondering why I remember the exact date, here’s why. It was my late partner’s birthday.

I had not planned to buy anything that day. I was just browsing the local nursery’s new arrival of plants, mainly West Coast conifers.

As I walked past one conifer, it looked like a stunning, younger version of a stately, older weeping pine right outside my kitchen door. “Gorgeous!” I thought. “But no need for another one.”

At about the same time, the manager walked past and saw me looking. Lingering. Pondering. Wondering.

“You don’t want to miss out on this one, Dr. Kendrick. It’s super special. We only have two, and they’ll go fast.”

I’ve known John since he was a youngster, when his dad owned the nursery, and I trust him just as implicitly as I trust his dad.

“Oh, yeah?” I teased. “What makes it so special?”

John started telling me all the details, reassuring me that it’s mature size would be perfect for the small area where he knew that I wanted a unique conifer.

I leaned in close to take a closer look at the tag, and as soon as I saw the name–Angel Falls–I knew that this tree was going home with me. It had to go home with me. Aside from being Allen’s birthday, I had written a blog post about him two months earlier, “Honoring an Angel.” But this story is not about Allen. This story is about a special weeping pine.

I had an immediate plan. This tree would become one more focal point in the garden that I had designed for Allen. But, again, this story is not about him. This story is about a special weeping pine.

I had just one concern. Even though the tree was small–no more than three feet tall–it was in a large tub, the size, perhaps, of a bushel basket. I knew that John would help load the tree into my Jeep, but could I manage to unload it alone?

I decided to figure out the logistics after I got the weeping pine home.

And figure it out I did. I stacked bags of mulch below my Jeep’s lowered tailgate. I slid the tubbed weeping pine onto the top bag, and, then I continued stepping it down onto the ground.

From that point forward, I knew that dragging it downhill to its intended destination would be as easy as stepping into the future.

And, for a second, I stepped off the sharp edge of now into the softened expanse of tomorrow. I stood there–looking beyond the spot where I would plant the weeping pine–gazing ahead into years, each stretching beyond the next, further and further and further into the memory of forever.

And there it stood, as majestic and as grand and as unique as I ever dreamt or hoped that it would become: days, months, seasons and years melting into fluid time.

Then, suddenly, a March wind blew me back to my present reality, and I pushed the tub right beside the spot where, tomorrow, I would dig the hole that would become forever to my Angel Falls weeping pine.

The next day, I did the early, chilly morning needful. I dug the hole. I measured it precisely, making certain that it was the perfect width and depth. I added loam to loosen and enrich the soil. And I had my water hose at the ready to give a good soaking once the weeping pine was in place. I wanted to make certain that I did everything within my power to get the weeping pine off to the right start.

Then I locked the unsheathed blade of my utility knife and cut the sides of the tub so that I could free the weeping pine and anchor it to its new earth home.

The heave-ho that I gave was far more than needed. I found myself standing there with the weeping pine mid-air, with little more than a 5-pound ball of clay securing the roots of its foundation, the roots of its future, the roots of my hopes.

Where was the balled and burlapped bundle that I had always seen before whenever I gave a heave-ho to lift a tree from its tub? Where were the tender, wondrous roots pushing through the burlap? Where were the reassuring signs of life?

As I stood there, decades of gardening whispered to me, telling me to take this one of a kind, unique weeping pine back to the nursery and get a refund. The root ball was wrong. All wrong.

But I had dug the hole. I had freed the weeping pine from its tub. And I really wanted that tree in that spot. Now. Forever.

I sighed a sigh of hope, and I planted it. Now it was mine. All the worry about its well-being. All the responsibility of taking care of it. Today. Tomorrow. Beyond. Mine. All mine.

Nonetheless, I was so convinced that my weeping pine was a loser that I stopped by the nursery the next day and told John all about my experience and my misgivings. He was more optimistic than I, but he agreed to put my name on the second weeping pine as a replacement, just in case.

When I drove back home, I stopped beside my weeping pine. It looked stunning with its twisting, green-needled, falling branches contrasted against the fresh mulch.

As I looked, I wondered whether my morning assessment had been too harsh. I wondered whether my morning  conversation with John had been too direct. I wondered whether I had been too stern.

Confident that my assessment was correct and my conversation on target, I drove a little further up the hill and turned left into the driveway.

March melted slowly into April. Every day I visited my weeping pine. I was so proud. I wondered whether my neighbors admired it, too, as they drove past daily.

No one had said a word. Not one neighbor. Not one word. Finally, I asked one neighbor what he thought.

“You just planted it? You’re joking. I thought that it had been there all along.”

I thanked him for what I took to be a compliment. It was a compliment in my mind, because I like my garden plants to look as if they are growing in forever.

It was too early in the season for me to see new growth. But even so it was now my responsibility to water my weeping pine weekly during times with no rain or no snow.  And that’s just what I did.

By mid-May, my world was a mountaintop of spring growth and spring blossoms. Bleeding hearts. Clematis. Daffodils. Dogwood. Peonies.

More important, all of my specimen evergreens were putting out new-growth candles, especially my white pine outside my kitchen door: candles six inches long, if not longer.

Sadly, my Angel Falls looked exactly as it looked the day that I planted it.

“Well,” I thought, “at least its needles are still green.”

I checked, every day, attentively. It became my routine.

By the start of June, something started happening: yellowing, browning needles appeared on the lowest branches of my weeping pine.

Armed with a cell-phone photo, I stopped at the nursery the next day to show John the death that I was living.

He grimaced. “Not good.”

“Yeah. I know. Maybe I should go ahead and replace it with the one you’re holding?”

“Hmmm. Not yet. Try cutting off the dead branches and wait two weeks.”

My weeping pine looked better with the dead branches removed. Actually, it looked rather healthy once again. I was cautiously hopeful.

One of my neighbors agreed, reminding me that my weeping pine was probably in shock just from being transplanted from the West Coast to here.

“But you know,” he said, “It’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. It will all work out the way it’s supposed to work out. That’s how life is.”

Two weeks later, more branches had died.

Armed with more photos, I went back to the nursery.

“Should I give it some fertilizer?”

“That would just stress it more. It’s probably a goner, but let’s wait a couple more weeks, just to see.”

I had never lost a tree before in all my years of gardening. I kept replaying everything that I had done since planting my weeping pine. I couldn’t help but wonder whether what was happening was my fault. What had I done wrong? What could I have done better?

When I weeded the garden where I had given my weeping pine a home, I talked to it, encouragingly and out loud, especially as I sadly cut off more and more branches.

When neighbors walked past, I lowered my voice, hoping that they would lower theirs. I didn’t want my weeping pine to hear them as they bluntly asked whether I had noticed that it was dead. Dead. That’s exactly what they said. I was shocked.

“I’m not so sure. It’s still trying. It’s a fighter. You’ll see.” I know how to put up a front when I need one.

My weeping pine kept fighting, all the while that its branches kept dying.

“How long do I hold on?” I pondered.

Two more weeks passed. My weeping pine was an embarrassment, to me and to neighbors who, by then, didn’t know what to say. Sometimes, saying nothing is the best thing to say.

I resolved to take one final photo, show it to John, and drive back home with the replacement weeping pine.

The next morning, when I got up close to my weeping pine, I witnessed a few short candles, no longer than an inch. Not many, but enough to make me believe that my weeping pine was alive, that it really was fighting. I zoomed in really close on those candles, determined to capture their bright green.

“Dr. Kendrick, you’re holding on to false hope. Let’s get that replacement loaded into your …”

“But look!” I took my fingers and stretched the image as far as John was certain that I had stretched my hopes. “Look at how green those candles are. See? Look. Right here.”

“All right. If you insist. Maybe give it another couple of weeks.”

Every day, I visited my weeping pine, witnessing more and more green candles of life in the midst of more and more brown needles of death.

A little more than a week after that, I was ecstatic when I made my daily visit and discovered that all the green candles all over my weeping pine had unfurled into short, stubby, vibrantly green needles. At this point, my weeping pine was certainly not much of a specimen. In fact, it was just a shadow of what it had been. But it was a livng witness to life’s fierce determination to keep on holding on, against all odds.

By then it was near the end of July. One morning, I stopped by the nursery just to check out their inventory.

John approached and inquired about my weeping pine.

I beamed as I shared the recent turn of events. Beam begets beam.

“Here’s the deal, John. Go ahead and sell the replacement pine that you’ve been holding for me.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m absolutely certain.”

“Okay. I will. One thing’s for sure. If your weeping pine doesn’t make it after all this, at least you have a story.”

“You bet,” I thought, as I walked away. “It’s a story of survival.”