the other dana guthrie
July 4, 2009
I was spying on looking in on my friend Jeremy Halinen over on Facebook this morning. It’s the lazy person’s way of maintaining a friendship with someone. Rather than calling them up, or even emailing them, you look at their recent status messages to get a sense of what’s going on in their lives. Jeremy’s status messages never fail to entertain. Today, he’s asking people to “bing” themselves — meaning to look their own names up on Microsoft’s new search engine, bing.com, and he wisely includes the warning, “Don’t go on a bing binge.”
“Why not?” I thought. (I had to think this because I was not having an actual conversation with Jeremy, simply spying on paying careful attention to his status messages.)
My vanity search on Bing led me to a post about another Dana Guthrie, one I am very familiar with. He lives in my hometown, and I used to receive phone calls for him on my private line when I was a kid. I would pick up my little pink rotary-dial princess phone and some gruff-sounding person on the other line — obviously a grown-up and not one of my prepubescent playmates — would ask for Dana. “I’m Dana,” I would say. “Dana Guthrie,” they would ask, quizzically. “I’m Dana Guthrie,” I would chirp with a voice that hadn’t yet caught up with my age.
It always scared me to talk to these grown-ups when all I wanted to do was deconstruct the latest MTV video or squeal about how cute some boy was with my friends. Grown-up voices are intimidating, even at their most syrupy. I could hear the years of drinking and smoking — of pain, love and loss — in those voices. Voices that weren’t unlike my father’s and mother’s. And it only got worse with advancing age, which I learned from spending time with my parents’ older friends; the voice eventually breaking down to a fistful of aggregate in the throat, and the throat in turn reduced to nothing more than a faulty tumbler that never manages to polish the rocks it encases.
I wasn’t scared enough to hang up the phone, though, or to not answer these strangers’ inquiries. This was before the days of telling children never to answer the phone; of getting on the internet and searching for sexual predators in the area, pinpointing their houses and avoiding those houses on walks in the neighborhood; of parents figuratively and literally tethering children to themselves.
Back then, a tornado warning was just a tornado warning — an occasion for dragging out the mattresses to catch glass turned to shards and two by fours turned to stakes. I actually looked forward to the warnings and crossed my fingers every time it began to thunder. A tornado warning meant we’d get some solid family time in, as my mother rounded up the candles and my father tuned the battery-operated radio to the AM news station.
There’s nothing that says, “We’re a family, and we’re in this together” like collectively hoisting a full-sized mattress off the spare bed frame, dragging it down the long hall and using it to block the hall closet doorway. Nothing like my mother and I breathing stale air inside that closet, blankets and candles at the ready. Nothing like my father standing in the middle of the living room looking out the front windows for whirling dervishes in the sky, radio in one hand, cigarette in the other — our lookout, our protector.
Our family always functioned at its best, each of our roles most clearly defined, when a natural disaster was imminent. In these moments, as the sirens growled through the air, we felt we could take on, and survive, anything. If not, we’d go down as one. And in the wreckage, we would appear as we should: caught in the moment of familial togetherness, like the bodies we studied in history class at school, the ones captured in lava at Pompeii. A child curled into the chest of its mother. A father leaning over the two, as if saying a final blessing.
Now those same weather sirens suffocate towns and cities with different meanings. Amber alerts warn us that another child has gone missing, that a family has already been devastated. We find ourselves looking up and out, over the sky, into the entire urban landscape, everything in our line of sight a potential crime scene, every adult a potential criminal, every child potentially criminalized.
If I were a child now, and someone called for the other Dana Guthrie, I doubt I would talk to them. But this was the early ’80s, so I told those people I’d never met who I was. At some point, a dialogue must have opened up because I learned that the Dana Guthrie they were looking for was an adult male, and a police officer. Because children love to step out of their own skin and imagine themselves as others, especially those elusive, complicated and intriguing people known as adults, I of course had no problem stepping into the role of being the other Dana Guthrie. Wise. Strong. Important. Brave. A working man who could take any perpetrator down — not that I knew the word perpetrator yet.
Knowing that there was another Dana Guthrie out there, and that he lived in my own town, made me feel the importance of plurality. (Was this how royalty felt when using the royal we? We are Dana Guthrie. We live in Norman, Oklahoma. We have telephones. We have callers.) Knowing the other Dana Guthrie was different from me in so many ways made him even more intriguing. He was the male to my female. The age to my youth. The productivity to my aimless meanderings and mishaps. The gun to the wad of gum in my hair. The dark blue uniform to my Ocean Pacific. The cop car to my ten speed. The bullet-proof vest to my training bra.
I even talked to him on the phone once. (Although that could be one of those childhood flights of fancy that gets recast over the years as fact. For instance, I was convinced until I was about 20 years old that a small decorative box my parents displayed in our living room was an item my father unearthed while tilling the garden one year, a surprise gift from the earth. Even after my mother told me that wasn’t the case, it took a few more years for my mind to distance itself from that misconception. But let’s just move forward with the narrative here, assuming that I actually did talk to Dana Guthrie.)
He must have been getting phone calls for me as well, as baffled by the squeak-toy voices on the other end of the line as I was by the gravel-road voices on the other end of mine. As a police officer, I could see how he would want to get to the bottom of that. So he looked me up. How important I felt! To be called by the other Dana Guthrie, the adult one! The respectable one! To be talking to him directly as opposed to through his friends!
At some point, I stopped having a separate line. There was an issue with a couple of girls giving me a hard time, prank calling me and threatening to beat me with chains behind Stubbeman Village. Sometimes when they called, they didn’t say anything at all. They just jangled chains then hung up. Where was my police officer when I needed him? Why couldn’t these girls make a mistake and call the other Dana Guthrie — he’d surely set them straight. When I asked my father to have my phone line disconnected, the occasional calls that kept me tethered to the other Dana Guthrie stopped, and he receded as my mind became occupied with other role-playing games.
But when I binged myself today, there he was, recipient of the Crime Stoppers Award. I did a little more sleuthing and saw that his work includes investigations into cases involving the disappearances of children. That makes the other Dana Guthrie a hero. I am honored to have gown up in the same town as him, and to know that he is helping others look out and out in their communities, and to see less aftermath, more clear skies.
read write poem #81: human/animal image prompt
July 1, 2009
Carousel
An otherwise ordinary day,
blades of grass leaning
into the light. Sky meets surface
only at the horizon. My hair is pocked
with dew burns. My vision folds in
like dry-edged petals.
The spinning starts, a slow, sickening
rotation. Men with the heads of kangaroos,
bison and zebras force their way
inside my legs. I climb onto their backs
and ride them, one by one, not sure
if they are humans under the spell
of animals or vice versa.
Whose spell am I under, fur between
my fingers, skin against my thighs?
When will the looped circus music stop?
I toss my head back and feel myself
opening under the sun.
* * *
Process Notes
I wrote this piece based on Read Write Prompt #81, and I have to admit that entering into the image was a little harder than I anticipated it would be. Partly that’s because I’ve been ill since last Thursday, and I’ve had a migraine since then as well, so I haven’t felt up for much of anything, including writing poetry. But a giant yay! to Read Write Poem for making me get my ass in gear and at least eek something out today in time for this week’s Get Your Poem On post.
I am not sure if I will keep this piece in its current form. I have to give that some thought. I might even expand it. Who knows.
Oh, and here’s a little bit of information about carousels. I was lazy with my research because of the migraine, so I only consulted Wikipedia. This information didn’t overtly make its way into the poem, but I am sharing it anyway, since I find it interesting. You can click on the link to read more.
things that get said in workshops
July 1, 2009
“It’s your story, your voice, your choices, and I don’t want to question them, but why these words?”
(Click on the excerpt to read the piece from McSweeney’s in its entirety.)
read write poem #80: telling all
June 24, 2009
Where Did Your Mother Live?
– after Barbara Jane Reyes writing after Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan
Where did your mother live?
In Oklahoma.
Where did your mother live?
Lying on the grass, head resting on the neck
of a horse who was also lying on the grass.
Where did your mother live?
The back of a girl’s bicycle, candy
cigarette in her mouth, her older brother peddling.
Where did your mother live?
A photo the size of my thumb, both her arms caught
in movement, mouth open, smiling
at someone off camera.
Behind her, a window and waning crescent moon
drawn on a cardboard backdrop.
Where did your mother live?
Behind the barn.
In the pasture behind the barn, touching
the soft sides of animals who never spoke when spoken to.
Where did your mother live?
A Headrick School photo dated 1941, blond hair
twisted into a knot and held in place with a dark clip.
Where did your mother live?
In California, where her family moved
during World War II, into a neighborhood
Japanese Americans had been forced
out of when they were rounded up
for internment camps.
Where did your mother live?
Back in Oklahoma, in a kitchen with her parents.
Corky the cockatiel calling “hello!” from his cage
as her father poured the day’s first cup of coffee.
Where did your mother live?
Baseball caps. Short shorts. One-piece swimming suits.
Penny loafers. Pillbox hats. Leather pumps.
Falsies the shape and color of tipis.
Where did your mother live?
The beauty shop, hair being curled into a flip,
a 1956 Saturday Evening Post calendar on the wall
over the hair dresser’s shoulder.
Where did your mother live?
Inside my father’s crooning voice.
Inside his pressed shirts and pleated pants.
Inside his handkerchief folded and tucked in his breast pocket.
Inside his promises of gazebos and international travel,
of circle drives and a world free from democrats.
Where did your mother live?
At the club, where she begged my father
to dance after Irv Wagner played the spoons.
And when they danced, the light fell
over them like a soft frame.
Where did your mother live?
At the lake, my father’s shadow darkening her pale body.
Where did your mother live?
A black-and-white geometric print dress, disco ball
earrings and strappy silver heels;
Bloody Mary in one hand, menthol cigarette in the other.
Where did your mother live?
The living room where my father’s heart failed.
Where did your mother live?
In my father’s absence.
Where did your mother live?
At the dining room table. At the dining room table
with her hand on a remote control. With her hand on a drink.
With her hand on the phone, waiting for it to ring.
Where did your mother live?
In Oklahoma.
* * *
Process Notes
I was visiting Barbara Jane Reyes’ site when I saw her poem “One Question, Several Answers,” which she wrote after poet Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan. This striking piece deals with the narrator’s father by asking the same meditative/nearly obsessive question: “Where did your father live,” to which the narrator provides various answers throughout the poem.
Even though this week’s prompt at Read Write Poem — brought to us by RWP community co-manager Kristen McHenry — was to write about what we have never told our mothers, I was so captivated by Reyes’ poem that I decided to imitate it as my contribution to RWP this week. I changed my question to “Where did your mother live.” Even though the piece doesn’t deal with what I’ve never told her, it does deal with her, perhaps even touching on what I’ve never seen in her or what I haven’t stopped to see in a while.
Like all poems, this piece isn’t strictly autobiographical (or in this case, biographical). It’s got a narrator, and that narrator is doing the talking, not me per se. However, this particular poem does come pretty close to being autobiographical. I used old photos of my mother as the basis for many of the images in the piece.
And in case anyone wants to see Irv Wagner play the spoons, check out this YouTube video:
my weekly microblog digest
June 22, 2009
- That’s it. No more robots in the living room. Period. #
- Crap. I just got a business card stuck to my lower lip. Oh wait. Now it’s stuck to my upper lip, too. #
- Sometimes when I’m thinking, I use air quotes around certain words. I wonder what that’s about. #
- Using my mouse wheel actually has an intensely calming effect on me. Who knew the way to serenity was through my index finger. #
- Someone just made their way to my site after searching for the term “words to express pregnancy.” How about this: “I’m pregnant.” #
- Someone just made their way to my site after searching for the term “A bottle of bubbly makes naughty girls giggle.” #
- Someone just made their way to my site after searching for the phrase, “what slang do cops call it when they take a nap at the squad.” #
- My husband tries to sneak little robots into every room, as if I won’t notice. #
- How is it possible for my stress level to be directly proportional to the number of tabs I have open on my internet browser? #
- I just saw a drapery rod finial out of the corner of my eye and mistook it for a wasp’s nest. #
- It has been decided: The hermit crabs are coming with us on vacation. #
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. — Ray Bradbury
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
