I was on the road performing poems and conducting writing workshops for more than 30 years. It never got easier leaving home.
January and February were the loneliest months. The days were growing longer, but it was the coldest time of year.
In the fall and spring, I carried a bicycle in the back of my poetry pickup. After school visits I’d ride around towns sightseeing. That wasn’t possible during the bottom of winter.
The best times were being in front of an audience. The worst were long hours in hotels or motels, and eating alone in restaurants.
Snow days just kept piling up like drifts along the roads. The hardest were away from home. Thank you public libraries and malls.
One January I got lucky and spent a week in Portland, Oregon. It was below zero back home. A teacher asked what it was like when it was that cold. I told her the air hurts.
The next week I was in Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country. It was a balmy 70 degrees.
I’d spoken to some Lafayette teachers at a summer conference. Saturday they attended my Stone Circle and loved it. So, they created their own.
But they don’t have boulders in south Louisiana. The school arranged some logs and called it Cypress Circle.
They flew me down and paid me to do poetry writing workshops and host their Cypress Circle. I visited Cajun country four winters.
After the first January they brought me down during Mardi Gras. I have a Dr. Seuss top hat full of fancy beads school kids gave me.
I became good friends with the daughter of Felix Richard, a master accordionist and famous force of the Cajun music renaissance. She’s like royalty.
I danced with her at the Liberty Theater west of Lafayette. It’s the Grand Ole Opry of Cajun music with live Saturday night radio broadcasts. I traded humorous poems and stories with her husband, a Cajun comedian.
After that first January, I flew home to reality. The next week I worked around Manistee in below zero temperatures.
My lowest traveling experience happened during a late January. I had scheduled three days of speaking at schools in southwest Michigan. But all schools were closed because of a cold snap.
With windshield factors it was 45 to 50 degrees below zero. I was stranded in a cheap hotel on the south side of Benton Harbor for three days. The only thing to do was watch TV, and read “Catcher in the Rye” for the second time. It’s not a very cheery book.
For breaks I’d walked across the frozen parking lot to browse the aisles in a big box store, or eat at the restaurant next door. On the third miserable morning my wife called to say our heating pipes were freezing up. I canceled and drove home through a landscape that looked like Siberia.
After thawing the water pipe behind my desk, I wrote this month’s poem. It’s a sequel to Max Ellison’s, “October.”
The next week it warmed up to 20 degrees. The air didn’t hurt anymore.