Word Raccoon wants to know what the big deal is. Why am I feverishly hunting through my writing room’s closets, hoping to find my extra books? 

“We’re going to participate in the alumni author’s event this year at, duh, our alma mater,” I tell her, but she waves at me like that tells her nothing. I know she wants to ask me why I’m doing it this year and I haven’t before, but I don’t have a good answer except that I was invited and I said yes.

And maybe because I’m hoping to see a fellow classmate to whom I owe an apology. 

BTW, I can’t find the books. I know I have a box of both of my novels somewhere because although I sold a boatload at the launch of my second one, I vividly remember carrying a box back to the vehicle after into the cold air, which was welcome after having been in that overcrowded bar. 

(Not complaining! It was the best launch party ever! Even if one of my friends and I literally could not find enough space to dance. We just swayed in place.)  

That classmate, now also an author? I haven’t seen him since the 1990’s, but we were in class one day and during a heated discussion about Whitman’s work, when (at my demand that someone tell me what the hell the poet meant by a certain navel-gazing line), he said “I just let it wash over me and I just absorb it.” 

Well this-age Drema understands what my classmate meant. And, possibly, what Whitman meant.

Twenty-year-old Drema took that as a clever, smug, attempt to mask ignorance and a lack of true engagement with the text. 

I’ve always been an “if you don’t know, say you don’t know, and maybe we can figure it out together,” kind of person. Literature is no casual thing to me. Don’t try to bullshit me. 

What was the line younger me shot back at that unsuspecting classmate? 

(I’m covering my face in shame. Word Raccoon is laughing. Thank GOD I didn’t let loose Word Raccoon in class.)

“What are you, a sponge?” 

Dear Reader. I did. I said that to that young, budding poet. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies. He’d even given me his poetry collection to read, although (how symbolic is this?) it ended up at the bottom of a stack of my bridal magazines and I found it literally stuck to one a few weeks after I married. 

I have no idea how that happened, and I was horrified when I found it. I had never meant to treat someone’s poetry so disrespectfully, even if we had occasionally sparred in class. 

I pitched the magazines that I had felt ambivalent about anyway. (I still think big, elaborate weddings are ridiculous wastes of money unless you’re just rolling in it.)

So if I see him this weekend, I’d like to apologize for my mean comment. I’d like to apologize for not getting back with him on his poetry, although I think I heard that he’s converted to fiction. (LOL.)  

Although his comment could have been better delivered, he was young too, and now I think he might have been trying to literally explain how he personally handled poetry that seems impenetrable. I should have thanked him or at least not gone after him for that.

But at the time, I felt as if, too, Whitman was being let off the hook for something that I felt was his error, not mine: inaccessibility. 

Ironically, while finishing re-reading Oliver’s excellent poetry handbook yesterday, I came across a passage from Leaves of Grass, and it was so lovely I stopped and took a photo of it. I read it, re-read it, and although I still wasn’t feeling well, I found myself riffing on it. Agreeing, disagreeing, asking myself if the places where he was wrong factually were okay because he was making a valid point about humanity. (God, that makes me sound like I think I’m better than Whitman or any other poet. No WAY! I am just learning the craft by dissection, questioning the boundaries, I swear.)

Probably a more pressing matter (besides finding those damn books!) would be details about this event. I filled out a form that expressed my interest and what I would need at the event, but other than the day it will be held, I have no further information. I think I may need to send an email. 

That’s my task for the day.