A Blast from the Past
January 23rd, 2010
On the recommendation of a friend, I opened a Live Journal account in 2005. I thought about that account today and as I logged in and perused my past life I was surprised to find that I only posted three entries. I say surprised because my memories of Live Journal are much bigger than three entries. It was one of my first forays into social media before social media become my job. It was a way to connect with new friends that I’ve now fallen out of touch with. It was, in a lot of ways, a prelude to that awkward phase between adolescence and death.
My first Live Journal post comes from September 14th, 2005, and I don’t remember what was going on that day but thanks to the Internet’s long memory I know that I was listening to The Good Life’s Black Out and that my mood was best described by an emoticon with a thought bubble. I was writing about the author of a poem I’d heard earlier that day on the Writer’s Almanac. The 2010 Zach is more than a little taken with a 2005 Zach who, thinking of someone he’d never met, would rather imagine her than Google her. It was very English major of me, and while I’m generally pretty happy with what I am I can’t help but wish I was a little more like that.
I’m including that post in its entirety, because despite the syrupy, pubescent melodrama more at home in a Smith’s song than in my present life, I still think that this poem is beautiful and relevant—especially after a week of thoughts, prayers, and donations sent to Haiti: “We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father. We clean up his disasters … afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs they could damn us unawares.”
Somewhere in Pittsburgh there is a woman named Julia Kasdorf. I don’t know her, but I imagine that she’s one of those willowy, long-haired types you sit next to on the subway because of their hygenic appearance and quiet manners. She has a canvas bag at her feet. It is full of books whose spines you can’t quite read and the cloth is at that comfortable place between the sterility of its shopping mall inception and its future disposal in some kitchen’s garbage can. But now she seems contented, and is someone who, without words, establishes herself as one of ‘your kind of people.’
Ms. Kasdorf writes poems. Her poems are the kind that don’t fight for attention, but quietly wait until there is a hole in your life. Then they unassumingly crawl into that empty space and expand like sponges into your hurt, patching it over and filling it back in. I’m typically not this melodramatic, but here’s her poem ‘Mennonites,’ as featured on the Writer’s Almanac. All things considered, I think that it’s appropriate.
We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other’s feet
twice a year and eat the Lord’s Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents—children then—
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
’til we’re drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.