Letter to Emporia
Dear David and Buddy—
Please don’t believe everything I write—
Whether it’s imploring midwestern noir poetics
Or being ensconced now in new Kenyon Heights
Miss Anita B. Rice died in 1994, of course—
There’s no way she could be living now with me now
Except in my midwestern noir fictional fantasy—
It’s nice you were able to visit her back then
At the Presbyterian retirement home though
One’s perception I suppose of those incredible—
Midwestern monolithic personalities back then
With the looming Easter Island image of Bloxom
Standing there at that same third floor door—
Greeting us with his continuous grimace back
Then each morning like he’d done for centuries
Photos of Wood as football coach back in 1938—
All of them standing there against the brick wall
Of the western EHS façade below his class window
Teaching in the same classroom back in the ‘40s—
When my mother walked those same hallways
And sat at those same scarred bolted-down desks
It wasn’t just plane geometry Wood preached—
It was everything else under the sun including
The fact that Hispanics were surely doomed
Holding all those generations not so enthralled—
As he was with his high-toned lecturing voice
His features gnarled like gargoyles from Chartres
“Somewhere in Kansas the sun is shining—
But it’s not shining down here on Emporia today”
Was like his continuous rant and by-line message
And he was probably true as was Anita Rice—
Saying daily “I’m simply appalled, my dear” when
Nobody could answer her American History questions
That Wood was seemingly racist was bad enough—
But he was also downgrading and misogynist toward
Budding young women scholars like Connie Leonhart
Who won a National Merit Scholarship to Stanford—
There in Palo Alto like Larry Ballard to MIT but that
Was something we all had to put up with back then
I doubt if a teacher like Wood Bloxom with attitude—
Could get away with what he opined those mornings
To us his captive audience of denigrated youngsters
But that was then from another generation—
Can you imagine being nailed down all those years
To one class of dummies after another?
No wonder Wood and Anita were cynical I suppose—
And yet it was a job like his wife there at Walnut
Rice, Bloxom, Price, Parker all of them gone now
Being lock-step captives since Walnut Elementary—
All the way up through EHS and perhaps KSTC
Surely it was a rather unique social situation?
Growing up that way with a group of people that—
From Emporia who would’ve just been strangers
Had it not been for such a unique school system?
No wonder buildings like Lowther and EHS—
Standing lonely like Neo-Classical Temples there
On West Sixth Avenue could be so very haunting
And the YMCA across the street with its pool—
Basketball court, juke box and dancing room
Torn down now and just a forlorn parking lot
So much of Emporia history gone now like—
The Hood Mansion on State Street where
Marion Howard the Spanish teacher lived
Me and my divorced mother in a little shack—
Across the street on Seventh Avenue just up
From Roberts-Barnett-Blue Funeral Home
How gaunt and gothic the Hood Mansion—
Standing there in the Midwestern moonlight
Reminding of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” mansion
And yet it had its own Emporia history—
With Major Hood from the Civil War days
Cattleman mover & shaker bankster lord
The gone First Christian Church on Exchange—
Byzantine with its moody domes and its basement
Smelling of some kind of strange incense there
Baptized but not really knowing why it was—
That my County Commissioner grandfather and
G.A.R. grandmother insisted I get dunked then
Norton Hall on Twelfth on the KSTC campus—
Where I stood enthralled gazing horrified at
The bottled babies embalmed in formaldehyde
Vernon Sheffield coming to my comfort back—
Then when he was a math professor, hearing me
Sobbing forlornly there by the display cabinets
There but for the grace of God I could’ve been—
Bottled in bug-eyed perpetuity staring out at
The passer-bys peering at the dead embryos
Sheffield playing Chopin for me on the piano—
Soothing my shocked adolescent impressionable
Mind back then, his recitals were inspiring
