At a local library used-book sale recently I picked up a small Peter Pauper Press volume, Japanese Haiku. An inscription inside the front indicates that it was a 1967 Christmas gift from "Jean" to "Linda", who met at "Camp Hitaga" and became friends. (Where are they now? Did the book end up in her estate when Linda passed away? Or was it simply misplaced and donated to the library inadvertently?)

That little book brought back some haiku-related memories of a friendship of mine from about the same time. Joe Walling and I were students together at J. H. Reagan High School in Austin, Texas. We were comrades but parted ways at graduation, when he went to Rice University and I stayed nearer to home at the University of Texas. But a year later I transferred to Rice, and Joe invited me to share an apartment with him and a couple of other students. We exchanged banter and wordplay constantly. I remember commenting, at dinner when I had cooked green peas and one of my roommates refused to eat them: "All we are saying, is give peas a chance!" (OK, so maybe you had to be there, in the early 1970's, for it to work. Sorry....)

In a more poetic vein, Joe Walling occasionally tried his hand at verse. His best haiku was beautiful, striking, and cannot be repeated here — since, besides issues of copyright, its imagery is rather too explicit for this journal. Joe's effort begins:

and goes, hmmm, up from there. Typically sophomoric, in other words ... but hey, we were all sophomores at that time.

(see ^zhurnal 29 September 2000, CollegeCollage1, for other notes on the Rice experience.)

Sunday, July 15, 2001 at 05:36:42 (EDT) = 2001-07-15

TopicPoetry - TopicHumor - TopicPersonalHistory

(correlates: Gross Anatomy, AnnotationPunctuation, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, ...)