The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poem: "The Junior High School Band Concert" by David Wagoner, from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. © University of Illinois Press, 1999. Reprinted with permission.(buy now)

The Junior High School Band Concert

When our semi-conductor
Raised his baton, we sat there
Gaping at Marche Militaire,
Our mouth-opening number.
It seemed faintly familiar
(We'd rehearsed it all that winter),
But we attacked in such a blur,
No army anywhere
On its stomach or all fours
Could have squeezed though our cross fire.

I played cornet, seventh chair
Out of seven, my embouchure
A glorified Bronx cheer
Through that three-keyed keyhole stopper
And neighborhood window slammer
Where mildew fought for air
At every exhausted corner,
My fingering still unsure
After scaling it for a year
Except on the spit-valve lever.

Each straight-faced mother and father
Rested his moral fiber
Against our traps and slurs
And the inadvertent whickers
Paradiddled by our snares,
And when the brass bulled forth
A blare fit to horn over
Jericho two bars sooner
Than Joshua's harsh measures,
They still had the nerve to stare.

By the last lost chord, our director
Looked older and soberer.
No doubt, in mind's ear
Some band somewhere
In some Music of some Sphere
Was striking a note as pure
As the wishes of Franz Schubert,
But meanwhile here we were:
A lesson in everything minor,
Decomposing our first composer.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the poet and novelist Louise Erdrich (books by this author), born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). Her father was of German descent, her mother a Chippewa Indian. She grew up in North Dakota, where her parents were both teachers at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school.

She studied creative writing at Dartmouth. After college, she decided not to go into teaching as she had planned. Instead, she wrote poetry, and supported herself hoeing sugar beets, picking cucumbers, babysitting, life guarding, selling fried chicken, waitressing and short order cooking. She was even once a girl with a flag at a construction site on the highway.

She switched from poetry to fiction. One of her first short stories began to grow in her mind and became her first novel Love Medicine, about two Indian families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. She created those two families and then went on to write several more novels about them and their imaginary reservation in North Dakota, including The Beet Queen, The Bingo Palace, Tracks, and others.

Louise Erdrich said, "Writing became a way for me to talk about myself—or a character—in a really personal, surprising manner without any embarrassment. I was brought up to be an incredibly nice person, but not everything I wanted to say was nice."

It's the birthday of the linguist Deborah Tannen (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1945). She caught the mumps when she was a kid, which damaged her hearing, and she compensated for this hearing loss by paying very close attention to the way people talked. She was drawn into linguistics as a study and wrote her book, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was a best-seller in 1990.

Deborah Tannen said, "Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball."

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