once upon a smarty pants

You know how you stumble upon old pictures of yourself that you didn't know existed? and you're amazed at how young and thin you looked? It's very much like finding old Advanced Composition homework assignments. You can't believe how sharp your wit once was and how arrogant you were. Please to enjoy: my response to a tea hosted by the PLNU literature department, featuring special guest Mary Crow and held in Culbertson Hall, which had pretty much the best views on campus. My apologies to Ms. Crow, who i hope does not make a habit of Googling her name. It should be noted that i presently have no memories of any field trip to the paper factory, nor do i know if there is one in Shasta County, and i only have snatches of memory involving fish food in a gumball machine.
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I never thought an overcast ocean could be so interesting, but behind Mary Crow, the poet laureate of Colorado, the gray-on-blue expanse beyond the soccer field held my rapt attention from the second I looked up from my equally fascinating plate of cheese cubes. So flat and dull was the sky that I imagined I could bounce a rubber ball off of it like so many hours spend playing Wally Ball in fourth grade. Fourth grade… what an enthralling subject of thought; I could spend forever thinking about fourth grade. Mary Crow stopped murmuring long enough to take a sip of water and the break in sound pulled me out of my reverie to remind me that there was a famous poet speaking. By her tedious presentation it appeared that poetry, to her, was equivalent to using a Q-tip: you should try to do it once a day, everyone has a different technique, Q-tips are nice. In looking around at other members of the audience, I observed flowers, guitars and waves being detailed on notebook pages and the backs of binders and even a few decorated cheese cubes. One student was endeavoring to pick all the seeds off a strawberry using the cap of her pen.
My interest piqued when Mary Crow read some of her poems, most of which were styled similarly to her charisma-less method of public rhetoric, but well written. However, lapsing back onto the subject of translation, she sent out me on the ocean again to further contemplate fourth grade. In fourth grade Mr. Avila took my class to the fish hatchery and the paper factory, and I began to wonder if Mary Crow has ever been to a fish hatchery. Surely, in all her worldwide travels and experiences, she had come across a hatchery. At our fish hatchery you could buy fish food out of a gumball machine for a quarter and throw it in the makeshift ponds. All the fish freak out and thrash around in competition for a tiny handful of pellets. Maybe if Mary Crow read a poem about thrashing, greedy salmon the girl in front of me would have stayed awake. Perhaps if she had presented her good tips and well written poems with at least some of the passion of a fourth grade Wally Ball champion I wouldn’t have watched the ice melt in my tea. If the poet laureate of Colorado and accomplished translator had shown a fraction of vigor in regards to her life’s work, maybe the problem she addressed – poetry being underappreciated – would vanish into the gray-on-blue Pacific horizon.