Everybody can play along today. Just recite your favorite poem. I asked people around north Everett if they could recite a poem they recalled from childhood.
People such as Terry Yuhas of Everett, 63, mentioned an old standard: “A peanut sat on a railroad track. His heart was all a-flutter. Round the bend came No 10. Toot, Toot, peanut butter.”
Fine and dandy, but I was looking for more obscure doggerel, such as the one I taught to my three children: “I had a little tea party this afternoon at three. ‘Twas very small, three guests in all, just I, myself and me. Myself ate up the sandwiches, while I drank up the tea. ‘Twas also I who ate the pie and passed the cake to me.”
All of my children can still recite the poem. Brody, my middle son, needed to recite a poem for class while attending Seattle University, and the tea party came to mind.
At American Legion Memorial Park in north Everett, Allison Sicsic, 34, of Everett said she used to know the words to “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” but they escaped her.
Let’s jog our memory about the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Listen my children and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive, Who remembers that famous day and year.”
Dave Cross remembered not only a poem but the author, Shel Silverstein. Spinning his 2-year-old grandson, Ethan Pewitt, on a playground ride, Cross said: “I will not play at tug o’ war. I’d rather play at hug o’ war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug. Where everyone kisses. And everyone grins. And everyone cuddles and everyone wins.”
Then he launched into another favorite by Robert Louis Stevenson: “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”
I found Lidiya Dorogastina, 49, of Everett eating grapes while waiting for a bus. Sure, she said, she could recite dozens of poems, all in Russian. And she did. I didn’t understand a word, but loved the rhythm of her voice.
“My mother, sister and I made poems by ourselves,” Dorogastina said. “In school, we had to read and remember. Teachers would say, ‘Remember poem,’ and we got graded.”
She said she loved and memorized the work of Russian 19th-century author Aleksandr Pushkin.
Thinking back to 12 years old, Julie Santos, 43, remembered being a big hit at a middle school talent show sharing something she wrote. The Everett Community College student set many of her poems to song, including one with these opening words: “Janna come on, give it a try, show me you love me, live or let die. She was sweet sixteen, had a life of pleasure, and then one day, came her so-called treasure. He was constantly running, drunk every night, high in the sky and ready to fight.”
At the end of the poem, Janna dies after battling an addiction.
Heavy.
I found William Bunce, 50, of Stanwood at the Everett marina. Boy, did he understand what I wanted. Bunce bounced right into a poem he wrote in the second grade: “I have a little dog, his name is Fritz. He’s not a shepherd, or a spitz. He’s just a little dog, who sort of walks with a jog. He sometimes barks and sometimes not, but he’s the only dog I’ve got.”
He remembers his mother helped him rhyme a word with Fritz.
Bunce was so enthused with the topic, he offered: “Spring is swell, I like it a lot. The flowers smell, and it ain’t hot.”
At the Everett Senior Center, Sadie Comers, 53, of Everett was the most impressive of the group.
She did the entire “Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both, And be one traveler, long I stood, And looked down one as far as I could, To where it bent in the undergrowth.
“Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there, Had worn them really about the same.
“And both that morning equally lay, In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
“I have a different kind of love for things,” she said.
Walking out of the Everett Senior Center, I mentioned my mission to Nancy Fischer, 61, of Everett. One step later she recited Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman”:
“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees. The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor. And the highwayman came riding-riding-riding. The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.”
That beat my tea party all to pieces, but through the decades, my old ditty did its job.
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.
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