Friday, April 18, 2008
Earthquake?!?
I was woken up at around 6:40 this morning to the bed lightly shaking. I thought it was the cat, but Pandora was downstairs. Turns out a 5.2 earthquake all the way in Illinois made it all the way to Columbus. Pros slept through it, heavy sleeper that he is, but BOY was he excited by the news of the tremor.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Once Upon a Time, Part 1
This is a story that popped into my head sideways. I'll be posting what I have a little at a time in the hopes that I'll decide where to take it next.
We were twelve, my sister Emily and I. It was early August, and the heat draped on our skin with beads of sweat and mud. We were too young to go to the cotillions with Mother and too old to throw dirt clods with the neighborhood kids, so we stuck together for company. This was okay, since Mother taught us that we’d been born together, so we might as well stick together. The neighborhood kids also couldn’t get over that we were two girls that looked exactly alike, so they tended to be a little distant with us.
I could never understand how anyone could mistake the two of us. As far as I was concerned, Emily was the pretty one. She had a pretty that came from deep inside her and radiated across her face. Mother said that she was graceful, but to me, that was what made Emily pretty. I was the one with my nose in a volume of Grimm Brothers or Hans Christian Andersen. It didn’t make me “the smart one”, just the one who looked for mermaids in the lake and fairies in the trees. Emily didn’t laugh for making her search with me, but maybe that’s because there was nothing in our reality that was as much fun as my fantasies. Mother never questioned my attachment to these stories because she knew Daddy used to read them to us. Emily would fall asleep after the first page, but I would stay awake, begging for the next chapter. Daddy left one night while we were sleeping, but he gave me his books and Emily his watch and wedding band before he closed our door for the last time.
Emily sat underneath the tree I was trying to climb. She had picked Black-Eyed Susans on our walk to the lake and was braiding their stems into a wreath. She barely needed to touch the flowers; they arranged themselves because Emily wanted them that way. That was part of her grace making everything pretty like her. My hands were quickly blistered from the effort of the climb up the sharp bark, and I was thankful I’d worn jeans instead of short, or my knees would have bled into the wood.
The image of giving my blood to the tree suddenly caught in my mind. “Hey, if I pricked my finger and fed three drops to the tree, do you think the dryad in it would wake up?”
“Dryad? I can’t remember, what’s that?” Emily looked up at me, but her fingers continued to lure the flowers into place.
“Dryads are forest nymphs, kind of like fairies. I read about them in Daddy’s Bullfinch’s Mythology.” I scrambled to a thick branch to catch my breath. “They can turn into trees when they want to hide from satyrs chasing them. Satyrs are half man, half goat, I think.”
I watched her turn this thought in her head. “Wow, I’d run from them too, I’d bet.” Her hands slowed. “Do they have goat’s heads or legs?”
“They have human heads and chests, but from the waist down is all goat, so they run really fast. Nymphs can run too, but dryads can turn themselves into trees so they don’t have to run.”
“That’s clever of them.” She held the completed wreath between her slender fingers. “This would be a perfect crown for a dryad, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded, “It would, but only as long as you didn’t pick the flowers from the trees they’re hiding in. It would be like pulling off one of their fingers.”
“Eeew, Sarah!”
“It’s true.” I tried to bring the exact story to the front of my head. “A woman picked a flower from a tree that was really a dryad in hiding. The dryad was so mad that she turned the woman into a tree and wouldn’t turn her back.”
Emily’s forehead creased in a frown. “That isn’t fair. Did the tree have a sign that said, ‘Warning: Dryad’? I’m sure the woman didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
I shrugged and ran my hands along the bark. “I didn’t make up the story. It’s the way things were. It just doesn’t happen as often now that it isn’t ‘once upon a time’.”
“Is that why people don’t believe the stories as much as they used to? Because ‘once upon a time’ was so long ago?” She looked up at me while placing the wreath on her own head.
“Once upon a time was probably a much better time for the dryads, the satyrs and everyone else.”
We were twelve, my sister Emily and I. It was early August, and the heat draped on our skin with beads of sweat and mud. We were too young to go to the cotillions with Mother and too old to throw dirt clods with the neighborhood kids, so we stuck together for company. This was okay, since Mother taught us that we’d been born together, so we might as well stick together. The neighborhood kids also couldn’t get over that we were two girls that looked exactly alike, so they tended to be a little distant with us.
I could never understand how anyone could mistake the two of us. As far as I was concerned, Emily was the pretty one. She had a pretty that came from deep inside her and radiated across her face. Mother said that she was graceful, but to me, that was what made Emily pretty. I was the one with my nose in a volume of Grimm Brothers or Hans Christian Andersen. It didn’t make me “the smart one”, just the one who looked for mermaids in the lake and fairies in the trees. Emily didn’t laugh for making her search with me, but maybe that’s because there was nothing in our reality that was as much fun as my fantasies. Mother never questioned my attachment to these stories because she knew Daddy used to read them to us. Emily would fall asleep after the first page, but I would stay awake, begging for the next chapter. Daddy left one night while we were sleeping, but he gave me his books and Emily his watch and wedding band before he closed our door for the last time.
Emily sat underneath the tree I was trying to climb. She had picked Black-Eyed Susans on our walk to the lake and was braiding their stems into a wreath. She barely needed to touch the flowers; they arranged themselves because Emily wanted them that way. That was part of her grace making everything pretty like her. My hands were quickly blistered from the effort of the climb up the sharp bark, and I was thankful I’d worn jeans instead of short, or my knees would have bled into the wood.
The image of giving my blood to the tree suddenly caught in my mind. “Hey, if I pricked my finger and fed three drops to the tree, do you think the dryad in it would wake up?”
“Dryad? I can’t remember, what’s that?” Emily looked up at me, but her fingers continued to lure the flowers into place.
“Dryads are forest nymphs, kind of like fairies. I read about them in Daddy’s Bullfinch’s Mythology.” I scrambled to a thick branch to catch my breath. “They can turn into trees when they want to hide from satyrs chasing them. Satyrs are half man, half goat, I think.”
I watched her turn this thought in her head. “Wow, I’d run from them too, I’d bet.” Her hands slowed. “Do they have goat’s heads or legs?”
“They have human heads and chests, but from the waist down is all goat, so they run really fast. Nymphs can run too, but dryads can turn themselves into trees so they don’t have to run.”
“That’s clever of them.” She held the completed wreath between her slender fingers. “This would be a perfect crown for a dryad, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded, “It would, but only as long as you didn’t pick the flowers from the trees they’re hiding in. It would be like pulling off one of their fingers.”
“Eeew, Sarah!”
“It’s true.” I tried to bring the exact story to the front of my head. “A woman picked a flower from a tree that was really a dryad in hiding. The dryad was so mad that she turned the woman into a tree and wouldn’t turn her back.”
Emily’s forehead creased in a frown. “That isn’t fair. Did the tree have a sign that said, ‘Warning: Dryad’? I’m sure the woman didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
I shrugged and ran my hands along the bark. “I didn’t make up the story. It’s the way things were. It just doesn’t happen as often now that it isn’t ‘once upon a time’.”
“Is that why people don’t believe the stories as much as they used to? Because ‘once upon a time’ was so long ago?” She looked up at me while placing the wreath on her own head.
“Once upon a time was probably a much better time for the dryads, the satyrs and everyone else.”
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Me To You (an older poem of mine)
You are to me the full moon,
Sometimes shrouded in clouds
Only around once in a while.
But when you are here with me,
You are clear and bright
Illuminating the right path
With just a touch of lunacy.
What, then, am I to you?
You are to me the exotic,
The combination of the Orient
With its grace and rhythm
And Italy’s brilliant colors.
I can count the many trips
Your heart takes between them.
I watch but dare not follow.
What, then, am I to you?
Am I the innocent child
Who amuses you for a while?
Or maybe the wide-eyed student
You wish to fill with wisdom?
Calm and patience flow from you
While I am so coltish and wild.
There is little I can offer
There is less you can use.
You are to me a sorrow,
A dream I can never have.
Only a shadow of what jewels
Lie outside my weak grasp.
You are so tantalizing.
You keep so distant
As we stand under the full moon.
What, then, could I ever be to you?
Sometimes shrouded in clouds
Only around once in a while.
But when you are here with me,
You are clear and bright
Illuminating the right path
With just a touch of lunacy.
What, then, am I to you?
You are to me the exotic,
The combination of the Orient
With its grace and rhythm
And Italy’s brilliant colors.
I can count the many trips
Your heart takes between them.
I watch but dare not follow.
What, then, am I to you?
Am I the innocent child
Who amuses you for a while?
Or maybe the wide-eyed student
You wish to fill with wisdom?
Calm and patience flow from you
While I am so coltish and wild.
There is little I can offer
There is less you can use.
You are to me a sorrow,
A dream I can never have.
Only a shadow of what jewels
Lie outside my weak grasp.
You are so tantalizing.
You keep so distant
As we stand under the full moon.
What, then, could I ever be to you?
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
A Book Review (of sorts)
Reclaiming Icarus: Reading The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
I had never heard of David Dornstein until days after his death. It was Mr. Stefanisko, my 11th grade history teacher, who gave this person life and death in my mind. It was the last class of the day, shortly before Winter Break, when Mr. Stefanisko came into the room. His beefy face was damp and his eyes were unnaturally puffy and red.
After a few moments of catching his breath, he spoke. “I am assuming everyone in this classroom has paid enough attention to current events to know about the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103.” We all nodded, but our teacher stared beyond us all. “The school has just received the news that David Dornstein, one of my very best students, was on that flight. He was flying home from Israel, and he apparently had a copy of his first novel with him, the only copy.” Mr. Stefanisko’s voice broke with the last of his control, and he sobbed openly in front of the room. I sat in the front row, close enough to touch him, but I sat still in my seat, taking in the current event that was the explosion of an airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, and giving it a name. It was then that I realized that this David Dornstein must have been Ken Dornstein’s brother.
Ken Dornstein graduated from my high school just as I moved to CHS to start my sophomore year, but my parents were teachers at the school and had given me copies of Ken’s work from the school newspaper. His final piece comparing writing the perfect college essay to eating frog’s legs was a study in pretzel logic. My grief in hearing about the older brother was the thought that he may have been as brilliant a writer as the younger one.
These were the thoughts that went through my mind when I found Ken Dornstein’s The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. I quickly made the purchase, ran home and flew through the first section. The emotional recall that Ken was able to bring from himself pulled out that memory of Mr. Stefanisko breaking down in class, and I left the book on my shelf for over a year.
This was a mistake.
There are many lessons to be learned in this memoir of two intertwined brothers. From the stoic standpoint of a writer, this is a brilliantly researched and faithfully written piece of nonfiction. Every quote made in the book is substantiated by an immediate source, most often David’s own fanatical journal writing. Ken makes much in early sections about how David wrote about his predictions of an early death in an air accident. This unsettling but almost romantic image is tempered by the remembrance that David’s predictions coincided with the death of a beloved local celebrity in a skydiving accident. The link is substantiated in David’s journals, and Ken is able to move forward in his research rather than being bogged down in the tragedy.
Ken’s connection to own his grief and his obsessive need to “find” his brother lead the surviving brother to start “The David Project”, where he spent years reading through David’s journals and interviewing those who had any kind of influence on David’s life. Through a chance encounter on a train, Ken became reacquainted with Kathyrn, David’s college girlfriend. This meeting would lead to a complicated relationship that runs parallel to “The David Project”. Ken’s mixed feelings of love for Kathryn and guilt for stealing her away from a brother who could not claim her made for a story equally compelling as his emotions regarding the truths he continued to uncover about that brother.
Simply put, there was no novel.
This truth was one that had me run to the phone to call my parents. Did Mr. Stefanisko read this book? Did he know that “The Tragic Twist” reported about his star student was an unfounded myth? Sadly, they let me know my favorite history teacher is in a nursing home with dementia and probably would not even remember that David, Ken or I ever existed. Mr. Stefanisko had always had a touch of madness to his teaching persona, so this did not surprise me.
The madness of the teacher may also explain his emotion connection to his student. While Ken moved through David’s journals, he was able to piece together a story of a mentally tortured older brother he did not know. David suffered as he felt an artist should, but his writing did not grow as he thought it would. The elder brother’s mental health devolved over time, which the younger brother traced back to a possible molestation in David’s childhood. In this passage from David’s journal, he realized that he needed professional help:
YOU NEED TO STOP WRITING IN THIS NOTEBOOK, DAVID… Your life is not the biography of your life that you imagine. You can’t live a book. You can only live a life and if you’re lucky on day you will write the book of your life. But it needs to be done in that order…
Ken continued to research and write David’s life while living his own. He graduated from Brown in his brother’s footsteps and moved to California, then to Boston, where he moved in with Kathryn. His search for remnants of David took Ken to Lockerbie, The Hague and Israel, where he spent time with Rina, David’s last love before he boarded Pan Am 103. What Ken found was the real tragedy in David’s life was not his shocking death, but that he left Israel and Rina behind.
I emailed Ken Dornstein shortly after reading The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky:
When your book about David came out, I bought it immediately, but it took much time for me to get past that first chapter. I picked it up again on Monday and dealt with people asking what was making me tear up, then giggle. For me, it answered the biggest question about the Dornstein Family: would Ken keep writing after he left CHS?
Within a few days, Ken wrote back, remembering my family and our high school teacher:
Thanks so much for this thoughtful, sweet message. Just thinking of Mr Stefanisko being hit with that awful news creates such a sad scene in my mind. I'm glad you got some amusement from the book, among all of the bittersweet parts of it--most people don't know it's okay to laugh in some spots because of the gravity of the topic.
I'll do my best to keep writing, although my day job keeps me quite busy.
All the best,
Ken
Ken is definitely busy. Aside from being a Senior Editor and Producer for Frontline, he and Kathryn married and have two children. Neither are named for their late uncle.
I had never heard of David Dornstein until days after his death. It was Mr. Stefanisko, my 11th grade history teacher, who gave this person life and death in my mind. It was the last class of the day, shortly before Winter Break, when Mr. Stefanisko came into the room. His beefy face was damp and his eyes were unnaturally puffy and red.
After a few moments of catching his breath, he spoke. “I am assuming everyone in this classroom has paid enough attention to current events to know about the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103.” We all nodded, but our teacher stared beyond us all. “The school has just received the news that David Dornstein, one of my very best students, was on that flight. He was flying home from Israel, and he apparently had a copy of his first novel with him, the only copy.” Mr. Stefanisko’s voice broke with the last of his control, and he sobbed openly in front of the room. I sat in the front row, close enough to touch him, but I sat still in my seat, taking in the current event that was the explosion of an airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, and giving it a name. It was then that I realized that this David Dornstein must have been Ken Dornstein’s brother.
Ken Dornstein graduated from my high school just as I moved to CHS to start my sophomore year, but my parents were teachers at the school and had given me copies of Ken’s work from the school newspaper. His final piece comparing writing the perfect college essay to eating frog’s legs was a study in pretzel logic. My grief in hearing about the older brother was the thought that he may have been as brilliant a writer as the younger one.
These were the thoughts that went through my mind when I found Ken Dornstein’s The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. I quickly made the purchase, ran home and flew through the first section. The emotional recall that Ken was able to bring from himself pulled out that memory of Mr. Stefanisko breaking down in class, and I left the book on my shelf for over a year.
This was a mistake.
There are many lessons to be learned in this memoir of two intertwined brothers. From the stoic standpoint of a writer, this is a brilliantly researched and faithfully written piece of nonfiction. Every quote made in the book is substantiated by an immediate source, most often David’s own fanatical journal writing. Ken makes much in early sections about how David wrote about his predictions of an early death in an air accident. This unsettling but almost romantic image is tempered by the remembrance that David’s predictions coincided with the death of a beloved local celebrity in a skydiving accident. The link is substantiated in David’s journals, and Ken is able to move forward in his research rather than being bogged down in the tragedy.
Ken’s connection to own his grief and his obsessive need to “find” his brother lead the surviving brother to start “The David Project”, where he spent years reading through David’s journals and interviewing those who had any kind of influence on David’s life. Through a chance encounter on a train, Ken became reacquainted with Kathyrn, David’s college girlfriend. This meeting would lead to a complicated relationship that runs parallel to “The David Project”. Ken’s mixed feelings of love for Kathryn and guilt for stealing her away from a brother who could not claim her made for a story equally compelling as his emotions regarding the truths he continued to uncover about that brother.
Simply put, there was no novel.
This truth was one that had me run to the phone to call my parents. Did Mr. Stefanisko read this book? Did he know that “The Tragic Twist” reported about his star student was an unfounded myth? Sadly, they let me know my favorite history teacher is in a nursing home with dementia and probably would not even remember that David, Ken or I ever existed. Mr. Stefanisko had always had a touch of madness to his teaching persona, so this did not surprise me.
The madness of the teacher may also explain his emotion connection to his student. While Ken moved through David’s journals, he was able to piece together a story of a mentally tortured older brother he did not know. David suffered as he felt an artist should, but his writing did not grow as he thought it would. The elder brother’s mental health devolved over time, which the younger brother traced back to a possible molestation in David’s childhood. In this passage from David’s journal, he realized that he needed professional help:
YOU NEED TO STOP WRITING IN THIS NOTEBOOK, DAVID… Your life is not the biography of your life that you imagine. You can’t live a book. You can only live a life and if you’re lucky on day you will write the book of your life. But it needs to be done in that order…
Ken continued to research and write David’s life while living his own. He graduated from Brown in his brother’s footsteps and moved to California, then to Boston, where he moved in with Kathryn. His search for remnants of David took Ken to Lockerbie, The Hague and Israel, where he spent time with Rina, David’s last love before he boarded Pan Am 103. What Ken found was the real tragedy in David’s life was not his shocking death, but that he left Israel and Rina behind.
I emailed Ken Dornstein shortly after reading The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky:
When your book about David came out, I bought it immediately, but it took much time for me to get past that first chapter. I picked it up again on Monday and dealt with people asking what was making me tear up, then giggle. For me, it answered the biggest question about the Dornstein Family: would Ken keep writing after he left CHS?
Within a few days, Ken wrote back, remembering my family and our high school teacher:
Thanks so much for this thoughtful, sweet message. Just thinking of Mr Stefanisko being hit with that awful news creates such a sad scene in my mind. I'm glad you got some amusement from the book, among all of the bittersweet parts of it--most people don't know it's okay to laugh in some spots because of the gravity of the topic.
I'll do my best to keep writing, although my day job keeps me quite busy.
All the best,
Ken
Ken is definitely busy. Aside from being a Senior Editor and Producer for Frontline, he and Kathryn married and have two children. Neither are named for their late uncle.
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