In My Own Voice. Reading from My Collected Works

In My Own Voice. Reading from My Collected Works, #1

Each of us, in our individual lives, has a moment or two of epiphany. That is to say, a moment of surpassing importance and significance. Mine took place in summertime at the Downers Grove Library.

My mother had begun taking me to the library very early in my life.

I was voracious about stories, could never get enough of them, and was always grateful to be advised on their presentation and explanation. In this way, the librarians came to present me with readings from the great poets... people like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.

I can well remember being told by the ladies one day that they had a present for me... and so they stationed me in a rather dark, gray room, everything cool to the touch, and turned on their latest acquisition.

"I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too."

"The Pasture", Robert Frost (1915)

I played this poem so often, each time hearing a little more of its author, the often irritated and irascible Robert Frost. I like the way he rolled those three little words: "you come too." Only he didn't pronounce it like that. Great poets have great eccentricities, and his were encapsuled in his rendering of these three words. Thus "ah you come too". It was a call to come and be sociable, come and share, come and see your neighborhood and everything in it.

So powerful and so unfading were these words that when Robert Frost's Cambridge home came on the market, I almost bought it, just so that I could sit in the parlor and read my envious friends from the poet's ghost that resided there with all its poems, just for me.

Now, I have the opportunity to read my own works... to you, and hope that you will hear just how personal they are, and how each one, so powerfully written, touches your heart, because that is what I aim for.

This book contains five of my favorite essays... the one that I wrote when I turned 65; the one bringing you inside a great nor'easter; the one detailing the foolish hijinx of Captain Owen Honors, United States Navy; the one detailing the turbulent life of Amy Winehouse, a warning if there ever was one; and finally, one about the Andrews Sisters... three girls who kept America jumping throughout its greatest war, and reminded us what we were fighting for.

I have a special word for all you young people reading these essays. You have so many media choices that you may well overlook the importance and value of hearing authors read from their own works. This is something you need to do... you need to hear what they write, in their own way, and you need to recite what they write in your own way. If you cannot do this, you will miss so much of the pleasure of both author and reader.

And this special note to you library ladies: you did me such a life-changing favor so many years ago. Now, I want you to take what I have written, what I have recited here, and pass on the importance of the writers voice for the next generation, and the next after that.

And now without further ado, here's the first volume in this series. Read the text along with the video, then read it again, until you are as expert in my quirks and foibles as I am myself.

Dr. Jeffrey Lant

From The Red Drawing Room

Cambridge, Massachusetts,August 2016