Reflections on a 50-year-old Rejection Letter

Today I found a rejection letter wrapped around a poem I wrote in 1968. It was from the staff of “The Source,” the literary magazine at Whittier College. I didn’t know then that it would be just the first of many I would receive on my journey to becoming published.

Although I know it dates me, the poem was written during my love affair with Rod McKuen. I was obviously channeling him—his angst, his loneliness, his unrequited love. All his books still stand on my bookshelves today. One, Listen to the Warm, was autographed by him after a concert  he did in L.A. I found the flyer and the ticket stub in the book—March 10, 1968, Hilltop Theater, Tujunga—marking the place of one of my favorite poems. I can still recite it from memory. 

The poem was about his cat, Sloopy, who disappeared from his apartment one night when Rod didn’t come home. He wrote, “I’d like to think a golden cowboy snatched her from the window sill, and safely saddle-bagged, she rode to Arizona. She’s stalking lizards in the cactus now perhaps, bitter but free.” I've often thought of my beloved cats I've said goodbye to, that they were also snatched by that golden cowboy and are stalking lizards in the cactus--not bitter, but free.

Writer and literary critic, Nora Ephron, once said, “For the most part, McKuen’s poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly.” I guess I'm in good company, then, although no one will ever recite my poem from memory, even me. But here it is, in all its superficial, platitudinous, silly, and amateurish glory:

The Corridor

You move down the concrete tunnel alone

in a crowd of faces,

seeing only emptiness in eyes

that strip you of your individuality

and make you, too,

one of the poster-on-the-wall,

superficial,

hung-up

personalities around you.

Then a stranger brushes elbows with you

in the crowded corridor

and is suddenly

no longer a stranger.

The touch is all you share

but it seems a prelude to much more.

The hall no longer is

quite so impersonal

now that you have a non-stranger

to stand with for a moment—

within, yet outside, time,

elbow-to-elbow,

mind-to-mind.

Alone together

you watch the tide of faces

surging around you

sweeping you along.

Parted by the crowd

you lose touch

and are alone again,

alone in the expressionless.

But that elbow-touch

of that non-stranger

remains

as does the mind-bruise

he left,

and the corridor no longer seems

quite so long,

so empty,

so dark.

I’m not sure why I saved it, but it certainly is a testimony to the fact that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So now I’ll tuck it back into that scrapbook where I found it. Someday, when my writer daughter is cleaning out my house, she hopefully will get a chuckle out of it.

Waiting for the Mail

I'm not the only one who's ever waited for the mail. This spring I had the pleasure of taking a memoir-writing class, even though business demands forced to me to drop out before the end of the semester. It was taught by a friend, Marilyn Donahue, well-published children’s author, local SCBWI Schmooze coordinator, past co-director of the Inland Writing Project and writing instructor-extraordinaire. One of our assignments was to find an old family photo and write about it. While digging through shoeboxes of old pictures several years ago, in preparation for creating scrapbooks for my two brothers and me, I found one I especially liked. I’ve posted it here, along with the memoir piece it inspired. Those ladies knew what waiting was all about.

Waiting for the Mail

Every afternoon the women gathered in the yard of the housing project. With hair done up in bobby pins and wearing flowered house coats, they shared gossip and recipes for casseroles the kids would eat. Children played lazy games of kickball in the dust. Les Brown’s music drifted down from an open upstairs kitchen window. Washing could wait; so could the ironing. Babies were napping, but still the women listened with only one ear while they chatted. Some rubbed their lower backs, standing with that unique posture of the pregnant—the backward lean to counter the baby weight. Others had grimy toddlers tugging on their skirts. They were more than friends; they were sisters. And so they waited together.

No men were there. The husbands were in Italy, France, North Africa, or somewhere in the Pacific. Some were pilots, some were cavalry. Others were foot soldiers sleeping in foxholes across Europe or sailors on battleships off the shores of Iwo or Saipan.

Well, it’s not entirely true that there were no men. There was one, and every afternoon he became the most important one in the world. He was the mailman, and when he arrived on his bicycle, there was always a hopeful, smiling welcome committee. Each woman desperately prayed he’d have a letter with her name on it.

When he did, she was jubilant. When he didn’t, it was impossible not to ache with loneliness. Those fragile, papery sheets of scrawled handwriting were all she had to hold onto, all that connected her to the man she loved. Parts of those letters were shared with her sisters over late-afternoon cups of weak coffee, sweetened with rationed sugar. But other parts were saved till later, tucked into housecoat pockets. Those parts would be savored over and over again in the dim light of the bedroom during the long solitary nights.

And tomorrow she and her sisters would wait again for the mailman.