Common Ground by Paul Willis

July 26, 2009

Here’s another gem from The Writer’s Almanac. I’ve never heard of this guy, Paul J. Willis, but I’m going to have to get his book/s. This poem is so unique and beautiful and spare but so rich. I love the story of this Grandfather.

Common Ground

by Paul J. Willis

Today I dug an orange tree out of the damp, black earth.
My grandfather bought a grove near Anaheim
at just my age. Like me, he didn’t know much.
“How’d you learn to grow oranges, Bill?”
friends said. “Well,” he said, “I look at what

my neighbor does, and I just do the opposite.”
Up in Oregon, he and his brother discovered
the Willamette River. They were both asleep
on the front of the wagon, the horses stopped,
his brother woke up. “Will,” he said, “am it a river?”

My grandfather, he cooked for the army during the war,
the first one. He flipped the pancakes up the chimney,
they came right back through the window onto the griddle.
In the Depression he worked in a laundry during the night,
struck it rich in pocketknives. My grandfather,

he liked to smoke in his orange grove, as far away on the property
as he could get from my grandmother,
who didn’t approve of life in general, him in particular.
Smoking gave him something to feel disapproved for,
set the world back to rights. Like everyone else,

my grandfather sold his grove to make room
for Disneyland. He laughed all the way to the bank,
bought in town, lived to see his grandsons born
and died of cancer before anyone wanted him to, absent
now in the rootless presence of damp, black earth.

“Common Ground” by Paul J. Willis, from Visiting Home. © Pecan Grove Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission (from The Writer’s Almanac NPR website).

…how it brings the image of the black earth–which it began with– back at the end.

***

Oh, hey. I’m on vacation now! Yay!

Which means of course: writing.

I’ve been teaching this wonderful Nonfiction Writing Workshop for three weeks now and not only are the students talented and smart but they are all so genuinely excited by writing, and sharing their work, and open to new ideas and dialogues about writing. I love teaching this class, working with other serious writers. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching in general, but when I teach a class like this, as opposed to my Composition classes at the community college (which I do enjoy for the most part), I come away each night after class burning with energy and inspiration. Last week we discussed ‘character’: how to strengthen characters in NF, how to flesh them out, how to give them depth. I gave the class a free-write and, as I usually do, I partook of the free-write, too.

I ended up with the start of an essay that I now want to pursure further, about my third-grade teacher, Mrs. K, who was Armenian, who ran every class as if it were a Wellness Retreat (hugs and back massages were a crucial element to learning), who cried when she got the end of Charlotte’s Web –while reading it to us aloud, who gave most of us, I’m assuming, our first taste of Tabouli, and who introduced us to the term: genocide.