Talk in the Reading Room

By Nils Peterson

The first poet laureate of the Silicon Valley meditates on the meaning and mystery of memory, looking back on his childhood as the son of a chauffeur in New York and his college days in Eastern Kentucky. This is an insightful and often funny memoir from a member of the last generation to grow up without TV or coed dormitories.

A sample from "A Hero's Life":
"He was the worst teacher ever to be given a festschrift. He was so bad, he was a blessing, for the shyest, timidest, dullest, stupidest of us could feel superior, could know that when he said white, blue surely was in the running. His wife Cora, however, was very sharp. She had a Ph.D., taught English at the girls’ school across town, and looked like the heavy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in the middle of her big scene. She would come into his class, sit in the corner cackling and muttering under her breath, knitting like Madame DuFarge on some object that never got any bigger. When Lark would say something stupid, Cora would look up, snort, and say matter of factly, 'Freddy, you fool'”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordrunner eChapbooks
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311189899

Nils Peterson

Nils Peterson is an emeritus faculty member of San Jose State University where he taught creative writing and Shakespeare among other things. He has published several collections, including the two mentioned below. In 2009, he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley).Some of the pieces published here were originally in poetic form. Those pieces have been rewritten or reformatted. Versions of “My Lecture on Romanticism,” “A Story,” “A Latin Class” and “Homecoming” appeared in Comedy of Desire, Blue Sofa Press, Minneapolis, 1994, which was edited and introduced by Robert Bly.Versions of “The Bus,” “Christmas Mysteries,” “Father Arrives in the Triumphal Car,” “The Reading Room,” “Sandlots,” “A Thing of Beauty,” “Learning From My Father,” “Go Way From My Window,” and “On the Nature of Exposition” appeared in A Walk to the Center of Things, Caesura Editions, San Jose, CA, 2011.A version of “Letter to Paul Cantrell” appeared in San Jose Studies, and a version of "The Moon and the Bulldozer” appeared in Red Wheelbarrow. Versions of “Halloween,” “Yankee Stadium Gone — Impossible,” and “Sandlots” originally appeared in The ERFA Newsletter [Emeritus and Retired Faculty Association].

Book preview

Talk in the Reading Room

A Memoir

by Nils Peterson

Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

(an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

PART 1: GROWING UP

The Reading Room

Halloween

Christmas Eve at the Big House

Christmas Mysteries

Summers in Long Island

Father Arrives in the Triumphal Car

Yankee Stadium Gone — Impossible

Sandlots

A Thing of Beauty

Learning From My Father

Learning From My Mother

The Bus

PART 2: COLLEGE

Next Stop

Going to College

My Lecture on Romanticism

A Story

Go Way From My Window

Singing in the Rain

On the Nature of Exposition

A Latin Class

A Hero's Life

Letter to Paul Cantrell

Homecoming

The Moon and the Bulldozer

About Nils Peterson

About Wordrunner eChapbooks

PART 1: GROWING UP

The Reading Room

The Reading Room had at its center an enormous globe that showed the way the world was. It turned as easily about its spindle as the world itself and I spun it slowly with my long thin fingers, exploring place after place, each country with a color defining its I amness. How much blue the sea took to get its proper share.

Sometimes I would sit in the room and read my books for awhile before roller skating home on the streets that had the smoothest sidewalks so the wheels clamped to my shoes with a key would not catch on a tree- root-propped slab, tear loose, and send me tumbling to another scraped knee. Sometimes I’d finish my book and return it before setting off from the friendly silence.

The room was high-ceilinged, tall-windowed, square, with a square of leather-cushioned chairs surrounding the globe. This is how I want to live, I felt rather than said, in a solid, permanent, somewhat dustily elegant place, with the round certainty of the way things are before me.

More than sixty years later, only the blue of the sea has stayed itself. Now the old globe with its intricate pattern of forgotten countries rests, a curiosity, in the back room of the antique shop of world history. Maybe the library still stands, but most of the books I read have long since disintegrated or disappeared.

The boy who sat there reading whispers to me sometimes. He tries to tell me what was. I listen, nod, but cannot tell him what will be.

Nils, nine years old

Halloween

They’ve made me wear a sport jacket, I don’t think a tie, but I am neat. I go down the stairs from the chauffeur’s flat on top of the garage, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house — crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, lingering smell of burnt leaves, feel of tended grass — to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin, and my Godmother, waits to let me in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are the girls, all Swedish like my father, mother and me, though I am not quite as Swedish, since I was born in Plainfield, New Jersey.

Anet escorts me through her pantry with its jars of exquisite, thin cookies ready to be set out for the Lady’s tea, past the dining room where the great table lies polished and