Poems for Peg

By Stephen Dotson Dale

"Poems for Peg" is a memoir in the form of prose and poetry curated from a life's-worth of writings. Presented in twelve chapters, the words explore a wide range of subjects. As one travels through life, moods, events and emotions arise. Stephen Dotson Dale's words mimic the rise and fall of our love, life, and wonder at our place in the universe.

A brief introduction explains the origin of the project and how the author accumulated these writings. Organized chronologically, we see the journey of a man in the words he wrote in-between the scenes of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098322090

Book preview

©2020 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-09832-208-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09832-209-0

Contents

INTRODUCTION

POEMS FOR AND ABOUT CHILDREN

POEMS ABOUT POETS AND POETRY

POEMS ABOUT NATURE, THE SEASONS AND HOLIDAYS

POEMS ABOUT LIFE, AGING AND DEATH

POEMS OF HEARTACHE AND LOVE—PART I

POEMS OF HEARTACHE AND LOVE—PART II

POEMS OF THE BAR NAPKIN POET

POEMS ABOUT HER

CONTEMPLATIVE POEMS—PART I

POEMS OF CONTEMPLATION—PART II

WHIMSICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

PEG’S POEM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

My dear Peg,

Today I am presenting to you a book of poetry--an original book of poems I’ve written over the course of my lifetime that I’ve taken the trouble to organize and edit especially for you.

This book does not include every poem I have ever written—I don’t think you, or anyone should suffer such an affliction. The majority of poems I’ve written are unpalatable tripe, so I’ve spent the last few years selecting and editing my poems in order to proffer what I consider to be my better compositions. Of course, as the author of these verses I have no legitimate means of assessing their actual merit, so it is highly probable that anyone with sound judgment or good taste would find even these selected poems to be essentially moronic. Hence I present these poems to you with significant trepidation. As you read through these verses be guided by the fact that it is only because of my affection for you that I have undertaken this project in the first place, hoping that your affection for me will temper your criticism of what I now place before you.

Let me take a moment to provide some personal history relating to the compiling of these poems.

I have been writing poems and verses since my youth, at least since high school, perhaps even earlier, and what is collected here represents poems written over a period of more than thirty years. I wrote a lot of poems during those thirty years; however I was rather careless with the original manuscripts, stuffing them here and there, and in the course of all the moves and changes I’ve made throughout my life many were discarded and tossed away. Still, what remained of these jottings turned out to be more than I expected.

Some years ago, after I obtained a computer and became familiar with the wonders of word processing, I began to type several poems I had at home into computer files and saved them on floppy discs. Later they were transferred to hard floppies, rewritable CDs, and most currently to USB storage devices. I imagined that I had pretty much transferred all my salvaged original manuscripts of poems to the computer files, and I intended some day to simply reformat those poems into some presentable document representing a complete survey my poetic efforts.

However, when I retired I discovered that I had accumulated at least a few hundred more handwritten poems in a locked desk drawer in my office. You see, while I was working I occasionally would take a break from writing legal briefs and compose some verse or two that I would then tuck away into that desk drawer. Upon retiring from my law firm, in the process of cleaning out my office, I reclaimed all these manuscripts. For some inexplicable reason I brought these desk drawer poems down to my winter home in Florida. These desk drawer poems are ones that I started reviewing and editing during idle months in Florida, the unidentified project I evasively would tell you I was working on while away, intending to add them to the others already typed into my home computer.

After I finished joining these desk drawer poems to the earlier processed verses in a computerized file I felt ready to plunge ahead to start preparing this book of poems. But I was curious about locating the original manuscripts for the poems previously processed and in searching my house I came upon a large box that had accompanied me, unopened, through my many changes of residence. Inside this box I discovered hundreds of additional poems long before written, but also long forgotten, and I set about reviewing and editing these boxed poems as well. In the end I entered approximately 1500 of my poems into the overworked circuits of my computer’s memory. To be fair, some of these poems do not deserve that appellation as they are merely brief couplets or simple verses of no consequence. And this total includes some dreadful limericks and juvenile word play too embarrassingly trivial to be preserved, let alone shared. And I discovered that a few poems were duplicates, or later edited versions, of poems I had previously composed. Still, all in all, even taking these deductions into account, I found I had undertaken a much greater task than I anticipated as there were more than a thousand potential poems to sort through in putting this book of poetry together for you.

This is likely more information than you need to be bothered about, but I feel some obligation to explain why it has taken me so long to share these poems with you. Quite honestly, it was never my intention to share these poems with anyone. It was long my fantasy that these poems would lie fallow somewhere among my possessions only to be discovered after I died, at which time, I hoped, some thoughtful heir might posthumously publish them. As you will see, many of these poems are extremely personal--several contain insights into my deepest thoughts and many evolved out of bleak moments of my life; many are maudlin, brooding, self pitying and supercilious. One of the difficulties I encountered in preparing this book is that some of these poems forced me to relive incidents, and revisit relationships in my life, that were far from pleasant. And in sharing these poems I reveal a private and a personal history containing many unflattering and distressing episodes. Still, the majority, I believe, are harmless and merit your consideration.

After the musical artist Prince died I read an article mentioning that he had left behind manuscripts of hundreds of songs that he had never published, and no directions as to their disposition, leaving his heirs to fight about their fate. The article questioned whether it would honor him or diminish him, as an artist, to publish these additional songs he may have deemed of poorer quality. Reading about his death and his unpublished work was one of the things that prompted me to begin this task. Among my poems are a lot of shoddy ones I wouldn’t want you or anyone else to waste their time reading. The ones gathered here are the better ones I wish to share.

Or consider the fate of Emily Dickinson. She wrote more than 1700 poems, but only handfuls were published in her lifetime. She never took the time to edit her poems for publication, never bothered to give her poems titles by which they could be identified, never attempted to sort out her poems thematically or to discriminate between those she felt were most meaningful to her and those she suspected were trivial, and left the world to guess the context and reasons for what she had written. Annually she haphazardly bundled her year’s worth of poems together in a packet tied with cord and laid them aside. When she died her sister recovered these retained bundles of verses and somehow they came into the possession of Harvard University where, decades later, they were fortunately resurrected for publication. Today we have the gift of her 1700 plus poems, but, to be honest, this exhaustive body of work, I believe, is diminished, rather than enhanced, by their bulk, the lack of discrimination and the absence of editing. Her best and better verses are camouflaged and depreciated by being scattered among the hundreds of minor and petty poems published in her complete works, and the absence of context and of titles is infuriating. I mean, what sense is to be made from an assertion that I found verse 327 emotionally moving, but frankly consider verse 1510 to be derivative. There is a narrowness of themes in her poetry and much repetition, probably because her own interests seemed to be confined to her immediate surroundings and especially her garden. She wrote an awful lot of poems about bees, and flowers and birds and clouds—and death. She wrote a lot about death, in a disturbingly pleasant and lighthearted way. (Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me.) I decided, late in life, that I did not want to leave my poems is such a muddled state as sweet Emily did, and, besides, my sister is as like to throw them out with the trash.

Now don’t get me wrong—I am hardly in the category of Prince or Dickinson, nor anything near to being labeled an artist, but I do feel that in many ways these simple poems of mine, even if they are mostly drivel, are my only legacy, the only extant evidence that I once walked upon this earth, and loved, and felt heartbreak, and laughed, and occasionally had deep thoughts on serious subjects. I have no direct heirs, save for my sister and her descendants, and I have become fearful that once I am gone these poems will be ignored, forgotten or simply discarded. So I have determined that before that occurs I would at least take the trouble to sort through my hundreds of poems and find ones I feel, without shame, can be shared with you, the final and best love of my life.

I know there is a great risk here. These poems may reveal things about me that might best remain suppressed and hidden. Some reveal my secret thoughts. The saving grace, I hope, is that these verses all relate to a life I lived many years ago. All these poems were written in a very different stage of my life, when writing poetry was my way of coping with the absence of someone like you being a part of my life.

In preparing this book I have struggled trying to recall the incidents, the events, the circumstances and the feelings from distant times that inspired me to write these poems. Sometimes I could. But often I could not. And sometimes I was surprised by what I found hidden in the memories stirred up by a few of these poems.

Because these poems span a period of more than thirty years, and were all written more than twenty years past, I confronted a dilemma in determining how best to present them in this book. The choice of presenting them chronologically (as Dickinson’s poems usually are) was quite impossible. Over time these poems have become all jumbled together and I cannot now reconstruct in any meaningful way the order in which they were written. But to present them randomly would cause only confusion and would lose important context for these poems. And it would be silly for me to try to offer these poems going from the best to the worst as I simply cannot distinguish between those that may be surprisingly good and those that are painfully bad. I believe, or at least hope, that there are some gems among the dross—but I stand too close to these products of my muse to weigh their merits, which is why there are so many. So, mindful of the semi-autobiographical nature of what I am presenting to you, I decided to separate the poems into chapters touching upon different aspects of my life as expressed in the different themes of these poems.

Accordingly I present these poems to you categorically, having made arbitrary decisions as to what these categories would be. Even in doing this the scheme adopted is not perfect—many poems placed in one chapter as easily could have found a home with another. But if some of my choices seem to make no sense, some nuance known only to me (and likely now forgotten) determined my final decision. And, here’s the kicker: I introduce each poem with a recently composed narrative striving to explain its background, source or significance. I realized, as I was typing and editing these poems, that many would make no sense at all devoid of context, and thus require an explanation of what events in my life inspired the thoughts and feelings expressed in these verses. These are, in the end, my poems, uniquely born out of my experiences, my thoughts, my feelings.

They are mementos of a life I lived before I began to live my life with you.

CHAPTER 1

POEMS FOR AND ABOUT CHILDREN

My dear Peg, in this first chapter of this collection I present Poems for and about Children. These poems are mostly short and uncomplicated and serve as a benign introduction to the poetry that I’ve written over the course of more than thirty years before meeting you.

To place these poems in their proper context, however, pause to journey with me through a landscape of personal memories. Some of these memories are pleasing to revisit, but others—well, some memories pertaining to the circumstances underpinning these poems are more painful to recall, especially since many involve my troubled relationship with Fran. The first several poems in this chapter are poems I wrote either while I was courting Fran or during the early years of our marriage. Since this book is somewhat autobiographical in its scope, let me give you a bit more back story to explain these initial poems.

The story of my relationship with Fran begins with an accident of office geography. When I started working for my law firm in May of 1972 the firm did not quite know how to accommodate me in its Buhl Building offices. Its downtown venue was populated with attorneys crammed into every available room, so I was initially directed to set up my practice in the firm’s small library, already brimming over with summer clerks. This was not an ideal situation as I required some privacy to concentrate on the writing of legal briefs. This inconvenience became apparent to my colleagues, so the firm created a unique office for me. A room previously used as a storage space for old files, office supplies and broken typewriters was cleaned out and assigned to me. It was a small, narrow room in which a desk and chair barely fit, though it did have the advantage of a smudged window that looked out towards a sliver of the Detroit River just barely visible past the neighboring Consolidated Gas Building (where you may have been working at about this same time.)

The space was extremely confined and made more so by phone wires hidden behind a large blue plywood panel covering half of one wall. My legal career began at a time when law offices still had telephones connected to a central, manually operated, switchboard. My miniscule office with its yards of telephone wiring lay directly opposite the small cubby occupied by the receptionist/switchboard operator, a space I passed several times a day. Accordingly, in the course of the day I would take breaks from my work and engage in a friendly chat with our switchboard operator.

Shortly after I was relegated to this office Fran was hired to work as one of the firm’s receptionists/switchboard operators. I began spending much of my idle time conversing with her. Fran, I discovered, was an exciting and extremely attractive person quite unlike any other woman I had previously known. I had been involved in two serious relationships before beginning my legal career and both had ended badly. Fran was very different from the demure, sensitive and sensible women I had previously dated. Despite not having attended college Fran was remarkably well-read and had a wide-ranging knowledge of culture, history and politics. She had a fast and baroque cleverness. (To this day I remember an incident in which the office door mysteriously opened and closed without anyone entering and Fran immediately saying, Well, good day Mr. Raines! When she saw me looking at her quizzically she explained that the actor Claude Raines had played the Invisible Man in the 1932 film. Her mind made those kinds of snap connections.)

Fran had grown up in an impoverished and stressful environment, having an alcoholic father and a sternly religious mother. At an early age Fran was compelled by her mother to work for a pittance as a seamstress sewing buttons at a bridal shop after school. While working at this shop she taught herself the skills of a switchboard operator to escape to better employment. Never having learned to drive as a teen, and unable to afford a car in any event, she had to take receptionist jobs at downtown businesses she could reach by bus. Before coming to work for us she worked as a switchboard operator at one of the major radio stations in the city. This was where she met her first husband, a prominent sportscaster. However, soon after the birth of their daughter he divorced her and she came over from the radio station to work at our firm.

Fran had red hair, a broad, fulsome smile, a thin, well-proportioned body, and a quick wit that surprised and dazzled everyone. Fran was this exciting, beautiful woman with an outgoing, overpowering, personality and an unstoppable vivacity that was fascinating to observe. She was flirtatious to a fault (as I would later discover to my regret.) She winked at every guy, laughed at every joke (especially the off-color ones), smoked, drank, and after work partied down in the Buhl bar whenever she could. She loved jazz and classical movies and expensive scotch. She could always season a conversation with some pertinent cultural reference or humorous anecdote, and make herself the center of attention. She also, on occasion, demonstrated flashes of a furious temper cohabiting with her exuberant personality. She was six years older than me, divorced and had a young child, and despite all my friends’ warnings, I fell madly in love with her.

Or I must have done. Sadly, the memory of those feelings disappeared long ago. They are gone, overshadowed by an amnesia that has descended upon all things concerning Fran. What remains, what still conjures up memories of those days when Fran was the most significant person in my life, are the poems I wrote during our relationship.

Of course, I was not the only one attracted to Fran. In the years before we married she had several other admirers and suitors. We would have several break-ups over this period, and each of us dated others, but I always came back to Fran whenever she was between lovers. One major advantage I had was that work—geography—brought us together all the time. As I explained, my small office was just across the hall from her. So whenever a relationship didn’t pan out for her, she knew I was faithfully around, near at hand and still interested. But she was resistant. She often told me, after we were married, that the day before she started working for the firm a fortune teller predicted that she would marry the first person she met at her new job, and she claimed that the first person she encountered was me. Her immediate reaction to our initial meeting, she further would remind me, was that the fortune teller was an idiot. In any event, our tumultuous relationship rode a carousel pony for quite some time.

I had one further advantage that others did not in courting Fran. I knew that what mattered most in her in life was her daughter. It especially pained her that while she was working she had to leave Jennifer in the care of her parents and sister. Fran often confided in me how this broke her heart as she did not trust these people, hated the way they lived, and worried about the way they were raising Jennifer. She claimed that they were intentionally trying to alienate Jennifer from her, which no doubt they were, given that Fran lived an outgoing life style objectionable to their own narrow views.

I had one occasion (thankfully only one) to observe personally what concerned Fran when I once went with her to retrieve Jennifer from her parent’s home. The house Fran’s parents lived in was cramped, old, and located in one of the poorest sections of the city. Fran’s father, a recovering alcoholic, remained meek and silent in a dark corner of this home for this was a house dominated by his strong-willed wife, who was fanatically religious. I had never seen an interior like this. Every nook and cranny of the house was overlaid with religious icons. Every wall was encrusted with crucifixes, every table and bureau was crowded with votive candles, plastic and ceramic statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and a pantheon of other Catholic saints, and every piece of furniture was garlanded with a variety of rosaries. In the few uncomfortable moments I stood in this house I kept thinking that the money Fran’s impoverished mother’s spent on her collection of religious bric-a-brac would help furnish a large suite at the Vatican. I concluded there had to be a whole lot of guilt and fear in this house. Of course, there was little or nothing of any real Christian spirit in Fran’s mother’s heart—only bigotry and selfishness and meanness. She sought to keep Jennifer away from Fran, claiming she was an unfit mom. It was an ugly scene I witnessed when I went with Fran that day to retrieve Jennifer, with her mother yelling all kinds of bitter, nasty things at Fran and little Jenny crying and screaming and Fran’s sister pretending to act calm while pulling Jenny back away from Fran to keep her in this sanctimoniously gaudy yet disturbingly dismal house.

But it was well before this incident, and well before I first met Jennifer, that I began writing poems about Jennifer as part of my courtship of Fran. Others might drink and dance and party with Fran, but each weekday she came to work and I was there, in the room adjacent to her, to listen to her tell me stories about her daughter. And I responded with a few poems that I hoped would warm Fran’s heart and might make her fall in love with me.

It may have worked. I don’t know. It may have been that my persistence eventually wore her down. I don’t think Fran ever truly fell in love with me. She may have married me only for the safety and security it provided to her and her daughter. But all this no longer matters. Out of this whole episode did come a few poems that I am proud of, so proud as to make these few simple little poems the introduction to all those that follow.

The first of these poems is simply called Jennifer, and was written a year or two before I met Jennifer. Years afterwards, when I reconnected with Jennifer, at Fran’s funeral, I mentioned that I had written this poem about her and asked if she remembered it. She did not—Fran might have never shown it to her. This is the poem I composed while courting Fran, in the version I later presented to Jennifer:

JENNIFER

Here in the dust of fairy-clouds

In rag-a-muffin skies

A little girl called Jennifer

Brings laughter to my eyes.

There is a bit of magic

In the songs she sweetly sings

That merges crystal winter stars

With the warming winds of spring.

Her lollipop dreams and ice cream hopes

As simple as the dawn

Walk with her in crisp petticoats

Across the morning lawn.

She has a gift of happiness

To share with everyone—

The promise of her sparkling smile

As brilliant as the sun.

So be so kind in passing by

To stop along the way.

Tell her that you love her, too—

It’s not that hard to say.

And if you feel some unnamed joy

Within begins to stir,

That’s not an angel sweeping past,

That’s only Jennifer.

The following poem, My Favorite Artist, relates to the drawings Jennifer made that Fran posted up by her switchboard. Every mother does this, taping such drawings onto walls, doors, refrigerators, etc. so if I hadn’t written it for Fran’s daughter so many years ago I might have written it today for Emma, Nora or Brooke, and whoever else comes along adding to life’s sparkle:

MY FAVORITE ARTIST

The greatest artist of all I know,

The one whose works I most esteem,

Is a toddler Michelangelo,

A little girl who draws a dream.

Her pallet is a box of crayons.

She takes them out and, with a shrug,

Before she struggles with her plans

She lays them down upon the rug.

She spreads her paper on the floor,

Smoothes out all its curls and folds,

Then grasps a crayon to draw a door,

Adds windows, squirrels and marigolds.

She draws a figure near one side

With blue dot eyes and curly hair,

With lines that meet and then flair wide

And says that that’s her mother there.

She draws herself, as small as fleas,

In something like Picasso’s style.

A bright red crayon she curves with ease

To give herself a lasting smile.

The colors fill the paper sheet

As bright as sunlight in her sky.

No other artist draws so neat

Nor pleases so this critic’s eye.

The finished product I approve,

By far the finest piece of art,

You will not find it in the Louvre,

But here, forever, in my heart.

The next two poems are poems that relate to the experience of sending Jennifer off to school. Like the previous poems, I believe the one entitled First Day of School, written from a mother’s perspective, was composed even before I met Jennifer, who would have started attending school around the time I first met Fran. School Day Morning is a poem I had entirely forgotten about it until I came across it in preparing this manuscript. It appears to be a poem I wrote about a year after I married Fran:

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

We walked to school this September morning—

I remember five years ago, the day she was born,

The nurses placed this precious gift beside me in the bed—

A small excitement.

I gave her life,

And the promise of wonders to discover as she grew.

Five calendars ago, and since

Each day she’s filled my life with immeasurable joy.

She, my shadow on the couch.

She, my echo and my second self,

And now—now I walk with her to school.

Where has time drifted? Forgotten hours of play

Have passed more quickly than the echo

Of a tricycle bell ringing out on a summer afternoon.

This child, my daughter, spreads her wings and flies--

At times too fast for me to follow.

But I cannot sorrow to watch a flower bloom.

Glad is my heart to see this excited girl,

Bright of spirit and full of curiosity about the world

Greet this adventure with laughter as well as tears.

I share this world of hers, young, fresh, alive.

I embrace anew the secrets of the rose and the stars,

Of paste and pencils and tying knots in shoes.

I am my child as much as she is me.

We grow together.

I gave her life

And she gives me wonders to discover once again.

A SCHOOL DAY MORNING

Reluctantly opening her sleepy brown eyes,

Staring at the ceiling looming over her head,

She struggles to wake to the first light of dawn,

Tries to shrug it away with a toss of her head.

My eight year old daughter is drifting on by,

Rubbing her eyes, an insouciant ghost,

A trip to the bathroom to shake off the night,

Then down to the kitchen for her bacon and toast.

That’s when I leave, with a kiss thrown her way,

Heading for work as a parent must do.

I turn back to see her donning her coat

And run out the door in a bundle of blue.

Lunch pail in her hand, her backpack secure,

She merges with yawning friends in a pool

Of youngsters like her, all gathered together,

On their way to their neighborhood school.

Somewhere between her home and her class,

Outside, as morning’s clouds are unfurled,

Her first peel of laughter breaks through her scarf

And her brown eyes wake up to conquer the world.

For no particular reason I offer here a small birthday verse I wrote for Jennifer. It requires no further explanation, and is saved from total mediocrity only by its last line.

ANOTHER BIRTHDAY POEM FOR JEN

September’s child,

Daughter of the harvest moon

For whom the trees lay down a carpet of leaves,

May your life be enriched by a thousand blessings

And may the path before you

Be as crisp and clear

As the autumn breeze you captured

In your first breath.

And, above all,

May you always find a wastebasket at hand

In which to toss away such drivel

As the poem that’s written here.

Sadly, it was probably around the time I wrote this birthday poem that domestic matters began deteriorating rather rapidly between Fran and me. They also became troubling between and Fran and Jennifer. I spent the final years of my marriage trying to provide a safe refuge for Jennifer, hoping that the anger and bitterness that started to engulf all three of us would not ruin her life. I remember her once saying to me, My (real) dad’s a schizoid and my mom’s an alcoholic—I haven’t got a chance! But somehow she managed to come out of a challenging childhood all right, becoming an intelligent and beautiful woman. I am glad I wrote these bits of verses for her and am grateful for the inspiration she gave me.

The poem I next present to you, Dinosaur Bones clearly was not written for Jennifer, nor specifically written either for, or about, my friend Penny’s son. When Penny Jones worked as my secretary she would frequently talk about her children, Kris and Candice, but in so doing her son Kris was always just Kris. But one day I heard her refer to her son by his full name--likely out of exasperation for some annoying or foolish thing he did which is usually what prompts a parent to invoke a child’s full name--and suddenly the phrase Christopher Jones has dinosaur bones just popped into my head. (For the poem I chose to use the more common spelling of this name.) It was only the lyrical sound of the name that inspired me at that instant, and only a happy coincidence that Penny’s son’s last name rhymed with bones. What I am most pleased about in this poem is that I found a pertinent rhyme for cretaceous while penning this silly verse:

DINOSAUR BONES

Christopher Jones has dinosaur bones

That he keeps by his bed in a sack,

And late in the night, when the stars are just right,

He will take them around to the back,

Then with consummate care he will whisper a prayer

That he found in a sorcerer’s book,

And bid them arise, with a flame in their eyes

That could turn you to stone with a look.

For these dinosaur bones of Christopher Jones

Are magical bones from the East,

They clankle and clack when removed from their sack

Like some feared primordial beast.

They shake and they quiver, they spin and they shiver,

And assemble themselves with a growl.

Their muscles will mesh—just add dinosaur flesh

And they’re ready to go on the prowl.

The neighbors may balk if they see some great hulk

Go stomping about in his yard.

But Christopher sneers at such childish fears

And gives such concerns no regard.

He knows the neat spell that will cause them to dwell

Under his charm and his sway.

The master is he of all he can see,

So his dinos won’t wander away.

"Arise Brontosaurus, and summon a chorus

"Of dreadful creatures cretaceous,

"Parade here ‘til dawn across my back lawn,

But try not to be ostentatious.

Thus says Christopher Jones to his dinosaur bones

When he take them all out of their sack

Late in the night when the stars are just right—

‘Til his mom makes him put them all back.

I am certain that I composed The Beastie Mice before I saw a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. But I was well