Sheepdog Verse, Keep It Terse

Duffy, Mike, and Sophie in the Forest

Dear George,

My poetry writing was mostly confined to my sophomore year in college when I’d switched to being a lit major and thought that poems might be a good way to interest girls.  It didn’t really pan out.  Instead I became a psych major and got interested in interpreting dreams.  Now that I have more time on my hands, I decided I should give poetry writing another try.  As a first step, I’ve done some research on the types of poetry one can choose from.  There seem to be seven major categories of poems.  These are: limericks, sonnets, haiku, love poems, death poems, epic poems, and Old English Sheepdog poems.  Sheepdog poems are a recent addition, but it looks like they’re becoming the rage in Anglo-American literary circles.  It’s probably because the nobility of the species transcends more mundane topics like love, war, or death.  Since we own two Old English Sheepdogs, Mike and Duffy, writing poems about sheepdogs seems a natural for me.  However, it’s challenging -- you practically have to become a dog whisperer.  So I’ve been working on refining my dog empathy skills at the same time that I’ve been searching for words that rhyme with sheepdog (e.g., treefrog, prologue, peat bog, leapfrog, yule log, seadog, beanstalk).

Most contemporary poetry is written in free verse, i.e., without rhymes or any fixed rhythm or length of lines.  In grade school I was always taught that poems rhyme.  Thus, I decided I better start out by writing sheepdog poems that rhyme. There are, of course, different forms of rhymed poems. Some of the most important are: rhyming couplets, tercets, quatrains, limericks, sonnets, and villanelles.  Here are some sheepdog examples of these forms.       

(1) The Rhyming Couplet

A rhyming couplet is the simplest, shortest form of poetry.  As the name suggests, it’s a pair of back to back lines that rhyme.  Such line pairs can be very short poems (cf. Ogden Nash) or, more typically, subunits of a stanza or of a longer poem.  Here are a few sheepdog rhyming couplets.  

Being a sheepdog is such a big hoot

The kiddies all pet you and think that you’re cute

Duffy and Mike form a two-dog pack

If Mike misbehaves, Duffy gives him a whack

Our dogs never fraternize with real-life sheep

If they ever do, they’ll giggle in their sleep

The sheepdogs and I took a stroll down the block

We ate Graeter’s ice cream and heard some punk rock.

If I were a sheepdog I’d certainly wish

To live free like a squirrel or maybe a fish.

(2) Tercets

A tercet (or a triplet) is three lines of poetry.  It can stand alone as a short poem or be a sub-unit (e.g., a stanza) in a larger poem.  Usually it’s the first and third lines that rhyme in a tercet.  Tercets are a favorite form for sheepdog poems.

Duffy gives Katja a big sloppy kiss

I think it’s disgusting

But she thinks it’s bliss

Each year the dogs have creakier hips

They can still get from there to here

But with far fewer flops and flips.

(3) Quatrains

Quatrains are four lines of verse.  Usually the four lines have the same meter or rhythm so that they flow together.  They can follow various "rhyme schemes" (see below).  Here are examples of some of the most common rhyme schemes:

AABB (lines 1 & 2 rhyme; lines 3 & 4 rhyme)

When the dogs and I camp out in the woods

I bring along most of their worldly goods

Two balls, ten chewies, our big spacious tent

They think it’s dog heaven to which they’ve been sent.

ABAB (lines 1 & 3 rhyme; lines 2 & 4 rhyme)

Sheepdogs are much bigger than lizards

And more handsome than pot-bellied pigs

They’re not quite as brainy as wizards

But they’re better at chewing on twigs

ABBA (lines 1 & 4 rhyme; lines 2 & 3 rhyme)

Duffy acts like he’s Big Mr. Tough

Trying to frighten other pups in the park

He gives them his loudest and scariest bark

But those dogs know his toughness is bluff

ABCB (lines 2 & 4 rhyme)

Duffy was always the Alpha dog

And Mikey was usually submissive

But now Duffy’s calmer than Melba toast

And Mike’s become Mr. Aggrissive

(4) Limerick

Limericks are five line poems that have a distinctive rhythm.  The rhyme scheme is AABBA.  The first, second, and fifth lines are longer than the third fourth.  Limericks are usually humorous and are often racy.  Sheepdog limericks aren't usually racy though (but rather are quite serious).  Here's are a couple of examples.

There once was a sheepdog named Duffy

Whose hair was incredibly fluffy.

When he walks in the rain

It creates so much pain

Cause Duffy turns fluffy to scruffy. 

We own an old doggie named Mike

To lie on his back he does like

He does it all day

Till his itch goes away

And then he leaps up like a tike. 

(5) Sonnet

A sonnet is made up of fourteen lines.  Traditional English sonnets use four quatrains and a windup couplet in the following pattern: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.  While Elizabethan sonnets are usually about love, sheepdog sonnets are mostly about sheepdogs.

                                     Maturity

When Mike and Duff were very young dogs

They loved to chew on our stuff

They ate twelve pairs of Katja’s clogs

And that was barely enough

They ate my glasses; they ate my keys

Ball point pens would drive them wild

I begged them to stop with endless pleas

But the dogs just nodded and smiled

Now that Duffy and Mike are more mature

They’re content to just nap on the floor

It’s not that clogs have lost their allure

It’s that chewing’s become such a bore

So that’s the end of my story for now

The dogs could say more if they only knew how

(6) Villanelle

The Villanelle was invented by French poets and didn't appear in English poetry until the 1800s.  Villanelles are made up of 19 lines which are divided into 6 stanzas.  The first 5 stanzas have 3 lines apiece and have an ABA rhyme scheme with the first and third lines rhyming.  The sixth stanza has 4 lines, and it ends in a rhymed couplet consisting of lines 1 and 3 from the first stanza.  Only two rhymes run through the entire villanelle (see the example below).  The villanelle was a favorite of Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas.  Writing villanelles is pretty hard (sheepdog villanelles are the hardest). 

                           The Sheepdogs’ Day

The sheepdogs’ day is a joyful affair

They’re busy from morning to night

Mike and Duffy are such an astonishing pair

At eight o’clock they feel the sun’s glare

They leap from the bed in a beam of light

The sheepdogs’ day is a joyful affair

At nine o’clock they crouch by my chair

A bowl full of food is a welcome sight

Mike and Duffy are such an astonishing pair

At one o’clock we go out in the air

A two-mile jaunt is our daily rite

The sheepdogs’ day is a joyful affair

At six o’clock the dogs get a scare

If supper’s late they’re extremely uptight

Mike and Duffy are such an astonishing pair

At nine o’clock it’s time for a prayer
Another day finished, another day right

The sheepdogs’ day is a joyful affair

Mike and Duffy are such an astonishing pair

So far it looks like couplets are my most promising medium, and villanelles are beyond me.  However, I’m going to keep working at it.  I hope that this info about forms of poetry inspires some creative writing among readers.  If you send me one or more poems about your pet, I’d be glad to publish them here.

Love,

Dave

Katja's Lost Childhood

Katja, age 3

Dear George,

Katja says she remembers hardly anything about her childhood.  That can’t be entirely true because she’s told a lot of anecdotes over the years.  Last week we sat down and chatted about her recollections in more detail.  Here’s the picture that Katja provided.   

I always thought of Katja as a Southern belle, and it turns out there’s a kernel of truth to that. 

She was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in the late years of the Great Depression.  Her mom, Helen Werrin, was 25 years old and had graduated from Temple University with her degree in nutrition and diatetics.  Her dad, Milton Werrin (henceforth Buck), was 30 and had received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Penn.  His job for the U.S. Army took him around the state of Virginia, inspecting meat at military bases to make sure it wasn’t infected. 

Katja, 17 months, in Roanoke

The family lived in a beautiful white house in Roanoke.  They got together regularly with family friends, the Pressburgs, who had two small boys about Katja’s age.  The children played lots of  baseball, and one of the Pressburg boys smacked Katja in the forehead with a baseball bat.  She still has the scar above her left eye.

Buck’s and Helen’s families lived in Philadelphia, and, homesick, they decided to return in 1941.  Buck bought his brother Nate’s veterinary practice and house at 408 S. 20th Street in center city.  The animal clinic was on the first floor, and Buck, Helen, and Katja lived upstairs.  As a young girl, Katja loved the 20th Street neighborhood.  She was allowed to be out on the street by herself, and it was very exciting.  There were tons of kids, lots of different kinds of people, the streetcars ran right by, and something was always going on.  Her mother disliked 20th Street though – the city heat, the smells coming upstairs from the animals, the noise, the shabbiness of the neighborhood.

408 S. 20th Street (today)

When Katja was four, her parents enrolled her at the Settlement Music School, a famous community school and daycare center.  The children were introduced to music and the arts through lots of rhythm instruments.  Katja’s specialized in playing the triangle.  She went to school every day and completely enjoyed it.  In fact, until she got to high school, she always loved school -- the whole idea of going off to school and being part of a place.

In 1942 Katja started kindergarten at Spring Garden School, a couple of miles away at 12th and Parrish streets.  Getting to school required a trolley ride, and Katja began doing this on her own by first or second grade.  Occasionally Buck would take Katja and her friends – Joanne Soloff and Charlotte and Judy Kaplan – to school in the family Chevy.  The children loved riding in the rumble seat, even though Joanne had a propensity to get carsick.  Once there, Katja’s favorite subjects were English, History, and Music – just about everything as long as it didn’t involve arithmetic. 

Spring Garden Public School, 12th Street

Katja’s siblings, Ami and David, were born during her early years of grade school.  The family home was a few blocks away from Rittenhouse Square, and Helen would take the three children to the Square on outings.  Katja got to push Ami and David in their double-decker baby carriage, and Helen called her  “my little mother.”  There was a bronze statue of a goat with little horns at the center of Rittenhouse Square, and the children’s favorite activity was climbing on the goat.  As they got a little older, Katja would take the two kids on outings to Rittenhouse Square by herself.  David was a cutie-pie, though he often suffered from his eustachian tubes being inflamed.  Katja remembers Ami as being mysterious and very organized.  When they later shared a bedroom, they’d get into fights because Ami wanted Katja’s side of the room to be as clean and neat as her own.  Katja did have lots of responsibility as a child.  She took the bus, trolley car, and/or subway to school by herself, and at home she cleaned up the house, did the dishes, and helped with the laundry.

In their 20th Street neighborhood most of Katja’s playmates were young African-American girls.  The children’s favorite activity was double-dutch jump-roping.  While Katja participated regularly, she was awed by the abilities of her fellow rope-jumpers who did triples, somersaults, and all sorts of fancy moves.  She summed up, “They were great!”  At home Katja spent a lot of time curled up by the radio, listening to the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, Fibber McGee & Molly, the Green Hornet, and Superman.   

Around third grade, Katja started helping her dad in his vet practice after school.  She’d feed the boarding animals, play with them, and try to quiet the animals down while Buck was working on them.  Her most significant task was holding puppies or cats in a blanket while Buck was castrating them.  He’d explain, “It’s all over in just a minute.  Just hold them around the head in the blanket so they can’t move.”  The puppies and kittens were usually just a few days old, and they didn’t seem to mind it much.  Katja said about her vet assistant duties, “I loved it.”  Buck in turn helped Katja with her homework.  Everything except math, which was his worst subject too.  In general, Buck was the more lenient parent; Helen, more strict.

Buck and Helen (circa 1970)

Helen’s father, Samuel Brooks, owned a custom tailor and dry cleaning shop in Germantown, a Philadelphia suburb where he and Katja’s grandmother lived.  Helen’s biological mother had died when she was only three, and her father remarried Dora, who Katja knew as Grandmom Brooks.  Katja went regularly to her grandparents’ house for the weekend.  She was very close to her grandparents, and her love of opera traces back to her visits with them.  Mr. and Mrs. Brooks kept a kosher household, so the only thing that they did on the Sabbath was to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. When Grandmom and Grandpa Brooks came to visit at 20th Street, her grandfather would always pull a candy bar out of his pocket to give Katja.  She remembers him taking her to her first movie, The Dolly Sisters with Betty Grable and June Haver.  Grandpa Brooks liked to take Katja and her siblings places, but he was very poor and money was always in short supply.  He had excellent taste, but never any extra money for luxuries.  He was very proud when Helen completed college.     

 

These childhood years on 20th Street weren’t an easy time for the family.  Buck’s veterinary practice was a struggle, and there were always money woes.  Helen was working as a substitute home economics teacher in an inferior public school, and she was unhappy there.  Her salary was $5 a day – better than nothing, but very low pay.

Katja’s Grandpa Werrin (Michael) and Grandmom Werrin (Anna) were Russian immigrants who had met and married in America after their arrival around the turn of the century.  Grandpa Werrin had an egg candling business on Water Street.  He imported eggs from Vineland, New Jersey, then distributed them to local grocery stores, making daily decisions about how much to pay and how much to charge for the eggs.  He loved to play cards and won a seashore hotel in Wildwood, NJ, in a card game.  He and Anna operated the hotel in the summer for many years.  Grandma Werrin cooked and ran the hotel.  Customers would come for a week, month, or the entire summer, and their room price included three meals a day.  Buck met Helen there when she applied for a waitress job.  Years later he sent Helen and the three kids to Wildwood each summer to protect against polio in the city.  Usually they would stay in Wildwood with Grandpa Brooks, but Katja also stayed in the Werrin’s hotel on occasion.

“The Vampy Scamp” (Katja, age 8, at Wildwood)

Grandmom Werrin had a reputation as an excellent cook, and the entire family would gather at their West Philadelphia home on Friday nights.  Because Anna wasn’t allowed to cook after sundown on Friday evening, a live-in maid did the cooking on Friday and Saturday nights.  They’d have bagels, cream cheese, and lox; smoked whitefish; smoked sable; bialys; Manischewitz wine, and some hard liquor as well.  Katja remembers those meals as much like scenes out of The Godfather, Part 1.  Michael and Anna had five children: Doris (who later married a wealthy chicken king from Chicago), Beatrice (married to Joe), Nate (married to Sophie), Milton (with Helen), and Miriam (married to Moe).  Grandpa Werrin had an explosive temper.  He could be loving and warm at one moment, then yelling and throwing things seconds later.  Buck and Nate had inherited some of that volatile temper themselves, so Katja describes extended family gatherings as very noisy.  There’d be lots of fighting and uproar; then everybody would get over it and get back together.  Helen often felt caught in the middle.  After the meal was over everyone would gather around the tiny TV and watch boxing.

Katja  was always told by her dad that she had inherited “bad blood” from his side of the family.  Once when a friend came over for a tea party, the little girl broke one of Katja’s toys, and Katja pushed her down the stairs.  Another time she got in a fight with one of her little boyfriends, and she went to his house and hit him over the head with a sock full of potatoes.  The boy’s mother called Helen and said Katja was forbidden to ever play with her son again.  These incidents seemed to confirm the bad blood hypothesis.  

Ami (left), unknown friend, and Katja, age 8, on the Jersey shore

One year Helen took a summer job as the dietician at Girl Scout camp, and Katja got to go along for free.  She wasn’t enthusiastic about sleeping in a tent, and, because Helen was on the camp staff, Katja had to dig latrines to avoid being labeled a “teacher’s pet”.  She had a much more enjoyable time during the summers of 1947 and 1948 at Camp Galil, a Zionist youth camp in Buck’s County.  Katja loved Camp Galil and acquired her first boyfriend there, a good-looking boy named Jules Cohen.  It was the time of the War of Independence, and weapons were hidden on the camp’s grounds for shipment to Israel.  Buck and Helen also took the three kids on a big trip one summer to Maine, Montreal, and Toronto.  The kids spent the whole time in the back seat reading comic book tales about Emma and the Cement Mixer.                       

Katja’s family always had dogs.  Buck gave Katja her first dog, a little dachsund which was to be her own.  Katja loved the dachsund.  A week later her dad said he had to take it back because the previous owner’s daughter who had polio missed it so much.  Katja was heartbroken.  The family also had a beagle that was completely untrainable.  Their beloved boxer, Tammy, who was really Ami’s dog, died of cancer, and everyone felt very sad.  

Katja, age 10, and David on a hayride at Farm School
  

Starting at age 12, Katja took piano lessons after school once a week.  Her teacher was Miss Theresa, a heavyset woman who had been blind from birth.  Katja’s not sure whether Miss Theresa lived alone, but there was never anybody else at her house.  She lived in Little Italy in South Philadelphia, and Katja travelled there by herself on the hour-long trolley car and subway trip.  Miss Theresa was very nice, but the piano lessons themselves were boring.  At home Helen played the upright piano in their living room.  Katja did too, though she didn’t like to practice.

One of Buck’s veterinary clinic clients, Mrs. Scott, took an interest in Katja and gave her books and a subscription to the London Illustrated News which was full of articles about royalty.  Katja became very interested in British royalty.  Mrs. Scott also talked a lot about going to France, and that became one of Katja’s major goals.  Katja says she always wanted to go away and have adventures from the time she was a little girl.

So those are some of the highlights of Katja’s girlhood.  Her Philadelphia world and family life were pretty different from growing up in Menominee in the U.P.  That’s what makes for the spice of life. 

Love,

Dave

Mother's Day 2013

Katja with J’s flowers (5-11-13)

Dear George,

The delivery man just brought a beautiful Mother’s Day bouquet for Katja that J sent, and it made her beam with delight.  J has always been thoughtful about these things.  I wish I’d done more of that when I had the chance.  My mom died on April 24, 1986, at Marinette General Hospital.  We had some advance notice, and my siblings and I came in from around the country.  Peter and I were in her hospital room when she said her last words: “I’m grateful.”  That’s how mothers are.  My mom was by no means perfect, and I was difficult as a son.  A loss of one’s mother, though, is a powerful experience that takes a long time to recover from.  There’s such a primal connection between mother and child, and, I suspect for most people, there’s no one in one’s life who has such a deep attachment and lifelong sense of caring and concern.  There are many things I wish I’d expressed to my mother and many questions that I wish I’d asked.  However, we make do with what we do and try to learn from it.  Here are some of the wise, interesting, and/or humorous things that people have had to say about mothers:    

• "Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother."  (Moorish proverb)
• "It's not easy being a mother.  If it were easy, fathers would do it."  (From the TV show, The Golden Girls)
• "Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all."  (Author Unknown)
• "Mothers are all slightly insane."  (J.D. Salinger)
• "Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have so spend the whole time avoiding land mines."  (Amy Tan)
• "My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."  (Mark Twain)
• "Sweater, n.  Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly."  (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)
• "She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along."  (Margaret Culkin Banning)
• "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."  (Ferrell Sims)
• "Don't ever tell the mother of a newborn that her baby's smile is just gas."  (Jill Woodhull)
• "The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face."  (D.W. Winnicott)
• "I felt my mother about the place.  I don't think she haunts me, but I wouldn't put it past her."  (Julie Walters)
• "I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers, If I belittle dogs and mothers."  (Ogden Nash)

Our family, of course, has many wonderful mothers, and that goes on across the generations.  Here are some of the mothers we know and love.  Happy Mother’s Day to all!

Love,

Dave

My mom Doris with my sister Vicki (ca. 1949)

Katja with J at Mt. Airy Forest (ca. 1972)

My sister-in-law Margie with Jennifer and J (ca. 1973)

My sister-in-law Faith with Chris (ca. 1978)

My sister Vicki with Jacob (ca. 1973) 

My daughter-in-law K with our grandson L (2012) 

Cavorting With Mortimer and Charlie

Dear George,

Believe it or not, the world’s greatest collection of ventriloquist dummies is located across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky, less than ten miles from our back door.  We’d known about if or a long time but finally got to visit it recently.  The collection was amassed by a Cincinnati businessman and amateur ventriloquist nicknamed W.S. by his friends who bought his first dummy (“Tommy Baloney”) in New York City in 1910.   Over the next half century W.S. accumulated a collection of over 700 dummies, along with photos, posters, books, and other memorabilia.  Lacking heirs in his later years, he created a foundation to make the collection available to the public in perpetuity.

I didn't know it, but ventriloquism originated as a religious practice in ancient Greece.  The word in Latin means "to speak from the stomach" (“venter” = belly; “loqui” = speak).  Noises produced by the stomach were believed to be voices of the deceased, and the ventriloquist would interpret the sounds and use them to predict the future.  By the nineteenth century Spiritualism had spread into stage magic, and ventriloquism became a performance art.  The modern comic approach to ventriloquism started in vaudeville in the late nineteenth century.  Famous vaudeville ventriloquists included Jules Vernon, Fred Russell, Arthur Prince, and the Great Lester.  It was one of the Great Lester's students -- Edgar Bergen -- who (with the help of Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd) made ventriloquism extremely popular by the middle of the twentieth century.

As you can see from the photos below, the dummies are wonderful, many of them exquisite works of art.  Our tour guides demonstrated their facial expressiveness, not only talking motions, but pursing their lips, wrinkling their foreheads, raising their eyebrows, wiggling their ears, bobbing their Adams’ Apples, winking, smoking, even spitting.  Some dummies were able to walk or scratch their heads, and Baby Snooks could wet her diapers. Made of wood, paper mache, latex, or soft cloth, some figures look like cartoon characters; others are very realistic.  With a little help, of course, the dummies have a lot of opinions about all kinds of things.  None of them spoke to us during our visit, but who knows what happens when the lights go off.  With hundreds of pairs of eyes focused on us during our stay, the scene was a little eerie.  When we next get visitors to Cincinnati, we’ll have to do another trip. 

Love,

Dave

Sources: www.kimn.com (“History of Ventriloquism”); www.wikipedia.org (“Ventriloquism”) 

Who are those dummies in the back row?