Happy Father’s Day to all New Castle Dads!

June 17, 2011

Editor’s Note: As a tribute to all New Castle Dads, NewCastleNOW.org is publishing an original poem by Brooke Biederman, a recent Greeley graduate, which won a prize in the Friends of the Chappaqua Library-sponsored Young Writers’ Contest.

State Mottos

He says he memorized them the summer before sixth grade.
Before I can ask, he says in Latin, too, except for the few in Chinook
Or French or Spanish, and don’t forget Hawaiian.

He says he did them in the order in which the States were added to the Union,
Which I can say doesn’t surprise me the way it would a stranger,

Someone less ambitious and more inclined to alphabetization.
I smile at his revelation as we leave Colorado and cross into Utah,
A “one-worder” he says with a familiar grin: Industry.
We are finally on our trip out West, a fabled journey we’ve planned on
Since my own time in sixth grade, when I grew enchanted by the Rockies

And the chance to sleep under the stars as he had once done.
This is our story:  he talks of his childhood, I listen hungrily,
Growing more in awe of the man with big shoulders and kind hands.
It is curious that it’s taken 18 years for him to tell me of this checked-off goal
And eight states of road-tripping for us to touch upon it.

I wonder what made him do it.

What made him commit these Latinate phrases to memory,
Nestling in for eternity on a shelf next to birthdays of college roommates
And knocking to the floor vocabulary lists of fifth grade Spanish.
I do some quick math. It was 1964 when he conceived of the idea,
The decade of free love and the Beatles and Alfred Hitchcock.

I picture my earnest father, closing his weathered copy of Huck Finn
And sitting straight up in bed the evening of the last day of school.
By late July, he was done with state number 30, Wisconsin’s Forward
Echoing in his head as he gulped in deeply and blew out the eleven candles
Of the double chocolate cake dotted with strawberries and wax.

I thought of him pushing the lawn mower proudly in the leafy backyard
Walking the mile to the town pool with a towel slung over his not-yet-broad shoulder
All the while repeating Si quaeries peninsulam amoenam circumspice
And wondering if suburban New York counted as the pleasant peninsula
Michigan’s great founders had in mind back in 1837.

I thought of him setting the table for my coiffed grandmother,
Ferrying dishes of uniform carrots and peas between the kitchen and the porch
While inside my grandfather fiddles with the knobs of the television,
LBJ’s face too green, too blue as he tells Americans about the Gulf of Tonkin
And my father sets down cups and finishes off South Dakota’s Under God, the people rule.

Had he been stumbling over Washington’s Native American Al-Ki
When he broke to listen as Billy Mills pulled away to win gold at Tokyo?
Making his twin bed while mumbling Idaho’s Esto Perpetua 
And wondering if boys in the land of the potato liked or disliked farm chores?
It’s easiest to imagine him doing these all, and with delight.

The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness, he says
As he pulls off at the sign that will take us to the campsite.
Ever true to his word, he’d made it through all fifty.
I fold the map that we’d used to navigate over the mountains,
And in our silence we feel a proper note of finality in Hawaii’s elegant emblem.

Other children would return to school in September with newly sprouted freckles
And tummies rounded by daily trips to the ice cream truck.
My father would enter sixth grade with a few freckles, but mainly his mottos
To keep him company all those days on the school bus, nose pushed against the glass.
50 one-sentence mysteries in his pocket, ready to ponder at the earliest boredom.

Brooke Biederman