Here is the first thing anyone should know about poets: they’re good at call-and-response. That is, if someone in “the family” calls, the family responds. Here’s how that looked today:
I woke up this morning in the dark. The flight from Seattle to Chicago was an hour late. I had ten minutes to get from one end of O’Hare to another to catch my connecting flight, and just barely caught it. By the time the plane landed in the Columbus sunset, I was sweaty, grimy, chapped and tired. I’d eaten exactly one Fig Newton and drunk two glasses of EmergenC. I’ had imprints on my face from sleeping on the airplane windowframe.
But when I landed, I called Dave, a Columbus poet who’d been offering rides. Dave and I don’t know each other. He arrived at the passenger pickup just as I walked out. He took my bags, gave me a hug, and herded me into the car. He asked, “Are you most tired, hungry, or anxious?”
“Hungry,” I said instantly, my stomach growling in accompaniment.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “it just so happens that I’ve got four pots of soup sitting at home – which is on our way to the host hotel. What do you think of stopping?”
Another ten minutes, and I was at Dave’s kitchen table with a steaming bowl of chili in one hand, and dill pickle soup in the other (dill pickle soup is made mostly of sour cream and pickle juice. If this sounds good to you, we should probably be friends.) He then pointed me to the nearby hippie co-op grocery so I could get some snacks for later, and drove me to the host hotel in downtown Columbus.
When the family responds, we respond well.
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