“Ode to a Teardrop”

By Kate Sullivan

Ode to a Teardrop 

I am not a poet, but gimme a choice between an acrobatic clarinet line and a piece of dry toast, I’ll take the clarinet every time. Maybe that counts for something and I’d rather sing than talk.  Remember the time I had to wipe my tears on the wide white sleeves of my surplus when we sang that Irish tune during the service?  Or when we would jump over each other to be chosen by Mrs. Keenan (requiescat in pace) to go to the blackboard to scan the dactyls and spondees of the iambic pentameter of Virgil?  Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Perhaps some day it will be pleasing to remember these things. I bought the sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue in Newton Center when I was a junior in high school and have been working on it ever since - and to think he made it all up!  I believe I’ve slipped through life without ever having read a sonnet. What a shame, but alas, choices must be made. Now seventy winters have besieged my brow, but 70 is the new 50 and I’m hoping to take a cross-country trip like my whizz-bang 72-year old poetry teacher, Barbara. I want one of those little silver teardrop trailers big enough for one bed and a toilet and a place to heat water for tea. I could read my sestinas in little country taverns, then park my teardrop at the water’s edge for a skinny dip before cocktails. “You’re only young once!” my father used to say, and at 70, he died suddenly and peacefully in his sleep, taking us all by surprise. “A gift from the angels!” said one old lady at the party back at the house.  I was 34 and wanted to clock her one.  Now I know she was right.

Kate Sullivan likes to play around with words, music and pictures. She is the author/illustrator of two children’s books, On Linden Square (Sleeping Bear) and What Do You Hear?(Schiffer) and illustrator of Brief Accident of Light (Kelsay). A linguist by training, she is also an award-winning composer and performer. Her one-woman theatre piece LENYA! won the Independent Reviewers of New England prize and her Fugitum Est was premiered by The Kremlin Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Her paintings range from travel sketches to her series of ostriches set in JSSargent paintings. She plays the musical saw to impress people.