Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Essay and Imitation of Helen Alderfer's "Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living"

The piece I chose to imitate is entitled “Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living,” and can be found in Helen Alderfer’s The Mill Grinds Fine. At first glance, this poem appears to be a rather depressing eulogy of the speaker’s youth, but the final stanza reassures the reader that these doubts and fears “are passengers in a boat in a safe harbor / with pilots of skill and compassion.”

Ms. Alderfer’s poetic voice is simple, straightforward, and easily understood. Critics might think her work lacks complexity,  but I believe that her easy to read style allows for a deeper connection with her audience. Her similes and metaphors do exactly what they are meant to do, which is to conjure a vivid image in the reader’s mind. Take, for example, the first line of “Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living:”


            When a flight of stairs looks as daunting as Mt. Kilimanjaro
            Where gourmet meals taste like sawdust
                        To those who have no appetite


The flight of stairs being compared to Mt. Kilimanjaro could be argued as a hyperbolic simile lacking complexity, but I argue that Ms. Alderfer is not exaggerating as much as some might think. Speaking as a person who is only 20 years old, I can only imagine what having joint pain or arthritis would feel like, but I’m sure it would make a flight of stairs look like Mt. Kilimanjaro. Regarding the simplicity of this comparison, I believe a strong writer doesn’t need to rely on extravagant, wordy comparisons in order to reach the audience. Can you imagine a gourmet meal tasting like sawdust? This is another example of a simple, yet very effective comparison.

            The poem’s structure is a single14-line stanza, followed by a one-line stanza, and concluding with a four line stanza. The 14-line stanza deals with questions and doubts about living in assisted living, which Ms. Alderfer experienced for herself in Waterford Crossing Retirement Home. These issues range from low energy, to table conversations exclusively about pain and pills, to a “dead mailbox” that can “hurt all day,” the line that concludes the first stanza. The concerns of the speaker build to this point, and the tension is released in the next one-line stanza, which is just, “Do not be deluded.” The last stanza continues to ease the tension and provides a more hopeful outlook to help resolve the issues in stanza one. In imitating this work I tried to preserve the structure Ms. Alderfer has, with the tension building and falling away in the same places. I kept a few lines verbatim from the original poem, the most important being “Do not be deluded,” the one sentence second stanza.


            Helen Alderfer’s straightforward style was a lot of fun to imitate, and despite the subject matter of “Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living” being alien to me, I resonated strongly with the underlying themes of loneliness, reminiscence, and growing older.




Waiting for Tomorrow in a College House

When a walk with you is as draining as a marathon
When words flop like escaped fish on the deck of a boat
            because the fisherman is inept
When energy is so low that it is impossible
            to imagine that we walked for hours,
            carving our path into the night
Where casual conversation concentrates on
            parties, boys, and how-are-yous,
            not words that break the ice between us
When I remember your past and can predict a storm
            dancing on our doorstep
When the old familiar contact
            is too much or too little
Where a dead phone can hurt all day.

Do not be deluded.

We are passengers in the boat of our 20s
            with pilots who are unpredictable,
            bumping into each other, or steering away
            when we have grown apart.

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