Craft Talks
by Lorine Parks
“You guys have known me my whole life,” said Alex Lopez, adding he felt he had been “born and raised in Downey Rotary.” In opening his Craft Talk Alex remembered, “My father brought me to meetings as soon as I could stand on a chair and wave. But I only came for the ice cream.”
After graduating from UCLA (cheers and boos from the audience), Alex felt inclined to go into the insurance business: “My father and father-in-law were in it.” He soon found, “I like selling. I enjoy visiting new clients and learning about them and how their business operates. And if I don’t have all the answers I know where to get them.”
Alex is also a Star Trek Trekkie - ask him if he speaks Kingon - and loves computer games. But the main event, since marrying Jenette, is “I am blessed with twins. Nathan and Benjamin are 16 months old now, and they are both walking.” Time to bring them to visit us, Alex, and keep up the tradition.
As Alex talked, his father Raul was taking pictures of him, to show his mother Arlene and the family at home. Raul Lopez was our president in 1994-95, and now Alex is following in his steps, as president-elect for 2017-18.
Second craft talk was given by yours truly, Lorine Parks. When Roger Brossmer asked me to speak, he wanted to know what I “had been doing lately.” To me, that meant life after retiring from my classification of travel agent.
In 2008 I closed Stonewood Travel after 33 years of doing business in the Stonewood Center Mall in Downey. I missed being in the travel profession, the counseling, and the experience-gathering in travelling, but the void has gotten filled with writing and poetry. I also do volunteer work at the Downey City Library and for the Downey Symphony, and work out at the Y, but I am writing poetry full time. As my granddaughter commented, “You’re living the good life.”
In 2010 the Downey Arts Coalition asked me to curate a monthly event that I named “Poetry Matters.” What is a “curator?” A combination of impresario, bringing the best in contemporary poetic talent to Downey; teacher, encouraging local writers; editor, producing three anthologies to mark the six years so far; and spokesperson for the arts at large.
The Downey Patriot asked me to curate a weekly poetry column, also called Poetry Matters. I try to showcase timely and accessible contemporary poetry, and each week I write a paragraph inviting the reader into the experience of the poem.
Being a member of the Rotary Club of Downey, going on twenty-nine years now, has meant a great deal to me, and six years ago I was asked to be the Reporter and be responsible for writing the entire weekly Hubbub. The irony of an increasingly deaf reporter is not lost on me, but the room is quiet and I listen intently and then get to research the program for the article in the Bub.
Almost two years ago, the District 5280 Senior Governor for Communications asked me to write the feature stories for the monthly online District 5280 magazine, Imagine. It’s been good practice for me, practicing new and different techniques, journalistic prose and conversational dialogue.
Bring the curator, I felt I was precluded from printing my own poems in the Patriot, but this still leaves me time to write my own poetry. I have published two collections, Catalina Eddy, and Persons of Interest. And I am ready with a new book of poems suggested by my travels, Feeding the Panda.”
People often ask where poets get inspiration, and I think the real world is a good place to start. This poem below comes from my Rotary experience, and is dedicated to my sponsor in Downey Rotary, who was our president-elect at the time I joined the club, in 1978.
on first wearing a hearing aid
for Rick Lively
the simplest of sounds startles me now
the conversation of crickets
taffeta’s rasp
with my new-crafted hearing
would I have sensed
your suicide vowels
delicate syllables
beyond acoustics
past reason’s pitch
you have become as light
as the shadow of a fish
falling through depths of water
dissolved
in your own
reflection