Growing up, I adored Garfield, the cat, the comic strip. In fact
for years, I would receive some very odd presents from family – all having Garfield on them. To this day, I still use my Garfield trash can, and if I could pry them from my mother, I’d take back my Garfield pillow case(s). But that’s neither here nor there.Also growing up, I was in a church group called “Guild Girls” along with my friends Debra and Shannon. It was a missions group and generally we did mission-oriented things, but each summer the leader (a wonderful woman named Thelma Shaw), would drive us to Santa Claus Land (now Holiday World) for a day of fun. I don’t know how old Thelma was, but I’m sure that she could have listed plenty of things she’d have rather done than take a group of pre-teens on a road trip, but she did it every year… until Debra got her license and she was able to drive us! Stay with me, now, these two items will collide in a minute.
One year, in Thelma’s backseat, I recited for Deb and Shannon a poem that would impact my life for years to come. I can type it now from memory. It was in a Garfield strip. I can’t recall exactly the point of the strip, but I loved the poem. Here goes (with apologies to Jim Davis)…
My Buddy – by Garfield the cat
I have a buddy
My buddy’s a toad.
He’s kind of muddy
He’s flat on the road.
But he’s my buddy,
My buddy to stay.
‘Til he’s peeled up
And sailed away.
The three of us started reciting it over and over to the point that I’m sure Thelma was ready to abandon every Christian teaching she’d ever learned and hurt all of us. But then at some point we decided to each come up with a new verse. Honestly, as I’m writing this, I cannot remember any of them, but again, I dug them out of my memory drawer and here is the one I wrote (I’ll not reprint the others out of respect to my friends):
I have a buddy
My buddy’s a rabbit.
I have his foot
‘Cause he don’t have it.
People run from him,
He’s kind of scary.
He’s missing an arm,
His name’s Two-Legged Harry.
But he’s my buddy,
My buddy to stay.
‘Cause without that foot,
He can’t run away.
So I know you’re thinking what an odd life I must’ve had for this stupid poem to effect it, right? Well, when I got into high school, Mrs. Hunt, one of the English teachers (she taught Creative Writing – which, ironically, I did NOT take because I did not consider myself creative) somehow found out about the poems. Again, memories here are slightly fuzzy as to the how, but she fell in love with them and during my freshman year at DePauw, she wrote me to tell me that she’d inaugurated the First Annual (or it might have been Semi-Annual, I seem to recall that that class was just one semester) Rose Barger My Buddy Contest – she was having her Creative Writing classes write new verses to the My Buddy poem and she’d mail them to me to judge the winner. The first time, I was surprised and honored. But by the, I don’t know, 10th year, I was beginning to dread back to school time because I knew the kids would have to write those poems and I’d have to judge them. In retrospect, I should have stayed honored. That was really nice of her and I hope she never got the feeling from me of my disdain (although I’m afraid she must have because they finished coming at some point… but then that might have been just because she retired.) But in case she did, and despite the fact that I have NO reason whatsoever to think she reads this blog, I apologize to her. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, you know I’m going to have to print this out and mail it to her. Dang me!
Mrs. Hunt, that was really a very sweet thing and although I don’t think your students ever really got the true “my buddy” feeling, (because, you know, sometimes they had the buddy surviving the poem!) it was fun to read them. So I truly apologize for my ill feelings toward the whole contest/judging thing.
Well, that's it for my first poetic remembrances. Tomorrow... an Ode to a Hoosier Attorney
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