I did a lot of substitute teaching on Long Island, which included Madonna Heights, a place for girls not unlike the farm for boys I lived in while growing up in New Jersey.
These were girls who were often in trouble but not really criminals and the purpose of the place was to keep them protected and safe more than anything else.
Anyhow, this was a long-teerm gig and the principal told me that the girls, mostly of high school age, lkked poetry. So I decided to move in that direction.
I started to recite Harry Chapin’s classic “Taxi,” knowing that these girls probably never heard of it. It was four decades since the record came out and Chapin had been dead 30 years. After I recited it, there was a lot of conversation, especially about the lyric: “We learned about love in the back of a Dodge. . .the lesspn hadn’t gone too far.” There was a lot of discussion about how the girls would have sex with the boys and then get dumped, especially after they came to this place. A few of them got pregnant during Christmas recess and could not stay there if they got an abortion, This place was run by the Catholic church.
I led them into a discussion about how our hopes and dreams never happened as we hoped and asked them to write about that in a poem, or in a letter to someone, perhaps God as they saw him.
The results were astonishing. Some of these girls were really talented writers. They poured their hearts into it.
The next day we did another Harry Chapin song/poem called “Dogtown.”
It is about the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Since colonial times, it hass been a fishing village. Today, it is home to Gortons Fish.
Over it’s long history, many of the fishermen from the town have been lost at sea and there is a statue of a sailor in a rain slicker gripping a steering wheel called “They that go down to the sea in ships,“ based on a Bible quotation. Surrounding the front of the statue is a fence listing all the sailors who had perished.
A few hundred yards down the road is another statue about a woman looking out to sea with a baby in her arms waiting and hoping her husband would return.
Chapin wrote about these women. He picks one woman who married her husband and he left for the whaling trip ten days later: “He took me up to Dogtown the dday I was a bride. We had ten days together before he left my side. He’s the first mate on a whaling ship, the keeper of the. Log. He said ‘farewell my darling, I’m going to leave you with my dog.’”
The girls were very upset the woman had only ten days for her honeymoon. I askled them what they knew of the Puritans from their history lessons. This was the town they settled in. I noted that the first ttime they ever kissed was possibly when they got married as there were very strong religious rules then. The sailor had gone to Boston to find his bride and they were strictly chaperoned.
The woman, now a three-time widow, frequently walks along the coast ranting and raving. The song ends with these verses:
“Sitting by the fireside, the embers slowly die.
Is it a sign of weakness when a woman wants to cry?
The dog is closely watching the fire glints in his eye.
No use to go to sleep this early, no use to even try.
My blood beats like a woman's,
I've got a woman's breast and thighs.
But where am I to offer them
To the ocean or the skies?
Living with this silent dog
All the moments of my life,
He has been my only husband;
Am I a widow, or his wife?
Yes, it's a Dogtown and it's a fog town,
And there's nothing around 'cept the sea pounding granite ground
And this black midnight horror of a hound.
I'm standing on this craggy cliff,
My eyes fixed on the sea.
Six months past, when his ship was due, I'm a widow to be.
For liking this half living with the lonely and the fog,
You need the bastard of the mating of a woman and a dog.
And I have seen the splintered timbers of a hundred shattered hulls,
Known the silence of the granite and the screeching of the gulls,
I've heard that crazy widow Cather walk the harbor as she raves
At the endless rolling whisper of the waves.”
Dogtown was the place where these impoverished widows and orphans moved to. It was an area about a mile inland from the coast and the women lived in shacks. Alll that remains is a few ruins. The rest is woods and the road into the area is chained off. If you want to visit, you have to hike in and many a tourist has become lost there.
The girls in the class responded to the thought of not having anyone to offer their breasts and thighs to. They were all sexually active and thought about their “dry spells.” They also absolutely hated ‘the bastard of a mating of a woman and a dog’ line. I shared the line before that about how Chapin wanted to show the horrors of living in this place.
We continued to review poetry for another week with more mainstream poets.
But the girls didn’t respond with as much emotion to these poems as Chapin’s.
During that time, I discovered “Sequel.” It’s a follow-up song to “Taxi,” ten years later. It’s about how Chapin, now a very successful singer, returns to San Francisco and visits the woman in the song. She has left the luxury of 16 Parkside Lane and has learned to like herself. In the original ‘Taxi,” the woman had wanted to be an actress and he had wanted to learn to fly. And she acted hppy inside her handsome home while he flew in his taxi stoned.
Chapin concludes this song as follows:
So I thought about her as I sang that night
And how the circle keeps rolling around
How I act as I'm facing the footlights
And how she's flying with both feet on the ground
I guess it's a sequel to our story
From the journey 'tween Heaven and Hell
With half the time thinking of what might have been
And half thinkin' just as well
I guess only time will tell.
The girls were quiet for some time. And I repeated the last line. I said that they will decide what their time will tell. Their future has yet to be written. But they need to create and follow a plan. The plan would be subject to constant change but having a goal will keep them out of worse places then Madonna Heights.
Maybe you know a girl like these?
