Monday, June 25, 2018

I and my poetry are profiled in the New York Times today

Our Newsroom Doesn’t Have a Poet Laureate. But This Guy Is Pretty Close.

Tim Torkildson is a retired clown who got the attention of New York Times journalists when he began emailing original limericks to the newsroom several times a week.

By Lela Moore

June 25, 2018

Tim Torkildson at his home in Utah, responding to a reporter's positive critique of his 'Timericks.'CreditCourtesy of Tim Torkildson

Tim Torkildson’s limericks — he calls them “Timericks” — are a familiar sight in the email inboxes of New York Times journalists.

Several times a week, he sends them to 22 journalists, including eight at The Times.

When The Times reported in May that China’s president, Xi Jinping, stood to benefit most from a proposal to cancel sanctions between the United States and North Korea, Mr. Torkildson took to his computer to send his readers this limerick:

A 'Timerick' inspired by a May 11 Times article, "On U.S.-North Korea Talks, China May Hold the Cards."

The poem is one of approximately 1,000 that Mr. Torkildson estimates he has written for Times reporters over the past four years.

A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 19 Times article, "How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country."

“He is often clever and on point regarding human foibles, the press and our current national situation,” said Dennis Overbye, a science reporter at The Times who regularly receives Mr. Torkildson’s poems. Often, Mr. Overbye said, they relate to articles that he has written.

A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 14 Times article by Dennis Overbye, "Black Hole Drags Star to Dusty Death."

Over the years, Mr. Torkildson has struck up email conversations with several of the journalists he’s written.

“Any acknowledgment from a reporter, even if it's just 'thanks,' makes me feel wonderful,” he said in a phone interview with The Times. “I feel like I've accomplished my goal in life, at least for one day.”

At 64, Mr. Torkildson is retired from clowning and lives in Provo, Utah. “I was born different,” he said. “I truly believe I was born to make people laugh.” He was born in Minneapolis; his father was a bartender and his mother a homemaker.

“To them, the best thing in the world was to have a good steady job, even if it was boring,” Mr. Torkildson said.

During his senior year of high school, he applied to and was accepted by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He said that after his mother called the Better Business Bureau to determine if the school was legitimate, she gave him her blessing.

Then Mr. Torkildson hitchhiked to Venice, Fla., in 1970 to begin what he called “boot camp for funnymen.”

He did not expect to end up with a job. “I was the worst, least funny student they’d ever seen,” he said. “I couldn’t juggle, couldn’t ride a unicycle, my makeup was horrible. I never expected that they’d hire me.”

But after an audition in front of Irvin Feld, the circus’s owner at the time, in which he accidentally sprayed Mr. Feld with caustic chemicals from a fire extinguisher, he learned that he had been hired.

Mr. Torkildson toured with Ringling Bros. for five years, using the alias Dusty.CreditCourtesy of Ringling Bros.

In 1974, he left the circus to serve as a Mormon missionary. He worked in Thailand under the auspices of the Red Cross, performing his clown show in schools, prisons and other venues.

Upon completing his two-year mission, he briefly performed again with Ringling Brothers.

He said he was fired in the late 1970s after an encounter with Michu Meszaros, the so-called World’s Smallest Man, who later went on to portray the title alien in the 1980s sitcom “ALF.” Mr. Meszaros died in 2016.

Left, Tim Torkildson in costume as Dusty the Clown with Michu, the World's Smallest Man, center, in the arms of Dougie Ashton.CreditCourtesy of Ringling Bros.

One morning before Mr. Torkildson went to church, Mr. Meszaros poured beer on his Book of Mormon. Angry, Mr. Torkildson locked Mr. Meszaros in his wardrobe trunk and headed to church.

“In the circus,” he said, “there’s an unwritten rule that you never touch or abuse the little people. I’d crossed the line.” Mr. Meszaros was rescued from the trunk, “madder than a wet hen,” Mr. Torkildson said.

So Mr. Torkildson found himself back in Minneapolis, in urgent need of a new career. He took a vocational course in radio broadcasting that sowed some of the seeds for his unique brand of news poetry.

The course helped him land a job in 1981 as a radio news DJ at KGCX in Williston, N.D., where he met his former wife, Amy.

The couple married in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City and had eight children while Mr. Torkildson tried to adjust to the serious business of being a newscaster. “When I’d try to make my newscasts funny,” he said, “I’d get in trouble, and a couple of times I lost my job.”

For the next decade, Mr. Torkildson worked on and off as a traveling clown and ringleader, and in temp jobs. But his family began to fall apart under the stress of his work schedule. He got divorced and fell behind on his child support, and his mother died.

A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 13 Times article, "Common Drugs May Be Contributing to Depression."

After paying off his child support debt, he moved to Provo, near several of his children, in an effort to see them more often and “see if I could mend some fences,” he said.

“I’m the perfect grandpa,” he said, referring to his clowning abilities. “It’s been slow and it hasn’t been easy, but I am making reconnections with my children.” He said that one way he connects with them is by researching his family’s genealogy through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Mr. Torkildson began composing and emailing his limericks in 2014.

A 'Timerick' inspired by a June 14 op-ed, "Hey Boss, You Don't Want Your Employees to Meditate."

One of his early recipients was Lizette Alvarez, a former New York Times Miami bureau chief. She shared some of his poems with her husband, Don Van Natta, Jr., the editor of The Sunday Long Read and a former Times correspondent.

“Tim was sending her limericks off Florida news stories; Lizette thought they were fun and funny and she’d share some with me,” Mr. Van Natta said in an email. “He has a particularly sharp eye for stories that skew writers and editors.”

Mr. Torkildson now serves as senior limerick editor for the online edition of The Sunday Long Read. To craft his news poetry, he reads four newspapers online daily and, depending on what stories strike his fancy, constructs a limerick or two.

“I usually choose my stories by first going to Google news and entering keywords of current interest to me,” Mr. Torkildson said.

“I don’t have a TV, I don’t watch local news, don’t listen to radio news. My news comes from newspapers — the last best defense against tyranny and against falsehood,” he said.

The children are scattered

The children who were forcibly separated from their parents
at the border by the United States government are all over the
country now, in Michigan and Maryland, in foster homes in
California and shelters in Virginia, in cold, institutional settings
with adults who are not permitted to touch them or with foster
parents who do not speak Spanish but who hug them when they cry.
Washington Post

The children are scattered; nobody knows where --

Which causes their parents to tear out their hair.

Is Pablo in Denver, Marie in Saint Paul?

Do they have clean clothing, good food, and a doll?

And Uncle Sam doesn’t care one little bit

That fam’lies are shattered by such a foul split.

Protecting the border now means finally

Our government spurns even mild charity.

I’m thinking the Statue of Liberty weeps

That innocent children are locked up by creeps.

I’ll tell you what Tolerance Zero should mean:

Flushing Jeff Sessions down the nearest latrine.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

My Unhappy Childhood

Tolstoy wrote somewhere that all happy families are boring and all unhappy families
are the basis for bestsellers, or something like that. But what did he know?
As an old man he lost his marbles and ran away from home to live in a train
station, or something like that. Writers: they don’t know from nothing most of
the time.

Including me, of course. Whenever I make a conscious effort to be a ‘writer’ I
usually descend into bathos and moody wordplay. So this time around I’m just
scribbling and jotting down the flotsam and jetsam that surfaces on a Sunday
morning after a good night’s snooze and the prospect of ham and eggs with
buttered toast smothered in marmalade for breakfast. I don’t think Proust has
anything to worry about.

I’d like to write that I was a misunderstood child prodigy, which caused me
enormous misery. But my parents understood me all too well -- I was a
rapscallion with the instincts of a guttersnipe and the work ethic of a three-toed
sloth. By turns moony and cranky, demanding and put upon, I was an open book
to them. Why they didn’t pack me off to Mao’s China to be re-educated by the
Red Guards in some dismal rice paddy I really couldn’t say. Lord knows
I deserved it.

Maybe they kept me around just for laughs. I remember a great deal of laughter
while growing up.

On Tuesday nights I sat entranced in front of the television, drinking up
the lowbrow antics of Red Skelton. One Christmastime sketch had him
playing a would-be Santa on a snowy slippery roof, with all the attendant pratfalls
and inevitable slush down the front of his pants. I howled in merriment to such an
extent that I had to take a second bath that night.

There was my mother’s spaghetti. It was good -- no, I lie; it was superb.
The pasta was Creamette brand and the sauce came straight from a bottle.
But she made her own meatballs and the combination perfectly suited my taste
buds. I always had seconds and strenuously wangled for thirds. Her spaghetti
put a saucy red smile on my face that didn’t completely wash off until the next day.

Every spring produced baby rabbits in the decayed trunk of old Mrs. Henderson’s
crab apple tree next door. I couldn’t bear to touch them, because I was told that once
the smell of humans was on them their mother would abandon them. So I just gazed
at them and let the warmth and wonder of creation flow into me.

And despite the oft-repeated cry that we were all going to the poor house in
another minute that echoed around my house like waves crashing on a lee
shore, I knew that if I asked mom to buy me another Little Golden Book it would
be in my hands PDQ. I had The Pokey Little Puppy fully memorized by age six.
And I doted on my copy of The Wonder Book of Clowns as if it were a narcotic.

Each year for my birthday I got a cake from the little bakery that was adjacent to
the Red Owl over in New Brighton. A white cake, with white frosting, with my
name spelled out in thick blue icing on top. And I always got to cut it myself and
was allowed to slice myself the biggest gooeyist piece of all. You may prate about
the woes of famine and want, but there’s something to be said for pure
unadulterated gluttony on a little boy’s birthday. My Grandma Daisy always
gave me a mere coloring book, but along with it she gave me lavender-scented
hugs that linger with me still.

Wild games of flashlight tag with the neighborhood kids on a sultry summer night.
Water balloon fights that left me hoarse from screaming and chortling as I
bombarded my sisters unmercifully -- there is nothing more satisfactory in life
than drenching your own sister with a water balloon. Kickball games in the alley,
with the inflated rubber ball ricocheting off garage walls with a bell-like peal.
Rhubarb pulled fresh from the garden, dipped in a brown paper bag full of sugar.
The first snowman of winter, with one of my father’s disreputable old trilby hats
snug on the head. The Kool Aid stand in the front yard where I drank most of
the grape-flavored stuff myself. Kites. Roller skates. The advent of Mountain Dew,
with a grinning hillbilly stenciled on each green bottle. The elm leaves piling up
in autumn, when the whole world was allowed to become messy and musty smelling.
Silly Putty. MAD Magazine. A new Duncan yo-yo. And roaring blizzards on a Sunday
morning, which meant not having to get dressed up to go to Mass -- instead lazing
about in my pajamas while mom made cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Fishing off
the dock at Como Lake, where the aggressive little sunnies would bite at anything.

And my dad’s rasping laugh -- a rarity, indeed. I recall a Sunday afternoon
when he and I sat together in front of the TV watching W.C. Fields in
The Bank Dick. At one point in the film Fields is driving a open sedan
past a busty blonde and raises his straw hat with the greeting “Hello, toots.”
This tickled my dad’s funny bone enormously, and he began laughing.
I looked at him in wonder: so the old man could do more than yell and
take naps on the couch -- he could actually laugh! Someday, I said to
myself, I’m going to make the whole dang ornery world laugh, too.

And, by thunder, I did, for a while, as a circus clown.

Ah, memory is such a pleasant companion -- but such a terrible master.
It’s about time to let those recollections float back to their misty homes and
think about breakfast. Those ham and eggs aren’t going to cook themselves.
And, come to think of it, I believe there’s a bit of pickled herring left in the back
of the fridge. That stuff never goes bad (or as my children firmly believe,
it already is bad.)

Saturday, June 23, 2018

the small smiling rock

winks at slow eternity

but says nothing more

Widdershins

When I was a child I had trouble remembering which was my right
and which was my left. This problem stayed with me well into high
school. And beyond. Looking into this trait on Google, I learn that
children who can’t tell right from left often struggle with dyslexia
as well. Which I never did. My mother read me and my sisters
books whenever we asked her to in the evenings, and I credit
that with my avid enjoyment of reading on my own from the
age of eight on up.

I also had trouble tying knots. Specifically, tying my shoelaces.
Before the era of velcro I struggled with my Buster Browns on
Sunday, and my Keds tennis shoes during the week. Mom
always tied my shoes for me when it was time to head out
the door, but if they came undone while I was away from home
and didn’t have a patient school teacher at hand to retie them,
I was forced to wander about with the refrain “You’re gonna trip
over them shoelaces” coming at me from all sides. I was too
embarrassed to ever ask any of my friends to tie them for me --
nonchalantly telling them I left them untied on purpose because I
liked to live dangerously. Sometimes in desperation I’d just do a
basic over and under maneuver on my laces until they looked like
macrame plant holders. But then when I got home I’d have to sit
out on the porch slowly unpicking them, sometimes weeping with
frustration. If I was in a hurry I’d simply rummage for the sewing
scissors mom kept in the drawer of her Singer and slice the
doggone things right off my shoes. But that didn’t go over too
well in our thrifty household.

“Do you know how much shoelaces cost?” mom would cry out
in vexation. “I just hope Woolworths is having a sale on them this
week, young man!”

I once got on the bus with mom to go over to East Hennepin for
a sports jacket at Eklunds Clothing to look presentable at my
First Communion. We sat by a man redolent of Four Roses
who had not bothered to button up his shirt in the front. He
wore plastic bags on his feet, wrapped with scotch tape. That
seemed like a brilliant way to solve my shoelace problem, but
when I eagerly suggested it to mom she just shook her head and
moved us over a couple of rows. Parents can be so narrow-minded.

It was a happy day for little Timmy when I finally got the hang of
tying a bow all my myself.

But the problem of right and left bedeviled me for many more
years to come. Out on the playground when we formed up teams
for softball during the spring I never knew for certain which way to go
when a high flying ball was popped into the air and my teammates
hollered at me to go left, go left for gosh sakes, to catch it.
I never caught it. This made me something of a pariah when
it came to choosing up sides. That, and the dangerous habit
I had of swinging wildly at every pitch thrown to me when I was
at bat; I often connected with the catcher’s shoulder or an unwary
bystander’s kneecap.

When I got into my high school theater class and began appearing
onstage in extracurricular plays, I often had to be physically pushed
in the proper direction when it came to walking stage right or exiting
stage left, until finally I took to labeling the white rubber tips of my Keds
with an R and an L. That helped somewhat, plus it also labeled me
irreversibly as one of the school’s outstanding eccentrics.

When I joined Ringling Brothers as a First of May clown in 1971
I frequently caught hell from the show choreographer Richard
Barstow during rehearsals in Winter Quarters because I seemed
to be flouting his directives to have the clowns turn right or sashay
left during the big production numbers.

“Stop! Stop! Who is that boy? You, boy. Are you a complete idiot?”
he’d scream into his microphone whenever I fouled up the simple dance
routines he drilled us in. “I want him fired! Get him off the lot, right now!
Hand him a shovel and put him behind the elephants or something. Only
get him out of my sight!” Charlie Baumann, the stern Teutonic
Performance Director, would pull me out of the chorus line and whisper
to me to go sit down on the bleachers until Herr Direktor had cooled
down a bit -- showing me an unexpected kindness that belied his
normally ferocious demeanor. Steve Smith, my future partner
when we worked together as advance clowns for the circus,
took pity on me and usually managed to stand next to me during
the dance rehearsals, whispering frantically to me to “turn this way,
Tork, this way!” to avert the missish wrath of Barstow.

By the time I was called to go to Thailand as an LDS missionary
in my twenty-second year I had pretty much figured out the right
and left situation. I only had to hesitate a second or two before
heading in the correct direction. But then, learning the Thai for ‘right’
and ‘left’ put me over a barrel once again.

To go right is pronounced, in Thai, “khwa mur.” To go to the left,
“sai mur.” When not riding bikes or taking the bus, we often waved
down a three wheeled pedicab to take us to proselytizing
appointments. But darned if I could ever remember how to tell
the driver to turn left at the corner or stop at the noodle shop
on the right. So we overshot our destination nine times out of ten,
making us late. But then again, being Thailand, nobody ever
seemed to mind if we showed up twenty minutes past the time.

Today, I am happy to report, I only wear shoes with velcro.
And in my own native tongue I am perfectly secure in always
going in the right direction. But don’t get me started on clockwise
and widdershins . . .

Quand un enfant devrait-il avoir son premier compte sur les médias sociaux

L'âge moyen auquel un enfant obtient son premier compte de médias sociaux aux États-Unis a encore diminué. Des études récentes confirment que près de la moitié des fœtus du troisième trimestre ont déjà un compte Facebook et Twitter. Lors d'une conférence de presse de leur siège à Slickpoo, Idaho, le président de l'Institut national des instituts nationaux a déclaré à un rassemblement de journalistes que l'activité des médias sociaux fœtaux est "sinon l'éléphant dans la pièce, Ellen Hives Wooster a longuement parlé aux journalistes du nombre impressionnant d'enfants à naître qui utilisent les médias sociaux pour exprimer leurs opinions sur des choses telles que le liquide amniotique et les cordons ombilicaux. "Ces récits sont restés longtemps sous le radar", a-t-elle déclaré jeudi. "Nous suivons un véritable blizzard de 'goo' et 'gaa' et même quelques remarques embarrassantes comme «oot». Il est clair que ce segment du spectre des médias sociaux commence à affirmer son droit à l'expression de soi ». "Il ne faudra pas attendre longtemps avant que les annonceurs et les spécialistes du marketing en ligne n'atteignent ce marché inexploité, ce qui pourrait rendre les choses problématiques pour les parents", a-t-elle ajouté. "Je ne pense pas que maman et papa soient prêts à voir la naissance de leur enfant sur Snapchat, par exemple - de l'intérieur. Et le flot d'annonces graphiques pour tout, de Gerbers à Pampers. " Les sages-femmes médicales autorisées expriment également leur inquiétude face à ce nouveau phénomène. La sage-femme professionnelle Tiffany Ziehehart lors d'une interview sur Fox News a déclaré: "Il est effrayant de penser que dix minutes après avoir aidé à la naissance d'un enfant, ce bébé peut me donner une mauvaise critique sur Yelp!"

Friday, June 22, 2018

the evening drops

The evening drops

upon the mountains without

any sympathy

with holes all around

a man has to be wary

of what they contain

Thursday, June 21, 2018

What's the Difference Between Trump and King Herod? Good Question . . . .

Pentagon Asked to Prepare

Housing for Up to 20,000

Migrant Children

NYT

Such is the country’s proud flesh;

The Pentagon turned into creche.

Will babies salute

and forced march to boot,

While keeping their white diapers fresh?

the light and shadow

of the scaly bark and leaf

pull my spirit taut