Dear Mr. Walt Whitman

We were assigned your poems in high school English class, 1963. 

It was a time in my muddled, addle-brained teen years when being, acting and dressing “cool” was the only slick slide to acceptance, popularity and attracting the opposite sex. Hormones ruled the day, wrong-headedness ruled even more.

But, on looking back, I’d guess there may have been something else inside pushing against it.  

We were assigned your poems, “I Hear America Singing”, “Song of Myself,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” for a homework assignment, which I’d “forgotten” to do.  Mrs. Beatty, our English teacher, decided to have us read your verses in class.  She didn’t call on me, but I was listening and following in the textbook.  You were asking us to hold schools in abeyance, to lean and loaf and invite our souls to observe simple blades of grass, flags of our disposition, handkerchiefs of the Lord.  And you had us feel we were joining you with wide-open eyes in your breezy stroll through the streets of “Mannahatta”, observing everything and greeting just about everyone in your passing:  the masons, boatmen, mechanics, shoemakers, ploughboys, wood-cutters, women sewing and washing, “brothers, sisters, mothers all.”  I could hear the exhilaration in your voice and feel your warm regard for all the workers and the newly-arrived immigrants of all colors and cultures – and your deep belief in us, in America.

I think of you now, Mr. Whitman, on my walking jaunts through Meriden streets mornings and some afternoons.  I see townsfolk of every color, spoken language and persuasion, nearly always waving back with cordial hello’s or comments about the weather or goings-on as I pass the school crossing guards, grade school teachers getting out of cars, backpacked kids hanging on to mom or dad’s hand, the van driver carrying the disabled girl to her motorized wheelchair, older folks on Charles Street waiting for their daily ride for dialysis, landscape crews rolling out equipment, bag-carrying food shoppers, the pregnant mother walking her love-lapping sheepdog, the scruffy man with the cart full of empty bottles, the excited young father getting ready to take his little boy fishing, the Baptist church pastor clinging to a bible, and the greeting of the hijab-wearing Muslim woman – all of them, Us.

I hope and pray that good, decent folk like these in neighborhoods across the country comprise the Real America that will humbly and bravely hold sway against the forces tearing us apart –again. 

Mr. Whitman, you saw and felt the death-blade of a nation cut asunder as you visited and comforted the wounded and dying soldiers in Washington and behind the front lines in Virginia, writing their letters for them to family and loved ones.  The war ended, and your hero’s life ended soon after.  I’m sure the bullet that struck Lincoln struck you, too – “O Captain, My Captain” just poured out of you on hearing the news. 

Look back on us now as you walk the hills of eternity, and drop reminders to us below as you go, of the Promise, of a nation of the people, all of us, not just the few and the powerful.

Yours Respectfully, Paul R. Scollan