‘I can fly!’

By Jack Canfield

I was thrown out of class only once.

It wasn’t in grade school.  Not even in high school, but in college.

Atop Fort Hill at Potomac State in Keyser, we were fortunate to have Dr. Louise McNeill Pease on our faculty.  Straight out of high school, as we were, we didn’t appreciate at the time that she was a nationally recognized poet.

Her lectures were riveting — that low voice, that focused look from dark eyes underneath a halo of white hair.    [Ben:  There are pictures in your files at the newspaper]

But, mid-lecture one spring afternoon, my stomach started to growl.  Loudly.  Joanne Ashby from Parkersburg, my fellow journalism classmate was sitting next to me in the front row.  She couldn’t ignore the sounds and got the giggles.  Then I got the giggles. Then we giggled – you know, uncontrollably, like in church when you shouldn’t.

And then, “The Voice:” 

“Mr. Canfield, am I boring you?” “No, ma’m.”

“Do you find me funny?” “Yes, ma’am.  No ma’am.“

“Mr. Canfield, please leave the room.”

Next day I went onto the Potomac State campus lawn and picked a bouquet of dandelions and handed it to her with an explanatory, handwritten apologetic note.

Fast forward:  Sixteen years later, Governor Jay Rockefeller, for whom I worked, chose her as Poet Laureate for West Virginia.  She had written several books, “Elderberry Flood,” “The Milkweed Ladies” and others — poetic versions of West Virginia history – and sent me an autographed copy , “To Jack – With Dandelion Memories – LMP”

That’s one reason I loved her.  The other is this – “I can fly!”

At age seven or eight, I would run up the knoll behind our house atop Allegheny Front in Elk Garden, and come barreling down, arms flailing like wings at full speed as fast as my little legs would go, “landing” in our back yard.  I was flying! Everyone laughed. 

Except it turns out that Louise McNeill Pease, who had written this poem, flew too while a child in Pocahontas County:

Once when I was little and played on the hill,

One wondrous evening, I dream of it still –

Mom called me to dinner, impatient, I knew –

So I lifted my arms up and flapped them and flew.

I lifted my arms up and flapped them and lo!

I was flying as fast as my short legs could go.

The hill swirled beneath me, all foggy and green;

I lit by the yard fence, and no one had seen.

I told them at dinner, I said, “I can fly”

They laughed, not believing.  I started to cry

And ran from the table and sobbed, “It is true –

You need not believe me; I flapped and I flew.”

I told them next morning; I told them again –

For years I kept telling; they laughed and I ran –

No one would believe me; I ceased then to tell;

But still I remember, remember it well –

One soft summer evening up there on the knoll

Before life had harried the reach of my soul,

I stood there in twilight, in childlight and dew –

And I lifted my arms up and flapped them and flew!

                              —Jack Canfield lives in Charleston