Curator Magazine

Today he is all but forgotten, but there was a time when Etaoin Shrdlu showed up daily in newspapers across the U.S. His name most often appeared in the dense columns of classified ads or in business listings, but it also popped up in stories about political intrigue, society soirees and gruesome crimes. In 1922, The Lawrence Daily Journal identified Shrdlu as a railroad union kingpin. Three years later, The Chicago Daily Tribune listed him as a boy soprano at a major music festival. In 1929 The Newark Advocate referred to Shrdlu as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany.

I interviewed Lyd Havens in the summer of 2021 when we were all flirting with the idea of returning to a more normal life. People were still clamoring to get shots, and there was talk of abandoning masks by Thanksgiving. I even saw a movie in theaters. Then the delta variant took off, and the timeline for “normal” stretched indefinitely. At the time of this writing, literal fires are consuming Lake Tahoe. I live south of Los Angeles, but my computer has decided to start reporting my area’s AQI on the bottom right of my monitor. There’s a metric for the damage climate change will do to my lungs, so I will learn to think in terms of damage done as opposed to escaping. It’s in this context that I find myself revisiting the titular poem in Havens’ poetry collection Chokecherry.

Deb, you told the principal I look disheveled. I appreciate the honesty. Stop telling people I remind you of a mop bucket. Honesty is nothing to sneeze at. You know I’ve always balked at looking down my nose at the janitorial profession, down at any sort of physical plant or groundskeeping or maintenance type of role.

It was just after dinner on a weeknight in 1981 when my best friend Tom called me on the phone to ask if I’d be his wingman on an exorcism. Tom had been my freshman college roommate. He’d left college after a single year to marry his high-school sweetheart. A part-time seminary student, he worked full time and moonlighted as manager for the apartment quad he lived in. Tom collected rent, hassled deadbeats and changed the occasional faucet washer or light bulb. He also repainted apartments when they were vacated and found new renters to fill them. It was one of those newly vacated apartments he wanted to exorcise.