Below: Pam in the upper left, with writer buddies
Pam Herbert Barger almost majored in writing right after high school. It was a toss-up between writing and music. Despite her deep love of language and self-expression, she remembers feeling that her thus-far sheltered life left her little with which to deepen her singing, or to give her anything of consequence to write about. It turned out to be a moot point...
Real music got in the way, and she jumped at the chance to blow off college for what turned out to be ten years. Instead she sang and played guitar with the then-falling-from-fame Rick Evans (the brains behind Zager and Evans' "In the Year 2525."), and later with a traveling band called Sour Mash.
She made it to college only after she had two kids and a full-time piano studio. She majored in piano performance at UNL, and graduated with high distinction, but took as many writing classes as she could. This year marks her fortieth (and near last) year of teaching piano to much-beloved students. She currently sings and plays with the Melody Wranglers, and the Toasted Ponies. The FabTones (mostly retired) and Sour Mash band both have been inducted into the Nebraska Performing Arts Hall of Fame.
She's never stopped writing, however. Her articles on teaching have appeared in music magazines, and two essays on parenting her grandchild have been published, one in Woman's Day. She's published poetry in the likes of Rattle, West Branch, The Mid-America Poetry Review, the Nebraska Poets Calendar, and in the anthology Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace. Her chapbook The Pinball God Let Fly was published by Puddinghouse Press. Right now she’s working on a memoir about piano teaching, tentatively and audaciously titled Suzuki, the Buddha, and Me: One Piano Teacher’s Observations.
Doing My Part to Save the World
Everything I do will be insignificant, but I must do it anyway.
Ghandi
Like, Go in the bathroom, son.
My net contribution to the planet may be
(though the outcome remains uncertain)
three heirs who reliably use the toilet.
You do what’s in front of you.
I chop onions,
scour sinks.
Some folks make big differences;
I take turns with my son, rolling a die,
moving the appropriate number of squares
on a grown-up game, thinking of a question:
Can you give me a word that rhymes with “cat?”
Dog, he answers, and then insists I name a word
that starts wif stinky.
This is what parents do.
and here I am, enduring it…
checking off another duty,
as though rolling dice with my son
is equivalent to feeding the hungry.
Now I’m folding socks,
matching gray bottoms to gray bottoms,
separating elastic-top from plain,
stuffing my husband’s two dozen white ones
into his drawer unmatched, inside out.
It’s what’s in front of me…
I want to be deeper.
Instead: socks, socks, socks.
Down on the carpet, my son is freaking out,
hating the little bump at the toe of the
white sockie he’s pulled on all by himself.
At this moment, my calling seems to be
to teach him socks are like that,
more or less.
I give him words to live by:
Sweetheart, this is as good as socks get.
Warm Volkswagen
String quartet, Haydn
seventy-five miles per hour
somewhere near the Alma exit
The sky a covering of down
blankets of snow nuzzling up
yellow cottonwoods reaching
The bluestem the bass line the hawk
cello
milo
the air within
the air without
I find
I am of the planet
the way a worm is of soil
a bird is of sky
Atoms moving among atoms
altering
being altered
this gray day I find
I could as easily slip into soil
as I could sigh once more
and go on melting
into such welcoming air.