The Story of Stu's

A Grown Up Poem to Promote The Pie and Discourage The Stralfs

Around 1920, Bug Stu started working through “7th Pie Theory” with his friend Allie Space-Owl. This rendition is by J. Johnson in the Land of Kent, which also happens to be the hometown of George Ade, the national narrator of our rural migration from the 1890’s through the 1930’s.

Allie and Stu are from rural Morocco, Indiana, “where it all began” (according to Stu, referring to some small insidious aliens that landed there). Allie and Stu now reside in Kentland, aka the Land of Kent. I just felt like jumping in here with a new poem, in their honor. The characters Rhettie and Wally have taken over my role in “making Bug Stu real” (Allie exists where Bug Stu exists, it goes without saying), but today this needed to be from me.

The poem is not comprehensive, and even the picture above doesn’t provide the usual thousand words without more background. The much-too-long explanations are around here on the internet somewhere, but I wouldn’t go down that rabbit hole or whatever it’s from. It will show up soon enough here. We haven’t found the real culprits for our societal woes, is the point.

To those of you who receive my email newsletter, last weekend’s could well be in your spam or promotions folder—my wife’s was. I think it’s because I used the word “Romance” in the subject line.

If I were still teaching, let’s say teaching the subject of This Project, this poem would be the final exam, and attentive readers would have been able to expand on each line, and maybe we could have even pulled some Environmental Science and some Physics into it. Fond memories.

And to my longest term readers, some of you were in that very first North Newton senior class of mine, next year will be the twentieth anniversary of the greatest field trip, and the greatest “finals week”, of my life, maybe of the entire galaxy, which was around this very day. And that year launched a project in my mind, which became This Project, and I hope you and others will understand why projects like these take so long, at least for people like me (whatever that is—but it’s not fast, nor easily sure).

A Cursory Rhyme for Our Curious Time
(dedicated to Stu and Allie’s work)

Maybe what we’ll try again,
as a way where we, and more, can win,
and understand what win might mean,
from failures, fancy, lessons gleaned…
As the Emerald City beckons on,
its Wizards, curtains, witches, pawns…
and sales…of souls that say they’re free,
but that’s not real, but they can’t see.

Instead, I’d find a shining star
with gardens, ponds, a soft guitar,
and work that none can take away,
and purpose in Another Day.

A shop, a village, a bygone town
without much gold to weigh it down,
so it could rise above these times
of inter-planetary crimes.
A landing, port…The Pie might be
a place for you, a space for me.

We need a chef, we need a baker,
a different kind of difference maker,
a duchy of a different sort,
a middle that still holds, supports,
provides what’s not commodity,
a future force…not oddity.
I see how this could come to be,
what Stu, and Allie, hope to see.

And there they were, in the Land of Kent,
not can’t, not won’t, not tools hell bent
on ROI in gold and myrrh,
or emeralds as if any were
the source of joy in lasting ways
not ploys, from Stralfs, for our last days.
But they know what they’ve come to do,
--to cast a better place to you.    

Thanks for reading.

“Mr. Storey”