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Village life: Child is having Mrs. Ticklefeather life

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Monday, April 30, 2012

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My first role model for urban life was, to my five-year-old mind, the world's greatest old lady. She was named Mrs. Ticklefeather, or "Lucky" Mrs. Ticklefeather, the title character of a Little Golden Book published in 1951 by Dorothy Kunhardt.

According to this book, "Mrs. Ticklefeather was a very thin old lady with a good sized feather in her hat, and on her feet she had tall black shoes with plenty of buttons."

She lived "on the top floor of a high, high, terribly high building," which she liked because up there she could get sunshine, and "oh what a good thing sunshine is for thin old ladies!"

The best thing about Mrs. Ticklefeather was that she had a pet puffin. His name was Paul. Mrs. Ticklefeather and Paul sat around every night sipping tea from a samovar and playing violin duets. Paul wore a pink nightcap and sometimes sprawled, talons up, on a chaise, reading a book, while Mrs. Ticklefeather worked on fancy knitting.

I think Mrs. Ticklefeather and Paul the Puffin were in love. (You really have to read the book!)

One day Mrs. Ticklefeather gets it into her head that she wants a sunflower. Avidly attentive, Paul disappears, and the rest of the book is what happens when a tearful and grief-stricken Mrs. Ticklefeather turns to a policeman, a train engineer, a teacher with a frog on her shoulder and a chef named Mr. Macaroni to find her beloved puffin-amour. It is the greatest book ever!

(Spoiler alert — it has a happy ending.)

I'm not sure who in my evangelical family, barely a generation from Quaker asceticism, let this subversive Golden Book into my innocently receptive hands. The parsonage we lived in then was carved onto an acre of former Ohio cornfield about as far from Mrs. Ticklefeather's penthouse as you could get.

But I do know that it convinced me urban life was full of exotic possibilities and interesting characters. It convinced me old ladies could have exciting lives. And also, if you ever wanted a sunflower, somebody who loved you would get you one, and maybe the whole town might get into the act.

I hate to admit it, but as it turns out, downtown community life might be a little bit more complicated than Mrs. Ticklefeather's unnamed, lovable metropolis.

A case in point.

The other afternoon a couple of friends and I were on our way to 501 Grille when we spied two drummers at the corner of Saginaw and First streets under the terra cotta American eagles of what used to be First National Bank.

From a distance it sounded like amateur auditions for a Fourth of July parade but it was only late April.  Still I admit there was something pleasantly odd and rousing about it.

Hmm ... drumming on street corners. My friends and I considered. Is this a good thing? Or is this something worrisomely earnest, like awkwardly hopeful murals sprouting up on abandoned walls?

Since we were in an optimistic mood anticipating our first glass of wine of the day, we decided it was a good sign. Buskers, we've got buskers, just like Washington Square Park in New York, Dupont Circle in D.C., and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco.

When we got closer, I recognized one of them, Quinton Robinson, a talented slam poet who goes by the performance name of "Ethereal." I'd just seen and heard him perform at Good Beans and I was glad to run into him again.

An hour later, they were still there and I threw a fiver into Ethereal's bucket. In turn, he performed a poem for me and my friends as we paused at the angled backdrop of what's now the First Street Lofts — a place that looks a lot like Mrs. Ticklefeather's urban high rise. We marched back toward UM-Flint, merrily flushed with a rhythmic case of busker charity.

But the next day, I ran into Greg, one of our promising young professors, who happens to live in the First Street Lofts. I've been proud of him for living there, along with several others. It seems right to me that UM faculty should populate and class-up downtown.

He wasn't happy.

"I think I need to get a homeowners' association going downtown," he said.

"Why?"

"Didn't you hear about the drummers?" he said. "Yesterday they were on the corner right under our windows — for hours. It was driving us crazy."

One of the other tenants, another young professor I know, finally went down and asked the drummers to pack it up. This second professor, Joe, and his wife, Maureen, have a toddler and it was time for the kid to go to bed. Things ended up courteously, enough, but Joe noted this is not the first time the values of downtown vitality have clashed with what it means to be neighborly for downtown denizens.

Sometimes I see Joe pushing his child in a stroller along Saginaw Street, and I've thought — how cool, that child is having a Mrs. Ticklefeather life! How nice, I've said to myself. We've got a professor who lives downtown with his wife and child and who walk around. There is nothing more joy-inspiring for a rejuvenating city than that.

And I also loved running into Ethereal and his drumming partner that spring night, knowing that they were raising money for Occupy Flint, and that Ethereal was declaiming from memory a poem he wrote himself about our town.

And it made me very happy at the last Art Walk when Stephanie Carpenter's UM-Flint creative writing students positioned themselves at 10 spots downtown and recited poems they'd written, as three little groups of us moved from one to another, listening and leaving behind little cloudbursts of appreciative applause.

The drumming episode strikes me as a small-scale but hopeful kind of conflict, indicative of the patience and grace it takes to live together as humans.

As utopian architect William McDonough said recently at a UM-Flint Critical Issues Forum, "good design is a human right."

Why not take it on? Why not try to figure out how to design our town to nurture humans' propensity toward growth, or as McDonough calls it, "fecundity"? Maybe we can accommodate to many values and varieties of loveliness.

I think Mrs. Ticklefeather would approve of such ideas. I also know that if I ever want a sunflower, I can find one three days a week at the Farmers' Market. The only thing missing is a debonair puffin named Paul.

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Columnist and poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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