The Tale of a Whiteboard

I love whiteboards. There is something about a blank whiteboard that entices, even demands, to be written upon. Apparently, however, they don't have that effect on everyone; the other members of my family think my whiteboard obsession is eccentric at best.

Last month, you see, my parents purchased a magnetic whiteboard for the refrigerator door, with the admirable goal of having one, very visible place for grocery lists and notes to other family members. When this useful object had been installed and duly admired, it sat there for nearly a day entirely blank. This, I saw, would not do; so, in deference to its official status as bearer of household messages, I wrote across the top: "It is hereby decreed . . ."

Within the next few days, a Walmart list slowly grew beneath my writing. My sister, who disapproved of my whiteboard writing from the beginning, pointed out that the phrase "It is hereby decreed" made no logical or grammatical sense when followed by a Walmart list. I therefore modified it so it read, "It is hereby decreed that any member of this household who shall make pilgrimage to Walmart shall not return from hence without bringing these relics:"

In due time, the Walmart list and its preface were erased and the board was again blank. Its unrelieved whiteness made me think of Robert Frost's Desert Places, so I copied the last stanza unto it:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Since then, I have been writing a different poem on the whiteboard every week or so, to the general amusement of my family (except for the one time when I wrote a note instead, telling people not to eat the bananas I wanted to use for baking, worded thusly: "Behold the sacred bananas. Let none touch them, for in three days they shall be suitable for banana muffins.").

At present, I have an Emily Dickinson poem up:

I lost a world - the other day!
Has anybody found?
You'll know it by the row of stars
Across its forehead bound.

A rich man might not notice it.
But to my frugal eye -
Of more esteem than ducats.
Oh find it - Sir - for me!

This one has not been generally popular, but I like it. When you walk past the same poem every day, different interpretations and shades of meaning pop out at you each time, depending on what mood you're in. When I first copied this poem unto the board, it seemed jaunty and light-hearted, Emily in a silly mood. But the tragic undertones gradually became more obvious - the loss of dreams and illusions and all the little worlds we humans construct for ourselves. At first I thought "Sir" in the last line was an address to the reader, but then I remembered that Dickinson sometimes refers to God as "Sir." In that light, the last line becomes a desperate prayer or even an accusation of divine indifference.

I wonder why I didn't think of this method of studying a poem when I was in school.