Most people keep the experience of a colonoscopy to themselves. Gordon Jevons, however, wrote a poem about it.
“I think any idiot who’d write a poem about a colonoscopy deserves something,” Jevons said with a laugh.
Jevons’ preparation for his checkup is just one of the everyday events he explores in his first book of poetry and vignettes,
“Grandpa Gordon’s Book of Light Hearted Poetry and Anecdotes,” published by The Troy Book Makers last month. The collection includes snippets of Gordon’s life, including working 27 years in the North Colonie School District, spending summers in the Vermont Von Trapp Family home and just plain getting older. Although the book is now on sale at The Little Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza, the 84-year-old poet wasn’t initially planning on distributing it to anyone except his family.
“I want to leave something for my kids, grandkids and so on,” Jevons said. “A little remembrance, perhaps. I decided to try to put something together in book form, and that’s what came out.”
Yet Jevons, who retired just last year, said he’s been writing little bits of poetry since college. He studied elementary education at SUNY New Paltz in 1948, when there were only 800 students at the school – 700 of them girls.
“I wanted to be a phys. ed teacher. Cortland was full. They said, ‘Go to New Paltz’ and then later I could transfer over,” the Colonie resident said. “Well, once I got to New Paltz with 700 girls, you don’t think I was going to go to Cortland!”
Once he got his degree, Jevons headed back home and helped work at the family-owned Manor Inn in Rensselaer. He then got a job in 1956 teaching fifth grade at the one-year-old Boght Hills, which had just opened on Dunsbach Ferry Road. Jevons stayed at Boght Hills for 12 years, and then moved on to Shaker High School into the guidance department, where he said he helped raise the school’s attendance policy from 94 percent to 97 percent. At night, Jevons would call parents at home if their kids weren’t in school, something the school hadn’t done before.
“They’d go, ‘Well, Johnny was in school today.’ ‘Well, our records say Johnny wasn’t, would you check with Johnny?’ They’d come back and say, ‘Yeah you’re right, he didn’t go to school,’” Jevons said. “They knew they couldn’t get away with it anymore so they started coming to school. I was no miracle worker or anything like that.”
Some of Jevons’ anecdotes reflect his days at the schools, where he recalls interactions with students. Growing up around kids, Jevons said he always loved working with them, though he did admit he preferred stricter teaching methods and decided to stop teaching when calmer policies were put in place.
Jevons has seven kids of his own, 19 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. His family trickles into his pieces and one of his grandsons, Sam, did the eccentric cartoons that are speckled throughout the book. As a grandfather, Jevons prefers to be called “Grandpa Gordon,” mimicking Grandma Moses.
Many of the poems in the collection have been written over the years, and Jevons said he enjoys using his “poetic license,” though he sticks to using a rhyme scheme.
“The other forms never made sense to me. Maybe (they’re) too deep for my simple mind, I don’t know,” Jevons said.
Jevons also has a number of political pieces in his book, showing as he got older, his political views changed. On the back of the book, he warns liberal readers to “please be tolerant of my senior citizen views.”
Jevons said he is already working on his next book, which he said will be more organized, and will feature his “musical claim to fame,” when he brought Louis Prima to SUNY New Paltz.
Although he’s unsure whether people will buy “Grandpa Gordon’s Book of Light Hearted Poetry and Anecdotes,” he hopes he can spread some of his stories and moments in time.
“I’ve had some pretty good critiques on it. I didn’t think it was that good myself,” Jevons said. “I just want to give people a little laugh and a little lightheartedness.”