Monthly Archives: October 2011

October 27, 2011 · 8:00 am

Ice Cream Ride

Sitting on the top step of the porch of our brick and flagstone house on May Street. It had rained earlier in the day and the air was thick with the muggy smell of wet grass. Small puddles filled the chipped flagstone crevices of the porch. I was looking into a puddle watching specks of dirt floating and wondering what kind of ice cream I’d get today. My dad was sleeping on the couch again; I could hear his deep rich snores out here on the step. I had told him that Mr. Joyce, my Little League baseball coach, was on his way to pick me up and take me for ice cream. To which he answered without opening his eyes, “that will be fine”. Dad spent most of his time on the couch since he closed The Blarney Stone, his bar, mom said if his customers drank as much as dad did we would be millionaires.

I had a lot of ice cream that summer; usually after a game, Mr. Joyce would take me to the Prince Castle the ice cream place on Western just outside the city. He didn’t invite the other kids. Just me. We would go for long rides down side streets or along the forest preserves and get ice cream at the end of the rides. Mr. Joyce had been a coach for a while. I don’t think he was really very good at coaching but he let me play second base even though some of the other kids were better fielders and hitters than I was.

 

 

Coach’s baby blue Pontiac pulled in front of my house. I ran to it hoping no one saw me. I pulled the door open by the shiny handle it felt heavy resisting my hand. Mr. Joyce reached across the seat to help get it open. On the gray vinyl bench seat, his hand rested outstretched. I got in and sat as close to the door as I could and did not look at him.

“Hey Mr. Joyce,” I said

“Hey” he said “go for a ride?”

I didn’t want to ride today just the ice cream “how about ice cream first?”

“Usually we do the ride first, then ice cream, no?” He said.

I sat there looking out the window and I saw Al and Chucky playing strikeout in the schoolyard across the street. “Hey Al! Chucky!” I wanted to call out “ice cream?” I sighed. Looking up at Mr. Joyce, I said “ice cream first.”

The ice cream was usually one small scoop. But today, I was thinking more. Bigger. Richer. “Hot Fudge Sundae!”

“We usually get one scoop!” he said. Not today. We said nothing for a moment; “Okay.” he patted the space between us with his right hand. “Closer, come closer,” he said.

“Ice cream first,” I said. “Hot fudge.”

He sighed and snorted as we pulled away. I hated his snorting. It reminded me of our neighbor, the Sorenson’s boxer, who grunted and snorted at the fence whenever I walked by on my way to school, his nosed pushing through the chain link. The Sorenson’s didn’t much care for us, always muttering about “Shanty Irish” and “a disgrace“. They wouldn’t let their kids play with us, which was just as well because my house wasn’t right to have kids over anyway. When friends asked to come over my Dad was always too tired or one of my brothers and sisters was sick with the flu and might be contagious. He snorted again; I moved closer to the door, he patted the seat harder this time. “No. Ice cream first! Hot fudge!”

Another quick snort and we were off. We didn’t say much, maybe a few words about the White Sox chances this year and the game we had coming and “could I play second again?”

“Sure, but don’t be afraid of the bounces, put your body in front of them” he reached over to pat me a few times but only the tip of his middle finger touched my thigh which made me stiffen.

I was thinking thick hot fudge on vanilla. I love the thick warm fudge dripping over the white vanilla, sweet covered in sweeter, nuts sprinkled and gliding through the fudge. A cherry on top was optional as far as I was concerned, but a not a bad place to start the feast.

We got there, finally. I pushed the car door open forgetting to shut it behind me.

“Hey the door!” Mr. Joyce yelled. I kept going toward the faux castle facade past the sign with the profile of a dashing young Prince savoring a cone. Prince Castle. Once inside I was washed with a blast of cold air. It was always cold inside which quickly dried the dampness at the back of my thighs. I looked up at the menu behind the tall white and glass counter and saw that the hot fudge sundae was almost the most expensive at three dollars only surpassed by the banana split. I had made a good choice, though obviously coach was feeling the pinch. “Sure you want the Sundae, not a scoop?”

“Sure.” The girl behind the counter dug deeply into the brown vat of vanilla bending her elbow with the weight of her body to break the hardened surface of the fresh tub. I watched as she pulled the long ladle out of the silver fudge container my eyes pleading for more. I ate slowly digging my spoon into the sundae glass, allowing each spoonful to melt a bit in my mouth and finally getting the last speck, my tongue stretching into the small indentation at the bottom of the glass unreachable by spoon. I took a moment to savor my small victory.

 

© 2011 Patrick Moloney

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October 25, 2011 · 8:00 am

Wanted: Fat Girl

Maybe I bumped her elbow. It could’ve been something as simple as that: the catalyst. And when she turned around to see me, her response was habitual – not calculated. She saw my face and then looked down my body and back up again with disdain, then disgust, and then she finished with a small laugh of gleeful pity. The entire assessment and pronouncement lasted a full second – not more than two.

Could I have imagined the disdain – or has there been some past interaction between us to prompt her disrespect? No, I am anonymous – and I have spent a lifetime cataloguing glances such as these. I know the difference between a pullback that implies I’m taking too much space, and a step-aside that extends respect for someone who needs to walk past. I’ve been thinner too – and I know these glances suddenly disappear. (They are replaced by different glances, but that’s another story.) Those who don’t experience them often dismiss the social sanctions that take place in mere moments. Imaginations, paranoia. To those who know them, they are as real as the furniture.

To be fair, she had been drinking. To be fair, it was late at night and I was on her turf. That is, anyplace where the body is put into motion. I can sometimes get her respect in the classroom, or behind a desk, a place where my body is secondary to my mind. The hour and alcohol would only serve to drop the decorum she might use at, say, the post office. She would note my body shape and size, attire and demeanor at the post office too, but the schoolgirl glee at my perceived defeat is reserved for late night. For slight intoxication. For a place where she believes I am unarmed, unwelcome.

We had just left the dance floor and I think I bumped her arm. We’d been out dancing and the music was ending for the night. We were coming back to ourselves – the selves that are no longer ecstatically moving, bodies pulsing rhythm. We were coming back to the selves that have to find meaning in our own lives, make decisions about who we are, how we project ourselves onto the bright canvas of culture. The bracketed existence of dance floor anonymity was finished. And though I don’t know the woman who gave me “the look,” I know how much she needs me.

What causes one to offer disdain toward another and think it is warranted? The fact that it will be excused, or lauded, for starters. What causes a person to dismiss the humanity of another? A need to elevate oneself, for one example. And that’s why the slender girl on the dance floor needs me to be fat. She needs it, and while she thinks she doesn’t want me around, she wouldn’t know how to live without me. And her fear that she could be me, but isn’t, adds the gleeful chuckle of dismissal to the end of her affront. I give her life purpose.

By the bar, late at night – this is not the time for conversation, but I catch her eye and look for a moment with real compassion. This does not even take a second, maybe half a beat. I am so out of place in this interaction – not doing my job. And indeed, I know how to do my job – to avert my eyes and show her the shame that I feel. I felt it as a child, and still do at times when someone like her catches me unaware, the shame of forgetting that I am not credible, followed by the hot rage of unspoken justice. But not this time – and not usually anymore. I just look at her with compassion – so different from pity. I am not afraid I could be her. I know I could be her. And I know that my ability to practice kindness toward her will help us both – and probably others whom we haven’t even met.

I just stand and stare at her, thinking: I know how much you need me. Without me, you’d have to do something with your life in order to feel good about yourself. You couldn’t just gloat about not being me. You couldn’t use me as the ballast that keeps your head from floating away thinking of all of those on the dance floor who are prettier or thinner or shapelier than you. Without me, you’d have to make someone else your scapegoat, and it might not be so easy, if there weren’t obvious physical criteria involved. Barring replacing me, you’d have to focus on who you want to be within yourself – not just in comparison to others. I want to ask the kind of rhetorical questions that prompt reflection in a quiet moment: What must you think of yourself to elevate the size and shape of your body – perhaps what you do to make it so — to traits worthy of virtue? How little must you think of yourself to look at me that way and take pleasure in it?

Her glance also makes me know that she doesn’t know me at all. Does my demeanor say it: Maybe you didn’t know, but any fat woman you meet in a social setting – especially one who’s doing something that uses her body: working at a job, dancing, buying clothes, eating a meal – she has character and fortitude to spare for surviving a world that uses her as you’ve just done. Fat people may scapegoat others to find their self-worth, surely. If she thinks she’s so different than me, then she doesn’t know me at all.

I don’t say any of that, but for our similarities, I seem to know something she doesn’t see. She doesn’t actually need to DO anything in order to be worthy of respect and positive attention in the world – neither do I. It’s already done. We are already fine people, just as we are. Even as she puts me down, she does not deserve my put-down. How much lower can we agree to feel? No lower. No more.

I didn’t speak at all, standing on the edge of the dance floor, late at night. But if I could read her painful need in her quick behavior, perhaps she could read my truth in a simple stare as well. Perhaps she heard me say:

“Gentle, darling. No one deserves your derision. Not even you.”

 

 

© 2011 Kimberly Dark

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October 20, 2011 · 8:00 am

We see the carousel

We see the carousel

and at our age

we still can’t come anywhere near resisting

Three riders

brothers

forced best friends

“How far to Jerusalem”

The truest

realest

most unprovable things

are really funny

sometimes.

Crusaders, disciples, forced individuals

who probably would be on a quest, if they had one

but the impending night

the curly haired shadows

the goes without saying greatness

of shared experience

rides behind is

reminds us

that maybe

if we knew how far

to Jerusalem

to equality

to win her heart and our own

we probably wouldn’t ride

© 2011 Frank Possemato

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October 18, 2011 · 8:00 am

A Question of God and Daffodils

I used to wonder why Mom planted all those flowers in a big strip across the back yard, going from the corner where the swing set used to be with those mud puddles underneath where our feet had rubbed the grass gone, to the corner with the Russian olive tree which didn’t grow the green or black olives like they have in Greece but little silver olives that were hard like bb’s and tasted bitter so we couldn’t eat them, just like the red berries growing on the hedgerow that could kill you even if you just ate one. But we liked writing on the sidewalk with those red berries because the juice stained the cement, like once when Jan wrote “I love Davy Jones” and it lasted all summer, not like when we wrote with chalk which was more fun because of the different colors and you didn’t scrape your fingers up like you did with berries, but it washed away as soon as it rained. Except the time right after baby Emily VanPeter got hit by a car and her sister Laura started pulling out her hair in big chunks and wrote “Emily is dead” over and over in yellow chalk on their sidewalk and one of the dads had to hose it off late at night because it didn’t rain. Our dads would trim those sidewalks up with daisy-shaped edgers and sometimes they would mow their lawns together and end up talking for twenty minutes about their jobs while they left the lawnmowers running and they had to yell to hear each other. The dads helped us pitch tents too when us girls would have a camp-out in one of our back yards and then the dads would stay out in the yard till after dark drinking bottled Coke or Budweiser until they were sure we were in our sleeping bags, and one night Mr. Larson shot off some firecrackers outside the tent and we ran out screaming because we thought someone was shooting a gun and Mr. Larson and Mr. Gunter laughed and laughed and punched each other in the arm.
It was when we got older that Mom planted that whole row of flowers in the back for some reason even though I thought the bunches of buttery daffodils we already had poking up around the front evergreen bushes every year were just fine, plus we had peony bushes by the side kitchen door where we used to watch the ants crawling all over the buds eating the glue till the pink petals burst open. And there was the row of irises standing thigh-tall along the patio’s edge that we had to hop over to reach the grass which was annoying because Mom knew we would have to do that, but she planted them anyway like she was trying to keep us fenced in and she yelled at us whenever we knocked one over. Then that fat groundhog came and ate all the violets from under the irises two years in a row and then Fluffy killed a little shrew that was living in there and brought it into the house dangling from her mouth like a trophy and we all had to praise her for it because Dad said she was acting on instinct even though she killed an innocent thing. So Mom replaced the irises with more daffodils which were smaller and hardier, and in a couple of years we weren’t spending much time back there anyway because we were old enough to go to Lion’s Park Pool without grownups. My best friend Sue and I went on our bikes almost every day with our green metal pool passes sewn to the hips of our suits, and we would swim the whole width of the pool under water and do back flips off each others’ hands when the lifeguards weren’t watching because it was on the sign that listed Prohibited Activities.
The front of the house was lined with bushy evergreen shrubs and a flowering magnolia which Mom thought was perfect for the family Easter picture so she would have us stand in front of the tree with Jan and me in our matching homemade dresses and the boys in their suit jackets. That was the only time Jan and I allowed ourselves to be dressed alike because here we were two years apart but the same height and wearing the same size clothes and everyone thought we were twins which made Jan mad because she was older, but we had the same picture year after year with us kids surrounded by the same white petals and we all kept getting a little bigger along with the tree. The year Mom was in the hospital on Easter and Aunt Opal was living with us we had to wear store-bought dresses and I was mad because I wanted to wear the peach dress Mom made the year before but it didn’t fit any more, and you could tell in the picture that I was pouting and Keith was crying because I think it scared him to see Aunt Opal taking the picture instead of Mom. He was only four and he was always scared of something, like when Richard and Jan would sneak up on him and say boo just to see him jump and start running in place not knowing where he was which they thought was funny but I didn’t laugh at him because I knew he was fragile since I heard his leg bone crack that time the VanPeters’ teeter-totter smacked into it when he was three and he had to wear a cast and be pushed around in a stroller for two months.
We had vines too all along one side of the house that grew deep purple grapes that we had to pick before the raccoons gobbled them up, and Mom would make them into jelly in the fall to give away in pretty jars as Christmas presents. The church ladies would always say Joyce’s grape jelly was the purest and sweetest they ever had, not knowing how our whole house reeked of grapes and sugar for days as she boiled and strained the grapes and then churned the mush around and around in a sieve with the wooden juicing wand that I used one year for my Halloween costume as the Statue of Liberty’s torch because it had a handle and was shaped like a cone that with some imagination looked like a flame. I won first-prize at the church costume party even though I was wearing a baptism robe which I knew was a little inappropriate to wear for Halloween even though the church ladies said I could, and Jan wore another baptism robe for her angel costume but it wasn’t as original as mine because I even made a Declaration of Independence out of cardboard and wrote “Declaration of Independence” on it in magic marker and made a cardboard crown too, since by then we had started making our own costumes because Mom was hooked up to the dialysis machine in her bedroom three nights a week and didn’t have time for that kind of stuff any more.
But my favorite flowers of all were the white lilacs over by mine and Jan’s bedroom because in the morning in springtime I could kneel on my bed and open the window and that sweet smell would float in and I would get that tingly summer feeling like I had forever ahead of me to go to the pool and read mystery novels and listen to Larry Lujack on my transistor radio while Sue and I strung beads in our fort made from lawn chairs and beach towels and sang along with Carole King on Tapestry or James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” about his girlfriend in drug rehab who committed suicide which was so tragic. One morning I knelt to open my window and a hummingbird was drinking from the magenta flowers on the bush just outside and shimmering in the sun, hovering there like time had stopped. I held my breath and could have reached out and touched him. I knew from the pictures in Mom’s bird book that he was a ruby-throated hummingbird even though I had never seen one before and I wondered how he could be so tiny and so beautiful and move his wings so fast and be right outside my window when I didn’t even wish for it with his needle beak dipping so daintily into those pink cups. But then he was gone before I could wake Jan up to show her, and I wondered if he was even real and thought maybe he was a miracle like when Mom didn’t die even after the doctors said she might and that maybe the bird had come to my window to give me a secret message but I didn’t understand it.
But I wasn’t sure about miracles or God or any of that stuff because I remembered how it felt to be huddled in Mom and Dad’s bed with my sister and brothers that night a few summers before, seeing the red lights flashing around on their bedroom wall for hours and hearing the sirens and Jan’s whimpering, and we were all hugging each others’ arms and legs while Mom and Dad were out front with the Gunthers and Larsons and a whole crowd of other grown-ups plus some policemen and ambulance drivers who we could see out the window all gray under the street light like they were in an old detective movie. Later we heard Mom and Dad talking about how Mr. VanPeter kept repeating he didn’t know Baby Emily was outside when he and Dad and Richard were playing catch with a softball in our front yard and the ball went into the street so he went out to fetch it and figured he’d just hop back into the yard and keep playing. But a miracle didn’t happen that time and that station wagon driver didn’t see Emily following after her daddy and neither did anybody else, not Dad or Richard or even the daffodils or magnolia in the front yard since it was July and they weren’t blooming any more.
And so when Mom came back from the hospital after she didn’t die, at first I didn’t know if it was because of God or just because we were lucky or maybe unlucky because she had to sit in a wheelchair with her eyes that were tired and glossy like pudding. She took lots of naps and couldn’t eat most of her favorite foods like chocolate or oranges because they had too much potassium and she couldn’t drink coffee because she didn’t pee any more so if she drank too much she would get all yellow and puffy. Three nights a week she had to sit in bed with the needles Dad poked into her arms and the tubes of dark blood snaking up into the humming and beeping machine and going around and around inside the silver canister where the poisons came out, and Jan and I had to do the cooking those nights and carry food back to her on a tray and sometimes I would put a peony or some lilacs in a vase on the tray next to her one little piece of chocolate and she would smile and say thank you. And I don’t think it was a miracle when a couple of years later Mom became Mom again because it was the machine that was saving her, which I explained in detail for my seventh grade Science Fair project and even made a big poster where I drew the metal kidney machine using my silver and gold crayons but I did not draw the tubes because I had learned by then that some people faint at the sight of blood.
The summer I finished junior high Mom planted the whole row of flowers across the back yard, and I remember that was the year Richard dropped out of college and ran away to live in a commune in the desert where he got a scorpion bite and then sliced open his arm when he crashed his Volkswagen and also thought for a while that his girlfriend was pregnant. Mom planted early-blooming purple crocuses and then zinnias that looked like pink cheerleading pom-poms and snapdragons that grew tall like and dainty like white or yellow queens that ruled over all the rest and finally the shrubby chrysanthemums that opened up after school had started back and I was surprised that they were as orange as pumpkins like somehow they knew fall was coming. So then I thought maybe Mom planted all the new flowers because we were all growing up and spending more time away from home and she wanted to surround our house with beautiful colors to keep from seeing how gray the sky was sometimes or how the road in front of the house finally got paved over where Emily’s blood had left a stain. But I still wasn’t sure about anything and then Mom died so I couldn’t ask her.
A few years later just before Dad remarried and sold the house and moved away, I looked out of my old bedroom window for the last time and I remembered the hummingbird floating above the magenta bush and I could still imagine Mom in the distance by her zinnias wearing those navy-blue shorts and her white tank top with her dark curls that were just starting to turn gray. And finally I understood why she needed to plant all those flowers, even though she knew we were all too busy to notice and she knew she wouldn’t be around much longer to enjoy them. She planted them because it was all there was left for her to do. And maybe when she died she flew up like a bird over those rows of flowers and they all rippled just a little as she flapped her wings, if only we had known to look.

© 2011 Kate Hutchinson

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October 13, 2011 · 8:00 am

Jerusalem Sunrise

In the periwinkle-grey of morning,

From primordial mountains,

Jerusalem births

Herself majestic.

 

Purple toward azure,

Whispers Shacharit;

Prayers kiss

Shemyim’s sister.

 

White clouds realize the day,

Then donkeys, hens, and cars,

Embrace the dawn;

Unspoken serenity erupts for hours.

 

Pink plus golden moments filter

Rare light in Benyomin’s hills,

Beyond the brightly illumined

City of Kedosha


© 2011 KJ  Hannah Greenberg

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October 11, 2011 · 8:00 am

To Jabberwock, From Charon: Wherever I May Find You

I never felt like I belonged in my family. Born the last of four accidental children, by the time I made an appearance my mother not only skipped making a baby book for me, she never bought a stitch of clothing, nor pretended—as she had with the other children–I was anything more than an unfortunately animate bodily secretion.

As such it was easy for her to zip her fly and turn her back on the lot of us when we were pre-pubescent children, abdicating in search of greener pastures with my father’s then best friend…This ended the friendship, needless to say.

But back to the baby book thing. Of all the evidence of my mother’s lack of interest this one hurt the most, especially when my brother and sisters would take their books out, which I remember as frequently. All three had one: bound in gender appropriate ribbons with gilt pages and pre-printed headings for a lock of hair or birth certificate. They compared tiny, ink-smudged footprints and progressively less detailed observations of their newborn selves, removed grainy black and white Polaroid’s from the little holders in the old albums–as I looked on, learning what it was to covet for the first time.

I turned my back on my family when I could, at fifteen, looking for a more welcoming place in pop culture. Would you believe there wasn’t one song—not one—dedicated to a girl with my name? Of all the ballads to Rosanne and Sara, and plaints to Caroline, Diana, and of all names Rhiannon, they (and by they I mean the music industry at large) never bemoaned my passing and/or leaving even once in song? Vexing, I tell you. That’s what it was, and my quest to stand out turned academic.

Though my associates took as long as a masters to earn, it did supply the missing link.  During the course of astronomy class—I needed earth science units to graduate; finished third in my class, too—when the professor inevitably came to the topic of Pluto and the moons that orbit the icy planet–it was still a planet back then–he pronounced one of them—the biggest one–exactly like my name:

Karen

Which gratified my nomad self to no end. Upon further inquiry, I learned the moon’s moniker could be pronounced Sharon or Karen, and either would be correct.

At last.

This was where I fit in. In the cosmos. Why didn’t I think of it before? I always felt so above it all—if you’ll pardon the cliché—so what better to identify with than a celestial body? Such were my thoughts at the time and if it seems a bit overwrought to say I was suffused with belongingness let me just tell you, you’re dealing with an unstable person. I look for signs in everything.

I happily changed my online handle to Charon, then at aol.com, but now at cox.net—I have a tendency to jump around, looking for the best deal—and fired off an e-mail to my father, excited to share my discovery. My father was an atomic physicist—and how handy was that, to have a resource like him at my fingertips, when studying such a hard subject, though this isn’t about that. Dad and I had exchanged daily e-mails throughout the term, the perennially stalled lines of communication at last reopened, but since I was literally over the moon at the time, I thought nothing of his failure to return my e-mail immediately.

Thought nothing too, of answering my cell a few days later, only to have my brother tell me—a shade too excitedly—that Dad had died suddenly and irrevocably of a massive heart attack, and all I could say was ‘so that’s why he didn’t reply!’. Days later I worked it out that my screen name was changed on the exact same day he passed, but I’ll get to the reason for that in a little bit.

I fell to my knees after that of course, but it was almost as if I were standing outside myself, watching this woman do the appropriate grief-stricken thing. It was just so unreal. I stayed up all night, doing blow and drinking, thinking if I could somehow hold back the dawn, a day would never break on this ludicrous and unacceptable new reality. How could Dad die when I hadn’t made my peace with him yet? When I was just rediscovering him? When I still didn’t belong?

But a new day did come, and a week passed in a xanaxed out haze—twenty of ‘em, which is impressive, if you consider the fact they were the big, fat blue kind—and I shivered and sweated for days upon returning to my job as a bartender. It sucked too, because people were really checking me out. My boyfriend said they were just being solicitous when I complained, but I felt scrutinized.

I hated being looked at right then. These days, too, but it wasn’t always this way. I can look back now, and see that was the turning point. I liked the attention back when I was younger. Too many years ago now everybody, and I do mean everybody—guys and girls alike—gave me the head-to-toe. Not to brag, but I was that good-looking. I should have been, too, because that’s all I was doing. Being good-looking and looking for my reflection in other people. Not anymore though. Either thing. My ticket to ride has been downgraded to coach, that’s for sure, that’s what I experience these days.

But I digress.

Over the course of the next month or so, I found out that charon actually has a dual meaning, the secondary one—or the primary—being the name of the demon that paddles the boat across the river Styx. Oooh, you might scoff and fine, you’re welcome to that opinion. It just creeps me out that I coincidentally—and I use that word with a great deal of Freudian connotation—happened to change my moniker to the same as Hell’s ferryman on the day of my father’s death. You can see where that might be rife with portent for a person of a…shall we say…delicate temperament?

I’ve kept the moniker. I’m superstitious about it now in an undefined way.

When my oldest sister—Zjabberwock—shot herself three months after Dad’s heart attack, I left bartending for good. I had some money—Dad’s money—and I lived well on it for a year, and not so well the next, so I took a job as a part time cook for a widower and his son in the suburbs. I isolated. I saw no one but my boyfriend and bane for the last thirteen years–and if you said oooh, and scoffed here, you’re entitled to that, too–anyway no one but him, my boss, his son and the functionary characters that made my life work.

I liked this.

 

 

For a long time.

 

 

Two years.

 

 

Why did you withdraw, you might ask and I’ll tell you. When Diane killed herself—that’s Zjabberwock; someone must have beat her to the punch you know, the Z thing—anyway, when she shot herself, we were communicating for the first time in years, in a meaningful way, on an almost daily…eventually daily…basis, and I was trying to help her.

 

 

She was devastated.

 

 

She was drunk.

 

 

She was on drugs, but so was I, so I didn’t say anything other than ‘thank you’, when she gave me the web address of a Canadian website where all that was needed to order pills was a credit card number. ‘Thank you’ is what I said. Not: you shouldn’t be doing things like that Diane—or—I’m coming, I’m getting on a plane, hang in there. No, just ‘thanks’, and, ‘I’ll have to call you back; I’m running out of minutes’.

And I had lied. Lied about the time left on my cellular plan, lied about my feelings, and lied to myself that this was just her usual dramatics. Did I mention that I fretted for a long time–each time–after hanging up? Let me do that now. I did cry, but I’m not sure for whom anymore. Probably myself.

And Diane had died. Early the next morning by her own hand. I didn’t find out till two days later she’d used a gun–I just naturally assumed it was the pills and the reality of that is the real knee cruncher in this story. And by that I mean: I really fell to my knees, without watching myself for effect.

Zjabberwock. I think of her like that a lot, it was her online moniker, but more than that, it was the last form of communication I ever received from her. The day after her death I had checked my Inbox and felt like I’d been touched by another world when I saw the sole correspondence there was from–

Zjabberwock. How was it possible?—I’d wondered, full of excitement. Somehow I’d been granted a reprieve from this tragedy—her, too—and here was the missive telling me it had all been a grotesque practical joke, some monstrous misunderstanding to weakly laugh about when I’d read the details. Not funny ha-ha, but funny oops. Like someone threw acid in my eyes, funny. Joke’s on me.

I’d double-clicked but she hadn’t come zooming out of my PC as the fantastical author of her moniker might have had her do, or the wishful thinking that shaped my own thoughts. I was so disappointed I can’t tell you and I won’t make a metaphor of it, though that’s the best way for me to think of things. As something other than they are.

And so the Jabberwock’s toves will remain forever slithy and I, Charon, bearer of the damned across the river of fire, will help no one. But I would like to tell you, Zjabberwock that I am sorry–sorry every day that I didn’t help you from falling into the abyss. I want you to know too, that I’m lonely without you, and if you’d stuck around, we could have grown close and belonged to each other.

© 2011 Karen Robiscoe

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October 6, 2011 · 8:00 am

HANDS

“Ain’t nothing much harder to get at than the truth.”
Samuel sat on the edge of the couch in my office, rubbing his huge hands together and shaking his head. I was often distracted by those hands, giant upholstered creatures he never put by his sides. They were always outstretched, reaching into the world, ready to engage, looking to be useful. Years of lobstering and commercial fishing had weathered them to a polish, thickened the skin to burnished leather. But it was not their texture that drew me to them, it was their size. They were enormous. Like the swollen muscles of a weightlifter they loomed out of proportion to his already large body, dwarfing even the thick arms and shoulders that stemmed them. When he cried, he needed only one hand to cover his entire face, sausage-swollen fingers broad enough to mask both eyes while his palm cupped his chin. He would sit, rolling side to side, wounded sobs escaping from behind the hand.
Sometimes he’d gaze at those hands, propping his elbows on his knees and laying the palms up side-by-side ten inches from his face as though he were inspecting a fish. In those moments, the hands became a mirror, and over the months we met, I watched him find anger, sadness and regret seeded among the calluses, imbedded in the deep creases in his palms.
“My whole life, I’ve worked with these,” he’d muse. “Grabbed, caught, trapped, pulled. Now it seems like everything’s getting away. Seems like my final catch is going to be loss.”

Samuel was not a simple man. I’ve lived too long in this coastal Maine community to make that mistake. He’d arrive in overalls if he came straight from the boat, and leave his dirt stained rubber boots at the bottom of the stairs to my office, but that meant nothing. People here lead simple lives. They are not simple people.
And so we talked of loss. The loss of sons, whose talents he supported even as they took the boys far away and deprived him of the pleasures of watching their success. The loss of a curly haired daughter whose virus beat out his race over winter seas to the mainland hospital. The loss of a partner, who found the island fishing life too small, too stifling, and once the children fled, took wing herself. The loss of believing in his own choices, most frightening of all.
Always, it came back to those hands. “I needed to work with these” he’d say, “I still do”
And as we parsed the cost of that, and tallied what he lost, he’d repeat that wistful thought, “Ain’t nothing much harder to get at than the truth.”
One day I asked what that statement meant to him, and where it came from.
He smiled, let his hands drop gently and fold into each other as he lifted his head and began:
“Oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths:,
Win us with honest trifles; to betray us
In deepest consequence.”
“Shakespeare?” I asked
“Macbeth,” he answered. “It’s that scene where his friend tries to warn him that the three witches can’t be trusted, that they’ll tell you small things that are true but lie to you about the important stuff. I guess I have my own three witches.”
“Anyway,” he laughed, “the short version works better on the boat.’

Near the end of our time together, when the loss had etched its way through rock and found fresh soil to water, he arrived one day carrying a bucket of shrimp. Hundreds of still squirming tiny Maine creatures captured in a silver bucket that dripped on my rug. He handled it with two fingers. I knew I would need both arms to carry it down to my kitchen after he left.
“I’ll take ‘em back if you can’t use ‘em.” he offered.
I smiled.
We both knew I’d be up past midnight, until my hands ached, snapping the heads off, peeling the translucent shells away from the tender pink bodies, dropping the perfect thumb nail sized gems into a bowl.


© 2011 Mary E. Plouffe Ph.D.

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October 4, 2011 · 8:00 am

Look at Him on the Edge

When Zachary was eight months old and in his baby walker and in a second of my inattention and mistake, he scooted onto the landing of a flight of twenty-two concrete stairs that led down into the dark basement floor of my mother’s house. There he was, looking at me, smiling, his square walker firmly, for now, planted on the landing. I turned, put down my spoon, and everything stopped, just like in the cliché, just like in the movies. I could see my life after that moment, after the screaming and the dialing of 911. After the weeping and the blood would come the disaster of blame and guilt. This gorgeous smiling baby would be gone, and it would be entirely my fault for the rest of time.
Forever I would see him as I actually still do, looking at me in that second before I pulled him to safety. He smiles, his eyes wide and dark, waiting on the landing.
Years later, when he was 16 years old and frozen in the almost coma called akinesia brought on by the repeated Haldol injections he was given to allay his psychotic LSD rantings, I remembered him in his walker on the landing of my mother’s stairs. But now, he wasn’t bright eyed but dead eyed. The doctors had pumped him full of Benardyl to counteract the Haldol, and his father and I were waiting for him to come back, hoping that he would, hoping that it wasn’t too late.
Time seemed to slow again, and I had the same feeling that I had when he was balanced on the landing. In a second, life could go one way or the other, toward the light or the dark, but the dark seemed so much more possible.
At the emergency room, I wept as though purging. Through my tears, I was trying to get rid of all the mistakes I’d ever made with this boy, my choices that had clearly backfired. As he lay there staring up at nothing, his eyes vacant, I realized that the time and effort and organization and help and punishment and discussions had not kept him from being right here, frozen on this gurney. All the family trips and enrichment classes and special tutors and high school sports had led to this one place. Regardless of what I had done as a mother, he’d begun to experiment with drugs, taking BART into Berkeley to visit the free clinic so he could procure a clean needle. At 16, he bought heroin on his own. At 16, he became addicted. At 16, he got himself off heroin without anyone noticing. Without my noticing. Without his father noticing. Without either his father or me seeing that he was on the landing at all.
After heroin, he went into LSD. On the wild trip that eventually brought him to the hospital, he’d thought he was at the beach. Not knowing what to do with someone on LSD, my husband put Zachary into the car, and took him to a church that we’d often visited as a family. It was just before Christmas, the church wild with lights and a stunning view of the Bay Area. Zachary had broken free, trying to find the water on his imagined beach. My husband ran after him, losing him for a moment, only finding him when he spotted two rather large men subduing him. They helped wrestle Zachary back into the car, asking my husband never to come back there again. With Zachary flailing around in the car, my husband sped to the hospital, where orderlies and police officers restrained Zachary in order to begin giving him the drugs that would bring him to this zombie state.
We sat by him, and I knew that I had never done one right thing for him. Not one.
The monitors beeped and whined, the ER air cold and clinical. Finally, I noticed Zachary looking around, shifting slightly against the sheets, and I took his hand.
“You’re back?” I said.
He nodded, and I held his hand and my then husband’s. With Zachary, in this, always, my husband and I were together. One more time, this time, we had pulled him out of danger after all.
I no longer can pull Zachary back from the various landings he slides himself onto. He likes the edge, and as he goes into his life as an anarchist, living in abandoned homes, traveling to Germany to pull up cobblestones and throw them at police, protesting the war, breaking down barricades, I can’t lean far enough forward or backward to make it all right.
When I see him now, he is always on the landing, and I am always just one second away from having to save him. I am so scared to be an inch, a foot, a mile away from him sometimes, knowing that I might not reach him. How many times can I almost save him? When we I be too far away to ever do anything ever again? When will I finally miss?
But he is no longer an eight-month-old almost toddler, and I am almost at the point of knowing I have to look at him on the edge, see my boy smiling up at me, and wave, turn, walk away from the danger he so likes to live on. Walk slowly out of the room and close the door.

 

© 2011 Jessica Barksdale

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October 1, 2011 · 8:00 am

An Introduction by Rick Marlatt

Dear Readers,
Thank you to all the writers who submitted their work for this month’s issue. For the last two months, I have been humbled, amazed, and blessed by your wonderfully crafted essays and stories. As I first began reading through what had come in, I immediately recognized that while the experience of reading and analyzing this incredible work from fantastically talented writers would be tremendously gratifying, I gauged just as quickly that the task of selecting just four would be painstaking, if not dumbfounding. It is with this collective and creative spirit that I congratulate the four submissions selected. These writers submitted pieces which stood out not only in terms of their artistic worth, but also in their connection to the theme of origins; and did so in ways which were unique and unforgettable. To each and every of you, thank you again. I hope you enjoy this month’s issue, and by all means, keep the good fires burning.

all the best,

-Rick Marlatt

From “Lifelines: Letters from Nebraska Soldiers during World War II,” by Nathan Piper.

“I believe this is my last letter for sure, darling. So keep your chin up a little longer and don’t give up hope. Gee, honey, I can hardly wait because I’ve been waiting so long for this day. It’s sure going to be great to get home again and stay-that’s what makes it all worthwhile. Darling, I want to be with you before the baby arrives…that’s what I’ve dreamed of ever since the day you told me about it. I can’t promise I’ll get there in time. If I don’t get there in time, you just make it easier on yourself by not worrying about me or anything else. I will be with you even though there may be miles between us. Darling, just close your eyes and see if I’m not there. In closing, I send all my love and kisses, hoping my darlings are well and that I am with you real soon. Love always your darling husband and daddy, Bob…”

War letters from Nebraska soldiers contribute importantly to the maturation of studies concerned with Nebraska history during World War II. The words and experiences found in these letters create for scholars and readers alike a valuable narrative. In them, the voices of Nebraska soldiers make vividly evident the sacrifices and contributions made by Nebraska servicemen during the war. They create a better understanding for modern audiences the influences World War II had on regions like the state of Nebraska as well as allowing us to understand the essential nature of war-time correspondence. War is complex and bitter. Its conclusion leaves for those who survive it a complex legacy. But left with that legacy are the stories, and relics, that make our understanding of the period more complete-stories which are found in the letters from a solder keeping faith to his sweetheart back home, in letters from a son reassuring his parents that he survived being in harm’s way, in letters from a father who fears he may not live to see his daughter grow up, in the last letters from a soldier to his hometown friend and Army buddy. And these items-these letters-become for a modern audience precisely what they were for the soldiers who wrote them and their loved ones. They are lifelines, a means of connecting us to the lives of Nebraska soldiers during World War II.

The concept of origins is interpreted widely and in different contexts. In his brilliant essay, Nebraska educator and historian Nathan Piper examines the cultural importance and impact of correspondence between servicemen and their loved ones. Piper’s work is a detailed analysis featuring preserved letters written to loved ones by soldiers, namely, his own grandfather, Robert Sinkler. This particularly moving letter from Sinkler comes toward the end of Piper’s work and details the final days of the war.

By showcasing these letters throughout, Piper is able to expose the reader to the tremendous emotion channeled from Sinkler to his wife. Moreover, these recordings allow Piper to go a step further and contextualize his research. That is, Piper’s own origins are embodied in the letter as his mother will be one of the six children brought into the world by this couple. What makes Piper’s analysis so powerful is that it not only provides a moving war time perspective from the frontlines and the home-front, but it also examines the societal and cultural results of these heroes’ sacrifices, as well as redefine their legacies in current terms. All the while, Piper is engaging in a deeply contemplative investigation of his own origins through a mixture of academic and creative nonfiction. His writing is bold, brave, and important. Shouldn’t all of our endeavors be so?

© 2011 Rick Marlatt

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