Short Takes: Resistance and Resilience

 

Tis the Season to be Jolly: An Introduction

We are in that strange, hectic season when the sun sets before the afternoon is halfway done, but the darkness is relieved by millions of tiny lights: Hanukkah candles, Christmas trees; starry garlands blinking from balcony railings and arched over city streets.

 

In the so-called temperate zones of the north, this is the deepest, darkest, coldest part of the year. Beneath the snow and ice blanketing the cold ground and furring the trees, there is nothing but dead, browned grass and bare branches. If you had never come this way before, you might think the earth had permanently died.

It is no coincidence that this is also the moment for the December holidays, stitching the cold and dark with the joyous glow of light, warmth, and cheer. Just when we need an antidote to frigidity  and fear, the world’s religions provide us with one, replacing depression and gloom with frolic and fun. “God rest ye merry, Gentlemen.”

The earliest anthropologists were Europeans, white men astounded by the stories (some true, many made up) of weird and wild lands, peoples, and customs brought home by those explorers we used to hear about in grammar school. From these tales, credulous writers like Henry Maine, James Frazer, and James Campbell spun even more fantastical tales. They imagined benighted continents where people actually believed that without an annual human sacrifice, strung round with frenzied dance and elaborate ritual, winter would never give way to spring, plantings would never again reap bounteous harvests, and both people and land would wither and die. In those tellings, the holidays come at the darkest times not just to make us all feel better but out of what the true believers of a simpler age thought to be dire necessity.

Real anthropologists, men and women who actually travelled to those fabled lands themselves, put the lie to those stories. So-called primitive people were, they discovered, considerably more sophisticated than Maine, Frazer, Campbell, or any of their eager readers. If there is one thing everyone the world over knows—at least everyone not confined to a big city—it is that spring follows winter, inexorably, every year, whether or not a prince has been killed and his body dismembered to feed the dead ground, and there is little that mere mortals can do, short of contributing even more toward global warming, to change that. The winter frivolity does not in fact cause spring to come, but it does serve the happy purpose of reminding us that it will. I write this during breaks in the annual task of decorating the apartment for the holidays, setting out the ornaments, moving the menorah stage center, and, once everything is in place, dimming the house lights so that the tree, the candles, and the garlands of lights will sparkle. But, in doing this, I am not girding my condo against the darkness and the cold. I am in Florida. The sun does set early, but with a magnificently incandescent red glow that turns the pleasure boats on the lake into silhouettes between the darkening sky and the gleaming water. Once twilight settles in, the air becomes soft, balmy, faintly scented with frangipani. Winter is no enemy here.

And yet even here, there is cause for reflection, for resistance, for resilience  in the face of the myriad threats that, despite a heartening midterm election, still stalk our world. And also as we confront  the inevitability of our  increasing years. We are in the last of our time here, my partner and I. But by some unearned and unexpected twist of luck and fate, this is a very good moment for us. We are in excellent health, even if it is measured in large part these days by our ability to climb stairs. We have each other, homes in New York and Florida, a mutual love of theater and books that we can afford to enjoy. Our children are fun, productive, loving, and in pretty good shape. We each have work that fascinates and engages us.

Yet we know that this period of abundant happiness will last perhaps a little while longer, and even then only if we are very lucky. Humans go against the tide of nature. While just about everything else cycles through the fallow and the bountiful, the dark and the bright, from life to death to life again, humans are on a downward trajectory to an inevitable end. Except for continuing all those routines–the right food, the right exercise—that are supposed to encourage good health, resistance is all but futile. We will get older, no matter how valiantly we resist. And age will bring whatever it has in store.

That leaves resilience. And the question: when it comes, when the good times fade, when we can no longer enjoy these unexpected fruits of a well-lived life, will we be able to marshal the resilience needed to take it as it comes? To look again at those holiday lights and refrain from cursing their false promise? One never quite knows what adversity will make of one. The best I can say is: I hope so.

But in that quest, I can be guided by the examples of resistance and resilience that our readers present below. Beset by problems far more frightening even than mine, they have lived to tell their tales— and have even learned how to thrive. They have found within themselves the resilience to resist. I salute them. And I commend their work to you.

 

 

 

 

Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2

 

 

 

 

 

My Father, Archived, Me Quietly Screaming

Middle of the night it started. Was it before or after Devra finished Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson biography and texted my cousin Edye who then emailed me? Was it Edye’s Uncle Alex Gaby, Leon’s brother? How could it not be, with a name like that? Then her sister Carol chimed in and I Facebooked my sister. It took her longer to answer, being the baby of the family and less emotionally invested, a better sleeper.

I’d done some Googling of my dead father in the middle of the night during an earlier bout of guilt just after I found a pristine copy of his novel on Amazon—last copy and no more on the way—wrapped in cellophane, with a pulpy broad leaning on a table in a bar on the cover. Diminishing the seriousness of the book, which I might have known.

Had I read it.

How many times did I lie to him about having read his book? I was two years old when it was published, but still. He’s dead twenty-seven years, and now I’m a writer whose daughter doesn’t read her stuff either and I’m Googling him in the middle of the night because it’s humid and I can’t sleep after being diagnosed with some cardiac condition. Not what he had, but he did die from his sometimes generous/sometimes crazy heart just exploding one evening while watching Wheel of Fortune. It’s all I can think about, waves of fear and guilt. Bed spinning. while clichéd, is exactly what it feels like.

Much use of the word abyss. As in me screaming “sorry” across it in the dark, sweaty night.

There it is. The New Yorker ran his short story. Archive: September 27, 1941. Before the war took him away and never dropped him back to where he had been.

The fucking New Yorker. I remembered Collier’s and Ellery Queen and the Saturday Evening Post. The Hitchcock screenplay. The short story that MGM bought and made into a Grade B movie only shown at drive-ins. Hot Rods to Hell. A cult classic. But the New Yorker? I am one degree of separation, the closest I will ever get to the crème de la crème of publishing. Crème de la crème being a favorite phrase of my father’s; for emphasis he might crook a pinky finger, tilt his head.

So. Devra has just read the Shirley Jackson biography and there he is. Mentioned by Jackson’s husband, critic Stanley Hyman, in the same breath as E.B. White and James Thurber, my father’s story—my father’s!—described as “one of the punchiest and most horrible stories about chauvinism against the Negro ever written.” Page 151. My “unknown” father’s story an example of rare social consciousness, transcending the magazine’s short-form fiction.

My father doesn’t know this. And I can’t tell him. I prop the novel with the bawdy cover up on the nightstand like some people do with photos of John F. Kennedy or Frida Kahlo. Maybe the Pope.
 

 

 

The House on Pine Street

My kids send me photos of their father
tearing apart the house of their childhood.
The house he and I bought together in 1987.
The house I left behind in 1997
with him in it.
The children are grown and in homes of their own.
Despite twenty-five years gone, I still somehow consider
that house mine.
I still feel Me in it. I still feel my kids.
My ex rips out the cabinets.
He rips out the counters and the floor.
He tears out the island where I used to sit every day
for breakfast
for lunch
a phone to my ear at noon on a routine call to my mother
who is no longer alive.
He rips out the pantry. On the door, there used to be
a huge calendar, to track all of the kids’ activities
and my own. Track our lives together.
He rips out the half wall between the kitchen and the living room
that half wall where I used to lean and tell him about my day
while I kept an eye on the dinner, bubbling on the stove
and the kids did their homework in their rooms.
The house, my kids say, is going to look completely different.
And I see in their eyes the Christmas stockings that hung
from the half wall
the snacks grabbed from the pantry.
Those snacks shared after school and before bed,
all three of them laughing at the kitchen table.
And I feel, as he tears apart the kitchen, that he
tears out the last vestiges of Me. Of those kids. In that house.
Who I was
in that house.
Who they were
1532 Pine Street.
With the memories in my eyes,
reflected in my kids’ eyes,
I hug all three
and tell them again their stories.

 

 

 

 

Las Meninas

Elizabeth would’ve walked the couple of kilometers from the Picasso Museum to La Rambla, but her feet were killing her and, my God, the humidity! Sebastian had insisted she dress up, so she slid into the taxi wearing a navy shift and strappy Gucci heels that showed off her toned calves and demure, taupe pedicure.

“It would reflect badly on me if you went out in one of your Bohemian get-ups,” he’d said.

Not that she had any of those “get-ups” anymore. That was the old Elizabeth. Before Sebastian. Back when she was Lizzie, which he deemed unrefined. She’d been so taken with him. At fifty, he was still boyishly handsome and sophisticated-–bespoke suits and a continental, boarding-school accent that made her swoon.

Sebastian was a collector. They’d met at an opening in Santa Barbara, where she’d worked for the caterer, whirling around the gallery pouring Veuve Clicquot for the guests. By the time she learned he was married, Elizabeth had convinced herself it was love.

Lately, though, she was suffocating. Sebastian spent his days in meetings with artists and dealers and sent her on cultural missions to museums and cathedrals. Her assignment in Barcelona was to study Picasso’s Las Meninas series and report back on how it paralleled the Velázquez Las Meninas she’d viewed at the Prado in Madrid last week.

Elizabeth exited the cab at La Rambla, fanning herself with a brochure, and took a seat at a tapas place. She munched on olives and sipped sangria, and, while waiting for her gambas ajillo and patatas bravas, she pulled out a paperback. The Sun Also Rises was a reading assignment from Sebastian. Elizabeth prayed he wouldn’t take her to a bullfight.

In front of her, two twenty-somethings hopped off bicycles in a fit of giggles and shook the sand out of their espadrilles. Long hair, damp and curly from the beach; faces glistening with perspiration from bike riding. They were breezy and carefree in gauzy blouses, tattered shorts, and hoop earrings that shimmered in the afternoon light.

Elizabeth ordered a second sangria. She was thirty. Not much older than these girls and living as Sebastian’s mistress like some lady of the manor, not allowed to let her own curls out of their prissy bun. Except in bed, the one place he appreciated her wild side.

Elizabeth paid her bill and left Hemingway on the table. In a side-street resale shop, she tried on torn, white cutoffs and an embroidered, yellow peasant blouse. She had a fleeting thought of Sebastian’s tacit disapproval of used clothing as she reached for a pair of vintage Birkenstocks and a floppy straw hat.

Elizabeth bartered for the outfit, trading in the navy shift and Gucci sandals for all of it.

“Anything else, Elizabeth?”  the shopkeeper asked.

She pulled her hair out of its bun and shook her curls.

“It’s Lizzie, actually. And yeah, do you know where I can get a bicycle?”
 

 

 

Resistance and Resilience

I love these two words. Together they provide inner steadiness. I’ll tell you about a time I was stubbornly resistant, a time when I was powerfully resilient, and a time I experienced both together.

I grew up in New York City and lived in apartment 6B in a tall building with elevators and a doorman named Matt who opened the building’s large front door for us. Every day he tipped his hat my way and said, quite Irishly, “Good morning, Missy.” I scowled, looked down, and said nothing — an ornery four-year-old adolescent-in-training. Why? Because my mother, a cheery sort, begged, cajoled, and scolded me daily, pre- and post-Matt: “What is wrong with you?”  I resisted. I felt strong—not my mother’s “good little girl” for once. I was also rude. Within two years that faded; as I left the building each morning my father walked me to school, Matt, in good form, said, “Good morning, Missy.” I grinned and waved, “Hi Matt.”

Many years later that early resistance to maternal control became, as they say, integrated. As a woman, I called my resistance assertiveness—feminist but not Nazi. Deep inside I felt that little-girl resistance. I loved that kid.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was a proud mama to four lively children I adored. I was sheltered from the “world” yet in thrall to the church’s altar and things called holy. The Episcopal Church had voted in 1976 to allow the ordination of women priests. Naively resistant to any and all possible dangers, I entered the ordination process and got walloped—flatly, out-and-out rejected not once but twice. Apparently, I could not be a mother and a priest—a “dual vocation” they called it. I resisted with all the vigor and anger of that little girl. Anger—righteous indignation—was unbecoming to “high” vocations, and certainly to women of the cloth.

I collapsed into a grief so profound it felt like falling down the deepest, darkest, most silent well. There I heaped my pain onto God, who listened to my prayers when scolding might have been more obviously divine. Emboldened by this lack of divine scolding, I brewed my own little dark-hearted parable of woe and empowerment, including divorce, Dad’s death, my sister’s death, anger, therapy, seminary, and grief profound enough to flatten me. Meanwhile, I studied theology and hoped my beloved children would forgive me. My soul healed.

Resilience took over. I fell in love with biblical stories like mine, moved to a condo, dated a man I’d later marry, did chaplaincy work, and bought a Crockpot whose quiet genius—patient, warm, maternal, simmering—made dinners perfectly cooked if not stunningly diverse. I learned to simmer with resilience, and retrieved enough resistance to apply again for ordination.

My natural resistance joined my maturing resilience. Together they got me ordained, even though the bishop sputtered a bit about my history.
 

 

 

Cassandra Sets the Record Straight

When I promised Apollo my favors,
I didn’t intend to keep my word.
I’d never bow to a vain young god 
who once killed a man for claiming 
to be a better musician. 
Nor did I wish to be like Daphne,
whose father saved her from Apollo’s
lust by transforming her into a tree.  
Many think I can’t be trusted
because I betrayed a son of Zeus. 
Some say that Apollo, in his rage,
took away, with a kiss, the gift 
of prophecy he’d granted me
in return for my promise. 
Others say he spat into my mouth,
nullifying my ability 
to foresee the future.
The truth is that Apollo’s lips never
touched mine, and he didn’t have
the power to take back a divine gift.
The price I paid for freedom
was to no longer be believed. 
I’m called a liar and a madwoman, 
while Apollo enjoys the adoring 
attentions of the Muses.
Apollo has his kithara to play,
and his fame as an archer, 
slayer of serpents, bringer 
of plague, and rouser of armies. 
He’s lately been seen in a chariot
pulled by lions. Some say it was 
pulled by swans. 
Last night, I had a vision of the fall of Troy.
When I awoke, my eyes burned
and my heart was crushed 
by a terrible dread. 
But I’m a princess,
the proud daughter of a king
and queen. I’ll remain true 
to my sacred vow of chastity 
and use my powers to aid my people 
for as long as I draw breath.

 

 


Migration, mixed media by Alanna Pass

 

 

To bend and not break

As dawn spreads, I pull my blinds to see the maple tree outside my bedroom window. Today autumn leaves blink yellow and gold and move aside when the red-crested hummingbird comes to rest. A wind ripples by and the branches bend in submission or welcome. This lovely tree, aging just like me, leans so close I can touch her with my fingertips. If I still my soul, I hear her whisper:

Be strong in root and growth, but resilient in wind and rain; live into the coming winter and the spring will follow. Blend with change of hue, spread arms to greet sleet and sun. Be fearless, release what clings to you.  A buffet will not break you and, no matter the deluge, you will not drown. Open your blinds each morning. See that am here.
 

 

 

Thirteen Conversations I Never Had with Dad

1.

Dad, I’ve waited a half century for us to have this talk. Now that you’re six feet under, the time is perfect.

2.

Remember that hot August night when Mom needed milk? You winked at me and asked, Wanna come? Ill get you a candy bar. You chose me over my little sisters, which made me think I’d won the prize for being the good daughter.

3.

I should have stayed home, melted into the couch, watched more Three Stooges.

4.

The National Center for Victims of Crime reports that children are most vulnerable to sexual abuse between ages seven and thirteen. I was eleven.

5.

At Kroger’s, you grabbed the milk, I picked out a Heath bar, then we headed home. In the car, you laughed, squeezed my bare leg, dragged me across the bench seat, and poked your fingers into my shorts. The car swerved back and forth across the highway. Our headlights flashed over bushes, trees, and oncoming cars. I laughed hard…loud. Did I sound happy? Did you look into my face? If so, you’d have seen terror.

6.

Instead of going home, you pulled the car onto an abandoned street. In the green glow of the dashboard lights, you begged, dont tell, your mother. Shell be mad at you. These words pierced like an arrow. My mother was my best friend…my confidante.

7.

When you begged me not to tell, I thought I heard remorse. Maybe we’d pretend this never happened…act normal. I had no idea this was only a preview. You’d hunt me down, corner me, then poke, prod, and expose yourself. I grew afraid to leave my bedroom.

8.

I needed someone to tell me, this is not your fault. I needed my mother. She was the one person who loved me. Yet, how does a girl tell her mother that she is being hurt by her father, the man her mother loves?

9.

Shell be mad at you. These words would haunt me. How could you shift the blame onto a naïve pre-adolescent child, who didn’t even know how babies were made?

10.

I stayed in my bedroom, locked the door. I’d be in there day and night, night and day…year after year. I’d lie on my back, stare up at the gold glitter in the ceiling and imagine galaxies far, far away. I’d take a rocket, travel there, and no one would find me.

11.

I wished Id helped you more. These were the last coherent words you said to me. How do you think you would have helped? Better yet, why didn’t you help?

12.

Or is help your version of sorry?

13.

Don’t try to answer. Don’t sneak up behind. Don’t haunt my dreams. Don’t whisper in my ear. I’ve grown used to the silence, and I’m sure you’ll grow used to it too.

 

 

 

 

gray-haired cowgirl

gray-haired cowgirl sits high
leaning into the riding mower
boot off the brake, clutch out

in wide spanning circles
she moves with ease
familiar with the worn path of duty

she’s a one-girl rodeo show
honed all the tricks of a country wife
marriage being her timed event

steadfast as a wheel-horse
she stays in the saddle, still
waiting for her trophy buckle

 

 

 

 

In My Backyard

In July 1988, I was going to help save the world from disease and poverty, ignorance and fear, so I joined the Peace Corps. And then I dropped out. Less than three months overseas, I came back to my hometown of Fresno without a job, my dog, furniture, or a head held high. I had given all of those things away.

When people asked why did you leave? my answers were vague. Not the right time. The islands too isolated. Even, I missed my dog. I think these were all true, but depression had claimed me in a remote village in the South Pacific and I couldn’t quite name it. Back home though, shame settled so deep in my bones that I slept disgraced for two weeks straight in my childhood bed.

Sometimes I still wonder why I went. I was twenty-nine years old, my long-distance boyfriend had found a new love, most of my friends had married, and I had always been the anxious girl. The one who feared merging onto a freeway, heights, and deep water.

So, what the hell, sign up to live thousands of miles away among strangers! Sign up to fail. So I joined. And then I dropped out.

But purpose still pushed me. In college and clinics I had learned about the prejudice of old and new infectious diseases. I believed strongly in the wonders of science and had faith in the truth. Within a month I enrolled in graduate classes where I typed public health papers on my reliable Smith Corona typewriter. Within two months I got my dog back; I recovered my car in three. I took a clinic job one city away where I learned about local disease and poverty, ignorance, and fear. I got an apartment, bought secondhand furniture, and with coworkers traveled to migrant camps and rural health fairs, handed out bleach to the homeless, and learned to stick needles into people’s vulnerable veins. The epidemic was in our backyards.

Eight months later, I wrote my first grant proposal on that old Smith Corona typewriter.

Needs: AIDS testing and education

Target Audience: Farmworkers, at risk teens, (really almost everyone)

Budget Request: $100,000

Reasons: Too many to count

Deadline: Too soon for someone without any knowledge of budgets or state guidelines or how to fit countless objectives into the Department of Health’s formulated boxes.

I studied. Learned about statistics and communities and how to ask for help.

So on December 1, 1989, five hours till deadline, I made Xerox copies of the 100-page document. Two hours till deadline. I drove down Highway 99 in winter fog to deliver the proposal, without one error, one city away.

Postmark: 11:40 PM and then I drove to my childhood home and slept in my childhood bed and wept.

But we got the damn grant.

And maybe somebody was saved.
 

 

 

“LA FLUTE ENCHANTÉE” from SHÉHÉREZADE by Maurice Ravel

 

LA FLUTE ENCHANTÉE

The shade is soft and my master sleeps,
A cone-shaped silken cap on his head,
And his long yellow nose in his white beard.
But I am still awake,
Listening to the song
Of a flute outside that pours forth
Sadness and joy in turn,
A tune now languorous now lively,
Which my dear lover plays.
And when I draw near the casement,
Each note seems to fly
From the flute to my cheek

Like a mysterious kiss.

 

 

 

 

Stealing Home

My mom Sally didn’t know the month, day, time, or who was in the next room.  She did know her daughters’ names and the rewritten words to her favorite songs.  Alzheimer’s takes the memories you least expect to lose.

We would arrive home from a ride around the neighborhood and Mom would beam when she saw our house.

“Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.”  She would smile with never forgotten tenderness.

Cancer stole her right breast when she was well into her eighties.  She equated the loss to losing a precious home.

After her mastectomy she told us “This is where I held you when you were born. You knew you were home.” She cried mournful tears touching her newly flattened chest. Her phantom breast held the cries of her babies.

“I guess I am lucky; they only took one. I am one-tit Sal!” she would say to any startled listener. Seeing their expression, she would look at me and wink. Her sense of humor was forever intact.

Alzheimer sleep has no rhythm and no hours.  A bit like cancer, another thief, this one also steals not only memory but rest.

One night, sleeping on the pull-out sofa in her living room, I heard Mom crying.  She often woke up many times in the middle of the night.

I snuck quietly to her door, peeking into her room. I hoped that she was just having a bad dream.  She heard me and looked up.

“Maya?” she patted the bed next to her. “Get in,” she said in that tone only a mother giving an unequivocal command can use.

She was used to us lying together in her king-size bed in the mornings.  It isn’t easy to crawl into an on-loan hospice hospital bed, especially with the sides up.  The bed was permanently in that position so she wouldn’t fall during the night.

She no longer remembered she couldn’t walk and would try to stand to go to the toilet.  Forever elegant but now incontinent, she hated wearing Pampers and being wet.

I put my hand on her forehead, “I’m here, Mom.”

“Oh dear” she said, “I have to tell you something!  I am pregnant.”

With no incredulous expression I responded.  “Oh, Mom, you’re having a dream.”  Anxiously stifled tears sat in my throat.

I moved the chair closer to her bed.  “I will sit here with you. Try to go back to sleep.”

When I heard her stirring the next morning I peeked into her room.  I wished her a good morning and moved the chair back next to her bed.

“You had a dream last night, Mom.”  She reached between the bars for my hand.

“You told me you were pregnant.”

“Oh no!” she said, more upset than I expected.

“You didn’t tell anyone I said that, did you?”

“No, of course not.  But why wouldn’t you want me to tell anyone?”

She squeezed my hand tightly.” Because I don’t have a husband.”
 

 

 

Suffragette Crowns

Come women, all hearts, all hues, all generations
tread lightly over roads of tar, cobbles and dirt
march in solidarity in our homeland
and across the world; we blend to one
in this sea of pink, of suffragette crowns,
a garnish on our heads

Great grandmothers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts,
daughters, friends from long ago, we honor you,

you, who have carried us this far
your spirits guide our every ebb and flow
in our blushing sea
we roll call your names, never forgetting
our struggles
as we demonstrate against inequality, for liberty
you are forever embraced in this sea of pink
with suffragette crowns,
a garnish on our heads

Come women, all hearts, all hues, all generations
clamor with determined voices, echo throughout
canyons of time   to never be crammed into an
archaic black night again
in this sea of pink, with suffragette crowns,
a garnish on our heads

Combers of change, we demand it,
crash onto our shores of tomorrow
as we proceed
with spirit sisters walking at our side,
conveying promising words to tell
how far they have come
their life-force arouses our confidence,
because of them
we travel forth,
we must go on…
we know we will succeed

Twenty-first Century Women march on; march on
together, in our sea of pink with suffragette crowns,
a garnish on our heads

 

 

 

 

Ten things I wish I could tell you…

Once last January, when the phone rang, I thought, “Oh good, Pete’s calling.” But I had buried you two weeks before, and no, of course that wasn’t you on the line. But every day this year there have been things I wanted to tell you, trivial pieces of our shared lives.

  1. Every morning I put on the bathrobe you gave me for Christmas before I go out to pick up the newspaper. Then I put it on again before I settle down to watch TV before bedtime. It’s warm and soft and to me it feels like you’re hugging me. I don’t know what I’ll do when it’s too warm to wear a winter robe.
  2. Remember the flycatcher that nested outside our front door last year? It’s back and it wove a strand of the silver wire that you wrapped around the Christmas garland along the outside of its nest.
  3. About a year ago, we watched episodes of Murdoch Mysteries about the power of guarana. Well, today I walked into Panera and saw their poster for the new summer drinks—they all contain guarana. We should be able to enjoy one together.
  4. Today I saw the first gosling near the mall, right where we usually spot them. And of course, that reminded me of the time we were stuck in traffic waiting for a duck and her ducklings to cross the road. The last one couldn’t scale the curb, so you got out of the car, scooped it up in the palm of your hand, and put it back in line with the other ducklings. You loomed so large, and the duckling was barely visible. Did you know that Chris—our contractor—called you “the gentle giant”?
  5. There was no sense in paying insurance and doing maintenance on a vehicle I would never drive, so I sold your truck. Old and battered as it was, you loved that truck. I was stunned by how awful I felt selling it—as if I were giving a piece of you away.
  6. Going through the seasons is its own kind of pain. On what would have been your 82nd birthday I opened the pool. At first I couldn’t swim without you, but I thought you would just roll your eyes at that, so I got used to swimming alone and learned to enjoy it. In September I closed the pool and ached at how quickly the seasons slip by without you. 
  7. I had to buy a new car because the transmission in our Honda was going.  At first it was so painful to drive a new car and not have you sitting beside me, but all the new safety features won me over and now I love it.
  8. The holidays are approaching—your absolute favorite time of the year. You made the holidays magic—decorating the house, spending days baking traditional Italian cookies while listening to Christmas music, inviting friends in. I can’t maintain all those traditions without you, but I can bask in the memories while I find my own way to celebrate.
  9. I wish I could tell you how much our children and friends have helped me through the year—arranging to have coffee or lunch with me, going on hikes, to museums… I don’t know how I could have managed without their ongoing support. I will always miss you and I will always love you, but bit by bit, I am re-learning to be happy.

 

 

 

 

Love in a Pandemic

One rainy night last week
I encountered a couple of my neighbors
in the bread aisle of our local supermarket.
“How are you?” the man asked me
so tentatively I felt sure he’d seen
the House For Sale sign in my yard.
This pregnancy was draining her,
the woman said, rubbing her belly,
grimacing. “I can’t eat almost anything.”
Her husband frowned into their cart
as though the items had got there
when his back was turned,
him half-aware, at best, of what they were.
He reached in and lifted out a loaf of bread,
replaced it on the shelf, then touched her arm.
“We’ll be all right,” they said together.
Outside the store, stars streaked
a path through the showery sky,
intent upon their task of polishing the dark.

 

 


McKenzie Salmon, mixed media by Alanna Pass

 

 

Women’s Choices

It was fall, 1976, my senior year of high school. College application season.

Mom cooked supper while Napoleon, my orange tabby, begged for food. I laid three college applications on the counter. Because I had to use ink, I had filled them out slowly, methodically. I wanted them to be error-free. They represented hours of work.

“What are those?” Mom asked.

“College applications.” I handed her a pen.

She lifted one and read the first page. “Why did you write ‘education’ under ‘Intended Major’?”

I want to be a teacher.

“I’m not signing these. You’re not going to be a teacher.”

I most certainly was.

“You’re going to be a doctor or lawyer or something else.”

I most certainly wasn’t.

Mom had waitressed all her life, but after my parents bought a tavern, she poured beer, mixed drinks, and emptied ashtrays in a cigarette haze while the jukebox shouted songs from the ’60s and ’70s.

We screamed at each other, a couple of crows fighting over the applications like they were roadkill. Napoleon retreated from the kitchen.

“You can do better,” she said.

We screamed louder. She refused to sign, and I refused to cross out the word education.

“Fine,” I said. Picking up the applications one at a time, I tore them in half. “I won’t go to college.” I left the severed papers on the counter and stormed out.

A few days later, I laid a pen and three newly completed applications on the counter. “I need you to sign these.”

Mom picked up an application. I had written “undeclared” in the space under “Intended Major.” She signed all three. A wordless compromise.

I didn’t ask why she didn’t want me to be a teacher because I thought I knew. Throughout my high school years, she bragged to friends and relatives that her daughter was going to be a lawyer or a doctor, so, of course, if I became a teacher, I would embarrass her.

When I became an adult, Mom shared her stories with me. She was the only girl in her Catholic high school mechanical drafting class. She wanted to be a graphic designer. In 1958, at the same Catholic school, she wrote an essay supporting birth control and refused to rewrite it, even when administrators threatened to withhold her diploma.

But she didn’t tell me about getting pregnant at eighteen and having to marry my father—I knew the story anyway. I grew up with their unhappy marriage.

Now, I understand that Mom raged because when she was in high school, she was told her choices were secretary, nurse, or teacher.  Then pregnancy erased even those options. Perhaps it was also because Roe v. Wade didn’t happen until 1973. Too late for the choices she might have made. Maybe she raged to give voice to her lost dreams. Whatever the reason, I no longer think Mom objected because of what her friends would think. Not even because I wanted to be a teacher. Her anger that afternoon was never about me. I became a teacher, and she was proud.
 

 

 

Golf On A Friday Afternoon

 

1971
Rutgers University; married student housing, both graduate students
still newlyweds
me, 22
teaching third grade
husband just turned 25
making the trek from New Jersey to Flushing, New York one Friday
unusual for us but planned on dinner with his parents
older, established, stable
his dad, brilliant, cerebral, quiet
Eisenhower look alike
law and engineering degree
his mom,
factitious, tasteful, slight air of pretension
life force of the two
gentle chill in early October air; his dad had the day off
perfect
for 9 holes of golf
lovely table set; stuffed cabbage – her signature dish
visible note on the table stating he’d be home at 6
my husband’s father and my husband wrote the book on punctuality
if they say 6, it’s not 5:59 or 6:01, it’s 6:00.  Sharp.
which came, and went
could be traffic.  Maybe he joined a slow-moving group
“let’s eat” my mother-in-law declared
her house, her rules
couldn’t taste a thing, though – too eerie
someone at the door!
there he is!
but why the front door?
no one comes in through the front door of the house.  Only the side.
it’s not his dad at all
two police officers, one fat, one thin, looking for the upstairs neighbors
why the neighbors?
chubby one said they had news they wanted the neighbor to give his mom
WHAT?
my husband, frozen, statue like, asked for the news
his mom, behind me, like a shy child hiding from strangers
police officers
don’t lie
why are they telling us this
he left perfectly fine to play golf, at 66 years of age
but
died
on the 9th hole

watched the light leave my husband’s eyes
never to fully return
his mom rushed to the garbage can where that note now was
smoothed it out, caressing the paper
calm, secure household morphed into controlled confusion
no crying, wailing,
methodically, trance like
my 25-year-old husband turned into the man, not the son
need to identify body, plan funeral
many months later, per her wishes move his mom to a studio apartment in Manhattan
rather than remaining in the large home of his childhood
my husband, always strong, dependable, reliable
became more resilient to life’s challenges
every future milestone – joyous tinged with grief
his dad didn’t see him grow into manhood
receive his doctorate
move cross country
meet his beautiful grandchildren
gradually
a transformation occurred
he embodied his dad’s spirit
five decades later and still will never again
eat stuffed cabbage
always wondered
did his dad take the swing
what went through his mind
and heart
before
he died
on the 9th hole

 

 

 

 

My Hair, My Rules

So, I’m 75 and dying. No, not the dying like kicking the bucket dying. Not yet, not if I can help it. I’m dying like gonna dye my hair pink, and butter my butt if folks don’t like it. Including my boyfriend, Holy Holcomb, the retired mortician. Thinks he knows all there is to know about cosmetology and hair.

Oh please. My hair, my rules.

Me and Holcomb, or Holy Holcomb, as I’ve called him since I first discovered the old boy’s hung like a horse, we were having ourselves a fabulous little roll in the Hope Springs Senior Living hay when I told him, “I’m gonna color my hair pink.”

Perhaps my timing was off because Holy Holcomb screamed bloody murder. I assumed it was the idea of me with pink hair, but, you know, it could have been a muscle spasm from doing the dirty.

Anyway, Holy Holcomb screamed, then said, “No way, Babe. Pink is for rabbit eyes, not hair.”

“Wrong. Pink is for septuagenarian punks. Babe is for Paul Bunyan’s Ox. My hair, my rules.”

I first met Holcomb when Mom died. Younger than me by a good bit but, even five years ago, he was no spring chicken. There he sat in the Happy Trails Mortuary cosmetology cabinet, studying his high-pigment makeup for stiffs. I mean, really, talk about artificial, the cherry-berry red paint on his shelf looked more clown than casket. Plus my mom never ever wore red lipstick, just clear lip gloss.

I sashayed up to him. “Ix-nay on the cherry-berry kisser, Mister. Make her real.”

“And you are?”

“Next of kin.” I straightened my shoulders. I’m a looker, not ashamed to know it, not ashamed to show it.

He put the paint down, wired Mom’s mouth shut, as if even then she’d have something say about a hook-up commencing over her dead body, then asked me out. Been together, more or less, ever since. Though I still sow a few wild oats in my head.

“You can’t do pink dye on white hair, Eve. Not at your age. It’ll burn your follicles, break your hair. You’ll be bald.”

Mister, you don’t tell this gal no. In the scheme of life and death, like, hair matters anyway? Well, yeah, it does.

So the next morning I squeezed into my pink spandex tights and tee, put on clear lip gloss in honor of Mom, then marched into Hope Springs’ Breakfast in the Bistro.

The room got real quiet.

Holcomb rose, cleared his throat. “You did it.” He hesitated. “Sure looks different.”

I grinned, shimmied my fat ass, then tossed my gorgeous pink wig to the table. I stood big, beautiful, and bald.

“Bought myself a pink wig and shaved my head,” I announced to the room. “First round of chemo starts next week. Cancer’s not gonna call all the shots. My hair, my rules.”

I bowed to loud applause. Holy Holcomb bowed to me.
 

 

 

Fifth Grade Volunteer

The principal’s voice on the PA recites the pledge.

Just like the 1950s.

Mr. N talks to his class through their individual Chromebooks.

Adults roam: special-ed literacy coach, paraprofessionals, and me, a volunteer.

ELA   English/language arts: Reading Fluency—”The Cricket and the Mountain Lion.”

In small groups, I read, each child reads, we read together until I can recite it by heart. At least someone is fluent.

Omicron has emerged.

Kids have been wearing facemasks for two years—in the 1950s we would crouch in the cellar expecting the H bomb to obliterate us.

My mask clouds my glasses.

The kids range in size from little pipsqueaks to tall ones beginning puberty

They work on sentences—declarative, imperative, interrogatory, exclamatory— How can you tell which is which?

It’s on the tests—Mr. N says apologetically. This is the worst class I’ve had in 20 years, he adds.

They work on a flow chart tracing cause and effect: Bonnie throws a snowball which causes Annie to toss one that hits a teacher. Which is the cause and which is the effect?

Why is this important?  Also, on the TEST?

They watch their own videos on their own screens.

A girl with long dark hair wears the same oversized lifeguard sweatshirt every week.

Back home—Grandma dies of Covid.

Mom and Dad divorce.

White supremacists try to take over the country.

Global warming causes catastrophic storms.

Schoolchildren are killed with guns shot by other children.

But the fifth graders go on learning what to call sentences and what cause leads to what effect.

Burning fossil fuels causes global warming which leads to species extinction—This is not on the worksheet.

They pick up their folders, their Chromebooks, their earphones, their backpacks and move on for science.
 

 

 

Little Girl Moonrise

Rows of deep pink crescents
on both palms;
often, too often, the moons of me.

I unfurl aching fingers
and watch the moons rise.
Though my nails are deeply bitten,
they still make moonscapes
when fists clench and clench again.

I let rigid arms go limp,
releasing trembling ribs and legs.
First deep breath over raw throat—
eyes fill.
At last safe to cry,
no longer wrapped so tight.

Crouched in the corner, again and again,
I gather up rocks shattered by the moon-quake,
meteorites, moondust,
bits of shadow from crater-edges—
try to figure out how they fit.

Each time, so many times,
I put the pieces back together,
more or less—
a cobbled-together self,
until I am old enough to get away.

I will not be eclipsed,
I will have a life,
afterwards.
 

 

 

Lost and Found

 

 

Sees her face in the mirror 
Dust from the past
More gray hair than she has regrets

If she left here today
Put her keys in the bowl
Where would all of the memories go

Sees her eyes in the mirror
Memories move from behind
Dark rooms and sticky soles

She remembers the bars
All the times that were hard
And the love that went down at the old lost and found

There was dancing at the old lost and found
Women strutting spinning round and round
Outliers and outlaws
Out on the town
For just one night feet never touched down

Memories pour out
The back of the mirror
Cowboy boots, red flannel shirt and new jeans

She sees her standing
Her back to the wall
She’s going to hold her
Before the last call

There was dancing at the old lost and found
Women strutting spinning round and round
Outliers and outlaws
Out on the town
For just one night feet never touched down

The cops came in for a bribe
Threatened to take them downtown for a ride
They all knew what to do
For those boys dressed in blue
They had secrets and closets for most of their lives

The cops would show up around 10
All the women would have to pretend
No touching or kissing
But after they left
All the women got out on the dance floor again

There was dancing at the old lost and found
Women strutting spinning round and round
Outliers and outlaws
Out on the town
For just one night feet never touched down

There’s a woman in the corner
Playing guitar
For all the girls
Sitting at the bar

Telling stories love lost
And the will to survive
She’s hoping her songs
Keep someone alive

We would dance at the old lost and found
We strutted spinning round and round
We were outliers and outlaws
Out on the town
For just one night
Our feet never touched down

 

 

 

 

Double Fault

After college I moved to a bigger city for work. A red-haired, 30-year-old Dallas newspaper editor, worn from his two years in Vietnam, interviewed me for a job. He moved into my apartment shortly after. We drank every night, I broke wine glasses, my PR internship ended, and the neighbors stole my handbag while I was moving out to Andy’s new place. There was no longer any discussion about my working for the paper. We were a couple, yet his reporter friends treated me with condescension.

Andy drank more and came home later at night. He sometimes entered slurring and blaming me vaguely for being out with someone else. Still dressed for work, he would struggle to release himself from his shirt, tie, and 3-piece suit, then careen off to bed. He almost never removed his socks. “My feet,” he told me,  “were in jungle water for two years.

The fungus of Vietnam stuck with him. He daily berated himself for not having a “real job,” making just $13K with the paper. Andy’s father had been a postman all his life, which had ended a few years before we met. Andy’s mother sold ladies’ apparel at a local department store. Like me, Andy had no siblings, though one night, in a drunken blur, he began talking incoherently about a sister he once had. The next day he denied she had existed.

In recent years, I discovered unexpectedly online that Andy had died long ago, before he would have turned even 50. I remembered his chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and anger. At me in particular. He would lash out if I behaved in what he thought was a childish way, like exclaiming “Wow,” or car dancing to a rock tune, or wanting to rush outside into a rare Texas snowfall.

Now I imagine how resentful and deprived he must have felt during our brief time together. I was several years younger and his war had never intimately touched me, except for wearing a black moratorium armband once or twice to march in a grassy park. I was from the generation that hated the Vietnam conflict and was not afraid to protest on campus and in the streets. We were the fortunate ‘70s youth who just barely escaped from a war that was so confusing, prolonged, and failed that it was called an era. We had no idea about the dark, hopeless experience endured by returning soldiers.

One night I woke to Andy’s fist clobbering the side of my head. I turned to see  his shaking arm raised high in the air, hand clenched.

“The helicopter,” he murmured the next morning over his black coffee and cigarette. “Shooting a machine gun from the ‘copter.”

I was not strong for Andy. When I left after two years together, our failure became another casualty of an impossible cause. But it was the only way I knew to save myself from the black mold of war and inevitable heartbreak.
 

 

 

Before Me Too

A million things you can’t have 
will fit into a human hand.
—Barbara Kingsolver

Naïve in seventh grade
I watched the ritual
of our teacher standing
in front of the window
his arms draped
around the shoulders
of two of my more
endowed girlfriends
waiting for the second-load
buses to arrive before
class began

Removed and yearning
cold and lonely
craving attention
wondering how
I could earn it
I watched the wind
blowing like ghosts
over the playground

We all liked the teacher
and missed him
even grieved for him
when he didn’t return
to the classroom
the next year

No one bothered
to tell us
why he had to leave
 

 

 

Chance Encounter in McDonald’s—2/3/09

There was the time I went shopping at the Atlantic Center on a crowded weekend. I found myself starved for lunch and not yet finished shopping. McDonald’s was right there and, in those days, I was less fussy about what went into my mouth and what came out of it.

I waited in the long line of shoppers for my little bit of greasy protein and chemical drink and found a lone seat, off to the side, where my only fellow eater was a slender elderly Black lady two small tables away. She wore an old-fashioned black hat that looked like it had come from her mother’s milliner, her somewhat shabby cloth coat was draped about her narrow shoulders as she delicately nibbled on her McSomething and sipped her coffee. We glanced at each other. I don’t know what she saw when she looked at me, a plump, white, middle-class, gray-haired, cheerful woman in her fifties with too many packages.

The restaurant crowd thinned out and we were alone in our corner. We began to chat. How we got to the topic of religion, I don’t know for sure. She was praising God, I believe, or talking about depending on God for something or other. With our newfound intimacy, I saw no reason to humor her beliefs.

“I don’t believe in God,” I said, pleasantly, between bites. She looked up, astonished, from her Styrofoam cup and held her gaze on me in a straightforward open-mouthed way.

“What?!” she said, “You don’t believe in God?”

“No,” I affirmed, “I just can’t see a reason for it.”

“But, what happens after you die?”

“I don’t know.”

She turned back to her place setting for a moment of recovery. “But… haven’t you ever had anyone die?” she asked, while looking at her coffee.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s terrible.”

“Yes—it’s terrible,” she said, turning back to me, “But, if you’re gonna see ‘em again, well, you can bear it.”

I took a long sip of my diet Coke through the thick plastic straw and turned back to her.

“Yes—I guess believing that could help. But I just can’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“But, who do you think wrote the Bible?” she posed, as though that challenge should make a difference.

“Men wrote it. Lots of men who lived at different times.”

She stared at me frankly shocked. “But, what do you do when someone dies?”

“I feel very, very sad and I miss them, and maybe I feel those feelings for a long time.  And, maybe I never forget all the good things about them.”

I finished the drink and gathered my debris from the table. I stood and picked up my bundles. “Well, I’ve got to go. Nice talking with you,” I said.

The lady watched me, speechless, as I moved toward the exit, stopping once to throw out my McRefuse.
 

 

 

Self Portrait of a Shoreward Woman

You will find out who I am by observing where I live
You cannot separate one from the other, for I unfurl here
like a sail on a ship

Atlantic saline flows through my veins, granules of sand
permanently dwell beneath my fingernails, tuck inside
the folds of my belly button

My hair resembles sea weed in its chaotic profusion
long strands, tangled brown, touched with silver salt
are not coifed like a bottle-blonde pageant queen

I dress year-round in plaid flannel, fleece, and jeans
clothing suited for the weather, like clapboards worn gray
thrashed by ocean air, protects its wooden shell

Open the barn door and you will find my beauty inside
among the rusty tricycle, grandma’s jelly cupboard,
half-empty paint cans, old stone crocks

My ears are ambivalent conch shells, for I hear waves
crashing violently, the flap of sea birds landing gently,
the hollow howl of the wind

I am a mighty oak rooted deeply along the shore
offering shade to those who sit beneath–not the pretty pine,
short stocks, ready to uproot in a sudden storm

I offer stability–
will take a beating, will remain strong and steady
 

 

 

Swallowtail Dance (Chianti, Tuscany)

On the terrace of Hotel La Noce, a black butterfly (a Coda di Rondine, the server says) flits and flirts around us. Its spotted dark body is as tiny as a fairy fly, but as dazzling as the feathered Sulphurs in Van Gogh’s Butterflies and Poppies, where their lemon wings, dipped in onyx, center and stir the painting alive. They dilute the verdant background of vines clinging for attention. Shrivel shy russet blossoms.

Now this ebony Swallowtail dances, dashes, and darts among the guests and suddenly lands in my hair.

Thats good luck, my daughter-in-law Karin says.

Its a sign of transition, Carol, my friend, offers.

The server shakes her head and states: Someone who has passed has stopped to say hello. 

Immediately, I think of my mother and her immense love of nature: birds, butterflies, and bees that flooded her garden aching with gardenia aroma, so intoxicating my sisters and I would each push our nose into a flower’s orange center and claim we would faint from its perfume.

Even the swords of her lavender gladiolas would pierce our red hearts as we stroked their upright green fans. Then we’d try to catch Monarchs that zipped in and out of small citrus milkweeds’ faces.

Finally, the black Swallowtail untangles his wings from my hair and flickers back into the blazing Tuscan sun. Darkness entering light. Softly I whisper, Thanks for stopping, Mom. 

 

Introduction: WTF Is It with This Weather??!!

When we decided to focus on climate change in this issue, we had no idea what an outpouring of excellent stories, poems, paintings, and photography would result. Nor did we anticipate that our decision to use a millennial shorthand in titling Short Takes–one that would demonstrate how we all feel about climate change–might not sit well with all our readers. We want to reassure those of you who were put off by our choice of semi-ripe language that we do understand and appreciate your response to it. This is evidenced by the exchanges, below, between two concerned readers and our editor, Peggy Wagner.
 
One subscriber wrote:
 

I’m sure you will receive wonderfully creative submissions for Short Takes re the weather. I have to say, though, that the title, for me, is disappointing. We have to endure so much these days that might be called “foul.” But to see the wording of the title to the theme for the current “Short Takes” made my heart sink. Do we really need to [be] reminded of what is base in our language? When we are the champions of words? 

 
A second subscriber wrote us in a similar vein:
 

I am a long-time subscriber to Persimmon Tree, have submitted and been published in Persimmon Tree. However, I was somewhat offended by your title for the short
takes. I’ve always thought this is a classy, artistic publication and I find there is no reason to result to street language for a prompt. Spring, the season of rebirth, can cause disappointment but why not encourage spring positivity rather than rants.

 
Peggy replied similarly to both readers. I’ll quote here from one: 
 

Thank you for your response to our “Call for Submissions” email. My colleagues and I appreciate receiving your thoughts. As you know, from being one of our subscriber/readers, everyone at Persimmon Tree deeply respects the power and integrity of language–written, visual, and musical.
 
The arts are also expressions of the temper of the times in which they are created. We are currently in an era when climate change is contributing to difficulties that wreak havoc in the lives of many individuals–-a fact that tends to result in sharp linguistic expressions. These are not a debasement of language, but rather visceral reactions to trying circumstances. That is what we recognized in the wording of the Spring 2023 Short Takes topic.
 
I regret that the wording offended you. And, again, thank you for contacting us. With respect and best wishes,
 
Margaret (Peggy) Wagner
Editor

 

Let me say again that all of us deeply respect both sides of this argument. It has prompted us to think—and then to think again—as, I expect, it will many of you. In particular, it has led me to think about the power, the connotations and emotions, the ever-changing nature of the English language. I might propose that we devote Short Takes in some future issue to that very topic. 

If you’d like to add your responses about the title of this issue’s Short Takes, do please post a comment at the bottom of this page.

 

 

 

 

Capriccio in D Minor, Op. 116, No. 7

 

A capriccio is a prank, a flight of whimsy or fantasy, and, in music, an instrumental piece in free form, lively and brilliant. Brahms composed his Capriccio in D Minor sometime in 1892 or 1893, when he was turning 60. This capriccio is neither whimsical nor light. It is a study in contrasts, beginning with a stormy flight so quick that only a pianist as nimble as Gena could keep up, melding into a middle section of almost beatific serenity, only to quicken again, with a shocking suddenness, into another passage of quickly tumbling notes.

 

 

What’s in a Name

Greenhouse effect suggests an arboretum’s musky fecundity,
not nature ruined and everybody dead.
A future we squinted to see 
from Al Gore’s movie or casual observation, 
like out-of-season weather for a year or two.
Easy to toss such miscellany in a junk drawer
with our rotting rubber bands.
 
Then came global warming, a moniker we laughed at 
in ice storms, argued with, or coolly pinned to glacier cracks 
or random heaves of melting permafrost—
notes on a bulletin board, covered by internal weather
like the lead-cold grief that moves in when a loved one dies.
Global warming sounded benign—Florida in winter.
Before long came climate change 
in deference to doomsday fires, 
rising seas drowning people and land, plagues of hurricanes.
 
Then COVID struck. Calamity.
Climate change—too neutral,
like changing baby’s diaper or replacing the oil in a gas-fed car.
 
Lately I hear global weirdness,
passed off as sarcastic shorthand 
that draws attention to the speaker’s wit 
and downplays the immensity of doom.
 
Remember Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal?
The scrape of a woodman’s saw, mostly off camera, 
where the grim reaper, that cutting old fool,
will topple the tree where the frightened man 
the camera lingers on 
has climbed to escape danger.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Hurricane Ian Approaches

First, our eyewalls notice that the sky shades begin to fluctuate, blue to cobalt, 
gray to charcoal, like ominous cumulonimbus. Storm cloud colors that set the great white egrets paler in flight.
 
Then the wind loses its white lisp of a whistle and exhales horrible howls, like a rabid wolf’s cry—loud, prolonged, mournful. It rattles the frightened windows,
those transparent frames that see it all, yet vulnerable as crinkled veins—frail, flimsy, frangible.
 
Then in a clash-clank-crash the gale clangs the terra cotta tiles. It backbends the ribbon palms into aching green arcs. Suddenly, the whitewash rain slants sideways 
like a slippery, putty-colored, sidewinding rattlesnake, always furious as the now dangerous streets swirl in white-capped waters. Going wherever its wetness wants.
 
Amidst the splatters and howls, the power flicks on and off like an unlucky birthday surprise. But sometimes power, like faith, will stay steady. And the house holds up to its coded promises while the storm rainwater keeps searching in the saturated streets, across drenched driveways, then starts to flood our startled lanai.
 
Everywhere is home to a hurricane.

 

 

 

 

I Imagine You in Greenland

Well-versed in how to survive new ice,
you fished and sealed like before
on the mainland.
 
The seafaring horned men 
tired of gray conquest, left 
their scattered ruins, 
and sailed warmer
 
far-flung seas to people 
easier climes and to pillage 
brighter treasure.
 
And now, they war against their own.
No one left unlike enough
to plunder.
 
They level vast dwellings.
Set new fires that can’t
be doused by tears
 
or rising seas. They poison
the world’s bread. But you 
just wait.  Remember
 
the old ways. Your language.
The sacred place 
you call home.
 
How someday, that name
again will mean just
what it says.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Hot Mess

The headlines read: California buckles up for dangerous heat/California heat wave smashes records as hottest day approaches/Intense heat wave continues in Fresno and the Valley.

In the heat of an unbearable August 2022 night, I wade in a pool of my own sweat–crafting stream-of-consciousness lists of things I like better than California’s sweltering 114-degree heat wave–this one threatening to scorch my senses.  

  • Hotdogs.
  • Wearing hot pants in the 1960s.
  • A short-lived series of hot flashes back in the 1990s signaling the end of childbearing years, baby showers, breastfeeding, diapers, and sleep deprivation.
  • Still being called “hot mama” by my kids.
  • Piping hot water for chamomile tea laced with honey.
  • Finding myself in hot water after telling an ex-employer to drop dead and go to hell.
  • Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic American romantic comedy movie Some Like It Hot.
  • Hot dates.
  • More hot dates.
  • A local weatherman and wannabe comedian boasting “cloudy today, hot tamale” during his five o’clock forecast.
  • Regurgitating obscure facts while on the hot seat of a wild debate with my once-upon-a-time, know-it-all mother-in-law.
  • The lyrical sound of hotsy-totsy and hoity-toity.
  • Even more hot dates.
  • Feeling hot to trot and ready to embark upon new travel adventures: seeing the pyramids, traipsing the back streets of Paris, visiting my homeland, Armenia.
  • Steam rising from a hot bath (Note: different than finding oneself in hot water).
  • That anxious, antsy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sensation right before something unexpected finds its way into my heart.
  • Feeling hot and bothered after the third rejection letter.
  • Seeing my debut memoir hot off the press. Hoping it sells like hotcakes.

 

 

 

 

The Dead of Winter in Minnesota

The snow and ice persist,
spread sideways, fill frozen frames
that surround these shuttered windows.
Silence. Stillness.
Other seasons sprint at lightning speed. 
In spring, rivers 
launch their marathon run, rush past
white-bellied mergansers 
folding over like cream-filled pitchers.
Bulging buds shiver, 
awaiting their moment in 
spring’s talent show.
The summer sun scissors an arc across the sky
shooting crimson spears across winking waves.
In fall, I hold my breath. 
Each orange-and-gold leaf elicits equal measures of ecstasy and despair.
I feel alive in fall.
Winter has its moments, when the first snow falls
with its topping of white, as sensuous as meringue,
as fresh as clean sheets.
But then the snow turns mean, congeals,
and the ice is full of threat,
a menace that moves me inside.
I doze at my desk,
dream of peonies with
their chorus line of gossamer gowns.
I start awake, the pock-marked 
snow still stuck
beneath my window.
Winter is tired too,
ready to float away 
on the warm arms of the wind.
My head wobbles toward my chest.
Wake me when the robins sing.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Friday Night Twisters

Weekend farmers, this Friday evening Dean and I need to get to the greenhouse pronto.  Violent storms on their way. Dean checks online: warnings for one county west of us. Onward to the greenhouse to pick up a few plants for the Saturday morning farmers’ market.

Now the radio reports a tornado sighted in the county southwest of ours. Probably thirty minutes from us. The earlier rains had the ground soaked already, so we park the cargo van just past the barn on gravel. Quickly walk up the hill, gathering armfuls of plants, each making three trips back and forth. Our last trip back to the van, the sky is an eerie green with a black cell in the middle. Lightning bolts flash bright; the heavy rain starts. The van radio tells us a tornado warning has been issued for our county; a tornado is in Defiance. Where we are! Guarantee that black cell above is the twister!  

We are in a rush; the van slides off the gravel road into the slippery clay mud, just inches from the rushing creek!  Dean tries pulling forward. We are stuck. We try wood planks and prayer. Not moving, especially when Dean locks the keys in the van. Thank God the engine was turned off! We take shelter in the barn and find the radio. Flash flood warnings come over the weather band station. 

We call our son-in-law; Mick gets to us within a few minutes, bringing our spare key. Dean rocks the van back and forth, shifting into reverse, then forward. Mick and I push with all our might. A wood plank shoots back and hits my ankle. Bruised, swollen, and sore, but no cut. Rocking back and forth for ten minutes, the van is finally out of the muddy mess onto the gravel road. Shovels put away, barn lights off, we all manage to cross the creek to the safety of a paved county highway. 

Reports on the radio now of a huge tornado touching down in nearby towns, wiping out multiple houses. Cannot help thinking we were stuck in the mud to avoid being in its path. A muddy mess and sore, we three are safe in our houses tonight. Grateful we are kept safe amidst the storm. 

Jump a few years, another Friday night twister touching down just yards from our greenhouse, leveling homes, barns, and outbuildings in a three-mile stretch of the county highway. Sadly, one fatality. Farmer Chuck explains the hole in his barn door, “I cant imagine the power needed to pick up the huge oak beam and throw it like a spear across the road, through the trees, and into the barn door.” This beam was hurtled across the highway from one farm to another.  

But our greenhouse still stands, untouched. Mother Nature’s temper tantrum disrupts this rural community much like our granddaughter’s protest for her second COVID vaccine. Wasn’t one enough? 

 

 

 

 

Weather reports

snow sleet wind chill
heart fishtailing like a car
 
swirling funnel of air
freight train going up your back
 
ocean kicking up its feet
a mama lion in your throat
 
grandma lucy
listening to radio catastrophes
places she can barely imagine
her sixth-grade hands
sewing sequins on sweaters
amidst the lava and the ash

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

In the Bleak Midwinter

When I lived in wintry, cold Indiana, Mom would taunt me on the phone: “The trees on the parking strip are in full bloom. Pink blossoms everywhere.” I envisioned her standing in front of the big-paned windows in her living room, looking down on the flushed beauty of the flowering trees. It was late February. In Indiana, I was still checking the weather each night to see if snow would block my long commute to work. Even if it was dry, icy winds would wrap themselves around me whenever I stepped outside.  I was glad Mom got the joy of the blossoms in her last, semi-housebound years.

I’d like to believe that by this point in her long life, Mom understood that my husband and I had made the decisions we did out of necessity, not some kind of nasty wish to leave the idyllic greenery and family bosom of my native Seattle. We moved around the country for my husband’s academic jobs and spent snowy winters in Eastern Oregon and Montana and Utah and Colorado, finally landing in Indiana.

My brother didn’t leave Seattle; my sister did for a few years but came back. I was the only one who moved away.

 As they aged, my folks traveled less and less. Even though the apple trees in my big Indiana backyard were in full bloom when they visited for a few days in a long-ago gentle May, they never had the energy to come back.

After Dad died, I checked in with Mom daily. Weekdays, I’d drive an hour up I-69 getting home from work. If the roads were good enough, I’d use that time to call. In the spring and summer, the trees lining the route were leafy green; in fall, they did the Midwest change-to-gold thing. I never shared my descriptions of them with Mom, especially in the winter as I drove past them, leafless and barren. 

The January after I retired, I slipped on the ice outside our garage, fell flat on my back, and tore my rotator cuff. Mom was gone by then, but of course, she wouldn’t have said “I told you Indiana was no place to live!” Probably would have thought it though; and I decided for sure I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life missing the mild Northwest winters.

She would have been overjoyed to know that my husband acquiesced; we moved back near Seattle a couple of years later. So now, it’s only the end of January, and I walk out into my little courtyard. No flowering trees yet, but already the tiny white blossoms of snowbells are blooming, and last year’s chives push through the soil, so I can add their gentle onionness to an omelet for dinner.

 

 

 

 

But That Wasn’t It

It wasn’t a question of the wind, which was blowing continually. Weather is a skin to every day, and we don’t ignore it. But that wasn’t it, the way she felt puzzled and transparent. Nor was it the comic question of the antic cat, who, though he was heavy, had been up on an impossibly high and difficult to reach cabinet earlier in the day. Maybe he’d jumped down from the loft railing, a perilous jump. That seemed unlikely. As did so many things that daily made themselves ordinary. News hammering rumor into every skull.  Or the dandelion yellow of yolks.  As she whipped the eggs into a froth, she thought life blends velocity and entropy into a daily stew made of hurry and moments stretched thin as spider web. Structure looks so yellow, so old news, and then ha ha shows a flash of its quantum underbelly. Black holes barking faintly? Blood between the lyrics? Or just the fervent reach of blooms toothed mouth, always imminent? She caught herself about to trip on the kitchen stool and swore, then laughed. The world does not comply. At that very moment the crow with the injured foot arrived at the back fence, looking for a handout. She saw the black flash from the kitchen window. While she wondered if there could be a logarithm that would tell you how many dishes you had done in your life or how many times you’d tried to do three things at once and then fallen off the edge of the current world, she went to the fridge and took out cheese to chunk up for the crow.  No other comfort quite resembles the simple exchange of support between species. Cousins so many times removed. It’s a story we love to tell but can’t quite feel the real fur or scales of any more, how we all came out of the same sea, discovered the same cave, ran hungry through the same woods, felt joy when we saw the tiny hands or paws or hooves of our progeny. And not just the mammals—what about the birds? As for the trees, who knows how they think? How their pale blood calls to ours. The universe of bloom, the hands of history gone back beyond—they’re broad. She takes the cheese outside, and the crow sidles toward her, eye glinting curious. Even the glaciers, who have known how to grow and can change their nature utterly, becoming water, have a song they sing.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Sing or Die



It’s sixty degrees 
in January. Janus reveals 
his two faces:
winter/spring, beginnings/endings.
The sky, 
a seamless blue but for two fat clouds, 
streams past the past. 
Last night
when the Wolf Moon howled 
I woke to troubled dreams. 
Now the sky 
is not only sky, but omen, 
a scrim Cassandra 
looks through, knowing her predictions 
must always go unheeded.
 
I remind myself 
to greet each moment as it arises.
To notice is only 
the first step. To speak is the second.
Then to do—but what?
How lost 
we humans act, or are.
And yet 
each morning I wake 
mostly happy to be here, 
to drink hot tea and watch 
birds splash in the bath,
talk to someone I love.
A mockingbird 
lands on a bare branch,
tilts its head: 
sing or die



 

 

 

 

Cockeyed Climate

I have lived in New England all my life. These days I make my home in Northampton, a small city located in “the Valley,” as it is colloquially named, in western Massachusetts.

On an unseasonably balmy day a year ago, sometime close to Thanksgiving, I decided to take advantage of the unexpected opportunity to enjoy the sun’s warmth. Heading out to my patio to relax on the chaise longue yet to be stored in the garage for the winter season, I discovered that the two-year-old clematis vine, twining around the wooden trellis at the edge of the pavers, was ablaze in sky-blue blossoms. Attempting to make sense of my ambivalent response, I wrote this tanka.
 

Clematis climbing:
cerulean blossoms reach
toward summer warmth
this breezy November noon.
Season blunder offers cheer.

 

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Hurricane Season in New Jersey

A little black t-shirt, capris, tank tops, a bikini, and great gaucho sandals. My hobo bag looked like Santa’s sack as I filled it up for a four-day weekend at the Jersey Shore. It was just what this Phoenix gal needed, a reprieve from the scorching Southwest summer inferno.

“Pack light, dress casual,” Brenda said. “If you need something you can borrow it from me, it’ll be just like college.” An escape to the yellow sandy beaches and open-air bars along the Jersey coast sounded amazing. Maybe I’d even get a sighting of Springsteen or Bon Jovi in Asbury Park. I could feel my hectic work schedule stress dripping away like the sweat on my face as I entered Sky Harbor Airport. Little did I suspect that hurricane Morris had his evil eye on the East Coast.

Five hours later, Brenda picked me up with a yellow rain slicker in her hand. She said, “Put this on, you’ll need it.” As a fashion accessory it wasn’t flattering, but I followed orders and we headed for her shore home. The Southwest is immune to such weather events. I was used to the relentless summer heat and our annual El Nino, but a full-scale hurricane was downright scary. Wild winds, torrential rain, and huge waves were pounding the shore. I was guaranteed a “hot” nightlife and gorgeous sun-tanned men, but that’s not the scene I got.

I took up Brenda’s clothes-sharing offer, but not for trendy outfits. It was hoodies and jeans for the next few days. “What happened to beach weather, tans, and cool guys?”  Brenda shrugged, “I swear we’ve had a whole summer of sunny skies and no rain.”  That didn’t make me feel better, in fact it made me feel worse!

So we spent the next few days catching up on old times, watching TV movies, and wolfing down clams and beer at seafood eateries. In desperation for something to do Brenda said, “Let’s find old boyfriends on Facebook.” When it came to contacting them, we chickened out. All the cute ones had posts about their kids or family vacations.

By the time Hurricane Morris finally moved on to disrupt another place, Brenda and I were driving up the Garden State Parkway to Newark International Airport. “Promise me you’ll come back next year when it’s not hurricane season.” I gave her a look that didn’t need translation and we burst out laughing.

 As we hugged good-bye at the curbside, a gentle breeze brushed through Brenda’s hair revealing flecks of natural highlights. “Where are my highlights?” I muttered to myself. Hurricane Morris was now pummeling New England, and summer was back. But its return to the Jersey Shore was too late for me. Most of my holiday wardrobe was untouched, having been replaced with borrowed hang-out clothes.  I was flying home to Arizona, and all I could think of was soggy sweats and forced isolation. I asked myself, “WTF is it with this weather?”

 

 

 

 

A Christmas Cactus Celebrates Easter

What strange notions make you
open your clenched fist on this Ascension
Day? We gave you up for dead,
confined in clay, neglected on a shelf,
arid earth trapping your prickly arms
waiting for December’s darkness to expose 
your coral fingers.
 
What message should I read
in the palm of your outstretched hand
that holds a single purple thread
rising from a tuft of yellow hair?
When spring comes alive 
you should be sleeping. Your drooping limbs
should make me wonder whether
you will ever see another year.
 
Instead, as Eastertide ends you fool
your body into living. I thought I understood
about the seasons. Now I watch your
unexpected life spring from the earth
without my reason.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Tree Hugger

My therapist told me to take back my own story. Celebrate in the face of adversity. Like what, I wondered? Run in the rain? Splash in puddles? Notice commonplace stuff—the warmth of the sun on my face; breeze in my hair; a hummingbird hovering nearby, its long, delicate beak extracting nectar from an amethyst foxglove blossom? I don’t think I’m cut out for that.

A red maple stood before me. Huge and strong, blanketed in vermilion leaves. I laid a palm on its silvery bark. Leaned in. It held me. Did so willingly without even a hint of bending, dodging, turning its back on me. 

I looked beyond its deep-red leaves into the cerulean sky overhead. Felt the vastness of this world, marveled at the beauty, aware of my infinitesimal, atom-size self in an immeasurable universe.

In summer, the tree’s leaves turned green. I complained about sweltering heat. Sat with my back against the trunk, taking refuge in the shade. Hugged my knees to my chest, never glancing at the book that lay open by my side.

Autumn leaves changed color: yellow, red, orange. Shedding, they gathered on the ground, a harbinger of cold, dark days to come. 

In winter I grumbled about sleet and snow, freezing fingers and toes. The maple’s bare limbs, darkened by weather, in bright December sun were excruciatingly beautiful.

It’s hard for me to reconcile the immensity of my feelings of importance, my grasping, yearning, striving, with my undeniable insignificance. The importance I place on everything—running out of shampoo, arriving late for an appointment, craving a latte. I desperately want to get that acceptance letter. I berate myself for saying something stupid. Shame, desires, aspirations are relentless.

The tree doesn’t care. Doesn’t notice if I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet with delight on a perfect spring day or if tears stream down, threatening to freeze on my cheeks in winter. If I’m brooding, ruminating with regret, fear, loss. Wallowing in self-doubt, whining about some petty perceived injustice. It remains.

It accepts rhythmic seasonal change graciously, unyielding to powers of nature, random storms, fierce weather. Forces that would level me. It endures. 

I wonder if I should tell my therapist. Applaud his sage advice. Tell him about my tree. That it is wise. And I have a lot to learn. 

I place both palms flat against the bark. Feel the tree’s strength, enormity, magnificence. I resist the urge to name it, to anthropomorphize it. I press my body against its trunk. Wrap my arms around its massive girth. 

I laugh, picturing myself one of those T-Rex memes, stubby little arms barely making a dent. I laugh realizing I’m a tree hugger. I laugh for no reason at all.

 

 

 

 

Walking Hibernation in the Anthropocene

        “Yes, the extinction tables show a mounting tally, and yet there is still the hoot of owls in the evening,” Bill Mckibben, The New Yorker, April 2022

We mull spring’s eruption, how it blew 
in like an exaggerated sneeze 
from a nose full of pollen. 
Syrup chugs through blue tubes, 
ubiquitous to our hollow––
limbo lines for deer.
 
Icicles drip, drip, drip. 
Brooks, waterfalls crash and tumble.
Mud squishes and squirts 
beneath rubber boots, seeps 
into every cranny, follows us home—
impossible to clean. 
 
From the window we watch a bear amble 
out of the woods, across the meadow,  
toward the house. She claws at bird feeders 
and compost, overturns garbage pails, 
scratches the screen door. 
 
Hungry and prickly, desperate 
to feed her cubs, she cannot 
wait for berries and buds 
yet to bloom. 
 
We liken the bear to the enemy 
in fairy tales and war stories, the aggressor, 
though it’s we who encroach, provoke fires 
and floods, spin nature’s rituals out of sync 
while she struggles. 
 
But now melodies waft
through the hollow, caressing
the bear’s upturned face––
already the noisiest of springs,
peepers, crickets, and frogs
still find reason to begin
their seasonal symphony.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Weather…or not

Wind whips around our weeping cherry tree, a tree already attacked by fungus that has been boring into the base. Now these strange new blasts bear down on it. The arborist warns the tree will soon be unstable. I weep for the birds that roost in its slender limbs, for the squirrels that scurry up and down its weakened trunk in their endless games of tag. I will miss the fragile pink veil that appears every spring.
 
Easter in Hollidaysburg will always be in April. Never mind the liturgical calendar. In the soft breeze, the daffodils danced at the edge of the beds bordering the front walk where my sister and I posed for pictures. Little girls in pearl grey suits, white ankle socks, shiny black shoes. Now, Easter can feel like February or July. We could be shoveling snow or seeking shade under the bur oak that shouldn’t even be in leaf yet.
 
Apples are available all winter now. What happened to apple season? What happened to the months with only red delicious in the bins, and we just left them there. Now all year long we see Pink Lady, Honey Crisp, even Stayman Winesap, which used to be local only to eastern seaboard, and then only for a month or two. How are growers doing this? 
 
Tornadoes tore a trail through South Jersey farms and up into the Philadelphia suburbs. They flattened a new development and demolished a family farm that had served up fresh produce for generations. One lone silo was left behind. The cats and I had cowered under the hall stairs as the monster moved past just a few miles northeast of us. Tornadoes are not just in Kansas anymore.
 
Hurricane warnings were rare in Hollidaysburg. Maybe once in late summer the local Channel 6 newscast from Johnstown would make our parents worry. I remember once biking home from the swimming pool, pedaling fast because the wind had kicked up and it had started to sprinkle. But that was it. Hollidaysburg had no battered shoreline, no thrashing harbor, no palm trees bending in the wind. The names sometimes didn’t get to the middle of the alphabet. Now hurricanes happen everywhere all the time. The names run out of the Roman alphabet and start in on the Greek. 
 
England, that green and pleasant land, is now not so green or pleasant. Floods stall train lines from Stowe-on-the-Wold into Oxford. Offices in London close through lengthy heatwaves. No air-conditioning. Verdant fields now vacant. We haven’t been back in years. Maybe we should just leave our memories alone.
 
Rain comes down not in sheets but in heavy suffocating blankets. A stream cascades down the brick steps to the patio, already ankle-deep in water. The newly-planted roses would be water-logged, if they hadn’t already been scorched by the preceding ten days of 102° temperatures. We give up.

 

 

 

 

Humid All Day In The Desert

Same clouds still there at sunrise.
The adjectives slept fitfully.
They couldn’t quite wake up
Or propel themselves as usual.
They’d lost their lust for nouns.
 
Adverbs sat up slowly and lay back down
In damp sheets. If anything happened
There would be no how, where, when or why,
And no degree but that on the thermometer.
 
Nouns and verbs never showed up for work.
Probably under a bridge downtown drinking
In a parallelogram of shade,
Wet inside, wet outside, wet all around.
 
A rabbi on TV recommended six-second
Kisses, which seemed lengthy on a day like this.
Meeting and parting, he said, were always crucial.
He couldn’t imagine El Paso in August.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Snow Panic

“I can tell you one thing, I am NOT shoveling snow for the rest of my life,” my 74-year-old wife declares, as she stomps her waterproof boots on the back steps. 

 

Checking on her earlier, I chuckle, wanting to capture the image on my iPhone: two inches of snow piled around the brim and on top of her hat. I picture a bright red cardinal making a soft landing. Cardinals aren’t indigenous to our area, and I’m certain the humor will be lost on her. 

Face flushed, nose dripping, soaked through with sweat and melting snow, she is loaded for bear. Here I am, warm as toast, working away at my writing desk. Fluffy snowflakes drift down, accumulate on our 20-year-old pines, and I was thinking about baking a batch of her favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, as a reward for her hard work. My dreamy snow globe spell is broken. 

What did she say? I try not to panic.

Maybe she just means shes going to hire the work done from now on. 

Surely, she doesnt mean shes done/done, as in, she wants to move, leave this place we moved to only two years ago. 

Our third winter here, it’s the worst so far. In fact, the snowstorm of the century. A series of back-to-back bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers off the Pacific, sufficient, at our elevation, to create a snow wall on our front lawn taller than she is, she points out, all of which she shoveled and blew, sometimes two or three times a day.

Be aware–-my wife is not fragile. A 4.5 level Pickleball player, guys half her age invite her to team up for tournaments. After five straight hours of play, women her daughter’s age bow out. Others ask for lessons. Her millennial grandsons call their Nana a badass. When two separate male neighbors offer to help with the snow shoveling, she internally scoffs, but politely declines. Clearly, today? She has had it.

A thought avalanche crashes inside my freaked-out brain. 

If we moved, where would we go? We cant go back to the triple-digit, scorching summers of Central California; the reason we left our home of over four decades in the first place. We cant move to yet another state, even farther away from our old friends and adult children. We cant afford the California coast. Well, we can, but do we want a jumbo mortgage at these interest rates, at our age? What about rising sea levels, mud slides, and tsunamis?  

I stop, take a deep breath, say, “I know,” and help her shed her sopping wet clothes. 

That night I dream of moving boxes, moving vans, packing tape and bubble wrap. When we wake and peer outside, there’s a fresh six-inch layer of powder. Over coffee, we read the weather forecast: more snow to come.

“Do you want me to call the snow removal guy?” I ask. 

“No, I’ll do it. It’s good exercise.” 

The sun is out…today.

 

 

 

 

Conversation with a White Goat

You nibble dry grass alone in a neighbor’s yard, my presence
of no interest to you, your hair wired in all directions, a hint 
of red across your crown. I once created a weaving of your 
style of fibers mixed with sheep, dog, and alpaca wools, to 
form a textured moonscape that hangs in a mountain cabin.
 
The forest service brought a dozen goats of your breed 
to eat parched grasses, dried mustard, and wild lupine 
on the hillside above our town, but fire razed the forest 
so swiftly the goatherd couldn’t gather them to safety.  
 
Still, I wonder the meaning when you appear in my dream, 
as you calmly glean scrub from a summer-yellowed pasture, 
as I prepare to move to another city, as I sort the salvageable 
from the discard. My loom and fibers remain stored, soon 
to be reclaimed, but not the silk dress of luminous peonies 
in gold and pinks, worn only at my niece’s wedding.  
Her marriage didn’t last, its remnants ashes 
in their fireplace.

 

 


From Rain Change, photographs by Sally Buffington

 

 

Climate Experts Know Their Stuff

Nineteen Sixty-Nine was not only Woodstock, the Moon Walk, and my high school graduation. There was also the massive snowstorm that dropped several feet of snow on the Long Island street where I lived, giving my friends and me these gifts: the opportunity to shriek and whoop wildly in the middle of the road; go sledding down hilly neighborhood thoroughfares; and be even more hidden in our secret place. Under the abandoned stone bridge, we smoked a joint, roared with gleeful laughter, and loved the snow even more. 

In 1983 a similarly deep, brilliant snowstorm fell on the New York area. I was living in Manhattan in a boyfriend’s apartment on East 64th Street. We had gone across town to eat out near Lincoln Center and were stunned by what had taken place by the time we left the restaurant. 

Even though buses were running on Broadway, we decided that getting back across the Park and over to First Avenue wasn’t going to happen. Already the sidewalks were covered as we began our trek uptown to 110th Street, where my apartment overlooked the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. 

At the next corner a bus pulled over. We nodded at each other and, after I almost slipped in a puddle of slush, D held my hand and we got on the bus. It was crowded with folks having the same idea, but we created room in which to stand. The bus crept along and, as the snow hit the windows, dripping down like rain, we were glad for the driver’s cautiousness.

Arriving at the corner of Broadway and 110th Street, it seemed as if another massive layer of snow had fallen in the hour it took to go forty-five blocks. Holding onto each other, D and I pushed through the cold whiteness that reached his knees and my thighs. By the time we got to my building, the lobby mirror reflected our smiling apple-red cheeks and woolen hats and jackets shiny with moisture. We ran from the elevator into the apartment, stripped off our clothes and made warming love!

Of course it’s snowed heavily between 1983 and now, but nothing like the storms I remember. Sure, it could be that my memory is selective. When I became a full-time employee and mother, snow lost a lot of its beauty and became more of a hassle. Now that I’m retired, I long for snowfalls the way they used to be. But as of the end of January, sadly, the season remained without snow.

In an article I read about changing weather patterns, an “expert” was quoted as saying, “Just wait until February. That’s the snowiest month.” The article provided examples of winters that were snowless until February, when blizzards hit and cities and towns were brought to a standstill. So we know it was no coincidence that New York’s first snowstorm of the season happened on the penultimate day of February! Yay!? 

 

 

 

 

The Cold

The cold could be so beautiful
But it doesn’t seem that way
To the old lady, who picks her way down the gravel path
To her car, trying to miss the frozen puddles,
But finds one anyway. Now lying halfway on a bush
 
She bends her ankles, they hurt but still work
To carry her. She pulls herself up slowly
On a fence, inches herself painfully
To the car, opens the door and gets in, sighing.
She rubs a hand across a wrinkled cheek.
 
She’s forgotten the flash of frenzied glee
Playing crack-the-whip on the pond, flying off into the woods,
Landing unscathed and laughing in a snowdrift,
The air then so sharp and bright
It crackled in her chest like stars.

 

 


From Rain Change, a suite of photographs by Sally Buffington
Living in coastal southern California, a place that has long known drought, I marvel at rain when it does fall. Afterwards, I wander my neighborhood, noting the water left behind and how it holds light, sparkling out even from cement and asphalt. 
 
Succulents like deep plum aeonium are precisely dotted; agave serves up water on pointed spoon-like blades; and shallow ponds of decomposing leaves reflect the hue of Emily Dickinson’s eyes, “Like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.” 
 
Oh, how the water magnifies, glorifies, earth and leaves and twigs—and trees in reflected spheres. All inspire a kind of surface tension on my mind; my thoughts bloom. Drops and droplets, puddles and pools, lead me on to yet more rain-change, all revealing “something rich and strange.” 

 

— On Rain Changes by Sally Buffington

 
 

 
   
Rebecca Allan: Cultivating Eden
on view at Wave Hill January 18 through June 4, 2023 rebeccaallan.com | wavehill.org
 
Photograph by Ellen McDermott

Turning Points

 


All photographs on this page are by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

 

Introduction: Turn, Turn, Turn

Turning points: we should honor them, celebrate them, at least remark on them. They are, after all, signal events. They can happen in a moment – that split second when something that was ceases to be, and instead becomes, inevitably, irrevocably, something else. 

 

We can honor them, but we seldom can run from them. We might hope to avoid them, to outwit them (and in the process, to outwit time itself), to stay in the moment we knew and liked (or even didn’t like), to refuse to move into whatever change is being foisted on us. 

The reality, though, is that we seldom get to do either — to celebrate the moment or to mourn it, to embrace it or hide from it. Because, most often, we don’t even recognize it until well after it has happened. Until there is no turning back. 

We are affected not only by the turning points that happen in our own lives, but by those that happen in the larger world as well, outside of us, beyond our control, but nonetheless shaping our lives (and us). And just as with our own turning points, we often miss the moment, waking up to wonder when did this one happen? When, for example, did the Republican Party turn from being a party that favored business, global capitalism, and minimal government intervention, and come to embrace instead censorship, racism and sexism, even insurrection? When did they stop even pretending that they might try to save the planet from climate catastrophe? When did this become a world in which enormous wildfires, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes, hotter than hot summers, and constant flooding became everyday occurrences? When did it become impossible to place effective controls on firearms that have no other purpose than to kill as many people in as a short a time as possible? When did women lose the right to make decisions about our own bodies, and how soon will it be before gay couples will no longer be able to marry, heterosexual couples no longer be able to practice birth control, and trans people be denied even the pretense of equality? When did another world war become possible, spreading from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the rest of Europe and beyond? When did the two-state solution become a phrase no one was allowed to say? 

The world’s arrival at these turning points was so gradual, so insidious. There was no sharp, clear turning point, no single moment when we could have said, no, stop, we aren’t going to allow this to happen. Or was there – and we missed it?

There are, however, turning points that the talented women who have contributed their writing, music, and art to this issue did not miss, and they share those moments with us in brilliant prose, poetry, and painting that will alternately thrill, amuse, delight, or alarm us. Indeed, there were so many contributions on this topic – and so many of them were so very good – that we could publish only some of the very deserving entries here. We are holding over the rest for our fall issue.

The poems in this issue’s Short Takes were written by Kathleen McClung and six members of her poetry master class. The class has met via Zoom on alternate Friday afternoons throughout the pandemic. Responding to prompts from Kathleen, the students – all San Francisco Bay Area women over 60 – workshop new poems, focusing on both craft and publication strategies. For this issue, Kathleen and six students each wrote a short poem on the topic “Turning Points.” We invite students and teachers in other poetry and writing classes, to follow their lead and submit your work as a group to future editions of Short Takes. 

 

 

 

Sylvia, My Lighthouse in Whose Beam I Live

 
He just arrived, 7:55 pm, clutching a wilted bouquet
from a financial district corner stand, 
his trench coat dripping—this, every night.
His communion, “These are for you, little Pooh bear.” 
 
He set them on my hospital tray next to a glass of water, 
a juice jar with a chewed, bent straw hanging out.
Fidgeted, checked his watch when he heard, “Visiting hours over.”
Turned, waved, trench coat swaying as he sauntered out.
 
I looked over to the newly occupied bed, medical people who’d 
brought her, hovered, trailing away. She turned the head she could 
hardly lift towards mine, smiled, eyes closing, “I’m Sylvia.”
Thus began our days unfurling, spinning a spider web 
 
of us on the oncology ward—silken threads golden, 
our goddess whispers spinning light amidst the darkness of my
excised tumorous scapula bone and her blackened cancerous lungs.
“If you smoke,” she said, “give it up. I am only 38, and look.” 
 
She wrote her husband’s thesis while he slept around. She supported
them as a lab assistant and gofer for the rising male stars at Harvard.
Once she’d left him, she worked three jobs to get her Ph.D., did  
groundbreaking research, turned a key into the autistic mind, her passion.
 
She watched my husband, absent, spend 5 minutes, walk away.
She said, “You can do anything you want. I am glad I started 
believing in myself—you can too.” She touched my longing, 
a secret dream, was my mentor, though she never knew—
 
died that morning I was rolled out for tests. It is Sylvia who helped me, cancer-
free, pass the tobacco store, leave him behind, head for college and beyond.
 

 

 

 

What a Widow Knows about Love

Tiny wet flakes whisper to the windowpane, instantly melt, slide down the pane like tears. It is my first winter alone.

In this morning’s gelid dark, I brushed a dense, wet blanket of snow from my car, scraped a scrim of ice from the windshield and then shoveled the driveway.  Bend, scrape, lift, toss.   Bend, scrape, lift, toss. I scooped up driveway salt and sprinkled it on the concrete with arms still shaking from the effort of shoveling.  

He always did this for me. On dark winter mornings, he rose with the alarm while I stole a few more minutes of half-sleep under fluffy down. While I showered, blow-dried and made up for the day, he was out in the cold in galoshes and old gloves, shoveling, salting and clearing.   Bend, scrape, lift, toss. He stamped in the front door, clumps of snow dropping wetly from his boots and clinging to his cap. He’d toss his gloves aside and rub his reddened hands together, his glasses fogging in the sudden warmth of the house. “Your car’s warming up,” he’d announce, and I’d casually call back, “Thanks.” I would have been more grateful if I had known how hard it was: bend, scrape, lift, toss, your nose running, your glasses fogging, your fingertips going numb, the ache in the back with the bend, the twinge in the elbow with the lift. I wish I had known to be more grateful.

I wish I had known, the last time we made love, that it was the last time. The last time to see his face above mine, his eyes at once hungry and tender, skin on skin, the familiar fullness and release, the drowsy burrowing together and teasing afterward, the contented murmuring.  Exactly the same almost all the time, now that we were old. Comfortable, easy to take for granted, less fireworks than the gentle glow of candlelight. Never again, I realize about once a day, and I am cut by despair and – still – disbelief.

The evening before his last heartbeat, he got home from work ahead of me. Evening light, as thick and golden as honey, streamed into the kitchen where he was making a salad:  iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber, grated carrot, sliced celery. My heart sank a little: some darker greens, maybe? Some mushrooms or olives or goat cheese? He smiled. “I picked three tomatoes today. Smell.” He held out a sun-warmed red globe. I inhaled its green, prickly, just-picked smell, and he planted a quick peck on my lips. He gestured to his salad. “Look good?”

“Looks great,” I answered. “I’m starving.”  

 

 

 

I Could Have Been Another Shirley Temple

 
In 1938 during a vacation in California
my mother and I were walking on Sunset Blvd
when a tall sun-tanned MGM talent scout
stopped us       he asked her to bring me in for a screen test.
He said I could be another Shirley Temple, discovered when 
she too was three years old.
NO     my mother said. She said I was entitled to a normal life
not one of endless uncertainty.
 
NO    two little letters and my life changed.
I could have learned to sing,
tap dance with Bill Bojangles Robinson
steal scenes from W.C. Fields
spoof stars like Mae West
and Marlene Dietrich
swish my head of bouncy curls
smile adoringly at the camera.
 
NO      two little letters and  
I could have been immortalized
with my own star on the Vine Street sidewalk.
NO       two little letters 
A wise mother’s choice
NO    for me is being married for
sixty loving years, two caring daughters,
and enjoying life as a poet with every letter of the alphabet.
 

 

 

 

Chickening Out

Once upon a time there were three little chickens. Unlike the more famous ducks Huey, Dewey, and Louie, these remained nameless and indistinguishable. They wore no colorful clothing, were not only naked but two-dimensional, and were only revealed sporadically in weekend newspaper ads.

These three headlined modest advertising illustrations for Chicken Delight and topped a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers to call when ordering a chicken dinner delivered  “right to your door.” Years before Uber, Lift, Grubhub, DoorDash, and the like, this provided quite a popular – if limited – meal.

The trio came under my supervision when I took my second job out of college, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. The first had been composing descriptions for the large cards describing fashions in department store display windows. I was coming up in the world by moving from window to newspaper exposure (with the goal of eventual fame).

I wrote nothing. Exposure does not mean creativity. The pre-set text filled the newspaper ads with information on ordering food. The chickens were hooks, responsible for drawing the attention of potential customers.

When I started my assignment, all three marched, facing left, across the top of the ads. To heighten excitement, over the next weeks, I ran them down the left side, then the right side, and, finally, across the bottom, always facing left. I had no idea how to reverse their direction. 

Ultimately, I rebelled, broke up the row and scattered them into corners, finally placing one, solo, at the top. What a shame it was not a crowing rooster, but that might have signified a tough bird and undercut the possibility of a soft, delicious chicken dinner.

This was not the career I expected after earning a university degree in English! The degree seemed worthless. I could not get hired for anything more substantive than playing duck-duck-goose for a fast-food franchise. Why had I spent four years reading, writing, and analyzing stories instead of learning poultry illustration?

One day, I took out my scissors and began cutting out the ads. While filling page after page of a large scrapbook with the variations of chicken placement, I suddenly had an epiphany. This was the turning point of my life and saved me from madness.

“I do not have to keep doing this,” I thought. “I could do something else! I could go back to graduate school.”

My parents agreed, with one condition. This time I had to be more practical: stop reading, writing, and analyzing stories. I had to enroll in education classes and acquire a skill I could apply intelligently to the real world – teaching. So I chickened out of the fowl conditions of advertising and grew my own wings to seek a better roost in a future where I might ultimately perch with a flock of wise old owls on an educational branch. 

 

 

Waltz No. 3 in E major

 

 

 

Life Lessons

 

Inspired by high wire artist Philippe Petit and his walk between 
the Twin Towers in 1974 and over Jerusalem in 1987

 
Philippe, I wonder at your steel spine, your grin, your trust as you step into dissolving air. How you venture into the void, shift your weight, toe-heel, heel-toe, black slipper poised 1350 feet above the ground. You pace back and forth from North Tower to South, those now-fallen symbols of despair. I watch on film as you cross and imagine invisible bodies jumping. Yet here you are, buoyant, radiant. Your precise calculations as you plot each move, seize the moment, fully focus on the high wire. No matter the sway of the wind. No matter the dove of peace you release from your silk purse. The dove lands on your head as you walk between enemy sectors. You laugh, sit on the wire, even risk looking into the abyss. The people below are tiny dots as sound waves carry high the rhythmic clapping of Arabs and Jews, who have come together to rally you across Jerusalem. You balance with your twelve-foot pole. No tether, no net. Only joy.  

 

 

My House through Lives and Time

I feel her presence every day in her new house, now my old house. Built in 1812, it was three years old on the day her world changed forever. Irena Wilse Mather was a young wife with a baby son called John. Her husband, Richard, was the chief boatbuilder in a Long Island waterfront village where boatbuilding was the major trade. 

INSTEAD, IT IS DARK
by Cynthia Hogue
  After her husband's massive heart attack some years ago, Cynthia Hogue began spontaneously writing poems based on dreams and memories that her husband, born into occupied France, had shared with her of being a child growing up in a time of vast wartime and postwar food shortages. When asked by a curious American, members of her extended family in France told never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—a hidden child. Their stories crystallized into instead, it is dark, which Ilya Kaminsky has called “a beautiful spell of a book.” Weaving history of there and present day here in poems that explore how an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry speaks a complex truth, these poems cast a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of the book—love. Publication date: April 4, 2023 Available now for pre-order at https://bookshop.org/p/books/instead-it-is-dark-cynthia-hogue/18735119

From the windows of her house, Irena could see the water, could watch the boats that sailed from the village to New York City, sixty miles away. Yet I don’t imagine she had much leisure time to spend gazing from her windows. There was the baby to care for and  bread to bake in the cellar’s brick beehive oven, at which my guests still marvel. She had three levels plus an attic to dust and sweep, fireplaces to stock with wood for winter warmth.

Still, as I gaze at the water of Long Island Sound, I imagine Irena drawn to these same windows again and again through her hardworking days. She thinks of Richard at work in the harbor. She is eager for late afternoon when she can hope to watch him walking uphill toward her. She anticipates the moments when he lifts the baby into his arms, when he slices into her newly baked loaf, announces the next improvement he plans for their loved house. 

I know (how can I know?) they imagine other children who will be born in this house. They anticipate the eventual need for bedrooms in the attic. 

I investigated the history of their marriage at the village Historical Society. That’s how I know about the end of their story together. One day when Richard’s newest ship was nearly complete, he climbed the mast, fell, and was killed. I hope Irena was not at a window. But nothing shielded her from the moment life with Richard ended and another life began.

Irena lives on as a heroine in my heart. She raised her son to become a respected citizen of his birth village. His own adult home now serves as the history museum.

A twenty-first-century crossroads is approaching for the two-century-old house. I like to say my husband and I are growing old. But in truth, we are old. No longer do I run up and down the several staircases with the speed and energy of Irena. I cling to the banisters, imagining broken hips.

I am giving possessions away.

Memories will be cherished.

Visions of Irena will never fade.   

 

 

 

 

Skin and Water

 For Valentina
 

 
I stare at the thin blue vein skimming the surface
of your pale chest, a tenacious arc around your little-girl nipples.
You plunge recklessly in the slick bathtub, glowing,
translucent as you thrash back and forth the full six feet.
You call this surge “astercizing,” slapping water rhythmically
over the edge of the tub onto the tile floor.
I sit on a stool, dazed and watching, aging new mother
stunned by this spark of a daughter. The years
of infertility, the taste of its bitter disappointment
forgotten in the crushing overwhelm of sudden parenthood.
I study my toenails, long and untended, too tired
to reach for the clippers. I try to ignore the nagging fear
that I’ve finally taken on too much. For now
we are tethered together, land to sea.
You are my slippery talisman, small watery companion,
skimming through bobbing rubber ducks and a whale,
still giddy from your transatlantic crossing.
I look up to see you with a brown and white cow
at each nipple, rocking side to side, your eyes closed.
You press their hard mouths onto each breast,
crooning one of your mysterious Slavic melodies,
your voice so deep for a child, and inform me,
 “my cows missed their dinner, I milk them for you.”
You are pink and pure against the porcelain.
 

 

 

With or Without You

Your dented white minivan rolled slowly across two lanes of opposing traffic and over the curb, stopping just over a low concrete wall, hanging gently by your two front wheels. Three palmetto trees stood close to but not touching your front bumper. You were still upright when the paramedics arrived. We’ll never know if you knew what was happening or if you were already gone. If you were afraid. If you were careful not to hit another car. If you were in pain. Why does it matter so much, the last few minutes of a lifetime? Why does that last week, when your kids didn’t see you as much as they could have, trouble them so? Why does the last time I saw you — when you wouldn’t walk on the beach with me, our favorite way to step away from everyone else, and I became impatient and less sympathetic than I almost ever have been —  replay itself in my mind? 

On the radio yesterday, I heard a stoic philosopher — by which I mean a philosopher of stoicism, not a philosopher who’s stoic — recommend we play the “last time” game: To appreciate what really matters, imagine this is the last time I’ll (fill in the blank). How would I have lived my moments, knowing the great treasure of your company would end? For one thing, I would surely have been a stellar sister that last evening. But the thing is, we both knew from too young an age that someone we need can die, that someone we need can leave us, that no one will ever replace them.

I keep picturing you, that seven-year-old boy with the mischievous grin and curly blond hair, hands on hips, singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” I can’t see myself then, at nine, when we were sent so far away—but you always saw me. I can picture adult me with two young kids, when I thought I would lose my home again, and you were kind and quiet and didn’t require me to know what the fuck I was going to do now. Now I see you dog-paddling in the water with your floppy, old-man hat, while I swim curving strokes and loop around you; or hamming it up on the stage, your dancing hands practically pirouetting across the keys, your grin the same one fifty-plus years later; or laughing with your grandson at Taco Bell on Jolly Ollie Tuesdays, unless I was visiting and it was Jolly Ollie and Molly Day. You deserve a holiday, too.  

Now that you’re gone and I go on without you, I have to swim straight. I have to remember on my own to breathe three times slowly. I have to make a holiday for you that’s a different day from the one, two years and fifty-one days ago, when your van rolled across the street, with or without you.  

 

 

 

Lost and Found

For Richard
 

 
first an email      then phone call      then daily calls
after fifty-four years apart
 
asking if I remembered      guiding me through the week
we spent together in 1967 when I called you distraught
 
because Jerry       the man I left you for   took his own life
blank      I did not remember
 
how you drove 500 miles      kept me afloat      brought me back
to myself      then you were gone      and I bereft      erased
 
you      but your heart held me      wanting to tell me
of your love      we were twenty-two      learning to live
 
you recalled our first date      first kiss      skinny-dipping
in Jones Lake      building a fire for our first dinner
 
you knew my intensity      my strength      my joy
now      midway      meeting anew between Oakland
 
and Salem      a month later at my apartment
two weeks at your house      days in bed
 
photos      you in the army      your five-foot salmon catch
your mother Sadye’s worn leather manicure bag
 
tortoiseshell clippers      scissors      tweezers
you gift me a new Leatherman multi-tool 
 
pliers      screwdriver      metal file
a tiny sewing kit for mending
 
two safety pins      six colors of thread
and a woven gold purse of quarters      just in case
 

 

 

 

Everything Has Changed

 
Please don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret. They asked us not to tell. Please don’t tell anyone it’s a secret. Do you see the difference a comma makes? Please. Don’t tell. My secret. They begged us not to tell. Are we ashamed? We are not ashamed! How is this a secret? He’s on the sex offender list! Someone will see and think he belongs there! His wife and her sister called and said, We are telling you because you are his mother and it’s terrible it’s too late and he did not even do it. There is a point system, and if you download (Say it!) child pornography even accidentally you will be arrested. At work he was arrested, and because he would not tell them why, they took his job away. He has been at home all these months. I knew that, but he said it was the virus. He was the victim of downsizing, and of course he was at home with the girls. He is the best father in the world; it is his mission to keep his girls safe and oh, they adore him, he will do anything for them. He did not do the thing they say he did; he ordered something legal, benign, and something else invaded his computer — something vile, something hideous — but what he actually ordered took so long to download he shut the laptop and went to bed and spent the next day as he always does, being there for his daughters, the twins, not quite six, the girls he will protect from anything, and when he saw the hideous thing on his computer that night he was repulsed, aghast, terrified. He deleted, deleted, deleted; he did whatever it is you do to wipe your hard drive clean, because it was horrifying. How can such a thing exist? How can anyone want that? He would go to the ends of the earth to stop that happening to any child and there it was on his screen; when he saw it he cast it out. But they knew. And they came, two of them, to his office and took him away. And even though he told them what really happened, and even though his wife told them in no uncertain terms what an amazing father and husband he is, it didn’t matter. The public defender, the private attorney, everyone he thought would pry open the trap, told him he had no choice, and a 70-month plea deal was good, the best, which of course it is for someone who actually asked for perversion like that. And now everything has changed; there are five words I am not supposed to say to anyone outside the family, the pod, the seven of us, nine if you count the girls, even though it’s what I’m thinking All. The. Time. My son is in prison.  Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.
 
 

 

 

Unruly Sonnet After January 6

 
O, to be you, dear spiders, spinning your 
platinum discs over the wind chime water 
of Fern Creek, grooves rippling in reflected 
waves, as divine rays from Mt. Olympus 
cascade through the crowns of coastal redwoods. 
While the trail below is littered with burnt 
foliage and my blundering footprints, 
you weave the terrible stories, daughters 
of Arachne, undeterred by the one
who demands fealty. In our cities 
you are shaking out the debris brought by 
wind and human breach, hoisting once again
your stout strands between fence and garbage bin, 
your spinnerets announcing, Were still here. 
 

 

 

 

Goa is on another continent

Barely a bunk to call your own. Payments home on the portage bill. Name might be Gonzales, Gomez, or Pereira. Your height singled you out. Some jumped-up engineers, chunky young men in monkey jackets, complained about your attitude. In A-deck staterooms the VIPs escaping five months of English winter. Down aft, tourist class: cockroaches and burst pipes — the hazards of assisted passage.

You failed to serve breakfast. Colleagues are quizzed, charge sheets prepared.

You will be summoned before the ship’s master. His somber voice on the public address system. Slicing through the spray, twenty-thousand tons of steel must turn back towards that wave when you were last seen on board.

The blur of someone’s sun hat swept away in the gray swell. A telegram had come. Thin strips of paper turned you, three months away from leave, into the father of your family. The ship rumbles and shudders, she is trying to make up time. Tomorrow they will queue for refunds on the shore excursion: a fire dance on the Dakar quayside.  

 

 

 

Wizard of Oz Abecedarian

                          for Clara Blandick
 

 
Auntie Em, believe her. While you, Henry and the farmhands huddled
below ground, Dorothy ran with Toto in her arms,
crossed dry Kansas soil, her gingham
dress slapping like a ship’s sail. She used
every muscle to pull against the storm cellar door.
Frantic, she stomped again and again with her shoe.
Girls everywhere witnessed the advancing tornado, wished
her family underground would hear her, rescue her. But no,
instead, we saw your house swirl into the sky, Dorothy inside, 
journeying alone, so far from her kin. Em, you must be
kind. Be patient with her. Reconciling may take a 
long time for you both. She has slept among poppies, seen so
many colors you never will, appraised radical
new ideas, dreaded sand draining through a witch’s hourglass.
Oz has changed her.
 
People do return to their roots, embrace wholeheartedly their
quiet kin, resume crocheting projects, braiding
rugs, canning for winter. Listen closely to her
stories, though, Em. She may speak fondly of scarecrows, lions,
tin men. She may stammer about dark sky
under the wings of flying monkeys, a man’s 
voice and face enormous in a hall until Toto,
with his small dog mouth, pulled back a curtain
exposing an unremarkable fellow, a huckster in a bolo tie.
Your faith will be tested, Em. Sit together in the parlor, repair
zippers in trousers for the farmhands.  There’s no place like home.
 
 

 

 

Pissed

I moved the box of your ashes from the coat closet in the hall to the file cabinet in the garage today and peed my pants. It was bad Feng Shui seeing the box every time I opened the door. I tried covering you with scarves and hats, but even in death your vibration permeates our home. The mailman delivered you in a box marked Cremated Remains Priority Mail. He gently extended a clipboard for me to sign, wondering which way this widow was going to blow. “I’ll be OK,” I said. The cat ran and hid under the bed and wouldn’t come out for a week.  

When friends ask how I’m doing I say, “Raw at a new level of grief.” I omit the part about peeing my pants while carrying grocery bags up the stairs. I’m mad all the time now. Your death unleashed a rage that surpasses all tantrums to date. Furies flew from my heart when the bathroom light blew out. I don’t know how to fix a leaky faucet or my bladder, and it’s all your fault. I’m lost in this body, in the house, in this new life. No wonder I’m pissed. You died and I hate you for making me get old.   

I wasn’t old last year, but now why bother? I’ll just piss my pants and cry even harder than I did yesterday. I could buy diapers, but instead I’ve altered my wardrobe. Those size eight European jeans you loved have been replaced by old-lady clothes purchased at Goodwill. No more Lucy yoga pants, the ones that made my gams look sexy. I no longer rock those Lululemon skorts, now folded in a pile in the back of our closet, the “I’ll get back to you” clothes. Nope, I’m a frumpy vision in black nylon stretch pants, size large or extra-large depending on the day.  I never wear the sexy underwear you bought me anymore. I’m mortified at the thought of peeing those pretty white lace briefs you loved. 

Bladder issues are common in women my age, but after years of yoga practice and tantric sex I’m appalled at my lack of control. I will not be discussing this issue with my physician because adding another medication is untenable. Hell if I’m going to tell her I stopped taking two antidepressants. Perhaps it’s the withdrawal from reuptake inhibitors that has affected my sphincter muscle.

I’ve learned where all the bathrooms are on my daily route. The bank tellers don’t like it when I ask if I can use the facilities, but they’ve been kind to me since your death. You were such a good customer. Walks in the park or by the river are out of the question. It’s me and the homeless people frantically searching for a friendly loo.   

The cosmic joke’s on me, peeing my way through my widowhood. Lost husband, lost control, dignity, hope that I will ever be happy again. Humility through incontinence is my new spiritual practice. I’m living with uncertainty and wet undies.  

 

 

Forgetting


Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations on this page are by Judith R. Robinson

 

 

Introduction: It Is the Forgetting

How close are death and forgetting? At our age, all too close, it turns out.

 

It is the forgetting that makes me mind death. I would not mind it if I could hold onto myself, if I could remember, if I could dream. If death truly were the same as falling asleep. I would slip into that sleep, and there Steve would be, in my dream, as real as people are to the dreamer of any dream. I would hold myself against him, and dream I felt the closeness, dream his body solid and supporting, his arms around me.

We would talk, he and I, it would be dream talk, but it would feel as real as conversations ever feel to those who dream them. Sometimes I would be with my brother or my daughter or son. If I had a conversation with Caroline or Gar I would not be surprised. Would I think, “But you are dead. How can you be here?” I might. Dreamers sometimes do. But it would not end our conversation. They would perhaps be giving me advice, and my dream self might even be taking it. Or at least acting enthusiastic about it instead of noncommittal.

The important thing is not to know I am dreaming. I would not have to think I was alive, just that there was some kind of reality in the people I was seeing, the words we were saying.

Will I dream forever or as my body decays and disappears will I gradually slip away, my memories going with me? And will I mind by then? Perhaps not. But only because I will be dreaming, and dreamers do not think, plan ahead, or ponder. They only breathe and wonder. And recall.

*********

 

How close are forgetting and death? At our age, all too close, it turns out. Forgetting, it turns out, is not a happy topic. Although there are a few amusing moments scattered through these Short Takes, the topic is not one that produces much in the way of cheer, at least not among those of us who are forgetting more than we remember.

And yet, while most of the contributions to this issue will not make you smile, they will make you glad you’ve read them. They are uplifting and engaging. And, most of all, they bring us the grace of new perspectives on issues we thought we were versed on all too well. They make us remember in new ways what it is like to forget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praying Mantis

I.
She is captivated by their delicate limbs
and soulful eyes so much that she
saved a young one from drowning in
the birdbath. But later that summer in a
fit of anger she mistakes the praying mantis
for the culprit killing her mandevilla. She
sprays it, half hidden in the tangled vines,
with a soapy solution. It stares up in horror
as she gasps at her fatal mistake. In that
moment – on the heels of running a stoplight,
forgetting her boss’s name and finding the milk
in a cupboard – she faces her fear that she is
losing her mind, as her mother lost hers
at the same age she is now.
 
II.
She cannot get over killing one of
her most beloved creatures for she is
the kind of person who leaves stinkbugs
alone when she finds them on a curtain or
a counter. She takes hairy spiders outside
on the end of a broom. Once she returned
an ant to the garden after it rode in on a
peony blossom. Now she remembers
reading somewhere that finding a
praying mantis is good luck and
wonders if killing one is an
omen of her pending demise.
 
III.
Her partner, who has resisted
the idea that she has anything more
than garden-variety forgetfulness,
releases an audible groan when the
doctor informs them it is something
worse. On the drive home he tells her in
a choked voice that for as long as he lives,
she will never live in any kind of facility.
His words warm her heart and calm her mind,
even though she knows it’s a promise
he may not be able to keep.
 
IV.
She insists on riding along the day they
donate her car to a garage that will fix it up
for a young mom who needs one for her new job.
She is moved by the symmetry of this, having
bought the car with money from her promotion
to a job she loved but can no longer do.
As her partner starts the car, she notices
a green twiggy shape on the windshield and
wonders if it’s only her mind misfiring.
But no, he sees it, too, and waits while she
gets out and nudges the praying mantis until
it leaps from the car into the tall grass.
 
V.
Home alone the next morning, she feels
her mother’s spirit as she folds the towels
still warm from the dryer. She recalls standing
with her in their basement long ago, folding
a fluffy pile of her baby sister’s diapers and
how – several decades later – her father
would dispose of his wife’s paper diapers
as if it was the most ordinary of daily tasks.
She thinks now how lucky they both were
that her mother died before she forgot
who he was and how much she loved him.
Tears fill her eyes as she prays that
she, too, can offer this one last
comfort to her own partner.

 

 

 

 

 

In the Empty Evening

 

 

 

 

 

Forgetting to Forget

I promised. I prayed about it, and swore to all that I held dear to forget how I relinquished a doll without regret. But it is no use, I can’t remember to forget. Now at 70, I still feel the sting. No matter how many times I resolve to forget, to let go, I carry this memory given more importance than it deserves. Here is my confession.

Cousin Beth was five and I was three, when she suggested we swap our two dolls. Her doll was soft with curly blonde hair and gleaming blue eyes. Mine was a hard plastic with a light tan molding to give the impression of hair. Neither of our dolls wore any clothes. Then, as if a scene from My Brilliant Friend, Beth and I switched our babies. My memory is faulty as to what happened next; at about suppertime a knock came at our door. It was my Aunt Anna, my mother’s older sister, with Beth by her side holding my doll.

We lived upstairs in my Aunt Anna’s two-family house. Our living space was inadequate for my parents, my two brothers, and me. We had a small kitchen, a bathroom, a living room and one tiny bedroom. Downstairs, my aunt, her husband and my four cousins had three bedrooms, a large parlor, a big kitchen, and a bathroom. It was luxury compared to our meager upstairs apartment. So it isn’t surprising that Beth’s doll was better quality than mine, and even at the age of three I recognized the difference.

The chance to have a prettier baby-doll was not to be missed. I really didn’t love my baby-doll, but instantly loved the one Beth had traded.

Aunt Anna knocked on the door and called upstairs for her sister, my mom.

“Maria, the girls gave away their dolls to each other, and Beth wants her doll back.”

Beth was teary and holding my doll willy-nilly by its arm. I stood like a defiant soldier at the top of the stairs cradling my new baby-doll properly, smashing it to my chest.

“I want my doll back,” Beth cried. “She has my doll.”

“Come downstairs,” Mom commanded me.

One step at a time I made my way to the bottom of the staircase, clinging to my adopted doll. Mom inspected it.

“That’s not your doll!”

“Beth gave it to me and I gave her mine. This is my doll.”

Mom removed the doll from my grasp, and handed it to Beth who promptly dropped my doll onto the bottom step. There my doll lay, just a dirty, ugly, hard plastic, naked cheap toy. She couldn’t be my baby-doll. I never named her.

Decades passed, Beth and I remained close cousins, had real babies and real grandchildren. If I could just un-feel the deep loss about that doll. Which doll? Not the pretty one I gleefully accepted from Beth, but the doll I never loved.

Why could I not remember to forget about the doll incident? Forgetting to forget is a topsy-turvy way of saying forgive and forget.

I don’t know what became of that doll. We moved from Aunt Anna’s home when I was five, and it was probably tossed. Today, I like to imagine another girl found the doll on the heap of our discards, scrubbed its face, dressed the doll with a pretty frock, kissed and named her. This is what I will not forget to forget.

 

 

 

 

 

Night by Night

A hand loosening its grip
is still a hand.
 
Two eggs for breakfast. A mineral smell.
 
We’re not like that, we have
interesting thoughts
a certain slippage is all
 
and did I already salt
my egg
 
on what basis
 
this morning a wandering through
language, those asides
 
sliding free as pennies on
stairs, bright
 
promising, but strange
 
down there.

 

 

 

 

 

Karen to the Moon

My friend has a penchant for the supernatural. “You need a warlock to rid this place of evil spirits,” she insisted, viewing the fixer-upper we’d bought on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. “Carlos is in Mexico, otherwise he could do it,” referring to her second husband. We had trouble finding a phone number for a substitute warlock, but we burned some rosemary and sage for a fresh start. The house felt better.

Karen also initiated the moon worship I’ve half-believed in for the last thirty years. Every full moon, she held her empty wallet (must be empty) aloft toward the moon and offered an incantation sourced from a book of spells:

“Flibberty, gibberty, flasky flum, Hooky, maroosky, whatever’s the sum, Heigh-ho! Money come!”

The moon responded generously. After a sketchy income for years, neither of us has wanted for cash.

Karen dredged up spells for our annual Summer Solstice party. Without internet, in the 1980s, this required research in the art museum bookshop where she worked. We did not shed all our clothes for tree circling at midnight, but some of us came close. Nowadays, we are mainly preoccupied with earthly concerns, appropriate wines, and the menu of fresh goat as we celebrate the changing seasons. Karen shares few concerns at all, locked in the prison of dementia, but perhaps still singing her prayers once we’ve left her alone with the moon.

What I really wanted to tell you is that I miss my friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Things I Had Almost Forgotten, 1969

I had almost forgotten
The tinfoil ties
That the boys in our high school crinkled into shape and wore
So that they would be in compliance with the letter of the dress code
Though demonstrating, not the spirit
This seemed like big, brave rebellion then
At Our Lady of Lourdes High School, in 1969
 
The Brothers had told us of the radical priests, the Berrigans, in religion class
And I had almost forgotten the Moratorium that year to stop the Vietnam War
And how we all went downtown to the local march
And stood in the October crispness in our plaid skirts and knee socks
I didn’t know what it was
When the list of those lost was handed to me
And I was told it was my turn
My turn to read out ten names
 
I had almost forgotten these things
Until, hearing “Un Flambeau, Jeannette Isabella” on the radio
I recalled them all
And remembered too
How in French class
Sister Mary Gerald had taught us la chanson
 
And I had almost forgotten this singing of our all-girl class
And how the Sisters wore the floor-length habits then
So at peace as they swished by

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fragmenting Stories

Every Sunday while I cooked dinner, my mother-in-law, Audrey, in her eighties, sat at my kitchen table and told stories. They could be about singing Norwegian Christmas carols at her great-grandparents, about her grandfather making a doll out of kindling for her, about cutting class with her high school friends to play cards and smoke cigarettes. The next week she would tell another set of them. Perhaps about her friend from childhood who was so poor she had to share a doll with her sister, about writing to movie stars for their autographs, about the first time she met her husband. She had dozens of stories stowed on the shelves of her brain. She told them as an unrelated series, jumping time and place, and when she finished, she looped back to the first one and repeated it, forgetting she’d already shared it.

Dementia had thrown sludge into her short-term memory, hindering her ability to record what she had for lunch or how many people attended church that morning or what she talked about five minutes ago. But she remembered the old stories, and when she told them, the facts were constant. Over the last two years, I’d recorded them, typed them, and organized them into a book for her. The stories were my friends. I knew them so well that when she told them, I could drift in and out and not become lost.

One Sunday while I cooked, Audrey started another round of stories. I recognized them like a song from my childhood, which I could sing for a bit but then would need to hum. Though if someone else sang it, so could I – word for word. But if the lyrics became tangled, I knew it.

I was daydreaming when a snarled narrative snapped my reverie. Audrey had blended two stories, pulled events and people from one and inserted them into another. I listened while she built a hybrid tale from vestiges of her memory. Dementia had obliterated the walls between the stories.

After his parents left, I told my husband. He didn’t want to understand the distinction between his mother repeating a story several times during a two-hour visit and her blending two distinct stories together. A few days later I told his sister, who didn’t want to understand the distinction either.

The following week my in-laws came again for dinner. Audrey told more stories, shifting elements, creating fan fiction from her memories. I listened, never correcting. The humor and poignancy of her stories remained. They gave her pleasure, but the revisions weren’t my friends; they were harbingers forecasting the death of her long-term recall. I didn’t mention it to my husband or his sister again. They didn’t want to think about dementia sliding its icy fingers through the shelves of their mother’s brain, shuffling the realities of her past.

 

 

 

 

 

Musings After Hearing Eurydice on the Radio (Metropolitan Opera)

She has crossed the river        of forgetfulness        only to find herself
in a shower in the elevator        that takes her down        to the Underworld
no memory        no words        & she doesn’t know who her father is
though in my case        I wonder how long it will be        before my dad
doesn’t know        who I am        because yesterday        after I walked around him
after sundown        to retrieve my phone        he didn’t even know
I was there        because sundowning        is a real thing. Can a man whose message
is delivered by a worm        restore memory?    Meanwhile which Orpheus
is which        &    is it even possible        to meet someone interesting
anymore?        My father takes        a new dip each day        into the river
of forgetfulness        & why         even when the title is        Eurydice        must
everything        always        turn out to be        so orphic        in the end?

 

 

 

 

 

Will I Remember?

My favorite scarf went missing in December. Suddenly it wasn’t on its chair, not with my coat, not in the car, not on the closet floor. I hunt through all the sleeves of all my coats, in every drawer and closet, behind boxes on shelves and floors.

I push panic aside and methodically make a list of every person I’d seen in the past two weeks, and then asking:

“Do you remember if I wore my grey scarf that day?”

“Could you have picked it up by mistake?”

“Did I leave it at your house?”

“In your car?”

“Please look in your car.”

I contact every place I’d been: a Thai restaurant and a Chinese restaurant, two coffee shops, a movie theater, a grocery store, a tire store. I diligently make multiple calls and second visits. Strangers behind counters offer sympathy for my loss and tell me about things they have lost. We speculate about how we lose what we care about most and why the lost object matters.

After another week of hope, I stop searching, admit the scarf is gone. I call my brother, a curator at a history museum.

“I’m feeling blue – I lost the scarf he gave me.”

*

On a dreary January day some twenty years ago, a grey cashmere scarf arrived in my mailbox. It was from an old friend who had moved to my city a few months ago. We met for movies and shared meals in neighborhood restaurants.

His gift surprised me. His note surprised me even more.

“I wish I could be where this will be.”

I smiled at his graceful phrase, admired his risky words.

And the scarf was a delight – soft, thick yet light, generously fringed. I wore it as we walked more frequently, lingered on cold benches, stopped at an Italian place to warm up with espresso or Irish coffee.

Friendship turned into affection, intimacy, and love. We married. Happiness lasted until his death fifteen years later.

*

My brother and I talk about objects and memory and the links between them. He says the urge to keep things is a natural instinct and that most people, just like museums, collect and preserve meaningful objects. I remark that according to Marx and Madonna we all live in a material world, and he laughs too hard at my feeble effort at humor.

When I say goodbye, he says, “Cheer up. You’ll always have the memory.”

Will I?

I don’t think so. I won’t really remember.

Yes, I’ll always have the story about the scarf – the story I tell you now.

But without seeing the muted grey and feeling the fine fabric in my palm, I will forget walking together in cool winter air, the warmth of the scarf, the weight of his hand on my shoulder.
 

 

 

 

Don’t Forget Death

Whoa, Death. I know you’re there
I live better by not forgetting you.
 
So no need to hide in back alleys of my mind
squatting seething sneaking ‘round
corners of my consciousness
Scythe a’ready to cut me down
at first whimper of ache or crack of age.
 
To wit. Go. Sit.
Perch atop your boulder of ruthless indifference.
Glare out from your endless emptiness.
But stay silent!
Keep your deadly handshake in your pocket.
 
I promise to live a full squeeze-the-orange life
before you kidnap me into your impersonal nothingness.
Your black shrouded skeleton your monstrous Otherness
will have its day of reckoning. But not now.
 
My body has not yet gnarled up, no teeth fallen out,
Memory can wobble but I still grasp day of time and who I love
I will surrender to you some day.
But not now!
Now I savor!
 
More time I need to awaken to sparkled morning dew
To smell blood red rose on bended knee
To giggle at the renegade Red Balloon sailing to heaven
To linger over afternoon tea, over love and loss, licking lipstick and lollipops,
More time to taste each bite of juiciness running down my chin
a mouth smacking life
delectable
beyond regrets.
 
Whoa, Death.
Stay silent now.
We’ve agreed.
I’ll see ya later.

 

 

 

 

 

Sprinkled With Glitter

I visited my mother yesterday at the nursing home. It was 10:15, and she was still asleep in bed. She looked smaller than she ever had, her cheeks sunken without her false teeth, her body so still beneath the blankets which were drawn to her chin. This woman is so different from the one I visited years ago before we moved her to our Minnesota town. I had flown into Evansville, Indiana for a short stay at her apartment in the senior residence. Back in the city where I was born, I experienced a child-like wonder at having a sleepover at my mom’s and the amazing thought that this could be fun.

Moving her a few years later from Indiana to Minnesota was the right thing to do. But her presence at Life Links Senior Apartments felt like a burden. Dealing with her desires and loneliness, her diminishing capacity, her frequent puzzling demands and constant dependence on me was nearly more than I could bear – especially given everything else going on in my life at that time. I would work five more years before retirement. Our son’s huge turnaround was still several years off, and my uncle’s decline became obvious and irreversible a year or two after Mom, his sister, moved into the same complex of apartments and care centers where he lived.

Watching the final season of Shameless and Mickey Milkovich’s grief-stricken reaction to the death of his violent, racist, and homophobic father made me think about my own troubled relationship with my mother. Daughters and mothers don’t always get along. They don’t always share clothes and spend afternoons together at the mall. My mother wasn’t a Milkovich, but her behavior towards me was erratic and careless. I spent most of my life trying to get away from her.

Now she’s eighty-six years old, I am her legal guardian, and the staff at the care facility where she lives tells me that this is the last stage of her long life. As she drops pounds and loses bits of her meager cognitive ability, it’s as if she’s been defanged, stripped of claws, bubble-wrapped, and sprinkled with glitter.

I am often on the verge of tears. All her rough edges have been sanded away. She teases me without barbs. When I kiss her she leans into me, warm and brittle. All the love I had packed away for the too-young mother who was too involved in raising herself to raise me has come out of hiding. Along with it comes sadness.

I am losing, have lost, and have found my mommy.
 

 

 

 

 

Forget-Me-Nots

Wouldn’t it be wise to try forgetting
or at least to set aside—“it’s over,”
knowing the body’s soaked into soil—
let go of regret while the modern casket
releases organic liquors from drains?
 
To embrace each day without regret,
let me forget being held when weeping—
I’ll remember instead this morning’s list
of notes to send, tasks out of doors
finding tiny blue florets I’ve set
 
in the garden bed after the dead.
Does this old sweater recall warm arms?
Maybe one summer morning I’ll call
all the photos to face the wall—turn a corner
toward a path ahead
 
that’s free of how love’s insistent blade
carved and reshaped my pathways, made
a topographic map in shades of blue
and green and neat inked labels. Stillness
gleams like shaded water—then pellets of rain,
the scent of pain, unmade again. Remain.

 

 

 

 

 


 


 

Memories Thin to Gauze

Each memory starts as a gash,
harsh sweeps
all aligned,
horizon battling horizon.
Blood over a subtle grid calls us to earth,
then to water, where jellyfish tentacles sway a veil
in phosphorescent oceans.
The artist gives no moment no end,
sends us on to white walls
interrupted by disintegration.
 
Each memory will thin to a gauze
of silvery needles
all aligned.
These robes are woven for mothers who weep, who wait
for the spirit who drifts, dissolves, leaves ghostly threads
as though casually strewn
on sidewalks,
to invite the footfall of shoeless wanderers
barely awakened by a dim consciousness
that souls were here, now forgotten,
gently trying to give us a message,
before we move on to walls of white.

 

 

 

 

 

Forgetting You

I do not want to be reminded of your death. Not the day or the week or the month. It is too painful. And yet, every day, there it is. You died on June 15, 2021. I remember in excruciating detail all of the events leading up to your death, every time you fell, each time you could not navigate to the toilet, all of the days in the hospital, each drive to hospice, especially the last one when they called and said there had been a change in your condition.

Is it wrong to want to forget? To envy those who cannot hold a thought longer than a minute. Perhaps less.

The grief books and therapists tell you to live in the present. Life is in the present, not the past and not in the future. The past is where regret lives and the future is the home of fear, so you must concentrate on now, this moment. That is where you will find happiness.

Instead, I swing between the past and the future and it is whiplash for my heart. I remember you driving oddly, getting weaker and shaky. Falling. I regret not seeing what was happening for what it was. You had been ill before and you recovered. You were not going to die, you would get better. We both worked so hard to make that happen. Only it didn’t.

And now these memories return as flashbacks that grab at me while I am thinking, how can I go on? Waves of grief stab at me while I sink to my knees in fear of a future alone.

So, I want to lose the ability to remember anything. I do not want to remember that you died. I do not want to think about you when I am alone. I want to forget everything.

Some people would say, what about the memories you have of the good times, of your love and the fun you had? But those memories are smoke. I cannot hold a memory or touch its arm for reassurance. A memory will not make me laugh or help me when I need advice. A memory cannot hold what is best about us: always you and me.

I long for the thing to happen, for my mind to get slippery and lose its laser focus on all that has been lost and all that will come. To let go of it all and just live with no memories and no fear. Then I will be free.

 

 

 

 

 

Being Human

I can’t know why
I phoned my husband
when I did, just in time
to hear him tell me,
“He is going now. He took his last breath.
I’ve got his hand in mine.”
 
I’d like to think I was responding to a frequency,
a singular vibration in the universe,
a nudge that said “call now,” that it was happening –
this sturdy patriarch
was leaving his warm body ,
now, as his bony hand was
clutched inside his son’s unbreakable love.
 
I listened to my husband
murmur in his father’s empty ear
how many on this earth would miss him,
how he was so important to the lives he touched.
 
Being human, who knows how much
his father felt or understood?
But being human, it is important to remember
how the earth summoned our attention
to this detail of his death,
this vacant air, a hole in the clouds,
or something silent in the sky,
one hand held, now floating in an other’s empty hand,
one disembodied lifetime, held close, among so many stars.

 

 

 

 

 

Memory Cracks

“Do you remember?”

I look at my husband. We’re sitting in the living room watching our favorite TV show.

“Do you remember where we met for the first time?” I ask him.

I can detect that look in his eyes. The one that only recently appeared. It masks, I know from my own experience, a certain sense of loss. Over the years, my memory transformed from an ally to an adversary. It seems as if a safe storage place has suddenly sprung holes where information, at times crucial, is leaking out.

It started with names, of people and places. A name that was there a minute ago is now lost. It is almost a physical sensation; this piece of information slips away too quickly for me to send a metaphorical hand to retrieve it. Five minutes, or an hour, perhaps a day, and here it is back as if it was never absent.

Only names, I think; tiny fragments of information. There are perhaps too many of them, occupying my mind like an overloaded computer. The comparison to my computer brightens my mood. I know how my personal computer sometimes fails to retrieve the information I saved in it. Perhaps all I need to do is defrag my mind, just as I do with my hard drive. After all, a defragmented hard drive is a happy one, say the computer geeks. Delete what is not needed, lose the second or third copy of the same file, and the movement of knowledge will become smoother.

Reorganizing files on a hard disk ensures that each file is appropriately stored on the disk, thereby improving computer performance and maximizing disk space. I wonder if this reorganization can work for the brain as well.

“We met in your office in the town of Arad in September of 1975.” My husband’s voice startles me from my deep thoughts.

“You really thought that I could forget such important information?” I can detect the teasing tone in his voice.

Upon retrieving the information, the entire file opens up. Forty-six years slide down the memory chute to reveal one special, unforgettable moment. A moment when two strangers met and formed a lasting connection. Computer defragmentation and rearranging particles of knowledge: They have nothing on the human brain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forgetting

Starts with—’ I say
mind groping for a word
afraid
of getting
forgetful
forget-full
mind empty but
no longer
regret-full
no longer
set on
remembering
re-member-ing
 
dis-membering
 
Forgetting is good
for getting
free of regret
 
And yet.
 
Ends with—
 
a word
 
a poem
 
a defiant act of
 
[not] forgetting

 

 

 

 

 

The Water Has Been a Long Time Coming

The water broke in my mother the day I was born. She no longer remembers that day, she no longer remembers placing me in the warm womb of the sea for the first time, she no longer remembers what she had for lunch today; she still does remember my name, the feel of my hand in hers, the knowledge that I am her firstborn, her only daughter, who was taught to stand on dry ground.
 
But now my mother, who no longer can share the memory of water breaking, who can no longer stay afloat in the water of her life, who has been cast adrift in her waning years, opens a fissure in my earth. I sit by her side holding her hand and cry for her memories blown away by the winds of age and genes, and for all those who struggle to hold on to who they were, are, and will be. I cry for myself, for my fear that when I look into my mother’s face softened by wrinkles and forgetfulness, I am looking into a mirror.
 
I cry not only for all that is lost but for what could be lost, for those memories I can still pull out of the drawers of my life; that I can take out one by one and slowly run my hands along their creases. When I sit by my mother’s side, holding her hand, a dam breaks inside me.

 

 

 

 

A Small Motel Mirror

Once in a small motel awaiting a visit
from a secret lover
I felt so futile
I wanted to get drunk or high
 
instead of sitting—waiting like lint
on the mattress—swallow and move
a little further into the fog of forgetting
but the booze ran out before the feeling
 
and I was left with my reflection
in the mirror over the dresser—a sad
woman with mascara blurring her eyes—
it’s anybody’s story sometimes
 
but for me it was the beginning
of self-hatred for all the motel rooms
wild nights of spilled drinks
and manic conversations about poor me
 
I picked up my fake fur coat
and without leaving a note left
the room and that part of my life
lying on the bed

 

 

 

 

I Have Forgotten

 

 

 

 

 

Forgetful … or Not

“So when are we going to the show?” my husband Steve asks as we dig into our grilled chicken and salad dinner one evening.

“Uh…honestly, I’m not sure. Sometime the week after Labor Day. I just don’t remember the exact date,” I respond, concentrating on my plate.

“Saturday night?”

“Definitely not Friday or Saturday. I didn’t want to deal with traffic. One night during the week. Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.”

“You don’t know? You don’t remember? Didn’t you exchange the tickets?” looking at me as if I was from another planet. His body language insinuated: How could you forget?

“I did. Called last week. I just don’t remember what day the new tickets are for, and forgot to add it to our calendar.”

“Oh … you better find out when we’re going or we won’t go. I don’t want to lose our money.”

”I know. I’ll call.”

End of conversation.

 

The next day I called the box office and sheepishly explained my dilemma to the woman on the other end of the line.

She burst into laughter.

“I won’t ask your age or how your memory is doing these days,” she says between fits of hilarity, and, after controlling herself, continues, “OK, give me your name and let me look up your account …”

A minute later she was back on the line, “I see you requested a ticket exchange.”

“Right, we couldn’t go when originally scheduled. Last minute grandsitting obligation.”

“I understand. I have your account here. I see the request for exchange, but we are holding for further instructions. There is no date noted for another show.”

“Oh, I guess that’s why I couldn’t remember when we were going. There was no date. I guess I called requesting an exchange and figured I’d call again and choose another day later. Can I exchange my tickets now?”

“Sure. When would you like to go?”

“OK, give me a minute, I’m bringing up my calendar.” A few seconds later the information appeared on my computer screen, “How about Wednesday or Thursday, September 6th or 7th?”

“We have good seats available for either night.”

“OK, let’s make it Wednesday.”

“Any preference for seating?”

“No, we haven’t been to that theater before.”

“Well, I have two seats row six center.”

“Sounds great …”

“You will receive an email confirmation. You can print your tickets.”

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome, goodbye.”

 

I immediately put the information on my calendar.
 

 

 

 

The Gardener

Withered fingers touch the bright green leaves.
“This needs some…”
Words retreat
and slither off
beyond her grasp.
Restless fingers
gently trace
and feel the buds
that hide between the leaves
and tenderly caress
silken blooms
upon their plastic stems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heroes


All Photoart by Paula Schultz, unless otherwise noted

 

Everyday Heroism: An Introduction

During the Covid lockdown, I became something of a movie buff. Not in theaters, of course. Frankly, I’m not sure what people miss about movie theaters. The huge flat screen in our living room plays just fine for anything that doesn’t feature entire armies of souped-up superheroes locked in armored battle with ten-foot robots against the backdrop of an immense green-screened land- or star-scape. We get to pause it when we need to, talk when we want, and eat something other than two-day-old popcorn. And we don’t have to listen to other people talk, chew, snore, or text.

 

You wouldn’t know it from the summer listings of most movie theaters in non-Covid times, but there are lots and lots of charming, thrilling, heartstopping, heartbreaking, and engrossing films that don’t include the obligatory scene of the protagonist fighting off six bad guys at a time with guns, bricks, bats, or whatever else is handy and lethal. Most of those non-avenger movies are not made in the United States. They are, however, made almost everywhere else. We started with French films, then branched out to China, Japan, Spain, Mexico, Germany, India, Iran. I especially recommend taking a look at some Iranian films. At the very least, the wrenching ordinariness of the characters, their fumbling attempts at kindness, their everyday embarrassments, the small mistakes that they regret— in other words, their absolute similarity to ourselves and the people we meet and know—cannot help but remind us of what we already know: that the people we demonize, the people we call our enemies, are not demons, not even bad at the core, they are just people; they are us.

The directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, and actors in these films gave me many blissfully immersive hours when I could forget about pandemics and viruses and Trumpists and the greed and selfishness of too many Americans. Each movie has a lot to teach, and you can benefit from those teachings without the aid of classes or primers. But the more you get into the world of film, the more you want to learn about it. So I must give a well-deserved shout-out to two of my gurus, Shelly Isaacs and Annette Insdorf, who have each brought to Zoom their very different but equally fascinating and illuminating film courses. Shelly brings his boundless energy, his encyclopedic knowledge of world film, and his ability to make us love every film we’ve seen, even those we were sure we didn’t, to an online weekly seminar sponsored by Florida International University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. And Annette, who teaches at Columbia, combines her remarkable erudition and her deep knowledge of the works and ideas of some of the world’s most illustrious filmmakers with her palpable love of film in her Sunday online course, courtesy of New York’s 92nd Street Y.

One of the many lessons of world film is that the most heroic actions are performed by quite everyday people. Nor is heroism at its starkest, or most terrifying, or even most, well, heroic, when it involves tossing about giant buildings, beating up suspicious (i.e., ethnic) strangers, or dodging bullets. The most heroic acts are those done quietly, repeatedly, sometimes dutifully, often unwillingly, usually at great personal cost, but always in aid of someone else.

For an example of true heroism in action, watch Sarbajaya in Satyajit Ray’s masterful Apu trilogy – a mother, not always a patient or demonstratively loving one, who perseveres, silently but stoically, for the sake of her children, through poverty, eviction, illness, and death. Or consider Valentine, whose youth and optimism and above all generosity of spirit, bring Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red to its stunningly embracing and life affirming conclusion. And then there is Elsa, the German war widow in Jean Renoir’s epic masterwork La Grande Illusion, whose kindness to two French soldiers, escapees from a German prisoner-of-war camp, is enough to close the gap between enemy nations. And one more, from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s brilliant and disturbing A Separation. Termeh, the shy and book-loving daughter of a divorcing couple, chooses to remain with her father, not because she loves him more or even because she believes he will care for her better than her mother, but because, and this is heartbreaking (she is only a child), she understands that he is the more fragile of the couple; he needs her more. In the midst of this brilliant deconstruction of the mess that class, religious, and gender differences cause grownups to create for themselves and each other, she is a remarkably still and centered beacon of love and reason.

The contributors to this issue’s Short Takes understand, much like the directors of these glorious films, that heroism consists of the small, unselfish, sacrificial acts of the people we hold most dear. They write about mothers and grandmothers, nurses and cab drivers. I have learned from their stories, just as I am learning from the films of the world’s great directors, to appreciate the heroic in the everyday.

 

 

 

We Are Out of Tea

Six paper bags lined up like soldiers on my stoop.
Me, peering out, a timid ghost behind the curtain,
 
waiting for the brave essential worker to remove
herself from my orbit, lest our spittle slay us.
 
I step forward and loop the sack handles over my wrists
to haul the booty inside my isolation chamber,
 
formerly known as my house. Spinach, almond milk,
havarti, eggs, hibiscus tea, carrots, whole grain bread,
 
and more – funny how a grocery delivery seems like
Christmas morning. I, wife of a man with three
 
pre-existing conditions, telepathically thank the shopper
and double her tip on the app. The least I can do.
 
The least I can do. That’s the rub. The least is the most
I can do, coward of necessity, hiding behind heroes
 
daily risking themselves for my benefit and others’.
I used to volunteer at the shelter. I used to visit friends,
 
help care for my 83-year-old mother. Now, I hole up,
asking people with fewer resources to drink my cup of risk.

 
 

 

 

March 2020

Both my sons are in the FDNY – one is a paramedic, the other is a firefighter. The paramedic tested positive for the virus. He’s at his apartment on Staten Island assuring us that it’s a mild case. On day six of his quarantine, his birthday, we drove there to leave a package of goodies on his stoop: Tylenol, tea bags, Vitamin C, bagels, a funny card, a Colin Quinn book. We waved at him, masked, from our car.

My younger son just wrapped up training at the Fire Academy. Without a graduation, he was assigned to an engine company in Queens. On his second tour, he went to five different homes resulting in five dead bodies – all from this virus. When he comes home, he puts his work clothes in the laundry, takes a shower, and calls up to us from the basement that he’s home. We haven’t hugged him or gotten within six feet of him since late March.

I have a rainbow on my door because someone wrote that it’s a great sign of hope and that little kids will like seeing it. I want little kids to see my door and like it. Someone sent me a post about how Pope Francis suggested a white cloth be tied around doorknobs to signify a prayerful counterattack against having the virus enter my house. I did it immediately, even though my husband rolled his eyes and wondered aloud if I thought we were living in the fourteenth century. Aren’t we, I wondered.

Are my kids heroes? No more than the guy who delivers my mail every day. Or the UPS driver who almost daily makes his deliveries at 7PM, the same time my neighbors and I are out on our front porches banging pots, clapping, hooting, and hollering loud THANK YOUs to all the heroes, near and far, in this time of united concern. Once, he held his phone out so his wife could hear the racket we were making. He had a big smile on his face, and said his wife was grateful to us.

My sons will tell you they are just “doing their jobs.” My nurse friends will say the same. So will the workers at Stop & Shop, the restaurant owners adapting their menus for deliveries instead of in-person dining, the plumbers masking up to come fix a leak in your house. Essential life goes on. Daily acts of solid altruism and necessity are the precursors to heroics. The capacity to be heroic may be built into our DNA. The practice of helping others strengthens our altruistic impulses – it feels good to do good. We don’t have to look far and wide for heroes.

 

 

 

My Father’s Hands

My father’s hands,
weathered, callused, scarred,
were large,
the fingers thick,
one stumped and poorly stitched.
 
Too young, those hands put books aside
(a widowed mother, farm, two younger boys)
to hold the plow,
the ax and awl,
the hammer, spade, and plane,
 
to till the land,
fell trees,
build houses,
bridges,
ships,
 
so that my hands might hold a stronger tool,
        a parchment,
rolled and tied in narrow gold.
 
“My dream,” he whispered once
(such men do not speak aloud of fantasies)
“was to be a surgeon.”

 
 

 

 

The fine line between heroes and villains

I stepped into my garden’s sunshine and a cacophony of feathered outrage. For a moment the sheer beauty of the sparrow hawk stole my breath. It was on the grass, close to the circular patio still bare of summer chairs. Then the rest of the scene came into focus.

A desperate shrieking was coming from a terrified young bird pinned to the ground by the hawk’s talons. Two blackbirds, presumably the parents of the captured fledgling, were screeching a strident protest. The local jackdaws were cawing the corvid equivalent of ‘fight, fight!’ like a pack of playground bullies.

My maternal instinct kicked in. I ran towards the hawk. My voice joined the discordant vocal melee.

“Let it go!” I shouted. “Let it go!”

The sparrow hawk froze with indecision. Then it took to the wing, the youngster in its grip screaming and twisting as it was carried into the air. The parents morphed into streamlined missiles, firing themselves at the predator. A lone jackdaw flashed across the garden like a paparazzi photographer darting in for the close-up shot.

Suddenly the fledging was free. It plummeted into a thick clump of Michaelmas daisies.

The hawk and the blackbirds vanished into the greenery behind the fence. The jackdaws melted away, pretending nothing of interest had occurred.

Shocked by the sudden silence and the utter stillness of the garden, I went indoors. From my kitchen window I had a panoramic view.

“Come back,” I whispered, willing the blackbirds to return for their youngster. Nothing moved. A bubble of inertia gripped the garden.

Impatience got the better of me. Was the youngster injured? Or even dead from the shock? I headed outside again, and carefully parted the fresh green leaves of the daisies. I caught a glimpse of movement – a beady eye and the pale yellow of a gaping beak. It was alive! To prove the point, it made a run for it and immediately it was out in the open and took flight. My heart soared in joyful unity; there was no sign of injured wings as it headed for a nearby fir tree.

I headed back indoors, praying the family would reunite. Moments later I told the tale to my husband: “I was going to say I was a hero, saving the little one.” I sighed. “But I guess the sparrow hawk would have a very different opinion. I robbed him of a meal.”

My husband nodded sagely. “Hero or villain – how often does that depend on a point of view?”

 

 

 

Silver Star, Purple Heart

        for Bertram Harvey Rutan

 
 

My friend was blown up at Iwo Jima,
you told me, 92, gripping your walker.
Right next to me, his back
was blown away, I could see his lungs,
I could have been killed.
 
You never talked about this the years
I was growing up. But when I was nine
you had a nervous breakdown
and wouldn’t get out of bed.
For months we drove every Saturday
from Palmer to Anchorage so you could
see a doctor.
 
There’s a scar at the corner of your jaw
where the bullet passed through. You think
it causes your headaches and stiff neck.
When my sister visits, she says
you cry out in the night. You say
you can’t shake the loss of your friend.
You say you couldn’t tell his family
the truth.
 
You were twenty-one, a Marine on a ship
with your buddies, gliding toward
a deadly island
in the dark night sea
waves rising and falling.
Silently you slid into the water.
 
They asked for a volunteer
someone to walk in front of the tank
on enemy ground. You’d learned
to jump out of airplanes.
You jumped in front,
leading the way.
 
Some of your friends lived, came home.
Some of your friends died, never left.
Every one of you lost your self
one way or another,
winning the war.

 
 


War by Elisabeth De Nitto

 

 

My Homegrown Hero

“I’m quitting, Ma,” she said over the phone.

Last thing I expected to hear.

She loved the hospital she worked in. And the people she worked with. And they loved her.

Her life hadn’t been easy. Took her years to get her Certified Nursing Assistant certificate. She was finally coasting.

“Did you get fired?” I asked suspiciously.

“No!” She laughed. “And they don’t want me to leave either. So there!”

“Got a better offer?” I was hopeful.

“I think so.” She was thoughtful. “I’ve been there a long time now. I want to do more.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m going to be a traveling nurse.”

“Travelling to where?”

“To wherever COVID is worst at the time. Wherever the local hospitals don’t have enough staff to handle the incoming. To assist in the ICUs, with the ventilators, with anything they’re short-staffed on.”

And just like that, I split in two. One-half of me was so proud of her, I could hardly wait to boast to my friends. My other half was screaming to keep her as far from COVID as possible. And here she was, going into the Navy Seals’ equivalent of nursing assignments.

Eventually, my voice returned.

“Like, worst where?” I stuttered.

“My first contract is for three months in North Dakota. I leave in two weeks.”

Funny, I’d just heard about North Dakota on the news. They were dropping like flies there. And three months meant she’d miss Christmas at home with Jerome.

“Jill…” I croaked.

“I know,” she interrupted. “But they put out a call for help. And I can do so much more there.”

“What about Jerome…?” I started to stack up my arguments.

“He’ll drive up for holiday weekends,” she countered. It was a two-day drive from their home to North Dakota and back, but Jerome hadn’t flinched.

He made the drive three times while she was there. They didn’t even spend Christmas Day together. Jill had volunteered to cover when the hospital couldn’t get anybody else. But the week they’d had together did include Christmas Eve. He left the next morning, as she left for work.

By the time her contract ended, North Dakota had quieted down, and the numbers were rising fast in Florida, thanks to spring break. Florida was mere hours instead of days from where she lived. She signed up right away, more because of all the people she could help immediately than the proximity to her house.

I was so afraid for her. I wanted her back at her quiet old hospital. But I could see that that would be a long time in coming. For now, for as far into the future as she could, she would be plunging into the belly of the beast, wherever the beast was, whenever it appeared.

Somehow, safe stay-at-home that I am, I had raised a real-live hero.

 


Violin Sonata No. 7 in A Major, K. 12 (version for flute and keyboard) : I. Andante
Carol Wincenc, Flute
Gena Raps, Piano

 

 

Ferlinghetti Paints Carla Kandinsky

Carla Kandinsky called
to tell me Lawrence Ferlinghetti died.
I already knew.
Jack Foley had already sent
          out an email.
Carla said, “I can’t believe
          Ferlinghetti was 101 years old!
You know I used to model
          for him at his studio.
He painted a picture of me nude
          with a vacuum cleaner,
called it
Emily Dickinson Vacuuming!”
 
I laughed.
“You’re a lot more voluptuous
          than Emily Dickinson was
if my Dickinson genes
          are any testimony.
I’m about as flat-chested
          as you can get and could
probably fit into Emily Dickinson’s
          tiny white housedress!”
 
She laughed.
And repeated again,
“I still can’t believe he was 101!”
          “Mr. Blue Eyes,” I said.
“I remember when he was 99!
He was going to be 102 in March.”
“There’s vigil tonight at City Lights,”
          she said, but I know
neither of us will be there.
          Rest in peace, dear poet.
 
Later, I remember
          Christopher Felver’s
photographic book
          of Ferlinghetti portraits—
And there’s Carla
          in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s studio
at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, 1995.
She’s sitting in an easy chair
          covered with a Japanese cloth
straw hat on her head
           light drape around her shoulders
revealing voluptuous, drooping breasts
           and stomach curves.
She looks, well, she looks bored
           or maybe just contemplative
thinking about her next poem
           for she is, after all, a poet,
or maybe about her next cleaning job
           for she is, after all, a house cleaner too
or about the next apple pie she will bake
           for her lover.
 
Lawrence’s back is to us
           at his easel
as he paints his model
           in her “relaxed” position—
One arm flung over the back of her chair
           one leg raised, supported by the arm rest.
I don’t think his portrait
           of Carla is a very good resemblance
but there is something
           about the way he captures
                     the tilt of her head
giving her that regal look
           of a sought-after artist’s model
for she has, after all, been painted
           by all the Bay Area greats.
Maybe by now
           Carla would just like
to get out of her “relaxed” position
           and stretch
for isn’t that a timer
           sitting at her feet
to declare her break?
 
On the page opposite
           Lawrence painting Carla
is a face-on portrait of Ferlinghetti
           at the De Young Museum, 1996,
wryly pinching his lapel button,
           FUCK ART
           LET’S DANCE

 

 

 

My hero, my grandma

My grandma emigrated to the U.S. from Hungary around the turn of the 20th century. Number six of seven children. Her mother and youngest sibling died during childbirth. But her father married a “girl” half his age, and together they had seven more children.

Illiterate and plagued with life-threatening illnesses, my grandmother became my rock.
Old country tough.

We lived close to each other in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, until my family moved to Canarsie. A few years later she moved across the street.

My high school years were hell.

After spinal fusion surgery and being in a body cast flat on my back for six months, the world I once knew went away. Or rather, I went away. I turned into an overweight, chain-smoking, tough-looking adolescent who didn’t give a damn about school. I dressed in tight sweater blouses and stretch pants, and wore a black leather jacket. My teased hair and bright red lipstick completed my trampy appearance. I was crying out to be noticed. To be visible. No one seemed to hear or see me. Except Grandma.

My hero, my grandma. Every night, I’d visit her to do homework. She’d serve me pure sugar cookies she received from the welfare line as I sat on the sofa bed trying to make sense of my assignments. She’d sit on a hard chair watching TV with the sound off so I could concentrate. A safe haven, unlike the tumult and dysfunction in my home.

Then, we’d play gin rummy. I could see her hand in her glasses and kept showing her how to hold the cards so I wouldn’t see the reflection. She didn’t care. I tried not to look but I couldn’t help it. I’d usually win. She liked it when I won. It’s as if she did it on purpose.

My grandma nursed me back to life. Just by being her.

In her broken English, she instructed me to do well in school, practice the piano, observe the Jewish Sabbath, and wear a kerchief to keep my ears warm.

One evening, the snow came down hard. I thought I could skip a visit.

But a force came over me and I ran across the street without a jacket. Or kerchief.

The smell of gas nearly knocked me out.

“Grandma,” I shrieked. Apparently, she had left the burner on, and having no sense of smell, could not detect a thing.

I turned the gas off and opened all the windows even though it was freezing. I embraced her round body in relief.

“Don’t cry, Ellen Coo,” she said. “Where is your kerchief?”

Years later when I told my brother this story, he told me I saved her life. I corrected him. “No, she saved mine.”
 

 

 

It’s Hard to Reason with the Dead

My maiden aunt, for instance. As the century turned, not this one, the last, whether by choice or default, she was the daughter who didn’t marry, the one who took care of Mother. It was the Irish way. Now she wants to be remembered. Of course, you’re remembered, I remember you, I tell her. You used to take the bus every Tuesday to visit with my mother. And share a cuppa tea, family woes, gifts of soap and toothbrushes, and goodbye hugs before my dad got home. Not good enough, she says, you’re the last one standing and you’re on your way out. That’s not fair, I tell her. Besides, what could I say? Aren’t I the keeper of family secrets, our official eulogist? And, you already showed up in one of my poems. Yeah, as a “peculiar aunt?” You know better than that. Oh, you’re right. I’d forgotten. And the “soul-sucking end.” That the best you can do? I even died on your birthday. Wasn’t that worth something? I guess I do owe you an apology, but it was only a poem. I was universalizing. And particularizing. Which leaves me worse off than before, she says. I remember the bus trips from church you used to take with your tall, spindly friend, to shrines in Canada, D.C. That’s something, at least, she says. And there’s that picture of you leaning against Uncle Pete’s Packard. You must have been 22. Elbows on the sleek hood, elegant in your flowered dress, looking like you’re ready to take on the town. Now we’re getting somewhere, she says.

May you rest in peace, dear Marnie.
 
 

 

 

Kathleen

During my one pregnancy, a good friend was there for me – not the father (well, there were two possible fathers), and not my sisters (they were worried and, based on my track record for coping with life, not encouraging). An acquaintance quipped, “This is supposed to happen when you’re sixteen, not thirty-five.” He meant to be funny, but I felt ashamed, lonely, afraid.

But Kathleen, when I told her my news, was happy, and helpful. She was the one who told me I would be a wonderful mother. She (who had been my drinking buddy) was supportive of my newfound sobriety.

It was sort of funny. She brought one can of beer when she came over, thinking we could each drink just half. I had to tell her that maybe she could do that, but for me half a beer was just temptation, torture really, that I would crave more and find a way to get it. When she understood that, she started offering juice.

She took me to the thrift store to find long shirts that would work as maternity tops. She gave me the baby clothes her three children had worn, lovingly washed and ironed.

She was the one who encouraged me to breastfeed. At first it seemed weird and unnatural. I didn’t know if I could go through with putting a little human to my nipples for milk. I didn’t understand until I took my newborn in my arms. It was tender and serene. I’m so glad Kathleen was insistent in suggesting it.

She also suggested bringing music to the delivery room with me. I didn’t do that, but I did have it ready when I came home with my baby: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” two of my favorites, and they were perfect for the occasion. I cried, releasing all the fear and tension of nine months, celebrating the new life – two new lives really, my daughter’s, and my own sober life.

Kathleen had cleaned my little two-bedroom trailer, not just the water that had broken and gushed all over the kitchen floor, but every tabletop and corner, making it welcoming. In the baby’s room were her little bed, the rocking chair, the rainbow mobile. In the living room were the flowers from my hospital room, so pretty.

My sisters came back again, and my daughter’s father, too (she has his eyes). Somehow a baby does that, makes miracles.

But it’s been forty years.  Kathleen moved away, and I’ve lost track of her.
 
 

 

 

my non-heroic, non-inspirational tale

my right leg
is much larger
than the left
 
in its white bandage
my body bent
forward and to the right
 
no more catcalls
only blank stares
stares that burn a hole in you
 
but not in me
i was diagnosed
with fibromyalgia
 
in middle age
although the symptoms
were apparent since childhood
 
during cancer
in 2015 and 2018
i prayed
 
first to live
then not to cut my genitals
then not to cut too much
 
then not to take everything
few wishes are granted
in this life
 
you say i am a hero an inspiration
the bravest person you know
i am none of these
 
just an ordinary person
who poops and pees
like everybody else
 
who has a colostomy
and a urostomy
into plastic bags that stink itch and leak
 
sometimes gas fills my
colostomy bag so that it looks
like a large balloon under
 
my clothes that
even my gargantuan tunics
and flare skirts can’t hide
 
i am tired
of hiding the facts
i have no bladder
 
no anus no rectum
no ovaries no uterus nor fallopian tubes
no vagina no vulva at all
 
the doctor
stretched my skin
and sewed me shut
 
i named my colostomy stoma
“my meat” (i am a vegan) and my other
stoma “plumdrop”
 
i thought of naming my scars
but thought better of it
too busy maybe
 
am i now the plus in LGBTQAIplus
if not also the B
yet I was an A student
 
i can’t scratch
my itchy peristomal skin
i can’t put back my clitoris
 
but i’m here to tell you
i just turned sixty and i’m
alive alive alive

 

 

 

Redefining Heroes

My father has always been my hero. As I grew up, I sought his advice about school, studied his professional demeanor, and even followed his footsteps into a career in higher education. His resumé boasted a thirty-year career in the Army and a fourteen-year career in higher education.

My mother didn’t have a resumé. Her one job had been Assistant Postmistress in her hometown, throughout WWII until she married my father at age 28. As an orphaned teenager she raised four siblings (one a newborn) while her older brother kept the family together, but you wouldn’t put that on a resumé even if you had one. When I was growing up, she was a wife and a mother. She didn’t have a career.

I didn’t look to my mother for advice about school or work (except about dress and manners). Don’t get me wrong: she was an outstanding mother who hosted childhood birthday parties replete with angel food cake (my favorite) and party favors for my friends, made velvet dresses in styles I chose for my junior high school winter dances, accompanied me on grad school interviews so that I could be dropped off without fretting over parking – and more.

My mother knew I loved her and that I was grateful for everything she did for me. But all that she did escaped me at the time. She served as a certified, uniformed Red Cross volunteer in hospitals; co-ran thrift shops at our Army posts; was “Room Mother” every year in my elementary school; co-led my Girl Scout troop; and taught Vacation Bible Schools – all while overseeing 16 moves of the household in 19 years, usually when my father was away. The list of unpaid deeds includes hosting events at the college where my father spent his civilian career, organizing Welcome Wagon activities for community newcomers, registering voters, and taking underprivileged children to the dentist.

It’s taken me a long time to realize that heroes come in various packages. They don’t always have resumés. In fact, there are people with impressive resumés who don’t tirelessly serve the public or practice compassionate citizenship or invest in the lives of children. My mother was definitely hero material. I wish I could tell her that.

 

 
 

Random Acts of Kindness

Frost on Window by Elsa Lichman

 
 

Introduction: Where Has All the Kindness Gone?

I had occasion recently to read about London during the Blitz, and was struck by its focus on the courage and kindness of ordinary Londoners during those frightening and unprecedented months. The article made hardly any mention of conflict or cowardice, small-mindedness, selfishness, or greed. Instead, its anecdotes were about people sharing their rations with their neighbors, helping the elderly or infirm into bomb shelters, even rescuing kittens from the rubble of bombed-out buildings. They were stories of people who at another time might disagree about almost everything, who might even look down on one another, but who, in the stress of those harrowing moments, responded by forgetting their differences in the larger cause of making sure as many as possible survived. They were tales of people whose appetite for hardship or danger had never before been put to the test, and who now acquitted themselves with quiet bravery. The word the British used to sum up their response to Hitler’s nightly raids was pluck – a word that, like the people it describes, is deceptively simple and self-effacing.

 

I have found few, if any, stories like that in press reports of the reactions of ordinary Americans to the coronavirus. Quite the opposite. Television news carries frightening scenes of mobs of gun-toting white men (and a few women) screaming that a mask will forever sully their individualism. These may be the same people caught on thousands of twitter feeds, mask-less, screaming and spreading fetid droplets of spittle on hapless Walmart clerks or Starbucks baristas. TV talking heads who pretend to white-coated medical respectability tell us we should let the elderly and the ill die horrid and lonely deaths on ventilators (provided the hospitals have any ventilators to spare for them) so the young and healthy can attain herd immunity. Politicians refuse financial support to the jobless; instead they insist that businesses re-open, because keeping the economy ticking and employment figures high is more important to them than protecting citizens.

It is possible that 1940s Londoners were kinder, more generous, more prone to think first about the other guy than are 2020s Americans. Also more courageous, with more fortitude; more willing to suffer a little in the hopes that their sacrifices would lead to a common good. In a word: pluckier. And that is why newspaper stories of World War II Londoners are so much more positive than the media reports of Americans facing (or not facing) the corona pandemic.

I prefer, however, to ascribe the difference to the press rather than to the people. I prefer to think that, during that frightening time when no one was safe from bombs falling randomly from the sky, people just preferred to read about the good in one another. And that, for some reason, today, with illness visiting itself in ways that seem equally random, the press has decided that it is far more interesting to catalogue the petty calumnies of cowards and bullies than to focus on somebody who does a generous or heroic act, someone who acts selflessly.

Oh, there were reports, at the start, of doctors and nurses pushed to and over the brink, working round the clock, night after night, without enough masks and gowns and gloves. But once those stories disappeared, nothing positive came to take their place.

I was sure, however, that, during the long months of this pandemic, many good and brave and generous deeds have been done – and are still being done – by ordinary people. And that our readers have witnessed them. We need to share those stories. We need to celebrate those people. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as a ratty bunch of selfish losers, because, unless we can get a better opinion of ourselves, we may gain back our health but we’ll never regain our self-respect. We need to see ourselves again as a nation made up mostly of people who are plucky in the face of adversity.

We at Persimmon Tree hoped that this issue’s Short Takes would help to set us on that course. We looked forward to an outpouring of essays and poetry about the manifold good works we and our neighbors have done and witnessed during these locked down months. That did not turn out to be the case. Most of the submissions were about the good Samaritan who stops to change a stranger’s tire on a lonely stretch of highway – definitely an act of kindness, but entirely unrelated to the coronavirus. Very few were about the pandemic. On the basis of this evidence, anecdotal though it is, I would say you can confidently expect help if your car breaks down, but don’t be so sure you’ll get it when the virus means you need your prescription picked up, your lawn mowed, or even just a friendly cup of coffee. And definitely don’t expect to see a lot of people honoring the workers who risk their lives during lockdown to repair our buildings or collect our garbage. Oh, but wait a minute. Those are exactly the topics of the few (but quite wonderful) essays and poems about Covid, and people’s responses to it, that we did receive. So, maybe all is not as dark as it seems.

 

 

 

 

Trash Day

The only person I know personally who has died of COVID-19 is my friend Dinah’s husband, William. And by personally I mean I met him exactly once, at a reading where Dinah and I were both participating. He had come to cheer her on and the sweetness between them was palpable. She called him Bunky. They had met as co-workers years ago and were just now contemplating retirement in far-away Belize, where they had been visiting right before they both got sick. Dinah recovered, but William did not, having underlying and complicating conditions such as heart disease and being African American.

Dinah is a member of my beloved Ladies of the Long Table, self-dubbed before I ever joined. A group of female writers I am deeply honored to sit with (currently remotely) nearly every Wednesday at lunch time and whose honest and heartbreakingly beautiful words worm into my soul over and over again and change me in ways I’m only starting to understand. Dinah has been AWOL for about a year, busy with other pursuits (like moving to Belize) and not in the head space needed for writing. We all knew/hoped she would eventually return, but now she is grieving and not quite yet ready to be among us.

But I missed her and worried about her and I am a hanger-on-er of the first order. I don’t like that many people over the age of three, so if you happen to make the cut, it is a life sentence.

I was driving right by Dinah’s house (sort of) on my way up north last Monday so I asked if I could bring coffee and muffins and have a chat in the yard, 6 feet apart. She responded sweetly but noncommittally and I took it she wasn’t quite ready for company. But I felt compelled to do something, she being on my very short People I Care About list. So I cut a bunch of daisies from my overflowing garden and two slabs of the very delicious almond apricot cake with rosemary I had just made (hey-it’s not my recipe so I can brag on it all day long – this stuff is KILLER!) and headed for her place to make a stealth drop on her porch.

I think I had a couple fillings fall out on her unpaved washboard street (I use that term loosely). Geesh! How do people live out in the sticks like that in bad weather? It was tough enough making the drive on a gorgeous summer day! But anyway, I got there, parked on the street, slipped up the driveway on quiet feet to not disturb Dinah or her dogs, made my drop and headed back to my car. And that’s when I saw it. The note.

It was trash day in Oxford and Dinah had put out her two barrels for pick up. Carefully taped to each one was a handwritten note that said:

“In the words of Thomas Edison:

‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.’ Please don’t give up! Thank you for coming to work today. You are deeply appreciated.”

Here is what gobsmacked me about that.

  1. I have never thought for a moment of leaving the trash collectors an encouraging note. Not now, not earlier, NE-VER.
  2. This woman just lost her beloved husband and her dream for a blissful retirement together. Is she sitting around feeling sorry for herself? Maybe, but if so she is simultaneously reaching out to uplift others and a category of others universally ignored and taken for granted.
  3. I lost my own husband 5 years ago and am still mad as hell about it. After unfriending God on Facebook I have now decided he can come to Thanksgiving dinner but can’t be seated near me. In other words, I am stuck in a way my friend seems not to be, despite a hurt that is so very much fresher. As so often happens with these lady writers I love, there is a lesson to be learned here and behavioral changes to consider.

I guess I’ll start with meeting the grocery clerks’ eyes and acting like they are actual humans instead of robots with leprosy. Next, I’m going to write some notes to 2020 graduates I know who got robbed of so many things due to Covid. And since the pen will already be in my hand, maybe I could scrawl a little Thank You to the trash guys. Couldn’t hurt and in some way maybe it would honor William and the huge-hearted widow he left behind.

 

 

 

Praise

the friend who can still see to thread a needle
 
the form-filler who keeps us on the straight and narrow
 
the plumber who unblocks our hope
 
the tired mother doing time in the rainy playground
 
the Avon lady who delivers magic oils to the lonely
 
Yusif who saves the woodlice in the playground
 
Lily who asks me if I’m going to die soon and gives me her crisps
 
the driver who waves out cars waiting in side roads
 
the limping woman who shepherds a stray dog to safety
 
the postman who sprints singing up the steps
 
Dawn who saves the ducklings hatched on the high street
 
Rob who won’t fell the tree till the robins have fledged
 
Adam who hands me a rose for no particular reason
 
the careworker who strokes my sister’s hair
 
the shrugging teenager who counts out my change
 
the computer expert who will explain slowly
 
whoever mops up sick
leaves us windfall apples
finds our car keys
finds our dog
finds time
 
Praise to all kind people who don’t expect to be thanked

 

 

 

A Mitzvah

She was seated a few feet from me; her ankles crossed, her hands folded neatly in her lap on top of her handbag, her hair an astonishing silver glow, her head lowered. She appeared to be dozing.

They were standing at the pharmacy consulting window having a lengthy discussion with a pharmacist … two twenty-somethings … apparently brother and sister. It was hard not to hear the conversation.

As the siblings became more agitated, the older woman got up and approached the three who were so engrossed in their conversation they didn’t even notice her.

“What seems to be the problem?” she asked. They looked at her, startled by the intrusion. The brother and sister looked at each other quizzically.

The sister spoke. “The doctor has ordered these prescriptions for our mother, but we can’t afford all of them. We asked the pharmacist to help us decide which would be the least harmful for Mom not to take.”

“I tried to explain to them I am not a doctor and can’t make that judgment,” the pharmacist explained to the woman.

“I see.” she said. “How much do the drugs cost?”

“$63.”

At that point the brother spoke up. “We only have $50.”

The silver-haired woman reached into her handbag, pulled out her wallet and handed the pharmacist three twenty-dollar bills and a five. “Give these kids the prescriptions for their mother.”

The young man tried to give the $50 to the woman as he said “Thank you.”

“Save your money for something else your mother may need.”

“But we don’t know you. How can we repay you?” the sister objected.

“Someday you will see someone in trouble. Help them out. That will repay me.” the woman responded as she turned, went back to her seat and resumed waiting for her name to be called so she could get her prescription.

I watched as the young couple left the pharmacy smiling and shaking their heads in wonder and delight. I saw the silver-haired woman sitting with the slightest smile on her face. I looked at the pharmacist who was still standing at the consulting window grinning.

This is a day to remember I thought to myself. At least five people have had their spirits lifted and their faith in humanity restored.

It was a mitzvah.

 

 

 

End of Mars Retrograde in Aries

In the stale hospital hall, a doctor
sees my confused mother and walks
 
her to the right door. Kathleen pulls over
in traffic to carry the dog’s body we found
 
in the street, to the roadside, bowing
her head as she brushes fur from its eyes
 
and lays him on the grass. My own
dog sits up to watch after I answer
 
a phone call, then storms to the couch
to lean against my trembling ribs. Paula
 
asks if there is anything she can do,
while the others only want to know
 
who tested positive. Every other week
Danica bakes a cherry pie for a caregiver.
 
Mimi secretly pays the rent for a friend
in recovery. My sponsor in Al-Anon asks
 
the silence, each morning, how she can
be of service. Mike, not knowing me,
 
Just that I had nowhere to live, offers his
empty apartment with its leather couch.
 
My sons deliver Christmas presents
to families who live in the dry riverbed.
 
And the nurse, unaware I’m watching, tucks
the blanket carefully around my mother.

 
 

 

 

Singing Acts of Kindness

 
 

 

 

Without a Word

I’m high risk, say the epidemiologists. Because I’m over 60. So I food-shop at dawn now, when only we high-riskers are allowed in the stores. We all wear masks. I have a lot of faith in masks. And staying home. And FaceTime.

So I was sure that, not only would I never succumb to COVID-19, I’d never even need to get tested.

Then suddenly, on the news: “If you shopped at (a certain local health food store) between July 1st and July 5th, go get tested immediately!” One of their employees had tested positive.

And wouldn’t you know? I’d shopped there on the 3rd. Two lousy probiotics. In and out, six minutes tops. That’s how I shop – ninja-fast. The only person I saw was the cashier. And she was barricaded behind Plexiglas walls.

But there’s no reasoning with a pandemic. I got tested at my doctor’s office. Now I had to isolate and wait for the results. I felt like a grounded teenager, stuck in my room. And I knew the test would come back negative.

What worried me much more was that I was down to my last two migraine pills. Okay, it’s not life or death, but when you’re a migraineur, yes, it is life or death. Ever have a migraine? Sixteen hours of kill me now. These pills really work for me. I carry them with me, even when I just go to check the mailbox.

So why had I left the prescription at my old pharmacy when I moved? I liked the drive out there. Friendly staff. Very knowledgeable and helpful. I called them immediately and credit-carded a refill. But I was no longer in their delivery zone.

Why didn’t I refill it sooner? I thought I had all the time in the world.

Meanwhile, word got out about where I’d shopped on that fateful day. My friends called to sympathize, and we laughed at the irony of possibly getting the plague at a health food store.

But no migraine pills? Not funny. They’re my Dumbo’s feathers. If I ran out before I got the test results, before I could go pick up my refill, my fear alone could trigger a cascade.

Two days later, there was a package at my front door. It was from the pharmacy, and attached to it was a note from one of my friends. I must have babbled my terror of being without pills to her when we’d FaceTimed. She had driven forty minutes to my pharmacy, and explained the situation to them. And they, in turn, had entrusted her with my prescription. Then she’d driven an additional twenty-five minutes to bring it to me. It would take her another hour to get home.

I sat on my doorstep, hugging the bag, overcome with relief and gratitude.

The test came back negative.

 

 

 

Before the V Day

Your once robust face has slowly changed
to a dark coconut husk shape;
your teeth look tainted and broad
you do not have the energy to walk
you lie all day and I feed you with semi-solids
your face slumps after every feed
you say you are frightened
of me because I ask you to eat
it takes ten minutes for me
to put you into a wheelchair
you are on a milk and protein diet, so
I stop giving you your insulin shots
I know your sugar level will spiral up
and your temperature will rise
septicemia will set in slowly.
 
I will give you three tablespoons of milk
and when the third spoonful does not go in
I will give you up, release you from the bonds of love
and set you free, soon before the V day arrives.

 

 

 

Our Morning Ritual

The men outside my window are replacing cracked bricks in the building I live in. It is the pandemic, so we are sentenced to stay home all day, even while they are doing this. I watch them drill the bricks, the noise so loud I have to keep my Bose headphones on. A couple of days ago three men scaled up three floors, and onto my terrace. I asked if they’d like coffee or tea, but they shook their heads, surprised.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Their eyes lit up. Two asked for coffee, one for tea.

“Milk and sugar? Yes?”

They nodded, smiles stretched ear to ear.

When I came out to the patio with my large ceramic mugs, their smiles vanished and they shook their heads.

The man with an orange helmet said, “Paper cup, no?”

I shook my head. “Why paper cup? Don’t worry if it breaks, it’s okay. They’re old.”

Their smiles of gratitude reminded me of my mother who was an octopus. Compassionate as she was, she used her six children’s limbs as if they were hers. She’d ask my brother to take Aunty Alice to the bus stop; she’d make tea and ask me to serve biscuits on a pretty blue plate to the gardener, or to the dhobi who picks up the laundry. If I grumbled or rolled my eyes, she’d say, “Lalita what is wrong with you? You can’t stop to serve Aunty Mary?” Or Aunty so-and-so. The word wrong sounded like a gong. I brought that blue plate with me to America.

As I serve these men every morning – on the patio, out of doors, socially distanced – I see my mother peeping through the clouds and smiling down at us on my terrace. I stop and watch the leaves turn orange, yellow, green – a promise of better times to come in this sad world of ours.

 

 

 

Alpha Bird

The hummingbird feeder is crowded. Four red-plumed birds,
iridescent feathers, long thin beaks plunge into feeder holes,
reminiscent of the fake birds placed on water glass rims,
dipping up and down, thirst-crazed creatures, never sated.
 
There was harmony among the birds, until Alpha bird appeared
clacking his beak, clik-a, clik-a, clik-a,
wings whirring wildly, in attack mode
driving them all away.
 
From the other side of the window,
I look at him, furious with his tyranny.
I try to distract him, banging on the window,
blowing a shrill, high-pitched whistle.
 
Nothing works.
 
I consult a bird specialist. The bird man says
Alpha bird may be a female, injured, unable to feed properly,
who has become ferocious,
and territorial to save herself.
 
The next day I stare at Alpha bird. She looks back, cocks her head.
Perhaps only one eye can see me. I lean close.
Is one tiny toe missing?
One wing a little bent?
 
I fill the humming bird feeder to capacity.
She flits back and forth, red neck feathers flashing
watching me.
I smile at her.
 
I spin my prayer wheel. I offer a benediction.
And an apology,
to a bird of courage,
one that I now admire.

 

 

 

The New Normal

We open our motel at the beginning of June. It is three weeks later than our usual opening time, which is usually just after the frost is gone and before the official Memorial Day start of the season.

When we drive into the parking lot loaded with our stuff, I am taken aback by the height of the grass growing on the front lawn. Never in the fourteen years we operated the motel has it been left to grow wild like that. I reflect on an image that amuses me from time to time, of the forest crawling from the back, trying to take over the land that over sixty years ago was cleared for the motel.

We unload everything and open the front door with caution and some apprehension. Every year when we return after the seven months of being away, we encounter unexpected surprises. Usually, we find water leaks and busted pipes, and on occasion wild animals who decided to become guests for the winter. Like the family of raccoons, a mom and six babies, who moved into the ceiling of our bedroom one winter.

Once we assess the damages in our residence, open the windows, and take the tarps off beds and furniture, the sense of being back home is somewhat established. We can start with the tedious task of opening the guest rooms and getting them cleaned and ready.

But this year, we have four acres of overgrown grass almost up to my knees, already wearing a crown of seed heads. There’s no one in town – we are situated on the main road – who did not witness this stage of neglect. Everywhere we go people nod their heads in disapproval. “We thought you left never to come back,” is their unspoken message.

My job is to mow the lawn, so before doing anything, I fire up the mower and go to work. For hours I go back and forth on the overgrown grass. The first cut has to be high so as not to choke the machine. Then a second cut, somewhat deeper, and still when I inspect the results at the end of the day, I am amazed at how little progress I made.

The next morning, I wake to the noise of people talking and the unmistakable zoom of weed whackers. I look outside and see three men working on our lawn. Quickly I dress and go outside to discover Adam, our part-time housekeeper’s husband, and two of his buddies. The three of them are working on the lawn. Before noon everything is done.

The new normal, or perhaps just neighbors helping neighbors who go through tough times created by circumstances out of their control. The way it always was and the way it should be.

 

Justice

Introduction: What is Justice

Pin collage by Julia C. Spring
I have been a lawyer most of my adult life, which means I no longer have much of an idea what is meant by that slippery and overly general word “justice.” The help I’ve gotten on that from my own profession is confusing and conflicting at best.

 

Once upon a time, one of the justices of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was a tiny little old round-headed bald guy named Timbers. No, really. Timbers was his name. William H. Timbers. Justice Timbers did little that was memorable, unless you count his long, long, long tenure on the court as an achievement in itself. By the time he’d become that tiny little old round-headed bald guy – so tiny, in fact, that counsel, standing at the lectern, looking up at the judges ranged above them, could see nothing of Justice Timbers but that tiny little old round bald head, poking up over the bench – Justice Timbers was known mostly for his irascibility. He was particularly harsh on lawyers who made the mistake of trying to slip a little feeling into their legal arguments. Like that memorable day when a very young lawyer, unschooled in Justice Timbers’s preferences, dared to ask the court to give his client justice. “We don’t do justice in this court,” Timbers’s tiny round bald head grumbled. “We do law.”

Justice Timbers is not the only person to dislike the very concept of justice. The most renowned faux lawyer to badmouth justice was Portia, who famously commented at an infamously truncated show trial that mercy, dripping through its metaphorical strainer, is much to be preferred. However, Portia herself turned out to be unreliable as a moralist. She was, after all, arguing on behalf of a privileged member of the bigoted dominant class of Venice against the poor merchant whose only crime was to worry too much about his daughter. And, oh yeah, to be a member of a persecuted minority.

And that’s the problem justice always has. Those with power and privilege tend not to like it as much as the folks without. Even the good guys in the dominant class don’t easily understand the need for it. I am reminded of a panel many years ago when two stalwarts of the left – Peter Gabel and Patricia Williams – locked horns. Both were professors at lefty law schools. Both believed absolutely and without reserve in the duty of all lawyers to use their legal training in the service of human needs, social justice, and equality. Both were thoughtful, kind, and generous people.

Peter – the opposite of Justice Timbers in all things except the accidents of gender, class, and race – was on the panel to argue that formal court trials should be replaced with more informal mediation between the parties, on the grounds that legal rulings, with their emphasis on the Law, on Rights, on Justice, succeed only at dividing people, whereas mediation, with its twin goals of conciliation and compromise, promote harmony and bring people together.

He did not understand why he was unable to convince his colleague Pat Williams, an equally liberal, thoughtful, and generous person – who happened to be Black and a woman. She continued, despite his best arguments, to argue in favor of formal trials. Women, working class people, Blacks will always be on the short end when it’s a mediation, she might patiently have explained to him, because the privileged don’t give up their privileges just because you ask nicely, or even because you explain, totally convincingly, why they should. They give them up only when you make them. And the only way to make them is to go to trial, remind the court of the rights enumerated in the Constitution, and insist on justice.

I might add, as recent events have suggested, that there are two ways, in addition to lawsuits, to get justice. One is to protest. The other is to vote. And both of those prove Professor Williams’ point: the guys with privilege don’t give up their privileges just because you ask. Women, working-class people, Blacks get justice only by fighting for it.

So: Protest. Vote. And, if that fails, sue.

 

 

 

 

Insatiable

Greed,
enshrined
economic dogma,
devours   depletes   destroys
our unreturning reality.

 

 

 

Propositions

I snicker at his footwear and how his ankles are exposed, this young man in the lobby with his missionary tracts. He’s being ignored. Except by me and I don’t know why I bother.

He’s clean-shaven and backward, I think – then there’s a leap in my thoughts. If he were my boyfriend, that might give my mamma back some of the hope my ‘unsuitable hook-ups’ have taken away. Hope might be the difference for her. The doctors don’t tell you that, but everyone knows.

I go over, look him in the eye and say I’m ready to accept Jesus into my life. He’s okay in looks but with those pimples, it’s good that he’s religious. Yes. He’s got one foot in heaven. Just like Mamma.

Nathan is his name, he tells me, as if he can think of nothing else to say. He looks around. I know they work in teams during these salvation sweeps, but no one is there for Nathan. He’s startled, like I’ve propositioned him to do something unseemly. This is too easy. I smile as I look him in the eye.

“You must meet Mamma. This day, our story … her prayers are answered.” His white skin splashes with red as he blushes. I take his wrist and lead him to Mamma’s hospital room. One of his mentors notices him, nods his approval, and my own holy man walks a little straighter. He believes!

Mamma looks our way. I link elbows with Nathan.

“My friend is offering lessons in heaven. I thought you’d like me to know Jesus.” A flicker of something crosses her face before she turns away. She sees a charade. The nurse checks the I.V., then brushes past.

Nathan speaks. “May I?” His voice breaks within this brief sentence and his face grows redder but he disengages my arm, straightens his tie. He approaches my mother, grasps her hand as if she’s made of glass. Stroking her hand, he begins to speak with her, his voice low, soothing. Her responses exhale a word at a time. Is this the conversation she’s waited to hear?

I feel a pressure in my chest, a shame. She’s dying and I’m stupid. My hands fly to cover my face.

“Yes,” I hear my mother say and I become aware of the sunlight from the window; clouds must have moved. He holds the water straw to her lips. Is that what she said yes to?

“You can let me do that.” I say before he can get a hook into us, before either of us believes we need his comfort. But he holds the water steady.

“Drink,” he says. She does.

 

 

 

The H-Bomb’s Thunder

It was 1958. I set off with my best friend
Josephine on the first Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament march from Trafalgar Square.
 
Today I found a crumpled songbook.
On the cover an unborn baby screams
as strontium 90 rains from the black sky.
 
We walked four days as crowds grew to call
for an end to war. Josephine refused all rides
as bubble-sized blisters grew on her feet.
 
Nights with Quakers on school gym floors.
Hot jam donuts at six a.m. in empty streets.
I met my bully boyfriend on that march.
 
House the homeless, help the needy
shall we blast or shall we build?

We knew we could change the world.

 

 

Safe

I was a freshman in college when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. I was sure justice would inevitably follow his death, that the riots of that year and the summer of 1967 would be the last riots, the marches would soon be over, and justice would triumph.

On May 26, 2020, I saw Gayle King on CBS This Morning get rattled – really rattled. We both saw the video of a police officer kneel on George Floyd’s neck. I was tucked in the north woods at the cabin, as safe as one can be.

“It feels to me like open season … and that sometimes it’s not a safe place to be in this country for Black men … This is really too much for me today,” she said.

I felt sick.

When the KMart where I biked to grab shampoo and Band-Aids was broken into and looted, I was still 200 miles away. I heard no helicopters, no chants of “I can’t breathe,” no crash of broken glass at the post office where I sent Christmas presents to my grandchildren. I heard the whoosh of a pleasant wind through the tallest Norway pines. My daughter told me I was lucky to be at the cabin and not in my Minneapolis house. I suppose I was as lucky as one can be. I didn’t tell her I had already planned to leave as soon as it felt safe to go back, but I always feel safe.

I pulled off I-94 East onto Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, blocks from my house. All the businesses were boarded up; some had “open” scrawled on the plywood. Most were covered with extraordinary artwork proclaiming “Justice for George,” and similar messages in dramatic colors and letters taller than me. These had appeared like magic as soon as there were boards to cover the windows – broken or not.

I was stunned; and a week of crying jags started all over.

Still, I felt safe driving my neighborhood streets, getting out of my car in my driveway and going into my house, empty since the pandemic hit. I was alone, elderly by COVID-19 standards, female and safe. But I’m white.

I felt safe on my bike ride to Chicago Avenue and East 38th Street. Safe as I paused by the field of white crosses in front of the homemade “SAY THEIR NAMES” sign. The “S” on NAMES had fallen over. I thought of putting it back up, but it didn’t feel right to touch anything.

The names also filled a wide swath down 38th Street, covered with flowers gently withering in the summer sun. I stared at their names, the wilted blossoms hugging the pavement. These people were not safe while I was.

It’s been more than fifty years, and here we are, still howling about justice and covering our past sins like the paintings on the plywood lining the streets in Minneapolis.

 

 

 

 

With My Hair Not Yet Grey

After Seeing One Too Many Articles Titled “How to Explain the Protests to your Parents and Grandparents”

 

Who, do they think, was marching in 1968, ‘69, ‘72?
Who, do they think, shut down campuses, and transformed what they read in school?
Got laws on the books to protect their bodies?
Got clubbed and gassed in Chicago? Rode buses to D.C., protesting
with a quarter-million throats unleashed?
 
Who, do they think, prepared the ground for them to discover,
at age 14 – maybe 15 –
that change is something to both desire and fight for
that it won’t come easily but it can come, visible
but only if you can look back,
a good 50 years now, to see that
some things,
not all,
but some,
have changed. So that hope can surge
for every generation
 
even those now rolling their eyes
as if our pasts and their future were not intertwined,
as if some explanation were needed,
as if every generation does not dream of justice, and still ache to build the world anew.

 

 

 

Justice For All

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Standing tall, I placed my hand over my heart as Miss Shelley our first-grade teacher, led us in the morning Pledge of Allegiance. Except I didn’t know the words. So, I mouthed it.

We’d been taught the Pledge in kindergarten. But I was kicked out of kindergarten. For being a crybaby and disrupting others.

When I finally learned to recite it, I had no idea what I was saying. Or why.

Justice for all.

 

In sixth grade, John asked me to the school prom. There were two Black students in our class, and John was one. He liked me, and I liked him.

One spring day, John rode his bike to my neighborhood, and I hopped on his handlebars; something we did in Brooklyn in the late 1950s.

My next-door neighbor spotted me. She wasted no time barging into my house to let my mom know.

“Do you know who your daughter is hanging out with?” she shrieked.

Justice for all.

 

Not long after that my friends and I were playing at our local park. Some boys started taunting us.

They got into our faces and said, “You killed Christ!”

I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn’t even know who Christ was and I certainly would know if any of us killed him.

Justice for all.

 

Attending Brooklyn College in my late teens, I majored in Education. My first student teaching assignment was in an all-Black school/neighborhood in Bedford Stuyvesant.

My first day of student teaching in a first-grade classroom, I was asked to get the kids on line for lunch. I did my best to settle them down. One boy glared at me and said, “Get your white motherfucking hands off of me.” Of course, I didn’t have my hands near him. But he already believed I was the enemy.

Justice for all.

 

A lifetime of witnessing racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and every other “ism” proves liberty and justice for all is a myth. It’s liberty and justice for some.

I’ll put my hand over my heart for the Pledge but just like first grade, I’ll mouth the words.
Sometimes I won’t even do that.

Justice

 

We Got You, Friend

“…this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear…”
– Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times Are These”
Without words the feds snatch him hands up from the sidewalk protesting police in
camouflage in combat boots feds in riot gear in military-grade guns grab him from the
sidewalk who are you protesters shout use your words they shout to the feds to the tear
gas use your words to the youth in black mask to his silent hard hat what’s your name the
crowd shouts to his arms tied tell us your name they yell to his mask to his black t-shirt’s
words “God Is…” not a sound from his back to the crowd head down unmarked car not a
word from the feds we’ll get you out we got you friend the crowd yells to the tail lights to the
tear gas to the weeks protesting the knee that killed GEORGE knee on the neck nine
minutes knee on the neck four hundred and one years WE CAN’T BREATHE graffiti six feet
high on the concrete base of the federal building FEDS GO HOME painted red dripped down
a pillar TAKE DOWN THE AMERICAN PLANTATION 

 


 

 

Justice in Martinez


Phyliss Wheatley
first Black American woman poet
Sculpture by Meredith Bergmann
Photo by Elsa Lichman

I was raised in the 1950s in Martinez, a working class refinery town of 10,000 people on the Carquinez Straits in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was not really aware of class at the time, though I was aware of various ethnicities, since I went to a Catholic grammar school. We were all of Italian, Irish, Portuguese, Mexican, or combination backgrounds. Mine was Irish and English. When I went to public high school, I noticed two other ethnicities, Japanese and Black, though just a few families.

 

Fast forward about 60 years. Martinez is now a town of 38,500, a commuter town within striking distance of San Francisco and greater Bay Area jobs. It’s still the seat of the monumental county court house, but a new jail has replaced the small granite building I knew as a child. Main Street, which used to have a Woolworth’s and JCPenney, now has antique shops, restaurants, and three coffee houses for tourists and locals.

In July 2020, I was shocked to see my once sleepy hometown town featured on national TV! A white couple, MAGA-costumed in red shirts, were painting over a BLACK LIVES MATTER mural that had just been completed on the street in front of the courthouse. The woman was roller-painting black over the bright yellow letters, saying: “Not in my town!” while the man was videoing and spouting inanities like: “There’s no racism! Read your history.” A spectator was videoing him with his phone. That citizen video of the Trumpish pair defacing the mural went viral and even the Washington Post carried the story.

The director of Main Street Martinez, Justin Gomez, had received permission from the city to paint the mural. After repairing it swiftly, he organized Martizians for Black Lives and held a pro-Black Lives Matter rally at the Martinez waterfront a few days later. Although the protest received threats from right-wingers, the large rally was peaceful. My brother later told me there was a massive police presence in the background that deterred the disrupters from attempting violence.

 

Justice was swift for the pair who defaced the mural. They were identified and charged by the district attorney’s office with three misdemeanors: vandalism, possession of vandalism tools, and violation of civil rights (a hate crime). The DA who approved the filing, the first woman and Black person to serve as DA, has gotten death threats. On August 4, 2020, the couple pled not guilty and are due back in court in October.

I see my hometown now in an entirely different way. I’m proud of the new citizens of Martinez who believe Black lives do matter and are willing to join in the fight against racism. I feel chagrined that Martinez has a bigoted contingent that the Trump era has encouraged to come forward. Will justice be served if the BLACK LIVES MATTER defacers go to trial? It remains to be seen.
 

 

Transitory: A Catalog of Trans Murders in July & August, 2020

an Acrostic for Justice
July 16, Marilyn Cazares, stabbed and burned a week
under turning 23, Brawley, CA. Dior H. Ova, 32,
stabbed in a hallway in the Bronx, July 26.
Twenty-four-year-old Queasha Hardy, shot
in Baton Rouge, July 27. Aja “Rocky” Rhone-Spears
came to a vigil for a gun victim, stabbed in Portland.
Every day without a new murder, a momentary peace.

 



 

 

 

The Woman Who Lied About Emmett Till Is Still Alive.

to Carolyn Bryant Donham
Pin collage by Julia C. Spring

You are 84. You say his murder has ruined your life. You say you feel sorrow for Till’s mother … especially after you lost a son of your own. You say white supremacy was wrong, are glad it’s gone. You must not be watching the news.

Your then-husband and brother-in-law got away with murder. You never even went to trial. But then, you didn’t admit your lies for more than sixty years, the statute of limitations on perjury long gone.

For the record, in case anyone hasn’t heard, you’ve admitted that Emmett Till, fourteen, did not assault you, did not say, How about a date, baby?, did not speak suggestively to you. He was neither lewd nor insulting, he did not grab you around the waist while uttering obscenities, and you were not scared to death. Did he whistle? You say you don’t remember.

You’re exposed, Carolyn. The world knows who you are, what you did. It appears you’re looking for sympathy and understanding. I can’t imagine how much you’ll find. Especially since you’ve insulted the white supremacists by saying that they are gone – and good riddance. They’re a touchy bunch.

I can’t wish for you an easy death or salvation. I can’t imagine how either could serve justice. Nor could I wish for you all the excruciations of hell, even if I believed in such a place. Would this be enough to fit your crimes: To be utterly alone in a nursing home staffed by non-Caucasian aides who know who you are. They’re not bent on revenge. They deal in mercies, their impulses kind. But who could blame them for putting before and after photographs of Emmett Till next to your bed, just out of reach, replacing them each time your daughter (who visits once every month or two) or some white administrator takes them away? Who could blame anyone for not offering sympathy or comfort when you wake screaming in the night, tell anyone who will listen about your nightmare: underwater, unable to breathe, or see with the one eye you have left, a cotton gin wheel held around your neck with barbed wire, and you   praying   praying   praying   for a bullet that would put an end to it all.

 

 

 

 

Eight Reasons Why George Floyd is Dead

because he is black
and killing black people is normal
in the USofA
 
because the fractured crevice of racial hatred
born of four hundred years of slavery
Jim Crow    mass incarceration     police brutality
corrodes hearts minds institutions in the USofA
  
because choke holds by hands or 
knees block the breath of life
 
because the president tells us 
white supremacists are very fine people
  
because infatuation with 
lynching      the public ritual of it
resides in the temporal lobe in the USofA
  
because three armed officers-of-the-lawless
stood by     dispassionate     while
standers-by begged for mercy
  
because TRAVON MARTIN 2-26-12 ERIC GARNER 7-17-14 MICHAEL BROWN 8-9-14 TAMIR RICE 11-22-14 FREDDIE GRAY 4-19-15 SANDRA BLAND  7-13-15 PHILANDO CASTILLO 7-16-16 STEPHON CLARK 3-18-18 BREONNE TAYLOR  3-13-20 AHMAUD AUBERY 5-6-20
THE LIST GOES ON
  
Because each morning white people in the USofA
open our eyes      and have amnesia

 

 

 

 

Black Lives DO Matter

I raised my daughter in Oakland – the land stolen from the Ohlone tribe – near Fruitvale Station where unarmed Oscar Grant (a Black man) was shot in the back while lying on his stomach as he was being handcuffed, killed by a white policeman who “meant to Taser him.” Now I live on Pomo lands, a few miles from a town named after Confederate Army General Braxton Bragg, who owned over 100 slaves but never set foot in northern California. In 2015 the California Legislative Black Caucus sent a letter to Fort Bragg requesting a name change due to Bragg’s legacy of fighting to preserve slavery. The letter was ignored, but the issue is alive again, with many residents supporting a change and others wanting “history to be preserved.”

I taught in a segregated Black community in West Las Vegas during voluntary integration. I had only two white students: a liberal professor’s son, and a troublemaker no other school wanted. The year after I left, under a desegregation plan mandated by law, white students were bused into the Black community in new sixth grade centers, one year only. In each remaining grade, first through high school, Black children were bused into the white community.

I remember sitting in an auditorium, my Black child next to me, as we watched Black Nativity on stage. I saw proud parents snapping photos as preschool children dressed in Sunday clothes sang their hearts out. I cried, knowing the struggles ahead of them, with their skin color creating a lifetime of discrimination.

At my daughter’s sixth birthday party, our house was filled with children and parents from her predominantly Black school. The white puppeteer we hired presented a story about a bad little Black boy who turned white when he became good. As people left, my white friend told me how nice everyone had been, sounding surprised.

My film discussion group recently watched Just Mercy, focusing on racism and lack of social justice in the south. I reminded them it doesn’t only happen there. My daughter’s husband was stopped last month outside of Boston. Two Black men on a deserted road at night, stopped for “seeming to be in a hurry,” although they were going below the speed limit. Their car was searched before they were released. My daughter’s response? “At least they didn’t plant anything.”

Then there are the social media battles. My distant relatives write rants showing no understanding of their racist assumptions: “I do not support BLM. They are a terrorist organization. Who has the guts to agree with me?” is one example. Comments that follow are even more depressing. And now, derisive texts about Kamala Harris, questioning her birthplace, her ethnicity, her qualifications, show what she’s put up with all her life.

My daughter and her Black friends post daily about racial injustices. I respond in support, while countering racist comments from others. The divide is scary.

My daughter is tired. So am I.

 

 

Election Stories

 

Introduction: Winning the Vote

Back in, say, January, when the Winter issue of Persimmon Tree went live, who would have expected that, before the next issue appeared, a murderous pandemic would totally absorb all our interest and energy. And, as recently as the beginning of this month, who would have thought that the pandemic would, in turn, be almost entirely erased from our minds by another, more evil because more human, kind of murder – the nine-minute, cold-blooded killing of a black man by a white police officer – and by the protests that have engulfed our nation in response not only to that defining horror, but to all the racist assaults that preceded it.

In the midst of all this, it is easy to forget that this was supposed to be the year of a Presidential election. The primaries that for the first months of the year absorbed our attention have disappeared from our ken as if they had never been. The incumbent President has continued to sit like a fat toad in the White House, spewing his usual venom, while his would-be successor appeared until recently to be silently imprisoned in his basement..

But, unless Trump uses the pandemic and the protests as cover for a coup – a no longer unthinkable possibility – there will be an election in November. And we must give it our attention. Elections and protests are the two sides of a coin. Our right to vote was founded in protests; its continuation has been ensured by protests. And those protests have not always been peaceful, nor have they been without damage to property. Most of the photos that accompany these electoral Short Takes are of demonstrations and marches by, and the often violent arrests of, women campaigning to get the vote – a basic human right afforded us only 100 years ago, already well more than a century after the founding of our nation. 

The United States was conceived in protests that began because American colonists were denied the right to vote by their British overlords. The first volley of what became the American Revolution occurred in colonial Massachusetts, when men and women — who were probably called looters and vandals at the time but are now referred to as patriots and Founding Fathers – looted and destroyed British property, crates of tea, by tossing them into Boston Harbor. That initial skirmish led to the revolutionary war, a protest of unmitigated violence.

Nor were the women of 1919 the last to engage in protests in order to secure voting rights. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s had, as one of its goals, obtaining for African-Americans the right to exercise their vote. It was clear to the leaders of those protests – just as it was to the American colonists in the eighteenth century and to the members of the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth – that only through the vote can we hope to secure life, liberty, and happiness for ourselves or for anyone. That only through protest will we secure and maintain the vote. And that, though many peaceful protests will be met with escalating police violence and obscured by the opportunism of looters and provocateurs, they are a bedrock part of the fabric of democracy. As the pandemic and the police killings show, protests and the right to vote are not enough. But there is nothing without them.

Do let these photos and Short Takes remind you: There is an election in November. Show up for it.
 

 

 

 

State of the (Dis)Union 2020

Women of the House and Senate wore white in memory of suffragettes
who marched, demanded, fought, and suffered state violence for the right
to stand, to be counted when mostly white men raised their voices,
cast their votes like Roman Senators, and ruled the land.

Heads high, backbones straight, these Women of Congress
wore white too bright to be eclipsed by shadows,
too starched to bend or bow, too proud to let the national clown
drown out their disapproval.

The Speaker of the House took her appointed seat.
Before her on the desk, the script of the State of the Union,
the weight of history in those white sheets.

In solidarity with her fellow congresswomen, she, too, wore white –
for justice like an old-fashioned western sheriff,
like the dissenters of more than a century ago
who insisted upon their right to suffrage despite tradition’s ignominy.

As the buffoon resurrected McCarthy ghosts, cold-war rhetoric, worn-out anthems,
boasting of our headlong descent into a century long gone
when men were men and women wore white aprons
and knew their place, she waited for him to end his rant.

And when the reality show was over,
and the buffoon had mangled language and canceled truth,
even as the applause endured,
there was no need to reread the State of the (dis)Union script.
The gaping wound, the rent in the national fabric, was far too deep to miss.

So even as the fool who would be king soaked up the acclaim
of his confederates in crime, having torn to shreds
decency and the rule of law,
offering in their stead his cult of power,
the House Speaker stood, dressed in white like those other women, past and present,
who took their places because it was (and still is) their right to do so.

Before the cameras, she stands in defiance, for the sake of the nation,
speaking even without words. She reminds us that tyranny cannot be tolerated,
she takes the many white sheets of the fool’s tirade
and, for the people, she tears each lie in two.

 

My Neighbor

Roberto is a decent type, a graying granddad who has the guts to raise his grandchild, a wild and headstrong five-year-old whose long hair whipping in the wind has caused him to be mistaken for a girl more than once, perhaps making him even more crazed.

To Roberto’s credit, he gets Beejay out on a daily basis, even though Roberto ends up running after him most of the time, powerless, as his grandchild rams into hedges on a bike or charges across intersections, deaf to his grandfather’s cautionary shouts.

One day, Roberto and I stopped and talked – friendly and neighborly – first about cars, followed by some pleasant commiseration about the world, but from there, we somehow moved on to politics.

“What? You voted for that…that person in the White House?” I said, incredulous, though still trying to appear normal.

“Not voting for Hillary,” he went on…. “Besides, there are too many immigrants nowadays and to make things worse, we’ve got a sanctuary city on our hands. They’ll be flocking here.”

(But, c’mon, your name is Roberto. Not Robert, not Bob, not…you know, Scott or Kevin or Keith. It’s Roberto! What about your roots? Your…)

“I voted for Clinton,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Obama first, of course, and then Clinton.”

“Well, I voted for Obama,” he said.

“You did? Obama one day and Trump another?”

It’s true. Zigzag voting is not unusual. A personal setback, a stroke of bad luck, a hit of unfairness and certain voters go sour. Then with an audacity peculiar to action-driven Americans, they decide their vote should “shake things up.”

“Well, I could never vote for Trump. I think he’s…” and here I hesitated. How to find the right words for Roberto’s sake? Let’s see… should I mention my profound conviction that our present president is incompetent, ignorant, and also a monster motored by his own self-aggrandizement? But Roberto was my neighbor, a nice man, a person I sort of wanted to understand. Plus, he was a committed granddad with a Beejay to show for his efforts.

“I think Trump is… is nuts,” I said as companionably as possible, grossly tamping down my strongest instincts in favor of neighborliness.

“Nuts is good!” Roberto said, his eyes lighting up a bit.

Did I hear right? I gulped. But at that point, Beejay, in bulldozing mode, had yanked hard on my arm, causing me nearly to lose my balance. The game was over and so was the conversation. The Wild One had offered me a way out, ironically guaranteeing that our exchange would remain civil and friendly.

“Well, take care, Roberto,” I said, still reeling from Beejay’s vital life force. I crossed the street and headed for home, haunted by our eye-opening conversation. Months later, I’m still reeling. Nuts is good? The initial dizziness has subsided, but an incipient vertigo has remained.

 

 

 

State of the Union

We’re addicted to the sideshow –
the lady sporting whiskers,
donkey with two heads,
cotton candy frosting hair
on carny’s tattooed arm.
We’re hooked on big striped big top,
the popcorn and the stink,
riding crop and oil slick
of barker’s red-tailed spiel.
We love to peek at freaky things
behind the velvet drape,
to hold our breath in choked suspense
as net-less bodies fly.
We want to hear the lions growl,
see cars spit out more clowns,
exhale ahs of hot dog damp
when wrists are caught… or not.
We crave our penny’s worth of pound,
our barrel full of Coke,
the cannonball, calliope,
cold tang of something sour.

 

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

This is a story from sixteen years ago. My client – we’ll call him Larry – was a state legislator representing a gritty district in an old New England city. Larry was a progressive, a maverick, facing a primary challenge from the city’s Democratic bosses who were tired of his non-cooperation.

A mutual friend, a state labor union official, suggested Larry call me to manage his campaign. I knew he was one of the good guys, so I said I yes.

My salary was $500 a week, a small sum, but I figured he would win the primary. A win always looks good on your resume. Larry had rented a cavernous office with cubicles and a large meeting space. The union furnished tables and chairs for headquarters. I brought office supplies from home. Few volunteers had mobile phones, and my first job was getting phones put in. Cash flow was always a problem in these campaigns, and I had magnanimously said I would wait to be paid until we got the phones.

Larry had a friend, a computer geek who would work from home furnishing voter lists. Larry’s lawyer headed the finance committee; another friend, a writer, would do publicity.

Larry didn’t carry a cell phone. I could reach him only by leaving a message on his apartment’s answering machine. Days went by when I didn’t see or hear from him.

The writer started sending press releases, diatribes against the city’s corruption. None was ever published. I began setting up fund raisers and contacting all the unions for contributions. Calls to the lawyer were never answered.

A union member regularly turned up to make Voter ID calls; a volunteer worked on absentee ballots. An old computer was donated but sat unused.

Picking up lists from the computer guy turned out to be a visit to the home of a hoarder where you had to move a mattress to get through the front door.

When Larry failed to show up at voters’ events on the schedule, he explained, “I said I might go.”

Nevertheless, the campaign received contributions, sold tickets to a successful spaghetti dinner and got union support. I was paid $1000, a check I quickly cashed.

Then I came in one day to see a lock box on the thermostat. The rent had not been paid. I worked that day at my desk wearing my coat, making my phone calls, including to Larry which he never returned. At the end of the day I packed up my car with everything I brought to the headquarters and left.

Larry did win the election, and afterwards I received some of my salary, not all but enough. Our paths never crossed again.

 

 

 

Obituary for the Voting Rights Act of 1965

In this poem I go to vote
in my sweaty yoga clothes.
I don’t powder my nose, put on
Revlon’s Russian Red lipstick, or
spray my wrists with Estee Lauder’s
Youth Dew perfume as my mother did.

I drive one mile to Iroquois Middle School
where both my sons endured
the agony of adolescence.
Two young women sell sugar cookies
and cupcakes for the PTA.
My neighbor, Ruthie, registers Republicans.
I walk to the next table
where my son’s former special-ed
teacher is registering Democrats.
How’s Ben doing? she asks.
I tell her he’s married,
works on Gordon Ramsey shows,
has a three-year-old daughter, Maia.
We both sigh with relief.

When I sign the register,
I’m the 200th voter of the day
even though it’s already 6:30 p.m.

I’m writing this poem to tell you
there were 27,000 voters in Dodge City,
Kansas, and only one polling place –
Outside the city limits – more than a mile
from the nearest bus stop.
Poor people, people of color,
Latinx people, denied the right to vote.

Somewhere in this poem is another story.
My son, Ben, thinks voting
is a waste of time.
Our government so corrupt,
we need a revolution.

I drive the mile home
to my split-level house
in Niskayuna, NY.
I could say I’m not
from around here.
It would be true
since I was born
in Poughkeepsie, NY.
But I can’t disclaim my ties.
I’ve lived here 37 years.

I’m scared that 27,000 voters
lost the right to vote in Dodge City
and it’s happening to the poor,
Latinx, people of color,
and immigrants across our country.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965
torn from limb to limb
and buried alive.

 

Campaign Walk

The Candidate hesitates and covers her mouth. Count to three. Don’t rush the gesture. The pause is perfect. In my peripheral vision I see the camera operator wipe away a tear.

The Candidate regains her composure. She’s rehearsed enough to know not to look at me – standing in the shadows behind the lights. “To those who question my ability to serve, to take the interests of our children and our future to heart, let me say, I have not always been childless.”

The camera pushes in on cue. On the wide polished desk, bronzed baby shoes shine next to three books: the Bible, Profiles in Courage, and Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. The spines face the camera, as do the metallic shoelaces. That’s the first tell. No one sits at a desk with their books or child’s shoes facing an audience.

“I had a glowing, growing baby. Samuel. Named after my great-grandfather. A laughing tow-headed boy. That life has never left me. I grieve for him still.”

She remembers to touch the bronze shoes beside the Bible. Good for her.

“I owe it to Samuel to make this country great again. To rebuild her cities and restore her farmland. To put her people to work and help those in their time of need.”

The prompter is going too fast. I glare at the dolt, motioning with a flat palm for him to slow down.

“Not every life gets to live to its fullest. My darling son was taken from me too soon. He never reached his potential. Sadly, I wasn’t able to nurture and guide Samuel to greatness, but I vow to do that for our homeland, with your help and the divine grace of God.”

Pause. Do not move. We practiced this.

She does not move. She keeps her eyes on the lens. I count along. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

“With a mother’s love in my heart, a fighter’s will, and a dreamer’s hope, I promise to bring the prosperity and peace to this land we so treasure. In the name of my dear son Samuel. Good night and may God bless the United States of America.”

Don’t move.
Do not move. It’s not over.
Stay put.

 

The camera goes dark.

And it’s over.

I hurry to her, “You did good. Hit all the marks. Well done.”

“Get me out of here without questions. Tell them I’m emotional, but, you know, not falling apart or anything.”

“The revelation to the country of your departed son has left you raw and we’d appreciate your compassion and understanding.”

“Perfect. Where’s the car?”

“Through the kitchen.”

She nods and is gone. The camera crew packs and the grips roll cable. Another spectacle done.

I gather the desktop items for the next stop. Books. Bible. Bronzed baby shoes: my thrift store find of the year. Whoever wore these – the little sucker’s gonna walk us all the way to the White House.

 

 

 

Judgment Day 2016

Woke to a sea change we didn’t foresee,
and now we all own it, you and me.
The people marched and the people prayed,
but nothing could change that judgment day.

Some children cried and some children died,
while the politicians prayed and lied.
How can they not see, how can we not say
that every day is judgment day?

Guns and crack and smack and coke –
the rich get richer and the poor get broke.
How can they not see, how can we not say
that every day must be judgment day?

Beneath the machinations churning,
our hurting earth is slowly burning.
How can they not see, how can we not say
that every day is judgment day?

Harsh words, like wind, just wreak destruction,
and willful ignorance, corruption.
God help us if we don’t use better
judgment come next judgment day.

There’s yours and mine and theirs and our facts,
but truth is always way more complex,
hidden deep within the noisy fray.
Be truth in action on judgment day.

 

The Family That Votes Together…

Election Day was a big deal in my family. We went to the polls en masse. Of course my cousins and I couldn’t vote yet, but our mothers never missed it, and they wanted us there with them.

We loved it. The mystery of the draped booths. The slam of the big lever finalizing someone’s choices. The curtain screeching back on metal rods. The official poll watchers bustling about with their clipboards. We couldn’t wait until we were old enough.

It was a neighborly section of Brooklyn – old Brooklyn, not hip, not Millennial, not overpriced. It was everybody-knew-everybody Brooklyn. So when we’d bustle into the polling place with my grandma and her father – my great-grandfather – it was like arriving at a party. And it was expected that either my mother or my aunt would be assisting Grandma and Zadeh in their booths.

Grandma had emigrated from Russia, following her husband who had gone on ahead. She could read a little English but needed help with which lever went with which candidate.

Zadeh was already fragile by then, and his eyesight was failing so he had to have someone in the booth with him. But there was no possibility of his being influenced. They could hear him telling my mother, faintly but forcefully, who he wanted to vote for, and occasionally why. He wasn’t concerned with privacy. He’d been an activist in Russia, and was “asked to leave” the country because he caused so much trouble. This, at a time when leaving was forbidden. He was ancient now but the fire still glowed.

Probably where the family got their ferocity. No way was Grandma going to miss an election. Nor were my mother or my aunt. And when we finally came of age, we made a grand entrance into the polling place, with all the poll watchers and other voters congratulating us and shaking our hands.

But, I once asked my mother, why do the people we vote for, always lose? Adlai Stevenson twice to Eisenhower. George McGovern. Eugene McCarthy. We never got Ralph Nader, for all the times he ran. Or Al Gore (and we should have). We did get Kennedy, but not for long.

She laughed. Doesn’t matter, she said. Once, we couldn’t vote at all. Now we can. So we vote, and we vote for whomever we believe in.

And so even in this crushing new world of gerrymandering, voter suppression, machine rigging, and self-focused politicians, I always do.

It’s in my genes.

 

 

 

Role Model

My grandmother Ruth,
born of Russian Jews,
drove in the Red Cross motor corps
at the end of the first World War.
In New York, she chauffeured
soldiers on ships wherever they needed to go,
took Spanish flu victims
to where they needed to go.
She wore her pin as proudly
as she did her right to vote, when it came.
She signed herself “Grandma,” in quotes
when she wrote, extolling
her grandchildren for everything:
our our school prizes, concert going, museum visits,
sketches, athleticism, my playing Emily Webb in Our Town.
She practiced yoga every day at home,
was the fastest walker in the City,
when we visited, she played Chopin Preludes
and had us invent dances.
Teaching yoga regularly, at the 92nd Street Y at seventy,
she was always dressed in leotards and a wrap skirt,
even swimming at Jones Beach, out on the island, near us,
where she vamped, hands on her hips, no skirt,
nose in the air. No cares.
Eighty-five, in red Keds, glasses ever lost
atop her head, she came with
my parents and my new husband
on our honeymoon on the Olympic Penninsula,
enjoying her cabin, like one we rented together
on Lake Willoughby when my siblings and I were children
that time she insisted we keep journals,
walk to town every day, play tennis after swimming.
She took Amy and me to Fire Island one summer,
where she took off her top on the beach,
she who had long celebrated female beauty:
praising, in contrast to our Catholic mother,
our own bra-unfettered breasts in our hippie days at home.
Born in 1900, she passed in 2007.
Today, on the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote,
I play note after note on my piano,
finding her again in Beethoven and Chopin.

 

 

When I Was 17…

Introduction
by Jean Zorn

We named this month’s Short Takes section after a song that was performed most famously by a man – and that exhibited a distinctly male point of view. There is another song, more apt in so many ways, that we should instead have chosen. When ABBA recorded Dancing Queen, the main vocal was sung by the two women in the group, the men on board just for backup and harmony. The lyrics are from the perspective of that seventeen-year-old girl. And, most germane, the song sums up what all the marvelous pieces we’ve chosen for this issue describe: at seventeen, we have within us all we will become, and yet we’re still at a moment when we might, depending on circumstances, character, and luck, become almost anything. But we don’t know that yet. We are not yet what we will be; we are the shy girl, the bookworm, the tomboy – or the Dancing Queen:

You are the dancing queen
Young and sweet
Only seventeen
Dancing queen
Feel the beat from the tambourine, oh yeah
You can dance
You can jive
Having the time of your life
Ooh, see that girl
Watch that scene
Digging the dancing queen

Take Elizabeth Warren, for example. By seventeen, she had already been the star of her high school debate team. But she was also a child of the 1950s, of Oklahoma (on the scrabbling, southwestern fringe of America’s so-called heartland), and from a family who, as Warren herself described it, was teetering “on the ragged edge of the middle class.” Warren’s mother called herself a housewife, as women proudly did then, even though, to keep the bank from foreclosing on the family’s home, she worked a full-time, minimum-wage job at Sears.

The part of Warren that had won those debating trophies enrolled at George Washington University. But there was another part of her that believed, as women were taught then by every romantic movie they saw and every book or magazine they read, that the natural goal of all good girls was marriage and children. That part led her, at seventeen, to drop out of college, marry Jim Warren (one of the guys from her Oklahoma City high school), give birth to his daughter, choose to be a stay-at-home mother, and even follow him as his jobs took him to Houston and then to New Jersey.

And in that life and that marriage the Dancing Queen might have remained, but for those occasionally helpful standbys, circumstances, character, and luck, that impelled her to finish her college degree at the University of Houston. Even then, she saw herself in traditional women’s roles. Her highest aspiration for herself was to be a teacher, and she taught in the Houston public schools until the move to New Jersey cut that short. The first wave of modern feminism was changing what many of us believed about ourselves and the limits we had set on our aspirations. Perhaps that had something to do with her decision to enter law school when her daughter was two. But even then, the realities of women’s lives – the circumstances and luck – colluded. Unlike Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had not been offered a single law firm job when she’d graduated from law school almost twenty years earlier, Warren was sought after by the large New York firms. But, a soon-to-be single mother of two, she turned the offers down so she could work from home, drafting wills and writing up real estate closing documents at her kitchen table.

From there, we know the path: law school teaching, a constant trajectory of moving upwards to more and more prestigious law schools, and a slowly developing interest in bankruptcy law, one of the legal fields seen – probably because it involves banks and money – as particularly the domain of men. The more she grew to appreciate the important protections provided to ordinary hardworking people by the bankruptcy laws then in effect, the angrier she grew at the conniving of banks and lenders, politicking to get the legal scales tipped back in their favor. The next step – moving from an interest that was primarily academic into activism on behalf of families and working people – was, for Warren, inevitable.

There are so many ways in which her life and career, up to and including her run for the presidency, corresponds to the lives and careers of all the women of our generation.  There is, first, the continuing likelihood that because she was a woman, she might never have had a career outside of the home, or, if she had, that it would have been in elementary school teaching, a noble profession but less likely to lead to the White House. There is, in addition, the accidental nature of much of Warren’s career. Like most women, she had no clearly ascendant goal when she graduated from law school, not even of partnership in a big law firm, let alone of high political office. Women our age, even as we found the courage to get degrees and jobs and baby sitters, were taught not to set our ambitions too high, nor to push for those ambitions too overtly. Instead, through circumstances and luck, the increasingly more important jobs came to her.

Well, partly through circumstances and luck. Of the three conditions, character may be the most important. If she hadn’t been who she was, if she hadn’t been that seventeen-year-old high school debate star, if she hadn’t persisted in finishing college and then law school, if she hadn’t been drawn to the humanity lurking in an area of law that most male scholars treat as if it were as dry and inhumane as dust, if she hadn’t made the leap from academics to activism, if she hadn’t been and done all those things, she would not have been Elizabeth Warren.

When we are seventeen, all that we can be is there within us. But only circumstances, luck, and most especially character will decide how much of it we become.

 

 

Blue

A mid-afternoon in June we heard him
coming down the stairs to find us spooning
on the single bed in the basement, the lower parts
of our bodies unclothed under blankets.
He sat down in the old captain’s chair
rolled a cigarette, asked about our day,
amber flecks of tobacco falling on his knee.
That was my father, half lost
in himself and the symphony of images
he would paint, his own music so loud
that he never flinched when the needle
stuck in the last groove of Joni Mitchell’s
Blue. Not one of us budged,
the smoke of his cigarette curled
into a lyric of its own.
 

 

I Stole Francie Bigassi’s Boyfriend

It wasn’t hard. We were at a weekend leadership retreat at Cumberland Falls State Park. My diet pills had worked, so I was wearing a size six denim shift with an apple embroidered at the bustline. Sleeveless to show off my tanned arms. An upperclassman with an easy laugh and a deep voice, Marty towered over me. We danced and talked until curfew. I kept his red tie because it matched the apple on my dress. Back in the bunks the girls told me Marty was Francie Bigassi’s boyfriend. They said Francie was one tough cookie. I said any girl with a name like that deserved to lose her boyfriend.

On Monday, Maxine knew where Marty and Francie sat in the cafeteria, so I went up to their table.

Marty, I forgot to give you back your tie.

That felt better than being thin.

 

Connection Costs

After high school graduation in 1965, I get my first job as a long distance telephone operator. From June through August, I sit, headset on, plugs at hand, staring at rows of unlit bulbs. One glows. My stomach contracts. I hesitate. What kind of call awaits? I plug in (because I must) and toggle the switch to hear and be heard. “Operator,” I say. A voice requests the most basic kind of call, station-to-station. I dial the number; wait for the ring, then toggle the switch assuring privacy. I breathe in the smugness of success. I thank the god of fate for luck and wait for another light.

Callers have a choice of call types – station-to-station, person-to-person, or collect which can entangle with station-to-station and person-to-person. For each, I have a script to follow, one that assumes alacrity of connection.

Person-to-person: “I have a call from___ for___.” 

A yes/no choice for the call’s receiver. Yes, that person is present (the one speaking or one nearby). No, that person is not available. I leave a call-back number. Not too difficult; a smile for fate; a plea for luck when the next light glows.

Collect: “I have a collect call from___. Will you accept the charges?”

Here lie two outcomes. A verbal skirmish; a caller trying to talk before I’ve completed the contract for payment. Or, a mystery of why charges are denied. Experienced operators say it’s a signal to call back, avoid higher collect call rates, used mostly by college students. College, my destination in September. I will remember this. I laugh at fate, shake hands with luck.

Long distance from a pay phone: “Please deposit $ __.”

My gut roils. Luck decamps and fate asks for a sweat sacrifice. I find the charges from ___ to ___. The caller deposits quarters, dimes, and nickels into slots. Each coin sends a unique tone. I count them, hope my arithmetic skills hold, hope my intense concentration doesn’t stray. The last step, remember to pull the coins into the box. I wait the three minutes, time allotted for pay phone conversations.

Breathing stops. Did I pull the coins into the box? Memory backtracks until I hear collected coins jangle, fall onto metal.

Electricity hums in cool air. Sweat on my upper lip dries. I breathe easily until a light comes on. Fate lets luck hover above my hand. I reach for the plug.

 

On My Own Two Feet

Until I turned three, family photographs showed a happy child. Then it was time to take care of my lazy eye. From that day on, I was transformed into an awkward chubby girl, then a teenager with short brown curls and heavy glasses.

When I turned seventeen, I enlisted in the army. The photograph from my army period show that I lost the glasses plus several pounds. Not a great beauty but pleasing to the eye and able to conquer the hearts of the other sex. No compliments, affirmations, or even a verbal approval from my mother reflected that change. I was still her awkward offspring. The one who would never match up to her younger brother.

The conversations with my mother followed the same pattern for years. “I don’t understand,” she would say, and my insides tightened.

“I do not understand why you married this man,” she said a week after my wedding, and repeatedly in the coming years.

“I do not understand what it is that you’re doing,” referring to my professional choice to become an educator (just like her).

“I don’t understand why the kids never eat,” was another favorite, meaning my daughters, who routinely declared a hunger strike on our visits.

Forcing me to wear clothes she sewed for me was, I was convinced, a form of humiliation. Cruising the streets of Jerusalem in search of material, then spending hours in front of the mirror being stabbed by sewing needles. When I was sure I had finally broken free, she showed up before my wedding day with a dress she’d made for me. All that was needed was the final fitting.

That sense of not being good enough, not quick enough, not pretty, and not as talented as my younger brother was always there. A curse, but in some ways perhaps a blessing. Once I turned seventeen and joined the army, I learned to stand on my own two feet.

Still, every year when I drive up the steep hills into the city that used to be my home to visit my parents’ graves, I am reminded of being an awkward seventeen.

I pick a few stones and put them on the grave as tradition dictates. Then I update my mother on my life in the year that just ended:

Still married to the same man,

Kids are all grown up,

Not an educator anymore.

When I get to the last part, my current profession, I hesitate for a minute. I know what she would have said if she were still alive:

“I don’t understand why you went to school and got a master’s degree, so you can become an innkeeper.”

But now, finally, I can smile.

 

 

Mother and Daughter Pretend

When I was seventeen, sharp abdominal pains sent me to the hospital, initially for observation, but the following day I was wheeled into the operating room. The general surgeon removed a dermoid cyst, complete with partially formed teeth and hair, attached to my ovary like a remora. Not only did the surgeon remove half of my reproductive organs;  he performed an appendectomy as well, endorsing it as a preventative measure. A jagged seven-inch scar curved from belly button to pubic bone. During my recovery, my unemployed, despondent father paced the hospital corridor. Later, saddled with bills and burdened by his own trauma when he was seventeen, he plunged further into depression.

A few months later, as I neared my high school graduation, he attempted suicide, painfully suffering from his self-inflicted injury until his body surrendered. My mother wanted my opinion about an autopsy on a body that two weeks prior had been a sullen man, but very much alive. I was horrified. A nurse handed us tiny white pills, which we washed down with paper cups of water.

At the funeral home my mother asked me to choose his casket. I did, with all the sensibility of a seventeen-year-old, choosing a gray box. During the viewing, I sought refuge in a lounge. The joviality of relatives and acquaintances buzzing around the room with my father’s closed casket was too much. I puffed on cigarettes. My absentee brother joined me once.

I wandered the school corridors, shell-shocked, my mind now a blank in every class. During that time, I met a rebel, my future husband. I was fully aware of my choice, as he was the opposite of my gentle father. Two welcomed daughters arrived as I endured nineteen years, finally divorcing the violent drug addict.

There was no denying that what happened at the tender age of seventeen profoundly influenced my life. Especially when the horror of the first six months of a blossoming teenager was swept aside by friends and family.

A mother and daughter pretended. We cried in separate rooms. We never spoke about my traumas, as if my disfiguring operation and my father’s death never happened. Each day going forward was to be no different than all the others. Not to my family, not to my neighbors, not to my classmates, as though the silence would rewrite my history. Only then  could I be a normal seventeen-year-old.

 

 

When I was seventeen…

When I was seventeen, I was five feet ten inches tall and weighed a hundred pounds. I stood out when I stood up.

When I was seventeen, I was a practicing Catholic. My mother had been in a car accident a year earlier, and after a period of intensive rehab, her doctors said she would never walk, think, remember, or speak clearly again. Since only a miracle could change her back to how she was before the accident, I prayed for one, pleaded for one.

When I was seventeen, I climbed into bed every night with the imprint of my rag rug on my knees. I recited the Holy Rosary every day and confessed every impure thought. Throughout the six weeks of Lent, I attended mass daily. I made promises to God about how I would live the rest of my life if only He would heal my mother, and even issued Him a few ultimatums. But no matter how hard I prayed or how many times I went to mass or how many other proofs of devotion I offered, my prayers remained unheard, unanswered.

When I was seventeen, unlike most of my peers, I knew that terrible things happen at random, that there’s no protecting against them, no fixing them, and no silver lining. In addition to being different on the outside, the experience of unmitigated loss made me different inside too, estranged.

When I was seventeen, I still had my faith.

 

 

A Life in Pieces

When I was seventeen my mother looked up from her sewing machine and said, “When you get married I shall make you the most beautiful wedding dress. It will be my magnum opus and you will walk down the aisle to admiring glances and feel like a princess.”

***

“Do come in.”

The woman stepped into the hallway of the empty retirement apartment.

A sewing machine stood in a wheeled teak cabinet.

Decades ago my mother had sewed my ivory satin wedding dress on it. Then she sewed three hundred pearls onto the front of the bodice, by hand. She also designed and created three pink bridesmaids’ gowns, copying HRH Princess Anne’s bridal style after her Westminster Abbey nuptials. Her magnum opus, that wedding.

“It’s a superior model,” the woman said, stroking the teak cabinet with her fingertips.

“Yes, she maintained it fastidiously; she sewed all her life. Only six weeks ago Mum shortened a beige cashmere skirt. She was less than five feet in height. Nothing bought in the fashion shops would fit,” I said.

My mother had fallen, broken her leg and never recovered. She was eighty, “a good innings,” people said, as if she’d played cricket.

The woman said, “Our charity runs community classes and sewing is now very popular. They’ll be so grateful for this machine.”

I wheeled the cabinet towards the door. The castors bumped up against the wooden threshold. One of the teak legs buckled and snapped off with a crack.

Tears welled up and spilled over.

“Don’t worry, our cabinet maker will fix that,” the woman said, laying her hand gently on my arm. “We are very grateful for your mother’s treasured machine.”

I wiped my eyes and together we eased the wobbling unit into the hallway.

The cabinet’s door swung open and banged against the wall, startling us both.

A paper carrier bag tumbled onto the floor, spilling out jagged remnants. Pink satin, an unfinished lace-edged handkerchief, and a two-inch-deep strip of beige cashmere, followed by a trickle of small pearls.

I picked up the cashmere.

It smelled of Mum.

 

 

One Girl from 1972 to 1973

Seventeen was a kaleidoscope. We were backlit by TV screens filled with Vietnam heartbreak and Watergate trust-break. 

I chafed being under my mother’s wing, shrugging off her protective arm when crossing a street. I bristled at her every word.  But when she went away to help one of my older sisters who had given birth, I ached for her.

Fear of looking un-cool constrained me. I didn’t ride my brother’s bike all over town anymore, button my coat or wear a hat in the cold, act in the play (ridiculed by my class), talk to anyone “weird,” or act like I cared. But I had my license, and got to drive sometimes. I knew the soundtracks from West Side Story, Camelot, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and belted them out them when nobody else was home. I liked some of the weird kids. And I did care.

My first boyfriend had broken up with me after junior prom; that soreness lingered like a ghost. I went out with other guys, lukewarm about most of them. I didn’t risk rejection by pursuing the ones I really liked. I disdained marriage and motherhood as primary aims. But I still adored babies, and hoped for love, romance, and clear skin.

My mother, aunts, sisters, cousins, and neighbors were traditional wives and mothers. That didn’t inspire me. Female wasn’t the number one slot in our immediate culture. Career? Rare. Speaking out? Dismissed. Independence? “Honey, how are you going to do that? (Chuckle, chuckle.)” I was resigned, and angry. Still, I basked in the support and the sunny funniness of women, and loved them. Loved the men too.

Seventeen was tender-skinned, with elation and despair all in the same week. It was sweaty palms before a test, a sentimental heart pitter-pattering around a cute boy, and eternal minutes on classroom clocks. It was thinking the future was Friday night. It was thinking you knew it all. It was not thinking.

Then, I was pieces of who I would become. Now, all my pieces still contain who I was when I was 17.

 

 

The Week of June 26th to July 2nd

When I was 17, one Saturday I inscribed, “Here are three poems I wrote. They don’t express what I feel.” I elaborated, “My aim wasn’t that. It was to write more maturely using symbols and images.” I could not help adding, “I feel really unsure.”

 
1.
Through pools of water I walk
My past fading away in the ripples of time
The farther I walk
The closer I get to the dry sand
Where the empty shells preside.
I cannot walk fast,
The water is too deep
But it does not matter.
I have time enough
To make it to the other side
Before the sun goes down
And leaves me with the fleeting ripples
And the dry sand.
 
2.
The little green car
That took me to the supermarket
The movies
The winter clearance sale
The free painting lessons
And the French restaurant
Has been replaced by
A long black one.
 
3.
They listened
As the words came flooding out
And ran over my lap
Onto the floor.
They stared
As my voice
Crept higher and higher up my throat
And grasped onto me
And cut me off
So I could speak no more
And then they looked away.
 
 
This Short Take is an excerpt from the author’s upcoming book, White Snake Diary: Exploring Self-Inscribers, due out April 10, 2020 from Atmosphere Press.
 

 

No Mistake at All

I was in Memphis, Tennessee visiting my adored grandmother, Mama Mamie, for a few weeks during summer vacation. It was rare for us to leave her little hometown for a shopping excursion in the big city.

After a few hours of power shopping, we were burning up in the blistering heat. So we took a break in a lovely city park – pink azaleas like cotton candy spinning circles around magnificent magnolias. I was enchanted; magnolia trees didn’t thrive in Michigan, where I grew up.

It was the quiet that caught my attention. I was watching an ant crawl around the toe of my white sandal carrying an impossible load before it disappeared in a crack at the base of the drinking fountain. The water was refreshing. Much cooler than I expected, so I took a second drink. From that head-upside-down vantage point, I saw Mama Mamie’s chunky-heeled church shoes drawing close. I stood up and swallowed the water.

In her pale pink suit, she looked like a Popsicle about to melt in the brutal sun. A steady line of little kids waited patiently to get a turn on the slide. I heard a few giggles. Mama Mamie placed a weathered arm around my shoulders, her sweet lavender fragrance mingling uneasily with the smell of many close-up bodies. She guided me towards the shade of a live oak tree, but I was still clueless until I saw it – another drinking fountain. A fountain for white people like us.

Okay. No harm done. Jim Crow raising his ugly head. That’s all.

No need to feel embarrassed. Humiliated. Rattled. A simple mistake. That’s all.

Giggling rose again from a crowd of cute kids.

I took a deep breath and climbed back into my white skin.

 

Short Takes: Arts and Crafts

Persimmon Tree was founded by women who deeply felt the almost total exclusion of women over sixty from a place in the artistic canon. Women of our age – even more than women generally – found it almost impossible to get their work published, displayed, or promoted. This issue of Persimmon Tree – a summer fest of the art, crafts and artistry of women in their sixties, seventies and beyond – is a tribute both to the artists and to Persimmon Tree’s original editors, women themselves, brave – and foolhardy enough to decide that, if no one else would publish women like us, then we would just have to do it ourselves.

And if this issue is to be a summer festival of the arts, it must be the theme of Short Takes this time around as well. We purposely left the invitation to the Short Takes contributors general: write a short piece, we pretty much said, on whatever facet of the arts interests you at the moment. Tell us whatever about the arts you’d like us to know. And we got, as you will discover when you read on, a delightful, distinguished and most variegated assortment of prose and poetry.

There is, however, a sub-theme that unites many of these pieces. It is not just the public that discounts the talent of women over sixty. We ourselves share that perception a little bit. Even as we aspire to become better writers, painters, weavers, composers, we question our abilities, our talents, our right to a room, or a publication, of one’s own. It is not surprising, perhaps, given the world we came of age in – the world we still live in – that we who were first into the second great wave of feminism have nonetheless not escaped entirely the view others have of us. As this issue attests, however, they – and we — are so wrong about us.

But, at least it makes for an exceptional batch of Short Takes. I invite you to enjoy…

柿

 

 

Memory Quilt

I didn’t often venture past my courtyard the first few months after my husband died.

Somehow, that crisp spring morning, I pushed myself out the door thinking it would do me good to get some fresh air. As I took to the walking trails, the cheerful chirping of the songbirds and the faint scent of pine trees slowly reawakened my senses.

The Pine Hills community where I lived was sponsoring a crafts fair on the village green. I meandered through the fair with little enthusiasm, but was drawn to an Etsy booth that featured striking colorful quilts with contemporary designs. I struck up a conversation with the two men who ran the booth. Henry designed the quilts and his partner Brian sewed them. Inspired by their creativity, an idea took hold of me. I asked if they could make a memory quilt from men’s ties. Before I knew it, I was telling them about my husband Dick, our lives together and how he had recently died from glioblastoma. The tears that previously had not left my house, flowed freely. Brian shared that his first husband had also died of glioblastoma. We hugged and cried together. I spent much of the afternoon at their booth, where they provided me with a chair, a box of tissues and warm understanding.
Later that week Brian and Henry came to pick up the materials. Since Dick had worn a tie to work every day, I was able to provide them with a multitude of ties and shirts. They reassured me they would have enough to make five quilts, one for myself and one for each of my children. I pulled out a tie I had bought my husband for our anniversary that had the Hebrew words “Ani L’dodi V’Dodi Li” – “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine” – from the Song of Songs. The wedding rings we exchanged 42 years ago bore this inscription as well. I asked them to incorporate that tie into my quilt.

On delivery day, I was astounded to see an incredibly beautiful butterfly design.

“You totally surpassed my expectations! We raised butterflies, photographed butterflies and they were a very important symbol in our lives. How did you know?“

“When we saw your house we sensed your love of nature and butterflies. Working with your husband’s shirts and ties, we could feel his love and compassion and it spoke to us and this design came to mind.”

The quilt is draped over the couch in my living room. People often comment, “It is a work of art. Why don’t you hang it on the wall to display?” But I like to wrap up in it every night and feel the love and cherished memories it holds.

Quilt
 

 

Thirty-one Syllables

My father sits at the wrought-iron patio table, sumi-e brush in hand. He dips the brush into the ink well, staring out at the persimmon tree and beyond.

The windfall of rotting persimmon has wafted through the air and drawn teeming wildlife. Last Saturday, a sea of iridescent Junebugs appeared, splashing their Orient splendor on the floor of our yard in a liquid current of metallic blues and greens. It is our first attempt at banana squash and they are thriving; some have grown two feet long and thicker than a sumo wrestler’s arm.

My father refuses to spray the banana squash. Instead, he sets a few choice ones on sawn pieces of two-by-four beams. The rest he leaves for the hoards of insects that have magically appeared. He seems pleased.

Is he reliving a time when there was not enough to feed the family? Is there solace in this scene where, as with unleavened bread in an earlier time, there is enough for all? Do the iridescent beetles count among the syllables of my father’s poems?

He leaves the fallen persimmons where they lie. Is it age or is there some hidden intention behind his action?

My father pushes the block of chalk to and fro, in unison with his breathing. It is a meditation practice, to empty the mind. What syllables is he contemplating? Is he recalling the time when he patiently waited as his older brothers crossed the Pacific in steerage, one by one, to join their father in America? At last his turn. In his passport photo, he looks sad for a young teenager. Sorrow must have been his companion while crossing the ocean alone, leaving behind his mother and all he had known.

 

When the fruit trees start crowding one another’s canopy, my father is reluctant to uproot one of them. He says the shock may be too extreme and the tree may not recover. Instead he prunes the branches and the trees lace together in a natural embrace.

My father is a man of few words. Is it his training in tanka that makes it so?

Is he counting syllables when he speaks to me? Silence is full of loud exclamations.

His sumi-e ink forms characters across the rice paper. Five lines, standing in formation by syllable count: 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7.

It takes a poet, meditating as he prepares ink from a block of charcoal, to sweep aside the distractions of rushing traffic, flying e-mails, and chirping cell phones, to once again see that which is only visible to the eye and the senses.

I see the thin line of economy threading through the natural world. There is precision and eternity in the count. Tanka is a centuries-old long tradition, intended to capture all that is hidden in nature.

He listens to nature’s measured whisperings, while softly, steadily, counting, counting, counting…

TakayukiHattoriPoems2
Poetry by Takayuki Hattori.

 

 

Teapot

TeaContainer

I used to collect teapots, when I still collected things. You can tell my favorites by the depth of the brown stain within. They say not to wash that out, not to use soap or scrub aggressively because the tannins build up and contribute to the flavor, like memories.

My favorite pot was a gift from my husband Marc. It is ceramic, a full eight cups, with a beautiful spout. He bought it at one of those crafty shops where you pick out the object you want, decorate it yourself and have it fired. He bought it for me during a dark time in my life and painted it cream with six bunches of blue daisies and yellow daffodils climbing up the sides. The leafy stems dance around the circumference and a ring of green leaves adorns the lid hallowed by a blue daisy at the center of the knob. I see this teapot every morning, on the shelf above my vitamins, and I use it when people come over, or when I am sick and need to brew a big pot. In this teapot I always use Swee-Touch-Nee tea bags stored in the red, gold and black metal manufacturer’s tin given to me by my father 35 years ago, still shiny with its neat rectangular lid. It was a Passover gift.

Each spring, in my father’s memory, I buy a fresh paper box of 100 Swee-Touch-Nee tea bags and put them in the tin. They make a good strong black tea, fine either with milk or lemon and honey, good at any time of day. A hamish cup of tea, like my father.

Inside, the teapot is dark with tannin stains. I give it a good rinse and let them be, ignoring the urge to scrub. I do the same now, 12 years after my father’s death, with some memories of him. Those still need to steep a while longer.
 

 

William Owen

Every Saturday afternoon, I waited for William Owen. Bent over his walker, he shuffled in at exactly ten minutes before the hour and sat in the fourth row, third seat from the right. He weighed less than a sack of potatoes. Unlike many of his classmates, he never fell asleep. At attention, his eyes wide behind thick glasses, the film class was his manna. He spoke once in four years. After Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven, William Owen’s voice exploded like an unplugged pipe. “That was beautiful,” he said. He never missed a session. On the Saturdays I felt exhausted, I thought of William Owen dragging down the aisle with his walker.

Then, his name wasn’t on the fall enrollment list. I stumbled through my first lecture without him. The Activities Director assured me that William Owen was alive. “He’s very fragile. He’s 89 years old,” she said.

By now the film class had over 100 people in it, but no one came every week. No one held on to my words. Without William Owen, I felt adrift and despondent.

 

Thinking vigorous exercise would help, I signed up at a gym and drove to the mall for workout clothes. A small store tucked down one aisle caught my attention. Surfing posters brightened the black walls, and the floor boasted a five-pointed star gone psychedelic.

I reached for a hot pink tee shirt blazing “Bitch” in white sequins and chuckled. A young man walked towards me, his long legs squeezed into black leather pants. His left hand gripped a cell phone. I shoved the tee shirt back on the rack. I felt too old to be in the store.

Dyed black hair swung over one eye. He stared at me with the other. “Did you teach Poetry?”

I nodded. That was five or six years ago.

“I was in your class. Great class.”

He didn’t look familiar even with five earrings in his right ear.

“I didn’t dress quite like this.” He gave a boyish grin.

Then I saw him – he had been clean-cut in rumpled shirts and khakis. The last class, he shyly handed me his CD: jazzy rock with good lyrics.

“Of course. Still writing?”

“Well, it’s mostly music now, which is great, but …”

“But?”

“There’s something about writing just poetry, you know?”

He had struggled at first. By his last poem, a letter to his father, he eloquently argued to end their long-standing conflict. The students had clapped like crazy when he finished reading aloud.

In the Poetry class, words had been important, and now I wanted to give this young man a whirligig of wisdom.

“Gotta get back,” he said. “I’m the manager. Just seeing you inspires me.” He put out his hand. I shook it and he quickly left. Words weren’t necessary; I had been his William Owen.
 

 

Intentions

As distinguished from crafts, those myriad Girl Scout and grammar school projects – lanyards, felt ladybug pincushions, lace doily hearts pasted on red construction paper, art with a capital “A” is found in museums and galleries. As a teenager I adorned my jeans with embroidery and ribbons sewn on the hems. I carted dusty misshapen lumps with wicks home from the beach, sand candles with unstable bottoms whose rivers of muddy purple and red wax marred the top of my dresser.

My daughters and I, on a spa vacation the week between Christmas and New Year’s, search for things to do together. What can we all enjoy – three women, 17, 26 and 62? We sign up for the craft offerings.

In the art studio we sift through mounds of colored beads, filling paper plates with our choices in glass, plastic, metal and ceramic. Patterns emerge – shades of blue, of black, white and silver, earth tones for me.

We don’t speak of my older daughter’s heartbreak, how her partner of five years left while she was at work. I don’t ask my younger daughter what colleges she applied to or about her last test scores. Yet these are the reasons we are here.

We sit across from one another at a rickety card table. We trade beads, offering them up like hors d’oeuvres. We string them on stretchy cords to make bracelets, which we will wear all week, rattling our wrists at one another.

Between exercise classes, meals, and spa treatments, we shape lumps of clay and affix yarn to boards sticky with beeswax.

 

Our last afternoon, we fashion prayer wands. We write our intentions for the New Year on slips of paper to be wrapped around sticks, then covered in yarn. We select feathers, charms, and herbs to dangle from the end.

“Some guests plant their sticks on the trail for a stranger to find,” says the man who guides us. “Or you can take yours home. The process is what matters and your intention.”

We sip hot cocoa with cinnamon and nibble sweet tamales. We share balls of yarn and advice – how to switch colors, how to attach the crackly spray of pungent herbs.

I ask my younger daughter what she wrote.

“That’s private,” she says.

“Yeah, Mom,” says the other, taking her sister’s side.

But her eyes are soft as she passes me the scissors. I flew across the country when her girlfriend left – when my daughter, who so rarely asks for anything, let me help her move.

At week’s end we pack. My older daughter lays her prayer wand on the coffee table. It won’t fit in her luggage. Now it sits in my office, alongside mine. I don’t remember what I wrote on that slip of paper, hidden beneath rings of blue, green and gold yarn.

Yet I know my intentions, for my daughters and for myself.
 

 

Arts & Crafts

I saw the handmade craft show sign in front of the old red community center by the shore of the lake. On impulse, I pulled into the gravel driveway, making my way between raindrops and puddles up the rickety stairs, into the building.

Years ago, when I first moved here and was furnishing a brand new home, the theme of the decade was “country” style, and I embraced it fully. What a treasure trove I found throughout the area – small cottages turned into gift shops, brimming with lace curtains, schoolhouse clocks, goose statues with ribbons around their necks, dried floral wreaths, homemade soaps, dipped candles.

On any given day, I could be found traveling from town to town, ducking into shops, reaping the abundance of handwoven tapestries, fluffy stuffed sheep, Halloween figurines perched on cabinet ledges. I brought these treasures back to the house, surrounding myself with the lofty ambition of making a home.

We built a family there. Though the house was new, its paint still fresh and carpet yet shedding from installation, the life inside was ancient, the essence of family that stretches back generations. Traditions, holidays, the aroma of roasts in the oven, windows steaming from baking and boiling, sounds reverberating up one story and back down, a house that breathed, sighed, groaned with life.

My childhood goal, to live in a house long enough to be able to find my way around in the dark, had come to fruition. The walls embraced me as I wandered in the moonlight, fingers touching the smooth banister, feet remembering the creak in each stair. Only the cat came out of the shadows, an escort as the rest of the house breathed steadily, slowly, given into dreams.

We watched our daughter bloom and grow, hands upon piano keys, tennis rackets, telephones, then, finally, clutching diplomas and awards, heading east to school. Her room a shrine: her teddy bear, Toby, still sitting on her pillow, waiting for her return, resignation in his button eyes. At dawn, I often walked into her empty room, sat at her desk, watched the sun peek over the rooftops, trying to feel her, so many miles away, then turned and strolled down the stairs, another day in an empty nest.

The animals remained. Stoic, loyal, captives behind locked doors, children who never grew up. I buried my face in their soft fur and breathed in the memories of so many days and nights behind these green shutters. Even now I hear the piano, and the barking of the slaphappy dogs as they careened around the wood floors, sliding and lunging, a carnival of noise, the echoes heralding change, a new dance card.

 

We left that house one day in August. Such heat that day, the movers begged to arrive at dawn. Like turtles, we carried our memories on our backs, up and into new closets, cabinets, and drawers, familiar yet foreign, settling in like goslings to our new nest. The animals didn’t question. They simply went along, rejoicing in a new yard, a new house, never looking back or morose. The gift of living in the moment transported them in and out of cardboard boxes as though they were taking the Grand Tour.

Our daughter was grown up and long gone. Married and busy, she was no longer around as we unpacked our things and tried to make sense of the new, barren garden and the quiet evenings, the piano gone with her, silence filling the rooms, our aging faces reflected in the windows.

We touched the calendar in surprise as the pages crumbled beneath our fingers, day passing day so quickly it was stunning. In the early hours, we spoke of golden years, and retirement, trips abroad, grandchildren, as we sipped our coffee and stretched out on the couch.

Then came the darkness, a lesion to the brain so swift and so merciless we hardly had time to understand that it planned to take him like a pirate and bury him by the sea.

 

And so today, I walked around the old wooden building, and the craft show. It smelled the same, of old attics and sweet caramels, knit caps and tallow. The floors were uneven, my feet braced as though on the ocean, keeping balance as I wandered from booth to booth. For a moment, I felt as though it were twenty years ago, the wares still so familiar, ageless handiwork, the murmur of the crowd softly reverberating against the dusty walls.

I gently touched a windowpane. The last time I peered through the glass, he was here on this earth. Alive, and healthy. He was here the last time I walked on these creaking, splintered floors. I touched the doorframe, and an old table in the corner. He had still been here, waiting at home for me to walk in, the dogs swirling about me like fish, splitting the air with their happy barks. I breathed in the moment, pretended he breathed with me and whispered, “It once was. It was so.”

I stepped back down the stairs, and into the wind, rain tracing my cheek like tears. I drove across the potholes and ruts back out to the road, trusting the car would find its way home.
 

 

Naked in the Mall

I wasn’t really naked as I shuffled, haltingly
around the outdoor art display in Cherry Chase.
And yet – my painting, my naked self,
hung in startling view on the walkway
for all to ogle, make fun of, deride.
 
Cheeks burned in unaccustomed blush.
Afraid to look full on, I focused sideways,
stealing quick-dissolving glances,
hovered well in back of other strollers
who might be eyeing with the thought of buying.
 
Wait – someone’s stopped to take a closer look.
OMG, I’ve got to flee. No, stay. See as a fresh eye sees:
a large canvas splayed in triangular shapes running amok
with brooms and brushes – paired in descending size –
aggressive push broom to intimate toothbrush.
 
Its background industrial green, horizontal pipe running through.
The floor wide-planked, weary, ending before it should.
Paint brush handle mis-attached, another homage to Cezanne.
A scruffy feeling over all: how over-used the hairbrush looks,
how bruised the slyly pointing dish brush handle.
 
Oops! It’s spilling off the canvas in search of privacy.
Of course it craves privacy: Blatantly sexual, erotic as hell.
Might as well be a poem by Anne Sexton with all its flaunting.
Look how flirtatious the broom shoulder,
how macho the scrub brush postures.
 
Shoe brush insouciant, curved, lying in wait to be seduced.
Even the zigzag netting of the whisk broom bespeaks action.
This painting is no twisted take on domesticity
swamped by the detritus of daily living.
Male and Female Created He Them its title.