NETWORKING SKILLS by Kathryn Spencer-Licht

1969 was the best year of my life. I was fifteen years old. It’s when I first became aware that I was well liked. I knew how to make friends, and lot’s of them. It’s when I knew I’d always have friends.

The skills I had developed by then, are the best skills I have even now. Everyone went to school with a girl like me. You didn’t observe me at the desk, raising my hand with the answers when the questions were asked. There was hardly a sighting of me in class at all. I had better things to do with my time. Much more important things.

When entering the girls’ room, right off the gymnasium, I was the girl at the sink. I was the ‘meet and greet person’ with all the hot gossip about everyone in school. I was the girl you’d confide in, and go to for advice…the original Ann Landers. Ann Landers with dirty jokes, and card tricks.

I would teach you what really mattered, like, how to smoke, and how to look sexy lighting a cigarette. I did everyone’s hair and makeup, and maybe their nails. I’d have you go inside the stall, stuff your bra with toilet paper, and roll up your skirt. “Make it a mini-skirt. Take off those stupid knee socks. Never stuff your bra with knee socks. It looks fake.”

I thought of myself as a mentor. I looked after everyone. I cared about them, and they knew it. When the girls got talked about, I’d tell them what was said, and who said it. We’d hold court in that girls’ room, and decide how to carry out our revenge accordingly, and always with an audience. We made examples out of them.

In time, lots of girls followed my rules. Rule #1: “Never date the boys from here. They all have big mouths. And whether you’ve done anything with them or not, they always tell everyone that you did, so don’t go out with them. Don’t even talk to them if you can avoid it, but be nice about it. Buy yourself a guy’s ring, and say that you have a boyfriend in the next town. Tell those ‘big mouthed’ boys, he’ll beat you up if you talk about me.” It always worked.

I also knew all the kids with the cars. You’d think we ran a taxi service, the way we’d transport all those pretty girls to the next town to meet the exciting, mysterious boys in Franklin, Ohio, a town with a zip code! A place where anything could happen!

Forty years later, we still keep in touch. We often write and call each other, referring to 1969, and how nothing has ever topped it since then. They’re all still in Ohio, and I’m here in New York, still giving them marvellous advice!

DO YOU, MR. JONES? by Mel Rosenthal

Something is happening, and you
Don't know what it i-i-is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?

This old Bob Dylan song, dating from sometime in the sixties, is one I haven't thought of for lo, these many years. I don't recall it getting all that much play or attention even when it first appeared, but, at least in retrospect, it could well be considered a sort of counter-cultural anthem, the expression of a distinctive conflict between generations. While nothing is said explicitly about Mr. Jones's age or stage of life, as an embodiment of the archetypal square he is clearly middle-aged, like the parents of the young and hip whose words and actions so mystify him. And for myself at the time (and since), a key question was: Where exactly did I stand in relation to this generational conflict? And the truthful answer: somewhere in the middle. In spirit I could say, or at least tell myself, I was on the side of the hip young, sharing in their amused scorn for someone so clueless, so irredeemably lacking in awareness. In terms of how I actually lived, however -- working at a 9-to-5 job in an office cubicle for one or another publishing firm, living alone in a small studio apartment, spending many weekends visiting my father in the arch-middle-class suburbia of northern New Jersey, and, perhaps most unhiply, suffering from social awkwardness and sexual inhibitions -- I was forced to concede that I had far more in common with Mr. Jones.

A small incident: I was returning to the City after one of my periodic weekends in New Jersey with my father, wearing a suit and carrying an attache case, and a young guy, presumptively hip, yelled at me from the window of a passing car, "White-collar fascist!" (True, he said it with a smile.) As it happened, the attache case contained chiefly soiled underwear from my weekend visit.

THE FOOL by Dermot McGuigan

Once again, I wake from the nightmare of being trapped in a vortex of water emptying down a black hole - I strain away but cannot escape. I want so much to be back under the sheltering tree, to see again the stars and feel the breeze on my face ... and that dream has gone.

Mother has brought me to the entrance to the schoolyard, framed on three sides by the red brick school and on the fourth side by a long concrete lean-to shed. It is cold, austere. Next to me a boy stands crying, clinging to his mother. I cross the empty yard alone and enter the school for the first time.

I know none of the other boys. My friends go to a different school. These boys speak with a different accent. We must sit still at our desks, all day. At our break we march in columns in the courtyard as teacher shouts “left, right; left, right” in Irish. I ask teacher questions, he is angry, saying: “You do not ask questions, I ask - you answer.”

Teacher has a strap made of stitched layers of leather. The first time teacher uses his leather he takes the small hand in his and unrolls the boys’ fingers with his thumb. The boys’ eyes are wide and watery. Teacher slaps the opened palm. Above teacher, high on the front classroom wall stands the Virgin Mary in a glass case. She looks serenely out over the class. Under her heel, the Virgin crushes the neck of a snake; the jaws of the snake are open, its fangs are white, its mouth bright red. The Virgin is oblivious to the pain of the snake she is crushing.

We chant our times tables. Teacher writes on his blackboard, and every now and again he silently swirls around flinging the chalk stick into the class of fifty boys. He says we must pay attention. Tiring of the chalk he flings the duster until a boy’s forehead is cut open on the wooden block, blood runs down the boys face from above his eye.

Long days, hypnotic with stultification, broken by the sing-song of other classes reciting alphabets and tables, and the echoing lashes down the long corridors as an infuriated teacher works his leather on an open hand. I count the lashes, six, twelve, on each hand.

I ask mother “Can I go to the school my friends go to, I don’t like this school.” Her response, when I ask again is no, adding that father also went to a Christian Brother’s school and I am to stay there, that it is a good school. Months pass. One day teacher calls me to the head of the classroom saying he has a task for me to do. He chooses me out of all the other boys in the class. I am excited and fearful. Teacher says it is a very important task.

He tells me to go to another classroom and ask for the round square for drawing triangles, saying to be sure to remember the correct order of the words. The words are meaningless and difficult to remember.

In the long corridor there are tall doors to one side, high windows on the other. I knock on the classroom door. A teacher opens the door and listens to my request. The boys in his classroom are older. He tells me to come in and to say out loud what I have come for. I ask for the round square for triangles.

A few of the boys giggle, others laugh. I don’t know why they laugh? He tells me to say out louder what I have come for. More boys laugh. The teacher shakes his head and says he does not have it, that I should go back to my class.

I return empty handed. Teacher tells me to go to another class and ask again. In one of the classes I hear the word ‘fool’. And so it went, class by class, not all the classes in the school but many.

Walking alone in the long corridors I feel hopeless. I am not special, I am a failure. At one point teacher has me repeat what I am asking for and boys in my class laugh, something has changed, something about me must be wrong.

Finally, teacher dismisses me, sends me back to my seat. Nothing further is said about the instrument, and he does not ask another boy to get it. I have failed. Each day I wait, expecting teacher to ask another boy to go for the important instrument. I wait for three weeks as resistance settles in me. I speak of my failure to no one, not at school, not to mother or father. I must hide that I am a fool.

Teacher marches us in the concrete schoolyard, shouting “left, right.” To his ‘left’ I step to the right. I fear and hate him. I give him nothing, I stop doing homework; I roll my eyeballs at him in contempt. And then the lashes begin, red-faced and angry. As the thick strap hits the open palm the shock ricochets within. I do not give him tears, I show him nothing of the pain. Afterwards both hands are numb, then a throbbing pain begins and slowly moves out.

The days pass with my barest compliance so as to avoid being sent to the reform school. Teacher tells us of reform school, where the disobedient and the truant are sent. I daydream that the headmaster announces that we have five minutes to destroy the school. Over and over I imagine myself smashing the windows and in my fantasy I smash the most, I have a plan.

Nine years later the annual school report suggests I be removed from the school, that I will not pass the intermediate exam.

More than four decades later sitting with mother, I finally tell her what happened that day and that, with hindsight, I assume it was April 1st., when I was six. Mother, once again, tells of how she nearly lost a finger when she was a child and that in those days there was privation and pain, real pain.

Another day I tell father the story. He knew nothing of it, he is saddened and says: “That was cruel!”

LIVING THE STORY: THAT’S THE HARD THING by Daniel Marshall

The subway. A group of friends. Front of the first car, behind the cab where the engineer sits. I’m carrying sheaves of papers. I lay them on the floor and sing to a little boy who stands among us—something sweet and instructive like “Tommy Lad” or “Danny Boy”. Not my son, but the son of a friend. When I leave, passengers clap, and I collect my papers from the floor, but incoming passengers flood the car as the door opens, treading on my sheaves of papers. They know nothing of me.

I totter to the bathroom trying to focus and clear my eyes of sleep. After reading, I return to our darkened bed and strive to drift again toward trance and dream and the unpleasantness of sleep. I wonder whether I’ll lie awake as sometimes I do thinking of Elizabeth’s departure, Arthur’s cruelties. Wondering is mother to the thought. Besides a prayer, I know only to call my senses to attention upon the moment, scanning our environment for simple sounds of traffic and machines that might distract, smells of sleep and night air that’s been filtered through the air conditioner, eyes shut awareness of our dark room, and the soft pressure of latex through wool pad and pillow cover and of cotton in sheet and coverlet.

I reach into space and touch Dee, who stirs after a moment. We closed our eyes at bedtime touching each other. After a few minutes, I felt her withdraw her hand and turn. Later, I woke. Last night’s “Bachelorette” episode comes to mind, and my still near-dreaming thoughts are about love. I remember from the Bachelorette episode an enamored, infatuated look that this bachelorette gave somber Wes, who sang country songs to her, accompanying himself with a guitar—but we viewers suspect him to be a quiet and reserved bad boy, a type to which she’s said she’s vulnerable. We suspect there’s something that he’s not telling her. I touch Dee and take her hand, and a wave of utter grief and sorrow, shame and guilt sweeps over and through me for all the dreams and loves that I have lost, stopped pursuing, or failed to win—from an engineering degree to the women I’ve courted. No one shared the dreams. They flower alone. Thought returns of one great culminated passion—my eight-year marriage with Elizabeth. Of how, many times, she looked enamored, infatuated into Arthur’s eyes—as numerous times before she had into mine before meandering away, fickle in a hard time, from me to him. I force my mind to return to Dee and fall asleep.

“More powerful than a Google search, friendlier than a wiki, and the best natural language processor on the market.” This is how Erica Olsen, the founder of Librarian Avengers, has characterized librarians. The words cross my mind. Another day calls this librarian avenger to move mountains and accomplish the impossible, which with interruptions takes a little longer than immediately. Grim smile at this humor that has flickered through myself. A hook, upon which to hang grit, with which to climb from bed.

I am standing, late at night again, under fluorescent light on the subway platform at 34^th Street. Trains shriek as they brake and start. I have just done the dangerous thing that I regularly have done and maybe shouldn’t—scanned my surroundings to ascertain that I am by myself, planted my feet, and gingerly leaned over the track to see whether a train is approaching. Not yet. On the platform people hover; they walk, talk, stand at the booth that recently after a couple of years was re-opened, where a man sells newspapers, candy, and glaring popular magazines that display pictures of shapely pumped, barely clad flesh and muscles and contain articles about how to change one’s image and attract lovers.

I acknowledge what I have and don’t of muscles and attraction; and the thought comes that I am to love faithfully regardless. I embrace the thought, committing determinedly to it; and for doing so I feel calmer and more present to these lights, this platform, this moment. I pray silently.

A TIME CUT OFF FROM TIME by DeAnn Louise Daigle

That’s how it felt when I went to Fran’s place out in Mattituck on Long Island. We did whatever she felt like doing or we did nothing at all. I ran a few errands for her or defrosted her little refrigerator. It was our time together and as the end grew closer, she told me how much she looked forward to my coming on the weekends.

There was no knowing how long Fran would live after she renounced the chemo and radiation. The pain grew bolder and she fed herself her own meds. Fiercely independent, she maintained control for as long as she could. Hospice grew tired of her calling them. She was afraid of being alone, I’m sure. She knew I’d come whenever she wanted me to, but she would send me away too – wanting me to go back to the city. She’d be okay.

“Let me know,” I’d tell her. “You know I’ll come.” I used up all my sick time and personal days from work and I was hoping to hang on to my vacation days. But, I had those for her as well if she wanted and needed me to come out to her.

I guess I’ll always feel I could have done more, I should have gone out there to be with her, but I needed my job too.

Because she wasn’t a close enough relative I couldn’t take a leave of absence to be with her. But, I would have stayed anyway if she needed me to. She didn’t want me. She kept saying, she was saving me for later.

But, the weekends were ours. I grew to looking forward to spending time with Fran. She was easy to be with. She probably held back on her meds so that she’d be alert enough for us to go riding. She had to give up her driving – a really big deal, but she did it. She was brave and so dear. I drove her van. We went to the shore – the sound, the bay, and on good days and when Jim was free to come, we went to the South Fork to see the ocean.

I tweaked her big toe. “I’ll see you soon, Baby Doll,” were my last words to her when Jim and I left the hospital on Sunday. I spoke with her briefly on Monday. “I love you very much,” I told her on Monday afternoon. “Who said that?” She responded on the other end of the line. “DeAnn,” I said. “Tell her I love her very much too.” “I will,” I said. She was confused from all the morphine, I knew.

On Tuesday morning I called her. “I can’t talk right now,” she said. “I’ll call later, Sweetie,” I said. When I called she was asleep.

On Wednesday, I waited and called the nurses’ station when I knew they would have checked in on her. “She’s resting comfortably.” “Thank you,” I said.

At 11:20 A.M., Dr. Emanuele called, “Fran went to heaven at 11 this morning.”

ALMOST FIVE by Ruth Berg

I was four, almost five, too young to start school in Texas. There were no public nursery or kindergarten classes in Texas. Public school began at six years old. My grandmother, Mam-ma, was living at our house out on Bridle Path. She was in charge of my sister, Bah, and me. Mother was in the hospital; Dad was away auditing some out-of-state insurance company.

Mam-ma worked at Billy Richardson’s Hardware Store on Congress Ave. in Austin. She was in charge of buying crystal, china, pots, pans,utensils...all the things for dining and cooking. Bah was enrolled at Pease Elementary School. Then there was me. What to do with me? The answer was “Send her to kindergarten at St. David’s.”

St. David’s sits on a high hill up the street from the Driscoll Hotel. As you drive up to the church, there is the feeling of approaching an ancient fortress. A long flight of stone steps lead up to a landing. Turn to the left and heavy doors open onto a small vestibule clothed in dark wood paneling. Through another set of doors lies the church’s dark interior with bits of sunlight pushing its way through the stained glass windows. It was here I was to be deposited for the year, Monday through Friday, from 8:30 to 12:30.

The weekday routine began with Mam-ma up and cooking breakfast; Bah and I dressing. Artie, the handyman who worked and drove the car for us, would arrive, have breakfast out on the back steps. After breakfast, there was a rush to get teeth brushed, hair neatened. Then we piled into the car, Artie behind the wheel with me seated beside him, Mam-ma and Bah in the back seat. Artie would start the car, slowly back out onto the gravel road. We travelled along Bridle Path, turned right on Enfield Road then on to Pease Elementary where Bah hopped out of the car. From there, we drove on to Congress Ave. and 6^th Street where Mam-ma would say “goodbye”. Then it was up the hill to St. Davids. Artie would park the car in front of the stone steps, get out of the car. He would come to the passenger door, say “Time to go to school, Miss Ruth.” And every day, every week, I would linger in the car, a churning in my stomach. Artie would open the door, take my hand and help me out. Slowly, we would trudge up the steep stone steps, Artie still holding my hand. At the top of the stairs, I would pull up my knee high socks that were bunching around my ankles. The bells of St Mary’s would ring out and the bells of St. David’s would answer. Once Mother had said that the bells of St. Mary’s and St. David’s spoke to each other saying “Good morning. How are you?”

Artie would slowly guide me to the kindergarten class promising to be waiting for me after class. And so went a year of my life.

The Life of the Party by Judith Blanshard

My father was always the life of the party at those summer vacation gatherings of 11 cousins, their parents and the grandparents at the farm in Maine.

The men would often stay up ‘till all hours playing poker or reminiscing, and the sound of their laughter, and wafts of snack food and smoke would drift upwards through the wrought iron grates between floors to the bedrooms, where some of us cousins were stacked up, sharing the crickety carved wooden beds that graced the old bedrooms which overlooked the back and front yards and farm.

My mother, grandmother and aunts could be heard gossiping and laughing as they washed and dried the dishes, or prepared food for the next day, or for “grownups only” at night.

We told stories and the older cousins (myself and Nelson mostly) hatched plans to ambush the younger kids in our “haunted barn”, or made a mental map of explorations we wanted to make in the mud flats or woods behind the chicken coop or up from the bay.

If by chance I managed to stay awake past the noise and into the quieter time when everyone had gone to bed, I used to love listening to the whippoorwills, and peeking out at the moonlit yard and field, where once in awhile, a tentative deer poked its way through the long grass . If I went to the bathroom, I was careful to walk along the long floorboards so as to avoid the creaks and groans of the old house and quickly, in case there were ghosts.