AUTHENTIC WRITING STORIES

LIBRARY BLUES by Bill Herman

2012-01-10T08:55:00.001-08:00

I looked at the County map with increasing anxiety. Would you like me to sit down and find you a route? But I have already forgotten the name of the boulevard. There was a TV show on about the Jones Town massacre.

I sit in Elting Library just off of Main Street in New Paltz, looking out the large green framed windows with a modest hopefulness. The view is distorted by the dirty windows and the glare of the afternoon sun.

The Women in Black who stand up for peace but really aren’t that friendly were just demonstrating on the corner.

Katy Boulevard. I think (and it certainly doesn’t matter) that was the name of the tiny squiggly line in square P-27. But now as often happens when I am under a little stress I am becoming tangential.

A certain number of pretty women pass by the big windows, but what I hope for is the sight of anyone I know, any woman I know. But time has changed and I don’t know very many women in New Paltz anymore, and mostly what I’m looking at is an animated picture of my own loneliness.

If I took it really seriously I would start to feel sorry for myself or at least get really bored. The window is not delivering love to me. Almost all I see is alienation.

I betrayed myself by being too weak. I should have been ten times as strong. I should look out these windows like a king overseeing his domain. Preparing for his next great battle. Calculating his brilliant chess move.

But I know that pretty soon I will just get in my car and drive home.

I stopped and prayed for any incidental thing to save me.

THE OWL by Debby Ogg

2011-12-12T03:53:00.000-08:00

It had been one of those long, exhausting days. There had been several emergencies, people needing assistance immediately, and more than one at a time. It had been the stuff that nightmares are made of, and I had wished to replicate myself or just be able to bi-locate to meet all the needs. But now the day was almost done; just one more visit to make.

It was nearing dusk in late Spring. I raced down the office stairs, knowing I was late for my next appointment. The air was cool, misty, and the peepers were singing their songs. I opened the windows of the car, took a moment for the car to warm up, and inhaled the intoxicating perfume of moist soil and lilac. Senses heightened and brightened, the rhythm of the day slowed down. The sense of urgency evaporated, and driving well below the speed limit, I was open to each sight, each sound, as I crossed the Reservoir bridge.

It was only a hundred feet or so later, that I saw what I thought was a large wing sticking up in the road. My breath caught in my throat. I feared it was an injured hawk. I slowed down to a crawl, not wanting to startle it if it still was alive. I pulled off the road, as much as I could, and jumped out of the car. I hadn’t a thought in my mind. It wasn’t a hawk. It was an owl, lying on its side, its large three-foot wing at an angle in the air.

At that moment, a man came running across the road. He was babbling about how he hadn’t seen the bird, that it had swooped down in front of him, and that he tried to avoid hitting him, but he had. He clearly felt terrible, but his presence seemed to disappear as I approached the bird from behind. It wasn’t moving. Very large, brown and white, I wasn’t certain if it was dead or alive. I placed my hands over him, hovering just a few inches above his body, and felt my hands pulsating. I prayed. I asked Creator to help this suffering creature. I imagined the sweetest love pouring through my hands into his body, into his mind and spirit. I was there for minutes when I felt the need to see him fully.

I moved around to be in front of him, and crouched down. At first I noticed his talons, which were larger than my hands. I looked up into his face, and it was only then that I realized that he was alive. His eyes were bright yellow, very round, blinking slowly, and so very beautiful. He was so very beautiful. He was breathing; he was not struggling. I put my hands over him again, pouring energy into him. I used my breath to connect with the energy all around me, and my hands, hot and electrified, were transmitting it to him. He wasn’t frightened. I don’t know how he communicated that to me, but he did. He took in everything given to him. I felt transported into the world of his spirit.

It was then that a DEC officer pulled up behind me. She was asking me to leave the scene. I hadn’t realized that there was traffic stopped in both directions. She was brusque and she was frightening. I begged her to take care with him, to bring him to Heinz Meng in New Paltz, a raptor rehabber. She said she had orders to follow, and they were none of my concern, and again insisted that I leave, right then.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I left. I never found out what happened to the owl. I was so touched by our moments together, by the way his eyes looked at me, which felt so much like the way I was looking at him, in appreciation, in sadness. It was one of those once in a lifetime encounters. Every day since, I see his face. I pray for his safety wherever he may be. May it be so.

LOYALTY by Nina Garnham

2011-12-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

My mother was every advertiser’s dream because of her unwavering brand loyalty. Here are her brands:

Lucky Strike cigarettes
Tide laundry detergent in powder form
Crest toothpaste
Wonder Bread
Thomas’ English Muffins
Breck Shampoo
Palmolive dish soap
Ajax
Brillo
Mr. Clean
Windex
Maxwell House Coffee
Manishevitz Matzoh’s
Pontiac cars
Minute Maid frozen orange juice
Welch’s Grape Jelly
Skippy Peanut Butter, creamy only
Ritz Crackers

During her lifetime, she only changed a few things. She quit smoking. She stopped buying Wonder Bread. And she started driving Toyotas. Otherwise, her shopping list, a close-knit family, stuck together like lint in the clothes dryer.

My mother demanded complete loyalty according to her strict definitions. When she visited an apartment I had when I was in my early twenties and saw Colgate toothpaste in the bathroom, she took it as a personal affront. “Nina, how could you?” she wondered aloud.

Relatives had to conform to her ideas of loyalty or else she was likely to cut off all communication. Neighbors too. No one could criticize her parents, her brother, or her Uncle Milton. She would enforce these Cold War developments with other family members:

My father was not to see or call his only brother;
We weren’t supposed to call Aunt Florrie or Uncle Joe;
Helen and Zigmunt were out;
We weren’t supposed to go inside Mary Ligouri’s apartment in 2D anymore.

The reasons for these silences were usually unknown to us kids.

I was not immune from the threat of excommunication. “When you were little, you’d go off with anybody,” Mom often lamented, afraid of her 4-year-old’s possible disloyalty so early on. It terrified her.

WRITING ABOUT WRITING by Christina Franke

2011-11-14T07:33:00.001-08:00

Writing about writing, writing as a little girl, before I can read, before I can write anything other than my name, my name, written out in full, painfully, unhappy that it is so, so long, so many letters to write, Maria Christina Franke, but at least not as long as my sister’s name, which still has the hyphenated second last name, Elizabeth Diana Franke-Ruta, the Ruta being a post office mistake, a small town on the Italian Riviera where my grandfather, a man I never met, my father’s father, lived and wrote, taking Franke-Ruta as his pen name, his name still popping up as a minor, very minor German writer of the 1930s.

Writing. My mother in the manic periods of her mental illness writing and writing, the typewriter clicking away as she writes short stories, some about us, about three children who live in Switzerland, the three children she sends to Switzerland to live with the German grandparents, the grandparents who had gotten out of Italy, walked out of an Italian jail in Lucca, the jailers not wanting them, this Jewish woman and her German husband, the writer, letting them walk, the jailers eating lunch in the next room, the cell door unlocked. Mother the writer sends us to Switzerland but we never get there, stopped by her mother at Ernst Stein’s Great Neck house with its white painted wooden paneling, so clean and glossy and beautiful. Writing as a little girl, scribbling lines across the page, just lines of scribble, “Look, Diana, I’m writing.”

Writing, my mother telling me how to write a story so that something that seems so hard is now easy, just tell the story to yourself and then write it, just write it, don’t worry, if you can tell the story, you can write it and I do and the little eight year old story I write about a donkey who did something I no longer remember, the story my mother helps me write, the two of us sitting in the rain drenched summer house in Inverness, the ferns wet and smelling of urine, everything wet, leaves dripping, the two of us against the world, safe in our little house, and she helps me write a story.

Writing in Mr. Trouse’s English class, writing about Macbeth, angry, furious, stubborn, twisting my hair into knots, sitting and refusing to write, then slowly, dragging my pen across the ruled paper, writing, writing about Lady Macbeth, about the words Mr. Trouse loved and so I loved too, writing about Lady Macbeth and her madness, pushing, forcing the words out, the writing rough and uneven, the pen tight, the ink spreading. And when Mr. Trouse comes to class the next day, holds up a paper and says to us, “What do you think of this?” and when he reads my writing and I think he is reading it to shame me and my anger, and when a boy raises his hand and says “It reads like honey,” and Trouse says yes, that’s what I thought too, I wonder how the words they hear are so different from the words I felt.

And summer, bored, lying on the couch, my little brothers and sister screaming, the ugly tract house, reading, reading Willa Cather, reading stories of Swedish pioneer girls and prairies, of wheat and sun and trains across the fields and I know that this is beautiful writing, that this is how I want to write.

LONG SHOT by Lynn Faye

2011-11-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

I went through this inexplicable period of promiscuity after I got divorced. I shouldn't say inexplicable in view of what preceded it, but looking back on it now, it seems very far away.

My mother was -- in many ways -- a prude. Oh, she talked a good game on the outside: loved the nudie ladies in Vegas; always warned me and my sisters and girlfriends to come to her if we got pregnant too soon -- said she knew what she was doing at our ages. She married the guy who turned her on and who seemed dangerous and then spent the rest of her lifetime trying to understand why he was such a chick-magnet and liked it that way.

My Dad was actually a prude, too. Wanted us to be ladies. Stay on the straight and narrow. Keep our thighs closed and cleavage covered. He talked a good game, too. And acted out plenty. But basically, he wanted his daughters to be good -- nice girls. I guess to atone for his prostitute sister and keep us away from her life of crime and degradation.

My folks were from hardscrabble backgrounds and worked hard to make up for it.

Mom -- from an orthodox Jewish family. Decided to rebel and marry the guy who wasn't even Bar Mitzvahed. All my Dad knew about orthodoxy was that he wanted to be far away from it. So did my Mom.

So the seeds of rebellion were planted in me long before I was born.

I tried doing the conventional things but was always just a step "out there."
Was boy crazy early.
Had sex early.
Ran off to New York for college to get away from home and never went back while all my friends stayed Midwest.
I wanted out of that stifling home. I'd flee my family and mistakes and make a new life.

So, I married a guy who didn't turn me on.
Avoid my mother's mistake and stay safe.
Wrong!
Our sex life was terrible -- even if we didn't realize it right away.
And then, everything about our life together was lousy, too.
Alas, he was from an orthodox Jewish background and had the same hang ups as my mother - just pretended that he didn't.
Like they say, we all marry our mothers.

So, after five years of lousy sex and playing house, when I got divorced, I wanted to play. I wanted no relationship of import with anyone. I'd gotten hurt and wasn't going to let that happen again.
So, I became a tramp for awhile. Not a big tramp -- but still a tramp.
Picked up men -- wherever. Slept with them. Discarded them. And didn't like them, either.
I was enjoying myself. Or was I?
I was acting just like my father -- acting out.
But I'm not a man and I didn't fare well acting like one. I still got hurt.
You can't just pick up people, sleep with them, and drop them -- without getting hurt.

On vacations, where no one knew me, I was fearless.
Flirt. Pick 'em up. Sleep with 'em. Have great sex. Feel nothing.
Ignored the rumblings of pain; hurt; -- when the men acted just as I expected and had set myself up for.

And one day, I found myself in London.
I picked up someone whose face and name I can't remember anymore.
He was foreign. Maybe Indian. Maybe African.
Mysterious. Dangerous. Interesting.
Had dinner with him.
Slept with him.
There we were in a hotel room. Perhaps mine. Perhaps his.
Along the way, the sex got rough. Not S & M stuff. But rougher than I was accustomed to. I don't remember if he bit me; hit me; or what?
But when I awoke the next morning, I was very sore. I could barely walk. The insides of my thighs were black and blue. He was gone -- as expected. I was alone.

I couldn't believe it. How had I come this far away? What was I thinking?
I could have been killed. Beaten. Drugged. I was lucky. I was only bruised -- in every way.
I was hurt but suddenly alert.
I was so very far away from home; physically, mentally, emotionally.
And I was done with this phase of my life. I would have to rebel in some other way.
I was not my father.
Not my mother, either.
Actually, not even me.

As Far Away from Home as Possible by DeAnn Louise Daigle

2011-10-23T15:53:00.001-07:00

When I think of home
I think of warm and fuzzy.
Why would I want to leave it?

Home is where I was nurtured
And made to feel secure.
Home was fine. The Beauty of
The Woods, the Sound of Birds
Chirping. Mom and Dad downstairs.

The cats in the shed. Jackie,
My bird, in the cage. And
Eventually the dog I’d always
Longed for, Chillie – all living
Elements of my warm and fuzzy.

Mom reading fairy tales to me
And Dad reading me the funny
Papers on Saturdays. Warm
And fuzzy. Why would I want
To leave home? I didn’t.
I wanted home to remain
Like this safe place forever.

Home wasn’t all safe and secure.
There were awful edges, sharp edges.
Dad’s drinking, Mom’s having
Awful bouts of worry. Their
Fighting left me feeling nothing
Was safe; the world could
Come crashing at any moment.

There was unspoken tension
I never knew was there.
I felt it without knowing
What it was.

Dad didn’t drink, Mom told me.
He wasn’t like the other men
Who sat around and drank beer
When they weren’t working in
The fields or potato houses.

Dad didn’t sit around and
Drink with them, he hid his
Drinking from me, from Mom.
Only, she knew. She suspected.

She also suspected, when he disappeared
For two weeks at a time, that he
Was bedding down other women.
She hinted at this only once –
Implying that he’d slept with
Her brother’s wife. How did I
Understand this? I’m sure I

Didn’t. I may have been 5 years
Old at the time. He’d been gone
And she was upset. So much is
Feelingly blacked out for me.

Only years later as I reflected on my
Attraction to a particular boy cousin
Did I begin to think that maybe
He’s Dad’s son. My aunt had eight
Children and her husband, Mom’s
Brother, could have easily just
Counted this one as another of his own.

But, did he suspect? He was in a beer
Stupor most of the time.

Did all of these people live a
Closed harmony in suspicion
Of one another?

If not consciously in my mind,
Then, feelingly in my heart, I
Took in all of these tensions and
Suspicions, lost hope, lost
Affections, lost warmth and feelings of
Distance inside.

I took them in, gathered them up –
All of these surmises and speculations
And bits and pieces of gossip gathered
Here and there, of overhearing. I
Took them in and tried, tried very
Hard to piece together the story of
My life, because their story was

So much my story.

Of course, there was then my
Mother and me and how maybe
My cousin, Dad’s nephew,
Might be my real father. That
Too was tucked away in my
Eleven year old mind. Such
Quietly explosive stuff borders

On the mystical.

The church was
At the center of all of our lives.
It taught us right from wrong,
Good from bad. The priest was
Passionate at the lectern and
Told us these Beautiful sad stories
About Mary, the Mother of God.

We all heard the stories and I
Wept right along with the
Priest, and the men, who came
To the store after Mass would
Poke fun at the crying priest.

But, people came from all the
Surrounding villages when during
The month of May, the month
Of Mary, we gathered in cars
Reciting the rosary. Cars filled
The church’s parking lot at the
Shrines he had built,

The first one to our Lady of Lourdes –
A grotto with the statue of Mary and
A statue of the kneeling St. Bernadette on
Beautiful white rocks with running
Water the priest had had piped in from
The brook that ran behind the
Grotto. People came from miles

Around to see what the priest
Had done. He enlisted the very people
Who laughed at him to build all
Of the shrines that would follow.
St. Joseph, the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
St. Therese of Lisieux.

In the summertime, there were
Processions on Sunday Evenings and
We walked around the large
Illuminated rosary at the edge
Of the water, where there was
Open ground and the grass was
Very green.

Ave, ave, ave, Maria, ave, ave
Ave Maria.

I have demons. I battle demons
In the night, and it’s all quite
Mystical.

A DIFFERENT VERSION by Edna Schneider

2011-10-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

Jim -- a different version of the man that I usually love. He wore white cotton shirts with short sleeves rolled up: a pack of Lucky Strikes could fit right in. We met on the plane, sitting next to each other. My divorce was just finalized and his wife had recently died. We both upgraded to first class. He was seated at the window. I, with my pearl earrings punctuating my smile, sat down next to him. The flight left Newark airport on a clear late winter morning, a smooth glide into the sky. Jim said, “Do you want to see my house?” I leaned across the space surrounding his chest to see the dot through the window. We talked and laughed and then he asked me to join him for dinner that night .

“I'm traveling with my sister and brother-in-law, so I'd like to include them.”

“Fine, wherever you want to go.” I didn't know...I had never been to this island in the Bahamas. I thought a safe bet would be to meet at the hotel where my family and I were staying.

I quickly swallowed a Nexium in the lobby shortly before I escorted him into the hotel restaurant. Susan, my sister, and Jay were seated at the table surrounded by perfectly-manicured palm trees. Jim asked me to order for him. I ordered shrimp not knowing it would be a different version. There were little shrimp still in their shells, not like the jumbo pink and white meat he loved to bathe in cocktail sauce at Ruth's Chris. After dinner, Jim and I went for a walk along the water on a wooden bridge over the man-made canal with domesticated baby sharks swimming beneath us. He took out a cigarette, “I hope you don't mind.”

“Well...” I spoke in a pitch that signaled disdain.

He said he would blow the smoke in a different direction -- whatever the hell that means! Jim walked me to my hotel room and we said goodnight. Then Jim went to the casino and met Jay, my brother-in-law. They became quick Blackjack buds. Jim won big! He called and invited all of us to have dinner with him at a restaurant that was featured on the TV food show as one of the food wonders of the world. We dressed in our Bahamian whites. A limo drove up to our hotel to drive us to the restaurant. As Jim climbed in, he held the side handle with his left arm and grimaced: a pain shot up to his chest. He dismissed it and we drove on. We arrived at the small white and blue stucco building and were escorted to the red velvet dining room. Seated on the tall black cushioned chairs, we ordered Champagne, caviar, conch fritters and steak. We toasted to a lasting friendship. After baked Alaska and cognac we went to the casino and Jim taught me how to shoot craps. After rolling the dice a few times, Jim asked me to join him the next day on a Catamaran cruise on the Caribbean Sea.

The next day came. Jay left early to go fishing. Susan and I were about to go to breakfast when the phone rang. “This is the Queen Anne Hospital, can I talk to Edna?” My head became light, my stomach quivered and my first thought was that something happened to my daughter; even though, Jackie was in New York City. Then the nurse said, “ Jim asked me to call you. He's in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“I can't tell you but he wanted you to know that he cannot meet you today.” I grabbed the white pen and memo pad left by telephone and below the word “Atlantis” I wrote the name and address of the hospital. We waited for Jay to return from fishing. His netted cap with the Yankee insignia led his way into the room. “Let's go to the hospital.”

When we arrived at the emergency room, we found Jim lying on brown paper covering the metal gurney. He looked so vulnerable: a 6'2” man exposed, hurting, tearful. We stayed with him for awhile then offered to call his nephew in Miami and wished him well. I cried. I knew this man only a few days and yet he touched my heart. He was a different version of the men I usually loved, the ones whom I loved more than they loved me.

Jim fell in love with me; he longed for me and embraced my whole life. After we started dating, he told anyone who asked how we met that I gave him a heart attack. The story would annoy me, mostly because he'd go into all the details of his health and hospital stay. Jim was born and raised in Kentucky; a country boy and I, a native of New York City. Even our love of horses was different. I would cheer the Quarter horses as they jumped over the cavaletti and he would root for the Thoroughbreds to win the trifecta. We traveled to many places after our time in the Bahamas. My favorite was our trip to the Derby in Kentucky. While in Kentucky, Jim showed us the apartment where he lived, above the store in Eatontown; the cannon ball sticking out of the stone wall which is a landmark from the Civil War and the huge green field with Fort Knox in the distance, where he played with his friends and became infected with a terrible rash from poison oak. He missed school for 3 months.

Jim was the kind of man who kept 1-800-Flowers in business. On our first date, and on many others, he knocked on my door with a fragrant bouquet. He sent flowers on Mother's Day, on my birthday, when I was promoted at work. All of my colleagues rushed into my office to find out who sent me a dozen red roses. Now that Jim has passed away, our differences have faded and I miss holding his hand, listening to his deep resonant voice. Forever, I am grateful that I welcomed into my life a different version of the man I usually love.

UNDEFINED TIME by Rosalyn Z. Clark

2011-10-08T05:13:00.000-07:00

I remember as a young girl sharing fruit with my Poppa.
He would peel the apple carefully in one neat swirl.
Next he would slice the apple neatly and share the slices of apple with me.
I quietly spitting out the apple seeds, but Poppa he would eat apple seeds and all.
The pomegranate, Poppa called Chinese apple, he also sliced oh so carefully.
While Poppa and I are eating this fruit we are laughing as we see each other with juice running down our chins.
Now with the grapefruits, Poppa also slices them oh so neatly, so their juices do not escape.
Now he shares the slices of the grapefruit equally.
Soon only the skins of the grapefruit are left.

Undefined time has passed.
I am a grandmother now and I am sharing an apple with my granddaughter.
First, I peel the apple carefully in one complete swirl and while I am slicing the apple, my granddaughter is eating the peel and laughing. So unexpected.
Next we sit companionably and eat the slices of apple and I tell her about my Poppa who taught me how to peel the apple in one complete swirl.

Once again time and years go by, my granddaughter is now a mother of her own girl.
She is now sharing an apple with her daughter, but this time she is not peeling the apple, but only slices the apple very carefully and shares them with her.
I ask my granddaughter why doesn’t she peel the fruit?
Oh Grandma, don’t you know there are vitamins in the peel?

IN A CROWD by Gina Crehan

2011-10-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

I lived on St. Marks Place in the East Village in the late 60’s. People lived on the street, crowded the streets, the cafes, the stoops….everything, everywhere, everyone was happening! It was a foreign, exotic bazaar and one of the nuclear spots for the worldwide youth revolution…drugs, free sex, free thoughts, new ideas, new religions, message and music. It was as viral as the internet of today and as momentous. It was like passing through a door to a somewhere else where you could never go back the other way again.

We were called Hippies but that seems too conventional, too limiting to this movement of rampant self expression which exploded at this time. It was our time! If you were 16 or younger, you still had parents. If you were over 28, you were too ingrained in the “old ways.” Whatever it was -- the music, the drugs, the Eastern religion -- the message was infectious and it was our fantastic kingdom…a mythological place where people dressed as they never had before, trusted easily, spoke a new language and tore down conventional social norms, in the snap of a finger.

It wasn’t all great, however. Some people OD’d, never came back from magic-kingdom thinking and some radicalized this “good vibe” and morphed things into anarchy and violence.

For me, it was about the clothes! Every day was a chance to be a new fairy princess dressed in a fantastic confection of whimsy and wonder, at court in this new mystical world I was now living in.

I started college in upstate NY at a well regarded all girls school. (Women were called “girls” then.) I wore Villager skirts, Shetland sweaters, round collared oxford shirts with circle pins. My curly hair was always a problem as I could never quite get it straight enough to fit into a “waspy” stereotype. On the weekends, my roommate would iron it. If it was humid or I was at a sweaty frat party, I might as well have called it a night, as Cinderella might soon turn into a version of the ugly “stepsister.”

I was a sophomore when I decided to transfer to NYU downtown. Either the upstate girls college was too small for me or I was too big for it…besides, I was a bohemian and a whole world was happening that I just had to be a part of. Because I applied too late, I was denied dorm space but that was quite ok with me. I wound up sharing an apartment with another student I met at a party one evening. Someone I had just met on the street invited me to the party in a crowded walk-up apartment. It was the first time I dropped acid and the first time I really heard the Beatles and boy, I really heard the Beatles. It was a religious experience and as an initiate into a new religious order, I knew I had to shed the old duds.

I was poor, living on my own, with minimal help from my divorced parents….but I knew all about couture clothing. My mother had been a model and both my grandfathers made my clothing from an early age which my mother had designed for me….and so, I hit the thrift shops. In those years, one could find a tattered Chanel jacket, dresses from the ‘40’s and maybe a Mainbocher coat, even though it only had one sleeve. I didn’t exactly have a concept of a “good working wardrobe” and didn’t read Glamour magazine. I bought as much as I could of great loot, as cheap as possible and hauled it home in large garbage bags. Our aptartment only had one bedroom -- a tiny one -- and I had it and arranged my clothing in bags by color, fabric, or mood so I could get at what I wanted more easily.

So it started….my love affair with visual fantasy. In a short time, I became really good at it, layering layers over layers, cutting out patches, making slits and strategically inserting other wisps of whimsy, chiffons, prints, you name it!....pins, buttons, feathers, threads, changing everything as I went along. I never wore the same outfit twice. How could I? I didn’t stop at just the body. There were headdresses
with veils, hats with jewels and plumes; everything had something, somewhere to look at, dangling, jiggling, and shining. I was a moving piece of art!

When the tour buses came to the East Village they always pointed me out. I was told I looked like Stevie Nicks…but I was more a Lady Gaga and then some. I became known as a “visual artist” and clothing was my métier. I got into all the clubs and was invited everywhere…a regal denizen of an illusionary world.

After I graduated college, I got a serious job as a writer for a small business journal. I had to tone my wardrobe down and decided a small gold head band and bright purple maxi coat on which I had sewn yellow stars were suitable conservative work clothes. Whoever I interviewed would initially stare at me in disbelief but once I started asking the questions for my story, my curious intelligence compelled them to answer and we started a dialogue. I always got a byline.

My family never quite adjusted to my eccentricity. When I went home to visit them in suburban NJ, in what I thought was appropriate “garb” -- a long black man’s tailcoat with 100 rhinestone pins and a feather skirt and polka dot hat -- they would open the door and then sometimes slam it in despair. My mother would weep. How was I ever to find a suitable husband looking like that?

Years later, when I became a successful fashion designer, it was she who always rushed up with a huge congratulatory bouquet at the end of my runway show. Tears in her eyes, she would say, “You’re perfect, you’re brilliant…You had us all fooled.”

THE TREE by Peter Bolger

2011-09-28T03:11:00.000-07:00

The tree looked Wizard of Oz-ish -- roots radiating, roots rippling in the dirt, roots like layered octopi; branches that spread in a circumference of endless arms yearning, trying to defy the roots' stronghold, reaching for air. The effect was liturgical.

It wasn't the tree the men wanted. It was its representation -- its un-stolid, stuck-but-screaming reach for more, its unbridled attempt to get as far away from home as possible -- that made it the gathering place it was, an ally to the nocturnal denizens of the Fens with their dicks out, jerking, kissing, licking, looking -- looking from the perimeter of the crowd for someone safe, detesting the safety of the outskirts, repulsed by the mediocrity of the middle, detesting the ferocity of the center, the soul stripped in defiance, roots that can't be outrun. The tree was the most alive.

JUST TELL ME WHERE MY CLOTHES ARE by Kirk Hummel

2011-09-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

They lost my clothes and I can’t think about anything else. How can I write when all I can think about is where are my clothes?

I read the instructions carefully for checking out and followed the steps exactly. I put my keys in the drawer, cleaned up all the trash and recyclables and put my luggage out on the porch. The luggage consisted of two suitcases and a large clear trash bag filled to the top with all my dirty laundry from the week. All suitcases and whatever else, were tagged with the appropriate tag identifying the room number, including the big trash bag. I thought carrying the trash bag to the car would be a good idea but the bag was heavier then I expected and the car was a ways away. My partner insisted that leaving the clothes on the porch would be fine and even remarked, “Stop being so controlling, haven’t you learned anything by being here?" I guessed he was right and what could really happen.

Packing, getting dressed and cleaning the room took more time than expected. The dining hall would be closing soon and there is no way I was willing to start my day without breakfast. This meant I probably would be late for class and I was. Walking as fast as I can through the gravel parking lot I see the platform ahead full of luggage waiting to be picked up by their lawful owners. As I get closer I see my luggage, “but wait, where's the trash bag full of clothes?" I am already late but can’t resist my controlling nature to find out why the clothes bag is missing? I go up to the Omega staff that are in the middle of their morning stretching exercises and ask if all the bags are there and were there more coming?

The one staff member seemed confused. “We will be picking up bags all morning and we only did one pick up.”

“But you wouldn’t separate someone’s luggage, would you?” I asked.

“No, of course not!’’ said the attendant.

“Well, I see two of my suitcases, but there was also a large bag of laundry that was also left next to them with a tag tied to it.

“Okay, we didn’t see that,” said the staff member.

“Well,” I said, trying to stay calm, “that bag has all my clothes in it.”

“Well, maybe you left it in the room,” he said.

“No, I left it on the porch.”

“Well, maybe housekeeping picked it up by mistake,” he said.

Now my NYC metro area personality started to show as I responded, “Is someone going to help me find my clothes or do I have to go and ask someone else?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” the young man replied, “it has to be somewhere. What is your room number? I am sure we will find it.”

“Oak-C,” I replied. “Please help me by finding my clothes.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “we will find it.”

Now I am even later for class and obsessed with the fear of them not finding my laundry, plus the idea of someone going through my laundry is also not comforting. I feel a bit of panic in my chest as I get closer to my workshop and now I have to write. How do I switch off my panic and turn on my brain or heart or both? Then a voice comes through my head, “Let go, just let go.” Okay, okay, I can let go, right?

After a week of rest, laughter, writing, meditation, music, friends, yoga and later today a massage, I must have learned something. I hope I learned something. Something I can use in my life, something that will help me love others. I hope to be able to go home with new attitudes toward being positive and healthy. Well, if not I will just have to come back. Back to remember what is important. Memories.

NEVER EASY by Jaspal Bajwa

2011-09-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

“It’s time,” my father’s quiet yet firm voice cut short my feeble attempts to appear busy re-checking my bags for the umpteenth time. After all, I needed to be sure I had everything I might need for the next nine months at boarding school. Leaving home was not something I looked forward to as a young boy of eight!

The car door slammed shut. I turned back for one last look, waving at the gardener and a few of my close friends from the township attached to the paper factory where my father worked. I could scarcely believe how swiftly the three-month annual vacation had melted away. Why was it that the vacation looked much longer at the outset, I mused.

Two hours later we arrived at the Howrah Railway station. It was the only one where cars could pull up alongside the main platform. A reminder of the grandeur of the British raj. This almost regal manner of boarding a train never failed to fascinate me. I looked around, straining to locate a familiar face. Clearly, we were one of the early ones. None of my school mates had arrived yet. Most of them lived close enough, just across the river in the city of Kolkata.

“Have you kept the pocket-money in a safe place?” asked my father . “And what about your keys?” added my mother. On any other occasion I would have been peeved. Not this time. It was nice to be fussed over. And perhaps receive some extra pocket-money ‘for spending on the way’. It was a good idea to stock up for the two-night journey which lay ahead to reach our school nestled in the Himalayas. I bounded across to the book stall. Never missed an opportunity to browse and savour the inviting smell of new books, momentarily helping me forget the stench of bleaching powder sprinkled as a disinfectant on the rail-tracks. Having bought some comics, I hastened back to the car winding my way through the crowd which was building up. The loud cries of the sellers on the platform reverberated all around me. The beggar with a stump for a leg, was still at the same spot where I had last seen him. Avoiding his doleful eyes, I dropped the change the book seller had given me in his outstretched palm.

As dusk settled, the crows and sparrows struck up a raucous chorus seeking out the nests they had built in the steel structure overhead. The flies and the stray dogs went about doing their business quite unmindful of the blaring car horns and the frenetic activity as everyone scurried around.

Soon enough I could spot a few of my friends. Other than a wave of the hand and a brief hello, each of us continued to hover close to our respective families. Hanging onto the magic of the vacation by a few precious moments. Even as the sounds and smells of a busy railway platform pressed in on us from all sides.

The crackling voice on the overhead loudspeakers announced the Howrah-Kalka Mail was pulling up at the terminal. Almost on cue, the entire crowd craned their necks and precariously leaned over, looking down the platform. The ground shook under our feet, as the majestic black steam engine, with maroon carriages in tow trundled by. I was glad everyone’s attention was momentarily drawn away. I fought back the tears threatening to roll down … the constriction in my throat was making it difficult to keep up the easy banter. I did not want to appear weak in front of my sisters who had come to see their big brother off.

Once our carriage was located; the coolies swung into action. Balancing numerous pieces of luggage on their head and shoulders, they wended their way deftly through the crowd towards our coach. Last minute checks. Renewed instructions to look after ourselves were interrupted by the shrill whistle of the rail-guard vigorously waving his green flag at the end of the platform. Time for the final good-byes . Silent hugs all around. Blinking away my tears, I jumped onto the carriage. Turned back for one last wave . And then we were off.

As the train slowly pulled away into the fast-gathering darkness, each one of us crowded to the windows to lean out and wave … our eyes glued to the slowly receding figures of our families .
Leaving home was never easy.

The train gathered speed and the rhythmic clickety-clack of tracks became louder. We turned to each other. Exchanging hearty stories. Very soon the lump in the throat had been replaced by gurgling laughter which comes so easy amongst friends. The spontaneous camaraderie slowly spread its warm glow. Anticipation of the adventures ahead took hold. We were like young blood-hounds sniffing the air.

We talked late into the night. Continuing long after the lights had been switched off by the teacher who was accompanying us. In the early hours of the morning … lulled by the sounds of the tracks and the occasional steam whistle of the engine in the distance we eventually slept … at home in our togetherness.

***

Having reached
… I begin
Each moment
…. A new beginning

TWISTS & TURNS by David Erhart

2011-09-18T06:03:00.001-07:00

A different version of life is presented to me during my trip to Omega during the summer of 2011. I suppose the best place to begin is with our afternoon off, on Wednesday, August 24th. The start is simple. I tell Penny that I am going to the fair. You know the Duchess County Fair held along Route 9, on the way up toward Red Hook.

My car ambles into town. The roads I pretty much recognize from the Sunday I came. On Rhinebeck’s Main Street, I march gingerly into CVS and get one of the pharmacists to show me where a bottle of vitamins are to deal with macular degeneration. Macular degeneration of the dry kind is not a big deal coming from the family I do.

Afterwards I zip across the street and go into a bakery and coffee shop whose iced brew I drank last Sunday. I see a crumbly bar to eat. It looks like an apple bar. Definitely, it’s the one I want. Asking the salesperson what’s in it, she goes on at length, but all I hear is “oats” and “chocolate.” Wanting something delicioso, as they say, to wash this baby down with, I order espresso and give the girl my name. Sitting down, I see sections of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on the counter in front, and since I am a wee bit starved for news, I begin combing. Business section… Tuesday: Market up, Gold down. Then hitting the Journal, I come across an article written about how my favorite baseball team, the Mets, have over the past five years imploded. Isn’t this subject known already?

Off to the fair I go. I’m crawling up a very clogged Route 9. I’m in the process of making a quick decision that I don’t want to stop at this stupid thing, and when I drive by I see why. There are lots and lots of rides, and not one farm animal in sight. Actually, this explanation is weak. In the back I’m sure there are birds, pigs, cows, and all kinds of other animals. I fight the traffic just a little ways further. Then whamo, on my way to Red Hook. It’s a curious town with a funny name. I really want to see it. Driving through, I catch the name of an Indian Restaurant and wonder if it’s doing as well as the restaurant in Rhinebeck that said “Essuyez vos pieds.”

A beautiful Parkway called the Taconic is the next thing on my slate. And here I am penetrated by a paralyzing thought. I was driving to Maine last week with my wife and twenty year old daughter, Claire. Claire was in the back, sprawled out in recovery from her party the night before. When all of a sudden, just south of Bangor, I fell asleep at the wheel. It just happened for a second, but I fell asleep at the goddamn wheel. I drifted, drifted into the left lane. There were no trucks, nor cars on the road. If there had been, my sleeping may not have occurred. But holy smokes, this one event would have been life’s moment most devastating.

A steep bank would have caught the car and flipped it down its side. Trees and rocks waited at the bottom. Who knows what they could have done? I’ve had horrible dreams of killing my daughter like I had dreams about killing my father. In this moment of senseless wandering, I came close to making these true.

All right... all right, my guide is speaking. She articulates the following: “Don’t drive long distances. And for God’s sakes, let your daughters drive, always.”

You see, a different version of life has come upon me. High-strung before my brain injury, I became even more high-strung after it. And now, ladies and gentlemen, my strings are tightened like the very tightest of a violin.

Back at Omega, it’s six o’clock, and I am on my way to dinner. Suddenly, it occurs to me. I am not hungry for food at all. I retreat to the Sanctuary where I go into the empty space, sit in a grounded chair, and let pictures of the weeks personages play out before me.

This Sanctuary is a Cathedral in the Woods, blessed from the heart by God. I sit there for a long period of time before another person enters. After some moments I open my eyes and see a young girl lying in fetal position up front where the alter would be. Quietly I get up, leave the building, place my shoes on my feet and see the scuffed heels of my prostrate partner’s sandals. Who the heck knows? Maybe we both found this chapel exactly when we needed to.

I walk down the path toward the campus’s main road. I have my flashlight around my neck but don’t use it. I feel truly blessed by my moments alone and decide that instead of spending so much time heading outward, I should begin the process of going within.

LIZA by Klara Dannar

2011-09-18T05:17:00.000-07:00

I prepared for my first visit to the refugee camp in Ghana by reading and talking with friends who had been there before. I meditated on the obvious contrasts: my life of comfort and privilege vs endless loss, hunger and discrimination.

My family had received so much, from so many, two years before when my father and sister both died of cancer. Friends and strangers carried us through that heart-breaking time. It was impossible to thank them all, so I embraced the decision to go to Ghana as an opportunity to give something back; in a way I believed my father and sister would have embraced.

It surprised me that I was going on a church mission trip. I had avoided organized religion since high school. As a perpetual spiritual seeker I had experimented with Buddhist meditation, Native American ceremonies, Sufi dancing and just about every other group I could test drive from the sidelines. A year before, in the darkness of grief, I started attending a small rural Christian church near me. I cautiously checked the waters by volunteering to be the parish nurse for the congregation and assisted members with health concerns.

I was comfortable in the caregiving role and looked forward to working in the refugee camp clinic. I met Liza my first day in Ghana. That evening, we were alone when she looked into my eyes, then away, while she held both my hands.

“I only opened the door,” she said quietly. “The rebels stormed in. They killed my father, and raped and captured my mother in front of all of her six children. As the oldest, I gathered my sisters and brothers and fled. Later we returned home. When I was out foraging for food, the house was torched. All of my siblings died. I was captured. I was a young girl, not familiar with the ways of men. I was raped repeatedly, until I lost consciousness. I awoke later with my vagina filled with salt to stop the bleeding. Soon I realized I was pregnant and escaped and fled to this camp.”

She released my hands. I remember repeating, “I am so sorry….so sorry…”

The next morning Liza led the morning prayer. In a clear, confident voice, she began, “I am so grateful for my life, for my opportunity to be of service to others, for the richness of my many blessings.”

I had imagined the refugee camp as an opportunity to give back, but by the morning of the second day it was clear everything had shifted. It was no longer possible to stay on the fringes of a belief system, or to continue to hide behind the secure role of caregiver. I listened in silence and contemplated the contrasts in our lives, and in our reactions to grief and loss.

I had been launched on a personal spiritual pilgrimage that would challenge me look deeply into my own soul.

THE BLUE BUTTERFLY by J. Murphy Krimshaw

2011-09-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

The assignment in my writing class was “leaving… write a piece on leaving! This struck terror in my heart. I would have to say my emotional framework has been formed by “leaving”. I was always leaving, someone else was leaving and whatever or wherever I was living seemed to leave me as well. I came to realize this couldn’t be stopped and a life worth living had a lot of entries and exits in it, but somehow the exits were a lot harder to bear.

When I arrived in Paris, I was almost ready to throw myself in the quai. My heartbreak was real, visceral, searing…a deep wound. I saw it coming but I didn’t quite expect him to break up with me the night before I left. We couldn’t decide on a place to meet, so I chose a tony Upper Eastside lounge with zebra covered cushions, curvy small cocktail tables and dim lighting. The ceiling was dropped to create cozy nooks and intimate spots. The place was busy, filled with blind dates, Match meetings and other assorted “adult” singles looking for “the one” In my optimism, I was hoping he would say he’d give it a try, couldn’t live without me, would stay in touch while I was away…but he didn’t.

We had an on and off again relationship, at least in a spatial way. What I mean by that: is not seeing him for periods of time, but that did not diminish thinking about him every hour, every day and knowing he was doing the same thing about me. Maybe 40 times a day, we used to joke! We called it “the longing” and indeed it was. I called him the blue butterfly, he sent me many images of the Morpho Blue as his symbol. I had never felt so emotionally compelled by anyone before…obsessed, actually. This was movie stuff. Not possible, but it was true and it was happening to me and like a good film noir or wrenching romance, it would have to have a sad, heart breaking ending, by definition. I realized it was hopeless for me and I was in destiny’s hands. I used to say, “Cupid shot me through the heart and then shot me in the foot!”

It started innocently enough. I met him at a cocktail party for an Architecture & Design Fair…over the cheese platter, in fact. We immediately started to talk and fell in love. He was handsome, very handsome, dressed in a grey flannel suit with a black turtleneck, in lieu of a shirt and tie. I could see his physique beneath the fabric and knew he worked out. His grooming was impeccable…studied, hip! He had great hands, well articulated with long fingers. My opening line made him laugh and we soon discovered we had a similar aesthetic, saw things with a similar eye, knew a lot about literature and cooking. He was not in the design world, but a guest of a friend and told me he was a writer and didn’t elaborate on what.

Three months of adventure, both romantic and fun, not just museums and movies, but poetry readings, reading to one another DH Lawrence, Billy Collins, Bachada lessons, (the Dominican National Dance), fishing, cycling and old movies, lots of old movies! He was smart, an expert on almost everything and I learned a lot; a real lot! He was different.

One warm Spring day he prepared a gourmet picnic lunch in a grand English basket with a complete set of china. He brought a rug, a canopy, and speakers to a hill he knew with an incredible view of the Hudson. I brought the crystal; my mother’s rose vase, flowers and 10 silly surprise gifts, laboriously wrapped. I wore a gingham dress. He asked me to. We stayed till sunset and attempted to make love on the lawn. Suddenly, some hikers appeared and caught us bare assed.

In general, we couldn’t keep our hands off one another; nowhere was excluded. I didn’t necessarily see him every weekend or every day but the relationship had a consistency of its own strung together with emails, letters, long love letters, cards and jokes. I confessed to my girlfriends I was in love, madly in love and I was. They asked me if I had ever seen where he lived and in fact, I had not. He told me his “meat market” loft was under construction, though we did drive by the building once or twice and he did seem involved in all sorts of issues of construction, something I actually knew a great deal about, having re-done a number of apartments with my ex-husband. I gave him advice.

And so, one night I met him in a strange Medina-like bar in a Mid Eastern restaurant in the East 40’s. I arrived early which was quite unusual for me. I decided to dress like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. I had on garters which exposed themselves when I crossed my legs. He soon appeared briefcase in hand. He was edgy, didn’t kiss me and seemed overly serious. I casually looked down and noticed he had a wedding band on. Yup, he was married!...about four years but not really to his soul mate. A mistake! She traveled a great deal for business and recently spent 3 or 4 months in Argentina, returning every now and then.

I was in shock. My heart sank. I didn’t yell. He asked if I wanted to hit him and though I did, I refrained. I just said I had fallen in love with him and what he had done was cruel and he was a coward.

More than a year later, I looked up the definition of sociopath: a person so pathologically self centered, they were incapable of feelings for anyone else.

THE DIFFERENT VERSION by Penny Knight

2011-09-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

There was a different version of my childhood challenge of sex abuse and the true version.

The different version was the story of my brother, two-and-a-half years older than I, beating me up all the time. This usually occurred when my mother left me at home alone with Toby while I baby sat my baby brother, Fate, who was 10 years younger. Mother used to say, “I was afraid to leave you at home with your brother for fear he would kill you.” I often wonder now, “Then, why did you leave me at home alone with him?” This was true but the different version. The true version was something my mother never knew.

For some reason my brother had gotten off to a bad start in his life. Well, maybe I did too, but I didn’t behave as aggressively as he did. He was a baby when a housekeeper gave him gonorrhea. I never did learn how that happened. I can only guess. My parents divorced when I was 4 and Toby was 6 or 7. He had already headed down the road labeled “difficult child.” I can sort of understand my mother’s wiping her hands clean of him and getting him out of her hair at times. I never had that luxury.

By the time he was nine, he was sent off to military school to set him straight. I didn’t know why. I thought he was the privileged one and loved more than I. Years later, I dreamed of going to a boarding school (maybe to get away from him or to have the same opportunity). As a therapist today, I have my own ideas about his being sent away. I think he needed more love than he received. I also heard stories about my grandmother, with whom we lived, chasing and beating him with a broom. I don’t remember ever witnessing that, but, then, I don’t remember much of my life at that time anyway.

My step-father to be, Miles Christian, was an instructor/teacher at Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee. My grandmother, mother, and I went to visit Toby once during the year he was there. I think we stayed in something like a bed and breakfast. I don’t really remember. But I do remember mother coming back from a date with Miles one night and saying, “Miles asked me to marry him.” I was probably 7 or 8 at the time and asked, “Did he get down on his hands and knees to propose?” As I’ve said in another story of mine, Miles was one of handsomest men I’d ever seen, next to Clark Gable.

In the summer following, when I was 8, I was visiting my cousins in Mansfield, Ohio. Joyanne, two years younger, and I were walking across the back of the couch while playing tight-rope walkers, when I lost my balance and fell on the floor on my back, pulling her right to the spot that broke my arm above the elbow. I was in the hospital a whole week for that injury. (Healthcare was different then.)

During my convalescence there, my grandmother appeared every day, but there was no visit from my mother for 3 or 4 days. Again, I didn’t feel very important to her. When she did come, she announced that she and Miles had gotten married. In those days, before any conflict between us, I called him dad because my own father did not seem to care enough to be in my life. I sometimes think my mother kept him away. Anyway, I was gifted with a puppy after the hospital stay for what I had gone through.

So we, now a family, found a house to rent in Shiloh a short distance away from Plymouth. We had an ice box and a cistern from which we pumped water. There was an abandoned building next door that was infested with fleas, and I ended up with bites all over my legs from playing there.

My brother’s introduction of sex to me first came, as with many children, innocent enough I would guess at the time, but when I reflect on our ages, we were past the age of “show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” But that’s how it started at 8 and 11. It transitioned from that to, “Let’s draw pictures of each other.” Somehow he made it clear we were not to tell mother.

Perhaps, I did get a temporary reprieve from the progression of the abuse. It was the start of the United States’ involvement in World War II. Miles joined the Navy as an officer, and following his training near Chicago, he was stationed in San Diego, California. So he and mother packed up Toby, and they all left me behind with my grandmother, abandoned and separate from my family. I didn’t understand why or what I had done to be left behind. Later on, when I was told and understood that it was due to Toby’s bad behavior, the damage to my psyche had been done. Still, what kind of excuse was that? Mother couldn’t handle us both?

They were there somewhat less than a year. It certainly didn’t change Toby for the better, just as military school had not,. I was excited when mother and Toby returned and bought a house in Plymouth, Ohio. Miles was not to come home for about 2 more years. When their furniture arrived, I was trying to untie a package when Toby hacked my hand with a knife. I still have the scar from it on my hand. That was just the beginning.

He was always beating me up when he felt like it, but sometimes, like other brothers and sisters, we were chums and sneaked out the door of my room onto the roof and climbed down a trellis to go see friends in the neighborhood, or sometimes during the day, we sneaked off with bathing suits under our clothes to go swimming (I couldn’t swim yet) in the creek of other school chums, where I almost drown. That occasion made me all the more determined to learn to swim.

When did the molestation begin? Most all of it is a haze in my mind. I think it began as I went into maturity and started developing breasts. He would always grab at me when no one was looking. I can’t tell you what actually happened, but I know it did. I remember his erect penis. Nothing else. There was a large old barn on our property that we played in. My memory of what took place there seems only to be imagined. But, what I think happened was that Toby invited some of the town boys to watch. In my mind’s eye, I see them lined up against the barn wall on the second floor watching us demonstrate sex. I don’t know if this actually happened, but I think it did.

What I do remember is being left alone with him and running for the bathroom to lock the only door that locked in our house. I didn’t want him to touch me. I ran and I screamed in terror. He refused to leave me alone.

Somewhere around 15 years of age, I got another reprieve when he dropped out of school and joined the military. I had peace for the next couple years, and when he returned after getting out before his time was served, he didn’t bother me anymore.

Years later, I have tried to figure out what happened to him to make him so unhappy and aggressive. He became an alcoholic and died young at 45 after choking on food in a restaurant. I learned how to forgive him. On another day, I will tell about a past-life memory that explains why he victimized me.

MONKEYING WITH MY VOICE by Tarak Goradia

2011-09-15T03:47:00.001-07:00

Standing at my desk, with fifty three pairs of expectant eyes focused on me to hear the answer to a challenge question posed by my first grade teacher, I found my voice stuck – stuck amidst the vocal chords. The harder it tried to come out, the more it got stuck. My abs constricted as if to push the voice out, the throat stretched itself to ease the passageway, the tongue and the lips did their usual synchronized movement to articulate the first sounds of the answer. But no air was coming out … as if the lungs had spontaneously called a strike.

Seeing the slowing rising eyebrows of my teacher and imagining the reactions of my classmates, I was sinking rapidly into a deep hole of embarrassment. As soon as I distracted myself from the act of speaking, the syllables began to flow out in staccato: “The Univvv … ”. With a glimmer of renewed hope, all of my gazillion brain cells were back to attending to my voice. Like a child slamming the door when paid too much attention, my voice retracted back into its chambers. The entire uncoordinated attempt to pry it out resumed – abs, throat, tongue, lips; it wasn’t clear which of them were helping . At that point, I lowered myself onto the seat. With arms resting on the desk in the front, eyes staring at the knots in the grains of the wooden desk, I was completely oblivious of what transpired in the rest of the class.

After the class, a couple of my friends came by and inquired casually. They even invented stories about people born with a terrible stuttering disability and reassured me that mine was of a milder kind. Conveniently, I accepted the interpretation of it being a disability and refocused my intellect in devising many tricks to minimize its social impact. Friends and family alike made adjustments so as to avoid putting me in uncomfortable situations. For countless errands that involved talking to strangers, my little brother would be dispatched instead of me. In spite of being a class topper, the privilege of addressing student assemblies was offered to other students. Whenever I struggled with a word, my friends completed it to avoid more embarrassment for me. When a new student would make fun of me, my fast friends would show him his place. Getting comfortable with this special attention, I almost began to feel good about my stuttering.

Fast forward to the mid-term assessments in the eighth grade theatre class. It was my turn to go to the stage and act out a dialog between two historic characters. As I walked towards the stage, the corners of my eyes saw classmates disengaging; I even imagined them talking in a hush-hush voice. Climbing steps of the stage, I recalled a much-celebrated argument between an 18th century emperor and his chief minister. I pictured ornate palatial chambers and immersed myself into the emotions of the characters. I presented the back and forth argument in two different voices – with a fluency and tempo that was unparalleled in my speaking stints. It ended with an applause that sounded like thunder that brings rain to barren lands. As I basked in the glory of the performance, a gut-wrenching thought grew more intense … it wasn’t a disability!

What was it then? Why me? Was my mind playing games? If so, I would sure show it its place! Easier said than done, I discovered in the journey that followed. Through therapies and quackery, through proud moments and dismal disappointments, through determination and self-pity, I came to realize that my voice was very much intact, but my mind was worse than a drunken monkey. My voice found a new life, loud and clear, loaded with emotions. It found expression through speeches at Princeton Toastmasters and story-telling clubs. Taming my monkey mind became the new goal for me. There began a conquest that is sure to last multiple life-times!

MOMENTUM by Judy Coppel

2011-09-14T03:02:00.000-07:00

We lived in our marriage for seventeen years. We seesawed from the high of blissful exploration and sexuality that began our life together into the balancing act that dominated the middle years.

Those years began with so much promise. And then, President Kennedy was assassinated, Vietnam raged, my husband who was in the Air Force, stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, was never deployed overseas. We were, in fact, living in Charleston when our first child was born. She had a full head of silky black hair and long black lashes that caressed her cheeks while she slept. There was no denying her Mediterranean heritage, a distinct contrast to the soft white down that covered the heads of most other infants in the nursery.

When AnnMargaret was just four months old, her father was discharged and we moved back to Miami to begin our real life together. Ours was a very traditional marriage. He worked. I stayed home to raise our daughter and the other children we wanted. He struggled to find meaningful work, but somehow we slogged on. Finally, through a family friend he got a referral to work in an insurance agency, and found the niche he had been looking for.

The birth of our first child had been so easy we had no reason to anticipate problems with any future children. I teetered between happiness and depression as the next five pregnancies ended in miscarriage. Finally, I was able to carry a second child to term, only to learn a week before her birth that she would not be born alive. I had joyfully prepared the nursery for her arrival…instead I came home with empty arms and a heavy heart. Shortly thereafter we moved into our new four bedroom home, purchased with the expectation of more children.

Believing we wouldn’t have another biological child the decision was made to adopt. On the day the agency called to tell me our application for adoption had been accepted, I learned I was pregnant again. The pregnancy was fraught with problems and misgivings. As we drove to the hospital for the birth of our third child we decided that if the baby was a girl her name would be Joy. And, indeed, she has lived up to her name. When Joy was just nine months old, to my surprise, I learned I was pregnant again. Not surprisingly, considering my history, the obstetrician strongly recommended a tubal ligation after the birth of our son, Marc. Our family was complete.

My husband was a good man, I was a good woman, but we were beginning to lose our balance. The world outside came into our home every evening by way of national news. There were more assassinations, Watergate, Woodstock, Hippies, free love, and the Women’s Movement. I celebrated my thirtieth birthday by going to hear Gloria Steinem speak and purchased her newest book which she autographed. We were feeling the pull of earth’s gravity and were fearful we would never soar again. We were weighted down by financial issues, children, and the awakening realization that we had limited our potentials, our possibilities, by our choices: each other.

We spent long evenings into early mornings talking endlessly about our issues, how to make our marriage work, how to make it better. I tried going back to school, he sabotaged my efforts. I tried enlarging our circle of friends, he refused to participate. He started to abuse substances, proposed an open marriage. Nothing was working.

One evening the children begged to attend a carnival sponsored by the elementary school they attended. Finally, their father was persuaded to go with us. Our son was very excited about a two-person ride, (with a name like Seesaw or Rocket) and asked his father to go on the ride with him. Sadly, he sullenly refused. Seeing the disappointment on my then seven year old son’s face, I offered to go on the ride with him. The object of the ride was to use the weight of your body and holding onto the metal bar create enough momentum to propel the cage up and over the top. We stepped into the cage and rocked back and forth until our momentum carried us over the top as we loosed the pull of earth’s gravity. I looked down on my husband and the father of my children, knowing as we went over the top that we were leaving him behind and soaring into a new life.

TOO EARLY TOO LATE by Lynn Faye

2011-09-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

It was 1969. We were not married very long. All the threats of moving to Canada to avoid the draft never materialized. After three years of watching our friends leave -- student deferments no longer an excuse and the musings of civil disobedience done --his lottery number came up. Too low to avoid it. His father -- a small. sweet, religious, seemingly unassuming man, so different from my own father -- a dynamic, strapping, ex-football player with an ego the size of Texas, was apparently better connected than I ever suspected. He managed to get his son into the Army Reserves and sent to the battlefields of Missouri for basic training and thereafter to the killing fields of Indiana -- a long way from Viet Nam.

We were newlyweds and separated already.

I was lucky. A mentor professor and friend, who saw this as a good opportunity for me to complete my master's degree unfettered, recommended me for a fellowship and I took a short leave of absence from my job to complete my internship program. An opportunity that moved me into a better position and pay range. All the time while my new husband was away -- miserable, complaining, and lonely. A Jewish college boy in the military stationed outside of St. Louis. He and another young man of similar background became fast friends and had each other. Everyone else couldn't stand them. Two privileged, educated boys from the east coast -- with enough connections to keep them here in the U. S. of A. while the other basic trainees were about to be shipped out.

Every telephone conversation or letter for the first two months was a whine -- long and angry. "And what are you doing there while I'm here?" he would say.
"Going to school full time and advancing yourself!"

Not a great beginning for us.

And so, in one telephone conversation I assured him that I would hop a plane as soon as school break began and come to visit him -- in St. Louis. Despite my Chicago upbringing, I'd never been to St. Louis. I didn't want to go, either. But poor him.

And so, I flew to Chicago, visited my family for a day or two -- a way to delay the reunion -- and then another flight to St. Louis. He would come from Ft. Leonard Wood and meet me that night. I took the airport shuttle to downtown St. Louis.
Checked into a long ago forgotten but nice hotel. As I unpacked, I realized that I had forgotten a nightgown or robe. Now... did I really need such things after not seeing my husband for two months?? Did he care what I was wearing? Wouldn't he keep me warm? No matter. I had to look good for him, didn't I?

I trotted across the street to Stix Baer and Fuller -- a long shuttered St. Louis landmark gone the way of Hudson's of Detroit, Marshall Field's of Chicago, Gimbels and B. Altman of New York; and the hundreds of other department stores that have been replaced by big boxes. But in 1969, Stix was still there. In I went. I encountered the quintessential saleswoman. Just like my Auntie Eva, who worked twenty-five years for Marshall Field and Company selling luxury handbags until the store saw fit to lay her off about a year before she became pensionable. Same perfect silver white hair, cropped just above the ears; same ice blue eyes that twinkled when you walked up to her counter and invited you to buy. And the same swollen ankles, knee problems, and orthopedic shoes that went with standing on your feet all day for a half-life. I felt like this saleswoman at Stix was my Auntie. I told her my whole sad story. Oh no! No pretty peignoir set for my husband. Just my winter white, white body. And she went to town. Fixed me up just perfect. She knew my history, I knew everything about St. Louis, and I left with a powder blue, see-through, shortie gown and matching robe. Certainly not the black, lace, plunging, floor-length nightgown my husband probably had in mind since he bought one for me not long before our marriage ended --- years too late.
I'm the picture of the Virgin Mary while he's hoping for Mary Magdalene.

And so, I returned to my hotel room -- soon to be our hotel room -- and waited, nervously. Did I really know him? Would he know me?
After all, we were together for three years before we got married.
But we were a pair of babies -- not all that far out of the crib ourselves.
While I waited, I tried to be excited but I was more anxious and frightened than anything else. Indeed, in two months without him, I was doing just fine.
And when he finally arrived, it was heartbreaking.
I didn't recognize him. His hair was shaved off and he had lost 20 of the mere 140 pounds he weighed before he left.
We were tentative.
We were shy.
We didn't know what to say to one another.
I was almost like we had just met.
Or were we different people than those we once knew?
Two months -- but two lifetimes.
He cried.
I cried.
We should have realized it then.
We didn't love each other.
But we didn't want to know.
And so we played at something. He pretended to like my nightgown. I pretended to like him. He pretended not to be angry that I wasn't going through what he was going through. I pretended not to be angry that he wanted me to be more loving and to take the lead.
And so, he ejaculated prematurely.
As always.
And, for the next five years -- while we figured out that we didn't even like each other let alone love each other.
Five years of ejaculating prematurely and pretending to be satisfied.
What a waste.
He blamed me.
I blamed him - and me. Typical.

FIRST OUT-OF-TOWN DATE by Susan Alessi

2011-09-11T07:18:00.000-07:00

As I careened the car around in a tight U-turn in the middle of Main Street, safely of course, clearly aware that there was plenty of time and space to do this, he said, for the first time:
“I had no idea you are such a scofflaw”, with a laugh both a bit terrified and intrigued. I suppose that was the beginning of our many adventures, not all involving breaking the law.

A sunny Fall day in Western New York was the setting, Rochester specifically, a white-collar city developed around Eastman Kodak and later IBM, industrial giants who invested in civic culture and beauty, and grew up a little jewel of a city. Built along the Genesee River, with river walks and bridges and parks full of flowers, Eastman hid his smoke-belching factories on the outskirts. George Eastman built his legacy along this river, too, upstream from the city center. He built a red-brick classic campus, reminiscent of the Ivies, for the Eastman School of Music and the University of Rochester. A beautifully landscaped, pristine-looking college with world class schools of Medicine and Engineering, where families and students ate picnics and played frisbee while watching the U.of R. crew team compete along the Genesee, which runs parallel to the Main Street of campus.

That was our final destination, our reason for being in Rochester on our first driving date out of our own city, Buffalo, a distinctly more blue-collar and industrial town. Our beloved Buffalo, formerly the Queen City of the Great Lakes, home of more millionaires in 1900 than all but three other U.S. cities. Designed by the legendary Fredrick Law Olmsted around a system of elegant parkways and intricately landscaped parks, our city was now struggling to maintain the best of her heritage after the breaking of her backbone, first by the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, bypassing Niagara Falls which formerly blocked passage to the East Coast, and then by the fall of Bethlehem Steel.

So in this more prosperous city, at the University of Rochester, we were going to see my daughter’s dance performance at the end of her Junior year of college. I wanted to expand and deepen our intimacy by revealing and sharing with each other the important parts of our lives. I was aware of feeling vulnerable and nervous. Sharing my love of travel and adventure, and sharing my adored daughter’s life was offering a tender and important part of myself, saying, “Do you understand? Can you appreciate and resonate with this about me? Can our relationship grow this way?”

And he, in the passenger seat on this particular adventure, was undoubtedly assessing our future, too, silently saying: “So this is who you are. I love your sense of exploration, trying to find the Art Gallery, the Ethiopian restaurant, then somewhere to park in this over-crowded campus on performance night. But… I don’t know about this scofflaw part of you. First, a sudden U-turn on a busy Friday afternoon on Main Street, and then, parking illegally, flagrantly, so we would be near the Auditorium. What other blasphemous things are you willing to do? What other, perhaps dangerously illegal, things have you lurking in your past?”

But you, too, my Darling, were revealing ways in which you are willing to be a scofflaw. I watched in silent amusement as you politely and somewhat sadly pointed out to the woman at the ticket desk of the Art Museum that we were there late in the day and could not take full advantage of the museum. I quietly chuckled as you skillfully got her to feel sorry for you and to offer to let us in for free! In later adventures, you further explained, without a blink, that when we wanted some favor from a gatekeeper, meaning we wanted to blast through the official rules: “if it’s a woman, I’ll do the talking; if it’s a man, you talk to him.”

In this way the scofflaw adventures of Dr. S and Dr. A began.

And you, my Dear, with your proper New England sensibilities would be horrified, or at least incredulous, that I would be conceptualizing our first out-of-town date this way.

BOY STUFF by John Ellis

2011-09-09T14:41:00.001-07:00

Johnny. They called me Johnny. Johnny. The J for Jacob Cohen, owner of a dry goods store in Ofallin, Illinois where my dad said they had curfews for blacks. Jacob was too Jewish for my Southern California transplant parents. They didn’t want me riddled with an old Jewish Man name. So it was John. Very Southern California. The ‘ny’ was a familiar addition, everyone called me Johnny. Like a nice Italian boy from the Bronx. Johnny, the cute, smiling kid with the hair Dippity Dooed to the side and that sharp part, diagonally grazing my scalp revealing the white road to nowhere. Johnny liked his jump suit, a cotton leiderhausen, navy blue with buttons. Worn with a simple white T and brown saddle shoes with white athletic socks. This was my uniform. And I wore it well past the age when it still fit. Little Johnny squeezed into his uniform, to do his job well.

We had a fort on Gayle Street. The sacred sanctuary of boys… and our street was a cul-de-sac of budding testosterone, almost all boys. The Ellis Boys, 2. Right across the street The Byars had 3. The Hydes had 3. All boys. The Miquelons had 2, and Cheryl, the one girl in the mix who I married in a performance, walking down our hallway, the proverbial aisle, as my brother serenaded ‘Here Comes the Bride” on our Acrosonic--Cheryl the first chap lipped girl I kissed at age 6, she was for Barbies. But the boys, we had our sports, our fights, our ping pong paddles, and our fort. Conrad Byars, the oldest and One Adam 12 handsome, a hairy 13, kept Playboys in the Fort. In a metal box that we kept under the floor in a hole we dug. Playboys. He’d lock himself in the fort, which sat in our sideyard, and flip through the pages. What was so interesting? ‘Was Conrad an avid reader?’ Johnny wondered.

The fort was our sanctuary, our special meeting place. We played Black Jack for money here. We lit incense and candles. We convened in the dark cool shack, made of boards we found at the Riverbed and dragged home. My parents, older and more relaxed, allowed our house to be the one with the ugly fort, our yard the football, baseball and Smear the Queer field. Dad proffered the used carpet samples, an array of shags and flokati and low piles patchworked into our wall-to-wall haven. Each time it rained, the must and wet ruined, and dad managed to save the day.

The fort was inclusive. The street – another story. This was the land of Baseball Coach dads who worked in Aerospace. Football Scholarship pops, who thanks to a knee injury, now sold mortgages. Jacob Cohen wouldn’t do well dovening on Gayle Street. You had to play sports. Well. Each season was a different sport, parallel to the professional sport seasons. We played baseball during baseball season. But we couldn’t play baseball when Mr. Scotteline’s shiny red Corvette was parked on the street. He scared us. The Byars' garage door would have to serve as backstop as we carefully woofle balled a pick up game.

Football season-Conrad Byars would throw a spiral as high as he could in the air… and if you could catch it, you could play.

Sports ruled the street. Jeff Byars' parents denied a Mentally Gifted Program so he could stay in the local elementary because they had better after school sports program.

Sports was in the blood stream. Parents bowled for money and trips to Vegas. Danced with each other at Baseball League fundraisers. The Gayle Street Gang as we families called ourselves, attended baseball games at the Big A, Anaheim Stadium, as a troop. and even had our name announced by the game’s announcer. But that’s not my defining moment. No.

It’s a hot Summer Day. We swam in the community pool about 100 yards from our Cherrywood Lane home with walls of geraniums in terra cotta pots on the wall outside the kitchen window. My dad was asleep. Or at work. My mom at work. Clark Reid and I went for a swim. We’d stand in the shallow end legs akimbo. Here we’d swim underneath each others legs, upside down and blow bubbles. It was our innocent choreography. Boy stuff. Like wrestling is a safe way for straight men to touch each other all over, over and over again.

We get home to my air conditioned country kitchen. Sitting on the plastic covered yellow and orange striped couch we’re cool and our wet bathing suits slip a little. Side by side, we sit and pull out our penises. I’m still a boy, like 11-12. Clark 14, has ‘changed’. Larger, hairier and hornier.

BLASPHEMY by Kat McCormick

2011-09-08T03:51:00.000-07:00

It was a blasphemy I suppose, but then it really isn’t for me to judge. All I know is that my step-father Charlie went for his usual walk that cool October morning. When he returned home, he seemed upset, my mother told me. He sat down at his desk decorated with plaques, medals, and jet aircraft models perched on pedestals. He wrote something, then he drove his golf cart onto the Arizona golf course behind his house, put the Glock in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

There are moments in life when everything changes.

Many years ago, my husband Barry and I drove to a golf course so that he could pick up a score card. While he went into the pro shop, I picked up my writer’s notebook to observe and write about whatever came my way. As luck would have it, Barry parked in front of a bush that was covered with beautiful Monarch butterflies in their finest stained glass attire sunning themselves, feeding, and perhaps chatting each other up. I got out of the car to get a closer look; and it wasn’t long before I noticed a stick that seemed to be moving with the breeze, getting closer and closer to one of the butterflies.

Suddenly two arms appeared from what I then realized was a praying mantis, and with two tiny hands, it grabbed each of the butterfly’s wings. I wanted to look away, but forced myself to watch as the hideous praying mantis begin to devour the beautiful and delicate fairy princess—I mean, butterfly.

The praying mantis was grotesque—like something from another planet. He had huge fly-like eyes, and he continued to eat—he was actually munching—as the butterfly struggled. At one point, he turned his head 45 degrees and looked directly at me—munching away with a satisfied look on his alien face. I felt like he was jeering me—“do you want a piece of me?” And I have to admit that when he first revealed his true identity, I fought the urge to save the butterfly. What changed my mind was strange because suddenly the prime directive from Star Trek popped into my mind. The prime directive basically says that we shouldn’t interfere in other cultures.

This was a moment that changed my life. I can point to it and say it has something to do with the beauty of life, the miracle tucked inside a single moment—and the cruelty, unfairness, and fear that we must deal with every single day of our lives.

I picked up the pair of butterfly wings that fluttered to the ground after the praying mantis dropped them. They are forever preserved in a ziplock bag which I keep on my writing desk as a reminder that everything can change in a single moment.

ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN DARK GREEN SHORTS by Bobbi Safire

2011-09-06T17:29:00.000-07:00

It was the summer of my 16th year. The train snaked for what seemed like endless miles with its soothing clickety- clack, clickety- clack. At each station stop heading west, groups of naïve, but prepared 16 year old girls would climb the metal ladders waving back to family, throwing kisses. Formidable size foot lockers were being heaved into the baggage car by dads, brothers and anyone else who chose to take the challenge of the heave. The mood was upbeat, filled with the newness of life.

Our “roomette” was a winner. The bunks fit flatly and securely into the wall of the train car patiently awaiting their release later that evening. On each side was an open but ample area for personal belongings. My buddy, Nan Futeronsky and I lucked out because most of the scouts were occupying berths, one on top of the other, for the journey across country. Some from hometowns like Freehold, New Jersey or Danbury, Connecticut or Wilmington, Delaware were represented. Scranton, Pennsylvania was our bid to fame, home of coal mines and column dumps.

At mealtimes we traipsed and plodded from one car to another toward our destination, the dining car. It was set in what seemed an enormous, bare freight car housing long tables and benches. How they served up all that food is still a mystery to me. We called it the cattle car. Hundreds of girls, with butterflies in their stomachs, scoffing down their dinners, were traveling cross country in dark green shorts, white shirts, lariats around their necks, comfortable shoes, and of course that special wool, green, beret with the girl scout insignia front and center. This was living the good life. Yes, we were on our way to Girl Scout Roundup in Farragut, Idaho.

The frenzied confidence in all of us was evident. Why not? Our training and preparation in primitive camping skills -- such as lashing, tying knots, building camp fires, hanging caches in trees, pitching tents and eating s’mores -- was universal. One particular event will remain permanent always in my mind’s eye. That moment 950 green and white future leaders of the world were released on Yellowstone National Park.

I ALWAYS KNEW by Susan LaFever

2011-09-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

I’m telling my story at a horn workshop. I’ve been placed in a group of six similarly-aged women and we attend small-group classes as a unit. We’ve played sextets together, we’ve played solos for each other, we’ve talked about creative horn playing in class. Now we’re sharing our histories.

You might consider us losers. None of us is famous, but some of us play better than others, some of us play better than the instructors. What was it in our past that had prevented our advancing, whatever that is, as far as we had wanted?

Yes, there is a system for producing players; although the figure even for Juilliard grads finding full-time orchestral work is only 5%. What chance did someone outside the system have? I guess you might say none.

I start talking in a low shaky voice. I always knew I was a musician. Even as a toddler I was always singing in the car. (In those days, we didn’t have car seats; the kids just rode in the back seat.) From the age of four I knew I was going to be a professional musician when I was introduced to the violin in a Suzuki class.

I remember standing impatiently as the instructors, one American man and one Japanese man, seemed to talk forever about the proper way to hold and care for your instrument. I just wanted to get my hands on it. When we were finally told to get our instruments, I ran over to the case and opened it to see my little brown violin. I was so eager to absorb everything that I was able to stand still for the lesson, ignoring the burning and growing itch on my leg (something that I’m not able to do now)!

In Suzuki instruction, the parents learn along with the children so they can guide and participate in the practice at home. I remember my mother’s frustration trying to tune our instruments. She couldn’t seem to find the pitch even though I could hear it. The practice sessions were sometimes frustrating as well. Fortunately, we had vinyl discs with the music to play along with that we put on the stereo, a huge cabinet console with built-in speakers that was a piece of furniture that took up a third of one wall.

One day, as we were struggling to learn a new piece, I told Mom I needed to use the bathroom. Figuring I was trying to get out of practicing, she wouldn’t let me go. Finally, there was nothing I could do; a stream of urine came bursting out of me with surprising strength. I can still hear how it sounded as it hit the green carpet in the living room with such force. As I was embarrassedly running to the bathroom, Mom yelled, “You did that on purpose!”

My parents never “got” me. Despite my talent and diligence in music, they had other plans for me. In high school, I would get up at 6am, after several “prompts” from Mom, which involved blinding me by turning on the ceiling light, and calling out to me every few minutes until I finally got up. I practiced the horn for an hour, ate breakfast and went to school, then practiced the horn for another hour after school followed by an hour of piano practice.

I loved practicing and loved my teachers. One day in third grade, I was made to stay after school, probably for talking out of turn. I remember sobbing loudly as my head was down on the desk where I was told to put it for my punishment, but not because I was staying behind; it was because I was going to miss my piano lesson.

My parents being strict and religious, apparently thought music was a good thing to keep me out of trouble before college, but never felt it could be a profession. To bolster their belief, they asked my horn teacher if you can make a living playing the horn. He himself, although principal horn of the local community orchestra, made his living teaching privately. I think they knew the answer would be a qualified no.

I was always a little confused about what love was. It seemed my parents were always thwarting my plans, telling me they knew better and that I would ultimately be happy that I listened to them. I never understood what was wrong with my plans for my own life since they didn’t involve drugs, alcohol or sex. I just wanted to be a musician.

THE LIFE I WAS IMAGINING by Todd Greenwood

2011-09-04T04:11:00.000-07:00

You could sit sprawled across the wooden floor of your apartment on Charles Street in the West Village, garbage trucks clanging and crushing their way down the street, with the map of the Indian subcontinent laid out in front of you. A copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to India with two smiling turbaned men in Rajasthani splendor guarding the door to the mystery that lay behind the golden bejeweled entrance to a mystery world. And there next to the map is a schedule of trains, and list of cities and places to be seen.

I had won the Priskell Travel Fellowship, a stipend of money that would allow me to study Open Air Marketplaces – and the world was my oyster. Anywhere in the world, any place on the planet where the agora had created its own organic form. To study and construct how the order of commerce, the simple and unplanned could be seen through the eyes of the designer, the architect. There was something to be learned by wandering in places that never saw the hand of an urban planner; places never needed to be mapped and plotted and defined.

Lying prone over the subcontinent it looked simple, easy, and knowable. It was December and the wedding was going to be in April. I had decreed. We had planned. I wasn’t going to let up this opportunity and Ruth wanted me to go, to take this opportunity and let me explore what there was in a place that the two of us could only imagine. Two mustachioed smiling men of Hindu mystery guarding an ancient door.

But as excited as I was by the prospect of flying to Bombay, and taking the train wherever the spirit moved me, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that this voyage would be the last of my life as a single man. At 24 years of age, I would be going to India, a place where I knew only one person – my Industrial Design teacher from Pratt - who would be staying with his mother and father while I was in Bombay. But from there, I would be on my own. The names of the map were mysterious, and alluring. Places that I knew little about. I could hardly even know what to expect in a place called Goa. Places in the South that eluded pronunciation. Places with names so long that I was sure they couldn’t be correct, or that they came along with some simple and shorter nickname that the cartographers were too proper to include.

I looked at the map and thought about the fact that we had sent out the invitations, found the synagogue, found a caterer who was Kosher enough for Ruth’s mom and dad to agree to (if they were going to pay)… but cool enough to be more than the "chicken or flanken" choices of the too many perfumed Leonard’s of Great Neck Affairs that I would die before submitting to. It was set: flowers, invitations, and an auspicious date: 4/8/84.

It was December and the wedding was April. Four months and I had enough money for just about that amount of time -- backpack, youth hostels and 30 rupees to the dollar. The only problem was that as I looked at the map, it dawned on me that the distances were huge. There was no way that I would be able to circle and explore the entire continent from the disputed and communist-controlled lands of Assam to the shores of Trivandrum in just four months.

The greatest trust: The moment of standing at the Pan Am counter, in Kennedy, with a suitcase that could be strapped to my back. My fiancée, the woman who I loved so dearly, an adventure that I had wanted so much. An adventure that I would have dreamed my whole life for. All those lists that I had on my wall as a child – the fifty things I would do in my lifetime. List of travel adventures, of jumping from airplanes, of taking a submarine across the ocean. Dreams fueled by Jules Verne and Popular Science magazine.

And I had managed to convince the committee sitting somewhere above Willoughby Street at the office of Pratt that here was a young man with a crazy notion: open air market places, organic design, the architecture of the unplanned. Let me have five thousand dollars and let him explore the unseen world.

I stood at the International Departure Lounge, surrounded by people who held their cigarettes in new ways, walked in curious arrangements, wore on their faces the signs and markings of places airports away, lands beyond. My sweet fiancée stood there telling me that I should have this adventure. Give this to myself, allow myself to experience what I had planned to do. She wanted it for me. But I wanted to hold on.

A month went by in which every day I smelled more like turmeric. A month went by in which the sounds of goats crunching on tin cans and honking rickshaws awoke me. A month went by in which my sandals became more deeply caked with the dust of the streets of Goa, Pune, and Bangalore. In which I sat transfixed by temples melting into the sea and lingams buried within the dark sanctums of places that I felt I should see, but were beyond my vision.

A month went by and I was sitting on a beach in Sri Lanka, in a small town south of Columbo - a place where the empty shells of buildings stood eviscerated by the ire of the Tamils. But this place was different. It was relaxing, peaceful -- so different than the cacophony of India or the sorrow of Columbo. There was a bar, and a bar tender and there was just one cassette tape that was pumping across the beach on endless repeat. I recognized the voices, seemed to know the singers.

"Hi, Hi, hi, hi, hi, Hi, hi, I want take you home. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Ooooo."

The Talking Heads. And the voice of David Byrne was of a deep unsavory guttural – a lurid devilish seducer, a dance of sexual invitation at the feet of imagined gyrating beauty.

I sat under a baobab tree – a tree with huge arms that swept and protected the beach for centuries. This was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been in the month on the road. The food was good. The air was clear and there was a freedom and clarity. A place of repose -- for the tranquility of India is the biggest myth of all. Maybe tranquility within – but certainly chaos without.

I sat under the tree and I cried. The pain was too great. I could not wait a moment longer and I knew that at that moment there was a decision that I could no longer put off. Each day, I had asked myself the question. Each day I felt the longing and I thought of the woman that I loved and the comfort of sleeping in our three quarter mattress atop the wooden loft, down the block from the Korean Grocer and the corner sushi and little place that we went for Gai Yang chicken after work.

My adventure… I sat under to Baobab tree, picked up my bag, and called Indian Airlines. I told them that I needed to be home on the next plane. Get me home in 24 hours. Someone at home had died.

ME & JULIAN by Rio Morales

2011-09-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

I got Julian’s twelfth birthday party invitation in the mail. Parisi Speed School: I hate sports. Saturday, October 10th: I was going to go bowling with my mom. 4-7:30: three and a half hours of sports. I hate sports.

I’d put up with Julian’s birthdays in the past, whether it was a Wayfinder foam-sword-capture the flag-outdoors-buggy adventure, or a baseball/basketball/skateboarding party at his house which involved sports and only sports. The people at these parties were mostly his other friends, which meant Day School kids, all of which could throw a perfect three-pointer and hit a home-run or land a kickflip. I suppose I liked running and catching and kicking, but these kids, who were my friend’s friends, were so good and so terrifying and so condescending about it that I’d spend the party inside his living room watching two of them play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, which I was also terrible at. I figured a Parisi Speed School Party meant throwing and batting and running, my question answered by the football and basketball stickers around the border of the invitation.

The past summer had been hard on my relationship with Julian. We’d hung out less, and when we did we played Tony Hawk and he would win, and to make me feel better he’d play me the Jay-Z CD Artie made him then teach me a new curse word he’d learned from Zach. We no longer traded pokemon cards or built towers or reminisced on our trips to the Statue of Liberty or Niagara Falls or the State Capitol Building.

Eventually we stopped hanging out, eventually I stopped hearing about him or his family, eventually my Mom and Ellen lost their friendship, too. Eventually I saw him on the first day of seventh grade, wearing a hat with some obscure logo on it, too big for his head, too big for the little kid I’d known. And eventually I got an envelope from him for his birthday party at Parisi Speed School, but I wondered if he even knew his mom had sent it to me.

NO MEMORY by Rica Rock

2011-08-07T07:50:00.001-07:00

For me, the problem is not remembering. My mother died when I was almost three and a half years old, but I don’t remember her at all. This last weekend I was at a retreat, where we had half-hour morning meditation on Saturday and on Sunday. No sooner do I make a concerted effort to clear my mind, thoughts of her come up – but they are all questions. This time I had the courage to try to remember what the physical circumstances of my first three years were.

As I understand it, most of the time it was me, my mother, and my big sister in a house about 14x16 feet. There was no bathroom or pantry or electricity or hot water or central heat. It consisted of a very small bedroom, a smaller kitchen, and a main room which was a bit deeper than the others, and as long as the two of them together. Did my mother sleep in the living room, my sister and my crib squeezed into the bedroom? Or, since my sister was a teenager and my mother a manic depressive, was it the other way around? Did I have a crib, and if so, whom was it borrowed from? If not, did I sleep on the floor, or were chairs arranged around a narrow cot to keep me from falling out, or what? Were there curtains? Bedspreads? Pictures? Books? A mirror? Where were clothes hung?

When I moved into that house again at age 14, my father had added many amenities, including a tiny closet for me in the bedroom (my room), another for him and coats, a pantry with room for the electric refrigerator, and a very small toilet with a shower. And, luxury beyond the beyond, a telephone.

But back to no memory of my mother, I cannot picture the house, or my place in it, or my mother. I had a fleeting idea to ask my sister to describe it for me – maybe that would trigger a memory – but I’m afraid that’s almost hopeless. She’s going to be 94 in August, and is past reliability. She has, however, two photographs of my mother: one is a formal studio picture taken of her standing by a tall pedestal, one elbow resting on it, in her late teens, a relatively new immigrant; the other sitting on the steps leading into the above-mentioned house, in a summer cotton dress, my father sitting next to her, bare-chested, in overalls, and my sister standing nearby in a bathing suit, with her hand resting on top of my mother’s head.

So, just as there are no physical artifacts -- except a hand-made, falling-apart, much painted-over little wooden stool, too rickety now, almost in its 90s, to trust standing on -- there are no memories of my mother.

ALONE by Cheryl Corson

2011-07-12T05:14:00.001-07:00

I worked alone for years, weaving scarves in a bedroom I’d converted to a studio in a little house on an island in Maine. This might sound like a bad idea for an extrovert like me. The two most important people in my life then were Jim, my live-in boyfriend, and Debbie, or Deborah Young as she was professionally known, my sales rep in midtown Manhattan, and long-distance friend.

I wove as I listened to NPR, or the World Series, or cassette tapes of Robert Bly. I wove like a human machine, beating the silk, alpaca, or merino wool yarn evenly, at 12, 15, or 18 picks per inch. My selvedges were flawless. I calculated shrinkage by percentage, to the inch, so that every scarf I shipped to Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy’s was identical.

After a few years, my boyfriend Jim ‘came out’ as they say, falling temporarily in love with his academic advisor at the college he attended in Bar Harbor. Around the same time Jim moved out, Debbie got lymphoma and died, way too soon for all concerned.
If I’d thought I was alone before, I was really alone then.

I began to work outside the house. “Working out” was what old Mainers called work outside the home for wages. That was before it came to mean driving outside the home to exercise at a gym.
I became chair of public art selection committees all over the State of Maine. Suddenly, from the same home studio my loom was in, I was using a government access code to phone artists, architects, school principals, and others all over the state and then driving, often for hours, to chair meetings where these people looked at artists’ portfolios and interviewed them for commissions.

I loved this work more than anything. So much, that I enrolled at the University of Maine to finish my undergraduate degree in case a full-time job should open up. Now I had professors and an advisor in addition to my committee members and arts council colleagues.
My time alone on the Island felt more precious, a welcome break from all the people I interacted with on the phone and in person when I drove to see them in my white Volvo station wagon, from Bar Harbor to Machais, Bangor, Biddeford, Damariscotta, Portland, Augusta, Orono and beyond.

Now, I work alone in a home studio again. It’s 27 years later, and instead of weaving scarves, I’m designing landscapes and playgrounds, writing and teaching. My clients can be wonderful, like today, when Dedra came outside when I stopped by to check on the crew working at her house. She’s had medical problems and recently retired. Her 2 acres had gotten away from her. Unable to walk well, she will need help with her gardens now.

After only 2 days, a crew of 4 men with a dump truck and a skid steer had removed every weed tree from her beds and revealed her gorgeous weeping thread-leaf Japanese maple, and the long, twisted branches of her Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick, and cleared large seating areas in the shade of her huge apple and cherry trees.

She stood there next to me and cried tears of joy. The 4 guys, Dedra and I all paused to appreciate the moment. It’s not always like this, of course, but this connection to other people, fostering their connection to the earth as well as my own, makes me not feel alone when I go downstairs to my office in the morning.

SCENE by Sophie Strand

2011-07-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

At first we sit in the middle of the field, sunglasses reflecting the remains of the day and small spiders propelling up the seams of our shorts. I fiddle with my bag and you lie back, flicking open your phone and bitching about the friend who failed to call.

Your hair catches on your lips and you sputter, blowing waves away in a messy kiss of air. A bug bite has appeared as a twin to a bruise on my calf. It blossoms, each rosy capillary swelling up to the surface - the skim of deeper blood.

You suggest we avoid the bugs and I agree.

"Yeah. That place by the pool, under the shade of the roof."

As we slip between red buildings, breathing in breath laced with brick, you observe that the pool is open now, its water a swarm of gnats and yellow light.

We settle on the concrete, soften our bodies against the advance of dusk by lifting our faces up to an invisible sun. It sits just below the curve of the mountain, sending out long arms of gold in farewell.

"This has been a really bad year," you say, pulling trail mix out of your satchel. You pop a peanut onto your tongue. "I forgot I had this in here."

I slip a slim cigarette out of my pack, lighting it in the shadow of my hand. It illuminates the lines of my palm before catching.

"I know," I say finally, sucking on the filter.

"Can you remember anything good? At all?" you query with your hands full of assorted nuts. The raisins, though, have been thrown carelessly into the grass at our feet.

I think and smoke and watch as a cop pulls a car over, a pulse of red flashing through the chain link fence in the distance - the color of emergency.

"Making spaghetti that one time we were drunk at Jess'?" I suggest but it feels wrong.

You nod, not necessarily in agreement.

The cop is saying something to the driver. He shakes his head and then smile sternly before walking back to his car. I'd like to think he let them off with a warning. But I know that a ticket probably nips at the ashtray as the driver pulls back out onto the pavement. There is always a cost for speeding and it is often the length of the road.

HIDING by Seraphina Mallon-Breiman

2011-07-02T05:15:00.000-07:00

My friends associate me with ‘knowing a lot of people’. They think I’m social and outgoing and confident in these public settings but I’m not. I can be, but not without exceptional self-consciousness.

When I was younger and I was in a public setting and I would see someone who I had a crush on, or whom I felt intimidated by, or someone who simply just made me nervous, I would hide from them. I would go to the bathroom in ‘Sunflower’ and stay there longer than I needed to. I would go to the back aisle of books in the library and pretend to be thoroughly engaged with my nose in the book with the biggest cover. (Libraries are very good places to hide.) I would blend into crowds, duck behind trees, or turn the other way and begin a conversation with a total stranger in order to look like I was doing something.

I’ve hidden underneath my headphones, behind my cell phone -- texting nonsense -- and in my room with my door shut. I’ve hidden in books, in my friend’s houses, in long sleeved shirts and on iChat. I always forget I’m hiding because I’m very good at it.

“…Nineteen, TWENTY! READY OR NOT HERE I COME!” Hide and Go Seek is a game I associate with my life until I was around thirteen. In North Woods, my homeschooling group, we would play this, ‘Sardines’, ‘Tag’, or something Connor Ritchey came up with called ‘Uber Tag’. I never actually ‘hid’ from anyone in Hide and Go Seek though because in my mind I was just playing a game, a fun game that included all of my friends.

‘Hiding’ when you know you’re hiding is the most healthy way to hide I think. Myself, and the people around me however do not generally know this. We use familiar people or objects or places and we use them to escape from the things that are the scariest.

ALL I WANTED by Edith Lerner

2011-07-01T04:12:00.001-07:00

I didn’t watch the Sound of Music until 3 days before my audition. My friend Seraphina grew up watching it and was appalled by that fact. I saw myself as a nun or a nazi, and I was excited to take part in my first school play.

Theater for me has always been comforting, I like to feel the moments of panic when a prop goes missing, and I like to know that my small insignificant role gives me the time to run like a madwoman across the theater to find it. I’ve been a shakespearean forester, a horse, a birdy-girl and even a troll, but in each one of these roles I’ve had the responsibilities of scene-changes and quick costume changes for the leads. I took those responsibilities very seriously, knowing that if I screwed up, it would be someone else that looked silly in front of the audience.

So I watched the movie, and I went to the audition. I had practiced my song a billion times, perfecting hand gestures that were dramatic but not unnatural. When I entered the room I was greeted by a tall blonde woman, who introduced herself, but whose name I immediately forgot. She, along with Mrs. Cayea and Mrs. Paetow sat in the middle of the house. The tall lady asked me to tell her my name and age and something I was passionate about. Shit, I hate that question. “I’m Edith Lerner, I’m sixteen, and I like Math.”

“Elaborate on that” she said.

“Well, I used to hate math, but now I don’t... I think geometry is cool.”

“Thank you, now you may sing. Whenever you’re ready...”

I began, and my voice was strong and clear. I did my little prance across the stage, but was shocked to notice that none of my audience members were looking. They were looking down, writing maybe. I didn’t get past the slow introduction to my upbeat show tune before they said thank you and I walked off stage.

I hadn’t wanted really wanted the lead role until that very moment. I knew Seraphina wanted it more than anything, and that would have been fine, until now. I came home and told my parents “If I get a callback, I’m going to be Maria.” There’s something about a beautiful tall blonde lady that makes you feel like you have to prove yourself. Maria, Maria Rainer. The desire to take on that role consumed me. The feeling of satisfaction that I used to get from placing a prop early, or watching a number from the wings wouldn’t be enough this time.

DRIVING by Chloe Brovitz

2011-06-30T03:40:00.000-07:00

I (like every other 16 year old in New York) had spent months practicing driving. Though I was not forced to sit through 6 months of Driver's Ed, I did experience the universal feeling of passenger seat parents. Of course they knew much more about driving than I did, but it was still aggravating when they would tell me to go 5 mph below the speed limit. Parallel parking was the worst, as I would only get it right 50% of the time, and everyone thought they had the hidden key to perfecting this daunting task. Regardless, I very proudly passed my first time - even fitting snugly behind the huge black truck my tester told me to park behind. That night I was eager to start my driving career. I told my parents I wanted to go to the Palenville market to get strawberry ice cream. I wanted to be mature and nonchalant about it, but they understood my excitement and made it a very big deal. I ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed my iPod, turning it on and spending 5 minutes picking out the perfect playlist to accompany me on my great adventure. "Don't get cocky, use your lights, drive slow" followed me out the door like smoke before I closed the porch door defiantly.

All it took was 6 steps before I was giggling to myself, saying "oh my god, oh my god" over and over again. I got in the driver's seat of the car as I had so many times before, but this was so different, even drastically different than when I made my dad sit in the back seat and not say anything the entire ride, feigning adult-hood. I plugged my iPod into the stereo and pressed play, thankful that I had done all the pre-planning before stepping foot outside. I knew that the car ride was a mere minute and a half at best, but I was still satisfied with my choice of playlists, even if I only got to listen to half a song.

The car ride was liberating. Though I was only going half a mile away, I knew I could go to Woodstock if I wanted to, I could go somewhere and never, ever be found. I turned right into the parking lot and parked sloppily right on top of a yellow line. Though I was the only car in the parking lot, I quickly backed up and meticulously pulled back in satisfyingly. I debated whether or not to take the keys in with me, and ended up decided for it. All I wanted was for the stereotypically Indian woman to say something about the keys I was cockily swinging around my finger. I had the burning desire to tell her that I drove there all by myself, that I was capable of going out into the world and returning home with a pint of creamy Haagen-Daaz. However, she did not ask which almost made me feel even more mature. After all, no adult bragged about driving 2 minutes to a gas station.

THE EASE THAT WOULD NEVER BE MINE AGAIN by Adam Rejto

2011-06-29T03:23:00.000-07:00

The first time you pick up an instrument you feel empowered, it seems as though it will be your weapon. The first instrument I was drawn to was the bagpipe. I sensed a distant connection to Scotland, or Afghanistan. I wanted to be able to connect with it. I began to take lessons with an elderly woman who was eager to take me as her student. I loved it for the first few weeks, and then I began to notice her eyes. Her eyes would follow me everywhere. Sometimes she would tell me that she had just gotten some sort of surgery on them, and they were healing. Something about them haunted me, I would sit next to her, blowing into my chanter, seeing through my peripheral vision, her eyes, staring. I couldn't take it any longer, I had to stop playing.

I took a few months off from music, until I felt a strong connection once again, this time not to one specific nation, but to the world. I wanted to bury myself in world music. Tones from Guatemala, melodies from France, and lyrics from Israel. I wanted to connect. Hesitantly, I began to play the guitar. I wasn't attracted to it, until I let a pattern of notes flow through my head, they were played by Leo Kottke, they changed me. I fell in love with the 12-string guitar, and when the opportunity came, I instantly bought one. I fell in love with it right away. I started playing more and more, and even started seeing a new teacher.

 I knew that the ease which I had felt with my previous guitar teacher would never belong to me again. Raphael began to teach me things I had never thought about, creating a new universe for me to view music through. He further inspired me, he made me want to be immersed in Ethnomusicology. As I studied more with him, I began to pick up new instruments, I started to diddle with the cello, the sitar, the cuatro, and many other little instruments. They began to cast heavy shadows in my life, I had to practice every day. And even though it added some stress to my life, it made me happy. Even though I had a new responsibility, I still felt empowered.

THAT'S THE WAY IT WAS by Daniel Marshall

2011-06-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

The idea was to see the world–to visit alternative communities, countercultural movements, religious and cultural roots. Different from the world of previous experiences: growing up protected in Brooklyn, Catholic school and college in New York and Massachusetts, secular university, menial work, true-blue Navy Air, and Berkeley. The idea was to travel with Elizabeth on savings until exhausted, to replenish funds wherever we were–for instance, by harvesting or tutoring, and to continue. To sleep outdoors or find hospitality, take a freighter, walk or hitchhike, seek our cultural roots in Ireland, Spain, Rome, Greece, and the shrines and museums of Europe and the Mideast, visit South Asia and India, meet other peoples, and trust God and others to lead, teach, and provide for our needs. To cast bread upon the waters. To follow the road by emptying our pockets.

If our generation learned one lesson, it was that finding a solution to life’s questions required individual or collective escape from the daily race of consumer life that had already hurled much of the earth pell mell toward destruction. Our goal was to find God, means of escape, and ways to serve.

When it was just an idea, Elizabeth agreed. Then for a month after her post-college teaching year, we were separated while she went to jail for occupying UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement. While she was there, I left my job, disbanded our community, and disbursed my possessions. I was champing at the bit, waiting for her.

An old sweetheart, affectionate and charming Consuelo, re-surfaced clearly in distress while Elizabeth was in jail. About the same time, the Navy ordered me to active duty, illegally, for quitting as a conscientious objector; I sent them a peace movement mailing address. After Elizabeth’s release, on the brink of our departure, she announced that she was afraid of facing her well-connected East Coast family unmarried and of getting pregnant. Her early separation from parents and the great female serpent Security reared and roared. She gave me three days to think about marrying her.

The weekend of the ultimatum I could find no one in whom to confide. So we married within a week, with two priests, at 7:30 AM one July sun-drenched Saturday morning in a hillside glade above Berkeley. Under the canon regarding special circumstances. The ancient commitment to be spouse ‘til death, in sickness health, for richer poorer, better worse. Friends brought flute and guitar, and orange juice and donuts for breakfast afterward; soft folk songs floated among eucalyptus. Elizabeth wore her California cousin’s China silk dress. She cried at the exchange of commitment but couldn’t explain why. Her mother, aunt, and cousin were there; my family refused to come.

I don’t think that Elizabeth worried as much about the opinion of her Seattle uncle Ed and his wife. An engineer, he had divorced, remarried, left Boeing, and undertaken carpentry, and he seemed pleased as a clam to see us. But the new arrangement between Elizabeth and me felt unexpected, precipitous, and troubling–so demanding and sudden, so backward! Wasn’t I supposed to plead for her hand in marriage? I felt unresolved all week, during the wedding, and after. Puzzled, and concerned, too, about fierce affection and a flood of memories stirred in me by Consuelo, and perplexed about radical changes in her aspect. Sour and depressed, she made an awkward attempt at seduction. Her body swollen, she did not appear the pretty, delicate woman with freckled round Indian face that I remembered.

From Yosemite Valley, on honeymoon already, I called Consuelo in a rare few minutes when Elizabeth was away, to tell her what I’d done. “I’ll be your mistress,” she said. “Consuelo, I can’t do that,” I told her; “I have to go, Elizabeth’s coming!” That was the last conversation that we had.

I was split, half of me undecided, between marriage and unmarriage, as if still unpressured, preoccupied with contemplating slowly and deeply on my subconscious backburner, the prospect of engagement and marriage, accommodating to new intimacy; the other half relying on previous intuition, prematurely and desperately married, scrounging to understand and perform. I felt guilty initiating sex, and we connected awkwardly the first time. Elizabeth was responsive, interested in sexual overture and foreplay. Pleasurable, functional, not so much intense as burning and calm often mistaken for peaceful, movement was what she wanted, energetic movement–rolling, tossing, and tumbling; once in a while she took control. Two or three times a week, where we found opportunity, we got wet together in showers, grass, our sleeping bags, her Peugeot, or beds in some pension, and eventually in our own place. We lay waiting at the rim of new creation.

Once in a while, with all this, I was puzzled that we were not pregnant. All play and no work. Not that I felt impatient; we were poor and with time more so. Not becoming pregnant permitted us for a while to live oblivious, as Hippie friends seemed to, until one day Elizabeth burst into our by-then semi-subterranean New Hampshire cabin, clumped in her felt-lined rubber boots down our four heavy wooden steps, stood in the middle of our home-built tongue-in-groove maple living floor beside a wood stove that had been my parents’ gift, stirred as if by a recent conversation, and in a voice guttural and pent-up struggling to emerge, apparently furious, demanded, “I want to adopt!”

She’d cornered me. I felt startled. I was unprepared. It seemed incredible, astonishing. Who’d agitated her?

“Elizabeth, we have no money!” I said. “Adoption agencies, as I understand it, for adoption require minimum savings that we don’t have and job security!”

But I realized as I spoke that I had another reason,. I’d noticed her teasing Arthur. A year or two before she’d even mentioned feeling affection. Just as well, if she’s flirting with him, I thought, not to procure a baby that, after I’ve loved bonded to it, if and when she leaves, she might take from me to him. I was sick by then, too. The cause eluded me. While our friends seemed to thrive, I languished. It didn’t add up. Our elderly doctors hadn’t been able to help.

“If a baby comes or is left on our doorstep,” I added, “that’s wonderful and welcome! But I don’t see how we can get approved for adopting one.” I guess that she must have felt stymied, but she expressed no further feeling.

Getting pregnant! Gut longing for fertility! The prayer of Abraham and Sarah. I longed for opportunity to raise children. I prayed and fasted for health so that I could do my share. The Growing without Schooling movement, later called “unschooling”, originated around John Holt in nearby Boston. It was becoming popular within a small following on our periphery. We loved the land, studied natural hygiene, Gandhism, and Catholic Worker philosophy, and sometimes attended Quaker meetings. We joined self-awareness groups, meditated, and visited communities and families that had children. All that we discovered I wanted to employ with children.

After five years, why were we not pregnant? Was it due to my sickness, Elizabeth’s dietary indulgences or bitter feelings, our rugged coldweather lifestyle? Were we allergic? To each other?

In Washington, one morning I collected a fresh sample from a wet dream and had it tested pro bono by a kindly Georgetown University doctor. Because of the method–I scrupled of others, he said that he could not be conclusive, but did find living sperm.

At this point, blessed though our sojourn had been at the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, NY, we had not found it the community on the land that we sought. The Catholic Worker always emphasized hospitality. “This is the front lines,” Stanley Vishnewski said. “It’s no place for families.” With few exceptions. More to the point, no one knew where title to the land was or boundaries, or told us that most was in a zone of conservation land that excluded building. Dorothy always apologized for shortcomings of the Worker and the distance that it yet was from the vision of Peter.

We moved–almost fled–at Elizabeth’s suggestion to D.C. close to her family. We got into pastoral counseling and Christian self-awareness. She studied Montessori while we house sat. “We need couple counseling,” I said. “I recommend individual counseling and group,” our counselor answered. So we did not talk with each other of what we needed or improve our communication.

By then, my weight had plateaued at 95 pounds. It wasn’t increasing, no matter what. I was distracted with worry about Elizabeth. At any cost I determined to keep us from New Hampshire and Arthur. My preference, had I been in position to assert, might have been New Mexico rather than Washington. Arthur took initiative to visit us once, radiating adoring smiles toward Elizabeth. Elizabeth left once, quite suddenly, to rake wild blueberries with his crew on Blue Job in New Hampshire, breaking her commitment to a paid speaking engagement with me in Kentucky and to a natural hygiene conference with me in Canada. A way! We struggled to find a way!

STUPID THINGS I DONE, Part One by Bobby Barresi

2011-05-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

The year was 1952, a great summer in Brooklyn for baseball card flipping and stickball in the streets. Our block was populated with mostly Dodger and Yankee fans, and I think all the families on the block were Italian. Me? I was a diehard Giants fan, my father was a Giant fan and I have been one since birth. I spent the entire spring and summer collecting all the New York Giants cards, but had a hard time finding the Willie Mays card. The Topps cards at the time were printed in a series of about 100 cards and were released to stores every two months or so, just to keep us kids interested. My friends had a favorite pastime of ripping up Giants cards in front of me, and laughing in my face, just to bust my balls, and when they ripped up the sacred Willie Mays card, well that was enough. I spent the remainder of the Summer planning my vendetta.

If I had a few pennies in my pocket, I always bought a fresh pack of either the penny pack or rarely, the nickle pack of Topps cards, chew the great tasting bubble gum, and slowly thumb through the cards, and pray for a Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle. Snider cards were found and ripped, with much flair, in front of those rat bastid Dodger fans. But that elusive Mantle was evading me. Summer shifted into Autumn, and I started the first grade.

My daily routine each morning before school, was to go shopping to the corner store, Sam and Archies. My mom would give me fifty cents, for a quart of milk, a loaf of Italian bread, and The Daily News and Daily Mirror. Up the block to 11th. Ave and 66th. Street I go and after buying what was on the list, there was always a few pennies change, so I purchased two penny packs of cards. This was the last series, all in all, a total of 409 Topps cards were needed to complete the 1952 set. I open the first pack, and there it is, #311-Mickey Mantle!! My day, in fact my whole summer was made. Revenge was mine, I'll show those little bastid rats a thing or two, now they will fear me!

The routine in Mrs. Satraino’s class was for every student to stand up and read their homework assignment. I waited my turn, Mickey Mantle card in my shirt pocket. Most of the kids on my block were in my class, so in one fell swoop I would extract my revenge. Like Micheal Corleone in The Godfather, I would settle all family business, in one move.

Finally I get my turn to read, and after doing so , just before I sit down I pull the Mantle out of my pocket, turn to face my class and rip it up, then slam it into the trash pail near the teacher’s desk. The guys were all clenching their fists and about to rush me, when Mrs. Satraino stepped in and ordered us all to our desks, with a few harsh words to me for my act of bravado.

Stupid move? Yeah, that 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311 is now worth somewhere in the neighborhood of five to twenty thousand or even more, depending on its condition, but at six years old, who knew?

In a perfect world a boy will grow to be a man, and lessen his stupid moves, unfortunately, that was just the beginning, there were to be some real doozies being laid out in my future.

THAT'S HOW IT WAS by DeAnn Louise Daigle

2011-05-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

My cousin Fran put together all the moving pictures that Uncle Jerry and she had recorded over the course of some twenty years or so.

Back in 1989, his sister called Fran out on Long Island to come to Bronxville, where our uncle died in his sister’s home, to look through his things to see if she wanted anything.

I was in the convent in Maine at that time and it was just before I’d be moving to New York to study at Fordham University.

Fran gathered the photos and film that were familiar to our side of the family. Aunt Rilla had died about three years previously and they had had no children.

Fran had been diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2006 just shortly after her fifty-first birthday. She created several projects for herself over the course of the three years to her death.

One of them was for us to decide which of the films to keep and which to discard. She would have the ones we’d decided family might enjoy having transferred to DVDs.

The films were old; they went back to the early fifties and none of them had sound. She wondered about a name for the series. She called me and told me the fellow who would be making the transfer suggested Memories.

That’s kind of perfect, isn’t it, Fran? I said. She agreed.

She loved Soldier Pond like I did. We both had this feeling for the land and the air and woods and fields and trees; that’s about what we shared most between the two of us. It was our bond; the love of our childhood memories.

Even though Fran had moved to Long Island in the fifties, she and her parents kept coming back to Maine every year. Fran’s Mom had a large family of siblings and the grandmother was still alive at the time.

Fran’s memories felt like my own. She was six years younger than me and left Soldier Pond as home when she was two, and I left at thirteen, but nature had been etched into my bones and all through me.

The place would never leave me and I would write about it; even when I was not deliberately trying to. Fran felt the same way, and she too wrote. She wrote through her childhood like I did, and I learned about that only later.

She loved everything I wrote, and was proud to share my pieces with her co-workers and friends. Only once did she question the meaning of something I’d written on a card – a quote from someone else, which I felt was thought-provoking.

She was perplexed by it. I guess I was too, and that was part of the reason I’d used it for that year’s Christmas card.

I try to write a poem for my Christmas card each year. That year, I was stumped, and I’d read a quote from another writer I had not previously heard of and used it for the card.

Fran and I did not know how long she would live. The doctors wisely gave no time limit. One doctor just assured her that this cancer would most likely be the cause of her death.

Three and one half years later on July first, 2009 she died; her last words to me on the phone from the hospital, where she had been for two weeks, were, “I love you too, I’m so tired, I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

This past week, I put on one of the several Memories DVDs Fran gave me. Pictures of Soldier Pond, a panoramic sweep of the hills and woods and water; Uncle Eddie’s boat that he’d proudly built and rode with an outboard motor on the lake;

the children, Uncle Eddie’s, the younger ones I’d grown up with. The year was 1959. Mom and Dad walking on the lawn, Aunt Rilla, Uncle Jerry. I was upstairs in my bedroom window waving to them;

I was still getting over the mumps and did not want my picture taken. There was Dad with Mom and he was waving me to come down. I can read his lips, Come down and his arm was beckoning me.

Then there were the pictures of my very first visit to New York. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Rilla were living in Pelham just outside the city.

There I was with them at the Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. There we were out on Long Island with Uncle Edmund and Aunt Madeline and Fran.

She was four years old and looked exactly the same as she did as an adult; the smile, always impish and playful. So full of energy, unstoppable little kid that she was.

It was hard to get me to move for the camera but not her. She ran and jumped and played with the kittens and the dog. She climbed on the car and posed.

What a dear and generous thing for her to have done. She’d completed this project and it was for others. She knew I’d treasure these memories and she hoped her living relatives in Maine would as well.

Her mother’s family meant a great deal to her and she had hoped she would die in Maine, but that did not happen. Her aunt told me on the phone.

I just buried my husband two years ago. We struggled with the ravages of his cancer. I cannot go through this again with Fran and my kids don’t want me to either.

I told Dolly, You must tell Fran; you have to be honest with her.

Fran. What made us love that place so much? Does a place have a consciousness? Does a place know we love it? Does the land really speak to us, like the Native Americans say? It must be so. It has been for us.

I knew on my first visit to New York City that I would have to live here someday; that was fifty-two years ago and I’ve been here twenty-two years. It took thirty years of meandering before I finally settled here.

All of this mysterious journey is a wonder.

I love this city too in a different way than I loved Soldier Pond, and I think it’s because of the artist in me and the reconciler and the optimist that dwells right next to the pessimist in me.

It’s all about the contrasts and contradictions and how the non-reconcilable can live with the reconcilable; however tenuous that situation may be.

I remember my friend Teresa saying she never felt out of place. I’m not quite there yet, but I feel closer to this state of being than ever before. I want to feel in-place wherever I am.

Oh, Soldier Pond! Oh, Manhattan!
I heard a hawk yesterday. It was hovering above the tall buildings.
I kind of fancy myself a bird of sorts.

The angle at which Uncle Jerry took some of that panoramic view of Soldier Pond, showed the store, the church, the bridge; I felt he must have taken some of that view from our lawn but also from the hillside I used to love to climb.

He must have gone there. That’s where I’d go to sit still and feel like I was seeing the whole world, it was the highest point from which I felt close and far away all at the same time.

I think Fran’s spirit is there now and so all of our loved ones’ who have gone, and I’m there two even while I’m here. Perhaps there is only a thin veil after all.

BUS STOP by Margaret Westley

2011-04-06T12:01:00.001-07:00

Over the years, people have asked me about my roommate who was with me when I was hit by the bus. "Well, whatever happened to her?" they ask, or hint about their interest in her whereabouts.

"She woke up screaming for almost two years," is the first thing I usually say, and then look away because sometimes I just don't know how to handle the look of shock, even though it’s been eight years now, and one would think I'd be used to it. To be honest, I don't think the concept of being used to having been hit by a bus will ever exist because every time I take a step, or my body tenses while trying to cross the street, I remember the accident.

My roommate told me about the nightmares several months after the bus. It wasn't until I called her two days into my hospitalization (or maybe she called me), that I asked (or perhaps she offered), if she wanted to come see me. She stopped by the hospital one afternoon and sat in the chair farthest away from my bed. It was difficult for me to keep my eyes open because of the pain, and the drugs that were being administered into my veins also contributed to my high level of fatigue.

Tired, I was very tired, but my body was more tired than my brain which became more alert the moment my roommate walked into the room. She sat still, very still, as I pushed the button on the right of my body which allowed me to sit up in bed without having to move a muscle. Over the course of my hospitalization, I learned to love this button.

"Be careful of the IV, Margaret," my mother warned, gently. Early on, whenever I moved, she kept a watchful eye and ever since my admittance, an hour didn't go by without me forgetting about the IV. If I suddenly moved my arm, the alarm would go off. Then the nurses on duty, or their aides, came running into my room.

I took my mother's advice because I didn't want the alarm to frighten my roommate even more than she already was. "Hey," I said weakly, "why are you all the way over there? Come closer!" My roommate obliged, drawing the chair closer to the foot of my bed. We talked for a little over half an hour, or until my eye lids started to drop and everyone knew I was tired. During our conversation she admitted she was afraid to come visit me sooner because she was sure I hated her for not pulling me out of harm's way. She thought I blamed her for being hit and the resulting injuries.

I didn't mean to, but when she told me this, I started laughing and then quickly added, "Are you serious? You saved my life!" And that she had.

Had she not tugged at the back of my black pea coat, the bus would have hit me in my head and I would have been killed.

THE DEAD CLOCK by Dermot McGuigan

2011-03-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

I go up the stairs to my room and close the door behind me, as I do every evening before school. I sit at my desk by the window and spread schoolbooks and copybook out as though I am doing the homework assignment.

From inside my room, at the top of the stairs, I differentiate between the footsteps of father and mother. I hear when one of them comes up the stairs or walks from their bedroom at the end of the landing to the bathroom next to my room.

I know to hide what amuses me when I hear the footsteps, return to my seat and text of Irish grammar or geography. Every now and again one of them will open the door and ask if everything is OK, I answer yes and they leave, they rarely enter the room or come to my desk. I know how to look busy.

Sitting on the floor I use the cutting edge of the pliers to snip the pin from a brass tack. Taking the round tack head between the teeth of the pliers I place it on the hot edge of the electric room heater. Then I press the hot metal against the skin of the plastic kit car I have assembled. I let the tack-head sink in and set.

I weld tack after tack onto the sides and top of the car – knowing that at some point I will subject it to increasing tests until I find its breaking point. The car survives multiple crash tests – continuing long after I sped it on its spindly wheels along the floor and into the wall, it lasted longer than all the others.

In the time between models, when the last one is broken beyond the point of interest and before I get the next one with my newspaper money, I turn my attention to anything else in the room, and inevitably, the alarm clock. Over and over I have taken the clock apart and put it back together – and it frustrates as the core will not yield to my curiosity. I can see the spring and the inner workings all punched tight in a metal cage … beyond my reach.

A test, perhaps the most severe, is to drop the object of my curiosity from my window past the dining room window and onto the path below. Father has his breakfast alone in the dining room with the door closed. He opens the hatch to the kitchen table where brother and I sit and offers tea from the pot, and then father closes the hatch. After dinner the dining room is empty. I drop the core of the clock out of my bedroom window and wait until the undefined time when it is acceptable to leave my room, when my homework is assumed to have been completed, then I go to retrieve the core, eager see to its fate. That it no longer works is mildly disappointing, that it remains impenetrable is frustrating. I re-assemble the clock and return it to the shelf in my room. It holds no further interest. Each night the time it tells remains the same. No one asks why; nor would I tell how it failed the test, or how tight it held its inner workings secret.

RAYMOND by Neil O'Brien

2011-02-27T08:05:00.000-08:00

Raymond is a tall, thin man of about twenty-seven. His head is clean shaven and shines. I wish to Christ he would grow his damn hair again. With his shaven head he reminds me of the guy who shot all the people in Tucson. From across the table his intense, brown eyes meet mine. He cries. Big tears roll down his cheeks. I want to cry but don’t. I’m not supposed to. I’m his “practitioner. That’s what they call me, a practitioner. My job is to take care of Raymond and others like him. Really, I’m his father and mother and his family. I’m here at the behavioral health unit to visit him. He is here after a severe panic attack caused him to pass out. The EMT’s had to break down his door to get him out of his apartment. He looks at me, cries, and then hangs his head. He shakes and touches his forehead and face over and over again. He’s decided he has OCD and ADD. I guess these are acceptable. “But I’m not mentally ill,” he says, “and I’ll sue anyone who says that for defamation of character.” At this moment he is very mentally ill but I don’t say that. He looks at me and runs his hands over his bald, shaven head. It has cuts in it from the razor. He tells me he’s never speaking to his mother again. “They hate me” he says of his mom and step-father. “They don’t hate you Raymond,” I say. “They’re concerned for you, worried about you.” As true as that is it is sometimes difficult to defend the actions of some people. She wants him to be in a place where he can be supervised twenty-four hours a day. He wants to be in his own apartment. She tells him constantly that he will fail, that he is incapable of living by himself. We give him a chance to live by himself. She hates us for that. Raymond won’t speak to her anymore. Now he has pulled his authorization for me to speak with her. She’s infuriated with him and me and everyone. I know how she feels because I’m the parent of two mentally ill children. I guess at 37 and 35, they’re not children anymore. Raymond gets up from the table and walks around to me. He drapes himself over me in a big hug. He is a big guy and squeezes me hard. “I love you,” he says. “I love you too Raymond,” I say in a whisper. I shouldn’t say that. I’m not supposed to love my clients. It’s not therapeutic. It crosses a line that shouldn’t be crossed, or so they say. But at this moment I do love him. At this moment he’s ripping my heart out. Why can’t I ever get used to this, harden up, not feel that damn knot in my stomach. It’s the same knot I felt for years and years with my own kids, and still do if I let myself.

This whole episode is driving me to a place where I don’t want to be, a place where I never want to go again. I look at him crying and rubbing his face and head and the cuts in his shiny scalp. First the Tucson guy comes to mind again. Yes that certainly could happen, I think. Am I enabling possible mass murder? It’s not so farfetched, happens all the time. Is his mother right? Maybe he should be locked up. Maybe that would be better for him and for society. Then I’m driven back in to my life. As I watch him hang his head and cry some more I see my daughter. I remember, for some reason, how she used to cut her face and arms up, scratch herself until she bled. I remember sitting in the hospital, this very same hospital, with her and asking to have her admitted. I remember having to tell the doctor right in front of her everything that was wrong with her. I remember the hurt look on her face as she listened. Most of all I remember leaving her here for the first time. It is a feeling that literally sickens me all these years later. It is a feeling that is being resurrected by this experience, by Raymond and all the others that I must work with on a daily basis. I remember how much I hated the mental health system and how I thought and still think that it helped destroy both of my children. “Christ!” I think, now I am the system. I still hate the system. I’m here to protect people like Raymond from the system I work for. Sometimes it’s just all too damn much. I want to sit down in my chair and write books and poems and get paid for it. That doesn’t seem to be happening. And who in the hell is going to protect Raymond if I’m not here? That’s pretty egotistical I guess, but that’s what I think. After all these years my brain doesn’t work right either.

Raymond came home to his apartment today. I’m not sure he will be all right. It’s a chance that has to be taken. He deserves a chance to have a life, even if mom doesn’t think so. It is six o’clock and I have to go home now to my own life. “You going to be all right for the weekend? I ask him as I open the door to leave. “Sure Buddy, I’ll be fine,” he answers. He likes me to be his buddy rather than his mental health worker. It’s OK with me if that makes him feel better. As I leave and close the door behind me, the knot in my stomach returns in full force. I hear the phone ring, though there is no phone here in the parking lot of Raymond’s development.

“It’s Shawn. I’m on the train Dad.”

“What train?” I say in my daydream.

“I’m on the train. I ran away and I’m lost. I think I’m in Philadelphia. Can you help me?"

I WAS GOING TO STAY by Jennifer Greenhalgh

2011-02-10T05:04:00.000-08:00

I was going to stay. I really was. But I can’t stand to be put up against a wall. That crazy woman wanted to play hardball and I definitely won’t be the one crying in the end. Yes, two and a half months is a long period of time, and yes, this place did essentially get me to stop a very destructive pattern of behavior, but come on, to ask me to leave the facility for the weekend? Ridiculous. All because I was caught giving a guy my phone number? Even more ridiculous.

I was accused of flirting and defocusing off of what I’m here for- I’m so insulted. Especially because I wouldn’t even call it flirting. Or defocusing. I’d call it talking to a person. Who happens to be male. And happens to have the bluest eyes that I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine that would warrant asking me to leave for the weekend though, and now I have to find a fucking place to stay.

I feel like they want me to go stay with him; just another ‘tough love’ tactic to manipulate me to follow their way. It doesn’t feel right to me. And the blue-eyed boy is seeming like a viable option to me now. He told me he was leaving on Friday and had found a room with a guy near the Ihop. I have no idea where the Ihop is. I have no idea about anything in south Florida and this was pretty much the worst non-decision of my lifetime to come here. I say that because I didn’t really participate in the recruitment process. I was forced by the almighty powers of parents in fear coupled with ‘experts’ collecting large sums of money. I guess I can’t really fault them anymore though, I certainly have realized that I’ve completely done this to myself. I was the one who drank to the degree that I did. I knew I passed the point of function; I knew where I was going. I can pretend that I didn’t, but I did. Deep down inside I knew that I was crossing into that abyss where it went from being mental into something physical. I just didn’t care. First I took the drink, then the drink took me. Classic. I needed it. Well, what could I do? I had nothing else. I still don’t, but at least now I have the blue-eyed boy beside me.

I guess my decision to leave was made. I couldn’t go back now. Plus, the blue-eyed boy was putting the pressure on. I had just entered into the vocational aspect of the program, so prior to this incident, I was actively looking for a job. It’s basically been pure hell. I’ve been going to the library each day and putting together my ridiculously doctored resume. I don’t have much, but at least I still have my college degree and I see no reason that I shouldn’t use it. The staff, however, feels very differently. They believe that I need to work at the local CVS or Publix grocery store in order to humble myself, and ultimately never drink again. A long stretch indeed, but an argument I was definitely losing. As was the case with most arguments with these people. The pressure for a CVS interview is this week and I just can’t bring myself to pick up an application. So this was my way out, now I can do what I want. Screw these people and screw CVS- the decision was made, I’m not going back.

It’s been extremely hot here in south Florida, not the optimal weather when you’re running away from your rehab. Today, I had to wait for the bus in the blazing sun with the rest of society’s rejects, carrying everything I own on my back while I situate myself at the rented room with the blue-eyed boy. My backpack must weigh at least 70 pounds. I remember hiking through Europe and my sack was 52 pounds, and this was definitely heavier. This was a far cry from the days of French bread and wine, traveling through the Alps, with my whole life ahead of me. I can’t believe what I’m doing here. It seems like I just woke up from a dream and ended up on the streets of Delray Beach, Florida. Where are my cats? Just a mere 3 months ago, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I even had a jeep, and a boyfriend. His name was William and he was from Ireland. An aspiring writer who worked carpentry and could make magic with his hands. William told me stories and I believed him; I believed in love and in us. And then it all changed. My demons had come back; I felt them creeping up on me and my urge to drink was returning. I thought love could stop them, but it couldn’t. Nothing was strong enough, I was naïve to the depth of my disorder, and one afternoon, I broke down. I was drunk at his apartment when he came home from work and he wanted nothing further to do with me. I didn’t really blame him, although I wished he would have put up more of a fight for me. He didn’t and I was in rehab within the week.

My intention was for this to be the time that changes my life. I really wanted to show William that I could stop this; I could be the woman that he thought I was, the woman that we created together. And my chance had finally come. It was after about two and a half months of thoroughly following the program that I finally got access to my cell phone and to William’s number. My heart raced as I dialed the number, I couldn’t wait to talk to him and tell him about all these changes that I had made, all the progress. How I no longer hated myself and how I finally found some peace through sobriety. I could finally take him on drives to the country and cook homemade meals fresh from the garden. And how he can rely on me to be the same girl when he came home from work that he left earlier that morning. I was done with all of it. Yes, this was it, the new me. And now we can start our life together. As I listened to the phone ring, my heart began to race. What would I say? So many words running through my head, my nervousness became palpable.

“Jennifer?”

“Yes… William, it’s finally me.”

“Are you alright?”

“I think so, well, now I am. Oh my god, where do I start? I’ve missed you. Well, I guess I can start there. God, I missed you. And I’m sorry, I never…”

“Well, before you finish, I’m sorry too. Jen, so sorry. Listen, there’s no easy way to say this, I’ve met someone… I wasn’t sure how to tell you, and we’re getting married…… hello?”

It was right then that I hung up the phone. Very calmly, very gently. But it felt like my knees were buckling. All that time, all our dreams… and he’s marrying someone else? I guess he really didn’t love me; I was right. Jesus, if I ever wanted a drink it was right at that moment but I didn’t have that option standing in my rehab room. I decided to do the next best thing and went to my notebook and tore out a page. I wrote down my number to give to the blue-eyed boy. I was done with William and ready for the next chapter… God only knows where this one will bring me.

THE HOME STRETCH by Cheryl Corson

2011-02-07T04:58:00.000-08:00

After the hospice nurse and social worker leave on the Monday after Christmas, Sadia, our first private nurse, arrives at 4pm. It’s been a long three days to get to this point.

There is a drug changing-of-the-guard as my Dad will no longer need most of his drugs, and morphine will take the place of oxycodone, docusate, losartan, and others too hard to pronounce, like ketoconazole. Except my father doesn’t like morphine any more than he liked the other pills, which means when I put all the plastic pill bottles the V.A. Hospital gave him into a plastic bag to take home, it seems to weigh several pounds.

After Dad dies, hospice will come and remove their drugs – morphine, halperidol, larazapan, senna – the extra- large diapers, the plastic pads called “chucks,” surgical gloves, catheter bags, and the hospital bed.

I ask what to do with the pills. The hospice nurse says the CDC says to flush them down the toilet, but there’s no fucking way I’m going to do that. There are enough bi-sexual fish in the Chesapeake Bay. I could sell them to Marion Barry, I guess, but when I have the energy, I’ll empty the bottles, destroy the labels with my father’s name on them, hammer the pills to pieces, and mix the dust with used kitty litter, then take it to the dump. It’s something to do.

Jenny, the hospice social worker stopped by today. She said goodbye to my Dad. He gave her a high-five. We all know that after the week-long vacation she’ll start tomorrow he’ll be gone. And so it is that people do their jobs, and come and go while other people lay in bed dying. And for some, dying takes a while. I’d say my father is in extra innings, and while he’s not eaten any food for about two weeks, his new favorite dish is crushed ice with a few teaspoons of grape juice over it. We call them “slurpies.”

He’s being a good sport. Now that it’s hard for him to talk, he moved his index finger around in a circle last night, pantomiming a request. I was there with Sadia. I guess, “Turn the thermostat up?” No. “Turn the light up?” No. “Raise the bed?” No. He finally laughs a silent laugh and we join him, losing this round of charades. Then Sadia gets it: “Turn on the fan?” Yes! That’s it.
I draw up a menu of common commands he can point to. Now he has a hand bell he can ring so he won’t strain himself calling to us in the next room. We adjust. Each day is different.

His eyes and his heart are wide open, more so than any other time in his life. It’s the home stretch and he’s teaching me the biggest lesson there is – how to face death – how to be fully present, how to lie in bed and shit in a diaper, and be a gentleman to the nurses who change him.

He was holding out on me, but how happy I will always be to have spent these days with him. Never until now would I have called him my hero.

MARCH ON WASHINGTON by Judy Blanshard

2011-02-04T04:55:00.000-08:00

I was almost convinced that they would come, Martin’s people had said they would, 500 ministers from all over the US, to defend our non violent protest of the inequities in our society. The Quakers, ladies in skirts and hats and white gloves from the Midwest, older graying men and women from the Philadelphia group, we young organizers who had rounded them all up in Cape May at the religious conference and bussed them down to DC with our high flying dreams and our guitars and songs of protest….We shall overcome…overcome the narrowness of human beings in this sea of prejudice and democracy…. The sun beat down on us as we milled around with thousands of others of all colors, from everywhere, and we planted our nonviolent feet on the Capitol steps….

How many years ago had I met him at that church in South Philly, when I went with my friend Christina and her parents, just back from Quaker service in India where they had met him…I was only 14, but had been marching around City Hall, picketing Woolworths, studying Ghandi and nonviolent protest for at least three years. My father’s civil rights activities had already impacted my family from my early childhood. It was always a part of our family life to defend civil rights and to reach out to others, from the Fresh Air kids that came from NYC each summer, to the Levittown family that sold their house to the first AfroAmerican family with cross burning on lawns and threats of the same to us…

Yes Martin, that proud and dark complected man at the pulpit with the mellifluous voice had won me over that day, he seemed like a living Jesus, a person who lived the message of all religions, that God is Love, that human beings can tolerate differences and respect and honor each other….his words were so powerful…
Shaking his hand after the service and meeting him at the Church after his visit to India to learn about nonviolent protest, sealed my fate….

I too had gone on Quaker service with my family, but to Africa. I too had imbibed Martin’s version of Ghandi in my activities, heart and thinking. And now he was no more….and we were here…Carrying on for him, towards
living his Dream…

The numbers of people never came, or at least I didn’t see them, before the police arrived…no dogs like in the South, no suffering like Martin and his people, but we were his people. They roped us off and headed us off for detainment. Martin was with us, and somehow today, I still see him, remember him, his guidance and noble words…his example. Martin, you are with us every day.

We shall overcome despite slow slow progress, and human nature…

Thank you, Martin Luther King.

BUSHWHACKING by FreyK Frey

2011-01-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

You have to imagine all the bushes, shrubbery, grasses and wildlife in my apartment. Bushes are growing thick and multiplying, books practically falling from the shelves onto my head, crowding. It's a great density of a forest. Vinyl records, CDs, tapes, and parts of technologies, cords and plugs, something that should plug in to something but now it is no longer known what it was to plug into. Round and red at the end of a cord, metallic and squarish, cords, parts, extensions! And that's just the first part of the bushwhacking.

Handlebar antlers of a bike are stretching out, taking up forest space. Startled, it could jump and launch a huge white paper landslide (I'm seeing Elizabeth Bishop here), the bike will fall, the papers will go with it, old papers on top of new papers, what a terrible archeological wilderness! Look, there are the notebooks, scratchings on them, loose leaves, missing pages, missing teeth. They are lisping, bewildered, wild eyed, all sizes of books, with all sizes of sketches, ankle high, knee high, thigh high. Get out of my way! I'm bushwhacking! Go! Go little notebooks, get away from me!

Why did I save you, you yellow paper taxi? What about you, you little broken mariachi band trying to dance with little broken arms and legs? (Here I get lost in the sadness of Mexico). Well you pots, then, you with earth that is so precious in the city. Did I really think your soil would support a farm come springtime? Now thinking about the pots I get lost in the sadness of the dry, dry earth, droughts, and the sadness of floods, and the sadness of bees, bees collapsing. But there is still the need for bushwhacking. Whack away -- at the pots and that stingy bit of earth in them.

Enough! Enough. I have to change pace. I have to admit that in the midst of bushwhacking -- I just brought in from the very streets of Manhattan bars of broken gold frames. They are beautiful, ornate, renaissance! Gold! Luxurious, far more luxurious than anything I've ever known growing up. There they were bundled with clear tape in front of Jack's Picture Framing. What a find! I'm in the process of throwing things out at home, and there they were -- in an elaborate golden pile, golden frames in pieces, Gold!

I saved them. I hugged them in my arms, like saving a crocodile I think, and I brought them home. Would they bite, destroy me, take over my apartment? Would I house them only to throw them out? Greed and love competed with the idea of a clean, clear space, a Celestial City.

I must now give up my idea of a simple Japanese aesthetic. I must give up the bushwhacking romance too. How does this gold fit into a rustic backwoods story? Gold? This gold did not get found in California, little grains in a pan by a stream, but in huge four-inch thick hunks of a four-foot long frame, ornate with broken golden paste embellishment. They are very rough indeed, rusty nails of all sizes stretch out of their edges clawing for attention, scratching to get back to their place in the world, to grandly enclose what is worthy of them, looking for a masterpiece -- or looking to assure some poor picture that it is a masterpiece.

So here's what could happen. I could take these golden sticks, boards really, out to the bush. I could set them in some sand and frame a rock, or cactus. It isn't likely I'll do that, but it is not likely that I will throw them out either, unclaimed, pretentious riches from the streets of New York. Back in my apartment I'll take poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop wrote a whole poem about an eraser's unicycle, a typewriter's terraces, the stubbed soldier-cigarettes in her ashtray.

SO MUCH PAIN by Polly Howells

2011-01-30T08:45:00.000-08:00

I didn’t expect there to be so much pain on this trip. And I’m a little embarrassed by it. One isn’t supposed to take a huge trip to Bhutan and Southeast Asia, seven weeks in all away from home, and come back primarily aware of the pain.

But it’s the truth. There’s the pain in my shoulder, not diagnosed until I returned, last week, as a 50% tear in the supraspinitis tendon of my right rotator cuff. I fell on the street in Brooklyn two weeks before we left. Nothing to do about it then. Don’t know what I’m going to do about it now. Visiting Woodstock Wellness regularly, being cracked and given herbal supplements by the good doctor there. A psychic relief, at least, if nothing else.

But more important was the pain of seeing how people live. Two hours of electricity at night. No hot water, or as in one monastery in Bhutan where we spent three nights, no water at all. Our physical discomfort was one thing, but seeing how people live in so much more physical discomfort, and take it for granted. That hurts. It hurts to see that what we take for granted is a luxury only the very few in this world can afford. Our guide in Siem Reap, where the twelve-hundred-year-old ruins of Angkor Wat rise mysteriously and majestically from the jungle, tells us that it takes his wife all day to cook, going to the market several times because there is no refrigeration.

Cambodia is a cauldron of pain. The first afternoon in Phnom Penh, we are taken to the Torture Museum, where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned the highest echelons of its party and saved for them the most exquisite forms of torture. Cells three feet by six feet, leg irons, cots with no mattresses, little metal boxes for feces. It’s all still there, still there the way the Vietnamese found it when they invaded in 1979, five years after the Khmer Rouge took over.

After that we go to the Killing Fields. There is a glass tower filled with shelves of skulls. There is a field on which slivers of bones are visible. Oddly the trees there are magnificent, tall and twisted, roots and trunks entwined, entangled. There are more butterflies on this field than anywhere else we go. The English doctor we meet the next day pooh poohs the possibility that these creatures are connected with the dead souls there. I don’t cry. I am numb, in awe.

The second day in Phnom Penh we visit the English doctor, the brother of a friend, who runs a hospital that refashions and attaches limbs to people who were disfigured during the Pol Pot years. When he hears that we are therapists, he says, “Oh you might want to visit our Acid Burn Clinic.” So the next day we go out there, some ways out of town, where people whose faces have been burnt off by angry relatives who have got hold of acid – sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, all available with no regulation, sold on street corners – are being treated, physically, emotionally. A nurse is massaging the scars on another woman’s arms when we walk in. A man without eyes, his face totally obscured by scar tissue, plays a piano like Ray Charles. His wife, who threw the acid at him, is so appalled at what she did that she works here as a cook. She serves us our lunch as we talk with the staff about post-traumatic stress disorder. The whole country seems to be suffering from this disease; the resources to treat it so few.

A girl holds a snake for me to buy, for food, on Tonle Sap Lake, not far from Siem Reap. The snake is alive. She is asking two dollars. I don’t buy the snake. But I snap her picture. I look at her now, look at her sad, serious face. Where did she find that snake? My friend went there several years ago, said she saw a girl selling a snake, right there. In the same spot. The same girl? The same snake? A scary thought. Is she a prop?

And then the next morning, Eric, my husband, woke up with the world whirling around inside his head. Couldn’t get his head off the pillow. The doctor came by, diagnosed it as vertigo, probably caused by the anti-malaria medication he was taking. Gave him some pills. I sat with him all day, but it didn’t go away. That night he was carried out of the hotel on a stretcher, down the steps past the swimming pool, carried by around ten small Cambodian men. We spent the night in a “private clinic,” a small hospital with one doctor and one nurse. An IV in Eric’s arm, they are hydrating him and giving him anti vertigo medication, and antibiotics, who knows what all, he sleeps, I do too, a little. There is a bathroom connected to our room in which the sink tap is dripping. The toilet paper is pink. At least there is toilet paper. Eric has been carrying three full rolls around in his suitcase, just in case.

It takes him 36 hours to sit up without the world spinning. One full day after he is admitted we leave the clinic. We go to a show that night, but the next morning he is still a little dizzy. It has now been three or four weeks, the dizziness has finally left, but slowly, oh so slowly.

We go from there to a small town in Laos, a lovely peaceful place, but it is the fall and everyone is burning the refuse in their gardens, and cooking on wood stoves in the street. Despite the physical beauty, when we come out of our room in the morning the air is pungent with wood smoke, hard to take in.

After Laos, we end up in Hong Kong. November 17, the city is completely dressed up for Christmas. Not one tall building without an array of Christmas lights. After three Buddhist countries, this is a shock. We find out that they do this for the mainland Chinese, who come to Hong Kong to shop, and to experience ersatz Christmas, not having it at home.

So many people. I learn later that 57% of the world’s population lives in Asia.
I am not surprised.

When we arrive in San Francisco, and the passport control guy says, “Welcome home folks,” my eyes actually tear up.

New York City feels like a small, peaceful town, even in the Christmas rush.

After a massage and a chiropractic session, I seem to get a cold. The chiropractor of course says, “that’s good, you’re draining.” What I call it, to myself, is “Post-traumatic drip syndrome.” The post nasal drip born of trauma.

Glad to be back.

I WAS ALMOST CONVINCED by DeAnn Louise Daigle

2011-01-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

Mr. McKibben was strict. He walked into the classroom and slammed the door. I was immediately intimidated. But, something happened. When he reached the front of the class, laid the book and papers down on the desk and began to speak, I felt I’d found my soul mate or at least a kindred spirit. There was just something about him. He and I resonated. It was enough. I knew everything I wrote in this Shakespeare class would be some of the best writing I’d ever done.

He was that kind of teacher. He allowed me to have my own experience of Shakespeare, and I could write about it in my own way. I looked forward to getting my papers back from him. His red markings in the margins were the most encouraging commentary I’d ever read about my writing. I found that I did have a voice and Mr. McKibben had the gift for drawing it out of me.

It didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes as well. He was, I thought, brilliant. He treated Shakespeare as gently and as brutally honestly as I’d imagined Shakespeare himself would have wanted to be treated as a writer.

I so admired and trusted Mr. McKibben that I gave him, one day, an envelope of my closely kept secret poetry. He generously read the poems and wrote on a separate sheet of paper in his typical red ink the most wonderfully encouraging commentary. I’ll always treasure the warm glow and experience of growing confidence of those precious moments when I first read his words.

How could I not fall completely and madly in love with this man, who was married with two children? But, it didn’t matter. I relished his classes, I wrote my papers and hung on every word of commentary. This man treated my writing as if it were something sacred. I grew in his classes on Shakespeare and in every subsequent course I took from him. He was a noble man, someone I highly respected, because he treated all of his students with respect and intelligence.

We became friends, and I found out he really wasn’t all that fond of teaching – even though it seemed to me that he had an incredible gift for it. I was almost convinced I couldn’t write before I met him. And years later I would begin to doubt myself again.

I never quite knew where to go or what to do with my writing, but I knew that it was vitally important for me to express myself. And now in my later years, I’m re-discovering the joy there is in that self-expression no matter how it comes out.

The stories of my life are in the sinews and muscle and bone fibers of my body. The stories of people and relationships and the embodiment of grace flood my memory.

Everyone I’ve ever met has played an important role in my election to frame my life in such a way that there would always be space for writing. I’d forgotten how vital a role Mr. McKibben had played in boosting up my confidence and so my desire to keep on writing, and not to let anyone take away my desire to write.

I sat in class looking out the window at the perfect tree standing tall out on the mound and behind the grotto of stone surrounding the lone standing white marble statue of Mary, her gaze heavenward. The trees all around the grotto, the sloping hill and the tall tree – that scene was suddenly the most freeing, the most fulfilling, the most inspiring object in my vision. At that very moment, it was etched upon my mind, and I knew with certainty that I was in the right place at the right time, and Mr. Mckibben had just laid his book and papers on the desk; he had not yet opened his mouth.

ONE BIG DISAPPINTMENT by Kathryn Spencer

2011-01-30T05:13:00.000-08:00

In 1968, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, and on the drill team of the Carlisle High School Marching Band. Being that our sports teams were the 'Carlisle Indians,' our drill team was known as the 'Indianettes.' This meant that, not only did we march in parades, but, almost every Friday night, we would get on a school bus and be transported to other schools and march on their fields at football halftime. It served as a guaranteed way to be out with my friends.

We had band practice every Saturday, marching for hours, all over the football field, and getting yelled at by our music teacher and band leader, Mr. Wyrick. Before each practice would begin, Mr. Wyrick would tell us that when and if he had to call us out by name and yell at us, we were not to take it personal. He assured us that he wasn't meaning anything by it, except directing us as to where we were supposed to be marching, or standing. He said that we were 'working together as one big machine,' and when he yelled, he was just trying to get the machine to run smoother. He gave us an analogy of 'keeping us oiled, and working out the kinks.'

While he stood on a bench on the edge of the field, he yelled and cussed us all out through a bull horn. He would yell so hard that blue veins would actually pop out of his forehead! At first, it scared me, but the older kids stood on the field and snickered while he referred to us as a bunch of 'losers and shit heads.' He would call out the kids that laughed and said, "You can laugh all you want to, but you're still a big machine made up of a bunch of little-bitty nothings from the middle of nowhere, and that's all you're ever going to be!"

We quickly learned how to judge for ourselves what we were supposed to be doing, to save the poor bastard from stroking out. When practice was over, he would have a big smile on his face and graciously thank us for our hard work, and point out the slightest improvements that any of us made.

After several weeks of marching in the cold wind and rain, we developed some not-so-elaborate formations. Some of us were bright enough to be bored with, and ashamed of them, especially when we marched on the football fields of other schools.

For instance: One of our routines involved marching out onto the field to the tune of the jingle from the 'Excedrin Headache' commercial. The first group marched in the form of a person's head. Two lines, marching in single file was his throat, and a group of us marched closer to the bleachers, forming an oval shape, which was supposed to be a person's stomach. At the end of the song, around the last six beats, and a drum roll, the drill team captain, Jeanie Shumaker, and her very best 'frenemy,' Vicki Carpenter, would appear on the field. Each would be carrying a large, white, circular piece of cardboard, with a big letter 'E' on each of them. They were supposed to be a couple of Excedrin aspirins.

They would run past the kids that were supposed to be a pair of lips, opening as they ran through. Then, they would run in the center of two marching straight lines of the kids that were the throat. When they finally reached the oval shape of us that were supposed to be the stomach, the cymbals clanged, and the trumpets and tubas would do a, 'TA-DA!'

After that, everything stopped to a silent stillness. The crowd in the bleachers would be sitting there, very perplexed. At the same time, all at once, the whole town took one big breath and said, "Huh?"

As we marched off the field to a pathetic rendition of, "Winchester Cathedral," the feeling of disappointment among us kids, was so thick, that we couldn't march away fast enough!

The few times that I ever looked out at the crowd of people in the stands, they were pointing and laughing at us. As I marched, I felt both anger and embarrassment. There was never any 'applause.'

TRADITIONAL NOT SO MUCH by Lorelei Black

2011-01-05T15:47:00.001-08:00

I often tell my best friend Asia that had I been born a beautiful gay Turkish man like I was supposed to, I would’ve coaxed Damien’s wavering bisexuality out into full force and she would have been my One True Woman. Then again, my idea of a romantic compliment is telling Damien he would be great as a twink in a gay porn. Thankfully, Asia understands this statement as the highest honour I could give her and she laughs and tells me we could just get married while we were in Montreal. I think this is an excellent plan -- then I would go marry Damien and she would go marry her boyfriend and we could spark a Supreme Court case asking whether we are committing bigamy or not seeing that the United States does not federally recognize gay marriages.

This sounds pretty exhausting, though, and we’re slightly too mentally ill and physically disabled to deal with something like that.

We are the sort of best friends who talk in broken, incomplete sentences or at times even just noises and understand each other as communicating full, insightful thoughts. Yes, we’re one of those. We amuse ourselves by playing what we call The Starbucks Game, where we walk into the Starbucks section of a Barnes & Noble and talk about the most disturbing aspects of our lives to date until we can clear out everyone in the area. This usually happens accidentally, though. We have no concept of ‘appropriate’ topics because neither of us have said anything to each other that we’ve found too disturbing, graphic, or just gross.

While pretty much all eight of my friends are my best friends, there is something about me and Asia that is different, I think, that while my friends and I all love each other, she and I practically share a mind. She’s the only person I could spend every day on end with and not want to stab myself in the eye, and I’m not even engaged to her. I even take her to family functions like she’s related to me or something. Damien’s family’s going to start feeling suspicious about something soon, even if they’re not sure what it is. But she’s the only person who can keep me sane through the crazy.

This Thanksgiving, Asia was not here, so I went with Damien to his brother’s new big house that Damien and his sister are so jealous of and he apologizes to me that he can’t be his supposedly wildly more successful brother. He doesn’t get that I’m not jealous because I’d rather not have a house with woodrot and be married to a sexually repressed bad dresser who works at a mega church. In any case, the whole family was there on both sides, and it was intensely awkward for me. Most people still aren’t sure about what to say to me or what topics to bring up, partly because they don’t know me, partly because I’ve been known to fly off my handle at their father.

“So what the hell is on my plate?” I whisper to Damien.

“Um, well, that’s turkey with gravy… here’s some creamed onions… those are sweet potatoes… and stuffing.”

“What’s in stuffing?”

“I actually don’t know.”

Marilyn, his mom, is now clued into the fact that someone, somewhere, is asking a question. “What’s wrong?”

“This is the first American Thanksgiving Lorelei’s ever had, so she‘s never had stuffing. She wants to know what‘s in it.”

Now everyone has heard: a first-generation American sits at their table, someone whose parents are from a different country.

“Is it really?!” Damien’s sister-in-law squeals. “I’m glad it could be our Thanksgiving! Do you like it?”

“Yes, it’s great, thanks.”

“What do you usually have, then? Do you not have turkey?!” Everyone is looking at me with wide-eyed anticipation.

“Well, um, we do have turkey, but Romanians don’t understand gravy, so we have mujdei. I guess Americans would call it aioli. We have mashed potatoes and we have icre. It’s a dip made with bread, onions, olive oil, and fish roe.”

Every time I tell people what I eat on Thanksgiving, I consider giving them some bizarre story about an ancient tradition where a virgin must walk through a field of chickens and see if it rains before the feast can begin. Thankfully, by the time I get around to describing icre, it has exactly the effect I’d have been going for. Everyone is disturbed, for some reason, and they say it must be interesting to be having a ‘regular’ Thanksgiving now, and they stop talking to me.

“Why does everyone like stuffing? I don’t get it,” I say as I work on the bland comfort food.

“I don’t know, darling, but you’re not making me eat fish roe.”

At least the kids are cute.

ALONE by Christina Franke

2010-12-04T16:23:00.001-08:00

Alone, I look out the window, I look and keep looking, no matter what is in front of me. I have a book, I always have a book, but on the bus I don’t pick it up, or when I do, I put it down right away, and keep looking.

I have three days ahead of me, on this bus, 75 hours from San Francisco to New York City. When I’m moving all that has worried me, all that has made me unhappy, goes away. All that matters is the movement, the movement is enough to occupy me, looking, looking out the window. I don’t care if I’m looking at grey and ugly strip malls, sad, broken-down houses, or desolate farms, I take in everything, every detail. I imagine the lives of the people in these places, I watch the mothers walking with their children, the old men talking on street corners, everything is of equal interest.

And I watch the people on the bus, who get on, ride 100 miles and then get off again. In the Midwest, I see overweight women in thin cotton dresses, burdened with bags and young children, eating sandwiches, feeding their children soda pop as we drive along. I watch the sky, dark, looming, remembering that we’re in tornado country, afraid. We drive into the darkness for hours, days it seems. People get on and off, on and off. I stay in my seat, looking out the window. I eat in rest stops, grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, pieces of apple pie, I brush my teeth in dirty bathrooms, trying not to touch anything. People on the bus are silent or murmur softly to each other. A child cries, then stops at a sharp word. I talk to no one, sitting in my window seat, looking out the window, never meeting anyone’s eyes, concentrating on the buildings and farms and trucks out the window.

Chicago. I have three hours before the bus leaves that will take me to New York City. I take a shower in the bus terminal, amazed that the Greyhound Bus company has thought of such a wonderful thing, a shower after two days sitting on a bus. When I get on the bus, clean with wet hair and a face that feels shiny from the soap, the driver tells us that this bus will go non-stop to New York. We leave at night and we’ll arrive at NYC’s Port Authority some time the next morning. We’ll only stop at rest stops, not to drop people off or pick people up. We’re all – the whole busload – we are all going to NYC.

Most of the passengers are black, many of them young. They’re thin, full of energy, talk, noise. I watch them, fascinated. They laugh with each other, they talk and talk, and as the night goes on, they all fall asleep, one by one. I sleep too.

In the morning, in the grey light, crossing Pennsylvania, crossing New Jersey, the talk starts again, the laughter, the joking, the stories. This is not the Midwest, these are not Midwesterners, these are city people, people going to NYC! I feel excited, I feel their excitement, and I know that they are the people I want to be with.

Way out on the flats of New Jersey, I see the Empire State Building first, then the other buildings of the Manhattan skyline. I weep with pleasure.

STARTING OVER by Arthur Kahn

2010-12-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

My observation is that when most people reach their early 60's their lives have more or less leveled out. Sure, this is a vast over simplification, but let's face it, When you're in your early 60's you've been working for over 40 years, give or take. Many people look forward to retirement as their own private Nirvana. For most, it's a pretty mundane Nirvana. For example, people who sew look forward to sewing for more than 2 or 3 hours a night. Golfers? I'm not a golfer (whew) but the people I know who golf seem to be unable to not golf. I'm not a fan of the sport (although I'm probably one of the few people who enjoy watching golf on TV – go figure) but those I know who golf derive true joy from it.

What I've described could be called “anticipatory retirement”. You're staring at the not too distant future. A future in which you reap the supposed rewards of having earned the chance to step off the whirling dervish that most people think is the whirl of life.

Me? Not on your life. My first (there were many) “mid life crisis” started in my mid-40's and ended right after my 50th birthday with a heart attack and open heart surgery with a pacemaker chaser.
At the time, I was working for a lawyer in Albany, N. Y. His self professed management style was “terrorist”, this all before we knew what terrorism really was. Mind you, I was not the greatest employee. A few days before my infarct ( the technical term for my heart attack was myocardial infarction – which feels really good on the tongue when you say it) I had been berated upon the discovery of hundreds of pornographic pictures on my hard drive at work. Thank God he didn't know, or suspect, that I would stay late at the office and have cyber sex or phone sex. Now, I'll grant you that, as a lawyer, I should have known that there is no right of privacy at the work place. Unfortunately, my life worked on the principle that lust trumped everything.

After initially surviving the heart attack (there were a few hairy moments, such as a precipitous drop in my heart rate after I was brought to Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, NY) it was decided that I needed to be chauffered to Albany Medical Center for a cardiac catheterization to determine if I needed heart surgery. The result was that I was scheduled for a coronary artery bypass graft (CABGx2 – pronouced cabbage), a double bypass. Better than three or four, no?

So, I'm lying in the hospital. I'm not too far from my office. I got along well with the staff, other than the terrorist, so I called and asked if they would mind bringing me a decaf iced coffee from this terrific coffee place near the office, The Daily Grind. One of them showed up a short time later, iced coffee in hand. With a letter “from Dennis”, the terrorist. With that she made an abrupt departure. As soon as I read the letter I understood the hasty retreat. Instead of a note of encouragement and perhaps a check, I was fired. Canned. Terminated. And, of course, no more health insurance.

Sometimes it pays to have other, more serious issues to deal with when faced with a crisis in one part of your life. Since I was about to undergo open heart surgery I mercifully couldn't dwell on what was, in the moment, an ordinary crisis, compared to what was coming. Open heart surgery is pretty serious stuff. What they do is put you on a refrigerated table to lower your body temperature to about 88 degrees. Then they put you into a coma (I had made a pact with the anesthesiaologist that he wouldn't catheterize my junk until I was out) and then they take a surgical steel sawzall and saw your sternum apart. They then take a rib retractor, separate your ribs and expose your heart. Next they hook up your major blood vessels to a pump. Then they kill you.

I DON'T KNOW YET by Leëta Damon

2010-11-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

I recently attended the Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference for women from around the world, who work in technology and computing. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was new to this organization and sitting in the midst of a career and personal crisis when I signed up to go. I’d been to several other conferences in the past, but only as an employee of the host organization, never purely as an attendee. It was to be one week in Atlanta in the fall, in a luxurious hotel. I decided I was going to go, leave my life and work behind -- just soak up possibilities, and unwind by indulging my senses. Intellectual stimulation, good food and wine, and bubble baths awaited. . .

Well, there’s planning and hoping -- and then, there’s execution. In the space of time between making a reservation and getting on a plane, my lap top dies and a few other big bills come in. So downgrading my hotel to one a few blocks away seemed the sensible thing to do. The week before I was due to leave I was still deeply ingrained in a project at work that I was hoping to be done with before I left, and clearly wouldn’t be. In that last week, I wasn’t sleeping well, or fulfilling anything off my carefully constructed prep lists. A sleepless night of packing, weather woes leading to 3 reroutes, and 15 hours after arriving at the airport, I was finally in Atlanta.

Had I stayed in the same hotel my conference was in, given the sheer onslaught of information and human energy, I probably would have retreated to my room and ordered room service. I would have missed the 4 block walk each day through oddly deserted side streets, at least twice a day, that was somehow uphill both ways. I would have missed the 2 horse drawn carriages that rested at a taxi stand on my hotel’s street, just past the unassuming but loudly grooving supper club with no windows onto the street, only a facade that looked like someone’s front yard and door. Across from it, the snazzy “tallest hotel in the western hemisphere”, that had it’s first 2 floors on this side covered in scaffolding. Around the other side of the block, the drive-up entrance was a level lower (being downhill you know), and bustling with cars and bellmen.

I would have missed the panhandler that pointed me the way to my hotel that first night before hitting me up for change. I paid him a buck, after all he’d offered me a valuable service. On the way to the hotel, I passed this odd parking meter looking thing in the middle of the sidewalk outside the police station -- a collection point for the local “No Panhandling” campaign. (Oops.) I would have missed the police officers nonchalantly patrolling on segway, horse and bicycle. I would have missed that simple dance of meeting eyes or not, as we walked down the street -- the ‘how’ of which is often telling about one’s origins. I would have missed the foreign nationals walking around, scowling at the maps trying to get oriented and find their next destination.

As I’d been properly brought up in a paranoid city, I was careful to do such scowling before leaving my room each day. Having done so though, I walked about the streets with a certain comfort that eventually had those same foreigners asking me for directions. Hearing the accents and languages from all over the globe (like Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan), I was thrown back to my teen and young adult years in Manhattan, doing the same thing. That music is one of the few things I miss about living in a metropolis. Atlanta is called the NY of the south, and I can see why, it feels much like that social home of my youth, but a little cleaner, a little saner, a little friendlier -- most of the time. I was happy to see a good number of couples of mixed-race comfortably walking about, but could not fail to notice that white men on the street almost invariably did not meet my eyes.

My formal conference sessions finally over, I head back to my room to prepare for the last event of this gathering, a Sponsor’s Night party to be held in the local aquarium. There was the promise of much dancing, something I do far too little of late, as well as good food and wine. I’d done relatively little of the indulging I’d planned on, since I was working between sessions or was too worn out to go out after the evening sessions of the conference. The aquarium was on my list of things to do in my carefully planned out first day and a half, designed to transition me from my always-working state to something a little more civilized. Unfortunately, Mother Nature and the entity I work for had different ideas of what I should be doing with that time; I was glad for this opportunity to see the fishes and such.

Back in my room I spruce up a bit, artfully slap on some warpaint as armor against the social onslaught I was walking into (2000+ women blowing off steam from an information-packed week is no joke), and put back on the only pair of shoes I had with me -- though somehow I’d ended up with something like 4 purses when I unpacked. (Such are the decisions made by a sleep-deprived brain.) The walking map said it was only about 4 blocks away, and the desk clerk confirmed that earlier. There it was on the edge of the Olympic park, piece of cake. The route I choose to avoid walking along the park as a woman alone, takes me down the steepest hill yet, and then uphill (of course) to the aquarium’s front door.

Walking into that dark throbbing womb, filled with sweaty, eating-drinking, dancing-laughing-talking women (a few men sprinkled here an there for good measure), was the sensory assault I expected. Jeans and evening gowns and glitter and glow sticks abound. Luckily the music wasn’t too loud, probably a by-product of the 40+ year spread of ages in the room. I bought a couple drink tickets, and got a glass of wine, saving the soft drink ticket for later. The ball room we were in had 2 huge glass sections on perpendicular walls, one looking into the tank of a pair of beluga whales and a pair of harbor seals, the other into an enclave of small sharks.

I spent some time up close with the whales, only a few inches of glass between us -- and, you know, thousands of gallons of water. At first I was wondering how the almost shamanically deep bass line was going to affect them, given the water’s and glass’s amplification properties. The whales seem genuinely unfazed -- enjoying themselves perhaps. They kept swimming very close to the glass wall, seemingly offering up their bellies for a good scratch as they slipped past. They seem amused as I refer to them as “little one” in our mental conversations. Turning away, I slip out of this main ballroom, have my 2 drinks and a bite, nodding at a couple people I’d met earlier in the week. Then having met my tolerance for humans and noise, retire.

In the morning, having been thwarted in my request for a late check-out, I have a choice: to make the mad dash out into the city and see a few tourist things on my neglected list, or to wander in a mellow fashion, just soaking up atmosphere and sunshine in this lovely southern city, I choose the latter. It’s a gorgeous early fall day, The weather has wormed up from the unseasonably cool temperatures of the last few days. Here in a business district on Saturday morning, traffic’s pretty light. I don’t even see the 2 horse drawn carriages yet. I head up the hill for the 2 pieces of unfinished business I left in the mall. A few serious indulgences later, I return with my still smoking credit cards (so much for downgrading).

I finally have my items packed and logistics worked out to get home, but my flight doesn’t leave for several hours. So I stack various carefully packed bags onto my newly purchased luggage cart and rolling suitcase, look around one last time, stack up my trash and recyclables and struggle out the door and down to the lobby. Leaving my bags with the valet, and waiting until I see him put them into the locked room, I step out into the delightfully warm and sunny day.

I head across the street, through the parking lot across the street, towards Ted’s Montana Grill, and turning the corner toward the restaurant, and spot Mr. Turner himself, mustache and all, deep in conversation, carrying a briefcase that is a little at odds with his chambray shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. I smile a bit and continue on. I walk in and for the second time this week, am shown to a paneled booth. Dark wood and leather banquettes reign here, giving a homey cave-like air even on such a bright day.

I choose one of the “only available on Saturday” meals, and pull out my book: Eat Pray Love. Reading it on this trip, I’ve been chuckling a lot, recognizing more and crying a little. I must find more by this author. I feel like I’ve known her for years. Lunch comes and I enjoy this gently barbecue-sauced, long simmered bison short rib, fork tender and toothsome. It’s paired with the most genteel garlic mashed potatoes I’ve ever had -- I swear they simply waved the bulb of garlic over the pot and muttered some vague incantations. Perhaps this town needs a few more Italians I decide as I continue to read about the author’s adventures in Roma and Napoli, and munch away.

Atlanta - what was that line I heard the other day? “All your dreams could come true or you can get killed at a stop light, you just don’t know... You just don’t know.”

WITH JOAN OF ARC by Diana McCourt

2010-10-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

1962

I am alone without another adult living with me for the first time in my life in a tiny apartment on the corner of Riverside Drive and 93rd St. Because she was worried about me, my mother did what she does well – decorate. There is a beautiful red rug in the narrow small room that serves as bedroom, living room and dining room. There is clean white linoleum on the floor of the miniature kitchen. Nina, my 1 year old daughter, has Margaret Owen wallpaper in her little room. The furniture is bits and pieces of mistakes from decorating jobs of my mother’s; a table that was the wrong size, a bed that didn’t fit.

The piano is mine, the only major piece I salvaged from the seven year marriage I recently escaped from.

Nina and I spent many hours sitting on the red carpet. I smoke a lot and Nina likes the cellophane from the cigarette pack that crinkles when she holds it next to her ear. I throw a ball to her and she ignores it, preferring the sound of the paper.

“Ball, Nina, ball,” I explain, taking her free hand to touch it. Nina loves the red rug, in fact will not leave it. She will crawl to the edge of it where it meets the kitchen’s white floor but will not cross that line. If I carry her to it she screams.

Dr. Manuel Furer of the Masters Children’s Center finally talked to me last week. Nina and I went four times to his clinic at the urging of one of my friends. They tried playing with Nina while her father and I watched through a big glass window. The blocks and toys that any other child could have responded to meant nothing to her. Nina was looking at the play of light on the white wall from the outside window.

There was supposed to be some kind of report or help or something but my calls to the Dr. never get answered until finally I told the secretary to get him to the phone right now – that this was cruel and unprofessional treatment. He did come and muttered, “It's hopeless, she’s autistic, it's hopeless,” and he scuttled away leaving the secretary to finish the call.

I wept for a while and then called my mother.

“The doctor says Nina is autistic”

“ARTISTIC!” my mother said delighted, “well there is nothing wrong with that!”

I felt bad for my mom who was having other shocks herself including a recent heart attack. When I explained that it was AUTISM, a serious mental problem, she responded with a trembling voice, “Don’t do that to me."

“Sorry Mom,” and I ended the conversation.

So now Nina and I are trying to make a new life in what was becoming a vacuum. I have tried taking Nina to the nearby playground but it terrifies her and she screams her high pitched scream until I must leave. There is my friend Harry who visits and plays the upright piano for Nina who responds in her shivering delight and trancelike rocking. But Harry wants to be with me all the time and I am not interested – he is needy and I have little heart to spare.

Nina and I visit the nearest safest place outside our little room – the park at the end of the block. It is the Joan of Arc Park holding the first female equestrian statue in New York. Her missionary zeal – her energetic warrior spirit is a mockery of my in-service and imprisoned life. Nina and I snuggle on a bench at the base of the statue, absorbing spirit.

FLYING DREAMS by Liam Watt

2010-08-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

Google “Wing Suits – Norway”. That'll take you to a series of You Tube videos of full grown men wearing something closely akin to a flying squirrel costume, jumping off some of the highest cliffs in the world, spreading their arms and legs, catching the wind and flying at over 100 mph along these cliffs, staying aloft with an incredibly long glide ratio, for five to ten minutes at a time. Then, when frightfully close to the ground, open a parachute and waft gracefully to a gentle landing.

I've always had flying dreams. From as early as four or five I've had the incomparable experience in my dreams of feeling some unfamiliar sensation of power in my mid section that allowed me to lift off the ground at will and soar casually around the trees and rooftops of whatever scene I'd find myself in.

When I was six, we got a new refrigerator that came in a cardboard box. When my father flattened that box and put it over by the garbage cans I knew immediately I had the makings for my first set of wings. While my parents were busy with their weekend chores, I snuck out a kitchen knife, then raided my mother's sewing box for some long elastic bands. In an astonishingly short amount of time, I was climbing out the attic window on to the rather gently sloping roof of our attached garage, pulling out behind me my newly constructed set of strap on wings. I put on my simple apparatus, strapped to my back and arms, walked over to the edge of the roof, and almost without hesitation, fully expecting that unique feeling in my mid-section that I'd experienced so many times in my dreams to carry me aloft, I jumped off the roof and crashed in a heap on the back lawn below.

Fortunately my parents hadn't seen me and I surmised that this might take more practice than I'd realized and accepted that I'd have to start closer to the ground. There was a stump of a large oak tree my father had recently cut down. Again and again I'd climb up on the stump just a couple of feet off the ground with my cardboard wings strapped on, try to feel that feeling of power in my solar plexus area, and jump out, frantically flapping my arms believing my wings would carry me farther than if I'd jumped without them. My father saw my experiments and actually helped me measure the distances jumping with and without the wings. He gently let me observe for myself, quite disappointedly, no significant difference.

But the flying dreams continued and each dream produced the most exalted feeling I'd ever experienced and I wasn't going to be deterred from having that feeling while I was awake. The property behind our house had a small empty field and a wooded hillside with some hickory trees that lent themselves to climbing. My next attempt was to grab my mother's umbrella from the front hall closet and my fathers umbrella from the garage, go back into the woods, climb into the hickory tree with the perfect overhanging branch, umbrellas hanging from my belt. I stood on that branch and got my balance, opened the umbrellas and leaped into the air, again in full confidence that exhilarating feeling of power would arise and carry me off like Mary Poppins – who by the way hadn't appeared yet into modern American culture.

No need to report the results of this experiment. But, although Mary Poppins hadn't arrived in the movies, Disney's first cartoon version of Peter Pan had, and it was all the rage for kids that summer. At seven years old, I went to see this tantalizing flying adventure with Jimmy Ardito, an older kid of about ten who lived a short bike ride down the road from our house. Jimmy's mom, Alice, took us to the movie and on the way home Jimmy told me he knew the secret of how to make Tinker bell's pixie dust. Chopped up toothpicks. Yup, he was sure, guaranteed, pixie dust was nothing but chopped up toothpicks.

While my mother sat at the kitchen table sipping cup after cup of Nescafe with Alice, and Jimmy had gone off to more thrilling adventures than misguiding a gullible seven year old, I helped myself to a handful of toothpicks from the kitchen drawer and arduously cut them into the smallest possible pieces with my boyscout knife. When my mother asked what I was doing and I told her, her response was about the same as if I'd told her I was going out to the back yard to play with King Kong. She never expected that I actually went back to that wooded hillside, climbed up to that perfect hickory branch about fifteen feet off the ground, sprinkled my freshly made pixie dust all over me, imagined that feeling from my dreams in my midsection, and plummeted straight down into the huckleberry bushes below.

Really dejected now, having used all my pixie dust at once, I went back into the house for more toothpicks. Of course I didn't share the details of where I'd tried my experiment when Ma asked, I simply said my pixie dust didn't work the first time and I was going to make some more. Jimmy's mom, Alice, straightforwardly asked “did you say abracadabra?” In retrospect, I understand where Jimmy got his sense of amusement, but my mom realized that I might be courting danger and insisted that I jump only from that stump that still remained from the big oak tree my father had taken down the year before.

Remembering the results of my earlier attempts from that location, I decided to save myself the trouble of the tedious chopping of the hard toothpicks, and my serious doubts about the mere words abracadabra, since I never had to say that in my dreams. Instead I took my favorite bamboo airplane with the wind up, rubber band driven propeller, and went out to the back field for some satisfactory, solitary playtime, knowing with full confidence that someday I'd learn the secret of that tantalizing power in my solar plexus that allowed me to fly so freely in my dreams.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD by Carol Welch

2010-08-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

It seems I worked the afternoon shift for Children's Fellowship. I can't recall now what children were in my group, my little fellowship which I oversaw for the few hours in the afternoon. There wasn't much to oversee really, since every activity was planned out in advance.

In The Way we were taught to "plan the adversary out of our life." The adversary was the devil, the dark spiritual force that "walketh about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." We were to be ever diligent to not allow a crack in our hedge of believing, to allow no fear. It was through fear that the adversary could gain a foothold in our life. If he got a foothold, he could gain deeper access to our lives, taking us "off the Word."

That's how devil spirits could get into our minds and even into our bodies causing diseases. But our positive believing could hold diseases at bay. If I couldn't believe to be healed in a category, I was at fault. But even then I was to have no condemnation. I would continue to confess the positives of the Word; that is how I could build my believing. That and by doing the five basics of witnessing, speaking in tongues, abundantly sharing, studying the Word, and fellowshipping with likeminded believers. Yet God was always the healer and was to always get the glory.

But by this Limb Day, I was doubting some of that doctrine. Why was it that since I had gone outside the Household of The Way I had gotten so much better in my physical and emotional health? It had to be my believing. It had to be that my reading and writing had somehow built my believing to allow God to work greater in my heart. But weren't all our needs supposed to be met within the Household? Craig had taught that if we are walking with the Father, that our needs would be met on a 24-hour basis. Sure some things took a bit longer, but most our needs should be met in that one day period or sooner.

But Craig was gone now. The believers didn't discuss Craig anymore, except maybe in private conversations behind closed doors.

After the Saturday Limb Day evening event, whatever it was, John and I met up with Linda ending up in her or our hotel room talking into the wee morning hours.

Linda had been in our Home Fellowship when John and I lived in Hickory. We had moved from Hickory in 1997 mainly because most of the Hickory Way believers had quit standing on the Word. Most had chosen to follow Mike and Jane who were made "mark and avoid" in 1995. The remaining people who chose to stand with the Household, drove to our home for Fellowship from Valdese or Morganton, some 15 to 30 miles away. All except Linda; she still lived in Hickory.

Linda and I had known each other since high school when we used to party together. But I wasn't the one that got Linda into the Word. My friend Debra had witnessed to Linda sometime in the early 90s. At the time Debra was a single mom with three boys. Linda was a single mom with the three girls.

Though I wasn't the one that got Linda to Fellowships, I had witnessed to her back in the late 70s or early 80s. Linda still remembered when I had her and her then-husband Joe listen to a cassette tape on which Craig taught "Truth versus Tradition." I had loved that teaching. I had loved Craig and how he taught with passion and how he confronted religion.

I didn't like religion.

Here we sat now, in 2005, in a hotel room discussing the Ministry and how it had changed. Linda shared how the Sunday teaching tapes were boring to her, but that it must be her. That she just needed to change her mind, because after all it, the teaching and the Minstiry and all that entailed, was still the Word of God.

"The Word, the Word, the Word and nothing but the Word," Doctor used to say. The Word was always right.

I sat in the upholstered chair in the hotel room listining as she spoke. My gut had butterflies. My heart trembled. A hint of anger lie just beneath the surface, a hint that I would quickly dismiss. Anger scared me.

Should I say anything?

"It's not you Linda." The words seem to come out all by themselves. "I feel the same. The teachings are dead. I've pulled out some of the old teachings by Doctor. I've been listening to those instead. Sometimes I miss Craig. I miss his passion."

I dare not go so far as to tell Linda what I had read on Greasespot Cafe. Besides, I still wasn't sure what to believe about the stuff I'd read. And people there seemed so bitter and one-sided. I didn't want to be one-sided. I didn't want to be bitter.

Then Linda opened up about what had happened to her and her family in the Fellowship where she started going after John and I moved from Hickory. It was with the same people where Eric and Debra had been publicly shamed. Linda and her daughters had experienced similar. The Fellowship Coordinator had even gone to school to complain to the high school principle about Linda's daughter. Her daughter ended up scapegoated by the Fellowship Coordinator. But still, Linda continued to attend Fellowship. It was the accuracy of the Word that kept her coming back. That kept us all coming back. Where else was there to turn?

Listening to Linda further confirmed my doubts. But how could I ever leave? When and if I leave, do I tell Linda? What about my family? How could my children get the accuracy of the Word if I left the Household? How could they know the truth? How could they function in life without the Household? How could we stay a family if we all weren't likeminded on the Word?

The next morning, after the Sunday morning service, I helped with clean-up from the Limb Weekend. I loved the saints, the believers in the Household.

I loved God.

I loved the Ministry.

* * *

This story is also posted at:
Ex-greasespotter
Toss and Ripple

STRAWBERRIES by Heidi Ritzel

2010-07-28T18:36:00.001-07:00

I wanted strawberries. Frozen strawberries. Not the kind I buy today, individually quick frozen to maintain their perfect shapes and packaged in a convenient resealable bag. The strawberries I was longing for, whining for, were sugar-laden clumps of red, broken fruit, packed tightly into a rectangular cardboard container capped at both ends with metal that you had to pry off with a can opener.

My mother stood in her sewing room, which doubled as our laundry room, carefully transferring my dad’s undershirts and my summer tee shirts from our white Kenmore washer into the dryer. She was annoyed at me, irritated at my whiny behavior, wanted to be left alone with her work and her thoughts. I had never done this before. I was the model German child, always doing what I was told to do when I was told to do it and never acting outside of the accepted, stifled confines of our family. But somehow today was different.

The strawberries in question were always kept on hand in our freezer. They were an essential ingredient in what became my mother’s signature dessert. The strawberries were placed in the bottom of a large glass bowl, the frozen red brick remaining intact for several hours on our yellow Formica counter until finally morphing into what could have easily passed for strawberry soup. Next my mother cooked a box of Jell-O tapioca pudding mix, using slightly less milk than the side of the box recommended, resulting in a thick, sweet, gooey pudding. This steaming hot mixture was poured over the thawed strawberries but not mixed. The berries would caress the pudding in their own time, gradually seeping into the white, hot goodness, forming what looked like little red fiords. Eventually, the strawberries created a liquid cushion on which the pudding would ultimately float. This dessert was made and served every time we had company and I never saw anyone not take a second helping. And although I liked this dessert as well as anyone, I don’t know why, on this day, I was so intent on getting my mom to take out one of those frozen boxes of sweet berries just so I could have some.

Her annoyance, as always, was palpable. She ignored me, told me to stop, threatened to tell my father when he got home, but I persisted. When my whining finally turned into tears, she stopped moving the laundry and did something extraordinary. Without saying a word, she walked to the freezer and took out a box of strawberries. For me. To eat.

I realize this was probably an act of sheer exasperation or perhaps the only way to stop my emotional upheaval. But to me, in that moment, it was the most loving gesture I had ever received from my mother. It was no longer about the fruit, it was about her willingness to provide some nurturing to a little girl who felt lonely, sad, unloved.

The fact that this rare display of love was provided by food was probably the first sign of trouble I would not fully realize until I was well into my thirties. The nurturing I so desperately longed for, arriving as it did in the form of food, became inextricably linked to eating. Food began to equal nurturing. The love I could find nowhere else I could easily attain from a gooey, frosted brownie. A hug would emerge as an embrace from a log of chocolate-covered marzipan. And an “I love you?” Well, that required pizza after pizza after pizza.

I didn’t know where else to get these things. I couldn’t ask, wouldn’t ask, because even if I had, the answer would have been no. And food said yes.

THE RESERVOIR by Billy Herman

2010-07-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

If you fell down the embankment the current of the water is so fast it would carry you over the dam. Then the reservoir cop gave me a little green ticket for less than a crime and instructed me to leave.

Years later I would try to construct a drama that would make this little incident very important. But the drama was made of the stuff of dreams and every time I tried to hammer it together it would turn to nothing.

My friend Brian said one evening that we realize at a certain point that we are not living narratives. Life is much more random than we think and we are not following a dramatic arc.

My mom wanted to paint. She had just retired from being a registered nurse and was really into the painting class she was taking. She is in fact a first-rate painter.

I got it into my mind that I was going to clean the entire inside of our house. It was in fact way too messy, and I decided to be Hercules.

We were at cross-purposes and one day in my frustration I exploded in a fit of rage, after which I felt very hurt.

I drove up to the Ashokan Reservoir, parked my car and started to walk. When I saw the sign that said go no further I was too sad to obey it. I wanted to see what the dam looked like from close up. When I saw the white police jeep out on the road I knew I had been spotted and I thought, he’ll be here any minute.

This drama I had in mind is oh so vague. There was this bully I knew in grade school named Chad. To this very day he remains a stupid bully. I see him every once in a while, usually in restaurants. He became the villain.

After that my mind free-associated bits and pieces from everywhere. The sex appeal of the actress Fran Drescher for example. But that’s all I had. Bits and pieces and vague feelings, longing, love. Danger. Walter Mitty heroics. Friendship. If only I could put it all in order and have it make sense.

I composed a few outlines for it. It looked good that way. One of the outlines was a good piece of comedy on its own. Then one day when I was weak and sick I wrote the novella. It was undeniably bad.

I have a dream of returning to this story and telling it right, but like I said before it is made up of dreams that trail off into nothing. Getting the woman instead of having her reject me. Overcoming the fear and the glory of police. Seeing Chad as the failure he is. Turning the authority figures in my little world into human beings.

It is all right to never write this story. It is all right to wake up from it and let it go.

THE DAMAGE DONE by Barry Miller

2010-06-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

It was a cold, snowy, winters, Friday night in February. I was fifteen years old and belonged to a high school fraternity. It was basically a group of friends who formed this frat. They named it Phi Lamda Omicron, which we called PLO. The irony was we were mostly Jewish and the infamous PLO was not even born yet.

Stuart Gross called me and told me there was a party at the frat house with a girls sorority of really nice looking girls. My parents didn’t like me going there so I told them I was meeting Stuart to play cards at his grandmother’s house. We met up at the subway train and went to Boro Park to party at the frat house.

I remember I was wearing my black and gold horizontal striped boat neck sweater. It was a favorite of mine and thought it would help make a good impression meeting a girl. Well I did. I met this very attractive, smart and funny fourteen year old. We were sitting on a couch just to the left of the front door which was about six steps down from ground level to this basement apartment.

We were talking, laughing and making out. I was giving her pointers on how to French kiss. The red lights filled the room with a soft sensual glow when all of a sudden the door flew open and a gang of guys spilled into the room with bricks, car aerials, and blackjacks. They were jumping on and pummeling anyone in sight. There was a slight warning because the first person in yelled “I’ll give you three seconds to get out of here!” That only lasted two seconds before the fighting started.

I took the hand of the girl I was with and since I was near the door I pushed her out, up the steps to protect her. I followed right behind until I felt a hard object like a brick hit me in the head. I fell on the steps holding my head and crawled up to street level where I saw what looked like a scene from West Side Story.

There I was laying in a fetal position in the snow holding my head watching this “gang war” when my friends came and picked me up and began to remove me from this awful scene. I heard them say “Let’s get him out of here before he gets killed!” As they carried me over there shoulders in a standing position down the block I felt something wet on my neck. I looked at my hand and it was covered with blood. Hey took me to the frat house of the football team which happened to be in the basement of one of the cheerleaders. She went upstairs to get her parents. I obviously had a very badly smashed skull and was bleeding profusely.

The parents took me to the emergency room. When I got to the hospital the only other person who got hurt was Stuart Gross who was there holding his head. Boy, the irony! Stuart was already sixteen so they brought him in to stitch him up. Being that I was only fifteen my parents would have to be present. So I sat there in excruciating pain, holding my head, bleeding, waiting for my parents.

I look up and see my dad in one of his very angry attitudes lunging towards me yelling “Wait till I get my hands on you!” My mother literally holding him back screaming “Leave him alone, look what’s happened to him!”

As soon as the release papers were signed I was brought into a room where I received nine stitches with no Novocain sewing my skull back together. It really hurt. The doctor said I was really lucky because it was right next to my soft spot and I could have easily been killed. I guess if I went to play cards all this damage would not have happened.

STEAL MY LIFE by DeAnn Louise Daigle

2010-06-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

Steeling away my life began to steal my life away, I recognized when I was sixteen going on seventeen. It was late spring of my junior year in high school and certain ones of about one hundred and eight of us in our graduating high school class were chosen to be coupled boy-girl and photographed for our Senior-Year Year Book.

My best friend Linda was a math whiz and so was chosen with another equally math-whiz person to be Mr. and Miss Slide Rule, and so went the categories; Mr. and Miss Personality; Mr. and Miss Athlete and I was chosen as Miss Shy along with my equally shy partner. It was all too too embarrassing, too too humiliating but there was no way out. We were coupled and posed with one another – and photographed for the year book. What made it even more cruel for me was that I towered above my partner, so we were made to be looking out from behind the auditorium door as if hiding.

How true this was; I had wanted to be invisible up to my senior year in high school. And I probably would have continued that way except that this event so infuriated me that I then and there – after the photo session, resolved never to be called shy again. I had so steeled myself from interaction and life in high school that I all but disappeared. In the lunch line one day in my junior year at Presque Isle High, a couple of girls I was talking with briefly said to me, “You’re the new girl, right?” I had started later after the potato harvest season was over my freshman year, but that meant instead of starting school in late August, I had joined the freshman class in late September and had been there all along. Mom, Dad and I had moved from Soldier Pond to Presque Isle during the harvest break in 1962 when I was thirteen. It had been traumatic, but I was relieved on some level. I wanted to make a new start. No one knew my Dad here; no one knew he drank; I could hold my head up here.

But, Dad had taken part-time jobs first in the shoe store on Main Street, then at the local pool hall, also on Main Street. And some of the kids began to know who he was, and he did drink – even though he wasn’t going to. We really didn’t know he had a disease back then. We thought by will, he could stop his behavior. I became embarrassed again and very shy and withdrawn. Writing was my salvation. I took refuge there, but criticism devastated me and I couldn’t even do that right, it seemed. How I managed to pull off being a B student at the end of four years is a sheer miracle.

I was enrolled in the college prep program. How ever did that happen? I guess, my father’s brother, Uncle Leo, was behind that. He would have wanted me to aim for college and Mom and Dad too, even though we could hardly have afforded it.

More importantly, however, was my realization that I had let those years be stolen from me because I so protected myself from being hurt. Linda was the only one I shared my poems and writings with and she played the piano for me after school. Her Mom always had treats for us after school – a brownie or some kind of sweet and a glass of milk. I preferred water. We would laugh and just enjoy one another, and that saved me. Linda helped me with algebra I and II and then geometry; although I had less difficulty with geometry.

I would remain shy during and after my senior year in high school, but never in the same way. The steel door had been taken down. Life became an adventure and I refused to go back to being paralyzed.

That day, after being photographed, I went to the girls room, whipped out my hair brush just like everybody else and began brushing my hair and fixing my makeup. I had never done this before. I waited until no one was there and then I’d bush my hair and put on my lipstick. I couldn’t pee either when anyone else was in the bathroom. I’d sit in the stall and wait until everyone had left and then I’d pee. I’d been like that for years. That day, I was so furious for having been posed with poor shy Brian, who hardly said two words to me for three full years when we had English class together. And I towered over him and we were both labeled shy – something a shy person never wants. The whole jig is to be invisible; not be brought to light. But the jig was up!

This anger I felt was probably my saving grace. I peed and it felt so good!

FLIGHT, NOT FIGHT by Mel Rosenthal

2010-06-15T18:23:00.001-07:00

It was the end of the school day at Orange High, and I was as usual down in the basement putting things away in my locker and/or getting clothes and books out of it, preparatory to heading home. While there, however, I said or did something that seriously offended a fellow student. This was a beefy, black-haired kid whose name I can't now remember, but still vivid in my mind are his hostile glare at me and the rumbling growl in which he voiced his anger. For my part, I was honestly puzzled -- I had no idea at all how I'd managed to trigger that anger, and had certainly had no such intention. But if I even thought of trying to explain this, to mollify him, I didn't get the chance. His fury quickly rose to critical mass and he rushed at me headlong.

My obvious obligation in this situation was to honor the Masculine Code, put up my dukes, and defend myself, in accordance with the standard stern injunctions most boys received from their fathers to stick up for themselves and fight like a man. My dad, however, an Eastern European much older than the average father of teenagers, had decidedly not instilled any such notions in me -- if anything, the reverse. And so, either true to my upbringing or simply obeying my natural inclination, or both, I chose flight over fight and, my adversary in hot pursuit, ran from the locker room up the stairs and out the school doors -- ran for my life.

WHY THIS INTEREST IN ME? by Daniel Marshall

2010-06-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

I dreamed how pleasant it would be to hold and kiss Carol del Casino. I wanted her -- to be close to her wonderful soft curves and mysterious, sultry quiet, to have her love.

“You girls look at the boys with cow eyes!” Sister Austina’s voice, dripping with sarcasm, excoriated the girls right in our presence. Pin-drop silent, listening, absorbing each word, we waited for what would come next. Austina was not given to bizarre outbreaks or extraordinary punishments, like some sisters; people said that she favored boys.

Joyce Accurso, Ginny Holst, and Carol got highest marks for the girls. Joanne Lanzarone was almost as smart and also pretty; I didn’t know that she cared for younger brothers while her mother worked. Sometimes she teased and laughed. Ginny Holst encouraged me in a quiet, modest way. I thought that they liked me, but longed for Carol. Carol had dimly-lit dance parties at her house. When it became clear that she favored Dennis Card, I was disappointed. Dennis was second in marks but had summers in Port Jefferson—I only got as far as imagining Port Jefferson’s dark and shady woods from pictures that he brought home; I couldn’t imagine the port. Dennis’s mother was Irish and welcoming to his friends; his father, Joe, hard-working and friendly, owned a tiny gas station where my father stopped for gas.

As I grew shyer, more depressed in high school, far each day from familiar persons, values, and things, far from summer vacations, I saw little of Carol. When I saw her occasionally at late Sunday mass, she wore wide-brimmed hats and pastel floral prints that were out of the ordinary in our parish. She was heartbreakingly attractive, if ambitious; I missed Carol that I knew. I don’t know why it was beyond me to call or ring her doorbell; maybe because I assumed that she dated older men on Saturday nights. I heard that after high school she went to nursing school. None of the bright Italian women whom I knew went to college. Eventually Carol married and was divorced. She raised two sons alone.

‘Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her // ‘neath the shade of an old walnut tree // with the flowers in her hair blooming round her. // It was there on the isle of Capri. Carol. On the isle of Capri. The song said what I felt about her. My Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. When the moon hits your eye // like a big-a pizza pie, // that’s amore! When the stars make you drool // just-a like-a pastavazul, that’s amore! The songs of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennet were about Carol for me. Everything about songs, flowers, and romance was Carol.

“I don’t know why you were never interested in Walda Salomon,” my mother said. “I talked with her mother the other day.” I didn’t know why either. I thought that Walda was smart, cute, and attractive. But she was not Carol. My mother didn’t see or talk with Carol’s mother, who lived near our old neighborhood on the other side of the parish. She encouraged me, instead, to date Kathy Dillon, the daughter of a Brooklyn College teacher whom she knew.

* * * * *

Pauline walked to the edge deliberately and looked down. The canyon was wide and deep. Trees in the bottom, scattered up the sides, seemed small. If she were to lose her balance, slip, or misstep, I could not reach her. I felt myself diving, grasping for part of her, my momentum and her weight pulling us toward and over the brink, my fingers hooking the edge, slipping slowly over gravel and sand, steadily, relentlessly, stones cascading over us, my eyes seeking below anything to grab hurtling past or upon which to break our fall. I thought of walking to the edge, bending over it, looking far down through clear morning air to the valley floor and, from sudden reflex, vertigo, distraction, or mischief, stepping or slipping into the air, tottering, hovering, plunging. Recollecting myself, releasing such thoughts, I became mindful that I was two or three leaps from the brink.

I hardly dared speak, fearing that I would startle or distract her. The woods around were quiet. She turned toward me in her brown corduroys, her back to the precipice. I spoke gently, my body alert, almost shivering, restrained, poised to do I knew not what nor how. Pauline seemed another kind of being, rash and unafraid. I wondered whether she courted risk habitually and whether she wanted to die.

The day was beautiful. She spoke cheerfully and succinctly. Birds chirped, and an occasional hawk soared. Earth suffused damp; air felt fresh and clean. Shadows in the valley shrank as the sun climbed. I ached, not moving. Speaking gently, I noticed that I felt terrified not even so much of losing her as of feeling helpless seeing her fall, climbing down to where she lay, broken on rocks below or dying in pain.

In those days, Pauline began to talk of the preferential option for the poor and of going to Nicaragua. She had all the recordings of the Weston Priory monks and introduced me to them.

* * * * *

At the reception, lights were subdued and shaded. A few people hovered by a table of conventional refreshments. There was a sense of impromptu. I knew few in scattered groups that extended into adjacent rooms, creating a hubbub of chatter and movement. Few if any introduced themselves to me; I thought that they must have connections among themselves that took priority. Anticipation was collective. A darkened energy, too. It arose and ended elsewhere. I did not usually circulate among militantly conservative Catholics; these were outspokenly so, but that was not the focus.

When Joan came, she urged me to dance and held me modestly, almost awkwardly, against her slender, angular form. She wore a satiny dress; it did not seem hers. I tried to discern and catch her eye, to look into it; she put her head on my shoulder. Quick, inquisitive, she bore no obvious signs of sexual humiliation or solitary confinement. I strained to think of something to say more than small talk. It was my first time seeing her since the meeting at our House on abortion. She was quiet. I assumed that others might be on her mind and heart. Others who might have visited and written to her at Broward. I’d missed that getting to know her while confined non-cooperating, identifying with and praying for babies threatened with abortion and doing penance for their mothers and doctors. She might be at Broward still, in solitary three more years, had it not been for Jerry Falwell’s Christian radio and television network pressuring the Florida governor to commute her sentence.

Joan was the heroine of this group, linked to them by pro-life newsletters and support lists. It was clear that they were inspired by her, ready for her to return to the peripatetic activism that she’d been waging when sentenced two years before. Their energy was a spring coiled; it was a strangely agitated environment. This was the first open gathering in the New York area that she’d attended since her release. After a while, she drifted from me, talking with others. It was enough, and not enough. I’d felt a connection, but already she was being pulled into a movement—far from God’s women and men and cats and cockroaches at Arthur Sheehan House.

THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM by Richard Husted

2010-05-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

If you happened to be in the Poughkeepsie train station on a Sunday evening in the spring of 1968, and saw this young twenty-two-year-old guy -- me -- being roughed up and escorted out of the train station by a white-coated doctor and his assistant on a mental-health pick-up, there really was more to the story than what you think you saw.

Four hours earlier, I was in New York City, flat broke, with my 1957 Plymouth, which was out of gas and on its last legs. I had driven down the day before to see a girlfriend. I sold a pint of my blood at a blood bank on Forty Second Street to get money, and we had a great meal at a Tad's Steakhouse that evening. I think in those days you could get the works for about $4.99. I spent the night and was now heading back upstate.

I was teaching at a private residential school in Rhinebeck for the mentally retarded. I was so poor, because the pay was low, and one time, after they deducted my phone bill for calls to a girlfriend in Virginia, my pay for two weeks was $2.98.

So to get home from New York, I would do something I had done a couple of times before. I would run into Grand Central Station at around five in the afternoon to look for Vassar girls heading to Poughkeepsie. They'd be easy to spot, and I'd give them a break on the fare and would drop them off right at their dorms. Sometimes I'd have three or four girls. This day, it was very slow, and I was lucky -- (and she wasn't) -- to get Abigail Auchincloss Dodge, of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, heading up to the now long-gone Bennett College for Girls, in Millbrook.

She followed me out to the car, we hopped in, and headed north. I put five dollars worth of gas in the car, and I was sitting pretty with two dollars left in my wallet. We made small talk, and I told her all about the autistic, Mongoloid, and mentally retarded students at the school, and my forty-year-old students in the third grade.

We were having fun and things were going great, until the car blew up in Ossining. This was not fun: oil leaking and spraying all over the place, engine smoking and banging. We limped into a gas station on Route 9 and left the remains of the car. Abigail pays the fare for a cab to the Ossining train station. From the station, I call my long-time buddy from elementary and high school-Niessen. I tell him the story and ask him to pick us up at the Poughkeepsie train station around 8:30. Niessen's resume: way nuts, master of disguise, a sick sense of humor, and weird cars.

The train arrives, we get on, and are now back on track and a return to a short-lived normalcy. Croton, Peekskill pass by. We chat. Beacon comes and goes, and we arrive in Poughkeepsie. Lots of people are getting on and off as we head up the stairs to the station. The place is quite full, and I'm looking around for our ride. Then I spot them and think, "Oh, no, here we go again."

There's Niessen, dressed in a white doctor's coat, stethoscope wrapped around his neck, hair powdered white, with fake wire-rimmed glasses, accompanied by my innocent "I'll do what I'm told" brother. They are heading our way as Niessen says in a loud voice, "There he is. Grab him!" They work their way through the crowd and upon reaching me, each grabs an arm and starts to move me along.

Abigail is startled and says, "Hey, what's going on?" Niessen immediately replies, "Did he tell you he's a teacher at a private school for the retarded?"

"Yes. Yes, he did," she responds.

"Well," Niessen continues, "he's an escapee from the school. We've had a thirteen-state all-points bulletin out for him, and we got a tip that he might be arriving on this train. Don't worry, Miss. We'll get you back to your school safely."

I'm saying to Abigail, "This is a joke. Don't worry, it's O.K."

Keeping their hands and a close eye on me, they take us outside to where Niessen has parked his huge 1950-something Mercedes limousine. The rear doors open in the opposite direction, the rear seats are set way back, and there is a sliding glass window between the front and rear seats. Abigail and I get in the back, Niessen locks the doors, he and my brother get in the front, and we slowly start to leave the station.

Abigail, now totally not knowing what's going on, says, "If this is a joke, I don't think it's funny."

Trying to comfort her, I say, "This is my crazy friend Niessen, and this is my brother."

With that, Niessen hits the brakes, whips his head around, and with astonishment says, "What!? You think Dr. Agnew is your brother? You're going to need more intensive treatment than I thought."

So if you saw that scene in the train station that day, yes you did see a crazy person. But always remember, things are not always what they seem.

THE BARE ESSENTIALS... by Chrissa Pullicino

2010-05-11T04:55:00.000-07:00

The day had finally arrived. I had given up my 4th floor walk-up apartment in New York City, left my corporate job with a severance package, severed ties with my boyfriend, and stored my belongings in my mother’s basement in Pennsylvania, waiting for some day in the future, perhaps 5 or 6 months from now, when I would return from my trip to Central America.

I packed a backpack, with the bare essentials and a mini, hand-held recorder so I could do some audio journaling along the way. The plan was to spend a few months in Costa Rica, volunteering at a rainforest retreat center, while I waited for my best friend to meet me in Guatemala, where we would spend a few months doing a Spanish language immersion program.

I had no idea what kind of work I would be doing, just that it had taken me a few months, and several epic emails to convince the owners to let me live there in exchange for room and board. I had found the hotel through Omega, even though I had not ever been to their Rhinebeck campus. But I knew of it, and had been introduced to one of the cofounders, who put me in touch with the hotel, because Omega sometimes rented space there for winter workshops.

During those months leading up to my departure I poured my heart out, across cyber space, trying to paint an accurate picture of who I was, and what I could offer professionally, and how I was standing at a post 9/11 cross road, desperate to get off the corporate ladder, and interested in alternative health and personal growth. I offered to do everything and anything – from marketing and PR, to teaching English, to cutting vegetables, or cleaning guest rooms – whatever was needed I would gladly do, for the opportunity to spend a few months there. I explained that in addition to my professional skills, I was also studying yoga and had recently taken a few introductory massage therapy classes at the Swedish Institute.

After a few months of writing to them, without a response, I logged into email one afternoon, certain today would be the day I’d hear back. Much to my dismay there was still no response. It was then that I surrendered and asked the universe to guide me to something else if this was not meant to be. At that very moment the phone rang! On the other end, a man speaking in broken English, from Sueno Azul Resort in Costa Rica, was thanking me for all my letters, and inviting me to get on the next plane and come down to be a volunteer. Thrilled, I thanked him and assured him I was not expecting money, just room and board, but he reassured me that they would give me something. I remember thinking, perhaps they would reimburse my bus fare, or minor expenses associated with getting to and fro.

And now, here I was leaving for Newark airport, backpack in tow, and a blank slate before me. As I was waiting patiently at the terminal, my ex boyfriend suddenly showed up. He had left work in the middle of the day, jumped on a train, and come to see me off. The romance was long gone, but I was touched, and we shared a tender good bye.

The flight was easy, and I was making my way through customs before I knew it. The hotel owner and his beautiful wife picked me up from the airport, and took me to their home in San Jose, where I would spend the night before making my way to the hotel in the morning. I don’t recall much more about that night, but when I woke up in the morning the 3 of us had breakfast at the kitchen table, which was prepared and served by a live-in housekeeper.

I decided it was a good time to broach the subject of what my work would be. In broken English they told me, “We think it best if you work in the spa. You teach yoga classes to the guests and give massages.” I was a little caught off guard. Sure, I was the one that said I was interested in yoga and massage, but I definitely was not certified or licensed in either modality. Intimidated, I tried to talk my way out of it, playing up all my other skills, but they were convinced this was best, and offered to pay me 20% of the income I earned for them.

Next thing I knew, a driver had arrived. He spoke no English, but I gathered he would be the one taking me 1.5 hours northeast to the hotel. It was a wild ride, me in the backseat of his pick-up, with my Spanish dictionary in hand, trying to express my amazement at the jungle and mountains we were winding through along the way.

Once I had arrived, met the hotel manager and settled into my lovely room, I went to the dining pavilion for lunch. There I joined the owner’s son, who was very gracious, and spoke perfect English. We shared a meal and some conversation, alone in the dining room. I asked him where all the guests were, and he said the hotel was at low occupancy, with just one group that day; a group of equestrians, who had gone riding in the rainforest for the afternoon. Quite happy to have finally arrived, and to have made a friend, and to find little to no work waiting for me, I decided to return to my room and take an afternoon nap.

As soon as I lay down, there was suddenly a frantic knocking on the door. It was Manuel, from the front desk, saying – “Tienes un masaje! Tienes un masaje!” Which I understood immediately. Holy cow, there was someone at the Spa wanting a massage. He asked me if I had white clothes, and if I knew where the Spa was. Luckily I did have a white tank top and slacks, so I changed quickly and then he took me to the Spa.

The whole walk there, through winding pathways, and lush green gardens with bright red ginger, I kept repeating silently to myself, “You ARE a massage therapist. You’ve done this a thousand times, you ARE a massage therapist. You’ve done this a thousand times!” Over and over again, I repeated my mantra, but I already knew playing this role was going to be a trip.

RUNNING AWAY by Palmer Shaw

2010-04-30T04:53:00.001-07:00

I didn't even consider running away from home. I heard kids did that but not me. I was petrified, locked in. I was a shallow breather, somewhat numb. I say that with hindsight 'cause it never occurred to me that I was anything but bad, with a capital B.

Of course, that was far from the truth. I tried to please, hoping to elicit some approval from mother. Which sometimes happened but I remember more the shaming and the jokes at my expense, the talking as though I was invisible, ignoring the abuse her pedophile husband inflicted on me, in denial of her alcoholism, of his alcoholism, of their narcissistic, sadistic, manipulative behavior. Slowly picking at me day after day, week after week, wearing me down, month after month, year after year, criticizing almost everyone and everything in their path.

I'm building a case here worthy of life imprisonment, hanging by the neck, actually torture seems fitting. Slow painful torture. I was so repeatedly tortured in what seemed like subtle ways I became convinced I was a torturer. I was dirty, evil, immoral, rotten to the core.

This became evident when I chose a direction down a dark and winding path to hell. Eager to please anyone who gave me the time of day, who smiled and spoke to me. I was lost not knowing where I wanted to go, just following along, riddled with guilt. How did I ever pull out of that downward spiral?

A tiny spark of something. A nun at boarding school had it, Sister Veronica Jean, she had compassion for me, a decency, a conviction that I was innocent, that I was worthy of gentle care, that inspired me as an 11 year old.

I was expelled because I was caught in the same bathroom with another girl, she was expelled too. But my mother was away so she couldn't take me home and I had to live in seclusion away from the other girls because the nuns must have thought I would contaminate them, they must have thought I was a budding homosexual. Nothing sexual was acceptable there. Sex was a mortal sin. But I was not familiar with the catholic church. My parents were not catholic but I knew that getting caught in the same bathroom with a girl was wrong. We had our clothes on but she was showing me what the word "Rape" meant. I had overheard girls talking and I asked what that word meant so one of the girls said I'll show you.

And then while we were in there someone called a nun and under the door of the toilet stall a black shoe appeared connected to a very stern and angry nun. The room I stayed in had only a brown fake leather sofa that I slept on and there was a bird in a cage and no curtains or shades on the windows.

PRETENDING INTIMACY by Liz Davies

2010-04-22T04:19:00.001-07:00

I was so relieved when my father died last October, and I am glad that I wasn’t present for the last few days of his life.

My sister Carolyn had called me from England on the Friday evening before his death, saying that the medical staff at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford had suggested that next-of-kin should be advised that his time was probably drawing to an end. My sister never calls me to talk; it had been clear for a very long time that we had nothing to say to each other, nothing in common, no common interests. She only calls in emergencies.

I was in my little house in Kerhonkson. I had just driven up from the city that Friday night, after work, as I was working full time then. I panicked, my heart started pounding. I told her I would immediately jump on a ‘plane and fly to Oxford. Then about thirty minutes later, my nephew Robert called, my sister’s oldest son who is now managing the Probate for my father’s estate, and from whom I have heard absolutely nothing since his cremation, when Robert was notably absent. Robert’s excuse was that his car had broken down on the way to the Banbury Crematory. He didn’t show up either for the food and drink that Carolyn had prepared at our father’s house, for all family and friends, after the cremation. Carolyn told me that he said to her he didn’t think it was worth it, to come just for the family gathering.

That Friday night last October, after I spoke with Carolyn and then Robert called, he said, Stay put, the doctors are telling us that it could change in the next 24 or 48 hours, he could rally, there is no point in your rushing over. So I breathed a deep sigh of relief and stayed put.

He died two days later, peacefully, in a coma induced by respiration pneumonia. He had fallen in the house a week previously and, because he was living alone – as no-one could stand being with him for more than a short period of time because he was so difficult and demanding – he had been lying helplessly on the living room floor for several hours, before help came, inhaling his vomit and mucous and emptying his bowels and bladder.

I prepared a speech to give at the cremation. Carolyn, in her usual very efficient way, had arranged for a Secular Humanist to preside at the cremation because Roger, our father, said he wanted nothing religious, and only close family and friends present. I emailed my speech to Carolyn, who gave it to this nice lady she had hired. I wasn’t sure that I could read the speech so Carolyn said that if necessary, the Secular Humanist would read it for me. Carolyn hadn’t prepared a speech. She had simply prepared an outline of our father’s life, most of it based on my speech, so that this lady could give the Eulogy.

At the cremation ceremony, after the Eulogy, I went up to the Podium and started reading my speech. After two sentences my voice broke, my eyes filled with tears, and I started sobbing. I had to sit down. The Secular Humanist lady, trained in these sorts of situations, said take a minute, I know you can do it, take a few deep breaths. I got up again and tried once more, but my voice was gone, and I once again broke into sobs, so she read it for me.

Nobody else wanted to speak; and so then the ceremony was over and we all embraced each other. Actually, not all of us, just my other nephew, James, Robert’s younger brother, and his lovely Moroccan-Jewish wife Natalie, embraced me. James and Natalie and I hugged each other and cried. My niece Sarah, Carolyn’s youngest daughter, didn’t embrace me, or anyone else. Robert wasn’t there to embrace me. And Carolyn just walked ahead and gave instructions to everyone to return to the house, for food and drink, which she had dutifully prepared.

FROM MINEFIELDS TO MOUNTAINTOPS by Neil O'Brien

2010-04-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, shortly after entering the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was asked to tell my story. In a fit of anxiety I exclaimed, “I have no story.” I haven’t attended AA in many years, much to the chagrin of my ex-AA friends. I guess AA is much like the mafia, once you join there is absolutely no possible way to depart, except in a box. But after twenty years I just felt like having a beer. One day I did just that. I have survived just as well with the beer as I did without. By that I mean I can wreck my life with or without the help of the evil alcoholic spirits. Given that fact I might just as well enjoy myself once in a while. For instance, financial ruin and two-and-a-half divorces all took place while I was free from the grip of “John Barleycorn.” I’m still using that brainwash lingo after all these years. I figured I just couldn’t do much worse from an occasional partaking of an alcoholic beverage. And that thought has held true.

There have been three or four lives that seem to me to be completely separate. In each one I’m a different person. Each life could be titled with a woman’s name. Like chapter one: The Susan Era. Sadly, the only thing that has remained constant is that every chapter has the same ending. I guess I’m still looking for the chapter that has no end. Right at the moment I feel about as far from that dream as one could possibly be.

I told a woman friend of mine who seems to be just waiting for me to make a move that I’m alone because I’m tired of feeling like I disappoint people. By that I meant wife-type people or relationship-type people. The thing is that I really like this woman. After I said that to her I thought, “Good work, Neil. There’s nothing a woman likes more than a great show of confidence.”

It’s time to start a new story. I’m not sure if the next chapter will be titled with a woman’s name. But I must admit to hoping it will be so. I guess a therapist would consider that to be a psychological defect, and tell me I must love myself first, along with the rest of the standard psychological mumbo-jumbo that I’ve heard way too many times. Screw Sigmund Freud anyway. Psychological defects aside, I’m still hoping to get it right.

Working in mental health, at this point, literally sucks the life out of me. Unfortunately being a starving artist doesn’t put food on the table and taking care of psychiatrically ill people does. It feels as if mental illness has been stalking me my entire life. It is time to say enough is enough. Mentally ill children, mentally ill wives, and my own depression that went unidentified for so long. Depression has often taken me down a dark lonely road with no off ramps and no u-turns signs posted all along the way. The thought that I am also dependent upon mental illness to live and eat is hard to bear. I think I have done my duty to the world of psychiatric disabilities.

Despite the earlier satire concerning Alcoholics Anonymous, I did learn some great things there. One that sticks in my mind is a little Charlie Chaplin-like, vagabond cartoon character. This happy little guy carried his past in a small bundle on the end of a stick, opening the bundle only occasionally to use one of life’s lessons in a positive manner. I’ve always liked that philosophy though I’ve never quite gotten the hang of it. My bag always seems to be filled with bricks. And they seem to be bricks with a reproductive system.

I had a dream some twenty years ago about an older man with long, gray hair who travelled the countryside writing. He was high in the Rockies, somewhere in Arizona or perhaps Colorado and there was a woman. She was not visible in the dream and she did not speak. The dream was about travelling, nature, and writing and a man who had learned to become one with the Universe. The woman’s presence, though the man did not see or hear her, was both strong and sweet, enhancing the experience, making an already incredible Universe even better. She was going his way and he was going hers.

After more therapy than anyone should ever be allowed, it is in the writing that I have figured it out. I keep writing about the endings. And it is for sure the endings that are preventing the beginning. The endings make the air thick with jagged knives that will cut deep in to my heart if I invade the space they inhabit and call their own. And landmines litter the earth, just waiting for me to dare tread in that hallowed territory called a new beginning. With that fear in mind I have lived all too long in the limbo-world. It’s time to move on, start the new story, and once again take that trek across the minefields of life. The possibility of being blown to smithereens is the price one pays to live. And even being blown up is more fun than being part of the living dead in the limbo world.

PADDY'S PUKEFEST by Dermot McGuigan

2010-03-16T17:40:00.001-07:00

I have a terrible conflict, you see, I hate St. Paddies day and its religiosity with a passion, and I am Irish, yes - a Mick, a Paddy - born and raised in Dublin, the whole delicious catastrophe. Mostly, I love being Irish, and there are challenges that come with being Irish, Paddy’s Day is the biggest.

As the day approaches I become prone to a bad dream … I am trapped in a series of three deluges; the first I am almost drowned’ed in a deluge of green beer, the second, in a flood of green piss, and the third, almost unspeakable, in a sluggish vortex of salty, green snot. I know, dear reader, you too can almost taste it.

I love to visit Dublin, my home, family and friends. And me Mammy, me dear old Irish Mammy. I had the privilege and pleasure of growing up near Donnybrook (yes, home of the brawling fair), Dun Laoghaire and Sandycove. There, looking out on the very sea Ma and me would swim in all summer, Joyce described it as the “ the snot-green ... scrotumtightening sea.”

For us growing up in Dublin, Paddy’s day was a day of misery. We had to go to mass and hear about how we should thank St Paddy for saving our souls, that we are sinners and if it were not for Paddy himself we would all be surely going to hell, hell without hope, and that the poor would surely go to heaven, just as the rich and happy would go to hell. The priest would thunder down upon us “Yis are all sinners, the whole shagging lot of ye, and ye better not sin today, this holy day of the patron saint and savior of Ireland, himself, St Paddy, the very man who drove the snake and sinful pleasure out of our holy land.” And, as if to amplify the priest’s message, outside the church, rain would always pour on Paddy’s day - rain driven by a howling west wind sent by God to remind us Irish of our lowly status as a shower of shaggers.

There were no parades and there was no drinking, just holy wet misery. We would hear on the radio about a troop of NY firefighters and police who came over to Ireland to celebrate with the Irish. As my mother would say, “Ah those poor feckin’ eejits, sure why would they come over here and stand in the pouring rain when they could be cozy back home in New York.” “Its a mystery,” she would say, and that would be the end of talk of Paddy’s day.

Now Easter - there was a parade where the full might of the Irish army, with its fleet of six WW2 vintage tanks, would roll down O’Connell Street, and pause in respect at the General Post Office, the GPO, the holy shrine of the revolution that finally, and for good, drove the oppressor out of the 26 counties, “… and the devil take the lot of them.” At the GPO stood Eamon DevValera, Dev himself, the long-faced head of Ireland, and next to him stood the miserable Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid . “Arragh,” the Ma would say, “... that fella, McQuaid, doesn’t have a decent bone in him, sure didn't he shut down the soup kitchen I helped at, and only because two Protestant women helped there - the poor starving feckers from the Dublin slums had no better place for a decent bowl of soup.”

She told me about the soup kitchen one day as we were sitting on the harbor wall at Sandycove waiting for the tide - which was at an almighty low - to turn so we could swim without being murdered by the seaweed. That was the day she said “Feck it, come on,” and we walking around the corner to the Forty Foot, where the water was always deep and the swimming was good. We walked past the oversized “Men Only” sign with a nod from the Ma to a couple of auld fella’s sitting outside with their donation bowl and the chalk board on which they wrote the days’ water temperature, 55 degrees it read, “grand” says the Ma.

GRANDMA by Deborah Gordon-Brown

2010-02-28T13:48:00.001-08:00

I was never comfortable in my Aunt Esther's house. It was a ranch house somewhere in Queens, in some fairly new series of tract homes built for families who required several bedrooms, a basement, enough of a backyard to feel like property and enough of a front yard to allow its owners to decorate it in a way that would differentiate it from the others. I remember plastic flowers on the front lawn near the door but that could have been Esther's house or another. What I experienced each time we went there was a sense of being lost in a land of sameness, a sense that didn't leave me even inside the house.

Grandma had moved to the house with Aunt Esther and her husband Eddie. She had asked my mother if we would buy a house to share but my mother had said "No". I knew only because on the day we all trooped out to see the land on which Esther & Eddies house was to be built, Grandma and I walked away from the group. We walked toward one of those wire fences through which one can see but clearly speaks of borders and boundaries. We stood at the fence. I think I curled my fingers around the wire, cold in the March air, the trees beyond it still winter bare, although had we looked I'm sure we could have seen the faint color of buds.

We weren't really looking though. We were quiet. Then I heard my unusually silent Grandma sigh, a deep sigh unedited for the 11 year old at her side. I remember looking up at her then taking her hand. "You mustn't tell", she started softly, not looking at me, seeing probably nothing. Her eyes looked clouded. I moved slightly so that I too stared off again through the fence, also unseeing.

We had a special relationship Grandma and I. It wasn't that we had secrets, but that we could share thoughts that others might consider impolite, so Grandma's asking me not to tell wasn't shocking. What was shocking was the depth of the place it came from, not memory or a story but from a place of monumental importance. The moment was truly frightening.

I remember her coat, a nubby gray wool and her scarf. I remember the damp cold and leaning closer to her, wanting to make whatever it was that was troubling her go away. "I don't want this," she said quietly. "I asked your mother. She said 'no'. Your mother is proud, too proud, but she is who she is. She is honest. I hoped that your mother and father would buy a house in which I would have an apartment. I would give them the money. Your father thought it would be a good idea but Evelyn [that's my mother] wasn't ready. I don't want to live like a guest, like a child."

There were other words, there had to be, and I'm probably not truly remembering the exact words that buried themselves in my heart. Like the cold of the March day my grandmother, whose house was always warm and full of heavy furniture that would last forever, was becoming a piece of something else in someone else's house, and helpless, helpless the way I was with my family. Everything in my house was careful and loving but the real heat of life was tucked away. I didn't know about Esther and Eddie. I wasn't comfortable with them so when my Grandmother spoke, her head turned away from anything familiar, I knew more than I could know: We were both lost in a way and we loved each other, trusted each other.

I remember feeling ashamed of my mother, angry with her, although we never spoke of that time in our lives until years into my adulthood.

We visited Esther and Eddie and Grandma in that house in Queens, not a lot, but certainly a number of times. Susan, my cousin, a year older than I and Esther and Eddie's daughter, insisted we play together as did her parents. I just wanted to visit Grandma who would shoo me away to be with Susan. When I snuck a moment to ask why, why couldn't we just be, Grandma taught me about what one does in another person's house, you don't make them angry. You try to live in a way that is comfortable for them. They wanted me to play with Susan. It would be good for Susan. We would get to talk. And we did, we did talk sometimes on the phone, but that's not the same of course.

And then we went to the house in a very solemn mode one day, my parents quiet in the car on the way up. Grandma was very sick. My parents were going to see her. But when we got there, when we got in the house, the house that was all sameness and like all the other houses except that my Grandma was in one of its rooms, I wasn't allowed to see Grandma. I asked. I was told she was too tired.

I remember the emptiness then, the cold air, the hushed voices, the fake antique furniture and Susan's self importance. She held a secret she finally whispered to me, "Grandma is dying" she said, her voice full of her special secret knowledge.

And then it was too much. I begged to see my Grandmother, then I wept, then totally uncharacteristically I threw myself against a wall protesting until they had to let me in, couldn't keep the noise away. I had to promise I would stay "just for a minute" but I didn't. Sometimes you just have to lie.

My grandmother's eyes were open when I came in and she smiled. She was frail without energy but when I sat on her bed and put my hand next to her she took my hand in hers, her fingers cool, her embrace warm. "Debbie, Debbie", she said. I bent toward her and she reached to touch my face. Of course I told her I loved her. How could I not have. I was bursting with love. I hugged her and I asked what was wrong because, no matter what anyone else said, she would tell me the truth. We talked a little bit, about her illness, about me. And the she asked if she could tell me something. I nodded, of course she could, and we were alone again. We were safe. "I'm dying, Debbie," she said, "and I am afraid."

My heart rose to fill the space between us. "What are you afraid of?" I asked, worried. "Of dying", my grandmother said, her blue/gray eyes so deep, "Of death." And my heart opened even more. I didn't want to see my grandmother suffering, frightened. "Please, Grandma, you don't have to be afraid," I assured her with everything I knew. "Lots of people have died, Grandma. It can't be that bad if everyone does it." That seemed so logical to me, so full of truth that what I said next seemed equally possible, "I will stay with you, Grandma. I will hold your hand and you can travel with me. I know you won't be alone." It was an easy promise to make. I would be with my Grandma as she had been with me. I was unafraid.

They tried to get me out of her room but they couldn't until Grandma fell asleep and even then, when they forced me to leave, I begged for a few more minutes. When the door was shut again I pulled a ribbon off my braid and tucked it into her loosely opened hand, gently closing her fingers over it so she would know, if she woke up, that I hadn't really left. I would never leave her. She would know that and be comforted.

ANOTHER KIND OF HISTORY by Polly Howells

2010-02-12T01:49:00.000-08:00

It is the McCarthy era. My father is the chairman of a state-wide organization called the Liberal Citizens of Massachusetts, or LCM. My mother reads to me at night, “The Little Maid of Concord and Lexington,” one of a series championing the heroic deeds of little girls during the American Revolution. In this book Paul Revere rides down the road from Lexington to Concord, knocking furiously on people’s doors. “The British are coming, the British are coming! Wake up!” There is something about John Hancock’s response that makes my mother weep. She says to me, “Oh, we had such good men in our country then!” I take her feelings to heart. I know that she cares, deeply, about the state of our world, and is grieving for some imagined past when the values of our leaders and her values lined up.

Actually, it wasn’t an imagined past. It was a past they had only just lived through, but one that existed before I was born. An iconic story Mother told was of waiting for Father at the Alexandria Virginia train station and hearing on the radio that FDR had died. She burst into tears. They did believe in FDR. Mother’s memory of her sudden, unexpected, grief lives in me as sharply as if it were my own.

Mother and I would go to the parade on the Concord Lexington highway, every April 17th, the anniversary of the “shot heard round the world,” the day on which the Boston Marathon is now run. We stand in front of one of the tumbling down but still beautiful stonewalls that line the road, and watch men in revolutionary uniforms march by, whistling their fifes and drumming their drums. I feel a deep excitement, a sense of belonging that is probably fueled in part by stories of my some number of greats grandmother watching the soldiers march by in 1775 from her window on that very same Concord-Lexington road.

In back of that house on Wellesley Street, between the house and the golf course, stood three white pines, providing a barrier between us and the 17th tee. It says something about how my different my family felt from golfers, from people in the “ordinary world,” that Toni and I took it upon ourselves to hide beneath these thick and scented pine trees and “spy on the golfers.” We actually took pads and pencils out there and wrote down everything we heard the golfers say. In my memory we didn’t learn very much about how ordinary people lived, if that was our goal. “Oh shit!” was probably the most exciting comment we ever heard, as someone’s ball traveled into a sand trap or far away from the green.

We went to Maine for three months every summer. One summer we came home to find the house on Wellesley Street had been broken into. These were the days before alarm systems or house sitters. Our house had been left alone. The window of the sun room was broken, and cigarettes had been crushed out on the dining room floor. But the only things that were disturbed were the card files of LCM. I can see those cardboard boxes, mottled black and white, with colored 3x5 cards in them, each with a name and address neatly written either in my father’s or mother’s hand, and in this scene they are spilled on the floor of the closet off the dining room with its glass dining room table. They were not after jewelry; they were not after clothing or my mother’s fur coats. They wanted to know who were the members of LCM. I see my parents’ long faces, and I feel with them the dilemma they are in. We live in a Republican town; the police probably sympathize with the FBI agents who have invaded our house. So do we call the police? What’s the point? My father does call the police, but he doesn’t tell them he knows who broke into our house. He just files a report, and leaves it at that. They have the window replaced.

Do I feel unsafe? I’m not sure. It is so much the context of my life, this sense of moral responsibility, this sense that my parents are heroic crusaders for democracy and civil rights. I feel proud of them, almost as if by association I am one of those little girls I read about in the “Little Maid” books. I also feel the weight of keeping these stories secret. I know my classmates, and their parents, would not understand.

A few years before this, I am standing in the kitchen of our house in Belmont, the house we lived in before we moved to Weston. I am five years old. I know it is in that kitchen because I am looking down at the terra cotta linoleum on that kitchen floor. My head is about at the level of my mother’s thigh. She is giving me a glass of Coca-Cola, as she always did when I got home from school. I say to her, “Mummy, will we be in history?” She looks at me, surprised. Dumbfounded. She says, “Well, I know I won’t be in history, because in order to be in history you have to be famous. And I know I will never be famous.”

But I think now I wasn’t asking about that kind of history, the history that is written in books, the history that made so many of my ancestors famous. That is one kind of history. I was already so aware that my parents were active in present-day history, trying to change the course of this country. They had just been through a presidential campaign in which they fought tirelessly to get the Progressive Party candidate, Henry Wallace, elected. They had traveled into Armenian neighborhoods in Arlington, knocked on doors, signed petitions, sung songs. He had lost, but in living through this with them I was already one of the foot soldiers in the war to make the world a better place. I didn’t really need to ask my mother if we would be in history. In my feeling, I already was.

NETWORKING SKILLS by Kathryn Spencer-Licht

2010-02-02T19:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-21T03:05:00.000-07:00

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.