A MOTHER'S VOICE by Jessica Rosenthal

As the cold scissors slide up my blouse to cut it open I can hear my mother’s voice, “Always wear clean underwear, just in case.”  My clean panties were in the trunk of my now mangled Honda Civic because I had picked up my laundry from the wash & fold the night before and didn’t bring it in the house.  Today, it was a cold California morning in October and I was too comfortable to go outside in my pajamas to get the bag of clean laundry.  So here I was, in the back of the ambulance, the EMTs trying to keep me conscious – and I was NOT wearing clean underwear.  My mother would be so disappointed.

My mom Lois, or Lotus Blossom as my father affectionately calls her, has a very definite idea of right & wrong and structure.  This discipline contributed to her and my dad’s thriving even though they had very little money.  They first lived in a small one bedroom on Colby Court in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.  I don’t remember the first few years of my life there, although I can see certain images from the home movies we watched on holidays.  I could imagine our time there from the narration that went along with the silent films.  Nowadays, we rarely break out the projector but when we do, my parents play “dead – not dead” and my dad always winds up crying.

I spent a lot of time with my dad in the early years of my life.  By 1976, my parents had been married 4 years (though they began dating each other 9 years earlier) and they had moved to a two bedroom apartment in the Warbasse neighborhood of Brooklyn.  They lived in the same building as my mom’s parents, and one of my grandmother’s brothers and his family.  My dad, an electrician, was furloughed from work at this time, so my mother went to work at Coney Island hospital in the billing department while my dad stayed home and cared for me.  I loved those times.  For breakfast, he would add uBet® syrup to my Rice Krispies® so I would be sure to drink the milk at the bottom of the bowl.  Our days were filled with fun excursions, like going to the park, or walking over to his mother’s house on Brighton 7th Street, where her sisters all had houses too.  I would sit on the red stoop and listen to the grownups talk, or roller skate on the uneven payment, or perform for my great aunts and grandmother.  I was the first of all the grandchildren, #1, and I garnered a lot of attention.
              
Occasionally, my dad and I would spend the afternoon in the apartment. I would stand on the wood galley table and dance to Bob Dylan as my dad held my hands and sung along to the record, “Everybody must get stoned…”  Some afternoons, his friends would come over and they would smoke cigarettes that they rolled themselves from a wooden cigar box.  In high school, before I knew what getting stoned meant, I pictured people throwing rocks at other people like they did in the Salem witch trials.  I didn’t understand why my Dad liked that song so much.  In my twenties I told my dad that I remembered these times, and he assured me that he NEVER rolled his own tobacco.
              
Music has been an extremely powerful influence in my life.  At first, after my accident I couldn’t listen to music at all.  Knowing my love of music, my dad would suggest turning on the radio from the remote control attached to the bed, but I was too afraid.  What if something played that made me sad?  I didn’t want to cry anymore.  After many little surgeries, it was time for the big one.  Using shards of bone, pieces of my shattered pelvis, titanium plates and bolts, the doctor planned to put my hip back together.  I was sedated to the point of being out of my mind and body, but I was scared.  While my dad stayed with me until they rolled me into surgery, my mom had gone back to the hotel to shower and get some rest after several days of sleeping in hospital chairs next to my bed.  He kept me conscious by reciting the lyrics of as many Dylan songs as he could remember.  And there were a lot.  I sang along, “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet…We sit stranded but we’re doing our best to deny it.”  It kept me from thinking about the possibility that I wouldn’t make it out of surgery alive, or never be able to walk again.  One after the other, we sang together until the attendant came to wheel me away.  My dad followed close behind to make sure the orderly took great care in transporting me.  Any abrupt movement was painful as my leg hung from a gurney and a pin temporarily kept it in place.  As the nurses greeted me, my dad wished me luck and told me, “I’ll be right here when you wake up.”
              
And he was.  The surgery was a success and I was relieved to move to the next phase of recovery.  I was still afraid to watch TV for fear of the Allstate commercial where they show a collision and you can hear and see it happening. I still didn’t want to listen to music.  Slowly though, as the days turned into weeks, I was less and less afraid.  I began with the doo wop station, upbeat and light hearted.  A couple of songs here and there were enough to remind me of the healing power of music.
               
I learned to lift myself out of the bed, onto a plank and into the wheelchair. Then from the wheelchair to the walker; Standing, shuffling a few feet while my dad pushed the wheelchair behind me in case I had to sit down midway down the hall.  When I was able to get to the end of the hallway and back to my room using only the walker, I was ready for the music.  I found myself singing the Grateful Dead, “…gotta get back to where you belong, little bit harder, just a little bit more, little bit further than you’ve gone before.”  I emailed my friend Dave and asked him to send me some CDs.  When they arrived, I listened to that song, The Wheel, over and over again. 
              
Eventually two months from the fated day, I was able to climb a flight of stairs, albeit slowly and sometimes by using the rump bump tactic.  I was released from the hospital rehab and allowed to go home.  My mom had already flown back to New Jersey two weeks earlier, barely arriving in time for my sister to give birth to my twin nieces.  I can’t believe I missed that special morning when my nieces were born.  Regretful, but out of my hands, I was in California.  My dad stayed with me for several weeks, until I could live again independently. On our way home, we went to Home Depot so my dad could buy materials to build a sturdy bannister that would help me up the 12 steps to the front porch.  I wasn’t used to wheeling myself around.  My arms were so sore the entire next day that all I did was sit and watch old concert footage, barely moving from my favorite armchair.  By the third day, I was feeling better and the bannister was complete, wooden stain and all.
 
It was an eye opening experience using a wheelchair.  I knew I was lucky that this was only temporary.  After months of physical therapy, I would be able to walk again and not be wheelchair bound.  But I noticed things that had been unimportant before.  The cuts in the curb on the sidewalk were often too bumpy for me to wheel over alone.  Without my dad, I had to ask a stranger for a push.  So many places in my small little town didn’t have a ramp or a handicap bathroom.  It was a simple injustice, but it felt like a personal “You are not welcome here.”  The most enlightening and sad thing I noticed was that people wouldn’t make eye contact with me.  They would talk right over my head to my dad, as if I wasn’t there; Or that somehow the wheelchair left me unable to think or speak for myself.  I think people were afraid to look, in fear of what they might see – what they imagined could be wrong with me.  I wanted to tell them that I was okay, and that in a few months they wouldn’t even know that I had not been able to walk.  But before I had a chance there eyes would dart away and they’d be gone.  Now, I always make it a point to make eye contact with and smile at people in wheelchairs.  Immobility does not define a person.  Nobody likes or deserves to feel ignored.  Everyone wants to be asked to dance.

FOG by Sonja Leobold

When Jacques and I were together, so many years ago, we hitched from Paris across Europe, ending up one night in Bavaria. We had no idea where we had been dropped off, only that we found ourselves in a dense fog.

We walked blindly, not even knowing if we were still on a road. No cars passed us, and every once in a while, we could see through the mist, fields, and, once, at a distance, a barn, which gave us hope that we might be able to sleep somewhere for a while. Jacques crossed the field to see if we could get into it, but a dog began to bark ferociously and Jacques backed off.

We walked most of the night, hardly able to see a foot in front of us. The fog enveloped us, but sometimes retreated, trees appearing from nowhere, sometimes a house or two, then disappearing. We kept losing sight of each other, too, only to rediscover one another just a few steps away. But we never saw another human being. It was as if we were between worlds—unknown places. Nothing seemed real.

As the fog lifted and light drifted down from the sky, things around us began to stir. A farmer left his house and headed across a field towards his barn, a dog at his side. Once in a while, we saw a cow or two standing as if in a trance, slowly blinking. Morning was breaking.

At some point, we heard a truck coming our way. It was a milk truck and the driver was kind enough to pick us up. He said he would take us into town. We had started out to try to find an old friend of mine who lived in Oberbayen, a small town in Bavaria, south of Munich. Amazingly, the driver told us we were practically there. Once he dropped us off in town, we were able to find the small inn where Robert, my friend, was staying.

It was good to see Robert. Robert. Solid, kind, wise. He was 65 and I was 21. He had lived a complicated life. He was German and as a young man, had served in World War I, only to emerge from it, shell-shocked and with a horror of war. During World War II, he had worked in the underground, helping Jews escape. After the war, he had come to America, living there for many years, and doing many things, some of them simultaneously. He started an old-time one-room schoolhouse, worked as a therapist, treating people who were “lost causes,” was a water-color painter, and was in the midst of translating the verses of the I Ching. 

The quality in Robert I found most impressive was his ability to focus. When you were with him, he was totally attentive and fully present, so that even five minutes with him was completely satisfying and felt like five hours. And, perhaps because of that focus, he was acutely perceptive and sensitive. He learned so much about you without you having said a word. I think that’s why I had wanted to come to see him with Jacques. I felt so conflicted in my feelings for Jacques, and thought that perhaps things would clarify in Robert’s wise presence.

 

THINGS I DIDN'T KNOW by Daniel Marshall

I felt comfortable sitting on a padded stool, the counter hard underneath my forearms when I leaned on it.  With my eyes, I followed the marbled pattern on the stone, veins of white running through black, this way and that, webbed.  The seat revolved, though not the yoke-shaped steel footrest.  I twisted to left and right, stopping my swings with my feet, waiting for service.

“What will you have?”

“A vanilla malted.”

My eyes swept over the store—the mirror facing me that I turned from, not wanting to see myself, the shiny painted and chromed paraphernalia on the sideboard, the wooden telephone booth with the glass windows at the end of the walkway, and a few empty booths.  The store was empty, except for me.

It was a choice of either a malted, a milkshake, or an egg cream, but I was hungry and wanted something thick and soothing, not runny with seltzer and lumpy with ice cream scoops.  A memory flickered across my mind of an apple-cheeked young man and woman, she in a checked dress, sharing an ice cream soda with two straws in the Norman Rockwell painting.  But I had no young woman soft on me to share a soda with, though I could have asked one if I’d had time.

I thought of Beverly, how pretty and demure she was, with long blond hair, and of the day that I passed her house and heard her screaming at her younger brother.  An image of Joanne Lanzarone came to me, but I hadn’t seen her since eighth grade and didn’t know where she lived.  I thought that I’d intercepted some glances from her, and there was an engaging sweetness about her but Carol del Casino was more sultry and got higher marks, though not quite as high as mine.  Why was I thinking of them; they were moving in a different direction from me, and I never saw them anymore, except once or twice a year when I went to the same Mass as Carol, and she was wearing attention-getting fashionable grown-up clothes now.

The truth was that Regis kept me away from the neighborhood.  I hardly even saw the pretty Wotman girls next door, though I still saw Marge in the kitchen when she visited my mom and they sat talking around the table.  My mom liked to give advice and listen to people’s problems or just chat.  I wondered what my classmates were doing.  Tommy Keller liked to visit my mom, so once in a while I heard something about him.  I liked to visit Ethel McDonald, Brigid’s mom, but Brigid still looked a lot like a girl and wasn’t sultry like Carol.  Besides, the girls whom I went to school with seemed ordinary, and I wondered what sort of people were beyond Brooklyn.

I thought of Joanne in a one-piece elastic bathing suit, like the one that Joanne Galuski used to wear when I met her in Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario, behind the university buildings where my dad did research for a summer job, and the summer before that Mary Morrow at Lake Champlain, where Harry Holmes lent us a big summer house on an acre of land by the only main road.  I couldn’t remember when I’d seen Joanne in such a bathing suit, but I could easily imagine her looking attractive in one.  I must have seen her somewhere.

Beverly was taller, and she could have had such a suit, too, but I couldn’t imagine her in one.  Or Ginny Holst.  I thought of Bev in crinoline and satin like the dress that she wore when I took her to the junior prom.  My mom wanted me to date Mary Flaherty, but she was plain and chatty.  My mom knew her mom.  I thought of Ginny as very modest, in a plain flowered dress.  She got the next highest marks after me and didn’t start school with us.

Making a malted was liturgy and performance.  I couldn’t often afford one, but I wanted one to cheer me up.  I remembered being disappointed when Carol showed a liking for Dennis Card.  The counter guy dropped a measured spoonful of a white powder with an expert toss and, pulling a handle or two downward toward the metal canister that served as mixer, he dispensed a couple of fluids into it, thick and white.  He locked the canister into the mixer and flicked a switch.  The machine turned with a soft, business-like little roar.  It was pea-soup green and enameled; they always were.  Maybe it was in my imagination that I imagined seeing the liquid swirling.  Then with a flourish he set a tall glass in front of me, poured the contents of the canister into it, and plopped a straw and spoon in.  It was thick enough that a little indentation formed around the straw.  I sipped, thinking of Joanne Lanzarone, Mary Morrow, and Joanne Galuski in bathing suits and wishing that I had a girlfriend like one of them.

IT'S NOT OVER by DeAnn Louise Daigle

My art history class transported
me to Rome, the Netherlands,
Greece, France, Holland, Germany – 

But more than cities and countries
with boundaries and languages
were the paintings and sculptures themselves.
Like music, they transcended all borders and
destinations except what led to the human heart. 
Art and the human heart.

These few hours every week were precious and
inexplicably freeing for me. 
When I was there in the evenings at the
university, I left behind W. T. Grant Company. 
I was nineteen years old and totally in love with
the study of art and the worlds it opened for me. 
I soared, I wept, I stayed awake nights writing
and reading about my experience of art
and the world of impeccable beauty and how it
nourished and sustained me
by feeding my imagination with an opening to
endless possibilities.

It was this experience that gave me the wings of
courage to go outside, to work, to speak, to have
conversation, to try to live my life as if there were
someone I could speak with about all I felt
and dreamed and hoped for.

I wrote about the whistler of the night
who walked in foggy footsteps I could hear
outside my window
in the middle of a summer’s quiet evening.
And I wrote, after seeing Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks, about the same sky,
the same sun, the same moon, the same stars
from above my room to other rooms on the
other side of the globe, and how we shared these
together – human beings unknowing, quiet,
apart and yet together.

THE SEASON OF FEAR by Ruth Berg

This past winter has been a bitch. I have vegetated in my house....scared of icy roads and sidewalks...terrified of falling...broken arm...leg...back. I carry the hiking stick which I can barely manage when walking the dog. Yes...Yes what I have experienced is  fear...real fear..and I hate it. Long ago I swore that as I aged I’d be bold, take the risks, not let the years strap me in an unmovable chair, be who I was.

I was in my twenties. I was in New York City taking an acting class that met on a Sunday night at twelve midnight on Sixth Avenue and 24^th Street. You climbed up three flights of rickety stairs to the studio. The class met at this witching hour because everyone in the class, except me, was in a Broadway show and they could make it down after their performances.

The class ran from midnight to 2:30 or 3:00 am. After class we’d trudge down the rickety stairs...some turned north on Sixth Ave....four of us turned south headed toward The Village. We didn’t wait for a bus but walked the blocks south to 8^th Street, talking about the scenes that had been presented in class; the working actors gossiping about the evening performance. At 8^th Street, two turned west and two of us turned east. At Cooper Union, I lost my companion. I continued on, alone, to St. Marks Place, past the darkened Jazz club, on to First Ave., south one block to 7^th Street and home at last. Unlocked the apartment door and my dog, Hambone, greeted me. I’d put on his leash, back down the stairs to the street with Hambone desperately searching for the nearest pole to lift his leg. Then a quick run around the block, back up the stairs to the apartment, feed Hambone and the cat, General Beauregard, then into the shower and getting ready to make the trip uptown to get to work on time.

. 

What I remember of that time?  The silence of the streets, hearing my shoe heel strike the pavement, the wild conversations as the four of us walked south, the lack of fear... Being alive in the moment. Being young. I want it back. I reach out.

CANYONLANDS by Pauline Tamari

The white water rafting trip down the Colorado River from Moab was exhilarating. I couldn’t believe I was able to once more feel the thrill of being on the edge; taking a bite out of life, once again. 

It seemed at some point fate dictated a decree of disease that would imprison me in a static state of health debilitation. Prematurely old, sick, alone; an invalid, one who is not valid; whose life is not validated, who has no validity. I could not continue my life work, the work that fed my soul, my passions unattended. I could hardly care for myself; not for others, in and out of the hospitals where the lack of care and compassion was firmly correlated with the overwhelming humiliation from which there was no escape. Each time in the last quarter of a century the ferocious dragon who I had thought I had slain would raise its immortal head I was sure it would be the end. I was sure this last time I was on the only road left, a lonely and painful trek to the grave. 

But here I was back in life again, in the rage of this rushing water as we flow over rocks and ripples sprayed with a canopy of life-giving water, we wind our way down this magnificent alley sheltered on either side by the sand colored mountains. I feel my soul settle in serenity.  When the whitewater hits we steady ourselves, crouch on our fear and scream and yell as unencumbered teenagers on a rollercoaster. When taunted if anyone would want to venture a solo run in the kayak that is trailing the raft there are only two of us who take the bait, a young teen age boy on the trip and myself, the two polar ends of a life course each having an appetite for the taste.  

We would stop in late afternoon our raft pushed up on the side of the sandy, secluded river beach where we would camp for the night. There were no other beings, no other boats, and no other intrusive noises, nothing that grated the ears or distracted the eye, and caused sensory agony, nothing that did not belong there, except perhaps us. 

I would often float in the warm, soft, red muddy waters and let it wash over me at the end of the day. Stretched out, I would float with my face to the sun and just be. For me to just be in this force of this fearsome beauty that surrounded me, my body at peace, at one with me and the world around me, was heaven. I would set up my small tent quickly so I could take a solitary walk, a short hike in search for my soul and my being to become one, one with this awesome mystery that encased me. 

In actuality I was “one,” the other five on this rafting trip were a young couple and a father with two teenagers. When we met in Moab, Utah to begin this adventure, the others were a bit surprised that I, somewhat strange in age and even stranger to be a woman of my age who was doing this type of trip alone. I was quite used to both being strange and doing strange things alone. On this trip even our two river guides came as a pair. But for the most part I felt a comfortable ease with and a part of this rag tag group of river rafters. We had quickly learned to delight in each of our strangeness and our appetite and exuberance in this adventure. 

After an unusually superb dinner accomplished in some magical way over a fire by our river guides, with provisions so expertly concealed on our raft that the first day I began to think they forgot about bringing food, we would all sit around the fire, its light dancing shadows on the red rocks of the surrounding mountains. We talked, sang songs, heard old river stories and drank wine. I was surely back in life. 

Later I would lie on the sand outside my tent. I would think of the starched, scratchy sheets and the needles plunged in my arm, with oxygen in my nose to face one more night of sleepless agony in an antiseptic unfeeling sterile world. I shiver. I then look up at the stars above me, twinkling me messages of delight, the soft glow of the moon and the warm sand beneath me and I feel at peace and alive in that very same moment  as the silent song of serenity sings me to sleep.

BRINGING IT TOGETHER by DeAnn Louise Daigle

It feels like nothing is ever resolved.

Just when I thought that in knowing

My past more clearly, as in Bud

Actually being my biological father,

Something would be completed.

Rumors seem to have basis in fact –

At least in some fact, if not all.  That

Hearsay, that rumor, that gossip

Repeated to me by my cousin when

We were ten or eleven or nine years old

Had its basis in something, and something

In me knew this, even if what he told me

Was not true.  Yet, why would he have

Bothered to tell me?  He wanted me to

Know.  He felt compelled, on some level

Of his youthful humanity, for whatever

Unfathomable reason, that I should be

Aware of this information.  He believed

It.  And so I lived with his knowledge

Unable to do anything about it or with

It for some four decades when – just

Maybe – I was ready to find out for sure –

And for true –

Bud and I wept on the phone.  It was true.

What Carl had told me that day in the old

Boarding House, which held so many

Memories, so many stories of our roots and

Acadian history – so much of that big story

Of our ancestors – it was there on a warm

Summer’s day in one of the spare bedrooms,

Where who knows who had slept.  On that

Day he told me the rumor he had heard, so

Convincingly, and his cousin James was there

To confirm it.  Yes, it was true, it was very

True.  I have loved you all these years.  Sonorous

Regret in his voice echoes still in my mind.

Bud was my father – but he was not – nor

Would he ever be – my Dad.