ALL I WANTED by Edith Lerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.