A new store just north of town, designed for writers, opened up this week. The size rivals IKEA, with rooms filled with every imaginable writing tool and solution, definitely at least a day trip. I needed to tie-up two subplots that had gotten kind of knotted. So, I set out to explore Writers Ultimate Solution.
The first floor opens to grammar, punctuation, anything basic. The second caters to all aspects of non-fiction: science, nature, current affairs, blog advice, and cooking. It holds a full-service cafeteria. Just to make a writer feel at home, a dietician sits next to the cashier and hands out rejection slips to those folk whose trays lack adequate nutrition.
The third floor is the poet’s friend. In fact, on the day I arrived, WUS had a three-metaphors-for-the-price-of-two sale, going on. Unfortunately, as it often is with sale items, two lines would fit, but add the third and it sounded like something out of a 1960s Beatnik coffee house. I guess I could use the lines in three different poems, but I didn’t want the cashier to think I was on drugs.
The fourth floor, the most crowded, specialized in fiction, just the section I wanted. It also looked and felt more like a circus. Clowns somersaulted from room to room. The Red Pony dropped something of himself in the hallway. And Curious George kept trying to lead me to the children’s section. “Another day. Another day,” I told him. Guess there’s a good reason why he has been around since the 1940’s. Signs in every room read: The fiction writer’s job is to entertain. The top level of WUS has been designed to stimulate your creativity. Instead, I got a migraine.
A door at the end of one hallway read: Excuses. By this time, I thought it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Fortunately, I looked inside before I took a step. A cold breeze provided the first hint; there was no inside. It led to a mud pit at least six feet below.
“Our boss’s little joke,” an employee said when I backed into Moby Dick, not Ahab, the book’s main character. I was caught by the whale.
I ended up buying three ballpoint pens, and a half dozen semi-colons that will only apply themselves in the best-suited places—and I got them at a double-markdown price. Interesting that items were marked down so soon after opening. Hope that’s not a bad sign. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t grab one of the dollar-mystery bags, probably full of adverbs. My story still sounds like it was written inside a blender. Guess I need more than a superstore.
“I have lost friends, some by death—others through sheer inability to cross the street.” —Virginia Woolf
NO ORDINARY RECITAL
Jack:
Songs I recognized from at least twenty years ago rose from my daughter’s kitchen CD player. Amy seemed to prefer a beat to match her syncopated movements. So-much-to-do, although she never let anyone know what that so-much was, only some vague importance to taking out the garbage.
She stirred a pot to the rhythm of a rock band. She hummed as she turned up the oldies. However, when she turned to me, she reacted as if a snake-oil salesman had opened her back door, and then he had the audacity to sit at her kitchen table with a cup of her freshly brewed coffee.
My grandson had brought me the cup, as if it had been some kind of prize, before he left with my son-in-law for rehearsal. I’d visited because Mikey had invited me, the grandpa he wanted to know but didn’t. Yet.
Temporarily, I had moved in with Amy’s brother, at least until I could get back onto my own two feet. Amy saw the possibility of my walking a straight line as likely as a change in the Law of Gravity.
I had played keyboard, guitar, violin—you name it, lead guitar in a band, taught myself trumpet. I’d worked in an everyday office by day and ruled the stage at night. Before I lost just about everything. To king alcohol. A few months in jail.
The sweet jazz quartet calling from the player in a niche in the corner could have been the news reporting earthquakes downtown, or worse in my daughter’s backyard. Ten feet from the back door. Two feet from where I sat now. Then again, I felt an earthquake tremor begin in my chest and work its way to my stomach. My coffee grew cold. My daughter grew colder.
She stared at me with that look I recognized. Can’t-count-on-you-Dad didn’t need to come to her lips. Instead, the anger showed in her eyes, voice, the tight pull of her lips.
“So, you say you’ll be at Mikey’s recital Friday night. On time.”
“Yes.”
“And you will be sober.” She leaned over the table. “Not, but-I-only-had-two-drinks. Two quart-sized drinks?”
I had talked to Mikey. Before I’d set foot in the house. He’d run out to meet me. “Oh, Grandpa! My recital. It’s going to be great. You know what Daddy told me?”
I’d admitted I didn’t.
“Daddy said you played violin, too. You played really, really good. Could you play for me now? When we get inside.”
“How about some other day?” I’d answered. “Right now. I’m way too excited to hear you play.”
A partial truth. My heart wasn’t ready for music yet. It reminded me too much of what I’d thrown away.
I’d put my hand on his shoulder and Mikey didn’t pull away. He didn’t have the storehouse of empty promises in his memory his mom had. Her brother, too. He had taken me in—to a bed in his basement, next to the hot water heater. The upstairs door remained locked. I had to knock to get in. I’d stolen from both my children. I admit it. Giving back wasn’t easy.
“Did you used to live in Florida or California?” Mikey had asked. “Or was it another country?”
I’d bit my lip. I’d lived ten miles away before I passed out on the job. Mikey had no memory of me at all in his seven years of life.
Since then I’d managed to get a car, guaranteed only to be a car. I had my license back. I had a job, more of a pity offer with pittance pay.
Respect? That was going to take more time.
Amy: three days later
Mikey’s recital is about to begin. I know I should have told him about the call about his grandfather’s death. Jake, my chicken-husband won’t do it. The police swear the accident wasn’t Dad’s fault. He was stone sober and wearing his seatbelt. Probably wasn’t paying attention, however, as the semi crossed the middle lane.
Damn! I’d like to think something positive about my own father. And my insides feel just about as cold and empty. Maybe I didn’t give him much of a chance to apologize.
Mikey’s group is up last. Jake told him the best gets saved for the end, so nobody needs to follow it and feel less-than. Mikey thought that made sense. Of course, he believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Jake says. “Are you okay? Or at least as okay as anybody can be…under the circumstances.”
“We can’t just pretend Dad beamed up into a spaceship.” My voice doesn’t leak sarcasm. It explodes it.
“Mikey doesn’t have the same complicated memories you have. You can’t shield him from hurt. You can’t assign your feelings of guilt to Mikey either?” Jake’s voice is soft, but he doesn’t blink.
“What guilt?” I raise my voice and the lady in front of us turns around.
“Sorry,” I say to the woman, feeling heat rise to my cheeks. Guilt. Maybe. Dad tried to apologize. He said something about making amends. He could have been talking to an oncoming train.
Jake pats my hand. “I could have been kinder, too.”
I want to swat him but don’t. Not here. His words are like a fresh stab in a seeping wound.
I hear each musical presentation, the way I hear a passing train while waiting for safe passage. Yet I wonder if safe passage exists.
Mikey’s group appears. He doesn’t seem to see us right away. I don’t wave and make a point of the fact his newly discovered grandfather is missing. Then, Mikey begins his solo, an Irish song I recognize from forty years ago, when I was small. I asked Dad to play it all the time, and then danced across the floor.
My son’s technique and timing improved. He adds style I didn’t know he knew. Jake looks at me with his brows pulled together. He shrugs. Apparently, he wonders when Mikey transformed from a good violinist at age seven to a prodigy.
He is beaming as he leaves the stage. Several people grab and hug him before he gets to his dad and me, but his eyes seem to scan the back of the auditorium.
“Mom, Dad!” he calls. “Where did Grandpa go? He was here a minute ago. Why didn’t he tell me he was going to be part of the show?”
“He. Did. What?” I ask.
“With all those lights around him. In the back. You’d think everybody would be turning around to look at him! But I got it, the way he held his fingers on the strings and moved the bow—to make the song sound better. He didn’t seem so far away. He felt right next to me. I’m not sure how. For real. Not sure I could play the same way again without him.”
“You’re sure that was Grandpa?” I said, “because…” I choke on words that won’t fit together.
When we get to the car it is locked. However, Dad’s violin is lying across the back seat.
“A gift,” I whisper,” from Grandpa. “That was his. I’d recognize it anywhere. I knew Mikey would hear the story of his grandfather’s death in a different way now, a way he would be able to accept long before his dad and I could. Mikey believed in miracles.
Now I needed to believe in forgiveness.
originally published in Piker Press on May 8, 2017
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi.
My brush fills with blue watercolor and finds sky on the paper. “Keep moving,” my teacher tells me. Watercolor isn’t as forgiving as acrylics. Sure, there are tricks. Looks like I may learn a few. Now.
Dab the spot out with a magic eraser.
Or add white to another color and paint something over it.
This mountain can be a tad higher.Or this ocean needs waves. This pot needs another flower.
Watercolor painting is like living life to the fullest. Stay awake. Let the colors of the day lead and follow what is important. Not every effort is effective. However, it can be a learningplace.
Let the first coat dry before attacking it with another. I want results now. Real life tells me something else.
That I am a student. At the age of 78. May the learning continue.
“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.” ― Jules Renard Old People
Old People, Look at the present and savor it because each Day may not be Perfect, but if it’s not Enveloped in pain, it’s okay. Old folk, celebrate the Persons in your lives who Love because it alone makes Existence worthwhile. Love back~
Anne Frank’s words: “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains.” Her voice was forever silenced. Yet, her heart rings true in this oh-so-similar era.
Hope. Insight. Peace. They grow inside seeds that don’t recognize their worth when planted. Small, invisible in a world where power and greed rule. May buds of integrity bloom, then refuse to die.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. (Mark Twain)
Joy to the World” rose dulcimer sweet and holiday warm from my car radio as I pulled into the church parking lot last December 23. The song’s bright spirit irritated me. It reminded me of the heat in my ‘85 Buick—hell-fire hot on high or dead cold on any other setting. Turning off the ignition eliminated the carol, but it didn’t solve my problem.
So why was I going to a Christmas program, advertised as experiential, in a grumpy mood? A place where joyous carols were inevitable? I could convince myself that I was here because some random sign recommended the evening: Be in St. Patrick’s lot at seven. A bus will take you to the program from there. Location will not be announced. This is a definite don’t-miss! But my reason was less noble. I had refused to go with Jack and Tara to the airport to pick up my mother. My mother’s plane arrived at seven—I wanted to be almost anywhere else. This sign was the first thing I saw on my escape route.
Tara had brought a white poinsettia for Grandma Paisley. With her own money. I don’t know where my fifth-grade daughter found such fondness for the old witch. It’s not like Grandma gave her any more than an obligatory birthday gift now and then, usually the wrong color and the wrong size—from the double-mark-down, non-returnable rack.
Tara hadn’t even seen her grandma in two years. Mother moved to Florida in November on a whim. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just packed a suitcase and moved into an old friend’s apartment in case she decided to move back. She stayed for six months but didn’t pay rent—the friend evicted her. So much for Mother’s friends. I’m not certain where she went after that.
I couldn’t understand Jack’s enthusiasm for Mother’s visit either. He had been so supportive of me when I went into counseling, so depressed I grew dehydrated by crying. Not literally, but it felt that way.
The counselor was only minimally helpful, too confrontational. She had the audacity to suggest that I intentionally put on weight to hide my obvious resemblance to my mother. Yes, we both have eyes the color of weak coffee, slender noses, and square chins.
However, I’ve never been drunk in my life. And you can be certain Tara didn’t learn profanity from me. Any resemblance is skin-deep. That monotone-professional-doc-distance that the therapist used made me even more angry.
“Anna,” Jack said sighing. “Paisley has been sober for five weeks now.”
“So, you say. She also told you she’s vegetarian,” I said, shuddering because Jack said my name with disdain, yet referred to his mother-in-law by her first name. “She’ll take one look at our Christmas turkey and call us a bunch of carnivores. Then she’ll spread wheat germ into my cookie dough as if she were disinfecting it.”
“But nothing like that has happened yet.”
“Right. The key word is yet. Have you ever heard Mother say one kind word to me? And has she asked to say one word to me?”
“Compliments aren’t her way,” he answered.
***
I locked my old Buick and zipped the keys in my purse, I felt betrayed. Tara was barely ten years old. She didn’t know any better. But where had Jack’s support gone? I knew—to the airport to bring home a woman destined to destroy the happiest season of the year.
I was the last person in line to get on the bus.
“Not much of a turn-out for a production that’s supposed to be so incredible,” I mumbled.
“Oh, people are busy and over-committed this time of year,” the young, pregnant girl in front of me said. She had thin, stringy hair, washed, yet hastily combed, so it dried in haphazard clumps. She wore a faded wool coat that was the same shade of sweet potato orange as her hair. Two oversized buttons connected with their buttonholes at her neck and across her chest. Successive buttons and buttonholes grew farther and farther apart, exposing bib overalls over a belly ripe for birth.
I decided she couldn’t possibly be married. “Too bad you couldn’t bring your husband with you tonight,” I said, with only the barest tinge of regret.
“Oh, but he is here,” she said revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth. “He’s driving the bus.”
Two green, bulging trash bags lay on the seat behind the driver. She dropped them next to her husband, in the space between the driver’s seat and the window. He turned around and grinned. I guessed him to be part Mexican, a good ten years older than the girl. He had long, straight, dark hair that looked even straighter jutting out from a tight, brown knit hat. I wasn’t impressed with him either.
The girl motioned for me to get into the seat first.
“My name’s Marilyn. What’s yours?” she asked.
“Anna Barnes,” I answered. I didn’t really want to tell her, but “none of your business” contains three more syllables. I looked out at the pale flurries swirling in the darkness as if I really cared about them.
“We have an Ann in our famil…,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I said as free of affect as I could.
“I’m sorry you need to be so angry,” she said.
“What makes you think I’m angry?” I turned to face her.
“It’s thick around you, dipped-in-concrete thick.”
“If I were angry, could it be any business of yours?”
“Oh, we’ve had to forgive lots of folks who don’t understand the birth of this child. Haven’t we, José?”
José nodded and I felt emotionally naked and stupid in front of these bizarre strangers, despite the fact that my views were probably identical to the views of the forgiven.
“Nice lofty thought,” I said. “But some people deserve to be kept at a distance.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But keeping them off saps my energy. Besides, this baby is due any day now! He’s my first and I have no idea how long my labor is going to be.”
By now we were thirty miles east of the city, cornfield country. José turned down a narrow, unpaved road. The loose rocks made it difficult to drive with any speed. About one-half mile down, he stopped the bus at a farmhouse. One light shone from what was probably the living room. Silently he got out of the bus, walked to the door, and knocked. No one answered, he knocked again. The light in the house went out. José climbed back on the bus.
“We’ll try farther up the road,” he said to Marilyn.
He started the bus again and drove ten more minutes until we came to another house. He got out again and knocked. A man came to the door. Gesturing and pointing, he said something to José we couldn’t hear. José smiled as he re-entered the bus.
“Maybe not what we’re looking for, but this is it,” he said to Marilyn. Then he took the green trash bags to the back of the bus. Most of the people in the bus looked puzzled as the men and women in the last three rows reached into the first bag. Inside were angel costumes, white robes with gossamer wings attached. The angels sang as they pulled the robes over flannel shirts and faded blue jeans, “Silent night, holy night. All is calm. All is bright…”
Their voices blended a Capella—bass, alto, and tenor—with simple, unpretentious strength. A man opened the second bag and brought out shepherd costumes. He passed them out to anyone who would take one, then stood carrying a lantern. Outside the bus he lit the lantern while the angels continued to sing, “Oh, holy night. The stars are brightly shining…”
José took Marilyn’s arm and led her behind the house to a barn.
The people inside the bus followed.
The man with the lantern opened the door of the barn as Marilyn and José went inside. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” he began, loud and clear without help from a microphone.
There were no chairs, but I didn’t feel like sitting anyway.
The singers directed us to join them in “The First Noel.” I don’t have much of a voice, but even I couldn’t disobey angels.
Marilyn looked at me and smiled. Somehow, from center stage she didn’t look like an ignorant young girl to me anymore. She was smiling into my soul as if she could see all the concrete-angry ugliness I cherished. Yet she chose to care for me anyway. I wasn’t ready to accept or give that kind of love yet. But I was willing to learn—difficult visitor at my house this Christmas or not.
Merry Christmas
The illustration was made from a public domain image, color paper, and a piece of an old Christmas card.
Inside the Kiln
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” ― Terry Pratchett, Diggers
Nan stares at her pottery in progress
as if it were a foreign object. Another student
asks why she appears distracted and sullen.
"Too much going on," she answers, rather than saying my father died.
"The classmate answers, "Have you tried
melatonin? Meditation? Acupuncture?"
Nan answers, "I consider the sourceof all suggestions."
The critic leaves to finish some work at the kiln.
Another student touches
Nan's shoulder. She pauses then says, "The kiln’s fire finishes our creations. Too bad that same flame can mean incinerate, or char, or..." The student speaks softer,
"Yesterday I met a girl who said she was your sister. She told me something. I have known a similar
too-much-going-on. Can we simplify it together?"
The other side of the bus door would become a faraway adventure to another state. Faraway, a vague notion that showed up only in Lucy’s story books. The little-kid kind. The ones she could read. She told her boss at the thrift shop where she had worked that she wanted to wait for the bus alone. She would be okay. The new place wanted her, and that made her happy. She could be the strong middle-aged woman her body said she was.
She felt the stare of a small boy who could be five, standing next to her. She knew what he saw. An awning-sized forehead, small green-pea-sized eyes, and a jaw as square and pocked as a sidewalk block. Didn’t matter. Bigger people stared, too. Maybe grown folk weren’t as blunt about it as kids. They were all rude.
Lucy’s mother had a troubled pregnancy and delayed birth. Lucy’s brain didn’t get sufficient oxygen. She understood why that made her learning slow, kind of. But she couldn’t see why she had to be ugly, too.
She turned toward the boy, slightly. He paused, then buried his head into the shoulder of the woman with him. She leaned toward the other side of the long bench, her eyes closed, and either sighed or moaned. Lucy couldn’t tell. She stayed focused on the door that would open soon, her exit from the impossible, thanks to the kind woman she worked for at the thrift store, who saw her frequent bruises and wouldn’t stop asking about them.
But Lucy didn’t have the money for rent and all the bills that came with living alone. She had to stay with her father. He apologized later. Said he missed Lucy’s mother, and couldn’t get over her death. That’s what set him off. How could a woman as good as his wife get cancer? But he wasn’t nice to her before she died, not that Lucy could remember. And apologies didn’t help when, in a drunken rage, he stepped on Lucy’s chest and broke a rib.
Lucy cried in the bathroom at work because each breath brought a nasty stab. That’s when her boss insisted that she tell the truth. Now. The police came in, and her father ended up in jail. Summer and winter mingled inside Lucy, next to the hurt, both relief and rejection. But her boss turned her confusion into spring. She had a friend who owned a sprawling three-hundred-acre farm. She offered Lucy a home and a job in her house. However, Lucy would have to move to Indiana, more than a hundred miles away. The friend would pay for the bus ticket. Lucy’s boss added a word new to Lucy: stipulation. Her father could not visit until he had been paroled for two years and sprouted wings and a halo.
Lucy fidgeted with the handle on her suitcase. She hoped she had everything she needed: a few pairs of jeans, some T-shirts and sweatshirts, a worn coat wadded into a ball, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. A half-dozen storybooks.
She looked into the glass door of the parked bus but got lost in her own reflection and winced, frightened. Did her boss tell her friend how ugly she was?
The little boy got up from the bench and came closer to her this time. He tapped her on the elbow. “Scuse me,” he said. “You going to Shelbyville, too?”
Lucy nodded.
“My Uncle Red brought me and my mommy here, but he had to go to work. She can’t walk good. Can you help her get on the bus?” he said. “Please?”
A man disconnected the guard rope.“Be glad to,” Lucy said, noticing the woman for the first time, as she leaned into a worn suitcase and grabbed a cane. The woman breathed as if she were in pain.
“It’s a long ride to Indiana,” Lucy said as she took a few steps forward. “If you like, I have some storybooks with me. My favorites.” “Okay,” the boy said. “I got some, too. Let’s share.”Lucy linked an arm around the younger woman’s waist as she looked at Lucy as if she had wings and a halo instead of a broken face. A good omen.
The line paused as tickets were checked.
Lucy whispered. “I have a small pillow with me. It’s new and clean. Your mama can use it. But can I ask if you or your mom have trouble with your eyes? Is your vision okay?”
“We see just fine,” the boy answered. “Why do you ask?”
She laughed and turned to the boy’s mother. “Okay, ma’am, My name is Lucy. I’m glad to meet you. One, two, three, go.” For both of us.
terrypetersen 