ChrisWrites

2010-12-31T12:09:00.000-08:00

Been spending lots of time on a Big writing project, so haven't done much here.
Sigh...may be a good New Year's resolution to re-visit some of these Fun
Flash fiction things. Anyway, couldn't let the Holiday go by without this,
So...

Welcome to my annual Christmas Story...

The Break…In

What woke me up Christmas Eve (or rather, I should say, Christmas day) at 3:15 in the damn morning wasn’t the sensitive alarm system I’d bought myself for Christmas, -- it wasn’t there to do its job yet. The installation was supposed to have been done the week before Christmas, not the week after. But because I was such a nice guy about their busy holiday schedule, the company kept putting me off day by day by day. Until finally, I said okay to January fourth hoping that the company holiday hangovers would be dissipated by then.

No, what woke me up was some fat guy stomping around on my long back porch cussing a blue streak. Though I’d immediately thought it was the robbers, from Thanksgiving, come back to clear me out of whatever they’d missed or I’d replaced. When I heard the clatter, I’d jumped out of bed in my flannel pj’s, groping for the can of pepper spray I kept on the nightstand now. If those robbers were back, they weren’t getting anything this time but a face full of pepper, guaranteed (it said on the package), to force a grown man to his knees in blind pain. I could hardly wait to press the button and see the guy who’d come for my new Samsung flat screen TV laid out in horrific agony. Ah, sweet revenge.

I’d crept down the hall to the living room and edged as close as I dared to the window – spray in hand. But what I saw was only this fat guy all dressed in black, stomping intently from one end of my porch to the other, not even looking at the house. Every time he got near the back door at the east end of the porch, the motion sensor light I’d installed after the break-in flipped on and then back off as he headed back to the other end. I could have sworn I’d set that thing for four minute intervals. Every step he took made the steel mesh security door rattle and clank like Scrooge’s chains.

Though I’m sure I was clearly visible through the glass, the big guy didn’t even pause at the window where I stood ready to spritz him when he broke it. I wondered: Would he use his fat fist or was he going for one of the gardening tools I kept in a bucket at the far end of the porch? Damn, I should’ve moved those weeks ago.

But like a train on a track he didn’t pause at the wall end of the porch or even glance down at the bucket, he spun on his heel and headed back towards me. So intent was he on his diatribe I thought he’d go right off the open end of the porch this time, but six inches from the end, he spun around again as the light flicked on and off, and kept right on going back towards the far end. I noticed that he was waving his arms in the air and smacking his chest here and there in punctuation, I could see little dark puffs of powder popping off his chest with every smack. Mesmerizing.

On his fifth pass by me, I was thinking less and less about the possible dangers of a mad man tromping my back porch and breaking in, and more about what the hell he was so fired up over. So the next time he headed into the darkness, I reached up surreptitiously, flicked the lock off, and slid the window open a crack so I could hear his words. And boy, did I get an earful, though of course, I didn’t hear every detail. After all he was still marching back and forth and talking to himself and not to the window where I was eavesdropping on his complaints.

I did hear a lot about the “damned EPA” and what “lame-assed anal retentive jerks” they were. Something about how he’d filled out all the permits apps, followed all the regulations and gotten the testing done on the sleigh. But it was “unconscionably ridiculous” to test the reindeer by putting that thing up their asses to measure the “piss-ant greenhouse gases they emitted. I’ll reduce their damn methane emissions, by God!” (This was a smack-worthy moment.)

He spent quite a bit of time addressing his complaints about NOAA and their “two-faced smarmy bullshit fake ads on national TV” about how they were tracking his progress and clearing the skies to assist his deliveries. “What a load of crap! All they do is trot out the same old bullshit about the snow and rain and if I’m on schedule or not. They don’t have one teeny iota of a clue about what my schedule is really like! I’d like to jam that schedule up their butts and see how they like it!” I lost some of that when he wheeled down to the dark end, screaming, “I hate the bureaucrats! I hate every one of those loser, money grubbing SOB’s!”

But the agency he really had it in for was the FAA. “They call it Civil Aviation, I say, there’s not one damn civil thing about it! And oh by the way boys, ‘trajectory is a noun, not a God damn verb!” There were some mumbles I almost missed about the “inappropriate and totally illegal momentary confinement” of his transport at the local AFB. “Who the hell has an x-ray machine that big? Yeah, and I dare em to do some pat-downs on Rudolph. He doesn’t just use those hooves to run on, morons!” And some remarks about his “aching back” and “didn’t they realize how heavy the fucking bag really was?”

From there he slowed down to just whining for awhile about how much “I hate the black hoodie, it keeps getting in my eyes, and the sweat pants may say XXXL on the tag, but it’s not my XXXL. Not to mention that elastic on the bottom of the pants doesn’t jam into the boots at all. But if I have to listen to my wife bitch one more time about how filthy the Official Outfit is; I’m gonna seriously consider losing the red and white for good.”

I was glued to the window by then; the pepper spray had fallen out of my hands back around the NOAA soliloquy. He was almost in tears when he got onto the currant building codes, and how “all the chimneys have spark arresters now. Even this old dump has a wire mesh I can’t fit through and its nailed on so tight I can’t get the stupid thing off. Who do they think I am -- Jesus Christ!” A long pause here and then: “Boy, it sure feels good to vent! Haven’t had a chance to do that in a long while!”

I could hear the thunk of his bag as he dropped it over by the porch swing. “You’re gonna have to be satisfied with this, it’s as close as I can get to the hearth.” I saw him pull out a package and set it on the cushions, and then I could have sworn he looked right at me and winked. “Should be about time for the boys to get here.” He looked out at the sky and nodded. But just before he stepped off the porch into the back yard he said one more thing, really loud. “FYI: I am a grown man, and I am fucking sick and tired of COOKIES!!”

Good thing I have an empty ½ acre of land out back, otherwise, where would they have landed? I only wish I’d had my camera close by, it happened so quick, I didn’t dare take my eyes off them. And then they were gone. But when I opened the security door to take a peek I saw and heard the bells he’d hung from the mesh. Sleigh bells ring, are ya listenin?

Next year, I’m gonna take the grill off the chimney top around the twenty-third of December, and ice the vodka and glass right up until the last minute. Maybe some brie, or caviar, but I guarantee you this (and I hope he’s listening), NO Cookies!

2010-04-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

Strange are the ways of the Universe...

WHAT WAS ON THE FLOOR

There was a pile of bills on the floor that Josh walked past every day. The old days of tidy stacks and organized files had first given way to two blue plastic bins, one for pay now, one for later. Then he just started dropping all the mail on the floor.

The first year he’d been out of work he’d called every one of his creditors religiously: apologizing, explaining, vowing minimum payments at the very least. Every so often he’d actually cried on the phone, not out of any sense of drama, but because he was so damn humiliated.

“This isn’t me, this isn’t how my life is!” he sobbed. “I’m an upstanding citizen, a bill paying machine – my credit’s been perfect for years!”

And also for that first year the voices on the other end of the phone had sympathized with him. Mrs. So and So at Mastercard had gushed, “Don’t worry; we’ll work with you to get through this difficult time.”

Rex down at Silver’s Gym had assured him that his work-outs wouldn’t be curtailed. “You need to keep yourself in shape; exercise is a great antidote for stress.”

Ms. Jones at Allied insurance had set up a payment plan for all his insurance premiums. “One small payment every month will keep those policies in place. We wouldn’t want to have them lapse now, would we. You need the peace of mind that being covered brings.”

Now, well into his third year of joblessness, those sympathetic voices had been replaced by the irate and frankly hostile ones of the collection agency employees. Any pretence of polite conversations had disappeared along with his salary, savings, job security, self-confidence, or giving a shit.

His depression seemed to multiply in direct correlation to the sky-rocketing percentage rates on his over-due credit cards. Too many days he had to foist himself out of bed to face the interminable day. Insomnia and lack of appetite dogged him until the afternoon he sat down outside on his miniscule patch of green grass contemplating the least painful method of ending his life when the rabbit hopped over his bare foot. Whoa.

Josh straightened his bowed back and stared at the glossy black rabbit. It was distinctly not a native species.

“Oh boy, I’ve lost it,” he said. “Hallucinating in my own back yard. Could be too many missed meals.” He sighed and added, “If this thing is a sign from God, with that color, it can’t be good.”

The rabbit lifted its face from the dandelion it’d been eating and wriggled his pink nose at Josh but said nothing.

“No comment, huh?” Josh said as the rabbit hopped to his left to reach the next yellow weed. He nibbled five or six of the spiny leaves before munching the flower down in several neat bites. Then he licked his right front paw and cleaned his face, catlike.

Josh watched the rabbit eat three more dandelions while making a slow half circle around him. He had to shift his weight and scootch his butt to keep the rabbit in view, but it didn’t seem bothered by his movements or proximity.

“How strange you are, fella.” Josh told the rabbit. “Just showing up here out of the blue. I keep expecting you to disappear in a plink of Disney sparkles like Tinkerbell. But if you’re not going to disappear, you need a name. How’s Ralph sound to you?”

The rabbit looked up at Josh when he said ‘Ralph’ and Josh could have sworn he nodded. Ralph made several more hops nibbling away at the weeds and completed a circle around the man.
“You know, I might have a carrot in my refrigerator. You may like it better than the weeds.” Josh levered himself up off the grass as Ralph lay down to wait. “Be right back.” Josh told him and headed for the back door.

While Josh was inside, the rabbit pulled a tiny silver cell phone out of a pocket in his chest fur and flipped it open. “This one might take less time than we thought,” he said. “We may be able to move the schedule up.” He listened for a moment and then said, “It’s going well. He’s gone to get me a carrot; he was smiling when he left.” Another listen and then “I have to say I’m not crazy about the name this one picked. -- Ralph. -- Okay, no laughing. – Yeah, well, I’ll listen to him call me that and even eat the carrot no matter how old it is as long as it does the job.”

“By the way Boss, we might want to re-think the fur color for the next one. Black isn’t getting it, but the pink nose works. He’s definitely not thinking about suicide anymore.”

2010-03-31T16:09:00.000-07:00

Some days you dig

THE PHONE RANG

He was outside when the phone rang, thereby not having to feel the clinch of his gut at the bbrringg, bbrringg, bbrringg sound of it. He didn’t have to suppress the irritation at who it might be since the bounds of his old life had melted. When he was a witness to the lit telephone screen, Caller ID was useful. And when he was not, the insistent callers always left a message.

He knew all the numbers by heart now: the bank, the collection agencies, the mortgage company. Their unwavering diatribes threatening or wheedling or oily.

Jeff was less interested in their repetitive words than he was in where they got them. They were so boringly similar maybe there was a series of pamphlets being passed around from one company to the next. If so, who wrote the scripts? Was there a company that specialized these days in writing badgering dialogues for them all? One size fits all with inter changeable verbs and convenient blanks awaiting gender, name, amount owed, and dire consequences available. He’d be happy to apply for that job.

Two years ago Jeff had been the head of advertizing at a prestigious company. His snappy patter was the best in the building until the company (apparently not quite as prestigious as claimed) rolled over like a gut-shot dog and died.

Too bad, Jeff thought, for all his lowly co-workers. He felt secure in his reputation and the impressive Capital Letters (including punctuation) following his name and believed that the stench of the dead dog would not affect him.

But as the weeks turned into months and his peers at other (still alive) prestigious companies stopped taking his calls much less returning them he distainfully applied for unemployment benefits. He considered it a momentary lapse of his fortunes.

When six months had gone by and he had been turned down for every imaginable job he had applied for, he rationalized those meager checks as his due. After all, he had paid outrageous amounts into the social security fund all his working life.

Two years later, he’d exhausted not only his benefits but his arrogant attitude and was reduced to flinching at the phone and trying to find something to do to keep himself sane.

He’d begun the trench in the back yard to dig up a leaking water line, but though the repairs had long since been accomplished, he kept on digging. He found great satisfaction in the depth and length of each day’s excavations, and realized the added bonus of a weary body’s capability to sleep.

He’d also discovered the subtle art of contemplation, simply by resting his overlapped hands on the top of the shovel handle to support his chin. No wonder guys on road crews did it all the time. It was a vantage point that allowed him to appreciate the half acre of dirt he owned free and clear, the fact he couldn’t be fired, and the realization that he could keep on digging trenches to his hearts content until the shovel broke, or he dropped dead, or the fucking recession ended.

2010-03-31T16:02:00.000-07:00

Some days suck...

How it Ended

I’d like to say it ended like an Edgar Allan Poe story. The entire requisite build up of fear to terror, the knife point dimpling thin white skin with its first pressure, then the pop as it pushes in. The bright gush of blood escaping almost joyfully through the vent, eagerly exploring new surfaces, the pocked dry wood of the desk, the curved lip of its edge, the blue wool of the rug drinking in the red. White wool would have been much more satisfying.

The appropriate wind howling beyond the windows, trees tossing in dismay while the clock that is always on the wall steps center stage and raises its voice and volume in the only monologue it will ever have. Less of a tick or tock than a repetitive clunk.

Poe might have preferred a thunk to resonate with the sound of a lifeless hand falling onto wood, or the measured tread of the footsteps exiting the room.

But alas, Poe is long departed. The wind’s voice muffles the clock’s, and the only liquids escaping are my tears that there is no end.

2010-01-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

This is a true story. I just can't remember if there were two or three. Oh my!

THE DUFFLE BAG

Dad and I were diving Lake Mead at the Cliffs the day I found a duffle bag with three heads in it.

We were down on the bottom at seventy-five feet, visibility not so hot, although we’d both been careful to keep our swim fins aimed away from the mucky bottom. It only took one kick of a fin to stir up a cloud of mud that brought visibility to ziltch for twenty feet around us. I’d stopped to check out a sparkle in the mud (turned out to be a beer can), and when I looked up dad had disappeared again. He was the worst dive buddy in the world. Once you got down on the bottom, he’d be off like a shot, his head swiveling back and forth, raking the bottom with his eagle eyes, intent on being the first one to find anything and find more of it than anybody else.

We always hoped for treasure, like a gold chain, or a wallet full of money, but mostly we only found trash. Stuff that people dropped overboard off their boats.

When I saw him gone, I laughed into my regulator, blowing a stream of wasted bubbles towards the surface. No way was I going to try and chase after him: been there, done that. He was probably thirty or forty yards away by then and never would look back. It was extremely bad dive etiquette on his part, but that was dad.

So I shrugged and began my own slow cruise along the irregular, bumpy bottom keeping my eyes peeled for any unnatural shape or lump or color, I’d been trained by the master. Six inches of a rope lying in the muck might lead to a long buried anchor. It didn’t matter that dad had found hundreds of anchors over the years – they were still coveted finds. Sunglasses were also a hot ticket item. Our record in one day was twenty-six pairs: four of them Vuarnets! I had to haggle like hell with dad to keep those Vuarnets, even though he couldn’t even wear them. Dad’s belief was that because we were on his boat, using his gas, and his air tanks, on his lake, anything we found together was rightfully his.

The bottom along the stretch we were diving that day was full of sudden drop offs and unexpected cliff walls. I had to keep looking up to make sure I wasn’t about to bonk my head into a wall. I also kept checking my depth gauge after swimming over a ridge and down into the abyss of a ravine to make sure I didn’t go too deep. A diver doesn’t have much bottom time at one hundred feet, just a few minutes.

I wasn’t finding much of anything, one decent lure tangled so badly in a drowned creosote bush it took me ten minutes to get it out. I followed a ridge line for a while before checking my compass and realizing I was headed straight out into the middle of the damn lake. So I turned around lined up my compass and followed the ridge line back towards shore. I was still at sixty feet when I ran into a cliff face and got spooked when my tank clanged into the overhang above me.

I had an interesting moment of a short news video playing in my mind where the overhang had collapsed onto my body and I was trapped sixty feet deep with no one knowing where I was. This is one good reason to never dive alone.

By the time I swam clear of the overhang and stopped hyperventilating, I’d kicked up so much muck I could barely see my hand in front of my face. I decided to head back to the boat. Mom had dropped dad and I off at the west end of the cliff wall and would be sitting in a little cove on the boat at the east end waiting for us to finish our dive; she would have lunch ready and cold beers.

All I had to do was to keep that cliff wall on my left side and I would be sitting on the Sea Ray eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Corona in a few minutes. I kept my fingers on the wall until I passed the brown smog I’d kicked up. Once I got in clear water I calmed down a tad and started prospecting for stuff again.

Off to my right I caught a glimpse of white, definitely not a rock. I swam towards it entertaining the possibilities: blanket? Towel? Garbage bag? When I got close enough to see the straps I knew it was a perfectly good, probably expensive, nylon duffle bag. I could tell by the plumped out cylindrical shape that it was full of something. What could be in it? Maybe it was full of money. Hallelujah! That would make my day. Family history said it was possible. (My folks had once found a bag of money in the lake. I have a picture of mom laying out wet bills in a grid on the shop floor. I can’t tell if they’re 20’s or 100’s even with a magnifying glass, but there were rows and rows of them. They never did tell me how much it was, it was their paranoid secret.)

I picked up the white bag by its green webbing handles and hefted it off the bottom. It was heavier than paper money would have been. Damn! So then I started thinking: jewelry, coins, something wonderfully valuable. The zipper was closed all the way and I wanted to open it then and there at seventy-five feet in the muck. But I recalled dad’s first rule of underwater salvage that he had drilled into my head. Never open anything underwater – wallet, bag, car door, anything! If there’s money inside, it will likely disintegrate and you’ll be shit-out-a-luck.

So I eyeballed the cliff wall again to orient myself, direction wise, and started swimming for the boat. The more I swam the more excited and curious I got. What was in the bag? In my excitement, I was sucking down air out of my tank like crazy and my fingers itched to yank that zipper open. But no, remember what dad said, I told myself. Well it wouldn’t hurt to just shake it a little – or hey – maybe just feel the bag. That might give me a clue.

So I stopped swimming in the murky water and held the bag in both hands, squeezing it with my eyes shut, hoping for a vision of wealth. It felt like one…two…three big round things. Hmmmm. Three big round things, now what could that be? Some kind of sports equipment? Balls, maybe. I squeezed again: too small for basketballs, soccer balls would be closer. Just get to the boat where you can open it, Chris, I told myself. So I started swimming again.

Suddenly, I had this truly terrifying thought. Those round things were just about the size of my head. I felt my head with one hand and the round things in the bag with the other and freaked out! I screamed into my regulator, “Dad!” But of course, he was no where in sight. Swim for the boat, swim for the boat! Then I was kicking like an Olympic champion swimmer for the finish line.

It can’t be true. I’m imagining things. I can’t be carrying three people’s heads in this bag. I can’t! I couldn’t get the gruesome possibilities out of my head.

If I just stopped for a minute and opened the zipper a little way and peaked inside the bag, I might be able to stop freaking out. What if it is heads? I’m sure it isn’t! What if it is?

Finally I couldn’t stand the suspense or my terror for another second and I stopped swimming and carefully set my flippers down on the closest rock. I held the bag as far away from my body as I could, and tugged the zipper pull, one inch…two inches… five, twelve – and then I watched in horror as long dense strands of brown hair slowly drifted out of the opening.

I’m pretty sure I screamed. I know for sure that I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could. The hair was bad enough; I did not want any gory pictures burned into the retinas of my eyes or my brain. I opened the zipper the rest of the way and dumped whatever it was out of the bag, swimming frantically away from it and furiously waving the bag behind me with one arm to get every last speck and hair out. You see, I really wanted that bag.

On the other hand, I was so creeped out by what I had seen, that I was desperate to be out of the water, in the sun, in the boat with my mom and dad, safe from the creepy- crawly feeling that pulsed all over my body, and safe from what lay behind me in the lake.

I angled up towards the surface as quickly as I could safely do so, until I broke out into the sunshine. And then I thrashed along the edge of the cliff face like a crazed woman until I rounded the last point and saw our boat. I should have gotten a medal for that last speed sprint with all my dive gear dragging on me. Mom and dad were sitting in the cockpit of the boat, calmly eating lunch in the sun when I clawed my way onto the teak swim platform with relief.

“Find anything?” dad asked while I stripped off gear: mask, fins, weight belt, BC, tank, regulator, gauges.

“I found this duffle bag,” I shouted, flopping the stinking thing on the teak. “And it had three heads in it!”

Dad dropped his sandwich and gave me his immediate attention. “Heads? What heads? Where’s the heads?”

“Back there! Out there!” I waved out at the water I’d just been delivered from. “I dumped em out.”

“You what? Let’s go back and get em!”

“Fuck you!” I told my father. “I am not going back to look for heads. You want to go look for heads, rock out, go look for heads – I’m not going!” I yelled at the sky, “I need a beer!” Mom got me the beer and a sandwich, but I couldn’t eat. By the time I’d told them the whole story I was exhausted and mom had talked dad out of going back. “You’re not bringing any heads onto this boat,” she said. Then we stowed our dive gear and dad drove the Sea Ray back to Vegas Wash Marina where we put her on the trailer and went home.

I never dove that spot again with dad. I had nightmares about the hair for a while, and I washed that duffle bag over and over trying to get the smell out. After all, as dad would say, it was “a perfectly good” duffle bag. But I finally threw it away.

I’ve been forever thankful that I shut my eyes after seeing the hair. Because even though I still have that image of wafting hair stuck in my mind, if I really concentrate (in the light of day), I can almost convince myself that those heads were actually soccer balls.

2010-01-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

What is family? Why do we go back?

SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM

Joseph sat in his immaculate black 2009 Lexus in front of his Aunt Mabel’s house in Garden Grove on the first day of the New Year and wondered if it was safe to leave it parked on the street.

The driveway was clogged with his relative’s cars: clunkers and pick up trucks, Chevy’s and Fords and one bright red Dodge Hemi, which was his Uncle Bill’s pride and joy. At least no one had parked on the grass.

Even with his car windows up he could hear the tumultuous sounds of too many people who’d already had too much to drink and who obviously loved really loud country music. Just once he’d like to hear some good jazz at one of these things. He wondered yet again why he kept coming.

His eyes flicked to the rear view mirror and he patted his hair. Tony, his barber, had left it too long on the sides again. The gray was starting to be too obvious, maybe a brown rinse next time. His face was still okay except for those lines around his mouth that deepened when he frowned, which he was doing right now. He tried forcing a smile but it wouldn’t come, so he settled for rubbing his right palm across his mouth twice to erase the lines.

Reaching up to automatically adjust his tie, he remembered that he’d dressed down for these people. The blue shirt was a shade lighter than the cashmere sweater, but it brought out the color in his eyes. The chinos were raw silk and the loafers Italian, not that anybody in this crowd would notice. Oh well, might as well get it over with.

Joseph put his hand on the door handle just as his cousin Russ popped up at the rear of the car and slapped both his hands down on the trunk with a thwack! Joseph’s body jerked at the noise and his frown turned into a growl. But then Russ was at the driver’s door wrenching it open and yelling in his face, beery breath and all.

“Joe, you old bastard, how are you? Are you gonna sit in that car all day or are you comin’ in?”

Joseph squashed his growl, composed himself with a deep breath through his nose, and turned his head to face his cousin. Russ grabbed his left arm and started to drag him out of the Lexus, Joseph let him take the arm but planted first his left foot and then his right on the asphalt to maintain his equilibrium. He shook Russ’s hand off, slammed the door and clicked the lock button in his hand at it.

“Wow! Nice ride, Joe!” Russ said, running his hands along the Lexus’ sleek sides. “Bet that baby cost you an arm and a leg. I’d hate to have to make the payments on it.” And though Joseph wanted to tell his cousin not only exactly how much he had paid for the Lexus but that there were no payments because he’d paid cash – he didn’t.

“Yeah, well Russ, I got a good deal on it.” He said as he started the long walk to Aunt Mabel’s front door.

Russ flung his arm over Joseph’s shoulders and gave him half a bear hug. “Course you did! Just don’t tell Uncle Bill that, you know how he is.”

“Yes I do.” Joseph said. He stopped to look at the red Hemi, the best vehicle in the yard, and then turned a little to his right so he could see his car again. “Don’t worry Russ, I won’t say a word.” He said and smiled.

Then Russ retrieved his arm from Joseph’s shoulders and took off for the house hollering, “Hey look who’s here! Joe’s here! And guess what, he’s got a Lexus!”

Joseph tried to lose the smile but didn’t quite succeed as his other cousins poured out of the house and swept him into a crowd of his relatives as though he belonged there.

2009-12-26T17:03:00.000-08:00

And so this is Christmas, as the song says. I am pleased to still be upright and in it.

CHRISTMAS DAY

It’s Christmas day in Las Vegas, Nevada, and although it’s been pretty cold for us (32 degrees last night), there is no snow. There hardly ever is.

My turkey is in the oven and I have opened my presents. There are no cars in my driveway, nor will there be. I’m doing Christmas this year for me.

For the first time in my life, I threw away the giblets and the neck. I’ve never liked them – and the only person, who did (my dad), is long gone: dead now these six years. Old habits die hard.

I’m cooking my turkey in a stove I’m not accustomed to and my mother (who’s been gone two years) isn’t around for me to ask about its idiosyncrasies. It’s taken me four years to get used to living in my parents old house, although I now own it. It’s taken me much longer to let go of my disappointment every year that Christmas isn’t what it used to be.

But I’m in my sixties now and maybe it’s time to figure out why I’m disappointed every year. The Christmases I long for are from long, long ago; fifty years or so. I was much shorter then and less observant of emotional undercurrents in those days.

Threading my way through the forest of legs that were my aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents, I was easily distracted by the noises and smells of the family holiday. All the adult’s conversations pulsed far above my ears, a tide of words flowing around up there from one to another. There were Christmas carols on the radio in the living room, and a baseball game on in the den.

Outside was the cacophony of the cousin’s continuous pecking order argument, centered on the inherent prerogatives of age. Being one of the youngest, I knew that no matter what game was in progress, I would never get to be the rule maker or the star; be it teacher, superhero, or queen. And since I was continuously informed that I was lucky to be allowed to play at all, I settled for one of the lesser parts. But I fought against being the bad guy; that was the worst role and always got foisted on the youngest. I knew my rights; there were three younger than me.

Back inside the house there were no uncomfortable politics at my height, though there were still rules of conduct. I was allowed in the male dominated den if I kept still and quiet, an unimaginable demand on my natural tendencies. There was something in that room that drew me and it wasn’t the ball game or the chess matches. I kept drifting in and getting thrown out all day, trying to figure it out. My grandfather smoked cigars and pipes, was it that smell?

Food etiquette was easier to swallow; if a platter of food was on a table and the saran wrap had been peeled off, it was fair game: no limits and no time frame. There was never just one platter of food or one table. But each table held its array of specialties. Care for a pickle? I grazed through the gherkins with delight: from tiny to gargantuan. Sweet or dill, homemade or store bought. I decorated my fingertips with black olives, and sucked the pimento out of the big green Spanish queens.

The meat table was loaded early in the afternoon, ham and turkey, garlic stuffed pork roast all carved in the kitchen by one of the men. I never understood why a husband or uncle had to be drafted for the duty. If the women were capable of producing the bounty with all its mysterious rituals (and they were) why couldn’t they do something as simple as cut it into slices? But since I was too young for cooking duty, I never asked. Besides the kitchen held no allure for me, it was simply where the food came from.

The desert table was my favorite of course. Though every woman made something, a pie or a cake; my Great aunt Francis was the queen of deserts. Her cookies and candies were works of art. I remember White Divinity packed with nuts, exotic cookies elegantly decorated, Gingerbread men with perfect white frosting buttons marching from throat to belly. My mother seldom even made oatmeal cookies. No contest.

Three paragraphs of food here I see, and though I remember it well, that isn’t what I long for. It was something less tangible than edibles. A certain aura of belonging, and also possibly the carefree habitation of my youthful age are closer to the mark. And the sheer numbers of the tribe made it easy to blend in or test the boundaries of. There was a swirling bustling flow of family through those rooms: cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents who loved me as one of their own and bestowed their pats and words and hugs without restraint.

I’m thinking it also had to do with the ratio of adults to children. Not being limited to merely two, as I was at home, I had the luxury of other adult attention and input. Not what I’d imagined was the crux when I started writing this, but I’ve learned to trust the words that spill out of the ends of my fingers when my brain is not watching.

So what do I yearn for: my carefree, irresponsible youth, or the extended family that is long dispersed? I carve my little turkey (it’s not that difficult), stir my gravy, and set out my plate. I dish up the bounty and dig in. It’s delicious.

I pat my little belly and say my blessings now. And I find that I am thankful for the lovely memories and still able to be happy for my bountiful table of today; set for one.

Merry Christmas.

2009-11-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

I went to a craft show last week and watched this scene unfold.

CHRISTMAS CHEER

Threading her way through the slow moving crowd at the Christmas Craft show, a tall thin woman stops in front of a ten foot pegboard wall of ornaments. Before her are row after row of baked clay gingerbread men, Santa Clauses of all kinds, reindeer, puppies, and kittens. Each one is adorable, four inches tall, flat, and brightly painted. It’s a staggering array of imitation confectionary characters.

She counts the rows, top to bottom (eleven), while she touches the colors on a squirrels face, painted lights on a curvaceous palm tree and a trio of candy canes snuggled together in a bow.

She plucks at a bear in snow shoes, turns it in her hand, and hangs it back up with the rest. Her fingers linger on a kitten peeking out of a box, painted tinsel in its eyes. Lifting it off its hook by its thin red ribbon, she holds it in her palm, trying to make up her mind.

Glancing into the booth, she notes that the proprietor is making change, opening a bag and wrapping little ornaments in tissue paper. Her fingers close over the kitten in her hand and she drops her arm to her side, her hand hidden in the folds of her skirt. Moving down the rack, she looks intently at several more ornaments before she drifts away into the crowd.

One aisle over, she drops the kitten into the green cloth bag slung on her left arm, where it joins the other things she’s taken today. Her heart is pounding furiously but her face is as bland as her outfit. Her generic tan sweater, brownish mid-calf skirt that matches her hair, beige belt un-stylishly cinched at her waist and a cheap long silver chain with a polished slice of oval cream stone make her forgettable.

No one notices her slowly making her way down the aisle, lifting a pair of earrings here, four wooden book marks there, charms, gee-gaws, pittances that all get slipped into the green bag. It’s her pounding heart she relishes, not the things.

She feels a hand on her shoulder, half way into the next aisle. A heavy set black woman in a beige security uniform speaks quietly to her, “We’ve been watching you steal things for three days.” Caroline’s face stays impassive, but she shrugs the green cloth bag down her arm to her fingers and sets it gently down just inside the boundary’s of the booth to her right, dismissing the responsibility of it.

The white paper gift bag is still in her hand: two receipts, two things she’d actually bought on Friday, legitimate purchases to mask her game. Now she can show her worry, her fright. The guard says, “Don’t get upset, it’s all right.”

It’s not all right, but it will be. She’s been caught before and she knows how to act from here on. She lets the guard lead her quietly off the floor of the convention center, down drab hallways to a room where she’s invited to sit. There’s always a room and a chair. Caroline sits, clasping her hands and crossing her ankles demurely, acting confused, but certain that she will evade punishment again.

She doesn’t know that the plainclothes security man who picked up her green bag is going from booth to booth with his list of its contents. Whispering to venders, he tells them the thief has been caught and confined. “She has something of yours, will you come identify it? Will you press charges against her?” Caroline doesn’t see the anger in their eyes when they say yes.

She doesn’t know that this time she will not be going home for a long while.

2009-11-12T17:03:00.000-08:00

Haven't posted anything for a bit and feeling the lack of it.
So today, a piece I wrote last week.
More coming!

ALL FALL DOWN

The house is falling apart and Jerry is wondering where to place the blame. He leans towards a vague conspiracy theory – one with nice broad shoulders to carry the load of responsibility – but is also happy to entertain the possible supernatural aspects, an aberrant curse say, or a rogue ogre suddenly inhabiting the basement.

The fact is the house is over thirty years old and the life force of the appliances and plumbing and electrical has just been exhausted.

He wouldn’t mind so much if the catastrophes were spread out into manageable bits but they seemed to occur in badly timed chunks. Like when he’s just paid a pile of bills and is broke, or when he’s walking out the door for a two week vacation in Cancun. That’s when the veritable flood and fire commences.

Okay, well a thirty year old hot water heater that’s been seeping water into the kitchen floor for the last fifteen or twenty years finally breaking through the last fragile wall of rust and flooding the kitchen linoleum isn’t exactly sudden. And when he goes down to the basement for a tool and there’s a steady stream of water pouring out of a fluorescent light right below the kitchen, it isn’t actually an act of God. Okay, so it was possible fire and flood.

He had to admit that it was better for it to have happened as he was packing for his trip instead of already on it. At least he’d had time to stabilize the mess, do damage control before he left. Who would have been there to turn off the power to the leaking light and drain and disconnect the water heater if he’d been gone? Nobody, that’s who.

Hell, the house could have burned down while he was flirting with that tall red head on the beach and he would have come home to a charred ruin, everything gone. That might have been okay (he could always re-build with the insurance), if only he hadn’t missed the last payment on his homeowner’s policy that month so that he could pay for his trip. He would have been homeless, not even able to pitch a tent in the yard, because his fancy tent was, of course, in the basement.

Maybe he should sell the old house and find something new, in a better neighborhood and with a warranty on all the appliances and plumbing and electrical. Then he wouldn’t have all these ridiculous crises cropping up. But he hated the thought of moving, the housing market was as flat as his wallet and the neighborhood really wasn’t that bad. Sure, there were barking dogs on both sides of him, but at least no meth labs that he knew of. It could be a lot worse.

Jerry’s brother had suggested going through the old place with a keen eye and a clipboard, checking every possible problem area and making a list of things that needed fixing. “Using a systematic approach with a list as a basis, it’s possible you could get something done before the next melt-down occurs.” His brother had said. “God knows your present system wasn’t working.” His brother was disgustingly organized.

Jerry had pointedly ignored these remarks when his brother made them, knowing from experience that if he agreed, he’d never hear the end of it. But the next day, he started looking around for that old clipboard he’d had in college. Wasn’t that thing in the basement?

He found it in the basement all right, complete with a thin pad of paper and a stub of a pencil still caught under the clip, so that’s where he started.

He hadn’t used the bathroom down there in ages, and when he checked the valves to the toilet and sink they were dangerously lumpy with corrosion. He tried not to breath on them too hard, and quickly put them first on the list. The previously leaking fluorescent light was next: 2. Repair or Replace. It felt so satisfying to write it down. He decided he would never tell his brother. The list itself would take a while and for sure the repairs weren’t going to be cheap. But on the other hand, if he spaced the repairs out, he could afford it. And a big plus would be that the sickening thought of moving again would be taken off his plate.

He really hated moving.

2009-09-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

The following four are from last week.
This one is non-fiction for the most part.
Try it some time.

CLOSE YOUR EYES

My piano man could coax the sweetest jazz and most wrenching blues out of his keyboard. He lived alone and he had always been blind.

I drove to his little house in Venice, California four times a week to rehearse our act. I watched his face while I sang “My Funny Valentine” or “As Time Goes By”, but he watched nothing. He told me he heard the music with his ears and felt it on the surface of his skin. I asked him once if he could read music, and he laughed. Then he showed me the Braille scores he’d written, guiding my fingertips over the bumps I couldn’t translate.

When my throat was sore from singing, we’d take a break and he would walk through his living room to the kitchen, heat water for tea, and pour two steaming mugs, deftly handing me mine. He never stubbed his toes on the furniture or overfilled the cups, or missed my hands. One day I asked him how he did it.

He grinned at me and said, “Its all tricks, anyone can do it. I never move the furniture and I’ve memorized where everything is. When I fill a cup, I put the tip of my index finger inside and listen to the water. The tone changes as it fills, and I can hear how full it is before it touches my finger. The finger’s just a back-up. And I can tell exactly where your hands are by your voice. If I hold out a cup to you, you’ll always reach for it.” And he was right, I would.

He walked back to the living room confidently and sat on his couch. “Most people rely so much on their vision they miss out on a banquet of input from their other senses. Too bad more folks don’t cultivate those other inputs.”

“I want to,” I said. “How do I do that?”

And he said, “It’s easy. When you get home tonight, do whatever it is you usually do, but this time, close your eyes and keep em closed. Then pay attention.” He laughed again.

“What are you laughing about now?” I asked him.

“I’m thinking about all the bruises you’re going to get before you get the hang of it.” He said.

I did get bruises, but I also eventually learned how to see with my eyes closed, and I still use it after all these years.

The gift of un-sight.

2009-09-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

This one was just plain fun. My revenge for having to sit in too many courtrooms. HA!

IT WAS TERRIBLY COMPLICATED

Both attorneys pretended to be friends when meeting in the hallways. Insincere handshakes and inquiries regarding children, pets, and spouses came out of carefully composed faces and mouths. It was an orchestrated waltz of friendship.

But once within the confines of the court, facing the judge from behind their respective tables, the dance segued into a military engagement. Advance, retreat, demand, expound. They fired intense dramatic salvos across the five foot aisle that separated them.

The judge listened to the cannon’s roar with half an ear, texting on his IPhone. His twitter message to the judge three courtrooms down was football based, “On the 50 yard line, Al, the balls in play.”

A fat man in the sixth row back was idly sketching unflattering cartoons of the judge, both attorneys, and the back of the woman seated directly in front of him. His case was the last one of the afternoon and he was trying to keep himself awake long enough to hear his name called.

An eager, yet grossly underpaid young intern from one of the attorney’s offices was frantically writing down every word of the attorney’s conflict. The star of the law firm that employed her stood on the left of the aisle, brilliantly destroying her opponent’s arguments (or so the intern thought). She was hoping for a snippet of the action that she might use to stroke the great ego into recognizing her, and maybe getting a raise.

Two Latino gentlemen seated along the rear wall of the court whispered furiously trying to agree on their testimony before being called as witnesses. Their case was number thirty, ten past the one being heard now.

The bailiff was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot trying to get his bullet proof vest to stop pinching his left armpit and praying for a recess. His bladder was demanding his attention; he should never have had three cups of coffee before court.

A muttered conversation in the hall broke into shouts of profanity that hit the oak doors of the courtroom and caused them to sway inward. The judge twittered “penalty flag down” to Al and told both the attorneys to shut up, the bailiff to go attend to the ruckus and called a ten minute break.

Twelve assorted people rushed out of the courtroom to go to the bathroom, eight of them in inter-related cases. A fist fight broke out in the men’s room over who would get the Hereford cattle from Grandpa’s ranch in one case, and security was called by the bailiff who had finally gotten to pee.

Sounds of breaking glass and ripping clothing distracted half the security force into the women’s bathroom and several arrests were demanded for attempted assault.

The judge reconvened to an almost empty courtroom, the bailiff entering still in the process of zipping up.

Al texted his friend, “I’ve got both your attorneys down here in front of my bench now.” And the judge texted back, “Game called on account of rain” -- banged his gavel and said, “Court’s adjourned until tomorrow.”

2009-09-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

Now this was one of the strangest prompts we've had. I had no idea what to do with it. But then I saw this big bird in the sky and...
Oh, maybe only a writer would get it, but I think my reader(s) are smarter than anything!

YOU CAN'T FORCE A STORY THAT DOESN'T WANT TO BE TOLD

A Great Blue Heron flew over my house this morning – his long legs leaving a trail of words behind him in the sky. The words joined the particulate matter from the California fires swirling in the air above me. Several paragraphs worth settled onto the back half acre of desert behind the house. They spread across the landscape like bits of shredded documents.

I wanted those words.

I equip myself with empty buckets, gloves, hat, and a fine mesh strainer for the shyer consonants. The flat-blade shovel is too big, so I chose a small spade and a hand trowel. Once out there bending to my task, the yard looks enormous and I realize that my verbal archeological dig will take some time. I return to the house for a low, tri-cornered stool with rubber wheels. Sitting will save my back while I sift through imaginary grids in the desert dust.

A flock of grazing mourning doves lifts and settles – lifts and settles just beyond my feet. I tell them that they are welcome to the beetles and the ants, but please do not peck up stray ‘an’s and the’s and but’s.’ I will need those to assemble the sentences. A large Quail swoops down and stabs a phrase. The words overflow on either side of his beak. I can clearly see the beginning of “no part of this story may be reproduced…” on one side, and “except in the case of brief quotations…” on the other. Maybe the Heron will never know.

Each time I fill my buckets, I carry them to the shallow trays I’ve laid out on the table beneath the portico. Here I’ll make my effort to re-assemble the prose. By dusk, I’ve found several pages worth, but the fulcrum and the climax have eluded me. Still I’m determined to bend what I’ve found into shape, knowing I’ve a cache of vowels and punctuation to dip into just beneath the table.

A shadow crosses my yard, re-enforcements for the doves. And the Quail has marshaled his troops. I rush out, flapping my arms and yelling. “The Heron no longer owns those words! I have recovery rights to them as they are on my land.”

The mourning doves chuckle en masse, and the Quail shakes his imposing top knot at me. “It isn’t the Heron that commands us, you fool,” he says. “It’s the story itself that refuses to be told. Don’t you know you can’t force it?”

2009-09-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

The only school I go to any more is this one:

BACK TO SCHOOL

It’s the kindergarten
Of the soul
This life.

I’m crawling underneath
Pint-sized desks
Searching for

The missing colors in my
Crayon box
That blue

The one that finishes
The sky and my
Blind eyes.

2009-09-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

The next five are from last weeks prompts, a strange mix indeed.
Fiction is a marvelous thing.
What Fun!

WHAT SHE REALLY WANTED

What she really wanted was to murder her father, flat hack him up into little bits. But since he had the audacity to die peace full like all on his own, she didn’t get the satisfaction. She did get away with blackmailing him for 30 or 40 years and got a shit-load of unmarked cash out of him before he croaked. You’d think that would be a tasty enough revenge, but not for the ole Queen of greed. It just pissed her off that the well dried up, so to speak.

I’m the only one left now who knows the real story, and lately here, she’s cranked up the attacks and aimed her sights at me. She used some of her cash to track down and hire this nefarious pit viper lawyer who skates on the thinnest ice of the legal system. It’s a wonder she hasn’t fallen through and froze her ass off, or gotten disbarred. I bet she’s lined some pretty deep pockets in this town, though how she got close enough is anybodies guess, she’s real ugly too.

Her brief case clangs when she sets it down by the trunk of her car in the parking lot. I walked past that trunk once and caught a glimpse of gun metal blue. Good thing they have those metal detectors outside the courtroom.

I keep seeing these men drive real slow past my house on a regular basis. I think those could be baseball bats that they are holding, but then again, they could be shotguns too. Now I can’t let the dogs out anymore. Someone got into the back yard and poisoned old Fred. Put ground glass in some hamburger, and dumb old Fred gulped it right down. It was a horrible death. Dad had really loved that dog.

I think it’s about time for me to go on down to the Sheriffs office and re-up my gun permit. I’m not getting taken out like Fred.

I remember back a ways when things were getting real bad, I had this covert ops buddy who offered to take care of the problem. I knew what he meant. But I turned him down, being the good Christian person I am. I’m starting to wish I had that decision to make again.

Some folks believe that blood is thicker than water; that family is the most important thing in the world. Wish someone would’ve convinced my sister of that a long time ago, before she went wacko. A pissed off wacko can do a lotta damage.

2009-09-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Saw this dust devil right outside Tonopah. Whew!

BLOWING SOMETHING UP

It was just a little skittering wind, coming from the north, sliding down the flank of a ridge of desert peaks which were bigger than hills, but not erect enough to dignify the term, mountains.

The wind touched the edge of a long dry lake bed, and picked up a few grains of sand. It roamed east a bit and then west, gaining more sand and strength from its lazy brother winds who only hovered negligently and were easily absorbed. A belligerent cross wind further down the lake bed tried to flatten it, but the little wind spun around and caught it up in the vortex.

Then, spinning constantly and running south, it pulled a steady trickle of sand and weaker winds into its maw – the growing wind kept it’s mouth in the sand and reached it’s twirling arms to the heavens, it’s voice rising to a roar.

“Good God, would you look at that?” Ed poked his snoring wife Maddy awake. “I’m pulling over!” he shouted and slammed on the brakes on the thirty-six foot RV they lived in. They slid to a stop on the gravel shoulder of the two lane highway they were traveling.

“Jeeze Ed, what is it? You near scared me to death!”

“See for yourself!” Ed told her, pointing out the windshield. “That’s the biggest damn dust-devil I’ve ever seen – must be five miles high!”

And they both stared open-mouthed as the little wind, now grown so huge, danced across the road fifty-yards in front of them and plowed happily into the vast remaining miles of the dry lake bed.

2009-09-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

NEVER AGAIN

The whole problem was that Carol had wanted Jeff to fix her, not an unusual occurrence in her dealings with men. She had discussed this propensity for dysfunctional relationships ad nauseum with her shrink.

They’d eventually narrowed the original cause down to a day when she was twelve years old. Together they had pried the memory of that crisp November day in Compton, California out of her subconscious. But once it was floating there on the surface of her mind, she remembered all of it: the red T shirt she’d had on and the faded jeans she’d learned to tuck into her white socks while riding her bike, especially during a race.

And there had been a race that day, between her and Timmy McQuinn. Every kid in the neighborhood had turned out to watch their defending champion (her) take on the new kid in town. (Timmy) Willie Shaw from down the block was elected to start the race by shouting, “Ready! Set! Go!” But the “Go!” leapt out of the throats of the twenty kids lining the sidewalks of Oak Avenue and could probably have been heard in Orange County.

Carol had her right pedal set just forward of the top of its arc, and her right foot mashed down on it as strong as she could. She had her butt poised over the seat and her left toes on the pavement for balance. The rubber handlebar grips were clinched in both her hands and she was straining forward waiting for that “Go!”

The smell of Bermuda grass her dad had cut that morning mingled with the rank odor of the sweat in her armpits, when she stomped that pedal down with all the strength in her sixty pound body. She could beat this kid, she knew she could.

And she would have beat him too, if her dad hadn’t come around the corner and pulled his truck right onto the middle of the racetrack on his way home from the hardware store.

She’d slammed the pedals backwards, but knew that the brakes weren’t enough to keep her from smashing into the hood of the truck. So she swerved hard left – right into Willie’s front yard and the oak tree just off center of it. The impact ripped her right off her bike headfirst into the tree. But her left leg dragged across the metal edge of the pedal, ripped out the inseam of her pants from knee to ankle, and left a trail of bruises and blood in the soft flesh of her calf.

She didn’t feel like a champion then, she felt broken. Carol could still taste the dirt from the roots of the tree and the blood from her front tooth that had been loosened on impact. She was trying hard not to cry, her dad hated it when she cried.

And sure enough, when her dad had stomped his way from his truck to her wreck, the first thing he said was, ‘Can you move your arms and legs? Good. Okay then, nothing’s broken. Sit up and let me see that leg.” He rotated her left leg as though it were a thin tree branch, separate from her body. He poked his fingers at the scrapes and said, “You’re fine,” dropping her foot down into the dirt.

Then he crouched by her banged up bike and fingered the chain, spun the lopsided pedal, and stroked the ding where the red paint had peeled off. “This though, this is gonna take some serious fixing.” He picked up the bike and carried it to his truck, lowered it into the bed and drove it the half block to home.

Right there, at that moment, Carol wanted more than anything in the world to be a broken bicycle and not a girl. Something that could be fixed, something that he’d want to fix. She’d practiced being broken with every man she’d met since then, and not one of them was ever able to fix her. Her shrink had told her that she had to convince herself that either she didn’t need fixing or that she could do it herself. “Manifest that,” her shrink said. “Buy a tool box or a med kit and practice on yourself.” And Carol thought long and hard about doing so.

But what she finally did was to buy the fanciest reddest racing bike she could afford. She was going to race again, and she was going to win.

2009-09-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

COOKING

Nerve endings
Sauted
Anxiety
Hard boiled
Intregrity
Frapped

Hunger
None.

2009-09-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

PRESERVING THINGS

The Family museum is open nine to five, seven days a week, excluding holidays, occasional sanity-preserving week-ends at the lake, and annual trips to Mexico and other exotic locals.
Admittance is free unless you are a dysfunctional Family member, in which case the cost is approximately $160,000.00. This amount includes both local and federal taxes and all pending legal fees.

Please keep in mind that a signature of Insurance Waivers is compulsory before admittance. There are free maps to this historic residence at the door, along with a semi-complete list of the priceless contents of each room, including the infamous fifty year old orange Chinese couch that nobody in the family has been able to throw away for decades.

Please follow your guide closely and listen up. She will be giving a fascinating narrative of the glorious history of each and every member of the family and their impact on the local economy. You won’t want to miss a word.

There are identification plaques throughout the house and grounds, listing the common names, followed by the Latin names, of every plant and piece of furniture, and the approximate dates they were added to the collection. If you have any questions, please ask your tour guide. She knows it all.

The next tour will begin in ten minutes. The line forms at the top of those stairs where your guide will lead you down to the very bowels of the residence, the three thousand square foot basement, where many of the un-catalogued items are stored in a climate controlled environment. You might think of it as the Smithsonian archives of Las Vegas.

We’ve tried to maintain the exact placement of certain stacks of boxes and precariously balanced piles of furniture just as they were when the previous owners departed this world. Touch them at your own risk.

From the basement we will be proceeding directly into the rear yard. Please watch your step as the management is not responsible for errant piles of cat shit, or vicious aberrant cactus spines. After a leisurely stroll through the gardens, we will make a short stop at the world famous guest house, where there is a unisex bathroom for your convenience.

You will also have a chance to view the exact location where the amazing orange two man submarine was stored. Unfortunately it is no longer part of the collection. However, there are plenty of color pictures of it for your viewing pleasure.

From there we will proceed to the ground floor of the residence itself. Your guide will be happy to open any of the multitudinous cabinets you may find interesting – where you can view, among other things—the world’s largest collection of antique Tupperware, and priceless textiles from the 1950’s, including bed sheets of every size.

Our final stop today will be the cavernous work shop where you will be able to peruse the massive collection of tools, both useable and broken. An extra added attraction is the screw and bolt collection to rival any other of its kind.

Don’t forget to visit our gift shop after the tour, where for a small price you too can buy copies of even the tackiest articles and the most sordid family documents.

Also – due to the high cost of maintenance and upkeep – Today Only – there will be a Once in a Lifetime chance to bid on some of the furnishings at the Estate Sale scheduled for six pm. Please have your checkbooks ready. We accept MasterCard, Visa, and American Express, as well as cash.

The management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone, regardless of age, sex, race, or Familial connection, and retains the right to sue at will.

Thank you for your attention. Please enjoy your tour.

2009-09-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

The first half of a two-part piece. (actually I wrote the other one first,
but posted it first too...Oh, just scroll down and read the other one first.)

SOMETHING DESPERATE, DEPARTING

Bruce thought it was a done deal. He’d worked those two old guys like the pro he knew he was.
If Mickey was still alive and in town, Bruce would’ve gone right down to the Carney lot and knocked on the Boss trailer to tell him what a great teacher he’d been. He’d show Mickey the bogus contract he’d written and had printed up at Kinko’s. “Nice piece of work,” Mickey might’ve said.

Then after Mickey’d pumped his hand in pride and invited him in for a cold beer to celebrate, Bruce would casually set the bank statement down on the little dinette table so Mickey could see the fat five figure score. And if Mickey said, “What, no perks?” Bruce would tell him about the kickbacks from the contractors, tell him how he’d set it up with each one – cash only, under the table, foolproof.

The whole deal was a perfect scam, and Bruce knew Mickey would be proud of him. Maybe he’d talk about his plans for expansion. He could say, “The fields ripe, time to pick it clean.” Mickey liked those farmer type sayings, though he’d never been on a farm in his life. He would have had some good ideas, Bruce was sure.

Bruce sat back in his desk chair in the storefront office, plopped his feet up on the desk and watched the clunkers crawl through the parking lot. He could afford to wait another month or two for the bank balance to pile up – both the old guys were outa sight, outa mind. Don down in Prescott, doing whatever he did, and Jim in Galveston happy as a clam on his crappy shrimp boat. Jim had even sent him a picture.

Bruce had a whole list of excuses ready to mail out with every months paperwork, this needs fixing, and that. The bogus contracts in a neat pile on his desk, just pick one out, type in the date, and mail it off. Bruce locked his hands behind his head and stretched his back, smiling. Life was good.

He saw the old yellow Caddy pass his window and noted the beginning of the rust streaks on the doors. Bruce knew from the stints the Carney had done in Florida that salt air did that. Mickey’d bitched plenty about it. Bruce was just standing up, fixing to go take a good look out the window when he saw the trunk of the Caddy backing up into his view. He remembered that Jim had a car like that just before the driver’s window came even with his storefront.

The old fart was looking up at the address and then checking something in his hand. Bruce took that minute to snap the lock shut on the front door and back peddle to his desk. He grabbed the trash can and scooped up papers off his desk as fast as he could, praying Jim hadn’t seen him. The sun was on the windows; maybe the glare was enough to hide him.

“Oh shit! Oh shit!” He ducked behind the partition that hid the back end of the store from the street, punching down the papers in the trash can. He yanked open the back door, thankful that he’d never forgotten Mickey’s Number One rule: always have an escape route. Good thing he’d parked his car in the back.

He flung the can in the back and him self in the driver’s seat, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The starter ground but didn’t catch. “Com’on baby! Com’on!” Bruce hissed at the car, “Time to haul ass!” He could hear the old guy banging on the front door as the engine caught. His screeching tires muffled the old guys shouting, but Bruce didn’t care. He was outa there!

2009-09-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

The other half of a two-part piece.

HE SUSPECTED

The guy says his name is Bruce and already I don’t like him. Before I met him down at the stores, I talked to him a couple of times on the phone. He’s got this little skinny high-pitched voice and he talks real fast. Fact is he never stops, not even a pause. How does he keep pouring out all those words without taking a breath? I suspect he does it to keep any sharp words from coming back at him.

Mr. Brucie is this hot-shot property manager my brother Don found. Don says we’re both getting too old to manage the strip mall anymore and this guy is gonna take care of everything. All we’ll have to do is sit back and let the cash roll in. Easy for Don to say, he lives in Prescott, Arizona and hasn’t done anything but let the cash roll in for years. Since I live right here in Dallas, I’m the one been doing all the work down at the stores.

Now a strip mall in Dallas, Texas may sound like a pretty sweet proposition, but that place was built in ’65 and every time I turn around some old wiring or plumbing needs repair. Getting Don to agree to spending money on the place is like pulling teeth, and I am sick of arguing with him. Seems like the neighbor hood keeps going downhill too, and I had taken to carrying my little twenty-two hand gun when I went to collect the rents. It’s a damn shame how things change.

My wife Betty Lou and I have been talking about retiring down to Galveston for the last few years. We could pick up an old shrimp boat for peanuts. Since Katrina, lots of guys have given up shrimping. We could fix it up and live on it dirt cheap. Hell, we think it’d be fun.

So I agreed to talk to this Bruce guy, met him down at the stores three months ago and walked him through all the known problem areas. I have to say here, he doesn’t look like a Bruce. More like a wanna be Hollywood producer. His hairs a little too long for my taste – all those curls floating just past his ears – but his jeans were Wranglers. So.

His cell phone was a Blackberry, wouldn’t you know. I don’t think he ever let it out of his hand, except maybe when we climbed the ladder to the roof to check out the situation with the AC units.

I didn’t mind his fast talk so much that day, seeing as how he was agreeing with everything I said. He was backing me up on all the things I’d been trying to get Don to understand need to be fixed. Real smooth. So I ended up signing the damn management contract, and Betty Lou and I packed up for Galveston. I was even thinking about how nice it was gonna be to have somebody else run things for a while.

The first two months things seemed to be okay. Bruce was getting Don to agree to some major repairs he’d been fighting me on, a couple new AC units, paving that end lot, even fixing the roof. I was a little po’d that Bruce’s contractor’s prices were coming in higher than anything I’d got, but at least things were getting done. I thought.

But now I’m thinking that little SOB is more of a con artist than a property manager. I haven’t seen a red cent in two months. I called the bank to find out what the balance is in the working account and they told me they can’t say, as my name isn’t even on the account.

So now I’m thinking, I need to haul myself back up to Dallas and track down that little bastard and see just how fast he talks when he’s being held up-side down with his head banging on the pavement in front of the stores.

I may be old, but I’m still pretty tough, plus I got a friend used to be a linebacker for the Cowboys and between him and me, I bet we’re stronger than that little pissant Bruce.

2009-09-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

Whats for sale? Quien sabe?

FIRING A GUN

All three men in the house sleep with machetes in their hands. They have no beds, only filthy blankets or sleeping bags thrown on the brown carpeted floors. Two rest their heads on rolled up jackets, one has a pillow but no case for it.

The machete handles are wrapped in beige masking tape and I’m not sure why. Are the handles cracked or broken? Does the tape make for a better grip? Why do they need machetes to sleep?

These men aren’t supposed to be living in the little house attached to the back of the store front that is my rental, but they are. Tony, the owner of the tire store tells me it’s only temporary. “I am doing a favor for my cousin,” Tony says, “My nephew, my brother.” He shrugs.

The men work in the tire ship all day and carry black grease and rubber into every surface of the house. Each door handle, every floor tile, every inch of the new carpet is now black. They fry meat until it’s burnt directly on the coils of the electric stove I bought new six months ago. A time distortion of ten years of grease compressed into those six months makes the stove look ancient.

Tony complains to me that the toilet is broken and it is my job to fix it. The fill valve and flapper inside the tank were abused to the point of death. I consider this an impossible thing to accomplish without malice. Armed with thick yellow gloves and a face mask I replaced them, recoiling at the possible origin of suspect liquids and gels coating all surfaces. I intently avoid looking at the shower.

A four foot by five foot, ¼ inch thick plate glass window in the shop front is broken. Tony tells me it was a rock thrown by some kid. Even I can see the bullet hole. The Mariachi music could be too loud for me to hear Tony as he lets it slip that someone shot out the window. And he quickly corrects himself when I turn the music down.

“Oh,” he lies with sincerity, “It was a rock.”

Ten feet behind us the men talk to each other in Spanish, laughing at how stupid the gringa landlady is. They don’t know I understand the words. They don’t know I am aware that they sell much more than tires here. They don’t know I’ve seen their knives.

2009-09-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

ENDING THINGS

Knee deep in traumas
If it isn’t
Broken water mains,
Its pit vipers
With a law degree.

Quicksand of quandaries
Why can’t fixed things
Stay fixed?
It’s part of the fairy tale
I forgot how to believe.

I want a fat-tired bike
And a radio flyer red wagon
Keds, and shorts, and t-shirts,
And belief in Jiminy Cricket’s
Song – back.

2009-08-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

The next five are from last weeks online thingy. I wrote this one last Monday, having just got back from a week at Squaw Valley Community of Writers workshop.
It was an amazing experience that I'm still digesting.

WEATHER AT SQUAW

Sitting in the big room at the lodge
Yesterday there was a bird in the room
Desperate to get out.
But patently ignoring the open doors
For the myriad crumbs on the floor –
Feasting on them and maybe the words too.

Today there’s a huge storm
Flinging itself through the sky
And clawing its way over the peaks
Forcing the Aspens to samba
At the point of its guns,
And the bird now wants in.

The b-b shots of hail pull my eyes
Past the words and the big windows
This storm is the loudest guest speaker here,
But nobody’s taking notes.

2009-08-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

TELLING A LIE

“I love you, Willie,” she said.

And though the words were there, the inflections, the emphasis, the pose, even the eyes all correct – it wasn’t the truth.

He didn’t see it; he bought the whole package because that’s what he wanted from her. She looked at his face from behind the carefully arranged intensity in her eyes and wished she meant it.

Willy was a nice guy in a long list of nice guys that Claire wanted to love. The truth was she loved the idea of love more than any of them specifically. It was like a picture puzzle she kept trying to fill in with all the wrong pieces. She could always get the framework, the sky, the trees -- but not the people – not the lovers in the center.

She was tired and saw she’d let the pose slip. He said, “Claire?” She looked up and saw a big question mark where his nose should be.

Claire got up from the worn red hassock and took the two steps that would put her close enough to touch his face. She could smooth that look away with her fingertips. But when she reached up, she touched his eyebrows with her thumbs and then slowly drew them down, closing his eyelids so that she wouldn’t have to see his eyes.

He shivered at her touch, but let her do it. And then he said, “I’ll always love you, Claire.”

But she didn’t believe him.

2009-08-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

Do we ever grow past what our parents didn't give us -- or gave us?
It's a quandry.

IT WAS MISSING

Everyone’s dead now, but that doesn’t mean that anything’s changed here. Eddie is just as alone in this house as he was when he was five or fifteen or forty.

Sure, he had family, a mother, father, older brother, but he also had a big wall between him and them. When he was a little kid, he accepted that wall like his skin color or the shape of his teeth. But when he was eight or nine, he stared dreaming about it. He’d wake up shivering from the snow on his side. In his dream, there was sun on the other side, and words and laughter being passed around like a picnic. But no matter how high he jumped or how loud he hollered, he stayed hungry.

When he was ten he asked his brother about it. “What do you do about the wall Gerry? How do you get through it? Can you see over it?”

“What wall?” Gerry said, and just kept on thunking his baseball against the side of the garage. Klonk. Klonk. Klonk. Their mom was in the kitchen but she kept on washing dishes like she couldn’t hear. Eddie had thrown the ball against the garage door a few times himself, then quit. Because no matter how hard or soft he threw it, she’d be out the door, slapping his face, snatching the ball away from him. She never did that with Gerry. Since a klonk was a klonk in Eddie’s view, he never could figure out the difference.

When he was a teen-ager, he asked his friends – most said what Gerry had, but one skinny kid they all called Pretzel cause he was so nuts said, “I don’t got a wall, but I got fog, does that count?” Like it was something good.

Eddie moved out when he was seventeen, barely finishing high school. He was surprised that the wall didn’t move with him. But at a Psych. 101 class in Community College, he finally figured out why. The Prof. told him his parents had built that wall, and it was a relief to learn he hadn’t had a thing to do with it.

He had a string of girlfriends then, but none of the relationships took. Fear of wall, he’d joke to him self. He met Karen in Alameda. She lived in the duplex next to his and there was a five foot wall between the yards. She talked to him over that wall all the time, planting her elbows on the top blocks or resting her chin there. It made him laugh.

When he took her back to meet his family, she shivered in the car all the way home, and kept saying, “Oh Eddie,” and “God! They’re so fucked up.”

They tried to go back every few years, but Karen finally said, “No more, Eddie.” He went back alone for his father’s funeral, but the wall was still there.

He didn’t know his mother was dead until he ran into Pretzel at some airport and he said, “Sorry for your grief,” to Eddie.

“What grief?” Eddie asked, and that’s how he found out. Even so, he still hadn’t cried about it, just kept seeing his mom snatch that baseball out of his hands.

Two months ago Gerry died in a hit and run on I-15 and left no will, he’d never married. A lawyer called Eddie and told him the house was his.

He walked through the house looking at all the left over junk like he was at a stranger’s yard sale: assorted clothes, furniture, plates, cups. There was nothing here for him. The realtor would be around tomorrow to let the Salvation Army guys in, what was left would go to the dump.

Eddie walked outside, shutting the door behind him, touching the lump in his pocket. Then he stood in front of the garage – pulled the baseball out of his pocket and started doing the one thing he’d come back for. Klonk. Klonk. Klonk.

2009-08-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

This one's for Stryker.

LOYALTY

I was down in Harry’s bar Friday night like always. After the eagle flies, a bunch of us guys from work usually end up there before we go home to whatever’s waiting for us: wives, or wives plus kids, girlfriends or just roomies – Me, what I have is my dog.

It’s true he can’t cook or do the laundry, but he’s so big I can wrap my arms around him and get that feeling of holding something worthwhile, a good solid hunk of flesh. He’s a purebred St. Bernard, Edward Maximillion Bonaparte Questor is his official papered name, but I call him Max, and he’s okay with that. We both put up with the drool and hair.

One Friday night about a year ago, I was with the guys at Harry’s, and we had two of the big square tables shoved together. Maybe ten guys in all sitting on those fake captains chairs Harry got over in West LA when some some Red Lobster restaurant folded. I told Harry those chairs don’t work with the rest of the décor, but he said, “They’re chairs, Roy, not fucking décor.”

He obviously didn’t get the joke, but then anybody who would buy (much less hang) so many three foot by five foot velvet paintings of dogs playing poker and pool wouldn’t know décor if it bit him on the ass.

Any way we were drinking Cuervo shots and beers and I noticed that some of the guys were going at it pretty heavy for the shank of the night and I said so. Then this fat guy from shipping pipes up “Some of us ain’t got all night, Bub. Some of us got to get home to the wife and kiddies.” He said it real sarcastic and I couldn’t tell if he was ragging on me or just dreaded having to go home.

This guy was so fat he had to wiggle his haunches around to even fit into the chair, those curvy arms bit right into his gut, and I could have felt sorry for him. I had a row of shots lined up in front of me and had just tossed back the fourth or fifth one – had my eyes closed and was trying to visualize the poor woman who’d married this bozo when I felt something slam into my chair.

Now I had a nice buzz going from the Cuervo and was concentrating on the sounds Santana was ripping out on the jukebox, so I didn’t notice at first that the fat guy was trying to pick a fight with me. I don’t know why, I’m sure I hadn’t said anything about his possible wife out loud. But when I opened my eyes and saw him standing next to my chair I cracked up. I mean he was standing there with that captain’s chair stuck on his fat butt like a bolt head stuck in a rusty socket.

I guess I made some smart-aleck remark then about what he had waiting for him at home and he took it to be demeaning about his wife. Because the next thing I knew he was slamming his ass-caught chair into my back, screaming, and poking at me with his chubby fingers. “Listen Bub, my wife is better than any fucking dog you could have!” Well, that just pissed me off, though I may have misunderstood him. I hate it when people don’t remember my name, and I take serious offense when someone maligns my dog, also I’d had those tequila shots.

So I said, “First, my name is Roy, you moron, and second my dog is better than any fucking wife you could have!” I never should have mentioned my dog.

Well, you can see how the whole night went down the tubes after that. After some more insults on both sides, a fist fight broke out. Guys with wives and/or kiddies sided with fatso, and most of the single guys sided with me. A bunch of those captains chairs got busted up and at least four of the dog paintings got smashed over some heads. Can’t say I’m sorry about the paintings, but it was just terrible to see all those full liquor bottles get smashed on the floor.

The worst thing was that some people who were there that night became convinced that I have some kind of perverted relationship with Max, since I may have mentioned his hug-ability at some point, what a mistake. I had to stay out of Harry’s for a while and poor Max was embarrassed to be seen with me on the other end of his leash. I think he’s over it now.

Well, like I said, I was in Harry’s again last Friday, although things have changed some. What with the layoffs and guys moving on to other cities, most of the old crew is gone. Fatso got fired a while back – called the foreman Bub once too often I guess. Can’t say I’m sorry about either one. Harry got a deal on a bunch of metal stackable chairs and some fake paintings of landscapes from a Motel 6 re-model. They’re better than the dogs.

I usually sit in a booth now, though the duct tape on the cracked vinyl seats has a tendency to stick to my jeans. I don’t drink shots of any kind, just nurse a few beers. I still enjoy the jukebox, and will engage in conversations of all sorts, but if somebody starts talking about their wife I clam up. And I absolutely never, ever, mention my dog.

2009-08-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

Let's hear it!

No, Talking

Her voice is big, like a canyon half full of a boisterous river, swearing at the boulders in its way, shouting at the little humans bouncing along its surface in Crayola colored rubber boats. The river and human’s determination and impatient volume echoes against the amphitheaters of the canyons walls, even in the flat stretches. So too her voice echoes in her mind.

Like the river she can be quiet, murmuring – but also like the river she can’t control her exultation at and of the rapids, and she doesn’t want to.

Kristy likes to think of herself as a river – wild and free, impossible for others to control. But in her real life there have been those who haven’t agreed with her. She has been forced to endure censorship too many times over the years and it’s always felt like imprisonment to her. Being bound and gagged by someone more powerful than she, her parents, assorted teachers and bosses, bruised her. And then there were the boyfriends – the men who came into her life praising her voice, her tone, only to eventually scramble for the volume knob. The ones who searched with their hands and eyes to locate the dial to turn her down or even sometimes to turn her off, wounded her.

She’s never understood this. It’s not like she ever disguised herself. Kristy wears a shooting star at her throat with one small glowing diamond. One guy she dated bought her a gold anchor to replace it with. If he’d wanted an anchor kind of girl why didn’t he pick one in the first place?

Well, now she’s done with all that, one of the perks of getting older. She’s outlived some of those controllers and also made more money than the ones who might threaten her into silence with their paychecks. And like the useless, outdated dams being blasted on rivers she’s read about, she’s done some dynamiting her self, blasting out old patterns and behaviors so her interior river can flow free in all its voices.

When she laughs her big loud laugh in public, people will sometimes turn and stare at her, but she doesn’t mind. If they frown she ignores them. If they smile in delight, she gives them an encouraging thumbs up, because she wants to hear all the voices, even the really loud ones.

2009-07-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

The following four are from last week.
This one is my very favorite!

THE EYE OF THE STORM

It’s quiet now. The first salvo has passed us by and those of us who survived it are picking ourselves up, brushing ineffectively at the embedded grit, and checking for missing digits. “Bobbie, is there time, do you think, to make it to the hardware store?” Earl asks me this question as though he expects a reasonable answer.

I look into his eyes and see the shock that is pounding through my own body mirrored there. Earl is my older brother by four years and a Vietnam Vet. “No, buddy,” I say. I put my hand on his left shoulder and squeeze. I’d like to hug him desperately, cling to him like a limpet to a rock, but he will not suffer a man’s hug. Not even mine.

I look beyond him to the rubble where our houses used to stand side by side, and am again thankful that Joyce and Rhonda and the kids are all in California at Mom’s house. Not because of any foresight on anybodies part, but just because our wives had agreed that the kids needed to get to know Mom better. And so they had packed up and flown off into the gray Gulf skies two weeks before we even had a rumor of the storm.

Thank God for that, thank God.

I must be crying now because Earl is patting my back rhythmically like he used to do when we were kids. “S’okay Bobbie, s’okay,” he’s saying.

The wind is picking up and I can see people straightening up from sifting their fingers through the debris. Mr. Winton has found something and handed it to his wife. She clutches the large black book to her breasts as though it will save her. Who knows? Maybe it will.

We’re all facing south now; we survivors, we refugees, watching the second act of the storm roll in.

Earl takes my hand and leads me over to the concrete steps of my house that used to go up onto my porch. “Let’s sit here, Bobbie,” he says. “We got a great view.” And just before the leading edge hits us he wraps his arms around my chest and hangs on with all his might.

2009-07-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

BURNING WITH FEVER

As always, when Clarice spoke to the Lord, she tried to assume an external and internal posture of humility. Not to say that she succeeded on both fronts, but she felt pretty sure that at least He knew she tried.

During her regular evening monologues sent out to Him, she always knelt by her bed, knees tight together and toes overlapped. (Her friend Bitsy had called that “toe hugs” when they were girls.) Clasping her hands fervently together, Clarice leaned her elbows on the bedspread and spoke out loud. Dear Lord, she began as though beginning a letter.

And in a way that’s what it was. Passing along the news in her life and neighborhood, asking for special favors, and thanking Him for whatever grace He had bestowed on her lately. She always ended with, this is Clarice signing off, Lord, and then, Amen.

If she felt the urge to pray during the day she knelt facing her couch. At seventy-eight she was a little rickety on her pins and needed the couch cushions to lean into. She believed He’d understand.

Lately she had been praying for Him to wreck vengeance on the two women who had bought the house next door to hers. Every time she peered out of her windows at them – seemed they were entirely too friendly – always touching each other, patting a hand or arm, or actually hugging in the yard in broad daylight, the hussies! Front or back yard didn’t matter, they were shameless.

Now Clarice knew for a fact that the Lord did not approve of such goings on. He’d said so in black and white right there in her Bible. But He may have been too busy with more important matters to see what was going on right under His nose. So Clarice felt it was her Christian duty to keep Him updated.

This morning she’d just happened to be in her laundry room perched up on her little rolling stool and if she leaned over to the right she could see directly into their living room. They had been hugging on each other something fierce

After making sure that her eyes did not deceive her, she went right to her couch and knelt down to pass on this latest information. In the midst of her feverish description to Him of what she’d seen, and her demand for instant retribution, her power went off.

The big rotating fan she’d positioned behind the couch to cool her at her devotions stopped in mid-rotate. The window AC shut down with a clank.

Oh Lord, why me? Clarice cried out as she levered herself up off the floor. It must be 105 outside today and her little house would heat up so fast her old bones would surely melt right inside her parched skin.

Just then there was a loud knock at her front door and Clarice shuffled over and peeked out the little peep hole in the door. Why it was one of those scarlet women from next door. Maybe if she stayed real quiet and pretended she wasn’t home the woman would go away. But no, she kept knocking harder and harder on the door and shouting “Ma’am! Ma’am!” Like the furies of hell until Clarice couldn’t stand it anymore. So she whispered Lord be with me now, and opened the door.

And the woman said, “Hello ma’am, are you all right?” Clarice just nodded, at a complete loss for words.

“Name’s Mildred White, I’m your next door neighbor. Me and my cousin Maudie, (that’s her with the fire extinguisher) saw a bunch of blue sparks coming out of the side of your breaker box and got so worried about you. What with it being so hot today, and these old houses dry as tinder, a spark like that could’ve burned in a quick minute. The fire department will be here in a minute, but now I think we’re gonna need the power company too. Maudie has got a little carried away with that fire extinguisher on your breaker box.

Whew! It’s hot in here already, why don’t you come on over to our place and we can have some nice cold lemonade while we wait for some assistance. Hope you like lemonade, I made it fresh this morning.”

As Mildred cupped her elbow and helped her across the yard, Clarice looked up and silently, this time, said, thank you Lord.

And although there was not one cloud in the sky she distinctly heard a clap of thunder, as if in reply.

2009-07-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

INSEPERABLE

Hand in glove, peas in a pod, they fit together. There was one more example, but he couldn’t think of it right then. Because just now, she had gone down that road, over that hill, and disappeared out of his life. Like the flame on a match dropped into the dust – phffft – just like that.

It was not right, not right at all. He had him self a major temper tantrum right there on the side of the road. Stomped his feet in the dust and whirled, and howled, flailed his arms, beating himself and the air around him black and blue.

But then the gray dust rose up around him, over his head, covered him gently. Like the faded quilt she used to pull up over their heads in her little bed.

He shook his head furiously, not wanting that comfort. He’d show her, he’d run away and live in a cave like a hermit. He’d wear raggedy clothes and eat pork and beans with a fork, out of the can heated over his campfire.

He did run away – to his secret cave and pouted and whined there until clear after dark. Nobody came after him (much less her) and he finally got too cold and hungry to be mad anymore, so he trudged on home.

His mother was standing outside the front door calling his name, “Robbie! Robbie!” He ran the last half block into her arms. And though he was too big to be picked up (being seven and a half, almost eight) he allowed her to cosset him, to feel his forehead, clean him up, feed him and tuck him into his own bed. There he could just be the little boy he was, whose best friend had moved away.

Many years later, around a campfire in Yosemite, his twin sons asked him for a story about the old days. So he told them about that day and his best friend Reba and the two things of how they fit so perfectly together: hand in glove, two peas in a pod.

“And the third thing? What was the third thing, Daddy?” Jake yelped.

“You know what it was,” Robbie said. “You’ve heard this story a million times.”

“No! You have to show it, you have to show!”

So Robbie stood up and offered his hand to his wife Reba, sitting there on the log. And they got up and walked slowly to the back side of the fire so that their shadows stood out from them against the side of their van. Then he stepped behind her, engulfing her in his arms and they said it to each other, together. “Me and my shadow.”

And their boys whooped in glee like wild Indians.

2009-07-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

OUTLAWS

“Do you remember my set of in-laws?” Joyce said. “They were like a hideous set of salt and pepper shakers I had to keep putting out on the table even though I hated them –because they’d been a gift.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Hideous is right.”

“That was way back in our suburban housewife days, when I still gave a shit about adhering to the rules of the enclave I was pretending I belonged to.”

“Oh, I remember that,” I said.

“Sometimes I look at pictures from those days and just cringe. I see this poor carefully sculpted politically correct woman manikin. Perfect make-up, perfect eyebrows, color coordinated outfits, why I wouldn’t even leave the house unless everything matched.”

“Everything?” I asked.

“Yep. I can’t tell you how many times I changed purses just to go to the grocery store.”

“My god!”

“I know –but the worse thing was how I felt inside.” Joyce sighed. “I felt so…invisible, and paranoid too, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, like one day the suburban fashion police would catch me in my secret cotton underwear or my raggedy sweats, and the jig would be up.”

“You mean like those sweats?” I asked, pointing at her lap.

“They still make a statement, don’t they?” Joyce laughed. “Remember that old ad jingle, ‘you’ve come a long way baby.’? They were talking about cigarettes but that’s not what I heard.”

“Me neither.” I said.

“Remember how good it felt to quit all the maintenance and up-keep, and just let your own real self come out?”

“I sure do. What a relief. Too bad it took us so long.” I said.

“Well yeah, I agree. But it would have taken longer if we hadn’t had each other.” Joyce said.

“And Roweena, and Sandy, and Beatrice! Remember her? What a group we were. Remember what we called each other?” I asked Joyce.

“How could I ever forget,” She said.

And then we both shouted in unison and defiance like the old days; “The Out-laws!”

2009-07-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

The five from last week: I swear, I have no idea where these things come from.

Right here I was going for my grandmother, double and triple checking her key in her front door, muttering "Is it locked? Is it locked? Is it locked?"
See what happens when you let your brain just roam around?

COMPULSIONS

Amy was standing in line at the grocery store in Tonopah when she felt that little sliver of worry in her gut. What had she forgotten? She yanked the list out of her right hand shorts pocket and eyeballed each item she’d put on the conveyor belt. Milk, check. OJ, check. Lunchmeat, yogurt, TP, sunscreen, ice – all there. She flipped the list over: two quarts of 30 weight oil and three flashlight batteries, (D’s).

She’d just have to go back; she didn’t want to stop again. Tahoe was still five hours away and she wanted to be there by dark. These days driving after dark made her jumpy – her depth perception wasn’t what it used to be and the oncoming headlights on the old narrow 95 highway seemed blurred.

Amy started to put stuff back into her basket and heard assorted grunts of exasperation from behind her. Four carts and several large families blocked her retreat. She set the milk and TP back down and sighed. She’d just have to go through twice, pay for this load and then go back.
But then she couldn’t leave the basket on the other side of check out -- no, someone would probably steal it. She’d have to take it out to the car and then come back.

Once she got to the car, she had to rearrange the cooler to fit the milk and OJ in. She dropped the ice bag on the asphalt to break it up so it would settle over all the food. Then she crumpled up the plastic bag, stuck it in the trash, and forgot to go back.

She was just outside Hawthorne on the swooping curves by Walker Lake, the alkaline water tugging at her when she remembered – batteries, three D, alkaline! And there was something else, what was it? It was on the list in her shorts pocket which she tried to dig out, but the pocket was deep and the seat belt was in her way. She un-clicked it and squirmed, wiggling her fingers down into the tight fabric, the car swerved a little. Where the hell was her list?

A big black pick up roared around her, his horn blaring, his fist pumping a digit at her. Another swerve, and he cut in front of her too fast. An eighteen wheeler thundered by them both. It was too much. She pumped the brakes and yanked her car off onto a little access road just ahead, coming to a stop right in front of a pit toilet. This was a good thing as she had to pee so badly -- but first she had to find the list.

Lifting her butt off the seat she still couldn’t wiggle her fingers deep enough into the pocket to find the list. So she wrenched the door open and flung herself out of the car. Finally! She held the list up in triumph and read the back: 2 quarts of 30 weight and three batteries. The wind off the lake snatched the list out of her hand and sent it soaring over the cliff in front of her.

She grabbed the pencil and post it pad she kept on the dash and muttered to herself: 2 quarts of 30 weight, 2 quarts of 30 weight as she sprinted to the toilet.

As she sat on the toilet peeing in a near state of bliss, she began her new list. Was that 3 quarts of 20 weight, or 2 of 30? And what was that other thing?

She could see the lake thru the slats in the door, oh yeah, Alkaline, batteries, three, D.

She put it on the list.

2009-07-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

I actually would like a plan, but what I get is this messy life.

WHAT PLAN?

Lately Jeff was always telling Rosie how disorganized she was.

Her fiancé: Mr. Anal, Mr. Bureaucrat couldn’t even go to the grocery store without meticulous planning. She could have handled a list, but mapping out which aisles to go down in advance was a new level of obsessive-ness.

God forbid something got put in the cart that wasn’t on the list. Sometimes she’d tuck bizarre things in there just to get a reaction out of him. Things like: baby pacifiers, a jar of pickled oysters, hemorrhoid pads, or Fixodent.

Five years ago they would have laughed at her choices but not now. He seemed to be clenching into himself more intensely lately, and she seemed to be purposely flinging herself into bedlam.

It’s true they’d always been an odd couple, being complete opposites, but there was an interesting symmetrical balance that made it work. She loosened his tension and ties, and he gave her a comforting stability to rely on and turn to. It was surprising even to them how well their relationship worked.

Today they’d hit a new low, perpetrated either by the global crises or the full moon. They’d both said unrecoverable words before he’d stalked out the front door to go to the mortgage seminar he’d signed them both up for, and she’d flung the surprise picnic she’d planned into the basket of her bike and pedaled it furiously down to the park.

Rosie intentionally spread her blanket in the direct sun, knowing the exact words Jeff would have to say about the dangers of UV exposure. Well, she wasn’t listening today – she was sick and tired of his lists and charts and damn reasoning. She tried to eat, but was still so upset, she could only manage half a chicken leg. She defiantly popped open the wine and drank almost 2 glasses before falling asleep on her stomach.

She woke up to some man’s hand on her shoulder and panicked. She thrashed over onto her back screaming for Jeff. Rosie almost smacked him in the face before she realized it was him. “Why aren’t you at the seminar?” she gasped.

He was kneeling in the damp grass in his white khakis. “Oh honey,” he said softly. “You’re bright red.”

She pointed to his knees, “You know that stain will never come out.” They looked at each other for a full minute, and then he pulled her to her knees and they both stood. Jeff picked up the picnic stuff and moved everything over to the shade of the big tree behind them. He flipped the blanket out and down, not even smoothing out the wrinkles.

“Any lunch left?” He asked.

“Yeah, but it’s been in the sun,” she said.

“That’s one of the best thermal coolers money can buy.” He smiled.

Two women were sitting on a bench a few trees over. One said, “Look how different they are.” And the other said, “That pair will never last.”

Little did they know.

2009-07-14T19:14:00.000-07:00

Interesting what pops up, when the grid goes dark. What did they do at Stonehenge?

IN THE DARK

Carol sits in front of her computer screen checking her emails, part of her morning ritual. There’s one from her brother, there’s her daily horoscope (silly things but she reads them everyday – sometimes they make her laugh). Spam show up even though she has a filter. Ads for LL Bean, Ugg Australia, Amazon, places she’s bought something from trying to tempt her into buying more.

Delete, delete. The NY Times she keeps. She’ll scan it later for articles that interest her. She clicks on her bother’s name, leans back in her chair waiting for it to open, and suddenly the screen goes black. She jiggles the mouse, com’on, damnit. Did she hit the wrong key again? Then she notices the silence.

It takes her a minute to realize what is missing, that annoying whirr of the cheap ceiling fan over her desk. She looks up and sees the four blades frozen in mid rotation. The end of each blade curves gently down as if apologizing for their failure to spin. Reaching out to her desk lamp, she hits the switch, on, off, on, off – nothing. Must have blown a circuit breaker. She’ll have to go down into the basement to check which one.

When she walks down the hall to the top of the stairs she hears more silence. The AC duct isn’t wheezing around the filter. She reaches out and flips on the light switch at the top of the stairs and laughs. The powers off, you dummy. Carol glances into her bathroom. Built into the center of the house, with no windows, it’s always night in there. The stark white tub and toilet glow a bit.
She gets to the bottom of the stairs opens the basement door and reaches in to switch on the light. Funny how her hands and arms keep repeating the same automatic motions even though her brain knows it’s fruitless.

The basement is so dark, not one window, she’s always hated it, reminds her of an Edger Allan Poe pit. She’s forgotten the flashlight. Looking up to the top of the stairs, she thinks, there’s one on top of the oak bookcase in her office. Then she remembers a flashlight she left on the dresser down here last month, when she’d had to turn off the power to replace a burnt out plug. The red handled screwdriver and the pliers are probably still right next to it. She’s gotten lax about putting things away.

Carol stands in the doorway for a minute envisioning the exact placement of the dresser on the far wall across the huge room, must be fifty feet away. But she really doesn’t want to go up and down the stairs again. Taking a deep breath she strides out into the room, forgetting how quickly the basement door will slam shut by itself. It sounds like a tomb. God, she really has to get Poe out of her head.

She’s halfway across the room now, knowing this because she’s just slammed her thigh into the big oval table. She feels her way along the edge of it, gasping. Okay, here’s the last chair. Carol sticks her arms straight out in front of her and lurches towards the dresser. Her arms hit the wall before her right foot bangs painfully into the dresser. Standing there in the dark, she clutches the top of it almost sobbing. More deep breaths and then she can grope for the flashlight.

She switches it on, pitifully grateful for the faint light, and here’s the screwdriver and pliers right where she’d left them. Yanking open the metal breaker box, she checks every breaker and they’re all fine, so it must be a power outage. Closing the metal door harder than necessary, she walks across the room to the door.

Leaning her hip firmly into the door handle, Carol flicks off the light and allows herself a moment to remember why she hates the dark.

Five years old and locked in a closet by the babysitter for being a Bad Girl. A fifteen minute time-out that had turned into hours before her parents came home and found the babysitter in their bed with her boyfriend and Carol terrorized in the closet. She’d peed her pants but hadn’t screamed. Good girls didn’t scream.

With the door handle still anchoring her; she lets her self scream now. It was the only good thing for her about the basement. She could scream all she wanted to and nobody could hear her. Maybe one day her five year old would be all screamed out.

Then she opened the basement door and climbed the stairs up into the light to call the power company.

2009-07-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

Somedays, is it even worth getting out of bed?

WHAT'S WORTH THE RISK?

Richard lay flat on his back in his bed – some part of him knowing it was morning, but unwilling to open his eyes to confirm it. Some days were like that.

Maybe he shouldn’t have watched the late news before turning in, too much gloom and despair to take to bed with him. Snippets of it replayed behind his eyes: Putin’s skinny head, Madoff’s piggy eyes and little pursed mouth saying I’m sorry, who cares?

Wall Street’s melting into the gutters of New York and no one honest enough to say the D word. The latest suicide bomber’s smoking truck; was Richard the only one who saw the broken Beamer emblem on its hood? Bombers driving Beamers, what next?

Richard popped his eyes open and saw a wonderfully ordinary pale blue sky just outside his bedroom window. He arched his back and stretched, his arthritic old knees giving two little pops. Then he sat up and swung his legs to the floor. His right foot landed on Ralph’s tail and the little terrier gave out a yap of annoyance. Richard moved his foot and apologized, “Sorry buddy.”

The he got up and walked into the bathroom to pee. He turned the tap on, washed his hands and scooped cool water on his face three or four times, it felt so good.

He could hear the old Mr. Coffee machine pohp, pohp, pohpping the last bit of his morning coffee into the pot. He wiped his hands and face off and went to get a cup.

The old gray tomcat, Max, sat waiting for him at the back door, he knew the routine. Richard snagged his coffee cup, his glasses, and his book and opened the back door.

Then he and Max went out into the new day.

2009-07-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

I keep asking myself, will I ever be done with this?

NARROW ESCAPE

“It was a narrow escape,” I think. “You could be her,” I say to my self. And the horrifying consequences of me becoming my sister are known only within my head.

Resonating there inside me are a million little pictures that support the word ‘horrifying’, but I could write all day and you’d never see the half of them. I believe that I am not alone in this.

How many other women drag along behind them a toy wagon full of un-shareable memories? Mine is a Radio Flyer red wagon heaped with pictures of my dysfunctional family.

And as the years have passed, I’ve accumulated more wagons and rusted shopping carts to accommodate the mounting memories. That clanking I hear is the chains that join this bizarre train, that screaking protest is their over loaded wheels.

I’ve forgotten exactly when I tied this antiquated train to myself, but the sturdy rope I used is now frayed. I stop for a moment, straighten up, and the rope falls to my feet.

I narrowly escape my childhood – yet again.

2009-07-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

These next five are from last week. I've posted them in the order they were written, as they are all about the same family, a different character's viewpoint/life each day.
A strange, interesting, Fun writing experience. Enjoy!

EXCUSES

It isn’t that Cory doesn’t know right from wrong. God knows his father drummed that into him plenty of times before he left. Of course when the boy got too big to bend over his knee, he’d take that chair out into the far end of the back yard, under that elm, and make him hang onto the ladder back of it while he stripped off his belt.

But he didn’t just whip him for the fun of it, no sir. All the long walk out there and clear through the whole thing he would talk to Cory in the calmest voice explaining what wrong the boy had done and why he must take his licks like a man. Always told him how many lashes he was to get and why, and never raised his voice or cursed either.

Now I believe in that saying, “spare the rod and spoil the child” as much as my husband Bill did, but after awhile I just couldn’t witness it anymore like Bill said I should. Though even if I was in the living room with the vacuum and the radio going full blast; I could still hear every one of those lashes. That’s when I would pray out loud for mercy and forgiveness. Hallelujah!

It wasn’t until Bill left and the father’s duty fell to me that things started going so bad. So I guess that you could say it’s partly my fault. Those first few times Cory got into trouble I really did try to discipline him like his daddy would have, but I just couldn’t pick up that belt. So I sat him down here in the kitchen and tried talking to him. He listened at first, but then he started tipping that chair back on its hind legs and chewing on a toothpick, not meeting my eyes.

Pretty soon he wouldn’t even sit down when I told him we had to talk. He’d just lean his elbows on the top of that chair ladder back and kind of grin at me. I have to say I didn’t care for that grin at all. He was eighteen when he ran off for good, and by that time he was much too grown for me to have been able to stop him.

Now you come here and tell me that my Cory has committed some terrible crime and will probably be living out the rest of his life in the state pen. How can you tell me such awful things about my only child? No matter what you say, I know that he is still my sweet boy. You can tell him for me that I will always love him.

You make sure you tell him that from me you hear?

2009-07-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

FAMILY

Cory sat on the edge of his bunk in the county jail cell, alone, and thankful for it. One bad thing about living a life of crime, as his truant officer had so often told him, was being locked up. But worse than that, as Cory knew from experience, was that you had no say so in who they locked you up with.

He looked at the cell across from his and thought it was a mercy that it was empty. He wouldn’t have to watch some brute take a dump in the toilet in the center of the cell, or feel some pervert’s eyes all over him, or listen to any steady stream of shit coming out of a hard-timer’s mouth.

There were eight more cells in this block and though he couldn’t see the other inmates, he could hear grunts and farts, toilets flushing and an occasional slap of skin on skin that he didn’t want to think about. He sang “Yes, Jesus loves me,” in a whisper to cover over the noises and move his mind to a better place.

The trustee came onto the floor with the chow cart amidst a clatter of keys, doors slamming, jangle of spoons and trays. The wheels of the cart needed several shots of WD-40 to stop their shriek. The cart stopped in front of Cory’s cell and the trustee slapped a metal tray down on the concrete and shoved it with his foot under the bars and into the cell. Didn’t even look up.
Then he pushed the cart on down, not stopping at the next cell door. Cory listened for the shriek of the cart, slap and scrape of the trays and counted them. Two men in the next two cells, and one in the end, one in each of the last two cells on the other side.

One thing he’d learned in jail was to listen; the other was to keep his mouth shut. First time he was in Juvi, he’d got the ABC’s of both from the eighteen year old toughs who bragged that next time they took a fall they wouldn’t get stuck in kiddie court. They’d go to a real jail and not have to listen to any snot-nosed babies wailing for their mothers. Well, this was Cory’s third time in county and he couldn’t see any glamour in it. Locked up is locked up.

The first time he’d got off because some rookie cop fresh out of training had forgotten to read him his rights, and had bungled the evidence. Tripped on a rock and lost the whole bag of dope down the sewer drain.

Second time, he was on the front side of twenty, still nineteen and scared shitless to do any real time. Lucky for him that judge sounded just like his daddy out under the elm with his belt in his hand, so serious and righteous like the wrath of God. Cory went into some kind of trance and answered just like his daddy’d taught him: take his licks like a man, apologize fervently, and look as humble as he could manage. The judge gave him that same sorrowful, “this hurts me more than it hurts you” look and gave him forty hours of community service and probation. Hallelujah!
Now he was almost twenty-one and a third timer to boot, he didn’t feel so lucky. He was older, not necessarily wiser, but at least knew the game. When the deputy came to get him for his court appearance Cory shuffled along next to him and recited the words every inmate memorizes. “I know my rights. I got a phone call coming and a court appointed lawyer.” The he added, “I have the right to remain silent, remember that.”

All the deputy said was, “I wish you would.”

2009-07-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

HOW HE THINKS ABOUT MUSIC

Bill Williams stood in the auditorium with all the other hopeful auditioners and muttered fiercely to himself. “Bunch of untalented upstarts, wouldn’t know Mozart from Hayden, not to mention real rag time, or authentic jazz from rock and roll. Why, I’d been playing on stage before any of them was even out of diapers.” He looked around him at the fiddles and guitars some held, and the battered black cases at other folk’s feet and bet himself that most of them could only play the one instrument. He, on the other hand could play just about anything.

You name it, he could make it sing: strings, horns, piano, drums. And he hadn’t had the luxury of lessons either. No sir. Good old fashioned hard work, daily practice and discipline, and a God given talent the Lord had seen fit to bless him with were what had gotten him to where he was today.

Well, maybe not this particular day, but as a musician generally. It was a sin and a humiliation that he had to audition at all. The pure fact of his name alone should have been enough for a guaranteed seat on the stage.

It’s true he’d never been a headliner, but he sure as heck had played with the best all down the years. His list of bona-fide gigs would make anybody sit up and take notice. It was also a known fact among real musicians that he was humble as well. An important attribute when there were so many prima-donnas making the rounds.

He was just as happy with second chair violin as first, back up guitar vs lead, even bass: stand-up or electric didn’t matter, anything that was wanted.

No, what counted with Bill was being on stage in any capacity and making a joyful noise with his fellow man.

Maybe if he’d started his career sooner, it would be his name on the marquee or at least he’d be the guy sitting in the shadows of the front row doling out rejections or approvals. But the fact was he’d listened to his mother to face his responsibilities and marry that mousey girl so the child could get born all legal and respectable.

Then the girl’s Pa gave him a decent job in his fancy office, and he was stuck. Selling insurance wasn’t Bill’s idea of heaven but it paid the bills when plenty of other’s were hurting for any job at all.

A lot of water under the bridge since then, he couldn’t remember for sure what had made him finally leave. Maybe it was the boy, what was his name? Started with a C. Bill wasn’t cut out to be a father, and the boy was a handful from the first time he opened his mouth and said no – his eyes blazing at Bill like a slap in the face.

Bill had tried, Lord knows he’d tried, but in the end he just couldn’t face it anymore, felt whipped like his soul would disappear with a pop one day, it was getting so squashed by that life. So one day, he just drove off with his tenor sax, his coronet, and his Martin guitar in the trunk and never looked back.

He’d had a good long run with more to come, and thankful for it all. Just then he heard his name called, “Bill Williams.” When he pushed his way up to the stage the guy looked at his worn tux and his slicked back gray hair and said, “What you got for us, Pops?” Hearing those words Bill knew he’d never get this gig, but he pulled out his soprano coronet and played a scintillating Bird riff anyway. Not even three minutes in this spotlight before the guy interrupted him, “Thanks, we’ll call you.”

But the two minutes on stage was better than nothing and he had another audition in forty-eight minutes across town. “Thank you!” Bill said, and he bowed low, packed up his horn and strode regally off the stage.

As always, the consummate musician.

2009-07-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

LAUGH TILL YOU CRY

A new judge sat on the bench. Cory didn’t recognize the face above the black robe or the name on the little plaque sitting on the desk. When the bailiff had droned out the opening lines, Cory only heard pieces of it. “The blah blah court in the blah blah state, judge blah blah residing. ALL RISE!”

So they had. All the innocent-until-proven-guilty accused in their dark blue jail scrubs and their assorted county issued handcuffs and leg chains clanking like cheap over-sized jewelry, straggled to their feet.

“BE SEATED!” the bailiff honked out, and they did that too.

The clerk called the first case and Cory tuned out, leaving merely a sliver of his attention listening for his name. He settled back in his chair with his cuffed hands in his lap, crossed his ankles (no leg chains on him), and focused on the audience. It was the best cure for court nerves he’d come up with.

He’d pick a face and tell himself a story about that person. Who were they here to see? Were they supporter or accuser, lawyer or civilian? He could dismiss about half the spectators because of their blatant facial expressions, body language, or dress. And actually that was fine with him – he preferred the less obvious, hard to crack folks. A nice suit didn’t necessarily mean an attorney.

Take that frumpy woman in the back row. She cold be a legal eagle with really poor clothing sense or attempting a calculated intent to camouflage herself as a rube for the judge. When he heard his name called, Cory had just latched onto a smart-dressed matron in the fifth row, three out from the wall. He snapped to attention, his eyes on the judge, blanked his fear as best he could and stood.

“Step forward, Mr. Williams.” Cory almost looked around to see who he was talking to.

“It’s Cory, Sir. Just Cory.” He wanted to say. “Mr. Williams was my old man. That son of a bitch that walked out on us is the only Mr. Williams I know of.” But of course he didn’t, can’t talk that way to a judge. Cory took the three steps forward that put him at the railing and tried to stand tall. He’d have put his two hands on the rail to steady himself, but for the cuffs. The sight of them shamed him. So he leaned his belly into it instead and waited for the hammer to fall.

“Mr. Williams? You’ve asked for a court appointed attorney, is that correct?”

“Yes sir, it is.”

“Well, I see by your paperwork here that as of this morning you already have counsel and therefore are not in need of another.”

“What?” Cory blurted out, but added, “Sir,” as quickly as he could.

The judge shifted his gaze to the tall man making his way from the audience to the defense table. “For the record, Mr. Sledgeham, you represent Mr. Williams?”

“Yes Sir, I do,” the man said.

“I see you’ve requested Mr. Williams be released under his own recognizance, but I can not allow that. However, I will set a reasonable bail of $50,000. with the condition that he have the supervision of a responsible adult and wear a tracking device until his court date. Are we agreed?”

“Yes Sir, thank you Sir.” Mr. Sledgeham said. The judge banged his gavel and that was it.

Cory stood limply by the rail, his mouth hanging open, as the stranger who’d just pulled off the impossible walked over to him. “I’ll explain everything later, Cory. Right now, they’re gonna take you back and process you out. I’ll meet you in the hall right outside intake in about an hour. Okay?”

Cory couldn’t answer him.

“Just nod if you agree son.”

So Cory nodded, and kept nodding as the deputy walked him out of the court room, down several echoing hallways to the processing room, and unlocked his cuffs. At the desk, the sergeant handed him his clothes in a plastic bag, and another man ushered him into a little room and watched him while he changed. Then back to the desk to retrieve his personal effects and sign for them. They clamped the tracker on his left ankle and opened a door.

“Go through here now, your lawyer’s right out there.”

Cory was still nodding slightly and blinking furiously to keep from crying. But when he saw Sledgeham waiting for him and heard the door click shut behind him, he started laughing so hard he couldn’t hear a word the guy said. By the time they hit the street he was crying again.

2009-07-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

The matron from the fifth row watched Cory meet his attorney in the hall. She wanted to see his face when he came through the door, but sat on a bench far enough away from it that he wouldn’t notice her. She wasn’t quite ready for that. What mask he might pull on or any of the possible conversations they might have if faced with each other. No, she wasn’t ready for any of that.

Nora had felt her son’s eyes on her in the courtroom, but he hadn’t recognized her. And then the flurry with the judge and Harry going up and Cory standing there in the sad blue clothes wearing those pitiful handcuffs, it all went by so fast.

She’d kept her own eyes fastened on his face, having been starved for it too long. She noted the hard lines and pallor – It seemed a disguise painted on the face of the boy she remembered.

She’d hoped it was worth the risk of recognition to wait in the hall. In that unguarded moment when he came through the door and saw Harry, his face lighted up, and in that and his laughter she’d seen a glimpse of her boy again. That face now etched on the back sides of her eyes no matter what else happened.

How pitiful she had been back in the old days. How desperately she had tried to keep first Bill and then Cory tied to her. How long she had wandered from room to room in the empty house and how close she’d come to disappearing. And then finding that tiny ledge of hope or will inside herself – She’d almost passed it by.

Had she made a conscious decision to build on that or had it occurred instinctively? Like a terrified animal struggling for the shoreline in a flood.

Well, no matter. The fact is that she had built on it, many small steps that had led to that first job and a semblance of independence. Always making sure to give thanks for helping hands, yet allowing her self a modicum of pride at each accomplishment. And so by the time Harry came along she was no longer grasping for rescue, but standing steadily on her own two feet. That could be why he saw things in her that Bill had never seen, and was able to give her what Bill could not.

Poor Bill, she’d been such a scared girl with him, with no sense at all of who she was, no base. And poor Cory, with a child for a mother, no wonder he’d sneered at her.

Nora straightened her back and checked her watch. It had been over an hour since they’d left the building, but she and Harry had allowed for two. It should be enough time, they’d agreed, for Harry to lay the ground work of her plan. A plan for Cory to find his own ledge of hope and how he might build on it, how she might help.

She already knew what she would say when she slid into the booth across from him at the restaurant.

First she would say, “I love you Cory.” And then she would say, “You can call me Nora, or Mom, whichever you prefer.”

2009-06-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

The next five are from last week's online writing. I am continuously surprised by what comes out of my pen. Thank God!
The prompt for this one was "it's not a work of art", but sometimes it's fun to NOT write the obvious.

WORK OF ART

They met online, not at one of those tacky internet dating services that connect the dysfunctional with the desperate, but introduced by a mutual friend, Barbara, thru email.

“You have a lot in common,” Barb typed. “You’re both adventurous, out-spoken, well-read, and independent. You share a love of the water and boating. Here’s his email address.”

“I don’t know,” Ellie typed back. “I’m not really looking for a relationship at this late date.”

“Who said anything about a relationship? He’s a nice guy and I think you could be friends; that’s all. Besides you’re always bitching about how solitary your life is.” Barb leaned back in her chair, took her fingers off the keys, and read what she’d written -- twice. Then she shook her head and pressed her finger on the backspace key, deleting that last sentence. Instead she typed, “It might be fun. Can I give him your email address?”

Ellie read what Barb had written and mulled over the ramifications of saying yes. It would be nice to have someone to chat with and email was a relatively safe way to communicate. No worries about that extra twenty pounds showing, or dress code judgments. No possibilities of her blurting out something that would make her feel like a fool. Only words on a screen that she could tweak for as long as she liked before sending.

The next morning she sent Barb an email that said, “Okay, I’ll give it a shot.”

Art had no reservations at all. Ellie got a chatty two page introduction from him before noon. Her first response was only a paragraph and that painstakingly written and re-written before she felt it had just the right combination of casual interest and minor personal information. She got back a page and a half in less than an hour and felt like she’d just been asked to the prom.

For two weeks they wrote back and forth, the letters getting more personal and in depth as the days went by. Ellie had been relieved to read that he was retired, yet in her same tax bracket. But she double checked this fact with Barb. No sense getting involved with a man who couldn’t carry his own weight. Was she involved? She did feel a little giddy these days, and she had to admit she was having fun and eagerly looking forward to his responses. Was that involved?

On the second Saturday of their communication she sent him a long email he did not respond to, not Sunday, Monday, or the rest of that week. Had she offended him in some way? She poured over what she’d written but could find nothing that might have been misconstrued. She agonized over the possibilities another three days before she called Barb.

After some polite chit-chat, she said, “Have you talked to Art?”

“Yeah, I talk to him every day.”

“Has he mentioned me?” Ellie asked.

“Well, he did say he was thinking of flying out to meet you the other day.” Barb said.

“He what?” Ellie couldn’t believe it.

“I think he really likes you.” Barb said.

Ellie didn’t believe her ears; this was a patently ridiculous statement from a guy who’d been ignoring her for over a week. She found herself wanting to know more, but hating feeling like she was about fourteen, all caught up in the throes of juvenile emotions with a guy she’d never even met. This thing with Art was never going to work.

What was he thinking? What had she done? Why did she give a shit?

She changed the subject as quickly as she could and hung up as soon as possible.

A month later she got a new long chatty email from him. She opened it and read it three times. Not one word about why he’d been silent for so long or a hint of an apology. What a shame. With a touch of sadness, she reached out and hit delete.

2009-06-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

This is an old prompt from every writing class anyone has ever had, but it was still fun this time around.

SUMMER VACATION

Larry sat in the driver’s seat of the burgundy Range Rover waiting for every one to go to the bathroom one more time before they left. It was Standard Operating Procedure for every trip his family had ever taken, but he was still irked.

He flipped his visor down and scanned the titles of the ten CD’s he’d picked for the first one hundred miles. This time he hadn’t even bothered to try for a family friendly selection. The kids all had IPods now, a step up from the Walkmans of old. The wires trailing down the sides of their heads to the gadgets were color coordinated: green for Brian, red for Ken, and white for Nance.

His wife would only listen to classical which was usually fine with him, but not on a trip. Half the fun of trip music was singing along, and Mozart was lyric less. Cheryl’s IPod was pink.

Larry looked in the rear view at the cargo area, pleased at how well he’d packed all the camping gear. Nothing would rattle, and the top of the pile was level and low enough so he could still see out. All the big stuff was up on the luggage rack he’d paid extra for. He didn’t have to get out and check that. It was all in specially ordered duffle bags and criss-crossed with bungee.

His dad used to do that. Larry remembered watching him secure the load ceremonially on top of their old station wagon. The fist time he was asked to help, he was thrilled. When he was finally allowed to do it solo and his dad didn’t double check his lashings, it was a rite of passage. Brian and Ken never even watched.

Larry heard the front door slam, and watched his kids walk down the front steps and cut across the lawn to the car. He’d told them a million times to use the sidewalk. He opened his door to yell at them, but then didn’t. There was Brian striding towards him so tall, seventeen last month. Larry could see the blush of the man he would become in the new muscles of his shoulders. Ken was a few steps behind Brian, his Raider’s cap backwards on his head. Only a year younger, but almost as tall as his brother.

Cheryl had caught up to Nance, and slung her arm over her daughter’s shoulders. They were laughing about something and Nance had lifted her chin up just a little to look into her mother’s eyes. They rubbed noses in an Eskimo kiss and Larry felt a tug of jealousy. Would Nance still accept this intimacy when she turned fifteen next year? That’s about when the boys had outgrown it. Larry blinked -- when had they all gotten so big?

Suddenly they were at the car, opening doors, tossing in back packs, talking over each other.
“Did you pack the raft, dad?” Brian said.

“There’s the paddles on the roof you dork!” Ken shoved his brother in the chest.

“Honey, did you remember your ear plugs?” Cheryl was leaning over her seat patting her daughter’s knee.

“Yeah mom, I did. I’m not going through that infected ear thing again, like last year. You can bet on that.”

“Lar? Is the med kit accessible?” Cheryl asked him. She always asked him that.

“Right on top in the back,” he said, just like he said every year.

Four doors slammed and Larry said, “Everybody buckled up?” and four varied groans told him they were. As he started the car and put it into reverse to back up he smiled at himself in the rear view mirror.

2009-06-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

I think the sub-heading in my brain for this one was addiction, who knows? But this is what came out onto the paper. Sigh.

TEMPTATION

It’s just a little yellow box, 2” x 3” x 1”, but it calls out to her as though it was broadcasting Bert Parks from the old TV show, “The Price is Right.”

“Come On Down!” Kate can hear him screaming at her every time she walks past the coffee table. She manages to avoid the living room and the voice in the box until almost noon. But while she’s running the vacuum cleaner in there, her hand reaches out, grabs the pack of cigarettes and shoves it into her shirt pocket. Why, it’s almost as if it’s someone else’s hand.

Most of her had vowed to quit smoking this morning but the determined smoker in her might not have heard the news. “I’ll just keep the pack in my pocket then I’ll feel more secure. I don’t have to take one out and smoke it.” She told her self. And that worked for another two hours, but Kate caught her self patting that pocket right over her heart again and again.

So she took off the shirt and draped it over the back of a kitchen chair and made a late lunch in her tank-top and shorts. She took her lunch out onto the back porch so she wouldn’t have to look at the shirt. Her apple juice tasted so good today.

But after she’d eaten her sandwich and picked the last bits of potato chip up off the plate with her moistened fingertip, the voice was back. Maybe it was that Pavlovian lull right after every meal when she usually savored a cigarette. “Oh hell!” Kate said, slammed her chair back and marched into the kitchen for her shirt.

Pulling the pack out of the pocket, she held the box and flipped the lid up and down, up and down with her thumb for a good fifteen minutes. Finally she pulled out one cigarette and stuck it between her lips, but didn’t light it. She gnawed on the filter while she went over all the arguments she’d had with her self last night. All the reasons why she wanted to quit smoking, needed to quit, would quit.

Deciding that it was the readily available pack in her hand that was the problem, she marched out to the garbage can by the curb. She made a little ceremony of lifting the lid and jamming the pack deep into the garbage knowing that today was trash day and the temptation would soon be gone.

Back in the house she felt so virtuous and strong until about six pm, when she started thinking, “I may have to make a run to the store later. Damn!”

2009-06-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

You might say that this is a pet peeve of mine.

SHAME

It’s a shame really, that some people are allowed to have dogs. It should be mandatory to have to pass a written test before being allowed to adopt a pet. Probably a basic field test of empathy and caring should also be required, like the drivers test at the DMV. Maybe a demonstration on knowing how to pick up an animal or brush tangles out of long fur, or having a dog come to you if you just hunker down and softly call it’s name.

I admit I’m a little fanatic about this subject, but then again, I’m the one who has to listen to the pitiful cries of my neighbor’s dogs. The guy to the west of me has a dog left behind by his ex wife, he doesn’t even like dogs. Oh sure, he puts out food and water for her but he spends maybe ten minutes a day, max, with her. I hear that dog cry like a lost child almost every day. When he leaves for work she paces the perimeter of the fence line for hours desperately hoping he’ll appear.

It breaks my heart, but there’s nothing I can do. If I go out to console her, she barks furiously at me through the fence. I don’t think she likes women.

The east side neighbors have an eight foot wide dog run along the length of my property. Their two elderly German shepards were imprisoned there for years. Day and night, summer or winter they were confined to that compound. At least I could pet those two through the chain link. I’d stand there until my knees ached with my hands stuck through the wire petting their faces and getting my fingers slobbered on with their gratitude.

One day last fall they disappeared and I can’t say I’m sorry. I just hope they went to a better place, one with full buckets of water and dishes of food.

I don’t own a dog right now, but happily my four cats allow me to live here and pay the bills. And although there’s cat hair on every surface, including me, no matter how often I have to clean, I consider myself lucky. How could I write without a paw on my arm?

We’re all getting older around here; some of us are well past middle age. But if the day ever comes when all my furry friends pass before I do, I might get a little dog. You can be assured that I’ll take the aforementioned test and pass it.

Would you?

2009-06-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

What's growing?

IN THE GARDEN

Diana was trimming dead branches off rose bushes in the six foot wide planter to the west of the front door. Her older brother Joe was supposed to be cleaning up debris in the east planter, but he’d gotten out of it as usual.

The sprinkler system was on the fritz again. Every time they had a power outage the thing shut down as though it had been personally insulted. Diana didn’t understand why it had become her duty to fix it. Nobody in the house would notice it was off until the plants were sagging in despair and at least one or two things were DOA.

Then her mother would walk the length of the two planters sighing forlornly – touch her finger to the tips of dead branches and say, “Di, can you coax it back to life honey?” Why couldn’t it be Joe’s job?

Of course what her mother meant was not only to re-program the sprinkler timer – which in itself was a frustrating and time consuming job, since Diana could never remember how to do it in between outages and the thing was so complex. (She’d finally hung the instruction book on a nail right next to the contraption in the garage.) – If that wasn’t enough, the job included clearing out the dead and dying bushes, driving down to Lowe’s garden center to buy new, carting it home, and figuring out where to plant it.

Why me? Diana muttered to herself as she viciously beheaded a dead yellow rose bush she’d always hated. It made no sense whatsoever that her mother insisted on rose bushes, her social schedule was so busy she only took the time to look at the planters when things were dead. Maybe Di could get the same consideration and attention the planters got if she keeled over in the driveway. But then who would her mother get to bring her back to life? Joe? Not only was that a horrifying personal thought, but absolutely impossible to imagine happening.

No, Joe had far too many important male-bonding rituals to participate in to be bothered with his younger sister’s corpse. And since their father had absconded with his secretary and investor’s funds; her mother doted on her only remaining male. It was enough to make one sick.

Well, this time Di would bring home the most exotic colors she could find, purples and varied-colors, maybe even branch out into hibiscus or bird of paradise. Her mother probably wouldn’t notice until they were either dead or six feet tall.

Diana didn’t consider her self a gardener; she really had no time for it. Maintaining her grade point average and lusting after an ivy-league admittance were her main goals. But, by God, if her mother was going to continue foisting this responsibility on her, she could at least do it her way. Not her mother’s, not her absent father’s, not Joe’s, but hers.

Hmmm, maybe a small tree? Eucalyptus?

2009-06-19T11:51:00.000-07:00

The following five pieces are from last week's online.

The prompt for this one was "What I want to say about my father.." This little half page piece took me two gut-wrenching hours to write.

FATHER'S DAY

Every father’s day before dad died I used to stand in front of greeting card racks in Hallmark or the drug store, searching for a card that I could bear to buy. Sometimes it took hours. It was a refined form of torture for me.

The mushy ones made my gut clench and my hands shake. If I could read the words on the front of the sentimental ones without sobbing out loud, I might look inside –I rarely got past the covers of those. Joke cards were easier, though most of them didn’t say “I love you”, which I did. But I could always write that in.

Some years I made my own, carefully crafting the text inside to be as innocuous as possible.

It’s been a burden I’m glad to be shed of. Because in the last seven years since he died, I don’t think the card situation has changed much. I’m pretty sure that there is still no sub-section in the aisle of father’s day cards in Hallmark, titled “child molester.”

2009-06-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

MONEY

“It’s only sixty bucks,” Jerry told his mother.

“Sixty bucks is sixty bucks.” She said. “I have to work a full eight hour day to get that much.”

Jerry knew by the way she crossed her arms over her chest that any hope of a continued conversation was gone. She was switching over to lecture mode, specifically, the ‘money’ lecture. He could almost hear the gears grind.

He wiggled his 6’2” lanky body more comfortably into the sagging cushions of the blue plaid couch. He knew she would go on for at least thirty-five minutes; he’d timed it more than once. Though he’d have liked to put his feet up on the coffee table, he didn’t. She had a lecture for that too.

They both knew that Jerry was too old for these lectures. Twenty-two, with a scholarship in basketball at UNLV, he rarely asked her for cash. But, it was true he lived at home. She bought all the food, paid the bills, kept a roof over his head. Did his laundry, cooked the meals -- he had her list memorized. The only thing she let him do was load the dishwasher – and study. Another lecture topic he didn’t need to hear. He wouldn’t have kept the scholarship if his grades weren’t a steady 3.0.

He tuned back in to see where she was in the lecture. Another five minutes, so it wasn’t his turn yet. When she took a deep breath and turned her back to him, staring out the living room window, he started.

Jerry made his arguments in a calm voice, ticking off his points on his upraised fingers. “I can get everything I need at the pic-a-part junk yard. The carburetor, spare tire including rim, and radiator will cost me less than half of new. I have all the tools I need and I can do the carb re-build and all the installations in the garage. I’ll clean up any mess I make and put down a layer of newspapers so no grease gets on the floor. I can do the whole thing on the week-end and have the truck ready to go by Sunday night. Monday morning I can make it to class on time and practice after.”

His mother had moved from the window to her desk and picked up a stack of bills in her left hand. Each time she moved an envelope from the top of the pile to the bottom with her right hand, she nodded slightly. A sure sign he’d almost convinced her. He made one last point. “With the truck running again, I can go back to taking care of some of your errands, give you a little break.”

She set down the mail and opened her purse, stuck her hand into the inside pocket for her money. He waited until she walked towards him before he stood up. And as she handed him the three 20’s, he wanted to tell her why he really wanted his truck running perfectly. He couldn’t say, “It has to make it to Reno.” She didn’t know he’d already talked to UNR and made sure his scholarship and his credits would transfer, before he filled out the application. Next semester, there was a job in the cafeteria and a dorm room waiting for him, and he’d do his own laundry.

He did tell her, “Thanks mom. I really love you.” And that was true. He’d tell her the rest in the next week or so, just not right now. He really couldn’t take another lecture.

2009-06-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

Not my usual forte, but it went from a list to a story before I realized it.

WHAT'S FORBIDDEN

No Trespassing

No Spitting

No Loitering

No Running

No Skateboards/roller skates

No Parking

Handy-cap Parking Only

No Soliciting

No Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages

No Smoking Within 20 feet of Entrance

No Liquids Over 8 Ounces

No Carry On Luggage

No Fishing or Swimming in Marina

Do Not Harass the Ducks in the Walkway

One Way Traffic Only

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service

We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone

No Outlet

Dead End

2009-06-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

There's all kinds of dancing in life, here's one more.

SLOW DANCING

Belinda was folding laundry in the living room and thinking about cooking dinner when her husband Robert came home from work.

As soon as she heard his car pull into the driveway she began to sweat. She told her self that it was just another hot flash, but that didn’t account for the sudden tremors in her hands. She walked over to the open window and peered down to watch him get out of the car.

The driver’s door of their green Toyota Camry swung open and he stuck out his left leg. His black shoe reflected the summer sun; the knife-edge crease she’d ironed into his pant leg was still visible. Robert was very particular about his uniform, he said he represented his country at the Army recruitment office and had to look immaculate.

It had taken her a long time to figure out how to get that damn crease just right. But he wouldn’t let her touch his shoes, said the perfect shine was beyond her capabilities.

She wanted to see his face, what was he doing? It looked like he was stretched out onto the passenger seat reaching for something. Oh God, had she left her Starbucks coffee cup on the floor? Not only did Robert hate trash in the car, but he despised Starbucks as overrated and overpriced.

Belinda held her breath waiting, until she saw him sit up in the car, his black tie in his right hand. He scooped up his jacket from the seat and stepped out of the car. She let out her breath and gulped in several deep lungs full of air. His face was tight, but not scowling. She smoothed the T shirt she’d been clutching to her chest. She’d rumpled it so badly she might have to iron it. Setting it back in the laundry basket, she hurried into the kitchen to get his drink out of the refrigerator.

Then back in the living room, she set it down on a coaster on the end table next to his ugly green recliner. As she heard the front door open she snatched up her tennis shoes and the newspaper she’d been doing the cross word puzzle on and jammed everything into the hall closet. Robert disliked clutter.

He called out her name and she took a second to check her appearance in the long mirror on the closet door. She patted her hair, smoothed down the front of her shirt and pasted a small smile on her face. Then Belinda turned to walk back into the living room, taking slow and measured steps. She got just inside the door when he said her name again, said not yelled.

“How was your day, dear?”

“Fine,” he said. He settled into his chair, picked up his drink and took a long sip before he noticed the cat vomit under the couch that she had missed.

He scowled, she tensed. They were about to accelerate from slow dancing to their own personal violent tango.

2009-06-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

THE HOSPITAL

This is the view from the cockpit of my sailboat. A high black ridge runs along my right, its jagged peaks are topped with steel mesh towers, like something built from a child’s giant erector set. The thin cables strung between them carry electricity from Hoover Dam to the Las Vegas Valley. The sloping feet of this ridge rest in the lake, green scrub bushes dot the slopes.

Lake Mead cradles my hull and stretches out around me – past the break-water built of truck tires, to the Boulder Islands and the lower basin beyond them. The lake extends further into canyons I can’t see, but I’m not sailing there today.

Two small toes on my left foot are broken and I am ensconced in my cockpit surrounded by pillows, recuperating. A small breeze ruffles the surface of the water and the sun reflects off each ripple, specks of glitter strewn across the bay.

The green-gray of the lake is deceiving; it can change as quickly as the wind. Yesterday it was howling and the water frothed with white caps and turned gray. Waves smacked into the stern of my boat and splattered the cushions in the cockpit –gusts were up to 41 mph.

Today a mama duck escorts her five teenagers to my stern. I toss them stale crackers and dog kibble, which they gobble up as though they’re starving. Then they glide two boats over to the next handout. I imagine the mama telling them which boats in the marina can be relied on for regular meals. Fat two-foot carp lurk in the water just below the duck’s feet to catch the scraps.

The breeze picks up and dies, picks up and dies and the song of the water hitting the bottom of my dinghy changes accordingly: blues, rap, rock and roll, blues.

Its 88 degrees at noon in the middle of June, an unheard of temperature for us, we’re normally into triple digits by now. If it was 110 and I was down below in the AC, I’d miss the Great Blue heron just gliding into a landing on the shore, or the turkey buzzards riding the thermals off the ridge. I wouldn’t hear the wind set the halyards ticking on the sailboat masts around me.

And I wouldn’t be sitting in my underwear in the cockpit reading Amy Tan and healing.

2009-06-13T18:31:00.000-07:00

The next four are from last weeks online group. Am I Blessed or what?? Actually there are 17 bookcases, but who's counting? If you love books like I do this will resonate with you. Or not...

READING

I have fifteen bookcases in my house and every single one is stuffed with books. Also every other flat surface has at least a few books on it, some have stacks.

Every couple of years I pull the books off the bookcase shelves and try to get organized, alphabetically, by author. For a month or two it stays tidy but then I keep buying books at thrift stores and garage sales and jamming the ones I can’t bear to part with horizontally onto the shelves.

I don’t just love reading, I’m addicted.

I learned to read before I started kindergarten, egged on by my mother who, although she couldn’t give me her love, gave me her love of books. I will forever be thankful for those weekly trips to the library. The kind librarian introduced me to the children’s section where I discovered that sticking my head in a book and reading gave me unlimited access to lives much better than the one I was stuck in.

Of course reading led me naturally to writing. The old “I could do that” syndrome popped up in me when I read my first Dr. Seuss book. So I did write a kids book, illustrated it too! I think I was ten or maybe eight.

I started keeping a journal when I was twelve and haven’t been able to put my pen down since. I'm forever thankful for that, what a gift.

Reading has gotten me through many a tough time in my life, and writing is still the cheapest therapy I know of. For me, they go together like cookies and milk. I never go anywhere without a book and something to write on.

For years I believed that this love of reading was a common human denominator, but alas it just ain’t so. Now I ask every new person I meet, “Do you read?” with a maniacal gleam in my eye and the fantasy in my mind that if I can just give them the right book they’ll be hooked. (Delicously, like me.)

Sometimes I succeed. I had a 35 year old sailor friend once who told me he had never read a book all the way through, never. So I went on a mission to find him a book that would keep his interest. I gave him ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ which he finished even though it took him six months. I was so thrilled for him; I gave him the other two books of that trilogy.

I can’t imagine existing without reading. Books are my friends, teachers, travel guides, and treasure. Sometimes I just sit in front of the bookcases and look at all my wealth.

Sometimes I look at the titles on the spines and plan a trip, where will I go today?

Right now I have to go to the thrift store. Why? Because I need more books.

2009-06-13T18:24:00.000-07:00

I have no idea where this came from, but I'm glad it did.

BACK UP PLAN

Rae and Sami had been best friends since that first roll call in homeroom 104 at Rialto Junior High. Mr. Johnson had stood up at the front of the class room and called off names alphabetically. Glancing up to check for a raised hand and look at the face that went with it. Then he’d look down at his clipboard, say the name to himself and check it off.

When he got to her, Rae Corly raised her hand and said, “Here,” like everybody else.

But Mr. Johnson looked up and down and then up again and said, “Oh. You’re a girl,” and a wave of laughter rolled through the room. Rae covered her face in her hands to hide her blush and for the umpteenth time hated her name. Why couldn’t her mother have given her a real girl’s name, like Alice or Mary? When he called Sami Williams, the whole thing happened again but Sami didn’t hide her head or blush. She glared around the room until she locked eyes with Rae, and that was it. Funny how a small thing like a name can bind two people together.

Over the years they had spent an inordinate amount of time inventing occupations and lives to match their names. Sami might say, “Ray took auto shop in high school and he’s gonna work for his Uncle Tony at the old Texaco.”

And Rae would pick it up and embellish the story – “Yeah, well Tony’s got a chop shop out in the back and when he has a heart attack at fifty, Ray’s gonna take it over and upgrade from Chevys and Fords to Beamers and Jags and make a fortune.”

“That’d be about the time he finds out that his real last name is Corleone and the mob takes him in like a brother.” Sami added. They had watched Godfather 2 the night before.

“Good for business but not so hot for the wife and kiddies,” Rae said.

Sami smacked her on the shoulder, “What wife? He’s a playboy!”

“Says who?”

“Says me!”

“No! He has to be married, it’s what they do, you know that. Family is everything.” She growled it out in a fake Godfather voice and they both cracked up. They’d riff on Sami’s name for a while (they took turns), and then do their homework.

They kept this up all the way through college where Sami got engaged to a pre-med student and then married him in an ostentatious full-blown church wedding. Rae was disgusted and refused to have any part in it. She had discovered feminism with a vengeance, burned all her bras (which was really no big deal as she had tiny tits anyway), shaved her head in sisterhood and started spelling her name with a Y.

“How could you sell out to the bourgeois establishment?” Rae screamed at Sami over the phone. She'd thought they had a deal.

“It’s always been my plan to get married, you knew that. Please come to the wedding.” Sami begged.

“Not on your life! No way am I gonna watch you make a fool of yourself!”

“Asshole!”

“Shithead!”

They both slammed down their phones and didn’t speak for six years.

Rae gave up blatant subversion of the establishment for covert ops from within it. and graduated from college with a Masters in Business. She got a job as an intern on Market Street. She wore power suits and 3” heels and had her hair done twice a week, highlights once a month.

Sami got divorced from the doctor and moved to New Mexico with her fat monthly alimony checks. She’d called Rae to cry about the divorce and now they were talking again.

“What’s the plan now?” Rae asked her.

“I don’t know, I never thought I’d need a back up. Getting married was it.”

Rae was standing in her fancy office staring at the pink slip in her hand wishing she’d had any plan at all. “I just got fired.” She said.

“Oh Rae, what are you gonna do now?”

“Shit! I honestly don’t know.” She told her best friend. They just breathed at each other over the phone for a while.

And then Sami said in her old voice, “Well, what would Ray do? What would Sammy do?” Suddenly they were kids again and they both had to laugh.

“I think Ray would take a break from the city and drive out to see his old friend in New Mexico,” Rae said. “Then they’d go out for tacos and beers and catch up on old times.”

“I think Sammy’d like that, he’s got a spare room and he knows this great place to fish on the Rio Grande and a bar that’s got the hottest chicks in town. Maybe they’d both get lucky.”

“Maybe they would, you never can tell with those guys.”

2009-06-13T18:15:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I did not use Lenny from Mice and Men, this is the name of the dead guy my father recovered from the bottom of the lake for the Park Rangers, but it is odd that they are the same. Hmmmm...

WHAT I WANT TO SAY IS...

What I want to say is, I have tried and tried to explain this but nobody will listen to me. I know that the people of this hick town don’t think I am able to do murder, but I did do it.

I even went down to Sheriff Moby’s office and told Deputy Carl all the gory details of how I broke into Mr. Dukowski’s house and killed him. Well, Carl wrote it all down and typed it up. It took forever because he types with two fingers and not his whole hands like you’re supposed to.

Then he had me sign it. The whole time I was talking and he was typing he kept explaining to me that this was called a con-fess-ion, like I didn’t know that. But mostly what made me so mad was the way he was talking to me like I was a little kid. I am not a little kid; I will be twenty-eight next month on the fourteenth. I am a grown man and also very strong.

When I signed it he stood next to me patting my shoulder like I was some kind of stray dog he felt sorry for. I just hate it when people pat me. The people at the Special ED. Class I used to go to never did that. They know that just because a person is a little slow, he still needs to be treated with respect. I like that word a lot, respect. There’s a song about it, the woman who sings it spells it out for you. Another word I like is dignity.

When Carl patted me, he said, “Lenny, I am real glad you came down here today.” But I could tell by his fake smile that he really wasn’t. I could also tell that he didn’t believe a word of my con-fess-ion. Even though I put stuff in there that nobody else would know but the guy who did the crime.

Like taking the wheels off Mr. Dukowski’s walker. I am very good with my hands and some people even pay me to be their handyman.

Some people would say that taking some old wheels off a walker doesn’t equal murder. But I say that if you had been in and out of that house as many time as I have been you would know that Mr. Dukowski was half blind and that it would take him a while to notice that the wheels were gone. Also there is three steps down from the living room to the hall and a door right there to the basement that is kept open a lot.

Now I want to say that I am very sorry that I didn’t get the new wheels on sooner and about the big mess at the bottom of the stairs where Mr. Dukowski hit. I don’t know who they got to clean that up.

Anyway I have told everybody about how I killed him and I am willing to take my licks like a man. Only, like I said, nobody will listen to me. That is not respect.

Maybe tomorrow when I fix old lady Johnson’s toaster and her house goes up on fire, they will listen to me then.

2009-06-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

GRADUATION

Since being released from the Looney bin I have lived in three different places. The first was a type of half-way house with carefully structured day and night activities, but no bars on the windows, only wire mesh embedded in the safety glass. To be honest, I missed the bars at the hospital at first.

I’d heard visitors from the outside comment on how horrifyingly cruel those bars made the hospital appear. But to many of us on the inside the bars represented safety. They protected us from the dangers of the outside world.

We used to discuss this in group. Karla always said that her husband who’d been trying to kill her for years couldn’t possibly get past them. Tom believed that the Republican Conspiracy of global destruction was kept at bay by the slim strands of steel. I was convinced that the bars could magically repel my parent’s vengeful ghosts. The metal shone like silver in the moonlight and everyone knows that silver has magical properties. Even the Lone Ranger with his silver bullet knew that.

In my year at the half-way house, I managed to convince myself and the staff that I was improving. What I didn’t tell anybody was that much of that improvement was based on the fact that I was allowed to wear jewelry again. This is not something one should share with one’s shrink.

But I wasted no time in arranging an excursion to the vendor on the corner of 12th and Oak whose tray of inexpensive Mexican jewelry included bracelets of all kinds. I took my time teasing myself by trying on even the most inappropriate. Until finally I allowed myself to hold the simple circle bangle I’d wanted all along.

After a satisfying haggle with the vendor I’d slipped the bangle over my left hand onto my wrist, where it glinted at me in the sunshine radiating its protective magic. I bought two more bracelets from him before I moved to the group home, where there was merely a modicum of structure and not even wire mesh in the glass. My three bracelets tinkled merrily while I did my chores and filled out job applications under the watchful eye of the house mother.

I was able to land a job at the Salvation Army Thrift store with the help of social services. Each time a silver bracelet appeared in the jewelry case I bought it – luckily I got a 10% employees discount.

Six months later I upgraded to being a cashier at Ross’ Department store and moved into a three bedroom apartment with two other women from the group home. I still see my shrink once a month and now that I the assistant manager at Ross, he’s encouraging me in my desire to live alone.

Each time I see him he admires my growing collection of bracelets, but I don’t believe he sees them for what they really are. How can I explain to him that my mental illness exploded within me instantaneously, whereas reclaiming my sanity is a gradual process; achieved one
silver bracelet at a time.

I don’t think he’d see it as clearly as I.

2009-06-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

The next five are from last weeks online thing. This first one was just plain fun. The intensity of the next three made me want some good old fashioned fiction. I like the conveluted mix of all these characters and metaphors. HA!

A GOOD LIE

My best friend Felicity lies all the time. I keep telling her that lies are like spider webs. Once you start spinning, there’s no end. – You catch a few flies and it messes up the web, then you gotta go clean em up, repair, reweave -- on and on forever.

But she just smiles like The Madonna and says, “Querida, a good lie is like a hot fudge sundae. It goes down smooth, tastes yummy, and fills you up.”

Then I say to her, “What if you’re allergic to ice cream?” She doesn’t have an answer to that. She’s been getting away with her lies since we were little kids, but this time I think she’s in deep ca-ca.

Felicity has been dating Reynaldo Juarez for almost a year and lying to her mama about it. She uses me for cover sometimes even though she knows I will not lie for her.

The problem is that Rey is the lieutenant of a Southside LA gang’s Jefe, and they are doing some serious drug dealing over there. Or maybe the problem is that Felicity’s mama, Marina, is the amor of the East side gang’s Jefe, yet also a strict Catholic. She will not abide drugs or criminals in her sight. I have yet to make sense of this. But Marina always gets what she demands, no matter how conflicting it seems.

Anyway, I believe that Marina is so in love with Jorge she will say anything to him and unfortunately she tells him about her daughter and the young man she is dating, Rey. And of course Jorge knows who this Rey really is. And, even though Marina professes to be this great Catholic, she once was a member of the LA street gangs in her youth. South or East, I’m not sure.

But I do know for sure that Marina does not approve of her daughter’s affiliation with Rey, and I think she has decided to do something about it. Word on the street is that there will be a battle tonight and odds are on the East side gang. Felicity isn’t worried about it, she is listening to her heart she says, but I believe the body part she is listening with is much lower.

She also assures me that her mama told her all would be well and there is no danger. I have been trying to convince Felicity all day to stay with me tonight. There is serious danger on the streets. But she will not listen to me, she believes her mama. I am very afraid, as I don’t believe anything Marina says, even in her Catholic mode.

After all, where do you think that Felicity learned to lie? Eh?

2009-06-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

Sort of an essay, She is still listening to me. I really like this one.

AS FOR GOD...

I talk to God on a regular basis, but I’m never sure if she’s listening. For one thing I think the phone lines get clogged up with so many minor requests that it takes the under-grads a long time to weed out the important stuff and pass it along to her inbox. Also they might get overwhelmed by the sheer volume and make unintentional mistakes, for all I know my prayers might be lying in the slush pile.

Then there’s the time lapse issue. It’s quite possible that any year I might spend thumping my foot, impatiently awaiting a response – like last month would be good! – could be only a half blink of her eye. That broadens the margin of error between my definition of instant grat and hers. Thus it becomes even more ironic that two of the things I pray for are patience and letting go of control.

Have I mentioned the “Bigger Picture” aspect? I can go online and download pictures from the Hubble telescope of our galaxy and the many others beyond us. I’m not sure if the pictures that show millions of other galaxies and ours as a teeny dot on the edge are photos or artists renderings. It doesn’t matter to me, I still believe them. And I pray that we earthlings just may have gotten past the egotistical delusion that we are the only intelligence in the neighborhood. I mean, really.

The final thing I’m concerned abut here is that I might not even be on her mailing list, since both my parents were atheists and religion was not a topic we discussed. But even though I set out at ten years old to do a taste test sampling of every nearby religion, I never actually became a card carrying member of any of them.

You could say I took something that worked for me from each one and sort of cobbled together my own version. Hey, I was only ten. But it still works for me; it’s got all the basics, like the golden rule stuff and belief in a higher power much bigger and smarter than me. The stuff I couldn’t stomach I left alone: elitism, prejudice, misogynist, inquisitions. You get the idea.

Anyway I’d like to take this opportunity to make it clear to her once and for all that I am here. I may carry my own card, but it’s definitely got her Higher Powernesses name on it.

But really, as for God, I think she’s known me all along.

2009-06-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

most of this one is fiction, but the clock was my grandmothers, tho not tea pot shaped , it is this amazing pale green. I still have it, and against all odds, I do still believe in happy endings.

CONFESSING

Although she knew it was totally irrational, given the realities of the fifty-plus years she’d been alive, Janine still believed in happy endings. Most of the time she kept this belief sequestered deep within her, feeling slightly embarrassed by it.

As a successful litigator she could logically argue that there was no evidence to support it. But then again there was that persistent little voice inside her that kept insisting, “Someday,” accompanied by Disney overtures and smarmy sunsets.

Janine hadn’t survived an abusive childhood, the rigors of law school, and countless failed relationships by listening to that sentimental crap, or had she? Was it the tough, no-nonsense woman who had kept her going all those years, or the child inside her who kept holding out her cupped hands full of hope. How many pro-bono cases had she taken on in the belief that she could make a difference in some poor schmuks life? And here and there, she had.

A little late to be analyzing that now. She glanced up at the pale green tea-pot shaped wall clock above her sink and realized that she had exactly forty-five minutes to make it to the courthouse for her first case of the day. She shrugged on her jacket, and bent to grab her briefcase. She stole one more look at the clock. It had been her grandmother’s, a woman who’d believed in hope until the day she died.

Janine had fought her siblings for that clock; it was the only thing she’d wanted. The loud tick, tick of it reminded her of her grandmother’s perseverance, and her stubborn belief in the possibilities of happy endings.

Janine didn’t have to tell anybody she’d inherited that belief, she just needed to get down to the courthouse and try to make it happen – one more time.

2009-06-06T19:23:00.000-07:00

I don't know, fact is wierder than fiction, and genetic families are not as good as the people you get to choose...I wish it were different...

MY MOTHER WARNED ME

“You won’t fight, will you?” My mother put her hand on my knee, her words soft and pleading. And though we were driving home from her doctor’s appointment and those words were completely unrelated to any subject we’d talked about for months, I knew exactly what she meant.

At the next stop light she said it again and this time I replied, “No, I won’t fight.”
It was a promise I didn’t know I couldn’t keep.

“Don’t fight your sister over the inheritance when I die,” is what she meant. I wish I’d asked her why.

All my adult life I’d watched my parents prepare their elaborate pretense of a ‘normal’ family’s life each time my sister came to visit. They would busily stuff all the ugly realities of sexual abuse and extreme dysfunction under the couch – deep in the closets, behind moldering unused clothes and paint their faces with smiles. They would dust off the playing cards and trot out an itinerary of interesting excursions to entertain her. Feasts were planned, pots set bubbling on the stove with fragrant soups.

But everything was done with an edge of fear.

What threat did she hold over them? Had she ever put it into words, or was it just the ordinary life-long fear that my father’s aberrant behavior and my mother’s enablement would be exposed?

Imagine how you’d prepare for the visit of a known berserker on a weeks leave from the State Mental Hospital -- Like that. Plan on lots of soothing gestures, placating smiles, and careful avoidance of known triggers. It smacked of blackmail to me. I think that somewhere in there they’d all made a deal to keep the beast in her at rest, and I missed that part.

I watched the same play unfold year after year but never knew why it had such a long run. The script was so trite.

When my father died, my mother kept it up for another seven years, and then she died. Since I didn’t know the play or the speeches, and wasn’t privy to the pact, the tradition died with them.

Then I watched in amazement as the berserker leapt out -- retreated – and reappeared, with stunning regularity. Those five words my mother had said were the only warning I was given, I’m still angry about that.

Yet over the years I’ve learned to deal with that beast and all her attendant guises and assorted personalities with an interesting concept my parents never used. It’s called Truth. And even though it doesn’t always work for my sister, it consistently works for me.

The six year Inheritance War is nearly over now, so the relevance of my understanding her is close to a moot point. But sometimes late at night I still wonder…

What was the threat; was there a pact? Who wrote the play? I think of the stress and the legal bills I could have avoided if I had known.

If I could have that day in the car back, I would pull off the road and park. And then I would not move another inch until my mother explained the fear in her eyes to me when she said, “You won’t fight, will you?”

2009-06-06T19:19:00.000-07:00

MARRIAGE

Tom and his wife had been married fifty years, and then she died. Their friends brought him casseroles, sympathy, and willing ears for two years. Then they started bringing relatives, widows, and divorcees as potential replacement material.

Tom was having none of it.

The only thing he wanted to talk about was his dead wife. He name had been Joyce, but he called her Joy. His Joy.

He told the same stories of their perfect life together over and over and at first the friends clucked and nodded in sympathy. The widows patted his arm and the divorcees shifted subtly closer to him on the couch.

“Oh you poor man,” they said. “She must have been lovely,” they said. And Tom would say, “Yes, she was.” Smile sadly, and stare off into the past.

Then came Jewel. She was a spunky 68 year old woman who bought the bungalow next to Tom’s. She wore shorts, t shirts, and baseball caps, and moved in with only one small truck full of furniture and a few boxes. Tom watched the unpacking from his living room crammed with fifty years of furniture and felt sorry for her.

Jewel heckled the movers in a loud voice and when they were done she handed them each a cold soda and a big tip.

In the ensuing weeks Tom watched Jewel tackle the neglected yard, ripping out overgrown ivy, and pruning the rose bushes with no mercy. Half the time she forgot to put on her gloves. Joy would never have forgotten, she had taken such pride in her white hands and immaculate fingernails.

When Tom finally introduced himself, Jewel stuck out her hand to shake and said, “Hi neighbor, like a beer?” So Tom started to tell her all about how he and Joy didn’t drink.
“Joy. That your wife? She inside?”

Tom leapt into the opportunity to tell his tale of Joy again, but Jewel interrupted him.
“Oh, she’s passed on then. Sorry to hear it. So’s my Phil. Well, nice to know Phil’s got good company up there,” she glanced up at the sky and grinned.

“Got to get back to the yard now, that philodendram needs serious cutting back. Got company coming on Saturday and we’ll need the space.”

“Why?” Tom asked. The yard seemed big enough to him for a few tables and chairs.

“Have to have the room to set up the Croquette set. Nothing like the sound of one croquette ball smacking another one out of play. You’re welcome to come on over and join in, always room for one more.” She laughed so clear and loose.

Tom didn’t go; he sat in his den going over old pictures of him and Joy. Jewels friends asked her about the new neighbors, were they nice, did she invite them?

Jewel looked up from her croquette ball and said, “Got a nice one over there, but it’s gonna take him some time to come on over.”

“Here?” some one asked her.

“Nope,” she said. “To the present.” Then she smacked the shit out of that ball.

2009-05-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

These next five are from last weeks online group. I thought it was a very good week for writing.

When I started this first one, what I had in mind is definately not where it ended up. But, hey, Sometimes that just happens. Thank God!

A MAN ONCE TOLD ME...

A few years after my father died I was going through all the stuff in his workshop hoping I might be able to throw most of it away. I couldn’t do it. I kept expecting him to come swinging through the door trailing the oxygen hose from the cannula clamped to his nose behind him and yelling at me to leave his shit alone.

I reminded myself that he was dead and turned the radio on to a really loud rock and roll station just to spite him.

My father and I had a love hate relationship that I am still chewing at six years after his death. Part of the love was that we had many of the same attributes, things I’d learned from him. We were both entertainers; great singers and storytellers, and larger than life characters.

Unfortunately he didn’t want to share the stage with anybody, much less me. He never actually said those words, but he made it excruciatingly clear to me in other ways. He interrupted my stories, sang louder, drank harder, and made snide comments that humiliated me. Or he might simply leave the room taking the audience with him.

He could do this because it was his house, his friends, and he had a lot of cool things to show them in other rooms. For instance he had a bright red, two man submarine in the outside garage. His ace in the hole to get the audience moving was to say, “Wanta see my sub?”

Of course everybody wanted to see that sub. And so they would all troop outside, following him and hanging on to his every word of the story about how he got the sub, put it together, and used it to find treasure in our lake. He’d stand next to it while each person climbed the ladder and eased themselves into it, a benevolent observer.

I would hang back watching him being the star of his own show and knowing there was only one star allowed in the room, and it wasn’t me.

Someone once gave him a T shirt that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” and Dad made that his credo.

The sub was just one of the things he accumulated to keep on the top of that most toys list. Boats, cars, prestige, money, even the accouterments of his dying illness were the biggest and the best. His motorized chair was a maroon Mercedes Benz of chairs, with gold trim. The electric hoist that got it into the trunk of his Cadillac was the best money could buy.

But the fact is that no matter how many toys you have, when you die, you’re just as dead as if you had none. I think he finally realized that in his last year when all the toys he had couldn’t take the fear of death out of his eyes.

The night he died my mother said to me, “You’re the man of the house now.” And even though I’m a woman I never thought to question that. What I thought was, “Yeah! It’s my turn to be the star.”

But since then I’ve decided that it’s a legacy I don’t want to carry. When I’m in a roomful of people now, I try to remember what a friend of mine told me long ago at a jam session when I was hogging the show. He took me aside and quietly said, “Other people want a turn, Chris.”

Oh. Duh.

So that’s what I want when I die, to be the woman who remembers that everybody wants to be a star, and to know enough to shut up and let somebody else have a turn.

2009-05-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

This one was just plain old fun!

PANTS DOWN

So here’s what happened. Me and Bill were getting ready for bed. Bill (that’s my husband) had hopped into the shower and was singing along with the Rolling Stones on the shower radio – runs on batteries you know. I got that at K-Mart on the sale rack last month and Bill just loves it. Of course he can’t carry a tune, but that’s why he likes that radio in the stall there with him cause he can turn it up real loud. Then when he sings it almost sounds like Mick.

Anyway, I had just taken my jeans off and laid em on the bed when I heard this terrible crash and then some girl screaming help help. So I ran out the front door to see if I could – help, that is.

Talk about your fender-bender. There was two cars all smashed up together. One was Mrs. Lukowski, she got hit by a carful of crazy teenagers just as she was pulling into her driveway, lucky for her it was on the passenger side. I think those kids were drunk or stoned or something. The boy driving bonked his head on the steering wheel or the airbag, one. And the girl in the passenger seat, (probably his girlfriend cause she was the one screaming, help help and then his name which I am still not sure it was Wayne or Juan or what, she was screaming real high and drawn out).

Of course all the neighbors had rushed out of their houses too, so there was this big crowd all running around in circles telling each other what to do. Well, I thought call 911 and I reached for my cell phone which I keep in the left hand pocket of my jeans and at that same exact instant my neighbor Marge who was right next to me by then said real loud, “Wilma, where are your pants?!”

Thank God my t shirt was oversized and I could sorta yank it down over my panties. By that time almost everybody on the block had their cell phones out calling 911 and the operator was telling people to hang up cause they already had someone on the way.

Well, I couldn’t see what I could do to help especially in my pantless condition so I ran back up to my porch and grabbed the door knob which I had forgotten I’d locked before I started getting ready for bed and pounded on the door and yelled for Bill. I could hear him still singing away in the shower.

Marge finally saw that I was locked out and went to her house and got me a afghan off her couch to wrap around my butt.

The cops and ambulances had got there and everybody in the wreck turned out to be okay. Though Mrs. Lukowski kept hollering, “I’m gonna sue!” Over and over till the cops calmed her down and then they took that boy to the hospital to make sure he didn’t have a concussion but they also arrested him for DUI. Not sure how that works, can you be arrested in the hospital?

Well anyway, Bill finally got out of the shower and came out to see what all the commotion was about and I was right there at the door to make sure it didn’t slam shut again. From now on when I go out the door I’m gonna check the knob from the outside to make sure it’s not locked.

Like I said, thank God that shirt I had on was so big and long cause I had on this little red thong that Bill had bought me, I’d never worn it before. And now I don’t think I’ll ever wear it again.

And that’s what happened.

2009-05-30T16:31:00.000-07:00

The prompt for this one was 'What I dream.' I dream of having a family that loves me.

DREAMS

The house is all wood. In every room wide windows open in welcome, invite the outdoors inside. It’s always spring or summer and there are no mosquitoes. The oak floors glow as if lighted from within, but it’s more likely they are burnished by all the bare feet that glide across them.

This house, like the others around it, has many rooms and although each room has a door, they are seldom closed. Striding down the expansive hall I peer in at the furnishings, taking pictures with my mind. A brass bed here with a white crocheted cover, a salmon-pink piano shawl tossed over the intricacy of the shined footboard. A mahogany sleigh bed further down, its matching dresser with the beveled mirror on the wall next to the window. A white runner embroidered with tiny blue flowers covers the dresser top and hangs down on either side. A silver mirror and brush lie askew having just been used. There are long red hairs in the bristles.

A deep window seat in the living room, its thick cushion and plump pillows all covered in a large floral printed cotton fabric, beckons to passing readers. It’s already taken. A young girl, her legs tucked up beneath her, twiddles her blonde hair as she reads. Her book is thick, I can’t see the title. But it must be good, she is too engrossed to answer my wave.

The French doors are open and past the redwood deck broad steps lead down to the meadow. I see my friends out there, the people I call my family. Women, men, children who call me family too, though there’s no blood tie.

There’s an impromptu game of catch going on. Tents and tables at the edge of the meadow provide shade and food and company. I can smell the chicken grilling on the barbeques and hear the clink of ice when someone fishes a soda or beer out of the ice filled washtubs. The beach is past the tents, a sliver of the green river just visible beyond the trees. There are smiles and laughter on the wind.

One black haired woman is sobbing by a yellow kayak on the beach, but its okay, friends are around her. A teenage boy gently rubs her back. The mother of the girl in the window seat is crouched down holding her hand. A fat man stands by her shoulder speaking quietly to her, touching her arm now and then.

I nod at them all and walk on to the waters edge, knowing the dark haired woman’s needs are being met. I’ll take a swim, fill a plate, drink some wine, play some catch. Maybe later it will be me sobbing, or a wounded child that I will hold.

It’s why we meet here in our dreams– we orphans of the other, real world. We help each other through.

2009-05-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

I've hated this thing for years...

CACTUS

The huge prickly pear cactus had been growing undisturbed by the steps in the back yard for years. Jim figured twenty years, maybe even thirty. Its big flat paddles reached up ten feet tall and spread out at least that wide at the base.

Jim had always hated it. If he went carelessly down the second tier of steps by its lair it might reach out and spear him with one of its inch long vicious needles. Sometimes he’d swing an arm or hand too close to an emerging new paddle and get a fine coating of tiny spines embedded in his skin. They hurt like hell and were barely visible in the sun, virtually impossible to remove. But within an hour, a maddening itch and dots of blisters in his flesh would show him those he’d missed.

His mother, Velma, had loved that plant. She’d never pruned it, and seemed to glory in its ferocity. She only let him take off a paddle or two when they’d grown out obnoxiously past the hand rail and were therefore more capable of attacking any passing flesh.

Velma was five years dead now, and she’d left the cactus and the house to Jim. Each time he passed the cactus he cursed it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to destroy the thing. Whether it was out of respect for its age or his mother he didn’t know, but the most he could manage was judicious pruning.

At the end of last winter, the prickly pear developed a rash of small white spots which Jim ignored for quite some time. Unhindered, the spots multiplied until they painted both sides of most of the paddles and hung down the bottom edges like long white beards. A leprous cotton candy rot. Jim tried spraying it off with water, but it just grew back. In the spring fruit grew along the tops of the paddles and opened large yellow blooms. But although the bees hovered above the flowers they did not land. Even the bees knew something was drastically wrong.

Jim finally looked up cactus diseases on the internet and found a picture of his with the same sticky white fluff on it, and under the picture was the name for it.
Cochineal insect infestation. The article said that once it was this far along, there were no remedies. The minuscule insects burrowed deep into the flesh of the cactus and laid their eggs, and every patch of white was protective cover for those eggs. He checked six different websites and they all said the same thing. The only solution was drastic surgery. Chop off any parts infected with the white spots and throw them in the trash. Disinfect the knife between cuttings.

The advanced rot gave Jim the justification he wanted to finally get rid of the cactus. He’d started the job at nine am Saturday morning, his biggest knife, barbeque tongs, and a twenty gallon garbage can at the ready. He wore thick leather gloves to protect his hands.

By ten-thirty he’d already stopped twice to pick cactus spines out of his knuckles and realized just how heavy each twelve inch paddle was. He could barely lift the first half-full garbage can to empty it into the dumpster. So he pulled the dolly and another can out from under the porch and only filled the cans a third-full next time. He took periodic breaks to minister to his punctured aching hands and think about how many trips he’d made to the dumpster and how much cactus there still was left to cut.

Right after lunch he grabbed a 2” thick paddle with his tongs and it shot a black needle right into his left cheek like a bullet. Was it only his imagination that the cactus seemed to be fighting its dismemberment?

By four pm his arms were shaking from hefting weighty 3” thick slabs to the trash cans. The tongs had broken in half and he’d dropped the last paddle on his foot. It sent two needles through his boot and the edge left a dusting of spines on his shin. Enough was enough, he didn’t have the strength to hoist the last two can loads into the dumpster. So he washed the goo off his tools, the sweat off his face and neck and quit.

He went into the house, grabbed a cold beer, the tweezers and some salve, and sat back on the porch to observe the gaping hole where the monster had been. It was amazing that all those years of growth could have been decimated in one afternoon, but he was glad it was gone.

Then he noticed the clumps of aloe that had been huddling under the giant for so long. They seemed to be stretching up into the gap. He’d almost forgotten they were there. With a slurp of his beer he toasted their health and growth. Wonderful aloe: beneficial, healing, and NO spines!

But after he tended his wounds he thought to toast the vanquished beast. “Here’s to you, you bastard. You fought a good fight, but I won!”

Then he went into the house to see what was on TV.

2009-05-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

What's the best part of waking up?

COFFEE

One cup of weak instant, that’s all it takes now to wake me up. Used to be a whole pot of dark roast, or endless miniature white mugs of café Cubano; so sweet the sugar rush was as strong as the caffeine. Back in the day.

I tell my friends, “don’t call before ten, I haven’t even had my coffee.” But really how much oomph is in a teaspoon of instant?

That coffee thing -- that’s just my cover story. For my friends and for myself – a cup to hold in my hands and sip from while I sit on the back porch and stare out at the birds and the tree and the wind.

The real ritual that wakes me up now is that starring –pause – picking up my pen and writing in my journal -- pause – letting my mind wander along it’s strange and delightful paths. – pause – Just me and my brain and the writing. Coffee is just my cover.

Don’t tell, okay?

2009-05-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

These next four pieces are from last weeks online group.
The first one is my very favorite, I had so much fun writing it, I shoulda been taxed!

SHOW AND TELL

Hi. This week I had friends come to visit at my house. We had a lot of fun and today for show and tell, I’m gonna tell you how much fun we had.

Here’s the tickets from when we went to Hoover Dam on Wednesday. We took the Power Plant tour – see it says that right on the ticket. We didn’t take the whole dam tour cause it cost too much. Then we got this free button and this bumper sticker. They have lots of red, white, and blue on them for America!

Then we came home and Bob cooked grilled steaks on the bar-be-que. Here’s the fancy McCormick grill mates pepper he sprinkled on the steaks but the lid fell off while he was shaking it and there was wayy too much pepper. We scrapped off some of it but there was still a bunch left. It was real good though I had to drink a lotta water between bites of steak.

Thursday we went sailing on the big sailboat and Bob got to steer. We put up all the sails but there wasn’t enough wind so we had to keep the engine going too. That’s called motor sailing. Here’s a picture of Bob steering. Here’s a picture of Billie sitting in the sun. Don’t worry; she put on a lotta sun screen so she wouldn’t get burned. See.

Here’s a picture of the five antelope we saw drinking at the edge of the lake in Castle Cove. That’s my favorite cove in the whole lake. The antelope had big white spots on their butts. Billie said that was so they could follow each other at night, like car head lights. You can see the white spots right here but you have to look real hard cause they blend into the desert rocks.

Then we came home and got all cleaned up and went out onto the Strip to see this Cirque de Soleil show called “Love.” Here’s the tickets. Our seats were right next to the stage and you could see the people’s faces while they twirled around on the trapeze thingys. The bungee jumpers boinged up real high almost through the roof. I want one of those bungee things and one of those trapeze things at my house.

Here’s a piece of red crape paper that fell out of the ceiling at the end of the show. There was a lotta stuff happening on that stage and it was hard to see all of it. My eyes got sore from trying. See how red they still are?

Then we went home but we were still so excited from the show we sat up and talked until midnight! That’s way past my bedtime.

This morning my friends Billie and Bob helped me set up an awning in my back yard and we talked a lot more until they had to leave. That part was real sad. I’m gonna miss them.

Oh one more thing, here’s the bag of all the wine bottles we opened and drank. Bob likes beer better, here’s all his bottles.

This last picture is of me and my cats Rocky and Max waving good-by to our friends. We are saying “We love you! Come back real soon!”

But you can’t see that in the picture.

The End

2009-05-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

It's been wayyy too long since I felt this way. But I am happy to report: It's baacckkk! Hurrah!

FAMILIAR

How long has it been since I opened my eyes in bed I the morning and smiled at the possibilities before me? Too long – millennia or merely years?

For the last three days, I’ve felt this little place inside me where laughter and fun used to be, filling up again – swelling like good bread dough with lots of healthy yeast percolating away – rising. Rising! All those particles of yeast nudging each other gleefully, a happy conspiracy to surprise me with a fragrant delectable extra sourdough loaf of fun.

The yeast is chortaling, “Wait’ll she sees this! Wait’ll she smells this! Her taste buds are gonna go ballistic!”

It’s like knowing all my best friends have gotten together and are planning a gigantic surprise party for me. I’m touched, and excited, and a little humbled. I’m also careful not to spoil the surprise.

But all through these days little bubbles of laughter pop out of my mouth, and here and there parts of a song.

I remember this, it’s so familiar.

When the loaf has risen and baked and been set out on the counter with candles in it, all those parts of me that have been waiting patiently to be resurrected will jump up and yell “Surprise!” And I will be properly and thankfully delighted. I’ll blow out the candles but I won’t make a speech. I’ll just say Thank You, and maybe Welcome Back.

And then I’ll sing really loud right through my big fat smile.

2009-05-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

OFF BALANCE

Cerise fell down in the Wal-Mart this morning. She didn’t trip on the spill in aisle four where the yellow collapsible wet floor signs had been set up. Nobody had accosted her, no screaming out of control children had run into her legs. She just fell down.

She’d been near the pharmacy area scanning the shelves for a miracle cure for her dizziness. For a week now she had had that swirly feeling inside her head like she’d been on the big Wheel of Danger ride at the carnival too many times.

As a kid she and her friends would actually pay good money to be herded up the rickety ramp, inserted into those coffin sized slots and stand there gripping the bars in anticipation as the bored Carney guy came around and clipped the safety belt on (which she’d finally realized was patently ridiculous as the thing was at least a foot away from her body).

Thirty years later in Wal-Mart she was getting that same weak-kneed feeling for free. Now she would have paid to have it disappear.

Glad that she’d worn her purple muumuu which puddled gracefully around her butt and old lady chicken legs, she sat on the concrete floor and tried to get her eyes to focus on the band-aids and Bactine in front of her. Her fellow shoppers just walked around her like she was invisible. Weirder things had happened at Wally World than an old brown lady on the floor, she guessed.

Cerise recognized an employee by his distinctive blue cotton shirt and name badge racing past her towards the check out counters. He kept yelling, “Code 24, code 24!” which probably meant “shopper down” in Wal-Mart vernacular.

Would they call an ambulance? God, that would be ridiculous. If she could just get this dizziness under control and get up she could move over an aisle and act like it was somebody else on the floor before the manager got to her.

A little boy stopped in front of her and stared deep into her eyes. He scrunched up his nose, put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Lady, you all right?”

Cerise shook her head. “Dizzy, can’t get up.” The boy sped off around the corner and she felt deserted.

The band-aid labels were coming into focus, the dizziness was draining out of her into the floor. If she could grab a hold of the shelving, maybe she could get up.

Suddenly the little boy was back dragging a man by the hand. The man had tattoos all over his arms and looked dangerous. Cerise flinched. But he leaned down and said, “Need a hand?”

“Yes, thank you,” she told him. And he stood behind her, put his arms around her chest and picked her up like a sack of flour. When she was on her feet her head felt clearer.

“Do you want to sit down? There’s a bench over there in the pharmacy.” He said.

“I’m fine now,” she said. “If I can just get to my car, I’ll be okay.” So the scary strong man linked her arm in his and gallantly escorted her out into the parking lot to her old beige Chevy Impala and handed her into it.

Cerise had giggled when they passed the manager heading towards the pharmacy with two paramedics in tow.

She buckled her seat belt, waved to the man to show she was okay and started the car. As she drove out of the parking lot, she vowed to call her doctor as soon as she got home and make an appointment to find out what the dizziness was.

Cerise never wanted to fall down in Wal-Mart again.

2009-05-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

HOME

In her mind, Mona had this frosted pick meringue-covered picture of home. A circle of a cake house two tiers tall, with those perfect little sugar rosebuds pressed lovingly down into the top icing.

Her real home was the back seat of a faded green Dodge Dart parked at the end of a dirt track in the desert. The meringue she dreamed of would have melted.

But when she lay down in the back seat of her car at night with all the windows opened and listened to the coyote’s talk she could close her eyes and see that cakey home.

Although it changed colors in her head it was always pastels. She’d never seen a real house painted those colors or made in that shape. Real houses here were all the palette shades of sand or, in some parts of town, bright pink or blue or orange. And they were all boxy: square, rectangles, dominoes, geometrically opposed to her circle.

The inside of her Dodge was boxy too. The only circles inside it were the steering wheel which had lost its function when she couldn’t buy gas anymore, and the springs under the thinning gray upholstery of the back seat that were digging into her shoulder and hip. She shut her eyes again but it was no use. She squirmed. The back seat was too short for her lanky body, and she needed to stretch out. She popped open the door by her pillow and hung her head out, then her arms.

She flopped over onto her belly, and let her ands rest in the dirt outside the door. The cake fantasy wasn’t working; maybe she’d just go with the shape. She smoothed the dirt with the flat of her hand and built a circle with the pebbles she’d moved. She peopled it with used toothpicks off the floor of the Dodge. A whole family of nice people, not like what she’d had, not like what she’d lost.

The good thing about toothpick people is that you could make them anything you wanted.
Tomorrow she’d walk to the Senior Center, it was free bread day. They were nice to her there, called her by name, “Hi Mona”, invited her to lunch. They accepted who she was, who anybody was: fat, old, thin, rich, or poor enough to have to live in your car. Also the front of the building was round; the lunch tables were round, even the receptionist’s face was round. It was a homey kind of place.

If they invited her for lunch again she’d stay.

They might have desert after lunch, maybe they’d have cake.

2009-05-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

Is there anything out there we really know for sure? It's been a strange, yet fun, week. I wasn't going to post this, it's a little preachy. But then again, maybe it's time for every one to speak out a little.

I DON'T KNOW

I often think that there are more things I don’t know than those I do.

Why are cockroaches so impervious to destruction? Why do human beings mindlessly seek it? Why is our own good green earth spinning out of control? And why has it taken this global crisis for most of us to even begin to admit we may have a problem, much less consider ways to fix it?

Why didn’t the Big Three American carmakers start re-tooling for small electric cars twenty years ago? Why is Madoff still smirking? And why are Wall Street executives still getting obscene bonuses?

Why did I ever have kids? Why did I believe that I could be a better parent than my own dysfunctional mother and father?

Is there really a purpose to any thing I do? Or is life just a mush of ingredients that accidentally fell into a bubbling pot on the back burner of some god’s stove.

I just don’t know.

What I do know is that, against all odds, I am still upright. Plodding along through each day holding hope and my integrity tightly to my chest and believing that my small actions might make some difference. And that there are others like me who still have hope. Maybe that hope is what will save us all.

I don’t know.

2009-05-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Ain't this statement the truth?

YOU CAN'T DO IT THE SAME WAY TWICE

John’s killed her a thousand times. The first time he shot her the caliber of the gun was so big the bullet chewed through her chest like a panzer tank. Blood and guts splashed all over the walls and floor, even the ceiling got decorated with intestines. Far too messy.

The second time, he stabbed her – got as close as he could with an insincere bid at lust and brought the knife up from behind his hip. He held the grip in his right hand, the blade facing up and drove it in between her third and fourth ribs with the force of that oil gusher in “Giant.” Instant grat, death wise. But then he lost his footing and fell on top of her. He couldn’t get him self out of the room quickly enough from that awkward position.

The third time, strangulation. Ah, but then he had to watch her body twitch and jerk and hear her muffled gargles. Yuck.

Poison was good, silent with a bonus graceful collapse, even time for a poignant farewell. But trite, so very trite.

On the sixty-third try, he just burned the whole damn house down. But then he was depressed for weeks because he’d forgotten that the cocker spaniel and the mynah bird were still in there.

He’d written twenty-two crime novels in the last twelve years and he was running out of methods to kill off his victim. Maybe he should make a master list of what he’d used so far. Whoever had said that genre readers were dense didn’t get the critical emails from his readers that John did.

He knew that if he ever used the same gimmick twice they’d crucify him.

2009-05-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

GLASSES

There they were glasses of every shape and size, a testament to the sacrament of alcohol and the rite of social parties. There was the blood of Pan poured into a crystal goblet and set before you with a flourish and a cocktail napkin. The depth of the wine’s redness glowed in the candlelight.

Pan’s flesh was in the imported crackers and cheese, black olives his dark eyes starring at you from the plate. Who plucked them from his face?

Don’t be distracted by the music, it’s just a raucous hymn. The dresses, tuxes, and jewels are as effective in their own way as priest’s robes and nun’s habits. Costumes of sincerity. Are the mendicants aware of their roles?

You would believe it so if you could have seen the hostess the next morning cleaning up. She washed and polished each champagne flute and brandy snifter, each German beer stein and crystal mug, and placed them reverently back into the glass fronted cabinet. There they waited for the next convocation on Saturday night.

It was an honor to be served a drink from one of those glasses during the week, a minor yet still acknowledged ritual. The glasses were more intoxicating than the liquor.

When I inherited them, I threw them all away.

2009-05-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

Life is all just a matter of perspective...

DANGEROUS

Dr. Yahov tells me it’s dangerous to follow the paths in my mind that are scorched or embattled. In fact he would like me to abandon my interior wandering and re-join what he calls the real world.

I humor his gentle nudgings; he is after all a kind man. But even with all his degrees, (and I see them behind him on the wall of his office every other day at three pm) he knows nothing about my mind.

After lunch I pass Joseph in the hall on the way back to my room. He nods and says, “Hello Mary,” to me, but I can see how his back is pressed against the wall behind him, he isn’t ready to leave us either, although he longs to.

I have been in Dr. Yahov’s real world and have no desire to return there. I much prefer this place where all my physical needs are taken care of and I have my small sparse room to retreat to when the other’s thoughts get too loud. I can close the door and even though there are no locks, it is a safe enough haven for me.

I can lie on my bed, shut my eyes, and go wandering for hours at a time. It’s true there are a few constraints in living here, but none as bad as out there.

Each evening when I watch Dr. Yahov drive away from the hospital, I pity him. I haven’t told him this, but it’s true.

It’s much safer in here.

2009-05-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

How many people are in the car when you are driving alone?

Driving Alone

Terry looked over at his wife Linda sitting in the passenger seat of the white Caddy. He couldn’t see her face. She was starring out her window as though there was magnificent scenery to be observed.

She was still pissed off at him. They hadn’t said more than thirty words since leaving LA this morning. While they were in the snarl of the freeway traffic he’d been able to concentrate on driving, but once they got through Cajon Pass and Apple Valley it was pretty much flat desert.

He’d set the cruise control at 78, three miles above the speed limit, but not fast enough for CHP to care. Barstow would be coming up in another hour or so, and they’d planned to stop there for gas and have lunch at that Mexican restaurant. Maybe he’d just pull into a fast food drive-thru. He knew his wife could maintain that frosty silence for days.

If he was alone, he’d pop some Randy Newman into the CD player and sing along. Loud. But Linda didn’t like Randy’s songs or Terry’s singing.

This trip to Vegas was supposed to have been a relaxing get away from the stress of both their jobs and LA’s smog. But he could feel the tightness of her body two feet away. When she stomped her left foot down on the empty coke can that kept rolling around at her feet, he almost groaned. He was never going to make it through the week-end like this. Shit.

So even though the fight hadn’t been his fault and she was the one who should be apologizing to him, he flipped down his visor, pulled out an old Eagles CD and stuck it into the player. Welcome to The Hotel California washed over the frosty interior of the car and he could see her relax just a bit. It was her favorite song, it was their make-up song. He kept his left hand on the steering wheel and reached out his right hand as far as he could, flat on the seat, not touching her leg, but almost.

There was Barstow coming up beyond the next rise, he could see all the little homesteaders shacks dotting the desert around them. Linda had always wanted to stop and take the time to explore them, but he always wanted to keep going, get there, have fun, and get back. He didn’t even hit his turn signal, just pulled off at the next exit.

Linda sat bolt upright and turned to face him. “What are you doing, Terry?”

“Well, we’re ahead of schedule and I thought you’ve always wanted to stop here and poke around. Don’t you want to stop here?”

She leaned towards him a little, looking into his eyes.

He wasn’t good at apologies, especially when he hadn’t been wrong. She knew that, she knew that about him.

She looked down at his hand next to her thigh on the seat and covered it with hers. “Yes Terry,” she said. “I’d love to stop here, and then we can have lunch in Barstow at the Mexican place. We’ll still have time won’t we?”

“Yes, Linda,” he said. "We would.”

2009-05-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

What's the first thing you think of when someone says eggs?

EGGS

Juggling, Troy’s father had told him, was really just a trick of the mind. You had to convince yourself that you could throw two or five or eight things up in the air and they would stay there long enough for you to move your hands around so fast the audience would be convinced that you were actually juggling.

“Start with simple things,” Big Ed had said. “Fruit is good, oranges or bananas maybe. Best to stay away from things with sharp edges until you get the hang of it.”

So Troy had started with bananas. But juggling is hungry work and by noon he’d eaten one and a half of them. He found that it’s really no use trying to juggle half a banana, so he ate that too, and moved onto two oranges.

Unfortunately one was a little riper than the other and all he got for his efforts was a large orange stain down the front of his shirt. Every so often Big Ed would wander by and nod approvingly at him. “Good job son, keep practicing,” he’d say.

Now, all Troy’s mother’s crockery was in pieces littering the yard and he still hadn’t gotten the gist of juggling. There were knives aplenty in the kitchen drawers, but Troy looked at the bits of pottery and then at his fingers and knew he was no where near to the point of trying with them. He was wracking his brain for something less dangerous to practice with; whatever he picked had to have some weight to it too. He knew for a fact that feathers or blades of grass or the like wouldn’t do.

Just then he heard a squawk and a fluttering of wings from the henhouse at the edge of the yard. “Ah!” he said. “Brilliant!”

He pushed himself up off the overturned bucket he’d sat on to eat the last orange, picked it up and crossed the yard.

If he scattered all his mother’s pots and pans around him while he practiced, he thought, he might be able to make a decent omelet out of the eggs he dropped. Big Ed would be so proud of him, multitasking so to speak.

And, also, that would take care of dinner.

2009-05-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

This one is for the little abandoned dog in the desert, and the guy in the silver truck who rescued him. I was the lady with the chicken. Live long little Billy.

I PRAYED FOR IT

The cancer was just eatin’ me alive and the pain was so bad I just prayed for it to end. The good Lord musta heard me, cause he took me home pretty quick. Well, I am here to tell you that heaven ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. All that mumbo jumbo you hear in church just ain’t true.

Ain’t no pearly gates, the food is worse than the cookin in the old folks home and my bursitis is still vexin me.

I called the God Hot Line, but got put on one of them stupid press one for Spanish, two for English, no real person available thingys. Let me tell you – I had enough of that crap in my life.

But what really upsets me is the view. See, it ain’t what’s around you here. It’s what you have to keep seein down there. Like some kinda punishment…

Still seein the leftover things of your life. Most of it I don’t give a shit about. But last week I saw my daughter Zelda take my little dog Billy and dump him out in the desert like he was just a piece of garbage she didn’t want to deal with. Then I had to watch him cryin like a baby and runnin back and forth across that road, just a lookin for me. Jesus, it near to tore my heart out.

Poor little Billy, he almost got run over about fifty times, and here I am sitting in heaven, still cryin my heart out and beggin the Lord to save my dog. Well, I guess the Lord is either intentionally ignorin me or he don’t give a damn about dogs.

How could I ever respect a god who would allow Billy to go through all that? I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.

Anyway, I finally quit askin anybody up here for help and just concentrated on finding someone down there to find Billy and at least give him a little water and food.

He’s such a little bitty thing and he’s been out there in the desert for almost four days. It’s a wonder the coyotes ain’t got him.

So, finally this guy in a truck stops and gets poor Billy off the road and gives him some water, first he’s had in a while. And then another car stops, some lady. She had some fried chicken in her cooler and Billy gulped it in right outa her hand.

The truck guy put a leash on Billy and walked him to the truck to take him home, but it was the woman picked him up and set him in the seat. So at least Billy won’t get run over by one of them eighteen wheelers out there.

But I tell you what. The next time I have a chance to speak with the Lord, I will have a thing or two to tell him. How in the world could he hold his head up and let Billy get treated that a way?

That just ain’t right.

I don’t care whose son you are, you need to pay some god damned attention right now.

2009-05-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a terrible week. When all my hope is gone and I think there is no more reason to live, I remember these two. Mother Earth and my writing...my work.

WORK

Visions of rage reverberate in his mind and Bernard drops to his knees on the edge of the forest and clasps his hands together to pray. But like his name and his black robe, the rituals he has been taught are too new for his heart to trust.

So he stands and rips the hated robe from his body and flings it as far away from him as he can. Then he prostrates himself on Mother Earth, his fingers clutching at her soil, his face buried in her sweet green grass and begs her forgiveness.

“Oh Great Mother, I am lost. The evil ones have stripped me of my family, my language, and my ancient ties to you. Although my flesh remains, I am but a hollow shell. I beg you to help me to remember my true name and my sacred path or free me from this life.”

He cannot stop the water pouring from his eyes or the despair filling his heart and throat. But he vows that if Mother Earth refuses him, he will find some way to free himself.

Perhaps he sleeps and it is only in his dreams that he hears her voice.

“Oh my son, you should know that I have never left you. Release the thoughts of death that plague you, it is not your time. There is still great work for you in this life.”

He opens his eyes to the moonlight and a tug on his hand. A great she-wolf stands before him, waiting. He feels no fear as he pushes himself to his feet.

She trots to the edge of the forest and stops to look back at him.

He whispers his thanks for this guide and follows her, knowing that she will lead him back home.

2009-05-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

It seems to me there are demons abroad, through out the entire world. I weep for the children.

SO, WHAT HAPPENED?

One day life was okay, nothing to rave about, but normal enough: eat, sleep, work, play. Now everything is doom and gloom.

Mom and Dad have these long screaming arguments about losing the house. I don’t understand. How can they lose anything as big as our house, besides it’s nailed into the ground some how.

Last summer I lost one of my Hot Wheels cars but what really happened was that our dog Jed buried it in the back yard. And anyway, I found it a few months later when I was digging a fort out there. I don’t think Jed could bury the house in the back yard, even though he’s a really strong dog.

Mr. Zedemeir is the only teacher left at school, but I guess that’s okay; I’ve always liked him the best. There’s not as many kids in my second grade class either. Someone said the buses aren’t running anymore. Dad says I’m lucky our house is only two blocks from the school so I can walk there.

We’ve been having beans for dinner almost every night and I feel like a big old fart machine. I used to love mac and cheese but now when we don’t have beans we have that and I’m getting pretty sick of it. Why can’t we have pepperoni pizza once a week like we used to?

Dad yells at me to turn the water off when I’m brushing my teeth like he thinks we’re gonna run out. And Mom isn’t using the dishwasher anymore. She’s got this big old bucket next to the sink and she washes every plate and fork by hand.

I was supposed to get a new pair of Nikes for school but I’m still wearing my old Keds. Things have changed and I don’t know why.

Can you tell me what happened?

Can anybody tell me?

2009-05-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

STAY NAKED

I was born naked, the warp and woof of the fabric that defined me embedded in my sinews and capillaries. No power suit from Bergdorf’s could convince me of my strength and integrity better than what lies beneath my skin.

Diamonds on my fingers could not reflect the clarity of my soul, nor rubies at my throat the breadth and depth of my good heart.

For those who were not gifted, can even the finest lace disguise the gaping hole where honesty should have grown? Can brilliant silks cover the lack of truth or justice?

Look past whatever magnificent gowns I may don, or paltry rags I might be forced to wear. There is no truer clothing than the garment I was born with.

Naked I was born and naked shall I stay.

2009-04-28T17:23:00.000-07:00

Not sure if i wanna be the shrimp or the band, but I sure had fun with this one. Hurrah!

SHRIMP ROLLS

On the edge of the beach at Rocky Point, Mexico at the Playa Bonita hotel, the mariachi band was tuning up. The sun was giving its daily performance of disappearing below the mountain range across the Sea of Cortes and many touristas watched closely for the fabled green flash they had been told they might see. It was said to happen in the last instant between the lingering tip of the sun being there and poof, being gone.

None of the band members or the waiters on the large dining deck even glanced that way. To them it was just the end of another day and the beginning of a long night of work. Satisfying a new group of drunken Americans and praying for a decent tip certainly outweighed the possibility of the green flash.

Far beyond the deck, the Sea of Cortes began the second of its daily withdrawals from the beach, paying more homage to the moons power than to the suns.

All of the creatures in the sea honored the power of the tide. Dolphins and sea rays moved out beyond the third reef, knowing that it was death to be stranded on the hard packed sand. Clams burrowed their way deep beneath the crust, patiently awaiting the return of the sea.

But the shrimp were foolish and lingered at the waters edge, dancing there to the music from the mariachi band.

And so it was that Pablo walking tiredly home along the hard packed sand harvested enough of the stranded shrimp to make a fine meal for his family. God had even provided him with a plastic bag, half buried in the sand to put them in.

As he rolled one foolish shrimp after another into his bag, he gave thanks to God for this bounty from the sea.

His wife would be pleased with his catch.

2009-04-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Oh I wish it would be this simple

GET A LIFE

Belinda stood at her front door and opened it to let the cat out. As usual Rocky mewled his thanks, and she spoke to the rear view of his fluffy brown raised flag of a tail. “You’re welcome.” It was ridiculous to answer him like that, but she did it every morning now. The words just popped out of her mouth like happy little frogs.

She smiled and started to close the door but the sun was shining just beyond the porch and there were spots of yellow and lavender off to her left that she hadn’t seen yesterday. Five steps across the porch and she was in the sun feeling forty pounds lighter. From here she could see that the dabs of color were newborn flowers, nodding their baby heads at her.

She looked back at the cavity of the still opened front door and saw shadow. Inside that shadow was the silent phone she’d been staring at for the last week. She was shackled so tightly to the need for it to ring that she hadn’t even gone to the store and she’d been out of yogurt for three days.

Had her husband signed the papers? Had her lawyer filed them? Was she officially divorced and free to move on with her life?

She wondered if she could hear the phone from here.

Belinda looked from the flowers to the door and back again. Six more steps to her left and she would be able to bend over and smell those jonquils, maybe get a little pollen on the tip of her nose. Or, she could go back inside and wait.

The phone began to ring when she was bending over the purple iris but she didn’t hear it.

She was already six steps into her new life.

2009-04-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Extreme Greed has many faces and one of them used to be someone I knew.

HEAT

120 degrees in the Las Vegas summer is nothing compared to the heat of a ninety-two page document from my sister’s evil attorney that not only reiterates every accusation she’s made about me in the last five years, but contains brand new attacks on my integrity and ethics. The Probate Court Judge holds a copy.

And although every word she has written is lies, I can feel the molten lava reaching out to me from where it is smoldering on his desk. If I picked it up would it melt my fingers as well as my resolve?

I sit in court in the last row, my back against the wall, the door one seat away, hoping that Wyatt Earp’s defensive strategy will work for me. I am momentarily safe from a knife in the back but not from the toxic gas that flows out of my sister’s mouth as she turns and smirks at me.

The judge picks up those ninety-two pages and throws them down onto his desk in disgust. I can see by his eyes that he expects there to be many more thick documents, months worth, years worth. It’s an overwhelming prospect to me.

My sister’s attorney stands between me and the door and directs her underling to take the seat three to the left of me. I pull my knees back and snarl at her touch, but my kneecaps are already melting down my calves along with my belief in justice. The spy is taking notes for her boss, often glancing at my face. Is she logging the number of my tears or the deepening crease in my forehead?

My attorney sits next to me with a whispered offer from the enemy. I am so tired I can barely hold my pen to write down the numbers. I rub my aching temples each time my attorney goes out into the hall to fight for my rights.

But every time I look up at the judge’s bench, all I can see is the crystallizing future. The abysmal stack of documents that will be multiplying like cancer cells before my eyes every time I am forced to come here.

I think about how hard my parents worked to amass their modest fortune and how carefully they tried to insure its equal distribution between my sister and my self with Trusts and documents. And I think about how many years I have fought to honor their wishes. But this unending battle is taking its toll on me and the cost is mounting daily.

Is my sanity worth more or less than the two hundred thousand dollars inequity that my sister is demanding?

Justice lies dead at my feet. So I reluctantly agree to terms that I know are very wrong but will ensure that I will never have to sit with my back against this wall again.

On the way to my car, I see my sister and her entourage doing a victory dance in the parking lot. It’s a sickening sight. But I pity her all the same, because I know there was no real victory for anyone in that courtroom. She may have gotten the money, but both of us have lost a sister.

I get in my car and drive home to mourn her death.

2009-04-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

KISS AND MAKE UP

“Kiss and make up,” my mother says as she shoves me towards my sister. Her hand flat on the center of my back is covered with needles. They penetrate my t-shirt like the minuscule spines on an innocent looking cactus. My sister stands across the room, a tiny smirk betraying her triumph. I shout, I snarl, I cry in defeat.

“Why me? It’s not my fault. I hate her!” My mother will not hear my words. She won’t look directly into my face. She won’t see the darkening bruise on the outside of my thigh where my sister jabbed me with her fork at dinner. There are tiny matching spots of darkness down the top of my right arm where she has cruelly pinched me whenever she got a chance in the last two days.

I don’t even try to show my mother these. Each one is painful. But not as painful as the look on my sister’s face as her fingers twist and squeeze. Or my mother’s deliberate ignorance.

“Go on,” my mother waves her hands at us.

My sister takes one step towards me and clutches my bony shoulders in her hands. She bends down and plants a wet kiss on my forehead. It burns. I can feel it etched there in acid, though I don’t know what acid is. She looks over my head and smiles sweetly into my mother’s face.

“Good girls.” My mother has turned and is half way out the door.

My sister ducks her head and catches some of my hair in her teeth. She throws her head back and rips out a few strands. They hang from her mouth like shredded skin from a dragon’s teeth.

And then she grins.

2009-04-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

A few pieces from last week.

Wine bottles with real corks are out, plastic corks are out, twist tops are in. And the lowly wine in a box that I have been derided for drinking is now politically correct and earth friendly.
Who'd a thunk? HA!

WINE IN A BOX

I buy my wine in a box, a nice Chardonnay from Franzia. I didn’t even know that these things existed until I began running white water rivers in 1991. The first time I rowed the Green River in Utah I learned more than just how to get my rubber raft downstream right side up.

There are no 7-11’s on the Green, so anything you will need in the next ten days after you launch had better be in your waterproof boat box. Since big rapids are notorious for snatching things off your body or your boat, make sure everything has a strap or lanyard and is secured. Always carry spares. For instance, if you can’t see without your glasses, tie them onto your face, ditto your hat.

Lost your hat in that last rapid? Check the boat box for another. Did the batteries die in your flashlight? There’s more in the box. Lost your sunscreen overboard in the last water gun fight? More in there.

Another practical rule on rivers is that everything you carry in, you must carry out, including trash and human waste.

This is an important factor to keep in mind when provisioning for a trip. Rule # 1 is: no glass containers. We compact our trash using foot power into old army duffels, after every meal. Plastic containers can be smashed flat, we cut the ends out of metal cans and stomp on them, extraneous paper can be burnt in the camp fire. But glass is heavy, can’t be compacted and might shatter. This is not something you’d want on your inflatable rubber raft.

On that first trip, I never saw the ‘box’ of box wine, those got left at home, too bulky. What I saw was the naked Mylar bags that are inside the box. Each bag has its own attached spigot and they are so malleable, they’ll fit in any boat box or cooler. We label them with magic markers as to color and flavor. And when they’re empty, they smash up into a compact ball as small as your fist. Very practical. Also each bag holds the equivalent of three bottles of wine, which is a good thing for me as I love wine and hate to run out.

In the seventeen years that I’ve been running rivers, I haven’t made one trip without box wine, so as well as being practical, they hold a lot of memories for me. I row the Green almost every year and have floated and rowed down many of the rivers of my dreams, including two spectacular eighteen day trips on the Grand Canyon. They don’t call it the Grand for nothing.

Every night, on every river, we had box wine with dinner and around the camp fire later.

So tonight when I turn the spigot on the box of wine in my refrigerator maybe I’ll think of some of those camps and hear the roar of the rapid just above it.

And maybe I’ll lift my glass in a toast to all the rivers I’ve known.

2009-04-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

Ever want to just stay in bed because life is wayyy to messed up?

SLEEP ALL DAY

Peter wondered when his life had gotten so convoluted that it was unbearable. Was it last week? Last year?

Didn’t he remember a time when he’d greeted each morning with pleasant anticipation? He’d loved his job, his wife, his dog, his house, the yard, an endless list of Blessings.

Those were the days when, since his wife Susan wasn’t a morning person, Peter and his dog Max were the first ones up and out of the house to officially greet the new day. It was Peter’s habit to spread his arms in welcome, while Max assured himself that no other dogs had claimed his territory in the night. A few sniffs and a leg lifted at the more important bushes satisfied Max – Peter strolled the garden saying good morning to the roses and the lemon trees. A quick game of chase the ball and then it was time to put the coffee on.

By then Susan would be in the bathroom brushing her teeth awake and splashing cold water on her face. It was true that she often grumbled at him over breakfast, “You are disgustingly cheerful this morning.” But it was also true that two cups of coffee and a shower would take that frown right off her face.

It had been a good life. Hadn’t it been a good life?

Peter had always thought so, but apparently Susan hadn’t. Because one day when he came home from work, she didn’t. He’d found a terse note from her on the dining room table that said, “Peter, I’ve had it. My attorney will be in touch.” She hadn’t even said ‘Dear’ Peter. And when the phone rang and he snatched it up hoping it was her and the whole note thing was a joke, it was his boss.

Mr. Radwick grimly told him that there would be a series of lay-offs and cutbacks, and that Peter was appointed to hand out the pink slips to people he’d worked with for the last ten years. When he tried to decline this onerous duty Mr. Radwick had shouted, “Just be glad that you still have a job!” and slammed the phone down so hard that Peter heard the reverberations for half an hour.

He hated to go to work now, as all his co-workers had begun shunning him and calling him “the hatchet man” behind his back, which he certainly didn’t deserve.

He also dreaded answering the phone as every other call was from a collection agency. When Susan left, she took her paycheck with her and he was in arrears on half the bills.

His email inbox was a minefield of threats from her attorney and people he’d been forced to fire. To top it all off, he’d had to take Max to the vet for surgery on a mysterious lump on his back. Dr Hurst told him they’d have to keep Max for three days.

Peter went to bed early that night feeling very alone in the big empty house, not even Max to keep him company.

His only cheering thought was that tomorrow was Saturday and he didn’t have to go to work and face Mr. Radwick or his whispered nickname. Maybe he’d just sleep all day Saturday – maybe Sunday too.

He wished he could sleep for a month and wake up to his old life.

When did it ever get this bad?

2009-04-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

ON THE RADIO

There’s a radio in Wanda’s kitchen, but it doesn’t work anymore. Every Friday when she makes the week’s bread she wishes it did.

She punches down the dough and separates it into the six loaf pans she has oiled and floured to receive it. She groups them shoulder to shoulder and covers them with an old table cloth, like tucking her children into bed to sleep and then rise.

She wipes her hands on her apron and stares out the kitchen window at the garden where her husband Edward wrenches up weeds and talks to one of the goats. Before the Depression Edward taught Agriculture, now he practices it. Thank God he wasn’t a stockbroker.

It’s not a bad life now, more physically demanding, but there are perks to that. Her little pot belly has disappeared and her fears of carpal tunnel brought on by hours at her computer are meaningless now.

Edward is breathing easier since he quit smoking. The scarcity and exorbitant cost of one pack of cigarettes finally forced him to quit a habit he couldn’t manage to do on will power alone.

The tomatoes from their garden taste better than the ones she used to buy at Albertsons. She’s come to enjoy the pungent flavor of goat cheese and milk and hardly misses red meat at all.

In the fall she and Edward will trade one of the baby she goats for a pair of breeding pigs from the Bruster’s last litter. Wanda doesn’t know squat about pigs, but the thought of bacon frying in her cast iron skillet, sending out a formidable aroma, gives her the determination to learn.

Edward calls to her from the garden, “Hey Wanda! I could do with a hand out here, you done with the bread?”

“Yep, done and coming out. How about some lemonade?” she hollers back.

“Yes, great! Bring the pitcher please,” he says. “This is thirsty work and I’m liable to drink the whole thing.”

She tucks two plastic glasses into her apron pocket and lifts the Tupperware pitcher by the handle with her right hand. On the way out the door she glances at the inert radio and then over at her old six string Martin guitar. When the garden is weeded and the goats fed and milked, it would be nice to have some music.

She decides that tonight they will have another performance of the “Wonderful Wanda Radio Hour.” As program director and solo performer, she will take requests and keep the commercials short and silly.

Thank God she learned to play guitar.

2009-04-25T10:44:00.000-07:00

Is there anything more traumatic than going to the vet?

MAX'S TEETH

His mouth hurts and he’s pissed off. You would be too if someone shoved you in a crate and trundled you off to the Vets to have your gums chopped into.

His upper right canine was broken off (not gone) and they had to dig out the leftover root. They pulled two teeth on the lower left side too. Poor Max.
]
He’s not supposed to go out for a week, but neither one of us can handle that. When I let him out this morning I watched him as closely as I’d watched my four year old daughter walk to the neighbors alone for the first time. I think he was insulted but he did come back in half an hour. I left the back door open so he could return with some dignity. Then I gave us both some quiet time while I screwed up my courage to give him the medicine.

I talked to him when I set him down on the floor between my legs and squatted on his back. I had the plunger filled and ready by my right hand. Then I held his head with my left hand and tried to get the thing close enough to his mouth to squirt it in.

He growled that scary noise he makes when he’s ready to fight – clawed the carpet, and wrenched his head around trying to get lose. I talked louder and sat on him harder and tightened my hand on his head, but it was a good minute before I got anywhere near his lips.

We’d passed gentle by then, and I took a last flying shot at it, pushed the plunger and let him go. Most of it went into his mouth but there were a few pink drops on the rug where he’d shook his head disgustedly. He sat across the room from where I crouched and glared at me.

I felt so bad I coaxed him up onto my bed and apologized while I petted him. He may have forgiven me just a bit because he purred before he fell asleep. When he woke up from his nap he looked happier, so I let him out once more. The Vet would be having apoplexy.

But I know Max’ll be pissed off again tonight because I have to dose him again before I go to bed, and then twice a day for the next SIX days. How will we survive them?

I’ll have to keep sitting on him because he needs the penicillin to get well but I don’t relish the possibility of getting clawed or bit.

Poor Max, and now that I think of it, poor me. Let’s just hope we can both get through this with our friendship and my hands intact.

I hate going to the Vet.

2009-04-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

This was the strangest prompt of last week, but that first sentence just popped right into my head and off I went...What FUN!

I AM THE PLACE IN WHICH SOMETHING HAS OCCURRED...

I’ve moved the sand around in the cove, not an easy job to hide where a boat has beached. Especially his.

All that weight you know. The chest alone would have weighed a ton, then you must add the six burley men he’d brought with him to dig the hole.

Aye, I know he was a large blustering chunk of a man. I’ve heard enough of the stories. Fact is I’ve felt his weight me self, striding along my beaches and chopping through my poor lovely tropical forest. But I also know he was vain and abhorred physical labor, heard him say so right here. Wasn’t it my skin he ordered his men to dig through?

I watched him leaning there against that tree, his cutlass in his hand, his fancy buccaneer’s hat with the feathery plumes waving in my breeze. Probably took it off some Spaniard.

I tell you I felt absolutely violated that he’d chosen to bury his treasure on me. The worst bit though was after the chest was buried and his men had carefully filled in the hole, he drenched my soil in their blood. Sliced em down like coconuts with that cutlass then left em to rot here. The stench was simply horrific for ages; it took my assorted creatures and insects forever to clean up that mess.

I’d thought that was quite traumatic enough but it seems the bugger was rumored to have left a map with a big X painted on it to mark the spot. Now it’s been more than two hundred years and I am still suffering fools and dreamers poking and prodding over every square inch of me still trying to find that chest.

So let me just set the record straight, and I would appreciate it if you would spread the word to the rest of you humans. Although it is true that I am the island that Blackbeard buried his treasure on, IT IS NO LONGER HERE.

You see, he came back within a few short years, had his new crew dig it up and carted it away on his ship. No, I do not know which direction he sailed away to. I was just glad the damn thing was gone.

Now I’ll thank you to get off me and take that bloody sign with you.

Blackbeard’s Treasure is NOT here.

2009-04-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

AGING

I’m still asking myself, “What will I be when I grow up?”

Although my face and body have aged appropriately for my years there are still places inside me that are stuck in childhood. The adult me stands tsk-tsking in disapproval and disgust every time my little child reacts to life in ancient and tattered knee-jerk dysfunctional patterns.

“God! Get over it! Grow up!” I shout at myself. But the little girl just huddles in a corner and cries.

“Okay, wrong approach,” I think. I pull my little girl gently from the corner, hold her in my lap and wrap my arms around her. “Hush, hush,” I whisper. I want her to feel how much I love and cherish her, but as long as her face is buried in my chest I can’t tell if I’ve succeeded.

I wonder if other seeming adults cradle their damaged children. I can’t be the only one.

Too often I feel that this whole aging thing is just a masquerade I’m engaged in and one day I will be found out. That face in the mirror I see isn’t really me.

And some day the aging police will come along and ask me, “What will you be when you grow up?”

And I will look at them perplexed and admit, out loud, I don’t know.

2009-04-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

What's playing on the radio?

ON THE RADIO

There’s a radio in Wanda’s kitchen, but it doesn’t work anymore. Every Friday when she makes the week’s bread she wishes it did.

She punches down the dough and separates it into the six loaf pans she has oiled and floured to receive it. She groups them shoulder to shoulder and covers them with an old table cloth, like tucking her children into bed to sleep and then rise.

She wipes her hands on her apron and stares out the kitchen window at the garden where her husband Edward wrenches up weeds and talks to one of the goats. Before the Depression Edward taught Agriculture, now he practices it. Thank God he wasn’t a stockbroker.

It’s not a bad life now, more physically demanding, but there are perks to that. Her little pot belly has disappeared and her fears of carpal tunnel brought on by hours at her computer are meaningless now.

Edward is breathing easier since he quit smoking. The scarcity and exorbitant cost of one pack of cigarettes finally forced him to quit a habit he couldn’t manage to do on will power alone.

The tomatoes from their garden taste better than the ones she used to buy at Albertsons. She’s come to enjoy the pungent flavor of goat cheese and milk and hardly misses red meat at all.

In the fall she and Edward will trade one of the baby she goats for a pair of breeding pigs from the Bruster’s last litter. Wanda doesn’t know squat about pigs, but the thought of bacon frying in her cast iron skillet, sending out a formidable aroma, gives her the determination to learn.

Edward calls to her from the garden, “Hey Wanda! I could do with a hand out here, you done with the bread?”

“Yep, done and coming out. How about some lemonade?” she hollers back.

“Yes, great! Bring the pitcher please,” he says. “This is thirsty work and I’m liable to drink the whole thing.”

She tucks two plastic glasses into her apron pocket and lifts the Tupperware pitcher by the handle with her right hand. On the way out the door she glances at the inert radio and then over at her old six string Martin guitar. When the garden is weeded and the goats fed and milked, it would be nice to have some music.

She decides that tonight they will have another performance of the “Wonderful Wanda Radio Hour.” As program director and solo performer, she will take requests and keep the commercials short and silly.

Thank God she learned to play guitar.

2009-04-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pieces from this weeks online stuff. I'm very blessed to have this place to stretch my writers muscles.

Webster's says: the rising of the dead, coming back to life...Amen to that.

RESURRECTION

There had been too much destruction in the house, too much death, literally and figuratively. Death of childhood dreams, the pretense of respectability, her father in the hospital bed next to the big picture window.

She’d insisted they put the bed there when he came home from the hospital to die. But in the five days it took him to stop breathing, he never looked out of it.

Her mother would have died there too, if she hadn’t gone crazy and run away to California. She’d died alone in that assisted living home, without the comfort of the older daughter she’d run to. It was fitting in a way, for her to have run so far and still be alone at the end.

The residue of her parent’s corporal bodies was long gone, tucked away beneath the earth. But the house was still full. Boxes of pre-packaged memories in the basement, echoes of thirty years of battles hanging in the air of closed-off rooms, sibling conflict impressed deep within the sister’s psyches and fed by an eternal court battle.

Eternal, now that’s an interesting word, the younger sister thought. As in, eternal guardian of the flame, eternal custodian of the boxes and memories of two dead people.

The house ached for release as much as she did. And though the Courts had yet to close the file, she knew the end was near, and therefore also a beginning was within reach. Tired of waiting for some stranger to give the okay for the resurrection of her life, she began it herself.

She opened every door and window in the house and started carting boxes up from the basement to the curb, not even checking the contents. Let it all go to the dump where the wheeling seagulls would care less. No more waiting – it was time to begin again.

As the pile of stuff grew at the curb, she felt lighter and lighter, like a weight had been lifted and she was coming back to life.

2009-04-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

This one is a fictionalized account of how my parents met, wed, and....well, you'll find out.
I still wonder why I changed my mother's name. (I have changed it back to her real name, the time for secrets is long over.)

INFIDELITY

Alma loved her husband Buddy more than anything in her world. The first time he came sweeping boldly up to the big porch at Mama’s house where she sat awaiting adventure, she was thirteen years old. Buddy was three years older.

“Hey, little girl, what’s your name?” he’d said.

She’d crossed her skinny ankles, dirty white socks drooping down towards her scuffed black Mary Jane shoes and pretended to be shy. It wasn’t easy for her to be so still and quiet with the shivers of excitement racing up and down her spine. She couldn’t look up because then she’d see his eyes. Was there anything in the world to match that blue?

She’d felt those eyes on her for weeks. Once while walking to the store, hand in hand with Mama, he’d been slouching against a palm tree, his feet out into the sidewalk so they’d had to walk around him. “Mornin’,” he’d said, pushing the brim of his hat back with his thumb. His soft southern accent drew the word out like an invitation. She’d looked up into his face, but it wasn’t his white teeth or the shock of blond hair on his forehead that had captured her. It was those eyes.

Since that day Alma had felt that a thin silk thread connected them. It grew thicker and stronger each time she peeked out from behind her long black hair at him. She could feel it from the playground, from behind the Eucalyptus tree in the front yard. She wanted what was in his eyes.

And three years later, they’d married. Mama was against it, she’d shouted that Alma was too young and Buddy was too old. But Alma turned to her Papa, letting her tears fall on his shirt and touching his hand, whispering to him, “Please Papa, I want him so much.” Papa clenched his pipe in his teeth and glanced at the young man waiting on the porch. He looked at Mama and said, “There are ten years between you and I Mama, the age will make no difference. They may wed.”

Alma and Buddy had a year of love and lust before the war took him away and left her pregnant. For two years she ached for him, her only solace her small daughter and the thin blue paper of his letters. When he returned from the war she clung to him, greedy for the feel of his body and the touch of his eyes, both of which he gave her until the baby would cry or dinner had to be cooked.

But it wasn’t the same.

She wanted to believe what the papers said, that time would heal the wounds of the war for everyone. She tried to believe it was the war that had changed them. But what she saw was this; her husbands eyes were no longer solely on her, they lingered too much on the child.

She pushed her jealousy down with both hands telling her self that it was only natural for a father to adore his beautiful girl.

And until that day that she opened the bathroom door and caught him she made herself believe it. Not only his eyes but his hands and mouth were on the child, their child. She stood in the doorway for an instant too long before she screamed in revulsion and lunged to snatch her daughter out of his arms. But in that instant of animal jealousy Alma made a selfish choice that would haunt them all their lives.

For no matter what he did, she knew that she would never leave him. Nothing could make her give him up.

No matter what.

2009-04-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

Communication:

PLEASE WRITE, DON'T PHONE.

The phone rings and rings and Annie does not move. She counts the rings knowing that after the sixth but before the seventh, her answering machine will click on and she will hear the generic female voice recite her phone number, say she is unavailable, and to please leave a message.

She steels herself hoping it is a telemarketer, PBS, or the bug man, but of course, it’s Jake.

“Annie, please pick up,” he says. “We really need to talk about this.” There’s a pause and she can hear the moment when he goes from pleading to frustration by the way he breaths. Right about now he will be pursing his lips and puffing up his cheeks to blow out a long blast of air. He has told her that this blowing out calms him, helps him to focus, but Annie believes it’s an announcement of coming events, possibly anger.

And sure enough his next words are, “Damn it, Annie! You’re being incredibly childish. Avoiding talking to me won’t make things any easier.”

Annie drifts across the living room away from the machine, towards the big picture window and thinks, “Oh yes, it will.” She keeps her back to the phone and whispers the words to her self as though he might hear.

He talks on, berating, cajoling, demanding for another two minutes. Doesn’t he know that he can’t manipulate a machine?

When they are face to face or even talking on the phone, he just goes on and on, throwing words at her so fast she has no time to think. He’s always been quicker at this verbal sparring than she. By the time she’s thought of a response to his first statement, he’s ten sentences beyond her and she can’t catch up. She can never catch up.

She listens to the silence for a while and then goes to her desk and jiggles the mouse to bring her computer screen to life. She clicks on email and then ‘write message’, the comforting white screen pops up and she rests her fingers on the keyboard. Taking a deep breath, she types in “Dear Jake.” Then she stares out the window at the big pine tree across the street and watches a family of quail cautiously cross the road.

Annie highlights the words she has just typed and hits the delete button and they disappear. She types in “Jake”, comma, “I need to tell you how I feel.” She will type and edit, read and delete and then type some more before she has told him that she feels bruised, crowded, and manipulated. She will stare out the window again; save her words to draft and go into the kitchen for another cup of coffee before she is satisfied that these are her truest words, her feelings spelled out without interruption or confusion.

And she will read the finished draft many times before she can hit the send button with no anger in her heart. But that’s all right, because in this comfortable white space, this written medium, she finally has what she had needed all along -- all the time in the world.

2009-04-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

THREE THINGS I CAN"T SEE

What is the shape of a soul, the texture of integrity, the sound of fate? Where in my body do they live?

For some reason I’ve always thought of my soul as round. It has all the colors of a prism, yet is soft as down and smells of jasmine. It resides just beneath my breastbone next door to my heart, a true and steady chronometer of me. Like a compass that always points north, I have only to be still for a moment to feel it.

Integrity is less ethereal. A chunk of granite, painted with lichen, slippery when wet, with a deep basso profundo voice. The moisture comes from its sad eyes when I have thought to ignore its words. The lichen are scabs of healing from childish mistakes of trying to tear myself away from it. I try to never take my hands from its surface, but being human, sometimes I slip. The sun warmed rock is my strength. It’s the base of my spine.

Fate is the bubble I dance on, also round, but much bigger. Music pours from it, helping my feet to fly, and lyrics are available, some I write and some are gifts. Once in a while in my obdurate way I try to change the tune and am gently rebuked by the maestro that I do not control the orchestra. Off tune singing is not allowed and only hinders the melody.

These three things are my light, my air, my sustenance.

My day job is to keep them all in balance.

2009-04-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

There is nothing that lingers more than a child hood trauma.

WHAT SCARES ME

Past the field behind our small house in Compton, California is the Sacramento River. One day I plan to build a raft and float down it to the sea like Tom Sawyer. But that will be when I am older, eight or nine.

Today I am five and my sister and I plan an adventure. My sister is three years older than me and cruel; her mouth makes a smile when she beats me. Her fat legs straddle my skinny rib cage imprisoning my arms by my sides and she punches my flat chest and my bucktooth mouth.

She says she has the right to beat me because she is the Chief Explorer and I am only her slave, useful for carrying our equipment, but not necessary. I know better than to argue with her when her eyes are tinged orange with madness and her calm words are meant to dissect my heart.

The gravel beneath my back pushes through my dirty white T shirt. I can feel its marks on the bumps of my spine long before she lets me up.

“Now we will attack the castle,” she commands me. She points to the old water tower near the river. She force marches us to its base and I can see the rusted red and white danger signs on its side. One sign hangs loosely by a nail and whacks itself against the flat gray boards that make up the room beneath the tower.

We squat beside the room while she plans her attack, drawing her maps in the dirt with a stick and consulting with her officers. Slaves are not allowed to speak during this planning, but I am bored and make my own quiet game of throwing pebbles at a nearby stick. I count coup each time I hit it, I am winning.

My sister snatches me up by the front of my T shirt, “Now! You go first.” She orders me with a push. We sneak around the scary room under the round water tank until we come to the door set into the gray planks. She yanks open the door and shoves me into the darkness, where I stand frozen in fear as she slams the door shut behind me and leans hard against it. I can hear her cackling through my hysterical screams.

I whirl around and race to the door, spider webs cling to my eyes, nose, cheeks. I bang my fists against the door begging, “Please, please, please…” and she laughs harder. There are soft things with legs falling on my head, my arms, crawling on me. Through a sunlit crack in the wall I see hundreds of black spider bodies, the red hourglass looks painted on their bellies. I am locked inside that room for eons.

When she finally lets me out, my sister drapes her arm over my shoulder as we walk back to our house. Her arm around me makes it appear to the world as though we are friends, sisters. But we are not.

Fifty-seven years later I am still having nightmares about that day.

But it isn’t my sister that torments my dreams; it’s the black widow spiders.

2009-04-06T12:58:00.000-07:00

This one is just an ode to the wonderful therapy of yard work. HA!

TEMPER: LOST

It should have been something monumental that made him lose his temper, like fire, flood, or famine. But it was finding the used (USED!) condom casually flipped over the fence by the neighbor’s sulky teenager that did it.

Jeff stared at the limp disgusting thing for five minutes forcing himself not to touch it. What he ached to do was snatch it up and take it next door and smash it into his neighbor Bill’s smug self-righteous face. He knew exactly what he’d have said too. “I saw your precious daughter screwing two boys in your boat yesterday and here’s the proof!”

Then again, maybe something less pointed would be better, like, “You may want to have your pastor speak to Lily about the proper disposal of her boyfriend’s condoms.” He liked that one. Jeff could just imagine the shock and consternation on Bill’s face as it dawned on him that his sweet young daughter was a tramp. Then again, that might be too vague, you had to spell things out to Bill – innuendo wasn’t his strong suit.

Pointedly ignoring the disgusting thing, Jeff made an effort to calm himself by finishing up the yard work he’d started earlier. His wife Melody had told him that morning, “This stupid law suit you are handling at work is making you crazy. You need to get outside, work in the yard, get some sun, get your mind off it.” She’d kissed him on the nose before she’d left for the library. And for a while, it had helped, just like she said.

He gathered his tools and rinsed the mud off each one, all the while running more scenarios through his mind of what he could say to Bill and his obnoxious daughter. A monarch butterfly flitted past his nose and he could hear the phone ringing inside the house.

Damn it! Damn it, damn it! He threw the rake as hard as he could out into the grass, it felt so good he followed that with the trowel, the pruning shears, the hoe, and all the swear words he couldn’t say in court. He waved his arms around and stomped and screamed for a good fifteen minutes.

Then he picked two twigs out of the trash, walked over to where the offensive condom still lay draped over a bush, picked it up with the twigs and deftly tossed it back into his neighbor’s yard. It landed neatly and clearly visibly right on the bow of the boat. He had to laugh.

Surveying his almost pristine back yard, he gathered up the flung tools, and stowed them in the shed. Jeff felt so much better he vowed that when Melody got home he’d have to tell her that she was right. Yard work was great therapy.

2009-04-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

When is it difficult to know when you've done wrong?

GUILT

Kate sat in the backseat of her attorney’s car as they were driving away from the meeting. The stall tactics had worked again against her clueless sister and she should have been ecstatic.

But there was a new pain in her gut and it wasn’t the by now familiar feel of the demon she’d invited in to masticate on her soul. This was new. She looked out the window trying to distract her self but she didn’t see the cars passing them or the landscape whizzing past.

What she saw was her parent’s faces. This was blatantly impossible, she knew that they were safely dead -- weren’t they? But there they were vividly alive on the glass, snarling in anger, their lips moving furiously. Even though she couldn’t hear their words, she whispered to them, “I’m getting her, mom. Dad I’m winning. I’ve learned my lessons well, aren’t you proud of me?”

Suddenly she could hear their voices so loud in her mind that they overrode the triumphant crowing of her attorney.

“You are a bad girl, and you will be punished. This isn’t what we wanted and you know that!” They shouted on and on and on and she closed her eyes but couldn’t stop the voices. She didn’t hear her daughter ask what was wrong or feel the car pull off to the side of the road.

Because after all her years of carefully constructing one new persona after another to avoid the edge of madness; today her parents voices had finally tipped her over into the abyss. And the blankness in her eyes and the froth on her lips came not from the demon but from years of built up guilt.

Too bad she couldn’t tell anyone.

2009-04-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it is necessary to remember love, and cherish it.

FINALLY, ONE MORNING, WE FOUND OURSELVES IN BED

Most of the time anymore, we don’t sleep together. I have to admit I started it. She began getting the night sweats and every time she’d get one she’d throw the covers off. I mean all the way off her whole body and part of mine too. If that didn’t wake me up, the way she flung her arms and legs out did. Five, six, seven times a night, I couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep for months.

Some guys wouldn’t mind I guess, but I have to get my eight hours or I’m no good at work. I slept in the guestroom for a while, but I missed her breathing next to me. You sleep next to a person for thirty or forty years, you get the habit.

So I go back to the marital bed but I guess not getting enough sleep was getting to her too. Marge and me grew up in the same neighborhood in east LA and I’ve watched her go through a ton of changes. I don’t think I’ve seen her this cranky since she went through puberty. Her skin is sensitive, her nerves are sensitive, she can’t stand being touched at night, won’t even let the dog up on the bed anymore.

Well, I told her I’m not going back to the guest room again, and she told me she sure as hell wasn’t going to give up her own damn bedroom so we compromised on separate beds. But we had to downsize to twins because two kings wouldn’t fit in the room.

That was okay for a year or so until she started yelling at me every night to quit snoring it was keeping her awake. “I don’t snore,” I told her. “It must be you.” And we argued that one back and forth until she bought a little sound activated tape recorder and got proof. No way could those big deep snores have been coming out of her. So back to the guestroom for me and it’s pretty much permanent now. The sleep clinic got me a machine that helps with the snoring but makes so much noise of its own I have to wear earplugs to cancel it out.

She’s still got night sweats and now I’ve got this machine, we’re more like roommates at either end of the house than man and wife.

Last month we got into this big fight over nothing really, but you know how it is. One person says one thing and the other person says another and the next thing you know it’s World War Three and no graceful way out for anybody. We went to our separate beds, both of us still mad as hornets.

But about four am I found myself back in our old bedroom kneeling next to her side of the bed, crying and missing her so much I couldn’t stand it. She woke up, saw me crying there, and this time when she threw back the covers it was to invite me in.

Finally, that morning, we found ourselves in bed together and I think she needed it as much as I did. We still can’t sleep together every night because of our individual problems, but we talked about it and settled on a pretty good compromise. We made a deal that once a week or so we would spend the night together. And she says it’s worth listening to me snore for one night to cuddle again. I feel the same.

It’s kind of romantic really, knowing that we’ve got that one night coming up. Like when we were dating, only better.

2009-04-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

A few things from the last week of online writing, this one is todays. How FUN!

THREE THINGS I CAN'T SEE

What is the shape of a soul, the texture of integrity, the sound of fate? Where in my body do they live?

For some reason I’ve always thought of my soul as round. It has all the colors of a prism, yet is soft as down and smells of jasmine. It resides just beneath my breastbone next door to my heart, a true and steady chronometer of me. Like a compass that always points north, I have only to be still for a moment to feel it.

Integrity is less ethereal. A chunk of granite, painted with lichen, slippery when wet, with a deep basso profundo voice. The moisture comes from its sad eyes when I have thought to ignore its words. The lichen are scabs of healing from childish mistakes of trying to tear myself away from it. I no longer take my hands from its surface. The sun warmed rock is my strength. It’s the base of my spine.

Fate is the bubble I dance on, also round, but much bigger. Music pours from it, helping my feet to fly, and lyrics are available, some I write and some are gifts. Once in a while in my obdurate way I try to change the tune and am gently rebuked by the maestro that I do not control the orchestra. Off tune singing is not allowed and only hinders the melody.

These three things are my light, my air, my sustenance.

My day job is to keep them all in balance.

2009-03-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

I am proud and honored to say that this piece was one of (I think) seven pieces chosen out of about 90 pieces this week to be posted on Creative Caffeine's Blog.
I could just about bust my buttons with joy!

WAKING TOGETHER

Often they slept spooned, one snugged behind the other. Sometimes she was the hugged spoon, sometimes he. They had no rule or habit about it. Whether before or behind, it was the touching that held importance. Though even when there was a foot of space between them in the bed, they were still connected, by breath, by snore, maybe just their hair touching. It might have been the mere knowledge that if you flung your arm across the bed you’d hit a comforting lump of living flesh.

If she awoke before him in the mornings, she might spend time just staring at his skull, the bones in his face, his silvery hair, before he opened his eyes and stared back at her.

Five minutes or ten could pass staring each other full awake before they mumbled “morning”, threw the covers back and began their day.

Arthur no longer shared her bed and now when Alberta woke in the morning it was her cat, Max, who stared her awake. She still said “morning” but Max’s reply was a rumbling cat word that loosely translated meant, “time to let me out.”

She threw back the covers and began her day by letting Max out the front door for his daily rounds. She stood in the doorway for a time looking out at the day and thinking, “God, Arthur, dead ten years and I still miss you.”

Then she closed the door.