The Diverse Arts Project just published a nonfiction piece of mine. Here’s the link:
http://www.diverseartsproject.com/reportage/2016/8/30/i-meet-mary.html
It’s about the unusual way I experienced my mother’s final years.
Read, enjoy, and leave me a comment, if you so desire.
Getting lunch to go at the Taco John’s. Ten people lined up at the till, ten more in line in cars at the drive up outside. The number on my ticket is 76; 71 was just called, and I’ve been waiting a while, so there’s probably another ten awaiting their food inside, and probably another three or four outside in cars between the menu with its speaker and the window with its cash drawer. From where I stand, I can see through into the kitchen. There’s just five people in there. They’re several races, span three generations in age with hair ranging from bright blue to none. They are surrounded: six against 30+, but they work fast, efficient and smooth. Their eyes and faces constantly looking up at a monitor I can’t see that shows them the orders. Not just glancing at it, concentrating on it like faces staring over battlements, and that leads me to think how brave they are. Outnumbered six-to-one, but getting it done, filling the orders with the knowledge that one slip-up could end up with some impatient yo-yo screaming at the poor kid behind the counter out front. I could not do it. I tell the woman who brings me my order in its brown bag, I tell the woman who brings me my order — 76 in a brown bag — “They’re working their tails off back there, I’ve been watching. You tell ’em, I’m going back to work, and if I can work as hard as they are, the rest of the afternoon, I am going to get a lot done. You tell them that, OK?” She gives aa big smile, “I sure will.”
Eight miles out of Valley Center, on a country road in the middle of nowhere, a tire went flat. I asked Edmund to hold the flashlight for me while I unpacked the spare tire, jack, and lug wrench from the trunk. While I set the jack under the back bumper, he asked me to hand him the lug wrench. “Left rear?” he asked. “Yep,” I said. As I started jacking, I heard the hub cap pop off, and the sound of the wrench being fit over the first nut.
I jacked slowly. It was late, approaching midnight, and I was tired, but more than that, I was distracted by the stars. It was a cold, clear night, miles from any city, and the late December sky blazed with stars. God, there were lots of stars. You ever look at a beach and try to see just one grain of sand? You can’t do it, the grains don’t stand out single, they clump together, and all you see is beach. The sky that night was nothing like that. The stars were too many to count. Each stood out to be seen, crisp and bright, a single point of light.
“Elsa,” I called, “get outta the car and look at these stars!”
Continue reading “Getting Miss Elsa Home”
The first memory is of mountains. Standing on my mother’s lap, I see them out the small window. Gray, black, and dark green, they are crinkled like an old person’s skin, with white snow on top. Continue reading “Small Windows”
The dog was maybe brown but more the color of the farm lane it lay in, the gray dust coating its thick hair, coating all of us, too, me, Dad, the farmer he was talking to: all the same color, texture, Continue reading “Still Life with Tick”
The mosquitoes that weekend ruined both our camping trip and our relationship. Vicious little cupids, they jabbed us from all directions and all angles. Their wounds raised welts, not passion, and ended our love-making not long after it began. Continue reading “Not Up to Scratch”
The scrawny kid usually gets a hit. He’s left handed but bats right. Batting right means his surest and strongest hand is nearest the bottom of the bats, and maybe this helps steady his swing. Batting right also means that as his bat leaves his shoulder, its tip seeking the ball, his left arm leads the way. It’s the arm he habitually uses to reach for things, and maybe that gives him a surer, truer swing. He’s only ten, none of this occurs to him, but he just accepts as fact that if the softball drops anywhere near his strike zone, he will connect. Continue reading “The Scrawny Kid on Base”
Our orchard has grown through the years from a single tree to over a hundred. They spread down a grassy slope.
Last winter winter weighed heavy on the limbs, and spring iced the flowers. The trees are unlikely to bear fruit this season. Still, we must tend them. A few years back, the wild mulberries failed to produce. By midsummer raccoons, thin, starving, ragged, were raiding the granaries and barns, even breaking into the houses, desperate for food. The cherry trees that year also failed, but the following year, both mulberries and cherries bloomed and the boughs dipped low with fruit. No one had ever seen such abundance. Even people who hated cherries and mulberries ate them anyway, there were just too many, being prepared and served in too many ways, to say no, and when the path before you is partially blocked by a low limb heavy with plump, juicy, sweet-smelling fruit, it is impossible to not sample just one, if not devour dozens.
Our greatest fear is an overabundance of apples. The heavier the crop, the longer it takes to destroy them all, and the greater the chance that someone will yield to temptation and eat one, and the eternal harmony of the world we have built for ourselves, all these centuries, in this garden, will be destroyed, for the apple remains forbidden.
1.
Zandra stayed in shape by running the stairs of her St. Louis high rise five steps at a time. Ten steps separated each landing, and she took each set in two long strides, identical twins of muscle and grace. Twenty measured, airborne lunges to reach the tenth floor. Twenty loping, free-fall leaps to go back down.
Moving to a small town, Zandra bought a house with only two floors. The stairs had two landings. The first landing was just three steps up from the living room floor. A quarter turn left, and seven steps to the second landing, another quarter turn, and seven steps to the second floor hallway. She struggled to learn the new stair case. Her long legs balked at the change from the straight-five cadence of the high rise to the syncopated 3, 4 of her new place.
Frustrated, she tried for all seven at once and found herself stuck on the stairs in a full split, one foot on the bottom landing, the other one step short of the top one.
2.
Each morning, Paul breakfasted on the morning paper. When he was ready for his check, the waitress would come, and he would tell her what he had digested.
“Front page, letters to the editor, box scores,” he usually replied.
“Whole or skim?” she asked.
“Just skimmed,” he said.
“Browsing and skimming,” she said, listing what he’d read, with prices, on her little green pad. “That’s not a healthy breakfast.”
She’d put the check face down on the table. He’d finish his coffee, steal a peak at the comics, and leave a lousy tip.
3.
Zandra’s daughter, Zoey, sat on the bottom landing below her mother, finishing her homework. Luckily her homework was to write a letter of persuasion, and so she had written a plea for someone to come save her mother. She chose a block business style so the person receiving it would take it seriously. She tri-folded the letter and handed it to her mother’s friend, the Roller-Blading Krishna, who wafted gently from the house and floated toward the sky. “Pfut, pfut, pfut, pfut” was the sound his roller blades made, trailing puffs of orange smoke. For several blocks, the Roller Blading Krishna could still sense Zandra’s pain, but then the warm sunshine burnished his cheeks, and the gentle breeze slipstreamed his lips into a smile. He was so glad they had moved to a small town. The brutal crosswinds of the St. Louis high rises made roller-blading difficult.
+4.
Lindsey lost her footing on the waxed floor and embraced the linoleum hard. Computer tapes in round metal cans scattered from her arms. Paul, her boss, came skidding across the floor on his knees, gathering up the tapes.
“Oh, God, Lindsey, this one has a little dent!” said Paul.
“Paul,” said Lindsey, “we’re the only dot.com on the planet that stores its data on a mainframe.”
“Mainframes,” said Paul, straightening, “took America to the moon, and that is so far above the Cloud it has to be better.”
Staring at the pink slip he handed her, Lindsey said, “You’re phf-firing me? What the phfoot?”
Lindsey, raised Amish, never used bad words. She stomped down the hall, turning halfway to the doors. “You know what the phfirst letter in ‘phfired,’ is Paul? It’s phfut. Phfut you, Paul. Phfut this crappy job.”
She hit the crashbar, breaking free into the sunshine, dumb, bummed, but deep down, ecstatic.
The Roller Blading Krishna was waiting, bobbing cross-legged over some dahlias, on a cloud of phfffty orange smog.
“You said the magic word.” He handed her Zoe’s letter. “You said it four times.”
“Who the phfut are you?” said Lindsey.
“Five times,” said the Roller Blading Krishna.
Lindsey’s eyes widened as she read.
“O. M. G.” she said. “The pain in her hip flexors and hamstrings must be excruciating.” She narrowed her eyes. “How do I know this girl’s mama is really trapped in the splits between landings in her house?”
“Here is one of her socks,” said the Roller Blading Krishna. “The other sock is out of reach, at the upstairs extremity of poor Zandra.”
“I can help,” said Lindsey. “I know just what to do.” She leapt into the Roller Blader’s arms. They phfut phfut phfutted away on puffs of orange smoke.
5.
“Momma.”
“Yes, dear?”
“Why didn’t we just call 911?”
“Because momma forgot to charge her cell phone last night. Oh, this hurts.”
“As much as childbirth?”
“Not quite, dear. But if someone offered me an epidural right now, I’d take it.”
“Momma?”
“Yes?”
“If you got me an I-Phone, I would promise to always keep it charged.”
In the yard, they heard the familiar Phfut, phfut, phfut of the Roller-Blading Krishna. “He’s back!” shouted Zoey, “With a lady! My letter worked!
6.
The next morning, for breakfast, Paul devoured three whole columns of newspaper. When he called for the check and the waitress asked what he’d digested, he pointed to the headline. She scribbled it down on her pad.
Pointing to the picture of the story’s hero, Paul said, “Best programmer I ever had.”
“Article says you fired her,” said the waitress, laying his check face down on the table. “It says she didn’t seem to mind.”
“Yea, well,” said Paul, hanging his head. “I know her better now. It says her she’s got an associate’s degree in Physical Therapy and that’s secretly what she’s always wanted to do. I never knew that. And she was raised Amish. I never knew that either.”
“What I’ve been telling you,” said the waitress. “Breakfast’s the most important meal of the day. Pay on your way out, you schmuck.”
Paul read his check.
“Disgruntled Dot.Com Darling Saves Day.
“Mother Fine. Daughter Recuperating in School.
“Amish Carpenters to Add Three Steps between Landings.”
Paul nodded. Everything was in order. He left the waitress a big tip.
The bike path I was riding on ran under a bridge that crossed a creek. Two men sat in folding chairs by the path, fishing.
“What kind of fish do you catch here?” I asked one of them.
“Catfish,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Joe,” I said.
“I’m Dan, and this is my good friend Bob.”
“Hello, Dan and Bob,” I said.
“Do you fish?” asked Dan.
“No.”
“Well, why not?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s because I just can’t sit still that long.”
Dan gave me a look that told me he knew better.
Bob said, “That must be why you ride that bike.”
Dan said, “You ever ridden RAGBRAI?”
“No,” I said. “But this bike has. My daughter rode this bike on RAGBRAI when she was sixteen. She rode clear across Iowa.”
“That’s just sad,” said Dan. “Your daughter rode RAGBRAI when she was sixteen, and you don’t even fish.”
“Worse than sad,” I said. “because I’m on my way to work.”
Dan sucked in a deep breath.
“But I’ll be back with a fishing pole,” I said. They laughed.
“No, I won’t,” I admitted. I mounted up.
“Thanks for stopping,” said Dan. “Good meeting you,” he called as I peddled away.
Shortbread Fiction 