(c) 1/12/2023
I didn’t sign any papers;
it was mutual. A handshake. Culturally
driven. Just the way things are.
All my writing...the good, the bad, the embarrassingly awful.
(c) 1/12/2023
I didn’t sign any papers;
it was mutual. A handshake. Culturally
driven. Just the way things are.
(c) 3/21/2022
“Well, Sean,” I said, “You look good! Your wound has healed
up nicely.”
Sean had shaved off the scrub of beard and mustache. His
makeshift cast, which was built up from strips of t-shirt and plaid shirts
wrapped nearly two inches thick and that had been hiding a purplish, swollen
hand, was now gone. The gash had healed to a four-inch-long welt along his
wrist. His hand looked normal.
Sean showed me how his wrist was stiff and that he could
barely bend it. If he’d had any type of manual labor job before that
opportunity was now past.
“I sure wish you could have gone to the ER with that!” The
mother in me popped out. I hoped Sean wouldn’t take it poorly. I had already
learned that he wouldn’t check in to any medical facility. Money and lack of
insurance aside, he was convinced Doctors would lock him up and force feed him hallucinogens
and poison.
I noticed that while I couldn’t say Sean’s clothes looked
freshly laundered at least they weren’t rank and grubby from months of daily
wear.
“Yeah,” he said. “I got the chance to clean myself up.” He
beamed and his blue eyes shone with a calm I hadn’t seen when running into him
during the past year.
I thought against asking him where the opportunity came
from. It had taken me several months, a few dips into my grocery bag or wallet,
and a couple of meals at Ozzie’s Pub before he offered his name.
The first time I saw Sean panhandling outside of Starbucks
three different people, including me, ran up with cups of coffee and bagged
pastries. I nudged my companion. “Look how he shines!” His smile was infectious.
I instantly wanted to give him the world. If only I’d owned the world.
When I talked him into a meal, I learned to not ask many
questions. His meal choices had started as burgers and fries, an occasional steak.
Eventually all he ate was pulled Pork and a Pale Ale. No sides. No buns. “This
is what the German’s eat,” he’d said. He’d never go back to California to see
his mother. The German’s were teaching him how to be a man. I didn’t ask about
the Germans. I supposed they were white supremacists, and if Sean bought into
that belief, I didn’t want to sit here feeding him. I hadn’t asked about the
wound on his wrist either. I couldn’t tell if it was an accident or
self-inflicted. I had offered to pay for urgent care. That is how small my
world is. He needed much more than one doctor visit.
Sometimes Sean would shut down, turn slightly, and stare to
the right of my face. Then he grinned as though there was a frenetic comedy on
a big screen beside my head. A couple of times I turned to look. “There’s
nothing there,” Sean said somewhat dispassionately. After a long pause, he would re-start the
conversation.
The last time I ran into Sean he showed how he got around the security fence and slept in the crawl space of the now defunct Kasper’s French restaurant. The restaurant was festooned with notice of what new Apartment Complex was coming. Now four years later, I think of Sean on occasion and with worry. It never changes anything.
(c) 3/20/2022)
One
confession night in October, Jimmy confessed to masturbating.
Gathered
from across the states we were a community of forty young Presbyterians,
Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and some like me, non-denominational. Our community
leaders were married and the rest of us had taken vows of poverty and celibacy.
Of course, Jimmy masturbated.
Jimmy
felt the need to confess details. He did it whenever his roommate left for the quad
bathroom. Instead of eating dinner. Or breakfast. During solitude hour, usually
reserved for prayer and meditation. He described his grip, moving his hands like God moving heavenly hands
over the water in the silent dark, bringing forth teeming creatures from the
depths.
As an activity that amounts to self and group
denigration, confession provides criticism to promote mortification, to forge
new identity and new norms based on the power of the group, to reduce individual
separateness. Instead, Jimmy’s confession disrupted everything.
Fifteen
minutes into a confession that would seemingly never end Jimmy started to cry.
“I can’t stop. I know Satan controls my
penis. Everywhere I turn is temptation.”
“Stop
already!” I thought, utterly transfixed. All the girls continued to look on wide-eyed.
Sure,
sure there’s the sin of Onanism. By Jewish law, Onan had to marry his brother
Er’s widow Tamar and help her bear a son that would carry forward Er’s line.
Instead of impregnating her Onan spilt his seeds on the ground and so God smite
Onan. It wasn’t spilling seeds that was the sin but Onan’s refusal to invest in
raising up his brother’s son.
How
cruel that his parents, and his church taught him this shame. Masturbating was
probably the only activity most of us could take to remain born-again virgins.
Jimmy
wasn’t one of the boys any of us speculated about marrying. He didn’t play
guitar. He’d never lead a Youth Group. He hadn’t spoken much before tonight and
wasn’t a powerful orator. The chances of his becoming a pastor were slim. Even
in the secular world he would likely have problems finding a Friday night date.
Without Satan, where would Jimmy shift blame for his transgressions? Shame radiates
outward. How would Jimmy relieve that pain? Upon whom?
Finally,
Bill broke in. “I see you girls looking with disgust at Jimmy. But masturbating
is a totally normal thing for guys to do.”
“Yeah, sure thing Bill,” I thought. It
is normal. We women though, held captive to a near-pornographic call for our
comfort and understanding was not.
(c) 3/19/2022
The Page of
Wands always stoops
to smell the
roses, or to sneak
Spreading
Phlox between the pavers.
Equal parts
haphazard and methodical,
she
generates ideas while planting seeds.
My Great-Aunt Winnie loved the garden.
She labored beside the work crew that planted
crocus’s and daffodils each spring
in the concrete planter bowls straddling the entrance.
Flowers were intended to make visitors feel welcome.
Winnie had no visitors. Not her mother.
Not any of her five brothers. But then,
taking time for family can be such an inconvenience.
More than anything, Winifred loved to listen to music.
Music
soothes the soul and the Page of Wands
by default
of immaturity faces challenges.
Whatever
journey she began back home
The Queen circumnavigated
it and
had Winnie institutionalized here
among catatonics and their colonic irrigations,
among palliatives, shocks, and needles.
Access to a turntable took finagling the one attendant
who wasn’t easily agitated. Even Glen Miller and
Gene Autry become irritating when over-played.
Winnie was, my father said, a talented pianist.
“She spent her time playing for the inmates
and probably felt fulfilled.”
The Page of
Wands is modest, and Winnie
may not have
realized she had been sterilized.
The Page is
a dreamer, an idealist,
whose energy
uncoils as optimism,
and maybe Winnie felt fulfilled
Sundays after lunch, plunking out As Time Goes By
or Blue Moon on the auditorium piano.
Capable hands her mother saw no use for at home.
(c) 3/19/2022
Charles wore thick-rimmed glasses that were held onto his head with a large rubber band and a nose clip. To make it easier to wear, he’d said, his mother shaved his hair down to a blonde crew cut reminiscent of the soldiers on the news. No one else at school wore hair short enough to show even their ears.
Whenever Charles saw me on the playground,
he came charging whether I was on the girl’s or the boy’s side, or at the top of the neutral stairwell that led down to the street. No matter how many times I told
him to go away he laughed loudly and drew even more attention. Sometimes
he handed me a note with hearts drawn all over it. Once he told me that he
loved me. When he brought blue bells picked from the school entrance, I scrunched
them with my foot on the concrete.
One day, after ripping up another
note, waving it in his face and yelling, “Stop it!”, Charles said that he would
pull down his pants for me. My friend Stephanie looked shocked. Kanda laughed. I
certainly did not want to see his privates, let alone any boy’s privates. I
didn’t think he’d go through with it.
And yet, “Sure Charles” I said. “You
can pull down your pants for me. But not here on the playground.”
He decided it would be at Roger’s
Park after school let out the next day. Roger’s Park started at the bottom as a
track with a soccer field in the center. From there it was like a bowl with a steep
climb up to the trails through Fir, Hemlock, Maple and the stinky scent of
Scotch broom. In the late Spring we girls like to sit off the track, chain
daisies together and talk about boys. We never talked about Charles.
Charles raced to find me after
school. His forehead glistened with sweat. His voice shook. “Are you ready?” he
asked me.
I had forgotten but dutifully turned
with Kanda and followed him. My word is my word!
Notice of the event had spread. At
least fifty unruly, exuberant students already assembled followed Charles. He
stopped walking halfway out on one trail and turned to face the crowd who were
now surrounding him. He looked frozen. One hand on a Fir trunk, his other clutched
his trousers as boys shouted threatening encouragement. Pinecones were thrown. Small spits of gravel. Charles
started to unbuckle his belt.
“I don’t think I can watch,” I
said to Kanda. What if I had pushed through and told Charles that I didn’t even
want to see his privates? How could I say that amidst a mob?
Charles dropped his trousers.
Underneath the standard beige he had on plastic pants that were covered with cartoonish
fire trucks.
“Oh no!” I gasped. Nobody wore
plastic pants. That was for babies, not for third graders. What was wrong with
him?
As I turned to leave Charles was
crying, sweat rolling down his forehead into his eyes. Still besieged by the throng,
the din captured the attention of college boys jogging in the bowl who,
thankfully intervened.
I felt shame and regret that I’d
agreed to look at him. I was partly to blame for his humiliation. It was a guilt
I didn’t have to face for long. He transferred to another school the next week and he was soon enough forgotten.
(c) 03/16/2022
1968
and we were eight and nine, the butt-end of the baby-boomers, city kids whose working
class parents didn’t flee to the suburbs. Nixon was president. The Vietnam war
raged across our black and white television screens. Kennedy and King had been assassinated,
yet we didn’t know a thing about racial unrest or civil rights. Zoning red
lines had lifted in Seattle; our student base still looked like it was
segregated. None of us had parent’s contemplating divorce, and we were shielded
from those older cousins who started taking the pill.
The world rarely broke through our slumber-party TV nights, the homogenous Brady Bunch and the strangely matriarchal Partridge Family. The three of us, Kanda, Stephanie and I, had Davy Jones posters on our walls. A couple of times I wiped boogers across Davy’s face.
Kanda was already talking about how many babies she would have. Three, maybe four and at least one of each. We were allowed to look at, but not touch her baby doll. It was expensive and looked real. Stephanie didn’t talk about babies. She was already focused on what her husband would be like.
The last thing I wanted was a baby, and the attention of grown men either made me uncomfortable or terrified. It was clear to me that I’d would never quite fit the mold they both so easily slipped in to. I didn’t know what else to want.
Kanda’s mother worked at Fircrest which is an institution housing the intellectually disabled. That was not the label we used in 1968. We went there on weekends to play on the trampoline, but just us. Not the residents. I was confused by their visible inabilities to do simple things on their own, such as walking. Kanda’s mom seemed unfazed by it.
Stephanie’s mother volunteered at the church. I tagged along sometimes to youth events. I’m sure someone, somewhere hoped I’d become a believer. For a while I did.
We lost touch over the years, got back in touch, lost touch.
In
1980, Kanda had secured a job for me as a housecleaner for anarchists. There
were guns on the floor and in cabinets and hunting knives on the kitchen counter.
I cleaned one day and never went back to collect my money.
When I introduced her to my infant, Kanda held my daughter for two hours.
At our twenty-year high school reunion, Kanda brought one of her gay male friends and introduced him as her husband. We made eye contact. He shrugged.
As it turned out Kanda never had any children. She died of alcohol poisoning before she turned forty.
The last time I checked Stephanie had already been divorced three times. She is still committed to her church community.
I kept trying to fit the mold our parents set before us, even while the world all around illuminated that the mold was faulty. That if it wasn’t the mold that would break, it was us.
3/5/2022 (c)
I was still on maternity
leave and David was still working the dinner shift. He told me we had money, but
so far we weren’t living it. Or at least I and the baby weren’t. The only
groceries in the apartment were popcorn and one old bag of rice, and not always
butter. I learned how to eat it dry. That wouldn’t be so bad except David liked
to call me on his break and describe the quail under glass, the steak tartare,
French onion soup, or whatever he was having that night. Even then, under the
weight of that unnecessary cruelty I made excuses for him. I would make excuses
for years, mostly to myself.
One day he came home from work in a Rolls Royse. It was an older model but mostly clean and such a pretty blue-gray. He said he bought it for me. I would have preferred food but said nothing as I didn’t want to appear ungrateful.
“You should drive it into work and show your coworkers!” he said.
“What did they say?” Well, they thought it was a pretty car.
“No, about me?” Well, yeah. They thought it was a generous gift.
He let me know that my enthusiasm was insufficient. Perhaps the lack of nutrients going into my body and my baby sucking out what flawed nutrition she could took my mood down. In any case, a week later my car was gone.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Oh, I sold it and made a tidy profit.”