Breakers

We have gone to the beach, my children and I, finally this summer, in mid July.

Our toes slide past the shoreline’s tickling foam fingers with hours and hours of traveled anticipation at our backs pushing us further and further into the crashing waves.

The first slap of ocean upon sun warmed flesh a shock delicious and bracing, and as familiar as breathing to me, thrown suddenly way back to my beach-washed childhood.

They want to go deep, my sons. Beyond the breakers, with me.

"Swim, mommy! I want to swim!" Jacob has been chanting over and over, impatient through the processes of establishing our beachhead; of blankets unfurled and corner weighted, towels piled at the ready, glasses securely stowed away.

He will not be denied.

We stand thigh deep in the churning foam as I test the ocean’s resolve to push us under, pull us out. The waves are dramatic but not demonic, the undertow manageable. It’s a go.

This first time I must take them out together, as neither will countenance being left behind, shore-locked and waiting.

When I was their age I was out in the deep on my own, body surfing the breaking waves as my father had taught me.  But these are city boys, our forays to ocean beaches few and far between. Once or twice a summer season. (Last year not at all, to my heart's sorrow.)

And I, after an urban beginning, was raised an Island girl, the south shore beaches my constant summer's terrain.

It was a casual thing for our family. Once a week, sometimes more, we'd toss our towels and a couple of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches into a bag and we’d be off to the beach. And then as a teenager, I would venture alone with friends on the Jones Beach bus.

With my sons, however, it's an outing, a sojourn, planned, scheduled, only attempted when the stars align and circumstances are just right. Like last Sunday.

They want to run headlong into the surf but I hold them back, an old hand at this game.

“Do you want to get trashed by the waves?” I ask them.

“Noooo!” they howl, seeking to be spared this indignity.

“Then wait for my signal, move when I move, and fast!” I instruct.

I stand looking seaward, study the waves as they collapse upon the many small sandbars that carpet the ocean floor here, engendering a complex pattern, difficult to properly time our approach.

I watch the ebb and the flow, making sense of what looks like chaos, and slowly the patterns emerge. There are occasional rogue waves coming in from the right, but basically these big waves come on: one, two, three, and then a little lull, one, two, three and then the lull, the outgoing wave canceling out the incoming one, creating calm, the appearance of stasis on the surface when below there is a swirling pas de deux.

“Now!” I yell, hoping I‘ve got it, that the wave I see beginning to swell out beyond the red ball buoy is going to be small, shallow, cresting once we are well beyond it. And indeed it is.

“Jump” I shout as the wave passes, rising us up with it, nowhere near ready to crash and crush.

(Yes, I’ve called it right.)

We bob and sway with the tide. Our faces split open in joy. You wouldn’t know which twin is autistic out here in the deep, both boys happily treading water, calmly following my instructions.

“Over, over!” I yell, and we rise up together, laughing into the spray. With Ethan tightly gripping my right hand and Jake my left, I am sincerely hoping my nose does not start to itch.

Occasionally a wave rises up and up, curls over us ominously, and our strategy changes. “Under!” I command and we dive below, surfacing to the screams of those being crashed upon, further ashore.

A double wave catches us by surprise, causing me to drop right into its crest, expecting a lull. As I snort some ocean water, I feel my feet starting to cramp and realize I have hit the point where my body is tiring of this constantly alert state. Time to head in.

The boys howl in protest, would stay out here all day, rising and falling in the swells with Mom. But I am the grown-up here, know when I am reaching my limits.

“It’s not safe anymore,” I tell them, “I'm getting too tired to keep you safe.”

“Nooooo!” they wail. But I am the Mom.

I turn my body toward the shore, but my head and gaze swivel back to watch once again the patterning of the waves. I want us to travel with them, to use the waves’ energy to bolster our flagging reserves, riding them shoreward.

I am trying to describe my process to Ethan, trying to teach, to pass on my knowledge; but this is hard, making explicit what is inside me mostly a feeling.

There are so many variables, chaos theory in action. There is my mind, calculating, looking at the swells: how high will they go, how fast are they traveling, how long it has been since the wave before, how fast it is being chased by the next, when and where and how large is the wave returning from shore to meet it?

But what is happening in the ocean at any moment is more than the sum of these parts. There is a gestalt to it, a knowing of the ocean, a sensing of her mood.

I can’t even say how I know what I know, but I know it. I feel it.

I have spent hours, days, years in the ocean and been trashed maybe thrice. Not in years.

And so when I yell to the boys “NOW! Move with THIS wave, let it carry you in!” I know it HAS to be this one; that hesitation will bring disaster, our timing off, the pattern all wrong and a wave will crash at our backs before we are far enough in, possibly throw us down, pull us under into a total sand-face-mash-up.

Not the end of the world, these waves too gentle for real damage; but still, a scary incident, a glimpse into the dark side of the ocean’s magic that I am not ready to invite yet into their sweet lives.

But lo, the boys listen, they move with me and the waves, let themselves be carried in.

And as our feet hit the sand we run, slogging fast towards shore. So the waves catch up with us too low to pull us under, a sandy tickling caress only.

We splash around in the shallows for a while, not quite ready to leave the salty sea. And as we drop onto the sand happily spent, let the receding tide tickle our feet, we look out at the noisy ocean and laugh. How we laugh.

They like to go deep, my sons.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write about a time that rhythm, or a lack thereof, played a role in your life. And don’t use the word “rhythm.”

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

The Cube and I

I am sitting crosslegged on the sofa, ignoring the cat batting at me, attempting to wrest the Twinkie from my hand. She sprints to the living room’s windowed wall, fantasy-stalking the birds flitting about the feeder, newly filled by my mother.

Their hungry chirps an invitation to come outside and play before this winter afternoon’s blue light fades to black.

Though the huge nor’easter was two weeks past, there are still deep piles of snow out back, making odd, lumpen shapes out of our backyard’s buried furnishings: picnic table transformed into igloo palace.

But the pull of something else bears a stronger seduction: an ugly square box with golden antennae perched atop. Curved glass holding shifting ghosts of black and white.

It’s 4:30 PM. Sunday afternoon. I am watching TV.

And after today, February 23rd, 1969, my brain will never be the same again.

I am, as is common, alone; my parents busy, elsewhere…  Mom in the laundry room perhaps, Dad in the darkroom.

I turn on the TV set. Channel 4, NBC. OK, why not?

Something comes on. Something I have never seen before, and, for many years afterwards, am not sure I had actually seen then, not just hallucinated:

“The Cube.”  

I see this...

There is a man alone in a small white room.

Perfectly square.

A cube.

Each wall, floor, ceiling made up of a 4x4 grid of white squares, in turn.
 
The man is searching, questioning: What is going on? Why is he here?

People begin to enter the cube, interact with the man.

But no one gives him answers.

They only draw him into their own dramas.

The mystery deepens.

Existential angst engulfs.

People talk:

“None of us are real, he’s not real, we’re all projected.”

“Well, as I interpret what you’re doing here, this is all a very complex discussion of Reality versus Illusion. The perfect subject for the television medium!”

Reality shreds, hangs on by a thread, disappears completely, appears to return, and then? Poof, in a whiff of strawberry jam, it is gone…

What remains?

The Cube.

So yes, at age eight and a half, I had my already precocious mind completely blown by a bit of TV.

Produced for NBC Experiment in Television, directed & co-written by Jim Henson (yes, that one).

This will be hard for those born into the cable-TV-10,000-channels-that-must-be-filled-at-all-times years, but this aired exactly twice.

Once, the day I saw it, February 23, 1969, and once again in 1970.

Then it disappeared.

When I would describe it to friends, with a few rare exceptions, they would look at me as if I had three heads, shake their own heads and declare that nothing that strange had ever appeared on television; I must have made it up, so fantastic did it sound.

But oh, it was real. Very real.

If you have never seen it (and I am guessing this describes 99.9% of you) you must.

Here:

"The Cube" a tele-film by Jim Henson (& Jerry Juhl), 1969

Now imagine yourself a hyper-sensitive, highly intelligent not-yet-nine year old girl with an over-active imagination and a developing penchant for getting stuck in the revolving doors of her own mind, watching THAT alone on a long ago February afternoon...

Anybody have any questions as to when the seeds were planted for me to become a student of avant-garde filmmaking at an experimental college at 17? A hippie, lesbian, college-drop-out, bean-sprout farmer living in a primitive geodesic dome on a ridgetop in Northern California at age 20?

And then, at 33, a married, Manhattanite, globe-trotting corporate video producer with a closet full of suits?

I thought not.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about a TV show from your past. 

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

One Picture

NOTE: This is FICTION folks. Really. Linking up with The Red Dress Club today.

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This morning I am practicing my coma.

Pretending I don't hear the soft sing-song calls of "Mooooommeeeeee" wafting in from out there somewhere. In stereo.

I don't hear the tinkles and toilet flush. The pitter-pat of four little feet.

It's June 24th. Let me sleep.

I do, however, feel the knee in the left ovary and the little agile fingers prying my eyelids open.

"Good morning, darlings! What, awake so soon? Let's go make us some breakfast!"

Two almost three year-olds? Love to "help" in the kitchen, make making breakfast a whole morning-long activity. Thank goodness. Because I am out of fresh ideas.

The pancake batter drizzled all over the floor? Why do you think we have a dog?

Did Robert fill the plastic pool before he left for work, set it in the sun?

Yes! (No divorce today.)

Hours of splash the brother / dunk the sister have done their job.

After lunch? They go down for a nap. Hard.

I honestly don't know what I would have done today, otherwise. Chained them up in their room? Maybe.

No need.

I slip away from sleeping children, back downstairs, then down again.

A room of my own. Merely a screened off corner of the basement. No matter. Mine.

And in my desk, middle drawer, back, under, no further under... there it is.

I pull out the envelope. Plain, manila tan. One corner worried at, a bit torn.

Inside: one picture. The only one I have of her.

18 weeks.

Blurry, the way ultrasound pictures are supposed to be.

But still, the features are clearly there: Elli's nose, Josh's pointy chin.

The big sister they will never know.

Once the twins came along, Robert stopped mourning, moved on. Full of love for the living.

But I can't. My heart is not built that way.

So I contain it, crack open on specific occasions. An hour here, a day there.

Like today, June 24th.

Her (would have been) due date.

I slide the photo back in, tuck it away. I don't really need to look at it anyway, so seared into my soul.

Back upstairs, upstairs again.

Sitting, waiting for my children's eyes to flutter open, for them to tumble, sleepy, out of newly minted toddler beds.

My arms will fill with the sweet weight of them, as my heart’s doors swing open and shut, open and shut. And open.

Overflowing.

Always.

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This post was written for The Red Dress Club's Red Writing Hood prompt: "Flash Fiction can be fun and a real challenge. Write a 300 word piece using the following word for inspiration: LIFE."

And? As usual, I've gone a little over the limit - pretend it said 400, OK? Problems with authority, following the rules? Me? Noooooo. (And I wonder where Ethan gets that from, sheesh!)

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Sweat Memories

Spring has now surrendered herself to summer’s sultry heat. As I stretch my loosening limbs and feel the sweat trickle, tickley, down my slick armpits, I get thrown, always, back through time's twisty tunnels: summers past rushing by, swirling their memories around me, tantalizing snippets.

Sense memories all, sticky, sweaty summers full of swelter and promise. One stands out, recently plucked from the memory box…

Summer of ’77. High school graduation; beginnings and endings, all rolled up into one.

Or maybe more like this: a constant tumbling head over heels of endings and beginnings, chasing each others tails, a blur of old and new and old and new; the wheel, spun again and again, the endless yin and yang of it, as I tried to make a 16 year-old's sense out of my life.

My parents loved me dearly, cherished me fiercely, but were often clueless. They didn't attend my high school graduation ceremony. I had been ambivalent about attending it myself, and by the time I decided to show up after all, they had made other plans; important plans.

Not nearly as callous as that seems, I'm sure they had asked me at least three times if I’d minded that they weren’t there.  And I'm sure I'd reassured them that it meant very little to me and I was OK. But I also know at some deeper level I was disappointed, feelings were hurt, a disconnect widened.

As a mother, I have learned to listen beneath, to the waves below the words; to discount, at times, the surface, the brave “I’m OK”s from little boys who aren’t. My mother never did, needing reassurance more than truth. Pity.

At sixteen, I was so very young and clueless, though I'd thought myself sophisticated, a worldly woman. I was sorting through so many things in my mind, and developing just about zero practical skills for negotiating an adult life in the actual world.

Navels were for gazing, and I did, how I did.

New York City (suburbs). 1977.

It was the summer of Sam; and Star Wars.

I remember waiting hours for tickets on opening week, the first time I had ever done that, with my last high school boyfriend, Ben. Sitting on the roof of his Black 1963 American Rambler in the parking lot of the Huntington Mall cinema, we were trying to catch a slim breeze as we waited for day to wheel into night and the movie's magic lantern to begin.

I have since seen that film dozens of times, but will always remember my first, seen with a last. Beginnings and endings tumbled together, wearing each other smooth like the rocks in the rushing river we camped beside, on the sweet and wondrous weekend road trip we took together that summer.

That summer of last high school boyfriend, while I was also quietly falling in love, unrequited, with girls right and left; my head and my heart in a tug of war (along with some select other parts).

I did not even have my plans solidified for the fall, having missed the drop-dead dates for completing college applications, my parents once again useless here, being "no pressure" individualist hippie types, never realizing that a sixteen year-old girl might need a little guidance, a little pressure to make things happen, barely knowing her own mind, leaf-tumbling through life, lucky beyond all knowing that life never tossed evil into her hapless path.

And the soundtrack to all this mayhem? Somewhere between Patti Smith’s Horses album on my stereo, Springsteen’s Born to Run blasting out of a jukebox, John Prine being strummed on my boyfriend's guitar and Abba’s Dancing Queen wafting in from a somewhere distant radio.

If the smell of being thirteen was Coppertone? The smell of sixteen turning seventeen for me was sweat; the intoxicating scent of fresh sweat, honestly earned.

And the salt taste of it, the startlingly metallic and musky tang of it, on my hungry, awakening, clueless tongue.


P.S. If you want to see me on the day of my High School Graduation? Go here: I Was a Senior Feminist-Hippie-Hottie  

This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about Graduation. 

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Dunia

Asked to picture my grandmother in her vital days, before the stroke that laid her low, creating the shadow who hovers dimly in the background of my later childhood years, this image comes:

Dunia, in her kitchen; yellowed light from an ancient ceiling fixture suffusing everything with a sulfuric glow, wiping her hands on her ever-present stained apron, a cigarette stuck to her lower lip, as if by glue and not mere spittle, the red edge of a pack of Pall Malls peeking up out of the apron's torn pocket.

Moments before, her hands were furiously busy with wooden bowl and gleaming blade, chopping up the eggs, onions and chicken livers whose frying smell hangs close, blends with the cigarette smoke to create a thick haze in the kitchen: the smell of Grandma Dunia's house. (I have that chopper now, passed down the maternal line, its metal handle still retaining a hint of the red paint that once caught my eye, there in my grandmother's kitchen.)

Outdoors the air is fresher though also strange, dank, loamy; her yard deeply shadowed by old tress, old bushes grown tall and feral. The lilac that stands by our own garage door comes from these here, my flower-loving mother happy to have a piece of home with her. But somehow, here, even the lilacs seem dour, moody, menacing as they tower over me, the smallest, palest thing around for miles.

The old swing-set in the backyard is miraculously still standing, and I push the upstairs tenant's twin toddlers higher and higher to their squealing delight. At eight, I am the big girl, enjoy watching the little girls' flashing smiles, marvel at the many tiny pink-barretted braids it must have taken their mother hours to tame their hair into.

I do not know this will be my last visit, that my grandmother's days of independence are swiftly numbered. I will miss spending time with these little girls, the only young, new things in this creaking old house.

Finally the gloaming completely engulfs the yard, a perfect background for the fireflies dancing delight. But it is time to head inside, the night being no time for young girls to linger outdoors in this now rough neighborhood.

Smoke swirls through all the rooms of this house, as my grandmother lights one cigarette off the dying ember of the previous, a chain that will, by necessity, end the soon-coming day she keels over.

My mother, once a smoker too, now quit, waves her hand in front of her face to clear a small circle of air, hoping to breathe freely.  She knows better then to ask her mother to stop smoking, in spite of the wheezing it now brings on. She knows better than to ask her mother for anything, empathy and generosity running decidedly short in this house.

We do not visit often, but when we do I marvel at how different it is here than in my home. Her ancient standard poodle skulks like a ghost from room to room, large and silent, its one eye turned milky strange, a frightening apparition to a child used to frisky cats.

The television is round at the edges, encased in a huge wooden cabinet, almost unrecognizable to me, but for the comfort it provides; the familiar images appearing therein reminding me that I still inhabit the same solid world, though the frame has shifted.

While I watch TV, the grown-ups talk and talk. I do not try to listen in. When my grandmother tells a joke, though the telling is in English, the punch line is always in Yiddish, a language I do not understand. Even the laughter here bears a sharper edge, a tang, is not easy and light. 

When it comes time to leave, my mother comes to sit in the back seat with me, her lap my pillow, a sleepy girl's fondest wish. The car's windows are open, inviting night's fresh air to rush all around us, and we gratefully inhale.

She strokes my head, her hands ever gentle with me, as her mother's never were with her.  And I drift off, knowing I will wake up in the arms of my strong father carrying me from the car, bringing me home.


Curious about my unusual Grandmother? I have written about her before: here, and here.

This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post inspired by this photo:

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Fight Club

I hear the volume increasing, and my stomach tenses. Still, I ignore, stay turned to the task at hand, dinner in the making: skins thinly peeled from slices of ripe-bursting peach, rice steamed to softness.

And then the pitch rises again. And the thuds. And the keening. And the wail. The wail that cannot be ignored: Mooooooooooommmmaaay!

In their bedroom is a tangled mess of snot and confusion. Jacob with glasses awry. Ethan with hands on temples, shrieking “He head butted me, he head butted me!”

Jacob, alternately growling like a caged lion and laughing theatrically, a perfect rendition of a cartoon villain's world-destruction-anticipating cackle. Ethan now lurching at his brother with clenched fists and a growl of his own, “I’m going to kill him!”

And me? I’m in the middle again; sorting, soothing, trying to make sense of the senseless. I don’t even bother asking what or who started it, for these things just start.

Ethan is maddened by this idea, full of indignation and bluster, dead sure of his own absolute blamelessness in the matter. “He’s the worst, the meanest brother in the world! He took my Pikachu, he laughed at me when I tried to take him back!”

I could explain, for the hundred thousand and second time, that there is not the same purposefulness behind Jacob's actions as there would have been had Ethan been the perpetrator, that the motivator is not cruelty.

But why?

Ethan knows his brother has autism. He's never going to be happy about it.

Once again, the physical damage is minimal. The psychic, massive.

Ethan’s anger is a wildfire, burns blue-hot, consumes all in its path. He spits words at Jake through gritted teeth “Do. Not. Laugh. At. Me. Ever. Again!” Which Jacob, of course, cocooned in his autistic obliviousness to much that is normal human discourse, finds hysterical.

Jake love, love, loves his brother brimming full like this, is getting his lasered attention, for once. And just to ratchet up the annoyance factor? Begins to repeat his usual mispronunciation of his brother’s name in his most grating sing-song voice: “Oh, Eeee-fan” giggle “Eeeeee-fan” giggle.

If glares could kill, Ethan would be the only man standing.

Thoughts of dinner temporarily abandoned, separate them I must. Jake to remain in their room, Ethan to come with me into my bedroom; to float in the middle of my big bed, try to find his calm, regain his rudder.

Sponge Bob on the TV providing perfect distraction, I return to the scene of the crime, find Jacob rubbing the spot on his shin that will surely sprout a game-token sized plum splotch by bath time.

Mystery bruises his usual specialty, at least this time I know the culprit: bedframe.

"Are you Okay, Jake?" I ask.

"Efan was MAD!" he says with glee.

"Yes." I agree, breathe deep, dive into an explanation made as simple as can be, but still fitting the bill. "When you took his toy he got mad. And when you laughed about it he got madder. It's mean to laugh at people when they are mad or sad, Jake. Do you want to be mean?"

And then he's got his contrite face on. The one he pulls up when he knows he's done something wrong, but can't understand for beans precisely what. "No" he answers, fairly sure that this is the right answer, the one that will grant him hugs and cuddles, absolve him of all transgressions.

And it does.

"Come here, honey," I say as he climbs into my lap, my eight year-old, eighty pound toddler.  I put some music on the radio and we sway together for a minute, but stomachs are grumbling and dinner sits, bereft, barely halfway complete.

Ethan's laughter trickles through my bedroom doorway, mood lifted by the magic of television, as I make my way back to the kitchen, to settle once again into the rhythms of cooking.

Then, to pick up the scattered fragments, to shake the jangly shards of our family back into a familiar shape.

Dinnertime.

Let's eat.

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This post was written for The Red Dress Club's Red Writing Hood prompt: "Write a piece about a fight. What happened? Why? Who 'won'? What were the repercussions?" Can be fiction or non-fiction. 

And this story? Unfortunately, FACT. My life most days. 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Coppertone

I slip into the bluemercury make-up store with my cousin Annette and her two daughters, one poised on the precipice of teenhood. We have been strolling languidly down Broadway popping into stores willy-nilly as the fancy takes us.

I have stolen an afternoon from my tightly pressed life to pretend for a moment that I am a lady who lunches; to bask in the girlyness of my cousin and her daughters, my dear nieces that I have spent precious little time with, absent the testosteroned clatter that is my twin eight year old sons.

We know we're not going to part with any money in this bastion of expensive make-up and skin care products, and the salesgirls know this too. But it's a way dead Thursday afternoon and the staff is bored to tears, so they happily indulge us and make-over the girls to their giggling delight.

I glide past the perfume cases, pick up a bottle that looks interesting, open it up and am transported... somewhere, way back in time.

Not a smell I associate with perfume, but rather hot sun, AM radio blaring Crocodile Rock, my scrawny bikini-ed body with sand stuck to it in all the uncomfortable ways and places sand sticks, especially since I'm slathered in... COPPERTONE!

That's the smell! I look up, questioningly, at the sales girl and she smiles. "Is this... ?"

"Yes" she says, "it's been created to smell like vintage Coppertone." Emphasis on the "vintage."  Like me. It's two days after my 50th birthday, she didn't need to rub that in.

She holds up the bottle. That's when I pay attention to the fact that I've just sprayed myself with something called "Beach."

I take the bottle from her, cradle it in my hand for a minute, knowing I'm never going to spend $45 to smell like my thirteen-year-old Jones-Beach-loving self.

But for just a moment I contemplate it, sniff my perfume sprayed arm; close my eyes, feel the sun-sweat start to pool between my just budding breasts, sway to the beat of Loggins & Messina telling me that my Mama don't dance and my Daddy don't rock & roll.

The seagulls keen and try to steal our gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  The waves crash in the background, drowned out by the cacophony of dueling radio stations around us.

My friends slather Coppertone on each others backs and keep one eye out for the boys, who will never speak to us, but we like to think know we're there for them.

We are a young thirteen, filled with longing for things we are nowhere near ready for, cannot even fully imagine, but know that it has something to do with the faintly tingling feeling between our legs whenever they come into our midst to retrieve a tossed football gone astray.

And then the tinkling laughter of my nine year old niece breaks through.

She and her twelve year old sister are cavorting through the store, showing off their glamour to my cousin, who smiles the indulgent smile of a mother of daughters, fondly remembering her own first forays into the world of make-up, and all things grown-up and semi-forbidden.

Cousins attempting glamor, 1973

And then we are back out in the street, onto our next girly mini-adventure.  Something involving chocolate.

All too soon it comes to an end as I drop them off at the subway station. I race back home to meet my autistic son's bus, hoping that someday, maybe someday, he will be able to find himself on a beach playing ball with his friends, buoyed up by the admiration of sweaty, giggling girls he is so carefully pretending to ignore.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about a sound or scent that brings you right back to your past.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Cheryl

Asked to write about Kindergarten, my usual free-flowing memory fails me.

I spent just one year in that school. (We moved the summer after.)

And of that year? Nothing remains.

The memory box is empty.

Of the building that I entered daily? There is nothing, less than nothing, not even a shadowy pseudo-memory, mocking me with its vagueness. Just... a blank, a black hole.

Of the classroom where many hours were surely logged, I get... nothing. Almost nothing. A feeling that the walls might have been green. The smell of thick paste and finger paint.

I think my teacher's name began with an "F."  Mrs. F... nothing.  I have been told that I loved her, that I looked forward to school each day.

This is inconceivable.

I am someone who has memories of laying in her crib. I have sketched the layout of the city apartment my family inhabited from my birth to age three and a half, accurate to the utter astonishment of my parents.

I remember elevator rides from a two year old's perspective, buttons frustratingly, impossibly high, mockingly out of reach. The shock of a Central Park orange creamsicle to my toddler mouth on a summer day.

I remember. Everything.

But that whole year of my life?

Astonishingly. Nothing.

Except this: a person.

One girl.

A friend.

Brown pigtails. Blue dress. Brown eyes. Brown skin.

Big smile, just for me.

A friend.

A best friend.

Cheryl.

Inseparable.

Until we moved, that afterward summer, to the other side of town. Across the divide: Old Country Road.

A different school, a different, "better" school district. Decidedly paler.

Separated.

Somehow, improbably, our friendship remained intact, though we became occasional friends, different than schoolmates.

Of Cheryl, much remains.

Games of hide and seek with her older brothers Darrell and Victor that always involved basements and crawl spaces, delicious in their slight danger.

The sulfur smell of cap guns mingling with burning leaves on crisp autumn days.

Watching "The Birds" on the little TV in her bedroom and scaring ourselves silly.

The smile that broke across her handsome, dignified, Doctor father's face in the presence of his children.

Her southern raised mother, calling me "Sugar" and melting my heart.

Her mother's home cooking attempting to put some meat on my then skinny bones.

A love pervading that house that was ceaselessly demanding yet unconditional. A rare combination. The sense, always, of high expectations for those children, including the brother with Cerebral Palsy. An example set, which I have never forgotten.

Sleepovers.

Late night whisperings, gigglings. Eventual sleep.

Riding home from a sleepover in her father's strange, wonderful car. The intoxicating smell of sun warmed leather rising up from the seats.

Our neighbors wondering who the hell we knew who drove a Rolls.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a memoir piece about kindergarten.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 


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Pink

Look: it's another piece of FICTION this week, people! And it's a good thing I'm a writer, because otherwise? I'd be starting to worry about all these other people's voices I'm hearing yakking away at me, inside my head.

Let me begin by saying I fucking hate pink. It's just so... so... pink, you know. And I'm sorry about the cursing. But don't worry, if my kid were around I'd have said "freaking" or some other such almost cuss word. I'm not an idiot, I'm a halfway decent parent, after all. Unless you think I'm all evil and Satan-spawned because I'm my kid's "other mother" but then YOU'RE a hopeless idiot and I don't really care what you think, anyway.

So, my partner, Jess, my kid Ruby's "official mother of record," the one who got to go through the whole 9 months thing, the one she calls "Mommy" (I'm "Mamma-lu", don’t ask) is a bit younger than I am, doesn't have the pink aversion.

Well, actually, a bit more than a bit younger. Really younger, but not scary, could-be-my-kid younger. 12 years. I mean, I guess I could’ve had a kid at 12, but if I'd done that I'd be fucked up in so many other ways, having a somewhat younger girlfriend/life partner/wife/whatever-you-want-to-call-her would be the least of my problems, you know.

It doesn't cause trouble much. Just now and again, we seem to come from different cultures. Because when I was 20? We were Dykes, called ourselves womyn. But when she was 20, it was all lipstick lesbians. Pink? Doesn't throw her a bit.

Me? I got dressed in way too much of it as a kid, well against my wishes. My brother, on the other hand, my twin? Secretly longed for pink. Yeah, we’re that kind of family. We were quite the pair, drove our mother batshit. I was a full-on tomboy and my brother fairly well into the realm of sissy.

I would be rich as Midas if I could've have a dollar for every time I'd heard "you should have been the boy and he should have been the girl, just look at your muscles and his pretty eyelashes..." and then there’d be the tongue clucking, and the pitying looks cast at our Mom who, as always, had her game face on.

But we’re close, my bro and I, real close, which is a good thing, as it’s how I get to have a biological connection to our kid, too.  Because the "father," the guy who supplied the baby juice? Yeah, him.

Our mom was a little freaked out by this, but as it was the only way she was going to have a bio-grandkid she settled in after a relatively short period of kicking and harrumphing (she’s not a screamer, thank God). See, my brother didn't want to take on the full responsibility of parenthood. He's a travel writer and his partner’s a major international finance dude. They are actual globe trotters. And kids? That doesn't really mix.

But he’s happy to be Uncle Dad, and loves Ruby to pieces. They take her shopping, even buy her pink dresses. With gusto. Because our daughter is going through this… this… phase (please God, let it be only a phase), they even have a name for it -- the "Pink Thing."

Now I know the history of pink, that it's a relatively new phenomenon (no self respecting Women's Studies major from my era worth her salt doesn't know all about the social creation & scaffolding of gender difference markers). But it's just so damn much worse now. There's even a new book out about it: "Cinderella Ate my Daughter." When I saw that on the bookstore shelf I laughed my ass off because, crapola, that's how I'm feeling right now.

What happened to my feisty four year old who liked to make mud pies and gave as good as she got? Three weeks in public school Kindergarten and she's all "I'm only wearing dresses now” and “I NEED more pink."  She's all "this is for girls and that is for boys" with most everything I like to do downgraded to the "that" category.

Yeah, I'm feeling a wee bit rejected round about now. Why? Does it show. Yeah. Well, OK, so where I'm going with this...

It was my birthday the other day. Um, Happy Birthday to me. 49. OK? I'm not super uptight about it. It's not like I'm a Hollywood starlet who is likely never to work again once the first un-Botoxable wrinkles set in. But still, with a life partner twelve years younger? Next year will be a big deal. But anyway... birthday...

Besides shopping with Jess for my "big gift" Ruby likes to buy me a little something special by herself with her "very ownliest money." No she doesn't talk that way any more. But she did when she was three and started this tradition. Nostalgia, OK. Shut up.

It has to be a small thing since her "money" is mostly change we've let her keep rather than weigh down our pockets with it. And now, of course that the tooth fairy has started to visit, those precious Sacagawea "gold" dollars.

This year, my birthday gloriously fell on a Sunday, which meant that for once I did NOT have early morning duty. I got to escape watching My Little Hannah Strawberry iCarly Montanna Pony Shitcake with the dear one. (Because Sunday morning is her weekly TV time, folks, and she milks it for all its worth.)

And I got served y'all. Breakfast in bed. Fluffy scrambled eggs, extra crispy bacon. And on a special heart shaped plate: the pinkest frostedest donut I have ever seen.

Now, I have a weakness for donuts. Can't indulge it much anymore or my waistline would be the size of a small planet. But every now and then, for a special treat, like on my birthday...

Ruby knows it, and so this was her special gift for me. A very special donut, the one she would have chosen for herself, the one she would most have wanted to eat, of all the lovely donuts in the fancy new donut store that recently opened up in our 'hood:

Strawberry flavored, pink frosted, pink sprinkled... with tiny pale pink hearts on there as well, just in case it wasn’t pink enough.

A thing of beauty. If you like pink.

As she set the wobbly breakfast tray down on the cleared off nightstand, my daughter's eyes shone with pride. And with something else, too. Love.

I guess I don't hate pink quite so much, anymore. Today.

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This post was written for The Red Writing Hood prompt: "Write a post inspired by this photo" 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

My Brother's Heart

People? What follows is something really different. This is fiction. Written for this week's "Red Writing Hood" prompt. A first here at The Squashed Bologna. So, with trepidation, herein lies a story...

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I have my brother's heart.

I wish I meant this in a metaphoric way, like... my brother really loves me or I hold his emotional well being in my hands, gently. But, unfortunately, this is just not true.

Or rather it is true, was, my brother does love me, did... crap! And I am often his somewhat unwilling keeper. Was. Why do I keep doing that? But that's not the point here. The point... shit... how did I get so far off track?

OK, starting again: I have my brother's heart. Literally.

There was an accident, a terrible accident. A moment of dreadful fucking fate, unavoidable.

We were on a train going... well, does it matter where we were going, really? Since we never got there.

My brother had bounded into the window seat. And, for once, I simply let him have it. I always fight. For everything. And I always win. That's who I am. That's the way with us. Has always been, as far back as I can remember. I know it's childish, but did I ever claim to be mature? No.

He is larger but I am more powerful, wily. I care about the winning more than he ever will. Did.

This is getting tiring, this remembering to use the past tense: he was, not is. And isn't that the whole point here, really?

The point, yes, the point... there was an accident, a major derailing. I'm sure you read about it in the papers, saw it on TV. It was ugly. Newsworthy.

A fucking idiot left his car on the tracks at a crossing, a big suburban SUV that had never been off-road in its shiny life. If this idiocy was by accident or design is not known, may never be knowable. The idiot isn't talking. But does that matter, really?

There was an accident. A terrifyingly metallic screech of brakes. We braced. I don't remember much of anything after the initial jolt.

I was told: our car rolled off the tracks, onto its side, as some of the outside came inside. A stout tree made its way through the shattered window and into my brother's brain.

Hulk tree smashed through his eye socket, destroyed all the higher functioning parts of his brain but left the stem untouched. Autonomic systems intact, it erased who he was, just pushed the fucking reset button.

And me? Pierced my heart (or near enough to). Ironic, if you knew us.

He had the window seat. For once. I thought I was being kind. For once. Mature. Or was I being prescient, my finely honed survival instinct kicked in yet again? My brother has, had none, the ultimate sap.

In any case, it came down to this, a pair of twin brothers straight out of the Wizard of Oz: Tin Man with no heart and Scarecrow with no brain.

Fraternal though we are, were, we shared enough: blood type, some obscure enzymatic factors, the requisite snippets of DNA to make us a good match.

And my, our, poor mother had a terrible choice to make that was not a real choice. You can transplant a heart. Not so a brain.

I have my brother's heart.

She wishes it had been the other way around. She will not say this, but I know he was ever the favorite, the son of her heart. I don't resent it, it's the simple truth, just is.

I was a rotten teenager. I looked out for number one, ever. He was always softer, sweeter, almost the girl she had always wanted. Also, not as smart. Like, Special Ed not-as-smart. Like I was going to be keeping an eye on him for the rest of our lives not-as-smart.

They call it autism now, but back when we were kids, they didn't have a good name for it. The neighborhood kids used to call him, well I'm not going to say it, but it's the "R" word. Or they did until I heard them say it. Then I beat them up. I may have fought with my brother, but if you looked at him funny? He's my fucking twin and you will respect him, understand?

I was academic, athletic. The ambitious one, the winner in all things, the golden boy. I have degrees, a big job and the big money that comes with it. It should have been enough to win the mother-love prize. But I understand why she loved him more.

Don't take me wrong, she was never a cold mother, no refrigerator there (was that ever a stupid theory, anyway). She loved me. Demonstrably. And would never admit to a favorite, claimed to love her two sons both the most, equally.

I'm a lawyer. There is no such thing as equal. Her head may have refused to calculate, but her heart surely did. He needed her. Always would. I'm rather self sufficient.

And my mother loves me still, now more than ever. All she has left. Especially with that piece of him walking around inside me. His big, shaggy heart. And, save our mother, he loved none other more than me, his brother, his twin, his one true friend.

I had the smarts, but he had the bigger heart. Now mine, too. I win. Again. Fuck it.

We set out together for Boston, but neither of us made it, were detoured, side by side, onto diverging paths.

Mine led to this hospital bed in this rehab unit. Will eventually lead home, back to my life that is now other than my life, singular and singularly altered.

His led to a grave, that, in a year's time will bear stone fruit, a headstone solidifying his last place on earth, in it.

His heart however, is still free, walking about this world, in me.

I suppose I will now have to strive to become a better man. More tolerant, find my own inner sap. I owe him that much, that small portion of the everything that I owe and cannot pay back, ever.

I would have given him my brain. What good have I ever done with it, really? One less corporate lawyer in the world? So what.

But it doesn't work that way.

I have my brother's heart.

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This post was written for The Red Writing Hood prompt: "Write about a time when you took a detour. Where had you intended to go and where did you end up?" 

OK folks, that was really scary. This is the first piece of fiction I have attempted to write in 15 years, the first I have "finished" in maybe 30.

I actually had two different real-life stories that this prompt drew out from me.  But as I attempted to whittle them down and shape them, pick one?  This STORY just came roaring out instead. And so I was all WTF!?!?  But felt like I should just go with it, since I have been told this is the space to don my daring Red Dress and not my familiar fuzzy pink pajamas.

I am open to, and seeking concrit on this, but as it's my first time, please be gentle ;-)

Let me say off the bat: I know it is too long, I am way over the word limit. If I had another week to finish it, I could probably get it down. The cutting, the honing is ever my weakness. But I wanted to get it up & out there in a timely fashion. So here it is, in all its overwritten glory. Have at it.

And for those of you who read me regularly, know that I do actually have fraternal twins of very different natures, one with autism?  Please rest assured, the characters in my story are not at all my sons. They are not even in any way an imagined or projected future version of my sons. They, and their dynamic are wholly invented, it's just the specific constellation of the family's make-up (fraternal twin boys, special needs) that is vaguely drawn from my own life.


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The Beauty of Blue Bear

Jacob's Blue Bear

He is no longer blue, has not been for nearly as long as I can remember. He once was, there is even the photographic evidence of it.

Jake with Blue Bear (actually blue) at 5 months

Bedraggled yet beloved, he no longer resembles a bear, having lost most of his facial features to the ravages of time and Jacob’s strong teeth and saliva in the time when he sucked and chewed on everything in sight, those many early years of mouthing for sensory input.

But “Blue Bear” he was dubbed and “Blue Bear” he remains, even though “Gray Rat” would be a more apt description of his appearance these days.

Jacob chose him as an infant, out of the many stuffed animals gifted to the boys when they were born.  And from about the age of six months on, they were inseparable.

Jake was the easy to put to bed twin, right from the start.  Once they found each other, as long as Blue bear was in his hands, all was right with the world and off into dreamland they marched together. 

Ethan, on the other hand was not a stuffed animal baby, not a lovey lover.  When he had to have ear tubes put in at 18 months, we were told to have him bring along a special toy for comfort, and he chose his then current favorite: a hard plastic toy tomato from his play food basket.  The doctor’s office staff was quite amused by this, having never seen a child soothed by a toy vegetable before.

Ethan eventually succumbed to the charms of a stuffed brown monkey, and then moved on to a whole family of dragons, eventually hosting a parade of Pokemon and pufflesin his bed.

Ethan and (stuffed) friends, age five

But for Jacob, it is now and forever, always Blue Bear.

When Jacob’s chewing and mouthing was especially fierce, from about 18 months to age three (at which time Jake’s sensory issues were decidedly ameliorated by a course of Tomatis) Blue Bear was a favorite object for this, too.

He was always in Jake's mouth, never dry.  Which led to his nickname among family members and in-home therapists: “Stinky Blue Bear.”  We don’t have a washing machine in the apartment, have to use the laundry room in the basement, only available certain hours, which meant opportunities to sneak the soggy bear out of Jake’s hands and into the wash were quite limited.

So Blue Bear got washed about once a week, twice if we were lucky and very wily.  He smelled… a lot... like wet dog, like old saliva and a little mildewed to boot.  But he survived, we survived, and Blue Bear is still the guest of honor at any table Jake sits.

Over these many years Blue Bear has been Mom-repaired too many times to count. His arms lie flat, their former filling having leaked out slowly, one tiny bead at a time.  His head has been reattached, a bit awry. His stuffing re-stuffed at least thrice.

He has one original plastic eye, the other rendered in black thread, hastily stitched into an imperfect circle that was nonetheless accepted, his owner anxiously watching the process, worried over his one-eyed bear, happily now made whole.

To an outsider's eye, Blue Bear is an ugly old thing, over-washed and worn out, warped from his original shape to near unrecognizability. 

But of course to us, we see neither the chewed upon ears nor the grayed matted fur.

We see only the love that has been poured into him for eight years, the comfort given, the tears snuffled out with head burrowed into his soft, giving, forgiving belly.

We see only the beauty of Blue Bear.

This post was inspired by the Red Writing Hood assignment to write a short piece about something ugly - and find the beauty in it.



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The Last Room

The Room

There was nothing particularly special about this room. In fact, what stood out most about it was its lack of outstanding features, defined, by default, by its utter ordinariness. 

Boxy, square, white walls, one wide window with white venetian blinds. Rented, transitory, stripped of all but the increasingly bare necessities:

Bed. Dresser. TV that is no longer turned on. Nightstand where books had once piled high, reading glasses at the ever handy, now filled with supplies: tissues, non-latex disposable gloves, chucks, Depends, Vaseline, bandages.

The room my father spent the last three months of his life in.

Home. But not really home. The assisted living facility my parents had moved to a scant nine months before.

My father, he who had traveled the world, danced in tavernas on Greek isles, hiked the terraced rice paddies of upland Bali, swam with dolphins in Caribbean waters, now lived, or rather existed, in about 150 square feet of white room.

When first home from the hospital, he would leave the room occasionally, shamble out to the living room to perch on the sofa, briefly.  Once or twice he made it into the second bedroom, the room filled floor to ceiling with his life’s work: his photographs.

Shelves overflowing with boxes of negatives, prints; once ordered, now haphazard and random as his brain. A worktable splayed with his astonishing black and white images, waiting in vain for his hand to turn them once again, leaf through, arrange, plan books, shows, a future.

But in the last, his final month, there was no more walking. There were no more words. Up until the very end though, he would still, on occasion, stand.

It was impossible. He had no muscles left in his legs, no strength, no breath, hardly any blood coursed through his desiccating limbs.

Yet stand he would, and, for a handful of heartbeats, gaze out the window into the vast brightness.

From the 19^th floor, looking west from the east, there were mostly rooftops, a glass and steel high-rise or two looming above, piercing the sky, proclaiming the cityness of this cityscape view.

Busses rumbled below. Pedestrians well bundled in their winter wraps. Dogs being walked, children being strolled.

But my father did not look down. He looked out. And up. Into gray wintering skies. I have no idea what he saw, what beckoned at his horizon.  

And then, at the very end, his domain shrank again. No longer inhabiting the room, he instead inhabited the bed. A rectangle, roughly six feet by five. Covered in the soft mauve comforter I had purchased for him when he came home from the hospital. 

My mother hated it then, wanted her old down comforter back, resisted the truth of the need for machine washability and fast drying. Now she loves it, runs her hand over it, thanks me for buying it. Not remembering why.

We would all take turns laying beside him, ever so gently stoking his back. Because only with the reassurance of touch would he rest, sleep deep.  Like a colicky baby that needs to be held and rocked 24/7, so too was my father at the end of his life.

After he died, and a little time had passed, my mother moved to a smaller apartment within the building.

It was my job to pack her, to move her, and then to slowly go through all of my father’s many things, to dismantle his workspace, parcel out his photographs, his life‘s work, for cataloging, storage, posterity.

At long last I was done. And as I left their apartment for the last time, I needed to stand in that bedroom once again. Empty this time, truly, but for faint ghosts.

I stood at the window, looked out, up.

The Window

A moment froze in time. I took a photograph. I cannot say what I saw, felt.

I then looked west, towards my home, towards the schoolbus that needed to be met, the dinner made, the homework supervised, the bustled life lived in our too full, overflowing rooms.

I left, closed this door for the last time.

I went down to my mother, waiting in her apartment, twelve stories below, to sit with her in her widow's lair and look out together on the city, a little bit closer to the earth.


This post is linked up with the memoir prompt over at The Red Dress Club.  To see the prompt, click here.  To go to the link-up and read other posts, click on the button below: 

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In my Grandmother's House

Memory is tricky.  There is the memory of childhood events and the telling of these events.

The older the memory and the more frequently retold, the less distinction exists between these two, the fuzzier the line between actual, visceral memory and mere story, until I can only guess what was my direct experience and what has been told to and by me and now feels remembered.

But tonight I shall attempt to trick the trickster, to carve back the lacquered layers of an oft-told tale to find the little girl hidden within…

 *****

It is dark.  And I hate the dark.  I find it very frightening, the quiet and the shadows.

I see things in the shadows, always.  The swirling shapes that menace, the snakes under my bed, the things I cannot name, that I know intend me harm.  Light vanquishes them all, and I long for light.

Yet here I am in the dark, forgotten in this forgotten room in my grandmother’s house.  In here, there is darkness, but not quiet, for the sounds from the living room, from the commotion without, still flood in.

When I was hustled into this room and bade to stay still and quiet, the door was pulled closed, but not completely, so there is a slim rectangle of yellowed light brightly rimming the doorway through which the world continues to exist.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness I see that the shape in front of me is an ancient cot, folded up like an inchworm humped in mid crawl.  I crouch down behind it, lean my face in, seeking comfort.  But its sprung wire cage presses harshly into my soft six year-old cheeks, so I retreat, sit on the wooden floor and warily wait.
 
The musty smell of things long unused overlays the cigarette smoke drifting in from the living room, which has itself mixed with the usual scent of the house, a heady blend of fried onion and old dog.  But then a new tang wafts in, tinged with something odd, metallic.

Watching occasional shadows flicker through the yellow rectangle, I listen for clues, cues as to what is going on and why I am here.

First there was a guttural male voice and high pitched female screaming, then police sirens wailing closer and closer, doors banging, more voices, male and female, talking, shouting, talking again.  And through it all, the soft sounds of a woman sobbing.

I almost drift off, but for the churning in my gut, the fear I have been forgotten, will remain here, always. 

Then, eventually, someone remembers - the child! - and comes to get me.

It has been a long time.

It is over.  This is the aftermath.

There is still a policeman, a doctor.  In the alcove, between the doorways of the unused bedrooms I see a young woman in a short dress with bandages covering her legs, arms, face.  She is talking to the police, shaking her head.

The doctor is putting on more bandages.  There are many of them.  They look pale against her warm brown skin, and some are starting to turn crimson as the blood leaks through.

I fall asleep on the sofa, and wake in my mother’s cradling arms, being carried out to our waiting car, their evening out cut short; my father, somber, at the wheel.

I never sleep over my Grandmother’s house again.

*****

This is what I believe I have actually clearly remembered from that evening. The rest of the tale, cobbled together from memory bits and what was subsequently told to me over the years to become part of my memory, is in my repertoire of colorful childhood stories, and goes like this:

When I was six years old, my parents were going out and asked my grandmother, my mother’s mother, to watch me.  As it was Saturday night, the night of a regularly scheduled poker game, she didn’t want to, but reluctantly allowed my parents to drop me off to stay with her for the night. Naturally the game went on as scheduled and I was left to entertain myself, as I saw fit.

When you think of the term “Grandmotherly,” the soft, warm, nurturing indulgent presence that implies?  An image of my grandmother will not come to mind.  She was anything but.  She did not like children.  My mother’s childhood?  Not particularly happy.

On this particular evening the poker crowd was large, so card tables had been erected in the living room, with maybe a dozen players gathered round.  There was much smoking, probably a fair amount of drinking, though that really didn’t register to my six year-old self.

They were having a jolly time.  I was sitting in the pushed to the wall sofa, playing with my etch-a-sketch, oblivious, when the trouble started.

One of the card players was a young woman who had recently broken up with her man, and he had not taken it well.  His mind had turned to a decidedly “if I can’t have you then no one will” bent, and he walked through the front door that evening with a knife, intent on ruining her beauty.

I did not see this.  I heard a door bang open, a male shout, a female scream.  And then I was swiftly picked up and deposited in that dark, musty, unused bedroom turned storeroom.  As it was just off the living room, I heard everything, but made little sense of it, having no context.

They really did forget about me in there for the longest time.  When I came out there were police taking statements and a doctor bandaging up the girl.

I was told what had happened was this: The ex-boyfriend had come in with a switchblade held high.  The crowd had attempted to keep him from the woman, but he got to her and began slashing away.

Someone had procured a baseball bat at about the same time the police arrived.  So whether it was because he heard the sirens or wanted to avoid the bat, he bolted out the back door, vowing to return with a gun, finish the job.

My grandmother got a hold of my parents and told them to come get me, which they did rapidly and with great alarm.

We were told that this man did indeed come back later with a gun, but the police were laying in wait, and apprehended him at the door.

My grandmother continued to live in that house and play poker nightly with that same crowd until she was felled by a stroke some four years later, to live out her remaining years in a nursing home (where she stripped all the other old ladies of their nickels daily in gin rummy).

The stroke came upon her during a poker game, and the rumor was that she finished the round before she keeled over because she had held the winning hand.

Somehow, I believe this to be true. 


This post is linked up with the memoir prompt over at The Red Dress Club.  To see the prompt, click here.  To go to the link-up and read other posts, click on the button below: 

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