Chautauqua is published each December and June by Chautauqua Institution, a not-for-profit corporation under section 501(c)(3) of the United States Revenue Code.
The opinions expressed in Chautauqua are not necessarily the opinions held by the editors or by Chautauqua Institution.
On the Cover:
Oriental House and Tree Fountain, 1876, Chautauqua Institution Archives, Oliver Archives Center
Below photos courtesy of Chautauqua Institution Archives:
Students of Rudolph Torrini, 1975, Oliver Archives Center
Ladies at Old First Night Run, Oliver Archives Center
Louise Igoe Miller Garden, 1940, Harold Wagner
Mina Miller Edison with CLSC Diploma, 1930, Harold Wagner
ISSN 1549-7917
ISBN 978-1-940596-55-6
Produced by The Publishing Laboratory Department of Creative Writing
University of North Carolina Wilmington 601 South College Road Wilmington, NC 28403-5938 www.uncw.edu/writers
The Chautauqua Way
For a hundred and fifty years, Chautauqua Institution has served as a stage and a classroom for leading figures of the times, including Ulysses S. Grant, Booker T. Washington, Alexander Graham Bell, Susan B. Anthony, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Chautauqua way is a habit of living in a state of continual enrichment: learning on vacation, finding intellectual stimulation in leisure, imbuing all activities with a passion for art. Learning and art should not be confined to separate spaces or designated hours, nor spirituality expressed only within sacred walls or books of prayers.
Chautauqua is a literary manifestation of the values and aesthetics of Chautauqua Institution. Each volume is a portable Chautauqua season between covers. The sections loosely reflect the categories of experience addressed during those nine summer weeks, playing one writer’s vision off another’s in the spirit of oblique, artful dialogue.
The Chautauqua way is also reflected in how we make this book. Each year, in partnership with the Chautauqua Literary Arts, graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington work as members of the editorial team, guided by professional editors and an advisory board. They read and discuss submissions, fact check and edit, search for art, and participate in the artistic process of building a book, to be released at the start of the summer season.
In our editorial sessions, we read aloud excerpts or even entire works, listening for the music of great writing, searching for the piece that eloquently addresses the issue’s theme through some facet of the life in art, spirit, or play, or a life lesson. Writers, ages twelve through eighteen, enjoy that same respectful attention through Young Voices.
So settle back on a couch or a comfortable patch of grass and spread this book open like a tent. Immerse yourself in the world of ideas, imagination, and language that lives between its covers. For as many minutes or hours as you like, you are part of the Chautauqua community.
Jill Gerard, Editor Chautauqua Institution
Chautauqua thanks Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua Literary Arts, and the Department of Education for their support of the journal.
•
jill gerard Where the Heart Is Rooted IX
janice eidus The Woo Woo Women of Mexico
michael waters Magdalene
gregory donovan Exhibit No. 108 in the Corridors of Hell
kevin lanahan Water Witch
fred zirm The Fourth of July
richard lehnert Just as Far
josh macivor - andersen Come Talk to Me
jeromiah taylor In the Manger
charlotte matthews Where the River Meets the Sea
keith kopka Pornography
angela townsend Watch Your Words
leonardo chung Midas
john hoppenthaler Single Life with Cardinal and American Goldfinch
randall watson Commission
charlotte matthews Cows in March
jana - lee germaine Letter to My Daughter: Science Lesson
anna scotti Smoke
todd davis Dry Rain Freeze and Thaw Of This Failing
gabriel welsch Once There Was a Fire
amity doyle So Much Depends
jason newport Tomorrow We’ll Be There
timothy geiger After All
glen vecchione Consecration of Dolphins
linda k . wertheimer Free Pizza with Jesus on the Side
john schneider A Field Flows in Every Direction
kelsea conlin Deadheading
kristen dorsey Ecdysis
mary jane kidd Look at Them
jen mcclanaghan Where You Go
kristin kovacic On Consolation
mark liebenow Speaking of That
john hoppenthaler Mitchelville, South Carolina
dina greenberg Far from Home
kira witkin Notes on Grieving the Living
richard lehnert Virtually
matthew meduri Grief’s Mascot
mary gilliland Treasure
bridget a . lyons When the Chestnut Falls Far noah davis The September Side of Light
doug ramspeck The Return
clara silverstein Letter to Great-Grandma from Summer Vacation
steven vineis Out of the Woods
clara silverstein Train Tracks
marc eichen Creamed Spinach, Little Debbie, Emma and Me
jana - lee germaine Pitcher Mountain
annie penfield Abandon
Where the Heart is rooted
Jill Gerard
“to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.”
—Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”
One of my earliest memories of Chautauqua—I think I may have been in eighth grade—is the Sunday my dad drove my mom and me over to listen to Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas speak. Sundays were “free days,” and the only days we came when I was young. We enjoyed the talk and wandered the grounds and poked through the shops. I was in wonder that people stayed for a week or two or a summer in such a place. That day I made a promise to myself that I would make that happen some day for me, and for the family I imagined in a distant future.
So many years later, when I came with my young children, I made that dream come true—and in the making I became part not just of the larger Chautauqua community but of this wonderful community of writers and readers who would change my life. That is not an overstatement. Chautauqua changed my life—and because it changed my life, it has had an impact on so many others.
In Michael Hill’s Three Taps address that closed the 148th season— he speaks to the need for empathy and hope, and acknowledges those words can seem ephemeral. In his discussion, he adds that hope was purposefully chosen, that it does not “skip the hard work to get to ‘the good stuff.’” I sat with these ideas—empathy, hope, hard work, good stuff. So much of the world seems to counter such concepts. Yet when I think about what matters, when I think about the writers who spoke to me through their books, essays, stories, poems, and songs, I found at the foundation of the works that stay both with and in me that those ideals prevail.
I have been rereading Emerson recently in an introductory American literature class. Many of my students find Emerson’s transparent eyeball interesting, confusing, engaging—all at once. In Emerson’s words, “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe
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air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” These are words that I like to sit with—and they are words I like to walk with. When we take time to be in the world, in each small moment, “mean egotism” does vanish.
When we take time to sit together in community, it does as well. As it turns out, Hill often speaks of being “in community.” He says, “If hope is the central ingredient to be able to do anything, then the achievement of authentic experiences of empathy may well be the secret ingredient we need to heal a broken world.” Time spent together—time spent being present in the company of others—nurtures good will and hope. When we sit together to share our work or to respond to the work of others, we practice deep listening, which connects us both to our selves and to others. We learn to hold space for one another—an act of gentle recognition.
Reading stories, poems, and essays increases our capacity for empathy. Through those works, we enter other worlds and see with new eyes. In a TED talk, author and teacher, Joseph Luzzi argues that books area agents of change. Books, he suggests, allow us to visit new worlds, to meet new people, and foster universal connection. As it turns out, stories, poems, essays, and songs are of vital importance.
The literary arts are well rooted in the Chautauqua experience—and each year there is new growth. So, as this new issue of Chautauqua begins, we offer you a collage of personal stories—remenisences and reflections on what Chautauqua has meant to some of our writers.
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my chautauqua through the years
Diana Hume George
i did not love chautauqua in my childhood. Everyone else in my extended ministerial family did, and my group of cousins have nostalgic affection for childhood swims in the lake, running around in the square,
Jill Gerard
eating ice cream, jumping from shore to shore in The Holy Land. But in my memory, I sit watching them, sedate, my mother’s hand firmly in mine. The same summer vacations other family members looked forward to—I have a photo of my parents happily transported on a Chautauqua rail line when they were young—I dreaded. As one of my later partners in life put it, Chautauqua was the place where the boats quietly said “putt putt,” and the children’s voices whispered “yay.” No one shouted or whooped in my old Chautauqua, most especially not me.
There were reasons for this quietude, for my enforced nearness to my mother while my aunts and uncles conferred and laughed, attended morning lectures, musical performances, church services. My father was the minister in the family, as his father had been before him, while two of my uncles were medical professionals, and Aunt Sis married yet another doctor. My father died a suicide, a thing not spoken of openly in 1954, and although there had been Chautauqua trips when he was alive—I have a group of visual memories that have to be at the Presbyterian House—most of my emotional impressions of the place have their source in the aftermath: the very worst had happened when I was only five, and she was certain that without constant vigilance, something unspeakable would occur again. And so my Chautauqua was a place of subdued sadness, and as soon as I could, well before my teens, I simply refused to go. I escaped her anxious fear in every way, in every place in my life. Or I thought I had. I did not return to Chautauqua for over twenty years.
But when I came back in the late 1970s, I arrived to an entirely different and wondrous place, the Chautauqua that I’d been meant for: on impulse, I stopped at the grounds to hear a poet read, met Mary Jean and Paul Irion, and was changed. After that, I came every season year after year, to the great flowering of literary Chautauqua, to teach weeklong writing workshops and stay at the Irions’ Fernwood residence right off the square. I eventually brought my own family there now and then, my son Bernie and his children, and my partner John Edwards and my stepson Diehl, who did his first busking there, juggling. Then he joined the workshops as the writer he grew into. I still have the
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photo of my parents on the railway car, my son with his kids near the Athenaeum, the Chautauqua Daily photo of my stepson juggling on the square. A couple years ago, we made it four generations when one of my great-granddaughters won a playwriting contest in elementary school. Her short play was performed one warm afternoon at Chautauqua.
I joined the board of the developing, still embryonic literary program to work closely with Mary Jean Irion as always, and later with my fellow writers. I knew and came to have affection for them all, including Mary Jean’s subsequent incarnation in Clara Silverstein, whose off-campus home I’d sneak to through some bushes, and I worked on the board building toward a real Literary Arts program with Georgia Court, Mary Ann Morefield, and an assortment of grand folks, culminating in my favorite of all, Rodney Lay, whom I adored, along with his artist wife Meg. Rodney’s vision for the future of writing and literature at Chautauqua became palpable to me, a goal to be worked toward, mostly because Rodney insisted that I see what he saw would be possible.
I loved the new writing center in the CLSC building, but I was atavistic—for me, Fernwood’s creaky floors, rattly window air conditioner, back fire escape (where my oldest friend Richard Lehnert, still my oldest friend, joined me), and wicker-chaired porch overlooking the grand ferns were the very thing itself. Over all those years, those decades, the people who signed up to spend a week of their time writing poetry or prose and discussing ideas and images, matters of life and death, always knocked me out—so many lives from so many places, and the qualities they shared, always, were thoughtful curiosity and gentle mutuality. They’d been through so much, those people, in part because they skewed older than younger, and they’d truly lived, and that means they’d also truly learned how to lose things and people precious to them. And they knew how to create, with what those losses had caused them to learn.
Finally, and I do not remember exactly how it occurred, I became one of three directors of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, which took place—still does—the long weekend before the season opens. Sherra Babcock brought it into being with Philip Terman, then George Looney joined in, and finally me. For about ten years we brought in a roster of
Jill Gerard
writers famous in poetry and fiction and nonfiction, that endured for many years in the form we gave it. Now it’s grown into a new incarnation.
Among the sixty-some writers we brought to Chautauqua while I was there, was my good friend and colleague Philip Gerard. His wife Jill Gerard, who grew up in Erie and loved Chautauqua from childhood because unlike me, she was allowed to have fun here, could see how Philip would love it. On the literal eve of their marriage near Chautauqua, I came to them, on assignment from the literary board, to ask if they would edit the Chautauqua Journal, and for these many years of consistent excellence, they fulfilled that loving promise. But if you listen closely to the story of the decades—in my case from the 1950s straight through the first quarter of the 21st century—life happens fully inside such a seeking community, and life includes death, like my workshop writers at Chautauqua taught me decades ago about their own long-gone mothers and fathers, their grandparents, their mates.
Now, within a short year and a half, Philip Gerard, in his sixties, is gone. I participated in the Chautauqua celebration of his life last summer, and now my son Bernie is also gone, in his fifties, quietly in the night of a heart attack just like Philip. I was my son’s mother from the time I was not yet an adult myself, and we grew up together, so I do not know who I am without him. Nor does Jill know quite who she is without Philip. But ciphering these matters, querying the universe, asking for guidance toward a sense of purpose, striving toward meaning, making meaning where none is presented without one’s spirit seeking it out, these are the matters that brought Chautauquans together in the first place so very long ago. And still do. •
chautauqua, august 2006
Richard Lehnert
i lived for four years in chautauqua county, from 1968 to 1972, while attending SUNY Fredonia, the better part of one of those years of
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hippie glory spent studying mediumship in Lily Dale. In 1974–1975 I lived in Collins, in rural Erie County. And in the late 1950s, far to the east, I’d spent two years of my childhood in Amsterdam, on the Mohawk River—like Fredonia and Collins and very nearly Chautauqua itself, another town strung along Route 20, that long heartline of central New York. The terrain, the lakes, the vernacular wooden architecture of the 19th century, the complex and tangled spiritual history of this notorious “burned-over district” of America’s Second Great Awakening—of the many true homes in which I have lived, the various Upstates of New York are perhaps the most hauntingly poignant.
Despite all that time in the area, I never visited the Chautauqua Institution until more than 30 years later, when I was Poet in Residence at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center for Week 9 of the 2006 season. I was honored that the Writers’ Center chose me. I stayed on campus in Fernwood, the old Victorian house of the late Paul and Mary Jean Irion, who as hosts were as gracious and kind as they were thoughtful and intelligent. Rooming with her family directly below me, on the second floor, was that week’s prose writer in residence, the novelist Ann Hood. My last morning there, while the Hoods were out, I sneaked downstairs to steal from their fridge a splash of milk for my final cup of Yorkshire Gold. I remember, too, talking on the third-floor fire escape with my closest and oldest friend, Diana Hume George—poet, critic, essayist, and Advisory Editor to Chautauqua. We talked about poetry, running workshops, and the many entanglements of our long friendship, which even then was well into its fourth decade.
August 2006 was hot. I remember, after each morning’s workshop, lying most of the rest of the day on the floor—the coolest place on the Irions’ third floor—with a pile of workshoppers’ poems and a pencil, making comments I hoped would be useful the next morning to my hardworking students, who varied in age from 20 to their early 80s, the latter decade represented by Mary Jean Irion herself. Only in the cool of the evening was there time to venture out to see what lovely Chautauqua had to offer. One evening, it was a concert in the Amphitheater by a somewhat geriatric edition of the Beach Boys. Another, Diana and I listened to the sound of hundreds—thousands?—of people singing the
Jill Gerard
classic, foursquare Protestant hymns we quondam Presbyterians had grown up on, most of them written in the few decades to either side of Chautauqua’s founding, in 1874.
In churchly realms I find myself no longer a believer, per se, in anything but that music and those hymns, which still move me deeply. Their implacable iambic tetrameter seems as inextricably jointed into my poetic skeleton as it was in Emily Dickinson’s, a foundational rhythm to which the lines of my poems seem always to want to return. I was glad to be still and listen, bathed in the cool air off Chautauqua Lake and the sounds of those voices, joining in when I remembered the words—and for almost every hymn, I did remember. When I think of Chautauqua, it is that perfect late-summer dusk that always comes first to mind, standing there sung to by all those voices raised in the music that raised me.
chautauqua remembrance
Janice Eidus
as a young writer, being invited to teach fiction at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center by its founder, Mary Jean Irion, was a defining moment in my literary journey. But nothing prepared me for the enchantment of the Chautauqua campus—a realm where art, literature, spirituality, and nature converged in an almost magical tapestry.
I embraced early mornings to immerse myself in my students’ stories. Their deep ties to Chautauqua added to its allure for me. While I taught, my husband went sailing, and afterward I swam in the sparkling, nearly empty pool.
A few years later, I returned as faculty at not only the Writers’ Center, but also at the Jewish Writers Festival, which was occurring simultaneously. This time, my husband and I brought our young daughter. She loved the day camp and declared Chautauqua's ice cream to be “the best in the world!”
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Shortly after my brother’s unexpected death some years later, I returned once more to teach, taking solace in Chautauqua’s comfort and beauty. And then, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was again invited, this time to teach on Zoom. Our landscape was now virtual, and my students and I found inspiration and camaraderie despite the distance.
My connection with Chautauqua is not just a chapter but an ongoing tale —a story of growth, resilience, and deep kinship. I look forward to returning soon.
•
a chautauqua remembrance
Keith Kopka
i could have almost been convinced that the first floor of the grand Victorian house I was staying in was still without electricity. Its white clapboard seemed to cocoon it in the history of Chautauqua, and inside, each wall was decked with pictures of men and women in poses of nineteenth-century modesty. However, what kept this house out of the clutches of mere historical society plaque nostalgia were the shelves and piles and stacks of educational and library records that dominated each spare corner of space. Every afternoon when I finished my editorial duties at the Chautauqua literary journal and before I climbed the polished staircase to my small room, I found myself drawn into these cubbies of catalogue and history.
At first, I would wander through the rooms and draw random volumes from the shelves with the hope that a secret passage would open or that I would find a love letter hidden between the pages of some obscure ledger, but, after a while, I became awed with the achievements of the people who were, and still are, the Chautauqua Institution and with what they were able to do for education in America. After reading account after account of the adversity that the Daughter Chautauquas faced to help create economic, gender, and racial equality in education, I began to understand that even if I’d never have heard the name
Jill Gerard
Chautauqua, these people and this place had shaped what it is to learn and to be an educator in America.
I started my work for the Chautauqua Institution and the Chautauqua literary journal in 2009 as an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I had worked with literary journals before, and I was excited to travel to New York in order to spend a summer writing poems and promoting Chautauqua’s fantastic, but lesser-known literary journal. I had heard bits and pieces of what Chautauqua was like, but no description by my editor, or anyone else, could have really prepared me for the Chautauqua experience.
When people ask me about it now, my own weak description is that the Chautauqua Institution is like traveling back in time with the benefit of any modern convenience that one might actually miss. This comment often breeds raised eyebrows, and in defeat, I mutter half-heartedly, “You just have to see it,” knowing deep down that seeing it is the smallest part of the impact that Chautauqua has made on me. My summer at Chautauqua literally changed the course of my life. My experience at the institution is the reason that I chose to live in Florida and was lucky enough to earn a doctorate in English and Creative Writing. It was my time in this educational paradise that afforded me the opportunity to present my own work to my contemporaries in an open forum where I was treated as a peer, and not merely as an underling.
The people that I met during my summer spent at Chautauqua are some of the kindest that I have ever encountered. When I first arrived, my luggage had been lost, but it was only a couple hours before a kind Chautauquan had taken me into her home and let me choose clothes to wear from her own son’s wardrobe until mine had been recovered from the depths of TSA purgatory. But this act of kindness was only the beginning. Every person I met at Chautauqua was warm and welcoming and treated me with a kind of respect that, unfortunately, is uncommon among strangers. But maybe at the root of the tangible goodness present at the Chautauqua Institution is that no one is actually a stranger. Each person that has experienced Chautauqua becomes part of a shared history.
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Whether or we realize it or not, the Chautauqua experience continues the belief in tolerance and education so dear to the people in those photos that I spent countless hours creating elaborate histories for. My fantasies were unnecessary. A history suggests recalling something that is no longer happening, but this isn’t the case with Chautauqua. Each summer, Chautauqua reinvents itself. It becomes a living moment, a living history that once again realizes the faith and the ideology of those original Chautauqua pioneers and reaffirms their attempts to better the lives of anyone they encountered. My life is certainly better because of Chautauqua, and I am thankful for the opportunity to have spent time in such a special place.
•
chautauqua: the art and practice of community Noah Davis
i came to chautauqua by way of the lake. My father, the poet Todd Davis, had been a visiting writer at the Institution when I was in middle and high school. And while my mother required us to visit one lecture or musical performance a day, my brother and I spent most of our time on the docks with fishing rods in hand.
There we’d catch pumpkin seed, bluegill, white bass, bullhead, and yellow perch on little, white jigs then quickly return them to the shadows of the boats that rose and fell with the waves. But every early morning and late evening, we hoped to glimpse the apex predator the lake is famous for, muskellunge. We didn’t have the equipment, bait, or knowhow to target these water wolves, and that kept them in the realm of myth.
In the common area of the visiting writer’s suite, posters of Chautauqua covers lined the walls. Each one unique and striking, inviting and promising, yet on the far wall next to the elevator was my favorite: a black and white photograph of a mustached man standing next to a giant musky. But instead of settling for a classic shot of human dominating nature, the artist had overlaid the photograph with colors as if
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to pull some beauty back into a scene that might only be about taking. When I began writing myself, Chautauqua became a dream journal, and I’ve been fortunate to place pieces that mean a great deal to me in a journal that means a great deal to me. The art and practice of the community there on the lake is codified in the pages by editors who look beyond the expected narrative and into discovery and beauty, a mission that I am grateful has endured like the musky in the lake and in my own imagination.
•
my epigraph for this collage of memories comes from a Mary Oliver poem. In her work I often find inspiration and solace and sparks of joy. But the phrase, “crazy roots, in the drenched earth” captures for me the very notion of rooted and growing. Imagine all those roots and rootlets reaching down and down—through sand and silt and clay and loam— feeding all manner of plant life.
Do you, like me, cherish the wild diversity? The tiny American Pink, the giant Australian Tree Fern, the stinky Corpse Flower…so many plants to bring us wonder. And stop for a moment to consider how we too are roots. From our roots and rootlets come poems and stories and essays and songs and symphonies and paintings. The roots of society— culture, friendship, family—those metaphoric roots are just as strong, just as vigorous.
As you read and listen and make art, as you love friends and family, as you raise your voice for what is right and just in this world, take the time to nourish the roots. Make it possible for the new growth to seek out light and to flourish. In “Sometimes,” Oliver offers us these words: Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
For me, those instructions are caught up in my Chautauqua experience and have become the soil in which my heart is rooted.
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Rooted & Growing
“‘The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who stepped out of the frame.’”
—Salman Rushdie
Life in Art
The Woo woo women of mexico
Janice Eidus
Istand alone in a corner at a cocktail party in a Mexican town high up in the mountains. I moved to this town just four weeks ago, and I don’t know a soul.
The party is in a grand, three-story house scented with lavender, cinnamon, and citrus, with boveda ceilings, a winding marble staircase with elaborate wrought iron railings, and carved wooden patio doors that lead to a garden with a cascading fountain. I slowly sip an iced Jamaica tea, tart and crimson-colored, a drink I remember from my one visit to this town many years ago.
I’ve not spoken to anyone since I arrived, other than the host, a longtime expat wearing flowing palazzo pants, who greeted me quickly at the door and then breezed off to chat with guests she knew. She’s a cousin of the principal of the Brooklyn high school where I taught science for thirty years until my recent retirement. She invited me as a favor to her cousin, although I hadn’t asked for the favor.
And now that I’m here, I have no idea why I came.
the party is teeming with expats, mostly gringas over sixty like me. I can tell from their colorful outfits that most are what I call Woo Woo Women, meaning proponents and practitioners of every healing and wellness fad to come down the New Age pike. They wear brightly colored, beribboned dresses and kaftans embellished with a combination of New Age and Mexican imagery: chili peppers, cacti, winged cherubs, iguanas, mandalas, parrots, crystals, the Virgin of Guadalupe, third eyes, Day of the Dead, and vibrant portraits of Frida Kahlo with her fierce and knowing gaze.
Since moving to this town, I’ve learned from eavesdropping, people watching, and scrolling social media, that the Woo Woo Women move here to reinvent themselves. Overnight they metamorphose from accountants, real estate agents, and social workers into shamans,
Janice Eidus
priestesses, mediums, and medical intuitives. I am their opposite: I pride myself on my rational mind, my belief in science, facts, and empirical evidence. I wear simple clothes, mostly blacks and grays; I’ve never worn anything “Frida” in my life.
I’m sure there are women in this town who are as far from Woo Woo as I am. But I’ve read that wherever expat communities exist, the Woo Woo Women come in droves. I watch them now as they happily gather into pairs and small groups. Some sip Jamaica tea like me, while others indulge in margaritas overflowing in frosted glasses so slim and elegant, they look like works of art.
I overhear them greeting each other by their Woo Woo names— Starshine, Sacred Grace, Radiance, and Heart Flame. They talk about aligning chakras, curing arthritis with flower essences, and ascending to higher planes of consciousness.
There are some men here of the same vintage, mostly gray and white bearded gringos, in their versions of expat regalia: straw and leather sombreros on their heads; huaraches on their feet; and fringed shoulder bags.
But it is the beautiful, spellbinding Woo Woo Women that dominate the party, and whom I can’t help but watch.
a month ago, I uprooted myself from the historic, tree-lined brownstone neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, where I was born and raised. And where, as a single mother, I raised my own son, who now lives in London, working in some techy field I don’t quite understand.
I couldn’t bear to be in Brooklyn any longer without my best friend Helen, who died a year ago. Although I had other friends and colleagues about whom I cared, meaningful work, and even the occasional romance, without Helen, my life no longer felt like my own life. Or like much of a life at all.
Helen and I grew up only blocks apart in Brooklyn Heights, she on Pineapple Street, me on Cranberry. Our good-natured, middle-class parents were friends. We were both only children. At five-years-old, we pinky-swore ourselves to be “sisters for all eternity.” We were proud that we knew the sophisticated word “eternity.”
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When Helen first died, other friends said to me, “You’ll be fine. You’re popular.” They didn’t understand that I’d lost my sister, my rock, the person who’d always stood beside me, and that without her, I felt undone and adrift.
it is because of Helen that I’ve chosen to make my new home in this faraway place. Many years ago, she and I spent ten glorious days here together. We were both single mothers of toddlers back then. We’d made our decisions together to take the sperm donor route rather than to continue to wait for our respective Mr. Rights.
But too many sleepless nights, first with colicky babies and now with rambunctious two-year-olds, had left us feeling frazzled and depleted. “We desperately need to get away,” Helen had said, rubbing her eyes. I nodded in agreement, guzzling a Diet Coke for the caffeine.
It was our hairstylist back then, a woman our mothers’ age, who told us about the Mexican town where she’d spent five years of her “wild bohemian youth.” Lena worked out of her musty, rent-controlled apartment, and believed in reading the iChing and tea leaves. She wore puffy-sleeved embroidered blouses tucked into patched jeans. She pinned red roses to her long, dyed black hair, like a Mexican film star. She was a Woo Woo Woman, although we didn’t know that term then.
“Ladies,” she said, as she blew dry my imperfectly layered haircut, “you must visit mi pueblo. The mountains, the sunshine, the cobblestones, the colonial architecture, the tequila. You’ll feel refreshed. Renewed. Everyone does.”
So, for ten of the happiest days of our lives, while our mothers enthusiastically watched our children, Helen and I woke up late, visited galerias de arte, shopped for Talavera pottery, and swam in the local hot springs. Linking arms, we walked everywhere, traversing the narrow, cobblestoned sidewalks and hills. Tipsy on margaritas, we were emboldened to flirt with waiters and taxi drivers in our barely remembered high school Spanish. At dusk one evening, as a mariachi band serenaded us in a taqueria, we pinky swore our sisterhood a second time.
Janice Eidus
nowadays, the town is crowded, touristy, and much more expensive. But the mountains are still magnificent, the sun shines most days, the cobblestones are charming, the main church glows pink in the honeyed sunlight, and the margaritas are as powerful as they were decades ago.
The small casita I’m renting is splashed with light and decorated with Mexican tiles and rugs. It has a small garden. Helen had a green thumb and would happily have dug in the soil to cultivate the daylilies and hibiscus. I’m content to let the landlady’s gardener do whatever he likes.
I’m getting used to not drinking the tap water and to rinsing with Microdyn the mangos, papayas, and nopales that I buy in the mercado. I’m also getting used to paying in shops with pesos, not dollars or credit. I’m even getting used to street dogs barking and fireworks going off all night long.
the day before Helen died of a rare, aggressive cancer, she lay in her hospice bed, a frail, faded version of herself. At sixty, Helen’s wavy, dark hair had turned curly and silvery, seemingly overnight. She’d adored her new and unexpected look. She had no idea that just a few years later, chemo would make her bald.
“Let’s pinky swear our sisterhood,” I said, knowing this third time would be our last. She opened her eyes and nodded slightly. She was too weak to lift her hand. I reached over and touched her pinky with mine. “Sisters for all eternity,” I whispered, as her eyes closed once more.
After she died, I couldn’t bear walking by the small brownstone on Orange Street where she’d raised her daughter. I couldn’t bear passing the café where she and I often sipped cappuccinos and chatted for hours after work. I couldn’t bear running into the retired doctor she’d been dating, who broke up with her the day after she was diagnosed. I couldn’t bear walking along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where she and I used to wheel our children together in their carriages at dusk, pointing out to them the lights of Manhattan across the river.
I sold my one-bedroom apartment, donated most of my possessions, and here I am.
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more and more Woo Woo Women are arriving, and I’m ready to leave the party. I place down my cup of tea, which I’ve nearly finished. Immediately, a Mexican woman whisks it away and then offers me my choice of bite-sized tostadas and flautas from the tray she carries. She’s wearing a pale pink apron, the uniform of all the women serving food and drink to the guests at the party. “Gracias,” I say, popping a spicy tostada into my mouth, promising myself to take a Spanish class so that I won’t live here in just a world of expats. Some of the Woo Woo Women speak beautiful Spanish, I note, and others less so; but many of them try.
I remember something Helen would say during our vacation to anyone who was kind to us: Mil gracias—a thousand thanks. Suddenly, a Woo Woo Woman appears in front of me, blocking my way. She’s in her mid-seventies, I guess, and stunningly beautiful. She’s dressed a la Frida, in a brightly colored, embroidered square-necked blouse over a long skirt, and a fringed rebozo draped across her shoulders. Her thick grey hair is pinned up in a bun, enhanced with ribbons and flowers.
I stare off into the distance, refusing eye contact, assuming she’ll move on. But she doesn’t move, and I give in and meet her bright green eyes, noting her bold pink eyeshadow and scarlet lipstick, both of which I like. She holds out her hand for me to shake. Her skin is thin and veiny, reminding me of the translucent, light fabric of the scarf Helen gave me a few years ago for my birthday, which I made sure to bring with me to Mexico.
“I’m Gardenia,” she says, smiling, “formerly known as Maggie. I moved here a decade ago to escape a stultifying marriage, and I quickly blossomed. I became Gardenia.”
Part of me wants to laugh, but I can’t. For one thing, I can tell by her genuine smile that she’s affectionately teasing herself, and that she’s totally in on the joke. For another, she’s simply too strong and confident a presence.
Still, I don’t want to engage with her. All I want is to return to my rented casita to sit alone in the small garden. I moved to this town for
Janice Eidus
space and solitude, so that I could simultaneously remember and forget Helen, which now strikes me as the true definition of grieving—remembering and forgetting, forgetting and remembering.
Gardenia glances casually around the room and then back at me. Her voice is gentle. “You know, I recently lost a very close friend to cancer.”
My breath catches in my throat. Why in the world has she told me this? Could she be the real deal, a genuine psychic with telepathic powers who’s read my mind about Helen? Of course not. There’s no such thing; this is coincidence, not karma. As we age, we all lose loved ones, often to cancer. Still, why bring this up to me, a total stranger?
“There is, however, a silver lining.” She touches my elbow in a gesture that feels far too intimate. She looks at me with such intensity my breath catches again. In that same soothing voice, she says, “When the best friend leaves, a huge space opens up.”
Next, she’ll offer to lead me into the jungle to take mushrooms with her while she reads my Tarot cards, performs a séance, communes with the earth, calculates my astrological chart, creates an astral vision, performs an Ecstatic Dance, and helps me to find my bliss. Why, oh why, did I move here? I don’t fit in—not with the locals and not with the Woo Woo Women. I force myself to stand tall and straight, but inside I feel knocked about and off kilter.
Gardenia smiles. “Our hearts don’t have infinite space. Now you have more space. As do I.”
Is she implying that she and I will fill those spaces for each other? But we don’t know each other from a hole in the wall. And, at our ages, do we even need to fill those spaces? And why does she think she can tell me what my heart does or doesn’t have?
Yet, I feel something shift within me, as if the outer shell of armor protecting this heart of mine has cracked open. Infinitesimally. For the first time I ask myself whether Helen would want me to be so alone, so cut off from others, so wedded to solitude and loneliness. Wouldn’t she encourage me to lean into Gardenia’s warmth, and to stop punishing myself for surviving without her?
Still, I don’t know what to say to Gardenia. I’m not a seeker. I’m not as hopeful as she. I blurt, “Your Frida earrings. They’re so … Woo Woo.” The phrase escapes me. It’s too late to take it back. Surely, I’ve offended her and every other woman here.
Gardenia must know that Woo Woo isn’t a compliment. She’ll know that I don’t take her seriously, and she’ll tell her friends. I’ve alienated them all. Which may have been exactly what I meant to do. But since my goal is to live fairly anonymously in this town, I can’t have enemies who gossip about me. Which means I had better apologize to her.
Before I can do so, Gardenia startles me by throwing her head back and laughing so heartily a few women across the room glance our way. “Welcome to Woo Woo Town,” she says, smiling broadly, her green, heavily made-up eyes warm and glowing.
And here, amidst the Woo Woo Women and the heady scents of lavender, citrus, and cinnamon, I feel it again: that brittle shell surrounding my heart cracking open just a bit more, the slightest, infinitesimal amount, barely perceptible.
Mil gracias, I think, not yet ready to say the words aloud. A thousand thanks.
Chautauqua
Waters Magdalene
Donatello, 1453
The wood seems to weep,
White poplar still alive.
Flowing hair ropes the ragged
Shift at the waist and torn strips
Swathe scabbed thighs.
She lifts hands toward prayer,
Though palms never touch.
Cavernous eyes and parched lips
Express anguish—
Having witnessed her man
Step from the gaping tomb
Only to evanesce, herself left behind,
She knows her faith need no longer
Deepen, but like her flesh
Must petrify. You and I
Waver before this six-foot-two
Statue, ignored by the sinner
To whom we don’t matter.
Her gaze is not upward but beyond,
And if we turn we might glimpse
The world that will still exist
When one of us is gone.
for Mihaela
Michael
Exhibit No. 108 in the Corridors of Hell
Gregory Donovan
To find it, you must be well lost. The museum begins Before you know it, a passage winding through the hips, blades, And shins of a cruel gunpowder-grey desert, its streams of grit
Slipping over the warped dunes like smoke, filling in the tracks left Behind as you walk ahead. In an instant, the whipped wind carves Your likeness into the rotted cliffside’s face, staring back. If you attempt
The vast salt flats in pursuit of the dark hooded figure seen wading Toward you from afar through the liquid silver pulse of its wavering Mirage, a slim and singular question mark, you will not reach it,
Not even if you could fly over the red and black lake of natron
Where firebirds feed and breed, and you stirring up their thundering blasts
Of flight from the scaled skin of acidic waters with your ridiculous Balloon. Seek to drink, and you’ll once again look deep into that final Image held within the accusing eye of your dying grandmother—
The stripped rib racks, the dried skins and delicate hooves, the horned And scattered skulls circling the empty maw of a poisonous well Gone dry, her cinched lips clamped over the o of her final cry of pain. When the screams and weeping, the explosions and flares, of winter Blitzkrieg
Begin to follow you, echoing down the halls as you drift Into darkness, passing the dim alcoves of poorly lit exhibits, The man eating his own brain in the crumbling Tower of Rue, The forensic artist feverishly slapping clay onto his own partly reconstructed
Face, the awkward laughing woman telling again of the accidental drowning
Of her baby, and after turning red standing there so long frozen beneath
Gregory Donovan
The cracked EXIT sign, too late you’ll realize you have finally come to 108,
The Canción Aeterna, sonic whirlpool you cannot escape, the fugue and mystery
Of Astor Piazzola played by a trio of madmen to accompany The death of an angel tortured with pliers by a punk in a pompadour do
And dark goggles whose crime it was to beat his street dealers, All children, with a nailed club when they failed to bring him enough Money. And now, without expression and without end, he sings passionately,
Loudly and off-key, into the badly busted microphone so that within its static and deafening roar there is not one word you will ever understand.
Water Witch
Kevin Lanahan
September 5, 1983
Two weeks from moving into the house we discover the well is dry. My father stands in the dirt we dug out around the fieldstone foundation, staring into the sky. I look up there with him but there’s just a few faraway clouds. It’s a day with no breeze, the heat like a fever and the gypsy worms dropping dead out of the trees.
I wait for what’s next and sweat in the gauzy haze and listen to the DJ on the transistor we have going. He talks about the coast to coast drought. Labor Day, 1983, hottest in recent memory, he says. Then there’s something about Johnny Ramone having brain surgery. A street brawl on the lower east side of Manhattan, rock and rollers! I worry about what this means for the band. I worry what this means for my life if the Ramones are no more. But my father hears none of it and takes up the shovel again, moves some more dirt around. Then, after a while, he waves me over. “You fit in there?” he says, pointing into the hole.
It’s tight but I squeeze through. And under the house the unturned earth is like some ancient secret. The air cool and beautiful. Broken bands of light peek through the stones of the foundation where the mortar has fallen away and I can see a group of cinder blocks set in a circle maybe twenty yards away where the well is. I push forward on all fours with the homemade measure he gave me in my jeans pocket and the melody of “Teenage Lobotomy” in my head. I think how they probably had to shave Johnny’s black hair to remove a piece of his skull and stop the bleeding. Then I realize this might be what our English teacher Mr. Kissick calls irony. Like Ahab’s whale bone peg leg or when Holden tells Sally he loves her. My father calls out to see if I’ve dropped the measure down yet, his voice thin and muted, like he’s a universe away. I keep crawling and shout back that I still have a ways to go.
This is just another thing that’s gone wrong with this house and I know what he’s thinking by now. Possible causes, possible solutions.
Kevin Lanahan
How much it will cost. What’s left in the bank account. Here’s what I believe: most of what is happening to us is of our own making. We call it bad luck, like each turn of event is a coin toss, but the truth is we should have known better. My mother calls the house a sinkhole, a money pit. We already have a house, she said, when my father told us he wanted to move. A house that felt safe and comfortable, snug between two other houses that look just like it. But we sold it and our stuff is packed in boxes and soon we’ll move out and a new family will move in. I agree with my mother on one thing: we didn’t need to come down here to this river town, in the middle of nowhere, with the smell of swamp rot and the coydogs that run the old ferry towpath, crying in the night.
When I reach the well there’s a quarter inch copper pipe that extends out of the dark hole and disappears into some ragged batting and the floorboards above. I drop the stone down like he said, but when I reel it in the string and stone come back dry. I try again, let out as much of the slack as I can and pull it back up but it’s the same. Then I place my ear to the earth. Listen for the seam or the vein, the sound of water running in between the pore spaces and fractures of rock. But all I hear is his voice out there afraid and searching. “Anything? Anything? Can you hear me?”
I consider staying put for a while. Taking some time to rest in the cool air. Back out there the sun is wilting the trees and scorching the black crows. Peeling the last vestiges of paint from the ancient siding we’ll need to replace. But even this far away I can feel his worry so I start crawling my way back. And when I finally come out from under the house the heat hits like a wall, the light so bright it’s like the end of the world. I blink and squint and when my eyes finally adjust I see my father is now in the front yard with the German carpenter who lives down the road.
“This heat. Very bad,” the German says. “You need a vater vitch.”
“A what?”
“A dowser. A vater vitch.”
My father hires the German on the cheap when we run into roadblocks we can’t figure out. When we lack the tools. His name is Niko Schmidt and he works in wooden clogs and blue cotton button-down
Chautauqua
shirts. Smokes unfiltered Eckstein cigarettes that come in frog green cellophane packs shipped over from Europe. He arrives for work with his lunch wrapped in cheesecloth, packed neatly inside a tin bucket and a corked ceramic growler filled with beer. By the end of the day, glassy eyed and rank, he has me sit with him on the flip-gate of his pickup while he smokes and talks about growing up in Germany during the war.
But right now he’s pointing around the yard in random places, explaining that dowsing, vater vitching, originated in fifteenth century Bavaria. “You drill here, here, here, yah?” he says. “Maybe wasser, maybe no. Or you get a vater vitch and drill just one time.” My father looks like he’s had the wind knocked out of him. But the German is smiling in the sun with these cobalt, seagull-eyes and red lines like spider legs across his pink cheeks.
september 8, 1983
At school in the morning the Christian Brothers parole the halls and hurry us into homerooms. You there, look alive. Where are you supposed to be? The military instructors wait for us in the doorways with high and tight haircuts, smelling of cigarettes and Aqua Velva, ready to conduct inspection. We stand before them at attention and they look us up and down. You use dogshit to shine those shoes? You sleep in that shirt last night?
After inspection, Brother Patrick’s voice comes through a speaker in the wall, deep and resonant and comforting. We face the flag, salute, and he leads us in the pledge of allegiance followed by an “Our Father.” Then he calls for a moment of personal reflection and we drop into our chairs and fold our hands, bow our heads and close our eyes.
In the quiet I pray for water at our new house. I pray that the Water Witch my father and the German have hired isn’t the quack it sounds like he is. Then I say a prayer for Johnny. I ask God to reduce the swelling in his brain. I ask God to give him the memory to play the guitar as fast and loud in that impossible downstroke style as he ever did. Since the news broke, I’ve learned the fight was over a girl. So I close by asking God to grant him true love, not the kind of bullshit that got him into this trouble in the first place.
Kevin Lanahan
september 14, 1983
Kissick comes jogging into English class like he’s on fire, carrying his scarred, brown leather briefcase, swinging it up and letting it bang down onto the desk. Then he turns to us and claps his hands together.
“Lads,” he says, like he’s calling a taxi. It’s the first class of the morning and we’re groggy and cobwebbed, but he’s on a full charge again. He steps slowly from behind the desk scanning the room in his navy polyester suit pants from Sears, rolling up the sleeves of his white oxford.
“The good people live on casualties of the sea,” he says, and we understand this is something important. A quote from the Conrad text he had us read. Some of us start to fidget. We look at each other with empty, worried eyes. Kissick stands all of five eight but to us he’s a giant. To us he knows the way and we wait for directions, the secrets he holds to the universe. “Gentlemen, someone explain what Conrad means here, please.” He holds his hands behind his back and walks up and down the aisles, waiting for one of us to be brilliant. He has earned our love and respect. Each one of us. And holds it delicately, preciously in his hands. No one wants to disappoint him. But there is just silence. “Come on, lads,” he whispers, pacing the classroom floor. “What does Conrad want us to know?”
Kissick was in Vietnam. 1967 through 1969. The military instructors give us their stories, are forthcoming about the villages they raided, the firefights in the jungle. But Kissick doesn’t talk to us about his time there. Instead, we count on details of his experience to leak from the faculty lounge. That mysterious place we only get a glimpse of when the door swings open for a brief moment. Someone going in or out and then the whiff of lunchroom food and cigarette smoke escaping. The black plastic ashtrays and the hum of the air conditioner going year round.
Here’s what I’ve heard: he was ten miles from the DMZ. Russian 122s as tall as a man. Coming in sometimes fifty a night. His platoon was responsible for establishing a camp for the radio relays. They rucked equipment into the jungle, found some high ground, cleared it for an encampment, and built a comms outpost and then defended it. The
Chautauqua
constant shelling. Always digging in deeper. Never deep enough. Like ticks burrowing into the skin of the earth. Oil lanterns in the holes and trenches for light. Reinforcing, and bracing the walls with whatever they could find. Eyes always watching the loamy, black-green perimeter.
Kissick has us read Conrad and Melville. Joyce and Hemingway. We see something in his eyes when he asks us to interpret the texts. He tells us to underline passages and make notes in the margins. He sees into our souls. Our future. And we want to know what he knows. He says it again, slower and quieter this time: The good people live on casualties of the sea. But we have no water in the house that will be my new home. And I pray he doesn’t call on me because I can only think of the dry.
september 30, 1983
I cross the quad while a breeze pushes the fallen leaves around and blows the smell of burning coal from the nearby power plants up the hill. I’ve been sent on a mission to fetch ice from the rectory for our biology experiment when Mr. Canyon, the history teacher and baseball coach, sees me and calls my name. I stop and he approaches with his hands in the pockets of his tweed sport coat, the collar turned up and his nose red from the new chill.
“What’s that about, son?” he says, eyeing the bucket in my hand.
I tell him about Mr. Setlock. How he sent me to the rectory’s basement for ice and that the class can’t do the biology experiment until I get back. But he doesn’t seem to get the urgency and looks past me at something in the distance.
“The rectory, huh? That’s usually off limits. But okay. If Mr. Setlock sent you.” I tell him, yes, Mr. Setlock sent me, and start to go but I don’t get very far when he calls me back. “You know I’ve always wanted to ask you, son. Your scar there,” he says, and points his index finger at the raised red link of skin that runs across the front of my neck. “It looks to me like you could use a blessing of the throat.”
I’ve seen the mass and I know the story of St. Blaise, patron saint of throats, who saved a boy choking on a fishbone. I know about the candles, tied with seagrass that the priest holds to your neck while he
Kevin Lanahan
recites the blessing. Through the intercession of Saint Blase, may God deliver you from every disease of the throat and from every other illness. But what happened to me was not a disease. It is a burn scar. And there is the matching and much larger scar across my chest and parts of my arms. All of it still pink and angry. Something the doctor calls a keloid.
“I know a priest,” he says. “A man born again. And he can lay hands on you, son. The healing power of God is in this man’s hands.” He raises his own hands up now and looks into the moody sky and the wind blows our hair around while he waits for my answer. “The lord our savior,” he says, “is here with us now if we will only receive him.” I look into the sky, see what he sees. The broken clouds, some starlings swimming through. I tell him I’ll think about it. I tell him the biology class is waiting on me. I tell him I have to go and he says something else about God but I just keep moving across the dewy lawn, leaving him back there with his hands and his face raised to the sky.
Inside the rectory it’s as quiet and dark as I imagined. I find the door to the basement and head down the brown carpeted steps where at the bottom another door opens to the game room with this strong smell of cigarettes and vermouth and mothballs. There’s a full bar with one of those restaurant size ice machines, large enough to chill a corpse, and a cheap framed lithograph of Saint John Baptist de La Salle on the wall above. There are green-felted poker tables and a group of midcentury wooden chairs in front of the biggest television I’ve ever seen, a maple console record player-radio, and a big gold framed mirror on the opposite wall.
I fill the bucket with ice. Then I pull the bottle of Macallan down and take a long drink. Then another. And when I start to go when I catch my image in the big mirror. There’s the jagged, still swollen line. The keloid across the front of my neck. A blessing of the throat, I think to myself. Healing. But what I didn’t tell Canyon is that when I look in the mirror lately, like I am now, I imagine what must be a scar just like mine running across Johnny’s skull. And I feel a kinship. A connection. A brotherhood stronger than anything I imagine God can provide.
Chautauqua
october 10, 1983
The Water Witch arrives in a green van with a daisy painted on the side and the name LISA in big block letters above it. He opens the door and jumps out wearing khakis and an Adidas t-shirt with the three leaf logo. The German goes over and they embrace and whisper to each other in their own language, then erupt in laughter, doubling over and stomping the ground and slapping at one another. The rig driller leans against his muddy truck and looks on in stained blue-jean coveralls and a red Mack Truck baseball hat, shaking his head like he’s watching clowns at the circus.
The German pulls the Water Witch over to meet my parents who are standing in the overgrown grass, not speaking to one another. The Water Witch says he will find us water. He speaks directly to my mother and touches her shoulder gently and calls her frau. He says the rigger can only drill random holes in the ground. But not him. He says he can feel the water. That the earth gives off vibrations. That you must open your heart and soul. Then he puts his hand up to his chest and lowers his voice. “You feel it here,” he says, and then goes to his truck and brings out a metal pendulum on a chain and two shiny, L-shaped metal rods the length of baseball bats.
I see my mother has had enough, that look in her eyes that is fear and anger all at once, and now she’s coming to me with her arms folded across her chest, high stepping through the tall grass with the grasshoppers jumping out of her way. When she reaches me she puts her arm around my waist and draws me close and I feel her trembling. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “This is going to work.”
This close to her I smell that Mom smell. Clean and bright and flowery, like I remember. Something familiar that reminds me of when I was younger. A time from before all of this. And it strikes me how I haven’t been this close to her in a long time. She’s been lost, I realize, and maybe I’ve been lost, too, in the barrage of things to fix and build these last couple years since my father first bought this place and we started the work.
We both watch the Water Witch stumble around the lawn with his swinging pendulum. It courses back and forth, and he stares at it like
Kevin Lanahan
it’s a sextant of spiritual forces, and I realize that this moment, where we wait to see if we have something so necessary as water, might finally bring us back together. I think of all the weekends our family has been split apart. Time my father and I have been here working while my mother was off somewhere else tending to my younger brother and sister. Time away. What were they doing all of those hours and weekends? Standing here now, waiting for water, I can’t even say, and I feel lousy I never thought to ask.
And then I look at my Dad. Lost in all of this himself. I see the stress has dulled him. All of those trips to the hardware store, lumber store, the dump. The lifting, hauling, tearing down, building back up. Always sweating. The two of us pissing outside. Digging and then squatting over a trench latrine. Our boots caked with mud and hair full of white gypsum and orangey sawdust. Shirtless and sunburn in the summer. Or wrapped up in layers when it was cold, our fingers frozen around a hammer in winter. Paint and stain and grease and oil on our clothes, our arms and hands. Rinsing it off with gasoline or turpentine from an ancient rusted can. Feeling it soak into our skin, our blood. Smelling of it for days.
And I think of what I must smell like to my mom right now. It can’t be good. But she holds me close and while the Water Witch serpentines left and right, something comes to me: how outnumbered she’s been. All of these men. This collection of us. The Rigger, the German, the Water Witch. Me, my father. We’re all dangerous. A threat. A risk. Doing shit and making decisions without thinking of the consequences. My father is like this.
From the beginning I’ve been like this too, and I don’t know why. Like the day, as a toddler, I pulled the pot of boiling water over top of myself and gave myself these scars. She’s trapped in our orbit. The gravitational force of these men in her life that she cannot outrun.
The Water Witch takes up the L-shaped rods and walks like he’s drunk, pulled left, then right, humming to himself. I look at my father and he runs a hand through his hair. Then I look at the rigger and he shakes his head in disbelief and stuffs chewing tobacco in his mouth.
The Water Witch stops and looks into the grass a long time, staring a hole in the ground. After a while the German says his name. “Herbie? Wasser?” But the Water Witch doesn’t answer. He keeps humming and
Chautauqua
begins to mat the tall grass with his feet. Then he goes to his van and brings back a can of white spray paint and marks a large white X on the flattened grass.
“Here. Right here,” he says, looking at the Rigger and pointing at the X. “You drill here.”
The Rigger pushes up the brim of his hat, turns and spits out a long ribbon of brown saliva. Then he turns to my father. “You good with this? I get paid for every hole I drill. Water or no water.”
My father nods and the Rigger says okay, and climbs himself into his truck and starts the big diesel engine and puts the truck in gear and moves it around, backward and forward, until its positioned over the X. Then he jumps out of the cab to operate the hydraulics. A three-story iron needle rises off the bed of the truck until its straight up in the air. Then it begins to rotate and descend until it reaches the ground where it chews up the grass and dirt like nothing followed by a lot of pounding that I feel in my legs and my chest. My mother says something to me but the noise is too much so I just nod and she pulls me tighter while the drill bit whirls and slaps into the rock bed.
I watch my father’s eyes watching the drill, and while we wait to see if we will find water, for some reason a memory comes to me of the time he shot a deer and hung it in the garage for I don’t know how long. Skinless except for the head, I thought it was never coming down. Black, glassy eyes staring into nothing, mouth open with the frozen tongue. The rest of it all unwrapped sinew and bone. The hollowed out cavity, white ribs like long teeth smiling. Finally, one cold morning he lowered it onto the garage floor that he’d covered with newspaper.
Keep the head steady, he told me, and I grabbed hold of the antlers while he butchered it. The cutting and sawing, pulling the animal apart in sections. Take that leg. Stretch it back. The rank odor of game, greasy in my nose. Just like this house, which would come later, I thought he knew what he was doing. But he hadn’t shot an animal before. One day he had a shotgun, and off he went on autumn weekends into the woods, and returned one night with the deer roped to the hood of the car.
At the end, it was in pieces. A pile of meat stacked on the Sunday comics. He made my mother cook some that night, but we couldn’t stomach
Kevin Lanahan
the taste and never tried it again. Beige fat pooled in the broiler pan.
Water begins to show at the hole but it’s frothy, filled with slurry, and the Rigger shakes his head and shouts that it’s just ground water, not the good stuff we’re looking for. It’s not until clear white water begins to rise out of the hole in a fountain as tall as me that the German and the Water Witch throw up their hands and cheer.
That’s when my mother buries her head in my shoulder. And I feel her start to cry, her body shaking. Her tears wet on my skin.
october 30, 1983
With the cold weather we rush to get the roofing done. We have the underlayment and tar paper down, the valleys waterproofed. Now we’re installing the shingles. But we’ve waited too long and there’s rain the next several days, so we have to go out in it.
We’re in down coats, climbing the slick ladders in wet jeans with roofing bundles on our shoulders. And when I climb I can't lift my head to see the upward progress I’m making, just the ground getting farther away. When I get to the top he pulls the bundle off of me, and then we separate and distribute the shingles and begin to nail them down. I bend a lot of nails and have to claw them out and start again.
We work all morning like this until around noon when the weather breaks a bit. That’s when the German arrives. He doesn’t come with his lunch pail but he has the growler and he wears a black watch cap and a heavy brown wool sweater with a threadbare hole in one shoulder over his blue, cotton button down.
He works fast. Always a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’s stringy and wiry but strong as anything I’ve seen. He can climb with two bundles stacked. He takes just two swings of the hammer for a nail, beginning with a quick, careful tap to set it, then two perfect strikes on top of the nail head and it disappears every time. He doesn’t stop to talk or take breaks except to drink from the growler once he gets back on the ground for another bundle. His movements are fluid, and he travels along the pitch unfazed where my father and I are cautious with the height.
After hours of this, the light is finally fading. The trees are silhouetted black against the muted sky. The German says that’s it. Too dark now
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for roofing, he declares, and we climb down one by one. I’m glad to be off the pitched roof, tired of focusing on just the few feet in front of me, and a narrow, vigilant frame of vision, all day.
Back on the ground I can see the rest of the world again and that’s when I notice how tired my father is. He’s wet and weathered through. Face drawn, the worry there that’s eating him. He pays the German in cash and stumbles off to the back of the yard to gather the wood we’ve split for the cast iron stove we have going in the family room. With not enough money to install a furnace we opted for electric baseboards. But inflation and the oil wars with the middle east we read about in the papers has driven up the cost of electricity so high it's like a nosebleed, my father says. So we wear hats indoors and burn the cord wood we split and stacked together. I watch him load the wheelbarrow up high as he can before he pushes it back to the house.
The German calls me over to where he’s sitting on the flip gate of his truck. He doesn’t seem eager to leave yet. So I put myself down next to him and he drinks the rest of what’s in the growler and lights a cigarette and offers me one, but I shake my head.
“Good boy. Today was hard. Let me see your hands.” I show him and he squints with the cigarette in his mouth, pressing on the callouses. “You work hard. It's good. Hard work is good.” He gives me back my hand and we sit there a while watching the light change. “Not many your age like hard work,” he says. “Me, I work from just this tall.” And he holds out his hand now to show me. And then he describes how he grew up in a village in the north, outside of Lubeck, a port city at the edge of the Baltic. They were the very first to be bombed, he says. Hamburg, just an hour south, was heavily defended, and the Brits knew it, so Lubeck it was.
He says it was a cold, clear night in March under a full moon. The bay was covered in hoarfrost, bright like a mirror. And the canals, fed by the Wakenitz, and the Trave, were still frozen in long strips of silver. All of it like a map, a beacon for the Wellington and Stirling English bombers.
By dawn his church was gone. His school just tinder sticks. The homes and buildings of wood and brick ablaze across the city. The copper roofs opened like tin cans.
Kevin Lanahan
As the war dragged on the men disappeared from his village. Sixteen and over were conscripted. Eventually, over time, just mothers and girls and boys were left. Like him. And that’s how he learned what became his trade. With no men left to do the work, the boys took up their father’s tools.
“All the fathers gone, okay,” he says, and snaps his fingers, drags from what’s left of the cigarette and then throws it into the grass. “What you think of that?”
But I know he doesn’t expect an answer and I say nothing until he asks me instead about school. The teachers and the Christian Brothers, the military instructors. I tell him about Mr. Kissick. How the other day, there was some malfunction in the front office and this loud whistling noise suddenly rang out over the loud speakers. Just a few seconds but loud, piercing. And I tell him how Mr. Kissick collapsed spread eagle on the floor, like he couldn’t get flat enough, a look of terror on his face, hands over his head, eyes shut tight. And then I describe that moment when he realized. The look on his face as he slowly came back. Understanding again where he was, and all of us watching him lift himself from the floor.
The German looks at me, then looks away, nodding like he understands. Like he knows Mr. Kissick even better than I do. I watch him light another cigarette and recognize a wildness in his eyes. Something born of a longing, a hunger. Sounds from somewhere echo back to us. Barking dogs, a tractor engine. The wind moves the tops of the empty trees. We don’t speak for a long time and darkness sifts down around us and the windows begin to glow yellow light, and then he rustles my hair and says its time he gets home. So, we close the lift gate and pack his things and I watch him pull out of the drive and when his truck is too far down the road for me to see, I step into the warmth of the house.
december 24, 1983
That night. That time in our lives.
The snow piles up outside and the wind pushes it against the door. We feed the woodstove and tape that cloudy plastic sheeting over the windows and plug door drafts with blankets and towels. It’s too cold
and the roads too treacherous for any grandparents to make their way so it’s just us and Mom has a turkey in the oven and the tree blinks on and off with those big multi-colored bulbs and Jonny Mathis plays from the record player.
We still don’t have stairs. Just a wooden ladder covered with paint splatters and dried taping compound that we climb to get to the second floor. The wiring is all wrong. We flip the switch for the downstairs foyer and the lights go on in the hallway upstairs. Installed by someone my father found in the Pennysaver who swore he was about to receive his electrician’s license. There is one toilet for the five of us where eventually we will build walls but now sits behind bedsheets tacked to the rafters for some privacy.
You make choices that at the time feel like the surest thing. You buy a faulty house you should have known was cursed and you wake the gods who respond with prejudice and punish your stupidity. Like Johnny Ramone, you give your heart to a girl and she swears it was written in the stars but then you discover she’s been in love with someone else all along. Or you swear the bend in the road isn’t that sharp but, high on amphetamines, you crash the 1976 Toyota Celica your father cobbled some money together to buy for you.
And when you come to, tasting blood, and resting upside down in a creek somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you hear that familiar sound of water pouring in and you have to laugh remembering that time the Water Witch did his crazy dance in your front yard.
We sit for dinner and we take our hats off and just as we’re about to eat, audible above Mathis’ smooth ring-ling-ling-a-ling, we hear noises in the walls that make us stop and look at each other. Except my father, whose eyes are set hard on the ceiling above and the exposed roughhewn oak beams and pink Corning fiberglass rolls stapled into the bays, his jaw clenched tight.
My mother jumps up from the table and takes the needle from the record and Mathis is gone and we listen to the gurgling and popping from behind the drywall more clearly now. My sister finally says, “What’s that?” and my mother lifts my baby brother from his highchair, and my
Kevin Lanahan
father pushes himself from the table and stands up and tells me to get a hammer, the drill, box cutters, electric leads.
Then he turns to my mother. “How many hair driers do we have in this house?”
I could tell you how many holes we put in the new drywall. I could tell you how we spent all night running the electric leads back and forth and moving the hair dryers from one hole we created to another. Guessing at where we needed to triage and then scoring the lines and punching through with the hammer. I could tell you how eventually we went outside, shoveled a path furiously through the knee-high snow to that spot in the foundation I crawled under that past September. How I jammed myself under there again, this time with a flashlight to rig a space heater and how we then crossed our cold, frostbitten fingers that it would make the difference. I could tell you how the turkey sat there on the table and the mashed potatoes went cold and we never ate anything and were up all night, my mother trying hard not to cry again.
But I could also tell you how through it all two things happened I never felt before and maybe I’ve never really felt since. And that’s what this story is about when I think back on that time.
My father and I joined forces that night. We were one in a terrific battle to save our house. A thing we had built together and then became one in trying to defend. Together we were a fire team. Just like the Army sergeants taught us in Military Science class. The two of us moving in bounding overwatch. An alternating coordinated action in support of a forward offensive against a more powerful force.
My father and I couldn’t know then what was coming for us next. Future wars. The months and years ahead. Trying to defeat other invaders we would have to repel. The unfortunate but inevitable battles we would have with one another. Drawing blood on occasion. But that night I learned something of what tied us together. A simple struggle to survive. Against the earth and all of her elements. The power of water in its different forms.
We loved each other that Christmas Eve. That’s what I remember. Waking the next morning and opening presents, the post-adrenaline,
post-cortisol haze. Although I couldn’t tell you now what presents there were. That’s all gone, all dust. What lingers is that feeling. The feeling of connection born from fear. Born from the fighting.
Thinking back, the new year came, and we built stairs, laid flooring and closed the holes in the drywall we’d punched through. Spring arrived, and the weather warmed and eventually we blew in insulation so that we wouldn’t have to worry again. And later on, in the fall I think, when the air turned again, and the promise of winter was in the air, The Ramones, with Johnny on guitar, released a new album: Too Tough to Die.
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Chautauqua, NY
The Fourth of july
We are given paper bags as we enter the Amphitheater—as if we had forgotten to pack our lunches or are in danger of hyperventilating during the concert. Then, when we get to “The 1812 Overture,” we are instructed to blow into the bags and then pop them on cue, so the hall will resound with handmade thunder— the gunshot sounds we used to make in the school cafeteria, a harmless prank in those pre-Columbine days when trench coats were worn by grizzled, hardboiled detectives, not pimple-cheeked teenage snipers. But now we await our chance to be the cannons’ roar and wish that was all there was left of war— and all that was left of cluster bombs were the faint fireworks, glimmering over the lake like temporary stars.
Fred Zirm
Just as far
Richard Lehnert
after Margaret Wise Brown’s The Train to Timbuctoo: A Little Golden Book, 1951
From Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo
it’s a long way down the track and in my fourth year or the third there was no way longer that dark last page the midpoint of some long arrested westing into a purple weal of ending day the two rails ever meeting where they disappeared no train or bird or person but on the left a semaphore signing in colored tongues I still have not yet learned its promise or warning of how the getting there would be
I did not then know those names were of places trains could go or that no tracks can join them and when book said or Mother read And from Timbuctoo to Kalamazoo it’s just as far to go back I could not read the words signaling from the page only stare into inked distance as if I could will it to tell where it went and what that meant as I have every picture song and star every joy and death and sunset since
Richard Lehnert
this child of four or five or sixty cardboard suitcase weightless in his hand standing on an empty platform in the vast light at end of day having always just arrived and now about to leave
Come talk to me
Josh MacIvor-Andersen
After we stuck the landing at our first wedding ceremony—yanked from the ether during eleven days of engagement; tied together with a makeshift knot of favors and loaners and the exceedingly goodwill of a few folks with low expectations—my wife and I thought we’d throw a second. This was to be a community-wide celebration, the kind that would include the ever-expanding diaspora of our friends and family. We now had months to plan, invitations to send, tables and chairs and a porta potty to rent for the sprawling Tennessee farm that would become the backdrop for a reiteration of our vows.
A cousin promised to play the bagpipes. We put a deposit down for huge vats of saag paneer and malai kofta from our favorite Indian restaurant. We filled our gas tanks in Philadelphia for the long drive south.
When we finally arrived at my parents’ 170-acre farm—a rental, but one that had become home for over ten years—my wife and I had already been married for five months. That was long enough to have stepped out of the endorphin cloud that was our get-r-done first wedding and get settled a little in this thing called matrimony. We had fought. We had made up. Both with great passion. We had fused and organized our finances enough to successfully rent things like porta potties from a single checking account.
The ceremony quickly began to mushroom around us. Friends we hadn’t seen in ages texted from the airport, giddy in their arrivals, as we and a small army of volunteers attended to the myriad needs of a wedding, including combing through the grounds to clean up the feces of the many, many animals—sheep, llamas, dogs, rabbits—who called the farm home.
We didn’t want to call it a wedding, though. It was supposed to be a big party, a celebration. Simple. Sweet. Easy. Yet the logistics began to feel like the falcon’s ever-widening wedding gyre. We wondered if the center would cease to hold.
Josh MacIvor-Andersen
And what was that center? It wasn’t really us. I mean, sure, we had called all those people together to celebrate this thing we were doing, which was to publicly announce the promises we had already whispered in private, but it was more than that. It was about all of us, this community stitched together over years and continents, through staggering joy and immense grief.
These ceremonies give us all important footholds of meaning as we climb up our existential rock walls.
“We want to remind ourselves of the continuity of our lives in the midst of change,” writes Madelon Sprengnether of our ceremony-making habits. “In each case, we face the loss of the past as we have known it and an unscripted future, as full of danger as possibility. We want to be carried safely across this perilous crossing into our new lives, knowing that we have not lost the ones that have sustained us this far.”
So, we gather, and in Tennessee we hoot and holler, and we lift each other up and remind each other that we’re part of something bigger and more vital: the (hopefully) long arc of an individual life and simultaneously an important patch in the quilt of some community. We rejoice at the unscripted future unfolding from every celebration, imaging what will be, what could be, how we all might fit into that distant, imminent frame.
That day my cousin played his bagpipe and my brother drank enough whiskey to take the stage and the curries were delicious. Cows mooed with intent on the periphery. We reveled in our web of people— grandparents and babies, former television stars and aspiring musicians—and when we slept off the hangovers of boxed wine the next day, we all stepped into the light to begin writing the next scenes in our respective scripts.
long before that day and the days to come, my wife, K and I, just beginning to construct the relationship that would eventually move us into marriage, sat close at my cousins’ house on a damp, hot summer night in Chattanooga. It was late, after midnight. The front lawn where we sat sloped away from my aunt and uncle’s ancient Victorian farmhouse. That house—a kind of second home for me, and within
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it a second family—sat directly at the bottom of Lookout Mountain. It always felt like the serpentine road switch-backing down the slopes spit you out directly at their doorstep. The acrid smell of brake shoes grinding against drums never seemed to leave the air.
K would soon spend a year in Spain, and I would complete a magazine internship in D.C. We were both alive to the world and hungry for travel, for adventure, for love. Earlier that night, we had spent hours arguing with my Uncle Jim, a watchmaker, about the benefits of movement and experiencing culture and popping through multiple timezones only to land, bleary-eyed…somewhere. He had made a different argument, that staying put in a single place, like the small neighborhood of St. Elmo where he had his shop and his church and his people, had its own merit. He said that the ability to not only receive the benefits of one’s community but also to contribute your gifts to it was just as important as running off to see the world’s wonders.
At the time, I couldn’t see his perspective through the haze—the high—of having spent the last few years buying one-way tickets to mostly European countries and trying to find my way back home, broke and buzzed and longing for more. K, in her own way, had broken through monolingualism and was now reading novels and poetry collections in a new language. A whole new history (and future) was opening up in front of her.
We pushed hard against Uncle Jim’s missional provincialism. Maybe too hard. Our chat began to spin its wheels until, finally exhausted, we told him goodnight and went to the front lawn and listened to the cars careen down the mountain and screech to a halt at a red light just beyond the yard.
Nights like that were frequent back then. How the hours simply collapsed, meant almost nothing, aflame with fresh love, burning brightly with the expanse ahead of us, a future so colossal, so intimate, so ours that all we could do was keep talking and talking and talking about it, about us, about Uncle Jim and how someday he might see, if only he’d get that passport and step into the full sensory experience of, say, a Turkish market in summer or the womb-like warmth of a packed pub in Scotland in winter.
Josh MacIvor-Andersen
We could have stayed in that front yard forever it seemed. In many ways, we thought we would.
we felt grateful for the incredible outpouring of love and volunteerism and good will at our second wedding ceremony, but we also wished we had stuck with one. When you open the floodgates and invite the water, you sometimes get swept away. There was drama. There were fights behind the scenes, unanticipated pressures, and the sheer weight of added logistics. I spent no less than half an hour making sure the porta potty stayed level on uneven ground. My grandparents, both in their mid-nineties, rode shotgun in Dad’s old paint truck. Dad had just had a fight with my brother who, too deep in the whisky, had threatened to throttle Dad, and he might have deserved it.
I see that season so dimly now, straining to peer past the blur of fifteen years of life and marriage, and make out the shapes of us, of our friends and family. My brother is now sober, God bless him. Dad has gone through three paint trucks. K and I have three children. Uncle Jim’s heart ceased to beat on a cobble-stoned street in Dublin where he had been living for years, having abandoned the provincialism he once preached on his porch in St. Elmo. Grandma and Grandpa, of course, are ash.
About halfway through those fifteen years of marriage, my wife made a discovery about me that she wishes had remained closeted— she found out that I love Peter Gabriel. That’s because she finally asked me the names of the songs I often hum to myself on repeat, and at least three of them were from Gabriel’s album So, which might be the absolute pinnacle of human-made music. The song I hum the most, though, is the first track on his follow up, Us, an album thematically preoccupied with relationships and their varying dynamics of push and pull, give and take, longing and loss. “Come Talk To Me,” a track I’ll never be able to shake from my head because it’s in me as deep as bone, is all about reaching out over a relational chasm to simply connect.
Gabriel wrote it about strained communication with his daughter after the dissolving of his marriage, but it’s the kind of song whose intended meaning is easily co-opted and repurposed. I’m not sure why it
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has resonated so strongly with me for so many years, but I know that after I first saw the live performance of the song from 1994’s Secret World Live Tour, where it was performed with Paula Cole, I wasn’t sure if I’d witness anything as artistically awesome ever again. That’s not hyperbole. I felt like I had experienced the musical and theatrical peak—pure pathos at its highest, most perfect decibel.
The genius of that live performance drew from Gabriel’s propensity for theatrics to deliver something extraordinary, sublime, pyrotechnically flawless. This is where my wife would ask me to please stop talking. But listen, just for a second. Or rather see the stage bathed in the flicker of tens of thousands of flames, a single red phone booth rising to the surface and Gabriel inside, gripping the phone, clad in a white jacket seemingly searching for a way out. His band ascends, bassist and guitarist pivot to create an avenue for his escape, and then get this: he explodes from the phone booth only to take the phone with him. And the cord stretches! He’s tethered but on the move. And it’s not an easy movement. He’s heaving against the cord, fighting for every inch forward, where Paula Cole waits, encouraging, pleading, longing for connection but also kind of adversarial.
How can a person contain all that at once? While singing in front of tens of thousands? Without missing a beat or a note or a single stretch of harmony?
Eventually, some pulley mechanism embedded in the phone booth begins to yank Gabriel away from Cole, perhaps aided by some kind of conveyor belt beneath his feet, and, although he’s pulling against the cord like mad, he’s not strong enough. He is dragged back to the booth and that potential moment of connection vanishes the second the receiver slams down.
They were so close. They wanted it so bad. They almost made it.
i still think of the inexhaustible energy to connect that my wife and I shared when we first came together, how our conversation seemed singular and rich and ongoing, interrupted only momentarily by physical distance. We were so thirsty for every detail of each other’s history and
Josh MacIvor-Andersen
for every thought and idea that came into each other’s heads. We would have crawled into each other’s skin just to feel how everything felt for the other.
Relationships, of course, are never meant to stay static. The chemical deluge of early love is not supposed to sustain. It is instead catalytic. The compressed burn of two people first in love becomes a soldering iron, and with the tip of that iron, they etch out the shape of a door, and the door smolders and lingers and at its edge appear two hinges, and as the heat from the door’s outline begins to dissipate, they have to decide if they’re going to open the door and step through, which leads to a longer arc that some call partnership, others marriage, others simply the next chapter.
When I see Peter Gabriel reaching for Paula Cole on that stage, I think of reaching back through that door to the people on the other side, but not just to my wife and me. I imagine reaching for that entire season, for all those people who came to celebrate the promises we were trying to make, the younger versions of a hundred lives that have since ricocheted through time, some on longer trajectories than others.
And I want to say Come talk to me, Uncle Jim, as he towers over all of us, smiling behind his round, silver-rimmed spectacles. And I want to say Come talk to me, K, who could collapse time with her presence and vanish an entire world with her words. And I want to say Come talk to me, Big Brother, and I’ll tell you all about what’s ahead, which you’ll see with a kind of lucidity you couldn’t now imagine.
The cord pulls. The traction gives. The door, as it always must, slams shut.
In the manger
Jeromiah Taylor
Aretha Franklin
You heard the man. When you were a little girl, they pinned your ears back to take his word. Listening, with that pitch of yours, you found the key, and so you stored up your treasures in heaven. On Earth you left us gold. Your magi offering a cracked jewel case. My mother and I, that was our daily bread—no meal complete without the salt of a do-good woman . A chair always did we leave empty for the do-good man. A chair too big to fill as I bowed my head to say amazing grace over the aioli and asparagus. I never could feel quite like a natural woman, neither, I think, could my mother. So we fingered your voice like scripture, looking for the answer in the texture. The question being how do we fill this silence. The answer being to rewind and turn up the volume. God, I love this song.
where the river meets the sea
“I am stronger than I am broken.”
Roxane Gay
Charlotte Matthews
In the instructional video I’m watching to learn American Sign Language, the teacher tells me to touch my chin with my dominant hand then tap the center of my other upturned palm. This means I honor you. Means you matter. To sign octopus, splay four fingers and place them on back of your other hand, then move everything in unison. Voila: an octopus. You’ve brought to life a bottom-living cephalopod with a soft, oval body and eight long tentacles.
The splendor of sign language is that you reveal the contents of your heart and mind. You put it out there for all to see. It’s like witnessing a secret unfold. A secret become not secret anymore. The times there’s been a signing interpreter, at a graduation or public lecture, they’re the ones who get my attention. I’ll forget I’ve driven hours to hear James Taylor and watch as lithe hands fly in such angles and with such surety, I hold my breath. Watching sign language is like watching a fledgling take first flight: pure, weightless exuberance.
The mute swan who lived at the hospital’s name was Oscar. He outlasted his mate by six years, floating solo in that pond, summer and winter, rain and wind, night and day. He was exquisite, majestic, and whiter than white. On my way to appointments, he’d buoy me, make me want to go, keep on, despite it all. Sometimes I’d slow the car to a crawl, roll down my window and thank him for being there. Then I’d drive on to the shadowed parking lot of the cancer center.
To sign friend, take both of your index fingers, put a slight bend in the first joints and interlace them twice: friend. To sign please, rub your hand over your heart in a circle clockwise.
My neighbor is a signer. But I didn’t use to know that. I’d only seen her walking her dog with such patience and fortitude. I would imagine switching lives with her. And I’d witnessed her son watch a backhoe upend their lawn, watch the backhoe’s tines with such rapture I could
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not explain it to anyone for days. So, I was utterly floored when Jenny, mere doors down, was the interpreter for Roxanne Gay. She so fearlessly and expertly let us see, with her hands and face, Gay’s assertion, “I am just trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
To sign joy, hold both hands horizontally before your chest and brush up chest-wise in an oval motion. To sign mother, touch the tip of the thumb of your dominant hand, whose fingers are open, to your chin.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale, “The Ugly Duckling”, a cygnet is ostracized by his fellow barnyard fowl who tell him he is outright awkward and wretched. He wanders alone through fall and winter, hopeless and sad. To his delight, however, and to the surprise of others, he matures into a swan, the most beautiful bird of all. It’s a tale about transformation, of course, but also a lesson about how appearances are misleading, something anyone who’s had serious illness knows very, very well.
Oscar was at the hospital every single time, there to greet me on my way to the oncologist. If I felt well enough after my appointment, I’d pull over and thank him, tell him that next time I’d remember to bring some bread. One time I even walked down the steep hill to meet him in person. It was mid-morning and August and already on the pond so much heat and light. There were so many cars going by. And Oscar all alone, his webbed feet sending up strings of tiny beads of light as he paddled across the dark barrel of the pond.
To sign home, bring your finger and thumb together and touch your cheek near the side of your mouth.
In the infusion center, I spoke little. By the second week, I’d taught myself to hum as the nurse started the IV lines. Once hooked up safely in my La-Z-Boy, I’d close my eyes and channel Oscar. I’d think how in sleep he’d tuck his head back under his wings and stay afloat for hours, suspended. Oscar’s resting. He is thinking of the river of his birth, river where water joins the sea. He remembers the estuary of marsh grasses and mangroves, place where fresh water mingles with salt.
Charlotte Matthews
But this past spring he died and was so missed by so many, a blow-up swan appeared on the pond one morning, garland of fresh peonies encircling its neck, a sweet, fitting farewell. I think of Oscar a lot, Oscar in the pond with the fountain, Oscar stoic amidst the sterile buildings.
We carry the ocean inside our bodies. The swooshing water, the refrain of our heartbeat, the pull of the moon, the rising tide. But we are, for the most part, land dwelling creatures. Swans are the opposite, sleeping while they float.
Fly, now Oscar, unclip your wings. Fly free.
Pornography
Keith Kopka
When Queen Victoria first saw Michelangelo’s David, she was so shocked by its form that she commissioned a proportionally accurate fig leaf. It was hung by two hooks and kept on ready for any royal visits, removed only after the Queen had left the building. But this vain gesture of modesty was a privilege of the David’s fame. Pope Pious (the somethingth) spent years on a Church sanctioned campaign to lop the dirty “tail” off every lesser-known statue he could get his hands on. And because to be wasteful is a sin of the prodigal, reportedly, there’s room in the Vatican archives filled with all the excised phalluses. Can you imagine the thousands of them arranged by dynasty, size, or mineral? Some in boxes, others stacked like unlit votives around the alter of the Ego, awaiting discovery by some unsuspecting priest or nun who only wants to pray in the presence St. Anthony’s incorruptible tongue, but instead opens the wrong vault door and is faced with the horror of their human form en masse. And perhaps it arouses them. How could it not? Given what a life in the service of God demands: frenzied reverence for His great works,
Kopka and the grace to allow Him alone to curate what touches us, what stands as monument to our failure to love ourselves.
Angela Townsend watch your words
To write about something puts you in peril of loving it. You are wise to count the cost each time you grip your pencil.
I am a regular victim of this glad calamity. I may believe I have set out to scrawl a story. But before the ink dries on the side of my fist, my heart has unclenched, letting all manner of unsavory characters in.
The revelation repeats: these are the only characters available.
They are covered in peanut butter and petulance, eely with ego. They are magnetic tenderness under woolly eyebrows of entitlement. They infuriate and enchant me. They burn bushes and cookies. They wink like poets and tantrum like prophets. They wreck my schedule and pat my cheeks.
If I would like to keep hygienic distance, blister-packaged in calm, I must not write about them.
If I write about my upstairs neighbor, a wilting lothario with melty blue eyes, I will love him. God will ride the fireman’s pole down my ballpoint pen and hose off my resentments. Roy is eighty and alone, and he feeds the squirrels pretzel nuggets and rubbery vegan hot dogs. As I type these words, I want to ask him his birthday. I feel a gust of spirit when I tell you about his bright orange shirts. The wrinkled flirt is my neighbor, and putting him on paper kicks him out of the pigeonhole.
If I write about my bonfire friend, a carbonated event galloping the earth, I will love her. Jesus’ first miracle poured pizzazz on a party. Jamie is presence and paprika, a glittered bounce house that welcomes all. She is impatient with ink-smudged introverts because she believes we all belong together. She has heard the angels whisper that forty is the proper age to fully appreciate a Slip ‘n Slide. My opposite is my kindred spirit, and distilling her zest juices my affection.
If I write about the senator who miffs me, a man made of volume and nonstick spray, I will love him. The Holy Spirit gushes through louts and galoots, of whom I am chief. We will both regret many things
Angela Townsend
we shout. If I force myself to tap-tap-tap a tale about the thunderbird across the aisle, I will be forced to watch old VHS tapes of my ballet recitals. I have quoted myself with bloated pleasure. I have pinned my beliefs like butterflies, forgetting I am alive. My opponent, too, is a person in process, a kaleidoscope who cares.
If I am not careful, I fall off the page and into love with these fireflies. Notebook closed, I keep thinking about them. In the stairwell or the prayer hour, I pay them attention. The cost is steep. If I write about them, I cannot write them off.
The lettering is permanent. The next time resentment rises, it will crash into affection. Mercy has a weatherproof face, graffitied with gaudy love. Tenderness has a titanium core, as flexible as an ink refill. It bends limbo-low beneath the maddening moment. It pole vaults to victory over the day’s sigh.
If I hold you in my words, you capture territory in my spirit. Eviction becomes impossible.
Writing, it turns out, is prayer.
This is why I am driven to notebooks like a beggar to bread. I come for bare sustenance and find a brazen feast. I thought I was here to circle my own thoughts, but I’m whirled into the stomping square dance of mercy. I expect to produce art, and instead I am made into love.
Paying attention is reckless business. It is the savory center of the plot, a greater artist’s long game. It is the guerrilla mission of words to work us like clay, until we are warm and soft. It is writing’s riskiest secret. Your own sentences may render you smitten with your cast of characters.
The unsavory and the eternal are the only characters available.
Leonardo Chung
The stars are falling with the fireflies into the grass.
Nineteen years ago, only grass grew in this square lot with one poppy-mouthed edge.
Ottawa, Illinois
The stone patio stirs each head with propane heat falling from the wind. Soon, the new property inspectors will ax and tip the white pine trees, untrimmed for nineteen years now. The remnants, where my mother once tried to start a garden, still sleep in the bed of weeds the sun spun through the saplings after she spread zucchini seeds onto soil. Now, in their place, the table of patterned stones still burns from the moonlight. In the distance, the horizon kisses the January ground, tongue stuck on the frozen lake. I know a star cradled above the grass contains another house, the same house as mine, and the star’s dripping hot golden dew as a signal, a molten flare momentarily unveiled, to remind the clouds of nights we used to sit, counting our lost chances under their shade.
Single Life with Cardinal and AMerican Goldfinch
A bird I’d never seen’ere, bright yellow with a black cap, black flare of wings, leapt free from the oak into light,
John Hoppenthaler
alit in a straggle of grass at the roadside’s edge, where a muddy-red cardinal was feeding solo. Before long, they seemed blithely domestic, no wedge severing their peace at the table. So, forgive my conjecture of bliss: it was only the birds were not lovers, the birds were just lonely.
commission
Randall
Watson
“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by It.”
—Simone Weil
Portray her surrounded by light, not the familiar light of devotionals, not light as in the ancient icons of the annunciation not at all as in the slender necks of the swans of Ionia but more like the light in the factory windows of Hamburg, in 33, just after the elections, or like the face of a priest, neither self-conscious nor provincial, visiting the modernist boudoir of a rich American come to Brussels in the spring. Render her soul, for she had one, its kinetic, grave as despair and wonder, light as a blue dress speckled with lilies, via the stylized miniature of a farm girl slaughtering a pig, the landscape a Frankish pastoral, the pendant dangling from a machinist’s throat. Also, include angels beside her, if you would— I know—but I’m sentimental— one wearing a shirt that says Sunoco in red, the other parking its scooter, each of them curious, playful bearing bright swords at the borders of her tenderness. I would like to honor her in this way. Because she did not turn away from what she saw. And she saw the beauty in what she did not turn from.
Number 29 looks at me suspiciously like she thinks I’m behind the decision to move her to this pasture without the round bale, the one further from the creek where she likes to shift and circle, then lie above the water in the late afternoon sun. She’s the color of butterscotch, of light on broom sedge, and between her mascaraed eyes is a cyclone of fur so stately it's almost implausible When I touch her, it smells like childhood, like bread just out of the oven. Like we could go on and on without worry. She and I abide a long time, minutes, just the two of us, the rest of the herd gathered beside the barn near the western gate. In the adjacent orchard hundreds of peach trees are poised to burst open in a show of pink so lustrous it’s enough to break your heart. I think of my neighbor who I once saw photographing spider webs in the morning. It was like time stood still, this grown man enraptured, catching beads of dew in light. Maybe all loves come like this, briefly stilled, intrepid and raw.
Charlotte Matthews Cows in march
“There’s a lot of love around you, but if you don’t see it, it’s not there.”
—Kwame Alexander
Life lessons
Letter to my daughter: science lesson
Jana-Lee Germaine
The world is always ending, darkness descends as a galaxy clicks off like a lamp knocked over and broken.
How many mass extinctions in our past? How many little deaths like dragonflies on their final flight?
You see the news: Twisters sweep towns clear away, crumbs off a table, virus multiplies, dandelions on the lawn.
You see, also, nine painted turtles trudge from the brook and lay eggs in the sandy soil by the tetherball pole. Making sense of things at ten is not an easy task on dismal days, damp colds of spring, where dusk offers a lip of light to slit the clouds. We want to hold our world together,
but the universe rushes apart; these vast tracts are comforting, the way space curves, so if you travel in a straight line aiming for the edge of everything, you come back to me in the end.
But ancient.
We don’t know how many moons our solar system holds, 350 at last count, but the day you were born only 193. Dropped pins on a map
which shows Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbor, 6,000 years away by spaceship. Baby, it’s all small here, but this is home.
The mourning dove you found lying in the iris today, for whom the world ending was sunlight glitzing the picture window, lay on its back, feet curled like your fists as a newborn. You’ll be okay. Search
for answers to questions you don’t know how to ask. If you look
hard enough, a strange kind of love surrounds us all, like dark matter bubble-wrapped around the planets, a ghost ring we color blue to see. I show you pictures from the Hubble, curlicues of color, hydrogen luminescence thirteen billion light years away. Looking backwards into time’s teenage galaxies. You say Cool.
You like butterflies, flip sequins, holding my hand. Baby Girl, in this world, it's where you choose to keep your gaze that counts.
Chautauqua
When my sister died, she’d been smoking for nearly fifty years. I’d also started young; I had my first cigarette at nine, crouched on Louisa Randall’s roof, three stories above the street. By thirteen, I was sneaking smokes whenever I could get away with it. I averaged about a pack a day by age fifteen, and for the next ten years. I loved smoking. It kept my hands busy and my figure skinny, and I knew all kinds of cool tricks, from blowing smoke rings to lighting a single match from a matchbook held with one hand. Everybody knew about the smoking-cancer connection, but nobody worried about it much. Everybody smoked! If someone did chide us for smoking, Marcy would joke, “Die young and leave a beautiful corpse,”or “I’d rather be dead than fat!”
marcy was perpetually on a diet, and lived mostly on chocolate, steak, and Diet Coke. She loved to travel anywhere tropical, although she never availed herself of gift shops or tourist-packed bars. I seldom joined her because I hate crowds, I hate air travel, and I hate tourists, except myself. I invented the concept of fkygskam, or travel shaming, long before it ever occurred to the Swedes. When the school where I taught sent kids on a two-week sojourn to rebuild orphanages in Nepal, I received a disciplinary warning for pointing out that the intended beneficiaries would be a lot better off if we just stayed home and mailed them checks. None of this concerned Marcy; she just liked to sit on the beach and read.
The one time I did join Marcy on a trip, I came down with the flu and spent our entire four days in San Antonio watching women make claims of sexual harassment and assault against a presidential candidate as Marcy chortled, “No way this doesn’t bring him down.” In my fever, she was like Macbeth’s witches, all three of them, fascinating but
Anna Scotti Smoke
Chautauqua
horrifying, too, as she cackled and rubbed her hands together gleefully. On the day I was to fly home, Marcy gave me her deluxe travel pillow, an extra sweatshirt, and her one-day pass to the United Club Lounge, which was worth fifty bucks, unless you were trembling with fever and desperate for a quiet place to get a ginger ale and a Tylenol and lie down for an hour. Then it was priceless. Marcy flew home later that day without pillow or pass, and spent the next week in bed with the flu, herself.
What do you remember about a person when they’re gone? Marcy liked making things. She would have been a great pioneer woman or modern-day survivalist. She crafted pillows, afghans, curtains, and rugs. She grew vegetables she never ate, and berries and pears and peaches to make jam, which she did eat. She raised chickens and sold their eggs at an honor-system stand at the foot of her driveway. She treated the turkeys, guinea fowl, and peacocks she tended with varying degrees of affection, but mostly, she loved the koi she raised in ponds spread across her property. Marcy was afraid of a lot of animals—horses and dogs in particular, and also, almost everything else that crawls, hops, flies, or breathes. But she loved fish from childhood.
When Marcy was thirteen and I was seven, she brought home a pair of black mollies and an oblong glass tank that she spent hours setting up to make the perfect habitat. She fed the pair every night, sometimes letting me drop the flakes into the water, and once a week she would scoop the fish up gently in a net and put them in a clean mayonnaise jar while she scrubbed their tank. I longed to try catching the mollies, but Marcy wouldn’t let me. “You’ll drop them,” she assured me. She made me promise never to touch the fish, but I noticed resentfully that between water changes, she still hid the net.
One afternoon while Marcy was at basketball practice, I grew bored with reading her diary, trying on her bras, and searching for the net. I decided to catch the fish in my bare hands, just for a moment, just to feel their lively little living bodies, and then I’d let them go back into the water, no harm done. Astonishingly, I caught them both in one scoop, and there they were, safely in a half-inch of water in my cupped palms. As I lifted the fish close to examine them better, they wriggled
Anna Scotti
and startled me and I dropped them, and they began to flop around on the floor as I ran from the room, screaming, “I didn’t do anything!”
My conscience got the better of me and I went back in to rescue the mollies not two or three minutes later, but they were gone. I searched everywhere—along the baseboards, under the carpet, under the bed. Gone. It was a mystery. I really looked.
That night when Marcy realized the tank was empty, she knew immediately what had happened, but I refused to confess. “I know you did it,” she said reasonably. “What happened? Did you try to catch them, and drop them? Why didn’t you just pick them up and put them back in the tank?”
“You always blame me for everything!” I shrieked. “I didn’t do anything!”
Marcy nodded. “Okay. But if you did, it’s okay. I know whatever happened was an accident.”
I cried for hours that night, but I never confessed, even when the two pathetic mummified bodies were found behind the bookcase a few months later. When Marcy first started dying I wanted to tell her the truth about the fish, but there wasn’t an opportunity. What happens is, you plan to do things and say things but there’s always a better time. And then there’s no time at all.
when i was twenty-five, I dreamed I was lying on a table in a blue gown. A masked surgeon sliced me open and I was full of bubbling brown cancer, stem to stern. Upon waking, I threw out my Marlboro Lights and never smoked again. It was harder for Marcy. She quit a few times, with patches and gum, candy, will power, and later, vape. She’d call me, almost manic from nicotine, and swear that this time, or this time, or this time, it was finally working. But it never did.
marcy was a freshman in college at fifteen. It was the sixties, and she wanted to move into a student commune off-campus, but my parents wouldn’t let her. Instead, they compromised. She “belonged” to the commune by day, but she had to come home at night. We were six
Chautauqua
years apart, but since Marcy had skipped a few grades, her friends were eight or ten years older than I—an unbridgeable gap when you’re nine years old. She listened to cool bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and because she dressed like the people on the album covers—bell bottom jeans, tie-dye shirts, headbands—and nobody else I knew did, I thought she knew those people personally.
When Marcy was seventeen and I was eleven, Washington, DC, was electrified by May Day rallies against the Vietnam War. My parents strictly forbade Marcy from attending, and assigned her to hang out with me for the day as a further deterrent. Adhering to the letter of the law, Marcy eschewed the massive May Day protests on the Mall. However, we did not spend the day tidying the basement as our dad had suggested. Instead, we headed down to the Potomac River to join the protest against a planned bridge, Three Sisters. I can’t remember why we were against it, if we even were against it, but the protest was loads of fun. I got to wear real hippie clothes—dirty jeans, flip flops, and an army jacket—and Marcy lent me a headband with purple peace signs embroidered around the edges. People were smoking pot, although Marcy wouldn’t let me try any. The smoke hung sweet and heavy in the air and I inhaled deeply and pretended to be high by spinning in circles, muttering “far out,” and “groovy,” until I fell over.
Some of the hippies smoked cigarettes, too. Marcy’s favorites then were Kools, but mine were the “party sobranies” our brothers’ sexy tenth-grade girlfriends smoked, impossibly glamorous multi-colored Russian smokes that came in a sophisticated black box and were sold in the local head shop, which welcomed children to browse the bongs and crushed-ice candles. Sobranies looked like something my personal heroine, Ann Marie from That Girl, would smoke to annoy her square boyfriend, Ted.
That day at the rally I learned how to say, “Bum a smoke?” in a cool and laid-back way, like a real smoker. The hippie chicks were very generous and pretty in their granny skirts and peasant blouses and bangle bracelets. They spoke in gentle voices and made the peace sign a lot. The hippie boys were hairy and stinky but also kind, though terrifyingly
Anna Scotti
male and adult, with ropes of filthy hair and crusted bare feet. They were like feculent gods come down from Olympus, listening to one another strum diffident guitar or deliver angry lectures about human dignity. This was decades before the idea of cultural appropriation took hold. East Indian kurtas, American Indian moccasins, and Mexican serapes and ponchos were all the rage for middle class college students, along with flag patches and veteran’s gear for vets and peaceniks alike.
On our way to the protest Marcy and I had gotten off the bus a couple of stops early so that she could show me the commune, where she no longer pretended to live but did still occasionally hang out. It was insanely glamorous. There were colorful woven blankets spread over all the furniture, and straw-wrapped chianti bottles with candle tapers melted down the sides atop brick-and-board bookcases, and groovy posters of Che Guavara and Cesar Chavez on the paint-peeled walls. The couch was held up by a stack of paperbacks in the front where a leg was missing.
So I knew, sort of, where the commune was, and I knew the front door wasn’t locked. This was fortunate, because a few hours into the protest, the police arrived and arrested nearly everyone who hadn’t already scattered and run. I say “nearly” because they left me behind, standing alone in an empty field at the edge of the river. I heard my sister arguing with an officer, telling him I was only eleven, but it was to no avail. He glanced at me and shrugged, snapping handcuffs on her wrists. “At least let me give her bus fare,” Marcy pleaded as the cop slammed the paddy wagon doors. I waited in the field for a long time after they drove off, and then I set off walking, without any idea how to find my way anywhere. Eventually a cab stopped. The driver brushed off my tearful confession that I didn’t have any money, and we drove around for a few minutes until I recognized the commune. Ignoring his offer to find a payphone and call my parents, I jumped out of the cab and ran inside to safety.
i’ve taught seventh grade for twenty years. My students are mostly twelve years old, but they seem incredibly mature and competent compared with the mess I know myself to have been at that age. When I was
Chautauqua
twelve, I was worldly in some regards, painfully innocent in others. My heroes were the stoner drop-outs my older-older brother hung out with. I liked the way they swore and worked on old car engines and held their cigarettes pinched between forefinger and thumb. I liked their ropy bare arms in cut-off jeans jackets, and the way they’d tuck a spare smoke behind one ear. They were sixteen or seventeen but none of them went to school, nor did they work at what anyone might reasonably call a job. They were bad boys, and I couldn’t wait to grow up and be a bad girl. I planned to spend most of my time riding pillion on a Harley Davidson, but not behind a scary tattooed fat guy like the ones in Gimme Shelter. My guy would look like David Cassidy from The Partridge Family, just maybe a little less girly.
At twelve, I was a delinquent in training. But I was also a kid, and I bruised my forehead a fair number of times trying to walk through the back of my closet in case it was a heretofore undiscovered entry point into Narnia. Narnia sounded pretty good to me, even that part where it was always winter but never Christmas. I was just not having a good year. I grew suddenly overlarge. My hair was oily and unkempt, no matter how often I brushed it, and I wore tiny, unflattering wire-rimmed glasses that were sometimes bent and usually too greasy to see out of. My skin broke out and I hated school, but I also hated home, and I couldn’t seem to stop crying. My parents argued a lot. My older-older brother had run away at fourteen, and my younger-older brother, at one time my best friend, spent most of his time out of the house or holed up in the basement, pretending not to hear our parents calling him. Our little sister was my responsibility, mostly. She was seven— old enough to stay home alone in the afternoons until our mother got home, but…not really.
So Marcy stepped in. She had an apartment with her boyfriend by then. Contrary to prediction, they stuck it out another fifty years—in fact, until the day she died. But back then, she was only his girlfriend, and he must have had a great deal of patience to put up with both of her little sisters hanging around the kitchen every day after school, making hundreds of thousands of chocolate chip cookies and weaving
Anna Scotti
innumerable “god’s eyes” from yarn and sticks. We feasted on a smoked ham they kept under their kitchen sink, and made frequent trips to the National Zoo, which was right across the street. Marcy never made it seem like less than a super fun way to spend an afternoon, although perhaps an eighteen-year-old college student might have found other ways to pass the time. She even welcomed my older-older brother to crash in their walk-in closet-turned spare bedroom, at least until he accidentally set it on fire. We weren’t supposed to know he was there, because for some reason Marcy thought I couldn’t keep a secret. Ha ha, Marcy. I kept the secret of the black mollies for fifty-three years.
as soon as marcy was diagnosed, she started making plans to donate her organs. But a number of them were ravaged by the years of chemotherapy she’d endured as a treatment for multiple sclerosis. It looked as though a lot of her organs would not be suitable for donation.
One evening Marcy called, bubbly with excitement. “I’ve got great news!” she exclaimed. Naturally, I thought of all the best scenarios—a careless lab tech, a switched x-ray— whatever. I was prepared to forgive and forget whatever doctor or lab had caused us the trauma of a misdiagnosis, especially if there was a way to tack me onto the claim for pain and suffering in the inevitable lawsuit.
Silence. I caved first, as always. “What’s the great news?”
Dramatic pause. “The organ donation people think they’ll be able to use my eyes!”
That’s my sister. She had what the older-older brother refers to as a “relentless practicality.”
Eventually, unable to find any takers for her organs at all, Marcy arranged to donate her remains for medical school teaching purposes, and she didn’t flinch from relaying the specifics. Apparently they lightly preserve the body, keeping it chilled, and study it in various ways for about two years. Then the body is cremated. The ashes are given to the family or interred in a group plot, memorialized with a plaque. “It’s incredibly respectful. They even say a mass,” Marcy added, the first time she told me about it.
Chautauqua
“You could ask to be omitted from the religious part,” I suggested. Marcy was a life-long atheist, although she did sometimes believe in ghosts.
“I won’t care. I won’t be there,” she pointed out. Marcy told me about all this—in more detail than I’ve relayed here— at least three or four times over the course of a month. I thought maybe the cancer was affecting her brain, something she told us could happen, but it was hard to tell. Chemo had made her forgetful, and even before cancer she used to repeat everything four or five times anyway, in the manner of very bossy people who want to be sure all of their insights are appreciated and all their instructions followed. I’m a patient sort, but I became exhausted by sorrow as Marcy talked about what would happen to her body after death. I couldn’t understand why she insisted on telling me, again and again, about the preservation and the chilling and the ultimate cremation. And then I remembered a conversation we’d had after our father died. His body had been stored in a refrigerated mortuary cabinet for several days before cremation. Dad had been very skinny and constantly cold for the last few years of his life. I couldn’t bear to think of him there, alone, wrapped only in a sheet, refrigerated, something I’d confided to Marcy during a late night phone call a few nights after he died. I couldn’t bear it then, and I still can’t.
And so Marcy was telling me, again and again, that she would also be on ice—and for a much longer time—and letting me know that it was okay, that this was what she wanted, and that she wouldn’t “be there.” She was explaining again and again what would happen, so that eventually I could handle it. As my sister was dying, she worried about me and how I’d feel when she was gone. She did that because I’m sixty years old, but she was still my big sister, the only big sister I had.
And now she’s gone, disappeared like smoke.
Above the highest peak, like fence posts yet to be set, blue and purple columns float in haze. Lower, the trees’ perspective, which feels like your perspective: leaf-canopy obscuring anger, hiding the warbler who sings with a dry throat. My eyes search through what looks like dust from boot-scuff.
At breakfast you said The river’s gone dry. I said No one was willing to stop irrigating. Even clay ditch bottoms baked to stone. And now this false rain falling right where we can see it. Everything we need hanging in the air, but none of it making it to the ground.
Dry rain
Todd Davis
Freeze and Thaw
Todd Davis
Snow falls slant, then rain tapers a sparkling garnish. When teeth grow long at the gutter’s gums, I knock ice to the ground. My neighbor wonders if the deer who visit the apple tree at night suffer from insomnia. Moon’s sharp sickle rounds to a circle and helps them find their way back into the woods. My dad would holler Grub’s on! as he slabbed leftover meatloaf and cheese across thick bread. This past spring I watched a bear scrape for grubs beneath a log, licking the ground. At seventy four, he broke his back cutting firewood. That winter I shoveled the roof for my mother so it wouldn’t collapse. When he was alive, I’d dream his death: truck flipped in a cabbage field, body washed away with spring floods. Once I led a gray horse by the halter, logs sledding behind. He told me to let the horse go, we wouldn’t need it anymore. The next week the doctor said it was cancer. Wind rushes the mountain and tramples everything. This morning on the water more than 200 tundra swans: migration interrupted. As light grows longer, the ground begins to thaw and the woods crack open. I can see now this is a good place to sleep but not to dream.
Because I chase trout up the mountain, an abacus of fish teeth scar my finger.
High in a tree the sun sticks to pine sap, a poultice for the ring the porcupine teethes.
After a full circle of moons, the delicious degradation of the spawn.
Where our son’s head crowned, you draw me into the dark sphere that closes the ground.
You whisper that years from now a hairy woodpecker will drill down through the scar to collect the grub’s memory of this failing afternoon light.
Of This failing
Todd Davis
Once there was a fire
Gabriel Welsch
Darcy assumes something hit the side of the house—a bird, a stick one of the boys tossed, maybe an errant walnut off the tree—because a knock on the door isn’t something that happens in the creekriven valleys of the county. And if it ever did, it was PennDOT during the day, advising you about work in the area. But Rick worked with them all the time. If they were tearing up the road nearby she’d know.
The only other noises she’d hear were the same ones she heard growing up in this place of scant and reluctant change: a truck braking at the foot of the mountain or weekend bikers thundering through and jarring the birds into frenzy.
But when Darcy hears the second knock, she decides it’s real and she’ll have to deal with it. She checks: Rick’s Louisville Slugger is there by the door, jammed in with an umbrella and a broom.
On the porch, wearing rumply chinos and a denim jacket, stands a man who, if he had shaved that morning, did not do a good job. His patchy face looks to the side, squinting toward where the sun is setting. When the deadbolt clicks open, his gaze snaps toward the door.
She knows the kids are out there playing. The man pushes his hands into his pockets. She can’t hear the kids.
“Can I help you?”
“Thank you. Uh, yes, you can—I mean, if you would,” he says.
“Okay,” she says.
“Oh—right,” he shifts. “I have a flat, out back there.” He points toward the county road, at the end of her long yard. A small pickup leans almost into the drainage ditch. The back is tarped but looks like it’s full of firewood. Without her glasses, she can’t really tell. It sits several yards past a gory slump of deer, the road still scabby with blood.
“Did you hit that?” she says.
He doesn’t look back. “No. Just a flat,” he says.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have a jack or anything,” she says.
“That’s okay,” he grins. “I don’t have a spare. I just need to call somebody but—” he pulls a phone out of his pocket and waves it— “no service.”
Most days she sees that as a blessing.
“Wait here,” she says. She considers whether to lock the door again but cannot bring herself to do it. This happens to people , she tells herself. This is not a scary movie.
She retrieves the portable phone from the kitchen. When she opens the door, he moves aside and she steps onto the porch. “Yeah. You won’t get any coverage down here in the gap.”
She hands him the phone. They regard one another.
“I’m going to call, see who I can reach,” he says. He grins like a kid not wanting to try on clothes.
“Okay. Just knock when you’re done,” she says. This time, once inside and seeing him walk to the edge of the porch, she slides the deadbolt into place without making noise.
In the kitchen she looks out on two sides of the house and then spots her boys, down by the shed and woodpile, throwing sticks at a tree. The boys can make a game out of anything. Too often it is a game of throwing things.
Rick should have been home but was probably in some gap again down in the county, knee deep in a bracken-clogged culvert, PennDOT crew late and looking down as he prodded at the edge of the liner. He will be poking at an iPad bulked up with rubber made to look like tire tread and a screen protector thick as a thumbnail.
Antler shadows stretch like tines into the kitchen, from the mounted deer and elk skulls Rick arranged when he installed the oversized kitchen window for her thirtieth birthday. She pushes chairs straight against the little kitchen table, sweeps some crumbs from lunch into the sink, flips through a stack of mail that has built up. Now, the mail always lingered, the water bottles crusted from hard water, and the property continued to grow around her after the ten years since the firehall dance, the wedding at the farmhouse on now dead land that
Chautauqua
welcomes trout fishermen from the coast, and the lengthening limbs of boys she never thought she’d have.
She’d driven a hatchback out of western Pennsylvania to the Paris of the Appalachians, and at Pitt overcame revulsion of the cadaver room to earn her PA degree while cleaning fries off the floor of the last hotdog stand and bar left in Oakland. A charming engineer once helped her deal with the cops after a drunk skidded a motorcycle into the now totaled-and-gone hatchback, and then farm wedding and then brief stop in Costa Rica for a predictable boozy and sand-crusted honeymoon, and with his transfer to the only PennDOT office with an opening that year, she was back just a few minutes away from her parents. She isn’t back in the middle of nowhere—she considers it off to the side of the middle, the difference being that in early years she didn’t know anyone even though everybody looked like a person she should know. That’s changed, in a way that makes her tired, knowing everyone again.
She wonders if she has time to clean the dishes the boys have stacked all day in the sink, knowing the knock could happen at any time. She opens the fridge to weigh dinner options and sees mostly beer and things to put on burgers. Burgers it will be. She’ll send Rick for meat.
The knock is louder this time. By the time she unlocks and opens the door, he is already holding the phone toward her.
“Did you get somebody?”
“Yeah,” he says, rubbing a hand over his head. “My buddy’s coming over to help me out.”
“He nearby?”
“It’s uh, it’s gonna be a while,” he says, still rubbing his head slowly. “He’s across the county, but I can’t afford to pay nobody, so, you know.”
It will be dark soon. The yard light and porch light will flicker on automatically. She hears the tick of the electric fence where her yard meets Fiddler’s pasture. She smells skunk. The evening is cool and, despite shadows, still a ways from darkness.
She doesn’t want him in the house, but for reasons she cannot describe, she doesn’t want him down wandering around by the road. She
tells herself it’s because people come around the corner too fast, he could get hit, wind up like the deer down there. She knows that’s not it, but she doesn’t know why.
“You want a beer?” she asks.
He looks at her as though to ask come again? Then says, “Uh, sure.”
“Wait here,” she says.
She retrieves the beers and opens them. The boys are still near the woodpile, now absorbed in looking at something at the base, where the pallets sit on the grass. She spies deer at the dusky edge of the cornfield beyond. If she was wearing her glasses, she knows she’d see their ribs, the mange—they were walking drought.
The light blinks on at the peak of Fiddler’s barn across the field. She puts the phone in the pocket of her hoodie and heads for the porch.
He is still standing just by the door, hands jammed in his pockets.
“Have a seat,” she says, gesturing toward the further of the two rockers next to the door. They are visible from the drive. She can lean forward and see the boys if she needs to. It occurs to her that she could yell, run to the woods , and they would be out of sight before he even got around the house.
She almost pulls the phone out to set it next to her but decides she wants it in her pocket. And that she sort of doesn’t want him to see it.
At least not obviously.
He takes a careful swig of the beer, his lips pursing as though the bottle were too delicate to touch. “Thanks for this,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” she says. “Too bad about the tire.”
He nods slowly, as though dancing.
“Awful nice garden you got,” he says. “You work it a lot?”
The garden sits behind the house, not directly in sight from his truck nor from the way she assumed he walked to the house. She considers the width of the yard, the flowers in front of the porch, whether he means that.
“The flowers are really my husband’s thing,” she says. “He’s awfully proud of them.”
The man stifles a small burp. “Well, as I said, they’re real nice.”
Chautauqua
Headlights sweep through the curve of the road, flash over the truck below, and then curve into the gap until out of sight. A bat dizzies out of the porch dormer and into the dusk.
“You got any other gardens?” he asks.
She takes a long swig from the beer and holds it briefly before swallowing. She lets her lips smack. “Vegetable garden. You know.”
“Good year for tomatoes,” he says. “Been real hot.”
“Yup,” she says. “Not bad at all.”
The children come into her periphery, sprinting down the drive, a gravel scud and a cloud of laughter moving with them.
“Those your kids?” he asks.
“Two are. One’s a neighbor boy.” The neighbor is across town and due to pick him up soon, unless somebody finagled a sleepover and didn’t tell her. Wouldn’t be the first time summer plans happened without her input. The man watches them, his head not moving but his eyes active. She can’t shake the feeling that he’s brittle, like his bones will snap if he moves too quickly.
“They sure are interested in that woodpile,” he says. “Saw them when I first dragged over.”
“I guess wood’s interesting when you’re a kid,” she says.
Time moved so slowly. Every question she has he could interpret as rude, or prying. Then she wonders to herself, Why am I worried? He’s the one who needs me! He isn’t that much bigger than her. He seems both wiry and brittle, as though he lives alone, maybe owns two dishes, fries himself the same meal most nights, makes do on his own. Yet a man like him without a spare? Without the ability to just change a tire and move on? He dresses like a guy who has a garage full of tools in better shape than anything else in his house. But he carries himself like someone the world has decided to leave behind, as if going to buy food was a high point of the week.
She can only remind herself so many times that bad things in movies are unlikely here. They happen, yes. But not ever to anyone she has ever known. Which maybe means inevitability is due to catch up.
Rick loves to bet, to think about how he might see what everybody else misses, can flush it out and have the thrill of knowing a sudden win
Gabriel Welsch
lurked out there. Some evenings as they enjoy the porch view, looking to the dusk in back of their house, he marvels at how their lives led them to their beautiful spot of land. He always calls it a beautiful spot of land. She can’t argue with the beauty part. She sometimes points out the funnels of gnats, the thistle crowding everywhere the soil has broken, how birches at the woods edge mean once there was a fire.
If she stays quiet, he gets impatient. “Come on, Darce—what are the odds, right? How did we get so lucky?”
What are the odds that a central PA girl finds herself back in the sticks living with a hunter?
Real long odds, I’d say. Taste in her mouth like a nail.
Maybe inevitability catches up that way. Nothing more to worry about.
She smells something oily, reminiscent of the machinist shop where her father gave forty-seven years. The man next to her wears work boots in which it appears he actually works.
A crackle of laughter sounds nearby, the boys doing something to her left, now around the side of the house. She suppresses an urge to hiss at them to be quiet, to go inside, to calm down.
“Boys sure are making a time of it,” the man says. He leans forward in his chair and looks toward the sound.
“If I didn’t say something they’d be out here all night,” she says.
He nods and sits back into the chair, checking his watch. After a moment, he says, “You happen to have another one of these?” He jiggles the empty bottle.
“Sure, as long as you think it won’t get in the way of you driving later,” she says.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “It ain’t far.”
“You mean in town?” she says. “You live around here?”
He nods slowly and puts the bottle down on the porch boards. She stands.
“Huh, I’m surprised we haven’t met at some point,” she says. “You work around here, too?”
Between herself and Rick, they know just about everyone in the county. The school is the community, even more so than the churches.
“Yup,” he says. “For the state.”
Chautauqua
His hands are rough, callused. Whatever he does for the state, it’s probably outside. She also notices no ring.
“My name’s Dave,” he says.
After a moment she says, “I’m Jane. I’ll get you another beer.”
He nods slowly and neither of them break eye contact.
Inside, she looks at the answering machine, a college relic she had to dig out when they moved out beyond cell service. No light. No message from Rick. She can no longer see out the windows, the dark having outweighed the dusk. She listens for her boys and hears them talking, still at the side of the house. They have not had dinner yet.
You need to go , she wants to say, I’ve been patient and you’re creeping me out . But God forbid she do something so un-neighborly. Heaven forfend that you not drop everything for a local. People here are always proud about how they’d give the shirts off their back. She always wants to say only for some people . She knows it’s churlish. Plenty of people are really nice—but you also read every week in the paper about the domestics, the pedophiles, the shootings, the cranky anonymous call-in comments published on Saturdays in a paper that doesn’t publish on Sunday because Jesus might get pissed. This miserly place isn’t nice; it’s merely neighborly. She’s had enough of that.
The cap to his second beer rattles onto the counter. She runs water and rinses the spent bottle, imagining the laboring pump down in the well that she knows eventually will run dry, despite Rick’s assurances.
“This should help,” she says, as cheerfully as she can muster, when she hands him the bottle.
Headlights glimmer through the trees below, near the curve, and then illuminate Dave’s truck as another truck comes into view. It slows as it nears her drive. She recognizes it: Wendell Graves, a friend of Rick’s, part of his fantasy league, his boy the one playing with her sons. She deflates a little, having hoped it was Dave’s help finally arriving.
After a pause at the bottom of the drive almost long enough to make her get out of her chair, Wendell’s truck makes its way up to the house, headlights rocking, while the boys huff and pant up the hill toward the porch. Her older son spots the man in the chair and locks eyes with
Gabriel Welsch
her. She jerks her head toward the front door. “Help your friend get his stuff.”
As the boys clamber into the house, Dave watches them. She stands and waves to Wendell’s truck. Dave then leans forward, holding the empty beer bottle in two hands, head hanging to look at his feet. She takes the two steps off of the porch and down to the walk. A sparkle of fireflies goes off near the cornfield below, behind Wendell’s truck, on the way down the hill toward where Dave’s pickup slants by the ditch.
She is about to call out when the driver’s door bursts open and Wendell practically jumps out, as if prepared to chase something. His t-shirt is smeared and sweaty, as though he had left yard work to come get his son. His ball cap is dusty. His arm fires up to point at the man on the porch.
“Hey!” he yells, as if he doesn’t even see her. “Hey—what’s going on?”
A beer bottle clatters on the porch, a chair scrapes, and when she turns, Dave is standing, straightening his back and looking down at Wendell.
“This nice lady is letting me wait here for a ride. I blew a tire,” Dave says.
Wendell starts nodding exaggeratedly, keeping his stare with Dave. She is afraid Dave might hit him.
“Blew a tire. BLEW a TIRE,” Wendell says. “You just happened to blow your goddamned tire here, huh? Let’s say I go look at that tire, get you on your way.”
“Someone’s coming,” Dave says.
“Stop it!” Wendell yells. “Come down here and go to your truck. You are not welcome here.”
Dave straightens and looks quickly to the side, at her, his face both proud and, momentarily, a plea. “This is not your home so you can’t say if I am welcome,” he says. “This kind miss has been sitting with me while I wait.”
She puts up her hands. “This—whatever’s going on—this has nothing to do with me. And if you two are going to be yelling, please get away from the house.” She looks around to see where the boys are before continuing.
Chautauqua
She points at Wendell. “Stop yelling for Christ’s sake.”
As Dave stands, she says to him, “Get off my porch.”
He starts to speak and she cuts the air with her hand. “No, just get off the damn porch. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing but go wait in your truck.” She almost says leave the beer .
Wendell’s arms are crossed. Dave looks at him, eyes the stairs off the porch, and looks back at Darcy as if embarrassed, ready to apologize, and ready to fight—all at once. His shoulders give him away, leaning as they do toward his truck, toward the road.
When he does leave the porch, she expects Wendell to say something, or do that thing men do when they shoulder into someone else. Instead, Wendell leans back, as though Dave is a disease or a flame, something that will burn him. Darcy and Wendell each watch as Dave picks along in the deepening dark to his truck, starts it, and drives away.
As Wendell turns back toward her, Darcy says, “I don’t want to see that man again.”
“He has nothing to do with me,” Wendell says. His hands, now stuffed into his pockets, scream the opposite.
“Well, who is he?” she asks. “You clearly know each other.”
His son bounds out the front door and down the steps. Her boys stay on the porch, only her oldest sensing something simmering, looking at the chair where Dave had been. She notices two beer bottles—Dave left his drink behind after all.
“Get in the truck, boy,” Wendell says. The boy gallops off. “Thanks for having him. Tell Rick I said hey.”
“Tell him yourself,” she says. “And maybe tell him what the hell’s going on.”
“No need for that,” Wendell says. He turns and walks to his truck.
Her older son is a jittery question that she cannot answer. As she hurries her sons to shower and get ready while she figures out dinner, she wonders what she looks like to them. She pours Dave’s beer down the sink and then drops the bottle, which smashes in the sink. She shakes as she cleans up the glass and thinks about how she will deal with Rick when he arrives.
Gabriel Welsch
Not long afterward, the boys having eaten Hot Pockets and now winding down by the TV, she hears Rick’s truck finally. When he walks in, she sees he is showered, his head still red under his buzzcut from where the hot water drilled at him. His clothes sit in the bed of his truck caked in the sludge of stagnant water and reeking. He tells her he’ll get to them with the hose after dinner and asks her where he can get his plate. She tells him she didn’t make dinner, and as he pours a bowl of Raisin Bran, she explains the odd encounter and tells him about Wendell.
“That man is his dad,” Rick says, matter of fact, as though diagnosing a car problem. “He pulls that shit from time to time.”
the next morning , she is up before him. She goes to the garden to pull weeds and, as she does, forms the start to a conversation in her head.
Rick, I need to leave. I can’t be here. I want our boys far away from here. I do not want them to grow up here and then yearn to leave.
She comes inside as it starts to get warm and she hears the boys thunder down the stairs. While they turn on the television and sprawl over the couch, she scrubs the dirt from under her nails, her breathing a little ragged from her effort and the pollen. The coffee drips and gurgles as Rick pads into the kitchen. She leans in for a kiss as he goes for a mug, and he doesn’t notice her, so she rests her head on the meaty knob of his shoulder.
“I’m still thinking about last night,” she says.
Rick makes a soft grunt. “Well, it’s over now. Wendell’s got it.”
She glances at the boys and they are barely aware of anything beyond the screen.
“I’m getting really tired of this place,” she says.
He pours coffee and nods slowly. “Bad stuff happens everywhere.”
“That’s not it,” she says. “I am tired of living here. I know it’s beautiful here—the air is clean and all that. I know it’s not all bad, but I need to be somewhere that I can understand more clearly who I know and who I don’t.”
Chautauqua
He looks at her with his what-does-that-mean face.
“I don’t want to wonder what horrible thing is near me behind a friendly face. I want to see who the strangers are and to keep them that way,” she says. “I don’t want to worry about being nice when I don’t want to be.”
“Don’t get pissed—but I think you’re overreacting,” Rick says. “This is a community, you know? We have people here who have our backs.”
“Only if we play along,” she says. “Look, I’m tired of sports. I’m tired of church. I’m tired of Sunday dinners and Rotary picnics and Little League fundraisers and moms all with the same haircuts and the high school being somehow the center of the goddamned world.”
“Wow,” he says.
“It doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to be somewhere else,” she says. “It doesn’t even have to be immediate—just promise me we are out of here in a couple years. Please.”
“How come you’ve never said anything like this?” he says. “I mean, I’ve always thought you liked it here. We grew up here. We talked about being here.”
Darcy almost says, you talked about being here, and I didn’t know enough to have a preference one way or the other, and I’m sorry, but now I do . Her mind spiraled through all the problems with saying such a thing, with showing him that she essentially just went along, and decided they would handle that some other time.
“Well, things change,” she laughs, a note of derision. “And this place never does. While the world changes around it.”
“I think you may overestimate the world, honey,” he says.
“Maybe, but don’t you want our boys to know a bigger world?” she says. “I want to remember this place only as history, and not live in history. I am tired of being known. And I just worry that if we stay here longer it will—I don’t know, imprint on them or something, and then they meet some pretty thing who reminds them of home and then they come back here and live as an adult and realize they were right all along but end up trapped here. I want to leave. I never want to ever come back. I don’t want them to come back.”
Gabriel Welsch
He turns his head toward the boys while she wills herself to stop saying anything else, to leave her statement there. He breathes deeply and as his chest expands, she focuses on a small stain on his shirt, just below his collarbone, and tries to breathe with him. The boys are still and the cartoons shout as cartoons do.
When he turns back, he drops his gaze to her feet. “Well, there’s something you need to know. With all of last night’s drama and having to call Wendell and figure all of it out, and then just going to bed, I didn’t tell you my news.”
He pauses and she is not a fan of the dramatic interlude. “And?”
“Well, okay. So, I got promoted yesterday. It’s why I was so late. They grabbed me after shift and sat me down to talk it through,” he says. He puts his coffee on the counter and crosses his arms. “It’s a lot more money—like, a lot. I’m going to supervise a crew of engineers. I’d get a truck—so we wouldn’t have to keep up another vehicle. Hell, you could get a new car. We could afford to let the boys play hockey.”
She wants to be happy for him but feels only how heavy her feet, how near the ground, how strong the sensation that something is about to hold her.
“And we can afford to travel,” he adds, “Get out of here more—How about a vacation someplace we’ve never been?”
She recalls how her mother said to her once Enjoy it now. You will be amazed how things burn away.
in the hours after the wake, years later, as she sits outside inhaling the last dregs of juice and scowling at her reflection in a cracked window, Darcy notices a young man with a patchy beard and wrinkled pants near the guestbook, his hands fluttery as though he doesn’t know what to do with them. He keeps looking at her while trying not to appear to be. He was probably her oldest boy’s age, who had left a few moments ago to return to his hotel to clean up before the service. She hadn’t wanted to drive home but didn’t want to sit in a McDonalds or something pathetic, so sat instead in the parlor, a room that throws back to some rose-beige 1980s attempt at comfort.
Chautauqua
Part of her wants the boy to just get on with it, approach if he’s going to. She thinks probably he wants to say something. She can’t imagine what, though he might have been one of her sons’ friends or may have worked for Rick in the few months before the accident, when he was leading a new crew. He doesn’t look quite old enough to be out of college. Could’ve been an intern. She realizes she’s looking at him, not quite staring, but not looking away either.
“Do you remember the night a man came to your house and lied and said he had a flat tire?”
His face snaps into place. He is the boy who was at her house that night, Wendell’s boy.
“Do you remember?”
She nods, a tear welling but she doesn’t know why. Curiosity is not a crying thing. “I do—you were there and your dad came to pick you up.”
“That was a weird night.”
“Yes. It was. Thank you for coming to” . . . her hand arcs over her lap, takes in the room, the event. “Did you see the boys?”
He shakes his head no. “You probably know, but that was my grandfather.”
“I learned that later, yes.”
“I have wanted to say thank you for a long time. For protecting me. That night. For keeping him near you.”
She almost says that she didn’t realize anything was going on, or anyway that something involving the boy himself was happening, or what was going on with the family. She had been uneasy, had been unsure. She wants to say Instinct is just that—you don’t understand it. I didn’t. I didn’t understand it.
Instead, she nods and tries to smile at him, but not smile too much. “You’re welcome. I’m sorry about all that.”
He nodded. “I liked Rick. He was a good coach.”
Baseball, all those years, Wendell would sit through every practice. He would help Rick clean afterward, wait with him for the last parents to drive to get their boys. Sometimes stay at the Legion for a beer. They
Gabriel Welsch
would sit on an old porch expanded into a deck, look out at the valley, reflect on their good fortune about living in such a nice place.
So much depends
Amity Doyle
Upon those words
Spelling out the world. Will they make the purple Blossoms grow? Wild geese rise
And flock in a row? Creek, stream, rivers Flow? The bare branches sway in rain that turns to snow— The warmth is slain. Over mountains, and meadows, and valleys deep, shall the brown giant in dens still sleep? Shall the child of Peace and quiet step upon the petals Allay, and in a whisper, yearn to say: So much depends upon those words spelling out the world—shall they stay winter slumber, or spring unfurled?
Tomorrow we’ll be there
Jason Newport
anywhere you like
After the campus library closes, you give me a lift. Back to the house? Anywhere you like. Tires whistling through rain flooding gutters. I see her first. Wei Lei bowing her strings, nodding at the wet sidewalk. A bright orange PNC bank awning shelters Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue. Her, you tell me, as we slide by with the windows open wide. She’s the one.
the minor leagues
The minor leagues couldn’t be better. Two hot pretzels with mustard snaking their way from hand to hand along our row, plastic longnecks in the cup holders, our fists punching the sky at a diving catch, the crowd hollering agreement. Did your dad ever take you to a game this good, Corey? Mine didn’t. Putting our feet up on the edge of the hometeam dugout, calling insults to the visiting batters, until it’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, down by one with a man on second, a breaking ball hangs too long on the outside corner, then it’s disappearing over the right-field fence, headed for the parking lot, trailing salvation and fireworks.
our iguana, betty
Our iguana, Betty, likes perching atop the refrigerator. Motionless. Keeping watch over the vegetables. You use a spray bottle of water to mist her dishes of greens. After eating, it’s a long, dignified crawl back to the sun room to digest. I’m thinking of getting a tattoo on my back, you say, pointing at the base of your neck, where the spine rises. Of what? A scorpion. We just figured out you’re a Scorpio; I’m a Libra. I study the back of your neck. The hairs are very fine.
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you haven’t slept with her yet
You haven’t slept with her yet, but when you say, I’ll be right back, you never are. Did you forget you said we’d take Leaf to the park? She’s ringing our bell with the impatience of a nine year-old with Asperger’s, which she is. We’ll go across town, I tell her. We can take the bus. Corey, she insists, standing in the empty driveway.
leaf is never without
Leaf is never without her recorder, microphone, and headphones. She has over ten thousand audio files and counting. A sound engineer is what she wants to be when she grows up. What do you want to be, Josh? she asks.
A librarian.
What does Corey want to be?
A horticulturalist.
What does that mean?
Somebody who makes things grow. A gardener. Why didn’t you just say so?
I don’t know.
Her microphone is pointing at me. The little red light means my voice won’t be lost, maybe ever. Leaf will be a good-looking woman one day, tall and fair, like her mother, who works at the gardening center down the road from our apartment house.
At night, on my computer at home, she says, it helps the SETI radio telescopes listen for aliens.
You’re sure it’s helping SETI and not the Border Patrol?
Yes, it’s called SETI At Home, and it helps the radio telescopes listen to outer space.
Here’s the park, I say. What do we do now? She presses the bell strip hard to ask the driver to stop the bus.
tiny disturbances
The practice-room hallway in the Music Department looks like a row of jail cells. Straddling the piano bench sideways like that, you could be Jerry Lee Lewis. Wei Lei could pass for your thirteen-year-old
cousin, adopted from China. Far off, a tornado siren winds itself up out of the clear blue. Somewhere, giant golf-ball-shaped radar stations are mapping the terrain moment by moment, feeling the atmospheric layers for tiny disturbances.
vegan
Like, does Wei Lei know you’re not really a vegan?
you were building raised garden beds
You were building these raised garden beds in the backyard on the day I answered your roommate ad. Now Betty the iguana likes hiding behind the big green veiny shields of chard while I hose everything with water. I keep picking and eating basil straight from the stem, chewing the curls slowly. Betty lunges for the shelter of another row as the rainbow spray washes by. She hisses violently at a big bug but then lets it go on about its buggy business, clambering mildly right over the end of her passing tail. Leaf has downloaded to your computer every Leonard Cohen album ever made. You step through the patio doorway, ready to fire up the grill, asking, Want some dinner?
saving her virginity
Wei Lei is saving her virginity, or so you suspect. She’s been playing the violin since age two. How can anyone possibly learn something as complicated as the violin that early? Most two year-olds can barely color with fat crayons. Suzuki, you pronounce, eyebrows high.
a finger to her lips
At the garden center, Leaf, wearing her headset, points her microphone at a pallet of tomato plants. I have to tap her shoulder to get her to notice me, to ask, Can you hear them growing? She frowns, shaking her head, and puts a finger to her lips.
if you’re going to pass out on my bed, take your shoes off
If you’re going to pass out on my bed, with me in it, you could at least take your shoes off while you’re stumbling around the wrong room.
Chautauqua
I know, it’s your sister’s birthday and you were making sure she got home safe. I’ll find the aspirin. You should sit up now and take it with some fruit juice. Is the room spinning? Try to keep one foot on the floor. Here’s a trash can. Just lean off the bed if you have to barf. Betty lies atop the headboard, a spiny gargoyle. Facedown on my pillow, you start to moan. I kneel and untie your sneaker laces.
totally american
Wei Lei could have somebody back home, a not-quite ex. Or her parents could be arranging a marriage for her, to some Taiwanese bigwig. She’s totally American, you scoff. But still.
she spends hours a day in the practice room
She spends hours a day in the practice room, always the same one. The music majors can reserve them. Wei Lei’s room smells like yerba maté and bow rosin. They act like we’re all going to get salaried jobs with the big orchestras, Wei Lei says, but most of us end up teaching do-re-mi to third graders. She’s wearing olive-drab low-rise pants and a black tank top. The blades of her hips vanish and reappear with every shift of her clothes. I know, you commiserate, when I say plant pathology, people think I study crime scenes in the woods or something. Like I’m going to find out who murdered their ficus.
endless lists with cryptic titles
Leaf plugs into my laptop to play some of her files for me. A librarian, I hear myself saying. She scrolls through people talking. Is your mom working? I ask. She pauses to listen, then says, No, that’s at home. She switches to what sounds like a man singing along badly to Beyoncé while taking a shower. That’s my mom’s boyfriend, Leaf says. I look over her shoulder at the endless lists with cryptic titles. She cues another. A musician plays a mournful saxophone on the street, traffic honking in the background. There, I say, that’s the one.
leaf wants to sleep over
Leaf wants to sleep over. How do you know that’s even safe? I ask
her. My mom knows you guys, she says in a way that implies I’m being stupid. When did we become your free babysitters? I wonder. She ignores me. She’s on her hands and knees, creeping alongside Betty, keeping the sensitive mike close to the motion of dry green skin. I wonder if she can hear a heartbeat thudding through papery ribs.
so she can have her own tree
The garden center has the low-sided pot and acidic soil you need. Leaf’s mother gives us her employee discount. It’s for Leaf, you say. So she can have her own tree. Her mother and I look at the small pot. It’s a small tree, you explain.
line diagrams
The elaborate line diagrams in your microbiology textbook make me think of my dad cutting the grass every Saturday, before I got big enough to push the gas mower. He wore brown sandals and black socks; khaki shorts; and a yellow-stained, V-necked white tee shirt that hung loose over his dark chest hair. Red faced and sweaty, he steered the mower meticulously across the yard in diagonal stripes, shifting the height setting at each turn to give alternating rows a difference in texture and shade. After the last bit of edging, he would kill the engine and tip the hot mower on its side, and we would use sticks to shave the matted clippings off the rotor blades and undercarriage in thick, wet clumps reeking of greenness.
in the dead of night
I wake up thirsty in the dead of night. Passing through the apartment with the lights off, I notice your laptop is open. You’re not here. When I rouse the screen, it fills with the astral glow of SETI At Home, filtering streams of numbers sluiced from the ether: sifting, sifting.
on sunny afternoons, i lie out
On sunny afternoons, I lie out in the backyard in cutoffs, trying to soak a little color into my painfully white torso. Leaf thinks I’m better looking than her mom’s boyfriend, but she’s nine, so her ruse
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is transparent. They shouldn’t be allowed to call it Coppertone if it doesn’t deliver. You step through the patio doorway, squeezing a lump of raw hamburger between your oily palms, asking, Want onions in yours?
the bonsai looks terrific
The bonsai looks terrific. A perfect little brushstroke of a tree. It’s a Satsuki azalea, in the windswept style, you say, examining its tiny leaves one by one, clippers at the ready, but it doesn’t need any pruning. It sweeps fine. You started it last year for some project that’s ended. When are you going to give it to her? I ask. In September for her birthday. Her birthday is in August, I point out. You look at me blankly, then nod. Right, thanks, you say, I must have been thinking of Wei Lei.
like it’s the first time anyone ever
On the jazz station, Stephane Grappelli’s violin and Django Reinhardt’s guitar are tearing up some lost, smoky French club with a band that sounds like they’re playing for their lives. We put the speakers in the windows so we can hear better outside, amid the flare of tiki torches keeping the evening mosquito free. You’re hitting raucous air drums with phantom sticks, your bare feet thumping an invisible bass pedal and hi-hat. We’ve had a lot of beers. It’s after eleven, going on twelve. I told Leaf we’d take her to the zoo tomorrow. Huge portobello mushrooms lie sizzling on the grill. I’m cutting white coins of goat cheese for them. The neighbors are away, the night sky clear with a bright moon nearly full, and the music is unstoppable, played the way every kid in every garage and pick-up band ever wants to play, flat out, putting every ounce of muscle and gasp of breath into rhythm and chords like it’s the first time anyone ever thought of playing notes quite that way, because maybe it is, and maybe if you do it right it will outlast you and anything else you’ll ever do right or wrong. Grappelli and Reinhardt burst into a dazzling finish, and ghostly applause from a long-dead audience fills the air before the next number. Hey, you say, wiping your arm across your forehead as you lean back in the deck
Jason Newport
chair, it’s smelling pretty good over there. I toss the cheese rounds onto the centers of the mushrooms, where they instantly start to melt and spread, white pupils opening in dark eyes. In the kitchen, on top of the refrigerator, Betty stirs, watching us with all her ancient being, waiting patiently for one of us to step inside.
after all
Timothy Geiger
I carry my impermanence in layers of bone, muscle, skin, this blue T-shirt and jeans, out here, to this permanence that even now may be fading.
“Here” is my land, a house, a barn, five acres, some chickens and goats.
The field reaches to the tree line, full of ticks and timothy grass, and listens intently when I tell it how one day I will make it an orchard of apple and cherry. I will keep it mowed, water it, and care for it as it’s never been cared for before. It’s just earth, and clay down to the frost line and who knows how much further till the limestone appears, makes a backbone it all balances on. But up here, as we say, “in the country,” it’s just field.
It’s the place I never thought I’d arrive at after that alley off South Street, nineteen and too stoned to find my way back to the apartment’s address my friend Ron gave me only an hour before. Before what?
Before we snorted six more lines in the bathroom of Jim’s Steaks, and he left with a guy nicknamed Evil to score two more eight-balls of crank. He won’t be home in the morning, or for another three days, and I’ll be gone by then,
Timothy Geiger
catching the bus back up Market Street, then west to Bryn Mawr.
But first, I need to make my way back to his place. I need to have an argument with the traffic light, the homeless guy with no hands, the Hare Krishna in a robe so orange it burns my eyes. I need to stare down the stares of every passerby on that city street, the shame I felt surrounded by families, tourists from Brazil, the cops who’ll stop and ask from the backs of their horses, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” I tell them, I was born this way, always looking sideways, or down... Eventually, I’ll make it to his doorstep, to the bus terminal, to Bryn Mawr where I’ll hitch a ride with my Uncle who’s been drinking since lunch, since he broke his spine on line at the plant, back to my parent’s house and classes the next day— a handful of core requirements at the local two-year college—still having no idea where I’m going, or what I’m supposed to do with my life. I’ll find the words to tell my mother Yes, I’m fine, I was shopping, just shopping, that’s all, skipping stairs on my way to my room and a blessed sleep I haven’t had for days. My heart will finally slow down, the walls will stop
dissolving, and I’ll say Enough, and find my way here, thirty-five years from there. Does what happened in between finally make any difference, what little I remember of it at least, which is less and less the older I become?
There were places I found myself I should never have been—the junkie’s squat, the police lineup, passed-out in the backseat of my alcoholic uncle’s car—but also places where I always felt I was meant to be.
And really, most of those were like here, their own particular shades of green, essential to the overall compositions of forest and meadow and mountain burning off into the clouds.
Alabama, Minnesota, Montana to Ohio, March through October the maples erupting in emerald jackets, peaking a different orange, then fallen and raked to a different burning rising into the night sky and drifting always east, covering all the nameless constellations until the morning rose.
And each journey to get here, miles under the same tired sky revolving over the same earth that never went anywhere after all. And the memories of them— of Ron, dead at twenty-seven
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Timothy Geiger
from hepatitis, of Evil, who I never met but got gunned-down the following week, of my uncle, who finally quit drinking then died within a month, of my mother gone ten years, who listened and didn’t believe a word I said— all gone, but each got me to here, where my bones stretch against the skin of my fingertips plunging into this clay, as Kildeer rise like ghosts from the milkweed of the west pasture, where I am asking this field to show me how to live.
“Perhaps we were brought to the kingdom for just such a time as this.”
—Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson
life of the spirit
a consecration of dolphins
Glen Vecchione
“A pod of dolphins was found off the coast of South Africa swimming with the body of a missing drowned teenager. The girl, whom the authorities did not identify, was apparently washed off the rocks and into a rough sea.” Huffington Post, November 4, 2022
Perched on a slick rock at Llandudno Beach where the muuzas hawked knock-off earbuds until a swift claw of sea ripped her under so deep that the sun went violet she knew the water would take her take her and that the best way to drown was to pretend the sea was air and suck in a scalding so fierce she would black out and end the struggle— young woman from the Cape Flats now gone away away and away drifting prone in a soft Easterly arms outstretched like broken wings waist swathed in baroque drapery while the sea did what it does to remain pure leaching her out with each wind-scoured day the small fish nibbling in the convolutes of stocking and far off far off far off the dolphins tasting something in a draught of warmth interrupted their frolicking to glide towards her then circle in a curious commiseration until as if following some command they aligned in a glistening retinue and nudged her forward with sprays and clicks where they were going is still a puzzle a destination beyond inference
Glen Vecchione
a consecration of dolphins with their watery bier as if knowing this human now dead must lay in grace protected before giving up what remained of her in tenderness not violence this kin from another world now in yet another world and they long-snouted repiners would see to it become angels bearing the raft of their child-calf this mystery.
free pizza with jesus on the side
Linda K. Wertheimer
IIn fond memory of Philip Gerard
t was hard to escape Jesus at my high school. One day, as I sat with my usual group of friends at lunch, this twenty-something man with curly hair strolled up to our table. “Come to my youth group this week,” he said. “Free pizza.”
He smiled broadly as he began selling the merits of the Youth for Christ chapter he ran Wednesday nights for our school, Van Buren High. He was the youth group’s pastor, and along with the pizza, we could hear the gospel of Jesus. Some of my friends smiled back and promised to attend. I sat there in silence. My heartbeat quickened, seeming to thump as loudly as the basketballs pounding the floor in the gym next door. This man was offering me a ticket to the in crowd. I wanted to fit in, and yet I knew I would never attend his group. His magnetic smile could not suck me in. I was Jewish. I had no interest in being saved by Jesus. At Van Buren High, which had just 200 students, I was the only Jew other than my middle brother.
The pastor left our table and moved to another group. He was a popular fixture, and no one except me appeared bothered by his presence. Some teens even hugged him. The principal’s office overlooked the cafeteria, and our principal often walked through during lunchtime, keeping an eye out for mayhem. A pastor, however, was not deemed trouble in our public school where religiosity creeped into nearly every crevice.
Northwestern Ohio was as much a part of the nation’s Bible Belt as the Deep South. It was never a place my family had chosen to be. My father, a mechanical engineer, was told he had to transfer to his company’s Midwest operations in Ohio, so we moved to Findlay from western New York state in the mid-1970s when I was 9. My family quickly discovered we were just one of three Jewish families in the Findlay area and the only one in the Van Buren schools system. In our New York state town of Horseheads, we lived about a 10-minute drive from two
Linda K. Wertheimer
temples. In Findlay, the closest synagogue was nearly an hour away in Lima. Billboards proclaiming love for Jesus welcomed us every time we exited I-75 into Findlay. My family wasn’t religious, but my mom wanted my brothers and me to have a Jewish identity and some religious education. Dad considered himself an agnostic Jew.
Every Sunday morning, my parents drove us to a Lima temple for a few hours of religious school and a mini-sermon by a rabbi. I never got to know any of the kids well because most lived closer to the temple. I identified as a Jew though I did not consider myself spiritual. I hated the car rides to temple and that probably colored my view of Judaism. I associated it with boredom and the pungent smell of my father’s cigarette wafting from the driver’s seat into my face. By the time I was 12, I was a religious school dropout, having persuaded my parents to let me follow in the footsteps of my middle brother who had quit around the same age. But I was not seeking an alternative, either. I saw myself as a Jew no matter how much time I spent in a synagogue. My family celebrated the Cliff’s Notes version of Jewish holidays. Our Passover Seder involved reading the Four Questions, talking about how Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, then eating. We ate potato latkes made from a mix at Hanukkah and dipped apples and honey to mark the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah. My parents sprinkled enough Jewishness into our home for me to have some sense of who I was and who I was not.
In the Findlay area, going to church was the main social outlet for many of my peers. We lived in mostly farm country dotted by fields of corn and soybeans. Our area had a mall, with two flagship stores, J.C. Penney and Sears, and a movie cinema, which showed up to three movies. Toledo, a full hour’s drive away, was the big city. The Van Buren school system was perched on one of the few hills in the region and had fewer than 1,000 students housed in two neighboring buildings on the same lot. There was a building for grades kindergarten to third, and one for grades four to 12. By moving to the area from out of state, I was a bit of an outlier. The yearbook always included a photo of the graduating seniors who had been to Van Buren schools since kindergarten. It was at least half the class, and most of the others came from other small Ohio towns or transferred in from Catholic schools.
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My family moved to the area in the spring, and I was outed for my Jewishness from almost my first day in fourth grade at Van Buren. My school did not just embrace youth pastors. Weekly, it welcomed a Bible teacher, hired by an organization of local churches, who preached Christianity to children up until sixth grade. Wearing a long skirt, she entered my fourth-grade classroom my first week there and told us stories about Jesus and his disciples as she stuck colorful figures of the Christian Messiah and his followers on a flannel graph. Then she led us in songs, including “Jesus Loves Me.” I slouched in my chair, my face reddening. I knew enough about my own faith to understand that Jesus was not a part of it. I knew Jesus had been a Jew. I knew Christians saw him as the son of God and a savior, and Jews did not. The same Bible teacher went to my middle brother’s classroom, and both of us ran off the bus after school eager to tell my mom about it. Her face reddened in anger, especially when my brother reported that the Church Lady told his sixth-grade class that the Jews killed Jesus. She and Dad quickly rejected the idea of legal action. My father had a new job and did not want to risk it. And there was another reason. That spring, there was a news report that a cross had been burned on a Black family’s lawn in Findlay. My parents did not want to draw attention to us, the newest Jewish family in town.
My parents spoke in private with the school superintendent to protest the existence of those Christianity classes. He said he could not do anything about the classes but could excuse me and my brother from them. My parents agreed, so each week when the Church Lady, as I called her, entered my classroom, I walked out. Children are curious. My peers noticed when I left. “Why don’t you attend?” a girl asked me one day. I said I was Jewish. “Do you believe in Jesus?” she asked. I shook my head no, and she said matter-of-factly, “You’re going to go Hell.” I was no longer just the New Kid. I was now the Jew.
In junior high and high school, the Church Lady stopped being a direct factor of my sense of ostracization. I no longer experienced prying eyes following me for leaving class and going to the library when it was time for the weekly dose of Christianity. The youth pastor, though, was
Linda K. Wertheimer
there during lunchtime several days a week. Many of my peers adored him and frequented his Wednesday night meetings. Despite his friendliness to all, he was a constant reminder of my otherness. Hearing his cheery voice at times made me shiver, as if he were running his nails down a blackboard. At least I was spared from hearing him or anyone else preach. Or so I thought.
In December of my freshman year, the principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker. “There’s a surprise assembly in the auditorium,” he said. So we rushed out of our classes to the old gym which doubled as the auditorium. The surprise, though, was a dud to me. It was Jesus again. The principal welcomed us, then handed the microphone over to an older man in a suit. He asked us all to pray with him, then he introduced a band of our peers who had formed the group at their church. They performed Christmas songs and Praise songs, songs that praised Jesus. I wanted to leave but felt awkward. I was in the middle of a row. I would have to climb over my peers to escape. I sat there, held captive by a church service in the middle of the school day. Most of my peers sang and clapped. My pale face turned red. “Merry Christmas,” our principal said as the assembly ended. I walked out close to the principal. I wanted to say something, but no words came out. I just smiled, hiding my discomfort and my ire.
During a study hall the next week, I stopped by the principal’s office. Out of earshot of my peers, I thought I could make my case. The principal welcomed me into his office, and I told him that I wanted to be excused from the next religious assembly. He said there would be another one in the spring as Easter approached, and I could get a pass to sit in another room. I offered my own solution. I was a flutist in the band and was always preparing solos for competitions and concerts. I asked if I could go to a practice room during the next assembly. I knew full well that these assemblies were wrong. I suspect the principal did, too. But neither of us mentioned the illegality of what my school was doing by promoting Christianity. I wanted a way out, and he gave me one. I was not brave enough to argue the fine points of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state with my school principal.
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That spring, I was informed in advance of the upcoming Easter assembly. I got a pass for the practice room. As my classmates filed from the classrooms into the auditorium, I grabbed my flute from my locker and went to a practice room across the hall. I could hear bits of music from nearby but could not make out the words. I tried to block out the sound as I played Gluck’s Menuet and Spirit Dance. It was a piece my flute teacher had given me to help me become more of a musician rather than just someone who fingered the notes. I was learning to create a storyline for each piece of music I played. I don’t remember the exact story I devised that afternoon. Perhaps it was about a teen’s struggle to find her voice.
The principal forgot to warn me the next time there was a religious assembly. When the pastor was introduced, I whispered to a friend that I needed to leave and pushed up my wooden seat. I climbed over the legs of many of my peers, then walked into the hall, my face burning in embarrassment. I got my flute and closeted myself into a practice room once again. No one ever asked me why I left.
Christianity was the dividing line repeatedly between me and my peers. They knew I was the Jew. On the way home from basketball practice one afternoon, I was giving a teammate a ride home from practice, and she asked, “Have you taken Jesus as your savior?” I said no, trying to keep my eyes on the road. She told me if I did not, I would not be saved and would risk going to Hell. I did not say it but wondered how I could be Hell bound if I did not believe in the concept of afterlife, anyway. I was unsure if I believed in much of anything.
In history class my junior year, my teacher began talking about World War II, peering through his round glasses as he read a few paragraphs about the Holocaust in a monotone. He gave the murder of six million Jews the same treatment that the textbook did – a sentence. “Kike. My grandfather was in the KKK,” the boy sitting behind me whispered into my ear. My stomach tightened. I wanted to speak. I could not. After class, I wanted to tell the teacher about what had happened but lacked the courage. My school already had proven to me repeatedly that it was not a safe place to be a Jew.
Linda K. Wertheimer
My senior year, I was determined to try to at least alter one of my school’s Christian practices. Students picked graduation speakers, and annually, they anointed the curly-haired youth pastor to give the benediction and invocation. At both of my older brothers’ graduations, he stood on a dais near the school principal and urged us to stand and bow our heads to Jesus, to praise Him for the accomplishments of the graduates. Each time, like my parents, I stood. I stared straight ahead and fumed, though no one noticed my pitiful protest. Everyone was looking down or had closed their eyes in prayer.
As my own graduation neared in 1982, my senior class also picked the youth pastor for the honor of giving the blessings. I knew I had no chance of getting the pastor kicked out of graduation but maybe I could do something. The principal knew me well now, given the school was so small. Not to mention, perhaps in an attempt to fit in any way I could, I was in numerous activities, on the starting five on the basketball team; in band; in chorus; and on the yearbook staff. I was given the title of “journalist” because I wrote all of the copy to accompany the photos, including sappy poems that expressed a love for our school that I had never had. I strode into the principal’s office and told him that the prayer with Jesus at my brothers’ graduations had made my family and relatives uncomfortable. “Could you ask the pastor to at least keep Jesus out of the prayer at my graduation?” I asked, my voice cracking. I did not tell him all the reasons for my request. Both my grandmothers were planning to attend, and I wanted to spare them. And I wanted to spare me. I was graduating as the salutatorian and as an honor student. I would don the special yellow chords. I was considered the scholar in my family, and my graduation was a big deal for us. Jesus should have no public place at my graduation. The principal said he would ask.
At my graduation, it was my brothers’ ceremonies on repeat. This time, I was the one standing in a cranberry-colored robe in the rows of graduates. Once again, as I had during the Church Lady’s visit to my fourth-grade class, during the religious assemblies, and at my brothers’ graduations, I felt my face blush in a mix of embarrassment and anger. When the youth pastor stood at the dais and asked us to praise
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Jesus, I sealed my lips in silence. When the pastor asked us to bow our heads, though, I obeyed. I did not want to stand out in this moment. I bowed my head even though as a Jew, that was not something I would do in prayer. I wished I had pushed my school even more to remove the ever-present cloak of Christianity. My act of protest was a tiny request to the principal, a request that was heard but not granted.
Four years after my high school graduation, there was a young girl, Merith Weisman, who had a similar experience to mine, though it was at her middle school graduation in Providence, Rhode Island. A Baptist preacher asked everyone to pray and thank Jesus for the children’s accomplishments. Merith’s parents, like mine had, stood. So did Debbie, Merith’s younger sister. Jewish like my family, the Weismans did not protest in the moment. But afterward, they did. They were in a bigger city, with religious diversity, including Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. The Jewish Community Center was across the street from the middle school. Merith’s parents, Dan and Vivian, wanted to make sure their younger daughter, Debbie, would not have prayer at her graduation in 1989. They thought it would be an easy task. They were wrong.
They asked first in a letter. When they received no response, they spoke with a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island. They then tried to stop the prayer at Debbie’s graduation with a meeting with a principal. The principal said the prayers were tradition. So the Weisman family sued, and in 1992, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of this family of four and against the Providence schools’ practice of allowing clergy-led prayers in graduation. Their victory was almost exactly a decade too late for me.
I met the Weisman family members decades later and interviewed them for an article. I had become a professional journalist. Dan and Vivian told me they had first asked their daughters if they were okay with the family getting involved in a lawsuit given the publicity that would follow. Both girls, just teenagers, immediately said yes. The case put the family in the spotlight. They received numerous letters, some positive and others filled with hate. Debbie, while still in high school, was often the one to go to the mailbox after school and find the letters.
Linda K. Wertheimer
One stuck with her, the most vile of all: “Hitler should have finished the job,” someone wrote without signing the missive.
During the four years the Weisman’s suit was making its way through the courts, I was unaware of their battle. I had always wondered what would have happened if my parents had been willing to fight my school system. Could we have won? And if we had, would I have become a pariah in my tiny school system? The Weismans and their children had never faced any issues because of their faith before suing Providence schools. My family, though, already had felt uneasy as Jews in our rural Ohio town. We were too scared to take Van Buren schools to court. We experienced more than proselytizing. When I was a freshman in high school, our own house was covered with soapy swastikas. We never knew who the culprits were. We knew, though, that we did not want to bring more hate upon us.
A part of me wishes that my family had been as brave as the Weismans. Theirs was a worthwhile cause, an effort to prevent other children from experiencing the sense of isolation and difference that I did at my own graduation. On one of the biggest days of my high school years, I was the odd one out once more. It was the loneliest moment.
John Schneider a field flows in every direction
In the interval of waning light before our shadows consume what’s left of the sky, dusk begins to unmute the world: intensifying both the sweetness and rot of mid-summer apples; that overpowering meadow-scent of laurel leaves and lemony bracken; the birds we’d always known were still up there somewhere in hungering daylight. •
From the moon’s half-skull and vigilant eye, from those wild constellations and the darkness around them, we weave tales to make sense of how little
we really know of ourselves, our histories. This August sun just so damn loud I can’t hear the field filling with question marks or how nothing really ends
•
on a hard stop. Even the bleached effigies of dandelions softly spreading from a child’s pursed lips. Even these blank pages of clouds always rewriting
John Schneider
their own transparent stories. Nothing yearns to be silenced or seen so intensely. Every pore a wide-open window. Even the crabgrass lusters and reflects like alabaster. In this tender
interval where things rediscover their ambiguity, their sanctuary, wildness, the birds, the bracken and stars and wounds and everything else I’ve failed to witness flowers in every direction.
Kelsea Conlin deadheading
May always ate lunch behind the sheet. Julie had tacked it to the ceiling panels to designate one corner of the office as a break room, which she said should be provided by any decent employer. Even so, Julie made it clear that May could eat lunch at her desk if she wanted. But May liked sitting behind the sheet at the folding table next to the window, where she could see the ivy that blanketed the building next door.
A battered electric kettle that May was too scared to plug in sat on the folding table, along with a stack of paper cups and a bowl of shiny-papered tea bags. Dying carnations occupied the center. Over the past several weeks, their heads had closed slowly, buttoning up the inner petals like a high-necked winter coat. Their leaves molded in thickened water. May didn’t try to save them. As soon as their stems had been snipped, death was imminent. Better to let them get on with it.
She unsnapped her lunch container as her phone pinged for the first time that day. It was Leigh. Reunion tonight?
Their first college reunion. Five years. May hated her five-year high school reunion, all those people to make small talk with and pretend she cared. She tapped back a reply. No.
Even though the window next to her was closed, an October draft wheedled its way through the sash and skimmed the back of May’s newly exposed neck. Until this past Tuesday, her hair had hung in a straight, dark sheet that brushed her rib cage. To keep it out of her face, May’s mother used to insist on braiding it into tight plaits that strained her hairline and gave her a headache. But at her father’s house, she could let it hang free, rippling around her shoulders like a flag in the breeze.
When she walked into the hair salon on Tuesday, an earlier phone conversation with her mother elbowed its way to the front of her mind.
You can’t tell me you’re going to work at that housing agency forever and you could pick up your PhD right where you left off, you know. The stylist asked May how she wanted it cut, and May pointed to just under ears. Her father used to trace their outer edge with the tip of his thumb when she was little, sending fabulous shivers down her arms and making her laugh. Like fiddleheads, he used to say. Then he would pretend to play the violin.
May’s phone pinged again. Come on, May. Don’t make me go alone.
Then don’t go.
May smoothed the hair that wisped her neck. In early spring, fiddleheads dotted the trails near her father’s house like tightly furled fists until they were transformed into long-fingered hands by the summer heat. Now they would be muted green with brown-tinged edges, their pigment leaking back into the forest floor. One summer, May’s mother had begged her to uproot one. We’ll scrape it, look at its cells under the microscope. But May couldn’t bear to kill it.
Leigh’s text bubble appeared and disappeared. Appeared and disappeared. May went on eating her lunch.
Let me guess. Harold?
Harold. May had taken him to the park yesterday, at dusk, when the paths flickered with lamp light and shadows fringed the grass in dark blue and purple. She thought about what she would make for dinner. Burst cherry tomatoes over fettuccine. Harold liked tomatoes. It was amazing what rabbits would eat. Carrots, zucchini, bok choy, blueberries. But when May kept walking, when she had tugged on the leash, it came too easily; instead of Harold’s ears brushing her ankle as he hopped by, his empty harness thudded to a stop at her feet. May stared at it for a moment and then dropped to her knees, clawed through the closest holly bush, plunged her hands into a thicket of prickers, reached, grasped, hoped to feel Harold’s silk-soft brown fur under her fingers. Gone.
May sawed a mushroom in half with her fork. Dried blood pooled in her nail beds and beaded scratches latticed her hands, disguising the scar from where Harold bit her six years ago, on the night she found him. It had been another October night. Dirt under her fingernails,
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dirt in her ears. And Nicholas squeezing the back of her leg before he walked away. See you around.
She wasn’t going to respond to Leigh. Leigh would be the last person to sympathize. Leigh, who “accidentally” kicked Harold on more than one occasion and ate his carrots and celery out of May’s neatly stacked glass containers. I’ve never seen anyone love a fucking pet so much, Leigh said one night, not long before she moved out. I might leave the door open one day on my way out. Leigh said “pet” like it was frivolous, some kind of luxury. She apologized the next day, said she wouldn’t really leave the door open, but didn’t May think the size of Harold’s hutch was a little ridiculous?
As May speared another mushroom, the lights powered down around her with a dying wheeze, as if the breath were being sucked out of the building.
“Sorry!” Julie called. “Plugged my computer into the outlet by the window again.”
“I’ll reset the breaker.” May knew about old buildings. After her father and Sherry got married, they bought a colonial-era red farmhouse on the outskirts of a sleepy town about an hour outside the city. On her first visit, May wrinkled her nose at the half-rotted front steps, the large chunks of asphalt missing from the driveway, the front yard webbed with crabgrass. Soon enough, though, Sherry’s chickens and goats dotted the yard, and on weekends and in summers, May followed her father from room to room with a pocketful of nails, a screwdriver, and a hammer, fixing, fixing, fixing.
She snapped the lid onto her lunch, headed down the hall to the fuse box, and flipped the breaker. The building inhaled as she walked back to her desk.
Books, folders, papers, and mismatched furniture littered the rest of the office, but May had separate cups for pens, pencils, and highlighters, a freshly wiped monitor, a metal paper organizer. Next to her computer sat a picture of her father and Sherry in a heavy silver-plated frame. When they had given it to her last Christmas—the only time that her father, Sherry, her mother, and May occupied the same room—her
father said for your desk at work. Sherry beamed. Her mother rolled her eyes. She gave May a subscription to the Journal of Mammalogy, since you’re so interested in that rabbit. Sherry set her lips in a thin flat line.
“You know,” her mother went on, after May opened the gift, “Dr. Bassett was impressed by the work you did on the melanocyte study. I talked to her yesterday, after my morning class—did I tell you I’m teaching conservation biology this year? Fred—Dr. Handelman—he used to teach it, but he retired, you remember, such a good opportunity, so much of interest—and she asked about you. I said you were gapping— that ridiculous thing all the students are doing these days, gallivanting around Europe and saying they’re doing ‘community service’”—here her mother used air quotations—“or some such nonsense. I didn’t tell her about this little interlude of yours in case you decide to return. I can barely believe you’ve spent an entire year in that condemned building already—”
“I’m not going back to the program,” May said quietly. Sherry patted her knee under the table.
“You don’t mean that. So much talent, May, so much you started—”
“What’s wrong with May’s job?” her father said.
“There’s nothing wrong. But it’s not what she should be doing.”
May did not know why they still did family Christmases. They should be outlawed, like smoking on airplanes.
“Gloria,” her father said. “Enough.”
Her mother took a sip of her drink. She plucked the cherry—fluorescent red, the kind she hated—off its stem, chewing silently. They all chewed silently, like goats.
Sometimes May did miss the biology department with its bleachscented classrooms and lab tables, tubs of never-quite-dry beakers, heavy textbooks she pored over while sitting in the back of her mother’s biology lectures as a child. Her mother believed that coloring books infantilized children and gave May a pencil and blue-lined composition notebook instead. May copied diagrams of cells into the notebook, erasing and re-sketching until they were perfect replicas. She learned that cells could copy themselves; they could multiply! Before long, she
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was rattling off cellular components to the delight of her mother’s colleagues, colleagues who later mentored her as an undergraduate and ushered her PhD application through the admissions process.
“May?”
Julie stood next to her desk. “May? Sorry to ask, but would you mind staying for a bit?” Julie pinned a sheaf of papers between her bicep and rib cage while balancing a stack of folders in the other hand. Red smudges on the bridge of her nose marked where her glasses had been, which were now pushed into her bangs. Later, May knew she would hear Julie shuffling objects around her desk, and May would call, “Check your head!” They would both laugh.
“I’m fine to stay. Why?”
“I need these filed. If you wouldn’t mind?” Julie tried to look at her watch, which slid down her arm. “Shit, I have a meeting.”
“I’ll take care of it.” May extracted the papers from Julie’s armpit.
“Thanks, May.”
May headed to the filing cabinet. She ran her fingers over its worn edges, found the handle to the correct drawer, and pulled it open. This was why she had quit her PhD program. So she could file the As under the As and the Ps under the Ps and use her label marker to write LAST NAME, FIRST NAME in precisely spaced capital letters. There was no need for rigorously researched hypotheses, for observations that flummoxed her, for outcomes that sent her back to the drawing board after hours and hours of careful preparation. Nothing that didn’t make sense.
As she sorted, another message pinged her phone, this time from Ryan. Dinner tonight—your place or mine?
Even though Fridays were always dinner with Ryan, and had been for the past several months, May forgot more than half the time. This baffled her because she liked Ryan, whom she met over the summer at the farmer’s market where she bought Harold’s vegetables. Ryan, with his copper hair in a tight bun and crow’s feet that scrunched when he laughed. He sold her a bag of carrots so orange they didn’t look real. Inside the bag was his phone number scrawled on a piece of paper.
May’s filing didn’t take long, and she vacuumed before tapping on Julie’s door, which swung inward so violently that it nearly razed a tower of housing code manuals. Need to bend that hinge pin tomorrow.
“Do you need anything else before I go?”
Julie glanced up, glasses now perched on the end of her nose. She had found them on her own. “No, I’m all set.”
“Great.” May pulled her coat off the hook near Julie’s door.
“Off to walk Harold?”
May knotted her hands behind her back and stuffed her thumbs inside her fists, whelks retreating into their shells. She hadn’t told Julie about Harold. She hadn’t told anyone. She couldn’t bear to admit how he had been there one moment, gone the next, how she had dropped to her hands and knees and crawled along the trail, how she had torn through clumps of juniper. Are you all right, miss? A fleece-hatted man had said. Did you lose your dog?
“Yes,” said May. “Nice night for a walk. Don’t you think?”
the park was fifteen minutes east of the office. May’s apartment was ten minutes northwest of the park. May imagined a triangle, one point for each place. Sometimes the triangle lit up yellow in her brain, like the small yellow box placed around crime scenes in true crime documentaries. She remembered watching a Dateline special with her mother when she would have been far too young to watch Dateline specials—seven or eight years old—about a young woman who was killed walking to her car and abandoned in a dumpster. May’s mother didn’t believe in keeping things from children, least of all the frightening things. Better to face it. Better to know what one was dealing with in life.
Her mother had blown air through her teeth when they showed a photograph of the dumpster, graffitied with dripping white letters. “I would have killed the bastard,” she said. “You know? Some people just let it happen. Not me, no. I would kill the bastard.”
May cut down a side street that would dispel her at the park’s south entrance. Both entrances, north and south, were marked with scuffed metal signs and chain link gates, never locked. Latticing the park were
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hard-packed dirt trails with the life stamped out of them. They were so unlike the trails near her father’s house, stippled with crocuses and trilliums and fiddleheads. Here, most plant life had departed, abandoning the threat of rubber-soled shoes and stroller wheels, leaving behind only the hardy species that could survive anything. The earth would be a wasteland someday, but the juniper bushes would still be green.
The campus was near the park, nestled in the middle of May’s yellow triangle. She and her mother used to walk home through the park after her mother’s evening lectures, so May could visit the playground. After the Dateline episode, May began giving herself exercises while they walked. What would she do if someone jumped out at her? Jab him with her elbow, run. What would she do if someone grabbed the back of her shirt? Grab the man’s hand, twist it. She let herself imagine the initial shock of it, let the pressure mount in her chest like a kettle about to whistle.
May crossed a traffic-choked street and sidled through the south entrance’s unlocked gate. She usually walked for fifteen minutes on the main trail and turned around. She never went all the way through. Never went from south to north. Only south to south, and then back to the main street all the way to her apartment. Yesterday, she’d lost Harold about ten minutes into the walk. Would he have stayed on the south side? There was a chance, of course, that he had gone back to where she had found him on the north side. May felt the steam building in her bones but she knew she had to go. Animals had long memories; elephants could find watering holes not visited for years, humpback whales migrated the same routes every winter.
She came to the sign where she usually turned around. “North Entrance,” it read, in faded red letters on a thin sheet of dinged metal. Underneath it was another sign that pointed in the direction from where she had come. “South Entrance.” No sign of Harold yet, no flash of silk-soft brown fur among the shadows, no eyes shining underneath the juniper. In her pocket, May fingered Harold’s harness with the gnawed-through shoulder strap, which she had quickly mended this morning with duct tape. She kept walking.
Her feet hadn’t seen this side of the park in six years. Six years ago, she’d been nineteen, a college sophomore, signing the lease for her and Leigh’s off-campus apartment. They had clambered for that apartment, worlds above their freshman dorm. It had silver-scuffed blonde wood floors and a claw foot tub surrounded by a paper-thin shower curtain. Their rooms were squeezed into opposite corners. In the kitchen, laminate countertops bridged a yellowed porcelain sink and a two-burner gas stove.
“On your left!” A cyclist clanged his bell. It never failed to startle May, that on your left business. She always jumped left instead of right or right instead of left. This time, she flattened herself against a pricker bush as she waited for the bicycle to pass, its small strobe light flashing. From here she could see the playground turrets while the steam built in her bones.
It suddenly angered May that she no longer walked south to north, that her apartment was a twenty-minute walk from the south entrance compared to a ten-minute walk from the north, that she had stopped going to the pasta shop, where she used to pick up a pound of fresh spinach ravioli every Wednesday—Marco would set it aside, just for her, in a clear plastic bag knotted at the top like a bag of goldfish—and that, after, she had to make up excuses not to walk north to south with Leigh, even though they used to walk north to south all the time, excuses at which Leigh balked: why would we go the long way?
May was almost in full view of the playground now, of its rickety bridge and aluminum slide that glowed with heat in the summer. Her phone pinged with another message from Ryan. Everything okay? She slipped it back into her pocket without responding. Still no Harold. She smoothed her thumb over the harness’s worn silver buckle, imagined slipping it over Harold’s head and clicking it shut. The pressure in her chest released a little, a tiny puff of steam that hung in the air like dry-brushed paint.
On the playground was a brown-haired woman and a small boy with dark curls. The woman held her hand out to him, fingers wiggling. Once, May’s mother had stood with her arms crossed, refusing to help
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May off the monkey bars. You can do it yourself, she said. May fell, and her wrist broke underneath her with a clean snap, like a cleaved dinner plate.
May hadn’t messaged Leigh back after she asked about Harold. She hadn’t heard from Leigh for a few weeks at least but Leigh hated doing things alone, so May wasn’t surprised. They sometimes saw each other twice a week and sometimes went five months without speaking. They would never not be together in some way; there was too much history. May knew about Leigh’s mother’s suicide and had learned never to complain about her own mother in front of Leigh. Leigh always got that look on her face, that at least you have a mother look. Leigh knew that May had shoplifted once. Things like that.
“It’s time to go.” The brown-haired woman’s voice was a little sharper, less careful. The boy ran from her to climb the stairs again. Leigh sounded like that when May took too long to get ready, when she waffled on whether to leave the apartment. On that Friday night Leigh had charged in without knocking and pulled a sequined shirt that May never wore off its hanger. Wear this. Please? I don’t want to go by myself.
The party had been near the south side entrance; Leigh knew the friend of a friend of the host. Nicholas had come up to her while they waited for beers, flirted with her, asked for her number. It’s the shirt, Leigh hissed in her ear, before disappearing into the crowd. Nicholas’ hair was light brown, wavy at the top, and he wore a button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone. One front tooth pushed its way in front of the other.
“I didn’t wear my retainer,” he said, as they stood in the corner at another party, a few weeks later. He never called her after the first party, but they both ended up at the second party by coincidence. May had refilled her drink more than once and she reached up a finger and touched the tip of his tooth lightly when he smiled. He frowned, working his lip over the spot. Made the comment about the retainer.
“Sorry,” May said.
“It’s okay.” He kissed her, cupping a hand around her neck and another under her shirt, near her waist. She tugged her shirt down and placed his hand back on top of it.
“Really?” he said.
May liked Nicholas, liked how he moved through a room in sure, even strides, how he smoothed her earlobe when he kissed her. But she barely knew him, after all. Leigh was always bringing people back to the apartment. The walls were so thin May could hear everything, but that wasn’t for her and she knew it.
“But I’m still playing,” the child’s voice rang out. He went down the slide. When he shot out the bottom, his mother scooped him up. “I’ve got you,” she said, sing-songy. But the boy wasn’t having it. He bucked and shrieked, pounded on her with tiny fists. May envied his certainty, his outrage.
It had been a week after the second party when Nicholas messaged May late on a Saturday evening, inviting her to a bar near the pasta shop. Spilled beer slicked the counters and there was a pinball machine that took nickels. Someone had jammed fake plastic roses into white vases like they would spruce up the place. Dust fuzzed their petals. May touched one and a tiny white storm puffed into the air.
Everyone had fake IDs then and he ordered two beers, one for each of them. The heat of the bar felt good at first but soon enough her jeans stuck to her thighs and the beer glass sweated. May wanted to dab its condensation on her neck and behind her ears.
Nicholas trailed fingertips on the skin just under the top of her jeans. She moved his hand away. They had only kissed after all. Only kissed. He pulled his lip over his front tooth again, released it. Pulled it back. They stayed until last call and left with the rest of the group, snaking through crowded streets with everyone else who stayed until last call, all trying to hail cabs at the same time. They were near the north entrance to the park, and Nicholas’s group was heading south, back toward campus. Nicholas twisted his fingers through hers. Walk with me a little longer , he said. They lingered a block behind the rest of the group. Nicholas pulled her to him every few minutes to kiss her and then spin her outwards like a top while she laughed and laughed.
May was past the playground now. Her bones rattled with steam and her feet carried her in some sort of terrible dream toward the giant maple. That tree wept lichen. It was everywhere, metastasized cancer,
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on this side and that side, crawling up each branch and down the trunk. It was here where Nicholas had pulled her off to the side. I want to be alone with you is what she remembered. Then the sudden feeling of dirt under her palms, the shock of October wind on her legs. The rabbit.
Her wrist was pinned underneath her, her bad wrist. Her jeans were still damp with sweat from the bar and May wanted to pull them back up. How blank her mind had gone, how still her hands. But the rabbit. It watched her from underneath a pricker bush. An arm’s length away, whiskers twitching, ears flattening this way and that as it watched her.
When Nicholas’s belt buckle rustled and clicked shut, the rabbit still didn’t move.
There had been a page in one of her biology textbooks—perhaps the one on animal evolution, or was it zoology?—with dozens of hierarchy diagrams. Arthropoda, Mollusca. Chordata. What order were rabbits in? She had memorized this at one point, made up a song, but the words blurred like magic eye puzzles, the ones in the Sunday paper. Marsupialia, Eulipotyphla, Chiroptera, Lagomorpha .
Nicholas squeezed the back of her bare leg. See you around , he said. May waited for him to leave and then in the space of a blink she grabbed the rabbit, clutched it trembling to her chest.
For days after, May’s wrist had ached and ached. There had been dirt in her hair, dirt under her fingernails. That night she scrubbed her scalp and twisted a cotton swab through the grit in her ear. Like fiddleheads, her father used to say. She’d filed her nails down to the quick. Where the rabbit bit her, on the fleshy part of her thumb, she doused in peroxide. The bite hadn’t made her drop him, only made her clutch him tighter.
Wind blew on the back of May’s neck and she hugged it with her fingers, the pricker scratches on her hands itching and aching. Harold wasn’t here. He hadn’t come back. He could be anywhere, anywhere in this park. She twisted the harness straps in her pocket. Why would he want to leave? Her bones whistled with heat and she shut her eyes tightly, clutching and unclutching the harness.
“Excuse me.” A woman pushed past May. She walked quickly, a
mass of blonde curls and dark-red lipstick fringed by cigarette smoke. A green puffer coat, those black-checkered leggings that she’d gotten for ninety-nine cents at the bargain store. May’s hands stilled in her pockets.
“Leigh?”
Leigh jumped, dropping her cigarette. May hated when she smoked.
“May? Holy shit.” Leigh stamped the cigarette into the dirt. “Did you cut your hair? Wow.” She took a step back, looking around. “Where’s Harold?”
May cleared her throat. “Thanks,” she said. “And he’s at home.”
“Oh.” Leigh tilted her head sideways. “You never got back to me about tonight. What do you say? It’s at that bar, the new one.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Why?”
May typed Nicholas’s name into search engines sometimes. He had been in Chicago for a while, then San Francisco. She hadn’t checked in a few months.
“I just don’t.”
May’s phone began vibrating in her pocket and she pulled it out. Ryan. She hadn’t messaged him back, either time. Before she could send it to voicemail, Leigh pulled it out of her hand.
“Hi, Ryan.” She winked at May. “It’s Leigh. We’re on our way to our five-year reunion. Oh? She must have forgotten to mention it.” Leigh shrugged and held the phone out to May. May silently mouthed what the fuck as she smoothed over dinner with Ryan, who agreed to come over later instead. Leigh threaded her arm through May’s elbow.
“This will be fun,” Leigh said. “Like old times.” They kept walking north.
the reunion was at a bar across the street from the barbecue restaurant where May’s father and Sherry liked to go when they were in town. Nothing fancy, they always said. And it wasn’t. Sauce-soaked meats and potato salad and quarter-cobs of corn in paper trays. It was an institution, unlike this new bar, which opened last year. Even though she’d
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walked past it dozens of times, May hadn't been inside. She rarely went to bars anymore. What was the point? All that drinking and jostling and shouting, for what?
The new bar was one of those with no windows and a dark-painted door, meant to look like something else. An abandoned building, perhaps, a place you walked past without a second glance. A man at the door asked them for a password (“Banana pie,” Leigh said, elbowing May “isn’t this fun?”) and then gestured toward a long, red-carpeted hallway, at the end of which was a cavernous room with black walls and floors. Thousands of tiny lights flecked the ceiling, shining like splattered oil.
A sign welcomed their graduating class, and masses of people congregated around high tops and pressed against the bar. May clutched Leigh’s arm as Leigh made her way to the bar with her elbows out, churning them like rowboat oars. Leigh shouted at her above the noise. “What do you want to drink!” Then ordered two vodka sodas. There was nowhere to move while they waited. Soon enough the drinks appeared, topped with desiccated limes.
“So,” said Leigh. “Harold at home?”
May nodded. Leigh tossed back her entire drink and ordered another one.
“Still have that hutch up?”
May nodded again.
“Figured as much.”
On the night that May had brought Harold home, she put him in a cardboard box next to her bed and went to the pet store first thing the next morning. There were two rabbit cages to choose from, both barely larger than the cardboard box and included that offensive water bottle setup. As if rabbits didn’t know how to drink water! In the wild, they drank it right from the ground.
May had built a rabbit run once with her father, back when Sherry had rabbits. She and her father made the run out of plywood and chicken wire. It was ten feet long and could be moved around the yard, so they didn’t have to worry about the rabbits escaping into the woods or getting snatched by a hawk.
The hardware store wasn’t far from campus. It smelled like her father, like sawdust and wood glue. May purchased a hammer, a staple gun, a cardboard box of nails, and a pair of cutting pliers and walked to the lumber yard with a list of written specifications for the plywood and a request for a roll of chicken wire. The man rang her up and took down her address so that they could deliver the plywood and chicken wire later that day.
Once home, May busied herself with finding studs while she waited for the delivery. Harold’s hutch would run the entire length of the kitchen wall, on the side with the east-facing windows, so that it would glow with sunlight in the morning. Leigh hadn’t come home the night before; she still hadn’t seen the rabbit. But she had left May’s cast iron pan to soak in the sink again.
Leigh surveyed the crowd while May stirred her drink like her hand was caught in a whirlpool. “God, I don’t remember any of these people. Do you?”
May scanned faces to her right and left. “No.”
“You’d think we’d know someone.”
May wanted to say, Do you think Nicholas is here? But the words stuck in her throat like bits of foam. That would mean telling Leigh why she cared. That she couldn’t remember—for the life of her—trying to stop him. And why hadn’t she? She swallowed and swallowed and couldn’t move the words up or down. Then the moment passed and it was too late.
“Are you still at that same job?” May asked.
“What? Oh.” Leigh tugged on a curl that had fallen in front of her eyes. “Yeah.”
“That’s good.”
Leigh nodded. “You know what, I see Stella Marks over there. Remember her?”
May looked over. Stella threw back a shot of something clear and squeezed a lime between her teeth.
“I’m saying hi. Come with me?”
May shook her head. “I’ll stay here.”
Leigh shrugged. “Up to you.”
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May wedged herself onto a recently vacated bar stool and turned her drink in her hands. She shouldn’t have come. She’d finish this drink and leave, walk back through the park again to look for Harold. Rabbits were most active at dusk. May fingered the harness buckle in her pocket, the vinyl straps.
An elbow jabbed her shoulder as people shouted drink orders. Hands darted in front and beside her, stuffing tips into a plastic jar. The bartender sent out a beer here, a round of gin and tonics there. Four sad limes tottered across four tequila shots. May ran her fingers over the bar top, pale wood knotted with dark recesses.
When the plywood had arrived, May angled it against the wall every few feet and anchored it at the bottom with a horizontal plank before stretching chicken wire over the entire frame and using her staple gun to secure it. She cut a small flap in the chicken wire at one end so she could put Harold in and let him out. When Leigh came home and saw the hutch, she’d had a fit. You know we’re never getting our security deposit back, right? But May didn’t care. And Leigh moved out two months later.
Another elbow jostled May and vodka slopped out of the glass onto her coat sleeve. A man’s hand blotted her with a napkin. Her bones had been quiet, but the steam started to build, and her muscles bunched like an accordion all the way up her arm into her shoulders and neck.
May looked up at the man. She didn’t recognize him. He flipped his baseball cap backward and balled the wet napkin in his fist.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to spill your drink. Can I get you another one?”
“It’s okay,” May said.
The crowd squeezed him closer to her, and he leaned down, toward her ear. “Are you here by yourself?” he asked.
“No,” May said. She gestured to Leigh. “I came with my friend.”
“Oh, I remember her,” he said. “Lisa, or something? Right?”
“Leigh.”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
His eyes flicked over May’s face, over her hair, like he was trying to place her, too, and couldn’t.
“I wasn’t going to come,” he went on. “I happened to be in town.” He switched his cap from back to front. “Do you live around here?”
“Near the park,” May said.
“The park. Yeah.” He nodded. “I remember that place. Nice park. What do you do? For work.”
“I’m doing my PhD,” said May. “Biology.” In that moment she wished it were true.
“Biology PhD. Wow. So, you’re smart.” He moved closer to her and placed a hand on the back of her chair. She stiffened. The steam rattled through her bones like quarters in a metal can.
“Hey, nice talking to you,” he said. He picked up his drink. “Maybe I’ll see you around?” He squeezed her shoulder as he looked past her, not waiting to hear if she’d answer.
See you around. The steam whistled now, through her ears, her nose, her eyeballs, pushed against her teeth and prickled her skin from the inside out. Her breaths tugged at her chest, like barbed fish hooks.
May clutched the vodka soda as she pushed through the crowd to the bathroom, where she latched herself inside a stall. In the stall beside her, the toilet paper dispenser rattled. A faucet handle squeaked and the hand dryer whined and two girls checked their teeth for lipstick in the mirror. Nicholas could have been in that crowd, jostling her with his elbows, breathing her air. May pressed her forehead to the cold metal door and inhaled fumes, bleach and urine. Her fingers shook. She stuff ed them in her pockets. Flushed the toilet, washed her hands.
Back in the bar, the man with the baseball cap was making Leigh laugh, and May hurried to the door without saying goodbye. She’d message Leigh later. A line snaked its way down the sidewalk now, vibrating with shouts of banana pie and can you believe it’s been five years. May turned the corner, sucking barbecue smoke and car exhaust and the heaviness of impending frost, and headed toward the park.
On my way home, she messaged Ryan. Tired. Tomorrow?
The lamps flickered along the trails, guiding her from north to south. Harold could be hiding in a patch of underbrush, eyeshine gleaming in a night walker’s flashlight. Dodging long-fingered, sharp-toothed raccoons. Being picked apart, bit by bit, by a hawk’s sickled feet. May
thumbed the harness’s worn silver buckle, its tape. Skyglow outlined the trees in dark orange.
See anyone you knew? Ryan messaged back. No.
May was almost out of the park when she saw it. An anemic rose bush, choked for light by a juniper. Its flowers hung limply, soddened by the last rain. What had Sherry said, about roses? She was always snipping away in early October, removing the dying blooms.
May crouched in front of the bush and tugged on a flower, which came off in a spongy mass of petals. Deadheading. That’s what it was called. She’d need cutting pliers. May prodded the hard dirt around the rose bush and burrowed her nails into the earth, digging, digging, excavating the bush’s close-bunched roots, skeletal hands that had spent their lives reaching for something that wasn’t there.
May braced her knees and yanked the bush out of the ground. Needed water.
Needed light.
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ecdysis
Kristen Dorsey
The shedding of an outer layer of skin, as by snakes. From the Greek, ekdysis, a stripping; ekdyein, to strip off.
Sunshine
slanting through the farm’s windows woke me. I sat up with a stretch that aborted mid-yawn. A long, translucent snakeskin hung over a branch right outside the screen of the open window. I yelped and jerked the coverlet under my chin, rolled over to spoon my husband, and, freshly wounded to find him missing, cried into the lacy pillowcase.
The draped, gray skin spiraled in the breeze, long ends twisting and untwisting.
i sipped coffee on the front porch, slumped on a chair within view of the dangling skin. Itty Bitty, the tiny barn cat, appeared and I spread the towel I kept on the porch across my lap—she was a drooler—and she jumped up to purr and knead biscuits on my thigh.
I pondered the snakeskin as I stroked the purring cat in my lap. About three feet of vacant membrane hung from each side of the branch—a big snake. Serpents had been plaguing me recently, and I was terrified of them.
the previous saturday, a thunderstorm raged through the afternoon while I was outside weeding the flower gardens. I dashed around the house, drenched, slamming doors and windows closed. I ran to close another door, and a snake, black and lined like an almost-flat bicycle tire, had switchbacked up the screen door to escape the stinging rain. I screamed, “Tim!” before remembering he wasn’t there.
And lately, I’d been smelling something stinky in the kitchen and could not locate the source. A few days ago, I decided to pull the bottom drawer of the stove out—maybe I’d dropped some food between the counter and the oven. I maneuvered the metal drawer from its rails and
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knelt to look in that dark space. I screamed and crawled away on hands and knees like a crab, then perched on a chair, heels on the edge and arms squeezing my knees to stare at the coils of a raspy skin that I could see poking from under the stove. A snake had shed its skin right in my kitchen! When my trembling subsided, I swept away the snakeskin with disgust and crammed stainless steel wadding into the small hole beside the stove plug.
now, sipping my coffee and vibrating with the cat’s purr, I pondered these snaky sightings. Was the snake offering itself as a spiritual guide? This is how the shamanism workshop leaders said it happened—too many encounters to be accidental. I shuddered. No way. Not happening. Snake would have to find another buddy.
I had to get away from the snakes in my house and my head. It was a rare Sunday off, and I jammed some water and snacks in my backpack and drove through Sleepy Hollow to the Tuscarora Trail entrance in nearby Hedgesville, West Virginia, where Tim and I had loved to hike together.
The hike up to the Eagle’s Nest isn’t long, but it’s vertical. I pushed hard: head down, panting, sweating. At the top of the ridge, the trail turns to run parallel to several outcroppings of boulders that break the thick tree line. The Eagle’s Nest gets its name from the soaring raptors that loop through the treetops above the rocky cliff that overlooks a magnificent view of the valley.
I pulled off my pack and walked a short, mossy path to an overlook. I peered over the long rock ledge, ensuring other hikers or critters hadn’t claimed it, and dropped my pack. Bracing against the side of a boulder, I hopped down to a flat tabletop shelf of granite that jutted out from the mountainside, forming a sort of stone sofa. Gazing over the treetops down into the valley, the tiny houses and cars looked like Monopoly pieces.
My breathing slowed; my sweat cooled. A hawk screamed, its rufous tail flashing in the sun. Turkey vultures rested in the gnarled arms of a bony rampart, dark wings partially unfolded, looking like a funeral. I
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decided I’d sit on the rock formation to enjoy the stunning view and eat lunch. I turned to retrieve my backpack.
I froze.
Fire and ice collided inside me. I was sharing that three-by-six-foot horizontal flat-top stone with a giant stack of coiled serpent.
I saw my death. One step backward: tumble over the jagged cliff edge. One step forward: walk straight into a pile of timber rattler.
I stood, rigid. The serpent and I regarded each other. It wasn’t rattling; its brown and tan coils were so tight I couldn’t see the end of its tail. Its sharp triangle head, the size of my palm, was arched back, neck curved like an S. The threadlike forked ends of its tongue curled as it looped in and out, tasting my scent.
Years passed this way.
Then, inexplicably! gloriously! the rattler swung its head, pressed its thick body against the boulder, and rippled away. Its head disappeared over the far edge of the flat stone. I watched the tail follow; then it was gone.
I clamored back to the path; I gripped my belly and bent over, retching. I collapsed in the grass and curled like a comma, sobbing. Snot, ants, and moss stuck to my cheek.
Eventually, I calmed. The sun massaged my back; a finch studied me from a branch with questioning chirps before fluttering off.
OK, I surrender.
I had a snake guide.
Look at them
Mary Jane Kidd
Wraiths moving slowly over the earth
Multitudes crossing the continents moving through cities and deserts prairies and rivers of the world
ghostlike images faint traces of something like fine mist carried by the sea
They are pale thin shapes of the man or woman or child they once were
As they move through time their stories are collected and printed on their bodies
Gradually they drop all particulars of this time or that time of gender and age and span of life of who they were or what they did remembering only what they loved longing for the end of the journey
But one day on a summer evening they will appear at the edge of a freshly mown lawn
Mary Jane Kidd
see people in striped chairs laughing and eating watch the blink of fireflies in the smoky blue know that they want to begin again
Where you go
Jen McClanaghan
If it were not so. If the numbers we lived by, our princess phones, our flannel nightgowns— the ways of finding us alone our rooms, you in a canopy bed of executive secretaries, me losing my flowers, standing ever so slowly in the field of myself.
If we didn’t have our own princess phones— mine a gift you gave me
to smoke in bed, starlight, how many fires we could ignite you and me. What number of highways we could succumb to, state after state, flirting with long-haulers the way only you could
at a lowly bar. A road trip women make freed from the draft horse, stirrups silvering.
We’d steer a convertible under that same sky as always hung over us, I gaze up to now as if I might catch the light on your feet. I see myself in wheat’s wilderness alone.
That you left me when you left this world. Across telephone lines and copper wires, the contrails, the skywriters, the birds. Where you go, I will go, Ruth says, Where you lodge,
Jen McClanaghan
I will lodge, she tells her mother-in-law. Your people shall be my people, she promises and I’m obliged to give some of your ashes to the dog sitter when she asks; some to your best friend whose husband locks her in the bedroom. And Ruth says, where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. And so it is. And so it will be tomorrow and tomorrow again.
I will be gleaning wheat, waiting by each open space opening in space surrounded by space who knew how vast.
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on consolation
Kristin Kovacic
The Roman poet Ovid tells us that a young prince named Cyparissus was deeply loved by the god Apollo. Inconsolable after accidentally killing his treasured stag, Cyparissus prayed to Apollo for permission to grieve for eternity. Reluctantly, the god of sun and light, of music and poetry, of plagues and healing, of order and beauty, granted this request.
“His life force exhausted by long weeping,” Ovid writes of Cyparissus in his Metamorphoses, “his limbs began to take a green tint, and his hair, which overhung his snow-white brow, turned up into a bristling crest; and he became a stiff tree with a slender top and pointed up to the starry heavens.”
We all know this tree, the cypress, named after the grieving prince. If you’ve visited Greece or Italy, southern France or northern California, or even seen a movie set in those places, you’ll recognize the slim, monumental trees that are iconic to Mediterranean landscapes, standing like sentries over well-tended fields and roads.
the remarkable properties of the cypress have been prized since ancient times: it stays green year-round; its wood is resistant to decay and fire; it can bear even the strongest winds; its rich aroma refreshes the air; and as Ovid reminds us, its elegant, acute form points resolutely towards a world above the one we inhabit. Ancient Egyptians built their sarcophagi from the fragrant and incorruptible bones of cypress trees. For centuries, they’ve been planted in cemeteries. “To sleep under the cypresses” is an expression that in many cultures means to have passed on. The cypress is a symbol of both death and life, of grief and consolation.
consolation was an important emotion for the artist Vincent Van Gogh. He became a painter rather late in life, after spending years as a preacher that he could have used for formal artistic training. It was
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his second, firmer faith that art, more so than religion, had the power to console the living. His transition towards this position was quite concrete. One day, the people he was trying, and failing, to convert—wretchedly poor mine workers in Holland—became his subjects, in sketches and paintings that revealed rather than imposed upon them their grace. From there he never looked back, never stopped trying in his wildly productive but attenuated life to show, not tell, the mercy of God’s creation.
“In a painting,” he wrote to his brother Theo in September of 1888, “I’d like to say something consoling, like a piece of music. I’d like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quo i of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colorations.”
one subject of van gogh’s new mission was the cypress tree. In fact, the image of a cypress in your mind’s eye, if you have one, may come from him. The Starry Night, possibly the most recognizable work of art in the world, features a looming cypress in the foreground, reaching up into the vibrant ripples of the stars in the liquid firmament, darkly echoing and overpowering a meager church spire in the distance.
For generations since Van Gogh painted this cypress one tortured night in 1889, people the world over have found in this one image a compelling energy, beauty, and mystery. Right now a traveling exhibition of projections called The Van Gogh Experience allows anyone able to fork over $60 for a ticket the opportunity to soak in a light bath of The Starry Night, along with Van Gogh’s other visions of fields and skies, flowers and trees.
Whatever you think about this approach to the presentation of fine art—the New York Times dismissed the show as a “selfie chamber”—it can be argued that the desire to enter Van Gogh’s luminous night and stay there for a time, maybe sprawled out on a yoga mat, during our current whirlwind of plague and war and unspeakable, repeatable violence, is a desire to console our senses, if only for an hour—to sleep, however virtually, under Van Gogh’s cypress.
Kristin Kovacic
i haven’t visited the Van Gogh Experience. But I am fortunate to live some part of each year in southern France, a little north of Arles, where Van Gogh passed his astonishingly fruitful penultimate year on earth in 1888-89. Van Gogh went there to paint in the revelatory light of the region, and the hospital nearby at St. Remy is where he stayed to heal from the mental breakdowns that were his personal, cyclical plague, and it is where he completed his most celebrated painting, The Starry Night .
I have found myself, in what I like to think of as my last third of life (should I be lucky enough to live beyond ninety), the proprietor of a little house here, modest in every regard except one: the previous owner, a melon farmer, planted two cypress trees in the garden. Scrawny boysized saplings when he laid the cement bricks for the house in 1980, the trees are now, like Jack’s beanstalk, robust evergreen towers that rise more than sixty feet, far above the roof, lending the property a grandeur neither the farmer nor I could have otherwise afforded. For a few months every year, I do, in fact, sleep under the cypresses.
And I spend what feels to me a shameful amount of time looking at them, even when I’m indoors on a windy day, though you need a more forceful way to say that here, which the French provide: mistral. You can protect yourself from the mistral, as I do in my bunker of a house, but you cannot fully be out of it, because it blows all day, for days. It’s more than weather; it’s a condition. The wind pushes against the windows, against everything vertical, with a soft roar, like the even, threatening breath of a lion. The cypresses double over in the gusts, like yogis, but also, at thrilling moments, come apart, so that you can see each tree’s secret structure, the interior made visible in a flash. The solid, monolithic cypress is flayed by the wind, its bones separated, and then, in the blink of an eye, it re-composes itself, a pattern that is both hypnotic and frightening, like that breathing lion.
forgive me for this. I harbor a private guilt over my preoccupation with something as tritely poetic as a cypress in the wind when the world has gone so dark, when the circumstances beyond my little farmhouse are so cataclysmically dire, so saturated with horror.
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Just this spring, while I was observing the mistral having its way with a cypress, thirteen black shoppers at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo were gunned down by a young white supremacist, who coolly filmed the massacre from a camera strapped to his head and streamed the images, like a video game, around the planet in real time.
While I was watching a slender tree tickle the sky, a teenager in Texas celebrated his birthday by buying two assault rifles and 2000 rounds of ammunition and used them to murder his grandmother, steal her car, and proceed to an elementary school, where he massacred nineteen fourth graders and their teachers on awards day.
While I was admiring two well-tended cypress trees in the garden of a tidy house in a remote village in France, entire cities in Ukraine were leveled by a rapacious madman and his army in an attempt to restore to glory a kingdom that exists only in his own mind.
While I was describing the deep, invigorating blasts of fragrant air produced by a single cypress, the fourth or fifth wave of a viral disease that has sent six million people to agonizing deaths rippled across the earth, while a disturbing portion of humanity shrugged, threw parties, and mocked the frail.
And while I was admiring and maybe fetishizing a tree I still can’t quite believe is mine—can you ever really own a tree?—vast tracts of forest in America and Europe were reduced to ash in places that had never before burned in temperatures that had never before been recorded.
I am mortified by these events and by my own uselessness against them. Uselessly, I go out into the garden under a sky fracturing towards dark and stand in the abiding shadows of the cypresses.
here are a few things that Van Gogh had to say in his letters about a very simple image he had in mind to paint:
I...need a starry night with Cypresses or—perhaps above a field of ripe wheat, there are some really beautiful nights here. I have a constant fever for work. (April 1888)
But when will I do the starry sky, then, that painting that’s always on my mind?...the most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one’s bed, but which one doesn’t make...(June 1888)
Kristin Kovacic
It’s too beautiful for me to dare paint it or be able to form an idea of it... But there you are, we should keep quiet once again, because nobody is forcing us to work, indifference towards painting being, inevitably, fairly general, fairly eternal. (April 1889)
The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them...It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk...And the green has such a distinguished quality...It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine...Now they must be seen here against the blue, in the blue, rather...To do nature here, as everywhere, one must really be here for a long time. (June 1889)
to do nature, Van Gogh insisted upon painting en plein air rather than de tête, or “from the head,” as he called it. The mistral? He charged out into it, every day, cursing. He built crude mechanical hacks to keep his easel upright in the gales, throwing actual paint on the canvas rather than sketching. Recent examiners of his work have found bug carcasses buried in the oils. Other artists, like his friend Paul Gaugin, with whom he lived in Arles for a time, could not be bothered to work in the elements and considered Van Gogh’s methods primitive. Or nuts.
But Van Gogh had to get out into the air in order to get out of his head. He wasn’t a mad artist, as his biographer Martin Gayford points out, “he was a great painter desperately trying to remain sane.” Or as Van Gogh himself said more succinctly, “I work from necessity, so as not to suffer so much mentally.”
Even The Starry Night, a painting with such a dreamlike quality, was not painted de tête. It is the actual view from Van Gogh’s room in the St. Remy asylum. Incarcerated, he had to fight his doctors for materials, for the privilege to look out the window and paint a cypress tree.
i am here in France because I have retired from teaching, have cast myself out of all the boxes incarcerating my time (periods, school days, semesters, academic years), removing almost every obstacle between the larger world and me. I can look at trees all day if I want to. I can take a
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hike, a drive, a drink, a nap, in the middle of the week in the middle of the day. I can read any book ever written, right now, and write whatever I please. It still feels weird, carrying on in the dream that has become my real life, like I’m trying to act casual while walking on water.
In this dream of a life, I can also dive into the vast virtual ocean of the internet (one of the many charms of rustic France is fiber optic cable), and sometimes, I confess, I do. I emerge on such days full of it, bloated by alarming information. It can feel like work, keeping up, swallowing the waves of breaking news, work I have the freedom to do, now. But the purpose of holding it all in, like the First Chinese Brother who swallowed the sea in the grisly story I read many times as a child, I cannot really fathom. Who wants to know what I know about what is already widely known?
I also worry, like Van Gogh, about what this might be doing to my head. Research has shown that members of internet cults derive intense joy from their time online, a manic euphoria about the rightness of their vision, however misguided and dark. Those people are full of it, too, and it turns out, conspiracy makes you high, literally–it makes you look down upon an unenlightened world, rather than observing from ground level what’s before your very eyes.
If I lurk on social media, which I occasionally do, I see a lot of people ascending to this plane. I watch a young relative become an anti-vaccine evangelist on Instagram, transforming in her feed from a lover of stray cats and backyard salamanders to a delirious, red-penned circler of statistics. On Facebook, I see retirees like me earnestly take on the mission, via the juxtaposition of sunlit beverages and bodies of water, of taunting poor working slobs like you.
People I once rarely thought about, along with their breakfasts, haircuts, and new ink, can now enter my headspace with appalling regularity, and, as M. F. K. Fisher once said about a bottle of wine she drank alone, it is terrible and I enjoy it. Still, it makes me slightly sick. And at the end of so much scrolling I wonder if I am in my own way trying to console myself, to be reassured by the endless loop of blatant appeals for validation and transcendence that I have my own shit together.
Kristin Kovacic
like vincent van gogh, I have never had my shit together. It is one of my three secrets; the other two will sleep under the cypresses with me. Appearances to the contrary, I have never felt at home in my head or well in my skin, as the French say. I doubted every decision I made as a parent, while projecting my unwavering belief in them. Though my two children are grown and flown, digital nomads alighting in places I can never predict, I often wonder if it was my faux intransigence that set them on their wandering paths.
Over thirty years of teaching I wore turtleneck sweaters to my chinny chin chin, a compression garment to keep the imposter shakes at bay. I worked hard and I don’t need a medal to validate that work; I was paid for it. Still, I wonder whether I imparted any useful courage to my students, frightened as I was by my own inadequacies, anxious as they were about the menacing pasts and dystopian futures we so earnestly studied (Orwell, Butler, Morrison, Baldwin, etc., almost everybody, really). I know my own demands on them created prisons for their time they are likely happy to be free from.
Even in this simple melon farmer’s house, which transforms in late afternoon sun to a chest of glowing gold, guarded by evergreen giants, I have trouble laying claim to my earned place in it, a familiar confusion rising up and scolding me: Who do you think you are?
This may be such a common secret that it doesn't bear mentioning, like your nightmares about not having studied for an exam (teachers have them, too), or the painting you see while smoking a pipe in your bed that you will never make.
Still, it shames me to know that I have arrived at my seventh decade on earth without a clue about what I’m doing on it, a feeling made especially acute now that what I once called my work–the Dickensian tower of papers to grade and books to annotate and lessons to plan that shadowed all my adult days–has disappeared. The fact that I hacked it down with my own hands, paying the bills and setting money aside for the disorienting moment I now occupy, is little consolation.
You see, like Vincent, I want to say something healing to you, world, wrecked as you are, wreathed in toxic smoke and crawling with
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assassins (whose entrance into my classroom I role-played into memory). I want to say something to my children and to my students out there somewhere, everywhere, whose precocious despair for their ruthless and swiftly melting planet I could never manage to assuage, despite my composed authority and manufactured chill. I have a fortune of empty hours in which to do this. Instead, I find myself squandering time, gobsmacked in the garden, scribbling in circles about trees in the wind.
The problem is, once you’ve expended a considerable amount of your life force nurturing the words of others, coaxing and coercing them towards the dark revelations of literature, you feel you should have something profoundly true and hopeful to impart. The problem is you may no longer trust your own vision. The problem is, like your old school email account, you can no longer access the confidence you once carefully constructed for the reassurance of children (including your own), to reassure yourself that you do. The problem is, you may no longer have the energy, the hunger, the constant fever for this new work, your real work, whatever that may be.
None of this is a problem, I understand. It is a condition, like the mistral, panting steadily at my window. Having long ago lost the temperament for self-importance (an occupational injury), it is my deepest reflex that I should not be listened to. I am no Van Gogh. And even he, who never sold more than one painting in his lifetime, suspected that indifference, in any case, is inevitably, fairly general, fairly eternal. Perhaps the greatest gift I can offer the clamoring universe is to simply stop talking.
So before I go on I want to say to you, who for some reason is listening, I’m sorry. Excuse me for living, as we used to say in one of the decades I used to live in, excuse me for my life of relative peace and anonymity. Excuse me for my profligate looking. Pardon me for chattering on about the cypress, for believing that no one has yet done them as I see them, these trees that were done by Vincent Van Gogh, that were seen by the ancient Egyptians. My excuse, which is no excuse at all, is that I simply don’t know what else to do.
Kristin Kovacic
i go out into the wind-blown yard. When I look up at the cypresses, I wonder what they are pointing towards, what heaven if it isn’t this, this warm, gusting evening in May, the thrushes and magpies crying out their locations, making auras in the sky? If there is a heaven, are the children with their rifles there, ruing our arrival, poisoning the healing waters, their innocence and their hatred so powerful; how does that not transcend this world and carry on in another?
This shall not pass is the refrain on the wind, surging through the cypresses, spooking the more delicate olive branches, inciting the poplars into panicked applause. I see the despair in the wind, the very air troubled with it, the horizon making waves. But I also see the cypresses working, holding everything in place, fixing the roiling, ruined world. I can smell their strain, their piney sweat. I can hear the masts of their gathered trunks groaning with effort. It moves me, it draws me close and keeps me upright beneath them, quietly watching and blinking, like a small child at the knee of her colossal, vigilant mother.
In this still point at the center of a gyre, a center my body believes can hold before my mind can form the thought, I recognize something. For most of my life, I suspect, I have been this kind of presence, solid and flexible, externally strong and internally quaking, reliably unchanging, reliably here. I have been here for my husband in the forty years of our marriage, here for every moment of my children’s nested and migrating lives, here in the countless dawns of hundreds of students— particularly on those mornings when we processed the staggering losses of our time together: the World Trade Center victims, whose tiny futile banners we watched waving from the top of the towers; the radiant Florida teenagers massacred at their cafeteria tables; the dignified elderly worshippers gunned down while greeting one another at their synagogue, just up the street from our school. Though I never managed to make sense of the horror, because sense was not there to be made, I was, at least, there, bending to the task. It may have been a comfort, I don’t know for sure, but I am suddenly sure that it is the power of presence, not transcendence, that was my gift to them, perhaps the only one I have to offer.
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Grieving for eternity, as Cyparissus asked Apollo’s permission to do, may in fact be all I’m capable of in my last, lucky portion of it. It may also be what it truly means to be alive. How else to describe, for example, the remaining days on earth for the parents of the precious children of Uvalde? The days that remain to each of us, clinging like the cypress to a beautiful, mutilated world?
I look up once more into the vanishing, feathery tip of my cypress. I feel something rooting in me–to keep at it, to keep abiding, for the years granted to me by my undeserved fortune. I am as sad as I will ever be, and I am consoled, two feelings I didn’t know could be experienced at one time until now. Perhaps I am, here at last, at home in my skin.
i’d like to make a gift of my two trees, humble and monumental, supple and robust, to you. I’d like to place the radiance itself in your palms without provoking your cynicism, your envy, or even your praise. I would like you to be consoled, knowing as I am coming to know, this elemental beauty, this grounding sorrow.
But I am not, nor will I ever be, a mythical prince or a great, mad painter, or even an important writer. Thirty years of teaching adolescents will reliably relieve you of every illusion you ever had about yourself. I am not anybody, which is to say I am a woman on a parched patch of earth, which is to say I am everybody, standing under a cypress. And though I know this isn’t my consoling gift, I beg of you to take it. And of you, Apollo, god of sun and light, of plagues and healing, of order and beauty, of poetry and music, I ask you to let me be it.
Mark Liebenow speaking of that
We weren’t because people don’t like to talk about grief. It’s not particularly pleasant or easy to deal with, even though there are moments of beauty and grace that take our breath away. Yet, grief can be shared in words, even though it cannot be summarized in a paragraph, essay, or an entire book.
I thought I had a basic understanding of grief’s landscape because I’d been exposed to a variety of deaths—my grandparents first, as expected. Then the family dog was run over. A high school classmate bounced out of the back of a pickup speeding down a country road. A neighborhood teenager’s suicide by shotgun. The sister of my best friend hit by a car, abandoned by her husband because her recovery took too long, and died. A Chautauqua college friend hit by a car while riding her bike. A roommate in grad school hit by a car running a red light in San Francisco. A friend in his forties of AIDS. A friend stabbed in Greece for his passport, leaving his son an orphan. My mother’s long descent into dementia and death. A father-in-law whose brain dissolved in the spongiform prions of Creutzfeldt-Jakob after eating infected beef, the Mad Cow disease, and died in agony.
Then my wife died out of the blue in her forties from an unknown heart problem and dragged me to the edge of an inarticulate abyss and left me there tottering. People said, “There are no words” when she died, but there was still the compassion they held in their hearts. I was struggling and needed their help. Can I survive grief on my own?
Evelyn’s death unveiled the periodic chart of grief’s elements. If grief were a letter, it would be F—fragile, fractured, fatigue, forever, fucked. Is grief a noun or a verb? Grief is a drawerful of adjectives.
It’s a shade of blue that changes through the day. Sometimes it’s cobalt, azure, or cerulean. Even Prussian blue with its button-down, hardsoled formality. The blue lips of death. It’s the wistful blue glaze above the ocean as the last light of the setting sun fades, and a life that I loved
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disappeared forever. Grief is the deep, eternal blue of the cosmos at midnight when sleep won’t come and I drift like deadwood against the shores of distant constellations.
The notion that grief is blue feels right, no matter its shade, although in the beginning it was red. Blood red. Prussian red. Raging out-ofcontrol red. The deep magenta bruise of a battered heart.
When grief’s Darkness came, I pushed it away, afraid of crossing over its border and getting lost in a place that had no familiar landmarks. No North Star to fix my position. A place set apart. A place far away. A place with fewer answers and more questions. The Far Territories. My hours were abandoned to staring out the window and listening to the hollow acoustics of an empty house. Slowly I began to discern what existed before words could surface, and what I felt most was longing.
In the beginning, there was the word unspoken. Without a useful vocabulary, I searched for words that could corral the wild horses of what I was experiencing. Words of anger and rage. Of intimacy and commitment. Of interment. Her first words, and her last. I searched for words because they created pathways through the wilderness, and words that rise out of affliction are true. I chanted the words with the mountains as evensong to the night and listened for its antiphonal response.
The articulation of sorrow. Is it possible to say what grief is and be precise? Disarticulation—pulling grief apart to examine its pieces. Perambulation—walking around grief to get a feel for the whole of the thing. Rearticulation—taking what I’m experiencing and translating this into something that makes sense to others. Misarticulation—when people repeat easy answers and platitudes that smile but ignore the trauma rumbling beneath, phrases like “there, there, it’ll be okay.” No, I don’t think that it will. We should not seek to understand grief with our heads, but only with our hearts.
The sound of grief is the ping of sonar in the silent depths of the ocean that doesn’t echo back. It’s the steeple bell in an abandoned church ringing softly as an afterthought in the breeze calling the dead home. It’s the cool, blue solitude of night when the machines of the city power down, and I can hear the creek gurgling nearby on its journey
Mark Liebenow
through the darkness to the Pacific Ocean. There it will evaporate, return as rain, and gurgle past me again. Grief is cyclical as rain.
Words are shadows of what is already gone.
How does grief feel? I once likened it to being hit by a Mack truck, the one with the chrome bulldog hood ornament, because every part of my body ached, and I had been run over. But lying on the couch and doing nothing became boring, so I moved a little and cried from the pain. This ache was replaced by dead-calm numbness, which was boring, too. My choice was either to suffer the arrows of death stoically, or push back against inertia and despair, and rage against the dying of her light.
Grief tastes like lemon juice on aluminum.
Grief is a mirage in the desert. A phantom. A shadow that leans against the red brick wall in the corner of my eye. It didn’t physically exist, yet I couldn’t shake its presence. It had no face, but I could smell the cedar scent of its skin, feel the cool of its fingers touch my arm, and the winter-coat weight of its embrace on my shoulders.
Were grief’s shadows black or blue? I became a shadow. While the passage of time continued for the rest of the world, time stopped for me because all of my plans for the future were tied to Evelyn, and without her I had nothing to look forward to, so the future ceased to exist. I existed only in the thin now, twiddling my fingers, and trying to generate the impulse to do something. From the sidelines I watched people rush by like freight trains in their frenzied push to fill their days with distractions and matters that didn’t matter that much in the long run, just tasks to take up the empty hours until they felt they had done enough to be worthy of going to bed, as if the measure of an honorable life is in the quantity of what we do but not in how we have taken care of others.
Friends sent cards of condolence and brought casseroles, but many of them didn’t know what to say, and I learned to protect my grief from those who said they cared but didn’t want to listen, saving my insights and questions for those who did. “I’m fine,” I said to most. For the few who came to listen, I wanted to find the words that were capable of
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expressing the terror and the emptiness, the chaos and the despair, the lingering hope and the remembrance of joy. Perhaps most of them were wounded, too, and hadn’t yet dealt with their own losses. Was this a place of transformation like a cocoon, or was I refusing to accept Ev’s death?
Grief’s emotions have the uncertainty of freckles. How many are too much; how few too little?
Nothing was normal anymore. Ordinary days no longer existed because I knew that death could intrude at any time without needing a reason. I had an urgent desire to tell friends that the barrier between life and death wasn’t as solid as we had hoped, so we needed to do what we thought was the most important, because tomorrow one of us might not be here. A rift had been torn in the fabric of my childhood expectation that most people lived into old age. Too many friends had died young for me to still believe this.
Ev flowed away with the restless movement of the river and into the past, to be preserved in photographs and the stories I knew. But the boulder of grief remained sitting in the water in front of me. I want to believe that my memories of her are accurate, but how will I know if there are holes in the narrative, or if wishful thinking has already filled in some of the gaps, and she isn’t here to correct me? Even if I knew everything about Ev, her memories would not add up to someone who breathes. Will her personality disappear when the edges to her stories are sanded away into generalities by time? The one thing I do not want to forget is how the light in her eyes shone with hope.
When a loved one dies, time divides into before and after, with the wilderness of grief shouldered between them. Old dreams become deficient, and the past insufficient to support a present that does not want to move. Months are spent swirling like driftwood in an eddy as the river flows on. The happily forever after I had been counting on was gone. What do I dream about now? If it’s our dreams that make us, then without dreams, am I unmade?
As long as I was here, I thought that I might as well explore grief’s landscape and try to understand its place in life. I probably lingered
Mark Liebenow
longer than I needed to because all the emotions made me feel alive, which seems ironic for someone focused on death.
Grief was a physical place. There was a there there, in that I knew I was somewhere, wherever I was. Perhaps I am echoing Gertrude Stein that her house, her there, was gone, although both our Oaklands remained, there was a there here, just not the there I expected. Not that anyone ever expects the darkness that grief brings because it feels nowhere.
The longer I stayed in this place set apart, the more tempting it was to remain. I felt the allure of the forever. No one from the world bothered me here, and I could live in the past with my loved one. It was being in a private theater and watching the different movies of Evelyn’s life play over and over. I thought of becoming a hermit who lived alone in a cabin in the woods communing with nature and the spirits of my dead, because I figured that I had had my one great love, and that part of my life was over.
Much of what I believed about life turned out to be illusions, taught to me by my parents and grandparents to soften the hard edges of reality because they needed to believe that the dream was still possible. Society also worked to keep me in line and repeating what others had always done, instead of creating something new. Did my community even remember how to grieve honestly or how to take care of the grieving in nurturing ways? Whom could I trust? People who didn’t understand tried to place arbitrary deadlines on my grief, which wasn’t helpful, so I chose to grieve in the way that felt right.
The Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) of painters in Europe in the early 1900s, rejected the artificial rules of painting and did their own thing. They focused on being spontaneous, used bright colors to express emotions, and painted by intuition instead of trying to stuff their visions into the stilted boxes of overused conventions. Wassily Kandinsky belonged to this group along with Franz Marc and others. Marc painted his “Blue Horses” to express harmony and balance in the midst of society’s unsettledness that would lead to the First World War. For Kandinsky, the darker the blue, the more it awakened the desire in
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people for the eternal. Influenced by Cubist and Fauvist ideas, the Blue Riders moved beyond Impressionism towards abstraction. They erased the artificial lines between physical image and inner meaning, and tried to visually express what was hidden and had no form.
Can I do this with grief? I open my Crayola box of 96 colors and make swaths across the paper until I find the one that I’m feeling today. Sometimes my emotions feel purple or moss green, sometimes it’s gray with a tinge of blue. Is grief limited to what I color inside the lines drawn by others, or how I try to express them? Ev’s death has revealed that I’m not one emotion at a time, but dozens. My face may be calm, but I am a swirling, mottled rainbow of complexity underneath.
Our inner world is as real as our outer one, the one we can see, hear, and touch, because thoughts, feelings, and dreams are inside. Stimulus and response go both ways. Why shouldn’t there be a valley of wonder and light inside us that we can explore like the Grand Canyon?
I want today to mean something to myself or someone else. If what I did today doesn’t matter to anyone, then it was a wasted day. While small talk passes the time, it’s of no great importance, although it can lead to talking about the struggles where people’s lives are coming apart.
Grief has few linguistic handholds in its hard rock face to grasp or climbing ropes and pitons to tether me safely to its El Capitan. Yet risks have to be taken if I am to make my way through grief. Looking up at the mountain, I can see nooks and cracks where my fingers could go and begin climbing. Grief provides a chalk bag of metaphors that I can dip my hands into to improve my grip.
Other nature metaphors work, too, take your pick—Mountain. Forest. Ocean. Desert. Jungle. Places wild and untamed. Places stormy and cold. Places quiet and reflective where I could hear the chipmunks of thought scurrying through the leaves, the wrens of emotions singing today’s blues, and coyotes of wisdom padding by my tent in the middle of night calling to loneliness. Grief was the wilderness I had to cross that required more patience and courage than I thought I had.
I was hoping that grief’s darkness would be the cinematic version of being thrown into an alternative reality with colorful fractals and
Mark Liebenow
kaleidoscope images zooming past, like in Doctor Strange, but the place was just dark. Dark hours when little was visible, only fleeting images. Eternity came down with the stars to pause almost within touching distance, waiting for me to take a step towards it with a future that had yet to be imagined. I lingered in this peaceful silence that asked nothing of me, except everything.
My shadows held hard-won nuggets of wisdom, and I carry them in a pouch.
For a time, even my last place of refuge, the mountains and forests of Yosemite, were empty of beauty and joy because Evelyn’s death took them away. The ground I camped on was hard, thunderstorms were violent and wet, and Steller’s jays complained about everything. Yet, hiking alone in the otherness of the wilderness on backcountry trails gave me the time and space I needed to heal the rupture and find my way back. Over the months, staying a few days or a week at a time, my steps on the path lightened and nature’s wonder and awe returned. The sun rose, and set. The moon with its light rose from the dark side of the earth, illuminated the hidden places in the mountains, and set. They rose again, and set, and light gradually eased its way into the darkness that had filled my life.
A few brave friends came and sat with me in the silence knowing that they would not be able to take away my pain or fill the empty place within me. Yet, their simple presence and their hugs kept me connected to my community. I no longer felt alone.
In the beginning, I thought that grief was the enemy because it had knocked me down, so I fought back. That didn’t help. Then it seemed like a problem to figure out, but there were no solutions that took the pain away or brought Ev back. It became a therapist who kept asking questions and pushing me to go deeper, until the pressure became too much, the appendix of my emotions burst, and I finally understood what grief was trying to do.
Is grief necessary? Isn’t it an obsolete remnant, like the appendix, of a time from before scientific understanding enlightened us, and it no longer served a purpose? A vestigial organ that today doesn’t do
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anything? It may be superfluous, but if we ignore our appendix when it becomes inflamed, we die.
Is grief a wooden totem pole that stands in the center of town, with a raven on top to remind us of the gift of light, but also of death? And below this, a bear for courage. Then a carved frown of shame for our community’s failure to care for the grieving as we should. Or is grief a talisman, an amulet that we wear around our neck for protection, or a ring that we place on our finger to remind us that we have journeyed through fearful places and found the strength and wisdom to survive? Or is it a token we carry in our pocket that we flip every morning to decide which direction to head, each direction now being equal because we no longer fear death and because we desire to live?
Wild, wilder, a wild man in the wild West. The land west of longing. Desolate land, wasteland, the land of no return. I set the bones of my loved ones on the shelf and walk into the wilderness.
Grief is the blue shadow of things past. I think about this as I cook dinner for one, then wash my dishes at the sink, dry, and put them away, pausing now and then to remember what had been: warm sunny days, Ev’s cute little toes, her laughter, also the arguments, and the weariness of holding life together as it constantly threatened to pull apart. The struggle with low-paying jobs and bosses with limited imaginations. Her aches that came and went away, and one that didn’t. I lost more than my best friend when she died. I lost how the rumble of our days tumbled together into an eloquent life. I lost the one person who would always be there if I needed help. I lost the dreams we held in front of us to draw us through disappointments and doubts. We folded and refolded our lives together like origami for 18 years until her hands went limp. Now a flat sheet of paper lies on the table before me.
Is there any redemption in death? Perhaps for Evelyn who died young, full of compassion for every living creature, the reputed litmus test for heaven, before the bitterness, anger, and despair of old age seeped in and muddled her up. Any redemption for me? That I survived? Her death broke me apart, but her love salvaged my heart, so there’s that.
Mark Liebenow
Salvage, savage. Salve in the fathomless dark. Time spools in the unmarked terrain of midnight when there are no hours. Time weightless and forever. I have come to trust the darkness, set aside what I once believed, and exist in the heart’s perpetual night. Everything is possible in a place that is not a place yet penetrates the illusions of ambition, pride, greed, and the curled smoke of regret and sorrow. All are let go. I stand in the water of a dark planet, under the stars and their birthing, in solitude’s long remembering, in an ocean that sways my body with its gathering swells and ebbing, its unhurried reflections, and the caress of sleepless waves. I listen to the distant buoy, and the soft dinging of its bell.
The desire to go on living remains, and I do not want to let it go because my dead wouldn’t want me to, and Ev would want to live, too, if she had the choice. A good life still seems possible, even one that has tattooed me with the emblems of death. And because the joy of living is strong enough to balance the sorrow that the deaths of loved ones bring. Grief has become an old friend who occasionally stops by for tea. I have grown fond of Celtic music with its twining melodies of sorrow and happiness, and I dance with grief in one hand and joy in the other.
In the blue hour of twilight, wild horses graze in the prairies of my heart. Sometimes they gallop in the stillness of night.
John Hoppenthaler mitchelville, SC
In my head, I can’t help but hear the stomp and shuffle, clap and joy
of Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. Draped over live oak limbs, Spanish
moss resembles the gray beards of elders: its resilience, how it assimilates nutrients
solely from air, trapping water and particulates, silver garland
tossing its seed to the winds to survive. For the Mitchelville
freedmen, perhaps it offered solace as they stepped from the Praise House, fatigue and holiness, emergent joy only such dedication
to purpose can conjure. Ghost notes sound the morning mist.
The salt marsh surrounds Fish Haul Creek, just below
Port Royal Plantation where “contrabands” would be enslaved.
In memorium, Toni Morrison 2/18/31–8/5/2019
John Hoppenthaler
Toni, from your Bench by the Road, I look out over marsh grass, gray span of water in the distance, almost indistinguishable from sky but for one thin band of pale blue and, therein, the dark outline of a passing kayaker. I envision him one of the chosen, casting a hand-fashioned net from his bateau, the process unchanged from biblical times, skill passed from grandfathers and fathers, each net begun with 36 eyes tied together with 18,000 knots, 200 hours of labor to create meshwork with a five-foot circumference. Some slaves escaped into the confusion of the Battle of Port Royal Sound, others were just left behind. As in the
aftermath of a hurricane, their owners later returned to see what property
could be salvaged after naval ships and guns disappeared. In the end, it wasn’t much of a fight. Each 12x12 shotgun house had its quarter acre for farming
greens and sweet potatoes. Toni, there’s something in the tortured
limbs of older trees that have withstood too many storms. The last time I sat here, only two years ago, this bench seemed not so weathered.
Now it appears tethered between spirit and flesh, shackles and levitation.
Groups of vacationers, all white and Covid-distanced, stroll by to visit the end of the dock. I don’t think they know what this is. Beloved, there was a window, ten minutes maybe, when it was all silence.
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John Hoppenthaler
Soon elders appeared, faint clapping, stomp and shuffle, counterclockwise
circle, song and praise, haunted chants the prayer house can’t hold. They ringed the building—traversing time, turning to pure spirit before me. They
lifted as one toward the ether, and even Jesus there to usher
toward hush, the rarely seen Clapper Rail calling, riding this cloudy sky.
Dina Greenberg far from home
In a dream my mother flutters through a foreign marketplace in a city unknown but still familiar. She dashes through cobble-stoned alleyways, twirling, then ducking from sight, only to reappear, girlish laughter barely contained behind her flayed fingers. A turquoise scarf encircles her waist. Dime store bangles clatter at her wrists. Saffroncolored tights with a run the length of the Thames. Second-hand Mary Janes, the soles worn paper-thin and translucent. That black knit skirt, pilled from years of slipshod laundering. Furred by a succession of cats whose finnicky warmth my mother covets. An outrageous outfit—not so very different than the ones she’s fashioned in her recent waking life. But remember the peek-a-boo dress—the one whose oval cutouts made two identical picture frames for her tanned, taut midriff? She wore that dress when I was a girl. And she wore an A-line dress then, too, of crisp, lilac poplin. My little-girl dress, an exact replica of my mother’s, itchy where she’d trimmed the neckline with rickrack a darker shade of purple. In the dream I do not chase her—her movements so quick and crafty, designed to elude me. In the dream I do not tend her as she once tended me. Here, plastic tubes no longer tether my mother to this earth. Blinking machines no longer track her every heartbeat. In the dream her legs carry her wherever she pleases. In the dream I cannot hear her beg for home.
Notes on Grieving the Living
Kira Witkin
It starts like this. A text message ends my nap on a Friday afternoon: “Don’t want to worry you, but thought you should know…” My eightysix-year-old grandmother has suffered another stroke. “It doesn’t look good,” my mom adds.
I call immediately, of course. Pretending the phone is cutting out, I mute myself to cry.
I make plans I know my grandmother can’t attend. Can she fly to New York, three months from now, for a Broadway show? Or even, can she make the two-hour drive to Austin for barbecue? No, her answer is no, now, apparently. What about the woman who water-skied, parasailed, and sifted through the Belk clearance rack in six-hour shifts, stopping only for crab salad sandwiches? “She tires quickly these days,” my mom says.
I realize how much I owe her. Not even the sentimental things, like mothering me when my parents divorced. No, of course those things, but really, I mean numbers, dollars, cents. The dog’s ER visit when he ate a bag of Hershey’s from her purse. I said I’d pay her back, but I didn’t. That must’ve been, what, $500? Shit. And the time she paid me to upload pictures to Ancestry.com, but I got too busy. God. What did I do instead?
I’m too depressed to brush my teeth. It’s been like this for months— well before her latest stroke, though this news doesn’t help. When I wake up, it tastes like something died in my mouth. How funny. “It tastes like something died in my mouth,” I say.
I find myself searching the fridge for a pair of earrings.
My wedding’s nine months away. She was going to walk me down the aisle, but now she might not be there at all. I cancel the wedding, no, move it up, no, postpone it, no. Vacillating between pessimism and unearned hope, I’m not sure which is kinder.
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I have trouble staying awake for more than three hours at a time. How completely rude, how ungrateful I am for the life that stretches out in front of me. I take time off from work to visit my grandmother and regret it, knowing I’ll need the days off for her funeral.
ii. after
Two weeks later, released from the hospital, she picks me up in her city wearing pink dangling earrings. “I had a reason to dress up: I’m seeing my granddaughter,” she says.
She’s always seen color in 3D—she has access to a library of hues I’ve never heard of. We still haven’t settled the Great Teal-Versus-Turquoise Debate of 2012 (I still can’t tell the difference). On the car ride from the airport, she says I’d look good in melon.
“Is that orange, like a cantaloupe? Or pink, like a watermelon?”
“Neither,” she says, laughing. My mom, sitting next to her, doesn’t laugh—she continues to survey my grandmother for signs of unsteadiness.
Later that day, we linger on my mom’s porch. Over glasses of my grandmother’s favorite wine, the eight-ounce plastic bottles with twistoff tops, she holds her hand in front of her face. She says she’s checking if she can still see. Her vision will fade if she’s had another stroke, the “Big One,” the one that will kill her. “I do this several times a day,” she says.
Two weeks before, she drove herself to the nail salon without vision in one eye. She didn’t want to inconvenience the manicurists by cancelling her appointment. When she left—when she was driven to the hospital—she apologized to them.
“You just have to make it through this week. For your granddaughter’s sake, just make it until she leaves,” my mom says, as if I’m not there. “And then—until her wedding.”
“You know what they say,” my grandmother responds. “You can say a lot of prayers, but the most important one is, ‘Thy will be done.’”
iii. before
When I was eight years old, buckled in the car with my parents, grandmother, brother, and sister, it happened again: the sudden urge to pee.
I’d gone to the bathroom before we left home—just like I was supposed to, not once, but twice, hovering over the toilet and trying to force it out, even when there was nothing left inside me. A half hour later, my body betrayed me with that familiar fullness.
This time, I sat with the discomfort, not wanting to inconvenience my family in the car. I twisted the bracelet I made at summer camp until it indented my wrist. I loosened my seat belt. I clawed my fingernail into my palm. I berated myself for this fundamental failure of my body, compounding evidence that, as I knew deep down, something was wrong with me.
I considered peeing in my underwear, just a little, for a moment of relief. But there was too much, I was full of it—the pain—so I had no choice but to ask my father to pull over.
It will only take a second, I promised, I’d go behind a tree.
It was just like I expected: he was angry with me, forever angry with me. He seemed gleeful for the excuse to express this, though the whole family already knew how he felt. He said I should have learned my lesson by now. Why couldn’t I hold it like my brother and sister? He repeated the fourth commandment: honor your father. How selfish, how disrespectful of his time to ask him to stop.
Yes, something was wrong with me, I knew this for certain now. I knew how this conversation with him always went.
Except this time, my grandmother intervened.
“Stop the car and let the child go to the bathroom,” she said to her son-in-law.
This simple kindness felt radical. No one ever stood up to my father.
The relief of her intervention poured down on me as I waddled into that gas station bathroom. This time, I didn’t have to hide behind a tree.
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iv. after
“Your turn,” my grandmother says, handing me the keys to her SUV. We’d dawdled on my mom’s porch until it was too late for my grandmother to drive home, too dark for her aged eyes to see the road. My turn. Finally, an opportunity to take care of her—but I wish it could be something else. I’m a terrible driver.
In her car, we face the darkened highway. “What are you looking forward to in the next phase of your life?” I ask.
“Just waking up each day, I think, is enough.”
I am asking about a different phase, an afterlife. It’s clear now that she’s not looking forward to that. Even though I’ve silently disagreed with her Catholicism for years, I’d hoped it would derange her into forward-looking joy. Now I chide myself for the insensitive question— selfishly posed for my benefit, not hers.
I turn on the brights. “Remember what they taught in driver’s ed,” she says. “Just focus on the white lines ahead, in case the lights blind you.”
v. before
She surprised me with a handmade, life-size doll for my sixth birthday. Brown yarn hair, a smile made of buttons, and a flowery purple dress with heart-shaped pockets.
It brought me to tears. Not because I loved it, but because I didn’t want it. “What about Baby Born?” I asked. I’d wanted the doll that drank from a bottle and wet its diaper.
Looking back, I imagine my grandmother at her sewing machine for hours, pumping away like she always tried to teach me, if only I paid attention. I can see her attaching Velcro to the doll's hands, so it could wrap its arms around me in a hug. She must’ve gone over the seams for each finger until they laid just right, the perfect hands for hugging me.
vi. after
Nearly 30 years into our relationship, I learn my grandmother’s real first name. In her garage, sifting through boxes, I see it on an expired
Kira Witkin
passport: Jacqueline Kay. My whole life, I’d assumed her nickname, JacKay, was the one on her birth certificate. An omission of just a few letters, perhaps, but it sends me wondering: do I know her at all?
I have questions to ask her, but I don’t know where to start. So I introduce shallow topics, like what flying was like in the 1970s, what her first car was, how her prom felt. But I really want to ask: are you afraid?
Parasailing with her six years earlier, looking down at the violent ocean, I was entombed with fear I couldn’t verbalize, because I was supposed to be the young one, the brave one.
A decade ago, she visited my apartment. Walking back to her hotel afterward, she tripped and nearly concussed herself. She tried to hide the injury from me, a black eye ballooning by the next morning. How much pain has she not told me about?
She keeps cameras in her bedroom and living room, so her children can check if she’s dead before they enter the house. She’s always been considerate that way.
While dinner simmers on the stove, I help her set up an Alexa device, practicing commands to call for help when the “Big One” inevitably comes. “Call Kelli,” she rehearses. The call goes through. “Call Kathy,” she rehearses. The call goes through. But when she tries my name, the device repeatedly glitches. Instead of a ringing phone, nothing. “I guess I know not to call in an emergency,” she says, laughing. There’s nothing I can do now to protect her.
One morning I wake up to her dog barking like a machine gun. Angry, savage sounds. I jolt awake, naked, and hurtle to her bedroom, where I expect to find her dead. Except, her bed is empty. She’s outside, taking out the trash.
Later, in her shower, leaning nonchalantly against the wall, I see it: Oil of Life body wash. I imagine her in the grocery store, scanning the options and selecting, in a rare moment of decisiveness, this bottle, Oil of Life, in a gesture of desperation. I picture her slathering it on like a balm, a protective layer against death. It breaks me. I open the lid and cover myself in it. But I don’t brush my teeth. I know how it’ll taste in the morning.
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vii. before
Growing up, I obsessed over her Alpha Chi Omega scrapbooks. There she was: sipping whiskey with identically dressed girls, then doubling over in laughter in a ball gown, then sharing a bed with her roommate. She was beautiful. So unlike me, I thought.
When I prepared for my own sorority rush, I brought her to the mall to help choose my outfits. Together, we piled the cart high with treasures from the clearance section. Then she followed me to the fitting room, where I hurriedly tried on each vision of my future, tugging on a new dress before fully removing the previous one. But she stopped me, insisted I slow down, fasten the buttons correctly, flatten the hem with my palm, and take a moment to look at myself.
When I tried this, facing the dressing room mirror, I caught her reflection, smiling back at me.
“My beautiful granddaughter,” she said, pausing time.
I didn’t get into the sorority. Yet those outfits never became symbols of rejection, but an armor of her love, which I wore until they pilled and tattered.
viii. after
I resolve to approach our last days together the way she taught me in the fitting room: luxuriating in the moment, taking time to see our shared reflection before it shifts. But every time I try this, I fail. Pausing in the present, I can only see a future where she’s gone. We’re side by side on the couch, yet we’re already separated by time.
When she laughs—that trademark baritone laugh—instead of allowing myself to be soaked by it, let it penetrate my bones until it's part of me, I record it with my phone to play at her funeral. Looking at her, I study each wrinkle, attempting to memorize its shape so I can draw it with my eyelids when she’s gone. I waste the time we have left together, preparing for a future apart.
On quiet afternoons at her house, I sift through a journal I wrote when I was ten years old, flipping page after page memorializing my childhood unhappiness. My grandmother had told me for years that she “saw the light leave my eyes” when I was a little girl. I’d always
Kira Witkin
thought she was exaggerating, but it’s there, in my own handwriting: an entry about my “dying flame.”
On the next page, the ten-year-old version of me prays to a God I no longer believe in, asking him to protect me, give me the chance to “finish off youth.”
Sharing the couch with my grandmother and mom, I spot an entry that looks different. The handwriting tilts upward, as if buoyed off the page. Skimming the first sentence, I see the word “Grandma.” I start reading aloud, thinking it’ll be funny, shallow, childish banter. But it’s not what I expect.
I wrote that she sees me, really sees me, and loves me anyway. That she gives me hope.
But I don’t read this aloud because I’m crying after the second sentence. She was the reason I was able to “finish off youth”—how will I survive without her now?
“I didn’t catch that,” my mom prompts. “What did you say?” I don’t respond.
“I think she is emotional,” my grandmother says. My mom returns to sorting papers, my grandmother to her sudoku. I lean back on the couch and close my eyes.
Several minutes later, my grandmother breaks the silence. “You know I’m not dead yet.”
ix. after
I cancel my flight home to stay an extra week with my grandmother. I can’t say goodbye.
Leaning against her couch, I sit on the floor next to her legs. I reach an arm toward her, and she traces her wrinkled fingers against my hand.
“You’ve been working hard,” she says, and I know she really means, “You’re not taking care of yourself.” My skin is dry. She hates that. Anticipating this moment, I packed hand cream, but I’d forgotten to apply it. I hope she doesn’t notice my dry elbows, too—she always preaches the importance of soft elbows, should a date need to grab them to guide me on the street.
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As I rest my head against her knees, she starts in on my ears. My dirty ears, I realize as she rakes wax with a fingernail. She’s the only one I’d let inside my ears.
x. after
My grandmother would say that Oil of Life is not a metaphor. That sometimes, body wash is just body wash, and there’s no need to be dramatic about it. And for goodness’ sake, brush your teeth.
xi. after
Before leaving her city, before saying goodbye, I’m determined to cross the last item off her bucket list: ziplining. We climb the stairs together, her breathing labored before we reach the top. She sets a course record for her age.
The technician straps her to the cable next to mine, yanking her by her harness effortlessly, like a baby in a swing. “Brace yourself for the impact at the end,” he says. “People are always surprised when it comes.”
He counts down. “See you on the other side,” she says.
And just like that, I step into the air.
But her toes are still on the platform. She asked to come here, but as she stands at the edge, hundreds of feet above the trees, she hesitates.
What must she be thinking in this moment after I’ve jumped? Perhaps she sighs at the egocentric granddaughter who has made her an unthinkable request: to assuage her personal, selfish grief, ignoring the fact that she isn’t the one who is dying. Or maybe she pictures someone she’ll never get to meet—a mother, a grandmother, relearning to sew just the way she was taught years before, making a doll to ensure her girl will always feel loved.
More likely, though, she sees none of this at all. More likely, all she sees is open sky and smirking clouds and lush treetops that her beautiful granddaughter disappears into.
I am the beautiful granddaughter. I know this now: no, nothing is wrong with me, no, nothing ever was.
She watches me move forward without her in the space ahead. Then, all at once, she lets go.
Kira Witkin
Howling, I turn in my harness, backwards, to watch her travel through the sky.
Virtually
Richard Lehnert
These aspen leaves move with a distant unseen force each leaf spun at infinite angles of quick repose round its single pivot each twig then swiveling around its branch in slower socket turning then the slim bole working Earth’s fulcrum to lever the matching strain of root
In our current metaphor of bits of which all bigger bits are made each leaf blinks forth and back between two states of light one bright the other not if only half the time the rest of time gone into some elsewhen of which no one knows and many speak
To think through this I close my eyes and these aspens and the universe in which aspens are even possible which may have blinked into being only to end in aspens here grown this brain and body only to know the aspen in all things all disappear to blink on in the mind until my eyes which after all are
Richard Lehnert
just another way of saying aspen open wide their two small leaves move on their liquid stems and there the aspens are again
Grief’s Mascot
Matthew Meduri
Tfirst feeders at dawn paired like red quotation marks last feeders at dusk
—Michael J. Rosen, “Northern Cardinal” from The Cuckoo’s Haiku
folklore: passing
he day after my grandfather died, he returned transformed into a bright red cardinal. My family saw this as a sign—comforted by the notion he had not truly left us but rather took the form of a vibrant and beloved bird. He visited each of us, some more frequently than others. His crimson feathers and watchful eye curbed our grief; his song soothed our sadness. Memories and photographs weren’t all that was left.
Four years later, my grandmother died in early winter, and she, too, transformed into a cardinal, light brown and washed in vermillion, joining my grandfather on a branch just beyond her bedroom window, once again by his side. Given the people they were, we should have known that in death they would take flight. To live on the border of woodland and backyard, earthly existence and afterlife.
namesake
northern cardinal
Common synonyms: Red Bird; Cardinalitus; Le Cardinal; Eastern Cardinal; Cardinal Grosbeak; Red Grosbeak; Red Grosbeak of Virginia; Virginia Nightingale
noun
1. a high ecclesiastical official of the Roman Catholic Church who ranks next below the pope and forms the Sacred College which elects succeeding popes
2. a New World songbird with a stout bill and a conspicuous crest
3. the color worn by a cardinal; red
adjective
1. of basic importance; essential; pivotal
2. serious or grave
3. of the color worn by a cardinal; red
From Middle French cardinal, from Latin cardinalis (“pertaining to a hinge, hence applied to that on which something turns or depends, important, principal, chief”), from cardo (“hinge”) + -alis, adjectival suffix.
Cardinalis cardinalis. american ornithological society (aos), formerly aou, 1983
When the strangers outfitted in steel set foot on this land, its residents who were adorned in bird feathers and animal pelts called you red bird. They revered you for your bright color and beautiful song. To the recent arrivals, your brilliant plumage and tall crest resembled the scarlet garments and biretta of their religious officials, so they called you “little cardinal.” Intrigued, they shipped you, either caged or preserved in alcohol, to their homeland as specimens, gifts, and pets. The English called you “Virginia Nightingale” because your melodies resembled that of their own nightingale. However, given the religious undertones and the prevailing ideologies in both Europe and America, it’s no wonder why the name cardinal endured. Folk terms and phraseology,
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given their usage over time, often have a way of working themselves into the dominant or standard nomenclature. But did those early colonizers brandish the clever name out of your coincidental appearance or was it to pay homage to their religious leaders? When they caught and caged you, did they joke about their dominance over their little cardinals, maybe for once feeling a greater sense of authority and autonomy over their lives, even if momentarily?
observation
We were a bird watching family. Not the type equipped with binoculars, telescopes, and the latest edition of the Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds, though we did have some illustrated bird books on the shelf and an old pair of binoculars my mother used to spy on the neighbors. We never planned trips to specific locations, like various national parks or a wildlife refuge to sit on collapsible canvas chairs for hours on end, watching and checking off a list of notable birds. Instead, we stuffed my mother’s collection of feeders full of cheap, store-bought seed or tossed out old bread and toast crusts, and for several minutes, we’d watch them bounce around and peck at the food.
Our two and a half acres of land where I grew up just outside of Franklin Township in Northeast Ohio was a landscape of gently rolling hills that neighbored small farms and open fields, marshland and woods. It was an ideal habitat for various birds and animals. We had rabbits and deer, skunks and groundhogs, snakes and turtles. Sometimes the occasional coyote would come through our property and maim a doe or butcher someone’s cat. Of the many species of birds visiting our yard, the most memorable were goldfinches, blue jays, red-wing blackbirds, crows, killdeer, mourning doves, Canada geese, and hummingbirds, each with its distinct look and call. But the one bird we were most excited to see was the cardinal.
It’s no mystery, really, why cardinals hold our attention. Their bright ruby feathers and tall crests make them beacons as they dart from branch to branch, tree to tree. The bird demands our attention in any season, in any landscape. In a leafy, deciduous tree, they look like dangling fruit. In a cluster of conifers, they hang like little red bulbs on
a Christmas tree. In the winter, they dot the snow like drops of blood. Unlike the sandy taupe of finches or sparrows that blend in with the scenery, a red cardinal won’t go unnoticed. Even if you’re not looking, you’ll hear them belt out a tune. What cheer, cheer, cheer.
As a native Ohioan, I’ve seen cardinals my entire life. They are as common as the white-tail deer that pause to take you in just before sprinting across a busy road, nearly colliding with a vehicle, to reach a nearby woodlot, as abundant as the black squirrels of Kent that have commandeered every backyard within the city limits, every tree on the university’s campus. And even though our grade school science teachers and local wildlife services beat us over the head with the same ten hand-picked facts and holiday merchandise and sports mascots oversaturate us with images of this red bird, cardinals are still a wonder to behold, whether in a flock or as a single, solitary bird.
al vivo: in death, there is life
Perhaps the earliest rendering of a northern cardinal was painted by Daniel Froeschl in Bologna, Italy between 1570 and 1580—the bird perched on a stick, wings folded demurely to its sides, likely modeled after Ulisses Aldrovandi’s caged bird, this artist’s only experience with the crimson passerine. As part of the Aldrovandi’s massive natural history collection, the image is bright, no doubt colored by cochineal, and detailed but dull.
It wasn’t until John James Audubon that American birds would be depicted life-like, practically anthropomorphized, and in their natural environments. The irony of drawing from life or al vivo—a term Aldrovandi used to mean either particularly lifelike, derived from nature, or completely overwhelming the senses—was that most of these individuals were drawing dead, taxidermized birds positioned to appear alive.
state bird
The children will be handed ballots along with their Arbor and Bird Day books. Each child will vote for one of the predetermined birds native to their state or write in the name of another preferred bird. The
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list of native birds may overlap with other states’ lists, but that is to be expected. It is unlikely that every state will select a unique bird, one that no other state has selected, but it would be ideal if neighboring states did not choose the same bird. Teachers should cooperate and allow all students to vote, since democracy is the foundation of America. Teachers will then tally the votes and report to the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The winner of the popular vote will be announced during a scheduled meeting with each respective state’s legislature and will then be adopted by law as the official state bird.
We would like to thank Charles Almanzo Babcock, Superintendent of Oil City schools, for establishing Bird Day in 1894 and Katherine Bell Tippetts, founder of the St. Petersburg Audubon Society and vice-president at large of the Florida Federation of Women’s Club, who in 1927 led a national campaign urging regional Audubon societies and women’s clubs to educate their children about our precious wildlife and adopt state birds as an act of conservation. With this bold act of bird preservation, perhaps our boys will no longer desire to shoot the poor creatures and our girls will not want to adorn themselves with colorful feathers.
observation
My grandpa Fred instilled in us the love of woodland and backyard animals. He and my grandma Ruby lived on an acre of land cut out of a marsh in Kent, Ohio. During the time they lived there, from the late sixties to when I would visit as a child in the early nineties, their street was heavily wooded and sparsely populated. They’re location was deceptive: given the dense woods surrounding their home, you’d never know the neighbors were a stone’s throw on either side or that they lived in the suburbs, let alone the city limits. Similar to my parents’ place, they had an assortment of wildlife roaming their lawn. You could easily get lost in the woods behind their house, which was a thirty-acre nature preserve. My brother and I would often find a small clearing in the brush and try to squeeze our way in, unaware of thorns and ticks, awaiting the inevitable mosquito bites. When we hit the creek, we knew to turn around and come back.
Matthew Meduri
Fred meticulously cared for that modest piece of property well into his eighties, never letting anything go, doing most of the yard work, tending to a rather large garden, gradually painting every square inch of their house more than once, and daily feeding the birds. He’d wake up early and fill his two feeders with seed, miniature red houses mounted with flanges on thick steel pipes, each pipe outfitted with a trashcan lid a foot below the house that served as a makeshift squirrel baffle. But he didn’t stop with seed. He would grab old bread, leftovers, some meat, whatever he thought they’d want to eat, cut it up, and place it on the ledge of each feeder. Then he’d go back inside, make some coffee, sit at the dining room table, and sip his coffee while watching them. Once my grandma awoke, she would join him at the table, and they would have breakfast together and comment on the birds.
My parents told me about a time when my uncle, Fred and Ruby’s youngest, brought home a small white pine seedling to plant as part of his Arbor Day education. Fred took his son out to the backyard, and they planted the tree together. The next year, after it had grown some, Fred didn’t like where they had planted it, so he dug it up and moved it to another spot in the backyard, a place that seemed more agreeable for the tree. Before the end of that growing season, a male cardinal had begun to perch in it. He uprooted the tree and moved it a few more times over the next couple of years, not quite satisfied with its location. Each time, the cardinal found its way back to the displaced sapling. Finally, Fred permanently transplanted it to the far, northwest corner of the backyard where it continued to grow rather tall and house nesting birds for decades until the new owners cut it down.
conservation
Before you sat at your office window that overlooks the backyard to catch a glimpse of the cardinals flying from branch to branch; before you filled the feeder with seed and mounted it on a pole in your yard; before the winged creature tapped at the kitchen window; before you saw one fly into the dining room window and break its neck; before you regulated and then deregulated environmental policies; before you published a State of the Birds report showing over a 30% decrease
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in North American avian populations over the last fifty years; before you formed a forum of government agencies, private organizations, and initiatives to better monitor birds; before you donated money to the Audubon Society; before you sat with binoculars for hours on end and checked off the names of different species from your list; before you banned dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane; before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring; before you published field guides for birding and bird identification; before you adopted state birds; before you educated children on the importance of the environment; before you spoke the term “endangered species”; before you passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; before you destroyed the last passenger pigeon; before you passed the Audubon Plumage Law, which prohibited the sale or possession of feathers from protected birds; before you built wildlife refuges and sanctuaries; before you held the first annual Christmas Bird Count; before the first issue of Bird-Lore; before you organized meetings to convince women to eschew hats with feathers; before you founded and named your group after a man who killed thousands of birds only to paint their image; before you read Ornithological Biography; before you opposed a bill that would protect the passenger pigeon on the account of it being “wonderfully prolific”; before American Ornithology and Birds of America, Systema Naturae and Willughby’s Ornithology; before you taxidermized birds and positioned them with wire and string in order to create art and literature; before caged birds were a commodity that were shipped to England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain; before the land and resources became yours; before you clear-cut nearly all of the forests in order to build houses, forts, towns, etc.; before pioneers, missionaries, Manifest Destiny, and spreading Christianity; before you killed the men, raped the women, and captured and re-educated the children; before your ships collided with the coast of a place you called the New World that held untamed wonders like this bright red songbird.
folklore: two tales retold
i. cherokee
One day a raccoon insulted a wolf while passing him. Out of anger, the wolf chased him. The raccoon came to a tree beside a river, and he
climbed it and stretched out on a branch overlooking the water. When the wolf arrived at the river’s edge, he saw the reflection of the raccoon in the water and jumped in after him. Realizing his mistake, the wolf struggled back to shore, exhausted, and fell asleep. While the wolf slept, the raccoon approached him, took mud from the river, and caked it on the wolf’s eyes. When the wolf awoke, he could not see and asked for help from a small brown bird passing by. In exchange for help, he would give the bird beautiful bright red feathers. The small bird pecked at the dried mud, removing it from the wolf’s eyes. Grateful, the wolf showed the bird a magical rock with red streaks running through it. The little bird painted himself and from then on was a red bird.
ii. ojibwe
Two men lived in a house along the shore of a lake and dug for wild potatoes, the only food they had. Their names were Blackbird and Redbird. Blackbird told Redbird they should cross the lake where they could gather wild rice. Upon arriving, they were met by people picking rice who were glad to have their company. When Blackbird and Redbird went back to their side of the lake, the people picking rice plotted to go to the two men’s house, kill them, and take their potatoes. Blackbird somehow knew their plot and asked Redbird what they would do. Redbird transformed into a tiny red feather. Blackbird transformed into a cactus. When the people arrived, they couldn’t find the men and returned back to their home. The two men feared the people would return, so they left. They both transformed into birds—Blackbird flew to another lake, and Redbird flew to the forest.
observation
Fred and Ruby were a pair. They lived lives of quiet determination, always cheerful, always finding joy in simple things, and never openly complaining—if they did, it was often in the form of a joke. They lived their lives for others, working hard to make sure their children had what they needed, always willing to help someone, despite circumstance, generous with their time and resources, both intrinsic and extrinsic. Fred served in World War II and later worked at the local waterworks while
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moonlighting as a house painter. Ruby grew up on a farm, waited tables at the Summit Hotel, and was a home baker. They lived long lives, Fred dying at 92, Ruby at 93, and though the twilight of their years was somewhat more complicated, they found ways to age gracefully. The last years of my grandfather’s life were spent caring for my grandmother who had developed dementia. He did this until the repaired valve in his heart began to leak, and he showed signs of heart failure.
My parents temporarily moved in with them during the last year of Fred’s life, either staying in the guest room or sleeping on the pull-out couch, rushing home to shower, to go to work, to take care of anything at their own house. In the final months of my grandfather’s life, he spent most of his time in a recliner, drifting in and out of sleep, sipping wine, and doing the best he could to be a good host when people stopped by. Finally, in those last days, he was confined to a rented hospital bed placed in the living room, speaking only a few words, and surrounded by generations of family. The day after he died, a red cardinal came tapping at the dining room window that overlooked the bird feeders at my grandparents’ home, and someone eventually called him Fred.
surrogate parenthood
A cowbird may drop its egg into a cardinal’s nest that is already occupied by cardinal eggs. Unlike other birds that destroy the foreign egg before it ever hatches, the cardinal will tend to and incubate the egg as if it is its own. This phenomenon is known as nest or brood parasitism. In some cases, the cowbird egg hatches first, and the bird proceeds to take most of the food provided by the adult bird, leaving less for the cardinal hatchlings and subsequently leading to their malnourishment and inevitable deaths. However, there are cases where the cardinals have successfully raised both its biological and nonbiological offspring. The cowbird may have abandoned its child, but the cardinal cares for the fledgling as its own, never once questioning the bird or showing it malice. Some people aren’t even that good, but some are.
Matthew Meduri
redbird in a cage: a brief and inadequate history
A bird of this sort, pictured in the guise of life, was sent to me several days ago on the command of his serene highness, Ferdinand, Duke of Etruia, by the superintendent of his garden at Pisa, F. Franciscus Malocchius. . . to be seeing its own image in a mirror, it becomes pitifully agitated, uttering whistles, lowering its crest, raising its tail like a peacock, fluttering its wings, and at length striking the mirror with its beak. (Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae, 1599)
Some months ago, I placed a young unfledged cow bird whose mother, like the cuckoo of Europe, abandons her eggs and progeny to the mercy and management of other smaller birds, in the same cage with a red-bird, which fed and reared it with great tenderness. They both continue to inhabit the same cage, and I have hopes that the red-bird will finish his pupil’s education, by teaching him his song (Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, 1810).
In the morning the first bad news that assailed me was the information that my poor, pretty [cardinal] Reddy was dead! And there at the bottom of his cage lay the little lifeless remains of my late cherished favorite. I believe I have had him a full fifteen years. My beloved Algernon bought him in the Jersey market—brought him in his little corn stalk cage home in his carriage, covered with a silk handkerchief. He presented him to me, a precious gift, and I have cherished and loved him ever since. Ann [servant] and I buried him this morning in the garden (Deborah Norris Logan, Diary entry, 1838).
Few other birds are such universal cage pets as the Cardinal Grosbeaks. They are trapped by the thousands each winter and brought to northern markets. Thousands are shipped annually to Europe, where they are everywhere regarded as cage birds of the highest rank. In Germany it has been raised successfully in the aviaries, and escaped cage birds have even bred in the forests. If carefully and kindly treated, the Cardinal will live for many years in confinement. A roomy cage and variety in food is very essential to keep the bird in good health (Henry Nehrling, Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty, 1893).
In Ohio, a few years ago, a law was made that no cardinal should be caged, and those in cages should be set free. In one small village were
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more than forty freed. This shows how many are caged (Olive Thorne Miller, Children’s Book of Birds, 1899).
They were afraid she was really dying now, so they lifted the lid a little to give her air, but as they did so there was a fluttering sound inside and something flew past them into the thicket and they heard a redbird cry, “kwish! kwish! kwish!” in the bushes. They shut down the lid and went on again to the settlements, but when they got there and opened the box it was empty (James Mooney, “The Daughter of the Sun,” Cherokee Myths, 1902).
It is true that until recently large numbers of Cardinals were caught or taken from the nest while young, for shipment to foreign countries by bird dealers. Owing to the efforts of the National Association, this traffic is a thing of the past. The Model Law, which is in force in all the States where the Cardinal is found, prohibits all traffic in these birds and forbids their being shipped from the State. The Cardinal is too beautiful and valuable a bird to be confined within the narrow limits of a cage, where its splendid spirit is soon broken by its unavailing attempts to escape (William Dutcher, Educational Leaflet No. 18, 1903).
As a cage bird the Cardinal is familiar to nearly everyone; although in confinement he soon loses the brilliancy of his plumage, he often keeps his full song. . . . The Cardinal owes many of his misfortunes to his “fatal gift of beauty.” It is simply impossible that he should escape notice, and to be seen, in spite of laws to the contrary, means that he will either be trapped, shot, or persecuted out of the country. The fact that this bird has not become extinct is a wonderful proof of the endurance and persistency of the species (Mabel Osgood Wright, Birdcraft, 1907).
observation
When residence at a nursing home seemed like a unanimous decision for Ruby, it quickly became a non-option, and she moved in with my parents. My mother took an early retirement to care for Ruby, and my father wasn’t far behind. Life for them over the next four years consisted of making her meals, bathing and dressing her, taking her to church and the ladies’ club, watching hours of Bonanza, The Golden
Girls, M*A*S*H*, and The Lawrence Welk Show, playing dominoes, and engaging her in any way possible to keep her active. During those days, my father began a routine of drinking his morning coffee in their sunroom and watching the birds, specifically a pair of cardinals. The male would fly from the brush that bordered their property to a dead maple tree. From there, he would fly to a smaller dead tree a few yards away, then to the feeder, grab some seed, fly back to the smaller dead tree, and meet the female on the dead maple. The male would place the seed into her beak, a mating behavior, and the female would fly back to what was most likely a nest in the brush. This occurred nearly every day for the next couple of years.
During the week leading up to Ruby’s death, my parents noticed that the pair of cardinals were absent from the yard. The day after Ruby passed, my mother saw the pair outside what was Ruby’s bedroom window, which gave her the feeling that my grandparents were together again. A few months later, she received a card from my grandparents’ next-door neighbor. In the card, the neighbor had relayed a similar sentiment in the belief of signs from loved ones and how it seemed fitting that Fred and Ruby had chosen cardinals. She even had a moment when a female cardinal was at her window, convinced it was Ruby.
folklore: birds of loss
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross tells a brief story in her 1983 book On Children and Death about a woman’s four-year-old daughter who died of cancer. Before the girl died, she told her mother she would send a cardinal as a sign that she was in heaven. On the day of the girl’s funeral, more than a dozen of the red birds appeared in the woman’s lawn, which strengthened her belief in the “continuity of existence.”
After-death communication (ADC) is a spiritual experience that occurs when someone is contacted directly and spontaneously by a family member or friend who has died. Bill and Jill Guggenheim pioneered this field of research during the early nineties after attending a seminar held by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. According to their research, many people report receiving a sign which affirms their deceased loved one lives in “another dimension of existence.” This sign is called a symbolic ADC
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and can come in many forms, of which birds are the most common, namely cardinals. The purpose of these visits, contacts, and signs is to offer comfort, reassurance, and hope. ADCs usually reduce the intensity of an experiencer’s grief and shorten the duration of bereavement.
averno
There is a lake in the Campania region of Italy, ten miles west of Naples called Lago D’Averno, a volcanic crater lake with a circumference of two miles and a depth of two hundred feet. In ancient times, it was a mephitic lake emitting toxic vapors that repelled any animals that came near, supposedly killing birds attempting to fly over. Surrounded by dense forests, it was believed to be the entrance to Hell. In the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, Virgil wrote Facilis descensus Averno, and depending on the translation, this line means “The descent into Hell is easy.” Averno derived from a Latinization of the Greek aornos “without birds,” from a “not, without” + ornis “a bird” (see ornitho-). To the people of that time, hell was a place where there were no birds.
final observation
To watch a bird, as a casual observer, is to experience an animal almost entirely through human emotion. So many of the names they’ve been given (i.e., cardinal), the language used to describe their behavior and habits, and the dramatic and nearly human depictions in illustrations are all ways in which we’ve anthropomorphized these winged wonders. So, it’s no surprise as to why we feel as though we can relate to a fierce hawk soaring through the treetops or a drab mourning dove’s melancholy call or a bright cardinal staring at us from a tree branch, whistling a cheerful melody or tapping at the window. However, they are entirely inhuman: what they do has nothing at all to do with us. Perhaps we project our own emotions and personality in an attempt to better understand something about ourselves. And though we occupy the same space, relatively speaking, we are of different worlds, often separated by glass. I am the observer of their behavior, not the other way around—unless I attempt to breach that invisible barrier. They fly from
nest to branch, tree to feeder, house gutter to bush, but I watch from behind the window at the desk in my office, standing at the kitchen sink, or sitting on the porch swing just out of reach. Their lives are not mine, our relationship symbiotic, if that. We etched out a part of the wilderness for our own residence, expanding their range and providing them a mostly adequate borderland in which to nest. We supply enormous amounts of food throughout the year to keep them fed, so they’ll reside in our yards for years at a time. And why exactly? It’s not as if their survival depends on how often we fill the feeder or how many bird houses we construct and mount in our yards. At this point, anything we do to help conserve bird populations is mostly in response to the harm we’ve caused them.
now that my grandparents are both gone and in the ground next to one another, I often picture a pair of cardinals, each perched on my grandparents’ gravestones, respectively. I’ve envisioned this image dozens of times but have yet to experience it. Each time I walk past their graves, which happens about twice a week in good weather during an after-dinner walk, I look, hoping to catch a glimpse of the pair of cardinals, Fred and Ruby. Another reminder, another feeling, another image, another symbol that takes me back to a time when they were alive and together.
“It’s a great adventure, maybe the greatest adventure there is, and one that never runs out.”
—Philip Gerard
life at leisure
Mary Gilliland Treasure
Treasure the few days to idle. To gaze, socked feet up, distantly at salary or dirt. To chew a celery stalk just for the chew. To tramp (noun—a state), to troll (beneath a bridge where a fierce one always waits to sup a passing tender child). To wait out the wait. To decline. To recline, incline, refine fine nothings. With raveled sleeve, soiled face, to unrat the race. To send the jury out, hung, wrung with—that green music—laughter. To ripple, slough, demystify the plan to lift a finger. To wander lonely, linger, cast off any to and fro, pay and owe, shade, shine, yours, mine. To nuzzle up this setting, confabulated paradise. Lap streams of milk and honey. Boil money.
When the Chestnut Falls Far
Bridget
A. Lyons
My father is obsessed with the American chestnut tree. This might not seem odd if he were a biologist, an arborist, or a forester. Or if he, over the course of his eighty-two-years, had ever taken any kind of interest in landscaping. But he’s a Wall Street guy. Besides money, his passions are fly fishing, opera, and scotch. How the possible comeback of a species that disappeared from the American landscape before he was born fits into this assemblage of interests is a bit of an enigma. It does give me—a tree-hugging former wilderness guide—something to talk about with him, though.
I ask him questions about chestnuts in a desperate attempt to understand the constellation of things he cares about. For many years, I assumed that I wasn’t one of those things. I assumed that, when all was said and done, our story would be one of gradual estrangement. But I wonder, now, if a tree struggling to come back from near extinction might offer us a new ending.
the american chestnut story, until recently, has been a tragic one— not unlike the plot lines in my father’s favorite operas. Prior to about 1904, the species blanketed the east coast of the United States. Its hard, fast-growing, and rot-resistant wood was just what a booming country needed to fuel its expansion. Countless houses, floors, pieces of furniture, and railroad ties were made from the strong, straight-grained timbers it produced. Its nuts were a significant source of nutrition for humans and wildlife as well as a pre-slaughter fattening agent for cows and pigs. Black-and-white photos of chestnut trees show entire families posed for portraits in front of their trunks with plenty of space left on either side of Mom and Dad to give the viewer a good look at the bark. Their giant boughs offered broad-leafed shade on streets from Maine to Mississippi.
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Then the blight came.
All of the nearly four billion trees in the American chestnut’s historic range succumbed to a fungus that arrived in the New World from Asia. Cryphonectria parasitica’s spores spread rapidly on the wind, invading trees through wounds in their bark. Once inside the cambium, the fungus released acids that lowered the pH of the trees to lethal levels. While the blight has not killed off chestnut trees entirely, the continued presence of this tiny organism has made it impossible for them to grow any larger than shrubs in the geographic corridor where they once thrived. These shrubs have thriving root systems and can send up enough shoots and leaves to eke out an existence, but the majestic trees of legend exist only in history.
For now, that is. The chestnut’s ending hasn’t been entirely written yet.
the little i know of my father’s story isn’t tragic at all. In fact, his tale is a classic variation on the American rags-to-riches formula. He was born the third of six children to Irish Catholic parents in Queens, New York. His father was traveling candy salesman who lived on the road, and his mother was a brilliant woman who, after graduating from college at age eighteen, found herself in charge of a full house. She used prescription medications to ease the pain of being pent up with six of them, and my father, the only boy of her brood, made himself scarce. After the family moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, no one noticed that he spent most of his time hunting squirrels on the fringes of the city. Somewhere along the line, he must have done some studying because he won himself a scholarship to a Catholic college in Philadelphia. After serving his Korean War time, he returned to New York City to get an MBA, courtesy of the Army’s GI Bill. Then, he made the money his parents never had. He’s run banks and hedge funds, sat on corporate boards, and appeared on television talking about savings and loan crises. His parents lived long enough to witness their wayward workingclass kid from Queens transform into an responsible, upstanding scion.
They didn’t live to see him have grandchildren, however. My brother and I are both middle-aged and child-free, so that part of the story is in
Bridget A. Lyons
the books. I suppose the dying branch of a lineage might appear tragic to some people, including my father. It doesn’t to me. I think there are other ways to for family trees to grow, other ways to write the narrative of a good and meaningful life. It is on this point that I have always assumed my father and I differ.
my father and i planted two trees together when I was young. One was a Japanese maple, the other a magnolia. I distinctly remember helping my father with the excavation. “You’ve seen the rock walls we have lining our yard,” he warned me. “They all came out of the ground when these foundations were dug. This not going to be easy.” A few fading photographs in an old family album serve to testify the fact that I did do some digging. They also remind me that these trees were, once upon a time, only a foot or two taller than the four-foot me.
While I hit 5’8” in eighth grade and stayed there, these trees just kept growing throughout my childhood and beyond, with only sun, water, and soil to feed them. I think we humans, as relatively short-sighted creatures, underestimate how huge our tree companions can become. Clearly, my parents did, since they recently had to take the magnolia down when its branches started to scrape the sides of the house.
When I see the Japanese maple now—when I visit my parents to make sure they’re still healthy enough to live on their own—I barely recognize it. I would have never thought I’d live long enough to see it tower over the house. Maybe my father did, though. Or maybe he planted it thinking about his grandchildren.
i first learned about recent efforts to bring the American chestnut back from relative extinction from my father. He explained with astonishment that there’s a non-profit organization, the American Chestnut Foundation, dedicated entirely to this endeavor. I listened as he talked about blight-resistant hybrids and gene splicing. “And get this,” he added. “I’ve got a plan for this group to give me some that we can plant at the club.”
“The club” is a fishing and hunting property in the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania that he and fourteen other “owner/
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members”—all men, all wealthy—enjoy and steward. I have a hard time stomaching multiple aspects of the club, most of them having to do with its exclusivity, but I recognize the good it’s doing as well. Not only does the association preserve watershed land, deciduous forest, and stream quality, it gives my semi-retired father something to nurture. When I’ve visited the place, I’ve been reminded me of the days when he went camping in the Catskills with my Girl Scout troop, before he and I both got too busy to spend time in the woods together. So, when club news dominates our calls, I don’t mind listening. Lately, the updates have had less to do with trout and deer and more to do with chestnuts.
As he explained, and as I later read and reread online, genetic engineering at three different levels has created the possibility of restoring the American chestnut to eastern forests. At the most basic level of manipulation, the heritage trees have been crossed with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts as well as other root rot-resistant strains. The resulting tougher individuals have been planted in large swaths across the American chestnut’s original home range. In addition, geneticists from the State University of New York, using CRISPR (gene editing) technology, have implanted a blight-resistant wheat gene into the chestnut’s DNA, creating modified chestnuts with disease protection. Finally, work is being done to weaken the blight fungus itself. By introducing a virus into its genetic material, scientists hope to make the American chestnut’s mortal enemy less formidable.
In addition to raising funds and organizing volunteers, the American Chestnut Foundation serves as a clearinghouse for much of this research. They also periodically give chestnut saplings to people like my father. “Well, they’re not exactly giving them to us,” he explained. “I have to pay about ten dollars per tree. And I have to prove to the organization that we can keep the deer from munching on them, which is going to require some costly fencing.”
“What does the rest of the club think about this?” I asked. “Are they into it?”
“Nah. They could care less, as long as the streams stay healthy and full of fish. But they’re not stopping me either.”
Bridget A. Lyons
I was impressed. This struck me as a worthwhile project, if a bit like expensive and time-consuming windmill-tilting. It actually sounded like something I would do.
sometimes, when I’m on the phone with my father, I wonder how other men his age spend their time. I suppose some play golf and eat meals with friends, others do woodworking projects in their garages or volunteer with local nonprofits, and still others learn new languages or travel. Then, I remember that a lot of them spend huge chunks of time playing with their grandchildren, or making things for their grandchildren, or planning to visit their grandchildren, or FaceTiming with their grandchildren.
I’ve never wanted to have children. I announced this to my parents when I was young, and I’m sure they looked and me with knowing smiles and said that I would change my mind. As the significant birthdays passed—twenty, thirty, forty, and now fifty—it must have become apparent that I was sticking to my guns. To their credit, my parents have never made me feel guilty about this. Still, I once worked up the courage to ask my mother if she thought my choice bothered my father. “Oh, yes, definitely. He loves children, you know,” she said. “He really likes teaching the other men’s grandkids to fish at the club.” I shook my head, wondering what it would have been like to grow up in a family where conversations like this happened when they could have altered the storyline. Then my mother added, “He spent a lot of time with you when you were little. You remember, I’m sure. He likes people when they’re young and impressionable.”
I often think about the interactions I had with my father when I was just about the same height as the trees we planted. We took our German shorthaired pointer down to the lake to run off-leash, we went to the hardware store, we raked leaves and took them the town dump. We also spent a lot of time working on my softball skills. He had been a mediocre baseball player as a teen, and I think he hoped that I would do better. I must have been about eight or nine when my father brought home the two mitts that we oiled weekly to keep them supple and foster
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the development of the ideal softball-shaped pocket. From the start, I had a good throwing arm, so the two of us would stand at opposite ends of the front yard—one of us alongside of the Japanese maple tree, the other backed up against a giant oak—playing catch. “More follow-through,” he’d say. Or, “Hear that? That sound? That’s a solid throw, when you hear that smack in the mitt.” I knew that, and I’d swell with pride when he noticed. “Now, do that again,” he’d say. “Imagine you’ve got a runner to beat.” And I would. After a few years, I started pitching, and these sessions evolved into lessons on concentration and focus under pressure. All too often, my pitches would fling wildly into the air, knocking the buds off of the magnolia. I was, in short, inconsistent, and games were more stressful than fun. I quit before I had any chance to rewrite the family’s history with the great American pastime.
About that same time, I felt like my father disappeared. He started to travel more frequently for work, and, when he was in town, he didn’t get home until after my brother and I had eaten dinner. That was part of it, but not all. I know a lot of fathers with busy schedules who manage to connect with their children. I was still doing what I was supposed to do—getting straight As, playing clarinet, singing in the school chorus, taking art classes—but I was also spending a lot of time watching MTV and debating whether Duran Duran or Culture Club was the better band. I wore mesh shirts like Madonna, and, though I wasn’t allowed to date, I took a great deal of interest in my friend’s romantic pursuits. I debriefed the day’s events every evening on the phone with the three or four girls who formed my eighth-grade inner circle.
Maybe he didn’t like whom I was becoming. Or maybe he just didn’t like that I was becoming. I was a person forming likes and dislikes of my own. I didn’t need careful cultivation anymore, and I didn’t seem to be growing as straight and true as he wanted.
When I was fourteen, my parents told me I wouldn’t be attending the public high school up the street from our house. It was then that I discovered how much of my plot had already been devised for me. I would go to private high school that would assure my acceptance into a prestigious college that would launch me into a career that climaxed
Bridget A. Lyons
with money and success. I’d thought I would spend my freshman year taping photos of the Go-Go’s on my locker and walking home after school with my girlfriends. Instead, I rode a bus in New York City commuter traffic to an institution where my classmates both took calculus and snorted coke by the age of sixteen. I still had braces and glasses and watched M*A*S*H reruns on TV with my younger brother. A month into the school year, when I came home bawling and begging to rejoin my friends at the public high school, my father scowled at me. “What, and just be average? No.”
Soon after, I stopped calling him “Dad” and started calling him “Father.”
the american chestnut foundation, which was created in 1983, wasn’t always on board with the genetic manipulation of trees. At first, they wanted to stick with traditional cross-breeding, the kind that’s been a part of agriculture since the days of Gregor Mendel. By 1990, they’d warmed up to the experimental genetic work being done by a team of scientists at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. In 2013, this team unveiled an American chestnut variant, called Darling 58, that seemed to be resistant to the Cryphonectria fungus. Darling 58 still needs to be evaluated by the EPA and the FDA (because the nuts it produces will become food), so government approval of this chestnut strain will be a long and complex process. In the meantime, it’s launched the chestnut version of the increasingly common GMO debate. On the one side are the pro-modification people who argue that since our species’ movements brought the blight to American shores in the first place, our species should fix the problem. They argue that engineering pervades every other aspect of our world and that we might as well use it to restore a beautiful and useful tree to its rightful habitat. On the other side of the debate, opponents of Darling 58 claim that these genetically modified trees will cross with the few natives that remain and eliminate the heirloom strand from the gene pool. They also point to the fact that Monsanto has been waltzing around the GMO chestnut scene of late and allude to the dangerous precedents that might be set by
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the species’ adoption. If we promulgate this one superspecies, they ask, what’s to stop us from redesigning entire forests with “perfect” trees, all according to the latest fashion?
“It’s ridiculous that anyone would contest the introduction of this tree,” my father said. “Nothing but good will come from this. Imagine: Chestnuts all up and down the east coast again. It would be an amazing sight. What could possibly go wrong?”
I could think of a few things, but I kept my mouth shut. I’d stopped fighting him many years earlier, when I went to college and finally escaped our painful breakfast table debate forums. Whatever my brother or I said at 7am over our bowls of cereal—it could have been an opinion about a homework assignment, an observation about the weather, or an expression of of exhaustion—was met with a contradictory statement. Arguing was a sport for my father, one that he thought was essential to success in his field. Therefore, it was a critical part of our upbringing. “You’ve got to get your juices flowing in the morning,” he would say, as one of us raised our voice to rebut the remark he’d just made. “I’m training you. This is how you get ready for your day in the real world.”
It got me an ulcer diagnosis during my freshman year in college. It also stopped me from sending any exploratory tendrils out into the “real” world.
“so, i need you to make me a flier I can send to the other club members,” my father called to announce one day. “I’ve got to raise $30,000 to set up an enclosure.” The enclosure, he explained, would be a way to cordon off a chunk of the forest, ostensibly to see how the oaks did when Bambi and his parents weren’t chomping away relentlessly at every sapling in the area. And, it had an extra benefit: The American Chestnut Foundation people would sell him some of their blight-resistant hybrid chestnuts if he could get this thing built and ensure the young trees would be protected from deer.
“So, there’s this stuff called ski fencing. Have you ever heard of it? It’s this plastic mesh….” I cut him off. By that point, I’d lived in an Idaho
Bridget A. Lyons
ski town for twelve years and had a season pass to the local resort for most of them. I was quite familiar with ski fencing. “Well, anyway, it’s ugly. Orange, with holes. But it’s perfect, really, because you can move it around.” I knew this too. “I’ve designed and priced an enclosure arrangement that involves ski fencing and concrete pilings. I think it can work.” He went on to say that he envisioned barricading ten acres for seven years, then moving three of the four lengths of fencing to close off an adjacent ten acres for seven additional years, then repeating that pattern twice more. “So, we get twenty-eight years of data on how the forest does without deer, and we get to plant four crops of chestnut trees.” His voice got louder. “In twenty-eight years, the chestnuts will be huge! Not that I’ll live to see them, but someone will.”
Of course, his optimism rests on the assumption that the chestnut tree’s story will continue as projected—that all of these trees will take root, that the new genetic technology will enable them to fight off the blight, that some new pest won’t disrupt their life cycle, that we humans haven’t introduced another villainous plot twist into the ecosystem. In my worldview, that’s too much uncertainty to maintain trust in my father’s expected outcome. But that doesn’t mean I’m not curious about how this all pans out.
I made him a flyer. He sent it to his fellow club members. He did some heavy arm-twisting, and, I suspect, threw down a lot of the cash himself. Six months later, he called to tell me that he was on site with the club’s resident manager, watching him use a mini-cat to place the concrete pilings on the parcel my father had flagged earlier that month. “This is really cool,” he said. “And I have twelve chestnut trees to plant. Anyway, gotta go. We’re renting this machine by the hour.”
Of course, he didn’t ask me what I was up to. But I didn’t really mind.
if you take a seed from a chestnut tree, plant it, water it, and protect it from predators, you can typically expect it to produce a chestnut tree that looks and acts more or less like the one you scavenged the seed from. Parents-to-be are often curious about how their offspring will uniquely combine their own genetics. Many people assume that their
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kids will be ideal mash ups of both parents—in looks, habits, and interests. But it doesn’t always work that way.
I suspect my father planned for me take over his company, although, like most complicated subjects in our family, this one was never discussed. He started bringing me into New York City with him, to his office, when I was about ten years old. My brother and I had fun playing with the intercoms, photocopier machines, and dot matrix printer paper, but I think my father was actually hoping to ease us into the Wall Street environment so that, when the time came, we’d slide right onto the path he’d prepared for us. He did everything right; he pushed the academics, gave me a taste for travel, sent me to the right schools. I got all of the sunlight and water I needed, and yet, I didn’t blossom into the tree I think he wanted. Maybe I inherited an aberrant gene that gave me countercultural leanings, a wandering nature, and a lack of interest in material possessions and money. I bet he would have used CRISPR technology to excise this gene at conception if he could have.
Shortly after I graduated from a stuffy east coast college, I moved west and jumped from job to job for thirty years. Most of those jobs involved teaching in some regard—middle school children, yoga students, budding writers. Along the line, I spent thirteen years as a wilderness instructor, dragging suburban kids like the one I once was through Wyoming mountain ranges, Utah river canyons, and Patagonian fjords, hoping that the time they spent in the woods would foster an appreciation for the land and, of course, its trees. For a while there, I spent so much time camping for a living that I didn’t bother maintaining a home. I didn’t make enough money to be paying rent for a space I only occasionally slept in. Not only did I see places most people only glimpse in photographs; I developed relationships with them. I came to care as much about the land and its non-human inhabitants as I do about my own species. I now consider them to be my family.
I don’t know what my father thinks of the story of my life. For years, I assumed that I was a source of disappointment, if not outright embarrassment. After all, he never asked how my students were, how my kayaking trip was, if I was dating anyone, or where I hoped to travel to that year. He just told me about the weather in New Jersey and offered
Bridget A. Lyons
a full report on how his investment funds were performing, since we couldn’t talk about the grandchildren he didn’t have or the empire I wasn’t building at work. And he routinely asked if I needed money.
on a recent visit to New Jersey, I asked my father if we could go to the club to check out the chestnuts. He said yes and suggested that we spend the night there as well, since he also wanted to show me the trout habitat improvements the caretaker was working on. I packed my camera and journal and hopped into his hybrid SUV for two-and-ahalf hours of nearly conversation-free car time. I asked a few questions about the fund, about his cataracts, about the book he was reading and the Jeopardy champion he was following. The answers didn’t offer openings for further exploration, so I mostly stared out at the deciduous forest flying by through the tinted windows.
After arriving at the club and driving out to the enclosure, though, he started talking. “Look at this. Look how different it is in here without the deer eating everything. Imagine what this forest would look like if they could be kept in check, if the red oaks could really get a foothold.” He undid the clasp and pulled the orange ski fence over to the side. I could see six rings of metal mesh encircling green stakes and headed towards the closest one. “That one’s doing well,” my father said, as I approached a three-foot sapling with a few little branches and a dozen leaves. “And that one,” he gestured to another tree, “is the go-getter of the bunch.”
We walked around the plot, inspecting each of the saplings one by one. I took pictures of all of them, in part to document their progress for him, and in part to look at later, to remind myself of what he saw in them—not just a handful of young living things, but a handful of young living things that he had invested significant effort into acquiring and nurturing. A handful of young living things that he clearly cared about and had high hopes for. I knew, also, that he saw in them the future of a species in peril. I saw that too.
I paused in front of a rather sickly-looking tree and asked if he knew what was going on with it. “I’m not sure. It’s in the same soil as the others, and we dug the holes to the same depth.” I bent over to look at
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its leaves. It had them; they were just smaller. “It’ll do what it’s going to do,” he said, as we turned to walk back to the enclosure entrance.
i’m not as sure of my mutant status anymore. While I don’t think my father understands my choices, it’s possible that he sees some redeeming value in them, even though he wouldn’t have made the same ones— even though they resulted in a daughter who fell far from the tree.
What I do know is that, whether he likes it or not, my choices have forced my father to find new ways for his influence to survive him. His parents lived well into their late eighties, so the family genetics suggest that he could have five to ten more years on the planet. Still, although we never talk about it, I know he is thinking about what a legacy looks like without grandchildren in the picture. He recently told me that he set up a non-profit arm for the club, one that allows him and other members to make tax deductible donations to their conservation efforts. These include research into the effect of deer on red oak saplings, attempts to restore the stream banks, projects that help to naturally control the invasive gypsy moth population, and, of course, the ongoing cultivation of young American chestnuts.
I suspect some of the money he will end up donating to this nonprofit was originally sequestered in a college fund for the children I didn’t have—an account that would have made sure these young humans would have the opportunity to thrive. It turns out the funds will go to making sure some of our non-human family members thrive. I’m more than okay with that.
If he cares about what I care about, then maybe, by associative property, he cares about me.
a couple of months ago, I was mountain biking with a friend along the spine of the Santa Cruz Mountains, about an hour from my home. I rarely drive to go biking, but I’d wanted to explore the trails off of Skyline Boulevard, the north-south road that traverses the crest of the range. I knew there were vast hillsides of California live oaks up there, and that some of the trees had been planted by the Spanish in the 1700s. Seeing them would be well worth the trip. After planning a route that
Bridget A. Lyons
looked like it would maximize technical riding, Bay Area vistas, and oak spotting, we pedaled off to check out some new terrain.
About an hour into our ride, we arrived at a dirt parking lot, complete with an attendant and a few makeshift wooden stands. “Excuse me,” I said, dismounting from my bike. “What’s going on here?”
“We’re a chestnut farm,” the young woman replied. A chestnut farm in California? How had I not heard about this or seen it on the map?
“We’re open every weekend in October for u-pick. It’s by reservation only. We fill up every weekend, pretty much.”
In the process of firing dozens of questions at her, I learned that the farm’s chestnut trees, like the oldest of the live oaks, were planted by the Spanish. They’re European chestnuts, not American chestnuts, but the nuts for sale in big mesh bags looked the same to me. She told us we couldn’t enter the farm itself without a reservation, but we could skirt below it on a dirt road that had a good view up towards the trees.
I couldn’t miss the chestnuts as we rode beneath the grove. They stood out amongst the twisty-trunked oaks with their straight, strong spines and big oval leaves. Their foliage was beginning to turn an autumnal yellow—something the majority of California wild tree species don’t do. The chestnuts looked different from everything else around them, but they didn’t exactly look out of place.
As we came around a bend, I spotted one chestnut tree right next to the road. A wayward nut must have rolled out of the orchard decades ago and sprouted a sapling outside the orchard’s fences. I stopped and got off my bike. I’d only ever seen full-grown chestnut trees in photos, I realized, and I wanted to touch one—one that, like me, had been transplanted to California to begin a new branch of its lineage’s history.
I admired the tree’s serrated leaves while I caught my breath. Then, I reached up to grab a branch and pull it towards my face for a closer look. When I let go, the bough bounced right back up. I smiled, clipped back into my pedals, and kept riding.
update: in the fall of 2023, the American Chestnut Federation withdrew its support for the development and dissemination of the Darling 58 genetic variant. While the trees yielded promising results in labs and
greenhouses, they did not perform as well as expected in the field. In addition, it came to light that an error occurred in early stages of the genetic manipulation process. The American Chestnut Federation acknowledged the public’s existing fear of this technology, and its discontinuation of Darling 58 research is in part driven by their desire not to “erode public trust” in further research of this kind. They continue to pursue other promising paths towards restoration of the American chestnut to its historic range. For more information, see their website, www.tacf.org.
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The september side of light
Noah Davis
On the day no deer dies in the county and every bear finds enough acorns to eat then sleeps the rest of the afternoon into night where they see stars shaped in their image, my beloved and I pick the last tomatoes hanging like slow dripping water and bring the bread from the kitchen and lay in the yard watching two crows who we have named and who have named us fly from the neighbor’s yard where they talked with him while he dug the carrots his husband planted before he died in May, and the neighbor didn’t wash the dirt from the sweet orange skin before he chewed, smiling up at the birds with brown and orange flecks between his teeth, and now the two crows land on the house of the thirty-sevenyear-old woman
who hasn’t remembered her uncle’s hand on her thirteen-year-old-self in almost four days as she makes a bowl of kettle corn popped in coconut oil and sugar and thinks she’ll walk to the bridge and count the shadows of fish drifting across the sandy bottom, and maybe, if it’s not too late when she arrives home, she’ll call the man who gave her his number at the supermarket next to the little tubs of caramel for dipping apples, and my beloved and I hang between their yards, having already forgiven each other for the words said in the tenor of talus slopes this morning over oatmeal, and we eat the heavy bread and chew for so long that we must start a new conversation every time we swallow, such good, dense bread that jaws ache in eating, and we welcome the ease of sun-warmed tomatoes, and tell each other tomato stories, tilling and planting and picking
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Noah Davis
and eating, more tomato stories than we knew we carried, and in this discovery revel until we each, separately, and in two different moments, realize the warmth and release of tomatoes between our teeth is the same as our feasting on the softest, most tender parts of our bodies, and being pulled by that want, climb to the room with the windows facing joyfully west, and lay together in that light different from the day before, detached from the light tomorrow, when deer will die, and bears will wander hungry, and crows will not come to their names, but that time is far from our laying, and this room, and the hundred more stories, heavy like tomatoes, swaying on the September side of light.
The return
Doug Ramspeck
My dead are sitting with me again this morning on my back porch and saying nothing
beneath the berried clouds and the brightening mouth of day, the unperturbed backyard
grass wearing the dun robes of forever. I feel a certain short-sightedness in the chest,
as complicit as the tufts of weeds claiming the neglected vegetable garden. And my dead
sit wordlessly around this table while I gaze out at the pale throat of eons. And if the stars
last night wore the sky as their burial wrappings, this morning the light pools amid the waking birds,
the flesh of day opening to let the years spill out. My lungs know only to draw in this air then let it go,
in the way the years come toward me now then disappear, in the way I used to imagine as a child prayers
rising through the church rafters to get snared in the tree limbs or the clouds. I used to sit in those
hard pews like a boy condemned, my hair slicked back and my shirt top button so tight at my throat
Doug Ramspeck
it was a garrote. But now the alluvium of night has given way to the bloodied entrails of the clouds, and deer in the distance seem waxen into stupor, their heads bowed in supplication.
Letter to Great-Grandma from Summer Vacation
Clara Silverstein
The soaring ceiling of this hotel porch, thirty feet above my wicker chair with brocade cushions of pink peonies would look familiar to you when you wore princess line dresses and bound your hair with monogrammed silver pins that I keep on my bureau back home. Here, I’m beside a lake, weedy and only seventeen miles end to end. You’d have to travel here by steamboat, its hoots loud enough to overpower bird calls. I’d like to invite you to the opera, though it’s sung in English, and a drink afterwards. I should warn you, I like a brash Chardonnay. I sometimes order one for myself and sip alone, even though I’m married. I wear clothes that expose my ankles and décolleté. But I think we’d find something to talk about. I read Edith Wharton and Goethe, too, though not in the original. We’re about the same height so we could stroll, arm in arm, along the shore as sailboats waltz with clouds.
OUT OF THE WOODS – THE BRIGHT FUTURE OF FULL CONTACT RACING
Steven Vineis
It’s just before the last heat in the final race of the season. Cars wrecked beyond repair clutter the oval track. Three cars are still in motion, battering each other and spraying mists of mud upon impact. They’re also trying to avoid the mashups, not wanting to get hooked up on a broken axle or twisted together with a broken-down vehicle. That will make them a target.
I’m pinching two pieces of the throttle cable bracket poking through a hole in Poison Ivy’s hood like the periscope on a submarine. Redbeard’s forehead shines with sweat as he attempts to push a self-tapping screw through the two pieces with a wobbling drill. My thumbs burn as the bit spins, making no notch in the metal—only a slight divot. Redbeard isn’t racing today, but scrubbing in a pit mechanic. If he doesn’t fix this problem, Poison Ivy’s out of the race. He says he hates this design— you’re done for if you drive up under the car in front of you or flip over.
Poison Ivy’s driver, Sam, is knotted up with tension. She runs around the pit, borrowing tools from the other drivers as frantic to get their cars moving. The other drivers loan what they can spare as she chainsmokes and paces. The drill in Redbeard’s hand snaps its bit. Sam hands me a wet rag for my blistered thumbs.
“Zip ties,” Redbeard says. Sam scurries to search some out and I look around the pit of Full Contact Racing Association. Men and women are hunched over the hoods of spray-painted derby cars or laying on their backs beneath their grotesque and beaten cars. At this point in the racing day, it’s all about getting the car back out there for the final heat. The last man or woman with a car that moves wins the pot. And yet, there is no urgency to win today’s monetary prize. Everyone just wants to get back out there for one more rush of adrenaline. The tension of who is going to win winds the crowd up—families have come to spend this November day in the stands to watch the carnage of metal
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on metal. But for the participants, winning is secondary to making an impression. They want the favor of the crowd. They want the rush. They want to race.
Zip ties appear on loan from another driver. Redbeard and I snake them through the throttle body in a criss-crossed pattern. Sam jumps into the car, where she becomes Poison Ivy. She cranks the ignition. Poison Ivy ready.
“Don’t run up under anybody,” Redbeard advises. “You’re held together with chewing gum and duct tape.”
The current heat ends. Skid steers come out to remove the cars that can’t drive off the track. The last of the running cars leave the pit, assemble on the track, and wait. After the signal is blown to go, Poison Ivy runs up under the trunk of the vehicle in front of her.
Redbeard shakes his head. “You heard me tell her not to do that.”
“Yeah.” But it’s not about winning. It’s not about conserving the car. It’s about putting on a show. And the crowd wants to see big hits. Flipped cars and flames. The air brims with danger and spontaneity. They want the real deal.
That’s why they keep returning, because FCRA delivers on its promise.
the home track where I’ll spend the day is in an old soybean field a dozen miles outside of Wilmington. Despite the rough nature of FCRA, safety is a priority. The Bolivia fire department is on-site, praised by every driver I speak with. The stands are diverse—families, singles, kids, couples. One group of children are celebrating their friend’s twelfth birthday with shirts made to salute the occasion. They’re here for Baby Shark—a blue car adorned with a huge shark fin. The children come down to the pit and Baby Shark’s driver obliges every request for an autograph or photo—encouraging the kids to write on his vehicle.
The drivers I meet don’t introduce themselves by their first names. As in pro-wrestling, they go by their character. I meet a driver in tight clothes with her bare shoulders adorned with tattoos sporting long pink hair. This is Cotton Candy. She’s a crowd favorite. She loves the
Steven Vineis
attention and says the biggest reward is the cheering of the kids. Before the races start, she rides on the back of a motorcycle and gets the crowd riled up. Hopping off the back of the bike and posturing and posing before the packed stands, it feels like a pro-wrestling event. There are the fan favorites, the saboteurs, pageantry—and the promise of a good show. Despite the purse for the winner, many of the drivers are here to win a Mad Dog.
The Mad Dog is awarded after each heat of the racing day. The Mad Dog goes to the crowd favorite, and the crowd favors recklessness. The Mad Dog doesn’t always go to the driver who shows the highest degree of racing acumen, but the one who embraces the “Full Contact” aspect of the organization’s name.
i call fcra founder Ryan Roane upon my arrival. He asks me who I am—even though we’ve spoken a few days prior.
“Oh yeah, hi,” Ryan says. “I’m not there yet.” Ryan’s still making his way via his RV to the track. It’s been a long few days, he explains. Between running his own towing business and auto repair shop, he’s been helping other drivers to get their cars into racing shape.
I meet Ryan’s mom and dad in the pit. I sign my waiver that I know the risks that come from being in the pit, which is closest to the action. Wandering amongst the cars—some of which are still being tinkered with before the race begins, I meet Sykobilly and Puke. They both want to talk.
“People only want to see you almost die,” Puke says. Like a dog who begins to resemble his owner, Puke’s car is a mess of multi-colored panels and doll heads and other ephemera. It matches his mohawked appearance and excited demeanor.
I ask about Ryan—no one has a bad word to say about him. They describe him as indefatigable, always working to get more cars going.
Sykobilly’s RV is luxurious. He’s not driving today, even though he’s been part of FCRA since the beginning. He’s just here for the fun. He has an easy smile framed by a well-groomed salt and pepper beard, but there’s a sinister glint in his eyes. Whereas Puke will be out on the track
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in a matter of hours, Sykobilly reclines in comfort and reflects on road stories. Puke adds in details Sykobilly can’t get straight until it becomes a mess of contagious laughter. These are my people. Their reckless travel tales remind me of my aimless journeys in punk rock bands in my early twenties.
Sykobilly is among the crew’s wildest, even if he comes off unassuming upon first glance. Puke admits to having only had a few hours’ worth of rest as he worked on getting his car together. Other drivers will tell me the same throughout the day—their eyelids huge and heavy, clutching energy drinks. As the race starts to get closer, drivers who aren’t participating today like Redbeard and Sykobilly seem to get agitated. They want out there as the stands begin to fill and engines start to rev.
i have yet to find Ryan, and I need a lighter. A new RV pulls into the field a hundred feet away from the pit area. Its driver steps out, a rough looking man in stained white shirt and cargo shorts. I ask him if he has a light. He seems annoyed, in a rush. A few minutes later, Sykobilly says, “I see you found Ryan.”
Ryan’s hard to read. One of those people who slips so frequently between attitudes that you go from comfort to edgy in the space of a five-minute conversation. When we’re formally introduced, he’s smiling and excited that I’m there. Before his ever-present cigarette is halfway smoked, he turns interrogative. He wants to know what might be gained from having a writer around. I feel under evaluation. I get the impression he believes no one in the pit shouldn’t be working, doing something.
The cars are inspected for safety and fairness. No glass. Doors bolted or welded shut. Batteries in the rear. Helmets. Seatbelts.
There’s a reading of the rules, all created to keep the crowd and drivers safe. If a car flips, the race will stop. The firefighters, Ryan, and Whacko will come out to flip you back over if you’re okay to continue. Before the car is flipped upright, Ryan takes a selfie with the driver hanging upside-down—he’s amassed quite the collection of photos from this angle. The reading continues—if you lose consciousness, you’re out. No direct hits on the driver’s door. If the car catches fire, the fire department will
Steven Vineis
put it out. Do not exit the vehicle until you hear the heat is over—even if your car is stuck. As I’ll come to find, cars that I’m positive are out for good might get grazed by a competing driver and be able to move again. Sometimes on three wheels, even two.
my experience with racing is limited. I’ve seen NASCAR, Formula One, a few demolition derbies, and an endurance race my Uncle Bob participated in. I remember him showing me a grainy VHS tape in the mid-90s of cars running laps with the goal of keeping their vehicles running until the others either crash, catch fire, or fail.
Full Contact is unique. I wasn’t expecting the first hit to happen just seconds into the first lap. One car’s rear crumpled but it kept moving. As it rounds the turn, the spray-painted black vehicle collides with another car, sending it straight into the wall of high, hard-packed mud. The car is stuck there until another collision frees it, but now the driver is running the track in reverse. The crowd reacts much like they might from any other contact sport. Constant cheers for their favorite drivers, deep “ohhhs” when the vehicles crash into each other with metallic whip-cracks.
When the heat finishes, Ryan runs out onto the track and points out three drivers. They stand on the hood of their respective cars. Ryan points and the crowd cheers. This is how the Mad Dog is awarded. It doesn’t matter if their car is demolished and done for the day—Ryan, as well as the fans, want to honor their favorite driver.
Ryan passes off his leadership duties and transforms into Frankenstein when he slides through the window frame of his car. He puts on his belt and helmet. I feel I know him better after I see him drive. His car is a patchwork of several makes welded together—hence his moniker. Other cars in the pit might have the front end of a Nissan with the backend of a Toyota, with the bumper off a Buick. I see one car uses bolts to keep together, another has smooth welding. The varying abilities of some of the teams to put together a vehicle is apparent upon comparison. A few cars are whole, but they won’t be by late in the afternoon, where they’ll be gutted of their useable parts and those will be transferred into the next car for a future race.
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Frankenstein is not just an intimidating car, but like the good doctor from the tale—maniacal. Frankenstein tears into the other drivers. Dirt flies. The tires grind into the slick track. Though Frankenstein ends up stranded and dead in the middle of the straightaway, it’s still a target, taking a few blows on the track. The trunk folds in on itself. The frontend caves in. Ryan pops out to pick the Mad Dog contestants, excluding himself, even though it’s clear he might’ve been the craziest.
the race is over. Poison Ivy manages to make it to the final three before the car gives out. Moonshiners comes away the winner, announced by Brad over the PA. There is raucous applause before the stands empty. The skid steers start clearing immobile cars. It’s getting close to twilight. The drivers are looking to keep their adrenaline up, making plans for the night. They’ll party, then pass out in their own RVs, or someone else’s.
I find Ryan sitting on the edge of the track—he looks exhausted, but he asks if I’m going out for Midget Wrestling later at a local bar. He gives me a flyer the size of a bookmark. “They were handing these out in front.” Sure enough, there will be some matches tonight. Ryan acknowledges we didn’t really get a chance to talk, so we make plans to speak some time in the next couple of weeks. I tell him it took about everything in me not to try and beg my way into someone’s vehicle and drive.
“It’s addictive,” Ryan says.
A few weeks later, I text Ryan in the evening to say I want to sit down and talk with him. We make plans for the next day. I drive out to Ryan’s Hampstead home to find it packed with FCRA drivers—all of whom came together after a single group message. We all find chairs in the garage, and stories begin popping out of everyone as the Bud Light flows. Everyone is referenced by their driver name, whether in attendance for our discussion or not. There’s mention of Sykobilly, Puke, Moonshiners, Whacko, Swamp Thing, Poison Ivy, 101, Dracula, Big Will, Steel Bar, Buck Nasty Merica, Baby Shark, Dirty Dawg, Lunatic, Rowdy, Frankenstein, Medusa, Finn, Hooked Up, Streaker…and Walter.
Steven Vineis
Walter is rail thin and in work clothes, sporting a red mustache that envelopes his mouth. He’s quiet whereas the others clamor over each other, adding tags to stories or filling in details about races at other tracks, fairs. They’ll bark and yell over each other, snap jokes, recall missed details. “See what Walter has in pockets,” someone says. Walter looks over to me and begins to pull tools out of his pants and jacket.
“I swear he sleeps with tools in his pockets, like he needs to fix things in his dreams,” Ryan says.
It’s time to talk. “In 2008, scrap metal prices plummeted,” Ryan says. “I had a one-acre field over here behind this Food Lion, and I called all the tow companies I knew and said ‘let’s do a demolition derby and bet on ‘em.’ We went out there and had fun and we did it again and again. So, I went to talk to Brad, and I told him we were doing races out back here in the woods.”
FCRA’s resident announcer, Brad, pipes up from my left. He speaks with eloquence and command, as one might expect from a man often holding a microphone. “I said, ‘what are y’all racing back there, BMX bikes?”
“I hadn’t seen Brad since I was a kid,” Ryan says. “He used to work with my dad.”
“Ryan needed someone to corral these idiots,” Brad says. “Like herding kittens.” Everyone laughs. “I’d been announcing mud races for twenty-something years, and I remember when Ryan had his pink hair, his green hair. In Winnabow of all places, he’s like an alien. Somebody saw him come around once and said, ‘hey ‘bo, this ain’t the streets bo’, this is Winnabow.’”
“Those first races, we were the fire department, EMS, everything,” Ryan says.
“The news came out, and then more people started showing up,” Brad adds.
The other racers from those days nod and begin telling stories of how they learned what to do and what not to do. They established rules, invited new drivers. As the core circle of participants grew, Ryan began to see that they had the foundation for a new kind of enterprise.
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“You get your car in shape, you pay your entrance fee, and that goes in the pot,” Ryan explains. “Some people have come through and gotten too competitive with it and didn’t stick around.”
“They thought it was like a regular derby.”
“If you get your feelings hurt, then this probably ain’t for you,” Ryan says. “I’ve had guys wanting to fight other drivers in the pit. I told them ‘if you’re gonna fight, you’re doing it in front of the fans.’”
“No one here cares about winning,” Puke says.
“What we were doing was different,” Ryan says. “We went to the biggest demolition derby in the country: me, Syko, and 101. It was boring as hell. All the cars were just pecking at each other, because the goal there is to win by being the last man standing.”
State and County have furthered FCRA’s reputation. The folks in Ryan’s garage can put up a track overnight anywhere there’s a good plot of land. Moonshiners owns a land improvement company. Whacko, who used to be a roadie for Bon Jovi—and lives in one of their old tour buses. He’s been in charge of setting up stage shows costing millions of dollars so his mind is sharp to logistics. As I ask after each driver’s occupation—auto mechanic, machinery operator, excavator—I see Ryan’s sly grin appear. He’s got just the right group to help him execute his visions.
The conversation in the room splits into multiple side bar talks. I see what Brad meant about herding kittens. But no one speaks with malice towards each other or other drivers, even the ones who quit because the full contact style wasn’t for them. This tight group of friends are here for the thrill of the race, the professional challenge, the personal achievement of having the baddest car in the pit.
The future?
“More fairs,” Ryan says. “More people wearing our T-shirts, more drivers.”
“Not too many drivers,” Brad says. “Makes the whole day too long.”
“It’s the WWF,” I say. “You need bad guys, good guys—”
“Definitely more bad guys,” someone quips.
“Don’t have to be guys neither,” another adds. The FCRA welcomes anyone with a car.
Steven Vineis
As the unplanned party begins to disperse, Ryan asks me if I want to see his shop. He jumps in my car and directs me through his neighborhood, then tells me to make an illegal turn to get to his place. He keys in a code and opens the door. Frankenstein, or what remains of it, is suspended on a lift. Remnants of past races—signs, car parts, tires, humongous and daunting tool chests cloud the room. There’s even a Porta-John.
“This is a reality show,” Ryan says out of nowhere. The two-plus hour marathon reminiscence has lit his fuse.
I tell him about Poison Ivy in the pit—I didn’t have a dog in the fight but there I was to help Redbeard in any small way, just because I wanted more cars for the last heat.
“It gets to you like that,” Ryan says. He fidgets with one of his many massive tool boxes. There’s a couch in the corner for naps.
We talk about what he wants for the Association. I tell him about how this is a TV show, a YouTube channel, articles, a newsletter. I see the wide angle shots, the overhead drones, the time-lapses of the track being built, the chaos in the pit. The ideas flowing out of my head only confirm what Ryan already knows—he’s got something unique, something special, and it’ll always find an audience. It’s just a matter of expanding.
One could imagine his only problem might become that everyone in the stands starts showing up to drive.
We’re joined by Sykobilly and Puke. Like at Ryan’s house, the conversation slips in tone. One minute we are talking and laughing about road stories of fairs and other derbies, drunkenness and uncivil acts, when I notice Ryan gets quiet. His eyes dart around in his head. His gaze settles on me. He has his crew of friends and confidants—drivers, track builders, mechanics, friends. Now he wants to know where I fit in this world. What I might bring to it. I see it in his eyes, his posture. You’re either on his side or wasting his time. Interrogative, focused, flippant, wound tight or loose, Ryan’s mind is always running, like an assembly of gears more complicated than the insides of the cars he tears down only to build back up.
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Before I begin writing this article, Ryan shares a Dropbox with me. It’s full of video, photos, flyers. It makes me want to smash out the windows of my Altima and make a run to an auto shop and hardware store. I recall a time when I was a kid, watching wrestling on television. The pink spandex and tassels and mullets were gone. In its place was attitude. My little brother and I looked forward to Monday nights. There was no way we could go to bed before we saw the last match, because everyone would be talking about it tomorrow at school. The adoption of more attitude, reality, and insane antics kept us hooked for years. It was a rush just to witness.
Full Contact Racing is no cheap gimmick. It’s loud, defiant, exciting, and reckless. It takes convention and does the opposite. It runs itself. It’s no coincidence that Ryan’s car is named Frankenstein. The sum of its parts make a monstrous whole. It ain’t fucking NASCAR.
Train tracks
Clara Silverstein
This train is heading in the wrong direction. I should be traveling south to Richmond, Virginia after a weekend in New York, not to my home in Boston. I still remember the stops from my childhood: Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, Quantico, Fredericksburg. I picture myself climbing off the train at Richmond’s Broad Street Station. Under a big dome, long wooden benches curve around an oval centerpiece studded with lamps. Everything echoes in there.
When I was ten, it was an adventure to go to New York to visit my newly remarried grandmother and her husband in their apartment on the Upper East Side. My mother had lived in the city as a graduate student and knew her way around. She confidently led the way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As we walked through the Roman galleries, I imagined being Claudia in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, running away and temporarily living there. Another day, we went to an automat, where it was more fun to put coins in the slot and open a glass door with a plate behind it than to eat the stale turkey sandwich that I slid out.
As a teenager, I learned my way around New York, too. Every time I visited my grandparents, I walked uptown to the International Center of Photography in an old brownstone on Fifth Avenue, paying the admission with money I had earned from babysitting. How did each photographer frame the world for what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment?” I loved the patterns that fire escapes made with their shadows, and the people captured in everyday moments of adjusting a shoe or sipping from a glass. For a souvenir, I bought post cards of black and white photos I liked, brought them home, and taped them to the bookcase behind my desk. These images—couples walking hand-in-hand in front of Paris boulangeries, cars on rain-slicked
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cobblestones, mountains reflected by lakes—fed my dreams of one day escaping Richmond and leading an adventurous life.
In college, I took the train back and forth to New England. During the nine-hour trip, I leafed through the books I never managed to read when they were assigned, ate sandwiches and fruit that I brought with me in a paper sack, and made up stories about the other passengers.
I always looked forward to seeing my mom waiting on the platform, her jean skirt and sneakers unfailingly practical. She’d have my favorite Pepperidge Farm mini rolls, bright orange cheddar cheese, and grape juice waiting for me at home. Every morning, she brought up a banana from the ironing board in the basement. “They keep better there,” she said.
It was just the two of us. My father’s life was claimed by heart disease in his early 40s, and my sister was long gone to California. The yellow walls and orange rug in my bedroom offered cheerful refuge from the constant performance of being in college—trying to keep up with the preppies, toning down my enthusiasm because everyone’s shrugs made exuberance seem unsophisticated, wondering if my friends would be lovers and my lovers would be friends.
Today the train clatters north through stops I never made as a child: New London, Mystic, Providence. By now, I’m used to the landscape of snow occasionally blotched with mud. I am moving towards the life I built by scouring out my southern accent. What I took in—the gold dome of Boston’s State House, red brick sidewalks, twisting waterways and roadways— outlined the paths to my adventures. But today I’m looking back down the tracks. Behind me, home, a tableau of comfort spotlit before going dark. Ahead of me, home.
Creamed Spinach, Little Debbie, Emma, and Me
Marc Eichen
i.
Itry to keep my eyes from closing and tap the brakes to slow the car down from somewhere dangerously above seventy-five, jerking it back across the thump-thump-thump of the median.
My live-in girlfriend Emma, her folks, our dog Søren, and I are powering up the Idaho Panhandle. The darkened road with its hypnotically regular broken white line and my uncompleted dissertation, what Emma likes to call “The Big D,” stretch in front of me. I check the rearview. It seems all, including Søren, a charter member of Apnea Anonymous, are snoring blissfully. When I think about The Big D, the dual metaphors of the endless road and snoring aren’t lost on me.
Emma’s eyes open.
“Rolling the car with my parents, not to mention my dog, is not an answer to my question, even if we’re fine and you end up a charred marshmallow.”
“Will you visit me in the burn unit?”
“Yeah. I’ll bring creamed spinach casserole and you can suck it down through a straw. The nurses will think it’s an act of great love and kindness—but we’ll know the truth.”
And there it is: love. What could be at once so present yet so opaque, so infinitely varied yet so singular, so ever-present yet so allusive? When we talk about love, do we believe others understand what we feel, feel it in the same way we do? I love my books. I love my dog. But do I love my life?
I’m a list maker and instead of facing those questions, I chart a mental list of questions I might be able to answer. When Socrates asserts that love is a relational quality, what does he mean? How does Richard Rorty reformulate John Dewey’s notion of power in the service of love? Did we remember to pack the electric toothbrush? What will happen if I don’t finish my dissertation? What will happen if I do? What do I really know about love?
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Emma is still eyeing me from the back seat. When she looks at me like that, with her eyebrows raised and all irony, I wonder if this is just the smoldering long-tail of our pre-dinner fight or her way of underlining its importance.
How, on a cold November night did we all come to be driving those long, loping hills? Those hills with cut-down wheat and pushed-in barns, with double-wide trailers, pre-fab churches, junker cars and pine trees that smell like vanilla and stand tall and straight as buildings.
The elevator version: Jacob J. Einhorn, BA in Sustainable Development from Columbia. Running hard to get away from Mom & Dad LLC and dad’s sotto voce questions that often begin, “With that sort of degree will your development be sustainable?” Running hard from the obligation to comment on mom’s sewn sculptures and dad’s love of opera and old rock and roll. Not that I didn’t find it all homey and comfortable. Not that I didn’t care for them. Of course I did, I tell myself. I just didn’t want to be them by default. Two years getting my hands dirty outside Lewiston building solar greenhouses for the Nez Perce. Met Emma, washed hands, got into the PhD Program in Philosophy at Yale. Present status: ABD.
ABD, in case you were wondering, means All But Dissertation. Emma, prescient at thinking up alternative meanings for all sorts of academic shorthand, referred to me before I took my exams as NQ ABD, Not Quite A Butthead Dufus. The week after I passed she noted, “Changed my mind. ABD must mean All But Dog.”
“How about I pick him out and you can name him?” she said.
“You know this isn’t like you cut the pie and I pick the first piece. A dog is a serious responsibility.”
“So is good pie.”
A couple of weeks later I came home, returning from my weekly reconnaissance as “Professor” Einhorn, teaching two night sections of Western Philosophic Traditions at Tunxis Community College, and there was Søren, curled up on the couch. In the next week Søren would gnaw “every shoe you own, Emma. Every…single…one” seeking assurance of our unwavering love and full commitment to more stylish footwear.
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i asked emma before agreeing to this trip, “Are sure you want to visit your parents for Thanksgiving? You know we could take off between Christmas and New Years and go to Idaho for the vacation.”
“And what would we do there for more than a week? You would sit by the fire wishing you were in New Haven working on the Big D or you would take some giant book and hole up in the bedroom. I would just get mad as hell and go to bed angry. Bad enough before your exams. You brought your toothbrush, coat, two ridiculous button-down white shirts and forty-five pounds of books. And you complained that you were cold and couldn’t read the whole time. No thanks.”
“But I was there with your family, and we passed, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we did—but it wasn’t pretty.”
“These family things are never pretty.”
Emma gave me a look as if she didn’t know me and I pretended not to notice. But I bit my lip, instantly sorry.
“If we go for Thanksgiving, you’ll be able to grade exams before Christmas and then get some serious work done before the next semester begins in February. How about getting a chapter or two done before spring classes and I’ll show you a good time.”
“Do I have to wait till then?”
“You might. We’ve been discussing this in our PhT support group. I think we have a seminar coming up early next year, ‘Sexual Gratification: A Reinforcement Schedule for Peak Dissertation Performance.’”
“What if someone is busy and can’t follow the reinforcement schedule? Do you get someone else to stand in, like maybe Charlotte or Barry?”
She turned on her heel and went into the kitchen, thinking, I suppose, you may be ABD at Yale, but under all that paint, you’re still an eighth-grade boy.
This is another of Emma’s academicisms. PhT—Putting Husbands Through.
She had been going out, ostensibly bowling, every couple of weeks with a group of PhTs to share the strum and drag of it. Mostly to get slightly plastered. I always thought it would take me more than a few beers every couple of weeks to put someone through.
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At first, I must have seemed like a pretty exotic catch. You don’t meet many Ivy League grads banging nails in the Idaho Panhandle, where most of the towns had one school, a couple of stoplights, and a handful of bars. The majority of the bars served beer right from the can, no aspirations to stemware or even plastic cups.
In high school, Emma had a serious local boyfriend, a hometown honey. They were, true to local custom, maybe almost engaged and it seemed everyone wondered, more or less out loud, what would happen after their dramatic, some would say explosive, breakup.
The first time Emma brought me back from New Haven, she reminded me, “Hey, you’ll be nice, right? It’s a small place and we’ll probably run into some of my history.”
“Nice?” I kissed her, “I’m nothing but nice. Particularly when I’m outnumbered.”
Sure enough. I walked into The Express Lane, the main convenience store to survey the goods on offer: baby diapers, car parts, frozen dinners, local meat, school and art supplies, VCR tapes, cigarettes, smokeless chewing tobacco and assorted wrenches. Emma grabbed me and mouthed, “That’s him.”
Before I went up to pay, the guy behind the counter, for everyone’s amusement, said, “Hey, I’ll bet you’re The Professor. We all heard you were coming. You a…vegan too?”
“One hop short on both, my friend. I’m just a grad student. Have to finish school before they let me profess. And I eat meat. In fact, that’s all I eat. Don’t even warm it up.”
He smiled, started to laugh, and flipped a couple of packages of Slim Jims across the counter.
“On the house.”
I liked him immediately.
Truthfully, Emma was the rare catch. How often does someone like me get to date the valedictorian, the prom queen, and the editor of the school newspaper; someone who will get a PhT and think good pie is a weighty responsibility? How often does that person move to New Haven, get a job answering phones for Alumni Relations, and share an
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apartment the size of a medium-width shoe with seven hundred books and a guy making $28,090 a year?
But maybe the shine has worn off. Maybe she’s just tired of living on nothing, not being able to take vacations. Maybe she’s just tired of my act. It could be a million things or nothing at all.
Or worse, maybe I’m the one who’s tired of all that. Maybe I’m tired of my own story and I just can’t bring myself to admit it.
after a couple of years in grad school, Emma and I got invited to my advisor’s house for a Christmas party. This was one of the legendary Philosophy Department End-of-Term parties where the faculty find out if you can keep up with the big boys by sloshing back a large number of dry martinis. I’m a bad drunk and was discretely ditching mine in the downstairs shower. But after we had been there for a few hours, my advisor, Professor Norwood R. “You-Can-Call-Me-Skip” Hansen, the Wilson Bieneke Professor of Comparative Philosophy, came over, put his arm around my shoulders and, raising his empty glass toward Emma across the room, said, “Now I can see why you’re interested in love.” Ambling back across the room, he smiled a sly and knowing smile.
On the way home I mentioned this to Emma and said I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. She began shaking her head like I was as dumb as two short boards.
“I sure hope you learn a thing or two, doing this dissertation.”
That would become kind of a theme for us, Emma and me. While I went through all the maneuvers and poses, what was I learning?
I’m still too embarrassed and too shy to ask what Professor Hansen meant, or, for that matter, what I might hope to learn. He never mentions Emma. But we meet in his campus office, often with his other grad students to talk about our various research topics. I enjoy these sessions—except when it’s my turn. Then it feels like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That last scene where Nancy Bellicec is the only one who can still feel, the only human left. We are all talking about love, reflecting on our own hot, complex, intimate experiences filtered through
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Plato’s Eros and Philia, Nozick’s identity of the extended self, and Badhwar’s unfungibility of the beloved—and feeling what? After a few hours, I want to poke my ear drum with a mechanical pencil just to see if I could still feel anything.
iv.
i passed my qualifying exams and began to work on The Big D. I would be sitting in my tiny office, a cage really, in the basement of the library, surrounded by books with tags that say “Stack Privileges / Out through June 30th / Not to be removed from building,” referring to both me and the books. Emma would call, breaking some daydream or conversation with my office mate, a postdoc from Germany.
“So, want to go out for a sandwich and do some field work at the I-95 Motel?” This would entirely fluster me ,and I could only say something like, “Emma, please.” Of course I wanted to, but truthfully, I was never sure if she was kidding. Did she really want to go have some sort of midday tryst in the sleaziest motel on the Northside. A motel which reputedly rented rooms by the half hour and was a favorite of the med students when the utility closets in the hospital were locked. Or maybe she thought field work would actually add something to my research.
Several times I told her that philosophers don’t do field work. Doing field work would be committing a mortal sin. Your work would be labeled with one of the ultimate insults, sociology. I asked a sociology grad student what discipline they use as the ultimate insult and she said, without skipping a beat, journalism. So, I wonder what journalists use when they really want to hurt one another. Probably, “Hey, you’re a know nothing bum and all you write is philosophy.” But I haven’t had an opportunity to ask one.
When I told Emma that philosophers just read and talk and think, she said, “That explains a lot” with a finality that did seem to explain a lot. What exactly it explained, we didn’t want to explore; whether this included me feeling more at home with my 700 books than with our diminishing handful of mutual friends; whether she liked me better when she met me, back when I was banging nails.
Marc Eichen
Another topic on the list of things we didn’t want to explore too deeply was whether I was going to finish my dissertation. Or the even more significant topic of whether I was going to get a job once my dissertation was done. Once, after one of her lengthier PhT support group meetings, Emma came home, plopped down on the bed without removing her coat or boots and asked if I was aware of the University rule that terminated graduate student support after seven years.
Of course I was aware of this, I blurted out. Why the hell do you think I’m busting my ass on this thing? Don’t you think I want to be done with it, finally? But I wasn’t so sure. The ten-thousand-dollar stipend plus teaching wasn’t much. But compared to zero with a PhD, it sounded like a big, sure number. Besides, Yale gave pretty mixed messages on that seven-and-out policy. There were all sorts of stories about grad assistants becoming teaching fellows and then research post docs to either keep them around past seven years to finish their own dissertations or because they were running some faculty member’s lab or research program.
I had eighteen months to go before we had to find out if Yale was serious about seven and out, but I didn’t want to test any theory that Call-Me-Skip kept me around because he thought I was “quaint”—an anomaly, a philosopher who could build a greenhouse.
v.
i met a guy who had a PhD in geography from someplace first rate in central Massachusetts. He said he was at Tunxis teaching Geography of North America to keep his hand in. But he was learning how to program in rust and was hanging dry wall. I asked him why he didn’t get a job as a postdoc or in some Cambridge consulting mill. He said it was better to be out, really out in the world. He said out there, having a PhD still counted for something. When they found out about him, the guys on the framing crew were impressed and started calling him “Doctor.” Not in a nasty way, but in sort of sweet, kidding way, like guys at their best often do. When there was a problem with a customer or a complaint from a carpenter or plumber, they would say, “Better call The
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Doctor on this one,” or “Well, we’ll have to get The Doctor to make a house call and look into that.” After a Christmas party he sat in his car in a dark corner of the parking lot and began to cry and yell over and over that he was “DOD–Doctor of Drywall.”
It wasn’t a status thing or even the work, having to show up on a frozen job site before the winter dawn. He said that was cool, building the world from scratch while the sun rose. The hard part was getting your heart broken, not just once but every day. One day your life is what you imagined it might be. And then, gradually no one from your old life is calling you back. They treat you like you have some unnamed disease. They don’t know what it is. They’re just sure they don’t want to catch it. Eventually it just feels like a bullet hole, an empty space in your chest. I said I was sorry. And he clapped me on the shoulder and told me not to worry about it. After a while, he said, it scarred over and if you didn’t poke it too much, you could even wear it as a badge.
Emma and I were lying in bed a couple of days later, and I told her I didn’t want to be yet another DOD. I asked her in an absentminded way, did I want to avoid that so much that I was willing to be one of the zombies in Call-Me-Skip’s office?
Emma shuffled the pillows, smoothed my hair and kissed my neck. “You don’t have to answer that question, at least not yet.”
Over the next days and weeks, the instantaneous comfort I felt in her presence was gradually replaced by the slow drip of dread that there would be a day when I would need to find an answer. vi.
“did you see that?”
Emma’s mom, Daisy, is awake and I have a split second to decide whether to take the bait.
“See what?”
I’ve taken it. I’m like a fish, still swimming, thinking that I have a chance, yet knowing the best way to deal with my fate is not to struggle, but to surrender and hope for mercy. The very first time I met her parents, Emma said, “Look. I know my mom is not really crazy, but you’ll
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see. You just have to go with it.” And over time, it became easier for me to “just go with it.” When Emma would start to bounce with astonishment and annoyance, I could say things like, “Wow, that sure is a different perspective. You think we’re going to get any more rain this week?”
I’m always drawn into these conversations, answering a question with another question. So, when Daisy asks, “Did you see that?” it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to answer, “See what?” even though I know what’s coming.
What is coming is a cascade of words and observations, a real-time running commentary on everything. If conversation is the gentle melding of two streams, then Daisy is the Amazon and the Nile and the Mississippi in flood crest, a torrent of words that will engulf everything— every other topic, every other observation, every other thought—in its path.
“I just saw a truck with the license plate KWX 718. Did you know that 718 was our first address when Dwight and I were married? Now I wonder if I’m likely to see another plate with our address when we moved to Minoche. Was that before or after your sister was born? Oh, I don’t know. Look at that color. Dwight, do you have my camera? I’m sure I gave you my camera when I got into the car. No wait, it’s down here by my feet. If I can only get down there. I wish I had longer arms, like Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Søren, just move over and I’ll get it. Do you think I can get him to fetch it? He’s an old dog by now isn’t he. When did you get him? Wasn’t it before you went to New Haven? Oh well. You know, I really think it is harder to teach old dogs new tricks. When Emma was growing up Mrs. Samuels had an old dog. At least it looked old because it had gray on its muzzle. And she taught it to get the newspaper right out of the paper slot under the mailbox. Until one day it ran out and tried to take the paper out of the delivery man’s hand and bit him. And then just a couple of years later she was dead, inside the living room with the TV on. Well, I don’t know...”
Of course, in my head, I’m putting in periods and commas and sentences and punctuation. All that is my editing. It’s really more like, “Ijustsawatruckwiththelicense-plateKWX718didyouknowthat718wasou
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rfirstaddresswhenDwightandIweremarriednowIwonderifI’mlikelytosee anotherplatewithouraddresswhenwemovedtoMinoche...” Just thinking about this makes my headache in wonder. How does someone do this?
Every once in a while, Daisy’s river of consciousness would eddy and spin off a comment or a sandbar of information so perfect, you would run aground on it. Driving to a Fourth of July picnic a few years ago, we passed a local swimming hole. Daisy is making observations on the beauty of the rock formations and trees when she said, “Just look at that water and those rocks. You know I’m sure that we get migrating birds on those rocks in the spring. Just seeing them all together reminds me of the time in the sixties when Dwight and I tried group sex. It was with Donna and Harry, Harry was Donna’s first husband and they lived in Hills. Of course, Harry died right after that. But for a while I just felt like I had melded in and was flying with a small flock. Oh, I don’t know.”
I looked in the rear-view mirror and Emma, who is usually looking out the window trying not to hear, is staring straight ahead, trying to catch every word. Nonchalant as ever, I almost drove into the ditch. Daisy would do this sort of thing, randomly, just to be sure you were paying attention.
Emma firmly insisted she was nothing like her mom. But she was more like her mom than she wanted to admit. She knew more about the world and what was important in it than I would ever know. And when we talked, she would say something that would make my heart almost stop and my eyes widen in wonder for days, even years, later.
I had just gotten my acceptance letter from Yale, and we hiked up to Elk Creek Falls for a Sunday lunch. It was early spring, too cold to swim, but we sat, back-to-back on an outcrop, trying to catch a bit of the warming sun. I asked Emma if she wanted to drive east and live with me at Yale. She hooked my arm and kissed me, saying, “What choice do I have?” And she laughed. I’m still thinking about it, to this day.
When it came to conversation, Dwight, on the other hand, was partially deaf and completely inured to Daisy. After visiting a few times, I began to believe that Dwight wasn’t deaf at all, but only pretended to be
Marc Eichen
so he could step out of Daisy’s stream of words, get up on the riverbank with the rest of us, if only for a few moments, and watch the words go by. His conversations with me were more “mano-a-mano” and would usually begin with, “So, Jacob, what do you think about small cap mutual funds?” I would try to channel my dad and hold up my end as much as possible. But this wasn’t easy since I had run as far and fast as possible away from anything resembling a mutual fund and because at that very moment, I could vaguely hear Daisy going off on some especially juicy tangent.
“Do you think fund yields will be up in the next quarter, Jacob?”
“...you know that Harry left half his share of the condo to both you and your sister. And that should account for quite a bit of money. Your sister says she wants to give her share to the women’s shelter, but I told her...”
“Jeez, Dwight. I expect, er, that fund yields will go up, er, as long as the economy keeps improving.”
“Well, I expect they will as well. But our broker has been telling us, that, at our age...”
“...and then she said she didn’t want the condo interest and would let you and Jacob have it all. Oh, I don’t know.”
I found two of Daisy’s eccentricities to be especially endearing. When she began to run down, she would cover by saying, “Oh, I don’t know,” which I took to be a sort of eddy in the stream. She also had remarkable political views. “I’m sure there is a conspiracy between the eastern bankers and those Japanese companies that make kitchen appliances. I know they are putting TV cameras in those appliances. That way, they can see exactly what you’re eating and blackmail you if you’re not using enough of their stuff, like Miracle Whip.”
You didn’t get to hear these views too often at Yale and I found them refreshing.
Emma accused me of voyeurism. “You just like to spy on them.”
“You know that’s not true. I love talking with your mother because she doesn’t censor anything. Where I work it’s all about self-censorship and self-restraint. But with your mom it’s like a view of consciousness
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without any container of self-restraint. Besides I think they like me better.”
They love Emma more, but I think they did like me better. I didn’t come with all the tentacles and barnacles of family history. At least not yet.
They surely loved the Idaho Panhandle, its sweep and clarity and general orneriness. And they loved each other. You could feel it. They didn’t always like each other. They would bicker about this and that; where were the keys and why did you leave the peanuts in the glove compartment. But after all the years together, they loved each other. And that was something I just wasn’t sure about when it came to Emma and me. This was the Loch Ness monster in our relationship, surfacing occasionally but mostly slowly swimming, submerged below the surface.
Earlier this year, we were standing in line for a movie. Just like that, Emma had asked if I wanted to get married. I never answered her question. But a couple of weeks later, we were home on a Sunday morning, getting ready to walk Søren and I floated it back to her. She said, “Hey, you know what, can I think about that a little?” I felt … what? Relieved? I didn’t want to get married. Not with all this other stuff swirling in my head. But that didn’t dilute my feelings for Emma. I wanted to be sure it wasn’t about what we were supposed to do or what we thought we had to do. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t only gratitude for time spent as PhT. I wanted to be sure it was about love. And what did I know about love, for sure?
vii.
when i’m driving, I can force myself to stay awake. I have a three-step strategy. First, I try and find an AM station that has some sporting event and I try predicting what the play-by-play will be. Not the actual play-by-play, but the patter that doesn’t get on the air between innings or downs or shots on goal when the microphone is off or at least the play-by-play guys think it’s off. “Well, Muzio seems to be having a great year. And since last week, he’s hit three doubles to the opposite field and beat out a bunt. And you know, Jack, how I’ve always loved that
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tie. I just think the blue brings out those flecks in your eyes. But why the hell you wear it with that plaid jacket, I’ll never understand…”
Second, I sing, making believe like I’ve been asked at the last minute to tour with one of my dad’s favorite oldie/goldie arena bands from the 80s.
And third, I give in, pull the car over, and try to sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes. Only once did that result in being rudely awakened by a State Trooper banging on the hood, shinning a flashlight in my eyes, and asking me if I knew who was the President and what state I was in.
But this time we had miles to go. I wanted to repair, or at least begin to repair, what happened at dinner between Emma and me.
We had pulled into a diner and the four of us were just sitting down in our usual table geography. Dwight and I on one side of the table, Emma and Daisy on the other. We’ve been driving for a good part of the afternoon. Daisy had been narrating the landscape, commenting on various relationships. I thought she had said something about how she was glad Emma and I were together, even if it was just something temporary. And from there on, Emma had been mostly quiet.
“Hey, Einhorn, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.” I assumed the open-handed, Buddha pose, and Emma immediately looked annoyed. She kicked me under the table, not hard, and said under her breadth, “Outside. Okay?”
Emma ordered a burger and I got Mac and Cheese.
“We’ll be right back.” Emma didn’t smile as she said that ,and I realized I had misread the temperature of the upcoming conversation completely. We walked into the parking lot as the cold moon was ducking behind the highway sign.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day. Well, since we got here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m getting tired, really tired.”
“We should be at your folks’ house by midnight or one at the —”
“Not that kind of tired. I’m getting really tired of you. I’m getting really tired of your… fooling around.”
“What? I’m not fooling around. How could —”
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“Not that kind of fooling around. You’re not getting anywhere with your dissertation. I feel like I’m wasting my life.”
“You want to have that conversation now? Here in the parking lot of the Miss Idaho Diner?”
“I’ve been thinking about it since, I don’t know when, so why not? I can’t get you to think about it at all. Ever.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, it is so true. Whenever I bring it up you tell me things are good and I should be patient and ask don’t I like living in New Haven?”
“Well…”
“Well, what? New Haven is fine—for you. You don’t want to get on with your life. This is your life. If you finish, you’ll just be doing this, whatever it is you do, but at a smaller, less interesting place.”
I stared at her blankly and I guess that said it.
“See, you don’t really care about us. You don’t really care about me.”
“I love you.”
“Do you? You love having me around. You even like taking me to those parties, when you do. And New Haven is fine, for you. Do you ever think what this, this life, is like for me? I’m nothing in New Haven. I’m so nothing, even you haven’t noticed.”
The truth is, the real truth is that I didn’t. And it made me ashamed. Emma was right.
“So, here’s the deal. It’s either me,” I held my breath, “or you can finish your damn dissertation and do whatever it is you want. But not with me. I’m out.”
“So, it’s an ultimatum?”
“Whatever you want to call it. Just think about it. This seems to be the only way. I’m going back inside. I’m cold.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What? What did you say?”
She looked at me as hard as steel. And just like that we went back inside to Emma’s parents and the Miss Idaho Diner.
I pushed the Mac and Cheese around and made believe our conversation was nothing, but Emma was right. I felt myself sinking into that
Marc Eichen
hole, circling that drain where I just felt like shit and couldn’t think about anything. As I went over and over it in my head, Emma said, “I’m cold.” And I said, “I don’t think so.” And she probably thought I was saying no to her ultimatum. But that wasn’t it at all. I was saying it wasn’t her that was cold—it was me. That somehow I had already become one of those zombies in Skip’s study. I just didn’t know how to make it better.
viii.
the platonic ideal of coffee, somewhere out there, started to appeal as both a way of staying awake and repairing some of the damage.
I have trepidations about this because both Emma and I love coffee. This and Søren are two things, maybe the only two things, we never disagree or fight about.
Coffee in America tracks the American economy perfectly. On the coasts, great coffee, or at least something that aspires to be great coffee, is usually no more than fifty feet from where you’re standing. Anywhere.
Coffee was a separate line item in the budget in both the Philosophy Department and our household. The one major purchase that occupied a place of honor in our micro-kitchen was a Diguo Electric Syphon Coffeemaker. Emma once told me that if there was ever a midnight fire in our apartment, she was going to grab my notebook computer, Søren, and Diego, her name for the Diguo. I was on my own. I had the feeling she might wake me on the way out the door. But I told her that, as long as she and Søren visited me in the burn unit with a couple of cups of French roast, I would understand completely and there would be no hard feelings.
I tried reaching behind me to find Emma’s knee in the bramble bush of limbs in the back seat.
“You awake?”
“Yeah, but I’m the only one. Daisy’s in and out”
“You doin’ okay? Want to get some coffee?”
“Fine.”
“Fine you want some coffee or you’re fine, so you don’t want any?”
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“Fine like I’m fine. It would be fine to get some but also fine to wait.” It came out a little grumpier than I had wanted. I smiled weakly into the rear-view.
“If not coffee, who’s it going to be, Freddie Mercury or Steve Tyler? Mom and dad are not going to sing backup so maybe coffee. I’ll even let you get a couple of Little Debbie chocolate cupcakes.”
“Oh baby, I’m getting all tingly.”
ix.
the northern star beckons like it does to everybody older than fifteen and within 150 miles of Bonners Ferry. It’s after midnight but the place is rocking. The parking lot is full of over the road trucks, smoking girls in jeans and denim jackets waiting to get in without an ID, and local pickups. I can probably get coffee at the bar. I pull the car across the street to the Zip Trip Convenience, closed by this time of night, and turn off the engine. I clean my glasses on my shirt and get out to stretch my legs and check out the scene. An older guy and a babe are in the parking lot talking. Music pumps each time the door opens. The big red neon star keeps time, flickering on and off. Dwight, unsurprisingly, is still asleep next to me in the front. In the back seat, Søren is still asleep too. Even Daisy seems to be dozing, but Emma is looking back at me through the window as if she is seeing me for the first time, or maybe remembering what that was like. Silently throwing questions out into the night and listening for the answers; who is this man? Where are we going, really going? And are we going there together? She deserved an answer. At least I could give her that.
Before Yale, before New Haven, when Emma and I started dating, maybe before we even kissed, we were sitting in a parking lot behind Taco John’s in Lewiston. Building greenhouses on the Res is not a highskill career choice, and I was being paid accordingly. So, Taco John’s was at the top end of what I could afford. That day, embarrassingly, I didn’t even have a chance to shower after work and drove right into town to meet her.
Strangely enough Taco John must have had an arrangement with the local growers. They served… wait for it… creamed spinach. A large
Marc Eichen
order of creamed spinach as a side dish with everything. You order enchiladas and you get them with creamed spinach. You want a coffee and dessert, or even a beer, that comes with creamed spinach too.
After dinner we were sitting in my beat down truck, and I told her there was another woman in my life. She stared at me like a deflated car tire. “It’s…Little Debbie.”
I whipped out, from under my seat, a package of Little Debbie Chocolate Cupcakes and she laughed in a way that said, “Okay, I’m in. I’m all the way in.” And the way she laughed, sitting in the parking lot of Taco John’s with creamed spinach in our teeth, I knew I was in all the way too.
How did I get from there to here? Having studied it for years, what do I really know about love? I make a list.
I know that you never know exactly where you are going to land and that love is more surprising than you can even imagine. I know that love is out there when you least expect it and sometimes you should bang nails and build greenhouses. I know that sometimes your heart will tell you, but you have to listen carefully and quietly. I know there is more than one person out there that will make you laugh and love you, love the earth you walk on, even if you are sweaty and tired and have green creamed spinach stuck between your teeth. I know you should be especially kind to those people who love you the most, not just in spite of the barnacles and quirks they have, but also because of them.
And I know when Emma and I finally go to bed tonight and I sing to her, not entirely unlike Steve Tyler, You Are My Sunshine, and we say goodnight into the darkness, not just to each other but to all those we love; I know it is from the heart, truly and truly from the heart.
“Hey Einhorn. You with us?”
“Ah, yeah. More than ever. Don’t wake your folks. I’ve got this. One large. We’ll share.”
I cross the darkened road, push the bar door open, and look back over my shoulder into the car. I think, what else is there to know?
Jana-Lee Germaine Pitcher mountain
August shakes out her skirts. These days lope into quiet years on the same mountain, holding
my child’s hand, cracked coffee can tied with old rope dangling from my waist.
I walk the gravel path, gathering ripe berries until my tin is full. A perfect circle
of red hangs for hours in the sky: A child’s miscolored drawing until the wind whips
the color away with air that smells of woodsmoke. The baby eats a berry, pleased; plays with broken sticks, little broken babies she rocks, humming to them in her small mother-voice. Watching her,
my soul is whittled to a tiny figure of itself, friable wood, hands
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planed flat. The habit of wanting more. This vice: never satisfied with what I’m given. Off to my left the mountain drops to spruce and pine as the falcon strikes the sparrow. My fists are full.
Purple-black and tart. Put out your hand and taste one.
abandon
Annie Penfield
To port of our forty-eight-foot sailboat, I see a pod of fin whales. We are running off Raspberry Island in Kodiak, Alaska, traveling through the Kupreanof Strait. Unlike the motion of the humpbacks, the fin whales move like great eels, seventy-foot eels, through the unsettled ocean. They spout, and the shine and length of their backs lift, before submerging. It’s a two-part rhythm to the humpbacks three-part movement that often includes breath, back, and then the fluke breaking the surface. This pod swimming parallel to us has more than a dozen whales. Once we entered the strait between the Islands, the water calmed, and now spouts are blowing like popcorn. I stagger out on deck and with one hand for the boat, hold the shrouds, and secure my footing, and stare at the whales surfacing before us.
When friends ask about our sailboat, they assume I undertake this new life chapter as an avid sailor with experience, but I have none. Kent is my sailing experience. When he is at the helm, I feel safe. And this unexpectedly has become a balm to our thirty-year marriage. I don’t feel safe when he drives a car. He drives his car like the F14 he used to fly when we met. When I was twenty that was exciting, but now it involves me screaming and grabbing the door handle. Taking control has been a survival strategy; relinquishing control is a challenge. Being aboard a sailboat is unsettling. I don’t know what I am doing.
I also know nothing of whales. I don’t know how to speak of their anatomy or of their movement through the water. I know nothing of their habits, migration, nor feeding. I know when they swim parallel to us, I am in the company of grace and magnitude and wildness. They are unhurried. They accept our company and keep their course, only yards from us, as if we belong here among them. Their absence of fear and their proximity upwells a hope within me. Perhaps it’s possible we can be good citizens and live together peacefully.
Annie Penfield
When I left my Vermont home, time was ticking backwards to the 1950s. A Supreme Court ruling had decided that my daughters would have less control over their own body than I did at their age. And that the Environmental Protection Agency could not regulate the carbon emissions of power plants. Distressed by our reckless course and climate destruction and control over women, I could not pack my bag fast enough to escape, reunite with my husband aboard Rapport, and set sail beyond communication. To leave people and politics, anger and division, behind and be in the company of wildlife. To be a small boat within a great ocean, dwarfed by whales, overshadowed by mountains, is to be humbled by the forces of nature.
These whales feel older than time, and enormous. There is something lasting and stable, and yet they are also subject to the whims and destruction of humankind. So are too many of the creatures of these seas—the otters, the sea lions, the seals—all nearly decimated by hunting within a generation. The King Crab is nearly extinct. More recently, snow crab season was cancelled due to population collapse. The herring dwindled and then was nearly destroyed by the Valdez oil spill. The salmon overfished. Seeing this big pod of whales feels like a changing tide of hope.
There is little hope for me on stormy seas. On our passage from the Alaskan Peninsula to Kodiak, the swells crested over eleven feet and the wind registered over thirty mph. We would rotate on swells and then rise and fall. Two actions, and not in harmony. The motion of the boat assumed no rhythm. The rollers and the wind both exceeded the forecast, and I had not prepared myself for such turbulence. Kent raised the jib to stabilize us, but when the wind hit over forty, the jib strained and had to be reefed to reduce the surface area of the sail and stress on the rigging and mast. I watched the wind speed number ticking higher on the instrument panel.
The boat heeled and yawed, tipped and pivoted, on the unrelenting and discordant waves. When wind reached forty-two mph, Kent rose and shouted, not with panic but urgency, “Annie, take the helm!”
From my prone position on the bench, I leapt upright to take the helm just as a huge wave broke over the bow, and the boat was tossed
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sideways. “I can’t do this,” I screamed with total panic. And fortunately, my older brother came to my rescue. He and his wife had been aboard only a day, and this was their induction. He took the helm. I grabbed the jib line. Kent was on deck. I watched him, legs wide for stability, releasing a line, wrapping it on the winch. He should have on a lifejacket, I thought. What was that man overboard discussion?
We were tossing around. He did not have one hand for himself and one hand for the boat but both hands on lines. Kent reefed and reduced the sail surface. I tightened the line. He ducked back through the canvas dodger and into the cockpit. I pivoted, pushed myself though the canvas opening, leant over the cockpit wall, and puked on deck. Repeatedly. My vomit spattered the white fiberglass and ran down the gunnels and out the scuppers. The puke rose faster than I could climb out of the cockpit. I would have preferred to make it to the rail and vomit into the ocean. But I couldn’t and besides, the inconsistent roll of the boat would likely have pitched me overboard. I would have slipped between the cables into the sea to join the whales. And once I had puked on deck, what’s a dozen more times? I heaved until there were peanuts coming out my nose, and even when there was nothing left to vomit, I dry heaved so violently, that I, fifty-four-year-old mother of three children, wet my pants.
Apparently, land was visible ahead. My head rested on the side of the cockpit; my legs curled under me, nose stinging, stinking of pee, stomach no more settled, and I closed my eyes to the seas that rose high before our bow and twisted the boat. My sister-in-law asked if I wanted her to go below deck and grab me a change of clothes. “No,” I replied. I didn’t care about my state. No longer retching, I just wanted to be still. I was not afraid. This is what surprised me when I was curled up in my urine-stinking ball and unable to go below deck to change my clothes. I was not afraid—probably because my eyes were closed, and I was pretending this was like cantering my horse. I was curious. This also was not an atypical sailing experience for me, this puking overboard. Thirty years ago, we lived aboard a wooden ketch in Mission Bay when Kent was stationed at Naval Air Station Miramar. Each time we set out to sea, likely began with me vomiting, as we went through the
Annie Penfield
swells created by the breakers. But big seas were new to me. I was learning my limits. I was not capable of taking the helm when the seas are big. That bothered me more than the seasickness. I am hopeless at sea.
But I am here, at sea, working to subdue nausea, while Kent sprints along the deck. He has discharged his work back home in Vermont and been aboard already many months this summer. He has slotted himself into this life so easily. I have not. I still own a business. We have dogs and horses. We have adult children. I commute between Vermont and Alaska while he stays aboard. He has turned himself over to this life. Perhaps this is in his genes. In our attic room hangs an embroidered cloth about the birth and death of a long-ago ancestor: Peleg Kent, a captain living in Marshfield, MA. Perhaps in another time, Kent would have been a captain for his livelihood. Perhaps now, four months at sea in Alaska, he is finally at home, within the small spaces below, and more, the high winds above, and the great expanse of ocean surrounding him. Whereas I wonder how to find my purpose aboard this boat. Perhaps the seasickness is about a resistance to change.
When I am aboard Rapport, I bob on the seas, feeling the rise and fall of the uneven surface—a porous plane I cannot stand upon. I am rootless. I stand on deck, hold the stays in my left hand, spread my feet, bend my knees to absorb the motion. I seek to ground myself on a moving deck, look to the solid horizon to settle my breath, calm my stomach, quiet my nerves. If blood is one chemical removed from the composition of the sea, then saltwater should nearly run through my veins, but blood of my veins is landed. No seafarers in my family tree, although ancestors did come to this country on the Mayflower, become colonels in the revolutionary war, displace peoples from the land.
Being displaced, not rooted, ungrounded, seeking a foothold, letting the ocean move me, I am perhaps open to reinvention. Surrounded by a vast wilderness, the seemingly empty slate of ocean, and a far distance from home, there is an opening to hear other narratives, entertain other ideas, and to slip safely into another life.
Sailboat as vessel. Off the Alaskan coast, far from my farm in Vermont, away from my horses, from my business, from maples, I hold the stays, and let my feet find their balance. The sailboat is suspended
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in grey waters, three hundred feet above the ocean floor. Enough distance to allow a humpback whale to swim beneath our hull with only a blip on the sonar to reveal an obstruction below. Unable to see the depths, seeking to look to the distance, and maybe forget a present, a present of work that I want to distance myself from, let sonar plumb the depths, and try to let go of the stays.
Unbalanced perhaps, but I am aboard—and staring at whales. Kent is at the helm. I marvel not only at his skill but also at the man taking on this middle-age quest which shifts our empty nest from static routines to new adventures. I have turned myself over to his actions and knowledge. I trust him to make the right choice: he may be daring but he is not reckless. That distinction sustains me when the seas rise about eleven-foot swells and the wind picks up past thirty mph. And while I welcome the adventure, I am more passenger than partner. Today, I could not take the helm.
Previously, in acute situations, I rose to the task. Leaving the Tracy Arm Entrance cove last May, we pulled anchor when the wind had eased from fifty-eight to thirty-five miles per hour. Overnight, we had sought protection in the cove to evade a storm, but high winds found us anyway. By daybreak, the wind had eased enough to leave the protection of the cove, and we set out. I was at the helm and Kent was handling the sails. Then, the rise and fall of the ocean, the bow cresting and dropping, assumed a rhythm that I could relate to as similar to the canter stride. Bending my knees and taking up the motion, I relied on the predictability. Visibility was poor. Rain on the dodger obscured vision, but I followed the trajectory set by the navigational system, and by afternoon, the seas were relatively calm. Being at the helm had directed my fear to action and kept my stomach at bay.
two years in, I have built confidence in the boat. I thought after last summer in the inland passage, I was seaworthy. When I took the helm in Southeast Alaska, the seas were tranquil, the water eight-hundred feet deep, and the coast steep and obvious. The protection of the inland passage had me thinking that seasickness and even fear was a thing of my twenties, and my trust in Kent, was enough of a steadying force.
Annie Penfield
Last summer cracked me open to the evidence of destruction: glaciers recessed over a mile from the position on our chart, last surveyed five years ago; hunters we encountered that had shot a small, scrawny bear trying to escape up a tree; rows and rows of trawlers tied up in harbor revealing the volume of fishing and scarcity of fish; the museum recounting horrors of the Indigenous boarding schools; hillsides shorn of all trees. The landscape echoed with plundering and harm. I returned home, considering how could I develop a kinder and more lasting stewardship to the place I inhabit.
This summer, we travel not channels of the Inside Passage but exposed coastlines. The seas off Katmai and Kodiak and Kenai heave the boat in an unpredictable manner. I have had many nauseous days aboard but to yield to my inabilities would be to deny myself this incredible wilderness. What we see far outweighs my discomfort. This remove from the rest of the world has honed my focus on place and my role within it. I hear the breath of whales and the bark of sea lions. I allow my pace to be unhurried. Within this expanse, there is room to reinvent myself. There is nothing here to define me, no neighbors or family, no work, and no customers—no one knows my story. I can tell a new one.
Leaving Raspberry Island behind, we arrive at Whale Passage during ebb tide. The outgoing tide has been known to push a fully loaded tender backwards. Our timing is good. The tide with us, we motor easily through at eleven knots and round on Kodiak Harbour.
We spend a few days in Kodiak City, enjoying lattes and warm scones from the coffee shop at the top of the pier. We take advantage of being in a harbor to head into the hills and hike. My brother and his wife depart, and then we continue to Afognak Island and the Kitoi Fish Hatchery. We hope to see the largest of all grizzlies, the Kodiak bear, feasting on the easy catch of salmon at the hatchery. The forecast is for fog and swells and moderate wind.
Arriving at Kitoi, (nauseous), I welcome the quiet waters of the cove. By the time we drop anchor, and tether ourselves to the earth, I am scanning the shore for grizzlies. And they are easy to find. A boom has been set to contain fish near the hatchery. Fins break the surface,
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abundant like rain drops. Chum Salmon leap and skip across the water. I have never seen so many fish. They swarm like bees beneath the surface. We laugh at the bounty, like we are in a rainfall breaking a drought. We reach our hand from the dingy and try to catch leaping fish.
A mother bear stands neck deep in the water near the netting. She scoops a fish and eats it in its entirety—away from her four cubs (yes four!) sitting on the shoreline. Once sated, she heads ashore and delivers fish after fish to each cub. Each time she secures one, they scramble up a steep bank into the pines to eat in safety. Bald eagles circle overhead, swooping down to grab entrails. Near the hatchery, a cinnamon bear, solo and no longer relying on a mother, fishes for himself, stands in the chute to the hatchery to intercept leaping fish. He pounces and then stands on a fish but the tenacious salmon squirms out from under his great paw. He is bumbling but persistent. He runs along the shoreline in pursuit. We know he will succeed with such plenty around him. To see such ease of survival here is a salve to scarcity. The bears are indeed big, and healthy.
On the other side of the boom, gill netters haul in great loads of fish during a five-day allowance. Within this small cove, there are enough fish to both spawn and increase the population and to fill the nets of the fisherman. Regulation of fishing is succeeding, and so too the work of the hatchery to build stores. This interference with the spawning, this artificial means to improve numbers, feels like the antidote to the interference of so much fishing. It feels like amends and a means to right the balance to add more and not always deplete.
after a night in Kitoi, we transit Marmot Strait and return to mainland Alaska. We sail past a cliff walls rookery, home to hundreds of kittiwakes. The din of the birds is louder than our engine. For a short time, the wind picks up and we raise sails and turn off our engine. I hear the waves against the bow, and sea lions barking on a rocky shore. We are on course for Northwestern glacier. Entering the fjord that evening, we pass through an entrance narrowed by an erratic, a great boulder lifted from inland and dropped into the bay, like the hand of ice depositing
Annie Penfield
an island just here to create this protected cove like a gift to sailors. Black bears roam the shoreline. Climbing in our kayak, we seek to get a little closer and watch them safely from the ocean.
The following day we enter Aialik Bay and anchor away from the congestion of floating ice, but close enough to hear the glacier calving. White hunks slide down the terminus. Seals resting on ice floes bob on rollers caused by the dropping ice. After a day of witnessing glacial activity, we pull anchor. It is still hours until the sun sets at 10:30 pm. Dall porpoises enter our bow wake and race along with us for a time. On the shoreline, rock arches sprout from islands—nature-made architectural wonders. Vegetation embedded in small cracks in cliffs has gained enough purchase to bloom. Fireweed and pine saplings cling with hope to the cliffs.
I cling to this hope. I reach for the sacred evident in each encounter that catches me by surprise: the erratic dropped in the bay, the boom of ice calving, the smell of the whales surfacing, the mama bear scooping fish, the leaping salmon, the chatter of bald eagles, the din of kittiwakes, the clutch of the otter holding her young, and that burst of color sprouting on a rock face. So much determination—and beauty. This place has no regard for us but accepts us. Awe is an agent of change, and this landscape provocative in that it tells me to do better and turn witness into action.
In Prince William Sound, we encounter Olga, a whale researcher. We kayak to the rocky shore and sit outside her tarped structure. A large cooler holds food. A radio is set up on a table in the tent, and a cot. Her son has taken off to the glacier for an ice run. She holds a freshly picked bag of blueberries. She tells us in the early 1980s the humpback population was fifteen hundred and now it’s around twenty-five thousand. I understand how when restraint is applied, a better balance is established. Populations can recover when we behave as citizens in a shared community. Resilience is only an ingredient, but true recovery requires moderation, care, and time.
After a two-week stint aboard, I return home. Last summer this pattern was balance. Alaskan interludes, and then a return to commitments and companions. This summer, it’s not working as well. I
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commute back and forth, from boat to job, from him to home, from whales and bears to dogs and horses. Something has shifted. I have trouble maintaining life as I know it in Vermont. The labor shortages and volatile consumer spending create challenges at work and my ability to sustain these two parallel lives strains. Work piles up on each side of my trip and I return home to a frantic pace, impossible to meet expectations. This marriage of places is no longer sustainable. The self that is larger in Alaska is not fitting into the routines of Vermont. I cannot so easily insert myself into life as I knew it but now seek to transform life as I know it to create work that holds both experiences. To work to protect these places of wonder, in our own backyards. To find ways to support regeneration of our rural economy. To take what I have witnessed in Alaska and apply it here at home. I must create vast open space within myself, listen to the sounds and narratives here, and be an agent of change to commit to ways to reduce our impact on our places. Together for a time aboard, and then home alone for longer times. During our separations, Kent is often unreachable. On random days, I receive a text with a video of a bear chasing salmon, or the fluke of a whale. I might text off a question to him about work. He will reply with a photo of humpbacks bubble feeding, breaking through the ocean surface, rising together like a crescendo in a great ring before his bow. Or the sunrise pink above mountains after sailing through the night. I see this as I drink my coffee and stare out the window to our pastured horses before a hillside of trees lighting up with color. A deer grazed earlier but has slipped away like the mists of the cooler fall temperatures. A raft of turkeys lingers in a far corner. My phone pings with his texts—a sunrise, a porpoise, an orca—as I watch the wonder outside my Vermont window. I can see into his world, from my place within mine. We work to share our worlds lest they be irreconcilable.
A text arrives: a video of whales bubble-feeding (yes, a second).
My reply: I was defrauded 10k in a counterfeit check writing scheme at work this week (a first).
His reply: holy smokes.
The texts go from blue to green to gone, from three bars of cell service to one, to none, and I won’t hear from him for days.
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in late september, I join Kent in Ketchikan to sail through the Inside Passage of British Columbia. As whales too migrate south, I hope for a bubble feed. Days are shorter and our travel exceeds the light each day as we try to cover the length of British Columbia in a week. This is a last dose of this wilderness before winter. A last opportunity for the wild to speak to me, to offer me a course for my future. We are again within protected passages, not the exposure of Kodiak and Kenai, but narrow straits through archipelagos. I take the helm, but autopilot does all the work.
What am I doing here, aboard this boat in Alaska, morphs into I am here. I am a person of goals and agendas, but to force an agenda would be to force an outcome. To see what arises allows more opportunity and less tension around expectations. I may not see the bubble feed, but what will I see? Maybe the purpose aboard is to Be. Here. Now. In three breaths, like a three-part rhythm. Unhurried. To be a blank space that the experience of wildlife can fill. To be puking, and to be humbled. To be vulnerable and allow the awe. And this has been Alaska to me: quiet moments that explode into astonishment. This wildness seen from aboard Rapport has served up magic daily in so many unexpected moments. This wildlife is unconcerned with our presence. So unhurried, and me feeling the rush from this glimpse at their world and accepting a pace dictated only by tides and winds.
Days south of Ketchikan and two days north of Vancouver, as the sun rose blush behind the mountains of British Colombia, I sat, holding tea, wearing a wool hat, across from Kent in the cockpit of Rapport. He was on his third cup of coffee. He had awakened way before dawn, before five AM, pulled anchor, and motored out of Horsefly Cove into Grenville Channel, while I slept below deck. Two hours later, as the sun rose, I joined him. We see a spout in the distance, and we adjust our course. Three spouts ahead, and more behind. Whales. Humpback whales surrounding us on all sides. The sun not yet above the backdrop of mountains. We are in a large strait of calm waters. Together, in the company of whales.
I push through the canvas dodger and stand in socks on the damp deck, focus a lens on the whales. I hope to capture multiple spouts,
geyser of breath and water, caught in the backdrop of the pinking up sky. Instead, I capture an entire whale, forty yards from us, rising from the ocean. The great length emerges fully from the water, twists, and lands on his back, and great white waves telescope outwards, exposing the real enormity of the whale. I hold my breath and exhale as the great blow of whale breath mingled with mist carries across the water. The sun rises. Again, the whale’s great grace arcs over the surface of grey waters. I watch as the whale falls again into the ocean with abandon.
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Contributors Notes
Leonardo Chung is an avid young writer from Phillips Exeter Academy who has attended several programs such as Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, and Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He has been published by Hyacinth Review, Across the Margin, Sweet Literary, Sheila-Na-Gig, Clackamas Literary Review, and many others. He was awarded second place in the William Faulkner Literary Competition, first place in a Poetry Society of Virginia competition, a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, and included in Brushstrokes III: Ros Spencer Poetry Contest Anthology. He takes inspiration from distinguished poets such as Langston Hughes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Louise Glück.
Kelsea Conlin is a writer who lives in southern New Hampshire. She received an MA in Teaching Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and has been a writing coach for over a decade. This is her first publication.
Noah Davis’ poetry collection The Last Beast We Revel In is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. Davis’ first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, and North American Review among others. His work has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and now lives with his wife, Nikea.
Todd Davis is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Coffin Honey and Native Species, both published by Michigan State University Press. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg Uni-
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versity Book Prize. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Orion, and Southern Humanities Review. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
Gregory Donovan is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015), and the co-editor of Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry (Diode Editions, 2020), a collection of extended interviews conducted with thirteen nationally prominent poets in the making of the documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet, for which Donovan was a producer. He serves on the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a founding editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.
Kristen Dorsey is a writer, USMC veteran, and award-winning visual artist. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, Collateral Journal, Press Pause Press, Atlantis, Written Tales Magazine, and is upcoming in Litmoshpere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, where her nonfiction was a finalist in the Lit/South Awards. Dorsey’s nonfiction work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Readers can find these and other writing samples on her website, KristenDorseyArtist.com.
Amity Doyle is fourteen-years-old and an eighth grader living in Katonah, New York. Her previous poems have been published in The Louisville Review, Stone Soup, and Chicago Young Writers Review. She was chosen by judge Billy Collins as a winner of the New York Botanical Gardens Young Poets contest, and her poetry has received a Gold Key from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Amity enjoys dancing, writing, drawing, and wearing fabulous hats.
Marc Eichen has a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University with a research specialization in redistricting and very large, localized datasets pertaining to political geography and natural resource
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management. Since 2015 he has had an appointment as a Visiting Faculty member at the State University of Zanzibar. His fiction focuses on life in Zanzibar and in red-state America. His stories have appeared in Still Points Arts Quarterly, The Adirondack Review, West Trade Review, and Toyon. He is the winner of the Richard Cortez Day Prize in Fiction. Current projects include a book of short stories in both Swahili and English to be published in fall 2023, a mystery set in Zanzibar and a novel of loss and renewal set in Sandpoint, Idaho.
Janice Eidus is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She has traveled, lived, and written throughout the U.S., Central America, and Europe. Her novels include Faithful Rebecca, Urban Bliss, The War of the Rosens, and The Last Jewish Virgin. Her short story collections include Vito Loves Geraldine and The Celibacy Club. Her fiction and essays appear in many leading magazines and in over fifty anthologies. Her awards include two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and an Independent Publisher Book Award. She often writes in the mornings at her beloved “writer’s corner” table at the iconic Algonquin Hotel.
Timothy Geiger runs a small farm in Swanton, Ohio, when he's not teaching Creative Writing and Book Arts at The University of Toledo. His newest poetry collection In a Field of Hallowed Be will be published by Terrapin Books in September 2024. He has also published three other poetry collections, most recently Weatherbox (Cloudbank Books, winner of the 2019 Vern Rutsala Prize). Some newer poems appear in Poetry South, Plainsongs, and Tar River Poetry.
Jana-Lee Germaine is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She is Senior Poetry Reader for Ploughshares. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, EcoTheo Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Emerson College. She lives with her husband, four children, and four rescue cats in semi-rural Massachusetts. She is a member of the Board
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of Trustees for her local public library, and she can be found online at janaleegermaine.com.
Mary Gilliland, of Ithaca, NY, is an eco-activist and the author of two award-winning collections: The Devil’s Fools (Codhill Press 2022) and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (Bright Hill Press 2020), with poems anthologized most recently in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems on Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice; Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands; and Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She is a past recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant. Her new poetry book is Ember Days (Codhill Press 2024).
Dina Greenberg’s trauma-informed writing and advocacy gives voice to survivors of war, displacement, and sexual violence. She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and The Millions. Her novel, Nermina’s Chance, begins in war-torn 1992 Bosnia. She is now at work on an interview series focused on women of the Bosnian diaspora and a second book of historical fiction. Find her at: dinagreenberg.com
John Hoppenthaler’s most recent collection of poetry is Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area (Carnegie Mellon UP). Earlier collections include Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University, he also serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks.
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Mary Jane Kidd lives in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, where she was an associate professor in the Edinboro University Art Department. Though art was her career path, writing was of equal importance. She began journaling in her teens and has continued with that throughout her life as well as writing poetry, prose poetry and memoir. She has exhibited paintings, collage and book art regionally and nationally and has attended many writing workshops and classes. Her work has been published in regional and national poetry journals and anthologies.
Keith Kopka received the 2019 Tampa Review Prize for his collection of poems, Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020). His poetry and criticism have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, The International Journal of the Book, and many others. He is also the author of the critical text, Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry (GRL 2018). Kopka is a Senior Editor at Narrative magazine and the Director of the low-res MFA at Holy Family University in Philadelphia.
Kristin Kovacic, a writer and teacher, lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Laval St. Roman, France. Her essays have received the Pushcart Prize and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards, and have been published in many magazines, including Full Grown People, Brain Child, Table, and elsewhere. They are collected in the book History of My Breath (Red Mountain Press). She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, House of Women (Finishing Line Press) and an anthology, Birth: A Literary Companion (University of Iowa Press).
Kevin Lanahan's writing has appeared in The Water~Stone Review, Meridian, RiverSedge, The Red Rock Literary Review, The Saranac Review and other publications. He is currently enrolled in Bennington College’s MFA program and has attended the Breadloaf Writers Conference and the New York State Writers Institute. He makes his home in the hamlet of Lake Clear in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
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Richard Lehnert’s second book of poems, The Only Empty Place, was published by Patterson Street Press (2023), which has just republished his first book, A Short History of the Usual (2003). A chapbook, Grief Needs a Body, was published by Whole Notes Press (1999). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Barrow Street, The Southern Review, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Spillway, Mid-American Review, The Laurel Review, Commonweal, and many other journals. For more than thirty years he was a music critic for Stereophile magazine, for which he served nine years as Music Editor. He and his wife live in Ashland, Oregon.
Mark Liebenow writes about nature, grief, prostate cancer, and the wisdom of fools. The author of four books, his essays, poems, and critical reviews have been published in numerous literary journals. His account of hiking in Yosemite to deal with his wife’s death, Mountains of Light, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. He studied English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, creative nonfiction at Bradley University, and can often be found writing outdoors at Cyd’s Café. www.markliebenow.com
Bridget A. Lyons is a writer, editor, and explorer living in Santa Cruz, CA. Her book, Entwined: Insights from the Intersections of Species, is forthcoming from Texas A&M Press. www.bridgetalyons.com.
Josh MacIvor-Andersen is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir On Heights & Hunger and editor of Rooted and Rooted Two, The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. His essays, reviews and reportage have won numerous national awards and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in journals and magazines such as The Guardian, Normal School, Gulf Coast, Paris Review Daily, Fourth Genre, Arts and Letters, Sycamore Review, Sojourners, Geez, Ruminate, Rock and Sling, National Geographic/ Glimpse, Diagram, The Drum, The Collagist, Garden and Gun, Memoir (and), New Millennium Writings, Our State, Prism, and The Northwest Review, among others.
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Charlotte Matthews is author of four poetry collections and a memoir, Comes with Furniture and People. She loves moss, river rocks, and miniature objects. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at The University of Virginia.
Jen McClanaghan’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Narrative. She is the author of River Legs, selected by Nikky Finney for Kore Press’s first-book prize.
Matthew Meduri is a writer and educator living in Kent, Ohio. Their work has recently appeared in Catamaran, Gastronomica, Permafrost, and Story. His essay “Ruby's Oyster Dressing, or Edible Nostalgia” was listed as distinguished in Best American Food Writing 2022. He is a recipient of a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
Jason Newport is a Fulbright U.S. Scholar (Hungary) who currently teaches composition and creative writing in the Meredith College English department. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and for nine years served on the editorial staff of the Chautauqua journal. He has published many short stories, essays, interviews, and poems, including two stories nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
Annie Penfield’s writing explores her awe for the natural world, her relationship to place, and transforming within everyday life. A graduate from the MFA in Writing Program from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, she is working on a narrative based on her essay “The Half-Life.” Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre [notable BAE], Ninth Letter, Whitefish Review, Under the Gum Tree [notable BAE], Catamaran Literary Reader, R.K.V.R.Y, Assay, and Beautiful Things. She lives among horses in rural Vermont, and among whales aboard a sailboat in Alaska, and works to reconcile and honor it all through writing.
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Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a novella. His most recent book, Blur, received the Tenth Gate Prize. Individual poems have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
John Schneider’s debut poetry collection, Swallowing the Light (2022), is Pinnacle Book Achievement Poetry Best Book winner 2023, New York City Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite for Poetry in 2023, International Book Awards Poetry 2023 and nominated for the Hoffer Award. His non-fiction book, Dreaming and Being Dreamt, was published by Routledge in 2023. His poetry was a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2023 International Poetry Competition. He is also a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He resides in Berkeley, California.
Anna Scotti is a poet whose work first appeared in Chautauqua in 2009. Those poems are included in her collection Bewildered by All This Broken Sky (2021), which won the inaugural Lightscatter Poetry Prize and was short-listed for the Housatonic Book Award, the CPR Editors’ Prize, and the Louise Bogan Prize. Scotti’s poems, which Ellen Bass has called “suffused with beauty, pulsing with life,” have appeared in The New Yorker since 2016. Scotti is also an award-winning young adult novelist and a noted mystery writer. She teaches online at writers.com. Learn more at www.annakscotti.com. Check out Susan Polizzotto’s interview with Scotti on Chautauqua’s wix: “You Have to Live Before You Can Write.”
Clara Silverstein is the author of the memoir White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation, the historical novel Secrets in a House Divided, and four non-fiction books. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared at Boston City Hall and in Blackbird, the Paterson Literary Review, and other journals. Her articles and essays have been published in Runner’s World, Health magazine, and the Boston Globe, and several other publications. She has worked as a journalist, an histo-
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rian, and Program Director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. Raised in Richmond, Virginia, she now lives in the Boston area.
Jeromiah Taylor is a writer from Wichita, Kansas. His work has appeared in The Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, U.S Catholic Magazine, The Millions, and other venues. Jeromiah is an Editorial Assistant at The National Catholic Reporter, and Co-Editor of the Quack!, a zine by and for queer Catholics. He lives in Wichita with his partner and a long-haired tabby. Get in touch on Instagram @byjeromiahtaylor.
Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Razor, among others. She has lived with Type 1 diabetes for thirty three years and laughs with her mother every morning. Angie loves life dearly.
Glen Vecchione is the author of science, math, and history books that have been translated into several languages and distributed throughout the world. His poetry and short stories appear in Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, Cincinnati Review, Comstock Review, and Timberline Review. Glen won the Editor’s Choice Award in Last Stanza Journal and is the featured poet in Sequestrum’s “Wonder” issue of January 2024. He was also nominated for the 2022 and 2023 Pushcart Prizes and named a Finalist in the 2022 Sewanee Review poetry competition. His novel, Everything is Mine, is scheduled for release in 2025. He currently divides his time between Palm Desert California and New York City.
Steven Vineis resides in Wilmington, NC. His contribution to this issue is dedicated to Philip Gerard with enduring love, admiration, and gratitude.
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Michael Waters’ recent books include Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), and The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), as well as a collection of essays, The Bicycle and the Soul (Tiger Bark Press, 2024) and a co-edited anthology, Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). His poems have appeared in five editions of The Pushcart Prize and in Best American Poetry 2024. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, New Jersey.
Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide, (Madville Publishing), which received the Quarterly West prize in the novella; The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes; The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University; and Las Delaciones del Sueno, translated by Antonio Saborit with an introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bilingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico.
Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.
Linda K. Wertheimer, the award-winning author of Faith Ed, Teaching about Religion in an Age of Intolerance, is an independent journalist based in the Boston area. She was a prose writer-in-residence at Chautauqua Institution in 2017. Her essays and book excerpts have previously won awards from Tiferet Journal, Moment Magazine, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. This essay partly stems from a book in progress about school prayer. Find her website at www.lindakwertheimer.com
Kira Witkin is an essayist and reporter in New York. Her work is published by Esquire, NPR, The Sun magazine, ELLE, The Missouri Review, and other publications. Her essay in this issue is dedicated to her grand-
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mother and dear friend, JacKay Phillips O'Neill, for teaching her to see life in color.
Fred Zirm is a former English and drama teacher who has continued to direct plays and also focus more on writing during his retirement through, in part, his involvement with the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. His poetry and flash fiction have been published in more than a dozen literary magazines and anthologies. His first chapbook, Object Lessons (Main Street Rag), came out in 2021, and his second, Rescue Dogs (The Poetry Box), is scheduled for 2024.
