5 minute read
Beaufort Human Library
Where oral history meets speed dating.” The Beaufort Human Library project seeks to foster empathy and understanding across communities by offering the public opportunities to “check out” nearly a dozen Human Books who will be sharing their personal stories of overcoming and acceptance. These engaging conversations will cover topics including occupations, education, healthcare, gender, race, immigration, addiction, abuse, and law enforcement, among others. Ultimately the dialogues will focus on building bridges of understanding and acceptance, person to person, through storytelling.
The second edition of the Beaufort Human Library will be held on Sunday, November 13, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. in MacLean Hall, building 12 of the Technical College of the Lowcountry (TCL), at 104 Reynolds Street in Beaufort. Free and open to the public, the event is hosted by TCL; the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center; the Beaufort County Library; Bluffton’s Storybook Shoppe; the Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization chapters of Beaufort Academy, Beaufort High School, and Battery Creek High School; and volunteer community organizers.
Participating Human Books include Alisha Arora, Imelda Golden, Devorah Lee, Gwenn McClune, Dana Ridenour, Zvezdana (Stella) Scott, Jan Stanfield, Joseph Taylor, and featured Human Book Lynn Markovich Bryant. Beginning the event, Markovich will share her story, Navigating Racism . . . from a White Woman Raised Black, in the TCL auditorium from 1:00 to 1:30, after which, all of the volunteer Human Books will be available to be checked out for 30-minute small group conversations from 1:30 to 3:00. No advance registration is needed. Volunteer adult Librarians and student Bookmarks will be on hand to help guest navigate the experience. New to this edition of the Beaufort Human Library, TCL and high school student volunteers will also be reading thematically related picture books to their younger peers in the event’s family-friendly Teddy Bear Picnic outside on the lawn of MacLean Hall, aided by the Storybook Shoppe children’s bookstore and the Beaufort County Library.
Learn more about the Beaufort Human Library at www.facebook.com/beauforthumanlibrary or the Pat Conroy Literary Center website, www.patconroyliterarycenter.org
The Conroy Center is located at 601 Bladen Street, and open for public tours Thursday through Sunday from noon to 4:00 p.m., or other times by appointment.
Short Story Contest Winners Third Place
Time Zone By John Williams
I’m standing on my son’s dock, listening to the rain wind its way up Battery Creek. I pull my poncho strings tighter and flip it’s large hood over my head. One size fits all, I think, tugging at the hood’s long drawstring. The poncho’s military issue, or at least it was when I brought it home from Vietnam some fifty years ago.
My daughter-in-law found it in my old footlocker. My name’s still stenciled across its olive green top: Corporal Donald G. Roberts. It’s my personal time capsule containing only the poncho and a set of tiger fatigues complete with matching jungle boots, things I’d worn on my last patrol on what Snoopy would call a dark and stormy night.
The uniform’s not my original. The Navy corpsman cut my trousers open like a hospital gown. Like Forrest Gump, I’d been shot in the buttocks and it did sting like a bee, a large, pissed off bee that took part of my left cheek.
We didn’t wear hoods on patrol. The pattering rain drops stole your hearing. Better wet than dead. Lots of guys at this LZ were both, lying in the mud, waiting on evac.
Despite my protest, I rode with them. I got the top rack. Below me a morbid cocktail of blood, piss and shit leaked from the body bags and flowed across the steel floor. I looked down at the covered corpses. One was my best friend, James Monroe. He was American royalty . He could have dodged this war, but he thought he was a writer and he wanted the experience. He had this quote: “Nothing bad ever happens to a writer. Everything’s material.” ###
Musty odors seeped from the poncho’s hood. Vietnam air? I wondered. Everything else followed me home. Why not a little pocket of air. Around me, lightning flashes reach out, revealing the Lowcountry’s beauty in a gray silhouette of oak limbs and palms that quickly fades to black. Thunder follows, a deep, slow, rumble announcing its presence from the darkened heavens. I look back into the trees. It’s a habit I can’t quit. I miss my M16.
Funny, my first memory is of a gun. I still have it though nobody knows. Seventy years later, cocking it provides a painful reminder of the arthritis that racks my joints, thanks to an herbicide that killed more than foliage.
I turn seventy-five tomorrow. Seventy- five’s the first of the half-decade celebrations. Better not wait till eighty. You never know. The odds got worse every year but not in my case. My thumb’s on the wheel. The game’s fixed and I’m the dealer. I need just enough memory to pull it off without leaving too many days on the table. Days are my currency, my sole remaining treasure, but I’m not going to live them trussed up in a diaper.
I’ve saved my opioids from my last three surgeries. Minor stuff, but they say you heal better without pain. I take the pain and palm the pills. The pills are my freedom. I could take them now, but I’m not ready: Too many things I’d miss, like the people who love me more than I deserve. I’m working on my goodbye note. I need them to understand that I leave a little every day. Like MacArthur said, “I just fade, fade away.”
The dementia is slow but relentless, stealing my soul and my memories like the rice patty leeches stole my blood. An unseen foreign invader that’s broken my genetic code and tortures me daily with stirred neurons that produce strange words and converts Volkswagens into buffaloes. Soon I won’t know the difference. The thought terrifies me. It’s like dying without death’s grateful release. Wait too long and I’m doomed to a life sentence without parole.
I watch the storm move east, pulled by the Atlantic to die in the cool, ocean water. Behind me, I’m startled by a dull flashing light. I’m being summoned for supper.
As I walk up, lightning still glows on the horizon, creating a mountain range of clouds. I stare into the darkness and the Annamite Mountains rise from my feet. I know them well, but they belong in Vietnam, forming its spine between two oceans, not here on the South Carolina coast. I drop to one knee and look into the jungle. Monroe’s on point and it’s raining.
It’s always raining in Vietnam.
