Theme Week 6

Chairs that aren’t quite big enough. Desks in groups of four or five. Some desks have books neatly stacked according to size…pencils lined up... crayon boxes full. With the name tag still fresh and untouched , beside the pencil well. Other desks look ready to explode. One small jiggle will start an avalanche of books, broken pencils, eraser bits, and papers…some completed and corrected, others barely started. “Caught being good” stickers are stuck to the daily planner, and candy wrappers stuffed in the back. A run has started near the seam of the new carpet.
The unmistakable smell of chalk dust brings back childhood recollections of being the lucky one to write the date on the board.. Being the helper who got to clap the erasers. The new smell of dry erase markers competes with the old memories. The books are lined up in order for now. A-Z of the well used encyclopedias. Junie B Jones and the Bailey School Kids are ready for DEAR time…”drop everything and read”. On the walls, posters in primary colors contrast with the pastels of the world map. The classroom rules stress respect for friends, school property and ones self. All of the students have signed the rules. Some will remember them always. Others only until someone challenges them. The only sounds now, are the soft buzz of the clock on the wall and the occasional rattle of the hamster’s wheel. Ric tic tic, stop. He’s listening too. Ric tic tic, stop. Very soon the silence will be broken by the clatter of rolling packs, and the laughter of excited voices… Seeing one another after nine days at home. Catching up on the news. Making plans for after school. Re-forming cliques.
The closet will soon be filled with jackets askew on hangers, and backpacks stuffed haphazardly onto the bottom shelf. The ragged hand me down with the broken zipper alongside the Columbia 4 in 1 Systems, with a lift ticket attached to the zipper pull. The little girl, responsible for 3 younger siblings at home, competing with the privileged child, just back from his tropical vacation. Some are anxious to learn. Others are just happy to be back where they feel safe. Where no adult yells or raises a hand to them. Still others are already trying to decide if they have a headache or a belly ache, and can they convince the school nurse to send them home. Different sizes, different backgrounds, different goals and wishes. Which ones will be successful?
Another day begins.

Theme week 5 (2nd)

Joe and Henry landed in town in the 1930s, from somewhere in Massachusetts, so they said. People had no reason to disbelieve them. Everybody liked Joe. He was Portuguese, a big guy..maybe 300 pounds, but soft spoken, and honest. If you asked a direct question, he wouldn’t lie to you. He always wore his wool lumberjack shirt and pants in red plaid. He claimed it kept out the hot in summer as well as the cold in winter. Joe trapped some, tried his hand at logging, and built a camp with Henry on Ebeeme Pond. Their first winter there, Henry shot a moose and the wardens nailed ‘em. They spent that winter in the county jail. After they did their time, they were back at camp where Henry had been doing some bootlegging. Not the first in the area, but he was after all a stranger. One afternoon when Joe was cooking a mulligan stew, a boat load of the local gendarmes showed up. Joe invited them in for some dinner.
They had their fill of stew, and conversation, and as they were leaving, the leader gave a stretch and said, “Well boys, seeing as how we’re here anyways, we might as well take a look around. You don’t mind do ya, Joe?”
Joe said it was ok by him, so they went outside the camp and proceeded to have a look around. Pretty soon the leader brushed away some leaves which revealed a trap door. When he opened it up, it was filled with bottles of liquor. From the look on Joe’s face, they knew it was a surprise to him, but he picked up his jacket anyway, and said ,”O.K...Let’s go.”
They said they weren’t interested in him this time, so he could just go on back to work and they’d leave him alone. About this time, Joe was working on the extra gang with the railroad at Bodfish, near the foot of Borestone Mountain. He was a cracker jack mechanic, and fixed the motors on the motor cars. One day when the time keeper was at the shack by himself, a big white Cadillac pulled up into the yard. Two men in suits came in asking for Joe Silva. The timekeeper said he was not very well acquainted with the men there yet, and he wasn’t familiar with that name. As soon as they left, he high tailed it up the tracks to the rock cut where Joe was working. He told Joe what had happened and Joe thanked him. The next day they came back and Joe spent the better part of the afternoon in that white Cadillac, talking to the men.
Not long after that visit, Joe disappeared, without a trace. For weeks, everyone asked where Joe was. No one seemed to know for sure, but Doc and Fr. Daily, his two best friends, were not as convincing in their denials. Speculation was that he’d been in the witness protection program, and given a new identity. A guy who weighs 300 pounds, doesn’t just disappear, but no one in these parts ever laid eyes on him again.

Theme Week 13..Vignettes

All sisters have some sort of special relationship, good or bad. My sister and I are no different. The bad was mostly before I was 12 years old. That was before she moved out and got married. She was 7 years old when I was born. She was a princess, like many 7 year old, only children, and she didn’t like me much when I came kicking and screaming into her world. “Whaddya mean..be quiet the baby’s sleeping…this is my kingdom.” It must have been very hard to share what had been her glory for 7 years. Of course I only know this part because she told me, when we were both much older, and able to handle that truth. I do remember being a royal little pain in the ass who must have caused her no end of headaches when she was a teenager, with teenage friends, and teenage secrets. I remember sitting in the living room, under the piano (one of my favorite spots so the gypsy lady in the painting couldn’t see me) and tattling whenever Di and her boyfriend got too close on the couch, or turned out the lights to “watch tv.” More than once I heard, "Mama, can't you make her stop talking?"
As an adult with children and grandchildren, she probably wouldn’t condone corporal punishment now, but at that time it didn’t bother her much to whack me when she thought I needed it…which seemed often to me. I was sure she was just being mean when she made me spit out the gum (right in front of my friends) that I’d taken from her dresser. (That was o.k. My friends each shared a piece of their already been chewed gum with me) Or when she put the dishes back into the dish water saying they were still dirty, when in truth, they were probably still dirty.
On the flip side, I became her trained mascot who could jitterbug with the best of them…very handy to have a dance partner who was little enough to toss over your back or slide under your legs. It was cute to have a little sister dress up in a cheering uniform (pint sized) and go out on the basketball court. I was pretty useful as a go between with authority too. Lots of “go ask Mama if we can…” conversations. When she got a convertible,(57 Chevy Bel Aire...the only Chevy I ever loved)it was quite a thrill to be invited to go for a ride. When she got a diamond, she woke me up to show me first. By the time she was 19 and moving out, I figured she had grown up enough so we could finally be friends. It was many years later that it occurred to me that maybe I was the one who had grown up a little. It was very cool to go stay with her and her husband down near the coast. Later when I had a niece, then a nephew, it was my favorite place to go. My brother-in-law was the perfect big brother to me…wonderful to my sister, kind and caring with his small children, and just enough of a tease to always make me laugh. That all changed with a middle of the night phone call to tell us he had been killed in a car accident. As a typical 16 year old drama queen, I was pretty sure it was the end of my life too. I soon realized that my pain was trivial compared to my sister’s. She was now a 24 year old widow with two toddlers. Many years later, she summed it up when she told another young mother that when people tell you that time will heal the wound; you want to tell them to go to Hell, even knowing that they are right. We did all move on from that time.
When I got married, I moved in with Di and her children, while my husband was finishing basic training and tech school in the Army. At the end of the month, just before the allotment checks came, we’d clean out the pocketbooks for a supper out at The Chuck Wagon. We had a great laugh when Di introduced me to the waitress after I’d just ordered a beer, and the waitress asked which one of us was older. Filet mignon couldn’t taste any better now then those hamburgers did back then. We also had a great sense of teamwork. She worked and I babysat. On the weekends, we’d start cleaning at opposite ends of the trailer, and meet in the middle. During that winter, she began a new relationship, and when I moved out in June with a new baby, she remarried.
We’ve remained close, asking and giving advice freely over the years. Whenever there’s been a family crisis, we’ve talked to decide how and how much to tell Mom and Dad. That’s something that has continued with Dad now that Mom is gone. We’ve had a running joke about the Christmas newsletters from the absolutely bloomin’ perfect relatives with their exceptionally brilliant children. Even though we’re both busy with our families, work, and school, and don’t get together as often as we’d like, because of the distance, we’re still best friends. We may have gotten off to a rocky start, but I think we’ve worked it out pretty well.

Theme Week 4

Theme Week 4.
Take I
In March of 2004, my husband was in the hospital for a cardiac catheterization , after having a heart attack. (at the ripe old age of 55) Family members of patients are issued beepers so that they can be notified of the status of the procedures being done. Since I do not sit still well, and the weather was miserable, I decided to take a walk to the Riverside Inn, which is connected to EMMC by a series of dreary corridors, in essentially the basement of the hospital. The hospital was built in the 1890s, and the original portion is still there, where nurses used to receive their training. Since I was running on caffeine and nerves at the time, my imagination was a bit overactive. I did walk all the way to the hotel and back. I told myself that it wouldn’t be so bad in the daylight, and then I realized that there are no windows, so there would never be any daylight. It helped to pass the time, and kept me busy until Hubby was out of surgery and I could see him.

Take II
Have you ever walked from EMMC to the Riverside Inn through the underground maze? I have. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had my Cardiac Cath Lab issued beeper, Hubby was safely ensconced in the cath lab, surrounded by knowledgeable professionals, who were going to fix him up good as new (good as 40 anyway) , and the tv in the cardiac waiting room was driving me crazy…not to mention the morons waiting there. O.K. I should be charitable. Maybe they were as nervous as I was and their way of handling it was to be loud and obnoxious. At any rate, I needed to walk and since it was one of those crummy, slushy, days that we only seem to get in March, I figured I’d follow the arrows on the floor to the Inn. Kind of like my own Yellow Brick Road.
Things started out pretty well, but the further I went, and the more corners I turned, the creepier it got. I saw no one. I started talking to myself (only in my head… I figured whistling a happy tune might get me locked away somewhere) But every corner brought a new shadow, or the hiss and rattle of old pipes. Visions of the ghosts of nurses past and shrouded bodies from the morgue were in the back of my mind. In spite of wanting to just turn back, I was determined to give myself this little test of endurance, however silly, and go on to the end. Door signs indicated various labs, nuclear medicine, inhalation therapy, caution..oxygen, prosthetics, boiler room….always a scary place in the movies, and none the less so in my head at that moment. The writing on the floor told me that the Inn was just ahead, and at long last I came to the stairs which led up into the lobby. Once there, it looked like any number of hotels I’ve stayed in; A bit of an anticlimax after the walk there. I wandered around the room for a bit and headed back down the stairs, to the hospital. It was no less eerie going back, but I knew that I could do it without making a scene and totally embarrassing myself. It seems a bit juvenile now, but at that moment, it was a small victory that I needed for myself. Sometimes small victories are the ones that matter.

Take III

Have you ever walked from EMMC to the Riverside Inn through the underground maze? I have. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had my Cardiac Cath Lab issued beeper, Hubby was safely ensconced in the cath lab, surrounded by knowledgeable professionals, who were going to fix him up good as new (good as 40 anyway) , and the tv in the cardiac waiting room was driving me crazy…not to mention the morons waiting there. O.K. I should be charitable. Maybe they were as nervous as I was and their way of handling it was to be loud and obnoxious while listening to their soap operas and talking on their cell phones. At any rate, I needed to walk and since it was one of those crummy, slushy, days that we only seem to get in March, I figured I’d follow the arrows on the floor to the Inn. Kind of like my own Yellow Brick Road.
Things started out pretty well, but the further I went, and the more corners I turned, the creepier it got. I thought I heard a gurney being pushed toward me, and moved to one side, expecting to meet someone around the next corner, but when I got there, it was empty. There were no doors in that part of the corridor; only the fire extinguishers on the walls. I started talking to myself (only in my head… I figured whistling a happy tune might get me locked away somewhere) But every corner brought a new shadow, a new squeak, or the hiss and rattle of old pipes. Visions of the ghosts of nurses past and shrouded bodies from the morgue were in the back of my mind. In spite of wanting to just turn back, I was determined to give myself this little test of endurance, however frightening, and go on to the end. Door signs indicated various labs, nuclear medicine, inhalation therapy, caution..oxygen, prosthetics, boiler room….always a scary place in the movies, and none the less so in my head at that moment. I tried to ignore the brown spots on the floor , and convinced myself it was just paint. (even though it looked as though nothing had been painted in decades) The writing on the floor told me that the Inn was just ahead, and finally, running by now, I came to the stairs which led up into the lobby. Once there, it looked like any number of hotels I’ve stayed in; A bit of an anticlimax after the walk there. I wandered around the room for a bit and headed back down the stairs, to the hospital. It was no less eerie going back, but I knew that I could do it without making a scene and totally embarrassing myself. It seems a bit juvenile now, but at that moment, it was a small victory that I needed for myself. Sometimes small victories are the only ones that matter.

Theme Week 3

I was just trying to be helpful when I put the “Grand-dog” outside on his chain, for a little fresh air. Being a stray from the hills of Georgia, Chauncy hasn’t grasped the idea of staying in his own yard (or his grandparents’) and unless he’s in the house, and you have a biscuit, forget trying to get him to come when he’s called. Unfortunately, when I realized that I hadn’t heard him up on the deck for a few minutes, and went to check, the only thing left was a chain lying in the snow, with the registration and rabies tags attached.
With a yell of “The dog’s loose!” into the house, my son and I sprang into action. He grabbed a couple of flashlights and headed up the street. I jumped into the car and headed the other way, to the main road. I made a quick circle of the trailer park up the hill, where the dog had gone before, but saw no signs of him. Coming back down the hill, I met a car that came to a stop when the red dog ran in front of him. I opened the car door and in my best granny tone, called, “Let’s go for a ride!”
“No way Gran! I am having way too much fun sniffin’ around!”
I parked in a neighbor’s yard with the car lights on and the door opened, hollered to my son and we played tag with the little varmint until he streaked off back up the street. I stopped back at the house for bait, but the lure of freedom was much stronger than the box of Meaty Bones that I was rattling. When he disappeared into the woods again, I went back to the trailer park, cruising around slowly for a glimpse. I spotted him and with the door opened tried to make a ride in the car sound like the most fun since his coon chasing days..
He came running at me like a rocket, and at the last minute veered off to the left, “Psyche! Gotcha Gran! “
By this time, my son had joined me and was walking around with the flashlights, calling and coaxing. I had gone back to cruising, trying to spot the beast, and every time we’d get close, he’d take off again. It was getting darker. It was getting later. I had seen a few people look outside, but no one had come out to help or to ask what was going on. Pretty soon, as I was parked trying to figure out my next plan, a car full of young people pulled up and got out by one of the trailers. They spoke with Scott and all scootched down to call the dog. Again, he ran toward them like a shot, but when they grabbed, he dodged, laughing all the way.
At this point, I could see a police cruiser coming toward me. I rolled down the window as the cruiser stopped, and the officer inquired , “ Is everything ok?”
“Do you have a lasso? “
“Lasso? “ (followed by a blank expression)
“My son’s dog got loose, and he’s playing tag with us.”
“Oh. Someone called and said that someone was shining car lights and flashlights in windows. We’re just checking on it. “
“I’m sorry, officer. We aren’t shining them in windows on purpose. We’re just trying to get the cussed dog. “ (and I can just picture the jail administrators face when he goes to work in the morning if you haul us off to jail! The dear is sound asleep in his recliner, and missing all this great fun)
“OK..” And off they drive into the darkness….
I drive up the street and stop. Scott feels like he’s getting close. I’m watching from the car, and when I look beside the car, so is Chauncy! As soon as I open the door he takes off again. Finally, a man lets his dog out for his nightly pee, and when Chauncy goes to socialize, the bigger dog snaps at him. Chauncy cowers, and Scott is finally able to put the leash back on and lead him home. Wish we’d thought of using another dog as a lure about an hour earlier! Now if I put the dog out, I triple check that the chain is on the collar ring, not the tag ring.
I’ve cut the county police log out of this week’s paper for my scrap book:
“ 9:35 p.m. Car driving slowly around trailer park and shining lights in the trailers. “ Sorry people! Next time if you want to know what’s going on, just ask! I’m pretty harmless!