May 28.23: Coping, but barely

When War shatters bodies

and pain attends,

the cloth of life

forever rends.

Those who live

don’t want to know

how scythe of War

dealt final blow.

War Death comes also

serpentine,

fanged and poisonous,

cloaked, unseen.

Many there are,

alive in name,

dead by horrors,

never the same.

War breeds Death

of more than one kind:

not just the body,

but spirit,

will,

mind.

Maybe the deadliest

weapon of choice:

words — bloodless shrapnel —

the conscience-less voice.

Or maybe the words

lying fallow, unsaid,

lead to as many

mangled and dead.

How are we humans

to be made again whole

when War amputates

our reason, our soul?

 

It’s Memorial Day weekend in America, dear reader, a time to remember those who have died in service to the ideals of this country, ideals a bit wobbly at the moment. In no way do I trivialize the deaths of men and women whose bodies litter our history and whose families forever bear the pain of death by war, but I can’t help thinking this Memorial Day of all those whose minds and souls died but whose bodies still breathed. POWs, MIAs, and those who returned with invisible gangrene. We are butchering each other still, and this Memorial Day seems sadly weighted with futility.

The dedication pictured above is from the book “Family Separation and Reunion: Families of Prisoners of War and Servicemen Missing in Action,” a compilation of essays by medical professionals involved in establishing care after Viet Nam. One of those was written by our intrepid photographer, S.W. Berg, CAPT, MC, USN (Ret).

It seems to me that this dedication is appropriate for all the families who ache because of war death.

 

May 16.23: Thursday Doors Writing Challenge

Grandma was bony. Her light summer housedresses added no substance at all to her frame, and her summer hugs were especially skeletal. It wasn’t that she was skinny exactly; she just seemed to the child-me to have a lot of bones.

She sat at her kitchen table with the dented colander in her aproned lap, cleaning green beans from a pile heaped on a torn brown bag spread over the oilcloth. Her long fingers, never manicured or jeweled, moved automatically.

Such a small sound, that snap of the bean, blending arrhythmically with the summer breeze which carried its own small sounds through the screens, bits of birdsong, leafsong and the tickling jingle of the ice cream man. In summer’s slow time, the air mingled with the fragrance of the fresh beans, and everything was new.

Two windows flanked the table, their curtains puffed lightly by summer’s breath. Grandma sat between one window and the back screened door, locked with a little hook. What a joy to a kid to flip up the hook and careen out, over the small porch, past the pantry window that used to be their winter icebox, down the wooden stairs, into the little yard festooned with tomatoes and moss roses.

And what a smack was there! That screened door slammed shut with decibels to wake the dead. BLAM! It was a sound that shattered the snoozy summer every time. That door slapped her house so smartly that it was hard not to think that it was going after the flies that tried to get in. I’m sure it got a few.

There was something satisfying about that smack. There was a door with character, purpose, a voice. Everyone with ears knew of it. It announced our going-forths like cannon shot. After Dad and his sisters grew up, it might have been a happy time for the door to be again in the harum-scarum forces of little hands.

In the comings and goings of children, the slamming of screened door, the grandma, busy with the things of living, maybe thinking in her bones about the day the door would be quiet again.

 

 

Submitted to Dan Antion’s

Annual Thursday Doors Writing Challenge,

with thanks both to Dan for hosting,

and to Lois, whose door photo

reminded me of the long-ago door.

April 20.23: Coping, but barely

I had my annual Medicare Wellness appointment the other day and therefore I have need to vent. Feel free to change the channel.

Understand that I think it is very good to keep old people on doctors’ radar. As our cogs keep slipping, we might not know it.

However, it should be old people who design the intake. Consider, dear reader: Do you have any problem with your memory? Answer yes or no. Yes OR no? Pfui! That is clearly yes AND no! At the very least, an essay question.

Where did I sit in fifth grade? No problem. The lyrics to “Up and Down the Monon”? I’m all over that.  The how-to directions I just read? Poof! Gone!

I have to look up the spellings of words I never had to look up in years past, and there are a couple words I can never remember how to spell no matter how often I look them up. I’d tell you what they are but I can’t remember them. Our party-line phone number in 1949? I can rattle that right off.

The word I want mid-sentence? Nowhere to be found. Latin names for plants? It is to laugh. The sixth-graders I taught in 1965? I just jotted down the names of 32 of them by way of memory test. The numerous times I’ve made an idiot of myself? Down to the last detail. What day is it? Ummm…

So how did I answer? NO. Because I know that up and down that “rootin’, tootin’ Monon…everything is fine.”

Thus ends my vent. For now.

April 9.23: Coping, but barely

When I tell you, dear reader, the trains were in our back yards, it’s not hyperbole. You can see the railroad track behind me. Those trains were roaring behemoths, shaking the house, kicking up cinders while the open coal cars, toting fuel for homes and industry, dribbled black along the way.

So when I say spring cleaning with reverence and a slight shudder, you have some small idea why. All the curtains came down and went into the washing machine with the wringer on top. The lace curtains, still wet, were mounted carefully on wood frames with a million tiny sharp nails around the edges that held the curtains taut while they dried. OMG. Of course Grandma ironed them anyway before they were tenderly re-hung.

That was the same grandma balanced up on a ladder with a fistful of some goo, wiping the wallpaper in careful strokes, slowly revealing the color under the grit. Repeatedly turning the goo, wiping, wiping, down the ladder, move the ladder, back up, wipe, wipe. OMG.

Rugs rolled up and lugged outside to be thrashed?  Check. Hardwood floors, woodwork, windowsills scrubbed? Storm windows taken down, inner windows washed, screens hosed down and installed? Check, check. Dump the dirty water in the alley, fill the bucket again? OMG.

Then dinner to be made with no microwave, no dishwasher, no counter space, and a freezer the size of a shoebox? OMG.

And so was Easter dinner served in pristine newness. Old walls, old curtains renewed. Fumes of Fels Naphtha gave way to the perfume of ham and lemon meringue pie.

How close our metaphorical trains. How timeless the human need for renewal. I wish it for you, dear reader, and for us all in this season of many traditions.

 

February 25.23: Coping, but barely

My mother was the queen of the quick evening bath and usually exited the bathroom relaxed and comfy in nightgown and robe. There was, however, one time when she blasted out of the bathroom in a foam of mom expletives.

It seemed that, as she started to get into the bathtub, she noticed there was a washcloth but no soap. So she took the two steps to the linen closet to get some soap. As she started to get into the tub again, she noticed that she had two washcloths but still no soap. Back the two steps to the linen closet for the soap. As she once again started to get into the tub, she blew her last gasket: washcloths, 3; soap, 0.

Unlike us, she was not amused.

Of course I have no idea why this came to mind.

 

February 22.23: Coping, but barely

Ancient friendships. One of my favorite topics.

We were sophomores in high school when I met Donna and Bill, the intrepid photographer whose images often appear here. That was 1958. (All gasp.) My grandson’s eyes glaze over at the mere mention of such Olde Days, but what does he know? He’s never been to a sock hop at the Civic Center. But I digress.

Bill and Donna and I were in Speech and Debate. (They were debate partners and still are.) There are few bonds as strong as those that form when you gather in the school parking lot at 3:30 on a Saturday morning for an “away meet.”

Donna’s birthday is in December, mine in January, and Bill’s in February, and he has made the most of that, trying hard to represent himself as the youth among us. Therefore it has been decreed that no one turns until Bill turns. So today we all officially turn eighty! Bill is not allowed to be the youngest.

I think we were in our 40s in this photo, about halfway to here. That’s me on the left, Donna on the right. Behind us is my parents’ blue spruce, in front of which many historical moments were recorded.

If you have ancient friendships, dear reader, you know.

 

 

February 9.23: Coping, but barely

The speed limit here in a school zone is 25.

Flashback: the grade school I attended was brand new when I started first grade in 1949. Three classrooms, six grades, with room left over. We were on the cusp of the baby boom in a sprawling little farming community not far from Chicago. The area behind the school was our playground; there were swings, a slide, teeter-totters, all apparently excavated from some Roman ruins. But who cared? The main playground was an oak grove. Oh, it was splendid! We had acorns, and shade, and leaves in our shoes, hair, and stuck to our sweaters. And a white-headed, freckled nimble imp named Larry stood on his head there.

Then the babies boomed and the school boomed and one of the saddest days in my young life was the loss of that oak grove.

Yesterday, content at 25 mph, I puttered past one of our schools at recess. The playground is equipped wondrously, but some of the kids found something better: a gentle ravine, either a happy accident or a brilliant idea. Hills! Kids know what to do with hills, and there they were, rolling down at top speed, looking like so many bratwurst in winter coats perfectly formed for the occupation. Even in my car, I could feel the fun.

25 mph was too fast.

 

January 19.23: Coping, but barely

If you were light

and could play on a rose,

would you slide,

do you suppose,

down velvet hill,

where shadow splash

marks your soft plop

with grinned panache?

Then would you climb back up,

find that shy frill,

and pirouette there

in lucent trill?

Would you leap tip-to-tip

with weightless toes,

like drunken sprite

in perfumed throes?

Under, behind

each vale and peak,

would you dodge and dive

in hide-and-seek?

Would you stop perhaps

and oly-oly-ocean-free

to bask in the stillness

of unfurling reverie?

 

There is mystery here, dear reader. Apparently some call “olly-olly-oxen-free.” I was intrigued to see that some people who were kids in the Chicago area called “oly-oly-ocean-free” because that’s where I was a kid and that was our cry. So, oxen or ocean, nobody knows, though I did like the suggestion that olly/oly came from all-ye as a call at the end of the farm day to put everything, including the oxen, away for the night.

I remember it as inviolable. Once called, nobody could be tagged. Non-negotiable.

 

Many thanks to Susan Rushton for the beautiful photo!

 

December 29.22: Coping, but barely

Jeweled confection —

how dare we bite in? —

so perfect a morsel,

toothmarks would be sin.

The art of the little,

meticulous craft,

we must linger over,

admire, fore and aft.

From various angles

its magnificence savored,

the eyes are the palate

to guess at how flavored.

To taste with the eye

is the manner of some,

while others prefer

to taste with the thumb.

To find telltale hole,

the proof of the borer,

causes mannered among us

to recoil in horror.

What weaselly ways,

what etiquette lack,

to know what’s inside

and then put it back!

 

You may recall, dear reader, the indignities of my youth, with blue jeans not allowed. Not proper, said my mother. And yet — and yet! — there were the Fannie May or Mrs. See’s chocolates all pristine in the aerial view, but — what’s this? — a hole in the bottom? A hole which just happens to be the exact same size as my mother’s thumb? This is proper?

Thus did I learn that proper is a relative concept. My mother being the closest of relatives.

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

December 24.22: Coping, but barely

The perfect world

isn’t real

except in goo

of warm pinwheel.

Perfection twice:

Christmas then,

and today rich air

savored again.

My wish, dear reader,

whatever your feast:

may memory and hope

be your yeast.

 

The other day I had the privilege of teaching my grandchildren about yeast dough and sticky buns, closely related to the brown sugar rolls Grandma O’Hern used to make, and also the Christmas breakfast of their dad’s childhood. Once again the kitchen was crowded, not just with teenagers, but with ghosts happily looking on. (They were happy because they didn’t have to clean up. Sticky buns are so named because of the state of the kitchen.)

I don’t think I look for a perfect world, though I think I’d like it; I do, however, look for a world with some sanity, and that seems completely elusive most days. Then comes a day to bake with grandchildren and I see perfect order in the universe.

There are many beautiful traditions at this time of year; whichever ones you treasure, dear reader, may they bring a moment of peace and wonder to your heart.