the chosen few The Line Charlie Newman Let me tell you about the line: the line goes out the door and down the street and around the corner and across the intersection and through the neighborhood and over the city limit into the county and the state and the region and the country and the continent and around the world in 80 days and beyond the blue horizon and Let me tell you about the line: the line shuffles and mumbles and grumbles and gripes and groans and moans and cries and screams and wishes and swells and prays and grows and Let me tell you about the line: the line moves like death moves like marrow moves like history moves like a victim moves like spent thunder moves like disappointment moves like a civil servant moves like absolute zero moves like the moment of conception moves like the flying fickle finger of fate moves like everything you see through the wrong end of eternity’s looking glass moves and Let me tell you about the line: the line is in like Flynn the line is free as a bee the line is here for the beer the line is over in the clover the line is made in the shade the line is spent like the rent the line is ready to go steady the line is achin’ for a breakin’ the line is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ the line is reelin’ with the feelin’ and Let me tell you about the line: the line forms where dreams of glory wither and failure grows like dandelions the line forms when you turn your back and your blood grows cold the line forms if what you see is what you get and all you want is all there is the line forms the history of man and the fiction of fact the line forms to the right and Let me tell you about the line the line is a dotted line...a dashed line...a disappearing line in the sand the line is a long way from St. Louie...a long walk on a short pier...a long little doggie the line is a little spot on the lung of civilization...a little bit of flim flam from the man and Let me tell you about the line: the line stays and the line goes the line appears and the line disappears the line cheats and the line steals the line gobbles souls like a demon on a mission from the god of Dick Cheney’s pre-compassionate capitalism and Let me tell you about the line: the line dances a ballet on your last nerve and the line stops when and where it wants to stop and the line looks into your non-negotiable heart and the line listens to your soap opera prayers and the line dumpster dives your desires and the line wins one for the gipper and Let me tell you about the line: the line was written by some faceless nameless drone the line was swallowed with a hook and a sinker the line was here yesterday and you were in it the line will play you like the fish you are the line will settle old scores with new wars and Let me tell you about the line: the line ain’t smart and the line ain’t stupid and the line ain’t what it used to be and the line ain’t about to make any changes you’ll be thrilled with and Let me tell you about the line: the line has no heart and no soul and no conscience and the line has all the patience in the known universe and the line has you covered 5 ways from Friday, Amigo, and Let me tell you about the line: the line makes sure you are there in the beginning and the line sees to it that you are there at the end and Let me tell you about the line: the line is all there is and there ain’t nothin’ but the line PREACHER CAIN, THE TROUBLEMAKER Bernadette Miller Back in the 1950’s, when Lawsonia, Maryland, was still segregated, there was a black man who defied the town’s customs. While his people barely survived, packing seafood for fifty cents an hour, Preacher Cain obtained a government loan, bought a rundown grocery near the waterfront, and paid off the loan. Then, business prospering, he moved his family into the white section, and enrolled two daughters in college. So when he urged the Blacks to strike against the rich packers, their only job source, the white people labeled him a troublemaker, bent on starting a race riot in their peace-ful little town. One Saturday morning, while his wife fried bacon in the kitchen, he pondered the Whites’ unreasonable attitude. Recalling his struggle to escape the dilapidated shack on Paper Street, he scanned his cozy living room with its picture window, comfortable tufted sofa and matching wing chairs, and sighed in bewilderment. Why did the Whites resent his achievements? They called him an uppity Nigger pretending to be white, trying to make him feel guiltyÑas though a black man didn’t deserve success. Nigger! How that word cut into his guts: a sharp reminder that his great grandparents had been lowly slaves in that Virginia town near Lawsonia. Angrily he rose and swept aside the lacy curtains. The hushed street was wrapped in soft autumn haze. Across Myrtle, slim Mr. Laird busily raked leaves; next door, old man Cullen clipped his hedge. The idyllic scene evoked affection for his birthplace. Maybe he shouldn’t demand changes, aggravate everybodyÉHe shook his head. Though his own people, frightened, had begged him to forget the strike, he couldn’t. Somehow, they must conquer their submissiveness, claim what was rightfully theirs. After breakfast he walked to his grocery, passing neat clapboard houses and freshly-mowed lawns, and the church on Chesapeake Avenue where he preached on Sundays. Although not ordained, he’d felt called upon to offer his people hope by loving the Lord. He glanced along the quiet street, and marveled at the picture postcard tranquility that masked the town’s deeply-rooted antagonisms. Busy all day in his store, he didn’t have time to debate the strike. That evening, as usual, he crossed Main Street to the Rosenbergs’ clothing store. His people sat around a potbellied stove at the rear, and waited for Mr. Rosenberg, the wiry Jewish tailor they nicknamed, Cap’n Abe, to mend their shabby clothes; the tailor bent over his sewing machine whirring softly nearby. Miz Rosy, his chubby wife, and their young granddaughter, Jenny, nicknamed, Little Miz Rosy, waited on customers in the store’s narrow aisles of bulging counters. Dreading further rebukes from their hotheaded preacher, the group around the stove stiffened as he approached. He grinned cheerfully until his surveying glance rested, frowning, on Maybelle Thomas, bearer of seven fatherless children. How often had he warned her against the evils of whoring! But, no, she persistedÑand had another baby. Before he could utter a word, she said with a sassy grin, “Don’t you start with me, Preacher! There ain’t much joy for us in Lawsonia, so if you don’t like what I’m doing, then you’d better persuade yo’ God to make me white!” “I just want to do the Lord’s work,” he said, fighting to keep his patience. “That means not letting you cripple yo’self.” “We’re already crippled,” grumbled Big Juno. A husky fellow with pouting features, he wore a flat cap that he continually pulled down over his eyes, as though trying to shield himself from an unpleasant world. He was also drunk. “Huh! Seems like the Lord’s work is handing cake to the Whites and throwing us the crumbs!” The others murmured their agreement. Henrietta, an elderly, big-bosomed woman, said with a deep sigh, “The City Councilmen what owns the packing houses won’t let no fac’tries come to town, then pays us anything they please. We got no place to turnÉnone a’tall.” “That’s why you got to strike!” Preacher Cain said, hopping up in excitement. “What them packers gonna do? They can’t let the crabs and oysters rot, and nobody else’ll work in them sweat boxes, so they got to raise yo’ wages!” Shy, slender Mary said timidly, “Please, Preacher, don’t cause no more trouble. After you moved uptown, the Klan figured we wanted all the white neighborhoods. We’d come home, worn out from work, and not know if we’d see morning.” “That’s right!” Henrietta said. “Besides, ain’t no other jobs,” Big Juno added scornfully, “so what’s the use of striking?” “Because the Lord helps them that helps themselves!” Preacher Cain shouted in exasperation. The group fell awkwardly silent. Embarrassed at his outburst, he sat down and listened to Miz Rosy clatter dishes at a card table while she heated supper on the hot plate, savory stuffed cabbage. In the musty store, shadows from the fluorescent flickered over the group staring dejectedly at the hot plate. Preacher Cain felt deep sympathy. Without Mayor Tilghman and Sheriff Byrd guaranteeing them equal rights under the law, their despair seemed endless, each coping as best he could. Henrietta prayed, Big Juno drank, Mary accepted, and MaybelleÑwell, Maybelle had babies. But they must look beyond mere survival and shed their brain-washing by the Whites, realize they could overcome obstacles, if they’d try. “The Preacher’s made a good point!” Maybelle said suddenly. “If we don’t help ourselves, who’s gonna do it?” He felt a peculiar queasiness at this unexpected allyÑlike partnering with the devil’s mistress. Repressing his qualms, he said impatiently, “Well, you gonna strike? Or keep complaining?” There was a silence. Finally, Big Juno tilted up his cap. “For months you been throwing out bait, making us feel ashamed. Okay! Since you’re so almighty sure them packers need usÑthen Monday, we’ll strike!” Preacher Cain had yearned for this moment; now, watching the group’s shock at the decision, he felt weighted by reality. Was he really helping, or increasing their burdens? He shook off doubts. When the strike ended, their victory would give them desperately-needed self-confidence.Bolstered by the preacher’s predictions of success, the Blacks struck enthusiastically in October; they scrimped along on meager savings, expect-ing the packers to yield. But the businessmen, although agreeable to a modest raise, reasoned that by yielding now, they’d face extravagant future demands. So the strike dragged on into November. On Myrtle Street, the trees had shed their crimson leaves, the neat lawns turned icy, and his people, barely holding on, considered quitting. Torn by their renewed pessimism, Preacher Cain promised free food, and argued with his practical wife about their savings under the mattressÑthat precious hoard for their children’s education. “You know we can’t touch that money!” Laverne exclaimed over hash and collard greens. “What’ll we do when the children need it?” “What did the Israelites do when they lacked bread? The Lord will provide. You got to have faith.” “Faith! The Whites in this town have us so scared, we’re afraid to breathe, and you’re still gonna cause all this trouble?” His muscles knotted in anger. “Woman, don’t you see that’s why I can’t let it go! There’s some things a man must do, if he wants to call himself a manÉ” Checking her temper, she studied her fiercely-independent husband. Then, changing tactics, she said softly, “Cain, we got a good business, nice house, two daughters studying to be teachers. If the Whites burn us out, we got to start all over again. Is it fairÑrisking our children’s only chance at an education?” Upset, he stared at his emptied plate. For his family’s sake, he shouldn’t disturb the town’s status quo. But how could he end the strike, when it meant ending his people’s first real attempt at improving their life? His lips pursed stubbornly. “We’ll get the money back; you’ll see.” Sighing in resignation, his slender wife rose to wash dishes. “Well, you’ve done pretty good by us. I’ll just have to accept your decision.”After dinner, avoiding the subject, they listened to, “Life with Luigi,” on the big Zenith radio, chuckling at J. Carroll Naish with his foolish problems. But, later in bed, when Preacher Cain reached for his wife’s soft body, she wouldn’t budge, feigning sleep, and he knew she was angry. The next day, despite her anxieties, Laverne helped him unfold card tables in the church basement; they doled out milk and flour, molasses, hominy, and pork scrapple. There were no Klan threats and no riots, just a stream of black people toting babies and baskets and dragging small childrenÑthe Whites hooting as they grimly paraded toward Chesapeake Avenue. As December neared, and still the packers stood firm, Preacher Cain worried how long the strike could last. His children’s money was draining away, and he grew fearful. One evening, while locking up his grocery, he noticed two blond watermen in jacket and hip boots, lingering outside near the plate glass window’s Nehi Orange sign. The tall skinny one held a baseball bat at his side. Trembling, Preacher Cain slipped the store keys in his coat pocket. As he turned, the man with the bat, smiling pleasantly, said in his Eastern Shore twang, “You getting along all right?” He nodded, his gaze skipping uneasily from one face to the other.“Then you listen! If your people keep striking, they’ll starve. Next thing you know, there’ll be looting and fires, and Lawsonia will burn to the ground.” He paused, face clouding in puzzlement. “I don’t understand it. We let you move in with the white folks, ‘cause you people are always yapping how we don’t treat you right. Now, you got to be better then us. Seems like it don’t pay to be niceÉ” The blue eyes hardened. “Well, we’ve always had a peaceful town here, and we don’t want no trouble. Get what I mean?” Stomach heaving, Preacher Cain carefully observed the clean side-walk. “Yes, suh,” he said softly. He hoped they wouldn’t notice his shaking, and worried that he might throw up. But much worse was the shame that he determinedly fought, lest it scorch his soulÑa shame encouraged by the Whites to drain him of self-respect. “C’mon, Brit, let’s go, the husky one said. His skinny companion nodded. “You mind us, Preacher, for your own good!” They turned and clumped past Clyde Riggin’s Taxi office, and headed toward the nearby harbor, the smell of seafood searing the air. Still shaky, Preacher Cain sank on the curb to recover his composure. He felt like a gasping fish that a waterman had plucked from the Massape-quot River, and tossed back in the nick of time before the fish died. As he sat there, collecting his thoughts, he scanned Main Street glimmering in the sunset. His gaze swept past Aunt Ada’s Seafood Kitchen to the wharf, where seagulls wheeled gracefully above the gently-bobbing boats. How could the world be so beautiful, when there was so much hatred? He shook his head in sadness at the incongruity. Then, brushing off his coat, he forced a cheerful grin, and hurried across the street. Though they had no more money for clothes’ mending, the group still gathered, out of habit, at the Rosenbergs’ and reluctantly accepted Miz Rosy’s kind offer of chicken sandwiches. “Eat, eat,” the tailor’s chubby wife had insisted in her strange foreign accent. She adjusted her huge wrap-around apron. “I cook enough for an army!” “Cap’n Abe, how come you and Miz Rosy take a chance feeding us?” Big Juno had asked today. “Ain’t y’all scared, being the only Hebrews in Lawsonia?” The tailor, bent over his whirring machine, shrugged. “Lawsonia needs a good tailor, so they respect us and leave us alone.” “Land sakes,” Henrietta had sighed, “I wish they respected us, too, and just let us live like decent folks. Times was bad enough when we struggled to pay bills. But the strike has forced us to depend on other people, begging fo’ food.” The group nodded glumly. When the preacher entered now, they greeted him with reproachful frowns, as though accusing him of their present misery, their silence weighing heavily on his heart. Finally, Big Juno tilted up his cap. “Preacher, we gotta quit. Ain’t no way we can lick them rich packers.” “What does he care ‘bout the packers?” Maybelle said traitorously. “He’s got a nice store, and that house with the Whites. He ain’t living on rations and going hungry.” “Yeah!” Big Juno responded. “And who asked him to butt into our business? Our money’s gone, and the Whites are laughing at us. We’re just suffering for nothing.” Preacher Cain bit his lip to control his temper. “Please, just hold on awhile longer. They gotta give in soon. I seen the rotten seafood they throwed away and I’m sure thatÑ“ “Man, you act like somebody blind, waiting for a miracle!” Big Juno cried out in anguish. “Can’t you see what’s happening? Why go on, when everything’s against us?” “Because you can’t let a town run yo’ life. A man has to keep trying.” “Being a man don’t mean being a fool.” “Let’s step outside and we’ll see who’s the fool! boomed Preacher Cain, his eyes glittering with anger. The men jumped up eagerly with raised fists, the group shivering with fear and excitement. In the tense atmosphere, Henrietta glared at Big Juno. “You ought to be ashamed, insulting our preacher that way! You apologize right now, you hear?” Leveled by her sharp reprimand, he paused in confusion, and wilted into a sheepish child. He slunk in his chair, the cap pulled over his forehead. Watching his disintegration, Maybelle said bitterly, “Preacher, you probably think we ain’t got the backbone to stay on strike. We’ll hold out ‘till hell freezes over!” “Preacher is using his own money to help us!” exclaimed shy Mary, surprising them with her outspokenness. “‘Stead of complaining, we should be thankful!” They quieted then, torn between gratitude and inexpressible grief. In the shadowy store, the anxious faces turned toward Preacher Cain, their unacknowledged leader. They waited expectantly, as if, by their very silence, he’d understand, offer reassurance. He hesitated, emptied for once of words. Drained by his terrifying encounter with the watermen, and then the group’s desperate accusations, he needed reassurance himself. Though he knew he was failing them, he left, feeling their crestfallen gaze follow him past men’s coveralls and ladies’ blouses, and out the squeaky screen door. He trudged home slowly through the beginning snowfall, his mind wrestling with a dilemma. Was he playing God: pushing his own brand of justice at his people’s expense? They suffered worse than before, the Whites living in terror of riots, and everyone blamed him. He felt intense loneliness, isolated from the town that housed all his memoriesÉ Paper Street, where his gentle parents had poured out their love for their only childÉ And around the corner, the aggressive young girl who’d grown up to be Laverne, his love and comfort during those anxious years when he, like Big Juno, sometimes wondered what was the use of going onÉ Passing his church on Chesapeake Avenue, he chided himself for self-pity. The Whites tried to convince his people they were worthless savages, incapable of resolving problems; he mustn’t yield to these pressures. At home, he reached for his Bible on the sofa to search for a soothing passage, and heard a pounding at the door that prickled his skin. He hesitated.“Cain, please get the door!” Laverne called from the kitchen. “Just a minute, I’m going!” To his astonishment, it was corpulent Mayor Tilghman, and Sheriff Byrd, both in heavy sheepskin jackets, their teeth chattering in the sparkling cold air. Preacher Cain stared in surprise while Laverne, who’d entered to greet the visitors, huddled behind him. Finally, the Mayor said, joking, “Cain, you gonna invite us in, or we got to stand here catching pneumonia?” Recovering from the shock, Laverne rushed forward and motioned them toward the wing chairs. “We’re just a bit surprised, is all. Why don’t you make yo’selves comfortable?” The Mayor sat down heavily and cleared his throat. “Preacher, I’ll get right to the point. Don’t you realize the suffering you’ve caused? This town is my responsibility, not yours! So why don’t you help your people by calling off the strike? If notÑ“He stared dramatically at the picture window. “Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t let ‘em walk around near naked and starving. We’ll have to take drastic measures.” Terrified, Laverne whispered at her husband’s shoulder, “Tell ‘em you’ll call it off.” He hesitated, his will weakening under their arguments. Did he have the right to decide his people’s fate? The children’s money was vanishing, and now the mayor’s implied threatsÉ Maybe he was like a false prophet blinded by pride, not seeing the situation clearly. His brows furrowed in thought. There were two choices: security or freedom. Though a man prizes his possessions, however meager, they’re not really his without freedom. “Mayor, I ‘preciates yo’ concern, but we can’t be stopped from accomplishingÑ“ “No, no, tell ‘em you’ll call off the strike!” Laverne shrieked in anxiety. “May not seem right, me accepting the responsibility,” Preacher Cain continued calmly, patting his wife’s arm, “but I know my people can hold out fo’ better wages.” “Cain!” Frustrated by his obstinacy, she burst into tears. Mayor Tilghman scowled at her immovable husband. “You still refuse to send ‘em back?” “That’s right.” “Then the packers’ll pay ‘em seventy-five cents an hour,” the mayor said, and glanced away in embarrassment. Stunned by this sudden victory, Preacher Cain stared in anger at his fat guest. “You threatened me and my wife, when all along you knew thatÑ“Now, now, be reasonable.” Mayor Tilghman focused on the rose-patterned carpet. “You know we wouldn’t give up that easily. Anyways, we thought you’d back downÉ” His voice trailed off. Feeling discomfited, as though his black host had somehow proven him unethical, he nervously shifted in his chair. “Well, Cain, you gonna accept the offer, or go on causing trouble?” Preacher Cain waited, watching his guest fidget with his open shirt collar, savoring the white man’s chagrin. His face crinkled in a slow smile. “We’ll accept it.” “Then it’s settled,” the mayor said, relieved, and turned to the husky sheriff, gawking at the unexpected turn of events. “Let’s go, William.” After they left, Laverne whooped in joy, and exclaimed admiringly, “Cain, you’re the stubbornest man I ever seen, but you got principles, and nobody can take ‘em from you!” Monday, his people returned to the packing houses. When Preacher Cain dropped by the Rosenbergs’ that evening, the group greeted him with jubilant grins. “Preacher, you showed us we can fight fo’ our rights same as anybody!” Henrietta said proudly. “That ain’t all!” blurted Big Juno, sober for a change. “We let the Whites push us into the ground ‘cause we figured there was nothin’ we could do. Well, you finally got us off our backsides, and we’re gonna get things we eedÉlike a decent schoolhouse and good teachers. Some of ‘em can’t hardly read or write! And we’re gonna get a better place to live and decent jobsÉ It’s still a hard road, but we ain’t giving upÑnot anymore!” They began chattering among themselves, enthusiastically planning their future. Beaming, Preacher Cain stood apart in the darkened store, his heart swelling with pride. His people had gained their dignity. Sometimes, he thought, a man’s got to be a troublemaker. Strangers Bernadette Miller Gail, dreaming, floated on her back far out at sea, watching funny cloud formations, and sighed contentedly, until ringing interrupted her dream. Awakening in the moonlight, she groped toward the beaded lamp and picked up the princess phone. “Hello?” Against the air conditioner’s hum, her voice was fuzzy with sleep. There was no answer, just breathing. “Who is it?” she asked, apprehensive. A young girl said timidly, “Gail? It’s me...Skippy.” Gail checked the glowing alarm set for 7:00. “It’s two a.m.! What do you want?” “I’ve run away again from the group home. I’m in Long Island. Can I come over, please?” Gail glanced at her sleeping husband, sprawled beneath the patchwork quilted bedspread. From the dresser with its lace runner wafted the sweet scents of a cranberry candle with vanilla potpourri. Her mouth felt cottony. “Why didn’t you call sooner?” “I’ll explain when I see you.” “All right. Get here as fast as possible.” Hanging up, Gail studied her husband’s fair, plump cheeks, dark blond curls, and magnificent golden eyelashes pressed tightly together. Her adorable cherub. She longed to squeeze him. Instead, she shook him until he stared at her, his blue eyes glazed from sleep. “Well, what’s wrong?” he asked sourly, sitting up. He scanned the small bedroom and beyond to the open door of his studio. “Skippy.” He peered at the clock. “My God.” To ensure he remained awake, she watched him don baggy trousers and a tee shirt that read: Life is Short, Art is Long. Then, wearing her terry cloth robe, she entered the wallpapered living room with its pine furniture bought on sale. She switched on the wrought-iron chandelier and the petal-shaped sconces flanking the brick fireplace. Seated in the rocker, her back resettled against her crocheted afghan, she fought distress, as during Skippy’s previous nocturnal visits. Danny, yawning, plopped into the nearby wing chair, opposite the curved coffee table. Wondering when the teenager would arrive, they sipped fresh-perked coffee and waited, Danny reading The Village Voice for art openings while Gail scanned Backstage for casting auditions. Occasionally, they exchanged a warm glance, as if they’d just met at that art exhibit seven years ago. Blinking to stay awake, Gail shifted toward the foyer’s palm fronds caressing Danny’s impressionist painting of Skippy, and remembered her first visit at age nine. Surprisingly, the child had taken the Philadelphia-New York bus by herself; the driver kindly walked her to Danny’s Murray Hill apartment. Answering the doorbell, Gail had smiled at her with her pixie hairdo, serious brown eyes, and guarded smile. Despite Hilda’s slovenliness, her daughter had worn a clean jumper, plaid coat and beret, and polished Mary Jane shoes. In an arm she cradled a Raggedy Ann doll. She pressed the doll against her chest. “Is my Daddy here? Oh, I see him!” She rushed into the living room. Danny, beaming, picked her up. “How’s my curmudgeon today?” “Curmidge! Curmidge!” Skippy giggled when he tickled her underarms. “Gail, honey, could you get Skippy some milk?” Gail rushed to set a glass on the coffee table, but felt isolated from the pair laughing on the floral sofa. Danny, sobering, had questioned Skippy. “If your mother’s boyfriend stays over, where do you sleep?” The child remained silent, staring at Danny’s painting of Gail hanging above the fireplace: tall and willowy at age twenty-five, her long black hair cascading over a hooded sweater and pleated skirt. “Answer me, honey,” Danny said. “On a mattress outside in the hall.” “My God!” Danny, flushing, turned toward Gail. “You see why we must pursue custody?” He glanced at the child whispering to her doll. “You know I raised her until she was five, and I love her. Hilda’s become incompetent; paranoid.” But they’d been denied custody. Despite Hilda’s deterioration, the wadded hair, the torn clothing, she put up a fierce legal battle to retain her only child, and Skippy had wanted to stay with her mother. Gail then remembered Skippy when eleven: a waif with a strange half-smile, unable to make decisionsÑvanilla or chocolate... pink or blue pajamas. “You pick it,” she’d said sullenly. A child who never spoke unless spoken to, expressed no fear, no hate, no enthusiasm, no love...whose silence sometimes seemed deafening. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Skippy had laughed at those absurd television horror films, and excitedly hugged Gail with “Thanks!” over her birthday gift, ice skates. Surely, Gail thought now, she could raise a teenager with emotional problems, the way her Illinois grandmother had raised her after her father died and her mother abandoned her. An hour slipped past. The fourteen-year-old finally rang the doorbell, her narrow shoulders slumped from exhaustion; she lugged a heavy shopping bag. A dirty shift hung on the slender frame, the bobbed brown hair disheveled. “Hi,” she responded to their hello, and headed toward the sofa. She leaned against the fringed cushions, her shopping bag thudding against the braided rug protecting the parquet. A heavy stillness prevailed while the couple observed the child focused on the rug, perhaps preparing herself for questions, explanations, scolding. But I won’t lose my temper, Gail thought. No, we’re sensible adults. We can handle a troubled child. “Why did you run away this time?” Danny finally asked. The girl paused, as if pondering how to phrase her anxieties. “During group therapy, Mr. Williams’s assistant called me illegitimate.” She contemplated her ragged nails. “He told me you married Hilda so I’d have a father figure.” Skippy nervously twisted a hair strand, and suddenly leaned toward him. “Are you my real daddy?” He replied slowly, “When I met Hilda at a party, she was fifteen years older than I, attractive, and pregnant. She’d been alienated from her family, and wanted you very badly. I’d just graduated from college, full of ideals about painting and art. Well, I thought it was a noble thing, marrying her to give you a name and be a father. I would have told you sooner, but you were too young.” The girl nodded thoughtfully, an index finger tracing the sofa’s floral patterns. “Who is my father? Did you ever meet him?” “Hilda slept around so much, she wasn’t sure.” “Oh.” Skippy stared at the mantel’s pitcher of pink peonies between pewter candelabra. Danny shouldn’t have spoken so bluntly, Gail thought. But why didn’t Skippy cry? Get it over with. It made Gail feel awkward. “How about a tuna fish sandwich?” she asked, hoping to convey sympathy. “I’m not hungry,” Skippy replied. She twisted the friendship ring on her third fingerÑanother birthday gift from themÑand turned toward Danny. “Hilda used to hint you weren’t my daddy, but ask her outright, and she says no.” A fierce anger flared unexpectedly in the girl’s eyes and just as quickly died. “May I have some milk, please?” Rising, Gail reminded herself that Skippy had repeatedly refused to live with them; her unhappiness wasn’t their fault. But they should do something! She poured milk in the kitchenette while Danny questioned the girl. “Why didn’t you call sooner? What were you doing in Long Island?” “Dolores... an older friend of mine at the homeÉhad some Puerto Rican friends, boys, living near there. After dinner, we picked up more Puerto Rican boys and drove around ‘till we left Pennsylvania and got to New York about ten o’clock.” Skippy paused, twisting the ring, and continued. “Well, one of the Puerto Ricans asked Dolores if she wanted to sleep at his place in Jamaica and I figured oh, boy, I don’t want any of that business so I said let me out here please, and called you.” Leaning back, as if drained by the long explanation, she sipped milk. Gail seated in the rocker, said, “Skip, what happened between ten o’clock last night and two this morning?” The Spanish Inquisition, she thought wryly. The girl plucked a tissue from the end table box, folded the tissue and placed it on the coffee table doily, and set the glass atop the tissue. “Well?” Gail asked. “I told you.” Their eyes met; Skippy shifted her gaze to Danny. “I’m so tired... I can’t remember.” “Finish your milk,” Danny said in a warm, fatherly way, as if trying to put the girl at ease. She sipped slowly, perhaps stalling. Gail, determined to learn the truth, said, “Skip, what were you planning to do in New York? Finish school here, or what?” “I was going to be a waitress. Yeah, we were all going to get jobs. Only Dolores was very depressed. She just broke off with her boyfriend, and that’s why she wanted to leave the home. She kept mentioning suicide.” Skippy gazed at her nails. “Why do you pick friends like Dolores?” Danny said, exasperated. “People like that certainly can’t do you any good.” “She’s not really a friend... I mean, I hardly knew her. Anyway, I wasn’t going to stay with her forever.” “Then why did you go to Jamaica?” Gail asked gently, glad to receive some information, at last. Skippy looked up and said solemnly, “Well, see, I wanted to get to Hilda in Philly, but Dolores’s friends wouldn’t drive back to Pennsylvania, and I didn’t have any money, so we got to Jamaica and... I called you.” “In other words,” Danny said coldly, “you hadn’t planned on coming here at allÑjust as a last resort.” Skippy twirled her hair hard, making a knot. “I didn’t have any other place to go,” she said, sounding desolate. “Do you want to live with us or not?” Danny’s voice had risen an octave. “I don’t know,” the girl said softly. “Well, what do you expect us to do!” Danny finally spat out. “Hilda makes you sleep on a mattress on the floor like an animal while she entertains boyfriends, but when we tried to get custody, you told the judge I couldn’t take care of you.” Angrily he turned to Gail. “How do you like that! A painter must be irresponsible.” He stared past the ruffled curtains at the shadowy brownstones across the street. The girl sat still, her face frozen in an eerie half-smile. “Hilda probably brainwashed her,” Gail said. “She’s bitter about the divorce, and determined to wreck our marriage. You said she became paranoid.” Remembering Hilda at Danny’s divorce, Gail felt revulsion. That squat, fat woman of fifty, wearing a filthy skirt and blouse, Skippy’s mother! No drama, Gail reminded herself, she must stay calmÑfor the child’s sake. Danny swiveled to face Skippy. “We must know: do you want to live here?” The girl’s fingers curled in her lap. “If I...go back...they might send me to reform school...” “Suppose they don’t?” “I don’t know...” “Mr. Williams told us about your sneaking off after hours, God only knows where, and playing pranks on the other kids. We’re more than willing to take you, but it’s not easy. Although our apartment’s rent-controlled, my drafting job and Gail’s bookkeeping work don’t earn much. Yet, we’re willing to sacrifice and pursue custody because we love you. It’s up to you.” “We really want you with us,” Gail said earnestly, trying to convince herself to please her husband. “Mr. Williams treated us like prisoners,” Skippy said. “And he beat us... all the time... horrible bruises.” Danny looked skeptical. “Let’s see them.” “I put some stuff on and they healed.” Her thin mouth puckered in a pout. They’ll never learn the truth with Danny’s sarcasm, Gail thought. Still, who could blame his impatience? Questioning Skippy was like a broken record: endless questions, polite answers, and learning no more than before. Danny said eagerly, “Skip, we’ll turn my studio into your bedroom. A girl your age needs privacy. We’ll enroll you in a good school. Someday, Gail and I will be a successful actress and artistÑyou’ll be proud of us.” He paused. “We’re anxious to have you with us. Why are you breaking our hearts?” The girl noisily emptied the milk glass, and set it on the tissue. “I don’t know. Honest.” Danny shook his head in bewilderment. Gail smiled at him sympathetically. He was Skippy’s only father. Perhaps the girl refused because she didn’t trust themÑor anyone. “I want to go to Hilda,” Skippy said. “Tomorrow. By bus.” Danny’s pudgy hands trembled. “Look, Skip,” he said with a forced smile, “we’re not psychiatrists, but we know you need love and a good home. Haven’t I always given you sound advice?” She nodded obediently. “Sure it’s upsetting, living in a group home with emotionally-disturbed children, but eventually we’ll wincustody and you’ll adjust to a normal life with us.” He paused. “Don’t decide now. Think it over. You’ll see that I’m right.” Skippy’s body stiffened; her fingers drummed on the wooden sofa arm. The trio quieted then as wailing fire trucks pounded along a nearby street. I should insist she live here, Gail thought guiltily. Then she remembered Skippy saying once with sincerity, “If I leave my mother, she’ll die.” Other memories surfaced: last summer, when they’d caught Skippy sniffing glue for kicks. Danny hadn’t scolded her, but they’d been upset. And two short years before that when Skippy developed bleeding ulcers after Family Court declared Hilda an unfit mother and transferred the child to the group home. Skippy needed themÉ But should they press for custody? There would be expensive lawyers’ fees, time lost from work, constant aggravation. “It’s late, folks,” Gail said, exhausted. “Let’s finish tomorrow.” During the flurried activity she transformed the sofa into a bed with extra blankets and a pillow from the foyer closet. While Skippy undressed in the living room, Danny followed Gail into the bathroom to chat while she brushed her teeth. “I think she’s mentally ill,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to handle that.” “She needs the psychiatric counseling at the home,” Gail said. Later, lying against her husband’s soft, warm body, she suddenly sat up, listen-ing. Through the wall she heard muffled sobs. Poor Skippy... Gail felt terrible. She should comfort the child who’d just been dealt another crisis: Danny wasn’t her biological father. “What is it?” he asked, rolling over. “Skippy’s crying.” “Oh, she’s just pretending so we’ll feel sorry for her.” He stared up at the ceiling, and whispered angrily, “She doesn’t love usÑonly her mother who treats her like garbage.” He closed his eyes. In seconds, despite the emotional upheaval, Gail fell asleep, floating again, watching the same funny cloud formations. Except this time it was different, but why? Wait a minute. She couldn’t swim! The undercurrents became robotic hands, viciously pulling her under. Her arms flailed wildly, she gasped; the water filled her. I’m drowning, she thought. Her fright awakened her. In the heavy silence, she rose and stood by the window, gazing beyond the gingham curtains at the tree-lined street, and shivered in her thin nightgown. She remembered Kalil Gibran: “pride and vanity saith the preacher...” They could help Skippy by being loving parents. “I should have comforted her tears,” she whispered. “Come to bed,” Danny mumbled, half-asleep. “Soon,” Gail replied, gazing at the street. But a custody suit might drain them financially and emotionally. Why sacrifice their dreams to help a disturbed child who didn’t seem to care about them? Besides, despite Danny’s protestations, did he love Skippy? Probably when he’d lived with her, but that was nine years ago. Perhaps by now he subconsciously realized that Skippy and her mother weren’t family, really, but strangers. And that’s why Skippy, sensing the truth, refused to live with them. Gail nodded, and sighed deeply. With professional caregivers’ help, a resourceful child like Skippy could probably resolve her problems. Relieved at her decision, Gail returned to bed, snuggling against her snoring husband, and soon fell asleep. The next day Danny put Skippy on a bus for the group home, and the couple dropped their custody suit, convinced they’d done their best for the child. But two weeks later, while Danny and Gail were preparing for bed, Mr. Williams called from the home, his voice faltering. “Danny? I have sad news for you about Skippy.” “What is it?” Danny said at the bedroom phone, his body trembling. Gail, plaiting her hair, rushed to the phone and bent her head to hear the conversation. “Skippy committed suicide this afternoon.” “Oh, my God. HowÉ” “She walked headlong into a moving truck. The driver didn’t have time to stopÉ She died on the way to the hospital.” He paused as Danny began weeping softly. “I’m sorryÉwe’re sending the body to her mother. If there’s anything I can doÉ” “NoÉ Thanks forÉcalling,” Danny said. He dropped onto the bed’s edge, and held his head in his hands. “If only she’d stayed with us,” he sobbed. Shocked, Gail embraced her husband. “Honey, it wasn’t our fault. She didn’t want to stay with us. We did all we could.” He nodded, his blue eyes bewildered as he stared at Gail. “For some reason she didn’t want to stay.” Gail coaxed him to go to bed, assuring him there was nothing more they could have done, and they’d get over it. But after learning of Skippy’s suicide, Gail never forgave herself. Earthlight/Starlight I. National Geographic shows on a new fold-out map A whole year of collected light from Earth: I can make out my home town’s isolated dot; The country between Oklahoma City and Norman Where I was dumped beaten in the rainy dark Fifty years ago by a rich man’s hired goons Is now ablaze with light and safe for some, For light means, safety, knowledge, and easeful living. The streak outlining Lake Michigan’s shores Is thickest where I live, and I would not have it Any other way. The lights may dim soon, For we have been spending too many old fossils, But we have always lived on one edge or another, Avoiding self-destruction by a split hair, and, Because we cannot fully imagine our not being, We have a baseless faith that we must survive. In the meantime banks of Nile and Jordan brighten, The corridor on I 95 swells and extends, Rio, Phoenix, Delhi, Beijing, and Athens spread, Gas flares redden the Persian Gulf, Nigeria glows, And there is bright carnage again on the Tigris Where the oldest records tell of Gilgamesh Trying to avoid death, seeking out the oldest man, The one who survived the flood the gods sent When the torches of night cities disturbed them, But Gilgamesh was told that all of us must die, Although our brief candle may last a while If our trickster fire-bringers serve us well And we learn to save and share before winking out. II. Living amid man-made light I seldom see The spangled sky. No work of mine depends On star-sign. A yearly visit to the inner Dome of Adler Planetarium suffices to Locate my problems in cosmic perspective, But I know stars are there, can even name A few and tell some Maya, Greek, or Arab Tales that once guided shepherds, wise men, Or planters, maybe guide space probes still. Last month on Ireland’s Strangford Lough I saw Them clear with all the proper childhood awe That I felt sixty years ago sleeping out In a safe back yard and singing a song Asking, “Does their glory exceed that of ours?” I knew early on that awe is the right reaction And should be passed on even to those who Will seldom get beyond the urban light spill. Once on the way back from Disneyland I took A side road through Tohono O’Odham land To show my children clear night sky. That is Open range country. I swerved to miss one steer And hit another, nothing serious, even local cops Whose ancestral land this was could hardly keep From laughing at the family making a detour Just to look at stars, but stars were there: The dipper pointing to Polaris, the hero-twins Born to the Changing Woman, signs that days Will lengthen for a while and that soon We can report to friends that the universe is vast. ---J. Quinn Brisben 1 NOV 2004 Junkyard Find The area south of the Loop keeps on gentrifying, The Red Line el before it descends under earth passes Rows and rows of three quarter million dollar condos For dazzling urbanites with no kids, savings, conscience, No sense of the past, not knowing they are on the site Of the “Cross of Gold” speech, the Everleigh Club, old Yiddish theaters, Big Jim Colosimo’s, Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John’s First Ward balls, Jack Johnson’s bar Inlaid with silver dollars, and things still rattling deep Inside my personal memory like the golden taste of Gefilte fish at Mama Batt’s, Scurvy Miller in burlesque, And the junkyards, the acres and acres of rusting hulks Guarded by legendary dogs, the huge parts warehouse Labeled Warshawsky and Warshawsky and nearby Another yard called Original Warshawsky. I never Knew the cause of the family quarrel, if there was one, Nor did I ever wander Original Warshawsky’s yard, But sometimes in my dreams I looked for a tail pipe for A 1946 Studebaker, my first car, which rusted out and Was patched with a too noisy corrugated flexible hose. I am told that sometimes gold was found there: gears For a Chrysler Airflow, a Lincoln Zephyr steering wheel. Original Warshawsky’s could provide reanimation aids Like Original Frankenstein, but that yard is gone forever. I spent hours with a search engine and only found that Warshawsky and Warshawsky had merged with big timers And has a yard in another low-rent area and that Original Warshawsky has left no trace except in the junkyard in My head where it rusts but refuses to go away, just like Old Carter Family tunes: “Lonesome Valley”, “Wildwood Flower”, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and the rest known Since always, but always began some time. When I heard Them most recently, I searched my junkyard mind: not at Home on the family Crosley, nor the homes of kin. They Were not broadcast in 1940 on “Grand Ol’ Opry” or on “National Barn Dance” but on some border superstation With a transmitter in Mexico to which we did not listen. Then I found it in a dream, lying under more than a Half century of rusted memories. I was six years old, Across the street at the little Fogelsong house, watching Fascinated as Mister Fogelsong operated his mail-order Cigarette rolling machine, wrapping Zig Zag papers around Duke’s Mixture or maybe Bugler, while A. P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and Mrs. Fogelsong Offered me supper if I cared to stay, and I was part of the Circle with big brother V. K., talented artist Jimmy, and Gene my special friend who spent nights in my back yard Yard when we rolled ourselves in blankets like the cowboys We imagined ourselves to be. The Fogelsongs moved To Anadarko a couple of years later and we lost touch. I tried to locate them today on the web, but they are Not chronicled and there is a nearly even chance by now They are dead except in my mind like Original Warshawsky, But the memory, awakened by those old Carter Family songs Is bright like the imagined tailpipe on a 1946 Studebaker. ---J. Quinn Brisben 11 MAY 2005 Equinox 2005 The new mail carrier, disregarding regulations, Litters the sidewalk with rubber bands As each bundle is unpacked and at first, It being that time of year, I mistake them For angle worms, but I pick them up despite My stiffness in my seventy-first year because I recall the scrap rubber drives and the absence Of bubble gum during World War Two and Black marks on gym floors from bad synthetics After the Japanese unexpectedly bicycled Down the Malay Peninsula to take Singapore; So I am “an old man bending” thankfully not over Wounded boys but merely impelled by thrift And memories of a time when gasoline was twenty Cents per gallon. It is now more than ten times That and still going up while boys no older Than my oldest grandchild are blown apart Nearly every day. I look at the power-packed Ugly boxes of my neighbors’ SUVs and wonder Why some lessons take so much longer than One old man’s lifetime to be driven home. ---J. Quinn Brisben 20 MAR 2005 Noir (For P. D.) The rumbling el casts shadows from the moon; Some truth must be entangled from the lies; The rats are dying, plague will be here soon. The low-life bars sound with a wailing tune; The frightened man knows something, but he dies; The rumbling el casts shadows from the moon. The woman’s screams now soften to a croon; She knows a lot, you dare not trust her sighs; The rats are dying, plague will be here soon. The hired thugs get smashed, and that’s a boon, But Mister Big eludes you and cracks wise; The rumbling el casts shadows from the moon. Your questing dick is just a sad buffoon, But then you figure out the bloody ties; The rats are dying, plague will be here soon. Almost too late, you smash through one last goon, Deserted warehouse blazing, villain dies; The rumbling el casts shadows from the moon. The rats are dying, plague will be here soon. ---J. Quinn Brisben 11 APR 2005 Obsoletus Petrarch was among the first to use The sonnet-form and also wrote in Latin So elegantly correct and Ciceronian It killed the tongue for daily use, Confining it to the learned and then To no one when the learned wished To talk to everyone and a universal Tongue meant universal ignorance Of what was being said; the Latin mass Called Tridentine, an adjective from Trent where the Council met to publish it, Is no longer used in churches but is missed By those who recall its sonorous comforts; But it survives because Sebastian Bach And Mozart set it so sublimely that We find it useful to know that Kyrie Elieson is Greek for Lord, have mercy, And Credo Latin for I believe which We can sing though we no longer can. We file what we no longer use, Transmuting it to other tongues; sonnets Jump from Petrarch’s Italian to demotic English and a dozen tongues for those With leisure for that sort of thing and Ideal love is recalled if not experienced. The griot reciting in Wolof made a hit On 1970s television, and I hope the Griots have their lore backed up on disks By now, for genes and cultures merge to live. The griot is welded to the sonnet form, The sonnet to the griot’s mind and ours. We must not forget the closet where we Preserve the past, soon I shall teach The use of a clutch and stick shift To my granddaughter and mention to her That my father told me that when the Planetary low gear band was worn On a Model T Ford you could still Back up a steep hill with the fresh reverse; His father did not stick around enough To teach my father how to brake a heavy load Down a steep slope with reluctant mules, so That teaching is lost forever unless Some great Champollion repairs that gap In collective memory that we might need. Once I stood in odd Lenin Park away From traffic on the edge of Budapest Among a jumble of mismatched statuary No longer wanted by the present public but Preserved in case the times should alter By a city that history has made prudent; The largest cast is the Russian soldier who Used to hand the torch of liberty to The Spirit of Hungary on Buda summit; Only one small monument is vandalized, The one to a Judas of 1956 who was not Really needed, for the tanks rolled in anyhow As Lukacs had warned: Lukacs, whose best Writing was done in prison, who had been A minister in the short-lived revolutionary Regime of 1919 led by Bela Kun and Organized the artists with actors led by Bela Lugosi and musicians by Bela Bartok, Whose exile works are universal. The monuments to that brief interlude Are not heroically muscled like the soldier But sleekly art moderne, a style I rather hope will be admired again. I am full of it, the no longer in use, The obsolete, derived from Latin obsoletus, Past participle of the verb obsolescere, And I intend to spend my last years As long as a few gray cells are working, Re-learning Latin and even learning Greek, Like reactionary Cato and old Judge Holmes, And even writing down what I was the last Teacher in my last school to have At the tips of my fingers about sixteen Millimeter film projectors that once Had to be hand-threaded: you unreeled The opaque leader from the new top reel Under a stay bar and a toothed wheel, Then looping carefully into the slot Behind the lenses, leaving a generous Bottom loop, then around more sprockets And slowly, tightly around the sound drum And around two more steadying bars To the empty slot on the bottom reel. If print technology were not as old hat As the subjunctive mood and poems, I Could diagram it for you on a board That I still recall as slate and black. ---J. Quinn Brisben 28 JUL 2003 Observe “You see, but you do not observe.” I bought the two-volume set used In Tulsa for seventy-five cents and walked Up those seventeen steps to a place more Real than real, with bullet holes celebrating V R on her golden jubilee, tobacco in the toe Of a Persian slipper, and all the blessed rest, Imagined only a decade after a wire had said “Come here, Mister Watson, I want you,” but I never could observe like Holmes. However, I learned Doyle’s trick of working backward. The next summer I saw a Van Gogh wheat field After seeing real ones from Oklahoma to Manitoba And knew Van Gogh had observed and I had not. I have used the trick since, all over the world: For instance in the Galapagos, feeling soft-spined Cacti, watching the variously beaked finches, Seeing the terrifying subversive inevitability Of Darwin’s Bible-defying insight; and again In Trier with the wedding-cake episcopal palace Close by the brooding Roman Empire gate below The robber baron cliffs and above the laden river Observed in all their successions by young Marx; Closer to home in a plane above the linking portage Of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, I missed nothing Because Turner growing up there missed nothing. I believe that someone somewhere is observing: A computer screen in Bangalore, an up to now Unknown orchid in New Guinea, a microscope or Telescope revealing wonders in Kiev or Kinshasa. Observing fends off the speckled band, the hound, Even the giant rat of Sumatra, that is elementary. ---J. Quinn Brisben 26 APR 2005 Perhaps from Nothing (for D. F.) Recall from school those huge equations which With all the unknowns solved turned out to mean Nothing equals nothing, perhaps some glitch In nothing started all; this might be seen To be a good first myth, except it’s tough To compass nothing in our thought: the Zen Monks try, but thought fills every void. Enough To trace where things and life have been, Enough to be in awe of all that was And is, know some of how it works, protect Our bit, do not pretend to know the cause Or what the minds that follow should expect. We think and search until our time has gone. The other side of nothing stays unknown. ---J. Quinn Brisben 31 MAR 2005 Remembrances of Driving He was always taking roads he had not taken Before or at least had not taken in years but Almost always in prairie country, he did not like His view obstructed by trees, still less the twists Of mountain roads. Once, though, on a level Straightaway with the Grand Tetons on his left, He said, “This is mountain driving the only Way I like it.” When he could he would avoid Deserts, swamps, stony ground, anywhere That crops could not be grown, tolerating At most the dry farming country where strips Of crop land alternated with fallow, likewise He did not much like those valleys so wet That grain had to be bagged to keep from sprouting. I reckon that he liked his strangeness familiar, Would study the differences in town water tanks, The shapes of grain elevators, the many Different ways of baling hay, subtle Modulations in silos and milking barns. He bypassed cities although he knew I loved them with their book stores and movie houses And would probably end up in one, rejecting Most things he greatly valued, though I wanted to please him but never ever could. Years after he died I was driving below the Sea of Marmora in Anatolia where the Wheat combines still had six-foot swaths Thinking of many uneasy childhood drives When I saw a town with a tank, grain elevators, And a minaret and wished him still alive So I could tell him of that strange familiarity. ---J. Quinn Brisben 27 DEC 2004 Surrogate Too good to be true, but true, Stretched way too far, but true, Unfit for a careful book in the Field of popular science, but True, anyhow, despite everything, And it must be preserved somehow. Kathy, all agree her name was that, Worked for the minimum wage or less, For this was fifty years ago when Laws on wages did not cover student jobs, Worked as a night attendant in the lab Where rhesus macaques, baby monkeys, Were isolated in cages on purpose testing The need for play and soft affection That accepted theory in those days Said did not exist, but everyone knew, Even Kathy, especially Kathy, did exist, And she acted humanely, unlocked the locks, Allowed the babies to play together and Even picked them up and cuddled them, Spoiling some expensive, cruel experiments That nevertheless got made anyhow, Proving theory wrong and common sense right. Harlow, the experiments’ designer, and great By any reckoning, loved to tell of Kathy, Especially when he had had a few, Which was often, and the story stretched Too far for science, but that careful sort Of truth is not all truth, and those barred From the ideal republic because of their Lovely and incurable true lies repeat The story of Kathy in their own way, But within rules, always within rules, For poems, parenting, love, and memory Have rules, often broken but still there. My wife and I heard the story about Kathy In the spring of 1958, dining lavishly, The taste of lobster thermidor returns As I write. We had just discovered that She was pregnant, an unplanned happening, Not really unwelcome but inconvenient, For she would not be allowed to teach The next year by the rules of that time, And I would have to abandon an academic Quest and find real common work. The irrational and necessary thing to do Was to celebrate with dishes we had Heard of but never eaten in the finest Restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, and We did, joyously, and when we saw A young woman whom we knew and Her companion, a sculptor whom We had met once before, we invited Them to join us for coffee and dessert. The sculptor had great talents, also A famous father similarly gifted, Which is never easy, and I cannot Locate him today, cannot access him On the web. He may be dead, but I like to think he flourishes Under another name, free from His father’s shade. The last anyone Saw of him he was heading west On a loaded motorbike seeking A fresh beginning like a true American. He had helped build Harlow’s surrogates: The cold wire ones with the ready Bottles that the monkeys used But did not care for and the soft Cushiony ones sometimes warmed By a light bulb within that babies Loved and ran to in their need. This proved something that all of us Always knew, that Kathy knew, too, And we laughed and nodded as we Were told about her, everyone did, Even the learned scientists did as Harlow the showman showed off. But by the rules of their game Proof was needed, experimental proof, Properly monitored and chronicled, Something beyond a string of Anecdotes distorted because Everyone already knew they were true. Truth spreads slowly. Our daughter Came expeditiously exactly when due, As has been typical of her for nearly Forty-five years. I dropped out of Grad school to find I belonged Teaching the common and needy, but Ran into trouble for speaking truth To those who profited from lies and Had no new job lined up after We conceived another child. For Unknown reasons he came early, Seven weeks premature, weighing Only four and a half pounds, with A weak cry nevertheless heard With joy. It was touch and go. We could not take him home until He weighed five pounds and that Took many weeks. He was kept sterile In an incubator way at the back Of the viewing room. Once we asked To see him and were royally Chewed out by a starched nurse Who would not endanger fragile Babies for the bonding needs of Sentimental parents. Abashed, We left. However, he bulked up, Came home, was cuddled, loved, And generally treated as an infant Getting away with being an infant Because most of us must love them If we have been loved ourselves. Harlow’s breakthroughs had been Massively pictured in mass media And accepted by that time by peers, But the word had not gotten through To nurses in burgs like Waukegan, so We were late bonding with our boy, but He was not irreparably damaged, loves A loving touch more than most, Has weak but correctable vision, Possibly from too much oxygen In that incubator, early on made Huge piles of pillows that he called “Hunkabunks” that resemble a bit His preference in loving women, But is huge, hairy, competent, And an ornament to the planet. Learning is always slow to spread, And pioneering is dangerous work, For we cling to our soft illusions. I recalled the story about Kathy When I read a new book about Harlow, Although it did not contain that Too often stretched and unreliable tale. I learned much, however, for instance That Harlow was not his original Name; that was Israel, changed on Suggestion from a mentor, not because The man was Jewish but because The name sounded Jewish and such Names were unwelcome in academia In 1930. The mentor was Terman, Whose reduction of the human mind To a single number is pernicious And supportive of a rotten class system, But nevertheless a useful tool. In this new millennium we are Rightly embarrassed by our forbears And, one hopes, meticulously looking For beams in our own eyes. Harlow lived long enough to catch flak From feminists rightfully afraid that Emphasizing the need to mother could Be a tool of oppression in the hands Of arrogant males who had for so long Ignored common sense about affection. It did not bother him, for pioneers Need tough hides, and after his death He felt nothing at all when attacked By those who accused him of torturing Creatures whose cousinhood to us He had done much to establish In experiments that we are too feeling To repeat, and do not need to, thanks, At least in some small part, to Harlow. Thus, the story about loving Kathy Is, if not exactly true, truth’s Surrogate, comforting in this time When we work to stop our ruin With the warm mother wit we have. ---J. Quinn Brisben 6 MAR 2003 The Family Christmas Card My mother’s unique Christmas cards formed a series From the year of my birth until two years Before her death when the pain of cancer Became too much for her to do them anymore. In the chemical-smelling booth at Woolworth’s Where you could get four instant portraits for a quarter We posed as she had directed, then she would Trim the heads she had selected, paste them On the bodies she had drawn, with a message Lettered in India ink (she had learned calligraphy At the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922 from A teacher who had taught Vachel Lindsay earlier) The messages were always timely and witty. I recall us in 1943 posed with a newly relevant globe And in 1957 with an orbiting dog in space. Her first grandchild was born too close to Christmas To make 1958, but every year afterward grandchildren Were featured, and when my brother got divorced Grandchildren smiled alone as a solution To the problem of dropping someone without Hurting feelings, which was always a big problem, Because my mother made friends easily and hated To let go, but my father insisted that the list Be kept down to five hundred for the cost of printing Plus stamps and envelopes was over a hundred dollars Even in the 1950s, but people loved them and collected The whole series and knew my mother loved them Because they were still on the list. My brother and I Used to joke that we were sure Mama loved us As long as we were on that Christmas card list. ---J. Quinn Brisben 8 JAN 2005 My World War II J. Quinn Brisben The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 7:55am December 7, 1941. The news of the attack reached Enid, Oklahoma, by radio shortly after noon. By two o’clock that afternoon news bulletins from Hawaii and elsewhere had pre-empted all regular programming. The news took another half hour to reach me. I was outside playing our neighborhood version of football with friends. It was tackle football, but the rules were that no one could be tackled on a sidewalk, only on grass. I was four months beyond my seventh birthday, in the second grade at Adams Grade School. I suppose I had read the Sunday funnies with my parents that morning, although I was already sufficiently skilled to decipher some of them by myself. I suppose we had had Sunday dinner, which always took place at noon or soon after in those days. The memorable part of the day began for me when a boy named Harry Taylor came running out of his house to interrupt our game. “Go tell your dad that the Japs have attacked the Philippines,” he said, “and he’ll give you a nickel.” I doubted that, but I went home anyhow. Our radio was on, broadcasting one breathless news bulletin after another. Our brand new globe was out. So were our atlas and several encyclopedia volumes. I learned more geography in the next few hours than I had learned in my entire life before. I learned that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii on the island of Oahu and that Hawaii was a possession of the United States in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I learned that the Philippines were also our possession and that it was already the next day there because they were on the other side of the International Date Line, which was amazing but true, as confirmed by our new globe. I learned that battleships were named for states and that the one named for our state, the Oklahoma, had been sunk. I learned that Japanese fighter planes were called “Zeroes” although I never learned why, that day or later. I was allowed to stay up past my normal bed time of 8pm to listen to Walter Winchell’s staccato delivery of all the news and rumors. It was definitely a new epoch in the history of the world. However, I still had to go to school the next day. My exceptionally competent second grade teacher Miss Moore took advantage of the teachable moment to drive home some geography lessons, and my arm was in the air to answer questions so often that I was admonished to let others have a chance. We got time off from lessons to hear President Roosevelt ask Congress for a declaration of war. What happened in the days after that I have no idea, and I would have some difficulty telling you what I did last week, but my memory of December 7, 1941, and its immediate aftermath is indelible, as it is for nearly every American my age or older. Memory works that way. When I became a public school teacher in 1959, I would build lessons around this quality of memory. I would tell my students that their parents could clearly recall where they were when they first heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor. My students did not believe their parents were capable of such knowledge of ancient events, and were always amazed at the depth of detail the question elicited. Parents recalled Pearl Harbor with as much clarity as they recalled the birth of their children or their weddings. There were exceptions. One father in 1962 recalled that December 7, 1941, must have been after cotton picking was over and about hog-killing time in Sunflower County, Mississippi, but that for a family with no radio and no newspaper delivery, the day had no special impact. He knew it had changed his life, however, for within two years he got a letter from a cousin in Chicago inviting him to make fabulous money helping make airplane engines while living in a place with electric lights and a flush toilet. He understood very well that somehow the attack on Pearl Harbor had made this possible. Within a few years the parents were getting too young to remember Pearl Harbor, but there was another universally memorable date. My students could all remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they got the news that John Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22, 1963. Within a decade they were getting too young to remember that, but their parents could. By the time I retired from teaching in 1991, there were even parents of high school freshmen who were getting too young to recall that. I suppose teachers today teach the same memory lesson with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. By 2010 there will be high school freshmen too young to recall that clearly, and I sincerely hope there will be no newer universally memorable date. The Chinese are quite right to regard “May you live in memorable times” as a terrible curse. Actually, I was a bit surprised on December 7, 1941, to find that the United States was not already at war. I knew that American ships carrying supplies to the British and Russians were already being sunk by German submarines. When I had my tonsils out in September, 1939, my ether dreams were a green cloud of storm troopers goose-stepping through Poland like the ones I had seen in the newsreels. I knew that the United States had already started drafting soldiers, among whom was the boxing champion Joe Louis, whose defeat of the German Max Schmeling on June 22, 1938, is my very first datable memory. I recall hearing news bulletins day after day in 1940 giving news from “unoccupied France.” I asked why there was never any news from “occupied France” and did not get a satisfactory answer. I recall a favorite game of kindergarten boys at Miss Frances Reynolds’s Bluebird School that was based on the understanding of five year-olds concerning current events. We would agree to be representatives of various world powers with a designated enemy. We would be Chinese versus Japanese, Germans versus French, Italians versus Ethiopians, Russians versus Finns, and so forth. Then we would rush at each other in one grand melee with inventive alliances and betrayals. One boy told his parents about the game and was told that he could not be an Ethiopian any more because Ethiopians were niggers. The problem was easily solved because Italy was fighting Albanians by that time, and Albanians were white as far as any of us knew. There were already a lot of movies about the British being nice people who deserved our support and how we must learn to be tough in preparing for war. My favorite among those I was taken to see was a story of World War I, Sergeant York starring Gary Cooper. Alvin York was a poor hill farmer in eastern Tennessee who had become a religious pacifist after a wild youth. When he was drafted, an understanding commander sent him home for a few days with his Bible and also the basic documents of American government. After serious contemplation on a mountain top, York chose to aid his country. After his best friend was killed by the Germans, he became angry in the classic manner of Achilles. He used his back country shooting skills to kill or capture literally hundreds of Germans. My favorite bit was when he imitated a turkey gobbler, then shot the German who poked his head up to see what was happening. His neighbors rewarded York with a piece of the good bottom land he had always coveted, complete with a house with electricity and a flush toilet. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked, the American public, including seven year-olds like me, had been well prepared. President Roosevelt had many detractors in Enid, Oklahoma, his wife even more, the British Empire was not popular and the Communist Russians less so, but I do not recall any significant opposition to the war once it had begun. Hitler, who must have had the most easily caricatured face in history, was universally despised, Mussolini regarded as a buffoon, and the sneaky Japanese, who all looked alike anyhow, merged into one hated slant-eyed toothy face. There were German Americans in Enid, all of them loyal American patriots, but none of us had ever even seen a Japanese. On radio the Green Hornet’s valet Kato switched ethnicity from Japanese to Filipino the week after Pearl Harbor, although still played by the same actor with the same accent. No one objected when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and put in concentration camps. Our neighbor Sally O’Donnell was a local celebrity in early 1942 because she had actually been in Hawaii visiting her daughter when the attack occurred. She told us that Hawaii was full of Japanese, very few of whom had been arrested. Much of the work of the islands, including the running of military facilities, could not be done without them. This ran counter to a common but not universal opinion that the Japanese were not even human, just evil little monkeys. My mother believed that people who could create such beautiful fabrics could not be all bad but warned me not to repeat that opinion in public. My father, who had been twelve years old when World War I ended, warned me not to believe all the atrocity stories about the Bataan death march and the German concentration camps. He had believed the stories about German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, and they had turned out not to be true. All the boys in the neighborhood became experts on the war. When I was in first grade before the war began, the flight of an airplane over our area was so rare an event that we would be let out onto the playground to watch it fly over. An older cousin had taught me a joke that was guaranteed to upset our teacher, although we had only the vaguest notion as to why it did. One of us would ask: “Is that the mail plane?” and another would reply: “No, that’s just the landing gear hanging down.” By the next year Enid had an Army Air Corps training base, and the sight of BT-9 and BT-15 trainers became so common that we were no longer allowed outside to watch. We knew all about the Boeing B-17 long range bomber, the beautiful twin-fuselage Lockheed P-38, the British Spitfire fighter and Hawker Hurricane bomber, the German planes called Messerschmitt and Fokker, a name which gave rise to much schoolyard smut. I cannot identify any of today’s jetliners, including the ones I have flown in, but in the early 1970s I amazed my children by identifying every World War II aircraft baking in the sun at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson. We knew every gradation of rank in the army and navy, the difference between the wings of a pilot and a bombardier, the insignia of every branch of the service, and many corps and division patches like the thunderbird of the Forty-fifth Division, which was the Oklahoma National Guard. Many houses in the neighborhood had a red-bordered banner with a blue star hanging in the window, indicating that a family member was in the service. A gold star meant that a family member had given his life for his country. There was no such banner at our house, for I had no relative closer than first cousins in the service. I knew my father sincerely wanted to serve but could not. He had two young children and a business that could not run very well without him. He was in his late thirties and had once spent a year in a sanitarium and in bed with tuberculosis. He had no military experience and no military skills. Nevertheless, he wanted to serve. Brisben Furniture Company had been doing fairly well since 1940 brought the first good rains in a decade and simultaneously high wheat prices because of the war in Europe. My mother’s skills as an interior decorator were becoming widely known and widely appreciated. Good furniture was in short supply because all production was directed toward the war effort, and home appliances like floor furnaces and kitchen ranges were in even shorter supply. His only help with heavy lifting was R. D. Phelps, a fascinating man with four sons in the service and much of his savings in his mouth in the form of gold teeth. Mr. Phelps could not get a job in a war plant because he could not produce a birth certificate. He was white but lived on an unpaved street in a part of Enid I never heard called anything but “Niggertown” until after I was grown. My mother had a genius for supplying her customers. She negotiated a contract for decorating the officers’ club at the air base and some of the housing for married officers as well. The only upholsterer she could get during the war was dying of cancer, but Mr. Wassum’s remissions somehow got us through until VJ-day. My parents went to Chicago twice a year for the furniture markets and were very good at negotiating special orders of scarce furniture for customers. Once she went to Wichita to see if the stores there had furniture we needed and would exchange for items we could not move, a successful trip. She took me along. I was standing on the street in front of a furniture store when a bus stopped and about twenty midgets got off, most of them smaller than me at age nine. They worked at the Boeing plant. The B-29 bomber, so necessary for our victory in the Pacific, had been designed so quickly that the assembly line was already being set up when it was noticed that about fifteen spots on each line would not accommodate anyone taller than fifty inches. Midgets had been recruited from all over the country and specially trained, becoming one more group that the war was boosting into the middle class. That day at the same spot I also met a man named Gordon, a light-skinned African American who had once shined shoes in an Enid barber shop. I hailed him. He had on a Boeing badge like the midgets I had just seen. He told me his name in Wichita was Gonzales and that he would greatly appreciate it if I told no one in Enid that I had seen him here. I promised this on Cub Scout honor. He got on a bus, sat near the front, and I never saw him again. The president had issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in war plants, but this had not been enforced in Wichita except in doubtful cases like that of Gordon-Gonzales. At one time the army was excepting enlistees as old as forty-five years of age, and construction workers could be Seabees even older than that. Then the army announced that it was lowering its top age for enlistees to thirty-eight and would be more particular about persons in the upper reaches of that age range. The army had tired of having enlistees die of heart attacks during basic training and of having to pay for false teeth and bifocals. One evening after supper near the time when the new regulations were about to go into effect, my father left the house without telling us where he was going. The previous year he had taken a free chest x-ray from a storefront machine and had received a clean bill of health, indicating that the tubercular hole in his lung had healed over and that the scar tissue did not show in the low resolution picture. He was thirty-eight. He decided to take a chance. The county draft board was headed by John Vater. He owned a book and office supply store where I sometimes bought and often browsed. He was a Roman Catholic. His store had been vandalized in the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. By the 1940s that incident was part of the community’s collective amnesia. His administration of the draft was universally praised, even by former Klansmen trying to get exemptions for their sons as needed farm workers. He kept the draft board office open some evenings as a convenience to those who worked days. When my father asked for an enlistment form, John Vater said the matter needed serious discussion, the kind that was best held over a few drinks. He lauded my father’s patriotism but raised serious and reasonable objections, all the time pouring drinks from the office bottle into paper cups from the water cooler. My father tried to refute the objections, which he knew to be strong, and, clean contrary to his usual habit, kept taking more drinks. Close to midnight our doorbell rang. This was so unusual that it awakened me as well as my mother. John Vater was there with his arm around my father. It was the only time in my life I ever saw my father the worse for drink. Mr. Vater explained the situation and apologized to my mother. My mother hugged my father and said, “John, it would have been the wrong thing for you to go, but you are so brave and I am so proud of you.” I was proud of him, too, but I never got a chance to tell him so because the incident was never mentioned again by any of us. I helped the war effort as much as any boy my age could. There were scrap rubber drives that had me hauling my wagon around the neighborhood asking for old hot water bottles and patched inner tubes. Once I collected a whole ton of scrap metal for a drive at school. My school’s discretionary fund and the treasury of the local Cub Scout organization benefited greatly from the scrap paper drives that went on throughout the war, for my friends and I would never be war profiteers. My only indulgence was to read many old magazines before I turned them in. My grade school held twice-weekly stamp parades to a branch post office across the street. We would buy defense stamps, later called war stamps, in ten or twenty-five cent denominations, and paste them in a book. When we had eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents worth, we could trade the book for a war bond that would be worth twenty-five dollars in ten years. I became expert at getting the last dollar or so needed for a bond from my grandmother or other generous relatives and friends. Once I got the final nickel out of a bank cashier who was a family friend. By the end of the war I had three hundred dollars in bonds. I forgot about them until 1955 when I was getting married. Inflation had outpaced interest, which did not bother me because, like most Americans, I had bought them for patriotic reasons, but they allowed me to buy an engagement ring that I could not otherwise have afforded. The thing about World War II that I have had most difficulty explaining to subsequent generations is the near unanimous American support for it. Overage or inappropriate volunteers like my father were far more common than draft resisters. The husband of one of my mother’s cousins joined up even though he was in his mid-thirties and had enough political pull to get deferred and make big money. My father took him in as a business partner after his discharge on generous terms. I have been told many times that command economies do not work, but the United States allocated scarce resources to war production and starved the civilian sector with few complaints. We went without new cars, new refrigerators, and much else. Rationing and price controls were not popular, but they worked. We were limited to three new pairs of shoes per family member per year, an inadequate number for my rapidly growing feet. I managed to wear out one of my father’s pairs when we wore the same size, but my mother was in tears when my feet outgrew his. We saved sugar ration stamps for months so that I could have one of my beloved cherry pies when that fruit was in season. We did not want to be like the woman our neighbor Mrs. Miller told us about who had had two miscarriages and had ration books for both of them. My parents drove at thirty-five miles per hour on the open highway and never tried to get a larger gasoline ration than that the local board thought fair. We complained frequently, but most people obeyed the rules and vented their irritation at the Office of Price Administration (OPA) by making jokes. I really did not understand the following joke the first time I heard it, but it became a favorite. I used to tell it to the young men who made high scores on my World War II test as a special reward. A Chicagoan was looking for a prostitute. He went to North Clark and was told the OPA ceiling price was three dollars plus three red ration stamps. He had the cash but no red ration stamps. He was told the same thing on West Madison. Then he went to East Forty-seventh, the heart of the African American ghetto. He was told the price was five dollars. “No red ration stamps?” he asked. “No, man, this here’s the black market.” Bubble gum disappeared from the market, comic books shrank from sixty-four to forty-eight pages and were published less frequently, western movies of the type I watched every Saturday at the Cherokee Theater were limited to forty-five blank shots per picture. Gym shoes made with inferior synthetic rubber made ugly black marks on basketball courts. Women who could no longer get silk or nylon stockings painted their legs and drew artificial seams up the back of them. Buses and trains were crowded with those who could no longer drive cars. There were honorable ways around some of these shortages. My father claimed to be able to tell the difference between butter and oleomargarine, but my mother used oleomargarine in cooking without telling him, and he did not detect the substitution. He found a supplier in Missouri who mailed him Old Gold cigarettes when they were unavailable elsewhere. When I went to Chicago with my family in July, 1945, I found a candy machine in the lobby of a newsreel theater that dispensed Tootsie Rolls and spent fifty cents buying ten packages of five candies each. I rationed my consumption so that they lasted the rest of the war. The war was great early training for someone like me who would later earn a living teaching history and geography. I learned to find Singapore, Guadalcanal, Casablanca, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Bastogne, Remagen, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and many other places on a map. I knew that Rommel lost because he ran out of gas and why Mark Clark found it so difficult to take Monte Cassino. I even knew secrets which I did not repeat because “loose lips sink ships.” For instance a friend of my parents who was an importer was getting orders for high quality imported chess sets from places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, and had deduced that refugee scientists were up to something important in those places. By 1945 I was following the formation of the United Nations with great interest and was charting the slow progress of our troops in Okinawa from each day’s newspaper map. For those Americans who were not getting killed or crippled, World War II brought many benefits. It was considered out of line when my senile grandmother thanked God for the war while saying grace at a family gathering, but we all knew what she meant. My parents’ store was making good money and would make much better money when wartime shortages were over. My uncle’s bar near several war plants in Oklahoma City was filled with patrons at all hours drinking as if they were on a twelve-hour pass from hell. A cousin who was 4-F because he had lost the toes on one foot in a corn shucking machine was using his profits to expand his operations and buy new equipment. All of my cousins in the service got college educations through the GI Bill of Rights and eventually entered the labor force equipped with skills that they would not otherwise have been able to acquire. Many people like my parents felt somewhat guilty about this, but I never heard of anyone turning down the benefits the war brought. For midgets, for African Americans, and for those in the rapidly disappearing category of “Okies”, it was a brave new world. We got a few hours off at school anticipating VE-day, which did not happen until the day after we had spent a pleasant morning listening to Cliff Arquette in Glamour Manor. This did not bother me, for my fifth grade teacher was a hateful incompetent. When I heard news of the Hiroshima bombing, I had no idea of its importance. We were used to totally destroyed cities by that time and were hardened to the idea of civilian casualties. Most of the ten year-olds in the country envied the killers and would have been killers ourselves if we could. The few groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses or others who had religious or other principled objections to killing seemed faintly ridiculous. Many people thought that it would take another two years to defeat Japan with many hundreds of thousands of American casualties. On August 14, 1945, I was in the Chief Theater watching Boris Karloff strangle Bela Lugosi in a movie called The Body Snatcher. At that moment a bunch of newsboys rushed into the theater yelling: “Extra! Extra! Japs Give Up.” I jumped about a foot. That night my family and I went downtown to celebrate with our neighbors. A loudspeaker from station KCRC kept booming a Spike Jones number about a returning soldier called “Leave the Dishes in the Sink, Ma”. There would be no more gold stars. Within a few months bubble gum came back, comic books became plumper and more frequent, the “ruptured duck” button of returning veterans was a common sight. The end of gas rationing meant that we could visit my aunt and paternal grandmother in Oklahoma City more frequently. On one of those trips we stopped to deliver several cartons of cigarettes at the German prisoner of war camp near El Reno, Oklahoma. The prisoners were being rented out to local farmers at twenty-five cents per hour and were being held until the 1946 cotton crop was picked. My father knew the stories about death camps by that time and believed them, but he said most of these poor bastards had just been doing what they were told and had no choice about it. By that time we had heard stories from returning veterans that American troops had occasionally committed atrocities, too. It was my father’s opinion that we would have to do business with these people some day and that they would appreciate a small act of kindness. He insisted that the gift be anonymous but was thanked effusively by camp administrators and the prisoners working in their office. Within five years there was another war in Korea, but few Americans were enthusiastic about it even though there was little significant resistance to it. The movies about the Red menace were never able to rekindle the enthusiasm of the movies about the Nazi menace. Every American troop commitment since has aroused more opposition than the last. The sixtieth anniversary of the end of the World War II has been celebrated by its surviving veterans, and they have been widely and justly praised. Soon they will be gone and those of us who were children on the safe and prosperous home front will follow them. May you live in less memorable times. A Dose of His Own Medicine Eric Bonholtzer Dan’s hands trembled uncontrollably as he searched for his pills. They hadn’t even shaken this badly when he’d killed his first victim. His heart raced, terrified he was going to die. All this because I couldn’t sleep, he told himself. That was why he’d seen the psychologist, why he’d taken the pills, on his shrink’s orders, all because he had insomnia. Now, he felt ill. He’d tried to cough up the medicine, but all he could manage was a few dry heaves. His intestines seized and clutched like a cold fist in his gut. If only that smug psychologist were here now, he’d have some advice, Dan thought frantically, recalling his delight at the doctor’s look of disgust when he’d heard the reasons for the sleepless nights, conveyed with bloody detail. Dan was smart, well aware of doctor/patient privilege, knowing his shrink was helpless to stop him. Head throbbing, his vision blurred as he finally found the medication bottle. Squinting to read the label, realization suddenly set in. He staggered forward, reaching for the phone, falling after only two steps. Crashing to the floor, darkness encircling him, Dan thought of his psychologist, the bottle of pills rolling towards him, almost mockingly, the prescription boldly asserting: One pill daily. WARNING: DO NOT EXCEED DOSAGE- SEVERE INJURY OR DEATH MAY RESULT. As Dan made his final connection, he thought, the shrink had said, “take at least three.” He realized that perhaps the psychologist hadn’t been so helpless after all. Gaze Beyond Eric Bonholtzer Weightless atop the precipice I gaze into the yonder As red sand wends beneath my feet There is comfort in the warmth of the sun touching the reaches and recesses, lit for a voyeur’s pleasure. The sky is a myriad of blended color: Space and thoughts as a picture gazing upon vast expanses that are never as far as they seem to be. Horizons Eric Bonholtzer We can’t see it over the horizon The white warmth, echoing, calling For the celebrated return, Friendly faces smiling signs of welcoming The purity of innocence regained With the soles we have trod, over the hills A haven and valley of solace Always waiting as we make our way, our journey That will someday come and we will be home. Trails Eric Bonholtzer The beaten path bent backward upon itself and we followed The gilded orb beat with a fury of its own As we sought moisture. It was so clear that day The trails led all ways and to each Its own story As with reflections Looking back I see myself In a translucent pool of tranquil tumult There is order in the chaos. That I can see from a distance. So pristine and pure is the water Muddied by eddies of debris Blended by time a smooth flow Over rocks. Distorted yet clear in the reflection The river moves on as memories The reflections gazed upon for a moment. Cold Friends Eric Bonholtzer Two spiked wheels hang upon the nail A saline trickle drips down parchment With the curl of a lip and a glint, a grin, a cigarette for better times Against parched lips An open flame, a hearth against the white lakes of sky marring the mood Lucky, he thinks as a brand set against a carved table Out a window the snow was quick in coming And a bitter draught at the back of his throat For a friend so cold. Solace Eric Bonholtzer The green grew around us Like archways or caressing finger tips, As hoof beats twined our own hearts as we trudged, A road of many paths, directions an unnecessary nuisance The beauty of being truly lost Is that when you are found All is as it should be, in these moments Leaves, branching outward, onward. This is the reward for taking the time to listen To yourself and to others, in this hideaway Of solace found in mind The greatest sprits always within.