TAKING A LEAP

THEME: TAKING A LEAP 
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. ~ Henry Miller

         

She Could Have Had It All

Carolyn B Healy

I get temporarily popular every time a celebrity overdoses, suicides, or runs into some sort of ditch. Given my therapy background, people want to hear my attempt to explain such behavior. With Whitney Houston’s death, the question seems to be a three-parter: Why couldn’t she 1) kick that Bobby Brown aside, 2) get clean and sober and stay that way, and 3) get back to singing like she was supposed to?

There is an angry question lurking just below: How could she have a gift like that voice and squander it?

As I sit here I contend with dueling earworms.  With Whitney singing, “I will always love you…” and Adele belting, “We could have had it all…” it’s hard to think. But I’ll take a crack at it.  MORE . . .

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Echoes of Marian Hall (Part Two)

Ellie Searl

I arrived home at four. The twenty-eight mile drive from Marian Hall hadn’t erased my agitation.  Katie hugged my knees; her world of joy reminded me of normal.

“So, how was it?” Ed asked.  “Do you love it there?”

“Where to start,” I said.  “Do we have any wine?”

After an hour of relating my day, Ed had it all figured out. “So these are troubled girls from dysfunctional homes who do something bad, go to court, get sent to live with other troubled girls from dysfunctional homes all in the same colorless, cinder blocked, stinky-bathroomed, linoleum-floored, musty-furnitured room of a dead-bolted apartment inside a locked institution surrounded by a chain link fence and watched over by a bunch of nuns who patrol the building clattering keys around their waists.”  He took a chicken out of the fridge and rinsed it under the faucet.  “Now that’s living.”  He slapped the chicken onto the cutting board. “What, exactly, did you expect?” MORE . . .

GOOD INTENTIONS

THEME: GOOD INTENTIONS
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~ Douglas Adams

ECHOES OF MARIAN HALL (Part One)
ELLIE SEARL

I wonder if it smells the same. Rotting citrus. Meatloaf. Sour milk. Peanut butter. Disinfectant over vomit. Like an ignored school cafeteria.

Or if it sounds the same. Whispers, flushing toilets, sobs, pounding on metal doors, screams, record player needles scratching on forty-fives, keys clanking against the swish of black robes. 

I remember my last conversation with the director, Sister Mary Esther, who by that time was Jeanne Marie in street clothes, but to me she was still a Sister of the Good Shepherd, regardless of the switchover to secular management.  MORE. . . 

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MY BRAIN ON FREDDIE MERCURY

CAROLYN B HEALY

           Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head. Often the tune quickly dissipates, like the last wisps of a dream I can’t hold onto, fleeting and forgotten. I may recognize it as part of a commercial jingle (“1-800-588-2300 Empire”) that I hear all the time, or a line from a familiar song (like “This Land is Your Land” which I heard the other day). Its unimportance helps it go away.

But other times, the song stays with me all day long and into the next. My blood seems to pulse to its rhythm, and the words run like a news crawler in my brain, no matter what else I’m doing. When it finally lets up a couple of days later, it’s a relief.  MORE . . . 

HOME

THEME: HOME
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou

The Stories They Hold

Ellie Searl

        I’ve never liked to rise earlier than the sun, but lately I’ve savored the first hours of each day.  While I wait for a crack in the almost-morning sky, I imagine the treasures of my home.  Memory treasures.  Treasures our family has gathered through the years.  Chairs and tables, vases and pictures.  Sculptures and coats, lap throws and newspapers.  All of these in a comforting disarray of living.  We fill the rooms of our lives with love and bustle and happiness.  My home is alive with the stories written by the people who matter most to me. MORE . . . 

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Writing Your Way Home

Carolyn B Healy

By day, it was a typical conference room with moveable tables and stackable chairs. By night, or at least this night, it became a salon, a home away from home. The tables made a cozy U-shape, so everyone could see and be seen. Table cloths covered each, and antique-style lamps shed soft light. Plates of sweets and coffee took up the table near the door. Wordless music played quietly in the background.  The words would come from the dozen women who filed in, late because there was childcare trouble – too many kids with too many needs, more than had been expected. The chaos of resistance and misplaced toys and unfamiliar places took its usual toll on both mothers and kids. New childcare recruits were summoned to help, and we could begin.

These women looked tired. They had all experienced domestic violence and were finding their way out, either through shelter or education and counseling or groups for moms and kids. They had children to care for, jobs to find, homes to make. Homes that would be safe.  MORE . . . 

REMEMBRANCE

THEME: REMEMBRANCE
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~ Frank Deford

What Photographs Can Do

Carolyn B Healy

 My father is 14 or 15 in the photo, posing with the big band he helped organize in high school. He wears two-tone saddle shoes, neatly tied. They look new. The photo has been hanging on my family picture wall for 15 years waiting for me to really look at it. I finally did.

In any old picture, the first thing I notice is the shoes. They hint at normal life, intimate suggestions of routine and circumstance. As I study his picture, I imagine him tying them on that morning, and wonder what was going on in those minutes: was he bickering with his sisters; what breakfast smells wafted upstairs; what was on his mind?  MORE . . . 


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Spokes People

Ellie Searl

I joined the fall session because I wanted to get the district-required “Teaching with Intention” workshop over with as soon as possible. The class would begin again in November with fifteen more teachers, and then again in January, and so on every other month until each teacher had completed the course.

The six-week seminar would spotlight a new and improved instructional system— the latest fad dreamed up by some scholastic guru—to reverse shoddy teacher competence. And when this maharishi of scholarship blitzed the nation with a bigger, better paradigm, our administration didn’t want to be the only district holding chalk without a board.  MORE . . .

WHAT A CHARACTER

THEME: WHAT A CHARACTER
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poochie’s Day

Ellie Searl

 Poochie’s mom told him it was too early.  “There’s no sense you goin’ there ahead of time, - you won’t get your candy any sooner.”  But Poochie put on his pea coat and stuck a flashlight into his pocket.  He huffed down the front steps and across the street.  “Cover your ears,” Poochie’s mom shouted after him.

          Poochie walked past the Methodist Church and down the hill onto the short, two-lane bridge that crossed the river, which was more of a creek than a river by the time it trickled out of the mountains and meandered into the lake at the town beach. MORE . . . 

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A Happy Story about Borders?

Carolyn B Healy

It seemed like a nightmare. Borders on Michigan Avenue was closing? Where would I go to have a tea and look down on the Water Tower park at throngs of shoppers? What would I do when I could no longer browse the crazy assortment of off-brand books in the basement, or look through the ironic Christmas cards on sale in January, looking for the perfect ones for next year?  Where would I find another store with such character? If this iconic location could fail, what did that portend?

Soon there was an announcement. False alarm. It wouldn’t close after all. Phew! That was close. But the fear had been planted. MORE . . . 

DREAM ON

THEME: DREAM ON
Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

My Dream, My Book

Carolyn Healy

 

Here was my dream. I would write a book that would change the world. It would be about personal narrative, the story that each of us tells about our own life. For a while there, the working title was If Your Life Was a Movie, Would You Go to See It?

“No, too trivial,” said the writing teacher. “This is an important topic.”

Second working title: What’s Your Story? How the Story You Tell about Yourself Makes All the Difference.

“No,” said the writing teacher, “Wordy and repetitive.”

Time for a new writing teacher.  MORE . . . 

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Gatekeepers

Ellie Searl

They guard the entrance to creativity, allowing the select few—those who pass muster—to enter.  Not the riff raff.  Not the wannabees who try to worm through the slats, those sad, misguided dilettantes who think their work shows merit.  They’re gatekeepers, and they prevent the unskilled culture-defacers from assailing the public with crap. 

If it weren’t for that cadre of connoisseurs assessing, ranking, and restocking the Aesthetic Empire, the eating, viewing, and reading public wouldn’t know what to eat, view, or read.  MORE . . . 

HEAR NO, SEE NO, SPEAK NO, YOU KNOW

THEME: HEAR NO, SEE NO, SPEAK NO, YOU KNOW
Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.~ Comte de Mira

FAIREST OF THEM ALL
ELLIE SEARL

     The pressure for women to be skinny, gorgeous, tight-bottomed, de-wrinkled, balloon-lipped, and big-boobed is just plain evil.  According to magazines, billboards, TV ads, and fashion gurus, every woman who isn't a Heidi Klum clone, or close to it, should wrap herself in cheese cloth and squeeze out the hideousness until all that's left is a plasticine replicant of her former self.  Or if not that, then she should spend a month or two at a Human Reconstruction Institute until her body, hair, skin, and lips are taut, voluminous, porcelain, and pouty—respectively.MORE . . .           

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MY THREE DAYS AS A CUBAN

CAROLYN B HEALY

           The email fairly screamed: Please take it down. You could be placing people at risk. Give us time to look at it first.

            Uh oh.  All I’d done is set up an online chronicle of my trip to Cuba.* I had to do something with the barrage of images and stories that woke me up every morning, to the Afro-Cuban beat of the music that followed us everywhere and then followed me home.

            As a courtesy, or maybe nagged by a vestige of the paranoia that hovers in the Cuban air, the first thing I did was send the link to my two tour leaders. And received this alarming reply.  MORE . . .