SAVOR THE MEMORIES

A good meal makes a man feel more charitable toward the whole world than any sermon. ~Arthur Pendenys

WRITING THE BOOK ON PICKY EATERS
Carolyn Healy


Some people remember certain classics from their childhood bookshelves – Black Beauty, Green Eggs and Ham, The Velveteen Rabbit. For me, it’s the little-known Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding by Betty VanWitsen, last published in 1971. It tells the story of a little boy who would eat only those three foods and nothing else. Thanks to my mother I heard it hundreds of times. When I get hooked on something, I stay hooked. At least I was until I joined the Weekly Reader Book Club and got started on The Pink Motel, No Children No Pets, Leader Dog and the like. And then Nancy Drew came into my life and I put childhood things aside.


By the time I needed it again, Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding was long gone, out of print and available only in my memory. One miraculous afternoon in a pediatrician’s office, I found a copy in a stack of tattered children’s books. I persuaded the receptionist to let me take it home overnight to copy. Unlike Catcher in the Rye and Dick and Jane, which I have re-read with disappointment, C,P and CP held up over time. (SPOILER ALERT: there are currently no copies available on amazon.com, but just in case you experience a serendipitous discovery like mine and get to read the book on your own, you may not want to read the rest of this paragraph.) It had tension – earnest parents try to get him to eat. It had drama – he sits under the dining table refusing dinner. It had climax and resolution – a scrap of his older brother’s hamburger drops into his mouth and he finds it delicious. And it had realism – after that, he only eats cheese, peas, chocolate pudding and hamburger.


In a twist that suggests that the universe has a sense of humor, I gave birth to that little boy in real life, in the person of my daughter Katy. While gobbling her way through boxes of rice cereal and jar after jar of baby sweet potatoes, she spit out all meat products and anything green. As a toddler, she graduated to a monochromatic diet of grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese and applesauce. No candy, no cookies, no meat, no frills. I could have written a book. If the term picky eater didn’t already exist, I would have had to coin it.


It wasn’t that she didn’t experiment some. She liked fish sticks until she found out that they were made of fish; same with tuna salad. She was briefly willing to try hot dogs as long as they touched nothing else on her plate, until someone (I suspect her older brother) told her they contain things like rat lips and cat brains. And she was the only child in America who hated chocolate. Just like the book, her story has a happy but realistic ending, as she finally ventured out into Grandma’s Cheesy Potatoes, cheese pizza and the other Grandma’s mashed potatoes and eventually, the occasional pasta and chicken breast. While the color palate remained the same, she could enjoy much more variety. Once, well into adulthood, that same brother took both of us to an Ethiopian restaurant in his neighborhood. She tried to like it but her revulsion was real and at the end of the meal, she went straight across the street for the biggest slice of pizza I’ve ever seen.


I have a copy of Cheese, Peas and Chocolate Pudding set aside for her once she gets as far as parenting. I know she will bring special insight to its reading. In honor of her, here is one of her breakthroughs, Grandma's Cheesy Potatoes.

CBH 09/08


MEATBALLS ON BITTERBRUSH
Ellie Searl


It’s remarkable what an aroma can do. Just a whiff of Italian cooking takes my thoughts across the country to a little spot of heaven and a life-changing adventure in the Pacific Northwest. My journey started at the curb of Seattle’s United Departures where Dick and Carol handed me the keys.
“Call us if you have trouble. Don’t forget - you’ll be out of cell range and radio reception once you start up the pass. The instructions for Sirrus are in the glove compartment. Have fun on your adventure, Kiddo. The kerosene lamp is always full. Help yourself to the rum in the freezer. Do you remember where the generator is? . . . Watch out for the deer . . .and the hunters. Wear red.”


The groceries purchased at a little IGA rattled around as I drove toward the mountains. I should have packed better, but I was in a hurry to catch the last sharp images of the waning October afternoon. Bottles collided with each other and against my suitcases. The pungent odor of deli peppers and dill pickles filled the SUV; I hoped sloshed drippings weren’t saturating the carpet.


I meandered up the winding roads on the west side of North Cascades Highway toward Washington Pass. Autumn splendor dotted the landscape with copper and rust. Shafts of sunlight streamed through splits in the valleys. I stopped at look-out points to photograph breathtaking golden panoramas. The intense clarity of the late October afternoon made this one-woman-adventure-into-the-wilderness exciting and celebratory.


I was on my way to house-sit Dick and Carol’s isolated cabin in the mountains while they sailed in the Caribbean. Their Golden Retriever, River, had been placed in a kennel, so I wouldn’t be required to dog-sit as well. One time I dog-sat for my other brother's two dogs, and after that, dog-sitting was about as agreeable to me as swimming in oatmeal. Even though there would be one dog, not two, and even though River wasn’t deaf and blind, didn’t ooze puss from his eyes, didn’t need eye drops, didn’t take four varieties of pills wrapped in bread - or stuck in peanut butter - or mushed into soggy dog food, and didn’t chase around the pool yelping at swimmers, I still refused. I did, however, agree to take care of the cat, Cricket, despite the fact that she was deteriorating from old age and a weak kidney. I knew that Cricket was afraid of people and wouldn’t show her face until I had moved around the cabin for at least four days. And cats, sick or not, take care of themselves – as long as they can locate their food, water, and litter box. She was my kind of companion.


I took too much time admiring the changing colors of fading daylight. When the sun finally slid behind the stillness of Lake Diablo, dusk, combined with looming mountain shadows, made driving menacing. The lack of guardrails at outcroppings floating over vertical drop-offs swept away the casual security I had felt just a few hours earlier. I was nervous. The smell of onions, garlic, and pickle juice was strong and nauseating. By the time I crested Washington Pass and started down the steep-graded s-curves, it was pitch dark. The SUV veered around twists in the highway just a few feet from precipitous ledges that hovered over sharp drops to the valley floor.


I rounded the bend where, according to my brother, some kids careened to their death because they weren’t paying attention. As excited as I had been by the exquisite views a few hours before, I couldn’t look. I clutched the wheel and kept my eyes on the road. Headlights beamed on red and brown where evergreen should have been. The dull colors were out of sync with postcard prettiness. A sense of doom magnified my already waning excitement, and I worried that global warming and infectious diseases were destroying the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. I began thinking that my venture into the unknown was not such a bright idea. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left the company and comfort of my husband and home in Chicago to sail out on my own to this god-forsaken, desolate place. Not even the trees knew how to stay alive.


After convincing myself that those unfortunate dead kids were brainless blockheads on a drunken binge, I navigated the curves with invented courage - easing and braking, easing and braking - down the east side of the mountain, along the river, and then finally, up a steep rise to the safety of the cabin on Bitterbrush Road.


The night was eerily quiet, except for the stones crunching under my feet and a slight swish of branches high over head. Ebony stillness surrounded me. A symphony of stars in sparkling constellations I couldn’t name shone on me with mysterious silent glory from an inky sky. Gentle breezes nudged pine needles and oak leaves into singing their tree-songs. Cool air carried the scents of spruce and cedar.


I entered the warmth of the cabin and the joy of my brother’s life with Carol. I found a welcome note and house instructions beside a red and white striped bowl filled with Bombay Sapphire Gin, Martini and Rossi Dry Vermouth, a jar of olives, and a cut-crystal cocktail glass. The greeting was sweet and gracious. I placed the martini makings on the painted pine hutch next to the already-flowering Christmas cactus. Night magnificence, forest calm, and cabin lamplight revitalized me after that long, unnerving drive over Washington Pass in the dark. I opened a bottle of Champagne, drank a toast to my journey, and with glass in hand, searched for Cricket among the nooks, crannies, and quilts of her home.


In the next three weeks I would go to the farmers market in Twisp and buy sunflowers and home-made, orchard-fresh peach pie from the 85-year-old woman who baked it, pastries from the Cinnamon Twisp Bakery, and double-churned ice cream from Sheri's Sweet Shoppe. I would visit the Winthrop Art Gallery and watch glass being sculpted into vases and bowls. I would drive along the Columbia River and marvel at the immensity and grandeur of our world, and with a packed lunch, take a four-hour sight-seeing boat trip up glacial Lake Chelan to Stehekin outpost. I would sit on the back porch in the rain and work on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and watch humming birds quiver around the feeders when the sun came out. I would find a Washington Mutual Bank in Omak, 40 miles away, and get my nails done on the same trip. I would congratulate myself on not reaching a state of panic when I woke up at 2:00 am and thought I was blind because it was so dark that it didn’t matter if my eyes were open or closed. And then I would scramble for a flashlight in pitch black terror and phone the electric company to ask if there had been a power outage.
I would stroke Cricket, who found me sooner than four days after my arrival, and who sat on my lap and purred despite her fear of humans. I would tend Cricket as her health declined and sadly caress her on her final days and feel her soak up all the love I could give her in her last home under the majesty of the Cascade Mountains. I would take her to the vet and stand beside her and hold her as the difficult but necessary decisions were made to relieve her of her pain and misery. Then I would drive back to the cabin with an empty cat crate knowing that Carol’s buddy of 17 years would not be there when she returned home to sneak up on her and snuggle again.


I would read books, write in my journal, walk along the river, drink champagne, sleep when I felt like it, and wear red. I would create savory meals while sipping martinis or white wine bottled in Wenatchee. I’d make fresh vegetable soup and seared ahi tuna with asparagus and BLT’s with fake bacon, and an abundance of scrumptious baked Italian meatballs, so many meatballs that I’d eat them again and again with spaghetti or as hot sandwiches or just plain cold, straight out of the refrigerator.


I would stand on the mountainside and look down along the green and orange vastness of the Methow River Valley and thank my lucky stars that I had this opportunity to live here by myself for a short, beautiful time. And I would forever treasure these moments of my journey into self-hood, self-discovery, self-sufficiency, and self-appreciation.
When my senses detect even a hint of oregano or basil, this memory wafts over me and takes me to that little cabin on Bitterbrush where I rejuvenated my soul.

EVS 09/08

POCKETBOOK - PROSPERITY - POWER

DOESN'T MAKE SENSE
Ellie Searl


There is something about asking for money that makes my stomach go into knots. Just thinking about it makes me nervous and sweaty. I’d never make it as a prostitute. I wouldn’t earn enough money to pay for the outfit, accessories, and overhead necessary for success when cavorting with scum: slinky clothes, stiletto heels, cigarettes, whiskey, crack cocaine, rat-infested tenement. Not only would I charge too little for the humiliation of performing demeaning acts with creeps, I’d have to give more than half of my meager take to some pimp, who would most likely beat me up for being a useless earner.


It disturbs me that I’m too shy, or more likely, too insecure to charge for my services. Am I not “good enough”? Is my product not up to the standards of the general public? What am I afraid will happen if I charge too much? Or too little?


I’m a self-taught graphic designer. I design brochures, booklets, all-occasion greeting cards, posters, photograph collages, and other projects. But I’m a terrible judge of my own work. Others have said, “Ellie, this is so creative. It’s so beautiful. It must have taken a pile of time! How do you come up with such clever ideas?”


“I don’t know; it just happens.” Fortunately I have enough self-respect to keep the ah-shucks reply completely unassuming, not accompanied by batting eyelashes and a receding body slump.


This is not to say I don’t like to get paid for my services. I like to get paid - a lot! I just don’t like to charge. Like most insecure people, I want my product to be loved and wanted so much by my clients they will set the price higher than I would ever set for myself.


I want an exchange like this:


Ellie: “Oh, this is way too much; please, just give me half of that!”Response: “Oh, no, Ellie, I’ll give you even more! You’re so worth it!”


That’s how to get paid in a perfect world.


When Kathy flipped through the pages of my most recent creation, “A Year of Celebration,” a calendar gift book she had commissioned me to make for her friend’s birthday, she exclaimed about its beauty, its creativity, and the obvious pile of time it took.


“So, how much do I owe you?” Kathy took out her checkbook.


This is when the ‘what-am-I-worth?’ ache grabs me in the gut.


It’s underhanded, I know, but blatant manipulation is a good way to monitor someone’s appraisal barometer. I maneuver opinions out of people in order to discover what they really think of my work. If they say “ok” to giving me a free-will offering, that means they’re not crazy about the product, and the initial excited flattery was really just ‘hide-the-disappointment-in-nicities to make her feel good.’ That tells me to back off. But if they insist on a giving me more money than a paltry contribution, well, then maybe, just maybe, I actually made a product they like . . and want to buy.


“Just give me what you want to. I had fun making it.” I wait for Kathy to respond.


“No way! Look what you’ve done here. There are 26 color pages, you’ve included each month of the year, you’ve cloned our faces into just about every picture, and you’ve used tons of ink. It’s wonderful, and I’m going to pay you royally for this fabulous book.”


The most I’ve ever set as an actual fee for any project was for the cost of the paper. I never charged for the price of ink, the time spent working, wear and tear on my computer and printer, the electricity, any traveling involved, not to mention the wine, cheese, gin martinis with olives, coffee, and Alka Seltzer that kept me sustained at the computer until 2:00 am while numbing my butt or freezing my fingers because the heat was turned down to 55 degrees five hours earlier.


Once, I didn’t charge anything. I brought a friend into my home, helped her design thank you cards using my computer, and then printed all 60 cards with my card stock paper on my color printer while we drank a nice merlot. She wanted to pay me, but I lied and told her I do this all the time . . . for the love of it. I know; I’m an idiot. Did I mention it was my merlot?


I tell Kathy, “Ok, How about $50.00?”


“How about I triple that. You can’t do work like this and not get paid what it’s worth! You’re cheating yourself!” Kathy was adamant.


The manipulation paid off this time, probably because she was a friend of mine. The next person will have to be just as good exploitation material if I am to make any kind of living selling my free-lance graphic design projects - or anything else, for that matter.


If I do decide to try the oldest profession, I’d at least have the basic inventory readily available.


EVS 8/08


WHAT I FOUND IN THE BARGAIN BIN
Carolyn B Healy

When I was growing up, a great day out for my mother and me was a trip east down 111th Street from our apartment in Morgan Park, past the high school, two neighborhoods over to Roseland, home of Gately’s Peoples’ Store. Gately’s was kind of a combo department store and discount store before there was such a thing.
The southernmost neighborhood in Chicago, Morgan Park was a leafy hilly place, site of a private school with a handsome campus, and of a limestone library that we could see from our second floor apartment. Roseland was plainer, with its modest houses and tidy lawns set in a firm grid, the home of our rival high school. But it was one of our favorite haunts, thanks to Gately’s.

There was nothing fancy about the store. I remember squeaky wooden floors and glass-topped counters, and a giant center staircase. It had all the typical departments – ladies dresses, hosiery, fabrics and notions, childrens’ clothes. There was even a crowded lunch counter with tall skinny stools, I think in the basement, where you could grab a Coke if your shopping wore you out.
We’d look for whatever was the excuse for the trip – a dress for a special occasion, play clothes, a pattern and fabric that would make it to the living room closet but probably not into production. We had more ambition than follow-through.
The best part was located in the center of the first floor – the bargain bins piled high with turtlenecks, mittens, sweaters, blouses, pajamas, socks. We’d leave with a dark green bag with Gately’s written in yellow script, as satisfied as hunters dragging home their prey.

On the way home, we’d stop for dinner at White Castle on 111th just west of the store. Nestled next to the multi-story YMCA, it had an Edward Hopper Nighthawks quality. We’d order sliders, those mini-burgers steamed and covered with onions, each tucked into its own cardboard box, and then for dessert, lemon meringue pie. As we ate, we’d rate our bargains, reliving their pleasures as golfers do the great putt on 14.

Money was not a big issue then in my life, just a means to ends like turtlenecks, food, fun, something to spend as little as possible of but not to worry about. I know now that my single mother was doing the worrying while successfully hiding it from me.

Since then, I’ve had my run-ins with money – the bounced checks for my $5 a week expenses once I went away to college without a clue about how to balance a checkbook, for instance. And much later the midnight anxiety about how on earth I was going to make payroll when I had my own business and my customers didn’t pay me on time, or at all.

But my modest start did me a favor – my financial setpoint is firmly and permanently fixed nice and low. I definitely love bargains more than I love spending. Nowadays, on the rare occasion that I overdo it on one big purchase or a flurry of smaller ones and take myself over my long-established threshold, I’ll be sorry. Even though I can afford the splurge now, I feel a little sick and a little guilty, as if I had eaten the whole lemon meringue pie myself.

I’ve transferred my allegiance now to consignment shops and outlet malls, but the thrill of those outings with Mom is long gone. I’d give a lot to wander back through Gately’s aisles for an afternoon with her and see how much of what I remember was actually there.

Do other people have Gately’s memories too? Apparently they do if my discovery of http://www.gatelysstoreinroseland.blogspot.com/ is any indication. The next time I get an impulse to shop, I think I’ll explore there instead. Think of the money I’ll save.

CBH 8/08

No Longer Worth Living?

Carolyn B Healy



I slid into the pew. It was a Tuesday night and I went alone. There were about twenty of us, an assortment of silver-haired elders with a smattering of younger people like me, one still dressed for the office, most more casually, as if they’d stopped in on the way to the grocery store. Each of us carefully avoided eye contact with the others.

In the back, a table was covered with tall stacks of pamphlets available for a small fee, “The Right to Die,” “Special Issues in Alzheimer’s Disease,” and other titles. The stacks were so high that it suggested a miscalculation – either another hundred or so people had been expected, or each of us was to grab multiple copies to pass out to our friends and neighbors. In either case, it made the evening seem like a failure before it even began.

The three speakers whispered together in the back of the room, watching the clock. At exactly seven-thirty, the tall lanky mid-forties man in jeans and a plaid shirt strode to the front, while his colleagues slipped into seats in the first row.


He discussed the founder, a British journalist who had assisted his wife, at her request, to end her suffering from bone cancer by brewing her coffee laced with deadly medications. When his career later brought him to the States, he and several others, including his second wife, founded the Society in 1980 in his garage in California, to bring the “hopelessly ill” news of their right to practice “self-deliverance” and of methods to achieve “hastened death.”

The next speaker was the stocky kindly-looking woman, gray-haired and dressed like Kathy Bates in Misery. Her voice was strong as she presented the public affairs angle. As she covered court rulings, right-to-die legislation and subsequent legal challenges, her outrage grew. She spoke against the restraints on people who simply wanted to determine their own time and manner of death, and the penalties for those who might assist them.

When she got to the part about famous snuff-meister Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the defrocked doctor who claimed to have assisted 120 people to die, her conviction that he was a martyr to the cause leaked out among her facts. The first death he helped accomplish was a fifty-four year old woman who had Alzheimer’s. His last was a lethal injection provided to a fifty-two year old accountant with ALS, in 1999, which led to his conviction for second degree murder.

I set the pamphlets down next to me to give me some distance from heroes who bring death to your door. I had a client once whose religion taught that bad spirits attach themselves to objects, and won’t go away until the objects are discarded, or better yet, destroyed. The issue that had brought her to counseling was guilt and anguish that had plagued her for months after the end of an illicit relationship. She proved her theory - all her symptoms evaporated as soon as she burned the notes and trinkets left over from her lover. If she was right, these pamphlets might sweep forces into my life I wouldn’t be able to control.

The third speaker, the calm man dressed in chinos and a buttoned-down shirt, outlined the practical assistance system. The wanting-to-die person, while still of sound mind and body, explains his reasons for wanting to end it all. If he passes muster, convincing them of his seriousness and emotional health, he is assigned a guide, a volunteer who promises to stick with him throughout the course of his illness, continuing to discuss the conditions of mind and body and intention. The Society becomes the last matchmaker you’d ever need.

Questions bombarded me. Who are these people, these guides? Survivors of a parent’s excruciating death by cancer? Anarchists looking for the cracks in the social order? Well-meaning humanitarians? Libertarians looking to kick government out of our personal business? Does it even matter what their motives are, as long as the person who wants to die gets to? Is wanting to die enough?

The lecturer, a serene man who wouldn’t worry you a bit if he sat next to you on the subway, laid out the long-recommended method of – well, since they refused to call it suicide– hastened death: a particular cocktail of medications that could easily be prescribed by a sympathetic doctor over time and stockpiled for the final day. They would then be crushed and mixed into applesauce which the individual could feed himself. If he could feed himself.

A newer method was gaining support as well, he explained, that involved helium and a plastic bag over the head, secured with rubber bands or panty hose. The hope was that this method would provide a reduced chance of unintended survival.
Had my neighbor sucked in her breath at that revelation, or was that me? There seemed to be too little air in the room, too little movement to account for twenty-some living creatures.

As one who has spent a career trying to stand between suicidal people and their permanent solutions to temporary problems, I had negotiated dozens of deals, even written them down so my client could sign them, “no harm contracts” they are called: “I won’t act on a suicidal impulse unless I call you/go to the ER/ call the hotline.” What an optimistic endeavor, to make rational agreements with people subject to irrational and overpowering impulses. I sometimes wondered if I helped keep people alive by tipping them off to how devastated I would be if they did kill themselves. Maybe the point is to know that someone cares that you are still here, that your counselor is awake at two a.m. hoping that you haven’t pulled the trigger.


But this, it began to dawn on me, was entirely different. These people had permanent problems, terminal ones. It also became clear to me that while the suicide decisions that I had tried so hard to prevent can teeter on thousands of precarious and temporary impulses, the decision necessary to a end a life as the Society laid it out is made day after day, over a period of time, and involves planning and long-lasting intention. And courage. And help.

The woman next to me offered me a mint. I accepted. A few audience members spoke of their own situations – a spouse with a painful disease, a parent who had asked their help – most did not.

Meanwhile, across town, my mother sat, watched over by assisted care staff. She was at once no longer herself, yet unmistakably and indelibly who she had always been, in the moments when she would still surprise me with a joke or gaze at me with undiluted love. When on earth would her moment have been, when she would have thrown in the towel, declared her life no longer worth living? Should I have asked her that? We were certainly past it now, a relief of sorts.

She would have been, I told myself, of two minds: she would support the right of a person not to live out her days in dependency and diminishing faculties. But she was also one to let things run their natural course. She would survive as long as she could because life was good and she was part of it. Realizing that, I could breathe easier.

As I stood to go, I looked again at my neighbor and smiled.

“Good night, dear,” she said. She patted my hand and stepped into the cold night. I folded my handouts and followed.

CBH 07/23/08

Bionic-Footed Mom

Mary Lou Edwards

The logic behind an obese woman torturing herself in a girdle to look five pounds thinner always escaped me, but my reasoning skills totally vanished when it came to shoes. At 5’1’’ I counted on platforms to give me that long, lean look.

As newlyweds, we traveled to Central and South America with my shoe wardrobe consisting solely of platform espadrilles and high-heeled sandals. Not a pragmatic choice, but, of course, looking good is ever so important when crawling through ruins, and crawl I did. Had it not been for an eighty-three year old Yale professor lending me a hand as we trudged to Machu Picchu, I’d have been limping on my own.


After delivering his umpteenth “I do not understand your insistence on wearing those freaking shoes…” lecture, my 6’2” sanctimonious and sensibly shod spouse time and again left me in the dust. His admonitions only stopped when he became weak from altitude sickness (a big problem for tall people) and I transformed into the little pack mule lugging our bags through Peru and Colombia.

By the time we returned to the States I was ready for orthopedic boots, but I am a slow learner. I continued prancing in bound-feet type shoes for many more years until surgery and titanium foot rods brought my platform fetish to a halt.

I was delighted my daughter sprouted past me as an adolescent. When she carried flip-flops to her prom “just in case,” I knew my years of hobbling had not been in vain. My limping and tottering had inspired this young fashionista to value comfort. Her feet need never trigger alarms at O’Hare Airport.

07/14/08

Brave Runner

Ellie Searl

I lined up beside the others. I crouched, positioned my skates, and waited for the whistle.

The others came from out of town. They looked cold and uncomfortable in tight stretch nylon suits with matching gloves and hoods. I knew they’d trip on those impractical skates: black lace-ups with extended, smooth-tipped blades. They’d never grip the ice.

I’d been figure skating since I was a toddler, and by the time I was twelve, I was a marvel on ice. I could skate both forward and backward. I could make almost perfect, though wide, figure eights. I could even skate on one leg without falling down. And I liked speed. I skated faster and farther than all of my friends, so I entered the Winter Carnival Speed Skating Competition. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was way out of my league.

The whistle blew. I shoved off. The others sailed past me. Elongated blades swooshed and clinked, spewing sprays of shaved ice. Lithe, slender bodies swayed in hypnotic rhythm. I was stunned.

So calm, so fluid, competing with each other at a pace I didn’t expect. The heat of shame stung my cheeks and ears. Long legs drifted effortlessly ahead of me in seamless, congruent strides. Arms swung left, then right, then left again, in parallel formations. Wiry torsos leaned forward and a bit to the side as they banked around the track.

Hindered by thick wool snow pants, I chugged along with as much oomph as I could muster, my chunky legs trying to gain speed and make headway. I was desperate to prove I was good. Chin leading, arms akimbo, I pushed my metal blades in an acceleration of flying frenzy. My short legs lunged faster and faster, faster and faster, bouncing on ice patches, tripping on the tips of my skates.

For each one of the racers’ smooth, effortless glides, my feet made three, maybe four, awkward thrusts. The muscles in my thighs stung. My throat ached from shallow, rapid breaths of raw, frigid air. Ice shavings pitted my face and stung my eyes.

Arms flailing, heart pounding, I hurtled forward, the pain in my legs growing almost unbearable. Frost clung to my eyelashes; my fingers felt sticky with sweat inside my mittens. The others elegantly and effortlessly sliced through space with confident complacency - in no particular hurry, expending no particular energy.

I began sprinting wildly on the serrated tips of my blades. Dagger points formed mini-craters as the metal teeth dug into the ice. Chunks of frozen shards flew every which way. I bounced and bolted in a state of hysterical panic.

I was the Carnival Clown entertaining the crowd with idiotic gyrations and wild, toe-dancing jigs while the real race glided along in regal splendor.

Embarrassed tears clouded my vision. I wanted it over. Just don’t fall! Finally, in a desperate lurch, I pitched headlong across the finish line and collapsed into a snow pile. There I sprawled, limp and exhausted. I began to sob. How would I face my friends? I’d forever and always be known as Stumble-Bum-on-Ice.

A distant voice startled me. “And Third Place goes to Ellie Volckmann!” With reclaimed dignity I stood proudly to receive my Bronze Medal at the Annual Westport Winter Carnival Ice Skating Championship.

The sheer force of my determined twelve-year-old spirit and grit had plummeted me across the finish line ahead of four out-of-town, trained racers who looked abashed and bewildered in their skinny nylon suits and silly skates. I wore that ribbon around my neck all day long and into the next week.

EVS 06/27/08

Happily Ever After

Ellie Searl

"

. . . they lived happily ever after. The End."

"Night, night, sweetie girl, sleep tight.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“That they liveded happily ever after.”

“Lived, not liveded. Well, they just did, like in all your other stories.”

“Bambi’s mommy didn’t - she got shotted by a bad hunter.”

“Shot, not got shotted.”

“And the poor little match girl got frozed.”

“Just say froze.”

“But they got dead! . . . They didn’t lived happily ever after.”

“You mean they died, not got dead. And didn’t live happily ever after, not lived. Well, true, they didn’t, but that’s not how you say it.”

“What about the blinded mice? Their tails were cutted right off . . . with a carvenife . . . what’s a carvenife?”

“Blind mice, not blinded. Cut off. It was a carving knife, not carven. It’s like the one we use to slice our roast beef with.”

“She chopted their tails off with her meat cutterer?”

“Chopped their tails off. . . with a meat cutter . . . oh my, . . . yes. . . . she did. “

“Why? Did she hated the mice? Were they bad?”

“You mean, did she hate the mice. She probably didn’t like the mice very much. They must have been very, very bad mice. Let’s tuck you in now.”

“Did they bleeded?”

“Did what bleeded? . . . bleed. . . . It’s bleed.”

“The mice tails.”

“They probably bled. Now go to sleep.”

“How much?”

“How much what?”

“Did they bled?”

“Bleed! It’s bleed. Probably only a little.”

“Did they got band-aids?”

“Get band-aids. Yes, yes, . . . ok, now it's got. They got band-aids. I imagine they got band-aids.”

“From who?”

“Whom! Say from whom. Their mother, I suppose. Now good night.”

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“Are you going to chopted me up if I’m bad?”

“Chop. It’s . . . not . . . chopted! . . . No, honey, I’m not going to hurt you, ever.”

“Will I live happily ever after?”

“What? Oh, of course you will. You’ll be the happiest big girl in the world. Ok, that’s all for tonight.”

“You aren’t.”

“Hmm?”

“You aren’t.”

“Aren’t what?”

“Happy.”

“I’m not?

“No. You shout at Muffin and you tell me to wipe my face in a meany voice and you get mad at Daddy when he helpted you wrong . . . and . . . sometimes . . . you cry.”

“ Look . . .Sweetie . . . I love you and Daddy very much. . . but, every now and then, I might get upset . . . just a teeny bit. . . but that doesn’t mean I’m not happy. You’ll see someday. You really do need to go to sleep now. And it's not helpted me. It's helped.”

"Where does the prince and princess lived happily ever after?”

"Do live . . . I mean . . . did live . . .they lived . . . Oh, Lord, . . . ok . . . they did live in a castle.

“Did the prince helped the princess?”

“HELP! It’s HELP! . . . did help the princess. Yes, he . . . well, ok . . . here’s when you say helped. . . he helped her . . . all the time . . . mm mmm.”

“I hope they getted a dog.”

“Don't say getted! . . . Say got!. . . Yes, they got a very, very magnificent dog.”

“What kind of dog? Like Muffin?”

“Exactly like Muffin.”

“Read it again, Mommy.”

“Tomorrow night. It’s late. Now, goodnight.

I kissed her forehead and turned out the light.

"Mommy?"

"Mm?"

“Does they ever got a cat?”

EVS
07/20/08

Once Upon A Time . . .

Bernadette Adora



It was an old black ‘n white photograph stuffed into a cheap dime store frame that became a reason for a girlfriend to start teasing me. After studying the seventeen year old girl in a full length gown with her daddy in tails proudly escorting her onto a ballroom floor, the young girl’s patent-leather hair still glistening through the faded image, the friend pronounced, “Definitely, ‘once upon a time when we were Colored!’” And then she threw her head back and laughed, and I shook my own head, which was now cut in a short, clean-lined Afro and demanded, “Give me that back, you don’t have any respect!” After which, I laughed hard myself, ‘cause she was right; she was right-on!


Growing up in Detroit in the fifties and sixties was for me, a fine time to be Colored, to be Negro, to be Black, to be African-American, to be who I was and who I could and would become despite segregation; my father’s hard working, hard drinking ways; our little bitty money stretched to its limits. There was a whole lotta hope and determination for so-called, better times; it was then that we could and we would nearly always envision more . Be it the new thought understanding that is prevalent today in books and on Oprah, or just because we gave it our all despite what society said we could and could not have or could and could not be -- better times did come to pass. Quite simply stated, it is my unadorned and unabashed belief that it remains a privilege to help keep the dream alive, to help keep those so-called, better times just keep on keepin' on.


06/30/08