COMING HOME

THEME OF THE MONTH: COMING HOME
There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits. ~ Robert Southey

           

A SLICE OF SUMMER

Ellie Searl

My first significant A+ on a paper came in seventh grade from Mr. Feltman for a one-page, one-paragraph story about a terrible summer afternoon when I was five years old. It's been decades since I wrote that story, but here is what I remember:

It was lunchtime. Mom, at the kitchen counter, stirred lemonade into iced tea, my two older brothers stood beside her making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I sat at the table, coloring, my crayons scattered across the enamel. A man walked onto the back porch and spoke through the screen door. I thought he asked, "Do you want a Collie?" I looked up from my coloring book and said, "We already have one. His name is Teddy." I scraped back my chair. "Want to see him?" Then the sad man said he had run over our dog with his car. Teddy was dead. We walked to the highway and looked at Teddy as he lay on the pavement, eyes closed, as if he were asleep. I patted his tummy and cried and tried to wake him up, but he didn't move. No more Teddy. No more Teddy chasing sticks and lapping water over the edge of his bowl. No more Teddy snuggling his nose under my arm as we sat on the porch steps. No more silky amber coat and firm presence. No more best friend. My heart ached. The story ended with how Teddy had given me an irreplaceable security and comfort, a special belonging to the world. That he had taught me the importance of unconditional love and shaped the buds of my spirit. MORE . . .

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WHIRLWIND

Carolyn B Healy

It was an end-of-summer organizing day at the house. The kids were just starting 3rd and 6th grades and I’d taken the day off to whip things into shape for the new school year. We took a lunch break at Show Biz pizza, played a few games, and came back home to finish up.

Eleven-year-old Ben worked in his room and probably sneaked in some reading, while Katy and I worked in hers, attempting to contain her many collections into the smallest room in the house. Clouds loomed, no rain yet. Disk jockey Steve Dahl reported that there was some weather coming in from the west. He made fun of how alarmist meteorologists and their weather-spotters get lathered up every time the sky darkens for a few minutes. He scoffed at a report that cars were turned over near I-55 in Plainfield. MORE . . .

RELIEF

THEME OF THE MONTH: RELIEF
Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow, too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief? ~ William Blake

DR. MARVIN’S GOD
Ellie Searl

A string of spittle landed on the left toe of Dr. Marvin's brown Oxfords as he dumped a saliva-soaked cotton wad into the trash container. He pulled a tissue from his lab coat, bent down to wipe his shoe, and groaned in pain. On his return to Randy in the dentist chair, Dr. Marvin looked out the second-story window and barked, “Do you see that? Someone’s in my spot – again.”

Moaning from back pain and complaining about his filled parking spot had become daily rituals. Dr. Marvin's back ached all the time. “One of these days I’ll get it fixed,” he’d announce, on and off, to no one in particular. But he smoldered if someone parked in his private spot, which was pretty much every day.

I needed my job so I usually remained silent when Dr. Marvin fumed about the overarching transgressions of humanity - but my mouth shifted into gear before my brain turned on.

“You don’t drive to work,” I said.

“They don’t know that,” he sniffed and held out his hand. “Pliers.”

I slapped the instrument into his palm.  MORE . . .
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GRIEF AND RELIEF
Carolyn B Healy

My mother called me, incensed. She’d just found the receipt from her doctor’s visit a week before. Uh oh. How did I let that fall into her hands?

“Do you know what that doctor wrote down?” she demanded.

Yes, I did know. I had taken her in for an opinion on her increasing forgetfulness.

“Dementia!” she sputtered. “How could he say that?”

I summoned my reassuring reasonable self. “Mom, remember we went in to talk to him about your memory?”

“We did?” MORE . . .

NARROW ESCAPES

Theme of the Month:  Narrow Escapes

Wherever there is danger, there lurks opportunity; whenever there is opportunity, there lurks danger. The two are inseparable. They go together. ~ Earl Nightingale

DANGEROUS ROMANCE

Carolyn Healy

Have you ever been seduced by a house, or in the case of this tale, a townhouse? When I fell in love with it, it didn’t even exist. It’s the way a lot of romances begin, with a vision of something that isn’t really there.

It was shingle-style, with stone foundation and two porches, one screened in. It was roomy for a townhouse, meaning I wouldn’t have had to get rid of any of my lifetime accumulation of furniture I’m apparently not done with yet. The English basement even had room for the pool table and the juke box.

The sales team had it conjured on a full-wall video mural depicting the full sweep of the new neighborhood, to be constructed on the site of a recently leveled downtrodden apartment development. The sales office stood on an adjacent property, accessible via a circuitous route involving three left turns. MORE . . .

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LOSING CONTROL

Ellie Searl

In June of 2000, Ed and I took off on a road trip from the suburbs of Chicago to Tennessee. Our trip was two-fold: the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Nashville followed by a mini-vacation adventure through the countryside. We shunpiked our way through small towns - those pinpoints off major highways - mere outlines of their old glory: insurance companies, video stores, furniture shops, and a couple of bars across from boarded-up movie theaters and department stores-turned-thrift shops. Ed and I tried to imagine what the towns might have looked like before cross-country highways and discount superstores sent them into oblivion.  MORE . . .

TURNING POINTS

Theme of the Month:  Turning Points
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. ~Max Lerner

  
WHAT TO LEAVE BEHIND
Carolyn B Healy


There I was, two years old, crazy about my father (I’m told, because of course I can’t remember), and he dies. Over the years in waves that come years and sometimes decades apart, I launch into projects in an effort to get to know him and figure out which parts of me are linked to him. As a child who can’t remember her parent, I am a walking advertisement for ethical wills.


Here’s what I’ve learned about him: he was a great guy, more a poet than a salesman (he worked for a book publisher), talented musician who had his own band in high school, who fell hard for my mother when they met at a Christmas party and found a way to send her roses while she visited her family in the North Carolina mountains the next week. His boss told me 50 years after his death that he might well have become president of the company and I believed him since he still had my dad’s picture on his office wall. I read the stack of condolence letters from colleagues and clients that poured in after his death, describing his intelligence and good will. I read narratives his sisters wrote about their growing up in Chicago. I memorized the photos of my early life. Since he took most of them, he rarely appears, which allows me to see through his eyes, in a way. MORE . . .

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STRAIGHT UP
Ellie Searl



It started as a game I’d play with my father, a hard-nosed drinker and long-time alcoholic, although it took years before I came to understand that. Dad would give me tastes, laughing at the faces I made, and quiz me on their names. Manhattan, Rob Roy, Daiquiri, Whiskey Sour, Gimlet, Old Fashioned, Black and White Russian. I learned them all. Early. Perhaps Dad believed in the Forbidden Fruit Theory: Become an educated drinker while young and avoid the abuse of alcohol as a teenager. But it’s more likely he wanted to share his shame with someone who wouldn’t judge him. And judge him I didn’t until years later when I realized abuse was the operative word when it came to my father's drinking habits, an observation he chose to ignore. His relationship to liquor is an ambiguous legacy left on my soul, like an unattractive callus I can't scrape off but occasionally keeps the stones from hurting.


Dad's three-shelved liquor cabinet was above and to the right of the sink where clean dishes should have gone, alcohol being far more essential than any immediate needs of the kitchen. That cupboard was my father's savings and loan of satisfaction. He stocked-piled all kinds of liquor - scotch, rye, vodka, gin, whiskey, bourbon. Mixers and supplements - bitters, tonic, club soda, maraschino cherries. Stainless steel accessories - ice bucket etched with a penguin, cocktail shaker with a spout and handle, like an elongated coffee pot, strainers, slicers, stirrers, tongs. Everything necessary for the art of mixology. MORE . . .

LEGACY

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.`Pericles

  


DENTS

Ellie Searl

Katie phoned from college.

"Mom?" She hesitated. "Are you sitting down?"

In the few seconds it took to respond, I conjured scenarios of the typical fears: kidnapping, mugging, bankruptcy, expulsion.

"I wrecked the car."

She had taken my car to school with her for a couple of weeks at the end of summer and was planning to bring it back after Labor Day weekend. Her accident occurred at a five-corner intersection. A car appeared from nowhere and collided into the passenger side door.

"Are you ok?"

"I'm fine. The car's not."

My relief surprised her. But I was mollified by an experience that occurred long before she was born. MORE . . .

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ANNIVERSARY

Carolyn B Healy

Every year it creeps up on me. In late February I start feeling uneasy, not myself. I wonder if I’m coming down with something. Why can’t I sleep? It’ll probably pass, I tell myself. But anniversaries are hidden things that can seep in and seize you unaware. The light bulb goes on when my son Ben calls from Boston or D.C. or Texas or wherever he’s gotten off to and says, “Tomorrow is the day that Lauren died.” Of course.

The first time I met Lauren was in front of the library. Accustomed to awkward middle-schoolers with little to say, I was captivated by this short confident exuberant 12 year old who looked me straight in the eye, stepped forward and stuck her hand out for a shake. Introducing us was my son, also 12, and, I think, also captivated by this new friend. MORE . . .

LOVE

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. ~Zora Neale Hurston

  


THE BREAKUP

Carolyn B Healy

Here is what you say to your heart:

Broken is overdramatic and unnecessarily hurtful. You are not broken; bruised is more like it – alright, perhaps it’s a severe contusion if that pleases you more. You will discolor and feel exceedingly tender for a while; in fact, you’ll hurt in places you didn’t know you had. But no one has to perform open heart surgery to fix you, and you don’t need the paddles to shock you back to life. You’re still beating. You know how to mend yourself, with time. Either you’ve done it before, or it’s time you learned. Over your lifetime, you’ll beat 2.5 billion times. That’s what you’re here for, not to moon over this insult. I can’t get along without you, you know.


Here is what you say to the retreating back of your person of interest:
Goodbye. No pleading, no demands for explanations, no stalking of his/her future activities. From now on, that person is the person who used to be at the center of your life. Old news, out of date, no longer qualifying as the focus of your attention. You need that attention for yourself. He/she is best viewed from a distance, both geographically and emotionally. MORE . . .

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PARADISE

Ellie Searl

We shoved a five-dollar bill into the padlocked honor box and drove into the camping area. Pine needles, damp from a downpour the day before, blanketed the entrance. The weather had turned dry, clear, and warm - a few rays of sunlight managed to sneak through the slatted openings of dense forest walls and ceiling of intertwined branches. Aside from my husband Ed, our thirteen-year-old daughter Katie, and I, there wasn't another soul under the thick stands of evergreens and hardwoods.

Why an eerily deserted campground? In the middle of summer? In this prime location overlooking the spectacular shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? Maybe we were early and throngs of campers would crowd the grounds in a couple of hours. We'd find out soon enough - the hard way. MORE . . .

BEGINNINGS

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep upon you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring. ~Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assasin

   

TIME MATTERS
Ellie Searl

                                                                                             
“Hey, Ellie, now that you’ve quit teaching, what are you going to do with all that spare time?”

What a wearisome question. All that spare time. A massive life-hole filled with sluggishness and sloth.


“I didn’t quit," I'd say. "I graduated."


My plan was to find opportunities in a creative field that didn’t involve grading papers written by 12-year-olds who emulated Britney Spears and Dennis Rodman. As much as I loved the energy and enthusiasm of middle-schoolers, and as much as I enjoyed the classroom interaction, I hated reading and grading those papers. Despite my efforts to hone writing skills and instill effective techniques of framing a good story, the students' papers seemed to be written by motor mouths, without direction and without brakes. Accounts of family vacations were the worst. Mind-numbing litanies of nonessential details, with the actual visit to, say, Disney World, a one-line after-thought stuck somewhere between packing for the trip and driving home. MORE . . .

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HEROES HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE
Carolyn B Healy


It is the season of change. The holidays have faded, we can see more clearly with the leaves off the trees, and the snow piles nudge us to stay home more than usual. So we end up staring in the mirror trying to reason out how to improve ourselves. Lose weight? Stand up to an oppressive relative? Finally quit smoking? Stop the affair?


With all my years as a therapist, I am a big fan of change. I’ve spent years trying to figure out why it happens when it does, and why it fails to happens when it doesn’t. But I want to push beyond the shallow New Years’ Resolutions construct that plugs the media hole between the end of the Christmas holiday and Valentine’s Day. MORE . . .