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 . . . 

WELL, DUH

THEME: WELL, DUH

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.  ~Eric Hoffer

Positive Psychology and Me
Carolyn B Healy

I rented the office, then scoured used furniture stores and garage sales to furnish and decorate it. I even splurged on a painting of a rainy Paris street from TJ Maxx. I was ready. I was in private practice.

My very first client showed up on a Tuesday. I handed him the client questionnaire I had crafted, on a tasteful Lucite clip board. After the demographic info, I hit him with the big question: What do you hope to gain from counseling? I left three lines for the reply, but he only needed one.

He wrote: Peace of mind, and introduced me to the answer I would see far more than any other in the next 20-plus years of my practice.  It wasn’t happiness, or get my spouse off my back, or make my depression go away. It was a much bigger order, peace of mind.  MORE . . .

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A Social Call
Ellie Searl

She shouted from across the street.  “Hey!  Do you people believe in Jesus Christ?”

I stopped raking and looked up. 
She stood in her doorway, hands on hips, feet planted—square—like a drill sergeant, as if my answer could knock her over.  A full-length, flour-dusted apron covered her dress. 

 “Of course we do,” I said.  “He was a great leader . . . and teacher.  Everyone should follow his example.” 

Quick thinking.  Can’t argue with that.  I continue raking.

“But do you-all believe that the Bible is the word of God?”  MORE . . .

SAYING TOO MUCH

Theme:  Saying Too Much

If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.  ~Earl Wilson

GYM SHOES SPEAK

CAROLYN B HEALY

My friend Carol and I walked home from school down 111th Street. We made it almost to the bus stop a block from my place. It was a Friday because I carried my white Keds home for their bi-weekly cleaning, as required by the gym teacher. My name was neatly printed along the side, and I had them tied together by the laces because they looker cooler that way.

I know I was in fifth grade because I remember the cocktail of growing freedom that fall  – I could take unapproved routes home, pick up candy at the school store with my babysitting money, climb on the giant boulders where the vicious dog lived – without anyone telling me I was too little. Life was already good, and getting better. MORE . . .

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THE GOOD EDITOR

ELLIE SEARL

A good cook knows how to edit.  Take meatloaf.  Most recipes call for some kind of filler—like breadcrumbs. The right amount guarantees a moist, savory meatloaf feast.  Too much and it's dry, tasteless, stick-in-your-mouth lump.

A good writer knows how to edit. Take Mark Twain.  In his short story, "Advice to Little Girls," he wrote, "Good little girls always show marked deference for the aged.  You ought never to 'sass' old people unless they 'sass' you first." 

Now that's succinct. MORE . . .