Saturday Musings

Saturday Musings, 11 February 2012

2012-02-11T07:01:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

Disturbing news of wrangling over provision of health benefits relating to birth control to all women in America through employer-provided health plans blares into the room. I'm a lapsed and recovering Catholic with miles of disdain for that institution, and a deliberate absentee from the debate of birth control and abortion, which I believe should be private, personal choices. I do not care for insurance companies, though the annual dividends from my grandfather's company supported my family in some of its more bleak years. I feel clay gathering at my feet, and I stare at the morning headlines with impatience.

None of the scenarios seem reasonable and I toss the newspaper down in disgust. These politicians cast a putrid pall on living, with their endless insistence on clouding issues with irrelevant considerations, and the fact that women must choose between their religion and good health care frustrates my sense of fairness. Ironically, some polls show that the majority of Catholic women continue to use birth control. Perhaps the Catholic Church should revise its position; or perhaps we should take separation of church and state to its logical end, and loosen the grip of religion on our political decisions.

I push aside thoughts of political and religious debates and reflect on my week. I find myself looking at houses more and more. I like my house; don't get me wrong. Its cozy contours suit me. Certainly, we could use a few more closets, and another full bathroom, but I like the cathedral ceiling in its upstairs bedroom and the charm of its cedar shake shingles.

I am not gazing at other people's dwellings with covetous eyes. To the contrary: I am content with my abode. Instead, I am trying to see behind the stucco and siding to the families within. I drive down the street in a state of distraction, glancing at shrubbery, and lingering Christmas lights, and empty planters on stone porches. At stoplights, I gaze into windows from which curtains have been drawn to allow the winter light to enter, straining to see the twitch of the hand on the drapery cords or the child playing on the carpet in front of the sofa.

From an upstairs courtroom, I gaze across the city to the rooftops of old apartment buildings. I see a cluster of seating on a balcony, and a red rectangle that might be an abandoned book. I watch a Volkswagen parallel park as I drive down a side street near my office, and see the young man exit from its driver's door with a take-out box and a Kindle cradled in his arm. He enters a brick building which boasts of converted condominiums, and I recall the apartments that used to flank its dingy hallways, decades ago, when I still spent each evening in bars watching a trumpet player who had my affection at the time. Its exterior has been redone, and I am sure the place where I used to put my hand as I waited for him to unlock his door has been cleaned, my fingerprints covered with putty and paint.

I see a trio of children pulling a red wagon in which there appears to be a kitten sleeping on a towel. They bump the rolling burden over cracks in the sidewalk and disappear behind a hedge, beyond which I see a wooden door swing outward, then in again, and I assume the little girls have made it safely to their mother's arms. I gaze at the roof line visible beyond the bare maple in their yard, at the upstairs window with its broken screen, and the pile of leaves in the hanging gutter. The sound of a piano's keys under young fingers drifts from the unseen interior. I picture the kitten, yawning, perturbed at the disturbance to its nap.

At the end of a tiring work day, I drove home last night with half of my mind on a trial set for Valentine's Day and the other half thinking about the people in the cars which surrounded me at each intersection. A horn startled me and I jerked my wheel back, thinking that I must have drifted, but the blast had nothing to do with me and I continued driving. A city bus stopped and a small group of tired women stepped onto the cold bare pavement. They trudged past my car moving from west to east, and disappeared into a block of houses like mine, air plane bungalows with small closets and screened porches.

I pulled down our newly-paved driveway, and turned my car to back into its space against the fence. I shut off the engine. The sudden silencing of National Public Radio brought an amazing stillness. I sat, for a long moment, in my messy Saturn with its back seat full of clothes , culled from my stepson's wardrobe to go to the thrift store. My neighbor's little Kia stood solidly beside me, and a light winked from my back door. My hands gripped the edge of the steering wheel, clad in their black gloves, and I huddled, briefly, inside my plaid coat, while the jangle of my nerves subsided.

After a few minutes, I opened the car door, gathered my pocketbook and the odds and ends that cluttered around me, and walked the twenty passes to my front door, closing the world out behind me as I entered the warmth of home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 04 February 2012

2012-02-04T06:02:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

I awakened to the small sounds made by a husband trying not to awaken his sleeping wife. My parents-in-law are leaving for Mexico this morning, and their good son is taking them to the airport. I drag my sorry carcass from the heavy veil of drug-induced, fitful slumber, and struggle down to the first floor, where beans await my grinder and the dog scratches at the back door.

I spent yesterday afternoon at my in-laws' home learning to bake the carrot cake that my newly-formed nuclear family prefers on the birthdays that three of them celebrate together. I've made this cake on one prior occasion, and failed miserably. So this year, aware of the keenness of time's passing, and the potential that I might not get too many other chances, I persuaded the family patriarch to teach me how to make the damn thing.

At one point in the pleasant afternoon, I looked across at my husband's 81-year-old mother, smiling and nodding in her chair, half-asleep, hands tucked inside her sweater. I saw the tightness of her skin across her cheeks, and the frailness of her small forehead, with its thin sweep of white hair, and its porcelain pallor. And the years fell away.

I sat beside my mother in the last days and weeks of her life. She shrank to the form that I had not expected to see for three decades. Cancer aged her prematurely. She accepted her death-by-misdiagnosis with more grace than I could have imagined. She called me once, early in the eleven-month saga, and said, An angel came to me in my dreams last night, and told me I have less than a year to live. And I'm all right with that. I did not scream into the phone that she might be, but I was not. I'm only 30! I silently pleaded. I don't have children yet! Who will be their grandmother if you die?

Her angel had not lied. By late July of the following year, we knew. Weeks, maybe a month,maybe a bit more. We surrendered to the concept of her dying, and started coping in different ways. One brother moved into the house to take the night shift, his nursing credentials an invaluable resume for helping in the last months of an ailing parent. A sister made daily stops at the house. Others came and went on the schedules that their busy lives allowed. Most of us drank too much.

I drove into St. Louis most weekends, sometimes confusing myself when I stopped for coffee then could not remember if I was coming -- or going. Is it Sunday? Then I'm on the way to Kansas City. Is it Friday? Then I'm St .Louis-bound. The waitress at the Bobber in Booneville became my ally. She gave me a free to-go cup of coffee and bade me to drive with caution, twice each weekend, for the whole long summer.

On the Sunday before my mother died, I sat beside her bed. I had liquefied her Dilaudid and leaned towards her mouth, stroking her neck the way we had been shown, to encourage weakened muscles to do the job that they wanted to abandon. Swallow, Mama, swallow, I coaxed, watching her forehead for signs of effort. Swallow, Mama, please, swallow.

Her sunken eyes bore a heavy cloud, and she stared over my shoulder at something that I could not see. My hand upon her neck trembled; the spoon that I held to her lips faltered. Tears slid down my cheeks.

And then, for less than a second, for longer than an eternity, my mother caught my gaze with her gentle brown eyes. The veil lifted, and she drew her brows together, and spoke. I am still your mother, she snapped. Don't patronize me. Startled, I replied, Yes Ma'am, a nano-second before the shroud fell back across her face.

It was the last thing I heard her say. She died on Wednesday, 21 August 1985.

My husband fears the small ripples in my mother-in-law's grasp of contemporary events. He dreads her decline, her descent into the hopelessness of dementia. I have only known her for two and a half years, and I, too, feel the impending loss that hovers. But then she smiles, and touches the surface of the cake that I have just taken from the oven, and says, with great cheer, Oh yes, it's done. Don't worry about that uneven part on the side. You can just lay the icing on a little thicker there, and no one will ever know. Her eyes twinkle, perhaps at the secret memory of the many times that she has done just that, and in fact, no one was the wiser for it.

When my husband shares his dread of losing his mother, I try to show some sympathy. I know it is expected of me. But I am a greedy girl, and what I really feel is envy for the incredible good fortune that an extra thirty years has been for him. My mother did not see the birth or adoption of many of her grandchildren, let alone their blooming adulthood. She never retired to spend the winter weeks in warmer climates. She never owned a computer, nor did she behold, with her life-long Democratic eyes, the occupation of the White House by a person of mixed race and his brown-skinned family.

The sun has risen, for what it's rise is worth in my cloud-encrusted town. In an hour, I will help lend a hand to a stranger in need, standing shoulder to shoulder with my friend Katrina and our families, as we help a victim of fire sort through her soot-covered belongings, desperate for something to salvage. So it is time to close the lid of my computer, and find warm clothes, and heavy shoes. It is time to tie up my hair in a heavy clip, and put aside my memories. It is time to get on with living.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 28 January 2012

2012-01-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

In an ironic twist of universal humor, my local paper carried an article on the newly identified benefits of caffeine this morning, which I spied shortly after discovering that we are out of real coffee. I gazed at the offending bag of decaffeinated beans that my otherwise wonderful husband insists on buying, and poured his oatmeal into the boiling water, resisting less noble intentions. An hour or so later, dog fed, husband off to tennis, number two son still sleeping, I am at Dunn Brothers Coffee -- not mine, my lovely shop in Kansas with its marvelous fireplace; I could not rationalize such a drive. I've come to the one nearer my home with rowdy music playing overhead and chairs shoved up against the fake mantle. But their coffee emits its welcome fragrance from a mug by my computer, and I am saved.

I've never disputed the benefits of coffee. Many of my life's most poignant moments involve the steaming liquid: my first cup after a self-imposed abstention, following the birth of my child; a hot Americano spilled on my shoes at my first coffee date with my husband; the noise of the percolator on many a morning-after.

I became a coffee drinker as a senior in high school. My weekend job involved serving as the unit secretary for 3South, the acute ward of St. Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital in north St. Louis County. At the time, the hospital occupied an imposing turreted edifice, and 3S housed the patients whose condition warranted the most intense security. Sister Kenneth Anne, our head nurse, would ask me to pour the scalding liquid from the 20-cup urn into a paper cup and bring it to her. It's us or them, she'd caution. We've got to stay alert. Before many weekends had passed, I found myself addicted to the murky sludge.

Sister Kenneth Anne resigned a year after I started working at St. Vincent's. I had not realized that nuns could quit their jobs, but apparently the order allowed them to do so. I can't take this any more, she told me, on her last day. The bad coffee is killing my stomach. She glanced out the open top half of the locked Dutch door. Not to mention the crazy people.

I poured myself another cup of coffee.

I never saw my parents without a cup or mug of coffee near their elbows. My father hovered over the stove while the coffee brewed on the electric burner, the smoke from his Camel straight circling his weary head. I skittered around him in such moments; he never felt well in the morning, and the bent of his body increased on days when his disposition particularly suffered from his antics of the previous evening. But once the coffee finished perking and he poured his first cup, the Irish twinkle returned to his eyes, and the thin edge of his razor wit mellowed.

My parents drank coffee at all times of the day or night. Before breakfast, with meals, in the evenings in their twin arm chairs, my mother knitting or crocheting and barely minding the noise of the television while my father worked the crossword puzzle and smoked. The images which I now recall come from the later years of their marriage; I have no such pleasant memories of our early history. But even in the most tumultuous days, coffee stood on the stove. Eight O'Clock coffee ground in a machine at Bettendorf-Rapps; Maxwell House in 5-lb cans, the fragrance of which filled the kitchen just as soon as the can opener started around its rim. This was not coffee-shop fare, but a staple nonetheless.

When I was a child, my mother drank her coffee from Melamine cups on matching saucers. The honored child carried it from the kitchen to wherever she sat, and it did not matter if a little spilled because she could tip it back into the cup. She rewarded our slow trudge from the kitchen with a kiss on our cheek, and my skin still sings, fifty years later, with the thrill of that brand. I have one of those cups: small, dark green, smooth. I serve myself fat-free ice cream in it, and feel nostalgic.

My mothers' parents used heavy ceramic mugs, but my father's mother served coffee in china, from a matching pitcher into which the coffee was poured in the kitchen, for service in the dining room, on white linen. I preferred to eat at Nana and Grandpa's house, on a Formica table, where the coffee steamed in heavy mugs and someone would let me dip a piece of bread into their coffee to eat for my dessert. If I tightly close my eyes and hold myself very still, I remember further back, to my great-grandmother's home, and a heavy wooden table. I would sit in my great-grandfather's lap and knock for him while they played pinochle, drank strong coffee, and smoked endless cigarettes. I used to know what that sharp rap on the table signified in the game, but that knowledge has sunk into the pleasant morass of all the useless information that I acquired before the age of five.

Coffee figures in the more tense moments of my life as well as the pleasant times. I had a foreshadowing of my brother's death two decades before it actually occurred, standing in my mother's kitchen, watching him hunch over the electric coffee-maker with a cigarette in his hand. Ten years later, he and I spiked the coffee at the family gathering following my grandfather's funeral. I've made a pot of coffee at every tense vigil that I have ever kept, from the storm during which my brother Kevin had a terrible accident to the vacuum of pain surrounding my mother's death, to the morning after the last fight I had with my second husband, just before our final parting.

I did not read the article in today's paper. I did not need a scientist to warn me that coffee makes my heart pound and raises my blood pressure, and I do not need a scientist to cheerfully tell me that coffee has positive side effects. I like coffee. I take it straight, strong and unadulterated. I always have, and I always will. I extend a cup to friend and stranger alike; I proudly sport a Dunn Brother's Coffee sticker on my American-made car. My addiction to coffee does not disturb me, unless, like this morning, I cannot appease it.

It's ten o'clock, and the music has mellowed. The coffee in my heavy mug has grown a bit cold, but I'll drink that last inch anyway, and maybe another. When I feel adequately fortified for the morning, I'll buy a bag of beans, and go back home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Happy 35th birthday to my niece Lisa Corley Davis, born 01/29/77. I love you more than words can tell.

Saturday Musings, 21 January 2012

2012-01-21T06:06:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

Nearly a year ago, maybe a bit more -- I can't recall -- a young man lowered himself into the orange-upholstered chair facing my desk. He had come to me by way of a former client who had sat in a courtroom, on a matter unrelated to the service I had performed for him, and observed as this young man tried to represent himself in a status conference on a paternity matter in Jackson County. My client stopped the fellow outside of the courtroom and offered him my telephone number. Call my lawyer, said my client. You need the kind of help she can give.

That afternoon, the young man and his mother visited me. He wore a T-shirt and P-coat, above nondescript work pants. Red circles rimmed his eyes, and he held his arms close to his chest as he spoke in low tones about the little girl, born of a brief relationship, for whose support he paid without being allowed much contact with her.

I sensed an unspoken story. How old is she, I asked. Four, said his mother, from the second client chair, and I briefly turned my gaze in her direction. But hers was not the tale that I needed told, and I looked back at her son. I waited.

When he spoke, I strained to hear his words. I've been in Iraq, he said, without elaboration. I glanced down at the creased papers that his mother had pulled from her purse. I thought about the Service Members Relief Act, and the rights he might have under that statute, and the snowball's chance in hell that he would have had to enforce those rights, as the clock kept ticking on his time to respond to the mother's two-pronged attack: Administrative child support request; circuit court petition to adjudicate paternity in which she sought sole custody and limited rights of visitation for this lonely soldier.

We talked about the proceeding, and I took his mother's slowly-written check for my initial fee. I showed him the method in which our state calculates child support, a misguided formula that wrongly presumes that two people living apart have spend the same amount to raise a child that they might budget if their two incomes really combined to support a single household. I gestured to the space in which some mindless child support technician had inserted his pre-discharge pay, and talked about percentages, and overnight parenting credits, and the cost of health insurance. I felt my voice trailing, until I ran out of words, and the three of us sat entangled in the heavy morass of my depiction of reality.

He looked at me across the oak expanse of my desk, and did not blink for several long seconds. Then he turned his head toward the weak light of a winter window. I don't have a job, he finally said, in a tone so close to inaudible that I might have imagined it. How can I pay that much money?

I shuffled the papers, and moved my coffee cup to a place less useful than the one it had been occupying. I shot a glance towards his mother, and another toward the closed door, before replying. What did the Army train you to do? I asked.

He did not reply at first. I repeated the question, raising my voice a bit to project over the sound of his mother's muffled sniffles. His head slowly rotated towards the smug seat in which I sat, and he said, with no remorse, no lament, and very little tone at all: What the Army trained me to do, no private employer needs.

A few weeks later he returned, alone, to sign the response and counter-petition that we sought leave to file out of time. I asked how the job search had gone. He shrugged, and told me, about some short-term work for the client who had referred him to me. I just couldn't do it, he said. I didn't ask why, or what the job had been. He told me he had been thinking about returning to active duty. My mom doesn't want me to do that, because if I do, she'll never get to see my daughter. He looked out the window at the convergence of gray asphalt and winter sky. I don't care what the papers say except I want my mom to be able to see my daughter if I get called up again. He met my eyes, and held my gaze with a fierce intensity. That's the most important thing.

Six months later, I saw him again at the pre-trial conference. In the interim, we had done a temporary order for parenting time and support. He had gotten a job working private security for a defense contractor. He seemed more comfortable with the layer of skin exposed by the turning of the year. My daughter's so wonderful, he whispered, holding out a small photograph of her. This is her kindergarten picture. Even if the genetic testing had not proven paternity, I would have known her: The intense blue eyes, the curve of her cheeks, the straw-colored hair.

We set the trial date but it had to be postponed due to the illness of the mother's lawyer and our inability to overcome two issues: My client's request for the child's surname to be hyphenated, and my client's insistence on a provision that if he returned to active duty, and was called to service out of the country, his mother would receive visitation of one weekend each month and a half-day at Christmas. We agreed on everything else: joint custody, his parenting schedule, continued child support. But she balked at the last two requests so we got ourselves a trial date, and the autumn months faded into memory. I did not hear from my client. I assumed he fared well.

I spent the first half of this week fighting for joint custody and a respectable parenting schedule for another client, having foolishly set two trials in one week, an occasional oversight which I lament each time it occurs. My assistant had been trying to reach our soldier client for several weeks to confirm his current situation. He did not answer our calls or return our e-mails and letters. Finally, I located his mother's e-mail address and reached out to her. Please ask your son to call me. She responded, I'm sure he isn't calling because he knows he owes you money. I fired off an answer: Tell him to call. We can work out any money that he owes me; just get him to call.

He finally did, this past Tuesday morning. He said that he and the child's mother had agreed that he would drop his request for name change in exchange for her consent to the provisional grandparent visitation clause we sought. Great, I told him. I'll send her lawyer an e-mail and get the paperwork ready.

We appeared on Friday, and by then, the mother's lawyer had gathered together a small collection of what she felt was fatal ammunition to sabotage the deal that my client believed the parties had struck. We sat in the judge's chambers, and she made her pitch to my astonished ears. This is not a grandparent visitation case, she said. I've told my client that the grandparents aren't a party to this case and she doesn't have to agree to the visitation clause.

The judge leveled a long look in my direction. You aren't asking that the paternal grandparents have Father's time if he is unable to exercise it, are you? he asked. No sir, I confirmed. He kept his eyes on my face. I could not have anticipated his mood, or his position, since he is a fairly new judge and I've not had the issue in front of him, nor had it arisen in many of my cases over time. I waited. He turned his steady look towards my opposing counsel. So what Ms. Corley is asking, is that in the eventuality that her client is called to active duty, and is defending the interests of the United States of America in a foreign country, for example, Afghanistan, his mother would be allowed one weekend per month to see his child. He darted his eyes back in my direction. Is that what you're asking, Ms. Corley? I confirmed that he had correctly stated our request. So if I get this right, he continued, her client only wants a provision that says that if he is off protecting America, fighting, in some place like Afghanistan, his mother would get not his allowed parenting time, but a mere one weekend each month, and four hours at Christmas and Thanksgiving. I think that is a very reasonable request in this unique situation, and surely there is some point of agreement here.

The woman's lawyer went off to talk to her client about writing and walls, and I went out to the hallway where my client awaited the outcome of our in-chambers discussion. A long stretch of time went by, during which I reached out to touch a silver bracelet with black writing that circled my client's wrist. I asked about the names on it, and he told me that the two soldiers whose names he wore were members of his platoon. He whispered the tale of their deaths, which he had witnessed. We sat in silence because I had no words with which to express my sympathy and no genuine basis for an empathetic response. Nothing I have experienced could compare.

In the end, we agreed to the one weekend per month, and four hours at either Christmas or Thanksgiving, depending on which holiday was allocated to the father that year. The mother took the stand, replying, That is correct, to every question, in a cold voice with a little toss of her head. I pitied her child.

When it was my client's turn, I stood before the podium. I knew that there were a few jurisdictional questions that needed to be addressed, including the fact that at the time that the case had been filed, he was a member of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, serving on active duty. Yes, ma'am, I was, he acknowledged, and the red rim around his eyes intensified and tears arose, hovering as he struggled with the pain that had too long stopped in his heart. On cross-examination, the mother's attorney asked him about his potential return to active duty. I'm thinking about it, he admitted, in a voice that reproached her for asking and me for telling him that he would only have to answer most questions by saying yes or no. The lawyer looked down at her legal pad, and asked how long his reserve contract lasted. I signed a two-year commitment last July, but this reserve thing is not really working out for me. She had no further questions.

The judge told him that he could stand down. A few formal words were spoken, and the logistics of judgment-drafting were discussed. When the hearing had concluded, I told my client that I would get a copy of the judgment to him and that he should not need to do anything further. He murmured his thanks. Then he shook my hand, and exited through the heavy door of the courtroom. The judge, his court reporter, and I stood motionless in the lingering shroud of silence. Then I, in my turn, thanked the judge. I did not say why. My statement could have been the meaningless expression of appreciation uttered by any lawyer, any where, at the conclusion of any case.

But we both knew it was not.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 14 January 2012

2012-01-14T07:25:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

The radio murmurs in the background, emitting the gentle cadences of the morning commentators who people my world and have for many years. Their voices soothe me as I stumble around the kitchen, grumbling about the poor quality of my sleep, trying to keep my focus on the blessings in my life but momentarily distracted from that endeavor by self-pity. A man describes a hiking trip and the vibrant color of the woods through which he walks in the Adirondack Mountains. I stretch my neck and think about an upcoming Yoga class, hopeful for its positive impact. Another Saturday, another week, another seven days of tallying -- one for the W column, one for the L column or maybe just for the grey space in between. I never stop second-guessing my efforts -- as lawyer, mother, wife and friend. I never stop feeling that I fall short of a goal so painfully unattainable that my fingers ache as I stretch toward it and I only understand its virtue in the cold pit of my stomach.

I heard a story on the local public radio yesterday about a production at the Theatre for Young America. The subject of the play strikes close to home: bullying of disabled children. The idea of a hearing-impaired actress in a wheelchair playing a lead role so engaged me that I nearly struck a construction barrel and had to jerk my wheel hard to avoid collision.

I swear I experienced a flashback, to West Florissant Avenue, the long mile through Jennings, Missouri from the Catholic elementary school that I attended to the small bungalow in which I lived with my seven siblings and my parents. All those years ago, I huddled into my coat, book satchel thudding against my thin legs, and tried to ignore the gaggle of boys behind me. The trio staggered, arms swinging to and fro, guttural sounds emitting from their skinny necks. They called my name, and laughed, falling against each other as I quickened my tortured pace. I watched the houses as I passed, hoping for an adult to come out, see my tormentors and scold them.

Across the four-lane roadway, I saw the shamrocks on the shutters of the Clarke home and silently pleaded to Mrs. Clarke: Come on, come out, and call me over! Come on, I begged Marie and Carolyn, the daughters of the family, one my age and one that of my older sister. Born in Ireland, the Clarkes had clear and definite ideas about the proper behavior of children, and I felt certain that the conduct of the three boys who followed me would not rise to their strict expectations. But the door stayed closed; the house stood silent and forbidding. Keep walking, it told me. You'll have no safe harbor here.

I rounded the corner of my street, and the boys went by, hooting and dancing, thrilled with the impact that their behavior obviously had on me. I stood and watched them as they climbed the hill, beyond the corner gas station with the familiar figure of its attendant on a metal folding chair near the front door. He watched them, too, and then, with a quizzical glance in my direction, lit another cigarette. I turned away and trudged home.

The following Sunday, my mother and I walked home from church together. I felt the familiar lurch in my gut as my three torturers fell in step a half block behind us, oblivious to the potential of my mother's wrath. Their laughter drifted forwards. I quickened my pace, my legs jerking harder, protesting the strain of my speed. Slow down, my mother cautioned. You'll fall. No one had heard the word "disabled" in the early 1960's. My sister and I had a "walking problem", which the doctors claimed had "unknown origins of a genetic component". On that Sunday, I had no concern for labels, and only cared about whether my mother would realize that the children walking behind us created their entertainment by imitating me.

Three or four blocks into our walk home, my mother figured out what was happening. She stopped, turned, and stared at the boys. They stood still, wide-eyed and aghast. She took a step toward them, and they flung themselves in reverse and ran towards the church, their derisive laughter floating back towards us and settling on my miserable shoulders.

My mother looked at me. Does that happen often? she asked. I shrugged. She took my answer for confirmation and placed one hand on my face, cradling my cheek. I'm so sorry, she whispered. I knew she blamed herself. How could she not? She thought that she had failed to give me sturdy genes, and she knew that she had failed to give me a life that afforded me a chance to ride home in the sheltering confines of an automobile. It's okay, I insisted. Don't worry about it. I don't mind those guys, they're stupid anyway. I come from a long line of comforters. I spent my life lying to my mother. I never stopped. I never told her how I really felt, not once, not in all the 30 years we shared this earth. It's no big deal, I repeated.

She put her arm around me, and we started home again. After a few blocks, I realized that our physical proximity had caused her to limp in step with me, and I began to smile. I snuggled against her, poking her ribs, swaying my hips in time to her broken step, until she got the joke and began to giggle. We capsized against each other, chortling, holding on and howling. We slowly made our way down the street this way, sashaying, laughing, high-stepping, as the thin Sunday traffic slipped by, and the man at the gas station sat in his rickety chair and smoked his cigarettes, calmly gazing on us as though, perhaps, he understood.

The news has ended, and the Car Guys are now dispensing automotive wisdom. The morning rises around me, with its sharp clear air and its breathtaking freshness. With a long sigh, I glance at the clock, and think about the day ahead of me. The house sighs with me, and on the first floor, the old white cat curls on my son's abandoned pillow, and settles down to sleep.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 07 January 2012

2012-01-07T07:11:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

In a small, erstwhile TV room, the sprawled form of my sleeping son announces the folly of laying plans. Deterred from his departure back to college by his mother's spotting of a small puddle of anti-freeze in the driveway where his car had idled while being loaded, he has had to find pursuits to distract him from his impatience. Our mechanic toiled late into last evening, striving to complete the job so that Patrick could resume his journey this morning, while I secretly have enjoyed the extra three days of his companionship.

I am reminded of other young folks, lively and excited about their pursuits: my friends' children, my younger brothers, myself. But I also think of many whom I have encountered who have not had such opportunities; whose choices have taken them down gloomier paths, or whose parents have made choices that crowded their own way with brambles and baggage, over which each successive generation will stumble. We all make choices, a friend recently observed.

I thought of these choices as I sat beside a slender young woman yesterday, who huddled inside a heavy man's jacket, her long, streaked hair haphazardly pulled into a clip, cheap black glasses slipping down her small nose, a dainty bud flanked by stark cheekbones, above chapped lips. In a tiny voice, she testified, yes, I want the court to accept my consent to termination of my parental rights, and another child slipped from her mother's reaching fingers, into a life that might be better but might be worse.

The girl is two years clean, on her fifth child, a child whom she supports alone. The child whom she surrendered yesterday was conceived while my client participated in drug rehab, in a hospital south of Kansas City, under circumstances that I can only imagine. Her oldest three and her youngest share a father, but the fourth one, a little girl, is the child of a man who has not stepped forward to help, or even voiced much thought as to the child's destiny. He talked of taking the child but failed to act consistently with his stated intentions, and so his rights, too, will doubtless be forfeited.

My client fought the state's removal of the child, and got herself clean, and visited the child every week for the last year. But she has reached the end of her ability to struggle to regain custody while raising the last baby alone. Her husband keeps using cocaine and she does not want the baby to be taken so she has finally left him. Do I want to do this? No, she adamantly insisted. Do I see myself getting my child back? Do I see myself being able to prove that I can care for both of them? Do I see the court giving her back to me? No, and no, and no. So she signed, and I notarized, and the Court accepted her consent, and my last sight of her narrow frame as the elevator door closed tore my heart out.

We all make choices, my friend said, and we do. We choose to drink alcohol to excess, or to limit our intake. We choose to smoke cigarettes, or marijuana, or snort cocaine, or not. We choose to pursue college degrees, or to take our high school diploma and cast ourselves on the sea of society, barely employable, our lack of knowledge and training meagerly offset by our enthusiasm.

But what of those who have few choices? What of the little girl whose mother conceived her on a narrow bed, in a rehab facility, and whose father vanished into the morass of a southern state where another woman, and other children, awaited him, without knowing that the simple act of desperate joining had formed life? That child did not choose her beginning, nor did she choose the circumstances which might well lead to feelings of unspeakable loneliness a decade hence, when she looks at her adoptive parents -- loving, caring, with a biological connection through her mother's side -- and thinks, why am I here? Did my real mother not love me? Did my real father not want me? Her tears might fall, silently, as she lies on her own bed and wonders what her life might have been, had she been born of different parents, or if the parents who gave her life had not then given her away.

I hear my husband moving in the upstairs room of our home. The old floorboards creak beneath his feet. Neither sleeping child has stirred; they have their own social spheres, and each came home after I succumbed to the fatigue of yesterday. In a little while, the phone will ring, and our diligent mechanic will announce that the Blazer is cured, and Patrick will resume his place in the driver's seat, adjust his glasses and the rear view mirror, and start the music which he needs to propel him eight hours east. And I will stand on the sidewalk, and think about the circumstances of his birth. I, too, chose to bear a child to whose father I was not wedded, and I, too, was cautioned that my life as a single mother would be difficult. Oh, good, I replied. The first 35 years were sheer hell. Difficult will be an improvement.

As he backs out of the driveway, careful to avoid the neighbor's car, I will wave, and he will smile, and I will silently pray that all his choices will be the right ones, and then, when the car has disappeared around the corner, I will go back into the house, and make myself another cup of tea.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 31 December 2011

2011-12-31T07:54:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

On waking this morning, I realized that I had, in fact, survived another year. The casual section of our newspaper displays pictures of the many folks who did not, and I review their names in awe. I recognize some of them; many mystify me. All meant something to someone, somewhere, and apparently, a lot to many. Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Rooney, James Arness. . .icons in their day and still. We mourn many of them like lost members of our own family and in a way, of course, they occupy special places in the human family, the family of a post-industrialization world, in which currents conduct characters and airwaves shape our hopes, our dreams and our desires.

I have not made the magic hour on New Year's Eve for many years, not since before children, and mid-life ailments, and a keen awareness that over-consumption of alcohol holds no allure for me. From a time to party, New Year's Eve has turned into a time for self-examination. Am I really incompetent and an unbelievable bitch, as someone recently claimed of me? Do I insist on winning every argument, as I heard in another painful accusation? Or am I the virtuous helper that my Facebook friends acclaim?

Am I the Wicked Witch or Wonder Woman?

I push aside the newspaper and fall into a reverie. A gaggle of Corley kids out on the front porch. With pots and pans, and wooden spoons, they beat the old year out and herald the New Year. Inside, a tray of half-eaten Ritz crackers with cheese, and glasses with the residue of something sticky and sweet. My mother sits in her arm chair. My father's recliner stands empty. From the decades' distance, I spy him in the kitchen, slumped against the counter, stubbled face hanging slack, hand clutching a cigarette. I can't recall him drinking in our presence, but he must have -- or perhaps he had been to the local bar. I remember what came later, I keenly recall his hang-over and the wrath of his sobering self. But in that moment, I stood on the lawn and merrily banged on the back of an aluminum pan, and I thought, I can't believe we're staying up til midnight And the fireworks popped in the distance, and my brothers ran around yelling, Happy New Year! Happy New Year! Happy New Year! until my mother came out onto the porch and gently drew us back into the living room.

Years later, at a New Year's Eve party in a now-forgotten bar, I clutched a glass of champagne and braced against the rush of revelers. New Year's Eve 1980, at the end of my first year in law school, and a wild bunch of 1Ls crammed into a room more intent on finding someone with whom to share the last stray pillow of the year than on contemplating self-improvement. Recently single after a grim year-long relationship with a man twice my age, I had no interest in anything but escape, and I lifted the glass as though, like many before me, I sought refuge in its depths. And the crowd roared as the ball dropped in Times Square on the small television perched on a nearby table, and my drunken friends crowed, Happy New Year! Happy New Year! Happy New Year! until their dates and those in other parties scolded, enough, enough, enough, and confetti fell around my narrow shoulders and onto the dirty tiles beneath my feet.

The New Year's Eve celebrations of the last thirty years have faded in my memory. From partying, I turned to sleeping early; bidding the year good night and good luck from a quiet room, with a book, a spouse, and a sleeping cat. More recently, I've spent the evening worrying that my son would make it safely back to the Holmes house, or stay the night wherever he celebrated. I'm not worried that he will drink and drive; he's not yet 21, and though I do not doubt that he would drink, he is sufficiently afraid of the ramifications of being caught to insure that his keys stay on a table beside his discarded glasses and wallet until his blood alcohol returns to zero. No, what I fear is the driver that might not be as smart as my son, and might plow into the side of his car and ruin my one chance for immortality.

Instead of celebrating, I make resolutions. Like the non-Christian who takes the opportunity to celebrate Christmas without sharing "the reason for the season", I borrow New Year's Eve to wallow in self-scrutiny. Wicked Witch or Wonder Woman, I ask myself. Did I help more than I hurt in the previous 365 days? Can I see a way to improve my performance over the next 365? Do those who smile at me with appreciation outnumber those who scowl at me in anger? Do I tip enough? Do I thank the sales clerks with sincerity or snarl at them with petulance?

I cast my mind backwards. My ambitions have largely fallen by the wayside. I never had a poem published in the New Yorker. I have not been to Europe. I've not even been to Canada or Mexico. I've started three novels and abandoned them in varying stages of completion. I still file for an extension on my federal tax return every year, and I am sure that a few old medical bills lie unpaid in a drawer somewhere, or in the mail basket in our living room. I haven't visited my aunt Della in two years. I've never planted gardenias on my mother's grave.

The lesser resolutions have fared better. I lost weight and kept it off. I no longer raise my voice at my secretary when she makes a mistake, though I still feel the temptation and have to walk into my office to gain control. I clean my purse out regularly to make sure I haven't left any crumbled notes to myself to languish beyond relevant due dates. I never miss a dose of Warfarin and I get a regular dental check-up.

As the morning wanes and the old battery on my trusty iBook G4 starts to whimper, I ruminate over this year's resolutions. I reject the trite and true. I won't live like I'm dying; that's so last year. I won't live like there's no tomorrow, or consider today the first day of the rest of my life. I pride myself in creating my own nauseatingly sentimental platitudes.

I hear my husband gently clear his throat in the living room, and the chuckle of the Car Guys on NPR emitting from the radio in my breakfast nook. The furnace blower begins its obtrusive roar, and our old cat, the 17-year-old stare-down champion, yowls for something that I have not a prayer of discerning. I sit amidst the sounds of Saturday morning at the Holmes house, gazing at the bad news in today's paper -- famine, and crime, and the looming election cycle. Suddenly, my resolution seems so obvious that I laugh out loud.

I resolve to cherish what I have.

And now I can eat breakfast, and grouse at the cat, and pour another cup of Dunn Brother's Coffee. At this moment, when it is still possible that the vow of 2011 will not fall empty into a kitchen drawer or vanish beneath my delete key, all seems possible. So Happy New Year, everyone, and here's hoping that you all get safely to the berth where someone who cherishes you lies waiting.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

AULD LANG SAYNE

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely you'll buy your pint cup !
and surely I'll buy mine !
And we'll take a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

(Original Scottish Version by Robert Burns, English Version by James Watson, based on a traditional song / poem; Burns version 1788).

Saturday Musings, 24 December 2011

2011-12-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

The stack of wrapped presents begins to grow on my dresser. Two carry bags on the floor hold additional gifts, sorted by the households to which they will be taken. A third pile has yet to be wrapped, and in my closet, more await. As I cut paper and pull tape, I try to cough away from my work, desperate to keep my germs to myself.

I lean against the bed, gazing at the happy results of my shopping efforts. Simply put, I love Christmas. I'm not religious but I have adopted this holiday as my opportunity to bestow each person in my world with a tangible manifestation of my gratitude for their existence.

Yesterday, my secretary opened the small gift that I had chosen for her while shaking her head back and forth. I thought I saw her hands tremble. She has worked for me for just a few months, and I know nothing of her life, nothing that would explain the emotion displayed as she lifted the scarf and truffles from their gift bag. As I left an hour or so later, she spoke in a faltering voice: I'd sure like to give you a hug. I put my arms around her thin frame. Merry Christmas, merry, merry Christmas.

I've purchased many scarves for people through the years. I give my friend Basimah a new scarf each Christmas and birthday. I'm not sure how she wears them all, but I am certain that she will never have to buy one for herself. I try to think of another gift to give her, but find myself standing in front of the display of silk, cashmere and wool, caressing the lovely threads, fascinated by the shimmering colors, choosing yet another piece of fabric that she can wind around her neck or drape over her shoulders. She has never said, Enough, enough!, and accepts each with the same sweet, sincere smile.

Years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I purchased a matching hat, scarf and mitten set for a little girl whom I tutored. I used my babysitting money to buy them. I stood in Kresge's dime store for a long while, running my fingers over the knitted yarn. I imagined the child with her stringy, unwashed blond hair, and her deep blue eyes, and thought about the colors and how they would frame her face. I shifted from foot to foot, debating, and finally chose the red set, imagining the bright pom pom atop her small head, thinking of the light in her eyes as she tore away the paper and opened the box.

The following Saturday, I traveled to the church at 14th and Mallincrot in St. Louis for the Christmas party staged for our students by the parish sponsor of the tutoring program. I gazed out of the window of the vehicle in which my friends and I rode, watching the suburban houses fall away as we traveled south and east into the city proper. Apartment buildings with broken sidewalks took their place, and the quiet streets of our county neighborhood yielded to blaring horns and sirens; clean pavement gave way to littered slush.

But inside the church, dozens of small boys and girls chattered as volunteers handed out paper cups filled with hot chocolate. Among them, I found my student standing silent, gazing at the colored light bulbs draped from the folding table which held plates of cookies.

As the other children eagerly pulled toys from gift bags, my girl gently lifted the scarf and held it high enough to keep it from draping on the floor. I stood over her, encouraging her to wind it around her thin neck. I settled the beret around her curls and eased each of her tiny hands into a crimson mitten. She stood, gazing at me, wearing an expression that I could not understand, not moving, holding her thin frame rigid. I finally took pity on her, and removed the knitwear, returning it to the box. I thought she would run off then, but she reached for the gift and clutched it against her chest, and said, thank you so much for these beautiful things, and as she spoke, tears ran down her face.

The next week, my girl came to tutoring without her hat, or scarf, or mittens. When I asked about them, she shrugged. After the session, I mentioned them to our teacher, who told me that likely they had been lost or stolen. I felt a small measure of regret for having given her something so transient, something so briefly brightening her life.

At the end of the session, I learned that no one had come to retrieve my student, and that we would be delivering her to her parents' home. She sat beside me in the car without speaking, holding my hand, gazing out the window. When we parked near her building, she quickly wiggled out of the car and swiftly walked away from me, with only the briefest of glances in my direction. I stood beside the car, troubled, and from that vantage point, saw the door of the building open and her mother's narrow frame step onto the sidewalk.

The rush of shock propelled me forward several steps before my teacher's hand stopped me. We watched my student's mother walk forward to greet her, wearing a flimsy, tattered dress, a scarlet hat on her head, a matching scarf wound around her neck, and mittens on each hand. From the short distance between us, I could see hollow cheeks and dark smudges under sunken eyes. I saw the woman reach for her daughter with long, fragile arms, drawing her close, pulling her into the yawning gape of the battered door which closed behind them with a dreadful thud.

There was nothing to do but get back into the car and leave the place. The other girls talked happily among themselves during the ride home. When the car stopped, they spilled out onto the parking lot and called holiday wishes to each other as they ran to their parents' cars. I got out last, and stood waiting for my ride to arrive. The teacher spoke my name, and I met her eyes with a sharp snap of my head. Merry Christmas, she whispered, as my mother's Ford pulled into the driveway. I did not reply.

Decades later, my son's cell phone starts to ring and buzz in his bedroom. He's scheduled for his customary volunteer work with Meals on Wheels today. In a few minutes, he will stagger out and grunt a request for coffee. He will have tarried too late over his guitar and his computer. We finished Christmas shopping last evening, with dozens of other people at Barnes and Noble, where we had a coffee and talked about his fall trip to West Virginia. We went out one night with a bunch of people that I didn't know, and I had a really good time. That trip was great, he told me, and I believed him, for rarely do I see him speak with such uncontrived passion.

I purchased a scarf for my son this year, and as I wrapped it in tissue and gently placed it into a box last night, I thought about my little girl and her mother. I remembered the look in her eyes above the box which she clutched to her chest. I saw again the brief flash of red disappear behind a heavy door, and I felt again the cruel bite of wind on a St. Louis street, long ago, under a leaden sky.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Merry Christmas, and God Bless You, Each and Every One

Holiday Musings

2011-12-19T08:55:00.001-08:00

Folks:

Everyone gives to charity in some way: time, money, prayers. You drop coins into the red bucket and get a bell-ringer's thanks. You drop a can of beans into a barrel and it feeds a needy family.

If you are in the Kansas City area, consider giving to the Harvester's Community Food Network Online drive:

https://vfd.harvesters.org/Index.asp?IdS=000228-29EE0B0

This worthy program provides food and "back pack snacks" for families and children in our community. If you give before noon this Thursday, you can dedicate your donation to someone and that person's name will appear in Sunday's Kansas City Star.

My husband and I donated, and I made the donation in the name of my dear little brother, Stephen Patrick Corley, who was born on Christmas Day in 1959 and died in June of 1997.

I am very pleased to be able to celebrate his birthday this way. You, too, can celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah in honor of someone -- by donating to this or any other charity, giving of your time or talents. For example, our two sons will continue the tradition of helping by delivering Meals on Wheels with my best friend, Katrina, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church. I am sure there are many giving opportunities in which you can invest, and I encourage you to do so.

If your giving dollars and/or time are already committed to your personal limit, then give by sending positive thoughts out into the Universe, and remember: That clerk has HAD IT with unpleasant shoppers, so give her your smile. That's a gift that keeps on giving, 24/7/365! (or 366, if it's leap year!)

Merry Christmas,

Mugwumpishly tendered, with best wishes to all of you for a very, very safe and joyous holiday season,

Mary-Corinne Teresa Corley,

daughter of Richard Corley and Lucille Lyons Corley,
sister of seven Corleys,
wife of Jim MacLaughlin,
mother of Patrick,
stepmother of Cara and Ansel,
and your friend and colleague.

Saturday Musings, 17 December 2011

2011-12-17T06:15:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

Grey sky greets me from the opening where the pale orange curtain parts from the dingy sheer falling to the floor at the side of my dining room window. I strain to find some glimmer of blue but the heavy clouds, with their burden of rain, ice, or snow, block the sun. My heart falls and I think for a moment about the eight-hour drive from Greencastle, Indiana, to Kansas City, and wonder if the Blazer will make the journey without incident.

Seven months into marriage, I still find myself somewhat puzzled at having gone from a family of two to a family of five. The wonder of seeing my stepdaughter walk across a stage, red hair falling in a silky sheath from beneath a mortar board, causes my heart to pound and tears to well in my eyes. I've known this young woman for just over two years and have seen her blossom from someone struggling to find her place in an adult world, to someone poised to conquer. I never doubted that she would reach this point, but I did not anticipate this overwhelming rush of pride.

I cannot deny the strength of feelings that I have for this beautiful young woman who has late come into my life. My son knows that he occupies the first place in my heart, but my stepdaughter and stepson have their own little nooks in that scarred chamber. I've been a stepparent before now, in my first marriage, and not a very good one. I watched my second husband struggle to fit into the nearly impenetrable bond that joins my son and me. I've guided countless clients through the morass of his-mine-ours debates about discipline. I have experienced the pain and pleasure from every direction but one, and I've seen enough to have an inkling of the child's perspective.

With all of that, I nonetheless have been taken very much by surprise at the rise of love which I feel for my stepdaughter. Putting aside the several young women whose younger years coincided with my son's childhood, and whose mothers graciously shared them, she provides my first opportunity for same-gender parenting. She's certainly old enough to need very little hands-on mothering. Still, I have taken full advantage of this chance. I've waited a long time. Though I love my son, I am, after all, the woman who, upon being asked by a helpful clerk if I had gotten what I wanted after standing in the Action Figure aisle for longer than the clerk thought healthy, blurted out, No, I wanted a girl.

I don't doubt that there would have been times when I wished the opposite. I remain convinced that boys cause less daily aggravation. Certainly, they often quickly grow protective of their mothers, as my son did, as my stepson is towards his mother and my son's friends are towards theirs. But something about ribbons, bows, and Barbie dolls makes my stomach clench even now. I have no problem finding Christmas presents for my stepdaughter; in fact, my problem takes the opposite form: stopping myself from getting many more presents for her than for the young men of our family.

I look backwards, with something like sorrow, at the disconnect that broke my relationship with my mother at the start of my college years, which I never quite overcame. I still hear her voice on the telephone, snapping at me, telling me that if you are not home by five o'clock, don't come home at all, occasioning my departure from the family fold just shy of my eighteenth birthday. I never looked back. Though we found a way to communicate, after a fashion, the damage never fully healed. I vividly recall sitting at a restaurant table in the Central West End during graduate school, talking about the silver market and over-sprouted beans, thinking, who is this woman. Had I known she would be gone six years later, I might have tried to find out.

But now I can only gaze at a sepia-tone picture of her dancing in our front yard, and plead with her to tell me what made her heart so glad. In the pages of an old picture album, I find other snapshots from the same day: My grandfather, with his lovely brown skin and tall, sturdy frame; and my brother Frank and me, standing in front of a sheet cake, holding a knife together. I realize that the occasion was a graduation for each of us in the same year. I see the light in her eyes, captured when she least expected, while she looked at me across the room. I am suddenly breathless. This, this, right here in this picture: that is what I felt when Cara walked across that stage last night. A mother's love for her child.

It matters not that she was born of another, who sat in the same auditorium with right of first pride. Nor does it matter that she came from the genes of the man beside me, whose arm I clutched, as I nagged him to quickly hand the camera down to one of the boys so we would not miss the crucial shot. And, finally, that my son was born of me does not diminish my feelings towards my stepdaughter, just as my feelings for her and her brother do not detract from my love of Patrick. Our family has blended.

I glance out the window and am astonished to see that the clouds have scattered, and an azure expanse rises above my neighbor's house. My coffee has been replenished by a man sitting at our table in tennis whites, working a puzzle. In an hour, one of those young women whose lives I have shared will be coming to help me with chores that are beyond my physical ability, and we will have a pleasant hour restoring the Holmes house to cleanliness. Later, when I have done a little shopping and a little fussing over my Christmas list, I will make dinner for the new graduate and her boyfriend, and sometime this evening, my first-born child will arrive for the holiday.

And all will be right with my world, as it turns again, and inches towards the close of another wonderful year.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Congratulations, Cara Withers MacLaughlin, Bachelor of Liberal Arts Magna Cum Laude, 16 December 2011

Saturday Musings, 10 December 2011

2011-12-10T05:59:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

I've balanced my laptop on a wooden table purchased at an estate sale for five dollars, more years ago than I can recall. A stout cup of French roast cools at my elbow. At the far end of the scarred oak dining table, an assemblage of Christmas decorations stands at the ready for a later event.

The five-foot tree purchased a decade ago at a January half-price sale shines in its customary corner, lights glowing, only a few plastic needles falling to the floor. Christmas stands proud at the end of the next two rows of boxes on my German calendar. I braved the "early shoppers" sale at Kohl's yesterday, and even did a round at Target, being as I needed cat food any way. Every single sales clerk whom I encountered flashed smiles; but then, it's early yet.

Nearly sixty Christmases span the backward circuit of my life. As I make my lists, check them twice, buying presents for everyone regardless of whether I consider them naughty, or nice, I think about successful purchases in the past: the radiant smile of my best friend's granddaughter Nora just last year, when she opened a life-size, soft Christmas doll; my son's grin at the remembered request of a clock made from reclaimed computer parts, which he had spied at the VALA Gallery; and years ago, the same boy's shrieks upon spying the tall Batman with light-up eyes that Santa had finally found after searching a dozen stores.

But one of the most satisfying presents that I've purchased -- and I have purchased hundreds -- was the American/French idiomatic dictionary that I bought for my cousin Kati's then-husband Bernard in 1983.

He had little English at the time. Kati and I had reunited on their relocation from St. Louis to Kansas City, sitting for hours in their apartment chattering about our childhood and the decade of events since our college days. Bernard could not follow our conversation. He thumbed through a French-English dictionary and could not determine the meanings of phrases rushing around him in our common St. Louis twang.

For weeks, he grumbled about his crazy American wife and her wild cousin Corinne, though said in French it sounded elegant. I got it into my head that he might feel less alienated if he understood our vernacular, so I set about -- in the days before Al Gore invented the World Wide Web -- to find a French/American idiomatic dictionary.

Not easy, I discovered.

My search extended to the considerable reach of area bookstores available at the time. Harried clerk after harried clerk shook head after tired head. Finally, in Whistler's Books, then located in Westport, a salesman took pity on me. I'll try, he said, in a weary voice, seven staggering shopping days before Christmas. Don't get false hopes, he cautioned, and turned away to answer a question about the tells-all-star-biography-of-the-week, which No, they did not carry, we are an independent bookseller, we don't carry that kind of stuff, try Walden Books, he said, with only a slightly disdainful sneer.

Kati and Bernard had invited me to share a meal at their home for the holiday. I could never have declined. In addition to my craving for the company of family, the allure included the fact that Bernard, a French chef, would certainly provide something succulent and decadent. But I did not want to go without a present for Bernard, and I had despaired of finding what I wanted most to give him. I purchased a back-up -- I think it was a boring wool scarf -- and hoped it would suffice.

A half hour before I should have been arriving at their apartment, the phone rang. You ordered a book from us, said a very, very tired voice. It's here. I drove faster than I should through the thick traffic of last-minute shoppers, not noticing the lovely rise of Christmas lights on the Plaza, narrowly escaping a crash with Cinderella's horse-drawn carriage in my haste to get to Whistler's Books before it closed. My parking karma provided a narrow spot into which I crammed my vehicle, and I slammed the car door, barely pausing to lock it, arriving ten minutes before the store closed, and fifteen minutes after my scheduled arrival time at Kati and Bernard's apartment.

The man who had called was the same man who had promised to try to find the book. He handed it to me, and I gazed down at it with surprise. Slightly battered, a little care-worn, clearly used, nonetheless, it bore the title: Dictionary of American to French Idiomatic Translations. Or something like that. I looked at the clerk. How did you find it, I asked, with true wonder.

He smiled. I searched a lot of catalogs at first, he told me. Books in Print, too. Then, when nothing I did worked, I called a friend of mine.

The friend, it turned out, ran a bookstore in New York City. That friend had a friend who ran a bookstore in Paris, France. That friend had a friend who ran a used book stall on a side street in Paris, a hand-made structure with a slanted tin roof that did not even have a name. In the stall stood a small shelf of guides for French folks planning to travel in various countries, and on that shelf, my present for Bernard had waited. The Paris bookseller bought it, shipped it to the New York book store owner, who sent it to Kansas City, where I purchased it for less than the postage to mail it from France.

I gazed at the salesman with frank admiration. So much trouble for one book, I murmured, running my hands along its cracked spine. He shrugged. I told them about your cousin's husband, he admitted. About the two of you talking all night in their living room, and poor Bernard sitting in the kitchen, clueless as to what half your chattering meant. We all felt bad for the poor guy. He shrugged again, a careless lift of a wool-clad shoulder. I got the sense that his efforts rose more from his sympathy for a man with a crazy wife, and a crazy cousin-in-law, than from his desire to satisfy a customer. The motivations of the New York and Paris connections, I can only imagine.

I wished him a very Merry Christmas. I left the store, unwrapped book clutched to my chest, and made my way to Kati and Bernard's apartment. The meal did not disappoint, nor did the shining smile on Bernard's face when he saw his gift.

In an hour, three seven-year old girls will descend upon my home, to decorate my Christmas tree and paint glass ornaments. One of them, my friend Elisabeth's daughter Accalia, has hired herself out for the morning to raise money for Operation Smile (www.operationsmile.org). I will compensate her efforts with a check to that charity. I invited the others -- my friend Sherri's nieces, my flower girls, Courtney and Allie -- just to make a merry morning. I will feed them ants-on-a-log, and take their pictures to post on Facebook. When they have gone, I will sit in my rocker by the fireplace, and gaze upon the ornaments dangling from the branches of my artificial tree, recalling each Christmas that I have spent in this home. When I start to feel that I have been lazy enough, I will set aside that pleasant occupation, and get on with my day.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 03 December 2011

2011-12-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

Daniel Pinkwater and Scott Simon read a children's book in the background as I study my "contacts" entries and wonder whether my words reach those on the list or succumb to the vicious slam of a delete key. Occasionally, I hear from people -- "thanks for leaving me on your list", say some. "Delete me," say others. I try to comply and wonder if columnists whose essays appear in the newspaper fare as well as I do. So far, the expressions of thanks outweigh the expressions of annoyance about 4 to 1. As I ponder, Pinkwater concludes his "occasional appearance" on Morning Edition, the rain softly falls on the peeling paint of the neighbor's eaves, and the other sentient beings in my home begin to rattle around or pour second cups of coffee.

The year draws to a close more quickly than I anticipated. Like the errant buttons of my old alarm clock, the pages of the calendar have leaped ahead. I am another year older but no wiser; still stepping on my own toes, while pushing my foot towards my mouth and flapping hopelessly in the conversational breeze. I'm living proof that those who cannot do, write about doing.

After pizza and a tour of the Benson Gallery last evening, we arrived in Mission just before the launch of the fireworks. The shooting stars sailed over the old Fine Arts theatre, the former lobby of which is now the VALA Gallery at its new location. As I stood on the slick cobblestones and craned my neck back to better see the streaks of red, blue and gold, a mother broke away from the group gathered around the fire pit to take a frightened child farther from the crackles and booms. I was instantly transported to a long-ago Fourth of July, when my own small child huddled against me crying, They're pretty, Mom, but why do they have to be so loud?

Christmas fireworks don't figure in my own family's tradition. We install a smallish artificial Christmas tree in the living room, and decorate it with ornaments whose history I relate to anyone foolish enough to stray close to the action. Lights and garlands adorn the mantle; a small collection of snow globes, the plastic Disney kind, nestle among pools of tinsel. I usually get this done on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, but I have a trial next Monday and my attention has been distracted. I hope to have the tree installed before St. Nicholas Day, even though there are no longer small children whose shoes must be filled with candy overnight, and no longer anyone to anticipate a visit from the Tree Elf, who puts a small present for each child on the lowest branches the night of the tree's first appearance.

These rituals, slight variants of those which my mother orchestrated for my siblings and me, tell me that the year will soon fade into my increasingly cloudy memory. With less than a month remaining of 2011, I hold myself accountable for the failure to completely attain the New Year's Resolutions that I made on the stroke of midnight eleven months ago. I am no less catty; no less snappish; no better organized. I have not progressed towards getting published, nor gone paperless. In fact, the only one of my self-imposed goals that I accomplished this year was keeping slim. Three and three-quarters years after I started my diet, I hover between 108 - 111, depending on salt intake; I started losing weight at a horrible 175 pounds on March 1, 2008.

I mark the passing seasons by the changing colors of the trees rising above my neighbors' homes. Today they bear few leaves, and their dark scraggly limbs sag under the chilly weight of the winter rain. The view out my window could be anywhere but the most rural of locations. The houses press towards each other, dwarfing the urban clutter of wires and cables, looming over the SUVs on the small parking pavements at the end of the narrow driveways. Without the cheering rays of a summer sun, the roofs seem sad and dingy.

I feel a sense of listening, waiting, in the air around me, in my home and outside in the stillness of my street. Standing on the porch an hour or two ago, bending to retrieve the paper in its plastic wrapping, I let the cold air rush over me and closed my eyes. Winter drives the dog-walkers indoors. I have not seen the usual strollers in weeks, and when the first snow falls, I will close the blinds on the outside world, and retreat to my writing desk, where I will begin to compose another set of resolutions.

Perhaps next year, my successes will outweigh my failures, and I will not be overwhelmed by winter's gloom when December arrives.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 26 November 2011

2011-11-26T07:33:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

Muscles ache which I have not used for months. I suppose they are the famous "Mommy muscles" -- the ones that allow us to bend low, so as to lift a small child or a twenty-pound turkey; to push a damp mop across a kitchen floor; and to peel potatoes. But I awakened this morning to a house that sparkled, dishes snuggling in their cupboards, and a lingering aroma of fresh sage. I planned my life well: long-time guests who do not leave until the dishes are washed, dried and put away.

I enjoyed two Thanksgiving dinners this week, as I often do. On Thursday, we gathered at my parents-in-law's home. Last evening, our oldest and dearest friends (among many friends whom we hold dear) graced our table. And now I roll my shoulders to clear the happy stiffness resulting from eight hours of cooking. I smile over the pictures of young men teaching a bright five-year-old to play chess, and recall other chess games played in my house, a decade ago, when these same young men were serious ten and eleven year-olds. The world turns, and we move another click towards our collective and respective destinies.

I went to a new physician this week, an arrogant young woman who dismissively scribbled on my carefully penned medical history. For all of her supposed knowledge, she still got my symptoms wrong, as I learned when a testing lab phoned me to schedule their contribution to the puzzle. I put down the turkey baster to spare the woman a few moments, although she offered to postpone the scheduling interview until Monday. As we talked, I thought about the biting cold of the day on which I visited the doctor's office earlier this week.

When I left the medical building, I rued again my decision to dash over to the appointment without my coat. I stood on the curb, preparing to cross two lanes of parking lot traffic to reach the handicapped spaces. I stepped into the mark crosswalk, looking down at a long crack in the pavement. My eyes flickered forward as I gauged the potential for safe navigation to the center aisle, and I caught sight of a slim foot in a gold sandal extended towards me.

I noticed the thick support hose in which the foot was encased, and slowly raised my eyes. The woman wore a long, shimmering silver skirt that fell straight and stopped mid-calf. Her arms were bent towards her waist, her hands encased in white gloves such as I had not seen since my Catholic school days. The simple woolen jacket closed with a single large button. My gaze reached her face and met her eyes, for just one brief second, not long enough for me to register emotion. Her raised chin inched slightly upward. Her face was framed by thinning silver hair, swept up and held back no doubt with small metal hair pins.

She turned away from my scrutiny, unconsciously displaying the little tube running from behind one ear.

A man had one hand on the woman's elbow. As I passed the pair, I came close enough to recognize the smell of Old Spice clinging to his jacket. I reached the other side and turned back to watch him gently guide her to safety on the far curb. His suit fell away from his frame, its fabric countered before time robbed him of his sturdier presence. But his arm circled her as reliably as it surely had for decades, and in the brief second before the doors closed soundlessly behind them, he glanced back in my direction with a warning menace.

I closed my eyes and let the lingering fragrance settle in my lungs, a mixture of his after-shave and Chantilly Lace perfume. This is the smell of time, I thought. The scent of something that endures. I felt my body sway, and heard the voice of someone on the sidewalk talking into an invisible mobile device. I shook myself from my reverie, and continued into the parking lot, fumbling for my keys, pulling the stamped ticket from the pocket of my jeans. I took my place in the exit line and handed the ticket to the same woman who takes my ticket every time I visit one of my doctors. I listened to her cheerful greeting, and returned it, raising my window again before pulling out into the lane of traffic and resuming my mindless journey into evening.

A quiet rustle from the living room pulls me back into the pleasant air of a rainy Saturday. I spy the dog sleeping outside my son's closed bedroom door, and I catch a slight hint in the air of burned coffee. In a little while, I will rouse my son and we will venture into the city. He has not gotten a chance to do any of the clothes shopping that we planned for this holiday because his poli-sci professor handed out an assignment just before the students left campus for Thanksgiving Break. My son spent most of the last three days driving home or writing a paper on special interest groups. Today we will sip coffee at Dunn Brothers, and brave the aisles of Nordstrom Racks. Tomorrow the clock will resume its march toward the end of 2011 as he drives back to a place where he is not my just my son, but a person in his own right -- a world that exists on a three-hundred acre plot on which he has also staked his future.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Midweek Musings: 22 November 2011

2011-11-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

Only time will tell if I live to write another Saturday Musings -- we are all visitors, even strangers, on earth. None of us know when our tickets will get punched.

So in keeping with my belief that if one cannot be a good example, one should be a horrible warning, I'd like to share with you that someone did something really wonderful for me today. It came out of the blue, and I cannot share the details as to do so might inadvertently disclose a confidence. Suffice it to say that I left home this morning with a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat, but wearing, above my winter coat, a very broad smile.

This prompts me to suggest that each of you consider whether you can bestow an unexpected kindness. Lie in wait for it. Don't announce it. If possible, don't take credit for it. It need not be large; it need not involve an expenditure of funds. It can be simple. It must, however, be heartfelt.

I bid you all a wonderful Thanksgiving. As you and your families and friends gather, remember to do your "Thankful-Fors". This is a practice, started by my mother, in which those gathered each identify something for which they are thankful. We make the circuit from youngest to oldest, but you can do it any way you like. Get the hankies ready, and prepare to cry, and laugh, as your host carves the turkey.

Among the many things for which I am thankful: The Small Firm Internet Group to which my Musings are initially posted each week. SFIG is a family of colleagues which has given me both a forum and my voice, along with a keen awareness of the pleasures of our profession and an appreciation for its challenges.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May the Universe, and the deity of your choice, bless you, and may it provide many opportunities for you to pay your blessings forward to one who might need a tender touch.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 19 November 2011

2011-11-19T07:05:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

The mums which we purchases largely for their splash of color, one September Saturday, have decided that if we did not want to continue watering them, they would not continue to grace our deck. They have succumbed to neglect and the fierce whip of autumn winds, and now roll in their weightless pots behind the table. Fall threatens to yield to winter, and I pull my sweatshirt closer to my frame as I gaze around me before deciding to retreat to my idyllic bedroom with its early-century paneling and its cathedral ceiling. The wind batters my bungalow but I feel safe.

I have become a virtual parent. I felt this stark reality in recent days, as I watched my SmartPhone for messages from my son and his step-brother, one of whom attends the college that the other left to visit this week. I pull the laptop towards me in the evening and scroll through Facebook for news of my adult step-daughter and her adorable boyfriend, and there, too, do I exchange greetings with the boyfriend's mother. I do not cyber-stalk my son, but I do take note of the pictures on his Facebook page, and I cannot help but feel gratified by the complacency that I decide appears on his features. I feel a small wince of worry at the ever-present and barely disguised beer bottles, but I have only to reflect on my own college days to know that he has not yet attained the depths to which my friends and I sank during our own college careers, and so, I persuade myself to watch but not worry.

By text-message, I learn of his play that has been accepted for presentation in the playwrights' festival, and his short story that will appear in the campus literary review. I praise my son for these accomplishments, remembering the clench of thrill in my gut, nearly forty years ago, when I learned about the planned publication of three of my poems in a local literary magazine in St. Louis.

I got that news by mail, since the virtual word had not yet been born. I stood at my mailbox and tore open the self-addressed stamped envelope required with each submission. The editors of Eads Bridge are pleased to announce that we have accepted three of your poems for publication, which will appear as a triptych on adjacent pages. We enclose suggested edits of those poems, and await your approval. I clutched the paper and grinned at passing students. It was not my first publication. I had been a high school correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and a guest-essayist for a Christian magazine aimed at teenagers, the publisher of which employed my sister. I had been the editor of my high school literary magazine in my senior year, on account of which, to no one's surprise, my writing had been published. But the submissions to Eads Bridge differed from my prior accomplishments in that I had no guardian angel and no captive audience. If the editors of Eads Bridge liked my poetry enough to publish it, then maybe -- just maybe -- it was good.

In the end, only two of the poems appeared. I regretted that, but the editors had final say. I had written the poems together, and to me, they only made sense together. But I did not challenge the final decision and I accepted the "writer's copies" which were my only compensation. My father evidenced the most pleasure at my being a published poet, since his father had also been. From the example of my grandfather, who died years before my birth, I began to wonder if I couldn't go to law school and write as a vocation, while supporting myself as an attorney. I set my sites on this goal.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And now, my son has grown into a writer as well as the musician that he could not help but also be. He sends his short stories to me for review, and his essays, and his papers. I comment; I encourage; I support. From my perch, overlooking the neighbor's roof and the distant trees, I walk the line between mother and editor. I read what he writes wherever I am when I receive it. This story seems unfinished to me, I told him, texting from Division 3 where I awaited my very tardy client on Wednesday. Ugh, came his reply. Then, a few seconds later, okay, what should I do?

And although I know he seeks direction for this one story, which I imagine must be tendered to his writing professor within mere hours from the time he sent it to me to read, I find myself giving him broader advice: Just keep writing.

From the tenor of his answering text, I know he must be laughing. I give him more specific advice about the story itself, and why it leaves me wondering. He's better at essays than he is at short stories, but he is young, and might well find himself excelling in any of these genres. I haven't read the play as of yet, though I have asked to do so. He'll send it, in his own time, and, hopefully, one day I will receive a doc file of his first novel.

I am, when all is said and done, both a virtual parent and a dishonest one. If I bared my soul, I would admit that I want him to pursue his gift of writing in part, at least, because I did not. But as the wind whistles outside my window and the sounds of NPR drift around me, I protest to my silent, spiritual self that I do not strive to live vicariously through my son. Rather, I yearn to spare him from the isolation of regret that I feel for a road not taken.

Yesterday, I met a man at the Missouri Bar Fall Meetings who professed to have encountered me in the past, perhaps when he came to Jackson County as a visiting judge. I searched my data bank but found nothing to corroborate his memory. He asked me what type of law I had practiced in the past, and I told him: Lobbyist, prosecutor, civil litigator, family law practitioner. He remarked on the varied nature of my career, and asked of which endeavor I felt most proud. Actually, I told him, the job at which I think I most excelled was raising my son.

It might be the holidays making me a bit maudlin, or the long ride back from Jefferson City listening to country music. Perhaps in standing on my front porch at four yesterday afternoon, coat in hand, fishing through the mailbox, I triggered a recollection of that nausea which I felt long ago, holding the return envelope, wondering if Eads Bridge had accepted my submission. And perhaps that memory opened the flood gate of my most secret yearnings, of the life I did not lead, the loss of which I feel without diminishing my happiness in the life that I chose instead.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 12 November 2011

2011-11-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

The sky threatens to weep. I feel the bite of fall even here in my dining room, with the rush of heat from the register seeping into the air around me. A slight shiver passes through me. I bite into another cold grape and take another sip of tepid coffee.

Last evening, my stomach curdled as I read the 23 pages of grand jury report regarding accused child molester Gerald Sandusky. I reminded myself that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, but the grand jury's findings have the strong stench of starkly rendered truth. My eyes winced closed time and time again. I fought the urge to delete the file. I made it to the end, only skipping the most gruesome sentences. I had no taste for conversation after I read the report. My husband queried as to its contents, but I suggested only that he read it. I could barely bring myself to summarize the findings.

The question is not why he was allowed to return to Penn State year after year, but why he is still alive. You defense attorneys might protest, and in theory, I agree: he is legally entitled to a fair trial, before an impartial tribunal, with competent counsel. So to paraphrase the hanging judge, let's give this son of a bitch all the due process he can stand, and then let's crucify him.

This news occupied much of my week, along with the sad loss of several beloved famous persons, including Andy Rooney, and the passing of a friend's daughter after a most valiant and dogged fight with cancer. In my more somber moments, I wonder if I should cancel my newspaper subscription to avoid the heaps of depressing revelations that ruin my breakfast. Then giddiness overcomes me, and I stand on my porch to watch the piles of autumn leaves gather on my lawn. My brain can only stand so much grief before it must seek comfort in the changing seasons, or the comic page, or a cup of strong Earl Grey.

On the wall of my bedroom is a framed square of embroidery. It's a pillow case, I think -- a "sham", I suppose. Its contours sport crooked stitches next to exacting ones, and a broken ring of stain where the hoop stayed in one place too long while the unfinished work lay neglected in my mother's sewing basket. She started the piece while sitting next to my grandmother's bedside after Nana's first stroke, forty years or so ago. She did not finish it. I discovered it after my father's death in 1991, and brought it home. I inserted a few clumsy inches to complete its motto, and put it in an old gilded frame that I found in my parents' basement, during the purge, while my two-month old son slept in a baby seat upstairs.

It greets me every morning from the shadows of our bedroom wall: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

I see my mother beside the hospital bed, stitching, glancing now and then at her mother's prone figure. A doctor had suggested that Nana could hear, and so my mother kept up a running stream of chatter, story after story of the endearing antics of her clinic patients, my little brothers' successes in school, news of my sister Ann, far away and on her own. I watched the rise and fall of my grandmother's form as she breathed through a tube, under a snarl of wires and a cover that I thought was too thin. I reached one hand forward and twitched the blanket closer to my grandmother's body, smoothing the surface, wishing I could bring a fresh pillow and a sachet to place under it. My mother smiled at me. Our thoughts ran on parallel tracks. She reached across the bed and handed me a clean, ironed handkerchief, with delicate tatting on the edges, and a vague scent of lavender. I used it to smooth my Nana's forehead, and wipe the sheen of perspiration from her brow.

I have that handkerchief still, and keep it, with others, in a satin pouch in my bedside drawer. I hold it against my face and imagine that the scent still lingers. I think about my mother standing over her ironing board, patiently eradicating the wrinkles. I sat beside her as a small girl, with my toy iron, which she held against hers to give me a bit of heat so I could help. She handed me the linen napkins that we used on holidays, and I pressed them, quickly, earnestly pushing with my small hand to mimic the practiced gestures that I saw above me.

My disgust in reading the grand jury report of the travesties in Pennsylvania stems from my tattered belief in the essential goodness of humankind. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, I still cling to that delusion. I hear my husband's footsteps on the stairwell, and I know that in a moment, he will bend over me to place his lips on mine. He will inquire of my state this morning, and glance at my coffee cup to see if it needs to be replenished. I think about a basement bedroom, in Pennsylvania, where child after child cowered, awaiting a tread on the stairs.

I close my eyes and a lament arises within me. Victim 1, Victim 2, Victim 3, Victim 4, Victim 5, Victim 6, Victim 7 and Victim 8. I cannot call their names. The ones known are kept secret, as they should be. The identity of Victim 8 has never been discovered, but the man who stumbled upon the savagery inflicted on Victim 8 reacted so profoundly that those to whom he ran with the horrible disclosure described him, fifteen years later, as being so upset that they thought he was going to have a heart attack. If the sight of what Victim 8 suffered caused such grief, I can only image what enduring it must have done.

The morning sun struggles to dissipate the steely clouds. My coffee has grown cold and a fine layer of goose bumps on my outstretched arms tells me that it is time to raise the ambient temperature. My Saturday has begun in earnest, and I leave the past, with a small, terse nod to the gathering ghosts. Fare thee well, fare thee well; I love you more than words can tell.*

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

*From "Brokedown Palace", by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.
With a special smile going across Missouri to the Elvish Banquet gatherers.

Saturday Musings, 05 November 2011

2011-11-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

From on an old rocker in my living room, as Friday drew to a close, I watched a neighbor and her husband walk by. Their stride has slowed in the last few years, and they took several minutes to pass my window. I stood and crossed the room to stand at the window for a better view. I noticed the wife's hair has grown to a lovely shade of silver, and the husband wears a cap similar to one my grandfather might have worn, decades ago. In years past, this couple zinged past my window on their bicycles, she ahead, he behind, and groceries bobbing in a basket perched in front -- sometimes on his bike, other times on hers.

Even more than the thickening of grey in my own hair, and the tightening of my own joints and muscles, the changes to this pair of devoted lovebirds mark the passage of time. For a few months, in 2008 or 9, the husband took his evening bike ride alone. I learned through the neighborhood grapevine that the wife suffered some undisclosed ailment. Since then, I have not seen them on bikes but they still take their evening constitutional, on foot now, faithfully.

I expect to see one of them alone some day, and I will know that their lives have come full circle.

The particular oddness of my watching these neighbors lies not in my voyeuristic monitoring of their lives' devolution, but in the fact that the woman of this couple went to my law school, graduating in the class behind mine. Yet I have never spoken to her in all the years that we have lived within blocks of one another. I know her name, and yet I do not call it. I made an effort to do so, once, about fifteen years ago. I greeted her as my son and I walked in front of her house with our Beagle in tow. Her eyes evaded mine. I do not know if she failed to recognize me, or knew me but did not wish to engage. I tell myself that I am respecting her preference for solitude.

Two blocks north of me, a house stands empty. Its occupant, a woman named Johanna, has moved to a retirement facility. The one-story bungalow had been her childhood home. She never married, never had children, never took a room mate or a boarder. She, too, walked every day, greeting my son and me, hailing the other walkers and the men who mowed their lawns. I often wondered what she thought of the changing block. I spoke to her only in superficial tones, about the weather, my son's growth, the relative state of her infirmity and mine. She walked on her own for years, and then with a wheeled walker and finally, with a minder. One day she did not appear; a few weeks later, I saw an ambulance at her house. Now the "For Sale" sign signals her first and last departure from the home she occupied for eight decades.

In Jasper, Arkansas, town of 562 (603 on the water line), I represented a friend's grandmother when she sold her house and moved into a nursing home one county north. Everyone on the block helped me pack her belongings. With my client ensconced in a wide rocker made by her deceased husband, the wives came one after another, with gift-wrapped trinkets which might never get used -- hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, small jars of home-made preserves, packets of pre-stamped note cards. She stretched a liver-spotted finger out and touched the care-worn hands of the farmers' spouses one after another, occasionally reaching to adjust her cardigan, to wrap it more closely around her frail shoulders. Her smile never faded. If there were two hundred families in town, at least half of them sent a representative to bid her farewell. I stood at her elbow, watching the church ladies pack her china and the local auctioneer appraise her furniture. They touched each item with reverence, as she had done.

That winter, we attended a pie supper for a family that had been burned out. Fire accounted for much loss in the country, since most people heated with wood and wood has a funny way of over-taking even the most diligent tending. I'm not much for baking but we brought an apple pie that my then-husband had made, It sold for three hundred dollars, the top take. The hippies of Murray Valley crowded in the community center shoulder to shoulder with the locals. Before the auction started, apron-clad wives ladled chili into Styrofoam bowls, with a hefty square of tender corn bread on the side. I hovered in the background, still a foreigner, in awe of the carefree disregard with which the women scrunched their faces in deep grins that furrowed the crow's feet beside their sparkling eyes. These women had earned their wrinkles, from fretting over crops, worrying about the building of barns, and wondering whether the old John Deere would last through harvest.

I shared breakfast this week with a friend, and something about the simple honesty of her countenance reminded me of one of the women of Murray Valley. All those years ago, when I sat at her kitchen table and complained about being an outsider, Jeanne turned her head to one side and gazed at me for several moments before replying. You've just got to step into the breach, she advised. And trust that someone will catch you, she did not add. I dismissed her advice and never felt at home. I left less than a year later.

Now I wonder if I've ever understood what she meant. I wonder, too, on which side of the breach I stand. I have lived in Brookside for eighteen years and have watched my former classmate age just yards from my porch, and have never made a legitimate effort to engage her in conversation. I don't know Johanna's surname, or the name of the retirement community to which she relocated. I can't tell you what ailment took Lise out of commission and forced her husband to walk alone for several months. I only know that her once-blond and plentiful hair is now silver and sparse. I know that she used to pedal a bicycle with vigor and now creeps forward in heavy, clunky shoes.

I can't help but think that something has gone amiss. I've watched the world spin, the world which now wonders if the approaching asteroid will drive a 1700-foot hole into its surface. If that rock hit my home, and I disappeared into the resulting crater, would anyone bother stepping into the breach to lend me a hand? I heard a speaker from Mexico talking about Dia de Los Muertos earlier this week. In some random context, he mentioned that his favorite Beatles lyric contained the best advice he'd ever heard: And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give.

As I watched last evening, my neighbor raise her hand and rested it on her husband's arm, I drew a long breath, and briefly closed my eyes. I marveled at the ease with which she reached across that small space between them. Just before they moved out of sight, she turned her head backward, just slightly, in my direction. She caught my gaze across the expanse of my yard, and then, with seeming deliberation, turned away, and the two of them disappeared into the gathering dusk.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 29 October 2011

2011-10-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

If the success of an event is judged by the quantity of trash and the soreness of the co-hostess's feet, the inaugural Open House at Suite 100 passes muster. My suite-mates and I remain astonished at the strength of our collective friendships and the harmony with which the disparate groups mingled in the corridors and offices, among the striking, provocative and warm digital art of Jean Van Harlingen, whose works we have shown in our Suite for the last year. On Wednesday, this display courtesy of the VALA Gallery of Johnson County will come down from the walls of our suite, and the works of another VALA artist will be displayed. Fall fades, giving way to winter, and Thanksgiving dances just beyond our reach, on the next page of my calendar. Life continues.

My week held more than one astonishing, powerful moment. But among them, one rises in my mind as I sit here. I drove home by an unaccustomed route on Thursday, and as I made the long curve around a Kansas parkway towards State Line Road past the rich, green expanse of a golf course, a small fox stepped from the southern edge of the roadway and ventured into the throb of civilization's evening regimen. I drew my car to a halt, as did those to my left and in front of me. No one sounded a horn, or edged forward, as the critter softly, slowly traversed the span of asphalt and slipped into a small stand of trees on the northern side. I released the breath that I had held in apprehension for the little guy, and eased my foot back to the gas pedal. The world resumed its rush hour haste.

This is not my first encounter with the dizzy overlap of nature with modernity. I am taken back to a morning when I drove across the mountains between Fayetteville, Arkansas and Newton County to make an appearance in a case in which I served as appointed counsel for the mentally retarded mother of a young boy whom she sought to save from her predator parents. I drove too fast, distracted by my resentment at being drawn from the life I aimed to make in the tamed hills of Arkansas' college town back to the life at which I had failed in the sleepy town of Jasper.

I made a long curve too fast, skittering close to the edge which dropped beyond sight into a wooded expanse of Ozark beauty. I righted the vehicle, easing over to the brake, letting my heart pound itself to quiet in my chest. When the trembling had subsided, I resumed my journey, shaking my head, glancing at the rise of hill to my left and the depths of green to my right. No roses to stop and smell here, I thought, and laughed a little, out loud, in the empty car.

My self-congratulatory chuckle explains why I let the speed accumulate and gave no thought to my own invincibility. Around the next corner, I slammed the car to a sudden stop, and looked, without comprehension, at the mass in the roadway. My heart lurched as a pair of eyes returned my gaze from the near end of the brown bear otherwise comfortable in the lane that I meant to traverse. She must have found warmth on the pavement, or perhaps, like an old cat, she favored a smooth surface for napping. She appeared to have settled into a dip in the highway just large enough for her body.

We sat, the bear and I, for some moments. I rolled down the window for reasons I no longer recall, perhaps because it just seemed the thing to do. I have always been taught to crack the window while traversing bridges, and the movement must be instinctual for me. The cool fall air wafted into the cabin of my vehicle. Eventually, I became aware of sounds. Birds high in the trees; a distant drone; and a sound that I realized, after a few moments, came from the bear.

She was yawning.

The gape of her mouth startled me. Seeing the slight swing of her paw and the sharp edge of her teeth heightened my fear. The bear spanned one entire lane of the two-lane highway, and because of the curve of the road, I could not move to the left without the potential of calamity from unseen oncoming traffic. The road dropped sharply from the narrow shoulder with no guard rail. I assessed my options. I could risk a head-on collision, wait for the bear to move, or sit, in the last event possibly risking sudden death from the slam of a car into the back of my vehicle. Hobson only offered two choices, I reminded myself. But wasn't one of them arguably good?

The bear resolved my dilemma. For reasons of her own, at which I can only feebly guess, she rose, slowly, onto her back legs. Glancing at me with deliberation, she gazed behind her, into the descending depths of the wooded hillside. She considered her options: climbing up, or edging down. Without regard to my existence, she choose the latter. She swung her heavy body around, giving me a brief, awesome glimpse of her height, then heaved herself with something close to grace, and vanished, among the lower branches of the evergreens.

I did not move for a few long moments. I made the curve at a slow speed, and never reached the allowed limit for the rest of the trip. I fulfilled the day's obligation, and retook the road near dusk. I do not believe I drew a full breath until I pulled into my own parking space, on a small, tamed hillside in Fayetteville, where my old calico cat watched for me from one of the many windows of my house on Skyline Drive.

Tony Bennett sings on the radio. I stop to listen. From the interviewer's questions, I gather that Mr. Bennett has a new release. He speaks sentimentally of the past in a craggy voice, and the radio man lets him tell his stories. My coffee grows cold as I linger here, at my wobbly old writing desk, in Kansas City, where the only vestiges of nature are the likes of a small brown fox in the roadway, the occasional deer glimpsed at the edges of a city park, and the sad-eyed animals caged in our zoo.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 22 October 2011

2011-10-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

A helicopter hovered over my bedroom last night. The phone rang; a friend with a police radio advised that a robber had bailed from a moving vehicle two blocks from my house during a police chase. A dozen uniformed officers and numerous patrol cars had created a perimeter surrounding our block. Take cover, he said. Make sure your doors are locked.

My husband and I rose from near-sleep to call our youngest boy and ascertain his whereabouts. Near home, he advised. His father strode out onto the porch to stand watch, just yards from a searching officer, in tense darkness. By the time all settled around me, and the morning agenda had been planned, I could no longer sleep.

I am privileged to live without fear most of the time. I know that many cannot say as much. Around the world, children lie on thin pallets inches from their siblings and parents, the stench of poverty settling on their hungry bodies. I believe that countries still exist in which threat of reprisal inhibits the exercise of what I consider entitled speech. Travesties and terror exist. But they do not dwell in my home.

The sound of Morning Edition murmurs behind me. A grey sky rises over the neighbor's roof line, the color of putty, the color of their satellite dish. I live in mundane oblivion and complacency, bothered by nothing more aggravating than the occasional peak in an otherwise flat line of crime. I read the headlines and make a funny sound with my mouth that suggests arrogance. I do not think, there, but for the Grace of God, go I. Rather, I reject the notion that any of these sad stories could ever carry my name.

With my SmartPhone, I track the progress of my son's Fall Break odyssey. From West Virginia, where he saw mountains devastated by coal-mining; to Asheville, where he briefly rested among the majestic slopes of enduring hills; to Nashville, on a quest for music and good food. He sends me periodic messages to mark his journey, as we agreed. My motivation for our arrangement is to be assured that nothing has befallen him. He has a more basic desire: To keep his mother's calls at bay. I can't miss you if you won't stop calling me, he quips, with only half a laugh.

I cannot help but draw parallels from his youth to mine. I left home at 18 and returned only briefly, for a handful of months, a half a decade later. I called my mother one day to let her know that I was going to be home late. If you aren't home by 5, she snapped, don't bother coming home at all. I never did. A friend drove me out to the county to get my clothing; we were denied access by my father, and I started from scratch. Eventually, Mother relented and invited me to dinner. We spoke in colder tones than I had known possible. She told me that on the day of our break, she and my father had purchased an air conditioning unit for my bedroom. I gazed at her as she talked, unable to formulate a response. I could only shrug. I was glad to be out. With the clouded sight of youth, I evaded her questions but greedily snatched her Tupperware of leftovers, hauling it back to my temporary berth in the offices of a youth group of which I was a member.

The social worker who ran the group encouraged my rebellion. I won't name him: he still lives, as far as I know, with his wife in a western suburb of St. Louis. But at the time, probably estranged from his family, he had taken refuge in the same large, drafty apartment as I. I did not speak to him of myself. I listened to his stories and found them fascinating; eyed his lanky frame in jeans and work shirts, bending over an acoustic guitar, and thought him glamorous. I close my eyes and wonder what he could have been thinking, letting a young woman squat in an unfurnished bedroom at the back of an office rented with tax free dollars. I don't know, even now, if he thought about it at all. Perhaps he was just being kind.

I spent the next semester in a borrowed dormitory room courtesy of my employer, the Financial Aids Office. By June I had decamped to a sublet, and in the fall, I started my second year of college as one of three young women in a rented townhouse east of campus living with furniture bought at Vet's Village, walking to and from class, existing on precious little more than air-popped corn.

I spoke yesterday with my former receptionist, who has gone back to school. I inquired after her progress. It's okay, she said. I waited. She continued, I mean, it's school, it's not supposed to be fun, right? I laughed. Now she tells me. My ignorance of that concept might explain my stunning lack of progress in my middle years. I had too much of what passed for fun while I attended college. I never took anything seriously, not my studies, not my friends, not the haunted look of a boy that my cousin and I passed back and forth between us like a toy, who died too young of the cancer that plagued him at the time, the cancer of which he never once spoke to either of us.

As our youngest child searches for a good fit for his own post-secondary studies, I think about my miserable existence in that time of my life. I would have said I was happy; I thought I was smart. We drank in the pub, drove too fast, and snuck people in and out of the gender-segregated dorms. We had no political beliefs. We had no drive. Our aimlessness sent us into a wide orbit, nearly directionless, from which I was a long time returning.

I shake the past from my shoulders, and glance around the room. There is dust to be banished, laundry to be done, and plants on the porch that have not been watered for days. Whatever my life has or has not been, this is what it has become. A middle-class existence, in a cute house, in an old neighborhood uncomfortably close to one from which crime occasionally intrudes on my existence. The great American novel will have to be written by someone else. I no longer expect to have a poem published in the New Yorker. But a couple of states south of here, my legacy sleeps in a Nashville hotel room. He writes better than I ever thought of writing, and in the spring, his first play will find voice in a playwright's festival. And I will become immortal, if only by virtue of his DNA and the fierceness of his writer's passion.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 15 October 2011

2011-10-15T07:20:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

The brisk chill of the morning air shares its stunning impact on my senses with the headlines of today's Kansas City Star. I heard the news on my car radio coming home from work yesterday, but it still causes a small lurch in the pit of my stomach: Kansas City Diocese Bishop Indicted. One small step for the victims of abuse by clergy -- one giant leap for humankind. Perhaps it remains to be seen in which direction the leap propels us, but I am inclined to think that we will move forward.

When the story first came to me yesterday by way of our local public radio, I almost had to pull my car to the side of the road. Holy catnip, I thought to myself. You go girl, I silently crowed to the Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney, Jean Peters-Baker. Later that evening, my husband and I debated the legitimacy of the mandatory reporting law, and the prudence of criminal remedies for noncompliance. He voiced opposition to both. I appreciate the dent in unreported child abuse made by the former, and feel that anyone who, in the course of their profession, learns of, but stands silent regarding, a specific act of child abuse, should be drawn and quartered. A misdemeanor indictment provides a small but thrilling start.

I do not know if Bishop Robert Finn has criminal culpability within the meaning of the statute under which Jackson County has charged him. The news regarding these events, which I have closely followed, suggests that he had knowledge of the allegations against a priest in his diocese, and that he did not make a report to state or local civil authorities. If the facts come into evidence as they have come into the press, he should be convicted. Whether the criminal charge should or should not be cognizable under our law might be fodder for deeper debate, but the duty to report exists as does the potential of criminal prosecution for the failure to do so. I leave it to better minds than mine to determine whether the statute should be repealed.

For myself, the move soothes wounds I thought had long since healed. More importantly, as a step in the fight against child abuse whether by clergy or otherwise, this criminal prosecution signals a public intolerance of the kind of thinking that perpetuates the shroud which once surrounded abuse victims. In early days of public debate about domestic violence, one of the more important works had this telling title: Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear. Indeed. And now, thirty years later, a gutsy prosecutor has hollered from the rooftops, and the neighbors around the world will hear: We will not tolerate abuse of our children, and we will not abide your silent absolution of the abuser.

I do not advocate a climate of victimhood for any person who suffers at the hands of another. I myself strive to shrug off the excuse of my violent childhood, just as I refuse to blame God or the Ages for the viral encephalitis that struck me in my tender years, and gave me these wobbly legs and this addled brain. But a child who has been abused needs two things to happen before that child can arise from the veil of victimhood to the dawn of rebirth: He needs the abuse to stop, and he needs the abuse to be acknowledged. Jean Peters-Baker has given us hope that society stands ready to facilitate both.

Sitting in my dining room, just a few feet from my kitchen, I see again the reddened face of an angry five-year-old foster child named Mikey who lived with my son and me for six difficult weeks along with Mikey's brother Jacob. Mikey had been savagely abused by his mother's flavor-of-the-week, both in the sense of being beaten and in the sense of being sexually tortured. He had not one -- not two -- but three recorded episodes of attempted suicide before the age of five, the last of which involved his opening a car door while traveling, unseatbelted, with his mother and his abuser on Interstate 70 and allowing himself to slip from the vehicle and tumble down the shoulder of the road. As the paramedics slid him onto a stretcher, he told one of them, I just wanted to die. Five years old. Five years old.

I had to request that Mikey and Jacob be removed from my home after Mikey pulled a knife from my kitchen drawer and charged at me screaming that he was going to kill me and then kill everyone. I had no training for dealing with the extreme behavior that this poor child exhibited on account of what had been done to him. I could not lie awake at night worrying that he would begin to perpetrate on his brother or my son. I could not endure the anguish that I felt each time I held him while he sobbed.

On one of Mikey's last days with us, he collapsed into my arms and whispered to me: I just want to be happy.

I have a friend who has made a career of serving foster children, along with her husband and their now-grown birth-children who have long supported her efforts. She has harbored the broken and the beaten, the bruised and the battered. She has sat calmly beside them while they told her, with equal quietude, about their father's friend, their mother's boyfriend, their uncle, and the things done to them in the night, or in the day, sometimes with their parent nearby and seemingly aware. She has taken their anguish into her five-foot frame and used it to toughen her resolve. She has endured knowledge of the brutality that sick minds can visit upon the weak and helpless. She has done more good in a single year than I have done in a lifetime, in the name of saving children from abuse.

I am not like my friend. I let my foster license lapse, ostensibly because of illness, then, when that illness no longer presented an impediment to service, because of a new marriage. A decade ago, those excuses seemed reasonable. Now, I recognize them as cowardice, though perhaps understandable.

But I have had my braver moments, and those have helped me to rise above adversity. As some might know, I made a claim against the Arch-Diocese of St.Louis arising out of things that I experienced in high school, and was one of the first to insist on both a written letter of apology from the priest in question, and a clause in the settlement agreement that allowed me to speak openly of the events including identifying the perpetrator. I have not felt the need to do so, but I can if I wish. And in a file, in a box, somewhere, is the letter that he wrote. He knows, and I know, and they know. It was enough for me. The priest in question knew that I came from a difficult family environment, and took advantage of me when I came to him for counsel. He deserved to be punished, and he was. It sufficed to trigger my healing.

But for others, public prosecution is needed. For the ones in charge of the abusers, open castigation might be necessary to stop their tolerance of the savagery of child abuse. Look: Child abuse does not exist only in the Catholic Church. But anyone who has unfettered access to children coupled with the kind of societal protection that we afford the clergy can take advantage of their captive audience and the aura of invincibility in which they matriculate. That recipe for disaster gave rise to the environment in which child after child has been subjected to the whims of abusers. This results in a special kind of insidiousness, because the victim has had trust in his abuser imprinted on his DNA.

So bravo, Jackson County. Bravo, Jean Peters-Baker. If Bishop Finn had reasonable suspicions of child abuse, as a mandatory reporter, he should have called the proper authorities and let the system work. If he did not follow the law, he deserves to do his penance. And I do not think five Our Father's and ten Hail Mary's will suffice. I want some quality time on his knees, and a whole lot of community service, and I do not want that obligation delegated to his underlings. Hand him a broom, and let him sweep the corridors of a home for troubled youth. Perhaps the sight of their accusing, haunted eyes will open his own.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 08 October 2011

2011-10-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

Our wind chimes softly sing above the distant, intrusive roar of Saturday traffic on Troost Blvd., the large, symbolic dividing line that runs north and south less than a quarter mile to my east. The breeze which caresses the chimes also stirs the fronds of mimosa, wafting their mild lingering scent across my deck. I think that I can detect the fragrance of hot asphalt from our new driveway, but I am probably mistaken. I've never had a keen sense of smell; but I am susceptible to suggestion, and I let the pungent odor claim the backnote in my morning survey of our space.

I worked at a fevered pitch this week, and the quiet of this uncluttered morning embraces me, easing my tension. I cannot overplay the pleasure that I take in these mornings on my porch, nor the reluctance with which I greet the approach of winter's chill. I am an autumn woman. I like the warm colors of fall, and the light jackets and woolly sweaters that suffice this time of year. I do not manage well in heavy coats, boots, and mufflers. I resent December.

When I raise my eyes to follow the line of the neighbor's sugar maple that stretches its crimson leaves high into the vivid blue sky, I could be seeing any tree in any town where I have lived. In Arkansas, the fall came later than it does in Missouri, but it burst upon our world with just as much panache. I sat on a screen porch in Jasper and listened to the rush of the Buffalo River as it flowed past the town, and the rustle of October winds in the tall trees of Newton County. I nestled in a metal lawn chair on my mother's porch in Jennings, closing my eyes, inhaling the clean scent of a fire burning leaves somewhere nearby, no doubt in the confines of a steel trash can, overlooked by a watchful husband.

I have never lived in a seasonless climate. I imagine that the passing months would resemble one another too closely for my liking. I do not see the sense of entering the year's fourth quarter without the gentle falling rain, the leaves swirling on the sidewalk, the changing colors. I've heard people make a case for year-round education by dismissing society's ties to an agrarian calendar as meaningless in our technological age. I raise my eyebrows and make no comment. Three rowdy months of summer followed by a sensible change of temperature and freshly sharpened pencils -- what could be more natural?

I feel a quickening of earnestness in everything around me. My clients push to have their cases tried before the end of the year, presumably to gain some tax advantage. We got the driveway done so the asphalt would set before the first frost, and as soon as we can drive on it, the tree guy is coming to take out the old cedar, lest it fall on our house with December's ice and snow. Fall break at our children's schools approaches, and we have already begun to ruminate on the location of our Thanksgiving gathering. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Stack the firewood and bring the snow shovel out of its cobweb-infested corner. Autumn surrounds us; winter cannot be far behind.

I have only to close my eyes to envision myself in a blue serge uniform and white shirt with Peter Pan collar, trudging through the piles of crunchy leaves. I had a plaid satchel that I wore slung across my body. It clunked against my hip as I walked, and bunched my navy blue cardigan, but I liked the feel of its weight. The mile between home and school, traversed slowly in the chilly autumn air, afforded me time to dream. I composed my first poems in my head, and struck silent bargains with the saints. On the way to school, I beseeched my guardian angel to keep the big boys from teasing me; on the way home, I pleaded with St. Anthony to keep my Daddy from yelling at my mom. My brothers ran ahead, dragging a long stick along the ground, swinging their books and hollering at me to walk faster. I did not care. I knew they would not leave me.

As this year draws to a close, I will grumble my customary lament. I don't like to drive in coats. I fall on the ice. The cats will want to stay inside at night, and my husband will sneeze more loudly and cast baleful glances in their direction. But for now we can leave our windows open even at night, and the sweet winds of autumn waft through the house as I go about my morning chores. Other people clean their homes with increased vigor in the spring; I prefer the ritual of autumn cleaning. Once the cold of winter settles around me, my joints will swell and I will inevitably catch a wicked cold. We will all feel better if the house sparkles and shines before the winter falls around us. I will banish the germs, sweep away the collected debris of summer, and wipe down the cupboards. Then, when the seasons turn again, we can all hibernate in comfort.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 01 October 2011

2011-10-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

In the silence of the sleeping house my mind has no choice but to reflect. My week bore marked lows. I met with a former client to discuss a new matter, and experienced the shock of seeing a once-robust man tamed by approaching blindness. I stood on the sidewalk in front of my office and felt the rising rage within me, held back by dint of age, as a vendor for a neighboring business refused yet again to refrain from parking in designated handicapped spaces. I suffered a small, aching sadness tinged with guilt at news of my aunt's passing. I battled frustration at my own growing realization that perhaps I have outlived the natural usefulness of my scarred body.

Last night I stood in a tent filled with celebrating lawyers, friends of lawyers, and spouses of lawyers at the American Royal BBQ. My husband and I had tickets courtesy of my neighbor's firm. I leaned against my husband and let the cool of our last September evening flow over me. I cannot believe the year is three-quarters past, and yet, the mornings foreshadow winter. Soon we shall see a thin layer of frost where dew once bravely sparkled. I closed my eyes and thought about family -- my family, my clients' families, the families of those around me.

My primary contact with my son these days consists of words exchanged in the virtual realm. Oh, we spoke by phone last weekend, I hanging on every word and tone; he distracted by passing students on the porch of his fraternity house in the late Indiana evening. But mostly, I learn about his doings in fractured sentences into which I am hard-pressed to read his mood with anything near accuracy. I think about a recent comment made by a family court judge in discussing the parenting plan that he intended to adopt: Each parent should be able to contact the child by phone or text. . . isn't that how we reach our children these days? I protested then, and I protest now: If we limit our guidance to the number of words allowed by our cellular carriers, what cost to this generation?

And yet, I wonder if I had more or less contact with my parents in my third year of college. I strain to recall. Sunday dinner once or twice a month; I might have borrowed my mother's car on occasion, prompting the need to deliver a censored report of my comings and goings. My husband swears he saw his parents only twice each year during college: Thanksgiving and Christmas. Perhaps, perhaps, I acknowledge, but the question remains: are we the better for it?

I only have to close my eyes to find myself back on my great-grandmother's porch, at age three or four. My great-grandfather, Dad Ulz, whittles as he perches on the step beside me. The autumn night sings around us, and the low, pleasant murmur of the women and children in the house cascades over my tiny frame. I lean against my great-grandfather's strong legs, and think my childish thoughts, the content of which has been lost in the intervening five decades. The warmth of his body seeps into my deliciously chilly legs. The occasional flash of the last lightning bugs of autumn thrills me, and the heady smell of freshly mown grass envelopes us both.

I have a picture, somewhere, in a box in the attic, of my great-grandmother feeding chickens. She stands in a plain stretch of yard, wearing a flowered dress and a white apron. Though the picture has no color, I know her hair is red and the dirt beneath her feet is black. She raised her eyes just at the moment that the anonymous photographer captured her, and did not smile. I have run my finger across the square of paper and wondered where in me her genes dwell.

In another photograph, my mother leans on a railing and points to a distant, unseen spectacle. I stand to her right and slightly above her, my long hair cascading in waves, hers done up in curlers. I no longer recall who captured this funny tableau, or why. I remember the smoothness of boards on my bare feet and the sharp snap of the autumn air. The porch adorns the Bissell House in north St. Louis County, and the occasion must have been a Sunday afternoon outing to view their waning, delicate gardens before the first frost.

On a sill in my breakfast nook stands a photograph of my son, age three, in a rocking chair flanked by two neighbor children. His earnest face meets the camera's eye. I keenly remember the day, and my photographer boyfriend who captured the scene. I stood behind him, gazing on my son's countenance, seeing in it the curve of his father's mouth, my father's button Irish nose, the shape of my mother's brow.

I saw a photograph of my son on Facebook this week, his arm around a beautiful young woman. The sudden shock of beholding his tall frame, the shadow of his beard, his broad shoulders in a suit jacket, rendered me breathless. I think about the narrowing of his generation from my great-grandmother's brood: thirteen children down to one. He's all that's left of me now. Is it any wonder that I am discontented with the brevity of our contact? Is it so wrong to wish that I had one more chance to get this right, one more autumn night to sit on a porch step and listen to the crickets sing?

But the nights have all been savored or squandered. Whatever I was going to give him, I have given. Whatever he will make of it, is his to be made. Whether our children have enough or too little, they take their little kerchief-clad bundles upon their crooked sticks, and march down the road set in front of them. We are left to our rocking chairs, to the smooth remembered feel of cold boards on our bare feet, earnest faces turned towards the weighty lined countenances of their elders, and the wild flash of the season's last lightning bugs captured in a Mason jar.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Midweek Musings

2011-09-27T18:36:00.001-07:00

Good evening,

The news last night of the passing of my father's last surviving sibling caused me to feel a bit guilty. I had not seen my aunt Irene for six or seven years, and I don't recall speaking to her in that time. I toyed with the idea of going to the funeral, but the arrangements coincide with some client responsibilities that I do not think can wait.

I sat over coffee after court this morning, in a funny little restaurant that I did not previously know existed. My stopping there occurred entirely by chance. I had spent 45 minutes looking for the Liberty Department of Revenue License office, only to learn that my Property Tax Receipt had an error that prevented me from renewing my plates. Disgruntled, hungry, caffeine-deprived, I tried to make my way to the Starbucks on Route 152 but went the wrong way. Instead, I found myself west of the highway, gazing at my choices: one to the right, one to the left. I have no idea why I picked the latter, but there I was, with a bad cup of coffee, a soggy biscuit, and a runny egg.

I called my office and let my receptionist know that she could refrain from canceling my Thursday appointments, and scrolled through my e-mail messages. I pushed the egg around my plate and stared into the cooling coffee. After a few minutes of pretending to eat, I heard a voice on my right ask if everything was okay, and looked up, expecting to see my waitress.

Instead, a man hovered over me. I felt my brow tighten, wondering what he wanted, as I assured him that I was fine, all was well, I did not need anything. He smiled. "You probably don't remember me," he said. "You helped me out in a little matter over in Clay County about ten years ago, and I've never forgotten you."

I glanced at his name tag, but it bore only his first name which afforded me no clue to trigger the lost memory. I studied his face, but could not remember him or his case. He told me his surname, and that he has never missed a weekend with his child. "You were really great back then," he told me. "I appreciated everything you did for me. I've been on the straight ever since. A lot has happened. I've grown. I take care of my kid, and it's wonderful." I smiled, and nodded, and strained to recall what I might have done to cause him to look at me with such dazzling gratitude, this tall young man who seemed strong, confident and calm. I thanked him for remembering me, told him that I was really glad things had gone well for him, and returned his smile.

I finished my breakfast, and left, standing just a bit taller, no longer worried about the lines at the tax office.

Later, I looked on Case.Net, and sure enough, I had done a paternity action for him in 2000. Since the docket items are not visible due to privacy laws covering paternity cases, I couldn't tell how contentious the matter had been. His file probably had been crammed in one of many document boxes lost in a storage room flood. I can't event browse its contents to refresh my recollection of his case. I don't suppose I will ever know.

But if you get breakfast in Liberty one day, and a kind young man with a radiant smile asks if he can help you, leave him a big tip. He's got a kid to support.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 24 September 2011

2011-09-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

Unfamiliar surroundings greeted my slitted, foggy eyes this morning. My beloved and I slipped south on old 69 yesterday, bound for the Coves on Grand Lake near Afton, Oklahoma. Our lunch stop led to the discovery of a dusty used bookstore in Fort Scott, Kansas, at which I chatted with a Dead Head whom I stopped just shy of calling aging, realizing that we come from the same generation. I found a mystery by a Swedish writer whom I have been wanting to try, whose books apparently defy procurement by our public library. We drove around the perimeter of the Fort, then headed south again, arriving at our friends' golf course residence just in time to see a small doe dart across the road near their home. I marveled, until an hour later, on our way to dinner, when I saw the entire herd and listened to stories of the annoyances they cause.

The overwhelming beauty of their home and its serene air eases the tension from between my shoulder blades. We watch the finches sneak from amidst the dense foliage to settle on the perches of one of the many feeders tended by the lady of the house. My eyes flutter closed, and I let the quiet conversation fade into a pleasant blur.

I irritated yet another hearing officer this past Thursday. Among the thorns that I pressed into her side was a slightly snotty comment that slipped from between my lips before my brain could engage. For that, I rose to the occasion and sent a faxed atonement, but for citing law, I make neither apology nor lament. To my raising of a statutory defense to the action that the agency sought to have endorsed, the hearing officer snapped that she had no time to read the law. When she offered the agency's file into evidence, an act that should have been undertaken by the agency representative, not the allegedly impartial 'tribunal' , and I objected as it had not been previously served on me or my client, she nearly came undone.

Ultimately, the hearing collapsed of its own weight, ostensibly to be re-set, but I have triggered agency action to end the farce and evidence that they might take the bait has already surfaced. The local agency representative called my client on Friday, asking if I had sent a request for termination of the matter. I have, indeed, in three-part harmony, with notary seal, authentication, and tersely cited supporting authority.

It was a good week for the Indians.

I'm wondering, as I sit with my Mac resting on the scarred surface of an old French butcher table, how many mornings I have sat in other people's kitchens. From Murray Valley in Newton County, Arkansas, to the gentle slops of Epworth Heights in Ludington, Michigan, I've perfected the art of house-guesting. As I write, bacon lends its wicked fragrance to the air of this kitchen, here amongst the grove of thriving plants and scabrous stone that surrounds our friends' home. My husband has taken yesterday's Wall Street journal to the deck, which looks out over a steep ravine, at the bottom of which, I believe, is the lake itself. I have no responsibilities. I am free to sip coffee made by someone else, and stretch my aching neck, and wonder if my son got his anthropology paper done by midnight, as required.

I squander the quiet morning wondering why pillows cradle my head more gently in other people's homes. As a traveler, I abandon concern for whether my clothing demonstrates my dislike of ironing. It came from a suitcase -- of course it has wrinkles. Never mind that they are permanent: when one is traveling, one need not iron.

I think about my pro bono client of Thursday's hearing. As we waited for the hearing officer, whose call came ten minutes late without comment, she told me about her children, who range in age from thirteen to twenty-nine. I felt my forehead tighten as I calculated. Either she had started very young, or wore her age better than I do, the latter of which seemed unlikely given her two years in prison. I'm forty-five, she offered, seeing my confusion.

I could not believe it. She looked thirty or slightly more to me, with her thin, short stature and her smooth complexion. I only did drugs for a couple of years, she assured me. I got caught, and they made me for a felony because my youngest child was in the car. Preconceived notions splintered on the tile around me. I slid my eyes along the notes that I had written. I realized that there must be more to her story, since her youngest two had been in the guardianship of her sister since 1998. Oh, that, she whispered, and slightly shook her head. It was a bad time. Bad. I didn't ask her to explain. I have seen enough of other people's pain to make me keenly aware that my own pales by comparison.

After the aborted hearing, I followed her outside the building. I had assembled a bag of clothing to take to our local DAV, and it had occurred to me that the things might fit her, and might be put to better use in her hands. She accepted them with quiet and unapologetic gratitude. I offered to take her home, rather than making her haul the bag of clothing on the bus. She declined. I think we both felt relieved when I accepted her decision, and said goodbye. I watched her walk up Pennsylvania, past the gaggle of men waiting for the evening soup kitchen to open its doors at the corner church.

I represent this woman pro bono. I took her case in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, not out of a sense of social obligation but because I've gossiped behind the back of the old acquaintance who asked me to do so. I feel guilty about my cattiness, despite the fact that every word I spoke was the absolute truth. Over the last few months, as I met the various deadlines of this proceeding for which I am receiving no monetary compensation, I have lamented both my snotty comments about my old acquaintance, and the punishment that I let the universe mete out. But on Thursday, watching the unintended third party beneficiary of my self-inflicted penance resolutely trudge towards the first of two buses that would take her home, I had no regrets.

Breakfast begins to appear and its fragrance beckons. I leave my reverie about the events of the week, and turn my attention to a pair of perfectly cooked eggs, a jar of Michigan jelly, a toasted English muffin, and three smiling, robe-clad companions.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 17 September 2011

2011-09-17T05:42:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

I felt a sharp bite of fall air on my skin as I reached down to get the newspaper from the porch. The white cat slipped passed me into the house, casting a brief, indignant glance in my direction. I am to be blamed, I suppose, for getting married late in life to a man whose cat allergy necessitates her nocturnal banishment in all but the most inclement weather. Her indignation does not deceive me; I know she shares my love of the beautiful porch, and sleeps quite comfortably on the orange cushions of the metal furniture on our gorgeous new deck.

I spent the week in trial. Ten hour days, missed meals, a tension headache that defies all efforts to soothe. I found a new aching spot each time I shifted in my seat at court yesterday. Years of practice enabled me to keep the plasticine smile in place. Towards the middle of the afternoon, I nearly lost my composure listening to my client's ex-wife testify that she routinely spent $600.00 per month at the beauty salon. Appearing pro se to try to induce the court to increase my client's maintenance of her from $600.00 per month to some unspecified number north of there, this woman, who receives maintenance, disability, and works part-time, screeched at the judge that she thought the fact that she drives a Mercedes to be not relevant, not relevant, not relevant. The judge overruled her objection, and, with a rare show of impatience, told her, I think the fact that you drive a Mercedes-Benz is very relevant to the issues before the Court. Indeed.

As I cross-examined her -- bearing in mind that she fell into the "crazy like a fox" category -- I trod with careful feet on the issue of the beauty salon. I did not wish to suggest any racially motivated criticism to the woman, who sat in the witness box with what I mistakenly took to be long extensions. She corrected me, explaining that she has a weave. A weave, I repeated. I have to admit that I was not even sure what that meant. She placed a delicate hand on the side of her head, caressing the locks. I have to maintain my looks, she fussed. I'm very grey. If I don't get a color and a weave every month, it really looks bad.

My client is not wealthy. He has made his way up the pay scale at the Postal Service, and has a comfortable salary. But he took custody of their daughter at the time of the original divorce, and that daughter is now in college. He also took the home, the mortgage, all of the credit card debt, and the loan against his Thrift Savings Plan. During their marriage, she worked part-time, did volunteer work, and hung out with her girl friends -- which I know from her own testimony at the divorce trial. She also, to be fair, spiraled into periods of depression, and I think it is also fair to say that the records did support her disability claim. She's fairly taxed with only part-time work ability, based upon those records, and my client could not afford to have me investigate her current mental state. But I also know that the land-line she used for court proceedings from her home in Phoenix is listed in a man's name at the same address, and if I had unlimited funds, I am sure my investigator would bring me information that she avoids the trigger of termination of alimony by re-marriage in name only.

As I drove from court, muttering to myself to help me recall the details that I intend to put in my proposed judgment, my mind drifted to a time, decades before now, when I volunteered at a program that prepared adults to take their G.E.D. testing. At fifteen, with idealism in my heart, I found validation in the person of my first student, a working single mother in her thirties named Janet LeSeur. Each week, we bent over the training documents, she and I, my long brown hair falling forward, hers cropped tight against her skull in the way of serious black women of the day. We hammered at the materials, week upon week. I rode to the center with a carload of girls from my parish and the parish north of mine. She came by city bus. She never missed a week. Had I been tempted to skip a night, her diligence would have shamed me, and so I did not.

At the end of the school year, my participation in the program also ended. I spent the summer working, and in the fall, our project had changed its focus. We were now helping children at a center downtown. I did not see Janet again.

One evening that winter, the phone rang in our home. My father answered and I saw him standing, puzzled, beside the wall phone. Finally, he rested the receiver on the top of the phone and said to me, Do you know a woman named Janet LeSeur, as though it seemed inconceivable that his fifteen-year-old daughter might have such an acquaintance. I do, I assured him. I took up the phone, and listened to her excited voice. I can't believe I found you! she told me. I called every "Corley" in the phone book, asking if you lived there! She told me that our having a city exchange tricked her into thinking it couldn't be right, so she tried our number last. I thought you lived in Jennings, she said, and I explained that I did, but that years before, we had gotten a city exchange for reasons that I no longer remember.

At any rate, I found you, she said. And the reason I'm calling is to tell you that I got my G.E.D.!! I couldn't have done it without your help. In fact, I would have quit that program after a couple of weeks except that I couldn't stand the thought of disappointing you. If you hadn't been there, week after week, I would have stopped coming.

Other than having served as bolster for each other's best intentions, Janet LeSeur and I had nothing in common. We talked for a few minutes, and then said our goodbyes, and I have not seen or thought of her in forty years.

But during a break in yesterday's proceedings, the judge asked me to try to reach an agreement with my client's ex-wife, and so, I stood, talking to her, and in the course of that conversation she asked me, Why should I have to support myself when I was married to him for nineteen years? Suddenly, the face of Janet LeSeur popped into my mind, and I saw again the concentration on her smooth brown face, the focus which imprinted itself on the fatigue beneath it, and I heard again the triumph in her voice when she called to tell me that she had attained the first goal on her path to success.

Last evening, my husband, our youngest son Mac, and I went to dinner. The two of them let me babble about my day. After I had amused them with a high-pitched account of the hair salon testimony, Mac asked me why a woman would be entitled to get money from her husband after they were divorced. I tried to explain the history of alimony, the variance in standards for the grant of it as our society evolved, and the philosophy behind its award. My explanation sounded bogus even to me. And then there is the case of Janet LeSeur, a woman determined to be accomplished and independent, making her way one step at a time towards collecting the arsenal needed to attain her victory. In the final analysis, I cannot defend the system, and after a few minutes, I stopped trying.

Someone asked me a long time ago why I prefer to represent men. Although not all of my clients are husbands and fathers, many of them are. I formulated my response then, and have given it often. Most women ask me two questions: Can I make the bastard suffer, and How much money can I get? Most men, on the other hand, ask me two different questions: How much time can I get with my kids, and Can I make this as painless as possible for everybody?

Picking my clients by the measure of which set of questions they ask is easy. I do not discriminate by race, gender, religion, or political persuasion. I have my own litmus test.

It's 7:30 and the house has not yet stirred. On the other hand, the dog has fallen back to sleep and the white cat has stopped yowling. I think I will take a fresh cup of coffee out onto the porch, and have my morning session of yelling at the newspaper. Life has many simple pleasures, and that's one of mine.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 10 September 2011

2011-09-10T06:28:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

Darkness clings to the room around me, and to the world outside my window. I have awakened earlier than I needed to be awake, but I knew, when I fell asleep a few hours ago, that an unidentifiable longing restrained me from the relaxation that I craved, pulling me into a watchful unease.

Four of us drove from Kansas City to Branson yesterday, to attend a planning committee meeting for next year’s Solo and Small Firm Conference. I settled into the back seat beside my neighbor, our husbands occupying driver’s seat and shotgun. Thirty miles east of home, my cell phone rang. Glancing at the face, I saw my sister Joyce’s name. Odd, I told myself, and answered with the inevitable question: What’s wrong.

She told me that our brother Kevin had had a stroke.

None of us can claim to be young. Kevin just turned sixty – a fact that I ascertained by adding four years to the milestone that I myself have recently attained. Heart attacks, arthritis and strokes appear in our family medical history on both sides, so we expect such maladies to plague in our generation. But I am not ready.

I leaned against the seat, listening to the details, sharing them with those around me, calling my brother’s lady to hear more – and all the while thinking, Not yet, not yet, not yet. I am not ready to lose another brother.

The room around me fades to a darkened bedroom in Boston, thirty-four years ago, and the gentle sounds of the hotel air conditioning yield to the timorous voice of my twenty-two-year-old-self reaching out to my mother across the miles between Massachusetts and Missouri. Moving here was a mistake, I told her. I want to come home.

Less than a day later, my brother Kevin arrived on South Street, outside the door of Number 27, in my mother’s car. He rapped upon our apartment door, and gruffly greeted me, asking if I had gotten everything packed. I gestured to a couple of suitcases and a few boxes of books, more than I had carried with me on the plane eight months before, less than he had expected me to have accumulated. Easy as pie, he said, and hauled the lot downstairs in one trip.

I took him out to dinner before we left, to the No Name Restaurant on Pier One. He cheerfully consumed a huge plate of clams, fried golden, and downed a steaming cup of coffee. You’ve got to order it black, I cautioned, or it will come with milk in it. “Coffee, regular” meant thick and white, with whole milk. He marveled at such folly as polluting one’s coffee,and lit a cigarette, sitting at the counter, lean and wiry, quick eyes taking in the noisy surroundings. I guess we better get, he finally told me.

He drove the entire way. We pulled into a truck stop for a few hours, parking between two semis and across from a highway patrol car. By the beam of the dome light, I could see the napping trooper, his head nodding over a clipboard. We cracked our windows to let the cool autumn air whisk away the smoke from my brother’s cigarettes. I slumped against the window, feeling like a failure, worrying about my boss’s reaction to the cowardly message I had left on her answering machine. I can’t do this, I can’t switch to working nights like you want me to do, I can’t find a new apartment when my roommates move, I can’t live here. Thanks for everything.

I shared the apartment of two actresses in Brighton, near Boston College from which each had recently graduated. When word of our building “going condo” had come to us by way of a printed notice slipped under our door, the two of them got a house together in which, I was told without ceremony, there would not be room for me. We advertised for a roommate, not a sister, the dark-haired Marian bluntly informed me while blond Melanie stood beside her, expressionless, unyielding. My face froze in a glittering smile. I had thought we were friends. They had shared their social outings, invited me to cast parties, introduced me to men. I shuddered at the realization that I had been a bother to them.

My brother Kevin drove the whole way back to St. Louis. As we descended into the river valley east of downtown, I squinted into the strong rays of the rising sun. The place looked foreign, like the set of a movie, or an illustration of a science fiction novel. Home. He exited to take the I-70 loop into North County, and I began to worry about the look on my mother’s face, the disappointment in her eyes, the condemning shake of my father’s graying head.

None of that came to pass.

Kevin pulled my shabby belongings from the trunk of Mother’s car, and urged me down the steps into her waiting arms. Welcome home! My mother held me for a few moments, as my brother pushed the front door wider to accommodate his burden. I followed him into the living room, where my father sat in his recliner, sparing me only a brief glance that told me nothing of what he might be thinking. I brought your baby girl, my brother told him, and my father replied with a sound that told me nothing.

Later, after my brother had slept for eight straight hours on a bed in the sunroom, we all sat down to a dinner of salad and egg rolls. We traded only pleasantries, as though I had not been gone for more than half a year. Then, with a couple of hugs and a few gruff words of encouragement, my brother went back to his own apartment, leaving me to figure out how I would get my life back on track, feeling numb, my only clear thought a sort of grand relief that he had rescued me.

In the next few years, my brother Kevin made several other forages into the world to fetch other siblings. It became a kind of family joke in those days, at least between my mother and me, that Kevin’s job in the family was that of a St. Bernard, finding brothers and sisters who had gotten too far from the warmth and light of home. But I was the first to be saved, and I remain convinced, all these years later, that I would have spun out of control and fallen off the earth, if he had not tethered me and hauled me back into breathable air.

He lies now in a hospital bed in Washington, Missouri. I have talked at length to his lady and exchanged cell phone numbers with her. I have arranged berth with friends who live nearby, and transportation to the area should I need to get there swiftly, before Sunday, before another crisis. I have done all I can. But I am prepared to do more, for my debt to him is great, and my love for him has never been more clear to me.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

RIP Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley, 09/10/22 – 08/21/85
Happy Birthday Hot Lips Mama!!

Saturday Musings, 03 September 2011

2011-09-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

From a chair on my new deck, I see the blooms of my cultivated mimosa swaying against my neighbor's kitchen window. The growth of this little tree has been stunted by the lingering presence of the aging cedar which shades the back of our house. My mimosa started three years ago as a volunteer, which I watered, protected and nourished. Now it huddles, misshapen but eager, under the spindly, sprawling branches of the evergreen. I am not sure if one could be taken down without damaging the other, so we do nothing, pondering a replacement for both, as summer fades into fall.

My week brutalized me, save for a quiet evening with friends last night, with bounty spread upon their table and delightful, lively conversation. I spent the week roaring from court to court handling other people's problems. I missed a hearing that my usually diligent assistant had forgotten to docket, though I pulled that one out of the ringer thanks to a gracious court clerk. I yelled in outrage at a hearing officer who had called my client directly and held an on-the-record proceeding without me, despite the superseding entry of a judicial order rendering the issue moot, despite her agency's having previously told me that the hearing would not take place. I am not particularly proud of the manifestation of my fury, but I think it was understandable.

By midnight at week's end, my neurological system rebelled. The nerve running through my artificial knee knotted and spasmed until just before dawn, when I finally calmed it with repeated applications of balm and the ingestion of Vicodin. The human body recoils from a relentless onslaught of stress.

But this morning, the crickets sing to me, and the white cat has her morning bath on the decking beside my chair. I roll my shoulders and close my eyes, leaning back, feeling the cool air on my tired face. My own two divorces afforded me significantly less grief than the partings of the scores of strangers to whom I strive to give my staunchest defense. I carry their burdens between my shoulders, diagonally along nerves long encrusted with the shingles virus.

As I left the Platte County courthouse Thursday afternoon, tucking a file under my arm and rummaging in my bag for keys, the guard bade me a good afternoon and I stopped, considering the potential. He smiled, and I am certain he must have sensed my pessimism. Or have the best afternoon you can, he conceded. We shared a laugh, and I exited on his line.

Now I am scanning the neglected posts in my list-serve, contemplating whether solo practitioners should or can take vacations, whether the Democrats or the Republicans ruined our economy, whether I know any lawyers in any of the counties in which my colleagues wish to make referrals. I listen to the occasional honk of a distant, impatient driver, and the backnotes of songbirds, who seem oblivious to the demands of traffic. I find myself turning my head sharply, thinking I hear my mother's voice, my father's cough, my brother's Hey, Mare Bear. It is only the yowling of the cat and the drone of a small plane overhead.

As I exited my house yesterday to go to meet my suite mate for coffee, a mother walked down the sidewalk with her two children. The youngest sat, alert, in a stroller, while beside him, a small golden girl in a navy blue uniform tread carefully over the cracks in the old cement. She held a cup of juice. Off to kindergarten? I asked, thinking she might be going to the Catholic grade school that sits three blocks south of here. I'm only THREE, she announced, amused, as three-year-olds will be, at my mistaking her for a worldly five-year old. And I'm going to BORDER STAR!

Border Star is a charter school located about a mile west of my house. It used to be a public elementary school, but has evolved to survive. I was surprised that such a small child would be walking so far, and said as much to her mother. The woman raised an eyebrow as she trundled past, remarking only, Walking is good for you. I watched them for a few seconds, then got into my car. Later that day, when I returned, in my car, from work, I happened to see the same little girl sitting on her father's shoulders as he strode down my street, going home. The child still looked splendid in her tiny blue uniform, small white blouse and shiny Mary Janes. She still clutched her juice cup, smiling her radiant smile at the end of her glorious day in pre-school. I could not suppress my envy.

I like to think that I can remember such happy occurrences from my own childhood, but I cannot. The only time I walked home from school with my father was on a grim day in the 4th grade when I got suspended for slapping my teacher. She had jabbed my cheek with a ballpoint pen and made a check on my skin to punish me for poor penmanship, snarling that the red of the ink would match what she described as my horrible freckles. I backhanded her without hesitation. My father, the nonworking parent, had been summoned to fetch me.

I couldn't tell you why he didn't have a car that year, but he walked to my school and together we walked home. I would have hit her harder than you did, he admitted to me. But it probably wasn't the most clever response. When we got home, he made lunch for me, and a hot fudge sundae. The teacher, who visited such imprudent discipline on other students and had an annoying habit of sitting on boys' desk with her skirt hiked up above the edge of her stockings, did not return to school after Christmas break. We heard she got fired. The incident did not go on my permanent record.

I remember that sundae melting in the plastic dish in which my father served it to me. I swirled the sauce into the cream, and slurped its sweet stickiness. My father made himself a cup of coffee, and we sat in the breakfast room, the smoke from his cigarette drifting to the circular fluorescent fixture. I was nine years old. I got glasses that year, and heavy, ugly orthopedic shoes. In response to these indignities, I made my mother let me get my hair cut for the first time, which I later regretted. But on a cool fall day, my father spoke sharply to a small, ugly nun in full habit, and, in my defense, told a fuming lay teacher that she had no business being responsible for impressionable children. I stood beside him, trying to look repentant, thinking only that I could not recall another time when I had been proud to be my father's daughter.

I hear the slamming of car doors, and the quick roar of a lawn mower. Later today, the dead lawn in my backyard will be patiently Verti-cut by my persistent, persnickety husband. The seed of some desirable grass will be sown, and the dry earth will be watered. In the meantime, I think I hear a book calling me from the Half-Price Bookstore, and I am quite certain that there are freshly roasted beans designed for my Americano at Dunn Brothers Coffee.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

RIP Richard Adrian Corley, 12/27/22 - 09/07/91

Saturday Musings, 27 August 2011

2011-08-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

Last evening, I stood in my driveway chatting with neighbors from across the way, the husband of the two being a man whose mother still occupies his boyhood home five doors north of me. They live in a house across the street that once belonged to his uncle. We traded pleasantries, and discussed the departure to an assisted living facility of another long-time block resident, who had been born and raised here, and on this very block. Johanna never married, never had children, and never left. She grew to old age seeing the world through the eyes of her nieces and nephews, and the children and grandchildren of her friends. Her family possessions were auctioned off while I vacationed in Michigan this past week.

My vacation lulled me into a hazy sense of well-being. I undertook no task more vigorous than washing dishes. I read four books by European crime fiction writers and one by an American. I walked on trails, both high and low, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan in the resort where my sister-in-law has a cottage that's been handed down through my husband's family for several generations. My son launched his new college year from Michigan, in a Blazer less loaded than in the previous two years, his dwindling requirements matching the predictions of his college's president at the convocation for Patrick's freshman class. I stood in the roadway as he left, and barely shed a tear. Life continues.

With the warm Michigan sun casting delicate rays on my face, I drowsed on the bench that faces the Lake on the beach near the cottage. I drifted in time, in place, with thoughts of my childhood swimming to the near-conscious portions of my mind.

When I was four, my parents loaded us into whatever station wagon my father had at the time for a trip to my mother's parents' house. I can't name the make or model of the car. I remember its color, sort of a muddy grey-green, and the rope attached to the back of the front seat which we gripped when my father accelerated. He never went very fast. The inter-state highways had not yet been completed, and the state roadways that we took to Gillespie did not require much in the way of speed. With Mom holding the baby, my brother Frank, and the other six kids in the bench seats behind my parents, we made our way over the Chain of Rocks Bridge into Illinois and eventually, to Nana and Grandpa's home.

We arrived late in the evening. No one stirred in the house. Groggy, grumpy and grubby, we filed out of the car and up the wooden stairs of their front porch. The door was not locked -- in those days, the soft, casual days of the late 1950's, no one feared intruders; we did not even have a key to our house until well into the 1970's.

My mother scattered us with various tasks. The older siblings helped the little kids into pajamas, guided our hands on toothbrushes, and herded us down into the living room for night prayers. We knelt for the closing of the day in a darkened living room. At home, we would have faced the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in her alcove on the living room wall; at my grandparents' house, I think we faced a crucifix. We began the rosary. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. . .

Suddenly, a tall figure loomed in the doorway, and I felt a surge of panic in my chest. My father rose and moved with a rapidity of which I had not known him capable. I heard the harsh growling of male humanity, braced for catastrophe -- and then the room flooded with light.

My mother stood at the light switch, facing the front doorway. My grandfather, tall, broad and clothed in a green serge suit, holding a leather satchel, towered in the space near her, my father's hands clenched on Grandpa's wrist. Beyond this tableau, my small, blond grandmother hovered, confused, uncertain.

Relief coursed through my body and must have done its work in every one else, for my father stepped back and the set of my grandfather's shoulders eased. We didn't expect you until tomorrow, he said, with a mixture of reproach and relief. He shook my father's hand, and my mother stepped forward to embrace each of her parents in turn. We children rose from our knees and rushed forward, our nightly obligation abandoned. When each of us had received a kiss and a hair-tousle, and felt the warm caress of our Nana's hand on our newly-washed cheeks, we climbed the stairs to bed, while my mother settled onto the couch with my baby brother in her arms.

I don't remember if it was that trip or a later one in which my brother Mark and I got to stay longer than the rest of our family. We flanked our grandfather as the car pulled out of the driveway, early, on a Sunday morning, and then Grandpa handed a bucket to my brother and a basket of sandwiches to me. We followed his long, tireless stride down to the creek, and snuggled beside him as he fished, casting time and again over his head with a practiced ease more beautiful than a ballerina's twirl.

We ate the sandwiches that Nana had made as a late breakfast, under the shade of a tree, as the sun climbed towards the mid-day sky. We only caught one fish, with each of us wrapping our little mitts around the rod beside my grandfather's large, gentle brown hands so we could say we helped. Mark carried the bucket back to the house and hung it on the outside spigot, the fish swimming in creek water, my grandfather promising to clean it so we could cook it for dinner.

When we came outside later in the day, the fish was gone. The bucket swung a bit, as though it had just been moved. Must have wanted to go back to the river, my grandfather told us. He probably jumped out and wiggled his way down the yard, to the creek. Mighty strong fish you kids caught! We had chicken for dinner instead.

My sister-in-law and I drove home from Michigan last weekend, stopping in St. Louis to see my sister. As we drove west on 270, we passed the site where my father worked at a public pool, long ago, during the summer that I was nine. My brothers and I went to the pool on the weekends, and swam with many other kids in the crowded water while our parents sat on towels or webbed lounge chairs. Most of the other kids came from the city. Nobody I knew went to that pool. I can't remember what my father did there. But I vividly recall running on the wet, slick concrete on a hot Saturday in August, and slipping, tumbling into the deep end. A life guard pulled me out, and I lay, panting, spitting water, with the heavy smell of chlorine all around me.

The dust gathers under the dining room table, drifting in a haze of pet hair that I must eradicate. My husband and stepson have gone to play tennis in a charity tournament. I have a couple of weeks of laundry to do, and a whole slew of e-mail to read. Vacation is over. Fall approaches. The world keeps turning.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Midweek Musings: Mourning

2011-08-24T16:37:00.001-07:00

Good afternoon,

Before I take my tired body from Suite 100 to the Holmes house, I must briefly return from my Mugwumpish moratorium to share my thoughts about funerals.

I spent an hour and a half at the Zion Grove Missionary Baptist Church today, slipping away after the first choir number and before the eulogies. Although I only knew the deceased young man by sight, what I saw and experienced at his funeral moved me with such force, that I found myself unable to remain in the church.

A thousand or more, maybe two thousand, mourners filed into the church beginning shortly before the scheduled hour for the visitation. The young man whose life reached a tragic and heroic end had died as he had lived: protecting others. He had given shelter to children whose mother turned to Samir Clark for help, and as he sheltered them, their pursuer fired into the apartment where Samir had been visiting family, on whose door the children's mother had knocked. A bullet struck Samir, and he fell, dying within an hour or so thereafter.

Samir attended my son's high school. His brother Akeem was in Patrick's class, and Samir was in the class behind Patrick. Patrick and Samir had a close mutual friend, by virtue of whom they had contact. Patrick shared with me that Samir always showed the greatest of courtesy and respect for him; Samir treated him with kindness on occasions when others did not.

I learned, in the week since Samir's murder, that he attained Eagle Scout last year; that he participated in a mentoring program, that he helped out in the same food drives in which my son and I had been volunteers for Patrick's four years at University Academy of Learning Charter School, and also that he gave his time and energy to four separate churches as a volunteer, crossing into two different faiths to do community service. After a year of college in Iowa, he had been recruited by, and was transferring to, a university in Tennessee where he intended to continue his studies in biology and play football.

In short -- this life cut short so soon, had been a life well spent.

As I sat on the aisle of the church, watching his friends, teachers, Scout leaders and others collect, listening to the music, I tried to imagine how I would feel if Patrick had been killed in this manner -- or, indeed, in any manner. I cannot begin to reach those feelings, so deep would they run, so anguished would I be. I felt myself overcome with empathy for those who were closest to this boy, this young man. And as I sat, reflecting, I heard the soft voice of the pastor asking us to stand to receive the family.

I rose, with a thousand or more others.

Through the back door, near me, came a beautiful woman, held up on either side by young persons who looked so much like Samir that I knew they must be his siblings. The woman raised her eyes toward the front of the church, and stepped slowly. Her white suit, with its full-length skirt, fell in soft shimmers as she slowly traversed the aisle, and tears steadily streamed down her cheeks. Her boy, her beautiful boy, lay under a spray of blue and white flowers at the end of that long, terrible walk.

Violence cannot be justified. While this violence seems to have been personal -- directed at the woman who sought refuge in the apartment where Samir's killing took place -- nonetheless, violence rampages through our society. I am sickened by its brutal aftermath.

I could not stay for the entire ceremony, not because I had other commitments, but because I am weak: An abundance of sadness cripples me, and I retreat from it. Though I am reverent, and I do believe in the existence of a divine entity, nonetheless, I do not take the message of joy and salvation as one which affords us sufficient comfort to prevent our tears of sorrow at a life cut short too soon.

After I left the funeral, after lunch with my husband, after I returned to Suite 100, I chanced to exchange emails with a court clerk whom I know to be a woman of gentleness. I shared my experience with her in a brief summary of the events that I had witnessed, and she indicated that she had read about Samir's death. It makes you re-think your job as a parent, to want to cherish your children more, she wrote. And I agreed.

But it also makes me re-think my job as a love's after-math attorney. It reminds me of the difference between things of true importance, and things over which my clients should not bicker.

The lives we are privileged to bring into this world demand and deserve our strictest attention. I realize that we, as lawyers, are not responsible for our clients' decisions as to priorities during a custody fight. But we can draw a line, and we can ask our clients to consider if the points over which they instruct us to argue are really important, or if, instead, we could work with our opposing counsel and parties to structure a truly better future for our children.

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- we can whittle away at the malaise in society that spawns the fury which results in the loss of lives, such as that of Samir Clark. And until such time as the sickness of society abates, we should cherish the children of this world, and hold them close -- lest they be torn from us, as this precious child was torn from his mother's loving arms.

RIP Samir Ali Clark.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Mugwump Meandering to Michigan: Moratorium on Musings

2011-08-13T04:42:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

For the past couple of years, I have had the pleasure of being invited to Ludington, Michigan in late summer, to spend a week at the "cottage" -- a word which here means "a 3500 square foot house" -- of my now sister-in-law. This home has been in the MacLaughlin family for several generations. It is a lovely, inviting placed filled with comfortable chairs and smiling people, perched above Lake Michigan.

Last year we combined this visit with the return-to-college trip of my son. This year, Patrick is driving his vehicle to Michigan, and then taking his twenty-year-old self off to DePauw. Mom will try desperately not to cry as he pulls away from the cottage, five days hence.

For these reasons, I annually take a small break from musing -- or from Musing, since I never cease my internal conversations. I bid you good days, in these late days of summer. Prepare your children well for the start of school; visit your aging parents on your vacation days, lest you miss the last opportunity to sit in their gracious company. Rest on your porch, in a rocker, with a good book and a tall glass of something refreshing.

I will return, by and by.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 06 August 2011

2011-08-06T07:45:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

My neighbor has just tooled down our shared driveway, with a jaunty wave and a few minutes' conversation about a possible joint trip to the Planning Committee meeting in September. A stack of boards straddles her yard, delivered by Home Depot for her contractor husband to build a small deck on the side of our house, similar to one he built for them. Two boys stroll south on my street, their high voices drifting over to me, with the hint of daring of children every where, on the last true weekend of summer before area schools drop like dominoes into autumn.

Patches of brown span our front yard. Behind the house, what I had thought was grass dies under the onslaught of chemicals scattered by my husband. Apparently, the lawn that I enjoyed contained more undesirable vegetation than otherwise, and with September approaching, he plans to sow seeds for a lush spring crop of verdant growth. I look upon it all with a mixture of consternation and wonder. I have never minded what grew there of its own accord, and I shall probably not mind what grows there of his. It's all green.

The weekend hangs between a quiet week of intense work and a search for the perfect receptionist for my suite, and a scheduled trial in which two reasonably good parents will fight for principal residential custody of their thirteen-year-old triplet sons. Having raised one boy to age twenty, I think it likely that they each need some help from the other and I have put out overtures for some type of settlement, but I prepare for the worst while hoping that my feelers will take root in the remaining soil of the wasteland that their marriage has become.

In weeks like these, I wonder, time and time again, why I did not take the easy route. I could have, I suppose, married a neuro-surgeon, had 2.75 children, and lived in a swank suburban sprawling compound. I could have gone to lunch while my toddlers dabbled under the eyes of their nanny. Or I could have exited college into the waiting arms of the Peace Corps, and journeyed to points south, distant undeveloped lands where whatever skills I had as an unenlightened twenty-something might have been exploitable.

I have been asked, often, why I went to law school. I give various answers. My favorite quip involves having chosen law as a potential vocation in which I could write for a living. The truth is somewhat shabbier. I had been in graduate school, and my program lost its funding. The nine enrollees in the non-Masters-track Ph.D. program had received an invitation to finish our dissertations at another university, but at considerably higher and, for me, prohibitive cost. With student loans waiting to be paid if I halted my education, I did what I could do to delay repaying them: I applied to law school.

The state of Missouri, Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, kindly footed the bill. A friend from Kansas City, a Legal Aid Lawyer in the 70's who now graces the bench in Jackson County, encouraged me to investigate that potential. To do so, I made an appointment in the St. Louis City Voc Rehab office, which, if memory serves, occupied grungy space in an otherwise empty office building on Grand.

A receptionist showed me to the counselor's room. He sat behind a government issue putty-colored desk. He did not rise to greet me, which I found odd until he turned to take a binder from a shelf behind him, and I saw that he was sitting in a wheelchair.

I'm Dick Goodwin, he told me. And I'm feeling kind of embarrassed, I replied. He turned his head to one side, studying me quizzically. Why is that? he finally asked.

I gestured. Neither of us misunderstood my point. He drew a breath and nodded. Oh, the chair, he said, in a voice that meant, you idiot woman, Don't you think I know I'm in a wheelchair. He pulled my application towards him, adjusted his glasses, and read in silence for a few minutes. This says you have hereditary spastic paraplegia, he noted, naming the now-debunked diagnosis under which I suffered for half of my life. It was my turn to dip my head, in my own acknowledgement of a statement of obvious fact.

We sat for a few minutes without speaking, Dick Goodwin and I. He scrawled a few lines on the bottom of the pages that I had completed, and made a stray mark on my doctor's report. He grabbed another binder, and pulled a few more forms over to the pile assembled before him, and noted a couple of things on one or two pages, before looking back at me. The state of Missouri considers you moderately to severely disabled, he told me then. We'll pay your tuition at any state university that you care to attend to get a terminal degree that could lead to meaningful professional employment, and we'll give you a monthly stipend towards your living expenses.

It came to nothing more or less than the approval of this man, whose life clearly held more profound challenges than mine. I took his approval form, and exited the office, following his directions to the next phase, which consisted of a series of tests intended to identify fields in which I might be expected to attain some measure of success despite my moderate to severe disability.

Six months later, I started law school in Kansas City. I never saw Dick Goodwin again, but I had contact with him on a regular basis, and in the fall of 1982, when I got a ticket for parking in the handicapped space in front of the law school, despite my state-issued placard, despite my moderate to severe disability, I called upon him for back-up.

He wrote a letter to the Major in the University Police who had backed his ticket-issuing officer. Mr. Goodwin informed Major Garrett that the State of Missouri, Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, would be most happy to ask their attorneys to file a lawsuit against him, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and anyone else who wrongfully interfered with my lawful right and obvious need to utilize the designated handicapped space. He vaguely hinted at the existence of ample indicia that professors had been allowed to usurp the space without benefit of either hang-tag or disability, which he mildly suggested tinged the incident of issuing me a ticket with a degree of irony that he presumed a jury would not find amusing. He ended his letter by stating that the campus construction worker who had reported me as "not looking disabled enough" to use the space, might consider whether he needed new glasses, or merely suffered from a lack of enlightenment about the law governing provision of accommodations to persons, such as myself, entitled to receive them.

I am not certain if Mr. Goodwin's letter turned the tide, or if the article on the front page of the University News did the trick, or both. One way or the other, the ticket found itself dismissed, and I resumed use of the space, in which I parked, daily, until I graduated in May of the following year.

Yesterday, as I entered the building where my office is located, a client of mine exited. Hello Ms. Corley! he sang, always a cheerful way to be greeted. I smiled, and nodded my head towards a sleek black car parked in one of two designated curb side handicapped spaces without benefit of proper plates or placard. Not yours, I hope? I asked him, and he shook his head. I'm worried about the driver, I remarked. He raised his eyebrows. Driving around blind, he must be, I concluded, and my client laughed. We talked about his case for a few minutes, and parted. I went into the building, and greeted our long-time receptionist, with my daily request that she reconsider going back to school and stay with us instead. She declined, as usual, and my day rolled into its beginning.

Now the morning surrounds me, with its buzzing lawnmowers, the slight drone of a small plane, and the flutter of our American flag in the gentle breeze. This is the last weekend of my son's summer occupancy of our home. I half-suspect that it is also his last summer in Kansas City, for I know he longs to find something exciting to do, in exotic ports, between junior and senior year. In a little while, I will take him to buy shoes, and try to impart a pearl or two of wisdom over a mocha latte. But for now, I will take my moderately to severely disabled body back inside, and make another pot of coffee.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 30 July 2011

2011-07-30T08:04:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

A spray of rain greeted me at the back door today, and I made it welcome. It brought a rush of warm air into the kitchen, against which I finally had to closed the door and retreat into my dining room with a cup of cooling coffee beside the sprawl of perused paper. Congress wrangles still; the President stands helpless; the partisan snarling resonates through the marble halls of our capitol. The world spins; the sun rises with its usual disdain for our shenanigans. As thunder ripples through the air, I note the ragged growth of vegetation in our side yard, raising unchecked fronds to the spray of water feeding its thirsty roots.

My week felt like a lumpy mattress. I negotiated a last-minute settlement in a troubling case, in which my client gave more than he needed to sacrifice -- once again, and for the good of his children. He did so with clear-headed reasoning, driven by his hope, as always, that his children would have a better life because he put their needs before his own. His hope echoes my prayer.

I sat beside my husband's mother at dinner this week, listening to her sweetly narrated story of her and her twin sister playing their respective pianos from distant rooms in their childhood home. Her eighty-year-old frailty touched my heart, and put me in mind of another twin, just as old, just as frail, whom I met a couple of light years ago.

Her name was Evalyn, and her twin had died long before I met her back in my prosecutor days. Because justice is never swiftly dealt, we had decided to record her testimony to insure that we would be able to use her words and have the jury see the shuddering, sweet vulnerability of her somewhat vacant smile.

A video camera turned its objective eye in her direction from the far corner of the room. The defendant whom we had accused of stealing Evalyn's money did not attend; she huddled, instead, in a jail cell, her bond deliberately set at a level that we hoped would prevent her from finding another elderly victim while we awaited the trial date. The public defender sat at one end of the table. Evalyn had eased her frail form onto the hard, unglamorous chair of a county conference room opposite him. My boss and I flanked her, I to the left, my boss to the right.

Evalyn had perceived the importance of the occasion, and dressed as she might have to attend a church service. A stiffly ironed lace collar spanned the short space of her small neckline. The soft wool of a sweater surrounded her narrow shoulders, fastened in the center by a single pearl button. She folded her hands in her lap, holding a white handkerchief. When she had gotten settled, she turned toward the public defender, and graciously signalled him to proceed.

My boss stirred. Since this was a deposition to preserve testimony, scheduled at our behest, she went first. She asked the series of questions that would establish identity and ownership of the account on which we believed the defendant had cashed a series of unauthorized checks. The camera did not pause once during the proceedings; its minder stood impassively behind the tri-pod as Evalyn acknowledged, with a barely perceptible tinge of confusion, that she was indeed the only authorized signatory on the account. My sister Edith used to share this account, she told us. But she's gone now.

She stayed on task through the predicate facts of the case. No, the defendant did not have her permission to write checks on the account. No, she had no knowledge of the checks in question, at which she gazed for a few troubled moments before casting them with discernible disgust upon the table. We held our breaths, my boss and I, as she chuckled over a few random anecdotes about the defendant, who had somehow come to live in her guestroom, by some trickery the details of which I have never understood.

Finally, the basic facts established and the vulnerability of the victim recorded for future jurors to compare with mental images of their own grandmothers, my boss ended her questioning. The three of us turned toward the public defender, a young man who has since risen to higher offices, one of which he still holds. In those days, though, he was a slender, dark-headed earnest but inexperienced attorney, whom everyone nonetheless expected to treat our witness with tenderness and care.

He did not disappoint. In fact, his voice held so little force as to be almost inaudible, and I smothered a smile. He tried, without success, to establish senility on Evalyn's part, to suggest to future triers-of-fact that permission had been given and then forgotten. I did not blame him. I would have done the same in his place, though I could never have defended his client myself.

The woman in question had left other depleted bank accounts. One belonged to a man whom she relocated from St. Joseph to Kansas City in an effort to avoid an imminent prosecution. Her victim had died before his statement could be taken. I met with the police detective who had investigated, and he had no doubt that our defendant should have been made to pay for what she had done to the poor decedent. On the strength of some circumstantial evidence, including the defendant's description to paramedics of how the St. Joseph man had collapsed just before dying in his Plaza apartment, we had exhumed his body and had an autopsy done. But too much time had past, and the likely agent of his death, arsenic, could not have survived the formaldehyde with which his body had been filled.

Still, I did not doubt that she had hastened his death. I stood in the cold, clean room in which the coroner performed the examination of his pristine, preserved body, my gaze fixed on a spattering of mold on the prayerbook in his hands, and the Rosary entwined around them. I watched without flinching, without gagging, so intent was I on prosecuting this woman for his death. The police officers assigned to record the event snapped photo after photo, until red spots drifted before my eyes, but still I stood, a willing witness to desecration in the name of justice.

Afterwards, I burned the dress I had worn, the same dress I had worn the prior year to my mother's funeral. I could not get the smell of decay out of its fabric.

But Evalyn had not been killed, and she sat between the two of us, her protectors, waiting for the next question. The defendant's counsel seemed to hesitate, and, finally, he violated the cardinal rule of questioning: He asked something to which he did not already know the answer. How could my client have gotten your signature so perfect, he inquired.

Evalyn's eyes sparkled. No one in the room doubted the intelligence with which she had navigated the world, as she lifted her slender, quivering hand to raise the proferred exhibit, a copy of one of the forged checks. She held it out, a few inches higher than her face, and turned her mischievous eyes toward the public defender. The same way me and Edith made our mother's signature, on our report cards, she told him. We snuck into her desk and got a letter that she had written. We put the report card from our teacher against a window, the letter behind it. And we traced our mother's signature onto it! As she spoke, she moved a bony finger and traced her own signature, loop after loop, line after shaky line. And everyone in the room could see her long-dead twin beside her: two gleeful, clever girls in pigtails and pinafores, forging their mother's name to a card full of bad marks.

The camera recorded the whole thing.

As I sat beside my mother-in-law this week, watching her sweet smile, listening as she remembered the way she and her twin did everything together, through childhood, through college, and in the early years of their married lives, I thought about Evalyn. She has surely died by now. She must be somewhere pleasant, sitting beside her sister, cackling about the pranks they pulled, and the chagrin on their mother's face when they were found out. As for the woman who probably killed that poor old man, and certainly stole thousands of dollars from the old people on whom she preyed, I can only hope that she served out her time and found no further victims.

The brief thunderstorm has spent itself. My old Mac has just two minutes left on its battery, and duty calls. The other sentient beings in my household are either still sleeping, or have fallen back into a lazy dream, the Saturday sudoku lying on the floor, forgotten. Nearby, the dog snores in her bed, while the old girl cat watches from her chosen perch on the little bench in the hallway.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 23 July 2011

2011-07-23T07:22:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

The unbearable heat of summer lurks an hour from where I now sit, in a blond-wood rocker, on my porch, with my five-dollar estate sale table as a laptop perch. Beside me, the old porch chair abandoned by a departing law school friend sits with only an exercise ball for company. Its joints gave way a few weeks ago, and have not yet been re-glued. The plants on their stands seem happier for several days of excessive watering. The occasional neighbor listlessly wanders down the cracked sidewalk, getting in a few feet of exercise before the temperature rises. The gas man pulls into the driveway behind my Saturn, and the morning's activity begins.

But I have drift into the past, as I tend to do on these lazy days. My surroundings fade, and in their place appears a wooden porch in Winslow, Arkansas, built by a carpenter friend with lines that come to an apex in the middle of the highway. I appreciated the artistry, although natives often stood and wondered at the foolishness. Middle of the road, they mused, shaking their heads at the oddness of it. Huh, well, don't that beat all.

Heat surrounded me that afternoon, the thick, cowardly southern heat that flees at sunset with the sweep of the mountain's evening chill. With a glass of cool well water on the table and a book in my hand, I daydreamed about the life I planned to lead in my new home.

A year later, I would have erected a wooden fence on the property line and would not have been visible from the highway. But that day, anyone passing could see me idling away a perfect Saturday, and sure enough, someone did. An old Chevy truck, from the late '50s or early '60s, pulled down my gravel drive. As it slowed, I squinted, trying to see the driver. In those parts, in those days, most anyone would stop for most any reason, but usually I would recognize a neighbor's face.

This one had nothing about it that seemed familiar. Creased lines on either side of a lean jaw, light brown stubble, home-shorn hair. I judged the man to be in his mid-30s. He stepped lightly across my yard, and stood below the spot where I had risen to greet him. Mornin', he ventured. I returned the comment, glancing over at his vehicle.

I could see a woman in the passenger seat, and a couple of kids peering around the rusty side of the truck. Small children, none too clean, and hungry-looking. I turned my attention back to their father.

The slimness of his face topped an even thinner body, but his arms looked strong and his shoulders square. I knew what would come next. He had not stopped to beg, but to ask about work, and I started thinking about what I could have him do that might allow me to give him a few dollars with which to feed his family. The '80s had been hard on country folk, with dogged droughts and a collapse of the free-wheeling economy of the '70s. These wanderers might otherwise have been working a farm that had been in their family for generations.

I did not have to wait long for the man's request. In a voice that did not tell of the pain it caused him to inquire, he asked if I had any chores that he might do. I thought about the rick of wood that could be re-stacked, the north plot of land that needed bush-whacking, a door frame that sagged in the unfinished addition. I nodded, and gestured for the family to disembark from the truck's dusty confines.

The woman showed herself to be in her late 20's, with a boy eight and a girl six. The children ran around the front yard while their mother and I made lemonade, and their father dragged my small tool collection out to get done what he could before the sun set. I found myself chattering to the kids with their silent mother alongside me, and my nephew's calico cat, George, whom I had inherited when my nephew developed asthma, running around with the boy chasing her.

I fed them grilled cheese sandwiches with thin slices of tomatoes purchased from a farm up the road. The man ate his while standing alongside the porch but the woman refused what I offered. The boy ate two and the girl one and a half, and when I had washed the few dishes, I came back outside to find the mother sweeping the floorboards of my new porch, while the children napped on the seat of the truck, and the man cleaned the blades of my mower.

I gave the man some money, more than the hours he worked might be considered worth, and silently watched as his wife calculated whether they would find somewhere to sleep on the strength of it. I put a bag of cookies into the woman's hands, the set of my mouth telling her not to protest. The man gently hustled his children into the bed of the vehicle, helping his wife into the cab, softly closing the door for her. I looked beyond the little scene, to the curve of the hill on the east side of the highway, and the line of trees that followed the mountainside to the neighboring farms. Those trees would sway with the mildest of winds, but they stood motionless in the heat of the late afternoon.

With his family secured, the man had only to turn and thank me. I folded my arms across my chest, and fastened a smile on my face. By thirty-four years of age, I had suffered my share of humiliation, and did not lightly visit any on another human being. I would make his task painless if I could. Thank you kindly for what you did for me today, I told him. You can't know what it's like, living out here on my own, being unable to do those chores.

He paused. The brown of his eyes met the grey-blue of mine. We heard a jay call to its mate, in the still of the afternoon air. A long moment eased between us. He broke his gaze, then, and glanced at the land to the north of my house. You oughtn't tell people you're alone, he said then. There's some might not have ought but bad on their minds. I conceded his point with a little shrug. Some mightn't, I admitted. He nodded, just once. Well, thanks for the food and such, ma'am, he said, finally. I put out my hand, and the slim one he put into it felt strong and cool. He met my eyes again, and nodded again. Might be, I'll be back this way, in a couple of weeks, and I'll check on you, he said, and then, with a smooth maneuver that raised very little dust, he pulled his truck back out onto Highway 7, and headed north, into Fayetteville.

The gas man has finished replacing our meter, and the heat of the Kansas City summer has settled around me. I pull myself back into the present, and watch as the worker backs his truck onto Holmes Street, and drives away, to his next appointment.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 16 July 2011

2011-07-16T07:18:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

I'm standing In the warm, still air on my porch, gazing down the driveway at the new deck emerging from the rubble of construction at my neighbor's house. He's hustling to get this porch finished before a scheduled party this afternoon, having already laid a new flagstone patio to the south of his home. Looking at the debris of building materials in our shared driveway, I think about other wooden platforms on which I have sat, watching other summer scenes.

I am transported back in time, in place, in space, to the top forty but one, on Reynold's Mountain, in Newton County, Arkansas. August, 1986, and I had been persuaded to camp, something that I had not done for decades. With a slight nod to my city sensitivities, my companion conceded that we would pitch the tent on a wooden platform that he had built for such purpose, in the thick of trees, barely in sight of the rough road that led us to his land.

I stood, in cut-off jeans, a spaghetti-strap tank, and a man's work shirt, gazing around the span of wilderness. I was called upon to hand him things that we had hauled from the vehicle -- a back pack, a duffel, the sleeping bags. As I waited for him to finish assembling our temporary quarters, I glanced about, wondering if I could endure the heat, the bugs, and the absence of plumbing facilities.

After our gear had been stowed, we walked a bit, along a crude path, through a heavy growth of old trees. Through the still of unblemished nature, I heard the resonant voice of my companion cautioning from behind that I should watch out. . .for flying snakes.

I stopped, and he nearly crashed into my back. Flying snakes? I assumed this was a cruel joke. He shook his head, and I gazed upward, beginning to rethink the wisdom of this rural odyssey. We started forward again, though I repeatedly stumbled over vines and fallen branches, since I couldn't tear my gaze from the heights where these snakes must dwell.

Towards evening, we got the car from the crude parking spot between two spindly second-growth trees, and traversed the backside of the mountain to Thomas Creek, an old commune at which the original member now lived with his new wife. As the crickets and cicadas raised mild alarm in the distant reaches of the compound, I helped the wife assemble dinner, making salad from ripe home-grown tomatoes, the cool sweet corn of an early harvest, and crisp leaf lettuce plucked outside the kitchen window.

Are there really flying snakes around here, I asked, with a city slicker's hesitation at showing ignorance. I saw an eyebrow twitch. Did he tell you that, she wondered. When I nodded, she shrugged. There's lots of critters here, she conceded. I wouldn't be surprised. She turned away, and bent to pull a hot pan from the oven. I had no idea whether my fears had been assuaged or confirmed.

That night, we slept between two outstretched sleeping bags in the pup tent. My companion fell into an instant slumber, innocent and deep. I lay awake and listened to the sounds of the mountain -- a mild rumble, which I could not identify; the occasional distant rustle in the uncleared acreage; an owl's gentle hoot.

I awakened with the frightened jerk of one who has not noticed falling asleep. I was alone on the wooden berth, behind the small zipped flap of the narrow tent. I struggled to emerge, shaking the hesitance of a lingering dream and working the stiffness out of my limbs.

I did not see my companion. I glanced over the rise, and noted the continued presence of our vehicle. With care, I lowered myself until I sat on the edge of the decking, with my feet to the side, and there I perched, wishing for coffee.

In the underbrush around me, I heard sounds of a critter stirred by my careless, noisy rising. I judged it to be fairly large and quick, but could see nothing of its contours. I glanced above my head into the trees, thinking of the warning. Flying snakes.

I sat, unheralded by anything or anyone, while the sun began its quiet climb to warm the air around me. My mind shimmered, deprived of its normal chemical stimulant, and I felt my shoulders droop.

A sudden noise snapped me to attention. Surely it came from overhead, in the verdant billowing branches. I heard it again, to one side, but certainly above me. I began to wonder how large a reptile could be that lived in the trees and crossed the air between branches. I thought about what it might eat, and whether it required poison to snare its prey. The sound repeated, louder, closer, lower down, and I sprang to my feet. I felt the sweat rise on my brow and the blood rush, my heart pounding, my hands trembling.

And then, from the bushes, emerged my companion -- holding a thermos in one hand, and a long slender stick in the other.

Our eyes met. Neither of us spoke. He held out the coffee, which I took, and in a few minutes, we sat side by side on the aging wood, sipping the steaming liquid from tin cups, while we chatted about the people whom I would meet at church that morning.

A year later, after he and I had married, his daughter and his niece came to spend the summer in Arkansas with us. We lived down in town, and had a sleeping porch that looked out on the Buffalo River. Here the girls spent their time, giggling, talking, reacquainting themselves with each other after years of separation.

One morning, as I stood in the kitchen frying eggs, I heard a long stream of whispers from the porch where I thought they still slept. I paused, turning my good ear in their direction, with the cautious suspicion of the de facto parent of two pre-teens.

He told her there were flying snakes, I heard one of them say to the other, following which, they both snickered. Flying snakes, get real! the other answered. She never believed that, did she?

Indeed, she did. I finished making breakfast, and called out the front door for my husband, and through the back room for the girls. We assembled. Grace was spoken, as grace is spoken at every table at which I serve food. The girls glanced at each other, the occasional smirk passing across their faces, while I handed round the eggs and bacon. What's the joke, my husband asked, with all the innocence of every charming, handsome man. Their stifled laughter erupted as they surrendered to their amusement. I set my coffee cup down and slid my eyes in his direction. Flying snakes, I told him, and watched as he held a single breath, before his own laughter burst forth.

After a few seconds, I could not help but join them.

More than two decades later, I watch my neighbor start the last phase of the work on their deck. My cats loll on the porch, and a squirrel skitters along the parkway, before shimmying the height of our maple. The morning has grown too hot for me. With a last look at the boards lying on the broken asphalt, I go into the house, to start my day.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 09 July 2011

2011-07-09T08:05:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

A pleasant rumble in the distance heralds the impending arrival of the truck that will haul my neighbor's rented dumpster from our shared driveway. We have taken our allotment of space in the wide blue receptacle. My husband and son swung sledgehammers and wielded long pry bars to dismantle the old, unused ramp, slinging the rotting wood posts over the rusted edge of the dumpster. My neighbor tore down his decrepit deck, and we all hauled broken chairs, obsolete machinery, and the shreddings of weeds accumulated over the winter in our respective backyards.

My week brought an unusual amount of stress, and I am slow in unwinding from the press of it. I feel as though I have been lying on the broken asphalt with the full trash container resting on my bones. I've managed to settle a difficult case, finish a troubling trial, and manipulate other hearings and conferences to maximize my clients' positions. But my professional accomplishments this week have been at considerable personal cost, in lost sleep, aching muscles, and the undue shifting of burden to my husband's shoulders.

As I sat at a small restaurant yesterday, awaiting the opening of the courthouse, I watched a man struggle down the sidewalk outside of City Hall with the recognizable sway of a lawyer whose attache case has been filled beyond its normal capacity. He trudged with a familiar determination, south, towards Jackson County's tall edifice, without a smile, without an ease to his shoulders, a quiet determination claiming his features. I sipped passable coffee and glanced at the translated foreign novel that I had tucked in my handbag, letting its pages drift closed, having little appetite for its disturbing passages. Morning, Kansas City, the end of a work week.

I gathered my own heavily laden bag, slugged down the last of the cold coffee, and tucked my cell phone into a side pocket of my purse. I started down the sidewalk in the path of the man whose dogged steps I had observed. Ahead of me, a thin secretary hobbled on stilted slingbacks, a swirl of smoke coiling around her head. She reached to press the button to activate the cross light and started out into the street before the signal changed. I hovered behind her, balancing my load, watching the slight swish of her short skirt, listening to the snap of her heels on the surface of the street.

When the light alerted me to the prospect of safe passage, I started out, seeing that the girl ahead of me had already started east, across the next road, in a hurry to begin her work day. I tried to discern, from the way she tossed her spent cigarette to the curb, whether she liked her job or not. She glanced back, and the set of her jaw settled the question. A slight wind ruffled the edges of her hair and she smoothed it down with a brisk, annoyed gesture. I smiled, but she had already turned away and started up the ramp to the courthouse door.

An hour later, I learned that the mother of my client's son had left the jurisdiction on the heels of a positive drug test. The guardian ad litem held the evidence out for her attorney, me and the judge to see. We had already stipulated that the results would be admitted, after the first day of trial when each parent accused the other of addiction. My client's test came out clean. His ex-wife's did not. I had put months and hours into the case, and had already presented a half-day of grueling evidence. In the interim, I had prepared the rest of my case with hours of tedious effort. But her cowardly run for a shelter out of state put an end to the controversy. After an hour's additional consultation in chambers, and a brief spate of testimony about the rehabilitation program that I devised and the guardian approved, the case ended. I saw it as a hollow victory; my client already had his son, and now that son had lost his mother. Mid-day, Kansas City, one step closer to the weekend.

I reversed my steps and hauled the heavy briefcase back to my car. I slung my jacket to the back seat, and pulled out a protein bar. I knew that I had already passed the mark for a full day's charge in the city garage, so leaving held no urgency. I quietly chewed the only sustenance that I had yet eaten, and thought about the grim look on the faces of my client and his wife. Neither felt that they had won. Both understood the overbearing sadness of the day.

As I sat in the handicapped space on Floor six of the garage, looking south over the grunge of downtown, I contemplated the ways in which the day should have been a happy one. Twenty years ago that day, my son came into this world, and he entered laughing. His happy arrival followed 34 weeks of good health for me, the best physical shape that I had ever found myself enjoying, before or since. I disdained coffee and alcohol, ate a balanced vegetarian diet, and avoided places where people smoked. Despite an annoying weight gain caused by an unfortunate medical reality -- I had miscarried my son's twin, but my body produced enough amniotic fluid for two -- I was able to walk without pain medication, aided only by the occasional use of a cane and the T.E.N.S. unit for which Blue Cross had shelled out big bucks.

I munched the Zone bar, in the car, in the parking garage, at the end of the morning's appearance, and thought about the many times my son tried to enter this world far too early. I experienced labor the first time during a hearing in Louisiana. The second time, I was moving from my country house to a rented apartment in town. Later, I felt twinges that came hard and fast, two days before his scheduled birth by primary Cesarean six weeks before his due date. My mid-wife decided to let me labor, as the delivery would be occurring so soon anyway, but when midnight rolled round, I demanded that she stop the process. His absent father's birthday was July 7th, and I would be damned if I would spend the rest of my son's life celebrating on that date. She relented, and the birth took place as planned, at 1:50 p.m., Monday, July 08th, 1991, at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

I got the usual advice during my pregnancy. One kind soul suggested that I give the baby to a real family. Real? I asked him, holding the phone to my ear, shifting the discomfort of my growing girth. I don't think it gets any more real than this.

By "real", of course, he meant a family with a father and a mother. Fresh out of fathers, I quipped. He did not answer. I wonder now, two decades later, if that well-meaning person regrets his advice.

Another friend told me that being a single mother at thirty-five would be difficult. Oh good! I gushed. The first three decades were sheer hell; difficult will be an improvement. She didn't think so, but kept the rest of her thoughts to herself. I haven't seen that woman since my baby shower. She divorced her lawyer husband, who, it turned out, liked a little too much hanky panky. Difficult, I'm sure.

The mid-day sun poured into the parking garage as I started my car. I checked my cell phone, sent a text to my boy, and an e-mail to my office. I put the car in reverse, and started down the ramp. Earlier in the week, I had exited the same parking garage at the same time as the entire week's jury pool, and had spent 35 minutes in line, waiting so long that I nearly ran out of gas. I exited without incident this day, easing my car past the kiosk after paying, and merging onto Oak street.

Another day, another dollar.

Five hours later, my son, my husband and I entered the Kansas City Artists' Coalition gallery to see a juried show in which my son's godmother and my dear friend Penny Thieme had a painting exhibited. Seeing the other works and the many gathered guests, I realized what an honor the acceptance of her piece had been. I watched my tall, slender son stand beside his aunt Penny, shoulder to shoulder with his quiet, smiling stepfather. I sat in a chair next to a broad, puzzling painting of a woman's profile, and listened to the murmur of the visitors to the show. Evening, the River Market, another Friday, another weekend.

And now the warmth of a Saturday sun caresses my bare leg, as I sit on my porch and watch the neighbor build his fence. A middle-aged man drifts by on a bicycle, and a worker with one artificial leg backs a truckload of rock onto my neighbor's lawn. My American flag waves above me. In a little while, my family will come home from the various pursuits that have taken them away for the morning, and I will think about lunch. I shout a greeting to my neighbor and her granddaughters, and call out an admonishment to my whining dog. Then, I close the lid of my computer, and go into the house.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 02 July 2011

2011-07-02T00:18:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

The fragile truce that I cultivate with the vagaries of my flawed humanity disintegrates and I lie awake. Heady tones of a philosophical conversation echo around me. Before sleeping, my husband and I speculated on the cultural significance of art and its intrinsic worth. What do you value most, I asked him. Within the context of our ruminations, he understood that I was not angling for a compliment, and he answered honestly: Freedom.

I contemplate this notion as I struggle to keep my mind from fully awakening. My effort having failed, I rise, and ease the tortured muscles of my crooked back down the steep stairs, onto the main floor of our home. My son's cat yowls at his bedroom door, and I nudge it open enough to let her gain entrance. He greets me, taking ear buds out and pushing aside his laptop. Are you hungry, I inquire, though it's a silly enough question most of the time, especially so in the witching hours.

A few minutes later, I hand him a make-shift vegetarian taco salad, brush off his thanks, and return to the kitchen to let the dog back into the house. I notice that the ambient temperature has only slightly dropped. I pause on the back porch long enough to mark the distant sound of fireworks from the east and the rumble of a helicopter overhead.

Yesterday afternoon, my son and I sat without talking through the long crescendo of The Tree of Life. In the soft darkness of the Tivoli, I felt a flood of memories overwhelm me -- the twitch of fear at the raised voices of my childhood; unbearable love engulfing me while I huddled in my mother's determined embrace; later, stark shock as I clutched a telephone receiver to my ear and asked, which brother? The movie's narrative followed strikingly familiar contours, mirroring in many ways the tumbled path of my life -- uncanny, unreal, unrelenting and astonishing.

I am transported back in time by one scene of the movie in particular, in which the family celebrated the 4th of July. I feel again a small line of sweat trickle between my narrow shoulder blades, in the heat of an Independence Day decades ago, long forgotten. I see the shadowy angles of my brothers' faces, as they wave sparkler after dazzling sparkler high above their heads to slice through the summer night. I press against the brick wall on my mother's porch, far away from the blazing flare that my father has jammed into the ground. Its crimson flames shoot straight into the inky sky. A rush of terror floods through me; delicious, delirious. I grip my brother's arm. Firecrackers burst, brief and furious.

Hours later, I lie in the bottom bunk bed in the room that I share with one of my sisters, and listen to my parents arguing. My siblings sleep. Alone, I huddle under a thin cover in the stifling heat. The air stirs only when the oscillating fan spans in my direction.

My father's voice rises as my mother's tone descends. I cannot breathe. I wrap my arms around my chest, and squeeze my eyes more tightly closed. I will them to stop the dance that never ends for them. I bargain with God. I doubt that anyone hears my promises, but still I make them: Don't let him hit her, I pray, and I promise I will be good for the rest of my life. I fall asleep, still holding myself close, still murmuring my endless litany of shame.

In the morning our yard is strewn with the litter of our festivities. I rise before anyone else, before my mother, before my father, before my seven brothers and sisters. I slip into a pair of sandals and go outside in my pajamas. I gather the trash and dump the bucket of water down the driveway. I stuff discarded wrappers, spent whirligigs, and the rubble of flares and sparklers into a brown paper bag, and cram that into the steel trash can. I sweep away the ashes of snakes that my brothers lit at the top of the cement stairs in our front yard. By the time my mother shuffles into the kitchen to start the percolator, I am back in the house, sitting on the sofa, reading.

She greets me in her most quiet voice, the one that she uses when she does not want to disturb my father. I answer her in kind, and she lowers her body to rest beside me. Happy 5th of July, she tells me, and I snuggle against her frail form. I couldn't sleep last night, I admit to her, and I feel the tension in her response. It's okay, she assures me. Everything is okay.

I believe her because I want her to be right. As the smell of coffee rises around us, I bury my nose in my book, and she lights a cigarette. Our whispered pact binds us together; our lies keep us chained to our place.

The house falls silent around me now. I hear the occasional burst in the distance, as others who do not sleep salute our nation's independence, or their own wild natures, or, perhaps, just use the holiday as an excuse to strap small, discarded toys to firecrackers and destroy them. I think about freedom, as my husband sleeps, and the country girds itself for an onslaught of unbridled celebration.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 25 June 2011

2011-06-25T06:13:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

Beside me lies a rubble of a structure no longer needed here, a wheelchair ramp which, though poorly built, served well and now will be consigned to a dumpster. The newspaper lies on a tile-topped table, silently bearing its notices of deaths, and storms, and a surging river from the fury of which our water treatment facility has been spared another day by the failure of a northern levy. Faint trills of locusts, or crickets, or cicadas, call my stalking cat, who paces on the cold concrete.

My internal alarm clock summoned me at six, having no regard for the weekend. My husband had left much earlier, to take our youngest family member to the airport for the commencement of his summer sojourn at Harvard in its program for high school soon-to-be-seniors. He will spend the next seven weeks studying Greek Mythology and Philosophy, on a full-tuition program scholarship that he earned the old fashioned way: hard work, persistence, dedication. We burst with pride at the thought.

The middle child of our three, my son by birth, played soft chords on his electric guitar as the evening waned last night. I have no musical instincts but I hear the improvement he has made over the last year and understand that his gift is developing, along with his complex sense of humor, his intellectual prowess as he stands on the Dean's list, and his philosophical curiosity. I fell asleep wondering where the next few years would take him, and what new layer of complexity I will see in his eyes each time he returns, briefly, to grudgingly submit to a maternal inspection.

Of our eldest, my newly acquired daughter, I can say we smile with satisfaction. The application for December graduation has been completed, and she is set to commence graduate school shortly thereafter. We see less and less of her, which every parent's heart will recognize as a sign that she has fully entered adulthood, seldom needing our assistance, leaning on her own ability, even making arrangements now and then for family gatherings in my stead. The bird has flown the nest, and the papa robin chatters with pride as she soars.

I am not sure how I got this old. It seems mere moments ago that I myself left Missouri to start a life in Boston. I feel the plane lift from the runway at Lambert, and once again my stomach falls as the jet pitches and rolls in the winter sky. I am 21, and skinny, and I have just cut off three feet of hair and painted blond streaks in the resultant back-combed waves.

At the other end, at Logan, I am met by a friend, David Sotkowitz, who throws my suitcase in the back of his car in the snowy drifts of the short-term parking lot. The snap of cold air bites my cheeks, and I shudder in a coat that would have been more than adequate for Missouri winter but does nothing in Boston's December. We chatter, exchanging accounts of events since we last saw one another in a St. Louis summer, as he completed graduate school and I got ready to enter my last semester of college.

An hour later, after midnight, I lie on a makeshift pallet in a spare corner of his apartment, watching a new, vigorous snowfall. The ground outside holds seventeen inches, and another eleven inches will fall in the night, a heavy, silent shroud. I stand at the window in the morning, holding a cup of tea, wondering if I should grab my suitcase and go back to the Midwest. I am not this brave, I tell myself.

A few days later, I venture to the Boston College student life office, and page through a notebook of roommate listings. I use their phone to make a few appointments, then take the trolley downtown to meet my new boss at the job arranged for me by my most recent St. Louis employer. As the trolley slips underground, and the dark surrounds me in that brief moment before the lights come up, I feel the warm flush of fear. What do I think I am doing, I ask myself. I cannot answer.

In time, I learned to navigate the green line with ease. I never lost the slight surge of panic when the car traversed from trolley to subway, or the anxiousness of waiting in an underground station after the sun had set. But I developed some moderate adeptness, a passable ability to cling to an overhead bar so that an old lady could have my seat. I could, after a few weeks, read in a standing position. Though not a native, I could pass.

One evening, tired from work, I leaned against a pillar awaiting the train for home. My eyes drifted closed, and I felt my body sag. The low murmur of evening riders surrounded me. The cavernous underground stations hummed with the thunder of distant cars rambling through tunnels, barreling through the gloom of the spider web of which the Massachusetts Transit system is comprised.

I felt a gentle pull on the strap of my handbag. My eyes flew open and I grabbed my purse, stepping swiftly away from the body at my shoulder. I moved backwards, clutching my belongings against my chest, scrambling away from the groping hand.

I met his eyes. Dark orbs in sunken hollows, over crusty grime, surrounded by greasy, uncut hair. Raw, red lips; reaching hands with ragged fingerless gloves. The mouth gaped and sounds emitted, croaks that I recognized as words but could not distinguish. We stood, the thief and I, our gazes caught in an unending grip.

And then the train pulled into the station, with squealing brakes, and the rush of automatic doors. I tore my eyes away from the pathetic sight of my attacker, and stepped backwards, into a waiting car. I stood in the gap as commuters shoved past me, falling into seats. I remained at the entry way, watching the man, until the doors closed, and the train lurched forward. Darkness embraced me. I moved towards a bench, and lowered myself to sit, as the weary passengers adjusted to accommodate my small frame.

A storm has gathered as I sat on my porch, here in the Midwest, in the cool of early summer. In Boston, it is still springtime. A few hours from now, my husband's boy will struggle towards a waiting taxi cab with two large duffel bags containing what he hopes will be enough of the right stuff. He will spare the driver the flash of his confident smile, and perhaps, remember a few tricks of travel that we have pressed on him, in the last hours before his departure.

My stomach tenses as I think about his journey. I have felt this apprehension before now, when I sent my son to Mexico for his own junior trip, with everything on the packing list and his passport in a case around his neck, just as we were instructed. He came home seven weeks later with short, curly hair; two inches taller; and light years closer to his future, independent self.

I hardly knew him.

Thunder rumbles in the distant air. I am hungry, and I have chores to do. Although I have not miles to go before I sleep, still, my day is full, and there will be little time for worrying about the safety of our most recently launched prodigal son.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 18 June 2011

2011-06-18T07:54:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

The song of the mourning dove rises over the rooftops of the houses around me. The distant drone of cars on the main thoroughfare occasionally punctuates the stillness, along with the chatter of squirrels and an intermittent whoop of something I don't recognize. Morning; Brookside; another weekend.

I feel tension flowing from my body and breathe in fresh air to replace it. I am surrounded by a green veil of early summer leaves. I am hidden from traffic by the fluttering flag, the pale concrete of my porch, and a jumble of rocking chairs. My feet rest on an old grey rug, damp from the storm that briefly raged in the night. As creatures call to one another and a train cries in the distance, I am silent.

Over the gentle din of morning sounds, I hear another voice, speaking my name. I turn, and see a profile gone fourteen years this week. A strong chin, pale blue eyes, wide shoulders; a body in constant motion. I feel something long suppressed rise within me.

Another day, another house, another morning.

His figure huddled over a percolator, and I stood a few feet away, observing surprisingly dense stubble on his chin and a sweep of straight black hair falling over his eyes. He glanced in my direction and muttered, you don't look much better! before turning back, waiting for the bubbling coffee to settle in its pot. When the noise of the brewing ceased, he filled two mugs, and handed one to me. I moved ahead of him, through the living room, and out onto my mother's porch.

We both were docked in our family home, my brother Steve and I. It was the fall of 1977, and I had just come home with my tail between my legs, from a ten-month attempt to establish myself in Boston. I had escaped there after a pale conclusion to an undistinguished college career marked by nothing more or less glamorous than a stumble across the commencement stage and a few dim memories of classes that I frequently skipped. If I was 22, my baby brother Stephen must have been not yet 18, and maybe still in high school.

We sat in metal lawn chairs, on the wide brick porch, gazing on the street where we had played as children. Neither of us spoke. My hangover gnawed at my stomach. I glanced over at my brother, nervous, wondering if he could tell. The silence lengthened.

After a few uneasy moments had passed, Steve turned towards me, earnest eyes searching my face. What are you going to do now, he asked.

I knew he didn't mean, now that I had awakened, feeling sick, and had doused my nausea with the thick black brew. I set my mug beside his and looked across the street. I studied the house where old lady Venable had lived and, I understood, where she had died. I remembered her standing at the fence of her backyard watching my brothers and their friends party, in 1970, when I was fifteen and my parents had taken their first vacation, leaving my sister Joyce in charge of us. We thought Mrs. Venable disapproved of the hippies, and the motorcycles, and the blare of the Grateful Dead from the stereo. We derided her, even as we feared that she would come across the street and tell our parents about our parties.

I sighed. What was I going to do, now? I had gone to Boston ostensibly to start graduate school at Boston College, but fell of my own negligible weight, stumbling over the nightlife of the actresses whose apartment I shared. They thrived in their day jobs and caroused with their friends, while I sat at the table and wished that I could have their lives. I fled when we learned that our building would be converted to co-ops, and they said they did not want me to move into their new digs. We advertised for a roommate, not a sister, one of them snapped at me. I packed my clothes, my books, and an old rocker that I found at a junk store in Cambridge, into the back of my brother Kevin's car, and retreated. That had been a month ago, and I had spent the intervening time getting reacquainted with my old haunts in the Central West End and pretending to look for work.

The morning waned around us, and the sounds of the neighborhood rose. I could hear my mother in the living room. She opened the drapes, and gave a little wave to her children. I spared her a thin smile and turned back to my brother. I don't really know, I finally admitted. I can still go to grad school. SLU will still take me, in January.

He studied me for a few minutes while I avoided his gaze. Then he looked away, into the yellow leaves of autumn that swayed in the morning breeze. You ever wonder what the point is? he finally asked.

I could have answered honestly. I could have told him that I would have done anything to avoid that question, and often did. I could have told him that I had not one inkling of what the point was, nor of how to begin to figure it out, and the drive to know took me behind the wheel of a car with Scotch in my veins and an iron vise gripping my stomach. I could have assured him that the point had thus far escaped me, and that the quest for it haunted me and lurked in every bad line of poetry I ever wrote.

Instead, I laughed. No, not really, I told him. I'm not even sure there is a point.

He stood, then. He tossed cold coffee into the yard, and gave out a quiet, pale
chuckle. Me neither, he agreed. And the world turned a click to the right, as my mother opened the front door and summoned us to breakfast.

It's June, it's 2011, and I feel the warmth of the summer sun on my bare shoulders. I am hungry. The cursor dances on the screen, beneath the pale smears of dirt that I have let accumulate. My husband has already left for a breakfast meeting, and our two boys sleep the thoughtless sleep of their generation. Far away, in a small brass box adorned with a skull and roses sticker, the ashes of my brother Stephen have faded into a nearly painless memory.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 11 June 2011

2011-06-11T06:58:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

I sit awaiting plenary session, watching over a thousand lawyers stagger, wander and saunter into the room in various stages of comparative alertness. Coffee does not seem to be in evidence, which astonishes me as much as does the unconcerned reaction of the hotel staff to the apparent theft of my Blackberry. As the lone hold-out on the Planning Committee in the up-vote for Branson, I am beginning to relent.

I continue to rejoice in the annual phenomenon of seeing people whom I consider solid friends despite the gap between meetings. Familiar faces and voices around each corner warm my heart and remind me of the strength and joy to be found in the act of belonging. It must be said that I have never experienced a sense of communal acceptance as deep and abiding as I do when I among the Solo and Small Firm lawyers of the Missouri Bar, including among my families of birth and choice. When asked why I attend this conference to the exclusion of one focusing exclusively on my practice area, I inevitably answer with the only certain truth: These are my people.

Solo and small firm attorneys share a bent that transcends practice focus. That bent flavors our choice of clients, office-mates and staff. It guides the type of organization in which we matriculate, and the extra-curricular activities that we enjoy. We are unique. We sink or swim on the strength of our personalities and our devotion to independence, something that would actually detract from our effectiveness in many larger organizations. We are individualists, and we applaud the other solitary frogs in our pond.

The speaker takes the podium and begins his humorous narration, the chuckles starting slowly at first, but sure to build. My mind unquestionably wanders, thinking of my son asleep in a tent in Manchester, Tennessee, on the grounds of a rock festival. That I cannot text him to check on his welfare due to the theft of my phone troubles me less than it might have; perhaps I have begun to trust him, despite my apprehensions, in spite of my conviction, based upon my own youth, that folly hovers just outside the perimeter of his daily voyage.

Last night, our last evening on the patio -- not just for this conference, but forever, due to our impending relocation to Branson -- I sat against the hard metal of my chair and watched the gleaming faces of people whom I have grown to respect and even regard with a deep measure of affection. I think about the shifts in each of their lives over the last twelve months: marriages, divorces, realignment of practices, births, the departure of children from the family fold. I see the sheen of grey, more prevalent on some heads than twelve months ago; the deepened lines on faces; the slight droop that none of us can keep gravity from visiting on our physiques. I see, too, the gold-shirted gaggle of law students, who seem to carry the bucket of enthusiasm that once was the happy burden of my generation.

The lesson of the sixteen years that the Solo and Small Firm Committee of the Missouri Bar has been gathering to learn and share transcends the confines of our profession. That lesson speaks -- or should speak -- to everyone. The human experience cannot be successfully pursued in isolation. Navigating from birth to death without alliances can be done, but not without substantial loss of the richness and complexity of being that cannot be developed alone.

The speaker seems to have taken longer than I would have expected to reach his core message, the directive to "give until it helps". I like that thought, and I hear that he has now reached this part of his speech. And so, I will close, with a simple and short message to my friends -- on this list, and elsewhere. We have survived another year. In fact, it appears that some of us have actually thrived. For anyone who has taken two steps backward for every one step forward, I offer the hope that the next twelve months will hold opportunities to dance a little bit faster, or with a more adept partner, or to more beautiful music.

Jim Brady, Executive Director of the Missouri Bar's Lawyer Assistance Program, spoke about avoiding "doom and gloom" in difficult times. He invited those in attendance to embrace "eudaimonia", which loosely translates to the art of flourishing. That suggestion struck me as a timely one, and so, with thanks to Mr. Brady, I share it with you. I invite you to embrace the future, and to flourish.

I'll see you all next year, in Branson.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

P.S. To folks who read this who are not on the Small Firm Internet Group, my simple apologies that my musings this week speak to my brothers and sisters at the Bar. These Musings grew out of a weekly reflection that I post to the SFIG, the listserve of the Solo and Small Firm Committee of the Missouri Bar. Our annual conference occurs every year at this time, and I am attending the last plenary session of it as I write. My musings this week therefore naturally dwell on these people, my colleagues and my friends.

Saturday Musings, 04 June 2011

2011-06-04T06:58:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

I am able to enjoy the porch this morning, with the flag waving, and my son sitting in a chair nearby with a cup of coffee. The white cat stirs on the porch, where she has, presumably spent the night. When I came out of the house this morning, she crouched in the driveway, and a little critter nibbled at the food put out for her by my husband. The noise of my exiting apparently spooked the marauder, following the exit of whom, the cat retook her haunt.

I sit at the wooden camp table, one of two which I purchased at an estate sale several years ago for five dollars each at half-price time, late in the day, when the sale coordinators grew tired of arguing with the miserly customers and yielded to their demands for bargains. I try to write on this porch, weather permitting, since I find so much inspiration in the pleasant mix of urban sounds and smells. The recycling truck has already come and gone; I hear the trash truck in the neighborhood. A horn honks; a siren cries; the neighbor rattles dishes in her kitchen, beneath the open window.

I've had a scrambly week. I find myself stuck in the present, grousing and ruminating over an unhappy client, an ecstatic one, a few mistakes made by my otherwise beloved staff, a client's bounced check and the ache under my right shoulder where I carry my tension. As the vehicle's horn continues to sound, suggesting that it, too, suffers from undue pressure, I breathe the fragrant air of a city spring, and gaze over the lushness of our lawn, with its smattering of fallen leaves and the deep shadow of our maple tree.

I am at home here as I have not been at home anywhere else that I have lived. The rooms of our bungalow are too small for our belongings, and too few for our family of four. The cat has marred the hardwood floors in her dotage, with the smell that never quite vanishes and threatens to plunge the resale potential and value of the place. The door frames still need painting; the upstairs window has not yet had its broken pane replaced. A few of the home's more annoying problems would have to be listed on any seller's disclosure, and those annoyances plague us even now.

But for all its faults, this place suits me. It is the second house that I have owned. My first sat on the highway in Winslow, Arkansas, and had twice as many square feet, with only wood heat, and several acres of rough land around it. I might not have sold that place had I been prescient, for the highway has been re-routed and that land now sits on a scenic road, and no doubt has increased in value from the price I got for it.

My present home sits in one of the worst school districts in the country, and certainly, in the state. It has its faults. It posed insurmountable challenges for my former husband, bound as he was in a wheelchair that could not traverse to the second floor nor down to the basement. It presents different but equally annoying challenges for my present husband, with its tiny closets, and its dearth of living space, and its cussed location under the path of Life Flight's helicopters and the broad sweep of the police department's search lights.

And yet, I loathe to contemplate surrendering my ownership of this bungalow. I've resisted doing so for years, even though I realize there would be advantages to selling. I am a nester by nature. I shudder as I contemplate the homes leveled by the tornadoes, hurricanes and floods around our country and the world. I scroll over the New York Times before-and-after depictions, and my heart sinks. How could you stand to lose your home like this? Losing your spouse, or child, or parent, or friend, or neighbor would be far worse, I know. But there is a special sort of terror that overtakes me at the thought of losing my home.

I remember, though, a friend once telling me that she would be happy with her lover if they lived in a cardboard box on a New York City street corner. She found her home in his embrace. She needed only a place to nestle with him, be it a hovel or a mansion, or a nondescript apartment with one room and a galley kitchen.

The victims of the Joplin tornado lament the loss of photographs, and wedding rings, and the devastating loss of 134 lives. They stand, in footage on the news, and contemplate the rubble of their houses, and then, turn away, gazing fiercely into the camera, and give thanks for their continued existence, and the safety of their children.

My fifty-five years have brought me to this truth: I place my hand in that of one whom I love, and I step into the breach. The label on my clothes is unimportant. The texture of the walls around me has no relevance. The softness or hardness of the surface underfoot does not affect me. I feel the caress of the morning breeze, and close my eyes. I could be on a balcony overlooking a village in Spain; I could be, just as easily, outside a cabin in Idaho. The warmth in my belly tells me that I have been fed, and the slight tingle on my lips lingers from my husband's kiss, tendered as he left this morning, canvas bag slung over his shoulder. These sensations sustain me.

The horn has finally stopped. Presumably, its sheepish owner awakened and came outside to silence it. The sun has risen a few more notches overhead, warming the morning air. I hear a lawn mower in the distance, and the gleeful chirping of the baby jays who were born in our gutter and now are learning to fly, though we fear the one who catapulted out of the nest last week did not make it back to safety despite our encouragement. The knot in my shoulder eases, just a bit, as I think about the day ahead of me. There is work to be done, and chores to be tackled.

But before I undertake these responsibilities, I intend to brew another pot of coffee, and talk to my son about the rock festival he plans to attend next week, far away from here, in Tennessee, where all kinds of danger await, mingled with an equal measure of potential joy.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 27 May 2011

2011-05-28T06:27:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

An odd phenomenon has occurred several times in recent days. I have found myself lapsing into inexplicable tears while reading about someone killed in the tornado in Joplin. A husband shielding his wife; a mother dying with a child in her arms, its lifeless body clutched against her breast. The thought of these tragedies stabs into my heart, though I imagine it resembles a mere splinter compared with the rending of the hearts of those who cherished them.

I stood in a neighbor's yard when a tornado touched down, when I was five or six. The father of that household ran out into the melee and scooped my small frame into his arms as their sliding board flew away, just after the tree in our backyard had been torn from the earth. I know what a small funnel cloud can do, and I see the devastation in the before-and-after photos so I am not left to imagine the impact of the largest and most deadly of them. My breath catches; I drop the newspaper, and tears well in my eyes.

Next to the pictures of those whose lives ended last week in Joplin, I find a reference to the resolution of several competitions on television -- shows that I do not watch, and have never seen -- American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and so forth. I cannot acknowledge the virtue of shows such as this, even as a distraction, though I am known to watch entertainment just as pallid, such as Top Chef and Project Runway. But even I know better than to find such pablum newsworthy in the face of tragic loss. Who cares? I ask myself. Who cares who won this shlock? But someone must.

The world keeps turning. My cases march into fruition; my son ages another day. The balance in my bank account drops at an alarming rate; but my mortgage also dwindles. Three weeks have passed since I broke my wrist; nearly twenty years have slipped away since I first heard my child laughing, under the glaring lights of the delivery room. Fourteen years since my brother died. Twenty-six since we lost my mother.

But only seven days since the lives of over two hundred people ended on the day after the date that an old California man had predicted thousands of faithful would be borne aloft. One week, in which the lives of scores of survivors have stood still while rubble was searched. The collective breath of a nation held; the collective head of a community bowed.

My little world still dances on its axis. I have not lost anyone of recent years; and the three smiling children of this blended family bounce through the summer with glee. Their grades please us; their laughter soothes us; their slightly patronizing air amuses us. We hold them close. We know that we have been incredibly fortunate, to come unscathed, thus far, through the spring of 2011, when others did not fare as well, and now grieve.

One child stayed the night where he spent the evening; another watched television until the wee hours, then rose in time for his Saturday shift. The third has her own orbit, with which our days occasionally intersect. And I, in the last third of my life, can only feel grateful that I was not in Joplin, Afghanistan, Reading, or Iraq this week, and that none of them was. For those who were, I shed some tears, and made a modest contribution to help the efforts of Heart to Heart. I feel inadequate, I feel blessed, and I feel that somehow, somewhere, I should find or make an opportunity to do more.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 21 May 2011

2011-05-21T06:59:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

The world has not yet ended, so perhaps I have time for one short reflection on my life. I say "short" because I find it difficult to type with a splint encasing my left hand. Yes, folks, all those cautionary tales have come true: I did fall, and I did break my wrist, and all those head-shakers and nay-sayers can now sigh and intone, We told you so!

Every year, at my annual visit to the neurologist, he cautions that I should consider a cane or a walker. I thank him for the suggestion, and remind him of the best advice my mother gave me, which was, "If you walk every day of your life, you will be able to walk every day of your life." I mention, too, that I already have two legs that do not properly communicate with my brain, and the addition of a third just causes a third more confusion (assuming my math skills serve me). He smiles, an enigmatic smile that I choose to interpret as mild amusement, and we part, to reconvene and dance the same dance in twelve months.

My current injury hardly rises to the level of exciting. I took a spill after stepping on a piece of yard debris sitting at the bottom of my front stairs. I felt my body slice through the air and, as usual, thought only of protecting my head and my artificial joint. I landed on my outstretched left hand. Fortunately, I have a thin, small body, and the resultant crack is not "displaced" nor did it extend into the joint. Because I broke my non-dominant hand, I did not have to have a cast.

I think my most glamorous break resulted from doing the chicken dance at my first wedding in 1987. If you are unfamiliar with the chicken dance, imagine a circle of intoxicated hippies in the middle of which each, in turn, must imitate a chicken while the others clap and march first to the right and then to the left. By the time I got to the doctor in Little Rock after my Newton County wedding, my foot had swelled far beyond the capacity of any of my shoes. That ortho guy scratched his head as he showed me the X-Ray, remarking that my foot showed signs of prior breaks. He asked, "Didn't you ever feel any pain that must surely have accompanied these old injuries?" I shrugged. Pain? A Jewish woman I knew back in my misspent youth would say, "Mah nishtanah ha-lahylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-layloht, mi-kol ha-layloht?", which apparently means, "Why should today be different?"

I owe my artificial knee to a crazed Iranian in a VW Scirroco who couldn't see me because of the glare of the setting sun. He struck me from the left, and I flew higher than the second story of what was then the Tivoli Theatre in Westport. Summer Shipp, now tragically deceased but who owned the Tivoli in 1982, called the police as I sailed past her window. I swear I saw an angel, high above Westport Road, who urged me back down with a gentle push of her heavenly hand. It's not time, she said. I hit the VW's hood, then cracked its windshield with my right knee, shattering the entire leg. Twenty years later the knee surrendered its struggle to endure, and now I have plastic and metal that sets off airport alarms.

But not one drop of blood spilled on the hard asphalt that day, and I lived to make jokes about losing a contact and admonishing bystanders not to carry me to the sidewalk by asking -- Don't you people watch TV? You never move anyone who might have a neck injury!!!

My ankle broke in a horrible accident involving the joystick of an electric wheelchair and generally excessive alcohol consumption. The emergency room didn't catch the break at first, but my diligent doctor did. Those poor little feet had all their toes broken years before that, in a freak spill out in my backyard caused by a mischievous gutter hiding in a bank of snow. My son, aged three at the time, walked down the street to get the neighbor who carried me into the house. And in 2007, I fell going into the Minnesota state fair, resulting in a suspicious chip at the end of my elbow and a painfully dislocated shoulder.

As my husband set out this morning to make the drive to Greencastle, Indiana, to fetch the prodigal son, I tightened the Velcro straps on my splint and cautioned him to drive with care. In addition to my vehicle, of which I am fond, he'll be transporting the two beings most precious to me in this world. He smiled -- not entirely sure, perhaps, of which worried me more: the thought of having to replace the car, or the thought of losing my husband and only born-to-me child. He knows better; but my St. Louis-style humor still occasionally baffles him.

It's been a long nine months, without my son but with a new husband and a new young person barreling in and out of the house with raucous good humor and bursts of song in his beautiful voice. A confident young woman serves as another borrowed daughter, this time with a solid legally recognized connection to match the bond of love. The summer stretches before me. I check over my shoulder, and see that my guardian angel remains watchful. She winks, raises a heavenly cup of Joe, and gives me a little salute.

God is, indeed, in his Heaven, and all is, indeed, right with the world.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 14 May 2011

2011-05-14T07:53:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

Our schizophrenic weather staggered back into winter this morning, though the Saturday morning tennis players wore their customary white shorts as they whistled their way to their cars and wandered off, leaving me to shiver and huddle over a chilling cup of bad coffee. Weak light streams into my bedroom through the tilted slats of the blinds, falling onto the faded, tangled black lace of my grandmother's shawl.

The sight of this shawl reminds me of the time that I first wore it, at a party given by me and my college roommates. We all wore black lace dresses and heavy jewelry, old Hollywood hair-styles and shiny sling-back sandals. We posed for our portrait on the stairway to the upstairs of our Laclede Town townhouse, heads thrown back, varying degrees of vibrancy on our faces. I stand on the bottom step, in a tea-length dress with a wide skirt, capped sleeves and scooped neckline. I am not smiling; but my eyes squarely caught the camera's lens. I cannot tell what I was thinking.

At the end of that party, the three of us pushed the chairs back against the walls. I listlessly vacuumed crumbs from the carpet while someone carried beer cans and Margarita glasses to the kitchen. Outside, the night air began to yield to the rising sun, and the first glimmer of Sunday morning noises rose from the street -- the heavy ramble of the newspaper truck, a last, desperate siren's wail, the beckoning of a church bell. When we had finished cleaning, we shed our finery in favor of flannel, and crawled into our respective beds, with curtains drawn against the brightness of the morning light.

I awakened that day long after noon, though the house remained silent and my roommates' doors still had not opened. I softly padded down the stairs, and pulled the coffee-maker from its cubby under a cabinet. As I waited for the brewing process to be completed, I pushed the furniture back into its customary configuration.

With my coffee clutched closely to my chest, I slid the patio doors open, and stepped outside. The vague chill of a spring afternoon kissed my face and I closed my eyes, sipping coffee, receiving the grace of the wind's caress.

A woman's voice startled me, and I nearly dropped my mug. You all had one heck of a party last night, she said, softly. I turned towards the patio next to ours, regarding the slender form of my neighbor, who sat on a low stool with a small child leaning against her body. We had not met. When the three of us had rented our place, the entire row had been unoccupied. I didn't know anybody lived there now, I told the woman. I'm sorry; did we disturb you?

She turned away, wrapping one arm around the child's small frame, gazing across her patio to the abutting edge of the yards behind ours. She shrugged. Not really, she admitted. This one don't sleep too good, since his daddy left.

I set my cup down on the small metal table between our two lawn chairs. Do you want some coffee, I asked the woman, and when she accepted, I stepped into the kitchen and then returned with a mug for her, and a glass of juice for her son. She took both with a tiny nod and the briefest of smiles below her somber eyes. I sat down on the chair closest to her and the boy, and for a few minutes, no one spoke.

The child broke the uneasy silence. This is good, he whispered, and his mother's body jerked, just briefly, as though in fear. Thank you, honey, I offered, putting as much sincerity into my reply as I could. Silence resumed.

When the little boy had consumed all of his orange juice, he slid from between his mother's bony knees and handed his glass to me. Thank you for my breakfast, he said, solemnly, carefully, before returning to the woman's side.

My neighbor rose, then, and placed her empty coffee cup beside mine on the table. She swung the boy high into her arms, and spared me another small bend of her head. Without further comment, she carried her son into her own house. As the door slid closed, before the beige drapes blocked my view, I glimpsed a scattering of cardboard boxes, a few bulging black trash bags, and a tiny, lonely pile of broken toys.

From within my apartment, I heard sounds of my roommates rummaging in our kitchen. One called to the other as they debated whether they would have breakfast or dinner. Someone spoke to me, and I pulled my gaze away from the wrinkled expanse of fabric covering the neighbor's patio door. Coming! I responded, and hauled myself up from the chair, scooping all three cups from the table, tossing a little cold coffee onto the bare ground between our patio and the one next door.

From time to time, over the next few months, I would see the woman leaving for work and bid her good morning. The child walked beside her, usually with a tiny backpack settled between his shoulder blades, and a grimy stuffed bear held in the crook of his arm. Neither of them spoke to me in those brief encounters, although the child often let his eyes slip sideways to meet mine, and occasionally he flashed a hurried, radiant smile, to let me know that he still remembered the taste of the cold, sweet juice.

We broke housekeeping at the end of the school year. I moved out last, and whatever man I was dating at the time hauled my belongings for me, backing his pick-up truck as close to the entry of the apartment as he could. We loaded it with an odd assortment of storage containers and suitcases, the bookshelf my great-grandfather made, my old bed frame, and a couple of boxes of books. We bundled the last of the rubbish to be taken to the dumpster. As we finished cleaning, I noticed that the front door of the town house next to ours stood open. I stepped across to the stoop, and peered into the living room.

It took a few minute to realize that the place was entirely empty, with no sign of the woman or her son. No boxes, no bags, no broken toys. No furniture. Nothing. I stood, surveying the barren look of the place, astonished that I could have been as oblivious to their departure as I had been to their initial arrival.

After a few minutes, my boyfriend honked the horn, impatient to get the load to my new apartment before sundown. I shrugged, to no one in particular, and closed the doors of both houses, making sure the locks clicked. Then I left, without a backwards glance.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 07 May 2011

2011-05-07T07:12:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

Danger alerts sound outside: dogs bark, birds start a frantic twittering. Intruders pass -- a young mother with a stroller; a prissy little poodle, walked by a broad-shouldered man with a bald head. I don't look out the window, but I recognize the noise made by the three dogs at the side of our house -- mine and the neighbors' two -- and I imagine the morning brigade. Saturday in Brookside. I continue reading my paper, drinking my coffee, listening with half an ear to the soundtrack of my life.

I'm rushing myself a bit; I'm distracted by the knowledge that the number of coffee cups accumulated on the floor of my Saturn has started to effect my gas mileage, as has the heavy layer of road dirt on its exterior. I cannot think of any more excuses for avoiding this chore, so I'll grab a pair of jeans and my heavy shoes, and spend a half hour pumping quarters into the do-it-yourself car wash, holding the heavy wand with my right hand, babying my left wrist which still smarts from a recent sprain.

I used to take better care of my vehicles. My first car shone with endless rounds of wax that I rubbed into its British Racing Green surface. An MG Midget, in which I felt chic and fashionable. In a photograph album somewhere, in a box, in my basement, my eighteen-year-old self gazes out from its driver's seat. The top is folded back; the wind, doubtless, plays on my face. I wear shades in the picture, back in the days when I could still correct my vision with contact lenses -- the hard kind, for which one often had to search on one's hands and knees, on the tiled floor of the bathroom. In that decades-old snapshot, I have a bandanna tied over my tangle of long, curly hair and I wear a blue-jean jacket. I've got my arm dangling over the door, the other hand touching the steering wheel, and a broad smile widens my mouth.

The summer after my second year of college, I dated a police officer who worked second shift, ending his duty after eleven o'clock, when he would rap on my apartment door after parking his vehicle in the underground garage of my building. On one such night, he arrived well after midnight, and as I opened the door, he remarked, When I saw your car wasn't there, I figured you got tired of waiting and went out with somebody else. I shuddered as he spoke the words, and pushed past him, running down the interior stairwell, bursting through the garage entrance, standing, shocked, in front of my assigned space, in which I had parked my car earlier that evening.

My friend came up behind me, softly, putting his hand on my arm. I'll call it in, he said. I nodded, without speaking.

They found the car, stripped of its wiring, several miles from my apartment. My brothers installed a fuel-line kill switch when they replaced the wiring harness. Periodically, I would come down and discover it had been taken again. I would set out walking, dangling the keys, and find it a block or two away, the farthest it could be driven on the gas left in the line. Hot-wired, taken, and then abandoned.

I burned the clutch out on that MG three times before I finally gave it to my brother and bought a Chevy Nova from my cousin Angela. I took the Nova with me to Kansas City, when I moved here in 1980 for law school. The first summer, its carburetor rebelled and the car kept stalling; the guys at the Montgomery Ward Auto Center couldn't figure out what was wrong. I bought a carburetor rebuild kit and a Polaroid camera. I took the thing apart in the parking lot at the shopping center, piece by piece, photographing it as I went. Then I rebuilt it, using the line of pictures as my guide. When I finished, the vehicle started on the first try, and I wiped my hands, threw away the trash, and went home.

I sold that Nova for more than I had paid for it, and bought a big Oldsmobile which talked to me. The door is ajar, it said, in an insipid female voice. Fasten your seat belt, she admonished me. Oh, shut up, I took to telling her, before I figured out which fuse ran her and pulled it to silence her. The transmission went out on the Olds and she went for scrap, just before the accident which crushed my leg and netted me enough from my Uninsured Motorist provision to buy my first new car, a Nissan Sentra. I drove that little wagon until 1990, then gave it to a law student who worked for my firm in Fayetteville. I bought an old Audi with a sunroof until I drove until I returned to Kansas City to manage a Congressional campaign and had to dump the German car to appease the UAW contingent.

In the last decade, I've had three Buick Centuries, a small Saturn with manually operated windows, and a Chevy Blazer that introduced me to the world of SUV drivers, a world that just seems safer. Now I drive a Vue, and I'm hoping to get a sweet new Buick Enclave some day.

I can step through my life on the roofs of the cars that I have owned. I never expected to care about something so seemingly trivial, but I find that I am nostalgic for the little MG Midget with its classic lines and traditional paint job. I long to reclaim the casual air with which I shifted gears, as I accelerated into third on the highway between my mother's home in North St. Louis County and the dingy streets of the city where I lived. I have studied the face of the girl in the photo, her head thrown back, her eyes shielded but surely wild with laughter, her smile radiant. I do not know where she went, that girl; and I wonder what I have in common with her.

The house has assumed a deserted air with the departure of most of its human occupants. The cat yowls for water, no doubt standing on the edge of the sink in the downstairs bathroom. I tear my gaze back to the present, and swallow the last cold coffee. I rise from my chair, and the world shifts to a forward spin, while outside my home, the barking of my dog diminishes, and the startled birds fall silent.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 30 April 2011

2011-04-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

A vague ache clings to the spot between my shoulder blades where I store stress. I spent Friday in court, listening to a pair of parents, who formerly loved one another, present their differing views on where the child should reside, and who should control the major decisions in her life. That I represent one of the two gives little comfort; the mere fact of the fight still saddens me. Not even the collapse of the other parent's carefully scripted lies, which came, I note, before she left the stand, unclenched my tightened jaw.

I hear the unmistakable noises of a burgeoning spring, rising above the soft whirring of the air filter in the living room. A determined bird describes its pleasure with the glorious morning; the neighbor's dog sounds reveille. Cars lumber over some debris in the street; steel plates have vanished from our landscape, but litter still occasionally accumulates in the dips and cracks of the aging asphalt. Morning in the city; day 120.

A thousand days ago, a thousand times a thousand, more maybe -- another morning, on a balcony above a dirtier street in a noisier city. I sat on a webbed aluminum rocker, gazing down at a bunch of grubby, cheerful boys kicking something unrecognizable between the two rows of parked cars on the narrow road. Mothers occasionally leaned from their own balconies, cigarettes in hand, admonishing their sons with little enthusiasm and not much result.

My college semester had ended with no fanfare. Memorial Day loomed, and my only plans held no appeal: Yet another backyard barbecue at my parents' home, to which I would arrive late, and from which I would depart early. I clung to the workaday world with glum determination. I held several part-time jobs and one which could have been full-time, had I given it much thought. The three months between my restless contemplation of that late-spring morning and the frantic day of enrollment for the fall semester weighed heavily on my mind.

The voices of neighbor women rose from the balcony below mine. Harsh cackles followed low murmuring. I cast a glance back down to their children, who seemed to range in age from three to thirteen. I could see no little girls, but assumed that some must be lurking on the sidewalk, doing whatever little girls do, in the morning, on Saturday, when the local stations' cartoon fare has played itself out, and impatient mothers insist that they take themselves outside.

Some draw to self-destruction got me up from the chair and pulled me down the inner stairwell of my apartment building, and out the front door. Three faces turned towards the sound of my clumsy exit, and six eyes shifted away, seeking each other before closing, briefly. One of the women took a long, disinterested draw on her cigarette. Another set her coffee cup down on the porch rail, and looked toward the street. Stephen, goddammit, get out of the way of that car, you'll get yourself killed, she hollered, as an old Buick tried to wend its way through the kickball game. None of the players altered his stride. She turned away with less concern than she had held in her rough voice and caught me staring at her. What's your beef, she snapped.

Nothing at all, I assured her, hurrying down the steps to my car. Too late, I realized that I didn't have my purse or keys. I turned back to the building, gazing with confusion, maybe, or entreaty, at the women on the porch. They laughed. I hadn't fooled them. I ran back upstairs, and when I found myself safely in my living room, I shut the French doors that blocked out the noise of their amusement.

As the spring wore out, and yielded to summer, the women's gatherings on the porch below mine became more frequent and lasted longer. Their children and I shared a schedule: Nine months in school; three months out; and the time between discharge and recommencement offered too much liberty. The children roamed further and further from their mothers' lazy domain, straying north to the Park, and south to a little store which sold candy and single-bottle beer in equal measures.

Occasionally, one of the women would hoist her frame from the sunken porch chairs and bellow over the railing, and a bunch of kids would trickle into the scruffy yard, gathering on the cracked cement of the sidewalk that led into the building. When enough of them had gathered, they would get Velveeta sandwiches, or boiled hot dogs on soft white buns. The kids chewed their food where they stood, and sipped Kool-Aid from Dixie cups, before swiping a hand across their catsup-smeared faces, and scattering back out into heat of the afternoon.

On a Saturday night, one of many that summer when I had nothing better to do but show my stupidity, I ventured down to the street. The women had pulled their chairs out onto the sidewalk that ran the length of the street. Someone had jacked open the fire hydrant, and the children of the block ran through the heavy stream of water, pushing each other, lowering their faces to the gush, and screaming gleefully. None of them wore shoes, and most of the boys had discarded their shirts.

I hauled a cold six-pack of diet cola down with me, which I offered to my neighbors. None of them accepted, but one gestured to an empty chair. Sit yourself on down there, she said. I did so, and then I told them my name, and tried to pay attention as they each said theirs.

The conversation didn't go much further for a while. A child would occasionally run towards us, and the women would protest the spray of water that drifted their way in the wake of the child's passage. They smoked, and drank Budweiser, and periodically waved, without much hope, at the rising heat of June. I searched my mind for something to say, and drank soda.

After longer than I care to sit in uncompanionable silence, one of the women directed a question at me. You ain't married, are you?

I thought about lying. But I had lived there for a couple of months without so much as an overnight boyfriend presenting himself at the end of a date, so I didn't think I'd convince anyone. I admitted the fact. They laughed, and the weight of their amusement hung in the air. It seemed to say everything.

The woman, though, thought more should be noted. You're in college, ain't you? It sounded like an accusation. When I agreed that I was, she nodded -- a short, curt nod, the kind you might give if you were acknowledging a convicted felon sitting next to you in jail greens or a bunch of bugs you knew haunted your kitchen. A certain unmistakable wariness arose between me and the women. I began to reconsider my decision to join their group, and shifted in the chair.

Just then, a car slid to the curb, long, low and noiseless. A man climbed from the driver's seat, shrugging himself into a standing position, unfolding his length with an air of self-possession. I had never seen any of the husbands, and I took this to be one of them.

On my left, a woman chuckled. Don't get no ideas girl, she said. My head snapped towards her, and a slow blush rose in my face. I don't know what you're talking about, I told her. The idea that I might be gazing on her spouse with something like lust at first amused her though it shocked me. I studied the man as he strode down to their building without so much as a grunt in our direction. I returned my attention to the woman, and told her that I had no interest in her husband.

My disavowal worsened the situation. What? she demanded. You think you're better than him? You got no man of your own, you gotta work day and night to pay the rent on your cracker-jack apartment, and you got the nerve to turn your nose up at a good man what brings his pay to me and the kids, and works damn hard to do it?

Her companions moved closer to her, shutting me out from their circle. They stared at me, a solid wall of anger. I took in the lines and pits of their faces, the sharp angles of their thinness, the taughtness of their cut-off shorts and the deep plunges of their summer tops. No, no, I stuttered. I wasn't thinking anything like that, I really wasn't.

The women did not break their ranks. The wronged wife turned a corner in her fury and held on. What, you think you're so high and mighty that you could handle him better than I do? You ever seen a man come home so drunk and tired, that he can't get off the toilet or pull his head from between his legs? Retching on the floor, gorging out the beer he filled his belly with after grubbing all day, then climb in bed next to you and want what he thinks is his due? Huh? You think you could live like that? You think we got it easy?

Her venom blasted me, the charge of her hatred for whatever I represented to her. I had no chance to tell her that none of that was true, that I just got lonely and wanted a little company. I had not meant to start a war. I did not want to wage a referendum on the relative merits of our lives. I did not expect that I could win that battle, nor did I believe that she would be assuaged by my defeat.

I rose so quickly that the lawn chair on which I had been sitting collapsed backwards. The women stood, too, surrounding the one whose husband had gone unknowing into their apartment, where he probably pulled a beer from the refrigerator and flopped, still clueless, into a cracked vinyl Lazy-Boy recliner. Out on the street, I stumbled away from the wives of my street, retreating into my apartment, into the solace of my middle-class existence.

Last night, as my husband and I drove through the streets of a neighborhood from which his family comes, where they no longer live, and where I have never aspired to live, I thought about those women. I drew a measured glance across the lawns which stretched a distance that two or three houses in my neighborhood could occupy, and over the tall, locked gates that stood between the grand, ugly houses and the rest of the world.

After our evening drive, we parked in front of my bungalow, and I climbed out of the passenger street. In the dim light, I reflected on the rise of my home's roof, and the pitch of its beautiful porch. I let my eyes linger on the Japanese maple, with its delicate leaves swaying in the evening breeze. I reached for my husband's hand, and walked toward our home, with the satisfaction that comes with knowing that a journey has brought me to my proper place.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 23 April 2011

2011-04-23T06:56:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

A wave of color catches my attention each time I turn my head. I recently acquired a temporary prism on my right glasses lens, which raised the number of corrective prisms from 3 to 9. As a consequence, I feel as though I have consumed just enough intoxicating beverages to be tipsy, feeling faintly nauseous; and the world shimmies.

Growing old might well surpass the alternative in desirability, but not because of how easy I find it. Ah, life.

Spring surrounds me, with its nippy air, and the bright, verdant expanse of lawn. The Japanese maple raises its delicate tendrils towards the pale stretch of the clean sky. My world shakes itself, rising from the fog of hibernation.

In recent conversations, I have had to confront the coming religious holiday and this morning, as it looms, I discover that I have fewer ties to Christianity than I thought possible. In the past, I have been able to ignore the religious celebrations and focus on honoring the turning of the seasons and our commitment to a fresh start. But now, I have married into the Episcopal faith, and although my husband goes to church only for the big days -- Christmas, Easter -- and when he appears on the usher schedule, still, the inevitable confrontation occurs. I am not a Christian, I remind him, not as gently as I might have. He blames Catholicism for my corruption,and he might be right. Still, re-conversion is unlikely. It troubles him, I think; nonetheless, I shudder at the thought of embracing his faith with the overtones of hypocrisy. To keep the peace, I will sit in church beside his mother, and browse through the Book of Common Prayer, and quietly talk to God, but the rituals will not affect me. It cannot be helped; so I will make the most of it, and allow myself the luxury of an hour in quiet mediation.

I think about my mother's last Easter. Cold gripped St. Louis. Her backyard still looked barren, with only a few brave flowers nudging themselves above the frost line. She had lost her hair to chemotherapy, and wore a tri-corner scarf over the smoothness of her skull, perhaps to keep out the cold, perhaps to save her grandchildren from the fright of her grim appearance. She sat on a park bench and watched the children hunt for eggs -- Lisa, Rick and Cate, in their church clothes, with serious looks as they concentrated on the search. I sat beside my mother and held her hand from time to time. I caught her glancing sideways with annoyance, and let her fingers slip from my grasp.

Later that day, after my siblings had helped to wash the dishes, and my mother and I sat at the breakfast room table in the quiet of the empty house, my mother searched my face with her warm brown eyes. Not finding an answer, she inquired, in gentle tones, if anything was wrong. Oh, not much, I replied. Only that my mother is dying, that's no big deal. I pushed back my chair and snatched at our tea cups, moving without grace into the kitchen while she sat, alone, in the darkening room. I might as well have slapped her face.

I came back and lowered myself into the chair, and looked down at her worn hands, resting on the surface of the wooden table. She moved, slightly, slowly until one of her fingers rested on my arm. The weight of her illness hung in the chilly air of the evening, in the silence which surrounded us. I fidgeted beneath her gaze, resisting the comfort that she wanted me to take from her own acceptance of her fate. Easter Sunday, 1985, and I was not quite 30. My mother would not see her next birthday, and my boyfriend and I would end our relationship a few days after her funeral. He only stayed for my sake, to help me through; and by Christmas, my grandfather would have died, and I would have slipped into a pattern of drinking, carousing, and forgetting to go to work.

I don't know if she foresaw my decline in that moment. She reached further over, to place her hand on my shoulder. It's going to be okay, she told me, in the soft tones that only a mother can use. But I did not believe her, and I slumped against the chair, falling into my misery, while the sun set outside my childhood home, and my father watched television in the living room.

The house around me has grown quiet. My stepson trundled off to work, and his father, just behind him, to his weekly tennis game. In a little while, I will start to clean the house. I will send the dog out into the yard, where clumps of grass surround the wild violets. I've bought good chocolate, and I have chosen a dress to wear to church tomorrow. There is a slight chill in the air, but spring has taken hold, with a stubborn, cheerful insistence that I might do well to emulate.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 16 April 2011

2011-04-16T07:07:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

Beside me at the window stands an antique rocker, draped with the scarves and shawls with which I often warm myself when sitting, peacefully, on the pillow that pads its worn seat. The shock of silver, mauve and gold fabric mingles and shimmers in the pale, determined light of a sun that refuses to concede to the cold of the rain's greater force. I see the overgrown hedges on the back fence of my neighbor's yard dancing against the wind's breath. Spring struggles to assert itself. Cold lingers.

I've spent the last two days in trial in a juvenile court matter involving my client's grandsons and their drug-addicted parents. She has no explanation for how the little ones came to test positive while in her custody but visiting their parents under the auspices of the state's workers. The juvenile officer wants to apply a res ipsa loquitor reasoning to circumvent her "clear, cogent and convincing" burden. Meanwhile, the guardian ad litem, whose appalling lack of effort would have gotten me removed, draws a county paycheck and takes cheap potshots at the defense lawyers, mainly me. Two days of being fodder for his snickering degenerated into my taking an uncharacteristic jab at the social worker's lawyer, when he rehabilitated her by feeding her leading questions that directly contradicted her earlier responses, to which pablum she responded with automatic affirmative answers, without thought, wanting only to please. The charade prompted me to snap, and I said, loud enough to be heard across the room but not, thankfully, on the bench: Uh, oh, she left the reservation to tell the truth, and he's got to rein her back in.

Not nice, I knew. But when I later apologized to the Court, I owned the faux paus, though stating, on the record, that though lamentable and discourteous, the sentiment was sincerely felt when said. The judge, with whom I have no prior personal relationship, forgave me and admonished all counsel to stop their sniping.

I rushed out of the unexpected second day of trial to dinner at my in-laws, though I wished that I could have taken a long, hot shower first, to cleanse myself of the detritus of Juvenile Court. At the start of yesterday's proceedings, when only I and the first witness, a scientist returning to conclude his testimony, sat in the courtroom, I mused out loud that the day had promise since I had awakened on the right of the grass. Really, I continued, any day I wake up is a good day in the making. And every time I come to Juvenile Court, I remind myself that I managed to navigate my son's childhood without having to appear as a litigant here instead of an attorney.

A glance at the calendar reminds me that it is my sister's birthday. I dial her cell phone, and sing the birthday song into her voice mail in flat but lusty tones. She turns 61 today. I've told her, every year since I can remember with increasing glee, that she will always be five years older than I am. This obvious truth delights me more and more as we age. I am not yet sixty; she will never be less. I am still young; she is middle-aged. As I acknowledge middle-age, she concedes to growing old. I will always be Lucille and Richard's baby girl, and she will always be the sophisticated one who wore make-up long before I did and taught me how to shave my legs. She will forever be the big sister who shared her pretty rock with me, the one embedded in the newly poured concrete of our driveway that glistened after a rainstorm. When we move beyond the counting, beyond caring about the numbers, I will still be younger, and we will both still giggle when I remind her of it.

Meanwhile, the oldest daughter in my family-by-choice celebrates her second child's fifth birthday today, and my new husband and I plan to be in attendance. The pages of my calendar flutter; the stack of keeping days grows tall and heavy. I close my eyes to summon memories of my own childhood. Did I ever have a birthday party? I recall a cake after supper,with ice cream and presents, while my siblings clustered around me. I don't remember anything more; nor do I remember that it felt deficient at the time. The effort to recall signifies that I have forgiven my parents any failings that might have scarred me, and that the scars, which long festered, have finally healed.

As I sat at counsel table these last two days, I realized that my own family would have been hauled into juvenile court had such things existed in their present configuration five decades ago. I've wasted too many otherwise decent paragraphs describing the events which would have marked us as children in need of care, and too few remembering the drives to the Johnson Shut-Ins, the bunny-shaped Easter cakes, and the magic glistening of our tinsel-covered Christmas trees. The trials of the past fade. I am left to savor the endless antics of the eight Corleys, and the deep, unassailable warmth that I felt when my sister Joyce came home from her dates, and sat on a twelve-year-old's bed, speaking in delightful whispers about the unfathomable world of boys, which I could not wait to enter.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 09 April 2011

2011-04-09T07:13:00.001-07:00

Good morning,

My home has settled into a routine of comings and goings with its two new members. Saturday morning rings with vibrancy, rather than wearing a thin veil of solitary calm. One occupant has taken his seventeen-year-old frame off to his part-time job; another moves about the kitchen in preparation for Saturday tennis. The crotchety old single lady morphed into a contented married maven since last she sat to cogitate over the machinations of her life. The coffee still steams in the same cup, but the pot depletes more quickly now, and we mildly bicker over the true cause of the near-government-shut-down behind the raised folds of our respective newspapers -- mine the local rag, his the Wall Street Journal.

I find myself curiously focused on the present rather than the past. Time twists another click to the right, and I am one step closer to old age. The sudden presence in my home of a high school junior suggests that I can forestall the empty-nest syndrome for an extra year; and the acquisition of aging in-laws gives a happy contrast that improves my outlook. I am no longer the oldest member of my little family. I have context.

My breath catches as I review pictures of the wedding, mostly at the sight of my own son, standing eight inches taller than me, with his broad shoulders and easy smile. I hear a fiddle in the background and wonder where did my little boy go? Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. The days marched majestically, passing me on a swiftly moving conveyor belt. I expected to hold fast to his youth as I had not held onto my own, but it, too, eluded me. Now his name regularly appears on the Dean's list, and he grapples with impractical urgings to make music and write stories. I can only hope he will not sacrifice his dreams as I did mine.

We spent our honeymoon in New Orleans. I had not visited that city, except to argue before the Court of Appeals, since my early 20s. My new husband had only been to the city briefly, on business, and had not experienced its charming side. We chose New Orleans in part because we felt that New Orleanians needed our tourist dollars, and in part to have the experience of new discovery as we began our life together.

It did not disappoint. Oh, the hotel did not rise to our expectations -- and, you know me well: I have already negotiated a partial credit and a coupon for a free night, which we will use to celebrate our anniversary next year. And yes, the weather groused a bit: Torrential rain on the day we drove to Baton Rouge, and cool, damp evenings. But on balance, the city presented as the Grande Dame we expected.

We stood in line for a chance to eat hot beignets and drink chicory coffee at the Cafe DuMonde. We scoured the French Market to find "that guy -- Smoky" who sold me a blues harmonica for my musician son. I lit a candle at the St. Louis Cathedral, dipping to genuflect in the aisle, demonstrating to a hushed husband that my recovering Catholic roots still run deep. We rode the trolley; we ate raw oysters; we bit into juicy po'boys of fried clams and soft shell crab. I gamely trudged a mile or so back to our hotel on our first day; he gently helped me slide out of shoes that slightly pinched my little misshaped feet. The Blackberry clicked picture after picture, and his digital camera too: One of these days, we will locate the cable that will allow us to upload the pictures, and we will marvel over my perfect shot of the row upon row of above-ground, buried parishioners, among whom I am sure my great-grandfather sleeps.

A little known fact about me: I am a shameless Food Network junkie. Through hours of watching Rachel Ray, I kept my son from having to survive on Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and endless pots of turkey spaghetti. While learning to cook from the Network's many thoughtful chefs, I developed an unabashed crush on Chef John Besh, intensified by his tireless efforts to help his neighbors and the entire Crescent City after Hurricane Katrina.

For six weeks before our wedding and honeymoon, I hammered on the Internet trying to get reservations at Chef Besh's flagship restaurant, August. I finally got them for the evening and time that I preferred: Thursday, the second-last night of our stay, 7:00 p.m. I could not wait.

That afternoon, at the end of a day in which we took a driving tour, my husband decided that we should see the Ninth Ward. With rudimentary directions from the inadequately staffed hotel concierge, and a skeletal map from Hertz, we drove in the general direction that the irritating GPS lady thought should take us to the most seriously Katrina-impacted area of the city.

As we descended down into the Ninth Ward, it first struck me as an anti-climax. The lady at the visitors center had commented, "Of course, there is nothing left to see," suggesting to us that the entire area had been flattened. But we both recalled television footage of houses being rebuilt, crews volunteering, debris being shoveled into dumpsters. So we persisted.

And then, we saw. On either side of us, row upon row of small, scarred dwellings. The siding still peeled away; the windows boarded or simply left broken, raw, torn. Yards denuded. The quiet devastation. The abandoned, failed efforts to heal.

Every so often, we saw a home with new paint, glass refitted, curtains hung. A child jumped from a school bus into the arms of a waiting father. Down one deserted row of battered homes, a witch ditch stood, surrounded by a cheerful group of yellow hard-hats. My numbers-crunching husband estimated that about twenty-five percent of the houses in the area had been reclaimed, and sat in various stages of repair.

As we drove, I realized that as breathtakingly grim as I found the hurricane damage to be, more so did I find the fact that these houses existed in the first place. Tiny, vulnerable, sitting in the sure path of destruction much like a group of trailers in Tornado Alley. Who would choose to build where one's existence had such tenuous uncertainty? I knew, but I resisted the acknowledgment. Poor people, that's who. They did not build -- they bought or rented, cheap, flimsily constructed houses in a neighborhood that awaited disaster.

But the rebuilding seemed to be in earnest, and the few occupants visible in the late afternoon on a weekday seemed not grim but cheerful. I pushed aside my middle class values, and folded the map, stashing it back in the glove compartment, and turning my attention to contemplation of the proper attire for a fancy New Orleans restaurant.

Later, though, as I sat before my half of a two-hundred dollar dinner, my social conscience prickled. How could I eat a piece of flounder crusted with almonds, beside a delectable pile of shaved truffle, while blocks away, a child ate nothing for dinner but a piece of white bread with sugar-laden peanut butter? I consoled myself with the rank rationalization that our meal ticket helped to fund John Besh's good works for the benefit of that child and the many other children who just needed a full belly and a soft bed, to find some brief encouragement to get up for school the next day.

The week concluded, and we journeyed home. On Monday morning, the usual pile of unsolved problems awaited me at my solo practice, and I spent the new few days putting out fires that had been smoldering during my absence. By week's end, I loudly lamented my decision to take two weeks' vacation, even though I had been in town and touching base for the first of those. The events of our honeymoon faded, as vacations will, into a pleasant reverie. I can no longer recall which day we rode the trolley to the National World War II Museum, or on which evening a drunk driver rear-ended us.

But I remember the drive through the Ninth Ward, and I remember the evening at August. I remember my first step onto the St.Charles Trolley line, and the tall, alien trees that we passed. I remember the regal look on the face of a cellist sitting on a cobblestone street, with her tip basket at her feet, apologizing because she had not yet hit her stride. I see the broad smile on the face of an aging hawker who lured us into a restaurant in the Quarter, and the steamy softness of the soft-shell crab into which I bit, at lunch, that first day. And I remember the strong scent of that chicory coffee, and the slight dusting of powdered sugar on my blouse, after breakfast at the Cafe DuMonde. And the smile on my husband's face, at the sight of his silly wife, biting into that fried dough, which he no doubt suspected that I would regret.

But I do not regret any of it. Not one bit.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 19 March 2011

2011-03-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

Good morning,

As I complete the mundane task of washing breakfast dishes, a stained glass bird, crafted by my son's eight-year-old hands, dangles before me. I watch the light filter through its blue and green surfaces, thinking of the satisfaction on my son's face as he watched me tear the Christmas wrappings covering his work. Satisfaction melted into radiant joy as I exclaimed over the beauty of the piece. It has hung from the window frame above my kitchen sink for eleven years, slowly turning with the gentle urging of the air current, winter, summer, heat, air-conditioning.

One week from today, I will plunge, without reservation, into my third attempt at matrimonial bliss. Signs exist that this marriage will differ from the first (gas and a lit match) and the second (bravely sailed ships, destined for different if neighboring harbors). I pride myself on maintaining a friendship with my two ex-husbands, in wishing them well, in offering them assistance when they've needed it and receiving theirs on occasion in return. I do not bear grudges. I already have an ulcer; I cannot afford the luxury of vengeance and even if I could, nothing rings clear-cut, nothing arises to fairly apportion blame. Time passes; wounds heal; forgiveness soothes.

My parents weathered greater storms than those which shredded my first marriages. They separated; reunited; overcame; and upon my mother's death, at age 58 of cancer, had been married for almost thirty-nine years. My father died six years later, still grieving, still writing sad, archaic poetry in tribute to his lost love, whom even he knew he had not honored as well in life as he did in death. He failed to honor, but he did cherish, and he did mourn.

I picture, as I write, a couple whom I represented in a wetlands case north of here, close to Brookfield and Chillicothe. Strapping farm folks, both of them -- he, tall and gangling; she, sturdy but nearly equal in stature. I see them in the simple, faded cloth of their every-day existence: Denim, gingham and chambray. Her kitchen bore not one speck of dirt or dust; her breezeway held not clutter but the neatly organized flotsam and jetsam of a working farm and dog kennel. When I visited to scope out the alleged infringement on a protected wetland -- a dry creek bottom at the southern edge of the acreage passed down to him from three generations -- I sat at a wooden table crafted by her father's hands, while she perked coffee in a tin pot on a wood-burning stove. She had an electric range beside it, but could not be bothered with the slow-heating burners.

I sipped the steaming liquid and browsed through photos of their offspring. She wiped counters that I would have thought too clean, and began to set out the makings of a Sunday lunch, while her husband fetched waders to protect my city clothes. He stood near her, at the sink, sipping his coffee from a heavy china cup, and I watched the light gleam in his eyes at the sight of his seventy-four-year old wife of sixty-nine years. I swear, he pinched her bottom when he thought I could not see.

I casually asked how they had managed to stay married for almost seven decades. We never fight, he told me. She raised a thin eyebrow and shook a grey head. Okay, okay. Mebbe I ain't tellin' it straight. She smiled. Okay, okay, he relented. We've had one fight. She glanced at me, her smile widening as he delivered a practiced line. And it's lasted nigh on to seventy years!

We all laughed. Then he and I got into his old Chevy and lumbered down to the bottom of his land, where the offensive stump lay on its side, no longer hitched to the tractor he had used to disengage it from its withered root ball. I walked around it, taking a few pictures, squatting down to touch the waterless ruts of the long-dry creek. I stood, slowly, and scanned the nearby area for signs of offended wildlife, disturbed habitat, or threatened flora. I saw none.

We made our way back to the house, and sat at a table heavy with the bounty that people in rural areas always offer visitors. Never mind that they paid for my time and travel; or that I had only come a couple of hours to see them. My plate strained under the weight of the servings set upon it, and my cup of cold well water did not stand empty. He said grace; she laid the food; and their grown son, who lived a few minutes away with his own family, came and joined us to show respect for the lawyer from Kansas City.

A few months later, after winning his case by the merest of coincidences and the push of curiosity, which led to the discovery of fly-over slides proving our contentions, I visited again. I brought my own son with me to select a puppy, their gift -- along with a check for my fees -- to thank me for helping them. I stood by the screen door in the nippy March wind, watching my two-and-a-half year old earnestly gazing at a kennel of squirming young Beagles. Patrick's selection made, we sat down to another Sunday dinner, with Patrick on two telephone books in front of an enamel porridger, much like the one that I still use that belonged to my mother as a child.

On the way home, Patrick asked me why he didn't have any old people. I had no answer for him, other than the obvious fact that my parents had died, and his father's people did not claim him. We fell silent, and I imagine that he thought about visiting the kennels, hunting for eggs, and walking along the unevern, enticing paths of a north Missouri farm.

I heard that my clients' son died that fall, in a tragic accident, and each of his parents outlived him by only weeks. Their widowed daughter-in-law called me, to let me know that they had never failed to give thanks for my efforts, in their evening prayers, and in their Sunday intentions. You took a worry from them, she told me. I could not think what to say, imagining the worry she herself now faced, a widow at thirty-two, with children, and a farm to manage. I murmured something inane, then asked how they died. He couldn't live without his son, she said, quietly, with no hint of bitterness. And she couldn't live without him.

I said that I understood.

I'm fifty-five now. It's probably too late for me to have a marriage of seventy years. I raise my glass to anyone who married young enough, and has stayed married long enough, to come close to such a glorious accomplishment. My hope for myself is more humble: and it is a prayer, I suppose, more than anything. I hope, and pray, that I am able to honor and cherish this man, for any remaining day of my life that I am blessed to experience.

I've a pile of opened mail to peruse and trash, and a little bit of laundry to do. The prodigal son arrives at six tomorrow, and the next few days will race across the calendar with wild abandon. Saturday will come. Judge Brian Wimes will intone the ceremonial phrases in his sonorous voice, and I will whisper, I do, and I will. I expect to be rendered nearly speechless with tears. Patrick will hover nearby, watching his mother go willingly into the last good phase of her life.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

P.S.: The Musings will be on hiatus for the next two weeks, first as I get reading for my wedding and then because Jim and I are going to New Orleans for our honeymoon. I will attempt to post pictures on Facebook. On my return to Kansas City, I will, in due course, resume this pleasant endeavor. Be well, be joyful, and be at peace. CC

Saturday Musings, 12 March 2011

2011-03-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

Last evening, I heard a singer whose voice had a lilting, Spanish accent stealing the attention of diners at a Mexican restaurant in Waldo. My first listen caused my brow to wrinkle. But when he switched from American pop covers to the cadences of his birth land, his voice mellowed, and the diners set down their forks to genuinely listen.

I am continually struck by the differences that make our world sometimes joyful, sometimes disturbing. Conservative, liberal, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, brown, beige, pale: we strut around pushing our small rocks of weight against each other's space and demanding attention. I sit and listen to the rousing, rough debate -- in Wisconsin, in Washington, around the nation and the world. I hear the words "stalemate", "reckless", and "unconstitutional" intermingled with the words "freedom", "stability" and "liberty". I wonder if it matters. I worry that it is all given more importance than it deserves, and that the drive to win improperly colors the judgment of those who compete.

In a nearly empty courtroom this week, I watch a small, fretful woman twitch and toss a head of unnaturally blond, pressed hair. She glared at the man on the stand whom I represented, bursting out occasionally in protest at his accusations. When she took the stand, she admitted her drug use in ferocious, swaggering tones while begging for her son to remain in her home. She must have known -- as my client knew, and I knew, and the judge knew, that her addiction precluded such result. No one condemned her. Everyone pitied her. She slunk down from the witness stand and trudged the few feet to her chair, crumpling into it and sinking back into her leather jacket, pulling its collar over her face. No one spoke except the judge, who closed the proceedings with a few gentle comments, taking it under advisement, though his ruling came within a day. Motion for change of residential custody, granted. I felt it as a shallow victory, though perhaps a child had been saved from the folly that might otherwise have awaited him, in the clutches of an addict who thinks nothing of taking him with her on drug buys.

When I returned from court that day, I texted my own son, wondering which of my choices exposed him to potential harm. I pulled several files toward me, and, with the push of an inexplicable drive, I worked each one. With untiring ferocity, I sent paper into the outer limits of the Internet for review by clients. I tendered letters into the morass of the postal service, left voice-mail messages, and reviewed reams of paper sent by other lawyers from other desks, in other offices, driven by other unseen forces. By the end of the day, I had touched each of my cases, pushing the boulder just a little farther up the hill, propping it with a strong lever.

Yesterday, I heard a story on NPR about a recently written book detailing the events of the attempted assassination of President Reagan. I listened to the author describe the actions of the operating room personnel, and to the Secret Service agent who saved the President's life quietly tell why he decided to change the course of our history by diverting the limousine to the hospital despite Mr. Reagan's mumbled assurances that he did not need medical attention.

I reached my destination as the story ended. Sitting in my car, I closed my eyes and recalled, as I had not remembered for years, the split second when I reached for a seat belt just before a car slammed into the door of the vehicle in which I rode. Because I had not yet restrained myself, the powerful impact turned my body sideways, and my hip bore the crush of the other car's wheel instead of my pelvis. I thought about the force of another car, a decade later, that sent me flying high enough to be seen by a woman her in second floor office, who called 911 as I sailed back down and slammed onto the hood of the car that hit me. The woman in that office visited me in the hospital, just to be sure I had survived. Years later, she died a savage, lonely death at the hands of a man bent on committing a vicious, senseless act. Her body settled in the bed of a river, and there it rested for a long time, while her family and all of Kansas City searched for her, hoping to discover that she had simply gotten lost, or suffered amnesia, or merely absconded.

The world turns. In a split second, its cracks shift and a country reels. Its oceans rise and slam into the acres of cement and steel that we have constructed. A body slumps. A child dies.

On the table in my dining room, the shell of an amaryllis bulb thrusts out a shoot long after I had decided its life must have ended. In another few days, a bloom will appear, bright pink on a vivid green stalk. As I eat my breakfast, I gaze upon the sturdy frond rising above the pebbles in the crock, and I dare to think that somewhere, in a neighborhood not too far from my home, a twelve-year old boy secretly sighs in sweet relief, to be waking in a home with a sober parent.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 05 March 2011

2011-03-05T07:13:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

I raise the blind above my desk and gaze out of a dirt-streaked window at the soft sky, with its thin trails of white wistful clouds. Against this delicate backdrop, bare trees rise stark and black. Perhaps small buds of new leaves pepper the branches, but I cannot see them from this distance, and the sky looks to be clutched in winter's wicked grasp.

Nearly one-third of this year has dribbled through my fingers as I reached to grasp it. I am astonished at how quickly the time passes. I convince myself that the rate of minutes accelerates, though surely it does not. Surely, my obligations merely expand to clutter the days and send me careening from dawn to dusk, collapsing in exhaustion for a few meager hours before I rise and race against the staring clock with its rushing hands.

I don't know when my life became this frantic. But I suspect I share a common malady with many. I listened to an NPR story about a company developing plastic that doesn't poison us, and wondered how we ever came to use receptacles that do pose such threat. Surely, glass can hold milk without contaminating it. We strove to make our lives disposable for decade upon decade, only to learn that the means for such convenience now clog our sewers, kill our wildlife, and sicken our children.

From where I sit, I can see a "dish", with its metal protrusion gesturing in a manner only vaguely obscene. I suppose it catches some sort of signal that its minders claim does not damage anything else through which it passes. I begin to understand the craze-eyed wanderers with their tin foil helmets. The world sinks into strangeness, and I stand, observing, wondering what conveniences do not carry health risks, or make us lazy, or deafen our ears.

I remember simpler times. And I wonder, as I remember them, if they were better than the times in which we now live.

I used to say that my family "was poor", until I met genuine poverty, and now I simply say, "we were middle class". We sometimes lacked for sufficient food, though we never starved. A broken jug of milk evoked tears; and my clothes lagged a season or two behind those of my parochial classmates. But we did not wander the streets for lack of a bed or a roof, and grandparents helped if the money ran short.

Still, our play grew creative because our playthings fell into the rudimentary category. Perhaps we had what others had in those days, before video games and iPods. Perhaps we had less. Either way, the toys of my youth had no motors, and much of my childhood occurred out-of-doors. This was especially true in the summer, when we had free license to wander from after breakfast until the street lights came on in our neighborhood.

Down the street from my house, the railroad track passed a small commercial outfit. As I reflect back to those days, I can't recall the nature of that business. It could have had something to do with rail shipping; perhaps maintenance crews for the railway stored their tools in the locked shed. I can't say. But we played there, I'm sure against the instructions of our working mother. We scrapped among the rocks by the side of the railroad tracks, and used the corrugated tin buildings as targets.

A block up from that juncture, a business lay empty, or so it appeared to me. Its grounds mostly held a large pool of something dank and smelly. I don't recall that business ever being active but I do vaguely recall that at one time, it made X-ray developer. I'm not sure what purpose the pool served.

One day, I wandered as far as the old factory without any of my siblings. I pushed aside the rusty gate, opening it far enough to slip into the yard. I felt my way among the broken bricks, and stood above the stinking liquid of the large cesspool. My eyes glazed as I stared into its depths. I breathed the stench of the chemicals, and felt my head swoon. As the world darkened around me, I began to pitch, head first, into the well of filth below me.

A large, dark hand pulled me back and threw me down upon the cinder driveway. I stared at the face hovering over me, with its deep lines and heavy fringe of graying hair. Denim surrounded the unshaven, wrinkled neck, a jacket streaked with oil and grime. I pulled myself up, and the man stood back away from me. Neither of us spoke. My head cleared, and I inched away. When I had cleared the gap in the gate, I began to run, three blocks to my house and on down the driveway, then through our backdoor.

I threw myself into a chair in the breakfast room. I felt the sweat rise on my face and dribble down the back of my neck. My braids hung dank and clammy against my chest; my shirt stuck to my skin. The fumes that had risen from the factory's pool clung to my clothing. I shed it quickly, and stepped into a hot shower.

By the time my brothers came home from their afternoon bike ride, I had found a book, and thrown myself into the adventures within its pages. I did not tell them what had happened. I never wandered to that place again, and I never saw the man who saved me. I never thanked him.

A bird squawks outside my window, reminding me that the morning wanes. Downstairs, the black cat yowls to be released into the wild. I rise to oblige him, thinking that perhaps, the world is safe enough for my tom cat.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 26 February 2011

2011-02-26T06:18:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

In a life filled with ordinary days, the extraordinary ones shine, like the strong flame of a stout candle on a table in the middle of a dark room around which I stumble, tired and discouraged. I have lived an ordinary life, with the occasional flash of brilliance, the infrequent but comforting beam of a suddenly lit torch, raised in a cave, sending the shadows scurrying and the sordid creatures of scary nightmares back into their holes.

I am remembering such a shining moment, and that memory causes my breath to catch, and my eyes to close against the sudden rise of joy.

Standing at the top of a three-story parking garage with my son, more than half his life-time ago, I pulled a small bike from the back of my Buick and thumped it to the blacktop. Patrick slid with no small amount of reluctance from the passenger seat, dangling his helmet. His round face, still caught between the edge of toddlerhood and the bloom of childhood, scrunched into a frown. I don't want to learn, he told me. I had heard this before that day. I knew that he did; I knew that he wanted very much to learn to ride a bike without training wheels, because at age eight, all of his friends could, and he desperately wanted what every child wants: to fit into the group, so that he would be liked. I ignored his protest.

I pushed the kickstand out with one toe of my Doc Marten sandals and rested the bike near the car. Put your helmet on, I told him. I knew that studied, stubborn look. He settled the helmet too far back on his brown curls. It doesn't fit. I gently pulled it forward, and buckled the strap. It hurts. I paid him no mind. Come on, I said. Let's look around.

We had spent the last couple of weeks on the sidewalks of our neighborhood, faced with one failure after another. Under the rising umbrella maples, on the cracked cement of the hundred-year-old sidewalks, we had inched our way around Holmes, east on 61st Terrace, down the long hill on Charlotte, and back over to our street by way of 62nd. For the entire block-square route, I walked backwards, holding onto the handle-bars, encouraging, cajoling, and, occasionally, snapping. You can do it, I told him, with less and less gentleness, until we had finally abandoned the enterprise in a wash of his tears and my fatigue.

Now we had decided to try again. Three stories above 63rd Street, in the elevated parking structure of Cleveland Chiropractic College, my son and I faced his failure and my shortcomings, with a small black Husky bicycle minus its rusty training wheels staged between us, and nothing more than the faint potential of success and a guaranteed concrete from Foo's as incentive for his effort.

He scuffed his tennis shoes on the hot black surface of the top deck, running one toe through a line of debris. I stood, my back already aching, a trickle of sweat pouring down the crooked line of my spine. He folded his arms and studied the skyline. I placed my hands on my hip, and waited for him to relent.

After a few silent moments, he walked away from the car, over to the edge of the roof, and looked down at the passing cars. I stifled the urge to admonish him for going too close to certain death, thinking to myself, Well, you can't say he's not brave. Another little while passed.

I pushed my hair back from my face, and glanced over at the bike. Shifting my weight from one aching hip to the other, I watched my son shuffle toward me, hoping that he had found another burst of courage. But he barely looked at the bike before continuing to the car. I can't do it, he announced. I just can't. Somebody might see me, anyway. We might get in trouble. I might fall. An ambulance couldn't get up here. What if I get hurt?

With a long, hard sigh, I urge him back towards the bike. Look, I tell him. I'll make you a deal. I'll do it first. If I do it, you have to do it, okay?

I've got his attention now. He tilts his head to one side, studying my form, then the bike, then me again. His bright eyes pinch together as he draws his brows down, intently considering my proposition. You can't ride a bike, he tells me, in a voice that suggests that perhaps his only parent has forgotten her glaring inabilities. Oh yeah? Really? Then you won't mind making a deal with me, right? I shoot back, and wait for him to reflect on the odds of this seemingly sure bet. Finally, he wraps his small arms around his chest and says, Okay, yeah. You ride it, then I'll ride it, and then we'll go get ice cream, right? I agree.

At that point, I had not ridden a bike since I was fifteen years old and put the front brake of my little brother's three-speed on first, sending the back wheel flipping over and me sprawling head-first on the bike trail. I had struggled to my feet and staggered a few yards before collapsing, vomiting orange juice for a solid fifteen minutes then blacking out. I had been driven home by my friend's mother, and, later, much later, the doctor to whom my mother turned for help said I had a concussion. I have not drunk orange juice since. The memory sits keenly in my gullet.

As Patrick watched, I straddled the small bike, and hitched my heavy shoes onto its tiny pedals. I folded my knees as far from the handlebars as possible, and gingerly pushed the top pedal down. The bike started to wobble forward.

I made it about twenty feet before I felt the bike begin to tilt, and decided that I had shown enough prowess to call the bet. I put my feet down on the asphalt, pulled away from the skimpy seat, and said to my son, Your turn.

With the steady hum of evening traffic as our soundtrack, and the distant, setting sun as stage lighting, my son assumed the place that I had vacated. I stood in front of him, lightly holding the handlebars, while he settled himself. Ready? I said. I steeled myself against the earnest fear that I saw on his small face, apparent in the crinkle of his creamy skin, the one tiny tear in the corner of each of his half-closed eyes. Ready, he whispered, and I began to walk backwards. Pedal, Buddy, pedal, I said, and he pedaled, and after a few feet, I step aside, and let go.

And he went flying, on his bike, on his own, across the whole length of the parking lot, high above our neighborhood, as the sun filled the sky with one last long shimmer then sank beneath the distant line of dusty buildings.

Yesterday, my phone rang, and I heard my son's voice. I sent you my story, Mom. It's due in an hour. Did you read it? I smiled into the phone. Indeed I had. It's good, I told him. Damn good. Needs a little editing. . .maybe the foreshadowing is too obscure. . . but it punched me in the gut at the end. He did not speak at first. Then his voice, with only a small quaver, told me that a peer editor said she didn't get it. I assured him that some people would get it, and some people wouldn't, and whether everybody got it was not necessarily the measure of good writing. I heard self-doubt thick in his voice, and told myself: This too shall pass, and once again, he will fly.

When we ended the call, a wide smile spread across my face, and the room glowed with the fire of a torch held high over the wasteland of an otherwise dismal week.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 19 February 2011

2011-02-19T07:50:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

The crisp blue of yesterday's sky yields to dull, mournful gray. As I made coffee this morning, I drew a sweater around my frame, then succumbed to temptation and kicked the furnace back into functionality. Its steady drone comforts me even before the warm air seeps into the room around me. I surrender to civilization. I am a creature of modern times.

As I crunch my cranberry-and-ginger cereal, with its organic claim to vitamin fortification, I muse over the morning news. I've dodged the union discussion so far -- pleading ignorance, demurring on account of overwork, shrugging off my heritage of civil disobedience born on an Austrian hillside when my great-grandfather shot off his own trigger finger to keep from serving in a war which seemed senseless to him. I read the LA Times article without judgment. I can see both sides.

An animated science-fiction film spews forth from the living room, where my soon-to-be stepson recovers from oral surgery with a healthy dollop of lemon sorbet and chipped ice. I'm doing nurse duty this morning, while his parental unit slams the innocent tennis ball around on a court and munches after-game bagels. There is a hum of liveliness in the house to which I am unaccustomed. I've had the morning air to myself for a long time; the change unsettles me a bit, though it is not without its pleasant undertones.

The newspaper heralds approaching spring. As I browse its wrinkled pages, I think of other springs, other beginnings, other fresh starts and new arrivals. The contemplation amuses me.

I've been on the far side of a rising creek, a river's width away from my vehicle and consigned to an extra few days on a mountain top. I've crossed that river in a borrowed boat, astride a splintered wooden seat, with the mild threat of the rising water swirling in tantalizing waves around us. Decades later, in the city, as spring reluctantly moves into the vacuum created by the melting snow of a record-setting blizzard, I need only close my eyes to feel again the passing wind, the brief kiss of the falling rain, the sharp delicious rise of fear just before the boat clears the rocks and pulls safely to the dock on the other side.

My week filled beyond the breaking point with poignant faces. A man whose children fell into the system while he stood helplessly behind prison bars. Another whose former spouse moved their children to an undisclosed location while he served in Iraq. A woman with the faint stamp of drug addiction evident in a nervous fidget, who gazed at me with eyes of deep, fluid brown in which her hope of regaining custody had drowned. I shut the computer down at four o'clock on Friday, slid the last of the week's mail on top of a collection of personal belongings, and closed the suite door on stale air, dimmed lights, and tidied files.

I threw my pile of scarves, and shoes, and jackets on the car seat and started the engine. On the way to the laboratory for my monthly tests, I dropped the letters in a mailbox, glancing briefly at two huddled figures sitting on a nearby church step. I saw their many layers of dirty clothing, and the crumbled brown bag that each clutched, and felt my eyelids flutter. Look away, I urged myself. You've had enough.

I parked in the handicapped space along the far side of the clinic wall. I passed a woman pushing a walker, intent on safely traversing the sidewalk and just barely clipping me with the edge of her over-sized handbag. Beneath the awning, a dejected, tousled man in green scrubs took long steady draws from a burning cigarette. I avoided his eyes and entered the building, taking the elevator to the first floor, and promptly getting lost in the underground maze of the complex.

With directions from a passing, friendly face, I found the lab in its new location. I entered, signed the log, and sat. Beside me, a woman texted on her cell phone, while her daughter meandered through a tattered picture book. The woman closed her phone, tucked it into her purse, and leaned towards the little girl. Together, they found the hidden objects on the book's pages, giggling, naming each one, chortling with each discovery.

After a few minutes, the woman turned to me and said, in a cheerful voice, I like your shoes. Surprised, I glanced down at my feet, instinctively tucked together at their customary, curious angle. Thanks, I replied, in a tone that seemed too skeptical. They are made in Israel. We both looked down, trying to figure out what that might mean. Neither of us spoke again.

But the child had noticed her interest and stood, suddenly, excitedly. Those shoes look like dancing shoes! she cried, and her little braids flew round her head, in a flutter of colorful plastic. Are you a dancer? I shook my own head, but she did not believe me, and asked me if I would dance for her. You dance, her mother said. Dance for the lady! And the little girl shed her coat into her mother's arms, and in a cloud of pink and glitter, twirled around the waiting room, on her tippy toes, with a bright shine in her eyes and a wide smile on her earnest little face.

And my heart was made light.

The little girl's name was called by a technician. Her dance halted; she curtsied, and then, placing her small hand in her mother's larger, bejeweled one, she stilled her little feet in their sparkly sneakers, and solemnly went through the door, where she no doubt bravely submitted to the needle's sting.

Another patient exited, and I hastened towards the door to hold it as her companion navigated her out of the lab in her wheelchair. Thank you, she whispered, laying one thin finger on my arm. I nodded, and sat. After a few minutes, I heard my own name, and seconds later, I sat in the technician's chair, waiting for the butterfly to penetrate the thin skin of my hand, as she chatted about her husband's latest tour of duty in Afghanistan.

And then, my week complete, I went home, feeling less discouraged, and perhaps, even somewhat hopeful. I navigated the streets of Kansas City with the warm recollection of that tiny dancer twirling around on the tile floor of the lab, with her shining eyes, and the world's most endearing smile.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 12 February 2011

2011-02-12T07:29:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

One sentient being has gone off to take a standardized test; the other, to swing a small, stringed racket at a ball, with the intent of catapulting it across a net. I can more readily understand the first undertaking than the second.

I've had my 180 calorie breakfast and two cups of stout coffee. I've perused the Wall Street Journal and the Star, glad of the first while lamenting the second. I've no beef with the Star except bad writing; otherwise, they have shown more than expected generosity towards me, publishing nearly all of my letters and providing for ease of attainment by virtue of their "disabled" list, which requires their carriers to gently set the plastic-wrapped paper on my doorstep.

Both papers carry banner headlines about the ouster -- call it what you will -- of the Egyptian president. I read the WSJ article out loud to the tennis-player before he went off for his morning activity, marveling at the thought that a protest of 200,000 in the city streets, whether it is or is not properly called a revolt, was built and sustained in large part through the marvels of modern technology. I cast aside the dusty newsprint and poured another cup of coffee, and thought about my life.

I stood in a crowd of thousands once. I wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with the emblem of Walk for Development, the fund-raising venture of Young World Development. We claimed to be the inventors of the genre, and we might have been. In those days -- the early 1970's -- I still had waist-length hair and still wore blue jeans. I still had dreams, and ideals, and still believed that I could make a difference. I still aspired to nothing less than publication of one of my poems in the New Yorker. And yes, Virginia, I still believed in Santa Claus.

I took a train to Washington D. C. to the office of the American Freedom From Hunger Foundation as our local delegate. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I got: a nondescript, one-room shoestring outfit with a rotary-dial phone and a Radio Shack answering machine. I sat with the two wild-eyed hippies who ran the program, which had youth groups under its auspices across the country. They couldn't have been more than a decade older than my 15 years. Earnest and over-worked, the two had gotten grant after grant to address hunger in America through the efforts of American youth. They pushed their stringy hair back on their brows and stared at me with fatigue. I glanced about the room, at the dented green filing cabinet and the grey metal desk. They gave me some literature and thanked me for coming. They ushered me back downstairs, and left me to make my way back to my sister's apartment. I watched them walk away, down the streets of D.C., tense-shouldered, thin, sincere.

I went to the bootheel of Missouri one weekend, and stayed in the wrong side of town, where the streets had not been paved, and electricity had not been strung, and plumbing had only recently begun to find its way inside the half-finished, tar-paper homes. With a handful of other teens, I took the undesired residents of those mucky streets into the town's restaurants. We silently dared them to refuse to seat us. They sullenly dodged our dare. I suppose they must have spit in our food, judging by the rolled eyes, and the smirks, as we paid and left. We stepped off the curb and a car careened around the corner. Our host grabbed my arm with his strong black hand and pulled me to safety while the others in our group jumped out of the path of jeering teenagers. Let's go back, the man gently suggested. We're not really welcome here. Disgust rose in my young heart, bile in my belly. I stomped to the police building and filed a complaint. The clerk let me write it out, and put it in a folder on her desk. Uniformed officers stood nearby, silent, raising heavy, chipped china cups from which the smell of over-perked coffee wafted. I got their license, I repeated. You can find them, I got their license. The clerk nodded, never rising from her chair.

In a dented blue pick-up, we drove to a small canyon in the sweet, low foothills of the Ozark mountains outside that shabby town. I lay in the bed of the truck, feeling the sweet breezes of the cool night around me. I covered myself with one edge of a sleeping bag, and watched the stars, searching for something that might tell me what the future held. When I couldn't sleep, I stumbled over to the edge of the canyon and sat on a large rock, listening to the sounds of settling creatures, and the shrug of the trees dancing in the wind. I wrote a poem, which years I later entitled "Missouri Mourning" and dedicated to a man who did not love me. But when I wrote that poem, I only felt the draw of unsullied nature, and the allure of altruistic undertakings. I felt virtuous. I felt clean.

A social worker on that trip told me about his father's death at the hands of Idi Amin. Gazing across the expanse of the parking lot outside the extension office where the local workers welcomed us, this man must have been recalling a far different sight: his father's body, riddled with bullets from the death squad, his mother's slender, sobbing form, the terror in his younger siblings' eyes, his own posture of helplessness. He left his family to come to America, where people are not, as a general rule, killed for their beliefs -- at least, not by the government, or not if their beliefs are consistent with something close to the generally accepted mores.

As this dark-eyed, quiet fellow told me about his life before emigration, I stood, in a T-shirt, a windbreaker, and bell-bottom blue jeans, reflecting on the differences that a few degrees of latitude can make in one's life. Whatever I might suffer, I have yet to feel the impact of a dictator's bullet through the unprotected body of my beloved parent. On a scale of Nirvana to Uganda, I'm somewhere in between.

I can't quite pinpoint the moment when I stopped espousing causes. I can't put my finger on the precise second in my life when I abandoned my belief that I could make a difference, when the depth of my social contribution plunged, until it reached the stage of shallowness where it now dwells, amidst the ragged seaweed of unfulfilled ambitions. My only contribution to the social fabric consists of a ten-dollar-monthly contribution to the local public radio station, and the occasional thrusting of crumpled bills out my car window at the homeless standing at the corner of 47th and Main.

Perhaps it is a generational malaise. I close my eyes, and, when I have stilled my inner soul, I can summon a vague recollection of the bold feeling of power that I once possessed, when I stood in that crowd of thousands, waiting for the first Walk for Development to begin. I gazed across the expanse of the park at which we gathered, and met, with decided and conscious deliberation, the long lens of a photographer. Slowly, deliberately, I turned to face his camera, letting my jacket fall open, to reveal the emblazoned Walk symbol on my shirt. I set him up. He took the bait. My picture, standing in the determined throng of YWD Walkers that day, made the newspaper and I became the poster child for our movement. Not bad, I told myself, considering I didn't even Walk.

Forty years later, I fold the Wall Street Journal, and toss it on the small pile of paper destined for the recycle bin. My day holds nothing more challenging than laundry and dust patrol; and later, my beloved and I will be the guests of honor at a dinner given by his tennis group and their wives. While the people of Egypt rejoice, I will be obsessing over the proper attire for such an event. I won't even have the decency to be ashamed.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 05 February 2011

2011-02-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

In the dim light of my upstairs bedroom, I feel a pleasant sense of isolation. The house has settled into a lazy kind of stupor. My fellow humans have left to fulfill their responsibilities out in the cold of February, and I have regressed to browsing through pictures of last night's opening of Penny Thieme's new show at the VALA gallery, clicking past pictures of myself in my current somewhat daffy guise. I linger on snapshots of a radiant Penny greeting friend after friend in a trio of rooms crowded with those who have always known that Penny's star would shine, the walls of which rooms bore brilliant witness to the fact that she has always done so.

Winter has asserted its own dazzling wildness into my daily existence. I bundle in down, and wool, and knee-high knits, burnished leather, and waterproof gloves. I sling my pocketbook cross-wise across my chest and lumber through drifts to my car. A stranger beckons with his arm and navigates me across an icy sidewalk. My neighbor scrapes my car's windows; my son sends an excited message: School is canceled! when Indiana feels the brunt of Nature's fury. It has grown impossibly cold.

I need but close my eyes to remember warmer days.

When I was in my teens, my mother decided we should camp as a family. She had fallen into what we called then -- and now, 26 years after her death -- her "hippy days". She cooked with whole wheat flour and brown rice. She stopped smoking, and took up sewing again, making her own wrap-around skirts in every fabric she found on sale. And she dragged us camping.

I am there, in an instant, feeling the heavy air of a warm day in early August. My father sits on a webbed lawn chair outside of a green four-person tent. I am thirteen or fourteen. My brothers, in one-pocket T-shirts and cut-off shorts, rummage around the clearing of the our little private peninsula, far from the RVs, showers, and port-a-potties. Beyond our encampment is Huzzah Creek, one of two tributaries of the Meramec River, south of St. Louis and an eternity away from whatever cares my mother leaves behind when she packs the battered pans, a dozen eggs, loaves of bread and cans of pork and beans in our old green cooler.

Prior to my mother's hippy days, my father's notion of camping had involved a cheap roadside motel and black-and-white television. But in the halcyon days of my middle youth, he gamely strove to please my mother, a kind of apology for the sins of the early decades of their marriage. Thus did he grudgingly assent to sleeping on a cot and missing a few days of televised Cardinals baseball. My brothers, on the other hand, thrilled in these rare and idyllic outings, breaking sticks for the campfire, gathering rocks, and plunging with abandon into the Creek. Occasionally, they ventured to the Meramec River itself, while I stayed in the gentler, more welcoming ripples beside our campsite.

On the last afternoon of our few vacation days, my brothers lured me upstream to the vigorous waters of the river. Come on, Mare bear, you can swim! you can do it!, they urged, stripping off their sweat pants and their T-shirts, preparing to swim in the still-damp trunks they perpetually wore beneath their clothes. I laughed, and sat down on a rock jutting into the water, casting aside my sandals and rolling up the cuffs of my blue jeans. Not likely, I replied. Nice try, but no cigar. I sat beside the river as they hurled themselves into its rushing depths, their wild laughter drifting back to me. I pulled my knees to my chest, and wrapped my arms around them, resting my head, letting my frizzy braids fall forward.

I drifted, half-asleep. The voices of my brothers receded, and my reveries shifted to the foreground. I didn't hear my oldest brother, Kevin, approach; and didn't see the grin he flashed to his confederate, Mark, on the other side. I startled, suddenly aware, just an instant before they pulled me into the water -- warned, perhaps, by the call of a bird in a nearby tree, or the deepest, most basic instinct of self-preservation.

I entered the river struggling, but at a place where even I could stand and hold my head above the water. Come on, we'll help you, Kevin told me, and each took a hand. With my bare feet sinking into the muck of the riverbed, I let them pull me forward. They guided me to the center, and then, with the current, we began to move in tandem. Just as slowly, they let go of my hands, and I found myself alone, moving downstream, feeling the encouraging kiss of the sun caressing my back while the cold, cleansing strength of the river pushed me forward.

With my eyes closed, now, in the chilly confines of my room, I lift my face and feel again the exhilaration of that day. I snap my braids, long shorn, through the air and lift my arms, sensing the warm wind rush over them. I salute the majestic, ancient trees that flank the river. I hear the raucous calls of my brothers, and other voices, other families, on the banks as I pass. With my eyes closed, I am once again the strong brave girl who turned, and, laughing into the wind, strode back against the river's pull, holding her head high, and her arms wide, smiling into the dazzling brilliance of an August afternoon.

Later, we scrambled to load our camping gear into the back of the car, and shuffled into damp shoes and clothes made grungy from the weekend's adventures. My brothers shoved each other, and Mother scolded them in an indolent, insincere voice. They settled against their respective windows, to my left and my right. I leaned against the back seat. As night settled around us, we journeyed home, and I fell asleep, dreaming of my walk in the water.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 29 January 2011

2011-01-29T07:43:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

I stretch my taut, aching muscles and shake the tingle from my right hand. Last night, I fell asleep after reading only 20 pages of a book on chronic pain management. I've decided that it is not so much that the pain is getting worse, as it is that I am getting crankier about living with it. I want to be one of those uncomplaining women whose epitaphs praise how much they bore without grumbling. I'm afraid it's too late for me in that regard, so I am now striving to be charmingly humorous in my constant whining about my fate.

I know I am fortunate. I've outlived all prognostications and at least one prognosticator. I've been publicly proclaimed too stubborn to die, too mean to live, and too irritable to be told which way to dance. But I have not done so with head held high, and stoic gaze, and dry eye. Rather, I have done so with sniveling spirit, and snapping voice, and more than a reasonable measure of stridency.

I am reminded, as I strain to lift my coffee cup, of one afternoon at St. Louis University, in the fall of 1973, my freshman year.

I struggled across the quad, against the beat of an early, cold wind. I pulled my camel-hair coat tighter around me, and bound the sash belt more snugly against my thin frame. Shifting the pile of spiral notebooks and texts from one arm to the other, I stopped, briefly, trying to decide if I could cut another class. Look out, gang way, I heard, from behind, and stepped aside just quickly enough to avoid being side-swiped by a fast-moving wheelchair.

I watched as the chair, bearing a slender man whose fragile arms nonetheless worked the wheels with fury, zipped down the sidewalk and across Grand Blvd., and continued on, weaving around students meandering toward the buildings east of Grand. Amazing, I thought. I continued my slow trod to class, and thought no more of him.

Later, in the student union, I saw the man again, wending his way past dawdling young people into the pub. I watched as he touched an arm, nodded, and moved beyond the first few tables, pushing aside chairs blocking his path. He settled at a table in the far back, his arms drawn up, his head bobbing, the lean line of his jaw pointing towards the ceiling as his eyes pitched round.

He caught me staring. You, girl, come on over here, get a better look! he called. I closed my eyes in a futile attempt to escape the taunting cackle. Come on, you know you want to! I'm a damn good lookin' fella, come on over and sit yourself down. By the end of his second sentence, I knew that I had no choice; the entire noon-day population of the pub waited to see what I would do.

I sat down at his table. Someone brought a cold mug of beer with a giant straw for him, and glanced at me. You want anything? I shook my head. The waitress left without a second's hesitation.

He leaned forward, mouthing the straw, taking a long pull. I've got CP, he said. What's your excuse? I knew he didn't mean my excuse for limping. I'm sorry, I said, knowing the words were not enough. I looked away from his struggle to drink without meaningful use of his hands or arms. In my 18 years of living, I had yet to encounter many people with physical conditions more serious than mine. The Americans With Disabilities Act had not yet pushed its way onto architectural planning; there were few "crippled people" as we used to be called, who could really navigate the world so freely as to be frequently out on their own. Only people such as myself, still ambulating though with difficulty, traversed the world on a regular basis until the advent of plentiful ramped curbs and accessible buildings.

He told me his name was David. I tendered my name. His interest drifted from the silence that ensued, and he saw other people, people he knew, and haled them. Soon, a cluster of laughing young men and women surrounded us, on chairs, crammed against the back wall, and standing. David had many more friends than I did, an easier demeanor, and a razor quick wit. He was popular.

I eased myself up from my chair after ten or fifteen minutes of sitting in the midst of their good-natured rowdiness. I put one finger out, and touched his shoulder. Nice to meet you, I told him, and he jerked his head in what might have been acknowledgment, or could have just been a random spasm. I left as quickly as I could, and the gap created by my absence closed around him. By some sad coincidence, a loud roar of laughter rose from his table just as I reached the door of the pub, and I could not help but believe that the joke was on me.

I saw him a lot after that. I learned that he intended to be a writer, a poet or a journalist, he had not decided which. He carried a tape recorder in a canvas bag hooked to the side of his wheelchair. He interviewed everybody he met, and went everywhere he could navigate on campus. People remembered him; folks in wheelchairs are not common enough to be unremarkable even now, and they were less so in the 70s.

I came upon David in the pub many days. He wore his straight hair long, and sported heavy flannel shirts over thermal t-shirts. Coats are too much work, he told me. I did not reply. I started sitting at his table, listening mostly, while he gently prodded stories from other students. I never knew if they understood themselves to be material for his work, or if they knew but did not care. Everybody likes to talk, he told me. He rolled his eyes to find mine, canting his head, manipulating the recalcitrant muscles of his neck. Got that? Everybody likes to talk.

He never asked me any questions though. My story did not interest him. I sat in a miserable huddle at his table day after day, and watched the ebb and flow of humanity seek him out. He would let one arm fall down and graze against each person as they sat beside him, but the arm would draw back up to his chest, tight and stubborn. His knees knocked against each other; he strapped his legs to the brackets of his footrest and kept them in a bound position all day He lowered his arms only to work the chair and get it going, and when he did so, great beads of sweat broke out across his forehead as he strained to force his arms to do his beckoning.

Towards Christmas break, I saw him with a girl, who pushed his chair, and stood behind him when they paused at lights. She wore an impossibly long scarf and had straight, waist-length hair of an indeterminate color. She had a tattered pea coat and tall, black boots with laces. She did not speak. That's Susan, he told me, gesturing with one crooked arm, one useless hand. She smiled at me with her mouth, under a slender nose and grim, honest, clear grey eyes.

I got involved in a play after Christmas, and got bitten by a brown recluse back stage during rehearsal one afternoon. I made the first performance -- Look Homeward, Angel -- and sat on the porch swing until the end of the second act, swooning with fever. My parents had come to see the show, and took me back to their house, where I sank into illness that lasted several weeks.

When I made it back to campus, I looked for David. But I did not see him. I would occasionally hear someone shout, Look out, gang way! and, turning, expect to see his small form in its metal ride, hurdling down the sidewalk. But it never was. His usual table had been pushed against the back wall of the pub, and the multitude of chairs previously grouped around it had been re-positioned. No one seemed to know why.

Towards spring, I stood, one afternoon, waiting to cross Grand, waiting for a walk signal. A small noise on my right distracted me, and I looked at the person standing there. I recognized the long, lazy sweep of mousy hair, and the arch of one brow over an unrestrained grey gaze. I asked her, Have you seen David lately? and Susan replied, just before stepping off the curb, He died.

I held back, unable to make my feet hit the pavement. I watched her cross, and disappear into the unending flow of students, living their lives, from dorm to lecture hall, from student union to the cool of the shady quadrangle. A horn honked, and I found myself standing in the crosswalk halfway over to the far side, crossing against the light. I stood very still, and waited, until the cars around me had passed, and then, lifting my tired feet a little higher, and holding my lily white spastic hands a little more easily, I made my way to class.

I focus, suddenly, on the quiet rush of the tinnitus with which I have lived for years, and the hum of the refrigerator. The sounds of the house shift around me, and outside, a passing car briefly revs its engine as it maneuvers around the two white SUVs parked in front. Lifting my coffee cup, I see that I have, without realizing, drunk another eight ounces of lukewarm artificial energy, and I think about making an egg before getting dressed, and getting on with my day.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Dedicated to all the twelve-foot giants I have known. Rock on.

Saturday Musings, 22 January 2011

2011-01-22T08:49:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

The sun has climbed higher in the sky than I usually see as I write on Saturday mornings. I've slept a bit later; had coffee; eaten a Texas Ruby Red grapefruit, peeled; and read the Kansas City Star. I've traded idle pleasantries with my beloved, and kissed him goodbye as he headed for his 9:00 a.m. Board meeting. I washed and put away the breakfast dishes, and read a chapter of a pleasant novel by an Irish author whom I discovered at the public library yesterday. In short, I've done nothing at all, but the casual, first tasks of a day with few obligations other than laundry, and housework, and the running of errands.

I glance about the room, noting the chores to be done. I'm not an obsessive housekeeper. I make the beds; I put away the debris of weekly life; and I beat back the clutter that threatens to overtake my keeping shelf. Once a month, a college student comes for the heavy stuff, and every other week, I run a dust mop across the hardwood floors. Air filters hum between times, and the kitchen counters pine for a swipe at the end of the day.

I'm reflecting on mental illness today: the twist of thinking that drives a man to deep thoughts of self-harm; the jagged rush of chemicals that send a woman into hiding; the vile spread of gelatinous fear that overcomes a teenager just before she walks into a room filled with her chattering, sharp-eyed contemporaries. I have experienced sadness, and anger, and anxiousness; but I have been spared, I think, the kind of malaise that seeps into one's fiber or perhaps, exits within one's very genetic material.

Because I do not suffer genuine mental illness, I do not, truly, understand it.

Above the desk in my law office hangs a painting, intended to depict Venice. I can see it as I work; though more often, I am oblivious to it. The work has hung in every office that I have occupied since I received it from a client ten years or so ago.

Leah was her name. Intense, vibrant, driven; I see her sitting in my old office, an office from another decade, another century. I close my eyes; and her form solidifies. They did this to me, she urges. Make them pay. I gazed, without speaking, as she tried to explain. Then I glanced down at her intake form, where she had written the details of the matter that she wants me to handle. Military benefits.

I took in the gathering drops of sweat rising across the counters of her small face. I observed the tautness of her muscles. I listened as she talked, in rapid, jerky tones, about her time in service, and the young women who came to her, reporting sexual aggression by others. Leah had reported their allegations to her superiors. And they locked me up, and they gave me drugs to keep me from talking, and they made me like this.

The simplest analysis will serve this woman best, I told myself, gently placing her intake form on my desk. You've got a diagnosis, and it says here, that your illness had nothing to do with your duties in the military. Our eyes met. We both understood the portent of that determination. I want to appeal, she proclaimed. I can pay. My aunt is helping me. She stood, and I could not help myself -- I moved back, rolling my chair a bit further from her as she paced around the large area beside the small conference table at which we sat. She did not notice. I can pay, she repeated. I cautioned her, explained the potential futility of the appeal, the number of hours that I might have to bill, the likelihood of a disappointing outcome. I don't care, she repeated. They did this to me. They did. I wasn't like this before.

The diagnosis appeared multiple times in the small packet of records that she had brought. Paranoid schizophrenia. In the next box, the offending appellation: Non-service connected. No benefits. Medical discharge, back to civilian life, apply for SSI if you can, thanks for giving us four years of your life, we can't use you anymore. But Leah told a wild story of hospitalization, experimental drugs, retribution for defending the women who sought her help, the sexual harassment of whom she protested. If her story could be confirmed, perhaps the determination could be successfully challenged, and she could receive full benefits for a service-connected illness. Perhaps. Perhaps.

I pushed the little pile of papers to one side, and handed her a copy of my standard hourly contract, only briefly wondering if she could be said to be competent to enter into a binding agreement. She signed her name in bold, precise letters, and so, our odyssey began.

I started in the usual way: I filed the appeal, and then requested documents. Leah went back to her apartment, somewhere east of Main, on Linwood, in a tall building where the sick and the old lived in flats that used to be occupied by rick folks with heavy Victorian furniture. Weeks passed; and months; and paperwork dribbled into my files, small little packets of records of Leah's many hospitalizations while in service.

I shuffled the papers, idly, flicking my eyes through the boxes. Suicidal ideation, check. Paranoid thoughts, check. I ran my finger down a list of medications.

Geez louise, I thought. This woman has taken drugs I've never heard of, and most of the ones that I have.

I paced around my office, looking at the two-inch file. There have to be more records than this, I thought. She was in the hospital for six months, maybe more.

I sat down at my computer, and wrote another request for documents to the military attorney handling the defense against my client's claims. I read it several times, changing a word or two, revising my phrasing -- first more snippy, then less; settling on what I decided came across as mildly threatening but not indefensible. Save, print, sign, mail.

A month elapsed. Leah called almost daily at first. I assured her that I would let her know if I got anything more, if any progress had been made. I tried to bear in mind that her diagnosis suggested that she might not believe me, but if her paranoia extended to me, she did not show signs of it. Our conversations consisted of a brief query on her side, a disavowal of progress on mine, and her quiet thanks.

After the second week, she stopped calling. Time passed. We waited.

At the end of the third month, our UPS delivery person came into the office with a dolly full of boxes. Where do you want them, he asked. My secretary pulled me out to the reception area. I counted. Three boxes. I could accommodate those in my office, I suggested. He laughed, then shook his head. There's more.

We co-opted the floor's communal conference room. We arranged six tables in a square around its perimeter, and filled them with the cartons hauled upstairs by the UPS guy, in his brown uniform, his tall, wiry frame straining as he lifted them from his two-wheeler. Who'd this person kill? he asked. I chuckled. Nobody, yet, I assured him.

Fifteen boxes in all. Fifteen boxes, that I had waited more than ninety days to receive, and the contents of which I would now have to review. I called Leah. Good, she said, softly. She had not doubted that the records would come. She had more faith in my letter-writing ability than I did, it seemed.

A day or two later, I got a notice that our hearing date had been set -- in two weeks' time. Two weeks? What's their hurry now, I asked myself. I went across the hall to the cold room where my assistant sat, inventorying the contents of the boxes, and broke the news to him. Can't be done, he announced. I can't inventory these documents in two weeks, and you can't read them in two weeks.

We asked for a postponement on the basis of the delay in providing Leah's medical records. We got it.

The first snow fell. Thanksgiving came, and Christmas. Leah called the office over the Christmas holiday, leaving a message: They've got me -- please help! She left a number, which turned out to be the patient line at a hospital psychiatric unit.

I went to see her just before the new year. Her brown skin streaked with ashy grey, her tight curls awry, wearing a faded flannel robe, she pleaded with me to get her out. I just want to go home. I talked with the doctor on duty. She's not a danger to herself, or to anyone else, he admitted, but we think she should stay. My eyebrows shot up. Why? He shook his head. He was not been the treating physician. He could not explain. My eyebrows went even higher. I'll get a writ, if I need to, I assured him. You'll have to, he said. Not his call.

I went a notch or two up the food chain, sitting in a dingy office, crammed away in the back corridor. The agitated administrator pushed piles of unread mail around on the scratched surface of his putty-colored steel desk, and snatched my client's chart from my hands. The doctor thinks she should stay, he grumbled. But he can't make the standard, I gently reminded, and she wants to leave. The doctor hovered in the background, arms tightly folded across his chest, wearing an expression that aroused my suspicion. Not concern -- not worry for his patient -- something else. Fear.

The two exchanged looks. I thought about the fact that no one knew where I was. Silence surrounded us, palpable, cloying. I did not relent. They did not speak.

After a few moments, during which more meaningful glances passed between the two of them, the doctor relented and signed a discharge order. I hurried out of the office, and found my client. Get your stuff, I told her. Before whoever told them to put you here finds out you're leaving. She changed into street clothes and we hastened to my car.

I parked on the silent, dirty city street where she lived. She fumbled with the damaged handle of the exterior door to her building, then led me past a small assemblage of residents sitting, wordless, in the lobby. Eyes averted, I stayed close to her, trying to ignore the smell of over-cooked coffee that permeated the hallway.

Leah's apartment surprised me. Simply, shabbily furnished, and small, nonetheless, light streamed in through large, clean windows and a floral scent clung to the fabric of the sofa and chair. But most surprising were the large canvasses everywhere: leaning against the walls, on wooden easels in the area that might otherwise be used for a dining table, in the hallway that must have led to a small bedroom.

I stopped, and stared. In vibrant colors, Leah had painted children of Africa. Not tragic, sympathetic poor children, but vibrant, alive, joyful little boys and girls -- with their mothers, with baskets of grain, with each other. In some pictures, she showed just the women, standing in small groups, seemingly engrossed in casual conversation, perhaps casting one disinterested eye over a shoulder at the watching artist. Her people of Africa did not beg for pennies, or bemoan their poverty. They simply lived, with no regard for anyone outside the happy circle of their existence.

On other easels, I saw a few darker works. A woman standing on a city street -- New York, perhaps, I told myself, from the sinister appearance of the alley behind her. Wide, staring eyes; tense body; an absence of peace. The contrast between Western poverty and African richness could not be ignored in Leah's work. Have you been there, I asked her. Have you seen these villages that you're painting? She shook her head. She gestured to a pile of magazines, from which, I presumed, she got some inspiration. Then she pointed to the picture of the woman on the streets of an American city, saying simply, But I've been there.

I left her, listening as she slid the brass chain into its slot. I walked more slowly down to the lobby than I had come up through it, and nodded, briefly, to the people sitting on plastic chairs. They did not return my greeting. I pulled my coat tight around me, and went home.

Over the next week, my assistant and I read the records. Entry after entry about Leah's illness -- its progression, its symptoms, its seriousness. We began to lose hope that we could prove anything of what she had told us. We found no mention of her having reported the other women's complaints of sexual impropriety by officers; we found no account of the experiments that she claimed had made her ill. We began to take a dimmer view of our attempts to have her mental state attributed to anything that happened to her while she was in service, which finding we would have to secure in order to get the benefits she wanted.

The new hearing date drew closer. I had spoken to Leah just a few times since her discharge from the hospital. She seemed to be doing well. She talked about taking classes at the local community college; she mentioned the possibility that her works might be shown. She asked if we had found anything. She did not get upset with my reply.

And then, just days before we were to have the hearing, as I read the last file, in the last box, I found what I had read through fifteen hundred reams of medical records to discover. One line, in one paragraph, on one page, of one month's reports. This patient would not be likely to have experienced any of these symptoms but for the medications given to her during the initial hospitalization. And the signature, legible, bold: A doctor in the branch of service in which my client had served.

I sat on hold while a clerk got the doctor's number for me. I sat on hold while a nurse looked for him. I sat on hold waiting for him to come to the phone, after he had been located. He spoke his name into the receiver. I identified myself, and explained the purpose of my call. A silence fell over the line. Finally, he said, calmly, I've been waiting for your call.

A few days later, I had official confirmation of what I had negotiated on the strength of the doctor's statements to me, which he put in writing. Full benefits. Permanent, full disability, service-connected. I called my client and let her know. She, too, met my words with silence; she, too, finally spoke in a gentle voice: Thank you.

Several months later, Leah called me. Her bill had been paid in full; her benefits had, presumably, had commenced. I had sent the fifteen boxes to storage, and restored the conference room to communal usability. Her case had receded into the history of my work as a solo practitioner -- one for the "W" column.

I've got something for you, Leah said. And I've gotten something for your son, too. I reflected, but only briefly. Come to my house for coffee on Sunday, I suggested. I had been to her house; it seemed only right that she should come to mine.

The doorbell summoned me that Sunday, promptly at the scheduled hour. Leah stood on my screen porch, with a large canvas covered in a sheet. She held a Tonka truck, still in its box but unwrapped. My son's eyes widened as she gave it to him. She pulled the canvas into the living room, and gently pulled the sheet down, revealing her painting of Venice.

On the back, she had written a simple sentence, thanking me for my work, and signing it, in red ink, with her full name.

The house has grown still. I've sat at this computer longer than I had planned. My legs have stiffened; my wrenched hip protests. The phone has rung but I have ignored it; I hope the caller did not take offense. I shake my head, and sniff the cup on my writing table, wrinkling my nose at the acrid smell of cold coffee. From downstairs, I hear the yowl of a cat urging me to come and turn on the water in the bathroom sink. I'll go and do her bidding, and then put on a kettle for tea. After a while, perhaps I'll start on the second chapter of my book.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 15 January 2011

2011-01-15T07:52:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

I have broken my fast with a plate of crumpets, yogurt and banana. My sorry little behind is dragging around the house, my body tainted by a smear of shingles rash, my face tingling with the nasty little sting of the bug. I have not taken the dose of anti-viral medication properly, and the episode lingers, even rallies, reminding me that better living through chemistry requires careful attention to directions.

My housemate tip-toes through the morning, then ventures out into his day with something suspiciously close to relief. I have not snarled, but neither have I spoken; and he must be forgiven his trepidation. I lift a cup of cold comfort, and gaze about my bedroom. I see the assortment of pens and other flotsam stuck into my brother's coffee mug, including a small luster-lace key fob that my son made for me a decade or so ago. This mug sits on the back shelf of my writing table with a few framed pictures of my siblings, a Haviland fruit cup filled with pretty rocks, and a framed studio shot of my son at aged 2.

Today is Martin Luther King's birthday -- the actual birthday, not the day chosen to give people a paid holiday from government work in ostensible honor of Dr. King. Several articles in our newspaper mention Dr. King; more on the Internet remind us of his life, his work and his message. As for myself, I have a curious view of relations between people who are dark-skinned and people who are light-skinned. I vacillate between my recognition of our country's history of bigotry, and my own unwavering conviction that we cannot accept each other until we stop dwelling on our differences.

I am reminded of one of the foster children whom my son and I sheltered, back in the mid-to-late 1990s when we served as a foster household. I can see this chubby little baby, Bianca; feel the warmth of her fat body against my thin frame. Her eyes glistened as they fixed on mine, as she reached and claimed a great gob of my thick, coarse hair. I see her in my son's cradle, at the foot of my parents' old bedstead, in the back bedroom of my Brookside bungalow. She fascinated my son, who was five at the time. He stood for hours over the cradle, or the bouncy seat staged the dining room table, or the Grayco swing-o-matic in the living room. She clutched his small fingers with one hand while she waived her rattle with her other hand, and Patrick, in love, in love, in love, exclaimed to me, time after time: Can we keep her, Mom? Can we?

I could have. I wanted to keep her. I had wanted to keep little Kimmy before her, of whom I only recently discovered an endearing picture, at the bottom of a basket on a high shelf, saved but hidden, for fear my broken heart would not mend. Kinky corn rows sticking out from her delicate skull, inexpertly braided by her foster mother while her foster brother stood nearby; bright eyes; crooked smile. She spent several weeks with us before being placed with a "real" family, defined by her worker as one that looked more like her and had two parents.

Bianca came to us some months after Kimmy, but before the pair of brutally abused boys that would undo our resolve to continue fostering. Bianca had been born crack-positive but thrived, and by ten months, weighed more than Patrick had at twice the age. She demanded that I carry her everywhere, around the house, through stores, in the park. I did not mind. With Patrick at my heels, I sailed around the house doing chores, Bianca on a skinny hip, chortling by my ear, grabbing at my glasses, happy.

Until the week that Patrick got strep throat, the situation could not have been more perfect. But the pediatrician admonished me to find another home for the foster baby until Patrick healed. I can't place her anywhere else, whined her case worker. So I did the next best thing: I asked a friend to keep her for a day or two. I called the case worker back, but she had left the office. I tapped my pencil against the table, thinking, before dialing the extension for the worker's supervisor. It's out-of-county, I explained. So I wanted to get permission. It is just for 72 hours. She approved it, and off went my little Bianca, until Patrick's condition allowed for her return.

The following Saturday, the friend who had given her safe harbor returned her to my house, with a few assorted children of her own. Patrick and I had struggled through the week, and my friend stayed for a few hours, cleaning my house for me, while I played with the baby.

I had expected a visit from Bianca's CASA worker, and she arrived before my friend and her children left. I didn't hear the knock at first, but Patrick did, and he opened the door before I could caution him to wait. I came up from behind him, holding our little Bianca.

The worker gazed first at Patrick, and then at me, with the baby in my arms. No one spoke for a minute or two, and then the worker said, in tones that still cause my blood to freeze, You're white.

I don't know what prompted her honest reaction to bubble out of her wicked little mouth. She herself sported fairly dark skin; I am 1/4 Lebanese but in complexion resemble my Irish father. Patrick looks like his father, who claims to be half-Scottish and half-Native American. But whatever little nugget of bigotry prompted her outburst, out it did burst, and if the room had been chilly before her arrival, its temperature dropped another several degrees upon her announcement.

Patrick tilted his head back, looking up the length of her, and corrected her assessment. Actually, we're beige, he said. She tore her eyes away from my face and fixed them on my son, pulling her brow into a dark, angry frown. What did you say, she demanded of him. He did not shy back. I said we're beige, we are not white. She jerked her head back, and spoke again. And the baby's black, she snapped. Patrick gently corrected her. Actually, she's kind of Hershey-bar color, he observed.

I pulled the door open wider, and motioned Patrick to stand back. I asked the woman if she wanted to come into the house, and come she did. Who are all these other kids, she asked. I explained. I told her about the strep throat, and the case worker with no solution to offer, and the help given by my out-of-county friend. I gave her the name of the supervisor who had approved the child's stay away from my home. I showed her the cradle at the end of my bed, and the toys in the basket, toys that my son had chosen for Bianca, from his own collection of beloved baby playthings. She barely spoke, showed little civility, and glanced, with disapproving skepticism, at the cobwebs in my corners, the small smear of jelly on my son's door frame, and the scuffed black cowboy boots that my son had taken to wearing everywhere, including to bed.

Bianca was removed from my home by order of a Family Court Commissioner on the following Monday. I protested. The ostensible reason was, of course, the child's brief sojourn in another county, of which CASA claimed they did not approve. My son and I cried; my friend offered to write a letter, which could jeopardize her own foster license in the county where she lived. The supervisor who had approved the respite arrangements apologized. The commissioner noted my protest, and assured me that he did not consider that I had done anything wrong.

The man who came for Bianca simpered his own regret in hollow tones, as he waited impatiently on our screened porch. I gently tendered her into his rough, rigid arms, and gave him the new diaper bag I had purchased for her, fully stocked; and a second bag, filled with small toys, books, and stuffed animals that Patrick had chosen. My son and I stood on the porch watching the fellow sashay down our walk, taking the child from us, a child whom we had planned to keep. Bye, Bianca, my son whispered, and a thousand angels cried.

I took Patrick down to the Plaza that afternoon. We had lunch at Winsteads, and then went to a store the name of which I can no longer recall, but which sold semi-precious gemstones in a hexagonal plexi-glass bin taller than my son. Patrick studied the rocks, selecting each one with determination, measuring by a standard that I could not fully grasp. When he had found the ones that pleased him, he carried them to the counter, and paid "with his own money". The man counted change into my boy's tight little fist, and solemnly presented him with a velveteen bag of the stones that Patrick had chosen. Later, at home, Patrick carefully divided his booty in half, and trickled one pile into my outstretched hand. Those are for you, Mom, he said. To remember me by.

My feet are cold, tucked behind my lily-white spastic legs, under the old kitchen chair at my desk. The house around me has grown very quiet. I am alone. Laundry waits to be sorted, and floors to be mopped. After a while, when my housemate tip-toes back from his tennis game, peering around the front door frame to gauge whether it is safe to enter, there will be lunch to fix. I will dutifully take my new course of anti-virals, and perhaps by Monday, I will feel human again.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 08 January 2011

2011-01-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

I raise the shade which hangs between me and the neighbors' house, and see the distant, shivering trees, stripped of their coverings, rising into the pale sky. On the horizon to the north, a yellow house with its angled roof sits beneath a power line. Beyond, I see the grey gables of a Craftsman bungalow huddling between the spindly trunks of two second-growth oaks. My neighborhood -- a different perspective, north in the weak wintry morning.

I attended a meeting at a faith-based organization which contracts to perform the services of a Missouri governmental agency yesterday, and I am still nauseous. I would like to say that I held my tongue, but I did not. As the workers kept us waiting for fifteen minutes past the allotted starting time, I surveyed the collection of grandparents, birthparents, fosterparents and lawyers. "So," I ventured. "Where do all of you all stand on the separation of Church and state?" One grandfather, looming large across the tiled floor, waved his cane at me. Exactly! he thundered. He shifted his arthritic girth in the rigid plastic chair, and briefly rolled his eyes towards the receptionist. Nothing personal intended, but I don't get it, never have. Why is this here outfit doing what the state's supposed to do? The birthfather, seated near me, added a thought. My kids' mother and I never got married. These folks don't believe in that, and I feel them judging me. How can I trust them?

Silence descended again on the small, desperate group gathered to hear what the workers 'planned' for two adorable boys unfortunately caught in state care because of their parents' drug use. The father has been clean for a solid six months; the mother supposedly still has not begun recovery. It has been a long two years for the family, and working on a third. Trial will occur in February. The "state", in the person of its faith-based contract organization, has defied the judge's order to plan for reunification, and has had a "concurrent plan" for adoption, though none of the law-abiding dedicated grandparents have been given services pursuant to this plan. We don't know who has, but we suspect it is the foster-family, the husband of which got a special green Visitor's Badge at yesterday's meeting, presumably to quickly distinguish the saved from the hopeless in the event of an evacuation.

This morning, my mind insists on staying stubbornly in the present. I hold myself still but memories elude me. Perhaps the warm fuzzies which I have been accused of favoring seem too saccharine in contrast to the world in which I spend my workaday hours. Perhaps the crises of my past, which normally make just as lively reading as the pleasures, lose their importance beside the cancer of a friend's mother, the death of an acquaintance's grandmother, and the febrile seizures of the one-year-old grandchild of someone whom I dearly love. Life takes its feather duster and swipes with determination at my cranial cobwebs. The stories scatter, falling to the pile in the dustpan, under the rug, into the cold air return in the back halls of my mind.

I regaled a suite-mate with wild descriptions of the afternoon's events on return from the meeting yesterday. I cannot abide these self-perpetuating bureaucracies! I fumed. I recounted how the agency's attorney refused to answer the birthmother's questions. We prefer to talk with your lawyer about that, he parried. At his evasion, I raised my eyes from the legal pad on which I had been scribbling meaningless notes to distract myself from tempting but careless expressions of disgust. Was her attorney invited to this meeting? I asked, with seriousness but hardly from ignorance. I myself had been omitted from the invitation list, an oversight that the group bemoaned with nearly believable, wide, accidental eyes. I don't know, I assume she was, the man replied. He tossed an imploring glance at his client's representative, who could not hide the small, reluctant shake of her head. Aha. Another blunder, to parallel the omission of the court's mandated plan of reunification from the printed agency report, an oversight blamed on "software error".

My suite-mate, who also happens to be my future husband, listened to my tirade with a small smile of his own, sitting quietly at his computer. When I paused, perhaps to draw a breath, he spoke in gentle tones. Watch out, he suggested. You are starting to sound like a Republican. Presumably, he had forgotten that reliance on faith-based groups is a Republican proclivity. He meant, of course, that my seeming outrage at governmental involvement in these folks lives suggested a non-Democratic orientation.

But that is not my point. My anger rises not because the state has involved itself in the lives of two children born testing positive for methamphetamine.

My trigger trips with the combined weight of the state's abdication of its duties to a faith-based organization, and that organization's abuse of its delegated power. Every step of this long journey gives rise to another illustration of the workers' disdain for everyone involved, from the most circumspect court-appointed attorney whose e-mails are disregarded, to the birthfather whom the state's lawyers insist on addressing in a mocking voice by his given name, a habit taught to law enforcement as a tool for degradation of suspects during interrogation. The mannerisms of these state agents reflect their overall goal of splintering this family -- their "concurrent plan for TPR and adoption", served by strategies and tactics diametrically opposed to the court's plan of reunification: false and unsupportable accusations against the grandparents, which cause them to incur more legal fees seeking exoneration; removal of the children from a daycare to which they were well-adjusted, for the sake of a short-term placement in a religious but terrible foster home, leading to more upheaval and fear on the part of these precious little guys; unexpected rescheduling of meetings; failure to invite key players to the new settings; continued use of unreliable third-party service providers; peremptory threats to schedule hearings or depositions without regard to others' dockets; snotty comments in open court, directed to parties or their attorneys by state employees; the list is endless.

I often remind myself that nothing I have suffered rises to the level of the worst pain, the most frightening poverty, the sheerest, starkest realization of pending and unavoidable demise. On days when I feel so bad that I want to throw a chair through a plate glass window, I tell myself: Think of everything you have been given, and everything you have been spared. This week, at the top of my list of horrors not visited upon me, are the companion evils of being, or being at the mercy of, a small-minded social worker in a track suit, a tank top and a training bra, sitting squat and insufferable in a dingy, crowded conference room, holding a defective print-out of the plan to strip someone of their parental rights.

My coffee has grown cold while I have been writing. My neck protests when I raise it from the angle at which it must tilt to see the screen to accommodate my failing eyesight. I gaze, just for a moment, at the thin white smear of cloud stretched across the expanse of sky over my neighbor's roof. It will not rain today; nor will it snow. But the cold has settled in my joints, and for the rest of the day, I will best survive by counting my many blessings, and making cup after cup of tea; Earl Grey; hot.

Mugwumpitudinally tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 01 January 2011

2011-01-01T08:27:00.001-08:00

Good morning,

The gentle sound I hear is the little dog's carefree snoring. She sleeps in her tattered bed, head askew over the edge, oblivious to the passage of time and the turning of a new year. She knows only that her beloved boy has not made it home, and so she won't go into his room to sleep amidst the covers, without his long, lean body beside her.

My son received many admonishments to stay put last evening. The potential that he might consume alcohol and drive didn't worry as much as the potential that he might encounter someone else who had. His sleeping on a few feet of floor in a home where he spent many nights as a child seems more reasonable then venturing out into a city filled with amateurs attempting to navigate the city streets with impaired systems.

As for myself, I stayed home most of the night, after an early dinner with my son and fiance at Charlie Hooper's, where the jukebox played a curious mix of old Grateful Dead and more modern rock, while the waitresses sashayed in time to the music. I don't have much use for the kind of tipsy reveling that characterizes the heralding of the new year. I am content. I've unpacked a few boxes for the newest resident of the house, and culled out a round of nonmatching dishes to make way for his, which do.

All of this unpacking stirs memories of the many times I moved before I bought the Holmes House in 1993. I stop for a moment, raised coffee cup in hand, counting the places I've lived, and thinking aboutf my first real apartment.

On Russell, east of Jefferson, the shotgun flat had two bedrooms and rent due each Sunday. My living room windows faced north, the view consisting of a long stretch of other four-family flats, brick, with their curved German-style windows. In the '70s, the street's occupants were middle-class working people, who left each morning early and came home each evening late, tired and dirty, wanting nothing more than a heavy meal and a cold beer. I did not know any fellow St. Louis U. students who lived that far east. I chose the apartment for its rent and spaciousness, for the clean if old kitchen, and the well-kept hardwood floors.

I had spent one-and-a-half semesters living in a hastily-found dorm room, after an unpleasant conversation with my mother in late October. I'm going to be late, probably won't be home for dinner, I had said. She barked at me in reply: If you are not home by 5pm, don't bother coming home at all. I took her at her word, to her ever-lasting chagrin. My work-study job in the Financial Aids office garnered me an increased grant that covered the cost of a dorm room until the end of second semester, and that first summer, 1974, I sublet the apartment of a friend at Russell and Grand. When she returned from home for the fall semester, I found a place on down the road, far from campus, far from the clusters of apartments in which my contemporaries lived.

That year, I dated a medical student named Ray. We usually met on campus and went out together from there, so he rarely visited my home. He would bring me back to wherever I had parked for class or work, and I made my own way home. I only have one memory of Ray ever being in my apartment, and that was after our relationship had ended, in the spring. You broke up with me because I'm black! he shouted at me, in a raw, accusatory voice. Ray, Ray, do you think it took me a year to notice??

During the same time period, I had a friend, purely platonic, also black, named Hank. Hank, unlike Ray, freely came and went at my apartment. We fixed meals together, made fun of pop singers in loud, raucous conversations, and sat --- cozy, quiet, companionable, far into the night. Hank had strong, firm features; a short, sturdy body; and liquid, knowing brown eyes.

One Saturday, that spring, Hank rapped on the glass door to my apartment, hard and urgent. I lived on the second floor, and had to descend a long narrow stair to admit visitors. He knocked again as I came down the stairwell. Hold your horses! I called to him. I could see him through the window, glancing over his shoulder, worried, fearful. His polo shirt pulled tautly across his back and shoulder as he twisted around, and when he turned toward me, I caught a stab of the deep terror in his eyes. I opened the door. What's your problem? I asked. He put out a hand to urge me back up into the flat, and I had just a few seconds to see what kind of demon might be following him. I saw only my landlady, who lived in the flat below me, standing in the yard with two rough, heavy men from across the street. As I watched, my landlady folded her arms across her wiry body, and gave her head, with its row upon row of tight pin curls, a jerk in my direction. I could not read her expression.

Hank continued past my living room into my kitchen and opened the metal door of a cabinet, taking down a silver aluminum glass. He filled it with cold water from the tap, and drank: long, deep, without pausing to breathe. He set the empty glass down on the counter. I stood a few feet from him, not speaking, watching him stare at something in the sink. Finally, he faced me. I'm sorry, he said. I'm afraid I've caused you trouble.

I shook my head, disbelieving that this gentle man could cause anyone trouble. He rushed past me and paced around the living room, agitated, insistent, telling me that the landlady and neighbors seemed upset by his presence. Sit down, here, sit down, calm down. I touched his arm. He jerked away and continued his pacing. I stood, helpless. Don't be ridiculous, I assured him. What do they care who my friends are?

But care they did. The next day, my landlady awakened me with a series of forceful, insistent bangs on my front door that reverberated through the apartment and penetrated the thick fog of sleep. I stumbled down in my flannel nightgown, long, wiry hair tumbling over one shoulder, spastic legs protesting at such strenuous work before the synapses had stirred. What is it, I grumbled. Is the house on fire?

She handed me an envelope. It's your notice, you gotta get out. I stared at her, not awake enough to protest but aware of the ridiculousness of being evicted from an apartment with no more class than to cost fifty dollars a week. Why? I asked. We can't have no coloreds here, she snapped back at me, and turned on her tight little heel and walked over to her own stoop, disappearing into the door of her apartment.

I climbed the steps and sat in my living room. I looked at the shabby furniture that had come with the place -- a broken rocker, a bowed brown couch, a scuffed coffee table which appeared to have been used as a cobbler's bench and bore deep, scandalous scratches. Evicted. For having a black friend. And not even Ray, who had at least been my boyfriend.

I made my way into the galley kitchen, and put the percolator on the stove. As I waited for the first hot burst of coffee to appear in the little glass knob, I tried to get my mind around the landlady's comment. We can't have no coloreds here. In 1976. In a tacky little rundown neighborhood, east of Jefferson, in south St. Louis, where most of my Corley relatives wouldn't even want to be caught dead.

I spent the day gathering boxes for the move. I considered asking Hank to help, but thought that might just get him hurt. I had broken up with Ray by then, so I didn't have the muscle of a paramour on which to depend even if I would have asked, which I wouldn't have, for the same reason that I didn't ask Hank. I called a couple of my friends from North County instead, and started looking for somewhere to move.

One of my friends had a lawyer father. She mentioned my situation to him, and he suggested a complaint with the city. I pounced on this idea. The net result found a few hundred dollars in my pocket, which I used for a deposit on the next apartment, in Laclede Town, behind the University. My landlady admitted the reason she asked me to move. I don't think she even felt embarrassed. I'm not sure she knew why anyone would question her motivations. She didn't even have the decency to lie.

Hank had graduated, and left town shortly after my move. Though his full name has faded into the recesses of my old mind, I have not forgotten our friendship, or the hours we spent ruminating about the world, or that one, brief insight into what it must be like to face genuine hatred. I have not forgotten my glimpse of the fright in his eyes, or the electric feel of panic in his touch as he urged me back into the flat, as he pushed the door closed between us and that small, tight circle of angry neighbors on the sidewalk.

The dawning new year surrounds me, with its fresh, clean cold and the broad stretch of a pale sapphire sky. I shake away the memories, and get up to pour myself another cup of coffee. I've several loads of laundry to do, and New Year's Resolutions to make. After awhile, my son will come home, and I will hear all about the party he attended, on the last day of 2010.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley