Saturday Musings, 28 August 2010

Good morning,

The sweet breeze caresses my bare legs. On the parkway, a squirrel skims across the vincas and shimmies the height of a maple, clenching something round and scarlet in his mouth. The crickets still cry out to one another, or maybe that call comes from something more prehistoric -- this year's lusty crop of locusts, or perhaps the earth itself. The dark green expanse of lawn still lies in shadow, as the sun struggles to crest the steep pitch of the rooftops.

I hear the distant drone of traffic, somewhere to the east, where the sun has already risen and people have already swilled their fill of morning coffee and adjudged themselves capable of operating a motor vehicle. I would not inflict my driving on the world this early; I can barely walk; I did not even carry the laptop to the porch by myself. Though I am clearly a morning person, my neurons are not, and they grumble, looking for a chance to retaliate.

A cloud of sentimentality swirled around me all week. Last Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of my mother's death; my sister, traveling companions and I toasted her with raised cups of water and coffee at the St.Louis Bread Company. A few days later, a friend shared news of a Walk to Washington intended to raise awareness of depression, which triggered an afternoon of reverie about my little brother, whose suicide in 1997 abruptly introduced me to despair's keen power.

My brother's story is not my story; I have no license to even attempt to explain his decision, or to name the demons that drove him. I own my memories of him; a few precious photographs; and a couple of prints from the Lafayette Square home tours which once adorned the walls of his apartment.

Steve wears the same smile in each picture that I have of him. I see the fragility now, but I missed it in the years before his death. I notice now the distant pitch of his gaze, though in life, I would not have said he looked anywhere but squarely at those around him.

Steve radiated energy. He never just walked into a room: He entered snapping, dancing, eyes darting, calling your name, reeling you into his circle. He would tuck me under one arm and take a long draw on a Marlboro as he pulled us both towards the bar and flashed a radiant smile at the waitress. Two Stingers, babe, one for me and one for the shrimp here, he would say. You met my sister? This is my sister. . .He drank, and at times had worked, at O'Connell's Pub on Kingshighway in south St.Louis. There we consumed Stingers in memory of my mother after her funeral; there, he seemed to have many friends, and seemed to feel at home.

My son remembers my brother as a big man in a black shirt. Steve wore that shirt on his last Christmas, when he gave Patrick an alien catcher and a collection of creepy aliens rendered in hard, dark plastic. But I see the two of them in other scenes, earlier in the reel, long before Steve's tragic ending. I replay them repeatedly, clicking my mental remote control, searching for my favorites. Do you remember when your uncle Steve played with you and your cousin Whitney in Joyce's family room, I ask my son. He shakes his head and the small gesture momentarily startles me. Does he look like Steve? Does he wear that tender smile? Does he carry that sorrowful stamp?

Patrick and I flew to St.Louis for my father's funeral in a twenty-seater out of Springfield, Missouri, the closest fully functional airport to Fayetteville where I lived at the time. Patrick was two months old; I canceled his baptism because of my father's death, as a consequence of which, he celebrated his solitary Catholic sacrament in the Abbey at the Priory in West St.Louis County. After the baptism, after the celebratory breakfast, after the week-long cathartic cleaning of my parents' home, my son and I returned on the same small plane to our southern life.

Stephen took us to the airport. As usual, we tarried over coffee and cut our arrival time close. He dropped me at the door, saying he would park the car and bring my belongings -- including my son, still seat-belted, soundly sleeping. I glanced in the back, and Steve dismissed my fear. I'll bring him, don't worry; how could I forget your baby? This was in the days before orange and red alerts; he told me he would meet me at the gate, with my carry-on bag and my child.

I got our boarding passes, and made the long walk to the gate, where I waited. I fidgeted, first on one foot, then the other; up, down; hallway, chair; but he did not come. The gatekeeper had him paged; he did not come. The pilot exited the plane to inquire as to the reason for the delay in departure; and still, my brother did not come. The small group of passengers were apprised of the situation and polled, and agreed that they could wait a few more minutes; and still, he did not come.

The airline personnel finally signaled that they had to release the plane. I put one hand on the blue-clad arm of the attendant, and begged her for just another minute. I could see the stress of her life in the lines around her eyes; I knew she wanted to help. I reminded her that if I did not board that plane, I would not get home for another twenty-four hours, since they had only one scheduled flight per day. I played the orphan card; I told her, in wheedling tones, about my father's funeral, about the difficult week. As she hesitated, I tightened my grip on her arm, and turned us both toward the concourse, at the end of which I could see the river of shuffling travelers begin to inexplicably part.

Some hundred yards away, still a faint blur, came my brother. He left laughter in his wake as he always did, though on that day the smiles arose not because of the strong draw of his masculinity or the irresistible pull of his perpetual trawl. As he neared the gate, my hand on the arm of the attendant eased; I knew she could not see what I saw and fail to wait.

They came toward us, my brother Steve and my son Patrick, and every person whom they passed must still remember. Stephen had strapped my son, car seat and all, onto a luggage cart, and had taken off at a dead run: my infant son beaming, his little ears pressed flat against his head, my brother's tall frame and long legs catapulting them both the entire length of the Lambert-St. Louis airport.

If I close my eyes, here, with the kiss of the morning sun on my face and the chill of the morning air on my silk-clad shoulders, I can still see them -- my son squealing in delight, his adoring gaze on the grinning countenance of my little brother. I can see the victorious flash of my brother's pale blue eyes, as he released the strap and swung the car seat over to the waiting arms of the airline attendant. I told you I would bring him, Mar Bear, he admonished me. Have I ever let you down?

In 1997, after my brother's penultimate suicide attempt, I stood with him at yet another bar, drinking yet another Stinger, in yet another south St. Louis evening crowd. I chided him about his unsuccessful overdose, from which he had awakened in renal failure, causing him to summon paramedics with a punch of 911. I don't get it, Steve -- you take an overdose, then call 911 to save your sorry butt, I said, laughing into eyes that held grief to which I must have been blind. Before answering, he took another drink, and lit another cigarette. It's simple, Mar Bear, he finally said, in a voice that I did not understand, not then, not now. I wanted to die, not suffer.

A handful of months later, he got his wish.

The sun has cleared the rooftops, and the neighbors have begun to load a great pile of boxes onto a flatbed truck. The dog-walkers have all come and gone; and the crickets have sung themselves to sleep. There is laundry to be done, and dishes to put away, and after a while, the black cat will rise from the cold concrete on which he now sleeps, and insist on being fed.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

To anyone who has known depression, or known someone who suffered depression -- and for anyone who has been spared its grip -- please, I ask you:
sign the petition to increase awareness of this terrible disease:

www.walktowashington.org

Mugwumpitudinal Musings; 22 August 2010

Good afternoon,

The floors have been swept; the counters scrubbed; the sheets folded with crisp corners and smooth edges. I stand amongst the various old wooden chairs, and tables, and the pale orange curtains hanging at my windows. I am home; and the adept work of my house-sitter surrounds me. The black cat tarries at my feet, softly mewing; and the little brown dog sleeps on the porch outside the back door.

I listen to the inanities of the Verizon Wireless hold chatter. I have circled around 3 times in her mechanical litany. I have been to three Verizon stores and called two more; I am caught in the endless loop of their bureaucracy. They claim that my phone was purchased "at a third-party vendor"; yet their name glares at me from the invoice. They admonish that one employee avers that he tried to help me "but I had left the store"; I volley with the astonishing but true information that the "manager" kept me waiting for 45 minutes while he lallygagged in the backroom, and only offered a temporary replacement by phone to a companion ten minutes after we had left, when he realized that he might have made a tactical error by trying to sell me a new phone instead of replacing the phone that had died. No, he didn't help me, I tell them. We are long past the hope of catching more flies with honey. I am, in any event, allergic to honey.

My vacation leaves me emotionally reinvigorated though physically drained. I have been to Ludington, Michigan and all points in between. I felt the rough, pleasant warmth of sand on my feet, as waves rose and fell, and my tall, strong son cavorted in the warm water of in Lake Michigan at Epworth Heights. I allowed myself the luxury of ice cream, thick with swirls of caramel and chunks of dark chocolate. I fell asleep to the endless, soothing sound of those same waves, and awakened before the sun rose, to drink strong coffee while reading nothing more or less challenging than book five of Donna Leon's series set in Venice. And I ate Mexican food cooked by beaming immigrants in Indianapolis before settling my son at DePauw University and journeying home again. I have averaged 25 miles to the gallon and 25 smiles to the hour. I have learned of the triumphs and joys of 80-year-old twins and the ambitions of a sixteen-year-old scholar. I have heard wisdom a la Cohen Brothers, "it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart. .. " and I have justified myself by way of electronic mail to a former client who wants me to do more work without more compensation. I have toasted the twenty-five year anniversary of my mother's passing, and wished a friend's son Happy Birthday, on the same day, by way of public posting on his Facebook page.

My fifty-fifth birthday looms ahead of me two weeks hence; a week later, my Double Nickel Birthday bash at which we will be raising money for the Children's Miracle Network, the chosen charity of the Indiana Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon of which my son is this year's DePauw University Philanthropy Chair. I had hoped that by this age, I might have learned patience, but patience remains a virtue that I possess in only small amounts, the fountain of which has slowed to a trickle and will soon be entirely depleted.

I am still on hold, twenty minutes after commencing my fifth or sixth call, waiting for a briskly and coldly competent customer service representative to locate a replacement Blackberry for the failed one sold to me by a store masquerading as a Verizon store which had apparently converted mere weeks before my purchase to a "third party retailer". I close my eyes. The gentle hum of the central air reminds me that regardless of my bank balance, and certainly, despite the failure of technology, I have comparative wealth.

There is no memory that can supplant the joy of the present; no restless, beckoning ghost that can obscure the prospect of happiness in the future. Some material goods elude me; there are some luxuries of which I can count myself deprived. But I am, on balance, a lucky woman, a turn of events not necessarily entirely of my making. In the end, a relentless determination, combined with good fortune and the sweet attentions of others, has helped me to survive to middle age, and has brought me to the brink of the 55th anniversary of my inauspicious birth. In the meantime, I have showered, and put up my hair, and donned a soft cotton dress. I pad around my little bungalow, with nothing more challenging to do than worry about what to have for dinner.

I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?(fn)

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley



fn: by Richard LeGallienne. For the movie, "Friends", Elton John added a middle verse:

I asked a lizard the time of day
As he sunned himself on a moss-grown wall
and the buttercups nodded their smiling heads
greeting the bees who came to call.

Meandering Mugwump: Moratorium on Musings

My dear friends:

On the morning of Saturday, August 14th, I will be embarking on a trip -- first to Ludington, Michigan (oh, does that have 2 d's, possibly?) and then, at the end of next week, to Greencastle, Indiana. The first leg of the trip will be purely recreational -- Patrick and I have been invited to join the MacLaughlin/Mitchell clan as they celebrate an 80th birthday for twin sisters who are the matriarchs of the clan. The latter part of the trip will be to ensconce Patrick at the SAE house on the DPU campus -- which, in case you did not hear, has been named the number 10 party campus in the entire country. (A dubious distinction, but one which Patrick avows will not interfere with his studies.)

During my wanderings, I will be taking a Brief Vacation from the Musings. Like the lady with the red light on her porch, but not for the same reasons, I trust my vacation will "drive my customers wild", and you will be waiting, with patience but eagerness, for my return. This shall occur on Saturday, 28 August 2010, and might occur at some sporadic time before then, if time, wi-fi, and mood stir me.

Until we are reunited, please, know that you are in my thoughts as I hope I am in yours.

Happy trails,

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 07 August 2010

Good morning,

With a stout cup of French Market on the tiled table beside me, near the newspaper, overshadowed by the gardenia that I have yet to kill, I am again enthroned on my beloved porch. The heat has abated, at least for this morning, and the breeze wafts the American flag, lifting it to unfurl and stretch, and wave with a heady reassurance that time has only served to perpetuate.

My stubborn allegiance to my particular vices can be forgiven, I hope, as I raise my cup to a passing neighbor. I do not drink alcohol to excess; I've never been one for drugs, except the prescription kind; and I don't beat my child except with hopelessly maudlin metaphors.

I started drinking coffee at 17, during weekend stints at St. Vincent Psychiatric Hospital in St. Louis County -- the old facility, with a sweeping, wide driveway, Gothic turrets and frightening back hallways. I served as unit secretary for 3South, the acute ward. On Saturdays and Sundays through my senior year of high school and first year of college, I transcribed doctor's orders and served the clerical needs of the patient care staff, watching the truly ill wander the hallways and sometimes, climb the walls.

I have only to catch sight of a slender woman lighting a cigarette -- of old, in a restaurant or an office; but these days, more often on the patch of concrete in front of any building -- to remember my favorite patient, and wonder where life has taken her, with her anguish, and her desperation.

Her parents gave her the name of Sydney, and they told everyone whom they met, including a scrappy little ward clerk with a tumble of hair, that they had wanted a boy. Sydney's frame mimicked the thin body of an adolescent; she wore her hair short, with a pale blond lock across her forehead. She favored body-hugging ribbed turtle neck sweaters and hip-hugger blue jeans. During the time that I knew her, Sydney was in her early twenties, and spent several months each year getting stabilized on 3South.

Our ward consisted of ten patient rooms, a nurses' station, a dining room, and the back hallway where the EST treatments took place. The dining room stood at one end; the nurses' station, where I worked, at the other. Between them, the patient rooms flanked the corridor, five on each side; and in the corridor itself, clutches of chairs stood at intervals in a clumsy effort to make the place look homey.

Sydney paced from one end of this confine to the other for most of the hours between meals every day. The aides placed breakfast in the serving trays at 8; lunch at noon; and dinner at 5. Sydney went through the line and took minuscule helpings of each offering, huddled in a metal chair at a Formica table by herself to nibble at the tasteless food, and then, greedily lit a cigarette.

She pulled huge gulps of smoke into her lungs, closing her eyes, holding each draw as long as she could, then releasing it slowly, purposefully, taking several quick breathes between drags of cigarette. Her smoking fascinated me; my parents both smoked at the time, but I did not, never would, and I could not understand her obsession.

One afternoon, halfway between lunch and dinner, I chanced to be returning from my afternoon break and saw Sydney in the dining room. I don't remember what caught my eye -- the peculiar cant of her head, perhaps; or a fleeting look of restrained panic. I paused, standing outside the door, watching. I glanced at the house phone on the wall, prepared to summon help by calling a code if I needed to do so, but waiting, in case I did not.

Sydney walked, hesitantly at first but with a quickening pace, to the long table on which clean, unfilled serving vessels stood. Her hand slowly rose, suspended above the empty space where aides would later stack dishes for the next meal. I swear that I could see her take a plastic plate from a ghostly stack; and lift a spoon to serve a scoop of invisible green beans, then mashed potatoes, then a piece of gray meat vaguely reminiscent of steak. I narrowed my eyes and blinked; but the serving trays remained empty, the spoon nonexistent, the plate imaginary.

But Sydney carried it gently, gingerly, to the table and set it in front of her. She took up an unseen fork, and speared a bite, sliding it between her lips, and chewing. I shook my head, turning my gaze to each end of the hallway, hoping a patient aide would chance upon this scene. When I looked back into the dining room, she still sat, eating food that I could not see, from a plate that did not exist, with a fork that I could swear she held but which still rested in the buffet behind the locked door of the downstairs kitchen.

She finished, and rose to take her plate to the bus station. Reaching towards the bin in which the dirty dishes were to be stacked by the patients, she released her hand and I will swear, to this day, that I heard the clatter of the heavy plastic plate falling onto others already there. Sydney turned, then, and saw me; I drew back, but I need not have worried. Her dance had its own choreography.

She sat again at the table, and took out her pack of cigarettes. She drew one out with a smooth and practiced motion. Placing it between her lips, she leaned forward, and I could see the form of a patient aide not yet on duty, leaning to light the cigarette for her; and I watched the rise of her chest as she drew a long, unbroken swell of unseen smoke. Then she closed her eyes, and euphoria settled on her features as I jumped back from the sight, stunned, saddened, and suddenly, ashamed.

Much of my day consisted of transferring medication orders from patient charts to requisition forms. Hospital care has greatly advanced in its record-keeping aspects with computerization; but forty years ago, the pen and the three-page carbon-paper form served as the vehicles for communicating with the various departments of the hospital. Ostensibly, I did not need to read the patients' history to perform my duties, but that afternoon, I read Sydney's chart, and learned that her father only allowed her to smoke after she had eaten. I mentioned what I had seen to the head nurse, who shrugged her shoulders dismissively. Nothing surprised her. She did not even make an entry in Sydney's daily log, though knowledge of this behavior might surely had aided in her treatment.

Later that summer, Sydney came again to 3South but on a stretcher, strapped and submissive, probably sedated. She lay in her bed for several weeks before whatever she had taken or been given worked through her system, and then resumed her pacing, up, down, nurses' station, dining room.

Between my desk and the rest of the floor stood a dutch door. We kept the top half open and the bottom half shut, supposedly locked. On a late August day that year, I was transcribing orders from a stack of charts at my desk, unaware that the last nurse to leave for lunch had failed to latch the door behind her.

As I tried to decipher one doctor's particularly nasty scrawl, a large drop of red, viscous liquid fell upon the page. I looked up. Sydney stood over me, her wrists held out in front of her, blood dripping from puncture wounds up and down her slender arms. Sydney, I said, you are bleeding on my charts.

What should I do, she asked, in a barely audible whisper, her eyes wide, her face blanched. Bleed somewhere else, I snapped.

She moved, then, to the end of my desk, holding her arms over my waste basket. With only a small glance back at my work, with only a brief hesitation, I lifted the phone, to call the code, and then stood back while all hell broke loose.

My last sight of Sydney was of her eyes: large, luminous, not even pleading, just watching me, from the cart on which the code team had placed her, as they pushed back through the hallway, and furiously raced towards the medical unit, where tired nurses would try to stench the flow from holes created with the narrow end of a rat's-tooth comb.

The coffee has grown cold, forgotten beside me. The black cat came home a few minutes ago, with a new, disturbing gash in his neck. My son still will not let me get this creature fixed, and so he fights with anything that challenges his territory, and I am waiting for the day when he is not brushing up against my legs when I come out onto the porch to get my newspaper. I understand why Patrick insists that we not curtail his cat's true nature. But freedom has its price, just as captivity does; and I am sometimes unable to decide which is worse.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 31 July 2010

Good morning,

The sleeping form on my couch reminds me that three young men trooped into my house at 3:00 a.m. One claimed his birthright bedroom; another went back home; the third bunked in the living room. Awakened from blissfully unaware sleep, I had organized the search for an extra blanket, a sheet and a pillow; then trudged back up the narrow, wood-paneled stairs to my room. Just before I fell into a week's-end coma, a cat thudded onto the mattress beside me; and I heard a small, contented whimper from the foot of the stairwell, as our dog stopped fretting and settled for the night.

The blond curls barely visible beneath the orange blanket belong to my son's most long-standing friend Chris. They met in pre-school, just before Patrick's third birthday and Chris' fourth. They are now nineteen and nearly-twenty. Although they haven't attended the same school together since each started kindergarten, they have remained friends. We haven't seen Chris this summer, until last night, when he materialized in the driveway. Chris is here, Pat told me, twice. They went off with Pat's more recent closest friend, Jacob, to do whatever it is that young men do until 3:00 in the morning these days, leaving me to hope, with no small sum of trepidation, that they would return unmaimed, still at large, and only slightly worse for wear. Now they sleep with the reckless abandon of the nearly independent, and I tiptoe through the first floor, grinding beans as quietly as possible, shushing the boycat who insists on emitting fierce yowls until I get whatever it is he wants.

I am left breathless by the memory of these tall boys crowding into my living room. My fifteen-hundred square foot home seemed more than spacious to me when I first came to dwell in it with my toddler son, and now I feel its inadequacies. They rise above me, sweetly, goofily, sheepishly. I don't inquire as to where they spent the last five hours; I don't inquire as to what they did. I just push them to their rest, and bid the departing neighbor boy safe journey two blocks to his house, idly wondering if Chris' family knows he is here, ruminating on how early I can call to confirm that they are not fearfully ignorant.

With coffee in hand, I contemplate the week just past. My life evolves with breath-taking rapidity these days: divorce, son off to college, new man, new suite, new couch, a piano in the living room. The accouterments of my daily existence seem to sprout as though drawn by animators, with me a caricature of a fifty-four year old woman wandering in a daze from panel to panel. I pull old reliable characters along behind me; I hoist a few new ones from the strip below on the Sunday pages, in slightly crooked colors. Mostly I race, headlong, towards the last sight gag, the heavy-handed pun, the unexpected groaner. I pray for soft landings.

Life has gifted me with many slow rides through crystalline sky dangling from a billowing parachute. I took Patrick, Chris and a third boy, Maher, to Chicago for Game Day as a present for Patrick when he turned thirteen. They earnestly packed their gaming equipment in the matching black carriers for which their mothers had given no small number of hard-earned dollars, then carelessly threw extra jeans and socks into grungy backpacks. Clothes did not matter; what mattered rested in the foam-padded squares in their gaming cases. Painstakingly painted Warhammer figurines; small boxes of pieces that I had learned to call "bits"; tiny bottles of regulation paint colors. Warhammer accounted for all of their pocket money in those days, and quite a bit of mine, but its analog nature and the chance it afforded them to commingle with a good group of guys around a table at the game shop seemed worth the investment.

I drove the three of them to Chicago, in a climate of excitement so palpable that I could have sworn it influenced my gas mileage to the good. We wandered the western suburbs until we found the hotel, then slogged through the lobby, to our room. I had taken only one, which I came to mildly regret over the next three days; I still thought of them as children, but I do not suppose they really were, even then.

We crossed a sky walk to the convention center for the first session, just an hour or so after our arrival, still tired from the drive, but unable to contain the boys' anticipation. When we entered the atrium, above the holding area for participants, the shock of what we saw brought us short. Beneath the rail, on the floor below, thousands of animated teenagers and young adults, many accompanied by parents in various stages of obvious reluctance, awaited the signal for the start of Game Day. Each participant wore a pass, the gamers of one color, the financiers -- parents like myself -- of another. The horde stood at the foot of three escalators, oddly quiet, mostly respectful, orderly. And when the red ribbon fell, allowing them to ascend into the gaming floor, no one succumbed to the temptation to stampede.

I spent the entire convention hovering in the parents' area. Each boy wandered back to me from time to time -- to get money for soda, or ask about lunch; share a victory, or lament a loss. I became acquainted with parents from Iowa, and Indiana, and Illinois. I read two novels. I went back to our room and napped.

On the evening of the first day, we ventured into the city and found a restaurant for dinner. As was our custom in those days, we also found the nearest Game Shop, although anything they wanted to purchase could be had at the convention for a ten percent Game Day discount. I recognized Game Day for the marketing device it really was, but did not mind. In the immortal words of Lucille Corley, on balancing her checkbook to the banging sound of hard rock emanating from the living room, I told myself: Oh well -- they could be out robbing banks.

I have photographs from our visit to my aunt in her nursing home that trip, the boys talking patiently with her, she somewhat confused as to which grandchild or nephew each was. They let her call them by her sons' names, and the names of her son's sons, and they walked her around the corridors in her wheelchair. Aunt Del is nice, they said, as we loaded back into the car.

When the last bell had sounded, for the last round of Warhammer, we packed their armies, and their ragtag lot of blue jeans, and headed to St. Louis. We descended on the Arch at 8:00 p.m., and discovered that the hotel had lost our reservation. The concierge rose to the occasion and gave us a suite, and the boys grabbed my laptop and settled into their separate sleeping room behind French doors, logging on to the World Wide Web through the hotel's connection, murmuring long into the night, as I drifted to sleep, closing my eyes with a lingering image of their three earnest heads bent together over delicate, painted warriors.

And now those eager boys have become hulking figures that tower above me. One of the three, Maher, has long since decamped to Florida with his long-time girlfriend, where they pursue degrees in something too complicated for me to grasp. Chris studies Arabic, in which he is fluent, which I find ironic since Maher's mother is from Beirut. And Patrick, who gravitates between writing, music and theatre, still remembers the best birthday ever, in Chicago, when time stood still, and his mother did not once, for three days, say no, we can't afford that.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 24 July 2010

Good morning,

Darkness soothes me as I struggle to pull myself back to consciousness this morning, on a day when I had intended to sleep well past the dawn. Instead I nurse my first cup of coffee before the sun rises, and I see its soft light behind the stained glass lighthouse and the china angels which perch beside the picture of my son at 5, playing on the Easter rabbit statues on the Country Club Plaza. His mischievous look beckons me; his smile warms me.

Beside the frame that houses his picture squats a sweet angel holding a star. Under her, the word "Hope" appears". Hope. This word, too, sends an invigorating sensation through me.

I found myself in an uncharacteristic quarrel with a colleague via e-mail this week. I am perplexed by the bitter passion that seems to choke her when she deals with the parties involved in the case we currently have together. I try to tell her this: try to find out why she raves and chortles over the rise and fall of the sobriety of the parents whose children's lives she controls. She shrugs away my query and disdains to address what lies beneath her ardor. My efforts to neutralize her anger fail. I grow discouraged.

Late yesterday, I appeared before a judge and listened as he telephoned my opposing counsel to query as to the reason for his absence. We stood in the courtroom during the exchange, the judge on the bench, the parties and I flanking the rail in front of him. I heard the querulous tremble of the elderly lawyer explaining his infirmities and inability to bring himself to court and I thought, Please, God, do not let that be me, twenty years hence. The Court left the resolution of our dilemma to me, and I found our collective way to a happy ending. Doing so ultimately served both justice and my client. I could not bring myself to take advantage of the other party, whose lawyer could not appear; who stood alone, unprotected, before the bar.

I went home in the stifling heat, nibbling a protein bar, wondering how my world had come to this. Shuffling papers; applying some strained combination of good sense and legal precedent; searching for the humanity behind the enumerated paragraphs; closing the file; sending my bill.

I never meant to be an attorney. I planned to teach kindergarten and write. I majored in psychology because my university did not offer a special education degree and I wanted to teach mentally retarded children. In the first semester of my second year, I did a pre-teaching lab, which sent me into an inner-city program for disabled children.

On the first day, a small huddle of children whose bodies and minds had been smudged by some cruel genetic accident crowded around me. They touched my hair, and the cloth of my skirt, and pulled at my earrings. I reached down and held a dozen hands at once, small hands, with tiny fingers, some of them twisted, all of them tugging urgently for attention.

A few feet away, the classroom teacher watched the melee for a few minutes, then turned away. She began to lay paper on the picnic tables that stood in a ring around the large room. I tried to steer the circling mass of energy towards the table and became further entangled in their frenzy. I stared at the teacher, helpless, until she took pity on me and pulled the outer layer of children towards her, distributing them amongst the benches to start their morning finger-painting session.

I seated myself in a small chair at the end of one of the tables, beside a small brown boy with a shaved head. He turned staring eyes toward me and clutched more tightly at a rolled towel, thrusting the thumb of the hand which held the towel into his mouth. I smiled at him and he responded by collapsing onto the table in tears.

It proved to be a long day.

On the second day, I wore blue jeans and a plain white shirt. I exchanged my dangly earrings for simple studs and braided my long hair, wrapping it around my head, securing it with large brass pins. I left nothing free; nothing to fascinate and lure that cluster of desperate, reaching curiosity. When the body of children made for me, I extended my arms and grabbed the outer hands of the group, and pulled. The ball of children unwound itself and I sorted them out into their individual beings. The teacher's eyebrows raised but she said nothing. We headed for the pots of paints and started into an earnest session of smearing primary colors on smocks, and newsprint, and the floor.

The little boy with the towel edged towards me, shifting his eyes sideways to see if I noticed. I continued painting with the girl whom I had been helping, but scooted over a bit on the bench, to give him more room. He sucked furiously on his thumb and swiftly tore his gaze from me, wild eyes glancing around at the other children, his free hand banging on the table. But at nap time, he pulled his mat close to where I sat reading a book, and fell asleep with one hand on my foot, the other close to his face, holding his grubby cloth, sucking his thumb. I gazed down at his small body; the painfully frail legs; the thin arms; the sunken stomach. I closed my own eyes, trying to imagine what might have happened to this child, in utero or after, to bring him to this state -- where he took comfort from an unwashed bit of toweling and the sandal-clad foot of a stranger.

On the third day, I brought a Polaroid camera. I had to document my work at this center in order to get a grade in the pre-teaching lab. During my six weeks there, I was to keep notes to accompany the pictures, and write a paper about my experiences.

The teacher pulled a folder of permits down from a crowded shelf, to identify the children whom I would be allowed to photograph. My little boy with the towel fell in the group, and I gathered him and the other children towards me. I'm going to take your picture, I said. They stared at me. I showed them the camera. I took a snapshot of the teacher, and held it for them as it developed. They gasped as the ghost image solidified into the familiar face. Then I formed them into a crooked line, and took each of their photographs, setting the small squares in a row on a table. They stood in silence, each before their own picture, as their images emerged. Their faces grew radiant as they recognized themselves, and they giggled, and raised the small squares, and ran around the room to show everybody. Look! Look! It's me!

The boy with the towel was last. As his frail form appeared, one hand near his chin holding his towel, the other twisting an ear, he fell back, away from the table on which the photograph rested. He clutched at my legs, drawing me towards the image, pulling at my hand. I bent beside him and he wrapped his arm around me. I felt the small, fierce beat of his heart; the long draw of each breath; the shudder as he sank against me. I stood, and he held more tightly onto me. I carried him over to a rocking chair and sat down, snuggling him against me. I sang whatever song I could think to sing, the songs of my childhood, the songs my mother sang to me, the songs my grandfather sang as we crowded around him, in the cool of an Illinois night, long ago, when I was young.

I did not return to the pre-school. In fact, I did not return to the class; as far as I know, I still have an Incomplete in the pre-teaching lab at St. Louis University. I finished my degree in psychology but never took another education class, and never returned to teaching. My first poem was published that spring, and I harbored, for a few years, the hope that I could write. Eventually, by some road that I can no longer see when I turn around, I came to this, to this place, to leather attache cases and courtroom attire; to pages and pages of complicated drivel; to clients who complain about my bill and beg me not to quit, even though they cannot pay me. To eating a protein bar, stuck in traffic, on I-70, on a Friday afternoon, wondering if I will be making excuses for failing to come to court, when I am 82.

The sun's light is fuller now, outside my dirt-streaked window. The warmed-over coffee in my cup has grown cold, and I should make a new pot. I'm sure the paper delivery person has come and gone; and my neighbor, whose car got hit yesterday morning, has already photographed the delivery truck's bumper and gone back inside to write a letter to the Star's circulation department. The black cat probably waits patiently on the porch, to be let into the house, so he can drink water from his special dish, and curl up on my chair at the table.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 17 July 2010

Good morning,

Everything around me seems to be humming. The CPU flanking my chair whirs and emits a cold blue light. I can hear the air filter purring in the dining room, and the sound of the compressor outside my window rises in the warm air of the morning.

I prefer the sounds and sights on my porch, but I have left the laptop unplugged all night. An orange light glows from its port, and the warning of drained power admonishes me for my carelessness. I resign myself to writing without the surroundings that I so love: the emerald expanse of our yard; the charming cracks in the shared driveway; the long sweep of the maple's branches; the occasional, quiet greeting from a passing neighbor sharing the morning air.

Beside me on the window sill of my computer nook is a framed copy of the poem "Warning", by Jenny Joseph(1). I wonder when I will get to the age when I can flounce around in purple, with a red hat or its functional equivalent, disdaining of the opinions of others about how I look and dress. I used to wear flowing skirts and muslin dresses; I used to wear crushable straw hats and carry wide floppy handbags in soft leather. Somewhere along the last year or so, I began to think about what color might appeal to those who had to look at me; and whether I should tweeze my eyebrows; and what I should do about the lines on my face. Inexplicably, I have grown more worried about what others think of my appearance, rather than less. I don't think I could yet join the Red Hat Club. Self-acceptance seems, in the final analysis, to be a function of mind-set rather than age, and I struggle to recapture the casual confidence that I lost along the way.

Christopher Robin closed his eyes to see his nursemaid's robe hanging on the door.(2) I close my eyes to see my mother's face, hear my brother's laughter, smell the French fries at Pickwick's, the Famous 'n' Barr restaurant.

Those fries were thin, coated with salt, flash-fried and delicious. My girlfriends Trini and Mary and I walked from my home, up Kinamore Avenue, to visit a friend who worked at that department store and drink Cokes with plates of those fries. In our Campbell-plaid skirts with inverted box pleats, and the white blouses we pulled out to hang around the folds that hiked our skirts higher than the nuns allowed, we flounced passed tables of disapproving women with crabby children. Our eyes flashed back in disdain, though whether real or assumed, I can no longer say. When those women were watching us, we talked louder, and laughed with more gusto, and pulled soda through straws with more vigor. Their shifty eyes did not deter us.

I made the walk from McLaran to the Northland shopping center often. We bought our groceries at Bettendorf-Rapps, which later became Schnuck's. My mother worked at Famous 'n' Barr. My sister worked at the Kresge's. I had public school friends who lived on Kinamore, halfway between my home and the mall, whose daring always amazed me and whose freedom had a lurid allure.

The heady taint of attending public school fascinated me. Girls who went to public school had boyfriends, whom they kissed and, I suspected, with whom they did other things that I could not even imagine. They had jobs -- real jobs, not just baby-sitting or working in their high school cafeteria, but jobs at restaurants and in offices, where they went on early release from high school. I knew only one Catholic school girl who got early release, and that was because her mother had died and she was helping her father raise a much younger brother.

The summer of the year in which I turned fourteen, I became friends with a girl who smoked, chewed Juicy Fruit and lived across from the public grade school at Kinamore and Willet. She had dishwater blond hair, a thin frame, and angular shoulders. She wore crop tops and black pedal pushers and put the hair above her ears in pin curls, which she wore while she sat in the living room next to the box fan and talked to her boyfriend on the telephone. I can't remember her name but I remember the grey, worn carpet in her living room and her boyfriend's long, knowing gaze.

That girl gave me my first designer pocketbook -- a castoff, but new for me, a square purple purse, a Villager, I think. I had craved such a bag but never dared asked my mother to buy one, and my small earnings could not finance its acquisition. This girl tossed a barely used one in my direction, thoughtlessly, as though she could not be bothered with it anymore. I did not pay attention to her dismissive air. I eagerly deployed it and felt a little thrill.

With the same casual attitude, that girl also provided my first drink: harsh red wine from a bottle with a screw top that she poured into a Dixie cup, on a night so hot that she tied her blouse up and sat in short-shorts on the steps of her house. I am not sure where the girl's mother spent most of her time; I rarely saw her. The girl seemed to come and go with no limits. She had no father, no siblings, just the haggard mother who supplied her with cigarettes and left her alone for long stretches, to loll in the muggy night air, one arm around her boyfriend's outstretched legs, her eyes half-closed as she drew in smoke and blew it back out across my face.

At my house, the music on the stereo rotated between Broadway shows and early Rock, depending on who commandeered the long low stereo in the living room. At this girl's house, I heard blues, and jazz, and the mournful, sexy tones of saxophones. I fell in love there, too, with a friend of her boyfriend, a clean cut boy who never so much as touched my hand.

One night the four of us sat on her porch and she serenaded me. She had a decent voice but I squirmed beneath the strange attention. Her eyes danced as she held a hairbrush under her mouth like a microphone and pulled me from the glider to force me to dance with her. I can hear her voice now, though I strain, without success, to remember her name. Black pearl, pretty little girl, let me put you up where you belong.(3) Her boyfriend smiled, and encouraged this diversion with his indolent tone. The subject of my crush straightened his back and told her to leave me alone. She ignored him, and I let her pull my body around, in the dark, the only light provided by the occasional passing car. The shadows flickered across the hard planes of her face. I felt sick, but I succumbed. She sang; we danced; and her boyfriend lit cigarette after cigarette as the night waned.

She grew bored of me at last and shooed me home. I left the three of them and went down the stairs, holding onto the pipe rail, ignoring the flaked paint crumbling under my grasp. At the foot of the stairs, I nearly turned around to wave goodbye, but I heard her voice -- murmured, intimate words followed by a sharp, careless laugh. A sheet of winter ice gripped my heart. I did not look back.

Half a block away, I stood at the crest of the hill at the bottom of which our house sat. I saw our wide porch, with the light that would stay illuminated until the last child had come home for the night. I could see my mother sitting in a lawn chair, watching my younger brothers in the driveway. They were rolling Match Box cars down its rough contours, gleefully aiming for the gate to the back yard and the sidewalk which ended at the stump of the elm tree where I had learned to climb. I can't remember when disease took that tree; I can't remember when we had to take it down. But I remember the sight of my mother that night, and the little boys. I remember the quickening of my steps, as I stumbled down the hill, in the stifling air, amidst the sounds of crickets, and the occasional, eager flash of a firefly.


Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley


Dedicated to my mother, Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley, 10 September 1926 - 21 August 1985.
"My child and my heart will never part."(4)






(1) http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/warning/
(2) http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/47706-A-A--Milne-Vespers
(3) http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/b/blackpearl.shtml
(4) http://books.google.com/books?id=4_9EAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Emmy+Lou:+Her+book+and+her+heart&source=bl&ots=R-GjiP4YRm&sig=o96zU0V_4LmTO-b-s2t6fdJmlyg&hl=en&ei=ecFBTP6nOoeCsQPtnaCyDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false