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, March 19, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Saturday Musings, 12 March 2011
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
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, March 5, 2011
Saturday Musings, 05 March 2011
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
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, February 26, 2011
Saturday Musings, 26 February 2011
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
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, February 19, 2011
Saturday Musings, 19 February 2011
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
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, February 12, 2011
Saturday Musings, 12 February 2011
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
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, February 5, 2011
Saturday Musings, 05 February 2011
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
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
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The Missouri Mugwump®
- M. Corinne Corley
- I've been many things in my life: A child, a daughter, a friend; a wife, a mother, a lawyer and a pet-owner. I've given my best to many things and my worst to a few. I live in Brookside, in an airplane bungalow. I'm an eternal optimist and a sometime-poet. If I ever got a poem published in The New Yorker, I would die a happy woman. I'm a proud supporter of the Arts in the California Delta. I vote Democrat, fly a Peace flag, live in a tiny house on wheels, cry at Hallmark commercials, and recycle. I am The Missouri Mugwump. ®