Saturday Musings, 09 February 2013

Good morning,

I only need to close my eyes, and I am in the car with two weary young men who have been driving for twelve hours.  Snow surrounds them, a wicked, whirling blanket shrouding their windshield.  The wind raises great wafts of the stuff, a fierce wall which their headlights barely dent.  The two inch along, not daring to stop, unable to discern the surface of the road, shivering in their seatbelts, speaking only when necessary and in clipped, brief sentences.

Ahead, two lights seem to guide them.  The road must be to the right of those lights, they reason, and the driver turns his wheel.  Too late:  the dark figure looms  so close.  A sharp jerk, the figure leaps to one side, and the little car glides forward, carried by its own weight, compelled by this undeniable principle of physics:   A body in motion stays in motion until it slams into a stalled car hidden in the depths of a blizzard.  Eye meet horrified eyes seconds before the two vehicles collide.

The passenger in the crumpled car texted his mother late Wednesday night.  "This is kinda funny, but I got in another accident.  I wasn't driving and nobody got hurt."  Exhausted, medicated, curled in her bed with the electronics switched to silent, his mother does not see the text until Thursday morning when she rises from a fretful sleep.  On waking, she thinks first of her failure to buy coffee, of the empty silver canister with its few little shards of broken coffee beans.  She paces around the bedroom, walking off the effect of a desperately ingested painkiller,listening for the sounds of her husband moving around on the first floor.

Only when she has come fully awake does she reach for the cell phone and hit the power key.  By that time, she has been out of bed for ten or fifteen useless minutes, while far to the north, those young men have collapsed from exhaustion a handful of hours after their eventual rescue.  "Even the dog in the other car is okay," says the text, which she reads while standing by her wobbly antique writing desk, her face frozen in its grimace of shock.  The prior history of their virtual exchange mocks her:  She scrolls back to re-read her son's account of a blown tire, his fruitless struggle to stay out of the ditch, his reassuring conversation with the tow truck driver, the ride in a police cruiser back to school.  That was less than a week ago!  she thinks, before raising her voice to call her husband.  "Jim, my God, Patrick was in another car accident."

The Upper Peninsula shudders under the brutal weight of winter.  Nearly as far north as it is possible to go without a passport, it takes the brunt of a February storm and huddles deeper down into the rough land surrounding the  lakes.  The two travelers find themselves stranded.  The nearest rental car sits useless in a parking lot hours away.  To the south, a mother helplessly watches the drama unfold in short bursts of half-formed script scrolling through the little window of her cell phone's screen.  We're okay, comes the next line, while she sits at her office desk.  I've got beautiful pictures of the ice-carving festival. . . I talked to the AmFam agent.  Act III, Scene 1:   11:30 p.m. Friday night, two students, eager to leave the daunting beauty of the Upper Peninsula, throw their backpacks in ahead of them and board a Greyhound bus for the first leg of a twenty-one hour odyssey back to Indiana.

February 9th, marks the thirty-first anniversary of the evening that I was struck by a dubiously documented Iranian driving a silver VW.  In the last eight days, two of my children have been in a total of three accidents.  I am not sure if they have made it possible for me to feel safe on Sunday, my personal jinx broken; or if instead, they have completely dashed any hope that I will survive parenthood with my last shred of sanity intact.  Astoundingly, of the seven or eight people (and one canine) involved in the three incidents, not one sentient being sustained so much as a scratch. Three cars totaled or nearly so; one small Kia in need of two new tires and a replacement bumper; one tow truck driver still shaking from his frantic dive out of the path of that body in motion.  But nobody hurt.  Nobody killed.  Where do you stand now, on the question of divine intervention?

I open a weather widget and see that the eastern seaboard cowers under a relentless onslaught of winter.  I pull up a web page with a map of Michigan, and stare for a few shivering moments at the town towards which my only son-by-birth had been riding when that car succumbed to inevitability in a long, slow terrifying slide.  I shake my head a little, then close the web page.  The heady fragrance of coffee fills the house.  I shut the computer, and head downstairs.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 02 February 2013

Good morning -- or should I say, good evening, because it is late on Friday, not even midnight but dark, and quiet.  A life flight has just passed over the house, leaving me thinking, That's what I need; a life flight.

As our number three child said via text a few minutes ago, it has not been a good week for our family.  One son missed a treacherous curve on a country road in Tennessee and went airborne, he and his companion saved by the airbags in my husband's Ford.  The other son ran over something on a dark highway in Indiana, and found himself in a shallow ditch with two flat tires.  If our daughter had not broken an axle on her PT Cruiser a few weeks ago, we might be really nervous right now.  But neither son suffered any injury other than the tremors which follow such incidents, and the trepidation with which each called home.  I consoled one last night and one tonight; thank you, Verizon Wireless, for giving them each a mechanism with which to call AAA and Kansas City.

Everybody does this at least once, I assured each of them.  And I remember my most famous car accident, years ago, on Grand in St. Louis, in an ice storm.

I had left work early, sliding my small frame behind the wheel of my MG midget.  Sleet pummeled my windshield, defying the wipers, the sound of the cold grey against the glass sending shivers through me.  I pulled into traffic, feeling the tenuousness with which my tires found purchase on the pavement.  Moving slowly, hearing my brother's voice, Keep your foot off the brake; let your car do the work; keep your foot off the brake!  I rolled through a yellow light, not even pausing, creeping slowly forward, clenching the steering wheel with stiff icy fingers inside inadequate gloves.  I headed south, to my apartment building, on Russell, 2-1/2 blocks east of Grand.

I nearly made it.  At the intersection, with a green arrow, I started into my left turn just as a woman stepped from the curb against the crossing light.  A small figure in a long woolen coat, scarf tight around her chin, clutching her grocery bag in one hand, her pocketbook drawn against her narrow chest in the other. One foot forward, small, clumsy, in city shoes, her tights wrinkling around her ankles.  My eyes shifted rapidly back, forth, assessing my options as the world kept turning and my car kept moving forward and the sound of my brother's voice echoed over and over and over:  Keep your foot off the brake, let your car do the work, Goddammitnow, Keep your foot off the brake! But nothing about the clutch, or the ice, or the tumble of an old lady on the slick stretch of pavement in front of me.

I hit the brakes at the exact second that the woman saw me, her head turned, her eyes wide, the groceries spilling from the paper sack.  I had no choice!  And I started into my spin, going round, and round, hitting car after car, while the lady screamed, and a driver in the opposite lane of traffic laid on his horn, long, relentless and loud.

My little car stopped on top of a No Parking Sign.  As I spun round and round, I had hit five vehicles.  Towards the end of my wild whirl, the fallen woman struggled from the ground, the harsh sounds of her panic filling the air as she frantically gathered rolling apples and brushed the snow from her vinyl handbag.  A young boy stood at her side, patting her arm with his red mittens, asking if he could help.  I could have been killed! she screamed, grabbing her arm away from him.  Did you see her? She almost hit me! I could have been killed!

I got out of my car, and stood next to the open driver's door.  Someone ran to a nearby business and called the police; somebody else hurried the woman to the far side of the intersection.   She fled north on Grand and no one thought to stop her.  Several people parked.  Somebody put a blanket on my shoulders.  Somebody else brought me something to drink that felt like fire going down but startled me from my stupor.  I leaned against the frame of my little green car as the sirens grew closer, and the light above me turned from red, to green, to yellow and back to red, an endless cycle of direction that no one heeded.

None of the people whose cars I hit would give me their names.  The worst damage was to my own vehicle and the city sign.  I got a ticket for destruction of city property.  On the day of the court appearance, I stood below a high, dark bench and told the old judge my story.  He looked down at me for a few minutes, then put the little bundle of papers aside.  Go see the city clerk, he instructed.  Ask her what it will cost to fix the sign, then come back.

When I got to the clerk's office, a lady came forward, her arm in a sling.  She furrowed her brow, studying my ticket.  You ran over a sign?  It seemed as though nobody else had ever done such a bold thing to something owned by the City of St. Louis.  I told her my story.  She looked at me then, really looked at me, fixing her watery grey eyes on my face.  See this cast, she said, gesturing.  The day of that ice storm, I fell on a sidewalk and broke my arm. I waited.  So you're telling me, it was basically the old lady or the sign.  I shrugged.  I'm gonna charge you twenty-five bucks for that sign, she decided.  Between the lady and the sign, I think you made the right choice. She wrote something down, initialed it, and handed it back. She turned away before I could  express any thanks.

I went back upstairs with the little chit and handed it to the judge.  He scribbled something on it, and handed it to somebody at another table, a lower one, maybe a bailiff, and that person scribbled something of his own and gave me another little chit which I took to somebody in another room.  A few weeks later, I got a bill for twenty-five dollars and I paid it.  

I waited a month, but the sign never appeared.  I called the lady in the clerk's office.  She sent a supervisor out, and he stood on the corner with me, looking at the hole in the ground where the No Parking sign should have been.  I looked too.  Spring threatened all around us, with balmy breezes, and the first pale green buds on the forsythia bushes of the nearest house.  I stood there with him for a few minutes, remembering my first sublet in that very building, one room of the first floor which had been cut into four living spaces.  My little corner had been formed by blocking the arch of the dining room with a tall, wide bookcase.  French doors opened to the former entry-way of what once had been a grand home.  The lady who owned the house had the only bathroom.  She would let you use it but she stood outside while you did, and when you had finished, she fussed with the towels like she thought you had contaminated them.  I lived there for three months, between my freshman and sophomore years in college.  I didn't have a car then.  I rode the Grand bus to and from the University.  At night, I sat by the window and wondered how anyone's life could be so sad.

The supervisor promised that the sign would be replaced, and it was.  But by that time, I had moved to another apartment, further south, and had gotten rid of the MG in favor of an automatic, an old Chevy Nova that I bought from my cousin Angela.  It handled much better on ice.

A text sounds on my cell phone.  The little Kia has been towed to a garage in Greencastle and its driver is back on campus.  I am sure both Patrick and his stepbrother Mac will remember this week for a long time to come. As for their maternal unit, well, though I concur it has been a bad week, I am very sure that it could have been worse.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 26 January 2013

Good morning,

My first moment of irony for this grey Saturday came as the version of G-mail that I have loaded onto my tablet crashed four times.  With a moue of disgust, I abandon the effort and open a browser window on my eight-year-old Mac while the Saturday trash collectors bang the recycle box back to the driveway's edge and lumber towards the neighbor's house.  Life in the 21st century sometimes challenges my old brain.

The tennis player has already gone, signaling that I've lingered too long over my second cup of Italian coffee.  I've clucked about the local feature-writer's castigation of those who apply their ancient double standard to our outgoing Secretary of State, and chuckled at the antics of the kids in the Cul-De-Sac.  The Saturday after a long tiring week draws feebleness to the foreground.

The anti-abortion sentiments that choke my inbox remind me of my mother's caustic comment when a woman repeatedly shushed her one Sunday morning, displeased as the parishioner evidently was with my mother's proclivity to explain her own position to me as we listened to the priest.  To the shock of the lady who did not like my mother's talking, my mother told me in a stage whisper, "Now there's one woman whose mother should have considered abortion."  But her point related not so much to the undesirability of the woman's existence as to her rudeness in not tolerating the parental lessons that the priest himself encouraged.  My mother welcomed all life.  We knew this from an early age:  If you're ever pregnant, she'd scold, I'll raise the baby until you're able to take over.  When I had a miscarriage in her bathroom, anguished and single, twenty years old and emotionally unready for whichever direction the pregnancy took me, my mother held me close and murmured my name over and over again.  If she felt secret relief, she did not show it.

Another mother sat in my office yesterday, giggling, beneath a knitted cap, huddled in her ski jacket, clutching her cell phone and trying to remember the address of the most recent apartment where she has been given refuge.  An appointed case.  Her children, four and two, reside with their grandparents.  My client has never completed high school and has an IQ of less than 70.  Her behavior mimics that of a child, with little understanding of the potential loss of her parental rights and no appreciation of the impact of her inability to meet the state's demands for her behavior.  Earlier this week, she left a message with my secretary that she could not afford to buy birth control pills.  I resisted the temptation to give her money that she might well use for candy or soda instead.

Other mothers have sat in the same chair, in other offices, in other buildings.  The haunted eyes of one will  never fade from memory.  She, too, had two children, but no grandparents to take them, and so they fell into the system.  The mother, whom I had been appointed to represent, suffered from schizophrenia.  She had taken up with a band of undocumented immigrants of some Hispanic origin, and gave each of the resulting babies a slew of  Spanish-sounding names.  She told me she thought in Spanish and realized that she must have been stolen from Mexico as a baby.  If so, she had been sired by a Norwegian and borne by a Dane:  Blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, she resembled no one of Mexican descent that I have ever known.  She came to me twice with a tale of being pregnant again; both times, the supposed pregnancies fizzled.  Once she told me she had an abortion; once she whispered only, I lost the baby.  I held her close both times, and let her sob against my chest.  Even against my size 2 body, her frame felt fragile and tenuous.

That client finally disappeared.  I had a Guardian ad litem appointed for her.  We agreed that there was no good reason to prolong the outcome.  The court terminated her parental rights.

Good women choose to end pregnancies because they judge themselves unable or unwilling to parent.  Others should have that option so as to avoid the hollow-eyed desperation of my schizophrenic client.  These precepts persuade me.

A cluster of cousins, Catholics most, post on Social Media that the termination of a pregnancy is murder.  An old friend who raised a trio of children on her own after a nasty divorce hotly agrees.  My niece queries, Have you ever talked to a fifteen-year-old who has been raped, and wants an abortion?  I have!  I periodically insert a judicious comment, merely suggesting that each viewpoint has merit.  The pro-lifers loudly protest that the only legitimate pronouncement is theirs, because any other opinion promotes murder.  The pro-choicers seem to be somewhat more considerate, encouraging a civil debate, pointing out the factual inconsistencies in the life-begins-at-conception argument, quietly noting that no analogy quite jives with the fact that the growing cells, whether human yet or not, lie within a host who has not always chosen for the pregnancy to occur.  I see both sides.  My opinion remains the same:  It is a difficult issue, one that each person should be able to decide for herself.  I cannot liken all abortions to murder.  It just does not play; I cannot make that leap, though I understand why others do.  It all depends on a basic assumption that some present as fact without the ability to be sure. 

In the end, I bypass the sixth commandment for the words of Matthew: Judge not, that ye be not judged.

The trees rise above the roofs of my neighborhood, the bare limbs grey against the slight blue of the sky.  Matching green houses march  northwardly on the street behind me, their white trim bright in the dim light of the wintry morning.  A mound of laundry awaits me.  I put aside weighty thought, and head downstairs, to brew another pot of coffee, while the Car Guys dispense easy wisdom from the radio, and the sounds of traffic drifts towards me from the east.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 19 January 2013

Good morning,

A wide expanse of grey smoked glass signifies that I sit at a strange desk, in a town far from my home, a four-hour jaunt away from Brookside and our weekend responsibilities.  Small noises behind me alert me to the kind presence of our weekend host, his spouse and mine still sleeping, a small black cat sniffing at the bedroom door, wanting to curl beside her sleeping mistress.  Grand Lake, Oklahoma.  We've come to a place where I sleep the sleep of the welcome guest, with nothing more demanding to do than choose between coffee and tea for breakfast.

Dawn begins to filter through the tall, leafless trees outside the window, the sweet light of a morning that promises to be unseasonably warm even for the southwest.  I feel only slightly creaky today.  The face in the mirror of the guest bedroom, with its greying eyebrows and its myriad of fine wrinkles, appears slightly less tense than my winter morning face typically does.  What shall we do today, we've been asked, after a delicious dinner served by the same smiling waitress who cheerfully invented lunch for a non-meat eater during our last visit here.  We shrugged, Jim with his legs stretched on a large soft hassock bigger than most of my living room chairs.  A tour of the small plant that our hostess manages; a lazy trip to a Civil War battlefield; an hour in the hot tub.  Who cares? We're on vacation.

At home, the Christmas decorations rest in their plastic bins, on a dusty shelf in our basement.  I've weathered the holiday season with only a small amount of angst.  Our nest has emptied again, the visiting boys and the relocating daughter all journeyed out a spider web's path to the berths of their own new years.  I see a pinch of worry at the corner of my husband's eyes.  He briefly concedes that he misses his children.  My own boy, the boy born to me rather than the one acquired with my nuptial vows, has gotten past the stage when calling his mother prompts him to feel clingy.  I get a text or an email, a picture, a link to a poem he thinks I will like, almost every day.  Thank God.  The parent-shame phase lasted overlong.

That face in the mirror drifts before me as I wait for the coffee to finish brewing, the sound of it calling me to the smooth granite counters.  Except for the blue eyes, that face might be my own mother, gazing at me from wherever she rests in eternity.  In an instant, I sit again at her breakfast room table, trying to explain why my boss has required me to write a letter of apology to a co-worker.  I didn't do anything wrong ,I whine.  She's too sensitive.  I am twenty-two, more than old enough to know how to treat people, beyond the age when Saturday morning visits to my mother should be consumed with sniveling.  It can't be all her fault, her gentle voice tells me.  You need this job. Grad school is expensive, your apartment might be cheap but you still have to pay rent.  You can't come home again, she does not say.  I've adjusted to an empty nest already, her tone suggests.  Don't screw this up.  She sets a plateful of warm schmarrn in front of me, its luscious batter lightly browned and lathered with  the sheen of butter overcast by the sparkle of cinnamon sugar. I sullenly spear a piece with the side of a salad fork, and slip it into my mouth, cradling its warmth against my lips as I chew.  Thomas Wolfe be damned; I could eat this stuff forever, as long as my mother cooked it in her heavy cast iron pan, and served it beside a steaming mug of cocoa.

I grumbled over that letter for an hour.  In the end, I slashed the self-righteousness under my mother's slightly amused watch.  She had no need to speak; the perennial message shone from her eyes.  I set aside my cloak of denial, and admitted that I had been wrong, that I had been unreasonable and rude.  My mother could draw the feelings of shame from me as swiftly as she could reduce me to sniffles with the gentle touch of her spotted, worn hands.  I disdained of the accumulation of wealth, but if my mother approved of my moral choices, I felt like a king in his counting house, gleefully tossing each coin on a growing pile.

And now my thoughts stray back to my son, to the soft questions he poses over the wonderful medium of the Internet:  Have you seenRust and Bone yet? Did you listen to that song I sent you? How is the dog?  I hear again the gasp which escaped from his lips when I called to tell him of the death of one of his childhood heroes.  I was just talking about him yesterday! he protested, because remembering someone damn well ought to keep them alive.  I had no comfort to spare; I could only listen, just as I could only type concurrence in a mournful chat with my ex-husband an hour earlier. We should have done more.  Yes.  We should always have done more.  We have never done enough.  Just write the letter, my mother admonished, in her kindest voice.  You should have done more; you hurt her feelings; you know better.

As we drove the last miles to this retreat yesterday, my husband at the wheel, we floundered a bit, the map being too vague and his memory failing to supply the intricate details of the county roads.  I gazed out the window at the pastures with their small stands of livestock nibbling on the dry grass.  What harm would befall us, were we to get lost for a half hour?  I remained silent while he glanced back and forth at a troubling intersection, finally choosing one direction over the other for no reason other than it seemed to be correct.  And it was.  As we recovered the speed of sureness, he thanked me for not getting anxious.  I shrugged.  One small step towards redemption, my wobbly foot on the high road at last.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Sorrowful Musings

I recently learned that someone whom I once knew fairly well killed himself. The unfortunate reality is that he killed himself five months ago, at a time when I was out of town on my first-ever extended vacation. I had lost touch with this individual for the last several years, the last time I saw him being 2010.  A couple of months ago, prompted by my ex-husband with whom I remain friends, I started trying to "find" him again; without success, I know now, because he had died last August.

We all "knew" that my friend suffered from depression, alcoholism, and despondency.  I let him slip away from my life, from inertia, laziness, or because my daily interaction with him stemmed from a social communion that was splintered by my divorce and his, and by the aging of our children who no longer attended the same school or matriculated in the same social group. Those might be "reasons", but to me, now, they are actually just "excuses". This person and I had known each other for something like thirty years, and I just let him drift from my life, even knowing that he could damn well use my friendship.  I mourn his loss.

I share these observations so that you may have an opportunity to take away a lesson from my feelings of inadequacy and failure.  Please do not let the people in your life drift away, especially those who most need you.  This is not my first experience with suicide, as you might recall -- my youngest brother killed himself.  I have the same sense now that I had then.  My friend's suicide is not "about me", any more than my brother's suicide was "about me". But I am left with the stark realization that I might have made a difference to my friend, had I made the effort -- which I easily could have done.  I felt this way, as well, when my brother died.

Suicide is a personal choice, that some say is a selfish act.  I know it is often a last, desperate attempt to be pain-free.  If we can reach out to someone suffering from such pain, we can, perhaps, make a difference to them.  If you know of someone who seems despondent, suffers from depression, has begun to pull away from his or her normal social circle, reach out to them. If you do not feel competent to do so, alert someone else in their lives.  You might make a difference. You might help them see another way to deal with the overwhelming pain that hounds them.

Mugwumpishly -- and sorrowfully -- tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 12 January 2013

Good morning,

Other than my epileptic brown dog, I'm the only sentient being in the Holmes house today.  My spouse drove a Penske one-way to Omaha with our daughter's belongings, her silver-bullet car behind the vehicle as they journeyed north for the start of the next phase of her life.  I spent last evening padding around the house in black velour, rubber-bottomed slippers and a new pair of leopard-print pajamas, a size too large but cozy and warm, one-hundred percent polyester imitation coziness.  I watched one of those movies whose endings you see coming halfway through, with a glimmer of foreshadowing and a nuanced glance.  I cried anyway, laughing with the bitter sweetness of the heroine's move to mental health while her hospital romance assumed his old room in the ward where they had met. 

My stepdaughter's voice on the phone a few hours later, eager, alive, brilliant, pulled me back nearly four decades, to the drive from Logan Airport in the car of a young man who provided a temporary berth for me, in the weeks after my early college completion, December 1976.  Seventeen inches of snow had fallen that day, David told me; twenty more fell through the evening and night.  I could not sleep; I could hear icicles forming, snow settling, wind rattling the window near my pallet on the floor.  I set my glasses on my suitcase and closed my eyes.  

I had not known what Boston would be like, but I certainly did not anticipate the biting cold.  I took the Green Line to Boston College, where I planned to enroll as a graduate student in September. On the strength of my anticipated matriculation, the lady in the Student Life Office allowed me to peruse the "help wanted" and "roommate wanted" listings.  I left a couple of messages, scheduled an interview, then trudged back to the T stop in borrowed galoshes, clutching my Midwestern attitude to my chest, huddled in a thin wool coat and the scarf my mother had knitted for me.  The matching gloves sat at the bottom of my pocketbook, one thumb too big, the other too narrow, a little finger misshapen.  I wore instead a cheap pair from K-Mart.

Within a week, I had agreed to rent the third bedroom in a Brighton second-floor apartment, from two actresses who worked mundane day jobs and auditioned as an avocation.  A week later, I started work as the receptionist in a temporary personnel agency, the St. Louis branch of which had been my summer job during my last two years of college.  My old boss sent a letter of reference.  I did not tell them of my plans to begin my graduate studies; they promised that hard work would draw me upward in rank and pay.  I felt only a little shabby for the deceit.  I needed to work.

For the next few months, I learned to board a subway without falling, to avoid the glances of dubious strangers, and to take the Red Line out to Cambridge where I found myself frequenting the Harvard Co-0p.  I did a stint as a relief secretary at IBM, which ended when I told my boss that I would Xerox something for him.  The sales rep who had placed me apologized for ten solid minutes while I stood miserably by her desk.  She slammed the receiver down.  I resumed my place as the suite receptionist, and no one used me for an assignment again.  Instead, I started scheduling nurses and CNAs to the night shift, keeping the lists of available personnel in neatly printed pencil on yellow cards with printed columns.

By February, I had begun to party with my roommates.  I dated a banker who turned out to be gay.  I drank with unemployed actors and collected bets on the waiters at the Cafe Vendomme:  This one wants to be a rock star; that one came from Iowa.  When one of my roommates got a part in a local performance of "Look Homeward, Angel", I chugged red wine and got sick on the fire escape of the community theatre.  My date, fastidiously disdainful of my weakness but thankful for the cover that I provided on Sundays with his conservative family in Worcester, held my shaking frame while I gulped air and made excuses about bad chicken salad purchased from a downtown food cart.  I fooled no one.

In the sweltering summer, on a torpid July night, I huddled against a pillar in the subway station, miserable and lonely.  I glanced across the way, meeting the eyes of a man more miserable than me only because of the bent in his back and the curl of his spastic hands.  He wore an odd hat, dingy plaid cotton, with a ragged brim.  He held my gaze, then slid a crooked finger along the side of his face.  His gesture could have meant anything.  I took it as pity.

I sank against the seat, feeling the sweat soaking my suit jacket.  The train lumbered out to the suburbs, raising to trolley level, sliding into Cleveland Circle.  I limped towards our apartment, 27 South Street, my stomach tightening.  Our landlady had given us thirty-days notice, and my flatmates had already advised me that they did not want me to join them in their new apartment.  My misery sickened them.  We advertised for a roommate, not a sister, they told me.  

A few hours later, my boss telephoned.  They had decided to change the schedule, and assign me to the midnight shift, requiring me to journey downtown in the swaying confines of an empty train car, enter a locked office building, and organize the lists of nurses available to work in the morning as each hospital called.  The job would not become automated for twenty years.  In those days, nothing could be done remotely.

The prospect of moving to a dingy studio, working alone through the night, and finding new friends overwhelmed me.  I dialed the office answering machine and rasped out my resignation.  I called my mother; and started to drag a jumble of books and clothes from the bedroom closet.  In St. Louis, My brother Kevin slid into the driver's seat of my mother's vehicle and headed east.  I was coming home.

A few weeks later, I staggered from the sun room of my parents' house, foggy from a late night, to find my seventeen-year-old brother hunched over a coffee pot waiting for it to perk.  He shifted his bleary eyes towards me.  Neither of us spoke.  My desolation rose, gagging me, spewing into the silent kitchen.  In that moment, the long slow slide downward began.  It would only end when I hit so close to bottom that I might as well have died.

I think of my stepdaughter starting her new life, in a new town, at a new employer, in a new apartment with her boyfriend.  Not for her the stacked suitcases serving as a bedside table to a pile of blankets on an air mattress.  Though I feel gratitude, even now, for the welcome David showed me and the months that Marian and Melanie let me borrow their lives, this gratefulness mingles with a stronger sense of relief that Cara's journey has begun with more hope than I felt, in that brief, half-year, my Boston odyssey.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 05 January 2013

Good morning,

A woman reads from her newly released book in the background, a book about children whose parents failed to care for them.  I've switched on the radio too late to hear if she speaks of herself or invented characters.  But I do hear this much:  Now that her parents have been buried, "at least we know where they are".  She chuckles, and in response, I venture a small smile.  Certainty measures our lives, and spins our difficulties into gold.  Tarnished gold, sometimes, to be sure; but nonetheless, something to treasure.

My week soared and plummeted.  A difficult war lost; an uphill battle won.  New clients in the book; old clients abandoned from frustration at the rare but annoying failure to pay.  A judge retires; a new judge takes her docket, and sits on high, hands in a steeple before his face, gazing down at me, wondering if I will prove a thorn in his side or a boon to his management of troubling issues.  Film at eleven, ooh, ahh, ahh.

One child of our home throws his belongings onto the backseat and journeys to the rest of his life, on the last day of a fading year.  Within twenty-four hours, he's pictured with a clutch of laughing, hugging friends in the back of a limousine hailed on the streets of Chicago.  Thirty-five dollars for eight of us, he texts me, a day or so later, when the fog of an all-night celebration lifts.  His mother's heart sings:  no one drove after over-imbibing, his first New Year's Eve of legal age behind.  Come on, Mom, he chides.  I know better!  You taught me better!

Those who can't do, teach.  I close my eyes and see myself on many a New Year's Eve of decades gone by, always alone, always intoxicated, always driving.  Before my 25th year, the hard slam of a board against the side of my head sent me staggering from a fog of ignorance. I swore that never again would I take the wheel of a two-thousand pound dangerous instrument after having so much as a drop of alcohol.  I never killed, I was never injured, and the only damage came to my sweet little MG Midget which sustained a broken axle.  But I placed myself, a few passengers, and the rest of those on the road in jeopardy, startled to consciousness by the sound of screeching brakes and the horrified stares of other drivers, some no doubt scared sober by seeing me run a red light at Kingshighway and Vandeventer at one a.m. on the first day of 1980.  Any lessons that I've taught my son came honestly to my playbook.  I know better, Mom.  You taught me better.

Little Christmas looms.  In the home of my childhood, the wise men would be waiting their move forward by a small hand.  The Feast of the Epiphany signaled time to take down the Christmas tree, place it on the curb wrapped in yards of jute, and carefully stow the ornaments in their large cardboard box.  My father wound the lights around a contraption made from a wire hanger, the mechanism by which he insured the ease of use in the next holiday season.  Tinsel strewn on the front yard in puddles of melting snow; neatly packed gift boxes and smoothed sheets of wrapping paper beside the trash can; drying cookie tins in the drain basket.  And the visitors brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the sweet-smiling baby in his bed of straw.

Tomorrow the second son of our household will follow his stepbrother's example, motoring from Kansas City to the town In Tennessee where he attends college.  A week later, his sister's move to Omaha will be effected, my husband behind the wheel of the u-haul, she in her little car behind, up I-29 to her future.  And we will become empty nesters, me for the second time, him for the first.  Sheets will be washed and restored to the beds; stray socks taken down to the laundry, then tucked into the dresser drawers, forgotten until spring.  Our funny little dog will settle back into her routine, the young people who pet, walk and tease her all gone away again.  My husband will move his exciting business endeavors  closer to fruition. I will start working on the book that I  promised myself to publish this year.

And every once in a while, a text message from far away, or a picture on Facebook, will  make my heart race.  I will think of my mother, waiting for her children to come home, two sent to rescue two; one sent to rescue one; another struggling to reach home while the wind races round and the sirens blow.  Our own stories drift to their quiet end, and our children now take center stage. As the home fires burn, I reassure myself that our children's scripts will have happy endings, because of the lessons we have taught them.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley