Saturday Musings(tm), 23 January 2016

Good morning,

A cup of English Breakfast sits by the laptop.  Coffee has Jenny Rosen to thank for its safety; the infuser which she gave me for Christmas brews luscious tea, dark and smokey.  I sit in the wooden thrift store chair, at the crude, charming workshop sewing table, also a second-hand find.  In fact the contours of wood surround me, here in my cabin retreat, a-top my urban bungalow.

I close my eyes and the tea's fragrance carries me beyond this time, before it, when my face in the mirror bore no lines and the wind howled across my Arkansas acreage.

My home spanned a third of the land.  I made my bedroom in a half-built extension which had no heat or closet but gave me 300 square feet of the house's total footprint.  Its ceiling rose far above me.  I slept beautifully, with the windows cranked open and the night sound soothing me, far into the winter.

When the mountain snows drove me to an interior room, I huddled near the Earth stove in a rocker.  I carried my son inside of me that winter, the winter of the creosote fire.  Despite the loneliness, maybe because of struggles that I faced, contentment blanketed me.  I moved through the interior house with disregard for the wind buffeting the walls.    I had plenty of wood, a full rick, neatly cross-stacked by the tight lipped country man who had delivered it and had stashed my cash in the front pocket of his coveralls.  Anything else needs doing, call me, he muttered.  He swung into the cab of his battered pick-up and pulled out onto old 71 while I watched.

That had been in October.  Now in January, pregnant, alone, the damage to the stove from the small careless fire repaired but still remembered, I carried wood in a canvas sling from the mudroom to the living room.  Double-split for my small hands, the wood fit easily into the hopper.  Warmth rose.  I dusted my palms together and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

Broad sliding doors led to the back yard.  I gazed through the glass into the surrounding night.  I could not see to the bottom of my property.  I knew the river at its western edge would not yet be swollen.  Floods would come in March, but now its flat, flagstone bed would still be passable, sturdy, strong, a walkway for the deer.  I could see them picking their way through my yard.  One lifted its head and seemed to meet my gaze.  Neither of us questioned the other's stance.  After a few minutes the little herd moved beyond my sightline.

I shivered a little, wondering if I should use the electric baseboard heater spanning the kitchen wall.  Instead I took my tea and toast back into the living room and settled in the rocking chair beside the stove.

The cat which had kept me company all through the previous winter in Fayetteville did not survive the summer in the country.  She had brought baby rabbits to my feet through spring, proud and preening, but a car on the highway had nicked her and she did not live.  My friend Carl helped me bury her and then I had no other life in the home other than my own and, later, the one which grew inside me, though the unchecked mice skittered through the walls.

I did not mind.  I missed the cat but I had no need of any human voice.  The one which might have sweetened the air with its lilting notes chose to stay away and so, I contented myself with silence..

I knew that I should sleep, this winter night.  I had to travel on Monday and had only Sunday left of the weekend.  The day would dawn cold and dreary, struggling to push aside the heavy clouds.  I would drag laundry into the house's addition where the washer stood on concrete next to the bathroom.  I would drive into town to fetch the makings of dinner.  In the evening, I would pack a small suitcase and organize the documents for the hearing to which I would fly in the firm's small plane.

But still I tarried in the rocker, drinking strong tea from my mother's pink Haviland tea cup, nibbling whole wheat toast thick with butter.  I rested one hand on my belly.  I had no clear prescience of my life as a single mother. I did not know where the rocky road of my law firm's financial challenges would eventually take me.   Nor did I see, in January of 1991, pregnant and alone in my mountain house in Winslow, all that the next twenty-five years would hold.  I sat.  I rocked.  I dreamed.  Eventually, I slept.

Mugwumpishly tendered.

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings(tm), 16 January 2016

Good morning,

Yesterday I went to an estate sale at the home of a ghost.  I bought a coffee table very similar to one that I already have, a wooden utility cart, a wall hanging in German, an African letter opener, and five clean and neatly-folded bath towels in better shape than any in my cabinet.

Lise Koenig graduated from law school one year after I did but she never practiced law.  I'm not sure what she did.  She and her husband, a professor, lived behind me on Charlotte.  They rode bikes rather than drive. Their daily walks took them down my block most of the years that I've lived here, sturdy people, arm in arm.  They missed a few months -- her bout with cancer, his with heart disease.  Two years ago, he died.  Last year, her neighbors found her at the bottom of the basement stairs, still breathing, broken and battered.  The unopened newspapers on the lawn suggested that she had fallen three days before they discovered her.  She did not awaken.

Signs throughout the house admonished shoppers that the company tending to the sale did not carry purchases.  I stood looking at the wooden coffee table, thinking how perfectly it suited my front sitting room.  We are not Movers, Don't ask. I calculated that it might fit in the back seat of the Prius; that if I pulled into the driveway by the porch, I could maneuver it down the steps of this house; that I could repeat the process at my own home.

Can I pull in the driveway if I want to buy this coffee table, I asked the cashier.  A man around the corner, out of my sightline,  said something that I could not hear.  The guy at the folding table with his box of cash answered him then turned back to me.  This man will carry it for you.  I looked through the doorway and saw a tall man, with a shaved head, wearing a P-Coat.  I asked if he worked for the estate sale company.  No, came the reply.  I knew the Koenigs.

He told me his name three times while we loaded the utility cart.  I didn't understand it.  Then he said, I teach art in the elementary school at University Academy, as though, somehow, that knowledge would compensate for my poor hearing.  Oddly, it did.  I told him that my son graduated from UA.  We groaned over the ineptitude of the Upper School art teacher who admonished my son not to waste paper by drawing so small.  I asked if he knew Mark Landes, one of my fellow Rotarians, who had been a principal at UA.  Light dawned across his face; he nearly crowed.  He felt the same way that I do about Mark:  Just knowing him brings us joy.

At some point, each of us had to leave to go get cash.  It had not occurred to either of us that an estate sale might not take plastic.  When I returned, I strolled through the dingy, neglected rooms, examining the odds and ends remaining after two days of sale.  I stood before a tapestry vest hanging in the bathroom doorway.  I climbed the stairs and my breath caught at the sight of the bed, with a pair of slippers sitting underneath it.

 I watched my helper pay for the books he had collected.  I found the letter opener on a table full of sad little kitchen goods.  I fingered it, wondering if Lise and her husband (what was his name?) had traveled.  I asked my new friend to take the wallhanging down for me.  I don't read German.  Lise had immigrated from Germany.  She spoke with a gentle accent. I folded the fabric and carried it home in my pocketbook.

 I never spoke to them when they walked past my house.  I don't know if Lise remembered me.  I would lift my hand; sometimes I would nod.  Their faces remained impassive.  They continued walking, holding each other's hand; arms entwined; bodies moving as one.

Today I will clean my house.  I will situate the cart from Lise Koenig's house and her coffee table among my other castoffs from ghosts.  I have already put the towels in my bathroom cabinet.  The letter opener lies beside my computer, here on the secretary's slide-out desk.  I hung the embroidered piece on the only wall which could accommodate it, in the hallway.  It extends downward nearly to the floor.  I don't know what it says but my friend Sheldon Vogt speaks German and I'm hoping he can tell me.

Ever since my neighbor Jack told me about finding Lise, lying on the basement floor, she has haunted me.  After her husband died, she walked alone, trudging down the sidewalk in tightly-laced shoes with a scarf wrapped around her neck.  I did not make much effort to connect with her.  I still raised my hand; I still nodded.  She would lift her chin just a bit.  She kept her eyes forward, steady.  I swear: she wrapped her arm a little tighter around the arm of one no longer there.  And kept walking.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings(tm), 09 January 2016

Good morning,

All week I have had brushes with motherhood.  A prospective client shops for an attorney to file a paternity action before her maternity leave ends.  Friends bring their new baby to my house for a visit.  Another friend tells me that his wife strives to be the best mother possible to their lively three-year-old.  Did the prodigal son come home for the holidays, he messages.  Yes, yes, he did.

Driving the Prius through rain the other day reminded me of an April storm over Louisiana, a virtual lifetime ago.

Heavy with the child who would become my only son, I climbed into the Cessna 206, hoisted by the pilot, steadied behind by my co-counsel, Joshua Joy Dara.  The trial bags had already been stowed.  Joshua handed my pocketbook to me as I settled and swung himself into the seat beside me.  "Please, get comfortable, watch the baby, are you warm enough?"  I envied Elizabeth, Joshua's wife.  His lilting Nigerian accent flowed over me, soothing the tension knotting my shoulders.

I had already lost one child, the twin of the boy still in me.  I did not want to sacrifice the remaining baby to a rancher's two-thousand acres.  But I had a hearing to hold, a restraining order to seek, a bank to stop.  I would fly.

Our pilot spoke through the microphone, checking instruments, talking to the Springdale tower.  Soon we rose to the air and I leaned back against the seat.  I trusted this plane more than the others which our firm provided for these flights around the country.  The Cessna 150 seemed too small; its bolts rattled.  The big plane, the one which our boss bought from the governor's office, felt ponderous, too heavy for the light winds over Arkansas.  This 206 glided to and from the runway and skimmed the clouds.  And I trusted our pilot.  But still:  At 20 weeks, I had not yet gotten beyond the tricky bit of pregnancy.

And I wanted this baby.

We landed without incident.  Our client waited at the small airport and drove us to the courthouse.  There we met a banker and his lawyer, tense-faced, angry.  They felt entitled to foreclose.  We represented the era of farmers protesting the whiplash of the cash-flow decade, the droughts and land-value drops which followed the 1970s, the missed interest payments and failed crops.  We symbolized the liberal notion that debt should be restructured or forgiven, that farmers should get another chance.    They despised us.

An old grey judge lumbered to the bench.  Joshua and I had co-opted the table at the right -- the "bride's side".  The rancher sat beside us in his Sunday best: No jacket but a button-shirt and pressed pants.  The Farm Credit lawyer and his client wore somber black at the table on our left.

I did not hide my condition.  I wore a maternity dress, a long jacket, and a fake wedding ring -- this last, something I saw as a necessary concession to the conservative south.  My boss did not require it but I had found that judges did not respond well to the idea of an unwed woman with child at the Bar.

As the bailiff called the case, I felt the first twinge.  I turned to Joshua and whispered, "Don't panic, but I think I'm in labor."  His eyes widened.  I could not stop his alarm but I placed one hand on his arm.  I rose.  "Your honor, if I may speak?"  The judge nodded, clearly accustomed to the decorum, but certainly not anticipating my request.

"I will be conducting this hearing, but given my condition, may I have my co-counsel carry exhibits, and handle objections?"  I knew Joshua had the case law memorized.  I knew I could count on him.

My opposing counsel stood as though to protest but the judge waved one hand.  "Certainly, Mrs. Corley," the judge intoned.  "And Officer, please provide the petitioner's counsel with anything she needs while she is a guest in our Courtroom."  I gave the judge and the banker's attorney my sweetest smile and called my first witness.

The labor pains increased as the hearing progressed.  Two hours later, the judge granted my restraining order and I turned to my co-counsel.  "We have to get out of here, now.  Really.  Is the pilot here?"  Joshua gathered our bags and I started from the courtroom, our client ahead of us clearing the aisle.

The banker glared at me as I moved beyond the spot where he still stood with his attorney.  He turned towards my opposing counsel and spat his anger in tones loud enough to reach me as I exited the courtroom:  "I can't believe you got beat by a pregnant crippled girl from Arkansas."

A half-hour later our pilot went through his instrument checks as a storm gathered to the south of the airport.  I leaned forward, my voice quavering and weak.  "Joe," I said, to the pilot, whom I knew to be a grandfather.  "I'm not happy about having this baby in Arkansas.  I'm damn sure not having it in Louisiana.  Please get me home!"

The pilot smiled, his face crinkling, his eyes steady.  "Sit back, Corinne.  I'll get us there."

He started down the runway and I faced the window, watching the black clouds as we rose.  I felt the force of the heavy air, heard the pilot quietly assure the tower that he could clear the storm.  
Lightening flashed.  I heard Joshua praying.  "Mary, Mother of the Christ child, please protect us," he whispered, as the rain started and the Cessna climbed.

Our pilot worked part-time for my firm but full time for Sam Walton.  He radioed Springdale when we got in range.  He identified himself and asked them to call his boss.  "Tell Mr. Walton that I've got one of the Arens lawyers on board and she's about to have a baby."   I closed my eyes as another contraction hit.  I whispered, "hold on, baby, hold on."  Rain pummeled the craft as we slipped down the runway, a perfect landing, smooth as silk.

Strong hands lifted me to a stretcher and into an ambulance.  The last thing I saw before the doors closed, through the falling rain, was Joshua's broad face.  His lips moved.  I knew he was still praying.

It's eight o'clock on a Saturday here in Kansas City, nearly two-and-a-half decades after that eerie landing in Springdale.  Sometimes I wonder if I imagined that flight; the storm which chased us north; the kindness of the strangers who helped me that day.  Like much of my life, my time in Arkansas seems to have happened to someone else, or perhaps to have been a dream that I had.  But then I drag a box from the attic and sort through old papers.  I find the fading sonograms, the little bundle of hospital bracelets, the receipts for baby clothes, and a box of business cards bearing my name and an office address in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  I smile.  The prodigal son came into this world at 34 weeks gestation, smiling, laughing, three months after that hearing in Louisiana where a pregnant crippled girl convinced a Republican judge that the Federal Land Bank had over-stepped its legal rights.  I don't know what became of that rancher.  But for that moment, his life stabilized.  He clasped my hand as he helped me into the back of his Oldsmobile for the rickety ride to the Natchitoches airport.  You've no idea what this means to me and my family, he said.  I thought I did but  I did not contradict him.  I just smiled, and closed my eyes, and silently told my baby, Hold on.  Hold on.  Hold on.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley


P.S.  I might have told this story before today, in a long-ago entry.  If so, my apologies for repeating myself.  On another note, if you want to learn about what happened to my dear friend Joshua Joy Dara after his time with the Arens & Alexander law firm, please click HERE.

Saturday Musings(tm), 02 January 2016

Good morning,

In the quiet of a Central West End three-story, I sit as the sun begins to bring herself over the horizon's edge.  The window before me faces south so I see the barest of tinge, a kiss in the sky promising warmth and glory.  My hostess sleeps one story above me, as do, presumably, her canine companions.

I've continued holiday celebrations for last two days, after a couple of necessary mid-week work-sessions.  The prodigal son headed back to Evanston yesterday, and I followed on his heels as far as Boonville, St. Peters, and St. Louis, my Prius acting like a local ferry as it took me to my sister Adrienne, then my sister Joyce, then la Puma, Joyce Kramer.

As I nibbled black-eyed peas yesterday, I smiled over Joyce's struggle to explain "this wonderful bean dish" that would be served at her block's New Year's Day Open House.  I should have known what it would be.  What is a holiday without tradition?  But Joyce, though long in Missouri, has never stopped being a New Yorker.  How would she know?

The memories of other New Year's Day luncheons crowd me as I sit at Joyce's table waiting for the sun to rise so I can walk to Starbucks.  But none jostles to the foreground.  Instead I am remembering the Christmas week which my son and I spent alone in Kansas City, in a two-bedroom shotgun apartment with mounds of snow piled on the balcony.  He toddled from one end of the house to the other, dragging a stuffed Barney, while I huddled on the folded futon which I used for a couch.  The wind howled outside.  Misery rose to claim me but I quelled its laughter.  One cannot show longing to a child.

We watched videos and sipped instant hot chocolate, his cooled in a cup and made with fake milk.  On the television, Belle galloped through snow heavier than the storm outside our apartment, saving her Papa hour after hour, time after time.  Patrick pranced around the small living room pretending to be the rescuer.  I burrowed deeper in the quilt which my great-grandmother made from tailor's scraps and closed my eyes, listening to the wind.

I almost missed the gentle rap on my door.

Patrick peeked from behind my legs as I peered into the hallway.  A tiny form stood in the glow of the overhead light.  Mrs. Gray, I said.  Patrick came out and raised his arms towards the little lady who lived across from us.  She patted his head as she handed me a plate covered in foil.

Cookies for New Year's Day, she said.  Happy New Year!  

Fragrance rose from beneath the covering, almond, vanilla, warm flour.  I cried in dismay: Oh Mrs. Gray, I have, nothing for you, but she dismissed my protests.  My mother made cookies for the neighbors every year, she replied, as though this excused my empty hands.  Now get this little one back inside, it's too cold for you, she told me, and she took her own thin body back across the hall, closing her door with a whisper.

I set the plate on the trunk which I had staged in the center of the living room, the same trunk which carried my clothes to college, to Boston, to Kansas City, to every town where I had fled on the heels of whatever I yearned to escape.  Patrick edged his body against my legs and turned a corner of the aluminum foil to see the cookies.  I lifted him onto the futon and settled him beside me.

Let's watch Belle again, I said.  We fell asleep  under my great-grandmother's quilt, with the sounds of Beauty and the Beast filling our home, and a spray of powdered sugar covering us.  Outside, more snow began to fall but we did not notice.

In a little while, I will head north, to Ferguson next to the Jennings of my childhood.  There I will (hopefully) sip coffee at my cousin Theresa's table, before continuing down I-70 to Hermann, and finishing my holiday festivities over a late lunch with my niece Amy and her husband Harlan.  Then I will  travel to Missouri's western edge, to my little airplane bungalow and my epileptic dog, in Brookside, in Kansas City, which I call home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings(tm), 26 December 2015

Good morning,

My sluggish body moves around the house wondering why I feel like a truck ran over me.  I cast my eyes downward, to the DearFoam slippers into which I have eased my sore feet.  My son found perfect presents for me:  these slippers; FarberWare kitchen shears to replace the ones which somehow vanished from a drawer; an excellent five-inch kitchen knife with a sheath and comfortable handle; a stuffed giraffe to remind me to use non-violent communication; and the promise of Neko Case loaded onto my phone and a cable to play her through the Prius's auxiliary function.  This last came when I confessed that my Neko Case CD which he gave me two years ago seems to have gone the way of the kitchen scissors.  My ghost  perhaps? But who knows.  Both are gone; and he's seen to their replacement.  I wiggle my toes in the soft fuzzy warmth of my new slippers and remind myself how lucky I am.

How blessed.

We dined at McCormick & Schmidt last night; and tonight we will eat at the Carnie table, north of here, in warmth, and light, with the Carnie children laughing around us.  Our friend Ellen Carnie has invited us to dine with her and her son's family.  Tomorrow, we will serve our family-by-choice at our home.  We've had a wonderful Christmas so far.  I can only see it continuing.

Patrick asked me last night, are you sure you can afford this restaurant? I had planned it, of course.  I'm not wealthy.  We have done several lunches-out this week and he's protested each time.  Mom, you shouldn't be spending money on me.  In days when he worked, he would pay for lunch and shake his head, waving his hand if I tried to contribute.  But grad school has gotten serious, this second year, and he has no time for a job.  So he has put himself on a budget and taught himself to cook.  He often calls with questions but also found  a website with video and humor: Foodwishes.com.  Now he shares those recipes with me.  We spent time in the kitchen this holiday.

Over dinner last evening, I asked all the questions about screenwriting that had been hammering in my head as I watched him progress in his graduate program for the last year.  Technical questions; questions about the industry; questions about writing.  We talked as two adults, back and forth, listening to each other, following the flow where it led.  By dessert, I understood the rightness of the course he has chosen.

Last night before sleeping, a memory broke loose from the rubble at the bottom of my mind and struggled to the surface.   My mother stands at the front door of our home in Jennings.  I'm behind her, small, my hand on her leg.  I peer around to see what she sees: a cardboard box.

She pulls it into the house.  It's filled with food.  My mother says, They must have gotten the wrong house.  I don't know who would think we needed food.  I stare at the bounty.  One of my older siblings walks into the room and starts rummaging in the box.  Ann, maybe; or Adrienne.  Mom, we can use all this, look, there's a ham.  Mother starts to cry.  Her body crumples.  She sinks into a chair.  She shakes her  head; she wrings her hands.  It probably was meant for someone else.  But there is no one else.  They look for a note or some indication of the source of this gift while I watch them.  Finally my mother lifts the box from the floor and takes it into the kitchen.  Any talk of returning it has been stifled.

I never use the expression "don't cry over spilt milk", because I once saw my mother kneeling on our kitchen floor doing just that.  Shards of glass cut her hands as she tried to stench the flow from the shattered bottle and salvage some of the precious liquid.

My son and I started yesterday at Hope Faith Ministries, standing at the entrance to the bustling room where hundreds of homeless persons received a sit-down dinner on Styrofoam plates served by red-shirted volunteers with glowing faces.  The clientele coming through the doors passed through security, frisked by a laughing young man who made the undignified process as pleasant as possible, despite the gun on his belt, despite the filth of their layers of clothing, despite the bags they dragged into the place containing God knows what, their treasures, their lives.

I clasped their hands and wished them Merry Christmas.  They gazed at me, at the many strange faces in the row of greeters and servers.  Used to wandering into the place unobtrusively, they accepted our help but sometimes with suspicion.  One man studied my eyes before shaking his head but most took my hand and held it.  They read my name and thanked me.  I guided each person to one of the younger volunteers -- my son, or someone else -- who seated them and placed a small printed menu in front of them.  We did this for two hours.  I have never found a better way to spend Christmas morning.

As I sat at the restaurant table, I compared the look of our meal with the food that I'd seen at Hope Faith.  I know that I'm blessed.  I can afford the fanciness of restaurant service.  I can pay for the groceries that I will put on the table for my friends tomorrow.  I am not wealthy; I never learned to manage money.  I don't even really value it, not for itself, not in the way that I've seen in this world where the measure of  a man is often his net worth.

But I understand that money makes my life comfortable.  It sends me to California for my treatment at Stanford; it pays for the health insurance which covers that care; it keeps the furnace roaring and the Prius's motor churning.  I get that.  I love my work as an attorney, but I do it mostly to pay the bills and I accept this fact of capitalist society.  We earn our keep.  We make our own destiny.  Hopefully we get help when we need it and I've had plenty of that, too; and I have not forgotten my own guardian angels.  They stand with me when I stand for others; their love flowed from me to every person whom I greeted yesterday, through each cold hand, into each pair of lonely eyes.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

By coincidence, three pairs of mothers and sons worked the door at Hope Faith Ministries yesterday.

Saturday Musings, 19 December 2015

Good morning,

The tree stands at the window, its lights twinkling.  I had the timer in my hand for two seconds but got distracted by the prodigal son and now we have forever-lights, day or night, on or off.  I choose to leave them shining.  I'll find the timer when I clean, I'm sure; sitting on the mantle, or behind a picture on the piano.

Last evening my son and Brian carried a small dresser upstairs and settled it in its new place in my snazzy dressing room. Brian Martig, the carpenter/friend/fellow-Rotarian who rehabbed my upstairs attic and bathroom, vacuumed the last dust from his seven-week odyssey at the Holmes house, drank an Oatmeal Stout with Patrick, and bid us good evening.  He will return; his equipment stands in my garage and needs to be organized and taken home; he has a few trim pieces to install; he's put a temporary lamp where a light fixture will be.  But his second child will be born on Monday.  The little fixings can wait until January.

Today holds house-cleaning, laundry, new-closet organizing, and Christmas shopping.  My heart still hums from last evening's successful creation of muffin-tin frittatas and pan-roasted Brussel sprouts with Patrick.  We used Chef John's mini-quiche recipe and made six large frittatas, three with chorizo, three meatless.  We sauteed the chorizo in one of the newly re-cured cast iron pans, and the veggies in another.  Hot pan, cold oil, just as my mother taught me.  I felt a bit reluctant to eat while Brian still worked, but I offered him dinner and he declined.  The three of us had shared pizza on the previous evening.

Last week the ghosts of Christmas Past haunted me but this morning I feel contented.  I've been doing these musings for more than seven years.  They have evolved from what someone once described as "warm fluffy stories" to a generous if uninvited helping of my life's philosophy.  The Musings and My Year Without Complaining often seem to blend together. I've let go of the past more and more this year.  So many stories have been told.  So much has found its way to this virtual page.

But faces rise in my mind still.  Tender moments of today connect themselves to the thread of sweetness running through my life.

Christmas  Eve, 1973; Incarnate Word Hospital; St. Louis.  Those of us without spouses or children volunteered to work the late shift so that our co-workers could see the glow of Christmas morning from home.  I sat at the desk transcribing the day's orders in the way that we did back then, before computers invaded every workplace.

A heavy-set woman settled into the chair beside me.  Mrs. Turner; her first name escapes me all these years later.  She had straightened hair in the way of black women of the day.  A pink uniform smock strained across her shoulders.  Lilac lipstick made a crooked swathe on her mouth.

I had not worked with her before that night.  I moved a bit to let her reach for the chart she wanted.  I offered her coffee from the pot behind us.  She took the mug, wrapping slender, red-tipped fingers around its warmth.   You don't have any place to be tonight either, she said to me, in a tone which implied either resentment or despair.  I mentioned my mother and father; tomorrow's breakfast and dinner.  Presents under the childhood tree.  I didn't say that I had not had a meaningful conversation with my mother for four months.  I left out the part about the slammed phone, the sharp words, the September sabotage of my good relationship with the better of my two parents.

Mrs. Turner showed less discretion.  I had me a family once.  The bitter words could not be stopped. Christmas, presents, roast beef, everything.  I waited.  My listening skills needed sharpening but   I could hold my tongue even at eighteen.

The unit had fallen silent while the nurses and aides walked its corridors in their soft-soled shoes, checking on the sleeping patients.  Mrs. Turner and I staffed the nurse's desk, shuffling paper, sending orders to the pharmacy, keeping notes and paging doctors.  The late shift demanded less of us and so we had time to talk.

Mrs. Turner shifted in her chair, a short woman with a ponderous frame.  Yeah, I bet you don't know who I am.  I did not.  I tilted my head forward, a gesture modeled after my mother.  She took this as leave and continued.  I was married to Ike Turner before that woman.  That woman.  Tina Turner?

I tried to picture the type of man who would marry both a ward clerk at a small Catholic Hospital and a pop diva.  My imagination failed.  My skepticism flashed across my face and Mrs. Turner slapped her mug on the desk.  It's true, I can prove it.  She hauled some papers from a handbag stashed in the footwell of her desk and shoved them towards me.  All I could think:  She carries her divorce papers?  I gently pressed them back into her hand just as the first tears fell.

You got no idea what it's like to be left, she whispered.  I did not, then, though later, so many heartbreaks later, I would understand.

I had never previously put my arms around a woman not related to me except the very old, at the nursing home where I volunteered.  I did that evening.  I felt her shudder against my chest; felt the ripple of her pulling herself back together.  I moved away. I filled her coffee.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a little sumpin sumpin in that sludge, she said.

The elevator door opened just then; and the director of nursing came towards us with a tray of cookies.  Merry Christmas, girls, she trilled.  Mrs. Turner took a handful.  I shook my head but set the tray on the counter.  Our DON asked about the patient count, the events of the evening, where the staff might be.  Mrs. Turner answered all her questions as the senior clerk on duty while I finished what our conversation had interrupted.

When we were again alone at the desk, Mrs. Turner faced me and asked, You won't tell nobody I cried, will you?  I shook my head.  We went back to our work, to the business of running the ward, as the overhead lights dimmed and the strains of Silent Night drifted from the speakers overhead.

I don't know if Mrs. Turner still lives.  If I am sixty, she must be ninety.  I don't know if she truly married Ike Turner. I didn't read the papers she thrust at me.  I tried to find out once, decades later, on the Internet.  I did not satisfy myself.  I let her memory be; I allowed her to remain the wronged ex-wife of a flawed charismatic star. Her face has receded into the dimness of lingering memory, a face seen in a gloomy hospital ward,on Christmas Eve, when I was young.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 12 December 2015

Good morning,

A grey sky stretches above me as I stand at the backdoor and wait for the coffee to warm in the microwave, yesterday's leftovers poured into the crystal cup which a friend's daughter left at my house and my friend let me keep.  I cradle the cup  in my hand and slide into a dining room chair to eat my banana and scroll through news sites, social media, and e-mail.

Late yesterday, I settled my Monday trial, so rather than work this weekend, I can enjoy myself.  Jenny Rosen has invited me to a Hanukkah party.  I plan to shop for Christmas.  I might nag my son via e-mail about his potential arrival date for the holiday.  Fun stuff.  I wonder how my client from Monday's trial will occupy her time this weekend, in her small apartment, still confused about the end of her twenty-year marriage.  I worry about her.  Her fire might smolder and then inflame, fed  by the stacks of paper showing her husband's treachery, the pages of her diary filled with stories of loss -- her birth parents, her adoptive parents, her fostering aunt and uncle, her husband -- the last on the heels of a half-million dollar inheritance that he hid from her until the discovery phase of the divorce action.

A red and green pile of presents on the buffet reminds me that I have not yet dragged the artificial tree from the basement.  I'm debating.  I bought that tree more than a decade ago, closer to two; when the pulmonologist cautioned against my breathing live cedar with my uncontrolled asthma.  I used oxygen then:  a condenser when seated; a portable tank on the move.  I returned the tanks long ago, and the condenser accumulates dust in the basement.  My favorite curmudgeon used it for a while, but otherwise it sits idle, on a shelf in the basement next to the boxes of ornaments.

This week also saw the end of a five-year divorce action in which I'd represented the wife for only the last six months.  Her husband has finally been consigned to a Missouri prison cell.  A judge levied two consecutive seven-year terms on the man  for savagely stealing his step-daughter's innocence.  With the conviction, he ran out of funds.  His divorce lawyer withdrew and we set the divorce for disposition.  I thought the judge might cheer as he spoke the formulaic words with uncharacteristic vehemence.  He apologized to my client for the long wait.  She tendered a thin smile.  I gestured her to wait for me while I got copies of the judgment.   I found her standing with a friend's arm on her shoulders.  Not cheering.  Not gleeful.

Numb.

On the radio, I hear news of the first Saudi election in which women can vote.  I find this astonishing.  Though Saudi women still face a ban on driving an automobile, perhaps their voices will rise and finally be heard.  My cynical mind wonders if the Saudi election board can tell which ballots came from women.  I wonder if the segregated ballot box holds a shredder.

I have no plans for Christmas Day other than perhaps to watch a movie with my son.  We can spend Saturday at Carnies' Honker Springs Farm.  On Sunday, the usual suspects will gather at my table.  Scrooge and I share nothing except our ghosts of Christmas Past.  I don't need threats to move me to give, but spirits haunt me nonetheless.  I'm growing old.  I have sixty years of memories, each of which crowds for a place on my page.  I ignore them all, at least now, at least in the weak sunlight of a wintry Saturday.

A woman posted something nasty on my Facebook page this week, an admonishment that I would be condemned if I did not accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior.  She might be right, I suppose; though as I told her, I have lots of Jewish friends who beg to differ.  Her ugliness saddens me.  I let her statement stand and watched my friends rise to logically refute her contention.  Eventually the debate slipped into the depths of the social media morass.  But I continued to reflect on her assertion.  I cannot fathom a divine entity which limits acceptance in the way that she described.  "Divine" and "limit" seem incompatible.

It's human beings who judge, not divine ones.  I contemplate and find wanting the man who cast his wife from their home when his finances took an unexpected upturn; the man who ravaged his stepdaughter; the men who grudgingly allow their wives and daughters to vote while still denying them the right to drive themselves and their children through a day's activities.  But even though I feel confident in my judgments, I suspect that if there is a divine entity, he, or she, or it, opens a path to forgiveness even to those whom I condemn.

In thirteen days, much of the Western world will celebrate a Christian holiday commemorating the birth of a child in Bethlehem, a city which lies in Palestine, 93% of whose current residents belong to the Muslim faith.  Meanwhile, the world reels from the terrorist acts of Islamic extremists followed by angry retaliation -- the burning of Muslim mosques, the rejection of Syrian refugees, the assault of Muslims in subways and on city streets.

Society flags under the weight of shame.  I see it in my practice and I hear it on the radio.  The fact that any of us can still celebrate anything in the face of all this pain astonishes me.  And yet we do.  We do.  My clients will find a way to overcome their personal pain; the Saudi women will smile in glee beneath their veils.  Their eyes might reveal nothing, but their hearts will beat a little more wildly.  I will celebrate Hanukkah with Jenny Rosen, her boyfriend and his family, and a host of their friends.  I'll celebrate Christmas with Episcopalians.

Even though, as we all know, I am a recovering Catholic.  Life continues.

Mugwmpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley