Saturday Musings, 27 July 2013

Good morning,

The week draws to a gentle close.  From the vantage point of Saturday morning, I gaze back six days to early Sunday, when a small black Kia jetted east, then a bit south, gliding to a stop in a GPS-tracked restaurant in Washington, Missouri. I sat in the passenger's seat; my son in the driver's seat; and we looked first at each other, and then at the restaurant to which we had come for purposes of meeting my long lost niece.

We eased out of the car, stretching muscles held still since the last rest stop. I hesitated, thinking the restaurant looked closed but Patrick ventured forward and soon we occupied a table facing the entry way. "Do you think she will come," I ask, and my son just looks at me. I can't decide what he thinks except that I should stop chattering.

A few minutes later, I saw a tall, sturdy man walk into the restaurant and glance over at us. He left again; and then came back, preceded by a short woman, whose picture I had memorized so as to recognize her. Patrick and I stood, and the two of them approached. I saw the curve of her smile, her profile, and my heart stopped. I knew that profile.

And in an instant, it is 1987 and I am again the age of this long-lost niece.

I sit in a Firebird, wearing a blue muslin dress and white leather Mary Janes, clutching a silk bouquet. I turn to see the driver, in profile, a profile that I have known nearly three decades since his birth brought even-ness to my family, four boys and four girls. "Steve," I say. "Aren't you driving a little fast for these mountain roads?"

He responds with a grin and an upward crank of the Grateful Dead, and hands me a bottle from which I take a swig. "You're getting married today, Mare Bear," he scoffs. "You gotta live a little, it's your last hour of freedom."

I glance in the side view mirror at the line of cars inching up the mountain behind us. The gathering of Corleys, all of whom stayed at the off-season motel in the little mountain town, follows us. I am supposed to be their navigator to Murray Valley, above the county seat of Newton County, Arkansas, in the rich lovely hills. "I can't see Mark's car," I tell my little brother. "I think we've lost him." Steve responds by slowing down a mile or two per wild hour and I take another sip of Chivas Regal.

I gaze out the window, deep into the valley, at the tops of the lush trees and clustered homes. I roll the window down and close my eyes, letting the breeze wash over my face. "Casey Jones" blasts across the otherwise quiet land. I feel the staccato tapping of Steve's hand on the steering wheel, the warm flush of the Scotch; the slight flop of my stomach. I can't say if what I feel is from the impending event, the alcohol or the lurch of the city car around the country corners.

I open my eyes. "Steve," I say suddenly. "I think the mountains are on the wrong side." He doesn't understand at first and makes a joke about God's choice of where to put the mountains. "No, no," I insist. "I think we're on the wrong side of the valley. I think we took a wrong turn."

He stops the car on the narrow shoulder, on the edge of the mountain, a thousand feet above the rolling, verdant fields of spring in Newton County. A half-dozen cars pull in behind us. Steve eases himself out of the driver's seat, confers with my older brother at the wheel of the second vehicle, and we all turn, slowly, and go back down a ways to where we got off track. I do not speak as we climb back up, this time on the right road but now thirty minutes late. I glance again at his profile and take another drink.

"You know, Mare bear," he finally says, "If you don't want to do this, you don't have to. We can just have a big party and get everybody high, they'll think you got married and then you can just go back to Kansas City like nothing happened." He reaches out and touches my arm, his own clad in the light brown of the jacket he has worn. I feel the warmth of him through the thin fabric of my dress. "I know," I tell him. The Dead sings on, whatever song is next, and soon we are in a clearing filled with scores of trucks, and Jeeps, and a handful of small, dusty cars that tell me some of my friends have made it down.

We stop. The cars behind us stop. It is still, except for the call of a bird from a tall evergreen by the side of the road. Steve is watching me, I can tell, his face turned toward me. The bottle is nearly empty and the music has stopped. Sweet air flows through the car and his hand rests on my leg. "Okay," I finally say. "I'm ready." And Steve walks round to my car, opens the door, and reaches his hand for mine, while the music of the mountains whispers on the wind.

A lifetime later I sat at a table in a Mexican restaurant, meeting Steve's oldest daughter for the first time. She was born of a relationship that did not endure. Her parents were too young, maybe; or maybe something else went wrong. They went their separate ways and she grew into a lovely young woman without my brother's help. Six months ago, I awakened in the middle of the night with a lurching feeling. I barely made it to six a.m. before I called my sister Joyce with this urgent question: "Didn't Steve have another daughter?" I've already forged a relationship with his younger daughter, Chelsea -- maybe not enough of one, but something -- and suddenly, I have this insatiable urge to find Amy. Both girls were raised by their respective mothers and stepfathers. Both girls bear the unmistakeable stamp of Steve's profile, the slant of his nose, the line of his strong chin. Beautiful women.

Amy and her husband sat beside me in that restaurant, then for another hour in Starbucks. She talked about her childhood -- surgeries for a difficult birth defect, surgeries that succeeded as I can see. Her coloring comes from her Italian mother, as do her deep brown eyes. But that profile: That is pure Steve; as is the gleam of mischief in her eye and the curve of her smile. She seems level though, in ways that he had never been. She possesses a kind of peace that I think he would have envied. I can't stop beaming as we visit, flush with a warmth not from anything I've eaten or drunk but from something else; something close to joy. The feeling lasts the whole way home, and lingers still.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 20 July 2013

Good morning,

The unexpected heat drives me back to the dining room table from the muggy porch. My morning sounds shift: the dryer, the washer, the distant sound of the barking dog; the occasional rustle of the newspaper from the living room, where my husband works the sudoku. Soduko? I've never been too sure which it is. My son awakened before any of us, and I found him on the front porch with a guitar in hand, and his cat sitting next to him on the cool concrete. Six a.m. Before the coffee finished brewing, he had gone back to bed and now sleeps, the gentle, whirring fan providing his white noise.

My affinity with sound sharpens as my ability to discern it wanes. I still hear the few old-fashioned flourescent bulbs which keen above me in stores that have not yet converted. Voices recede; I've had to learn to patiently request that people say again, say again, say again. My requests are met with varying degrees of impatience. Many erroneously deduce that I did not understand their meaning, and they start paraphrasing. My brain rejects the change: that's not what I heard before! I'm cultivating a "Miss Manners" smile, which principally involves the lower half of one's face. The eyes do not engage.

My suite-mate had surgery yesterday, and as I sit here, I say a little prayer of thanks that it went as well as it could. I've come to consider her a friend, someone whose presence in my life provides enrichment. She's had a lot to handle of recent days, and handle it she has, that Jane Williams, with courage and grace.

My mother-in-law has made it back to her skilled nursing facility after a harrowing ten days in the hospital. I sat beside her bed a day or so ago, watching her nibble the Laura Little fudge to which I have gotten her addicted. And in a flash, I found myself transported to another bedside, my mother's bedroom, in Jennings, 1985.

I hold a little cup of water and guide her hand to her mouth. She sits in a hospital bed which has come from Hospice. The cancer ravages her bones. A few days before, she had called me, voice trembling. Oh Mary, she whispered, calling me by my given name. The X-Ray technician broke my arm! I dropped everything -- my failing law practice could flounder a few days without me; my city courtrooms could be covered -- and drove to St. Louis to relieve my tired siblings and sit beside her bed. I can't recall a cast, but there must have been one.

She sipped the cool water that I had poured from the yellow pitcher. It sat beside her on a little wooden table. I waited for her to swallow, then shook another Demerol from the bottle, and folded it into her frail fingers. She raised it to her lips and shifted her eyes to meet mine. Brown gaze connected to blue. She took the pill, and I handed her another glass of water to wash down the medication. She swallowed; she could still swallow then. Later, we would all liquefy the pills.

I set the glass down on the bedside table and settled back in my chair. She glanced for a moment out the window, at nothing: the house next door, the driveway, the power lines. I waited. Willie Nelson sang to both of us on the turntable: You were always on my mind; you were always -- on -- my -- mind. I felt my mother wished to speak. I let the air between us be still; I waited for her words.

I think I'm getting addicted to those damn pills, she finally said. Her face suddenly turned back toward mine; those nut-brown Lebanese eyes bored into my Irish gaze. I felt a flood of disappointment and irony. I had expected a deep disclosure, something I could hold in my heart after her inevitable and impending passing. I shifted in my chair and broke away from her penetrating stare. Mom, I said, with a tinge of disappointment in my voice. You're dying, I don't think anybody cares if you're a drug addict. I stood, I paced; in the small room, a room in which her babies had been nurtured, a room that had once been half of a dining room, I looked in vain for a distraction. I did not know what I had wanted her to tell me but waves of anger surged through me.

Then I heard her voice: small, weak, a pale mockery of the voice that had always soothed me. I'm sorry, she said. I turned sharply towards her, standing over her, my body rigid and my mind raging. We stopped in that moment: My mother and I -- she in the bed where she would, in just a few short months, die; and I a few feet from her with arms clutched against my chest. And Willie Nelson crooned, over and over: You were always on my mind. You were always on my mind. Time stood still.

And then my mother laughed. The tones washed over me, a soothing tide, a flood of comfort as I huddled on a bleak shore. Imagine me! An addict! Me! I'm the most straight-laced person ever -- and now I'm a drug addict! Her frail body shook, not with pain but with laughter, and I felt my muscles melt and I fell into the chair, overcome with mirth, giggling uncontrollably. At that moment, my father opened the bedroom door. Everybody okay in here? He asked the question with a face gone grey with worry. Neither of us could stop laughing long enough to answer him. He shook his head and closed the door again. He'd seen us in this state enough times over the last few years to know that once we got to laughing we would not soon be able to speak a coherent word.

The other day, my husband visited a nursing home that one of his clients needs evaluated. He called me from the road, and told me, if I ever get so bad that I have to be in one of these places, just shoot me. Later, when I sat beside my mother-in-law's bed and my father-in-law asked how Jim's trip had been, I briefly debated whether JIm's father, Jay, would find the remark humorous. But I hesitated only a moment, then quoted the line, the lead bullet line, and for the next few minutes my father-in-law and I shared a belly laugh that amused his wife of sixty years even as she stared at us, uncomprehendingly, her bemused look a sweet unwitting echo of my father, as he quietly closed the bedroom door on his dying wife and her silly daughter, long ago and far away.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 13 July 2013

Good morning,

An endless string of lovely Saturdays stretch behind me in time.  I turn the calendar's page with a brief whisk of my finger and see months upon months of them.  Birds squawk; squirrels bark; and a woman clad in cotton strolls past with her dog on a leash.  The black cat, having eaten a handful of dog food that its shameful owner foisted upon him, stares balefully at  me, then tosses his body down onto the concrete pad of our porch, and tends to grooming his paws.  I close my eyes and let the wind toss my hair against my cheeks, surrounded by nothing but beauty, relentless, cool and serene.

I feel the rush of caffeine hit my veins, and think of the pale grey of my mother-in-law's face, three days ago, as she lay in a hospital bed, her worried spouse of fifty-eight years hovering nearby.  It will take a little hissy fit by her daughter-in-law who does not care about the nurses liking her, before a unit of fluids and two of blood will restore color to the delicate skin of the ailing lady's face.  I am struck by the amount of time women spend standing beside others during post-surgical hours.  I wonder, briefly, if there is a gene for knowing the proper ratio of diplomacy to insistence.

On the wall next to my cedar closet hangs  a framed piece of fabric, with the words, "Tomorrow Begins Today".  I remember my mother sitting beside my grandmother's hospital bed, needle flying quickly through the creamy cotton, embroidery hoop holding the work taught beneath her  brown-spotted hands.  Nana shifted beneath the sheets; a machine trilled; and my mother jumped from her chair.  A soft touch on the taught forehead; the machine's noise settled to a rhythmic, periodic beep.  

I pull my car into the long driveway of the hospital, day after day.  I've learned to lie to the guard.  The parking lot for the Heart Institute affords me a shorter trip to my mother-in-law's bed, past the better coffee shop.  I'm supposed to park in the garage for the main hospital but have learned that the trip from there to her room exhausts me.  My father-in-law doesn't cheat.  At eighty-four, he could fib with moral justification and park wherever he chooses, but he makes the longer journey, in his tightly laced Rockports and camper's shorts, twice a day, to sit by his wife's bedside.

I greet the coffee shop clerk as though we know each other.  I tease her about her co-worker, whom I have seen flirt with her on other days.  She knows my order already -- a twelve-ounce Americano, no room for cream -- and I have exact change ready.  It's day five, day six, day seven; and for someone who favors routine, these hospital visits tuck neatly into my morning.

As I walk down the corridor to the Blue Elevators, lab-coated figures stroll on either side of me.  Their thumbs fly across the tiny keys of small black devices.  Smartphones or iPods.  Eyes down, elbows crooked, feet on auto-pilot set to rapid, as I trudge beside them, a heavy bag with my own gadgets tucked neatly inside slung over one shoulder.  They keep typing in the elevator, and I gingerly sip my coffee, straining to read their badges.  A doctor who looks to be half a decade younger than my son; a nurse with an unpronounceable name smacking gum; a couple of worried relatives.  The doors open on Four and I disembark, swiftly glancing at the small waiting room where others clutch cups of coffee just as I do, but moving on, having seen no one I know, not really expecting to see anyone but looking just in case.

The ladies at the desk raise their eyes as I approach, then look back down.  I'm one of a series of faces with which they will for a short time be familiar.  After my mother-in-law returns to the Memory Unit where she lives, the fabric of time will re-seal, leaving no trace of me.  Some other grumpy daughter-in-law will make an impression, on some other day, for some other reason.  I know that their knowledge of me will not endure, but I don't mind.  I respect their profession and most of their work.  Our dumb luck dictated that the one inefficient nurse among them happened to be on duty the day of my mother-in-law's sharp decline.  She hasn't been assigned to Joanna's room again, and not necessarily by chance.  I smile when I see the assignment board; as long as certain names appear on it, and certain names do not, I know Joanna will be as fine as she can be, given what she has had to endure and the  present state of her long life.

The hallway to her room smells the way all such hallways do. I pause halfway down, and breathe in the mix of antiseptic and sweat, Lysol and despair.  I see a little clutch of medical students in the distance, stethoscopes shoved in deep pockets, narrow shoulders pulled back, eyes pinned to the doctor standing in their midst. For a moment, I am lost.  I could be in the hospital where my mother's cancer marched her towards a hastened end; the long ago facility in which my grandmother recovered from one devastating stroke after another; or  the Arkansas nursing home to which I brought a sheaf of papers for a client's son to sign, as he stood, soundlessly sobbing, over her dying body.

Yesterday morning, I arrived at my mother-in-law's bedside before her husband.  She had just awakened, and lay quietly beneath a white sheet, her hands on its edge, her eyes alert in the pink flush of her face.  Good morning, Joanna! I said.  She does not know me.  But she knows that I come to see her wherever she is.  I can only imagine who she thinks I am -- an aide or a hired hand, I've decided -- but she smiled at me, as she always does, and echoed my greeting.  I hear you had a long visit from somebody special last night! I am talking about my stepson, whose name is Mac, but I don't refer to him because I do not want her to be stressed with the challenge of trying to remember.

But I need not have worried.  OH yes! She answered.  Mac came to see me! And her radiant smile confirmed that she does, indeed, remember.  I set my coffee down, and bent to kiss her forehead.  The lingering pleasure of that visit has made a permanent mark on her mind.  Whatever else might happen to Joanna this day, this weekend, this life, she has had that moment when a six-feet-two handsome young man, with his baritone voice and his broad shoulders, has sat by her bedside and held her hand.

In a few hours, I will watch a young couple exchange their wedding vows.  When they have been married sixty years, as my in-laws nearly have been, I will be long dead.  One of them will fall ill, and the other will travel from the parking garage to sit in the uncomfortable visitor's chair and watch the dials of the machine which monitors the patient's progress.  Some young relative will bring a brief ray of sunshine into the room, and some nurse will forget to monitor the patient's condition as carefully as she should.  Another nurse will intervene, and disaster will be averted.  As they stand in the church this evening, this brave, slender couple who have chosen each other, I will sit with my husband, hold his hand, and wonder which one of us will go first and who will come to mourn us.  Then I will turn my eyes back toward the bride in her beautiful dress; and the sturdy, strong groom, and for a few minutes, nothing  will matter but the light of love shining from their faces.

Mugwumpishly tendered.

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 06 July 2013

Good morning,

The distant rumble of a trash truck signals the morning has begun.  I have dragged a large pile of rubbish from the basement, the fruits of an Independence Day cleaning brigade.  I'm satisfied, smug:  I can use the laundry room again, and it only took two of us four hours to get it clean. I draw in the fresh June air. Three birds, flying in formation, land in the tree over our yard.  I listen to their song, wondering if they chatter amongst themselves or if they each have their own refrain. 

The neighbors' house stands in a state of stalled repainting.  The contractor husband divides his time between his flip-house projects and his wife's bedside.  Her perilous pregnancy demands constant medical care, just seven days from the planned early delivery.  A few corridors away in the same hospital, my mother-in-law lies in uneasy discomfort, having fallen in her "Memory Unit" and broken her femur, causing an irreversible change to her already fragile existence.  My husband and hers sit in the two chairs allocated to her private room, holding her hand.  I can picture the sweetness of her smile.

I spent July 06th in a hospital myself twenty-two years ago.  Another Saturday, two days before a planned C-section at 34 weeks gestation, my little baby eager to have the ties between us severed.  Labor pains started that morning, and the cadre of women in white decided to let the baby come naturally if he chose to do so.  I panted, listening to the somewhat patronizing tones of the nurses admonishing me to relax, just relax, now breathe, that's a good girl.  I gritted my teeth and glared at them but between contractions, I clung to them.  They seemed to understand the alternating waves of despair and dependence.  They patted my hand and smiled, unaffected by the daggers which I hurled at them in my pain.

Other hands held mine in turn.  The thin, cool hands of Paula Fulcher; the motherly grip of my friend Laura Barclay and the clumsy, caring touch of her husband Ron; the soothing, calming grip  of Joshua Dara, my colleague from Nigeria who divided his time between lawyering and preaching in the only black church in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1991.  They endured it all with me, that little labor team, uncomplainingly, even though to Ron and Laura there must have a tragic tone of irony.   I seemed to have conceived so easily, I, who had no husband, when they had been trying for years without success. 

I walked the halls and stood at the nursery window, that Saturday, so long ago.  I watched the tiny babies being tended by the efficient nursing staff. I gazed on women as they lay in stretchers, pushed down the halls, their huge bellies draped with soft blankets.  I yielded to passing wheelchairs surrounded by dazed, delirious family members, and smiling aides carrying flowers, new mothers on the way to  the rest of their own indelibly altered lives.  Once I doubled over, flailing, as a strong, urgent need rippled through me.  But the hours marched by, and the contractions brought no dilation, and finally, midnight came.  July 07th.

My midwife happened to be in the room at that moment.  I screeched at her to stop the labor, now.  She spoke in soothing tones, assuring me that I could endure for another few hours and soon the baby would come and I would forget the pain.  She did not understand.  Stop this labor NOW, I demanded.  I clutched her arm.  It's not doing anything; it's six weeks early, and July 07th is the father's birthday.  I will not spend the rest of my child's life thinking about the father that is not here.  My hysteria convinced her. She gave me a shot; I went home at noon, and reappeared, refreshed, with a well-rested labor team, ready for the birthing that Monday morning, July 08th, 1991.  Ron started the video camera; Laura and I were prepped and gowned, and Joshua stood beaming beside Paula's diminutive figure, my last sight as they wheeled me head-first into operating room number two.

A half-dozen years later, Ron would die when an aneurysm exploded in his head, apparently lying in wait since he skidded to avoid a deer someone kept in town as a pet and hit his head on the steering wheel.  He and Laura had just adopted a group of four siblings whom they had fostered.  She's raised them on her own.  Joshua slowly phased out law while he built a church in Louisiana; he and his wife, accustomed to the fifty-percent infant mortality rate in Nigeria, had eight children -- hoping for four.  Those eight children have all grown now, and Joshua is contemplating a run for Mayor of his small central Louisiana town.  I'm told Paula left Arkansas several year ago, and died under mysterious circumstances, in northern Florida, far from home. 

I still see them, in my hospital room.  Ron wears a Cardinal's shirt over his stocky frame, and bustles around, taking pictures that now have faded in a photo album.  I wish I could bottle that look on your face, he proclaims, in his gravely Oklahoma voice.  I'd make a fortune!  "Essence of Motherhood", I'd call it.  Laura crinkles her eyes in his direction, her glance flavored by the highlight of love.  Joshua hovers in the background, slightly embarrassed, averting his eyes from a woman, not his wife, nursing her baby.  And Paula, with her golden gaze, her diminutive frame, reaches her slender arms to take the baby so I will rest.  She settles into the rocker beside my bed, murmuring something only she and the infant can hear, and he drifts to sleep, the sounds of silence surrounding them both.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Saturday Musings, 29 June 2013

Good morning,

Plush green fools me into believing that I have been transported to a mountain retreat.  I face away from the street, ignoring the occasional rumble of a passing vehicle, keeping the gardenia plant on the table fully in view.  The begonias, nearly overgrowing their pots, frame the perimeter.  Cold smooth wood under my feet; chilly iron against my back; the occasional squawk of a blue jay; the gently swaying branches of a flowering bush, past its bloom but still lovely.

I only need to close my eyes, breathing long and slow, and I am again in Arkansas surrounded by the gentle rise of the mountains.  I stand outside a makeshift market constructed from four by eights and plywood, with piles of organic vegetables for sale, bring your own bag.  It's 1988.  I am alone in the height of the season, for reasons I no longer recall.  Perhaps my first husband, who dragged me to Arkansas, had taken a short contract in Little Rock.  Perhaps he was on tour with one of the theatre companies for which he freelanced.  But there I found myself, a city girl, in Newton County, Arkansas, with only a group of faded hippies and organic gardeners for company.

I trace the outline of a potato and ask the stand's proprietress what  kind it is.  She tells me that it is like a Yukon Gold, buttery and sweet, good mashed.  I put it down and select a few tomatoes and a late-season bunch of lettuce.  She tells me I can eat the tomatoes like apples, and I nod.  I give her a couple of dollars and get back into my Nissan Sentra, following the road down to our small house in town.

No one has come to my home-office while I have been away.  I'm not surprised.  I haven't done much law work since leaving Kansas City in July of 1987.  My promised job with the AG's office fizzled with the AG's indictment.  Chester's position with the Arkansas Opera vanished with a new General Manager who hired an entirely new staff.  We landed in Jasper in a rental house and he took up contract work.  I got a part-time gig as the county counselor only because there were four governmental lawyer positions and, before me, only three lawyers.  They greeted me with subdued enthusiasm.

That day, I put my vegetables away and decided to drive to Murray Valley.  Past Parthenon, a town so small it barely exists, along the paved road along the East Fork of the Buffalo River, Murray Valley lies on one side of Mount Sherman, flanked by a mountain which has a name, but now, twenty-five years later, I cannot remember it.  I've lost other names, including one of the two women to whose home I drove that day. 

But I have not forgotten them, nor the quiet drive to their house, nor the calmness of the summer surrounding me.  Only the occasional bird call, brief twitters, break the stillness of the warm morning air.  The trees on either side of the highway rise with a quiet confidence.  They grew before my birth and would survive my death, they whisper.  My eyes sweep up the lean trunk of  the tallest of them, which does not need to speak but merely stands confidently on the ridge as I drive past.

I almost miss the driveway.  It happens, in the mountains.  In the city we want you to find our driveway, cut boldly through the neat squares of lawn flanking the street.  We place statues at either side of the entrance and tile placards proclaiming the numbers of our addresses.  But in the country, a driveway serves as the last barrier between the sanctity of home and the harshness of the outside world.  The letter carrier doesn't even traverse that last stretch, but stays a respectful distance away, leaving your mail in a box at the driveway's end.

This driveway, on this day, has barely parted the lush growth of trees and undergrowth.  I pull onto the gravel and park beside a pile of stones.  I do not lock the car; I toss my keys under the seat.

One of the women whom I have come to visit stands on the stone stoop.  She has short black hair and wears a sleeveless white blouse and knee-length pants.  Her skin has deepened to its summer color of something just shy of walnut.  Her smile widens as I get out of the vehicle and she calls, "We've just made tea, come on up".  Without waiting for me, she goes back into the house, and I follow.

Everything about the house says comfort. Rustic woods, heaps of quilts, vibrant pieces of stained glass, cedar trunks and punched tin on the ceiling.  One large room, with a loft, and each function of the room defined by the positioning of its furniture: the inviting table, the poster bed, the wicker chairs, the wide windows.  Though it is June, the house feels cool.  I sit down and pull a mug towards me.  They did not know that I would arrive, but there is always a mug on the table, awaiting company.

The two women sit close together.  The second, heavier, more rounded, with long red hair twisted in a leather clip, crinkles her eyes at me.  She asks if city life had got me down, that I'd come slumming in Murray Valley. We laugh. Jasper has under six hundred residents and can scarcely be called a city but I know what she means.  I tell her that my husband is away.  She leans forward, and places one of her hands on mine.  Hers is a bit gnarled, mostly from honest labor but possibly from a bit of arthritis.  She tells me that if I ever get tired of my husband, I can come and live with them.  I think she means it.

We drink our tea and then walk a little on their land.  They sit above an unsullied sweep of mountainside, and we cannot even see another house.  I fill my lungs with long draws of freshness.  I tie the laces of my shoes a little more tightly and venture down a steep slope with the leaner of them, the dark-haired one whose name has slipped into time, holding  my hand. She wants to show me something.

We dip our hands into a small stream of water and pull a couple of flowers from a scrubby little bush.  We look at a grotto that someone has built, then climb back up to the house, quietly talking about who that someone might have been, and whom the grotto might have been intended to honor, with its stacks of carefully balanced stones.  When we get back to the house, my companion's partner has made lunch.  We eat in the kitchen, at the table for four, with light streaming into the house through the gauze of the embroidered curtains which flutter when the breeze rises and lie still when it falls.

After we have eaten, I decide it is time to go home.  They stand close on the stoop as I walk down to my car.  In that year, 1988, these two women had been together for more than a decade. Their stance seems natural, comfortable, almost careless.  They wave as I carefully back around a broken kennel that someone has left near a tree.  My last sight of them, as I pulled out onto the country road, was of two radiant smiles, two bodies seemingly melded into one, a lean arm slung around muslin-clad shoulders and the summer sun glinting on their shining hair.

My coffee has grown cold and the newspaper has been read.  As far as I can tell, our nation took one step backwards and two steps forward this week.  Though others might disagree, I like to think progress towards full equality for everyone is always a good thing.  As I take another sip of wretched, dank coffee, I strain to remember that other woman's name.  One was Carole, I know, but I just cannot recall the other.   I wonder if they are still together, in this golden summer, so many years  later, or if, like me, they have moved past that  marriage and live with one another in their Murray Valley cabin only in my memory.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Good morning,

The begonias on my porch and deck have taken on a life of their own.  They flank the tables and chairs, resting on old shelves.  The gardenia bush, given to me by my first writers' workshop, thrives in its place at the center of the table.  In the cool of the morning, before summer clenches this day in its grasp, I sit on the porch with one in an endless stream of cups of coffee and a plastic plate bearing a crumpet slathered with a weird combination of cream cheese and strawberry jam.  The cup announces that I Love A Mystery.

My life reverses in rapid shots, last year, last decade, last century.  Last night, I stared out of the passenger's window as my husband drove, down a street near the Little Blue River where an old boyfriend still lives.  We passed a man in a golf cart, wearing Blues Brothers shades and a crimped cowboy hat, talking on a cell phone.  I twisted in the seat to watch his image recede as my husband accelerated the Blazer and we pulled back onto Bannister Road.

I closed my eyes and felt the softness of the car seat.  As the motion lulled me into a stupor, the seat became a green recliner, in a fourth-floor apartment at the corner of 43rd and Warwick.  The rapid thunking of cars passing over a metal plate, not quite securely bolted over a pothole, startles me awake again and again.  It's 1982, early spring, and I have not been out of the hospital more than a week.

I shift the burden of the full-length cast on my right leg and reach for the cooling mug of coffee.  A sheaf of notes sits beside me, weighed down by a cassette player.  I've barely dented six weeks of recorded classes and meticulously compiled outlines.  I could have listened to them incrementally, while I lay in my hospital bed, but I did not.  I spent the first two-weeks post-accident luxuriating in star status from a haze of Morphine. At the end of that period, of which even then I had little memory, a surgeon laid my knee open to his indiscriminating knife, reduced the multitude of fractures, and stabilized the insides of my leg with a huge steel pin that I would one day marvel looked like a straightened coat hanger.

For the first few days after surgery, my star status spiked to immediately-post-accident levels.  My Constitutional Law professor brought a small bouquet of violets in a thin glass bottle.   The three Davids -- Boeck, Stever and Frye -- snuck real food into my room when I complained about the retched fare, and sat beside my bed listening to me belly-ache about my terrible troubles.  Law student run over by a car, ooohhh, ahhh, ahhh, film at 11.  Emmett Queener brought a giant chocolate chip cookie in a pizza box.  I picked at it, then sent it out to the nurses' desk.  I let them thank me as though I did it out of altruism.

I came home from the hospital six weeks after the accident.  The social worker expressed concern that I would be in a 4-th floor walk-up, but I wanted nothing to do with the rehab center she suggested as an interim measure.  Snow had fallen, got pushed to the curb lane in the streets of Kansas City, and melted while I dawdled in the hospital awaiting the doctor's permission to leave.  My visitor count had plummeted as the semester drew closer to final exam week.  I could not abide the thought of a shared bedroom in a facility of other struggling invalids.  The doctor signed my release and my parents toted me to my apartment.  They stayed one night, but my mother had already missed a lot of work on my behalf.

And so, I found myself alone.  Saturday, midtown, the sounds of birds drifting through the balcony door.  I could have struggled to my feet and crutched my way to the kitchen for breakfast, or sat on a chair in the bathroom to give myself a sponge bath.  I did neither.

The apartment fell silent.  I examined the scrawled names on my cast but then, listlessly settled my nightgown back over my leg.  I pulled my glasses off and threw them down on the table beside me.  A small sound from the back of the  apartment, where the door stood unlocked, distracted me but no one appeared, not one of the many friends who had volunteered to traverse those stairs with groceries, coffee, and clean clothes.

A blaring car radio disturbed my stupor.  I rose then, and staggered to the curtained French door.  I peered outside, searching for the source of the noise.  A car idled at the light, a convertible.  I pulled the door open and leaned further out, clutching my robe against my chest.  A woman sat on the top, her legs sprawled wide on the narrow back benchseat.  In the front, the male driver and a female passenger dangled their arms over the car's side.

But it was the woman in the back who caught my attention.  She arched her back, letting her long, thick hair fall behind and lifting her face in my direction.  With its slash of red, her mouth curled in an  upside down smile.  She closed her eyes and let the boldness of the spring sun caress her face.  From above, I felt the warmth that she must have been feeling, the coolness of the breeze, the complete abandon of her crazy perch.

And then, she opened her eyes.  She could not have seen me, half in, half out of my apartment and three stories above her.  But she raised her head, turned, and stared in my direction.  Neither of us moved until the light turned green, and her companions called to her, and she slid down on the seat just as the car shot forwarded into the intersection.

An hour later, clean, dressed, and fed, I sat down at my kitchen table, twisted my newly brushed hair up into a clip, and pulled the first of many days of class notes toward me.

I hear our neighbor coughing.  His wife lies in a hospital bed, where she will be forced to stay for the last month of her pregnancy.  I saw him walking down the driveway last evening, towards her car, on his way to get food and bring it to her.  He carried his worry in his shoulders.  I stood on our  porch, and watched his lean frame, watched the arch of his hand as he held a cigarette away, its smoke drifting over the asphalt and mingling with the waning heat of the summer night.  I waved as he passed, and he acknowledged me with a raised hand.  I watched the car until I could no longer see it, and then, went into the house, with a small shake of my head, and a certain understanding that has been years in the learning.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

Midweek Musings

Good afternoon,

Half my life has been squandered in coffee shops.  I have written essays,  poems, and pleadings, with a yellow pad, laptop or a tablet propped on the square of a wooden table, a slick formica surface, or the heavy, shiny counter while I precariously balance on a rickety bar stool.  I have eaten muffins, and scones, and sandwiches, from Boston to Denver, and many points between.  So I feel no surprise at finding myself in another coffee shop, on another afternoon, with another ceramic mug at hand.

I tried to explain the premise of my blog to the most recent iteration of my fledgling writers' workshop.  I told them that I start with the present, digress to a memory or a description of something that's recently happened, and end back in the present, in the intimacy of my bedroom, or the porch on our home, or my little nook.  I explained that the blog entries have two lines, one being the events that I describe, and the other being some theme or concept that I am trying to illustrate.  I don't much care if anyone gets both, as long as someone, somewhere gets one of them.

I found myself, today, standing on the steps of my Brookside home, watching a small black Kia pull away from the curb.  Patrick, my only-born son, left for Chicago.  I suppose adventures await him.  One friend offered lodging; another tempted with the chance of a part in an improv film.  He felt unsettled in our home.  I remember when my friend Diana Howell told me about the moment when her daughter Pia's room became not-Pia's-room.  The moment when she knew Pia would never live with her again.

That moment has not come -- I don't think.

I never expected Patrick to go to college.  Europe, perhaps; or Mexico.  LA, even.  I could see him, guitar in one hand, laptop under his arm, with a bundle of stuff in a canvas bag slung over a shoulder.  I remember arguing with his first stepfather about the difference between "cooperation" and "obedience".  He asked me then if I didn't want to get Patrick to obey me, and I shook my head in such haste that I truly thought I heard my teeeth rattle.  Hell, no.  I just want him to cooperate.

Cooperation takes different forms, with different motivations, at different ages.  But at any age, the person whose cooperation you seek must understand and accept your goals and how what you want them to do will aid in the attainment of those goals.  They must also be persuaded to want to assist in the accomplishments that you value.  This doesn't always happen in real life.

The virtue in teaching a child cooperation rather than obedience lies in the depth of contemplation that you cultivate.  The child taught cooperation really evaluates each situation.  I'm laughing here.  This parenting style can result in some extraordinarily annoying behavior.   I had an early warning.  As a toddler, Patrick did something to irritate me one day, and I instructed him to sit on the couch.  He did so but quickly rose again.  I snapped, "I told you that I wanted you to sit on the couch!"  He replied, calmly, "Mother, I'm 2-1/2, do you really think I care what you want?"

Ugh.

On the other hand, despite the occasional blip in the road, the ultimate result has been the development of an independent thinker.  While he lacks a few skills -- budgeting, the bane of my own existence, chief among them -- and insists on leaving dirty dishes in the sink, nonetheless, I would stand him against nearly anyone for patience, kindness, and courage under fire.

I always wanted a big family.  I certainly tried for one.  From the ashes of several failed pregnancies arose this Phoenix, this guitar-playing, vegetarian, playwright, a sometimes scattered, handsome young man who throws his belongings and his shoes into the back of his car and takes off: to Indy, to Asheville, to Chi-town, to LA, to Nashville.  He was born under the sign of Cancer, and for what it is worth, he should have been a Leo but he couldn't wait.

I've had a few chances to provide some parenting to other young folks.  I took in strays. I've had, and currently have, stepchildren.  I fostered through the state.  I've held the crack-addicted baby of a street-dweller, the child's sweet smile beaming into my face as she clutched my sweater.  I've cranked up the heat on an electric blanket for a wandering teenager whose mother lashed his back with a hanger.  I've taken a pregnant teen to an adoption attorney, and waved goodbye as she left the courthouse steps for parts unknown.

I've been accused of coddling my son, and of catering to his weaknesses.  I've been praised for letting him fly.  I've squeezed my eyes shut and thrown him back into the pool when he nearly drowned at age 3.  I've surrendered him to doctors, teachers, nannies, girlfriends, and the kindness of strangers.  I've made mistakes, playdough, Schmarren, veggie burgers, appointments, reservations, and promises.  I've bargained with the devil, the universe and God.  When the doctors gave me six months to live, I stubbornly rejected their prognosis, saying, "I'm the single mother of a six-year-old, I cannot die until he graduates from college."

He's walked me down two aisles and up three or four mountains.  He held my hand through Carlsbad Caverns and stitches.  He drove me to the emergency room twice before he turned seventeen.  He once stepped in front of an angrily thrown soup pot for me.  He's hailed ambulances and offered to face my sister's drunk boyfriend who threatened to disrupt my son's high school graduation party.  He moved bedrooms twice for new family members that I drew into our circle, ultimately landing in the room where he started, as a two-year-old, with an old Singer sewing machine table for a desk.

I am one of the lucky ones.  I have loving family and friends.  I have a professional license even though I've never figured out how to use it to get rich or even rise above middle-class.  I have a car, a house, a mortgage and a library card.

And, my friends, it must be said:  I have the greatest kid on earth.  There are a lot of people I love: my husband, his children, his parents and sister, my siblings, and that lovely cadre of my family-by-choice who stand beside me through tears and triumphs.  Will I ever love any of them as much as I love my son?  As much, perhaps; but never quite the same.

So if a little black Kia with Missouri plates passes you, somewhere, anywhere, on a city street, a gravel road, or the Interstate outside of Austin, give your horn a little honk and wave.  That's my kid, driving to his next destination, squinting through his broken glasses, with a guitar on the back seat and Shakey Graves cranked up loud.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley