Crow Analysis

Some thoughts on my creative-nonfiction short story, The Crow

***

My wife must have read only the first paragraph or two when she asked me, "Are you writing about me?"  It is a fascinating question because the truth is, it is about all mothers (and fathers).  In this instance it technically involves my mother because it is from the perspective of a child and I am that child.  The themes woven through the story are varied, but at their heart is the imbalance of power that exists between a parent and a child.  Parents are required to exercise a great deal of restraint in dealing with these little people who have immature brains, limited experience, and little insight into themselves.  Where it gets tricky, and potentially harmful, is when the parent lacks insight and uses the child as a foil for their own foibles and frustrations.

I wrote this story as truthfully as I could.  My purpose was not to teach anybody anything, but to try and learn a little something about myself and maybe even my mother.  Only in rereading what I wrote do I see the obvious fact that the crow served as a proxy for my mother and the unacceptable feelings her emotional impropriety produced in me.  The anger expressed towards our children due to our own lack of love and humility can have the quality of an annihilation, giving the impression that they are so bad that violence (verbal or otherwise) towards them is justified.  It reminds me of Bill Cosby's comedic assertion that "I brought you into this world and I can take you out."

By gaining power over the crow, I was gaining power over my mother and the ability to give or withhold love, which is the power of life and death.  I chose to withhold love by trapping and punishing the crow, a trajectory that ended in death and the realization that I did not want such power and that, truly, my mother did not want that power either.  It was forced upon her by her circumstances, whether that is the cultural milieu she was raised in or the dictates of a particular religion/philosophy that she followed.

As an adult now with my own children I can see there is no room for self-righteousness on my part, but only a growing realization that I am caught in many of the same traps as a parent and as an imperfect person.  I can only keep trying harder to be more loving and humble, less self-centered and ego-driven.  It is an awesome and terrifying task to participate in the formation of another human being.  May we be worthy of it.

Rag Mop Shuffle

***

My five year old niece is up on stage, black sequined and wearing a jaunty pillbox hat, doing the Rag Mop Shuffle. Two rows of little girls, only slightly in sync, wiggle with glee, trying not to bump into each other. It was bound to happen, during a turning movement, a girl stumbles and falls.

She sits there with a surprised look on her face, followed by a torrent of tears. A mother quickly detaches herself from the audience and hurries to the side stage where she meets the distraught child who has exited stage left.

My niece is the next to take a spill. The choreography requires them to lay down their mop props and jump over them. Instead, she lands on the pole and it promptly shoots out from under her, taking her legs with it and leaving nothing but air between the floor and her behind.

She bounces hard but never stops smiling, immediately finding her feet again, redoubling her efforts to finish the song.

***

The Hobo Tree

***

Sittin' under the Hobo Tree
branchless and sprouting
lines for the birds to perch
upon while conversations
fly overhead and underfoot
oblivious to the traveled man
waiting for his ride to the
other side on an iron horse.

***

The Crow

The memory flutters around the edges of my mind like a frightened bird desperate for escape.

***

It wasn't the punishment that pierced him so much as the look that accompanied it.  The boy sat on his bed, chin on chest, while she yelled at him.  His palms lay flat on the mattress and moved back and forth to smooth the sheets while his legs, which couldn't quite reach the floor, swung back and forth over the side of the bed.  He had removed himself to another place to wait out the storm, but something pulled him back and made him look up.  Something about the tone of her voice.

What the boy saw was a glimmer of hatred in his mother's eye, like a fleck of blood on a white wall.

He tried to emotionally disengage once again, but something held him fast.  The firmness of his perch no longer felt so firm, replaced by the sensation of the ground beginning to open at his feet.   Deep inside a dark space roiled with fear and rage.  Flashes of red in the darkness outlined a bloody beak and cruel claws.  A shiny black orb of malice hung suspended above him staring down in condemnation.  And as quickly as it had come, the energy of that vision dissipated leaving him empty and feeling terribly alone as his mother retreated back upstairs.

***

The clouds had been consolidating over the course of the afternoon, patches of blue growing smaller and more spread out, forming a patchwork quilt of a sky.  A cool wind blew in over the cornfields rustling the tassels, sweeping across the grassy field, wrapping itself around the house at the edge of town, and dispersing amongst the neighborhood streets.  The boy sat on the wide sill of the front picture window oblivious to these movements of nature, knees pulled to his chest.  From his perch he could see out over the neighborhood, between the houses and down the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of another boy or even another human being.

A black spot in the sky caught his attention.  As it slowly grew in size the boy turned to face it, kneeling with his hands on the window.  By the time he recognized it he was standing, hands on hips, waiting to see what it would do.  A large crow swept in towards the multi-paned window beating its wings, fighting against the wind.  The boy waved his arms up and down to try and scare the bird away.  At the last possible moment it swooped upward and over the roof.  He jumped down off the window sill and ran towards the back sliding glass door, hurdling the coffee table and circumventing the dining room table, but not before whacking his little toe on a chair leg in the process.

The crow landed on the hand railing of the second story wooden deck.  It pulled in its substantial wingspan and pranced in place for a moment or two testing its footing.  The boy stood frozen in place, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his toe.  The crow looked huge at this close range.  Its head cocked to one side, the black eye pierced the reflective surface of the glass door and fixed the boy in his place.  He felt if not heard his heart pounding in his chest and the quick shallow breaths escaping his partially opened mouth.

"CAW!" cried the crow, and the spell was broken.  The boy broke free from his paralysis and disappeared down the stairs.

***

He lay on his bed in the semi-darkness with his electronic football game held close to his face.  His right thumb quickly manipulated the direction buttons to advance the red blinking dot down the field before being tackled.  For the next play he moved two slots upward and let fly the imagined football.  Celebratory bleeping sounds signaled a touchdown as he dropped his hands down to his sides and stared at the gray ceiling.

He could not get the crow out of his mind.  The boy had never been so close to something so fascinating yet so terrifying at the same time.  He'd heard that seeing a crow meant that someone close to you would die.  His mother's face flashed in his mind's eye and he quickly dismissed it with a pang of guilt.  He'd also heard from his father that they were a nuisance to farmers, that they were dirty and ate dead animals.  "There's nothing good about a crow," his father had assured him.  His father had grown up on a farm and shot crows with a real gun, or so he imagined.  All the boy had was a bb gun and a slingshot that would not likely harm a crow, maybe just put out its eye if he got lucky.

***

That night his dreams  transformed him into a rat scurrying through the maze of a cornfield.  Something was crashing through the rows sending a flurry of blackbirds into the sky, their numbers beginning to block out the sun.  The dirt beneath his rat paws was loose,making it difficult for him to gain traction.  He felt the length of his hairless tail following behind him, making him vulnerable to capture.  The pursuing presence drew closer and growing larger, it absorbed the birds into its blackness.

He saw a blue patch of open sky down a row of corn and ran for it, now a boy again but only a few inches tall.  As the tree-sized cornstalks began to collapse next to him, he entered the open area at full speed and went over the edge of a drop off.  For a moment he hung in space still pumping his arms and legs, cartoon-style.  Below were tendrils of smoke coming up to meet him.  Blackened flakes of burned newspaper floated all around as he began to free fall into a burning trash pit.  He found his bed at the bottom, the sensation of a bounce, and sat up surrounded by the darkness of his room.

***

The next day the sky had cleared and the sun was shining down on the field below him.  A neighbor was bush-hogging the field and waved up to the boy on the wooden deck, standing there with a half empty bag of Wonder Bread dangling at his side.   While falling off to sleep the night before, the boy had hatched a plan to bring the crow back.  His punishment had lapsed and he was no longer confined to the house.  The tractor moved slowly, making wide lazy turns.  The pungent smell of cut grass and weeds wafted up to him.

When the neighbor had finally driven off, he ran down the deck stairs, across the driveway, and into the field.  The bread was starting to grow stale with some flecks of mold on it.  He'd fished it out of the trash earlier that morning and picked some of the green spots off of it to make it as white and appetizing as possible.  A pleasant breeze continued to blow as he littered the ground with torn up bread bits.  He glanced back over his shoulder at the high deck and hoped his mother wasn't watching him through the kitchen window.  She would certainly yell at him for pulling things out of the trash or wasting food even though it had been thrown away.  He seldom understood what upset her, but he knew it took very little to put him in her crosshairs.

Back up on the deck the boy sat with his legs dangling over the edge and his arms folded over the bottom railing, waiting.  He noticed movement along the fence line between the grassy field and the cornfield that stretched off into the distance.  At first he thought it was a dark brown dog, but it was too low to the ground and was moving in fits and starts.  It raised its head to get a peek above the grass.  The boy waved at it and yelled a greeting.  It froze for a moment, weighing its options, then scrambled down a hole by a fence post.  He realized he'd startled a groundhog, but at least it was now safe underground.

Clouds began to return overhead as the sun peaked in and out.  The boy was growing impatient and uncrossed his legs to extend them outward for a stretch.  He rubbed his eyes aggressively until blue flashes appeared and then resolved into blurriness.  He thought he noticed some black specks in the field.  When his vision completely cleared, he found that several birds had swept down and landed amongst his bread bits.  The large crow was there snatching up the bread and bumping the smaller birds aside.  He jumped up from his perch and ran down the stairs.

***

The boy snatched up a backpack from under the deck and headed for the small barn beside the house.  Inside was a clutter of bikes, storage barrels, and a riding lawnmower with the smell of gasoline and rust hanging in the air.  He jostled his bike free from the mess and pulled it past the wooden sliding door.  The concrete pad at the barn entrance was elevated above the yard, grassy slopes on three sides.  He crossed his left foot over his right and placed it firmly onto the bike pedal.  With one deft movement he threw his right leg up and over the bike seat and rolled off the slight drop off onto the grass.

A furious pumping of legs propelled him over the grass and onto the gravel driveway.   Loose gravel shot out behind him as he stood to pump the pedals, fishtailing until hitting the decline to the road.  A small raised mound lay at the bottom and he hit it hard and fast.  As the front tire made contact with the mound, he pushed his body down, then pulled up at its peak, willing the bike into the air.   He felt free breaking the property line while airborne, like making a prison break.

He made his escape out of the neighborhood to a long stretch of road that bordered the west side of town.  A ditch filled with tall grass and pieces of trash ran along a fence line.  He pedaled slowly and kept his eyes glued on the ditch.  A rabbit bolted past and startled him.  The boy knew there were dogs in this area and memories of past encounters made him jumpy.  A glint of green caught his eye and drew him into the ditch.  He hopped off the bike and let it fall.  Reaching down into the grass he wrapped his fingers around an empty 7UP bottle and brushed it off before putting it in the backpack.  A little farther down it was a Big Red bottle, a favorite fuel source when his Mom did not make lunch in the  summer months.

He was one bottle shy of what he needed and knew it would be tough to find another one as he had already gathered more than could reasonably be expected from this particular stretch of road.  Up ahead of him a cloud of dust warned him that a car was coming and coming fast.  The boy quickly steered his bike off of the road and, in his haste, fell over into the ditch.  He sat up in time to see the car slow as it passed and a teenage boy poking his head out of the passenger's side window, "Merry Christmas, kid!"  An empty RC bottle sailed through the air and landed at his feet as the car tore back off down the road leaving echoes of laughter behind.

***

The girl at the grocery store gave him ten cents per bottle.  It was an erratic source of income, only really available in the warmer months, but one that came with no strings attached, no questions asked.  He looked at the candy shelves and thought to reconsider his plan, swaying back and forth, lost in thought.

"You gettin' the fireballs, Aaron?" asked the girl standing at the cash register.  Besides the lady running the deli counter in the back, she was the only other person in the small store.

He blushed, jingling the change in his pocket. "Nah, I'm on a mission."

Her eyebrows rose slightly.  "A mission?  Something more important than candy?"

"Yeah, and it's secret.  See ya, Nancy."

The hardware store was his next stop.  It sat on the town square nestled between the shoe store and a diner.  The diner was a stopping off spot for the Greyhound bus line which ran through town, picking up and dropping off strangers.  It also happened to have malted milk shakes on the menu, the thought of which made his stomach growl and the dimes in his pocket burn a little hotter.  He leaned his bike against a newspaper box and headed into the hardware.

The sound of his beat up hushpuppies clapped the marred floor boards and sent echoes through the empty store that smelled strongly of oil and sawdust.  Somewhere in the back corner he found the mousetraps, but they were too small for his needs.  He squatted down and bent his head sideways to look to the back of the lowest shelf.  He reached back slowly, knowing it was silly to think a trap might snap tight on him but unable to shake the feeling.  His hand closed around a larger piece of wood and he pulled out what he was looking for, a rat trap.  It was huge compared to the mousetraps, cartoonish in its exaggerated proportions.  He put his foot on the trap and pulled against the spring to see if he could even set it.  The trap appeared to be trying to wriggle out of his grasp the harder he pulled, but he eventually got it all of the way open before releasing it with a loud *crack*.

The sound of shoes on stairs brought him to his feet.  The store owner appeared, an elderly man with a crack-filled face but kind eyes.  "Well, hello there young man.  Are you finding what you're looking for?"  The boy half held the trap at his back, reluctant to have it out in the open where his intentions might be guessed.

The owner did not wait for him to reply, "That's a mighty big trap.  What kind of animal are you lookin' to catch?"  His eyes popped up quickly to scan the man's face.  Did he suspect something?  Had he guessed his secret?  What he saw was a bemused expression which assured him his secret was safe.

"Got some rats in our barn" the boy offered, not making eye contact.

"Well then, let's ring you out so you can go and catch them varmints."  The boy followed him to the front where he laid out his handful of dimes on the counter.  The owner drug the coins off of the counter top onto his palm and gave a little shake to spread them out and count them.  "That'll about do it.  Happy hunting."

***

He waited until his mother had left for her ceramics class, then snatched two bread slices from the bread box, wanting to get more but not wanting his mother to figure out he'd taken them without asking.  He slid open the glass door and slowly approached the porch railing overlooking the field.

Time was starting to take on a different quality now.  A peculiar feeling was overtaking him, like waking up from an afternoon nap slightly disoriented and not yet fully reconnected to the body.  The initial plan had filled him with a kind of giddy excitement, but now that the pieces were falling into place he was not sure he could follow through with it.  An uneasy feeling had crept in.  Was it the falling into the ditch?  The RC bottle flying through the air and nearly hitting him?  The old man's cracked face and probing questions?

Something was watching him and tracking his progress.  He was sure of it.  Stopping was an option, though it did not feel that way.  It was inevitable that he descend the stairs, that he bait the trap with bread, that he carry it carefully into the field and place it gently on the grass.  The boy was sure these were only thoughts in his head, but then he was shocked to find himself no longer on the deck.  His vision hung above fingers breaking off bread pieces and dropping them onto the grass around the trap.  He felt himself back away from it and as normal perceptions of time and space returned, he turned and ran as fast as he could back up to the deck taking two steps at a time.

There was nothing more to do now but sit and wait.

***

It took longer for the birds to arrive this time or at least it seemed that way.  Maybe it was the presence of the trap.  They hungrily snatched up the bread bits, jostling each other as they had before until, on cue, the large crow landed in their midst and began eating what was left.  When all of the bread was gone, the birds moved on, leaving the crow to contemplate the last remaining piece on the trap's trigger.  Its head cocked left, then right, unsure of how to proceed.  It circled the trap, eye locked on the big fluffy white piece at the trap's center.  As the seconds ticked by the boy was sure the crow would fly off, content with the bread it had already eaten.

A sudden movement and then a flurry of activity startled the boy.  He did not know what had happened, but the crow was thrashing its wings and appeared to be attached to the trap, dragging it.  He could now see that it was caught by the neck and fighting to free itself.  Excitement mixed with fear gripped the boy and held him tight.  He watched from his far perch as the crow fought for its life, a small black dot swallowed by the vastness of the field.

The movements died down and eventually stopped.  He approached the crow he presumed to be dead and nudged the trap with his foot.  The exhausted crow gave a feeble twitch of a wing.  Its eye no longer had the power to pierce the boy, but fell somewhere between them, afraid and confused.  He walked back to the barn and returned with his BB gun.  As he held it firmly between his legs and pumped the lever, a growing sense of nausea began to form in the pit of his stomach.  At the tenth pump he rotated the gun downward and placed the end of the barrel against the crow's head.  Tears began to burn in his eyes as he pulled the trigger, "I'm sorry."

***

She saw him sitting on the deck stairs as she pulled up the driveway, legs pulled in and head down on his skinny crossed arms.  He looked so small and frail on those stairs suspended several feet above the ground.  She sat for a moment taking in this sight of her son, wondering what he'd done.  The familiar feeling of irritation started to rise, but then unexpectedly dissipated.  She removed her oversized sunglasses as she exited the car and stood at the bottom of the stairs with a hand shielding her eyes from the sun like a lopsided salute.

"Are you OK, buddy?"  She heard a sniff from him and thought she saw his shoulders tremble.  "Come down here and let me have a look at you."

The calmness of her voice confused him.  She should be angry and demanding an explanation.  He looked up and saw a person that was unfamiliar, but in a pleasant way.  He descended the stairs and stood below her, swaying back and forth.  He allowed himself to fall forward and wrap his arms around her waist as he closed his eyes tight.

"I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, Aaron."

"I'm sorry, Mom."

"I'm sorry too."



***

In Between Places

***

Sitting inside a mobile container
Somewhere in the netherworld
Between work and home
A tri-colored light determining
My rate of progress
As rain coats my window
On a dreary world

Another container pulls alongside
A blurry face turns sadly
In my direction, unseeing
We are lost in the desert of our hearts
In the wandering of our minds
Unable to connect
In these in between places

***

Anticipating the Kingdom

An e-mail to Jim Forest while I was in Iraq regarding something posted on the Orthodox Peace Fellowship (OPF) listserve in regards to a lady’s comments about the slow seep of Orthodox views on peace into our modern American mentalities.  The picture was taken at a bombed out track and field stadium on our base in Tikrit.  I was able to get such a clear low light shot by using my rifle as a monopod, ie, putting the barrel in the ground and resting my camera on the flat butt.

***

5 December 2006

Jim,

I really appreciated the lady from Alaska's posting on the OPF about our (converts in America) unfolding understanding of issues pertaining to peace and peace-making in the Orthodox Faith. It is something that has grown inside of me since that moment 10 years ago when I heard my priest explain to someone at an OCF retreat the Orthodox practice of requiring confession of a soldier who had killed in battle and prohibition from Communion for a time. It shocked me by just how much good sense it made and that it was not just a gloss over of "well, you did it in self-defense or for your country so it's alright" or even worse, "what you did was brave and commendable."

My commitment to the Army was made in these early stages of becoming Orthodox and I can't help but think I would have made a very different decision if only a few years later. As it is I gave my word to serve in the Army for a prescribed period of time and I plan to honor that. If I were required to "fight" or act in any way contrary to my calling as a physician and Orthodox Christian it would be a different story. So now I find myself away from my family and part of this war that I opposed from day one, when our President was first testing the waters and trying on different justifications to put us on the road to war in Iraq.

Something that really eats at me is the requirement that I carry a weapon around with me everywhere I go. Like in Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" it is an albatross hanging around my neck continually reminding me of where I am and the decisions I've made to bring me here. One way I deal with it is by thinking of it as something other than a weapon. For example, I injured my knee before deploying and it has given me trouble so that I use my rifle to get up and down from my chair at the chow hall, like a crutch. I also sometimes have to navigate across a large graveled lot with various barriers and vehicles in almost pitch black darkness. I swing my rifle back and forth in front of me like a blind man's cane to keep from running into things. In this way I have tried to turn something as ludicrous as a doctor carrying an M16 into something helpful, if not equally absurd.

I distilled all of this into a poem, "Anticipating the Kingdom?"

And in the Kingdom of God
They shall beat their swords into plowshares
And the lion shall lie down with the lamb

But in the kingdom of Man
Munitions plow the earth violently
And the eagle strikes down the weak.

In the kingdom of me
A rifle functions as a crutch for my sore knee
And a blind man’s cane when walking at night

In doing no harm
Am I at least
Anticipating the Kingdom?

The Free Throw

***

It was a thing of beauty

my ten year old
at the foul line
two sharp dribbles
and a pause
right arm perpendicular
to the ground
left hand resting lightly
on the side of the ball
a fluid movement
from crouch
to full extension
a flick of the wrist
ball rotating backwards
in an exquisite arc
nestling into the net

like a baby in its mother's arms.

***

The Green Mosque

It's been eight years since my deployment to Iraq and I've been revisiting some of the "letters home" I sent at that time.  They are all quite melancholy and have an undercurrent of homesickness.  They, along with my photos, were a lifeline for me and a connection to the wider world.  The thought occurred to me that I should start posting some of them on my blog as a kind of historical record.

***

At the northern end of FOB Diamondback in Mosul where three roads intersect one can find "The Green Mosque".  It was the airport mosque here in Mosul prior to the Army taking control of this area and separating it from the rest of the city almost four years ago now.  It has not functioned as a mosque since that time.

It is a melancholy place.  The grounds are surrounded by a short wall with a spacious courtyard in front full of various kinds of trees, shrubs, and bushes that have grown out of control.  Lamp posts dot the area inside the walls, rusty, glassless, with light bulbs that lean at odd angles and no longer function.  The only visitors these days are the birds that like to perch on its ledges and in the trees.

I imagine one day when we are gone it will once again become a place of worship.  But for now it sits isolated inside its walls with paint peeling and the greenery growing unchecked.  I think it will be better when we are not here.  This is not our home.

February 14th, 2007

***

Masterpiece

My love for art began as a kid in a small Midwestern town.  It was the 1970's when there was no such thing as an internet opening a window on the wider world.   Experiences followed a narrow groove worn smooth by a bicycle tire and a boy's imagination.  Museums were far away in big cities that we never visited and the best we could muster on our walls were Home Interior pieces of plastic and colored glass bought at house parties.

The library was a potential stepping off point for this kind of exploration, but it was a bifurcated building with the kid's section flowing to the left and the adult section flowing to the right.  The librarian's desk sat midstream as a kind of command and control center and resembled a judge's bench.  I remember on at least one occasion wandering over to the right side and having the librarian suddenly materialize beside me, asking what I was looking for.  There was something in the way she asked that insinuated that I might be doing something wrong and should skitter back over to the kid's section if I knew what was good for me.  My exposure to great art was not going to come from that direction, though we did have a set of Childcraft books at home that had some illustrations that tickled my fancy.

***

The beachhead to this unexplored world of fine art came in the form of a board game, "Masterpiece."  My parents would have friends over to our house from church to play games around the dining room table in the evening hours.  My first memory of Masterpiece was when I was six or seven and the adults were playing it while the kids played elsewhere.  I can clearly see myself standing next to my Dad's chair and watching them play with a peculiar energy.  I loved to see them so animated and hear their laughter.  I picked up some of the painting reproductions my Dad had acquired and looked at the value cards clipped to the back which told you how much the painting was worth and was known only to the person who owned it.  The strategy is to cash in the most expensive ones when the opportunity arises and try to auction off the cheaper ones at prices that exceed their value.  One of the value cards wasn't a number, but a word that I did not know, *forgery*.  "Hey Dad, what is a for-gary?" I asked, and everyone burst out laughing as my Dad snatched the painting back from me.

A few years later I was able to play the game with the neighborhood kids at the dining room table in the light of day, either on a lazy summer afternoon or a bleak winter weekend.  I learned the artists' names and their distinctive styles by playing this game.  By the time I reached High School I had stopped playing it for the most part, but I purchased my first oil painting from an artist from the Smoky Mountains at our local festival when I was a freshman.  It was an exhilarating idea that was made possible when the artist recognized my interest in a particular framed canvas and offered to let me pay him bit by bit on the honor system.  I made a passionate plea to my Mom to let me do it and convinced her that a fifteen year old could and should acquire a largish framed oil painting.  I gave him twenty dollars cash for a negotiated price of two hundred and fifty dollars and floated home with it on a cloud of wondrous disbelief.  I faithfully mailed him money every few months over a two year period until it was paid off.

***

Over the years I've had opportunities to visit some of the great art museums of the world in cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Mexico City, Seoul, New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco.  I was able to see many of those paintings I'd loved as a kid, firsthand in all of their full-sized glory.  And beyond that I found new favorites: the elongated form of John the Baptist wrapped in a blue sky by El Greco in the Pushkin Museum of Moscow, the terrible melancholy of "Wheatfield with Crows" thought to be Vincent's last painting at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the massive canvas of Ilya Repin's "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks" from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and Frida Kahlo's surreal self portraits in Mexico City.  Now, at forty five years of age, my prized possession is an oil painting lovingly dappled with brilliant colors of a scene at Winslow Farms in Fairmount, Indiana by Kevin McCarty, a dearly departed friend and my godson in the Orthodox Faith.  I first laid eyes on it at the Indiana State Museum as part of the 2000 Hoosier Salon and now it hangs over my fireplace in a place of honor and remembrance.

***

The impetus for this reflection on my love of art over the years came from an unexpected find a year ago and then a rediscovery this past weekend.  One year ago I was with my son at a local Catholic Church festival and while he ran off with his friends to play the games, I wondered into a tent full of garage sale items to putter around.  My gaze wandered over an old board game that turned out to be the original edition of Masterpiece.  I didn't recognize it at first because it was the 1970 edition and my parents had the 1976 edition with a different box cover.  When I realized what lay before me I could hardly contain myself.  I snatched it up and went through its contents with a huge grin on my face, finding it mostly intact.  I paid the preposterously low price of two dollars and carried it around the festival under my arm, protecting it like it was a newborn baby (an internet search from yesterday revealed that it is selling for 100+ dollars these days).

It has sat on a basement shelf with other games since that time, untouched until just a few days ago when it piqued my son's curiosity.  We pulled it out and I explained the rules to him as well as shared some stories of playing it with friends when I was his age.  The next day he got his Mom and Sister to join us in playing it.  As the game progressed, old friends found their way to the top of the stack to include the one that intrigued me the most as a kid, Grant Wood's "American Gothic."  Elias mentioned that he wanted to show it to his neighborhood friends and I had the queer feeling that time was somehow resetting itself.


Master Dice Roller


1970 Edition


***

Circus in the Sky

***
The sky was immense,
a massive canvas
unfurled across my windshield
on my morning commute.
It was nearly impossible
to concentrate on
the broken line of cars
flitting in the darkened
lower margins of this
magnificent spectacle.
I felt like a circus spectator,
plopped in a bleacher
for the greatest show on earth.
Wisps of a burning tiger
leaping over a blood red sun
sitting heavy on the horizon.
My exit arrived and the scene
scrolled off the screen
as my car headed
in a different direction.
***

You are a Person

***

You are not an individual,
rugged or otherwise.
You are a person
connected to people,
living or dead,
it does not matter.
Love is everywhere
and fills all things.
Of this, and only this
can you be certain.
Set it as a judge
over your thoughts
and actions.  Do they
pass the test of love?

***

Empty Shelves

***
The shelves of his mind
had been emptied of memories
and no amount of rummaging
could change that.
All that was left
was the action itself,
pacing those empty rows,
rubbing his hands
over the dust that was left.
He heard voices,
warm tones meant to reassure him.
"Remember me?  It's so and so,"
cruel in their strange familiarity.
Where is this place?
Who are these people?
The shelves lie bare,
leaving him scared and alone.
***

The Prodigal

When I'm lost
I don't always
know that I'm lost

but sometimes I do

like a butterfly
hovering overhead
self-seeing
feeling pity for
my waywardness
memories fluttering
to moments of a
peace-filled existence
that was lost
due to lack of diligence
a waning watchfulness
supplanted by a
pride-filled nothingness

but even so

when I'm lost
it is a grace
to know that
I am lost
and gain hope
in the waiting
for myself
to come home.

***

The Last Book

Life is Beautiful

***
Life is beautiful
always and ever,
though poorly perceived
through the dirty lens
that overlies the
eye of my soul.
A pure heart
apprehends it fully,
which means it is
something I must
simply accept on faith,
catching glimpses
through my children
who have yet to
become so sullied
by the demands
of a life-defying
culture that fosters
self-centered insatiety
as an ill-conceived norm.
I see myself as
someone who makes
capricious attempts
at capturing
it through art
and creativity,
but above all
through love,
however feeble.
***

The Doctor

They rolled her into the emergency room looking like Sleeping Beauty-on-a-stretcher, her long blond hair framing a pale face, unmoving, unresponsive, signs of trauma conspicuously missing.   She appeared to be in her mid-teens, eyes closed, and wearing a light blue dress which in and of itself was an unusual sight in the ER.  Maybe the EMT’s had been reluctant to remove it and somehow mar her innocent loveliness.  A physical exam, labs and imaging of her head had turned up nothing.  

The ER doctor on duty appreciated the challenge of a good medical mystery, but he also knew when his job was done and a more extensive workup was needed.  This zebra hunt would have to happen up on the medical floor.  He took a moment to appreciate the oddness of this particular presentation, run through a differential in his head one last time, and then sign the order to have the patient transferred to the medical service.  She was wheeled out of the ER as serenely as she had entered.

***

The hospitalist who had accepted the patient stared at the computer screen, frustrated that there were no red flags flying in the margins to alert him to what was wrong.  The physical exam had been equally unhelpful.  He scratched his head and fiddled with his coffee cup that sported the message "crazy days and Mondays always get me down" which got him humming.  The lush alto of Karen Carpenter began singing in his head and proved to be a helpful trigger; his subconscious mind doing its quiet work.  Thoughts of anorexia and then mental illness in general entered his conscious awareness and led to the conclusion that this was a job for a psychiatrist.

He grabbed her chart and wrote an order for a Behavioral Health consult, "Rule out catatonia."  The consult was marked "urgent," but that was a bit of a cheat.  She was breathing normally and her vitals were stable.  It was urgent in the sense that doctors fear the unknown and the consequences that can come from missing something.   It should have been obvious from the get-go, but psychiatric problems are not something that generalists like himself are necessarily comfortable with or consider except as a last resort.  And this is how it should be, he thought.  A medical reason that could put the patient's life at risk if not identified had to be pursued and ruled out first and foremost.  

He placed the chart in the New Orders slot for the unit clerk to enter into the computer and did so with a sense of relief that other minds would be brought to bear on the problem.  This also allowed him to move on to see other patients who were starting to accumulate on his rounding list.  The clerk snatched up the new orders and entered them into the computer.  Her typed words were transformed into 1's and 0's and sent along strands of copper wire insulated by rubber tubing.  In a quirk of cosmic necessity a 1 and a 0 traded places, diverting the request down an unknown pathway.

Within seconds of the clerk hitting the enter key, the elevator doors slid open and out stepped a peculiar fellow.  No one paid particular attention to him as he made his way to the patient's room.  The clerk assumed it was the consultant and was too busy to realize that the timing was not only not right, but impossible.  

***

Alone with the patient, the doctor placed his hand gently on her forehead as if feeling for a fever.  He looked out through the window and over the city, losing himself in an approaching bank of dark clouds.  A jagged line of lightning flickered, mirroring the line of his brow.  He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly as thunder rolled into and around the hospital.  

He exited the room and headed down the hall, looking for a particular door.  He found it due to its out-of-place appearance.  It was too old, too narrow, and with an outdated vent in the bottom.  The door and what lay behind it had somehow been overlooked in all of the updates that had modernized the hospital's interior.  In a word, it had been forgotten.  It was a bathroom and the interior was not much bigger than a closet.  Pink tiles covered the walls up to about chest height and the floor was covered with smaller tiles of pink shadings.

He stood there for a moment staring at the wall, the side of his pant leg touching the lip of the commode.  He traced patterns in the air without touching the tiles until he appeared satisfied.  A sequence of squares were then tapped in quick succession, the hidden pattern made visible by the faint glow of each tile touched.  As he made contact with the last one the entire sequence flashed simultaneously and the room appeared to rotate out of itself taking the doctor along with it.  He found himself on the opposite side of the wall in a mirror image of the old bathroom.  The colors and quality of light were different, but not in a way that he could have explained to anyone not on that side. 

He exited the bathroom and immediately perceived what appeared to be a translucent tube coming from his chest and terminating in a nurse standing nearby.  As she turned and acknowledged him a flicker of colored light traversed the tube towards him.  The doctor was pleased that he'd found the proper place to do his work and set off to return to the patient's room.  He had to remember to turn left when before it was right and vice versa.  Further complicating matters was a webwork of crisscrossing tubes that ran between people, lights pulsing and shifting through them like a neuronal matrix.  This resulted in having to backtrack a time or two, but eventually he found the patient's room and shut the door behind him.

***

The tube connecting them was inert.  He watched the rise and fall of her chest, bringing his own breathing into sync with hers.  A pattering of rain drops hit the window.  With each exhalation he sent a faint pink pulse through the tube towards the patient.  This went on for several minutes without change until he noticed a hitch in the patient's breathing.  Discordant pulses began to slowly course in the opposite direction of the pink ones.  The tube thickened to accommodate the two way traffic.  

The doctor began to sweat profusely as images and sensations began to come into his awareness.  She was no longer in the hospital room.  A trusted presence was standing too close to her and breathing too hard.  Out of respect she had not moved away, pretending not to notice that something very dark was trying to envelop her mind even as her body desperately wanted to run and hide.  She sensed the desire extending towards her like a ravenous beast that would destroy her for its own pleasure.  She heard the familiar voice trying to soothe her, "It's OK.  Don't be afraid."  The doctor stood as an unseen witness to what was unfolding between this young girl and a much older man.  When the man's hand made contact with her an internal switch was thrown, a fail-safe, and she crumpled to the floor.

The doctor stood with her in this dark place where she had sequestered herself.  There was only blackness in all directions.  He extended his hand in a pointing gesture and a spot  appeared at his finger tip as his arm reached its full extension.  It was a small point of light that continued to shine even as he lowered his arm back to his side.  A twitch of her eyes under closed lids betrayed the fact she sensed the change.  Her head slowly rotated towards the light and her limbs began to find themselves.  In wobbly fits and starts she pulled herself up into a standing position and then began to sleep walk towards the light with her eyes still closed.  It grew larger as she approached it.  She was oblivious to the doctor's presence beside her.  He did not interfere, but encouraged her nonetheless in ways that were available to him.  When the circle of light had grown to a stable size she stepped through it with a slight duck of her head.

***

Her eyes opened and she peered at the ceiling of her hospital room.  She felt the warmth of the sun coming in through the window and she turned to see a blue sky with patchy clouds breaking up in the wind.  The room was empty and she wondered how it was that she'd gotten here.  Outside the room the clerk glanced up from her keyboard in time to see the elevator doors gliding shut on the doctor.    

Floating Over a Dark Place

She is three years old,
a warm ball of roundness
sleeping on our morning bed
in an expectant state of un-
wakeful perceptiveness.

I can't resist to kiss her shoulder.
She rolls over and fixes me
with dreamy eyes and a lost smile.
"That's how you float over
a dark place," she confides.

Was it the kiss as protective talisman
or something deeper in her burgeoning
experience of the world, where the
realness of a thing is not so concrete
as matter and linearity, cause or effect?

***

After Midnight

***

Where does one walk
after midnight
on the bad side of town?
A chain-link fence to the left,
street curb to the right,
being funneled to
who knows where
to do who knows what.
A boarded up church sits
alone and abandoned
on a street corner.
You try the doors,
but they are locked so
you sit on the wide
concrete steps feeling
the cold through your pants.
You ponder your existence,
feeling rudderless and lost,
but free to roam the night
and think your thoughts
which can be summed up by
"why the hell am I here?"
***

Ancient Swag

We (and by "we" I mean "Anya") lost our remote control a few months ago and we have only had access to one channel until just this past week. To make matters worse, the one channel that was on when the remote was lost was the Disney Channel which made it the only game in town.  On the up side, the kids have watched less TV and we've been able to delve into some pretty cool movies that I've accumulated for them over the years, most notably animated films by Hayao Miyazaki.

Last week we decided to move our computer and modem out of the guest room to start transforming that space into Anya's room.  The cable guys came out to help make the transfer and while they were here, they provided us with a new remote control and we got back the multitude of cable channels.  After the kids went to bed I clicked through a channel at a time to manually block each one that looked to be iffy or outright inappropriate.  I judged this by my own reactions ranging from "ewww!" (ego dystonic)  to "ohhh!" (ego syntonic).

When I'd reached the upper limits of the channels I started finding some that I'd not seen before or even knew existed.  One in particular caught my attention as I recognized the person of Jimmy Swaggart, the famous pentecostal preacher and televangelist.  It most have been recorded some time in the 80's as he looked quite young with his big glasses and shiny forehead.  He was trimmer and fitter looking than I'd remembered him, but with the same habit of pacing the platform and using nonstop hand gesturing to tell his stories.

What caught and held my attention was what he was describing.  He was describing the ancient worship of the Jewish people in very reverent and awed tones.  His hands outlined the angels overlooking the ark/altar.  He described the priestly duties and the prescribed timing of particular actions during the year.  He picked up an imaginary coal from the fire and said in a hushed voice, "And the smoke from the incense filled the temple for worship of the most high God."

As I listened to his captivating description I found myself swept up in visions of the Divine Liturgy and it occurred to me that if he had stepped foot into an Orthodox Church at that time, far from extolling its fidelity in maintaining this ancient pattern of worship, he would have likely condemned it as "dead ritual" and idolatry.  I would not have understood the irony as a teen in the 80's, but it strikes me now that he was trying to put on some "ancient swag."

The Lion Weeps Tonight

I had been a member of the local Lion's Club chapter for just over a year when I knew it was time to make a play for being the lion.  The Memorial Day parade was coming up and they asked for a volunteer to wear the lion costume to walk the one and a half mile route.  I felt I had the required skill set to bring it to life and was excited for the opportunity.  It was quite a handsome outfit that completely covered the wearer from head to toe for the full immersive experience.  The tail was long and thick with a tuft of hair on the end that could easily be snatched up and used as a humorous prop.  The head itself was large and impressive, sporting a regal yet bemused expression, or so I imagined it.

I tried it on at one of my fellow Lion's house with my six year old son in tow as a trial audience.  She had worn it last at an indoor event and the suit was folded up inside the lion's head in the corner of her living room.  The head was so large that it needed suspender-like straps looped under the armpits to hold it in place.  With the head firmly attached, they helped me pull on the body of the suit and zip it up the back.  The gloves came on last and there I stood like a claustrophobic astronaut preparing for a moon walk.  I bent forward at the waist to line up the eye mesh so that I could see my son.  He had a great goofy grin on his face, but then I stepped back, grabbed the tail, and began twirling it while doing a little jig.  He immediately burst into laughter.

***

The decision to join the Lion's Club was inspired by my friendship with Kevin McCarty.  He was born with retinoblastoma, a cancer whose treatment left him with just one eye of limited vision.  Despite this obvious limitation, he made the unobvious choice of developing his talent as a visual artist.   By the time I'd met him in college he was in his late twenties and had become a fine oil painter with an impressionistic style that was unique in its vibrant use of color and texture.  Our friendship grew over several years to include at least two opportunities to sit as a model for him.  These were marathon sessions that lasted through the day and night in his small studio apartment.  The place was cluttered with large canvasses at various states of completion, some hanging and others leaning against the walls.  The hardwood floor was speckled with dried paint drops and the air smelled of pipe smoke and paint thinner.  Many of the human figures in these paintings lacked faces. He was fiercely proud of his work, but he admitted to me that he struggled with painting faces.  I imagine that faces over stressed his ability to discern details due to his extremely poor vision.

The one thing hanging from his walls that was not a painting or sketch was a large poster from the TV series "Beauty and the Beast", a show that ran in the late 80's for a few years.  The show's star was named Vincent and his face resembled a lion which was further enhanced by a full head of hair resembling a mane.  He lived in subterranean passages and mostly limited his contact with the wider world to the "Beauty" of the title.  The radiation treatments Kevin had received as a child had malformed his skull in such a way that he bore some resemblance to Vincent with his deep set eyes.  He felt a kinship with this character whose situation and appearance imposed a barrier of sorts between him and those around him.  It was the romantic archetype of the misunderstood loner.

***

As a point of curiosity, the Lion's Club is the world's largest philanthropic organization and very early on in its existence it took a special interest in helping those with blindness and/or visual impairment.  This came about after Hellen Keller addressed their international convention at Cedar Point, Ohio in 1925 and left a powerful impression on the attendees.  In early 2010 I read about a new chapter being started in my town in our local newspaper and I immediately thought about Kevin who had died the year previous due to a recurrence of cancer related to the radiation treatments he'd received as a child.  It was a terrible several year ordeal that involved him progressively losing bones in his head to surgery and culminating in the loss of his one functioning eye so that when death finally caught up with him he was completely blind.

The meetings were at noon on Mondays twice a month and I was able to attend by driving up from the hospital on my lunch break.  Having been a perpetual student for so many years through medical school, residency, and then a three year stent in the Army I felt like this was my first bona fide extracurricular adult-type activity, and at forty one year's of age I was one of the youngest in attendance.  We met at the  Holiday Inn near my house which had several smallish conference rooms that we rotated through.  The other members were heavily weighted towards people from the local business community with a police officer and a fireman or two sprinkled in.  There was also a small group of women who were staff members from our local library who had aggressively recruited their colleagues for membership.  The Memorial Day parade would be an opportunity to advertise our presence in the community and continue the process of growing the membership of this fledgling group.

***

The day arrived and it was the hottest Memorial Day in recent memory with temperatures in the nineties.  My wife tried to talk me out of walking the full route in the lion suit, but I was determined to accept the challenge.  It was so hot that she opted to keep our children at home.  I rendezvoused with the other members at the parade staging area near the end of the line with the lion suit folded into a large plastic Ikea bag on my shoulder.  I had spent much of the morning hydrating regularly, but taking care not to over do it as I would not be able to take a potty break once things got started.  My other strategy included wearing a thin loose fitting muscle t-shirt with baggy shorts and Birkenstock sandals.  While waiting for the parade to start there was a lot of joking around about my unenviable task, but also assurances that everyone would be looking out for me due to the heat and lack of visibility once I donned the head piece.

As the last few minutes ticked down to start the parade, they helped me get the suit on and talked me into riding in the convertible instead of walking.  I sat on the back of the car with my feet resting on the back seat and was handed a large umbrella to keep the sun off of me.  The parade began to creep forward towards the starting point and I closed my eyes and bowed my head in a kind of meditative state to conserve my energy, not knowing what to expect or how well I'd tolerate the whole ordeal.  It was a moment to appreciate the surrealness of being inside the cavernous lion's head with sound muffled, hearing my own breathing,  and feeling the glide of the vehicle underneath me.  The driver looked back at me and tapped my leg, "How are you doing in there?"  I gave him a thumb's up and looked around to see that we were beginning to hit the area where people had begun to line the parade route.

I started waving and caught glimpses of small children looking directly at me with huge smiles on their faces, waving frantically.  I felt a kind of adrenaline rush and collapsed the umbrella to throw it onto the floorboard while swinging my legs over the door to catapult myself out and away from the car to clear my tail.  I ran to the edge of the street to high five the children and look into their laughing eyes at close range.  I walked, danced, and stutter-stepped the rest of the way in a kind of half-blind euphoria, trying to run back and forth to either side of the street to catch as many kids as I possibly could while the parade moved inexorably on.

At about the halfway point of the parade I became acutely aware of the reality that I was wearing a furry costume with gloves and an overly large hairy helmet while running around in the direct sun of a blistering hot day while on pavement.  I couldn't quite believe that I felt so comfortable and that the time was going by so fast.  The street had broadened and I was weaving in and out of the other Lion's Club members to get from one side of the street to the other.  Their smiles were as infectious as the kids lining the parade route and I could only imagine what I must have looked like in my playful lion personae.  I could tell they appreciated what I was doing for the club by drawing attention to the signs and banners which trumpeted our various philanthropic activities.  A friend of ours from the community who had three boys at street side later told me the lion was their favorite part of the parade.

***

Towards the end I began to feel some of the fatigue catching up with me and the wetness that had soaked into my clothes.  The hot air sitting inside the lion's head was stale and musty.  I saw one more family sitting in lawn chairs on a street corner with a small boy in their lap and I trotted over to give him a high five.  Walking back onto the street I found myself looking at a sculpture from our local Arts Center which had been in front of us throughout the parade route.  It was now even with me and the driver was outside of his car securing the sculpture to its trailer with straps.  I thought this was odd and so I rotated my head to look to the front of his car only to find a mostly empty street with a few vehicles from the parade dispersing in the distance.  I turned to look the opposite direction to find my group and there was no one there.  No one.  Nothing.  The parade had ended at least a block back from where I stood and as the Arts Center guy pulled away I was left totally alone on the street.

I was at a complete loss.  There was no more parade and I was standing on the street almost two miles from where I'd parked my car in a lion costume in ninety degree heat.  I wandered over to the sidewalk and looked around some more in a state of bewilderment and indecision.  I didn't want to peal off my suit right there where some kids might see.  Somehow I had the idea that the illusion of the lion must be maintained until I could go somewhere out of sight and take it off.  A small cinder block funeral home was the nearest building to me and it had a few trees beside it.  I absent-mindedly noted from the sign that it specialized in cremation services.  As if in a daze I made my way back to stand under the shade of a tree and began the process of taking off the lion costume.  I stuffed the body of it into the lion's head and headed back the direction the parade had come from to find my car.

While walking back I glanced up a side street and recognized the convertible sitting in a church parking lot with some of the Lion's Club members milling about, drinking ice water, and packing up to get ready to leave.  I walked up to join them and no one seemed to notice that I'd been gone.  It crossed my mind that I could have collapsed from heat stroke and no one would have been the wiser.  I had to ask if someone could give me a ride back to my car and it was quickly arranged.  On the way back the driver (who later went on to become club president) attempted to make some small talk, but I was still in a kind of existential shock.  I may have told him that we were new to the community and that I was originally from Indiana, but I don't remember anything much beyond that.  What I do remember is the feeling of being utterly alone and disconnected from the world.

***

In the coming weeks and months my work at the hospital grew to the point that I was only able to attend Monday meetings sporadically until I finally had to notify the president that I could no longer maintain my membership in the club.  He was very gracious and said that I was welcome to come back at any time or participate in any of their activities as I was able.  Somewhere deep down I felt like I'd let Kevin down and in my mind's eye I pictured him as that sad lion standing in the middle of an empty street on a hot day, half-blind and alone.

Never Judge a Book...

I'm not sure why it bugs me so much, but I really dislike when a classic of Science Fiction or Fantasy is made into a movie and then the book is re-released with a scene from the movie as the book cover.  I like to think of a book as a unified piece of art much like record albums used to be.  This mish-mash of book and movie seems to violate that idea/ideal.  Instead, I really enjoy when classics get re-released with cover art that is conceptualized in a new and creative way.  The books that come most readily to mind are those of Ray Bradbury which have had several re-imaginings over the years by a variety of artistic talents, many of whom have left some stamp of the times on them which I find fascinating.

This whole line of thought was sparked by finding a paperback copy of The Postman by David Brin yesterday at Half Price Books.  They were having a 20% off sale and when I saw the book's spine I knew that this was the one for me, a classic that had evaded me since it's debut in 1985.  My excitement quickly turned to disappointment  when I pulled the book off the shelf and found myself staring at Kevin Costner.  Reading the back cover I learned that "For the first time since Dances with Wolves, this Fall's blockbuster motion picture will be directed by and star Kevin Costner."  Egads.  I have no recollection of any such movie which is probably a good thing.

I'm seriously considering using a Sharpie to re-imagine the cover, as well as blacking out any reference to Kevin Costner.  This would not be much of a stretch for me as in the past few years I've started a new hobby of creating book covers from photos that remind me of particular books.  I'm repeatedly surprised by how much excitement this generates in my humdrum existence when the idea takes hold and I'm looking to find time to photoshop it into reality.  I've even created the cover for a novel that has not yet been written, but is biding its time in my subconscious, as well as for a poem. I imagine these creations are Walter Mitty-like moments for me, letting me pretend I am a person of some renown in the publishing world.

Epic is the new Awesome

It's an epic tale that I'm telling,
full of epic adventures
with epic peoples.
Peoples who are like us,
but unlike us in epic ways;
taller, shorter, faster, slower,
fatter, thinner, smarter, dumber,
and all with some slightly
distorted physiognomy,
like pointy ears, ie, epic.
And the epicness does not
stop with the peoples, but
encompasses their journeys
as well, to the highest peaks
and to the lowest caverns
that reek with evil putrescence,
lacking in the most basic of
pulchritudinousness,  a word
that can only be described as... epic.
They cover epic distances
and meet epic villains
who are really really ugly
and may even smell bad,
but are epically brilliant
in the devious kind of way
that trips them up in the end,
climaxing in a climactic ending
that can only be described as... epic.

When We were Holy

When we were holy
I was just a kid.

The preacher pranced
on the camp meeting stage
in a building so large it
resembled Noah's Ark
left upside down to dry.
Emotions came in waves,
washing over us as we
sat passively on long
benches of wooden slats,
like a multitude of life boats
bobbing on a troubled sea.
His voice rose and fell,
whispers and shouts,
a Bible flopped open
in his raised palm
like a dead bird.

When we were holy
a young man ran the aisles
leaping and whooping with abandon.
An old man shuffled along
shaking a hanky over his head,
his eyes closed and tears
streaming down his cheeks.
The women in long dresses,
hair up in buns or beehives,
fanned themselves furiously
in the late summer heat
while kids looked to escape
into the sticky night air
and make mischief among
a maze of one-roomed cottages,
their laughter stifled in the dark.

When we were holy
the power to see other's sins
was granted to us,
tell-tale signs to distinguish
sinner from saved.
We were not like them,
the Bible told us so.
We who with one prayer
had been magically transformed,
traveling to church
three times a week
secure in the knowledge
of our personal salvation,
even as our hearts
withered in our homes
hidden behind drapes of denial.

When we were holy
I was just a kid.



***

Voices

***
The wind brings children's voices
caught in the filter of leaves and
dropped into my lap under this tree,
like bruised and over ripe fruit.

They rot in a melancholic disposition,
remembering the powerlessness
of being small and frail amongst
a host of unscrupulous giants.

Vienna After Hours

It was supposed to be a day trip into Vienna from Bratislava by train, but it didn't quite work out that way.

I'd taken a bus from Paris to Bratislava the week previous to visit my best friend from college, Shane, who had moved there after graduation the year before.  He had hooked up with some other idealists from our school and was providing educational resources (read: English lessons) for local college-aged kids out of a couple of rooms at the YMCA (or "em-ka" as it was called locally).  I'd spent a week or so in London, then the same amount of time in Paris before realizing my limited money supply was dwindling at an alarming rate.  It was the summer of 1994 and Eastern Europe was only recently out from under Communism making it very much on the affordable side of things.  My plan was to flee there and regroup for a few weeks before any further travel plans were to be made.

My arrival at the Bratislava bus station was made memorable by an elderly babushka I passed on my way into the men's restroom.  As I stood using a urinal I  heard her enter the room and start rummaging in a closet about ten feet behind me.  This made me uncomfortable and so I finished my business quickly and headed for the exit.  I was immediately cut off from leaving by the babushka who now had a broomstick in one hand and the other extended towards me, palm facing upward.  She was saying something to me and I just looked at her in dumb surprise.  Thinking she might be mentally ill, I attempted to go around her.  She immediately cut me off from the exit and started yelling while poking her hand at me.  It dawned on me that she was very likely the janitor and that this is how she got paid, so I fished some coins out of my pocket and placed them in her hand one at a time until she was satisfied and let me pass.

So, the day trip.  Shane and I swept into Vienna on the early train planning to wander the city all day and catch the last train back in the evening.  The wandering part went according to plan.  I remember visiting St. Stephen's Cathedral, promenading through spacious parks , and posing with an imposing statue of Goethe out of feelings of guilt that "Faust" was the only assigned work in my college World Literature class that I had not read to the end.  I seem to recollect the devil was involved in a wager of some sort and a cat figured into it, but I'm not wholly sure about the cat part.  I may be conflating it with Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita."  I remember the buildings being old and tall, but not too tall, with carved stone facades.  I couldn't afford the pastries that Vienna is famous for and may have even found a McDonalds to eat at for lunch, fer shame.

So, the day progressed and the evening arrived with us making our way back to the train station only to find we'd missed the last train to Bratislava.  No subsequent accommodations were found to soften the blow.  Having been in similar circumstances on previous misadventures, I was a little miffed at Shane but not wholly undone.  I knew it was going to be a very long night with a fair bit of unpleasantness due to a chill in the air and no sleeping bags.  Not to mention the fact we'd spent the entire day walking through the city and now were sore and tired.

There were some other young international traveler-types milling about the station for a time and we took advantage of the opportunity to talk with them, sitting indian-style in a loose circle, bumming cigarettes from one another to pass the time.  The number of people and passer-throughs began to thin and eventually we were forced out of the station by security.  We found some benches in the back where the buses pull up and tried to get some sleep.  There were a few others with the same idea who appeared to be of the local homeless variety.  Just as I was starting to drift off I was tapped on the shoe by a baton.  Two uniformed men were waking everyone up and asking for tickets.  No ticket, no bench.  Shane and I gathered our things and slunk away, tired and dejected.

This was "wandering the city", part two.   By this time it was well past midnight and I had caught a second wind.  I told Shane to sleep and I would keep watch.  He found a patch of grass by some bushes beside the wrought iron fence of a large park and settled in to sleep.  I sat on a low stone wall that lined the sidewalk about twenty feet from Shane's prostrate form and pulled out a paperback to pass the time.  In those days I had a book as an almost constant companion.  These days I typically whip out the smart phone when I have unoccupied time.  Back then it was a book in a cargo pocket.  That night was almost twenty years ago to the day, but I'm nearly certain it was Dostoevsky's "The House of the Dead."  I guess reading about the privations of a Siberian prison gave me some perspective as I sat there shivering.

I don't know how long I was there reading under the street light before I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.  I glanced up and saw a dark figure coming down the sidewalk a good way's off and  headed my direction.  I chose to be nonchalant about it and just pretend to read until the person passed me by.  As he came closer I could tell he was moving at quite a clip and what appeared to be a black overcoat was flapping around him.  As he approached where I was sitting I could hear him muttering to himself.

He stopped directly in front of me and I found myself looking at his  black boots over the top of the book that lay open in my lap.  I looked up not knowing what to expect and saw a weathered man likely in his upper forties with a large scraggly looking beard.  He said something to me in German and I just gazed into his face, uncomprehending.  I then noticed the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.  I instinctively reached into my pocket, pulled out some matches, and struck one.  He cupped the flame with his large hands and lit his cigarette.  He said, "Danke" and then headed off once again into the night, leaving me with doubts that the incident had even occurred.    

When the horizon finally began to glow a pale pink, Shane and I headed back to the train station and he bought tickets for the next train to Bratislava which was not to arrive for another few hours.  Exhausted, we made our way back to the benches we'd been evicted from earlier and laid down to sleep.  I was once again awakened by a uniformed man tapping my foot with his baton.  I was so tired I didn't even open my eyes, but pointed in Shane's direction and said loudly, "Shane!  Show him our tickets!" and rolled back over and fell asleep.