Four Poems and An Essay: Writing Journal Assignment 4

No Word

Inglorious, traitorous language

that forgot an appellation

for our state of being

after

our child is dead.

Perhaps it was Order,

crackling violently with disruption,

that coerced language,

just this once,

to submit to knowing

wordlessness.

Fear of the General

Quivering light from candles

in frost-covered trees,

gives shadows to abandoned trenches

of soldiers, right and wronged,

who bury their kind

and gift the inhuman enemy with

cigarettes and holy day carols.

The general, facing

a bloodless, prickling fear,

seeks succor in knowing truces –

no purview of the ordinary –

must cease and give way

to requisite war.

Darwin

He, condemned to a

fatal needle for being born,

saved by a Christian family

and condemned again

for perverting God’s plan by

having seven toes on each paw,

rescued by the woman who

determined that any god who

could create what is

must appreciate the same,

shows devotion by pouncing

on her sleeping form,

demanding fresh water.

Last Words

“No worries,” he said.

“She can’t hit the broad side of…”

And then he was dead.

Eyeshadow and Couches

I would like to know how much longer I will live. No, I’m not sick and yes, my estate (as I laughingly refer to it) is in order. Actually, I had great fun setting up my trust. Those grandkids who now think I’m nice (they’re young) won’t be sad at my passing once they discover that a bachelor’s degree or 80 years of age is required to get the 62 cents I’m leaving them. (Shhh… don’t spoil the surprise.) No, I need to know how long I’ll live for a much grander purpose: there is a shade of eyeshadow available that I like and should I buy 28 or 57 packages? I can guarantee you that the color won’t be there for long, if for no other reason than I like it. Seriously. I mean, they even discontinued my brand of deodorant. Who does that?

It’s not that I don’t like change. I’ve used the same antique trunk as a coffee table my entire adult life because I like it. I could have bought a new one. Truthfully, I looked around the living room the other day and realized that the only things I had bought new were the bookcases. My mom disparagingly called my decorating style “Early American Relative.” That isn’t true. Most of my furniture isn’t from relatives. They were finds. And, dang it, they come with stories. (I like stories.)

So let me tell you about my couch and loveseat. Many years ago, a friend and his co-worker were driving outside of Tonopah when they slid on a patch of ice into the back end of a snowplow, totaling the car. I, being the nice person that I am (no comments from the peanut gallery), drove to Tonopah and picked them up. The coworker spent the return trip going on about how grateful he was for the rescue. Fast forward a decade, and I show up at a house where a guy is selling his couch and loveseat. He looks at me, frowns, and says, “I know you.” I frown back, because I haven’t a clue who he is. “You rescued me in Tonopah!” Guess who now has a new-to-me couch and loveseat? With a story, thank you very much.

Now that I think about it, if my mother didn’t want the stories-in-the-furniture to continue, then why did she give me her own trunk? It is wood, painted olive green, and once held all her possessions when she and my aunt happened to secure two seats on a troop train from Kansas to California during World War II. Her eyes would get a far-off look and she’d smile at the memory, not that I ever got a single detail beyond “they had fun.” Mothers. 

Hey, now that I think about it, I did buy my dining room tables new. They came in boxes. And, yes, there are two, because they are tiny, square, easily moved, and one can serve as a craft/study table while the other serves its original purpose. When I’m done, I butt them together and cover them with one tablecloth. Come on, you really didn’t expect something ordinary, now did you?

Descriptive Writing

THE LIVING ROOM OF ASSUMPTIONS: A DESCRIPTION

You may think you understand my living room in a single glance: an oriental rug, brown fake leather sofa and loveseat, mismatched lamps, an antique trunk doubling as a coffee table, covered in books and notebooks, and all of this overwhelmed by six, tall and brimming full, dark wood bookcases, the space between the shelves and the ceiling made narrower by stacks of oversized books. Rarely does a visitor come within a foot or two of the shelves. They choose instead to look away, perhaps stating, “You like to read, huh.” I count on this. Hidden there, for all to see, is everything.

As required for a library-themed room, there is a milk-colored bust. Only it is not Beethoven or David. It is a phrenology bust from the Victorian science that mapped the oddities of the skull to divine personality traits. Ha. There is a small, pre-Columbian bowl, colored by human blood and stolen from Costa Rica, if the man who lovingly gifted it to my mother was to be believed. A massive, antique brass bowl hovers on top of the book cases. It was my Uncle Vic’s, a charming rogue who only a small child (and a foolish aunt, for a short time) could love, specializing as he did in gambling, racing and baking lemon meringue pies. He died of a heart attack when the IRS was literally knocking at his door, thereby avoiding their displeasure and a possible prison sentence. I believe I was his only mourner.

Disappearing between tall books is a piece of World War I trench art made from a 75mm shell casing with the words ‘Argonne, 1918’ an eagle and stars punched into the reshaped casing. I’m adverse to touching it but like it even less when others do. The pain, boredom and violence of war, along with the time-consuming and painstaking persistence in creating the art is all there, compressed into one tall piece of brass.

A reproduction of a medieval painting shows a monk writing while the Virgin Mary holds Jesus in the heavens. Of more interest to me is bottom of the painting where a small dog yaps at Titivillus, the patron demon of letterers and printers. His job is to collect misspellings and take them to hell to be weighted against the offender’s soul. Next to this is a full helmet, rusted, missing bits of its chain mail, but purported to be from the 1340s. Its story is that at the end of World War II, Germany museums determined to sell half of all their collections in order to rebuild. This is believed to be one of those pieces sold to a US collector, and was purchased for me in an estate sale. The 12^th century reproduction nasal helmet next to it is relatively new, being made a few decades ago for students to try on during school demonstrations.

Inspection of a basket high on a shelf reveals the head and neck of a chocolate Easter bunny, a half-year old but still flaunting a yellow ribbon and scary sugar eyes, in a plastic sandwich bag. It shares space with random pencils, felt-tipped calligraphy pens and a check register holding some cash in case of the zombie apocalypse or, far more likely, an emergency order with Scholastic books. (They still haven’t cashed a check I wrote before the Easter bunny was just a gleam in a pot of melted chocolate.) Honestly, a flashlight, a sword and a spare pair of glasses are the sum of my crisis readiness here although an axe, 12 packages of emergency food and bottled water are stored in another room because no matter where I move, I land in earthquake country.

A jewelry box, surrounded by medicine boxes from the early 20^th century, holds things of my father: his memorial folder, a business card, his Navy ring. A letter. Above that is an honest-to-God, small academy award. It is surprising how no one notices it with its shiny, iconic shape in the midst of the historical pieces. Then there are the books that mask all else, they themselves silently holding hope and history, shame and chivalry. Gothic Art and Beowulf share space with Uppity Women of the Middle Ages and 1066 and All That (a collection of bad student essays on the Norman conquest). An entire section on disease in history has Born on a Rotten Day (a humorous look at the dark side of astrology) stuck in the middle, just to lighten the mood. Works on religion and fairy tales bookend each other. Books on what-to-write, how-to-write, how-to-sell-what-you-write, and why-in-the-hell-are-you-writing sit bravely upon the tomes on death, funerals and famous last words.

Small children are permitted into the house despite the fact that the shelves hold titles such as The Hellfire Club, The Evolution of Desire, and Your Duties as an Estate Trustee, simply because no one looks. Most of the fiction sits in another room, but books signed by authors such as Anne McCaffrey, Robert Heinlein and several lesser-known authors stay in this room. The Heinlein is by far the most valuable, but it is the Medieval Calligraphy book signed by Marc Drogin that always causes me to smile. The poor man had long retired when I hunted him down for a magazine interview, resulting in a frenzied round of book signings for those who had long admired his lettering and scholarship.

Still, some things are visibly not as-all-others. There are no photographs. The TV is small, sits on a seventh bookcase, and no seat has a direct view of the screen. DVDs are stripped of their cases, alphabetized and stored in boxes. The clock can be heard but is only seen from one seat. The room is a work room and wasn’t meant for entertaining, but perhaps this does meet your expectations, after all.

WORDS ON AN AGING CAR

I tell you it was love at first sight. It was twilight on a mild fall day and a group of us had gone out for dinner. There he was, sitting in the parking lot: a black, shiny PT Cruiser, the first one I’d seen. Was he a kit car? I wondered. His build was reminiscent of the 1930s and he was gorgeous. But I didn’t buy one. You see, I’m of the “buy a used car and drive it until it is dead” school, and I had a perfectly good car. In 2007, that car died an untimely death due to sodium poisoning. Sadly, salt had been sucked into the engine on the salt flats (say that three times fast) when the air intake cover broke.

When I was car shopping, a black PT Cruiser was there but I avoided him. He wasn’t sensible for snow country. After depression began creeping in over the other choices, I asked to test drive the PT Cruiser. It wasn’t a commitment. It was just a test drive. I was so far gone in love that I didn’t even notice for the first 45 miles (after I bought him) that he didn’t have cruise control, one of my few requirements.

We are celebrating our ninth anniversary this month. He’s greying now – the cost of commuting in the snow and road salt getting under his clear coat, resulting in a stubble of white bumps. I maintain that they give him character. He was wrecked once (and no, I wasn’t driving). The insurance company wanted to total him but I refused to sign the “do not resuscitate” order. The repairs resulted in a few quirks. He’s squeaky and one door closes oddly, but there was another consequence I didn’t learn for a few years.

I was commuting with my friend, Marsha, and we also drove an elderly lady with dementia into the city to adult day care. Now, Betty was always cold so I kept a blanket in the car for her. And crackers – Betty was usually hungry. One winter commute home, Marsha and I were talking when Betty begins yelling “Cold! Cold! Cold!” I look back to make sure she is wrapped up when I notice the side panel window is precariously tilted out. I stop. We give Betty a few crackers to distract her, and Marsha and I try to get the window back in place, without success (all but one of the valiant screws had been sheered off in the accident). Finally, we use the only tape-like substance on hand. So, there we were, on the side of the freeway, taping the window into place with a mass of band-aids, to the puzzlement of other drivers. We were all cold but Betty was the only one announcing it because Marsha and I were laughing so hard that we could barely stand upright, let alone speak. Yes, I have had some good times in my lovely PT Cruiser* and I sincerely hope we have some good years left.

*I don’t name my cars. I reserve naming protocols for things like the cat’s favorite mouse toy, who’s name is Sally.

If Only I Believed in Hell

This morning I read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to get a Puritan perspective, and thought how horrific it must have been for them to live in such fear and dread of making the slightest misstep. Then, this afternoon, I had the opportunity to think that if “the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them” (Baym 213) that this could be a wonderful thing for some people.

My daughter received a phone call with a girl screaming that a man had grabbed her. Then the man got on the phone and said he had her daughter and if she wanted her back that she had to take all of her money out of her account and wire it to an account to Mexico. She signaled her fiancé, who unsuccessfully attempted to call the friend where her daughter was visiting and then called the police. She drove to the ATM, took out the cash, still talking to the “kidnapper,” and then drove like a bat out of hell to the friend’s house. When she saw her daughter, she just tossed her cellphone to the police. This scam is not uncommon and is known as virtual kidnapping. The local police turned the information over to the FBI, and they will be contacting her.

Tonight, I wish I believed in hell. It would be easier if I knew that this amoral, heartless son-of-a-bitch was going to burn forever for what he put all of us through. Did he ever stop and put himself in the parents’ position? Is he completely psychotic? Does he rationalize his actions by thinking this is okay because no one is physically hurt and that it is just a scam? It didn’t feel scam-like. It felt soul-crushing. Is this why the concept of hell was developed? It almost sounds like telling your children, “You don’t have to worry about that bad man, honey, the bogey man will get him when he least expects it.” Perhaps it is to allow good people to continue functioning without mentally getting lost in the need for some form of retribution.

When my ex-husband was in college, he and three roommates rented a house and promptly let all the grass and trees die. Years later, we rented out our house, paid the water bill and had all of the grass on a sprinkler system. The renters, as you now expect, turned off the sprinkler system and killed everything. They were also making meth. The house and the garage were so covered in the by-product of this endeavor that the sheriff’s department declared it would require a $250,000 hazardous materials clean-up. I remember lying in bed late at night, neither of us sleeping, and my husband saying, “This is my fault. This is my karma, and the law of ten-fold return for killing everything at that rental house when I was in college.” This is what happens when a Catholic gives up Catholicism but still accepts all of the guilt. Honestly, that isn’t very fair since guilt is a great motivator for me as well.

My dad and I had a challenging relationship. He was in World War II and saw horrific action, but came home physically whole with the exception of acquiring jungle rot on his feet that hurt and itched every day. Like many of his generation, he came home looking for the promised brightest of futures. For several years, it appeared as of he found it. Then things started going badly. My oldest sister became very ill, requiring 42 blood transfusions and running such a high fever that she died a few times before coming back to life. My other sister was badly burned in an accident, requiring being salt water floatation until they could do skin grafts. After that, my mom had a series of miscarriages. Dad’s parents died. His favorite brother had a heart attack, and when my dad got to the hospital, there was no sign of him. He searched that hospital until he found his brother, dead and stuffed into a janitor’s closet. He had died in transit, and the small emergency room had been overwhelmed, so they just put him out of the way.

Finally, I was one of three baby girls born in that same hospital on a hot, summer day. All three of us sickened with hours, unable to digest anything. The first died within a few weeks. The second lived until she was 19, never able to process the necessary nutrients from food to the point where she was wheelchair-bound, mentally and physically handicapped. Me? My mom took me to Children’s Hospital immediately. She’d been there enough and knew a sick kid when she saw one. For two and half years, they did tests and surgery, and wanted to start more when she stopped the treatment and took me home. She had studied herbs and vitamins in the interim, and had come up with her own treatment plan. By this point, our house was overrun with kids including his own children, nieces and nephews, and one of the abandoned neighbor kids. My dad took a stand. About me. “Let this one go,” he told my mom. “We have saved all the others. Let this one go.” My mom didn’t agree. She began using an eye-dropper to give me goat’s milk mixed with herbs while dad started using a coffee cup to measure his whiskey.

Dad was a handsome, brilliant, charismatic man – outside of the house. He was a successful business owner, working six days a week, he served on the local school board for nineteen years, and was important in the B.P.O. Elks, Lodge 1625 (odd how I remember that) and the American Legion. For the time period, he was progressive, hiring workers who were smart and hard-working, completely discounting their race, color, and histories. His employees were devoted and adored him for this. One of his brothers was deaf, so dad signed fluently. Customers would come from other states just to do business with him. He was a great father to my sisters for most of their childhoods. I saw occasional signs of all of this, but I never knew that man. For most of my childhood, he was the alcoholic I avoided. I was seven or eight when I discovered the true purpose of slats on the underside of the bedframe: they were there so kids like me could crawl under the bed and then pull themselves up to the bottom of the slats to hide.

So, while this was rather convoluted, it does touch on guilt. When dad was dying, I drove him for radiation treatments five days a week. His feet hurt. I bought him three pairs of slipper-shoes, trying to make him more comfortable. This upset my mom. “What are you doing? Nothing is going to help.” I explained to her that I had set a three-pair limit because I didn’t want to wake up in ten years and ask myself if I couldn’t have bought my dying father a comfortable pair of shoes. Three pairs. That, in my mind, was the magic number. She shook her head, but I knew I just didn’t want to have that guilt hanging over me.

Today, I don’t want to hear that the scam artist had a rough childhood, was deprived of a positive father-figure in his life or the succor of religion. Not today. Today, I just want the FBI to find this asshole and remove him from society. Period. I know it isn’t likely that they will find him. I also know not to expect justice. I was intimately involved in a court case when I was young, and learned that there is no justice, only a mass of often-conflicting laws. I think of Justinian I, the Eastern Roman Emperor, who took all of the Roman laws and directed that they be sorted and rewritten in a logical manner in 529 CE. Can we do this again? It isn’t as if all the law books would have to be re-printed. We could just publish them electronically. It took them four years with ink and parchment, so I’ll give them eight years with computers and internet (and yes, there is a logic there). Of course, this would lessen the need for nearly as many lawyers, so they would never let this happen. I was on a senatorial community panel for the Affordable Care Act. I asked why we couldn’t just have nationalized health care, and the response was that the lawyers absolutely would not permit it. Okay, now that I’ve written this many words, I acknowledge that the best I can hope for is that my daughter and her family puts this behind them in a healthy manner, and that I can educate enough people about this scam that it becomes an ineffective tactic. I’m just going to conclude with my favorite quote, attributed to Flannery O’Connor: “I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

 

Work Cited

Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. Print.