Rebecca and John (F)

Al-Anbar was enough. Helmand was more than enough. And so, Col. John Freeman, retired. Twenty-one years and 146 days. Two lifetimes, maybe three, lived. Survived. But standing in front of his uncle’s farmhouse five miles out of Port Harris on Route 6, what he saw across miles of open pastures and a few scattered homes suggested a possibility, life maybe to be lived again. Or in some fashion, even savored for the first time.

In his third week, after cleaning the house and the barn and prepping the tractor and mower and plows for field work, he was intent on organizing his uncle’s fishing gear. He was breaking down an old Penn reel and carefully laying out the pieces when his father called from town and asked him to mow the meadow down the road about half a mile. The old Tate place, now the Dorn residence.

The meadow was on the sea side of the road. As a boy he ran with the Tate brothers—they were four—across that unfenced space, and there they played bruising games of football and spooked rabbits. Stretched out on their backs at night, they sometimes could fall asleep trying to count stars in the great wash of faraway lights.

And so he hooked up the mower to his uncle’s red Massey Ferguson and cut the seven acres of the north pasture and then drove down the road to the Tate place and took the meadow down to nearly the ground. A week later his father called again.

“John! You cut the meadow?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I forgot to tell you—no, Miss Emily, not until next week! Charlene will call you! I forgot to tell you to cut their yard.”

“The—who are they?”

“The Dorns. I started taking care of their place, the yard, the meadow, last May.”

John waited only a few seconds. His father might put the phone down and walk off to help a customer.

“In May, you were saying.”

“Yep, after the accident killed those boys. That man.”

“Who?”

“Coach Dorn. He was killed in that crash coming back with the baseball team. And two of the boys.”

John picked up a screwdriver. “I remember you told me about that. So, who lives there now?”

“Mrs. Dorn. And the twins. Little girls, two or three—yes, three now I would think. Since you are living out there now. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

That his father asked, well that was something. That was most likely Miss Charlene’s hand at work. Dutifully, on the last day in April, he loaded the lawnmower in the bed of his truck and drove down to the Tate—down to the Dorn place.

The front yard was small and wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to cut, but the back was a good bit larger as it held the septic field. Still the task would be completed in under an hour. The surrounding hayfields marked open spaces with barbed wire and old wooden posts stretched out across the gentle roll of the land for hundreds of acres. From the backyard, he could see the bay and the sea beyond. That was the only shortcoming at his uncle’s place, sited on the wrong side of a rise so the view just revealed the run of pastures and hayfields and the mix of trees that followed creeks winding through the terrain.

There was a well-built swing set in the middle of the yard, and on the back deck was a picnic table and two folding chairs. At the back door was a mat with several children’s shoes, and leaning against the outside of the door frame was a broom.

The second time John went out to Dorn’s it was a bright Saturday morning. He hesitated when he saw the Subaru parked up close to the garage, but he had it in his mind to cut the grass, and so he got out and headed toward the front door. Half-way to the front porch, the door opened and two girls dashed out, both with their hair in ponytails with red ribbons and both wearing pink sneakers, but one with purple laces and the other with orange. They hardly noticed him as they raced to the car.

However, Mrs. Dorn noticed him and with her keys in hand, and leaving the door open, stepped toward him. She tilted her head and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly.

He stopped, and before she could speak, he offered, “I’m John Freeman. I’ll be taking care of the lawn and the meadow. If that’s okay with you, Ma’am.”

“You’re the Marine.”

He hesitated. “I’m Ed Freeman’s son. I’m living in my uncle’s house up the road now.”

She turned back to lock the door. “I’m Rebecca, Rebecca Dorn.” Then she came down to him. Her hand was cool in his. “The girls are Amy and Abby—just to make things harder.” She smiled. “Amy’s in the purple laces this morning.”

“Well, I’ll be done in less than an hour.”

“No problem. We will be shopping and getting some lunch. Thank you, John, for helping us this way.”

“My pleasure, Mrs. Dorn. I’m sorry for your loss.”

She unlocked her car doors. “Rebecca. It’s okay to call me Rebecca. Okay girls, let’s go.”

In May, he made a point of cutting the yard during the workweek. Sometimes he would see the Dorns driving into town on the weekends, and sometimes during the week, he would see them coming back home at the end of the day. When he was in his father’s store, Miss Charlene would ask about the Dorn girls as she called the three of them, and she would add some little piece of information—how Rebecca Dorn was a paralegal for Dickie Cass and how the girls were being taken care of by Cindy Wasserman and how she would see them at Al’s getting ice cream on Saturdays. How Rebecca was 29 and the girls would be four in August, but she couldn’t remember the day.

The first week in June, it rained for three days, a steady, chilly run of indoor days unless there was livestock to take care of. Finally, after the ground had a chance to dry out, he went out to the Dorn home. He left the truck on the side of the road and went up and knocked on the front door. Rebecca opened the door and held it open with her foot while she pulled her hair back in a loose ponytail.

“I’m sorry to be out here on a Saturday, Mrs. Dorn—“

“Rebecca.”

“With the rain, you understand.”

“You don’t have to explain or apologize. I am the one who should apologize for taking up your Saturday morning.”

“No need.  And my schedule is the flexible one.” They both smiled.

“I won’t take long.” He turned away.

“Take all the time you need, John.”

He was a dozen steps away from the porch when she asked, “Do you know someone who can build a fence for us out back?”

“What kind of fence?”

This time she laughed. “Just not barbwire.”

“I could do that for you.”

“Not too tall. And I could pay you.”

“Well, you just pay for materials and I will get it done—four-footer?”

“No, you do too much, that wouldn’t be right.”

He shrugged. “Well then, okay, contact the high school—“ Her eyes widened a bit and her body seemed to stiffen. “No, never mind, I’ll do it. Just let me take care of it.”

“Okay.” She forced a small smile. “Okay, thank you.”

Hot, sunny days came and as June unfolded into a string of hours spent setting posts and noting the red and white clover growing in the meadow, John in some moments would stop working and look out at the bay and think about fishing with his uncle and setting crab traps and how his father would rather be riding a tractor or stocking shelves at the store.

One Thursday, Rebecca came home during her lunch break while John was working out back. She came out on the back porch and shielded her eyes. “Hey, if you want some water, I don’t lock the back door.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Help yourself. I have to get back. Looks great!”

“The posts?” He laughed. “Yes, Ma’am, they are good posts.”

Rebecca laughed. “Well, I think they are great.”

John went back to his work after she gave him a little smirk and closed the door. He thought to stay another hour or two because rain was in the forecast for the next two days, and so after he ate a snack bar that he had in the truck, he came back around to go inside for water.

When he opened the door and stepped in, he saw a jumble of shoes and sandals and flip flops that would be under his foot if he continued. Without much of a thought, he got down on his knees and sorted them out, a pair of sandals—hers—the flip flops that were so small in his hand, a pair of black heels that seemed too dressy for the office. He lined them up pair by pair against the wall.

And last, a pair of men’s work shoes, like he would wear around the barn when no heavy work was to be done. Kneeling, as he picked up the first one, he felt a tear. More tears followed. He set the shoes in the row against the wall, and there he stayed on his knees for three or four minutes, maybe longer.  

John stood up and went over to the sink. He tore off several sheets of paper towels and wiped his eyes and then found the glasses in the cabinet to the right of the sink. He drank two glasses of water as he looked out across the fields to the bay.

The following Saturday, he ran into Rebecca and Amy and Abby at Al’s. While the girls looked over the buckets of ice cream, Rebecca pulled him to one side.

“John. You organized our shoes.”

He glanced over her head, blushed, and then looked at her. “Yes. I’m sorry, Rebecca. I just—“

“No, it was okay. I was just surprised. But I knew it was you, so it was okay.”

“Just, habit, and I just, well, I just did.”

“It’s okay, John. Really. Would you stay, have lunch with us—if you can.”

He could. Then July came and the fence was finished and the grass was green and a spread of wildflowers came up in the meadow along the driveway to Rebecca’s. Saturday lunches, a red maple in the ground now out front, a pan of lasagna that would feed him for a week, a trellis over her mailbox where morning glories flourished, pushing the girls on their swings, and life cadenced so that time neither lingered nor hurried.

In the third week of August, just an hour before the sun would set, John walked down to Rebecca’s. He knew the girls were in Marshall with their father’s mother, and he wanted to ask Rebecca to go to dinner with him in the city. 

He knew she would say, “Like on a date?” and laugh. He would be serious with her and answer, “Yes, like on a date.” Just a few strides from the drive, he looked across the meadow, and about 100 feet out in the clover and grass, there was Rebecca, facing the sea.

She was wearing a simple blue dress and her legs were out behind her, not as if she had fallen but had shifted her weight onto one hip and braced herself with one arm. He thought to call to her, but something in the way she rested her head on her shoulder, made him think better of it.

John walked out and stood behind her, and without saying a word, she rose and sighed ever so quietly. He stepped forward and put his right arm around her so it covered the upper plane of her chest, and she let out a little sob and he could feel her weight shift back against him. And in that way, for several minutes, they stood, watching the bay deepen in color as the sun was sinking behind them.

“Will you spend the night with me?”

“Yes” he answered.

“I don’t mean—“

“I know what you mean. It’s okay.”

Then and there, Rebecca and John, silent and still, together as their shadows lengthened, the night to come as it may.  Ladson 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Matter of Honor (F)

I have known Mr. Arnaud Etwal who was from Dominica since I was a boy of 4.  On Sundays, occasionally, my grandmother would take me down to the municipal pier where Mr. Arnaud sometimes would be entertaining “Those People” as my grandmother called Yankees. His blue crab, always called Winnie after his mother—sometimes a female, sometimes a male as I later learned--lassoed by a four-foot leather thong, would twirl and scuttle and then jab with its claws at a piece of chicken or fish on the end of a sharpened stick, and the tourists would take pictures and put dollar bills in Mr. Arnaud’s upturned straw fedora.

 

I was very impressed that my father knew Mr. Arnaud well—the first time I saw the two of them together was on my grandfather’s boat. As it turned out, Mr. Arnaud when he was 16 began working as a deckhand for my grandfather who was running a fishing charter out of Pass-a-Grill. He would only go down to the pier to make a little extra cash when the boat was not going offshore. My grandfather’s boat was Lucky Strikes, which his clients believed a clever turn of phrase that would bode well for the fishing and we in the family knew he began to think of as a thumbing of his nose at the surgeon general.

 

Mr. Arnaud could fix everything on the boat. He fixed the engines, he fixed the radio, he fixed the reels, he fixed the drinks, he fixed the breakfasts and he fixed the lunches, and I was told many times that Mr. Arnaud would never lose a fish once the leader was in his gloved hands.

 

That Mr. Arnaud now lives free of charge above my office where I run my financial advisory service astonishes most people who know the story. 

 

When I was 11, and Mr. Arnaud 27, my grandfather cut his hand on an oyster shell. The gash was deep and jagged, and later he told how he kept it in seawater for nearly ten minutes since it was a bad one, but the wound did not heal and a week later, he was coughing up blood. In this way, coincidentally, he found out about his cancer.

 

The month was March and by August everyone pretty much believed my grandfather would not see the holiday season. By September, even my grandfather admitted to me, “Sonny, I’m feeling a might bit poorly”, and he decided to have an attorney draw up a will. His house and all his belongings, he left to my grandmother and his boat and all the fishing gear, he left to Mr. Arnaud. 

 

My father and his two brothers were not happy.

 

My grandfather also allowed Mr. Arnaud to start sleeping on the boat which was seen as a sign that my grandfather was nearing the end. This decision further infuriated my father, and for the first time that I can remember, he began to refer to Mr. Arnaud as “grave-robbing darkie trash”. My mother would not allow any other epithet to be spoken in her house, but when my father and his brothers and I were out in the yard picking crabs or peeling shrimp, I would hear the kind of words that were I to have spoken them--well they would have led to an extra-large helping of Ivory soap being adminstered by my mother’s hand.

 

My father practiced locally as a heart surgeon and was on staff out at Bay Pines, the V.A. hospital. My mother reminded me often that he was a serious man who had serious work to do and that I should not distract him with frivolous matters. Of course, now I am not sure how a boy would make the distinction between serious and frivolous at all times, but in truth my father would take me fishing out of Big Bayou into the bay when he could and once or twice a week would find the time to play catch with me in the side yard. My uncles ran a painting business of a sort, and they would come by at odd times during the day in the summer and would also play catch with me and sometimes fetch with our yellow lab, Betsy.

 

The day after my 12th birthday, my grandfather died. My mother told me by telling me he had passed, which is the same word my grandmother used. My father just said that his father was dead and that he was better off because he was only being treated to endure the pain and could not have been saved. Two days later, on October 14th, 1971, my grandfather was buried at 10:00 in the morning. After the funeral ended and all the guests left the cemetery, my father and his brothers got in my dad’s green Chevy Monte Carlo and drove off.

 

The rest I know from newspaper clippings and what my mother and grandmother told me. I never spoke to my uncles after that afternoon. According to my mother they went up to North Dakota or Wyoming or someplace like that. My father and his brothers drove out to where my grandfather’s boat was docked, and once there, they shucked off their jackets and unknotted their ties and tossed them on the hood of the car.

 

Mr. Arnaud was seated on the bench on the port side and was splicing lines when the three men approached. According to another boat skipper who was resetting his dock lines, my father stepped onto the boat and raised my Louisville Slugger and shouted at Mr. Arnaud that he was a “goddamn grave robber”, but the swing of the bat just glanced off of Mr. Arnaud’s shoulder and Mr. Arnaud lunged up from the bench and shoved a marlinspike into my father’s throat. Somehow, and this according to my uncles’ accounts, my father raised the bat again, and Mr. Arnaud stabbed my father in the neck a second time. And then my father slumped against one of the fishing chairs and fell to the deck and bled to death right there.

 

My uncles never stepped onto the boat. The skipper from Sea-Deuced tried to help Mr. Arnaud stop the bleeding, but they couldn’t manage the wounds. The coroner and the sheriff both agreed that it was self-defense because the local D.A., according to a conversation my mother said she had with him, told them that when my father raised the bat a second time Mr. Arnaud clearly had to protect himself. 

 

My mother said it was mostly that local officials didn’t want the story to linger into high tourist season. Besides, she said, even my uncles confirmed the events that Captain Doug said he witnessed that afternoon and, after all, Mr. Arnaud did try to save my father.

 

So now Mr. Arnaud, who lost the boat when my grandfather’s customers either died or stopped returning, works three or four days a week on a charter boat where half the passengers vomit on the deck and think chum is disgusting. Mr. Arnaud says that bobbing about over a reef is not true fishing, but he likes being on the Gulf. He lives upstairs over my office because my grandfather loved him like a son and intended for Mr. Arnaud a roof over his head and a livelihood. 

 

In this way, as best I can, I honor my grandfather’s wishes. Ladson 2014

 

 

 

Souri and ShAhin (F)

 On a cold night, on the 59^th day of his journey, ShAhin awoke five hours before the rising of the sun. The moon was merely a last crescent of light before it would begin its cycle anew, and he sat patiently, awaiting the sun to light his way.

However, a chill came over him and he pulled his blanket closer about his body. Sleep whispered his name again. Hours passed, in quiet.

Suddenly ShAhin opened his eyes, the sun now up and beginning to warm his face. He cried out—not words, but more an exhalation of pain. He lifted his hand and squinted into the sun. What he saw, or what he thought he saw, could not be so. He pulled himself up between the two rocks that sheltered him that night.

He looked again. Dozens, no hundreds of beech trees were snapped off perhaps no more than six feet above the ground. More than hundreds. The forest was destroyed. ShAhin wept. All that he had known as a young man and as an adult became dead to him. He steadied himself between the two rocks. And in his weeping, he fell to his knees.

He cried out, “I have nothing. I have nothing in this world.” And so he continued throughout the day until one hour before sundown. At last, exhausted in his sorrow, he leaned back against one great stone.

Within a few moments, no longer, ShAhin fell back asleep. Deep into the night, in the final dreams of this sleep, he saw himself standing before Souri and her mother in their house, and a shyness came over him as if he stood naked before the women. Souri took note of his discomfort and came to him, speaking soothing words.

“You may be at peace, ShAhin, all is well.” But he could not seem to find the words to answer her. She caressed his cheek with her fingertips. “All is well.”  His cheeks flushed, and she giggled and leaned up on her toes so that she could ever so sweetly kiss him on the lips. “All will be well.” The scent of Ghamsar rosewater stayed with him even as he opened his eyes to begin the new day.

When ShAhin completed his morning obligations, he looked back down the road he had been traveling. He could see a man, who appeared to be quite old, beckoning to him. Without any apprehension, ShAhin trotted down the gentle slope and soon was standing before the stranger.

“ShAhin, quick now, listen. I am the King’s bookmaker on the way back to the palace, but a lady has told me that you, not the King, should be the keeper of this book.”

ShAhin stepped back and studied the old man. “I cannot remember that we have met, Ancient One.”

“Be quick, now, again I tell you. Take this book. I must be away.” The old hands thrust the slender volume toward ShAhin.

ShAhin fumbled the book in his hands even as the bookmaker turned and was striding briskly off to the north. In his hands, the book seemed weighty, but its size was not great like a book of maps. When ShAhin opened to the first page, he saw a hand-painted rose so artfully rendered that he was sure the breath he took in also took in the scent of that flower.

He closed the book and then carefully opened it again nearly half-way into the volume. There before his eyes was a most beautiful image, a vision of Lake Urmia, the waters of his childhood, the shores where he and his grandfather walked together. Gently, ShAhin turned the page. The language was not the language of his fathers.

Perplexed, ShAhin closed the book and again opened it a little further into the pages. And again the lake picture, but this time with hundreds of flamingoes like the ones he had chased as a boy, making them rise up in great clouds of pink and spiral off into the blue sky.

Lake Urmia, those waters that were once his whole world, lay to the south. He closed the book and added it to the sack of his few possessions. So on the 60^th day, ShAhin began his walk back into the time and place where he came from, the birthplace of his spirit.

At the end of the day, he found a small cave, and there ShAhin could take shelter for the night.  During the night a great wind came up and so he spent the 61st day of his travels in that place where by the light of a small fire he could examine the royal book.

He opened the book a dozen pages or so in and to his surprise, once again, the panorama of the lake with its flamingoes. He turned the page and again he could not read the words. ShAhin closed the book and opened to a page nearly at the end of the book. The lake spread out before his eyes, the flamingoes rising in their great flock.

Quickly he closed the book. Again his finger found a place to open. Again the flamingoes taking flight over the water. Closed. Opened. Closed. Opened. Always the same. At every place he opened to, the birds in flight, even more beautiful than the time before.  Ladson 2014

ShAhin slept that night with the book on his chest in his hands. The next morning—Day 62—he awoke and took the book with him and out into the light of the new dawn. He looked skyward and then gently turned open the pages.

There on the shore of the lake stood Souri and her mother. Both women smiled, and the mother raised one hand in greeting. Souri had her arms out toward him. He leaned in closer to the page and cocked his head.

ShAhin heard a distant sound of waves lapping at the shore, and then her soft voice, “All will be well.”  Ladson 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That Girl, Evelyn Gunderson (F)

Evie began building the birdhomes—that is what she called them—when she was five. Her grandfather taught her how to use the tools in the shed where he built furniture for private collectors. Evie, too, sold most of her work, but some of the one-of-a-kind creations ended up mounted on the walls of her yellow cottage sitting at the end of an unpaved lane that rose and fell through a meadow of blue Delphinium.

Her black hair is what at the beginning transfixed me because she took it in hand and brought it up and wound it round her neck and then let it hang down her chest to her waist like a scarf.

My first time out to her place Evie was waiting on her front porch as I pulled my six-year-old Pathfinder to a stop. As I got out of the car, after she did that hair thing, she reached behind her and took something from a rocking chair, which her grandfather built the day she was born, and held out a birdhouse about six inches square or thereabouts. The house was painted yellow with a green tin roof that had a chimney perched at the center of the ridge line.

“Uh, Miss Gunderson? Are you Miss Evelyn Gunderson?”

“You want to give her this one.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, I thought I might look at what you have. Are the ones on the tree for sale?”

She held it out for me to take. “Your sister will like this one.”

“Well, she might.  But…do you know my sister, Miss Gunderson?”

“She likes yellow. I like yellow too.”

“Well, true enough.  May I look at the others?”  I now was at the bottom of the porch steps.

“Twenty dollars.” Her brown eyes did not blink.

“Uh, okay.” I walked up the steps and held the bill out to her. She took the twenty with one hand and folded it neatly and slipped it into the pocket of her purple smock. I held out both hands for the birdhouse and when she gave it to me I gasped out loud. The structure was so light that it was if she had handed me nearly nothing.

“Wow, is this thing a real birdhouse for outside?”

“The tin roof will last forever.”

“I still want to look around, to see what else you have.”

“I am going to my workshop now.”

I didn’t know whether to follow her or go into the home or just take the yellow birdhouse and go away. I mumbled a “thank you” in her direction as she disappeared around the corner of the porch. Carrying—somehow that is not quite the right word—no, the birdhouse came with me as I went to the car and set it on the passenger seat. I would be back home in less than an hour.

Thinking I might find an interesting birdhouse for my mother’s baby sister down in Beaufort, I drove out to Evie’s a few weeks later. No rain had fallen and as I slowly drove down the lane, a great cloud of dust followed me along. I sort of knew somehow that she would be waiting, and sure enough there she was on the porch with a small birdhouse in each hand.

This time, I approached the steps with confidence. “Now, Miss Gunderson, I would like to take a look at some of the others if you would not mind.”

“Your aunt will like these very much.”

“But, Miss Gunderson, I want to see your other birdhouses.  And what about the ones on the tree?” I sort of gestured over my shoulder.

“Twenty dollars.”

“Miss Gunderson, you have a funny way of doing business. Did I say anything about my aunt?”  I waited.

So did she, blue eyes unblinking, and so I went up the steps and exchanged the money with her for the two houses, both painted green, with unpainted tin roofs.

“To your workshop?” No, of course, she did not answer, and with just a nod in Evie’s direction, I took my two houses for my aunt, and left without saying another word.

Over the course of the next eight months roughly, I drove out to that cottage and made my purchases—whatever she handed me, I bought.  Always, she was waiting and always the price was the same, twenty dollars. 

The seventh visit, however, was different.  Evie was not waiting on me.  I will admit I was more than surprised when I saw the empty porch, and I even left the car door open as I hurried around the house.

About 30 feet or so from the back of the cottage was Evie’s workshop—I could see her bending over a table through the open door. As I got to the door, she turned around and nodded to a large rocking chair. That was when she began to tell me some things.

Thus began my visits out to Evie’s two or three times a month. She was never on the front porch again. Sometimes I was out there just as the sun was coming up.  Sometimes in the mid-afternoon and sometimes in the early evening. Evie was always in the workshop.

When I wanted to buy a birdhome—now I use that word—she would say, “Go to the house and know which one you need”.  Know which one, that is how she would phrase it.

In October, late in the afternoons, we began walking together or sitting on a bench in front of the workshop. Sometimes she would bring her hair over the top of her head as she bent at her waist and then she would reach down with her fingers and lightly tousle her hair, working her way from the ends of her hair to nearly her scalp.

Suddenly she would gather the hair in her hands and bring it back over her head and let fall the whole of it unsettled down her back. And she gently would shake her head and laugh out loud as if she were watching herself.

I do remember the first time back in May how I found the lane to her home about half a mile below Mepkin as I was told I would by the clerk at the Stop-n-Shop just beyond the river.  “Oh yep,” she said, “Round here we all know that Gunderson place. That girl is some piece of work, just like her momma’s daddy.”

No mailbox was set by the side of the road, her mail instead placed in a birdhouse with a hinged roof attached to an old white oak just four or five feet back from the county road.  Another 15 boxes of various sizes were arranged up the trunk of the same tree.

The smallest of the houses would sit in my hand and had an opening the size of a quarter. The largest measured it seemed some three feet across and a foot deep. A porch ran the length of the front of that one, and flower boxes with white lilies growing were set under the windows.

The last time I went out there was December 21^st in 2006. I am sure of that date. The For Sale sign was mounted on 2 4x4s and advertised home, workshop, barn, pond and 11 acres. I drove a little faster to Evie’s cottage, and when I got out of the car I could nearly reach out and grab hold of the silence. The house was locked, of course, but through a window I could see that it was empty. I went around to the workshop, also locked, and it too was empty. 

When I checked the barn, there was a ladder, which I took and tied down to the top of my Pathfinder.  Why?  Because there were 16 birdhomes still out on that oak.

You want to see them? Come on by, and yep, maybe I will sell you one. Twenty dollars.  Ladson 2014

 

The Impressionist (F)

A book of human and animal skulls, the only book on Arlene’s coffee table, piqued my interest.

The first time we were together outside the workplace was with the Sunday women’s section editor having a late dinner at a cozy little bistro a block off Market Street. Most of the conversation went back and forth on topics like pot holders—Arlene makes her own—and salads—of those, she is a connoisseur. She was not aloof, but her part in the conversation never ventured beyond the present, and she didn’t ask any personal questions of me.

That I would ever be sitting in her apartment, a second floor walk-up at the corner of Alexander and Chapel, seemed at best unlikely. But I had lunch at Tangiers with my niece, and on our way out the door we stepped right into the path of Arlene. After hurried introductions and a bit of idle chat, I blurted out another invitation to dinner. Just the two of us.

Arlene, who is 28, is the receptionist from one to nine at the newspaper building where I work. In her first two weeks on the job, a number of the single male reporters, the married city editor, and the state editor asked her out. I of course was aware of the talk of the new hire, a brunette and slender and soft-spoken, and everyone mentioned at least once how she always keeps her eyes fixed on whomever is speaking to her. 

The best way to describe the effect, while somewhat out of fashion to say so, is to say they were smitten. While I was curious when I on impulse asked her to meet with the women’s editor and me at Rudy’s for a late supper, my intentions were without design. And, she did accept.

My niece’s first observation, after we had walked for a block back toward her apartment, came without prompting. “She’s not your type.” When I shrugged my shoulders, she followed with “She seems nice, probably she’s nice.” The phrase my type is an interesting attempt to categorize. To be honest, my niece has the mistaken impression I am still the younger version of a self who covered the first Gulf war and who lived for two years in Buenos Aires. 

But, life moves on, doesn’t it?

I stood when Arlene came back into the living room. She no longer wore a pink satin robe, but instead she was in what I later learned to be a bandage dress of a shade much more sophisticated than the word green suggests.  Her hair that had been down below her shoulders was now pulled up and back into a loose bun so that her eyes became even more compelling to look at.

“Interesting book, the skulls,” I observed.

Her eyes met mine. “Oh, yes. I use the illustrations for my sketching exercises.”

“You draw? You paint?”

“I did. I do. I just started drawing again. Just a little.”

“Again, you said. When, before?”

“Oh, I studied in Paris and Barcelona. I stopped when I saw Picasso’s student work at the Museu Picasso. When I saw his pencil sketches, I lost my nerve.”

“When was that?”

“Last year. I came here because my sister and brother-in-law thought I would like living here.”

“And do you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I hesitated. “Okay. Well, then, shall we go to dinner?”

“That would be lovely.”  Ladson 2013

Rain (F)

The rain like a gray veil unfolded across the bay and worked itself toward the city, and Dalaja wrapped the pillau of her saree a little tighter about her shoulders in anticipation of the cool air that would follow the rain in from the sea. Standing in the doorway of her father’s tea shop, she breathed in the air rich with the mud exposed by the low tide. Still, after seven years, the smell was not the smell of home, not the smell of her childhood by the ocean. Her English, still cadenced by the rhythm of her home, would be enough to remind everyone who lived in the city that she was hardly a local girl. 

Even the tourists who somehow managed to find the shop several streets over from the central market area thought her pronunciations more delightful than the Southern voices they thought they yearned to hear when they came from the towns and cities of the North. Of course this observation only bolstered Dalaja’s father when he explained to his wife and children what a brilliant stroke his decision was to upend his family’s tranquility and bring them to this foreign port. In Mumbai we were one of many he would exclaim, but in America we are exotics.

True enough, but for Dalaja her otherness oppressed her. Without an adult escort, she endured the first moment of entering a foreign classroom filled by other 12-year-olds, carrying her admission pass like a butterfly about to suddenly flutter away at her slightest misstep. As she walked the length of the classroom to the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, the other students were silent, but she could feel them studying her like some kind of fruit in the market that they had never seen before. While the teacher sounded out her name for the class, Dalaja glanced at the map above the chalkboard—the United States, with a large blue star located over the city that would be her new home. Now she would wear her otherness as another skin, on the playground, in ballet class, at the shore. 

The family would drive out to the beach where the lighthouse stood, and when Dalaja braced herself and faced the sea, she would be most grateful for those days when a southern wind brought warm and humid air. Deeply she would breathe in and let the heavy air fill up her lungs. Of course she soon was more than old enough to go out to the beach without her family—and there were friends, true friends, that would often go with her or invite her to go along with them—but, she most treasured those outings when she would walk the sand alone, sometimes drifting down to the edge of the water to let the last thin push of water sweep against her toes.

Dalaja leaned against the door frame and wrapped her arms around herself.  A fine, wet air, carried in ahead of the main sheets of rain falling, touched her arms and forehead. Even though the calendar marked the end of May, she shivered in the damp air. A day of rain was forecast, to be followed by another the weatherman had said. Like the rainy season of her youth. And now, so far from her home and after so much of her life spent in what would always be a land of strangers in her heart, she blinked several times to clear her eyes.

“Excuse me, Miss.  Are y’all open?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, we are open, sir.”

The stranger smiled. “You really are from India?”

“Yes, sir. I am from India.” Dalaja turned around and stepped away from the rain.  Ladson 2014

Matins (F)

Locals would call it the long way round when Laura Esposito goes into town to begin the day’s work. She rises at 1:00, and after a warm slow shower, she dresses, drinks two cups of Folgers coffee, black, and eats a thick slice of ham set between two slices of yesterday’s bread. She puts down food and water for the cats, and grabbing her purse and phone, locks the front door behind her.

Leaving her subdivision she turns right rather than left so that her route takes her to Railroad Avenue. By turning right at that intersection where the new warehouses now stand, Laura drives along a two-lane road that parallels the central tracks that run west from the port and through a three-mile stretch of pine forest with 40 and 60-foot trees still unlogged. During the afternoon drive home, the flickering sunlight and shadows often make her drowsy and so she sings out loud with the radio to keep herself awake.

Reaching the end of Railroad Avenue, Laura once more turns right instead of left and crosses the tracks, travels past a scattering of shacks long since abandoned, and then she comes to a road that forks back towards town but passes first through the middle of the 40-acre Morning Glory farm, three small barns and feeders and cows on the left; the family home, a caretaker’s cottage, a larger barn with a newly painted tin roof, and horses on the right. 

The shop—which is what she calls the bakery as did her parents—sits behind the newly remodeled Garrison Realty building on Lake Street. The two businesses share a rear wall, and so Laura must park around on the side opposite from 3^rd Avenue next to a 60-year-old magnolia. When she closes the service door and enters the shop, the store clock reads 2:05.

Louie and Peter are setting out the dough in buckets they have prepared for her during the night, and Laura with a quick nod to the men, takes her white apron from the back of her stool—she remembers afternoons, her grandfather sitting on that stool, she in his lap as he firmly dimpled the dough before refolding it before the last rest period.

With a deft shake of her hand, she scatters a nearly solid layer of flour across the bread table, and then lets the first lump of sticky dough roll out of its bucket onto the hard surface. Quickly she massages it into a 10 x 4 rectangular shape, but not too perfectly so that the rustic style of the ciabatta will be maintained. She moves the loaf to the rack behind her, and Louie covers the dough again.

Again, a dusting of flour, and a second lump eased out onto the table. Now her hands are moving with a more certain intent and the second loaf is loaded. The third and fourth and fifth loaves are done rhythmically, and,  settled into the task at hand, Laura works through the buckets of dough. After resting two hours the 40 loaves will be ready for the oven that has been heating.

Peter rolls the rack over to the oven he has been tending, and at 6:00 ten loaves are placed in a semicircle around the burning wood in the 450 degree oven. He rotates the loaves every 10 minutes, sprinkling the tops and sides with water so that the crust thickens. The first batch comes out of the oven at 6:25 and the loaves are loaded onto the cooling racks. 

In this fashion, then, is the daily bread of Laura’s father and his father’s father and his father’s father made. Ladson 2014

MyTube

My ten-year-old neighbor’s mouth agape, eyes widened, really said it all. “You have a Youtube channel?”

“Well, no, not really. Just making videos for my parents.”

She, eye roll.

“So, well, yes, I guess I do.” Cue weak chuckle.

Should I feel chastened, have I violated societal norms, are there going to be repercussions? Will I be…cancelled?

Hey, it’s not like I haven’t made a splash or two in the social media lagoon. I’ve had a blog—have had multiple blogs—for years. And years.

Anonymous: You have a blog?

Sigh.

The videos are just walks around the yard so my parents can keep up with what’s going on out back. They use to sit out on the patio—in matching rocking chairs no less—and I would show them what was growing, or not.

A friend of mine suggested I post the videos on Facebook. Really, are folks that desperate for diversion? I guess there could be some entertainment value as I crab about, even backwards at times, trying to avoid catching the corners of raised beds or small plants.

Could go live.

Cheech27397: Bet he trips over the new hydrangea.

Okay, could be, uh, fun. Sort of. Not exactly Skylla and Kharybdis out there.

Another friend proposed I do something more, and this is his word, poetic.

Poetic? Like declaim Ogden Nash’s “The Germ” as the camera pans the yard?

Maybe drag the old lectern out to the patio and give a soul-rocking reading of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”. I’m sure the mockingbirds would be unmoved. And the bees much too busy to be swayed.

Perhaps something a bit more extempore. A niece and some of her offspring have floated the notion of Observations with Uncle Scott. Might squelch the idea—for the good of the public—do we still consider the public good?

Former student: Good one, Mr. K.

As for the verite of these most minor of cinematic endeavors, all are shot before breakfast and after only a few phrases mumbled to my dog. Ultrahyper-keeping-it-super-real.

Might set up a Patreon account. First ever where the artiste is paid to just stop now.

https://www.youtube.com/user/readman53/videos?view_as=subscriber