Charli Mills

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments
IMG_0136
A neighborhood in northwest Phoenix (Glendale) Arizona, from the slopes of Thunderbird Mountain.

I noticed the neighbor girl at the same moment Danny, another neighbor, did. She was huddled on a big rock in her front yard with her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Danny and I looked at one another, and moved in from opposite sides of the street.

I’ll call the girl Kim. Though at 23, she’s more woman than girl, at least physically. She has milky white skin, pale blue eyes, and a mass of thick chestnut hair that falls in natural ringlets about her shoulders. She is what today we call special needs, and her manner slides on a scale between sweet and child-like on one end and anxious and fearful on the other.

I’ve known Kim and her parents, Karen and Joe,  since my husband Tom and I moved in down the street on New Year’s Eve three years ago. When we emerged from unpacking to go in search of dinner, theirs was the first house we noted; music was blaring, a bonfire was crackling, and revelers were awaiting the countdown to midnight. The following year we joined the party, in what we learned was an annual event Karen and Joe hosted in the neighborhood.

Last autumn Joe was in a freak motorcycle accident around the corner from home. He was driving 30 mph when he lost control of the Harley. He skidded and crashed, fracturing his skull and severing his spine. Karen was forced to get a job, something she had never done since her daughter developed a brain aneurysm at the age of 11 months. Now, as Kim will tell you each time you chat with her, she has to take care of her dad while her mother is at work. She has to take care of her dad while her mother is at work. She has to take care of her dad while her mother is at work.

The day I found her on the rock, I think the stress of these changes had simply overwhelmed her.

This episode made me think, as I often do these days, of neighbors and communities. We’ve been pulled deeper into this neighborhood since we landed here three years ago, intending to rent for a while, to recover from our own personal housing disaster and somehow thrive without taking root. But the threads of that illusion spun themselves out even before yesterday evening. They fly like tattered flags over our house, in face of the kindness of our neighbors and the stories we have come to know about them.

Take Dave and Cristine across the street. We hardly talked to them at all before this last Christmas, except to chat briefly on Halloween as we stood outside our houses surveying the number of trick-or-treaters. Then Cristine came bearing her annual gift of homemade Yuletide tamales. When we locked ourselves out of our house on a chilly night three weeks ago (without even a cell phone), Dave and Cristine stepped up like old buddies. They plied us with beers, found a locksmith, and urged us to wait it out in comfort at their house.

We know so many stories now about our formerly anonymous neighbors: smart, efficient Jennifer next door who lost her father this last year; Lewis the communications consultant on our east side whose brother died of a drug overdose long ago, and who leaves weekly shopping bags bursting with oranges on our doorstep every February; German Ilse down the street who photographs dogs and lost both her mother and her beloved black Lab at Christmastime; Lewis’s wife Liz who is crazy about crafts and scrapbooking and runs an annual holiday cookie exchange; Sharon, whose 22-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident the year before we moved in; and Karen, Kim’s mom, who was about to divorce her husband Joe at the time of his accident and now cares for him as he recovers and adjusts to life without the use of his legs.

Someday, if we ever want to own a house again, Tom and I will have to move from here. But my neighbors are going to make it very difficult to pack up and leave. I have never lived in a neighborhood so caring and embracing. A neighborhood where a dozen people will show up at your door with complete dinners should you experience some tragedy, as happened when Joe had the accident. And yet, it is just the kind of neighborhood I used to disdain. Just another safe and boring suburban enclave cut out of the desert, I thought, one house barely distinguishable from another, manicured lawns, cars duly backing out of garages each morning and returning each evening. But now, I’ve come to see the community behind the houses. And I regret that my days here are likely numbered.

Back to Kim. The night she broke down, I walked with her up and down the street. The other neighbor, Danny, and my husband Tom came to check every ten minutes and offer advice. Mostly they stood there, impotent, as I was. Each time Kim and I stopped walking, the tears and shudders would start again. Dark fell. Kim texted her mother. She had forgotten that this one night Karen was out for a brief respite: a couple of hours with a friend at a Mexican restaurant. Kim oscillated between anger and weeping. At last, her father, who had been knocked out on meds all afternoon, woke to find a ruckus in his carport. He bumped over the threshold in his wheelchair, rolled down a ramp they’d installed after the accident, and stopped before Kim. “Come on in Kimmy,” he said weakly. “Everything’s going to be all right.” Danny, Tom and I chimed in, imploring Kim to go inside and watch a favorite television program. She finally followed her father into the house, her shoulders sagging. She did not look back as she punched the garage door button.

A few days later I walked down the street again to the mailboxes. Kim was ambling around outside her house at the end of the block. “Hi Jeanne!” she called.

“Hi Kim,” I said. “Everything’s okay now, huh. Did you watch your shows the other night?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling at me. “Thank you for helping me. I really appreciate it.”

What Kim didn’t realize was that somehow she had given much more to me than I had given to her. She had pulled me one step further into community.

This post is a response to the latest flash fiction challenge from Carrot Ranch: January 27, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about how a community reaches out. Who, or what cause, is touched by a community “spoke”? Do you think communities can impact change and move a “wheel”? Why or why not? Explore the idea of a community hub in a flash fiction.

While Charli’s challenge prompted the above thoughts, a different thread was also going through my mind after reading accounts of the settlers on the American plains in the 1870s. The flash that follows owes its inspiration to that bit of history. And I think it speaks to the crux of what community is.

images

A Community of Two

Mrs. James McClure. Lucy McClure. Is that who I am? I hardly know. Look at me! Living in a dirt house. My only music the godforsaken wind. The space outside my door maddening in its infinitude. I wish I’d never heard of Kansas! But they say there’s another woman on these plains. I’ve walked hours to see if it’s true. And Lord above, it is! We look at each other across the mean, trodden yard. We daren’t breathe. Then we break. Fall into each others’ arms. Laughter and sobs leap from our throats. Oh, neighbor, how sweet the name!

 

 

 

Fairy Tales: Magic All Around

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 10 Comments

rosered_rackham1

Magic. Fairy tales. This be the prompt the mistress Mills has set for us this week:

January 13, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) begin a story with, “Once upon a time…” Where you take the fairy tale is entirely up to you. Your character can break the traditional mold, or your ending can be less than happy. Elements of fairy tales include magic, predicaments, villains, heroes, fairy-folk and kingdoms. How can you turn these elements upside down or use them in a realistic setting? Write your own fairy tale.

I have grappled with this challenge for days. Is it because I have lost what little faith I ever had in magic? That I’ve grown too removed from the stories upon which I cut my literary teeth and early artistic aesthetic? That I disdain the silly young girl I was, a creature who unconsciously modeled herself on all those lovely but passive heroines swooning and fainting and waiting for some prince to save them from remote towers, thorny enclaves, and glass caskets?

Not that I didn’t devour fairy tales. Not that my heart does not quiver still when I remember the gorgeous red-leather-bound volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that my sister Peggy “borrowed” from our Catholic school library. It was a book so far removed from the flimsy paper Scholastic books we ordered from school, and the ordinary juvenile mass market fare we got from the local library, that even my ignorant young mind intuited its quality. The Romantic illustrations alone sent me into ecstatic reveries that I did not yet know signaled an awakening to aesthetic appreciation.

And come to think of it, not all the heroines were silly little creatures. Among my favorite stories were “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” who defied their father’s authority and snuck out of the castle night after night to dance until dawn with rather dubious companions. And Snow White and Rose Red, who traipsed all over the dark forest, invited a bear into their home, and had numerous dangerous encounters with a malicious dwarf.

Alas, as we all do, I grew up. I lost my religion, replacing it with skepticism. I had my knocks and disillusionment. But I embraced other delights too: classic literature, philosophy, art, travel, science, humanism. And I found solace and delight in the natural world. I found wonder and awe. At times I mourned the loss of magic. At others I felt its power swell all around me in the things I had yet to discover.

And yet, fairy tales are not incompatible with an adult world view. They are not just simple stories for children. They are our connection to both a collective past and worlds erased by time. They provide a way of making sense of the world, not only for children but upon multiple readings over many years for adults too. Fairy tales are rich with examples of values passed on through generations. They are repositories of charming details and quaint customs. The creatures of fairy tales are tied to the ancient natural world. And like all stories, they perform the greatest magic trick of all: granting immortality to voices from the distant and near past. Carl Sagan put it this way:

Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

So. I find I want to think more about fairy tales. I want to reread them. And though I don’t think I’ve conjured up a true fairy tale, I did pick up the gauntlet Charli threw down. Here is my fairy tale flash.

Magic All Around

Once upon a time there was a maiden who scorned magic. A wise teacher called Skeptic had set her straight about the world. One evening Skeptic found the maiden on a cliff overlooking a vast canyon. Condors wheeled against cliffs glowing with a million sunsets. Below a turquoise river coursed its cursive script in an ancient letter to the sky.

The maiden wept.

“Why so sad?” the Skeptic asked.

“I want for the magic I once knew,” she replied.

Silence sang. The sun sank aflame. Stars slowly spangled the indigo sky.

“Be this not magic enough?” the Skeptic whispered.

Flash Fiction: Rebellion

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 13 Comments

images-2

Rebellion: 1) opposition to one in authority or dominance; 2) open, armed, and usually unsuccessful defiance of or resistance to an established government

I am inspired to write my first blog of the year by the January 6 flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch, which references, as a starting point, the occupation by an armed group in Oregon of a federal wildlife preserve, in protest over the government’s imprisonment of two local ranchers.

To provide perspective on this event, Charli gives us both a personal history of the kind of people who make their living off the land—and who often find themselves front line in the battle over use and control of resources—as well as an impassioned appeal to try to understand the intersection of power, control of resources, individual rights, and our duties as members of a democracy.

IMG_1229
The Farm outside Willow City ND, 2014

Most of us can surely sympathize with cases of justified dissent and protest, of instances of the provoked little guy finally standing up to the big bully. Indeed, I resonate with stories of farmers and ranchers standing up to the government’s overreach, tracing my own paternal roots back a hundred and twenty years or so to a farm cut from the open prairies of a remote stretch of North Dakota (how much of that state is not remote?) And like all Americans, and perhaps especially those who’ve grown up in a Western state like Arizona (in my case) or Idaho (where Charli lives and writes), I have also gotten drunk on the lore of the staunch, independent pioneers, ranchers, and cowboys who risked all to stake a claim to open space, land, and greater self-determination.

Ahh the passions such a train of thought can dredge up!

But I am no believer in the free rein of passions without the restraint of reason. Passion is the voice not only of rightful advocates of good causes but of mobs, fascists, and demagogues.

Which brings us to the current climate in the United States and the underlying issue of guns. Forgive the overt sexism, but any group of men wielding AK-47s is apt to make me piss my pants. I am one who shudders at violence as a response to conflict and to the vitriol, distortion, and irrationality of the debate surrounding the Second Amendment’s presumed guarantee that every American has the constitutional right to arm themselves to the teeth with high-powered automatic, military-grade weapons. So while I may find it edifying to hear the stories of the half-frozen men—now appealing for deliveries of vittles via the United States Post Office (a public service of the Federal Government)—their wielding such weapons makes them immediately suspect in my eyes. As does the recent evidence (the arrival Saturday of a similar group calling themselves the Pacific Patriots Network) that their example sends a clarion call to others whose main objective may not simply be solidarity with a cause but an opportunity to engage in rabble-rousing and mayhem.

In short, I realize it’s a complicated issue, but I do not support insurgency or outbreaks of seditious activities by any group. And I’d like someone to explain to me the justice in one group forcefully claiming 187,000 acres of federal land on behalf of the county in which it is situated. Last time I checked, we are supposed to be a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” and that land has been set aside and protected since 1908, for all Americans. Again, I admit there are issues here that I do not understand. I am willing to be enlightened.

For now, I prefer to hold faith with a central government that, imperfect organ as it is,  strives to balance the rights of all Americans and the competing interests of states, special interest groups, and individuals. And when that faith is tested, I turn first towards educating myself on the various angles of the issue being contested. In the case of Oregon, I first try to understand why the government owns so much land in the first place.

So many angles of this issue compete for our hearts and minds. That’s why I applaud Charli for honing in on this theme for the prompt this week on rebellion. Her appeal at the end makes it a particularly thought-provoking challenge.” As she notes: “Perhaps little story-rebellions from marginalized communities around the globe can teach us to better appreciate one another’s struggles. But how do we stand up to the powers that be? How do we take control of our lives and livelihoods without becoming what we struggle against?”

January 6, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a rebellion. Is it one a character fights for or is it one another suppresses? Explore what makes a rebellion, pros or cons. Use past or current rebellions as inspiration or make up one of your own.

And here’s my flash, inspired by reports on just one of the groups roused to anger by the events in Oregon.

images
Photo by Jeff Rietsma

Crack Shots

In the spring they came. From Florida and Minnesota, New York and Texas. A great gentle army streaming from the four corners of a common patrimony—the land. Along the Pacific Flyway they massed, their pickets like pistons, rising and falling with their footfalls. The first yellow warbler flashing topaz against the sky heralded their arrival.

Sharp angles marked the buildings of the Malheur Wildlife Preserve. Sunlight glinted off gun barrels from beyond the entrance. The marchers halted. They readied their arms. Focused their targets in their sites. And let loose a volley of shutter-clicks.

The Birders had returned.