Flash Fiction & Memoir

Desert Dawn: Greeting an Arizona Summer Day

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 11 Comments
Dawn over Glendale AZ
Dawn Over Glendale AZ

It’s 5:30 am in the suburbs of Phoenix. Summer is days away but the heat has arrived. Next Tuesday, the first day of summer, the temp will rise to 120º F (49° C). It’s the season of the dawn for those of us desert dwellers who wish to venture outdoors before the sun cracks open the oven door. So goodbye Stephen Colbert and Noah Trevor, you late-night purveyors of the politically absurd. It’s early to bed for me. You cannot compete for my one chance of fresh air.

Of course we here in the “Valley of the Sun” pride ourselves on our stoic endurance of the 6-month summer. Like people everywhere, we comment endlessly on the weather. “Hot enough for you today?” “It’s gonna be a scorcher.” Those who were here on June 26, 1990, when the hottest day on record hit 122º F (50º C), claim their bragging rights, their merely having been here validating their membership in an exclusive club of extremes.

Nonetheless, we natives shake our heads and wonder why the hell we are still here. We vow this is our last summer. As the heat rises from the pavement to drive us back into our burrows, we dream of moving to Seattle and fantasize about the rain. Some of us head north to the relative cool of Payson and Flagstaff. Sensible snowbirds fly the hot coop by the end of May. Only those who once suffered in snowbound lands and planted themselves here for good boast of their love for the heat. “Try shoveling snow in Chicago in January,” they say. “This is heaven.”

What the Desert Dawn Brings

Still, we natives find a stark beauty in the season. Dawn brims over the encircling mountains just after 5 o’clock with the cool promise it always holds—the chance to start afresh. When the sun climbs, each shade tree offers a small oasis. The  bougainvillea and lantana spill opulently over stucco and sand. The utter stillness of the afternoon (when all sane people stay indoors) rings like a cosmic chime. Pale, flat geckos take shelter on patio walls; long lizards dart in the bushes. The dry air breezes like silk on our skin after a twilight dip in the pool. Doves sing their plaintive laments and cicadas rev the Palo Verde trees as the shadows deepen.

Bougainvillea and lantana
Bougainvillea and lantana

Maybe I’m still under the thrall of returning to the warmth after a cold and rainy stint in Connecticut. Maybe I am waxing romantic. No doubt I’ll be cursing the heat next week. But as long as I wake with the dawn this summer, I’ll be ready to embrace the day.

Thanks to guest host D. Avery at Charli Mills’s Carrot Ranch for providing the prompt of “dawn” for this week’s flash fiction challenge. And to blogger Irene Waters’s Skywatch Friday post for inspiring me to dig up my picture of the dawn. Here is a flash memoir.

A College Dawn

The night already a blur: the party at Esperanza’s house; the beer and tequila; the bilingual chatter and rock music; the cousin, Hector—hot, handsome, strong—pressing me against a wall in the yard.

I should stop the car. The road through Papago Park is dark and curved, the mountains impossible to see but for the absence of stars. I nod off. Once, twice.

I crack the window. I blink, keeping my eyes closed too long. There’s a brightening in the sky. I step on it.

I arrive home with the dawn, relieved. My father will be up soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Higher Power: Transcendence in Rehab and Writing

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

I’m flexing my own creative writing muscles this morning with a flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch. Naturally the prompt leads me  to experiences in my personal life for fodder. This provides a bit of conflict, since I recently vowed to keep this blog confined to writing topics. Still, I hope to honor my vow not only by falling back on the oft-repeated maxim about writing—write what you know—but also tying in the theme of transcendence, whether in your personal life or your writing life (as if the two were separate.)

One thing I have come to know (against any intent or desire to do so) is the terrible challenges for individuals and their families wrought by the epidemic of opioid abuse in our country. According to last week’s New York Times article, Inside a Killer Drug Epidemic: A Look at America’s Opioid Crisis, it killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. When you count the families and communities affected, the damage goes much deeper.

Today, though, I want to address not the epidemic itself but the related topic of rehab, in particular the idea of the “higher power” invented and popularized by the most enduring drug and alcohol rehab program out there, AA.

Rehab and the Higher Power

I recently visited a loved one in a rehab facility here in Phoenix where he was doing a month-long residential treatment. It was cold outside, so we gravitated to the rather institutional cafeteria to chat. Posted on the wall were the 12 steps, among which 6 mention God or higher power, a key element of the program:

* Step 2—We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
* Step 3—We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
* Step 5—We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
* Step 6—We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
* Step 7—We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
* Step 11—We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

I was struck by the focus on God in the program, though I was aware of the idea of the higher power and that participants could interpret that according to their own beliefs. Yet, tending toward an atheistic view of reality myself, and having raised my children with a more scientific and evolutionary understanding of the nature of things, I wondered how my young man could reconcile his secular grounding with a program clearly designed with a deistic approach to human existence.

We revisited this topic last week when I drove him to a different facility for a second month in residential rehab. He admitted that he was having difficulties with this focus on God, that he had talked to his counselor about it. He understood the idea of replacing what had been his “higher power”—heroin—in the sense that he  had lost control of his life by giving it over to the needle. But try as he might, he could not identify what a “higher power” meant to him outside of the religious sense.

I recalled a conversation I’d had with my philosopher futurist husband, Tom Lombardo, concerning the idea of transcendence, which appears as a major theme in chapter 12 of his forthcoming book, Future Consciousness: The Pathway to Purposeful Evolution. In applying the idea to the struggle with addiction, I had understood it too narrowly. I believed that transcendence, in the case of overcoming addiction or character flaws or adversities, meant simply to connect to a vision of yourself that transcends your former self. Just as our older selves transcend our younger selves, so, I thought, could our future “good” selves transcend  our former flawed selves.

For Tom, however, transcendence is connected to deep purpose in life. As he writes:

Deep purpose usually entails some higher good or reality transcendent to our personal existence or life. Deep purpose is a “calling” toward something greater than ourselves, a holistic, perhaps cosmic dimension to motivation, bringing in the ego-transcendent, above and beyond our individual well-being. Deep purpose is intentionally placing the storyline of our lives within a bigger whole.

Granted, conceptualizing a higher good transcendent to our personal reality is a a task of a high order even for those of us with less challenging struggles than addiction. When each day is a battle with a demon, how do you identify what that transcendent reality might be? And yet, it is a mistake, I believe, to to underestimate the desire in the substance abuser to do just that. While the idea of the higher good may begin on a highly personal plane—good health; job stability; a “normal” life—from there it expands to goals such as improved relationships; marriage; membership in a community…moving beyond the narrow focus on self that substance abuse engenders to a view of how we might contribute to a broader good as neighbors, friends, citizens, humans, inhabitants of the earth and cosmos.

Moreover, the beauty of conceptualizing the higher good in this way is that it in no way sacrifices a person’s individual condition. As Tom adds:

Yet, reciprocally, deep purpose invariably reflects and serves the individual. In identifying a person’s deep purpose in life we find that it intimately connects with that person’s strongest interests, skills, and qualities of personality. Deep purpose seems to emerge, at least in part, through finding activities (and consequent goals) that we love. Deep purpose requires personal passion.

Transcendence and Writing

These passages only skim the surface of the topic of transcendence, but as I applied the message to the theme of rehab, I also thought of how it worked in my life as a writer. Specifically, what do I want to accomplish with my writing? What do I want to write about? What purpose does it serve? Certainly I write not only for personal satisfaction. I would like to touch others with my writing, to provide something of value, beauty, (dare I say) wisdom. On the highest order, I want to improve my craft to improve myself as a person, and thus equip myself to fulfill what I see as my own evolutionary purpose: to in some way contribute to the positive evolution of humanity.

These are the thoughts that go through my head as I enter my fifth year of a life dedicated to writing. What about you? How does your writing connect you to your deep purpose? How does it reflect and/or facilitate your passion? Is your writing ego-focused or ego-transcendent?

And…before I forget, here is this week’s flash fiction challenge:

January 5, 2017 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a rattling sound. It can be an intimidating sound of protest, a disorienting loud sound, a musical expression or a gentle baby’s toy. Go where the prompt leads you.

The Gettin’ Place

He took a drag and rattled the ice in his cup.

“That Coke’s no good for you,” I said.

“One poison at a time, Mom.”

Our usual exchange.

“Feeling ready?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“We’ll get the apartment packed up. Figure out the rest after rehab.”

He nodded, his beauty piercing and hopeful in the dawn light.

“Those blankets, though, I’m tossing them.”

“OK.”

We’d argued about the overstuffed garbage bag the girlfriend had left behind.

“Where’d she get them anyway?

He smiled, knowingly, sheepishly.

“The gettin’ place,” he said.

He’d come far, but the street was still in him.

 

 

Four Eyes-A Flash Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

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I read about a person’s “master status” when I took a sociology class long ago. I suppose there are several that might fit me: woman; Caucasian; Baby Boomer. But I also lay claim to one that has brought blessings, perhaps, while eliciting a kind of incredulous insensitivity on the part of children and idiots. And that would be my membership in the class of people who are “visually challenged; “four-eyes”; “blind as a bat”; burdened with “Coke-bottle” lenses; “rabbit-eyes”…in short severely myopic to the point of being legally blind.

Back when I would allow vanity to make me suffer, I could hide my infirmity. From 16 to 50, I wore contact lenses. What bliss not to have to hear another joker tell me something I already knew: “Wow, you have really bad eyes.” What good riddance to requests to “let me try them on” followed by revelatory exclamations of “you really are blind.” What joy to to run and flip and handstand myself silly; to forego the sharp knock of hard plastic against my nose when making a clumsy move; to kiss a boy without a fog of hot breath forming before my eyes.

And yet…my bespectacled state—leading to false assumptions as it could have had I not fit the bill—accurately presented the core of me to the world. I was a “bookworm”; a bibliophile; a reader; a girl early inclined to the intellectual, as evidenced by the long hours I spent poring over encyclopedia entries with zeal. When I think of the girl Jeanne, I think of a girl glued to her book. This has been one unswerving truth about me since I learned to read, and my glasses have been my badge of membership to an august, noble club since the age of 8. Further, having to wear those glasses kept me humbler than I might have been otherwise. Even when I turned to the rigid plastic eye scrapers that preceded gas permeable lenses, I could not in those days wear contact lenses round the clock without doing damage to the old corneas. So those who really knew me, knew me me for who I was and am, weak bunny eyes and all.

Cat-eyed Jean 1967
Cat-eyed Jeanne 1967

I did not get my first pair of glasses until, in 1964, an eye doctor came to Most Holy Trinity Grade School to give the pupils a rudimentary eye examination. Or maybe he just gave the exam to those of us students whose squinting, straining expressions and propensity to lean towards the blackboard  like magnets to metal clued the nuns in to our condition. However it happened, I was then sent home with a note to my parents reporting that I was in need of a visit to the optometrist.

A couple vivid scenes come to me now, of before and after the phenomenal event of that first pair of glasses.

Of the before stage, I remember at the age of 5 watching an I Love Lucy episode on a small, boxy, be-dialed television set perched on stiletto legs in the lounge at my mother’s place of employment—a small private nursing home. My face was perhaps 6 inches from the screen. It did not occur to me to question why my twin sister did not have to sit so close.

Of the immediate after stage, I remember being in the pew at the church to which the grade school belonged and putting my hand to my eyes to nudge the new prosthetic on the bridge of my nose. Like the good girl I frequently was not, I was facing towards the altar, and I realized that the blurred image of the priest was not the newly sharp and clear image the glasses had so recently revealed to me. What happened?

I was brought to dwell on the topic of lenses through another prompt from Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch. And while I chose to take the literal approach to the challenge rather than the lofty goal of pondering peace (decidedly challenging these days in America and the world), it’s been a good exercise in reflection. Here is the prompt:

September 21, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story using a lens. It can be literal, like looking at the world through rose-colored lenses or the need for spectacles. Or you can treat the idea like a perspective, showing how one character might see the same action differently from another. Think locally, globally, culturally. Is there a common lens by which we can achieve peace?

And here is my flash memoir, in which I capture that moment of adjustment to the new and sharply defined world before me.

Two Eyes

Father McHugh’s Irish brogue echoed through the vault. He was at the altar, the crucified Christ above him. I didn’t need to see him to know that.

Light streamed through the stained glass windows, illuminating the dusty-rose walls of the nave. So soft. So pretty. I wondered what the inside of a cloud looked like.

I looked towards the altar. Everything had looked newly sharp the day before, as if God had drawn lines around everything. Now Father was all fuzzy again. I squinted. I felt for the new glasses on my face.

My fingers jammed into my nose. I’d forgotten them at home.

 

 

Forging Flash Fiction from a Medical Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 12 Comments
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Model of the cervical spine with a cervical anterior plate.

If you are reading this post, you probably know where I disappeared to from May to August. Yes, it was that mythical book I’ve been working on for my retired neurosurgeon client. Well, the good news is that, after pumping out the last ten chapters in those three months, the manuscript flew off to the publisher ten days ago. Now I wait on the old tenterhooks for the verdict: Is it engaging? Is it good? Is it well written or screamingly pedestrian? Am I really done with the thing? We shall find out soon!

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog and on my old blog, Memoir Crafter, about my experience as a ghostwriter for the above mentioned surgeon. What an amazing journey it has been. I am not a religious person—I leave that to my twin sister, Sister Sara Marie Belisle—but I can’t help but marvel at my good fortune. Four years ago I wondered how I could ever leave my day job to write. Then, out of the blue, a completely unforeseen opportunity. Now, I have two complete 90,000–word manuscripts under my belt, the first a version of the book as life story, and the second a more commercial medical memoir.

I have missed my practice of flash fiction, however, and having had the pleasure of stopping in at Carrot Ranch again after months “on the trail,” I want to use this week’s challenge to flash a scene from the book. From the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge page:

August 17, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that features a fossil or uses the word in its variant forms (fossilize, dino bones, petrification, gastroliths, ichnofossils, etc.). Dig into your imagination and go where the fossil record leads you.

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My first urge was to create a fresh flash about real fossils or petrified wood or bones, but then it occurred to me to lift a line I was particularly fond of from a draft of my client’s story.

Here’s the back story: My client is a world-renown spinal neurosurgeon recognized not only for his many contributions to spinal neurosurgery—including patents on wiring, plates and other instrumentation that he was “instrumental” in designing—but also for his leading role in the fight to have spinal neurosurgery recognized as a sub-specialty in its own right. That latter achievement, many people say, was his primary contribution. Because up until the 1980s, aside from cervical trauma cases, spinal surgery remained largely the domain of orthopedic surgeons, not neurosurgeons. In the late 1980s, however, with technical advances emerging, a turf war broke out between the two medical communities: the bone docs and the brain docs.

A confrontation between an orthopedic surgeon and my client, the pioneering neurosurgeon,  became the impetus for a chapter in the new version of the book. I wish I could reproduce that scene here to show you how I whittled it down to a flash. (You can see it when the book comes out near the end of the year.) I think it well illustrates how flash can be used as an editing tool. Suffice it to say that this section was originally 438 words.

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A Half-Excavated Fossil

The whine of the drill got the orthopedist’s attention. He was chiseling a shard of bone from the patient’s hip while I worked at the neck where the dislocation was.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m putting plates in.”

He stepped up, peered into the cavity where the spine rose from the tissue like a half-excavated fossil. “Why?” he said. “Wires work perfect for the fusion.”

“The plates will work better.”

He pivoted away, ripping off his gloves.

“Take me off the op note,” he said, striding towards the door. “I want nothing to do with this case.”

So You Want to Live in the Desert?

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 20 Comments

Landscape 1-10

Our last house lay cradled in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains. The neighborhood terraced up the slope behind our property, ending three blocks away at the edge of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. From the path that emerged from our end of the development—marked by a dead, two-armed Saguaro that traced fat black ink strokes against the sunset—trails traced their way up into the desert: Lost Dog Wash; the Anasazi Spur and the Sunrise Trailhead; the Ringtail and Old Jeep Trails; Tom Thumb’s Trailhead and the Marcus Landslide Trail. A short hike over a low rise and the city disappeared behind us. Before us a sea of ironwood cholla, saguaros, barrelhead cactus, ocotillos and creosote crested like waves.

Cholla in the Storm
Sea of ironwood cholla with a storm heading in, one form of the notorious “jumping cactus.”

I loved the idea of living so close to the desert. We’d been a ten-minute drive from the preserve in the previous house, and though we’d had our share of javelinas and coyotes wandering down into the neighborhood, the mountain seemed removed. We could not feel its pulse. So when circumstances dictated a change anyway, we went with our gut desire to live in the desert, not just near it. On a March day in 2007, we rumbled up the long slope of a road called Via Linda—Pretty Way—to our new home.

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Looking east from our front yard. The foundation of a pretty yard here is gravel and river rock.

It was magnificent. We hiked the trails. We collected pieces of quartz from the upper elevations—the rocks spilled down one side of the mountain from a white waterfall of an outcropping two hours up the trail. At night, we ambled up the long, dark avenue bisecting the neighborhood until we reached the end of the pavement. We crossed over into the desert and paused, listening to the silence undergirding the night sounds. From our patio, we watched the hawks circling overhead, and reeled at the panorama of stars undiminished by the brighter lights below.

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Yours Truly with North Scottsdale and Phoenix in the distance from the McDowell Mountains

 

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The professor heading out on the Anasazi Spur just past a magnificent ocotillo

We had wildlife adventures. Coming round a corner before Halloween one year, we surprised a herd of javelina nibbling on pumpkins in a neighbor’s yard. We froze. They bolted. Stampeding towards us, they parted at the last moment and disappeared into the brush on the other side of the road.

Another time, heading up the avenue in the dark, we saw a parked car ahead with its lights on full beam. “Assholes,” I said to my husband. “What the hell are they doing?” The next moment the profile of a deer split the glare in two. It bounded into the brush at the side of the road and emerged with its young before hightailing it back into the dark mountains. The people in the car had been trying to locate the fawn, they explained when we reached them.

All this beauty so near. Geckos and hummingbirds and coyotes howling at the moon.

And treacherous creatures of a more insidious nature.

One night as I snuggled up to my husband in our bed, I felt a thin whisper on my leg. I had just enough time to wonder if I had felt it or not, when the hypodermic jab of a needle in my upper arm jolted me upright. “Fuck,” I wailed. I’ve been stung! I’ve been stung!

“What?” My husband hollered, still sleep drunk. “What happened?”

“There’s a scorpion in the bed,” I said, throwing off the covers and bounding out of bed.

“Hold on,” he said. “Are you sure? Maybe it was a needle from the cactus. We were re-potting those plants today. It could have gotten on you .”

“No!” I said. “That was no cactus needle. I’m sure of it.” Still brushing myself off and shaking my hair out, I danced around wondering if the fucker was on the floor now.”

My husband jumped up and circled around the bed. “There it is,” he said. “Get a shoe, quick.” It lay motionless at the foot of the mattress, primeval, repellent,  oblivious to its own danger. A whack and it was no more.

The scorpions sabotaged my desert mountain experience. I was later stung in a chair while convalescing from the flu. My daughter was stung in her bed and had to be taken to the emergency room. One of them crawled out of a pot my husband had held close to his chest a moment before. I could never relax when coming into the house or getting up in the night time, when slipping my foot into a shoe or opening a cupboard. I once found a dead one in the dishwasher and another in my china cabinet. The specter of the evil things haunted the house. I sensed them seething behind the walls. The “Scorpion Slayer” we hired (his business name) could only marginally keep them at bay. We moved after five years. I still worry about the young family that snapped up the house in a short sale in 2012.

On a footnote…if you happen to be thinking of moving to Arizona someday, read this NY Times article on the reality of sharing space with these truly creepy critters.

This reverie was stimulated by Charli Mills’s latest flash fiction challenge:

May 4, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) include insects in a story. Periwinkles, bees laden with pollen, ants building hills. What can insects add to a story? Do they foreshadow, set a tone, provide a scientific point of interest or a mystical element? Let you inner periwinkles fly!

So, here’s my flash.

The Sting

Cleaning day in the new house. The feel of fine grit in the bathtub. She scrubbed, like a woman she’d seen in Oaxaca grinding corn on a stone metate.

Then, Ow! What the hell? A sliver of glass? She turned to the sink and threw her rag down. Inspected the finger. No blood. Only a suffusion under the skin, as if the tip were blushing.

She did other chores. The finger grew numb. Still she didn’t realize. Returning, she picked the rag up. The evil thing lay in the bowl, flat, segmented, pincered, its barbed tail ready to strike.

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Ugghhh. I can hardly bear to look at a picture of it.

 

 

 

Of Libraries, Books, and Freedom

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

Marian the Librarian

One of the few compensations of being a four-eyed girl was the knee-jerk assumption on the part of others that I was bookish. And I was. By the time I got glasses at the age of eight—when a compulsory eye exam at school revealed to my overworked parents that I was nearsighted as a bat—I had been devouring books for three years. No wonder I loved libraries from the get-go.

Not that we didn’t have a few resources at home. One of the very few valuable items my parents invested in when I was a young child was a set of encyclopedias. Diving randomly into a volume was, for me, as engrossing as surfing the Internet on an iPad is to a child today. The only other place one could get access to so many fascinating words and stories was through the periodic delivery of cheap but entertaining Scholastic Books at school, or . . . the library.

When I think of libraries, the first one to come to mind is the two-story converted house on dusty Eva Street in Sunnyslope Arizona in the early 1960s. It was probably a much smaller house than I remember, but walking up the front curved staircase to the second floor made me feel I was a guest at a country manor with rooms of hidden delights. Indeed, the stacks where I hunkered down pulling books from the crammed shelves were just that: vast chambers where my imagination took flight. On Eva Street I discovered my first Arabian Knights, endless books about ballet, early historical fiction—one I remember is The Oregon Trail—stories from different lands, and biographies for youngsters. It never mattered to me that I’d have to trudge home balancing my load of six or seven or eight books. That one could take as many books as one could carry—and for free!—was more license than a child could hope for.

Other libraries came and went. By high school the public ones were cleaner but rather institutional brick-and-mortar buildings. By then I was mixing more serious fiction (the English and American classics) with Gothic Romance: Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn (the classic governess-falls-for-the-master-of-the-house tale) was one I reread a dozen times. To balance that frivolity, I remember checking out Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Libraries are nothing if not pluralistic.

Then there was the vast Carl Hayden Library at Arizona State University in the late 1970s, where I struggled with the Dewey Decimal system to find texts on Spanish literary greats and Latin American politics. And the narrow, secluded stacks in the back of the building on the top floor of the campus library at Beppu Daigaku (University) a decade later, where I had no competition checking out the works in English of one Japanese master after another: Mishima Yukio’s heartrendingly simple tale, The Sound of Waves; Kawabata Yasunari ‘s Snow Country and The Old Capital; Oliver Statler’s delightful history, Japanese Inn.

I still love libraries today. For a decade or so, Borders and Barnes and Noble stole me away, but before long both chains betrayed their original promise, revealing their insensible, market-driven hearts of mud. Navigating paths through Star Wars toys and shelves of YA Hunger Games knock-offs does not, for this reader, make for a positive book-browsing experience. And though I turn to Amazon from time to time, it’s the library that calls me, with its quiet shelves of books, its diversity, its knowledgeable and universally helpful staff, and it noble mission to advance literacy and thinking in the nation’s people, no matter what our origins or means.

Today I am fortunate in that I inhabit a fairly decent library of my own, thanks largely to “the professor” (aka Tom, my husband.) Tom was so devastated at having been forced to sell his Encyclopedia Britannia during a particularly bad stretch of “down-and-out” back in 1978 that he has never parted with a book since.

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One wall of Tom’s Science Fiction Room. The magazines on the left are a recent addition: 350 issues of Galaxy Magazine going back to the first one in 1950.

 

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The professor in his study (previously known as the front room.)

 

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A “Room of My Own”…the reading corner in my study. I have since added another large bookshelf to the left of the one present.

 

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And the blogger’s desk. A larger bookcase has replaced the small one here.

This post was inspired by Charli Mills’s flash fiction challenge over at Carrot Ranch: March 2, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that includes a library. You can honor the libraries in your own experience, dream about libraries of the future or explore a community without one.

I’ve chosen for mine, a particular kind of community…

A Free Man

The Protective Custody yard wasn’t quite solitary confinement. He could hear inmates in the other cells. Could call out to them. One hour a day he stretched in the barren exercise yard. The rest of the time, it was the eight-by-ten cell. Time seemed to stop.

Except when the book cart rattled by. Beats me, he thought, how a prison can have such a great library. The Brothers Karamazov, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Vonnegut. Joseph Conrad. It was the only thing keeping him sane. The only thing reminding him he was, where it counted, a free man.

 

 

 

 

 

Nature: A Saving Grace

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 9 Comments

IMG_0106I was doing my fifth circuit of the small city park when I spotted the woman with the snow-white hair. She was holding a small child up to one of the hardy desert pine trees that punctuate the perimeter. As I power-walked by, the wild-haired little thing gave a cry of delighted wonder. She slapped the bark of the tree and kicked the trunk with her small, ineffectual foot. I left the two of them looking up in wonder through the needled branches.

I was happy to think of the myriad pleasures and lessons from Nature that the child would, like all of us, go on to experience. And I delved into the depths of my own memory to recall the time in my youth when I first confronted Nature as a wondrous, awe-inspiring force.

I was five when my parents piled my four siblings and me into their pink and white, jet-ship of a Dodge and relocated us from Minnesota to Phoenix Arizona. It was July of 1961. Of that trip, I mostly remember being condemned for three endless days to the middle of the back seat between my two brothers and older sister. Yet, my first intimations of the power of Nature date to that first remembered journey: my mother pointing to the sky on a midnight rural highway in North Dakota, calling us to “Look!” as shimmering curtains of emerald and gold rippled across the heavens; my brother Jack at age ten standing dangerously close to the edge of a precipice in the Rockies, below which sheer walls of pine-encrusted rock cascaded down and down and down to a winding thread of river; a sea of buffalo and choreographies of antelope under immense skies, clouds sailing above like voluminous ships.

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From the left bottom: Jeanne, Peggy, Patty. From the left top: Danny and Jack. 1961.

Over the next decade and a half, we made the round trip from Arizona to my parents’ home towns in North Dakota three or four times. Eventually it was just my twin and me in the back seat, equipped with Almond Joys and Paydays, Juicy Fruit and Spearmint gum, Planters peanuts and playing cards. Up and back on different routes, passing from Arizona into Utah or New Mexico, on to Colorado, through Nebraska or Wyoming, and then into South Dakota. For three days we journeyed, straight as an arrow over flat eternities of desert; skirting towering rock formations and deep, layered, chromatic terraces; climbing vertiginous, pine-ridged Colorado peaks and plunging precipitously into cool, deep valleys. After the mountains and meadows of South Dakota, the fecund farmland of North Dakota finally welcomed us into her ample arms, her prairies rippling to the horizon like the gentle swells of an infinite sea.

I will be thankful always to my parents for giving those experiences to me. I am sure no one needed to educate them on the importance of taking their children out into nature.

I had a chance to revisit those vast, dramatic landscapes last August, when my North Dakota cousin Tommy invited me along to ride shotgun in a car he’d bought in Arizona and wanted to drive back up north. Tommy is a  talented photographer, so I’ll retrace that trip photographically with you here. Note that there are no cute and furry creatures—I dislike anthropomorphizing animals. (Though I admit to taking multiple shots of a pair of mountain goats in the Black Hills the year before on a trip with my sisters.)

The famous red rock formations of Monument Valley in northern Arizona. Many classic westerns, such as John Ford's Stagecoach, were filmed here.
The famous red rock formations of Monument Valley in northern Arizona. Many classic westerns, such as John Ford’s Stagecoach, were filmed here.

 

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The photographer and his “horse-powered coach’ outside Moab Utah.

 

The phenomenal Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
The phenomenal Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

 

An amazingly beautiful and pristine stream in the Black HIlls of South Dakota.
An enchantingly placid and pristine stream in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

 

The blogger drining in the beauty and looking like a startled deer.
The blogger drinking in the beauty and looking like a startled deer in a meadow near the stream.

 

Darn! They snuck in. Moutain goats near Mount Rushmore.
Darn! They snuck in. Mountain goats near Mount Rushmore.

 

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North Dakota: infinite horizons and the subtle music of wheat waving in the wind.

This short tour of the West and the flash that follows were inspired by this week’s prompt from Carrot Ranch: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about wild spaces. Is it a wilderness or a patch of weeds in a vacant lot that attract songbirds. What is vital to the human psyche about wild spaces? Bonus points for inducing something cute and furry.

The post and flash were also triggered by the ache in my heart for those separated from the beauty of nature. The shells and tiny mouse skull in that very top photo were collected by my son, now serving time in a minimum security prison on a drug-related charge. On trips we took to the coast years ago, he was always the one to find unbroken anemones or sand dollars, buffed and scoured sea glass, even a melon-sized moon snail in Washington that, much to the consternation of the park ranger, he began to dig up before he realized the shell was still occupied. Always an avid naturalist by instinct, his world has shrunk to a stark space devoid of all natural grace except wind, flat land stretching to the horizon, and sunlight. Even the stars at night are drowned in the glare of megawatt lights.

But not for long…

Here’s a flash on nature…

Absolution

He didn’t look back. Not as he walked to the car. Not as we circled back onto the highway. Behind us the towers melted into the horizon.

The road steepened. Pines appeared, grew thick, drank the sunlight. Outside a mountain town we stopped.

Resin and rain keened the air. Wind soughed in the high branches.

I waited while he walked into a clearing. He tilted his head. Palmed the rough bark. Drank the sweet air. When he returned, needles fell from his hair.

“Any place you want to stop?” I said.

“Nah,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I’m fine.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Power: Getting It, Losing It, Regaining It

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 20 Comments

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We’d seen the lights from the prison complex the night before, long before the actual buildings appeared just outside Winslow on Highway 87. Night had fallen black and featureless, and they shone over the horizon like the glow of a distant city, dwarfing the illumination of the town itself. When we came abreast of the starkly lit compound, the barbed wire fences and long squat buildings suggested more than anything an emptiness. A waiting. Then the darkness swallowed us up again.

Winslow. The Winslow of “Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona.” I’d long thought it would be fun to stop at the actual corner that the song celebrates. After all, the Eagles had provided the soundtrack to my college years. When, this last weekend, I found myself but a couple of blocks away, my mental energy was elsewhere.

I was in Winslow to see my son. My beautiful son. My son who is addicted to heroin. I could say he is an addict, but I dislike ascribing an identity to him in that way. As a friend pointed out, his addiction does not define him. Yet it has defined his life over the last half a decade. And that life went its predictable way since he started using heavily. He lost his job. Became homeless. He was in and out of jail for a year and a half. In and out of rehab, though never seriously in. Last September, he did himself the favor of not avoiding the police when he returned to an apartment he’d been staying at to find two officers responding to an unrelated theft. He was questioned, patted down, arrested. This time he got prison, not jail.

It was my first visit to the Arizona State Prison Complex, though my son has been there since November. A visit is of course not a slap-dash, spontaneous kind of event. There is the enormous task of figuring out the bureaucracy, paying fees for background checks, learning how to set up prepaid calls, and applying for visitation rights. I was approved before Christmas. Both my husband and my sister, for reasons I won’t go into, were denied. Finally I could wait no longer. I would go alone.

Even before Charli Mills put out the prompt on power last week, I had been thinking about the theme. I had been pondering it in relation to my son. In particular, I had been thinking about the lack of power, about throwing away one’s power. That led me to reflect on just how we get power, on what power I had, on what power remained to my son in his present circumstances.

I talked to my husband about it. I was thinking of power as force, but he pointed out how power is influence, the ability to effect an outcome. He noted Alvin Toffler’s book Power Shift in which the author identified three distinct kinds of power: the physical, the financial, and knowledge. So, I surveyed my own power or influence, checking my examples against Toffler’s basic formula but also including others. I have the power of knowledge, afforded by a curious mind and a decent education; some financial power in the form of a regular income and good credit; the physical power of a healthy (as of yet) body (and still functioning mind); the social power I might exert through my network of family, friends, and associates; the political power of my vote (I still think that is worth something); the power afforded by my autonomy and relative freedom; the power afforded to me by the rights I enjoy as an American citizen; and the power to influence my own circumstances through discipline, self-regulation, and self responsibility.

It’s not a great deal of power, but I was satisfied for the time being to know I had at least a modicum of the precious stuff.

In contrast, my son has been rendered almost powerless. I was reminded of just how powerless when we drove up to the stark, isolated complex on Saturday. It was a cold, bright morning. A guard checked our IDs at the gate and waved me in as my husband turned the car around to leave. The guard then instructed me to stand behind a portable trifold fence while a leashed German shepherd made a few sniffing passes on the other side. Satisfied that I was not carrying any drugs on my person, he then directed me to a nondescript building at the end of a short road. Once inside, I filled out the requisite form, removed my shoes and sweater for inspection, handed over my baggie of coins (up to $30.00 permitted for vending machines) and the one unopened pack of Marlboro reds I had bought for my son. I was told to open and empty the contents of the pack into another baggie. Then I passed through the security booth, gathered up my items, and entered the visitation room.

Inside three or four families of visitors had preceded me. They sat on cheap plastic chairs around battered square tables visiting with their orange-clad inmates. Around the perimeter various vending machines offered the usual chips, sodas, water, and weak coffee. I wavered for a moment surveying the choices of table. “You can sit anywhere,” a woman called jovially to me. She clearly knew the routine. An armed guard sat behind a folding table on the far side of the room, next to a locker that I later found contained board games and playing cards. He rose and asked me my inmate’s name. Then he moved to a locked door leading out into the yard and called it out. A moment later I heard it amplified by loud speakers. I was happy it was his name and not his number.

I chose a table within sight of the door leading to the yard. Periodically the guard stepped through it to see if any inmates had lined up outside to be admitted. I eagerly peered through each time he opened it, anxious to see that familiar form. I felt the keen anticipation one has when waiting in an arrival lounge at the airport.

At last he came through. At 6 feet 2 inches, my son has towered over me for the last five years, and the old pride of having to rise up to hug him returned. (The simple maternal pride of having produced this man.) He has a high-bridged prominent nose, dark, thick eyebrows and eyes the color of strong tea. These features were as familiar as always. But his strong, thick arms and shoulders were something new. As were the orange sweatshirt, pants, and slippers. I had not hugged him since last May. I had not seen him since then, except for the two times in court last November. Both times his wrists and ankles had been shackled.

We spent the next four hours talking, playing checkers (as we had so often done when he was a boy), and going out to a separate yard where he could smoke. He spoke of his arrest, of feeling like the moment had come to get out of the life he’d been living, of knowing there would be no other way he could stop using. He spoke of events in his recent past, some painful for me to hear. He spoke of his future, of what he wants and hopes for. And we spoke of power. Of being empowered.

And that is what I hope for him. That of the qualities on the list I made for myself above, my son achieves the last three while he is still incarcerated: the power to influence his future through discipline, self-regulation, and self responsibility. Those three strengths are the basis of all power to come. And those three qualities, if externally enforced now, can be bolstered internally.

Here is my flash on the theme of power. Thanks to Charli Mills for another provocative prompt. February 3, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that explores the question, “What good is power?” Is it a story of empowerment, or a story of a dictator? Poke around power and go where the force takes you this week.

The Power Remaining

He’d learned the unwritten rules in the first weeks. How he had to back up his own kind. Step into a fight between a white inmate and the blacks or Hispanics. Take another inmate with him anytime he talked to a guard, insurance against a false report on either side. And how to look out when someone got high on contraband dope.

The dope. He’d been offered it. Had fought the memory of the pleasure of it in his veins, the release, the purest happiness there could be.

But he’d resisted. It was the one power remaining to him.

 

 

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments
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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.

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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

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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.