Flash Fiction & Memoir

Times Past: A White Linen Tablecloth and Crudités

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

Baby Boomer, Phoenix, Arizona

Menu from Neptune's Table, Phoenix, Arizona, 1960s
Menu from a swanky restaurant, Phoenix, Arizona, 1960s

When Charli Mills posted a piece the other day based on a fellow Rough Writer’s memoir challenge, my own writing juices immediately started simmering. A link led me to  Irene Waters’ Times Past blog, where Irene has started a new monthly challenge for writers. What immediately marked this challenge as something special was its sociological bent. Participants are asked to state which generation they belong to at the beginning of their piece, so that in responding to the prompts, and reading others’ posts, writers will gain “social insights into the way the world has changed between not only generations but also between geographical location.” The first prompt is one that has been the crux of numerous conversations I’ve had with fellow Baby Boomers, most of whom have vastly increased their incidence of dining out since childhood. Here’s the prompt: The first time I remember eating in a restaurant in the evening.

The prompt immediately sparked a memory from about 1968. I was twelve and feeling very grown up with my stylish pageboy haircut and straight lime-green shift with a faux belt at the hip. I may even have worn fishnet stockings that night, held up with that queer relic called a garter belt. My mother had only recently allowed me and my twin sister to advance to a one-inch heel on our shiny patent-leather shoes.

The Green Dress
You guessed it; the green dress

It was some special occasion, perhaps my parents’ anniversary or my mother’s birthday. The seven of us had piled into my father’s boat-like Chrysler sedan for the ride over to Giordano’s Italian Restaurant on Central Avenue—upscale indeed compared to Sunnyslope. Russ Giordano was a friend of my father’s, a fellow veteran from the VFW club (Veterans of Foreign Wars). Along with our church, Most Holy Trinity, the Club constituted my parents’ primary social circle.

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The burgeoning Southwest hub of Phoenix Arizona, ca. 1960

The Chrysler was a recent luxury. My father’s paint-splotched Dodge pickup had served for some time as both his work vehicle (he earned his living painting houses all across the rapidly growing “Valley of the Sun,” as Phoenix is still referred to) and our family transportation. It was in the bed of that pick-up that we five kids had, until recently, ridden to our modest suppers out. Those were at one of two places in the north part of town where we lived, Sunnyslope, at both of which our play clothes were entirely respectable:

Sunnyslope late 1950s, early 1960s
Sunnyslope in the late 1950s, early 1960s

The most regular spot was the fish fry in the big hall at the Monfort post of the VFW Club on Friday nights, where permed and padded-hipped women called us “Hon” and sashayed loaded paper plates to the long folding tables. We squirmed on our metal chairs just long enough to eat, like skittish colts, the din of voices ricocheting off bare walls.  Nickels for the pop machine embedded themselves in our grubby, hot palms. A hulk of a bald man named Tiny could be seen through the cut-out window at one side, manning the sizzling fryers. Our hunger pangs subdued, we were off to the park across the street, but not without searching out the wizened old vet who always teased us through a little box on his throat.

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My family’s other go-to spot was the Northway Fish & Chips in Sunnyslope, where we dug into flimsy cardboard boxes of (yet again) deep fried cod squares or chicken or splayed butterfly shrimp served with a white bun and limp French fries. We gathered round a picnic bench under a festoon of fishing nets and glass baubles, jockeying for a place in the jetstream of damp air blowing from the swamp cooler .

That was before the change. Before the advent of my parent’s business venture. Before the five-bedroom, ranch-style house with the pool. The new Chrysler sedan and matching bedroom sets bought at auction.

And . . . a first grown-up dinner at Giordano’s on Central Avenue in Phoenix. The sophistication of the dimmed lights, the white linen tablecloth, the glass water goblets, the chilled oval tray of chilled crudités (celery sticks, radishes, carrots and fat green olives with pimentos) and salad served before something called an entrée. I sat straight and proper on my heavy wooden chair, dabbing the corners of my mouth with a cloth napkin.

Just as I had surely seen some actress do on TV .

 

Flash Fiction: Rebellion

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 13 Comments

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

Serendipity, Sakura, and the “Scribblers”

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 13 Comments

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I am averaging about a post a month since I created this new blog. Ideas roil in my mind; I catch a small one and pin it to a page of notes; I let the rest flutter into the rosemary bush. But today I am inspired again by writer and blogger Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch. This week’s theme is serendipity, but as always with Charli, other deep currents call for reflection. I resonated deeply with her reflections on taking the necessary time with the writing process:

Take action without holding tightly to outcome. Yes, have a goal, a plan of sorts, but keep an open eye to the unexpected. The agent who turns you down might buy you the time you needed to find a different path to publication. Or, in my situation with Miracle of Ducks, I knew something was off with the intro. My editor noted it but beta readers said it was fine. Because I’ve sat on it all summer, when I read the first chapter to my mother-in-law and her twin, it jumped out at me what was wrong. Truly a gift of sight! Sometimes we need to slow down and this process of writing invites us to do it, but we feel impatient. Fill the slow stretches with other projects. Learn to dance with your writing as if it were a life-long partner not some quickie date at the nightclub.

In my work on a re-write of a book for a retired neurosurgeon (coming on three years now), this slowing down is what I have had to accept. I feel pressure to deliver a completed project, and yet, I have discovered that stretches away from the book give me a fresh and much-needed perspective. These breaks allow me to work out, in those quiet moments while washing dishes or walking or watering the plants, the changes I know are necessary in my experiment with “genre metamorphosis,” that is, transforming my client’s completed life story into a commercially viable medical memoir. There’s much more to Charli’s post today, but her thoughts on writing triggered a long reflection on process, and resulted in a separate post on how that has developed with my current project.

Is Serendipity What You Make It?

But back to serendipity. Defined as a “pleasant happenstance” or “pleasant surprise,” the word has only been in use since 1754, and it rings with the fascination the British had for the exotic lands they so avariciously set out to possess. The English earl Horace Walpole coined the word from the place name Serendip, or Ceylon, inspired by characters in a fabled tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, that were always “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

We often use this word as a synonym for luck or chance. Of the former word, we often like to say that we make our own luck, and of the latter, that chance favors the prepared mind. It’s with those qualifiers in mind that I think of my own serendipity when it comes to writing. While we may not always see it when it arrives (take Charli’s example of being turned down by one agent as the avenue for another to open the door) or be prepared to accept the prize it brings, it seems in some ways that serendipity may very well be what Walpole originally intimated when he made up the word: equal parts accident and sagacity—or at least sagacity’s low-heeled but respectable cousin, preparedness.

Serendipity and the Writing Group

It was in some ways preparedness that brought me my own serendipitous moment, which came in the form of the flame-haired friend I call Sakura (cherry blossom in Japanese). I met Sakura some four years ago when my sister and I formed a small writing group we called “The Scribblers,” each of us inviting one writing friend to join us. Sakura was then the senior editor at the publication department of the top neurosurgical institute where the man who became my client, Dr. S., had built an illustrious and game-changing career in spinal neurosurgery. A shrewd and gifted science editor, Sakura is also a writer of sensuous and intelligent poetry, one whose high Romantic sensibilities immediately found resonance with my own, and whom I could easily imagine inhabiting Paris in the 20s or the island of Lesbos in the time of Sappho.

Dr. S. had been pestering Sakura for some time with the proposal that she help him write a book. That’s just what my overworked friend wanted to do after editing the dense and convoluted prose of a gaggle of brilliant demigods all day. She had declined, but now, the small size of our group allowing her to become familiar with both my abilities and my dissatisfaction with my job as an academic program director, a kernel of an idea popped in her head. Might she be able to provide a solution to both Dr. S.’s predicament and my own? Six months after meeting Sakura, I quit my day job to take on the project she had declined.

Now, it was serendipitous indeed that I met Sakura. It was serendipitous that I met her at a particular time—just as Dr. S. was intensifying his search for someone to help him with his book. Certainly the opportunity to quit my day job and delve into a full-time writing life was a “happy accident” that I was not consciously “in quest of.” But wasn’t there also some preparedness in the turn of events? Some sagacity in having committed to participating in the writing group to begin with? In seeding the bed in which a writing life might take root and grow? I dare say there was.

A Flash Memoir on Serendipity

The above ruminations were sparked by Charli Mills’s weekly flash fiction challenge at Carrot Ranch. Here’s the prompt:

October 14, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that reveals or explores a moment of serendipity. How did it come about? What did it lead to? You can express a character’s view of the moment or on serendipity in general. Use the element of surprise or show how it is unexpected or accidentally good.

My phone again. A drowned alarm clock palpitating in my purse. No doubt Jill. The dean and her urgencies. Fuck this 24/7 access!

Driving back from lunch. Fumbling for the squawking little warden in my bag. I’ll die in my car some day, I think. Dammit! Missed it. No, the predictable whistle of a text message. Immediacy is Jill’s mantra.

But it’s not Jill. Dear one,” the text reads. “Poss opptnty! Doc needs help w/ book. 30K, maybe more. Talk? Sak

Ahh, sweet little communicator. Cellular herald of new possibilities! Sit in my lap while I ponder the what’s-ahead…

 

 

 

 

Sharp Edge of Survival

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments
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Outskirts of Willow City, North Dakota

They make ’em different in North Dakota. They make ’em stronger.

I was reminded of this during a quick road trip to the great Peace Garden State last week, ostensibly to help my cousin Tommy drive the new Camaro he’d bought in Arizona back up to his home there. I hadn’t made the trip overland in decades, and thought it would be nice to retrace, perhaps for the last time, the journey my father had taken my family on several summers in my youth. That was during the 1960s and early 70s, when my father’s great boat-like Plymouths and Chryslers lumbered up and over the pine-studded, meadow-pocked ranges of the Rockies and the Black Hills, then sailed gloriously that long last day through leagues of fecund prairies, gathering dust, obliterating grasshoppers, making a dead run to the home farm like a hungry horse to its stable. Now I was back, for the fourth time in the last decade, in thrall as I have been since girlhood to the rough county lives of so many of my first cousins.

And this is where my claim for the superior fortitude of the Dakotans comes in. What evidence to have to support it?  I’ll give you two examples, one deserving of immediate dismissal by its sheer subjectivity and one with more journalistic cred.

And the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plains

Sunday August 23rd found me pulling into a field off a wind-swept crossroads outside of Dunseith, North Dakota with Cousin Tommy (this time in his Chevy Silverado). We’d planned to go straight to the horse show grounds where our mutual cousin Joe was to emcee the riders going through their paces. Sadly, Joe, who’d just quit his job as a long-distance truck driver to take a position as a school janitor, had been called in to work to deal with a reported bat problem (a sole bat as it turned out.) So in good North Dakota fashion, we were meeting in a field to have a quick visit. Joe was already there, with his brother Rick who’d picked him up in Rick’s own Silverado and was taking him back to his town thirty miles away.

Two Sensible North Dakotans, Cousin Tommy and Cousin Joe
Two Sensible North Dakotans, Cousin Tommy and Cousin Joe

The temperature hovered around 50. The wind made sharp staccato lashes of my hair. It had rained all day Saturday but today the sky was a deep, cloud-buffered blue. My thin cotton shirt gave scant protection and my bare neck taunted the prairie fates. I danced like a fool in the wind, slinging my song into its currents. “Nooorth Dakota, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains!” How intoxicating it was.

And how laden with dust and chaff in harvest season. That night my throat began to ache. By Monday afternoon when I deplaned in Arizona, my cold was full blown. My constitution had not been equal to that of my North Dakota cousins. It had fallen to the prairie wind, even in August.

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A farmers’ daughter falling from grace with the prairie
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Another sensible North Dakotan demonstrating proper wind wear

Climate and Culture of Centenarians

Don’t take my word on the robust nature of North Dakotans though. The home state of both my parents made news a year ago in Newsweek Magazine in a story entitled “The Oldest People in the US Live in the Geographic Center of North America.” That geographic center would be Rugby, the town where my Aunt Rita and Uncle Dick raised their brood of ten. According to the article, several factors contribute to this extraordinary level of health: for starters, take the stock. Most people in North Dakota go back generations (not counting the Native Americans who of course have been on the land for centuries). Those early pioneers who couldn’t take the bleak, frigid winters and backbreaking labor left, leaving survivor types. Second, consider community. People in the rural Midwest look out for each other. I saw this for myself on this recent visit when the welfare of a couple of elderly shut-ins was the main topic of conversation at a Saturday night corn fest held at the local Shooters Bar. And then there is all that clean air and water, at least outside of the fracking regions.

A Land that Suffers No Fools

Despite all the positives, this is a land that repays small lapses of judgment harshly. My father’s brother Jerry hit the angle of a ditch wrong coming out of a field in September of 1975 and tipped the tractor he was driving. It crushed him into the land he had farmed for half a century. The poetry of such an end has not lessened the tragedy of it among those who still tell the story all these years later. Then there was my grandfather’s brother Bill, who killed himself with a shotgun at the age of sixteen. I remember Aunt Rita and Aunt Jeannette nearly coming to blows as to how it happened at Uncle Roger’s funeral. Bill was either climbing over a fence or getting out of a truck when the gun went off. Either way, the gun was loaded and the prairie left to swallow the flood of pain that event must have unleashed. And twenty years ago, tragedy nearly claimed my cousin Janie’s son one record-breaking winter. Which brings us to this week’s flash fiction challenge over at Carrot Ranch.

Fence Down

August 26, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about the need for help in an extreme weather event. Is the help local or global? Does it arrive or the plea go ignored? Think about extreme weather occurrences and consequences.

Paul cranked the ignition. Only the same harsh rasp. And no service on the cell phone.

“Won’t be an hour,” he’d called, flinging his weight into the white, squinting wind; his mother’s voice a needle in the air before the sky sucked it up.

Now cold seared a sugar crust onto the windshield. The snow funneled down. It’d swallowed the fence in the south pasture. Now dense, wet waves of it lapped against the tires.

At least he’d found the cow, he thought, satisfied, settling back, closing his eyes, already oblivious to the sound of a truck door slamming.

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Cousin Tommy’s Windowpane, Winter 2014

 

 

Flash Fiction: Deer Struck

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 12 Comments
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Blessedly far from the highway.

I’ve got my excuses for not blogging more. The fallback one is the book I am rewriting for a client. Still, I know it’s a sham and that all those sentences running through my head should be finding their way to the screen (or the page.) So it is always a good stimulus to get Charli’s flash fiction challenge.

This week’s challenge comes from Charli’s surprise meeting with a deer on a highway in her home country of Idaho. In 99 words, (no more, no less), Charli’s stable of rough writers must tackle the premise: “I ran over a deer (or other animal) and have decided to nurse it back to health.” Not that, apparently, writing about hitting a deer is all that novel. Seems that Charli saw a piece in the Tahoma Literary Review bemoaning the popularity of the theme as a vehicle to play with metaphor: “The idea here (and it’s not a bad one) is to create a metaphor for the protagonist’s desire to rescue his/her life by rescuing another’s.”

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I’ll admit that the challenge did not immediately suggest the metaphor of rescuing a wild animal to me. Probably because of the novel I have been slogging through since before I went to San Francisco at the end of July (not that this fascinating book doesn’t deserve better than a slog). That novel, a science fiction classic titled City  by Charles Simak, chronicles the ten thousand-year demise of man and the rise of both robots and “Doggish” culture. Against the  backdrop of the human abandonment of earth for an evolved existence on Jupiter—and the more hopeful if flawed adoption of a Martian “Peaceable Kingdom” philosophy of brotherhood among beasts—the now dominant Dogs, taught to speak by the last reigning family of Websters, inherit an earth where the ancient blood instinct has been not quenched but stoppered. I won’t reveal what happens (only watch out for the ants!) It’s that bit about dogs being able to talk that dovetailed with Charli’s flash fiction challenge.

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That wasn’t the only thing going through my mind though. Like millions of people around the world, I felt my hackles rise over the “murder” of the “beloved” Cecil the Lion. My outrage was mitigated by a counterbalancing op ed piece by Goodwell Nzou, a Zimbabwean doctoral student in biosciences, questioning the skewed values that would place such a disproportionate weight on the death of a dangerous animal, one that for Zimbabweans represents terror and  untimely death, not an anthropomorphized, Disneyfied mascot. And this in the face of near total indifference not only to villagers killed or left hungry by wild animals but also by political violence or hunger. Nzou observes: “We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.”

Memorial light show for Cecil at the Empire State Building

The issues raised by this incident require more than a blog post but I think Americans, with our billion dollar pet industry, do need to get more perspective on these issues. We bemoan the fate of one star wildling but, as a recent New York Times article reveals, support with our dollars a booming sea slave trade on high seas fishing boats that trawl the sea bottom for cheap fish to convert into food for pets and livestock.

So, back to the deer. With these threads weaving through my mind this week, I set out to write one simple, little flash fiction piece for Charli’s challenge. Having a number of rural cousins for whom a deer in the road is an ever-present hazard, the scene came easily to mind.Thanks Charli. Here’s my flash.

Deer Struck

The deer leaped from the hillside, forelegs outstretched, real pretty, like wheat in the setting prairie sun. The near eye gleamed big as the moon. Then I slammed into her.

Goddammit, I thought, third one this year. I grabbed my old Winchester and kicked the door open.

She was lying on the highway, a gash in her hind haunch, one leg snapped like a dead branch. Not too heavy, I reckoned. Ought to get her loaded up all right.

I aimed, then lowered the gun. That moon eye was looking at me all steady like.

“Help me,” she said.

Flash Fiction: A Rich Little Poor Girl

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

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It’s flash fiction time as I ponder another challenge from Carrot Ranch. Charli’s May 27, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story, using the above photo. You can make it a garden party or an international spy thriller. Who is there and why? Does the backdrop scenery make an impact or is it ignored? The place is on an island, if you wish to make use of that. Go where the photograph leads you this week.

The stunning locale first suggested a tale of romantic suspense, like those so beautifully evoked by mistress of the genre Mary Stewart in The Moonspinners or This Rough Magic. A boat landing on a remote mountain estate seemed a perfect setting for a flash about a chance meeting between a smart, independent (and yes, attractive) young woman and a generic tall, handsome, initially-suspect-but-ultimately-kind-and-sympathetic love interest. After all, it was authors like Stewart and Victoria Holt, whom I read voraciously through my teens, that compelled me to pursue my own foreign and romantic adventures upon reaching the age of burning freedom myself.

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But then, a real-life story came to mind.

I heard the tale last July in Florida during a visit to a long-lost cousin of my husband’s. We’ll call him Billy. Affable, hard-drinking Billy had done very well for himself, not only in his career as an attorney but in his marriage to a wealthy sparrow of a woman with camellia skin and fair wispy curls, whom we shall call Savannah. On the patio of their luxury home, after a dip in the saltwater pool, I listened with deep fascination to Savannah’s story.

She had not been born into wealth. Rather, the youngest of seven children in a hardscrabble West Virginia family headed by a down-and-out alcoholic widower, the trajectory of her life had been radically redirected when a rich, local attorney adopted her as a young child. Overnight penury and hunger and squalor gave way to the privilege and trapping of a lonely, wealthy man’s only child.

Savannah never returned to the shack she’d shared with her rag-tag siblings, only visiting her father a few times before his death two decades later. Still, her wealth had not brought great happiness, or a love deepened by shared struggle, or health. Savannah told me her story in a thin whisper, conserving the breath now imperiled by her lung cancer. And during the six hours we spent there, Billy followed up on the libations he’d clearly imbibed before our arrival, downing beer after beer after beer.

The Lake House

Savannah surfaced and gulped the sweet, heavy air. It’s a dream, she thought. This lake, the blue mountains, the murmurings in the pines and skimming dragonflies.

She bobbed for a moment, then hoisted herself up the metal ladder. No, it was real, these wooden stairs, this path, the big house just ahead.

Clean, sweet-smelling New Papa was waiting there. She didn’t know why Real Papa had let New Papa take her away after Mama died. Or why New Papa hadn’t chosen one of the others.

A prayer beat inside her. Let me stay. Let me stay. Let me stay.

 

A Dawn Concert for Margaret

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 5 Comments
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Margaret: An indomitable spirit.

Margaret Egger Belisle was her name. Loyal wife, loving mother of five, dedicated nurse, rheumatoid arthritic. She suffered from her illness from just after my birth in the mid 1950s until her death in 1975 at the age of 53.

While I was growing up, I was oblivious to the harsh reality of her condition. It was just was the normal state of affairs. By the time my memories began to stick, she already relied on a cane. Then crutches. When the first wheelchair appeared, it was a hoot to take it for a spin down the hallway of our ranch-style home. Apart from those aids, she was like other working mothers I knew. Off she went to care for her geriatric patients every morning at the nursing home she had established with my father in 1967.

Mother’s disease followed its due trajectory through my high school years, reaching its pitch just as freedom sounded its shrill whistle most insistently in my ear. I was a freshman in college by then, commuting to class from home. I longed to move away. But Mother was still at home, deteriorating in front of our eyes. Not that RA takes a person quickly; it dawdles, inflaming another knuckle here, twisting another joint there, conspiring with a wicked cocktail of drugs to render the body a desiccated skeleton draped in swollen, mottled flesh.

It was the first stroke that put her out of commission. It hit her at dinner. One moment she was hunched at the end of the table forcing down spaghetti. The next, the left side of her body went slack, she slumped, and food fell from her open mouth. Two more strokes followed, successively robbing her of her few remaining comforts: reading, speaking, sharing meals. Like the first two, the third one cruelly refused to deliver the merciful coup de grace.

She languished in the family nursing home through the long summer before my sophomore year at college. I grew accustomed to her limbo state. Like the rest of the family, I visited, but I grew careless, even callous. I wanted to be out in the world, not sitting in that sterile room watching the arthritis tighten the screws, watching her wince with every small shift, trying to decipher her garbled speech. After one visit, I sat in my car in the parking lot raging at God for his abject cruelty. Why, why, why wouldn’t he take her?

The last time I saw her alive may have been the visit that coincided with my brother Jack’s janitorial shift at the nursing home. Jack was the big man of the family. He had been Mother’s arms and legs for several years, lifting her in and out of her wheelchair and bed, in and out of the car. Jack made sure to see her everyday, stopping in several times on his rounds. When he saw me sitting there, he lit in. “Where have you been?” he said angrily. “When was the last time you came down to see her? Your mother’s dying and you can’t be bothered to get your ass down here?”

I think I shot up and went at him, lobbing fervid excuses in my defense, my fervor growing in proportion to my guilt. Then we both heard a distressed, even indignant, sound coming from her bed. I turned. Her hand was raised, her finger pointing at me. Her eyes flashed the old spirited anger. Clearly articulating the words, she said, “I like you.”

Jack got his reward though. The only one down at the nursing home the morning she died, he was the last to see her alive. But even he wasn’t at her side when she breathed her last; he had slipped out to mop another floor. It breaks my heart that she died without Dad or any of her children at her bedside, but it would be even sadder if it weren’t for one small detail. Once we’d all assembled there, it was plain to see. Gone were the traces of pain that had gripped her face for so long. Instead, a peaceful smile graced her lips.

It’s too late now to make amends to my mother. How I wish I could sit by her side now, read to her, play music for her, take her mottled, broken dove of a hand in my own and hold it. But I can’t. I can only roll the memories and regrets around in my head. I can only belatedly offer apologies to the air.

This post was prompted by Charli Mills’s May 13, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that shows a hard place and a connection.

A Dawn Concert

Four a.m. The pain a staccato knock. No going back to sleep. She pushed up on gnarled hands, scooted, let the sharp ache push her into the wheelchair.

She followed the grooves in the carpet, pushed past the girls’ rooms, imagined their young bodies. They looked like her, thirty years ago, before the arthritis made a crippled birch of her.

She parked at the kitchen table. No coffee until Dan rose to percolate it. She waited.

At last a pale lemony light washed through the window. The familiar room emerged. And the concert began.

The robins never forsook her.

 

 

Beppu: A Flash Memoir for Spring

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments
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A view of Beppu, Oita, Kyushu, Japan

Spring always pulls me back to 1988, a pivotal year in my life. It was the year of change, of pulling up stakes, cutting ties, forsaking my stable landed existence for a leap into the unknown. It was glorious.

I had been living in Los Angeles for eight years. My initially enchanting if bohemian neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, had deteriorated, become the scene of racial confrontations and sad decline.

The relationship I was in similarly suffered. Having recently crossed over from my carefree twenties into the tick-tock thirties, the latent issue of babies awoke and set to screaming. I had never wanted them, or so I had asserted, had chosen my mate (an artist) not only for the mad love he inspired in me but upon the basis of a shared commitment to freedom, the pursuit of art, and childlessness.

But in crept my doubts. My dissatisfactions. At the same time I asked myself, if I was foregoing children, why was I locked into an arrangement that felt so confining?

What then? I had always had a wanderlust. My career as an ESL teacher had promised ripe opportunities before: sweet apples I had failed to pluck, had left to rot on the tree.

But now another fruit fell into my open palm. Sweeter than I had any right to expect. A teaching position in Japan. And not a job at one of those fly-by-night, exploitative, street-front language joints in Tokyo or Osaka, but a lecturer’s position in English at a college in the hot spring fairyland of a place called Beppu.

My decision on whether to eat that sweet fruit or let it remain unplucked changed the course of my future.

This post is my response to Charli Mills’s May 6, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that is a snapshot of spring…We could think of it as “spring eternal.” Warm, renewing, new life, hope.

Currency Exchange

He sat in the chair, vigilant, funereal.

“The taxi’s below,” she said. “I’ll call when I get there tomorrow.”

He didn’t rise. She gathered the last bags and closed the door behind her.

Freedom revved in her chest, maintained its thrum through traffic and customs. On the plane she exhaled into a blissful inaccessibility. Not even his voice could intrude now. Already he seemed far away.

She deplaned at Narita, boarded the island hopper to Kyushu. On the descent, she peered out the window. April sunlight glinting on the Inland Sea was a newly minted coin, just for her spending.

Janisha: A Flash in the Vein of “Black Lives Matter”

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 1 Comment
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In managerial stance, 2013

 

A blog I have come to follow during the last year is Charli Mills’s Carrot Ranch. Designed along Charli’s “buckaroo” persona, the site is both a showcase for Charli’s own literary outpourings and a refreshing and inspiring “watering hole” for a small but growing literary community; Charli has branded that community her “Rough Writers.”

Charli hosts a flash fiction challenge on her blog, and each week she posts a writing prompt for her stable of Rough Writers. Triggered by events in the wider world or by the quiet dramas of the natural sphere that surrounds her in Elmira Idaho, the themes selected are always ones that provoke a far-ranging response. The strictures she places on word count–99 words, no more, no less–encourage a tightening of focus and a keen, almost poetic, attention to vocabulary.

This week’s prompt, and the essay that precedes it, brilliantly conflate two recent devastating cataclysms, one natural and one social: the earthquake in Nepal and the racial turmoil in the United States that has seen a violent upswing in recent months in response to the anger unleashed by black communities over the deaths of black men at the hands of the police. Charli captures the fear, frustration, and helplessness many of us feel:

Like geological earthquakes, social ones rock the ground we stand upon. We feel ripped to pieces. We feel buried alive in the rubble of our riot-fueled angst. We feel the whole damn world is against us, no one understands.

What we need is common ground. To reach across the racial chasms we need to toss aside discomfort over “otherness.” Our first step is to recognize one race: human.

To toss aside otherness is a large order, one difficult to achieve even when the heart is willing. That being the case, the prompt this week is perhaps more challenging than most (and thanks to Charli for graciously allowing me to expand the word count.):

April 29, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that tackles racism. Think about common ground, about the things that rip us apart as humans. How we can recover our identities in a way that honors the identities of all individuals? What breaks the barrier of other-ness? Imagine a better tomorrow that doesn’t need expression in riots or taking sides on social media. As writers, think about genres, characters, tension and twists. We can rebuild.

As a member of the “dominant culture” in the States, I have had my own moments of reckoning over the years in regards to race. This flash piece (part memoir, part fiction) comes from one of them.

Janisha

Janisha planted herself before my desk. A bulwark, I thought.

“I want to talk to you,” she said.

Her tone conveyed a reprimand, not a request to a supervisor.

“Alright,” I said. “Have a seat.”

She ignored me. I looked uneasily behind her at the only door to my office and the empty hallway beyond.

“You might close the door,” I said, remembering the discrimination complaint she’d filed against another manager. I’d already gotten her play-by-play account of the incident, despite the dean’s warning not to discuss it.

I suppressed a sigh of defeat. Composed my face to its managerial mask. Wondered again what made this woman so bloody commanding: that throaty voice, those tight cornrows framing heavy brow and full purple lips. Her face belonged to some fierce Asian deity guarding a temple.

I cleared my throat. “You know it’s against policy for me to discuss your grievance,” I began.

Her face glistened like a polished stone. Glowering, I thought.

Then in a beat, she threw her head back, let out a full-throttle laugh.

“That’s not why I came in,” she said. And laid a plastic, motorized fan on my desk.

“Just gets so stinking hot back here.”