Carrot Ranch

Beacon of Hope in Troubled Times

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 16 Comments
Image of beacon of light from the starry sky
Photo by Nate Bittinger

When will the aliens come to rescue humanity? How will the revolution start? Why don’t those few leaders with a moral compass stand up to speak truth to illegitimate power? Where is that flashing beacon of hope?

The Beacon that is Literature

I see little on the horizon to answer these questions. So, I turn to literature. And having neglected some literary landmarks over the years, I dove into Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 “ambigous utopia,” The Dispossessed. A tale of two worlds cut off from each other by centuries of distrust—the larger planet, Urras, resembling earth with its wars and extreme inequality between rich and poor; and the other, Anarres, a  bleak and impoverished moon settled by utopian anarchists—it is a timely story, indeed.

Told through the philosophical voice of Shevek, a physicist from the moon who endeavors to reunite the worlds, it is impossible not to apply its lessons to the current state of affairs in the world. The riots that took place in Hamburg during the G20 summit this last week (anarchist driven perhaps, but also the expression of ordinary people looking for their own beacon of hope) aptly illustrates the anger and frustration.

Freedom and Responsibility

I’ve only just begun the book, but a passage struck me last night, compelling me to ponder the relationship between “order” and “orders,” between freedom and responsibility. The scene involves an argument the young Shevek has with a friend (Tirin) over the reasons why no one from the moon has visited the mother planet, Urras. “We are forbidden,” Tirin, says. To which Shevek replies:

Forbidden? . . . Who forbids? . . . Order is not ‘orders.’ We don’t leave Anarres because we are Anarres. Being Tirin, you can’t leave Tirin’s skin. You might like to try being somebody else to see what it’s like, but you can’t. But are you kept from it by force? What force? What laws, government, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature as Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

Certainly the book strikes a chord with me now. I still suffer a deep distress and pervasive melancholy over the election results of last year. And the ongoing assaults to our collective sanity and well-being from the current administration only amplify those feelings. Like others, I threatened (however hollowly) to move to Canada once the “Orange Menace” took office. But echoing Shevek above, I am America. I might like to see what it is like to be Canadian, but I can’t, really. The laws of either country notwithstanding, America is the skin I wear, no matter how deplorable I find nationalism.

Our Responsibility to Others is Our Freedom

Sadly, as Samuel Johnson said in 1775, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” My deeper distress comes not from the fact that such an unabashed scoundrel operates in the world, but that so many of my fellow Americans voted for him.  Sure, his followers saw him as the law-and-order candidate. The candidate who would protect our freedoms. But “order” in this case comes down to “orders.” And what a slew of executive orders we have seen. I don’t believe those “patriots” most given to “bullhorning” our freedom—those for example, who flaunt giant flags on their pickup trucks—take freedom to be the same thing I do…or patriotism for that matter.

Not that they don’t make a connection between freedom and responsibility. Not that we don’t have to fight for our freedom godammit. But what that brand of American seems to care about most is the infringement of their particular freedoms: to own assault weapons; to remove regulations that interfere with their own financial gain; to use the excuse of “religious freedom” to deny services to groups of “others”; to secure their own piece of the pie even if it means others get none. It’s a freedom enforced by law, not one defined by our responsibility to each other.

Freedom or the Totalitarian State?

These themes are nothing new of course. In thinking about all this, I pulled from the shelf Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytical classic Escape From Freedom. From the back cover of my husband’s 1967 Avon edition:

If man cannot live with freedom, he will probably turn fascist. . . Using the fundamentals of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Dr. Fromm reveals the illness of contemporary civilization as seen by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule. While the rise of democracy set certain men free in a political sense, it has simultaneously given birth to a society in which the individual feels isolated, dehumanized, and alienated. This situation has frequently resulted in blind devotion to a Leader, abject submission to an all-powerful State, and barbarous politics of aggression and mass murder.

Is this where we are in the United States at this moment? On the brink of fascism? Or have I overindulged in “fake news” put out by the “false media”? Considering that de-legitimization and restraint of the press is a common tool of despots, (witness the now closed White House press conferences), I don’t think I am overreacting.

So, I look for a beacon of hope. While our would-be fuhrer tweets his messianic diatribes to the angry dispossessed, I throw my lot in with the thinkers: with the writers and artists and filmmakers and educators who keep the intellectual flame alive. At least we are not burning books…yet.

As for beacons, thanks to Charli Mills and Carrot Ranch for Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge July 6provoking these thoughts with her prompt of beacon for this week’s flash fiction challenge.

Beacon

I search the night sky. As if the answer were there. As if science fiction were true and benevolent aliens could save us. Why bother? I see nothing. The stars are snuffed out.

Here below flames rip at cars and barricades and shop fronts—bonfires of fury and pain. The undercurrent of violence deafens me, pulls me down on streets wet from water cannons. My hands bleed from the bricks I have thrown.

You pull my arm. You scream. The maelstrom snatches your words and eats them.

But I follow at last—you—a brighter beacon than the flames.

Blogging: Purpose, Focus, and Value to Readers

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

So, what is this blog about? I admit that if I look at my list of recent posts, it’s all over the place. I see posts about writing, memoir, flash fiction, personal challenges, social justice themes, politics. In short, I see a recipe for mental fragmentation and confusion. I am grateful for those readers who have stuck with me through my faltering steps on the blogging pathway, but as the time approaches for New Year’s resolutions, it’s clear I need to bring some focus to this site.

As with any endeavor, it is important to learn from the masters. One go-to resource I use is Jane Friedman, whose blog and newsletter helps “authors and publishers make smart decisions in the digital age.” Jane, a Great Courses professor and contributor to Publishers Weekly and other outlets, has created a blog and website brimming with resources for writers, with links to her publications, classes, and related services. It was Jane’s webinar on WordPress that gave me the confidence to move beyond my first Google Blogspot blog, Memoir Crafter.

Through Jane, I have found other outstanding websites. Most recently, I followed a link in her post from October, “What Should Authors Blog About” that took me to writer, traveler, and unconventional living guru Chris Gillebeau’s blogging guide and manifesto, “279 Days to Overnight Success.” According to the statement on the manifesto page, Gillebeau’s blog is for “Bloggers, writers, online artists, and anyone otherwise interested in creating a new career or expanding their influence using social media.”  What the manifesto immediately did for me is get me thinking about the purpose of my blog and the possibility of threading the topics that are important to me into one cohesive theme. And if you are just starting out with a blog, his post on how to start one is one of the most succinct I’ve seen.

Another useful resource comes in the way of the bloggers and writers I follow regularly, those, for example, whose blogs support writers through the Literary Citizenship Model that Jane discusses in one of her posts. I follow several that are true to the goal of “celebrating and bringing attention to authors, writing, and books—the things you presumably love and want to support”:

Then there are author blogs. Among some I follow are:

And finally, the plethora of writing sites with blogs, such as:

These are just a handful of course, and I’m sure you all follow well-written blogs on topics other than writing that, despite their unique angles, convey a clearly recognizable theme and fulfill their purpose in giving readers useful and timely information. One blogger I follow that participates in the Carrot Ranch flash fiction challenges is early-childhood-educator Norah Colvin. Norah stays true to her purpose of inviting early childhood educators to support children’s learning through the use of her original teaching materials. Most recently, she is using her blog to launch Readilearn, a website that offers early childhood teaching resources.

So, it’s back to the drawing board for me. With today’s post, I plan to return to my original purpose and themes in blogging here. Those include topics related to memory and memoir writing; the craft of writing; and Word of the Week, exploring arcane and beautiful words. I’ll explore flash memoir through Charli Mills’s flash fiction challenges. And I’ll weave in two values in my philosophy of life—the pursuit of EXCELLENCE and the importance of HABIT—as they relate to the craft of writing.

If you blog, what have been your experiences in developing your online identity and themes? Have you found ways to incorporate seemingly unrelated topics into your posts without sacrificing focus?

 

Labor Day Writing on Nature from Charli Mills

~ Jeanne Lombardo

No doubt many of you have escaped the city this Labor Day weekend for inspiring vistas, the lull of waves or wind in the pines, the rejuvenating and grounding powers of Nature. If you haven’t (poor Jeanne has only her back yard for solace), or if you just love beautiful writing, you’ll be transported by this lyrical and evocative post on nature and saying goodbye from writer and blogger Charli Mills with two superb flashes to follow. Click on the link for the full post. You won’t be sorry.

And best wishes for a great break from your labors!

There’s a place on earth where cedar wax-wings dip low enough to know air and water amalgamate. High overhead the sky is blue as only sky can be; no jewel can rob its glory. Osprey fish the river and eagles hunt from higher above, sometimes stealing from the osprey. It’s as if this place can boast of paradise, whisper of dreams, vanquish the veil between those who sought shelter then and now. Animals, birds, humans in a circle of life, a beating heart of beauty. And I dared to name her parts.

Source: August 31: Flash Fiction Challenge « Carrot Ranch Communications

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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…