Tao of Poo

by Mara A. Cohen Marks

   

          My home is an oasis of beauty and order, but as much as I enjoy it, I spend most of my time in my head. Which sometimes feels like a dangerous neighborhood.

That’s why I’ve started meditating. It’s a remodel for my internal landscape.

I’m carving out time each day to just sit quietly. No multitasking, no worrying about the future or rehashing things that happened in the past. Just paying close attention to what’s happening right now, moment by moment.

And in this moment, I’m perched in a lovely half-lotus atop my brand-new meditation cushion. Although my eyes are closed, I know the cushion complements my bedroom’s decor. Its curry color looks quite handsome against the wheat-colored background of my antique wool rug from China. This pleases me. What’s more, although my eyes are closed, I know the brand-new standard poodle napping beside me atop my antique wool rug from China will not shed. This also pleases me.

In point of fact, the poodle’s eight years old, so it’s only brand-new to me. My daughter was the main reason there’s a poodle in my bedroom. She’s wanted a dog for the longest time. “Oh Mommy, see that fluffy dog? Isn’t it cute? Please, can I have a dog? Someday? Or at least a fish?” But every time my daughter said, “dog,” I envisioned slobber on my silk upholstery, scratches on my glossy black floors, and fleas in my Egyptian cotton sheets. I felt like a failure as a mother, more concerned with maintaining the museum-like atmosphere of my home than with my daughter’s happiness.

I wasn’t entirely sold on getting a dog, but my interest was piqued when I heard about an eight-year-old standard poodle that needed a home—a retired show dog who’d given birth to several litters of champion poodles. Such a dog would be obedient and even-tempered. As far as dogs go, this one sounded ideal.  

But adopting a champion standard poodle is an entirely different prospect than say, bringing home a fish. Prior to welcoming such a creature into my home, I wanted to feel confident I’d be able to welcome her into my heart. My husband and didn’t tell our daughter what we were up to the day we went to meet the poodle. I stroked the poodle’s curly black fur and enjoyed its surprising softness. I held the poodle’s long, elegant muzzle in my hand and admired her regal face. I imagined how comforting I’d feel at night, knowing the poodle was there in my room, asleep on the antique Chinese rug. The poodle and I gazed into one another’s eyes, and I decided that yes, I could open my heart to such a creature.

I imagined my daughter’s excitement to finally have a pet. She’d have her pet, and I wouldn’t have to contend with an untrained puppy.

Come to think of it, my mind is like an untrained puppy. Notice how my attention just wandered off—replaying events of the recent past that explain why there’s a poodle beside me right now? And the thing I need to remember right now is that I’m breathing. I’m perched atop my meditation cushion, paying attention to nothing but my breathing. I’m paying attention to my breathing as I sit atop curry-colored meditation cushion that complements my bedroom decor beside the poodle napping on my antique wool rug from China.

The poodle sure sleeps a lot. I hope she isn’t sick or anything. That growth by her rectum doesn’t look so good. It’s probably nothing. Her veterinary records indicated it wasn’t anything to worry about.

The next day, a veterinarian recommends surgery to remove the growth beside the poodle’s rectum. But his floors are dirty, so I decide to get a second opinion. The veterinarian at a well-regarded animal hospital where the floors are immaculate explains the poodle suffers from an enlarged perianal gland at imminent risk of rupturing. I present the poodle’s health records, which indicate the perianal gland in question had been surgically removed two years earlier, but the veterinarian at the well-regarded animal hospital with immaculate floors is unimpressed. “They probably didn’t get all the cells,” he shrugs.

The poodle undergoes surgery later that week. It costs approximately what a reputable poodle breeder charges for a healthy puppy, but afterward she’s given a clean bill of health. Back home, the poodle spends most of the next two days sleeping. She dozes on the antique Chinese rug while I read instructions for a walking meditation by Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. “Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet,” he writes. “… every step makes a flower bloom under our feet.”

That night I awake to the sound of the poodle barking. Undoubtedly she’s attempting to alert me to an intruder. Glancing at my husband’s unoccupied pillow, I surmise that poodle has mistaken whatever action movie my husband is watching downstairs for an intruder. “It’s okay,” I whisper groggily. But the poodle keeps barking. “It’s okay,” I say again as I stagger out of bed. I head toward the bathroom where my robe hangs from the hook on the back of the door. I tiptoe over creaky hardwood floors until I feel the antique Chinese rug under my feet. “Shhh,” fearing the barks will wake my daughter. “It’s just Daddy watching TV—”  

My voice trails off as my right foot slips on something cold. Recovering my balance, the ball of my left foot comes down on something squishy. “Oh-no. No, no,” I chant. My stomach tightens as whatever I’ve just stepped in oozes between my toes. Hobbling on my heels, I traverse the remaining distance over the antique Chinese rug to the bathroom, punctuating each step with my desperate mantra: “Oh-no, oh-no, oh-no.”

I reach the bathroom and flip on the light. Time stands still while I struggle to comprehend what my eyes are seeing. My feet are covered in brown sludge. Turning to face my bedroom, it is as if an army of Buddhist monks have conducted a walking meditation there, tracking enough dung across the antique Chinese rug to fertilize an entire meadow of flowers.

I conduct a triage operation on my feet and bathroom tile and return quickly to the bedroom to assess the situation. The situation is not good. The poodle, its vision obstructed by a lampshade-shaped surgical collar, paces the antique Chinese rug. Coppery marsh-like paddies are spaced irregularly over the wheat-colored wool. Several paddies bear smeary imprints of feet—some human, some canine, some both human and canine. “No, no, don’t move!” I plead. “Stay!” I correct myself. I lift the poodle, careful to avoid her sutures, and carry her to the stairs.

“Help!” I call my husband’s name in a loud stage whisper so as not to alarm our daughter, then louder: “Help! Help me!” I stagger down the stairs toward the landing.  In all the excitement, I’ve forgotten my robe, and as my husband and I reunite before the giant window overlooking the street, I have only the poodle to cover my nakedness. Exposing myself in the light of the moon and the glow of the street light, I bark, “You take the poodle! I’ll handle the poop!”

Back in the bedroom, I flush what’s flushable and scrub whatever’s left over with Nature’s Miracle, a scented product meant to prevent repeat offenses. Why? Why? Why? asks my puppy-mind running in circles. Stop, I command. The poodle just had surgery, and her bowels are just now waking up. The poodle was barking. The barking was probably the poodle’s attempt to warn me she’d had a mishap. The poodle probably feels terrible about this entire episode. I’m surprised by my equanimity, and I credit my meditation practice.

Sure enough, the harrows of the night recede in the dawn of the new day. I lie in my bed, my attention focused on my breathing. Nothing to do right now but breathe. Outside my windows, the morning sun kisses the top of the eucalyptus tree, and I watch the branches sway gently in the breeze. When I’m ready, I rise and inspect the antique Chinese rug. The wool feels coarse where I’d been scrubbing, but the color seems fine. This rug is very old, I tell myself. Probably it has been through worse. As for the poodle, the veterinarian has given her a clean bill of health, and with luck, she’ll see my daughter through her high school years.

Wearing her surgical lampshade collar, the poodle snoozes beside me while I settle into half-lotus on my meditation cushion. I close my eyes and feel my lungs expand and contract. I feel the cool rush of air through the tip of my nostrils as I inhale. The smell of Nature’s Miracle is very strong. It reminds me of Tang. Did the astronauts really like that stuff? I feel my shoulders relax as I exhale. I inhale again. Do I smell poop? I peek at the poodle to reassure myself she’s still sleeping.

After dinner the next night, I’m cleaning kitchen when I hear the click-click of the poodle’s claws climbing the stairs. Isn’t that sweet, I smile to myself. The poodle is tired and has decided to retire to the antique Chinese rug. Fifteen minutes later, I head upstairs toward my bathroom, intending to floss my teeth. When I reach the landing, I look up, and the poodle’s eyes lock on mine. Her face, framed by the lampshade collar, wears a mournful expression. “What did you do?” I say accusingly. I tell myself not to jump to conclusions, but my heart pounds with dread. I race up the remaining steps and down the hall to my bedroom.

I arrive at the doorway and flip on the light. I’m dismayed to discover that the poodle hadn’t gone upstairs in innocence. Instead, she’d returned to the scene of last night’s crime with the express purpose of repeating her offense. Anger, denial and betrayal compete for dominance as I take in the tableau—smeary turds deposited at random intervals across my antique Chinese wool rug.

I cry out for my husband who rushes from the den. “Bad dog!” he scolds. The poodle cowers and attempts to run away, but she’s no match for my husband. I think he’s been watching another action movie. He scoops up the poodle and deposits her in our kitchen. Where she will pass another night.

         

My sleep is fitful, and the sky is the faintest violet when I feel a set of eyes staring at me. The poodle has managed to push open the kitchen door and now has her front paws on the edge of my mattress, two inches from my face. “Off,” I growl.

A few hours later I head to Petco where I purchase a crate for the poodle to sleep in at night. The crate is beige and brown plastic and clashes with my decor. I put the crate in my kitchen. Beige and brown and hulking, it looks like a VW bus. I look at it parked there, and l feel sad as I drink my morning coffee. I look at it parked there, and I feel sad as I sit down to dinner. I move the crate to a corner of my bedroom, near my closet, off the antique Chinese rug. With my eyes closed and my back turned on the crate, I sit on my meditation cushion, and I feel sad. Very, very sad.

“Hello, Monarch Rugs,” says the voice on the other end of the phone.

I tell the voice the size of my rugs and give my address. I tell the voice about the antique Chinese rug and the fact that it is wool. “Wool is highly absorbent,” observes the voice.

“Think you guys can get rid of whatever the poodle is smelling so she doesn’t keep doing it?”

“We don’t guarantee against red wine or pets.”

“Okay, I understand you don’t want to give me a guarantee. But do you think you can get rid of whatever it is the poodle’s smelling?”

“We don’t guarantee against red wine or pets.”

I perch atop my meditation cushion on my bedroom’s naked hardwood floors. The room seems austere and uninviting. I close my eyes, and try to follow my breath. Instead, I follow the click-click of the poodle’s claws as she wanders around the room. I hear her walk behind me, toward my side of the bed. I make my eyes slits, and see the poodle is sniffing my pillow. I close my eyes, and I hear the poodle click-click back to the floor beside me and lie down. I hear the poodle sigh, and I know for now my bedroom is safe. After a time, the poodle stirs, and I follow the sound of her click-click walk to the French doors overlooking my backyard. There she stops. I imagine her crouching in preparation to poop. Opening my eyes, I see the poodle standing alert, ears cocked, facing the backyard. She is the very picture of focused attention.

The full gravity of my situation begins to sink in as the next days and weeks unfold. One morning, I’m unloading the dishwasher while I drink my morning coffee. Turning around, I realize the poodle has wandered off. I discover her standing on the vintage Japanese rug in my dining room, and on the ground beside is a pair of fresh, brown turds. Several days later, the poodle savages a meticulously woven Navajo rug. And twice the poodle lays siege against a humble mass-produced doormat hecho en Mexico. The poodle embraces multiculturalism and does not discriminate.

But I do not blame the poodle. Instead, I greet each doo-doo boo-boo as a fresh opportunity to judge my shortcomings.  It’s my own fault for failing to anticipate that even a former champion show poodle would need to be taught where it’s acceptable to “go.” It’s my own fault for not realizing that even a mother who’d raised several litters of champion show poodles would need instruction as to how to navigate her new home and to recognize which door leads outside. It’s my own fault for not watching her every moment. I have to be more vigilant.

This awareness of my failings doesn’t prevent me from feeling irritated and bitter. The poodle anticipates my every movement, and she accompanies me everywhere. Sometimes she’s so close she causes me to trip. I tell myself I should be generous and offer the poodle some affection, some token of reassurance that she’s welcome in her adoptive home. Sometimes I pet the poodle, but inside my heart feels closed and stingy. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to kick her.

Things were better before the dog. Things were better when my antique rugs were safe. Things were better before I had to pay such careful attention to the comings and goings and bodily needs of the poodle, before the poodle transformed the oasis of my home into a prison.

At night I toss and turn, analyzing each new mishap. In the light of day, the situation appears equally bleak. I sit on my meditation cushion, I close my eyes, and all I can picture is the poodle and her pooping. The poodle’s life expectancy is another four to seven years. I envision that time stretched out ahead, one long trail of excrement leading throughout my once-beautiful home.

“I’m sure the poodle can learn where she’s supposed to poop, but I’m not sure I’m the one to teach her.” I’ve interrupted my husband’s action movie to tell him this. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m exhausted. Sleepless nights have become a regular thing.

My husband pauses his movie. “Look,” he says, struggling to sound patient and reasonable. “Training a dog just takes time. And until then, we just have to watch her, that’s all.”

“We?” I say, my voice rising. “What do you mean ‘we?’ I’m the one who’s stuck here all day! I can’t watch her every second!”

“We should just put all the rugs in storage,” he proposes.

“Turning the house upside down? That’s the whole reason we went with an eight-year-old dog!” Struggling to regain my composure, I express the thoughts I’ve been afraid to admit. “Listen, I know we just paid for this big surgery. B-b-but it’s just not working out!” My eyes turn to faucets and the words tumble off my tongue before I can stop them. “I mean, it’s all I do—keeping an eye on her to see if she needs to poop and waiting for her to poop and cleaning up her poop and never knowing if maybe she’s going to poop!”

“Oh my God, you’re obsessed! I don’t want to talk about the dog and her poop!”

But there’s little else I can talk about. There’s little else I think about. My daughter sees I’m coming unhinged. “Mommy, it’s okay. I understand if we can’t keep the poodle.” I don’t want to disappoint this little buddha. I think of the effort I’ve already invested and the sickening possibility it’s all been wasted. I decide I’m not ready to concede defeat.

I spend hours in the yard, watching the poodle for some signal, some indication she is ready to poop. “Go poo-poo,” I say brightly. “Go poop!” I command. But the poodle seems more interested in eating the herbs we’ve planted in the garden. Tiring of my vigil, I bring the poodle inside. Wearily, I ask my husband to please keep an eye on the poodle so I can meditate before dinner.

Twenty minutes later and feeling quite refreshed, I decide to prepare my family a nice dinner. But there’s been an exciting football game on television, and my husband’s gone off to watch it in the den, leaving the dog locked in the kitchen. When I encounter her there, the poodle greets me enthusiastically. Unlike me, the poodle does not worry about the future, and she doesn’t regret the past. The poodle lives only in the present moment, and she’s forgotten about the three small turds she’s deposited on the kitchen floor while I’ve been upstairs meditating.

But I’ve been meditating and am the picture of calm as I clean up the poop. Sure, I’m disappointed to have missed a teachable moment while I was off meditating. But because I’ve been meditating, I have the clarity of mind to recognize there’s no point reprimanding the poodle for an offense that occurred during some indeterminate past moment I hadn’t been present to witness. Anyway, no rugs were damaged because the poodle pooped on hardwood floors. I have the insight to recognize this as progress. Because I’ve been meditating.

I feel my heart pumping from the morning’s brisk walk as I bow low behind the poodle. “Good girl!” I enthuse in an octave higher than my normal voice. “Good poo-poo!” I make this pronouncement with genuine pleasure. That’s because for the past several weeks I’ve subjected the poodle’s bowel movements to mindful attention—charting their time and location. The wisdom born from this daily practice enables me to recognize the small sack of shit dangling from my right hand as a precious gift. The poodle has given me a gift of freedom, good for the next five hours. During that time, I’m free from worry about the dog, and I’m free from worry about my rugs.

I’m also free to enjoy to the poodle. So later when I settle onto my curry-colored meditation cushion that complements my bedroom decor, the poodle will stand before me. She will stare at me with soft brown eyes, demanding my focused attention. I’ll cup her chin in one hand and stroke the back of her neck with the other. “You’re a goo-ood gir-rel,” I’ll whisper. When I drop my hands to my lap and close my eyes, the poodle will nudge my arm with her wet nose, and I will pretend to ignore her until I hear her lie down on the antique Chinese rug. When I hear her sigh, it will be my signal to focus my attention on my breathing. And to ponder the environmental impact of those plastic bags of poop.

Mara Cohen Marks’s stories have appeared in Alimentum, The Hairpin, Jewrotica, Medium, Mothers Always Write and Pentimento. Her essays and op-eds have been featured by New America Media, Los Angeles Daily News, LA Business Journal, La Opinion, and rarefied scholarly journals including Urban Affairs Review, Sociological Perspectives, and Political Research Quarterly. She holds a doctorate in political science, an invaluable degree for her current position in the field of uncompensated domestic labor. She lives with her family in Los Angeles. The poodle is doing just fine.

Fear

by John Guzlowski

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the near northwest side of Chicago, an area sometimes called Humboldt Park and sometimes called the Polish Triangle. A lot of my neighbors were Holocaust survivors, World War II refugees, and Displaced Persons. There were hardware-store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead comrades, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russian Gulag. They were our moms and dads. Some of us kids had been born here in the States, but most of us had come over to America in the late 40s and early 50s on US troop ships. 

As kids, we knew a lot about fear. We heard about it from our parents. They had seen their mothers and fathers shot, their brothers and sisters put on trains and sent to concentration camps, their childhood friends left behind crying on the side of a road. Most of our parents didn’t tell us about this fear directly. How could they?

But we felt their fear anyway.

We overheard their stories late at night when they thought we were watching TV in another room or sleeping in bed, and that’s when they’d gather around the kitchen table and start remembering the past and all the things that made them fearful. My mom would tell about what happened to her mom and her sister and her sister’s baby when the Germans came to her house in the woods, the rapes and murders.

You could hear the fear in my mom’s voice. She feared everything, the sky in the morning, a drink of water, a sparrow singing in a dream, me whistling some stupid Mickey Mouse Club tune I picked up on TV. Sometimes when I was a kid, if I started to whistle, she would ask me to stop because she was afraid that that kind of simple act of joy would bring the devil into the house. Really.

My dad was the same way. If he walked into a room where my sister and I were watching a TV show about World War II—even something as innocuous as the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes—and there were some German soldiers on the screen, his hands would clench up into fists, his face would redden in anger, and he would tell us to turn the show off, immediately. Normally the sweetest guy in the world, his fear would turn him toward anger, and he would start telling us about the terrible things the Germans did, the women he saw bayoneted, the friends he saw castrated and beaten to death, the men he saw frozen to death during a simple roll call.

This was what it was like at home for most of my friends and me. To escape our parents’ fear, however, we just had to go outside and be around other kids. We could forget the war and our parents’ fear. We’d laugh, play tag and hide-and-go-seek, climb on fences, play softball in the nearby park, go to the corner story for an ice cream cone or a chocolate soda. You name it. This was in the mid 50s at the height of the baby boom, and there were millions of us kids outside living large and—as my dad liked to say—running around like wild goats!

In the streets with our friends, we didn’t know a thing about fear, didn’t have to think about it.

That is until Suitcase Charlie showed up one day.

It happened in the fall of 1955, October, a Sunday afternoon.

Three young Chicago boys, thirteen-year old John Schuessler, his eleven-year old brother Anton, and their fourteen-year old friend Bobby Peterson, went to Downtown Chicago, the area called the Loop, to see a matinee of a Disney nature documentary called The African Lion. Today, the parents of the boys probably would take them to the Loop, but back then it was a different story. Their parents knew where they were going, and the mother of the Schuessler boys in fact had picked out the film they would see. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for kids to do this kind of roaming around on their own. We were “free-range” kids before the term was even invented. Our parents figured that we could pretty much stay out of trouble no matter where we went. We’d take buses to museums, beaches, movies, swimming pools, amusement parks without any kind of parental guidance. There were times we’d even just walk a mile to a movie to save the ten cents on the bus ride. We’d seldom do this alone, however. Kids had brothers and sisters and pals, so we’d do what the Schuessler brothers and their friend Bobby Peterson did.

We’d get on a bus, go downtown, see a movie and hang out there afterward. There was plenty to do, and most of it didn’t cost a penny: there were free museums, enormous department stories filled with toy departments where you could play for hours with all the toys your parents could never afford to buy you, libraries filled with books and civil war artifacts (real ones), a Greyhound bus depot packed with arcade-style games, a dazzling lakefront full of yachts and sailboats, comic book stores, dime stores where barkers would try to sell you impossible non-stick pans and sponges that would clean anything, and skyscrapers like the Prudential Building where you could ride non-stop, lickety-split elevators from the first floor to the forty-first floor for free. And if you got tired of all that, you could always stop and look at the wild people in the streets! It was easy for a bunch of parent-free kids to spend an afternoon down in the Loop.

Just like the Schuessler Brothers and their friend Bobby Peterson did.

But the brothers and Bobby never made it home from the Loop that Sunday in October of 1955.

Two days later, their bodies were found in a shallow ditch east of the Des Plaines River. The boys were bound and naked. Their eyes were shut with adhesive tape. Bobby Peterson had been beaten, and the bodies of all three had been thrown out of a vehicle. The coroner pronounced the cause of death to be “asphyxiation by suffocation.”

The city was thrown into panic.

For the first time, we felt the kind of fear outside the house we had overheard inside the house. It shook us up. Where before we hung out on the street corners and played games until late in the evening, now we ran home when the first street lights came on. We started spending more time at home or at the homes of our friends, and we stopped doing as many things on our own out on the street: fewer trips to the supermarket or the corner store or the two local movie theaters, The Crystal and The Vision.  The street wasn’t the safe place it once had been. Everything changed. Now we were conscious of threat, of danger, of the type of terrible thing that could happen without notice.

We started watching for the killer of the Schuessler Brothers and Bobby Peterson. We didn’t know his name or what he looked like, nobody did, but we gave him a name and we imagined how he might look. We called him Charlie, and we were sure he hauled around a suitcase, one that he carried dead children in. Just about every evening, as it started getting dark, some kid would look down the street toward the shadows at the end of the block and see something in those shadows. The kid would point and ask in a whisper, “Suitcase Charlie?”

We’d follow his gaze and a second later we’d be heading for home.

Fast as we could.

Home again, we’d catch our breath and sit down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a sandwich. Our moms and dads would come from the living room or the basement and sit down across from us. They’d want to talk. They’d smile and ask us why we were home so early. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, time for the nightly news.

We’d tell them about how we were playing outside, joking about stuff, making up stories about Suitcase Charlie, trying to scare each other, nothing but joking around.

They’d nod and say, “It’s good to laugh, good to joke around.”

We wouldn’t tell them about the fear we felt, the fear they knew in ways we never would.

John Guzlowski’s writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ontario Review, North American Review, Salon.com, Rattle, Atticus Review, and many other print and online journals here and abroad. His first novel Suitcase Charlie, a mystery set among Holocaust survivors in Chicago, is available from Amazon. His poems and personal essays about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his forthcoming book Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica Press, March 2016). Of Guzlowski’s writing, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said, “He has an astonishing ability for grasping reality.”

Poppies

by Lisa Lebduska

       

        Standing in front of a produce wagon on a tree-lined street in Bay Ridge, dazed but smiling, a swarthy teenage boy holding a basket of onions and swiss chard guards my kitchen. He makes an unlikely sepia angel, poised over a junk drawer in Connecticut. Some days he watches me watch chickadees squabble over thistle; on others he listens as I argue with my mother over the phone about why we need to retire her Honda, and with it, though I do not say this, her ability to drive.

Somewhere under the boy’s wave of chestnut hair is my grandfather.

        Cinched by a belt circling his waist almost twice, Pop’s pants jut out above his ankles and dusty broken shoes, inherited from his younger but fatter brother Tony. He holds the bridle of a horse that is wearing blinders. At sixteen he bought the horse without realizing that it could not see, discovering its dark truth in an epiphanic tumble that landed him, the horse, the wagon and twenty-five watermelons in a roadside ditch. Often have I stared at the picture and wondered if my grandfather had yet discovered the animal’s secret. He gazes out at me, far into a future that has outlived him, not knowing the woman who would be looking back at him, someone he would know only when he was an old man and she was a child, the granddaughter who had inherited his yellow eyes.

That blind horse, a parable for Poppy’s life, served as the center of Thanksgiving conversations that began with my mother’s declaration: “Pop never worried. He was no businessman. He bought the horse thinking he was getting a bargain. Women came to buy cucumbers and ended up with free strawberries and carrots. It’s a miracle we didn’t starve.” Whenever she said this, I would look at the ziti trays, roasted turkey and vegetables crowding the table and think the real miracle was that no one had exploded.

        Pop left the produce business to drive a taxi. One night, a man approached his cab at a stoplight, and when my grandfather rolled down the window to see what he wanted, the man reached in and tore off shirt pocket loaded with change and bills. The second time he was robbed, a passenger jammed a gun into the back of his neck.

        “Pop never worried,” my mother says while heaping mashed potatoes on to my Thanksgiving plate.

“Didn’t he get held up?”

        “Yes, but it didn’t faze him. He came home and said he was on the evening news. He never mentioned it again.”

Pop made Camels his daily passengers. Thoughts of his passengers’ vagaries may have played a role in his decision to smoke; likewise, careening cars, buses, trucks and other taxis, along with his need to support a growing family. Despite regular prodding by my mother and grandmother, he refused to quit. More evidence, my mother said, that he didn’t have a care, though sometimes she provided a denouement to his smoking tale in the form of a nurse who showed him an x-ray of blackened lungs. The next day he traded his Camels for sourballs. 

In his later years, Poppy resembled a smooth-shaven Italian Santa Claus: a prodigious belly braced by suspenders, full cheeks of baby skin and a twinkle in his cat’s eyes. He would eat a whole chicken in one sitting, smiling contentedly until the cannoli platter appeared, when he would announce he had “just enough room for dessert” and request two tablets of saccharin for his coffee.  

        Another picture, imprisoned in a Gimbel’s shopping bag at my mother’s house, once told a story similar to my sepia angel’s. I had not seen this picture in over a decade, but last month I rediscovered it during a search for the powder blue Dearfoam slippers my mother had bought but could not find. There’s a horse in this one, too, but it’s a pony, and a tiny girl, banana curls framing her face, sits upon its back, beaming. I recognize her, but I need my mother to tell me. I tell myself that if she can identify the girl, she will be more whole than not, more present than gone. If she passes the quiz, I tell myself, she will be happy and I am doing the right thing leaving her in this house with the wobbling toilet bowl and the crumbling roof, where she wants to be, with the mice and her memories.

When she sees the picture, my mother pipes up, “What a day that was. Aunt Aida was giving birth to Tony. They wanted to get me out of the house, so Grandpa brought me to Prospect Park. Just the two of us. We ate charlotte russe.” She smiles, satisfied with the joy that only the deep past now brings. She knows this story, where it will go, who the heroes will be, how it will end. It is all hers.

“I was so excited. I had never been on a pony. Pop spent a week’s salary to have my picture taken. Grandma almost killed him.”  I imagine my grandmother, renowned for her ability to cut any size cake into enough slices for seventeen people, asking her husband how they would pay their bills. On this particular day, I do not want to go there with my mother, so I return to the photo that I have studied on and off for the last forty years, hoping that it will save me, save us from that dark alley.

“Mom, what is that?” I ask, pointing to her girl self.

“That was my party dress. Grandma made it for me. I was so proud. It was yellow and edged in lace, and she did my hair. Those were the first pair of shoes I got that hadn’t been handed down from Aunt Susie. I loved those shoes.”

 “No, not the dress,” I say. “Over there, down by the saddle.”

She reaches for the magnifying glass and squints. There, where the back of my mother’s frilly dress meets the worn saddle, is a man’s roughened thumb, the sole trace of a vigilant father in heroic contortion to avoid the camera.

“Is that Poppy’s hand?”

My mother presses the photo close to her face. “Oh yes. That’s right. Pop was holding me up. He was absolutely terrified that I was going to fall off.”

Her memory belly full of sweet sponge and raspberry, she smiles. “I remember now.”

Lisa Lebduska teaches writing and directs the college writing program at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where her students bring lives to words. She has published work in such journals as Narrative, 4’33” and Writing on the Edge. With her husband, she grows prodigious imaginary vegetables for neighborhood chipmunks and deer, with the hope that one day they will stop settling for real-life seedlings and sprouts and she will be able to enjoy the first true tomato of her adult life.

Alachua Autumn

by Carla Charleston

 

My North Florida world is about to change.  Dark billowing clouds suspend above the earth—a cold front is on the way.  Hurriedly, I move pots of anthurium from the pool deck to the living room for a warm transition into spring.  In Alachua, “Latchuway” according to locals, tropicals don’t survive outdoor winters.  

A gust of wind rattles the trees and spills handfuls of confetti-colored leaves.  Flame red crepe myrtles, magenta dogwoods, and golden oaks.  Alachua autumns inspire a Miami girl who grew up thinking such color transformations only happened “up North,” in colder climes.

A leaf in salmon shades floats down onto the birdbath.  Yellow butterflies circle purple lantana and sip nectar from wine-colored periwinkles.  Satsuma branches hang like willows, heavy with mottled orangish fruit awaiting winter’s alchemy for transformation into golden oranges.  A squirrel darts under a Margarita daisy bush to scavenge long-buried hickory nuts.  Fresh sand mounds appear around the armadillo’s burrow in a far corner of the yard.  Will anyone mind if she remains?  Or if during summer drought, the deer munch the daylilies down to their roots?

Ginger leaves, so lush in summer, rustle like brown wrapping paper.  I pull up dried stocks of daisies, zinnias, and cockscomb, break off the seed heads, and shake them over upturned soil—the beginnings of next spring’s garden. 

My friend Wanda will arrive any minute.  She can use the seeds, too.  I jam desiccated plants and stacks of plastic seedlings pots into a yard bag to await her arrival.  I add other garden treasures for Wanda’s collection.  Amaryllis, epiphyte orchids in baskets and terrestrials in soil pots, a small Meyer lemon, and three knock-out roses.

In the distance I imagine golfers, a ruckus of laughter, curses, and whizzing balls.  No fairway chatter today.  No games.  Course closed.  For sale.  A sign of the times.

Don’t forget Wanda’s frangipanis, beautiful flowers in Hawaiian leis.  We’ve had “Whitie,” our oldest, for twenty years.  Her branches almost fill one side of the pool deck.  Last summer, a smaller frangi swelled with multiple shades of pink flowers.  In Alachua, whites grow more easily than pinks.  This year Whitie won’t have her blanket and electric light bulb by the pool.  Instead, we’ll pull her in close, under the roof, and wind her branches with sparkling Christmas lights for warmth and color.  Will she stay warm?

I set two young frangipanis by the lemon.  Overhead, a gaggle of Sandhill cranes stream south in v-formation.  Like colorful leaves, Sandhills are part of North Florida autumn.  The pomegranate, another long-term survivor, beckons me.  Now a collection of caramel-colored sticks with yellow leaf-fringes, in spring he’ll sprout orange tissue-paper blossoms.  

Wanda’s white pick-up truck pulls in the drive.  Quickly we load the plants and garden tools from my garage, and then say good-bye.  No more annuals or perennials for me.  I have no need for tools.  I’m moving to a new condo in Jacksonville.  Like pomegranate and Sandhill cranes, I must transition.  But will I survive there?

 

 

Carla Charleston is a freelance writer from Jacksonville, Florida.  Dr. Charleston was a professor and scientist in the field of communication sciences and disorders.   She has published six books and over fifty refereed articles in her field.  She is currently marketing her novel, Finding Faustena, the story of Americans rebuilding Naples after World War II.

 

Photos courtesy of Carla Charleston