This Is a Dickie Lee Song

by Maria Trombetta

          Dammit, Dickie Lee, you were supposed to live forever. You always said to me, “No way, uhn uhn, not me. I’m never gonna die. I’m gonna live forever. I’m stayin alive, like John Travolta. Stayin aliiiive, iiiiiiv—ah!”

          He used to say he was born in the Sonoma State Hospital on March 6^th, 1948. I can’t find any records of anyone being born there, no doubt his parents brought him there when he was a baby, less than two years old, after they realized he was blind. Albert says that Dickie Lee was on the little kid unit with him, Baine Cottage. When I met Dickie Lee he asked me my name, date of birth and place of birth. Vital facts that he stored in his mind for years. The fever that made him lose his eyesight may have pushed another part of his brain into overdrive, because he had a thing for dates and for music, an incredible memory bank that held lyrics and birthdays. He could tell anyone what day their birthday was going to fall on this year and next year. When I saw him in last April, he told me that in 2015, my birthday would be on a Friday.

          “Your name is Maria Trombetta and you were born on January 30^th in Santa Rosa, right? You are married to Jonathan Palmer and his birthday is September 9^th and he was born in Baltimore. Is his sister still Diane Bowcher and her birthday is March 31^st?”

---

         

The first time I saw him at the Neighborhood House day program, he was sitting scrunched up in a corner next to a CD player, grumbling about having to listen to the Beach Boys over and over again. His head was folded down to his chest and his arms were wrapped protectively over his red lunch bag that hung from a black strap around his neck. He was small, slight, with dark short hair. I was stationed on a chair in the hallway, doing my “observation”—a week long training that consisted of sitting and watching what was going on, watching the dramas of thirty-five unique lives play out on a six-hour stage. Dickie Lee was in the art room, the room designated for quieter work, which also seemed to hold the people who were able to retreat out of the main room’s chaos without drawing attention from the staff. So most of these folks were either napping or doing mosaics with dried beans and glitter glue. Once in a while, usually on their way to take someone else to the bathroom, a staff person would pop in to the art room and press play on the CD player. I don’t know how long the Beach Boys were in there before I started my “observation” but it was on repeat for two days at least before Dickie Lee freaked out. The Boss was taking him upstairs to the van, arms linked together to guide him, when he turned his face up towards hers and let her have it.

          “I don’t wanna listen to the same goddam songs over and over! I’m gonna blow this place up! I’m gonna blow all you up!” He pulled away from her, elbows out and free and stretched himself taller.

          “I’m going to blow it up!”

The Boss hustled him into the elevator, promising new music tomorrow in a syrupy voice. I heard her start humming a song and by the time they reached the lobby Dickie Lee was singing, “Sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time …” with gusto.

          I made a mental note to change the CD every hour. At the end of the week I was allowed to go in the art room. Dickie Lee refused to move out of his chair, but while I was painting with Albert or helping Monica with her magazines, we would sing with each other. Mostly Beatles at first, because those songs I knew well. Then after a few months, we branched out to Creedence and the Rolling Stones and by then he would stand up and paint with me.

---

         

Do you remember when we went on the summer trip to Santa Cruz and I convinced you to ride on the Merry-Go-Round? You got stuck getting off the horse and kept shouting that your leg was going to break? I had to lift you up in the air and wiggle you off the horse and heave you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. You said I saved your life.

---

         

The doctors say cancer has spread to his brain and he has maybe two months, maybe less. I have to go see him. I don’t want to go. He is receiving hospice care at his group home. My impression of group homes is that they are one step up from nursing homes, with plastic covers on the furniture and a lingering smell of pee. I don’t want to see him hurting and angry and belligerent. I don’t want to see him dying the way I saw Bill dying in SF General, shriveling up in the bed, or Albert, lost in his own mind and furious at everyone in the world. I dread calling his home. But when the phone rings, a really nice woman answers. She says yes, of course I can come visit and is this Maria Trombetta? I answer her, sounding I’m sure, confused.

          “He talks about you all the time. My name is Maria too. He always says to me, ‘But you’re not Maria Trombetta’.”

---

         

I cry when she hangs up. Even after I’ve been gone for five years, you must talk about me the way I talk about you. Telling small legends of our lives to other people.

---

         

When I introduce myself, people either forget my name instantly or start singing one of the songs associated with it. “Maria” from West Side Story is the most common for men between the ages of fifty and seventy, “Ave Maria” for the older folks who fancy that they can really sing, “Take a Letter, Maria” by a few obnoxious people, once the Blondie song by a slightly blitzed bartender, but the most common and horrible, from The Sound of Music, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”.

          This song was my sister’s weapon of choice for many years. She was clever with her forms of torture and as siblings do, knew what drove me to tears. The brown plastic Fisher Price record player placed just above my head on the dresser. She held the record like a trophy out in front of her, just out of my reach. One, two, three waltzing twirls around our bedroom she spun, pretending she was Julie Andrews on the mountaintop. Green shag carpet tickling my feet as I jumped for it, trying to swat it away from her.

          “Nooo!” I wailed.

Laughter. Evil sibling laughter.

          And as a child, I didn’t know that the nuns in the movie were worried about her free-spiritedness, or really why the nuns would care. All I heard was a nasty, mocking voice telling me that I was flighty and stupid and a big pain in the ass. When people sing it to me now, I have to stand there with a forced smile on my face and wait until they get through four or five lines before they forget the rest of it. Then they finish and I am still standing there, wanting to flee, and they always, always laugh a shrill little laugh. Like the song was a really funny inside joke.

---

         

I had been working at the Neighborhood House with Dickie Lee for two years when The Sound of Music appeared in a pile of videos after a trip to the library. I cringed and put Ben–Hur on top, hoping it would disappear. But, one movie day, somebody slipped it into the VHS machine. A great, green whirling Julie Andrews started singing before I could stop her, and Dickie Lee sat right next to the speaker on the T.V. I made a point to clean the bathrooms for a long time that day to avoid it.

          When the movie was over (well, we decided it was over after the goatherd puppet performance, since everyone but Dickie Lee and Rene had fallen asleep), Dickie Lee started humming the soundtrack. Days of humming, humming, humming. Songs that he had not heard in years, songs that had been displaced by Phil Collins and Elton John, they all came back. He hummed them all in a loop, until one stuck. The Maria song. Patting my arm, he hummed it. Coloring his sunrise pictures, he hummed it. It wormed its way around his brain and dug in. And then, after about a week of this, a week of me dreading that it would happen, it happened. He started singing. Quiet at first and then loud enough for the room to hear.

          “DA DADA DU DA DU DA DUUDO!”

Oh no. Oh no.

          “DA DA DU DU DU DA DU DOOO!”

I felt my face turn red hot, an instant sunburn. I wanted to hide. I wanted my name to be Julia, Rhonda, Sarah, anything but Maria.

          But this is what came out of his mouth.

          “NOBODY solves a problem like MA--RIA! NOBODY can catch a cloud and pin it down! NOBODY SOLVES A PROBLEM LIKE MA—RIA! Nobody holds a moonbeam in her hand.”

He lurched out of his seat and stood in the middle of the room, reaching his hands out for me, wobbling back and forth as he sang. I grabbed his hands and he pulled me in real close, arms crooking around my neck, chin stubble scraping my ear.

          “Nobody! Nobody solves a problem like Maria Trombetta!”

---

Were you the first person who made me feel loved?

---

         

I ring the bell on Tuesday and the other Maria opens the door. She is just as nice in person and the home is clean and beautiful, thank god. She brings me into his room and hooks him up to the oxygen tank so he can talk and breathe at the same time. He is in a reclining hospital bed, eyes open. I sit next to him and he doesn’t turn towards me. He looks smaller, face shaved, stubbly black hair cut short, a small sixty-six-year-old man sinking in to himself. I see the postcard of the Skunk Train I sent on the floor next to the bed, so someone must have read it to him. I rest my hand on his upper arm and try to think of something to say.

          “I heard a Billy Joel song on the radio today.”

          “Which one?” He rolls his head slightly back and forth towards me.

          “Piano Man.” Which is not true, it was “Only the Good Die Young”, my least favorite and too real for this moment. I suddenly can’t think of anything to talk about. I feel awkward and sad. His white t-shirt has a tiny spot of dried blood on it, right under his ear. I look at his dresser and the CD’s stacked up on it in desperation for a song. Journey? Is it possible that I will cry now every time Journey comes on the radio? He saves me by belting out Tina Turner unprompted. We sing “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and move on to “True Colors” and “Joy to the World” and “Stand by Me”. He tries to whistle “Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” but the oxygen tube is in the way and he starts clawing at it. I hold his hand and convince him to leave it in. We talk about when I came to San Francisco, and he remembers that I worked at the café in Noe Valley with our friend Max, who later got a job at the Neighborhood House after I put in a good word for him with the Boss.

          “Max Doyle was born on October 5^th in Washington D.C.”

          “You are right, Dickie Lee. When I started working with Max, he was only nineteen.”

          “He is thirty-three now. Just turned thirty-three.”

           I notice the tiny hairs on his scalp and how they have thinned over the years. I suddenly see an image of my father in a hospital bed, hair falling out, skin yellow, propped up on pillows and me by the side, rails digging into my arms. What will I sing to my father when it is his time? “Blackbird”? “I’ve Just Seen a Face”? The fear of that day hits my stomach and I feel like I can’t breathe. This is coming for everyone, everyone I know and love and it is my job to watch and hold their hands and then be left all alone.

          An hour goes by of us singing and talking and by the end of it I feel like no time has passed. We were right where we always started. But I know I should go now. His breathing is off and he seems tired. I say that I will come back next Tuesday to visit. The other Maria adjusts his oxygen and looks at me with big eyes and tells me to please come back next week, that he will look forward to it so much.

---

         

I was ready to come visit you on Tuesday, October 14^th, I made plans to leave early and my bag was packed. I called your home and Maria answered again. She said she was sorry. It was fast. You died on October 10^th, a Friday.

Maria Trombetta is a graduate student in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a nonfiction book about the Sonoma Developmental Center, one of the last institutions in California that houses people with developmental disabilities. She received her B.A. in Journalism from San Francisco State University and has written stories for the Oakland Tribune and the Sonoma Index-Tribune. She abandoned the city for the country and now lives with her family three hours from civilization, on the wild coast of Northern California.

Midnight Stops

by Eugene Durante

The Manhattan bound train is empty as it lurches forward and begins its midnight journey out of Coney Island. Winter winds whip through the train when its doors open as passengers board at the elevated stations. Most are headed to a night shift job or New York night out. My police radio is dead silent. With only one year on patrol I have yet to learn the best crime fighting efforts do not come from police executives or politicians, but from the tendencies of Mother Nature.

My assignment to late night train patrol was precipitated that winter by a ‘lush worker.’ He was cutting open the pockets of passengers to remove personal items while they slept. The crime is not atypical for the hour or area, and the eyewitness description of the perpetrator was a black male eighteen to thirty years old wearing a black jacket, black jeans, and armed with a box cutter. My platoon had been briefed numerous times about the robbery pattern, and with rookie ambition we certainly generated many stop and frisk reports that winter for the NYPD.

As the train pulled into the Neck Road station, I saw a figure on the opposite platform. He was a tall black man with braided hair, and he wore a full length black jacket and black pants. His hands were in front of him and he was facing the wall while awkwardly pivoting left to right. I could not tell if he was kicking the wall, marking it with paint, or moving back and forth while urinating.

Utilizing the advice of veteran patrol officers, I exited the train and stepped down a few stairs to tactically survey the cloaked figure out of view. Fortunately, his train had also just left and there was ample observation time. His behavior persisted, so I quietly approached for a closer look, but while crossing to his platform I made a common rookie mistake.

My radio had begun screeching and I quickly muffled it with my hands. The male froze, then looked around. I was surprised he heard the noise from the distance, but Neck Road is an eerily silent place at night. Prior to renovation, the train station was a spawning ground for rats and pigeons, and to this day there is not enough revenue to justify staffing the token booth overnight.

Broad shouldered, the curious figure turned my way and stood silent as I slowly approached. His hands were at his sides and his fingers were spread apart. He looked about forty years old from the sporadic gray hairs in his braids. I sensed he was no stranger to being stopped by the police.

“How you doin?” I casually asked, utilizing a common Brooklyn greeting.

“I'm lost,” he said. “I fell asleep on the train.”

Getting closer, I noticed black dress shoes and a black suit beneath the trench coat—not the common attire of a lush worker.

“Must’ve been a good sleep,” I said. “You’ve drooled on yourself.”

He started wiping his coat with a handkerchief, yet he awkwardly looked away and not at the stain as most people would. Then I noticed his walking stick and backpack on the floor next to a garbage pail.

“I know my home station perfectly,” he said gathering his articles, “But I have no idea where I am now. Thank you very much for being here.”

“Just check your belongings, Sir. Unattended items grow legs quickly in Brooklyn,” I replied. “These scummers will steal your walking stick if you weren’t looking.”

He smiled, and with that we broke the ice.

We made small talk as we walked toward the Manhattan bound platform. He reminded me to let the blind person grab your arm for better guidance. We exchanged names as I led him to a bench.

“So how long are you on the job?” he asked while using air quotes. I replied, then I enquired if he was born blind or lost his vision over time.

“My sight has diminished in the last decade,” he said, “but I can still see silhouettes.”

“That's very fortunate,” I encouraged.

“Sometimes I wish I never had vision though,” he said while adjusting his long coat in the thick wooden arm rests of the bench. “I think I'd have less anxiety overall.”

He continued; “Instead of earning my independence as a man in this world, I'm forced to live with my mother and sister for support. I'm blessed that I still have family, but I always dreamed of moving out of the ghetto after college. It's sad enough that I've changed, but I have witnessed myself become a different person to others.”

His voice then cracked, “To the outside world I’ve become a ‘he,’ as in would ‘he’ like a chair or booth, or would ‘he’ like another cup of coffee...as if ‘I’ never existed. You have no idea what it feels like when I go shopping and I ask the salesman if a shirt is a lighter or darker tone of black, and his response is, ‘Does it really matter?’”

“I used to always date hot women,” he said, “and now I'm alone. Heck, I don't even know what the Spice Girls look like.”

The blind man became silent and looked away into the darkness. The rattle of a distant train started vibrating the tracks. We then boarded the train together, arm-in-arm, toward his home station. On our way we discussed our experiences growing up in Brooklyn and how the city was changing. Upon arriving at Newkirk Avenue he softly pushed my arm away.

“I got this,” he said, and he breezed up the stairs and out to street level. I followed him up the steps, and we stopped together on the sidewalk. I offered to walk him home, but he insisted on walking alone.

“No problem,” I said. “I understand we both have reputations to protect in these parts.” We shook hands and extended that half-a-hug gesture that men do so well.

“Hey, Gene,” he said, “thanks again for being there, and more importantly, thank you for treating me like a regular guy.”

He walked away as my radio reverberated off the buildings on Marlborough Road.

Though I do not remember his name, the man’s heartfelt compliment was poignant and lasting. That appreciation is rarely experienced on patrol any more. Yet after two decades in public service, I’ve learned to embrace the lasting value of small deeds. Helping many people in little ways, with empathy and compassion, can be more beneficial to the spirit than helping a few people in big ways. Such interactions benefit the public by breaking down barriers and cops’ professional selves by promoting positive solutions. As police officers, we’re conditioned to think our careers are defined by newsworthy events, but too often we overlook the touching moments that help us become better cops, and better human beings.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Eugene Durante is an NYPD patrol officer and front row observer of the offbeat. City University of New York educated, Durante received his B.A. in Criminology and his Master's in Public Administration. "Gino" is well-known for not stroking others and not getting stroked in the process. 

Keisha, Urban Warrior

by Desirée Magney

          The familiar Marimba African rhythms chimed and I glanced at my iPhone to see who was calling. “Blocked Call.” It could have been a solicitation or a wrong number, but I knew it might be a defendant in one of my cases or, more importantly, one of the children.  

          It was the children who were my clients, but that didn’t stop the parents or guardians from calling me. Any time of the day or night, any day of the week, these calls came in. Of late, I had been working a particularly difficult case.  Seeing the disintegration of this family was akin to watching a train wreck in slow motion and I was at a loss to know how to stop it. The local evening news had reported another drive-by teen shooting in Anacostia. My stomach clenched. Was it my boy? I worried about these kids I represented as if they were my own.

          “Hello,” I answered tentatively. It was Keisha, the defendant mother in one of my custody cases.

“Miss Desirée, will you please come to mental health court with me tomorrow?”

Keisha was the biological mom in one of my cases. I was the lead attorney and was assigned a “shadow” attorney who would assist me. My shadow, Joan, and I hadn’t known each other previously but we became fast friends over the many hours spent pouring over case files, researching criminal background records at DC Superior Court, and talking over the unusual facts of this case. Joan would travel from Manassas, Virginia, catching the Metro train from Vienna to Judiciary Square, a good hour plus commute. We met at the DC Superior Court, Joan with a baguette always in hand, to begin our long hours playing detective, tracking down the facts, and requesting related case files. We bonded over lunches at the courthouse café, discussing Keisha’s children as well as our own, early on discovering we had daughters born on the same day, same year. We called them our twins. I asked her why she always carried a baguette. She explained it was for the long trip to and from the city. Thin and athletic, she admitted she didn’t act out of hunger; rather, she had a theory if she ate enough bread it would soak up any liquids in her system and she wouldn’t need to pee during the long commute. We laughed, a great diversion from delving into the heady, complicated lives of the parties in our case. As a fellow woman of a certain age, I understood what Joan meant. In that instant, we bonded.

A few years ago, I became a child advocacy lawyer with a non-profit organization. I was there at its inception at the invitation of a longtime acquaintance. She and I, like many others women lawyers we knew, had suspended our practice of law when we had children. Now that our children were getting older, there was a feeling that it was time to use our legal training pro bono to give back to the community. I served as a court-appointed guardian ad litem, representing disadvantaged children in often harrowing child custody cases.

---

Keisha was the biological mother of a number of children, two of whom we now represented. She wisely had given up custody of all of them. Having suffered for many years with drug addiction, she admitted to using crack cocaine throughout her pregnancies. Impoverished, she often found herself homeless and prostituting for drugs and money. She had been diagnosed as bi-polar and had been in and out of drug treatment centers and psychiatric hospitals. With no way to support herself, let alone her children, she had the good sense to know they would be better off elsewhere.

 She gave two of her children to a neighbor woman, Kim, who couldn’t have any children of her own. Tamika and Samuel had lived with Kim since their birth and were now teenagers. They knew Kim wasn’t their biological mom, but she was their real mom in their minds, although they regularly talked to Keisha and saw her on occasion. Kim finally had decided to legalize her custodial arrangement over the children. Joan and I were baffled as to why, after all these years, Kim would choose this point in time to come to court to seek an order of custody. But Kim had been recently disabled and unable to work and it eventually became clear that she needed a formal custody order to be able to obtain more benefits. Meanwhile, Keisha never disputed custody and the man listed as the defendant biological dad, Jimmy, didn’t dispute it either. At times, the entire group seemed like one big happy family. Joan and I weren’t sure why the court even felt the need to appoint a guardian ad litem in this case, given that none of the parties contested the best placement for these children. But obviously, the court had questions and as time went on, we understood why.

For years the case dragged on, the court and Joan and I reluctant to relinquish oversight of these children, wanting to keep an eye on their progress, as I recommended in my status reports and relayed in court hearings held every few months. As the kids became older teens, Kim was less able to exert any control over them. They rarely went to school. Kim would call me at 6:45 in the morning, even when I was on vacation, and ask me to talk Samuel into going to school that day. Tamika regularly got into fights, shoplifted, and was on probation. She lashed out on the streets, at school, and at home, once even throwing cleaning solution at a relative.

Joan and I got to know Keisha, Kim and her boyfriends, Jimmy and his latest woman friend, and most importantly, Tamika, and Samuel, as well as their great grandmother, aunts, and uncles. We had visits to Kim’s homes and the children’s great grandmother’s home. We talked on the phone to school and to community counselors, principals, and teachers. We attended numerous meetings at the children’s High School, met with the children’s education attorneys, the police, and Tamika’s probation officer. We tracked down allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Joan and I sought counseling for the kids and got them placed in Sasha Bruce, an organization offering services for at-risk children. We were more social workers than lawyers. Desperate for this family to survive, to thrive, we spent countless hours on the phone discussing their circumstances and what else we could do for them.

Meanwhile, tensions had been rising between two Anacostia neighborhoods. Tamika, hotheaded and ready to battle at any perceived slight, got into a fight at school one day defending her brother. Samuel, soft spoken and sweet natured, with beautiful, long dreadlocks, had been accosted in school by a group from another neighborhood. Tamika defended him in the hallway. Security guards broke it up and the police were called. Joan and I went to the local police precinct to discuss what appeared to be rival neighborhood gangs and the impact it was having on our clients. The police officers said the groups weren’t gangs, just feuding neighborhoods. It seemed to be a distinction without a difference.  

A few days after the incident at the school, shots rang out at the Anacostia Metro station.  Samuel was targeted. The shooters were cruising, looking for the “kid with the dreads” but found his cousin instead. The shooters missed and continued their search for Samuel. He began receiving threatening Facebook messages. At that point, I was no longer willing to visit the family in their home, not wanting to risk becoming a drive-by shooting victim, a very real possibility even if accompanied by security personnel provided by the legal non-profit. Kim had a car, so I asked the family to meet at our offices instead. Kim and Samuel arrived, his once lovely dreads freshly shorn. Kim was upset.

“Can you believe he cut his dreads? My boy cut his dreads! He shaved his head!”

I cocked my head and furrowed my brow at her. Sometimes the kids had more sense than she did. How could she be so oblivious? At least he knew what he needed to do to survive on the streets.

---

Meanwhile, Keisha was dealing with her own demons. During the pendency of the case, she was in and out of drug treatment programs, often homeless, and was arrested once again for prostitution. But she came to court for each custody hearing—unless she was in rehab or jail—and supported her children the best way she knew how by staying in contact with them and buying them things whenever she had money. The kids stayed in touch with Keisha’s family—their biological grandmother and aunts and uncle. Keisha seemed sincere in her attempts to “right her wrongs.” She would ask Joan and I to pray for her. She always thanked us for the job we were doing helping her children. It was clear to me she loved them. In my mind that was evident by the fact that she gave them up. But she struggled to get her life in any order to take them back.

She was enthused when a halfway house program taught her some computer skills and tried to help her prepare for her GED. But I still needed to sit with her outside the courtroom before each hearing and quietly read aloud my findings in the status report I had written for the judge. We sat shoulder to shoulder on a bench outside the Family Courtroom as I read to her in hushed tones. It broke my heart to have to read the truth I had written about her, the truth I had to tell the judge. But Keisha listened attentively, shook her head in acknowledgment, and slowly ate a piece of Joan’s baguette as I read—baguettes that Joan now brought as much for Keisha, as for herself. We never knew when Keisha had last eaten.

As she quietly listened to me reading the sometimes brutal truths of her transgressions outlined in those court filings, somehow we became closer, and I realized Keisha’s inner strength, her realization of who she was, and her determination to try to change. Although, she could have easily resented the candid nature of my reports, she knew I was only doing what I had to, by virtue of my position upholding her children’s best interests under the law. She accepted these truths for what they were even though she fought against what seemed to everyone else to be her fate.

“Oh, that Keisha. She’ll be back on the streets in no time,” Kim would say to me when I told her that I had heard Keisha was back in rehab. “She’ll never get better. You wait and see, Desirée.” But I had faith.

So when I got that call from Keisha asking me to meet her in mental health court, I agreed, gently reminding her that I was not her attorney but that I would be glad to be there for moral support. She assured me she already had a court-appointed attorney for these hearings. If she could get through the mental health court diversion program, her record would be expunged, but it entailed her staying in rehab, going for drug urine tests, and not getting re-arrested.

I met her outside the courtroom the next day. We waited for her attorney to arrive so that he could enter her name on the already lengthy, post-lunchtime docket. It was going to be a long afternoon. When the judge returned from lunch, the courtroom doors were opened. Keisha and I found seats a few rows from the defendant’s table and waited for her attorney to arrive and her name to be called. Keisha relayed the latest about all her children, showed me photos of her new grandbaby, told me of her newest drug treatment program. She was excited to be given yet another chance. She looked good. Her hair was set in small plaits around her head. Her skin had a healthy glow. She was smiling.

We did this three times. At what would have been her fourth and final hearing—the one at which the judge would have presented her with a rose and a certificate of completion—she arrived at the courthouse looking disheveled—her hair was dyed pink in places, and her skin was blotchy. My chest tightened. I knew these were bad signs. She sat down and proceeded to tell me that she had gone off her psych meds, had been arrested again, and her urine tests weren’t clean. I knew it was likely the US Attorney’s office would recommend jail time. I placed my hand atop hers and told her how sorry I was. I also told her that I had faith in her and that ultimately, I knew she could do it. I reminded her how often she had picked herself up and that I was certain, she would again. She smiled weakly and squeezed my hand.

Shortly after that day, Kim moved herself and the kids out of DC into Maryland. As a result, the custody case in which I had been the guardian ad litem was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. I lost touch with the kids. Even though they had my phone number, technically I wasn’t to contact them.

A month later, my iPhone rang. The caller ID gave no name or number. Keisha couldn’t afford her own cell phone any more but she had good news to report. She was back in rehab, doing well. She had picked herself up once again, was soldiering on. I couldn’t help but smile and feel hopeful she could do it this time, against all odds.

She told me she wasn’t happy about the further distance between her and the kids but she no longer felt she had a say in the matter. I had assumed Kim’s move was prompted by the annoyance of having the court and I oversee her life with a fine-tooth comb. Keisha confirmed this without my asking. Keisha updated me on the kids and her continuing concerns about them. She confided in me that Kim had yet to enroll them in school, even though weeks had passed since the move. She thanked me once again for all that Joan and I had done to help the kids and all the support we had given her. She told me to say ‘hi’ to Joan and to thank her for all those baguettes. This was sounding like her final goodbye to me. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to know what lay in her future. Then, just as I told her to stay in touch and we were about to hang-up, she said, “I love you, Miss Desirée.”

In the split second following her words of gratitude, I imagined what other lawyers would say in response. The ethical lines of professional responsibility can get blurred sometimes. As lawyers, we are supposed to maintain a professional distance between the parties to a case and ourselves. I had admittedly already crossed this line by sending food baskets to the kids on Christmas and their birthdays, filled with edible treats I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford, a sports book for Samuel, and a journal for Tamika to write in whenever she felt she was about to lose control. Each time we met outside the courtroom, everyone hugged, not something most lawyers do. So, it didn’t take me but a millisecond to respond to this kind and gentle woman, who needed all the support she could get.

“I love you too, Keisha.”

*The names of all the parties to the case have been changed to protect their identities.

Desirée Magney is a writer and attorney. She writes both nonfiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Bethesda Magazine, Washingtonian Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Writer’s Center—Art Begins with a Story, and Jellyfish Whispers. She was honored with a “Best in Workshop” reading at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a Board member for the literary journal, Little Patuxent Review, contributes to their blog, and has been one of their fiction readers. She has two adult children, Daniel and Nicole, and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland with her husband, John, and their dog, Tucker.

Black Market Pall Malls

by Emily Rich

2015 Essay Contest Winner, Theme: “War and Peace”

Colonel Troung was getting up from the desk again, excusing himself with a polite bow, pulling at the creases of his threadbare trousers as he stood.

“Why don’t you smoke at the desk like everyone else?” I asked. I was worried about falling behind on our cases. “It won’t bother me if you do.”

The colonel’s eyes scanned the long folding table “desk”: took in the neat pile of manila folders, the inkpad for taking fingerprints, the stacks of loose forms anchored by a stapler, a hole punch, a small piece of cinderblock.

He gave an apologetic smile. “No ashtray,” he said. “Too messy,” and stepped outside into the dusty heat.

The year was 1989 and the official ends to the conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were years in the past. But the borders still teemed with camps of refugees who didn’t want to return home. Most lacked proof of official ties to the ousted regimes and would be denied asylum by Western countries only willing to take in the politically persecuted.

My job, as a caseworker for the quasi-governmental Joint Voluntary Agency, was to interview the displaced and mold their individual hardship stories into narratives that would impress the American Immigration officers stationed in the camps. Colonel Troung was my interpreter.

The colonel’s arrival had signaled a change in the nature of our work at JVA. That year, in a gesture aimed at normalizing relations with the US, the Vietnamese government released thousands of former South Vietnamese bureaucrats and army officers who’d been sent to re-education camps after the Fall of Saigon.

Many of the newly freed fled the country immediately, some by boat, others across land through Cambodia, paying “snakehead” refugee smugglers to get them into Thailand, into the camps where I worked. Colonel Truong was in the latter category.

 He had been a rising star in the South Vietnamese Army, had been sent to Fort Benning to train with Americans, had been awarded the Silver Star of Bravery by American forces during the war. He was what we caseworkers called a “water walker,” someone who would be awarded US refugee status, no problem at all.

Because of his excellent English, he was offered a six-month stint as an interpreter for our organization. So now, the military wunderkind-turned political prisoner-turned refugee, was sitting on a folding chair next to a twenty-four-year old caseworker in a bamboo hut on the outskirts of Aranyaprathet, Thailand.

At first, I viewed Colonel Truong with suspicion. I’d been a history major in college and had studied about the war, how it was a mistake, how the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and undeserving of American attempts to prop it up. The idealistic just-out-of-college me had come to Thailand to help the victims of the war, not the perpetuators.

In return, Colonel Truong was nothing but gracious and respectful.

He admired the seriousness I applied to my job, he said. He advised his fellow education camp parolees to wait until they could get me as a caseworker. He was patient, with kind eyes and a gentle manner. With his oversized head and thinning combed-over hair, he reminded me of an elderly Asian Linus from the Peanuts cartoon. More like an egghead physics professor than an American-trained warrior.

He was also a nervous wreck. He would spring up suddenly from our little folding table desk and pace the dirt floor or gaze out the cutout windows of our bamboo wall. His hands shook and his legs were constantly moving even when he was deep in conversation with a refugee applicant.

Sometimes, between interviews, he would tell me about his decade in captivity, about the forced marches, the compulsory labor, the disease and starvation that did in fellow prisoners on a daily basis.

“I was once so hungry I ate another man’s vomit,” he told me, and then laughed awkwardly, embarrassed.

“I’m so sorry,” was my inadequate response.

He seemed to want something from me during these conversations, some sort of recognition of the unique horror of his situation, but I was unable to see him as anything more than one more story in the endless tales of hardship and brutality that were recounted before me on a daily basis. Before my stint in this camp, I’d spent three months stationed outside Khoa-I-Dang camp, interviewing Cambodian survivors of the murderous Khmer Rouge. Imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, it was all part of the cruelty unleashed by the senselessness of war.

One time between cases Colonel Truong unfolded a black and white photo of himself in dress uniform wearing the Silver Star. It was an eight by ten photo, an official portrait, creased heavily at the folds. He told me he’d taped the portrait to his calf before he fled Vietnam. Other than the clothes on his back and gold to pay the snakeheads, it was the one possession he had brought with on his escape to Thailand. It was his ticket to the US, and he knew it.

In the picture, he is crisp and pressed, grinning with pride. In some ways I could see the familiar Colonel Truong: the wide forehead, the dark eyes, the sharp nose that reminded me of an Indian arrowhead. But in other ways he looked different. His face in the picture is young, angular. His eyes are brilliant, energetic and alert. His smile is cocky and self-assured. Could such a man be capable of anything in a time of conflict? I wondered. Bravery, heroism, cruelty, atrocity? What would have happened had the war turned out differently and he could be jailer, not prisoner in its aftermath? The idea of it made me shudder.

Because he worked for us, Colonel Truong didn’t have to live in the refugee camp anymore, but he was not allowed to leave the cheap hotel compound where the JVA workers stayed. There were five other interpreters in situations similar to his, and the group of them kept to themselves after hours.

There wasn’t much to do in Aranyaprathet in any case. On Sundays, our only day off, the other caseworkers and I liked to wander about the local open-air market. Once, while meandering through the tables of piled sarongs, tin cookware, plastic strainers, and serving utensils, I passed something that caught my eye—a kitschy, ceramic hula girl attached to a turquoise lagoon ashtray. It was the kind of thing I thought was “campy;” something I might have displayed ironically in my off-campus apartment back home. I bought it for Colonel Truong.

I plunked it down on our folding-table desk Monday morning.

“Now you have an ashtray!” I exclaimed, happy with myself.

          I guess I thought he would react with amusement, but he said nothing about the ashtray’s silliness, only thanked me with a bow of his head and a slight smile. As if I’d given an order for him to accept it.

From then on he smoked at our workstation and did not take breaks outside.

Colonel Troung smoked throat-scorching Krong Thip brand Thai cigarettes, one after another. American cigarettes were banned in the country at the time.

“Can I try one?” I asked once. I wasn’t a regular smoker, just curious.

I took a drag and wheezed it out immediately. It was like inhaling field hay infused with Pine Sol.

“These are terrible!” I coughed. “What type of cigarettes did you smoke back home? Were the Vietnamese brands as bad as these?”

He sort of chuckled, and his eyes took on a far-off, remembering look.

“During the war I smoked Pall Malls,” he said. “American brands are always the best.”

Day after day we interviewed refugee applicants. Usually they were single men, but sometimes whole families would array themselves on the wooden bench in front of us. Western aid groups provided them with decent clothes and they would sit straight and proper as if in a church pew, children scrubbed and combed, parents clutching Ziploc baggies of what few documents they had. The hopefulness in their eyes never failed to break my heart.

One time a young father who couldn’t keep his story straight was trying our patience.

“The town he says he was born in is in the North,” I said. “But he claims his father was in the Army for the South?” I was trying to pin him down on specifics. When did the family move? What was his father’s rank? Where was his father now?

The man stalled. In the silence, an oscillating fan whirred and ruffled the stacks of forms on my desk.

The man’s wife said nothing but held her eyes on me with a beseeching look. Their three young children focused silently on their hands folded in their laps, as they’d no doubt been instructed to do.

Colonel Truong broke from interpreting my questions and began lecturing the young man in Vietnamese. His tone was stern but soft, in a caring, fatherly sort of way. The man bowed his head and frowned.

          The interview was over. We fingerprinted everyone and placed their file on the stack to go to Immigration. Colonel Truong pinched the top of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He was crying.

          “They will never make it to America with that story,” he said.

          He was normally so stoic and this show of emotion unnerved me. Did he mourn for the tragedy of this one family? For the young father who reminded him of his own lost youth? Or for the whole sorry state of his countrymen, crammed on a foreign border, raising up children in the hopeless dusty squalor of refugee camps with only the slightest prayer of escape? Colonel Truong had been granted his freedom and a shot at a new life but until that moment I hadn’t understood how irretrievable was his loss. These were his people and this was the tragedy he was destined to carry with him even as he made a new life for himself in the States. A generation lost to war.

          I was a rule follower in those days; not someone who would, for example, go to the black market areas of Bangkok and pick up a carton of smuggled American cigarettes. But I knew plenty of co-workers who would. Every smoker on the JVA staff had a supply of Marlboros or Camels or some other American brand. On a Friday when Tan, our Thai driver, was going into the city for supplies, I gave him money to pick up two cartons of black market Pall Malls.

          On Monday, I pulled them from the plastic bag beneath my chair and handed them to Colonel Truong.

          “I thought you might like these better than the Krong Thips,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

          His hands trembled as he held them out to receive the gift. His mouth slackened, his eyes moistened. He seemed in awe.

          “My old brand,” he said. “You remembered.”

          He held the cartons before his face, marveling at the crimson packaging, the regal lettering. Pall Mall. I watched nostalgia overtake him as he travelled back in time, as he became again the young promising officer working for the Americans, anticipating a bright future carrying him, carrying his country up and up and up.

         

Emily Rich is the non-fiction editor of Little Patuxent Review. She writes mainly memoir and essay. Her work has been published in a number of small presses including Little Patuxent Review, Welter, River Poet's Journal, Delmarva Review and the Pinch. Her essays have been listed as notables in Best American Essays 2014 and 2015.

Kindness

by Sharon Frame Gay

According to legend, angels are mystical, ethereal beings with feathered wings, gauzy gowns, and Mona Lisa smiles. They perform miracles from afar, gently pulling on the strings of our lives to veer us out of oncoming traffic, heal our sick children, or act as messengers for our prayers.

But I have learned that there are angels who fly much closer to the ground, touching our hearts with their kindness in unforgettable ways.

One such lesson arrived on a cold January day, the kind of day when even God was snuggled under blankets, sipping cocoa. He must have fallen asleep on His watch, because the winter skies cracked open with a ticker tape parade of snow, inches upon inches falling on our neighborhood. There was no filter to this storm, but rather a winter snowfall of such abandon that the dog could barely navigate his daily rounds. Absent intriguing scents, snow to his belly, he begged to come in and stretch out by the fire.

My husband, Ben, was huddled under two quilts, shivering. Radiation to his brain left his body regulating devices askew, and he was just shy of hypothermia. We both kept our fingers crossed that the power wouldn’t go out, a common occurrence in our neck of the woods.

By nightfall, the snow miraculously stopped, leaving behind a night blanketed by flinty stars, illuminated by a fresh moon. Outside, the snow glittered, lying crisp and unmarred, several inches covering our yard and driveway. Pretty as it was, there was danger in the cold, and I prayed that the streets would be navigable should Ben have a seizure and require help. As the only driver, and a poor one at best, I felt not a little panic.

As we watched TV in the back of the house by the fire, I heard a scraping noise out front. There was a steady staccato to the sound, interesting enough for me to crawl out from my blanket to peer out the front window.

There, in the moonlight, were several neighbors. Some I knew well, others I had never met. They each had a snow shovel and were quietly shoveling our driveway. I hurried into my boots and coat, grabbed my shovel, and drifted out into the snow to greet them. The world was quiet under the cloak of white, stars so brilliant that they cut holes through the cloth of the night sky, and the moon shimmered on the fallen snow, a spotlight on the faces of those who were there to help. There was little talk, just gentle smiles with a few softly spoken words and the steady shoveling. Working alongside my neighbors I experienced something deep in my soul that expanded out through my blood like tiny bubbles of champagne—a feeling of joy. Snow angels had fallen from heaven and left their mark indelibly on my driveway and in my heart.

As the cold gave way to February, there seemed some hope that spring might join us. But despite the promising slant of light as we crept closer to the sun, Ben’s condition wasn’t improving, and although the days grew longer, our lives felt shrouded in darkness. Ben needed to be moved to a facility. He left our house one dark afternoon in the back of an ambulance, both of us knowing he would not return.

I learned then that the halls of hospice are filled with angels. They occupy the corners of the rooms and walkways. The winter windows are frosted from their gentle sighs on cold panes. Some are there to welcome home the weary traveler, while others hover to support and bring comfort to those destined to be left behind. Candles flicker in the windows of those who have passed, a lighthouse for the angels, a beacon showing the way.

But not all hospice angels tread on heavenly planes. There was the man, a stranger, who spoke to me in the hallway. For a moment or two we were joined by our sorrow, commiserating, exchanging hugs. Then we turned away with sad smiles and resolve to continue our vigil with loved ones. The next morning he came to our room with flowers for me. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said with tears in his eyes. “These are from your husband. He would want you to have them.” I never knew his name, or where he lived, I knew only that he walked on this earth, an angel of bone and sinew.

Angels entered the room each day in the form of nurses, social workers, friends and neighbors. They made blankets to keep Ben warm and put hummingbird feeders outside to attract the tiny birds to Ben’s window. The birds would come, even though the February rains threatened to weigh down their feathers and push them to the ground, still they came, defying all odds, dancing in the wind.

One weary, grey afternoon, I returned home from hospice alone. It had been a sad day. A day of weariness and sorrow, exhaustion and trepidation. I needed to return to the house, feed the dog, pack a bag, get the mail—the everyday duties we must accomplish in the teeth of life’s turbulent changes. The sun was setting as I drove down my street, the hills beginning to darken, another day swallowed up in the great business of dying.

As I pulled into my driveway, I looked up towards my front door and the planter beneath the sidelight window. To my amazement, the planter was filled with bright, colorful primroses, their little faces peering out, illuminated by the last rays of sunshine. They were merry, hopeful, completely unexpected, a symbol of friendship and caring—the perfect gift when my heart was so heavy. More angels had touched me. Lovely neighbors, transforming the twilight in my heart to happiness.

Over time, angels brought us meals, drove us to radiation and chemotherapy treatments, took Ben for little jaunts and out to movies, called, wrote, and visited. Each one touched our hearts in ways that will never be forgotten. In the dark night of winter, these angels gave us wings.

Sharon Frame Gay grew up a child of the highway, traveling throughout the United States and playing by the side of the road. Her dream was to live in a house long enough to find her way around in the dark, and she has finally achieved this outside Seattle, Washington.  She writes poetry, prose poetry, short stories and song lyrics.

Forgiveness

by Susan Bonetto

My steadfast Midwestern parents get credit for ‘raising me right’, but I didn’t learn the consequence of forgiveness until I was well into adulthood in a land on distant shores. I grew up with the meaningful mottos, ‘forgive and forget’ and ‘turn the other cheek’. I would have said that I practiced these moral codes but it was in Fiji where I learned how little I grasped of their meaning.

My husband, Oscar, and I lived for one year on Leleuvia Island, an infinitesimal atoll that juts out of Fijian seas. Leleuvia is a permanent home to no one, a backpackers’ resort hosting the holiday comings and goings of youngish travellers. It is a landmass that, at high tide, spans a sum total of four blocks by one block. Twice daily, it stretches and yawns as the tide flows out, growing to a magnitude of nearly six by two blocks.

Given its size, staying on Leleuvia was akin to being placed under a microscope, where everything about you is known and discussed by the other residents. The resort staff observed our every move, dissecting our recurring interactions, clothes worn, food eaten drinks drunk, even our casual chitchat. Typically Oscar woke early and did a walk-about greeting our Fijian friends and co-workers. But, one morning, he slept late and it was I who, instead, stopped for tea at the back of the kitchen where the two cooks and their helper prepared the wood fire for the guests’ breakfast.

“Where’s bosso Oscar?” Lena asked.

I smiled a simple response, “Bosso’s at home.”

“He’s still sleeping?” she wanted to know

.

“Why, do you need him for something?”

“No, I just hope he’s all right cuz he’s usually up already,” Lena cooed, starting to stir a potential pot of worries amongst the employees.

Since, perhaps, everyday life doesn’t stimulate enough or, conceivably, for cultural reasons to which I never had birthright, this microcosmic indigenous community included its share of gossip. Fijians delight in recounting stories about people they know, stories being the precise term as truth is not a required ingredient in the telling. Mention to a Fijian that you have a bellyache and, by nightfall, people are discussing your likely appendicitis. Comment on the newly arrived, sculpted Italian beauty and during the evening’s grog festivities you will be teased about your desire for her. At times, this type of gossip infected Leleuvia and, once, blew towards us with a full cyclonic force that bent and broke the boughs of our finest friendship there.

We’d met Judy and Hans, the dive masters and only other resident expats on Leleuvia, more than three years back when we all were visitors to the island—each couple with the pipe dream of living there. Our subsequent visits overlapped and we became fast friends given our shared thoughts of leaving our developed worlds behind and moving to an infinitesimal island in the South Pacific. Once located there we’d become daily coffee buddies and confidants.

But one day, long after our relationship seemed secure, a long-staying tourist shared ugly rumors with me. As the tale went, our marriage was in trouble due to our mutual, straying eyes. It was hard for us to believe that our marriage was a subject of intense analysis. Married eight years, without a day of regret and with a momentous secret—we were now trying to have a baby. Foolishly, we tried to understand the gossip’s foundation. Apparently, each week, when one of us departed on the daily ferryboat for an overnight shopping trip to the mainland and capital city, Suva, we started tongues wagging as, in Fiji, devoted couples do not travel alone or spend nights apart.

I knew that there’s no sense in addressing rumors, as they take on a character of their own, expanding exponentially. But our local population was minute, and we discerned that, while the locals propagated the buzz, our good mates, Judy and Hans, had planted it. This data felled me; I couldn’t help myself, wanted to clarify the ‘whys’ and ‘what’s’ and visited Judy to ask “Really?” She confessed that she had made several comments about our relationship based on our abundance of independent overnight trips combined with our flirtatious manner with tourists, dancing and carrying on during the nightly entertainment. I started to debate her unsubstantiated facts but quickly grasped that she thought it amusing and didn’t care that her opinions had wafted across the island

.

We parted that day with animosity and proceeded to live side by side, un-speaking, on this miniature piece of land. For weeks, Oscar and I passed our once, closest friends multiple times each day and didn’t concede a greeting. Nightly, we sat as strangers at the same picnic table, visiting with the ever-shifting tourists concurrently. We must have seemed an awkward quartet to the short-term guests. Four members of the Swiss Family Robinson living and working in enmity.

On top of everything, their two-year old son, Ben, was both our buddy and inspiration behind our fresh thoughts of parenthood. Our captivating adopted child, he unfailingly arrived at the bungalow with the sunrise, an elfin alarm clock calling out his version of our names. “Oska, Susi, we go fishing?” Ben joined Oscar at the reef on the edge of the island for some morning casting and he sat on my kitchen counter licking spatulas and spoons as I baked cakes. Before day’s end we showered off ten hours of sand and mango stains together. The disease that swept over our relationship with his parents didn’t affect him and he continued his visits, taken home by Judy in icy stillness on warm tropical evenings. As they’d walk away I’d occasionally consider how to put things right but held onto the belief that we’d been wronged and, thus, our bond was broken.

Our indigenous friends surely watched in surprise as we behaved so differently from them. Months before there had been an argument between two of the ‘boys’—the young men who worked on the island. Their angry words turned to shouting and broke into punches. I saw blood and thought they would destroy each other. They had to be wedged apart and taken to separate borders of the island to cool off. The next evening these two men sat together around the grog bowl, singing songs and telling stories. I expressed astonishment to my closest local confidant, Lena, at seeing the duelling, hate-filled men laughing together. She explained it to me simply, “Fijians always forgive. It’s too small a place to stay mad at somebody.” To this day I don’t know if ‘place’ meant world, country, or our diminutive Leleuvia Island community when she gifted me these native pearls of wisdom.

But we were Americans, not Fijians, and I couldn’t bear to look at Judy, aware of the callous thoughts that she’d scattered. And, so, we continued our stalemate. Two months later, we lived through a hopeless night when a hurricane devastated much of the island and closed the resort. A week thereafter, while mourning the loss of our island dollhouse, Oscar and I relocated to Suva. With no ceasefire in sight we left Judy and Hans behind without a ‘goodbye’ while we sought more favourable conditions.

Once settled into city quarters, we began making habitual weekend visits to Leleuvia. As our boat came ashore we’d hear Ben’s small voice calling “Oska, Susi coming!” Throughout the weekends we played with Ben giving no acknowledgment to his parents. Six months later, through the same coconut grapevine that launched our cold war, we discovered that Judy was pregnant. As the months passed we watched her from the distance ripening and swelling like late summer fruit, Oscar and I ruminating silently over where she would have the baby. They had only a sparing business since the hurricane panted half the island away and eked out the most basic living with their dive business. The island had no medical facilities and Judy would need to find shelter in a developed location before long. One Sunday afternoon as we motored away, Oscar looked back towards our weekend sandbox where Judy sat playing on the beach with Ben. He shook his head, attempting to square his thoughts, then glanced at me and said, “I feel sorry for her; she’ll need a place to stay in Suva when the baby comes.” To which I half queried, half stated, “We can invite her to stay with us?”

And Oscar nodded assent.

That evening I placed a call to the island’s radiophone. Lena’s husband, Sireli, answered and, after a ‘Bula Vinaka’ greeting, I asked him, “Can you please find Judy and tell her that Susan wants to speak with her?” While waiting I imagined a new chronicle commencing about us peculiar foreigners. Judy came on the scratchy line and I spoke a mere one sentence—I asked if she wanted to stay with us until the baby was born. She didn’t hesitate, breathed a “Yes, thank-you,” and appeared on our doorstep three weeks later. The friendship resumed. No major discussion, psychoanalysis or sorting through feelings. Judy arrived with suitcase in hand, hugged each of us, and moved into the guest room. She stayed for five weeks pre and post delivery and during this period we shared coffees and cakes again, discussing safe tidbits of daily news until we regained a time when we could dive deeper into values and convictions once more.

This sort of thing never happened to me elsewhere. People who wounded me fell out of my universe and were erased. Judy, Oscar, Hans and I damaged and tried to shatter our friendship some years ago. But the forces of time and place wouldn’t allow it. Instead we learned absolution. None of us live on Leleuvia anymore. Since then we have shared many substantial events—child rearing, parents lost, jobs gained, jobs lost, lives lived. Today we reside in different countries but remain united, communicating often and warmly as people can who, once upon a time, forgave each other in Fiji.

Susan Bonetto grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin before moving to California where she met and married an extraordinary man who encouraged her to live abroad (with him) and travel as far and wide as possible. While living in Fiji, their son, Alejandro, was born. Susan works as a global Human Resources Consultant and has been fortunate to have lived in the U.S., Fiji, The Philippines, and Argentina and travelled to more than 30 countries. One of her Fiji stories, ‘Before We Lived Barefoot’ recently won second place in TransitionsAbroad.com’s 2014 Narrative Travel Writing Essay Contest while two of her travel articles have also been selected for future publication on this webzine.