Waking up to Privilege (A Little)

Uncategorized, Winter 2016-17

  

Elizabeth Rose

  Todd Gipstein / National Geographic Society / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

  Todd Gipstein / National Geographic Society / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

 

On the first night you brushed your teeth huddled around the blue pila, a large square concrete sink with three chambers. You were a gringo family honoring your oral hygiene despite the absence of running water. The water stored in the central chamber of the pila passed your visual cleanliness test, with the moonlight glancing off its ripples, but you knew that bacterial microbes lurked. No splashing of toothbrushes or cupping your hands to take a swig.

Instead, you shared a few drops of bottled Evian bought at the Atlanta airport by your teenage daughter. When the Evian ran out, your husband used Coca Cola. You were 4,000 miles from home and about to teach English in Guatemala.

As your family brushed you contemplated the pila. The four of you could have climbed into the central storage chamber, becoming immersed to your armpits.

                                                       ***

Running water was unpredictable in the central highlands where the indigenous Maya live. When the water ran, it was wisely stored in advance of tomorrow’s trickle. The pila was imported by the Spanish who placed the first fountains in a central spot in every town square. As the population grew the people placed private pila in the courtyards of their homes. At that time they had agua pura. Except for centuries of greed, wars, genocide and land grabbing, the water that night in your pila would have had a fighting chance of purity. Nothing in the natural world could have out-competed man at creating such a colossal catastrophe.

 

                ***

As you gazed at the southern constellations you missed your usual line-up of Big Dipper, Little Dipper and Orion’s Belt. But you reassured yourself that you could do this homestay with an indigenous family for just two weeks.

You were already an expert at crapping in the outdoors, if need be, and had brought a supply of toilet paper in a giant red suitcase. You had backpacked in Colorado, lived in a Spanish cave, hitchhiked through North Africa, bicycled in China and slept on a haystack in Ireland. You had the resume to qualify and this wouldn’t be insurmountable.

But it would take you days before you noticed the five-gallon blue bottle of agua pura the family stored in full sight in the kitchen. When you noticed you had to laugh, a small rueful laugh at your own blindness. It was a replica of the Belmont Springs bottle from home and yet you had missed it in your summation of objects in the kitchen.

Like a coloring book that asks the child to find everything mismatching in the picture, the sheer number of surprises was mind-spinning. No gas, propane or electric stove, an unplugged empty refrigerator, no spigot of running water and the buzzing cluster of flies congregated around the bowl of breads meant for your breakfast. A glance to the ceiling revealed open electrical wires. This was a kitchen called upon to feed four families, and now yours, three meals a day.

 

                                                           ***

You were sad when you first saw your room, smelling of old tortillas and beans. Like a jail cell, no window or closet. No fitted sheets on the bed, no pillows, no bedspread. You wanted to reach your white hand back through time just six hours, before your luggage was packed in the trunk of the Lexus, and open your well-organized linen closet smelling of Tide and grab a fitted set.

In the WC you faced a truth of your visit: Your hosts had never been to a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and why should they need to visit? A single industrial sized nail made a reasonable, though minimalist, toilet roll holder.

 

                                                           ***

 

You quickly got yourself in hand and began to adapt. You learned to bunch up a blanket and spread a towel to simulate a pillow. In the mornings, you drank lukewarm apple tea and ate small round sweet breads selected from the bowl on the table. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, from giant boxes with the signature red rooster, were consumed with warm powdered milk. Over time, the small green squash, called quiskill, and a chicken bone in your soup became a treat.

You delighted in the bustling streets brimming with smiling people. You liked the dusty switchbacks crisscrossing the green hills between pińon pine, avocado and cedar. You laughed at misshapen trees on every hilltop that reminded you of Dr. Seuss. The hills were spotted with smoke clouds rising from open fires and stoves that reminded you of Little House on the Prairie, but soon you admitted this was another romantic fantasy. The cardboard shacks with aluminum roofs were nothing like log cabins, and the open fires in the living rooms created respiratory illnesses, a leading cause of infections in children and death in the elderly.

You looked into the eyes of the passing women, carrying lumpy mystery bundles on their heads
, and said buenos dias
every morning and buenas tardes every afternoon, starting at one minute past noon.

At your lodging you heard 13 people all live underneath one roof without shouting. You saw uncles and aunts hug nieces and nephews, giving kisses just as loving as those given by the mamas and papas. You witnessed joyful reunions between adult siblings every Friday night, following five days of separation because work was in the capital, hours away. You saw the children play in the courtyard, digging with a spoon or flipping a plastic object. Once the littlest girl, just two, pulled down her panties to wee in the dirt. Her five year-old cousin stopped mid-game and, with a gentleman’s flourish, helped her yank her panties up before resuming their play. You witnessed a Saturday morning fiesta-day when 18 women, babies and children crowded into the kitchen and women patted out tortillas while others nursed babies on the floor telling jokes and gossiping.

***

On your return, while laying over in Atlanta, you used the bathroom just to celebrate the toilet paper flushing away. No longer would you have to store it in the little basket with the swinging lid. You ordered a green salad to extol the return of vegetables to your diet. You sat near a white family with three kids, all wearing baseball caps and trendy t-shirts. “Sit there and don’t move,” said the man, as he pulled too hard on the boy’s chair. The boy cried through his meal while no one offered consolation. Like leaving a trance you never knew you had entered, you missed the quiet murmurs redirecting restless children at the dinner table.

At home, you were both relieved and distressed. You had to reconcile a legacy of emotions. You were embarrassed by how tough you found the physical challenges and inconveniences. You were sad that your new friends might never have a vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, hot showers, clothes washer and dryer, coffee pot and a stockpile of food in a  working refrigerator, common conveniences in your country. You were guilty of impatience with delayed service in foreign restaurants. You shamed yourself for judgments of the poor. You assigned goodness to the poor everywhere—the ‘halo effect”–creating a kind of noble savage scenario. You knew your lifestyle was thievery, stealing more than your share of worldwide resources, despite your own efforts at recycling and driving a low emissions vehicle.

                                                           ***

You were happy to reunite with your kitchen with its potable, fluoridated and chlorinated water that flowed any time of day or night, and not just on certain lucky mornings. You filled a glass and drank the cool clean water that tasted like privilege.

Elizabeth Rose is a non-fiction writer based in Massachusetts.  She has published in the Boston Globe Magazine, the Newburyport Daily News, Newburyport Magazine, and the Northshore Jewish Journal. She is an MFA candidate in Lesley University’s Creative Non-fiction program. This article is the preface of her book detailing her experiences as a woman of privilege working in Guatemala.

Photo credit: ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.. Photography. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016. quest.eb.com/search/137_3166756/1/137_3166756/cite. Accessed 20 Jan 2017.

 

Grieving is an Art

Uncategorized, Winter 2016-17

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Kanani Foster

Schiele, Egon 1890-1918. 'Trauernde Frau' (mourning woman) / akg-images / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

Schiele, Egon 1890-1918. ‘Trauernde Frau’ (mourning woman) / akg-images / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

 

There is an airy humdrum whirring in the hospital room; wires hang and twist from bed to monitor and wall in a ceremonious blink of intermittent lights. Unlike the preconceived image of an omniscient heart monitor counting the moments between life and death, all is quiet.

My grandmother is curling in on herself slowly with each passing hour. Her heavy folded lids twitch while her soft dark hands paw at her face, and I am reminded of a fetus moments before entering the world, unaware of its surroundings and even its own self. She doesn’t hear my teary hiccups.

When I entered the room I called her name, apprehensive of even touching her. Last night, before the ambulances came, she did not recognize my mother, her own child. She screamed and pushed my mom away, frantic in the moment of not knowing, and then somewhere between her old couch to this hospital gurney she no longer responded to us. I am terrified of putting my hand on her shoulder, but I finally do. There is nothing here.

Sitting on the chair in the corner, I am acutely aware that this will be my final moment with my grandmother.

The only other death that had touched my sheltered life was a childhood friend. I could not remember the last time we spoke, but I did remember the news breaking over the school that day. That moment was only a point in my life, a marker to pinpoint how our paths were not explicitly joined, and neither her life nor death affected me directly.  It was simply a moment that made me sad, because I was acutely aware that I would not ever see her again.

This is different; I am watching a gentle death. It is astounding in the artistry and skill that is slowly taking place before me as organs find rest, the blood begins to slow, and breaths are pulled farther apart. I am sad that I am watching my flesh and blood wither. I am sad that I will never speak to her again. I am sad that I will not miss her as much as I should.

This death fills me with remorse to the opportunities I missed.

                        The knowledge and history that is gone.

                                    The relationship I could have formed.

 

***

 It’s hard to look at the withered man beside me. He is stripped of any bit of pride, vanity, and perhaps even his sanity at this point. My grandmother’s mouth hangs open like an old Japanese ghoul and I try to distract myself with the thought that, if spirits exist, hers had floated from her mouth like a soft exhaling of smoke. I suddenly have the urge to open a window to let her free.

 â€œWake up, Ma, wake up.” He is gently shaking her. I coax him into the chair next to the bed that he has already occupied for the past week, waiting. The wait is up and I am almost glad to feel the stress bleach itself from the room with a new shade of grief.

Over the past months we have watched my grandfather falter in speech, physical ability, and memory, yet in this moment he is more aware than I have seen him a year. He may not understand the complex renal system failure that claimed her, out but he feels the loss. He felt it when the realization dawned on him that these were her last days.

 

***      

I guess it’s selfish, but I haven’t visited my grandfather in two weeks now. I can’t bring myself to unless my mom pushes me to the small cabin across the way, muggy, full of his resounding grief. He has a compulsive need to fix the blinds that are not broken, and when he does my mom will whisper that the dementia is a blessing. I still can’t look at it that way.

My grandfather flutters between a drugged oblivion of minute details and past lifetimes to stuttered confusion at the here and now. Some visits he ignores me, staring blankly at another old Western film on AMC that he has surely seen within the past week; other times he paws at his leathered hands, stuttering in his excitement for this meager 30 minutes of company.

Like most people, I don’t stay very long.

He doesn’t get many calls and obsesses over the two times a week my mom takes him out grocery shopping, counting the days till he gets to go out again and do something. Busy work, it’s what keeps him going these days.

The cabin is unbearably humid as he always liked it, pretending he was back home in Hawaii or Florida, and sweat rolls down my neck as I try to talk to him. It has only been a few hours since our listless drive home from the hospital, yet my grandpa is completely focused on the shades covering the sliding door. At least he has that damned dog, I’m grateful for it even as it yaps and nips at my heels. He’d be lost without it.

The sliding door shade glides on a track that his stick is repeatedly poking and prodding,

                  “It’s stuck.

                        It’s stuck.

                                    It’s stuck.”

It’s not. He is relentless though and I try to think of something that might bring him to me and away from desperate thoughts of fixing something that’s not broken.

I ask, “What’s that tattoo of?” the ink on his body is faded blue on a canvas that is soft and crinkles like tissue paper. This tattoo seems to be a knife with what might be a hand holding it.

 â€œI was stupid. This was my- my first tattoo.”

The tattoo was ugly. Badly drawn with ink that faded quickly; he might as well have gotten it in prison with a safety pin. I point out another, one that his shirtsleeve covers. This tattoo is a piece of history; a black skull with air force wings and a banner overhead reading “Billy”.

 â€œI designed this. We, we all have it.”

  “Who?”

 â€
œSixteen of us. We were in the same–”
He stutters, trying to remember.

 â€œGroup? Platoon? Squad?”

 â€œYeah”

I point out another that his shaking fingers begin to sweep, this one being a red rose. It’s a cover-up job–lying underneath it, coiled in its petals is his ex-wife’s name that my mother has forgotten and he refuses to utter. I wonder how Grandma felt about it. Was it something they bickered over? Or something that was never spoken of? Another is the word Hawaii on his forearm, his social security number on his left shoulder, even his name is splayed across his arm. As we point and unveil new sketches of his own history I feel him begin to let go of his grief and reminisce on each moment in time he has saved on his body; each mistake, each victory and each love.

                                                           

***

Grieving is an art t unique to each person. My grandpa burned all of her clothes three days after she died, sprinkling the lawn with the ashes. My mom had her actual ashes sent directly to her brother in Hawaii–“It’s what she would’ve wanted”but I know that holding my grandma in that state would’ve been too much for her. She sat by my grandmother’s side till her chest finally caved in, refusing to rise again, and that’s closure enough for most.

I cried like everyone else but somehow still managed to crack a joke sitting in front of my grandma’s body; her mouth unhinged and eyes shut, earning me a sharp look from my mom till she began to laugh and cry once again. It was sad but my life continued on after we left the hospital, leaving me to wonder at my grieving.

I miss her. I really do.

I miss the little things though the most; her genuine interest in my life, her sticky rice that seemed stickier than most sticky rice, her long-winded stories that never concluded.

One day, at the Asian Art Museum, seeing the walls hung with ornate silk kimonos decorated with golden threads spun into peonies and koi, another memory returned–my grandmother clambering down from the upstairs of her cabin holding a parcel. Inside were her own kimonos from Japan, an airy blue with white flowers and a heavier white with gold flowers coating the bottom trim. There was no time or reason I would wear them, but I held them close.

Standing in the museum I foraged my mind for the kimonos’ whereabouts; my parents’ house in the closet, under my own bed, in storage? I didn’t know. It rattled me and I felt like a foreigner to this heritage and culture. I felt as silly as the white girls dressed in kimonos and sloppy geisha makeup waiting for the museum’s Japanese fashion show. I had lost my grandmother and a piece of my heritage.

My great-grandfather came to America on a tiny boat from Japan, ready to pick pineapple on the islands of Hawaii to save money and become someone. I remembered all this but I forgot his name, he would always just be someone now.

Later I call my mom asking if she remembers esn’t. Mizaki? Maybe Matsu? She has to think on that. There is no use in asking my grandfather; his speech is falling away along with the ability to even recall his last meal.

It is all slipping through the cracks.

 

 

Photo creit:

E.Schiele / Mourning Woman / Ptg./ 1912. Fine Art. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016. quest.eb.com/search/109_143051/1/109_143051/cite. Accessed 20 Jan 2017.

The Game

Uncategorized, Winter 2016-17

Adam Maarij

Soccer ball in net, close-up (Photo by Ian Walton/Getty Images) / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

Soccer ball in net, close-up (Photo by Ian Walton/Getty Images) / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

 

I stand on the dirt of a soccer field and watch the world become more still with each gust of wind. It whisks away the heat of my body and seemingly my color–makes me ashen, much like everything else in this dead field. Neither grass nor trees are spared, their glorious bright green and warm brown simply gone.

I’m always early for practice. Few people are here, including my coach. Usually more come half way through, but I figure today is too cold for most of them.

The year began with a bright fervor, teammates coming in an hour early to get into gear. When practice began each one of them would skip ahead the line, doing exercises again and again, with little regard to the ones behind them; They only cared about becoming better.. The sun was bright—too bright, obnoxiously so, sticking its rays like needles into our eyes, adding a layer of tan to the rainbow of skin colors on our team. That was fine. Even when the cruel field threatened them with its perilous bumps and holes, changing the trajectory of the ball, and sometimes ankles, that was fine, too. They would still push themselves to the very limit—every coach’s dream team.

A few weeks later, though, after a couple of games, their ardor would dwindle, like the passing of fall into winter. Not a rush, but a gradual process, one our coach did not notice but everyone else did. By the time it was the last quarter of our season, only half of the team would regularly show up.

Which was nothing knew. They were good, and this is how winners end up–arrogant, apathetic, foolish,  It didn’t both me, even seeing my teammates laze away the precious talent I would give an arm and a leg for. OK, maybe there was a bit of hate.

I always came back, whether I wanted to or not. I tried to give up, I really did, but it wasn’t my choice anymore. My mind is fully awake only when the ball is under my feet.

I stare at the scans on my knees, the bruisers of my feet, at the scrapes on my thighs. I listen to  my ankle’s popping noise when I walk downstairs. Yet my body would not listen. It had to come, a to practice.

So here I am again, still standing in the cold, still incapable of leaving when all others do.

A soccer ball rolls up to my feet.

“Hey! You up for a two-versus-three?

“Always,’’ I answer.

 

Photo credit: Soccer. Photographer. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016. quest.eb.com/search/115_2660289/1/115_2660289/cite. Accessed 20 Jan 2017.

Out of Iraq

Fall 2016, Uncategorized

Adam Maarij

Suicide Bomber Kills Five In Baghdad / Muhannad Fala'ah / Getty Images News / Getty Images / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

Suicide Bomber Kills Five In Baghdad / Muhannad Fala’ah / Getty Images News / Getty Images / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

Though it may be difficult to believe, being born and raised in a war zone had its advantages.

It gives top-notch war material to write about, confirms that nothing is worse than a slow internet connection, and makes an exceptionally adept Call Of Duty player, dodging drone strikes as if I’ve done it for most of my life. In addition of being around Lady Death (occasionally having her over for a cup of tea) I also get to   impress people with my tales of traveling through one of the Middle East’s many conflicts to get to the USA. They seem to admire me, as if I was the one who booked the plane ride, as if I was the one who took a bullet through his thighs, the one to see friends blownto pieces. Still, sometimes it’s nice to get credit for the horrible things I never gone through. I was only seven when I left Iraq, it didn’t matter to me.

Iraq to Jordan wasn’t much of an upgrade. I mean sure, no more exploding human beings or  free bullets for everybody, but I daresay I would prefer that over to what I had to deal with over the 4 years I was there. I’m half serious, but that statement does have some truth in it. In Jordan, racism was the norm, and brawling was never an even fight, much less a fair one. It also wasn’t nearly as beautiful as my Baghdad. The yellow skies and meager stars were not bright enough to light the streets like ours. Trees were scarce as gold, and even though the heat melted the tarmac, warm people were even harder to find. I was mocked by the kids because I spoke a different dialect.  My tanned skin stood out as well.  At some point, ten kids lined up, fighting each other  for the right to fight me. At the age of nine I became so popular my parents took me out of school. My response was making my own little gang of several other minorities. We walked around with an arrogant swagger, until other gangs pulled out sticks or knives–that’s when we ran like hell.

There was more than enough food to eat with the family and friends, and we had a stable income with a decent apartment. It was relatively safe, if albeit a bit stagnant; each day was much like the one before that, except for that occasional adventure of course.

Here is the thing: Back in Iraq, people were terrified of dying; I found that funny, since in essence, they were terrified of entering heaven with the help of people who wanted to enter heaven by killing them. The countless soap operas that intensified death and betrayal, kidnapping and ransom, corruption and human greed, did not help. Neither did the news, which primarily focused on broadcasting children with missing limbs and bloody clothes, or images of the mother, holding the bloody and ragged body of her child as her screeches played in the background. I found those channels more efficient than the terrorists themselves. They were doing the job of a terrorist, spreading terror and hopelessness–but only better, and on a world scale. People–including my parents–became paranoid. They looked for someone or something to blame for what’s wrong with this world. But since it’s wrong to blame a person, they went for blaming an entire race.

As grim as that sounds, It reminds us just how precious life is. Funny how you need to see heads flying until you realize that. YOLO; You only live once. We didn’t need a song to remind us of that, since we never knew when a bullet or shell would end it. But here, in Jordan, there was none of that. Their laughs were genuine, as were their smiles, but it wasn’t full. It was missing something, and I didn’t know what. At some point, I started missing Lady Death. She taught me that life is beautiful, and I appreciated each fleeting moment of it.

I was full of joy when I left Jordan, much more than when I left Iraq. The ride, though, was agonizing. We spent hours past midnight waiting for the airplane that may or may not come. The storm outside didn’t seem to care though, its winds bellowing as if it had nothing better to do. There was little to no sleep, as we constantly had to move around the airport alongside other immigrants, all of us scurrying around like a bunch of chickens without their heads.The coldness of the airports didn’t  help either. It seeped through my puffy coat, rendering a moment of comfort scarce in the four-day journey, more so for my anxious parents. The broken sleep rendered my memories vague and colorless, yet I’m almost certain that each airport we reached loathed us, as if the rest of the world was not enough.

We had reached Boston, Massachusetts, in the middle of its strongest storms during the end of 2008. It was as if the world was entirely covered in storm, from one edge to another. It was my first time witnessing the sight of snow and its chilling touch. It both terrified and exhilarated me. It felt like a present from God, his white snow a blessing. I enjoyed the snow at first. There was more than enough snow for me to swim and drown pleasantly in; an amount that only seemed to increase with each gust of wind full of an endless amount of snow flakes. The movies made snow seem so glamorous, pure, and majestic, yet they didn’t seem to mention how it melted on your cheeks and made you cold, or how it soaked into your clothes and made you even colder, or how it filled the sidewalks and forced you to walk on the streets, where the pure white snow become a contorted mess of black and brown that splattered on you with each passing car. It didn’t take long for me to start to hate it as much as it hated me.

I watched it stretch from a taxi window on my mother’s lap. It extended endlessly, covering everything in white from the Boston airport to the apartment that was rented for us in Worcester– the less desirable but cheaper city next to Boston. The landlord received us after the taxi dropped us off, leading us into an apartment that’s door had frozen solid. The door had to be forced open with a shoulder.The apartment had three rooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and two living rooms, all equally frozen solid. Sleeping outside, the snow being my blanket, might have made me warmer.  Except for the Kentucky Chicken and a gallon of milk in the refrigerator ( the American diet) the apartment was desolate. After laying down the mats, I and my two brothers slept in the first room, my parents in the second, leaving the third vacant. We would receive food, furniture, toys, appliances, heating, and hot water after the snowstorm calmed, three days later.

Adam Maarij was born in Iraq and immigrated to America at the age of eight. He attends South High school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enjoys soccer, running, reading, writing, and procrastinating.

Photo credit: Suicide Bomber Kills Five In Baghdad. Photographer. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/115_1619786/1/115_1619786/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

 

 

To the Woman at Food Fair Who Screamed at Her Child

Fall 2016, Uncategorized

Sarah Diamond Burroway

 

SUPERMARKET, 1960s. - A New York City supermarket / The Granger Collection / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

SUPERMARKET, 1960s. – A New York City supermarket / The Granger Collection / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

To the woman at Food Fair who screamed at her child last Tuesday somewhere between the boxed cereal and the bread aisle:

She heard you.

You didn’t have to call her a little bitch, wrenching her arm behind her, sending hot rivers of tears down her dirty cheeks, washing away stains from a day spent sitting in straight rows, eyes forward, feet on the floor inside a dark classroom by the cafeteria where her federal free lunch of half a cheese sandwich, green peas, canned peaches and lukewarm two-percent milk is served five days a week promptly at 11:20 a.m.

No “Would you like some inspiration with that?”

No creativity on the side.

Only children. Holding square, plastic trays, marching to tables; tended like baby chicks in a pen. Teachers hover and cluck “Hurry and eat.”  “Drink your milk.” No talking!”

She is barely five. And, she is hungry. She has questions.

“Where do crackers come from?” and

“Do fish sticks really live in the river?”

She needs answers. And hugs. And time to play with you and talk about ideas and places and things that would fill her mind instead of the worry and sorrow that creeps in when she is left to herself with no one to show her how to be a kid.

Children have a short shelf life. Before you can blink, it’s expired, and she’ll be all dented and past-date, just like you. What happened to “new and improved?” Where’s the happy? Look in aisle five, or maybe next to produce.

To the woman at Food Fair who screamed at her child last Tuesday evening: I know it’s hard to be poor and to feel like there’s nothing you can do about it. But you can do something about this living, breathing, smart girl who is hungry. For your attention. And to feel your arms swoop her from the floor and into the cart, even though she’s too big to ride in the buggy.

A girl who hangs on every word you say. Who wants to play and be loved. Who doesn’t understand why she can’t have a gumball from the machine in the lobby.

AndWhy does it make you so mad when I ask, mommy? Yes, I heard you, mommy, please don’t yell. I’m sorry, mommy. My arm.  Mommy, I promise I won’t cry…                                            

If you just stop.

Sarah Diamond Burroway is a Kentucky writer. Her essays and poetry are included in the 2015 and 2016 Women of Appalachia Project. Sarah’s plays and monologues produced in New York, California, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. She is pursuing her Master of Fine Art in Writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University.

Photo credit: SUPERMARKET, 1960s. – A New York City supermarket.. Fine Art. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/140_1682494/1/140_1682494/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

Next Stop, Agony Road

Fall 2016, Uncategorized

Isaac Nemetz

New York subway / Peter Carroll / All Canada Photo / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

New York subway / Peter Carroll / All Canada Photo / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

It was a cold, dry night this past January. I was listening to music on the subway platform and fighting to stave off sleep. I adjusted the buds to fit snugly in my ear canals and pressed the volume button on my phone through my jeans. A plump, grey rat scurried across the tracks, scavenging for morsels of food and fighting to survive the winter. I squinted at the scuttling sewer-dweller and empathized with the rat, wondering if he, too, just wanted to get home at such a late hour. A decrepit pillar, stained brownish-yellow through millions of interactions with dirty New Yorkers, propped up my weary body. It was two in the morning.  

I’d spent the evening in Manhattan with my brother. We watched a jazz band in the park as the last glimpses of the pale, winter sun faded behind the skyscrapers. We braved the cold, gloomy night, trying a new restaurant downtown and enjoying a few beers at a comedy club. I lingered late into the evening watching baseball at his apartment. Now I just wanted to get home, to get off my feet, and sleep.

I left my post on the pole to peer down the tunnel. A white glow, growing brighter, spread down the tile wall of the tunnel. I exhaled. The subway emerged through the black archway from a tunnel of immense, haunting depth into the station. The train was a snake, uncoiling itself gradually until you could see the full extent of its massive body.

The subway had bright, fluorescent, white lights and powder blue benches. The walls were made of the cold, silver steel which composed so much of the city. A seated man with sharp whiskers, paint-stained jeans and scuffed brown boots laid his head on an aggressive advertisement. His eyes were closed and his barrel chest heaved up and down with his breath. A young couple with clasped hands communicated with glances, not words. They massaged each other affectionately to stay awake. The car was silent. When I removed my earbuds, my ears rang in response to the quiet.

I advanced one train car every time the train stopped. I’d boarded at the middle of the train, but the station I needed to get off at lined up with the train’s last car. Walking between cars while the train is moving could’ve earned me a ticket, so at every stop I waited at the back door of the train car, hopped onto the platform when the train stopped, and walked into the next car before the train left the station.

After three stops I reached an empty car. I walked to the end and sat by the door, tapping my foot to the beat of my music. Vacant subway cars made me anxious. Silence is fleeting in New York City, and the peace of an empty subway car always feels temporary, like disruption is inevitable. I felt I was lounging beneath a greying sky on a summer day. I was enjoying the heat, but I knew the sky would open up any minute. Looking through the scratchiti-stained window to my right, I was relieved to see one woman sitting at the end of the next car.

When I entered the next car, I was surprised to see the woman was not alone. A man wearing khaki pants and a hoodie, which veiled his face, lay on the floor at her feet. His arms and legs were splayed like a starfish. The woman’s face was also obscured by the hood of her jacket, and the two of them were still when I entered the car. It’s common practice for subway riders to look your way when you step into a car late at night. Either the mysterious figures didn’t know I was there, or they were pretending not to.

Fear and suspicion pushed the drowsiness from my body. I plastered my back against a door at the foot of end of the car I walked in through, making sure to stay as far away from the mysterious figures as possible. I kept my eyes trained on the other passengers. For someone who had never been mugged, I was immediately suspicious and defensive. I was taught that the city is a dangerous place, perhaps more dangerous than it really is. But I knew I wanted nothing to do with these people. Those still subway riders could’ve been violent criminals feigning sleep, trying to lure me closer and preparing to pounce.    

Who passes out on the floor of the subway? I thought. These people were reckless. They got too drunk and too high and couldn’t make it home. If these people were a danger to themselves, I reasoned they could have harmed me when they woke from their inebriated slumber. I never considered that the subway may’ve been the only place these passengers could sleep.

I focused on my perceived danger and the strangers kept dozing. I pushed myself harder and harder into the subway door, as if I could camouflage into the train wall. The passengers were impossibly flat and still, like pancake batter sizzling on a griddle. Even the harshest jolts and ear-splitting screeches emitted from the train didn’t phase them. During normal, sober sleep, people stir. They adjust themselves during the constant struggle to satisfy the weary body. So I decided the strangers were either too wasted for me to wake them up or dead. I’d read news stories where citizens stumble across corpses on the subway. Bodies are found in the tracks, or on empty cars late at night, and even sitting upright on crowded train during the day. Hoping I had better luck than the New Yorkers in the papers, I tiptoed down the car to investigate.

When I walked to the end of the car, I saw the man on the floor was frozen. The woman’s body bounced slightly with the rhythm of the train. I reached the man first and I leaned over his sprawled body to take a look at his face.

I have never seen someone die from suffocation, but I thought the man was dying from a lack of oxygen. His head was tilted back. His chin pointed up slightly and the top of his skull rested on the subway floor. The skin and fat on his face and neck bunched up towards the center of his face, resembling rolls of fat on a stomach. His chin was maroon and the color only grew darker and more purple towards the top of his skull, where blood was pooling. I could barely make out the thin slits which were once his eyes. It was hard to imagine this swollen, bloody pulp of a face contorting into a recognizable human expression ever again.

I didn’t need to look at the girl. Her face was still veiled to me, but I couldn’t look anymore.  

Heroin, I thought.

I looked up at the electronic graphic to see how far I was from home. I was two stops away, which roughly equates to five minutes. Gnawing at my fingernails, I knew what I was going to do. It was not what I should do and I hated myself for the decision already. If I pulled the emergency break at the next stop and demanded that the train stop and help come immediately, it would mean I had to get out at the next stop and make the hour-long walk home at two-thirty in the morning. I chose to wait until my stop to get help. I chose to avoid an inconvenience instead of trying to save a life.

It won’t make a difference, I’ve waited so long already, I told myself. Every minute made a difference. I was selfish. I was a murderer.

I sat down at the o
ther end of the car and tried not to think about the passengers who were in need of help. I couldn’t honestly tell myself they’d be fine. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, but I kept imagining swelling pools of dark, red blood filling the subway car. The blood in the car was
my blood and I couldn’t move. A man and a woman looked at me lying on the ground and watched the life leave me. They whispered to each other that I could wait for help to arrive. They said I was reckless so I probably deserved to die. When I opened my eyes, my face was wet with tears. It was my stop.

I leapt off the train, but kept my arm in the doorway to prevent it from closing. A subway worker, donning the token dark blue cap and blue button down shirt, walked down the platform in my direction.  I yelled to him.

“You need to get help, now,” I said. “Two people… I think they overdosed on heroin. They’re not breathing. In this car. Please get help.”

The worker met my frantic eyes with indifference. “Sure thing,” he said.

Brushing past me, he walked into the car as the doors closed. He looked at the splayed man and the motionless girl for a moment. Then he walked to the opposite end of the car, as far away from the helpless passengers as possible, and sat down. He rotated his body ninety degrees, using the end of the bench to support his back, put his feet up, and faced away from the passengers. He tipped his cap over his eyes. I watched the train roll away.

 

Photo credit: New York subway – New York City. Photo. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/167_4042731/1/167_4042731/cite. Accessed 17 Oct 2016.

A Letter from the Past

Fall 2016, Uncategorized

Maria Reidy

I was dusting a bookshelf when, with my usual grace, I managed to knock to the ground an old book that nobody had opened for years. The book crashed to the floor and out slipped a letter, yellow and musty, the handwriting an elegant looping cursive. The letter itself was brief, just a few lines. It was dated m May 18, 1914 and addressed to no one in particular. It was signed by Mrs. Warren R. Gilman, a well-to-do woman living on Oxford Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. The letter was a recommendation for my great-grandmother, Mary Kett.

Mary was an Irish immigrant who had left her home and family  with just $10 in her pocket, arriving in the United States in 1907. She was hired by Mrs. Gilman to clean her house as a “second girl,” Whose primary job was laundry, as well as cleaning and cooking. Mary worked for Mrs. gilman for three years, and the recommendation letter notes that Mary, whose neatness, honesty, and cooking were all praised, was leaving the service of Mrs. Gilman to return to Ireland.

Mary never returned to Ireland. In fact, she never saw her family there again. Ana a year after leaving service, she married my great-grandfather.

Was  Mary lying so that she could get out of an undesirable job with a good recommendation? Or could she have actually been planning on going to Ireland but instead met my great grandfather?  

We’ll never really know. One of the challenges historians face when interpreting documents is lack of context. The meaning of documents is left for historians to determine, and many historical mysteries remain unsolved.

We often have so little to work on when  trying to recreate the past. Today, there is a plethora of facts and information about everyone. Nothing is private. In our age of social media, it seems just about everything is available on that screen. Mary didn’t have social media, of course, and one cannot check her Facebook page or tweets to discover where life took her in the years following.  But she did have what many of us yearn for in an age with an abundance of information: she had privacy.  It’s frustrating to me that we will never know the full story behind this  letter. How many other letters like this were lost to time? These small mysteries shaped the lives of our ancestors, possibly playing a role in shaping who we are today.

Recently, I drove through the  downtown area of Worcester that is full of old houses that have seen better days. The house of her former employer is old and white, with an attic jutting out towards the street that appears to be meant for the servants. Perhaps Mary lived and slept there. The house and the street have fallen victim to the negligence of time, and the glamour and prestige they had once has faded. I wonder if Mary could have ever guessed her descendant would again come back to the house following her little paper trail. Will my great granddaughter find some old e-mails of mine, perhaps catching me in my own 100-year-old lie?

Maria Reidy is a Senior at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is captain of the varsity crew team, a member of National Honors Society, and a really bad driver.

The letter from Mrs. Warren R. Gilman

The Day the Sun Turned Black

Fall 2016, Uncategorized

Jerine P. Watson

Girls playing in school playground / John Birdsal

Girls playing in school playground / John Birdsal

My world was not very extensive, back in those days.  The house, the backyard, the front yard, the driveway, the sidewalk.  We lived in a small bungalow on a busy street named Rice Boulevard.  I loved to say the name and even today, I think it has a nice ring to it.

The brick on the house was a dark red.  The front door was heavy wood with a fascinating crystal doorknob I liked to stare into.  The living room was always in shadow and seemed cooler than the rest of the house.  The only light from the outdoors streamed in from a narrow leaded glass panel set into the wall, beside the door.

Our front porch consisted of a rectangular thick slab of concrete, devoid of pillars or inlaid pebbles.  It was smooth and satiny-feeling to my bare feet.  Blistering hot in the summer, cold as ice in the winter and slick as oiled glass in the rain.  On each side of the steps leading down to the front walk stood large spruce trees – the variety that was always plagued with “bag worms” encased in their tiny little gray cocoons, swaying in the breeze like dun-colored, shabby Christmas ornaments.  When no one was looking, I picked them off, pried them open and watched the worms inside wiggle and try to dodge the bright light I had let in.  After they ceased to be entertaining, I squashed them under my heel.

The driveway, two narrow ribbons of parallel tracks, was of special significance in my small world.  Daddy came home up that driveway.  When I saw his black coupe bump up over, then cross the bulging, heat-swollen strips of asphalt and cough its way up to the wooden garage in back, my heart pounded with excitement.  After my afternoon nap, I parked myself astride my tricycle on the front walk, in order to be there first thing when he came home.

Between the sidewalk in front of our house and the curbing of the street was planted a four-foot parkway of grass.  Leafy tallow trees stood guard along this strip, one every eight feet or so.  To the right of our walk near the curb was an orange and black bus stop marker.  Made of a wooden stake four inches square, it leaned crookedly in the dry dirt by the curbing, taller than I was.  The word “BUS” was printed downward from the top in black letters, on the orange half.

One steamy afternoon, I had tired of squashing the worms on the hot porch and pedaled my tricycle back and forth along the sidewalk, watching and waiting for Daddy’s car.  I was not allowed to go beyond the hedge bordering the far side of the driveway, nor was I permitted to go along the sidewalk beyond its intersection with the drive of the house on the other side.

That day, I looked up to see a woman and a young boy about my age, walking on the sidewalk, coming from the area beyond my permitted range.  The woman was heavy-set, more than plump, and smiled at me.  I smiled back and looked with interest at the boy. He grinned shyly and ducked his head.  I remember the feathery length of his eyelashes, the wondrous shining of his eyes and his startlingly white teeth.

They stood by the bus stop, the boy hanging from the post by one hand, swinging himself around and around slowly, lunging out over the danger of the street in a daredevil sort of way, watching my face, his eyebrows arched upward in a teasing question.  I dismounted from my tricycle and joined him, laughing aloud.  When he laughed with me, dimples stamped his cheeks with a delighted mischief.  His mother chuckled at our antics, her bosom bouncing as she shifted the paper package she carried in her arms.

It wasn’t long before the boy and I, with an instantaneous mutual joy, were holding hands and playing Ring-Around-The-Rosy in the afternoon sun, tumbling ourselves down on the grass at the end of each twirling time.  Over and over we sang the old rhyme, over and over we threw ourselves down on the sticky grass.  Our giggles were spontaneous, our rapport mystical.  I couldn’t recall ever having had so much fun.  I remember the slight odor emanating from his white shirt.  He smelled of soap, starch and sunshine.  His mother watched us, smiling her gentle approval, warning us occasionally to “be careful.”

           I didn’t notice the front door of our house opening, but I remember the sound of my mother’s shriek:

“You get in the house this minute!”

I looked at the boy and his mother, bewildered.  He had run to stand stiffly against her skirt, his black eyes round with fright, his face solemn.  His mother’s face clouded over with something I could not understand.  Her eyes narrowed into slits and she looked toward my mother, then away from me. I was filled with an inexplicable guilt as I ran as fast as I could, up the front walk and into the darkness of the living room.  My mother slammed the heavy oaken door and grabbed me by the arm.

“Don’t you ever let me catch you playing with any of those filthy people again, young lady!  They’re mean and dirty and you should know better!”

She jerked me around and beat my bottom with a flat hairbrush until my skin stung like I’d sat in a nest of yellow jackets and the tears streamed down my face.  When her anger was satisfied, she stormed from the room, leaving me alone with my hysteria, unable to get my breath.

I remember stumbling over to the leaded glass panel beside the door.  I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the evil people outside by the bus stop.  My tears and the beveled glass sections distorted the image of the outdoors, but I could make out their shapes, still waiting for the afternoon bus.  I saw the boy’s round black head above his white, white shirt and his mother’s gentle brown hand resting on his shoulder, where his red suspenders crossed over.  Not until that instant did I know there was such a thing as different skin color.  Only at that precise, frozen moment in time did I become aware of certain persons’ “blackness.”  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, sniffled myself quietly into dry spasms and absorbed my mother’s ignorant fear with a four-year-old’s trusting obedience.

Nearly a lifetime later, I have often wished that young boy and his mother could know how I have grown from that prejudice, that ignorant xenophobic racism, of the “old South.”  Now perhaps they do.

Jerine Pace Watson was graduated from Southern Methodist University with BA in English. Her work has been published in HowlRound, Brazzil, and Penthouse, and she has published several novels and chapbooks. As a Featured Writer, Jerine is willing to field questions on the esthetic and commercial aspects of being an author. She may be reached at jerinewatson9@gmail.com.

 

Photo credit:Girls playing in
school playground. D055647John Birdsall / John Birdsall Education / John Birdsall Social Issues Photo Library / Press Association Images / Universal Images GroupRights Managed / For Education Use Only / Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 10 Aug 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/158_2481157/1/158_2481157/cite

 

 

The Politics of Beauty

Fall 2016, Uncategorized

Maroula Blades

ANGELA DAVIS (1944- ). - American political activist. Photographed c1971. The Granger Collection / Universal Images Group

ANGELA DAVIS (1944- ). – American political activist. Photographed c1971. The Granger Collection / Universal Images Group

 

In Western culture, Afro-textured hair is still stigmatized. Why? It is because those seen as “others” (blacks) have distinctive characteristics that are perceived by the white establishment as being undesirable? Once, this and other black attributes were either eradicated or dismissed as primitive and wild. Afro-hair in particular became a symbol for an inferior race.

 

Generally, I think Black self-esteem has steadily grown over the past decades. In the 1960s, the Afro was seen as a political statement of black consciousness. Angela Davis, who sported a famously large Afro, did much to change that negative perception of beauty, and she is still regarded as an icon of black empowerment. Today, multi-optional hairstyles (natural and processed) are gracing the streets, owing to the influence of the media, fashion and celebrities.

The influx of chemically based products on the cosmetics market has soared. So-called “beauty enhancers” straighten hair and bleach the skin, while some opt for  the most extreme procedure of surgery to alter black features. The late pop singer, Michael Jackson, was a prime example of someone that underwent surgery to acquire European features.

Living in Berlin as a woman of color, as I do, it’s difficult to find a makeup tint suitable for a darker complexion. Most department stores do not carry products specifically made for darker skins. True, some cosmetic firms have brought out a range of makeup tones, but these do not suffice, due to the numerous shades of black skin. For the entrepreneur, there is a potential market out there of women who are desperate to find the right colour.

There are Afro shops, selling hair and beauty products in Berlin, but the products are usually expensive as they are imported. Why aren’t our cosmetic needs being met? This is perhaps partly due to negligence and partly to the fact that manufacturing products for minority groups in Europe would not be profitable. It is therefore “our” (blacks) responsibility to highlight black skin and features in a beautiful way by using whatever means necessary.

In Berlin, many mothers of mixed-race children are white Germans who may not be able to give their daughters tips concerning beauty and hair management. Some support can be found in  black beauty magazines that aid and inform black women on cosmetic issues and give a positive all-round representation of black women.

Unfortunately, black women in Germany, as in many western countries, are confronted daily with marketing strategies which revolve around the western ideal of beauty–thin nose, slim hips, blonde hair, petite bone structure, etc. A number of black models have straightened their hair, and a few even resort to wearing blue or green contact lenses. These adopted characteristics may prove detrimental to a positive black identity.

However, all is not lost; it is wonderful to see the talented and beautiful black ballet dancer, Misty Danielle Copeland, gracing stages around the world. She was often told she had the wrong body type for ballet, but she persevered and proved the naysayers wrong with her grace and technique. Her determination to succeed in an art form traditionally reserved for white dancers makes her an influential role model for young peoples of color who wish to dance ballet, or, indeed, to achieve in any field.

I look forward to the day when black women living in predominantly white societies see advertisements depicting natural black women in a positive light, one that illuminates blackness as being wholesomely essential. Black is indeed beautiful.

 

 

Maroula Blades is an Afro-British poet/writer living in Berlin. She has published in various anthologies and magazines. Her poetry/music program has been presented on several stages in Germany. Her debut EP-album “Word Pulse” was released by Havavision Records (UK).

 

Photo credit: ANGELA DAVIS (1944- ). – American political activist. Photographed c1971.. Fine Art. Britannica ImageQuest. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 May 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/140_1686440/1/140_1686440/cite. Accessed 11 Aug 2016.

 

 

Before His Last Smile

Summer 2016, Uncategorized

by Catherine Tersoni

 

Underwood Archives  UIG / Rights Managed

Underwood Archives UIG / Rights Managed

I walk up the stairs and take a quick left to get to the time clock. I punch in my employee numbers two-five-eight-two-nine-eight just like I do after I clock out of every other shift. I walk back down the stairs to the sales floor. I walk out the automatic door faster than it can open, helping it along with the tip of my shoe. The cold air hits my face as I walk quickly to my car. I get a hold of the icy metal handle to the driver’s side door. My breathing is heavier now that I’m sitting still in my unstarted Nissan Rogue. I push the key in the ignition and hear the engine roar after sitting in the cold all day. I sit and press my toes lightly on the gas for a quick second at a time, in hopes it will warm up faster. I begin to get impatient and put the car into reverse to leave the parking lot.

                                          ***

Robert Frederick Page, Jr, was born on June 26th, 1923. He was the middle son of Robert and Julia Page. He grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where he attended parochial school. Leter, his family moved to Norwell, where he played baseball for the varsity team, achieving a record RBI. After graduation, he enlisted in the army and was assigned to the 416 Night Fighter Squadron. He was involved in multiple combat zones as an Air Operations Specialist. In 1945, he was discharged and soon became a sales representative for the National Lead Company, where stayed for 38 years. Then he worked for the Gillette Corporation, retiring 1985 at age sixty-two.

But that really doesn’t tell you who he is.

                                           ***

I drive the same roads home from work every day. Some days I stop on the way home at my grandparents, which is just a couple miles from home. I have watched the red stop signs in their neighborhood fade with time. I see the same sidewalks that lead right to the pathway to their front door. I walk up that path and open the door to the warm draft coming from their home. It’s always warm in there.

                                           ***

It was crowded on the dance floor, and young Marjorie stared at almost every gentleman in the vicinity, but didn’t see anyone special. Her friends had spent an hour bribing and convincing their younger friend to come. It wasn’t going great.

Robert walked into the room, flashed his smile, and headed toward Marjorie.

She saw him coming. He was certainly handsome.

He tried a joke. “I would take you home tonight, but my wife and kids are sleeping,” he said.

She wasn’t amused. Robert saw his mistake, took back what he’d said, and asked her to dance. She accepted the dance and fell for his smile. She liked his smile.                    

                                           ***

I always say hi to Grammy first. She is always the one to greet me at the door. The hardwood floors are bare; rugs get caught in Pa’s walker. I round the corner into the sunroom to see Pa sitting in his chair, watching “Wheel of Fortune,” an everyday routine. As soon as he notices me, he smiles and says, “Who are you?” He still has a beautiful smile.

I reply, “Who am I? Who are you? And since when do you live here?”

It was our little joke.

                                           ***

I take the first left onto Route 9, the same road I have traveled all my short life. The radio is playing an overplayed Justin Bieber song. I press the off button to the power of the radio, but it’s too silent for me. I turn it back on but adjust the volume to a softer notch. Before noticing what song is playing, it hits me. I am driving the same roads at the same time as always. This time was different though. My destination is the same place as usual, but for a different reason. I drive for 20  minutes, numb. My heart starts to race. Five minutes before I arrive, tears start forming in my eyes. I rub them out of the sockets of my eyes and hope my face hasn’t turned beet red from the tears. I can’t look like I’ve been crying.

I pull into the driveway of my grandparent’s home and put my car into park. I open the door to my now warmed car, step out,  and shut it hard behind me. I approach the door to the house and take a deep breath. The cold isn’t bothering me. The only thing on my mind is what words will be the last words my grandfather hears come out of my mouth. I open the door to the house, walk down the hall towards the hospital bed that seems so out of place in the living room, and sit next to my grandfather to say hello and see his smile one last time. 

 

Catherine Tersoni of Massachusetts studies English with a creative writing focus at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire.

Photo credit: New York, New York: 1941 .Couples dancing to the Dolly Dawn band at the Roseland Ballroom.. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 10 Jun 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/183_365825/1/183_365825/cite

Farming over the Abyss

Summer 2016, Uncategorized

by Mark Frank

Breughel, 'Landscape With the Fall of Icarus'/The Granger Collection/Universal Images Group/Rights Managed

Breughel, ‘Landscape With the Fall of Icarus’/The Granger Collection/Universal Images Group/Rights Managed

In the December of my eighteenth year, my best friend and confidant, partner in poetry, art, and sometimes romance, committed suicide. I heard about it during Christmas vacation at my grandma’s house in eastern Kansas. Though the two of us had often talked of suicide, her action took me by surprise. The entire trajectory of my life was changed, the way an earthquake can change a river’s course. Nothing was the same —there were no remnants of “same” to return to. The strongest feeling was not sadness, it was nothingness; the feeling that I was nowhere, left stranded above an abyss.

Her kind and beautiful soul ignited the love of literature and poetry and music in my own. I have spent the intervening years searching, collecting the pieces that were broken and scattered when she left. I lost faith and interest in tangible life, and turned to the things that we had shared: I tried to find life and solace in books and music, though they are sometime fickle friends. These sounds and shapes came and went, and I learned to live in pages torn from borrowed volumes and words suspended in air. In every new book, every poem, every album I listened to, I tried to find a trace of her. Sometimes I did, and I cherished that. The Ninth Wave by Kate Bush. The poetry of Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg. The 4AD record label. The Surrealists. There were two things I looked for: the honesty to confront and discuss the idea of suicide directly and the courage to break through the everyday, the anchors to this life, to pull them up and cut loose.

I learned to appreciate life through reverberations, still feeling her presence in a way that could not be verbalized, that resonated somewhere out beyond language. Colors became tones, and the change of seasons was always accompanied by an encompassing music that only I could hear. A few days after she died, she appeared to me clearly. I was lying in bed, and she came into the room. She was angry, asking why I did not keep my promise to join her. At first I did try to join her. I felt it was my obligation to end my own life, but I failed for various reasons. Finally, without really thinking about it, I quit trying and just let life be. But, there is always that voice that calls from over the edge. It is a familiar voice, nearly every day. Not usually 24 hours a day—if it were, it might be something that could be tuned out or ignored. No, it comes unexpectedly, at the most unlikely times. It always feels the same, like the floor has dropped out from under me, the constant sea of sound stripped away.

It is not a matter of being one step away from the abyss, nor of being on the edge, but of being suspended over it, with no visible means of support. I realized I needed to dedicate myself to something connected to life. I couldn’t express it like that at the time, but I think that is why I chose to go into education and teaching. I found that the classroom was a living organism, the chance to interact with and maybe even change other lives. I have always liked people but was too shy to really connect. Becoming a teacher helped me (forced me?) to overcome that. And then, becoming a farmer.

It started when I was teaching in Japan, we had a garden at my college. The students would collect food scraps from the cafeteria and make compost. Our first season, we had a meter high mound of compost. One day, we were turning it together. A student placed her hand on the top. “It’s warm, it’s hot,” she said, “like it’s alive!” We took turns touching it, picking up handfuls.  We all felt for the first time the power of composting, of fermentation, of life returning. Feeling the compost inspired us all, and galvanized our will to create the best garden possible. From these early experiences, my own love and respect for farming was born, and it became my inspiration to start a farm here in America. Much like the classroom before, I sensed that the garden was a place of life and learning and positivity.

There is a scientific basis for this feeling as well. The soil microbe mycobacterium vaccae has been shown to cause immune cells to release chemicals known as cytokines. These in turn stimulate nerves which cause neurons to release serotonin, high levels of which are connected to general feelings of well-being, while a deficiency is often connected to depression. I don’t mean to suggest that going out and getting your hands dirty can take the place of therapy or medication. I don’t want to trivialize anyone’s experience or reality. No, the kind of farming I am talking about is not a cure, but a recognition, a way forward, or at least sideways. Like everything in life, it is another scenic road to nowhere, but here, in the dirt, on the ground, under an enormous sky.  Seeing life pass through death and in that death provide for another life has given me some degree of solace and balance.

The simple process of growing a cabbage from tiny seed to giant head, taking it to market,and passing it on to a customer–that is a tremendous feat.

Suicidal thoughts reduce the imagination, limit choices, tie off the story in a knot. Farming is exactly the opposite: every day is an opening up, an unpredictable now, improvisational and wild. I have found companionship in the soil among the worms and microbes and roots and pillbugs. You may fail, but the dirt, the ants, the weeds, the critters, they all will be waiting for you again tomorrow, no matter how badly you mess up today.

I no longer see apparitions of my dead friend, but I hear her and feel her everywhere around the farm. At times when I go to sleep I hear her talking to me, whispering, a beautiful litany of poetry I could never write myself. The edges of the words leave me stranded, looking right and left, aware only that I will never have the ability to keep up. But there are also iridescent afternoons with muddy knees and hands elbow deep in mulch. Farming is not so much about the production of life as it is about life’s cycle. The farmer is not the creator of life, but the witness to its continual passing and returning. Time spent with soil and compost somehow can anchor us in this uncertain, floating world.

Mark Frank was born and raised in eastern Kansas. After completing an M.A. Arts degree in American Literature at Missouri State University, he moved to rural Japan, where he taught. There he also studied traditional agriculture, fermentation, and sake brewing.A few years ago, he moved back to Missouri, where he operates a no-till organic farm specializing in Japanese vegetables and fermented foods.

 

Photo creit: BRUEGEL: FALL OF ICARUS. – ‘Landscape With the Fall of Icarus.’ Oil on canvas, c1555, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.. Fine Art. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 10 Jun 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/140_1666209/1/140_1666209/cite

 

The Road Back: A Story of Healing

Summer 2016, Uncategorized

by Victoriahope McAuliffe

 

 

Victoriahope McAuliffe

Victoriahope McAuliffe

When I was 17 I made the decision to go ahead with a surgery that would hopefully control what I had lived with since I was four years old. I suffered from intractable Epilepsy, and typically had 200 seizures a day. I would fall down on the floor, crawl, scream, and end up injuring myself in all sorts of ways. I remember constantly having to bandage my knees because they were always cut up and bloodied. Most kids have scraped knees from sports or running around outside, mine were from constant seizures.

This surgery, a right frontal partial lobectomy, would hopefully remove the source of my seizures and change my life in unimaginable ways. Little did I know how many ways my life would be changed.

My surgery took place during my senior year of high school, in December. I had left school in October because my seizure activity had become so frequent that I was missing classes, so I was isolated for most of the time leading up to the operation. I remember being so excited that my seizures would stop, that I didn’t have time to think about being afraid. How could I be afraid? My whole life was going to be different, this was going to change EVERYTHING! As the day approached I began to feel scared and nervous as the enormity of what I would soon undergo hit me. I admitted to one of my friends I was scared, and he just said, “I know you are. You have been. You just didn’t know it.”

My surgery went perfectly, but I was exhausted and overwhelmed in the days following. I hadn’t realized just how much help and support I would need in the days and weeks that followed. I had to learn to walk again. I couldn’t shower alone for  two weeks, and I couldn’t walk by myself for three weeks. It was hard for me to accept the help of others, because I had no idea I was going to need it. In essence, while the operation was successful and ended the seizures,  it  also left me with a brain injury, which caused an entirely new set of problems.

By some miracle, I was able to graduate with the 2010 Senior class at Doherty High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and that fall I started school at Quinsigamond Community College. I soon found that I was tired all the time, and I needed to take naps everyday when I got home from school. The hardest thing for me was that I now struggled to read and comprehend information. I had always been a strong reader, and my slowed reading and processing speeds made reading a monumental undertaking. Still, I was able to finish my Associates Degree in Early Childhood Education in May of 2014, and I transferred to Worcester State University the following September.

Transitioning to Worcester State from QCC as a student with a brain injury was challenging, and disheartening at first. I had to navigate a new campus, meet new friends, understand how the dynamics of the school worked, and of course become familiar with the Disability Services Office. Adjusting to a new school is stressful for any student. Imagine trying to do it without  the part of your brain that controls emotion regulation, impulse control, inhibition, organization, executive functioning, and rational thought. Everyday difficulties were magnified into huge obstacles.

It didn’t help when the Disability Services office gave me a handbook titled, Transitioning From High School to College. Evidently my community college didn’t count. I stayed away from the office for two semesters after that, and when I had to return to use my accommodations for a mathematics course, I had a totally different experience and found the director amazingly helpful.

I get hurt and offended when people try to “help” me by dumbing things down, by diluting information so that I can absorb it. I am an intelligent individual, and I have met many people with cognitive and processing disabilities who have intelligence levels that far exceed those of the people who often try to help us.

What I need as someone with a brain injury and processing impairment is to be listened to. I want to be respected and heard as an individual with hopes, dreams, and goals. I am not just a statistic you write in your books to say that you graduated so many students with learning differences- I am a person and some days I struggle.

Some daysI struggle. I feel such extreme fatigue and exhaustion, I have to fight with myself just to get out of bed. Yet everyday I get up, and I show up, because I need to be there for myself. We live in a world where people like me can be overlooked, and it’s easier to do that when you seem healthy on the outside. That is the trouble with invisible illnesses– others cannot see them, but those who suffer from them feel their strength at full force. It is isolating, and often a heavy burden to carry.

My brain injury is a healing wound you cannot see. I am learning to live with that reality, this new me. Despite these challenges, I’ve managed to keep my GPA above a 3.0, and I’ve started working part time. Healing takes time, and someday I will reach the place where I want to be. And until then, I’ll keep my sights on graduating next May–which is not bad for a girl they said would never graduate high school.

 

Victoriahope McAuliffe is a student at Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts. She enjoys singing, hiking, yoga, and writing, and her goal in life is to inspire others to keep fighting. She blogs at  www.chronicbrainborrower.blogspot.com and can also be reached at instagram@wildheartedwanderer.

 

Kites Under the Sun

Spring 2016, Uncategorized

by Adam Maarij

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons

Ask me what I most remember about my birthplace, Baghdad, and I’d answer ‘’yellow.’’ I’m not sure whether my memories are fuzzy or I’m just mistaking dreams for reality, but the more I think about it, the more my hometown resembles a painting made of warm dust particles. This includes the yellow dusty brick walls of my house, the cracks of our concrete sidewalk, and the edges of Main Street, after which it just becomes a blur–yellow and dusty and devoid of any serene breeze. There was a field of brown dirt with clumps of withered grass and malnourished trees–eerie yet bewitching scenery. My parents though, say otherwise. They tell me that on the other side of the street were just more brick buildings. I am still reluctant to believe that the field did not exist, even though I was only five years old at the time.  It honestly shocks me, how many memories and tender emotions my five year old self kindly retained for me. Fake or not, most of my memories are simple fragments, such as me sprinting for my life from two other, much bigger kids, intent on beating me, while I laughed, my face red, relishing the exquisite pleasure of living on the edge.

Smart phones? Plasma TV? PS4? Ha! The very act of owning even a PS1 was a luxury not many could afford, much less a computer. Our main toys were our kites, which we made and flew with pride. The kites were typically crafted from sticks found on the streets and whatever material we could scratch up, all hitched to a thread that threatened to snap with each gust of wind. We all had our favorites. My older brother, Sarmad, a child blessed by the sun, had a red kite, while that of my oldest brother, Aseel, the smart child of the family, was black, white, green, and red patches poorly stitched together. Even though our kites were equally horrible, they did not fail to cause rivalry and arguments as to which was best. My father–a veteran at his craft– unsurprisingly surpassed us all with an eloquent blue, red, and white kite, perfectly symmetrical and devoid of any wrinkles (unlike his face). I wasn’t even in the running, since my favorite kind of kite amounted to one that was able to glide for a few fleeting moments without disintegrating.

We would gaze at them, adoring the kites’ refined dances over and over, never getting tired of its swaying to the left and to the right, up and down, and when the rare exhilarating breeze that would cool our lungs of the tepid air stuck within came, we would savor it.

The sun beamed brightly at us, unyielding. We would do better without you, thank you very much. I could not help but stare into it, to contest it, to see which one of us would surrender first and blink in shame. It was a battle that I always lost, of course. I hated losing, and I still do.

The rest of my precious memories are a scattered and disordered mess. What I do remember though, will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. My mother always reminds of the time she bought a bag as tall as I was full of small fish, and how we devoured them faster than the flames could roast them! Or that time when the power went out–and it often did–and my brothers and I went onto the balcony and let loose countless paper airplanes and watched them plunge for three or so floors, and then slept outside.

Sometimes at night we lay on the cool ground and gazed at the sky. With no sun and with very few lights, the stars and the moon were a pure, unforgettable white. I would smile and laugh for no apparent reason, and I felt blessed by the night and its glimmering stars. How magnificent they all were! They twinkled vividly and frantically as if they were oblivious to the shroud of the foolish, ghastly night.

 

Adam Maarij was born in Iraq and immigrated to America at the age of eight. He attends South High school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enjoys  soccer, running, reading, writing, and procrastinating.

 

Crying at Work

Spring 2016, Uncategorized
Heraclitus (The Crying Philosoher) / By Johannes Moreelse (after 1602–1634)/Wikimedia Commons

Heraclitus (The Crying Philosoher) / By Johannes Moreelse (after 1602–1634)/Wikimedia Commons

by Joseph Benavidez

The first time I cried as a journalist was driving home after covering a frigid winter event. A month before, a 46-year-old man had gone missing, and his girlfriend, family, and friends were holding a candlelight vigil to draw attention to the case, which had gone cold. The vigil was held on the second floor of a tiny church, and the girlfriend and his sister spoke about the good qualities the man had and how much they missed him.

Being in that church was disconnecting  for me. Mentally, I knew a man was missing and probably dead, but emotionally I felt nothing for the man or his family. I interviewed the girlfriend, taking her quotes before effortlessly moving onto the sister and then another attendee. During the moment of silence, I took photos of the small crowd praying. I did my job and left the church happy and proud of myself. I felt like a real journalist and not a college student playing pretend.

But on the drive home it hit me. This guy was dead and no one was ever going to say goodbye to him. In rural Massachusetts, a body can stay hidden in the woods for decades. Without warning, I found myself overwhelmed by a crushing wave of sadness.

Winter on Route 2 means ice, darkness and, if you don’t pay attention, accidents. Everyone who grew up along the highway has a story of teens dying in a car crash; and here I was, alone, crying fat, ugly tears. I forced myself to pull over and rolled down the window to let the cold chill my face. It wasn’t enough and I ended up calling my best friend.

We talked for almost an hour before I calmed down and felt it was safe to drive home.

*       *      *

To tell the truth, this wasn’t the only time I cried at work. When you’re the primary reporter for an area, you cover everything–fires, natural disasters, deaths, and fundraisers for community members suffering terminal illnesses.

One Tuesday at 6 p.m. a barn caught on fire in Phillipston, the middle of nowhere. I had finished writing my articles for the day and was preparing to head home when the scanner in the newsroom announced the Phillipston Fire Department was requesting backup.

Phillipston is farm country. With fewer than 2,000 residents, it seems there are more cows than people. My editor asked if I would drive out and take a photo. Something for the front page that would grab attention at the newsstand.

I drove the 12 miles to where firefighters from three towns were battling the blaze. The homeowners were not present, but their 27-year-old daughter, who had called 9-1-1, was there.

Before leaving the office, my editor had coached me on how to approach people in such situations

“Be kind,” she’d said. “Ask if it’s okay to take photos. I like to ask if they want some water or something to drink.”

With that advice in mind, I approached the daughter, asked if she needed something to drink, joking that I was finally over 21 so I could legally buy her some vodka.

She laughed. I counted that as a victory. “I don’t know how it started,” she continued, “but the rabbits were still in their cages. I’d just delivered 24 piglets today and now…now they’re gone.”

I couldn’t walk away–these were amazing quotes and my article was going to be 100 times better if I could just get her to cry.

“Did you name them?” It slipped out before I could think about it.

“No, not yet.” She smiled weakly, and I knew she wasn’t going to answer any more questions.

The journalist walks a tight line between asking appropriate questions and being an asshole. I hope I never crossed that line, but I do think I might have picked at people’s wounds a little too soon.

*     *     *

Another time work gave me emotional whiplash was when Jeremiah Oliver’s body was discovered. The Oliver case gained nationwide notoriety, culminating in the fall of 2014 when the head of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families resigned in disgrace.

Five-year-old Jeremiah lived with his brother, sister, mother, and his mother’s boyfriend in Fitchburg. His biological father, Jose Oliver, had been arrested on drug possession years earlier and the courts had awarded his mother full custody, marking the family as a case for state check-ins.

In October of 2013, Jeremiah disappeared. A month later, his mother finally reported him missing when a school counselor informed police that she hadn’t seen Jeremiah in a while.

When the word got out that Jeremiah had been missing for over a month before police were notified, news vans raced to Fitchburg to report on the little boy who had been forgotten. Articles and editorials flooded the newspapers. Search parties with cadaver dogs from Connecticut met almost weekly. Churches held prayer vigils. Jeremiah’s biological father was arrested for drug possession again. Anything remotely related to the case made front pages on all the papers.

Fast forward to April 20,14. A suitcase with a boy’s lifeless body inside is found off the highway not far from Jeremiah’s hometown. At the time I was vacationing in Los Angeles. My best friend saw the news and texted me.

I immediately went to the hotel lobby to watch a blonde newscaster on the large-screen TV relay details of the find. It wasn’t confirmed for another week, but everyone knew that Jeremiah had been found.The first story I had ever written as a reporter had come to a close–Jeremiah had been shoved into a suitcase and thrown on the ground as if he was a piece of garbage.

I sat in the lobby stupefied, remembering something one of Jeremiah’s neighbors said when I had interviewed her during the initial search.

“I’ve lived here over six years and I’ve never said hello to him,” she said that snowy morning. “If I couldn’t help him when he was alive, I’ll help him now.”

I couldn’t help Jeremiah when he was alive and now that he was dead, I asked myself, “Did I help him or did I profit from his death?”

I still don’t have an answer for that. I was gleeful when my article and photographs about the search landed on the front page of the paper, buying copies for my mom, my sister, myself, three friends and a former boss, smiling widely when I delivered them.

Some days I feel guilty over that pride, other days I don’t.

I quit being a journalist after two years. Too many heartbreaks, too many late nights. Still, it’s probably the only career where crying at work is a sign of job well done, and I’m not ashamed of those tears.

 

Joseph Benavidez is an editor for Buck Off Magazine, proud cat daddy and was a sexy Captain America for Halloween. He enjoys taking photos, sleeping until noon, and reading flash fiction. A graduate of Salem State University, he has left journalism and e
mbarked upon a literary career.

 

Where Are You From?

Spring 2016, Uncategorized
Steve Gorton and Karl Shone/ Dorling Kindersley / Universal Images Group

Steve Gorton and Karl Shone/ Dorling Kindersley / Universal Images Group

by Amanda Bigler

 

Five minutes after flying into Chicago O’Hare airport, I briefly watched Fox News on the television. Having spent the past three months in the region of Lorraine in France, and having resided in the United Kingdom since 2012, I had forgotten (or perhaps shut out) how blunt American media and politics have become. Donald Trump’s face popped up in between segments on Muslim fear. Car and food commercials chattered in between talking heads and propaganda. The shunning of Syrian refugees and scrutiny of President Obama’s religion were broken up by Taco Bell Crunchwrap! Live Mas! and Ford F-150, Built Ford Tough! At that point in time, I could understand the perceptions that other countries have of Americans: perpetual capitalism and consumption sprinkled with bias. I felt an embarrassment about my nationality that lurks beneath the surface every day, influenced by my encounters in both France and England.

 

 

 

The East Midlands is a rural region in England, which causes foreigners to stand out more than they would in, say, London. When walking through the crowded market square, I would often put a lilt into my words to mimic the local accents. If I didn’t cover up my hard Kansas accent, I would always be asked the inevitable question “Where are you from?” When answering “Kansas,” half of the time the inquisitor would reply “like Texas?” and I would not correct them. In the States, Kansas and Texas are two highly different entities (never confuse Kansas City and Texas barbecue). The Breadbasket of America is quite different from the state where “everything’s bigger, y’all,” but in the United Kingdom, I don’t have to be nit-picky; they both consist of fields, cattle, rural pride, and cowboy hats.

 

 

 

The question that always surprised me, however, and one that I was asked multiple times, was “Are you Canadian?” At first I believed it was because my speech had been affected by living in England for some months, but one day a stranger let slip the true reason. After replying that I was, in fact, American, he explained, “Oh, okay. I just didn’t want to insult you if you were Canadian.” The opinion of my Americanness and that it could possibly be insulting to someone else, in essence, insulted me.

 

 

 

Two months after this incident, I was detained at Heathrow Airport and eventually deported. I had a valid entry visa and was continuing my Masters degree at Loughborough University, but I had not purchased a return ticket, and it didn’t help that my jet-lag made my answers slightly unintelligible over the eleven-hour interrogation and overnight detainment. I was surprised that the loudest thought in my head was But I’m American. I’m not from some third world country. I have money. I’m spending money here. The entitlement I felt echoes the media mentality I had lambasted in Chicago.

 

 

 

Sitting in the overnight detention barracks, I was surrounded by women of various ethnic origins. Though through appearances I believed I could assimilate easier into British culture (being a native English-speaking white girl), I understood then that my subconscious entitlement no longer existed. This revelation made me ashamed of my own notions and lost in my sense of identity.

 

 

 

I have since moved to Metz, France, with my French fiancé as I finish my Ph.D. remotely. France is a country I had fallen in love with as a teenager, and I was anxious to return. Leaving the rain and the mushy peas of England, a part of me was relieved to experience change. I soon realized the devices I had been relying on in England to blend in could not be used in France. I cannot alter my accent, as the pronunciation of certain words still escape me. I cannot hear the difference, for example, between “rougir” (blush) and “rugir” (roar). I sometimes have a difficult time expressing myself, and I fear that my personality is lost in translation.

 

 

 

Unlike the Brits, the French people I have encountered have been direct when pointing out my American accent. When I studied in Paris in 2007, I was spit on for having George Bush as a president. This time around, I am often asked questions about politics, though so far sans bodily fluids (“Donald Trump, really? It isn’t a joke to you?”). I am also asked about implied American issues with French cuisine (“Can you eat paté? Snails? Foie gras?” etc.) I reply with a smile, as I had in England, because I believe these perceptions are ingrained in each person’s mind, just as my own American stereotypes presented themselves at Heathrow.

 

 

 

It is quite difficult to be a non-European Union citizen residing in both the United Kingdom and France. There is a constant stream of never-ending documentation that distances me from the citizens. In England, I obtained three separate visas, one of which was cancelled when I was deported. I finally received my residence permit, but each time I return to the country it is with trepidation and a pit in my stomach. My name has now been flagged and I am always rigorously questioned at the border, even with my permit and visa in hand. Over the past four years there has been an increase in the practice of detaining law-abiding immigrants to boost immigration restriction statistics. Similarly in France, I am required to obtain a full medical physical, radiological scan, and bloodwork to reside as a “visiteur de long sejour” (long-stay visitor). Even the title of my visa in question seems alienating. I am PACSed with my partner, and therefore am given the right to remain in France. The word “visiteur” has a short-lived connotation, and reminds me that I do not belong.

 

 

 

Coming back to the ever-looming question “Where are you from?” I do not know how to reply. I have not lived in America for nearly four years now, and even when I did, I felt that I did not truly fit in. I am technically a resident of the United Kingdom, yet I feel uncomfortable entering the country. I reside in France, but am considered a visitor.

 

 

 

What I do know is that through these experiences my personal identity has been muddled and, perhaps, expanded. The negative and often trying experiences have, in their own way, solidified my connection with each country. Though I might not belong in any of the three countries, they are all a part of me. Assimilation or, in the case of the United States, acceptance must be worth the struggle, or I would not have the passion to continue to do so.  When I am in England, I find myself missing the wide open Kansas skies that stretch for miles and the bittersweet smell of French boulangeries in the morning. In France, I wish I could have a chat with the bright-eyed Loughborough market vendor or hop into a car with the windows down driving for hours on K-10.

 

 

 

The next time I am in America, I will turn off the media diatribe. The American perception of America should be cultivated through oneself, as the authority lies within each American to determine his or her own culture. As for myself, I will lie in a field of wheat listening to the crickets chirp, feeling the roll of thick, warm wind on my face, and dream about cheerful strangers that call me “duck” and the peacefully lazy current of la Moselle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Bigler grew up in Altamont, Kansas. She studied literature with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Kansas and completed her MA in Literature at  Loughborough University (U.K.)  in 2013. She is finishing her doctorate at Loughborough University in the Department of English and Drama. Represented by Ravenswood Publishing, she had her first novel, The Takers, published in 2015. She currently resides in France with her partner.

Photo credit: Blue gold-printed cover of a US passport. P
hotography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 10 Mar 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/118_846071/1/118_846071/cite

 

Lost in the Woods

Spring 2016, Uncategorized
Michael P. Gadomski / Photo Researchers / Universal Images Group

Michael P. Gadomski / Photo Researchers / Universal Images Group

by Mark Bruno

 

I had these two friends once. Back when I was living in Revere going to Immaculate Conception Elementary School, Dan and Nick and I were inseparable. We hung out every day; playing video games, playing baseball and basketball and football in the park down the street from the school. We played Manhunt and Off the Wall. We were out until the sun went down. But the thing we loved most was going on adventures into the woods by Dan’s house. It was in those woods that everything changed.

When I think about it today, those woods were so small. If you stood at one end, you could see right on through to the other side. It was almost impossible to get lost in there. But lose ourselves we did. We thought it was the coolest place. It was away from the busyness of the shopping plaza in the square. The sound of the cars whizzing by on Main Street disappeared in there. But the biggest reason we loved those woods was because it was the perfect spot to build forts and climb rocks. It was our own little world that we filled with imagination and adventure.

I remember one time in particular when our parents actually let us camp overnight in there. Since it was a stone’s throw away from Dan’s house, they felt safe enough to let us do it–after weeks of begging that is. “Ah, what the hell?” my dad said. “I remember doing things like this with my friends back when I was your age.”

We had a clearing in the middle of the woods that we had been working on for almost a month. Loose twigs, rocks, empty soda cans and candy wrappers were tossed aside. We climbed high into trees and cut down these big branches and stuck them into the ground. With rope, we tied the pieces together, creating a makeshift hut. To provide walls and a roof, we brought a big blue tarp from Dan’s garage and draped it over the branch frame. For twelve year olds, we were pretty handy. That hot July night listening to the Red Sox game on the radio and telling ghost stories underneath the stars will forever be one of the best nights of my life.

That summer had come and gone and with that passing came a harsh fall. Getting back into the swing of school was brutal. The workload was significantly heavier than the years previous. Homework that used to take fifteen minutes suddenly turned into an hour-long affair. I missed my favorite after-school cartoons because I was too busy focusing on social studies and science. The sun was falling very early and darkness at four o’ clock became the routine. Dan, Nick, and I had also noticed that our classmates were very different. Something happened to them over that summer and we weren’t sure what it was. Ashley was taller and wore makeup and the boys started paying attention to her. Joe had little bumps all over his face and his voice sounded like my dad’s. Chris stopped arguing about who the best superhero was and started arguing about who the cutest girl was. Everything was different.

“Did you guys see Melissa and John holding hands during recess today?” Dan asked to Nick and me, as he bit into his Snickers bar.

“What was up with that? It’s like they…like each other or something,” Nick replied in a mix of disgust and disbelief.

But for the next few weeks, we began getting used to everyone’s strange, new behavior. It was still weird, but at least a little less unexpected. Everyone was changing except us. We were the constant. And there was comfort in this.

One blisteringly cold Saturday afternoon, we decided to head into our woods. “You guys,” Dan said to us, as we reached the dirt path entrance of the woods. “We’re going to have a lot of fun today. I’ve got a little surprise.” Nick and I weren’t sure what Dan had up his sleeve, but we were excited to find out. We went to our tarp-and-branch fort to see what it was he had in store.

“OK, guys. Check this out,” Dan said, as he reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out three cigarettes and a little book of hotel matches. “Swiped them off of my dad’s bureau this morning.” My jaw dropped to the cold hard dirt.

“Oh man!” Nick shouted with the excitement of Christmas morning.

I said nothing.

“I can’t believe you got away with it!”

I said nothing.

“Here, you take this one. And here’s the matches. I think you just slide it across this part right here,” Dan said to Nick, pointing to the rough patch of the matchbook.

Still, I said nothing.

“What’s wrong, Mark?” they finally asked me after what felt like an eternity had passed. I didn’t really know what to say. I was shocked. I had so much to say and I wanted so bad to find the words for it but I just couldn’t.

“You look like you’re going to faint, dude.”

I needed a minute. I needed to know that I was still on Earth. That I was still me and that I was still in my woods. I walked a few steps away from them as they fumbled with their matches and cigarettes. As I paced nervously around, I looked at the ground with new eyes. The woods were so damn dirty. The trash that we had cleared, those wrappers and cans, I started to really look at them. The pile of cans we tossed to the side had Budweiser and Coors written on them. Those wrappers I assumed were all candy actually said Trojan and Skoal Chewing Tobacco. Those woods were a dump. A wasteland of rebellion and angst and reckless abandon. It wasn’t some magic forest filled with adventure.

I looked around to the parts of the woods where we would play. I could see memories of us, playing like a movie reel from my mind, jumping from one rock to the next. We were throwing a rope over a tall branch, swinging from it with the wind blowing our hair and hitting our teeth. Those images, those memories of us, they were fading away. I remember standing there and watching those fun times desert me, leaving me alone and cold. The wind whipped my face and I turned back towards my friends.

“Are you going to try one?” Dan asked me.

I paused for what felt like ten minutes. I finally opened my mouth, unsure of what was going to come out.

“I’m going back.”

Dan and Nick stood there, cigarettes hanging on their lips with little streams of smoke dancing up into their faces. They didn’t say anything. And I left the woods, not looking back.      

This was the moment when I discovered that things eventually change, that people change. I don’t talk to Dan or Nick anymore and that hurts. Because they weren’t just childhood friends. They were a time and a place. They were a feeling that I will spend my whole life trying to feel again. I won’t ever forget what I lost in the woods that day.

Mark Bruno is a graduate of Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts, with a degree in English. He lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he also works at Ebsco Publishing. He is working on t
he script of a graphic novel.

Photo credit: Forest. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 10 Mar 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/139_1960112/1/139_1960112/cite

David’s Gardens

Spring 2016, Uncategorized

Gogh, Vincent van; 1853-1890. “Blooming garden with path”, Arles, 19 July 1888.

by Orrin Konheim

One of my favorite childhood memories growing up in Arlington, Virginia was spending weekends at my grandparents’ house in the nearby town of McLean. My grandparents’ one-acre property was a rugged play-land of sorts. The property was surrounded by a forest to run around in that has since been stripped of its enchantment (and for that matter, most of its trees) by development. I only had an aesthetic appreciation back then for the way the trees were arranged in lines and how various ditches were built on the property without knowing that my grandfather, David, was devoted to growing trees and plants.

David and his wife moved to the United States in 1978 to reconnect with his daughter, my mother, and to help her raise me and my sister. He was in his early 60’s at the time, an immigrant many times over and a veteran of two wars. Because he had so many other languages in his head from all his past lives — Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, and German — and he had come to the US so late in life, picking up English wasn’t easy for him. I spoke Hebrew as a toddler, but my entrance into kindergarten marked the beginning of a language barrier between us. I had to learn English and Spanish (we had a Nicaraguan nanny) and Hebrew went out the door.

As a result, I remember my grandfather today more through his actions than words. As someone who had been through his share of hardships, he could be difficult. He could be strict and got particularly grouchy at any deviations from his routine. Sometimes that grouchiness would be aimed at a little kid like me when I would do something like interrupt him during the news or “Wheel of Fortune.”

At the same time, he possessed a great capacity for joy, and there were simple little things that made him more joyful than I had seen in any man his age. He loved to listen to a pop tune on the radio (especially strange since he knew no English) and sing along.  He relished pouring salt on his dinner, even though it was against his doctor’s wishes. One summer, he was my biggest fan when I conquered my fears (and my grandmother’s safety objections) by diving off a neighbor’s upper deck into the canal below.

I slowly came to appreciate, however, that my grandfather’s greatest sense of joy was of a quieter kind. He had briefly worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant when he immigrated to Virginia, but for most of his last 25 years he was retired, and he knew how to  make himself useful, occupied, and happy, even when there was nothing for him to do but enjoy retirement. He would take to his daily tasks with a steady joy and purpose.

He enjoyed going for walks, reading books in his native language, fishing, and playing cards, but the centerpiece of his routine was the garden. It always bought a smile to his face.

Our lives overlapped for twenty years when my grandfather peacefully succumbed to a stroke in 2003 after several close calls. It wasn’t until a couple years after his passing that I discovered some old photo albums and saw pictures of a strapping young man in a military uniform that I began to really learn who he was.

My grandfather was born into a life of hardship in Mashhad, Iran as part of a Jewish community in strife. His family immigrated to Afghanistan for three years when he was eight years old, and he had to learn the Koran. But he was a Jew at heart and when he was 16 he set off for a land that would eventually become Israel. He was thrown in prison by the British government for illegal immigration and went through two wars, but he survived to help found Israel where my mom and her two siblings were born.

It was in Israel that he first tasted freedom and developed his love for agriculture.

Israel is known as “the land of milk and money,” a biblical reference to the agricultural abundance of the land. My grandfather’s love of agriculture was, therefore, part of a larger tradition, and after Israel’s independence, new immigrants were granted land by the government.

“He never studied,” recalls my Aunt Yardena. “But he knew what seeds to put and how to put the seeds. He knew what care he needed and whatever he planted, it was absolutely in abundance.”

My grandfather grew a garden wherever he went. He even had a rooftop garden over  a cramped apartment in Frankfurt, Germany, before emigrating to the United States.

When I was ten, my grandparents moved to the Florida Keys, and one of his first orders of business was rebuilding his garden. He didn’t have as much land, but he turned what would have been a bed of pebbles on a canal-side property into a garden of pineapple trees, banana trees and more.  

“Whatever [he] planted, if it was food or a fruit tree, it would grow,” recalls my Aunt Yardena. “And it could be in the hardest soil….He would just succeed in doing so.”

Nearly ten years after his death, his legacy lives on. His daughter Yardena maintains his garden in Florida, and my mom grows flowers in the summertime and brings them inside the winter.

“I find it very therapeutic,” says my mom. “It’s like raising children. It gives life.”

I find that I, too, enjoy watering my mom’s plants. It brings me a sense of steadiness and peace.

 

Orrin Konheim is a Virginia-based freelance writer, journalist in the Washington and Richmond markets, and public relations professional with interests in movies, television, the Olympics and local history. He blogs at http://sophomorecritic.blogspot.com. As a Featured Writer, he is willing to correspond with writers seeking advice on matters related to writing and publishing. Contact him at Okonheim@comcast.net.

Photo credit: V.van Gogh, Blooming garden with path. Photo. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 10 Mar 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/109_237835/1/109_237835/cite

Dad’s Haircut

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Joshua Lampert

Hulton Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images / Universal Images Group

Hulton Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images / Universal Images Group

 

Sundown. I’m wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and the October breeze whips the bare skin of my arms, I’m playing with a friend on on the patio of his house. Mom’s outside in her car, honking the horn. I’m eight years old, and I just keep playing. Soon, the clanking knocks on the door and doorbell chimes interrupt our game. “Donna’s salon in thirty minutes,” she says. “We’ll be there in forty if we’re lucky with this traffic.

 We arrive without my once asking, “Are we there yet?” It’s late.  The autumn crescent moon and the luminescent lettering of the salon’s name above the overhead awning are the only diminutive sources of light that struggle to illuminate theblack sky. The stained-glass door pushes opens right to left onto a warm-colored hair salon, and my eyes inevitably wander towards the only occupied chair.

 To my surprise, I recognize my father’s Pierce Brosnan type hair. Letting go of mom’s hand, I eagerly swerve through the chairs in the waiting area and run to my father, who stares into the mirror, patiently awaiting a haircut. I immediately wipe the “good to see you” kiss off my forehead and I scoot my way onto the neighboring seat. My eight-year-old torso sinks into the soft cushion of the pitch-black barber chair. Mom rifles through her pocket book for a pack of tissues. She fumbles with the packet until it opens. She keeps the tissues on her lap, resting on her cross-folded legs.

 Donna the hairdresser reaches into her drawer, grabbing the buzzers instead of scissors. A mistake? Quiet, pinned against my chair, I watch my father swallow his saliva and grip the cold, metal handles of the chair. Donna purposefully  plugs the clippers into the outlet and turns them on. They inch toward my father’s head. My jaw has dropped. I crack a smile. I have never seen my father with any other hairstyle, never mind a buzz cut. I begin to laugh; my mom cries. 

 When I was eight years old, my mother and I went to the salon. We watched as Donna shaved my father’s head and his Pierce Brosnan hair fell to the floor. I had no idea that I was witnessing the beginning of my dad’s journey into a ten-year battle with cancer.

1Joshua Lampert is a senior at Bancroft School., Worcester, Massachusetts, and plans to attend Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, in the fall.

Photo credit: Barber Shop. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 4 Jan 2016. http://quest.eb.com/search/115_2835844/1/115_2835844/cite

Lost and Found and Lost

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Akriti Sharma

Boxer puppy. Andrew J. Martinez / Photo Researchers / Universal Images Group

Boxer puppy. Andrew J. Martinez / Photo Researchers / Universal Images Group

My brother and I were beside ourselves with excitement when the local dog kennel called to say our Boxer puppy was ready for his new home.  Eager and impatient, we pleaded with our parents that they take us with them to go pick him up. My younger brother, Karan, was ready almost instantly, loading the car with toys and the dog basket we’d gotten to make sure everything was perfect for our puppy’s arrival.

My mother drove us through the narrow, winding streets of Kathmandu, expertly avoiding the countless motorbikes that wended their way through the traffic and the children and stray dogs that came running onto the street without warning. My brother sat beside me and went over the names he had in mind, not quite sure which one he liked best. Rex? Bruno? Or the staple name for a dog in Nepal, no matter what breed: Kaleh. He crossed off names from an imaginary list on his palm. “This is hard,” he said, “I want his name to be unique.” When we finally got our puppy twenty minutes later, Karan took one good look at our new family member and settled with the oh- so- original name for a Boxer puppy, ‘Tyson’.

Tyson was the youngest member of our family of 13, counting my parents, me, my brother, our four-year-old German Shepherd, Lucky, five fish, and two turtles.  My parents claimed that our house was one lizard away from a zoo.

Tyson was a brat, cheerfully indulging in the pastimes of eating, chewing, sleeping, and pooping whenever and wherever he felt the need. He bullied Lucky terribly, but Lucky did nothing about it. Tyson never sat on the ground, always preferring the softness of Lucky’s tail. When Lucky tried to get some sleep, Tyson would paw at him and yelp until he woke up.

One day, Tyson went missing. We roamed the streets calling out his name, over and over again, into the dead of night. For a week, we searched in vain. I posted flyers around our neighborhood, offering a reward to anyone who found our beloved pup. A month passed. My brother sat by his window at night, calling his name, straining to hear a response. He’d  asleep with his cheek pressed up against the cold window pane.

One Sunday morning, my mother got a phone call from a young child with an American accent. In one breathless sentence he explained that he had seen our flyer at the local bakery and noticed that the dog was peculiarly identical to the new boxer pup his gardener had “adopted.”  In a couple of minutes his mother took the phone from him and apologized for her son’s impatience. My mother spoke to her for a good fifteen minutes before she hung up.  She had a broad smile on her face as she turned to me. “Go get your brother,” she said, “and let’s bring his darling back home.”

Amazingly, the address was only seven houses away from our house. I passed it everyday on my way to school. My brother had stood before it countless times crying out Tyson’s name.

I rang the doorbell and was greeted by a middle-aged woman and a young boy, not much older than my brother, clinging to her waist. He pushed past his mother. “My mom asked me to get croissants this morning and I went with grandma but then I saw the picture of your dog and I knew it was him so I told grandma we had to come home quick and then”–he paused, drew in a deep breath–“I came running home and I forgot to get mom’s croissants! I called you because if anything happened to my dogs, Layla and Rose, I’d be very, very sad,”

The mother explained how their live-in-gardener had brought home an adorable puppy six weeks ago. He said that he was going to resell him. He was becoming too much of a hassle because of all his eating, chewing, pooping and relentless yelping. She turned to my mother. “I knew something was a bit off about that, he didn’t even have an answer when I asked him which kennel he got the pup from.”

In their garden were two beautiful female dogs, a Golden Retriever and a cream Labrador. Posed perfectly between them, sitting on both of their tails, was our brat.  He was bigger, but looked the same. He perked up when he saw us and stared for a while, inching towards us. My brother could barely contain himself. He ran and simultaneously flung himself onto Tyson, who, in quick response, somehow managed to do the same. The other two dogs began barking, creating quite a ruckus.

My parents told me when I was younger that if you are determined to find something you really want, you’re bound to get it. At that point, it didn’t matter if it was my brother’s cries and prayers that got us our puppy back or just the kind-heartedness of another curious child, because our family was finally complete again. All thirteen members of our little zoo.

***

About a year later, I was in the kitchen pretending to help my mother as she fussed over dinner. She asked me to call my brother in, but I found the front lawn deserted. I stared at the wide open gate and got the sick feeling that something was wrong.  I heard my brother scream, followed by a high-pitched howling.  I found them both two blocks from my house in the middle of the street.  The dimming yellow light emitted by the dying streetlight revealed a bloody body pulling into itself as it convulsed in pain. Our neighbors were on the street now, pushing to get a closer look.

I don’t know how I managed to pick up an injured dog and a crying brother, and walk home, but I did it somehow.  

Tyson was paralyzed. About a month later, we put him  to sleep.

Akriti Sharma is a senior at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Economics. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been volunteering many years. She loves books and dogs, and she greatly misses her two German Shepherds back home.

 

Photo credit: Boxer puppy. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 16 Dec 2015. http://quest.eb.com/search/139_1914154/1/139_1914154/cite

 

A Taste for Tea

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

 

Anna Liebling

 

I was never a tea person. Ever since I surreptitiously sipped my father’s iced coffee at the age of three, I have preferred the comforting smell of those oily, roasted beans. Tea can certainly be shared with a grandmother, and used as a sure remedy for a stomachache, but, in essence, all it consists of is hot water and some leaves. My apathy towards tea was exacerbated when my parents took my brother and me to live in India for three months to broaden our perspective and showing us that our comfortable, American way of life was not found everywhere. In India tea is as embedded in the culture as the bindi, that mark the foreheads of women.

For the first half of the trip, my family and I lived in the northernmost region of India in the middle of the Himalayan Mountains and stayed with a woman named Yaan Chen. Tea was made on her two-burner stove more times in a single day than I make my bed in a month. The first time Yaan Chen served me tea, carrying it on a tray, smiling, and saying, “Tea, Miss?,” I politely accepted, although I was not too keen on drinking it. Yet when that steaming cup of impossibly sweet chai slid down my throat, it was like drinking mother’s love in liquid form.

She served us tea several times a day, and for the first few days I enjoyed every hot, dense sip. However, after a week, I yearned for my familiar mug of coffee, and soon, even the sight of a teacup made me feel queasy. I accepted the chai anyway, because Yaan Chen had been so kind.

But one day, when Yaan Chen reverently bent over with her heavy tray of tea, I said, “No thank you. I’m really full.” Her smile faltered for only a moment, but it was enough to make me feel as if I had leveled a mortal blow. After repeated refusals, though, it became easier

Despite Yaan Chen’s struggle with English, she was able to communicate with us through her love and compassion. When I impertinently displayed my American teenage exasperation to my parents in front of her, she seemed to tacitly understand and never judged. On quiet nights, she invited my stepmother and me to cook dinner with her, showing us how to roll the flour for the chapati bread and pat it flat between our clumsy hands or how to fill the momo dumplings with just the right amount of vegetables. Yaan Chen laughed with us when our momos flopped over.

At mealtimes, she made sure that our plates were filled before she ate, and if she did not think that there would be enough for everyone, she would not eat, saying, “Oh, no thank you ma’am, not hungry.” Living with Yaan Chen showed me the virtue in being selfless and loving, peaceful and still.

At the end of two months, it was time for my family and me to continue our travels. On our last day with Yaan Chen, the air was filled with sadness. For the last time, our hostess prepared the tea. This time, when she offered her tray, I accepted with a sincere smile of gratitude for her many kindnesses. It was then, as I put the cup to my lips and drank, that it struck me that I genuinely regretted those weeks in which I had denied this drink, this ritual. I realized how much I would thirst for Yaan Chen’s steaming hot cup of chai, and even more, her omnipresent smile and the motherly affection that was steeped into every cup. Gratefully, I drank.

Anna Liebling is a former Clark University student now completing a degree in Environmental Studies at Naropa University, Boulder, Colo.

Photo credit: Tea. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015.
http://quest.eb.com/search/156_2408648/1/156_2408648/cite

Earthquake

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Akriti Sharma

                                                                                                           “Destruction of Heritage and Culture” / hoto by Drishika Dugar

Four a.m. on a Friday, exhausted after a night out with friends, I am stirred by the familiar notification ring from BBC news on my phone. I turn over in bed to face away from my phone, now shining brightly, demanding that I check it. I wonder if there is an option to mute the news notification at night. Frankly, I don’t really  care if the Duchess of Cambridge goes into labor.

A heartbeat passes and there is a tap on my door. The tap turns into a knock and before I know it my roommate, Shreya, is pounding at my door. She sounds scared. “There was an earthquake back home,” she says.

“Oh again?” I’m thinking of the 4.0 magnitude ’quake  that hit three years ago. But when I open the door and see her face I know something is wrong. I pick up my phone to read the notification. “7.9 Magnitude Earthquake slams Nepal, hundreds presumed dead.” My heart drops, my brain stops momentarily, yet somehow I find myself out in the dining room with my laptop and phone. My roommate sits by me, going through the news on her phone.

“The minute I read Dharahara fell, I knew it was a big one,” she says.

Dharahara was a national monument, a tower that overlooked Kathmandu city. Hundreds of people climbed it everyday.

“I still hadn’t climbed it yet,” I find myself foolishly saying.

The images on my laptop are horrific. At my side, my phone is trying to connect to my parent’s number, but keeps failing. According to the news, the lines were down. According to the images online, half my country is rubble. I stare at the photographs mindlessly, feeling numb, scared, and lost. The phone call cancels, and I notice three missed calls. My mother called me three times an hour ago.

It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. She had called not once, not twice, but three times, and I had failed to pick up because I had been out. Had she called me to tell me she was okay? Or had something terrible happened? My roommate was frantically trying to contact her family too.

Shreya and I stared dumbstruck at images of the destroyed neighborhoods where we had grown up. I stare at an image of Patan Durbar Square, which was a 20 minute walk from my house. It was one of the three Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu Valley, which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Built almost 500 years ago by the Malla Kings, this complex of temples, courtyards, and a magnificent palace built mostly of iconic red brick had been a magnificent example of Newari architecture within the Kathmandu Valley.  The images on my screen showed piles of these lying on the ground, tourists and locals alike looking shell-shocked.

The house was quiet and Worcester slept  peacefully. Halfway across the world, Nepal was in ruins, people buried under collapsed buildings, and many were injured. I would later find out that thousands were dead. In our little dining room, my roommate and I sat silently , still unable to contact our families. Right now, there was nothing we could do from so far away.

An hour later, another news alert  set off my phone. Two people were dead. The earthquake had been of a “violent intensity’, the ground swaying at unimaginable magnitude.

“I wonder what it felt like,” I thought out aloud.

The last earthquake to hit Nepal had been in 1934, and since Nepal lies on a major fault line, another devastating earthquake had long been expected. We had several earthquake drills in school each year, I used to always look forward to them as a way to miss class.

The thirteen-year-old me who had no conception of the destruction an earthquake could cause her country. The thirteen-year-old me who did not know at the time that she would be fortunate enough to never have to experience the horror of April 25th 2015. That’s what I was told later, by friends and family over the weekend, that I was fortunate to not be there. But that does not sit well with me.

My family had been separated at the time of the earthquake. My younger brother was at home and my parents had been driving. Was I fortunate to not be with the three people that I without a doubt love the most, during such a traumatic experience? I am fortunate enough that an hour and a half later I received a call from my father. I am fortunate enough that my family survived. I do not, however, feel fortunate to have been in Worcester when the earthquake struck.

This might be an emotional and irrational thought of a twenty-something, but my initial feeling that weekend and the following week was guilt. I felt guilty for sleeping in a bed while my grandparents slept under the night sky, their home on the verge of collapsing. I felt guilty for laughing with my friends on the morning after,while thousands of children cried over lost family members. I felt guilty for living comfortably a thousand miles away from what really was my home.

I stayed up until the crack of dawn that day, unable to sleep and responding to messages from friends, including some that I had not spoken to for years. Many of us were scattered around the world, and we felt helpless. We shared the guilt, too. We asked ourselves why we were away. Nepal was suffering, and we were out of the country, seeking “a better future.”

Aspiring students leave Nepal to gain a better education. Less than a third return. Some of those who return are dying to leave again. It took a natural disaster that destroyed our country to make us realize how much we wanted to be home close to our families. Everyone cried, everyone was scared, but from so far away there was nothing we could do but wait for more news.

My father’s first words to me that night had been “Don’t worry.” That is something I was and still am unable to do. It hurts to see a country that had been shaken by a royal massacre and has endured a decade long civil war finally get back up on its feet, only to be knocked down again. All of this, within my lifetime. I feel guilty right now, sitting in the comfort of my apartment writing this, while my brother and a hundred of other high school students in Kathmandu sit down to write their final examinations, a week after this disaster has struck. Most of them, having already been accepted to Universities for the fall of 2015 in America must give the exams to be eligible for their offers.  So they can come here and make a better future for themselves. So they can come here and join us in what I can only describe as an immigrant’s guilt.

Akriti Sharma is a senior at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Economics. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been volunteering many years. She loves books and dogs, and she greatly misses her two German Shepherds back home.

Photo credit: “Destruction of Heritage and Culture” by Drishika Dugar – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Destruction_of_Heritage_and_Culture.jpg#/media/File:Destruction_of_Heritage_and_Culture.jpg

Old Things Are Always Worth More

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Nick Porcella

“Come’ere and take a look at these,” he’d say. “What do I got here?”

“Oh, more coins, Grampa Ted?” I’d respond.

“Huh? What?” He was slightly hard of hearing, mind you.

Coins. Coins, yes?”

“Yeah. Well, take a look through ‘em and take what you want.”

There would be a pile—of varying sizes each visit—that contained random coins. Most were simple denominations: pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. Occasionally, I would find something more intriguing or valuable, like a half-dollar, or a foreign or antique piece, which was always a thrill.

Grampa Ted would tell me not to take the whole pile because I should “save some for the other grandkids” as well. (My cousins and I were in the midst of teenagehood and therefore had to be imbued with the art of sharing.) He would ask me what the coins were, as if he hadn’t seen them before, even if the coin in question was a humble penny. I would oblige, of course, and tell him what it was if I knew. And because I visited so often, I would get the most from the piles. Not only that, I would get to cherry-pick the best of the bunch. I was a self-made coin collector because of Ted, though for him, the name of the game was learn quick or get called an asshole.

The ordinary ones coins I rolled in coin-wrappers and deposited at the local bank. The extraordinary ones, which were older (thus deemed “rarer”) than their lackluster counterparts, I kept. I also held onto the special coins that were unique in origin or age.

There was kind of a fourth category: the “what the heck is that?” category. Anything that wasn’t a coin went here, and no, there was absolutely nothing valuable in these piles. Bus tokens, car fuses, and tiny chunks of metal were common.

“Grampa, this isn’t a coin. It’s a washer.”

“Huh? Goddammit, do you want it or not?”

I can remember one occasion when I was presented with a green, gallon-sized glass whiskey jug full of pennies. Frankly, the sentimental value it had to my grandfather, I was told, did not outweigh—although it seemed that the jar outweighed a neutron star—the fact that the container of pennies was just plain cumbersome. This jar contained nothing more than post-1980 pennies. They literally weren’t even worth their weight in copper since the government began using zinc and other fillers instead. And they really weren’t worth being put into coin rolls. After I had rolled them, I realized that I had earned fifteen bucks, which was like working for two hours at a minimum-wage job. It took an hour and a half to just sort them and roll them. I never told Gampa Ted that I deposited them. I can imagine his reaction.

“You did what?!”

Other occasions were more “profitable,” a word I didn’t like to use because it made it sound as though I only visited Grampa Ted for the coins. That was true for a while, I suppose. There were many visits where he would give me extremely special coins. Sometimes he’d give me pure silver. I would often get half-dollars, and I liked to hold onto the ones from before 1970.

One time, he gave me a coin from 1827, which I later had appraised. Turns out it was worth about $200. He was excited to hear that but disgruntled that someone would spend that much money on a coin.

One day he handed my dad a scrap of newspaper to bring home to me.

“Grampa thinks you should go to this,” my dad told me.

“Lemme see,” I said.

It was a newspaper clipping for a coin show in some town nearby. It mentioned sales, appraisals, and trading, as well as the opportunity to rent spaces.

My dad continued, “He also sent you this.”

He handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

It couldn’t be.

“Jesus, dad…” I paused. “I would love to go. Will you go, too?” I finally asked.

“Well, we’ll make a plan—maybe some weekend—to check it out. It’s about a forty minute drive from here.”

    It wasn’t more than a couple weekends and we were off to the show. I was really looking forward to it. Grampa Ted had never been to one of these, but he seemed to have an intuitive sense that I would enjoy it. I still could not get over the feeling of the twenty-dollar bill in my hands. I wanted to keep it forever, but he would certainly not have approved of that. If he was going to give me a small fortune, he would at least expect me to use it as he had intended.

When the day arrived, we drove off not knowing what to expect. The hotel where the show was being held had numerous signs advertising the event, so I figured it must have been popular. One of the signs read “Monthly Rare Coin Show.” Upon entering the building, we walked past some dealers who sold coin essentials such as coin-rolls and sleeves, as well as guidebooks on coin values and those pre-assembled collection kits like the 50 State Quarters Collection people bought for their kids all those years ago.

The admission was usually one dollar—because that would keep those who weren’t all that serious about coins from taking up room on the floor—but with our newspaper clipping from Grampa Ted we got in for free. He would have been so proud. We also got to enter a raffle for “a randomly selected coin valued between ten and twenty dollars.” While we were standing there, I signed up for the mailing list, so that I would always know when the next coin show would be rolling in.

We stepped onto the floor, felt the musty air of mildewed coin wrappers, and quickly realized our rookie status. Everyone looked the same, they all looked like Ted. Why wasn’t he here? Oh right, the only thing he hated more than hordes of humans confined to small spaces was the act of spending money.

“Um, where are the people other than the old white guys?” I asked.

“You think you’ll find women or children here?” my dad quipped.

There were more than sixty tables, and each had its own stacks of coins, paper money, rare metals, stamps, and similar items. Old white men held out magnifying glasses to inspect their purchases. Elderly customers bought from elderly dealers, who yelled across the coin cases about the price of silver bullion being particular high that day.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care.

Approaching one table, I talked to a dealer—in a very suave tone, might I add—about my h
ope to pursue mercury dimes.

“The 1916-D I have here is worth more since it is above XF grading,” the first of the old, white dealers said.

“Ah, yes, 1916-D. XF. Of course,” I followed up. Smooth.

Walking table to table, I managed to buy many one-dollar items, such as a 1943 German 1 Reichspfennig coin which attracted me with its moss-green color (though when I arrived home and turned it over, I realized it had a Swastika on it…oops). On a lighter note, I found beat-to-death buffalo nickels that some guy was selling for fifty cents apiece. I was unsure what year they were, but I didn’t even care! Then I thought I hit the jackpot with a 50 Franc Moroccan coin dated from 1371. “Old things are always worth more,” I thought. I learned after my purchase from another dealer that the date was relative to the calendar of Islam. So 1371 really meant something like 1951. Lame.

With a pile of coins in hand, my dad and I left more enriched than when we walked in. From many of the dealers, we had learned about the rating systems of coins. We learned which ones were the best to start a collection. We were taught how to keep our coins in the best condition for resale. I even kept the silver dollar I received as change at one of the dealer-stands.

No, neither of us was an expert at coin collecting. But Grampa  Ted wasn’t an expert at this either, so I didn’t have to worry about impressing him. I couldn’t wait to tell him about these people spending all that money on little chunks of metal! On second thought, I had better spare that detail. Old or new, he didn’t believe that anything was worth more, especially a coin sold by some anonymous dealer. All I know is that the older our relationship got, the more it was worth to me.

Nick Porcella  is a recent graduate of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., where he studied English and philosophy. He is now a part of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at the same institution. See more of his literary work at Entropy Literary.

 

Charles Olson, [my] Whirld Saviour*

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

by Casie Trotter

 

0
0
1
147
838
WPI
6
1
984
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Ezra Pound is famous (and infamous) for a lot of things: writing the Cantos, reinventing American poetry, and supporting Fascism. The third, which involved radio broadcasts he made in Italy supporting the Fascist cause during World War II, landed him in a mental hospital for 12 years after the war.

It was during this time that Charles Olson, a budding poet, began to visit Pound, providing comfort and conversation as Pound awaited the results of his trial for treason.1 Olson also worked through a lot of conflicted feelings about how someone who could produce such beautiful language could also spew so much hate. Later, after the hospital visits stopped, Olson would shout through the mail at Robert Creeley about Pound’s shortcomings, sometimes using their letters to speak indirectly to his former “Papa”: “Look you old bastard if you want open war come on it and get it.”2

But before that, Pound wrote to his attorney in the early St. Elizabeths days, “Olson saved my life.”3

For the past year and a half, the same has been true for me. It happened first in sudden leaps, then gradually—an instant love affair with his epic, Maximus, my first semester of grad school; then an easy decision to make a line from my favorite poem into my first tattoo—“hungry for every thing” (I spent days examining the deliberate space between the last two words); then a slow but all-consuming coming back to him at the lowest point in my five-squared-years-long life.

casie trotter/CASIE TROTTER

casie trotter/CASIE TROTTER

One day I picked up the book, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. In my roommate’s words, it was like I “absorbed the whole thing without even having to read it.” It went everywhere with me. In a drive-thru lane one afternoon, I tried to turn while reading and slashed a line through my thigh with my pencil; when I got home and showed it to Amy, I said, “I hope it scars.”

That’s the kind of commitment that Olson brings out of you. When someone makes his whole life scream at you on paper, you listen. You let it open you up. There’s no time for questions of practicality, of whether or not a course of study is “sensible,” of whether it will get you a job. When love comes, you eat it. That’s why the Olson tattoo on my forearm is in a place always visible when I want it to be, to remind myself not only that hunger comes before anything else, but also that it never quite goes away either.

At least, that has been my experience of this poet who’s been dead for forty-five years, gone a generation before I was born. The time collapses when I come to his words, come to taste and see what his life gave him. Over the course of those months following the Olson-Pound book, I snatched up everything I could find by him or connected to him, gathered all the pieces into a fragmented whole: over fifteen volumes of his letters; virtually every book about him on the library shelves; dozens of articles and special issues found in academic databases; and all the collections of writings.

In that process, Olson and I developed a metaphysical closeness. It felt like he was with me. Words keep people breathing beyond the space they once contained. When Michael, the (living) love of my life appeared in the middle of my year with Olson, at first I told him that he would have to wait. I made him sit with me watching CO read on YouTube to celebrate the dead guy’s birthday. Even when I found myself preferring living flesh to a printed one, the latter burrowed its way into me to keep warm for the winter.

By the time the actual work of my master’s project came around, Olson had grown even bigger, more real. Connections between us multiplied: the same love for learning and respect for “scholarship” coupled with rage at and doubts about academia; the hatred for abstractions; the craving to be a “whole” person; the ceaseless hunger, openness, and love. There were things I couldn’t talk about (or tell in their fullness) to anyone, but I could read them in Olson. Over the course of 210 published poems, 15 essays, his book on Herman Melville, two plays, and several hundreds of letters, I traced the stages of his development and how he turned into the person I’d come to love so viscerally. Some days, the heaviness would blot out all but the space he’d dug into me, make me start to wonder if I’ll ever feel the same kind of love from a blood-pulse hand as I do from his.

This is where the story gets a little harder to tell, because it brings up things that people don’t like to think about. To say that I got “suicidal” that summer after Maximus would probably be a stretch, but it’s the word that has the most roots in it for how I felt then. There were days in New Orleans, left to my brother’s empty apartment and Lake Pontchartrain, when I would drive across the water and have to consciously tell myself not to drive into it. Sometimes, whole weekends were spent in bed, stroking his words on my arm and trying to feel them underneath the skin, in the blood. I didn’t have to tell Olson these things because he’d already written them, lived them in his own bones.

Days, weeks, months like that prepared me well for understanding how someone whose vast output had such a lasting influence could also feel “grim,” as he once told friend and writer Frances Boldereff, convinced he should just stop writing.

These past two years with Olson have brought me to a place where the words to describe him mean less than the ways I’ve come to embody him. I’ve read his words so many times that they run through my head and into my own work without me fully realizing it. In a way more physical than spiritual, I feel his ideas make sense of mine, put the pieces together of how to inhabit a world.

I don’t know what all this says of me. But on the low days where the grimness sets in and threatens not to leave again, Olson keeps me open to what’s coming, even if “openness” means being sprawled on the ground.

 

Casie Trotter is from Owasso, Oklahoma, and has lived on Elysian Fields in New Orleans and in a Chicago soup kitchen. Casie has been a featured poet at Short Order Poems in Oklahoma City and her work is forthcoming in This Land. She was awarded  two research grants to study in the Charles Olson archive at the University of Connecticut. Read more of her work at somethingliketwentysomethings.wordpress.com

 

Notes

* The phrase “whirld saviour” comes from an angry letter Olson wrote to Robert Creeley on June 19, 1950. It was spurred by Creeley’s mention of some disdainful things Ezra Pound said about Olson, which reminded him that Pound had referred to him dismissively as a “world saver”—it turned out to be a very sensitive subject. See pages 109-11 of The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Vol. 1. Ed. George Butterick. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.

1 For more context about this relationship, see Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Ed. Catherine Seelye. New York: Grossman, 1975.

2 See the same letter, p. 110.

3 For more context, see Cornell, Julien. The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the aTreason Case. New

York: John Day Company, 1966. A copy of this particular letter is on page 71, though Cornell mistakenly identifies Olson as “a doctor who apparently gave him some comfort” (70).

 

Land of Saints, Scholars, and Sights

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

by Emma R. Collins

the author at the cliffs of moher/photo by andrew andraka

the author at the cliffs of moher/photo by andrew andraka

A girl stands in the security line at Boston Logan International Airport, laden with bags and hopes and fears. She has said goodbye to her family, her friends, her nervous black mutt with the wide brown eyes and half-flopped ears. Nine months, an entire school year, is a long time to be away.

But she shouldn’t worry. Soon she’ll stand where giants once stood, the blue Atlantic foaming and dashing itself against an ancient causeway built of myth and legend. She’ll hear the western winds whipping along the boundless cliffs of Moher. She will feel the rains fall in Wicklow that soften her hair.  She will know that the winking stars in Bray are the stars she has always known.

She will find herself lost in the Dublin streets that bubble with a thousand tongues and she will wonder at the familiar tucked against the new. She will spot the golden arches of a McDonald’s, but duck into a fish and chip shop that fries up the morning catch.

She will sit with scholars at Trinity College and walk across the ancient blue and grey and black cobblestones of Front Square. She will wander the forest paths of Glendalough softened with needles and the scent of still waters and sense the history that lies in the quiet shadows.

Soon she will forget her fears. She stretches to peek out the small airplane window and smiles seeing the new land below, verdant in the warm Irish sun.
 

Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.  She is currently studying at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

 

The Tiny Gray Arm

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

 by Jason Boulay

Crisp November air descends upon the sleepy valley in northeastern Afghanistan. Enormous snowcapped mountains frame the unforgiving landscape.

“Sgt. Foley, wake up,” I mutter, aching with exhaustion.                     

The author with a group of Afghani children/photo by jason Boulay

The author with a group of Afghani children/photo by jason Boulay

After another sleepless day of running offensive raids on Taliban strongholds south of Kabul, our three-man military police team is, once again, working the midnight shift. Tonight we are securing checkpoint 1-Alpha, the first line of defense for the United States airfield located adjacent to the small Afghan village.

                                                                                  ***                                                

The tall plywood watchtower does little to protect us from the biting conditions outside. Small openings at both ends of the oblong room provide some visibility, but also allow piercing winds to pass through unobstructed. The tower overlooks the dangerously straight dirt road leading onto the base, dangerous because the absence of bends means that a car rigged with explosives could speed toward base.

                                                                                   ***

My knees crack. I stand up from my failed attempt to wake the team leader. I scan the harsh and barren terrain. An unsettling stillness rises from the wasteland of brittle, sun-hardened clay. Countless white rocks, arranged in small stacks, decorate the landscape, each rock placed with cautious respect by villagers to mark the locations of active landmines. I pan left, across the vacant road, and towards the earthen ruins that were once an adobe home, a quiet reminder of the Soviet aggression experienced by the Afghan people the last time a foreign nation entered their land two decades ago.

                                   ***

My watch reads 2 a.m., only four hours into our tedious twelve-hour shift. It’s my turn to sleep. After working all day and through the night, I am aggravated and exhausted.

I kick Foley’s rack. “Paul, get the fuck up!”

Behind me, the rickety door slams shut with a loud clatter, causing me to jump. It’s our gunner, Specialist Barrett, returning from the latrine. He is a twenty-three year old, second-generation Irish Protestant from South Boston. Barrett stands 5’ 6’’, with a barrel-chest and stocky frame.

He lets out a guttural laugh, “Scared yah, Boulay?”

Although it’s dark, I can see the reddish hue of his neatly cropped hair as he removes his helmet.

Foley stands up and stretches.

“Whose turn to sleep?” he asks, barely managing to get the words out in-between yawns.

“Me,” I reply, irritated.

Barrett positions himself behind the machine gun; its matte black barrel extends out from the tower window, trained on the blackness that consumes the long desolate road. I look toward Foley; his thin, angular frame is reduced to a mere silhouette in the strategically dark tower. The 25-year-old sergeant proudly hails from a lineage of Irish Catholics who fled Ireland to escape discrimination in the mid-nineteenth century. Back in civilian life, Foley is a police officer in Quincy, Massachusetts, as was his father before him. Foley’s subdued nature often acts as a counterweight to Barrett’s boisterous manner.  

Foley asks for a briefing on the past hour. Just as I start to speak, Barrett interrupts.

“We’ve got something out heah, guys,” the sound of alarm detectable through his thick Boston accent.

“What is it, Barrett?” Foley asks.

Barrett pivots his machine gun to the right, pointing the barrel diagonally across the road, “Right theah, ya see it?”

In the outermost limits of the darkness, a pale, flickering light sways and dips, appearing to dance impulsively in the cold Afghan night. Foley radios headquarters to see if we have any patrols in that area.

A response comes back quickly, “Negative, not tonight, over.”

                                                                                    ***

Foley and I quickly inspect our assault rifles and 9mm handguns. Barrett drags two metal cases of extra machine-gun ammo across the splintered floor to his sandbag fortified position. We’re prepared for a firefight. All too often, the enemy creates a diversion to direct our attention away from the primary threat. Just last night we exchanged gunfire with Taliban fighters who started a brush fire in an attempt to lure us out of the tower and into the kill-zone. Dozens of bullet holes scar the pitted walls. Each one stands as a fresh reminder of our vulnerability and the enemy’s resolve.

Foley levels his M-16 Rifle out of the opening on the western side of the wooden structure. I cover the east. Barrett continues to keep our most powerful weapon trained on the unknown source of our concern. And we wait.

                       &n
bsp;                                                             ***

Minutes pass, disguised as hours. Tick! Tick! Tick! Last night’s ambush plays on continuous loop in my mind; the sudden rush of nearly paralyzing adrenalin, the loud rhythmic cracks of automatic gunfire, the sound of incoming bullets piercing the thin walls, and the all too familiar feeling of hot brass shell-casings bouncing off my wind-chapped skin. As I bow my head to pray, the sulfuric stench of gunpowder in the fibers of my uniform causes my eyes to water. My heart races, sweat builds up under my collar, and an uncontrollable anxiety flushes through my system.

                                                                                     ***

The dim light slowly gets brighter. The night air is eerily silent. The sound of our rapid breathing only adds to the mounting tension.

“The light looks like it’s standing still,” Barrett informs us.

“That means it’s either moving away from our position, or heading straight for us,” Foley replies.

                                                                                      ***

Slowly, out of the night, the vague outlines of people emerge, the flame of a kerosene lantern shimmering upon them.

I finally break the uncomfortable silence.

“That has to be more than twenty hoodgies.”

“Yup!” responds Barrett.

Foley pulls his weapon out of position, turns, and, breaking from his usually calm manner, barks out, “Barrett, keep it locked on them, and if anything seems off, light ’em up! Boulay, you’re with me!”

Foley and I quietly slip through the door at the back of the tower. As we near the bottom of the staircase, I nudge the sleeping Afghan interpreter. Startled, he opens his eyes and gasps, before jumping to his feet.  I press a single gloved finger against my lips, telling him to keep quiet. Foley goes around the east side of the tower. I take the interpreter around the west.

As we round the tower, my anxiety mixes with adrenaline. Getting control over the lethal mixture that is pumping through my veins can be the difference between life and death for everyone involved. I take a deep breath and try to force myself to relax. Carrying anxiety into an already volatile situation makes it impossible to focus. Moments like this demand absolute concentration.

                                                                                           ***

Briefly gazing up at the front of the tower, I see the distinct outline of the machine gun’s black metal barrel, standing in stark contrast against the pale yellow glow of the crescent moon. As Foley and I walk away from the giant structure, I feel Barrett watching over us, machine gun ready. My anxiety and fear subside. I can’t help but take comfort in the gun’s ominous presence.

***

My finger resting softly upon the trigger, I raise my rifle toward the potential target, flipping from safety to fire. With the push of a button, Foley activates the giant floodlights. A brilliant blast of radiant light illuminates the street. Tiny translucent scorpions and large black camel spiders scurry off the road. The hoodgies extend their hands in an attempt to block the intrusive light from assaulting their eyes. The sound of shuffling feet stops.

***

Foley instructs the group of villagers to send two people forward as representatives. From amidst the group, a man and woman emerge. The man has a long, thick, coal black beard with argent streaks irregularly spaced throughout. He is wearing the traditional daily Afghan garb, a loosely fitting perahan tunban. The woman, standing a half step behind him, is shrouded in a dark blue burka decorated with elaborate shell stitching. A thick-screened area conceals her eyes. She clings to an object covered by a dingy pink blanket. My finger tightens on the trigger.

Through the interpreter, the man speaks.

“Our baby is dying! Please help us.”

Without speaking a word, Foley takes five steps toward them—reaching out, he pulls the corner of the blanket back. A tiny gray arm falls lifelessly to the side. I lower my rifle.

***

A baby girl, only a few months old, clings to life. Her grayish blue skin appears shrink-wrapped to her skeletal frame. Each shallow, labored breath a struggle against the gurgling and crackling in her lungs. We motion for the man and woman to follow us into the tower.

***

Once inside, Foley calls for help over the radio. I take the baby from her mother’s arms and place her on the foldout cot. Pulling the fleece blanket back, I recognize faded images of Minnie Mouse on the inside. My niece had the same blanket when she was little. I begin CPR. Cupping my hands over the baby’s tiny nose, I begin breathing for the child, trying to keep her alive long enough for the medics to arrive. The heartbreaking sound of her mother crying hysterically adds urgency and purpose to every movement.

The sound of a Humvee becomes audible, followed by slamming doors and boots ascending the wooden staircase. Platoon Sgt. Bowe and Lt. Young enter the small tower.

“What’s the status?” Bowe asks.

I slowly back away from the child, “I think–” I take a deep breath, then continue, “–I think she’s gone.” The child’s previously shallow breathing has completely stopped without my assistance.

“We need to bring her to the hospital. We need to at least try!” demands Foley.

Lt. Young replies, “We do not have the clearance to bring unauthorized locals on base at this time.”

***

The interpreter speaks to the parents. Without protest, the father reaches down and in one seamless motion wraps the cold, limp, body of his daughter in the blanket, lifting her off the cot. With the lifeless body in their arms, they quietly leave, continuing on to their waiting tribe.

Just as the group had come, they leave, but now without the hope that the Americans can help. The six of us silently stand and watch them walk out of the glow of the floodlights. Bowe and Young leave. The interpreter goes down the stairs and back to sleep.

***

Foley breaks the silence “I’ll write the report in the morning. Boulay, you can lay down for a bit.”

I silently lie down on the cot, my head now resting where an innocent life ended only moments earlier. I close my eyes. This place is Hell on Earth! How much worse can it get, I think to myself, having no idea I would soon have an answer to that very question. I slowly fall asleep to the unnerving silence of the Afghan night and the occasional yawn of a teammate standing guard.

Jason Boulay is an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan from 2002-2003 as a military police officer, attached to the 82nd Airborne Division. He is a senior at Bryant University, in Smithfield, Rhode Island, RI, double majoring in political science and communication, and minoring in management.

  

What Separates and What Binds

Uncategorized, Winter 2015

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by Abby Frias

As a niña, the smells of rice, beans, and plantains seeping beneath my grandparents’ door were so strong that I believed they possessed magic. Like fairy dust, the perfume would billow through the cracks and spread down the retirement home’s hallway, putting every other apartment under my grandparents’ velvety Dominican spell.

Today, as a high school junior, I find my grandmother’s cooking no less enchanting. I ascend in the building’s elevator, and anxiety weighs heavier with each passing floor. I mentally prep my brain for rapid translations, verb conjugations, topics of conversation, until — Ding. The elevator doors open and an immediate plume of warmth melts my nervousness.

I stand and read the bronzed numbers on the last door on the right. 455. Quatrocientos

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cincuenta y cinco? My Spanish is not what it should be. I knock.The door opens and my grandfather beams at me.

“¡Hola chica! ¿Como estás?”

“¡Hola abuelo!” These words I know, having used the greeting countless times over the years. I feel safe and relaxed in my grandfather’s strong embrace.

Abigalita.” From behind, a different, gentler voice. Mi abuelita. I turn and smile into the deep glimmer in her wise eyes–ponds sparkling under moonlight. Her wrinkles swell and recede as she smiles up at me. A brown, weathered canvas of strength, each line and etched tale of strength, joy and, of course, grief. My father’s passing undoubtedly left emotional and physical scarring. I have had several years to mourn and cope with the loss, but each visit is a reminder of all of the possible conversations between my grandparents and I that never happen because of my rudimentary Spanish skills.

                                                 ***

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In the 1970’s, my grandparents emigrated from the Dominican Republic with their four sons. They worked in New York City, diligently crafting a better future for their family and unborn generations. But the land of opportunity came at a price. By the time their grandchildren came along, both my abuela and abuelo were far too oriented to their native tongue. We were free to enjoy each other’s food and company; however, my grandparents’ and I lacked the foundation of a shared language.

They did not give up, however. I remember at the age of five joining them at their English classes and “assisting” the teacher each day. My grandfather learned to string together phrases in the strange, new language, but my grandmother had a harder time. Thus, I’ve learned to read the “context clues”– body language, facial expressions, and hand gestures– to decipher her meanings.

“Abigailita, ¿Quieres comer?” My grandmother motions to the dining room table and pulls out a chair.

The table is filled with pastelitos, yuca, beans and other delicious dishes. The three of us join hands, my clammy fingers and chipped black nail polish against the smooth, cocoa-butter enriched grooves and arches of their palms. I squeeze tightly and lower my head.

They wish me a successful junior year of high school, good health and good grades and that God gives me a long life with joy, happiness, and–a good sweater? Wait, suerte doesn’t mean sweater, it means luck. They ask that God grant us many meals in the future and that God looks after Ramon.

Ramon. It’s my father’s name–his real name, not the Anglicized “Ray” that I heard most often. I repeat it in my head, rolling the “r” and emphasizing the “mon.” I repeat it once more, aloud, and raise my head as a pause of silence blankets our prayer circle. My grandfather’s eyes are brimming with tears. I hug him and smile. We say “Amen.”

                                               ***

I am flourishing under the parenting of my Irish-American mother and Italian-American stepfather–two amazing, nurturing, loving parents. Yet when I’m with my grandparents, we three always seem silently aware of the absence of Ramon, Ray, their son, my dad. This absence of a wnoderful man is like a branch broken from our family tree. But between mouthfuls of rice and circles of prayer, I recognize the tree’s undying strength. I feel safe and loved under its shade.

 

Abby Frias is a student in the Wachusett Regional School District. She hopes to pursue a writing career and study political science in college.

 

Photo Credit:

Oak Trees in Farm Field. [Photography]. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 14 Jan 2015, from 
http://quest.eb.com/#/search/300_2265907/1/300_2265907/cite

 

A Bibliophile’s Odyssey

Uncategorized, Winter 2015

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by Nick Porcella

 

Last summer I decided I would stay in my college town of Worcester, Mass, rather than return home. I picked up a job in Admissions and an internship at the Worcester Art Museum, and, for the first time in my life, I found myself on a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday schedule. The weekends were mine. Work ended at 5 p.m. on Friday and did not require my attention until 9 a.m. Monday. No homework. No appointments. I remember that first weekend kicking around my apartment, unsure of what to do with myself.

“Get used to it,” my Dad said, laughing. He’s been doing this for decades.

The profound realization that I was about to begin seeing a whole new kind of freedom was disconcerting. I felt like a domesticated eagle being pushed out of its cage and into the wild for the first time. What exactly was I supposed to do?

The next Saturday, I opted for change. I had a list of tucked-away used bookstores within one gas-tank’s driving distance. For the remainder of the summer, I decided, I would take one of my days off and just drive somewhere. Drive and find books, sit in coffee shops, see things.

My first trip was to Montague, Mass, which had a highly rated used bookstore called the Book Mill. Sixty miles away and on country roads—they seemed like country roads to me—I decided I would spend three hours of round trip travel to go to a bookstore.

                         nick porcella

                         nick porcella

Though their slogan read “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find!” I found them. Challenge complete! The Book Mill was a complex of different shops. There was the main book shop, yes, but also two restaurants, a music store, and an art gallery. All of the buildings, which were a part of the 1834 Montague Mill, overlooked the waterfall that gave the Millers Falls segment of town its name.

 

The place was brilliant. I loved the cozy atmosphere and the well-organized, diverse assortment of books. I spent some time in the Classics section, followed by Art (I always save Fiction and Literature for last). There were seats that encouraged people to sit down and read, and I found the perfect spot overlooking the waterfall. I sat and read a long while. It was one of those rare days where I actually thought I had a better time wandering lonely as a cloud. I hadn’t told anyone about my journey.

My pleasurable loneliness didn’t last long. The pictures of Montague that I posted online were a hit, and pretty soon I had  friends wanting to tag along on a book adventure. A few weeks later I picked a random Sunday (it turned out to be Father’s Day—sorry, Dad) to visit the Book Barn in Niantic, Conn. My friends Margaret and Zena joined me for the car ride down I-395.

nick porcella

nick porcella

The Book Barn was broken up into four sections, each with a different flavor: Midtown, Downtown, Annex, and something called Store 4. We began at the Midtown store. Midtown alone impressed, almost to a scary degree when we realized that the Annex was even bigger. This Midtown section was a maze!(ing). Books in nooks in corners—everywhere! Midtown had tens of thousands of books, maybe even a six-figure book selection. And this was just one store of four? Score! More! Books galore!

 

We decided that any store with such obscure sections as Glass Collecting and Dinosaurs for Youth would contain many hidden gems. So, we paid for what we had accumulated from Midtown, dropped the first load at the car, and proceeded to the Downtown Book Barn. We bought more books there and then made a stop at Lollipops and Gumdrops, where we ordered old-fashioned milkshakes and ice cream, and, with a sugar-boost and rested legs, continued our book shopping adventures.

We ended the day at the Book Barn Annex, the largest of the four sections, where we found hundreds of thousands of books spread over several buildings in a complex. By the end of the day we were punch-drunk from staring at books for hours and none of us had the stomach for Store 4. We left with a trunk full of books.

Everything had worked out absolutely perfectly, we agreed. We had found the place and we had shopped for hours.

We ended our summer of book trips by heading out to Northampton. Zena joined me for this trip, as well.

                                              nick porccella

                                              nick porccella

The long day of book-looking began at Raven Book Store. By now, we felt like experts. We were no longer surprised to find tens of thousands of books lining miles of shelf space. We no longer were shocked to be in aisles wide enough for only one set of shoulders. We also became more selective, especially knowing that there were at least a half-dozen other stores to visit. So at Raven, as well as at the next stop, the Old Book Store, neither Zena nor I bought anything. Each store probably had 30,000 used books. Each was entered through lower level basement-type doors. But for me at least, I was like a spoiled child: I had seen this all before.

 

Then there was Gabriel Books; or, the place that spoiled me all over again. Walking down Main Street past myriad sculptures, farmers markets, coffee shops, and young couples—indeed, all some of the things that make Northampton so spectacularly rich a community—we found Market Street. A few hundred feet down Market was Gabriel Books. A small store absolutely packed with goodies, Gabriel’s boasts an excellent selection of literary fiction, history, and rare finds, all packed in. We could hardly turn  in the aisles.

Very close to Gabriel Books we found Metropolitan Used & Rare Books and Records, amusingly located at 9¾ Market Street.

After lunch, we took a short ride to Hadley, which borders Northampton. There was one book store in the area, Grey Matter Books. There was no website for the place, but we figured we would give it a try.

We headed down Main Street towards Hadley. About three miles or so later we saw two small blue signs, one reading “Grey Matter Books 2/10 Mile” and the other “Troubadour Books 2/10 Mile” as well as directional signs pointing us left at the next set of traffic lights. We turned left and held our breath.

We could not find the place.  East Street seemed nothing but farm land. After driving up and down several times, we saw a small red sign through the trees. This led us to a one-lane dirt road and then to a big red barn, and there it was, under a canopy of verdant trees. No wonder the guide book reads, “We apologize in advance for any difficulty in finding us.”

Inside we found the single greatest place in the history of humanity. The music in the background was hypnotic, a mixture of tingling indie music. There were sections like Books of the Weird and even Hypnosis. There were rare books, first editions, and signed books. And since Troubadour Books and Grey Matter Books had evidently merged, there were two sections of everything. 

The Melville selections were particularly impressive, and I bought almost everything they had, as well as a first edition printing of J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. The guy at the register gave me a 10% discount. I could have spent much, much more.

At this point, Zena and I were beginning to droop, but we had had too much success to quit now. Driving back towards Northampton, we went the opposite direction on Main Street to get to our penultimate book stop. In Bookends Bookstore, I managed to find the exact edition of a book I needed for a class, brand new, yet cheaper than any used copies I had seen online.

And finally to our last stop, which was in Easthampton. Finding White Square Fine Books and Art, we parked on the narrow main street and headed inside. This bookstore was more upscale in décor than the other stores, but the prices were still reasonable. Paying for my 1892 copy of Melville’s Omoo, we left just before they closed around five o’clock.

We strolled down the street to check out the scenery and were rewarded with the sight of a beautiful mountainside overlooking a deeply green landscape that included a pond. This view was a cherry on top of the sweet, sweet day. We also found a quirky sculpture of a bear on which were painted dozens of fish. What an odd creation.  We called it a day and got on the road. And so ended our book odyssey.

nick porcella

nick porcella

 

 

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Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His interests include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.

Autumn Leaves

Uncategorized, Winter 2015

by Julia D’Arcy

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The Worcester Journal

The Worcester Journal

 

 

Most things unfold gradually, and at times the unfolding is beautiful, like that of a flower bud. At other times, it just hurts. Watching you slowly slip away from us is like saying goodbye to you every day. The pain never ends. Not that I would want it to.

There are so many things I would say to you if you could understand. I say them anyway, holding onto the tiniest sliver of hope that one day everything will click again, that the broken puzzle piece will repair, itself and you’ll be yourself once more, cracking jokes constantly and telling me a war story for the thousandth time.

 I’d rather hear the story about nana making a blueberry pie. Nana was trying to impress your parents the first time she met them and tried to make the perfect pie, only to forget the sugar. Your words paint the priceless expression on your father’s face as he took the first bitter bite. The story always left everyone in hysterics.

Why is it that some things stick with us like that? The simplest story becomes a staple for conversation and a filler of silences, told for half a century without becoming tiresome. Other things pass us by like autumn leaves in the wind, never to be thought or spoken of again.

Most things are autumn leaves for you these days.

I can’t quite remember when it started. There was no distinct first time. Not like the first time a baby walks, the first day of summer, or the first sentence a child reads. It occurred slowly with no clear beginning. It just all happened. One day you were your regular self. And then you couldn’t remember certain details or facts. And then you had episodes. Fits of rage and confusion. They were after you. The nurses were cops, foreign soldiers, or some other enemy. And now, well, now I’m not sure if you even know who I am. On the good days I am the girl with the car; you ask, “Can you take me out of here?” On the bad days–I don’t know who I am on the bad days.

I don’t remember a beginning, but I do remember the first day I visited you in the hospital. You’d been there before, hip and knee surgeries mostly, but this time was different, somehow. I could feel it when I walked into your room. We talked about the simple things at first: the weather, the view from your window, how I was doing at school. You struggled for words, while I did most of the talking. And then I found the light switch. The war. I don’t remember how or why I brought it up but bam, there it was, the key to conversation. Once you started going I couldn’t stop you, and I loved every second of it. Somewhere in your mind, you found the pieces of memories and stuck them together. I felt bad when I had to leave but I feel worse now that I know that was the best day there would be left.

If I listen close enough, I can hear you telling my favorite war story. You and your buddies were nearing an island and, being the curious guy you still are, you wanted to see the islanders. There was just one problem, there weren’t enough binoculars to go around. That, however would never stop you. You quickly realized that you could use the scope on your gun to better see. You failed to realize that this would alarm the villagers and send them into a panic.

I’m not really sure why that one’s my favorite, but it always made me laugh uncontrollably. Maybe it’s because while other people only see the harm and pain in war, you found the humor. You never have once told me a sad war story. Even the ones in which people die contain humor. You’d get that look in your eye and say flatly, “he died,” before glossing it over with humor or moving on to the next story, never dwelling too long on the sadness none of us wants to focus on.

Now, you’re in a constant state of confusion. I wonder what year you’re in. Sometimes it’s in the 1940’s and other times the present. I wish I knew who you think I am. You’ve lost a lot, but the one thing you hardly ever lose is your attitude. Sure, sometimes you get frustrated, but who wouldn’t if they were told everything they thought was true is wrong? Most of the time you’re the same cheery, gleeful guy I’ve known since I was born. The one who played Barbies with me on the living room floor, the one who built me a swing set, and taught me to swim. The one who has something to give everyone, even if it’s just a good laugh.

No, there was no distinct beginning or a list of firsts to this period in your life. But there will be a long list of lasts. I see them beginning and I’d give anything to put them on pause, but I know in the end you’ll be happier and freed of your pain. It started with the last day you were aware of what was happening. Then, there was the last day you got out of bed. And, today, today you stopped speaking in full sentences.

As I sit by your side on these days I’m thankful that you taught me your sense of humor. Even in these dark days that connect our family, we laugh. Because how could we make it through if we weren’t laughing with you as you “sew” the ripped thread on your blanket or only say “Hi!” to Amy and ignore everyone else? (I always knew she was the favorite.) Even on these dark days as the green leaves turn orange and red and slowly fall to the ground, you still provide us a ray of sunshine.

You always will.

                                                            ***

Editor’s Note: William Edward Tormey Jr. passed away on October second 2014 at the age of 91.

 

Julia D’Arcy studies Communication Sciences and Disorders at Worcester State University in Worcester, Mass., and is working toward a masters in Speech Pathology.  She enjoys reading, writing, and the beach.

Reyhan

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Akriti Sharma

The girl before me has straight black hair, a bob cut with fringes.  Her skin is olive and her lips are thin. She is wearing black sunglasses and is motionless. She is seven years old.

“Mero naam Reyhan,” she says.

I look down, and blink, “Your name is Reyhan?” It is a boy’s name.

“Yes,” she says. She stands a bit straighter, maintains a poker face.

I turn to the caregiver in the room to re-confirm; maybe I had misheard. Before I open my mouth, she says, “Yes, her name is Reyhan.”  I turn back to the girl, and tell her that I am pleased to meet her. We sit in a circle. There are nine children in the center with my four friends and myself around them. We are volunteers from the local high school.

The caregiver tells us we are to first help the children with their homework before getting to the other activities. Some of the children are older and don’t need help with homework. The younger ones begin playing games without even opening their books.

I am soon sitting with another young girl, trying to figure out fifth-grade science. I notice Reyhan is the only one sitting alone. She is in the corner, silently doing her work. I ask her if she’s okay.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing English.” It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk. I give her space.

The caregiver tells me that Reyhan was named Riya by her parents. Pronounced “Ree-yah” but with a dozen different spellings, it is a very common name for Nepali girls.

Reyhan is an uncommon name for Nepali boys. And it is never used for a girl.

The next week, the children are eating in the dining room. One by one, the room empties as the children finish and go to the common room to start their homework. All my friends have gone upstairs and I find myself alone in the dining room with her. Reyhan has finished eating, yet she’s sitting at the table alone. I ask if she wants to come up with me and she answers yes.

“I just have to wash this first,” she says. She navigates her way out onto the back porch where there is a low sink, kid-sized. She is washing her hands when I tell her to join the other children. “I will do your dishes,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.” I reach to take the plate off the sink but she snatches it from me.

“I said I will do it,” she says. “What makes you think I can’t do this myself?”

I apologize. She’s quiet again.

“Please wait for me,” she says.

                                                            ***

When we join the other children upstairs, Reyhan opens her book to begin her homework; she surprises me by calling my name.  “I need help with this,” she says, pointing to a page in her science book.

“Is it question 3?” someone from behind asks. “I don’t understand it either, how are we to answer this?” 

I take the social science book from Reyhan’s table and look at it.

Q3. What is the National flower for Nepal? What are its colors and what does it symbolize?

I look up at Reyhan who is running her fingers over the words as she waits for my response. My throat has a lump. I don’t know how to handle the situation.

 “Well, our national flower is the…” I begin.

“The laliguras, I know that,” Reyhan interrupts, referring to the Nepali term for rhododendrons. “But what are the colors?”

 I glance at my friends, who look as dumbfounded as I feel.

“I heard they are rato,” a little boy from the other end of the room answers.

“Yes, he’s right, they are red,” answers another girl. “I read it in a book”

“Rato” Reyhan repeats, the Nepali word for red. “I can’t remember, what does rato look like, Akriti?”

I scramble for words I can’t find. The caregiver enters the room. “Red is the color of festivals,” she says, smiling pleasantly. “Now please stop getting distracted and finish your homework so you’ll have more time to play.” She turns to me and takes the book from my hands. “Do they really have that question in here?” she asks rhetorically. “What the hell were they thinking?”

That evening, after my friends and I say our goodbyes, we walk the fifteen minutes to the bus stop in silence.

                                                ***

I volunteer at the blind children’s rehabilitation center. The students there are independent with a passion for life. They teach me more than I teach them. Science and math and English can all be learned. I’ve read books with the same descriptions of the solar system in English and Nepali. And in braille. I’ve run my fingers over the same content in braille while these children sat doing their homework. Knowledge is available to anyone willing to learn. 

I am lost as to how to describe this little girl. Once, when she was using her pointed stylus and slate to punch out letters in braille, I saw her prick her little fingers over and over, but she kept going. Persistence. When she fell in front of me, she refused to let me help her up. Independence.

Entering a room, she could recognize me by my voice, and even sense my silent presence there.  I marveled at the resilience of her brain and spirit.

I could not begin to imagine what this child had endured. Reyhan was not born blind. In fact, she had become blind less than two years before.

One afternoon, after the children are done with their homework and after a long game of Telephone, Reyhan asks to touch my face.

As her steady hands cup my face, feeling my nose, my eyes, my forehead, and chin, she speaks: “I used to be able to see. Then I got cancer.” She smiles. “That’s why I wear these.” She gestures at the sunglasses she always wears.

 “I’m forgetting what I look like,” she whispers, frustration in her voice. “How do I look?”

I tell her that she has straight black hair, fringes typical for a girl her age, and a little bob cut. That she has an olive hue to her complexion that gives her a nice glow, that she possesses a very nice smile, that she is a pretty young girl.

“I’m not a girl,” she said. A bit too loudly. “And I’m not pretty.”

Before I say anything, she gets up and storms off.  I don’t see her for the rest of the afternoon. At home that night, I ask my father, an oncologist, what kind of cancer could turn a young child blind.

Retinoblastoma, he says, is a common cause of blindness in children under five, if not treated early. He explains it to me, but what I really want to know is how I had offended her, and I doubt my father’s copy of Bailey and Love’s Short Practice of Surgery has the answer to that. 

                                                            ***

The following days are routine; Reyhan never brings up the incident and neither do I. The months pass quickly and I am accepted into college. Soon it is time for us to say good-bye.

My friends and I decide that before we leave we will bring some toys and gifts for the children. They must have known we wo
uld do this, since later that evening, as we were walking out, they yelled, “Don’t forget us!”

It only struck me then, that these gifts—the hair clips, spinning tops, dolls, marbles—were to the children reminders of the many 16-year-old volunteers who come and go in their lives. 

That afternoon, I buy a pack of hair clips for the seven girls in the group. One of them had said they liked the hairpin in my hair. I let them feel all of the clips and pick out the ones they want. Everyone but Reyhan has clips now and they begin braiding each other’s hair and giggling. I go to Reyhan.

“Would you like a clip?” I ask.

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I am tentative.

She shrugs and says okay and asks me to put one in her hair. Her fringes are growing and her hair has grown too. I put two into her hair.

“There, you look really nice now,” I smile, careful not to say something that might set her off.

“Really?”

“Yes, your hair looks really nice like this,” I say. “Maybe you should keep it long, Riya.” I slip. The second I say so, I know I’ve made a mistake. I watch her face contort as she gets up and runs out.

“DO NOT CALL ME THAT. I am NOT a girl, I don’t WANT to be one,” she yells. I don’t expect her to start crying.

I run after her. At her room there is no one.  I knock on the bathroom door. No answer.

Outside, the balcony is deserted. I head downstairs, to the common room, when I hear sniffling. Sitting curled up in a ball on the staircase is Reyhan, tears streaming.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” I sit on the stairs beside her. She stops crying. “I have an older brother and a mother,” she begins. “I love them very much and they love me. I have a father and I love him too, but I don’t know if he loves me.”

“My father always wanted sons,” she says. “But after my brother … I was born. And it was okay … until I got cancer.”

She’s quiet again and I hear her heavy breathing. The tears come once more.

“It was the first surgery, then the other,” she says. “Then I became blind, and I couldn’t do anything. I became a burden.”

Burden.

I became a burden.

This from a seven-year-old child. It shouldn’t shock me but it does; I have grown up in a country where children with disabilities are considered lucky if they are sent off to boarding schools. This is not always because families reject them. Most often it is because parents can’t afford them.

We sit on the dingy staircase and I try to console her, though my words are meaningless. I know nothing of how she feels, I know nothing of what she’s gone through. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have something that you take for granted snatched away from you.  She is distracted now, reminding me she still is a child. Her parents and brother are to pick her up for the holidays in a week. She can’t wait to see her brother.

“I want you to meet him one day,” she says. “He’s my most favorite person on the planet.” I tell her that I will, one day.

That evening while we’re leaving the house, she stops me.

“Akriti,” she says. “I want to ask you a question.”

I smile, “Yes?”

“Will you forget me?” she asks, looking up at me. “Promise me you won’t forget me?” She holds out her hand to touch mine.

I hug her and tell her, no, I won’t forget you, ever. 


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Akriti Sharma is a senior at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Economics. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been volunteering many years. She loves books and dogs, and she greatly misses her two German Shepherds back home. 

Immigrant Journeys

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Michelle Addai

I was born in Italy, and as an infant I was sent to Ghana, my parents’ homeland, where I was placed in the care of an aunt. My parents’ plan was to work in Italy and send money home to take care of us. Then eventually they could both return to Ghana and we could live together as a family.

That plan did not quite work out as intended. My father ended up immigrating to the United States, where he believed he could find a better job, and my mother stayed in Italy, while we kids stayed in Ghana. The entire family was torn apart among three continents–we kids in Africa, our mother in Europe, and our father in America. We lived like this for years without seeing our parents, and eventually my mother decided to return to Ghana to be with us. By the time I was 15, I had lived with my dad for only the first two years of my life and the few months he visited Ghana.

Two years ago I immigrated to the United States to join my father, who thought we kids would get a better education here. Like many immigrant parents, he wanted his children to have the opportunities he never had. My mother is planning to join us here eventually, and when she does we will be at last a complete family again.

This move to America was an abrupt change for me, and the world as I knew it was no more; the community, the culture, and the educational system were wholly different from what I was used to. Even the differences in climate were extreme. Going from the pleasurably warm weather in Ghana straight to the freezing cold winter of New England was a difficult adjustment.

The first few months proved challenging. I found many of the students disrespectful towards teachers and adults in general, which really disturbed me. Once, just a few yards from my school, a couple of students attacked a police officer and broke his leg. This kind of violence made me very fearful.

That was another thing, the fear I felt. I was so intimidated by everything around me that I could barely contribute in class. Furthermore, because I was from Africa, some students mocked me, saying mean things and claiming I ate lions for breakfast. I laughed with them to mask my true feelings, but it hurt.

At first I was able to at least looked forward to the weekend, when, as a Jehovah’s Witnesses, I could share the good news of God’s Kingdom with others. Little did I know that my evangelizing would result in more culture clashes. In Ghana, people are more accepting of this kind of volunteer preaching, but in America, well, not so much. Many people blatantly rejected our message, and slammed doors in our faces. Once, a few summers ago, when I was still a relatively recent immigrant, I joined a few members of my congregation to go to a town in Central Massachusetts to preach. At one home, I pressed the doorbell and heard the occupant yell that she would be with us shortly. When she came, however, she accused us both of having entered her house, and she called the police.

My heart raced when the police arrived and started yelling at us. An officer of the law had never before confronted me, and it was a frightening experience. We explained the situation to them, but one insisted that we be summoned to court. We were asked to leave the area, which we did without hesitation. It was a major relief for me when we found that we would not need to go to court.

These few years in America have been very challenging for me, but I continue to have a positive outlook because l know that no condition is permanent. My family and faith have been a support for me through my difficulties, and I strive to achieve academically because I know how hard my parents are working to give me this opportunity. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Being a teenager on the road to adulthood is in and of itself hard; being an immigrant teenager makes the journey even tougher.

The Things That Live On

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Sean McCarthy

As I follow my grandfather into his garage, which is stuffed with old furniture gathering dust, gardening tools, kitchenware, and old board games, a musty smell reaches my nose. He grabs the short stepladder that I am too small to carry and motions me to follow him into the backyard. The sun has warmed the air on this pleasant June afternoon. We stop at the edge of the woods, and he sets up the ladder. With a basket in hand, I nervously climb up a few steps, grabbing onto his open-collared shirt. He places his hand on the small of my back, the face behind his wide-rimmed glasses full of calmness, a constant easiness. Assured, I let him guide me to the top step. I reach out and grab a fistful of blueberries.

                                                            ***

Some years pass. I’m in church. The priest begins his homily, turning my attention from the way the wood is stained on the pew before me. I lean back in my seat, eyes on Father Bill, the man of the hour, literally. All of his stories begin the same way, starting with some recent event that links to and illustrates the Gospel reading. I don’t really care how much is invented. It isn’t a lecture. He is sharing with us, teaching us what makes life so worthwhile. It is the same consciously peaceful, caring attitude of my grandfather. For the most part, it’s the little things, the things you don’t usually notice, that end up having the biggest impact on our life. These seven-minute tales pull me away from the monotonous bore of church, reminding me of the unspoken closeness I share with my grandfather. It may be that I took these stories for granted early on, but, as I age, I listen ever more attentively to the smallest details—and then one Sunday we are told that Father Bill is ill.

Bill is also my grandfather’s name.

                                                            ***

I’m sitting with my family in Norwood Hospital. My grandfather lies quietly in the bed. Flipping through the channels, my mother starts to ask if the Sox are playing today. He tells her which channel to turn to before she has finished asking the question. There’s nothing about baseball, and especially Red Sox baseball, that my grandfather doesn’t know. The Parkinson’s hasn’t take that away from him.

It’s been a long time since we picked those blueberries.

                                                             ***

Mom tells us kids that it’s time to leave the hospital. I take off my Red Sox hat as I approach his bedside and lean over, my grandfather looking up at me. With a kiss to his forehead, an “I love you,” and a squeeze of his hand, just to make sure he knew I was there, I turn towards the door. Dad wraps his arm around my shoulder as we walk out. But just as we are leaving, my grandfather’s new roommate is being rolled in.

“Father Bill?” Dad asks, turning around.

And so it is. His Bible sits at the end of his bed. He smiles and shakes our hands. I wonder if he recognizes me. Whatever nervousness I had begun to feel as I left my grandfather’s room dissipates. I had heard of how Father Bill was being moved in and out of different hospitals. And now he’s here, with my grandfather and with my family. And that’s just a funny thing.

    ***

 Since my grandparents’ move to Walpole from Falmouth—where we picked the blueberries–and, in turn, my grandfather’s passing, the only trips I make over the Bourne Bridge are to visit him at the Massachusetts National Cemetery. It’s the first anniversary of his death.

He has rubbed off on me. He even taught me how to care for my grandmother, cracking a joke at the perfect time, just so she knows I love her. I stand by the grave, my grandmother’s hand in mine, as I think back to his last year. As his nervous system deteriorated, and his walking slowed, and his back arched, my grandfather kept going. His stubbornness, that I know all too well in myself, kept him fighting that stupid disease. I knew he would never stop the fight. Even when walking to the end of the driveway to get the newspaper became a huge physical and mental test, each step a battle and the stairs a mountain, he always persevered.

                                                                  ***

 It’s a cool day on the Cape. My grandmother stands beside me. The wind dries the tears as quickly as they come. The moment feels surreal, to realize the impact of my grandfather’s life, as I recall times we shared. I look to my left, noticing blueberry bushes lining the woods.


Sean R. McCarthy attends Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, Massachusetts, pursuing a degree in Interactive Media and Game Development with minors in English and Entrepreneurship. He is influenced by the imaginations of Jim Henson and Walt Disney.

He’s Mine

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Nick Porcella

The subject-matter was challenging, even uncomfortable: racism and derogatory language. My task as a mentor was to engage in a dialogue (“a constructive dialogue”) about the topic with my group of high school sophomores. We were to break up into small groups, and right away I looked at Angel, hooded and head down in the back of the room.

“I’ll take him,” I said.

In dodgeball selection Angel always got picked last. Why not change things up and go with the underdog? Even if that underdog had a lot of bite. Angel would be a part of my discussion on racism. He was going to be in my group and I would succeed at instilling in him the dangers, for one thing, of throwing around the word “faggot” so carelessly.

I had made a claim on Angel at a workshop earlier that day. I felt a deep pull towards him, all the time. His jagged edges somehow brought me closer to him than to the other students did. It’s not that I enjoy playing with broken glass, but something about Angel made me both like him and despise him. I don’t know if I felt threatened by him or if I just felt some inherent desire to see him succeed against all the odds working against him (not the least of which was his personality).  Working with Angel, you always wanted more and less–more effort, more care, less sass, less blaming.

Today I wanted more of something. I wanted respect. All I had to do to get Angel to respect me today was to talk to him on his level, man to man. Only, Angel’s just a kid, fourteen years old. But he says he has family in a gang, and he acts like more of a man than me, his masculine aggression not afraid to show through. Not sure how that should make me feel; not sure how he intends to use that information about the gang business one day; not sure if I’m translucent or transparent to him. He would hate me calling him a kid. He’s bright and he’s got all the tools to be a great leader. Angel does nothing to be the leader. He never has to, no one pressures him.

Am I jealous?

But back to dodgeball. “He’s mine. In fact, all you guys can work with me,” I said, addressing a few boys in the back, all sitting with Angel. These boys were always talking, texting, and mouthing off, but for the most part they showed up every week. They never behave well, but eventually they get work done. Our supervisor keeps telling us  mentors that our program really is for students like these. I can’t disagree, even though they were pretty stressful to work with. But by now I had committed myself to working with “the boys in the back of the room.”

Ambition. Macbeth is dead, after all.

Angel was quick to express himself: “Mister, why we got to do this?”

I ignored this. I gathered together  the gang I had so fervently fought for. Right away, they wanted nothing to do with me. Sure, they sat in a circle like I requested, but they did not want to hear a word I had to say. They talked over me, calling each other out: “You Mexican!” “Stop staring at me, a-hole!” “He’s pushing me!”—ironic of course because these were the very things I was trying to address. The noise was intense and all-encompassing, putting me in a stupor: Why did I sign up for this? But then everyone except Angel was talking. My chance. He’s mine.

“Angel, why don’t you talk to me? You’ve shut down.”

He said the activity was dumb. He hated it. Then he added that he was tired of me not listening to him. That one hurt. But was it true? He gave me a powerful stare—dark, pooling eyes and an ascending lower lip—as if he wanted to push my head through the wall. The gaze seemed familiar.

I was looking at James Dayton. I was paralyzed for a roughly two and a half second eternity. A reflex-driven eyelid snapped me back to see Angel. James Dayton, though, mattered to me now, even if I hadn’t thought of him for years. That was on purpose. James Dayton was the high school bully when I grew up. He made me fearful to turn corners in high school, thinking he’d call me a faggot or fake me out with a spectral punch. He owned me; I was his.

“You’re a faggot.” This time it came from Angel, but directed to a friend in the group who could only laugh. I glared at Angel. I wanted an explanation.

“What? He’s my friend,” Angel snapped. I did not know what to say. Calling him out would do nothing. He didn’t have to be here, but he came anyway. What did that count for? I unexpectedly realized that I was engaging with a reincarnation of what I hated and feared most just a few years earlier.

We could never have been friends in high school, I thought. But how can I tell you that? How in the world can I expect you to understand that?

Angel. Angel Dayton? Now I’m teaching you? Now I’m engaging with, talking to, and otherwise building a professional relationship with something I used to despise when it held another name and walked a different walk? I am working in a group with a student that had I been five years younger would have bullied me in high school? Just five years …

I think what was so particularly potent about James Dayton—James Dayton—was that he saw right through me. He knew what to say to hurt me most at any given time. He was talented at that. Raw and extroverted, like Angel. Unfiltered. Uncaring—something I remember both envying and loathing in another human being. I felt threatened then and I realized, in this group of five other guys and a conversation on racism and derogatory language that was heading nowhere, that I felt threatened here, too. I was just a boy.

In high school, when James Dayton was getting ready to pelt me with footballs in gym class, I sometimes thought about how my life would change if I had knocked him out, or even shot him point blank in the right temple. I wished him more animosity than anyone else I had ever known. There were surely people who said that about Angel now. Not me, though, I’m a whole five years older.

Why me? I asked of James Dayton, even though I was far from the only target.

These were not the feelings that I had for Angel. No, I wanted him to succeed, because I knew how bright he was. I knew he could succeed. Angel, though, had the unfortunate combination of extreme intelligence and extreme immaturity. He hadn’t grown into his brain yet, like some kids haven’t grown into their bodies. “Don’t give up on him,” I was told. “Everyone else has. But one day he’ll get it, he’ll blossom, and he’ll be invincible. He can’t do it without at least a little support.”

What if this was James Dayton? Where even is James Dayton today? I mean, last year I laughed at him because I learned that his family had lost their home. That was safe for me, like poking a bear with a hundred-foot poll. James Dayton couldn’t touch me anymore. I had no idea where he was. In a way, I felt (or at least I had convinced myself) that I owned him now. I wouldn’t even know if James Dayton had utilized all that raw ability that was mummified under his being a complete asshole. If I met him at my first class reunion and he was some kind-hearted, remarkably successful philanthropist, I’d probably hate him even more than if he was some conniving, sleazy, bully. His actualization of potential would make the old James Dayton a façade that didn’t have to be. No matter what, I’d find a reason to hate James Dayton.

But now, Angel.

I panicked. Could I teach the next Angel I met? Could I, one day, comfortably talk about literature with a classroom full of James Daytons?

Now that I had had this realization there was no turning back. I would surely see Angel every time someone made fun of another student. I worried for my impartiality. When Angel shines, as many have predicted he will, could I be fair—could I give him a grade of  “A” if he earns it? Just as I had so wanted to say
“he’s mine” to James Dayton, myself throwing a punch and shedding my quiet introverted skin, would I become obsessed with finding a way to own these students, these Angels? I had no desire to become a corrupt teacher, taking out three years of scared corner-turning onto generations of young people whom I didn’t even know. I didn’t even know Angel, did I?

Maybe it wasn’t that, none of that. Was I forgiving James Dayton as he lived vicariously through Angel? Were my constant attempts to work with Angel against all odds, and all fears that I had of him, merely a subconscious desire to forgive James? Maybe it was like the time that a college roommate took something from me without asking; I’d forgive him, but it would take some time, and he may not be a part of that forgiveness.

I wonder if forgiveness can be a selfish thing. I wonder if I can do it alone. I had no intention of telling James anything; I hoped to never see him again. But from a distance, I could forgive him, maybe.

I have always had this sensationalized dream that James would come knocking on my door when we were both forty to say he was sorry for what he did to me in high school, like I saw on a television drama once. When I think about it now, it seems silly, adolescent even. In my own little world, I wanted to own him and I wanted a reason to hate him. When I thought about it like that, none of that was how I felt for Angel—Angel is different. Angel I could still work with. He doesn’t need forgiveness because he doesn’t have that history with me.

But James, though, James is mine to forgive or not.


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Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His passions include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.

I Am Like You I Am Not Like You

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Hannah Yukon

JD

JD

America. The land of the free. The land of multiple brands of peanut butter and endless supply of saturated fat. America. Where my father roamed the streets of Memphis on his yellow bicycle with his best friend Marcus, who was both his neighbor and the only Black kid at his school. America. Where he was forced to attend Sunday school and learn Hebrew. America. Where my father majored in Geology and sacrifice, where he worked in the French Quarter with my Uncle, until he escaped to his Fishing Camp alongside the Mississippi River. Where he got a job working on an oilrig in the middle of the Southwestern Pacific Ocean. New Zealand. Where he fell in love with the whispers of open roads and calibrated data. Where he decided to travel and discover the other parts of himself that he never knew existed. He found other neighbors. Australia, Indonesia, Singapore. And just like Marcus, he was the only one. The only White man in his company. The only White man who rode the bus to work, who ate at the spicy, sweaty, hawker centers, with his blue jeans and scent of foreign. Singapore. Where he met a woman at a library who caught his heart and attention discussing Greek mythology and how the cheese in Switzerland doesn’t taste like the Swiss cheese elsewhere. Now, in his red pickup truck, he found a new friend. The distance between the islands created a chasm…a reaction, and now there was another. New Zealand. Where my father became a father. Where he wore his pants on his waist, instead of underneath his belly where they hang now. Where he decided to raise his daughter near her mother. Where he set sail and finally departed for East Asia. Singapore. Where she grew up Catholic. Where she spent the next 19 years of her life not knowing anything else except constant humidity and lackluster dreams and drainpipes that made too much noise when it rained. Singapore. Where she found herself strung between two poles of identity but where she was only allowed to have one. Countless boxes checked ‘other’, because there wasn’t a space for Mixed American Chinese Catholic Jewish girls. Singapore. Where they didn’t teach us about the Holocaust or Slavery because they were too busy teaching us to be similar and to tolerate the differences, if there were any. Singapore. Where she finally decided to sail West for America, with hopes of re-connecting with a part of her that had been squeezed into a box labeled “other”. America. The land of the free. The land of multiple brands of peanut butter and endless supply of saturated fat. America. Where my White roommate asked me why I speak English so well, or what my ‘real name was’, because ‘Hannah’ wasn’t Asian enough.  


Hannah Yukon enjoys the beach, cats, and guacamole. Born in New Zealand and raised in Singapore, she pursues her mission of something more she doesn’t know yet, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She can be contacted at hannahyukon@gmail.com.