FIRST DAY AT A NEW SCHOOL


The late October sky over Chicago was opaque and gray but the classroom lights of Madison Elementary School shone bravely into the cold morning air. On the second floor Mrs. Evans’ third grade class was working on addition problems when the principal asked her to step out into the hall. With him stood a 9-year old girl with a very serious expression and braids, with her father. To Mrs Evans, the earrings on such a young girl signified “foreign” and sure enough, the principal confirmed that the family had recently arrived from Germany. Karin had some English lessons but was very shy about speaking. It was agreed that she would start school the next day with Mrs. Evans .

I am nervous about going into this huge building full of loud children. In Germany my school was bombed out so my classroom was in a church sacristy and very quiet. I was the teacher’s favorite and often went on errands for her that let me stop off at my house for a snack. Here I have no idea how to even find our new apartment. I see hundreds of screaming kids but not one has a backpack for books like everyone at home wears on their back. At least I am wearing the snowsuit like everybody else. Papi had sent it to me in Germany and no one there had ever seen such an exotic outfit. It had made me "the American" last winter. Now I feel totally lost but at least I look like an American. The principal takes me to yesterday’s classroom. The same teacher smiles and talks a lot. I don’t understand a word but I get the picture… and a desk.

Mrs. Evans is an experienced teacher and the blank expression on this child’s face doesn’t fluster her. She calls to a tall girl in a plaid skirt.
“Mary, this is Karin. She’s new in America and I want you to help her get orientated here. Show her where to leave her boots and clothes and where the girl’s room is and whatever else comes up.

What the heck is this girl Mary trying to tell me? I’ve already taken off the jacket and hung it up. Now she wants me to take off my pants? What is going on here. Oh, I see they’re all taking off the jackets and the pants and wearing regular clothes underneath…and I am only wearing a sweater and underpants! Why didn’t Mami know about this? Oh, this is…
“Nein, No. No.”
They must think I’m a total idiot. Now they are trying to take my pants off for me. Do I have to hit them? Here comes the teacher…okay, I know what you are telling me but
“NO!,”
I’m not taking off these pants. Tomorrow you’ll see I understand. What a day. Being invited ten times to go to the toilet is a bother, too. Why do they think I have to go all the time? And why are they still printing instead of writing longhand. This America is really an upside down place. What a day!

Autobio. Week 14
Point of View

By Carolyn C

Friskie

We disagreed on some things, my husband and I. The kids and I wanted a dog. He didn’t. He didn’t want the responsibility of a pet, but since he was home so seldom, I thought his opinions were invalid. I thought the kids and I needed a dog for protection and safety. The kids wanted canine companionship.

We had had two cats when we lived in our house in California. We had to leave them behind when my husband’s company transferred us to Minnesota. We lived in an apartment for a couple of years until we finally found a house. A house with an empty back yard required a pet. The kids tried to convince their dad to approve the acquisition of a puppy. I cheered them on.

One week when my husband was out of town, my son and daughter, ages eight and nine, and I decided we had waited long enough to add a puppy to our family. We went to the Hennepin County Animal Shelter in downtown Minneapolis.

Litters of tiny, soft, wiggly or slumbering canines slept in clusters in warm cages.
Puppies have a special scent, an innocent fragrance. I wanted to take every one of them home with me. It took us a long time to select one lucky little pup. She was not one of the frisky pups in her cage. She was a docile, quiet puppy, a black and white beagle/mix. We filled out the papers, paid a small fee, and carried her to our car. Within minutes this new member of our family became active, like a wind-up toy, jumping from my son to my daughter. They called her Friskie.
Everything went well with our new puppy. She announced her need to go outside by hitting the springy door stop. It sent a vibrating sound throughout the house, audible from any floor. She ate well, slept in my son’s room and made herself quite comfortable in her new home.

A few days later, my husband called. I knew I had to tell him about the new puppy. I had prepared my strategy.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “You won’t like it. In fact, you might be very upset.”
“Just tell me.”
“Well, you know how you’ve said that our family should stay at four.” (make him think the worst)
“Oh, no. You’re pregnant?”
“Well, not really.” (keep him in suspense)
“Just tell me.”
“We do have a new little family member…” (keep him guessing)
“And?”
“We’ve adopted a puppy.”
Silence on the other end of the phone. A long silence.
“Wait until you see her. She is smart, affectionate, and adorable.”
“Oh great, it’s a she? You got a female?”
“You’ll love her. She’s bonded with the kids. She has already trained herself. (get off the subject now. move on to another subject ) So what exciting things are happening to you on the road this week?”

Like endearing family pets can do, they become a critical part of their family. Friskie was no exception. She enjoyed the good life. She went with us in the car, sat on a blanket with me as I watched my son’s little league practices, enjoyed rides in the basket of my daughter’s bicycle, played in the snow with the kids, and in the hot summer weather she went for a swim in the creek beside our house. The kids and I were amazed at her extraordinary intelligence. My husband, however, seldom said anything good or complimentary about the puppy and reminded us that he never wanted a dog and now we had a dog with a stupid name. Friskie pretended not to hear him and just became smarter, cuter, more protective than ever.

One evening, years later, when my husband was out of town, Friskie warned me of a back yard intruder. The kids and I knew Friskie’s bark and she was announcing danger. We heard a male voice coming from the back yard, commanding our dog to shut up. I called the police who surrounded our home within minutes. The neighborhood was searched as the intruder moved from one back yard to the next, down the block. The police followed the warnings from other barking dogs that lived in each of the homes. As the police were searching our back yard, my husband called from another state. I explained our situation to him. He sounded concerned. Before he hung up, he said, “I’m glad you’ve got a good watch dog there with you.”

I knew he’d come around, eventually.

by Marlene Hickey

Once upon a time . . . there lived a woman who believed she would never be single again. She’d married very young and could hardly remember a life when she wasn’t one half of a couple, but after 33 years of marriage and a few months notice, she found herself alone. I was that woman. The challenge for me during the first year of loneliness, despair and, finally, acceptance, was to somehow get through each day. I read books on widowhood, and many of the ideas mirrored what I was going through. One author wrote that the meaning of bereavement is that the love object is lost, and love without its object shrivels like a flower betrayed by an early frost. How can we live with-out love and its total commitment? In that author’s view, this loss explains the passionate grief of widowhood. Grief is a lament for the end of love. So it was perhaps inevitable that I should eventually begin to feel the need for male companionship again. I was in luck there, working as I did at a major amusement park where I was practically surrounded by men, many of them single.

His name was Mel. He worked as a security guard and would be described by teenagers now as a “hunk.” Whenever he was on duty, he stopped by my office to say hello and talk for awhile. I’d known him for a year when he asked me out for a drink, and I thought: Why not? As I put on my coat at the end of the day, I realized that after more than three decades, I was back in the dating game. I left my car at the park with the understanding that he would drop me off there in an hour or so. We drove to a nearby night club where we sat at an intimate little table in the smoke-filled, noisy room. He ordered a glass of wine for me and a mixed drink for himself from the friendly waitress. Since we had our place of employment in common, conversation flowed easily, albeit in louder than average voices because of the deafening music blasting our way from the small band.

He had a second drink, I switched to a Coke, and we talked some more. Finally I pled fatigue and cats to be fed so we stood up to leave, agreeing to go out to dinner the next time. That’s when he reached into his pocket for money to leave as a tip, and dropped into the server’s tray a small silver coin --- a tenth of a dollar --- one thin, lonely looking dime! I stared in shock at the single coin,
then raised my eyes to his to see if he was kidding around, but he merely said, “Shall we go?”

We had a few dates after that: a visit to a museum, a movie matinée at a neighborhood theatre that offered one dollar admission, and a picnic in the park on a quiet afternoon. Somehow, I wasn’t able to work up any real interest in him. That ten-cent tip had become an albatross in my mind.

A few weeks later, a fellow employee talked me into joining a walking club that hiked some nearby hills. While not actually a singles club, she assured me that lots of single men took part, and not a few hikers had found each other that way. It seemed silly to drive so far after work in order to walk, but I had nothing better going for me, so I gave it a try. On my second day, I found myself out of breath after a half-hour of climbing, and stopped to rest in a clearing. As I leaned against a low stone wall, one of my fellow walkers, John, stayed back to speak with me. After small talk about the weather and the difficulties of the preceding hill, he began to get more personal and started to talk about himself. Only himself. He didn’t ask anything about me or my life, and his conversation soon deteriorated into complaints about his ex-wife, what a witch she was, and how she had taken him for everything during the divorce. All I could think of was that he was proving what poor taste he had to marry her in the first place. I tried to decide on a polite way to leave this cozy little tête à tête, when he stopped talking and tipped his head back.
“Hey! Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” I asked.
“That kind of musky odor. It’s a wild smell.”
He sniffed the air again. “Yeah, definitely a wild smell. There must be a fox nearby, or a coyote. Maybe even a mountain lion.”

I straightened up and looked at him with renewed attention. He was speaking my language. But -- an animal lover? Him? Maybe I had misjudged the poor man. He might have hidden depths. A newly-formed bubble of interest took shape in my mind, but it burst with his next words.

“Man, I wish I had my shotgun with me right now. I’d hunt that sucker down. You should have seen this huge buck I brought down with just one shot two years ago when I . . .” But he had lost his audience. Mumbling something about finishing the climb, I was halfway up the steep hill before he finished his sentence.

For a few weeks I did see a lot of a guy named Mike. Did adults still use the term “going steady,” I wondered. I wasn’t sure, but I hated the word “boyfriend” at my age. Like most men I’d dated over the past year, he was younger than I, one of the occupational hazards of being a 52-year-old woman thrown back into the dating world. He’d been divorced two times and had moved back home with his mother. She helped him run the shop he owned and did his books for the business,so I
knew he depended on her for much of his livelihood. I just didn’t understand at first how dependent on her he really was. Mike often mentioned that his mother complained I was too old for him, and was upset that he never had dinner with her anymore. One evening right before our date, he said, “We can’t go out tonight. Mom said she’s fixing dinner for me and expects me home by seven o’clock. We’ll have to postpone until tomorrow. I’ll call you.”

Hmm, I thought. I’m all for honoring mothers, but a forty-year-old who can’t say no to his mom sounds like two episodes of a bad soap opera. I began to suspect there was ample reason for his previous marital breakups. When he called, I was busy and I stayed busy after that.

Sometimes when friends asked if I thought I would ever marry again, I always answered, “Only if I meet someone terribly rich or terribly intellectual.” Though I was joking, I actually had met a man in the latter category two years before, but he seemed as far out of reach as the red planet. To fill the long winter evenings after my husband’s death,, I had enrolled in some college classes, including a Philosophy course taught by an Irish professor. After I was no longer a student in his class, he and I still spoke occasionally. Knowing my son was studying to be a Lutheran pastor, he called now and then with questions such as “What did Martin Luther think of the Gospel of James?”

During that time, I continued the mad whirl of dating and waiting for the phone to ring. There came a July day, several months after I’d last spoken with him, when my professor phoned me again. This time he asked me to meet him for coffee at a nearby restaurant, at which time he suggested that maybe it was time for me to start calling him Denis instead of Dr. Hickey. The rest, as they say, is history (or herstory.)

The merry-go-round I was riding as a single was slowing down, the music becoming less frantic and more soothing. With Denis, I felt as if I had grasped the gold ring. Poetry flowed from this man’s lips like champagne from a silver goblet. Sounded like he had run through the Forest of Eloquence and bumped into every tree. He had all the characteristics that the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man of Oz had searched for: courage, a brain, and a heart. He, too, had been a searcher, longing to find the one person he could feel at one with, share laughter with, grow old with. My quest had been the same. Two years before we met, Denis had had his second book published, titled "Home from Exile." Twenty-four hundred years before that, Plato said, “When two people fall in love, each comes out of the loneliness of exile,” and this we had attained. We feel we have been together long enough now to safely predict that the end of the story will go something like this . . . And they lived happily ever after.

Autobio. Week 13
Narrative Proof


Ellie

By Carolyn C

She was a strong lady. Her strengths got her through more than her share of difficulties and tragedies. She found humor in life and gave us some favorite lines that I think of everyday. Her name was Ellie.

At eighteen years of age, she married a good looking twenty year old, who was an only child of a well-to-do family. He developed an alcohol problem. His own father didn’t encourage him to dream big and excel at life. Ellie remained strong in her determination to make her marriage last.

Ellie and her husband had four children, all boys. She wanted a girl.

The youngest son was killed in a tragic car accident at a young age. I don’t think her broken heart ever mended, but she remained strong when her other sons and her husband needed to lean on her.

Each of her sons developed alcohol problems and each one divorced at least once. Ellie remained loyal to the daughters-in-law, who also remained bonded to her. In spite of her disappointment in her sons’ choices, she continued to love them and was their pillar of strength.
.
Then her husband died. She found herself a widow in her later years when health problems began to complicate her life.

Then another son died.

Putting her own health in jeopardy, she tended to the responsibilities that a mother has when losing a child, helping her family get through the pain by being her strong and gentle self, as she had done many times before.

Within a year, her own health deteriorated greatly. Dealing with a son’s death and two surgeries proved to be too much. She died a few months ago and I lost a faithful friend who taught me to put life in balance, to take the good with the bad, to find the humor in every day situations, and to draw on an inner strength when life hurts the most.

Among her proverbs and words to live by, my favorite is “Fifty years from now who will ever know.” As a young mother of two children, and a full time teaching job, I used to lament about my lack of time to clean the house. Her comment always made me feel better. “Oh well,” she’d say, “Fifty years from now who will ever know about the dust under the sofa.”

Another comment was “Every little whip-stitch.” She’d use it most often when she talked about her favorite foods. “Every little whip-stitch I just have to make pan-fried round steak with mashed potatoes and gravy.” She was a tremendous cook and my recipe collection contains many of her favorites. Homemade mayonnaise made her potato salad better than any I’ve ever tasted. Yesterday I had a cooking question that I wanted to ask her. I almost picked up the phone to call her before I felt the sting of lose all over again.

She was the center of a fractured family, the strong glue that held the fragments together. Her many friends, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren loved her sweet, tender heart and her easy style of humor, but the quality that will be remembered and cherished the most, was the courageous strength that came from a tiny little lady named Ellie.

by
Reiss

“You know my mom can’t go with us.”

“I know, Leonard, buy my sister has a rehearsal today and, now, she can’t go.”

“Awww, I was counting on her so we could swim in the Gulf.”

“Me too but we can’t go without a grown up.”

“I have a new bathing suit and everything.”

“Oh well, next time.”

“That’s easy for you you say, you have older sisters and brothers who will take you, I don’t. It’s not fun being the oldest! I don’t get to do the things you do!”

The neighborhood picnics are always fun but children never go without adults to watch over them.

“We can ask Baby Nell if you can go with us the next time. She’ll probably say yes.”

“Guess I’ll go home then.”

“OK. See ya at school tomorrow.”

“Hey you two, what’s the matter. Why so glum?”

“Reiss’ sister was going to take us to the picnic but now she can’t go. We wanted to swim in the Gulf.”

“Wait, maybe you can go with us. We’re going... all of us. They’ll just consider you part of our family group. Let’s ask your mothers.”

“They already said we could go, both of them.”

“But, now, they don’t think you’re going, so let’s go and talk to them. No argument. You want to go, dontcha?”

“Yes we do, but..”

“No buts, let go and talk to them. Hurry!!”

“ Mrs. Phenella, is it OK if we take the boys with us to the picnic? We’ll watch them.”

“It’s OK but you have to run over to Cleo’s and ask her about Leonard.”

“OK kids, you can come with us!”

The truck was crowded. We knew everyone because they were either cousins or neighbors. We were no less at home than had Baby Nell gone with us.

“Down by the old Mill Stream Where I First Met You..”

We don’t know who started the singing but it was the natural thing to do and soon, everyone was singing. “Hey Reiss and Leonard, you’re both Choir Boys, sing the next verse alone.”

“With Your Eyes So Blue...”

It’s surprising how this truckload of picnickers is able to sing in such beautiful and interesting harmonies, no matter the song. People along the roadside must think we’re a traveling chorus. Little do they know we were just family and neighbors out for a Sunday outing to Waveland.

The Fifty Eight mile drive to Waveland from New Orleans is a great adventures because we ride on the Seven Mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain.... in the back of an open truck! Riding just above the water, bouncing to the thumpety thumpety thump of the tires on the seams of bridge, watching the water just below us, is eerie enough to make it exciting and slightly scary. Maybe the truck will go over the bridge and we’ll have to swim home! Wow!

Frère Jacques,
Frère Jacques,
Dormez vous?
Dormez vous?
Sonnez les matines,
Sonnez les matines,
Din, din, don!
Din, din, don!

The Round is perfect for the truck singers. We, without coaching, divide up into three sections and the Round is sung like it had been planed and rehearsed for hours.

Sonnez les matines,
Sonnez les matines,
Din, din, don!
Din, din, don!

“Look, there it is, The Gulf of Mexico! We’re there!”

In a very orderly, almost choreographed system, everyone jumps down from the truck. Ladies, immediately go to work spreading blankets on the sand. Food appears from boxes and baskets and, in no time, there is a feast of food all around us.

“Let’s change into our bathing suits and go swimming.”

“Where do we change? I don’t see any places to change.”

“We have to go into the woods to change.”

“Hunh? We do?”

“Yea, it’s OK, there is no other place to change.”

“OK. Let’s go.”

In minutes, clothes are traded for swim suits and we’re ready for the Gulf!

The walk back to the picnic site and the water, carrying shirts, underwear, shoes and pants seems longer than the walk into the woods to change.

Yiiikes, something squiggled and slithered under Reiss’ foot! The shoes, socks and pants fly in one direction, the shirt and underwear in another and Reiss, straight ahead at a speed to make lightning seem slow, leaving Leonard standing there wondering what happened and where he had gone with the speed of Captain Marvel without yelling “Shazam!”

MInutes later, Leonard arrives at the picnic site looking lost, confused and frightened.

“What happened? Where did you go? I looked away for a second and when I turned around again, you were gone! I could hardly see you, you moved so fast! What happened ?”

“I stepped on a snake!”

“You did?”

“Yea, and I had to get outta there!”

“You could have told me you were gonna run!”