Rehabilitation

Joyce could only remember doing a few things: glancing at the radio alarm clock with the numbers 2:37 glowing eerily in the darkened room, scrambling for her slippers, trying to walk and then feeling her right leg collapse like a falling cake. But that was over a month ago – ancient history – as she now sat in her wheel chair in the solarium on the third floor of the Samuel J. Nathanson Rehabilitation Center, watching her son, Andy, approach. Andy was smiling, but Joyce felt the smile was forced and she noticed that his face was looking pudgier and his eyes more tired than usual.

Greyhound Buses
By Pat Garrison
There isn’t much allure in a bus station or on a Greyhound bus, believe me, I became an expert on the subject. My father died August 2, 1956 and I took my first solo bus trip December 30, 1956 from my Uncle Homer’s ranch outside of Uvalde, Texas back to Radford School for Girls in El Paso, Texas. This was the first of at least fifteen trips that I can remember between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. The most memorable trip is the one I almost missed in August 1957.
I was scared, I didn’t want to go to another Boarding School, and I was dragging my feet all the way from my attorney’s house, where I had been staying for about a week, to the bus station. I halfway hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Irion might let me stay with them and go back to my old public high school. That wasn’t to be. I would have missed that bus if Mrs. Irion hadn’t had the foresight to purchase the ticket in advance. As it was, the bus was being called as we walked through the terminal door and Mr. Irion stayed at curbside, smiling and waving good-by, to make sure that I was on the bus as it pulled away.
The bus pulled out of the station in El Paso headed to San Marcos, Texas mid-afternoon. That put us into Odessa around suppertime and we were scheduled for a thirty-minute rest stop there. By Odessa I had resolved to make the best of the situation, as it seemed to me that I had little or no control over my life. I ran to the rest room, bought a stale sandwich and a coke-a-cola, and got back on the bus to reclaim my seat. The older lady who had been sitting next to me got off there and I planed to spread out and try to sleep.
The bus started to fill up and good looking boy about my age said, “Excuse me, mind if I join you.”
What choice did I have?
“No, I guess not. Sit down.”
I don’t remember exactly what we talked about all night as the bus wound it’s way through farm roads, by-ways, and highways, stopping at little out of the way towns letting passengers off and on the bus. We soon discovered that we were both on the way to the same Boarding School, San Marcos Baptist Academy. By Midland I knew his name was Duane, he was from Kennewick, Washington, and his parents were divorced.
He felt as unwanted as I did, and was just as scared of a new school, his first experience in Boarding school.
In Big Springs I started to cry and told him about my mother who was a patient at Big Springs State Hospital and who I hadn’t seen in a year. I couldn’t even call her on the phone from the bus station.
By San Angelo I had regained my composure and he bought me a soda.
We stretched our legs in Fredericksburg, and changed buses in San Antonio.
The sun was coming up in New Braunfels and it wasn’t long before we pulled into San Marcos.
We collected our luggage, found a coffee shop, and ordered breakfast. That is where he asked me for our first date.
After breakfast, we got directions to the Academy and walked up the hill toting our belongings. We found the office in Carroll Hall and checked in, only to be immediately separated. He graduated in 1959 and returned to Washington.
In late August 1960 I boarded a Greyhound bus for Cheyenne, Wyoming where Duane was stationed in the Air Force and we were married. Guess it is a good thing that I didn’t miss that bus back in 1957.

MOVING by Tim Glasby
Assignment #1

“Go, T.J., there’s nothing for you here,” was Ma’s reply when I told her my job at the S & H farm stores had ended. “I thought they’d get rid of you as soon as you finished with that Christmas ordering. Go back out to California, you'll have a lot of opportunities out there.”
My job had been buying toys for a small group of farm stores in central Michigan and once the orders were complete they didn’t need anyone until after Christmas or at least they didn't need me.
“Ma, I worry that if I leave, you’ll have no one to help you. The twins are useless and Earl and Sandy can’t seem to manage their lives or their six kids either.”
“Go, Tim. You’ve wanted to live there since we moved away six years ago. Call your brother Jack, and see if you can stay with him, Audrey, and the boys until you get settled. I’m sure he’ll say it’s okay. I'll let Earl know that he’s gotta take care of his own. I’m almost sixty and just can’t do it anymore.”
After phoning Jack and asking if I could stay at his home in Santa Barbara until I found a job and an apartment, I was assured I was welcome and I began the task of deciding what to take to my new life in California.
I would need all of my magic stuff including the six doves that had been dyed different colors. Maybe, in California, I could break out of the Mother/Daughter; Father/Son banquet circuits and perform at an actual club on a real stage.
I packed up my new 1972 Chevrolet Malibu, three speed on the floor, fire engine red with a black vinyl top, with all my magic stuff, clothes, and high school graduation certificate and headed West as my older brother had fifteen years earlier.
The good byes were short and sweet but before I got out of the state I was having second thoughts about my Ma who I loved so much. We had been through a lot together after my Dad had died ten years before. I just kept remembering what she had said, “There’s nothing for you here, T.J. Go to California.”
I had to stop in Illinois to pick up two more doves, as my delusions of grandeur of being the next Doug Henning were working overtime in my head. The six doves, in the big cage on the front seat next to me, seemed like a good start, but if I, a young hillbilly kid from Michigan was going to take California and Hollywood by surprise, I figured I had to be well equipped.
The cross country trip took four days and, after arriving at Jack’s home, it took me less than a week to find a job at Sears in as assistant manager of the catalog department. Within a month I had my own apartment with boxes for chairs, bricks and boards for shelves, and exposed bulbs for lighting.
The first year, I spent most of my money calling home to Ma, as I was as homesick as a puppy pulled from its mother’s teat. I didn’t know you could be that sad. But, I toughed it out long enough to set aside some of the homesickness and came to love California.
By the second year I was a real California boy going to the nude beach, concerts at the Santa Barbara Bowl, and smoking pot all the time.
I’ve lived in California for thirty years now and what I wouldn’t give for once, just once, to hear those kids and their folks yelling and applauding for me and my magic act at the Birch Run Baptist’s Father/Son banquet on a Friday night.

Diane Marcus

After Randy died I was alone and lost constantly worrying about the needs of my two other children. I needed desperately to know how to go on with my life when I really wanted to die?
The social worker that I went to was hysterical. “Oh Diane” she moaned while sobbing uncontrollably. “How are you living through this? If anything happened to my girls I would want to die.” “No kidding?” I asked and after comforting her I left, leaving this pathetically tortured therapist. So much for the psychiatric healing path! Then I thought about all the people that spoke about the comfort they receive from clergy and God. What the hell I thought. It can’t hurt. The minister I went to told me I would meet my son in heaven when I die. Since heaven was a concept never considered in my atheist home, and I had no intention of dying soon, he too was not only unbelievable, but lacked in successfully convincing me. Cynic that I was I denied his sincerity. I tried the Unitarians, the Rabbi whose congregation walked barefoot over hot coals, and a Rabbi who refused to lie to me and tell me I was living in a nightmare and that Randy will be in his bed tomorrow when I wake up, or drinking milk straight out of the carton with the fridge wide open. I even went to a psychic who told me I loved children. At first I was impressed because I had been a teacher in a university child care program, but my enthusiasm for her insight dwindled rapidly as it evaporated into a cloud and floated off into some ethereal space.
Then accidentally I heard about Compassionate friends, an outreach, self-help program for bereaved parents. Soon I became the editor of a monthly newsletter that ultimately grew to over two hundred mailings all across the US, England and Australia and New Zealand. This was my first involvement with writing and it was a beginning that I had never anticipated.
First I wrote quotes from Emerson, and other poets that sent positive messages. I looked at Spinoza, Sartre and Camus for insight and then not really caring if I was good I began to write my own comments and stories. No one in the group cared if you were a literary critic, an attorney, doctor, professor or short order cook. Our commonality was simple.. We were all parents who were suffering the loss of a child and needed other people who shared our grief and understood the depths of our loss to help us learn how to survive. At meetings we would do stream of consciousness writing and then not look at what we wrote for at least three or four days. I was always astounded to find out what I was thinking.
On one very pensive and rare rainy day, when my children were at school, I sat at the kitchen table and wrote. I wrote during breakfast with only my cup of coffee, filling and refilling the coffee pot. I wrote through lunch not stopping to eat, unaware of my surroundings Even the telephone went unanswered, unheard of since the accident since my senses were always on “panic” fearing and always alert to more terrible news. At three when my children came storming into the house, one running to grab his skateboard, the other rushing to call her friend whom she walked home with and lives only two doors away I realized how long I sat. I wondered what I could have written but refused to look until two days later.
I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but there was a drawing of a tombstone with my maiden name that said victim, and a figure, obviously me waving goodbye with the caption that said “From now on I’m in charge. It’s time to begin again.”

Reiss duPlessis

“I think I want to go to California.”

“Where did that come from? You never mentioned that before!”

The idea was a surprise, even to me. It was always assumed I would, like everyone else, go to the local Catholic College, spend the rest of my life, like everyone else, in the same old neighborhood, in the same old church parish, in the same old city... like everyone else.

“Adele moved to California and so did Paul. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Well, if that’s what you want to do, I will not hold you back. When do you want to go? What are your plans?”

This, Mama thought, was just another of my pipe dreams. She decided to play along, comfortable that I’d have a new one tomorrow.

“I want to go immediately after graduation and look into college there.”

“You should have done that earlier. Graduation is in three months.”

“I’ll manage. Would you ask Paul if I might stay with them for a while?”

Graduation, May 30, 1955.

Greyhound Bus Ticket. Date June 1, 1955.
Destination, Los Angeles.
Passenger name, Reiss DuPlessis.