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When I stepped outside this morning and smelled the cool air mixed with the mist off the Willamette, I knew we’d arrived, made it through another dismal Northwest winter. The feel of it took me back to the Southern Coast of New Jersey, where I worked as a commercial clammer in the middle seventies. The first thing I’d do each morning then, was to climb the stairs to an outside deck where I could catch a look at the bay, to see if there were any whitecaps visible, a sign that the wind was blowing hard and that working the bottom might be difficult that day. But as March rolled into April, the morning air would become softer, almost sweet. It was on those days that I felt filled with a quiet joy, a contentment that I’ve rarely felt since. The day on the water, working alone and working hard, stretched in front of me with a welcoming nod. I felt connected, without knowing exactly to what or why or even caring about giving it words. It was enough to be, to drink my coffee and walk on down to the boat. I hadn’t discovered meditation back then, but if I had I might have noted that how I felt was the state that those who meditate aspire to reach. But maybe if I had known, it would have ruined the whole thing.                      

 The object of clamming was to catch as many clams as possible in any given day, then haul them back, sorted by size into burlap bags, and drop them off at the clam buyer’s shed. Two hundred clams to a bag; five full bags made for a good day’s pay. Five cents per clam was the going rate,  but it could vary( mostly down) depending on the market.  Each bag weighed well over a hundred pounds, but I didn’t worry about that. It felt good to sling the heavy sacks off the deck of the boat onto the dock. By the time I drove my flat-bottomed wooden work boat back to where I kept it moored in the bay, unloaded my equipment, and walked  up 11th street to our little cottage, I was physically exhausted, but not beaten down. My back might ache, I might have cramps in my hands, but my head was clear. I was never too tired to take a late evening stroll on the beach with my wife and our baby daughter.           

A word about catching clams. Maybe harvesting is the more accurate word, but what I heard around the docks was “catching.” I didn’t argue. There are two basic methods for East Coast clamming: treading and raking. (There’s also tonging, but only a few old-timers still did that.) In treading, the clammer jumps over the side of the boat, wearing a wet suit, into shallow water (three or four feet deep) and treads backward along the bay bottom feeling for clams with his feet (I’d say his or her feet, but frankly I never came across a female clammer). When he feels one, a hard ridge in the muck, he dives down and picks it up. Some clammers have developed a technique of working the clam out of the mud and up their leg, so that they don’t have to dive each time. I found it easier and quicker to dive. Repeat this process over a thousand times a day and you’ve got a fairly decent catch and a head full of salt water.            

Raking is the method we switched over to once the water became too cold for treading. Even a wetsuit will only keep you so warm. The rake is used to pull along the bay bottom from the side of the boat. It has a head that’s about four feet across and long sharp teeth that sluice through the mud. Kind of a monster rake, the handle extends to over twelve feet in length. It takes a strong back to work that baby through the muck all day as the boat drifts through the shallows. Sometimes you can go hours pulling up nothing but mud, shells, and molting crabs; but then there are the times you find yourself over a rich bed. An experienced bayman can tell he’s on it, by the ticki-tick-tick of the rake teeth as they slide over the clam shells. On board the clammer smiles, grunts, and digs the rake even deeper. With a final heave, he pulls the rake head to the gunwales, shakes it a few times in the water to wash away the mud, and pulls his rake head full of dark cherrystones on to the deck. Nothing feels better.            

I had to give up clamming in 1976 when we moved to Seattle. My wife was tired of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, its cold winters and isolation. In many ways the life of a bayman had not changed for hundreds of years. Except for the outboard motors, the rhythms were the same. We lived by the tides and the seasons. One long day after the next. It wasn’t what Cathy had signed up for. She needed friends and a social life, wanted a place where people talked about things other than the next storm or when the bay would ice over. We had college friends in the Pacific Northwest. They told us it was lovely, that housing was cheap, that cool people were moving there in droves. I tried to hold out, tried to build a case for life on this six mile long island.  I couldn’t imagine selling my boat; I had just invested in a replacement motor, a spanking new 25 horsepower Johnson. But eventually I gave in. Seattle would be better for the children and C. was now pregnant with our second. I couldn’t be selfish, is what I thought. I feel trapped, is what I thought. Goddamn it all, is what I thought. I’ll tell you, I miss that boat to this day and think about it more often than seems natural.                 

In Seattle, I put my education to use and found work as a high school teacher. It was a good job, paid enough to support our family of four, and allowed us to buy a nice old house in the Wallingford neighborhood. But somehow over the years my life became more complicated. Teaching and writing did not provide the same sense of being at one with the seasons and the tides. I no longer felt like my own man. Everybody had a piece of me now – students, administrators, parents. Though more secure, pension and health insurance in place, I ended up feeling tense and worried.  The work life of a high school English teacher separated me from the throb of life by the sea, where the only imperative was to keep an eye on the horizon. And while the feeling at the end of a day on the bay was one of completion and exhausted satisfaction, the satisfactions, such as they were, of teaching were more nebulous. Who ever knew if you were doing the job correctly? It sometimes felt like steering without a tiller. Where were weall headed and how would we know when we arrived?                  

But there was no going back to the life of a clammer. That vocation was long behind me and, for the most part, had died away in my absence. It had been dying even back when I worked the bay. Near the end of my stay, more and more areas of Barnegat Bay and Little Egg Harbor were being closed to shellfishing because of pollution and the scarily named "Red Tide." My brother, who still lives in New Jersey, tells me that maybe a dozen old-timers still make a iving raking clams there. What’re you going to do? Time passes and spring brings sweet reminders on the winds of what once was: the ability to get up in the morning and go out on the water and earn a living with hard work and an untroubled soul.

Robert Freedman is a native (West) Philadelphian who now live in Portland, OR. Clamming — Changing Tide explains how her got there. After teaching at West Philadelphia High School, he and his wife and baby daughter escaped to Long Beach Island, where he became a commercial clammer on Barnegat Bay. He used to say, “I was the only clammer on the bay with a masters degree from Harvard, until I ran into a guy who showed me his doctorate.” He loved what he did in New Jersey, and misses that life to this day.

For years my mother, Sally, lied to me.  I always knew that she wasn’t truthful about her age, but until my father died I never knew the extent of her deception. Then I learned that my mother, who had long declared that she was many years younger than my father, was almost the same age.

Ironically, for most of his life, my father could have cared less about how old she was, but I can only imagine his wrath if, during their retirement, he had ever known the consequences of her vanity. In what were then leaner years for my parents, she did not claim her Social Security until years after she was eligible.

She’d always been much older than all of my friends’ mothers, but, to her credit, I could never tell. No one could.  Sally could, and did, pass as a much younger woman. She took great pride in her appearance, and the roots of that obsession were no mystery. She was born Sara Czernenka in Russia in 1914, and fled from pogroms there, arriving in Ellis Island with her mother and brother in 1922.  They moved to South Philly, where she grew up, and was immediately labeled a “greenie,” an immigrant fresh off the boat. She struggled to fit in. She didn’t know the language. She had few clothes.  She had no toys, not even one doll, and no bed of her own.  She grew up to the knowledge that for women, looks and youth were the path to belonging and success.

Yes, Sally was a stunner; her beauty a major asset.  When she dressed up, you might not be able to tell which movie star she looked like, but some famous actress’s name would be on the tip of your tongue.

In tribute to her beauty, an ex-boyfriend, a “mad man” who worked in the advertising industry, made her a professional looking Valentine lined with photos of the all the Hollywood femme fatales he thought she resembled. Printed across the top it read, “I see you everywhere I go.”

Sally saved that card in a box with all the letters and photos from her youth.  When I was a child playing with the old clothes in her closet, I stumbled on it.  How I loved that card! I was proud of and amused by my lively and alluring mother who, at one time, had been pursued by multiple suitors: Bill the muscle man, Barney the intellectual whose glasses were so thick she called him “The Blinde,” the blind one in Yiddish, and many others.

She wasn’t able to teach me how to be the man magnet she was, but she did teach me to care about my appearance.  Back in the late 60s, every season, my sister, mother and I went to the neighborhood high-fashion store for girls, “Gigi’s” in Overbrook Park, where I got to pick out a new wardrobe.  With the help of my mother and my older sister, I was the first girl in my class at Akiba Hebrew Academy, on the Main Line, to wear a mini skirt, bell bottoms or whatever else was in style. 

My mother tried, with less success, to imbue me with her precepts about age. Once I reached my twenties, a time when I was still excited about each year on my path to maturity, she urged me to start subtracting. “If you want people to believe you’re young, you have to start early.”  But I couldn’t be bothered with her calculated approach to aging.

As my role model, she was consistent with her carefully planned white lies.  But, as she grew older, and the very early signs of dementia began to appear, she had trouble keeping track. Suddenly she was four years younger than my father, rather than six.  Ironically, her accidental adjustments made her lies all the more believable, that is until 2001, when Ellis Island records were made public.

Since Sara Czernenka, nicknamed Sarushka, was born in Russia without a birth certificate, she’d always been free to lie. But with the advent of the Web, and the easy accessibility of the manifest of the ship that brought her family to the United States—the U.S.S. Gothland—the truth was finally exposed and immortalized.  She came to the U.S. when she was 8, not 3.  My mother gave birth to me when she was 39, not in her early 30s.

For my mother, uncle and grandmother, life in America was about reinventing themselves.  They intended to become what my great grandmother called “Yankee Doodles,” real Americans. So when they became citizens, Sara Czernenka turned into Sally Cherner, her brother Zelig became Sam, and my grandmother, Ryvka, became Rose. Since she had no birth certificate, Sally also changed her age.  Her citizenship papers said she was 26, but she must have been older by then.  Further refashioning her image, she even gave herself a new Russian home. No small town for Sally. She said she was from Odessa, the birthplace of Russian Jewish intellectuals, and the city where my grandparents had studied. But the shtetl she was from, Bilogorutka, was as far from Odessa as Poughkeepsie is from Chicago.

By the time of my Ellis Island discovery, my mother was in a Jewish nursing home just north of Trenton, suffering from dementia. At first, she held on to the essential aspects of her personality—her passion for grooming, her love of learning and Jewish culture, and her garrulousness. But, over time, her illness eroded her grounding in reality.  She began to disappear.

The first time I visited her after finding out her real age I blurted out, “I know how old you are. I saw the Ellis Island records.” I probably could have used more tact, but the truth amazed me.

Her face dropped. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” she asked. Being young was so important to her, that despite her confusion, she didn’t forget her deceit and never would.  Her manipulation of her age was burned into her brain.

“Aren’t you proud of how old you are?” I asked.  “You look great for your age.   Being older only makes you all the more impressive.”

“It doesn’t,” she answered. We were alone in her room, but she looked around afraid that someone might overhear.

She was forgetting so much about who she was, but not her commitment to deceit about her age.  Her defining traits, like her fixations with age and appearance, which had once annoyed me, now comforted me. They affirmed that I was talking to my mother.  Behind the confusion, my beloved Sarushka was really there.

She may have forgotten what ravioli were; she could no longer write beautiful notes as she once had; she couldn’t concentrate enough to read or even watch TV.  She talked about two husbands when she only ever had one and she sometimes thought she still had a baby.  But certain things were the same or almost the same.

Before she went to the nursing home dining room, she’d reapply her lipstick; and when I visited, she’d give me a big hug. Where once she was big busted and full-bodied, now I could feel her bony frame, but her enthusiasm was as large as ever.

“Lisa, Lisa!”  She’d light up.  “Lisa is here,” she called out to her aide whenever I walked into her room.  No one has ever been happier to see me. But, after my warm welcome, the first words out of her mouth would be, “Why don’t you move your hair away from your face?”

“It is,” I’d answer.

“You look so pretty, but it’s messy.  You should comb it.”

My long wavy hair contrasted with her short teased helmet, kept perfect by the nursing home beautician who gave her a weekly wash and set. Her hairstyle, even her hair color, was frozen in time.  At 91, she still dyed her hair and offered styling advice to the entire family, including my teenage niece.  My niece, she thought, should wear her hair like a Miss America contestant from the 1950s, with pin curls and finger waves. 

When I was younger, her constant attempts to control the way I looked irritated me.    But now her love was so palpable that her criticisms didn’t bother me.   I was so happy to find in them a glimmer of the mother I long loved, a woman whose memory was quickly changing so many things about her.

That glimmer remained until she died five and a half years ago.  Now my mother only exists in memory. On a day when my hair is messy I can hear her saying, “Brush your hair.”I carry round her lipstick case, and, just as she once did, I find myself reapplying my lipstick throughout the day.   I am different than my mother, but a piece of her remains embedded in my heart.  She was Sally, born Sara or “Sarushka.”  I am Lisa, once called “Lisenka” or “Zisa Lisa,” sweet Lisa in Yiddish, by my family.  I miss my mother, and as I get older I understand her better. At last I can relate to her reluctance to be judged by her age. When asked how old I am, I hesitate, but then I smile, and tell the truth, and think about my mother.

Lisa Z. Meritz lives in Philadelphia and works for Temple University. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle,The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Bucks County Courier Times. She is grateful for the love and support of her husband Craig and her daughter Rebecca.

            In Necessary Turns, Liz Abrams-Morley offers her skillful and graceful take on the oft-poeticized subject of time:  its harms and[img_assist|nid=6852|title=Necessary Turns|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=101|height=150] balms.  In the interests of full disclosure, I freely admit that Liz Abrams-Morley was a professor of mine during my time in the MFA program at Rosemont College.  She advised my graduate thesis in poetry and has bought me several glasses of wine since that time.  I count Liz Abrams-Morley among the poets and teachers most responsible for the shape and direction of my own writing.  In re-reading the notes in the margins on some of my poems, I frequently mistake her handwriting for my own. 

            We were discussing my thesis project at a Queen Village coffee shop in 2008 when Liz told me about her book, Necessary Turns and its impending Spring 2010 release.  I had been familiar with some of the poems from readings Liz had given as well as from her chapbook, What Winter Reveals.  Familiar as I was, however, with Liz’s poetry, her stories, her character, I found Necessary Turns to be at once an affirmation of all that I know and love about Liz, and an additional, complicating layer that challenged me and revealed her relationship with poetry as well as poetry’s relationship to the rest of her life.

            A blurb from David Wojahn on the back of the book characterizes these as “poems of a writer of a certain age, one who has come to something akin to wisdom.”  This “something akin to wisdom” gleams from unexpected sources and subtly undermines myths of aging and motherhood.  The speaker of the title poem drives an adult son to a train station and sending him off “to his own life.”  Some readers might find in this poem a lament on an empty nest:  “he would travel great distances / and I would travel other distances.”  But this speaker dwells only long enough to see her son off safely before thinking “something about how / holding no ticket meant I / could be going anywhere now,” recognizing loss as prerequisite for opportunity.  Or rather, the moral of the story is: “Change is inevitable, so what are you going to do now?”  I don’t know the Latin, but in these poems, Liz reminds us that the day seizes us, so we might as well seize it back.  And this mutual seizing looks a lot like an embrace in the poems of Necessary Turns. 

            Liz’s persona in these poems comes pretty close to Liz-in-person.  The loss, grief, and frustration about which she writes are buoyed by sincere tenderness and humor.  The losses of parents and a (too-young) nephew — and the various shades of the attendant suffering — cut through the collection sharply, but organically.   She writes about gardens and weeds, pruning and digging, and the new growth that is only possible when spent blooms are removed.  The familiar metaphor is no less apt than it was for Robert Herrick, but while he urged young, unmarried women to “make the most of time” and succumb to sensual pleasures, Liz Abrams-Morley takes the tack suggested in the epigram by Linda Pastan:  “If death is everywhere we look, / at least let’s marry it to beauty.” 

            Complicating the autobiographical quality of these poems is the character of Rose Climbing.  Her real name is Wanda and Liz often jokes about her alter-ego having an alter-ego.  Her voice weaves through the rest of the collection:  “Rose / draws ruby blood streams / from inquisitive fingers, / paints her own dry lips / in salty crimson.”  Through this voice which “whatever the weather… bloom[s] again / and again,” Liz punches a hole in her own authorial façade, reminding the reader that voice is a creation, that poems are constructed. 

            Many of Liz’s poems grow out of her life and experience – I recognized moments recorded in poems that I had heard first in conversation.  Many poems even felt too personal, as though I were privy to a greater secret than I had earned.  Liz’s craft and care expose a deep truth and, yes, something very much like wisdom.  She sometimes lets us forget that we are reading poetry; we feel as though we had just caught up with the author over a bottle of wine and a fancy cheese plate.  Then, Rose Climbing, the tough, terse, alter-ego of the alter-ego, reaches out to prick us and remind us – this ease ain’t easy!  Liz Abrams-Morley’s Necessary Turns is carefully wrought from familiar—even universal—tragedies.  She employs familiar images and echoes sentiments with which every writer—possibly every person—grapples, but the fine detail of these poems and the presence of an authorial foil allow this collection to stretch a thin shoot beyond familiarity and into its own sun. 

Courtney Bambrick is the poetry editor of Philadelphia Stories

For ten weeks last spring, I drove my daughter Madeline down to Elmer, New Jersey, for Saturday morning art classes. I was irritated that my day of rest had been hijacked. So while Madeline drew at Appel Farm, I cruised around “the Small Town with the Big Welcome” to find a warm place to wait, and maybe grade a few essays. After all, what else was there to do in Elmer? The cultural distance between Elmer and my home in Mullica Hill seemed more like a three-day road trip than a bullet shot, twenty minutes south. Surrounded by defrosting soy and spinach fields, Elmer, at first, reminded me of a hamlet in Iowa that was forty funerals away from a ghost town.

In the middle of town, a derelict grain elevator rose defiantly in rusted sandstone. Nearby, a police car idled in a church lot with “no tolerance for speeders” signs posted along Main Street and Broadway. At noon the bank closed. Old homes maintained a dignified grace while awaiting repair.  Signs at three closed car dealerships directed buyers to visit the showrooms in Vineland. Of course I’d already heard that St. Anne’s was vanishing into the larger parish in Mullica Hill. Even the small Elmer library was closed.  Then  I found an open coffee shop on Main Street, no bigger than a Victorian bedroom. As soon as I entered, a girl with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair said, “Good morning, honey,” her voice  as warm as buttermilk. It was that ‘honey,’ I imagined, that made their coffee sweeter than Wawa’s.

Odd, though, that she called me honey since I was twice her age.

In front of the counter stood a stout, shaggy-haired middle-aged man, clothed in a heavy brown jacket, jeans, and steel-toed boots cracked with yesterday’s mud. He leaned over the counter, holding his cup of Green Mountain coffee, engaged in a lopsided flirtation.

On the left of the rusty-hinged door, in a set up resembling a pipe organ, twelve coffee blends in thin, black urns welcomed the weary.  I pumped my own hazelnut-decaf, added a dash of flavored creamer, and muttered a brief hello. The picked-over bagels and blueberry muffins didn’t tantalize me. In beautiful script, a board in pastel chalks advertised a decadent drink menu, but I rarely drink my calories. I picked up a Coffee Club customer card, and was embarrassed when I didn’t have cash; they didn’t take credit or debit. Smiling,  the girl told me not to worry and stamped my card. “You can pay when you come back,” she said, writing my name on a tablet. I didn’t know the honor system still worked in Jersey.

I sat at the lone wood table by the bay window, the window half-bathed in the early spring sun.  A corner curio shelf displayed teapots for sale and Keurig single-serving coffees. On the wall, watercolor prints of Victorian houses hung in oak frames. I checked the time on  a white enamel clock with pink roses; it was stuck at five after ten. Finding excuses not to grade essays from my high school English classes, I even checked out the local paper. But I couldn’t concentrate because,  soon, the counter guy’s entire family descended – like those flocks of white birds I’d seen here in the half-frozen fields. His wife, who looked 20 years older than her husband,  wore gray sweatpants. There were three daughters, the oldest probably a sophomore in high school, and a lanky, pre-teen son, who sat in the chair opposite me, silent, head down, bangs covering his eyes.

It took five minutes for everyone to order. The eldest grabbed a YooHoo. The middle girl ordered a Smoothie. The young girl asked for hot chocolate with whipped cream. But the boy just shrugged.  “Why is your son so shy?” the counter girl asked.

 “He thinks you’re so good-looking, he doesn’t know what to say,” the father said.

She chuckled, and I looked over my essays to register the poor kid’s reaction, but he just murmured, “I guess I’ll have a hot chocolate too.” I wanted to paraphrase Philip Larkin, that parents really ‘mess you up,’ but I was raised in the ‘mind your own business’ suburbs, so I just stuck to my business  of grading student papers.

After ten minutes, the gang left, and led their mother up Main Street. The father followed a few minutes later. Why didn’t he come and go with his family? Did it have anything to do with the twenty-year old girl? Could it be he was just being neighborly? Even though the wife complained about money, the outing must have been a ritualized Saturday morning scene. The order was almost twenty dollars. A six pack of Swiss Miss brewed at home would have cost $1.49 from the local Super Value.  But the outing wasn’t about hot chocolate. 

The girl shook her head, wiped the counter, and told me, “It’s nice to have quiet.” I nodded and smiled, even though I didn’t agree. I enjoyed the dialogue.

Soon, an older woman  entered. She was a head taller than the counter with talcum white hair covered with a yellow floral scarf. “Busy today, Jesse?”

“Earlier it was very busy,” Jesse replied.

“Nice day, innit?” she observed, unraveling her scarf. “Before you know it, the crocus will be out.”

Then the mayor  entered through the creaky door. It was still five minutes after ten o’clock. He was tall and stocky and full of warmth. The door slammed behind him.

“How have you been?” the mayor asked the lady.

“A little under the weather… Jo’s got sick for a couple of days…” She looked under the counter and complained rhetorically, “No poppy seed bagels left?”

The mayor volunteered as a Scout leader, I overheard. There were 2,000 packages of food donations coming in at the Presbyterian Church.  Just then, a fire truck wailed down Main Street. They all went outside to chart the route of the truck. In this town, every fire was personal.

Once back inside, the scarf lady approached me, holding her cup with both hands for warmth. On my right was a half-completed community puzzle on a rickety, green folding table – a picture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s pencils. I know that because the box was upside down. The lady glanced at me, half-grinned, and said, picking up a loose piece, “Oh, this one looks hard.” She examined the puzzle the way I had been examining the pieces of Elmer.

The price of my coffee was rent for the sunny table by my window to listen to small town America – to enjoy the gossip, banter, chitchat. During that Saturday, I heard an elderly man with a green hat confab as he collected unused copies of the Elmer Times; I heard the milk delivery guy, the reverend of the First Presbyterian Church, Peggy the School Teacher, the guy who sold farm equipment, and the advancing of armies of the aged with news of grandchildren, snow, medical conditions, future vacations; I heard the auto salvage guys in blue overalls gibe while leaving their huge flatbed running outside. As I was about to leave, Jesse asked me: “So what brings you to Elmer?”

“My daughter Madeline takes art lessons at Appel Farm,” I told her. “So I take an hour for myself and do some writing. But mostly I grade essays.”

Like any writer, I wanted her to ask me about my writing, but she didn’t and said simply that was great. “Nothing to write about down here,” she added. When she found out I was an English teacher, she said that was her worst subject.

Over ten Saturday mornings, I compiled fragments of Jesse’s story: she liked hunting for used car parts in junkyards with her mechanic boyfriend. Lately she was looking for a muffler for an old Mustang. She was in her first year at community college, but she wanted to transfer to Rowan for education. She also worked as a waitress in Vineland at Lone Star. Her red prom dress cost hundreds of dollars… the exact figure I recall stunned me. While on her cell phone, I overheard her tell her friend: “There ain’t nothing to do down here. I can’t wait to get the hell out of Elmer! No one who’s anyone stays around here.”

I wanted to tell her, “You can’t vanish, too. Don’t you know what you mean to these people?”

Leaving the café to pick up Madeline at Appel Farm, minding the speed traps, I realized I was looking forward to next Saturday morning. I’m naturally shy, but when I have a stage, I’m full of thud and thunder, and perhaps this café, over time, could have been another platform. And it would be sad to witness another venue vanish for those who wish not to be impersonalized in the void of the suburbs. If Elmer keeps losing three percent of its population, over time, it will vanish. With my ego, maybe I’d be happier in Elmer where everyone knew me. In Mullica Hill, I’m not sure my neighbors know my name. I’m just as much to blame. I’ve lived with wide borders and invisible fences, and without Jesse the Counter Girl. Perhaps I’m not civilized after all.

So many of us have lost the art of the chat. In my part of Jersey, coffee addicts whiz in and out of convenience stores, checking the time on Blackberries. We even scan our own groceries. But it wouldn’t be morning in Elmer without coffee and neighborly parlance with the charming, country counter girl. It wouldn’t be morning in America either.

One Sunday a month I go to prison, the Federal Detention Center (FDC) located a few blocks north and west of Independence Hall. The FDC is a stone fortress, built as much to keep people out as in.  It imprisons over 1,000 women and men.  I go to visit one of them, Marcela.

 I bring Marcela’s fourteen-year-old son, Orlando, to see her. When I arrive at his foster home in Montgomery County he flashes a big grin and small bills as he hops in my car, eager to see his mom and spend money at the vending machines.  Sunday morning traffic is light; we arrive in Center City quickly and park along Arch near Chinatown. 

Once inside the FDC, I slide my license through a slot to the guard sitting behind inch-thick Plexiglas.  He gives me a form to complete.  I write my name, address and Marcela’s name and prisoner number.  I check “no” to the questions asking whether I’m carrying contraband like drugs, weapons, or phones. I return the form, receive a padlock and lockup our belongings before heading to the metal detector.

Passing through security can be a challenge.  Once, the guard told Orlando to change his khaki shorts because they resembled inmate attire.  We grabbed a blanket from my car and wrapped it around his waist.  As soon as we reentered the prison, the guard shook his head from side to side. 

“How’s that different than a skirt?” I asked preemptively.

“It’s not a skirt,” he responded.

“How’s it any different?”

“If it was a skirt I wouldn’t allow it; it shows too much on the side. No slit skirts!”

We went to Rite Aid and bought pajama pants with pink teddy bears.  It was the best we could do at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. Orlando didn’t care; he just wanted to see his mom.

 

After the metal detector, visitors enter an atrium.  Pictures of President Obama, Attorney General Holder, the head of the Bureau of Prisons and FDC’s warden adorn the wall.  We sign-in and the word of the day is stamped on our left hands with ink that glows purple under black light.  We’re escorted to the monitoring station, flash our hands under the light and are permitted entry.  Metallic clicks unlock doors of thick glass and steel.  The door in front of us doesn’t open until the door behind us closes.

We enter the visitation room, which contains one hundred and sixty interlocking blue plastic chairs arranged in rows.  No more than twenty-five chairs are ever filled.  Consultation rooms for lawyers and their clients line the back wall.  There’s also a children’s room with butterflies, birds and a castle painted on the walls.  It has toys and books for imprisoned parents to read to their children.

We wait for Marcela, which can take as little as fifteen minutes or as long as forty-five.  When she arrives, she smiles broadly as her eyes fill. Orlando leaps from his seat and they wrap their arms around each other.  Marcela grabs his face, kisses him on the lips, on his cheeks, and on the lips again with a loud smack.  She then embraces me.

“Hermano Timoteo, gracias por venir.”  Brother Timothy, thank you for coming.

Marcela and Orlando sit next to each other, across from me.  She runs her hand over his belly.  His childhood chubbiness is thinning out over a lengthening frame.  Marcela pulls the top of his shirt looking for pubescent hair.  He giggles, pushing her hand away. Seeing her son only once a month, Marcela notices every change.

Mother and son hold hands, stroke each other’s faces and glow.  His sun-kissed skin is darker then hers, which is no longer touched by sun.  Her natural brown hair has slowly returned and pushed dyed blond further out from her scalp, marking time.   She’s done twenty months and has ten to go. 

I walk to the bathroom allowing Marcela and Orlando time alone.  When I return Orlando heads to the vending machines.  He returns with Doritos, one bag of cool ranch, one original and Cokes.  Marcela offers me a little of everything. I pass on the Coke, but accept some chips.

This hospitality reminds me of my time in El Salvador.  I worked in a small community much like the one Marcela left behind.  Whenever I visited a family, the señora would grab a prized plastic chair and swat dust from it with a rag as a child ran to the tienda to buy a bottle of Coke. 

“Está en su casa,” the señora would say. “You’re in your house.”

Marcela doesn’t use these words but the sentiment is the same.  The FDC is no home, but life still moves here.

Every visit we see a girl about Orlando’s age visiting her mom, who is Marcela’s friend. 

“Digale hola a tu suegra,” Marcela jokes. “Say hello to your mother-in-law.”  His pudgy brown cheeks turn red.  She tosses her head back laughing, happy to think about a day in the future, free. 

We pass a few hours enjoying each other, talking about girls, school and court dates. Too soon for Marcela and Orlando, it’s time to go.  She kisses and hugs him and blesses him twice, touching his forehead, heart, shoulder and shoulder. 

I glance around as they say goodbye and see other families refusing to become strangers.  One mother tearfully smiles, watching her baby boy taking unsteady steps.  A father scolds his inmate daughter.  Three girls in pink practice a cheer. 

Marcela hugs me and thanks me for bringing her son.  Then, once again, Orlando and I place our hands under the light; a lock clicks and the door slides open allowing us out.  Escorted, we pass through more doors, through the atrium, and the metal detector.  We collect our things, exchange the padlock for ID, and exit one last barred door out to the uncontrolled climate. We drive west on Arch past City Hall, and work our way to Walnut and the suburbs beyond.

Tim O’Connell lives in Drexel Hill, PA with his wife and two sons.  He works for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in Hispanic Ministry. His writing has appeared at www.literarymama.com and Maryknoll magazine.  Whenever possible he participates in the Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio.

[img_assist|nid=6815|title=Self Portrait, Health by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=259]On Saturdays, we folded paper boats. With his sleeves rolled, he stood beside the pond creasing triangles, corner to corner, his reflection rippling in the water. He sailed his boat, forced breaths propelling it, keeping it afloat. He counted the seconds before it sank, dissolving to pulp.

On Sunday mornings he made egg sandwiches. In his old blue robe, he stood at the stove, the sizzle of butter in a frying pan. He cracked open eggshells on the rim of a bowl, never breaking the yolk. While cheese melted on a Kaiser, he sliced the pork roll thin, hot grease popping in a second pan.

After breakfast, he took us to the park, my sister and me. In cut-off jeans, he stood behind the swings pushing us both at once. Higher, we howled. He snuck drags,  and exhaled smoke between pushes. We pumped our feet, pointing soles toward the sky, leaning back, mouths wide open, catching the wind. The count of three: our two bodies, all angles and limbs, arcing through the air.

      Two

I dug tunnels and moved plastic molded army men around in piles of dirt. I conquered fortresses, soldiers surrendering in the late afternoon sun. On my bicycle, I jumped over ditches as deep as canyons and taught myself to ride with no hands. I fell chin first into a gravel pit. Don’t you cry, he said, so I taught myself to hold back tears.

I learned to throw a ball, to catch whatever came at me, to bat left-handed better than the boys. I learned how to spit, until my mother scolded me. I stockpiled crabapples in the yard and hurled them across the street at the neighbor’s fort, hitting it every time. Don’t get caught, he said, so I learned how to disappear.

I launched rockets and climbed the tallest trees. I built a slingshot and took aim at rabbits and squirrels when they got close. I caught fireflies and plucked the light organs from their bodies, smearing the bioluminescence on my face like war paint. From the window of the house on Bridge Street, he saw me.

 

Three

 On the day my father came home from Nazareth Hospital, at his request, I took a pair of scissors to his hair. In one hand, I held the fine-toothed comb lifting the strands of hair away from his scalp while with the other hand I opened the scissors, closing them like metal jaws, one sliding past the other, tufts of white falling onto his shoulders and the bed sheets, some drifting down to settle on my shoes.

In this same way, I trimmed the long wiry hairs of his eyebrows then reached carefully into the moist caverns of his nostrils with the tips of the twin blades. With each snip, he looked to me for comfort, searching with boyish eyes for a sign that it was almost over.

With my fingers still wrapped around the handles, I scissored the blades together, slicing them through the air, one half-grazing the other, a single silver screw allowing the simultaneous gesture of the object’s purpose and my intent.

At fifty-one, a massive stroke had left my father a hemiplegic. One arm, one leg, frozen at his side, no longer could he command either to move, to support his weight, to take him from one place to another. To bend. To wave. To hug. To hold on.

I was twenty-one when it happened. I spent my days conferring with doctors, my sleepless nights with bottomless cups of coffee and music blaring from headphones covering my ears. Springsteen screamed anthems of growing up and getting out, and here I was faced with knowing I needed to stay, to care,  to piece together some kind of future for myself in Philadelphia, my father’s city, his family tracing its roots along the narrow, shadowy streets for more than a century.

**

When I finished cutting my dad’s hair, I began dressing him, starting first with a long white pair of socks. I rolled them in my hands then unrolled them onto his feet, the left foot first.

“Aaahhh,” he screamed, the sound dragging out longer than it should, a high-pitched, impulsive wail. “You’re hurting my toes.”

They curled under like commas, rigid and deformed, the nails brittle and yellow.

I slid the left leg first into the pair of pants, then followed with the right. As he lay there, wordless and still, I pulled the zipper up, aware of the two rows of teeth dovetailing together. My father stared upward, his body a horizontal plane, now parallel to floor and ceiling.

I pulled his shirt over his head and worked to maneuver his left arm into the sleeve. Misshapen and stiff, it clung tightly to his chest. New at this, I did not know the order in which I was supposed to be dressing him. I did not want to be dressing him at all. And I sensed my dad’s frustration. With his right hand, he clutched the forearm of his left, lifting it then letting it fall hard against his body.

 ***

The phone call came in the middle of the afternoon. My father sounded child-like, pleading for help, trying, though, not to alarm me. I urged him to call 911, offered to call for him.

“Please,” he begged. “Just come over and help me up. I’ll be fine once you get me back in bed.”

Every single day, I worried that he might fall. Physical therapists had helped him to walk again, but he was far from steady. He clutched a hemi-cane in his right hand, his left arm tightly fastened in a sling against his body. He stepped with the right leg and commanded the left to follow, a sliding motion more than an actual step. He lived at home with my mother, who now needed to work full-time. My dad’s days were spent alone, the television his constant companion. I stopped by frequently, drove him to physical therapy appointments, but he quickly became cut-off from the world outside his little house.

I drove fast, arriving to find him on the floor beside his bed, his left leg pinned between the bed and the wheelchair. I moved the wheelchair out of the way. He wanted me to lift him, to put him back in bed so we could simply pretend he had not fallen.

“Hook your arms under mine,” he pleaded. “I’ll help you by pivoting my body toward the bed.”

But his leg was twisted in a way that made me know I should not move him. And even if his leg had not been twisted, there was no way I could lift my father alone. He was six-feet tall and outweighed me by at least eighty pounds. I dialed
911.

At first, he seemed angry with me. I apologized more than once, then folded myself onto the floor beside him. I lay down facing him, eye to eye. As I extended my hand toward his, he reached out and squeezed my fingers. He did not let go.

“Remember that 1980 Phillies team, Dad? Think you can name all the players?”

I turned it into a challenge.

“Mike Schmidt,” he said first. “Greg Luzinski. Tug McGraw.” He went on to name the entire line-up. The paramedics arrived just as he finished the list.

I stood out of the way as the two men in uniforms hoisted my father onto a gurney, their strong backs facing me. Sweat trickled down my dad’s temples. “Don’t drop me,” he said, more than once, his voice quivering. With his right hand, he held on tightly to one man’s arm, his fingers clenched, sinking into fabric and flesh. Both men reassured him, their kind words and respect for my father filling my eyes with tears.

I climbed up into the ambulance and listened to the wail of the siren as we sped through intersections along Cottman Avenue, watching as the two men began assessing their patient—blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation. “Caucasian male, mid-fifties,” one announced into the radio transmitter. After the final stretch on the Boulevard, we arrived at Nazareth. Once again.

From off to the side where I sat, I saw him. I saw my father folding paper boats, cooking breakfast in his blue robe, pushing my sister and me on the swings. When the ambulance stopped, the two men lifted the gurney out onto the sidewalk. The count of three: his body, a single motionless plane, arcing through the air.

Kristina Moriconi is working toward an MFA degree at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. Her work has appeared most recently in The Shine Journal, apt, Verbsap, and Opium. Her connection to Philadelphia became increasingly meaningful after her father’s death just before the Phillies won the World Series in 2008. She has begun an extensive research project tracing his family history and has decided to stay here even longer.

I can’t exactly say why I went to church on Saturday for the five o’clock mass, but that’s just what I did. I don’t know why that feels like I’m confessing to some dirty impulse–maybe it’s just that I’m still drawn to the liturgy–the music, the patterns of it–in spite of my exasperation with the Church. I hadn’t gone to church by myself since my teens, and as I walked into the sanctuary, I thought, okay, I’m home. When I’m with someone else–for Christmas Midnight Mass, or a funeral–I usually feel some tug of loss, a loss I can’t quite explain. But not this time. Maybe it helps that the church is a progressive church–many gay and lesbian parishioners, people of all ages and nationalities. Think of it as a Unitarian Church–but with communion. 

I’m usually not so big on homilies. I usually think of that as the time when the celebrant makes meaningless noises in order to fill up some space; time to look at the songbook, but this was different. He was talking about hospitality–what does it mean to welcome the people we love? I was thinking on that, my arms outstretched on the back of the pew, when a line of his jumped out at me: "The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom." Every molecule in me was turned to him. He said it once more, as if he wanted it to sink in. "The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom." What on earth could such a thing mean?

Later that night a friend told me about a white dog showing up at another friend’s house. The other friend looked at the dog’s tags–the address was three miles away, all the way on the other side of town. There were fireworks in town, extravagant fireworks, and it was likely the dog had run across woods, marshes, highways to get to the friend’s house. The friend looked out the door and saw what she thought was a white deer. But it wasn’t any white deer. It was a dog, a white fluffy dog, who walked right into her living room and dining room, muddy paws and all. The dog looked around a bit, submitted to the friend’s petting, then slumped, turned on his side and fell asleep.

The friend called the numbers on the dog’s tags. No one answered at the numbers. The friend left a message, and when she didn’t hear back after a while, she started to get suspicious. Maybe the dog was hers, the mystery beast coming up the street in the dark, out of the briars, the woods.

The next day the phone rang. A terse, gruff boy on the line, and the story comes darker, clearer. The dog’s human, his protector, his mother, drowned in the pool the night before. Did the dog see it happen? Did the dog jump in the water after her, try to rescue her? Was it a suicide, a heart attack, a slip off the side while she was heading back into the house with armful of dry clothes? The friend didn’t feel she had the right to such questions, but she did ask the boy–the woman’s daughter’s boyfriend–if he’d be willing to let the dog stay with her for a while. "He seems so comfortable here," she said. And the boy agreed to that, if reluctantly. And who could blame the friend if she started to make plans, if she thought about driving to the store for dog food. Life with the white dog, the white deer–and wasn’t she already relieved that she had a reason to keep herself from going so many places? A root in her midst. Finally, after so much running around.

I suppose I don’t need to say that the family wanted the dog back the next day. I suppose I don’t need to say that the friend was inconsolable, as the dog jumped in the back of the family’s car, so grateful to be back with his familiars. Of course his mother wouldn’t be there at the house when he jumped out of the car, but he didn’t know that yet. And all the losses of the friend rose up before her like ghosts turning to flesh, needing to be dealt with.

"The White Deer" is from a memoir-in-progress tentatively titled, I’D SURE LIKE TO SEE YOU, and first appeared in the online literary journal Sweet.

Paul Lisicky (www.paullisicky.com) is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines.

             No wheels, no license, no ability to drive – I’m  a little hesitant, a little ashamed. I pause for a two-beat before I dial Ursula to [img_assist|nid=6462|title=Flight of the Spirit by Donald Stephens © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=303]arrange our weekend together. She’s a teacher and single mother in Pottstown, I’m a late-thirtyish man living at my Granny’s Drexel Hill Tudor-style house. During this pause, I’m sitting at my adapted computer, my finger poised over my phone’s Velcro-marked Five button. I feel like I’m the sighted adolescent again, standing at a mall payphone, arranging a pick up.

 

            The adult me pushes through, and dials. But I don’t get Ursula. It’s her daughter.

            "Hi, is your mom home?"

            "Stop making that funny voice," Ursula’s daughter says, right away without a "howdy-do."

            "Is your mom home?" I repeat in my higher-pitched "everything is okay kid" voice.

            "Stop that," the girl shouts. "Daddy, stop talking like that!" Then slam. Dial tone.

            My chair creaks under me as my heart becomes all inaudible bass beat. I fidget with the phone cord, then work at disentanglement. I fill the silence with a movie image.  Today it’s Big, and Tom Hanks is hoofing "Heart and Soul" on the oversized walking piano. How many takes were there? Did he break a sweat?

* * *

             It’s the weekend and Ursula gathers me from the Reading bus station. We drop off my bags at her place, then take a walk through her neighborhood. As we stroll, my ears tell me what my eyes would. Traffic is infrequent, sound is sponged up by lawns and bushes,  the stationary eloquence of a robin several stories above me hints at tree heights.

            We head uphill, past the pools, and to the pond, circle it at leisure with my hand resting on her right shoulder for guidance. I hold my white cane upright, dandy-style in my free palm. Ursula pulls me aside when we meet an oncoming couple who haven’t done the white cane and black glasses math.

            "We’re coming to a footbridge," she says. "No rails."

            I scrutinize her tone for weariness or resignation. I still can’t figure if I’m man or encumbrance to her. Her divorce is not final and I fear I am a cliche in tennis shoes — the Transitional Man.

            A brush of her long hair against my arm tells me she’s turned her head away. I Photoshop her locks day-glo apricot to contrast her picket-fence spirit. Only, I’m thinking about the steady quiet of her neighborhood, its pond, its pools, the nearby market. I could easily tap-tap-tap along the pickets, as well.

            There’s the faintest of paddling noises from the water. I’m sure there are duck feet, upended, as a Mallard goes under for a morsel.

            "Still going swimming tomorrow?" Ursula asks.

* * *

            While she’s in the kitchen drawing up a shopping list, I’m out of the way, in the bedroom, attending to medical concerns. Diabetic, I test my blood sugar, the meter counting down aloud and voicing a number I’m satisfied with. It’s time for my afternoon meds, so I take the four anti-rejection transplant pills, the pair of blood pressure, the anti-nausea pill.

            Ursula calls out, "Can you think of anything besides soda and chicken you want?"

            "Strawberry Pop Tarts. The glazed kind, please." They are my current form of emergency sugar. But still, I blush.

            Before she leaves, Ursula refreshes my memory about the stairway threshold and projecting TV shelf. She grabs her keys, says, "I have to stop at my husbands with my daughter’s schoolbag." The door closes behind her. It’s not long before the stillness conjures the creepy twin girls from The Shining.

* * *

            We wait for the senior citizen hour at the lap pool because the main pool is a mined bay of bobbing children in nosecoat and water wings ready to sink my ship.

            "Marco!"

            "Polo!"

            Ursula gives me a quick description of the layout, and then I’m swimming, first time in the dark. Splash splash, then a little bit of a crawl, and then I’m going freestyle. I bump into walls and tangle myself in lane dividers. But this isn’t good enough.

            Hand out, I trace my way to the ladder. Once I’m up, Ursula walks me around to the deep end and sets up her towel. I perch on the coping, work up nerve, then jump. I try to go coast-to-coast underwater, and put my hand up to meet wall. I fall short the first dozen tries. This game still isn’t good enough, though. I encounter my first flotation worm and get ideas.

            The Styrofoam worms are a little shorter than my white cane, but when I’m up and poolside I find I can hold them ski-pole style and make it to the diving board.

            Once up, I edge cautiously past the handrails. Tap with the left pool toy. Tap with the right, then another tap ahead to discern my placement on the board. I don’t want to pitch forward unprepared.

            I find the end and ready myself. Ursula, poolside,  and a senior couple treading in the water, wait in sparkly daylight. This is not nighttime, shades drawn, lights out. My body is exposed, on display with my shrunken eyes, my transplant scars, my insulin injection bruises. I am a Google map of doctor visits and hospitalizations, Hinting at many more unpaved miles ahead. Is Ursula up for that trip?

            I am eager to dive. But my mind conjures a dry excavation in front of me. Then, the crypt full of snakes from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Next, a chamber filled with a thousand armed Chinese terra cotta soldiers.

            "Are you watching?" I ask.

            "Go ahead," Ursula says, and the words hang in the air. I picture her floating as well, Chagall-like, five feet over cement pool deck. "Just go."

            Finally, I toss the worms into the pool.  I trust there will be water, soft and buoyant, to catch me as I leap.

Sean Toner’s essays have appeared at webdelsol.com, perigee-art.com, and in Opium Magazine (where he’s twice been a finalist in their 500-word memoir contest). His CNF also appears in the Book of Worst Meals from Serving House Books. Sean is a former vice president of the Philadelphia Writers Conference and was chair of its Free Forums at Drexel University. He earned his MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2006 and lives in Bryn Mawr, PA, with the writer Robin Parks. Sean has been sightless since 1995 and is a public speaker about disability.www.seantoner.com

As I turn 38 and keep stocking drawers full of dreams and half-completed projects, I’m pushing forward with one big initiative: I’m having an imaginary baby. Why not? My friend Laura and I share imaginary cocktails via instant messenger at work. I talk to my guardian angel a lot (if shadows are angels). I sometimes comfort myself with the idea of alternate universes where I’m adored and published, or in prison, maybe all of these. 

Reasons why I want this baby: 1) I’m selfish. 2) My routine bores me. 3) Imaginary babies are less creepy than imaginary boyfriends. 4) I’m pretty sure I have really good advice to give. Unlike the dreamy-eyed hippies I got for parents, I will be candid. Here’s the set up: each family is a mini kingdom uniquely composed of demanding princesses with half-baked ideas about ruling. Every time you leave the house, you run into princesses who refuse to admit their titles, but like to pull rank. The important thing to remember when dealing with royalty is that there is protocol. Like any good tourist, you must observe the customs to the best of your ability and when committing a faux pas, remain polite. The other good bit of advice: It’s okay to go to bed drunk without brushing your teeth. I’m having this child because I’ve earned it—the search was long and arduous—because I’ve found the right child for me, and because it makes the commute to work that much more pleasant.  And finally, because my child is fun and has good ideas.

Before my plan was formulated, my baby was hard to find. I looked for the baby in the eyes of men, sometimes in the eyes of women, but I did not find my baby. I only knew its ghostly absence in my arms weighing on me. I clutched a gaping space, not in my body, but on my body. Full of the absence of the baby I didn’t have, I carried the emptiness around like an  invisible baby front pack—you’ve seen them.  They’re called Baby Björns, by the way.

I’m an accomplished singleton: I make and eat delicious food alone. I’m an expert at solo lovemaking. I’m not an imaginative daydreamer, but I am close to my heart’s desires.  My heart is full of invisible people — the friends and family I bring with me everywhere I go, inspiring authors and heroes whom I love, the half-baked crushes that add intrigue to my daily life. They are a rich society that is known only to me, part anchored in the world, and part whispering wishes.

The real world is, well, tangible, and quite demanding. Case in point, my friends’ lively offspring whose charms have matching drawbacks—like the bossiness and the tears, and the abundant curry-colored shit overflowing the diaper and dripping onto the carpet. These are drawbacks I would only dream of tackling in a team formation. Thus my baby, imaginary, and loaded with optional features tailored to my lifestyle. No curry-colored shit for me.  I won’t deny that I long for the body warmth of a real baby, but for now, I will be satisfied with this: My baby tells me stories to put me to sleep at night and holds my hand when I cross the street, but walks at my pace and I don’t pack a stroller. This is ironic because I lust for the big-wheeled strollers ambitiously fit parents run behind. Just cause they look so sporty and nurturing, simultaneously. 

My baby wasn’t born all at once. Or rather, she has been born often and dissipates back into star-stuff as needed. This process, like the singing of a song, is repetitive and allows for fine tuning or the universe’s baby-sitting, depending. She’s kind of a lease baby, but these are advantageous terms. She’s sleek and plush, and shape-shifty, like a dream car or a good pet rolled into one. But human. Making an alien would be too weird.

What’s nice about parenting is that there are no licenses and no tests, it’s your business until it becomes the state’s. You can fuck up just until the damage is so extraordinarily obvious that law obliges third parties to call in licensed professionals. Abuse notwithstanding, what scares me about parenting is that there are always plentiful bystander judgments. You’re being observed, and you are found wanting. More than usual, I mean.

Thus again, imaginary baby. Who never cries herself to sleep.

The baby doesn’t have a real name yet, but that’s her doing. She’s to pick out her name.  She likes to change them up. Today she’s Roujika, but I bet she’ll go back to something a little less interesting in a few days. Emma seemed to stick for a while. I sometimes wish I had a boy so I could call him Rafael. I’m a sucker for Italian boy names.  But I really wanted a girl. Girls are easier, and I can relate. I’m not sure what I would tell a boy. I’d cram his head full of feminist ideas, encourage him to read books– he’d be reviled by jocks.  It would be tough going.

Obviously, I haven’t fully imagined my baby yet. Most parents enjoy a minimum of nine months to accustom themselves to the notion of parenting. So I’m taking my time getting to know my baby. For example, I’m pretty sure that my baby is a good sleeper like me, not an early morning person, but a child that likes the smell of coffee. Specifically I start the day in a leisurely fashion. My child only wakes once I have drunk one full hot cup of java.  A friend suggested that I have a baby whose nostrils, when I squeezed the baby’s head, produce coffee. Now that’s monstrous. I’m not looking for a coffee maker. I have a coffee maker. 

Having my baby wasn’t so hard. There was no need to locate an inseminator, no need for a pre-baby diet, special baby vitamins, or post baby regimen. No need to think about the sad fate in store for my breasts, inflating and deflating, sucked dry. My baby is body friendly. No c-section about it.

Ponder the word delivery. Delivery is a strange, ominous word. It implies imprisonment or the arrival of packages that require a signature. Your body is to deliver the goods, the giant, multi-pound, independent mechanism that wants you to spend all your money on its education.  Luckily, I have no educational costs, I home school my baby while I work.

The day, as I said, starts with coffee. We take a shower, the baby scrubs my back, and I help her shampoo. We moisturize. I get dressed on my own. The baby draws the clothes she wants to wear that week, they materialize, she puts them on, and we have a fashion show. Sometimes I suggest alternate colors or fabrics, but, by and large, we agree.  This takes place on Sundays; I don’t have time the rest of the week.  On Mondays, the baby helps me with my commute; she holds my bags and we comment about the people on the trolley: their weird hats, their unfortunate lipsticks, their sleepy eyes. We wonder what their professions might be. My baby girl, she wants to be an archeologist or a dentist—precision instruments for cleaning either way. She doesn’t get that from me. I suck at cleaning.

Once I get to work, the baby plays with my feet while I check my email. She sings songs, and draws, and generally has a good time ripping paper all day. When I need a break, or when I feel overwhelmed, we take five minutes and she holds me close and pets my hair.  At lunch, I tell her stories, other jobs, other places I’ve been. She likes it when I talk about Hong Kong. We agree it’s a cool city. At 3 p.m., I riffle through my candy drawer and the baby gives me looks because she knows I’ll complain about my thighs eventually. Luckily the baby doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth which is convenient when I’m sneaking chocolate and don’t feel like sharing. I don’t like saying no to her, so that works out. 

I haven’t introduced her to my coworkers. They might be alarmed that she’ll distract me or lower my productivity. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I work harder when the baby’s around-it’s easier to do things for someone else. I am working hard and saving up for vacation. I can’t wait to show her the world.

After work, we walk home together and enjoy the changing seasons.  There’s no fighting at bath time, and she likes to go to sleep early in the evening. Before I make dinner. She’s easy going. If I go out for drinks after work, she’ll let herself into the apartment, eat a little something and go to sleep on her own. The universe turns out to be a generous neighbor– It’s always Saturday night, and the universe is always available, knows infant CPR, and doesn’t eat my food or make prank calls from my landline.

This leaves me with a lot of time for dating, which apparently I should put more energy into. So she tells me, the baby, not the universe. 

Sylvie Beauvais received her Master’s of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Her novella, Fly, Rapunzel was a finalist in Low Fidelity Press’s 2006 Novella Award Contest. She has been a writer and editor for start-ups and non-profits, but is now focused on publishing her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

My grandfather’s name was Efthimios Vasilios Patouhas, but I called him Papa.  As a toddler I could only manage to spurt out [img_assist|nid=6105|title=The Open Doors by Brian Griffiths © 2010|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=167|height=250]the first syllable of the Greek word for grandfather, pappou. The repeated pa, pa, pa eventually became Papa.  I’m nearly four years older than my next sibling and decades older than some of my cousins, so the name stuck long before any of them came along.

   Every summer, Papa went back to Greece to run his bar.  He spent the winters living with Angie, his youngest daughter, in a trailer park off of Route 70 in Pennsauken. As a kid I would sleep over there, falling asleep watching old movies with my aunt. In the morning, I’d wake up to Papa and Angie whispering, so as not to wake me, and the smell of scrambled eggs and English muffins.

   “You’re too skeeny,” Papa would say through his thick Greek accent.

   I ignored him, in order to act offended, but then got myself to the table for my breakfast.  When I was chowing down, Papa’s complaint would change.

   “They don’t cook for you at home? Eat, eat. Bravo, bravo.”

      When he died in November 2006, I couldn’t attend the funeral, because it was in Greece and I was 7000 miles away, in New Jersey, in the middle of the school year, teaching “The Odyssey” to ninth graders. Logistics, like time, money, and distance kept me from a farewell. It was all for the best though, because I wanted to remember Papa in my own way.

    A few weeks after his death, when I talked to my Aunt Angie on the phone from Greece, she said, “When you get here you can look through his jewelry box.”

   “I only want the tie,” I told her. I didn’t have to explain which one I meant.

   “Okay, it’s still hanging in his room.”

   For two more years, until I could get to it, the tie hung on a hook in his room with all the others At last, in 2008, I boarded the plane for six weeks in the Mediterranean sun with only a long narrow piece of fabric on my mind. The thirteen hour trip exhausted me. I wanted nothing more than to collapse on the lumpy bed in the house that Papa had built but my mother and her siblings now owned. But not before going into Papa’s room to retrieve the tie.

   From the cool of the dark long windowless hallway I knocked tentatively on his closed bedroom door as if he were still in there. I opened it and looked in. I wasn’t ready to study the pain of the room just yet. I only wanted my souvenir of his journey. I opened the door further and saw the hooks full of ties by the master suite bathroom door. There on top was the tie, my tie, the one I was after.  It hung so neatly and was still knotted as if Papa had loosened it from around his neck, pulled it over his head, and hung it there the night before.

   I grabbed it and pulled it over my own head and retired into the adjacent room. I slept carefully, so as not to undo his handiwork.

   Efthimios was born the fifth child of eight in a rustic mountain village in December 1938. He was an identical twin, but he was unlike any of his siblings. He had a wandering and wondering spirit that lead him at the age of fifteen, to traverse 20 miles of dirt road that wound down through evergreens and Cyprus trees to escape the andartes, the Communist rebels who were stealing children from their homes to fight civil warfare among the rocks of the motherland.  By foot, by bus, by boat, by the grace of God he made it to Wilmington, Delaware and became an American, Tom Patouhas.

   During the day, he loved everything about being an American, especially the work and the money. He worked his way up and down the country from Delaware to Tennessee to Florida to Ohio. It was while working at Libbey Owens Ford Glass Manufacturing in Toledo, Ohio that he met Simela Spirides. In the 1960’s and ‘70’s, he was a short version of Errol Flynn with a mustache, and he always wore a three-piece suit when he went out. That’s probably why Simela, on first seeing him, told her girlfriend that she was going to marry him. She did and they soon had three kids. The first was my mom.

   During the night he liked everything about being Greek. Smashing plates, dancing on tables, and drinking until he felt like smashing plates and dancing on tables. He loved his “Johnny Walker with a splash of Coke”, smoking a half pack of cigarettes in half an hour, and laughing his wheezing squeezed-lung laugh at dirty jokes. This may be why he and my grandmother divorced after five years.  She later joined a convent.

   In 1996, when I turned twenty-one, I hung out at the same bar Papa did. It was the only bar in South Jersey that played Greek music, so all the Greeks gathered there to smoke and drink and break things. I worked full time, studied at college full time, and partied full time. Weekends began on Thursday at 10 p.m., Greek Night, at the 70 West Bar and Lounge, and ended Sunday, at 4 a.m., in the adjacent diner, with pancakes and eggs for breakfast.

   Papa bought me my first legal drink.

   “What you have?” he leaned in and asked over the blaring belly dance music cut with a techno beat.

   “Ummm.” I looked at the waiting barmaid, completely lost.

   “Johnny Walker with a splash of Coke, hun,” he said to her. “You drink whisky, no bad shit,” he said to me.

   My drink was delivered right to my hand. He lifted his and we toasted Yiamas!, to health. I lifted the short stout glass to my lips and swigged a few gulps. The liquid ran through me,  marking a path like a brushfire from my tongue to my stomach. For a second, I felt faint.  I swayed enough to put the glass on the counter. in case I dropped to the floor, but I recovered almost instantly.

   “Yeah?” Papa caught my attention out of the blaze in my brain.

   I turned up a weak smile, “It’s good.” I said,  and promptly left the drink on the bar to go dance and sweat out the flames.

   The Christmas I bought him the tie, I was working as a cashier in an expensive women’s undergarment chain that used to be classy before it became campy. I worked, cascading small, medium, and large undies into panty table waterfalls and layered the sleeves of fuchsia ostrich feather robes as they hung from padded hangers. I kept myself motivated through the late winter work nights by saving every penny to buy my summer vacation in the Greek sun.

   Two weeks before Christmas, the company that owned my store gave us a 40% off discount throughout all its stores. Since the conglomerate owned three-fourths of the mall, I was set to get some decent gifts at reasonable prices.

   By then, in his sixties, Papa still wore a three-piece suit when he went out to the bar. Usually, it was a tan ensemble – jacket, pants, and vest. I figured a smart tie would be the perfect gift to go with his pressed shirts, but I struggled picking it out. The sales guy hovered over me as I touched the silk of each tie on display and scrutinized the individual designs. Finally, I chose a tan one with a design of inch-high rectangles that had binoculars, lanterns, or four tiny license plates with horizontal or vertical striped backgrounds. I chuckled about the binoculars. Papa used a pair to watch pretty girls on the beach,  from the balcony of that home he’d built in Greece, with all those American dollars he’d made. I picked out a tan pair of socks and was done for that season.

   Christmas at my parents’ house was always a big deal. We had to all get dressed and wait for my grandfather and aunts and uncles to show up before the gift exchange could begin. That year I was sure everyone would love what I’d gotten them. It was my first real job and the real  money I’d ever had to spend on gifts.  I’d gone all out, or as far out as my budget allowed. Papa strolled in with my Aunt Angie and us five kids and my parents settled around the living room close to the tree to hand out packages.

   Papa had a system to his unwrapping. He made two piles, one to keep and one to return. There was no polite pretending he would use the electric toothbrush or the back massager. He held them aside so he could give them back to you to exchange at the store yourself. I worried the tie would end up in his reject pile.

   He unwrapped the socks first.

   “Oh, these are good. These are nice,” he said showing them to everyone in the room.

“Look, they’re the kind that won’t cut off my circulation.” 

     I beamed. “I got them at the mall,” I said.  “Now open this one, too.”

   “Oh, more for me?” He tore the paper from the box and lifted its lid. He nodded more approval. “It matches the socks,” he said holding them up next to each other. Both were placed in the “keep” pile.

   I was proud that my hard work and hard earned money had garnered such a fine gift.

   Weeks later, deep into the new year, I came home from a class to find Papa drinking coffee with my mother in her kitchen.

   “You know that tie you got me for Christmas?” he asked as I walked in and unloaded my book bag.

   “Yeah,” I half-listened as I rifled through the cabinets for a snack.

   “It’s my whore tie,” he said.

   “What is it?” I asked peeking out of the cabinet.

   “My whore tie.”

   “Why?”

   “Because, when I wore it to the bar, all the whores came around me.” He wheezed out that hysterical asthmatic laugh and exposed the gold that replaced his upper right canine tooth.

   That’s the Papa I remember when I see the tie, his whore tie, now hanging on an antique hook by my own bed, knotted still, exactly as it was when he last put it around his collar and headed out to the bar.

Elaine Paliatsas-Haughey is a writer of small important things and a teacher of small important people. She is grateful for a story-rich family, Michael, and the Rowan Writing Program. “Whore Tie” is dedicated in memory of Efthemia.