Coming soon! Read my new collection of short stories, entitled MUSE!
I’ll be earning my MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from University of Baltimore this May of 2024, and a graduation requirement is to write and publish a book. I’m super pumped to publish my first collection of short stories. The collection is entitled “Muse”, also the last story in the book. I hope folks will want to purchase a copy. It will be available on Amazon, and I’ll also be selling it on my own locally. The cost will be $15.
Each of the five stories consider milestone moments I have faced in my life–death, grief, adoption, parenthood, retirement. And each one, I’m hoping, touches on topics we all ponder and offers a pov that may refresh.
Stay tuned!
Swimming
Before I wake, I’m in the middle of telling you something. I want you to fix the toilet, rake the yard, paint the shed. In my dream, I’m running around after you because we’re putting the house on the market. Today. Or, so I think. And the new family will want everything to be perfect. In my dream, we’re almost out of time.
That’s when I first feel a breeze. On my toes. I think that’s what wakes me. Because they’re sticking out—my toes I mean— from under the blankets. It’s a delicious ocean breeze that carries salty air that reminds me of that first trip we took to the beach every Memorial Day weekend when the kids were growing up.
Except it’s January. Or, it was. Before I fell asleep, I mean. I open my eyes. The room is dark except for a single lamp. It’s not our room. I’m not in our bed. I’m disoriented at first, not being home, but then memory creeps across my skin like so many spider legs. We’re at the Dove House. I came here to die.
I see shadows of people in pockets around the room. At first I see dozens—layers, almost—and the ones closest appear more tangible, more solid. Resting my head on a pillow tucked inside a pillowcase that smells like a cocktail of lemons and Downy Fabric Softener, I blink until I can see better. When I look a second time the filmier ones are gone. I see Michael, and then Johnny, our two beloved baby boys who in the blink of any eye turned into grown-ups with families of their own. Michael looks so much like you tonight, Leo. I never noticed how many strands of his hair—his beautiful little boy hair— are turning gray. And he’s wearing the same kind of flannel you always wore on winter nights.
A chorus of whispered murmurings makes me think about the sound our curtains made in the summertime when we kept all the windows open and the breeze made the fabric brush against itself—whoosh, whoosh. Nice. Quiet. Safe.
This room feels like that, safe—even with everybody braving grief. I’m like a baby swaddled in a blanket—protected, tucked in, cherished.
A screen door stands beyond the kids and grandkids and the pastor I never really got to know because I got sick before Father Tim retired. I know what you’re thinking, Leo. You think I’m embellishing to make this a better story. You’re thinking there isn’t really a screen door in a hospice. “Janie,” you’re saying, the way you always did, rolling your eyes and elbowing the boys. Well, it’s there. And beyond the screen door, as best I can see because my glasses are sitting on a table across the room, is the ocean. I hear waves before I see them. I squint to make sure. It looks to be dusk—our favorite time of day, Leo, especially at the beach. Do you remember how the sun hovered over the water, just about to sink below the horizon, and we’d scurry through dinnertime so we could make a ritual of perching ourselves on the sand to bid it farewell?
When I sit up, nobody notices me. They’re clustered. The pastor is saying something to Michael in the far corner, and Gina is cradling Johnny in her arms near the bed. Johnny’s weeping. You know how he gets, Leo—our baby boy. He’s all Mr. Stoic, and then that last straw releases the floodgates. I remember how he collapsed when you passed.
I scoot across the bed, away from my body, which looks dead, just lying there. You’d think that would scare me, right, Leo? I, the girl who couldn’t touch the dead mouse inside the “Have a Heart” mousetrap, never liked dead things much. But this is different. I mean, I don’t feel dead. I’m here. I’m not there.
Oh, it’s too hard to explain.
I take care not to touch anyone. It’s not that I wouldn’t love to wrap my arms around Johnny and Michael. If I could smell each one’s uniquely wonderful scent, kiss his forehead, feel his heart beating against mine one last time, well, that would be as if heaven in all its razzle- dazzle had docked its boat right here in this room. But it’s like I’m playing that game, Twister. Do you remember that, Leo? How we contorted our bodies so not a lick of ourselves so much as grazed anyone else’s body parts? There’s some clause buried inside me that says it’s ill-advised to touch the living people with your dead body. So I avoid making contact with Michael and Johnny, and the grandbabies Zoe and Zackary too, who sit huddled together on a woven throw rug, looking like they don’t know which is worse—the dead grandmother or the weeping father. I don’t exactly feel weightless, like the astronauts in space. It’s not like that. But nothing hurts either. And both my hips seem fully operational.
I tiptoe across the hardwood floor. It feels cold to my bare feet, probably because that darned screen door is wide open, but it’s nice too. It’s nice to be walking around, barefoot or otherwise. How long has it been since I walked anywhere? Thanksgiving, maybe? Longer still, since I managed on my own without a walker. I can’t think of the last time I tiptoed anywhere in bare feet.
I’m eager to smell the salt water up close. The summer before last, Johnny and Gina took me with them and the kids to Cape May. It was the first summer you were gone. I guess they thought the beach would be good for me. But I froze when we got to the sand. I feared I’d fall. What a burden I became. An albatross for Johnny and his treasure of a wife. But I’d already broken one hip, and I was terrified to break the other.
So I made them take me back to the cottage, and I missed getting to watch the kids swim. I put a damper on everyone’s fun, and felt ashamed.
When I step outside, I feel cold at first. I’m standing on a beach—a long beach with soft, white sand. I dig my toes into the sand. The sun sits atop the water, and the whole sky glows orangey-red, my favorite color. I turn to go inside to grab a sweater or a blanket or somebody’s spare winter parka. But the hospice is gone. Utterly. In its place are miles of dunes.
“Hey, lady!” a little girl calls.
She’s running toward me, seemingly from nowhere.
I don’t say anything back. I’m not sure my voice even works anymore. Leo, you’re the only person I’ve talked to in weeks.
“Is the water warm?” she says, closer now, looking beyond me to the ocean. She can’t be more than seven years old.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Let’s dive in,” she says, and runs past me. I jog after her, concerned she’ll drown. Where’s her mother? Or a lifeguard?
She has a head full of crazy blonde curls that bounce as she runs that make me think of Michael when he was a baby. Remember?
“Where’s your mommy?” I say. I reach out and grab her closest hand, then kneel down in the sand so we can see each other better.
“Little girl?”
“What?” she says, and looks at me. Her face, a second ago distracted by the promise of a delicious wave, registers shock. She gasps, and tries to wriggle out of my hand, wrestling harder as I grasp tighter.
“Are you at the beach by yourself?”
“No, I…” She looks around, like she just realized she is alone. She looks back at me, steps closer, places her hands on my cheeks, then clutches my whole face, and studies me. She runs her right finger across my eyebrow and frowns. I think about Johnny, and that time he wandered away from us when we were at that wedding in Boston. Do you remember? And I was so scared he fell off the stone wall into the ocean and drowned. Is this little one’s mother worrying too?
But, wait a minute.
I died.
So… none of this is real. I left my dead self on a bed in the Dove House in Westminster, Maryland. Frozen snow covered the ground. Now, one screen door later, I’m kneeling on a beach in some kind of perpetual twilight—a place that looks a lot like where you and I and the kids spent so many happy summers. Our cottage, I bet—with bikes and chairs and sandy boogie boards— is just beyond those dunes.
So, that means this little wanderer is dead too. Am I in heaven? Is heaven a beach?
“Excuse me,” someone calls. A woman, in her forties I guess, materializes. I think about my glasses sitting uselessly on a table inside the teleported hospice. I wish I was wearing them.
“Is that your mommy?” I ask the girl.
She shakes her head, still cupping my cheeks with her little girl hands and studying me like she’s trying to figure something out.
“Honey, you can’t know she’s not your mommy unless you look at her,” I say, prying her fingers from my cheeks and redirecting her gaze.
The woman approaches us. I rise from the sand, placing both hands on the little girl’s shoulders to hoist myself up. I want to ask the woman if the child belongs to her.
“Might you be this little one’s….” and I stop talking.
Just in these few moments since I stepped outside the sun has dipped into the sea. All of a sudden, it’s a lot darker.
But still.
I recognize the woman. Even in the dark. I literally recognize her pants. I loved them once upon a time. You did too, Leo. Or at least you always said so. She has on those silky red bell bottoms with all the flowers.
And now I understand.
“Oh my god,” she says.
The woman understands too.
For just a moment, I forget about the little girl. I’m mesmerized by this woman staring back at me. Her shoulders are hunched. Long, skinny fingers cover her mouth. And she’s staring at me with eyes that dart from me to the little girl.
And the little girl understands. She backs away and falls into the sand. She leaps up, little arms and legs twitching this way and that to escape—I’m reminded of a sand crab scurrying madly to get away from probing humans—and she runs down the beach.
The woman beckons her. “You’re okay, baby,” she calls.
And we follow.
The girl stops, abruptly, at the water’s edge. She stops like she hit a wall.
I lift my hand and feel something in the air like a force field or an undertow, except the current is blowing in the breeze instead of under the water.
“Are we trapped?” the woman asks. Her voice hikes up on the word trapped, and something about the sound of it—the petulance of it—reminds me of the night I crashed the car. I was still drunk when you got to the hospital, Leo, and I remember trying to con you into believing I’d fallen asleep, that I was sober, that I hadn’t been in the wrong. Wasn’t that the last time I wore those red pants? The EMT’s had to cut them off me. I feel like if I stand really close to her I’ll smell the alcohol, like, but for the wrinkle of time, it’s that night all over again and I’m trapped by my own stupidity.
All three of us see the teenager at once. We see her when she’s still way down the beach. Every once in a while she stops walking and raises a hand along the force field. And pauses. Then again she walks, head bowed like she’s seeking that most lovely seashell, that best prize that she can carry home and keep all winter to remind her this place exists. I don’t think she sees us. She wears cream colored pedal pushers and a dark brown pullover sweater that’s way too big for her. That’s because it’s your sweater, Leo. I’m sure when she gets closer I’ll see the hole peeking from underneath the right sleeve. And if she lets me get close enough, I’ll smell your scent.
She halts, mid-step, when she recognizes us. I guess nobody knows what to say. I sure don’t. So we all four stand in the stillness.
“I’ve been trying to find a place to get in,” she says, finally. “There isn’t one. There’s…this… invisible wall all along the shoreline.”
“Look!” the little girl says, and she points to the water.
That’s when we see you. I’m not sure what you look like to them. But we all speak your name, at almost exactly the same time, so I know we all see you. I see you the way you looked the night you proposed. You have on that Army coat you wore in those days, and your hair is long like it was when we were in our twenties. You’re not exactly walking on water. Not like Jesus. But you’re sort of hovering.
The teenage girl runs past us like a sprinter hungry to win first place. She throws herself forward, but crashes backward onto the beach.
“Leo!” she screams, crouching in the sand now, her pants wet and sandy.
I kneel beside her, and shiver. I’m not sure if it’s the breeze that makes me feel cold, or the way she cried out your name, like she knew, even at seventeen, that having you was more essential than air.
I try to speak. I want to tell her everything she doesn’t know at seventeen. I want to say yes, you love her as much as she loves you, and you always will. But I want to tell her no too. “Janie,” I want to say, “you can’t define yourself as the girl who Leo loves.” I want to wrap my arms around her and whisper the secret that wholeness lives inside her.
But words are too hard to say. They remain a muddled, unspoken mess.
She speaks instead. “You look cold,” she says, and takes off your sweater, the one I wore all those years ago ‘til it shredded in the dryer. She helps me put it on.
The sky darkens. We wait, together, but alone. The teen and I sit, the woman walks, the little girl explores.
“Oh,” I hear the girl say, much later. She’s up in the dunes when I hear her, and she runs down the beach to us.
“We’re not trapped,” she says. “But we can’t swim ‘til we make friends.”
We look at her. She sits down in the sand with the teenager and me, and folds her arms. I feel the hair on the back of my head stand up. I knew this, didn’t I? That we were the reason we couldn’t swim. Because we’re not friends. I try to remember when I stopped liking myself. A long time ago. I look back into the ocean. I still see you, Leo, but you’re fainter, or farther out. Or maybe it’s just too dark. I realize I’m going to have to save myself.
The woman paces, looking at the place in the ocean where we saw you, then at the rest of us. She hugs herself, and keeps checking her pockets like she thinks she’ll find a pill somewhere that’ll make all of this okay. Nobody talks. The rest of us watch her for a while.
“Why don’t you sit?” I finally say.
Eventually, she melts into the sand on the other side of the teenager, and wraps her arms around her knees.
We all four watch the waves lap across the sand for a while.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, after what feels like hours of silence, still looking at you, or where I guess she saw you before. “It would have been easier…for you,” she says, her eyes flitting in my direction, “after Leo died, if I’d tried to live my own life more when he was alive. I smothered him, I think.” She glances at me. “I lost myself.”
I nod. I’m embarrassed because she’s right. The rest of us know it. I’d held on to you so tightly, Leo, all my life. When you died first, I didn’t even know how to take care of myself. I made things harder for the kids.
“I drank too much,” she adds, softly, like she hopes we won’t hear her.
“I’m sorry too,” the teenage girl says to the little girl.
The little girl looks up at her.
One lone tear wanders down the teenager’s cheek. “I wanted so badly to grow up. I did it too fast,” she says. “You know? I did dumb stuff.”
We all lean in. It’s so dark I can’t see anybody’s face too well. I wrap my arm around her; the little girl holds her hand.
“You weren’t dumb,” the woman says. “Just scared.”
“If I’d had better grades in high school,” the teen says, “I could’ve gone to college.” She buries her face between her knees and cries. The night is so quiet—there’s nobody else on the beach, or road with cars on it, or some faraway strain of radio. All we hear is the teen’s soft weeping. We hold her. “I didn’t do anything important,” she whispers.
“Sure you did,” the little girl says.
“I just got pregnant,” the teen says, her head still buried. “And I was too young to even be a good mom.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not true.” I remember when Michael and Johnny were little, and how much energy I had, and how I loved to play with them. We had Halloweens, Christmas mornings, story time. We had rainy afternoons when we made up plays and laughed. I was there. For everything. “You were a great mom,” I say.
She looks up.
“How?”
“Because you didn’t miss it,” I say. And saying the words, I know it’s true. Flawed, impatient sometimes, too young to always know what I was doing, I ran that race. I loved my kids. I did the work. And they both grew up to be wonderful men.
The woman stands. “But then I turned into an alcoholic,” she says. “That was the end of everything. I mean, everything good.”
“And you quit drinking, Janie,” the teen says, standing too.
The woman looks at the teen. She studies her. “Eventually,” she says.
“I’m sorry, too,” the little girl says. “I was bad and made Daddy go away.” She buries her face and tucks herself up like the teen had, like a tired, old turtle.
“No,” we all say at once.
“No, Janie,” I say. I lean in and cup her face in mine like she did before. She looks up at me like I’m actually wise enough to have words she’s ready to hear.
“Not your fault,” I say. I say the words slowly, praying seven-year-old me hears across the chasm of time. I remember the night Dad walked out. I remember believing I made him go. I believed it for years. Even when I met Leo I couldn’t release that thorn burrowed deep inside, that lie that promised me Leo would walk away too, someday, when I least expected it, because nothing good lasts.
“Dad left us because of Dad,” I say, reaching out to her and pulling her on to my lap. “Not because of Mom. And not because of you.”
More time passes. Little Janie lays her head on my chest like Michael and Johnny used to. The woman and the teen sit beside us once again. I know it’s my turn to ask forgiveness. I’m cold, even with Leo’s sweater warming my old bones, even with little Janie in my lap. And worn out.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to my companions, and take a shallow breath. “I’m sorry I died. I let go.”
Little Janie wraps her arms around me.
“You held on for a long time,” she says. “You were brave.”
The others nod.
“And tired,” the woman says.
The teen tucks a loose gray curl behind my ear and points into the water. I see you, faintly, far away.
“Leo’s been waiting to dance with you, Janie,” the teen says, “for two long years.”
The woman helps me to my feet. The little girl, her head full of corkscrew curls, clutches, first my hand, and then the woman’s so the two of us can swing her back and forth while she laughs and squeals with delight.
We four walk together, hand in hand in hand in hand, to the water’s edge. I watch the water cover my toes, and carefully wade deeper. The wall is gone. I’m wearing my favorite red pants and my husband’s brown sweater, yellow curls turned gray. I glance back. The teenager has hoisted the little girl on her back, piggy back style. The woman stands a little apart, clutching her hands, like she’s praying. For the first time in a long time all I feel for them is love. And clarity.
I don’t see Leo. Or God. Or pearly gates. Just ocean. But when the four of us were busy exposing our scars, God sent me a full moon, and it’s lighting a path across the waves. I know what to do, all by myself.
I swim.
I swim all the way home.
End
Ch-ch-ch-changes
I’m with my dad at the Dove House, a hospice in Westminster. Last week, Wed, 8/24, he was eating pizza with his grandchildren. Today – nine days later – we’re here. I drove him home last Wednesday. All was well. I’m trying to think about what we talked about when we walked in his house, what I said – maybe something like, “See you Saturday, dad” or “I love you” or “Do you have anything you need from the store?”
Anyway, I didn’t call Thursday. I do, usually, call every day. I try to. I want to. Thursday I was at work from morning ’til 9 p.m. It was Meet the Teacher at my new school, FSK. And I never called. I called Friday. Jack wanted me to make sure my dad knew that Jack’s aunt, Eileen, was picking him up at 3:00 on Saturday to come to our house. We were going to have a combination send-off dinner/ sweet 16 dinner for Hannah and Sean. Hannah’s semester abroad is upon us, and Sean’s bday was 8/31. So Friday I called. I called a lot. He never picked up. I called his cell. I called his house phone. I left messages. I was irritated because he does that to me – and Jim too- he doesn’t answer the darned phone. Truth be told here- I wasn’t actually worried. I have been in the past. I have worried when he didn’t answer the phone. One time, I called his neighbor and they walked across the street and knocked on his door to make sure my dad was okay. He promptly called me and gave me an earful. “Don’t do that again,” he said. “Answer the phone then, dad,” said I. Other times, Jack and I have driven the forty minutes to check. He’s always been okay.
So Friday he didn’t answer the phone. Early Saturday, I woke up and found Jack in the kitchen already madly cleaning for the family shindig. I called my dad. He didn’t answer. “You should go over, hon. Do you want me to go over?” asked my beloved husband. I took Luke with me. I felt a little scared that maybe my dad had fallen down. Luke is strong. He’s helped pick up Pop pop before.
While we drove over, we talked about what we’d do after we checked on Pop pop, what time we’d get home, life in general.
His front door was locked. He didn’t answer it. Luke walked around back and I kept knocking on the front door. Then I followed Luke. The back door was ajar. My dad wasn’t sitting in his chair.
My dad must have fallen down in the tub. We’ll never know why. I guess we’ll never know when. The when bothers me the most. Because if he fell Wednesday night, which is possible, he lay there fifty plus hours. I can’t stand thinking about that. So he was in the tub, stuck, out of it. We called 911.
Imagine a raft floating on the water. It’s like somebody loosed the raft’s rope from the dock post. Saturday. Somebody let the rope go on Saturday. And now it’s Friday. And the raft has wandered way way way out into the middle of the sea.
My dad just hasn’t awakened. The doctors at the hospital told us they’d tried every conceivable test, angle, ailment – everything came up negative. All they know, after four days of tests, is that he didn’t suffer a stroke, or bleeding on the brain, and he doesn’t have meningitis. But the trauma did him in, and he is dying.
A little while ago, we were talking about going to visit my mom’s grave in October. So he’ll be with his beloved bride after all – before October I’m sure.
I have a lot of thoughts about it all, as I’m sure does everyone who has walked this particular road. I’m sad and stunned and guilty, and I’m glad for him that his season of bereavement is over – that he can finally board the train and escort his beautiful Irish bride onto the heavenly dance floor. Last night, driving to the airport for her semester abroad, my sweet pea, Hannah, gifted me with the interview she recorded with my dad last summer. I include it here if you’d like to listen. It’s pure joy to hear.
So, I think – what about me? Thinking about navigating life without a mom or dad makes me feel like I just landed on a planet that lacks gravity. And in this scary place, nothing is tethered. Everything keeps floating away. It’s like the astronauts in the rocket ships with their tang floating everywhere.
I like FSK. The folks are nice, the kids are kids – which is the gold in this sea of change – But everything is unfamiliar. Everything keeps floating. Hannah just arrived in Toulouse. I’m so excited for her. Truly thrilled for this journey. But she’s my bestie girlfriend. So my heart sort of floats.
So back to my title – “Changes”. Might I learn to freefall without fear.
https://storycorps.me/interviews/john-rooney/
killing
What do others think this morning? I mean, what is happening to us?
I participated in a debate a month or so ago about police violence. My team’s point was: 1. Police aren’t taking advantage of the whole working your way toward more lethal responses – like…words first…pepper spray…tazer…shooting an extremity, 2. Maybe the kind of person aspiring to the job of police person isn’t what we want, 3. Does there exist a “good ‘ol boy” mentality that makes people think they are actually above the law? and of course, 4. Is it really true that D.W.B. (driving while black) is real? I think about Sandra Bland a lot. That’s the lady who got pulled over when she was on her way to her brand-new job BECAUSE she didn’t use her directional. I remember, in the first articles printed, that there was a detail about her PULLING into another lane specifically because the policeman behind her was driving too close…like he WANTED to agitate her. And I watched the dash cam of their interaction too many times for sanity.
So, is that what’s happening? Are people killing each other because too many police officers are in jobs they shouldn’t be in? Or is our blood lust as human beings so insatiable we can’t help ourselves?
Another Metaphor Regarding Loss
Who’s been to Cascade Lake in Hampstead, Maryland? There’s a killer high dive there. When I climb the ladder – or, “climbed” since it’s been a while…but anyway – I spend most of my energy side-coaching myself to keep climbing. Because it’s A HIGH HIGH DIVE. I aim to tune out any words of negativity that might make me stop in my tracks, turn around, and fight my way past all the people in line behind me until I’m back on solid ground. I JUST KEEP CLIMBING and then, when it’s my turn at last and I feel nauseous because I’m so insanely high in the air, I put one foot in front of the other, and jump. I jump like I’m okay, like I’m not terrified. I pretend all is terrific up here because probs my three kids are watching, and I don’t want to scare them, and I feel like if I pretend long enough that this act of buffoonery is fun, I’ll make it so.
So I jump. The fall is two things. First, it’s unfathomably long. It’s long because the whole time I’m falling, I’m getting ready for the lake below me to feel like concrete when I hit it. So my overstimulated brain conjures images of a rock wall, or a sheet of glass – some texture that won’t embrace me. And I fall, obsessing, utterly shocked. But it’s a blink of an eye too. I mean, I just spent at least fifteen minutes climbing the line to the top. And the jump lasts five seconds.
Here’s what happens when I hit the water. I go under. Deep. Then, instead of taking a moment to process what just happened, I spend ALL the energy I have left madly swimming to the surface.
Finally, I breathe air again. And I have to hustle out of the way so nobody falls on top of me.
So, today I got two emails. The first told me my key card had been invalidated, and would no longer work should I think about swiping my way back into NCHS. The second, moments later, told me my key card had been validated, and I could now access FSK’s doors.
And for some reason, these two messages made me think about my year, and how I climbed the ladder all year, madly concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, and acting like everything was going to be okay. And smiling, even. Yeah, smiling. And then I leapt off the diving board. I waited, largely anyway, ’til the kids left. It seemed crass and wrong to teach in a packed-up classroom. I just couldn’t do it. So, anyway, I jumped. And the hours between that heart wrenching moment when we waved goodbye to the last bus, and Friday when I walked out and sat by Stevie Beall’s waterfall- the time in between was forever, and it was a single breath too. It was both, just like leaping off a high dive. It was forever because every single darned thing I did killed me because I knew, I finally knew, I was doing it for the last time. And it was a heartbeat. Because how can packing up thirty-four years in a day be anything else?
Once I got in my car and drove home, all I could think about was swimming toward the light before I ran out of air.
And now? Well, I guess I hustled out of the way. But still, despite all my brilliant maneuvers to avoid harm, yeah, lots of things have fallen on top of me. Like my deactivated key card, and my blissful faith that was would forever be.
Who We Are , Who We Were
Four years ago Jack, Hannah, and I drove to Long Island to cheer on Hannah’s runner friend, who was running in the Foot Locker race, held at Sunken Meadow. We made a pit stop at 2864 Eaton R…
Source: Who We Are , Who We Were
Who We Are , Who We Were
Four years ago Jack, Hannah, and I drove to Long Island to cheer on Hannah’s runner friend, who was running in the Foot Locker race, held at Sunken Meadow.
We made a pit stop at 2864 Eaton Road West. And another at Jones Beach. I wanted to show them my past. I wonder how many of us have tried to do that -to grab the hands of our present, and carry them to our past, to try to get the two of them to do a jig. I worried it would make me sad. I thought seeing the house I grew up in would make me yearn to walk inside, that seeing strangers inside those windows would make me very, very sad. I feared going to the beach would be a bad thing too – that Jack and Hannah wouldn’t like Jones Beach, that their response to it would somehow diminish my memories.
But it wasn’t like that at all. First, my house didn’t look anything like my house. The ivy I grew up with was gone, all the trees I remembered were gone, the white stucco was gone, the black shutters were gone. Even the fence was different. It simply wasn’t mine. HAD it looked the same, now THAT would have been awful. But life isn’t like that. Nothing stays the same. And “home” is all about who lives someplace. “Home” for me had traveled to Maryland, and two of my pieces of “home” were standing beside me as I gazed at the facade of a house that had once upon a time been mine.
And then, we went to the beach.And that was pure joy. It was November, and cold, and pretty desolate – just the way I LOVE it.The white sand felt soft under my toes like velvet, just like I remembered it, and dipping my feet in the November ocean felt numbingly freezing, just like always. I took Jack and Hannah to see the places I’d work – I showed them the boardwalk – which still smelled terrific – that I had painted when I was nineteen. I showed them the pitch-n-putt, which looked like it had been closed for a while. The hut still stood, though, and I peeked inside, and could see a few golf clubs- not the dozens I remembered, but enough to make it real. I had a terrific time that day. Nothing about it made me sad or wishful – I just felt glad to get to touch my cherished places- grains of sand, the hard wood of the boardwalk railings.
As is always the case these days, what I’m really talking about is how I’m coming to terms with saying goodbye to my school. So, here’s this. Like the house I grew up in, if my school gets turned into an office complex, or a recreation center, or if it’s razed completely and made over as a warehouse, it won’t be home anymore – it’ll be some other enclosure that belongs to somebody else. And what it was for the thousands upon thousands of us who lived there will live inside our memory. But there will always be that grain of sand, that hard wood smell of boardwalk railing, that spot behind the bleachers where the sunset is breathtaking. And I believe I’ll always be glad to have a sit for a bit.
Currently, I’m hoping Stevie’s waterfall stays.If I could sit on the bench and watch the water wander around the rocks, I’d be home.
Peeking into yesterday.
excerpt from “Paw prints under the Asphalt”
I’m working on a new book. I’m pretty sure my chapter about Saint G will be last.Here’s what I’ve got so far. If anyone wants to comment, or add memories I’ve forgotten, or details that are important, PLEASE let me know:
Chapter Last, “Saint Genesius”
I earned my undergraduate degree from Mount Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic college in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Upon graduating, not ready for the grown-up world, I furthered my educational studies at the Catholic University of America (I’m feeling very Catholic right now) with an M.F.A. in Directing. That’s when I actually had to find a job. I worked at Olney Theatre the summer after I graduated. I did some box office work, a lot of set building, painting, lightbulb changing. I was a dresser, follow-spot operator. I got to play a maid in The Hollow. That was a thrill because I acted with professional equity actors, primarily from NY. One night a man in the audience had a heart attack, and his wife cried out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Her plea was followed by a moment of stunned silence. Then my fellow actor, playing one of the mysterious characters on stage, and formerly an R.N., yelled “I’m a nurse!” She leapt off the stage and cared for the man until an ambulance arrived and he was escorted out on a gurney. Then she returned to the stage. We closed the curtain, and took a collective deep breath. And then, it was ON WITH THE SHOW. Don’t even try to guess how many drama classes I’ve told THAT story.
Anyway, when I arrived at North Carroll, I carried with me traditions from my alma maters. One was the “Tootsies”, an evening of awards at the end of the school year. At Mount Saint Mary’s, when somebody won a Tootsie, we pelted said lucky recipient with tootsie rolls. Yes, if you’re wondering, of course that hurt. So I instituted the Tootsie Awards at North Carroll. The second tradition was joining hands before a show, praying together, and then one of us saying, “Saint Genesius!”and EVERYBODY yelling, “PRAY FOR US!” I brought that to North Carroll too.
And from 1982 until the fall of 1986, we enjoyed our ritual for what it was. And then, something weird happened. Saint Genesius wrote to us.
I am 99% sure I got my first letter in November of 1986, when we were performing The Crucible. In the early years, Saint G was very straight-forward. On opening night, someone either delivered the letter directly into my hands, or he left it someplace very obvious – like smack in the middle of my podium, or taped to my classroom door. There was always a letter for me, and a poem for the cast. The poem always included tidbits, funny plays on words that referred to our rehearsals, things someone wouldn’t know unless they were there. Weird. He always ended by telling us he’d be watching us from his front row in heaven. So, so weird. But true. Sometime in the eighties I remember walking to my car to go home after the final dress rehearsal, and it was pouring, and the letter was sitting on my windshield, covered in plastic –so as not to get wet.
He’s always been a ninja. One time, again – in the late eighties or early nineties – an office aide delivered the letter to my room. I was in the middle of teaching something, and when I recognized what I was receiving – I mean as the envelope was carelessly being placed in my hands, its telltale markings alerting that this was a letter from HIM, I abandoned my class and sprinted to the main office. I demanded of Barb Yingling – main office secretary and captain of the ship extraordinare – the identity of the person who had delivered the letter. She looked up at me, face seemingly as innocent as those little baby angels barreling around at Christmas pageants, and said, “I have no idea. It’s been so busy here.”
“What?” I responded, incensed. The office was empty.
“Really, Roberta. Someone dropped it on my desk, and I just couldn’t tell you who it was.”
Once, in the mid-nineties, after I’d moved to Westminster, but before I got married, he actually taped it – again, on a very rainy final dress rehearsal night- to the front door of my apartment on Main Street. Maybe, had this not been a letter from Saint Genesius, who never failed to write something that made me cry, I would’ve been scared and felt like I was being stalked. But…I just felt…deeply loved.
Through the nineties, lots of people tried to help me figure out this mystery. One of my principals, Greg Eckles, a science guy, suggested we set up a hidden camera in my classroom, because at that point Saint Genesius was still generally delivering it there. But, somewhere along the line of life, I just stopped needing to know. I can’t pinpoint when.
In this twenty-first century, he’s gotten incredibly theatrical, and more than a little impish. In the first decade of the two thousands, he loved HIDING the letter. Oh yes. He loved doing that. Then, I’d have to puzzle out a likely location. The students absolutely got in on the search. It had gotten, by now, that when a cast or crew member in a North Carroll woke up on opening night, his first thought wasn’t, “Tonight’s the show!” It was, “Today we’ll get the letter!” And man, some years were STRESSFUL. There were actually opening nights when we were arriving for five p.m. makeup call, having not yet located the letter. And then, there it would be. Hidden in Titania’s hammock before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the coffin before The Fall of the House of Usher, on the fire escape before West Side Story. I always worried, during these last-minute-rescue nights, that he was done.
This second decade of the twenty-first century, he got crazy theatrical. On the morning of opening night of Les Miserables, I discovered a gorgeous red flag, handmade out of the coolest of cool tree branches and silky red fabric, leaning against my classroom door – with rope wrapped around it. I didn’t touch it all day; I wanted to unfurl it in the company of the kids. In my mind, I imagined he’d placed the letter inside it somewhere. In my “head movie” it was going to fall to the floor when I untied the rope, and released the red fabric. But nothing fell. I started to say, “Guys, there’s let…” when I was cut off by thunderous, multiple voices.
“IT’S ON THE FLAG!” And so it was. The most beautiful poem had been hand-written onto the red fabric itself. The end of the poem was cryptic and confusing.
“You’ve all worked long and hard to become these characters, now you’ll see, at this moment, ‘(you) know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing (you’d) want to be.’”
I always read the poem out loud to everyone, and when I got to the end of the poem on the flag, I didn’t understand what it meant. But he’d put quotes around, “(you) know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing (you’d) want to be.” So I understood he was quoting someone. But I didn’t get it. Anyway, we said a prayer, I said “Break a leg”, alerted them they had five or so minutes ‘til curtain, and walked into the auditorium. Moments later, Sara McConnell, who was playing Cosette so didn’t need to be dressed yet (Cosette has a LONG wait), RAN up the aisle, smart phone in tow.
“It’s from Catcher in the Rye,” she said, breathless and a little stunned.
Tingles ran madly up and down my spine, and my ears filled with tears. Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book, you see. And, I guess, my buddy Saint G knew that.
For Jekyll and Hyde, I arrived outside my classroom to be greeted by masking tape in the form of a dead body outside my room, a vial filled with red liquid, and a glass vase filled with green fabric spewing out. Can you guess where he wrote the poem? ON THE FABRIC.
For Star Wars, he created a miniature version of the Millennium Falcon out of balloons, and hung it from a fly bar hanging over the stage. For Oliver!, the second time we did it, he actually took me on a scavenger hunt. He left clues all over the school, and finally, at the last stop, the letter waited.
But this spring’s letter had to be the best. I’ve been saying, loudly, for a while now that: #1 I don’t want to have to find it. Worrying scares me. I want him to put it someplace obvious, and #2 For once, I want to be the one to find it. It’s been YEARS since I’ve gotten my hands on it first. I mean YEARS.
So, travel with me now, gentle and good reader. Go back in time with me to May of 2016, a Friday, the day of North Carroll High School’s last opening night. I got out of the car, keenly, painfully aware with every step that I was walking into my last opening night. I walked inside the building. Harold Leese, our head custodian who has been greeting staff and students at the door since his tenure began, said “Hey”. I drive that man nuts, by the way, but that’s another story.
A few beloved students were waiting for me. Because yes, they’d seen something, but weren’t touching it, because I’d so pitifully begged to be first. Together, we walked inside the auditorium. Our final spring musical was Flight of the Lawnchair Man. So yes, of course it does seem fitting that Saint G would use balloons. Flight of the Lawn chair Man, carefully chosen because I didn’t want our last show to belong to any other time or place, is about Jerry Gorman, a guy who attaches his lawn chair to four hundred helium balloons, and flies into the ozone. And there’s a scene early in the show, a hilarious scene, when Jerry watches the old French movie, The Red Balloon. That movie plants a seed in his sorrowfully delusional head that he can take to the skies via balloons as well.
So, we walked into the auditorium. Like stair steps to the auditorium ceiling, floated a dozen or so red balloons. They were attached to something flat sitting on the stage. We walked closer. He’d scrawled on the envelope, “From Saint Geenus.” The kids screamed a little when we saw that. The night before, at our final dress prayer, Faith Green, new to theatre had said “Saint Geenus” instead of “Genesius”. Thirty or so voices at once corrected her.
“He was here,” someone said.
I picked up the envelope, attached as it was to twelve balloons. On the back, he’d written another message. “Happy 34,” it said. I just stood there, letting it sink in. Here’s one more tidbit, reader, that will help you appreciate the value that message held. The main character, Jerry Gorman, is thirty-four years old. One of the funny opening scenes is his thirty-fourth birthday celebration, attended by Jerry, his mother, and his girlfriend Gracie. Gracie and his mom sing, “Happy 34” to Jerry.
And guess what? This year marked my thirty-fourth year teaching. Ask me if I’d ever made a connection between Jerry’s years of life, and mine at NCHS. Answer: NO…until that moment. Thanks Saint G, I thought to myself.
In his last love letter, he admitted it might be over. Probs, it’s over. In all the years I’ve been getting letters from Saint Genesius, he’s never written to me elsewhere. And I have directed elsewhere. I’ve directed at a local college, for other high schools, with community theatre. He never found me someplace else. I think he lives at NCHS. I think the kids, or at least some of them, hope he’ll travel with them to their new school. Maybe he will. But that voice that lives deep within whispers to me, Probs not. And if I really have received my last letter, it’s okay because I know… what a lucky, lucky drama damsel am I.
robertagore 