The Flight or the Seed

The Flight or the Seed

By Jennifer Zaslow


My great grandmother fled through Russia following the lines she kept
on a map she drew in her palm
and when sweat and salt and heavy things
washed them away
she followed the lifeline that stretched
from the base of her wrist
to between the high peaks of her index finger and thumb
she showed her brother, my great Uncle Mendel
pointing to her palm
here’s the river she said that means we’re getting closer
and he said but see how long our journey is?

she brought three things
the first was Mendel
who I imagine like the Byzantine Christ child
ancient face, baby’s body
the second was the samovar
that my mother fought and clawed for when we divided up the will
and the third was a child inside her
who would grow to be my grandfather

through the walls of his womb, my grandfather heard the musical drawlings of a Southern Russian
Iosif Dzhugashvili, who had changed his name to Stalin
because he hated his accent
and wanted it to sound like steel breaking bodies
in iron fists

how could I stay here she asked herself
aware of her organic insides, her fleshy body that she loved so much
she could not stay for a man of metal and promises
and whispering the Tefilat Haderech, the Traveler’s Prayer
she and Mendel flew with bodies that grew wings

when she came to Brooklyn, they called her Goldie
and she gave birth to a son who had a son who had a son
as though they’d always existed inside each other
like a Russian doll
and had traveled all that way just for the joy of existing
a few years after she had forgotten how to speak
and a few days before I was born
she held her lined hand
to my mothers belly
to show me the way out

Getting In Touch with Mother

Getting in Touch with Mother
by
Jan Epton Seale



With no snappy top, spigot, or pump,
her Jergens bottle, wide-mouthed, glass-hipped,
might be too generous at her tip and shake,
give her far more lotion than she
could possibly be beautiful in,
even counting neck and elbows.
She’d bid me, stuck in the doorway,
”Come. Give me your hands.”

I’d spring forward, lay palms to hers,
thrilled at this invitation to high fives.
Then she’d coat me with her excess,
first slathering on the glamour milk,
now feeling of my hands like fine fabrics,
now massaging, squeezing,
me knowing to stay utterly limp,
and finally, trolling each finger
as my giggles rose no-holds-barred
from this daring grown-up wetness.
Our lovely handwrestling complete,
and fresh out of her emergency,
all almond-scented and smooth
I’d stand alone again.

Seeing And Believing

Seeing and Believing
by
Edwin Romond



The girls giggled
but the boys laughed right out loud
when Mrs. Stone raged crimson
holding my eighth grade project:
"The Map of New Jersey."
"Get up here, boy!"
and I had no choice
but to walk the gangplank to her desk
where my map choked in her fist.
"What’s this jazz? Huh?
The ocean is not green, Bub, it’s blue.
Ya’ get it? Blue, blue, blue, blue!"
punching my map with each word into my chest.
My classmates roared a chorus
of "Green ocean! Green ocean!"
their voices rising in waves of laughter
as I carried the wrinkled and ripped map
back to my seat through their sneers.
Soon, all their maps perimetered the room
leaving me adrift in the memory of a Sunday
when, in the October air,
my father and I walked over seashells
and I, only nine,
remarked that the ocean looked green.
My father, peering out from beneath his cap,
said, "Yes, it does" and his fingers swam
through my hair.

Getting It Right

Getting It Right


What could it hurt to rewrite my adolescence--
for instance, say this time I kiss Anna after the Junior Prom.

as our limo drives through a night so dark I see only her lips.
The Globe can offer a correction: due to an editorial error

my football-crazed dog, Rambo, never collided with the fender
of that cruising Toyota. At fifteen, family eating pasta, let's say my father

no longer informs us he has throat cancer, there's no surgery
that steals his voice. This time Anna can arrive at my sixteenth birthday party

in a swimsuit. It wouldn't change the course of known events
for me to say we retired to the bedroom where I touched parts

of Anna's body which called to me like distant church bells.
And this time no one moves out: my brother still lives

in the basement, spinning a record twenty years long, an Eagles poster
"Live at the Gardens" nailed above his bed. My sister spends eternity

in the bathroom perfecting the art of mascara,
morning after morning her blond lashes bring a May sunrise

into our kitchen. Let Rambo score a touchdown running
a ten-yard fade. Let my father's voice call me to dinner.

The Herald can publish a new story: my parents purchase
that '89 mini-van, its tank big enough to hold 30 years of gasoline--

hands on the wheel, everyone buckled, my father leads us in song,
"The Long Road Home," and Anna too sits in the back,

her voice joining ours as she reaches for me,
her red bikini brighter than any brake light
~ Steven Coughlin

Remembering

REMEMBERING

By William Stafford

When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the
stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.

The Past is Still Here

The Past Is Still There
By Deborah Garrison

I've forgotten so much.
What it felt like back then,
what we said to each other.

But sometimes when I'm standing
at the kitchen counter after dinner
and I look out the window at the dark

thinking of nothing,
something swims up.
Tonight this:

your laughing into my mouth
as you were trying
to kiss me.

The Old Dairy Diner

I walked into the flower shop in my hometown this week and stopped just inside the entry. For a moment, time flashed back 30 years. In my mind's eye, I saw the place when it had housed the old Dairy diner. I saw the lunch counter before me, lined with familiar faces that I had watched eat lunch and dinner hundreds of times.
During my childhood, my grandmother worked late in her home beauty shop each Thursday, so for several years,my grandpa and I had a standing dinner date once a week. We always went to The Dairy. We sat at the far right edge of the counter that ran the length of half the building and along the far wall. It was a comforting routine to take our same place along that line of stools. The seat I always wanted has a close view of the many photographs of the young waitresses that had worked there over the years. Their pictures lined an entire wall and examining them kept me entertained until my standing order of plain cheeseburger and fries would arrive. They were all very pretty girls with elaborate hair . They seemed exotic and glamorous to a little girl in a dowdy bowl cut. I remember thinking that it was very kind of the Millers, who owned the Diary, to care about their waitresses enough to display their pictures.
My grandpa was a frequent customer and everyone knew him. He often talked his construction business with other men and many a house renovation or addition was planned at that counter. My job was to sit quietly and listen. Any nonsense like running around, whining or being obnoxious and demanding while out to dinner-such prevalent behavior today, was pleasantly absent from most restaurants in my childhood. It would have never occurred to me to misbehave, first because I enjoyed being there, and I certainly would not have wanted to risk my grandfather's displeasure or jeopardize future dinners together. An added behavior shaping incentive were the many customers who were also weekly visitors to my grandmother's beauty shop (back when ladies had time to get their hair fixed once a week). They would have informed my grandmother if I had misbehaved.
I passed the extra time after finishing my favorite dinner by covertly watching other diners, eavesdropping on conversations and surreptitiously spinning on my stool. If I drank too much pop at The Dairy, I might have to brave the long trip to the upstairs bathroom. I dreaded using the bathroom because I had to make my way up a long flight of stairs to an upper storage area full of boxes and old machinery that always seemed gloomy and dark. The little bathroom was all the way in the back; a tiny light glowed from the cracked bathroom door on the other side of the long room. I was convinced it was haunted up there and my over-active imagination made my heart race with visions of unseen eyes that seemed to be watching me walk through the gloom. The trip back down was a heart pounding, feet- flying sprint back to the warmth and safety of the lunch counter and my grandfather.
If I ate all of my cheeseburger ( never an issue), I might be offered a piece of lemon, chocolate, or coconut pie made by Ms. Peck while my grandpa finished talking contracting, or hunting, or fishing to a wide, jovial audience. Each Thursday night was an event.
After coming out of my reverie,I finished up my shopping and as I paid my bill, I noticed they have on display an old ice cream container from The Dairy. It was so nice to still be able to walk through one of the warm places in my memory.

Recipe Box

I opened my grandmother's recipe box this week. I was trying to get a head start for Thanksgiving and wanted to make and freeze her poppyseed cake. Along with Texas cake and carrot cake and pumpkin pies,her poppyseed cake made an anticipated appearance each year. While thumbing through the thick collection of recipe cards , I found myself pausing to remember many friends and beauty shop ladies who shared recipes with one another on a weekly basis. Many familiar names topped the carefully written recipes. “From the Kitchen of Dorcas Herren” announced the recipes belonging to my piano teacher, Mrs. Herren. She arrived at my grandmother's beauty shop every Saturday morning before dawn to have her hair done for over 20 years.
As I read her recipe for peanut butter bars, and Amish friendship bread I remembered how competently her hands flew across the keyboard and how she never once was grumpy at my obvious lack of practice. I read so many names and could see the familiar faces, now gone.
I read my great-grandmother's recipe for lye soap and wondered how she managed a chore involving dangerous, combustible chemistry and simultaneously keep watch of her 17 children. I wish I would have thought to ask her how she managed.
I found favorite foods of my grandfather- like the mock strawberries my grandmother would make at Christmas. They were made with condensed milk, sweetened coconut, and strawberry Jello and looked and smelled like real strawberries. Not caring for coconut, I never thought they tasted as good as they looked- but it was the comfortingly familiar process of making them that announced that Christmas was coming. I found the Swedish Meatball recipe and recalled how much Papa loved them and how my grandmother had made the tiny, labor intensive meatballs by the hundreds for my parents' wedding reception.
I found an old photo of my brother, Nick, tucked between two recipes. Nick is wearing a chef's hat and rolling out pizza dough. I remembered that day and taking that picture. It was a good, happy day- one of thousands spent together. I am comforted that he knew how much he was loved.
I finally found the poppyseed recipe, but was momentarily daunted to find that it only listed the ingredients- not directions how to put them together. My grandmother must have assumed that whomever made the cake would have the experience needed to put it together. I should have payed attention. I forged ahead, overly confident in my abilities to remember how the batter should taste.
The resulting mixture looked familiar and as the cake baked, I was hopeful . During the last 5 minutes, however, it collapsed completely. I must have botched critical steps. Luckily, my grandmother is still with us, I have time to ask her, time to learn.
The recipe box is a tiny time portal. It can connect me with faces and events that once were. It contains glimpses of a life lived well- with family and close friends. I can open the box and within seconds, am transported to Christmases and holidays spent with people I loved, whom I love still-but whose time with me was limited. We are never certain how long we will remain together for grief and loss visits us all. Although I sometimes ache for those who have passed, I am grateful for having the chance to know and love them. I think of the wise words a friend once told me about loss: “ The holes in our lives created by those who leave us are enormous and will never truly go away, but somehow, we reassemble ourselves around it.”
I hold the recipe box in my hands- it feels warm and alive with the voices and faces it contains.
A mini Pandora's box of love and memory. For this, I am truly thankful.

Halloween Memory

Excerpt from "I Want to Say" by Natalie Goldberg

I Want to Say Before I'm lost to time and the midwest

I want to say I was here

I loved the half light all winter

I want you to know before I leave that I liked the towns living along the back of the Mississippi

I loved the large heron filling the sky

the slender white egret at the edge of the shore

I came to love my life here

fell in love with the color grey

the unending turn of seasons

Each day when I drive my my sons to basketball practice, I pass the house where I grew up. Each of us has a house that we still think about and which we remember as truly home. For me, it is the house with the round window.
That old house absorbed the shouts and murmurs of my adolescence, saw the birth of my little sister,and was the scene of my wedding;vows said before the fireplace. The house sheltered me and seemed to mourn in tandem, while I grieved my brother within its walls. Two of my sons learned to walk on the old hardwood floors. I knew its every creak , identified while I cautiously tried to sneak in and out long past my curfew. I knew its harmless, but clearly audible ghosts, who inspired wonder and a little fear.
All of our family traditions evolved inside those walls and I think of those experiences as I watch the leaves change and feel the evocative emotions the change of seasons elicits. Many Halloweens were spent there. Each October. My mother would pain the huge round window with orange tempera. A giant, smiling jack-o-lantern would form under her brushes and be perfectly back lit by the warmth of our home. Families began their own tradition of driving by each year to see the giant pumpkin that, in the darkness, appeared to hover in midair.
This simple act of painting a window took time and effort, and I recall that the cleanup was often a nuisance, but it was well worth the trouble. People still remark to me that they remember that yearly pumpkin and that it holds a fond place in their childhood memories.
I remember that there were other traditions we held each Halloween...we lit a fire in the fireplace, often for the first time that year, my mom made special treats that we only had at Halloween (that kept them special)- a caramel, walnut and cream cheese apple dip that was fantastic, and an enormous bowl of buttered popcorn to share with the many children who trick or treated our house. My mother took care and artfully arranged simple but delicious snacks to balance the overindulgence of sweets she knew we would take part in later. It wasn't really about the costumes- although ours were always creative.
I remember the year I was a white rabbit and my infant brother was a carrot. I have a fuzzy snapshot of the two of us- an 8 year old white bunny holding a vaguely annoyed looking baby carrot. We won first prize at the costume contest held on the square; I recall first prize was a silver dollar and our picture in the paper.
Halloween evening at our home often became an informal party with parents, teachers, children from the school and others dropping in and staying to eat, laugh, talk. The little dining room off the entry would be cozily crowded and the front room pressed into service. A tape of creepy music would add to the atmosphere.
What I remember most fondly was not the frantic accumulation of sugar and door to door traipsing down sidewalks whose cracks I could map from memory, but the quantity and quality of time that was afforded me. Time to enjoy a lighthearted evening with family and friends, time to gloat over and meticulously sort my loot, time to listen and remember. The evening seemed to last and last. There were no cell phone interruptions, television was ordered off and remained so all evening. When we were together, we were truly connecting. I had time to think and reflect and enjoy each moment. The only interruptions were the periodic, gentle tappings on the front door.
I hope my boys will remember with similar fondness the Halloweens we have spent together, as a family. Happy Halloween!

Carmel Apple Dip

Granny Smith Apples
Jar of good quality caramel sauce
Cream Cheese
Toasted Walnuts or Pecans
Spread softened cream cheese on serving plate, pour caramel sauce over cream cheese, top with toasted nuts, serve with apples.

Back To School

The summer is waning, the evenings feel cooler and this week I caught the first scent of fall in the air. Late August is an evocative time.

As a kid, August represented a return to school. I always celebrated July 4^th with mixed emotions, for each day after the 4^th brought me closer to the end of summer. Even the droning of the cicadas seemed to hum vacations imminent end. After dragging my heels and squeezing out every bit of fun summer had to offer, I finally accepted the inevitable end of my break. I even began to enjoy the thought of a fresh start. I would lay out my new school supplies and admire the box of 72 crayons (with built in sharpener). I imagined how this year would be different from all my other years of scholastic mediocrity and odd duck status. This year was as fresh and unblemished as my Periwinkle crayon.

In my mind I saw myself dazzling my peers with my new school clothes and imagined stunning my new teacher with my wit and intellect. I banished all the many past educational and social failures from my mind and resolved to make this year successful.

I agonized over which outfit to wear; I wanted the best first impression. On the first day of school, I created many equally ridiculous styles with my mousy hair (In 4^th grade, after the success of Bo Derek’s movie, 10- I tried cornrows. I was less successful. ), and once even briefly tested a new walk- shoulders uncomfortably back, head held high, one foot placed directly in front of the other- a look I admired having watched the Miss America pageant. Adopting this rifle straight and odd looking gait in school merely resulted in boys asking if over the summer I had sat on a steel rod.

I nursed other expectations lovingly over the last long summer days; I would be organized, I would shock everyone with my new found confidence, I would find a true kindred spirit for a friend. Sadly, my hopes often fizzled within the first week. Boys and girls still treated each other unkindly, I was still scattered, awkward socially and physically, and unfailingly messy. It wasn’t many weeks before I would suffer the routine shame of an exasperated teacher shaking the entire contents of my crammed and disorderly desk onto the floor. I can still hear the sound a shaken desk and crashing books make in a hushed classroom. I spent many recesses slowly sorting and organizing my desk; always among the detritus- 72 broken crayons with torn papers.

When I think of these memories I have to admire my unflagging hope. I truly believed, however briefly, in each new beginning. I also remember with piercing clarity, not the curriculum, but individual moments of kindness shown by my teachers; those instances glow in my recollections. I remember how good it felt when a teacher seemed to genuinely like you.

I recall suffering a couple of teachers who made no effort to hide the fact that they didn’t care for me and how disconsolate their indifference, (or as in 3^rd grade- obvious distaste) made me feel. It made for a long, unhappy year. In 5^th grade, however, I met Ms. Moore who startled me with her kindness. Once, although I was taller by at least a foot, she helped me put on my coat, tied my hood with affection and then delivered a hug that felt like a benediction. That small gesture, and the many more she showed throughout that year renewed my faith in myself as likable.

Perhaps in these times of state mandated teaching to tests, rigidity and resistance in allowing creative teachers to be creative and an adopted mantra of “teach, don’t touch” holding sway, we sometimes forget how powerful simply connecting with a child can be. The 8 hours a child spends in school, nine months of each year, are central and formative to his life experience. In that time, in that place, young lives are being lived. I worry that important things are being lost in our resolve to “leave no child behind.” Teachers may be losing the time and the flexibility to teach at reasonable speeds and styles that match the natural development of children. Teachers and children alike are under increasing pressure to perform. I wonder what is truly being left behind.