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Monday, May 25, 2009

When Lilacs Bloomed

The following is the opening of a work-in-progress, a coming of age novel about a young girl growing up in the 1950s and 60s.


It’s August 16, Meg’s birthday, and I’m up at daybreak, as I always am on this day. I take my coffee to the porch and watch the dawn creeping over the mountains, dappling the trees with light and licking up the night. The lilacs planted along the porch emit a sweet fragrance, and the memory of Meg’s laughter trills faraway like the tinkling of distant chimes. I sent her a card, as always, but this year it was returned with “address unknown” stamped on the envelope. She’d never responded anyway, never acknowledged that she’d even received the cards. I haven’t seen or heard from her since that long ago summer.

I walk to the edge of the porch and bury my face in the lilacs resting on the rail. When I think of that summer now, what I remember first is this same heady, pungent bouquet drifting from the lilac blossoms on that overgrown bush in Meg’s backyard. It was there we huddled—Gail, Meg, and me—in a shaded cavern formed by the pendulant branches. It was there, out of the summer sun but mostly out of sight of Meg’s mother’s suspicious, probing eyes, that we plotted and planned, inventing a scheme to free Meg from her mother’s possessive grasp and give her a way to join us in our summer adventures.

It was a scheme we would call on again and again that summer, whenever Meg needed an excuse to get out of the house, and it succeeded beyond all our expectations. We laughed and larked our way through June and July, but always kept our sights on August, when Gail’s family and mine planned to spend a week at the Grand Lake Resort cabins. Our anticipation was even greater than usual because this year, since our scheme was succeeding so well, we knew Meg would be able to tag along.

We were thirteen that summer—three gangly girls hoping to giggle away the surprising and unfamiliar awareness of our looks and teenage bodies with an endearing dopiness and a comical goofiness. Caught on the edge of girlish pranks and womanly concerns, we spent hours in front of the mirror styling hair-dos on each other that we copied from magazine pictures of our favorite stars.

We used my father’s stash of short golf pencils to practice holding cigarettes in a seductive way, blowing imaginary smoke rings into the air, pretending that an adoring male companion gazed with passion at our puckered lips as we shot come-hither looks through half-lidded eyes in his direction. We lathered our legs and shaved them, caressing their smooth, silky texture while trying to ignore that the procedures involved with turning ourselves into teenage temptresses could be annoying and tiresome.

Finally, overwhelmed by the irksome demands that beauty and grace required, we’d revert to the tomboys we had spent the last few hours trying to vanquish, scramble out the back door to our bikes and ride whooping down the alley looking for an adventure.

We met each morning in the alley behind Mrs. Gundy’s house where the piquant perfume of the sweet peas bulging over her backyard fence mixed with the rancid vapors of pet feces and rotting vegetables crammed into trashcans beside her garage. A graveled lane, just one car-width wide, overgrown with weeds and lined by an odd assortment of wire, wood, and wrought iron fences, the alley’s eclectic, hodge-podge nature fired our imaginations. On its dusty field, overlaid with the scent of grass cuttings and wet leaves, we had grown up fighting bloody battles behind trashcan barricades, scaling the peaks of garage roofs to plant flags or screech a Tarzan cry, and slaying monsters concealed in the fiery caves of bulky, concrete incinerators that belched a lingering smoky stench even on non-burn days.

School had been out just a week and, as we made our way down the alley, we were discussing what to wear to the “Welcome Summer” dance for teenagers at the Community Center on Friday night. Gail was munching on a piece of jelly toast and a dab of jelly nestled at the corner of her mouth. Gail was always munching on something. My grandmother, Momey, called her “pleasantly plump.” She was describing the purple skirt and lavender top she was going to wear, when Meg interrupted her.

“I can’t go,” Meg said. “My mother won’t let me. She says I’m too young to go to dances with boys and I’ll get a reputation.”

“A reputation for what?” I asked. “Mooning over Sonny Denault or Mike Lewis. Or talking with a parent chaperone when no one asks you to dance so you can pretend that you are having such a fascinating conversation that you couldn’t possibly tear yourself away from it, even if Sonny or Mike asked you to dance, because you’d much rather talk to Mrs. DeBrock about the new aquarium Debbie received for her birthday.

“You can joke about it if you want, but it’s not funny to me,” complained Meg. “Since my dad died, my mom is getting worse than she was before. She doesn’t want me to leave the house, doesn’t even want me to hang around with you guys. It’s like she doesn’t trust me. I don’t do anything bad. I just want to be with my friends, but she thinks I’m up to no good every time I want to leave the house.”

“But what about your brother, Billy?” I asked. “He’s two years younger than you and she doesn’t make him stay home all the time. Why can he go out and you can’t?”

“Well, Billy’s a boy and…” Meg paused a minute, then shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, you know, my mom says boys are independent and can take care of themselves. But, she says, girls have to be careful, particularly when they become teenagers. They can’t just run around loose with all sorts of people. She says girls are susceptible. People will talk about them.”

This was news to me—Anne-Charlotte Knight, better known as Charlie, for short. I had had a lot of mother warnings in my life—always put on clean underwear in the morning, don’t lean your elbows on the table, don’t pick your teeth or your nose, don’t use someone else’s comb—but I had never been warned that people might talk about me for hanging around with my friends.

“I don’t get it either,” said Gail. “Like what are girls susceptible to? My grandpa says he is susceptible to constipation. That’s why he eats dried prunes on his cereal, so he can poop. I don’t know what the prunes have to do with it, except they look like little dried turds, so maybe he eats them and then his body goes ‘Turd Alert Overload, Turd Alert Overload’ and his brain flashes a green light “Go” signal so he can poop.”

Meg and I laughed so hard. Gail can be so funny. She can imitate all sorts of voices and crazy sounds. As we walked down the alley, she kept repeating in a high, shrill squawk, “Turd Alert Overload, Turd Alert Overload.”

“I can ask my mom to call your mom,” I offered to Meg, when we quit laughing, “and talk to her about it so she knows that it’s okay.”

“No!” Meg shook her head. “That will just make it worse. She’ll get mad because I told someone. She doesn’t like us to talk about her or our family to other people. Maybe I can convince her. I’ll try again tonight.”

“Well, we’ll have to think of something to convince your mom to let you have some freedom,” I said. “You can’t miss all the fun this summer.”

And we did, later that afternoon, we did think of something. How were we to know then the disastrous results that would occur when our clever scheme finally unraveled with tragic results.

Copyright Susan Matthewson 2009

Monday, May 18, 2009

Cinnamon Toast

         Apart from chocolate, nothing says love quite like cinnamon.  The aroma alone warms the heart, and mothers in our family have known this for years.  My grandmother expressed her love with fragrant gooey cinnamon rolls.  My mother pampered us with flakey buttery cinnamon piecrust.  And me?  I was the proud Queen of Cinnamon Toast when my boys were growing up.

         School day breakfasts were a fast and easy cereal smorgasbord – assorted cereal boxes lined up on the kitchen counter for the boys to choose from.  Cheerios, Kix, Crispix and Rice Krispies were favorites, and the boys poured at will into big wooden salad bowls, depending on what they had a taste for that day.  They washed the cereal down with giant glasses of orange juice.  One kid liked lots of pulp – the other hated pulp.  I made sure to have both kinds on hand. 

The one constant was cinnamon toast served on small green melamine plates, and I was the only one who could make it right.  At least that’s the line they fed me.  There’s no big secret to it, I used to tell them, but they wouldn’t buy it.  They wanted Mom’s cinnamon toast, not just any cinnamon toast. 

 I believe I could actually mark their growth by my cinnamon toast production levels.  When they were small I could get by with a couple of slices each.  But as they grew, so did the stacks of cinnamon toast until the two green plates looked like they would buckle under the pressure of the toast towers they held.

It wasn’t there long, though.  Those boys could power through that toast like nobody’s business.  They’d pull their stools up to the kitchen counter, pour and slurp their cereal and milk, guzzle the O.J. and inhale the toast.  Then they were out the door and off to school.  In their wake were bowls puddled with leftover milk, empty juice glasses and green plates glistening with cinnamon sugar.  Popping a finger full of cinnamon sugar in my mouth, I’d clean up the kitchen with a sense of satisfaction that I’d properly carried out my motherly duties.

Sometime during high school the toast production reached a point of diminishing returns, however.  I discovered this after a few days of seeing toast left on the plates, not just crumbs and cinnamon sugar, but whole slices of toast.  I guess like all things, there is a cyclical nature to cinnamon toast consumption.

At first I took it personally.  Was I slipping as Queen of Cinnamon Toast? Had I lost my touch?  Maybe, like a mother who asks too many questions of her teenager, I’d gone overboard with my toasting, overestimated their capacity.  I cut back, relieved the green plates of their burden.  But I found it strange that as my boys grew into young men, they needed less cinnamon toast, not more.  Maybe, I realized sadly, they just didn’t need as much of Mom’s toast.  Or Mom, for that matter.

I still have the green plates, but I haven’t made cinnamon toast in years.  Once the boys were out of the house, the toasting stopped, and we all moved on.  Researching for a writing project, I asked them recently what they remembered about breakfast when they were growing up, expecting them to mention the pancakes or French toast or omelets we’d have on weekends. 

“Cinnamon toast on little green plates!” they both said.  “That was the best part of breakfast.”

“Do you ever make it, since you like it so much?” I asked.

 “No,” they said.  “That’s a Mom thing.  You’re the only one who can make good cinnamon toast.”

And I smiled, feeling like all that toasting had just paid a huge unexpected dividend.  My heart was warm with cinnamon love.

 


Copyright Liz Zuercher 2009

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Belated Happy Mother's Day!

by Susan Cameron

I spent almost two blissful weeks away from newspapers, TV news, and even -- gasp! -- the internet, so this Mother's Day offering (inspired by Heather, a fellow writing student) is a tad belated. Nevertheless...

TRUE LOVE

My breasts were once firm mountain peaks
but now they're two balloons with leaks.
My thighs were strong and hard as rock
but now they jiggle as I walk.
My stomach flat, once wafer-thin,
has rolls of fat where none had been.
My stretch-marked skin, once smooth and silky,
maps the way to Albuquerque.

'Til I had you, I used to preen
before my mirror. A beauty queen --
Superficial, shallow, vain.
My body's loss was my soul's gain.
In giving life, mine got its start.
I lost my shape and found my heart.
Back then I didn't have a clue.
I know what love is, thanks to you.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999 or so :-)

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Nancy's New Car


Nancy's new Nissan Cube--she didn't get the purple car, so she wore purple pants to show it off.

Friday, May 1, 2009

A Woman Scorned

The Insurance Man. He has filled my law firm’s, and my personal, insurance needs for the past 24 years, but I hadn’t seen him, face to face, for nine years.

Though he is upon first impression a typical, run-of-the-mill Insurance Man with a rather annoying stutter, I hold an active grudge against and thoroughly despise him. For one thing, he’s smaller than I am, which always annoys me in any man. He’s very bland looking, tries to use a salesman’s smooth repertoire, but, mostly due to the stutter, it really doesn’t work for him. He’s a smart enough guy, good at what he does, an honest guy. No one could understand at first glance why I would disdain this man as much as I do, but I do indeed despise him because of something he unknowingly did nine years ago. Something which I have never forgotten, and which I will never forget.

At the age of 47, I was in the process of a divorce and had been covered under my husband’s health insurance. The divorce was finalizing and I needed a new policy.

Given the health care system in this country, my firm, which is just my boss and me, does not qualify for group health care. My boss uses his wife’s employer’s insurance, and he provides a private policy for me. As the policy I have is not a group policy, but is rather a "private" policy, I am not privy to the privacy policies that those who have group insurance enjoy. This is interesting to me. The monthly premium for a private policy is at least twice that of a group policy, yet one of the main features of a private policy is that it strips any element of privacy out of the policy. During the application process, my life is an open book, and I have to reveal everything that’s ever happened to, in, outside of and/or around my body.

So, indulge me and picture it: law office, downtown Denver, April, 2000. I’m under pressure to get the new health insurance policy in place before the divorce is final, and I am in the throes of an early menopause which started when I was about 42. I am more than a little bit stressed and more than a little bit hormonal. I’m with the Insurance Man in the “fish bowl” glassed-in conference room in my offices, engaging in an intrusive interview with him about my medical history. He has brought a scale with him that I have to stand on, in front of him, in the conference room. This is when the first blush of hate begins to spike.

In that first meeting, I was asked to list all the medications I was taking. I gave the Insurance Man the list, which included the hormone medication I was taking - the routine estrogen supplement that almost every gracefully aging woman in the US was taking at this time in history.

The Insurance Man returned the next week with the completed, final application, ready for my signature. Prior to signing, I reviewed the application thoroughly. To my utter amazement and outraged disgust, in the “Preexisting Conditions” column, this jackass had neatly penned “genital disorder”. As my vision focused on those words, I could feel a flush starting at my belly button and climbing to my cheekbones. A fine perspiration broke out all over me. I was hot and cold at the same time. I could feel my pulse throbbing in my wrists and temples and my heart pounding against my chest.

“Genital disorder,” I hissed at the Insurance Man. “What in the world would possess you to say that I have a genital disorder?”

“W-well,” he stuttered, “I had to code that-t-t hormonal prescription in as something, so I used the “g-g-genital disorder” code.”

I sat with my lips clamped together, my nostrils flared, trying to center myself and trying to stay in control. I held up a hand, palm facing out, signaling him to give me a moment, left the conference room, and stomped into my boss’s office. He is about my age and we’ve been together in this two-person firm for 24 years. I shut the door to his office, sat down in the chair across from his desk and managed to croak, in a trembling voice: “(The Insurance Man) has prepared an insurance application for me in which he falsely discloses that I have a genital disorder, and you need to go straighten him out, or I will kill him and throw his bloody limbs into your office on your carpet in front of your desk.”

I rose, regally I like to think, and made my way back to my desk, where I sat, catatonic for the remainder of the afternoon, staring at my computer screen, doing no work.

Amazingly, though a man himself, my boss managed to step up and really shine. I don’t have any idea what went on between him and the Insurance Man. I do remember that a few days later, my boss brought the application to me, pointed out the corrected “Preexisting Conditions” section, and I signed it. I received an insurance card and benefits booklet in the mail. Until this week, nine years later, I had not laid eyes on the Insurance Man since the more than distasteful application process.

Of course, my boss makes a point of periodically reminding me of this incident in my life. There are times when I am at my desk, brow furrowed, worrying over some file, and he will walk by and ask, sympathetically, “What’s wrong - your genital disorder acting up?” I narrow my eyes at him, he walks off laughing, and nothing else is said about it.

Earlier this week, my boss was kind enough to give me notice that the Insurance Man would be coming in. Given the bizarre economic climate, my boss has decided to explore life insurance investment vehicles, so he wanted to discuss what’s available with the Insurance Man. My boss, ever mindful of my feelings, said, “You might want to be ready with an update on your genital disorder, because the Insurance Man is coming in.”

I have to admit that I gave the upcoming reunion some thought; I wanted to be sure I was prepared. I can tell you with authority that it is very difficult to conduct small talk with a man while the words “genital disorder” are whirling through your head. I managed to do it, he proceeded to his meeting with my boss and was soon on his way back out of my office. I did not turn to watch him walk out the door. On his way out, he called, over his shoulder, “Good to see you, too, Linda,” as the door swung shut behind him.

“...How’s that genital disorder treating you?” my boss finished for him, winking at me with a mocking grin.

As I continued on with my work, ignoring my boss, I was somewhat surprised to realize that even now, nine years later, I could still gleefully slit the Insurance Man’s throat. I can’t imagine that I will feel any different, even when I’m 95 years old. But in actuality, I should probably just let it go. After all, I had used the term “hormone” during the application interview. I should just consider myself lucky that he didn’t insert “howling prostitute” in the “Occupation” section.