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Monday, July 26, 2010

Reprise

I'm very pleased that two of my essays are featured in a wonderful new anthology, From the Heart: A Collection of Stories and Poems from the Front Lines of Parenting, published by Write for Charity. All profits from the sale of this book will benefit children's charities, including St. Jude's Children's Research Center. To find out more about the book and how you can purchase it, please click on the Write for Charity link under our favorites below. As a sneak preview of the book, here's a reprise of Snacks, which first appeared here on Tasty Sauce in 2009. Bon appetit!


Snacks

Both pantry doors are opened wide and my son, Eric, studies the contents. He sighs. He closes the pantry, opens the refrigerator and stares inside for a while before sighing again and closing the fridge. He reopens the pantry, as if something new has miraculously appeared in the three minutes since he last looked. The question will come next.

“What do we have to eat?” Eric asks me.

“Chips?” I say.

He shakes his head

“Cheese? Crackers?”

“Nah,” he says. With a shrug he goes upstairs to his room without a snack.

Fifteen minutes later his brother, Greg, does the same thing: the pantry, the fridge, the pantry, the question. I offer suggestions that get rejected.

“There’s nothing good to eat,” he says. “I’m going over to Mark’s house.”

I never have the right snack in the house. If they want chips and salsa, I have cheese and crackers. If they want cookies, I have chips and salsa, since I stocked up from when they wanted those before. I buy potato chips and they want peanuts. I buy peanuts. They want Cheetos. I buy Cheetos. They want Wheat Thins. I buy Wheat Thins and they crave apples, but I’ve thrown out the apples that rotted in the fruit bin from the last time they asked for them.

You’d think by now the pantry and fridge would be so full of stuff they used to want, that sooner or later I’d hit the jackpot and everything they could possibly want would be ready and waiting. But no, I always come up short in the snack department.

I find myself wondering what Mark’s mom has in her pantry, and I decide to call her.

“So Kathy, “ I say, coming right out with it, “What kind of snacks do you have for the kids after school?”

“Nothing they ever want,” she says with a tone of exasperation I’m familiar with.

“Well, what are they eating right now?” I ask, desperate to know what perfect snack my son has found there.

“Oh,” she says. “The two of them stared into the pantry for ten minutes. Then they did the same thing with the fridge. Pretty soon Mark said they were going over to Jimmy’s house and off they went. I don’t think they ever ate anything.”

Still obsessed, I call Jimmy’s house and ask Mary what the kids are eating.

“Nothing,” Mary says. “I think all three of them are on their way to your house.”

I swell with pride. For once I must have the best snacks! I can’t wait to see what they’ll eat.

Meanwhile, Eric is back at the pantry, and I’m feeling more confident now. Bring on “the question”. But before he can ask it, Greg and his buddies swoop into the kitchen, grab Eric, and in a flash the four kids are outside playing street hockey. What about snacks? Don’t they want my snacks?

Deflated, I start to think about fixing dinner. I open the fridge and stare inside. I check the freezer. I open both pantry doors, searching for options.

The kids are right. There’s nothing good to eat in this house.

Copyright Liz Zuercher 2009

Monday, July 19, 2010

Storm Watch

You were born that spring
When the city oozed water
From every crack and pore
Like a soggy sponge.
Unending rain drenched the city
Dissolving its hard lines and solid shapes.
It seemed to soften and spread,
Melting into the landscape,
As if searching for a form
To fit the flooding waters.
So my body stretched and spread,
Shaping itself to your fluid form.

My swollen ankles, like sneakers soaked
With memories of splashed puddles,
Squished as I crossed the carpet
To the window to watch the street below.
Bright umbrellas bobbed like gumdrops
Caught in a rushing current.
At night, streetlamps lit the wet streets
With white shadows that flickered
Like billowing sails on a concrete ocean.

I cradled my swollen belly
Where you rocked in an inland sea,
Watching from the window,
Waiting for the storm to break,
Waiting for a signal,
Waiting for you to sail
From your watery world to mine.

Susan Matthewson
Copyright 1996

Monday, July 12, 2010

And the Work Begins Again

Old habits sneak back in
Excuses at the ready
Forgetting forgetting
What was it that I wanted?
I turn my back for just a minute
And they find their way
Through the cracks of least resistance.

There are still so many cracks

Two years of pulling weeds
And love and miracle grow and the weeds
Take it all out
But that is harsh. It isn’t really all gone – just a little gone.
Is the remembering just part of what
It takes to get it back?
Is the self-flagellation more destructive
Than the weed itself?
The weed can be pulled.

A garden never tends to itself but will become wild
Once again when untended.

And so the work continues.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Man of the Year

by Susan Cameron

Let's drink to the hard working people
Let's drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let's drink to the salt of the earth
.....M. Jagger/K. Richards

As a young man, my father watched many of his east side buddies go to prison or die in the streets. That’s the way it was, and still is, in White Trash America. But my dad decided to sign up for a stint in the Marine Corps, an act that he swears saved his life. The Corps broke him down, tore him apart, and reassembled him, minus the cocky wise-ass attitude problem he’d walked in with. William Cameron went in as an overweight buck private high school dropout and emerged a few years later leaner, stronger, smarter and better, a field-promoted sergeant with a G.E.D., a wife, and G.I. Bill benefits.


After I was born, Dad and his father-in-law built a solid little house for us in a raw new post-war suburb in former farmland just outside of Detroit. Dad went to an electronics technical school at night, sold Fuller Brush door-to-door and drove a massive fuel oil delivery truck six days a week to support his wife and, by then, two little daughters. When he graduated number one in his class, he applied for a job with a company called Hughes Aircraft in California.
They hired him, and off the four of us went, singing “California Here We Come” in our baby blue Rambler.

My parents were somewhat deflated when they discovered that Dad’s starting salary, a healthy paycheck in Michigan, was barely enough to cover food and rent on a grim little apartment down the street from an El Segundo oil refinery. My sister and I rechristened the city El Stinkgundo and learned to play nice with the hard-eyed eight-year-old future convicts who lived next door.


The space race was on – the U.S.A. versus the Russkies – and my ex-Marine dad took to Hughes like the proverbial duck to water. Despite emerging turmoil at home, he applied himself to the company and The Mission.


There’s a lot I don’t know about his twenty-six years of work at Hughes. As a supervisor, he had top security clearance and won’t talk about certain things to this day. But here are the bare bones of a story I found out about recently:


About five years into his career at Hughes, my father designed, fabricated and implemented automated test fixturing for electromagnetic components. Because of this, Hughes saved $100,000 in the first year alone. That was a lot of money back then, which is why the company named my father, William Cameron, Manufacturing Man of the Year, 1967.

Dad’s manager received a large monetary bonus for my father’s work.

Dad’s supervisor received a larger monetary bonus for my father’s work.


My father – inventor, designer, fabricator – received…(drum roll, please!)…

A pen set.

He laughs now. “Yep, still got it in the box. Two Parker pens attached to a black onyx base, or a base that looks like black onyx, and a gold-colored plaque attached: “William Cameron, Manufacturing Man of the Year 1967,” says my dad. “What are you going to do? It would make a good paperweight.”


Them that’s got, shall get
Them that’s not, shall lose

So the Bible says
And it still is news
.....B. Holiday

My father, trained by the Marine Corps, sucked it up. He feels lucky to have worked with brilliant PhD’s like Dr. John Bernham, and Dr. Harold Rosen, father of geosynchronous orbit, the technology that enables satellites to hover over a particular point on earth while hurtling through space at exactly earth’s speed (great for controlling weapons and cell phone transmissions). General Motors eventually bought Hughes and laid off or fired all the brilliant people who had made the company a success in the first place, but my father was fortunate enough to have known them in the glory days.

He is especially proud of his work on the Surveyor program moon probes. He was in charge of procuring parts, and if they didn’t exist?


He made them.

“Holy shit, Dad, your DNA is on the moon!”

“No, no, no,” and he chuckles a little. “Everything we sent up was absolutely sterile so we wouldn’t contaminate the experiments or the moon itself. Nice thought, though.”


1967 was a long time ago. I’m sure my dad’s manager and supervisor bought Cadillacs with the money that should have been my dad’s, and I’d bet the men and their cars have fallen to rust and dust. But tonight I don’t want you to think of any of that.

Tonight, I want you to go outside and look at the moon. Imagine being part of the team that built the Surveyor moon probes. Imagine them soft-landing and –- hooray! -– working, sending back the information we wanted and needed to know before we did the boldest, most audacious thing human beings ever do –- leave Here to go Way Out There.


You and your colleagues did good work, William Cameron, Manufacturing Man of the Year 1967. Semper Fi.

copyright 2010, Susan Cameron