Afternoon in Paradise

by Susan Cameron

Wow. What kind of mood was I in when I wrote this one?


AFTERNOON IN PARADISE

I've been lying
under the Southern California sky,
which is flatter than Kansas
and bleached as white as desert bones.

I shut my eyes against the glare.

No breeze disturbs the overheated stillness--
earthquake weather,
though people deny there is such a thing.

I lift the gin-and-tonic to my lips
and swallow hard.

I float alone in the silent pool.

There's a faint dry rattle overhead --
a spiky clatter and scratch.

My eyes are closed, but I can tell
we have rats
in the palm trees
again.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999

Father's Day Salute

In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a salute to my father, Wally Weidman, who passed away in December of 2003 after years of fending off a cascade of ailments.  His German heritage endowed him with clear blue eyes that twinkled when he told a joke, but showed his stubborn indomitable spirit when he was determined to achieve a goal.  He was the consummate salesman, who was loyal to the same company for his entire career, climbing up through the ranks to become a highly respected executive, then mentoring young rising stars.  He loved golf and Chicago Bears football and a thick medium rare aged Midwestern steak.  A sharp dresser, he always put his best foot forward and encouraged us to do the same.  He told a great story and embraced life at every turn.  Some might say he was larger than life, and maybe he was.  You decide.

  

Still a Tough Old Guy

 

            I think Daddy was pretty ticked off that he died.  All the signs pointed to it. 

The Tribune bearing his obituary didn’t get delivered to his wife, Audley’s, door.  The Trib was always there in the morning, every morning except this particular one.  Did Daddy reach back from the dead to snatch it away from the doorstep?

Even though an icy December downpour kept some people from the visitation, the room was full.   Chairs faced the rich wood coffin holding Daddy’s body, impeccably suited, as usual, but we all stood around the room with our backs to him most of the time. Every so often I felt compelled to turn and look at him, thinking I heard him saying, “Hey, I’m over here!  You can’t have this party without me!”  It just wasn’t right that he was not greeting everyone at the door with his warm smile and easy conversation or telling about his great tee shot on the eighteenth hole at Medinah.  It just wasn’t right to be turning our backs on him as if he weren’t there.  I’ll bet he was ticked off at that, too, that he could only be an onlooker.  No matter how many wonderful words were said about him that night, I felt him struggling to be part of it, angry to be left out.

He fought being dead the day of the funeral, too.  Was he the one responsible for the car’s stalling just as we pulled into the church parking lot?  And what about the minister’s microphone?  The tech guy swore it was working before the service, but each time the minister tried to begin his eulogy by proclaiming, “Good news!” the mike was dead.

“What the hell!” I could hear Daddy say. “How can it be good news that I’m dead?”  Oh, yes, Daddy was certainly ticked off.

I think the final straw for Daddy was “Amazing Grace”.  Damned if he was going to let anyone sing “Amazing Grace” about him!  That was a song for the dead and he was most certainly not about to admit that defeat!  He hadn’t fought so hard and endured so much over the past few years to up and die!  He was still a tough old guy, just like his doctor had said, and tough old guys didn’t let death take them without a fight, God damn it!  This woman was not going to sing that song!  Midway through the first verse, the noon bells began to chime, battling the contralto tones of “Amazing Grace” until the organist and soloist gave up and let the bells finish their insistent interruption. 

“Ha!” I heard Daddy say.  “Take that, Death!”

But as the bells’ final tones slipped away, the second verse of “Amazing Grace” prevailed, and the service continued without further interruption.   That must have been when Daddy finally understood that his fight was over - that this world he was trying so desperately to hold onto wasn’t his world anymore.  Did he let go at last, lay down his struggle and rest?  I hope so.  It was time for the tough old guy to relax and enjoy a perpetual round of hole-in-one golf.  He had certainly earned it.

 

The Writers Go To Las Vegas

Nancy, Liz, and Susan in the living room of their penthouse in Las Vegas. They saw "The Jersey Boys" at the Venetian and worked on their screenplay. And, yes, they really did work--can't you see how tired they are.

Pre-Teen Pleasures

As a pre-teen, my favorite place to play was at my friend Judy's house. District changes forced us to move schools. Though we knew each other by sight, we were not yet friends.

We were standing with our mothers in the hallway of the new school on the first day of third grade. All the other kids were reacquainting themselves with friends from the previous year, but we knew no one. That was all it took for us to become best friends.

We both loved to play and make up games, so after school and on weekends, Judy and I would ride bikes and give parking tickets to passengerless cars. Several times we talked one of the young neighborhood kids into coming into Judy’s garage which we claimed was really a space ship heading for a new planet. She would pretend to be brave and then begin to cry, so with a condescending declaration we would say we didn’t want whiny, sniveling cretins on our planet and send her home. I wonder what her memories of that are, and if she had to deal with it in therapy.

Judy’s basement was a magical place with many faces and functions. For some reason, we always pretended to be men. I was Mr. Delmaro and she was Mr. Goldberg, two of our favorite elementary school teachers. As teachers, we would lecture and make up tests for our students who were, in truth, our school mates. Their names were neatly printed in our roll books, and lines of checks and circles marked attendance. Grades, likeability dependent, were carefully penned into the perfect small squares.

Our imaginations rarely faltered, and we could always come up with a new game, or a new scenario for an old game. We did watch our fair share of television between bouts of martin, cops, teachers, chemists, magicians, and turning the living room into Barbie's mansion. Saturday mornings were for watching the Million Dollar Movie with its gladiators and monsters. We relished the classics such as The Giant Behemoth, Mothra, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Jason and the Argonauts, but I especially loved one gladiator movie about a scheming wife who helped to kill off her husband the king so that she could live with the new king, his brother, only to learn in the 11th hour that the queen of a dead king gets buried in the tomb with her husband and his "other" servants. I clearly remember images of the slaves breaking the ceramic nodes which caused sand to fill the echoing room sealing it off from the outside. As the servants stood stoically at attention calmly awaiting their fate, the deceptive queen cried and desperately begged for help while large stones were noisily sliding into place in other parts of the pyramid sealing her fate. Little did I know at the time that I would one day teach that story to high school students; only it was about a maudlin and articulate prince whose mother didn’t get buried with her husband, but maybe should have.

Those were fun days. Later in life Judy became a special education teacher, and I only started teaching in my 50s. It was only recently that I put two and two together realizing that we had intended ourselves into teacherhood through the enthusiasm of our youth. I still like grading, and sometimes, though I hate to admit it, it is still based on likeability.

copyright 2009

On Middle Age

by Susan Cameron

It's not my turn to post, but let me stick this in here. Every year, Jane Glenn Haas of the Orange County Register runs The International Longevity Light Verse Contest, and I decided to throw in an entry this year for the first time. If you'd like to have fun with it, here are the rules:

• The topic is aging/longevity/life after 50. Keep entries short. Homeric epics will be tossed.

• Do not use the word "geezer."

• Do not rhyme Viagra with Niagara.

• Do not look in the mirror and see your mother, grandmother, or great-aunt.

You must be 50 or over to enter. Put your name, address, telephone number, email address and age on the entry. Enter as often as you like. Deadline is August 21; winning poems are published in the Orange County Register in September. Email to janeghaas@gmail.com (Verses entries only). Send snail mail to Verses, Jane Glenn Haas, the Orange County Register, P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711.

Okay, so here's my entry:

ON MIDDLE AGE

We need to stop the whining and the narcissistic pining
for the bodies we had once and won't again --
the price we pay for living is the youth that we've been giving
day-by-day to tax-man Time since Time began.
Aging's not a tragedy; it's only nature's strategy,
so suck it up, 'cause life is still okay --
I'm still here and so are you; we know some day that won't be true,
so smile, old fool -- go out and seize the day!

Susan Cameron, copyright 2009


Have a good one, everybody!

What If?

I am a single mother of three, with a son who is two years older than his twin sisters. They are now 26 and almost 24 years old, respectively. They are fruitfully employed, are of good character and are reasonably attractive. (I can hear all of them screaming in protest here, “Reasonably? What the hell does that mean?” I say “reasonably” here just so as to hear them scream: “Reasonably? What the hell does that mean?”)

Of necessity, there were times when, as children, they were left home alone and to their own devices. Not abusively so - as unconventional as I may be in some aspects of my life, I was a good mother. However, I was never guilty of being a helicopter mom. There are some things children need to learn and experience without a safety net.

Though generally well behaved when left on their own, the children admittedly did have their moments of apparent unsupervised chaos. There is more than one patched and at least one extremely poorly patched repair in the drywall in my house due to one or more of the children acting up, apparently irrationally. I learned early on, as soon as they all began talking fluently, that it takes far too much energy for me to attempt to determine The Real Story with respect to some of their dalliances. However, sometimes I did have to step in to get to the bottom of what really happened, if only to satisfy my own piqued curiosity.

I recall returning home one particular evening when the kids were in 6th and 4th grades. It was early enough that they were still up, watching TV. The minute I hit the electronic force field of the family room, I could sense it: something bad had happened.

They were all sitting, overly calmly, on the couch in practiced, relaxed positions, watching TV. I noticed that Diana had been crying, and her eyes were swollen. Then I saw that her nose was red and swollen, too. She was squinting, staring at the TV, not making eye contact with me. Chelsea and Dan were also not making eye contact with me. I took the bait and asked, “So, what’s up with Diana’s nose?”

At a very young age, my children invented a game they called “What If?” A good, robust session of What If? is entertaining to watch (participation is not recommended). The children ask each other things like, “What if I grabbed your hand and held it down on the hot burner here?” and then perform a slow motion fake of the action, stopping, of course, an instant prior to completing the action. “What if I kicked you in the butt like this and you shot over the couch like this and your head cracked into the corner of the coffee table, like this?” “What if I picked you up by your collar and the back of your underwear, swung you back and forth, and threw you into the drywall, head first?” (See above for related information on drywall breaches.)

This particular evening, Dan confirmed my suspicions. “We were playing “What If?“ he admitted. “I asked Diana,” he explained, "'What if I put the palm of my hand on the back of your head and crammed your face into my knee like this?'” They had been sitting next to each other on the couch, and it was apparent that when Dan “What If-ed,” he, unfortunately, did not stop short enough, and Diana’s face had slammed squarely into his knee.

They had stopped the bleeding, shoved her nose back into place and were putting ice on it. Dan assured me that Diana did not need or want to go to the emergency room. Diana confirmed this with a stifled sob and a couple nods of her head, her eyes squeezed tightly shut as she tried to stem the tears, her nose glowing like Rudolph’s.

It is in a mothering situation such as this that you don’t need to take any action whatsoever. They have already proven your point for you.

The kids still play What If? occasionally, usually during the holidays when we are forced to be in close quarters for an extended period of time. And it still makes me, and them, laugh, but I do notice that they have either grown up or their motor skills have improved, because they stop way short of completing the action.

I never considered putting an end to this game of theirs. I figured that if they were brave enough to play What If? at risk of such severe physical consequences, perhaps that courage will carry over into life’s other challenging decisions - into career, health, relationship, financial and personal matters - and they will never hesitate to play a savvy round of What If? with themselves, having learned from experience that weighing the consequence in advance of taking the action can save a great deal of heart and nose ache in the end.
Linda Harris

Fall

by Susan Cameron

I know, I know, it's June 2. Nevertheless...

FALL

We crunch through the autumn woods near the cider mill,
laughing at our Labrador whirling through the leaves.
He caroms like a pinball from tree to tree to tree,
sniffing each and marking each as male dogs will.

So many trees, so little time! His tank is running dry.
He slurps some icy water from the noisy, rushing stream,
and, refreshed and refilled, pursues his doggy dream
of dominance and empire. He raises his leg high.

We laugh, and our breath makes clouds in the cold
that vanish in a heartbeat. "Want some more cider?
Another doughnut? A kiss?" Our spirits grow lighter
with happiness as we wander these woods of brown and gold.

Watch the swirling leaves body-surfing in the breeze,
the sun-sparkled icy streams tumbling toward the lake,
the furry squirrels skittering and chattering as they make
their storehouse preparations for the winter's long freeze.

I'm not afraid of winter. Happy memories of days like this
I've squirreled away like acorns to see me through
a lonely, hungry season -- but I'd rather share with you.
Now give me more sweet cider, and your even sweeter kiss.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999