Golden Boots

Golden Boots

by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

I have a pair of golden boots. They are not boots I would have bought myself, but when Pat said she wanted them I was tickled. Someone should have those golden boots. And they’re mine now. And I am both sad and happy at the same time because it would be nice if Pat could still wear her golden boots. She’s done with them. She’s done with it all. She decided, at seventy something that she’d had it here and was ready to move on.

I met Pat because I was her hospice volunteer. We became good friends. She told me her stories. Some common, some exciting, like about when she won a modeling contest even before finishing high school, and how she went all over the country and the world to model clothes. She showed me her picture in a magazine. She was adorable. She was wearing a cute blue dress, white gloves (I think), and a white belt that accentuated her teeny tiny waist. She was naive and young, and the money would be a great help to her hard working mother who she loved as much as life itself.

Though barely conscious, I sat with Pat a few days before she passed, and there were times she’d get a smile on her face that I knew meant she must be seeing that very mother.

While modeling in New York, she met a young man who was a friend of her employer. Sometime later she was invited down south where he lived with his parents for a holiday visit. He was Jewish and she was Christian and his mother would have none of it. He was wealthy and she was poor, and he adored her and she him. But he could not defy his parents, and they parted forever. Not a happy event for either of them.

The next time Pat heard from him was the day of her wedding. He decided he’d made a terrible mistake and went to her house; she was out; her mother told the young man that Pat was to be married that day. He left, I assume heartbroken. I tried to find him through Google and various social media sites, but I was never successful. I didn’t tell her that I was going to try, or that I did try. Neither of her two marriages worked and I had fantasies about them meeting and that meeting creating a healing for her.

Pat was very self-sufficient, but when I met her she was very ill and living at her daughter’s house. Right before Christmas she went back to her own apartment where I visited her for nearly a year. As she declined, she moved to a private care home. Before we knew it, she was off hospice for failure to decline. Being fed three meals a day, and assisted daily with her general care was probably the key though she often missed her independent living.

No longer my hospice patient, I kept visiting, and eventually we decided it would be okay, since I was now just her friend, to leave the house together. I would drive her. She loved my Prius plug-in. She loved the car, its light blue color, and the drive. She loved to get out and go places. We went to movies, lunch, and shopping. Pat loved to shop. It made her happy.

When I originally saw those golden boots my eyes widened, but it was more a “who would wear those?” wide. When Pat saw them she said “Oh my. I think I have to have those.”

She tried them on and asked me if she was silly to get them. I asked her if she really liked them, and when she said ‘yes’ I said, ‘no, you are not silly to get them.’

The following week we went out, and she was wearing the golden boots. She looked like a kid in a candy shop. “Will you be embarrassed to be seen with me wearing these?” she asked, a grin on her face.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, “I want to get a pair of my own!”

Rest in Peace Pat – you are missed

A post script to this story: I was working on a number of different possible stories to read at the open mic for which this was written. I spent hours and came up with lots of things that weren't working for a variety of reasons. None of them were about Pat. I took a shower to get ready to go figuring I would not read, just enjoy others’ stories. I sat down one more time with not very much time left before I had to go, the golden boots on my feet, and this story poured out of me. I’m sure it was Pat at my shoulder dictating. She would have loved the open mic evenings. I’m sorry I never thought to invite her.

Renewal & A Poem of Loving for Good Friends

Thank you Susie Cameron. Because of your brilliant villanelle from several weeks ago, I've been playing with that very constrained form and feeling safe and warm in its grip - this is the first of two.

RENEWAL

A life entwined in pains that are long past

A hugging terror grips my clouded mind

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

Afraid to speak my eyes avoid the mast

Where captain of my ship yells life is kind

A life entwined in pains that are long past

My frightened heart beats hard and much too fast

Always I feel like I’m so far behind

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

Why does the part inside feel so miscast?

My role in life will it I ever find?

A life entwined in pains that are long past

I wake up from a dream and am aghast

Your heart’s locked in a drawer a deaf girl signed

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

Open the drawer for risk I am now tasked

It’s time, I say, my life is not defined

A life entwined in pains that are long past

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

A POEM OF LOVING FOR GOOD FRIENDS

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

With histories that time’s heart always cheers

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

Through incidents that could have fostered hate

Forgiving hearts were bound by many years

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

Births and deaths all wandered through the gate

Familial bonds were sealed by flowing tears

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

They traveled far and not each found a mate

Loneliness through connections disappears

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

Old secrets lurk beneath and sometimes bate

And pain and anger’s head it sometimes rears

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

When old friends will show up with wine so late

The pain and anger fades along with fears

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

More Purple

Foreclosures, job losses, anti-Semitism, hate speak, divorce, amber alerts… Too much horrible stuff, and unfortunately, that seems to be what most of the media and many people want to focus on. One could be led to think that nothing good is happening anywhere, and yet there is good – lots of it. Many people are happy; even if their life situations aren’t idealic or even, in some cases, good. Two recent events have proven to me that I have grown, that I have actually been able to take past unpleasantnesses and turn them into the proverbial lemonade.

The first was a youth production of Les Mis Company in Los Angeles. In the production was the 16 year old daughter of my ex-husband’s second ex-wife (I am the first). Attending the performance were said ex-wife, our mutual ex-husband, and his wife-to-be number three. The actress’s biological father was in attendance as well, though his current wife was not there as she had already seen the production and only the biological parents are required to attend all 400 performances.

There was lots of laughter and happy bantering and one would think we were just a collection of good friends out for a nice afternoon. Which, I guess, we were. We are a motley crew who like each other and get along. We have defied the odds.

The second event was the wedding of communal ex-husband, who has proven his desire to keep trying this well-worn institution. Ex-Wife Number Two will more than likely marry again as they are both incurable romantics who want to be in relationships. I am an incurable hermit who actually enjoys being alone.

When my ex-husband called to tell me he was dating someone who he discovered I knew (though not well), I was excited and happy for them both. I liked this woman a great deal when I met her a year earlier. When he called again months later to say they had decided to get married, I, in a moment of insanity, invited myself to their wedding (I did NOT attend wedding number two – too close – not enough time had passed).

After hanging up and realizing what I had done, fear, regret, and nervousness began to bubble up. Several days later I finally called back, apologized, and offered to rescind my self-invitation. I did not want to cause any unpleasantness. I was told that because Third-Wife-To-Be liked me, she was fine with my attending. Her parents were a little confused, but not so uncomfortable they couldn’t accept it.

Despite the tangled web of relationships, all the players from all the various marriages do get along. After my divorce, the most important factor to me was that whatever woman Ex-Husband dated and perchance married, MUST love, appreciate, respect, and enjoy our daughter. It is an added bonus, through lots of personal growth work that I was determined to get along with them as well (though I didn’t have to LOVE them).

Ex-Wife Number Two liked and still likes our daughter. They still spend time together in person and on the phone. In the early days that made me a neurotic and jealous. What if Offspring liked Wife Number Two better? But the loving, kind, and thoughtful relationship which was, I had to constantly remind myself, a requirement of mine for a second wife for Ex-Husband was a much better option than the alternative. There are a plethora of examples of blended families that are disasters, and I have heard too many stories of blended families who appear to be doing fine, but when un-blending occurs, leave behind casualties called children. Children who have been thrown into a difficult situation to start with, but then come to grips with it because they are kindly embraced by the new spouse should not then be abandoned by said EX-spouse. It is horrible.

The 16 year old daughter of Ex-Wife number two has known my ex since she was three. They lived in the same house for many more years than his biological child had. Ex-Step Child is still important in both Ex-Husband and Offspring’s lives. Ex-Step Child is the only sister Offspring has known, and even though they have neither parent in common, which if fairytales are to be believed should be a difficult and disastrous relationship, they get along. They love and appreciate and enjoy each others’ company. Ex-Step-Sister flew to New York for Offspring’s college graduation and we all had a fantastic time together.

Ex-Step Child was, of course, also at the wedding though her mother was not. Too close. Not enough time had yet passed. The wedding was fantastic. It was fun and enjoyable to spend time with old friends, and to enjoy this new familial blending.

Ex-Step Child wore purple which is the preferred color of the bride. In a conversation in her and Ex-Husband’s apartment she said to me “There is not enough purple in the world.” When she made that statement, there was a look of pure delight on her face and true joy in her voice. Purple to her is an indication that all is right with the world. Purple is the proof that all is well.

Offspring, who was listed in the wedding program as ‘the best person/daughter’ also wore purple as did the mother-of-the-bride and the matron of honor, though the bride – because this is her first and hopefully last marriage – wore white.

I donned a purple blouse because I agree, we need more purple in the world.

The Women We've Become

Eleven of my sorority sisters and I are back on campus at De Pauw University in Greencastle, Indiana for our forty-fifth reunion, staying in a dorm where we’re crammed two to a tiny room and the bathroom is a long walk down the hall. We’re wondering how we lived that way for four years. We’ve come from all over North America, and for some of us it’s been decades since we’ve seen each other. Still, the conversation is non-stop and the memories flood in. It’s as if we never left campus.

One of us tells of overhearing a woman from a class younger than ours say to her college girlfriends, “I really love the women we’ve become.” We all nod in agreement. We feel that way, too. And it makes me think about who we were, what was expected of us and the paths we ended up taking.

Our school was small and friendly and provided a sheltered environment in which we could first try our wings away from home. It was a place steeped in tradition and we were traditional girls from solid, mostly Midwestern families. When we entered college in the fall of 1962, we were girls on the verge of discovering who we were, who we were going to become.

We have been on the cusp pretty much all our lives. We were on the cusp of the baby boom, not technically a part of it, but the forerunners, the ones born just before the wave of post war births began. Ahead of the trend – that’s what our generation has been.

We were on the cusp of women’s lib, too. In our day girls went to college to find a husband. Failing that, they became teachers, nurses or secretaries. We became all those things and more, because even though the envelope of discrimination against women in the workplace was sealed pretty tight, we were starting to poke at it, looking for spots where the glue on the flap had worn thin so we could slip through to forbidden territory. We still became teachers and nurses and secretaries, but we also grew into administrators, artists, writers, and experts in special education, orchids, native flora and fauna. We became designers, business owners, college professors, bankers, fundraisers and tireless volunteers. We followed tradition and became wives, mothers and grandmothers, too. But we are also world travelers thirsty for knowledge of our planet and the people who inhabit it. We are involved, curious, always seeking to expand our horizons, learning something new and enjoying every minute.

We were on the cusp of the civil rights movement, too. And in our protected little corner of the world we innocently thought it would be a simple thing to invite a black college student from a Southern university to live in our sorority house for a semester or a year. What could be wrong with that? Plenty, according to the national sorority president, who came to scold us for our outrageous behavior, shaking her finger at us. That wasn’t what the sorority was about the president said. The black girl wasn’t one of us, couldn’t possibly live with us. There were rules, she said, and we must follow them. She put us on probation. But to us, the sorority was about the bond of friendship we had, not some exclusionary set of rules. We only wanted to share that friendship. Rather than breaking our spirit, the experience brought us closer together, made us value each other even more. We became more tolerant, more inclusive.

On the cusp. On the verge. Right before. Ahead of time. On the leading edge. That is where we’ve lived our lives as wave after wave of change has washed over our world. We’re there now, too, as we have passed 65 and head toward 70. We’re a new kind of sixty-something. We’re still exploring, still learning, still pushing the envelope instead of retiring to a front porch rocker.

At the reunion we talk about our lives now and how we were in college. We laugh over old times and cry over losses and illness. We have somber conversations about those in our graduating class who are gone and we’re thankful it’s none of us yet. So we celebrate each other and our friendship that has persisted through nearly fifty years and vast geographical separation. We hit the dance floor with the kids from the Class of 2006 who are forty years our junior, and we all rock out to “We are Family”.

A young man from the Class of 2006 taps me on the shoulder and asks what class we are.

“1966,” I say proudly.

“Wow,” he says with a big smile. “You guys are awesome!”

I look around at my sisters, smiling, vibrant, dancing with abandon.

“Yes we are,” I say.

Copyright 2011 by Liz Zuercher

An Irreparable Earthquake in the Fabric of Friendship

Since birth I’ve been working on a patchwork quilt of my life. It’s colorful, it’s fun, and I love looking back on it, but it’s even more fun to create the new pieces, the additions, the new experiences that add to my already beautiful quilt. I’ve be doing this for barely over two decades, and hopefully I’ll have lots more years to put this thing together. In some places the stitches are rough and in some places the fabric’s a bit tattered or frayed, but it’s all coming together, and in retrospect, it all looks quite good. I have to admit that there are some lumps sewn in that I figured will need to be aspirated when they get out of hand, meaning too many failed relationships or other things that have me hiding under it rather than constructing further pieces. Perhaps some day I might turn to therapy or spirituality or some other form of mental, emotion, or spiritual dry-cleaning where the whole beautiful mess will be examined and analyzed square by square.

But I don’t know what to do with the square I am currently in the process of constructing. What am I supposed to do when a friend my own age dies? He was only 22. Really 22 and one day when death intruded, taking my friend without permission or rhyme or reason and blotting out the fantasy that I will live forever. But worse, as I looked back at my beautiful quilt I see a gaping hole where he had been, where the times spent, the laughter and the ‘oh my Gods’ used to reside. The fabric, ripped and flapping in the wind looks so raw and I don’t know how to fix it. Those memories – my first kiss, though forced in a playful and fun way, and the dozens of others that he tried to plant on my unsuspecting mouth, long conversations trying to understand this passionate, reckless nut but enjoying his fun loving attitudes and love of life. All my memories are now ghosts that haunt me and force me to question my life. It disturbs my peace of mind and makes me not want to ever sleep again as sleep is just the bedfellow of death. It disturbs me as do lesser questions like why people my age are getting married and having children. Things no longer make sense. Guilt and fear and hopelessness are rearing their unavoidable heads.

I never really thought about it, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever even see him again. I knew that leaving for college three thousand miles away was not just a new beginning, but an ending. Time does tear people away from each other, and that’s not really a sad thing, it’s just part of life. But then we get a call, or read Facebook entries and we think we are dreaming, but we are not. We have, ourselves, crashed at one-hundred miles per hour into the wall we did not see coming. Our tears are bad enough, but the tears of the ones who stayed close, the tears of guys we never thought we’d see cry, those tears dissolve the stitches that held together the pieces of our together past that are now a gaping wound as we search for reasons that we know we will never find. I begin to place a new patch, but that patch will never quite fit properly, and every time I look at it, it will remind me that things I thought were permanent are not, and that people I love or even just enjoy will not be around forever.

Only the Forever stamp is forever. Ten years from now, if I still have those stamps, I can use them when a letter costs a dollar or less or more, but ten years from now I have no idea how many of those colorful and wonderful patches will be shredded or changed irreparably, or even if my own quilt will still exist on this earth. But I don’t have too much time to ponder these things because, life, mice, and midterms intrude – and maybe that’s good.

Inspired by recent events and the lovely no-longer-teens who are in my life and copyrighted 2010 by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

Larry Lee's Orange County Story

by Susan Cameron

Back in the early 60’s I had a house in Dana Point.
You remember the movie “On Any Sunday”?
Remember the opening scene, kids on Sting Ray bikes,
Tearing through the dirt? My house was just behind them.
There was room then, room to play then, room to move then,
Space and freedom, not house house house as far as the eye can see.

We were young men, swimming in easy money.
We owned our own businesses -- we were 22, 23, 24 years old.
We had wives and kids and houses and motorcycles and race cars.
No big marina in Dana Point then, we surfed there then.
Hobie had his surfboard shop in his two-car garage.
Killer Dana – well, there’s a lot of hype,
Things always seem bigger and better after they’re gone –
But the surfing really was great. Orange County was great. Life was great.
Everybody played back then! I remember
The kite contest at Easter, where Blue Lantern ended by the headlands,
A contest for grownups, catered by Chart House and Ancient Mariner,
A bathtub full of booze with plastic cups for dipping.
Can you even imagine that today?
Liability! Lawyers! Lawsuits!
But there we were, hundreds of people partying, laughing, dancing to the
Mexican Fighter Pilot Mariachi Band. You heard me!
Crazy bastards in kamikaze helmets and goggles, dress whites,
Gold-braided epaulets, riding in,
Playing mariachi music on horseback. Great guys!
Did I ever tell you about the German tank my buddy the importer bought?
Tearing around Dana Point in a tank, sixty miles an hour in the dirt, with
Buckwheat the pit bull up the hatch wearing sunglasses and a red scarf!
We played back then, didn’t take life so seriously back then –
We were winning!

But then –

The developers bought off the county, threw up stucco wall to wall.
The grim-faced yuppies swarmed in to buy their house house house
And filled the harbor with their boat boat boat. That killed surfing.
No more motorcycles in the dirt because there was no more dirt.
The times changed. The people changed. The culture changed.

Hollywood came to Orange County with their shitbox ethics,
Running scams, snaking other men’s wives, breaking up homes,
Greed and evil running rampant.

No more easy money, no more free time, no more camaraderie,
No more young guys doing honest business with each other,
No more friendship, being playful and having fun.

Money dried up
Fun dried up
Land got built up
Harbor got filled up
People got split up
I got fed up
And got the fuck out of there.

But I remember Dana Point.

And every so often I watch “On Any Sunday” and see what used to be.
The place was a young man's paradise.
I was one of the lucky ones.
I feel sorry for the young now --
They don’t have what we had
And they never will.

Susan Cameron (courtesy of Larry Lee), copyright 2010