The Voices in My Head

Do or Die: A Short Story

2012-03-01T00:47:00.004-05:00

I get home from work and she’s still sitting in the recliner where she was when I left this morning. She’s watching Jerry Springer on the flat screen television she bought at the pawn shop a year ago. The volume is up as high as it’ll go. The smell of cooking oil is heavy in the small, dark apartment. She barely looks at me and I go into the kitchen to see what there is to eat. A grease stained paper towel covers a plastic plate. Two fried pork chops sit in a congealing mass. There’s a covered pot on the stove. I lift the lid and peer inside. Rice and tomatoes mixed together. Her favorite. I put one of the pork chops on another plate, scoop a glop of the cold rice and tomatoes next to the pork chop, and place the plate inside the grease filmed microwave oven. I punch in one minute and forty seconds and then press the start button. I retrieve the glass pickle jar from on top of the refrigerator and dump my day’s tips onto the pile of loose change already inside. The coins clink and clank like tiny chains. I put the top back on the pickle jar and spin it closed.

Chants of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” blast from the television.

”Hey! That shit is too loud”, I yell.

“What?” she yells back.

“Too loud!” I scream back.

“Who’s proud?”

Oh, hell. I go into the living room, pick up the remote from the coffee table. The dark wood varnished table is covered with white discolored rings. She refuses to use coasters. I turn the television volume down until I can finally hear myself think. The picture on the screen shows a short man licking whipped cream off the body of a fat woman in a bikini while Jerry looks on with the microphone in his hand.

She looks up at me. “Why’d you do that?”

“Too loud”, I say and go back into the kitchen. She follows me, shuffling her feet in her once fuzzy pale blue slippers. The slippers are now as worn as she is. I grit my teeth. I hate it when she shuffles her feet.

“I cooked pork chops”, she offers.

“I saw.”

Rice and tomatoes too.”

“I saw that too. Thanks.” The microwave dings. I reach for the plate and burn my finger. I grab a dishcloth and carry the plate to the table.

I place the plate on the red and white checked plastic table cloth. It’s seen better days, like everything else in this apartment. I grab a mismatched fork and knife from the drawer next to the sink and down. My head hurts. She sits across from me in the only other chair at the table.

“Your day go good?”, she asks.

“It was okay”, I answer. I hold the piece of meat down with the fork and saw into it with the knife. It’s like trying to saw into a cowboy boot. I stuff a piece of the pork chop into my mouth and crunch on a piece of fried fat. I shovel some of the rice and tomatoes into my mouth. This shit is going to give me heartburn. She knows that.

“Marty called”, she says.

“Oh, yeah. What’d he want? More money?”
“No, he just wanted us to know that Linda is out of jail.”

“For how long this time?”

She lights a cigarette. I glare at her.

“I told you I don’t want you smoking in the house”. I say.

“Sorry”. She takes a puff and then drops the cigarette into a cup on the table. The cigarette hisses out.

“And don’t use cups as ashtrays. That’s just nasty.”

“You ever gonna be nice again?” she asks.

I get up and scrape my almost untouched food into he trash can. ‘Probably not”, I tell her.

I go into the bathroom and peel off my work clothes, and then my panties and bra. I fill the tub with hot water and ease my aching body down into the rust stained tub. Chants of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” blast from the television again. She can’t hear worth a damn. I slide down until the hot water covers my breasts. I soak the weariness out of my body while the water cools, and then I slip my head down until I am submerged. It’s quiet under the water. Peaceful. I feel like the Lady of the Lake. I come out of the water just long enough to take a breath and then slip back under. I wish I could stay here forever. But I have to take care of her. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t know how I got elected for this shit job. Hell, she’s not even my mother, she’s Rich’s, but he’s gone. He left me his Mama and a house going into foreclosure.

“Damn Skippy, you did, Rich”, I say out loud. I have been talking to myself a lot lately. I wonder if that’s normal.

I get out of the tub and dry off and then slip into a t-shirt and my gray sweat pants.

When I come out of the bathroom, she’s still watching television. Some old seventies sitcom. M*A*S*H maybe? I used to like M*A*S*H. Yeah, there’s Hawkeye. She doesn’t even look at me as I walk over to the television and turn it down.

“I can’t hear it now,” she complains

“Yeah, and neither can the people in Alaska,” I say.

“You don’t like me,” she says.

“It’s not a question of liking you, Stella. I’m just tired and the T.V’s too loud.”

“Rich didn’t care if it was loud.”

“Well, I’ve got news, Mama Stella- Rich is dead.”

She flinches like I’ve just struck her with the back of my hand, and suddenly I feel bad. She hasn’t got anyone else, but how in the hell did I end up with her? I hate Rich. If he wasn’t in ParkWay Cemetery, I’d probably kill his sorry ass.

She starts to cry. Now I really feel bad. I go into the kitchen and open the tip jar. I sit at the table, empty the jar out on the picnic checked table cloth, and start separating the coins into neat piles; pennies there, nickels there, dimes and then quarters. I count the pennies until I have fifty of them and then slide them into the red penny sleeve. I tuck the pennies in tight and then fold the ends of the sleeve. I can hear her sniffle a few times from the other room. I continue rolling coins and try to ignore her. When I finish rolling the pennies, I start on the nickels. When the pickle jar is empty I have seventy one dollars rolled. I get up quietly from the table, careful not the let the chair scrape against the linoleum, and walk over to the kitchen doorway. I peer into the living room. She’s sleeping in the recliner, her head lolled to the side.

I go back into the kitchen and kneel down in front of the sink. I open the lower left cabinet door underneath. I push the container of Comet and the squirt bottle of Glass Plus aside, then reach way back into the cabinet until my fingers locate the cloth bag. I pull it out. I take the bag to the table and unroll it. I silently place the newly rolled coins inside with the rest and then roll the bag back up. I kneel down and push it back into the dark recesses of the cabinet and then arrange the cleaners in front again before closing the door. I brush off my hands and silently calculate how much I have now. Let’s see Tuesday I had fifty; I added seventy-five on Wednesday and then yesterday sixty. There was already two hundred and fifteen dollars from the two weeks before. With today’s seventy-one that brings me to four hundred and eighty dollars. In two and a half more weeks I should have enough, if I work double shifts like I’ve been doing.

I only need about a thousand dollars. That’s all, just a thousand, and then I can get out of this town. Down to the ocean where the rich folks live in Gulf Shores. Where it’s sunny and warm and I can walk on the beach, the real beach, and let the sea water rush over my bare feet, gaze out over the horizon while the sun sets and the sky turns all pink and orange. I can listen to the sea gulls cry, smell the salt air, and feel the sand between my toes. I might even drink a margarita with salt around the rim. I heard they’re good. I can make a go of it there. I know I can. I’m a good waitress and rich people always need waitresses. Don’t they? Find some cheap apartment. I don’t need much.

But what about her? I’ll just leave her here. Someone will find her. Someone will take care of her. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I’m fifty-five years old. If I don’t get out now, I’ll never get out. Never once in my life have I ever seen the ocean. When Rich and I first got married he promised he’d take me. But he never did. After six years of trying, we found out we couldn’t have babies. We didn’t talk much after that. Those first six years were pretty good though. The best I ever had. But six years don’t make up for the thirty-three lost ones. I deserve something. Damn right I do.

I go back into the living room and she’s still sleeping. I go to wake her so she can go to bed. The minute I touch her, I know. I put my hand over her breastbone. No heartbeat. Her chest is still. No breathe moves in and out from her tired old body. She’s dead as a proverbial doornail. The old lady finally did me a favor.

I look at the television. M*A*S*H is still on. Hawkeye is wearing his Hawaiian shirt. I wonder if they wear Hawaiian shirts in Gulf Shores?

A Mom’s Explanation

2012-03-01T00:04:00.001-05:00

Just because I don’t agree with how you run your life doesn’t mean I don’t love you.

Just because I choose to distance myself, doesn’t mean I am abandoning you; it just means I am saving myself and probably you.

Love sometimes means that a person just has to walk away.

FYI

2012-02-23T19:13:00.000-05:00

I love my hormone replacement therapy drug. My hot flashes are GONE! My mood swings are GONE!

Thank God the drug worked because there isn’t any room left out in the back yard for more bodies.

Write my own obituary? Sure, I'm bored enough....

2012-02-23T09:52:00.001-05:00

Teri Coley Adams died yesterday at her home in Cochran watching South Park. Her last words were, “Goddamit, Cartman” before the ceiling fan loosened itself from the ceiling joists and came crashing down on her head. Death was instantaneous.

Teri was born in Portland, Oregon, and she never forgave her parents for this. She wanted to be born in Texas. She grew up house hopping from state to state and country to country during The Cold War, thanks to her father’s military career. Her Military Brat status left deep scars on her psyche that led to a life of constant, almost scientific, observation of the world around her that warped her to such a degree that later in life she became a high school English teacher. She is remembered as “that crazy lady” by her students for teaching assignments that included deconstruction of scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. She also taught her students to burp talk the entire first two stanzas of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

Teri’s husband, Jim has no idea what to do with her book collection of over 50,000 volumes. Ten years ago, Teri commandeered Jim’s beloved Model Train room, an act that almost led to the dissolution of the marriage, to house her ever increasing collection of books. The family fully expects to find several missing neighborhood pets (and maybe children) under the Southern Writers book pile, most notably the O’Connor stack.

Survivors include husband Jim Adams, who will finally be able to sleep on more than three inches of bed space; children Adam, Lara and Aaron who are so thankful that death was swift and kind to their beloved mother (none of them wanted to have to chose her nursing home- and by the way, Teri left a note that stated " Ha, ha! I spent it all”); her three perfect more-gorgeous-than-your-grandkids grandchildren: Payton, Miley, and Emma; and Pirate, the blue fronted amazon parrot whose life expectancy of over 80 years gives him the last laugh.

There will be no funeral. Per Teri’s wishes, the remains will be donated to a Body Farm where experiments in environmental changes on dead bodies are carried out. There will, however, be a brief memorial service this Friday at 8 pm at Barnes & Nobles (fiction section) where attendees will be expected to sing all the words to “The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out” in Teri’s honor.

Alzheimer's: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

2012-02-20T16:34:00.000-05:00

Mom has finally, reluctantly agreed to give home assistance a try. Mom has got to have a few hours respite time that is all hers. She takes care of dad 24/7, and while he is ambulatory and otherwise physically fine, the common Alzheimer’s symptoms are getting worse: he asks her the same questions over and over again, is a bit snippy, is easily frustrated, has trouble conversing, and forgets where he places items. Mom also lays out dad’s clothes now because he can’t match them any longer. For example, if left to his own devices he’ll wear a red button up dress shirt with a pair of green jogging pants. Yes, mom deserves a break. Her guilt gets in the way though. She thinks she should be doing it all for my dad, all the time. Just her. No human being can do that. Maybe I’ve finally convinced her that she needs help.

The only problem left with bringing assistance into the home is my dad. He will fight this tooth and nail. I know him. He’ll say, “I don’t need a babysitter” or “I can be here by myself”, but he can’t. Not safely, and not to the point where my mom could ever go off to lunch with a friend or go get her hair cut without wondering if dad was okay. We’ve had some close calls. One day this past summer when mom made a short trip to the grocery store, my dad decided to clean the interior of my son’s old Mustang. When he got into the car he closed the door and then he couldn’t figure out how to work the door handle to get it open. He panicked. Thank goodness, he finally rolled the window down and crawled out. When mom got home, dad was very agitated. It must have been 150 plus degrees inside the interior of that car. The situation could have become a disaster if it hadn’t occurred to my dad to roll the car window down.

So, back to the home care point of this little blog entry: Today mom and I met with a woman from a company called Home Instead. Dear Husband picked dad up earlier in the day and they drove to the family cemetery under the guise of filling in some gaps in the Coley family genealogy research (it was needed info though). While Dear Husband and dad were snapping photographs and riding back country roads, mom and I were meeting with the Home Instead representative at my house. We were able to arrange weekly assistance (companionship, light house keeping) to come in to mom and dad’s home for four hours on Friday’s. As soon as dad gets accustomed to a strange woman being in the house, we can increase the hours. The goal, of course, is to give mom time to actually leave the house, but this is going to have to be accomplished slowly. All of this is called “therapeutic lying” because we are going to have to convince dad that the assistance is there to help mom with the house, not “babysit” him. And really, it’s not a babysitter, just someone to be there if he gets too confused. Peace of mind for my mother to have some time to herself.

I now have a headache.

UAE or Bust!!

2012-02-19T16:08:00.005-05:00

Next school year I won't be returning to the school where I have been teaching since July 2008. I’ll miss "my" kids, but I can't go back. I can't go back to a school district that has had four superintendents and five principals in four years. Constant inconsistency is the name of the game, and I am worn out. I gave it my best shot. Daily meetings during my planning and after school are just one of the many issues factoring into my decision. How can I work in my classroom if I am always in a meeting? How can I be there for my students if I am in meeting after meeting? In September I spent an entire hour after school one day in a meeting where the faculty was made to play word wall games in an effort to increase teacher use of word walls. Meanwhile, I had two week’s worth of papers that needed grading stacked up on my desk, and a student who desperately needed help with writing so he could pass the graduation exams. I knew I would be unable to catch up on my work the following day: I had another meeting during my planning and yet another meeting after school for one of the SEVEN committees I had been assigned. So what did I do? I stayed in that meeting room and played a word wall game for over an hour and fumed over what I wasn’t accomplishing. Staying after school everyday until 6:00 p.m wasn't helping much either, except for maybe contributing to my stress levels.

I am worn out, disillusioned, frustrated. I can’t teach in a school where the air conditioning and heating systems are patched over and over again instead of being repaired correctly. Believe me,

Georgia

in August and September is no place to teach with a hit and miss air conditioning unit. I can’t teach where there are no funds for basics like toilet paper in the student restrooms, yet admins carry around district paid for Ipads. I can’t teach in a system that values meetings, meetings, meetings over actual teacher/student interaction. I can’t teach in a system where the supposedly doctorial educated administration do not know how to write a paragraph without including at least two subject/verb disagreements, two run on sentences, and five unclear pronouns references. Makes me wonder who wrote their dissertations. I can't teach in a system that purchases educational software to the tune of THOUSANDS of dollars and that software does not work efficiently due to an outdated system server and hardware that is twelve years out of date. Didn’t anyone have the foresight to actually research the compatibility of the hardware and software before shelling out so much money? Money that could have been used to repair the heating and air conditioning unit? I guess not.

I can’t teach in a district where I am not valued as a professional; a place where an administrator points to my class literature texts and informs me that I do not teach my content (English), but rather I am supposed to teach the Georgia Standards. I can get a little testy when it comes to my content and my professionalism. I do not teach standards. I teach content. The standards are what I use to scaffold and support my content. Administrators, please stop a minute and understand what you are saying your teachers before you talk. And do not inform me that I can’t be a “good” teacher; I have to be “effective” one”. I am an effective teacher. Don’t use doublespeak to try and confuse the issue that you really have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to my area of expertise. I don’t try to tell you about your area.

            I can’t teach in a system where I receive an emailed warning for not being on duty in an area where I have not even been assigned. I can’t teach in a system that tells me to use my car and my gas to run to the alternative school everyday, teach, and then make it back in time for my 5^th period class. I can’t teach in a school where I am told that I must stay late to work sporting events for which I am not compensated. I can’t teach in a system where I am told not to enter a grade less than 60 on a report card for a student, even if the student has done no work at all. I can’t teach in a system that two years ago purchased smart boards for all the classrooms, but didn’t have the intelligence to purchase the ones that would have come with a repair service written into the contract. Now the bulbs are going out in the smart boards, the software is glitching up (for lack of a better word), and a lot of the smart boards are now hanging useless, where they aren’t so "smart" anymore. I can’t teach in a system where I am pulled into the administrator's office three weeks into the school year, handed a list of teacher evaluation items that I need to improve on, and (this is the kicker!) I haven’t even been evaluated yet. I can’t teach in a school system that holds faculty meetings to correct the “verbage” teachers are using on lesson plans. Give me a break. The “verbage”?

            I could go one and on. Issues that are state wide issues: lack of parental involvement; how NCLB is indeed leaving children behind; how responsibility for education is not divided between student, parents, and teacher, but rather loaded solidly on the backs of the teachers alone; the way teachers are ordered to “teach the test”; the exorbitant amount of money the state shells out for current standards material and training, just to change the standards five to six years later; how disruptive, ill behaved students are kept in our schools, regardless of how their behaviors impact the students who really want to learn; how systems hire totally online educated administrators who (surprise!) turn out to be ineffective. I could talk about all that, but I won’t.

            What I will do is follow my heart and go forward with an job interview that could see me headed to The United Arab Emirates in August to teach. Will it be perfect? No. The UAE is in the middle of a major educational overhaul, and as such there will be some difficulties. Will I run into some of the same problems as here? Yes, but I can be more forgiving of a country that is only forty years old and is valiantly attempting to create a top notch educational system. The

United States

has had over two hundred years to get our educational system right, and in the past fifteen years we have been de-evolving, rather than evolving in the time and resources we give to American education.

In my own country I am vilified and portrayed as a greedy, lazy state employee who only teaches in order to gain lucrative retirement benefits, three entire months off in summer, and work days that end at 3:30 p.m. (I am still trying to locate ANY American teacher who fits this profile). In the UAE, as in many other countries, teachers are still respected and valued. My final interview for the

United Arab Emirates

teaching position is soon. I have been studying the culture, the language, the people, and the geography. I am excited to be given a chance to join and be a part of history in the making. I am looking forward to being respected and regarded as the professional that I am. I am looking forward to being creative and energetic in a classroom with “my” students again! It won’t be paradise, but I’ve been through hell. All I want to do is teach. If the interview falls through and for some reason I don’t get the job, I will start to diligently rehearse the phrase, “Would you like fries with that, sir?” because until the American educational system starts operating under a modicum of common sense and professionalism, I’m outta here.

Until then, UAE or Bust for this American teacher!!!

Jumping Off the Cliff...

2012-02-12T21:52:00.000-05:00

There are some serious life changing decisions in the works right now. Just when I thought life had settled into a calm, peaceful, predictable pattern an opportunity comes along and blindsides me. I wasn’t even looking for it. It found me.

I’m not going to ponder it too much. I’m just going to jump. I’m fifty years old. If I don’t jump now, I never will. Look out below!

When I Grow Up (a poem)

2012-02-03T00:16:00.000-05:00

When I grow up I’ll be

Pristine, honest

Eager, helpful

Holistic, and non-judgmental.

When I grow up I will wear

Red cabbage roses, velvet dresses,

ruffle socks, linen trousers,

and a smile when I dance.

When I grow up I will feel

Confident, worldly,

learned, pretty,

loved, and humble.

When I grow up I’ll live in

a gingerbread house, an inlet by the sea,

a nook in a forest tree, a château in the Alps,

a tulip lined cottage, or under a magic toadstool.

When I grow up I’ll own

a cut glass bracelet, a blue unicorn,

two Chinese fans, a white picket fence,

five yards of pale pink ribbon, and me.

Teri Coley Adams

Bring Out Your Dead!!!

2012-01-27T22:48:00.000-05:00

One of my friends told me today that he loves Smarties but he doesn’t eat them when he’s alone anymore. Last week he was at home by himself, happily popping Smartie after Smartie into his mouth, and inhaled one. For a moment he thought he was going to die by choking to death on a Smartie. And all this after beating cancer. I told him at least he would have a cool obituary, and the conversation at the funeral would be interesting as hell:

            “You hear how Bill died?”
            “No, what happened?”
            “He choked to death on a Smartie.”
            “What the hell is a Smartie?”

“You know, those little candies that come in a cellophane roll.”

“You can choke to death on a Smartie?”
“Well, Bill did.”

I read on the Darwin awards website where some twisted fellow went down into his basement, dressed up in a school girl uniform, placed a gasmask on his face that had a long rubber tube extending from the end, inserted the other end of the tube into….um, (no way to put this delicately) his rectum ,and asphyxiated himself. Can you imagine the look on the face of whoever discovered the body? Can you imagine the widow trying to explain that shit to the life insurance company?

One of my mom’s cousins died a dignified death, but left instructions for her favorite pet cat to be “put to sleep” and placed in a box at the bottom of her casket. I didn’t find out about this until after the viewing at the funeral home or I would have been all up in that casket trying to find that poor cat. I don’t even want to know what she had done with the other cat that wasn’t her favorite.

Speaking of death stories, there’s the one about a distant relative who was cremated. His daughter switched out his cremated remains with some Kingsford ashes from the barbeque grill. The wife, I guess, still has the Kingsford ashes in an urn on her mantle. Her husband, meanwhile, is scattered over a cemetery seven hundred miles away in another state, per his last wishes that the wife did not want to honor.

Me? I don’t care how I leave this earth as long as it doesn’t involve fire or an overly extended period of suffering. Or anything like the poor guy in the basement. That goes without saying. Afterwards? I don’t care. I like the idea of shooting my ashes off into space, but that’s probably a tad bit costly. I’ve always half-joked that I want my cremated remains to be given to my daughter. She loses things constantly. She can’t keep up with her driver’s license, her makeup, her shoes, her brush. I figure if she gets my ashes she’ll just lose them and the problem will be solved. Maybe I'll eventually end up in a warehouse out in East Texas and have my fifteen minutes of fame on the television show "Storage Wars" when my ashes are discovered inside a makeup bag. Could be worse..

Their Personal Hell: An Observation

2012-01-25T17:56:00.000-05:00

Do truly crazy (I'm talking certifiable) people just kind of silently bloom in a corner where no one will notice them, and then lash out the minute their personal reality and the rest of the world’s clash? Seriously, I had a “conversation” with one of these wackaloons today. The way this person was describing her perceptions and interpretations of events, both past and present, was so twisted and skewed from reality that it sounded like a version of Bizarro world from the Superman comics.

I suppose people can convince themselves of anything if it soothes their minds and hearts and helps them deal with their own internal pain. I can’t help but feel sorry for these wounded souls though. They are poison to themselves and everyone who gets near them. When I identify one of them- the process is not always instantaneous- all I can do is speak my peace, back away slowly, as if backing away from a rattlesnake, and then proceed to cut that person out of my life totally and completely.

Self centeredness, jealousy, hurt, and pain stirred together in one person is a vicious combination. I can’t help anyone who envelops themselves in that deadly mixture. I can’t reason with a person like that. All I can do is step away and thank the stars that I don’t have to live in his or her skin. Must be hell on earth...

Fiftieth Birthday Manifesto

2012-01-18T20:41:00.000-05:00

I am fifty years old today and from this day forward I am allowed to do the following:

Tell certain people in WalMart that they are ugly and need to stop wearing their pajamas out in public
Get old lady hair (although I’m not quiet certain how one “gets” old lady hair.. maybe it just springs from the hair follicles after the 50th).
Remind those underwear showing teen boys to pull their damn pants up..and do not even give me that look, young man.
Smile smugly (I love alliteration) when I see a young mother struggling to pry her screaming children away from the Coca Puffs in the supermarket.
Stop pretending that I like plain active yeast yogurt. I hate that crap. I don’t care if it’s good for me or not.
Cancel my subscription to Cosmopolitan. Who cares that there are twenty-five new sexual positions that will get my man revved?
Start drinking a bottle of red wine every evening because it’s “good for the heart”.
Speaking of wine: Start drinking the really good, expensive wine because wine drinking after a certain age is considered sophisticated. A lot has changed since I used to drink Boone’s Farm and then puke in the backseat of my boyfriend’s car.
Walk past the tampon/maxi pad aisle in the drugstore and never have to visit it again…
Wear false eyelashes on a daily basis (where in the hell did my real lashes go anyway?)

That’s it. Like my good friend Martha Jean would say, “That’s the list.” Viva la FIFTY!!!!

Crazy is as Crazy Does.

2012-01-16T00:24:00.001-05:00

I was almost asleep last night and something popped into my head. You know how that can be. This one little thing grabs ahold of you and won't let go. Mine was this:

If you live long enough you're going to develop your own particular brand of crazy.

Wow, where did that come from? I didn’t know, but I liked it. I told myself that I’d remember it, but then it occurred to me that a lot of good story ideas, snippets of wisdom, and solutions to ancient and modern issues have probably been lost in time due to falling-asleep-epiphanies not being written down for posterity and morning. Late night genius has a tendency to dissipate before sunrise like Hot and Now Kripsy Kreme doughnuts bought at midnight. I know; I once solved the issue of the energy crisis before falling asleep. By morning it was gone. Just like that. Gone.

So, last night I knew I’d never remember the above piece of wisdom, so I grabbed my Droid charging by the bed on the night table, activated the camcorder and whispered into it. Then I figured while I had it on I might as well video Dear Husband sleeping so I could convince him that he really does snore. I videoed him for an entire three minutes. It's funny as hell. If Dear Husband and I ever have a major martial disagreement that becomes too heated, I might post it to YouTube.

So remember: If you live long enough you're going to develop your own particular brand of crazy.

Divorce Wars (Personal Essay)

2012-01-12T23:05:00.000-05:00

A writer acquaintance posted on Facebook today asking for women to post their most hilarious non-violent divorce revenge stories. She says it’s “research” for a book, but if her husband’s belongings show up in an EVERYTHING MUST GO FOR $1.00 sale, we’ll know why this certain research was needed.
            The varying revenge stories were quite unique and creative. One woman calmly asked her ex to stop texting, phoning, writing her letters begging her to come back to him. The REALLY bad part? The NEW girlfriend was standing right there when she asked. Another woman said she put in a change of address for her ex husband at the post office and had all his mail forwarded to a vacant house.
            Tonight I was relating these revenge stories to my friend, Scott. He proceeded to tell me about a woman (who shall remain nameless) who became so angry at her soon-to-be-ex that she repeatedly crashed her car over and over into his house trailer- I do live in the South- until the trailer physically left the foundation. Pissed off lady, I’d say. I hope she had some damn good car insurance, and he had damn good.. uh..… trailer insurance.
            I am a woman, but women can be evil creatures. We will carry a grudge for years, and no one can talk us out of it. There’s a reason I don’t have a lot of close women friends. They are devious as hell. A woman’s mode of thinking is somewhat like this: “I have been wronged and the scales must be balanced, even if I have to break my neck doing it”. Why?
            True confession here, and one I am not proud of (Husband of Thirteen Years, if you are reading this, stop now). When Husband of Thirteen Years and I split up, I sold his heater for $50.00. Not just any heater, but a MASSIVE kerosene blower heater used on construction jobs. I sold that sucker, and when Husband of Thirteen Years asked me about it, I naturally feigned complete innocence and ignorance about said heater. I really don’t think he believed me, but that was back in 1996. If there is any statue of limitations for selling an ex’s property for far less than its value, I think it’s come and gone. And no, Husband of Thirteen Years, I will not give you that $50.00. I spent it on gas. It’s gone. And I think I may have cut a few of your shirts with a pair of scissors too, but they were old shirts. And I was a lot younger and a lot more passionate in my anger back then.
            My Give-a-Shitter broke years ago, thank Buddha and anyone else responsible for the breakage of my Give-a-Shitter. I have calmed down considerably. If all that divorce stuff were to happen today I would probably just sigh and then go back to reading my book. I don’t have the energy for revenge anymore. I'm tired. Maybe that’s what getting older means: we’re too tired to fight over much of anything. Leave all that craziness to the young ones who haven’t learned that none of it will matter in thirty years anyway. Why waste a good hour or two on fighting, arguing, getting revenge, or destroying property? I could be taking a nap. Bet Dear Husband will be happy to read this entry.

How Do You Catch a Unique Dear Husband? You 'Nique up On Him! (Personal Essay)

2012-01-12T00:08:00.000-05:00

Dear Husband had surgery yesterday on his right rotator cuff. He’s had this surgery before in the exact same shoulder, so this surgery entailed the removal of scar tissue (yuck), repair of the muscle itself, and shaving down of a bone spur (double yuck).

Dear Husband has been sitting on the couch for most of the day with a morphine I.V drip in his vein. He hits a pink button and a bit of morphine is suddenly released into his system. About twenty seconds after the morphine is released (I know because I timed it) his eyelids grow heavy and he gets a dopey little shit eating grin on his face. Then his head lolls back, if he’s not in mid-sentence, and his mouth drops open, and a type of weird snorting sleep overtakes him. Weird sleep though. If I move towards him he snaps awake like he’s at Boy Scout Camp and someone is attempting sneak up and fill his hand with shaving cream. I haven’t been able to get within a foot of him without his startling into an instant awake state. He’s good. Even doped up, he’s good. It’s like trying to approach a vampire sleeping in his coffin. He senses the wooden stake somehow. But I keep trying.

It’s been an interesting and vastly entertaining afternoon, between trying to outwit a morphine drugged husband and driving back and forth to the store. Each time I come home from the store with an item he’s requested, he thinks of something else that he needs, then zones out for another twilight nap. Bread. Pimento cheese. Dairy Queen Blizzard. Benadryl. But I really don’t mind. I get to listen to Leonard Cohen in the car cranked full volume, and when I had surgery three months ago I kept Dear Husband running back and forth to the store like an overgrown Energizer bunny, only he’s not pink and doesn’t play a percussion instrument. But I, unlike Dear Husband, didn’t get to bring home a morphine I.V drip when I had surgery. How unfair is that? I wasn’t bombed out on the couch, and Dear Husband missed all the entertainment value of a spouse in a post-op morphine daze.

The nurse is coming tomorrow to remove Dear Husband’s I.V. What am I going to do for fun after that?

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth. (Personal Essay)

2012-01-11T00:23:00.000-05:00

In September, I decided to become, at last, a bit more serious about my writing. I have written all my life, but only on sporadic occasions have I attempted to turn my writing into more than just a hobby. My September decision to delve headfirst into a writing life was a huge leap into the unknown- a realm of do or die. I am a writer who composes in her head before sitting down at night to put into concrete words the often confusing thoughts. To give them life. To flesh them into something more than just mere ramblings. To enter the world of the true wordsmith.

Having entered this writing life (a lonely one, I’ve found), I stored all my teacher clothes in the spare closet, and began to live in what is becoming my everyday uniform: ragged at the cuff Old Navy jeans, various long sleeve boys’ button up shirts, and black high top Converses. I look like a twelve year old boy, but in my mind’s eye this is exactly how a true writer looks- a bit disheveled, low maintenance, and too busy in actual creation to give much thought to something as insubstantial as appearance. Did Van Gogh not sacrifice a portion of his body for his art (or was that lust?) Did Poe not forgo heat in his very own home in order to follow his tell-tale heart? Did Dickinson not send a letter to the world and then shut herself from it? And while I will not sacrifice an ear to the blade, because I just love the way small silver earrings fit into the little holes there, I will cut corners, so to speak.

I’m no Van Gogh, Poe, or Dickinson, but should I not have to suffer for my art? Should I not have to frump around in consignment sale shirts while I attempt to turn the words out onto the page like a perfect skillet fried egg? Suffer is a matter of perspective, anyway, is it not? I have pared back in my life: I do not darken the doors of Belk’s and buy that smoking hot dress that was made for my black boots. I do not wander into the regular priced section in Barnes & Noble, but instead limit myself to the clearance tables. I do not press a button and instantly order movies from satellite Pay for View, but have become one with the local Redbox where I can rent the same movies for a dollar. I am sacrificing. I am giving into my art. I am creating my own garret with instant Rhapsody music and green lemon tea with honey. I may want to appear like a self sacrificing “starving” artist on the outside; however I do not want to live like one. After all, my mama didn’t raise no fool.

So, if you see me around town, just nod your head and try not to tell me how awful my attire is. I know how unfashionable I am. One day, when I win the Pushcart Prize or The National Book Award, I will be called eccentric and fresh. Now? I’m just sitting at my computer looking like a frumpy fifty year old woman pretending I dress this way for my art, when really it’s just the fact that the older I get, the more the realm of comfort becomes my sole aim in life. Writer, my ass….

Somewhere Over the Rainbow (Personal Essay)

2012-01-09T13:07:00.000-05:00

My grandmother, Ma, has been gone for almost nine years. Let me rephrase that: My grandmother, Ma, has been dead for almost nine years. I don’t like to write the “D” word- it’s too permanent. But last night, oh last night, I was able to spend a few precious minutes with her. Not in this life, but in my other life. The one that I live in when I sleep- my dreams.

There she was, as real as I am, maybe more so. She was lying in a steel framed bed, dying, but alert. Her face pale pink against the white starched sheets. A blue hued painting hung above the bed. An impressionistic one. Monet maybe? In the dream, unlike the way it had been when she actually died, Ma knew she was dying, and there was a peace in her knowledge. She was animated, smiling even, and she wanted music. Demanded it. There was an old cabinet stereo in the corner of the hospital room. Ma held out a scratched 45 rpm record of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and then she asked me to dim the harsh hospital room lights. I placed the record on the record player, and Ma laid her head back on the bed and listened and smiled.

Back in my waking life, my heart tugs with an ache to see her, talk to her, touch her. When she died, while I was watched helpless to keep her here, a part of me left with her. And I haven’t been able to find it since.

But, she’s still with me. Still here. And last night it was wonderful to spend those few minutes with her.. To hear her voice and to be comforted with the reminder that she lives inside of me and that she’ll never really leave me. Not really.

The Quest for the Tater Masher (Essay)

2012-01-05T00:07:00.000-05:00

I came to the mountains yesterday for a write-cation. I have to get my novel revised if it is to have any chance (even as slim as that may be) of seeing published birth. I packed up three pair of jeans, some button up comfy shirts, a hard copy of the manuscript, pens, my laptop, jump drive, smart phone, and my dog, Truman; Truman is a little Maltese who has the eyes of a street beggar and the heart of a small lion. I loaded everything in my car and then drove four and half hours to get here. I also packed food. Lots of food. I also stopped at a Super WalMart halfway in the drive and bought fresh boneless chicken breast. Throw some parmesan cheese mixed with Duke’s mayo, spread it thick on the chicken, top with bread crumbs, and then bake.. viola! Heaven. I was determined not to have to ride the seven or so miles into town while I was write-cationing. But I also wanted to eat well. That plan didn’t work.

I peeled my potatoes to boil them for mashed taters (I do so love them smashed to a creamy concoction with plenty of real butter) and then discovered I had no tater masher. How can I have mashed taters without a tater masher? Put manuscript aside, grab car keys and wallet. Put Collective Soul in the car CD player and head out to get a tater masher. Five stores and twenty-five minutes later, still no tater masher, although I did find a white plastic strainer and a key ring with a cool red laser pointer thingy. I was starting to think if I was going to have mashed taters I was going to have to stomp on ‘em like they do grapes in Italy, but I wasn’t too crazy about the prospect of getting butter between my toes. On a whim I pulled into a small little EVERYTHING’S A DOLLAR store and there it was on a back aisle. A white handled tater masher. White to match my new strainer. The Holy Grail of mashed taters.

I cooked and ate my taters and chicken, and then Truman and I took a nap. I had to get the creative juices flowing again and a nap always seems to help. Tomorrow I have to find a corkscrew. I have wine and no way to open it. It is chilled in the refrigerator calling my name. I can hear it. Tomorrow back to the EVERYTHING’S A DOLLAR store…. Thank the baby Jesus for it.

The Bibliophile (short story)

2012-01-02T20:57:00.000-05:00

The Bibliophile

By Teri Coley Adams

The old man walked into the room. It was freezing. He blew out and his breathe crystallized into vapor the way it once did in his childhood in Ohio. Those were cold winters. This.. not so bad. But still, it would be nice to have heat on. Damn electric company couldn’t wait three more days until his Social Security check came, could they? No, they just turn the shit off and don’t care that an old man freezes his wrinkly balls off. And he was an old man. There was no getting around that. He hated the sound of “senior citizen”. You didn’t call a young person a “teen citizen” or a forty something-year-old frump a “middle citizen”. Where in the hell did that word come from anyway?

He went to the refrigerator and opened it. He cocked his head in puzzlement over the darkness inside then remembered for the hundredth time that the lights were out. The little light thingy in the fridge wouldn’t work. He reached for a carton of yogurt, hoping it wasn’t out of date, peeled the tin lid back and carried it into the living room where he spooned it up with a long handled silver ice cream spoon that had once belonged to his grandmother. The candle on the worn end table next to him was flickering into a waxy puddle. He’d better look in the drawer and see if he had more. Thank God Edna had stocked up on things like that before she died three years ago. Back then he had bitched and moaned about Edna’s hoarding of batteries, candles, jugs of water.. now he was grateful. It was if she had been able to see the future.

Edna had been the one to handle the money, the bills. He hated the same ole same ole of responsibility. He’d rather be writing a paper on Shakespeare and his contributions to the English language, or tending his African violets. Bills? Screw them. After Edna’s death, the old man’s oldest son had taken over the bills and had them set up on an automatic bank withdrawal system that the old man didn’t quite understand. So every month the account went into the red. Even when his son had taken the debit card away, the old man used a dusty old checkbook that he had found shoved in one of Edna’s junk drawers. It was for the same account they had had for over forty years. So far, the son hadn’t figured out why the payments still bounced.

The upstairs bedroom was filled with shopping bags of books, books, books from Barnes & Noble. The old man had almost had an orgasm when the chain bookstore had opened a spanking new store in the shopping mall not a mile from his house two years ago. Once his son had bought him a computer and arranged for internet access, and his granddaughter had taught him how to order online, the amazon.com boxes piled up too. The old man could order books any time, and often did at three or four in the morning when sleep evaded him. The UPS man was his most frequent visitor, often arriving with four or five cardboard wrapped books. The old man owned so many books that he could never read them all if he lived another fifty years, which was highly unlikely anyway.

Books, books, books. He loved them. He worshiped them. The feel of them. The smell of them. The very existence of them. They contained everything: wishes, dreams, adventures, horror, tears, sex, longings, fears- everything human under the sun was held in the pages of some book somewhere. This world was stale. The real one had never held much for the old man. He merely tolerated the world the way one tolerates waiting in a doctor’s office for a yearly physical. Not pleasant, but not exciting. On the other hand, life in books was more real, more tangible than anything in the so called “real” world.

Edna has never complained about his constant reading. She knew when she had married him that he was a college literature professor. For thirty-five years she chalked up the long hours spent reading to his profession, but when he retired and the reading encompassed almost all his waking hours, she had merely sighed and starting traveling alone to visit out of town relatives and old college friends from bygone days. The old man couldn’t be bothered. Only once, when a cousin’s twenty-something year-old son had died in a sudden, bloody automobile accident had the old man given in, left his precious library, and boarded an airplane. He’d only taken one book and had finished that one during the funeral home visitation the next evening. He’d much rather read about places than actually go to them. But he had attended the cousin’s son’s funeral because it had been so horrific, so unexpected. It had seemed like fiction. And Southern fiction too, since the accident and funeral had taken place in a small Mississippi town. At the long drawn out funeral the old man had kept an eye peeled for any Faulkner looking characters. He never did see one. He only spied a little wrinkled lady that might have been Faulkner’s older sister; the resemblance had been uncanny- the same beak-like nose, the same overdramatized eyebrows. But alas, no drama, no falling on the ground. No heart retching weeping, no fainting. The funeral had been sparsely attended. He left disappointed, and upon arrival at the airport had promptly made a beeline for the airport book store and paid seventeen dollars, a ridiculous sum for a paperback, for Tess of the De’Abervilles- the most depressing author the old man could think of-Hardy himself.

But the lights were out. The house was cold. And the old man was hungry. The yogurt had been half spoiled, he suspected. He stood up, standing in one spot for a moment until the light headiness passed, then he reached down and picked up the green saucer to which the candle was firmly attached. The candle gave off a weak glow, barely enough to cast a dim light a foot in circumference. The old man made his way to the stairs and mounted them slowly. He rarely went upstairs anymore except to throw the bags and packages of books in the bedroom that had once been his daughter’s. The stairs creaked in protest. The old man breathed out and the vapor fog drifted in front of his face like cigarette smoke. In the dead of winter when he had been a child and had had to walk to school, he would roll up a bit of white paper into a thin tube, put it to his lips, and then blow out in imitation of his chain smoking father. His father who had had died at the age of forty of lung cancer. So it goes.

He reached the landing of the second floor and opened the door to what he now thought of as the “book room.” Books upon books upon books. Piles of stories, adventures, horror, mystery.. Soft cover, hard cover, first editions, used and smudged editions, thin books, thick books, crisp new books. They were all here. He breathed in and the smell of paper and ink hit his nostrils. He smiled and the cold of the house didn’t seem so cold anymore. He walked to the middle of the room and knelt down on one arthritic knee. He caressed a towering stack of books and held the candle higher. He could just make out the farthest corner. The books rose waist high there. He sighed. His legs went out from beneath him and he thumped with a jolt on his butt, hitting so hard that his upper dentures almost leapt out of his mouth. He teetered for one brief moment and then fell face first onto an obscure little edition of a Dickens’s novel, The Cricket on the Hearth. The lit candle stub tumbled from his hand. He tried to curse and found he could only utter a deep guttural sound. His right hand was numb and didn’t feel like it belonged to him. He tried to raise it to pick up the candle and found he couldn’t. The candle sputtered against the dry paper of the books nearby. The old man felt a moment of panic and then inexplicitly he relaxed. The flames caught and rose as they licked the edges of the books. The books flared into shades of red, orange, yellow, and blue. The old man felt the heat rise. The colors were extraordinary and mesmerizing.

The old man was growing warmer. The heat felt good. He knew the fire was spreading, but couldn’t seem to summon the emotion to care. He closed his eyes and remembered all the words. All the words he had read. He breathed in the acrid smoke, the stories. And they gathered together into one giant heat before blowing into his mind and dispersing in ash memories. In a final movement, he reached his left hand under his semi-paralyzed body and struggled to clasp a thin volume that was trapped under his body. He managed to maneuver the book until it was nestled directly beneath his feeble and stuttering beating heart. The old man breathed the sharp sting of the flames deep into his already smoke singed lungs as the fire bellowed out into a roar of satiated hunger and finality..

We Didn't Start the Fire/2012

2012-01-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

A new year. An entire year of fresh possibilities. It stretches out before me like Frost’s road; it bends in the undergrowth and I cannot fathom what lies beyond that bend. I begin day one of this New Year with trepidation and hopefulness. I have learned how much life can change in one year-in one day.

Kennedy taken from us amid the pop of gunshots in Dallas; Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon and proclaiming “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"; The American military pulling out of Vietnam, and our prisoners of war, who had been held for years, at long last walking off that airplane onto United States soil; Nixon’s resignation, Reagan’s near miss with an assassin’s bullet, the Rodney King verdict and the violent aftermath; the Challenger explosion, the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the resulting unification of a country; the Twin Towers in New York City violently crumbling to the ground in a shattering of metal and human blood; the capture of Saddam Hussein. I could not have predcited these events. No one could have. But they happened.

On a personal level, dear friends can be seemingly healthy one day and fighting for their lives the next, our economic situation can fall and then rise again, we can trip in and out of love, our own health and quality of life can change in the blink of an eye, talents can be discovered, newly born grandchildren can be placed in our arms, we may be forced to say goodbye to loved ones we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye to, children leave home to start their own lives. All in the course of a single moment. The moments that make up our years, our lifetimes.

So, welcome 2012, whatever you may bring. I have my bitch boots on, my armor secure, my experience intact, and my heart wide open. But, nonetheless, you will surprise me.

My Mom Is Evil (and you wonder where I get it from??)

2011-12-30T17:50:00.000-05:00

As I have mentioned before, my dad has Alzheimer’s. Nasty disease (I hate it’s fucking guts). Dad retired from work eight years ago and has been a professional piddler every since. Pay sucks, but it’s fun and he sets his own hours.

Anyway, about three months ago, my usually early morning rise-and-shine-with-the-sun mom slept in. Mom and dad woke up at about the same moment. Mom looked over at my dad and told him, “You better get up if you don’t want to be late for work”. My dad, already confused enough as it is, looked at her in wide eyed wonderment and asked, “I have a job???”

Mean mom.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

2011-12-29T16:37:00.000-05:00

Human beings are stupid. They have always been stupid. From the story of Adam and Eve eating that damned apple and having us kicked out of paradise to the most recent Darwin Award nominees, which include a man protesting the use of motorcycle helmets at an anti-helmet rally- he sustained severe head injuries when he wrecked his motorcycle at the event- to an English teen who electrocuted himself stealing in-use copper wiring from a local business. Then there are actual Darwin Award WINNERS (losers?), like the young man who decided to white water the newly created rapids brought on by recent flash flooding. Only problem was that he attempted this while riding a foam mattress. Said mattress, naturally, became waterlogged and sank, taking its occupant with it. Rescuers found the man's body the next morning wrapped around a tangle of trees. Had enough?

Human beings are not only stupid, but almost insanely stupid. I am surprised we have reached the over 7 billion population mark. The odds clearly show that we never should have lived past the building of the first pyramids. Of course, the first pharaohs didn’t keep records on how many people died building these great super structures, but historians estimate that pyramid building was more lethal than planking on a busy freeway; at least a million people died while building tombs for a wealthy and powerful class of people who believed that they were going to take wooden horses and stale beer into the afterlife.

Just how stupid are human beings REALLY? Well, we are systematically destroying the only planet we know of where we can exist. We are poisoning the water supply, the air, and our food. We elect politicians who can’t spell “potato”, don’t know what the definition of the word “is” is, and continue to drag our country into bloody wars in which we have no game plans or exit plans. In addition, our scientists continue to invent quirky little life ending items like nuclear weapons and then can’t tell us how to get rid of the radioactive waste left from the manufacture of these toys. (“Fred, let’s just shoot it off into space and make E.T deal with it”).

And you might know, dinosaurs existed for about 250 million years. That’s a long damn time. Human beings, according to scientific data, not biblical, have only been around for about two million years. I doubt we’ll make it to 250 million years. Call me crazy, but dinosaurs didn’t yell out “Watch this” and then do some stupid shit like bungee jump and not make certain the cord was tied correctly, or start the car in a garage to get warm and then decide to take a short nap. They didn’t walk down a busy thoroughfare road at night clothed all in black, put a funnel into their open mouth and allow other dinosaurs to pour two entire quarts of Jack Daniel’s down it at a tail gate party, or fry themselves in the shower while attempting to dry their hair (you know some asshole somewhere did that. I mean that’s why hairdryers come with a huge label warning consumers NOT to do it!).

I have managed to live for almost fifty years. I should not have made it past the age of five when I thought it would be great fun to tease the fierce looking HUGE dog down the block. Happily, I only ended up with a severe shredded bite on my calf and wet ruffled panties (when I was a child my bladder did weird things when I was scared). Or what about the time I was fourteen and refused to tell my parents I was sick because I had third row seats to see Black Sabbath in concert? I ended up in the hospital with an emergency tracheotomy and to this day I have not rocked out at a live show with Ozzie. But I did almost die.

I give human beings a hundred years max on this earth. Two hundred if we stop huffing noxious substances for fun and lighting our farts.

la, la, la- a Bitch and Moan.

2011-12-28T21:05:00.000-05:00

Received a detailed report from the Mayo Clinic doctor I saw on December 13, 2011. After numerous costly tests, I find I am slightly anemic, have a vitamin D deficiency, and I have some increase in my gamma globulins markers that are not indicative of lymphoma (nothing serious- just need to be looked at annually now), and some degeneration in lumbar spine from the psoriatic arthritis. Otherwise everything looked normal.

So, why do I feel so not normal? Why does my entire body feel like I went eight rounds with a very pissed off Mike Tyson? The doctor had one explanation: pain amplification syndrome. Different from fibromyalgia in that the pressure points do not follow the usual pattern for a diagnosis of fibro. “Amplification” would be the word for how my pain feels. The past four days have been especially bad. And it was Christmas. I toughed it out, cuddled grandbabies, laughed, participated- all with a little help from a half a loracet twice a day; just enough to dull the pain, not get rid of it. I HATE taking painkillers. I will now spend the next week recuperating.

I am sick and tired of hurting for no good reason. I want to rip my entire ribcage out and toss it in the trash (that is where 90% of the pain is located), but tonight my friend, Scott, told me if I did that then my head would be sitting on my ass. He has a point…

I’m getting very angry about it all and feeling overwhelmed by the pain. Then I feel guilty because there are so many people out there worse off than me.. I am snappy, tired, and just want to hide. Trying my best not to do that.

Back to the Mayo in February. Ding Ding! Round Nine!!

The New Year's Musings of a 21st Century Middle-Aged Woman

2011-12-27T16:14:00.000-05:00

Winter days and the coming of the New Year always make me wistful. The bare branches on the trees; another three hundred and sixty five days- days lost in the past; the goodbyes to dear friends; the arrival of new babies, faces unlined, hearts untouched, all cause me to sink into a dearth of melancholy meanderings.

Like Prufrock, I seem to be measuring out my life in coffee spoons; a bit here, a bit there, until now almost fifty years have passed and I don’t know where the years have gone. I should have heaped my life out in gravy ladles, rich and overflowing- taken more chances, ran a bit faster, climbed more trees, loved fiercer. The realizations that come with age are an ironic joke played upon us all sooner or later. Just when we have gained the foresight to apply the lessons we have learned, life is almost over. I look at the young and shake my head in voiceless exasperation. They don’t know, and are too young to know that they don’t know.

I watch twenty-somethings in their daily struggles and know that the stumbling blocks in their paths are mostly ones of their own creations. I see the perplexed furrowing of their brows, hear the confusion in their voices over the occurrences of life, watch them as they become blocked by the debris of their choices, and I am unable to clear the path for any of them. They have to stumble as I did, as human beings have done since before recorded history. Nothing is new under the sun, although we like to think differently. And it goes on and on circling on a merry-go-round.

Of course, I still make poor choices, but the difference from my younger self is that I no longer attempt to rationalize my choices or explain them away. I no longer heap the blame on other’s doorsteps. I have learned that most often, I am to blame. And I don’t waste precious time in dwelling on the mistakes or berating myself too deeply. I simply accept the reality of them, tuck the lessons away, shrug and go on. After all, how many minutes do I have left on this earth? If I am lucky, I have approximately sixteen million minutes, or thirty years left to have the wind touch my face, fall asleep on cool sheets, get lost in the notes of a perfect melody, touch the faces of those I love, and spoon the ice cold creaminess of pistachio ice cream onto my tongue.

In my fifth decade, I listen intently for the song of the mermaids singing each to each..

Autumn Again

2011-10-30T17:01:00.001-04:00

It is a perfectly beautiful, calm October day. My little Maltese dog, Truman, is curled asleep on the floor where a streak of sunlight is warming his nine year old bones. There is vegetable soup simmering on the stove, full of potatoes, corn, leftover peas, and plump skinless tomatoes. I am dressed in my “doing jack-shit” uniform: a boys’ size 14 striped button up shirt, jeans, and fuzzy socks. The entire day is unfolded in front of me and I have no idea what to do with it. Should I read? Maybe clean the bathroom? Or perhaps write that long overdue letter to my sister-in-law? I don’t feel like doing any of it. I just feel like being in the right now without having any tasks, enjoyable or not to take up my time. Time, which as I near fifty is becoming more precious, that I waste.

I waste it by sitting on the front porch listening to the sounds of small town traffic that echoes from two blocks over and the slam of house doors down the street. I waste it by staring out the window in my study wondering if the bird sitting on the mulberry bush can see me. I waste it reading the news that never seems to change. I waste it thinking about what I want to do with the fifth part of my life, knowing that often plans come to nothing.

Life is broken down in sections or parts. No one has the same amount. Some people have three, some as many as ten. It is all dependant upon how many times people reinvent themselves, shedding old skin like a captive boa in a pet shop. I happen to be entering my fifth part. It is the first time I have been aware of the parts. I didn’t count them before, the way I do now.

In the first part of my life, I was a child. No worries except if Bennie was going to find me in the game of hide and seek, or if mom and dad had bought me that new doll for Christmas. The second part was the wild teen years, trying to fit in, coughing and laughing as I sent a tightly rolled joint down the line at a Ted Nugent concert, wondering if

Kent

really did like me. Fast forward to my third incarnation- motherhood and marriage. Giving birth to and raising three children, loving every minute being with my children, aching for a full night’s sleep, keeping watch whenever illness struck, watching as they grew and changed a bit more each day, trying to be a good wife and severely failing. The fourth part of my life was all mine. Going back to school earning a degree, diving head first into a career in teaching, being inspired by my profession and then becoming disillusioned, and building a new life with a good man..

I thought each part of my life would last forever. Now those lifetimes seem like someone else’s. Each separate, each distinct. Each belonging to four different people. People I don’t know. I lift the quilt that covers the small bed in my study and from underneath the bed I drag out a cardboard box. It holds the various photographs that I keep promising I am going to organize. I waste time rifling through the photos, and time slips through my fingers. Each of these lifetimes is memorized in photographs. Here is a photo of me pregnant with my third child, my wedding to the children’s father, my high school graduation, my three children dressed for Halloween, my daughter’s first Christmas, my ninth grade school photo with braces shining. The photos become strewn on the floor, and the concept of linear time breaks down and instead begins to exist like the photos. Scattered, unevenly, like a haphazardly unwound ball of yarn.

I scour flea markets when I am in one of my moods that doing nothing cures. I have a distinct affinity for old postcards and photographs. I buy the ones that capture my eye- for fifty cents, a dollar. . Some of the postcards are etched on back with handwritten sentiments that mystify and entertain me. “We are in Washington today and going to New York Wednesday. Love Uncle Bill” (1937), “The luaus and shows are something to see. Don Ho show tomorrow” (1974), “No horses are here they are all illegible. No place for you here J.S.H” (1915).

I turn them over, study the pictures, turn them back over, reread the message. Why was Uncle Bill in Washington? Was the trip for pleasure or business?

Was the Hawaii trip a honeymoon for a newly married couple? If so, were they happy? Did they stay married? Have children?

Why was it so important that there were no horses in Washington, D.C, and why is there “no place” there for the recipient of the postcard?

The postcards give me a glimpse into lives lived so long ago. I can almost hear their voices in the writings, and each life..

As for the photographs, I never buy them. I can’t bear to separate them from their nestled boxes or scratched frames, or the common smell of time that pervades the places that sell lives outlived. I merely look at the photographs, scanning the faces to see if I can decipher any emotion. I study the clothing, the backgrounds, and the eyes of the subjects. Are the people shown long gone and nothing more than the images they have left behind, or do they still exist somewhere in that ball of unwound yarn? What does that hand resting on that young woman’s back mean? Why is the old man looking at the younger one that way? Whose car is that the woman is leaning against? Is the young man in the World War II uniform coming back or going to war? The stories are lost. The people frozen in sepia tones or flat black and white.

What will become of my photographs after I am gone? Will a restless woman, starting to realize the preciousness and instability of the years, thumb through my photographs one day and wonder? Will she look into my frozen in time eyes and attempt to translate a portion of my life? Will she note the ring on my left hand or the way my gaze is off to the side, pulled at the last moment of photographic capture by the voice of my granddaughter? Will she perceive the questions etched into the lines on my face and feel a kinship? Will she sigh, go back to her life, sit on a porch, stare into the color of her life and attempt to become a part of the sounds around her, the way I do?

It is a perfectly beautiful, calm October day. It is my fifth chance to be me.

Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line (short story written on a rainy day)UNREVISED

2011-10-13T23:18:00.000-04:00

Heaven help me. I think I killed the son-of-a-bitch. I go into the kitchen and run the tap water until it’s cool. I grab one those plastic tumblers that’s supposed to make you think of cut crystal, and fill it to the brim. I drink the water in one long breath, letting it slide down my throat. I sink to the floor and throw the tumbler against the wall. It bounces off and lands back at my feet. Fuck. Now what do I do? I can’t break a plastic tumbler made in Korea, but I can kill a man? That’s screwed up nine ways to Sunday.

I look at my hands. I didn’t mean to kill him. I mean, who knew? I was only trying to hurt him a little. He spent all night trading googly eyes with that little slut at the bar last night. I just wanted to teach him a lesson. Not kill him.

I start to sob. What am I going to do? My mascara has probably run all down my face. I know I look like a raccoon. I bring the ends of my hair to my nose and sniff. Cigarette smoke and stale beer. I have to take a bath. But wait. What about his body? What about Lester? I gnaw on my bottom lip and contemplate the situation. Oh hell, he’ll keep. Not like he’s going anywhere. I chuckle, then start crying again.

I fill the tub with scalding water, pour in some of that lavender Bath and Body Works stuff Lester gave me last Christmas. I rip off my jeans and t-shirt. Throw my bra and panties in the corner and test the water with my toe. Hot, just the way I like it. I lower my body down. The hot water stings, but in a good way. I spy Lester’s razor on the sink. I start to cry again. I sink down into the water and give in to my grief and anger. That stupid fucker. Why did he die? He did it to get back at me I know him. Oh, God. I miss him already.

I give into my tears. But pretty soon my face starts to sweat from the hot water and I can’t tell the difference between the sweat and tears. It’s counterproductive to cry and not be able to feel the tears on your face. Kind of like fucking for peace. I hiccup once and stop crying. I know I probably look tragic like one of those busting out of her bodice women in those books I get at the WalMart. I inhale and thrust my bosom up. I take a deep breathe and exhale. My bosom is heaving.

Time to get to work. If I don’t get rid of Lester he’ll start stinking soon. I wrinkle my nose. I just had the carpets cleaned. Damn. I’ll never get Lester’s blood out of it. I towel dry my hair and get dressed in an old work shirt of Lester’s and a pair of cutoff shorts. I go into the living room, sit in Lester’s recliner and stare at his curled up body. I figure rigor mortis might set in soon and I’ll never get him straightened out, so I kneel down and unbend him. Just like playing with Gumby when I was a kid, only heavier. His arms are curled into his stomach so I unbend them. I roll him over. His legs flop down and splay. I push them together. I lay his head back and cross his arms over his chest. I sit back down in the recliner. No, that’s not right. I kneel back down and move Lester’s arms by his side. A little better. His eyes are wide open staring at the ceiling, but the face below the eyes is gone. I turn away. He looks kind of gross.

Now what to do with him. He’s too big for me to get in the back of the SUV, but what if he was in little pieces? I could move him then. I glance at the clock. 5:45 a.m. I could work all day; it’s Saturday. I don’t have to be to work until Monday morning. I could sneak him out when it gets dark and then think what to do with him.

Can I even start the chainsaw? I’m scared of the chainsaw. It makes a lot of noise, plus the Thompson’s, who live a quarter mile down the road, will probably hear it. Hand saw? Maybe. I go into Lester’s “shop” in the garage. There are five hand saws. One has a pretty red handle and looks nice and sharp. I take it and at the last moment grab a pair of wire cutters and pliers, and a rolled up sheet of clear plastic. I dump it all in the garage.

I go back into the living room and stand over Lester. Poor Lester. There’s a big ole hole where his nose should be. I aimed for his leg. Lester always did say I was a piss poor shot. Now his face is all messed up. He had a pretty smile. That’s the first thing I ever noticed about Lester. That and those big ole boots he always wears. I hate those damn boots.

I unlace the boots from Lester’s feet. I pull them off and throw them across the room. I ask Lester, “What you gonna do now?”. His eyes just stare up at me. He don’t say nothing. He won’t ever say nothing again.

I pick him up by his feet. His socks stink. I turn around and start dragging him to the garage. I get to the garage and his head thunkity-thunks over the threshold. It hits pretty hard. “Sorry, Lester”, I apologize.

I get him in the center of the garage and go peer out the closed garage windows. No one in sight. Good. I roll out the clear plastic on the garage floor. I pick up Lester’s legs to drag him on the plastic, but every time I get him on it, the plastic rolls up underneath his dead weight. I squat on the cement floor and think. Bricks. I need bricks to hold the plastic to the floor. There are several stacked against the back wall. I go over and get two at a time until I have ten of them. I place them around the plastic and attempt to drag Lester onto the plastic again. The plastic still rolls up. Shit.

Super glue! That’s it! I go to Lester’s work bench and look for the bin labeled “glue”. He might throw his crap all over the house and leave dirty dishes in the living room, but he’s a regular neat freak when it cam to his work bench. I find the bin and there are about five different glues in it; cement glue, wood glue, sealants. I find five tubes of Superglue. They’re pretty tiny. Maybe they’ll be enough. I uncap one and spread a thin line of the glue onto the concrete floor. Then I take an edge of the plastic and hold it down on the glue for a minute. I try to pull it up and it sticks! About time something went right. When this is over I’m so going to go to Panama City for the weekend.

I go around the perimeter edge of the plastic, one foot at a time and secure it to the floor. When I’m on the last two feet I try to pull my hands away from the plastic and can’t. I glued my hands down. Don’t panic. I pull and feel my skin ripping against the plastic. It hurts like a bitch. I plop on my ass, my hands plastered fast in front of me. I pull again. Again the ripping on my skin. Lester’s neck somehow turned when I was moving him around and he is staring at me. Shithead. I pull again. Nothing. I bend down and rip the plastic with my teeth until I am free from the floor but still glued to the plastic. I gnaw between the sheet. Now I can move my hands, but I have two sheets of plastic stuck to them. It’s okay. They look kind of look like gloves. Might keep my fingerprints off things.

I get Lester on the sheeting and undress him. His clothes are bloody, but I can probably get it all out and donate them to Goodwill. I put them in the washing machine, fill it with Tide and that Oxy shit stuff they sell on T.V, and close the lid. I look over at Lester. His dick looks like one of those German sausages they sell in the processed meat aisle at the Piggly Wiggly. It’s shriveled and gray. Not as tasty though. I know that for a fact.

Got get Lester into tinier pierces. I start with his legs. I figure those will the hardest. I remember when I was back in tenth grade Mr. Williams, the history, teacher told us how doctors back in the Civil War would amputate legs with hand saws. I figure if they could do it, so can I. At least Lester won’t be squirming around. It takes about two hours to saw through the legs and then saw them into four more pieces. I had to use the wire cutters a few times for some tendons and muscle that were a bit stubborn, but I did it! I am staving to death. I strip off my bloody clothes, go to the bathroom and get in the shower. The blood runs off my hands and arms and whirls down the drain in pale pink ribbons. When I am fairly certain I have most of the blood off my body, I dry off and go into the kitchen. I am still naked, but I’ll be damned if I will ruin any more clothes because of Lester. I make a bologna sandwich with mustard and eat it so fast I’m not even sure I chew. I open the liter bottle of Dr. Pepper and gulp it down, warm.

Time to finish this job. Getting Lester’s head and arms off is easy. Takes less time than the legs. I pile Lester’s parts in the middle of the plastic sheet and cut it free from the concrete floor. I fold the plastic over and then duct tape it all together. I use an entire roll of that silver duct tape Lester swears could fix anything from a washing machine hose to my vibrator. I go into the bathroom and soak my hands in nail polish remover. I inch the plastic away from the glue on my hands a bit at time. But I ruined the manicure I got yesterday at the Curl Up and Dye. After about an hour of sitting on the bathroom floor working diligently, I get most of the plastic off. Only tiny strips remain here and there. The bathroom reeks of nail polish remover, I used up two entire bottles.

I take another shower. This time being careful to get good and clean. I wash my hair, condition it, and then dry off. I put on my makeup and blow dry my hair. I blink in the mirror. More mascara. I apply another coat and then go through three outfits. The jeans make my ass look big, the green top has a stain on it. I finally settle on the cute black jumpsuit I bought at J. C Penny’s. I look hot in it. Lester always thought so. I add a wide red belt and slip on my red flats, the ones with the silver buckles. Now to get Lester in the car.

It’s getting dark. Another two hours and I can get this done and get to bed. I head out the front door and back the Chevy Tahoe as close as I can get without actually hitting the garage door. I push the button on the outside wall that opens the garage door. It squeals on its rusty wheels. We hardly ever open it. I go out and back the Tahoe into the garage until only the nose is sticking out. I peek around. All clear. This is going good. I open the back of the Tahoe, and drag the duct taped package over. Now how in the hell do I get Lester inside?

I lean up against the Tahoe and think. My eyes fall on Lester’s leaf blower. That’s it! I ransack the work shop cabinets until I find the big box of black leaf bags. I undress and fold my cute outfit over the hood of the Tahoe so it won’t wrinkle. I slip out of my flats. I get the scissors and start cutting away at the duct taped bag holding my dearly deceased husband. I get it open and gingerly place poor Lester’s pieces into the leaf bags. Just a few in each bag. I don’t want the bags to be too heavy to lift. When I finish, I duct tape the bags closed and go take another shower. I have taken so many showers and baths today I feel waterlogged. I rewash my hair, recondition it, reapply my makeup and blow dry my hair. I squirt some Poison perfume on for added measure, then pad out naked to the garage and get dressed again. This time I can heft the bags into the back of the truck. I finish loading the bags, go get my purse, lock the doors to the house, and pull the Tahoe out. Last, I hit the button on the key ring to close the garage door. The mess in the garage and house will have to wait until later.

I drive to Mama and Daddy’s house making sure to keep under the speed limit. It’d be a bitch to get pulled over, especially if it was by that gossipy deputy, Horace. If I was arrested for murder the whole town would know by sundown. The paved road turns to dirt and the Tahoe’s shocks bounce and stutter. Finally Mama and Daddy’s house comes into view. An old farmhouse that’s been in the family for years. A barn, horse pasture, chicken coops, and far away from the house out back are the hog pens. Mama’s car isn’t here. Good.

I go into the house and holler, “Daddy?” Daddy comes out of the kitchen wiping his grease stained hands on a cloth. When I see him I start to sob again. “Oh, daddy.” I wail.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?.” He asks. He pulls me into his arms and shushes me.

I look up at him. “Daddy, I did something bad.

“Bad? Sweetpea, you couldn’t ever do anything bad.”

“But I did” I wail. “I killed Lester.”

Daddy stands stupidified for a moment then takes me in his arms again and pats me on the back. “Well, I’m sure he deserved it, baby. Where is he?”

“I sniffle, “In the back of the Tahoe…. in pieces”.

Daddy seems to take this in stride. “Baby girl, I tell you what. Take the Tahoe down to the hog pens. Your Mama’s at the beauty parlor, but she’ll be back soon. Let’s be quick. I’ll meet you down there”.

I bump the truck over the rutted dirt road the mile to the hog pens. I can smell them before I see them. I hear the oinking and snorting of the hogs as soon as I step out of the truck. Daddy drives up in his old pickup. He gets into the Tahoe and backs it up to the pen that holds the largest hogs, the ones almost ready for sale. He opens the back of the Tahoe, grimaces and looks back at me. I shrug. He gets in back and pushes the leaf bags into the hog pen where they land with a dull thunk.

He walks over to me, looks over at the hog pen and says, “Well, that’s that. Won’t be much left in a few hours. Go get some shut eye and I’ll be over after dinner. I’ll tell your Mama I’m going to the pool hall. You and I will get the rest of the mess cleaned up. I’ll bring that new fancy rug shampooer your Mama just bought." he pauses. "There is a mess, isn’t there, honeypie?”

“Yes Daddy” I whimper.

“Okay then". He hitches up his pants. “Be on your way. I’ll be there directly”.

I kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you, Daddy”

“That’s what I’m here for, baby. Now go”.

All the way back home I blast Lynyrd Skynyrd on the C.D player. I punch my arm in the air a few times and yell, “Fuck you, Lester!” It feels good. Daddy will be over later and he’ll help me.

I get home, climb in between the cool sheets on the bed. Before closing my eyes I repeat the words Mama taught me when I was just a little girl.

“Now I lay me down to sleep…..”

The Bitch is Back (musing)

2011-09-28T19:36:00.002-04:00

Living with chronic pain is like living next door to a snarling, pissed off dog that someone has chained, beaten and mistreated. Most of the time he stays on the leash and just growls and snarls when you walk out on your porch. You know he’s there, but you also know the chain is holding him, so he exists in your periphery. But, every once in awhile, the phrase, “Who let the dogs out?” takes on an entirely new meaning and that damned pit breaks the chain or some asshole sets him free and you are left covering your head helplessly while he rips at you. And there’s not really much you can do except wait for someone to come chain him back up again or become so angry you do it yourself. Sometimes this takes quite a while.
     My dog is named “Arthur” (psoriatic arthritis). He’s a mean, sneaky son-of-a-bitch. There are times he curls up in the shade and goes fast to sleep, and all is quiet. He’s harmless and benign when he’s sleeping, and like all sleeping things I eventually forget he’s even there. I go about my business, write, go to work, exercise, travel, and think smugly, “Well, Arthur’s gone”. This thought only occurs during long term remissions though, of which I have had several over the past ten years. For the short term remissions, where I know he has one eye peeking open watching me, and he’s not so very benign, I am scared shitless waiting for him to break free. My arsenal against him is meager: drugs, that often have such bad side effects that I try not to even think about what they are doing to my body over the long term; doctors, who are like a dice game in a back alley with a bunch of hoods (you seldom roll snake eyes, but when you do it’s the best snake eyes you ever rolled); exercise, which is good for me but afterwards can make me feel like a wheezing Pinto on the Cadillac highway if I overexert; support from family, which I know they get tired of doing- hell I wouldn’t want to live with someone who suffers with chronic pain. I know I would be thinking “What a little whiner he/she is”.
     In the past year, Arthur has been more than just a nuisance. I have been going to doctors for months whining and complaining, my body feeling like I’ve gone eight rounds with Evader Holyfield, and generally making my doctors cringe when they see me coming, but all I’m trying to do is communicate the harsh reality that my long remission is over. Arthur has stretched his snarling self awake and he’s really pissed. I’m tired of whining, but I need certain parts of my life back. I want to know how to fight this dog, or dogs (I think I have acquired another to go with Arthur, but I don’t know his name yet). I am ready to kick ass and take names. The pity party is over.
     The dog is off the chain, but after months of covering my head and running directionless around the yard while Arthur bites my ass, I am ready to go “balls to the wall” and find the aluminum baseball bat that will beat him into submission. I used it nine years ago to bash him into unconsciousness. I know it’s still around here somewhere….

And So It Goes (poem)

2011-09-18T13:36:00.000-04:00

And So It Goes

I tore three pieces of fruit from the hanging branches.

One almost overripe in its knowledge of the world;

The second so perfectly formed it created an ache when it touched my lips;

The third so pure, so silent in its ripening redness, showing the blush of promise.

I ate all three.

Chewed them.

Swallowed them.

I tried to hold them in my mouth, but they wouldn’t stay.

Like a wound they bleed out and spread in three directions.

One seeped so far away- carrying its filled self to distant places.

The second curled under my feet, stinging the soles of my feet with the bile

mixed from our two selves.

The third slowly inched away like a silent rain- not wishing harm.

It is early evening.

I stand under the tree.

Three tiny shell white flowers

hold another promise.

But I wither smaller and smaller;

I won’t be able to reach the branches when again they bow.

I settle silently on the prickly grass,

consigned to observe.

Not to speak.

Not to pluck.

Not to eat.

I taste the memory of the fruit

on the tip of my heart.

Teri Coley Adams

September 18, 2011

How "Arthur" entered my life

2011-09-04T13:31:00.001-04:00

      Getting the Hep B vaccine was a huge mistake. Two weeks after getting my first shot I developed a mild case of alopecia; two weeks after that I woke up with intense pain to my breastbone that spread to every tendon in my trunk area; two weeks after that I broke out in a horrible skin eruption on the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands that looked like ant bites. They would blister, pop, then ooze. Afterwards they would crust over and flake away to revel tender not ready for air skin that split and bled. I continued to work, although the pain caused me tp miss a lot of work. I went to doctor after doctor as my body continued to deteriorate
     The boys at the Youth Detention Facility where I worked were curious. They were locked up; the staff often their only source of entertainment and link to the outside world. They wanted to know why I was wearing bandages on my hands (the skin on my palms would break apart and droplets of blood would smear onto my paperwork), why I was walking “funny” (the pain radiated into my hips and vicious spasms would grip my hip muscles in a blinding wall of pain). Some of the more heartless boys would insist, “Someone fucked her good”. I finally collapsed on the floor in my classroom, thankfully while the boys were at lunch, and I was driven home by another teacher. It was two months before I was finally able to go back to work. Two months of doctor visits and pain medicines that left me a dribbling fool, and still pain addled. I was reduced to using a walker part of the time.
      One doctor told me he thought I had M.S. He stuck electrodes in my legs and sent jolts of electricity into my muscles. Not comfortable, but not painful; not productive either. Finally he told me that he wanted to perform a spinal tap. I didn’t go back. One doctor told me it was all in my mind and if I didn’t think I was in pain, I wouldn’t be. Thanks for telling me doc. Let me plummet you with a brick and then you tell me it doesn’t hurt, okay? Fucker.
      9/11 happened. I found myself seated in my living room recliner, barely able to twist my body without debilitating spasms periodically locking my body. I watched the 9/11 news coverage over and over again. I watched the towers crumble. I watched the people run. I watched the tiny figures hurl themselves from one death to another. Grief and helplessness washed over me. The towers falling became personal and reflective of my own crumbling body. The towers came to represent everything I saw as hopeless and nonsensical. I cried so much that my dad came to my house and turned off the television. He told me not to turn it back on for awhile. I complied. I was too worn out with crying not to.
     I spent most of my days in a fog of pain medicines. When the pain became too much to bear and broke through the Loratabs, mom and dad would come to my house, slowly walk me to the car (sometimes half carry me), and drive me to the E.R where a doctor would inject me with demoral. That was the only thing that gave me even brief periods of total release. One doctor who saw me admitted that he really didn’t know what was going on. At least he was honest. He did give me the name of a doctor who he insisted was a great diagnostician. Three weeks later I had a diagnoses that sounded plausible and felt right; psoriatic arthritis. I was put on a cocktail of immune suppressant drugs, placed on a waiting list for a new biologic medicine and I set about trying to incorporate “Arthur” into my life. I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to go back to “my boys” .
     All of that happened over ten years ago. I no longer remember what it feels like to not live with a chronic autoimmune disorder. Some days, mostly the rainy barometric fluctuating ones, I ache with trying to be normal in a world that doesn't understand that this is as normal as I get, and that it isn't faked or contrived, or preconceived. I didn't do this to myself. It wasn't my choice. Why would anyone want this?.
     Did the Hep B virus vaccine cause it? Probably not in itself. Probably a combination of genetics, stress, and the vaccine. Anyway, I can't go back and undo it, so why conjecture?   I live with it, or "Arthur" lives with me. Take your pick. Either way, we are now life life companions, and I will not "go gently into that good night". Nope, I'll fight him, just as I have fought since he arrived. I have a life to live.

excerpt from novel in progress " Miss Kate" (I'm not good with titles...)

2011-09-03T13:43:00.000-04:00

The child sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, balanced on the wicker seating of ladder back kitchen chair. Her name was Sara. More a young woman than child. Just on the tottering rim of adulthood. In the kitchen corner, hunched over a stove that tottered on a slight downward slope, stood a stooped, ancient woman with gray wisps of hair tenderly escaping a thinning bun. She worked wordlessly; patting flour, Crisco, and buttermilk into a kneady mass. Trickles of glistening sweat dotted the skin of her crepe neck and the faded cotton housedress stuck to her underarms where wetness bloomed like roses. The sounds of a pig snorting and the smell of chicken shit drifted through the lone rusted screen covered window.

The old woman, Miss Kate, pressed the flour mixture in the bowl, while Sara watched silently waiting. The old woman was the only friend she had in the small Georgia town. A month ago her mother has packed a few of their belongings in three large black suitcases in the dead of the night while Sara’s father had slept . Her mother had called for a cab, and they had taken the Amtrak all the way from Texas to this dusty sleepy town where her mother’s “people” were from.

Miss Kate stopped working the dough, and squinted at Sara. “What you want, girl? A story? Lord, child, you the most story starved person I ever seen. Why don’t you watch the T.V like other young’uns?” The old woman sighed, turned back to the comforting, mindless work of pressing dough and began to speak.

“I been in this here house for over seventy years. Been sitting on my front porch all that time too. That’s on and off. I mean, I don’t stay out there on the porch all the time, just when the weather is good and the sun is warm on these old bones of mine. Yessir, I reckon I done rocked a million miles already and if the Lord be willing, I’ll rock a million more. Might be I’m the oldest person in these parts. I’ve seen a lot of going ons in all my years. Things people don’t even know I see. But I see, yessir, I see, and I keep my mouth shut. I don’t truck none with all them flap gum women in town who tell everything they know, and some they don’t know. Take a bit of advice from me, young’un: Gossip is like an ole biddy hen that will eat corn out of your hand one minute and peck you on the ass the next. I’m too old to be pecked, so I keep things to myself.

Most people think I’m deaf as a doorknob, but I ain’t. I hear right good, only I don’t let them know it. I heard you when you walked up today didn’t I? Use to be, when people thought I could still hear they’d come around at all hours of the day and night for advice. I reckon they thought since I’m just about as old as God, I might have some answers for them. I don’t. So I just started pretending I couldn’t hear ‘em and directly they stopped coming around. I like my peace and quiet”.

Miss Kate looked back. She waggled a dough encrusted finger in Sara’s direction. “I’ve always kept the dirt in my yard nice and swept. That’s something I take pride in. No matter how old I get, that yard’s gonna be swept good each morning. That’s what I was doing the day Davey Masterson and his new bride moved in next door”.

Sara squirmed. “Who were they, Miss Kate?”

Miss Kate let out a loud sigh. “That’s the trouble with you young’uns. Always interrupting. Can’t learn much until you first learn how to listen. Want me to finish this story or not?”

Sara didn’t answer. Only pulled her arms tighter over her legs and promised herself she wouldn’t interrupt again.

“They weren’t nothing but young’uns. Not much older then you, Texas. Davey was all of eighteen and that little Velma weren’t but sixteen. Davey worked over at the mill on the night shift. He’d come home each morning around 7:15 covered in lint ‘cause he worked the loom room. He was a sweet boy, even if he did seem to be thick as a brick in the head. That first morning after they moved in, I was out sweeping my yard and he walked right up to the fence and handed me a little paper bag.

“I seen you dipping your snuff Miss Kate and since I go by Walt’s store on the way home I thought you might like this.”

He was shuffling his feet in the dirt. I opened that bag up and there tucked inside was a red and white tin of C&C snuff. My brand, alright. I told that boy that I appreciated it, and told him how hard it was for me to walk down to Walt’s sometimes.

‘Weren’t nothing Miss Kate. I use to buy it for my grandma all the time.’

I told him, ‘Let me pay you’, but he only shook his head and said, ‘Oh, no ma’am. This one’s on me. You can next time.’

And that’s just what I done. Every Monday morning Davey would walk up to the fence and tell me how good the yard was looking and hand me that little paper bag. I always had the money ready in my apron pocket. He was a good boy. That’s about the only time I ever saw Davey. Didn’t see his little wife much. She kept in the house and didn’t never sweep her yard. I can only imagine what the house must have looked like inside. Never smelt no side meat, cornbread, or turnip greens cooking. I don’t think she was much in the way for housekeeping. She was pretty though. Had hair the color of golden corn and the bluest eyes you ever did see. Not that old blue that looks all milky and weak, but blue the color of violets. Deep, deep blue. She was a little bitty thing. Didn’t weigh no more than 100 pounds soaking wet. She wasn’t skinny though. Had good birthing hips on her for such a tiny girl. When she walked it was like the air parted for her.

She was delicate but you could tell that underneath there was a distractibility to her that Davey didn’t see. She never spoke to me, even though I called out “Hey” over the fence a time or two when I’d see her carrying in groceries or whatever. No, Davey never did see the other side in her until it was too late. He was devoted to his little Velma. Always came home straight after work and always handed her his paycheck on Friday. He didn’t go out drinking all weekend either. Whenever there was overtime at the mill, Davey was the first to volunteer. Told me one time that he wanted to save up so he could buy Velma a little house in town with a white fence and blue gingham curtains in the window. He loved that girl. I didn’t doubt it then and I don’t doubt it now.”

Miss Kate paused, spit a dribbling stream of snuff into a tissue stuffed can placed decisively on the kitchen counter and then continued, “After about two years, I started noticing things. I’d sit and rock, take a dip, spit in my cup, and watch. Not much changed on the outside. Not much that anybody else would notice, but I did. First there was the music. Davey had bought Velma a little radio. She didn’t play it much in the daytime when Davey was sleeping, but at night after he had left for work, lord that radio would go on all night long! I can’t tell you how many times I sat on my front porch and watched as she sashayed around like one of them dancing girls in her living room. Her windows would be wide open and that music would float out like that sweet perfume from the wisteria does. Velma liked that country music. She was always singing along to one of them radio singers. She had a pretty good voice too. I’d see her whirling around that living room while she sang her little heart out. I remember the words to one of them songs. Let’s see now. ‘It was just one of those things. Just one of those crazy flings”. Of course, she sang it better. Velma sounded so lonely when she was singing, even when it was a snappy song. Maybe she was just lonesome for her kin. She was from up around Atlanta and didn’t get to see her people much. But lonesome don’t account for that low down Ben Watson that she took to sneaking into the house after Davey had gone to work. Guess that little radio wasn’t enough company for her. Maybe it was all them cheatin’ songs she had been hearing on the radio that made it seem alright.

Ben Watson was a snake. He was a hard drinking man who had that bad boy charm that young girls find hard to resist sometimes. He had hair like coal tar and was tall. So tall! Must of been 6’5”. He had a pretty smile with white even teeth, that is when he took a notion to smile. And talk! That man could of talked a hog into the chitlin’ pot. He drove a brand new Chevy that he bought from Harold’s Chevy place out near Macon. I heard them commercials on the radio. Ben made decent money working for the D.O.T. Heard one time he was also running moonshine for Cap Adams and his boys.

One time I seen Ben threatening Miss Marshall ‘cause she was behind on her furniture payment with Brusters Furniture Co. He made an extra buck or two sometimes running down delinquent bills for the local businesses who didn’t have the gumption to do it themselves. I seen him clear as day that morning standing on the porch, yelling at poor Miss Marshall that if she didn’t have the payment by next Thursday there weren’t no telling what kind of fox might get in her hen house and have himself a high ole feast. Miss Marshall’s hen house was the only income she had in the whole wide world. She sold eggs and fryers to Grathams’ Grocery. Them hens had caught some kind of spell and hadn’t been laying for about two weeks.

Miss Marshal was crying and begging Ben to give her another week. Said she was expecting some money to come in the mail from her boy up in Birmingham.

‘Just don’t hurt my hens,’ she cried. Ben just glared at her and looked innocent all of a sudden. Miss Marshall told me later that Ben had siddled up real close to her and whispered with his hot breath in her ear, ‘Why, Miss Marshall, I’d never hurt your ole hens. I was just saying that I heard there was an egg eating fox on the loose. I was just warning you to watch out.”

Then he winked at her and strolled away. Winked, I tell ya! Don’t know about a man who would threaten the means of an old widow woman, but that was Ben for you. I heard tell that before he went to work for the D.O.T that he had spent time in Jackson for armed robbery, but I couldn’t ever get the story straight enough to say if I believed it or not. Probably true. Like I said, he was a snake. And that old snake got into Davey’s house before you could say boo!

I seen Ben the first time he come sniffing around Velma. She was carrying groceries up the walk and he pulled that shiny Chevy up by the curb, throwing dust every which a way, and hollered out the window, ‘What’s a pretty thing like you doing carrying them heavy bags?’ Velma turned white as a sheet and hurried on in the house like a wasp had gotten into her bloomers. That car took to driving by the house after Davey had gone to work. Ben would stop in front of Velma’s house and rev that motor up loud. It’d be so loud it’d scare Miss Marshall’s chickens to death and they’d start squawking. Velma would peek through the curtains and Ben would wave and rev that car up more. Then when he was satisfied that Velma had gotten her eyes full he’d scream off down the street burning rubber from here to the mill. Pretty soon, Velma got where she’d come out to the porch and wave back. Stupid girl! No more sense then a flea bitten bitch in heat.

Wish I could of warned her but she didn’t take to me and maybe wouldn’t have listened. Many time at night before I fall asleep I wish I had of at least tried to warn her. Maybe things would have turned out different. About two weeks later I saw them together. Velma was getting out of Ben’s car and he was carrying her bags up to the door for her. She kept looking around to see who might be watching. She looked guilty as Eve, but I don’t think at that time she had anything to feel guilty about. That didn’t come `til later.

I did notice something that day though that was real out of the ordinary. You see, Velma didn’t go in much for bright colors. All her dresses was light blue, light yellow, or some other pale color. That day though, she had a bright orange and red silk scarf tight around her neck. It looked kind of ridiculous. Didn’t go at all with her little pink and white checkered dress. The next week I went into the hospital with pleurisy and when I got home, six days later, ole Ben was set up like stink on shit with that pretty little Velma. Don’t know what all happened while I was in the hospital getting poked and prodded, but whatever it was, Ben had worked his charm and was using that girl just like he used all his women. Only this time, he had tangled himself up with a married woman. A married woman with a crazy in love husband. I always said you have to watch out for the quiet ones like Davey.

It was getting on summertime and I’d sit out on the porch and try and catch a breeze or two in the late evenings. I’d burn rags in an old oil barrel to keep the mosquitoes and gnats away. Didn’t always work though. Being summer time, it didn’t get dark `til about nine or so, and the street was always full of young’uns playing kick the can or riding ole chinaberry branches pretending to be Tom Mix. Davey got to where he’d come over to the fence to say hey before he went to work at the mill. Started seeming to me like Davey’s heart wasn’t into going to work. He never said nothing, not to me anyways, but there was a sadness in his eyes. One morning, as he was coming from work, he stopped at my gate.

He asked me, ‘You ever been married Miss Kate?’.

I told him, ‘Sure was, Davey. For thirty years, up until I lost him ten years ago. Me and Jasper had some good times together, but marriage can be hard, Davey.’

He got a right peculiar look on his face and asked me. ‘Why’s it got to be hard?’

I thought a moment and told him. ‘Don’t know. Maybe God is just playing with us, boy’.”

“Davey turned to go, but not before he said, ‘I wish to hell he’d stop playing with me.’ That’s the only thing he ever said that gave a notion to the fact that he knew what was going on between Velma and Ben. Maybe he knew it was Ben, and maybe he didn’t, but he knew something was up. You see, that Velma had got right bold. She had the fever bad for Ben. Davey wouldn’t no sooner be gone for the night shift and I’d hear that new Chevy pulling up behind Velma’s house. Not long after that the back door would slam and the lights in the house would go off. Thought they was being sneaky. They thought nobody knew. Some nights my head gets all swimmy and I can’t sleep. On those nights I go out on the porch take a dip of snuff and sit in the dark and rock and spit. One night I heard laughter coming from next door and saw Ben coming around the house buck ass naked with Velma hot on his trail. Her hair tied up in that bright orange and red scarf. They was playing like young’ uns. Another night they fought and Velma followed him out on the porch begging him to come back. Said she wouldn’t ask no more questions. About what I don’t know. He told her to shush before they woke the whole damn street, and then he followed her back in the house. I didn’t hear nothing else from them that night.

In the morning, I went over to ask Velma if she had a cup of flour so I could make some hoe cakes for breakfast and when she answered the door I saw she had a bruise on her cheek. She mumbled something about running into the door. I knew that weren’t true, but I didn’t say nothing, just took my flour, went home, cooked up them hoe cakes, soaked ‘em in cane syrup, and minded my own business.

Velma started coming and going more in the daytime when Davey was sleeping. I knew she weren’t doing her grocery shopping ‘cause I never saw her with no groceries in her arms when she came home. She always came home about an hour before Davey got up. She’d come home either dancing down the street or looking like her world had ended. Talk was starting to get around, too. I heard them talking in the Piggly Wiggly and the Post Office about Velma. People in town was saying some right ugly things about Velma, but you’d have thought it would have been Ben they was saying ugly things about, but it weren’t. The man don’t ever get the blame when it comes to town talk. Why you reckon it’s that way?”

Sara shifted. “I don’t know, Miss Kate”.

“Well I don’t neither” She cocked her head and listened with intensity, “Lord that ole pig out there’s gonna root himself straight to China”. Miss Kate laughed.

Sara unfolded her legs, pushed out of the chair, walked over to the window, and peered out into the dirt yard. Sure enough Daisy was digging up a nice piece of the yard with her snout and front hoofs.

Sara turned back around and leaned against the window.

Miss Kate’s hands stopped working the dough, and her eyes focused beyond the faded blue pattern of the kitchen wallpaper. “I don’t know if Velma had many friends and those she did have kind of quit coming around. She was so wrapped up in Ben Watson, she couldn’t have seen the sun if she hadn’t felt it shining directly on her face.

I think that Velma and Ben was planning on running off together. That’s what the rest of the town thought too. I’d been overhearing talk at church and at the Piggly Wiggly. With all that talk, it was only a matter of time before Davey found out. Three months had gone by and I got to noticing that Velma wasn’t hanging out as many of her underclothes at mid month like she always done. Usually around the fifteenth of the month that clothesline would be full of her white step-ins flapping in the wind.”

Sara interrupted, “Miss Kate, what do underclothes have to do with anything?”

“Lord, child, underclothes has a lot to do with a lot. You see, most women still wore them bulky pads during their monthlies. We didn’t have no Tampons , like you got today, and if we did, nobody bought them much. Them pads back then were bad about not catching everything, if you know what I mean, and when a woman had her monthly, naturally her underclothes got messed up a bit. Well, of course, this meant more clothes to wash. More underclothes hanging on the line. Know what I’m talking about?”

Sara nodded, “Yes’m. Velma was pregnant. Whose was it? Davey’s or Ben’s?”

Miss Kate shook her head, “Guess we’ll never know. Guess we’ll never know for certain if she was even with child, but it was mighty peculiar about the mid-month wash.”

“What happened, then?” Sara asked.

“Well, I got a bad toothache one night. Couldn’t sleep to save my soul. Got up and crushed up some aspirin to put on my tooth. It was a Monday night too. I remember because Davey had brought over my snuff that morning before he went in to bed. I seen him leave for work about nine thirty that night ‘cause I was outside on the porch talking to Miss Marshall. She was having a time with that son of hers. He had come back from Detroit and was causing all kinds of problems. Didn’t a month go by but that Miss Marshall wasn’t calling the Sheriff to cart that boy off to the jail to sleep off a drunk.” Miss Kate shook her head at the memory.

She scooped up another handful of dough out of the bowl, rolled it into a neat ball and placed the dough ball on a beat up aluminum pizza pan. She spit into the snuff can, wiped her hands on the rag tied around her waist, and continued with the story.

“Davey walked out of gate that night, stooped and looked back at his house all mournful like. He didn’t even call out good evening to me the way he usually did before he set off to work. Just stared at that house of his, put his head down, tucked his lunch sack under his arm, and walked off slowly towards the mill. It was a nice summer night. I remember that. I sat out until about ten o’clock with Miss Marshal, then she said she had to get home. She had brought me a jar of that blackberry jelly she used to make. I went to bed right after that but got up again around three in the morning because that toothache struck, so I went back out on the porch to sit ‘til it wore off. There wasn’t no body in sight. All the houses on the mill was dark. Every once in a while I’d hear a cat fighting or a hoot owl hooting from the trees by the river. It got so quiet that you could hear the humming of the street lamps. My tooth had just started easing of a little when I heard Ben’s car pull up behind in the alley way. Velma’s back door slammed shut. That snake had slithered back, alright. I heard a dog bark down the block, then another, and another. That don’t happen unless someone’s walking the street after everyone has gone in for the night. I thought I saw a shadow of a man creep up on the side of Davey’s house. I got kinda scared. Thought maybe I ought to try and make my way across the street to Miss Marshall’s house and call the police from her phone. I didn’t have no telephone. The windows was wide open at Davey’s so the night breeze could travel through. The back door slammed again and I heard Ben’s voice from inside the house and then, to my surprise, Davey’s. He only spoke one word real loud, and I knowed it was him. He said, ‘Why?’. That’s all. Just that one word. But that one word carried more weight and sorrow in it than any I had ever heard. Velma started crying a little. Not loud sobs, just little girl whimpers. Ben hollered out one time, Velma screamed, but then it’s like the scream just died off before it really got started. Then it all grew quiet again. It all happened so fast that if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I imagined it all. Davey came out on his porch, sat on the steps and cried like a baby. He never knew I was sitting in the shadows on my porch, not more then seventy feet away from him. That boy’s hurt traveled all the way across my yard and hit me right in the marrow of my bones. Directly, he got up and went into the house. The back door slammed four times, then the sound of a trunk being closed by someone who thought they was being quiet, and then the engine on Ben’s Chevy roared. I heard the car take off. About two hours later, I saw Davey walking down the street. By this time, the sun was casting the beginnings of pink wake up rays on the street. Davey walked up to his porch and went inside, but not before he turned my way and said, ‘Good morning, Miss Kate. How you doing?’. I told him I was doing fine, thank you, and he went into the house. The next night Davey got up as usual, got dressed and walked down to the mill for the night shift. All was normal for about a week and then one day the Sheriff pulls up at Davey’s. Before he went to talk to Davey, he sauntered up to my house with that gun slung low on his hip like he thought he was Bat Masterson or something. ‘Hello, Miss Kate,’ he said to me, ‘I need to ask you something.’ I was out in the yard planting that wisteria you see wrapped around that oak tree there. ‘You seen Velma lately?’ he asked.

I pretended to think for a minute.

“Well, not lately. I did see her one day last week when she was hanging out wash. Come to think of it I haven’t heard her radio playing in a while either.”, I told him.

The Sheriff squinted down the road and then lit up a cigarette. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he spoke.

‘Thanks for your help.’

He started to leave but I stopped him.

I asked him, ‘Sheriff what’s the matter?’

He chewed on a toothpick in his mouth for a second and then told me, ‘Oh, probably ain’t nothing,’ he said, ‘Her folks called from Forsyth and said they hadn’t heard from her. They’re just a little concerned. They talked to Davey on the phone, but they wanted me to come by the house and check on things. Davey told them he hadn’t seen her. I wouldn’t worry about it none, Miss Kate. You know how things go sometimes.’

I told him I sure did know and to let me know if there was anything I could do to help.

He told me to just call the station if I happened to see anything, but he also said he didn’t thinking I would.

The sheriff left and walked over to Davey’s. I don’t know what he and Davey talked about, but whatever it was, it must have satisfied that Sheriff ‘cause he didn’t come around no more. A few days later at the Piggly Wiggly I heard Miss Juanita tell Betty Ann Miller that Velma and Ben had run off together and wasn’t it sad about poor old Davey?

Davey worked at the mill for another two years, then he met a girl from around Augusta that he ended up marrying. Last I heard he was running her daddy’s auto parts store and doing pretty good. Nobody ever saw nor heard from Ben and Velma again. My money says that if you were to go to the old sawmill and dig around where they use to pile the saw mill shavings you’d find two bleached out skeletons, and that one of them would still be wearing a tattered orange and red silk scarf around its neck. That’s just what I think though. But I’m just an old woman, so what do I know?”

Sara was silent for a long time. Miss Kate didn’t say a word either.

“Why didn’t you tell? Sara asked. “I mean that’s murder. That’s wrong. You should have told somebody what you heard that night”.

Miss Kate looked at her a long time then quietly said, . “I don’t know. I don’t know why I never told. I should have, I reckon. Life’s full of a lot of should haves. Too late now.”

“But why didn’t you tell the Sheriff what you had heard?”, Sara asked again.

“I don’t know, child! Lord. It wasn’t something that I thought about. When that Sheriff came up and asked me, I didn’t know what to say. And afterwards… well. And I did like Davey. Still and all, Davey probably killed Velma and Ben. Later, after I thought about it, it just seemed better to let sleeping dogs sleep. Reckon when I go sit at Judgment Day, God will have a thing or two to say to me about it.”

“Married people don’t really do that anymore, do they?”

Miss Kate laughed, “Yes, but they do it in court now. They drag all their dirty laundry out, use the young’uns as weapons, and take each other for everything they can. Some people can be civilized about it, but not all. Worse than killing someone, I reckon.”

“Think my mamma and daddy will be civiilized if they get a divorce? They barely speak to each other now.”

“Well, if they ain’t civilized, you just call Miss Kate and I’ll straighten them out.”

“They never even look at each other anymore”

Miss Kate reached out her hand and ran it through Sara’s lank brown hair.” Well, Texas, your mama and daddy sound like they got some troubles that don’t have nothing to do with you. Things’ll work out. Don’t you worry. Just let them decide what’s best for them, and then it’ll get better for you too.”

“I know, Mama told me that right before we came out here.”

“Then believe it. Believe it and do the best you can. At least they won’t end up doing something crazy like Davey done. Things were so different back then. Times have changed a little. I always thought that if Davey had felt like the town wouldn’t have labeled him a coward, he would have just let Velma and Ben run off together and wished them good riddance. Back then though a man had to think about his reputation. Davey didn’t want anyone’s pity, so he took the only way out that he knew and then started over. There’s a mite fine line between love and hate.”

Sara sighed. “That’s sad what happened to Davey and Velma.”

Miss Kate bowed her head, closing her eyes for a brief moment in what looked to Sara like prayer. After a moment the old woman turned back to the dough and finished rolling it into half a dozen little soft balls. She placed them haphazardly on the cookie sheet, opened the oven door, and placed the pan inside. She wedged a dishcloth just inside the oven door before she closed it.

“Oven don’t close like it used to. I guess a lot of us don’t”.

Sara went home that night and dreamt about white rounded clouds, sad songs, lies, and doors wedged shut with pretend smiles.

Who Wins?

2011-09-01T19:16:00.000-04:00

I am a high school English teacher. I work on an average of 10 to 11 hour days. During prom, homecoming, football games, parent nights, it is not unusual for me to put in 15 or more hours a day, none of which I am paid for. There is no overtime pay for teachers. There is no forgiveness. There is no understanding. In the past five years I have become America’s number one enemy.

I spend most of my weekend hours at home consumed with creating detailed lesson plans that the administration picks apart with a fine toothed comb, murdered with red penned slashes due my "verbage" and “warm up activities”. I live in fear that an administrator will walk in my classroom to evaluate me while Linda is having a meltdown or Harold is making farting noises and doesn’t have his eyes trained on his “group activity”. Evaluations: perfunctory and punitive according to some pre-tailored checklist that don't incorporate a check box or standard for farting Harold.

I love “my” kids, I nurture them, I laugh with them, I cry with them. I hug them, I help them, I encourage them, I listen to them. I cheer when they succeed and mourn when they have a baby while they themselves are still babies of 15, and/or drop out of high school. I am baffled daily by their lack of base knowledge, their lack of reading skills, their lack of social skills, yet I am blamed for all of their deficiencies. They are passed to me from their parents, their pre-schools, their elementary schools, their middle schools, and I must sink or swim according to their deficiencies or talents. I have nowhere to pass them to. The so called buck stops with me. I am trained to teach to the median student because they are the ones who have a higher chance of passing the standardized test (one test from which all of the glory or guts is hung). Those students achieving below standards are “remediated” in a fast paced, whirlwind gluttony of regurgitatable information. Those students who exceed the standards are left to drown in their tears of tedium in the back corner of the classroom filling in multiple choice bubbles. Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) is the unattainable Holy Grail of 21st century education.

I am tired to death of reading how bad teachers are, how overpaid we are, how many holidays we get. I am tired beyond death of educational jargon like “NCLB”, “standardized testing”, “unpacking the standards”, “AYP”, and “differentiation”, when they are little more than buzz words constructed by high paid educational consultants and lawmakers who know nothing about MY students or any other student in the real world. You want to talk political doublespeak? Education in America is crammed with more doublespeak than politics could ever dream of on their best doublespeak day.

I want to thrash those who parrot the uninformed belief that teachers are riding a gravy train. What with our glamorous pensions (60% of pay after 30 years- if we make it that long), our wondrous health care benefits (premiums jump every year, benefits go down, and co pays and deductibles increase), and our relaxing summers off (eight weeks, of which two are spent in professional development and six spent furthering our own educations), it’s a mystery to me why anyone wouldn’t want incur to thousands upon thousands of dollars in student loan debt to climb aboard this golden train while it’s still running.

And what about the out of pocket expenses it costs for a teacher to just to walk into a classroom? I buy at the very least $400.00 worth of school materials a year. I supply pencils, pens, paper, hand sanitizer, Band-Aids, notebooks, folders, snacks, and contact lens solution to students. I buy my own posters for bulletin boards. I buy my own staplers and staples. I buy paper clips. I buy erasers and copy paper. I scour garage sales and flea markets so I can furnish books for students whose parents have never taken them inside a book store. I give away me. I don’t ask for recognition. I don’t want much. But neither do I want to be vilified by a media saturated populace who know nothing about the day to day workings of America’s schools or education system.
Teaching is one of the most stressful, demanding professions there is. According to Dr. Stephen J. Walsh, assistant professor of community medicine and health care at the University of Connecticut Health Center at the School of Medicine, high school teachers have a 143% higher chance of contracting an autoimmune disorder than any other profession. High stress levels are one of the contributing factors of autoimmune disorders. Yes, sounds like a real gravy train to me. I wonder why more people in the private sector aren’t jumping aboard?

Teachers are pulled between the love for our content and our students, the demands of administration (most who have never set foot in a classroom), and educational laws and policies. We stand by helplessly as our students fall further and further behind in basic skills, knowledge, and critical thinking abilities. We muddle through curriculum devised by “experts” and regretfully push into dark corners those sparkful, creative moments because they are not part of the “standards”.

After 12 years, I have decided to leave teaching. I want to curl up and mourn for “my” kids that I will be walking out on, but I am beat; literally and figuratively. They won. All those “experts” won. The policy makers won. The administrators won. All those who berated me to teach the test; continually canceled my after school tutoring on a minute’s notice because a faculty meeting was more important than my students; made it impossible for the school athletes to gain extra writing assistance because after school practice needed to win the Friday night game was more important; reprimanded me because my Word Wall was not “interactive; walked in my class and sneered because my standards were not worded verbatim on the board, and in doing so failed to notice the light shining in my kids’ eyes after reading JFK’s inauguration speech; insisted that I do not teach literature but standards while I stood my ground and argued back, "I teach literature"; sat back and piled illogical educational policy upon illogical educational policy; and did nothing to counteract the media witch hunt aimed at teachers everyday. They won. My students lost. I lost.

But, I will always be a teacher. They can’t take that away from me.

Fuck Cancer

2011-08-28T17:24:00.000-04:00

Fuck Cancer

When Scott told me he had cancer, my fingertips went numb. What popped out of my mouth was not planned: “But, you’re too cute to have cancer”. He shrugged and said, “I know”. The quiet closed in. Our fingers circled the stems of cut wine glasses. The Georgia heat bowed the trees and the cicadas droned on as if nothing had changed. The sweat dripped down my neck and the wicker chair cut into the back of my knees. And he had cancer.

Three weeks ago. All that happened three weeks ago. Now chemotherapy, radiation, biopsies, stages, are all part of his new vocabulary. He never planned for his vocabulary to increase in exactly this way. He’s pissed off, I know. I’m pissed off for him, for his family, for his friends, and for me. This crap hit right out of a dark corner like a New York City cab.

Scott is a young forty-six years old, his eyes as blue as the Pacific Blue in the Crayola box. He still looks like a young boy in many ways. The way his eyes flicker brighter when he’s getting ready to say something others would consider crude or rude. The way his head dips to the side a little when he knows that his listener has suddenly found himself/herself a victim of his intended shock, like a prizefighter jabbing a quick left that isn’t expected. The way he sometimes unexpectedly hugs me; small gifts parceled out that I tuck away. The way he has fathered, and continues to father, an amazing young woman. The way he has exhibited an unprecedented gentleness and love with those he has taken care of in their time of illness.

And now? The way he’s facing a son-of-a-bitch war, scared, pissed, but determined.

There will be many battles in this war. I’ll keep count of the ones he wins. I know how damn tough he is- he’ll win most of them. I have to admit, it’s the war itself that I’m worried about. I want to give him an AK-47 or a rocket launcher, maybe a nuclear warhead thrown in for good measure. I want this war to be one that is in his hands, but it’ll largely be in the hands of radiologists, oncologists, and surgeons. They will burn his skin, pump drugs in his system that will make him sick, and cut into him in an effort to excise the demon. But I know him. He will throw a few pity parties. He will cry a little, bitch a lot, and make a lot of off color, dark jokes that will make most people uncomfortable.

But as long as he’s saying “fuck cancer” and is bitching and throwing back a few Bailey’s in his coffee I know he’ll be okay in the long run. After all, he’s made me laugh for years and amazed me with his totally gritty attitude towards the human condition, so he can't go anywhere. He hasn’t shocked me enough.

Saddle up, my friend. It’s gonna be a bumpy fucked up ride, but I love you.

Another Flash Fiction Friday: One Night Stand

2011-07-24T17:25:00.000-04:00

Prompt: STARTER SENTENCE: “I slowly peeled back my eyelids and immediately wished I was still out for the count”
Genre: Open
Word Count: 1500 words
Deadline: Thursday, July 28, 2011, 8:30 pm EST

I slowly peeled back my eyelids and immediately wished I was still out for the count. My eyes felt like they had had sand thrown in them, my throat burned, and my head throbbed with a dull thunder. A ceiling came into focus. White, wide decorative cornices, a wicker bladed ceiling fan rotated overhead. I turned my head and red numbers shone: 2:34. Morning or afternoon? I didn’t know. I felt coarse sheets against my body. I was naked, or “nekkid” as my grandmother used to say. I wiggled my toes. I still had my calf length stockings on. A grunt startled me. The top portion of a head peeked out from under the sheets beside me. The previous night started coming into bleary focus.

A night out with the girls. A packed nightclub, pulsating strobe lights, throbbing music, a dance floor packed with sweating gyrating bodies, one too many shots of tequila, dancing on a table. A table? Crap. Okay, calm, down. What happened next? Where was I? Who was this person beside me? Okay, think. I closed my eyes willing the memories to form. Last thing I remembered was pulling off my black strapped high heel and throwing it into the street while I giggled and leaned against.. who? . My Jimmy Choo heel! Dammit! I loved those shoes. Think harder. My mouth tasted like an ashtray. What the hell? I didn’t smoke. I was beginning to feel like a character in a Twilight Zone episode.

The person beside me moaned. Please, please, please don’t let him wake up. It was a “him” wasn’t it? I sniffed. Yeah. Man sweat. It was a man. Plus the form under the sheets was too bulky to be a girl. Next problem: how to get home. Nettie had driven and I had no idea where I was, much less where Nettie was. My cell phone was on the table next to the bed. I slowly reached for it, flicked it opened and started scrolling through missed calls. There were two: both from Rob. No voice messages waiting. I had put the phone on silent for some reason. Why? Only time I ever did that was when Rob and I could find precious time, between his working and me taking care of three kids under the age of six, to make love.

I had picked up a stranger in a bar. I was a slut. Oh my God, I thought. I’m a slut. Me. Go-to-church-every-Sunday, volunteer-for-snacks-at-the-pre-school, take-the kids-to-ballet-and-baseball, scrub-the-grime-off-the-baseboards, bake-cupcakes-on-Sundays me. Now, here I am naked in bed, in God knows where, with God knows who. Did we use a condom? I leaned over the bed and looked around on the light blue carpet. No sign of a disposed condom. I’m sure we weren’t in any condition to be neat and throw it in the bath trash can. I might have gonorrhea or syphilis or AIDS. Don’t think about it.

I had to get up. Had to get home. I started edging towards the edge of the bed, cell phone clutched tight. The person next to me shifted. I stopped and held my breath. I really didn’t want any stilted, we-just-fucked-but-I-don’t-remember-a-thing conversation. I just wanted to get the hell out and pretend this never happened. The room looked like a hotel. Stark, impersonal. If I could find my clothes and get dressed I could sneak downstairs and call a cab. I waited a minute, two minutes. The person next to me relaxed. His breathing evened out. I slithered out of bed like a snake until I was crouched on the floor beside the bed. I peeked over the edge. He hadn’t moved. I crawled on my hands and knees and found my bra under the bed. I slipped it on while still crouching. My panties? Where were they? I couldn’t find them. Screw it. My pants? Where were my pants? I inched around the bed and spotted them and my blouse on the floor at the end of the bed. I grabbed them, lay on the floor and wriggled into them, zipping slowly and carefully. Damn, who knew a zipper could be so loud? I threw the blouse on and buttoned it wrong. No time to do it over.

My purse. I crawled over to the night stand. There it was. I slowly reached up, grabbed it and lay back on the floor trying not to breathe. Now, to get the hell out of here.

A noise. He shifted, the bed squeaked. He turned over, sheet still wrapped tight over his head. He sighed. Please, I am so close. Don’t let him wake up. I waited for him to settle back into sleep. When he quieted down and I was sure he was sleeping again, I flipped open my phone and texted Nettie.

“Where r you?” I waited.

In a few seconds a message buzzed through, “Home. Fun last nite, wild grl? lol”

Great. Now I was “wild grl” .

I texted back, “Call u in a few. We nd 2 talk!”.

Nettie texted back almost immediately, “I HAVE 2 hear this!”.

I slipped the phone into the side pocket of my purse. I peeked over the bed. The body under the sheet was still and breathing evenly. I looked around. The door was about 25 feet away. My lone Jimmy Choo halfway between me and freedom. I crawled on my hands and knees slowly towards the shoe, picked it up and traced my finger lovingly over the polished black leather. Holding the shoe and my purse, I made it to the door and studied the door mechanisms. There was a flip lock under the handle and a chain lock at the top. I looked back. He was still snoozing, facing away from me. I might get lucky. I stood and slowly, so slowly unlatched the chain lock, careful to not let it tap against the door. I flipped the bolt lock under the handle. It made a loud "click". I bit my lip and waited. I slid back to the floor on my haunches, clutching my purse tight to my chest.

Now the handle.. I reached up and pulled down. Now to get the door open enough so I could crawl out into the hallway. I glanced back. Still sleeping; he hadn’t moved. I opened the door an inch at a time. My heart thumped staccato beat in my chest. There was enough room to slip my body out now. I poked my head into the hallway. Dark red carpet ran in both directions down a long hallway. No one in sight. Good. I crawled until I almost had my shoulders out the door

A laugh from behind. Damn, he woke up. “What in the hell are you doing?”

I stopped, turned my head around, the door slid open wider. “Rob?”

Rob threw his legs over the bed. “Well, yeah, but what the hell are you doing on the floor?”

I couldn’t say anything. My vocal chords didn’t work. Rob laughed again, got out of bed. He crossed the room; his hair standing up in spikes, the freckle on his thigh, the scar on his stomach.

He laughed again and his eyes crinkled in that way that drives me crazy.

“I call you last night,” he said, “you tell me to drop the kids at my mom’s, meet you at the club. I arrange a cheap hotel room, we have amazing grown up monkey sex, and now you try to ditch me. Was it that bad, baby?”

I’m still on my hands and knees on the floor with one Jimmy Choo and no panties.

(If) god is dead (poem)

2011-07-19T16:39:00.000-04:00

I wrote this one about twelve years ago. It has since went through three revisions. It's a wonder it survived at all.

The poem reflects the dying whimpers of my own faith that I was experiencing at the time. Thankfully, in the years since this was written, I have discovered a faith in myself and a quiet acceptance of the world.

(If) god is Dead

The Corpse sprawled

beside the massive throne

Layered with the dust

of shattered angels

Golden streets (of paradise?)

crumble under the weight of fallen wings

The children spew

unheard prayers

Hollow eyes reflecting defeat

wash the cracked earth

with diseased tears of crucified faith

Hope flees

from a mother’s memory

as she pushes cold soil over the (still) form

of a silenced child

who lived in hell

will never know heaven

and will never touch the face of God

-Teri Coley Adams

Chapter 4: My Father's Apocalypse "Voice Message"

2011-07-18T01:21:00.000-04:00

July 18, 2011

I found out that my father had Alzheimer’s in a recorded cell phone voice message in mid August 2009. Mom and dad were in Jacksonville at the Mayo clinic for medical evaluations to try and determine what was wrong with dad. They had been gone for three days. Dad’s failing memory, his increasing depression and nightmares, his insistence that he heard a sound in his brain “like a whisk broom”, his trouble forming words were all starting to wear on him and mom. They needed answers that weren’t being given by dad’s regular doctors.

School had only been in session for about a week. I stayed at work late that day. When I left my classroom there was only one other teacher left in the building. I clocked out, walked out of the building, and reached in my bag for my cell phone. I kept it turned to silent during school hours per school rules. I saw there was one voice mail waiting. I entered my password and there was mom’s voice, “We’re on our way home....” her voice breaks “He has Alzheimer’s. Your dad has Alzheimer’s’”

At this point my knees buckle out from under me. I sink to the ground slowly and silently, like a puppet whose strings have been snipped.

Mom starts to cry, “We’re on our…. way home.. What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

The message ends. I can’t get up.

Musings on becoming an old lady.

2011-07-17T14:10:00.000-04:00

I sit here writing and my eyes blur everything together so I have to blink hard to bring my world back into focus. I am forty-nine years old and my eyes are showing no signs of the “leveling out” that the eye doctor assured me three years ago would happen. If anything, they’re getting worse. A funny thing. My brain has matured and I view life so much more clearly than I did at twenty or even thirty, but my eyes are failing, my skin is getting that old lady crepe look, and my thighs are starting to show signs of the first beginnings of small dimples.

My body resisted the ravages of time for quite awhile, years after when my friends were showing signs of melting into middle age. I was so smug about it. But now, it’s finally happening to me too. I’m not smug anymore. I am trying to deal with the acceptance of it all. I am trying to ‘grow old gracefully”, but all I am accomplishing is generating a quiet simmering anger against the entire process. One of my friends told me yesterday that he fears the moment when he walks into a room and no one notices that he has entered. I fear that also. Old people become invisible. My friend also said that getting old “ain’t for sissies” He’s right about that too. But I fear I’m a “sissy”, after all. Screw wearing red hats when I get old. I’m gonna run around screaming “Fuck!” at the top of my lungs. The injustices of getting old deserve a good well placed “fuck” every once in awhile.

Sidenote: My Father's Apocalypse July 17, 2011

2011-07-17T04:39:00.000-04:00

     Posting all of my writings about my dad's Alzheimer's on this blog has opened a scab. One that doesn't heal. I am good at pretending that things are okay. I am good at hiding my head in the sand. It's a talent I have nutured, but right now it is late at night (or early in the morning, depending on perspective), the house is quiet, the town is sleeping, and I want my dad back.
     I miss my dad so much. He looks at me and it isn't him anymore. At least he can still hug me tight and stumble over a whispered "I love you", but he is going away from me faster than I can accept. I don't go visit him like I should, and for this I feel guilty. I know one day I will be sorry I didn't spend more time with him, but it hurts. It hurts too much to be with him. I am selfish. Where is my dad?
     There are some things about this nightmare trip with Alzehimer's I can't post here. Some things that would hurt my mom. I wonder if other Alzheimer's families hide the same things?
    My poor mom. I need to help her more, but I am frozen into this damned inaction.

Chapter 4: My Father's Apocalypse "The Wind Blows"

2011-07-17T04:06:00.001-04:00

April 23, 2010

My dad taught me the first prayer I ever recited; “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take”. A simple child’s prayer, but in the face of my dad’s Alzheimer’s it has taken on a new meaning, especially now when my dad can’t speak well enough to recite the prayer. My father is slowly dying with his eyes wide open. He is not asleep. He knows exactly what is happening. How cruel can an illness be? To rob a person of their personality, their self, who they are, and to have no recourse but to sit back and watch as it happens. To lose yourself while you are wide awake. I cry sometimes because I want dad to just fall asleep and not have to suffer through this horrible soul stealing monster. Then I feel guilty and repent of those thoughts, but too late I think the wind has heard me…

Chapter 4: My Father's Apocalypse "Roses to Weeds"

2011-07-17T04:03:00.001-04:00

April 2010

Mom comes to my house and cries. She has days when I know she feels as if she just can’t do this. She feels overwhelmed and she comes to my house to drink coffee and cry. Sometimes she does this while I am at work, and my ever patient husband tries to comfort her the best way he can, or he just gives her space to be alone on the porch with a cup of coffee. She always tells him not to tell me, but of course, he does. Mom fluctuates between being upbeat and proactive, to feeling guilty over how angry she gets over my dad’s repeated questions. Questions she has answered a hundred times. Sometimes she just has to leave and be alone. Sometimes she needs me to go grocery shopping with her so she can vent. Sometimes she cries, sometimes she’s mad, sometimes she’s that sixteen year old girl in love with Jimmy Coley. She has no idea how to help my dad. And she has no idea how to help herself.

At this point she is reluctant to let others outside the security of her immediate family know about dad and his Alzheimer’s. She tells people he is just having a difficult time with PTSD. The social stigma is something she can’t deal with yet. She doesn’t want people to start patronizing my dad, or talking to him as if he is a child or worse, stupid. And they will. Once people know, they will treat my dad differently because they won’t know how to react to him, and they’ll be embarrassed by their ignorance and frozen by their fear. They’ll either ignore my daddy or treat him like he is an imbecile. They will talk at him, around him, through him, but not to him. So, my mom carries the burden and the secret and the self induced shame. I have tried to tell her to go to support meetings, but she is not ready for that yet, and I can’t push her past what she is able to handle emotionally right now. My mother is becoming a very fragile woman in the face of an uncaring illness. Her strength is way down deep. I only hope she can pull it to the surface in time before the fragility crushes her strength. My mother is a rose who must become a sturdy weed if she is to survive this intact.

Chapter 4: My Father's Apocalypse "Fitting the Pieces Together"

2011-07-17T03:54:00.000-04:00

March 2010

My dad gave up playing the steel guitar over three years ago. He was one of the best, and could make that guitar sound like an extension of his soul. He got the steel guitar case out three months ago and set it down in the study. Mom walked by, saw him, and thought, “Thank goodness, he’s going to play again!” Twenty minutes later she walked by the room and my dad was sitting on the floor with the pieces of his guitar scattered around him like Lincoln Logs. He was trying to figure how the pieces of the guitar fit together. Were did the legs go? What about this long metal rod? Mom stood there and watched him struggle for a second and then she walked away, almost in tears. A few minutes later he came out of the study. Mom asked him if he wasn’t going to play. He told her he had changed his mind. Once upon a time, my dad could put that steel together in less than 5 minutes blindfolded. Now he has no idea how to even join the two most obvious pieces of it together.

Chapter 4 My Father's Apocalypse "Writing"

2011-07-17T03:49:00.000-04:00

February 2010

My dad’s handwriting before the Alzheimer’s was distinct. He would press the pen so that the letters became inked in so deep they seemed to have been fired into the paper. He printed in beautiful sturdy letters with no flourishes or curlicues. Perfectly formed letters that gave the rock solid impression of strength and permanence. That handwriting is a thing of the past. His hand writing now is uneven, hesitant, with misspellings and uneven sized words. Three months ago I was at his house and I walked in on him in the dining room. He was holding a scrap of paper and he turned to me and asked, “Who wrote this?”. I looked at the paper and noticed that it was a kind of “honey do” list that he had made out to himself concerning varying tasks to be completed for my grandmother. I told him. “Dad, that’s your handwriting. Looks like it’s from a couple of years ago when Papa died and you took over some of the chores for your mom”. He told me, “No, that is not my handwriting”. I insisted it was and told him, “Dad, I know your handwriting and that’s it, believe me”. He stared at the paper a moment then said quietly, “Oh…. I had nice handwriting, didn’t I?” I agreed and hugged him. He put the paper down and walked out.

The other night he was trying to write something and asked my twenty year daughter how to spell “they”. He had no idea how to even go about trying to figure out how to form the word into letters. When he had to create a personal narrative describing the affects of his PTSD for the V.A Center, he came to my house with hand written notes that I could barely decipher. He broke down several times when I asked him how to spell the name of a friend who had died in Vietnam, because I could not read his written version of the name. It was at that moment that I was glad I am a high school English teacher. I assured my father that I read essays every day from my students that made his handwriting look beautiful! Even so, it took us over an hour for me to type out a one page narrative. My father used to write songs, poetry really, that looked and sounded like works of art on the page. What happened? Does Alzheimer’s have to take everything away? Can’t it leave something?

Chapter 3: My Father's Apocalypse "Signs"

2011-07-16T22:30:00.001-04:00

November 2009

Dad’s Alzheimer’s didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. There were signs for years that something was not quite right. Looking back, it is easy to see the signs for what they were: Alzheimer’s slowly coming to life inside of my father’s brain. My dad has had symptoms of dementia for seven years now. Of course, at the time we had no idea that was what it was. At first it was little things that we teased dad about, like his ever increasing reliance on Post It notes. We would find them in the strangest places: hanging in his truck next to the steering wheel with the words “GET GAS” printed in bold letters, scattered on the dining room table with his self written commands to “TURN OFF SPRINKLER”, “BUY MILK”, and “GO TO BANK”. I use to joke that The Post It Corporation’s profit margin was probably going through the roof thanks to the single handed efforts of my dad. Now I can look back and see where my dad was trying desperately to work around his slowly decreasing short term memory. Finally in 2003, he quit work with the pharmaceutical company where he had been the route supervisor. The entire family thought it had to do with his increasing health issues with ulcerative colitis.

Later, after my father was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he admitted to me that he had quit because he was so humiliated at not being able to remember tasks that his direct supervisor assigned to him. My father, the type A, ultra responsible man, could not find a way to circumspect his failing memory, so he blamed it on a more socially acceptable physical ailment, and quit work for good. My dad, a man who had always prided himself on his self sufficiency could not bring himself to admit to his family or others of a weakness, regardless of the fact that it was an illness he had no control over. In his eyes he still had to take care of us. He had to stay strong.

After he quit work he busied himself in his yard projects. The projects didn’t just stop with his yard though; they leaked into my yard. I would wake up on a Saturday morning and hear the lawn mower rumbling outside my bedroom window, peek through the window blinds, and see my dad puttering around the lawn on his riding lawn mower. I would come home from work to find him just finishing up weed eating around my driveway. I had two teenage boys who could have done the work. When I would reprimand the boys for not taking care of the lawn, they would insist, “He doesn’t give us time to do it. He’s here before we have a chance to even get out there”. To be perfectly fair to my dad though, I’m sure my boys took advantage of their grandfather’s motto of “Don’t put off tomorrow what can be done now”. I would beg my dad to allow me to cut the grass, but he wouldn’t hand over the riding law mower. One time I became very insistent and he relinquished and taught me how to use the mower properly. After that I was able to pry it out of his hands a few times. I truly loved riding on that mower, but dad still saw it as “his job”, so my times of mowing the law were far and few between. Most of the time he took care of the lawn duties while I was at work, and I didn’t have any choice but to hug him and just say, “Thank you, dad”.

He still loves to work in the yard, although now mom has to push him a little. She has to push him to do a lot lately. If left to his own devices he would just sit in the house and never leave. Since my mother has quit work, she asks him to complete projects in the yard and he is more than happy to do them. When she asks him to paint the steps, weed eat around her flowers, clean the gutters, he does so enthusiastically, but, more often than not, he has to have these tasks suggested to him now. Alzheimer’s is stealing his ability to even self motivate himself.

Chapter 3: My Father's Apocalypse "Time"

2011-07-16T22:26:00.000-04:00

October 18, 2009

My oldest son, Adam, is in the United States Marine Corp. He arrived in Iraq five days ago for his second tour. My dad and my oldest son have not seen one another in two years. It devastates Adam. He loves his Papa. My dad has been more of a father to him than his biological dad, who I was divorced from in 1996. My dad has also been “daddy” to all three of my children. When each of my children turned sixteen he bought them a car. When my children had problems they went to Papa because they knew he would take care of it. When they needed a strong male role model in their lives, my dad provided it. I am praying in my own contradictory agnostic way that the disease doesn’t progress quickly while Adam is gone. I want my dad and my oldest son to have one last “normal” time together. I want them to be able to converse and enjoy one another. If the Alzheimer’s will just stay at bay until after May when Adam comes home. Dear Universe, please. Only eight months. Just eight months. Give us that.

Chapter 3: My Father's Apocalypse "Iced Tea and Memories"

2011-07-16T22:18:00.001-04:00

October 2009

Yesterday mom and dad came over for dinner. Dad needed to get out of the house and I wanted to spend time with my parents without anyone else, but my husband around. After we ate, we ended up on the front porch. We Southerners love our front porches. They are extensions of ourselves. I made coffee and we settled into our favorite chairs. The conversation briefly turned to politics and the United Nations meeting being held in New York this week. Dad called Gadhafi an idiot. We took turns taking good old American potshots at various leaders of other countries who we thought had surpassed idiot stature and leapt over into the land of certified morons.

Our American duty dispensed with, mom and dad started talking about the past. Their past. They were so very young when they got married. Mom mentioned an old girlfriend of dad’s and said, “We saw her a few years back and the years weren’t good to her, believe me”, Mom gloated. They talked about their teen dates and how my mom had to be back at ten o’clock or my grandmother would “send the law out looking for us”. They laughed over a night when one of dad’s friends got drunk and passed out in the back seat of the car. Mom and dad left him there while dad walked my mom to the porch of her house. My grandmother came out, eyed my father and asked, Do you drink, son?”. My dad hastily said, “No M’am, I do not”. My mother prayed the entire time that dad’s friend would not come out of his alcohol stupor, pop his head up, and ruin the lie.

This is their past. A past I only know about from their stories. I was not there. But I have heard the stories all my life. I am beginning to question what is true memory, and what is merely the memory of the stories. Was I really there for some of them or have I just heard the stories so many times it just seems I was there? Later years when I was around, I know I didn’t pay attention to the stories if the happening didn’t directly affect or include me. If the topic of their stories were anything other than the major happenings I didn’t file it away. Like most children, we think our parents have no life outside us and our needs. The day we discover that they too are people, is the day we start moving towards adulthood ourselves.

Mom and dad talked a little about our time in Misawa, Japan where we were stationed in 1964-1966. Mom retold the story of how all the guys would go to AP Alley after changing shifts. The guys would rotate shifts between days and nights. The shifts went a week. When a shift ended and the guys rotated, they would all go en masse to AP Alley, which was a row of bars, and celebrate. Mom talked about how some women had to go to AP Alley and drag their husbands home. Mom said she never did that. She said dad would go to AP Alley with the guys, but he knew when it was time to come home, unlike some other husbands who would stay all day drinking and cozying up to the barfly ladies. I have an old worn photo of the guys lined up in AP Alley after a shift end. Dad had circled several faces with a black ink pen, but I have no idea who those men are. Dad told me once they were all divided into groups they called “tricks” and that determined what shift you worked. The guys in the photo were part of dad’s “trick”.

We sat on the porch and laughed at some of the stories. We reminisced. We smiled. We had fun together. The things I can’t possibly remember hold my parents together like glue. I have heard these stories a thousand times and I never tire of them. Dad was animated and involved. At one point he looked at mom and asked, “Want to?”. Mom looked at him in surprise and said, “What? Now?”. Dad looked puzzled and said, “I mean, are you ready to go home?” Mom laughed and said, “Oh Lord, I thought I was going to get lucky!” When mom and dad finally did leave about fifteen minutes later, mom turned to me and said jokingly, “Well, I guess we’d better get going. If we don’t leave now he might forget that he ‘wants to’”. Dad grinned a devilish smile. It was nice to have my daddy back for an entire afternoon. I know these times are going to become rarer as the clock ticks the days away.

Chapter 3: My Father's Apocalypse "A Child Shall Lead Them"

2011-07-16T22:05:00.001-04:00

July 2009

My daughter came to visit last week. They just left today. She brought my nineteen month old granddaughter, Miley, with her. When they arrived Mom and Dad were sitting on my front porch. Miley ran up to my dad and put her little arms around his neck, and said, “Poppi”. My daddy’s face glowed. A little while later, they were sitting together on the front porch swing. Dad had his finger looped through the back of Miley’s shirt to prevent her from falling. They glided back and forth while Miley ate a peppermint stick.

I tore myself away from the conversation buzzing around me. My mom, daughter, and my husband, Jim, were scattered around on various spots on the porch. I glanced over where dad and Miley were sitting, tuned out the chatter surrounding me, and started watching my dad with Miley. They were encapsulated in their own little world. Miley, intent on her peppermint stick, and tired from the long trip from Florida, had mentally removed herself from the world surrounding her. My dad sat, enraptured by her. He watched her with undisguised adoration. Every once in a while Miley would offer him a taste of her peppermint stick. Neither of them knew that anyone else even existed. Dad, with his diminishing ability to communicate, and my granddaughter, with her ever growing ability to communicate, didn’t need words. Their eyes and smiles spoke far more of that moment than any words could have conveyed. I want to remember that moment. I am going to lock it away in that small secret place inside myself. Years from now I want to be able to take it out and relive what I felt that day as I watched my dad and my granddaughter reach out to one another, and as my dad fell even more in love with his great- granddaughter.

Chapter 2: My Father's Apocalypse "The Wall"

2011-07-16T21:58:00.000-04:00

May 2009

My dad has always had problems associated with his time in

Vietnam

. He never would talk about it much, and if something came on television about it, he would either walk out of the room or turn the channel. When I went to Washington D.C for the first time back in 1996 I called my dad the night before I went to visit the Vietnam Memorial Wall. I asked him if there was anyone’s name he wanted me to look for. He said one name: Rodney Gott. I had never even heard that name before. I told him I would look for it

The next day I located the name on the black granite face, ran my fingers over the name , made a pencil rubbing on a slender strip of paper a vet working the site gave me , and shed a few tears for Sgt. Gott’s children. When I got home I gave the slip of pencil rubbed paper with Rodney Gott’s name in raised black lead to my dad. He took the paper, looked at it for a moment, mumbled, “Thanks”, and I haven’t seen that slip of paper since. I know he placed it somewhere special, but where I don’t know. Perhaps I never will.

The Alzheimer’s has caused the PTSD to progress faster. My dad no longer has the emotional brick walls in place that protect him from the memories. The Alzheimer’s has torn his self protected walls down. Some days my mom and I don’t know which is affecting him more; the Alzheimer’s or the PTSD. He will start crying and he can’t tell us why. He just repeats, “I don’t know”. The nightmares are coming more and more frequently. Mom says dad screams out in his sleep more often. He wakes up shaking and my mom can’t calm him down. Vietnam is not in 1968 for my dad. It is here and now. He lives it each day. Ironically, the more clouded his short term memory becomes, the sharper his long term memory becomes. I hate Alzheimer’s and I hate what Vietnam does to my dad’s dreams.

In the past few years I have considered what it would be like to go to Vietnam. To Pleiku, namely, and walk the paths my dad walked. I want to see the old base where he was stationed, close my eyes and try to hear the ghost rumblings of EC-47’s as they take off on a mission. I want to smell the air that my dad breathed for a year of his life, feel the Vietnam rains drip on my skin, taste the food, and hear the chatter of the people as they go about their daily lives. Maybe then I can understand just a little.

I can’t relive the feelings of dread my dad experienced the day his EC-47 had to make an emergency landing deep within enemy territory. I can’t take away my dad’s grief that February in 1969 when Rodney Gott’s plane didn’t come back; nine men were lost that day. Men my dad had served with, drank beer with, and laughed with. I can’t erase the image burnt into my dad’s brain of the body bags lining the airstrip tarmac filled with young American soldiers awaiting that final trip home. I can’t obliterate the night shellings when my dad and the other men had to dive out of bed in the middle of the night as round after round of rockets bombarded the air base. I can’t take back the nights dad lay in his bunk deep in the night and missed my mother with an ache that tore right into his bones. Yet, I still want to go to Pleiku. I still want to try to see that place through my eyes, instead of his memories. I want to know what it is that wakes him up screaming and fighting for dear life forty-two years later.

Chapter 2: My Father's Apocalypse "The Love She Gives"

2011-07-16T21:45:00.001-04:00

November 2009

My mother is living in a land in which she is a foreigner. She does not know the language or the culture. I see her struggling to grasp the language of Alzheimer’s: “progressive”, “aphasia”, and “long term”. She puzzles over her husband’s deep sudden stumbles into depression that are becoming more and more frequent. She tries to speak his language, to anticipate his needs, but sometimes she falls short of the target, and then she blames herself. She is juggling doctor appointments for her husband at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, a six hour car trip once every month. She drives her husband thirty minutes away every Monday morning to the V.A Center for his group therapy for PTSD. A PTSD that is a holdover from his

Vietnam

days.

My dad is not a safe enough driver any longer to allow him to drive distances more than 2 or 3 miles by himself, so mom drives him almost everywhere She quit her job right before his diagnoses. She didn’t want to. My mom is a very social woman and she loved working part time in doctor’s offices, seeing people, talking, laughing, and interacting with others. Now she lays her husband’s medicines out each day, and makes sure he takes them. She watches her husband closely for drug side effects and contacts the doctors when certain prescriptions have only made him worse, not better. This has happened more than once. The drugged out almost catatonic state that some of the drugs induce is worse than the Alzheimer’s.

She makes sure that her husband gets away from the house for a little while each day, even if it’s just for a short drive to town, or a pop in visit at my house for a cup of coffee and conversation on the front porch. She plays interpreter between the Land of Alzheimer’s and the rest of the world. She translates what her husband wants to say into what words that others will understand. And she does this so smoothly that people don’t realize the ruse dance of language that is occurring right in front of them. She pays the bills. She takes care of making appointments, paying taxes, and paying the house insurance, I’m not even certain that my dad knows what is due when. My mother knows she is losing her husband. She frets that something will happen to her and then no one will take care of her husband properly. No matter how much I try to reassure her that I would step up to the bat if anything ever happened to her, she still shakes her head and says, “No, it will be too much for you”. So, I have stopped trying to reassure her. I know what I will do in the event that my mother isn’t around to care for her husband. I will do what she is doing. I don’t know how. I don’t even know if I can do it as well as mom, but I would find a way. He is her husband, but he is my dad. I am his daughter. His blood runs through my veins.

Chapter 1: My Father's Apocalypse "Losing Himself"

2011-07-16T21:38:00.000-04:00

October 12, 2009

Dad loses things constantly now and is certain that someone is “taking” his belongings. We don’t even try and argue with him anymore. We just help him look for the lost item, and invariably these lost things turn up in the most bizarre places: $300.00 dollars in cash just lying on the seat of his unlocked car, his driver’s license under the driver’s seat, his debit card at the consignment shop. He lost his house keys the other day. We still haven’t found them. There’s no telling where they’ll turn up. He refuses to say the dinner prayer or offering prayer at church anymore because his speech has deteriorated to the point where he can’t form the words he wants. He gets frustrated and embarrassed. He shies away from social activities where he will be forced to come in contact with a room full of people. If he is in that type of situation, he just commanders a chair in the back of the room and watches. People don’t really notice this change of behavior because dad has never been a loquacious person to begin with. But I notice. I see the fear in his eyes of saying something inappropriate, or not being able to recall a simple word or phrase. He keeps quiet and watches. My father has turned into a silent, lonely observer of the world around him.

Chapter 1: My Father's Apocalypse "Diagnosis and Acceptance"

2011-07-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

October 2009

Since dad was diagnosed he has days when a dark certain descends on him. This is how he describes it: “a dark curtain”. On those days his movements are that of a very old man, his speech slows down, he does not smile, and he clings to me when I hug him. My father is not old; he is sixty-six. He and my mother should be traveling, enjoying their mountain cabin in Hiawassee, going to the movies together. Instead they are battling a disease they can’t see and one they can’t even fight. It is a no win battle. Alzheimer’s is going to win. There is no question about that. The only question is when.

Mom and dad are not giving up though. About a week after dad’s diagnosis I stopped by their house on my way home from work. I entered the house and called out for mom. She didn’t answer so I started making my way down the hallway to the back of the house. Dad came around a corner so I asked him, “Where’s Mom?”. He pointed to the sunroom, “She’s out there asleep”, he whispered. When dad and I entered the sunroom, we disturbed mom and she woke groggily from her nap. Dad looked at me and insisted, “She’s been asleep like that all day. I’ve washed the dishes, cooked dinner, mopped the floors, and cleaned the bathrooms”. I saw the expression on mom’s face and then I looked at dad. He was smiling a mischievous grin. My old dad. Mom, still nap dazed, said, “He’s lying! I’ve been asleep about 15 minutes”. She then looked at dad, saw the grin on his face, and told him, “You know, with Alzheimer’s, you’re supposed to forget things you’ve done, not remember things you haven’t done!”. Dad laughed and so did mom, He sat beside her on the couch and pulled her close and they hugged.

Sometimes laughter is all you have left. That’s when I knew that no matter what, mom and dad will meet this head on. It’ll be hard. Harder than anything they have ever gone through. Harder than when he was gone for a year fighting in a war. This is their new war. It may end up breaking them in the long run. . But as long as they can laugh with one another, Alzheimer’s will not win. One day, yes, but not yet.

NON-FICTION Chapter 1: My Father's Apocalypse "The Dad I Know"

2011-07-16T19:17:00.000-04:00

It is an unforgiving thick humid Georgia June day when my dad comes home from Vietnam. The airplane drones overhead. I squint and try to locate its flight path.The heat shimmers on the tarmac creating ripples like black water. I am only six and half years old, and my heart thuds against my chest in anticipation and just a little fear. My father has become a photo sitting on top of the black and white Sears television set in our cramped duplex apartment, where I have lived with my mom and my brother while my dad has been away. The plane lands. Time shifts and then the doors of the plane open; the sunlight glinting off the metal. Dad steps out with a military bag slung over his shoulder. His uniform is wrinkled from the long trip and his Air Force cap sits crooked on his head. He puts his hand up to shield the sun, sees us, and smiles. Mom runs forward as daddy comes down the steps. My little brother takes off running on his stumpy three year old legs. I hang back, and then as mom finally loosens her grip on dad, I run forward. He picks me up in his arms, lifts me, and I put my nose in his neck and inhale. This is my daddy. My daddy is home.

September 2009

I am forty-eight years old now, and I can still put my nose in my dad’s neck and inhale that same scent The one that tells me that this is my dad. The man who has loved me to distraction, and has made it difficult for me to find a man in my adult world who measures up to him. My dad was a military man for the first twenty-one years of my life. He is a man with a quiet, dry sense of humor. When he smiles his lopsided smile, his incisors gleam; pointed and white like small vampire fangs. This, along with his tanned American-Indian-influenced complexion, gives him a rakish air; an air that has always charmed women and children alike.

He is a man for whom music has flowed freely through his heart and veins. The steel guitar was my mother’s competition. When we lived in Texas, dad was away from home almost every weekend night “picking and grinning”. Sometimes my mom went with him. Sometimes my brother and I were allowed to tag along, if it was a church picnic, festival, or some other family oriented affair. On a few precious, rare occasions, I was allowed to actually accompany my dad to real honky tonks. Places where the smell of Jim Beam and cigarette smoke hung thick in the air. Places where Merle Haggard was king and the song “Silver Wings” could reduce me to hiccupping tears. Places where I was instructed to get under the table if a fight broke out. Places where I learned to dance to the Cotton Eyed Joe like a seasoned honky tonk pro, a few years before Mickey Gilley and the movie “Urban Cowboy” made Texas honky tonking famous. These memories make up a large portion of my pre-teen and early teen years.

I have photos of me and my dad in Japan, in Crete, in Texas, in Colorado, in Biloxi, in Georgia; all the places we lived. In each you can tell my he loves me. His arm draped casually, yet protectively over my shoulders. In a few of the photos he is smiling into the camera and I am looking up at him, almost anxiously, waiting for him to smile at me. My younger brother and my dad have a special relationship, but different from that of a father and his only daughter. My father’s brown eyes have been tender, reproachful, pitying, sad, and happy for me, but always there was the love. He hasn’t been a perfect human being, or even a perfect father, but he has been a good man and a father whose love and good intentions I have never questioned. Now that I have grown children of my own I understand that none of us ever parents our children with perfection and no regrets. We all have regrets. There are “should haves, and “could haves” that echo in our hearts long after our children leave us for the wide world and their own “should haves”. He has been “my daddy”. The man who helped shape and mold me. The man whose disciplining gaze could turn me to tears without his ever having to lift a hand to spank me. The man whose approval I yearned for all my life. Even now, my need to know he is proud of me is almost obsessive.

My mother and father have an almost fifty year old love affair. They married at 16 and 17, respectfully. They have had their clichéd ups and downs, but through it all I believe their devotion for each other, and for their children, has never waivered. Fifty years. In December it will be fifty years of marriage for them, and I wonder each day if my dad will even be able to fully take part in that day of celebration when it arrives. My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease last month. The day he was diagnosed we sat on his back deck at my parent’s house and we cried together. He, for the burden he feels he is laying at his family’s feet; me, for the knowledge that my daddy is leaving me and there is nothing I can do about it. I see, as clearly as if it were yesterday, my dad coming down the steps of that plane from Vietnam, shielding his eyes, and smiling at his family. That is what I choose to remember.

Flash Fiction Friday: Up From Zero

2011-07-16T16:39:00.000-04:00

Flash Fiction Friday Challenge

Prompt: Use the photo for inspiration.
Genre: Open
Word Count: 1000 words
Deadline: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 8:30 pm EST

http://www.flashfictionfriday.com/

UP FROM ZERO

An exercise in futility is what this is. Yes, a goddamn exercise in futility. Eating, sleeping, just plain living. All of it futile.

The subway car slows, rocks, and the doors open. Two punk ass kids get on. Their pants slung so low on their skinny hips they look like they rushed here from taking a shit. What is wrong with kids today anyway? Hell, what’s wrong with the whole world? In my day you respected yourself and your country. You worked. You didn’t live with your mama and get food stamps. You didn’t blast that crap they call music. You pulled your goddamn pants up. And you said “Yes, sir” and “No, sir”.

Beard itches. Maybe I should’ve trimmed it or just shaved it off. No, it’s me. Been me for so long I don’t think I’d even recognize myself in the mirror if I didn’t have it. Still, it itches. I scratch and the girl sitting next to me looks me over and then scoots away from me clutching her purse close like I’m gonna steal it or something. Hey, lady, I don’t have the crabs. Don’t you ever just get an itch? Train slows again. The kids start pushing each other and yelling. Maybe they’ll start fighting and kill each other. Everyone looks away. But I don’t. One of the kids walks up to me, leans over and says, “What ‘cha looking at, old man?” I glare at him. The car door opens and two fags and a lady pushing a stroller get on. The kid standing over me has to shift a little for the stroller to pass. There’s a fat baby sitting in the stroller chewing on what looks like a dog biscuit. The baby smiles and throws the biscuit at me. It lands at my feet. The kid shifts again, turns around and grins at his buddy. The buddy shakes his head and looks down at his tattered Converses. The kid looks back at me, cups his balls in one hand and steadies himself against the roof of the train with the other. “I said, what ‘cha looking at, old man?” I look away. The kid slaps my head. Not hard, just enough to make a thwack sound. Everyone in the car gets silent, even the baby. They’re trying to look away. Don’t want to get involved. I understand. I’m just a used up old man.

I wish the kid hadn’t done that. I was gonna get off at Times Square and do it. Just walk in front of one of those crazy New York taxis. Easy like. Now it might go the hard way. This punk ass kid is forcing my hand. I go to stand up and the kid pushes me back down. One of the fags yells something, but I don’t know what. The lady reaches down and picks up the baby from the stroller. The kid’s buddy comes over, “Say, man, leave him alone”. The other kid turns and yells, “Shut the fuck up! Anyone ask you?” The buddy slunks back to the other side of the car. I stand up. The kid pushes me back down. “I tell you to get up, motherfucker? I tell you to get up?” He’s screaming not five inches from my face. The cords in his neck look like they’re gonna pop. Droplets of his spit land on my lips. He slaps me on the head again. This time hard enough to make my ears ring. I quietly tell him not to do this. “Do what, you piece of shit? You think anyone cares about you? Look at you. Probably sleep in a cardboard box every night if you’re lucky. You stink like shit man.” The kid grins and then turns back to the other passengers. “Don’t he stink?” No one says a word. He reaches back over and slaps me again. This time even harder.

I put my hand in my pocket and feel the warm metal. My hand closes over it tight. I reach up and quick, just like Sgt. Moore taught me, shove the K-bar right below the punk ass kid’s breastbone. I shove up and twist at the same time. The kid’s eyes go wide. He looks down and then looks up at me again. I feel kinda sorry for him. He doesn’t even know what the fuck just happened. He slumps down like a wind up doll that has run down. Blood starts pooling around my feet, growing wider with each pump of the kid’s heart. His hand twitches.

The lady with the stroller starts screaming. One of the fags leans against the other and says over and over again “My God. My God, My God”. The girl with the purse is screaming too, but in small squawks like a bird. The kid’s buddy just stands there and stares at me. The train lurches. Times Square. The doors open. I get off. No one tries to stop me. The door closes and the train pulls away. Just like that.

Like Sgt. Moore said long ago as we were stepping off that C-130 in Da Nang, “Welcome to the jungle”. I walk up the dirty tiled stairs that lead out of this hole in the ground. Damn, Times Square looks bright tonight. Almost like a diamond.