Shirley

Susan, she of the poetry , said I must try Broder’s book. ( Milk Fed —what’s that one about? Pumpkins? Almanzo’s in Farmer Boy, a bowl parked next to it?) I pull into the desert town at sunset, begins Broder, feeling empty. I felt empty the whole drive from Los Angeles and hoped that my arrival would alleviate the emptiness, so when the emptiness is not alleviated, not even momentarily (all emptiness-alleviators are temporary), I feel emptier. Mm, nice. Just a minor change, maybe. I pull into the desert town at sunset feeling empty. I felt empty the whole drive from Los Angeles and hoped that my arrival would alleviate the emptiness. (W hen the emptiness is not alleviated, not even momentarily— all emptiness-alleviators are temporary—I feel emptie r.) Isn’t this the tiniest bit better? “ Help me not be empty,” I say to god in the Best Western parking lot, continues Broder. Since I don’t turn to god very often, I feel self-conscious when I do. I’m not sure what I’m allowed t...

Her Falls , or (Not) Navigating the Terrain    This one wasn’t anything, really. Clutching the green tomatoes she’d just picked for a pie for her husband, she went to step back onto the patio but her foot caught on the concrete edge. “Gotta keep my head up,” she told herself on the way down. “I can’t hit the patio with my head.” “Go get Dad,” she called to son Phil in the living room, tomatoes all around her. He’d come to the cottage to visit. She doesn’t think she made the pie. This second one, she was watching helicopter rides at a fundraiser event down the road from the retirement complex. Standing under a tree at the edge of the field, she was getting tired. She propped herself against the trunk for a bit, then decided to head back to the auction tent. A twig on the ground, though, caught her notice. It might cause somebody to trip. She smacked her foot down on it to break it—and suddenly dizzy, she crumpled. “Are you okay?” asked one of the young guys sitting near...

Friday Afternoon                                   En route to cousin Ann’s house, relegated to the back seat, I keep clicking clicking, trying to catch perfectly son and mother. But what’s more telling is the visit. We’re met by Ann at her front door. I’m right behind Mom, ready to grab at her if she topples. “Now you’re a spring chicken!” I announce to Ann, because it’s Mom, not Ann, who’s 95. Spring chicken relatively speaking, I mean, because being around somebody ancient makes you suddenly young. I’m practically a chick today. But right away Ann, her round eyes a-sparkle, lets out that she’s 91. Oh my. Paulson and I didn’t realize. As we navigate past her, what else flies out of her mouth is a Bible verse, although for all I know it’s Ben Franklin. “They that compare themselves among themselves are not wise,” she chortles. Paulson loves it. I love it. We laugh and laugh. She’s always been a ...

Here it is again—the video   I posted some time back, featuring that cud chewer . We’d visited a camel dairy in Indiana. Not Indiana, but that’s how I told it, wanting to preserve the farm family’s identity. They were shipping the milk on dry ice. I didn’t show you any faces, besides the camels’. But here are two of the children who joined us in the barn. You’re getting only glimpses. No red-enameled toes poking from shoes like Mrs. Finkelstein’s, ravaged by artifice. Instead these were just as God made them, bare and unafraid. Undefiled. Holy.    

As for dreams, here’s something I sent to an editor twenty-odd years ago when I was still submitting stuff to the church magazines. He sent it back. It was supposed to be a poem. Poetry confused—annoyed—me. Just chop up some regular sentences? How’d that make them poems? So I was experimenting. I thought the editor might fall for it. “No stalls, 1960,” I titled it. Around then, I’m guessing, is when the ladies had paraded past in my head. On the cusp of the ’60s, we good church people’d known perfectly well between right and wrong. Walls and fences kept things tidy. Stalls, too. Everybody reading the magazine remembered. I knew they’d get Peter, too—at least, his dream. His piety. Strict Jewishness. His kosher beliefs, his deep gut convictions. Even now, just because the editor didn’t bite doesn’t mean I was totally off. I don’t think.   In the middle of the night, folks were marching to Zion. They were lined up double breasted, walking pretty fast down Front Street. She re...

I’m jumping around, I know . You’ll need to leapfrog back to the post before last , about Gwen. A t the close of her sermon I was telling you about , she reveals a dream she had just days before: I come into a room at some kind of faith or spiritual gathering. I’m looking for a place to hang up my coats. I’m wearing a long woolen overcoat and a red ski vest on top of the overcoat. I hang up my coats and go sit down in the circle. The people in the circle begin to sing. It’s a beautiful, rhythmic chant in gorgeous harmony, many parts, with a nice low bass. They sing in a slow, pulsing beat, “Jesus is the way and the light of the world, Jesus is the way and the light of the world…” I sing along, making up an alto part. A tenor begins to sing a soaring, clear, high, solo part over it all, pure notes, no vibrato, perfect pitch. I don’t know if his melody is improvised or memorized, but it’s just gorgeous. It feels free and supported by the harmonies of the chant pulsing beneath it. ...

Our email a few minutes ago to Representative Ben Cline: We didn’t have enough time to talk, the other week. What about us coming for breakfast? https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKua8tGO5Wg/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D     

She’s gone. Her last Sunday, we missed. A few days later I thought I might still find her. I saw the doors were open—not the doors closer to her office—and a van was parked on the walkway, with some kind of industrial hose snaking from it up into the church, and when I got to the top of the steps, a man was machine-scrubbing the carpet. He let me pass—I took off my flip-flops—and I padded through the big wet empty fellowship hall, ducked under the yellow tape in a doorway, and barged into the office. But she wasn’t there anymore. I don’t even have a photo. She came only once to our house, for the Chuck & Franny reading , so here’s the dark hair and glasses—that’s all. But I still have the note she sent later. It astounds me, now—the pleasure she took from the gathering, and from the play, and the length to which she went to let me know. She even referenced particular scenes. “The green bean tips,” she wrote, “the cat poo in the sandbox sand and sniffing the mortar, the stolen She...

Police State, cont’d Yesterday David in California—he saw your Sharpie signs—wrote, “ People ask, ‘What would you have done in Nazi Germany?’ Now you know.” He’s right. That’s your problem. You’re still home doing your futile, ordinary things. You didn’t drive t o D.C. for the recruitment fair. It’s a two-day thing, so they’re still at it up there, offering people hefty salaries. You’re not standing by a Dulles Expo Center door way, without your fresh slogan s, just nabbing this and that young guy going in , asking if this is the country he wants. Asking what’ll his kids say when they’re old enough to know what he did. Asking how he’ll forgive himself. Instead you’re asking is doing up your garden stuff more importan t — the collards you couldn’t finish yesterday. S ome phone calling with family . Getting in t he next episode of Severance . Patting your dog. That stuff—all that. And how you’ll forgive your own self. And what’ ll be bad enough to get you into the streets, reall...

Police State, cont’d You wonder, later, if you were imagining things. Maybe it wasn’t ICE. But it had to be. And if you’d seen them drag someone from his vehicle—wrinkly dollars in his pockets, apartment keys, old Walmart receipts, no ID—then what? Would you have raced over in your flip flops, scratched at the officers to get them off the guy, and made them take you instead? Or what? Nothing’s stopping them. It’s only getting worse. Yesterday, a report on WMRA —a traffic stop near town, on I-81, ostensibly because the van was following another vehicle too closely, and the men taken away in handcuffs. And a career fair today and tomorrow, recruiting more ICE officers for your area:. Appalling. You’ve never been a big protester. Not your husband, either. But with things so out of whack, it seems like there’s little choice. Just glue sticks and Sharpies, though? Won’t you just be screaming into the wind?    

Police State   You’ve heard things. Everybody has. In this or that neighborhood, someone undocumented being seized. The stories coming out, it feels almost like Germany. Police cars roll past you on the street and your heart starts thudding in your chest. Friday, town and errands behind you, you see ahead, at a crossing, vehicles plastered everywhere, and uniforms. Slowing to a crawl, a cop in your path, you tap your phone and hold it up above the steering wheel. You stop the whole way, get your window rolled down. Now the lime vest and the dangly keys and the cop’s clip-on squawk box loom up close. Now you’re aiming at her face. I need to see your driver’s license, she says. Somewhere around here is when you put down your phone. It’s in the trunk, you say. You don’t explain, but you’ve got your junk store purchases back there in a box. When you left the store, not wanting the flowerpot and the glass lamp to bang against each other on the way home and break, you wedged your s...