The Lesson of The Apricots

Parents wait in the high school parking lot.  Their faces are joyful, expectant, relieved.  A couple of women stand outside their cars, shading their eyes and talking.  A man reads his newspaper.  A father and his son toss a baseball back and forth while a toddler runs between them, giggling.  Squints jogs across the soccer field. 

My cell phone rings.  “Hello?”

Filibuster.  Her voice is weary.  The roar of the bus radio covers her words.

 “I can’t hear you,” I shout.  From the bus radio, I get the score of the baseball game and the weather report.  She says something about traffic before she breaks the connection.

And so, we settle in to wait. 

Read more »

Affected

This essay was written in response to a prompt from the red dress club:

“This week we would like you to write about how the show of affection has played a part in your memory.

Choose a time when either the abundance or lack of affection (either by you or someone else) stands out, and show us.  Bring us to that time.  Help us feel what you felt.”

Of course, being a word nerd, I turned to my beat-up college dictionary (Webster’s New World) before starting:

1.    A mental or emotional state or tendency; disposition or feeling

2.    Fond or tender feelings, warm liking

3.    A disease; ailment

4.    An attribute or property of a thing

5.    An affecting or being affected

 I think I’ve got definition two covered.  Possibly number five.  Maybe a tinge of three if you look up the word on line.

Anyway, I was really going for a kid’s POV here, as something else I’m writing is written from the perspective of a youngster.

Affected

I was in the third grade.  I wore new baby blue corduroy pants with an elastic waistband and a matching jacket sewn by my mother at the dining room table.  One by one, the teacher called the students to her desk to retrieve their math tests.  Perhaps the tests were in order by grade.  Or alphabetically.  Or maybe they were arranged by row because he passed me on his way to get his paper.

He looked at his test.

His face crumbled in upon itself like a half-eaten apple left to dry in the sun.  He was close to tears.  But in a split second, anger replaced despair.  He snatched the paper from the teacher’s hand and stormed back down the row.  His paper was in his right hand, his pencil in his left.

Read more »

Fair or Foul?

The pitcher’s mound is dark with rain.  The path from home to first is sloppy.  But the puddles have been filled with sand, and the fathers have just put down a fresh white line clearly delineating fair and foul.

Little girls in raincoats attack their own field with rakes.  Watching them, I find myself thinking back to when my daughters played softball and all those years when I didn’t say a word despite the cold burn of resentment I saw smoldering in their eyes.

Read more »

This Situation is Only Temporary: And Yet...

Squints and my family are no longer able to care for Destructo on our own. 

Read more »

This Situation is Only Temporary: What’s in a Name?

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said to me last week.  He shook his head sorrowfully.  “You are no longer permitted to enter this library without the puppy.”

So today, Squints packed him up and we were off. 

“There’s the little guy.”  Bruce came out from behind the checkout desk.  The other librarians emerged from their posts.  “Look at how big he’s gotten.  Look at those ears!  Those paws!”  Bruce bent over and rubbed the back of Destructo’s neck.

Destructo responded by gnawing on Bruce’s index finger.  His coworkers laughed.  “Puppies chew, Bruce.”

It was as good a time as any: I held up the library book I’d been hiding behind my back.  Destructo had pulled it from a shelf and bitten through several pages before tearing the cover off.  “Apparently, he’s not a fan of Shakespeare.” 

Read more »

Cultural Maps

I raced as fast as I dared, keeping careful watch on the kilometers lining the inner circle of my speedometer.  I didn’t yet have my Canadian driver’s license.  My Ohio plates screamed “foreigner”.  Anything could go wrong if a police officer suddenly appeared behind me, lights flashing.  On the other hand, an officer might help—I’d be escorted quickly to the hospital.  I’d have sufficient time to get my son’s emergency chest x-ray done before I had to meet my daughters’ school bus.

I left the doctor’s Oakville office and headed west along Lakeshore, towards the hospital.  I suddenly found myself in Bronte—an area east of Oakville.   How could this have happened?  I’d used the navigational technique my mother taught me years ago when I was learning to drive.  “Use the lake as your guide,” she told me as we drove along Lakeshore Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.  “The lake lies to the north.” 

Of course: I no longer lived with Lake Erie to my north.  I lived on Lake Ontario.  And it lay to the south.  I’d been navigating according to my old map.  How could I have been so stupid?  My world, my life, had been turned upside down.  And I’d forgotten to make adjustments.

Read more »

Ptolemy’s Map

Part of my son’s homework today was to draw a map of his neighborhood.  Pencil tucked neatly behind his ear, he paraded up and down the sidewalks lugging a thick Williams Sonoma cookbook to serve as desk and a clean sheet of white copy paper.  At each driveway, he paused briefly to make a quick sketch of a house and to fill in the last name of the people who lived there.  The job finished, he returned home an hour later, proudly presenting me with his map.

I was so ashamed.

Read more »