Food Stories — the early years: short-shorts on a theme

My friend was spending the night. We both woke up in the dark and crept around. Quiet. Very, very early. My parents were still asleep, we could hear their light snoring. Peering around the corner from the dark hall to the kitchen. Dawn light. We wanted the sugar, some more. Bread box. I buttered four slices of spongy white bread. My friend watched. Then I sprinkled with a spoon from the blue pottery bowl pure streamed sugar, then stopped. It stuck pretty well, well enough. Whatever fell, fell to the plates. We put our slices on the drainboard, and then we each took a plate to lick up the extra. Sugar food. We knew we should hide our tracks, sugar tracks, but we weren’t careful. I bet my Mom figured out what we’d been up to, but she never spoke a word about it. Sugar. 
    - Alan Bern


Cloth puddings; oven-bottom bread; sponges; ham and mustard pickle sandwiches . . . my grandmother was a Victorian cook. Nothing fancy, just good old-fashioned home cooking. Dad took us walking, rain or shine, each weekend. I’d return home with pockets full of finds to offer to Grandma: sometimes an ammonite, sometimes a clam shell, or shale with a band of shining quartz. But my grandma’s gift was a constant one. She baked a table full of love each weekend and every Sunday we had cheese scones, currant buns, and cakes with neatly piped pink icing. At the end of these meals she took two small bowls of cake mix from the fridge for my brother and I. Half a century on I can still conjure the taste of it. And oh, what I’d give to say thank you to her one last time.
    - Alan Peat


During the months in spring when the sap was collected in buckets from the maple trees in our Catskill Mountains, my cousin, Teresa, and I would toast Freihofer’s brand white bread in our grandmother’s kitchen and then spread the most exquisite maple cream on the hot slices just popped from the toaster. The cream would soften as soon as it met with the toast and my mouth would water knowing the deliciousness about to be tasted. Grandma never stood over us and said “That’ll do,” or “Let’s put that away now.” She just let us eat the toast and the crunch and the sweet and the joy. She must have known what we didn’t — that the day would come soon enough when sugar and bread would bring enough restrictions and admonishments on their own to last the rest of our lifetimes. And for those few precious years, she must have thought, “Just let them eat toast!”
    - Anne Killian-Russo


During World War II food was on everyone's mind.  Because there wasn't enough of it.  Meat, eggs, milk, bread, cheese, almost any food you could think of, all rationed — 4 ounces of meat a person. No wonder people moved in together, pooled their ration cards, and got a small joint of meat for Sunday lunch, eaten after the slice of Yorkshire pudding which filled one up. At boarding school there was enough food but no one wanted to eat it. We ate in a long room with round tables. We were not allowed to talk or ask anything to be passed because we were expected to notice if anyone needed anything and pass it. Set out on the wide window sills were saucers with the week's ration of margarine and small tins with the week's ration of sugar. We were all sure that someone came in and stole some of these rations because before the end of the week they were all gone. Fried bread and powdered milk for breakfast. Rice puddings at lunch, crusty on the top — there was a rusty nail in the pudding, once. Stewed apple sometimes. Tinned meat, lots of watery cabbage, mashed potatoes covering a thin layer of mincemeat. I don't remember eggs or cheese. Salads, fresh fruit — what were they? No wonder we had colds all the time. A surprise that we didn't have scurvy. 
    - Antonia Matthew


When I was seven, my mother was hospitalized with a mysterious illness, probably referred to as “nerves” at the time. My father hired a housekeeper, a woman older than my mother, to cook and keep the house in order. My brother and I were to address her as “Mrs. K.” She was stern and humorless — but her greatest offense was that she stood in the place of our missing mother. Mrs. K’s cooking was basic and always included a canned vegetable. On the day she made spinach, I refused to eat it. After my father and brother left the table, I stared down at my plate in misery. The spinach mixed with margarine resembled green muck that washed up on the shore. The standoff lasted for what seemed forever, as did my mother’s absence. Dad returned to the kitchen, saw my plight, and said exactly what I had been praying for: “Barrie, you’re excused.” My hero! I could tell by the look on her face that Mrs. K was furious, but she couldn’t say anything because dad was the boss. Soon after, my mother returned home, Mrs. K departed, and everything in the world was right again.
    - Barrie Levine


I loved to watch my mom make fried chicken. She let me pull over a stool so I could stand on it and see everything on the counter as she worked her magic. First she took a giant knife and deftly whacked the chicken into legs, thighs, breasts, and wings. Then she dipped those pieces into a bowl of liquidy gunk before throwing them into her favorite breading mixture, patting each piece on both sides. The next step involved the hot, greasy bed of her electric frying pan. She felt very modern, having graduated from the big frying pan on the gas stove to this new-fangled piece of kitchen equipment that didn’t need a fire under it. As soon as Mom settled the breaded chicken parts into the bubbling hot oil they began their crackling journey toward crispiness. Then she was done for a while and began washing some dishes. I’d go off to play with my dog. Soon it was time to flip the chicken pieces over so I jumped back up on the stool to watch the show. Mom grabbed each piece with a pair of tongs and tossed them over with a special flare just for my amusement. We laughed as the back sides got their chance to sizzle. I got bored after a while and went off to play some basketball. Eventually Mom called me back inside to set the table for dinner. My dad, my two big brothers, and my big sister all sat down to enjoy an amazing dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and peas from a can. I felt that I had helped to make it all happen.
    - Blue Waters


Crimson, scarlet, kaleidoscope in a glass — bitter, sour on the tongue — my first taste of cranberry juice was a psychedelic experience. I was 16, vacationing with my parents on Cape Cod. Ocean Spray had not begun to market this magical elixir, so it seemed we had discovered a hidden treasure. I can still see the white linen table cloth, sparking goblets, sunshine glowing through the juice like rubies. Now, I am obsessed, stashing bags of cranberries in my freezer all year, making endless crocks of cranberry apple sauce. I eat tangy berries every morning with yogurt. Delicious, even without sugar, they explode with flavor, and I’m right back there, in that long-ago summer.
    - Carole Johnston


Continuity seemed the name of the game in our suburban home for nearly every meal when we four were young. Maybe because Mom grew up with a cook in the household, she'd never learned the fine art of cooking or the joy of cooking with spices. Mornings brought cold cereal with milk, lunch found us eating pb & j or possibly a bologna sandwich (yuck), an afternoon snack consisted of a buttered slice of Wonder bread sprinkled with sugar, and dinner fare centered around the day of the week. Starting with Monday, typical features included tuna casserole, frozen chicken croquettes, her version of American Chop Suey, hash, frozen fish sticks, hot dogs and beans, and a pot roast or possibly a roast on Sunday, if we could afford it. To her credit, over time Mom developed a few specialties. Topping the list were cheese dreams, fudge, deviled eggs, and a tasty breakfast of cornmeal mush which sounds distasteful but is really quite yummy — the cornmeal mixture is chilled then sliced, fried, and served smothered with butter and warm maple syrup. She also had a fondness for replicating the smooth oatmeal Nanny once made. The secret? A double boiler and soaking the oats for hours before cooking overnight. The gleaming two-tiered pot hovered over a pilot light for a long, slow cook time, with only an occasional stirring. Oatmeal could only be served the next morning with the cream that topped the bottled milk. Treasured memories for sure, and the reason why I took over cooking the meals at a young age!
    - Deborah Burke Henderson


To cook spaghetti, you boil the water, then add the spaghetti. For eggs, the opposite. Reverse it, I learned, and the eggs crack, the spaghetti clumps. My mother was a patient teacher. Standing beside her, burners glowing, the rules of cooking weren’t lessons or tests, but knowledge dispensed, wisdom offered. Here’s the difference between chopping and slicing. Here’s how to stir. Here’s when to cover. Meatballs shrink as you cook them; matzoh balls get bigger. Close my eyes, and I’m there again, among the sharp knives and friendly spoons, whispering incantations: Slow simmer. Rolling boil. Sauté.
    - Ellen Orleans


My OCD behavior began in1948 when I was twelve years old. My parents took me with them on a 2-month trip around the world, during which my physician father visited mission hospitals in the Philippines and throughout India. I was terrified of flying, and with over a dozen flights on our schedule, I was convinced that one of the planes was bound to crash. Having no other way to control my destiny, I used  counting, touching, and made-up gestures to protect us. I touched doorknobs and trees, twirled in circles, counted steps. My parents must have noticed my odd behavior, but said nothing. On our flight home, the plane had a middle-of-the-night layover in Greenland, and the airport was totally deserted. Half asleep, we sat at an empty table with nothing on it but a small pot of something yellow next to the saltshakers. Whatever it was, I told myself I had to eat a spoonful of it or our plane would end up in the ocean. It was horseradish! My mouth was on fire, but we made it home . . . safely.
    - Emily Johnson


As a child I was very fond of cozonac, a kind of sweet bread that is stuffed with cocoa, Turkish delight, and ground walnut kernels. My mother would make a small loaf for each of her children, as a special treat for Easter; we would eat it in portions, divided into days, to make it last as long as possible. But in our country, at that time, it was difficult to obtain delicacies like Turkish delight. My mother, prudent by nature, stocked up beforehand, in anticipation of the holiday. One day, when I was bored with our usual dessert — a little butter spread on bread, with sugar on top — I rummaged through the house until I found the hiding place where the small pieces of precious, fragrant, colorful Turkish delight were stored. I ate, like some insatiable ogre, leaving almost nothing behind. Because of that, Easter was much poorer for us children that year. As punishment, I was to be forbidden any cozonac. In order for me to have even a small amount I had to beg bits from each of my brothers, in an attempt to satisfy my appetite.
    - Florin C. Ciobica


Whenever Aunt Pearl gave me advice, her back was turned to me.  And since she moved and turned constantly in the kitchen, that could be often. “Always look beyond what you see, Mickele. And always look even beyond that,” she said, turning. “You want milk in your tea?”  Over time she sounded more and more like Bobbe. I know her back was turned right when she gave advice because I looked to see her expression but couldn't. “Like if you look and see a tired face, what's beyond that? And beyond that?” She turned to me. “One sugar or two?"  I said, “Milk, two sugars please Aunt Pearl.” I looked up but she had already turned again. “And if you see a promise, what's beyond that? And beyond that?” All I saw were her apron strings. And she turned to me and stopped, wiping her hands on her apron. “Mickele, we forgot the toast.” And I was sure for a moment, I was looking right at Bobbe, and beyond.
    - Ian M. Shapiro


When I was six, my grandfather decided I was old enough to sit at the Passover table. By the time the adults had demonstrated their courage by swallowing bits of matzos topped with my grandmother’s fiery homemade horseradish, I began to nod off. But I was revived by the aroma of chicken soup when the feasting finally began. One of my aunts placed a portion of gefilte fish on my plate. I took a nibble and began to choke on a bone that had eluded my grandmother’s radar. That was when my Uncle Eddie, who was on leave from the Army Medical Corps, saved my life. Fighting his way through the crowd of relatives who were poking their fingers down my throat, Eddie performed the Heimlich maneuver and the bone popped out onto the table to cries of “Gott sei dank!” Then, like a Torah procession, a group of men triumphantly carried me off to bed. I never got a chance to thank Uncle Eddie who was killed in action a few months later.
    - Jack Goldman


I threw my first dinner party in 1979. I was sixteen. I invited eleven friends — five boys and six girls. Of these, only one had a driver’s license and most had not heard of Julia Child or her famous Beef Bourguignon. I had never made this recipe, which with preparation time and cooking can take up to six hours — but I was undaunted. The entire affair would have been impossible if not for my father, who agreed to buy the needed bottle of Burgundy. For dessert, I prepared (also for the first time) twelve baked apples, served with French vanilla ice cream. I set a formal table with a white tablecloth and red candles. Guests arrived at 5:30 p.m. for cocktails, which consisted of ginger ale, orange juice, or milk. The music was from an album titled, “Life of the Party.” Clearly, I was vying to be the next Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet. Years later, one of the friends who attended told me that it was not only the first formal dinner party of her life but also the most memorable. “Oh, you enjoyed it?” I asked, expectantly. “Well, all I can say is: what the heck were you thinking?”
    - Jim Mazza


In a city of hyphenated Americans, I attended grade school with Irish, Poles, and a plethora of friends from places not found on a 1958 world map — Croatia, Ukraine, and more. Delores was Polish and Croatian, blonde, blue-eyed, talented and kind. Sister Anne often said, “Delores is like an angel.” I was thrilled to be her best friend and frequent after-school invitee at the house where Delores lived with her Polish grandmother. One December afternoon, Delores asked if she could share Oplatek with me. Permission given, Delores pried open a decorated tin from Poland, and solemnly lifted out a thin white rectangular embossed likeness of Mary and baby Jesus. Delores broke off two corners saying, “They taste like communion wafers.” As I tried to swallow my piece without chewing, Delores explained these were for Christmas Eve — a sort of family communion. “Sharing makes you my sister.” I was in heaven. Cancer stole my sister/bestie long ago. “An angel taken back to heaven,” Sister Anne told me when I asked how to reach Delores. Yesterday I learned Oplatek is also called “angel bread.” I wish I could tell Delores, but likely she already knows.
    - Joan Leotta


my mother was always soft she had a certain sense of deliciousness imparted as if a secret could be kept between slices of the white bread she discovered in America after her Egyptian childhood of creamy barhi dates and ripe mango she served sprinkles of white sugar or a whole thin hershey chocolate with  buttered wonder then taught me to savor creamy ricotta sandwiches and her soft stuffing and chicken fricassee until I could taste the warmth of Mediterranean thyme sun stewed fresh 
    - Kath Abela Wilson


“…smooth bean and wrinkled pea.” When I first heard this phrase from Robert Frost’s “Putting in the Seed,” I knew he was talking to me. And to my dad, beside me in the sun, showing me how many seeds to put in the furrow and how far apart. How to cut seed potatoes so each piece had an eye from which the new plant would sprout, and how to hill up the dirt, as new potatoes like to be covered deeply to protect them from too much sun. This was in the days when organic hadn’t yet acquired a capital O. Everybody’s fertilizer came from grandpap’s cow or from their own chicken coop, though you had to be careful with chicken poop; it could burn the new plants. And pest control was a kid — sometimes me — picking potato bugs and tomato worms off the plants, one by one, grimacing all the while. After the gardening part, the teacher became my mother. All that provender had to be preserved. Canning season was heat and steam and color and sound. Scalding tomatoes to remove their skins. Pouring peas like pearls and corn like gems into gleaming Mason jars. Placing peach halves cut side down so their golden shoulders pressed against the inside of the jars. And finally, sitting with a glass of sweating iced tea and listening for the unique “pop” each lid made as the jar cooled and sealed. Then down cellar to place them on the ready shelves where, it seemed, they glowed, still bearing the summer’s sun and shining gently on their potato neighbors, plump and dusty in the nearby bin.
    - Kathleen Kramer


Growing up, “tea” was the beverage year-round —  lunch, dinner, sometimes breakfast, and anytime in-between. “Tea” came in one form — poured over a glass of ice cubes and sweet. The only choice was, sometimes, with or without a slice of lemon or a mint leaf. Tea that was served in a cup was called “hot tea” and was what you were given with a piece of dry toast for an upset tummy. Sometimes Mama served it for a chilly afternoon women’s group, using the silver tea service. There were girls’ tea parties where we wore white gloves and learned proper etiquette. When I first left the south and ordered tea the waitress asked if I wanted it “hot” or “cold.” When the “iced tea” arrived unsweetened I asked for “sweet tea.” She gave me little white packets of sugar to add to the tea. It doesn’t work. The sweetness is in the brewing process. Years later, on return trips to the south, I knew I had crossed some invisible geographical line and I was almost “home” when I ordered tea and, without being asked, it was served “just right.” “Tea” — iced, sweet, pronounced with not quite two syllables.
    - Margaret Walker


On those Sundays the preacher came to our house for lunch after church, Mother came home after Sunday School to prepare her usual meal of fried chicken, homemade biscuits and gravy, and a Southern vegetable casserole. The school custodian lived behind us, since my father was superintendent and we rented the house in front, owned by the school. Chickens were kept in a pen between our houses and it was Alma’s job, the custodian’s wife, to wring one’s neck, then chop off the head and pluck it. Mother then cut it into enough pieces to serve five people. One Sunday my cousin, a year younger, was staying with us for part of the summer. When she first saw a beheaded chicken circling the pen until its muscles collapsed, she shrieked. NOT GONNA EAT THAT, Dee announced, before running off in horror. Sure enough she made her meal out of biscuits and casserole and gave us nasty looks as we ate the poor chicken. For the rest of her visit, chickens were off the menu so we didn’t create a major rift in our previously contented family.
    - Pris Campbell


When I was a kid in the 1960s, I’d have ice cream on Saturdays, usually from the Dairy Queen on the corner. But the ice cream outings I remember best are the trips with Daddy to the University of Maryland's dairy farm and creamery. The first stop would be a large barn where cows were milked by machine. We'd walk among stalls where cows were hooked up to milkers that hummed and clicked. I was fascinated and a little frightened by the rows and rows of cows, tubes, and lights. Later, we'd make our way over to the creamery and order our favorites: mine was a black raspberry double-scoop cone. Daddy and I would sit on the terrace outside the creamery and savor our Saturday treat.
    - Theresa A. Cancro


After evening chores, we ate fried egg sandwiches on Sunday nights sometimes. It was the closest my mom came to a break from the endless three-a-day feedings of a farm family that eventually had 8 children. We could watch TV Sunday nights, too, while we ate, the only time we were allowed such a privilege. Douglas Edwards and the news and then maybe Lassie, I am trying to recall . . . Ed Sullivan for sure. The eggs from Izzy Clark’s farm (Izzy would yell “Car-ol!” as she came in the mudroom and my sister and I still imitate her yodel 60 years later) were hardshelled and the yolks solid with orange protein. On an episode of my favorite ’90s Brit TV series “Pie in the Sky,” chef Henry Krabbe rhapsodizes about the pleasures of the underestimated fried egg sandwich and I sure agree, even if we ate them on white bread with ketchup.
    - Tina Wright


On the mornings when Mom was in charge of breakfast she’d put boxes of cold cereal out on the kitchen table — Raisin Bran, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies — and a container of skim milk. My sister and I hated Raisin Bran, except for the raisins, but we weren’t allowed to just pick those out and leave the rest. It was all or nothing. We chose nothing. Rice Krispies were fun because we could call out, very loudly, snap! crackle! pop! On really awful days Mom brought out the dreaded box of shredded wheat, but that didn’t happen too often. Mostly Dad was in charge of breakfast and that meant hard-boiled eggs (mashed up with too much salt and mayonnaise) or oatmeal. The oatmeal was lumpy but at least we were allowed to put brown sugar on it. The very best breakfasts were the ones Grandma made. My grandparents lived in the apartment next door and on those mornings when Grandma was in our kitchen by the time we woke up it meant one thing — guggle muggles for breakfast. Raw eggs, milk, and a great big squirt of Bosco chocolate syrup. Everything went into the Osterizer. Whir whir whir. And quick, before Mom could see what we were up to, Grandma let us dip Stella D’oro “S” cookies into the concoction to get them soft and soggy . . . and we snarfed them right up.
    Zee Zahava

Numbers: short-shorts on a theme

 
Niner Niner 49er, I was born in the year of California 1949, 9/9/49. It meant the world to me. This was 100 years after Californians successfully sought statehood. What else might this all mean? When I was 9, I began listening to transistor radio, all for sports, San Francisco Giants baseball and San Francisco 49ers football. The sports magic began with my elementary school friend, Tom, even though he didn’t listen to sports much. But I liked him because he could draw comics and illustrate stories. And his father liked sports, a lot. It was always better at Tom’s house since he had 3 brothers and 2 sisters. His older sister, yes! And better snacks: fresh bakery white bread in the deep bread drawer. One day up at Tom’s, I walked by his dad on the landing, John Christian Weaver, M.D.. What was he eating? I asked Tom who whispered, “Peanut butter and pimento sandwich.” Pimento? With peanut butter? Would my dad eat that? Other times I’d seen Dr. Weaver eating a banana, and both times he was holding a transistor radio. This day he was angry, muttering under his breath and sandwich, “Damned Rams, 49ers lose again!” I’ve never stopped rooting for the Niners.
    - Alan Bern


It’s 1970. I’m in a Yorkshire village called Muker, walking to the post office, when an old man sitting on a nearby wall beckons me over. He asks me how old I think he is. He looked really old but, figuring an honest answer might appear rude I say that I don’t know. He delightedly announces that he’s 94; that drinking the water from Muker beck is what keeps him young. I’ve seen the Caddisfly larvae that live under its stones and I can’t say I’m tempted. Most of my 1970 is lost but what he tells me next is clear as day. He says that when he was about my age he shook hands with a man who was as old as he is now, a man who fought at the Battle of Waterloo. And, with that, he puts his hand out for me to shake. I remember, back at the caravan, taking my notepad out. I wrote 1815 first then 1970 then 94 and I worked it all out on paper: in the sixth month of 1970 I shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who fought at the Battle of Waterloo.
    - Alan Peat


In the game of numbers, she was 28 and I was 1. Now I'm 57, she's been gone for 19 years, she was 66. Not sure how it all adds up, but I know somehow it does and the love remains. Cheers to you, mom.
    - Amy E.  Bartell


Everything that ever happened to me as a child happened when I was ten. Ten was when I kicked in the plate glass window and had to spend a month in the yard, alone. Ten was when my father made the adjustable wooden hurdle and we all worked at jumping higher and higher. Ten was when the new beagle, Toby, spent his first night in the house because there was a thunderstorm and he chewed the arm of the newly upholstered chair. Ten was when I got a maroon button-down collared shirt with matching socks for my birthday. Ten was when I first knew the magic of a Moravian Lovefeast. Ten was when my grandmother sat on her brown sofa, me beside her, singing hymns late into the night. Ten was when I fell off the downed tree, pretending it was a balance beam, hitting my cheek and leaving a scab the size of half my face. Ten was when I got a shiny blue English bike for Christmas and made it into my pet and my best friend. Ten was when I first tried to grasp the idea of infinity.
    - Ann Carter


At dusk the blackout curtains were drawn and stayed closed until dawn so I never saw moonrise or counted the stars as they came out. Now it was suppertime and then bedtime. I was allowed to read for fifteen minutes before turning out my light. It was hard to fall asleep because at night air raids happened with lots of bombs dropping. One time I woke in the middle of the night being carried downstairs into the basement air raid shelter. Down there we still heard the bombs fall. How close were they — two streets away? The far side of the main road, or on the long path into the big park? The peacocks in the zoo screamed and we counted the screams — eight that time, I said. We never knew the number of hours we'd be down there. We guessed the time — two o'clock? No, three thirty. Didn't matter, the time was always a long time until the All Clear sirens wailed. They wailed forever, too long to count the minutes. We went back upstairs. I counted the stairs, all twelve of them . . . hoping it was breakfast time.
    - Antonia Matthew


My first telephone number is emblazoned deeply in my mind: Linden 3–3033. There’s something so comforting in the memory of it. One day in grade school, the teacher asked us for our numbers. When my turn came around, I proudly recited it, the special number with so many threes. One day, I answered the dial phone on our hallway table and the caller asked, “What is the name of the famous clock in London?” I was only seven or eight and clammed up at being put on the spot by a strange voice. I quickly hung up. I didn’t tell my mother about the call. Maybe she entered a contest and would have won something big if not for me. This was yet another secret of my childhood that I carried for a long time. But then, maybe I saved her from some kind of scam or sales pitch. As suburbia expanded, new telephone exchanges were introduced. Our original number, with the name of the town and sonorous threes, was changed into digits: 486-3033. Then area codes came along, and random numbers with no elegance whatsoever were added. The poetry of phone numbers disappeared forever. 
    - Barrie Levine


Second grade: numbers lined up on the page like dancing cockroaches. Eraser smudges and coal-black ink. I can still see white pages of subtraction problems, punishing me every day, until my head ached. By grade four, I had quit doing math. On the last week of school, my workbook was still mostly empty. Mrs. Ferguson called my mother who decided the only solution was to do all the math problems herself. (What a relief!) My sixth grade teacher, Roberta Pangborn, was an angel. I mean, really an angel, wearing the same clean, pressed, and starched, pink dress every day. In spite of my obvious math deficiency, she placed me in the highest level of 7th grade with all the smart kids. That changed my life. My self esteem soared. Math became superfluous, just something I had to suffer through or ignore, like algebra one and two. Geometry was okay because I could see it. Higher math was like god, I could believe in it, or not. My choice. I chose to write poems.
    - Carole Johnston


Four decades ago, on a business trip to San Antonio, I networked with others in the adoption field. I learned children in foster care were profiled on cable television in Georgia. On the flight home, I drafted a proposal and ultimately pitched the three major networks in Boston about profiling older and special needs children with the goal of finding permanent, loving families. I selected the CBS affiliate, WBZ-TV 4, for “Wednesday’s Child,” and the rest is history. The series, hosted by news anchor Jack Williams, captured two presidential awards and was replicated nationally. As communications director for the Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange, I worked with social workers and staff at residences to identify children, develop scripts, and select activities and locations for our film crew each week. Wednesday evenings, I answered incoming calls. The series increased public awareness of adoption issues and found permanent families for 85 percent of the children profiled. Jack Williams frequently spoke about the program and always testified as to how the series changed his life, too. WBZ-TV 4 hosted the “Walk 4 Wednesday’s Child” for many years and Jack personally hosted a “Ski Race 4 Wednesday’s Child” for years at Waterville Valley, raising much-needed funds.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson


A friend needs the last four digits of my phone for Venmo and I nearly send her the last four of my social. 1101. 1348. 1612. 1650. 1734. 1825. 2130. 3412. 4004. 4706. 9227. Phone number. Post office box number. Campus box number. Home address and work addresses — old and new. Club house code, cell phone code, garage door code, ATM code. Not necessarily in that order. Definitely not in that order. Numbers here may be changed for security reasons. Or not. Psych! Once, I stayed at a writer’s retreat in far north Minnesota. For two weeks, no keys, no locks, not a single code. What would life feel like if we could trust everyone, all the time?
    - Ellen Orleans


69. That’s the age when my father passed away. It happened on a Sunday, in a hospital. Lung cancer. When he breathed I remember I could hear a murmuration of starlings coming from inside his chest. I'm still sorry I wasn't with him in his last moments. I would have held his hand and told him that I would take care of my mother. We would have remembered the days when we went fishing together, the way I caught a few crayfish for the first time. Another time I sat on his shoulders and stretched my hands toward the stars; believing him to be Atlas, I was trying to touch a constellation. From now on I'll look for him among the stars and tell him that everything is almost fine — that I'm starting to look more and more like him, my mother actually says that; that I'm getting old, my wife thinks this; that I'm getting more and more unbearable, my son invents this; that I can't stand winter anymore because of the cold that makes its nest in the bone marrow. 69 is the milestone at which my father's heart stopped on earth and went on to beat somewhere in the sky.
    - Florin C. Ciobica


My mother has moved to a nursing home. After a lifetime of good health, at 91, her body and mind have suddenly changed course. Regrettably, we have found ourselves canceling her apartment lease and giving away her furniture, household goods, and many of her clothes. It’s been a gloomy job, but perhaps saddest of all was the most unexpected: the act of turning off her phone line — a phone number she has had for 70 years. The number was originally assigned in the early 1950s, when my parents bought their first home, a tiny two-bedroom on top of a hill.  A party line with an ‘AR-’ exchange (later changed to ‘27’), it served both my parent’s house and the neighbor next door. While shared party lines — with their ease for informative and entertaining eavesdropping — became obsolete in the 1960s, the phone number did not; it travelled with my parents from household to household with each subsequent move. Now, though, the phone and phone number are gone, as is much of my mother’s ability to remember the past. Despite the profound memory loss, to our delight — and hers — she still easily recalls that phone number first used seven decades ago: AR2-6160!
    - Jim Mazza


Growing up, before multitasking was a word, I embraced its forerunner — the three-ring circus. Elephants on the right, acrobats to the left, and clowns in the center. Last week I faced a new sort of circus — a three-ring crisis. While caring for my ill daughter and worrying about my husband’s biopsy results I put aside the center ring pains in my left hand, pain caused by three rings, one never removed for forty years, two not having made it over the knuckle for twenty years. When my wedding ring finger turned purple one night, I soaked it in icy water until it turned pink again. The next day, I called a local jeweler. Snip, snip, snip with a special cutter and my finger, though still with marks on it, could breathe free again. My daughter is now recovering from her surgery. My husband’s biopsy was negative. And I have learned that one act at a time is best for focus, and even when there is action in all three, I need to spend time on that center ring, since you cannot pour into others from an empty pitcher. No more three ring crises.
    - Joan Leotta


10:10 p.m. I think, but I’m not sure. This is the time I was born but it’s not on my birth certificate . . . it’s just what my parents told me when I was very young. I do not remember the conversation. I just remember the time. 10:10. So neat. So symmetrical. Such an even number and I usually hate even numbers. Yet every other day or so, I find myself looking at the clock at exactly 10:10 and it always excites me and I always have to shout it out to whoever is in earshot. “It’s 10:10!!!” Even if I’m all alone, I am compelled to yell, “It’s 10:10! I am born! I am alive! I am here!”
    - Judy Cogan


1 Apostles’ Creed, 5 decades with 1 Our Father, 10 Hail Marys & 1 Glory Be each. Saying the Rosary was an exercise in mathematics as well as an exercise in meditation. It required concentration — and that was the point — but when the Rosary was recited by 7 women from St. Timothy’s Altar & Rosary Society kneeling in my mother’s living room, it was even harder to keep my mind on each bead as it moved through my small fingers. And I know Mother was having difficulty concentrating, too. She was hoping the dust bunnies had been cleared from under the sofa where Mrs. Yacabucci was kneeling. She was hoping that I’d done a good job polishing the piano bench where Mrs. McCorkle was resting her upper body, obviously tired from dealing with 2 sets of twins. Mother was also thinking about the 2 pans of cinnamon rolls in the oven, pleased with the delicious smell, but hoping the Rosary would be over before they burned. She really wanted to serve them warm with cups of 8 O’Clock coffee, which she knew to be Mrs. Yawarsky’s favorite, having talked about it when they ran into each other at the A&P.  I was kneeling next to Mother by the stand that held the Boston fern and where she could keep an eye on me and make sure my back was upright, as was prescribed. When, at last, the final Glory Be had been said, the sighs of 7 women and 1 little girl were prayers of a different kind. Gratitude, perhaps?    
    - Kathleen Kramer


Strings of numbers come to me sometimes at night, to have the last say on dream sequences I already didn’t understand. Yes, Pythagoras said the world’s built around numbers, but surely the dream architects remember I was an English major, therefore allergic to math. Last night, after I worked at a Catholic high school run by openminded nuns and priests — and sat in their big domed wooden church — and after sleeping in a room with twenty-odd people, who kept giving me toddlers so I could calm them to sleep — and once, a Scottish terrier to soothe — and after I went out to the hall with a man who also couldn’t sleep and wanted to trade ideas — the first number that arrived was 1, which seems appropriate: start at the beginning. Also, Three Dog Night told me while I grew up an only child that one is the loneliest number. The next integer, my birthday (26) also made sense. After that, I am at a loss. The last was 57. Heinz varieties? The age of Prince, Chaucer, and Stokely Carmichael at death? But no, it’s probably more like Bruce Springsteen’s song title, as applied to my dreamlife: “57 Channels and Nothing On.”
    - Laurinda Lind


Numbers. There are so many kinds: natural, whole, imaginary, real. For me, almost all numbers are complex and irrational. My struggle with numbers began in the fourth grade after my teacher recommended that I move up to the highest math group. “Marcie needs a challenge,” she said. And math certainly challenged me — to the point of tears most nights. Now at fifty-one, you’d think I wouldn’t cry over numbers anymore, but I’m a “word” person. At least, that’s what my friend Jenny would tell you. She was the “numbers” person, the one I’d call for help when I couldn’t get my “cookie numbers” to balance out during Girl Scout cookie season. Calm, logical, Jenny was someone I could count on to help me figure things out, even when she was struggling with difficult numbers of her own — like stage four breast cancer and stage two brain cancer. It’s February now, which means it’s “cookie season” again. And here I am, on my own without Jenny to help me, face-to-face with a bunch of numbers that don’t add up. Six years of cancer treatment plus three months on hospice equals one death two days before last Thanksgiving. Forty-nine, it turns out, is the most irrational number of all.
    - Marcie Wessels


When sand dollars were plentiful I watched them glide in on the surf, throwing back the live ones to ride in yet again. Days when a little boy rode the surf, face alight with joy, turning, board under one arm, ready to paddle back into the waves for just one more ride. Hundreds of sand dollars, hundreds of rides. I scattered his ashes in that same surf, walking the beach one day after another watching for just one more sand dollar, rare now, to glide onto the sand like proof of one last ride that never came. One surfboard gathers dust in the corner … forever.
    - Margaret Walker


Rest stop towards Gallup — I buy an Acoma pot from the potter. Her wares are on a blanketed table in the parking lot. I pay $80.00, a very fair price. I say: “Almost 40 years ago my mom bought me a large pot from Acoma Pueblo.” I show her the size with my hands. I don’t tell her my mom spent $250.00 which in those days represented a fortune to me. She did not offer me rent or car repair money, but I didn’t mind. The pot is still gorgeous, painted with 2 earth-toned birds. “That’s worth a lot today,” the potter says. “Is it signed?” I nod. She wraps up the new pot. It is small, a seed pot with just a tiny hole at the top, painted in free-drawn converging lines. I take the package, walk away, and burst into tears. My father bought Acoma pots on their honeymoon. My mother, often a mean person, did give me a present. I’m almost 70 years old. The potter wears her graying hair tied back. Her face shows both worry and calm, not unlike my own in the mirror. The tax is a bit more than $6.00.
    - Miriam Sagan


The count down starts and restarts . . . 10, 9, 8 . . . pause . . . explanations for the delay come over the airways from Cape Kennedy. Stomachs go tight. Rockets can indeed explode. After all, just 35 years ago, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just over a minute after liftoff, killing all 7 crew members, including civilian schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, horrifying all of us watching on TV. How many times did we wonder over the years if they burned to death or did death come instantaneously. Right now my husband, a friend, and I are sharing an oceanfront condo in Daytona Beach, only 75 miles north of Cape Kennedy and we’ll get to see the rocket’s flare in giant technicolor. We press out onto the balcony again as the count restarts and goes to Lift Off! We feel we’re bare inches from the rocket as it passes us, goosebumps on our arms, this time carrying everyone safely into the far black yonder.
     - Pris Campbell


At 110 Snyder Hill Road there’s an old Cornell barn with the peeling yellow paint of the ancient Ag School barns. There aren’t too many left, maybe Cornell has other plans for the land the old barns sit on? I almost feel like volunteering to help paint those old barns. The one on Snyder Hill and Pine Tree has other modern barns around it but the sheep that moved in last fall are in that sweet old barn, on the ground floor with a hay story above it. You can see the outside hardware where a “hayfork” track begins at the ridge top, part of the pulley system to put loose hay into barns before hay-baling, back in the years of farming with horses. Mostly, 110 Snyder Hill Road is for Cornell horses now, a changing bunch of beautiful horses including polo ponies. These horses are my neighbors. Especially in summer I am likely to be within hailing distance as I walk by, sometimes certain horses and I talk a little bit. It’s quite a feeling when a horse is happy to see you. 
    - Tina Wright


On my twentieth birthday Dimitrius played the mouth harp. In serpentine silence the revelers followed along the cliffs of the island Hydra. “Did you say dance?” he asked. We leapt and twirled under the cool February night sky, oblivious to the repressive Regime of Colonels across the gulf in Athens. His song rose like a smoke signal to the Convent of the Sacred Mothers who were making lace inside the clouds on the mountain above us. Dimitrius, wearing a crown of curly hair, scooped up a jellyfish with one hand and smiled into my camera: victorious youth! We partied through the night, feasting, swimming, dancing, singing songs censored by mainland monsters, the island a haven of amnesic joyfulness. We grapevined our way to the crescent-shaped harbor where the balm of the lemon trees and the calm of sleeping fishing boats greeted us. On my twentieth birthday, across the gulf, my future lover Fotis packed his body into the trunk of a car and escaped Athens, all the while on Hydra, filled with cake and youthful optimism, Demetrius and his followers forgot for one night that the dictator Papadopoulas was on the prowl.
    - Yvette Rubio


The French toast was all runny, with threads of white gunk dripping off the bread. “I can’t eat this,” I told Mom, “it’s too eggy.” She told me I couldn’t get up from the table until I finished every bite and then she said I should stop whining. (So unfair.) I sat there, but I didn’t eat. Instead, I cut the bread into itty bitty squares, neat incisions, this way and that. Then I counted the squares. There were 12 little squares of French toast. I looked down at the plate. I looked some more. And at that moment a bell went off inside my head. Ding, ding, ding. I understood everything. 3 x 4 = 12. 4 x 3 = 12. Coming and going, it was still 12. Up and down, it was still 12. The mystery of multiplication was revealed to me in the French toast. I wanted to shout out to Mom and let her know what I discovered. But also, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. “Stop whining,” she’d said, and I wasn’t even doing that. So I stayed right there at the kitchen table, all alone, thinking my very smart thoughts, keeping my little burst of genius to myself.
    - Zee Zahava

A is for . . . . Short Prose Pieces Centered Around a Single Letter

alone
Alan Bern

In Aina Haina Valley, Honolulu, on one short block, Kimokeo Street, 52 kids! 52! Always a game going in the street. Mostly German dodgeball: the best way to stub toes. Just a little blood, but so bad hurt. That hot day while sister napped, I looked out to the street and saw Ronnie and Lynn — both older than me — kicking the ball around. I rushed out, no shoes, and ticked a big toe on the curb — oh sting! I looked up, embarrassed. “Ronnie!” I yelled. But they were going in. “Lunch,” Lynn called. I looked across the street, no Stephen or Stuart. But there was a ball. I stepped carefully across and kicked it softly. No one to play with. So so quiet. Where was Ivan? Hot day. Then I remembered: my dog! I’d named her ʻeleʻele one (pronounced élay élay óhnay). I called her whole name two times, and she ran over wagging and wagging. We could play dodge ball! Oh, well, maybe not, but what a good good dog.


astronaut                  
Alan Peat

We are sitting in the space where the cookery books were yesterday. Not many of us; thirty at most. When the nervous young man introduces the evening’s speaker he jokes about the poor attendance — calls us “a select group.” No-one laughs. The astronaut doesn’t look up. Last week a Spice Girl was moved to a bigger venue. Twenty-odd of us eagerly wait for the man who walked on the moon to start talking. Then he begins and an hour passes quicker than you can say Saturn 5  — the dangers of being a test pilot in the 1950s; what it was like to enter Tokyo Bay at the end of World War II; a couple of anecdotes about being one of NASA’s Mercury Seven. He doesn’t look like his heart’s in it but, after he’s done talking, I stand in the short queue, waiting my turn with the requisite recently bought hardback autobiography in my hands. And, when I reach him he dutifully signs it and I can’t quite believe that I’m shaking hands with Alan Shepard: the first American in space; commander of Apollo 14; the man who played a golf stroke on the moon.


apple (cider)                                                                    
Antonia Matthew

I went to stay with my uncle and aunt in rural Devonshire. One afternoon my uncle said, “I’m going to get some apple cider. Come along.” It was a long walk along country lanes to a farm.  There was a large open barn; inside were tall round tanks with pipes coming out of them. My uncle gave a whistle. A man appeared, grinning. “Cum for your zider now, 'ave yer, Mr. Bill?”  My uncle nodded. The farmer walked into the barn followed by my uncle.He turned a tap, ran some brown liquid into a mug and handed it to my uncle. My uncle took several swallows, then handed back the mug. “Good cider John, lousy, good and lousy.” Lousy, I thought, doesn't that mean no good? The two jugs were filled, my uncle paid the farmer who slapped him on his back, “cum agin soon, Mr. Bill,” and my uncle nodded. We set back down the lane. Later, I asked my aunt, “why did Uncle Bill call the cider lousy?”  My aunt laughed, “wait till supper.” At supper we lifted our glasses. “Cheers,” they said. I took a drink and the cider hit the back of my throat, so sharp-tasting, that I spluttered and coughed. They both laughed. “That's what cider's meant to do, catch you at the back of the throat, good and sharp. We call that lousy.”


agriculture
Barrie Levine

I am a suburban New Jersey native. My husband grew up on the mean streets of Boston. We married in 1972 and purchased an uninsulated cinderblock house, north of Boston, but we couldn’t resist the magical property, ten acres of meadow bordered by a stand of mature pine and lakefront. Paul quickly took to country life and bought a John Deere farm tractor with attachments. He built stone walls, the borders that make good neighbors in New England. He rototilled the soil and planted vegetables, including an impressive field of cornstalks. He built a coop and our children collected eggs and tended chickens, until the flock was decimated by a wily hawk who left piles of feathers. Paul enrolled in an animal husbandry program at the county extension school. He purchased a pair of Oxfordshire sheep, a handsome breed with dark faces, and they thrived chewing the meadow down to the ground. We delivered the lambs, thanks to my husband’s knowledge of animal breeding and behavior. A hairdresser by trade with his own salon, he bought shearing equipment and we sold the wool. I could never have predicted that, during an idyllic phase of my life, I would become a farmer’s wife.


allergic
Blue Waters

When I was little I used to love all the excitement at our family’s farm near Greensburg, Kansas whenever it was time to mow the hay from the fields, thresh it into piles of grain, and store it in the big silo. All those enormous whirring machines were magical to me. But soon an itchy rash would spread across my face, and my eyes would burn and swell up. When it got so I couldn’t breathe anymore, I would go and hide inside the pick-up truck, roll up the windows, and wheeze into a paper bag.


angel
Carole Johnston

I did see a bright green halo above that little girl’s head. I really did. However, I should not have posted it on Facebook. Immediately, I got a text from my daughter telling me to see a neurologist because it might be an aura signaling an ocular migraine or an impending stroke. So . . . after I endured the horrendous cacophony of a head scan, the neurologist said that my brain was normal, although a snarky friend insisted my brain never had been normal. I started googling auras (the spiritual kind) and angels. What else could I do? A green aura designates the person as a healer. Then, I had a dream about an angel wearing green, standing behind my cousin who was about to undergo a liver transplant. I was spooked. I called my friend, Normandi Ellis, who is an Egyptologist and Spiritualist minister. She confirmed that a dream about an angel wearing green was a good sign for my cousin’s transplant surgery and recovery. The surgery was, indeed, a success, but what about the little girl with the green aura? I saw her again and she appeared to be perfectly average — no halo. So . . . is this girl a healer? Is she an angel? Or did she need healing that day? After three years, I still have not had a stroke nor seen another glowing green aura. Was it delusion or hallucination or just a bright spot on a grey day? It’s a mystery.


artichoke
Deborah Burke Henderson
 
During the height of the sticky, summer months, Dad relished having a big steamed artichoke with dinner. He introduced us four kids to this enjoyment, too. Settled in his armchair at the head of the table, he’d warn us about the spiny tips sprouting from each leaf. Then, he’d carefully pluck a deep olive green outer leaf, dip the wide, ridged edge in a small ramekin of shimmery melted butter, bring the beauty to his lips, and let his tongue savor the blend of flavors as he chewed. After the pile of discarded leaves grew deep in a nearby bowl, he went on to explain how to prepare and eat the choke’s heart. “This is the best part,” he’d exclaim, a gleam in his eyes. Soon, warm droplets dripped down our wrists as we shared butter pots. Grins spread across our faces. Sometimes, young Dud let out a screech whenever a thorny spike pricked his chubby little fingers. Dad introduced us to so many new experiences through food, music, and travel, and inspired each of us to challenge and stretch ourselves. Grateful for that. Grateful for you. Miss you, Dad.


ants
Ellen Orleans

“I’d always imagined I’d live in a modern split-level,” my mother says, wrestling with a stuck kitchen drawer. I am ten and have never lived anywhere else. Drafty rooms in the winter, basement floods in springtime, ants in the kitchen each summer. Just yesterday, my mother swept six carpenter ants into a dust pan, while I tugged open the kitchen door, then deposited them outside. This is not uncommon. “If you wanted a split level, why did you buy this house?”  “Your father wanted to move here.” “What about what you wanted?” “I imagined him on his house calls, driving past the home he wished he’d bought.” I don’t notice she didn’t answer my question. I do know my father stopped making house calls before I was even born. Years later, long after I have moved away, my mother will still sweep ants. But first she will step on them, then drop them into the trash. Too difficult now to balance the dust pan in one hand, open the heavy kitchen door with the other, before shaking them loose — alive — into the grass below.


aura
Emily Rhoads Johnson

I was practicing a Mozart sonata on the piano when suddenly sections of notes on the page disappeared. In their place were large black patches that slid from one spot to another. How fascinating, I thought. How thrilling! Was it some kind of magic? Was I having a vision? (At 14, I was into stories with a supernatural twist: the Brontes, Dickens, Poe.) When I told my mother what was happening, her face fell. She told me I was seeing an aura, a visual disturbance that often precedes a migraine, something she had experienced many times in her life. To her, it was a sign of misfortune — an indicator that my life, like hers, would probably be plagued with excruciating headaches. She was right. Today, decades later, the start of an aura fills me with dread. Oh, how I wish I could still feel that same sense of wonder I felt at 14 — believing that somehow I’d been singled out to experience beautiful, glimmering emanations because I was touched with magic!


awe
Florin C. Ciobica
 
Crack of dawn. Like every day, I go for a walk in the neighborhood with my puppy. Toto doesn't understand what humanity is going through. Suddenly I notice something that terrifies me. A featherless swallow chick lying on the sidewalk. I realize he's fallen out of the nest. I immediately pick it up, wrap it with a napkin and then put it in a small plastic bag. In the distance, the siren of an ambulance can be heard. I bring the dog home and get on my bike. I have to find a proper place to bury the baby bird, not among concrete blocks of flats. I pedal until I am away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I stop at a small park where there are a few fruit trees. I kneel down and dig a small hole under a bitter cherry tree. I place the baby bird into the hole, muttering a short prayer. The breeze covers him with a few petals. I burst into tears. Nobody observes me.


abject
Joan Leotta

Perhaps a word of disheartenment seems odd for a birthday word. But I am writing it on this day to loosen its ties on my mind and heart, to expel it from my being. “Be Not Afraid” is the message of the angels — and so we walk ahead into whatever life has spread along our path, looking forward, without fear, and with confidence, even if it is only of the shaky variety. If abject takes over, I will be dropped to my knees, unable to progress. If I become an abject-controlled person then I will be walking without the light of hope to guide me. Right now, as I wait for my daughter’s surgery date and see her growing weaker, the light on my path feels dimmer, as if the wind has blown down the power lines. I sense abject circling, but remind myself that even abject cannot sever the tie between me and my faith. I know that the light is still there.


answers
Kathleen Kramer

The Baltimore Catechism — it had a dark blue cover, worn soft from much use. It resided next to the Douay Bible on top of the piano. Every Saturday evening, Mother would take it down, sit in the rocking chair with the needlepoint seat and call me for our weekly lesson. So while Grandma clattered the supper dishes in the sink, Mother quizzed me on the Catechism. Full of questions, full of answers. I got most of them right and loved the approval on Mother’s face. Maybe that’s why, in school, third row, 4th seat from the front, I would wave my hand wildly, eager to give the answer, the right answer, and see that look of approval. Some of the other kids undoubtedly hated me. And I don’t blame them. But now I’ve come, instead, to love the questions, the ones without an answer. Scientists are discovering how things happen, when they happened. The Big Bang. Giant tube worms, squirming a mile deep in the sea. Us. Me. But do they know why? There could have been nothing. But here we are. Seeking for that why is reason enough to keep going.


artist
Katrina Morse
 
From the earliest age I was Observer. Before I was 2 years old I remember looking under my great-grandmother’s kitchen table in Kansas, my head just under the tabletop when I was standing. I saw a big gallon glass jug in the corner. My mom told me it was root beer, getting bubbly the old-fashioned way with yeast and sugar. As I grew and my brothers and sister were born, I was Big Sister, telling my younger siblings not to swear and to feed the cats. Then I learned the miracle of sewing and made stuffed animals and my own bell-bottoms. I was Seamstress at age 8. When I was 12 I had the false title of Tennis Pro when I won a neighborhood tournament, being the oldest contestant. I got to go to the Tennis US Open for that. That was also the age that I was Strongest and Fastest, being the tallest child, boy or girl, in 6th grade. In Junior High and High School I was Scientist, studying nature and loving the periodic table. But I also became Artist — a creative thinker and maker of things and happenings. Now I realize I’ve been an artist all along.


aglow
Margaret Walker
 
When I was growing up it seemed every house had a piano and long before we started piano lessons we learned to pound out two songs on the piano. The first was Chopsticks followed soon by a one-finger version of Heart and Soul. “Graduating” to playing Heart and Soul with both hands and then as a duet was a major accomplishment — and one to be repeated as loudly as possible when having new guests for whom to display this prodigious talent — sometimes including our own flourishes that we were certain added magnificently to the arrangement. At some point, my friends and I discovered the sheet music and lyrics and were able to add to the cacophony by singing at the top of our lungs to our own accompaniment. It was some years before I fully appreciated the lyrics — “…that little kiss you stole held all my heart and soul.”


a-line
Peaches Gillette

1965. I run through the tall summer-green grass in Prospect Park, in search of a place to hide — my brother is the seeker. I stay close to my mother who sits on a bench smiling and looking toward the sky. She is my sun, in all I am, in all I do, in all I feel; she is the center of the universe. Her yellow A-line dress curtains around her, and sweetly rests upon the top of the grass, grounding her to the earth. Her glow pulls me in. I tuck away under the bench where she sits. Her dress conceals me, her motherness protects me, my brother cannot find me. Her A-line dress becomes a place in which I drift away. I am at peace.


allowance
Pris Campbell

When I entered eighth grade in the fifties, grown up enough to wish for lipstick and perfume, my father began giving me 25 cents a day during the week as my allowance. It was his intention to teach me how to save money for special things, in advance of the time when I would have to budget for rent, clothes, and food. Lipstick was still a no-no and cheap toilet water was barely within reach, much less perfume, so I saved for daily sodas and cheese crackers at Kohlers drug store, a weekly barbecue sandwich at Press’s Grill, and occasional drive-in movies across the state line in Monroe — often with a couple of friends stashed in the trunk to make our money stretch far enough for popcorn and soda for each of us. My parents relented and bought me a bottle of perfume for Christmas when I was 15. The bottle was white with large marble-like bubbles across its surface. It was shaped like it held a genie, with a beautiful ceramic stopper and a cork plug. The bottle could be upended, saturating the cork, which was then used to dab faint aromas behind my ears and on my wrists. Not for school days, my parents admonished. But it was allowed for the occasional dances at the community center or square dances at the edge of town. I still have that bottle. I’ve kept it sealed up for all these years but the few times I’ve opened it there was still the slight hint of perfume lingering on the cork. As if a genie truly inhabited the bottle, each sniff brings back my parents’ faces, my South Carolina home, and friends who are now long gone — as well as those secret hopes I had that a boy might be so entranced by my scent that he would kiss me.


alice
Theresa A. Cancro

"A my name is Alice" was one of the jump rope rhymes I learned on the school playground. And Alice happens to be my middle name. When I was growing up, it was considered old-fashioned. In first and second grade, I was proud of it, but later I was reluctant to tell anyone who happened to ask. Over the years, I learned about Aunt Alice, an older sister of my great-grandmother. She was very much ahead of her time: a free spirit who outlived two husbands and divorced another, moved to California, and bragged about her family heritage to anyone who would listen, including claiming to be distantly related to General Lafayette. During the roaring twenties when she dared to wear short skirts, she talked my great-grandmother into cutting her long hair. As an adult, I've grown to like my middle name, and even though I never knew her, I feel a kinship with Aunt Alice, especially when I strike out on a new, unusual project.


acres
Tina Wright

When I was a kid 20 acres was a big field and it took forever for my dad to plow even 10 acres with the John Deere A tractor and a 2-bottom plow with no hydraulics. As a farmhand years later, I was expected to polish off such a field pretty damn quick with 100 horsepower (or more) tractors, 4- or 5-bottom plows. Way back in the day, you felt every rock on the old John Deere that Dad was bouncing on . . . at the same time a farmer across our little valley was plowing with horses! I only saw Joe Cashun and his horse team from far away, never close up.  


ants
Zee Zahava

My mother used to buy her magazines at the check-out aisle in the supermarket: Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Redbook. She read them at night, in bed, to help her fall asleep. She carefully studied the recipes — every cup and every teaspoon — until her eyes closed. She tried hard to replicate these recipes: cheese and bean casseroles topped with marshmallows; cornflakes smashed to bits and mixed into meatloaf; tuna and Jell-O pie. The magazines also gave Mom ideas for “healthy snacks” to serve in the afternoon, in case anyone wanted a “pick me up.” I never did, but that didn’t stop her. One time, and only one time, it was ants on a log. My mother took celery stalks, stuffed Skippy peanut butter into the crevices, and placed plump raisins down the “log.” She presented this with a ta-da flourish. I said No. I said it loudly and I said it forcefully. Some foot-stamping might have been involved. What was she thinking? Ants? Ants??!!?? The only thing worse than celery is celery with ants. Even if those ants were really perfectly harmless raisins. It was still unthinkable.

F is for . . . .

fennel
Alan Bern
 
You didn’t believe me when I said that “I was bored . . . in my childhood.” “Fiddle-faddle,” you stomped a foot, “no way!” I explained: “When I was seven, I’d wait in front of my house for my best friend Jim to let me know when he’d be coming down so we could play with toy soldiers. Jim and I called it playing with men. Awfully 1950s, no? Jim mostly didn’t let me know when he was coming down since he was always so slow doing his chores. Like folding his clean clothes and putting them away. Well-organized dresser drawers. Jim’s mother required them. Even back then I thought, “Good luck to her.” It was so dry in the hellstrip dirt out in front of our house where the fennel grew wild. It wasn’t that hot, but it never rained in the summertime at all. Didn’t the fennel need water to grow? Maybe not much. Then I told you about the host plant fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) where swallowtail butterflies come to lay their eggs and swallowtail caterpillars feed. Then you wanted to kiss; and you knew I did, too. Lace in my fingers, and into my palms — the scent.


feathers
Alan Peat

Whenever I go for a walk, I can’t resist picking up feathers. They seem too beautiful to be tramped into the dirt, so I fill my pockets with them. I’ve been at it for so long now that distinguishing their origin is usually a relatively simple matter. I mainly find crow and pigeon and magpie feathers but occasionally something catches me off guard. A bright green feather in Kew Gardens foiled me.Turns out that escaped parakeets have bred there for ages: problem solved! One day my pockets were so full of feathers that I stuck one into a knitted monkey I owned. Goodness knows why I had a knitted monkey! Goodness knows why I stuck a feather into him! But then I stuck in another. And another. And now this monkey, who I call “Feathers” (of course) sits on my dashboard, a feathery porcupine, all hint of his simian origins hidden. My pockets are still filling up with feathers. So, dear reader, if you happen to have a knitted monkey lying around, unwanted and unloved, please do feel free to contact me. I have a good home for him by the steering wheel.


family
Ann Carter

family is baggage is wind is complex fortune is a backwards step is happiness is confusion is dull and delightful is the answer is the question is salt air is found objects is soft steps and jumping jacks is long deep breaths is hiccups is misfortune is a hot cup of tea is the bottom of the compost bin is a tickle instead of a tear is a favorite pet is the pet’s untimely death is a favorite cousin is sunburn and windburn and what it feels like when the wind stops is green grass and fresh snowfall is having your hair pulled is having your hair brushed is a knot that can’t be undone is a cat sitting on your lap and a dog chasing its tail is long conversations and short hellos and whispers and a broken dish and the dish glued back together is a ringing telephone is a three point shot is a pansy in bloom in February is no holes in your socks and freshly made bread and not being interrupted and forgiveness.


fired
Barrie Levine

After freshman year in college, I landed a summer job at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. I learned how to make malts, sodas, sundaes, and banana splits. One of my regulars, an older man who ordered apple pie with coffee daily, always left a quarter tip under the saucer. Another girl was soon hired full-time for the busy counter. One afternoon, she prepared a strawberry malt and I saw her insert the canister into the spinner — but not far enough. It rocketed through the air and skidded on the floor, but not before ejecting its contents all over, including on my yellow uniform. My boss walked up to me and shouted, “Miss Weiner, did you do that?” I tried to explain but he didn’t believe me. The bright pink dripping off my uniform convinced him of my guilt. The new girl just watched. He ordered me to return my uniform and leave. My public humiliation at the counter burned for weeks. In September, I returned to school, armed with a tougher shell and more prepared for “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Still, I wondered if the apple pie guy cared enough to ask why I’d gone missing.


flatulence
Blue Waters

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard the word flatulence. Maybe 8 or 9. I knew it to be a polite way of saying farts, so that was something to ponder. I enjoyed the fine art of creative farting. A solitary artform, for the most part, and the best place to go to practice it was high up in a cottonwood tree on a windy day. I would have extra beans for lunch and wait for my gut to gather up some powerful gasses. Then straddling a branch in various grandiose poses, I could force out some impossible combos of sweet little squeaks, quick pops, low rumbles, or hideously long blaaaaats. My posse of squirrels and crows would gather around me to enjoy the performance. And any living thing on the ground below would look up with big eyes to locate the source of all this raucous flatulence. Me!!


freedom
Carole Johnston

This is a meditation on the freedom to be lost. I want to be “cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown” on a mountaintop. I imagine rambling down the mountain, meandering here and there in a marigold yellow caravan, a green lantern in the window. I want to be a hawk streaking across dawn in a turquoise boat, into azure seas. I remember camping out on a red dirt mesa in Monument Valley, below a myriad of stars. Alone. No destination. Once I drove solo through mountains and desert, camping beneath stars and pine trees, free to linger here and there, no commitments, responsible to no one. Once I danced on a windy hill in Norwich, making magic with the Hawthorn Queen (the poet Joy McCall) in the power of a fairy ring. Now . . .  freedom is a memory that lights up my brain like a poem of the open road.


flames
Christina Martin

Eyes glazed, not really seeing. That's what happens when I stare too long at the flames in the fireplace, floating into another world, a world of safety and comfort, Christmas and birthdays and parties crackling with noise. The Swiss cottage we all used to stay at. And of course, snow. There has to be snow doesn't there — that's the best part! My snow castle is the tallest. It melts as my granddaughter walks through the door pulling off her hat. “Nana!”


friendship
Deborah Burke Henderson
 
The years have passed by, 58 to be exact, and her love continues to surround me, fill me, comfort me. We were 13 when we met, both navigating the white waters of adolescence. Over time, we have seen one another through the ebb and flow of each struggle, joy, and sorrow. Like bits of sea glass, treasures to be found in the tangle of black-green seaweed, our journeys have honed us. We have lost any sharp edges, polished by the turn of each wave, but still we sparkle in the dazzling noon light. Our connection is deep-rooted and ever constant. Our souls sing melodiously. Our friendship is a gift never to be taken away.


father
Ellen Orleans

The doctors say it’s a matter of weeks. I’m in the car with my father, driving away from the hospital. What I want him to say is This doesn’t seem possible. This can’t be real. How will I live without her? Instead he says, “I know how to use the dishwasher. I know how to use the microwave oven. I know how to use the washer and the dryer. I guess I’ll be okay.” If I were a different daughter, if he were a different father, perhaps I would not be stunned into silence. I’d forgive him for thinking of himself first. I’d remember he’s never lived alone. I’d feel pity. I am not that daughter. Four months later, I will listen to widowers speak of their wives: She was my best friend. She made me a better man. I’m an ex-Marine who fought at Iwo Jima, but living without her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. These men are not my father.


forget
Jack Goldman

“Forget about it!” was my father’s way of telling me that, no, I couldn’t have that pair of rugged boots displayed in the window of our local shoe store. An especially emphatic “I said, forget about it!” was what followed if I continued to nag him. Once his verdict was rendered, it was final — basta! finito! end of discussion. Argument was useless. He never changed his mind. You almost had to admire his unshakeable judgment. But as I grew older, I came to question his injunction. How was I to forget something just because he told me to? Sure, I had to accept his refusal to buy me something I wanted or give me permission to, say, go Christmas caroling with some of my Christian friends. But, in the end, though I’m sure he didn’t realize it, I disobeyed him. “Forget about it?” I never did.


fennel
Jim Mazza

If I were to write in praise of my favorite flavor, it undoubtedly would be an ode to fennel or, as I prefer to think of it in Italian, the playfully-named, finocchio. Contemplating the flavors I love most — lemon, basil, and cinnamon come to mind. Yet, fennel, with its soft similarity to licorice, ranks on top. Fennel is an herb, which grows tall from a bulbous base, and is often thought of as a vegetable. And I say, yes, herb AND vegetable! Either way, given my severe case of finocchio fever, I can’t get enough of its enticing aroma and flavor. Years ago, we rented an ancient stone cottage in Liguria. When we arrived, we made our way through a steel gate opening onto a sizeable garden situated in front of the tiny, shuttered dwelling. The garden was comprised of hundreds of 4- and 5-foot-tall fennel plants — a dense, feathery forest of greens and whites and flowering yellows. Realizing we had arrived at a place that, for me, verged on the spiritual, I immediately dropped my luggage and leaned forward, burying my face among the feathery fronds. In my revery, I heard an unmistakable whispering: “Benvenuto … Welcome!”


first
Joan Leotta

Looking for part-time work, I stumbled upon a call for docents at Mount Vernon, home and resting place of George Washington, our first elected President. Soon, I was posted in rotation at various places on the Estate — the house, the garden, the tomb, etc. — to tell visitors that part of GW’s story. A reenactment was planned for December 14, 1999, the two hundredth anniversary of GW’s death. Docents vied for assignments that would let them watch most of the cortege. No one wanted to be the docent who would have to miss out, but someone had to remain in docent HQ. I also wanted to be a part of the event, but as newest docent, considering fairness, I offered myself to our supervisor as the person to stay behind. She was puzzled. I explained I felt as last hired, I should not take a coveted position from others. Two days later, “funeral” duties were posted. The HQ docent job was divided. No one would miss more than an hour of the festivities. Except me. My assignment? To accompany Mount Vernon’s press person all day. I got to see the entire reenactment. My offer to stay behind put me first. Last-hired, first to see all.


falling
Julie Lind

“Maybe we’ll see some seagulls at the Falls,” I said as I pulled out of the driveway. “I hate birds,” Nanny said. I nodded and turned onto Pine Avenue. The neighborhood changed when we passed the Middle School and entered downtown Niagara Falls. Houses were now hidden behind dilapidated factories. Smoke stacks emitted puffs of stale gray air that refused to be absorbed into the humidity. Behind them, I could make out the rapids of the Niagara River. I followed the signs to Goat Island. The grass became greener, the factories now in our wake. As we entered the park, I could see the mist of the Falls. I found a parking spot and helped Nanny out of the car. “Isn’t it nice?” she whispered, leading us to the mist. Though she was not even half a foot away from me, I could barely make out her words. Her voice was calmer than I had heard it since my aunt’s death. “So nice,” she repeated. She didn’t wait for me to respond. Her voice kept going. “Doesn’t it make me want to . . .  Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it make you want to fall in?”


forever
Kath Abela Wilson

fallen hero it is my father i am thinking of I have not written enough about him he was my forever passion to write he was a poet the first in my heart and i was first in his i always knew that and i was first of five children i  kept my place as he did in the forever heart of  the world but he forgot that forever lasts forever and he fell out of love he who created love and  forever in the first place every little bit of it his was the long long story and when he forgot that first was forever and left the whole of it and disappeared and i found he found another I called and said you have gone against everything you taught me about forever he started a new forever and a new first she left her own forever for him in the end became my friend because we shared that forever she told me after his long long silence in the end he fell down the front stairs away from her and she still loved him too


flowers
Kathleen Kramer       

Dad never bought flowers for Mother. Unless you count the spray of roses we bought in his name for her coffin. He couldn’t go to her funeral. He had had too much of death and his 75-year love for our mother didn’t need his presence to confirm what we all knew to be true — she was the center of his life and would remain so, regardless of whether she was alive or not. More than once after she died I overheard him reliving some memory with her in his quiet, raspy voice. And although Dad never bought flowers for Mother, he brought her flowers — often. Honeysuckle, pink and wild. Lilacs, purple and white, drooping with their perfume. Apple blossoms from the crab apple tree in the backyard and from gnarled, abandoned orchards behind old barns. We were always glad to see the flowers drinking their fill from a mason jar placed squarely in the middle of the blue-topped dinette table in the kitchen. Their fragrance filled our house. And our mother, breathing it in, knew, in spite of  her failing sight, that Dad loved her.


fuel
Lou Robinson
 
Food for the animals. Hay stacked to the ceiling; dry and frozen dog food stored. Heater in the water tank. Bag of carrots. Am I spoiled? Yes but. So many signs of early deprivation all around me. Mostly lack of love, or abundance of cruelty, and I can’t feed them all. I want the barn full but I don’t want to feel full. When we canoed to the farmer’s market we’d canoe back with baskets full of healthy vegetables. The return was hard paddling, upstream, startling nesting egrets along the shore into flight. Keep everything moving. Anxiety is fear of stasis. Everything, even water, runs to stay alive, or at least until death catches up.


funnies
Margaret Dennis

My Aunt Ki always read us the funny papers on Sunday. It was a ritual. After 9 o’clock Mass, she would walk my little brother Johnny and me to Fred’s News Store, just around the corner from our house. Fred’s store had everything, but what we liked best were the racks of comic books. Ki had rules: we could each pick two, but there was to be no romance for me and no war themes for Johnny. Ki picked up the bulky Sunday paper and waited patiently for us to make our choices. When at last we were ready, we went up to the counter to pay Fred. He was always the one behind the cash register. Fred had a very mean look and only one “regular” hand. His left hand wore a brown glove and it remained still, down along his side. We kids were fascinated by that and tried not to look, but we looked, every time. Once the transaction was complete, we would leave and head for our house. There we would settle on the couch, with Aunt Ki sitting between Johnny and me. Then she would read aloud the “funnies.” There was Sluggo and Nancy, Terry and the Pirates, and my favorite, Brenda Starr. Sunday was the best day of the week.


fascinated
Margaret Walker
 
A tiny white-haired lady with a cane boarded the Metro. Seated near the door I motioned to her to sit beside me and greeted her in my execrable French. Hearing me speak a few words to my husband she asked if I was American. “Oui, madame.” She told me she loved Americans but had not talked with one in many years. She had learned some English from American soldiers who liberated her village outside Paris during WWII and proudly recited the English words she remembered — a total of about 20. At our Metro stop I was so engrossed in this conversation that we rode on as she told me, with gestures when I didn’t understand, about living in France during WWII and the glory of the liberation of Paris. Tears filled her eyes — and mine. At her stop, she thanked me (as if I had personally liberated France), took my right hand in both of hers, and kissed me on the cheek. Lifetime souvenirs — the stories of one-time strangers.


fame
Pris Campbell

I’m at a posh Menninger’s Foundation party at APA (the American Psychological Association) in Washington, D.C, and I’m talking to Claude Brown, famed author of the top-selling Manchild In The Promised Land. The book describes his experiences growing up Black in a time when water fountains and bathrooms still said “whites only,” and his years of trouble with the law during and after. I was invited to the party because I worked as an extern at Menninger’s one summer, during grad school, and Claude was invited by an older female psychiatrist from Menniger’s, his “sort of” date. She eyes us now possessively from across the room. Even though we’re not nearly through with what has become an intense conversation, her attention is wearing us down, so he asks me to spend the next day with him. He plans to briefly see two old protest buddies from college days and then look around Washington again. I go along, and we have a great time before parting at the end of the day. We live too far apart to plan future visits. More than a decade passes and I read a syndicated column written by him. In it he talks about his Black friends calling him “marshmallow” because he has White friends, doesn’t speak jive, and likes classical music. Every time he feels he has become just one of the group with his White friends, someone says “and what is the Black point of view on that?” and he’s reminded that, despite all, his skin color still separates him from them. I write him a note of encouragement and send it through the paper but I don’t know if he gets it, or if he even remembers me all these years later. The next time I look him up I discover that he died in his early sixties. In my mind I rerun that day we spent together in Washington, so long ago, and wish that things would have changed in this country by now.


fairies
Theresa A. Cancro

I have always been fascinated by fairies. I guess it started with the poems my mom wrote to accompany her detailed color pencil drawings. I remember "Moon Fairies": "I know moon fairies dwell within the woodland/ Among tangled honeysuckle brambles and wild rose briar . . ." In the first grade, my teacher assigned groups of three or four kids short skits based on poems and songs she came across. That spring, on a small school stage, my two classmates and I — all of us normally very quiet and shy — sang, danced, and skipped to "Ring-a-ring o' Fairies/ Pixies, sprites and elves/ Dancing with a little child/ As nimble as themselves . . ." It was as if Mrs. Lutz knew of my fondness for these mythical beings. Later, when I was a bit older, I imagined tiny humans with butterfly and moth wings flitting among lily-of-the-valley and pink weeping cherry blossoms in our small garden. On my nightstand now is a fairy figurine, complete with stained-glass wings.


forecast
Tina Wright

I love weather and thinking about it. Farmers have always been obsessed with meteorology, way before the Weather Channel and even before the Old Farmers’ Almanac, from which I still remember the winter warning, “When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen.” Making hay in summer takes a lot of forecasting. You mow hay when expecting a few days of good weather and the next day waiting for a heavy dew to burn off the rows of cut hay before you can rake and bale the hay up. A nice sunny day with very little dew and a farmer thinks, “It’s going to rain later.” Because of the lack of dew. There is counterintuitive forecasting on these kinds of days, it can be hot and really humid, you wouldn’t think hay would dry but before a new front of rain, hay dries really fast in the humid air. And you are racing to beat the rain. The Spectrum News weather report on TV is called a Futurecast, what an irritating made-up word! For gosh sake, guessing whatever weather spell the goddesses are sending our way, that’s a forecast.


forgetting
Tom Clausen

So much to forget. Yes, I did get an “F” on several tests and exams through high school and college. But amazingly to me, my parents, and my friends at the time, my serious struggles to not get an “F” were just enough to avoid getting one as my final grade. The label of “failing” was often a close call but not what defined me! For the record, I did get 12 credit hours of D-minus in my junior year of college and a letter was sent to my parents, explaining my poor performance and saying that if repeated in the next semester it would result in suspension and a need to withdraw from future studies. It was a scare enough to get me to do better and I began (to try) to forget that I had done so poorly. Here, fifty years later, I have mostly forgotten all my earlier trials and tribulations but of course those failings still reside in some place, like all failings that we try to forget but never totally can . . . until everything, even the best memories, are forgotten. 


fish
Zee Zahava

Betty and Jay are our neighbors who live in the apartment next door to us on Vyse Avenue. Sometimes I go there so Betty can watch me if Mom needs a break. They have a daughter named Susan who is always in her crib, sleeping. She is a boring baby. Jay is a skinny man who blinks a lot and he talks very fast. He keeps big fish in a small fish tank. I don’t like him. Betty wears her hair in a pony tail the same way I do, which is funny because I’m just a girl but she is a grown-up woman. One day when I’m sitting on their living room rug, watching the fish go back and forth, I figure out how to tie my own shoelaces. When Mom comes to pick me up I run to the door to show her what I’ve done. But Betty gets there first and tells Mom that she taught me how to make the bows. She lied! She was in the bedroom with boring Susan the whole time. I don’t say a word because Betty seems so happy. She’s bouncing up and down and that makes her pony tale swoosh back and forth. But a few months later Betty and Jay and Susan move away. Betty is crying, the day they leave. My mother doesn’t cry and neither do I. An old lady moves in next door to us. We don’t even know her name and she never invites us into her apartment. I don’t know for absolute certain but I have a pretty strong feeling that she doesn’t own any fish.

G is for . . .

gone
Alan Bern
 
I was counting back one day. The numbers disappeared. I stopped. Cold. Started again. They still left. John was showing me his dance moves. They left too. We knew we were hungry so we chose the left turn back into town. Walking. For sandwiches. Tuna. They’d disappear too. Soon enough. Uncle George was sure I’d remembered wrong where the little blind alleys lay in my wonderful walk years ago. “Across the pond, yes, and you took a right turn.” Now I remembered: no, it was a left. And the walk along was long. But so worth it. Though not at all retraceable. Really finished. We stuffed the sandwich wrappers in our jacket pockets. Wadded up.


gran
Alan Peat

Grandad is in the living room. He’s wearing his white shirt and a burgundy tie. I’m sitting in the kitchen with Gran, when, quite suddenly, she takes my hand and leads me through. He is lying in an open coffin. “It’s the last time we’ll be together and I want him to know,” she begins. I well up immediately. “I want him to know that we jumped the gun, but we proved them all wrong.”
She is shaking her head and now we’re both crying. I’ve worked out what she means and can’t believe it’s never crossed my mind before. I know gran is seventeen years older than my mother but it’s just a fact; like knowing she was born the year the Titanic sank. Nothing more or less than that…. Some time later, I learn that when her father discovered she was pregnant he beat her so hard that the neighbours heard it through the walls. But still she washed his clothes and cleaned his house and cooked for her stepbrothers. And after my grandfather’s death she laid his clothes out neatly on the bedside chair each evening, just as she’d done for sixty three years.


girl (scouts)
Ann Carter

It was when she went away to Camp Shirley Rogers that my sister learned to be away from Mama and Daddy and our brother and sisters. She didn’t like it really at all, and got very homesick. Probably the only thing worse than the homesickness was trying to pass her deep water swim test. She failed it, which only made her want to excel at cooking. And I can tell you she used to make the very best chocolate pound cake and buttermilk biscuits. Johnny Sue Sassenfield is the only girl my sister remembers from Camp Shirley Rogers. She was also from Winston-Salem, but didn’t go to the same school as my sister. After those few weeks my sister never saw Johnny Sue again. The other day we found a little cardboard box that contained my sister’s scout pins and membership cards, along with her flying up wings that were sewn on her badge sash. On the sleeve of her scout uniform, which is also in that little box, are the other badges she earned: camp crafts, plant kingdom (trees and shrubs), model citizen, traveler, let’s go cooking, pioneer, books, my country, and a few more that she can’t quite remember. In weekly Girl Scout meetings my sister solemnly pledged to do her duty to God and country, and to obey the Girl Scout laws, and she can still recite that pledge. But the part she remembers the most are the sour bubblegum balls that burst in her mouth in surprise and delight.


groceries
Antonia Matthew

Who could have ever imagined that getting groceries would become so fraught with danger and that the supermarket would become a place to be negotiated with fear and trembling. Regulations: Hours between 6 and 8 a.m. for high risk shoppers only. Masks  compulsory. Keep a social distance of 6 feet between yourself and other shoppers. Follow the directional arrows. Travel the aisles, looking straight ahead. Ignore the person breaking the rules. The security guard will strong-arm them out the door, as they spit and curse. Forgot an item? Travel the circuit again. Approach the cleaning aisle with care, hoping not to find anyone hiding bottles of hand sanitizer about their person while two others, nearby, wrestle over the last pack of toilet paper. Wait in the checkout line with feet firmly on the STAND HERE square.


girlfriends
Barrie Levine

We met a couple in birthing class 35 years ago, the start of a friendship that ended, so sadly, when they recently died within a year of each other. Our daughters, born ten days apart, claimed that they talked to each other by telephone from their mothers’ stomachs. When they were eight or nine, they re-named each other Frank and Charlee. They wrote scripts for plays with these characters who were themselves. They started a “company” to end pollution and mailed out newsletters in their handwriting. And probably more that we did not know about. They carried on with their self-made world every weekend into their early teens, and then just as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared. Even now, both married and leading responsible lives with little girls of their own, they will occasionally call each other by those special names. I notice the recognition in their eyes of the young girls deep inside, a treasure of their friendship. At the first funeral, of the dad, they hugged and cried together — all four parents were really parents of them both. At the second funeral, I lent my shoulder for them to cry on, now mother to two daughters.


gibbous
Blue Waters

My father and I were driving along a dirt road on our way back home from our farm to the small town where we lived. He probably wanted to check on something and I jumped at the chance to ride with him in his pick-up truck. It was so much better than a car. We sat quietly and watched the moon rise above the flat Kansas horizon. It was huge and orange. I asked if the moon could still be called full even if one side of it was a bit fuzzy and didn’t form a perfect circle in the sky. He thought about that for a long time and then told me there’s a name that describes an almost full moon but he couldn’t remember what it was. This remained a mystery to me until, decades later, I heard someone describe “the gibbous moon” in a very dramatic way, in a conversation I overheard at a restaurant. Later, I started asking everyone I knew if they had any idea what a gibbous moon looked like. Some did, most didn’t. I looked “gibbous” up in a dictionary and it made sense that it was probably the word my daddy was trying to remember, all those many years ago.


grief
Carole Johnston

I heard a scream the night she died, just after midnight. It woke me from a dream. The phone rang. They told me she was gone and I was a thousand miles away. Years later, I visited her grave, all tangled and overwhelmed by weeds, as if her own children had forgotten her. I brought a trowel, and buried a silver angel charm beside the stone. No one knows. I’m sure it’s still there and will be there as the Earth spins through eons and millennia. The poems she read to childhood-me will last as long. Sometimes I smell tobacco smoke, when there is none, and I feel her presence. She smoked too much and died too young. Grief never leaves us, but we fill the empty space with creativity and poems.


guts
Ellen Orleans

Tug of the tail. Crack of the shell. The colander of raw shrimp sits between my mother and me. I shake my fingers, willing away sticky, dangling feet. We keep peeling. It is June. I am twelve. I remember the cool, clean pages of a hard-bound journal. Sharp knife over shrimp back. “De-veining,” my mother explains. “The vein is really the digestive tract.” She sees my body tighten. “I’ll do that part.” But it’s only fair I do my share. The first two I butcher, but then get better, flesh splitting evenly. I reach for another but it’s the journal I see. My mother’s Marriage Encounter journal. None of my business. I had opened it anyway. She and my father in Montreal.  It is early spring here. As we stepped out of the hotel this morning, I felt like a new bride. Fingers thick with viscera, I remember the journal’s blank pages. “Do you still go to Marriage Encounter?” “Your father didn’t like it.” “Can’t you go by yourself?”  “Marriage Encounter is for couples.” I add my half-peeled shrimp to the pile. My mother carries the bowl to the sink. Cold water, full force, she begins to rinse.


gefilte fish
Jack Goldman

The year my grandfather decided I was old enough to sit at the Passover table, I nodded off during his interminable recitation. When I woke up, I took a nibble of the gefilte fish on my plate. It was my good fortune that my Uncle Eddie, who was on a holiday leave from the Army Medical Corps, was at the table as I began to choke on a small bone that had eluded my grandmother’s radar. There was a general tumult as I gasped for breath. “Drink some water!” “Swallow some matzos!” Uncle Eddie fought his way through the crowd of my well-meaning executioners, some of whom were poking their fingers down my throat while others were slapping me on the back. Eddie picked me up and deftly performed the Heimlich maneuver. The fishbone popped out onto the table to cries of “Gott sei dank!” Then, like a Torah procession, a group of men in yarmulkes and prayer shawls carried me off to bed. Dai-dai-yenu,
Dai-dai-yenu, Dai-dai-yenu, Daiyenu daiyenu! I never got a chance to thank Uncle Eddie, who was killed trying to assist a wounded infantryman during the Battle of the Bulge.


garbage
Jim Mazza
 
The barrel-vaulted glass ceiling of the Milano Centrale train station was ablaze in the afternoon sun. Making ourselves comfortable at the window seats of our train, we soon would be bound for the Ligurian coast. Yet, we were surprised when the compartment door abruptly opened and we found ourselves staring at a well-dressed Italian businessman clutching a bag of McDonald’s takeout. Seeing us, he immediately stepped back into the passageway. We motioned for him to join us inside, but he refused, saying through the half-opened door that he could not eat such spazzatura — garbage — in front of others. “Non è un problema … we’re Americans,” we said smiling. He did not budge until hamburger and fries were consumed and the bag cast aside. Now more relaxed, he entered the cabin, sat down, and immediately launched into stories of his beloved Genova: the architecture, art, and culture. He was most enthusiastic, however, describing the food — the most elegant pasta, richest pesto, sweetest tomatoes. He was disappointed to learn we were not stopping overnight in his hometown. “How could you not stay for a meal or two…?”  We chuckled. For as we listened, we simply could not put those golden arches out of our minds.


giddy
Joan Leotta
 
Growing up, compliments were distributed often in our family. My mom often told me I was smart, loved, precious. But praise for looks, something I craved as a child, was always conditional. Mom would say, “You’d be pretty if you . . . . You could be prettier if you . . . .” However, when she talked about my younger cousin — no hedging. She was the pretty one. My reaction? After a brief flirtation with eye-shadow colors as a teen, I rejected all makeup. I came to terms with being okay looking but not the prettiest. Years later, when my now husband and I were dating, he often told me I was pretty, beautiful even. I’d reply, “You should see my cousin. She’s the really pretty one.” After he met my cousin, Joe told me, “I don’t know what you’re thinking. Your cousin is nice looking, but you are the prettiest.” I began to laugh. I felt a weight lift from my spirit. I was and am pretty — the prettiest, even — to the one whose opinion on that matters most. He still thinks I’m pretty and smart, and I still feel positively giddy when he tells me so.


grampian
Kathleen Kramer

Google the word “Grampian” and you’ll learn it is one of three major mountain ranges in the Scottish Highlands. If you search further, you might find that it is also a tiny town in Pennsylvania, population 321. It’s the tiny town where my parents met at the Grange Hall — a square dance, my dad said. And the band was the famous Bud Moore & the Hillsdale Hillbillies! Dad danced with my mother the whole evening long. Grampian is also where I was born, and my grandparents lived just 7 miles away on a little rented farm, the “Johnson place.” Grampian is where I had my first “permanent wave,” with huge electric curlers so heavy I couldn’t hold my head up. It’s also where, when 4 years old, I strolled up the front steps to our house, vigorously chewing gum. (In those days, a 4-year-old could walk, without fear, to and from a playmate’s house a few doors away.) When my mother asked where I got the chewing gum, I said, “Lia-tia gave it to me.” The next question: “Was it wrapped in paper?” “No, Lia took it out of her mouth.” I got a little spank for that. But it was worth it. Who can resist Wrigley’s Spearmint, even if it’s “ABC”? (ABC = Already Been Chewed!)
 

graveyard
Lou Robinson
 
I sat up in bed, thinking “lost paper bag!” and remembered what spooked him, Tyson, the big warmblood, leaping in the air at the far end of the pasture because a paper bag had blown into the fence and hung there, struggling to get loose. I lost my black leather jacket. The one where the arms hung down past my hands. When next I saw my father, I remembered it was his, the one he wore when riding his Harley. I apologized for losing it and he said, “I still have mine. You got that one at a garage sale.” She says, “I still wear the rubber boots I wore twenty years ago when we went to Scotland!” And there they are, on her feet in the wet grass of the graveyard up the road where all graves bear names of my relatives, but how can they when I’m from far away down south, and so were they. Wait, their relatives were from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales! And now thanks to Helen’s boots, we are all connected!


gab
Margaret Dennis

“Gab” is a word that is probably outdated. To my mind, it meant to talk a lot about frivolous things. My mother and her generation used it a lot as: “I was gabbing on the phone with Anna May Mitchell for an hour,” or “that Tess Burnside really likes to gab!” It seemed my mother and her friends spent a lot of time “gabbing.” This was a time in the 1950s when most women didn’t work outside of the home. My mother was a very social person. I’ve heard that she loved to tell stories and make people laugh. In fact, I’m told she liked to laugh a lot herself. This was not the mother I saw at home. No. That mother was tight-lipped and stern. In our house, the telephone was in the dining room on a little table in the corner. While on the phone, my mother would sit on a straight-backed chair, smoke her Winstons, and talk for hours. I sometimes crouched in the pantry and listened in. It wasn’t what they discussed that interested me. No. I longed to hear the voice of that other “mother.” The one I never saw or heard. When she laughed, I laughed.To myself, of course.


glimpse
Margaret Walker
 
Mama made her way along our quiet beach at least once every day. Litter bag in hand, she collected the debris left behind by tourists.This was no leisurely stroll. Mama strode rapidly with frequent bends to pick up a piece of garbage and numerous side trips to the trash bins to dump her full sack of litter. She kept her eyes peeled for treasures — sea turtle tracks, unusual shells, sand dollars and anyone she might know. One afternoon Mama suddenly headed toward a group of people some distance away. A woman about her age jumped up. She and Mama hugged and chattered and hugged again. Clearly, long-lost friends. I wandered in that direction and stood next to a man about my age. We just watched — waiting to be introduced. No introduction. Odd. Then the two women stopped, looked closely at each other — and said “Oh, I thought you were somebody else!” I was mortified. Not Mama. Not the other woman. They began to laugh. This quickly became a conversation of “Where are you from?” and “Do you know so-and-so…?” Connections were made. Introductions. Finding a new friend. Walks with Mama embracing her world.
 

goodness
Pris Campbell

……GRACIOUS, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE! Jerry Lee Lewis waves his curly hair, bangs on the piano with fingers, butt and feet, belting out his hit song in the joint fifties rock and roll concert at the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina. Backstage, Chuck Berry and other icons of the era await their turn to astonish. I’m 15, old enough to have my drivers license the year before but our mothers insisted — one of them must chaperone my two friends and me on this hour-long trek from our tiny town just over the South Carolina state line. My mother got the short straw. The music is wild. Teenagers are screaming. A couple is mouth to mouth on the steps next to us. Mother is fearless. She calmly tells two drunk boys sitting behind us that my name is Priscilla when someone sings the song by that title, humiliating me. They sing along with the song, poking at my shoulders and laughing hilariously. Mother says nothing, no lectures on how disgusting it was when we get home, despite her earlier lectures about Elvis and his swiveling hips. I think secretly she enjoyed that night of being a teen again, rediscovering a different sort of youth through the magic of rock and roll.


garter belt
Theresa A. Cancro

After I got my ears pierced on my twelfth birthday, I set my sights on other "adult" milestones. Persuading my mom to let me get my ears pierced had not been easy. When she was my age, few girls in her school had pierced ears; it was considered quite exotic. Some of my older friends were already wearing stockings with garter belts, which seemed very grown-up and sophisticated. I begged my mother for one, but she didn't think I was old enough. Yet. I waited another year and a half . . . . Christmas morning 1969, a slender box peeked out from my holiday stocking. I ripped into it to find a lacy garter belt along with fishnet stockings in hot pink and lime green. I was elated and felt so grown-up. But when I wore them to parties — not to school — the elastic bands shifted, the rubber clips pressed into my legs when I sat down, and the lace was scratchy. They were awful! Luckily, pantyhose had just become popular. My garter belt eventually made its way to the bottom of my underwear drawer and was forgotten.


glf
Tina Wright

The G.L.F. was our local farm supply cooperative, a big wooden store near the village railroad tracks in Moravia with a feed mill and grain storage bins and always sweet smelling of milled grain and molasses and harsh smelling of chemicals and fertilizers. I loved going there with my father, especially in August when we brought our just-harvested oats there in our big truck. We were part of the action! And best of all, I usually got a nickel (or dime?) to buy a Coke from the machine. The Coke was in a small heavy bottle, less than 12 ounces, and you pulled it from metal hands that let it go when the coin clicked through. G.L.F. stood for Grange League Federation, born of the farmers’ cooperative movement by three organizations, the Grange, the Dairyman’s League and the Farm Bureau Federation and part of my upbringing was to respect all of these like a UAW family would their union. Fiercely. There were G.L.F.s all over farm country in upstate New York then and now they are called Agway and no one thinks of them that way anymore.    


glasses
Zee Zahava

I complain to Mom that I can’t see what is written on the blackboard and she writes a letter to my teacher, asking if I could change seats and sit in the front row. The teacher suggests that I get my eyes checked. She doesn’t want me to change seats because she likes all of us to sit in alphabetical order. But anyway, it is a good thing that I have my eyes checked because it turns out I need glasses. My first pair have candy cane frames. Mom’s choice. She says they are adorable. I hate them. I wonder why my mother is so enthusiastic about eyeglass frames with a red and white striped pattern when I am not allowed to eat candy cane candy. It is a Christmas treat for most people but apparently it is not appropriate for Jewish children. At least that’s how it is in my family.