Category Archives: writing & Such

Camp stories – 2018: One: “Talking With The Trees”

But there was more to see in these trees on Bert’s farm than the fiery palette of the maples. Bert took us on a tour past his barn, down a path through a copse of these trees, beneath which the ground was crowded with seedlings and saplings, still green and fluttering in the morning breeze. The path led us to his large woodlot, in which tall pines stood in rows.

There we stopped, and Bert invited us to contemplate the two scenes we now confronted. On one side were the native trees, especially the maples, huddling together at random. But really, Bert explained, if we could only see the world from their perspective, we’d know the air of vivid autumn exuberance was an illusion; in fact, they were all caught up in a desperate struggle: each tree was stretching for the sky, competing with all the rest to take in enough sunlight to make its food to get through the coming long, cold winter.

This was not a friendly contest, but life or death, all against all. And below, the riot of green around our feet was even more deceptive: among the slim saplings and winsomely tiny seedlings, almost all, he told us, were certainly doomed. They would be crowded out by others, with the bigger trunks and branches blocking access to direct sun. At night, deer and other animals would chew up the tender shoots

A Hospice for Hope: Another Quaker Holiday Story

“This place always gives me the creeps, ” she told her sister. Allyson was sitting safe at home in Cincinnati, more than a thousand miles away.

“Why?” Asked Allyson. “Because it’s full of dying people?”

“Maybe partly,” Lexie said, “but I think it’s more the way they kinda package the whole thing here, like everybody’s getting ready for a birthday party. I mean–

A woman’s voice interrupted. “Can you help me?” It sounded weak, but piercing. “Can you help me?” Again.

Lexie slowed and glanced to her right. In a lounge doorway a woman sat in a wheelchair. Her hair was tousled, her hands outstretched, reaching toward Lexie.

“I, uh — I” Lexie started, then noticed that the woman’s gaze was fixed somewhere behind her, and her eyes seemed unfocused. The image came to Lexie of someone caught in a swirling river at floodtide, about to be swept away.

Lexie swayed uncertainly. Both her hands were full. She heard Allyson saying, distantly, “Are you there?” as if the call had dropped, which it often did. And looking closer, she saw the woman was strapped into the chair, with what looked like a seat belt.

Lexie thought, I bet she’s from the Memory Unit at the other end, and she was parked here while the attendant is outside smoking. She probably doesn’t remember how to unbuckle the belt.

The woman repeated her call, “Can you help me?” and Lexie snapped back to her own reality. “Sorry,” she told the woman, and started walking again. “I’m here,” she said into the phone. “Just got derailed for a minute.”

Lexie was headed for the second last room in the long hallway. Each door she passed had someone’s last name in block black letters on a card in a slot, and she knew most of them by now: Callahan, Bradley, Washington–

— No. Washington’s slot was now empty. Washington — Lexie didn’t know if it was he or she — was dead.

“Looks like another one bit the dust,” she told Allyson.

The Poet Laureate of a Banned Black History Month! Langston Hughes–Sing us a bit of your famous Blues!

It’s Langston Hughes’s birthday (1902-1967). Known primarily as a poet, Hughes was a versatile writer: by his mid-twenties he had published challenging essays in national periodicals, and two books of poetry. I’m reading his first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, when he was 28.

This passage evokes a domestic scene in a small Kansas city, modeled on Lawrence, where Hughes spent several boyhood years. Hughes was proud of his humble roots, and the creativity it wrung from hardship, like the largely homemade blues songs by the itinerant laborer Jimboy. Here he has returned after a long absence seeking work. In Hughes’s prose, we can hear the poetry woven through it.

Holiday Story #2 – How I Got so Lucky

At five o-clock, I was grateful to escape into the icy December darkness, and turned away from the subway toward the department stores a few blocks away. I was behind on Christmas shopping, and there were only a few days left. I went into E.J. Korvette’s, a big discount place that was the Wal-Mart of those days.

Not sure what I was looking for, I wandered from one department to another, and soon was passing the pipe tobacco section.

I hate smoking, always have; but something drew me to the counter. There were large brightly colored round canisters of pipe tobacco on shelves behind it. “Do you have Bugler?” I asked.

The clerk smirked. Most tobacco fans think of Bugler as little more than shredded cardboard. But what did I care? He stooped down behind the counter and came up with the blue labeled canister. The price was ridiculously cheap. “I’ll take it,” I said. “Oh– and a couple packets of cigarette papers.”

From there, it was just a few steps to the electronics department, and a compact-sized AM radio. It took a little longer to settle on a small kid’s record player, with an arm you moved by hand. The real find was in the 99 cent record bin: an album of hymns by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

The whole haul didn’t cost much over twenty dollars. After that, the rest of my shopping came easily.

Christmas morning was still bitter cold, and subway trains were few and far between. It took a long time to get from home to that street, and I stood shivering for what seemed like an hour, pounding on Mrs. Lee’s door.

Who Knew? Wikipedia Can Be Funny!

It’s dispiriting to see articles about schools these days putting Huckleberry Finn in the literary dustbin, because of concerns over trigger words that were authentic to the culture Twain was portraying. But then, that’s happened a lot to other classics too.
I’m not going to get into the weeds on all that here, though I’m standing by my (Twain) man. Rather, I want to note that related controversies are nothing new for Twain’s magnum opus. Indeed, they go back to its appearance in the U.S. in 1885. (It was published in the United Kingdom a year earlier.) And here is where the tale gets interesting, and not about the word that is so radioactive now. No, it was much bigger.