Your love or my shoes - Camden

prompt: shoes

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Long time ago, his girlfriend got mad and threw his favorite pair of shoes over the telephone line outside their apartment. He had mourned profusely and broken up with her ten minutes later. It was just one of those things.

And it was a shame, because he actually really liked her and she was pregnant with his child, but he figured they’d never get anywhere, anyway, if she didn’t at least respect his stuff. He’d have rather had her punch him in the face then expose that pair of Nikes to the elements.

He didn’t feel guilty for breaking up with her for long, not when three more pairs of shoes joined the first pair on the day she moved out (surreptitiously, while he was at work.) He was an honest, hardworking man, and he wept like a child in the street, face tilted toward heaven, toward his beloved shoes. His boys stood around him, hands placed on his shoulders for moral support. They lost no respect for him. Those shoes were expensive.

And that was years ago. Now the streets were darker and the kids had gotten grey. The mayor boasted that they’d cleaned up the city, but none of the inhabitants in his part of town ever saw the city with the mayor’s privileged eyes. No sparkling buildings, just gum stained pavement and sickly trees that grew no leaves. It didn’t matter though; no one cared what the city looked like. He kept the same job, making pizzas for the same people. His boys stayed alive, the only family left to care about. He hadn’t thought about The Ex-Girlfriend in a while (there were many ex-girlfriends, but she was always The One) but the evening before they’d been rolling around, acting stupid in his neighborhood, when one of his boys jumped up from the roof of his car to grab a familiar-looking pair of shoes from the telephone wire.

“Hey man,” he said, “isn’t this yours?”

The kid was holding the last of the mighty pairs of shoes to survive. His former favorite pair, now beaten and torn. He felt proud as the shoes were dropped into his hands. They had withstood years of atmospheric abuse and were perhaps not so glamourous as before, but they were still intact. An utterly worthless pair of shoes really, but at least they had a story.

He thought disjointedly, back at the pizza shop, it’s kind of like my love, or perhaps my dignity. He shook his head to clear it of all the romantic bs and looked up when a woman, child in tow, entered the restaurant. She said, “hello,” in the way he always loved and he curls his toes under the edge of the counter, securing them to his feet.

He said, “hey,” and then with a smile, “what can I get for you?”

A Letter Home - Camden

prompt: snow

Thank you Cindy for telling me to post this; going back and revising gave me some good ideas for expanding this.

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It snowed in the summertime, fat white flakes that fell from the sky in clumsy waltzes. I couldn’t believe it, first time I saw it. Standing outside in the summer sun with the neighbors, watching the snow pile up along the street and drifting up against doors. Freak phenomenon? No. It snowed the next day. And the next day. It wasn’t until the 4th of July had to be cancelled due to a chance of snow that the mayor finally acknowledged there was a problem.

“But what,” he said, spreading his arms wide to the convened town, “can we do?”

Not one of us had an answer for him as to how we might control the weather, and we all quietly agreed to blame global warming.

It still snowed. On and off, all the way into winter. One hundred and fifty three days of snow, until Christmas when the sky darkened from crisp blue to grey like dishwater and the rain washed the snow into the gutters. Turned those fine flakes into soot.

I sort of missed the snow, fully expecting never to see snow again, or certainly not the snowmen, unmelting, in the bright sunlight of June-July-August. I was wrong. It came back promptly in the end of May. It was a different snow this time, though. It was warm. I couldn’t believe it, looking out of the kitchen to see school children change from uniforms to bathing suits, grabbing their parents’ trowels and tupperware and charging into the street to build snowcastles. It was a warm, icy snow covered houses and threatened to cover streets. I salted the steps of the house as best as I could, but they were insistently slippery, and I had to hold the railing when I left in the evenings. The mayor called another meeting. His arm in a cast, he pleaded, “what is going on?”

No one had an answer for him and we all agreed to blame the government.

But it kept snowing. Every year, it snowed in the summer just as the old folks claimed it never had. Always a different snow storm then the previous year too. Snow that could never be grasped or shaped fully. The children were sad that year. And there was the sticky snow that was impossible to get out of carpets and the grooves between fingers and the soles of shoes. One time it was snow so cold that I damn near gave myself frostbite cleaning the windowpanes. We got hot snow too, so scalding to the touch that not a person in the town was left without blisters the size of snowflakes by the time Christmas came around. Grey snow fell one year that gave everyone a shadow of a different color. My shadow was pink like washed socks. The dog’s was blue, just blue like the air. The mayor’s shadow was a fine shade of yellow, found in toilets mostly, although sometimes in lemons that dropped before they were ripe.

It could never be collected. This was the most infuriating thing about the whole business - there wasn’t anybody to blame because there wasn’t anybody who tell what it was, was it even snow, even. It was the children who discovered this, packing snowballs into their thermos’ and lunchboxes, in a bid to create some tidy chaos in the classrooms. The lunchboxes, the thermos’ would be empty. As with the scientists who came around to tell us what was wrong; the samples they took each year would turn up empty or missing, without fail.

4th of July quietly got relocated to 4th of December and the town held a meeting each year instead (weather permitting.) No one ever had any answers for us. We never had any answers for each other. We blamed the communists. The farmers. The homosexuals, the foreigners, lawyers, extraterrestrials, poets, the upperclass, the lowerclass, the Devil, and finally, God, though we never blamed anyone with very much conviction.

It just kept snowing too, it just kept on snowing.

Death Changes Everything- Cyndi

The death that changed everything for me was not that of a friend or family member. It was the death of someone I never knew. Someone that no one ever knew, really. A patient on the maternity unit where I worked had delivered a stillborn son. A fetal demise patient, we called her. Each time we have one it is a little different experience, as everyone copes with tragedy in a different way. And this woman was very different from any that I had ever taken care of before.

She was very quiet most of the evening, her attentive husband by her side. She would do the things required, complying with my requests to help her get up, get cleaned up and change her gown. She was from India and her long dark hair hung down her back in a single braid. Her face looked sad, but she did not express her grief and did not wish to converse with me about her feelings, even though I tried. She sat through the evening hours holding the still form of her tiny son, wrapped in his blanket, looking much like any other mother, except her child’s body was stiff and cold. It wasn’t until the end of the shift that things changed. When it was time to send this lifeless bundle to the morgue and this seemingly calm and composed woman fell apart.

I attempted to take the baby from her, but she was unable to physically part with him. Her husband tried to gently and lovingly lift him from her arms, but she held fast as if a part of her was being torn away. When the baby finally made it in the bassinette to be wheeled away, she jumped out of bed and draped herself over the crib, crying the most heart wrenching sobs I have ever heard. They seemed to come from deep within her very soul. Her eyes overflowed with the tears of her pain. They held a look beyond description, but that will be forever etched within my heart. This child, her son was not to be among the living, never to breathe upon this earth. All her hopes and dreams for him and his future were vanishing. She stood broken and defeated, her whole being crying out in distress.

How could this be, I wondered? What was the purpose of this lost life? Why did this happen and why did it seem so unfair? These questions haunted me as I saw the anguish on this woman’s face and heard her torment in my mind for days and weeks afterward- and still do even to this day. Her story has become a part of my life story, searching for the answers that may never come.

Prompt- death changes everything, 7/21/07

Mono Lake - Greg

Jumpstart 6/30/07 - Lee Vining Creek, Mono Lake California

There are a number of wonderful benefits to this writing group, but an extraordinary one is the occasional opportunity to share in the passions and callings of it’s members. Maya and her husband, Barry, have a passion for spoken art–poetry and storytelling–and once or twice a year they put on an Oral traditions Salon where friends come for “An evening of ritual, poetry and storytelling . . . LEARNED BY HEART!” Wonderful!

Last week we had the privilege of being invited into share in Anna Mill’s passion for nature (http://onnaturewriting.blogspot.com/ ). Anna organized an incredible writers and families trip to Mono Lake/Yosemite. It’s hard to say what was the best part, maybe sleeping under the stars, which always puts life into context for me. Learning about eh simply, yet powerfully compelling ecology of Mono Lake. Maybe it was Santiago taking us on a tour of the lake by canoe and watching a thousand Phalaropes perform an amazing synchronized aerial show over the sapphire blue waters, or late night poetry readings on the grassy campground, or maybe just hanging around my people (writers). There was a good amount of warmth, creativity and fun out there. It was great. Thank you very much, Anna. Thanks also to our new friend Santiago, who is doing heroic work educating the youth about our environment through the Mono Lake Committee.

(Oh, Bryn took some terrific pictures: )

The Prompt:

Dutifully we did our writing on Saturday or Sunday morning--I forget which. Anna sat us under a poplar tree next to Lee Vining creek which empties into Mono Lake. She did a Mary Oliver reading, then told us about an nature writing class where the teacher said that everything had a consciousness. She then asked us to walk about the creek area and see if something around there opened up to us, spoke to us, and then to write about it. Here is my offering:

= = =

A stone calls to me as Mary Oliver speaks her New England nature wisdom through the voice of our Mono Lake hostess, Anna Mills. Black and smooth, it begs to be touched, and so I do, rubbing its smooth surface until it shines with the oils of my hands, my heart, my spirit.

Anna speaks of a teacher who taught that all things have consciousness, and while she doesn’t know if she believes it, she tells us it is an interesting idea.

My black stone pebble hears this and I hope he is not offended by Anna’s lack of faith. But I rub harder until his annoyance is assuaged. Sometimes, I think, some times it only takes a little attention to bring someone or some thing alive.

The poet David Wagner speaks next through Anna, about being found. Another pebble calls to me. I pick her up. She is mottled and flesh-colored with smoke-black markings. The other stone has scurried away. One of her facets displays a set of symbols--subtle displays of her profound beauty. I admire and rub her smooth curves and lines, falling into her art and beauty. She does not say it, but she has worked on this for 70,000 years, then waiting another ten for someone to admire and appreciate it. Her. I can almost see her tears of joy, of relief, of gratefulness that her art, her stone life has been witnessed and touched by another.

I attend to her a bit longer until a third stone, passed to me by my daughter, Bryn, comes into my hand. Larger, and unapologetically phallic and baroque, he slips into my hand with the panache and confidence of a flamenco dancer. His art is slashes, swirls, and striations–black contrails frozen in white stone. Dark entrances, fissures to universal mysteries.

“Don’t even think about rubbing me,” he says. “I care not a whit of that, but just . . . “ He stops, silent, can say no more.

I say to him: “No need for words, my friend. You are as us all. You need me and I you. Together, today, we complete each other.”


Sometimes I think that love is nothing but to pay attention. Me to thee, thee to me. In the Orient they have an Indian word that means the Godliness in me bows the Godliness in you. Namaste’, they say, bowing to each other in greeting and parting.

I put the stones in my pocket where they touch and see each other for the first time. They say stones cannot weep, but I have seen them do so.

Jump-start Goes to Mono Lake

We had a wonderful weekend at Mono Lake. Thanks to Anna for setting it up. And muchas gracias to our old friend Santiago Escruceria for being our tour guide extraordinaire!

Take a look at my pictures at www.flickr.com/photos/mayaspector (sorry - Blogger's not letting me hotlink).

Maya