Train

There are portals in the fabric of time that take us momentarily back to some earlier place in our lives. About two blocks down the street from me on Park Ave. in Pennsauken, New Jersey where I live, a train track crosses over.  It is a remnant of an earlier time when long passenger trains whisked people off from Philadelphia to Atlantic City. Now it may delay cars heading down Park Ave. once a day, but it is a freight train now and short,  never keeping drivers for  more than ten or fifteen seconds.  At night, once in a long while, it is still a passenger train.  The long, lonesome sound wakes me in the middle of the night and an I am transported to a time many years ago.

I’ve just turned ten years old. Looking out of the window of the train, I can see its tail as it curves around the side of a mountain in the fading twilight. That’s all I can see. It is really the sound that has transported me here. I don’t even see the rest of my family, but I know they must be here.  We are leaving our home and headed for San Diego, though at ten I don’t know why. The last thing that I remember is our dog Trixie. She was a black and white spotted cross between a dachshund, a cocker spaniel and something else, but in her low body the dachshund won out. All of us loved the dog and we were sad to leave her. I think evryone cried. The night before my dad had taken her over to some friends to take care of, but somehow, the next morning when we arrived at the train station, Trixie was there waiting for us. We were thrilled to see her, but sad at having to realize once more that she could not come with us.  I’m not sure what became of her. 

Drifting in and out of sleep on the train I have no idea that out next home will be one half of a Quonset hut (that corrugated tin can cut horizontally and plopped down in a sandbox) in National City, just outside San Diego.  The Quonset hut days will return to memory later in life only as a few pieces of a shattered clay pot.  There was the time when we were not allowed to go to a promised trip to the zoo because my brother Steve refused to eat his brussel sprouts. And roaches, of course. But what I remember most was impetigo and how it was passed around from one of us to the other and the bright purple medicine surrounding Steve’s mouth that advertised his condition.  I Ed (still almost a baby)  and I were the only ones who escaped that.

It was really Ed’s birth about nineteen months early that unleashed the series of events that led to us being on the train.  We had just moved to a new house in Concord, California.  New, because it was a new construction, right on a street corner with an address that I still remember - 2012 Ponderosa Drive, one of the many post World War II suburban housing developments that were beginning to pop up all over, but also new because it was the first place my parents had ever owned.  It was not an apartment or naval housing or a rented, shared duplex.  It was their own.  I was a month into beginning fourth grade, transferring from Berkeley to the fifth of the eleven schools I was to attend.  

A  few days  after we arrived there, Mom went into labor.  She’d been through four previous births, at times without Dad, who was in the Navy and often at sea.  But this time was different. A blood clot somewhere near her heart.   At one or several points, a priest came in to administer last rites.  Dad was unable to watch the kids. Only Steve and I were in school.  Dave was sent to live with Aunt Ardel and Judi with Aunt Lucille in southern California.  Steve and I stayed with our neighbors, the Gray’s, after school. They watched Ed as well.  It may have been for six months.  The time is still all a fog. 

When Mom returned home, the next year was one of the happiest times of our lives. We planted fruit trees and built a patio of colored concrete.  Steve and I got new bikes for Christmas. Trixie had puppies that we pedaled from house to house to give away. I hunted for pollywogs down in the canal near the house and brought them back to watch them grow in a jar.  Halcyon days. 

But something beneath the surface unraveled.  It involved gambling, drinking, writing bad checks.  Whatever happened is beyond recapture.  All I have is a brief picture, a cameo of sitting in the back of a courtroom at a naval base in San Francisco, waiting for what seemed like forever.  And then the train.

There is an old tale called “Stone Soup.”  In the story, a man with no food puts a stone into a pot of boiling water.  One by one the neighbors come and toss in a vegetable that they can spare until, in the end, the man has a full pot of soup.  I think our lives like that.  Over the years each vegetable that is tossed into the pot of water brings us to where we are now, makes us who we are.  But the metaphor breaks down because we are all still “a work in progress.”  I think that is a more felicitous image.  Progress implies that something good is coming. Even that isn’t accurate, of course.  Linear time and self are both illusionary concepts that in the long run won’t hold.  Nevertheless, I’ll stick with that: work in progress.  This train I’m on, the one that reverberates in my head from mid-night on Park Ave. to somewhere in the past 63 years ago somewhere between Concord and San Diego, is headed somewhere.  I don’t know just where but I can only think that it must be somewhere good. I hope so. 

Maya's Book: A Family Effort

When readers open a book by a first time writer, they generally thumb quickly past those initial paragraphs that include all of the thank you’s to people whose names mean little or nothing to them.  I know that I do.  But recently when Maya had her first novel published, the list of all of those people involved in helping to get a book published became much more real and meaningful to me. 

It was almost three years ago now that Maya began working on her novel.  It was accomplished in a burst of energy over a period of a few months.  Because she is a true writer and writes to express herself rather than for any monetary rewards it brings, when she finished the manuscript, Maya had no intention of trying to get it published or even showing it around.  She had accomplished her goal, which was to write a novel.  The result was that it sat on her shelf for well over a year. 

As the editor of Wordgathering, I’m constantly being sent not only writing submissions but books to review.  One day last fall, I pulled my copy of Maya’s manuscript from my book shelf and began re-reading it.  Two things immediately struck me.  The first was what a damned good writer my daughter is.  The second is that her book was more interesting and well-written than many of the published works that I have sent to me. I urged her to consider having her book published.

Anyone who writes knows the excitement of being able to hold in their hands the book that they have created.  There is a palpable reality to a book whose pages you can physically turn with fingers that doesn’t exist in text that remains wedded to a computer screen.  Since the goal was to have Maya’s book in our hands, we opted to cut to the chase and go with self-publishing, as the best route.  It was at this point that many of the family and those who are thanked in the book’s acknowledgements got involved. 

Because of her constant involvement with reading and reviewing legal writing, Lora has an excellent eye for ferreting out errors in writing mechanics such as spelling and punctuation.  She, Maya and I each separately re-read the manuscript and combined our efforts into making corrections or needed changes.  While this was going on, we were also thinking of cover design and there was only one person ever really considered for that – Eli.  Maya knew that as an architect, photographer and graphic designer, he’d come up with something. 

One of the important elements for the back cover design was the inclusion of endorsements (aka blurbs) for the back of the book.  We were able to enlist the help of two published authors, Anne Kaier and Jessica Powers, but here again, family came to our assistance.  Maura’s mother-in-law Erika is the author of two novels, one a mystery, and that fit well into the literary genre that potential readers of Maya’s book were attracted to.  Lora’s sister Paula also created a blurb for us, which the limitations of how much we could include on the back cover forced us to cut in the final version.

Looking even further into the future, we asked Judi’s daughter Amber to write a review of the book that could be published in the June issue of Wordgathering when we anticipated that the book might come out.  Not only a family member and someone involved in writing through her own professional work, Amber was a natural choice because she is closer in age to readers that the novel is likely to attract and her take on the story was important.  She definitely came through as this short excerpt from the review shows:

  Johanna's Secret is a multi-layered novel—one with twists and turns that will keep the reader intrigued the entire way through. As human beings, we naturally love stories. We connect with stories. We remember stories. We have a strong desire to "escape" the worries, trouble and woes of our everyday life through stories. While there are numerous characters to keep up with, this novel does a beautiful job of intertwining each character into the overarching unsolved mystery.  (To read Amber’s entire review, click: review.)

At this point, everyone’s efforts are coming to fruition.  The book’s release date is July 16, but it is already up for pre-order both as an e-book and a paperback. (Just click here to order.)  Maya has also had the excitement of seeing the first box of books arrive. It has definitely been a family effort.  All of those thank you’s in the acknowledgements at the back of the book have definitely become much more real!

 

Father's Day

          5:30 AM

          Even summer mornings he rose

          Before the house and sun

          Putting coffee on, savoring

          Those seconds of anonymity

          Before strapping on his roles:

          Provider, worker, spouse

          Cementing block by block

          That wall we stood upon

          But never saw.

          Peeking in at him

          Out of my childish ignorance

          What could I know of the dreams

          He’d frozen for us,

          The wraiths he killed.

          The coffee is rich this morning

          Its darkness deepening these momentary silences

          Before heading off to work.

I wrote this poem for my dad about twelve years ago. The poet Louise Bogan wrote, “Women have no wilderness in them,” but I think that it could easily be transposed to say, “Father’s have a wilderness in them.”  I know that was certainly the case for my father.  There is always a certain restlessness, a tension between the kind of father that they would like to be and the reality of their own limitations.  Dad was never able to overcome it and neither was I, but, fortunately, I have four fathers in my life  - two sons and two-sons-in-law -  who are much better examples of how to bridge that gap.

 I am immensely proud of all of them..  They are wonderful models for their own children and the proof is the palpable closeness that shines through when my grandchildren are with their fathers. Happy Father’s Day to them all.