A Dream from His Youth -- Flash Fiction

Tom woke, face down in the sand. His head muzzy. As difficult as sitting was, standing would be impossible. Where was he?

He kept his eyes closed. Using both hands, he pushed hair away from his face. At least he still had hair. Most of it anyway. The one loss he didn't have to face.

Ken shaved his head, the fashionable method of dealing with baldness. But he was a good guy, Ken was. Gave him a way back after everything. A job. A ticket to the coast.

They'd been pals all through high school. Both made the team. Had plenty of girls. Went to college. Lots of parties. Probably drank too much then, too.

Then they married. That's when they began to lose touch with each other. Ken married Alice, moved to California, and started his own business.

Tom married Marybeth and went to work for her father. Selling Real Estate. He should have known better. His dad warned him about the job and the drinking. He did pretty well at first, but he wasn't a born salesman. Then the kids came, two beautiful daughters. They needed things. They wanted things. Things he wanted to give them. But Marybeth's father did things. Business things, personal things that Tom couldn't go along with. Drinking made it easier. For a while. Then it all went to hell.

"Come out to the coast," Ken said. "Remember when we were kids and used to talk about living on the beach. Surfing from dawn to dusk."

He did remember. They'd get an old woody, load surf boards on top, and hit the beach.

"I got a job for you. I need an accountant. My guy's retiring," Ken said. "Man, I need someone I can trust and that's what you went to school for. You're a numbers guy, not a damn salesman."

So he did. He quit drinking. Moved to California. Went to meetings. Hadn't touched a drop in two hundred eight-three days. Until last night. He held his throbbing head in his hands. Oh God, what was he thinking?

Ken trusted him. With his car. With his daughter.

His mouth tasted like dirty gym socks. His hands came away from his head sandy with a smudge of red. Lipstick? Ken's daughter didn't wear red lipstick. None of the teens did. Had he been so drunk he didn't remember picking up some woman? Gentle probing discovered a gash over his right eyebrow. He needed a drink.

Ah, yes. Ken's daughter -- a beautiful beach blonde teenager who drank too much, too. At least last night she did. Tom was supposed to drive her and her boyfriend to the prom and to an after party, then deliver them home, put the car in the garage, and enjoy the rest of the weekend. No big deal. He had a book to read while he waited for the kids.

"Hah!" Oh, that hurt. He'd better be quiet.

The after party had turned into several with the kids disappearing at the third one. They took off with friends, leaving him parked in the circle drive of a spacious two-story Mediterranean estate with x-number of bathrooms, a four-car garage, a pool, and palm trees. Two million and change, no doubt.

Okay, so he'd lost Ken's daughter. What could he have done? Like she pointed out, he wasn't her father. He couldn't make her do anything.

At least he still had the car. The car, a 1936 Phantom II Woody Estate Wagon with a luggage rack on top -- £240,000.00, that's 343,200 American dollars. There it sat right beside him on the beach. A magnificent machine. Talk about a beautiful woman inspiring lust. That ultimate dream of a ride did it for him.

At least he hadn't lost that. He looked at it's roof. No surf board to mar the paint. Well, that was good. He could be glad there wasn't a surf shop open in the middle of the night.

Right now, he wished there hadn't been a liquor store open either. Too bad the kind proprietor had broken the law and sold him booze. He guessed that, technically, he'd broken the law too since it's illegal to buy liquor between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.

Gentle waves touched him as he sat there. How near the water was he? The tide must be coming in. He'd better move the car. He checked his pockets for the keys then realized he must have left them in the car. Yes, he could see them, still in the ignition. Thank goodness for that.

He pulled on the door handle. It was locked.

2016 The News -- Nonfiction

SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS HAPPENING SOMEWHERE!

Things are wrong in our world. But it's getting better. I'm getting better.

When I was a child, black people were not allowed in the amusement parks in our city. Or the "public" swimming pools. They weren't allowed to eat in the cafes in our town. They weren't allowed to be in our town after dark. At some point it occurred to me to wonder how a parent explained to their child why. How do you explain to your child that they've done nothing wrong, that they were just flat out born wrong?

I didn't realize that I, too, was just flat out born wrong. My white advantage gave me a distorted view of the world and my place in it. The white world I was born into set me up to be afraid, afraid of people who were "unfortunate" enough to be different from me. I didn't understand that that was my misfortune as well.

I didn't meet a Jew until Girl Scout Camp the summer after the 6th grade. I've still not been inside a mosque or a Hindu temple. I do not personally know a woman who wears a hijab.

I certainly never had trouble understanding the anxiety of a police officer's mother about whether her child would survive the job. Police work is dangerous. They deal with dangerous people in dangerous situations. Not people like "us."

We want to believe and want our children to believe that police officers are here to protect and serve. The truth is I find them frightening when I encounter them doing their duty. Like during a traffic stop. They have the gun. They have the power.

In light of our ongoing history, I must consider the anxiety of a black man's mother. She knows her son may not survive going to the grocery store. To the baseball game with his friends. Stopping at a convenience store for a six-pack. And if that black man happens to be big like my own son . . ..

The talk? Yes, we had the talk with my white son. "Be courteous. Say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir,'" we told him. If he was treated rudely or unfairly, we would complain and seek redress later. There is a proper and safe time and place to speak truth to power. It is not on the street. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white.

In my comfortable world, I'm not afraid of the sheriff's deputy who lives next door. I know him. He has two young children. Their brightly colored beach balls occasionally end up on our side of the fence. He works in his yard and barbecues. I hardly ever think about him being a cop. Except when I happen to see him going to work in his uniform. Or when something terrible happens to policemen somewhere. Then I think about him and realize just how much I appreciate what he does and I'm aware of how much I want him to come home safe at the end of his tour each day.

That old hometown of mine is better now.

You can visit amusement parks no matter what color you are. And "public" swimming pools are truly public. You can eat in any restaurant in that town and live in that town without regard to the color of your skin. (Maybe because of its disgraceful history, it never developed a "black side of town.")

There is a mosque in that town, but the town is still pretty white. The town I live in now is even whiter, so, if I don't watch the news, it's easy to forget the troubles in this country. It's easy to dismiss my passive complicity in these troubles.

Truth is I don't have to watch the news. I get called out by Bill Nye, the Science Guy. "Change the world," he says. "If you don't believe you can, then why the heck are you here?"

Why the heck, indeed. Starting with me.

Elie Wiesel -- In Gratitude

This kind of silence hurts the bystander and allows the oppressor to harm himself. Elie Wiesel spoke up. We don't need a holocaust or a cross burning or a riot downtown for us to speak up.

When a beloved family member reverts to bigotry we can speak up. A simple "That's not right" will be enough.

When a friend says something ugly about another friend. "That's not right" will be enough.

When someone, bullies someone in the school hallway, an offer to walk with the one being bullied will be enough, whether we know them or not. And if we do know them, our intervention will mean even more.

We can speak up in our own lives, in our own corner of the world, and in our own time in history.

When I heard that Elie Wiesel had died I felt no sadness, only gratitude that he had lived and that he spoke up.

Why? -- On Writing

image from measurethefuture.net

See all these books? Your public library probably looks very like this. Prefer to read on your electronic device? You can probably get ebooks from your public library. Your favorite bookstore will either have the book you want or they can get it poste haste. That bookstore most likely will help you get the electronic version if that's what you want. And there's always amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

Now why, with all these choices would you read a book that doesn't suit your purpose?

And as far as television and movies go -- same question. Why would you willingly, or worse yet unwittingly, donate your time and intellect to a production that will not meet your needs?

As a writer I have three needs that should be met by the books I read and the movies and television I watch. 1.) inspiration   2.) education  3.) entertainment. Yep. It's all about me.

(Well, okay there's one more but we're not supposed to talk about it.  4.) kill time, exercise denial, and avoid. All available on demand from the internet.)

The thing is, if what I'm reading or watching meets any or all of the first three needs, I'm less likely to spend time on the fourth. And more likely to get the laundry done, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and write.

Good writing inspires me. Barbara Kingsolver's work is an excellent example. She is a maestro of English. Much of her work is in first person which in the hands of many authors actually distances me from their characters.

She uses simple language beautifully. Here's a sample from Animal Dreams published in 1990.

"It was hot and my mind was fraying at the edges. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and massaged my prickly scalp, thinking I must look like a drowned hen, but maybe nobody would recognize me today. Living without a lover was beginning to produce in me the odd sense that I was invisible."

Here is a woman returned to the small Arizona town of her unhappy youth after an absence of fourteen years. She's broken up with her boyfriend of ten years. She didn't belong in that town when she was in high school and she didn't feel that she belonged there now.

I am inside the character. I can feel what she is feeling. Inspiration.

Compare that with Andy Weir's The Martian.

"It's a strange feeling. Everywhere I go, I'm the first. Step outside the rover? First guy ever to be there! Climb a hill? First guy to climb that hill! Kick a rock? That rock hadn't moved in a million years!"

If he didn't use exclamation points I wouldn't know he was experiencing any feeling intensely. And what was his "strange feeling?" I don't know. Expletive deleted! Here's a man alone on Mars with little chance that he'll survive long enough to be rescued. Surely something is going on inside him. Wonder? Amazement? Sheer terror?

Okay, to be fair, Weir is writing his castaway as though in his mission log. And a log is traditionally a formal document expected to hold fast to unembellished facts. That would seem to preclude exclamation points. Or an exploration of the astronaut's emotional response to his predicament.

I understand that the very situation should give the reader a "feeling." But a writer is supposed to show that the character is having a feeling. I just never could get close to Astronaut Watney. It's hard to be inspired by someone I can't relate to. Need number one -- unmet.

Education from The Martian? Hardly. Either Mr. Weir chose to ignore Martian reality or he didn't do his research.

Mars does have dust storms. And they do present problems. They temporarily block out or reduce sunlight which is the major energy source for equipment on Mars. According to NASA "The winds in the strongest Martian storms top out at about 60 miles per hour" but with an atmosphere only 1% of Earth's atmosphere, that 60 MPH wind would not be enough to do the damage ascribed to it by Mr. Weir.

Emotion is hard for me to write, too. My own writing weakness is enough reason for me to read someone who does it well and learn how it's done. Inspiration and education.

So, yes, I threw Weir over for Kingsolver. And now I'm also being entertained.

If you're a writer, you will probably have the same needs, but those needs will be met differently. The trick is to find out what suits you and don't pay too much attention to what meets my needs.

The Newsroom -- A Review

         Please take the time to click on The  Newsroom and watch the opening scene.

I've never worked in a television newsroom. I have worked in a newsroom. The newsroom for a small town daily newspaper where we didn't measure our stories in minutes, but in column inches. We had to leave space for our advertisers because that's where the money came from. Subscriptions and street purchases wouldn't have been enough to pay for the paper our news was printed on.

The Newsroom is television. It covers real news stories that occurred far enough in the past that the writer knows what happened and when. But recently enough that most of us remember following the stories as they happened and were reported from real TV newsrooms.  

The first season starts with the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, who is a pompous ass news anchor concerned only with himself and his ratings. Luckily for him, though he doesn't appreciate it, his boss, Charlie Skinner, played admirably by Sam Waterston, hires a passionately idealistic new Executive Producer.  British actress Emily Mortimer plays MacKenzie McHale, the new EP. She has a past with Will.

Will's redemption brings me to tears. The first season of this show is, if not the best, one of the best written and acted series I've ever seen. And I'm a died-in-the-wool Downton Abbey-Maggie Smith fan.

The second season runs through the Romney campaign while all hell is breaking loose in central Africa and Syria is gearing up to collapse in the tragedy the world is still dealing with today. This season deals more with romance. Okay, so the course of true love does not run smooth. There is humor. There is pathos. There is "Are you kidding me already?!" We get the private lives of the characters -- all the characters, the main characters, the supporting characters, the cleaning crew. (No, that's not true. We never find out who the cleaning crew sleeps with or wants to sleep with or used to sleep with.) I don't believe it lives up to the first season's promise.

But even with the second season being less-than, it is so far above standard television fare that I came back for the third season. And I'm glad I did. It is as good as the first.

The third and final season begins with the Boston Marathon bombing. This season deals with the downfall of the news organization -- battered on all sides by market forces, the competing interests of its owners and its news people, and ultimately the passage of time and life.

The Newsroom made me laugh out loud. And I cried because it was so touching and because it was so sad. That, for me, is the mark of good work.

Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin is the writer, the man who conceived of and wrote The Newsroom. He proves that Americans can write. I was beginning to think your middle name had to be Julian Fellowes and you had to be British to write and sustain quality TV material. Thank you Mr. Sorkin.

In this year of our country's history, this election cycle, this media frenzy, I cling to a life raft. A life raft of ideals lashed together with oft maligned ropes -- information, education, ethics.

And today's media? It is a child who wants to be popular, to have the highest ratings. It participates in a political arena that's been taken hostage by a circus. It's a regular kid being bullied by a spoiled rich kid. It's caught up in a maelstrom along with a certain portion of our electorate who are Pinocchio to that spoiled rich kid's Lampwick. I hope we don't all grow donkey's ears and a tail.

The sad truth is Walter Cronkite doesn't live here any more.

We are facing a choice between two less than inspiring people, each of whom is roundly disliked by portions of our society. And for good reasons.

Me? I'm going to vote for the person I perceive to be the lesser of two evils, and I believe The United States of America is strong enough to survive the next four years.

America may not be the greatest nation in the world. I don't think there is a 'greatest nation in the world.' But I do believe 'It can be.'

My Daughter's Ruining My Life -- Nonfiction

image from spoilertv.com

My daughter is ruining my life. She has infected me with Binge-Watching. It's a thing. There's even a Wikipedia entry for it. Click here.

There was a time when television series were available once. And once a week, at that. I watched Upstairs Downstairs one episode a week. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I, Claudius. M.A.S.H. Northern Exposure. There was no Hulu or Netflix. No Amazon Prime.

I watched Downton Abbey for years. One episode a week. Even when I got the season's DVD early for contributing to my local Public Broadcasting Service affiliate. I would watch on Sunday night. Then I would watch that episode online at RMPBS again during the week -- maybe a couple of times. There were so many details that I wouldn't catch the first time through. I only watched the DVDs while I waited for each new season.

Grace tried to get me hooked on Orange Is the New Black. But there was a time when I attended meetings with inmates in the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center when it was in Oklahoma City. I understand they now have a newer facility in a small town east of the City. Let me just say prison is no fit place for anybody to live. You don't get to choose your roommate and if you get a difficult one, you damn well better be sure she takes her meds properly. Somehow I just couldn't get into the 'humor' of Orange.

You know how folks offer you a month's subscription free? Well, I got started watching Bosch on my free month of Amazon Prime. It's a police detective show based on Michael Connelly's novels, most of which I've read. In spite of the habitual cliff-hanger endings to each episode, I started out watching one show at a time. Often with several evenings in between. Toward the end of the second season I found myself watching two at a time. My husband liked that series, too.

Did you know there's something called commitment rings? You and your partner each wear one and they keep you from watching a TV series without each other so no one 'cheats' by watching ahead. (This one's for you Doctor Who fans. You know who you are.)

So, what started this rant? The Newsroom which Grace recommended. I've finished the first two seasons and am well into the third. In what? Less than a week.

Look -- I'm supposed to be writing a book, a literary piece of short fiction, a murder mystery short story featuring my senior citizen walking group crime solvers, and these blog posts. My father has dementia which presents as severe anxiety (among other things) if he doesn't see me daily and he lives thirty minutes away from my house unless there's traffic which there almost always is. (It's just a good thing he's cute.) I have a bad cat and clothes to take out of the dryer and hang up because I do not iron. (It's a good thing the cat is cute, too.)

And I've been reading the same book for a week. I'm a writer. I have to read. There are too many books out there I've never read and new ones coming out every week. Maybe every day. I don't have time to spend a whole week reading one book.

Binge-watching TV has no place in my world!

Did I mention HBO NOW? You don't have to have it in your cable package. I can get it for a monthly fee of $14.99 without upgrading my bare-bones Spanish Language Cable Package. I know. I know. No one in my house speaks Spanish, but that's another story.

Gotta get back to The Newsroom. I'll write a review when I finish watching.

I'll read the book when I go to bed.

Saturday's Walk -- Nonfiction

                                      Teri, Mary Catherine, Barb, Marlene, and Ruth Ann

Hudson Gardens! Who knew? A shade less than 12 miles from my house. Our walking group met there this morning. Rich and Sally happen not to be in this picture, but they were there.

I'd never heard of Hudson Gardens before but some of the people who've lived here longer than I, gave it such a glowing report I was all in favor of doing our Saturday walk there. It didn't hurt that my favorite restaurant is just up the street and around the corner.

The thirty-acre botanical gardens are open to the public free. It is also an event center complete with a summer concert series (which includes artists I've heard of and some I've not. The outdoor concerts are not free, but the tickets are fairly reasonable.) Then in September is the Brews and Views Fest. Truly, I think Colorado must be the micro-brewery capital of the world. And from Thanksgiving through New Year's it's home to the Denver-metro area's premier holiday light show.

   

And they have miniature trains! Designed to replicate Colorado's landscape, the G Gauge railroad runs on more than 700 feet of track, complete with trestles, waterfalls, and bridges. They run two trains at a time Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays through the summer.

There are roses and roses and more roses. Every turn in the trail brings more beautiful flowers.

                                                         water lily and reflections

                           Then we went for a late breakfast at Lucile's Creole Cafe -- beignets!

             A lovely way to spend a bright summer morning. And, yes, we'll definitely do it again.