My Dad: No Major Goof-up

Gunner Jack Clark
in the turret of his half-track
 "Any Gum Chum?"

My dad--Jack Meredith Clark Sr.--turns 91 today. In his honor, I wanted to call attention to the story of his experiences in WWII and the role played by his unit, the 474th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons battalions. This group of men landed at Utah Beach in the first wave of D-Day, marched through France to Belgium and Germany, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and, eventually, served in the Army of Occupation before being discharged and returned home.

I began work on this story with dad back in 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day. I remembered from my childhood dad joking about his life in the Army, but as more specials came on TV to honor the anniversary of the event, he began talking about it again, but in a more factual AND emotional way. I decided to take notes.

This led to writing a letter to the one Army buddy dad had kept in contact with, Ray Bilicki. Ray has since passed on, but before he did his legacy to me was a treasure trove: a commemorative troop movement map of the 7th Corps, of which dad's unit was a part, and a privately published book about the unit, The Maverick Outfit by Frank Spaletti. I also dug out all dad's old photos from this time.

The book gave me a guideline for formally interviewing my dad about this monumental time in his life and in world history. We also went through the photos, and he told me all he could remember about who was in them and where they were taken. Then I put all the pieces together into three-ring binders for each member of our immediate family.

Through the years cousins, aunts, uncles and acquaintances have asked for copies. And five great-grandchildren have joined dad's list of offspring since then and may someday have questions. So in May 2012 I converted the book to a website, No Major Goof-up. Follow the link to read where the name came from. It will give you a chuckle over dad's sense of humor and Susan's naivete.

I've also added a permanent link to dad's blog in the sidebar of this blog, just below a listing of my other posts. I hope you'll take time to check it out. Everyone who reads it tells me it's a compelling story. And if you've ever wanted to write family history of any sort, it may give you some ideas. I put it together on Google Blogger, which is free and has a wide range of design templates available. I have a background in publication layout, so I modified a basic template to get the look I wanted.

This year dad will spend his birthday in rehab, following a hospitalization for pneumonia and congestive heart failure. He navigates life from a power-chair and needs to regain some strength for everyday tasks so he can return to his assisted living apartment. Though his days now consist more of Bingo, physical therapy, stamp collecting and emergency rooms, he always has a clever comeback for anything his caregivers throw his way. And he can still beat all comers (including me!) at Checkers.

Happy birthday, dad! I'm glad you made it back from the war, and I'm glad you're still fighting the good fight!!

To know or not to know?

I believe in mystery.

I don’t know who or what created the heavens or the earth or me, and I don’t need to know.

In fact, I do not want to know. The world doesn’t need more people who think they have the inside scoop.

There’s something, yes, mysterious about experiencing the world through the eyes of ignorance, free from the clouded lens of traditional belief. If I begin by knowing I don’t know, to paraphrase Socrates, I learn more, see more, do more. To embrace mystery is to stay young, to be always a child on the inside, regardless of gray hair, wrinkles or creaky bones.

The mystery of what lies ahead wakes me each morning and carries me through each day. It makes me savor the feel of the bed against my body at night, the slow drift into the world of sleep and dreams, and the return trip toward another mysterious day.

I don’t want to read any book that claims to give me all the answers. I want to read lots of books and let each one reveal to me a mystery new to me. Why does my husband love me? Why does the moth fly into the flame? Why is falling asleep outside on a summer night so fine?

Am I destined for hell then? Could be. Some people probably think so, but who really knows for sure? It’s a mystery, and I’m okay with that because I want to experience as much of mystery as I can and write about it. 

Not to solve anything, mind you. None of us ever really solves anything. All we do is leave breadcrumbs for someone else. And the most we can hope for is to find the crumbs someone left for us. They may be hidden in a dream, pressed between the pages of a library book, dropped along a gravel road. They may be contained in a shard of sea-blue pottery, a feather, a mangled wrapper, a pressed leaf—each one pregnant with the secret of how it came to be where we found it.

This is what it is to be human. 

To me, this is religion. 

In fact, when I dream about writing, the setting of the dream is church because this is a holy thing.

I lead writing groups, and I tell those who write with me that it’s a writer's job to embrace mystery and get comfortable with not knowing. It’s a little like getting lost on purpose and learning to like it. Writers must make certainty their enemy and their senses their best friend. What does the mystery look and feel like? How does it taste and smell? What is the sound of it and how does it move across the pages of our lives?

Writers should do this so that those who hide behind certainty—which is all of us at least some of the time—will know that it’s okay not to know. Because too much certainty smothers possibility.

Because mystery, if we let it, can grow and open inside us, like a flower. 

Like a flower in nature, it opens so wide that it wilts and seems to die. It gives everything in a splurge of beauty and pain just so it can make the seed the wind sows.

And that's why mystery is the only resource that will never run out. 

PROMPT: NPR ran a series of personal essays on the topic "This I Believe," which are archived online here. Read a few, then write your own. Mine was written in my Saturday morning writing group today, Feb. 2, 2013, Thank you to Mark, Miriam, Sadie and Linda for your comments and encouragement.

Below the surface, beneath the snow

Once upon a time in spring, down on my knees, yanking weeds, I found a perfect rabbit skeleton sprawled on the rock edging of my garden.

I almost missed seeing it, hidden as it was by the low-hanging boughs of an eastern white pine tree.

I guessed the rabbit sought shelter there during a winter storm and drifted into its forever sleep protected by the curtain of soft needles and a hedge of drifting snow. My husband and I had seen other animals do as much during wind and snow and pelting rain--squirrels, birds, raccoons, even possums.

I thought about this discovery again on this wintry day when I saw this photo by ALWARDii Photography. It brought back the sense of wonder I felt that particular spring day, that I could be so intent at as mundane a task as pulling weeds and stumble upon evidence of a life lived. That I could be tearing out something that spoiled my idea of nature--my garden--only to come across Nature herself, in all her raw beauty and mysterious terror. 

Days like that one--discoveries like that--are why gardeners garden, I think. It's good to be reminded of what's real about nature and what we just invent. Not that gardens or invention are wrong--certainly not! But friendly reminders of how life and death continue on with or without our conscious participation are something I think gardeners are on the lookout for. 

I know I am. Not to mention that the endless digging and pulling and planting gives a person time to sink into a slim, silent moment.

I remember how the rabbit's jaw was open--as if in a scream, I thought at first. But maybe the mouth opened as a reflex to collect one last taste of this world. 

I searched my garden bench until I found a long, flat container, then I placed the skeleton in the same arrangement I'd found it on the rocks. Later I cleaned the bones. Then later in the summer I buried them in the tomato patch, something I thought the rabbit would appreciate, food for the journey into the next life. 

More than once I'd found a plump, over-ripe tomato with a bite out of it, often on the ground, but now and then still on the vine. I never minded much because I always planted more than I needed so I could share. Perhaps it was my tomatoes that rabbit opened its mouth wide to taste one last time before it dozed off into the sleep that melted its fur, long ears and fluffy tail into pale outlines on the stone.

I hope so.

A light blanket of snow dusts the ground this bitter cold day outside my home in central Indiana. Tomorrow, the blanket is expected to thicken. This photo reminds me that so much goes on beneath the surface, and I should always remember to look for it. That I should never forget to open my mouth wide and be ready to bite into each moment as if my last.

PROMPT: What does the photo call to your mind? Of what experience of nature or of an animal does it remind you?

Annunciation

Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the 2006 edition of the literary journal Peregrine. I've posted it on my web site before, but not since converting to the blog format. Hope you enjoy!

When your Red Ball moving van pulled up in front of our house on West Clinton Street in Elmira, New York, and you honked its horn because you liked making people jump, our family’s way was to grin and bear it.

The Virgin Annunciate by Carlo Crivelli

You had at least one run a year between your house in Emporium, PA, and ours. My folks pretended you were welcome then complained about you when you left. When momma and her sisters got together back in Dayton, PA, they made fun of you, called you “boisterous” and swapped stories that always ended with “If it wasn’t for Aunt Minnie, we wouldn’t put up with that Roy Beck.”

Momma told you after your first visit she didn’t mind you and your son Richard, but she wasn’t feeding and making up beds for your other movers—quieter men than you, some with better manners, but not relatives and so people we didn’t have to take in.

I remember you as plenty rough around the edges but never mean. You laughed a lot and said things to kids other grownups wouldn’t say. Your big voice hurt my littler ears. Your plow-horse shoulders and arms squeezed me hello and goodbye hard. And you kissed my cheek with too much suction but, thankfully, no drool.

Once we visited you in the hospital in Sayre, PA, just over the state line, and you untied your robe and showed us the feeding tube planted in your stomach. Daddy said you didn’t know what you were doing because of the pain medicine. Momma said if she stayed any longer she’d have a stomach ulcer too. And you said the doctors took out three-quarters of your stomach. I wondered what was left for a tube to go into and couldn’t move my eyes from where it disappeared in folds of belly like the roots of the red rose that twined around the paper-bark birch in our front yard. Nobody said why you were in a hospital so far from home.

Once we came back from grocery shopping and saw your semi-trailer idling in front of our house, parking lights awinkin’. You couldn’t see into our car in the dark, so we drove on past. We circled ‘round to the street below and parked at the Young’s house. Mrs. Young—momma called her Bobby—stowed our milk and meat in her fridge for a while. And when us kids got sleepy and you hadn’t budged, all five of us tiptoed the groceries across the lawns and up the hill to our back door. We put everything away without turning on lights, changed into our jammies, and still you hung on, hoping we’d come home and save you a few dollars on a motel.

Finally daddy gave up and flipped the switches, and in a few minutes you rang the bell and we took you in. Momma told you we’d been to dinner at the neighbors and just got home. She always told me not to lie, so I stayed suspicious of you because where you were concerned she broke her own rules. Did you really believe her? Was my momma a good liar?

Annunciation by Fra Angelico, 1450

When momma’s sisters visited a year ago June they said Aunt Minnie was still alive and alert, in her nineties. You passed over a long time ago, and none of us noted it. Richard runs the Red Ball now and doesn’t pay much attention to his stepmom, but his son and daughter-in-law look after her. She still lives in that rambling pink house with all the stuff you loaded into the moving van when her momma died. One of my uncles said you and Minnie fought with her brothers over the roll of toilet paper on the holder in the bathroom. And the last time I saw your house—thirty years ago or better—I figured you won the lion’s share of those battles.

My aunts talked again last summer how Minnie spent time in Torrance. Torrance! They still said it like it was tornado! Once I asked momma what Torrance was and she said, “an asylum.” When I frowned, she added, “a mental hospital” and spun one finger in a spiral at the side of her head. No one ever said why Minnie went there, but daddy always made sure to mention you were the one who sprung her. They said you wanted to marry her—your wife had died and you needed a mother for your boy—but no one wanted to let you because you were cousins and it wasn’t civilized. Then you showed ‘em a place in the Bible where it said it was okay as long as the light of life had gone out, and they had to let her go home with you. I didn’t know what any of it meant, though I was sure a place named Torrance could douse anyone’s light.

Aunt Minnie made you a good wife, I expect. I could tell by the light in her smile when we visited even so. Now that I’m getting to be the age she was when she was in Torrance, I dream about her. And in my dreams she is called crazy, even though she acts just fine. In one dream I live with her, except we have made the house bigger and built it around the little pink one. The living room is an auditorium with a stage for performances and bright red couches for watching. She leads me into our kitchen—tidier and bigger than hers in real life (mine too)—and shows me shelf after shelf full of bowl after bowl of beeswax—all lined up like sunny soldiers at warm attention, the smell sweet and wild. And then I dream she really is crazy, that I’m crazy too, and a voice says crazy is sacred and protects us both.

After that I asked my momma, getting up in years herself, the why of Great-Aunt Minnie. Why was she in Torrance? Momma said when Minnie didn’t marry, she lived with Gramma Thomas, her momma, looked after her, but started acting funny. I remember my Great-Gramma Thomas—stern and still, stone deaf—and I shudder to think about sharing a house with her. Still I ask, Whaddaya mean, funny? And momma said one day Minnie went into her bedroom and turned on the gas heater but didn’t light it. They put her in Torrance before she blew up the house, and she was in there a year or so. You visited her and told ‘em Minnie wasn’t crazy, she just needed someone to make a home for her and care about her, and then you did and she never acted funny again.

Annunciation by Salvador Dali, 1956

Weeks later, you popped into my mind’s eye, middle of the night when I was drifting back to sleep. I didn’t know it was you at first—it’s been a while since I’ve seen you or thought about you, and you looked out of place in my living room. But it hit me later that it was you who took a seat at my writing group, as if a regular. And you sat on my sofa where Sandra always sits—the petite lady with the short silvery hair who fits that corner like a crisp marker in the dog-eared leaves of a much-read book. But your ungainly body called out for a bigger space as you slung your left arm across the back and shifted sideways. I bet you carried sofas bigger than mine on your back and up flights of stairs, lugging, lugging, all your life until your heart exploded.

Then my living room fell away, and you stood beside a field, newly planted. You wore the same baggy rolled-up jeans, T-shirt and red-heeled Rockland socks, their thick oatmeal cuffs turned down over the tops of mud-caked Wolverines. The wide brim of a tattered straw hat blocked the glare from the setting sun. And I watched as you knelt on one knee, opened your arms to the tumbled earth and invoked the seeds to grow.

Start 2013 off WRITE!

I currently have NO free workshops scheduled at libraries, but I do plan once again to host fee-based creative writing workshops in my home in 2013, starting in January. Workshops will meet weekly on the same day and at the same time. I may do more than one, depending on interest.

Here's how the fee structure will work:

• Payment (check or cash) is due for all meetings you plan to attend in a particular month on the first meeting date of the month. 
• Cost is $15 per meeting if you plan to attend off and on, or $10 per meeting if you plan to attend regularly. For example, let's say you were going to attend a Thursday meeting, beginning in January. The amount due at the first meeting, Jan. 3, would be $50 if you planned to attend every week (5 Thursdays in January 2013), $15 if you just planned to come to one, $30 for two and so on. Sometimes it will be cheaper to pay for the whole month at $10/week, even if you miss a meeting. 
• Payment is due upfront because seating is limited, and I'll be reserving a spot for you. In case of illness or inclement weather, payments made can be applied to the next month. 

Format will be the same as my library workshops, except that we will meet for only two hours, and size will be limited to eight people. A manuscript sharing option will also be included on a sign-up basis. Coffee, tea and filtered water will be available at no extra charge. 

Please note I have a cat, in case you have allergies. For those of you who remember Molly and Katie, both have gone to kitty-heaven, and my current feline is a rambunctious 4-month-old tabby named Maisie.

I live just off the Greenwood exit for Interstate 65--about four miles south of my previous address, for those of you who attended workshops in my home several years back. Specific directions will be sent to those who decide to attend.

If you think you might be interested, please email me regarding preferred days and times (M-TU-W-TH-F-SA-SU; morning, afternoon or evening), or post info in the comments section here. From that list, I'll put together offerings to accommodate the most people and send out a follow-up email to those who respond. I look forward to seeing you all again and writing together!

Prose, poetry, pantoums and possibilities

I recently tried out this multi-part prompt of my own invention while subbing for a colleague in a writing group she leads. I often try new things that don't work, so I was delighted when this one generated at least two interesting results for each participant. I'll go through the prompt step-by-step, using my own results to illustrate what can happen...


Read aloud this excerpt from the novel Written in the Ashes (Balboa Press, 2011) by K. Hollan VanZandt:

Hanna crawled into bed that night beneath a shaft of moonlight that spilled through the little rectangular window high in the wall. The day had gone as well as could be expected, and yet she felt even more imprisoned. The cold bronze collar at her throat choked her tears. This beautiful place with its kind women would never really be her home. How could it?

Home was a field without a roof, and the sound of goat bells tinkling in the afternoon as the black-faced sheep and sprightly lambs trotted across the rugged slopes, her father calling to her across the meadow. Home was a thousand stars trailing through the sky in late summer above the humped shoulders of Mount Sinai as the locusts whirred in the night.

Home was far away and never, never again.

Create a character, complete with a name, and write a narrative piece that tells us about this character without using straight description, as the writer does in the example provided. I wrote:

Home to Maggie was yellow. A kitchen painted yellow because it was the only conceivable color besides beige to pair with the turquoise countertops the house came with. Home was the frantic search with her mother for just the right print that combined the two colors for the kitchen curtains. It was the smell of muslin, mercerized cotton thread and wet wool in her nostrils—her mother's smells—and a bench with a lid that lifted up to reveal a bounty of scraps Maggie would cut and wrap and tie with ribbons onto her dolls.

Home was yellow pads of ledger paper her dad brought home from the office for her to draw on. It was the warm glow inside when he called her "my little Margie," like the TV heroine.

Home was yellow fireflies blinking in the summer night as she dashed after them with her emptied-and-washed-clean mayonnaise jar. "Good job, Mags," her oldest brother would call out after she trapped one. "I bet I can get more than you, Naggie," her middle brother would tease. 

Home was also the "yell-o" from her mother that began with "Now Margaret Elizabeth..." not to run with glass in her hands. She'd slow her pace until mom looked away and drink in the yellow smell of the just-cut grass, as the steam set to rise from it in the early summer morning lay in waiting like welling tears beneath the snipped blades.

When Maggie moved here, to her own house, with her own family, she painted all the walls yellow, pale yellow—candleglow, the paint chip said—but it still didn't feel like home.

Outside, the grass had yet to germinate. And in the morning before the workers began pounding on the other houses in progress, the air was still and empty—no birdsong, no squirrels or chipmunks, no neighbor kids on swings or bikes. At mid-day, to stand on her new back porch was to feel as if she'd landed in the middle of a desert where all the houses looked the same on the outside and none with turquoise countertops inside, she bet.

Some teenager even bounced a basketball up her front sidewalk, rang the bell and asked why her house was so different from the others. So different to the other homesteaders, yet still not home to her.

Go through your narrative piece and underline about a dozen phrases or sentences that you feel call forth the strongest imagery. If the passage contains two or three images, count them individually. Write these selections on a separate sheet of paper, and skip lines between each. You may edit out small words or names that interrupt the image. I chose:

• the frantic search for just the right print
• the smell of muslin and wet wool in her nostrils—her mother's smells
• a bounty of scraps to cut and wrap and tie
• yellow pads of ledger paper to draw on
• fireflies blinking in the summer night
• she dashed after them with her emptied-and-washed-clean jar
• the yellow smell of just-cut grass 
• as the steam set to rise from it lay in waiting like welling tears beneath the snipped blades.
• candleglow, the paint chip said.
• Outside, the grass had yet to germinate.
• the air was still and empty
• in the middle of a desert where all the houses looked the same

Now cut apart the lines and rearrange to create an abstract poem. Create four-line stanzas, and in each new stanza reuse one or two lines from a previous stanza and add in two or three lines of new material. Write at least four stanzas, and make sure all the repeated lines stay the same. Here’s what I came up with, though it’s far from a finished piece:

Candleglow, the paint chip said…

The yellow smell of just-cut grass
waiting like welling tears
beneath snipped blades.
Yellow pads of ledger paper to draw on

beneath snipped blades,
the air still and empty,
the steam set to rise.
The yellow smell of just-cut grass,

the frantic search for just the right print,
a bounty of scraps to cut and wrap and tie,
fireflies blinking at dusk.
She dashed after them

with her emptied-and-washed-clean jar
the smell of muslin and wet wool in her nostrils—
her mother’s smell—a bounty of scraps
to cut and wrap and tie.

Outside the grass had yet to germinate,
a desert where all the houses looked the same:
yellow pads of ledger paper to draw on.
Candleglow, the paint chip said.

Follow the link to read about the poetic form called a pantoum, which involves an intricate pattern of repetition, and to read a modern-day example of a (broken) pantoum, "On Beauty" by Nick Laird, which also inspired the novel On Beauty by Laird’s wife, Zadie Smith.

As you rework your piece, does it call out to be structured as a pantoum? Which did you like better—the narrative or poetic version? What were the good points of each? The group I shared this prompt with thought their poem versions concentrated the images and told essentially the same stories as the narratives, but in a more emotion-packed way. At the least, it’s a lesson in approaching the same material from different angles.

Feel free to play with your results from this prompt over and over. Rearrange, add stanzas or choose different lines from the narrative. You can also use the image/poem part of the exercise with a prose piece you’ve already written. If you like what you come up with and want to share, email it to me and I'll post on the Your Words section of my website.

Have fun!

A Writer's Art

A tip of the hat to Beverly Crawford for allowing me to use her homage to Sherry Parker as my blog nameplate for a while.

Bev is a familiar face at my library writing workshops--one of the west side gang who often shows up on other sides of town as well. What she writes usually has the entire group laughing or crying or both.

I only recently learned about her whimsical digital art creations and challenges. Check out her full portfolio at  http://indybev.blogspot.com/.

I plan to change and/or rotate the art/photo in my blog header as the spirits move me. If you'd like me to consider something you've done, please email me.