The big city is supposed to hold allure. It collects smog, I can tell you that. It’s crowded, I can tell you that. It’s noisy, and everyone seems to think it should be even noisier. Music is turned on high. Voices are raised. What’s the attraction?
Oh, yeah. The culture. The museums, the concerts, the stage plays. Life at its fullest.
It’s draining, not filling. Are those fighting words. Then . . .
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He fancied himself a sailor. He spoke of sailing in the bars he frequented. He spun long tales of days at sea, of winds, currents, stars, and jumping whales. On Saturday and Sunday he walked to the local Starbucks in deck shoes and read the morning paper over coffee while regaling the other Starbuck’s regulars with talk of teak and rigging and jibs.
But at home, he faced the truth. And the truth was that he’d never come closer to sailing than the local library. He’d read everything in the library about sailing twice already and he wanted more…
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“I’m at peace with it,” she said. “I think my song now is moving on up to a higher place.”
She did sound oddly radiant and happy. For so long she’s struggled to fight off the inevitable, cursed her situation. She alternated between anger and self-pity. Now, when the trip to hospice was certain and everyone knew what was coming, she finally reached acceptance. There was a certain beauty in it, a certain growth.
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Janine left the desert where the air was clear and the sky was blue. She descended into Chicago in mid-afternoon. It was not raining. It was not foggy. There were a couple of clouds in the sky. Yet Janine couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. The air was full of—what—smog? A cloud of something so thick that buildings half a block away were obscured by it. The water on Lake Michigan sparkled as if the sun were shining. But the sun was hidden behind a screen of something gray and impenetrable. How did the sun shine through that glaze of goo to reach the water? How did anyone even know it was daytime? It made her throat ache just to think about whatever it was she was breathing—even before she actually took a breath of it.
Janine considered returning to the airline and asking for a seat on the next plane back to the desert. But she couldn’t. She . . .
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The daisy looked at me
Its perfect flower face
A round and cheerful orb
I held its long stem
A wagging tail in hand
And thought of summer sun
Such a simple thing
This daisy-face
To lift my heart
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Remember the wolfman? Unless you are well up in the double digits or a fan of really old movies, you may not. The wolfman gave me nightmares. The first I ever remember having. Big metal ants in a playground don’t scare me a bit. They just make me want to crawl on and go for an ant ride. But the ants don’t look alive. The wolfman did. Sort of. Not by the standards of today’s special effects, but alive enough for my immature mind to accept as real. A teeny live spider is much scarier than a huge T-Rex with foot-long teeth at the museum. (Unless you’re Ben Stiller.) So when I saw the . . .
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She loves that raggedy old stuffed dog. His fur is soiled from handling and dragging about and being slept with. His stuffing is bunched up in spots and thin in others. He looks as loved as the Velveteen Rabbit, except he still has both his eyes. Other toys come and go, but the dog is eternal. The dog is required.
Kids have so many toys now. With Toys-R-Us and Build-a-Bear in every town, kids’ rooms bulge with toys. But there’s always one favorite toy, one that’s clearly the best, most loveable, most cherished. Hers came to her from . . .
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My tire was flat. It was raining. I was late for an important meeting. My cat was high up in the peach tree and wouldn’t come down to be put back in the house because she didn’t like the wet tree. I was struggling to regard this as a blessing. I know I promised myself to be positive, to look at every event as an opportunity rather than as a problem. I stood under the porch roof looking at the cat. It’s hard to be positive about life. Especially after a lifetime of thinking the worst. What would a positive person do? I pulled out my cell phone and called AAA. Then I went in the kitchen and got my rattily tin of smelly cat treats and walked back to the porch shaking it noisily. I extended it temptingly with one hand and called my boss with the other. . .
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You have to have the right travel tunes in your car so you don’t fall asleep at the wheel and drive over a bar ditch and into a stubbly corn field. What ever happened to that two cassette set of a live Tina Turner concert I used to throw on about 30 minutes before reaching my destination as celebration music? Oh, right, I don’t use cassettes any more. I must find that old concert on a CD. I’m always so tired those last 30 minutes. I know I’m almost there, but it seems endless. And Tina perks you right up. You can shout, “What’s love got to do with it.” at the top of your lungs and get a little fresh oxygen in your blood in the process. A physical and mental boost. I wonder if iTunes . . .
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Sharon MacManus stepped out of her unit. Out of habit, she checked the placement of her .38 in its holster under her left arm. She was a homicide detective. She shouldn’t be checking on elderly parents for out-of-town children who can’t get anyone on the phone. She’d gotten thrown off a case and was assigned to duties like this until she cleared her name.
She approached the door of the trim condo and rang the bell. A pot of petunias desperate for water sat beside the entrance. A small plot of soil about a yard square with a few herbs and a tomato in it looked equally parched. She rang the bell again, but . . .
Please leave a comment with your first 50 words on the topic “parent.”
