The Query that Failed

Lorin Stein, Editor

The Paris Review

62 White Street

New York, New York 10013

Re: “Unspeakable”

Dear Mr. Stein:

Once, I lived so normal that it made my throat hurt in a way that I was unable to take in the kind of air that feeds the parts of me that medical science cannot see.  It was a pain that distracted me from reaching the segments of the world that have stories that need to be told.  Those are the stories I write; the ones that otherwise cannot be heard, or read, or started, or finished.  Or, mostly, understood.  That’s what it is for me.  I write about the things that I need to better understand.  The news media helps.  Like, when a father kills his four children before the mother can wake to save them.

I am well-versed on the definition and format of an industry-standard cover letter.  I know all about current trends in querying editorial decision-makers, or more accurately, editorial interns who flush the piles.  Unfortunate for those who insist upon such formalities, and as I previously stated, normal almost killed me once.  I will not let it take me on a second occasion. 

So rather than hook and capture you with attention-grabbing action verbs and extravagant adjectives that illustrate my unending fortitude and passionate tenacity, certain to prompt you to turn this page and engage in intricate language that portraits sociopathic tendencies and a woman’s inability to suffer, I simply ask that you read the enclosed short-fiction piece.  And then publish it. 

Thank you, Mr. Stein, for getting this far.

Sincerely,

  

Saranne Fosselman

Enclosure: “Unspeakable”

Redemption

It happened on a Saturday morning.  It was early spring; the first really nice day of the season.  The sun was clear and bright against blue.  The air was easy to breathe with a tinge of leftover chill reminding fellow runners of the long, drawn-out winter we all survived.  Survived because we were still on the pavement.

Most of my runs are that of redemption where I must retrace a former run to redeem myself from having to walk it in or tie my left sneaker seventy-two times along a six-mile path or stop to stretch my hamstrings or stop because I can see the silhouette of the Divine Lorraine on the distant horizon and it is telling me that I can quit running now.  That I no longer need to take part in these shenanigans of sorts.  Then I hear the eco of my sister’s voice in my head that I will never give up because she said so.  I run home knowing that because of the urban landscape that day, I will return to that route seeking redemption.  And in that specified case, to tell the shadow of the Divine Lorraine that she is the one who has given up.  Not I.

The particular Saturday in my mind was crisp and fun and made me run out loud with my sights set on breezing out of Roxborough with my hands in the air, through upper East Falls wagging my head to the rhythm of my music, and along the perimeter of North Philadelphia with Fairmount being my destination.  Six miles out.  Bus route 32 home.  There was not a footfall in that first mile that gave me the slightest impression that the route I was about to run would, under all circumstances that were about to unfold, need to be redeemed under the policies and guidelines definitive of a redemption run.  Yes, regardless of the perfection indicated within that first mile, I would be running this route again not for things gone wrong, but more for the unexpected miles that were about to unravel before me.

It is in looking back over my shoulder at this day as it plagues my memory that I wish angels would articulate rather than administer operations within hushed whispers that come to me as mumbled wind in my ears.  But then, I wonder if I had heard the angels that day, would I have run in a different direction?

She was standing on the ledge of the Henry Avenue Bridge.  It is where we all go to kill ourselves.  She was no dummy.  It is completely one-hundred percent fail proof.  They all have died going over the Henry Avenue Bridge.

The crowd around her was a conglomerate of law officers, paramedics, a team of crisis intervention counselors, and campus police who had migrated from Philadelphia University, the campus being less than a half-mile distance from where she had perched herself on the ledge.  She was holding a bottle of water.

I wondered, as I ran, my ear buds in, if the crowd would part to let me through.  It didn’t.  I hopped off the sidewalk and squiggled my way through parked police cars and an ambulance on the street.  I made the sign of the cross because that is what all good Catholics do.  We cross ourselves to say God Be With You and of course With Me, Too.  A half-mile later, I turned around.  I ran back.  I pushed a few police officers to the side.  I wedged myself between a paramedic and a crisis intervention professional.  They wear special unit jackets now with important titles embroidered into the front left chest panel.  As I approached, I could see that they were speaking to her.  I couldn’t hear them over my music, but their mouths were moving.  I looked up to the girl on the ledge.  I searched her eyes for signs of life.  The breeze swept across my wet back.  I shuddered with a chill.  She saw me then, at that moment and I stepped forward toward her wondering who are these people who are so brave and so bold to teeter above the world like this?

I rested my arms on the ledge. I rubbed the rough pebbly surface of the bridge’s structural composition with my fingertips.  I leaned against the concrete, my arms still outstretched over the abutment.  I turned my head to the right and looked up at the girl standing over me at an angle.  The sun pierced the space between us.  She took a step on the ledge toward me.  She wobbled.  I put my hand on her sneaker.  I reached with my other hand to turn off my music.

“Are you going jump today?” I asked her, not letting go of her shoe.

“Are you going to push me?” she asked.

“Only if you want me to,” I answered.  The crowd behind me muttered things.  But I was on a run that day, I had a destination, and I didn’t have time to lecture them on how this is a switch that calls upon the attention of the world which is impossible to wield and therefore should be released as a win-some, lose-some event.

“I know what this feels like,” I whispered through the sunlight to the girl, the words crackling at the back of my throat not wanting to be heard.  Not wanting to be felt.  “But I am still here,” I added.  “I run.  And I dream a lot.  I am not good anything I do.  But I am still here.  And I think that might be important to a few other people I know.”

She took the lid from the bottle of water she had been holding.  The label read “Philadelphia University.”

“Do you go to school here?” I asked.

She looked out over the trees and the creek and Lincoln Drive below.  If only those drivers knew.

“You look hot,” she finally said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty hot out here.”

“You want me to pour this on you?”

“No,” I said, pulling away from the ledge, releasing her shoe.

“But if you’re hot,” she replied, “let me cool you off.”

She poured the water over my head.  I let her do it.  She emptied the water bottle by half of its contents.  Half of the water remained.

“You are a good friend for cooling me off,” I said.  “Thank you for that.”

A smile spread across her face, brief, like a flash of something that wanted to breathe the outisde air.

“I have to go,” I said.  “I’m in a hurry.  I am running to the art museum, but I will come here when I am done.  You should come down before I get back.  Or you can wait for me with the rest of that water.  I’ll need it by then.”

I looked around at the people behind me.  One of them asked who I was.  Another said I was a runner just passing by.  I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not one of these people, you know,” I said turning back to the girl and gesturing toward the uniformed representatives behind me.  “Don’t think that about me.  I am not here to help you.  I just wanted you to know that I….well….you are not the only one that keeps ledges in her life.  The talent lies in what we choose to do with them.”

I turned my music back on.  I shuffled around for a good song.  I wished the officials the best of luck.  I ran away to the art museum.  I stopped to tie my shoes twelve times.  I stretched another nine times.  I walked the length of the reservoir along Prospect.  I cried the final tenth of a mile just in time to get on the 32 bus at 20^th street that would have taken me back to Roxborough if it weren’t for unknown, unexplained urges that often times overcome me and completely destroy any semblance of a schedule to which I might have been trying to adhere.

On the bus, I stretched, I sat, I stood, I stretched, and three blocks from the place where I boarded the bus, it stopped, the doors opened and something made me exit from the rear.  I had no more money.  I hadn’t brought my phone.  I was six miles from home.

The walk is a blur to me.  I recall very little of the uneven sidewalks, the boarded homes by which I passed, the hoards of small children playing in the streets, the mothers exchanging gossip on the corners, the old men sitting in the shade of tattered porch fronts.  My iPod was no match to the base that resonated from tricked-up cars driving the strip of 33^rd street.  These are things that I know about the route because I drove it days later to retrieve the memory of not only walking home six miles through the city, but doing so after running those same six miles trying not to hold myself accountable for a life that no one else touched a sneaker to save.

Interventionists are never instructed on the power of touch.  They learn more about personal space and how one may feel and let’s resolve this matter so that we can move forward in our lives.   They are always, for whatever reason, instructed to reiterate the phrase, “Nothing is so bad that you have to kill yourself over it.”  I think they practice it in front of mirrors before they go to sleep at night.  I think they believe that they are going to save a life with it someday.

When I came up on the bridge, I realized that the 32 didn’t stop at the bridge.  I would not have gotten off the bus at the place where the girl wanted to end her life via the Henry Avenue Bridge.  The bus would have passed by the place at the standard accelerated speed of light that all public transportation must fulfill under the requirements of driving busses and trains through and around a metropolitan area without caution to pedestrians and other motor vehicles with which the roadways must be shared.  I would never have seen it from the bus.  But I saw it
from the opposite end of the bridge, on foot.

The gully that the Wissahickon Creek has carved out over the past sixty-million years, for which the bridge is used to cross, is always full of wind and things.  It pulls moisture from the corners of my eyes and catches my oxygen intake by surprise.  With my vision blurred by the wind and feeling generally pissed over spending an entire day walking home from the art museum, I tried to make out the figure at the other end of the bridge.  From the distance, I assessed that it was a death marker.  You know, one of those white marker thingies that I see in Law and Order that they place around the scene of the body.  A death marker.

Without reaction to my assessment, more so because these things happen and not that I am sociopathic, I continued walking.  The thing is that these things really do happen.  People take their own lives.  People take each other’s lives.  And then the rest of us die of age or disease.  It is a simplistic approach but a realistic ideal.  We all die.

I was standing over it before it registered.  I even stepped away from it.  Walked away.  Walked back to it.  Looked around for a hidden camera.  Looked further around for the body, or the remnants of police tape and blood splatter.  But there was nothing remaining of that morning other than a single item left behind and it was not a death marker.

Sitting upright on the edge of the sidewalk curb exactly adjacent to where the girl had teetered on the edge of life that day stood a water bottle with a label that read, “Philadelphia University.”

The bottle was half-filled.

The Problem

I am too easily distracted. I will engage in anything, anything at all, in the name of avoiding the task at hand.

I used to think that I was going to change the world. We all do, right? Like, in kindergarten when I convinced myself that if I stood at the top of the jungle gym and jumped to the ground in a spiraling motion, I would metamorphose into Wonder Woman. Who wouldn’t, right? I mean, that’s how she did it. She spun. And then she was AMAZING.

So, I spent the entire year on the slide during recess as to not let the other kids know that if I accidentally spiraled myself off the jungle gym, I would most certainly turn into Wonder Woman. Not until May.

It was an overcast day. A slight breeze. Just enough chill for me to keep my sweater buttoned. Jonathan Spearl, or whatever his name was, was the only thing that stood between me and my climb to the top of that jungle gym where I was about to reveal my power from within.

He missed a toss of the Nerf and had to jog to the left. I ducked to the right and took hold of those metal bars, then an ascension up the wooden steps, around the tower, over the bridge, and finally…finally, I was standing on the highest platform of the structure. I immediately noted that I should have not chosen my first day on the jungle gym as my Reveal Day. It was high and kind of slippery beneath my Keds. The bars were cold and too big for me to wrap my hands around. The ground was so far away.

But this was it, right? My big day. My Debut. Dayyyyyy-Bewwwwww!

This was the moment for which I had waited my whole life. Brother John was all grown up enough in seventh grade to ride his bike all by himself without our parents trotting behind him on the sidewalk barking at him to stop at every corner until they caught up to cross him through the intersection. Even after he came home with a rock in his head, they let him out. Even after he caught his friend on fire down at the empty lot at the end of our street, they let him out.

And then there was baby Jessica. Who cried. All. The. Time. She cried colic all over that house from floors to ceilings and it ricocheted off walls and draperies and berber carpeting that my mom insisted was genius on which to raise her children. It was pea green. We spilled everything on it. All the time.

But this day, the one that happened at the top of the jungle gym, this day was mine. Carpe Diem. Yadda, yadda. Blah, blah, blah.

“Are you going to jump or what?”

It was Jonathan Swirl, or whatever his name was. He was standing behind me, sort of hanging from the tower rods, smirking, making fun of the little kid with her Keds getting ready to turn into Wonder Woman so that the world would finally understand her outward strangeness that attracted kids like Jonathan to, well, pick on her. And now I am talking about myself in third-person, which brings me to the point at hand.

I couldn’t talk myself into jumping that day. Nope. Not on that day. And I never turned into Wonder Woman. In fact, I wasn’t even permitted to watch her show on television. My mother thought she was sleazy. So while all the little girls who populated my neighborhood that summer wore snazzy Wonder Woman tank bathing suits, I adorned a fluorescent pink tank bathing suit with a gray elephant embroidered on the belly. There are photographs of those little girls in their Wonder Woman bathing suits in my mother’s photo albums.

I am in the albums, too. Strange. Awkward. Unusual. You can pick me out of all the group shots. But not because I turned into Wonder Woman during kindergarten recess. And not because I am running through my father’s sprinkler in a fluorescent pink tank bathing suit with an elephant embroidered on the front. But because I have always been different.

I still climb to great heights. I still try to jump. And then I find something else to do. Before the leap comes to fruition.

Eulogy

My grandmother passed in 2005. I was summoned to author and present a eulogy at her funeral service held at the site of the former Wila Methodist Church. The following is what I delivered to the congregation on that day. I post the passage annually on May 14th; Violet’s birthday. She would have been one-hundred-and-three-years-old today.

Eulogy

Violet Wilhemina Tressler Fosselman

May 14, 1909 – July 3, 2005

Growing up, I didn’t have a grandmother, or a grandma or a mum-mum. I had a Mema. A woman who, in my early years, was defined by a drawer of junk food she kept for me in her kitchen and the toothbrush, just for me, that dangled in a dispenser on her bathroom sink. By the time I was eight, and living only a mile from her house, my every weekend and holiday was spent with Mema in what seemed to me a land of magic and wonder that never tired no matter the number of minutes, hours, or days I spent with her.

When my Aunt Sandra asked me to say a few words regarding the life of Violet Fosselman, a million stories came to mind. I remembered the sealed jars of her homemade grape juice she stored in her basement where cousin Katie and I used to make inventions with in intention of changing the way the world interpreted technology.

I remembered Jiffy Pop on Friday nights and Violet’s rice pudding that made my insides melt. I remembered the smell of Violet’s attic; a treasure trove that provided afternoons of investigative rooting through boxes and bags of life manifested long before my time. Our parents scolded us for dragging Violet’s ancient ruins from the attic collection into the family room. We took the reprimand in exchange for stories that Violet shared for every item; stories delivered in an elaborate tapestry of the olden days.

I remembered Violet dousing my every boo-boo with Solarcaine, her cure-all for wounds ranging from skinned knees to bee stings. I remembered her patience, her tolerance and her tenacity. I remembered old five-eyes that hung on the wall above her range. A wooden paddle with five holes drilled through the center. She never used the paddle on the grandchildren. The threat alone was enough to keep us well-behaved.

I remembered Christmastime and Halloween at the Wila Church. And fausnaught day! That special Tuesday in February when I’d come home from school to find a box of homemade doughnuts made at the grange hall. Catholics call it Fat Tuesday, but Mema was a faithful German Protestant. I was the only one of Violet’s grandchildren confirmed in both churches.

I recalled sitting in Violet’s rocking chair on a lazy summer afternoon with my arms hanging limp over the sides of the chair. My mind drifting and my hands in the wrong place at the wrong time, I managed to rock the chair over my fingers. With a shriek that must have echoed all the way to the T. Luke Toomey Bridge, I leaped from the chair and fell into a fetal position on Violet’s back porch. Traumatized by the pain, I clutched my hand to my chest and rolled around calling for help. My sister, Jessica, was the first to arrive on the scene to immediately assess that I was having a heart attack.

“Mema!” she called through the screen door into the house. “Mema! Get out here! Come quick! Sara’s having a heart attack! Mema! We need you!”

In a flash, Violet was standing over me, her face white as a ghost. For an instant, I think she might have believed that maybe I was in cardiac arrest.

“I rocked over my fingers, Mema!” I shouted.

Violet smiled, and then chuckled. She ushered me into the house and sprayed my swollen fingers with Solarcaine.

And then, quietly, almost still like an ocean tide before a wave rears its foamy head, I remembered a walk I took with Violet on a warm summer evening.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she had suggested. I was about 14-years-old.

We crested the hill behind her house and stopped to survey the valley below. The creek. The church. Lib Lyons’ General Store.

“I’m going to build a house here someday, Mema,” I confided in Violet.

A moment passed before she spoke. And I wonder now if maybe, standing on the fringes of her empire, Violet considered life and how it tosses us like dried leaves in the wind. How misdirected motives influence and lead us down paths we never imagined to exist. And most certainly, I wondered if Violet considered at that moment how the passage of time casts life into faded memory and we forget the things we once promised to do.

“That would be a nice thing to do,” she answered and as we walked down the hill, back to her house, a deer leapt from the brush and onto our path. I easily startled and Violet took my hand. The deer stood like a statue on the path, staring at us in alarm.

“Scat!” Violet said to the animal and the deer disappeared into the green of the summertime hillside. Violet gave my hand a squeeze and let go.

Mema taught me how to sew, but never on Sundays. The seventh day was reserved for rest, she warned me. This made little sense to me as a child. It contradicted the fact that every Sunday morning Mema came into my room, the blue room, the one in which I always chose to sleep. It was my father’s old bedroom, the one with Little Boy Blue on the wall and the teddies on a chair in the corner and the giant headboard on the bed that me feel safe, protected. At the crack of dawn, on the day left for rest, Mema woke me, religiously. I whined and moaned and insisted that I would not be getting out of bed. By the arm, Mema would drag me into the bathroom where I was ordered to splash cold water in my face and brush my teeth. It was time to go to church. This was the thing, Mema said, that God kept for the seventh day. A day of rest, she told me.

What is the worth of a life lived so long that you don’t know in which direction to look when it has ceased?

Ninety-six years this woman lived. I was blessed with knowing her for 34. Yet in all the stories and memories I could recount in the wake of my Mema’s death, it will be the final segments of her life that I will hold dear to my heart. The days I spent with her in a nursing home in Monmouth, New Jersey.

I know by now that the most amazing things in life come packaged in small whispers and quiet kisses. And although we have ninty-six years by which to remember Mema, what I will take with me from her life is the grace that was granted to me in her final years.

My two-year-old daughter, Hazel, too young to be afraid of old age, liked to sit on Mema’s lap when we visited the home. The old woman’s hands wrapped around my daughter in contrast to new and unclaimed flesh. A kiss on Hazel’s cheek. A squeeze. Hazel would find the spot just beneath my Mema’s chin where she’d gently lay her head. Mema would press her face into Hazel’s hair and breathe in life renewed.

“Do you have a boyfriend, little girl?” Mema asked Hazel one day. “I bet you do. I bet all the little boys are chasing you.”

Mema laughed at her own silliness.

During another visit, Mema sang Hazel a song and told my oldest daughter, Zoey, about the turkeys and how proud she was that Zoey did well in school.

One day, in the middle of singing Hazel a song, Mema bent her head toward Hazel’s ear.

“Let me tell you something, little one,” Mema whispered to Hazel. “They will never know how much they mean to us until we are gone. You need to know that. You need to remember that one.”

She gently patted Hazel’s leg and continued to hum a lullaby.

I said goodbye to Mema seven days before she died. I held her hand and helped Sandra give her some fruit punch. The outside world fell away from me in my final hour with Mema. Nothing seemed more important than watching an old woman die. But Sandra said it was time to go. She was right. How long can we hold on to the dying? How long we can ask that they extend their stay? That request is for us, and not them.

“I have to go now Mema,” I said into the woman’s ear. “I want to see you again. You hang in there, okay?”

“O….K….,” she answered, her voice dry and raspy, her eyes closed.

“Mema,” I said, my lips almost touching her ear. “Mema, open your eyes, I want to tell you something…” my voice caught in a lump that knotted in my throat.

“O….K….,” she answered, her eyes open, but not searching for sight.

I swallowed hard and called upon the words I could not leave unsaid. I pressed my cheek against hers and squeezed tears from the corners of my eyes. I pulled back to look into her eyes, to make her see me, hear me.

“Thank you, Mema,” I cried. “Thank you for everything. You did good.”

Mema started to cry. Sandra went to her side. Still holding my Mema’s hand, I was sure I’d never be able to let that woman go. Claire, my middle child, began to cry in the corner of Mema’s room. Sandra offered her a tissue. How long could I stand there? And what power greater than myself would pull me away from a woman who made all the difference in the world to me? A woman who taught me everything I ever needed to know. One who never faultered. Never failed. At every turn, she was always there for me. Without question. Without a doubt.

“I love you, Mema,” my final words falling like echoes from mouth.

Mema stretched her neck, lifted her chin and took a labored breath.

“I love you, too,” she said. Her final words to me.

 

Sometimes I have to be Told

I have been waiting to re-post this story for two years. The following is in its original form, right down to the final line. But today this story is not for me. I am posting it for my friend Stacey who needs to be reminded that she is strong, courageous, and loved by many. This is the story of how that kind of love can carry us through to the other side of devastation.

 

Sometimes I Have to be Told

by Saranne Fosselman-Miller

 

“Are you relieved?” a friend asked.

“Are you excited?” another inquired.

“This is wonderful!” another acquaintance offered.

Relieved. Excited. Wonderful.

Based on the circumstances, I was supposed to be feeling the above mentioned descriptive terms because, after seven weeks of living emersed in uncertain limbo, my husband drove from indefinite unemployment to a new job on Monday. Who wouldn’t be elated?

But when I measured my emotions upon seeing my husband off to work Monday morning, none of the above came to mind as new items on the list of feelings I had harbored across seven weeks. They existed, and remained present, but relief, excitement, and wonderment were not spawned by a job offer, but rather evolved on the day he lost his job.

Ten years ago, my husband, Andy, stood before me in our newly custom-constructed house nestled in the suburbs of Central Pennsylvania with my hunter-green Jaguar parked in the black-top driveway.  I had been in the middle of folding laundry when he approached me in our bedroom to articulate that, after months of driving new market opportunities, strategizing, reducing overhead, and cutting staff, his business had officially gone under. We were weeks away from having just returned from a vacation in Paris. I didn’t take the news well. And the events of the year that followed, I didn’t take those well either.

Having left the house and the Jaguar and further anticipated European vacations, we migrated to Philadelphia in 2001 where Andy matched a marketing manager job post. I waved him off to his new job and felt with anticipated excitement that  I was standing on the threshold of something new, and back then, that day was wonderful.

Andy was granted a grand office in a Center City high-rise structure with a bay window that overlooked Love Park. He was blessed with quality office furniture, solid initiatives, and reasonable senior leaders. But I watched him whither behind the chunky desk. Within months, the view from that bay window molded into a two-dimensional backdrop. By 2002, I recommended he move on to a more challenging position, and so he did. Another new threshold awaited and once again, Andy left on a Monday morning to tackle a new professional opportunity.

One year later, in 2003, while the U.S. was unpacking debris left behind by 911, Andy called home from his year-old desk. I was just getting out of the shower. I wrapped myself in a towel and scuttled to the ringing telephone. Andy had lost his job. Shower water ran down my shins and pooled on the hardwood floor at my feet. Our six-week-old daughter squawked from her crib. Nap time was over. I communicated my condolences to Andy on the phone. “We’ve been here before,” I expressed. “We’ll be fine.”

But that phone call, stacked upon the years that had collected beneath me, took on the effects of the sun, so that I didn’t feel the burn right then, standing wet on my kitchen floor. It would take hours, days, and weeks before emotional blisters festered into boils of fear, insecurity, anger, and eventually rage that seeped from my pours into all facets of my daily life. I didn’t take it well. I wanted that house in Harrisburg back. I wanted my Jag. I wanted white plush carpet and mommy groups and playgrounds exempt of graffiti. I didn’t want this city. I didn’t want what had been given to me.

The months following melted into a blur of panic-stricken distress. We had an infant and two preschoolers under our roof. My fear drove me into isolation. Rather than reaching out to family and friends, I convinced myself that I was too far from home to call upon family, and that, having only lived in the city for two years, I did not have friends close enough with whom to share my distress. Both of which were lies.

Within a year, Andy found a new job and contributed to the growth of small empire over the next six years. Life was basic. I did what was in front of me, he did the same, and our children flourished. Over the course of this time period, I cultivated and fostered wonderful friendships and came to accept that I would probably always live far from home. This enabled me to plant my roots, enhance relationships here in Philadelphia, and nurture the relationships with my family with whom I only shared company a few times throughout the year.

In May 2009, Andy came home from work without a job again. The company had gone in over its head, and Andy was one of the first to go. Every drop of rage and fury that had seared its ugly head in 2001 and 2003, greeted Andy at the door. “This can never happen to us again,” I demanded of him in 2009. But in 2010, just seven weeks ago, it did.

We can blame it on lack of market demand, a diminished economy, poorly administered operations, but the bottom line is that I got that call again on March 9, 2010 at 2:45 p.m. Andy’s employer had turned the building over to the bank. He would be home by four with his box of belongings.

Different from years past, the call that came just seven weeks ago did not have the effect of a bad sunburn. It was more like a tsunami. Unsuspecting, silent upon approach, and devastating upon contact. I cried.

First, I emailed my sister, Jessica, at work. Within minutes she had managed to slip away from her desk and placed a renegade call to me on her cell from a public restroom. Her voice echoed against tile walls through the phone.

“You aren’t going to be homeless,” Jess rebutted to my fear of losing our house. “I will make the parlor into a master bedroom. The girls can have Sophie’s room and the spare room. You will come live with us. It will be the greatest thing that ever happened.”

Really?

I hung up the phone, tears still streaming down my cheeks, and called my mother-in-law, Joan.

“You are not alone, Sara,” Joan encouraged me. “We are a family and we are in this together. When you struggle, we all struggle together. We will get through this as a family.”

Really?

The girls came through the door from getting off the school bus. They read my face. The asked their questions. And disbursed throughout the house to process, in the minds of children, what it meant for daddy to lose his job.

By 3:30, I had achieved a zombie-state-of-mind. My insides burned. My legs were the consistency of Jell-O. My breathing was shallow. I climbed into a laundry basket on my kitchen floor and sat with my knees pulled up to my chest. I took out my cell and called my friend, Maureen.

“You are good people,” Maureen responded to my weeping. “Remember that. You are good, hard-working people and you will be fine. You have a good marriage, good kids. You will get through this.”

Really?

I climbed out of the laundry basket and texted my friend, Barb.

“You are the strongest person I know,” Barb replied to my news.

Really?

And that is when I let it go. Before Andy even reached the front door to a house I was not certain we could keep, I felt relief. It washed down over me like a bucket of warm bath water. I considered what might be out there for us, as a family. Where would this predicament take us? Excitement bubbled and jump-started my zombie heart back to standardized blood-pumping through my veins. I sat on my sofa, in the still wake of my children still trying to figure out the meaning of the day’s events. I pondered those four people; Jess, Joan, Maureen, and Barb. They made me feel wonderful.

My children would not be homeless.

We were not alone.

We were good people.

I was strong enough to take this on.

Really.

I stood from my seat on the sofa, seven weeks ago, and did not look back or return to retrieve the pile of distress my friends and family had shed for me. Breathing came easy. I smiled. I enjoyed every last morsel of life that surrounded me. Because it was a job that got lost in a fire. A job. We still had each other. We had good friends. We wouldn’t go without a roof over our heads. We’d be taken care of.

That day, and every day that has followed, opened my eyes to components of daily life that had gone unnoticed in the rustle of raising children, running programs, and meeting deadlines. I didn’t cry for a newly built house in a town that wasn’t meant for us ten years ago. I didn’t ask God if could have the hunter-green Jag back. I didn’t curse the city. I didn’t curse my husband. Instead, I wrapped myself comfortably around everything with which I’ve been blessed. The bounty was limitless.

Andy and I did chores together, we ate together, we walked together, we sat on our front porch together and sipped on freshly brewed iced tea. We strategized finances to keep the boat afloat. We laughed at daily humor that otherwise goes unnoticed. We planned TV nights, movie nights, evenings in the park with the girls.

Over the past twelve years of parenthood, I have often remarked to Andy, “Remember when we were in our twenties and we’d spend entire weekends just being together doing nothing important but enjoying each other’s company?” Andy nods when I broach this topic, not feeling quite as romantically hopeless as I. But I continue, “I guess we have to wait until we’re old and the kids are gone to have that back again.” Andy rolls his eyes at this part and reminds me that our grandchildren will run us ragged. “There will always be something, Sissy,” he says.

Except for the past seven weeks, there wasn’t. For seven weeks, I basked in the glory of feeling twenty again. I spent forty-nine days enjoying lazy afternoons and peaceful evenings with the very best friend I’ll ever know, and feeling like the luckiest woman alive. Go figure.

I answered, “Yes”, to my friends’ Monday morning inquiries on Andy’s new job, not totally lying. I let them believe that the new job brought on relief, excitement, and wonderment. What I neglected to tell them is that it was they who had delivered those gifts to me, curled in a laundry basket, choking on my tears. It was the special group of people in my life, including those not mentioned here, that enabled me to wake every uncertain day of Andy’s unemployment knowing that I have a home. I am not alone. I am a good person. I am strong.

I look forward to the day I have the opportunity to re-gift.

Things I Did When I Was A Kid….That My Children Never Will

1. I walked with my parents down a dirt road on election day where they entered a shed-like structure in the middle of a corn field and casted votes for our U.S. President.
2. I laid on my back in the middle of the Big Buffalo Creek and felt the wing feathers of a heron brush over me as he swooped for a landing in the shallow water.
3. I committed up to twelve hours a day to riding dirt bikes and four wheelers across the coutryside, which served as the four corners of my world.
4. I attended Friday night lights like a Catholic attends weekly Mass without fail.
5. I fed the cows every morning before school and every night after dinner.
6. I square danced on Saturday nights in real barns with livestock in the stalls and to the tune of live banjo bands.
7. I played basketball with my friends in my own barn.
8. Everything I ate came from our land or our barn or the pig pen or the chicken coop or the sheep pen.
9. I climbed silos to feed my need for a thrill.
10. I skated on a frozen creek from December to February against a bon fire built along the water’s edge.
11. I climbed a mountain to feel God’s grace.
12. I stopped to watch the sun set into the adjacent mountain crest.
13. Trick or treating was my dad driving me farm to farm for apples and bags of freashly popped corn.
14. I snowmobiled into late night hours on snow that stayed white on the ground all winter.
15. I climbed trees and imaged the world view from a high-rise apartment building in New York City, which was where I assumed Sesame Street was filmed.
16. I watched “The Waltons” every week night at seven.
17. I learned to drive with a manual clutch on my father’s tractor.
18. I met my friends on horses at a clearing along the creek on lazy afternoons.
19. I invested a critical pride in attending mt great-great-great grandfather’s alma mater, shared by generations across more than 200 years.
20. I gathered as a teenager with my friends at a pizza shop on the town square where football players wore varsity jackets, and cheerleaders mingled with field hockey palyers, and everyone knew everyone because this was our hometown, 36 miles from the nearest hospital, shopping mall, and movie theater, and 200 miles from where I now live.

Don’t Call Me White

Last year, flash mobs were booming in Philadelphia. They gathered, collected, rallied, and attacked, breeding superior rule over commoners who are plainly shopping, socializing, generally milling around city streets on otherwise innocent Saturday evenings. That is how I interpreted the news reports. I had not put a color on the skin of flash mobsters. If a photo is included with an article, I had not taken notice. Not until The Philadelphia Inquirer published a story on flash mob victims in the B section of Sunday’s edition sometime last year.

The Inquirer article, written by Monica Yant Kinney, states, “…the galling fact that the perpetrators of these violent attacks are black and the victims, nonblack.”

But what does that mean? Nonblack. And black. And what difference does it make to flash mobs? What button is she pressing here?

I learned about being black in 1976, in a kindergarten class at Hampton Elementary School located in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. I was five.

I didn’t enjoy my peers back then. And the jury presently remains out on that issue. Regardless, in kindergarten, I flew solo. I painted at the easel, I perfected my handwriting in meticulously kept copybooks, and I played quietly during outdoor recess on the monkey bars until other children wanted to do the same. At which point I found pleasing solitude on the slide. I could climb high, sit at the top, and survey the ant-like creatures that ran in circles below me. When all of the above failed to provide me solitude, I chose jigsaw puzzles. I constructed the puzzles on the carpeted floor area near the bookshelves which no kid chose to occupy during free time. Reading wasn’t pleasure for those kids. It was a chore. All the better for me.

I liked new kids, though. Kids who were brought into class mid-year, presented to us in front of the blackboard, nervous and anonymous. I liked those kids for their potential to be my twin.

I believed that there was someone out there in the world like me. A twin, I called it. I told my mother about it at Roy Rogers in the Capital City Mall one day. We were having lunch together because my sister had just been born and my mother told my pediatrician that I was having issues with the baby in the house. Dr. Forti articulated to my mother that I was suffering an identity crisis and that she was to take me to lunch on Saturdays. Her favorite place to eat was Roy Rogers.

I told my mother about my belief in having a twin because I wanted her to know that I felt different from the other kids at school, but I hadn’t lost hope in finding one like me. At the age five, I didn’t have the words that matched what was going on inside of me. So I told her I was looking for my twin and that I thought the twin might be living in China. I knew, even then, that China was a far cry from Pennsylvania, but I believed that the twin could find her way to me. I wasn’t concerned about the distance between us, nor was I concerned about the chance of finding one kid in this world who was compatible enough to be my friend. I was certain that fate would overrule logistics and on one unexpected day my twin would show up in my kindergarten classroom in the form of a new kid.

At the time, I was also very concerned as to whether or not I would have long hair to my waistline by the time I was in college. I asked my mother about this at Roy Rogers as well. She assured me that my hair could easily grow to my waistline by the time I was in college. She expressed, however, uncertainty regarding the aspect of me finding my twin. Especially if my twin indeed lived in China.

The new girl’s name was Shannon Johnson. She showed up in April. She had white stuff on her skin.

“What’s that on your arm?” I asked her on her first day at Hampton Elementary School, after Miss Stoup had introduced her from the front of the classroom. I figured that if Shannon was going to be my twin, I might as well cut right to the chase in finding things out about her. I started with the white residue on her arms.

“My mom puts that on me,” Shannon replied.

“I don’t have it on my arms,” I said, revealing my arms sans white stuff. “Can I touch it? Maybe I can rub it off.”

Shannon shrugged her shoulders. I grabbed her wrist in one of my hands and rubbed the areas of her arm covered in white with my other hand. The residue came right off.

“See?” I said. “It comes off. I knew it would. It looked like it would come off.”

Shannon looked upset. “But my mom likes it there,” she explained. Her eyes looked wet.

“She won’t care,” I said. “It doesn’t look right on you anyway.”

I took Shannon’s wrist in my hand again and rolled her arm around to the underside.

“Look,” I urged her. “I didn’t even get it all off. There’s still some on you, right there on the underside.”

I continued scanning her appendage for further white stuff, but stopped, my eyes caught in the palm of her hand.

I rubbed my fingers across her palm, peach-colored with brown creases running like streams through her flesh.

I wanted to tell Shannon that her hand looked funny, but her eyes were already wet and even at the age of five, I knew that some things were better left unsaid.

I dropped Shannon’s arm like a hot coal and returned to my prerogative of doing things in the classroom by myself. I hadn’t completely struck Shannon from the potential twin opportunity, but something wriggled in the back of my mind whispering that she was not the one.

Leaving Shannon with wet eyes at her desk, I scanned the classroom. I pulled a puzzle from the shelf and toted it to the carpeted book-reading area. It was a good puzzle. Butterflies in the Amazon.

“Can I help?” Shannon asked, squatting beside me.

I was alarmed. Had she not been notified that the carpeted book-reading area was my domain?

“No,” I replied with bold authority. And without making eye contact.

“This one goes here,” she said, touching a puzzle piece.

“Stop it,” I said quickly, implementing a get-out-of-my-space tone of voice.

“And this one goes…”, Shannon started. But she didn’t finish because I slapped the puzzle piece right out of her hand and pushed her to her back where I hovered over her and uttered through my teeth, “I don’t want your help.”

My words were clear and concise as to ensure the avoidance of further misunderstanding.

Incidentally, Shannon was not my twin.

Principal Masterson was a large, bald man who hollered messages of discipline and reprimand like a barbarous Viking throughout the school. I felt small sitting in the chair opposite his large, chunky wooden desk. He tapped his fingers against the blotter that covered the top of his desk. He twiddled a pen in the other hand. Then he ceased both activities and rubbed a palm across the top of his shiny, bald head.

I took a deep breath and released an exaggerated sigh into space between us. The pending doom was inevitable. I would be punished with recess at my desk for a week. Miss Stoup would call my mother. I would be without TV for another week. Blah, blah, blah. I knew I shouldn’t hit other kids. But damn, if they’d just leave me alone, no one would get hurt. And that’s when I decided to take the upper hand.

“Mr. Masterson,” I began. “I don’t want other people touching my things. I do things by myself. I like it that way. They are my things and I know Miss Stoup says that they are really her things or the school’s things, but when I’m doing a puzzle, it’s mine and I don’t want other people touching my puzzle when I’m doing it by myself.”

There was a silence.

I didn’t know if I should keep talking or go back to wondering if Mr. Masterson was born bald and stayed that way for the rest of his life, or if bald is something that happens to people when they grow up. Like a sickness. I knew about sicknesses. By kindergarten, I had already lost two grandparents. I made a mental note to ask my mother at Roy Rogers on Saturday why some people are bald.

“Saranne,” Mr. Masterson said, breaking my train of thought on baldness. “Shannon is a very special little girl in this school. Her family is a very good family. They are special people. I have spoken with her mother and her father and they are very kind, good people who are very special to us.”

What. The. Hell. Is wrong. With this guy. I wanted to say it out loud. Just like that. With the “hell” and all. But I didn’t. I was curious to know where Mr. Masterson was going with this one. Me cursing in his office ran a tremendous risk of him losing his own train of thought.

“Okay,” I said in response to the special people in our lives at Hampton Elementary School. Maybe Shannon lived in that development across the creek with the big houses being built up in the woods that my dad says costs an arm and a leg, which apparently is far more than we can afford with three kids at the dinner table. Or maybe Shannon’s mom worked a fancy job in an office in the city. Or maybe Shannon’s dad was the President of the United States. That surely constitutes being special.

Mr. Masterson developed himself a grin that stretched from one ear to the other. He leaned back in his puffy swivel chair and told me that he knew I would understand.

“Shannon needs good friends like you, Saranne,” he added. “We need to be extra nice to Shannon and her family.”

Then he dismissed me from his office. No indoor recess at my desk. No telephone call to my mother. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Instead, I was simply returned to my kindergarten classroom. Shannon was standing by the bookshelf. I approached her with caution. When I was close enough to her, I gently took hold of her arm, like I had done before, and lifted it so that I could see the remaining white residue, the powder that I hadn’t wiped off the first time. I brushed the patch of white from her skin with my free hand.

“It’s baby powder,” I whispered. “I can see it on you because your skin is brown.”

Shannon pulled her arm from my grasp. She took a few steps backward, away from me.

“Is that what makes you special?” I asked. “You being brown?”

I didn’t get an answer because Shannon started to cry and I was removed from the classroom – again – and sent home for the day.

Last year, in her Inquirer article, Kinney referred to flash mob victims as “nonblack.” And then wrote the following statement in parentheses:

“(And no, I’m not avoiding white. One innocent was a Cambodian shopkeeper.)”

In parentheses. Like she had to whisper the line into the facade of reporting on flash mobs in Philadelphia. Let’s face it. Kinney’s story wasn’t about flash mobs. It was about black kids breaking the law and ruining Philadelphia. No different from NPR’s Morning Edition report on the difference in income between black and white families. The story aired around the same time that the mobs were a popular past time for teens. One study, the NPR report indicated, has extended beyond 30 years of research and data collection. To the naked ear, a listener may have heard a report on economic quantification. But listen a little more carefully. The story included the voiceover of the female reporter, voices of the black family, and voices from the white household. The black family chosen was homeless just a few years ago, lived in a shelter for a while, reaped the benefits of welfare stipends, and currently does not own a home, “…not uncommon among black and Hispanic families,” the reporter added. While the white family voiceover included a six-year-old child reading Dr. Seuss out loud as her father droned on about acquiring Aunt Lucy’s family inheritance with which he will be building a multi-million dollar home on the family estate property.

It was a fight over a puzzle.

They are kids gathering in mobs and reeking havoc.

Our economy is failing.

Some people have wealthy relatives.

They are not special. They are not black. They are not white. These are elements of our lives that should not be defined by hue.

Rather than teach me to share my toys that day in kindergarten, I was taught to see the color of someone’s skin for the first time in my life.

And rather than report that today’s youth needs constructive evening activities and an upgrade in influential parenting, the Inquirer blamed violence on the color of children’s skin.

Rather than speak of social class, NPR relied upon stereotypical (and somewhat historical) portrayals that were rich enough in color to stand as cover art for The Saturday Evening Post.

I have spent most of my life trying to figure out the rules to this game, the guidelines. I have tried resolving why the color of someone’s skin constitutes being special, and later researched why that color might mean something bad. I have aced African-American History courses, devoured Black Women’s Literature curriculum. I have studied Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, all of Toni Morrison, and Alexander McCall Smith among others. I have read The Help and cringed, then celebrated something I saw in the beauty and love and unity among a segregated race.

As far as Kinney, Masterson, and NPR are concerned, I don’t belong to a race of color. Don’t call me black, and sure as hell do not call me white. Both terms serve as vessels through which news media and racists choose to paint us. Sound juvenile? Then so does every ignorant fool who believes that color plays a role in who we are. I was almost homeless a little more than ten years ago. And I do not have an Aunt Lucy. Nor a family estate property.