Dream House
by Gretchen Anthony

I have a vision for my marriage. We live in one of those good-sized houses in Park Hill. Lots of trees. After dinner late May, he and I are up to our elbows in dish suds. I have just made him laugh with some brilliantly told story about my day, and he thinks how lucky he is to have me in his life. After drying our hands on tasteful kitchen towels we retire to the living room with tea. I light a fire. The kids are doing their homework in their tidy rooms, or one of them is doing homework and the other one is polishing a Bach cello suite. My husband and I are planning to go to the theater. We talk about the books we’re reading. He listens to me — looks on me with attentive eyes.

I am sitting in the gray leather armchair in my therapist’s office. A black plastic clock sits near a box of Kleenex. She looks at me through magnifying glasses, her brown eyes like paired tunnels to the underworld. I have just told her that I am committed to staying married. She asks me why. I hear the wheeze of a dentist’s drill and feel the floor vibrate. The building has been under construction since I started seeing her a year and a half ago. "It would be easier to work out." Whizzzz. "For the kids. I don’t want to mess up my kids’ lives." She shrugs.

I pull up to the kids’ school. They both see me then turn back to what they are doing. I sit in my car in the loading zone stroking the steering wheel telepathically telling my twelve year-old girl, to get her butt over here. She must hear me. Her defeated shoulders lead her shuffling, long-in-her pants body my way. Her face is red with acne and defiance. She opens the passenger-side door. "Mother, would you please get out here and help me get my stuff?" This is not a request. I follow her to the bench, reach for her backpack. She doesn’t let me. "I want you to get my cello from the music room in the other building." I glance over my shoulder at the loading zone a long line of cars, right blinkers flashing. I am frozen for a moment. I see myself in dog training class bent over my golden retriever mix, quivering hands holding its new red collar in the "gaining control" position. "Come on, Abby*, show her who’s got the thumbs, who’s got the money!"

My son yanks out his fourth tooth this week. They sit blood-side up in a square on my husband's bedside table. My husband, Ted, is the tooth fairy. He’s got the thumbs; he’s got the money. We fight about the house. We roll over each other’s feelings with well-developed oratory laid out for a jury of our kids in the kitchen court. I say I want to live in a normal house like a normal person. He says the place we’re living in, "This old cowboy bank, is perfect for me," and I flap suds at the wall, resting my case. For him, for him. "Do you hear that, kids?" I don’t say that part out loud because I know they are pretending to play Digimon Dungeons and Dragons and only want to listen when it suits them. Besides, there is always a chance they would weigh in on his side with praise for our gymnasium-sized living room. He would jump on it, "How many kids get to roller-blade inside their own house? How many kids get to have a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, and a fucking foosball table right in their living room?"

My therapist chuckles. "He’s got a point. You can do a lot with nine thousand square feet. But I’m not sure the house is really the issue." I am smooth, nouveau-educated when I respond, "I know, it’s just a symbol . . . for . . . something." I head for my new Subaru Outback. I feel slightly guilty. Ted bought it for me a few months ago on the day my grandmother died. We had been shopping for cars anyway, but he’d wanted to buy used. I suspect his willingness to get this new suped-up version was a way of buying me off, an indication that he was sensing a change in me. I guess it didn’t work this time. I glide into the leather seat, press a button, and Aretha Franklin’s "Soul Serenade" bursts into the space — my personal sound track. I want to be free to fly away and sing to the world . . . Like an addict, I long for any errand that will take me on a new route through some old neighborhood where I can slowly drive streets like aisles at the supermarket looking into windows for another life. I feel like a pervert at a playground. I am even afraid of getting caught — imagining how much less square footage I’d need without him.

I buy Marjorie Garber’s Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses to prove to my husband that we live in this monstrosity of a building because of his excessively large ego. He doesn’t seem too interested in Garber’s: House as Beloved, House as Mother, House as Dream, etc. He leaves the book sitting on his desk, in his office, downstairs, where it becomes the bottom layer of a contract and letter-to-the editor sandwich. Now, we sit propped up in the king-sized bed we bought ten years ago so our two babies could sleep between us. I ask him if he’s had a chance to thumb through the book. He doesn’t answer. He is still reading the twelve-volume autobiography of Casanova, a set I gave him a couple of Christmases ago. "Do you mind if I read a little of it before you do?" He doesn’t respond.

I brace myself for the trip downstairs. I throw off the covers. The butter-colored down duvet I bought on sale last summer is still visible along the edges of the unzipped gray and navy sleeping bag Ted added when our heating bill went higher than our mortgage last December. I grab socks out of my drawer and spread them on the radiator while I hunt the rocking chair for a sweater. I move quickly hoping for friction. I hop on one foot and the other while I don my socks. Then I lean my butt against the heater to shove a stockinged foot between the iron loops. For my coat, I enter the purple TV room — no heat, no rug. One, two, fling open the door. Hop, hop, grab the coat. Out the other door, into the open space of the living area. I hurdle a scooter, a soccer ball, a dog. I shuffle across the bare wood floor, leaving a track in the dust. I pause at the top of the stairs in the moonlight. The soft thrum of a slow-moving train runs like a ghost through the stockyards.

Marjorie Garber is a fly on the lace curtain of my dream house. She exposes me, weakens my argument. She explains the seductiveness of real estate in a flood of mundane and scholarly examples.

"Upwardly mobile middle-aged professionals scan real estate ads with the same vague prurience with which they scan personal ads, not with the intention of pursuing anything exactly, but for the pleasure of enjoying the fantasy such ads represent." She sees me with my hand in my pants, and I am ashamed. I glance over at my husband. I wonder if he really needs to read this. I consider various hiding places for the book. In its smooth jacket I could slip it under the mattress right now. But I have to read on, and I get to a part where Garber cites a medieval treatise on the body as a house for the soul. "Since a woman’s body was ‘open,’ its boundaries convoluted, the inside-out version of a man’s, she needed [my Italics] a second ‘house’ a building, to contain her and protect her soul." I click my vindicated tongue and roll over.

I notice my therapist’s body language. She sits in her desk-chair, legs tucked up to the side. Her yellow legal pad balances on her knee. "A lot of people who feel the way you do would have been gone by now." I look over her shoulder out the window. I see the green trees of Cheesman Park even though it is winter. I look in the direction of my perfect Denver Square with the ivy-covered trellis and crocus-lined walk. I see myself picking up the mail, smiling at a neighbor. I am calm knowing Ted will not pull up in his mud colored bread truck to embarrass me. I will not have to attempt to explain what the tempera inscription on the side of his truck means. Chicky birds blow me away! Save section 16!

"So, Abby, how’s the auto-biography coming?" "Not bad, you’re in it." "I’ll bet you’re learning a lot about yourself. Your father?"

My father barely existed until I was six when he almost killed himself in a one-car roll- over on Route 2. I stand by his bed, head just high enough to smell his fumy breath, my small hand on his hot chest. Now I’m eight. I keep a spy’s record of my parents’ conversations while they enjoy their before-dinner drinks. I fill the black composition book with the gossip I hear about other teachers and their families. "Mr. Who?" I ask. My father flaps his hand dismissively. I hear ice crack then clink against the side of his glass. I make my notes in scrawling pencil strokes; the Palmer method has had no impact. I swear I know what it all means even though I never tell what. I pride myself on keeping secrets. Smoke from the fireplace mingles with smoke from a pristine white Pall Mall dangling from my father’s lip. His nonchalant hand pulls the cigarette out of his mouth with a soft pop and cradles it over the heavy glass ashtray next to the green Dewars bottle. I like to feel the round indentations and bumps on the bottle. I can’t tell if they are going in or out.

I am eleven. My mother dies on a gray Tuesday. Metal rails. Maroon box. My childhood lies sprawled on top. Lowered into the hole. My dog dies a few months later. A couple of weeks after that, I get my first period. Now I’m twelve. My dad makes a pig face at me across the table in Kellas dining room at the girl’s boarding school where he works and we live. I ask for seconds on mashed potatoes. I am ready to pass my plate. He pierces me with his eyes. I counter defiantly offering my plate again. He responds by inflating his cheeks until his eyes disappear. He thinks he’s funny, and he can barely contain the air as he pans the audience, snickering. Mr. Mitchell, my dad, teaches Shakespeare, Flannery O’Connor, and D.H. Lawrence to teen-aged girls. It isn’t his fault my mother died, like my grandmother always says. I see him bringing home metal cylinders of mashed potatoes and gravy, mixed vegetables and some kind of tough beef from the school cafeteria. He cries a lot. He dreams that my mother comes to him with advice about what to do with us. "‘Right here,’ she said to me. I think she wants you to go to school here." His eyes are shy with tears.

"You know what you’re going through has nothing to do with your dad or even Ted. Look into your heart. What do you want?"

Ted comes to therapy with me. He sits in the gray leather chair. I take the matching sofa. The therapist asks him questions. He says he knows I’m angry and that he thinks there’s a finite number of things I’m angry about and that if I were to make a list he would look at the items to see if he could "get" them. The therapist says it might be more complicated than that.

For the next two weeks I’m distracted with listing. In the bathroom, I remember the easy ones, like the time he went off to Alaska for two weeks when we’d first moved to Colorado leaving me with our two-year-old and a six-month-old in a tiny cabin an hour out of town. No phone, no radio, no people I knew, and no money. Lying in bed, a sleeping child on either side, I watched as mice marched single file across the rafters. I pleaded for you to come home and you said you couldn’t because your van was broken. You came back three months later.

In the car, doing errands, I am a fountain of items, general and specific. I am in a hurry to get someplace for the inevitable spill. I pull up to the Sushi Den, get a table for one, and open my journal to a blank page. I title my list: Things you’ve said and done that communicated a lack of love and respect for me. Black ink scratches fast. Number 3. Feeding me a lettuce leaf for dinner when you had steak because you thought I was too fat, when in fact I was the thinnest I’d ever been as an adult. Number 8. Calling me from Africa saying you wanted to adopt a crippled street child, when I am four months pregnant and living in a Quonset hut with no running water. Number 14. For years, like the first ten years, never saying you’re sorry for anything. Twenty-nine, forty-five. Wasabi makes me cry. Fifty-three. I call my best girl friend to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Fifty-eight. Sixty-one.

Ted and I are waiting to see the therapist. He is reading the paper. I ask him if he wants to see the list before we go in. He flaps his hand, "Na."

"I had a dream last night. ‘Weirdly real,’ as my dad would say." I am sitting on this wicker couch in the kitchen of an old house. The house seems full of friends, like at Easter. I ask for a cup of tea and someone brings me a tiny newborn baby wrapped in a white thermal blanket as if she’s mine. I peel away the blanket like I’m skinning an onion. I want to check her over to see if she’s been well cared for. Her black eyes look hungry. I put her to my breast. She sucks a little but my breast is empty. I notice a tiny milk moustache on her dark chocolate skin. I sit calm and relaxed until someone else brings me another baby. This one has deep red hair and puckish hazel eyes. I hold her to the light and realize she’s the loveliest baby I have ever seen. I wonder whom she belongs to, and without my asking someone says; "She’s yours. They both are." "Where’s Ted," I want to know. My friend Darlene comes into the kitchen and takes one of the babies. I think I remember that Darlene is a trustworthy friend, so I ask her how I came to have these two babies. How could it be that I go to sleep one day in a hospital and wake up with two babies that look so very different from each other? Didn’t I go to the hospital to have a hysterectomy? Yes, a hysterectomy. I can’t have anymore children. The smell of lilacs rides a puff of spring breeze through the front screen door and out the open window at my back. Suddenly, I understand. I have been gone, maybe in a coma, for a year. Ted has two girl friends, one African-American, one Latina. He’d gotten them both pregnant, gotten custody of the babies, and now he wants me to raise them.

I am lying face down in bed with my arm behind my back. When I realize I am awake, I release my arm. I feel blood rush into the pinky and ring finger of my left hand. I tuck my knees up under my belly in the yoga position called "pose of the child." My dream is fading, but I catch it just in time. I am about to give the dream a number and add it to my list, but I remember one thing my therapist said. "You are changing so fast right now, any relationship you have would have to transform too."

I place my list in a folder labeled "divorce" and hide it in my filing cabinet. I tell my best friend and my sister not to say anything bad about Ted, that I’m really going to work it out with him. I farm the kids out on a Saturday night so we can go to our favorite Indian restaurant. We sit in our usual booth. He gets what he always gets–coconut shrimp curry–and I get a vegetarian dish I’ve never tried. I tell him that I am committed to absolute honesty at this point, and I request that he, too, open up and share his heart with me.

We look into each other’s eyes for long time without blinking. I can feel my love for this handsome man rising to the surface of my face. Flushed, I reach for his hand. The waiter pours ice water into our glasses. Ted leans in and says, "I don’t know if I can open my heart to you. Especially not now when it seems like you aren’t even interested in me anymore. I guess I thought you’d be a safe bet for marriage ‘cause you’d consider yourself lucky to get someone like me. I figured just getting married would be good enough for you. You’d be happy with the residual glory that came your way, and since I didn’t really love you much I wouldn’t get hurt if you left." I thank him for his honesty.

I have a vision for my life. I live in a simple house in a fairly safe neighborhood. I pay my own bills, mow my own grass, and walk my own dog. After dinner late May I am up to my arms in dish suds. I have just made the kids laugh with some silly story about my day, and I think how lucky I am to be alive. After drying my hands on a clean kitchen towel, I help my children with their homework and listen to their music practice from the back stoop as I rub a twig of lilac over my face and hair.

*Names have been changed to protect the individuals privacy.
Top

Japanese Internment Camps and Snow Cones
by Jill Jones

The research assignment: American Internment Camps during World War II; that’s easy, I thought, it’s where you make snow cones. Throughout my life, snow cones always pop into my mind when someone mentions the Japanese Internment Camps. A Japanese lady, whom I think of as a second mother, put this second-hand memory of snow cones in mind when I was very young. I have held on to the memory; it’s made it easy for me to believe the camps were a necessary evil needed during a war. Imagine - I once thought of them as a small inconvenience endured by a few Americans, happy to do so for the good of their country. Roy Web from the Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah, reminds us:

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States was gripped by war hysteria. This was especially strong along the Pacific coast of the U.S., where residents feared more Japanese attacks on their cities, homes, and businesses. Leaders in California, Oregon, and Washington demanded that the residents of Japanese ancestry be removed from their homes along the coast and relocated in isolated inland areas. As a result of this pressure, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the forcible internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. More than two-thirds of those interned under the Executive Order were citizens of the United States, and none had ever shown any disloyalty (1).

Years later, when I was about six or seven, my family was falling apart, within my own house. Ravaged by divorce and mental illness, I found refuge at my best friend’s, the home of the Tanaka’s. The exact opposites of my family, the Tanakas were as All-American, Leave it to Beaver-like as they come. They had a modest five-bedroom house in a California suburb and four children. Dad worked; Mom stayed at home to care for her children (plus one extra, a funny looking one with pale skin, freckles and mousy brown hair). In the family room hung a photograph of a young Mr. Tanaka in an Army uniform taken during World War II. I remember thinking how proud he looked, an honorable man. I didn’t understand then what he must have had to suffer to wear such a uniform at that time. He was, no doubt, one of the 18,000 Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) who fought in the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the100th Infantry Battalion during World War II. Many of these men volunteered to serve the United States right after being forced from their homes and incarcerated in internment camps by that same country.

While it is true that some of the men escaped the camps by volunteering to die for their country, the same was not true for women. There were approximately120,000 people interned in camps and almost half were children. One of the children was Mrs. Tanaka. I know this because of a story she once told her daughter and me after giving us frozen Fudgecicles as a snack.

"When I was a little girl," she said, "my mother used to gather up some snow in a cup, put food coloring over it, and call it a snow cone." She smiled to herself, reliving a happy memory of her childhood. Marleen and I looked at her doubtfully; it didn’t sound very good.

"You didn’t have Fudgecicles?" I asked incredulously.

"No," she laughed, "they didn’t exist and we were far too poor. We lived in camps. There was a war going on."

"Yuck, it couldn’t have tasted very good," we protested, fascinated by this brief look into her past, but missing the fact that the government forced her to live in an internment camp.

"My mother would tell us to pretend the different colors were different flavors and had us describe them to her: plum-blueberry, banana-pineapple and wild raspberry. They were wonderful. You see," she said, looking intently at each of us individually, then together, "sometimes your imagination can dream up things that are even better then real life." She got to her feet and left us there, suddenly sad with our pathetic Fudgecicles. They could no longer compete with Mrs. Tanaka’s multi-flavored snow cones. Later, after learning about the internment camps I understood what she meant by "lived in a camp."

I have had a hard time thinking of them as unpleasant. I’ve always clung to Mrs. Tanaka’s one happy childhood memory, unwilling to think of her in someplace cruel, put there by hatred. But, this assignment forces me to face real photographs of innocent American children driven from their homes, most of their belongings taken from them. They felt lucky when they got old snow with food coloring for a treat. One photograph in particular makes my heart turn to ice; a little girl looks out of the door of a shanty barrack. My tears sting as they roll down my face. There comes a time when you have to let the real world in to replace childlike imagined places.

After facing the reality of the camps and the unquestionable injustice done to this group of Americans, I still ask myself were the camps good or bad. This is a child’s question. There is nothing more un-American done to a citizen of this country than to drive him from his property and take away all his liberties. Today it is easy to look back and ask "how could this have happened," but it was a different time in 1942. For the courts at the time the question was easy. They upheld the constitutionality of the curfews for American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and approved "differentiating citizens of Japanese ancestry from other groups in the United States." The American legal system had not supported such blatant racism since slavery was legal.

So I ask myself, where is the rage? Why are the Americans who where detained in Internment camps not marching in the street demanding justice. Of course they are angry and have since demanded and received a formal apology and monetary retribution from the government. Did this apology make a difference to the people who had part of their lives taken away? Did the monetary restitution make a difference? I don’t know if Mrs. Tanaka would think so. How did she really feel about life in the camps? These questions nag at me and I am left unsatisfied. The answers I seek are as elusive to me as imaginary flavors in a rainbow colored snow cone.
Top

The White Box
by Damon Garr

There is a knock, quick and steady, upon the hotel room door. Almost 8:30. Breakfast. This is it, I tell myself, as my heart settles in my throat. A young man brings in a silver tray, sets it quietly on the small table in the living room. I look at the tray, disappointed. It doesn’t look how I had imagined it. I expected it to be full of various objects, glasses, silverware, condiments, very elegant, where the ring box would sit hidden, to be discovered by surprise. Instead, the tray is simple: the two lidded plates stacked over one another. The box is going to be obvious. I sign for our meal and send the young man away.

I step quietly to the closet and dig the little white box from the bottom of my bag where it has been hidden for the extent of our trip. I cautiously open it to make sure that everything is right, to make sure that this simple, yet expensive thing that, in only a few seconds, will determine my future, is ready to be transferred onto the hand of the woman I love. There it would stay, sparkling, on that beautiful freckled hand, binding that finger, dimpling the flesh, tying us to one another.

It had been on a bus in Vail, some six months ago, that I realized that I was in love with her. We sat together among skiers in brightly colored outfits who talked about shopping, the condition of the slopes. Outside, the piles of snow glistened, reflecting the light in many directions. My attention, though, was focused on her.

The late afternoon sun of winter struck her through the windows, brightly lighting her red hair as it flowed out from under her hat. It was her rosy little nose and smiling cheeks that inspired me. It was the way she looked at me.

"What are you thinking about," she asked, smilingly slyly. She knew what I was thinking about.

"Thinking?" I bit my lip and smiled back. "Nothing." I was thinking that I was in love with her. She is the one. I was resolved.

I was as resolved then as I am this morning in a hotel room in downtown St. Louis, at the August peak of summer, where we have spent the night after visiting my grandparents. She had said that she would never get engaged before she met my family. We spent two days with my parents, then one evening with the grandparents. She smiled, she made jokes, she used her many charms. The approval was reciprocal. Now, with that step out of the way, I am going to do it.

Back in Vail I had been afraid to say a thing. As we sat that next morning after our bus ride, each of us reading, I looked up at her as she sat curled under a blanket and was struck again with the same sensation that I had on the bus. My head was light. I felt faint. She is the one. I am in love with her. I was sitting there, full of all sorts of giddy happiness. All smiles and staring eyes. I could not say that four letter word, I could not understand the meaning of the word. All I knew was how it felt touching her, or with her smiling at me. All that I understood was the levity that she brought me, this height, this légerité.

That lightness contradicts the gravity of what I am going to do on this August morning. Nervous, very nervous, I pick up the tray and push open the French doors to the bedroom of the hotel room. And there she is lying in the spacious bed, a pale freckled face surrounded by swirling red hair floating on the clouds of white sheets and pillows. She stirs and sits up as I set the tray on the bed in front of her. "Thank you, sweetie," she smiles to me with waking eyes.

I go to the window and open the drapes, to bring some light into the room. I understand what it was I want to remember from this occasion, how I want it to occur. A dark room where we could barely see one another would not be the perfect scene. I also know well how the diamond glistened in the light, each facet reflecting and refracting, and with the sunlight coming through the window, the effect would be perfect.

Turning back to her, I see that she has not yet noticed the box. She lifts the lid off the first plate, admires the breakfast on it, eggs benedict and an English muffin, she replaces its lid, and she moves to lift off the plate when she stops. "There is a box there," she says. I simply smile at her, holding back tears.

She looks at me, slightly questioning, and picks up the white box. She pulls off its lid and slides out the jewelry box inside. Again, she looks at me. This time her eyes turn down at the outside and she, herself, begins to cry. She flips open the box, sees the ring, and looks back to me, arms extended. I hold her, both of us in tears, and I try to prepare myself for the words I have yet to say.

It was weeks after that February weekend in Vail when I finally decided to say those words, to tell her what I had known since that winter day. We were standing in the dark of her bedroom, only a faint light made its way into the room. I moved to kiss her, the light outlining the side of her face, the little round cheeks, the beautiful golden eyes. I love you. The words were there. They leaped, like an animal yet untamed, from my lips. I felt foolish, as if this could not be happening to me. Ah me, foolish me. But I am not a fool, because she loves me.

Long before this morning in St. Louis, my mind had been made up. The white box has been in my possession for well over a month. I called my mom the day that I bought the ring. She was not home, and I had to leave a message saying that I wanted to talk.

"What is it?" My mom’s timid voice sounded exceedingly nervous when she called back

"Well, Mom, I’m going to ask her to marry me."

"Oh, honey." I heard the sniffles start on the other end of the line.

"You know, your dad knew it when you called. He said, ‘Oh no, he’s going to do it.’"

"Tell him I am."

I am prepared. I have anticipated it. I am doing what I never thought would be done.

I hold myself together and pull back enough to see her face, which only makes it harder for me not to cry.

"Will you marry me?" The words are rough coming out of my throat, but she pulls me back to her.

"Of course…. Yes, yes."
Top

A Dead Man’s Shoes Can’t Just Walk Back Into Life
by Corey Ryan

Williamstown, NY is about thirty minutes from Syracuse, NY. Williamstown is a small town for small town people. My grandfather was one of those small town people. He owned a small camp on a small lake.

Kosoag Lake. From what I remember of the historical facts I gathered from growing up, asking questions, and pretending to listen, Kosoag Lake was earth. The lake was a part of Native American land flooded out for God knows what reason. In essence, it is a man-made lake, and that is why it is clean and beautiful. The water doesn’t contain oily swirls created by Mercury 250’s flying by as extreme sportists hang on for dear life. There is no room for that kind of foreplay here.

The water is deep yet dense with seaweed. Tree stumps lay patiently at the bottom of the clear water waiting for kids, who think they’re Jacques Cousteau, to discover with a mask and snorkel. Canoeing is the most exercise you’ll get off Kosoag Lake. To canoe across the entire lake would only take thirty minutes or so. Or one can paddle for a good 10 minutes and reach the only bar within miles of the winding, motor home populated, dead deer ridden roads: Kosoag Lake Inn. And this where it all began, or where it all ended.

First I’ll start from sort of the beginning, the beginning you should know about. My Grandfather; Papa; Grandpa Ryan; David; always smoked Camels. Camel non filters. His wife Nana; Grandma Ryan; Mildred; always smoked Pall Malls. Pall Mall filters. Nana passed away when I was young. I was watching Willow. I didn’t understand the movie and will never understand death.

Fast forward ten years...

Sitting at an empty seat at the Kosoag Lake Inn, where there will always be an extra seat, Papa met a new Nana. Her name was Lily. She was actually the cousin of the Champions. The Champions, Betty and Dick, were the owners of the camp next door to Papa’s. They are great people and it is a shame that they are forced into relation with Lily.

But not to jump ahead, and also move quickly.

Papa and Lily were married shortly, almost too shortly after those empty seats at the bar were filled. But then again, maybe that’s why there are always empty seats at the bar.

The marriage didn’t last long, though it was long enough for her to rip out our memories of camp decor like particle board floors, walls and ceilings, 1970’s vinyl stone floor, and velvet pictures of graceful ducks. Even the camp smell of Wonder Bread and Skippy had been replaced by potpourri. Lily had made the camp that I held in my heart a home. I didn’t go there for years. The clear lake was replaced by a chlorine clear swimming pool somewhere, everywhere in central NY. Our summer getaway became nothing but a get together for births, deaths or graduations.

Papa smoked Camel non filters, remember. He acquired lung cancer, had one lung removed, stayed within the confines of my parents’ home and a long, cold, Syracuse winter. Lily, Papa and his lung weren’t too happy with the situation, so they moved back to the retirement capital of the world, Florida.

He died shortly after. One lung just wasn’t enough.

The camp at Kosoag Lake was now Lily’s camp/home. My father, mother, aunts, uncles, cousins and whoever else remained true to Papa, were pissed. Our escape place, my families place to escape was now in the hands of a widow, twice over. God it was a long battle. My dad spoke his mind, and due to the lack of grace between his mind and mouth, was no longer able to speak a word to Lily. So what. To hell with it.

So I took a nice ride up there during a hot, hazy and humid day in central New York to rediscover aspects of my youth that I had sadly lost, or maybe misplaced.

II

The pale green siding of the camp was much paler. The harsh winters had taken their toll and so did the departure of its maker. The camp was in a sad state. Being all locked up for the winter was a usual occurrence, but the closed drapes kept me prisoner from any particular visual grasp on a memory that I longed to get back. Much like the drapes had stolen my view to the inside of the camp, the sun had deprived the drapes of color and life and brought only gifts of dust. Nothing was happy within the camp. Lily had the key.

The regular monuments on the camp grounds looked depressed. The shed contained the most keys to unlocking my youth. The shed held all the remnants of days long gone when we could swim with the pleasures usually only afforded to mermaids and drowning sailors. Bright orange swimming masks, matching flippers and jet black snorkels lay dead within the prison walls of a canvas bag and an old, rusted Masterlock. The swimming toys needed us as much as we needed them. She had the key to the shed too.

Even the oars for the damn canoe were out of my reach. The canoe gave us freedom before we reached the age to actually need or want freedom. We didn’t have a license to travel a great distance in a short time. We didn’t need money to "have fun." No photographs needed to be taken for me to remember what I experienced. It was just the fish and I under the water that barely rippled. The rest of the world was long forgotten when I sat inside that canoe.

Next to those oak oars in the shed are the tools of a true carpenter. No, papa wasn’t Jesus, but I’m sure if he could build anything to bring him back to the water, his creation would outshine even Noah’s Arc. But again, this was all locked away from me. Keys can withhold a lot of memories for copied pieces of cheap metal.

Around the back the rain gutter hangs down the side of the camp like Papa’s limp arm during his afternoon nap. The porch mimics a twisted hammock tied to two twisted trunks of helpless birch trees. The porch wood is losing a long, drawn out battle against the weather. The floorboards are making their way toward a perfect circle and all the weather protective coating has taken its vacation with the snow.

But Nana’s, the real Nana’s, bed chair still rests upon the porch. That lone fixture sitting there nailed to the porch brings back all the wrong memories and emotions. The bed chair sits there with its rotting wood and absent cushion. The steel mesh tries to find shelter from reoccurring storms, but can only remain exposed and embarrassed. The reclining backrest still reclines at that 30 degree angle even though no one has reclined here for years. I can recall a mental Polaroid of Nana smoking in that exact chair while her skin gave up and her bones began to take pride and show themselves. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Even though the bed chair sat there, and all the concentration camp like images burned in my mind, this deadly chair was nice to see. I needed something of the old days to help me with the present. The old days when things may have been bad on people’s inside, but shone on the outside. There was hope back then. A chance that everyone will come to Papa’s camp every summer with no absentees. Hope is very deceiving.

But the canoe had hope. It was my father’s aluminum canoe. The brand of it included some kind of arrow or something. I don’t know what the brand name was, but if I had to buy a canoe at some point in my life, I’d buy that brand. The thing has not changed a bit, much like my dad. It hasn’t become rusted or bent up-just a bit dirty. The spiders have a new home and the chipmunks a new playground. No bad images exist throughout the canoe. Countless rowers have tipped it over in mid-lake and have been able to retrieve it. Countless fish, if you call five inch sunfish fish, have been lured into its bottom. The canoe is older than me and has yet to leave anyone. People just seem to be leaving the canoe.

O! but I came back to it. I cleaned it out and ruined some insect’s homes, but that put the canoe back on its only home, Kosoag Lake. First I paddled through the "tunnel of love" and then over the beaver dam. I then came to the posted fishing signs and the scary movie camps that no one has inhabited for years. I showed the canoe how certain sections of the lake now remained closed off to anything but breeding mussels; something had to eat the seaweed before the seaweed soaked up the lake. I pointed out to the canoe how certain parts of land had become million dollar homes and other camps had changed their child like fish decorations to child like shark decorations. I came once again to the bar. I didn’t drink there because I didn’t have my ID, in case the canoe let me go overboard. The bar would still be there later. On the way back I showed the canoe the rope swing that could still be used if there wasn’t anybody at the camp, but the owners were there. Finally, the canoe and I came upon a family of ducks and the water damaged dock of my camp, our camp, anybody but Lily’s camp. Then I laid the canoe to rest. Some sort of aluminum funeral. The spiders began crawling back and the chipmunks gathered whatever it is they gather to store in the canoe. All was going to be well. Then I spotted the shoe.

Life was gliding on as if Papa and Nana were inside resting from a long day of canoeing, carpentry, and cooking PBJ’s. I was content with the fact that both Papa and Nana had decided that it was their time to leave camp forever. Everything was perfect and it was going to be from now on. Then that damn Reebok shoe, all dirty, dusty and worn in, caught my vision. The shoe was my grandfather’s.

No he wasn’t dreaming of aluminum canoes and velvet ducks inside. He had walked away without one shoe. If I was an optimist I’d say that Papa had walked away with one shoe. A dead man’s shoe can’t just walk back into life like it never left. If Papa wasn’t with his shoe, then the shoe becomes useless. The shoe can’t protect anything. It can’t make anything look or feel better. It can’t come here nor there. The shoe can’t come back to this life without it’s owner. And Papa wasn’t coming back with only one shoe. That would look much too asinine for a man of his stature.

I miss him dearly and in missing him, am afraid to make a few steps myself.
Top