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What would you do if the written word was central to your life but the acts of reading and writing became nearly impossible?
Weekly Featured Essay
Summer Reading
by Kevin A. Louderback
I have a problem. It’s a serious problem because I can’t ignore it, rationalize it, or forget about it, and it has fundamentally changed how I engage with the world.
My eyesight has rapidly degraded over the past decade. And while I don’t know for sure that blindness is in my future, my problems go beyond simple eyestrain or acute light sensitivity or anything an ophthalmologist has been able to help me with beyond recommending stronger and stronger prescriptions. I’m forty-five years old, and my vision has gotten worse with age, as it does with every human, but apart from that, I experience a throbbing in my left eye and a burning sensation in my right. It’s a pain that migrates through my skull, radiates through my teeth, and will escalate into a spiteful demon fever if I don’t simply stop reading. Sometimes, for relief, I have to wear a cold mask—think Patrick Batemen in American Psycho, when he’s telling us about his morning routine—and for the rest of the day strive to look at absolutely nothing closely, just stay behind dark glasses inside dark rooms, if possible. I’ve been living on a steady diet of black coffee and fat blue Naproxen gelcaps.
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Singing: A Requiem
by Gary Fincke
Mr. Bell was the elementary school music teacher. He had a raspy voice and used a small round tuner he blew into to get us searching for the correct pitch twice a week when he visited our room while our teacher Mrs. Sowers disappeared for forty minutes. We sang “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Marine Corps Hymn” from the stapled book full of uplifting songs we stored in our desks between his visits. In September, Mr. Bell had told us we were all blessed to be born under a fortunate flag. For our first sixth-grade music exam in October, he’d listened to us sing, one by one, “The Star-Spangled Banner” from memory, placing us exactly under the flag for our performances.
There was more to it than moving our mouths, he’d explained, showing us the proper posture for singing the National Anthem, his back as straight as a soldier at attention. All of us learned to keep eye contact with a spot slightly above his head so we looked patriotic and proud, working our way through the a cappella praise for what he called “our home.”
What I remember most clearly about Mr. Bell is that in January, for a PTA meeting, he chose eight sixth graders to sing “America the Beautiful” and “Beautiful Dreamer” for a room full of mothers and two fathers. By late summer, my singing voice would turn tentative and tenor, but on that January night I confidently carried those tunes in close harmony with Paula P, Nancy H, Jim D, Dave S, and three others, all of us soprano and alto. Mr. Bell introduced us by name, and we were a hit.
On War, Love, and Loss: A Life in Three Acts
by Elizabeth Bird
Prologue
I watch over my father as he fades slowly into darkness. Nurses flit by, chatting quietly.
“We hardly got to know Tom, but he seemed like a lovely bloke,” says one.
“He told wonderful stories,” adds another. “So funny—and exciting!”
I ask what kind of stories. The family, his life as a doctor—surely the story of meeting my mother?
“Oh no, love. War stories! One about picking up stranded Dutch soldiers some-where in the Pacific, I think. Quite dramatic!”
As his final hours drift by, I think on my father’s life—the joy in his roles as husband, father and grandfather, and the love and kindness he showed in his ninety-five years on earth. And how the legacy of war helped shaped that life, casting shadows and yet guiding him into sunlight.
Love Me, Love My Stuff
by Barbara Belzer Adams
Hank decided it was time for me to do my Swedish death cleaning—a method for getting rid of the cherished objects around your house your heirs probably won’t want— so he jump-started the process by breaking three thirty-year-old holly green glass vases I’d found on vacation and a raku bowl I’d spotted at an art festival two decades ago.
I should probably mention that Hank is a cat.
A feisty grey tabby just past the kitten stage, Hank paved his initial path of destruction in the early morning hours, three consecutive crashes startling me awake. In fairness, he probably had some help: I had put the vases in a kitchen cabinet for safekeeping and my guess is that another family cat opened the door (it’s a unique ability that you have to see to believe: he stands on his hind feet, his claws engaged over the top of the door, then pulls it open by walking backward), giving Hank unfettered access. In less time than it took me to run out of the bedroom, a pile of shattered glass lay on the floor and next to it was a remorseless Hank. He took care of the raku bowl later that day, knocking it off a low shelf WHILE I WATCHED.
Four items down (literally), how many hundreds to go?
Brotherhood
by Jeffrey B. Burton
Don’t tell anyone I’m going on hospice. My family will just fuck up the works. – Eric
I met Eric in third grade when my family moved suburbs. Our introduction was abrupt and memorable. Eric’s bully-prick of an older brother set the two of us up to fight for the enjoyment of himself and his friends. Eric’s brother invented the “Thunderdome” rule before the Mad Max movie made it famous—”two men enter, one man leaves.” Fortunately, the seventy-five-year-old recess lady broke it up before any damage could be done, but Eric’s brother dragged us aside and whispered, “You two are going to fight tomorrow until we get this thing settled.”
I’ve never been sure exactly what Eric and I needed to get settled, but his brother was adamant about it. Terrified, I didn’t sleep that night and at recess the next day, I headed toward Eric, where he sat near the tetherball court, as though I were walking the plank.
“I guess we’re supposed to fight,” I mumbled.
He glanced at me, then looked up at the sky, and said, “It’s too sunny to fight.”
I exhaled with relief and nodded in total agreement. It was too sunny to fight. Fortunately, his brother was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d moved on to fresher prey.
As kids do, instead of fighting, we became friends.
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: West Meath, February 1976
by T.S.Ollerhead
I caught up with her beyond the fallow field, hoar frost glistening blackened elms, ryegrass stems rustling to her listless tread, and in the corner of the next field, seeking the comfort of an overhanging blackthorn, a small group of heifers nuzzled closely for warmth, their condensing breath heavy in the chill morning air. As we walked in silence towards the stand of skeletal oaks, a solitary raven, late to catch the flock, flapped clumsily away from a high branch.
She had been this way for nearly eight weeks, fifty-something days of self-imposed silence, a deliberate personal catharsis. We headed for the gap between the dying hawthorns and the fallen gate, twisted and neglected, decaying into the land itself. I held her arm as she cautiously picked her way over its mud-slickened crossbeams, her eyes glazed, fixed now on the derelict cottage. It was silent as we approached, quiet in its heavy winter stillness, a chapel-like reverence. She held the blackened roof beam, twisted and weathered from generations of neglect, steady in her watery gaze.
Poor Josie
by Maria Hetherton
I met Noreen in Cork, the year after my mother died. She welcomed me around a table crowded with cousins I’d never met, all of us drinking tea and eating cake and the men sipping whiskey. Everyone laughed when my husband confused a salt cellar with a sugar bowl and put salt in his tea. A few well-placed f-bombs made our discourse pop. We discovered a shared failure as children to keep our mouths shut during school. It all added up: these were my people.
My mother rarely mentioned these cousins in Cork, and was mostly mum on the subject of her childhood in Ireland. She told me her family were among the poor given baskets from the grocers on Boxing Day, and that pregnancy made her mother very cross. The eldest daughter, she was often charged with the care of younger siblings. Sundays, she’d earn a penny escorting her blind aunt to Mass, a penny she refused to relinquish when nuns at school asked alms for children in Africa. A few of her memories bordered on the political, like the rhyme she and her friends enjoyed as children: Colman’s Mustard, Colman’s Starch, tell Mr. Colman to stick it in his arse, Colman’s, of course, a British brand.
Noreen and I still correspond. We exchange cards at Christmas, our families’ latest traumas scribbled into the white space, and emails at random times of year. She’ll share memories of growing up alongside a river in a mill town near Cork. Sometimes we exchange insights from ancestry profiles. Did you know our grandmothers share DNA with the Somerset Cheddar Man? And sometimes, Noreen reveals stories about poor Josie, my mother’s mother, a woman I never knew.
When the World Shakes
by Joanell Serra
When the magnitude seven earthquake hit Northern California in December, I was at home, chatting on the phone with my oldest son in New York. My phone spit out a high pitch blaring alarm with an announcement: EARTHQUAKE NEAR YOU, SEEK COVER.
I dropped the phone and ran to check on my husband, Harry, who is fighting a tough cancer battle and had just headed out with the dog for a backyard rest.
I’m fine. He called out. I’m staying out here. I looked around—a wide grassy area, no trees above him. Good call. I squatted down as well and waited, but other than the slight shudder of an aftershock, we didn’t feel it. I called my son back, but within minutes the screaming sound from my phone started again: TSUNAMI WARNING IN EFFECT. STAY AT LEAST ONE BLOCK INLAND.
This was not a problem for us—we live high on a hill nowhere close to shore. Because we travel back and forth from San Francisco for my husband’s cancer treatments, my phone is set for alerts in both counties.
I scrambled to reach our two other adult children, both in San Francisco that day. My daughter lives about a mile from the ocean. I urged her to stay inside for the next hour just in case. My youngest had just arrived downtown for his shift at a retail store on Market Street. Our messages went from: I’m at work. Can’t talk, to They are closing the store and sending us home. That meant crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. I jumped on the phone and implored him not to cross the bay in the next hour. He sighed.
My buddies are at the beach and they say it isn’t anything yet.
I almost suggested he say goodbye to his surfing buddies, but I held back.
Just promise me you won’t go near the beach. In the two years since my husband’s diagnosis, we have faced chemo, radiation, emergency brain surgery, and more treatments. He is doing fairly well, but we carry a constant sense of waiting for the next crisis.
