Angel

I know I haven't written in ages, but this aching feeling won't leave. John Prine died last week. It hurts my heart to know he is gone. And I’ve been thinking about Mike, my cowboy, gone now for over eight years. Sometimes I miss him with an ache that feels as fresh as yesterday. So this is the story I wrote in my head.

Angel

She sat at the kitchen table, staring at the screen door, its latch broken as it opened slightly and slammed shut in the humid stirring of wind. Maybe there was a storm blowing in. The sky darkened and the air hung heavy. A fly buzzed past her ear and landed on the cold eggs on the plate in front of her. The fly had more interest in her breakfast than she did.

She stared at the screen door, the vacant stare of one whose mind was many miles, many years away. She tried to remember the melody of that fiddle tune they played together—he on guitar, she on banjo. There was some gimmick in that tune that was distinctive, a slide from the 2^ndfret to the 5^thand a hammer-on to the 7^thfret. But the melody was lost in the quicksand inside her head. Maybe she could pull out the old recording of them playing together but it required more effort than she could muster.

What was beyond that screen door? The years had flown by leaving her a mottled string of emotions. Like her mother’s old recipes, scribbled on bits of paper, torn envelopes, and the back of Christmas cards, yellowed with age and stained with nearly a century of splattered food. She remembered how she felt when she once had dreams—hopeful, significant, young—but she tied the memories to no specific events. Nothing happened but she once felt young.

Big drops of rain began to fall as the screen door blew against the broken radio that had been sitting on her kitchen floor longer than she could remember. She knew the rain would come in and soak the kitchen but still she sat and stared. Ten years ago, just after he died, she stopped smoking. But now she wanted a cigarette.

The old woman's fairy tale

Where have I been? Everywhere. No where. I spent all of 2018 doing a fellowship on spiritual formation. There was a lot of reading and some writing, community engagement, and all-day retreats/classes once a month, usually in the Shenandoah Valley.

We were required to do a final project that somehow, in our own particular (for me, quirky) way reflected our year-long spiritual journey. There is really no way I can describe the journey. I have had a number of amazing encounters with a real God, indescribable pure love. So in a meager attempt to put form to my experience I wrote it as fiction, in the form of a fairy tale. Here it is.

The Old Woman and the King: A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time in a deep valley at the foot of a majestic mountain there lived an old woman named Daria. No one knew how old Daria was, but according to legend she had been born in the valley just after the dawn of time and she had never left. Her clan was unknown and there was little memory of her husband or children. Faelan, the old man who kept the history of the valley, believed that she had children who had left the valley long ago in search of fortune and never returned.

Daria lived in a humble shelter near the river, far from the other villagers. She kept animals—dogs, sheep, and goats—and she could be seen collecting reeds and vines, berries, tree bark, lily leaves, and flower petals to weave and dye the baskets and woolen cloth that she sometimes sold to people in the village. She had woven bits of the forest and the wool of her animals into a large blanket that covered her shelter. Inside the hut she had a warm fire, books, baskets, and brightly colored woven cloth. Sometimes she sang beautiful old songs to the dogs who sat at her feet. Her solitary life, her loneliness, was both a blessing and a curse.

The village in the deep valley was part of a large kingdom under the reign of a wise and benevolent King who lived high on the majestic mountain. The King knew everyone in his kingdom and nothing brought him more joy than spending time with his subjects. He had been on the throne for a long, long time, even longer than Daria had been living in the valley.

But Daria kept her distance from the King. She didn’t trust that his kindness and concern for her were sincere. Her deep sorrow was that she was alone and rejected, yet that sorrow made her withdraw further lest she be hurt again. She didn’t want to need anyone because she feared that needing others would weaken her.

Early one morning on a dark day in deep winter, out of the cold mist, the King himself, alone, came walking along the edge of the river, cracking the thin ice that had formed on the bank. Daria was boiling water, bark, and berries in a large cauldron over a fire, stirring the mixture with a long wooden paddle. From a distance she heard the ice cracking and the dogs began to bark. Then she saw him, wrapped in a long woolen cloak, walking toward her, his eyes glowing, his mouth softly smiling, his arms stretched wide to greet her. In an instant the dye she was boiling became intensely blue—indigo, the color of the yearning in her heart, a yearning that frightened her in its intensity. She felt life swell up inside her, yet she also wanted to run and hide, afraid of the intrusion into her small, isolated world.

He sat on a tree stump. She smelled sunshine and lavender in the dark of winter.

“Your majesty,” she said, “I have nothing to give you. I am just a poor, old woman with nothing of value.”

“Daria,” said the King, “I have only come to see you, to spend time with you. Being with you is what I value most. I knew you even before you were born and I have always loved you, more than you can ever know. Will you make some tea and we can sit and talk?”

Daria stuttered, afraid and unsure how to answer. “Yes, your majesty, of course. I don’t have much to offer, but come inside and I will make us tea.”

The King sat with her by the fire inside her shelter. The tea warmed them and the room began to glow—crimson, gold, saffron, and indigo—and from under his cloak he unwrapped a loaf of bread, broke it, and placed it on the table before her.

Until the sun began to set in the west, Daria and the King sat by the fire telling stories, laughing, singing old songs, and sharing the deep communion of silence.

“Daria,” said the King, “I must go now. This time with you has filled me with such joy. I want to spend much more time with you. Will you let me do that? Will you let me show you how much I love you, how much I have always loved you? I want you to know me, to be with me. And, Daria, know that I am always with you, even when you can’t see me, know that you can find me in the silence. Will you do that for me?”

She looked at him in awe, unable to find the words to respond to him, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

He held her in his arms and wrapped his cloak around her, like holding a child. “Just say yes, my child, just say yes.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes!”

Through the long, dark winter Daria spent many hours recalling the time she had spent with the King. She sat in silence, pondering what he had said about always being with her, even when she couldn’t see him. Sometimes she could feel his presence in the silence, yet other times she only felt his absence and longed to see him again. She had so many questions for him and she wanted his advice. But mostly, she just wanted to feel his love—the strong, pure love of a father for his child. Before he came to her that winter morning, she had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be loved. Now that she had rekindled that connection, she wanted to know him better, she wanted to bring him joy, she wanted to see their relationship grow strong, but she didn’t know how to do such things.

As winter slowly began to thaw, mosses remembered their unique shades of green and birds returned from the secret places where they had spent the long, dark days. Daria went to the river’s edge to gather reeds and among the reeds she discovered a small round boat and a paddle. The boat, only big enough for one, was beautifully constructed of bark and willow, the bottom covered in tightly woven fabric and sealed with resin. The fabric was dyed indigo. She knew that the King had left it there for her, to encourage her to explore the river beyond the hollow where she spent her days and nights. 

The little blue boat was like the boat she loved when she was a child. She quickly regained her skill with the paddle, softly skimming the surface of the water like an insect. She quietly paddled down the river until she came to the place where old Faelan lived. As she approached the shore, she saw Faelan stringing fish on a line to dry. 

He chuckled when she came near, and said, “Will wonders ever cease? Is this old Daria coming through the reeds?”

She couldn’t keep from smiling. “Aye, tis myself, old Faelan. How can it be that we two old goats are still here in the shadow of the mountain?”

They chatted unceasingly, catching up on the years apart, and the time together brought great joy to both of them. Daria told Faelan about her visit from the King. The old man agreed that indeed it was a rare and wonderous thing to spend time in the presence of their King. He then snapped his fingers, told her not to move, and scrambled into his hut to retrieve something.

“I have something very precious to share with you, Daria. It is a book—"The Book” we call it—and it tells the history of our people and the incredible story of all the King has done for us through the ages. Please accept this as a gift between two old friends. And I would so enjoy discussing it with you as you read it.”

Daria said, “Thank you, Faelan. How kind you are. Indeed, I will read it and we shall discuss it as long as we’re able.”

She wrapped The Book carefully under her cloak, climbed into the little blue boat, and paddled back up the river, waving to Faelan as he disappeared into the distance. Her heart was full.

Daria returned to the shelter at her quiet place on the river and read until the sun came up. She read a story in The Book about a poor mother who put her baby into a basket in the reeds at the edge of a great river in order to save the boy’s life from evil men who would kill him. The daughter of a king found the baby in the basket, took him in as her own child, and raised him in the royal household. The story reminded Daria about a young mother in the village whom Faelan had told her about during their visit. The young mother in the village was very poor and recently had given birth. She struggled to find food for herself and her child and she carried the baby with her everywhere. Daria’s heart ached for the young mother, for she herself had once been a young mother who struggled to care for her children. Suddenly a thought occurred to the old woman, as if she heard the voice of the King whispering in her ear, telling her how she could help them. She remembered weaving a long swaddling shawl to carry her own babies and realized that she could create such a shawl for the young mother to carry her baby. Daria began to spin and weave a shawl—yarn dyed saffron, crimson, the color of juniper berries, golden brown, and green, the color of spring. And intertwined among the other colors, some of her treasured indigo yarn.

Daria worked day and night and when the swaddling shawl was finished, she climbed into her little blue boat and brought the shawl to Faelan and asked him to give it to the young mother.

“Ah, Daria,” he said, “Such beautiful work. This kindness becomes you. Surely the young woman will be pleased to receive such a gift.”

Daria paddled home, speaking aloud to the King as if he was beside her. “Thank you, my Lord, my King, for you have been so good to me. Thank you for reminding me that I could do something to make the young mother’s life a little easier. Please keep her and her child in your tender care.”

Days later, Faelan came trudging noisily through the trees, a sack slung over his shoulder. Following him was a young woman, her child swaddled securely across her chest with the shawl Daria had made. 

Short of breath from his long trek, Faelan panted, “Daria, this is the young mother I told you about. She has come to bring you cheese that she made to thank you for your kindness. And this little one is her daughter Maire. Yes, she was named after the mother of the King. That promises great things for the child.”

The young mother smiled shyly as Daria clasped her hands with great tenderness—cold young supple hands wrapped in the warm gnarled hands of the old woman. Daria peeked inside the mother’s swaddling shawl and drew in her breath. “Such a face!” she exclaimed. “The child has the face of an angel—an angel with flaming red curls and indigo eyes like the sky! Surely, she is worthy to be the namesake of the mother of the King. Blessings be to Maire and to her mother. Come inside, my dear. You and the child must warm yourselves by the fire. We’ll have tea. And come along, old Faelan—you are family in my home.”

The three spent time by the fire getting acquainted and Faelan broke a loaf of bread at the table to have with their tea, and with reverence he gave thanks to the King who provided for them. 

In no time Daria had become a doting grandmother to the young mother and the child. 

Faelan was fidgeting in his chair. Daria sensed something. “What have you got to say, man? You’re squirming like a snake!”

“Ah, you’ve barely seen me for the past 20 years and you already read me like a book,” said Faelan. “Alright, then, I’ll say it—I’m thinking it would be a good thing for this young mother and little Maire to stay here with you for a while. The child is no trouble at all. This young mother needs someone to take her under wing—someone like you, Daria. I think it would be good for all of you. Perhaps you could teach this young mother how to spin and weave so that she can make a living for herself and her baby.”

Daria was taken aback. She became very quiet. She had never considered such an arrangement. Could she give up her quiet life alone, away from others? An image came to mind. She recalled her time with the King and felt the comfort of his loving embrace when he wrapped his cloak around her and held her in his arms like a child. She was filled with light and an unflinching knowledge of what the King had called her to do. She would follow his example; she would let the King’s boundless love and compassion be her guide.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes!”

From that day forward the young mother and the beautiful red-headed child lived with Daria. What Faelan had in his sack when they came tromping through the woods to visit was the young mother’s meager possessions. He had discussed the situation with the King and he was certain Daria would say yes, for the King had softened Daria’s heart.

Daria began teaching the young mother what she had learned over a lifetime. She taught her the long process of weaving—shearing sheep, spinning the wool, gathering berries and bark, and creating dye. The old woman found a new love for her work and her creativity flourished in partnership with the young mother. The young woman was a natural weaver, eager to learn, and together they created the most beautiful work of Daria’s life

At the summer solstice, a group of people from the village arrived at Daria’s place by the river, bringing tools and materials to build a shelter for the young mother and her baby. The sounds of saws cutting wood, hammering of nails, children playing, shouting and laughter filled the woods. When their work was complete, they shared a great feast to celebrate their accomplishment. A large cauldron of potage had been simmering all day. The hard work and the aroma of the food increased their appetites. They piled a large make-shift table with cabbage and beans, cheese, fish, bacon, plums, and honey.

Before they began to eat, Faelan spoke. “Let us give thanks to our King for his kindness and provision. None of this would have been possible were it not for his great love for all of us. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for creating this community, for giving us one another. Thank you for being with us through joy and sorrow. We break this bread to follow your example of sacrifice and your unending love for us. We are deeply grateful.”

As the evening ended, people returned to their homes while Daria and the young mother sat in the glow of the fire and marveled at what an incredible day it had been. The young mother took Maire into their new home, leaving Daria alone by the slowly dying embers to spend time with the King, thanking him for the day and sitting in the quiet of his company.

“Father King,” she said, “you can see me here. I know your great love. This growing love that I have for you, this sense of your presence, is not something I have created out of my own strength and imagination. You have drawn me to you. Create now a new story of my life—a story with you at the center.”

She began to see how his presence had transformed her life. Though she was advanced in age, she felt like a child cherished by her father. He became the most important thing in her life and, as she became more connected to him, she became more connected to others in the kingdom. He had claimed her as his own, put his stamp on her heart and she belonged to him, a connection of pure love. He pursued her when she felt unworthy of love. She became familiar with his voice as she spent quiet time in his presence. She sought to see herself as he saw her, to model her life after his, and to surrender to his plan for her. As she became more aware of his love for her, that love transformed her. She grew in kindness, compassion, and connection to others. As she became transformed she gained the strength to step out into the world and to try to make the world better for others. She continued to see his love in action, she grew closer to him, and as she grew closer she yearned to become more like him. 

The summer flew by—days of work beside the young mother, and nights of joyful chatter under the stars in the company of her fellow villagers. They kept Daria up to date about the all the pending births nearby and she went to work creating a special swaddling shawl for each mother and baby. She visited each new child to deliver the shawl and cherished the time she spent in the sacred presence of new life. Although she considered the creation of a shawl a small gesture, she did it with great love. Joy shone from her heart and soul. She gave thanks to the King for allowing her this privilege.

The long days of summer became shorter and a chill settled in the valley. Trees released their leaves and the sky became deep blue, indigo. Daria’s old bones ached as the wind became colder. She was unable to work as she had before. As the leaves fell and autumn settled in, word reached her that her old friend Faelan had taken to his bed, sweating with fever, and wracked with the cough. She sent him her warmest blanket with a simple note expressing her love and concern for him. She wanted to do more for her old friend, to sit by his bedside and feed him spoons full of tea and honey, but she lacked even the strength to paddle her little boat down the river.

She was tired, yet she felt satisfied, beloved, and part of the rhythm of life in the village. Her connection to the King continued to grow stronger. For so many years she had held her sorrow in her talons, afraid that sorrow was the glue that held her together and, if she released it, she would be empty. Yet she recalled that the King once told her that you need to be broken to become whole. And now she began to understand what the King had meant. She had lived many years in sorrow and brokenness, too absorbed in herself to see beyond it. Then she began to know the King, to understand his deep love for her. Had she not experienced the broken, lonely life, she may not have been so fiercely drawn to his love. His love transformed her. It made her whole. She saw that her pain had a purpose; it created a path that led only to him. For that she was grateful. Now all she wanted was to do his will.

Daria awoke one morning just after the first snowfall. The sun was shining, illuminating the snow like a million stars and the sky was deep indigo. The King was standing in her doorway with his arms open wide.

“My beloved child! Come with me. I want to take you up to the mountain to be with me forever. Will you come? Please say yes.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes!”

_________________________________________________________________________

This old song has been running through my mind lately. It was written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson, a gospel blues singer, guitar player, and street corner evangelist who died in 1945. This song was the inspiration for this story.

Bye and Bye I’m Goin’ To See the King

I said bye and bye I'm going to see the King
Bye and bye I am going to see the King
And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

I said bye and bye I'm going to see the King
Bye and bye I am going to see the King
And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

You know after death,
you have got to go by yourself

And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

I said bye and bye I'm going to see the King
Bye and bye I am going to see the King
And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

Bye and bye I will hear the angel sing
Bye and bye I will hear the angel sing
And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

You know after death,
you have got to stand your test
And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

I said bye and bye I'm going to see the King
Bye and bye I am going to see the King
And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God

Songwriter: Blind Willie Johnson

Bye and Bye I'm Goin’ to See the King  © Alpha Music, Inc

Chapter 1

I don't know what I was waiting for. Perhaps I believed a huge flood of inspiration, a fully formed, perfectly grammatical book was going to spring out of my computer. I waited. I waited some more. I've had some cryptic notes, some unconnected snippets (100 pages of it!) that have been languishing in MS Word for a long time. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to start chipping away. I'm still not sure how the organization is going to work out or, truthfully, or where it's going in general. Just some flimsy ideas, 100 pages of gunk, and a first chapter. It's fiction in the voice of my alter ego. Here's the first chapter:

Breezy

by Donna Xander

Chapter 1: The Girl and her mama

            “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Ralphie. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

That was the voice of my mother. It was in the spring, 1959, I was 12 years old, and I had just been hit by a bread truck. I was innocently riding my bike home from my hula lesson, singing “I’m a little brown girl in a little grass skirt in a little grass hut,” when a Strosneider’s bread truck came barreling around the corner, hit my bike, and sent me flying about 10 feet through the air, clear over the prickle bush hedge, and onto the lawn. The guy driving the bread truck didn’t even stop. My bike was a mangled pretzel by the side of the road. Stunned, scraped, and bruised, I managed to get up, counted my body parts, and checked for missing teeth. Mama just stood there by the front door, holding two bags of groceries from the A&P, shaking her head, saying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Ralphie. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

            I suppose that little story could give you the wrong impression about a couple of things. First of all, my mama was never a mean person—she just believed in self-reliance. I never would have expected her to drop those groceries and come running to see if the bread truck had killed me. She had faith in my powers of resilience; she just knew that I’d bounce back, that I was stronger than any bread truck.

            The second wrong impression you might get from the story of my collision with the bread truck is that my name is Ralph. Not so. My name is Marie Antoinette Zimmerman, but my mama rarely called me by my given name. I often wondered whether it was a bad omen to have been named after a woman who was beheaded. Perhaps, because when my mama called me Marie Antoinette I knew it meant trouble. Actually she never called me by any girl’s name and she rarely called me the same name twice. But somehow I always knew she was talking to me when she called me Wilbur, or Thurgood, or Gus, or any of the thousands of boy names she used. There was just something in the tone of her voice that I knew she meant me. Everyone in Breezy knew she meant me too, though usually when she referred to me outside of our little family, she just called me “the girl.”

            Breezy is the town where I grew up. Actually, you won’t find it on any map listed as Breezy. Its official name is Breezy Point. It’s in Calvert County, Maryland, on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The houses in Breezy don’t have much in common except they are all rather squished into the town, some on the shore, others high up on the hill, or back in the pine trees. Most of them were built by the people who live in them. And some of the builders were more skilled than others. Every house had some version of a screened porch as a defense against flocks of mosquitos in summer. Every house had a propane tank or two. The pretty houses were freshly painted and had hydrangea bushes in the yard and black-eyed Susans—the official Maryland flower. The not-so-pretty houses had rusty, inoperable cars, trucks, lawn mowers, and swing sets in the yards and their paint was peeling.

My mother was named Mary Magdalena Zimmerman, but everyone called her Maggie. She was more than a little eccentric—in some ways like a rabid butterfly, flitting around, changing to suit her whims, but in other ways she was as immutable as the Rock of Gibraltar.

One of her most obvious whims was her hair obsession. On alternate weeks, she changed her hair color. It could be magenta, burnt umber, platinum, or a combination or any of the above. These were never hair colors never seen in nature. She had an entire collection of falls and wiglets and little chignons that she attached to her hair with no regard for trying to match the color of the fake hair to her hair color du jour. Once she cut tresses out of one of her hairpieces and glued them to her scalp with industrial strength glue. She thought it looked great for the first day and she believed she was on to something, that she had discovered a great new beauty tip and she began brewing a plan to market her discovery. Then the glued-in pieces started falling out along with large chunks of her natural hair. She didn’t miss a beat though and she didn’t fret about the big bald spots on her skull. It gave her an opportunity to get some new hair pieces until her hair grew back. And it gave her a chance to be philosophical, to impart a little of her wisdom to me, saying, “What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, Grover. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”

Mama liked to quote Scripture. She always repeated it for emphasis.

Glamour was Mama’s passion and she figured out how to support us by making glamour her business. She sold Avon for 35 years and eventually worked her way up to regional manager. People in Breezy used to say, “Ding dong” almost any time they saw her. She loved Avon and her customers loved her.

Then there was Mama’s redecorating obsession, limited only to the living room. The dining room never changed; it was wallpapered with lords and ladies dancing the minuet and cluttered with stacks of boxes of Avon products, a gallery of paint-by-number oil paintings, portraits of saints, and Mama’s extensive collection of Queen Elizabeth coronation china. Other than the coming and going of Avon products, nothing in the dining room ever got moved.

We ate our meals on TV trays in Mama’s bedroom, sitting on the pink chenille bedspread while watching whatever grainy show was on the television, one show nearly indistinguishable from the next. In the corner of her bedroom was a statue that Aunt Eloise had shipped from Mexico. I think it was supposed to be the Blessed Mother but the Blessed Mother was dressed in a tacky satin wedding dress and bridal veil and she was wearing a wild black wig. The weirdest thing about the Blessed Mother Bride was her size—she was not the standard-size statue that could be put on a mantle or dresser. She wasn’t life-size either. She was the size of a young child, dressed in a satin wedding dress. Why couldn’t we have had a nice smiling blue-eyed blonde Blessed Mother statue like Mary Margaret McCarthy had? No, we had to have the pygmy bride of Frankenstein version of the BVM. She creeped me out. Whenever I was sick, burning with fever, Mama would say, “Come and sleep in my bed, Richard, so I can keep an eye on you.” No way! I’d always lie and tell her I was fine, but to tell the truth, I feared having delirious nightmares featuring the fiend in the corner more than I feared any illness.

While the décor in most of the house never changed, the living room got painted once a month, whether it needed it or not. Mama bought the paint at yard sales, liberated it from the neighbors’ trash, or borrowed it from her sister Eloise. I don’t know how she intended to return the borrowed paint once it had been applied to the walls. She often mixed paint to create her own “special blend” of colors. On more than one occasion she mixed in hair color in an attempt to make the living room match her. Mercifully, these colors could not be replicated. Mama’s plan was to make the living room her little oasis of elegance. Accessories included cherub lamps and American eagles and ashtrays with swan wings. There were framed photographs in the living room but she bought the picture frames with photos already in them, never photos of anyone we knew. Mama called me Marie Antoinette once when she overheard me telling Barbie Grant that the handsome young man in one of the framed photos was my cousin Pierre from France and that he was going to send me a French poodle and a box of chocolate-covered cherries for my birthday. Although Mama’s own interpretation of truth could be a little wobbly at times, she held me to a higher standard.

Although the dining room furniture was threadbare and held together with duct tape and twine, Mama regularly redid the living room furniture in an endless variety of themes. We went through several versions of Polynesia, although she once corrected me to clarify that it was Bora Bora and not Polynesia. We had 1880s New Orleans for a while. One summer she did a “North to Alaska” theme because she thought it would be cooling in the absence of air conditioning. But she reliably returned to some version of Gay Paree. She sewed window swags and pillows and reupholstered chairs with fabric she got dirt-cheap from her best friend Darla who was the manager of Jo-Ann’s Fabrics. (Darla also was into competitive ballroom dancing so she always wore high heels because she said she had to keep her feet in training. Darla was married to Vince, a telephone repairman. Vince was a competitive body builder, he shaved his chest, and used Mantan because he wanted to look like a bronze god. Once Vince was doing some telephone repair work in a house when no one was home. Seems it was a hot day and Vince decided to take a shower. Imagine the surprise when the lady of the house came home and found the telephone man in her shower. Vince got fired and began selling World Book encyclopedias. He couldn’t read that well himself but the ladies liked him.) But I digress.

And there was like a revolving door of pets coming into and out of our house. Mama’s friend Blanche was the pusher, keeping Mama supplied like some sort of dope fiend who was a sucker for a furry or feathered face. Blanche worked at the county animal shelter and Mama was always willing to take in another cat, dog, bird, or a pet in the “other” category. But the animals usually didn’t stay for more than a week or two. When the new pet seemed to be AWOL and I asked her where it was she always said, “Guess it must have run away. You know that God created all the wild animals according to their kinds, Louie, and He saw that it was good. Yes, He saw that it was good.”

Seems most of them ran away because they objected to being house-broken. One time Blanche sent from the shelter a lovely yellow and green parakeet. I named it Chiffon, but pronounced it “Chee-fawhn” with a heavy French accent that seemed appropriate for our décor. I didn’t know any French but I thought it might be the French translation of the word chiffon. I might be right—I never looked it up. The bird stayed for about a month but it got mites and gave them to me. Soon after the mites appeared, Chiffon just up and disappeared too. When I asked Mama where the bird was, she said, “Guess it must have run away.”

“If it left, it probably flew away,” I muttered. “And when it flew away it took its cage with it.” The sarcasm was lost on her.

Just before Easter one year, Mama came home from the feed store with a baby duck. I named it Elmer. Elmer had the run of the house, waddling free, quacking and pooping. Apparently it’s difficult to house train a duck. I tried but I could find little guidance on duck training, even at the country library. I tried to shampoo him too, but he would have none of it. As if the duck poop wasn’t enough of an issue, Elmer developed a serious limp. Mama decided that the limp was a sign that the duck was terminally ill and the humane thing to do would be to put him out of his misery. So she turned the gas on in the oven without lighting it and put Elmer in the oven. As we were getting asphyxiated on the gas fumes, Mama kept checking the oven, expecting to see the poor little duckling’s limp body. Every time she opened the oven door, he just quacked and looked at her. Fearing we all would die in a house-leveling explosion, she finally turned off the gas and took him out of the oven. Elmer was fine. Actually, he was cured—he stopped limping and eventually he went to live with the other ducks in the pond at Gate of Heaven cemetery. For all I know, he’s still there, quacking and pooping.

So there were the things in our household that were always changing, like Mama’s hair, and our home décor, and passing parade of animal shelter refugees. Then there were the things about Mama that were immutable.

For example, she had these little food obsessions. Every day, without variation she ate exactly the same thing for breakfast and lunch. Breakfast was two of the big shredded wheat biscuits, warm milk, one teaspoon of sugar with a cup of black Sanka. Lunch was a sliced hard-boiled egg with mustard on Wonder Bread. There were slight variations for dinner because I made dinner—pancakes on Sunday, spaghetti on Monday, tuna noodle casserole on Tuesday, hamburger surprise on Wednesday, scrambled eggs on Thursday, and fish sticks on Friday. On Saturday we went out to Lula’s for hamburgers. On the first Sunday of every month we had cream chipped beef on toast and peas—it was our way to celebrate.

Mama was obsessed with bugs, especially flying bugs. She was convinced that mosquitoes were responsible for all manner of illness including chicken pox, tuberculosis, polio, leprosy, acne, and diarrhea. She sprayed me with insect repellant every time I left the house. She’d check the outside thermometer—if the temperature was above 20 degrees F, I’d get sprayed. To this day, the smell of insect repellant and wet paint reminds me of home. I wonder how many of my brain cells were destroyed by the insect repellant.

Mama never wavered from Catholicism either. She had memorized both the Baltimore Catechism #1 and the Baltimore Catechism #2 and could point out the fine points of all the differences between the two. She did novenas and First Fridays and knew the patron saints of everything, even obscure things—like St. Lucy the patron saint of electrical contractors. (She said special prayers to St. Lucy every time Bert Wojcik came to fix the fuse box—she didn’t quite trust Bert on his own merits.) And she went to confession every Saturday afternoon at Immaculate Conception Church, whether she needed it or not. She didn’t have many sinful habits. She didn’t exceed the speed limit, or curse, or drink alcohol. (Once Doc Betz, the druggist, told her to try a little glass of wine to help her sleep. So she poured herself a shot glass of wine, climbed into bed, drank the wine, and immediately lay down.) I think she went to confession in lieu of going to therapy. Father Mahoney could have set his watch every Saturday when Maggie Zimmerman appeared on the other side of the confessional screen. The only thing she probably had to confess was that she lied so frequently about the disappearance of the pets.

But here’s the ultimate proof that Mama’s tenacity never stopped at the border. When I was 12, Mama had been married to Daddy for 20 years. But it had been 10 years since Daddy walked out of the house to get a pack of cigarettes and never returned. No word from him, no explanation, simply gone. Mama still considered herself married. Occasionally I’d get up the nerve to ask her about him. She’d say something like, “Well, I’m not sure where he is, but I do believe he’ll be home by Thanksgiving. He just loves a good turkey.”

She baked him a birthday cake every year on his birthday. (On one of Daddy’s no-show birthdays we had a new dog. It was a big, black dog who drooled and smelled bad. The dog ate most of Daddy’s birthday cake. The following day the dog “ran away.” Mama said the dog favored Daddy and just wanted to be with him.) And every year she bought my missing father an anniversary card, signed it “with all my love, Maggie” and put it on the living room mantle. The cards were always those really mushy cards with poems about how their love had grown over the years.

And my father the disciplinarian, though absent in fact, was ever-present in her mind. When I misbehaved, she would say, “When your father gets home, you’ll have your day of reckoning, Homer, you’ll have your day of reckoning.” Wherever he was, perhaps he was more powerful in his absence than if he had been there.

The cold

Just feeling the itch to do a writing exercise. I want to drift into the other side of my brain for a while.

So I pull a book from the shelf and see what happens. Combining a little reality with a prompt from fiction. The book—Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. On page 120, the sentence: “I can’t have my wife sleeping in the cold truck, not now. Not with the baby coming so soon.”


On my right foot: big toe pink, second toe white, third toe white, forth toe pink, pinky toe not pink but white. My left foot a different pattern of white and pink toes. Having once experienced frost bite, my feet are not fans of cold weather. But I wonder if this obsession with staying warm lies in something deeper, in another life at another time. I fill the bathtub with the hottest water I can tolerate. Steam fills the room and begins dripping down the walls, beneath the iron cross and the Guadalupe votives. Soaking in the bathtub, the room lit only by candlelight, I lift my arm out of the water and watch steam rise from my fingers and hands as I make steamy designs in the candlelight—figure eights and waves like a witch invoking black magic. When the steam dissipates, I put my arm back into the hot water and try new designs, new rhythms, anything to conjure up protection from the cold. On an exposed northwest corner, my bathroom is the coldest room in the house. The walls are cold to the touch and I imagine there is no insulation between the outside brick and the inside plaster. It was built at a time when energy was cheap. The leaves are only beginning to turn on the trees and hard winter is many weeks away. This is how I will live until spring returns, soaking in hot water until my skin erupts in itchy, rashy patches. I can’t sleep if I’m cold so I cook like a lobster and quickly slip into bed where the heat of my over-cooked body warms the cold sheets. Am I awake or am I drifting off to sleep? Startled, I sit up in bed, thinking I heard the voice of my long-dead father. “Papa?” I whisper. No response. I burrow down deeper under the blankets. And I begin to shiver. I hear his anxious voice as if from another room. “I can’t have my wife sleeping in the cold truck, not now. Not with the baby coming so soon.”

Just like Scout

A few nights ago a dear friend called me just to chat and catch up on life. He said he had been watching the film To Kill a Mockingbird and he paused the film to call me. He said that it suddenly struck him how much Scout, the girl who is a major character in the film, reminded him of me, what he imagined I was like when I was a kid. He said she looked somewhat like me, but that it was her personality that seemed so much like me. I do believe this is the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten from anyone.

The fluky thing about his comment is that when I’m writing fiction I often write in the voice of a 12-year-old girl living in the mid-20^th century in a small town on the Chesapeake Bay. And I realized that this girl who occupies my brain is much like Scout Finch. So when I write I do look like her, I act like her, and I write in her voice. I never had put two and two together before.

I posted this piece of quickie little piece of fiction on this blog once before, quite some time ago. This is an example of something I have written in the voice of my alter ego, that 12-year-old girl who could be Scout.

 

Sammy and Angela were sitting on the front porch of the store when I walked by. They had obviously stopped talking when I got near enough to hear. I walked past them, let the screen door slam, grabbed an RC Cola out of the ice chest, and dumped an orange juice can full of pennies on the counter. Miss Dixon always tolerated me. She just chuckled and counted the pennies.

 

She said, “Well, you’ve got 24 cents extra. How about I throw in a penny and give you five nickels in trade? You want to play the slots?"

 

Of course I wanted to play—I’m a preteen slot machine junkie. Ever since the time I hit the big jackpot down at the amusement park, I’ve been expecting to hit it big again. I figure I’m just lucky.

 

So I walked over to the nickel slot machine by the front door. First nickel, nothing. Second nickel, nothing. Third nickel, I got straight cherries and nickels started pouring out of the machine. 

 

Miss Dixon said, “Girl, if you just aren’t the luckiest kid I’ve ever seen. You must have been born under a rainbow.”

 

She handed me a paper bag and I sat on the floor by the door putting all my loot in the bag. I could hear Angela crying on the front porch.

 

“Sammy,” she said, “I just can’t understand why you won’t believe me. I don’t care who told you and I don’t care what they said. I did not kiss Bo Maltby, I swear. Some of the girls think he’s cute, but not me. Tell me who told you. Tell me!”

 

Geesh, Angela was such a liar. I saw her kissing Bo Maltby just a couple of days ago, out behind the tobacco barn on the road to the store. I’m like a cat, just walk around with no shoes, not making a sound. I see all kinds of things I’m not supposed to see. Like the time I took the shortcut home and saw Mr. Morris sitting in the sun on his lounge chair wearing only what God gave him. Well, he was wearing sunglasses—I suppose God didn’t give him the sunglasses. He was all smeared in oil and had some big aluminum foil contraption all wrapped around him. And if you want to know the truth, I really did see his wiener. I’ve only seen one before, but that was my brother’s and that hardly counts because he was a baby. Mary Francis told me that her uncle showed her his wiener and it was ugly and hairy. So now I’ve seen one too and I don’t hardly care to ever see another one again.

 

I did see Angela kissing Bo Maltby, but I didn’t tell a soul, and she was flat-out lying to Sammy out there in front of the store. Sammy just shook his head, got up, put his hands in his pockets and walked away, leaving Angela crying. I grabbed my bag of nickels and sat on the front porch to drink my RC.

 

Angela sniffled, looked at me, and said, "You heard that, didn't you?"

 

I just drank my soda. 

 

She said, “You are evil. Everyone thinks you’re just a goofy, harmless little kid but I know about you. I’ll bet you’re the one who told Sammy about Bo and me, aren’t you? I’m going to get back at you for this, just you wait.”

 

Her dark eyes glittered at me, but I wasn’t afraid.

 

Skeeter del Puente

A couple of nights ago I awoke from a dream with the name Skeeter del Puente floating in my semi-comatose brain. Even half asleep, it made me laugh. “Who the hell is Skeeter del Puente and what is he doing in my head?” I asked the darkness. I got up and wrote down the name, knowing that I wouldn’t remember it in the morning. There’s nothing I can do with Skeeter except work on a writing exercise and see what I get. Here goes . . .

“A voice in the crowd erupted: ‘Now don’t you go forgetting the skeen!’” Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, p. 101

"Don’t believe him,” Cherise whispered in my ear. “He used to live in my neighborhood when I lived in San Angelo. I don’t care what he calls himself. He was born and bred in San Angelo, Texas, not in Hispaniola and his name is Dwayne Lee Skeen.” No, no, no, no. Cherise had to be wrong because everything about Skeeter del Puente was so right. He had transferred to our school in the middle of junior year and stole the hearts of nearly every girl in the school. Even the teachers’ voices seem to soften and go up a little higher in a flirty way when they talked to Skeeter. Well, I mean the women teachers but I probably should include the chorus director Mr. Miller in that group. Mr. Miller was a little . . . umm. . .light on the feet. Skeeter’s hair was black as coal, almost like Elvis’s hair. His skin was nearly perfect except for a couple of zits that I noticed on his neck, but he flipped up his collar to cover them. His eyes were a dreamy golden brown and when he spoke to me, his eyelids were half-closed. And when he spoke . . . that exotic voice, the voice that only could have come from the prince of Hispaniola. I wasn’t sure where Hispaniola was, but Skeeter del Puente said it was a beautiful island, surrounded by the aqua sea, and there were wild parakeets in the coconut trees, and the women were the most beautiful women in the world. When he described his homeland to me, he said with his eyelids half closed, “One day I will take you there. And you will be the most beautiful of all the beautiful women.” Oh, swoon. Skeeter explained that he had moved here from Hispaniola to spend some time with his aunt and uncle and to go to an American high school to perfect his English. Besides, his father was taking an extended trip to Arabia to buy the finest horses and his mother was busy learning her role for the opera and he took the opportunity to live in a small town in America. When he said the word America it seemed like it had about 15 rs in it. . . Amerrrrrrrica. I thought maybe I was in love with Skeeter del Puente. I couldn’t concentrate in class and I kept writing in my notebook: Mrs. Skeeter del Puente, Mary Margaret Donnelly del Puente, Maria Margarita del Puente. I wondered what our babies would look like. I dreamed of going to the prom with him and imagined myself in a red dress, dancing the tango. Surely Skeeter danced the tango like all the great Latin lovers. He would teach me and, even if the DJ was playing a Ricky Nelson song, we would dance the tango. It would be so perfect. But Cherise was jealous and she kept trying to spoil it for me. She would wave at him from across the room and say, “Well, look, it’s Dwayne Lee Skeen! How’s things in San Angelo, Dwayne?” Skeeter just looked through Cherise like she didn’t exist. He was cool that way. So later in the term we had a junior class meeting on plans for the prom. There were nominations for prom committee, and suggestions for the prom theme. People suggested themes like Hawaiian and future in space (that was Bernie Wojik, that nerd) and moonlight in Paris. The prom committee would make the final decision. Then it came time to nominate junior class members to be prom queen and king. I didn’t even want to be nominated for queen. Big deal—Vickie Sterling and Barbie Knutz and a couple of others got nominated, all blondes who had already grown chests. Then time for nominations for prom king. I was sitting way up front. People called out names—Billy MacKenzie the football player, Richie Stearns the baseball player. Then I heard her. I knew who it was without even turning around. A voice in the crowd erupted: “Now don’t you go forgetting the Skeen!”

The book

Just in case you think I'm blowing smoke, that I'm the master of the empty gesture, I want to show you something. I really am writing a book. I wrote one non-fiction book but never was able to get it published and it now feels stale to me. This newer unfinished book is fiction, but I've been stalled for a long time because I can't figure out the voice and structure. The current working concept is that it is a connected series of short stories similar to Olive Kitteridge. (If only I could write a book worthy of being compared to Olive Kitteridge.) Instead of being connected by a single character, it is connected by a place, specifically a town called Breezy Point on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. There is a real town called Breezy Point that I knew in my childhood, but here I'm just using the name of the town and fictionalizing details. It takes place in the late 1950s and much of it is written from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old girl. But there are other voices too, and that's where I'm making myself cray-cray, trying to sort it all out and unify the pieces. The working first chapter is in the voice of the 12-year-old girl (obviously my alter ego because I write in her voice all the time). Current draft is over 100 pages, so it's a start but needs so much more work. But here is the draft of chapter 1 of the book, working title, Breezy. I used to call it Believe but I think Breezy may work better. Some of the chapters are much more serious, haunting than this, not all attempts at my version of humor. And much of this has been inspired by real life. You can't make up this stuff.

            “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Ralphie. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” That was my mother talking. It was sometime in the spring, 1959, I was 12 years old, and I had just been hit by a bread truck. I was innocently riding my bike home from my hula lesson when the Strosneider’s bread truck came barreling around the corner, hit my bike, and sent me flying about 10 feet through the air, clear over the prickle bush hedge, and onto the lawn. The guy driving the bread truck didn’t even stop. My bike was a mangled pretzel by the side of the road. I was stunned, scraped and bruised, but I managed to get up in one piece. Mama just stood there by the front door, holding two bags of groceries from the A&P, shaking her head, saying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Ralphie.”

            I suppose that little story could give you the wrong impression about a couple of things. First of all, my mama was never a mean person—she just believed in self-reliance. I never would have expected her to drop those groceries and come running to see if the bread truck had killed me. She had faith in my powers of resilience; she just knew that I’d bounce back, that I was stronger than any bread truck.

            The second wrong impression you might get from the story of my collision with the bread truck is that my name is Ralph. Not so. My name is Marie Antoinette Zimmerman, but my mama rarely called me by my given name. I often wondered whether it was a bad omen to have been named after a woman who was beheaded. Perhaps, because when my mama called me Marie Antoinette I knew it meant trouble. Actually she never called me by any girl’s name and she rarely called me the same name twice. But somehow I always knew she was talking to me when she called me Wilbur, or Thurgood, or Gus, or any of the thousands of boy names she used. There was just something in the tone of her voice that I knew she meant me. Everyone in Breezy knew she meant me too.

            Breezy is the town where I grew up. Actually, you won’t find it on any map listed as Breezy. Its official name is Breezy Point. It’s in Calvert County, Maryland, on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The houses in Breezy have little in common except they are all rather squished into the town, some on the shore, others high up on the hill, or back in the pine trees. Most of them were built by the people who live in them. And some of the builders were more skilled than others.  [MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE TOWN]

My mother was named Mary Magdalena Zimmerman, but everyone called her Maggie. She was more than a little eccentric—in some ways like a rabid butterfly, flitting around, changing to suit her whims, but in other ways she was as immutable as the Rock of Gibraltar.

One of her most obvious whims was her hair obsession. On alternate weeks, she changed her hair color. It could be magenta, burnt umber, platinum, or a combination or any of the above. These were never colors known in nature. She had an entire collection of falls and wiglets and little chignons that she attached to her hair with no regard for trying to match the color of the fake hair to her hair color du jour. Once she cut tresses out of one of her hairpieces and glued them to her scalp with industrial strength glue. She thought it looked great for the first day and she believed she was on to something, that she had discovered a great new beauty tip and she began brewing a plan to market her discovery. Then the glued-in pieces started falling out along with large chunks of her natural hair. She didn’t miss a beat though and didn’t fret about the big bald spots on her skull. It gave her an opportunity to get some new hair pieces until her hair grew back. And it gave her a chance to be philosophical, to impart a little of her wisdom to me, saying, “What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, Grover. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”

Mama was totally into the glamour business in general, which accounted for her career choice. She sold Avon for 35 years and eventually worked her way up to regional manager. People in Breezy used to say, “Ding dong” almost any time they saw her. She loved Avon and her customers loved her.

Then there was her redecorating obsession. But the redecoration whim was limited to the living room. The dining room never changed; it was wallpapered with lords and ladies dancing the minuet and cluttered with stacks of boxes of Avon products, a gallery of paint-by-number oil paintings, portraits of saints, and Mama’s extensive collection of Queen Elizabeth coronation china. Nothing in the dining room ever got moved. But the living room got painted once a month, whether it needed it or not. Mama bought the paint at yard sales, liberated it from the neighbors’ trash, or borrowed it from her sister Eloise. I don’t know how she intended to return the borrowed paint once it had been applied to the walls. She often mixed paint to create her own “special blend” of colors that could not be replicated. On more than one occasion she mixed in hair color to make the living room match her. Mercifully, these colors could not be replicated. Mama’s plan was to make the living room her little oasis of elegance. Accessories included cherub lamps and American eagles and ashtrays with swan wings. There were framed photographs in the living room but she bought the picture frames with photos already in them, never photos of anyone we knew. Mama called me Marie Antoinette once when she overheard me telling Barbie Grant that the handsome young man in one of the framed photos was my cousin Pierre from France and that he was going to send me a French poodle and a box of chocolate-covered cherries for my birthday. Although Mama’s own interpretation of truth could be a little wobbly at times, she held me to a higher standard.

Although the dining room furniture was threadbare and held together with duct tape, Mama was constantly redoing the living room furniture. She made window swags and pillows and reupholstered chairs with fabric she got dirt-cheap from her best friend Darla who was the manager of Jo-Ann’s Fabrics. (Darla also was into competitive ballroom dancing so she always wore high heels because she said she had to keep her feet in training. Darla was married to Vince, a telephone repairman. Vince was a competitive body builder, he shaved his chest, and used Mantan because he wanted to look like a bronze god. Once Vince was doing some telephone repair work in a house when no one was home. Seems it was a hot day and Vince decided to take a shower. Imagine the surprise when the lady of the house came home and found the telephone man in her shower. Vince got fired and began selling World Book encyclopedias. He couldn’t read that well himself but the ladies liked him.)

And there was like a revolving door of pets coming into and out of our house. Mama’s friend Blanche was the pusher, keeping Mama supplied like some sort of dope fiend who was a sucker for a furry or feathered face. Blanche worked at the county animal shelter and Mama was always willing to take in another cat, dog, bird, or miscellaneous pet. But the animals usually didn’t stay for more than a week or two. When the new pet seemed to be AWOL and I asked her where it was she always said, “Guess it must have run away. You know that God created all the wild animals according to their kinds, Louie, and He saw that it was good. Yes, He saw that it was good.” Seems most of them ran away because they objected to being house-broken. One time Blanche sent from the shelter a lovely yellow and green parakeet. I named it Chiffon, but pronounced it “Chee-phon” with a heavy French accent. I didn’t know any French but I thought it might be the French translation of the word chiffon. I might be right—I never looked it up. The bird stayed for about a month but it got mites and gave them to me. Soon after the mites appeared, Chiffon just up and disappeared too. When I asked Mama where the bird was, she said, “Guess it must have run away.”

“If it left, it probably flew away,” I muttered. “And when it flew away it took its cage with it.” The sarcasm was lost on her.

Just before Easter one year, Mama came home from the feed store with a baby duck. I named it Elmer. Elmer had the run of the house, waddling free, quacking and pooping. Apparently it’s difficult to house train a duck. I tried. I tried to shampoo him too, but he would have none of it. As if the duck poop wasn’t enough of an issue, Elmer developed a serious limp. Mama decided that the duck was terminally ill and the humane thing to do would be to put him out of his misery. So she turned the gas on in the oven without lighting it and put Elmer in the oven. As we were getting asphyxiated on the gas fumes, Mama kept checking the oven, expecting to see the poor little duckling’s limp body. Every time she opened the oven door, he just quacked and looked at her. Fearing we all would die in a house-leveling explosion, she finally turned off the gas and took him out of the oven. Elmer was fine. Actually, he was cured—he stopped limping and eventually he went to live with the other ducks in the pond at Gate of Heaven cemetery. For all I know, he’s still there, quacking and pooping.

So there were the things in our household that were always changing, like Mama’s hair, and our home décor, and passing parade of animal shelter refugees. Then there were the things about Mama that were immutable.

For example, she had these little food obsessions. Every day, without variation she ate exactly the same thing for breakfast and lunch. Breakfast was two of the big shredded wheat biscuits, warm milk, one teaspoon of sugar. Lunch was a sliced hard-boiled egg with mustard on Wonder Bread. There were slight variations for dinner because I made dinner—pancakes on Sunday, spaghetti on Monday, tuna noodle casserole on Tuesday, hamburger surprise on Wednesday, scrambled eggs on Thursday, and fish sticks on Friday. On Saturday we went out to Lula’s for hamburgers. On the first Sunday of every month we had cream chipped beef on toast and peas—it was a crazy way to celebrate.

Bugs—Mama was obsessed with bugs, especially flying bugs. She was convinced that mosquitoes were responsible for all manner of illness including chicken pox, tuberculosis, polio, leprosy, acne, and diarrhea. She sprayed me with insect repellant every time I left the house. She’d check the outside thermometer—if the temperature was above 20 degrees F, I’d get sprayed. To this day, the smell of insect repellant and wet paint reminds me of home.

Mama never wavered from Catholicism either. She had memorized both the Baltimore Catechism #1 and the Baltimore Catechism #2 and could point out the fine points of all the differences between the two. She did novenas and First Fridays and knew the patron saints of everything, even obscure things—like St. Lucy the patron saint of electrical contractors. (She said special prayers to St. Lucy every time Bert Wojcik came to fix the fuse box—she didn’t quite trust Bert on his own merits.) And she went to confession every Saturday afternoon at Immaculate Conception Church, whether she needed it or not. She didn’t have many sinful habits. She didn’t exceed the speed limit, or curse, or drink alcohol. (Once Doc Betz, the druggist, told her to try a little glass of wine to help her sleep. So she poured herself a shot glass of wine, climbed into bed, drank the wine, and immediately lay down.) I think she went to confession in lieu of going to therapy. Father Mahoney could have set his watch every Saturday when Maggie Zimmerman appeared on the other side of the confessional screen. The only thing she probably had to confess was that she lied so frequently about the disappearance of the pets.

But here’s the ultimate proof that Mama’s tenacity never stopped at the border. When I was 12, Mama had been married to Daddy for 20 years. But it had been 10 years since Daddy walked out of the house to get a pack of cigarettes and never returned. No word from him, no explanation, simply gone. Mama still considered herself married. Occasionally I’d get up the nerve to ask her about him. She’d say something like, “Well, I’m not sure where he is, but I do believe he’ll be home by Thanksgiving. He just loves a good turkey.”

She baked him a birthday cake every year on his birthday. (On one of Daddy’s no-show birthdays we had a new dog. It was a big, black dog who drooled and smelled bad. The dog ate most of Daddy’s birthday cake. The following day the dog “ran away.” Mama said the dog favored Daddy and just wanted to be with him.) And every year she bought my missing father an anniversary card, signed it “with all my love, Maggie” and put it on the living room mantle. The cards were always those really mushy cards with poems about how their love had grown over the years.

And my father the disciplinarian, though absent in fact, was ever-present in her mind. When I misbehaved, she would say, “When your father gets home, you’ll have your day of reckoning, Homer, you’ll have your day of reckoning.” Wherever he was, he was perhaps more powerful in his absence than if he had been there.