Thrilled to announce a new poetry collection. Published today in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington.
https://www.createspace.com/6198995
The River sums it up for me. “I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” It happens every year. There are holiday parties I love to go to and others that are painful. I ha…
Source: Cherish The Light
The River sums it up for me.
“I wish I had a river I could skate away on.”
It happens every year.
There are holiday parties I love to go to and others that are painful. I have a friend who is brilliant with small talk so I go to parties with her so I don’t have to say much. I marvel at how she can ask thoughtful, personal questions based on what the other person has told her. It just never occurs to me. I can talk about how good the spread is or how much I like the music, but small talk, the kind where you actually learn something about people, that eludes me.
It’s probably why I disliked family holidays so much. I can only remember about three family holiday dinners in my life where I walked away thinking how lovely that was, how wonderful that was. The constant in these three wasn’t the food or the event but the person who invited me. She has a gift for putting the right people in a room with the right food and the right mood and I measure other parties against hers.
Wishing someone a “merry” Christmas is just a greeting, of course, but I like to think it means, “have the kind of Christmas you need this year.” If you are having a terrible time at your job, I wish that you could be able to put the job on a shelf just long enough to have some peace. If you have trouble with your children or your parents, I wish you the ability to appreciate that they are just trying to get through their day too. And if you find yourself alone, and everyone asks you how you will be spending the holidays, I wish you the courage to say, “I will be spending it alone and I look forward to the solitude because it will feed my soul.”
When you spend the day alone, Christmas never really seems like just another day. There’s something in the air, there are fewer people out and about because they are all inside with presents and trees, and the day is suspended somehow and everything waits.
Holidays can be stressful because it’s easy to let others tell you how to spend them. It’s not always the most wonderful time of the year, there’s never peace on earth, and stores don’t care if you can’t handle the debt. People are still homeless and poor, they are hurting and sad. Families can’t get together and when they do, even when there is tremendous love present, personalities collide, hidden agendas reveal themselves.
But then, there’s this light. This particular holiday holds hope and promise in its open hand and the symbol is light. Christmas is a celebration of a better tomorrow. You can acknowledge that regardless of the hopelessness and grief that you feel today, the sun will come out tomorrow, just like Annie wails. There is tremendous vulnerability in evidence here in all the Christmas card pictures of a baby boy whose poor parents were left to fend for themselves in an unforgiving landscape. But it’s still all about hope. Be honest and craft the holiday you need.
I’ve selected my river this year and I will skate away. But I always hold the promise of growth and change, and even peace for tomorrow.
So, have yourself your very own personal kind of Christmas and cherish the light.
Greetings!
The Late Orphan Project is reopening for submissions starting November 2, 2016. Essays, journal entries, poetry, theater – all will be considered as long as the theme supports the Project.
The Project – to encourage writers to discuss the death of your parents. The easy story is to write about what happened. My mother’s long history with depression, my father’s heart ailments – easy to write because they tell a story that happened. This happened, that happened, and then they died. What the Project tries to do is not to discuss the details of the death or what led up to the death but rather what happened next?
How did this loss impact you?
When your mother or father dies, the impact is considerably stronger than other deaths in the family and the impact is frequently unpredictable.
How are you changed? What did you learn? When you picked up your life again, how was it different, or better, or worse? How did you chart your life without your parents?
What the Late Orphan Project was able to do in the first volume of stories was to show that the most personal story displays the most universal truths. The reader understands and feels empathy with the writer and the writers can sometimes find closure or healing or a deeper understanding of the events that followed the deaths.
This is not a sad project even though the stories will likely make you cry. Rather it is a celebration of real life through the telling of these very difficult stories.
Submission deadlines – November 2 to December 2, 2016.
Guidelines – All entries should be approximately 1000-1500 words.Shorter pieces will be considered but longer ones may not. One entry per person please. Stories should be accompanied by the following:
1) A 6-line author bio, written in 3rd person.
2) The name of the mother or father in the story, including birth and death dates and geographic location.
3) The word SUBMISSION in the subject line of the email.
4) All submissions to lateorphanproject@gmail.com
5) Identify please if your story has been published previously with a note that you have secured permission for The Backpack Press to republish if you story is selected.
If you have questions about submissions or the Project in general, please contact us at lateorphanproject@gmail.com.
Thank you to everyone who has expressed interest in this project! Our book is available here.
We are now 25 writers, expressing our thoughts, feelings, confusion, realizations, even humor after the death of our mother or father. In many cases, grief was delayed by activity. In some, the role of parent was pushed off on the child. In others, something was learned after cleaning out the family home.
But in each case, the writing exhibits a portrait of a family, a loss, a complicated or troubling relationship, or the lack of one. The stories are human, personal, and ultimately universal by nature.
It is an honest assessment of how the death of a parent impacts the child.
The fact that the child is also an adult is what makes these stories so rich. They are filled with regret, with questions left unanswered, with late admission of the depth of the parent’s love, or the ever-present understanding that this relationship, between parent and child, is one of the most complicated of our lives: sometimes satisfying, often incomplete. The stories cover a broad and varied view of the days – and even years – after a parent’s death.
Prompted by a need to express the impact of the death of the editor’s own father in the fall of 2015, The Late Orphan Project started to take shape as the submissions came in. Poetry, essays, journal entries – each writer facing the days after the services, the burials. Some days are better than others, some events are easier than others, and some anniversaries are impossibly hard. But the idea that the impact of this close loss is felt somehow less by an adult losing an older person is easily refuted.
Welcome to These Winter Months: The Late Orphan Project Anthology, edited by Anne Born, The Backpack Press, (September, 2016).
The writers are:
Amy McVay Abbott
Dane Aska
Kerry Boland
Anne Born
Emily Conyngham
Roger Fallihee
Jaime Franchi
Lourdes A. Gautier
Michael Geffner
Sue Glasko
Jennifer Harmon
Ken Hartke
Joan Haskins
Lisa Kern
Catherine Nagle
Sharon Nesbit-Davis
Jeanne Sathre
Anne Shrock Ott
Monika Schott
Lisa Solod
Tery Spataro
Marsha Tejeda
Deb Victoroff
Barb Hamp Weicksel
Joan Becht Willette
For more information: lateorphanproject@gmail.com
You might expect me to be in the Madrid Cathedral on a major feast day like Corpus Christi, but I’m not. I have a particular fondness for this smaller church: Nuestra Señora del Carmen near the Puerta del Sol. It’s a local church. Gets a few tourists, but for the most part, it is a local Madrid parish.
I always start by buying a candle. Tall red candles are dispensed for 2€ from a red machine located in the corridor that runs alongside the left side of the chancel. It looks more like a Coke vending machine than anything else. There are boxes of matches near the display of candles.
The side chapels have little blinking electric lights that stand in for real candles. You drop in a coin and all the lights blink, then settle down with one more lit. I’ve done it, but it’s not satisfying.
Slowly, the parishioners file in, make the rounds of their favorite chapels and take a seat. One man in a leather jacket left a bouquet on one side altar. An older woman reached to stroke the feet of a state in another. And a couple volunteered to do the readings. Each personal gesture, each individual, reverent protocol adds to the experience.
Mass begins and that lone man – the one with the tan topcoat, the pink shirt, the shined shoes, and the pink tie – stands and walks out the door. It’s as if that few moments in this sacred space were all that he needed.
On my way out, I stopped for a few of my own prayers at the chapel of Our Lady of Soledad. She is my favorite image of Mary. Typically she is dressed by the community in a long fabric gown or dark cloak. And she is so very sad. In processions, she will follow the body of Christ.
Then, lunch in the Plaza Mayor!
Today’s entertainment? A full circus troupe of tumbling gymnasts worked in and around the Segway tours, the African street vendors, the gypsies on the side streets with their sprigs of Rosemary, and some political protest with two women handing out fliers.
Everything has a protocol.
I must say, “I’m back in Madrid” is one very happy sentence for me. But this getting back tonight was late, empty, curious.
Allow me to elaborate.
Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid are two big soccer teams – and they played each other tonight. My flight got in late and the airport was empty. Everyone watching the game, I think.
The T4 terminal at Madrid Barajas is a work of art. My favorite airport terminal.
And everything was neat and put away.
It felt like I was walking with Howard Carter into a freshly discovered pharaoh’s tomb.
The cabbie the dispatcher at the airport gave me said “No” when I got in and told him I was going into the center of town. Football game. Streets are all closed to traffic, he said.
So I hopped the Metro, which was cheaper certainly, and empty, for the most part.
With a string of empty stations. On the three lines I used to get into town.
But light at the end of the subway tunnel! McDonald’s was still open – so I got my ceremonial Big Mac meal.
And settled in to watch the game.
Real Madrid won.
I love that expression – take away. In New York, we call it “take out.” In Spain or the Spanish neighborhoods in New York, it’s para llevar. But here in York, we take away. Last night we got Chinese – and we just ordered, waited, and took it away! It’s like, “And away we go!”
Visiting York in the UK just for a few days without going to London or Stonehenge is kind of an interesting experience. I get to see more of what living in England is like even though I’m still surrounded by tourists, both from the UK and not.
And that is the big attraction: York Minster.
My passion is visiting houses of worship – both empty and filled – and this one is very special. You pay one admission that nets you a ticket good for a year’s worth of visits and there are free tours every day led by a guide instead of one of those irritating audio hand wands.
I found the ceiling particularly fascinating because I can’t begin to imagine how those patterns are achieved with the end result being architectural support for the roof.
The windows are sublime – deep, rich colors and patterns.
There are kings and saints, apostles and wealthy locals – all conveniently housed someplace within.
The floors and walls are filled with York’s public memory, including several plaques commemorating soldiers or regiments who died protecting York or the Crown.
Behind the Minster, there’s a lovely garden where the armies of York’s past are memorialized together. Each bay is labeled with conflicts that include Napoleonic conflict in the Pyrenees alongside Japan in WWII.
Just a very sweet place to sit and think, and write.
Tonight, we have tickets to The Mystery Plays.
My beautiful cousin Marian died last month. It will be my regret that I spent so much of my life not knowing her, not visiting her, not celebrating life’s little moments and achievements with her. While she certainly did not lack family or friends, I know my life would have been richer having her in it longer than the few years we did spend together. It was only distance and my taking so many things for granted that stopped me from connecting with her sooner.
Marian assured me of the existence of the communion of saints. It’s something I never understood, never took seriously until I had one wonderful phone call with her where I explained some extraordinary things that had happened to me after laying flowers on a grave in my hometown cemetery. I have a much fuller appreciation for this sacred bond we all have, one to the other, and I owe that understanding to Marian.
Just this past week, I was in the house I recently inherited after my father died. Every single time I walked in there, I said, “This carpet has to come up – it has to be the first thing I do, no matter what.” I had planned some small renovations, certainly, and I planned to update the backyard to make it more summer friendly, but in fact, I could have just shampooed the wall-to-wall carpet and been done with it.
I hired a contractor, bought hard wood oak flooring, made appointments for the carpet to come up and the floors to be laid down. It was probably within the first few minutes of pulling up the old baseboards that the contractor saw the termite damage to the walls. He went in the basement and found even more damage, necessitating immediate attention to the floor joists and to several places in the main floor. I brought in an exterminator, added some construction costs to the budget and realized in short order I never would have found the damage if I hadn’t been so driven to pull up the carpet. Something – or someone – was stopping me every time I walked in the door, saying “Take up the carpet, and do it first.”
All damage is now corrected and the new floors are going in today.
I come from at least five generations of carpenters and builders. When my three times great grandfather came to this country with his family, I like to think he brought his tools with him. My grandmother’s family came to Indiana from Montreal to build the first Catholic university in America. And when we needed a garage at the house where I grew up, the one we lived in before my current house, my dad, his dad, and his grandfather built it. Of all the places in my childhood, that little white garage is the one place with the most emotional attachment. I can still see them working there, together.
“Take up the carpet – do it first.”
We went to Mass together over Easter – my children, their dad, and me. We selected the Easter Vigil purely out of convenience. We all love that service and have attended many vigils in the past and with airplane and car travel plans the next day, it just seemed like the thing. We had a lovely dinner beforehand.
During the service, the priest mentioned the communion of saints and my daughter and I looked at each other, sensing Marian was close by. I was smiling to myself, remembering her gentle soul, when the priest announced that the Mass was being said in honor of my father. I felt like I’d been hit. We had no idea that the Knights of Columbus had asked for that Mass to remember my dad. My dad, who died last year. My dad, who had long been a member of the KOfC.
I live in New York and am able to visit my home parish only a few times a year, much as I wish I could visit more often. The odds that I would choose to attend that one beautiful celebratory service are astronomical. But there we were. And it was wonderful.
“Take up the carpet – do it first.”
My ancestors surround me and right now, they are guiding me. And my feet. And I like to think they will look after my house for me when I’m not there, but I suppose, the fuller appreciation of the communion of saints notwithstanding, that’s a lot to ask of the dead.
I’m delighted to announce the next title in my series of collected stories written on the MTA!
Look for my new book at key launch events in early March and for sale here at The Backpack Press in My Bookstore.
I write about New York – and everywhere else!
The Backpack Press 