I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

To every end, there must be a beginning. The story of the end of my life has yet to be written, but someone may someday want to know the tale of my beginnings. Here it goes.

I was born in La Habana, Cuba, at 2 AM on Sunday, February 21, 1943, in a maternity hospital for working-class families in a poor section of the city. I was a Pisces born in the Year of the Goat. A few days earlier, the Soviet Union had announced that the 163-day Battle of Stalingrad had ended after the last of the German Sixth Army forces surrendered. Was my birth a transcendental event on the heels of another? I very much doubt it.

According to my mother, it was the coldest day that had been registered in quite some time in Havana; weather records indicate that the temperature at the time of my birth was about 55° F, quite cold by Cuban standards. I must have shivered as I emerged from my mother’s womb. Was I ready for what the world had in store for me?

My mother was. She had been in labor for three days, waiting for a stubborn child who was reluctant to come out. And, more importantly, she had been awaiting anxiously for months, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.

Her anxiety was not without foundation. Shortly after my parent’s wedding, my mother had become pregnant. She had an uneventful pregnancy and I am told that she was bursting with excitement in anticipation of her first child’s arrival.

Alas, only a few weeks before the delivery date, a chair on which she was rocking herself collapsed, flinging her violently onto the floor. She was injured and the unborn baby was lost.

For many weeks following the miscarriage, my mother struggled with the physical and emotional consequences of the accident. She was devastated, for her lost child was a perfect, beautiful boy that would have been her pride and joy.

It took her two years to recover enough to be ready for another attempt at motherhood, and this time she was taking no chances. When told that I was on my way, she announced: “This one is mine, and I’ll make sure he grows up healthy and is raised properly.” My father, fearing for her mental health, obeyed my mother’s commands and stood back. He was a good provider but he and I always remained distant and did not become close until my mother passed away more than forty years later. So, for most intents and purposes, I was a single-parent child.

My mother dedicated her life to ensuring I was given every advantage and protected from every harm. My mother, who had been meticulously careful with all her actions during my gestation, continued her vigilance after I entered the world.

Since the very first day, she sheltered me from any potential adversity. In the early years of my infancy, when boys learned to master themselves through rough and tumble interactions with the world and each other, my mother held me back to save me from injury. She was not aware, perhaps, that the non-injuries I was sustaining could be more severe than a few cuts and bruises. I never broke a leg, fell from a tree, or got a black eye from a schoolyard scuffle. Also, I never played ball, flew a kite, or went fishing. I only learned to swim and ride a bike when I was well into my teens. I grew up carrying the heavy weight of my mother’s solicitude.

I thus grew up alone. A younger brother was born when I was four years old, but he and I were never close. The age difference kept us apart, and our temperaments and views of the world were quite different. Plus, I think my brother noticed and resented my getting more attention than he did and doing better than him academically, for he was an average student. He would go on to lead a troubled life.

I cannot lay blame for my upbringing solely on my mother, who meant well and acted out of love. My own nature conspired to render me a loner. I was more interested in nurturing the mind than cultivating the body. I enjoyed learning. I began reading for pleasure while in elementary school. I was going through adventure novels (like Treasure Island) at an age in which most kids read if anything, comic books.

I spent the first four years of my education attending a small elementary school a few blocks from our home. There I was doted on by my teachers, particularly Miss Leonor, a beautiful brunette in her twenties. She loved me and I loved her back.

When I went into the third grade, Miss Leonor brought me to the attention of her boss, Mr. Herrera, a successful businessman who was the owner of the school I attended. Mr. Herrera had my mother and I over one Saturday for a visit, I think for the purpose of evaluating me. He had gone to high school in a very good, and quite expensive, Catholic school and was planning to perhaps recommend me for a scholarship at that school, for we were too poor to afford the tuition they charged and the idea of enrolling me in a public school was “unthinkable” due to the poor quality of Cuba’s government-run educational institutions.

I must digress to describe briefly my living conditions growing up. My father was a taxicab driver and made just enough for us to eke out a living. We all lived in a house owned by an unmarried aunt on my father’s side, who bought it with a small inheritance she had received. The house had three bedrooms, but was quite crowded, holding our family unit plus three unmarried aunts and my paternal grandmother, who lived until I was a teenager. As a result, I never had a room of my own growing up. I slept on a Murphy Bed in a corridor and had a desk set against one of the walls of the living room, where I did my homework, kept my books, and stored a few valuables. In summary, I lived in isolation, a single boy in a house full of women.

I remember to this day my visit to Mr. Herrera’s home, for he owned a house in the far suburbs of La Habana that was the total opposite of my own. There was a large flower and vegetable garden and separate enclosures where Mr. Herrera raised chickens and pigs. The house had many rooms, but the one that I liked the best was a den that featured a TV set, a rarity in 1949 among people of modest means like us. I was very impressed with Mr. Herrera (an unprepossessing middle-aged man who sported a graying beard) and his house, and he may have been satisfied with my potential because he told my mother that he indeed was going to recommend to his Alma Mater that I be admitted as a non-tuition-paying student.

So it was that, a few days later, Miss Leonor informed my mother that Mr. Herrera had arranged for me to interview with the priest in charge of finances at the Pious School in Guanabacoa, a town half an hour by bus from our home. The Piarist priests, whose order got started in Spain in the 17th century by St. Joseph Calasanz, are dedicated to evangelize through education the children of the poor, and to this end have established unique schools throughout the world.

The Piarists had five schools in Cuba, the one in Guanabacoa being the oldest and largest. The Guanabacoa school was part of an impressive complex that included a three-story main building featuring cells for the priests, housing for the out-of-town pupils who resided on campus, a huge kitchen and dining room, ample classroom space on the lower two floors, and a very large backyard which served as a playground as well as an exercise arena and was the site of outdoors school events. The most eye-catching part of the complex, however, was a cloister containing a lovely indoor garden, which held numerous specimens of domestic and foreign plants of all kinds. (The cloister was featured in a series of postal stamps issued by the Cuban government in 1957, to commemorate the school’s centennial). Adjacent to the main building were a church, parking lots, and (later) a seminary. 

I was immediately enthralled by the place. Once it became my school, it remained one of my favorite places, even after I graduated.

On my first visit, I was to meet with the priest in charge of the school's financial matters, including tuition assistance. According to their charter, Pious schools have two kinds of students: those whose parents can afford to pay tuition and those who are admitted for free. There was inequality, however, built into the arrangement that I found in Guanabacoa: the paying students received a better education, had the best teachers and facilities. The tuition-free students were located on the bottom floor, with only a couple of teachers responsible for everything. The paying students were trained to attend college upon graduation; the tuition-free students were expected to proceed to a trade school or get blue-collar jobs.

We anticipated that Mr. Herrera would have recommended that I be admitted to the tuition-free school, for which available spaces were limited. However, after a very pleasant conversation, the priest with whom I met (an energetic, yet affable short man in his forties) related to my mother that Mr. Herrera was advocating that I receive a merit scholarship that would admit me, tuition-free, to the same high-quality schooling the children of the rich received, and that he concurred with Herrera’s recommendation and approved that I start attending the Pious School next September, as a fourth-grade student. He added a clarification: my status as a student on a scholarship was not to be disclosed to the teachers, staff, or other students. I would be on par with the children of the wealthy who could afford one of the most expensive private schools in Cuba.

I was only eight years old at the time, but I still remember how astonished and elated my mother and I were at the news. I have always interviewed well, a gift that has helped me time and again throughout my life, so I presume that my conversations with Father Manich, and previously Mr. Herrera, must have impressed them favorably.

That was the beginning of the most important formative period of my life. I attended the Pious School all the way from fourth grade to my graduation from high school and loved every minute of it. I learned much and greatly appreciated the skill and devotion of all my teachers, priests, and laymen alike.

I graduated with top honors in 1960. I do not take particular pride in being the top student in my class, or getting “As” on every course I ever took (except physical education, where I barely passed). Studying came easy for me and doing the homework and preparing for exams were just chores to be carried out without putting much thought into them.

Being a gifted student, however, had downsides. I was already a loner by nature, and an invisible barrier was created between me and my classmates, which only a few of them would get through. I was not aloof, or standoffish, or vain. It was just that I found many of my fellow students uninteresting because the things that attracted them (like baseball, action movies, and comic books) meant little to me. Likewise, what I liked (literature, history, music, the fine arts) was considered arcane by most of them.

Music, in particular, was an important dividing line. I began listening to music while I was doing my homework, sitting at my desk in the living room of our house. With all the women coming and going, it was always very noisy at home, so I started listening to music on the radio to drown out the chit-chat. At first, I would listen to popular songs, but I quickly found those vulgar and distracting. I then landed on a station, CMBF, that played only classical music, and I became hooked. I did not quite understand what I heard, but soon was addicted.

And this is how I got to know my best childhood friend, one whose passing decades ago I still lament. Angelo was the son of a high executive who oversaw some of Texaco’s operations in Cuba. The family lived in a large house on a hilltop with a view of Havana Bay. They were affluent and well-educated.

Angelo was the top student in the class that followed mine. We became acquainted during the school bus trips that took us back and forth twice a day between home and the Pious School. I learned that we had similar tastes and, particularly, were both quite fond of classical music. One day, Angelo told me his parents had bought him a nice new record player console on which to listen to his growing collection of classical records. Would I want to come to his home some afternoon and listen to some Brahms (his favorite composer). I jumped at the opportunity and, for the next ten years or so, he and I became inseparable. I would come to his house, where we were often joined by a classmate of his, Vicente, who was also very bright and a lover of music. We would listen to one record after another, talk politics and other current affairs, have an excellent lunch prepared by Angelo’s mother, and argue to no end over whether Toscanini or Karajan was a better conductor. It was perhaps effete, but those afternoons at Angelo’s house were very important in rounding up my education in ways beyond what the school could provide.

I graduated in June 1960. I was the Valedictorian of my class and delivered the last commencement address given at the Pious Schools, which were taken over and closed by the government right after the end of the school year.

I could have started at the University of Havana the following year. However, the school was now requiring that all new students join the Communist Party. I was determined to get a job rather than sign up with the Party but was saved by the intervention of another benefactor, this time a good friend of one of my aunts. The lady was well-connected in Catholic and academic circles, and when she learned of my predicament she came up with an idea: I should apply for a scholarship to be admitted as a freshman at the Universidad de Villanueva, a private university run by the Augustinian Priests, sister of Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Villanueva did not have any scholarships of its own available, but there was an opening for a scholarship to study engineering sponsored by Bacardi, the rum manufacturer. The time to apply for such a scholarship was almost closed, so my aunt’s friend undertook to help me secure and file an application.

I applied, took an exam, had another personal interview, and was awarded the scholarship, the last one (to my knowledge) that was ever granted by Bacardi in Cuba. It was the autumn of 1960.

The Villanueva campus was in Miramar, an exclusive neighborhood on the waterfront south and west of the center of Havana. Miramar boasted wide avenues and old palatial mansions and was the site of many foreign consulates and embassies. Thus, Villanueva had a beautiful campus in a lovely area, but attending it presented a difficulty for me: to get there from home, I had to travel on three buses and then proceed on foot for nearly a mile. It was an hour and a half each way, but I was glad to do it because the quality of the school more than made up for the inconvenience. I had planned on majoring in Chemical Engineering, and Villanueva had a great program in that discipline; it even had built a small sugar mill in one of the school buildings, so students could get hands-on experience in industrial chemical processes. It was ideal for me.

Sadly, my dream was truncated by external events. In the second semester of my freshman year at Villanueva, the doomed “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba took place. On April 17, 1961, the school was closed by the government and never reopened; I was later told it had been turned into a warehouse, and all the facilities and academic wealth of the institution had gone to waste.

That was the end of my formal education in Cuba. Not being willing to take a Communist Party oath, I stayed home for a full year, during which I took French lessons at the Alliance Française, and started taking after-hours German lessons. I read, went to the movies, or to the National Library to listen to its excellent classical music collection (there I became acquainted for the first time with opera, one of the few benefits of my months of forced inaction).

It was not until 1960 that I met a girl that I really liked, one that would have become my wife had I not left Cuba. Mercan was a beautiful brunette who had been courted unsuccessfully by over a dozen boys by the time we met. She, like me, was an intellectual and had no patience for things like soap operas, sewing, and home economics. Her father had fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and had been forced to migrate to Cuba, where he and his late wife raised Mercan, her sister Alicia, and their younger brother Julio (Julito).

Julito was who brought us together. He was a little devil of a boy, always making mischief and getting away with it because he was one of the funniest people I ever met. I met Julito through my brother, and Julito adopted me because I was serious and businesslike, all the opposite of him. Julito introduced me to his eldest sister, and the three of us spent many a pleasant hour together in their apartment, downing Cuban soft drinks, talking politics (we were all strong opponents of the Castro regime), and watching comedy shows on TV. Mercan captivated me with her beauty and quick wit, and I found myself falling in love with her.

But it was not to last. An opportunity to leave the country presented itself two years later and it was too good to pass up. Mercan and I wept profusely as we said our goodbyes; we corresponded a couple of times after my arrival in the United States, and then silence. I hope she has had a good life, and still remember her as my first true love.

As 1962 started, nothing was happening that appeared to change the dismal future that lay in store for us in Cuba. My parents started getting together the mounds of paperwork required to leave the country. One of my aunts on my mother’s side was in Miami and helped us with the application and provided the dollar fees required for their processing. The plan was that my brother and I would come to the United States together, I would get a job and support us, and later help my parents make the trip. The two of us filed simultaneous applications to depart Cuba in the spring of 1962.

My brother, who at 15 was able to travel out of Cuba without needing a U.S. visa, received a telegram from the government authorizing his departure in July 1962, while I, who was 19, was still awaiting my visa. He left, and upon arrival in Miami, was sent to a camp (“Camp Matecumbe”) south of the city where unaccompanied Cuban children were kept, waiting for their parents to arrive from Cuba, or pending their resettlement elsewhere in foster homes across the country.

I was left behind, waiting for my visa, which finally arrived in mid-October 1962. The fateful telegram came days afterward, and I was directed to proceed to the offices of Pan American Airways to get a ticket for a departure for Miami on October 27. I went to Pan Am’s offices on the afternoon of October 22 and got my plane ticket. Upon returning home I turned on the illegal short-wave radio that had been bequeathed to us by earlier departing relatives. We all gathered around the radio, and listened, as it was our custom, to the evening broadcasts of the Voice of America. That evening’s broadcast was to be different, though. At 7 PM, President John F. Kennedy went on the air, announcing the establishment of a quarantine against the Soviet Union activities in Cuba. He said:

“…[A] strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, from whatever nation or port, will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers.” The Cuban Missile Crisis had started.

The following day, commercial airline operations between Cuba and the United States were suspended, and the Pan Am flights were stopped, never to resume. I was left holding a worthless ticket for a flight that never took place. My future seemed glum.

I was able, however, to leave Cuba with my parents seven months later, as detailed in “The Black Pen.” But that is another story.

END

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over one hundred of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in anthologies and paying magazines, blogs, audiobooks, and podcasts. Some of his unpublished works have also received "honorable mentions" from a number of paying publications. The first collection of his stories, “The Satchel and Other Terrors” was released in February 2023 and is available through Amazon and other retailers.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

Nelson Mandela

Part 1: Blame John G.

I was born into a poor family in La Habana, Cuba in February 1943. My father had to go to work as a laborer in the cane fields at the age of seven to support his widowed mother and sisters, and never got a formal education; he ended up making a meager living as a taxicab driver. My mother, one of six children of a grocery store owner, was a housewife who only got the sketchy schooling that middle-class girls received in the early part of the twentieth century. Both of my parents, therefore, viewed going to school as a way out of poverty and were determined to see I got as good an education as it could be managed.

I was a gifted student and was able to receive a solid education thanks to getting a scholarship to attend, tuition-free, one of the best private schools in Cuba. As I negotiated high school, the questions that my parents and I faced regarding life after graduation included whether I should attend college and, if so, what course of studies should I pursue.

Here the calculus involved, not what my academic preferences were but what professions were perceived as being most lucrative. At the time (it was the 1950s) there was a glut of teachers, lawyers, and physicians in Cuba, so those careers were disfavored and my family steered me away from them. On the other hand, holders of technical degrees, particularly engineers, had no trouble getting good jobs, since the supply of such professionals was limited and demand was high.

A career decision was thus thrust upon me when I was in tenth grade. When I graduated from high school I would enroll in the university and get an engineering degree. The next step was simple: I enjoyed organic chemistry, which I found akin to voodoo magic, and had an excellent Chemistry teacher, who made learning a difficult subject almost a game. For those reasons, I opted for becoming a chemical engineer.

I graduated from high school in 1960, at the time when Fidel Castro was already in power and well on his way to turning Cuba into a totalitarian state. The political situation on the island affected my professional plans. I could have entered the free University of Havana and pursued there an Engineering course, but incoming university students would be required to join the Communist Party, which I was loath to do.

I was rescued from my predicament by a friend of my aunts, who suggested I should apply for a scholarship at the Universidad de Villanueva, a private university run by the Augustinian Priests, a sister school to Villanova University in Pennsylvania. There was an opening for a scholarship to study engineering at Villanueva sponsored by Bacardi, the rum manufacturer. I applied, went through tests and interviews, and was awarded the scholarship, the last one, to my knowledge, that was ever granted by Bacardi in Cuba. It was the autumn of 1960.

I planned on majoring in Chemical Engineering, and Villanueva had a great program in that discipline; it even had built a small sugar mill on campus, so students could get hands-on experience in industrial chemical processes.

I attended Villanueva through the first one and a half semesters of the 1960-61 academic year, did well, and was enjoying myself. Then Fate intervened and forced me to make a drastic career change.

The doomed “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba took place on April 17, 1961, whereupon the school was closed by the government; I was later told it was turned into a warehouse.

That was the end of my education in Cuba. Had matters been otherwise, perhaps I would have stayed in Cuba and become a chemical engineer. It was not meant to be.

My parents and I came to the United States in 1963, among the many thousand destitute Cubans reaching these shores to escape the oppression of a tyrannical government. Shortly after arrival, I began to look for a way to continue my education. I had a constraint: I could not go away from Miami, for I did not want to leave my family so soon after coming to a strange country. I enrolled at the University of Miami, but Chemical Engineering, my preferred choice, was not among the programs they offered. I had to settle for switching to Electrical Engineering, a discipline that I had never considered before and did not interest me.

I was able to attend school in Miami, and later in Ohio and New York, through a generous loan program developed by the Kennedy Administration for Cuban refugees. Cuban Loan Program funds paid for the four years it took me to get a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Miami. After receiving my Bachelor’s Degree, I went to work for an electric utility in its planning department. While that was probably the most interesting job I could get at a utility, the work bored me to tears.

It was out of boredom that I decided to apply for a program at Ohio State University that allowed me to work at a school engineering laboratory while taking courses part-time toward getting a PhD. I moved to Columbus, Ohio in the Fall of 1967, the first time away from my family, leaving the relative comfort (for a Cuban) of the Miami environment.

The nature of the research I did at Ohio State was somewhat more interesting than transmission line planning. At the end of four years, I received a PhD in Electrical Engineering with very little practical knowledge of the subject and no great desire to expand it.

I worked in Columbus for a year after graduation and then moved back to Orlando, Florida in 1972 to take a position with an aerospace company helping design guidance systems for a new missile being developed by the U.S. Navy. The work was challenging and interesting, but Fate intervened again to steer me, this time in the person of my office mate John G.

John was in his mid-fifties, twenty years older than I. He was a very nice, skinny man who was going through a streak of bad luck. His wife had divorced him and her lawyer had secured a property settlement that took away his home and forced him to pay alimony, leaving him penniless. John became a chain-smoking bundle of nerves who could hardly concentrate at work and coughed frequently. I felt sorry for the fellow.

I became even sorrier for John when the company decided to lay him off. There were at least two reasons for this. First, after being employed at the company for two decades, his salary was high for someone in his position as a line engineer. Second, he had learned his Electrical Engineering skills in the nineteen fifties, and never quite mastered the use of computer-aided design tools, so he was becoming technically obsolete. In addition, his productivity had declined because of his personal situation.

The company may have been justified in getting rid of John. However, the dismissal rendered him unemployable, an overqualified fifty-something, at a time when keeping employed was crucial. I was not thirty years old yet, but I pictured myself in a similar situation twenty years hence and got scared. For the first time, it dawned on me that being an engineer in the U.S. forced one, in most cases, to remain an employee of a corporation with no assurances of long-term employment. I could work for many years and then find myself thrown on the street.

What could I do to improve my chances of steady, secure employment? I spent some time examining the job market and came to realize that it was the total opposite of what I had seen in Cuba, and the strategy that my parents and I had selected – and to which I had adhered since coming to the States – was erroneous. In fact, in America, doctors and lawyers made top money, were highly respected by society, and were far more secure in their long-term professional outlook than engineers.

That realization made me focus on the professional switch that my friend and former roommate Paul was making. He had started his life as a physicist and, after securing a job with Bell Labs, had been sent to get a Master’s Degree at MIT and had graduated with honors from that institution. Despite these successes, he had decided to switch careers and was now a first-year student at Harvard Law School. Was he doing the right thing?

I never had paid much attention to the law as a profession. I knew it involved a lot of writing (something I enjoyed and did well; I had been the editor of my high school’s magazine for two years), arguing (which did not come natural to me), and appearing in public (of which I had no experience), so on the whole it was a dubious field into which to cast my fortune, but I was ready to make a major career decision and did not stop to consider whether I would actually enjoy the work. It had to be better than engineering.

I decided to make a gamble: I would apply to the top five ranked law schools in the country and, unless I was accepted to one of them, would give up switching to law as a profession. My rationale was that getting a law degree from one of those five schools was likely to lead to a successful practice; going to a lesser school might be a disastrous professional change and leave me worse off than staying with my current employment.

I sent out the five applications. One of the schools, Yale, rejected me outright. Another, Stanford, rejected me after a long delay. Harvard placed me on a waiting list and ultimately also found no place for me. Berkeley and Columbia, however, admitted me to their upcoming entering classes, with an expected 1976 graduation date.

I was pleased with the results because they signaled a good chance of future professional success. I chose to go to Columbia because Berkeley was on the other side of the country, far from family and friends. Columbia, on the other hand, is in New York, two hours by plane, a day and a half by car, from my family in Florida.

So, I spent three years in Manhattan, living in dorms, cooking for myself or eating out, enjoying for the most part the law school courses and the cultural life of the metropolis, but developing an aversion to living in dirty, expensive, unsafe, crowded New York City. That aversion prevented me from seeking a job with a New York law firm.

My academic course of studies at Columbia went well. I graduated in May 1976, became an associate at a medium-sized Washington, D.C. firm, made partner after seven years as an associate, and went on to practice for almost forty years before retiring in 2015. In that period, I made several discoveries. I learned that practicing law was less intellectually demanding than doing engineering work; I found out that I had what it took to succeed as a lawyer; and realized that I would never love my new profession but was content with having made the switch.

Part 2: I like It

Since I learned to read (my aunt Maria said that I was two at the time) I had a passion for the printed word and devoured everything that was placed before me. My aunt Laudelina, who had received an education, read every night before going to sleep, and she let me read her castoffs. Not everything she read was appropriate for me (she spent weeks going through “Gone with the Wind” and never gave it to me – not that I would have enjoyed it), but some of her stuff was fine.

I recall reading one of her castoffs, an adventure novel called “Rupert of Hentzau,” when I was only seven years old and thinking it was a lot of fun, as were a number of other stories to which I became exposed. Since those early years, the quality of the material I read or listen to in audiobooks has improved, but my appetite for reading fiction has remained unabated but is now bounded by the time now available to me; anything in print that is available for me to read must be great if I am to give it any of my remaining time. I have dropped reading newspapers and magazines altogether.

I cannot recall the first time I actually wrote something that was not an assignment from school. I became the editor of the student newspaper at my high school when I was in the tenth grade, and I wrote editorials, articles, and even gossip columns for every monthly issue for two years until my graduation. I thought writing was easy and enjoyable but did not take it seriously.

I did no writing whatsoever during those dreary years when I was trying to leave Cuba, or in the period I spent getting a college education. I did, however, remain aware of the new wave of Latin American writers that were becoming famous and got familiar with the works of Borges, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, and Cortázar, and their Cuban counterparts, particularly Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas and José Lezama Lima.

My interest in literature reawakened around 1968 or 69, when I was living in Columbus, Ohio, attending Ohio State and working on my PhD in Electrical Engineering. There, I met a fellow Cuban who quickly became one of my closest friends and an important influence on my future life as a writer. His name is Eloy and, at the time, he was pursuing a doctorate in Romance Languages at Ohio State. Eloy and I discussed often our shared love for Latin American fiction and he encouraged me to audit a class he was taking under an excellent Argentinian professor who was going over the works of many contemporary Latin American writers up to then unknown to me. In particular, the course covered the section “Informe Sobre Ciegos” (Report on Blind Men) of Ernesto Sábato’s novel “Sobre Hombres y Tumbas.” The Informe blew me away by the hallucinating, surrealistic quality of its prose. I did not sympathize with Sábato’s twisted protagonist but his brilliant depiction in the novel made me think, for the first time: “I wish I could write like that.”

Out of my auditing of that course came the writing of my first short story, “The Black Cat,” now mercifully lost. I do not remember the details of the story, but when I showed it to the professor, she delicately suggested that it needed more work. I am sure it did. I did some other writing while in Columbus, but virtually nothing is left of it except snippets, now incorporated in a couple of my stories.

More years passed. Engineering, law, marriage, and family life occupied my time until March 2015, when I retired. For the first couple of years, I did little but become increasingly bored with life after full employment. Then, in 2017, I had a dream.

In the dream, which I vividly recalled when I woke up, human life on Earth was being threatened by a subtle invasion by extra-terrestrials who were planning to extinguish humanity by “poisoning the wells” with a substance that, when ingested by pregnant women in their drinking water, prevented them from giving birth to females. Through that ploy, the invaders expected, that human life would come to an end after a generation or two without having to fire a shot.

I turned my dream into my first short story, “Something in the Water.” I wrote the story as the transcript of the police interview of an Indian youth who had learned of the aliens’ plot and sought to destroy the invaders by setting afire the tavern in which he worked and where the invaders gathered to hatch their plot. In an added touch, I left the ending indefinite, suggesting that the aliens might or might not have succeeded in their plot.

After writing “Something in the Water” and editing the draft several times (something I have always done with my work since the days I was a lawyer) I sent it to Eloy for his comments; Eloy, at the time, was a full professor and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at a Western university. He liked the story and sent it to a colleague, who dismissed it as the type of writing that serves as therapy for some pensioners. Undaunted, Eloy had the students in a class he was teaching read the story and comment on it. The students’ response was enthusiastic. Eloy concluded: “Your writing shows promise. Keep at it and don’t be discouraged if there are negative reactions. Writing is a difficult field to get into.” He has continued to serve as the main critical reviewer and mentor of my literary efforts.

The bug had bitten me and I began writing short stories and sending them out to magazines in the hope of getting them published. After many rejections (they are the daily bread of writers, regardless of talent) I scored my first hit a year and a half later, when in early 2019 another short story of mine, “The Blue Pearls,” was accepted and published.  “Something in the Water” was accepted for publication in 2020, becoming my fifteenth published story.

A question I keep getting asked is, “How do you get the ideas for your stories?” The simple, but unilluminating answer, is “from everywhere.” Many, like “Something in the Water” arise from recalled events or nightmares. Others are prompted by items in the news, like a story (perhaps apocryphal) that I once read about a hush-hush research project funded by the religious right to find the location of the soul in the human body. I turned that into one of my scariest stories, “Pineal Split,” published at the end of 2020, my thirty-fifth story.

Other stories come out of real-life incidents like the winter night my daughter drew my attention to a large slug that was seeking warmth, pasted to the door leading to the backyard. That sight was the genesis of “Slug,” one of my favorite tales. I am an opera fan, and nearly a dozen of my stories have plots that relate to operas that I admire: Tristan und Isolde, Turandot, Cavalleria Rusticana, Tales of Hoffman, La Boheme, and others. Still, a few others reflect my personal background and life experiences; “The Magic Chrysler,” for example, is based on reminiscences of the desperate plight of people trying to escape from Cuba in the late 1970s. Still others arise from classical mythology and fairy tales, like “The Yellow Butterfly” and “Scheherazade’s Last Tale.” Others are based on historical events, like “The Last Tsar.” And so on.

Given the great variety of their sources, my stories tend to be very different from each other. I take pride in never repeating myself and have not needed to do so because the world is like an immense summer meadow, full of diverse stories ready to be plucked. As of this writing, I have authored numerous short stories, and have been lucky enough to have gotten over a hundred of them published. I love all my literary children, though I recognize that some of them have turned out better than others. The list of rejections of my stories runs over thirty single-spaced pages.

I have completed two novels. The first, The Taíno Women, is based on the first century of colonization of Cuba by the Spanish Conquistadores; the second, The Travels of Lázaro Serrano, takes place two centuries later. I have started writing a third, which occurs in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, but do not know if I will live long enough to finish it. I am impatient by nature, and the research and writing of a three-hundred-page manuscript requires a concentrated effort that is alien to me. When I get an idea for a three-thousand-word short story, I finish it in three days or less. Writing a chapter of a novel seems to take much longer, and calls for more time and effort than I can typically muster.

“How about your writing style?” I have never tried to do a post-mortem on one of my works, but I believe my fiction is terse and economical, like the writings of one of my heroes, Ernest Hemingway. My writing reflects over forty years of practice as a lawyer, where clarity and conciseness are at a premium. That is perhaps why I never have tried to write poetry.

Some have asked me: “Why do you keep writing? Haven’t you had enough?” The honest answer is that I write because I cannot help it. I enjoy too much taking an idea, a concept, and turning it into an interesting story that may not always have literary merit but will (hopefully) be appealing to readers now and some years into the future.

Perhaps a future scholar will do an analysis of my work and pinpoint the recesses of my subconscious that hold the key to why and how I write. My answer to that future scholar, apart from wishing him or her good luck, is to paraphrase Mick Jagger and note “It’s only cheap fiction, but I like it.” And I will keep writing it as long as my brain cells function and my arthritic fingers can tap on the keys of my laptop. 

END

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over one hundred of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in anthologies and paying magazines, blogs, audiobooks, and podcasts. Some of his unpublished works have also received "honorable mentions" from a number of paying publications. The first collection of his stories, “The Satchel and Other Terrors” was released in February 2023 and is available through Amazon and other retailers.

“Fairways and Bluewater Boracay! Get out!”

Our driver, the smiling jockey of the gaudy yellow electric cart we just rode in, gestured towards the massive gates of the resort. He had a huge beer belly. His Red Horse Beer t-shirt was soaked with sweat. I knew immediately where the belly came from. My hand brushed the peeling paint of our transport as we got out and grabbed our suitcase. I put an arm around Flora protectively, and a quick look back ensured Mike and Annie made it off without tripping over their sandals. Something deep inside was bothering at my mind, nipping at the edges. This something had no face, but I could tell it needed to be addressed before my overthinking ruined the whole trip.

The four of us hurried to a waiting van with the resort logo stuck to the side, hoping that a hot shower and food could be found somewhere within. We were exhausted. The day started early and dark, with a five-hour drive to Caticlan. Then a wait to get on the busy ferry at the port. We then survived an hour-long boat ride across the rough seas to Boracay proper, where the waiting electric cart took us through the first two stations until we arrived at ours - hot, hungry, and more than a little bit fatigued. The resort was made up of separate mauve and stone buildings. Ours seemed to be on the far side of the massive compound.

On arrival, we took a steep set of cement stairs down to the lobby at the bottom. The suitcase bumped along behind us, musically hitting every stair like a note on a xylophone. As we sidled up to the counter a feeble old man in a loud tropical button-up stepped out of the mirrored elevator to our left, trailed by a young Filipina. She was hardly older than a teenager. He looked hangry. Hungry and angry. His face was an alarming color red. He spat more than spoke as he looked back at his companion.

“I don’t care if you’re hungry, I don’t like the food here!” he grumbled, waving his hand around the spacious lobby.

“But I don’t want to go all the way to the beach just to eat, they have free lunch here!” The pretty Filipina pleaded in broken English. She looked desperate to eat - if you could judge by the miserable look on her face. She wore a bright golden sundress and straw beach hat on her head.

“Tough! I’m paying for this, so we do what I want!”

Looking away, not wanting to embarrass the Filipina any more than she already was, I wondered how they were related – husband and wife? Such matches were common in the Philippines as many older men came here specifically looking for young women to marry. In fact, Flora and I are eighteen years apart in age. Friends and family gave me grief after announcing my move to marry in the Philippines because everyone assumed it was to bag a younger woman. That could not have been further from the truth. I came here to escape the toxic environment in America. Her age was a point of contention when we met, but once we got to know each other, that ceased being a problem. We were in love despite our age difference. We vowed to make it work, even if people thought me some kind of pervert with a mid-life crisis.

If the old man and Filipina were married, the gap was more pronounced, maybe fifty years. The Filipina couldn’t have been more than twenty, and the grumpy man must have been at least seventy. Glancing over to Mike to see if he had seen this scene play out, he appeared to be busy getting us checking in, flashing plastic. Something about the pair unnerved me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It only added to my discomfort and overthinking. It was almost as if the couple were more like Flora and me than unlike us. We stopped the elevator and wheeled the bags inside. The feeling from before grew stronger, something felt more acutely here in paradise.

As the numbers changed from floor to floor, I couldn’t help but wonder how much flack this guy got for being with a girl who was practically a teenager. He didn’t look like he cared at all. I did. It was then I recognized the feeling that had been nagging at me all day. I’d received hate comments a few days before after writing and publishing an essay about marrying Flora, a younger woman from the Philippines. What would the would-be feminist mafia that attacked me so viciously have said about the pair, fifty years apart in age? We were only eighteen years apart, but dozens of rabid women took away my “male feminist” card away because they said I was an asshole and an abuser.

I still don’t know why. And still the feeling in my chest grew.

According to the website, “Fairways & Bluewater Resort in Boracay Island offers nothing less than world-class service and facilities. In here, we don’t just give pampering a new definition. We also let you mix business and pleasure during your holiday.”

There were five floors. Mike and Annie were on the fifth and Flora and I were on the third. Mike had graciously absorbed the cost of the resort. We could never have hoped to pay for something so extravagant and ritzy. Our room was spacious, with two pillow-soft king size beds and a huge sliding glass door covering one wall opening out to the resort’s golf course. The manicured greens gave way to rolling hills and jungle. The view was spectacular. The brown stone-tiled bathroom was bigger than our bedroom at home in Iloilo City. The bathroom had one other thing you don’t see often in the Philippines – a shower with unlimited hot water. We raced to strip off our sweaty clothes to see who could make it to the shower first. It ended in a tie. So we shared the shower, which led to an afternoon of splashing around and steamy marital naughty time. I’d hoped our first vacation away from the kids would lead to intimacy but wasn’t expecting it to happen as soon as we arrived.

After washing away our efforts in the steamy shower and soaking for some time, we got out our phones and sent a text to Mike and Annie. We suggested we go and get seafood. Figuring we were on an island, it was bound to be fresh caught that morning. After dressing in t-shirts and shorts, we slipped into our sandals and headed to the lobby, flush-faced and hungry. What Flora didn’t know was this whole time my mind was in turmoil, and no amount of seafood was going to make it behave like we were on vacation. Experience taught me that when my brain was in a state of fuckery like this, nothing could change it. The published story had caused a stir online. Not for the last time, I wished that I hadn’t read the comments before leaving on vacation.

We took another electric cart to station one, this time lime-green with a happy blue sailboat covering the side. Our driver said was the freshest fish in Boracay was to be found there. We stopped at the entrance to a gated town square, and tread lightly through a labyrinth of twisting narrow streets. We wove past dirty hostels and ladies of the night, to a small, simple resto with turquoise plastic chairs and tables. The amazing thing was the massive cooler displaying all types of colorful fish, shellfish, giant shrimp, prawns, Philippine lobsters, and tasty scallops. We could order by the kilogram and it would be cooked right in the restaurant and brought to our table.

“What do you want Mike?” I said pointing at the local who was scooping green shells into a small bucket to weigh.

“I want a fish. A big fucking fish!” He was eyeing the orange Lapu Lapu, and the colorfully-dressed lady scooped that up as well.

We ended up getting steamed Talaba(Oysters) and sour Sinigang made with the large shrimp. We added a legendary-sized Pusit (Squid) and the Lapu Lapu, both grilled to perfection. The waitress piled our table high with the seafood, and the rickety plastic bowed under the weight. To say the dinner was mind-blowingly delicious is an understatement.

It was better than anything any of us had ever tasted.

During dinner, when the conversation lagged because everyone was happy with mouthfuls of fish, I couldn’t help but think about the couple at the hotel. My mind swirled around the day’s events. It gave me a headache. I’d judged them reflexively without knowing their story and was ashamed. Flora and I hated it when people did that to us. Maybe the old man married her because he wanted a companion in his golden years. It doesn’t always have to be about sex. Maybe she agreed to marry and take care of him in exchange for a better life for both her and her family. Many of the men who come to the Philippines to marry also take care of the family of the bride, knowing how close the family units are in the archipelago. Hell, maybe they are in love? Is it so terrible for two people to come together for their own reasons? Maybe the real problem is gossipy people like me who can’t keep their noses out of other people’s business? After dinner, we walked the beach at sunset to station two and watched the fiery orange sun disappear into red and purple on the horizon. It was gorgeous and awe-inspiring. We were spent and satisfied with our full stomachs when we retired for the night.

“WAFFLES!”

I smelled the doughy aroma before spying them on the decadent buffet. The spacious and sunny room smelled of bacon and maple syrup. Flora and Annie had already started piling steaming spoonsful of savory beef Tapa onto their plates. This was their country. The dark-haired women knew the niceties of the Filipino buffet, while Mike and I had to take a moment to see how the whole thing worked. At fiftyish, we took one look at that delicious buffet and were tweens again. It didn’t take long until we had heaped our plates with eggs, waffles, and fresh fruit. We made a quick trip back for steaming coffee and iced pineapple juice, then hunkered down, hardly looking at the gossiping women or each other.

But I noticed the same pale old man arguing with the same teenaged Filipina from the day before. “This food is garbage!” he yelled, “Find me something I can eat!” Noticing the matching gold wedding bands the pair wore, I realized this Filipina was really this nasty and privileged old miser’s wife.

There, I did it again - I judged! Maybe he was sick? Maybe mornings were not a good time for him. Maybe we happened to see him at his worst. Yes, he was grouchy, but why did I assume the cruelest of him because he was with a young woman who could have been his granddaughter? One look around the room told me everyone else was doing the same. Most people stared with their mouths hanging open. It made me wonder what people thought of Flora and I. Although we look closer in age for having spent the last twelve years together, there was still a noticeable difference. What evil things were people thinking about us? I was starting to see that this was what had been bothering me since we stepped foot in Boracay, but my mind could still not let it go. I gave the grouchy senior a last look, and then minded my own business. The old man just ignored everyone and seemed oblivious to the drama unfolding around him.

Our group left to head to the beach. We would board a multicolored banca boat for a tour around Boracay island. We headed to Puka Island, but soon turned the thrashing boat around because the open water was too dangerous to traverse. We instead dropped anchor for a quick swim in the cool tropical water. The only one of our group of four who wanted to swim in the blistering heat of the day, I dropped in the clear salty drink and paddled. Pale and chubby, my body bobbed like a cork. The cool water soothed the beginnings of sunburn starting to appear on my bald head. Soon tired from treading, I climbed the splintered ladder and shivered. Sitting in the stern next to the colorful life jackets, my skin soaked up the warming rays of the afternoon sun.

Then we sailed to the opposite end of the bay. When crossing the deep open water south of the island, we hit huge, frightening waves. They sprayed us every time we mounted a new swell. Flora gripped her orange life jacket, and we held each other tightly while the boat thrashed violently. Over the roar of the waves and their splash crashing against the hull, Flora was screaming “I don’t want to DIE!” I wanted to scream too, but only managed an open-mounted grunt that was soon filled with brackish water. When we finally made it to shore safely, we’d had enough of banca boats.

With enough excitement for one day, we headed back to the beach and stopped at a quaint little café for Mango shakes. The theme of the café was tropical, with bamboo covering the walls and ceiling. We again saw the old man, walking angrily with his long-suffering Filipina trailing behind. Her long jet hair blew wildly in the breeze as she tried to keep up. He had a scowl despite the pristine white sandy beach and the gorgeous setting sun.

“But I want a beer!” he pouted like a child.

“Get one! Don’t be so cheap!” the Filipina was clearly getting tired of the complaining and entitlement.

“But it was like five dollars! I refuse to pay that much!”

“We’re on vacation Harold, live a little!”

Shaking my head, my mind was in turmoil. I didn’t act like Harold, but wondered if the people who were sitting at the café tables thought the same things about me that they were clearly thinking about him. Why was this bothering me so much? Truthfully, little thought went into this topic in my time in the Philippines. Eleven years. But sitting here in the sparkling sun, with the press of people around us, I couldn’t stop overthinking. I couldn’t help but wonder at the thoughts of the young and old walking mindlessly along the beach. If people in the comments of my essays on the internet think I’m an evil pervert, what about these people? My brain wouldn’t stop ruminating.

The couple soon moved to where we couldn’t hear them any longer. Out of sight, out of mind. Harold wasn’t going to ruin our day; we were in paradise. Keeping up with this train of thought would ruin the trip for us. So far, the group were unaware of my turmoil, and I vowed to keep these negative thoughts to myself. We finished our mango shakes and headed back to the hotel – another bright electric cart zooming through the narrow street. After a shower and change of clothes, it was dinner at the swank restaurant in the resort. The girls played it safe and ordered Filipino dishes while us guys ordered massive burgers, a pizza, and beer.

This would prove to be our undoing.

“I don’t feel very good, but I’d love to jump in the hot tub,” I told Mike, burping and clearly uncomfortable.

“Maybe just for a while. The heat will help with the bloating.”

After bobbing around in the steam for a while, neither Mike nor I was feeling well, so we both headed to our rooms. My stomach felt dangerously full. On separate floors of the hotel that night, we suffered through chills, cramps, and diarrhea. Chilled to the bone, Flora sat me to steam in the hot shower for most of the night. Around 5 am, I fell into a fitful sleep. The sun shining through the sliding glass doors startled me awake for breakfast not long after.

It was the pizza that did us in. I learned Mike was still on the toilet this morning and would be late to breakfast.

We were not feeling much like eating. The buffet was piled with French toast, pancakes, and sausages that mocked me as we nibbled on fruit and drank black coffee. We noticed, as sad as our state was, we were still having a better time than feeble old Harold with the young Filipina. They seemed to be following us around. After a whole day, they still couldn’t seem to find anything to eat.

Seeing the couple brought up all the uncertainty from the day before, and I felt worse for having to deal with the poisonous thoughts. Should we really care what other people thought of us? Up until that essay, I didn’t care, but the comments bothered me greatly. Up until that point I’d seen myself as an advocate for women. Now, this whole group of them thought me an aging pervert, who somehow tricked my young wife into marrying me to satisfy my unnatural desires. Maybe it was the poisonous pizza, but I just wanted to go home. There we could hide away from the knowing stares of the judging people around us.

Even in paradise, if you want to be unhappy, you will find something to be miserable about. Even though grateful to be in such a beautiful place with people who loved me, I was now as, if not more miserable than Harold and his young wife.

After breakfast, we had to decide if we wanted to stay another day and try to salvage what could have been a disaster. The trip was fun, but getting sick, even in paradise, put a damper on the vacation. We didn’t feel up to a long day of travel six hours back to Iloilo City. And I was walking around in a daze with a frown on my face, thinking people were judging us.

We would have to find another hotel because we didn’t have a reservation. The resort wanted more for another night than we were willing to pay. We jumped on our phones and soon found something a little more in our price range. The we hopped another electric cart to our new digs for the night. The rooms were nowhere near as plush and ritzy as our last resort, but for one night it would do just fine. It had an air conditioner and a shower and was a little more at the level to which we were accustomed.

Later that afternoon, Mike and I recovered. We wanted to spend our last night in paradise on the beach watching the most famous sunset in the Philippines. The ladies found a spot in the sand, and we left them chattering away to walk in the rolling surf. As the sun dipped to the horizon, a thousand brilliant colors lit up the sky. We busied ourselves taking pictures and marveling at the sight of so much grandeur. As we watched the last of the sun drop below the horizon into darkness, it occurred to me that I’d spent much of this trip in my head. Instead of enjoying the company of friends, the food, and the sandy white beaches, I was overthinking and worrying. Seeing Harold and his young wife brought up feelings I’d kept buried, and instead of either talking about them to my companions or forgetting the angst for another time, let it ruin my mood. Does anyone have control over what people thought of them? It just goes to show, you can be in paradise and still believe you’re in hell. The old man wasn’t having a good time despite being in one of the most picturesque places on earth, and neither was I. The idea that maybe a few people didn’t like me sent me over the edge. On the outside it was a vacation, but on the inside, I was more miserable than Harold ever was.

On the way back to the hotel, Flora and I talked.

“Babe? Do you think I’m a dirty old man? I asked, my arm around her waist, walking past the bright lights of the noisy restaurants and bars along the boardwalk.

“Yes, of course! But you are MY dirty old man.”

“But do you ever wonder if people think less of you because you’re with an old man?”

“Ugh! I never think about it, and damnit, you are not that old!” I could tell she was losing patience with my questions.

“You know I love you, right?”

“I love you more, now shut up!”

We left Boracay the next day, and the best few hours were the last few, walking the beach with my best friend as the sun set in a kaleidoscope of color and light, and spending the rest of the night with the woman I loved. Who cares if a few people didn’t like that we had an age difference? Between us there was love and an understanding that life is precious. We couldn’t waste it pleasing others. The next time we step foot in Boracay, I will leave the overthinking at home, because there is nothing worse than being in paradise but feeling like you are in hell.

We are somewhere en route: to California, to South Dakota, to the East Coast, to Panama City. My brother and I, both preschoolers, are in the back seat of the old Dodge, and (what a smart way to keep the kids in line) my parents are singing—and we are singing along, or trying to, not yet knowing all the words. Even my parents don’t know all the words, and many of the words they do know, I find out later, they know wrong. But that doesn’t stop them from singing with loud authority all the songs they can remember, from “My Darling Clementine” to “The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboango” to “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.”

Later: Our family has grown by first one sister, then another, and the songs serve a new purpose—to rev us up for the new place we will live for a while, which is typically half a continent away from our setting-off spot. We sing “Springtime in the Rockies” on the way to Colorado Springs, “There’s a Pawnshop on the Corner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania” on the way to where you’d expect, and many, many songs, a whole dancehall act’s worth of songs—“The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and cowboy songs galore—while bound for Fort Worth.]

The romantic images conjured by the songs have little to do with what we’ll find where we’re going, but they help us look forward instead of back. We may be plunked down in a typical housing development in Fort Worth, but not till we’ve sung ourselves through the mesas and tumbleweeds of the Wild West on the way there. The songs are like cheers: for the team of our family and the new playing field. We make up for weakness in tune-carrying by sheer volume.

It wasn’t just with my family that I used to sing on the road a lot. In practically every one of the places I grew up, there was a bus to take, to school or to play. To my mind, the virtues of the neighborhood school have been overrated. A school one had to be driven to seemed to me much more exotic and grown-up than the six-blocks-away variety and riding to school in a bus made the experience more definitively Getting Away From Home. Being bussed meant a free ride—with music. Maybe some kids sing while they walk to school together, but I’d bet most require wheels rolling under them to have that joy (those few who do, in this age of isolating electronic playthings).

More powerfully than anything that actually happened in a first-grade classroom, I remember those early bus rides, bound for school in St. John’s, Newfoundland, from Pepperell Air Force Base. Some older Woody Guthrie fans led us in “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” a song that I couldn’t distinguish the words of—though I did sing something—let alone what they meant. Now that I know the words, I can’t hear them without being for a moment back on that bus.

In Colorado Springs, I walked to school; but one summer, after first or second grade, I got to ride a bus several times a week, from the nearby Air Force base to the Broadmoor Hotel, to take swimming lessons with Sergeant Susan. The sergeant was from Hawaii (we accepted his last name like a foreign exoticism); he was short, stocky, and strong, with a voice as powerful as his arms, and he loved to sing. So sing we all did, nonstop, on the way to the pool and the way back.

The sergeant’s repertoire was heavy on military anthems, which most service kids grow up with, but his passionate rendition of “Off We Go Into the Wild, Blue Yonder” seemed to have more to do with flight and adventure—and even metaphorically with love—than it did with war.  When we sang “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” not having the foggiest idea of what caissons were, I imagined them as something like the wheels of our bus, a magic bus taking us to magic places.

In those days I took my songs pretty literally, tried to make a story out of the lyrics whenever I could, and identified that story with whichever elders were singing. My mother must have been the woman to whom my father would sing “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly.” And Sergeant Susan I imagined setting down his suitcase at midnight in dimly lit halls of rooming houses across the land, still broken-hearted but always in hopes of finding his own true lover, whenever he sang “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.”

I wonder how many of the other kids on the bus still remember where they learned that song—whether, like me, whenever they hear it now, they see our sergeant, his arms extended as if offering his heart to the audience, and us singing back-up, thrilled by our mastery of lyrics so full of melancholy, mystery, and sweetness—an early introduction to the complicated pleasures and sorrows of the grown-up world.

In Altus, Oklahoma, where I arrived in time for adolescence, the local Protestants, who made up the vast majority of the town’s population, could be distinguished from each other by the extent of the restrictions imposed on their social behavior. Methodists were allowed to dance and sing and play musical instruments but weren’t supposed to drink alcohol. Baptists could sing and play, but not drink or dance. And members of the Church of Christ were confined to a cappella music. But no one was prohibited from singing, and there was lots of singing in Altus—in churches, in schools, and on buses—most memorably for me on the buses that took Methodist Youth Fellowship members on weekend outings, to camps in the country, or to Oklahoma City.  A lot of what we sang was spirituals—“Do Lord,” “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Elijah, Rock”—but what they expressed for me was less religious meaning than joy at joining voices with others on the road.

There was much less of that in college, though now and then, in cars with friends, we’d try to sing all the words of songs with many verses, typically folk classics by the likes of Dylan, Joan, and Joni, in the cause of keeping the driver awake through a late-night trip. One day I took a long bus trip during which no one sang, the first of many. Even on buses bound for political demonstrations, singing was rare, people being too respectful of each other’s right to privacy and sleep to ask for musical communion.

Now when I’m on the road with friends, the singing is all on radio or CD or iPod. Most people I know say they can’t sing (meaning, I suspect, they don’t think they sound good enough to expose their voices to others), and therefore don’t. I can remember only one time as a grown-up, years ago when I got to sing in a car the way my family used to sing.

In the middle of my first trip to Europe, I’d arranged to meet up with an older friend, Shelley, and her friend George and drive around for a few days in George’s car, starting out from a village in southern France. The first day we rode through low mountains, George taking the frequent curves at a clip that left my stomach floating a beat behind the rest of me. Suddenly there was rain—a lot of rain—and no radio anymore. George slowed to a crawl, and the late summer afternoon darkened into autumn evening. Someone must have brought up a song, maybe asking if anyone knew the lyrics—somehow, without anyone’s saying, Let’s sing, we were singing. We sang mostly show tunes, songs from the childhood of Shelley and the young manhood of George, wonderful songs that I knew if at all, only the tunes and a few words of. A child again, of different parents—sophisticated, theater-loving, city-dwellers, whose ranks I aspired to join—I did my best to follow along. 

Besides essays, Kathryn Paulsen writes novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and screenplays. Her work has appeared in publications from Canada to Ireland to Australia, including the Humber Literary Review, The New York Times, The Smart Set, The Stinging Fly, Scum, Craft, and Big Fiction. For fiction and playwriting, she's been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and other retreats. Kathryn lives in New York City but, having grown up in an Air Force family, has roots in many places. She sings with the New York City Community Chorus and enjoys dancing (especially English country and contra) and, during election season (beginning now), canvassing voters.

ramblesandrevels.blogspot.com

Memories, like muscles, tend to atrophy with neglect. They need exercise, or they deflate and disappear. But memories are also weighty, unwieldy things, so it's best if they're shared, and I'd like to share these memories with you. Of all people, my grandfather deserves to be remembered. As I write, he died 17 years ago, almost to the day.

He told me many stories about his life throughout my life. It seemed like every story he told was about a different job he had--I couldn't count them all, let alone remember. At times, he was the child in the story, working in abject poverty in the cotton fields of his native Georgia. Then he would be an adolescent working in a butcher shop, at one point defending himself against an attack wielding his butcher knife. Then, he appeared as a young man registering for service in the Air Force, remembering the deaths of several friends and family members in World War II. Later, he was a Master Sergeant, stepping away from his desk, deciding to live out his retirement as a poultry farmer somewhere in the high plateaus of Wyoming or under the boundless skies of Montana. He told me these stories (never in any sort of order) in his Georgian, Southern accent--an accent he never lost despite leaving home in his teen years and living everywhere from Okinawa, Japan, to the corn fields of Illinois, the monuments of Washington, DC, and at last the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Some of the stories were unforgettable. His father, tormented by poverty exacerbated by the Great Depression, was an alcoholic and an abusive, violent drunk. One day, when he was still a teenager, he returned home to find his father, who, in a drunken rage, was chasing his mother through the house with a knife. He tackled his father, wrestled the knife from his hand, and held him in a headlock. In surprising honesty, he told me that he was afraid he might have to kill him (or at least that thin wisp of a man who was trying to find his lost humanity in the bottom of a bottle). That feeling didn't last long, he told me. After a moment, his father, gasping in the lock, pleaded through tears, "Please, Hoyle, let me go!" He left home not long after that.

That was one of the stories he saved until I was old enough to hear it. There was no moral offered at the end of the story--there never was. Like any good writer or storyteller, he knew that a story well told was best left to the reader's conclusions. It worked. I learned two things: first, to fear the bottle, and second, that cruelty is not a genetic inevitability. While it is often borne from broken family to broken family, the trend itself can be broken. My grandfather wrestled cruelty from his family's history the way he wrestled the knife from his father's hand that day. He taught me that kindness, decency, and altruism were always possible--no matter what you've endured or where you came from. Like that Southern accent, through all the trials of a life that began in a shack during the Great Depression, kindness was a trait he never lost.

He taught me to be a teacher. Under different circumstances, he would have made a great teacher. Whether I was a child, an adolescent, or a young man, he spoke to me in a way that honored the maturity I would someday earn, the intelligence I would eventually discover, and the autonomy I longed for. In other words, he spoke to me as he would any other person he respected. His tone rarely changed whether speaking with a child or an adult. That's what a good teacher does--they acknowledge and respect the humanity of those they teach. I learned that first from my grandfather.

These big intrinsic lessons were the underlying reality of all the other smaller things he taught me--practical things like cooking, gardening, and conversation. He taught me to sing and that it's okay to treat life like a musical--moving through his home singing, without a hint of inhibition, old country story-songs by Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins, Hank Williams, and the like. Whenever I create a mental picture of him, he's cooking and singing.

My strongest memories of him are the most recent. When I would visit him in his home on the slope of Lookout Mountain in Golden, Colorado, we would mainly talk about three things: raising poultry, ranch land for sale in Montana and Wyoming, and the pulp Western novel he wanted to write. There was always a McMurray Hatchery poultry catalog on his table.  He'd show me pictures of the pheasants, chickens, ducks, and guinea hens he planned to raise. We'd talk about land he found for sale, pointing out the circled entries in the classified section of the Denver Post. And he would outline chapters of his very promising Western for me as though it were already written.

It was like this for nearly a decade. Over and over, he invited me into the world of the things he would someday do. They were so real and vivid when he enthusiastically described them that they felt like forgone conclusions--certainties that would come as surely as the changing of the seasons.  I didn't ever really notice that, for all of his planning, he never got any closer to his hen houses on the Wyoming prairie or tucked up under the vast horizon of Montana. When you're dreaming vividly, you don't notice that you're lying somewhere, immobile, in the real world.

In his late seventies, he got sick. A visit to the doctor became a referral to one specialist and then another. Finally, he learned that he had an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma--a cancer of the lymphatic system. Treatments didn't seem to slow down the progression of the disease. Eventually, his body began to swell with so much excess fluid that he needed pints drained on a regular basis. As the months progressed, standing and walking became difficult.  Then the singing stopped. Eventually, sitting became too much of a task, and a hospital bed was placed next to the window in his home office.

Have you ever watched a loved one dying? It's a strange process that feels, somehow, unreal. It's like they're being disassembled piece by piece. My grandfather was always a big man in my memory--strong and full of intelligence and vitality. Every visit to that bedside, I noticed something else missing.  Now, he could not talk; now, he could not eat or drink; now, he slept most of the time. This man who was once so full of life and dreams was deflating like a balloon before my eyes. In the end, he looked more like a sick child than the man who sang with me and taught me about kindness, service, and respect.

My last visit to him was the day before he died. I hope you'll forgive me if I say that I wondered why I was even there. By that point, he was never (at least noticeably) conscious. His breathing was irregular and labored. He was gray, his skin almost translucent.

My turn to say goodbye came.

I took his hand; it was cold and didn't respond to my touch. When was the last time I held his hand? I thought to myself.  I must have been a child of five or six. What do you say to someone when you're not sure they can hear you, and you know that it might be the last thing you ever say to them? I was at a loss for words. Under the weight of silence, I took a moment and looked around the room. As my eyes wandered, looking but not seeing, something stopped them on their aimless journey. A moment more, and the thing came into focus. On a table beside the bed, I saw the cover of the latest McMurray Hatchery catalog--a bright pheasant decorating the otherwise beige room. Besides the catalog, under a cup and some papers, was the classified section of the newspaper, open to land for sale. I looked across the room at the computer where he labored to write a single chapter of his unfinished novel. My heart broke, and after a moment, I realized that this man who had taught me so much throughout my life had a final lesson to teach me--maybe his greatest lesson.

I decided at that moment that if I wanted something or believed in something, it would not be enough to dream and plan and wait for the right moment that may never come. Life is fragile, fleeting, uncertain. I would live in the moment and take action; I would risk failure, knowing that even if I failed, I failed boldly, staving off regret in the effort.

I've heard it said that regret is the strongest emotion. I hope my grandfather, who lived so much life in his 77 years, did not experience regret in those final moments. More than anyone I know, he deserved to live his dreams--such reasonable dreams! The least I could do now was to live mine in his memory. "Thank you, Papa," I said, finally breaking the silence.

Gabe Andersen is a teacher and writer located in Houston, Texas.

It was late 2002, back when such things were still possible. I was still young, living at home, going out with Kristin, and still friends with Matt.

Usually, he would come over and we would play video games in my parents’ finished basement. That’s what we did that night. We both sat on a metal futon with a dark blue mattress. He always sat on the side nearest the television, and I would sit on the opposite end with a pillow stuffed between my back and the cold metal bar of the futon’s frame. And, in keeping with his nature, Matt lounged rather than sat, his baggy jeans and black Deftones t-shirt hanging off him.

Matt looked at me and said, “Let’s get a game, yo.”

We’ve been doing this for years by 2002, the two of us passed the gate of adulthood, either too old to keep playing or playing for too long to stop. And I was 25 by then, older than him by a few years.

I motioned to the game console, and said, “Go ahead. The game’s in there.”

He turned on the black Playstation 2 and up popped our game of the moment, NFL 2K3 by Sega Sports. Video game football has always been a staple of ours, especially since we both enjoyed watching the sport at the time. We had both grown up rooting for the hometown team, the Chicago Bears, but in the years since, I stopped watching football. Too many brain injuries / domestic abuse scandals / macho bullshit made me feel wrong about it.

I have no idea how Matt feels about football now.

“Who are you going to be?” he asked me in his unhurried, dull drawl. If you didn’t know Matt, you would think he was perpetually disinterested, often muttering in a monotone and curling his bushy goatee into a mischievous smile. Hell, I knew Matt, and I often wondered how much of him was ever really there.

“Who are you going to be?” I asked him back. After a minute, he settled on the Chicago Bears, and I chose the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 

“Fucking hungry, dude,” Matt stated as I kicked off to start the game.

The time was past ten p.m., and I asked, “Your Grandma didn’t make dinner?” Matt lived with his grandparents because he didn’t get on well with his stepfather, Tom, and didn’t make enough to live on his own. 

“No man, I mean yeah, she made food, but I didn’t eat it. Homeless motherfuckers eat better than that!”

I got ready for my first series on defense. When playing video game football, I took the liberty of blitzing Matt’s quarterback with a linebacker. This is risky because it pulled the linebacker away from the zone he normally would be defending downfield, but it yielded great results when it worked. And it kept me from getting bored. Back then, I played a lot of video game sports, many more than I do now, and I needed to spice things up.

On the second play of the game, I lined up Buccaneer Derrick Brooks at the line of scrimmage and had him run at the Bears’ quarterback, Jim Miller. Wikipedia says that Brooks was a great player, good enough to go into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014. Miller wasn’t quite that good, but he did ok for himself. After retiring, Miller has done radio and still has a gig as a football analyst on local Chicago cable.

In the video game, my linebacker hit Matt’s quarterback as the quarterback was in the process of throwing the ball. This caused the pass to only fly a few yards downfield. One of my linemen was in a fortuitous position and caught the ball. He was soon tackled, and the ball was mine on my own fifteen-yard line.

“Cocksucker!” Matt yelled. 

I said nothing and picked a pass play on the offensive menu. My quarterback, Brad Johnson, threw the ball to a receiver I didn’t know at the time, Karl Williams, and Williams caught the ball in the end zone. He danced in the digital representation of Raymond James Stadium, where the game was being played, complete with the mock pirate ship that loomed over the real end zone there. I kicked the extra point and was leading 7-0.

“So anyway, your dad got any beer?” Matt asked.

My dad had an open-fridge policy for Matt for a couple of years at that point, one of which wasn’t legal. Dad died in 2007, in the early morning after the Bears lost in Super Bowl XLI, due to alcoholism.

“Go check,” I said. “Probably. I know he bought a case yesterday. The cats were jumping in it.”

“Fucking cats,” Matt said as he received the kickoff once again.

“What’s wrong with cats?”

“They ain’t as cool as dogs, for one. Although,” he paused while his running back, Anthony Thomas, got tackled two yards past the line of scrimmage, “they can be fun.”

“I really don’t want to hear another pussy joke about my sister’s cats.”

Matt laughed as his quarterback threw a ball the receiver caught, then dropped it as my defensive player hit him. “Oh, you fucking punk! No man, when I was little, my stepfather had a cat. Did I tell you this? It was when him and my mom was going out. She brought me over to his apartment.” 

I had not heard the story. I also have no idea what happened among Matt, his stepfather, and his mother after about 2009, when Matt and I had our falling out. The last I heard, his stepfather and mother still live in my parents’ old neighborhood.

Matt tried another pass, and this one wasn’t even close. 

“This is some shady shit, right,” he started, “but they were like, doing it in the bedroom, and they left me with this cat in the dining room.”

I squinted back at him. “They were having sex with you there?”

“Yeah, I don’t know, I guess my mom couldn’t find no one to babysit. I was pissed too. I remember I threw shit at their door and my mom made me stand and look at the wall in this little dining room.”

“Shit,” I said.

By this time, my defense stopped the Bears on three straight plays, and Matt stupidly tried to go for fourth down instead of doing the safe thing and punting away. 

“Anyway,” Matt said, “I was bored, and I never liked that fucking cat anyway, so I picked him and threw him out the window.”

“How far up?”

“Like five stories.”

I stopped him again and took over on offense.

“And he lived?” I asked. I actually took my eyes off the screen long enough to watch his reply.

He nodded with a straight face. “Yeah man, he didn’t break anything either, he was fine.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

Matt didn’t admit his lie, but he didn't embellish it either. In the next series, I ran the ball a few times through my running back, Michael Pittman. Wikipedia doesn’t have a lot on Michael Pittman. It doesn’t have much on Karl Williams, either.

After that, I failed to connect on a short pass, then succeeded on a few short passes. And then I threw another touchdown pass to Karl Williams.

“What the fuck!” Matt ejaculated. “Am I even pressing the right buttons for this team?”

“Bears are good this year,” I muttered as if to apologize as I had my kicker kick the extra point again. I was referring to the team stats, meaning how strong the video game made the Bears based on their real-life attributes. What I said may have been true—I don’t remember—but the team I picked won the real championship at the end of that season. We didn’t know that yet, of course, but we knew enough to know I had picked the better team. Or, at least, I knew.

“Whatever,” Matt said. “Yeah, though, that wasn’t all I did to that cat.”

“What else?”

“This other time, I fed him some of Tom’s prescription medication.”

“Was Viagra even invented back then?” I asked.

Matt laughed. “I doubt it. He didn’t have a hard-on anyway. He was too fucked up. Dude, it was so fucked up he didn’t move at all the whole day, not even to his litter box.”

Matt was laughing by the time he finished, and I asked, a bit annoyed, “And you’re proud of this?”

“No man, fuck it, whatever, it was ok. It didn’t die. Tom’s a dick anyway.”

I didn’t argue with that. Tom was an awkward, vaguely dickish man when I knew him. Still, maybe the passage of time has granted me a little wisdom because I have to acknowledge that Tom had been dealt a very awkward, vaguely dickish hand when he married into Matt’s family. There may have been mitigating circumstances.

“That cat was cool though,” Matt drawled on. “You could kick it in its ass all day and he wouldn’t say anything about it.”     

Without really expending any effort, I got the ball back once again. I chose a deep pass play and Williams got another touchdown, this one about sixty yards long. Before that game, I didn’t know anyone named Karl Williams even played wide receiver for Tampa Bay, but damned if he hadn’t just caught three touchdowns for me.

The score was 21-0 at the end of the first quarter and 35-0 by halftime. Matt had barely done anything against my defense. He had only even come close to scoring once.

“You want to call it?” I offered. We would do that on occasion, consider a game over once one of us—usually me—got so far out in front that there could be no doubt as to the outcome.

“Nah, I got nothing better to do.”

“Well, I do, if we’re going out for food later. And I’m expecting a call from Kristin. Her friend needs help on some paper.”

Kristin was my girlfriend at the time. We went out from late 2000 to the middle of 2007. Well, officially August 2007, right after my grandmother died and six months after my father died. She told me we were basically done in August 2006. For a year after that, we did a combination of me hanging on in the most delusional manner possible and her stringing us along on a wait-and-see basis.

Either way, it was her idea to break up. And to tell me—a couple of years after the fact, of course, so as not to invite blame—that she had cheated on me.

Time and wisdom have done a real number on how I think about Kristin, but all of that was ahead of us. At the time, 2002, I thought she was the one.

Matt smiled. “Great. How can I get involved.”

It wasn’t a question. Matt would speak question sentences without any inflection at the end, and you were still supposed to fully understand.

“You can’t,” I told him.  “Kristin doesn’t even want you talking to—”

I won’t mention the friend’s name here. I will say that the story about her and Kristin made me uncomfortable. They had grown up together but had drifted apart so badly that Kristin actively avoided her…behind her back. To her face, Kristin was still friendly, doing things like offering her English major boyfriend’s help as if nothing had changed between them. And although the friend must have noticed her BFF barely acknowledging her after 2001 or so, she never said anything about it.

Are they like that to this day? I have no idea. Because of the nature of the women involved, they could very well still be.

Or maybe they’re like me and Matt, and all they have left are memories of fun times in basements.

“Oh, that girl,” Matt said.

I was on offense again. “Right.”

“That girl who’s drowning in a sea of chubby,” he chuckled as I threw my second incomplete pass of the drive.

That wasn't nice. The friend was overweight, but neither Matt nor I—then or now—had any room to make fun of anyone’s weight.

“Stop,” I said. “You’re the one who wants her number.”

It was this kind of misogynistic / childishly needy manner that kept Matt single for so long. He was so desperate that he latched on to the mention of single female friends like a cat high on Viagra. But once he was even close to a woman, he insulted her. I think he thought of it as courting.

“Yeah man, I don’t care. Fat is cool. I’ll bang her.” 

As far as I’d been told by this point in 2002, you could count the number of times Matt had sex on one hand. Even if you lost three of those fingers in a tragic boating accident.

Since then, he’s had at least one long relationship that I knew about, and it was incredibly toxic. I believe they had a child together, so he probably had sex then.

Meanwhile, in the video game, I had done nothing positive and had to punt the ball away. Since sometime around the middle of the second quarter, I had been coasting and not really trying. 

“No, you won’t bang her,” I said. “Kristin already told you she won’t hook you up with her.”

“What’s the problem?”

I told him what I had been told. “Kristin says you’re too much like her brother,” I explained. “You two wouldn’t be good for each other.”

Who knows if the thing about the brother was right or not? It seems like a story to me now. Probably, Kristin used it as a cover for both of us: Matt and me. Having Matt obsessively calling her friend day and night while joking about her weight was not something to be wished on any woman, lapsed friend or no. And Kristin didn’t want to break it to me that my good friend was an immature oaf that I needed to leave behind.

“Moooooooooooooo,” he mooed. He had completed a couple of passes by this time and was actually threatening to get past mid-field.

“Moo all you want,” I told him as he threw another completed pass to the left sideline. “Your dick wouldn't care.”

“You’re right, beer says it all.” I was prepared to question the logic of that when Matt added, “And with her, lots of it.”

“Shut up.” 

Matt floundered on another couple of plays. He was stuck around his own thirty-five-yard line.

“Listen, at least let me get her screen name,” he said. “Let me fuck with her online.”

Another relic of 2002: young people still “fucked with” each other on AOL Instant Messenger back then.

“Yeah, that’s a smart move,” I said.

“Come on, let me…” and he interrupted himself as David Terrell, one of his wide receivers, caught a ball in the corner of his end zone. “Finally, I get something!”

I silently agreed. The game was getting tedious, and by then I had been silently begging for Matt to give me some competition for two quarters.

“If I gave you her screen name,” I started, “you’d have to change yours so she didn’t know it was you.”

I think I was just playing around. Would I have ever really given him her screen name? One way or another, it never actually happened.

Matt laughed. “It’s got to be something to do with a food group, like chocolate sauce.”

I laughed then too, which I’m not proud of today.

“Maybe ‘Igotcheese,’” I said.

“Whowantssyrup,” he countered.

“Mydadownsawendys.”

“Allforfat.”

“Imifyoulikewaffles,” I snickered.

“Floatacoke,” he said.

“Snickerssnickers.”

“Ineedbeer.” 

“I don’t think she likes beer,” I objected.

“No, I mean I need a beer. I’m really thirsty. Want to call it?”

I did. The score was 42-7 when we laid down the controllers on the basement floor and got off the creaky futon. I turned the system off.

“I’d like food if you still want to go,” I told him as we walked to the stairs.

“Yeah, let’s get that.”

I looked at my digital clock radio—the one I got for my birthday in 1984 and still operates today—and said, “It’s late though. Probably have to get White Castle or Taco Burrito King.”

My stomach doesn’t relish either late at night here in my old age, but back then, screw it.

“That’s fine,” Matt said. “Dude, after missing dinner, I’m so hungry right now I could hit up an orphanage and try to get some food off them.”

“That would be interesting,” I said.

Matt stopped on the stairs to look back at me, an unfortunate move since his baggy jeans and baggy boxers failed him and gave me an unintended view of a hairy butt crack.

“Yeah, I bet the woman over there would be like,” and he assumed a high, feminine voice, “‘Excuse me, son, are you a registered orphan? ‘Cause if you’re not, we can’t give you any food...’”

And that’s what I miss.

The video games were cool, but they were always the conduit, not the main draw. What I really miss is sitting around and talking and firing off those riffs on the ridiculous, when Matt would hit on a line so magical and unique that I would have to write it down, and then write a whole nonfiction essay around it for class, like I did back then. That’s how I can remember this over 20 years later.

Matt had a lot of faults, and probably still does, and there were / are good reasons we stopped hanging out. It wasn’t the same in 2009 as it was in 2002, when we played that game in my parent’s basement, or in the early ‘90s when we first met, and it wouldn’t be the same now.

It doesn’t mean I don’t miss him. I’ve met some amazing people in my life since we stopped speaking to each other, including my wife, and now, our daughter. I’ve met people and done things and all of it. But no one has ever popped me quite like Matt could, and he would do it without even trying.

Registered orphans. What does that even mean?

“As a child, I'd been doing a lot of projects. Starting and finishing projects; personal ones, and professional ones, with deep roots. Both pretty and un-pretty, and very comparable to polishing silver, because gold is hidden deep inside”

Studio magic began at home for me in Toronto, within the confines of being a MuchMusic and Bollywood music fan at an early age, and family and my music teachers making beautiful music and art over the years, which served as big influences on me. Ma, a nurse, and my grandparents loved to draw pictures for me, it calmed me down.  Pa, who was an auto parts store owner, was also in a band playing keyboard and guitar, and he had a wedding photography business, which I helped with as a teenager when he had gigs. I still remember I would quickly get acquainted with DJs at reception halls and talk about 80s and 90s music with them, and enjoyed dancing.

Over the years I took different extra-curricular classes and enrolled in gymnastics, swimming, and skating, but I had musical interests of my own, and took piano lessons throughout my childhood as well, making remixes of classical and R&B songs on my Yamaha keyboard, which I would record on cassette and bring to school for my peers to hear.

I started writing poetry in 5th grade. My teacher Mr. Chandler gave me a lot of book reports to do, which I enjoyed, including a creative one in the form of a book burger.

He also gave me an A for my angry, erupting volcano where I used pepto-bismol and water, before a time when I learned in science class at a later date to add water before adding a chemical.

A classmate had muttered “Yeah right” as my 10-year-old self announced “I will now make this volcano erupt”, and that marked my first time overcoming stage fright and having the power to control reactions in the audience when the volcano made a big mess in the classroom.  I felt I had made magic with this eruption when my classmates gasped in disbelief.

I was the best speller in class, and had received yearly “creative writing” “young author” “spelling” and “book bug” awards throughout elementary school.  That year, we each wrote a poetry book, and I began my creative journey from there.

It was the early 1990s at this point, and the PBS show “Ghostwriter” aired on TVOntario (TVO). The same year, TVO Kids was launched between television shows, and they were requesting music and art pieces from viewers, so “Ghostwriter” was the first (rap) song I wrote,

It went something like this:

"Ghostwriter ghostwriters always on the case

But he doesn't really have a face"
But That’s no prob cause the writer is rob

And there’s Alex and Gabby who had a job
Lenni is nice, Tina is smart and Jamal has a really good heart
Hector is cool but Calvin is a fool

"This is the end of the rap
Let's hear TVO kids clap!!!!"

I never ended up sending it to the station.

But anyway, that was my first brush with writing a song.

Two more poetry units in later school years were coupled with occasional piano gigs.

When I reached high school, I wanted to be a singer and to be able to dance with grace.  I took vocal lessons at the New Conservatory of Music, and won runner-up prizes in the form of trophies two years in a row, for singing Janet Jackson’s “Again” and Mariah Carey’s “Hero.”  I also did a duet with my baby sister to Barbara Streisand and Celine Dion’s “Tell Him” and we won second place.

I studied the dance moves of my favourite artists’ music videos and concerts over the years, and won second place in the Dance category at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Star Search competition, where I free-styled dance moves while channeling the emotions I got from watching the music videos and concerts tapes, both from VHS and from VH1, courtesy of satellite signals!

After writing, singing, and dancing, the next logical step was Canadian Idol! It started as a running joke when friends told me to go for it, but it became a reality for me for about a week during its last season.

“Canadian Idol eh????
Yes sir, My best singing recital
Competitive stress with
Celebrity judges to impress

Was exploding backstage
Soon enough, we would be
Centre stage and
Glued to the spotlight
With No trace of fight or flight

They Expected belts and screams
But I had sweeter dreams
Resorted to classics
With no use for gimmicks

They wanted prototypes
With Identical vocal pipes
Refusal to conform
And Would rather be authentic
In Top form.

Canadian Idol top 125 folks!
Thank you”

I made the top 125 after 24 hours of waiting for vocal screenings, which I passed, and led to auditioning for the celebrity judges a week later. Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror” and Heart’s “Alone” were the tunes that got me in, at a time before those 80s songs gained popularity again in the late 2000s. However, I got a case of camera shyness when it was time to meet the celebrity judges, messed up the words to Alone, and didn’t go further. Thankfully my mishap didn’t make it on television!

But after this experience, I started singing cover songs at open mics, fundraisers, and on one occasion, at the Canadian National Exhibition’s (CNE) Rising Star competition. I recorded some original music as well that I held onto for years. The sessions were like music therapy for me.

A decade after being engrossed with a fulfilling career in social work, I wrote spoken word pieces on a whim and shared them at weekly poetry events in the city. Eventually, I shared poetry and acapellas of original songs, got my poetry published in zines, anthologies, and publications during and since the Covid-19 pandemic, released a poetry chapbook “Internal Eyes”, and finally released my music on all streaming platforms, with an upcoming single, Fearless, in the works; childhood dreams come true at last! It’s never too late to follow your dreams, no matter how big or small.

Exploring my creative side from childhood to adulthood, which not everyone got to see before the rise of the internet and social media, enabled me to share my hero’s journey of chasing the “Canadian Dream” and trying to “make it” in the art scene.

This is my story, a memoir as a wannabe rock star! Thank you.

Elisha Alladina is a social worker, published poet, expressive artist, and singer/songwriter from Canada. She has had 15 poems and a children’s short story published to date for various zines, anthologies, and online publications, as well as a poetry chapbook, Internal Eyes(2022). Her song/poem Christmas Candles was nominated for Publication Of The Month on spillwords.com, and is available on all streaming platforms along with several of her other songs.

In the Summer of 2021, my wife Fran started feeling sick. She developed constipation and her bowel movements were accompanied by great discomfort and pain. She visited her gastroenterologist, who ordered a CT scan of her lower abdomen. The scan identified the existence of “a large complex cystic and solid mass deep within the pelvis.” The mass was pressing on her ureters and blocking her colon.

Fran had undergone a hysterectomy in 1981 and was aware of the potential cancerous implications of such an operation, even twenty years after the fact. She immediately consulted a leading gynecologic oncologist at one of the leading hospitals in Washington, D.C. The oncologist examined her and diagnosed her as suffering from stage IIIB primary ovarian carcinosarcoma (a rare, and very serious form of ovarian cancer) and scheduled her for surgery, which took place on an emergency basis on November 4, 2021.

The surgery was scheduled to take three hours. However, Fran was in the operating room for over seven. The operation went smoothly but took much longer than anticipated because the tumor (over six inches long) attached itself to a portion of the intestine, which had to be cut off and the ends reattached. Also, the tumor was putting pressure on one of the ureters and a stent had to be inserted, to be left in place for a few days. The surgeon told us that she had removed as much of the tumor as she could see, but given its size and location she was sure that cancerous cells remained in Fran’s abdomen that would require further treatment.

Fran had to be taken to the hospital’s intensive care unit after the operation because her blood pressure was dangerously low. She had to remain in the ICU for an entire week, during which period she experienced anxiety, boredom, and frustration but handled the situation bravely.

She was finally released from the hospital on November 13, 2021, nine days after the operation, and taken to a rehab facility near our home. She did not fare well there. The care she received at the rehab facility was indifferent and sometimes inadequate, but she suffered through it all without complaints. Although she was there to receive physical therapy, this was largely prevented because she developed large blisters on her right foot that, although not infected, prevented her from being ambulatory. We later learned that water retention in the extremities was a byproduct of the disease that would bedevil her from that moment on.

She went home from the rehab facility just before Christmas and we encountered a couple of problems. First, Fran was unsteady on her feet and fell several times, particularly going up and down stairs. Second, she could not sleep lying in bed because she had trouble getting in and out, and because fluid began building in her abdomen again as the cancerous cells multiplied.

Her relatives came down from New York right after Christmas and left on Sunday, December 27, the day before her first chemotherapy session. The family was to return for visits in May and July, which were greatly appreciated by Fran, our daughter Anastasia (“Nastya”), and me. Fran livened up in the presence of her kin and did all she could to look good for them. The chemotherapy had made her lose her hair, so she purchased and wore several wigs. She never lost her vanity, and our daughter took excellent care of all her needs and her desire to remain as attractive as possible.

The first chemotherapy session took place at the hospital’s “infusion center” of the oncology department on December 28. It did not go well. Her blood pressure dropped drastically and all her vital signs went awry, so the session had to be terminated. The attending doctors decided that she could not receive the chemotherapy doses as an outpatient but needed to be hospitalized so she could be monitored and given the necessary drugs while the injection of chemicals (which lasted up to three hours) was in progress.

Thus, a cumbersome routine was put in place. Fran would need to be admitted to the hospital the night before the chemotherapy and would be released the following day after the chemicals had been administered. An added complication developed at the same time: her abdomen continued to fill with fluid released by the cancerous cells, so in advance of the chemotherapy she would have to undergo a paracentesis, a procedure in which a port would be installed in her abdomen and the fluid drawn out in significant amounts.

All these ordeals would have discouraged a less resolute person, but Fran soldiered on. The head oncologist suggested that, instead of continuing to treat her cancer, they provide “comfort care” to alleviate the side effects of the disease, an approach that would lead to her death within three months. She insisted that the chemotherapy treatment continue. She wanted to stay alive, not for herself, but for me and – mostly – for her daughter.

We did the best we could to alleviate her pain. We installed a stair glider that eliminated the need for her to climb stairs. We got her a recliner, which she found too uncomfortable so she spent most of her time sitting on a large chair. Likewise, we got a stool for her to rest her feet on, but doing this caused her pain. She never made much of her suffering, which was constant and considerable. She had shortness of breath, constipation, and swelling of the ankles.

The worst side effect developed them. The chemicals in the infusion that was administered to her caused her to develop severe neuropathy on the nerves of her feet. The neuropathy gave rise to constant pain, which she sought – without much success – to alleviate through various medications. As the winter of 2022 led into spring, she accumulated an array of medicines, which were often ineffective. She has multiple health problems, including atrial fibrillation of her heart (a congenital condition), low blood pressure, tachycardia, and bouts of anxiety.

I foolishly tried to put a positive spin on things and continued to predict that we would soon see the positive effect of the chemotherapy. Our daughter, more realistically, insisted that Fran was dying and that my trying to downplay the gravity of the situation was not helping matters. She was right, of course. Love makes us blind.

On her May 24, 2022 treatment visit Fran reported having severe neuropathy on her feet, swollen ankles, and lower extremity edema up her knees and above. The doctors decided to discontinue the treatment she was receiving because the cancer had become resistant to those drugs. Her treatment was switched to another drug, less effective but potentially more suitable in her case.

The second chemical proved more benign than the first in that it did not aggravate the adverse side effects of chemotherapy. However, it proved ineffective in treating the cancer, which continued to advance, filling her abdomen with fluid, and causing other conditions to worsen.

On Sunday, July 24, 2022, we took Fran to the hospital to treat a fever that had developed and get her ready for the chemotherapy treatment to be administered the following day. Overnight, she fell on her way to the restroom. She did not sustain any serious injuries, but because of the concerns about her lack of stability, they moved Fran to a regular bed, where she would be safer but less comfortable than sitting on a recliner.

We met Monday afternoon with the assistant to the lead oncologist and we concluded, and Fran agreed, that whether chemotherapy would be continued would depend on the results of an abdominal CT scan to be performed prior to the treatment. Because of her fall and her lack of mobility, it was uncertain whether or when she would be released from the hospital and whether she would be able to walk and move around on her own afterward.

Fran was shaken by this development. She refused to become and invalid and stated that she would rather die than be unable to move by herself.

Nastya and I were unpleasantly surprised Tuesday morning when we arrived at the hospital. Fran’s condition had drastically deteriorated overnight: she was hardly awake, had trouble breathing and swallowing, was incoherent (although lucid) and could not move on the bed where she had been placed after her fall.

We stayed at the hospital until the scheduled CT scan was performed that afternoon, and the results showed that the existing cancerous tumors had grown and there were new ones in her abdomen. The chemotherapy had been ineffective and there was no hope for recovery. Later, we confirmed this conclusion with the oncologist who attended her. She told us that, based on her observation, Fran had only a few days left to live. I sent word to the family, who drove down the next day to be with us.

The last part of the week became a death watch. Fran was unable to speak, though the nurses told us she was conscious and could hear us, but could not respond. She was maintained in a hospice routine in which no efforts were being made to keep her alive. She was not fed or given fluids or medications, except morphine to dull any pain. We took turns visiting with her; now the full immediate family was there, including her brother, her sister-in-law, and their two daughters with their three children. Her brother sang to her and we continuously let her know our sadness and reiterated our love for her. I want to believe she heard us.

Thursday, July 28, the family left to return to New York. Nastya and I returned to the hospital the following day, Friday, July 29, and spent the day with Fran. We went home at seven p.m. when visiting hours were over. A little after eight that night, I received a call from the hospital advising she had passed away from heart failure, apparently feeling no pain.

Fran was buried on August 3, 2022, in the same cemetery where her parents are buried. I delivered the following remarks at the graveside internment ceremony. They summarize the life of my courageous wife and express, as much as my words can convey my appreciation for her and her love, and the immeasurable magnitude of our grief over losing her:

“I met Fran when we both were in our late thirties. It happened in Cape May, one enchanted evening during the 1979 Labor Day weekend. Then, I saw a stranger across a crowded room and I knew then and there that I had found my true love. I laboriously pursued her – she was not easy to get – and finally won her.

“We were married for forty years. Over time, I came to realize that it was not her beauty, her intelligence, or the strength of her character that was her most outstanding feature: it was her heart. Physically, due to a birth defect, her heart was weak and required multiple treatments and constant care. Spiritually, however, her heart was a priceless, golden jewel.

“From an early age, she felt an urge to help those less fortunate than herself. Her childhood dream was to become a nurse. In fact, she became a social worker, assisting underprivileged children with foster care, protective services, and adoptions. Years ago, I met her supervisor during the early nineteen seventies, who related to me Fran’s tireless and passionate efforts to help the children in the community. She would drive hours, day and night, over two-lane country roads, to secure the placement of a child at risk in a suitable home. She would go at all hours to unsafe neighborhoods, sometimes even before the police arrived, to rescue an abused or neglected child. In a few years, she became a hero in the eyes of the social worker community and her clients.

“She continued her formal education and in 1973 received a Master’s Degree in Social Work from the Catholic University of America. Her new degree, her experience, and the enthusiastic endorsement of those who knew her professionally led to her appointment in 1975 as the Child Protective Services Supervisor for the city of Alexandria, Virginia, a job that entailed leading a team that provided services to families whose children were in need of protective supervision. She held that job for seven years; she was still doing it when we first met.

Our own wedding had to be postponed for a few days because she had to testify in court, as she often did, in a case involving the welfare of one of the children under her care.

“I witnessed how hard she worked for the clients and how disappointed she became when funds were cut significantly so that the agency became paralyzed. Ultimately, she quit government work in frustration in 1982 and went into private practice, where she had a successful career spanning over thirty years.

“Again, she was regarded by her colleagues as among the best and most skilled social work practitioners, applying the highest standards of practice to the care of adolescents, single adults, families, and couples. Some of her former clients still contacted her for comfort and advice many years after her retirement in 2015. One of them reached out to her for help only a couple of months ago.

“But there was always room in her heart to give out love. In 1999, we adopted Nastya, an eleven-year-old girl from Russia. For the following twenty-odd years, Fran showered our own child with boundless care, firm guidance, and affection, helping her navigate the storms of adolescence until Nastya became the lovely young woman she is today. Fran and I were both touched and awed by the love and attention that Nastya provided her mother throughout the course of Fran’s illness.

The beauty of Fran’s heart was displayed outside the family as well. She had many friends at all levels of life, both on account of her community activities and arising from her numerous interests, from jewelry making to flower arranging, which she pursued with unfailing skill and good taste. In the last five days, I have received a deluge of messages of condolence with words like these: from Bolivia: “My children and I are very sorry for your loss, she was a great and lovely person, and our prayers are with her;” from Virginia, “She was a great gift to all of us. She will be missed” and from California, “She was an exceptional person who will be missed.”

“I can truly say that Fran was a loving wife, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, and friend to many people, known and beloved for her kindness, empathy, and generosity. Nastya and I will hopefully manage to live through our terrible loss, but Fran will never leave us. As my favorite song says: Once you have found a person with such a beautiful, exceptional heart, you never let her go. And we will not.”

END

Born in Cuba, Matias Travieso-Diaz migrated to the United States as a young man. He became an engineer and lawyer and practiced for nearly fifty years. After retirement, he took up creative writing. Over one hundred of his short stories have been published or accepted for publication in anthologies and paying magazines, blogs, audiobooks, and podcasts. Some of his unpublished works have also received "honorable mentions" from a number of paying publications. The first collection of his stories, “The Satchel and Other Terrors” was released in February 2023 and is available through Amazon and other retailers.

Clouds still fill the sky enough to disappear the stars, but not the three-quarter moon. Its light slithers across the blackened water. I lean against the green and white railing of the balcony. Reggae songs flow from the Tiburón II. Scattered groups of people hang around outside the club, talking, drinking, laughing. A somewhat quiet night for Tela, here on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, where cocaine still drifts along the old Contra supply lines … where a father gives his son a gun for his sixteenth birthday. And yes, where a “decent” woman does not go out on the street unescorted.

“I don’t know if I’m imagining things.” At her words, I turn to Deysi, the newlywed from Yoro. She shakes her head. In the light of the one streetlamp, her face is mosaicked with concern. “Do you see a couple down there on the beach?”

I move closer to her and follow her thin, dark arm pointing down the beach. “Yeh, I see a couple.” They seem to be lying on their backs, resting on their elbows, at the water’s edge. Ribbons of silver moonlight fray across the water in front of them.

“I think he’s raping her. I heard a scream and saw her struggle with him. He then hit her and she fell.”

I put my foot into one of the openings of the concrete-block balustrade. It feels cool against my bare feet. I strain to see through the half-light and distance. They seem to be sitting, legs stretched out. The surf rolls towards them, filling the night with its wash.

Deysi shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I am just imagining things. Perhaps it’s the marijuana I smoked.”

“No, no. I do see a couple down there. But it looks like they’re only sitting there.”

“I could have sworn I saw what I saw.” She leans over the balcony, squinting into the darkness.

“Well, if you think she’s being raped, why don’t we just take an ‘innocent’ walk by there—just fifteen, twenty feet away—to disrupt the moment?”

She pulls away from the balcony and looks straight into my eyes. “Oh, no. That would be too dangerous.” She vigorously shakes her head. Her dark hair brushes her shoulders. “It is better to let the police handle it.”

“And, of course, the hotel has no phone. Nor is there any place near here, to call the police.”

“No.”

“Where is the police station?”

“You know that road that goes by the gas station? Past that … on top of the hill.”

“So—probably close to a mile from here.”

“Yeh—about a half-an-hour walk.”

I mutter a damn under my breath, leaning once more over the balcony in hopes of closing the distance a bit between me and that couple. They move a little. Over the steady wash of the waves, I hear … so faintly … a scream.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t want to take just an ‘innocent’ stroll? We don’t need to say anything, just walk on by.” I glance over to her.

Fear brims her eyes. She silently, rhythmically shakes her head.

I breathe deeply, exhale slowly. “I was raped. And I wish someone could have helped me. Have you ever been raped?”

She quietly answers yes.

“Didn’t you wish someone would have helped you?”

She nods slightly. “But …”

The word floats from her lips. The night drifts between us as we silently watch the couple on the beach.

I turn away from her and walk up the balcony. My hand slides along the smooth, concrete railing. Down below, three men sit on a bench in the circle of the streetlamp’s light. Further up the beach, two couples run to the waves. They laugh as the water sprays their legs.

Rubén, the sixteen-year-old night desk clerk, comes onto this common balcony. I hear the bride telling him her speculations. He leans over the balcony, looking at the couple. “Oh, they’re just making love.”

“Hello, dear.” The Honduran woman turns to her husband, Jürgen. His blonde hair catches the streetlight. “I’ve got dinner here.” Deysi distractedly takes his free hand in hers and draws him close to her.

“I think there’s a woman being raped down on the beach.”

He tilts his head in question. Then he squints down the beach.

“I heard a scream and saw her struggling with him. He hit her and she fell.”

Jürgen sets the bag down on the table. His brows draw together.

“Oh, they’re only making love down there,” says Ruben, lighting a cigarette.

We hear a scream, barely audible above the surf. No one says a word. Rubén moves away from the railing and leans against the wall. Shadows cover his face.

“Wouldn’t anyone be willing to take a stroll past there with me? We don’t have to do anything—just pass by. Perhaps our mere presence would stop the rape.”

No one says anything. The German groom sits at the table and opens the bag. He pulls out the plate covered with a napkin. He silently hands his wife a plastic fork. She peels the napkin from the food.

I leave them to their dinner and walk down the balcony. As I pass Rubén, I look into his dark eyes. He takes a steady drag from his cigarette. The orange coal lights his face. He shrugs.

I reach the far end of the balcony. Down below on the side street, a couple walks out of their house. The woman wears a light night shift. She crosses her arms against her bosom. Her mate wears only shorts. They look over at the couple on the beach, less than a hundred feet from them.

Deysi leans over the balcony, a French fry dangling between her fingers. She calls out to the neighbors, “I think she’s being raped.”

The man down below walks towards the beach. His plastic sandals kick little sprays of sand against his ankles. He stops and stands in the shadow of his house. I see him tightly ball his right hand. After a few minutes, he walks back to his wife. He puts his arm around her shoulder.

I lean over the balcony. “Would you be interested in walking by there with me? We don’t have to do anything. Just our presence.  Perhaps it would distract him and make him stop.”

The man looks over at the scene. Looking up at me, he calls up loudly, to be heard over the waves, “Yes.”

“I’ll be right down.”

I run to my room and stuff my tennis shoes on, not even bothering to tie the blue laces. I clamber down the staircase, letting the momentum carry me across the sparse lobby, to the wrought-iron gate. I grab the slide to open it. It won’t move. I reach for the padlock. Damn. My hands slap the grillwork.

I run up the steps two at a time and to the balcony. Everyone is leaning against the railing. They are silently, intently watching the couple down the beach. I stand in the doorway. “Rubén ….”

We see the couple stand up. The man adjusts his belt.

“See? They were just making love.” Rubén lights another cigarette.

A scream cuts above the surf. She pulls away from him. He jerks her towards him.

The night is heavy with our silence. I suppress my words: “You call that ‘making love,’ Rubén?” I look coldly at him.

The couple walks along the water’s edge. The woman pulls away from him again.

Rubén walks away, to return to his desk downstairs.

Anger gnaws within me. At Rubén for his machismo, his denial. They were only making love. At the bride, for her fear. At the groom, for his silence.

The newlyweds sit down at the table. They stare at their now-cold dinner. The German gently forks the piece of chicken.

Down below, the man in the shorts puts his arm around his wife’s waist. They enter their home, heads bowed.

Frustration rolls within me, like the sea. Damn, I so wanted to help her. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t. Was it because of my own weakness? Was it because of circumstance, because of where I am?

I walk to the opposite end of the balcony, nearer the Tiburón II. Out of its open doors flows a ranchera song. I close my eyes tight and grip the railing. Beneath my breath, I express my regrets. “I’m sorry. Please—I wish I could let her know we tried to help her.” My mind wants to reach out to her, to comfort her, to let her know she’s not alone.

I shake my tears away. My teeth nip my bottom lip.

Would it have been any different any place else—back home?

Down in the circle of the streetlamp’s light, the three men still talk. Out at the water’s edge, the two couples still play.

I glance down the beach. The man grips her tight around the waist. I see her, once more, pull away from him.

I hear her scream.

Wandering troubadour Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator, and travel writer. Her works appear in over 400 journals on six continents; and 23 collections of poetry – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023) and Caribbean Interludes (Origami Poems Project, 2022). She also authors travel narratives, articles, and guidebooks. Her writing has been honored by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2011) and thrice nominated for the Best of the Net. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful travel companion, Rocinante (that is, her knapsack), listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at Facebook or WordPress.

Different troubles are still troubles; only memory blurs the lines.

“It’s a deer hide,” he says to the woman sitting opposite him on the Belfast to Bangor train, nodding at the package he’d just placed in the overhead rack. “From Lapland. Bought it in the Christmas Market. Only ninety quid. She wanted a hundred, but I reminded her it was raining and my business was better than none at all, so she took the ninety, looked like she was 'bout to cry though. Polish lass, I think, or from one of them Eastern European countries.”

“Lovely,” the woman says, as if this was just what she’d expected to hear.

 “Wud’ye remind me not to forget it?” the man asks.

“Sure I will, and what stop are ye?”

“Last stop., Bangor,” he replies.

“I’m the one before ye. Bangor West,” she says. “But I’ll remind ye anyway, sure you can sit and hold your parcel for one stop.”.

The man looks satisfied with this solution; it’s maybe even better than he expected. He wouldn’t forget his parcel and he’s landed himself some company for the half-hour journey.

The woman doesn’t seem to mind a chat either. She looks to be in her sixties, as does the man, though she is a bit more colorful in her red rain jacket with a hood, curled blonde to graying hair, and red lips that make the cool blue eyes leap out of her face. The man, if you ignore the web of thread veins on and around his nose, has a pleasant face and wears a smart navy blue rain jacket with a hood. Rain is something you can rely on here.

You can also rely on the trains; they run on time. The conductors haven’t been replaced by robots, yet. There’s a table to put your newspaper on and read it without doing contortions, and there’s free high-speed internet. Best of all, there’s the conversations you overhear, that make you want to laugh, cry, think. Make you feel something.

In what I consider to be a fragile state of peace, people are less wary of complete strangers these days. Not like during The Troubles, when we were inherently suspicious and had an armory of questions to detect someone’s religion. If you went to St Columbanus’ Secondary School, that was a dead giveaway, as was a name like Concepta. No question there, but in my girls-only grammar school it was a big deal to find out that out of the 120 in my year, Linda Meredith, unlike the other 119 of us, was Catholic. Looking back, I applaud her parents. The idea was certainly vanguard, and I never remember Linda Meredith getting bullied the way poor Susan Newberry was for having an older mother than the rest of us. I think we were all too intrigued with having a Catholic in the classroom to worry about bullying Linda Meredith. Besides she was pretty and thin, and she made good grades. At that age, we believed at least one of those qualities might rub off. 

Nowadays, Protestants name their kids with Gaelic names, like Saoirse, which makes the whole detecting the religion thing much trickier, and people talk to strangers without caring. As did the pair on the train.

“What are ye going to do with the deer hide?” the woman asks, looking at the parcel.

“I’m going to put it on the back of the settee,” he replied. “Always wanted one but they were awful dear two years ago. Now I don’t mind spending the money, saved up a wee bit during the pandemic, and she gave me the ten quid off.”

“Hope you don’t have any friends in PETA?” The woman says this with an evil twinkle in her eye.

“Awk, what a load of auld nonsense,” he says, “Sure wasn’t the beast dead anyway?”

I left Northern Ireland, where I was born and where I remained for twenty-one years because I had no choice, at the first opportunity. But every time I visit, I’m reminded why I love this messed up wee country for all its problems. People find humor on the grayest of days and in the darkest of times.  

I stare out the window of the train, as the defunct shipyard, and the murals of East Belfast, honoring the preferred murdered gangs or the football hero George Best, shrink into the distance. There are fewer green hills littered with sheep these days; golf courses, council houses, mansions, and luxury hotels, all mesh together to the extent that Bangor may as well be an extension of Belfast. Only Belfast Lough remains the same; water is water.

As a Protestant child, I knew no better than what my bigoted parents passed on.; o Only when I went to college and mixed with Catholics did I start to question what I’d been taught, but I stayed loyal to the cause, whatever that was. I viewed the groups of young Catholic men, who were often seen huddled in the student unions of Belfast drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and having a clear-headed conversation, as the enemy. As my sister-in-law often reminds me, “Protestants drink and Catholics think.”.

Very few were left untouched in one way or another by sectarian violence. My experience came in the form of Brian. I was fifteen when my alcoholic dad found me a job with an old friend of his, no doubt one of his drinking mates. That friend was Brian, who owned a petrol station and shop and something of a used car dealership. Brian offered me 50 pence an hour and told me he didn’t need me; he’d given me a job as a favor. I served petrol, worked long shifts, mopped the floors if there were no customers around, and did everything I could to prove he did need me as badly as I needed the money.

Brian’s parents were the parents I wished I’d had, stable, stern, always well-groomed, and kind. Two of their sons had followed them into a business where there’s always a demand in Northern Ireland —opening fish and chip shops just like their father had done. Brian had been lured into the other business where there’s a career for life, joining one of the protestant paramilitary groups. Joining is easy. Leaving, it turns out, is not. Brian’s parents had shipped him off to the British Navy for a few years hoping that would clean him up, and in a certain way, it did. He came back healthy and disciplined and ready to make a fresh start with this business, or so he thought.

His old friends would drop by the garage at odd times of the day or evening, friends who wore sunglasses all year round and who seemed to have no visible means of income, but were never short of cash. I could always tell when Brian was off drinking with them when he wasn’t there to close up shop or open up in the morning. Sometimes I had to tell a white lie to his parents about his whereabouts. He may have been a paramilitary with tattoos on his biceps, but he didn’t mess with his mum who couldn’t have been more than five foot two. Brian and his mates went to the popular bars in town, but I soon deduced there was secret drinking in bars with no names in dodgy parts of Belfast.

Then one day there was no Brian, just mum and dad running the show. I learned he’d gone to jail for a year for something nobody talked about and that hadn’t made the evening news. His parents were business-minded and had a presence; in some ways, they brought about a sort of serenity to a petrol station shop if there were such a thing to be had. Most of the staff didn’t like this new stricter order and left. I didn’t like it at first but grew to appreciate discipline in one area of my life.

It was 1982 when Brian was released. He had lost weight in prison, but he looked strong and muscular; he told us he’d been lifting weights and I for one wasn’t about to ask about anything else that went on inside. An attractive English girlfriend appeared out of nowhere to live with him. They rented a house and lived in sin, it was 1982 after all, and would go out to dinner in the few fancy hotels that existed back then, that I knew because he would ask me to book the table. I had become in some loose sort of way his part-time assistant, and the pay was better. I was about to go to college, and I needed that job.

Then the shady friends, who were scarce when the parents were in charge, started to appear again, like drops of water from a dripping tap. One or two. Three or four. One or two again. Then, the three. It was a Saturday afternoon before the evening newspapers arrived. I remember dark hair and black leather jackets and sunglasses even though there was no sun. They asked where Brian was. Something told me to say I didn’t know. They didn’t like the answer. They walked around the petrol pumps, surveyed the cars on display in the forecourt, then came back. The obvious ringleader, short and stocky, took off his sunglasses.

“Tell’em Lenny was here,” he said.

“Okay,” I replied. I was blushing and I didn’t know why. His eyes bore through me, giving me a message that I wouldn’t forget this visit. A couple of hours later, when I opened the stack of Belfast Telegraphs, the front page announced that the Shankill Butcher had already murdered three people in the few weeks he’d been out of jail. I looked at his picture. The one who’d taken off his glasses and who’d been in the shop looking for Brian. I had a strange sensation of wanting to pee. When I look back, I wonder if this was the start of the paranoia that’s been looking over my shoulder throughout my adult life.

I started college in Belfast a few weeks later, deciding to live at home and commute on the train rather than shell out money for rent in the big city. Plus, I got to keep my job.

Then the bombshell. “You’ve heard about Brian,” my mum said as she opened the door. But how could I have? No cell phones with breaking news in those days. I’d worked the night before and I recalled he was on edge, but weren’t we all? She put the front page of the Belfast Telegraph in front of me. Brian had been shot dead on the Shankhill Road.

The weeks that followed had all sorts of reports about how he was a turncoat, according to the Catholic papers, or a UVF hero duped by his own men, according to the Protestant tabloids. The shady types spoke out, vowing revenge. Months later I learned the truth. The Butcher had bought a car and never paid for it. A friend of Brian’s took him drinking in an illegal bar in Belfast that Sunday night, a row broke out over the car, someone spiked Brian’s drink, and as he left the bar someone drove by on a motorbike and shot him in the back of the head. All someones.

 The train pulls into Carnalea, one stop from Bangor West, bringing me back to the present.

“Wee woman next door to me is a vegan,” says the man as he looks at his parcel. “Thin as tin she is,” he goes on.

 “At least we have our own beef, what with this Brexit nonsense and talk of a hard border with the South again,” says the woman.

“Wud’ye look at us,” says the man. “We were famous because of The Troubles, and now we’re in the news again because of Brexit. Famous for fighting with each other, for a museum named after a ship that sank, our airport named after an alcoholic football player, and Boris Johnson wants a border in the Irish Sea. Why can’t we be famous for Liam Neeson or Jamie Dornan or, I dunno, butter?”

The woman zips up her jacket and nods at the deer hide. “Hope you have a lovely Christmas and enjoy your deer hide,” she says, as she gets ready for her stop.

Troubles. Brexit. I recall one of the murals I’d seen that morning, paramilitaries past and present pointing their guns, with the message, “No Border in The Irish See.”. Lord, they were evil back then, but they did know how to spell.

A self-confessed paranoiac, Sharon Heller left her home country of Northern Ireland for London in 1984, going on to spend most of her adult life living and working in the Middle East, along with a few years in South America. She now lives in Western Colorado with her husband and their two Labradors. Sharon works with a non-profit organization dedicated to combating political extremism, a phenomenon she’s run into far too often. Drawing on her life experiences, she is working on her own book, a collection of essays entitled, Essential Paranoia.

Exhibit A       

It’s the golden hour. We’re at the Grand Ideas Garden, part of the Michigan State University extension, a vibrant oasis in the middle of a residential neighborhood, a garden “designed to inspire and educate gardeners of all ages and backgrounds.” We’re taking Senior photos, and the lush green, punctuated with blooms, is a perfect backdrop. My eyes fall on the white petals of a hydrangea, as I wrap my arms around my sweet girl. 

 “You are so much darker than your daughter!” exclaims the photographer.

 Yep.

This is a piece about color.

About being (not) white. And what that means. 

There’s not usually anything to say about my friend Christina’s skin. Her hair? Hell, yes! Her clothes? For sure. Her sassy attitude? Well, maybe you don’t say anything, but you can’t miss her long lashed eye roll, even over Zoom. However, no one comments on her skin. No one says, “Hey Christina, you’re looking especially brown today.” No one says, “You used to be light tan, and now you’re more of a medium tan.” No one says, “Professor, you must be feeling sick because today you are taupe.”

Well, maybe someone does say it to her, but no one white says it. Everyone who is white sees that Christina is a brown woman, and because they are “careful,” because they “don’t see color,” no one comments on her particular shade of brownness. At least, that’s not what “nice” people do. At least, that’s what I’ve observed about my community, this little pocket of liberalism in a conservative section of my state.

I know that in many communities of color, there is a hierarchy, where people, women in particular, who are more “white”—paler skin—smoother hair—are considered more beautiful, more valuable. No one will come out and say “We like you because you look white,” but that is the undercurrent. Black is Beautiful! People cry—but we like you better if you are white.

Yeah, so I’m getting that impression.

Because everyone wants to talk about my color.

Exhibit B

When, I was about 11 years old, and I came home from sleepaway camp, my grandfather asked me, “How come you look like such a shvartze?” Schvartze is the Yiddish word that equates closely with the n-word. I remember his clammy hand on my shoulder, I remember the humid air, the marine stink of the harbor just a few miles away. I don’t remember what my mother said, but I remember how she steered me past the white wrought iron of the entryway and into the house, where the storm door slammed behind us. I remember feeling like shavartze was not the thing to say, but I was super dark.

Exhibit C

A friend of my grandmother’s once remarked to me, “Your children are much more attractive than you are.” Shocked, I blurted, “I know.” But really, what did he mean? That their bright blue eyes out-sparkled my chocolate brown? That their creamy skin, rosy cheeks, drew the eye past my olive visage? Their button noses, more shapely than my ethnic schnozz? I think he meant that we don’t match up–that they are lovely, and I am…something else?

Exhibit D

It even comes from my closest intimates.  At the Ford Museum with my family, we were exploring the Jim Crow Era exhibit: Ku Klux Klan uniform; restroom signs directing people to “whites” or “coloreds”; the original Rosa Parks bus (the tour guide will show you exactly where she sat); the white and “colored” water fountains as well as two separate (and definitely not equal) waiting rooms at a “train depot.” 

My 5-year-old daughter, Davita, guided me to the “Colored” water fountain. “This is for you, Mom, because you have brown skin.” My laugh was staccato, surprised. My older daughter, Tali, tried to tell her little sister that was “not nice,” but my little one continued with her reverie. She hugged the “white” water fountain, grooving on it, “This is my water fountain because I’m pure white.” Like synchronized dancers, everyone else in my family took a step away from her. Oooooh shit. Here we are, thinking that the kids are learning something about Race in America, and it’s clear our little one has no idea, doesn’t get it. “Davita! Stop!,” Tali said. I was smiling but my eyes stung. Another family was approaching this part of the exhibit. My husband touched Davita’s shoulders gently. “Let’s give someone else a chance, sweetie.”

And other families moved through, getting their chance. A chance to see that water fountain from 1954, a chance to know that it’s easier, more comfortable, to be white.

Sometimes, it’s not exactly a comment on my skin tone, but an understanding that my skin is darker, and in that darkness, there must be a meaning. 

What are you? People like to ask. 

Exhibit E

What are you? When the guy behind the counter at the Mediterranean restaurant asks me where I’m from? The student who shyly approaches me after class, usually a student whose roots are toastier than the typical midwesterner: Can I ask you something, professor? Even the little boy in the Central Galilee region of Israel, who could barely speak Hebrew or English, did manage to ask me, “Ruski?” There’s something about me that makes people wonder—to want to categorize, figure out.

My children have progressively come out whiter and whiter. They are beautiful children—objectively. I know so because other people tell me that they are beautiful. Peaches and cream skin. Dreamy blue eyes. Pink mouths. I know also that other people find our pairing a mismatch. I used to joke that everyone thought I was the Latina nanny. But it was true. Once a child boldly approached me and asked, of my golden haired baby, “She’s adopted, right?” I wasn’t mad or annoyed that she said this. It was only a confirmation of what I thought people were already thinking. Because they keep saying it. Yes, I am a dark-skinned woman. But I am not African American. Not a Spanish speaker. Not Latina. These are all wonderful identities. If I were, I would embrace it. But I’m not.

So what am I?

Exhibit F

List of countries people have thought/said I was from:

Japan (a girl in a Dublin tea shop)

Lebanon (the guy behind the counter at the pita shop)

Greece (customers at Taverna Nikos, where I waited tables)

Poland (some Polish girls at a train station)

Russia (a little boy in the Central Galilee)

Italy (a former student)

Israel (my best friend, the first time I met her)

Mexico (a colleague at the community college)

Exhibit G

When I studied abroad in 1996, we didn’t take digital pictures just yet. I returned home after six months with a pile of cheap 3x5 glossies for my mother to peruse. Suddenly, she howled with wicked surprise. “You look exactly like Osama bin Laden in this one, Rachie!!” 

On paper, I’m white. I was brought up on Long Island among Jews, Irish and Italian Catholics, and Koreans. I have had just about every New York Jewish White Girl privilege you can think of—family trips to Europe, education at elite liberal arts college, fancy New York wedding, mother with a platinum card at Saks. I thought I was a white girl.

It was a surprise to me that other people didn’t think I was white too. In fact, when it became clear to me that other people didn’t see me as white, I turned to science. When I say turned to science, I mean I mentioned it to my husband, an evolutionary psychologist. He offered that research suggests this “misinterpretation” comes to humans naturally. Robert directed me to the work of Mark Changizi, who writes in his book, The Vision Revolution, “In skin color, we tend to lump together the skin colors of other races as similar to one another, even though in some cases their colors may differ as much from each other as your own color does from either of them.  For example, while people of African descent distinguish between many varieties of African skin, Caucasians tend to lump them all together as ‘black’ skin.”(p. 18.) There’s actually an explanation for the ridiculous idea that All [insert ethnic or racial group here] Look The Same. It still feels gross.

No, I’m not quite white. I’m sort of brownish. Like my half-Pakistani brother-in-law sometimes says, “I’m from brown town.”  Brown hair. Brown eyes. Brownish/tan skin. But hey—one of my grandfathers was full-blooded Italian from Calabria! The first time his future mother-in-law saw him she forbade my grandmother from being associated with “a colored man.” The other grandfather had Russian-Jewish ancestry. We’re swarthy folk. 

I knew that when I moved to East Grand Rapids I was moving to “Pleasantville.” We arrived in late June. One of the first images I saw when I arrived here was the montage of all the beautiful people at the concert in Collins Park. You know what I mean, the mothers and daughters in their matching Lilly Pulitzer dresses, the girls with those huge hair bows holding back their flaxen hair in side-parts. I saw them, and my own hair poofed out into an even bigger Jew-fro as the sweet breeze blew off of Reeds Lake.

It took me a while to realize that I was going to be perceived as other. And it wasn’t just because I’m the only one who will loudly complain about the absence of sufficient cashiers at a retail store. It took 5 years, precisely.

Exhibit H

I was with a group of friends at the Lakeside Elementary fundraiser. I can’t even get into the dynamics of said fundraiser—let’s just say that we’re a privileged lot and our kids are damn lucky. Making small talk at our table, an unfamiliar woman recognized me as the mother of a kindergartener. I was. She asked, “Are you Tobenna’s mother?” 

Tobenna? I thought, Tobenna? Tobenna is the one African child in the kindergarten. Now, as I said, I’m a bit brownish, but Tobenna and his absolutely gorgeous and sweet family are easily distinguishable from me. Or at least I thought. This was before I knew about Mark Changizi and his idea that people generally group all the “browns” together. 

The next thing I thought was, “Tobenna is an unusual name. My son, Zev, has an unusual name too. Perhaps I was just being lumped in with a group of women who have sons with names that are not a-la-mode.”

 (Because I am a kind and good person, I will omit from this essay my critique of aforementioned a-la-mode names, but you know who I’m talking about, Tinsley).

So I corrected her—not Tobenna’s mom. Zev’s mom. Yes, Zev’s mom. I think I even explained that we were Jewish. I don’t think I said anything as explicit as “Not Nigerian.” But I did say not Tobenna’s mom.

As strange as the interaction was, I just put it in the box of funny-ha-ha stories (See Exhibit F). But then the story continued.

On no fewer than two additional occasions, I was approached by the same woman from the fundraiser who continued to assert that I was Tobenna’s mother. Once she started telling me about how Tobenna didn’t have a coat on the field trip, and how she had lent him one of her own child’s coats. Another time, she approached me right before the holiday party and told me that Tobenna was waiting for me to arrive. At that point I was too embarrassed, and too befuddled, to continue to correct her. I just smiled and nodded. I even thanked her, before I immediately reported this absurd, to me, mix-up to Tobenna’s mother who was delighted with the idiocy of it all.

I was gobsmacked by the misunderstanding. Was it funny? Was it stupidity? Was it something more insidious? Was it just a ditzy lady in a ditzy town who couldn’t distinguish one minority from another? 

I didn’t think I was really so different from everyone else. I’m not blonde. I’m not Dutch. My name is not Van Vandervan. But I’m not that different. But I am a little bit different. And I guess this woman, who I’m sure is nice, and means well, and isn’t, well, that stupid, could tell that I was somewhat different, something else, and was just putting me in a group with all the other others.

How do I feel about all this? This notion that I am a standout. That people in this town can tell that I am not one of them.  That I may as well be from Nigeria, compared to all the sleek-haired, pale skinned, PTA minions. 

At first, I thought it was funny. 

And now? As a person who thought I was white for the first thirty years of my life, it’s confusing and disconcerting to be outed, to be such an obvious outsider. I thought it was because I drank coffee and read The New Yorker when everyone else had their babies on their laps during story time. Now I know they saw me coming a mile away.

I used to think I was the diversity hire in the English department because I am the only one who has ever expressed an emotion publically. It turns out that I bring geographic diversity, and well, I didn’t want to say it, but I’m not that white.

But I used to be white. I thought I was white. But it seems I’m not anymore. And the feeling is revelatory in a way that is exhilarating and also makes me feel open, naked, not-quite-right. If I moved back to New York, would I get to be white again? Could I? Would I want to? To me, being white means a certain comfort, confidence, security, safety, belonging, and it may be that those things never belonged to me, and I just didn’t know it before. 

I thought I could just blend in, that I ought to blend in. But it seems that’s not the case, and part of knowing who I am is knowing that I’m just not that white. Even if the rest of my family is. And I used to be.

Rachel Lutwick-Deaner enjoys a bookish life. She earned a BA in English from Colgate University, an MA in English Literature from North Carolina State University, and a MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She currently resides in Grand Rapids, MI,  where she teaches college composition and literature at Grand Rapids Community College. Rachel delights in writing essays that challenge and affirm her readers, and her ultimate goal is to make people laugh, even uncomfortably. When she’s not writing or teaching, Rachel loves reading, and her book reviews can be found at Southern Review of Books and on Instagram @professor.ld. 

I am a white grandmother living in a place called Canada. Or, let me try this: I am a settler living on Indigenous land.

What does it mean to be a settler? When I first heard the term applied to anyone – mostly white people? – who is not Indigenous, I felt uncomfortable. Somewhat insulted, actually. I came here from Germany in 1982! I didn’t ‘settle’ like Israelis in Palestine or like farmers in Manitoba in the 1800s who plonked themselves down on fertile land and said, this is mine now. The term ‘settler’ made me think of the Monopoly man, sitting down somewhere with his fat behind, money bag in hand, smirking with disdain at the losers who didn’t have the smarts to amass as much fortune as he. That wasn’t me!

It occurs to me now that I saw that term depicted in my mind as much as a caricature as the ‘Indian’ I had grown up with. Germany, my birthplace, was and still is fascinated with ‘Indians’ and as a child, I, too, loved the books by Karl May, a shady character who wrote reams of adventure books without ever having been to the countries he supposedly portrayed. His most famous hero was the ‘Indian’ Winnetou, portrayed in movies by the white French actor Pierre Brice, who impressed mostly through his noble-savage sexiness.

Caricature that he may have been, I probably arrived in Canada more with the ‘noble’ part in mind than the ‘savage.’ To some degree that could have been influenced by having lived in Paraguay for two years before I came to Canada. Whatever the questionable history of Spanish and other colonizations in Paraguay is, for a number of reasons, the most-often spoken Indigenous language there, Guaraní, is very much alive and truly a national language. That keeps the image of Indigenous people there at the forefront, if only nominally. Together with my German noble-savage fantasy, this experience made for some expectations when I came to Canada. But almost everywhere I expressed it, my interest in Indigenous history and life met with blank “what-is-she-talking-about” looks.

I entered this enormous expanse of land that stretches from the territories of the Mi’kmaq to that of the Nootka, from the Inuit to the Anishinabek, carrying with me a backpack. Which was, by the by, made by a Paraguayan man who surely must have had some Indigenous ancestry, crafted in the – most likely colonial – leather style sold by Indigenous people on the hot streets of Asunción.

Heavier than that was the other baggage that I brought with me. Generations of landed gentry are etched into me on my father’s side, and generations of theologians, teachers, merchants, and doctors on my mother’s. There was also an explorer, Ludwig Becker, the illustrator of the Burks & Wills expedition. Each generation was dotted with people who, like me, were hungry for other countries, different landscapes, new language sounds, music yet unknown. But we can’t be confused with nomadic First Nations because we weren’t nomads – we were and are visitors, explorers, and, like my father’s forebears and – settlers. Uninvited visitors.

One of the reasons why I ended up in this country called Canada was my on-again-off-again boyfriend who had decided to emigrate to Canada. Backpack on my back, and half-formed ideas and my history and personal baggage somewhere on my inattentive mind, I arrived one morning at his doorstep, took off that backpack, and settled. Within an hour, boyfriend took me to a ravine in Oakville, Ontario, where he lived, on the traditional territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Ojibwe/Chippewa peoples. I climbed into the lap of that beautiful, lush piece of land, walked through grass taller than my white-woman stature, heard the fish splash, and saw more dragonflies than ever in my life. It was an instant falling-in-love, there in the ravine, here in this country. I settled into that falling-in-love down in the ravine, like heavy honey settles in the bottom of a cup of steaming, fragrant tea.

To a degree, I suppose one falls in love with something or someone familiar. There must have been something I recognized on that hot summer day in July of 1982, a peacefulness perhaps: I still remember how comfortingly far-from-everything that place felt. But all in all, I’m probably more the type that falls in love with the unknown, with the not-me.  Is that my forebears’ spirit, the hunger for the different?

Love and hunger – they can be so dangerously close. Unconditional love is gentle, appreciative, giving, freeing. But that’s usually not what happens when one falls in love. Falling in love is marked by desire, and desire is hunger. I want more! I want it all! More yet! This grasping, gasping, ravenous desire, celebrated in millions of love songs all over the world, from Elvis to Rihanna.

Back then I knew nothing about how to love and respect a place. It wasn’t in my city-dwelling, land-owning, explore-to-dominate bones; my history hadn’t taught me about that. I’m thinking of Pelka'mulox now, the father of N’kwala, the man after whom the Nicola Valley and Nicola tribe in the Merritt area 270 km east of Vancouver is called. In his long life in the 1800s, N’kwala was grand chief of the Okanagan people and chief of the Nicola Valley peoples, an alliance of Nlaka'pamux and Okanagans and the surviving Nicola Athapaskans, and also of the Tk'emlúps te Secwe̓pemc in the area around the place that is known as Kamloops.

What I read is that Pelka’mulox was one of the first people to encounter North West Company traders. He described them and their lifestyle to another chief, who found that story so preposterous that he called Pelka’mulox a liar. This started a row that ended Pelka’mulox’s life. The settler-explorer-landowner lifestyle, the life I grew up with, was just too unbelievable, but even from afar, through a story, that lifestyle managed to kill an Indigenous man.

There’s also my buddy Alf. Mi’kmaq on his father’s side and Mohawk on his mother’s. Alf’s lifestyle, the life he must live to keep bread on the table, kills him. He would much rather put venison on that table that he has brought in himself, or salmon caught from a canoe. But he has to settle for, has been saddled with, driving big, loud vehicles that poison the air my fore-settlers took as their property.

I’ve known Alf for over two decades. It was his wife, another immigrant, who mentioned maybe ten years into our friendship that his mother was a residential school survivor. How his grandmother would steal to the school fence day after day so that she could at least see her daughter. Alf doesn’t like to make much of his Indigenous heritage. Being ‘Injun’ wasn’t such a good thing in the sixties and seventies when he grew up.

Alf and I, we love trudging through the woods together, and have long conversations that are at times so hilarious that we have to stop and catch our breath. He understands the land way better than I do but he doesn’t call it that. Instead, he talks about his time as a Scout master, about being out in the mud during his army time, about all the time he got lost in the bush – “but I’m never lost, I’m always right here.” He trusts the land. I’m learning to trust with him, learning that the land likes me, is always inviting me, despite all the harm done to it. I’m learning to love it back.

The Anishinabek, one of the peoples who had lived in and around Oakville for a good ten thousand years, have seven sacred teachings, among them respect, humility, and (mutual) love. It’s not that I did not respect the land, or was against mutuality in love, or that the concept of humility was unknown to me. It just didn’t occur to me that these ideas could apply to the physical place I had so quickly settled into, or that there were any teachings to consider. I had only the vaguest, vaguest notion of connectedness, such an important concept for Indigenous people.

That ravine in Oakville – I was not able to do more than give it the label “beautiful,” and it makes me think now of a plantation owner branding his slave. Utterly unable to perceive it with my conscious mind, somewhere deep I knew, though, that much more was taking place; rather than me stamping a word on that ravine on the outskirts of Oakville, I was being received by the land some call Turtle Island.  (‘Canada’ and ‘America’ being names that were given by the colonizers/settlers.)

In Oakville, I became pregnant. The boyfriend who had by then turned into a husband (now ex) saw a painting entitled ‘Mindemoya’ and instantly fell in love with the name. So my first child born in Canada got the Ojibwe name Mindemoya.

Did we give her that name or did we take it? It certainly never occurred to us to consult with an Ojibwe Elder – that would have been miles away from our thinking. We were, however, curious about the name. In the beginning, we didn’t even know it was Ojibwe – it just sounded really nice. The cadence of Ojibwe, Cree, Inuktitut and other frequently spoken Indigenous languages was not only unfamiliar to us; we did not know these sounds and languages were anything to know about.

We did start asking around about the name’s origin and finally heard one of the legends of Mindemoya told to us by a white poet, Peter Jones. Mindemoya, he said, means something like ‘Old Woman’ in this language called Ojibwe. We also heard a few legends about her. Our favourite was the one where the Old Woman sacrificed herself by jumping off a rock; in return, the hope was, Spirit would save her people from starvation. It’s our favourite version but I’m wondering now, is it a settler version?

At some point we realized Mindemoya was the name of a place on Manitoulin Island. It may have been then that it started to slowly dawn on us that there was something important about connecting place, name, and Spirit but if that was the case, it was only in a faint and intellectual way. A few years later, we drove through Northern Ontario. It was the first time that I felt some sense of Spirit in the trees and earth and the awe-inspiring Northern Shield.

The baby Mindemoya, the Old Woman, was my first true entry into the Indigenous world. An uninvited, uninformed entry. We could say we settled the name Mindemoya, took it without asking because, well, there wasn’t anyone around to tell us otherwise. That’s a colonial thing: something appears to be lying around, no-one’s fighting you, so you take it.

My maiden name is von Huendeberg – “Of the mountain of the red deer hind.” (The hind is the female red deer.)  It was good to take my now husband’s last name, Mori. It means ‘forest’ in Japanese. His first name is Glenn, also a forest name. These names, too, call me to the land.

The people who were of – owned? – the mountain of the hind most likely owned serfs, seeing that they were ‘landed’ Germans in Russia and the Baltics, where owning serfs was commonplace among landowners and families like my grandfather’s, small-potato aristocrats. In other words, they were slave-owning settlers – not on Turtle Island, not in the Caribbean, but in Eastern Europe. Russia ‘gave’ them land, meaning that they took it from the people who lived there originally and handed it over to the ‘landed’ gentry so that they could occupy it for Mother Russia. Colonialism and the hunger for land that Indigenous writers like Thomas King talk about so eloquently thrives everywhere, in all sorts of forms.

Yes, I come from a family of settlers. My mother and father didn’t own land or serfs anymore – I grew up poor, my father the proverbial starving artist – but some of the mindset still remains. A small example: I find it easier than my husband, who comes from a family of Japanese Canadian farmers, to take without asking what I need – little things, a cup, a roll of duct tape – and I more naturally occupy space in our home with books, chachkas, paintings. I also think nothing of hiring someone to clean the house, something my husband is not particularly comfortable with.  

It was natural, too, that when I lived in Paraguay, I had a servant, a muchacha, meaning ‘girl’. Everybody had one! ‘Everybody’ meaning all the other immigrants and relatively well-off people I knew. The ‘girl’ was a few years older than I. Her name was Chinita. I patted myself on the back for paying her a few pennies more than average. She worked more hours than I and was a wonderful second mother to my little son, my first child, born in Germany. Only once, for a minute or so, did I meet one of her own children. I made eight times more money than she. She probably was at least part Indigenous. Being a settler, a colonizer, comes easy to me. How different am I really from the Monopoly Man?

So here I am now, settled on this land that the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Watuth call home. There is no treaty; the land has never been ceded or otherwise negotiated.

It takes only a few steps to walk over to the Tea Swamp Park. The creek that used to be there, like so many others, has been built over. Frances Bula, one of Vancouver’s historians, tells us that it used to be a beaver pond in a dense forest with a rich flora. One of the plants that grew there was a type of rhododendron that had a variety of healing properties that Indigenous people used by brewing parts of it – hence, the “tea swamp.”

I was invited by the people who teach Indigenous Cultural Safety courses where I worked to look at where I’m settled but also what my cultural history is and what lands, physically, I come from, to feel what it means to be connected to land and to ancestral land. We all come from the Earth; what did that particular piece of earth where I was born and raised look, sound, feel like? Eventually, I wrote this poem:

I’m from a big old city,

an old house that survived war bombings

a big old city flat with long hallways,

with paintings everywhere, and records and old books;

a cold, old kitchen.

I’m from a father who smoked cigarettes

in communist-red packages

a mother who believed in unions.

And going deeper, farther, older, from the forest,

I am of wolves and of red deer.

I am a grandmother, and thrive among the trees.

I’m from a grandfather

who gathered egg shells for the compost

and rosehips, raspberries and dandelion.

I’m from a mother

who hiked with me through Alpine meadows

and who I herded out into a man-made park for hours on end

to snatch her from the death-claws of depression.

I’m from my own story

of loving, settling on, one landscape after another

the blue sky, green brush, and red earth of Paraguay

the cliffs and luminescent sands of Chile

the meadows of my homeland Germany

the deep ravines of Anishinabek land.

And here I sit in Rupert Park

land of the Tsleil-Watuth,

land sloping down the narrows,

with willows planted on them. White people willows.

A golf course. White people golf course.

Right by a highway. White people highway.

… and wonder:

what would this land be like had settlers mingled peacefully

with those who’d stewarded the land for many thousand years?

Isabella Mori writes novels, short fiction, poetry and nonfiction, and is the author of three books of and about poetry, including A bagful of haiku – 87 imperfections. Isabella’s work has appeared in publications such as State Of Matter,  Kingfisher, Signs Of Life and The Group Of Seven Reimagined. An alumna of The Writers Studio, Isabella is the founder of Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize which celebrates socially engaged poetry. A book of nonfiction about mental health and addiction is planned for publication with Three Ocean Press in the spring of 2024.

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South Park, Colorado. Yes, that’s a real place. At 10,000 feet altitude, the ecosystem is a masterclass in survival of the fittest. Gnarled bristlecone pines, many of which are centuries years old, are scattered among ponderosas and aspens on the hills jutting out from the high-altitude prairie. Despite the fact that much of the land remains undeveloped wilderness, wildlife is sparse. Bison, pronghorn, elk, bear, and coyotes predominate. Not much else can survive the 6 to 8-month winters, temperatures that can fall below -20 degrees, and winds that can reach more than 40 mph. Indeed, only the strongest survive.

It’s the same with the people living in the area. Desolation can be beautiful, and South Park is an exemplar of that statement. Consequently, there’s a draw for people who fall in love with the allure of the mountains, who want an affordable home closer to the ski resorts in Breckenridge, or even those who — for reasons undisclosed — want to get away from society and start over. Whatever their reasons, few who move to the area last more than a few years before leaving to literally greener pastures.

Yet, like the pronghorn and coyotes, there are “full-timers” who never leave. Among these is a large contingent living well below the poverty line. Many of these live in the two trailer parks near the center of town, while others — often ranch-hand families — live in pull-behind trailers littered across the thousands of acres of open lands. Often, these trailers have no connection to the electrical grid or running water. They rely on solar panels, small wind generators, and water tanks. And it’s not uncommon to see whole families enter the local rec center in the early morning for access to warm showers.

For a time, I was one of the more fortunate “full-timers” with a house of my own and some land. Still, I lived (of necessity, not choice) off-grid, running on solar power, a well, and a wood-burning stove. It was a hard life, and I often found myself questioning why I was there. Was it worth it — all of the pain and inconvenience? And then, like clockwork, just when I would begin to plan my escape, I’d be taken off guard by a sunrise on my way to gather firewood for the day. And, for that moment, at least, all of the discomfort and inconvenience would be worth it.

During my time there, having taken a sabbatical from my teaching career, I was engaged in remote work as an IT consultant. This position occasionally afforded me some flexibility in my schedule, prompting me to volunteer as a substitute teacher at the local school, the center of South Park’s community and economy, which served students from preschool through high school.

Until that point, my teaching tenure, both in Europe and the US, was exclusively with adults, primarily undergraduate and master’s students. I genuinely enjoyed teaching this demographic and hadn’t thought about instructing any other age group. So, when I volunteered, I specifically marked my preference for high school students, with no intention to venture into the realms of kindergarten, elementary, or middle school.

The administration, however, seemed to consider my preference immaterial. I was frequently implored, often with a note of desperation, to substitute in the elementary section.

Each stint in the elementary school was a test of endurance. I realized that teachers (elementary school teachers especially) were Darwinian survivors. Like the full-timers in South Park, they were the few who found the fortitude to endure.

For me, the task of overseeing simple activities in one room for a full day was nothing short of exhausting. Yet, it enriched me with diverse experiences. One day saw me aiding children in a specialized program, all of whom had not yet learned to read despite being in the second or third grades. On another occasion, I stepped in as the aide for a non-verbal autistic student whose regular caretaker had taken time off due to being hit in the face by said student. In another instance, I spent a day caring for a third-grader who, mentally and emotionally, functioned as a toddler. But an especially impactful moment came during a few-day stint of substituting for a first-grade class.

It was during a temporary easing of COVID restrictions in early 2021. Students and teachers had returned to the classrooms and were subjected to a number of new safety protocols. 

What struck me first was how normal the abnormal had become — how well the group of 20 or so 6-year-olds had adapted. Each morning, they entered the classroom in a (mostly) orderly fashion, proceeded to their desks, now separated for social distancing protocols, and cleaned them with disinfectant wipes. Each child carried a plexiglass shield, which they placed on their desks, creating tiny, transparent cubicles.

They were colorfully arrayed in a range of masks, some featuring superheroes, others various cartoon characters, kittens, or just solid colors. A few students wore the standard paper masks in medical white or blue — provided by the school for those children who had either forgotten their masks or did not have one of their own.

One child in particular caught my attention early on; we’ll call him Caleb. Caleb was dirty and smelled bad. His mask, apparently made out of a t-shirt, was discolored and wet because he sucked on it tirelessly. He misbehaved constantly, always leaving his desk to walk around the room aimlessly or with the apparent aim of distracting and annoying his peers. But what I noticed first were the bruises on his unusually skinny arms and a cut, camouflaged under a layer of dirt, under his eye. Each day, he arrived in the same outfit.

Caleb had an absent stare. He wouldn’t look me or his peers in the eyes — even when taking actions specifically aimed to annoy them or garner negative attention. Despite my sensitivity, he tried my patience. While I maintained kindness and control in my actions, it wasn’t long before care and concern — I’m saddened to admit — subsided in my heart. But I took consolation in the knowledge that the hands of care do not require the permission of the heart.

I spent three days with that first-grade class, and it felt like most of that time was spent in efforts to keep Caleb in line, following the COVID protocols, apologizing to students he had handled roughly, or numerous other forms of acting out. He was a force of nature, like those 40 mph South Park winds.

I thought of the full-time teachers who spent every day with these kids — and especially of Caleb’s teacher, who dealt with him day in and day out. Elementary school, it occurred to me, was a harsh environment. Desolate, like the high-altitude prairie of South Park. Those elementary school teachers were survivors. Hardened by their environment to withstand the elements.

As my three days drew to a close, I found myself counting down the minutes. When, at last, the bell rang on that third day, I swore to myself that it was the last time. Never again would I subject myself to such an exhausting and thankless environment. I was planning my escape in the same way I planned to escape South Park, gathering firewood so many early mornings.

The teaching assistant entered the classroom, and the students gathered their things and lined up to leave. I had told them that their regular teacher would return tomorrow and that it was time for me to say goodbye. As they filed out of the room in an orderly fashion, Caleb broke out of line and walked towards me. “Here,” I thought to myself, “is my last exercise in patience. Kindly direct him back to the line.”

He was still sucking on that discolored mask. As he approached me, he pulled his mask down and looked into my eyes for the first time in three days. His stare was still blank, but at least now, there was intention beginning to shine through. I was taken aback and said nothing but kneeled to get down on his level. He told me something I’ll never forget. It was something equal parts touching and heart-breaking — something that made the wasteland of those three days worth it in the same way that the sunrises on those wood-gathering mornings kept me living in my off-grid mountain home.

His exact words were, “I wish you were my dad.”

I responded in kind, fighting back a flood of emotions for later processing, “Thank you, Caleb. I wish you were my son.” And just like that, as though nothing had happened, he turned, rejoined the line, and left. That was the last time I saw him and the first time I realized what it can mean to be a teacher.

A.G. Elrod is a Lecturer of English at the HZ University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands.

I quit high school for good when I was fifteen years old.

Due to my ever-worsening depression and anxiety, and the prospect of changing schools for the tenth time and being held back a year, I left the grounds one day, stubborn and sullen, never to return. I spent my days hiding from the pesky truant officers at the local library, reading massive encyclopedias and learning about forbidden things like sex, evolution, and other religions, which I was never able to do before because I grew up as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I lived a sheltered and strict life and wasn’t supposed to learn these illicit subjects. The library offered me freedom and an education I could never get in school.

After that, a neighborhood grocery store said they had work for me, so it was little trouble for me to get a job. I enjoyed working mostly because I was able to contribute to my poor family, who were struggling at the time.

But we left Minnesota shortly after and headed for Texas, where dad would have a job in yet another bakery. He was a master baker and in high demand. I helped him in the back for a while, hiding out and mostly washing dishes, but there was a chance the police would find out I should have been in school, and I didn’t want my dad to get in hot water. So, at sixteen, I started looking for jobs — and the fast-food places would take anyone — so I answered an ad in the newspaper that said Burger King had immediate openings.

Before long, I was schlepping greasy hamburgers and fries, and suggestive-selling large strawberry milkshakes in the drive-thru at a very high-volume store in Midland, Texas. The pace at which they expected you to work was break-neck and frantic, but I was young, healthy, and had a lot of energy. I also had easy access to as much Coca-Cola and greasy carbs as I wanted, so I worked the ten to twelve-hour days and mandatory overtime without complaint.

Even if I was making a measly $2.33 an hour, all that overtime always ensured that I had a big check (for a sixteen-year-old) after two weeks. But because dad’s MS started making working impossible again and he struggled to pay the bills, I gave everything I made to my family, except for a twenty-dollar bill, in case I needed to take a bus. I never whined or felt sorry for myself, because for all the years Dad and mom worked their asses off, even when they were ill, they never once complained and gave my brother and me everything they could manage and more.

We eventually left Texas and headed back to Louisiana. In Baton Rouge, I was a server at a Pizza Hut, and when we went back to Bunkie, also in Louisiana, I wrangled pizzas again.

We moved around more than most families did, looking for greener grass, and finding jobs for my dad until his health would give out inevitably. Then we would go somewhere else. That was the pattern of my young life, but it was my life, and I didn’t know anything else.

From Louisiana, we headed to Tucson. I worked for years for low wages in a horrible environment at Burger King, I worked countless hours and endless shifts. But when the bosses chose me to help open a new store, they put me on salary so they could push me to work longer hours without earning overtime pay.

By then it was the late 1980s, and I had a wife and a growing family, but I rarely saw them because I was working so much. My life was the restaurant, and even when my mental health kept getting worse, I worked harder so I could support the people waiting for me at home.

After years of thankless toil and some marital trouble, we split up and I took a break from food and worked as a manager in the furniture rental industry. But a combination of separation from my kids, my worsening mental illness, a penchant for collecting high-capacity firearms, and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol caused me to crash and burn in the most public of ways.

I headed back to Tucson and my troubled marriage and grabbed the only job that would have me. For the next year, I worked at Little Caesars Pizza as an assistant manager, and as the store manager after we moved to Gallup, New Mexico. From there, we moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and I scored a high-paying manager gig at Taco Bell. I say high-paying, but the only people who considered it as such were poor people like me.

The eighty-hour weeks and stressful long shifts pushed me and my mental state to the brink until I crashed again and knew I needed to make some changes.

All those years in fast food took a toll on my physical and mental health until I was a shell of the man I had once been. All those days and nights away from my family were also one of the big reasons my first marriage ended in divorce a few years later.

I couldn’t do it anymore, but I didn’t know anything else, so I set out to change that.

I needed a new career direction, and the only way I knew to learn something new was to go to college. But I had a problem. I wasn’t even a high school graduate. I found out I could still go to college with a GED, so I looked up where to take the tests. I remembered little from school and never got to learn things like Algebra, so I found a study guide at the library and started relearning everything I had ever forgotten and absorbing some new things I had never gotten to in High School.

It took a few weeks, but I was finally ready to take the tests. I was nervous, but confident, and walked out of the building that day knowing I had aced them. They were easy. I found out later that I had placed in the top 2% of the country, and it made me feel better about going to college in my late 20s.

I was on my way!

What I really wanted to do was be a writer, but I listened to the well-meaning people who reminded me I had a family and “Had I forgotten that writers don’t make any money?” I started checking around schools and tech universities and working with computers seemed to be the most promising track I saw.

I signed up, qualified for student loans, and before the day was over, got my badge that said I was in the computer animation program at CAD Institute.

But I still had a problem. I had to work.

Taco Bell was not thrilled about me returning to school and wouldn’t agree to trim my hours back. I was a salaried manager and expected to work as many hours as they needed me, which turned out to be between 60–80 a week.

But I didn’t give up. I‘d planned for my assistant managers to open the store, so I could attend class from 4:00 am to 8:00 am on weekdays.

Every day I showed up on campus at 3:45 am. Then I would leave school at 8:00 a.m., change my clothes, and start my workday at Taco Bell at 8:30 a.m. I often worked until 10:00 p.m., or longer if the unpredictable overnight crew didn’t show up. We were a 24-hour location, so if my people didn’t show up to work, and I couldn’t get anyone else, I worked by myself.

It happened more often than I would have liked.

Somehow, for the next three years, I managed both my job at Taco Bell and college. I don’t remember how I was able to do all the art projects, papers, and extra programming that had to be done and keep myself on the Dean’s List, but I did. I don’t know how I taught myself web design when I saw that my arts degree would do very little to get me a job as an animator. Sadly, I had no artistic talent, but I could build websites.

I don’t know how I managed to support my family as the only breadwinner when I was completely and utterly depressed and anxious all the time. I don’t know how I managed to graduate with honors when life was bleak, and I couldn’t control what was going on in my head anymore.

A few months later, I left the animation program because a bachelor’s degree would have been a waste of time and money. Instead, I took the web design skills I’d taught myself and moved on to a better career.

Taco Bell was the last fast-food place I worked, and it almost killed me. I was a 30-year-old in a 50-year-old body, and my mind was so damaged I would never be the same again.

I did go on to do big things, working my way into a job making $125,000 a year and even starting a web design business with my best friend in Boston, all while holding down that six-figure job.

Then one day I lost everything.

But that is another story.

There is a Lesson Here Somewhere

Even though, for most of my life, it felt like I lived without any control over anything, I took the circumstances I’d been given and made the best of them. Yeah, life handed me the shitty end of the stick often, but I made the decision to keep going forward and never give up.

Contrary to what I’ve written, there were good times in my life. I’ve been a husband twice, and a father five times. I’ve lived all over the United States and ended up halfway around the world living my best life in the Philippines after losing everything and heading into a death spiral. I’ve worked for peanuts and six figures.

Even with the mental illness thrown on top of everything else, I‘ve had moments of extreme bliss and happiness. I’ve grown into a person who knows the importance of family and how to love.

Even if my life has been one big shit sandwich, I found fulfillment.

Keep going. Never give up. Cherish to good times.

I did, even when work was sucking the life from me.

Strolling aimlessly through a grocery store pushing an empty cart with a floppy wheel is interesting because you have time to explore and find things to take home and eat — at least when you have money to buy anything. But when you are walking through the same well-stocked store, pushing the same empty cart with the whopped wheel and you only have $5 to your name, it’s a completely different story, on so many levels.

It was 1986 and I was ending my problematic and angst-filled teens in a depressed mining town in northern New Mexico trying to figure out this adulting thing. I’d left a dead-end job managing a movie theater because my manager was stealing money from the safe I was responsible for. I’d gone to the owners with my fears, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t believe that their flesh and blood would steal from them (yes, my manager was the son of the owners). Knowing it was a matter of time before the missing money became a problem and they took the side of their son and blamed me, I took all the proof I had of my boss’s thievery and handed in my resignation.

It had been a well-paying and enjoyable career for an 18-year-old high school dropout, and I hated to leave, but no amount of free movies and stale popcorn could make up for them potentially branding me a thief. I looked for a new job for a few weeks, but it was a small town and as soon as jobs opened they were filled by people with more experience and better education.

In desperation, I found myself sitting in a showroom, learning how to schlep myself door-to-door and sell Kirby vacuum cleaners to clueless homemakers with more money than sense. It says a lot about how spunky I was that in my first week knocking on doors, I sold two $1500 machines, wowing them with a $20-a-month payment plan at only 34% interest. I made a commission but they told me since I was new it would take a month for my check to arrive.

I was so broke, that homeless people felt ashamed for asking and gave me money.

I only had a lonely crumpled $5 bill in my wallet to feed both my new girlfriend and me for the next few weeks. Neither one of us had any meat on our bones, we were both rail-thin and not at all suited to skipping meals on the regular. So, we found ourselves with an empty cart, one wheel flopping around maniacally, cruising the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly for something that would satisfy our needs.

It seemed hopeless at first and we began to despair, but then I saw a lone 30-pound bag of gorgeous Russet potatoes with a red discount sticker that proclaimed loudly: $4.25! I snatched it up before one of the other hungry and destitute shoppers could claim it and headed for the condiment aisle. But ketchup and mustard were too expensive so I headed for the checkout. I had a handful of change left over after tax, so we split an Orange Crush from the machine by the exit doors.

The orange soda tasted like fine wine because I knew it would be my last for a while.

The next few weeks saw us learn how to cook potatoes in ways you wouldn’t have thought possible. It was almost as if poverty forced us to become the most frugal professional chefs imaginable. Fried, mashed, boiled, baked, sauteed — we didn’t even bother taking the peels off because we didn’t want to waste the vitamins and minerals they provided to our famished bodies. There was no butter or sour cream, no ketchup or even hot sauce— we seasoned them with whatever spices were in the pantry, which after three weeks turned out to be stale red pepper flakes and cinnamon.

The potatoes inevitably ran out, much to our dismay. We went hungry for a week, and were so light-headed I broke my cardinal rule and called my dad to ask for money. When I moved out, I’d promised myself I would do anything to not bother my parents for money. I wanted to be independent and prove that I could live on my own. But, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded because I’d been practicing being poor my whole life.

I sucked it up and they sent me $100, which seemed like a fortune at that time.

We Were ‘Turkey Neck Soup’ Poor

Growing up in a family who moved from place to place looking for greener grass, we were anything if not dirt poor. There were times when my dad’s health would fail and he would be hospitalized, and we had to get by on a few dollars and the goodwill of the members of our church.

It was 1982, Michael Jackson released Thriller, and we were in another grimy grocery store with an empty shopping cart and no money. Most likely the wheel was broken on this one as well. It was summer in central Louisiana, and the temperature and humidity gauge were both stuck in the red at 100 degrees. We sweat out our liquids faster than we could replace them in a time before bottled water.

We couldn’t expect any money coming in, because my dad wasn’t working and Social Security ran out. My long-suffering mom was running her finger idly along the packages of meat, checking out the prices, hoping for a miracle, and my troublemaker of a brother and I were standing close by in the candy aisle dreaming of Snickers Bars and Three Musketeers.

Mom was almost at the end of the massive meat case when she stopped short like something had bitten her on the rear. She picked up a huge bag of mystery poultry in triumph! The bag was opaque, so you knew there was some kind of bird inside from the pale white skin, but you couldn’t tell what kind. She looked at the price and smiled, then looked at my brother and me (who were still eyeing the candy bars wondering if the penalty for shoplifting was worth it) wondering if she could cajole us into eating whatever was in the immense bag.

After arriving at our two-bedroom house that was comfortable but cheap, we found out that my mom had scored a monster sack of turkey necks. Though we kids weren’t convinced a meal could come from the little bit of meat on the bone, we trusted mom, because somehow she always had a hot meal on the table for us, no matter how little money we had. Also, we were hungry and learned long ago that you never complain about food when you have nothing else to eat.

An hour later, after sniffing the air for the enthralling smell coming from the kitchen, we peeked our heads around the corner to see what was cooking. Mom had somehow found a few vegetables — celery, carrots, and potatoes — and cooked them with a few of the necks to make the most delightful-smelling soup we could ever dream of in our adolescent brains. And, as a credit to my creative mother, it tasted like heaven and filled our empty stomachs until we could eat no more.

We ate turkey neck soup almost every day for months at a time. Sometimes we would come into money from an odd job or a bag full of groceries from a brother and sister in the faith, but when everything ran out and we were hungry yet again, my mother would find some turkey necks, and we would eat.

Is It Sad That Free Government Cheese Was a Treat?

We were no strangers to the pale brown boxes of commodities that were delivered to our house every month. If you’ve never had a grilled cheese sandwich made from a hunk of government cheese, butter, and soft wheat bread, you don’t know what you’re missing and I don’t know how you grew up to be a well-rounded person. We would also get cans of meat and bags of flour and cornmeal. Can you say cornbread? Mom could somehow look at a cupboard of ingredients and an hour later have a meal sitting on the table waiting for us kids to devour that tasted so good, we never missed McDonald’s.

If Mom had been any other person, we might not have survived those years.

Things eventually got better, but we rarely made it above the poverty line. It would be ten years into my first marriage before I finally made enough money to change tax brackets. I’ve been down, and I’ve been up over the years. I’ve gone hungry at times, and at other times, I was able to give of what I had and help other people. I made over 125k in one year, but I’ve never felt rich or even financially comfortable. I’ve never had good credit and I always considered myself broke.

It wasn’t until recently that I could call myself rich — not for having money but because I didn’t want anything. I had a beautiful family in two parts of the world — the Philippines and the States — and there was nothing I wanted that would satisfy me more than that. I am a man who walks around with a smile on his face for no reason — but not all the time, because no one can be happy 24/7 — and I know, no matter how much or how little money I have, I will always have love and fulfillment, and that is plenty for me.

What Have We Learned from Potatoes and Commodities

Those of you who have been poor know what I mean when I say growing up without money teaches a person what is important in life. It may take a few years to realize it, but when we do, it makes all the difficult times we lived through seem like nothing.

When you realize you don’t need to buy things to make you happy, you can finally be free to enjoy life for what it truly is and not be stuck in a constant rat race. Those who realize the truth in the old saying, money can’t buy happiness, have come to a place where we know that money is necessary but not enough to give up your life for.

Sadly there will be those who don’t figure it out until they are half-dead, lying on a deathbed, realizing they can’t take wads of cash or a gleaming diamond Rolex into the afterlife, and they have given up the only family that could have been with them and any fulfillment they could have enjoyed in the pursuit of fame and fortune. They worked their whole lives building cogs to make others rich and sacrificed their time and bodies for the sake of their needs and a new iPhone every year.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to determine what’s important. Fulfillment is what we live for, and the only thing that matters in this life. One day you will realize it yourself, but I hope it’s not because of a bag of potatoes and an empty floppy-wheeled shopping cart. I hope it’s because you saw the race to get more money was futile.

Dr. Borreros glanced over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses and looked me in the eyes.

“You have a SCAD, and you are dying.”

I sprawl naked, surgically taped by arms and legs to an overlarge operating table. There was only a thin blue sheet covering my unmentionables, and I felt vulnerable. The surface was frigid, smooth, and sanitized for my protection. I am a man of size, and it took no less than eight nurses to scoot me over from the gurney. Filipinos are not massive people known for feats of strength and a body my weight is not a simple thing to maneuver. The fluorescents were dimmed, but not romantically so. This room was for serious, life-altering business, and its utility spoke of calmness and assurance. This was the Cath lab of The Medical City Hospital, and I was the patient in the middle of an Angiogram.

I wasn’t sure I heard the cardiologist clearly with the low, busy din of the nurses in the room. They had given me some kind of narcotic to help me relax before they jabbed a thick needle in my left wrist – through which a tube and a wire went in through the artery, all the way to my heart. “Relax” said another voice when I grimaced in pain and grunted, because it turns out being stuck to an icy, unyielding table for hours was painful and uncomfortable. The muscles in my butt and legs were a painfully numb and prickly mess, so all I was thinking about when the doctor spoke was easing the discomfort in my extremities. I knew the next few minutes would decide my fate, but all I could think about was trying to move my leg a few inches to ease some anguish.

“Please, sir jason, do not move,” came the rebuke from the masculine, yet syrupy-soft voice of my nurse, sitting a few inches behind my head. A few minutes later, I was trying to move again without being noticed by my eagle-eyed captors.

Don’t Worry, I’m Only Dying

I found myself in the middle of an emergency procedure because I had stumbled in the ER a day before, complaining of excruciating chest pain. Two misguided and overworked doctors in another ER had overlooked my elevated Troponin I levels and had sent me home, saying they couldn’t find what was wrong with me. My EKG was normal. But, after being released, my wife, Flora, forwarded the test results to my primary, Dr. Fuentes, and he phoned us back almost immediately, saying a Troponin I level of .60 was undoubtedly a heart attack and I must go back to the ER as fast as I could manage.

We were dropped by taxi uneventfully and triggered the noisy automatic doors of Metro Hospital, after dropping the kids off at the in-laws and racing to the only hospital that wasn’t swamped by Covid cases. Test results in hand, we informed the baby-faced intern on duty of the situation and complained about the terrible chest pains again. He ordered yet more tests and strolled back momentarily, nurse in tow with a steady flow of enough medication to put a horse to pasture. The goal was to stop the heart attack and prevent any more damage if that were possible. I could easily have already died by now.

After I took all the pills they asked, and an IV was inserted in my left hand, they didn’t just page any run-of-the-mill cardiologist, but a legend in Iloilo City. He was an overachiever who mostly handled celebrities and politicians in the area, so I was honored, because he was taking a real step down in status taking my case. Sure, he cost a pretty penny more, but when you are dying, price in no object. He and his stone-faced resident pored over my EKG and blood tests with a composure that reflected the seriousness of my situation and told us I needed an angiogram to find out how many of my arteries were blocked, causing this massive heart attack.

I shared a look of genuine concern with Flora, one that said we had no insurance in the Philippines, and this would cost more money than we could hope to wrangle at short notice. Her smoky eyes misted, partially obscured by her coffee-colored hair, but didn’t look away. A fact about hospitals in the Philippines is you must pay for all services rendered before you leave the hospital – there was no such thing as credit or paying later. The issue was, if the angiogram proved I had a blockage or two, I would also need angioplasty, which would be another million pesos, and we couldn’t hope to pay. Our bank balance was zero. She hesitated, asking Dr. Borreros, a diminutive and modest man, if the angiogram was necessary. Not skipping a beat, he let out a sigh and said, “Absolutely, your husband could die without it! It should be done sooner than later.”

As a pair, we decided to get the angiogram done immediately and began to gather the 100K Pesos ($2000) down payment by borrowing from my true friend Mike, who laughed and told Flora that “he knows five fat people, and I was four of them” I could always count on Mike for insults and money, like all my good friends. We also borrowed against the credit cards of Josh, my brother-in-law who is more than blood to me, and would play it by ear when we found what was wrong with my arteries after the initial procedure. After a stormy and melancholy ambulance ride to the only hospital in the city with a Cath lab, and a night in the tiny yet modern ICU, here I was, horizontal on an unyielding slab trying to figure out what a SCAD was.

Let’s Have a Round of Applause

SCAD is short for spontaneous coronary artery dissection, and it is exactly as bad as it sounds. The Dr. pulled the bleached sheet that had been blocking my view and I realized for the first time that the entire wall next to me was covered in monitors. Currently playing on the CRTs was a loop taken by the C-arm, a white fluoroscope machine, with the business end hanging precariously over my chest. Through the tube in my artery, they’d released dye, which clearly showed some of the large arteries that fed my heart had been blocked and one inexplicably burst and was leaking blood. The two ends of the artery were inches from each other - not at all where they should be – and one end was in danger of disappearing into my chest, unable to be retrieved. The team needed to try to fix them but weren’t sure they would be successful – it would be a blind procedure. Dr. Borreros stated matter-of-factly that if they didn’t try, I would surely die – maybe in hours, maybe in days.

I didn’t know drama was unfolding twenty feet away: they were spilling the news to my frightened and skittish wife, who was trying not to have a panic attack. She retreated to the corner after crying for a few minutes, worried and inconsolable, and got on the phone with my parents in Arizona, whom I had a strained relationship with. She explained that I needed emergency angioplasty, but because this would be blind procedure, the doctor couldn’t guarantee it would work. It was a 50/50 thing, and Flora could not make this decision on her own. She, my solid and level-headed dad, and emotional but resolved mom decided it was best to try save me right away, as soon as possible. Dr. Borreros floated the idea that I could go to the States and have the procedure done there - there was a slim chance I would survive the trip, because he couldn’t make any guarantees of success. But we all knew he was a consummate professional and could be trusted just as much as any doctor in America.

As I lay trapped and in extreme pain, stuck to the torture surface they called an operating table, Flora whispered so close that her breath tickled my ear, “They are going to do the procedure,” barely holding on to her composure so as not to stress me out. “I’ll see you when it is done.” She held back tears, knowing that she might never see me alive again.

Ten minutes later, the whole cadre of doctors, nurses, and technicians in medicinal blue scrubs cheered and clapped - and the nurse by my head softly chuckled and said that the procedure was a success. Dr. Borreros had rejoined the two ends of the artery with a stent, all blind, a feat that even I understood to be almost impossible. Being the professional he was, he did it without breaking a sweat, without hesitation - and saved my life. An iceman in his own right. Because of him, I had a new lease on life.

Ten Years Before - September 2011

Swampy air and staggering heat slapped me in the face as I plodded down the damp and treacherous steps of the gangway. I’d arrived in Manila, Philippines by dead of night, just missing a passing rainstorm that made landing an experience I wanted to forget. I was in this country to change the way I lived, and hoped changing my address and hemisphere would do the trick. I’d left Tucson behind a few days before, having only known suffering in the States, saying goodbye to my three boys. They were men who still had too much growing up to do. I also left my parents who knew that leaving was the best choice for me considering all I had been through. I had just lost my only brother, and because I was due to step on an international flight, couldn’t attend the funeral. Waiting for me outside the terminal was a beautiful soul with a welcoming smile, a beautiful Filipina bride almost two decades my junior. We had only met online, never in person. She held promises of white sandy beaches and cocktails of sweet coconut milk. I hoped against all hope that I was finally home. A home only a broken man could appreciate.

2022 Heart Attack – The Aftermath

After the angioplasty – the unblocking of a few arteries and adding a stent where the SCAD had been - I languished a week in a nondescript taupe room, streaked windows with fingerprints from past residents covering one wall. An adjustable single hospital bed filled the middle of the room with a turquoise Naugahyde-covered bench along the window-wall. The air smelled of the alcohol I used on my hands religiously, because the last thing I wanted was Covid in the hospital and having to stay longer. Masks were mandatory and mine smelled of the chicken and rice I’d eaten for lunch. I lay, attached to an IV, unable to wander because I had been relegated to dreaded bedrest. But everything was different in a moment. Dr. Borreros and his ever-present resident said I was ready to go home because I had finally pooped in a diaper, which I wore like a badge of honor, despite my best efforts to avoid having to go number 2 in bed. Having someone cleaning up after my rectal gymnastics was the last thing I wanted, but days of eating plenty of roughage and taking copious laxatives left me with no choice but to let go. I’d held it in for too long, and the diaper was nowhere near capable of holding the feces that came flooding out. Before I could react, it was everywhere, peanut butter-colored paste that smelled of Cthulhu’s ball sack, running down the sides of the bed to pool on the floor. I responded by screaming into the intercom that I needed help immediately. They thought I was having a medical emergency. Four nurses, two men and two women, arrived in time to see me losing my mind in this maelstrom of my own stool. Dr. Borreros and resident must have heard of my embarrassing plight because he let me go home that weekend. In my shit-induced psychosis, I could tell they were holding back a fit of the giggles, but in truth, they were as professional as ever. The damages came to 690,000 Pesos, or $13,000, and if it were not for my brother-in-law and his magical plastic money, I would never have left the hospital, probably still working off the debt in the kitchens a few years later.

This was the second time since I arrived in the Philippines that I came close to death. The first being after I took too much medication and fell asleep in a beanbag in the living room thinking I wouldn’t wake the next morning. Both experiences left me feeling I had cheated the reaper, and it was up to me to ensure I didn’t waste these second chances on life I had been handed. My first brush with death pushed me to completely change everything about my life at the time. I went back to college, quit smoking, and broke an addiction I had to my anxiety medication by suffering through months of horrendous withdrawals. I started communicating more with my wife, instead of suffering through my illness alone, and we both started the process of building a worthwhile marriage, instead of the daily screaming matches we engaged in the first few years I was in Iloilo City. Flora started to change too because she had been cursed with anger issues and terrible anxiety. Me almost losing my life twice only caused more trauma for her, but she persevered through her undiagnosed PTSD.

Instead of continuing to do the same things I did in America unsuccessfully to survive, I set out to improve everything a little bit each day. I promised myself I would stop regretting the past, and even though I am still struggling with that very thing to this day, have been improving my outlook a tiny fraction daily since then.

2011 – A New Life?

A month after arriving in the archipelago, Flora and I married, even though she was reeling and confused that I had never told her about the severity of my various mental baggage. She was a beautiful and vibrant island girl, and I was a sick, broken, and obese shell of a man. The first few months, because of medication issues, I slept constantly. She and her family didn’t know how to deal with me because they had no frame of reference or experience with anyone who suffered as I did. Despite not really knowing each other and my medication-driven asexuality, she announced she was pregnant. But another issue would ruin the experience of impending parenthood for both of us. I had been on Social Security Disability for years, and right before I left the States, they told me my benefits would be ending. My experience with the administration was that they used the possibility of losing benefits like a carrot on a stick, making sure I would jump through whatever hoops they asked. Right before I left, I’d filled out reams of paperwork about my condition and attended to my day in court, all to keep my benefits by proving I still needed them. But they cut me off anyway. I mistakenly thought I could maintain my moods and get a job in the Philippines when I arrived but could not handle the medication issues and the sadness that sent me in a spiral down the rabbit hole. I also had no chance of getting a job because there were none, and even if there were, I had no college degree.

After months of almost starving and being unable to support Flora and our unborn baby, I borrowed enough for a plane ticket and flew back to America to get my benefits back. Unfortunately, it took more than a year - I missed the birth of my first and only daughter, and I couldn’t make it back until she was officially one year old. I worked at a convenience store in Tucson the whole time and sent money back for diapers and formula.

2022 and Beyond

Two months after the heart attack, something happened that would forever change our lives again. My son, only three years old, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We had known for a while that something was different about Joey, a hefty and rambunctious boy, but it wasn’t until we got him tested, we found out he was on the spectrum. Flora regretted missing the first few years of his life because of work and quit her job to focus on the boy who needed us more than ever now. Add to that the fact we had a year to pay back $13,000 in loans on various credit cards. We were broke and there was no way I could get either medical or life insurance. If something else happened to me, I would most likely die because we had no more resources to pay for medical care. Add to this we had to pay for therapy for Joey, because his speech was delayed, and he needed help learning how to do things that other kids took for granted. Somehow, we made it with only my Social Security and the little money I made from writing.

 If it had not been for my closest friends Mike and Annie, to people in separate parts of the world, we would never have made it this far. I was thankful for the two people who had stuck with me through everything. It had been a long time since I had people I could call friends, and thankfully, I chose well, because both of them are the best people I could have asked for. In addition to providing financial support, they were willing to listen to both Flora and I rant about difficult our lives were. Yes, it is a give and take relationship, but I feel lucky to have struck gold in the friends I have today.

2015 – An Academic Journey Begins Again

After starting the journey to changing my life, I went back to college online. The first six months at Ashford University were a dream. I was accepted into the Honors College and was a member of Alpha Sigma Lambda. I kept a 4.0 GPA just as I had done throughout my associate degree back in the late 1990s. But the stress of college, and all the improvements I was trying to make made me feel as if I was burning the candle on both ends. The worst was trying to break the addiction to clonazepam and cigarettes which was about as enjoyable as chewing nails and sawdust. The hellish withdrawals and crippling anxiety were making me feel as if I couldn’t cope. I just couldn’t maintain and dropped out. I felt like a failure and like nothing would ever work out for me. But several years later, in 2021, I started again at a new college, Southern New Hampshire University, and continued back where I left off with a 4.0 GPA. But disaster struck when I had to quit because of the heart attack. After my health improved, and I was able to pay back what I had borrowed to stay alive; I went back to SNHU to finally complete what I started all those years before.

A year later, present day, I will be graduating Summa Cum Laude with a degree in General Studies and a member of Alpha Sigma Lambda. I have plans to start my MFA next year if I can get grants and scholarships, because I don‘t want to add to my already huge student loan debt. Even though many are telling me to slow down at my age, I can’t say goodbye to academia. I love it too much. I also have too much to prove to myself and cannot bring myself to exit the college experience that I couldn’t get younger in life. Flora is also going back for that elusive undergrad degree next year as well. Even better, my friend Mike suggested I teach English in China next year as he does, and it looks as though I will be a teacher starting in 2024. Through it all, every hardship, every illness, every setback, Flora and I kept the faith and tried to stop regretting the past. We looked with hope at the future. If I had continued on the path I was walking when I arrived in the Philippines, I would never have made it this far. We kept improving and kept our hopes for the future alive – and most of all, we started planning for a future that was as bright as the sun over the azure waters of the Philippine archipelago.

I have my family, friends, and a wife who wants only me in her future. At 55, as I plan for the next ten years – learning, growing, teaching, traveling, making money, and building our future one step at a time, I feel something that had been missing all those years ago, when I got fed up and boarded a plane for the beaches of Iloilo. I feel hope, and it all started when I stepped off that damp gangway, in the mid of night at the airport in Manila, and said, “I’ve arrived.” I felt a glimmer of hope for the first time in my life.