beaded crochet necklace

page 1 - Leon's WWII Diary

New Air

I think, just possibly, I might be able to believe in God again.
I couldn't understand how she/he could possibly permit someone like Bush to run this country.

But now, I think, God put the right person in the right place and it was the right time.

Kudos to all the 20 somethings who got involved in the political process.

Kudos to Obama, who will have the hardest road ahead of him. Not because he is black, but because there are SO many, major, extremely big problems.

Uncle Neville

My Uncle Neville, my father's brother.
He currently lives in Virginia Beach with his wife Betty. They had two children- Neville and Mark. And there is a granddaughter who flies helicopters and is currently stationed at Fort Knox.

If you ever want to meet him, they go back to Kentucky for a reunion in October of every year. It is a big republican, right wing discussion every time and although I would have liked to go this year, I couldn't stand the politics. The men go in one room and talk about world affairs and the women sit in the other and talk about curtains and babies.

How did I get to be the only (and lonely) liberal in my family?

There are Still Knights

There are still nights when oceans blend.

There are still nights which kiss beauty.

There are still nights where rain airs radiance.

In our unfolded hands a diamond resolves.

There are still knights.

Cat patient

Bubba sits neatly and waits. Slim black tail curled properly around the immaculate white feet.

Large jade eyes turn, the head painted with harlequin colors follows me around the kitchen.

She didn't like the white wild cold stuff outside, explored it somehow without wetting one paw. And now she sits on the counter beaming subliminal messages to me.

"Eat. Eat." I think, I've had breakfast! And, then , those glowing translucent eyes catch me. Ah. It is not my hunger.

Flicker

Movies have flickered in and out of my life.

Filmed before I was, black and white shadows of the 40's illuminate my parent's romance, blaze of The War. "I saw....", "It was sure swell." "On the carrier tonight they showed "Stars Over the Pacific."

Even though they were not my theaters, their story lines not my own, they shaped me as surely as if I acted in them. Perhaps I did. Played in my mother's conception of what "should" be. My father's blind sailor washed idealism.

"How now brown cow." It was a trailer for Snow White. I don't remember watching Snow White with my father at the drive in while my mother was hospitalized. Don't remember, consciously, her illness.

But the boy who couldn't speak, he was sent to a special school. There he eventually delighted his proud parents with the simple rhyme that still conjures up the cartoon for me. "How now brown cow?" Indeed.

Movies mark stages. Ben Hur at the Starlight Drive Inn. In the backseat with my parents up front. Moses lifted the tablets and fog obliterated the light. No smoking mountain, but some revenge perhaps on the growing sins of early adolescence.

Dr. Zhivago with a group. With me, a boy who wanted to hold my hand in the tinkling balalaika music. But he had no money to spend on me. I needed someone to spend money on me. To make me feel like I was worth something.

Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare's yummy words, Zeffirelli's equally poetic sets. Another drive in. Another boy, much older. I was way too young for him and he took me out as one would take out a younger sister. Half bored, half condescending. Some amused. But he was willing to spend a little money, perhaps sensing my need to feel "normal" for once.

Vampire movies at the Prytania at Morehead. I didn't love them, but my roommate did. They were cheap enough at a dollar for me to afford. And it was fun to wear a huge tin cross picked up somewhere at a bargain price and watch reactions.

A dollar a movie. A two stick theatre. One to prop the seat up with and one to beat the rats off with. It was a theatre dimly lit for good reason.

Art films, foreign films with subtitles. Married now, with some money thanks to a husband with a thing for leggy big breasted girls, I could afford the alternate theatre on the Prytania. Rosario and I accidentally ended up at a male porn film one night and giggled our way through the medical checkups and weird photography.

Star Wars was a revelation seen with my husband in a theatre in California. California was a revelation as well. Epic, immense, science fiction immortalized.

Back in the South. Child years. Children and Disney. Animation. Candy, gum, demands, sticky fingers, tears. A cuddle and a sleep head warm and sweaty. A lap full of child that I long for again with a passion unmatched by any other. The movies irritating, tacky, or somewhat interesting. The theaters becoming bombastic, iconic, expensive.

The latest. End of the world scenarios. Various variations on horror, crime, violence, blood, some humor. The venue? Plush, pseudo quilts, cutsie track lighting in plastic tubing reminding me of Christmas tree lights. A cup holder for an outsize drink. Reminders to turn off all electronic devices. A seat that would be comfortable if I could sit still, if my bones didn't ache, if I didn't know that when I stood up I would be too stiff to move quickly. The result of too much damage.

Movies. Theatres. The RKO Albee in Cincinnati, Pike 27. All the unremembered seats and places inbetween.

Bread and Circuses. The distraction of a distraught age.

hands

Her hand had been well-tended, was slender, beautiful in age with its careful veins arching gracefully over the standing tendons. Diamonds hung loosely in the worn metal of their settings. They drifted around the slimness of her fingers in circles of endearment that young lovers could not possibly know.

His fingers were softened with age, but they were still squared with his ambition, still strong enough to clasp a mistress. Still greedy enough to ruin other men's reputations, ruin lives with no more thought than they would swat a mosquito. Perhaps less.

Well Fair Disabled

It is not quite light.

In the dusk of the wire fence pairs of eyes patrol. Wary heads turn at human sounds, but mutter their own low tongued conversations.

She thinks she has been feeding the feral black and white cat that lives in the culvert, looses her litter to high water every spring when the rain turns heavy. But the coyotes know differently.

She sits heavy in the 70's kitchen chair, its orange plastic bruised and rubbed, cracked and mended with the silver of duct tape. Rust lines her hands when she uses the metal as a lever to stand. Her back bone is fractured with hairline cracks that medication and a food stamp diet have added to her weight.

Blue eyes seem to reflect sparks from the fence, as a train crosses the boggy land at the other side of the pasture. The expected rumble disturbs neither the cat hunting coyotes nor the blue eyes hunting ease.

She sits and watches as though the land were the television she will turn on when she returns inside. On her lap sits a pan of greasy yellow macaroni topped with buttery fake cheese. A clear plastic fork lifts and falls with an intense uniformity that the coyotes and the cat envy.

"It's the Ambien," she says. "It makes me eat."

In early summer the smells are still sweet. Honeysuckle fragrance drifts and the partially blocked sewage system is not yet blooming in the summer heat to come.

"It's all the fault of the liberal bastards." she says. "Them that kills unborn babies and commit same sex adultery."

Her church reassures her. No matter what happens. It isn't her fault.

Out

Two days of dancing ice.
I locked in the South with a glacial blue norther.

I Had to dig out, find my white car
Under its pale freeze of cloud born powder.

I had to drive with the snow sun
And glare dancing like desert diamonds,

Drive over black ice blue
Under tree thin shadows of polished ebony.

I Had to get out under the white sky skin,
The twig capillaries flattened budding sprigs.

Get to where no liquid ran
And Spring was a lonely lament
Unheard, unseen.