In the Ether

You see me here, don’t you? Laura G.? You think you know me. You see my outline in flesh and bone and blood. Yes, I’m real, a corporeal body, you think. Is corporeal body redundant? Maybe you think I’m redundant. You see my streaky hair, my brown tired eyes. My dress droops over thin hips. My heels are run down. You think I’m a poor housewife, don’t you? That I have to work to make ends meet, that I’m part of a family just scraping by?

You see me at the market, pushing a cart in front of me, piling in cans of soup and tomato sauce, quarts of sour cream and ricotta cheese, boxes of pasta, bloody steaks and congealed chicken parts in shrink wrap. OK, I’m no longer fastidious about the fruit I pick. So what if there are blemishes on the tomatoes and pockmarks on the Granny Smiths from the stems of neighboring apples? Do you think my kids will notice? No way. They couldn’t be bothered. They’d much rather eat the pizzas we order in or the McDonald’s hamburgers I pick up on the way home from the office when I work too late to cook.

You see me here, you see my body, but that’s not who I am. The body you see isn’t the real me. I don’t live in this world. I live in a world of becoming, not in the world of the now. The now is not what I meant it to be. It just happened. So I live in the future, in the good luck or good fortune or good will or the willpower that I will exercise to get there, to become. To be how I was meant to be, how I wanted to be.

There’s Charlie, of course. My husband, poor thing. He’s stuck in the Now and can’t come with me into the To-Be. He sees the sides of the box he’s in and thinks that’s all there is. He believes in the definition of us, of our small house, our two kids, our two meaningless jobs. I’m out of the box, you see. Up here. In the ether. Can you follow me? You know, up here is magic. Up here, I wonder with amazement that planes don’t fall from the heaviness of their own weight.

I mean, it’s magic, isn’t it, when you think about it. How do the planes stay up?

We may appear to be a poor two-income family with run-down heels and tired eyes, but we have managed to travel some, mainly to Florida to visit Charlie’s parents. The last time we flew to Miami, when I looked out the window, I couldn’t tell if we were in the sea or in the sky. Serrated clouds, like surf, stretched back to the horizon, white-ridged ripples extending to the invisible line where sea and sky met. And there was I, strapped into a metal container with other fleshly bodies, insulated in this metal cocoon, warm and snug, hurtling at five hundred miles an hour through the wet coldness of clouds. A miracle.

Charlie and I married young, just after college. Heather was conceived right away. Too soon, too soon. Charlie wanted to go to law school, but instead he got comfortable at Allstate. Health insurance and retirement benefits and vacation pay and small promotions and small pay raises propel him along, give him a sense of movement and progress. He’s strapped into fatherhood and husbandhood and beancounterhood and security. His eighteenth floor office overlooks Midtown.

Sometimes when I’m soaring in the ether, I see him lean over his desk, shoving aside the endless pile of insurance claims. He covers his ears with his hands, while the wind squeals and the cold dampness of the clouds seeps into the pores of the skyscraper.

 Charlie’s and my sexual frenzy lessened after Heather was born. Instead, we fell totally in love with our daughter. The back of my neck ached for months from bending over to marvel at her tiny face as she laid nursing in my arms.  Her tiny fingers curled around mine, clutching as if holding onto a life preserver. And that’s what I became. I – the I who floats in the ether – was totally lost in serving Heather. Feeding and bathing her, washing her tiny pink stretchies, holding her over my shoulder and patting her back for that little reassuring burp, changing diapers, powdering her peachy little rump, pureeing solid foods in the blender. I was much more careful then about blemishes on fruit.

Just as Heather became a little person, Jeremy came along. He was colicky from the start, a more difficult child. And I was exhausted, wrung out, an automaton who moved mechanically from sunup to sundown. Sleep was fitful as I tried to shield Heather and Charlie from Jeremy’s nighttime outbursts. Jeremy’s colic subsided as the months went by, but he had a weak respiratory system and succumbed to every bacteria and virus his sister brought home from nursery school. Heather might be sick for a day, but Jeremy’s reactions lingered on. He was a sponge that retained sickness like greasy soapsuds.

 I got a job as an admittance clerk at Lenox Hill Hospital after Jeremy’s third birthday. Heather was in first grade. At first, it was exciting. I was out of the house every day, working and talking with adults. I took coffee breaks and lunch in the hospital cafeteria, seeking out companions. But all seemed unapproachable. There were two kinds of people, those who clumped together forming a group wall and those who sat alone, eyes downcast.  I felt even lonelier than I had at home with the children.

The Mir station was launched into orbit that year. And that’s when I started floating into the ether. What was it like, being an astronaut and staying in space for months at a time, looking down at Earth?

Every day anguished people sat in front of me across a wide Formica-covered desk. Mothers whose children had fallen down the stairs and broken a leg, fathers who had drunk too much and gotten into a bar fight, teenagers who’d had a knife thrust in their arm or streaked across a cheek, middle-aged men laboring for breath and clutching their chests, runny-nosed infants coughing in their mothers’ arms.

Day after day, I performed triage, deciphering and decoding the symptoms, the broken English and other languages, screening out the emergencies from the sit-and-waits.

One day the police brought in Walter. They had found him curled up in the fetal position on Lexington Avenue, lying against the southwest entrance to Bloomingdale’s just as dawn broke. As I looked at Walter, I could see what he saw when he awoke – dawn bursting over the horizon spilling chips of golden light down 59^th Street. I could feel Walter’s grin spreading happily across his face as he greeted the police, as happily as if his mother had awakened him for a special Sunday breakfast of Swedish pancakes and lingonberries.

The Walter sitting across my desk in the cocooned cubicle grinned happily, although moaning and holding his head. He rocked back and forth in the swivel chair, his whole body thrusting around as if on a Coney Island ride. 

“Looks like he’s been kicked around some,” the female officer said. “I’d have his ribs checked. He’s been cut with a knife too.” She reached for his arm and pulled back a torn jacket sleeve. “See?”

When I bent toward the wound, the foul odor of Walter’s clothes shot up my nostrils, sending warning signals to my brain. My mind automatically catalogued the scents – vomit, beer, cigarette smoke, feces, urine, and strangely, cheese – even as I fought the urge to recoil, and moved closer to see. Blood had already congealed in a line from the crook of Walter’s arm to his wrist. There was no evident seepage, and I concluded that Walter must have been sleeping off the attack for some hours.  

“And hit on the head,” the male officer added. That was obvious from the blood and bruised mess on Walter’s temple, under the hand that was lamely trying to protect it from further harm.

“We’ve got to complete the paperwork on this guy, so we’ll sit in on your triage,” the female said.

“Sure,” I said, doubtful that Walter would be coherent, yet somehow already knowing everything about him, fellow traveler in the ether.  

  

Mother’s Days

February 11, 2007

Mom’s memory is mostly gone. She remembers my sister and me, but has no memory of her grandchildren. She talks often about visits to her long-gone parents. She imagines getting on a bus to see them in Brooklyn, although she’s lived in Florida for more than thirty years, long after their passing.

In her mind, she sometimes prepares dinners for her older sister Lillie or Dad’s four sisters and two brothers. She imagines she’s back in the Brooklyn house that held the family together.

Her caregivers in the nursing home tell me, “Your mom’s been baking a cake this morning.” And they smile.

When I visit, she says, “Let’s go upstairs and have coffee and cake with your dad.” Of course, there is no upstairs to go to. Her skilled-care unit has 35 beds. She shares a room with a woman frozen immobile, silent, and twisted like a pretzel by Parkinson’s. Mom has macular degeneration and is severely deaf, and has no idea the woman is in her room. I wonder if Mom is aware that she herself is in a room at all. Does her mind even register physicality, materiality?

Most of all, Mom’s attention is focused on Dad. She’s built her life around him. After sixty years of marriage, he alone is still the center of her universe. After he sold his business in New York, Dad and Mom moved to a senior community of single-family houses near Fort Lauderdale. They spent the happiest years of their life there, after turbulent decades earlier.

Eight years ago, they downsized to a small condo apartment. But as Mom’s health declined, and Dad couldn’t manage her care by himself anymore, my sister and I found an elder facility that offered “independent living” for Dad and full-time care for Mom.

Dad had a studio apartment, furnished with a minimum of their possessions. He visited Mom every afternoon, taking the elevator from the second to the fifth floor. He had a tiny kitchen and preferred to prepare his own meals rather than have dinner in the congregate dining room for the “independents,” mostly widows who park their walkers and wheelchairs on the edges of the room and engage in what was to him meaningless conversation. Or maybe he preferred not to put his hearing aids into his ears.

     When Dad died suddenly, falling onto the floor of the bathroom in the dead of night, we didn’t tell Mom the next day, when we discovered him. My sister and I were stunned by the shock. We didn’t know how Mom would react, nor how we would handle her reaction. We imagined her shrieking with horror. We feared she would have another, a possible third, heart attack. We imagined her crying uncontrollably, pitifully. We didn’t know how we could console her.

We held his funeral without her.

     As it turned out, when we finally did tell Mom, she couldn’t grab her mind around it.

“What?” she asked. “Where is he?”

A moment later she’d forget, and ask where he was. Over and over, day after day, hour after hour of our visits, we would have to remind her that he was gone. Every time she heard it, it was as if it were the first time. But she didn’t scream, didn’t cry. All she did was repeat the questions.

On a few occasions, the director of the skilled nursing unit heard us. One day she said, “Stop telling your mother that her husband is gone. Every time she hears it, it’s a fresh assault.”

It was hard for my sister to lie at first, but when Mom asks me, “Where’s your father?” or says, “Let’s go upstairs for coffee and cake with your dad,” I answer, “Daddy is taking a nap,” or “Daddy is at the store,” or “Daddy is at work.”

These lies seem to satisfy her, to make order in her universe.

Still, she visibly brightens up when a man’s large figure passes through the reception room where we have our visits. Through her eyes grown dark with macular degeneration, she believes the shadowy form is her husband, come to sit by her side and talk gently with her about family, memories, the life they had together.    

One day my thirty-year-old son comes to visit with me. After he leaves, she says, “He has a nice nature. He’s very friendly.”

Of course, as his mom, I agree, finding her newly acquired perception disarming and charming, even if she doesn’t recognize him as her grandson.

Then, from the midst of her dementia-fragmented mind, she makes a Zen-like proclamation, which I like to attribute as arising from her deeply buried and suppressed essence: “Not everything comes. One thing comes. Another doesn’t come.”

Isn’t that just like life?

Too Many Fish to Fry

Too Many Fish to Fry

    There are fish stories, then there are not-fish stories. I’m collecting wannabe fish and not-fish stories. The only link between them is me, and my life.

Fish Story #1

At the age of twelve, I was taken by my father to go deep-sea fishing in Freeport, Long Island. My dad often treated me as if I were his son, instead of his older daughter. He had no sons, so there I was, a surrogate son. It was okay with me, because I loved my dad, idolized him even. Any special attention from him was wonderful. Any time I could get away from my mom was equally wonderful.

At that time in his life, Dad was a cabdriver in New York City. His haunts were the airports and Manhattan hotels. He cruised the streets for maybe ten or twelve hours a day, stopped for meals at cabbies’ favorite cafeterias (at which I would sometimes meet him for a talk, later in my teens). He liked talking to his passengers. As for the hours he was on duty, I’m only guessing, because my father led a double life, which I didn’t know about then.

It was a cold day as I remember it (must have been in the fall or maybe early spring), and we left the house so early in the morning it was just turning daylight. We picked up Abbie, Sandy’s husband. Sandy was next to the oldest of my thirteen cousins on my father’s side.  Her sister, Marsha, was the eldest. Later in life they became permanently estranged.

My father’s car was a dark green Plymouth, or maybe a Chrysler. I sat up front between him and Abbie. In 1953, most cars seated three in front and three in back. Abbie had a great sense of humor and we laughed a lot as we headed east along Sunrise Boulevard to Freeport.  

Dad said we should stop and have a good breakfast at a diner on the way. It was probably the first time I had breakfast in a diner. I had eggs and toast. Probably not bacon, since my mother kept a kosher home. I still hadn’t tasted bacon by the time I reached twelve. Everyone I knew was Jewish, except some of my schoolmates, so I hadn’t even had an opportunity to eat bacon.

When we arrived at the dock, we met up with some of my uncles and friends of my father. The party boat was designed to hold about twenty or thirty people. I was the only girl aboard. The men settled along the perimeter of the boat in preparation of casting their rods out to sea. The fishermen each had a pail of live bait near their feet. Little fish or worms swished around in the pails’ water as the boat left the dock. 

We were on our way over a dark gray ocean under a solemn gray sky. It was cold and I shivered, wishing I’d worn another layer under my coat. The boat’s prow plowed through the choppy waves, parting the sea with a V-shaped wake behind us. I was excited and enchanted by the new experience of being at sea. After a while the boat reached its destination in what seemed to be the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight. Suddenly the motor was switched off, and the roar of the boat and the crash of waves were gone. For a brief moment, there was an eerie kind of silence (at least as I remember it), and then the gruff sound of men’s voices and laughter began, as if another kind of switch was turned on.

My father baited the hook on my line. I followed him to the places he had picked out for us to stand. The rail was about waist-high for the men, and nearly shoulder-high for me. Still, I could look over the railing and see the gray-green water swirling below, lapping against the boat. Lapping, lapping, and the boat swaying, swaying, swaying, lapping, lapping… and I vomited.

And kept vomiting until all of my breakfast was feeding the fish the men would soon be catching. The muscles in my chest on down to my female parts were in agony as they responded to the retching of my seasickness. I was weak and shivering, with shuddering chills. My dad found a place for me to lie down on deck: a covered storage locker about six feet by six feet, and a dark blue blanket to throw over me. I could barely stretch out my legs (even though I was a short kid) because of some coiled ropes at my feet. 

I kept moaning, “Dad, make the captain turn the boat around.” But neither he nor the captain would listen. For the next eight hours, I lay there, nauseous, pain-wracked, angry, and shivering as I realized my father was not God.

Published in various versions in Asheville Citizen-Times (September 8, 2015) and Black Mountain News (July 16, 2015)

Black Mountain Writer Pat Christy's Book, "The Education of Temple Fox," Explores Rebirth of Spirit 

Everyone has a story to tell. Each of us (sometimes secretly) believes our life history is unique, rich with quirky detail, and huge with seas of emotion. And, universally, people want to share their stories – even with strangers.

     When you’re a writer, you’re compelled to commit your story on paper. It’s a gift: a wave of longing, a tsunami of passion, that rushes you onward from the turbulent ocean of your imagination. The story may be told as allegory, disguised in fantasy, but it pushes shoreward, building momentum, into a heap of manuscript pages crawling with the blood and guts of your soul.

     Ah, that first draft. You feel relief, throw open your arms, curl your toes into the sand, eyes on a miraculously clearing blue sky, and sigh: Behold, this is who I am.

This is the exhilarating spirit reflected by writer Patricia S. Christy in The Education of Temple Fox, a spiritual fantasy and adventure story like no other.

     Pat Christy, who’s lived in Black Mountain for ten years, was born in Baltimore in 1953, child of a magician and a mercurial, beautiful mother, each self-absorbed, complex, depressive, and having suicidal tendencies.

As a precocious, shy, and curious child, Pat took refuge in deep thought. At age fifteen she became a Neo-Platonist, believing in Truth, Beauty and Love, with a belief in divinity residing in human form. 

A restless and questioning soul, Pat felt guided by "Spirit" to move to many terrains across the country, where one could say she has lived several lives, both on terra firm and in metaphysical realms.

While living in Santa Fe, NM, she learned to discern the charlatans from the genuine shamans of New Age thought. In the “lush, green woodland of somnambulistic” Connecticut, Pat said she had an experience that "engulfed me in magnificent love and peace that permeated every cell of my body.” 

Pat survived three serious illnesses and was told by “Spirit” to move yet again, this time to Wisconsin.

“It was there that I slowly gained the power to heal myself, and where I fell in love,” she said.

In 2005 Pat and her partner were told, again by “Spirit,” to resettle among the mountains of Western North Carolina.

Has this writer drawn on her own rich spiritual experiences to develop her memorable characters? Unquestionably, yes!

The hero, Temple Fox – an Anglo-American free-lance pilot in 1930s Kenya – emerges from Pat’s pen as his wood-hulled plane crashes headlong into a lightning-torn sea, where he meets his maker.

But wait… The hero, struck dead in the first chapter?

No, of course not. Temple Fox is fished up from the sea by a magical, primitive tribespeople, far from civilization as he knew it. Brought back to life, Temple Fox is hailed by them – well, by some of them – as a god and savior.  The story of Temple Fox is a universal one of rebirth, spiritual awakening, mysticism, magic, belief, and disbelief. It is also a compelling, beautifully crafted saga that enchants the reader page after page.

Copies of The Education of Temple Fox are available through Amazon, at Town Hardware in Black Mountain, and at Mountain Made in Asheville. Book Two of this trilogy is being written now.

“It’s taken twenty years to bring Temple Fox’s story to the public,” Pat said. “Now he can proudly proclaim, as I can, ‘Behold, this is who I am.’”

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Published in Black Mountain News, August 20, 2015

Not Your Grandfather’s Hardware Store

By Myra Schoen

Town Hardware & General Store celebrates its second anniversary this summer under the ownership of Beth and Peter Ballhaussen. It was love at first sight for the couple when they learned that this historic and iconic “Main Street” destination was up for sale two years ago.

“We had already planned to eventually retire in Black Mountain when the time came,” said Beth. And when the previous owners, Barry and Susan Robinson, decided to sell, the time seemed perfect, she said.

In stories, when a stranger comes to town, anything can happen, often life-changing to the inhabitants of the town, be it sinister, wondrous, or gradations in between.

Bob McMurray, executive director of the Black Mountain Chamber of Commerce, said, “When Beth and Peter came to town, they fit right into the community. Peter joined the Chamber of Commerce marketing council. He and Beth improved Town Hardware and they do a great job of promoting it.”

He added, “What’s good for Town Hardware benefits the town’s business economy.”

Of most importance to Beth and Peter was staff retention. They are loyal to staffers, some of whom have been at Town Hardware for 10, 20, or even 25 years.

Susan Brackett, a Town Hardware salesperson for more than 20 years, said, “They’ve made us feel secure in our jobs.”

According to Peter, “I don’t know of any other hardware store in this area or other places in North Carolina where we’ve lived that can offer the staff expertise of Town Hardware.”

People in Black Mountain rely on the shop’s personnel to find the solution for their household repair problems, whether replacing a lost screw for an appliance, recommending the appropriate tool for a do-it-yourself job, or identifying a cleaning product for a glass stovetop, Beth said.  

“We like to think of Town Hardware as a resource for all things household,” Beth said.  To that end, the couple has introduced several new product lines.

“While it’s important for us to maintain the traditions and atmosphere established by previous owners,” Peter said, “we’re also making some subtle improvements and integrating new product lines that we believe enhance customer experiences.”

If a customer wants something not in inventory, it will be ordered on the spot. Town Hardware is part of the Do It Best cooperative, which enables the store to compete with “big box” stores, Peter said.

With 4,000 other small businesses in the national network, the Do It Best cooperative enables Town Hardware and other members to buy in bulk, helping them to keep prices competitive. A regional warehouse in Lexington, South Carolina, stocks more than 70,000 products and supports customer requests. Special orders can be speedily fulfilled, Peter said.

“We’re constantly looking for ways to build upon Town Hardware’s base, adding new services and goods, and improving the accessibility and appearance of the three distinct shop areas that comprise Town Hardware,” Beth said.

A revamping of the shipping area (with Federal Express and UPS services) at the back of the store cleared the way to a mezzanine, which now houses the new Book Nook. This treasure trove of new titles includes the works of Black Mountain authors such as Pat Christy and Jerry Pope, as well as cookbooks, how-to books, and those addressing regional history, nature, and art. There are also rocking chairs in which to enjoy respite and perusal of the eclectic collection.

The store’s original wall-length countertop in the hardware section has been sawn into two parts and reconfigured into a shape that accommodates two checkout stations rather than one.  At the rear of the store, the exterior deck has been opened to customers and transformed into a showplace for gas grills.

Town Hardware is no small Mom & Pop enterprise. Peter and Beth estimate their inventory contains a quarter-million items, which includes 37,000 different products. Nearly 200 vendors supply the store in addition to the Do It Best consortium.

Comparing Town Hardware to an old-fashioned general store (although it has that feel) is like comparing a pad and pencil to an iPad.

The variety of items ranges from garden hoses and birding supplies to kids’ metal lunch boxes; from pop-up birthday cards to jars of local jams and honey; from axes, screwdrivers, and pocket knives to toy dinosaurs and miniature John Deere tractors; from cast-iron skillets to nuts, bolts, and nails; from shaving supplies to egg timers and pepper grinders; from craft brands of local and regional soda pop to snow shovels, sleds, and garden gnomes.

Like most of “historic” downtown Black Mountain’s structures, the Town Hardware buildings were constructed in the 1920s.

###

[Cut by editor due to space availability:]

The original hardware store was flanked by a drugstore in the corner building and a five-and-dime on the other side. Previous owners acquired the two adjacent properties and connected all three to form the current layout. The corner store has kitchenware, small appliances, gifts, cards, old-fashioned candy, and a variety of food typically found in a general store, such as grits, corn meal, and country ham. The middle room has hardware, electrical and plumbing supplies, toys, tools, key-making and plain good advice on fixing stuff. The third room features outdoor living products, yard and garden equipment, cooling and heating devices, and seasonal goods.

Town Hardware’s website, Townhardware.com, lists an inventory of some unique and popular products as well as a how-to-do-it video encyclopedia.

      In the months to come, Town Hardware will introduce new customer enrichments and delights, and continue to repurpose spaces for new ventures and uses.

“We hope that for today and into the future, Town Hardware will continue to surprise and satisfy visitors and customers with the diverse products we stock,” Beth said.  “As we like to say, Town Hardware has ‘aisles of smiles.’”

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8/14/15 2:14 PM