Overheard Malicious whispers Between two Co-workers My heart grew cold at their words Squeezing in my chest
Breathing stopped Blackness obscured sight My fists clenched And unclenched Thoughts swirled like a tornado Unholy and wild
Office chair Calmed me in this storm I held on Took a breath Straightened my back and went out “I heard what you said”
This is my response to this week’s W3 challenge: to write shadorma poems.
The shadorma is a compact Spanish syllabic form built from a six-line stanza with a strict syllable pattern: 3 / 5 / 3 / 3 / 7 / 5 (26 syllables total). It is typically unrhymed, and a poem may consist of a single stanza or a series of stanzas.
For this challenge, the theme is Sensory Details.
Write a close-up study of a single inanimate object or a very specific moment. Think small and focused rather than narrative or expansive. The power of the poem should come from sensory observation—what can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or felt.
Yes, this actually happened. It was a specific moment and I tried to write the sensory details of it.
Soooo… I’m looking for challenges or prompts to inspire me.
You understand, right? I wantto post on a regular basis, but the question is what to post!
Dawn, a blogger that I follow, posted a photo that she called Triptych Crop. Her photo reminded me of a photo I have on my desk (someday I’ll post a picture of it) that is from Varde, Denmark, circa 1900. It’s the kind of photo that pulls you in. I followed Dawn’s rabbit trail which led me to a photography challenge called Unusual Crop.
Well, after looking at 60+ year old photos of my brothers playing chess, I went back to that album and cropped photos of each of my siblings (and me) from that same time period. I don’t know if the crops are unusual, but here’s what’s left of the photos I cropped:
Remember the days of COVID when businesses shut down and then slowly reopened with new rules and regulations. Masks. Social distancing. Hand sanitizer. Who could have imagined it all?
Cooperation was palpable in those early days. We looked for ways to make it all work. Hand-sewn masks were made and distributed because manufactured masks weren’t available. Restaurants developed take-out menus. Zoom changed its meaning; it became a way to meet and connect, rather than something a car did on the highway.
When the sports facility where I worked reopened, we required everyone to wear masks. In the pool, where masking wasn’t possible, we implemented social distancing rules. Every other lane was left vacant and swimmers had to sign up to reserve their lane.
Over time, the restrictions were slowly lifted. The mask rule remained, however, long after other businesses in town had removed it.
One morning, A.M. (Angry Man) came in the front door. “WHAT THE #@*!$# DO I HAVE TO WEAR THIS FOR?” he yelled across the foyer to me.
I started to answer, but he continued cursing and yelling. “I DON’T HAVE TO WEAR IT ANYMORE. THE STATE LIFTED THAT REGULATION.”
I wanted to say that I understand. I wanted to tell him that I’m sorry; I don’t make the rules. I wanted to remind him that we are privately owned and run; we have to wait for The Foundation to lift the rule.
But he was yelling and other members were coming in, wearing masks, checking in at the front desk.
As one woman scanned her membership card, she said to me, “This is how Hitler got started, you know,” and she pointed at her mask.
A.M. was still yelling, F-ing this and F-ing that. I swear, the Hitler woman was smirking at me behind her mask. Other people were staring — at me, at A.M., at the mask sign on the front desk. I turned and walked away.
I walked into the back office where my supervisor worked. She wasn’t there. I walked down the long hallway to the Director’s office and knocked on the door. I interrupted a meeting.
“I don’t get paid enough to be compared to Hitler,” I said, and I told her the whole story.
When I finished talking, I saw A.M. coming down that long hallway. He reached me and went down on his knees.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please forgive me. I’m so sorry for the way I spoke to you.”
“Of course, I forgive you,” I said. “Thank you for apologizing.”
We had a brief conversation and I went back to work. I think he stayed to talk with the Director.
Just the other day he was in my office.
“You know I have opinions,” he said.
I smiled. “Yes, you do, but this is a nicer way to handle them.”
He shared with me a concern/complaint/suggestion. I listened and thanked him.
That first angry interaction did not define our relationship and he is no longer a stranger. I think there’s a lesson or two in there somewhere.
I drove to Roanoke and back, stopping overnight in DC where we visited an amazing new museum called Planet Word. I delivered my middle daughter to school and drove home yesterday.
In the meantime, I fell behind in the minimal writing I’ve been doing. Tanka Tuesday and W3 — you’re on my list for today. Readers, stay tuned.
For this post, though, my Stream of Consciousness writing exercise, I want to try to unravel the writing process a little more. I’ve been wrestling with the W3 prompt for this week which is to use line or lines from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” as part of a new poem.
I had Anthem on repeat for a good year at one point not so long ago. It’s a great song.
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen, Anthem
So… process… I reread the words to the song, and immediately, the whole thing was playing in my head.
How can I take something so epic, so classic, and craft it into something new?
Enter Doctor Who. Remember the episode when the Doctor meets young Amy. For the record, it’s called “The Eleventh Hour,” S31 E1. My favorite line: “Must be a hell of a scary crack in your wall.”
Process — continued — Suddenly I have two sets of background singers in my head. One is singing, “Must be a hell of a scary crack,” and the other responds, “That’s how the light gets in, that’s how the light gets in.”
Seriously, I even hear a tune to their words. I can hear them going back and forth. And it’s like I’m just waiting for that lead singer to step up to the main mic and start singing the verses.
That’s what I have to write. The verses that go with the background vocals.
In the meantime, all I can think about is this homeless man that came in to eat the hotel breakfast at 6 AM of my day in DC.
I was drinking my coffee and doing my morning reading down in the breakfast area while my daughter was still sleeping in our room. He walked past me, and the first thing I noticed was the worn grocery store bag he was carrying filled with recyclables — bottles, mostly.
He wore a dirty army green jacket — and that was noteworthy to me because it was hot out, even at 6 AM. His hair was unkempt. He was unshaven. All this was one quick impression as he passed me.
I had my back to the food, so I didn’t see what was happening. I was reading, so I didn’t even really pay attention to it at all. There were a few other patrons there plus the woman who was keeping the food stocked and the area clean.
Suddenly, four men went past me in a hurry. They were big and wore vests with the word “SECURITY” emblazoned on them.
I heard the scuffle behind me, but didn’t turn to look.
They literally dragged the homeless man out. He cried, “Where is the humanity?! Where is the humanity?!” all the way out the door.
Then silence.
I sipped my coffee and pondered his question.
The woman who worked the breakfast came over to me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “He can’t just come in here like that.”
“I understand,” I replied. “It’s sad, though, isn’t it?”
“If he came back at 10, I would give him the leftover food,” she said. “I have to throw it away. I’d rather it be eaten.”
We co-existed in silence for a bit, each lost in our own thoughts.
“Thank you,” I finally said. “You do a lovely job here.”
But that story, I knew later, was the fodder for the verses to go with my insistent background vocals.
Because, really, where is the humanity? It’s masked by a scary crack. And that’s where the light gets in.
First, let me just say HOLY COW!! WRITING ONLY 23 WORDS IS A CHALLENGE!!
There. Got that off my chest!
I was thinking about Sabbaths and how we need to take breaks — regular breaks — from hard things. There’s discipline and then there are nutso compulsions. I work at a gym, so I see a lot of those people who are very disciplined about their training, but I also see people who compulsively overtrain to a point where it’s pretty unhealthy.
Writing 23 words is not unhealthy. It’s hard, though! But I decided that I would be disciplined about it six days a week and on the seventh I would blather. Uncontrollably blather. And use Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness (SoCS) writing prompt as my excuse.
Today’s prompt: “out of the box.” This isn’t really an out of the box story, but it’s the first thing that came to my mind so I’m going to run with it.
Over the last few weeks I have found myself.
I know that sounds ridiculously pop-psychology 1980s, but when you’ve lost yourself and found yourself again, it’s kind of amazing.
For my regular readers, remember when I wrote this post: What’s Your Goal? I was incredibly frustrated by someone trying to help me by asking me about my goals. I was too lost in the darkness of a deep forest of I-don’t-know-what to even understand that question.
Fast forward to maybe two weeks ago.
No wait — in the intervening time — about 9 months — I took on some new duties with my job. I’m helping bring some senior programming to the facility where I work. To do that, I’ve been working with a woman who has been running a senior program at another location. This past Thursday, January 5, was the big day of inviting seniors in for an Open House.
Like I said, leading up to it, I’ve been meeting regularly with a woman who has been doing this job elsewhere. We’ve discussed rooms to hold events and places to store materials. We’ve discussed personnel to be involved and practical safety issues for the population we’ll be working with. It’s all been so good.
Then the lightbulb went on a couple weeks ago. I was talking to one of my daughters about it, about a few ideas I had. Specifically, I said, “We should have a ‘Bird’ month of programming. We could have one of the artists lead an art project involving birds. We could maybe build some birdhouses, We could have someone speak on backyard birding and ways to attract birds.”
I was on a roll and getting excited as the ideas started to flow. “We could go out birding. We could get out the badminton nets if people wanted to hit the birdie back and forth.”
“Mom,” my daughter said, “this is what you do.”
And she was so right. I’m an idea person.
That free flow of ideas had been so stuffed in for so long, for so many reasons.
Not everyone likes idea people. One of the people I work with is an idea-shutter-downer. “Stay in your lane,” she said to me when I made suggestions.
Out of the box may not be the right term for what I’m feeling.
Maybe out of the dark forest. Or out of a hole.
I feel alive again. The Open House was a HUGE success.
What’s my goal? To use my unique giftedness to serve other people. I LOVE doing that. Now I have an outlet for it with the senior programs where I work.
[a momentary pause before I finish my alphabet challenge]
The other day I got a call from a friend that I hadn’t heard from in a while.
“I’m gong to visit my brother and thought I would reach out to some of my friends while I was driving,” she said.
I was so honored. We hadn’t talked in a long time. At one point we were going to try going for walks together wherever we were and talk on the phone, but it only happened once or twice before it fell by the wayside.
Life has a way of pulling us away from the very best of ideas.
The truth is I need more perseverance, more stick-to-itiveness, in my own life.
The other night I was so frustrated with my job that I went for a walk afterwards and mentally drafted my resignation letter. I thought through the commitments I had made there and when would be an appropriate time for me to give as my last day. I came up with a plan and was heading home to write the letter when I made a quick stop at the grocery store.
After I had picked up my bananas and bread, I headed to the checkout. Lately I’ve been using the self-checkout because I am peopled out by the end of the day, but I recognized one of the check-out people and went straight to her line. It was not the shortest or the fastest, but she was someone I knew from my job at the gym.
During the summer, she and her friend had been part of the early morning crowd. I loved the way they spurred each other on, sometimes only coming because the other was expecting them. M and D were both from Cuba and worked in housekeeping at a large hotel in town.
One day in the fall, M didn’t come, but D did. “Where’s M?” I asked.
“She’s packing and repacking her suitcase with food because she’s going to visit her family in Cuba,” D told me. “She wants to fit as much in as she can but she can’t go over the weight limit.”
“When does she leave?” I asked.
“In the middle of next week,” D said, “but she gets very anxious about her trips so that’s why she didn’t come this morning.”
All week I would ask D how M was doing. She was anxious. The next week, the day before she was to leave, when I asked D, she said, “Everything has changed. M heard from immigration and can apply to bring her children back with her.”
To make a long story short, M came back to Cooperstown with her children several weeks later. Despite hurricanes and glitches with visas, they made their way through the process incredibly quickly. I met her daughter in October, a beautiful girl who didn’t yet know any English.
That night that I was ready to quit my job and had stopped at the store, I saw M working the checkout line, her second job to make ends meet. She looked exhausted, but she brightened when she saw me.
“How are you?” I asked as she was scanning the groceries of the person ahead of me.
“So tired,” she replied.
“How are the kids doing?” I asked.
“We went to the gym Saturday and went ….” I could see her searching for the word. She paused and made an arm movement to show me.
“Pickleball? Racquetball?” I guessed. Pickleball is so popular these days that my mind immediately went there.
She shook her head and did the gesture again.
“I think it’s bowling,” said the woman ahead me.
M nodded vigorously. “Yes! We had so much fun. We want to do it again!”
When it was my turn, we talked a few minutes. It was so nice to hear her enthusiasm for having her family together. “Next week I take my citizenship exam,” she said. “That would be so wonderful to be a citizen.”
I wished her well and went home with a lighter spirit.
My petty complaints about my job seemed just that — petty — in comparison with all that M had gone through and was still going through.
I told a co-worker the next day, “M saved my job. Seeing her last night put everything in perspective.”
I’ve made a list of people that I see at work for whom I am thankful. M is near the top of that list.
She’s teaching me about perseverance, hard work, and joy.
Helen’s bouquet was lovely, wasn’t it? I don’t know the names of all the flowers in it — roses (obviously), lily-of-the-valley (a nod to my mother — that was what she carried in her bridal bouquet), and ranunculus (that peachy-colored one that is dead center). I feel like I should know the names of the purple ones and the white ones but I don’t. (Anyone?)
Ranunculus is one of my favorite flowers. I first remember buying a few stems at the Farmers’ Market for my ikebana pot and delighting as they opened from small round balls to those amazing delicate layers-upon-layers of petals.
In the ikebana vaseAnother ikebana arrangement
I bought fresh stems on every visit to the Farmers’ Market in my year of ranunculus-discovery. Until they ran out.
“Not even one last bud?” I asked, trying not sound whiny.
“No. Their season is past,” replied the woman at the stand, and I went away sad.
The next year I purchased them early and often.
Ranunculus. What an ugly name for such a lovely flower. It sounds clunky and awkward, not delicate and beautiful. The name derives from Latin for “little frog.” I don’t see the similarity.
One of the things I’ve learned in recent years is that I like people. I genuinely like people.
I like the varieties they come in. I like the get-my-ducks-in-a-row variety and I like the deadline?-what-deadline? variety. I like the spreadsheet variety, the clutter variety, the same-routine-every-day variety, and the but-we-did-that-yesterday variety. I’ll admit that I struggle more and more with the black-and-white-thinking variety, but I also can’t wrap my mind fully the there-is-no-right-or-wrong-everything-is-on-a-spectrum variety.
One of my sons has been working as a caretaker at a small village park this summer. I’ve been going out to help him occasionally, especially when he has school-related Zoom meetings, but sometimes just to give him a break.
The other day was a Zoom day. I was sitting in front on the Caretaker’s cabin while he was inside discussing philosophy or some such thing. A dad and a little girl came up from the beach and wandered past me a few times.
Finally the dad approached me. “Do you work here?” he asked.
I”m never sure how to answer that. “Um.. kind of?” I said. “I’m the caretaker’s mom.”
“My daughter cut her foot and she needs a bandaid,” he said.
I had her sit at the picnic table so I could take a look. When she took off her pink croc, I couldn’t really see the cut because of all the blood.
“Hold on,” I said, and ran into the cabin to get bandaids, alcohol wipes, and paper towels. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I called to my son as I zoomed in and out, interrupting his Zoom.
I handed the girl a paper towel. “I need you to wipe away some of the blood, so we can see,” I said.
“NoooOOOOooooo,” she cried, sounding remarkably like the coyotes I hear at night.
I took a few steps back, trying to think how to tackle the problem, when Frank, the red-tailed hawk man, came over.
Frank is a fascinating person. He’s been coming to the park with his current hawk, Bella. He told me that very few hawks live to adulthood in the wild so he captures young hawks, raises them, and then releases them.
“Do you do this for a living?” I asked him when I first met him.
“No, this is my passion,” he replied.
Back to the howling child — “Do you need help?” Frank asked. He saw the bloody foot and said, “Let me get my first aid kit.”
While he went for his supplies, the little girl sat on the bench and cried, the dad tried unsuccessfully to comfort her, and I tended to some other park visitors who needed easier assistance. When I got back to them, Frank was cleaning the cut. The girl’s wails had subsided to sniffles.
Frank purred his words while he worked. His skill of calming a frightened animal worked with this human child.
I stood back and watched the scene. It was really quite lovely.
Yesterday, when I went to the park, my son had this drawing on his table:
That’s me on the left looking on, and her father on the right doing the same thing. My son had come out of his meeting during the bandaging operation and told her funny stories about how he lost the whole toenail off his big toe at the park when he was a child and the Toenail Fairy (aka my brother) came to visit him, bringing him VHS Muppet shows.
But, you know, people. I remember standing there, watching, and thinking, “I really love people.”
The day before this we had the throw-rocks-at-the-ducks variety of people at the park — and I don’t like that variety.
But Frank makes up for it.
I hope you enjoy the varieties of people in your life today.
Open — I like open spaces, open people, open doors. In yoga, it’s the classes where we focus on opening up — the shoulders, the chest, the hips — that I feel the tears come.
Opera — I went to my first opera this summer. My daughter Mary is working at the Glimmerglass Opera this summer as an apprentice in Front-of-House. Yes, we have a professional opera company not far from the small rural town where I live.
The Glimmerglass Opera Theater (aka Alice Busch Opera Theater)
Since Mary is there, I started taking a little more interest in the opera people who come into the gym for memberships. “What do you do at the opera?” I would ask as they sat across the desk from me completing the necessaries for membership. They would tell me. I would promptly forget.
One day, I was having just such a conversation when the man asked, “Do you enjoy the opera?”
“Um,” I said, “I’ve never gone. I don’t think it’s my cup of tea.”
“You should go,” he insisted. “Try The Sound of Music.” They do one musical theater production each summer in addition to the operas.
“I’ve seen The Sound of Music so many times,” I replied.
“But you’ve never seen it unmiked and with a full orchestra,” he said.
Sold.
I asked Mary to get me a ticket to the show. I went and loved it.
A few days after my opera visit, I saw the guy at the gym who had talked me into it. “I went to The Sound of Music,” I told him. “I really enjoyed it!”
“What did you like about it?” he asked.
I told him I liked the orchestra. I told him that I thought the young woman who played Liesl was amazing. Then I told him how much I liked the dancing.
“Oh!” he said, bringing his hand up to his heart. “That’s what I do.”
I looked him up. He was, indeed, the chief choreographer.
And it turns out I may actually like opera. I now have tickets to two more shows.
Old — I was going to say that I don’t like growing old — the aches and pains of it — but I really LOVE the older people who come in the gym where I work. Recently, an 84 year old woman joined and she’s been trying all the different classes we offer. “I don’t want to do those old people classes,” she said to me, so she signs up for Spin or Zumba Dance. More than once, I’ve seen her watching people climb the high wall. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that,” she said the other day, “but maybe next year.” When I’m 84, I want to be like her.
There are so many other O’s that I like: the ocean, orchids, being outdoors, and October, to name a few.
I don’t like overbearing, overly-opinionated, offensive oafs. Enough said.
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 