of missing persons

Like most people (or at least so I presume) I don't like funerals. I honestly haven't been to that many but it still seems like too many (especially the ones for my brother and my favorite uncle far too many years gone now.)

For the second year in a row I'll be attending a funeral for one of my mother's sisters (my mother was the fourth of six children...she's now the eldest surviving sibling after the deaths of her older brother and two older sisters.)

My Aunt Sarah and I weren't especially close during the past couple of decades...we were closer when I was a child but we drifted apart when she wouldn't...or couldn't...stop trying to keep me in a child's space long after I was past the age of majority...and her passing wasn't a surprise (she's been fading for some months)...but it is still sobering and sad that we will be burying her on Thursday.

Perhaps she's found the peace on the other side of the light that she never seemed able to find here during her nearly eighty year journey on this bittersweet Earth of ours. I certainly hope she has.

Pictures on the nightstand, TV’s on in the den
Your house is waiting, your house is waiting
For you to walk in, for you to walk in
But you’re missing, when I shut out the lights
You’re missing, when I close my eyes
You’re missing, when I see the sun rise
You’re missing...

"You're Missing"
words and music by Bruce Springsteen

Dancing Just for the Sake of Dancing

The music was loud…far too loud to permit any kind of meaningful conversation to take root and bloom…and so we danced. Almost all of us…in the cocoon of shadows and flashing lights, of sweat and body heat and primal expectations, of energy sparked and stoked by lust, loneliness, alcohol and recreational drugs…dancing the night away because the alternative was too much to bear.

At some point my companions…fellow seekers of things we didn’t really want to give voice to…melted into the throbbing throng and I was dancing alone…dancing with random partners…dancing just for the sake of dancing.

Then, suddenly and amazingly, random partners became one specific partner. We smiled…obliquely, sizing each other up, drawing close without getting too close, looking into each other eyes to see if what we thought we needed was to be found there…and the crowd fell out of our perception. The crowd fell away and we were dancing…alone, together…maybe a prelude to something wonderful…maybe a prelude to something fleeting but thrilling for that magical moment…maybe a prelude to nothing at all.

In the middle of the invisible crowd…in the midst of the booming music…we danced…alone, together…letting furtive, pregnant glances speak where words could not. Fleetingly we touched…sweet electric contact of skin on skin, body on body…and then, inevitably, the crowd surged back into our perception and we were driven, inexorably, apart to the jealous, all-consuming beat of the never-ending music.

The music and the resurgent crowd brought me back to my companions…still dancing, still seeking something we really didn’t want to give voice to…and my attempts to locate my specific partner in the crowd came to nothing. And so we danced…we danced until we were tired of dancing and looking for something we really didn’t want to give voice to…and then we pushed our way back to the cool openness of the night.

We…my companions and I…shared some self-conscious small talk before we drifted off to our personal vehicles. Feeling for my keys, I found a piece of paper…a piece of paper with seven numbers and a name scribbled on it. My specific partner’s hands apparently having been quicker than my besotted eyes.

Maybe it was the prelude to something wonderful…maybe a prelude to nothing at all…maybe it was just a prelude to dancing just for the sake of dancing.

Many Happy Returns

Today is my favorite nephew's 11th birthday. It seems like he was a baby just a little while ago...seems like it hasn't been that long since I held him up to a warm summer night's sky and told him, in the vein of the somewhat corny but still meaningful scene from "Roots", to "behold the only thing greater than yourself" (yes, I really did this and I'm only slightly chagrined by my hubris...he just gurgled happily [babies trust me...don't why but they always have] and it was all good.)

I will spare you (and myself) the cliches about time "flying" and the like ...

Springtime weather slipped in here while I wasn't looking. Walking in the breezy sunshine is a grand way to recharge the creative and emotional batteries and that too is all good.

Enjoy the day.

Namaste, y'all.

a prologue

The novel I’m currently tweaking and editing…Soul Deep… is about a boy living in Los Angeles who turns 12 in a tumultuous year (1968). This is the prologue from that novel (which may or may not make the final cut):

* * * * *

My childhood was a series of shadows…shadows eluded and shadows embraced with all the strength one little black boy could muster. Sometimes I thought the whole world was lost in shadows. Sometimes the shadows were just fine with me…they were just something to dance with…to scream into…something to keep the rest of the world at bay.

Sometimes I would imagine, in the way the only children can imagine, that the whole world revolved around me. I knew all too well that this wasn’t the case but that didn’t stop me from wondering, more idly at some times than others, if (and indeed how) people really moved and did things when I wasn’t around to see them. Imagination was one thing I had in abundance.

Imagination and childish ambition…at one point I wanted to be a fireman, at another point I wanted to be policeman. In years to come I wanted to be a hero…a super-hero if possible…and I had more than enough imagination to make it all seem like something I could easily do.

I had plenty of imagination…given free reign in pictures and words (in books and comics and wherever I could find them), and in music and fanciful ideas…and so many memories.

One of my earliest memories is a painful one. We were living on the East Coast at that time; it was a cold, autumn morning and storm clouds were gathering purposefully overhead. But I didn’t care. My daddy was coming to spend the whole day with me. Only me. I was three.

I waited, bundled from head to toe, at the gate in front of my mother’s little rented house straining to catch a glimpse of his car coming up the quiet street. Daddy loved big cars and I knew that I would be able to see him coming from far down the street. The icy breeze cut through me from time to time despite the coat and scarf and button-down cap Mama made me put on…but I didn’t care.

My sister Amanda, six years my senior, was pouting in her bedroom because she wasn’t invited to come along with Daddy and I (I didn’t care about that either…she’d spent the whole previous weekend with him and now it was my turn.)

There was music playing, my mother often had the radio on while she was doing housework or just trying to relax, though I don’t remember exactly what songs there were.

Behind me in the doorway, my mother stood fuming silently. Her eyes were filled with hot, stinging tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks every time I craned my neck at the sound of a car engine only to slump down dejectedly when it wasn’t my daddy’s car engine.

“Bastard,” she hissed as she spun on her heels and stormed towards the telephone. She stopped herself and took a deep breath. She lit a cigarette and made a concerted effort to calm herself before she picked up the phone.

Mama drew a measure of pungent smoke into her lungs and exhaled it slowly. She dialed the number she wanted and waited. It rang once…twice…thrice…twelve times in all. She dropped the receiver back onto its cradle. He wasn’t in his apartment. And he wasn’t, she was sure, on his way to pick up his son.

I stood at the gate for nearly an hour, crestfallen and hopeful at the same time. I waited until the clouds finally opened and the rain began to fall. I turned, my face wet with both raindrops and my own quiet tears, walked back up the path and up the stairs into the house.

Mama took my coat and scarf and cap and hugged me for what seemed like a million years. She said something about daddy but I don’t remember what it was. Amanda slipped out of her bedroom and asked me if I wanted to play Monopoly; I declined with a shrug and shake of my head. I went into my bedroom and flopped down onto the bed. I closed my eyes and slipped away to my garden…the quiet place in my head where the world was right and my mother was always happy and I was the sunshine of my father’s life. I spent a lot of time in the garden way back then; it was a world I felt safest in until I discovered the many safe havens to be found in books and comics and rock ‘n’ roll music.

Daddy showed up two days later. It was a bright day…cool and crisp and sunny. He was perplexed by the reception he got at first…even Amanda, who loved Daddy more than anybody, was chilly…and then it dawned on him what he had done. He had forgotten. “Sorry ‘bout that, boy,” he said in that happy-go-lucky, undeniably charming way of his. He chucked my chin and smiled. “Think you can forgive your old man?” he said flashing his most disarming grin.

I nodded. And I forgave him. But I never forgot the lesson he taught me on the cold autumn morning. My name is Malcolm Eli Hunter and this is part of my story.

Important Birthday Questions...

When I get older, losing my hair,
many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine,
birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out 'till quarter to three,
would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm 64?

I could be handy, mending a fuse,
when your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside,
Sunday mornings, go for a ride.
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
when I'm 64?

Every summer we can rent a cottage
in the Isle of Wight if it's not to dear.
We shall scrimp and save.
Ah, grandchildren on your knee:
Vera, Chuck, and Dave.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say,
yours sincerely wasting away.
Give me your answer, fill in a form, mine forever more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
when I'm 64?

Today is my birthday…I’m still a ways away from 64 but it never hurts to start getting your ducks in a row as early as possible :-)

Namaste, y’all.

“When I’m 64”
words and music by John Lennon & Paul McCartney

Maude

My grandmother…Maude Brooks Willis…was born on the fourth of July in 1888. She died on the nineteenth of July in 1983. In between those two dates she lived a life filled with all of the bittersweet ups and downs that all of us walking the path from the birth to the light leading to eternity with our eyes and hearts open should and will experience.

My grandmother…who was funny, feisty, active (even tending to a large vegetable garden in her yard every day), and unflappable into her nineties…gave birth to ten children over the course of twenty-eight years (her youngest son, the ninth of those ten children, was my father), a few of whom (including a daughter who died at age 15 a month of so before my father was born) I hadn’t known about until the start of a very recent effort to collect family information into one collection. That effort has brought her into the forefront of my thoughts…fondly, indelibly…lately.

My grandmother lived in a grand old house in a very tiny town just outside of Philadelphia. I last saw her in 1978 having taking my vacation time (I was toiling in the administrative bowels of a major cosmetics company in Hollywood…its initials, MF, having more than one meaning for those of us working there… at the time) flown across the country on the occasion of her 90th birthday (every year the 4th of July parade in town stopped in front of her house so that the marching band could serenade her with an affectionate rendition of “Happy Birthday”.)

In quiet times, I would sit at her kitchen table while she puttered about…she seemed to have an endless supply of energy…and listen with fascination as she talked about her life…her family…her world. She never dwelled on anger or regret…life was too short to fret overmuch about that which could not be changed…but rather with an appreciation of all of the wonders (both amazing and mundane) that had filled her long life. She was filled with homespun wisdom, gently acerbic humor, abounding love, and, if you listened in the right way, echoes of the melancholy that is part and parcel of any life fully lived.

Every once in a while she would make a cogent point by putting her hand over mine, looking me straight in the eye, and saying “Buddy, you should always remember…” (My father’s nickname is Bud and I, by extension, was “Buddy”…but it was an appellation used only by her and though I’ve never been big on nicknames…though I accumulated a few over the years just the same…I never minded being “Buddy” to her.)

My grandmother (I’m positive she wouldn’t mind me putting it this way) was a grand old gal.

To Touch a Star (the tomorrow song)

Aurora smiled her shy, beguiling smile and looked up. The great dragon instantly knew her fondest desire and, with casually majestic grace, her unfurled his great, golden wings and took to the azure sky.

Aurora whooped with delight as she held on to the mighty creature's leathery neck undaunted and, most certainly, unafraid. The sky was hers. The golden dragon was, by his own choice, hers as well. The world below…the mundane workaday world she had known when she lay down to sleep…it was falling away swiftly left to fend without her participation for a wondrous while.

Up they flew, higher and higher in the sparkling, cloudless sky. Suddenly, naturally, a lilting melody came to the dragon's mouth; a melody as ancient as the universe itself...a melody as timeless and enchanting in its unmistakable soulfulness and undeniable power. The dragon, caught up in the joy of the moment, was singing the fabled "tomorrow song".

Down below, the grey land-dwellers cast grey, envious eyes upon the bright-eyed, raven-haired beauty and her shining, singing dragon soaring in carefree abandon in wide, swooping arcs above the fields of sweat and workaday suffering. If they could they would slay the great golden dragon and force Aurora to toil again with them in the endless grey fields forever and a day.

But they could not.

And Aurora flew higher still upon the sturdy pack of her friend, the dragon. Together they threw off the shackles of the world and reached for the boundless, star-flecked heavens.

To touch a star, Aurora thought with awe, if only to touch a star if only for a brilliant moment. The dragon, knowing full well his friend's wish, soared through the ebon expanse towards the brightest, most wonderful star of all.

Aurora reached out her hand eager to catch the star, just for that single, amazing moment, and then let it continue on its appointed journey. Her smile was dazzling...a rival to the radiance of the proudest star itself...as she reached out for a fleeting celestial flicker of light...

And then, almost as a matter of course, the incessant whine of a digital clock abruptly brought Aurora back to the world. She sat up with a disappointed start and, irritably, wiped the sleep from her eyes and glanced over at the clock. She sighed wistfully...it was, of course, only a dream.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked out her bedroom window. The sun was newly-risen and the world was waking to reluctantly face another day.

And she listened. The house about her also began to stir with reluctant activity as her family…her husband in the shower, her sons half-heartedly indulging their first squabble of the day in their own room…began readying themselves for the new day.

And she listened. Outside her window, the birds roused themselves from peaceful, dreamless sleep and began to add their sweet songs to the symphony of the morning.

And she listened. For a fleeting moment, she put off dwelling on the mundane demands of her day…of her husband, of her children, of her co-workers…that would soon gather all of her attention and energy unto itself.

And she listened. And faintly, but distinctly, she could hear it...a haunting, eternal melody...a song for dreamers who would try to touch stars. Aurora smiled her shy, beguiling smiled and hummed along...filled suddenly with a glow of contentment and purpose...with the dragon's immortal "tomorrow song" as she rose, undaunted and inspired, to meet her day.

- for Tracey -

Okay, So I Couldn't Stay Away...

Yes I freely admit that I missed updating this blog. Bread and Roses was…and hopefully will be again…a great place for me to exercise my writing muscles…to publish pieces that were too short or too offbeat or too whatever to market…and to interact with other writers.

In the two months since I stopped updating this site, I haven’t found an agent but I have completed most of the principal writing on my most personal novel to date and that’s all good (and a good week before my self-imposed deadline of March 13th.) But there are stories and thoughts and vignettes that come into my head and I haven’t had a place to work them out.

And thus I return to this blog (maybe not by “popular demand” but what’re you gonna do? :-)

Multi-tasking is the key. I’ve always been good at that and I’m anxious to get Bread and Roses back into the flow of that.

So ready or not, Bread and Roses is going back online with semi-regular updates.

Perseverence furthers (or so I’m told anyway.)