DOES CUPID HANG OUT AT THE SHOOTING RANGE?
2009
2018
COLD WAR
In the dark night the baby came. Too early.
While a thick blanket of snow fell outside my window.
So tired and scared and alone
I stepped outside and closed the cabin door
At frozen daybreak. Hurry, hurry hurry.
Surrounded by gray mountain quiet
My woolen cape covering both of us.
Tiny girl wrapped in my arms,
Her pale skin shaded from icy sunlight.
Over hill and field, my boots crunching, crunching, crunching.
Frozen feet found the unpaved road.
My nose numb and cheeks chapped from wind.
Gloved fingers stiff with cold and hope.
Then! The clinic ahead in the valley,
Gray smoke climbing from its brick chimney.
My breath clouds coming faster, faster, faster.
.
Too late, too late. too late!
No mercy; they could not help.
Carried her close to my heart.
Wrapped in my cape.
Not enough to keep her
Warm.
I MET THE PRESIDENT WEARING A $10 DRESS (ME, NOT HIM)
1978. We were young, married a year, both working but making modest salaries, paying $278 a month for a small, two-bedroom apartment in Alexandria Virginia. We took the bus to work, went to cheap matinee movies on weekends, seldom ate out.
We got an invitation to the White House. No, really. Because we had worked in the Carter Campaign, and because my husband was a political appointee in the administration, we were on a DNC list of people to be invited to something at the White House. When the engraved invitation arrived in the mail we were very excited. We were to attend the festivities following a state dinner, and we would be meeting the President and Mrs. Carter and their guest, Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia.
Two twentysomething nobodies from Rhode Island and we were going to the White House!
Dress was black tie. Easy for my husband to rent a tux. I had nothing to wear. And there wasn’t a lot of money to buy something, either. I searched the mall for a bargain. Nothing in Hecht’s. Nothing in Woodies. Days went by and the date was getting closer and I was getting panicky.
One day I went into Sears to buy some paint for our bathroom. I wandered by the ladies dresses, and saw a single rack with a big “SALE” sign on it. I gave it a perfunctory once-over and turned to leave when something caught my eye. A dress. Black. My size. A simple, sleeveless, v-neck, floor length sheath. Price tag: $10. No, it couldn’t be.
I tried it on. It looked damn good. I bought it with my Sears charge card, the only store charge I owned.
In Woodies, I picked up some costume gold neck chains for more than I spent on the dress.
We were quite a handsome pair the night we walked into the White House. It was such a thrill to be there, to meet Marshall Tito (who would be dead not long after).
It was a very special evening.
And I well remember shaking hands with the President and thinking, I’m at a black tie event at the White House and I’m wearing a $10 dress from Sears!
THE FIVE-DOLLAR DRESS
I’ve only had that kind of shopping luck one other time. One January, I learned I was invited to the formal Blarney Ball, an annual gathering of Irish Americans who party and raise money for a worthwhile cause: bringing children from Ireland over to the US in the summer, to get away from the “troubles” for awhile. I wanted to wear green velvet, and I set out hunting the sales to find one. I went from store to store, trying on this dress and that dress, and not finding any in the green velvet I was dying to wear. Nothing was right. The ball was only three days away and I still had nothing to wear. I had tried on gowns in all colors and and prices, but nothing was right.
After a long day trudging from store to store, I decided to return to Macy’s to the sale rack and settle for the plain short green velvet dress I had tried on earlier.
Then, nearby, I saw it. There was only one like it, but it looked perfect. It was a designer dress, green, floor length, velvet skirt and rayon empire top with long straight sleeves. Simple, elegant, and beautiful. And my size. I tried it on. I loved it. I didn’t care what it cost, this was THE DRESS.
I still liked the other dress, and decided to take both. At the register, the clerk rang up the purchase and asked me for $35. “$35?” I said, “For both of these?”
“Yeah,” said the clerk, while chewing her gum. “This one is on sale for $30,” she said, pointing to the short dress, “and this one is $5.”
“Are you sure?” I said, my eyes must have been the size of golfballs.
“Yeah, this is the last one and we want to get rid of it.”
SO, I wore a $5 dress to the Blarney Ball. And contrary to what you might expect, almost no one else wore green velvet.
ASSORTED SHORT STORIES AND POEMS
THE THRILL OF A LIFETIME
After his 60th birthday, Robbie started telling people to call him "Rob" and began thinking of himself as old. He lived alone and his parents were dead. Looking backward instead of forward, he faced the facts of his life: he would never go to college; he would never travel to Australia; he would never be part of a rock band; he was never going to be a father, and now that his second wife had left him he would never marry again. He would never quit smoking; and he would never be back to his high school weight until he was sick and dying. Someday he would be buried in the same boring town where he was born. The black grime under his fingernails was never going away because he was going to run the Exxon station until he dropped.
Of all the nevers he had to face, the hardest to think about was this: he would never see Wendy again. Wendy came to mind on this particular day, as he packed up his apartment so he could move to a smaller one because his rent had doubled and his income had not. He packed his collection of LP's and when he came across his high school yearbook he went to the page where Wendy smiled at him with pearly white lipstick. Wow. The sepia colored Loring photo obscured the color of her hair that she complained about but had driven him crazy with yearning to touch. Her smile reminded him how much he had liked her naively upbeat view of the world at a time when he mocked everything as dark and pointless. He stared for a moment at the photo, then snapped the yearbook shut and dropped it in a box.
She was the one who got away. But now he was sure they never had a chance. She was a lawyer’s daughter, an only child in a family with a country club membership. An honor student who played cymbals in the school marching band. A girl filled with optimism, school spirit and lots of friends. He was a kid who grew up with four younger siblings he had to look after because there was no dad and Mom worked two minimum wage jobs. Robbie was a rebel, a cutter of classes and the most successful seller of marijuana in the school. Wendy wore penny loafers shiny as her auburn hair. He wore stained tee-shirts and faded jeans from the Goodwill store. She was a passionate fan of the Beatles; he thought they were overrated and preferred Grand Funk Railroad. A golden "Wendy" necklace decorated her throat; a hard pack of Marlboros left its outline on his back pocket.
Wendy was obsessed with NASA and the space program. Robbie ‘s ambitions topped out at playing guitar in a band and buying a pickup truck. He mocked her ponytail and her clothes and her family. He offered her joints of good Columbian and tabs of acid, but she always said no, thank you. He dreamed about changing her, taking her cross country with him in his truck and living in L.A. He ignored the fact that she was accepted to MIT and he was probably not going to get his diploma. Still, they continued an odd friendship. They joked around in class, spent hours on the phone. They never became a couple, even though others in school thought they were. Robbie never let on to her that he thought she was perfect; that he couldn't believe or understand why she talked to him at all. Maybe it was because he was witty and made her laugh. And back then he looked sort of like James Taylor. (Well, if James Taylor was heavier and not so tall. And wore glasses.)
Life hadn't treated him well. Not at all. So many nevers. Maybe if he and Wendy had got together things might have been different. But 1969 got in the way. Wendy's biggest thrill was the Apollo 11 moon landing, Robbie's was scoring two $18 tickets to Woodstock in a drug deal.
Those Woodstock tickets were set in a frame and hung on the wall. He took it down and stared at it. Maybe they were worth something now.
When he got them, he called Wendy.
"I've got tickets to this outdoor concert next week in upstate New York." He told her. "Let's go." They would hitchhike. Camp in the woods. It would be a blast. What an adventure!
"My parents would never let me." She said, "Besides, why would I want to do that?"
This pissed him off. They were on different planets. She would never be his hippie chick. He wouldn't be able to change her. He hit back, told her she should tell her parents to go fuck themselves.
“Do something real for a change! Break some rules, baby!”
“I’m leaving in two week for school.”
“You’re never going to be an astronaut.”
“Thanks.”
“You are such a fool.”
She hung up on him.
He threw those Woodstock tickets in a drawer . He saw the news coverage on television. The stopped traffic on the New York Thruway. Rain, mud, debris, portajohns. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll looked like a weird kind of fun. He was secretly glad he wasn't there.
Wendy left town and they never spoke again.
When the Woodstock movie came out a few months later, everyone went to see it. Everyone talked about it. Robbie started telling people he'd been there, and showed his tickets to prove it. He said he tripped with John Sebastian and bathed naked in a river a girl with a hair to her waist. His friends treated him like a hero; people asked him about it all the time, just as they asked returning soldiers what it was like in ‘Nam.
Woodstock became his thrill of a lifetime. He told the stories so often he almost believed he had truly been there.
In 2015 he found Wendy on Facebook. She was a grandmother. Her hair was still red – had to be from a dye-job. She was some kind of office clerk at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She posted a picture of the thrill of her life: when she shook Neil Armstrong's hand at an Apollo 11 anniversary event. Rob shook his head and lit a cigarette. Hadn’t he tried to tell her in 1969 she’d never become an astronaut? He considered sending her a private message on Facebook. He thought better of it.
He tossed his framed Woodstock tickets into a box along with his collection of baseball cards and Penthouse magazines and his Colt-45 beer mug. His Schwarzenegger and Stallone DVDs went into a nearby trash can.
Suddenly he got choked up. All those nevers.
Wendy. What could have been. Should he have tried harder to keep her? Maybe.
But one thing he was sure of:
He damn well should have gone to Woodstock. Maybe then everything would have been different.
THE END