One Would Think

 Sunday, March 26, 2023

One would think, after open heart surgery (a triple by-pass, no less - major league stuff), a broken foot, and spinal surgery, plus the premature loss of a beloved dog and, not to mention, one subdural hematoma, all within little more than a year - add to that equation a guy looking at eighty-three - hangin' in but still - One Would Think - that I'd have some sort of profound take on things. You'd think, right? I mean, isn't the point of anesthesia to bring you close to death then back to life again? Shouldn't I have had some kind of experience? After all, you're lying there in a hospital bed, attached to machines, having survived a situation of some risk, folks in uniform efficiently monitoring your every trickle, relatives and close friends with worried faces...You should have some kind of at the very least a slightly unique take on "Why am I here?" Or more specifically, "Why am I still here?" But, nope. Instead, I came out of the anesthesia riven by the thought that my car needed a brake job. Open heart surgery, and I'm thinking, "My car needs a brake job." After a lifetime of searching and thinking and reading and watching and listening: my car needs a brake job. Forget God. Call Pete (Pete's my mechanic). There's a lesson here. Even here. It tells me that a sense of humor comes in handy, pretty much no matter what. Mass shootings? Tornado destruction? Not much funny about stuff like that but most things? Feh. A sense of humor:  In your emotional tool kit it's like your vice-grips of emotional tools - adjustable to most problems.

So, did I need brakes? Absolutely, but I doubt other worldly vibes brought me that conclusion...which reminds me of my gall bladder operation and Neal Diamond. Huh? Tru'dat. Stay tuned.

Sagan/Sartre

 In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. - Carl Sagan

Hell is other people." - No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre

Nu? Which way do you swing? St. Augustine has a good one as well, one of my favorites. 

Two thieves on the cross. One was saved. Do not despair. One was damned. Do not presume. 

I enjoy contradictions. I don't presume. I don't despair. I pass this on.

Outside my window a three foot snowfall is gradually melting away. It was a third of the distance up the trunk of the maple tree planted when? That long ago? I'll need to trim the lower branch so as not to block the view of the creek, a clear panorama of kingfishers plunging straight down like feathered darts into the roil while cinnamon tufted flycatchers wheel about plucking gnats from mid air. We weathered the worst of winter so far, one nine hour blackout being the brunt of it. However, I think maybe worse than the actual blackout itself is the anticipation of one - Keep a flashlight within insta-grasp - Keep the fireplace friendly - Do not flush - Are the fire extinguishers where they ought to be? Where? Do you know how to use them? Will I freeze to death? Lots of rules to confront what could be an existential inconvenience or simply a few minutes without Mr. Coffee. 

We don't have a generator, so when a pile driving wind and heavy snow collude to pulverize branches and down power lines we can go black. And do. Mostly we don't stay that way more than a few hours because the emergency repair crews are excellent, however, when the dark suddenly swallows your world like a sinkhole and nothing, absolutely nothing, works, there isn't much one can do except sit on the sofa, stare into the fireplace, and hold hands until the light comes back. One could say, well, we've been married for damn near going on forty-five years, so nobody's tearing anybody's clothes off any more, so what's the big deal, but we're sitting there holding hands and it's quiet and that's the big deal. We didn't say much.  I don't know how long. We mostly sat there holding hands and staring into the fire.  The moment lasted until the lights came back, then lasted a bit more as they stayed on and as the relief set in.

The Best Burger Ever!

 2/10/2023

Had the best hamburger of my life today, another dimension of burger, a taste that sweetly erupted in my mouth.

Imagine this: you thought you were walking into an elegant, lovely, but very polite chamber music recital in a big city art museum and instead found yourself in a magnificent concert hall reverberating with the full philharmonic creating Mahler? Got that? Imagine asking for a Pop Tart and getting an entire devil's food chocolate cake - free - instead. By now, you get it.

Jamie and I had spent the morning going through pre-op exams at Vassar hospital before my upcoming surgery. If you're reading this, the operation already happened. I assume it went well. To make it all tolerable, J staked out this tiny place for lunch - the eponymous Match Box - comfort food and cookies - two tables,eight seats - charming and original - The Match Box. Now, obviously,I'm curious with a penchant for looking into things, but I don't necessarily seek out the "charming". J brings them to me. J's like NORAD when it comes to seeking. You know, NORAD - North American Aerospace Defense Command - 24/7 sky surveillance - What's out there? Have we seen it before? Does it want to play? Ambience was important but out PR'd by purportedly having the Hudson Valley's best burger. How do I describe this hamburger? Hint: re-read paragraph two above.

A slew of lifetimes ago, shortly after The Jazz Singer opened, I was hired by EMI to write an original based on the Spanish Civil War - Butch & Sundance go to Spain. When I think of that idea from this distance I shudder, but what the hell? What has this got to do with the best hamburger I've ever eaten? Plenty. Stay tuned. The deal is I need to stay in London to write it. We're talking months, but, since Jamie and I had only recently married, it might as well have been years. Anyway, part of the deal is a ticket for J to come and stay a while. We lived in Tim Curry's apartment; I was making a shitload of money; what could be so bad? Comes the week-end I say to Jamie what should we do? Let's go to Paris, she says, so we jumped on a plane and did. It was Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing through the spangled streets of Paree. Hollywood is all about myth, and, if one is fortunate enough to be in the town's good graces, life itself becomes myth. How many times did Cary Grant say to a maitre'd, "You decide"? How many times did I? Once - only once - that week-end in Paris. With my honey. Dressed by Saville Row and Rodeo Drive. At a four star restaurant."You decide, Monsieur." It was a spectacular meal, but was it the best I've ever had? If I told you - almost  - second best - lamb and duck, pate' and patisserie, sorbet between courses, fine wine, armagnac - what could be better? Here goes: The Match Box in Hyde Park, New York, that tiny place with eight seats and a hamburger that catapulted the species into the stratosphere. A tower of thick tomato slices, crisp lettuce, sweet, clean, pristine, sliced onion, and a hockey puck sized mound of beef cooked precisely to the degree  promised. A logjam of thick, hand cut fries. A bite that took goodness for granted but turned out to taste like no other. How to describe this hamburger? Find another genre. It was like a thick malted compared to a scoop of ice cream, like a Maserati Quattroporte compared to a Ford 350 pick-up, like a Napoleon compared to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I bit into it, expected goodness, got rapture - expected Neil Diamond but never Chopin. The Match Box. Twelve stars? Is there such a thing? Well, now there is. It was not a lunch. It was a launch. The Cape Canaveral of meals.

PROLOGUE

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Been A Bad Ol’ Booger But He’s Come ‘n‘ Gone                                                                                                                                                                                     by

Stephen H. Foreman

                                    Prologue

Fall and Poppa were both born by the same breath. Fall was our favorite season. We braved the freeze of winter, the muck of spring, and the  sweat of summer until we got to Fall. It was Fall when Poppa was most alive, and, because he was, I was, too.  Poppa was really grandpops, my  grandfather, but not any more. I called him Poppa early on and have done so ever since. When I was little I rode Poppa’s back through a blueberry jungle in August. It seemed I was always riding Poppa’s back somewhere, through something, around something, the world from Poppa’s back. Somebody once said about him, “Underneath that rough exterior beats a heart of cream of wheat.” That’s my Poppa right on.

I never have been a big fan of Summer. Born and raised in a cleft in the Catskill Mountains when they were still home and hearth to dogged farmers tilling fields whose main crop was rocks.  This was way before so-called hipsters from Brooklyn donned their L.L. Bean backpacks crammed with gorp and holy water, and discovered we lived here. I don’t dispute that summer in the mountains is lovely – fulsome creeks fished by blue herons and eagles, thickets shielding deer, partridge, and bear, goldenrod and purple astor, so many shades of green I couldn’t count, but, still, for me, mercifully short. It’s a season that can’t be avoided and therefore posits the obligation to hungrily suck it dry of all its pleasures right down to the last hot dog on the grill and that August mountain thunderstorm right above your head. I do, but I cannot tell a lie: that first chill wind and the changing colors soon after – that’s what I wait for. Maple syrup, pumpkins, and the palette a hardwood forest offers in the Fall – maple, ash, beech, oak, black cherry, walnut, chestnut – an opera of shades – basso profundo – coloratura - bronze, orange, red, yellow…I know from firsthand experience that  Alaskan hardwoods are small and stunted. There are no beauty queens on the tundra. It’s so cold that leaves and roots become necessities. Wood, the stuff of trunks and branches, is a luxury. I look at the mountains across my valley and it’s like looking at a bouquet. “Here y’go, young lady. This one’s for you.” 

Every year of my life back then, and even now sometimes when I’m back, me and Poppa kicked through the cover of dry leaves that had fallen to the ground when we walked through the woods along Hunter Creek one October morning. I remember a young spruce, maybe three feet, sparsely but gracefully branched, decorated by wind and gravity, with brightly colored leaves that had fallen from other trees. It was not the burning bush, but it dazzled. Our mountains are part of the range that goes south into West Virginia and Kentucky, all the Appalachians. Oh, my, the aroma of fresh, rich mud – better than morning coffee – that came from those kicks. Life was in those kicks. Even the sound – that crispness – that snap, crackle and pop - of leaves so casually scuffed aside! To walk through that woods in the Fall was to experience transcendence.  I’m not talking religion here, but I know the feeling when it’s there. It envelops me and whispers to me, though I never quite catch the words. What was that, that something I can almost remember, a sad thing and a happy thing, not birthday party happy - astonished happy - and not terrible sad but longing? Feels both at peace and a piece of the puzzle, tranquil and untroubled, and yet something I urgently needed to know, just out of reach. How could it be that with every breath I was both aroused and at rest? How could that be? I remember leaving the woods of that childhood at dusk, and above me the moon was full and bright, serene, imposing: Buddha. How could that be?

**********************************

It was Fall, first day of school, but we had plans.

  Poppa knocked on my door when it was still more than an hour from daybreak. 

“Bacon, sunny sides, hash browns, hot chocolate. Hit the deck,” Poppa hawked from the other side of the door. “Dress warm.” 

I had my warmest clothes all laid out, layers of ‘em. I felt like the Michelin tire man, but it was gonna be cold out there. I love being out in the cold but I don’t like being cold, you know?

In the Spring you smell fresh flowers. In the Fall you smell dead ones, crisp and sharp. The season has a tang to it. Poppa showed me a wild apple tree. A macoun. His secret. Nobody else knew where it was, and how it got where it got even Poppa couldn't say.            

“They talk to each other, y’know, not like we do, but think of all those tangled roots mingling underground, connecting like telephone cables. Information gets passed on through. All these oaks? They weren’t here when you were born. Logged out. But all this time they’ve been migrating down the mountain, and look at them now. Maybe they send out pilgrims to scout new territory? Like anybody would.  ‘Course, I’m no botanist, so wha’ do I know?” he said. Poppa said that after a lot of things - “Wha’ do I know?” But he knew just about everything, and, if there was a speck of something he didn’t know, he’d find somebody who did or look it up or just go and figure it out for himself. He’d pick up a bronze leaf and tell me oak, a red leaf, maple, a yellow leaf, birch, a different red, sumac. Wild berries had been gone for a month, but pears and apples were in, and a pumpkin patch he planted just for me, tiny pumpkins and really big ones, hundred pounders, a patch the size of a swimming pool. That patch made my Halloweens even more magical. Every Halloween we’d choose the second biggest and carve a monster mug, scary being the operative word. The first biggest, the biggest biggest of all, we saved for when I was Cinderella and needed my coach.

With a bellyful of breakfast, Aunt Gert stuffed egg salad sandwiches into the pockets of our red and black wool hunting jackets.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” she asked.

“She is in school,” said Poppa.

“I am in school,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you,” said Aunt Gertie

“Yes, you did,” I said.

Aunt Gert shut the door behind us, called the dogs to join her, and dove back under her quilts. 

We set off over the back field towards the tree line and a special spot Poppa had picked out a few weeks earlier. all by the light of a slender sickle moon. He had his ancient shotgun with him, turn of the century, Remington Model 1889 10 gauge double barrel. Worth a fortune to a collector. It had been his father’s and his father’s.  He could’ve afforded a new one, but why? This old thing could damn near shoot itself. He might admire the craftsmanship of British shotguns, fine metal married to finely grained wood, delicate engraving, light and whippy. But, still, Poppa wanted one good reason, “Why?” He could be cantankerous. Once he was quoted in an interview as saying, “If you don’t own a gun and you don’t own a book, what good are you?” He actually said that. It was the caption under a picture of him grinning like he’d won $5,000 a month from Publisher’s Clearing House. I think he was joking. 

No matter how hard I tried not to make any noise, withered grass sheathed in ice crackled underfoot. Poppa had taught me how the Mohawks walked while hunting, slowly, setting the whole foot down gently, one single gradual movement instead of heel-toe-heel. My feet still went crunch crunch. Poppa wore moccasins and made no sound at all.

Up in the blackest sky I’d yet ever seen, the moon had shrunk to a slice. The stars looked as if the popcorn machine exploded. Tingles of light cluttered the sky. I got thinking about the wandering bands of early humans.  How much of their lives were spent staring up at the stars? It was the best quiz show in their universe. Stories flowed. Ideas flourished. Mathematics was born. Directions were set. 

I don’t know how he did it but when we crossed the tree line into the woods it was so black I thought I went blind only Poppa didn’t seem bothered one bit. I knew Superman could see in the dark but I didn’t know Poppa could, too. Off to the side somewhere over the hogs were already on 

the move nuzzling for chinkapins. Might be some wild ones with ‘em. Poppa beckoned me keep quiet. We didn’t want to set them off and spoil the whole thing. Pass on by. Shhh. Poppa veered off a bit. I could just see an old maple tree, thick like a pillar on an ancient temple.  You couldn’t miss it, trunk warped and twisted all the way up with large boles like warts. Something so sweet once came from that tree. Poppa pointed to the ground. I sat down, my back against that scratchy bark. Poppa cut brush and fashioned a blind, then sat down next to me. He put his finger to his lips, took three long, slim bones from a leather pouch hanging from  his belt. Call bones. Thin, graceful, harp-like. Call bones he’d had since he was a kid. Cup them to your lips and talk turkey. 

With the shotgun in the crook of his arm, Poppa arranged the bones in the palm of his hand, cupped them to his mouth, and what came out was a puk puk puk, a sweet chirp almost impossible to hear. Puk puk puk. I listened hard but all I could hear was quiet. Puk. Puk. Kinda like,  tickle tickle. I think Poppa mighta winked at me. Not sure. The next one just fluttered out, some sweet puk puks, lilting chirps, and tra la trills. A symphony of bones. I listened hard. The silence was thick and firm. Then, oh my God, I heard this boom boom boom coming towards us. Boom boom boom! Heavy wings beating on the ground. Might’ve been Godzilla. Poppa gave a final  puk puk trill cluk, and the most humongous turkey on earth busted through the brush smack into the clearing in front of our blind. Stout as a sergeant major. He came to a stop, stood at attention, and looked around. Poppa gave it one more lick. That big dandy fanned out his bodacious tail - a thing of beauty if you ever see one - an emperor  - danced and pranced in a circle, and made right for us. The shotgun jumped to Poppa’s shoulder and fired. That bird went down like a running back clothes lined by a safety. Whop. Down. Poppa didn’t move. One wing fluttered then fell still. Might’ve been the wind. We waited for the echo of the shot to fade away and then sat still some more. It goes so quiet in the woods when a hunter -  man or beast - takes prey. Something about that silence says you must sit still for a while. I got up when Poppa got up, and we walked to where the bird had fallen. Poppa knelt down to check the bird’s spurs, big ones, long, sharp, a good two inches.  He didn’t say one word for a bit until, with as much reverence as I’d ever heard him, he stood and said:

“Been a bad old booger, but he's come and gone.”  

End Prologue

******************************************

One hundred and fifty six pages more, and you'll have read the whole thing. It's ready to be read, only that's my problem. Who's gonna read it? No agent in sight. No publisher in sight. If anybody out there knows anybody out there who might take an interest in "Booger" and help push it along towards publication I'd love to hear from you. Somebody's gotta know somebody gotta know somebody. Know what I mean?

UPDATE: Am recuperating well from spinal surgery. More up than about but more about each day. I'm happy to hear from so many of you how you've missed the blog. It's still a little hard to sit up straight for any length of time but I'm getting there. Snow is right outside the window, but so is Spring and more daylight. I feel energy from the soles up. It's all underway.

Thoughts As The Temperature Enters Free Fall

2-15-2023

I first wrote this a couple of weeks back when the free fall was imminent. What's currently imminent is my back operation. Finally. If you are reading this, I'm either in the operating room or recovery. I'm publishing this now because Sunday morning is out, and I cannot promise the following Sunday because I don't know what recovery will be like. My instructions from a couple of folks who have done this: Don't be brave. Take the pain medicine. All of it. As for the following weather report: it's terse, and a bit unsettling. 

February 3, 2023

It's so quiet. It settles so softly yet so urgently this quiet. We are at six degrees above zero heading to minus thirty degrees (wind chill) over the next twenty-four. So quiet. So still. Frigid air settles over the land like parachute cloth. Everything snaps or can snap. Apprehension is the watchword, an anxiety rarely brought on by living like we do. Will half a tank of oil be enough? Will the power go out? Will the pipes freeze? Will we? Jamie is upstairs currently wrapped in an electric blanket, but if the power goes out? I brought in three extra armloads of wood this morning to keep from running outside for more during the coldest stretch. We won't freeze, but damage could occur. The county emergency commission called each resident to warn them of the pitfalls. Stay inside. When the seasons change, when the snows fall, when the rains pound and thunder there is awe and wonder and maybe a soupcon of worry that the roof could leak, but there is no fear. The weather we have now births fear. It's like more and even greater weight continues to press down upon you. There is little escape. It presses down and down. Both hands. Is this what it's like in a desert heat wave? I was once in weather in excess of 120 degrees with no shade, and it felt like this - dangerous - like walking point on patrol, like being pressed under a hot rock, a human panini.

Normally, the drama of the weather fascinates me. I don't watch the weather channel, but I do stick my head out the window a lot, not to mention time spent daydreaming on the bridge, weather permitting. However, this stuff going on outside my house right now gives me pause. Jamie calls downstairs on the walkie-talkie to me in my office, "Minus twenty degrees." I don't want it to linger. I want it to go away. I think of being squeezed by a gigantic python thick around as a truck tire. I went outside to latch the porch door against the growing wind, took off my glove to do so, and my fingers damn near went numb before I got back to the house.  Looking at minus thirty degrees. We're prepared for a black out - lanterns within reach, lots of firewood, extra water, quilts, bread'n'butter - but still it won't be pleasant, and it won't be exciting. It ain't Ukraine, and it ain't Turkey, and it ain't Syria, but it is a notch on the survival pole that I can do without.

Further Annals, Etc. - Ms. Agnes and Lorelei

Her breasts were so big they came atcha like an an eighteen wheeler with the high beams on. The other one's smile was like an abandoned highway. One lived in a Beverly Hills penthouse apartment, the other on the streets of that same city. One drove a Mercedes. The other carried a throw rug with her wherever she went so wherever she was she could simply plop it down and say, "I'm home." As for the penthouse, it wasn't really a penthouse but it was the top floor of a fifties, four story, stucco apartment building, and so the developer called it the penthouse, actually, the penthouse suite. 

It was an interesting period of time. Thanks to a Hollywood career that had more craters than the moon, I was again plying the raw streets as a social worker. This time my constituents were the male and female denizens of halfway houses before going on with the next phase of their lives, if they had one - the homeless, addicts, alcoholics, parolees, ex cons. That same period of time I was also hiring out as a writing coach to folks who could afford my rates, which is how the one I shall call Lorelei from Beverly Hills came into my life. One summer. Two women. One's name I can't remember. One's name I can't use. So. Ms. Agnes and Lorelei shall they be.

Lorelei had been a centerfold in a national magazine who now worked for that same magazine meeting potential centerfolds and welcoming them into the "family", making certain they were met at the airport and escorted through the motions, sure they were both cared for and safe. Lorelei had had a tumultuous and very public affair with a very famous actor, absolutely, positively the love of her life. He was a known curmudgeon and womanizer, but what they had was so special the world should know. Or so she fancied the world should know. She wanted to show what it was like when they were together, just the two of them, away from the spotlight. Oh, how lovable he could be! Not like in the trades. So beautiful. So beautiful. Perfect for the screenplay she was bursting to write, asked around, and hired me to help her write it. So, for a period of weeks, we worked together daily, in the penthouse suite, and, in the evening, I'd go see Ms. Agnes who'd just come in off the street.

I met Ms. Agnes when she was coaxed in by another worker. She had managed to acquire a small propane heater to ward off chilly nights, but it had been stolen earlier that day by some guy who punched her in the face, grabbed the heater, and ran. She could not remember whether she had spent the night with him, but he cold-cocked her hard when she looked the other way and scuttled off. "People ain't mean," she said, "But livin' like make 'em cruel to the point of death."

Lorelei augmented her income as a model in various states and stages of dress and undress. Even now, twenty years later, those breasts continue to amaze me. Kind of like a singular statistic, you know, like the tongue of the blue whale weighs six tons. Can you believe it? The tongue alone weighs six tons! She wouldn't tell me her age, of course. She was in her forties, I'm sure, but lookin' very very fine regardless of two score plus. And maybe plus again. I'm not sure, but the photographic range was astonishing from coy to near porno. Oddly, her sexuality was not on display when she wasn't modelling. It was like being in the room with a sculpture by Michaelangelo, the David, for instance - awesome but you don't touch it. It doesn't even invite you to touch it. Yet, it's naked. What it does: It says, "Stand back. Breathe. Just take it in." 

She amazed me, Ms. Agnes did. She actually missed the street and intended to go back out. While we spoke she packed and unpacked her worldly goods on a decrepit baby carriage she pushed in front of her. 

"Room ain't safe." She tried to explain. 

"The street's safe?" I asked.

"Safer."

"But you were punched and robbed out there!"  She shrugged. 

"People livin' home get punched, too. They don't? I don't read the papers? What inside a damn room gonna do for me? I still got to hustle lunch.  A job? Me? What I know how to do and who's gonna hire me and why do I want to work for 'em anyway? For a 'partment where the door ain't lock and the landlord ain't do shit? Don't need no Goddamn landlord. I got my rug."

 "What about when it rains?", I asked. 

"I get wet." 

"What about sick?" 

"Coroner know where I am."

A few months after working with both these women I left Los Angeles for good and settled on a creek in a valley in the Catskill Mountains. Decades later, from this vantage point, I am astonished at the parade of so many fascinating characters throughout my life. As a young teen I remember standing on the street corner in downtown Baltimore checking out all the passersby, making up stories about them, finishing their conversations. I'm still at it. My mother used to say, "You got a mouth? Use it." The key is to know when not to use it. One of my pleasures has been the ability to talk to anybody. Forget attitude. Just listen. I worked in the White House knee to knee with a sitting President of the United States, and I've talked with a bushman around a campfire in the jungle. The key? Get them to talk about themselves. I don't need to tell them what I know. I already know it. I need for them to tell me what they know. Whatcha got cookin' interests me a lot more than what I've got cookin'. I tend to over cook, anyway.

Even Further Annals of a Social Worker

I first wrote about my stint as a social worker a few blogs back. Folks wanted more. Here's more. 

After graduating from Morgan State College (now, University), I went to work for the Baltimore City Department of Public Welfare, Childrens Division, Emergency Care Squad. There were only five of us for the entire city. When a child was reported in difficult straits, abandoned, neglected, brutalized, or otherwise abused, one of us would be called to ensure the child's safety. Most of my clientele were Black, but two families come to mind who weren't: Miz Homewood's and the DeCosmo kids.

Miz Homewood was a thief with three sons. She'd been intimate with all three and taught them well.  When she came into my life, her two oldest were serving prison terms for breaking and entering, and her youngest might as well have been. He was in reform school, now due for release, so, since he was still a minor, I went to the mother's apartment to do a quick home study. There was no place else for him to go except for foster care which, it turned out, was better than going back to mama or the street. But, this was an official visit and had to be done to keep things official. 

Her apartment was the second floor of a small brick building that should have been boarded up, originally built to house slaves, a fact that caused her a fair amount of grief. She was immediately on me to find her some place else where "they ain't". "I don't want my boy raised like this," she told me, completely oblivious to the irony. As low as she was, she needed to know someone else was even lower. Lyndon Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Emptying pockets was Miz Homewood's specialty: yours, mine, hers...

Miz Homewood, native daughter of West Virginia or Tennessee or someplace like that, called herself a back porch Baptist because she loved the Lord but loved to sing and dance and sip her whiskey, too. "It don't hurt none to frolic." Wasn't gonna give neither up. She also had no teeth, not an incisor, not one molar, stumps maybe. I never wanted a closer look, and all she wore was a ratty, chenille bath robe. She assured me, "I'm gonna f*** you 'fore we're through." I assured her she wasn't, although I remember motoring down the hall to get away from her which wasn't easy given that back then suit, tie, and cordovan brogans were normal attire, even on the mean, hot, Summer streets of southwest Baltimore. Nothing Nike about it, but I did leave her cackling in my wake. 

That's not the worst part. The worst part follows.

While her youngest was in reform school he left the care of his prized flock of homing pigeons to his mother. I didn't see any. Where were they? She beckoned me into the kitchen where she opened the oven door to reveal a number of baked birds, stomach side up, little claws reaching for the sky. She didn't say anything, but her gummy jaws moved back and forth. I'm sure I recommended foster care, although what ultimately happened to her son I can only guess, as is the case with all my clients. I wonder what happened to them? Did any of them escape? Did he? Have I passed him on the street and not known it?

                                        ************************************

The DeCosmo kids (there were three of them - Karen, eight, the oldest, a younger sister and still younger brother) came into my care when child services was called to a rundown apartment where these three children seemed to be waiting patiently for someone to pick them up. They had been bathed and dressed well, their nicest clothes, hair fixed and combed, plus there was enough food to last them the day plus an extra large box of Rice Krispies, their favorite cereal. It was a Hail, Mary play by the parents who could not find work and had no money, so desperate and incapable they concocted this scheme to park the kids as safely as they could, report their whereabouts as abandoned children to the police (who would then call in child services), and drive off to find employment while living in their car. These were not ragamuffins but cared for little creatures who could no longer be cared for. I was an emergency care worker, and here they were. We were immediately drawn to each other. 

Even after all these years I wonder at their comportment? All three remained calm and agreeable, and I could already see the oldest, consciously or not, assuming the role of Older Sister, fixing her little sister's dress, brushing back her baby brother's hair. What had their actual family life been like? All of them had reddish hair and freckles. They did not want to be separated, so I needed to find a home that would take all three, preferably on a continuing basis. I managed to find one, and, once they were officially in that home, my job was officially over. I'd provided emergency care, and others would take over from here. I was supposed to let go, but this is one of the few times I didn't. I wanted to be a staple for them as long as I could and so visited them periodically, stayed in their lives awhile. I don't remember how it came about but the three of them were transferred to a convent, so I no longer had access to them. Then the time came for me to move on. 

Morgan State had been my saving grace. They accepted me provisionally when I'd run out of other options and my life had ground to a screeching halt. I'd failed so many times - high school as well as college - I had nowhere else to turn. But, Morgan was there. Morgan accepted me. I wrote my first play at Morgan. Morgan jump started my life. I graduated magna cum laude and was accepted to Yale for grad school. Yale? Me? That's right. Yale! Given my pathetic academic history, how could I turn Yale down? I couldn't. Being a social worker was and remains the best gig I've ever had. It was a tough choice, but I had to make it. I would need to say goodbye.

I thought of the DeCosmo kids, wondered, again, what would happen to them, wanted again to see them so literally went and knocked on that convent's formidable front door.

The door was so thick I marveled that the knock even went through when suddenly it flew open and there stood a force so potent it pushed me back. A nun in full regalia glaring at me as if I were sin incarnate or a turd on the hem of her habit. How dare I knock on this holy timber! Who are you? What do you want? What I wanted was to see the DeCosmo kids one more time, to thank them for the delight they brought into my life - Some day I will be a father - how they'd helped to soften my days with their smiles - And this is what that will be like. 

Sister probably shouldn't have relented, but she did, and I spent the next hour chatting with the DeCosmo kids about this 'n' that. A sister may have overseen us, but I have no memory of that. There was still no word from the mom and dad, but those kids were quite resolute in believing their parents were coming back for them. Yes, the sisters were very nice, and there was plenty of food. They had Rice Krispies. You did have to chip in and help at table, though. This is school, too.

I heard from an ex co-worker a couple of months later that the parents had come back and collected them. Word was there were jobs and a home in a neighboring state. There was no word of charges brought.

Nearly sixty years have passed, and I still have their school size photos on my bulletin board.