January 21 – A Daughter, Sand Angels, and the Sun

by Tania Pryputniewicz

I woke curmudgeonly grumpy from a tangle of blankets, one son’s knees grazing my spine, husband and Husky hugging the far wall. At my feet, my middle son. Parallel to the bed on the floor, my twelve year old daughter, hair smothered by pillows as I turned off the alarm. Transplanted from northern to southern California, I should have been overjoyed after three years of two-city living without my husband to be reunited under one roof.

But I’d acquired a hyper-vigilance due to raising our children alone–a “too-little-to-go-around” self whose reaction to any sentence starting with, “Mom” opened with, “What?…can’t you see I’m….” x, y, z. My daughter, with infinite patience last year, drew note after note decorated with rainbow letters, “Can I come down for tea with you tonight?” Fatigued, as hard as I tried, I felt locked in internal sorrow, afraid I’d never rise above our circumstances to be larger of heart.

I feel my shortcomings as a mom most intensely in relation to my daughter. Because we are both firstborns? Female? Because her brothers’ needs seem easier? I only know I’m more conflicted with her. And she has no qualms about letting me know how I’ve failed her. Which took me to some dark places last year (given the struggle to raise the children, work, hold down the fort, and stave off the ever present poet’s dream of writing a poem worthy of eternity).

But even as we wrangled, I understood the only way was “through”–not over, not around, not under, but through. The sun would rise; I’d try again. Some nights we had tea; others I deferred to stacks of student papers, dishes, or her brothers, especially during the month the littlest broke his elbow and needed surgery.

We’ve only been in the new city for two weeks, but my shoulders have dropped several inches now that two adults absorb the field of the kids’ needs. The one place that soothes all of us remains the ocean, mercifully close by here as it was up north, so instinctively, we keep the ritual.

Within moments, I’m photographing patterns–the retreating waves make sand angels below each beached pebble everywhere I look. My girl comes abreast of me and delights in the find. My husband salvages a purple bucket and one tiny green plastic soldier; the boys catapult down the sand dunes. The Husky runs leashless in wide arcs, nipping at the waves.

Dusk finds my daughter and I walking together. She’s willowy, lovely, inching towards adolescence. Hard to believe soon she’ll yearn less and less for my attention. I ask her to stop long enough for a double self-portrait. Finally, we get it right, shoulder to shoulder, positioning the setting sun so it crowns half of her face. We found that when you tilt just far enough apart, the light of the sun breaks into a gold-red fan of spokes across both faces like a blessing.

Tania lives in southern California with her husband, three children, husky, and two disoriented housecats still recovering from the move. A poet by night (MFA, Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and a writing teacher by day, she is heading into her second year of teaching Transformative Blogging for SCN (next class starts February 4th) and is writing a book for women bloggers.

July 18 – Magic Mike and Me

by Carol Ziel

The Gravois Bluffs Great Escape Movie theater promised a night of raunchy male entertainment. I’m nearly sixty-five years old, haven’t dated for five years, and decided that reacquainting myself with the male anatomy was an attractive proposition. The movie was “Magic Mike” and it plunged me back into my adventurous past.  Like Alice, I fell into the rabbit hole where I found memories of my wild self.

Suffice it to say that I was a late bloomer. The shackles of Catholic training and a convent past stayed intact until my mid-twenties.  I usually looked for myself in all the wrong places–first the Peace Corps, the army, and then the USO.  However when I found strip clubs and other party places I knew I had finally come home.

I remember the first time I saw a stripper dance.  It was as if the Red Sea had parted and the scales had fallen from my eyes. I looked around and recognized my tribe in the drinkers and dancers, in the crazy colors and mist machines, and mostly in their frenetic freedom. For the first time I was truly alive feeling that I actually belonged somewhere. I stood at the bottom of that stage , gazing at the dancer with the thirst of someone who had been wandering in the desert for a lifetime. The burial clothes I was born in no longer bound me hand and foot . I emerged into my future life.

Like the character, Mike, I entered that lifestyle in innocence.  What we both saw was the wild abandon and freedom to be yourself: perfect bodies, perfectly present. No shyness or excuses for being anything but who we were. Embracing our sexuality like the sun embraces the summer sky.  Strutting our cosmic stuff.  We were butterflies exploding out of cocoons; every dance was Fourth of July.

However, like sunbursts, meteors and other blazing things we extinguished ourselves in the heat of passions.  We were both Ithacus flying too close to the sun and melting into deepest darkness.  We both found that all that glitters is not gold.

There is a paradox here. What we saw was true–the ownership of raw energy, and manifestation of exuberant sexuality was real, but that is only part of the story. The price one must pay to stoke the furnace of desire, to feed the beast of libido is heavy.  Like Alice we went through the looking-glass, but what we found eventually was a shadow life full of empty promises. We both became shadow people.

Thirty five years later I sat in a dark theater contemplating the past, I mourned for the loss of the dream, and what I lost reaching for the dream.  I have no regrets now that I am on the other side. I travel with a different tribe now, and the most “blaze” I get is gardening in July. But, I am grateful for that time and place, and what I learned. It’s part of who I am.

Carol Ziel is a sixty-four year old grandmother, gardener, mental health professional and grateful member of Story Circle Network.

January 27 – The Fork in the Road

by Pat Bean

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”–Neale Donald Walsch

It was a sunny day in 2004, just three weeks before I would retire from a 37-year career as a journalist, when I drove a brand new RV off an Ogden, Utah, sales lot. It felt like the butterflies in my stomach had developed thorns on their fragile wings.

Everything that had been a part of my past life was about to change. I had just blocked off all chances of remaining rooted in my small, but cozy home that sat in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountains I loved. There simply was not enough money in my future to both fulfill my lifelong dream of living and traveling on the road while maintaining fixed roots within a circle of friends that had taken over 20 years to acquire.

This day I had not only chosen the unknown road that lay ahead, but had wrapped my choice in cement. I had even traded in my Honda Odyssey as part payment for the undersized, 22-foot RV that was now my only form of transportation, and soon would be my only home.

By the time all the paper work giving me title to the 2004 Volkswagen Vista/Winnebago had been scrutinized, signed and finalized, it was early evening. I was too unsettled to take my purchase for a check-out spin. So, feeling tall and strange sitting behind the wheel with my new living, dining, sleeping, cooking and bathroom facilities behind me, I drove home. Emotional turmoil, good or bad, always sapped my energy.

On carefully pulling into my driveway, testing the wideness needed to turn my new RV, I heard frenzied barking from inside the house. It was how my dog, Maggie, reacted to the sound of strange vehicles invading her territory. She never barked when I returned home, nor did she at any of my frequent visitors. But she did not recognize this new vehicle.

When I opened the door, Maggie gave me a quizzical look of surprise. Then, realizing in a split second that something new was parked in the driveway, she dashed between my legs and ran out to explore.

I opened the RV’s side door and she eagerly hopped in. She slowly sniffed every surface she could get at, then finally hopped up onto the couch and gave me a look that I easily interpreted as: So where are we going? To explore America, the beautiful, I reply. I always answer my dog’s inquiring looks. .

And that’s how my my travels with Maggie began. It’s been a journey that’s now heading into its eighth year. And I still have nary a regret.

Pat Bean is a wandering/wondering old broad who is beginning her eighth year of full-time RV-ing with her canine traveling companion, Maggie. She is passionate about writing, nature, books and birds and writes a daily blog.

December 20 – The Long Green Thing Surprise

by Pat Bean

“Hey Mom, I brought back a surprise for you from Afghanistan,” was the message I got from my oldest son, D.C. I was in Idaho at the time, and the only thing I wanted from Afghanistan was my son, home, safely.

Later, I wondered what the surprise could be.

“It’s a long green thing,” my daughter-in-law, Cindi, hinted.

It took a few minutes, but then I burst out laughing.

“Oh, you mean his Christmas stocking,” I said.

This is a thing that goes back many, many years, back to the time when my son was a pre-teenager. It was a time when money was in extremely short supply in our family, and so our Christmas stockings were just that–everyone’s own clean sock. And the kids always found the biggest ones they owned to hang up.

Now D.C. always was an ingenious kid. He chose his long Boy Scout knee sock, but decided it still wasn’t big enough. So he cut the foot off one of the socks and sewed the rest of the stocking to the top of the other one. It was such a brilliant idea that he didn’t even get punished for the deed. I think I filled it up with oranges that first Christmas.

In the meantime, as kids do, D.C. grew up, joined the Army, married, had kids of his own and made the military his career for the next 35 years. It was during one of his three tours in Iraq as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot that I came upon that long-forgotten green stocking.

As a joke, I filled it up with goodies like smoked oysters, canned chili, Vienna sausage, nuts, toy cars, hand warmers, a Pez dispenser and a heck of a lot of other stuff and sent it to him that year for Christmas.

He’s made sure the stocking was returned to me every year since.

I guess in thankfulness for my son’s safe return from the war zone, his upcoming retirement and all the laughter that stocking has provided the family over the years, I’ll have to fill it up yet one more time.

Pat Bean is a retired journalist who lives and travels the country in a small RV with her canine companion, Maggie. She is passionate about writing, birds, books, nature and travel.

May 7 – Caution

by Sally Jean Brudos

Walk, run, hop, skip and jump and by all means take the stairs; the mantra for the weight loss program at the Stanford Department of Dietetics.  O.K.  I can try that – and I did.  But, now I am more cautious. 

My son Eric had just started a new job in a tall building 50 miles away in downtown Oakland.  “Come for lunch and I’ll show you around the office.” he said. “Call me when you get to the parking garage and I will greet you at the office door.”

After maneuvering the freeways 680, 880 and 980, I finally arrived at the tall building.  Following instructions, I called him and started to go up in the elevator.  The only problem was his office was on Floor 17 and the elevator that I had taken only went to Floor 15.

So – Oh, I can take the stairs two floors up.  The stairway door; quite a heavy door at that, slammed shut and I began my ascent.  When I got to Floor 17, the door to the hallway was locked. PANIC! What do I do now?  Go back to Floor 15 and find the other elevator.  But, the door was locked on Floor 15 as well.  PANIC!  I took off my Patten leather dress shoe and pounded on the door to no avail. 

Then I saw a phone – but no one answered.  PANIC!  I raced down the stairs and tried every door.  I’m not sure which floor it was that I finally found unlocked or how many times I picked up the phone on each floor, but I do know it took fifteen to twenty minutes before I walked out of the elevator to Eric’s questioning eyes.  We calmly looked around the office and then went downstairs in the elevator to the café on the street level.

Just as we were ordering our lunch, we heard the loud scream of sirens and saw three huge fire engines approach the building.

(I guess that telephone did ring some where after all!)

Sally Jean Brudos was a closet writer until breast cancer showed up on a mammogram and she began writing with other women in the “Sisterhood.” From the positive comments she realized there is a writer in everyone. A survivor, Sally Jean now leads a small group of women writers who encourage each other with laughter, tears and compassion.

April 29 – Relatively Resemblent

by Marjorie Witt

As Mother’s Day 2011 nears, I reflect on annual dual celebrations of Mother’s Day and Mom’s May birthday each year until her 52^nd year.  She would have been ninety this year.  As my 62^nd birthday rolled around this month, I went through the decade old process of sadness the turns to grief over her lost years. It feels strange, scary and uncomfortable to get older than her. But one thing I have learned is that when this annual reminder comes around, a sense of humor helps to create balance.  In that spirit I share the following weblog entry I wrote a few years back.

A few years back I was trying to train a new hairdresser. One day…
Hairdresser says: How about something a little different?
Note: This is the 2nd time she has cut my hair.

I say: OK whatever.

Wash…rinse…snip snip…gel…hairdryer…gook…teasing…hairspray…I look in the mirror.

Hairdresser: Do you like it?

Me: hmmmmmm

Hairdresser: Well I’m not letting you out of the chair until you say you like it.

Me: Do you think you can tone it down a bit?

Note: Is Aquanet back in vogue?

A little tugging here and there…actually she pulls on one hair and they all move. She pats the sides of my head but the mass just springs back into form.

Hairdresser: Better?

I look in mirror:

Me: Sure it’s fine.

I’m walking down the street. I look in windows. I see my mother:

I’m not dense. I know what comes next…grandma: 

Margie Witt joined Story Circle Network over ten years ago intending to “write the book.”  Memoir may be the goal but is currently best pursued in short stories as life unfolds with complex challenges. Balancing work, play, and raising a grandson leaves little time to write so blog posts appear with less frequency these days at www.wittbits.blogspot.com