photo prompt

So, how is it that I luxuriate in this airconditioned center of learning, option after option of possibility presented to me, excited at the chance to examine ideas and plan new things when this fear ridden woman frantically looks for safety for her baby and herself?  The unfairness is difficult to think about:  Why do I get the chances I do when she is stuck, and how do I help?

Somewhere in that endless librairie, there is a book waiting for me. I know it is there, it was specificaly writing for me. It is about everything I love to fing in a book. It is well writen. The environnement is so well described that I could almost smell the odor in the story. It a very long story happening on many, many years, with many diffents caracters.

  Gaston doesn't play the cello.  He tried once, but the sounds were so strained, so painful, that he felt he was violating the instrument, forcing his brutish caresses on an unwilling creature.  But he loves the cello, or better yet, he loves the idea of the cello.  At work, his daydreaming moments are filled with mildly erotic images of his cello.  Slowly unbuttoning the cloth cover, shivering at the first sighting of the creamy, dark wood. Slipping the heavy, rough cloth over the shoulders of the instrument.

The man could make a mean gin and tonic. Indeed, he was the only one in a family of light drinkers (perhaps a glass of wine with dinner) who could make a mean anything. But nothing tasted better after a day at the beach with the entire family than one of Uncle Sam's libations. We would sit on the beach house porch, letting the lime and the fizz cool us and talking. He was an inquisitor--but a gentle one. He was a debater--but a respectful one. He was a joke teller--but not a very good one. Thirty years of beaches and gin and tonics.

There will be a beach this summer, but there won't be a gin and tonic with Uncle Sam.

Telephone booths are a thing of the past. This hotel still has them on the Mezzanine but there are no guts in the booth.

     Two Roads....

 The sun blazed each day in June. Heat and humidity hung with such permanence that no one could believe that the ocean lay only a quarter of a mile away. But on June 21st the breeze finally picked up and caught an ember at Blubber Hollow near the North River. The ember flew, up and over Federal and Chestnut Streets before landing, explosively on the corner of Lafayette and Front Streets. Up Lafayette, over Pope, along Congress the flames consumed homes, businesses, and factories. 

Salem would never be quite the same. The tanneries would leave the factories rebuilt.

follow her despair
through the dirt-wrought ribbons
of home
say goodbye to the fields,
dizzying green of tomorrow

splinters;
echo

a chiseled childhood that
went up
in flames .

  My grandmother's library.  What a magical place.

The Relocationist

It was hard, at first, to know what to do. 

What would you do? Fight crime? Develop a secret identity? It did cross his mind. 

This ability, this way of moving, this way to go, it simply did not fit with anyway to connect with someone. Who else could know this? Who could relate? 

He shared it with no one, of course. That whole secret identity thing stuck with him. Why is that imbued in the collective unconscious? 

In class, I was always the quiet kid.  Both my teachers and classmates either hardly knew me because I didn't exist.  My presence was only spoken to others by the obnoxious  sounds I would make as my losinge interacted noisily with my saliva.  Truth be told, my relationship with the losinge did not exist because I had lost my voice, but instead because I had no voice.

Now, I have found my voice; and, as the rain drizzles down upon me, I have found another way to preserve it.  Under this umbrella is joy, friendship, and love.  Outside of the umbrella is the losinge-sucking kid with no voice.