AHEAD BY A NOSE

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Way back when I was a kid of Columbus, Ohio’s inner-city, narrow ribbons of patchwork concrete ran between the old, asbestos-clad Victorian houses and row upon row of brick townhouses, dwellings comprising neighborhoods much like those found throughout Colonial American cities. In one of the townhouses lived my friend Janey and her mother, Helen. Helen was the only single, working mother on our block, a status that rendered her a curiosity among the stay-at-home-mothers. There was never any mention of the whereabouts or even of the existence of Janey’s father. At some point, one of the local busybodies decreed that he must have been a casualty of World War II, for after all, most of the neighborhood kids were born while the fathers fought in that conflict. The explanation took hold and held, but we never really knew the true story behind the mystery of Janey’s missing father.

Actual fatherlessness was an almost unknown factor among our circle of family and friends in those days. Whether birth fathers or surrogates, fathers were at minimum often obscure figures in the background of our daily lives. In my and my sibling’s case, our dad worked nights and while he was at work, we slept, and while he slept, we were at school. He was nearly a specter-like presence among us on weekends, for most Saturdays and Sundays he was preoccupied with repairing his car, replacing a busted faucet or other chore required to keep a family and its household whole and functioning. But our dad, like the dads of other kids we knew, was there—somewhere—when the chips were down. Janey was the exception.

Janey was the exception in other ways, as well. She was the only kid I knew who sassed her mother. That kind of thing just didn’t happen in my tiny 1950s world. I stood in shocked horror of Janey’s aggression toward her mother, a kind of hostility I didn’t feel toward my mother, and if such a thing ever popped into my head, I ejected it for fear of hurting my mother’s feelings and/or losing her love. That Janey took such risks with her mother was astonishing to me. I didn’t like Janey’s behavior, but at the same time, I felt a kind of unwelcome admiration of her pluck. Guts like hers could take a person places, and that fact gave her a pass in my mind. It set her up as the wild-child of our play group and a fascinating character I was content to embrace despite her bad behavior.  

At bottom, the thorn that pricked the clashes between Janey and Helen was that Janey sucked her thumb. Janey and I were both six years old and in the first grade of the same school as well as neighbors when we met. She sucked her thumb then and still sucked her thumb when at the age of fifteen we said our last “goodbye” on the day my family moved out of the neighborhood. Throughout the years I knew them, Helen had coated Janey’s thumb with iodine and other bitter substances, had wrapped her thumb in tape or her whole hand in gauze, all to no avail. Janey persisted in her baby-mode despite the fact that her mouth and teeth were altered by the practice, and the thumb she sucked was stunted. It never developed to a size larger than a toddler’s. Other than the pint-sized thumb, the most notable mark of the thumb sucking ritual was on her nose. As Janey sucked her thumb, she hooked the index finger of the same hand across her nose, and the constant pressure from that finger carved an inwardly curving ridge in the bridge of her nose. Her ski-jump nose made Richard Nixon’s look half-baked. I can’t help but wonder if Tricky Dick sucked his thumb on the sly.

I am not here to disparage Janey. I have infinite sympathy for her, for surely her thumb was the pacifier she used to cope with the challenges that came with the absence of a competent father-figure somewhere in the catacombs of her days, and exaggerated by the enormous stresses of an overworked, single mother. Helen’s anxiety over Janey’s thumb sucking addiction was understandable for there was no getting around the huge impediment her thumb sucking presented to her future success and happiness. But even so, I just bet there is room for optimism about Janey’s chances in life, for you never know where an oddly-shaped nose might point you. Look at Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand. Janey’s strong and nervy, ramrod-straight backbone set against the flimsy bent of her nose tells me that while she might have remained a strange character in the eyes of many, she was also wily enough to stay ahead of the game—if only by a nose.©*

 

*The above is a work of fiction based on a composite of actual events as they exist in its author’s fuzzy memory bank.

 

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           Linda Lee Greene’s award-winning novel

 

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT

 

“5 Stars…A woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s infidelity unearths dark secrets and monstrous circumstances, chilling exposures that in the end illuminate her path to a new and better life…told from varying viewpoints in varying states of existence and so becomes quite unique and utterly fascinating."

 

Purchase Link: goo.gl/i3UkAV

 

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IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

 

“Resurrection” as illustrated in Christianity’s Easter and “indictment,” as attached to America’s former president are top of mind just now. Surely I am not the only one to take note of the irony. Religion and politics don’t have a lock on such goings-on. While usually narrower in their reach and impact, such stories abound across all sectors of humankind:

 

IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

We lived in the tight, inner-city streets and on our spacious porches as much as inside our homes when I was a scruffy kid. A mishmash of early, twentieth-century Victorians, freestanding doubles, multi-family townhouses and apartment buildings—brick or asbestos-shingled masses packed together like sardines in a tin can—our homes were separated only by slim spans of pockmarked, concrete sidewalks and face-to-face across narrow streets paved in bricks. The streets were edged with skimpy strips of weedy greenspaces and broad walkways. Graffiti was an ever-present feature of the streets and walkways, chalk-doodled and scrawled as they were with our hopscotch grids and hide-and-seek bases and baseball diamonds. We could depend as well on hearts and flowers in chalked messages of love blooming in the clay and concrete, the hard surfaces that were the avenues of our transportation and commerce and recreation.

            Oddities, injustices, cruelties, as well as charity and compassion abounded at every point of the compass—the kind of fodder about which writers dream. There was the brewery, the brick and river-stones behemoth around which our dwellings were clustered and that provided employment for so many of the locals, a place that belched poisonous, sinus-scorching and tear-wringing fumes in the air every afternoon. And who couldn’t guess that on the other side of the street, positioned in a straight line with the entrance of the brewery was the most heavily trafficked beer joint within several blocks? Of course, one of the city’s oldest and most revered Catholic Churches right around the corner from the watering hole is worthy of a mention, for it was, among other notable reasons, a house of worship famous for its standing-room-only confessional.

Two streets south of us was the cloistered district tagged by bigoted outsiders as “Fly Town.” It was the DO NOT ENTER place that was the stomping grounds of the black people in our midst. On many Sunday mornings, I sneaked across that invisible boundary of segregation and stood outside their small church and listened to the glorious music that soared through the walls of the building—spirituals and gospels, “Amen” music as it is commonly known—music that sent chills of wonder down my spine. Oh, how I wanted to go inside and join them. While I was drawn to that kind of spiritual abandon, it also scared me, and I didn’t dare cross that barrier.

Feral cats and stray dogs roamed the area at will. The standout in my memory was an imposing, black Chow Chow, a bear-like beast that was in constant battle with other dogs and cats and that terrified every human being it encountered. Across the alley just west of our house lived Freddy, a kid of my same age and a Ted Bundy in the making. Freddy’s pastime of choice was to catch a feral cat of the day, swing it around by its tail and then bash its shrieking head against a telephone pole. The terrorized cats usually survived Freddy’s assaults while I and the other kids in witness were traumatized forevermore by his violence. Freddy and the Chow Chow would have made good bedfellows.

            The house directly across the street from us, clad in shamrock-green shingles and like most of the freestanding houses of the area, featured a spacious front porch. It was the residence of Catherine, a World War II widow and stay-at-home mother of my friend Molly. Molly was the only person of that name whom I have ever known. There was the Unsinkable Molly Brown who survived the sinking of the Titanic and Molly the cloned sheep that had its 15 minutes of fame in 1997. Molly, my friend, also had the distinction of being a genetic double of her mother. They were both petite, blue-eyed blonds. Their physical features weren’t remarkable in a neighborhood of a preponderance of little and pale females. The odd thing about them was that during the nine years I knew them, Molly had a parade of new fathers and with each new father, she had a new last name. Catherine’s free-hand with Molly had its limits, however. It turned to out and out suppression in other ways. For instance, Catherine denied Molly’s every plea to cross the street, or to play in it or on the sidewalks with the rest of us kids. Molly’s porch was her private and only playground. I see so clearly in my mind’s eye that lonely, little girl standing at the edge of the porch watching us play, her bottom lip quivering and her tears dripping from her trembling chin.

I lost contact with Molly when my family and I moved out of the neighborhood. Both Molly and I were fifteen at the time. Six years later, in a peculiar mix of serendipities, I ran into Molly among the New Year’s Eve throng gathered at Times Square in New York City. What were the odds of happening upon a person I used to know from two states away and all those years before? I recognized her instantly, as she did me. “Mollyyyyy,” my mind flipped through the long list of her various last names for the appropriate one. I would have expected Molly’s face to have been ruined by the emotional wounds that surely were the legacy of her swinging-door fathers and conflicted mother, but it was nothing of the sort. Molly’s face was fresh and as sparkling as the crystal ball that a few minutes later dropped into the New Year.

 

She recognized my bewilderment and said through a kindly smile, “It’s just Molly now. All those last names sent me into therapy for a long time. I came away from it simply as Molly.”

 

“That’s cool!” I declared, and I wrapped her in a big hug. I pulled away and added, “Cher and Madonna have done quite well for themselves that way.”

 

“Exactly!” Molly affirmed. We laughed and there was no need for further discussion on the matter.

The incident brought Freddy to mind. Did he ever make it to an analyst’s couch or a church’s pew? Did he have nightmares about the cats he tortured? I had to be content with knowing that at least Molly had made it to the light. And what about Catherine? At the time, I still held to the opinion that she was bat-&hit-crazy. Years later, my assessment of her grew more flexible—when I became one of those desperate mothers trapped in a frantic search of a substitute father for my children.©  

   

#Easter, #Indictment, #Resurrection, #VictorianHouses, #Townhouses, #ApartmentBuildings, #TedBundy, #FeralCats, #StrayDogs, #ChowChows, #MothersAndDaughters, #GardenOfTheSpiritsOfThePots, #LindaLeeGreene

 

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Multi-award-winning artist and author Linda Lee Greene’s GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS: A Spiritual Odyssey, is a novella in which ex-pat American Nicholas Plato relocates to Sydney, Australia to escape the mental torture of devastating losses back home. Strange encounters in Australia’s outback with an Indigenous potter reveal to Nicholas unexpected blessings and a new way of living. The novella is available in eBook and/or paperback. Just click the following link and it will take you straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase the book.

https://www.amazon.com/GARDEN-SPIRITS-POTS-SPIRITUAL-ODYSSEY-ebook/dp/B09JM7YL6F/