Eighteen Freedom flash non fiction practice under 100 word stories

Eighteen Freedom

Our cousin Pam was 18. I was 11, my sister 7. Two other cousins 12 and 10. Pam owned a mustard colored British MG.  Summer visit she put the top down and we flew along country roads, hair knot-twisting in the wind.
She bought us ice cream cones! We sat in a row across the back, bare feet in the leather seats. Don’t drip any of that on my car! she threatened.
She had streaked blond hair and an easy laugh.  Cold ice cream melted on my tongue in long hot sun.  Eighteen couldn’t come fast enough.

march 20 thoughts of the coming 24th and fred's eulogy

my email to fred this morning:  it's just brilliant.  last month or so when we chatted you sent it and it was exceedingly timely then and timely now once again.  tuesday marks the one year since dad died and i still feel kinda lost on the ocean of my world without much of a sail and the rudder is rather broken off....  it still feels decidedly wrong that he isn't here.  it still feels fresh that he was sick for so long---longer than i can even remember so the more of the real him i can find---like in your eulogy---the better.  time collapses.  just yesterday i was 14 and you and he were talking in the den before dinner...  time collapses.

i want to believe that all the pain of loss we feel for those we love like this is a sign that it will not always be like this i fear sometimes it seems as plausible that it is a sign that it will never be more than this again...  so there it is, my great lack of faith laced with rage a little...  that things have to be this way.  (okay, i'll add "for now" just to sprinkle a little powder sugar of hope on it all).

may i post your eulogy on my blog?  it's very private there...nobody reads the stuff...but i hope maybe someday i'll write something worth reading... (okay THERE it is, the spoonful of self pity to stir into the coffee of grieving...just for a bit of flavoring)...

i will add this---it is a GLORIOUS friday morning of my spring break and i am outside on the patio loving the relative peace and quiet...with nothing more to do today than ignore and deny the impulse to work in the yard or clean the house while i indulge in the work of the novel about my father's family.  got back last night from spending a week (well, since saturday) with the Ballard Bunch in Columbia!!!  it was fabulous.  all day with aunt dot telling stories and pouring over (is that the right "pouring"? or is there another spelling?  bly me) the rough draft...  so now i will move on into all of that and work the story...i suddenly saw the metaphor of kneading bread dough...man is it a workout!!! hopefully it will leaven properly, bake well, and feed everyone...

so is that a yes on posting your eulogy?

he responded "post away" so here is his eulogy...cut and pasted from his email...

2014 04 16 Jerry Ballard eulogy—Fred Alexander

            Last month I spoke to a college class.  In my hour and fifteen minutes, I covered only 5 of my 20 points, plus 3 things I thought of just before my talk began.  And all this got lots of laughs, a few ah-sos, 2 ovations, and a professor who said she took some helpful notes.  Good thing I gave everyone a detailed handout afterwards!

            Driving home, I realized, if I believed it possible, I had been channeling Jerry Ballard.  I was privileged to work with Jerry, frequently daily for about four years ending in 1977.   I began working for him part-time, as a grad student at Columbia Bible College.  That’s now Columbia International University.  He was quite old when I met him, maybe 37 or 38.

            When Jerry was on a creative roll—and he frequently was--he had amazing insights, great humor, a barely audible voice, illegible handwriting, and absolutely no sense of time.           

            I had never met anyone like him.  Nearly forty years later, I still haven’t met anyone else like him. 

            With my background as a young Marine officer, Jerry thought I could help him meet deadlines.  After creating a management system and working with him several months, I had to tell him our system wasn’t working very well.

            “Why not?” he asked.

            “Because you are not a Marine and do not follow your own orders or my suggestions.”

            Very quietly, he said, “I was afraid of that.”

            I heard him deliver the message at a daily CBC chapel one time.  Guess what his topic was?  Time management.  I know he struggled with it as a stewardship issue in our culture.  But I don’t think he was ever quite convinced that our North American ways were always God’s ways.  

            He was the first person I’d met in full-time Christian work who was not a pastor, musician, or missionary.  He was my model for how to be a committed Christian in a secular world.  The Jerry I knew enjoyed the world that God created, but kept his heavenly loyalties.  At work and as a family man at home, I saw him live with freedom and responsibility.

            Professionally, he was my mentor.  He would give me my own one-student seminar on how to write a letter, the graphics of communication, type selection, and communicating with senior leaders. 

            When he left CBC to found a Christian advertising agency in Atlanta, I succeed him as department head.  With the president’s permission, I hired Jerry to do the creative work we needed.  He was simply great and in his element—deciding what to do and say to reach a target audience.  He could create the concept, words, and art—and I could get it produced on time.

            Within a year, he hired me to join him in Atlanta.  In the sovereignty of God, which often leaves us a bit humanly confused, Jerry was offered . . . and accepted . . . another job between the time I gave my notice and arrived with my very pregnant wife! 

            Frankly, years later I understood that the new ad agency owner was terrific and hired him twice for projects in WNC.  But at this time, we didn’t understand each other well.  I saw that my labor needed to be in another part of the vineyard and left.  I certainly needed a job to support my wife and our one-month old son!

            It seemed likely that I’d be working for a non-Christian organization.  Now I wasn’t sure how to think about that and it made me uncomfortable.  Jerry listened carefully and observed that “God doesn’t call most Christians to work in Christian organizations.  I think He wants most of us to work where the people who need Him are--in the world.”

            With Jerry, came Winnie—for whom many of us truly did thank God!  I think Winnie consoled my new bride about living with a communicator.  Diane was wondering why I could write all this stuff to reach hundreds or thousands, but couldn’t remember to tell her basic things, like when I was coming home or going out of town.  “It’s the curse of the communicators,” I think Winnie said.  “They can reach the masses, but they have trouble with individuals.” 

            Jerry was a world Christian.  He told of sitting with a brother on the dirt floor of a hut in Africa or South America.  Though they did not share a common language, they enjoyed each other’s company.  Jerry said that was because they had the joy of having the most important thing in common, faith in Christ.

            I saw Jerry as an insightful expert on parenting—at least one day, for a few minutes.  While we talked before supper in his Atlanta den, fourteen year old Kim walked in with a request.  There was a communications gap and some mutual frustration, which was fortunately shaded by an umbrella of love. 

            In the end, Jerry admitted communications defeat.  And Kim was still a bit frustrated.  To her, and perhaps to himself, he said, “You know Kim, the problem is I just became competent in being the father of a 13 year old girl and now you’ve turned 14 and changed some more.  Now I need to start all over again!  So bear with me.” 

            Finally, my mentor and friend taught me that genius does not think in ways I’ll ever understand; it is good that God made us different; and that friendship and love can transcend decades and debilitation. 

            I think the world is a dimmer place without Jerry Ballard and look forward to seeing him again someday through the hope we have in Our Lord Jesus Christ.  

Walmart * 118 * Mama Ruth

030715

Rolled over at 3:30 this morning and decided to give it a nap...got up at 4:45...!!!  Hate that.  I like 4:00!!!  Even a little before but...I guess it’s okay...it’s Saturday...and then realized I really have this horrible list of supplies I need to get from Walmart so no time like the present...(and “no present like the time”—a great line from “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”)  But it’s the downside of the pay weeks so I’m lowwww on cash and besides that went out with friends to dinner and a movie and I bought a cheap drink—twice that turned out to be $9 each!!!!  Some lessons are real expensive.  So I had to dip into the little collection pot for the road trip and took out two fifties.  I thought I still had about 30 dollars left in my pocket so I just added the hundred and calculated from the list that I would spend, oh, probably about $75 (now that’s very subtle foreshadowing, that is). Left out of here about 5:20.

To say it was redeeming might be a little strong but it was nice.  NO MUSIC in the store!!!  Only workers putting things on shelves—maybe two other customers.  In fact I was in the kitchen cleaner aisle looking for my beloved choreboys that nobody carries any more so was trying to make a choice from the 4000 other distant second choices when I heard a guy in the aisle one over ask about rubber gloves and the shelver said he didn’t know but he would look and so I couldn’t stand it, I said, “The rubber gloves are over here!” pause “oh!  Okay!  Thanks!” “Not to eaves drop or anything,” I added for the chuckle, and the little guy came around the corner—we had passed each other in other aisles so we were really good friends.  He said, “oh!  And you don’t even work here!” and I said, “Nope, but I happened to notice the gloves about the same time I heard you ask...” He said, “Oh here’s a box of 40 pair!”  I said, “You think that’ll do for, what, an hour’s work, maybe?”  Still reading the box, he said straight up, “Naw, I can stretch’em maybe  two days—I work slow.”  We laughed and went on our separate ways.  Matching a goofy sense of humor with a stranger is a wonderful thing.

Got my cart loaded up with all those things you can’t really buy anywhere else...toilet paper, 5 billion kitchen garbage bags, sandwich bags, freezer bags, tea (almost $2 less than what I pay elsewhere!!), shampoo/conditioner, butter (almost $2 less...) chocolate (the exact same price), kleenex, and probably other items...did I mention toilet paper? I have an irrational fear of giving out of toilet paper.

ANYWAY another thing I hate about Walmart even early early in the morning is that there is never any cashiers only the automated do it yourself thing and of the four usually at least two are broken and one has a guy at it like me who only comes once a year to stock up so checking out is a nightmare.  Well this morning the only register open was the 14 items or less (FEWER!  FEWER! I always want to scream) and the lady who should be at it was two aisles over rearranging point-of-purchase bags of chips.  So I asked her if that was indeed the only aisle open she said yes and made her way to the register...   Oh and a rake.  The main thing on the list initially.  And popcorn.  Resolve carpet cleaner!  Glad I saw that!!

So I checked out.  Loading the cart from the rounder of half filled bags and she says, “That’s a total of $118.37.”  Wow.  So I pull out the two fifties and say, “There’s the hundred.”  And thinking I had at least another twenty, I pull out the rest of the budget cash and...there’s a ten, a five and three ones!  No wait, FOUR ones!  Whew!  I laughed and said, “Oh my goodness!  It’s everything in my pocket!” I hand her the $19 and say, “So much for the drive-through for breakfast on the way home,” which I hadn’t planned to do anyway.  The floor manager a few feet away says, “You can always eat that popcorn.  It’s lookin’ pretty good right about now, I’m sayin’.”  “Yeah, and I’ve got the little cokes in there to wash it down and some butter, too, if I’m still hungry.”

As I thanked them and left, rounded the corner with the cart, out the automatic sliding doors and the world only a shade lighter than when I went in, I noticed a very dark, very worn, penny on the sidewalk, heads up!!!  Mama Ruth*!  I picked it up and plunked her in my pocket!   JUST LOVE that kind of punctuation to an episode like that.  How can you not smile and feel like the whole world is coming along nicely after all....

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m in a hurry to go back before, like, August.



*For years now, Mama Ruth has been hanging around and making her presence known by the showing of a penny.  The first story was published some years back so anyone who knows me really well will catch this familiar, intimate, inside joke-like truth...always adding a special connection and presence for me.  Oh, and Mama Ruth is my Mama’s Mama.  Her birthday is March 24...the same day my Dad died in 2014.  She died in May something like 1996?  The year Emily was born...and Mama this morning mentioned “19 years ago”...

I miss everyone so severely...but tangible connections, the symbols that remain vibrant in my life, keep the connection strong and the hope of seeing them again pulsing with the longing beat of my heart.

Calvary (2014...by John Michael McDonagh, Father James played by Brendan Gleeson)

...Lush Irish countryside along the beach.  A “good” priest has been given the warning through the confessional that he has one week to live before the unseen perpetrator will put him down because he is a “good” priest.  This unseen man believes this will bring into balance the wrong done to him as a child when he was raped by a priest who was not punished for it.
Flannery O’Connor at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” says through the antagonist, “‘She would have been a good woman if there’d been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life.’” While this is specifically said of the protagonist, a grandmother quite ignorant of her influence and impact on the people around her, I believe O’Connor is making an obvious statement about human nature.  The truth extends to Father James as he lives out a week balancing his duties and convictions as a priest with his responsibilities as a father and his faith as a man, a learned, astute, wise, discerning man.  He was a good man before the proverbial gun was put to his head.  Everyone in town suddenly becomes suspect—and while he intimates to the Bishop that he might know who it is—the rest of us are left wondering, listening to the voices carefully to see if we hear the tone and timber of that original confession in the opening scene.  All the men in that town are troubled.  All the men of earth are troubled.  Yet the perspective is shifted ever so slightly through the filter of this eminent threat.
The film is billed as a dark comedy.  The traces of humor in the script and play on words and language and relationships that led someone to deem it that are indeed dark but as a film, I disagree that it’s a dark comedy.  There is dark humor there, satiric jabs; and poisonous sarcasm grows as Father James approaches the Sunday deadline.  And just as that word carries a double entendre, language and images throughout the film carry the weight of double entendre, searing and sneering jokes and reparte failing to mask toxic wounds of the soul.
It is a social commentary, a cautionary tale, a character study (of many characters).  It is insightful, revelational, simple and complex.  You will see yourself in every character.  You will long to have Father James as your confessor.  You will long to stand between him and Calvary.  But that would be to violate what God has set in motion—the grace, the deeply personal (violating) grace and calling for the one to let his faith emboldens him to walk directly into the blinding light of God’s unspeakable, inexplicable ultimate plan.
Do not read on until you have seen the film, then read as an invitation to discussion.
Calvary is of course the place where Jesus was crucified.  The meaning of the word is literally, “place of the skull.”  Connotations ring out as referencing the dark irony that we would put to death the very One who would be our way of salvation, one who would be most honest, most loving and forgiving.  It is through the death of the One that we are saved.  Does that make Father James a messiah figure?  In as much as anyone who answers the call of Christ to follow and model choices after the teachings of Christ, yes.  Jesus walked into his eminent death with similar phases of hope and prayer.  As a story archetype, I believe James is a messiah figure.  Any Christian seeing this film may be the most disturbed by this emotional climactic scene of the story (or not).  Where James separates from Jesus in innocence is in admitting that whereas he cried at the slaying of his beloved dog Bruno, he confessed he did not cry when, personally detached, he read the news that came by way of the paper about so many children who suffered at the hands of pedophiles who masqueraded as priests.  His honesty, his confession pulled the first trigger.
Parallels, cycles, connections are made at every turn in this film—the most profound perhaps being the one in the final scene.
Stories give us the opportunity to live vicariously, to search our hearts and minds and to connect with people and ways beyond our own, which also, conversely and miraculously are in reality our own.  The power of life and language lies precisely in our need to connect in empathy—to love as to be loved—to understand as to be understood—to forgive as to be forgiven—to live as to die.

Not one message lost that day (flash fiction)

Morning drags herself in for night crew waiting those last hours, minutes, before shift changes and shut eye comes before the ache subsides.  Radio room below deck of an aircraft carrier smells just like you’d think in an airlocked compartment where barely ten guys could stand and turn, elbowing on all sides.  It was close quarters.  Air piped in mixed with that machine smell of electrical boxes stacked floor to ceiling all with nobs and gauges that pulled thinly threaded sound into the ears via doughnut earphones.  Static at least let you know the box was still hot.  There were two of us fresh on duty that morning and we could hear the bombs in the distance even in that underwater tomb.  Too far away to hear the warning signals.  The next sound shook us, I looked up through the top and saw planes, meatballs on the wings.  I shouted down, “Japanese!” Jumped to, adjusted the nobs, both of us trying to determine what was going on.  Radio buzzing up with questions. Cautiously we said it looked like an attack—hadn’t heard from headquarters so we say nothing much.  We knew the truth in each other’s eyes.  Pearl Harbor was under attack.  The Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor. Then we received and relayed orders to dispatch planes.  We knew lives were flaming out with every sound and tremor.  Pen and paper at my elbow.  Suddenly my crew, my friends, my own life became most precious.  No thoughts, only words.  As pilots headed in they could see the mass destruction forming clouds with sparks flying, like crazed palm trees capping out with swirls of smoke and ships exploding in the seas.  The pilots knew where they were headed and radioed in the letters. Voices like ghosts trapped in the wind screaming over screaming engines, each word fired into my memory, shot out of my pen, my lips trembling with their fear and bravery. “Tell Mom I’m thinking of her and I’m sorry I won’t be home at Christmas after all.”  “Sally Fulbright, 157 4th Street, Tupelo: Honey, I love you—every hour was hoping to see you again.  Okay?”  “This one’s for you, Jimmy! Take care of Mommy for me.” “Mail the letter under my pillow. Got it?” “Mom, I remember the train engine you got me for Christmas—I was only 7 but I knew it cost you more than money.”

between death and resurrection october 4

100414  Emotional bombs keep exploding at the sight of things I’d forgotten.  Why do I weep?  Does it matter? I weep.   Dad, dead now only five months.  Like yesterday and forever alive but I can’t reach him or talk to him or roll my eyes when he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.  Except for that one time just before we had to move him to hospice, I got home from a visit, they live three hours away, and I called him to say I’d arrived home safely and we chatted about how wonderful the weekend was (as we always do) and then in childlike fun we exchanged all kinds of goodbyes—his voice, my dad’s of all my life so familiar so right so him, but in light-heartedness so rare for a man so serious—we played with, exchanged, all the different words for bubye...see you later alligator, tata for now, ciao, ciao bella, so long, see you next time, it’s been real, sianara, toodloo, adios amigos, bubye...and it went on for awhile and I was giggling and he chuckling, so great to hear joy in his voice, and mama was in the background saying, “Jerry!  Hang up the phone now!”  Dad and I were gloriously stuck in some delightful spin of timeless, spaceless connection that of course now is weighted down with all the grief of time violently chiseling away at such precious moments of being and connection, forever here separated by a violent, traumatic death that quickly followed that call.  It keeps roaring back at me like the relentless ocean waves storming onto the beaches of my memory and I can’t swim there any more.

Now Mama stands in her new, smaller, more cost efficient “garden apartment” sorting through for the third time in as many months, what she treasures.  This last time she sorted without me and so I picked up boxes labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” (my friend and I and others are having a garage sale next month).  This morning, back at my house, I opened one box she’d filled and in it, carefully wrapped, are the blue delft plates she so dearly loves from Holland they bought when they traveled there, permanent fixtures in every kitchen since, emblems of my youth and the certainty of a loving, mostly stable family and there they are in a box labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” and the whole world again crashes down on my heart and soul and it’s like the earth opens and swallows me into the shards of no longer being. And I hear echoing mama’s voice last weekend as she stands in her new, smaller, more efficient “garden apartment” say, “I just don’t really care about any of it any more.  I’m over it.  I look at things I’ve loved for so long and I’m just over it. Is that horrible?”  I don’t remember what I answered (didn’t know she meant my childhood, our whole lives together, surely she didn’t mean that exactly) probably responded that it might just be the numbness of so much grief and loss happening all at once that this is kind of a defense mechanism.  I’ll keep everything for you, Mama.  Maybe one day soon you’ll want it back.

Then again maybe not.

As keeper of the treasure I feel the weight of all who have gone before more profoundly than ever.  I have furniture and wall hangings and treasures with rich, variegated stories, swords and knives from all over the world, figurines and plates and, plateware, a window from Mama Ruth’s house, Chinese praying Jesus from Mema’s house, quilts from grands I never met, a village carved from a single piece of mahogany three feet long, and I can’t let go of any of it because I want my Dad back.

The problem is clothes

100414 The problem is clothes.

What is more glorious than the sunrise?  Or the sunset?  Especially in south Florida?  My home has a delightful patio in middle of the back, screened in, with privacy created by two oak trees, a couple of pines, and some other bizarre palms and ficus and hibiscus and oleander and bamboo and other things I don’t know the names of. The neighborhood is squeezed together somewhat so that blocks the view—I have a very dappled southerly view of branches near and far and these green beasts I’ve named.

I would have to leave the house in search of the sunrise and sunset.  To leave the house I would have to dress.  The problem is putting on clothes.

Just this morning I discovered, after living here about five years, that the best view of the skies at sunrise is out my bathroom window—the one over the toilet.  This is most unfortunate for any kind of meditative gazing.  To go out into the yard would involve shoes because between my patio and that side yard is an expanse of wet mulched ground and then the grasses on that side yard by Saturday are long a mucky with torrential rains of the night before and dew. And I’d have to drag a chair out from the inside.

Sounds like a lot of excuses.  I did stand facing the toilet this morning and looked out the window at the view between my neighbors’ house that faces an angle away from my visage, and their tree line which is quite far from their door.  They have a lovely view out their back over the corner of the rolling golf course.  No one around here really sees the sunrise, just the red lines the clouds make when there are clouds, against that icy blue colored sky so early in the morning.  It’s not long before the reds fade to pinks like cotton candy and then change to the gauzy white as the clouds seem to be left behind from the storms that tore through here last night.  They, these leftover clouds, move imperceptibly, soaking up the warming sun.

The report back from the HOA is that I have a great deal of growth (told through chuckles over the phone) growing on my roof.  I noticed that for the first time driving home yesterday.  I do have.  On the roof that’s right over my kitchen where the bay window protrudes.  The mossy green on the roof is probably about a yard by a yard and quite healthy with the bright green of my distant homeland at least four generations back.  I couldn’t help but smile when I saw it as I drove by—just a quick glimpse.  I like having a garden on the roof so bright green.  Very fetching.

How the heck am I supposed to get that off of there?  Spend a fortune for someone else to do it. The someone elses came to do it apparently but couldn’t because I have six or seven broken tiles and that must be fixed before the germicide poisoning whatever it’s called will happen on the roof as part of what the company is doing in preparing the houses to paint.

But I digress.

The point is the problem of clothing.  I sit in the mornings that I crave and enjoy, nay BASQUE in, in a large green Irish teeshirt that I cannot feel on my skin, it’s why I wear it, and my tiger print pajama bottoms that likewise comfort without really touching my skin.  I don’t even go to the mailbox in these clothes.  I certainly can’t drive out to the beach for the sunrise—plus it takes me away from the patio.  Nor can I drive out to the bridge—which I haven’t fully figured out how I would do that anyway—to watch the sunset.  I’d have to walk the bridge to see the sunset and I am just not into that at the moment.  Perhaps I will one day.

I would also love to go to the pelican or osceola café for breakfast but again, the problem is getting dressed and missing out on this holy of holies—time and space in such comfort and quiet and absolutely private surroundings—except for the mucky squirrels and the occasional rabbit and sometimes the mourning doves...the occasional armadillo and family that migrate through are perhaps my favorite.  Don’t know why.  Love their rolly polly look and their quiet foraging.  They are a vision of the ancient times when dinosaurs ruled the world and yet somehow futuristic silver armored scales so neatly laid from head to tail in that slight rounding of the back.  Their claws are beautiful, their snouts perfect, waddling along wearing their armored clothing they were born with.

They don’t have to dress.  And neither do I.  Except I also need to go to the grocery store and really should go now or 20 minutes ago when the store opened to avoid the Saturday crowds but I don’t want to pull on the undergarments that squeeze the most sensitive parts of me or have to pull on clothes that remind me of how much weight I need to lose as I head for the market where I will purchase more of what will keep the weight on me.   The hair and face would need some attention as well.  I’m not lazy, just drained of all humanity’s noise and views and eyeballs and interchanges.  I just want to sit here and read and write and daydream into the luscious healing shades of viscous greens and unselfconscious mammals and birds and color morphing sky patches and only occasional voices of walkers who cannot see me.  I love not being seen!  And I do not want to go out there where I will be seen and heard and have to see back and hear.

So it’s the clothes.  And the face.  The eyes and ears.  Overexposure sends me to retreat in my open and glorious cave...  But I miss out on the sunrise and sunset and I’m hungry.  But I just can’t miss out on the even more precious quiet hours of sunrise and lingering in the words from books and emails and online readings and my own words clicking across the pale icy lighted screen....  I only wish of the two—sunrise or sunset—I could at least fully absorb one from my home.