The Ordinary Day
by Gayle Seely

It is an ordinary day today. Tomorrow will be much the same as today. Here in my everyday life in the northwest it is all about the usual getting up early, in time to review the homework before class, and then getting into my too-large car and rolling down the too-steep driveway to the not-so-quiet suburban street that is usually wet, not looking up at the house that needs painting and the gutters that need cleaning out, aiming towards the major road at the edge of my area that will take me past the large empty park and the complexes of office buildings that are half vacant, though you can’t tell unless you look closely, and out onto the thoroughfare of Cornell Avenue, which my neighbor tells me was recently widened but this is hard to believe because the traffic still creeps along until 185th, and then I go over the 26 freeway, looking down at the flow of cars heading towards the beach, which is only an hour and half from here and I could go that way and skip class, could skip the whole day, could stay down there and walk on the beach but it wouldn’t be any fun without my dog, who is at home in the kitchen with my husband and was sitting and watching me with sad eyes as I left yet again, was probably wondering if I was going someplace with good sniffs and not remembering her, but I DO remember her as I slide into my parking place at Rock Creek and rush to the business office to pick up my parking permit that I should have come over and gotten last Friday but I was too lazy or too tired, most likely because my sister came down from Seattle and we sat up and talked until late and then I could not sleep even though I only drank water, but just lay there in the dark as so many memories came shoving back up into my brain that I had to take each one of them and look at it, and soothe it, and put it aside, put it away, back down where it belongs, and then I began to feel less sad, and finally I wiped my tears for the last time and looked at the crazy stupid clock which read 2:50 a.m. and turned my pillow over to the dry side and finally went to sleep.
I get to my Spanish class early and sit near the man who is here from Arizona for only a few months until he can go back and who aches from our cold weather that is the first hint of global cooling – no, not global warming – that the NASA scientists and the veteran predictors at Farmers Almanac have recently decided to believe. He is a nice man and he has lost his acceptance of the cold, which is perhaps the best kind of protection against it. In Spanish we get to go around the classroom and describe ourselves and I get to say I am ‘vieja’, which is old, and ‘gordita’, which is plump, and some classmates laugh and I am glad because I am happy to be here, old and plump, and not young and stupid with all those hard years ahead of me. The teacher does not ask us to describe our joy or our sadness or even our money worry and that is good because I do not have the vocabulary, the ‘vocabular util’ in Spanish, to tell about these things: not in Spanish, not in English, maybe not in any words.
But on the way home from class as I cross back over Highway 26 the sky has opened and the clouds have slid to the sides like the drapes on a theatre stage and the sun begins to shine down its slowly warming light and the blossoming trees come into bright focus: kinds and kinds of pinks, like babies fingers, and puppies noses, and the colors of dresses of little Mexican girls going to a Posada. And there are whites too, fluffy outlines which are lacy if you stop under them and look up after you have parallel parked your car, and the tiny flower fragments fall onto the closed sunroof and you can imagine them swirling up and behind you as you drive away, like a stream of fragrant snowflakes, a fragile proof of life that is such a strong contrast to the fortress-like structure of my steel, air-bagged, anti-lock braked, officially safe, road-warrior car. And it comes to me as I cruise through the flurries of petals that long after this vehicle and I are rust and dust, these fragile petals will come back again and again to cover the landscape with spring.

Thieves

There are two
No, more than two: three at least and maybe four
Not four, we would have noticed,
heard them
heard them at the car doors
heard their breath when they were searching.
We were blindfolded at the same time--I watched your face--
Black gloved hands
Other hands pulled at the upholstery
Under your seat, too
I don't know
You do think
Yes,
yes I felt them, their hands between my knees I thought--
They found it.
I don't know
You do
Yes
It's over then.

Our beach house at Hatteras: the hurricane Andrew?
Hugo
The windows like black wide mouths sucked the glass in and
spit the shards
On our backs we hunched in pajamas under the secretary
Glass crept out of your skin for months, you slept on your stomach
The ocean at the second balcony, the house sliding away sliding
But we made it
Yes

Where have they gone?
They'll need to see if it's real show it to someone
This duct tape rips the skin on my wrists.
My ankles are knotted cords.

Seven long months
Please, not this
We did everything we could for him: you awake all night, the doctors
All those tubes all those tubes stuck in his tiny body
And he'd look at us like
I wanted to nurse him I really wanted to nurse him and there was no reason
You were strong
We made the right choice the only choice
Yes

Coming back, listen,
Those two, the same
No, more than two, all the gravel crunching, at least three
Here they are
Yes
It's over then
Yes.

Prompt: This is what happened to you...

This is what happened to you; your phone rang at 6:02 am and woke you up. Then it rang again, two minutes later. You rolled out of bed and checked the caller ID: Mom. Then Dad. In 34 years since their divorce, this had never happened. You called Mom first. "Hi, Son. Something terrible has happened. Mack called to say that little Craig didn't wake up this morning. We're on our way up to Trenton now to see him."
It was The Call everyone fears.
You called Dad. "Well, it looks like he was sleeping with the boy. Mack got up to feed him at midnight, then the he fell asleep on Mack's chest. Sometime in the night, the boy rolled off him. When Mack woke up, he was pinned between Mack's arm and the corner of the futon mattress."
You called Mom back, "Is anyone with Mack?" "No." "I'm calling him and staying on the phone with him. I don't want him doing something awful to himself."
You called Mack. "Hey, man." "Hey, bud." "Well, I've done something awful, man. It's pretty bad. I killed my boy, Bill." "No, you didn't, Mack."

Mom said, "I've struggled with him all these years. First, it was the principal calling once a week to say Mack had shut everyone out of the bathroom during recess, or picked a fight with the class bully. I'd step into the living room and there he'd be, sitting on Hop's chest, choking him, Sam beet red going toward purple.
Your father would come home from his sales meetings and do nothing to help me. Half the time, he'd dismiss what I was saying. In retrospect, I realize he wanted to undercut me and any authority I had. Just to win favor in the situation. Favor from whom? Mack? Sam? He ruined them to me.
When Mack got up to be 13 or so, I'd finally had enough and divorced your father. Mack started drinking and smoking dope that first summer. He was sent off to the Marines instead of jail when they caught him with dope. Then rehab, after rehab. I begged the last place to keep him there until he sobered up. The man in charge told me Mack was the toughest case he'd ever seen. He stayed pretty clean for the last 5 years or so. Then she moved down here unannounced, he moved her in, and she got pregnant almost immediately. I'd held out hope for them and the little girl. Then the boy came along and she left like she did with the first one. Trenton is 50 miles away. I never did trust her. She knew he was drinking again. Why would she drop off the two kids with him if she knew the state he was in? And now here we are.
Driving up to Arkansas to bury my grandson in the family cemetery. A little boy only three months old. The prettiest child I'd ever seen. Just beautiful. But all I can think is that we have to keep Mack out of prison. Whatever we do, we have to keep him out of prison.
I've been through a lot with this boy. By 47 I hoped he'd have it together by now, but what more can I do than what I've done? He'll lose everything he's worked so hard for: the land, the house, maybe even his truck. How will he get back and forth to work, then? What will happen to the little girl? It breaks my heart to think of her up there in Arkansas repeating the same pattern we've been stuck in for so long. What can we do?

"Get your ass down here," Dad said on the phone, "You may be the only one who can help us."
I sat in meditation the whole plane ride down to Dallas. "
Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
"Just remain upright," my inner voice said.
I saw a buoy far out in the ocean during a storm.
"Just remain upright."
I have to stay upright, not get pulled under by the riptide.
Be there for him. Stay with him. Don't leave his side.

So for five days I sat outside the therapist's office, hauled bag after bag of beer bottles to the dump, talked and listened and cried, then hid the guns from sight.

Prompt: A photograph from the 1960's of a woman in a bright floral dress seated, smoking, on a bright floral outdoor rocker

Hilda always wondered what people did without any color in their lives. Those people in the tract houses all painted the same shade of khaki from the outside and ecru after the front door. Were their dreams in a washed out palette, too?
Then there were the opposites: the dictocrats, the matchy-matchy's as she liked to call them. The ones who dressed all in black all the time. To avoid having to make a decision she supposed.
Why couldn't color run rampant? Why couldn't pattern scream from the heights, shake down the mysteries, reveal the hidden agendas of the soul?
Howard had always appreciated her bohemian vagaries. Her "nerve" he called it. Too bad he'd found the nerve to sleep with that tart and enact the free love he'd always yammered on about. At least he'd left her the Art, and the books, her bound beauties lined up in a row. Those and the 24 year-old Macaw were all she had left from her time with Howard.
Things grow, leaf, die and fall she thought. Trees, people, relationships. Yet, here she still stood, hot as fire on the inside, burning embers waiting to extinguish, or set aflame, or tear through the ideas of Romantics and misty-eyed fawns who showed up every fall for her Introduction to Modern Literature course.
How could these soft-shelled, pasty little figurines ever see the passion? What kept her going were the surprises. Even 40 years later she was still taken aback that her first assessments on the first day of class turned out to be only half right. In the still of the semester, on that rare occasion, a lone purple orchid bloomed from an otherwise wan little child and a beauty unbeknownst to anyone revealed itself.
Those moments, stark in their clarity, showed brightly. Their contrast bemused her, fueled her passion to continue on, to drudge through the oblique reasoning with yet another group of children. All for that moment of discovery, a revelation. A spark revealed.
Yes, that is what I'll say, Hilda thought, as she lit another cigarette. That's what I'll tell them when they ask how I've lasted this long. As the Deconstructionists have been abandoned and another Postmodern truism becomes the faddish catchphrase, my Beauty will throw them. "A Romantic?" they will think, "Old Mrs. Rubicon, a Romantic?"

Prompt: Why I Write

Why I write is beyond words. It's a scratch to the bottom of my soul, it's my unconscious leaking out of my body, it's stuff arriving from places that surprise me, images from the gods, dialogue from those I do not know (but somehow I know them), jokes and animals and achy breaky hearts marching across my beat up old notebook. It's powers that be from another plane crossing this metaphysical barrier to visit me.

Sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes I am locked in reality--flat, drab, confining, boring reality. At those points I am so grateful for 10 minute prompts, for words that evaporate as soon as they drop onto the page, words that get plowed under with the next prompt.

Alida Thacher, Friday Morning Workshop, Summer 2009