"Stitches" -- Becoming Memory Series

 Stitches

From my bed, the house is quiet, too quiet until I hear the clickedy clickedy clickedy of my mother’s black Singer sewing machine. A deeper click—metal arm on metal—as the presser foot is raised; a small clunk when she lowers it again. A hum rolls the flywheel forward, and then clickedy clickedy clickedy under the machine’s tiny light, now faster, now slower, my mother’s hands under the machine’s strong light.

Plink—a pin drops into the pin box. Plink. Plink. Silence and I know she is re-pinning, re-folding alone at the dining room table, hunched over the dining room table, hours with that tiny, strong light.

How smart I will look in my new pleated skirt, I think. Her handiwork gathers yards of plaid into neat folds, over and over all that fabric into neat folds secured at the waistband with a straight topstitch. The pleat edges meet perfectly, obscuring the layer beneath. The cloth’s cross patterns always line up— “matching the plaid” the mark of a careful seamstress.

Tomorrow I will stand on a dining room chair and turn, turn one pin at a time as she folds the hem just below my skinny knees. It takes so long that a little restless hot spot burns in my belly. I hate how tiny my turns have to be. I want to be able to twirl and leap. Eventually, the ironing board will be brought out, and each pleat ironed so that they march briskly around the skirt, ready to give and flow with movement.  A pleated skirt is not as good for twirling as a flared one, but the accordion action of the pleats is excellent for leaping.

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

"Gunsmoke" -- Becoming Memory Series

 Gunsmoke

My father plays out his cowboy self with a .22 pistol the year we live in Sunnyvale for his temporary job in California. Some Saturdays, he takes my brother and me out to a gravel pit in the hills for target practice. I aim for those concentric circles off in the distance, just like my father shows me. The kickback, relatively small, makes my ten-year-old arm jump. My father kneels behind my brother, only six, to hold his arm up when it’s his turn.

Afterwards, we study the little holes we made in the target paper, unable to tell whose is whose. Together in the faint autumn sunlight—Central California before the rains and the smell of dry leaves and my father’s suede jacket and his Chesterfields all mix together. It always hangs around him, that outlaw smell, but he was never really an outlaw himself. He didn’t have the heart for it.

It’s that Thanksgiving my father shoots himself in the thigh practicing his “quick draw,” like on “Gunsmoke,” my brother’s toy plastic holster strapped to his leg, Jim Beam by his side. The women and kids are back at the house helping my aunt clean up dinner when my uncle brings him hobbling in, blood streaming down his leg. They don’t bleed on television shows in those days, and we all stare in fascination. “He got me. He got me. The S.O.B. got me,” my father, the great kidder, moans in mock agony.

My mother takes him to the hospital where they pull the bullet out and stitch him up. The story becomes a family joke, a neighborhood joke, a workplace joke, a bar joke, a story about how tough my father is that morphs into a story about how cool and ironic my father is as I grow old enough to want to be cool and ironic myself.

One of his buddies makes for him a commemorative wooden plaque—a two foot by ten inch piece of pine stained a dark brown and carved with the tribute:  “Dick ‘Quick Draw’ Buckmaster. November 24, 1960.”  Mounted in the center like a trophy fish, smaller than you would expect, is the bullet, the legend being larger than reality, as legends usually are.  

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster 

"Becoming Memory" Series -- Florida Sunday

 Florida Sunday

It could be any late Sunday afternoon, one of those when my father might be home, barbecuing chicken, though the forecast is for thunderstorms.  He sits in a lawn chair, shirtless beside the palmetto palm, a can of Schlitz in one hand, his latest issue of Time in the other, folded back over itself. The chicken always takes very, very long, and we’re always waiting. Perhaps it’s because he started the charcoal too late or my mother put the potatoes in the oven too early. They discuss this every time.

At that time on a Sunday, I am usually walking home alone barefoot on hot asphalt up from the beach at the end of the street. It’s not one of those soft, fine-grained white beaches rich with quartz sand where families usually go. Instead, this sand is coarse, brownish tan with the shells of tiny animals worn down to grains by millions of waves. The coquina reef just below the sand bares itself close to the water’s edge, stark at low tide, or at high tide scraping your legs if you forget while swimming and kick too hard.

Walking  toward the black afternoon thunderheads, the heat letting up just a little, I round the corner to Albatross Drive, noting whether my father’s car is in the driveway, whether we are having chicken tonight.  And if not, my mother and brother and I will eat once-frozen chicken pot pies and wait for “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” to come on as the foaming thunderheads move over the house and leave behind a great humid silence.

Copyright, 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster

"Becoming Memory" Flash Essay Series

The High Lonesome Sound

In the early days of our family when it is just me and no car air conditioning, my parents drive all night through the Southwest to escape the heat of the day. It’s the beginning of the aerospace industry, and my father follows the jobs around the country with his GI Bill engineering degree—Riverside, Long Beach, Norfolk, Maryland, and eventually Cape Canaveral. We’re in some kind of Chevrolet coupe, of course, second-hand.  That’s what he always drives. In later years, I’ll associate the rounded lines and grinning grills of the early 1950s models with the possibilities of family.

In the mornings, we pull into a motel where I amuse myself with books and dolls while they sleep. My mother wakes late morning and takes me to the pool so my father, the driver, can get a few more hours’ sleep. After lunch in the car, he’ll tell jokes and sing loudly in what he calls his “whiskey tenor.” “When the moon hits the eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore,” he sings, never finishing a whole song.

We drive through the afternoon and evening, the desert landscape rolling by. After a long sunset, the funnel of the headlights reveal just what was necessary to know of the road ahead. My parents talk through the night quietly or not at all, my four-year-old self witness to this dashboard light intimacy.

Eventually I climb into the rounded window shelf above the back seat, just cozy enough for a small child,  and hypnotize myself with the passing lights that fade away into the darkness as the radio plays softly and my father sings along from time to time. Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Flatt and Scruggs, music that is always best with a bit of nighttime static behind it conveying great distances, distances traveled and those left to go.

I’m too young to understand the situations they’re singing about in those songs, but the music tells me everything  I need to know. The “high lonesome sound” drifts around the car while the hot air pours through my father’s window, his elbow languishing on the door. The singer’s plaintive story-telling, the dobro’s call, the pedal steel guitar pulling long and low, the fiddle alternating between joy and sorrow—this is life, I come to imagine, or at least my father’s idea of life. I learn about loneliness and longing and loss, real or imagined, from that radio. I hear how they wrap around each other in harmony and travel with us through the hot night on invisible waves of air. 

From "Becoming Memory" published in Upstreet 8. http://upstreet-mag.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Buckmaster_08_website.pdf.