"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.

"Becoming Memory" Flash Essay Series

 We all have our father stories. I'll be posting mine as a series of flash essays that make up a longer essay titled "Becoming Memory." It was originally published in "Upstreet 8." If you want to read the whole thing at once, you can visit http://upstreet-mag.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Buckmaster_08_website.pdf.

"Waiting"

My mother, who will not be my mother for some years, waits on the corner of Broad Street and Oregon Avenue, waiting for my father, of course. South Philadelphia after the War, both from the same neighborhood, and somehow engaged though he wasn’t the boyfriend she always thought she would have. My father, the bad boy of Mollbore Terrace. His father, the steady draftsman at the Navy Yard with a job all through the Depression, keeping a bottle in the desk drawer and another down in his cellar workshop.

“You get out of that tree right now, Dick Buckmaster!” my mother had yelled at my father years earlier from inside the house where she was babysitting. By then, he was already a pack-a-day teenage smoker but still climbing city trees and teasing younger girls. He told her later on their wedding night, “I never thought I’d get someone as nice as you, Thelma.”

Now, here she is waiting for him, her fiancé. The sound of Benny Goodman’s clarinet slips out of the radio at Tony’s Corner Store each time a customer opens the door. They go in and out again picking up a pack of cigarettes, a half pound of cold cuts, an Italian ice, and still my father hasn't come. The streetcar stops, then clangs its lunge forward.

My mother bends to straighten the seam of her stocking. Streetlights blink on. She opens her handbag and pulls out her compact. She doesn’t yet know that this will be her life.

What have your read about Florida?

There really is no place like Florida and never has been since the days of the Ais Indians. Here are a few quotes and a partial list of books that have inspired my writing that you may be less familiar with. Writing about Florida starts in the 16th Century and goes on from there.


"The wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame. Both, though, are always in flux . . . Nothing seems hard or permanent; everything is always changing or washing away."
                                                                     Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

“I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.”

                                                             Zora Neale Hurston, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me"

"The fact is, that people cannot come to heartily like Florida till they accept certain deficiencies as the necessary shadow to certain excellences." 

                                                              Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Palmetto Leaves 

“The Florida Reader. Visions of Paradise 1530 to the Present.”Eds.: Maurice O’Sullivan and Jack C. Lane. Pineapple Press, 1991. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Old South, New South, or Down South? Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Ed.: Irwin D.S. Winsboro. West Virginina University Press, 2009. An excellent collection of essays on the legacy of racism in Florida. Included are essays on violence such “as debt peonage, convict labor and convict lease systems, race riots, and Florida’s leading the nation in the rate of per capita lynchings for a number of decades.”

“Palmetto Country.” By Stetson Kennedy. Florida A & M University Press, 1942, 1989. With an Appreciation from Woody Guthrie. Between 1937 and 1942, Kennedy headed the Florida Writers’ Project on folklore, oral history, and ethnic studies, traveling around the state gathering stories. A classic.

“Ecology of A Cracker Childhood. “By Janisse Ray. Milkweed Editions, 1999. Ray is a naturalist and environmentalist who says, “The landscape I was born to, that owns my body” is southern Georgia and where she now lives in northern Florida, both originally home to the endangered longleaf pine. She alternates memoir and ecology about this unique ecosystem.

“Florida’s Living Beaches. A Guide for the Curious Beachcomber.” By Blair and Dawn Witherington. Pineapple Press, 2007. A wonderful guide. Not meant to be comprehensive but full of great info. Did you know that a seabean is a fruit or seed that has made a sea voyage and that seabean season on Florida beaches is September to March? The section titled “The Hand of Man” tells about the roll-on deodorant balls on beaches world-wide.

“The Wild Heart of Florida. Florida Writers on Florida’s Wildlands.” Eds: Jeff Ripple and Susan Cerulean. University Press of Florida, 1999. Perhaps you’ve never seen this Florida?

“A History of Florida.” By Charlton W. Tebeau and William Marina. University of Miami Press, 1999. Beyond St. Augustine and alligators. The basic story with a whole lot of details.

“Florida’s Space Coast. The Impact of NASA on the Sunshine State.” William Barnaby Faherty. University of Florida Press, 2002. A personal favorite.

 

Space Heart -- Last installment

A Teflon tube -- Return -- First breath

My mother waits and waits. The surgery plan is for four hours but four hours, five, seven, nine pass while the OR nurses go in and out. They’ve already been informed that no one will be allowed to tell them anything until it’s over. My father reads much more of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than he intended. Probably hanging on the wall is one of those plain white-faced clocks with big black hands and numbers that my parents don’t want to look at. Beyond those wide swinging doors, I am sleeping.

Finally the surgeon emerges, shakes my father’s hand. “Everything is fine,” he says. “A bit more complicated than expected. But Linda is fine.” It’s then he tells them for the first time the story he will have to repeat later so they can take it all in, a story that wasn’t in the diagrams on my mother’s bed: There wasn’t just the hole . . . we found more than expected . . . three veins on the wrong side of the heart . . . brain medically frozen for thirty minutes, blood flow stopped  . . . a piece of Teflon tubing through the hole to plug it and drain the veins into the right side . . . there permanently . . . should be no problem, should work  . . . the Teflon tube? . . . yes, the same thing they use in astronaut suits . . . no, it’s not usual . . . we improvised.

Hours later, the turtle scatters loose sand into a fine, thick cover for the eggs, and without looking back, makes her way again into the indifferent water.

When I finally wake up in my hospital room, the private duty nurse is sitting in a chair reading. My mother is just sitting. I try to say something but can’t. Is it over, I want to know. Both of them are immediately by my side.

“You won’t be able to talk for a little bit, honey,” my mother explains. “They had to make a hole in your windpipe and put a tube in so you could breathe better.”

“It’s a tracheotomy,” the nurse says coolly as she takes my pulse. “Nothing to worry about.”

You mean I couldn’t breathe, I want to ask. I put my hand to my neck and feel the plastic box inches before I touch where my skin should be, the hoses forcing oxygen into my lungs. After a few days, the box comes off, and I have to learn to breathe on my own through my neck. I write notes voraciously on little pads of paper to be heard. I change my new Barbie doll’s outfits. I watch cartoons from the television hanging from the ceiling. After another ten days, the doctor comes in to take out the tube.

“Now you’re going to have to learn how to breathe through your nose again,” he says as if it were a great joke. An oxygen mask is put over my face while he works. I feel a small tug as the tube comes out and a little gurgle, then the creepy feeling of stitches being sewn even though he’s “numbed it up” first. There will be a scar at the base of my neck as well as the looping one across my chest where they opened it up.

Everyone in the hospital room watches while the mask is removed. If I get this right, I will be able to leave the hospital tomorrow. At first I panic as nothing happens when I automatically work my neck muscles as I have been for the past week. Then my body remembers and takes over. My first inhale is a gasp. I think I cry a little bit.

Copyright 2016, Linda S. Buckmaster