Author: marydpierce

Waiting. . . .

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Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

                                                                       — Henry Van Dyke

I can be impatient sometimes.  (When my husband reads that line, he’ll laugh, and say sometimes?)

Mostly, I’m impatient about waiting.  Waiting on hold for customer service, waiting in heavy traffic.  Waiting for my husband to chop vegetables when I’m rushing to get dinner on the table.  It’s one of the character flaws that I need to attend to most.  And I’m trying.  I really am.

I try to schedule doctor and dentist appointments for the exact time the office returns from lunch, so that I’m in and out before things get backed up.  I try to avoid driving anywhere during rush hour.  I try to breathe slowly when I have to wait.  Often I try to distract myself with something else.

Which is what I am doing now.

My son lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  After the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, it has felt like anything can happen.  We have all been waiting for the answer to the questions of who and why all week.

Last night, before I went to bed, there was news that a shooting had occurred at MIT.  Shortly after that reports of an explosion in Watertown.  I wondered whether it was connected to the bombing on Monday.  I think most people did.  And then, when I woke up this morning I discovered that it was indeed connected and that one of the suspects was on the loose, armed and possibly carrying explosives.  The entire Boston area was under lock-down and everyone had been told to stay indoors.  I’m pretty certain that shutting down an entire city like that to search for a suspect has never happened before.  At least not to my recollection.

Fear is a rat that ran up my spine.

I immediately texted the boy.  Are you home & okay?  I waited for his reply.  Thirteen minutes, I waited.

Here is another true thing about me:  In the face of unusual circumstances, I am apt to imagine a multitude of scenarios.  I tell myself it’s a writer thing, I make up stuff all the time.  Sometimes, depending on how much time I have, I can terrify myself.  Thirteen minutes is a hell of a long time.  More than long enough to imagine a desperate bombing suspect hiding at the house my son lives in and holding everyone captive.  Which would explain why my son can’t text me back.

That image, however wildly unlikely, was enough to set my heart racing.  I picked up the phone and called, whereupon I found that the first, more probable scenario I had imagined was correct.  He was still in bed.

Still, I’m glad I called.  It was comforting to hear his voice, to know that for the time being he was safe, and I could say aloud, I love you.

But now, I’m back to waiting and I hate that.  We are all waiting for something.  For answers to questions we haven’t even thought of yet.  For closure.  For peace of mind.  For the violence to end.

The mama in me wants to get in my car and drive to Boston and bring my 24 year-old baby boy home.  But, I know I can’t.  I know that like everyone else who has been affected by this, I will have to wait.

The waiting is excruciating.

boston boats 2

This one’s for Puck

/ marydpierce / 60 Comments

Right up front, I will tell you that this story is true.  I should also warn you that it’s a little bitter-sweet.

When my brother Peter came into our lives my parents already had three girls. They longed for a son.

A couple of interesting points about this story:  First, like all good men living in the area of the Adirondack Mountains, my father liked to hunt.  Hunting season in those parts was a religion, sacred and holy; the woods, nature’s cathedral.  The thing about my father was that he had never bagged a deer.  He’d been hunting with plenty of other guys who had, but he’d never actually shot one on his own.

The second thing, is that shortly after the third girl was born, my father started growing a beard.  It grew fast and bushy, and with a red hue that didn’t match the hair on his head at all.  (Somewhere there’s a photograph of my dad at that time, sitting on my grandmother’s front porch, wearing an army style camouflage cap.  He looked exactly like Fidel Castro.)  My mother didn’t much like that beard.  My father said he would shave when he got a son or a buck.  Either one.  Whichever came first.

The third point is that my mother is half Mohawk.  She was born and spent the first decade or so of her life on the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve, which straddles the border of Canada and the US.  We would often make the winding drive to visit aunts and uncles and cousins there.  One day after a visit, on the return trip, the car held my parents, my sisters and myself, and a brand new brother, named Peter.  He was 18 months old at the time.

The particulars of how it came to be that we brought him home are not important.  What matters is that he was ours from that day on.  I wasn’t very old then, but I do remember the car ride home — I remember Peter’s little face peaking over my mother’s shoulder, watching us and smiling.  Oh, how I remember that smile.

Peter in an old photo taken when he was about 3. Even though the quality of the photo is poor, you can see how his face lit up with the sweet spirit of his smile. He was some cute kid! Peter in an old photo taken when he was about 3. Even though the quality of the photo is poor, you can see how his face lit up with the sweet spirit of his smile.

My father did not get his buck that season (nor any season, ever).  But he got his son, and true to his word, he shaved.  Peter grew and thrived, we girls grew and thrived, and my mother went on to eventually have three more babies – all of them boys.  And we were a rowdy raucous family of seven kids who were sometimes very close, and sometimes throwing things at one another.

Except for Peter.  At least, the way I remember him, and I’m telling the story so you’ll have to take my word for it.  If you happen to know or run into one of my siblings, they may tell the story differently.  That’s the way families work.

Peter was a quieter kid than the rest of us, he was by nature more even-tempered. And always, he was quick to smile.  He loved to hunt and fish, though he mostly used his hands for the latter – he was that patient and that quick.  As a teenager he took up wrestling and was pretty good and quick at that.  He was no push-over if really provoked.  Somewhere in those teen years, people started calling him Puck.

He tried his hand at many things.  He joined the Navy, hoping to travel, but that didn’t work out the way he planned.  He got married and moved back to the Adirondack town where we grew up.  He raised chickens for awhile, and for awhile he worked at the local paper mill.  Eventually he and his wife moved to Erie, Pennsylvania where her family lived.

Today is an anniversary of sorts.  Twenty-two years ago on a day like today, full of spring and glorious sunshine, I took my then two-year old son to the park, and later for the first ice cream cone of the season.  The phone rang as I was leaving the house, but I paid it no mind.  If it was important, whoever it was would call back.  Turned out it was my sister, and call back she did.

Peter was thirty-four years old on the last night he went to sleep.  A hemorrhagic tumor was the reason he didn’t wake up.  Twenty-two years is a long time.  Also, twenty-two years is no time at all.  It’s one of life’s many conundrums.

I believe in stories with happy endings, or at least in which there is the possibility of something honest and good.  In this story I once had a brother who possessed the kindest of hearts and a sweet smile.  We called him Puck.  He is with me still.  And that is enough good for now.

Puck holding my son. Still the same smile. Puck holding my son. Still the same smile.

A fool and his folly

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iconic stonehenge pm smaller This is the photo of Stonehenge that set my grandfather’s heart ablaze.

There are variations of my grandfather’s story, but I prefer this one.  Mostly, because it came from my great-aunt Sophie, and she never said anything that wasn’t true.  Or at least, true enough.  She was the keeper of our stories.  From births to deaths, weddings to wakes; new jobs, new homes, new dreams, if it involved a Webster, Aunt Sophie wrote it down.  That job fell to me a few years ago when, at the age of eighty-two, she fell off her bicycle, hit her head, and died.

(Let that be a lesson for you — You are never too old to wear a helmet.  Aunt Sophie would back me up on this if she could.)

This story began fifty years ago when Grandpa Webster had a dream.  In it he dreamed that his ancestors had been druids, and this pleased him immensely.  The whole wise man, mystical nature thing.  He thought it might be true.  But, when he told others about it, they said — Don’t be daft, you fool.  It’s just a dream.  So he shut up about it.

Still.  A wisp of the dream remained.

Shortly after that grandpa bought a box.  He was fond of auctions, and even fonder of bidding on blind boxes – blind in the sense that you had no idea of the contents but were willing to chance that there might be something of value inside.  In this instance, the thing of value was the tinted photo of Stonehenge you see above.

How that photograph took hold of my grandfather.  He kept it on his nightstand.  It was the last thing he looked to before he closed his eyes, and the first thing he saw upon waking, his wife coming in a poor second.  But she was patient because she loved him.  And she knew about his druid wish.  For even a wisp of a dream carries a sweet, smoky odor that a good spouse can smell.  She went to the public library and brought back a book — The Stonehenge Myth — and set it next to the photo on my grandfather’s side of the bed.

My grandparents owned a small farm at the time.  Eighty acres on which they grew corn and wheat and raised chickens, sheep, and some dairy cows.  (My father grew up on this farm and knew before he was eighteen that he wanted something else in life, but that’s another story, for another time.)  Four months after his finding the Stonehenge photo, six months after the druid dream, my grandfather dragged home his first big rock, a four foot by two foot slab of stone that he slid off the back of a flat-bed trailer at the end of the sheep field.  The neighbors wondered what use could be made from a stone that size, but my grandmother had an inkling.

Over the next six months, my grandfather brought home twelve more boulders and stone slabs of various sizes.  He paid his four strapping boys and their friends to help him arrange the stones in a circle.  He borrowed a backhoe and a front end loader.  He carried the Stonehenge photograph in his shirt pocket, and when people asked him what in blue blazes was he trying to build, he pulled out the photo and handed it to them.

This, he said.  I’m building this.  It’s iconic.

Some people thought he said ironic.

Over the years, my grandfather and his folly became legend.  There were stories told that he danced drunken and naked in the moonlight among those stones.  Aunt Sophie said that wasn’t true.  She said that he simply found comfort in sitting in that stone circle while the sun rose or set and he could think about the day ahead of or behind him.  It brought him peace.

For my father and his brothers, it brought them something else.  There were more than a few times when they and their friends dared one another to strip and whoop it up around the rocks.  For them, it was a level of coolness others didn’t have.

We were the only kids with Stonehenge in our back yard.

Fifteen years ago, as my grandparent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, their sons wanted to gift them with a trip to England, to see the real Stonehenge, they said.  My grandparents turned them down.  Why spend all that money, when they were happy with the one they had?

I’m no fool, my grandfather told his boys.

It was the truest thing I ever heard him say.

The Webster family Stonehenge that stands in what used to be a sheep pasture on the farm. The stones are not as big as they look, not nearly like those at the actual Stonehenge, but they were good enough for dancing around in the moonlight. The Webster family Stonehenge standing in the sheep pasture on the farm. The stones are not as big as they look, certainly not like those at the actual Stonehenge, but they’re good enough for dancing around in the moonlight.

n.b.  This is not a true story.  It is fiction.  I wanted to see if I had a photo that was iconic to me (for the Weekly WP Writing Challenge), and then make up a story to fit the picture.  Also, I have been to the real Stonehenge.  I wasn’t allowed to dance around the stones, though, naked or otherwise.

Hark, a buzz . . . and then a light

/ marydpierce / 21 Comments

I am a back sleeper.  A plank.  I don’t move in my sleep or thrash about, even in the midst of dreams.  And I do dream.  A lot.  I am dreaming now, of a sound.  It’s the sound of an angry bee somewhere very nearby.  I am terrified of bees.  I have never been stung, but I know it will hurt.  In fact, I am quite sure that I will die.  But right now, I can’t find the bee, I can only hear it, and the fearful part of my brain that is not ready to die from a bee sting becomes more shrill than the buzzing noise.  It shrieks at me:  Wake up!

Then I open my eyes and see a light.

How much time does it take to realize that the light emanates from my cell phone?  And how much more to comprehend the source of the buzzing?  Nano seconds, perhaps.  It feels longer, but I know it cannot be.  I reach for the phone and push the on button, wondering who could this be?  There are no words in the text.  Only a photograph.

In the darkness and the silence, the photo glows.  A sphere of dark shapes are surrounded by swirling colors – yellow, pink, blue, and green.  Who sent this to me, and why?  Is it a mistake?  The number is not one I know.

It is impossible to think rationally when pulled from dreams and presented with a puzzle.  I try to go back to sleep.  Instead, I wonder about the person who sent a photo without explanation at 2AM.  A stranger reaching out to someone else in the middle of the night.  My head is filled with thoughts of wrong numbers and missed connections.  I think about strangers, about all the people there are in the world, and how we are most of us strangers to one another.  Stranger danger . . . Danger, danger, Will Robinson.  We teach our children to run away.

Somewhere a clock is ticking, but I cannot sleep.  My head is crammed with thoughts of strangers.  Of long ago hook-handed madmen who lurked in the dark waiting for lovers to park.  Of boogie-men and nightmares that carry us away; of drowning, falling, flying.  Of noises that bother, unexplainable and irksome, buzzing, buzzing, and then once again back to bees. . . .

Beware the sound of a vibrating phone in the middle of the night.  If it wakes you no good can come of it.

You have been warned.

magic ball pm

There are so many things I should have been doing today.  This was too good a challenge to pass up.

We can’t always be good

/ marydpierce / 43 Comments

I used to be a really picky eater when I was growing up.  I liked spinach (which is weird, I know, for a picky eater), mac & cheese (homemade, not a box), pork chops, and pretty much anything that had lots of sugar.  That was about it.  My tastes broadened as I grew up, but I still leaned heavily toward a fondness for cake and pie and all things chocolate, and when I was feeling especially low – banana splits.  Eventually my body reached a point of sugar overload and told me, Quit it, will you?!  I decided it was best to listen.

Another thing about me, is that in times of stress and fatigue, I feel like crying.

I’ve been really busy of late.  I’m revising a novel that has been a labor of love, but consumes a lot of my time.  I’m also co-director of an annual writers’ retreat that is coming up next week.  So, in the interest of writing efficiency and mobility, I decided to buy a laptop.  And I wanted it to have touch-screen technology.  I got online, found the perfect model and ordered it.

When the laptop arrived a few days ago, I unpacked it and went through the process of setting it up.  It was zippy and sleek and Windows 8 was actually not bad – BUT <—- (big but) – the display was NOT a touch-screen like I ordered.

Bugger, hell.

It took me two days of phone calls and waiting on hold and emailing and waiting for responses to my email, and then calling and holding again, before I finally had a prepaid UPS label to slap on that sucker and send it back.

It was the last phone call that did me in, though.  After establishing (with the third person I talked to) that it was, indeed, the wrong item, the returns rep asked me if I would consider keeping it if they gave me 5% off.  I said, “No.  It’s not what I ordered!”

And then she asked, “Would you keep it if we give you 10% off?”

I knew I was in trouble.  My eyes welled up, and my voice took on that quavery underwater tone.  “No!  I just want to return it.”  I felt like I was begging.

I finally found what I wanted locally and for $170 less, so my misery wasn’t all for naught.  But by the time I brought the right laptop home, I was feeling battered and fragile, and I needed, REALLY NEEDED to listen to my mood and tell my body to just shut up for the time being.

And my mood was saying, Give me sugar!

So I did.

bite me 2 web

Chocolate ice cream, enrobed in fudge, and wrapped in Belgian milk chocolate. Because sometimes you have to have something bad for you, so it might as well be good.

And in the wise words of Robert Frost . . . that has made all the difference.

If it’s Monday, I must be home. . . .

/ marydpierce / 11 Comments

My friend, Mod Mom Beyond IndieDom, hosts an I Don’t Like Monday Blog Hop. She’s invited me to join the party.  The best thing about the invitation is, it’s not necessary to dislike Mondays.  Which I don’t.  In fact, I rather like Mondays.  The way I look at it, Monday is a whole new beginning.  A chance to start anew on those pesky things I didn’t finish the week before.

That’s why I’m almost always home on Monday.  I try not to schedule appointments or errands for that day.  I want my new beginning to be really new.  Like having fresh dirt at the starting line in which to dig my heels. . .Get ready. . .Get set. . .Go!

So, because it’s Monday, and I’m busy being all new and getting stuff done, feel free to entertain yourself with this really cool video I stumbled across a few weeks ago.  The Scared is scared.  A senior project by Bianca Giaever.  Music by Alpenglow.  It’s a six-year-old’s imagination made manifest – word by wonderful word – in video.  Worth every second of it’s 7:52 running time.

Welcome to Monday, people.  This is guaranteed to put a smile on your face for the rest of the week.  Trust me.

/ marydpierce / 6 Comments

Because Washington Irving was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid (the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow fame scared the bejeezus out of me, which was thrilling, and the notion of sleeping 20 years like Rip Van Winkle was kind of awesome), I wanted to share this fun post via the folks at Interesting Literature. And it is World Book Day in the UK today.

Enjoy!

InterestingLiterature's avatarInteresting Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Washington Irving. Who was that man? Find out just a handful of reasons why we should all have his name on our lips.

View original post 1,099 more words

The boy who wanted to be a stunt man.

/ marydpierce / 29 Comments

We noticed when he began throwing himself down the stairs.

“What are you doing, trying to kill yourself?”

“No,” he said.  “I’m practicing to be a stunt man.”

Sometimes he’d start at the top of the stairs.  Seized by a heart attack at the age of seven, he’d clutch his chest, crumble to his knees, and then roll – bump, bump, bump – down each step.  Other times he’d start at the bottom and dash up – chased by a knife-wielding or gun-toting villain – only to be stabbed or shot in the back half-way up, whereupon he would crumble to his knees, and then roll – bump, bump, bump – down each step.  Backwards.

When he perfected falling down stairs, he moved on to leaping over trees.  Short trees to be sure, sapling evergreens, but a fair leap for a kid.  Eventually he graduated to flinging himself sling-shot fashion out of bigger trees.

The year my parents took part in a local theater production of Dracula, he pretended to be the lunatic Renfield, and collected flies in a jar.  He went around saying heh heh heh and wringing his hands for a year.

He had a paper route and accidentally set himself on fire.  He graduated high school and started lifting weights.  He grew muscles.  He went to college and studied chemistry.  He thought about becoming a pharmacist.  He got married and had two sons, instead.  When I got married he was best man at my wedding.  He showed up shortly before zero hour in a car with a door that wouldn’t open.

For a while he chased demons.

What happens from there to here?  From boy to man?  From lost to found?  Life.  Life happens.  And we manage somehow to muddle our way through it.

For the love of a good woman (my take on it), he has now found his way to where he needs to be.  He is not a stunt man.  He’s a research scientist/engineer and he would like to go to the moon.  Or at least into outer space.  I think that he is happy now.  Which is the best stunt ever.

He wins.

Boy bundled up & reading on a cold winter afternoon. Stunt boy bundled up & reading on a cold winter afternoon.

N.B.  I started this as last week’s DPChallenge on Character.  I like stories, and what are stories, but a study of character?

We interrupt this broadcast. . . .

/ marydpierce / 29 Comments

I live on the southern coast of Rhode Island, so when we heard that a major snow storm was headed our way, we prepared ourselves.  We went to the store two days before Nemo’s arrival, we filled the cars up with gas.  We bought plenty of bread and milk.  And wine – because this woman does not live on bread and milk alone.

Friday morning my husband went into work early so that he could leave early, before little Nemo grew into a bigger, meaner fish.  I made meatloaf with baked potatoes and vegetables, because, if you’re going to be stuck inside for a few days, you want your belly full of comfort food.  And chocolate.  And wine.

Nemo as seen through the window Friday evening. Looks lovely, almost magical, but you can't hear the way the wind was howling, nor the tree branches scratching at the windows.

Nemo as seen through the window Friday evening. Looks lovely, almost magical, though you can’t hear the wind roaring, nor the tree branches scratching at the windows.

The wind began to howl.  There is something about the ferocity of that sound that fills me with anxiety.  The lights flickered.  We were prepared to lose power, though we hoped we wouldn’t.  (Our electrical line taps into the main line on a grid, so that in the past, when we lose power, we’re generally the first ones to get it back.)

But the power stayed on.  Which meant I could watch CSI NY.  The second of a two-parter, AND a crossover from the CSI set in Vegas a few nights earlier, I was really looking forward to watching Mac Taylor and D. B. Russell race together to save Mac’s girlfriend.  A glass of wine, my love beside me, and a favorite TV show.  Blow, Nemo, blow.

Alas.  To paraphrase my birthday pal, Robert Burns:  the best-laid plans of mice and ardent CSI fans are often thwarted.

Do you know what happens when mega storms hit?  Every local TV news station usurps air time with constant blather coverage of the storm (except for insertion of all the usual commercials, naturally).  They tell you obvious important stuff like, it’s really nasty out there, don’t go outside, stay off the roads.  And to prove how nasty it is, they send news teams out to drive the hazardous roads so they can film the wind and the snow.  They point to the banks left by plows.  “See if you can get a shot of that,” one reporter says to the camera person, as the snow swirls furiously, making it impossible to see much of anything.  “Look at how high the snow is there.  I don’t know if you can really tell, but it’s high.”  They tell you how many homes are without power.  That number increases rapidly.

To be fair, there are probably a lot of people who do want to know – constantly – what’s happening during times like this.  It may reassure them that everything is under control.  I am not one of them.

We had options, though:  DVDs and books, board games, candles, flash lights with extra batteries, heat, and running water.  We made it through the night.  We did lose power twice for short periods.  We were fortunate.

Aftermath - shoveling out. Not so fun.

Aftermath – shoveling out. Not so fun.

The snow-shrouded branch pointing at my kitchen window was actually touching the glass. Made me think of a blink angel getting closer and closer. . . .

The snow-shrouded branch pointing at my kitchen window in the morning was actually touching the glass. Made me think of a blink angel getting closer and closer. . . .

My husband has managed, with the help of our kind neighbor and his snow-blower, and an anonymous good Samaritan with a backhoe, to dig us out.  We still have lots of comfort food – I’m making a beef with red wine stew next.  And chocolate chip cookies.  Later, I may go see if I can find the CSI NY episode I missed online.  Even if I don’t, it’s all good.

For those of you who were also in the path of Nemo, how did you fare?  I’d love to know.