Witch Sisters III

I'm heading down Chicago's Longwood Drive, looking past the wet leaves sticking to my windshield and watching the last bits of bright gold desperately cling to the windblown Maple branches.  The sky is low and heavy and grey.  My mind sees it purple.  The atmosphere is a book, a fantasy, a painting.

The only thing missing are the witches. As I pass the Irish Castle, I look up over the hill and through the branches and I pretend they're there, just over the turrets; circling the old limestone battlements on top of the hill.

I know they've been in the Broom Room all summer, spinning and flying and cackling. And waiting for this time of year. A Beetlejucian production worthy of Tim Burton showing up and directing it himself. But we don't need him, because we have my father.

In some ways, the three sisters aren't archetypal witches.  Yeah, they have pointy hats and broomsticks.  Cauldrons and warts, yes. But they're not scraggly and smelly shopping-cart ladies like you might see on Western avenue or the L-platform.

Our witches are an eclectic mixture of different themes, like the ones written by the Brothers Grimm and found in family favorites like Magical Beasts and Bed-knobs and Broomsticks. Strangely more Nancy Drew than Creature Features.

My father sketched the witches on scrap mat-board left over from framing projects he did himself in his first gallery - the one next to the railroad station and across the street from Monterey Pharmacy, Kreteck's and Kaden's.

It was probably fun for him too.  He was so busy painting local houses and drawing historical landmarks that any child-like diversion was almost certainly welcome. And thus, they came drifting into our childhoods like bluish wisps of Bond Street smoke from his pipe.

We knew, as the leaves piled up on the driveway and it would get dark just before dinner, that it was witch time.  My father already had a love for storms and clouds and folklore.  All he needed were his pencils and mat-boards and us, and the sisters and their world readily came to life.  Vincent Price had his pipe organ and my father had his art supplies.    

And we were an attentive audience - we'd rather hear about their magical and mischievous antics then listen to an opera or hear about some old building on Prairie Avenue. Give us the girls.

At bedtime, in the days when everyone could fit into the same bed, we'd listen to the witch stories, and my father would draw them as he told them.  I oddly remember his hairy fingers gripping his Turquoise Pencil or his felt-tip pen. The pictures were never really the same, but we didn't care - or probably even notice at the time.

I wish I still had some of the illustrations, just to see them once more. But sometimes memories are even better than the real thing. And when the good ones are happening, you never really know it at the time.

Crumpled pictures find their way into the trash - but memories find their way into blogs.

And when it feels like the fall - a purple-grey sky, a leaf-rustling wind - I think about the Witch Sisters.  I picture my father, in 1966, picking up scraps of mat board from the floor of his gallery to bring home.  And I see him putting that felt-tip marker and Turquoise Pencil in his pocket.

Thanks dad.

Cutting the Blue Spruce

This week, on a blustery fall afternoon, I found a kind of sadness in my parents' front yard.  

I was trimming the aging blue spruce, which stood among a collection of mismatched apple trees. They stood like a maze of confused sentinels, intent on guarding the old Victorian house.

Under the slate sky, I felt the past.  

I saw Riley, our one-time gardener, in his bib overalls and leaning on his rake.  I heard his toothless and raspy Louisiana laugh; possibly at some direction my mother had just issued from the front porch. Maybe asking if he wanted a lemonade.  He'd shake his head, laugh again, and pat his pocket.  

Over there, near the sidewalk, an enormous granite block had been anchored to the lawn.  It was an odd - and certainly incongruous - donation from my father to the orchard.  I could hear him telling the grandchildren that it was actually some kind of old hitching post.  Embellished, of course, by tales of its paranormal powers; that it would mysteriously shift as a result of creepy occurrences around the property.  

I watched the crab-apple shadows as they fell across the antique post, reminding me of the two only-children and their two only-perspectives, living there together in the old house.  I sighed, wondering about a man who would plant an immovable relic in his yard, and the woman who would carelessly crisscross it with a hybrid population of catalog apple trees.  

My father, for his part, was content to paint the relic, as it stood, on Arches 140 lb - in yellow ocher and brown madder. My mother would bake hers, over and over, every season, on long afternoons in her long Victorian kitchen, occasionally stopping to direct Riley on some important yard task. 

Curiously, both post and apples were of madder and ocher.

As I gathered the cut branches on the grass, I saw that the blue-green needles were mostly gone.  After braving so many seasons, they finally succumbed.  In Decembers past, though, these branches were fragrant green and sticky with sap - and the Christmas snow gathered on them like soft powder.  I remember it blowing across the front of our minivan as we pulled into the driveway on certain Christmas Eves.  

After the snow melted in the warm spring winds, we'd sit on the porch and watch the storms.  We were self-appointed lookouts, on the swing with my father, on alert for for lightning strikes and tornado touchdowns. He'd occasionally whisper, "Did you see that?" and we'd all gasp. We'd count until we heard thunder, and watch as the giant oaks threw their branches across the sky in a panic. Then we'd listen for sirens and speculate on devastation we couldn't see. 

On the porch, there on the wall, is a brass plaque.  It commemorates how the old house was restored from broken pipes and windows and leaf-filled rooms. I can see my mother and father standing next to it, posing for a picture; my father in his crew cut, smoking his pipe. My mother in a dress and holding a baby. The Beverly Review taking pictures of them for the local paper.  

Now, no one really looks at the plaque anymore.  It's just an old Victorian house with a big front yard.  With twisted and unkempt apples trees and a weird looking block of granite on the grass. 

And a blue spruce tree that has lost most of its older branches because of things like snow and thunderstorms and old age. 

But looking up, the blues and greens are there - on the younger, higher branches.  Sticky amber sap, like fragrant pine syrup, drips from them to the brittle needles below.  

And past the high branches, if you squint your eyes and see the way I do, you'll probably see my parents in the window, looking out across the yard.  And at their past.

And that's what made me sad on that blustery fall afternoon.    

California dream time

Magical days 
in a bright dawn life 
West coast sunsets;
hill-whispered nights

Honeysuckle, Dianthus
Green jades and pools 
neon sunglasses
on our Coppertone jewel  

Surf sounds and life guards
sandy carpet clues 
convertibles and flip flops
The suns against the blues

Jasmine flowers, cactus
Hidden oranges and scented pines
citrus and sticky 
in life and love sublime

Bleached beach paths 
A twisty wistful tour  
of sweet California dreams 
and young life's couture

Jumbo jet junkets
sisterly visits   
for looking and finding
the future implicit

Babies and diapers 
sunscreen and strollers
ice cream whites
and turquoise wave rollers

Our California girl
Like we all wish they could be
She's still Californian
and a deep love to me

And in California dream time 
life's sweetness persists
in the shadows of dreams
is where it exists

Uncle Bill, D-Day June 6, 1944

Uncle Bill on D-Day, June 6th 1944

This is August William (Bill) Diedesch.  He was my father's uncle.

Shortly after this was taken, he signed up for the reserves.  Then his unit was promptly called up to active duty and assigned to General Bradley for the invasion force on June 6th, 1944.

Uncle Bill was placed into the 116th Division, 29th regiment.

The following is an excerpt from a story in the 1960 Atlantic Magazine, which chronicles the fate of the 116th as they landed on the beaches of Normandy in the first wave of the assault.

• At one thousand yards, Boat No. 5 is hit dead on and foundered. Six men drown before help arrives. The other six boats ride unscathed to within one hundred yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No. 3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats.
• At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head.  Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.
• The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the water-logging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. 
• The seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.
• By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon. No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example.
• By the end of one half hour, approximately two thirds of the company is forever gone. There is no precise casualty figure for that moment. There is for the Normandy landing as a whole no accurate figure for the first hour or first day. The circumstances precluded it. Whether more Able Company riflemen died from water than from fire is known only to heaven. All earthly evidence so indicates, but cannot prove it.

Uncle Bill, we remember you and thank you for your ultimate sacrifice in the early morning hours of June 6th, 1944.

A Perimeter Parting

In the Dunwoody HBO & Company building, I remember looking across the pine trees in the parking lot at the Darth Vader building in the distance. 

I remember watching groups of customers on their way to “Hospital 2000” with Dan Labenne or Dan Mowery.  

Having lunch on the sixth floor in the executive dining room with the CEO.  

Writing contracts and RFPs after everyone else went home.  Then being at the front door before anyone else arrived in the morning.   

To me, just a skinny guy that looked like a teenager, it was awesome.

Back then, the Coke dispensers in the break rooms were a novelty and STAR ruled the IT skies. 

It seemed then like it was always spring.  In my memories the colors are always yellow-green and the world was budding and blooming. 

Of course, things change.  Monday is my last day with McKesson. 

I was barely out of my entry level job when I started here.  Every paycheck I can remember has had HBO & Company or McKesson logos on it.   Now I’ll look at a different logo for a while and see if I can get used to it.

This company has been my education, my family, my friends, my life. 

And I'm very grateful for the opportunity to be at such a wonderful place – one that has given so much to me.  To spend my days with better people than I could have found at any company in America.   Of course, that’s my opinion, but I wish that everyone working here today could know what I know about our history – and the people that made this such a great place.   

So here is a heartfelt goodbye and a thank you.  To the people I work with now and in the past. 

You helped me be who I am. 

And if the Coke is still free, maybe I’ll be back.

Goat Pirouettes

I saw a goat up on a mountain
I watched her from a distance
precariously climbing up
on a course of her persistence

Snowy-crowns and complex clouds
a calling to the soul
maybe not the top she sought  
neither refuge nor control

She was younger then but strong
tense but not timid
she'd been treacherously summered
dangerously wintered

With an upside up and a downside down;
a master climber and a risker
a sister soul, a speaker
an old age thought resistor

By chromosome and floating fog
she was tentative but not falling
like a gravity doctor thesis
defying Steve Hawking 

But through the miss's mist
she seemed informally not normal
Jumping tall and wide
like a careless young immortal

I saw her skating then, in pirouettes

like a wonderful young Fleming

out there on the precipice -
dizzyingly ascending

Hypnotizing, mesmerizing
no understudies, no rope nets
just icy flashes and fog curtains
a sometimes soul subrette

But frequent streaks of brightness showed
blinding sunshine
searing white
melting ice and warming hearts
leaving spots upon our eyes

In silhouette
she stood on top 
a conqueror, acting rested
yet another pinnacle
she fearlessly had bested

Then standing in the summit's cold  
she peered back down the path
and saw a bird and heard a chirp
and her reality was recast

It was a small thing, rather puny
to this conquering mountain climber
a needy little puppet bird,
a Sesame Street headliner

But the chirp became an urgent call
a powerful magnet source
greater than the summit's siren
this avian counter force

And so these days I see the goat
on the lower mountain tracks
climbing through spring flowers
with the bird upon her back

But when the bird gets big enough
and it won't seem very long
He'll fly her back to the summit's crest
and chirp his saving song

Typewriter waterfall

Here it is  

a whitewater future

we're rushing across the edge 

across a typewriter waterfall

In our hands; ghosts

typed up voices

hollow, shallow; spectral fonts 

shoulder tappers

Urging and urgent

small case, large case

important and meaningless

filled, filed

Marking time

inbox fears, outbox hopes

stealing time

distorting reality

Philatelic friends  

they're plastic, electronic 

tagged and totaled

displayed and discarded 

A roulette table world 

of spinning urls; reaching, linking

of reds and blacks

of ones and zeros

A generational genome  

of gorilla glass soldiers 

of technical clothing
and forbidden fruit   

And now
I need a break

give me colors and inks, sharpies and pencils

pigments and papers

  

Feel    

passion and love
soul and depth 

truth and inspiration

More than a :)

A Terra Cotta Hiding Place

Here is your chance

Cartagena or Quito
LaPaz, Cuzco, Ushuaia

Brazil or Costa Rica or Panama

It doesn’t matter

You’ll get chiles and sunsets and surf

And terra cotta hiding places

and an escape

Out of your stupid kitchen

and heartache and sadness and noise

Put your fingers in your ears

Open your eyes and be who you are

Strawberry gringa

Dreamer, comic, artist
Woman 

It's four times ten

chasing you back from infinity

So run

From the traffic in your head

From the toll of existence

Don’t you feel it?

Distant thunder and green-lit skies

electric air

They’re your storms and they’re chasing you down

And you’re just wishing them back

Escapa, mi hermana

Run through the sand

Beautiful in the afternoon sun

Your hair and your freckles

Streaming in the wind

Play cat gut guitar

y canta de la vida dulce

Feel it now
the breeze on your cheek
the sun on your shoulders
the soul in yourself

Drink some tequila and be free

hold someone's hand y sabe el amor

dream in a new language
and listen to la gente 

dice tu nombre 

Because there
in your land of escape
you’re the you I know
The you you know

el verdadero tú

But if you can’t escape yet
I can close my eyes and see you there

Y para alla, mi hermana, te amo