LANDSCAPE & MEMORY
Lynch, John A.
LANDSCAPE & MEMORY On the death of my parents John A. Lynch nything in our house of age or memory or an- and more careful than when he was younger. But he...
...I thought my father in his time up, with the sky streaked pink, we would be at the dock, would have preferred scarlet bee balm and black-eyed Su- untying the boat...
...Her mind had been made up long never able to fix the leaky roof...
...We approached through exhausted, haphazard, weedCloser to me than I grown fields...
...I traveled down to a brook among dark maples, where and recognizing no one, her days completed...
...Out of sight a bird called, an early arrival, perhaps a horned lark...
...country was abandoned to teasel, juniper, and old-field cedar...
...It's been three years," she said mysteriously...
...As I do so, memories of my parents become sharper in some ways...
...moved from walker to wheelchair to bedridden confineShe did go into a nursing home when she left Martha's...
...rather formally, with my father summoning plates from the I never saw bitterness between my parents, although my kitchen through a swinging door by means of a foot-operated father commonly teased and my mother may have been anbell under the dining-room carpet...
...It was odd coming On an early autumn Sunday, when he was several years from her...
...had trouble handling pots...
...me that she was frightened of death...
...He wouldn't be happy there...
...to drive a car, and she remembered indelibly through her moth- There was a public school on Kenilworth, the next street er and grandmother accounts of Indians and missionaries...
...he kept us supplied with scuffed baseballs, huge scarred With it had come the arthritis that would leave permabats, and other equipment from the Tigers' surplus...
...My wife and I were married in 1948 and have lived in California, Michigan, Indiana, and Massachusetts...
...for cruising muskrats, I thought, but though I waited sevI did not and do not understand death that easily...
...Coming up the stairs learned the names of trees and flowers she sounded tired and a little cross and all the swimming and crawling creatures...
...In her sixties she was My father shared a law office with an older attorney, I not much over five feet tall, quite visibly short"Colonel" Sheahan, whose brother was road manager for er than in her fifties, and the plumpness, much of which she the Detroit Tigers...
...Our shoes sank into moist ground and frogs the time through the streets of Detroit...
...There was no cancer...
...We were restricted with a bowl...
...I did not want to know that my parents were dead...
...we took our lumps...
...The corridor was oddly empty: the traffic of that in 1971...
...In the kitchen I noticed that she the extravagant glove of shortstop Billy Rogell...
...At one nent disabilities...
...of their house and find someplace "There's a woman who swears," that easily...
...She did picnic with she had an encounter with a young woman, Linda, that us on the hill behind the cottage, however, and we laughed ended all the mistress-servant foolishness...
...Just forget whatever you milk wagons delivered bottles to the door at daybreak, ice heard," my mother said and walked slowly into the back wagons hauled hundred-pound blocks which were split yard, where she stood against the fence for a long time...
...family as a privilege and a trust...
...With one corner he covered her crooked fingers...
...I could have been ten or twelve, "My mind just wanders," she said...
...We climbed upward the streets of her childhood...
...manner of crawling, jumping, swimming, digging, and fly- She kept a keen eye on the neighborhood from her chair, ing things...
...willy-nilly giving away to neighbors her heirloom French I never saw my mother alive again...
...She apologized for not having told us sooner, but she had difficulty even acknowledging it...
...Mosquitoes hummed Commonweal 12 July 14, 2000 in the darkness of our rooms...
...mortuary lackeys were standing at parade rest, a strange Returning up the slope, I picked a solitary stone from priest my parents never knew was leading prayers for the the ground and weighed it in my hand...
...In the rocker she was barely marking time...
...To my mother's inquiry and mortifi- the dock at the lake's edge, but never went deeper than her cation, Linda said that was a day when her church, led by the chest...
...of the stairs, I heard her once at night...
...Newspapers, broken At times I have felt glass, and beer cans littered the basement and, in the darkThe world so utterly est corner, a patch of snow remained...
...From a ficer...
...He had pervasive odor of skunk...
...religious brother, and taught at Saint and sold the pelts to a favorite school- Edward's University in Austin for teacher...
...I was only guessing: I could not name it...
...watch for low-flying herons along the shore, and someI took the family to my mother's funeral in Detroit, and where hear gentle mourning doves in the breaking dawn...
...She never had a job...
...My mother said that he had lung cancer but wasp t aware of it and we should not bring it up...
...Her right arm was satisfactory note, and my appeal to It was seven years tucked under the sheet and her left my mother met with a declaration of was spasmodically twitching...
...While the Then, louder, drawn out and insistent: "Oh, Goddamnit...
...They respected each other's idiosyncrasies...
...Well, he has lung cancer...
...stink bugs, caterpillars, and beautiful night moths among During one visit to Grandville, from my room at the top them, which we kept in pails and jars and makeshift cages...
...He was forty- longer there...
...She never fished, though she she had to know when she came that day that she would cleaned our catch of bluegills and perch without a word Commonweal I I July 14, 2000 when we were too young to handle a knife...
...He had given me Creek to fish...
...But he no longer drove 1600s, first established themselves along the waterfront in his car and it sat in the garage on softening tires...
...My parents were lockThe first summer Nancy was with us she wriggled a piece of ing up and I listened as my father set the bolt and tried the rope at my mother in the kitchen and said it was a snake...
...My mother was devas- When she was finally asleep, I told the nurse that I was tated and never saw or spoke to the doctor again...
...I don't drive...
...She wouldn't tell me, and my father loved nineteen grandchildren...
...being careful not to squeak the doors...
...I get so worn out...
...of too-perfect blossoms, sidewise glancing to learn by whom Saturday mornings at Lake Oakland, before the sun was the garlands had been sent...
...but talked on, as if life's accomplishments were not all that While my mother feigned interest in spiders and cray- she thought had been promised her...
...noyed, but she did not tease in return...
...many years ago...
...I was visiting for a longer time than usual, and I short of retiring, we took a final trip to Lake Oakland...
...His tomato plants magically grew four feet tall in the sand...
...She wanted to visit again other in the living room...
...I don't like her...
...That's too far...
...We had never known our professed lamely that he didn't know...
...Her fingers tightened on my and the vast unbroken sky...
...She wants to stay here...
...said...
...The diag- her eyes on a corner of the sheet and said, "Natalie looks nosis had been incorrect...
...birch tree...
...Goddamnit...
...stopped going to his office, traveling the five If it rained, we could count on the roof leaking and would all miles downtown by bus and back, when he be up placing pans under the leaks and would return to our S was seventy-nine...
...Linda was about my age and in her way charming, but in the boat with my father...
...But I did kneel there and I saw my parents made up the oars, which made only light sucking noises in the water, and dressed up, resting in their satin-lined caskets, clutching Dan and I squatted in opposite ends of the boat...
...She would live an- back by six o'clock...
...My father brought out a robe and laid it across her lap and tucked it in around her legs...
...She would lean heavily on the chair as she soothed (my father's, too), and the tolerance shown for all tugged, her soft shoes shuffling along the concrete deck...
...The Depression did strange things to propriety and province to do so...
...persuasive...
...but her response was minimal...
...His "The Art Walter, let's hide...
...Dan, who had for being a "showoff" when he car- freeways, and ramps, been ill with rheumatic fever in high ried the muskrat into the cottage, but and the exact location school, didn't see combat but served I, being twelve, was proud...
...Her soft earth shoes massaged feet whose who doubled in house-cleaning, some cooking, and taking toes had painfully curled under...
...She did enue near the geographical center of Detroit, a block and a not finish high school...
...There was leaving...
...When I talked with him, I suggested that both of them would be is better off in a nursing home...
...He between their deaths in a fetal position, tiny and shrunkwas her doctor, too...
...From the cottage door, by a trick of perception, it apat a country store to get to the final turn...
...He mowed the lawn and shoveled his sixty feet of sidewalk in winter, but was a little awkward "Now that the kids have all grown up and moved out, John A. Lynch lives in Framingham, Massachusetts...
...The family stands before its two- A fire company on Woodward used our street as a passtory clapboard house...
...into twenty-five- and fifty-pound chunks and carried by iron tongs on the iceman's shoulder...
...My father, three months short of his eighty-third birthday, looked weak, was walking hesitantly, and doing a great deal of coughing...
...His children I had never known exactly how old my mother was until had grown to responsible adulthood...
...I 0 0 walked over to Outer Drive to bring home takeout dinners...
...a seventh was born after we had settled in...
...sat impassively, gazing forward, her bent, useless hands in It would have given urgency to whatever decision they her lap...
...firmly around its neck, the hind legs But the streets were no "Look back," she said...
...My spent more of it with her...
...The X-rays had been misread...
...children...
...Then a voice came through the stillness, soft as a whisper, from where I do not know, a fter my father's death my mother sold the house disappointed soul waiting for her Jesus, mistaking defeat with Mary's help and moved in with Martha for what was soon to be victory: "Lord, Lord almighty...
...he had known and her sixtieth birthday...
...nurses and carts had moved on...
...south, but that was off limits, and we walked three blocks in From my father's house there was only an old photo- the opposite direction to attend the Catholic schools on Belgraph, taken in 1895 at the family farm in Newport, New mont Avenue...
...She lay her complete trust in the doctor...
...My mother would have known, had she been there...
...My mother's eyes were closed and shadows were lengthening when we returned...
...For several years he had been beds hearing the plinking in the pans, the drumming on the working a shorter day, in anticipation of retirement...
...her pillow and began to cry...
...It was from him that we forty-two years...
...Wind scurried over the farm, a hint of more snow to come...
...I "Scavengers...
...Her legs Commonweal 1 4 July 14, 2000 would no longer get her up and down the stairs, and in Jan- yet a third home...
...I vowed eral minutes peering into the black water I saw none, nor not to kneel in that solemn parlor, where the dark-suited did anything move except the wind...
...The barn's Seeing it...
...mother was resting on the porch and we promised to be "I'm afraid of dying," she admitted...
...Only a cellar hole of chiseled and fitted stone Am to myself, Eckhart was evidence of any kind of dwelling when we parked the Said about God and yes, car and walked over the grounds...
...It's beyond treatment now...
...Can't away, but I was uncertain about the you give him something to relieve Quinns...
...I stood outside my mother's door for a moment, no thought of a malpractice suit...
...were day-help and traveled by streetcar from some faraway In 1925, my parents purchased the cottage on Lake Oakneighborhood that we barely knew about...
...of white hair about her ears...
...House, barn, all tore down...
...When we eventually left the cottage crankily but rightfully complained about how everything she took down her chart, folded it away, and kept it in her had gone wrong, how the pan beneath the icebox had overtrunk of memories in her bedroom in the city...
...Good people did not do looking back...
...E Commonweal 16 July 14, 2000...
...They held their no check with the police-given an upstairs back bedroom, anger in check...
...My sisters and I I did not and do not her glasses her eyes seemed nearly agreed that our parents had to get out understand death blind...
...When Did they make love in that room, later tiptoeing out to my parents visited us in the East, it was the first airplane the bathroom, crossing the worn rug in the middle room, flight for both of them...
...At Lake Oakland, northwest of Pontiac, where we sought refuge from Detroit summers, my father could plant carrots at the end of June and harvest them before we went back to the city...
...It doesn't matter," she said...
...The cottage the house, chastened our mischief by locking us in a dark cost a thousand dollars...
...A house was still for sale, however, she had begun Goddamnit...
...how someone had stepped on glass and cut a foot, and how he family moved to Grandville Road in Red- she had been, most of all, alone, with my father at his office ford, a Detroit suburb, in 1940 when I was a in Detroit...
...The cuffs on the sleeves of my fa- sageway on its eastward runs and trucks clanged regularly ther's jacket are halfway to his elbows, his haircut fashioned through the neighborhood day and night...
...inviting, green-glass insulators atop the telephone poles, hearing the wires sing...
...The My parents are buried beside each other in Holy Sepulfarm had been sold at auction to an absentee landlord after chre Cemetery in Southfield, Michigan, below a slight rise my Uncle Will, who lived on the farm, died...
...Woolworth's, she cut out their profiles and pinned them to At the cottage, lying beneath the window where the moon the chart...
...Where have you been...
...But her interest lagged and she cancer, and I think my mother was wrong in not telling him...
...During the years of World War II he had cultivated a victory garden in a vacant lot, in addition to his own backyard garden...
...At Grandville my mother gained a front porch to sit on, I realized later that the days at the lake were really no and, on a good day, she would rock the entire length of the pleasure for my mother...
...freshman at Notre Dame...
...We walked along the creek bank, pulling other fourteen years...
...Rowing out into the lake, my father at sans...
...My mother lived that he might live forever, if there were time...
...In 1971, my wife and I drove to Notre Dame for our son Tom's graduation, and on the way back to Massachusetts we stopped over in Detroit...
...Mandy was a land, where the family spent summers from school's end to hearty, big-chested woman who, when Mother was out of Labor Day as we children were growing up...
...enues," Mary said in desperation...
...I walked through the fields where my father and his father together had walked...
...ourselves through head-high alder, grown since we had last I did, incautious as it was, because we were driving at been there...
...Nancy melancholia...
...He "Yes," I agreed, aware that she was drifting...
...In their place were massive batches of concrete and road...
...I'm not able to get my wife and I were in Massachusetts with six away...
...Then: "Would you hold my hand...
...Toward the end, one day when I came into her room she "If you want to know, ask your mother," he replied...
...York, when he was seven...
...When he had just turned eighty-two we A through my mother, born in Detroit in 1889 and were still putting up the storm windows together, I flying descended from French-Canadians who, in the from Boston to Detroit for the visit...
...The moments in the sun or feeling porch, about eighteen feet from railing to wrought-iron railthe breeze beneath the willows on the shore, dangling her ing as her chair slipped sideward almost imperceptibly, a feet from the dock or walking through the thick lakeside fraction of an inch with each forward motion and skidded an clover, hardly balanced the meals prepared on a balky equal distance on the back stroke, so that by twilight she kerosene stove, the clothes soaked in a galvanized tub, the would have to rise and tug the rocker back to where she floors swept of sand, the slivers removed, the sunburns had begun...
...In her quiet way she soon knew more of bird lore streamed in and lit the old painted bureau, had my mother than all the rest of us...
...ries, it and all its furnishings were sold for slightly more Long after we were grown, after moving from Westmin- than the original figure to a butcher from Royal Oak...
...Two weeks later my father was taken to the hospital and "Arizona," my mother sighed...
...Evening was drifting into the street and lights coming on in neighboring houses...
...Without and come to Detroit...
...In si- my feet, hopped crazily on my heels, then bent and gathlence, somewhere near McNichols Road, I felt her fingers ered a few stones from the road to peg at the glistening, slip from mine...
...the early skunk cabbage leaves were just beginning to apIt was seven years between their deaths but it was like a pear...
...She would swim from that was "bump day...
...face round, her lips thin...
...Gone...
...We World War I. By a coincidence of logistics, when in 1944 1 had roller skates and ice skates, wagons and scooters and reached Italy as an infantry replacement in World War II, I sleds...
...She went reluctantly ter...
...He had heard his father speak of my father's family...
...The Steiners I knew had passed "Doctor, he's coughing a lot...
...ment on the third floor of a nursing home, her muscles pracWithin six months she moved, and within another year, to tically evaporated, at the end unable to hold up her head Commonweal 1 5 July 14, 2000 "The farm is gone," the clerk said, "so you won't be surprised...
...is eighty-two years old, after all...
...She wiped died there of pneumonia...
...Fourteen years later, full of memocloset beneath the stairs that smelled of rubber galoshes...
...coming back on the New York Thruway, we drove off at Utica Oars dipped, we headed up to the mouth of Sashabaw and went north to my father's Newport farm...
...In their place raised four children, put them all six at the time and my mother ad- were massive batches of through college, and one has come monished him for his recklessness and concrete and tons of steel, through the war...
...the Quinns, but you haven't come until now...
...of Giving" appeared in the February 26, 1999 Commonweal...
...We talked of the Quinns, Natalie Dan flew to Detroit, but had no more luck than we did and and George, whose daughter Beth had moved to Arizona went back within a week...
...I've brought it up, but your mother won't go...
...She turned on "Your father's too old and weak for that...
...With the difficulty she had getting around, my parents had been eating only two meals a day...
...My parents would not have understood all that we have known, but reluctantly and surely I am approaching my own octogenarian years...
...appear into Detroit's Lower East Side and await the poignant In the twenties and thirties the drivers of horse-drawn church-led assault on Monday...
...She detested the homes, one no better than uary they had the four-poster mahogany beds that came the other, she complained, and my sisters, who picked up her from her house moved down to the dining room...
...then, reaching dead, and the closed-lipped mourners sat within the breath back, threw it as far as I could across the land...
...The Steiners were here last night," she whispered, "and "Did you do a biopsy...
...Let's go home...
...They came from another era...
...I had to lean forward to catch her "We've been down all the av- words...
...Who...
...with me and we would take pictures of them with "Mimi," My mother gave me the doctor's name and I called him...
...I don't believe my father suspected the trellises and hanging plants...
...I asked...
...I wiped my face with my hand, finding tears...
...Her face I called Dan in Texas and suggest- I did not want to know was round and small, with strands ed that he get an emergency leave that in y parents were dead...
...He knew the place, he peared perfectly round...
...board, and a little spending money...
...In memory, I spun on the balls of hand...
...I wish I could have done as much...
...My father graduated from Colgate University- by parental rule to two or three adjoining streets, except to the only one of six siblings to go beyond high school-moved walk cautiously beyond cross-streets on the way to school or to Michigan at the urging of a classmate, and studied at the to visit school (read "Catholic") friends...
...My mother was seventy that year, my avoiding the red-lacquered chairs, the low wicker table, father seventy-one...
...Linda announced to see her crawl under the fence, which she did, as I rethat she couldn't come on the following Monday because member, with considerable grace...
...I was exhilarated and my father, although breathing tons of steel, freeways, and ramps, and the exact location of hard, looked as good as I had seen him in years...
...flowed onto the kitchen floor (had I neglected to empty it...
...We stood in her birth house could not even be determined...
...and her family for nearly a year...
...ana...
...She was the last of four children and For nineteen years our family lived on Westminster Avstayed home to be with her mother after her father died...
...Did she plead with him: "I'm not suited for this...
...She walked with the help of care of us children...
...Their disparate lives came together in Michigan, melded there as one, and they never left the state...
...We've scratching at his wrist...
...Outside there would be the urprisingly, my father died first...
...It was in this reach that my father had was home she would ask me to take her into the city and caught the feeding muskrat some thirty years earlier...
...The following day she recI wasn't prepared for this rudeness and insisted that he tellognized me but was confused, thinking I still lived in Indime everything...
...She never learned half east of Woodward Avenue, the city's main thoroughfare...
...We were sure they viewed marriage and common sense...
...There were spiders, crayfish, mud puppies, a and once was astonished when a dark stranger appeared broken-winged blue kingfisher lying crumpled in a box, leading a pot-bellied pig...
...I barefoot in the dirt, stamping to see the imprint of my foot, find myself wondering what is on the other side, and I can't dust puffing up between my toes, warm beneath the sun talk about it with your father...
...her entire life in Detroit...
...The ground had been Absorbed there was no- dug up in places where rhubarb or roses or something Thing to see, no one thought to be of value had long ago been taken...
...A few Distance away, far broken, moss-edged boards lay scattered where the barn As memory is from had been, as if these alone had been too miserable to steal...
...monious petitions entered and echoed with a triumphant yell, his fingers into every corner of the house...
...More and more, cereal boxes, We had two younger sisters, Mary and Martha, and dur- milk cartons, screw-top jars, and tightly wrapped bread ing our childhood my mother employed a series of maids, were beyond her...
...The awful...
...Since then, for in the ground and in the shadow of a double-trunked white all practical purposes, it had been deserted...
...She was land, and a runaway from Kentucky, Nancy Durham, plain essentially shy, sometimes moody, and could easily fall into and straight-haired, who preferred bare feet to shoes...
...but it was like a inonth...
...They were at an impasse, When I visited her in the first home I would push her in growing uncommonly irritable, speaking but failing to un- her wheelchair around the block to admire the gardens and derstand each other...
...Formerly, at Westminster, where mother was momentarily frightened and thought this was the banister from upstairs turned a corner and from where completely inappropriate and told my father so...
...Her twisted fingers looked as if someone time my brother Dan, a year older, owned one of third base- had beat on them and they were welted and lumpy and man Marvin Owen's discarded gloves and I played with bent at uncomfortable angles...
...He had roof...
...I want to know what is wrong with my father," I said...
...And Dan, having pocket guide "illustrated in color" which she bought at traveled that far, she reasoned, should have become a priest...
...Sometimes I would bring my nieces and nephews might make...
...How to explain eighty Robert Cording years...
...laundry and brought her extra food, were given to under"Your father doesn't want to go to a home," she said later...
...en on the nursing home bed...
...I expected Sandwich, Ontario, across the Detroit River...
...He told of her birth house could not in postwar Japan, came home, joined us that, at the Newport farm, he and the Congregation of Holy Cross as a his brothers had trapped muskrats even be determined...
...LANDSCAPE & MEMORY On the death of my parents John A. Lynch nything in our house of age or memory or an- and more careful than when he was younger...
...mother in 1925, and my father's parents in the years beAnd one day, in a later year, when we were alone, she told tween...
...She remained with us for They complemented and appreciated each other in ways more than three years...
...Perhaps she was not Help were older black women-Lulu and Mandy-and mentally agile enough or lived life too seriously...
...My father tried to help out, but she wouldn't relinquish her kitchen...
...But mostly stone foundation had been smashed, run into by someI am always the same one's jousting truck perhaps, and stones removed...
...I don't recall that we Detroit College of Law...
...Occasionally when I zigzagged ahead of us...
...My knob on the front door...
...Commonweal 10 July 14, 2000 the fire engines and would lie down on the pavement ahead be summarily fired...
...The first time, regret Scavengers, the man had said...
...She regretted I had not been an ofabove her stove of those she had come to know...
...the sun, admiring it all...
...During the sandlot days of the Depression had lost in her middle years, had returned...
...directions when I first had begun visiting from Massachu- Halfway down the hill to the lake, my father had plantsetts, but often I was flying and this was the first opportunity ed an elliptical bed of red and white petunias for my mothI really had to drive there, although I needed the aid of a clerk er...
...stand that she was not an easy patient...
...Someone needed a door, And self-pity constant a pair of hinges, a piece of siding, a window frame, a few Reminders of the I old barn boards, stones to erect a new foundation...
...did not immediately know me...
...One time, she said, "If grandparents, my mother's father having died in 1913, her I tell you, then we'll both know," and looked at me slyly...
...For one thing," I said, "you're both starving...
...the view downward past the staircase window with its patch I remember a day when my father of stained glass ended in darkness, I crawled silently along the shore on had often heard them saying their his belly through weeds and muck to evening rosary, sitting beside each catch a feeding muskrat in his hands...
...Mice played in the kitchen at night...
...She died in March, chairs that previously she so carefully protected with cov- three months before her eighty-ninth birthday, having ering sheets when toddlers were in the house...
...It was far and away an improveJohnny darters, frogs, turtles, gophers, snakes, dragonflies, ment over the raucous fire engines of Westminster...
...Certainly she had amfish, she displayed a natural liking for birds and kept a chart bitions she never realized...
...The Writing these words...
...The farthest they commonly traveled was to the cemetery in Sandwich where my mother's ancestors lay buried...
...We would rosaries in their lifeless hands...
...was not more than sixteen when she appeared at the door If my parents were sometimes quarrelsome, neither was one day looking for work, was taken in-no questions asked, willfully mean or strident with the other...
...If somewhat over-disciThe other white women also lived in, but the black women plined, ours was a peaceful home...
...My father had been a sergeant...
...Ice was still tight in spirals along the banks...
...But he was tique value-furniture, glassware, or curio-came in good health...
...He served in the 88th Division in ever owned bicycles, although I knew how to ride one...
...I can remember having supper served a black cane...
...If this was a little unconventional, that we did not discern or understand, nor was it our so be it...
...where they could be suitably cared she said, as if suddenly she had refor, but we had not been sufficiently membered something of importance...
...But the streets were no longer to a field of tall corn, walked the edge, and came out on a dirt there...
...ago about minorities, but she was constrained with arthritis In the years at the cottage my mother never hiked to frogand she hung on for expediency's sake until one day when laden Sashabaw Creek like the rest of us...
...If we were adept remember photographs of my mother in her enough, we might be able to knock off shards to suck on teens, a small girl given to plumpness, her pale from blocks still in the wagon...
...Their harHe snatched the animal into the air the streets of her childhood...
...In arguyounger white women-one from Estonia, Sofie from Fin- ment she tended to be trivial, but she would argue...
...All she asked was carfare to get home, of them when we heard the bells and sirens, but always jump- which I gave her and bade her good-bye, so she could dising up and running off before we were in any real danger...
...Tore down," he said...
...Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike, played "chicken" with My parents died in their eighties...
...A place month...
...We used The conversation ended on an un- to be friends...
...done about everything he had wanted to do...
...Once, she said, as she stood in shallow water in her pastor, went to downtown Detroit on the busy sidewalk in high-necked, skirted, black bathing suit, a long-nosed garpike front of J. L. Hudson's to "bump white folks into the gut- swam across her toes and startled her...
...that...
...Dester, after college, after the war, my mother still brought in spite many improvements in the cottage, my father was day-help for cleaning...
...doctor was stunned and apologetic...
...Did they make love under cover of the rain...
...We we would go east, then west, then south, past places famil- crawled around a fallen willow, and within the framework iar and unfamiliar, both recognizable and newly strange, of its downed branches a colony of blue-fringed gentian and eventually downtown where she wanted to visit again bloomed, mouths flecked with pollen...
...To the horror of all our mothers, the boys on our street, was assigned to the 88th...
...Twenty years later I have no friends here...
Vol. 127 • July 2000 • No. 13
