Quills & Pixels2011

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Writers’ Network

Quills & Pixels accepts submissions on a continuous basis from all members of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock writing community, including past and present students, staff, and faculty, as well as alumni of the university. The editorial staff welcomes submissions from persons affiliated with UAMS and with the William H. Bowen School of Law.

Writers of nonfiction in all its forms—creative nonfiction, personal essays, research essays, academic writing, journalistic features, technical communication, and other genres—are encouraged to submit, to have their work peer reviewed, and depending on the outcome of the review, to have their work published. Only original, unpublished nonfiction work not under review elsewhere will be considered.

Quills & Pixels does not publish or review poetry, fiction, or drama. The staff will not consider anonymous or pseudonymous writing.

Do not include your name anywhere on or in the writing (use a temporary pseudonym if your name must appear in the writing).

A title must appear on the first page and may also be used as a header, along with the page number, at the tops of subsequent pages.

Each submission must be accompanied by the author’s address, e-mail address, telephone number, and the title of the submission on a separate page or on a submission form—available from the University Writing Center and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing.

We strongly encourage electronic submissions. Send one electronic copy plus the author information in a separate file in Microsoft Word format attached to an e-mail addressed to cmanderson@ualr.edu with the subject line, “Quills & Pixels Submission.”

If you prefer to submit hard copy, Writers’ Network/Quills & Pixels drop boxes are located in the University Writing Center, SU-B 116, and in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing mail room, SU-B 100. Submissions may also be mailed to:

Quills & PixelsDepartment of Rhetoric and WritingUniversity of Arkansas at Little Rock2801 S. UniversityLittle Rock, AR 72204

Quills & Pixels2011

A Publication of The Writers’ NetworkUniversity of Arkansas at Little Rock

Development EditorsJanet Anokye, Jennifer Atkins-Gordeeva, Gloria Conley, Brittany Foster,

Fredy Guzman, Susan Heffern-Shelton, Caleb James, Eva McKinney, Darricka Malone, Paige Mitchell, Kelly Plopper, Priscilla Rodriguez,

Kenneth Tuberville, Lauren White, Amanda Wilson, Jade Wilson

Production EditorsGloria Conley, Heather Ernst, DeAnna Gupton, Drew Glover,

Susan Heffern-Shelton, Caleb James, Kelly Plopper, Lacey Thacker, Priscilla Rodriguez, Kelsie Walker

Layout and DesignPriscilla Rodriguez, Chuck Anderson

Cover PhotoDrew Glover

Funding provided by the UALR Office of Student Activities and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing

ditors’ ForewordE

nar•ra•tive /ner-ə-tiv/ n, the representation in art of an event or story, from the Latin verb narrare, to recount; related to gnārus, knowing, skilled.

Narrative is essential to communication, to understanding, some would

say to our very humanity. Whether the story is one that leaves us nodding in recognition or shaking our heads in disbelief, it is our connection to another person, and it creates the communities in which we become the best, the most fully human that we can be. The UALR community is as diverse, as deep, and as interesting as any you could hope to find. Students, faculty, and staff from all over the world gather

on this campus, each with a unique story to tell, some personal, some public, some recount the pleasures and insights that come from research. In your hands, you hold an exceptional collection of these stories.

The stories in Quills & Pixels 2011 run the gamut of human experience, from ordinary events we can appreciate for their familiarity to incidents we would never want to face firsthand to extraordinary moments we wish had been our

Gloria Conley

Drew Glover

Susan Heffern-Shelton

Kelly Plopper

Lacey Thacker

Heather Ernst

DeAnna Gupton

Caleb James

Priscilla Yvonne Rodriguez

Kelsie Walker

own. By writing their stories, the authors have transformed experiences into narrative. By editing with them, we have gained understanding. By reading the end products of our collaboration, we hope you will gain a larger sense of life’s possibilities and a deeper connection with your community.

Just as people benefit from connection, so too do narratives. As far back as Aristotle, writers have known the importance of arrangement. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends; movements and transitions; echoes and tides; vistas and crescendos; luminous moments and long, unbearable stretches of time—parts that collaborate, connect, and create meaning. The same is true of this book.

In the beginning, Jenna will touch you with its poignant recounting of birth and the love affair of mother and child; in the middle, The Bridge will carry you to loss and back again; at the end, Storytellers will inspire you with its homage to family tradition handed down and passed on and with the opening of that tradition to the largest of all large things. As you move from beginning to middle to end, you will travel from the Old South to South Korea, from wild horses to domesticated people, from the twilight of dying to the dawning of love. You’ll feel injustice and grace, destruction and renewal, hopelessness and healing. When you’re finished, we can promise you’ll look at some things in ways you never have before—even things you didn’t think were worth a single

glance, like answering machines and pillows, wigs and wind, a broken window, a stick and a soft drink can.

As works of nonfiction, the skillful sincerity of these narratives is sure to speak to you. They will take you on truthful journeys. The “journey” is, of course, a cliché, but only because true things tend to get repeated.What does not often get repeated are the particular moments that make up each particular person’s particular journey. It is these moments, these small and wonder-filled steps along the way that teach you something, that offer experience, that take your breath away.

We hope you are changed by what the particular moments that make up the narratives in this volume have to tell you.

Now go ahead, turn the page. It’s time for the story to begin.

ditors’ Foreword

JennaDeana Nall

Learning, Listening, and the Power of Change

Raison d’être 101 Carole Geckle

Song and Dance Dana F. Steward

ElbowRoomBethany May

The Answering Machine Erin Pennington Wood

Fade Deanna Smith

Arrive Costumed and Enjoy Fine SpiritsKatherine Parker Lamb

Gentle Solutions for Wild HorsesJim Dawson

Perspective, Perseverance, and the Call of Yesterday

A Meditation on Pillows: An Appeal to ReasonMark Isbell

ElizabethKathryn Brady Ragan

Wind, Wheels, and WaterChris Bell

Tabl

e of

Tabl

e of

1

4

6

9

16

20

28

35

39

41

Con

tent

sEvery Day a ChampionMike Rush

My Old House and HGTV Donna Landreth

The Story of the YurtThompson Murray

February’s GhostSarah Peterson

The BridgeMark Stanley

Resistance, Reprise, and a Vow to Fulfill

What Do You See?Kathryn Brady Ragan

Worth the Weight?Jennifer Stanley

Caving InLoria Taylor

Remembering Through Celluloid: World War II Films as Memorials

Jeff Wright

London’s BurningSiobhan Bartley

A Formal Analysis of Carl Gutherz’s Light of the Incarnation

Bryce A. Chandler

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59

63

67

83

86

91

94

103

110

JonathanJoseph Johnson

Delight, Desire, and the Complications of Love

A Soul’s Delight Don Streit

A Short History of MenAmy Manning Burns

An Old Fashioned Love SongJanet L. Darling

Marriage in the Middle EastJennifer Guzman

That Beautiful Stupid Hot Damn WigValerie Henley

Homeless TequilaV. Louise Johnson

To Touch a ManJoseph Johnson

StorytellersMark Isbell

(con

tinu

ed)114

121

124

131

135

139

142

148

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ennaJDeana Nall has been writing features for magazines since 1994 and contributes to a number of nationally-distributed publi-cations. She has also written newspaper features and a weekly humor column, for which she won an award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors in 2002. Deana lived in Texas most of her life before moving to Arkansas in 2006. Deana is working on an MA in professional and technical writing at UALR. She lives in Bry-ant with her husband Chad and their two daughters, Julia and Jenna.

Deana Nall

On an August morning in 2004, Jenna came wailing and wriggling into our lives. Eight-and-a-half pounds.

A golden sheen to her head that promised blonde hair.

And her eyes. I guess you would say they are blue, but they are more than that. There really isn’t a word to describe the color of her eyes.

But I’ll try.

I learned to scuba dive in 1993. And I learned something about it right off: scuba diving is a big hassle. So much heavy, awkward equipment is required for breathing underwater. The tank by itself weighs eighty pounds. Then there’s the weight belt, which must be adjusted just right so you won’t float to the surface or be stuck on the ocean floor. Then you have the buoyancy compensation device, the fins, snorkel, mask, and wetsuit. Once you get all that stuff on, it’s hard enough to remain upright, let alone walk normally.

But once below the surface, the oppressive gear becomes your key to the underwater world. You swim around, weightless, holding out fingers as curious fish swim up to them. Your teeth clench around the regulator that, on land moments before, was uncomfortable in your mouth. Now it’s the only way to get air into your lungs. The sound of your constant inhaling and exhaling is a reminder that you’re doing something humans weren’t made to do. You are living, thriving

underwater. The hassle, for the moment, is forgotten.

It took us a long time to get Jenna into this world.

I got pregnant, then miscarried. Pregnant again, but one sad morning, blood. Pregnant a third time, then another loss. We started thinking about adoption. Then I got pregnant again, and this one held. I became very sick, was placed on home healthcare, and then developed gestational diabetes. Then, one Thursday morning, the previous year and a half faded as I finally looked into her eyes.

And I remembered the circle of light.

Thirty feet under the ocean’s surface, it’s easy to become disoriented—to the point that you can lose track of which way you’re supposed to go to reach air. As a scuba diver, you learn to look for light. Light means surface. When you find the sunlight piercing the blue depths in which you are submerged, you slowly swim toward it, exhaling all the way. Surrounded by shades of watery blue, the circle of light expands and seems to pull you toward itself. You keep swimming up, up, up—until you think your lungs can’t expel any more air. But the bubbles keep coming, and you keep moving toward the illuminated mass.

Then you reach it, and you burst through it, into air, light, life.

That’s what color Jenna’s eyes are.

earning, Listening, and the Power of Change

L

earning, Listening, and the Power of Change

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A school is not a factory. Its raison d’être is to provide opportunity for experience.

J.L. Carr

My heart was pounding, and I had a hard time catching my breath as I walked across

the hot asphalt of the parking lot. I was covered in sweat, but it wasn’t from the August heat. It wasn’t even from being out of shape or from the fact that I was already exhausted after putting in the proverbial “long day at the office.” My panic was because I was headed to my first college class in more than twenty years. I was terrified.

The thought of going back to college to finish a BA had been exhilarating when it had been one of the “Long-Term Goals” on my “To Do” list, a someday-when-I-have-the-time-and-the-money dream. But it was actually happening here and now, the first night of my first class had arrived, and I was sure I would pass out before I even reached the classroom.

I entered the big concrete building that housed the English Department with my husband’s words running through my pounding head: “Just give it a try…one class…that’s all…You know you’ve always wanted to do this.” His words had given me courage earlier, but now they just

seemed like the platitudes of a loving husband trying to be kind. Who was I kidding? This was a ridiculous idea. I am definitely too old! But suddenly, there I was, standing in the doorway of Room 104B, trying to get enough courage to go in.

Somebody bumped me from behind, and my shaky legs didn’t have any more time to be shy. I casually sauntered over to a desk in the center of the first row, just like my brand-new copy of Success Guide for Adult Students had advised, and awkwardly sat down in a kindergarten-sized chair attached to a very unyielding desktop. I told myself to breathe. Big cleansing breath in…light shallow breaths out…puh, puh, puh, puh, puh …WAIT A SECOND! That was for childbirth class a million years ago!

When my head cleared a little (probably from the Lamaze breathing), I experienced one of those startling déjà vu moments. Being in class wasn’t actually much different from the way I remembered it twenty years before: the room had the same book-and-kid-body smell; it had the same grey carpet, metal/Formica desks; and most of the other students had the same nervous look in their eyes that I remembered so well. I could almost read their thoughts:

Raison d’être 101Carole Geckle

Carole Geckle is a freelance writer living and working in Little Rock. She is committed to creation care, the environment, scripture studies and spiritual formation. She holds a BA in Ministry and Organizational Management and is pursuing an MA in Professional and Technical Writing at UALR.

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Don’t look scared…look cool…is anyone watching me? I’m sure my eyes were telegraphing the same message. As long as I couldn’t see my reflection, I was eighteen again. All of my hard-won self-confidence and “leadership skills” had vanished. I was once again a sweating, pimply, uncomfortable freshman waiting for the Grim Reaper. The classroom was a more effective time machine than H.G. Wells had ever conceived.

Our professor still hadn’t arrived, so I got the courage to look around the room at my fellow classmates. It immediately struck me just how diverse we were. There was one other “non-traditional” student in scrubs, who looked as scared as I felt; several who were talking in different languages; a guy in a turban; and a woman in a Muslim-looking head scarf. There were twenty-somethings; dual-enrolled high school students; kids with pierced things, tattoos, blue fingernails; and a guy who obviously spent as much time in the gym as I do on the couch watching TV. Surely someone in the Admissions Office had made a mistake. Didn’t they have different classes for different people? How could any one teacher get the same message across to this A to Z of humanity? It seemed impossible. I was glad I wasn’t our teacher.

But the class which seemed so impossible that first night, morphed, week by week, into something quite different…and so did I. Like seedlings unfolding in a National Geographic video, I saw our class grow together. We were all leaning toward the sunlight at the same time. We talked, we laughed, and we learned. It was easier for some than for others, but we became

a community of people who helped each other and didn’t ridicule or embarrass. Even though we didn’t always agree, we were a community. And our teacher, who somehow had learned to speak all of our individual dialects of age, gender, race, and culture without even a discernable accent, taught us much more than English composition.

Watching this classroom bloom brighter each week brought me an even greater epiphany; I realized that I wasn’t quite as sophisticated and intelligent as I’d been pretending to be all these years. There are actually some things that people younger than me or from another country or with different religious beliefs know more about than I do. It was a cruel, ice-water epiphany at first, but the moment it poured over me was the moment I really began to learn. It no longer mattered how much money I had—or didn’t have. No one cared how many people I supervised at work or who my friends were. Gradually, my entire Zeitgeist—every cultural, ethical, spiritual, political presupposition I had held onto so firmly—was being examined and expanded.

I may never again learn as much in thirteen weeks as I did in that first class. It transcended any casual definition of the word “education.” Despite age, diversity, or self-perception, people need to continually learn about—and be challenged by—each other and our differences. There will never be any graduation ceremony for this kind of education.

Or will there?

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My husband pulled up to the pump and got out of the car to fill up our gas tank. It’s funny how the mind seeks to occupy itself when left alone for even a short while. Instantly bored, I started scanning the neighborhood, seeing what was up.

The glow from the street lights that were just coming on softened everything. I hadn’t noticed anyone when we first pulled in, but there were four of them…what you would politely call “street people.” A few months ago, I would have called them “bums.” Sun-darkened skin, dusty with dirt; matted, uncut hair; filthy clothes. But their appearance belied their activity.

A noise: CRACK! Wood hitting metal. And then loud hoots and hollers, followed by clapping. The sound didn’t make any sense, but once I focused on where it was coming from, everything fell into place. They were playing baseball! Street guys playing baseball with the only sports equipment they had: wooden fence slats and empty soft drink cans. The rules seemed the same, even though the equipment was unique. The pitcher pitched his best “fast can” over home plate…the batter swung his fence slat…CRACK!

One diet soda can, sailing into right field. More hoots and hollers as the batter half ran, half limped to first base—an old cardboard box from the nearby dumpster.

I watched the game while my husband squeegeed the windshield, and I realized that we were sharing the Great American Pastime. I rolled down my window and smiled as I cupped my hands around my mouth…

“HEY, BATTA BATTA BATTA … SWING!”

They smiled…and waved. I opened the car door and stepped out….

In tribute to Professor Lynne B. Thorner

2009 Teacher of the YearBroward Community College,

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

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Like many women who carry a freshly-minted Medicare card, I have lived my life on the

cusp of two generations—the generation of our mothers, who considered making a home their ongoing profession, and that of our daughters, who did not. Predestined by my heritage to stay home, I managed pretty well. Trained to teach, I had a successful career—after the children left home.

Now, in retirement, I run into old acquaintances, especially younger women, who ask, “So what do you do now?” I fall mute, feeling inadequate to reply. What DO I do? I muse....

“Lady, looks like you’ve got your hands full,” the clerk volunteers, as I trail my granddaughter and my father down the baked goods aisle at Wal-Mart, becoming frantic as they spin off in separate directions. My granddaughter Violet is a chunky twenty-month old, pushing her toddler cart with authority; my dad is eighty-eight, hurling his riding cart through the store. Both are oblivious to other shoppers and ominous stacks of canned vegetables. They are totally enamored of their rolling stock and clearly paying no attention to me.

Two days a week, I keep Violet. On another day, my dad and I make the rounds of doctor appointments central to his life. But on this day each week, on Friday, Violet and I spend most of the day with Dad. Violet babbles incessantly to her great-grandfather. His speech has been compromised by a stroke, but he still carries on fluent conversations with her.

This is not my first venture into care-giving. Several years ago, I left my high school teaching position and assumed more of the responsibilities of keeping one arthritic, little old lady, my husband’s mother, in her home.

After my retirement, as my mother-in-law’s health continued to decline, she was consuming more and more of my time, but also capturing my imagination. As we wandered the mall together, she slowed my pace, and finally, after forty years, we began to really get to know each other. I learned that she too felt she had lived on a cusp of time: coming of age in a depression, serving as a Red Cross nurse during the Dust Bowl, daring to board a train in 1940 to a new career a thousand miles from home. There had come the fateful meeting with her future husband, the handsome captain who took her hand to help her reach a dish on a high shelf at

Song and DanceDana F. Steward

Dana F. Steward is a retired teacher of English and Composition who received her MA in Technical and Expository Writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1995. Her most recent book is Rough Sort of Beauty: Reflections on the Natural Heritage of Arkansas, published by UA Press.

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a USO dance and never let go. Next thing you knew, she was president of the PTA and chair of the Methodist Women. She had been the great champion of my freedom when I was a young mother, but it wasn’t until she was eighty that she began to say “I am”—with emphasis on the am—“a registered nurse,” even though she hadn’t worked in the profession in sixty years.

She’s gone now, Miss Elma, but not before her great-grandson Baby Jack and I became regular visitors to the hospice, where these two, some ninety years apart in age, bonded over shared kisses and Wendy’s Frosties. Although Elma died when Jack had just turned two, he remembers her last birthday cake.

Now I spend time with my dad, and I am learning that he too feels he lived on the cusp of two generations: this farm boy who had never left the hills of rural Arkansas until he went off to seek his fortune picking vegetables in the Texas Valley in the late ‘30s, this young man whose world view consisted of basketball tournaments and “city” girls from the county seat, this soldier who saw Paris and the worst and best humanity can be, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, he would never return to the farm.

As we sit waiting for test results and doctor consultations, he tells me random stories I’ve never heard before. Unhindered by chronology, these stories amaze me: I imagine him driving his Jeep™ through Europe; I visualize his father carrying him as a toddler across a muddy field after he broke his leg.

My dad and I have occasional squabbles about me spending too much time with him. On the way to get his hair cut or to shop for the best price on birdseed, he will say, “You need to not be doing this; you need to get on with your own life.”

But I think he’s wrong. This is my “own life.”

Then comes Friday. Today, Dad and Violet have their heads together. They play with the Russian stacking dolls, put pennies in the toy clown, and split a Wendy’s Frosty. Together, they enjoy an intimate musicale: Dad hums, “You Are My Sunshine” off-key, and Violet twirls precariously about. I grin as I watch them.

What do I do now?

I listen to my daddy sing, and I watch my granddaughter dance.

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In a moving crowd so thick and frantically kinetic that it’s dangerous to slow for even a

moment, you’re supposed to throw your elbows out hard. Let them hook into the crevices of the crowd and pick up your feet. Let the crowd carry you when there’s no space for you to move your own feet.

I’ve been in Busan, South Korea, a city of four million, for nine months now. Little Rock’s population density is 1,576 people per square mile. Busan, my new home, is an elbow-to-elbow 12,168 people per square mile. I never believed that overpopulation was a real phenomenon because I had never had to really share my air with anyone to the point of discomfort. Sure, I shared a bedroom and bunk bed for awhile when I was a kid, but in rural Arkansas, I spent years swimming in, sleeping on, strolling through, sprawling out in, and even wasting an expansive space. Precious space.

HowManyPyeongs?

A pyeong is the Korean unit of measurement for floor space in living quarters. One pyeong is about four square yards. It is supposed to be

about the size of a man with his arms and legs outstretched like the Vesuvius man making snow angels on the rug. I would generously estimate that the studio apartment my school in Korea provided me was about 5–6 pyeongs. Once we removed our boots and dropped our luggage, there was enough room for a small tip-toeing path to the bathroom.

A twin-size bed for the newlyweds. Spooning was a necessity with no relation to intimacy or romance. We took turns sleeping on our sides throughout the night, and I cracked my neck and yawned all throughout my ten-hour workday. For three weeks in that apartment—which was very near the size of a dorm room—I cried and thought we had made a big mistake quitting our jobs, selling our car, and moving around the world and away from our friends and families.

It’s not how I pictured married life. I thought I would be a ‘50s advertisement for a Maytag with a laundry basket under my arm, peep-toe heels on my pedicured feet, potatoes and carrots around the pot roast, and a big roof over my perfect head of hair. You can’t fault me though, I hope. No one wants to daydream about a life with flaws and hurdles. The disconnect between

ElbowRoomBethany May

Bethany May lived in Busan, South Korea, with her husband Adam, where she taught English to kids who were too cute for their own good. She learned to set aside Southern manners and to push back in the crowds. Despite the amazing experience and government healthcare, she sorely missed her family, friends, weenie dog, and IHOP. She is on her way to growing up, slowly weaning herself from tu-tus, online tabloids, and candy for dinner.

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the hallways in my head and the room that doubled as bedroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, closet, and receiving foyer was a constant disappointment and source of guilt. Why do I want so much space? Why do I need so much space?

We only stayed in that room for one month. Adam got a job at a different hogwan, a Korean private academy (or ‘cram’ school. Ironic?), and we moved to the apartment that his school provided. It was a bit bigger, about fourteen pyeongs, with a full-size bed. This home is twenty minutes away by subway from the neighborhood where I work. It’s at the end of the line, so I always get a seat before the train car gets too crowded. I still knock knees with ajummas (Korean for woman old enough to be married, but colloquially a permed, visor-wearing, old, pushy woman who wears floral print shirts and mismatched patterned pants) and businessmen in shiny suits and bedazzled ties. Sometimes, I’m so sleepy by the end of the day that while I sit with my eyes closed, my head drops and my body weight shifts onto whoever may be sitting next to me. It’s worth it, I think, for those extra pyeongs and a washer of our own, snuggling for comfort rather than spooning to save space.

Actually, I spend most of my transit in Busan underground in concrete tunnels packed with hundreds of others going somewhere fast. We’re anonymous, staring at each other’s differences. I walk past schools and offices and bars stacked on top of each other to reach our new home. The neon buzz and drunken duet from the No-rae-bang, the Korean singing room, serenade me

all the way home: sounds of commerce and entertainment, people enjoying themselves despite the close quarters.

Aislespace

For me, the crowds are a hindrance to the fun. Even shopping, a once relaxing and even therapeutic pastime, is too hectic for me to just stroll through a mall or market and let the rush of the workday dissolve. Instead, the rush thickens, as escalators sometimes hold customers on every ascending or descending step. Every American is familiar with Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. The crowds are suffocating in all retail locations. Our first shopping experience was like this, and almost every subsequent trip to the grocery store, department store, and even the fabric market has been equally swarming with rushed shoppers and oblivious strollers. To stay on your feet in the crowd requires constant awareness and reaction to any haphazard change of pace so you can move out of the way for those in a hurry or redirect your steps when the walker directly in front of you stops abruptly.

Farmers park blue trucks along busy sidewalks to lay their fruits and vegetables in bowls for pedestrians and future customers to examine, sample, and buy. Bike racks and trees occupy more sidewalk space, and then entrepreneurs set up tables with silly socks or homemade hair bows. The walkers are forced to set their paths in the bike lanes and jump out of the way when they hear the Brinng! Brinng! of bike bells or the Vroom! Vroom! of delivery motorcycles that

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make use of the lanes when the traffic lights turn red. The pushing just happens. It isn’t rude; it’s just necessary to get where you’re going. It’s like the Native American belief that space is no one’s. It’s everyone’s. So just take what you need and give it back when you’re finished with it.

Then at the elevator, the huddle to get on starts before anyone even steps off. Adam and I always get pushed to the back, often with two or three people stepping between us as more people load the elevator when we stop on every floor. Like clowns in a car or marshmallows in a game of Chubby Bunny, the Koreans can always fit one more inside. It’s not a “more the merrier” mentality. It’s just their space economy.

PanicRoom

I can’t think like that yet though. It’s still frustrating when someone just steps in front of me or uses their elbow to shoo me aside. We came to this new place to seize financial opportunity, eat kimchi, and spread our adult wings. Set against this new environment are my memories of wide open spaces and plenty of room for snobbery and ten-foot poles with which we refuse to touch some people. I don’t have room for that anymore. I just come home to our little apartment to find a slower pace and sanctuary from the mob scene outside. I spend my weekends inside crafting—painting canvas, framing photos, embroidering pillowcases—trying to make our space feel like home. I keep adding to the nest, trying to manage this space because it is mine, and no one can run over me in here. If I take ownership of it, if I keep it for

only us, I feel a little more in control. It’s like my tangible space is connected to my headspace. I am not so anxious when I have this breathing room.

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In the age of voicemail, the Uniden 5.8 GHz answering machine looks like something

that should be tossed with the garbage, but it is different to me because I know what it has recorded. I have avoided it, keeping my closet door shut tightly, as if touching its buttons might pour old ghosts into my new life.

What do you do with an answering machine that holds two messages from your dead father that make it sound as if your relationship had been the one you always wanted—a thoughtful exchange, a warm and steady hand reaching through telephone lines? What do you do when the tone of his voice, his words, imply that he built bridges between you rather than digging a gap as broad and deep and stratified as a canyon? Do you take the machine out of storage and press erase? Do you press play and let the snap and sizzle of dead lines send you reeling? Or do you try to understand your father through those messages, try to salvage something good of him from the wreckage and, by extension, to understand and salvage something of yourself?

Hi, sweetheart. Just checking in on you. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you in a while. Just been busy packing up and pitching stuff at the store. I’ll be moving Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next

week. Give me a call if you get a chance. Bye-bye. Love you.

I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you in a while.

He knew better than to call me. He knew he had made me mad. I had always done what I could to keep hundreds of miles of phone line between us. He was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I had gone to boarding school, first in Maryland and then in Massachusetts, spent summers in Maine, had gone to college in North Carolina, and then moved to Atlanta. I leaned closer and closer to home, but doubted I would ever return to Arkansas; he was there.

He made me angry at the end of the first visit I had spent at his house in thirteen years. I had been living in Atlanta and going to law school, and I had just taken the bar exam. He had told me over the phone that he wanted me to come for a visit. He told me there were things that he wanted to talk to me about.

“I know there were some things I could have done differently. I know I haven’t always been the best father.” His words rang in my ears like the unexpected doorbell that makes you jump.

The Answering MachineErin Pennington Wood

Erin Pennington Wood lives in Little Rock with the two loves of her life—her husband, Brett, and her bullmastiff, Angus. This essay was written as part of her collection, Storied Things: A Memoir in Possessions.

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I visited. We never talked. He went to work each day and avoided me at night by turning on the television or by going to bed as early as 7 p.m. He was complaining of back pain so severe that he could not sit to eat; instead, he ate standing up at the kitchen bar. But he wouldn’t go to the doctor. When he walked into the house after work during my visit, he would take one of his painkillers. I would watch his eyes glaze as the release hit him, and he would disappear down the long hallway to his bedroom.

The last night of my visit, he took my stepmother and me on a boat ride across the lake to meet their friends for dinner. I sat in the front and felt the breeze from the water, relieved that I was done with law school and the bar exam, anchored by the sweet weight of relaxation. He and my stepmother were bickering about something in the back of the boat, and his voice gained force. He snapped at her, “Stop it! You’re making my daughter uncomfortable!” It was unsettling to hear him imply that he was defending me; wasn’t he the one raising his voice, making me recoil? I wanted to tell him to take me back to the dock, to tell him I was going to pack up my things and drive through the night back to Atlanta. I wanted to tell him that he was the one making me uncomfortable, who had always made me uncomfortable. But I said nothing. I closed my eyes against the scene because that’s what I had always done. I imagined my arms stretching out like harpoons; I pictured myself diving into the warm lake and hearing the boat motor take him further and further away until there was nothing but darkness and stillness and silence.

Habit wasn’t the only thing that kept me from asking to go back to the dock. I had a feeling that if I went back to the dock, I would never see him again. So I stayed on the boat, and we got to the shore. We had dinner with their friends, and we drank too much, and I laughed at his jokes, even though they were not funny. I laughed out of some vestige of love. I laughed because I could see in his eyes that he was worn down. He knew that he wasn’t funny anymore, but he hoped we would all keep up our end of the bargain—if he would continue his role as the entertainer, we would nod and laugh and join him as actors on the stage he set.

The next morning, he told me to meet him at his clothing store before I made the nine-hour drive back to Atlanta. He had something to give me, a lamp that had belonged to my great-grandfather. He wanted me to put it on my desk at my law office. We left his house at the same time, and he told me he would meet me at the store.

I waited for thirty minutes. He showed up with a dry-cleaning bag hanging in the back of the car.

“Sorry—I wanted to stop and get my clothes.”

I said nothing, but boiled inside.

He gave me the lamp, and I put it in my car. I took my camera out and told him I wanted to take some photos of him in the store. I took two inside, one of him lifting some bowties from a hanging rack, the other of him standing behind the counter. I took a final photo of him standing underneath the store sign. That was the last time I saw him conscious.

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Just been busy packing up and pitching stuff at the store. I’ll be moving Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week.

Before I was born, the store had been located a couple of miles away. It had been run by my father’s parents and my great aunt and uncle as a hardware store. When my grandfather died, my father moved back to Hot Springs from Dallas. After he married my mother, the two worked together to transform it into an upscale men’s and women’s clothing store and gift shop—the most successful store in the city and one that people knew around the state and beyond.

After he and my mother divorced, the store became less and less of a success. As money got tighter, sections of the store were eliminated and employees let go until eventually there was only the men’s section. Time burrowed holes in the soles of his loafers from standing day after day. The store’s hardwood floor behind the front counter became darkened and worn from the steady presence of his shoes. The water line in the apartment above the store leaked through the ceiling and dripped onto the pool table he used to display belts. There was damage to the rear walls from a rockslide, and he began to crumble physically, seemingly linked to the store’s slow but steady financial decline. The damage was visible in the drooping of his jowls, the hollowing under his eyes, and the stooping of his shoulders ever closer to the store’s foundation.

I stayed with him on Wednesdays and every other weekend, and much of my time was spent at the store while he worked. I usually tried to

avoid being in the same room, keeping to the break room or helping customers, because when we came together, even my use of too much tape on a package would result in a blow up and cause me to dissolve in tears.

I often cried when he would call me into his office once a month to write my child-support check. He paid it from the time of the divorce until I was about ten; then he stopped altogether. In his office, he would pull the cord of my great-grandfather’s green lamp to illuminate his checkbook. I stood next to his desk and watched as he performed the ritual of filling out the check with his square, capital letters. He would then deduct the amount from his balance, making comments about how he “sure could use the money to fix the air conditioner in the Jeep™” or, on particularly slow months at the store, “Don’t know how I’m gonna pay Mr. Freeman.” When crocodile tears made rivers down my cheeks, he would tell me to stop crying.

Sometimes the source of my tears ran deeper. Sometimes he would grab my wrist and hold my palm flat against the same table where store packages were wrapped. With his other hand, he would pick up a pair of scissors and see how fast he could touch their pointed end to the table between my fingers from side to side and back again without cutting me. Sometimes he would let me go when I started to cry; other times he would hold my hand fast.

Give me a call if you get a chance.

I never got a chance. I was away for the weekend at a wedding in New Jersey. He refused to call

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me on my cell phone because he thought cell phones were ridiculous. I wouldn’t realize that he left the messages on my answering machine until I got back home—after I had gotten a call from my uncle telling me my father had had a heart attack, after I had driven to Hot Springs to see him in the hospital on life support, after I had spent days waiting to see if he would move a toe or a finger, after I had come back to Atlanta because getting back to work was the only way I felt useful, normal.

I’ll be moving Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week.

He would have been moving, but instead, he would be found lying in the store having suffered a massive heart attack. Instead, we would be making the decision to take him off of life support. We would be watching and waiting for ten days as he died a slow, sputtering, violent death against a canvas of white hospital sheets.

Love you.

He always told me he loved me when we got off the phone, but I hadn’t said it in almost a decade. Not since my mother told me, as I was sitting in the little phone booth that I shared with the twenty girls in my boarding school dorm that he had been taking money from my college savings account and signing letters that it was for my benefit. When I went home for Christmas break, I went to the store and asked him about it. He took two piles of money from the cash register.

“Here’s how much you have,” he said and piled twenty singles. “And here’s how much I have,”

placing a one next to the larger pile. “Would it really bother you that much if I just took this?” he asked, sliding two ones off the top of “my” pile and onto “his.”

When I returned to boarding school, I alerted my hall mates to tell him I wasn’t around. I severed the lines that ran between us. Eventually, he resorted to writing a letter. And I wrote him back, telling him that I needed time to get over what had happened. When I signed it, I left off “I love you.” I would never say it to him again.

Hey, sweetheart. Just Dad checking in with you, again. Figure you must be out of town or something. But anyway, I wanted to call you. This is my last day at 120 Central. We’re gonna start packing up this afternoon, and the movers come tomorrow. So, kind of a sad day and a happy day altogether. Umm. Lookin’ forward to the move, though. I can’t wait for you to see the new store—it’s all painted and fixed up and lookin’...uh ...lookin’ forward to it. Better location I think and...we’ll see what happens. I love you. Bye-bye.

When I was fourteen, my father bought a Mustang convertible. He had a special plate embossed with, “This car was made especially for ESP” (my initials). He told me that when I was sixteen, the car would be mine. If it were spring or early fall, he would sometimes drive us up West Mountain in the Mustang to “enjoy the view.” But I could feel my back and my neck stiffen as we made the steep ascent. I knew what was to come. The drive down had intensely angled switchbacks. He liked to see how far down the mountain he could get without putting on the brakes.

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When I turned fifteen and got my driver’s permit, he told me I could drive the Mustang as fast as I wanted, as long as I was willing to pay the ticket if I was pulled over. He reminded me again and again that the car would be mine, asking me if I was excited to cruise around town with the top down. I touched the cruise control and the stereo buttons, imagining the moment that I would be able to have complete independence, to drive around alone. I turned sixteen, but he never gave me the Mustang. When I asked him about it, he said that he had decided he needed it for himself.

Hey, Sweetheart...I love you.

When I stayed with my father, I used to imagine crawling out the window of my bedroom, walking down the highway to the Co-zee Lounge, and calling my mother from the payphone. I wanted to tell her to pick me up, that I never wanted to see my father again. Every now and then, I would prepare for my escape; I would go to my piggy bank and count my change. One time I went to count it to find that all the quarters were gone, and only dimes, nickels and pennies remained. In my adult life, even now, words like “Sweetheart” and phrases like “I love you” are empty for me. He told me these things, but his words were transparent against their backdrop.

When I think of my father now that he is gone, I like to think of his baby pictures. I like to imagine a time when he was all instinct—no disguise or cover-up or recognition that such things existed—when he was pure and uncorrupted.

Despite everything that I remember, there was something that always kept me from

permanently cutting off all communication with my father, from leaving him altogether. Sometime in college, I began to accept that he wasn’t going to change and if I was to ever be happy, I would have to change my expectations of him. I stopped expecting him to know the names of my friends and what classes I was taking and what was going on in my life, and I became a listener. It wasn’t always an easy role, and sometimes I resented it, but I listened to him. I wondered if anyone ever really had.

He began to tell me things, to open himself, to share. And I began to see a larger picture that was beyond me, beyond a father and a daughter, stretching back through the gnarled and knotted branches of our family tree. It wasn’t until after my father died, and I was talking to one of my stepmother’s friends that the gravity of the things that had shaped him became clear to me.

She asked, “Did he ever show you the whip that your grandmother used on him?”

“No.” I knew that he and my grandmother had a strained relationship, but I never knew she whipped him.

“Come here.” She led me to his closet and opened it. From behind his hanging clothes at the back of the closet, she pulled out something that looked like a cat o’ nine tails.

My god. I thought of my grandmother going to church every Sunday and on Wednesday evenings. I thought of my dad getting so drunk when we went to one of his girlfriend’s houses or to a party that he ran off the road.

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When I see the cover art to the Penguin Classics printing of Death of a Salesman, I think of my father. He is Willy Loman, sketched in charcoal against a stark backdrop, the shadow of his body hunkered over his folded knees, his tie swinging as he raises a fist to pound it against the unyielding ground, the anguish of all those years of disappointment and unfulfilled dreams stretched across his pained face. My father carried his years of failure in his chest, in his ventricles. I think of the enormous gap between his potential and his reality; the gap I knew he felt, but never labeled. I think of the continental shelf that had eroded between his intelligence and his lack of drive to carry things through. He was an idea man, but his ideas only incubated; they rarely came to fruition.

The more the world ignored him, the harder he yanked at its coattails, the louder he shouted to be heard, the harder he pretended that everything was okay against the glaring evidence that it was not. Like Loman, he wanted, more than anything else, to be the light of his customer’s days, to be well-received, to be well-liked, because without that, I don’t think he believed he was worth much at all. My father pretended to the point that he no longer knew what was true. He seemed to only know who he wanted to be, never who he was.

What was confusing to me as his daughter was whether it was better to go along with the story, to sustain his illusions, or to confront him with reality. Somehow, confronting him with the truth seemed too cruel, and what his reaction might be seemed too unpredictable. I worried he might implode with the realizations, and so I continued

to let him dream. But he must have known. He must have known in the weeks and days leading up to his heart attack that this was his D-day. This was the time that counted. If things did not go smoothly, if the store did not get on its feet and run, there would be a landslide down the mountain of lies that he had built. We could see this after he died, when we discovered that he had taken out loans he had never even discussed with my stepmother, extended his credit to the max. He was pushing himself and everything in his life to the limit.

...lookin’...uh...lookin’ forward to it. Better location I think and...we’ll see what happens.

What I gained from my father is his optimism. I like to think that mine is much more grounded in reality, but at my core, I have always had the feeling that things will work out—that everything will be okay. And maybe that is true of the way I will deal with these two telephone messages. The emotions I connect to them are not neat and tidy; they are messy and dark, tangled and confused. After listening to them over and over again, I have tried to find the gift in them. How many people get to hear a message of love from their father on the last day that he was alive?

Maybe someday, I can realize that in the words I heard through the receiver before our last visit, (“I know there were some things I could have done differently. I know I haven’t always been the best father.”) there was recognition. There was a willingness to take responsibility; there were the kernels of change. Maybe someday I can be certain that pushing “play” on the answering

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machine will not cause ghosts to seep out. Maybe I can trust that as messed up as things were sometimes, my father may have actually meant the things he said.

As difficult as it is for me to say, maybe my father did love me. After all, people don’t love you the way you need or want them to. They love you the only way they know how.

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I had known this bedside vigil was coming ever since Dad got sick ten years ago. I thought I

was prepared—I researched the disease, the treatment options available, and what to expect when there were no more options—but I was not confident I could process the emotions that would surface.

Dad was seventy-eight years old. For the last forty-eight hours he had been bedridden, living in a drug-induced wonderland of cowboys and soldiers, even though just five days before, he was walking around and telling jokes to the hospice nurse.

I was sitting next to his bed when he pulled the oxygen tubing away from his face. The hissing sound startled me, and I put down my knitting. I gently replaced the nasal cannula and looped the tubing around his ears.

“Do you need anything, Dad?”

He didn’t answer.

I grew up afraid of my father, and throughout my adult life, ugly memories dominated my mental scrapbook. Dad’s parenting style started off harsh, but not unbearable. For example, when I

was seven, he grounded me for putting a fork in the dishwasher upside down. Over the years his hostility grew. At age twelve, I was snooping for Christmas presents when I ran across a notebook with my dad’s careful handwriting describing me as lazy and worthless. Then late one afternoon when I was seventeen, the bubbling undercurrent of hostility erupted into violence. I found myself hunkered into a dining room chair with my arms wrapped around my head for protection while Dad was trying to pry my hands away. He was yelling at my mom to hit me in the face because the marks she was leaving on my back wouldn’t teach me enough of a lesson.

I was afraid that when Dad died, the bad feelings were all that would remain, but in his final days, the traumatic incidents from my childhood faded into ghost writing on a chalkboard that I had to squint to see. As I sat by his bed, knitting, the easy rhythm of the yarn looping around the needles lulled me into a relaxed state, and gentler memories began to emerge.

I am eight years old, sitting on the tweedy recliner watching Diff ’rent Strokes when I feel something touch my forearm. I look around to

FadeDeanna Smith

Deanna Smith is a wife, mother, knitter, writer, and late-blooming student owned by two meowing fur-balls who think they rule the world. After completing her undergraduate degrees in Professional and Technical Writing and Spanish at UALR, she hopes to begin graduate work, focusing on creative nonfiction. While Deanna believes it is possible to have too much of a good thing, she doesn’t believe that rule applies to naps or chocolate.

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see what it was, but I only see Dad taking a nap on the Naugahyde sofa. Mom is staying late at work to do inventory, so Dad and I are settling into our usual after-dinner routine. I decide that I am imagining things and turn my attention back to Arnold and Willis and whatever Willis is talking about.

The second time, I feel more of a sting than just a harmless brush against my skin. I rub my arm and start looking for a wasp. As I do, I notice that Dad’s eyes are closed, but one side of his mouth is curled up, like it can’t keep a smile from leaking out. His right hand holds a single rubber band.

“Dad?”

He opens his eyes and turns to look at me.

“Gotcha!” he says, and the almost-smile becomes a grin, a grin he usually saves for drinking beer and telling jokes to his buddies. I wonder why he is sharing it with me.

He sits up and shoots another rubber band my way. I swerve in time, but I need ammo. The rubber bands collected from the daily newspaper are sitting in a little pile on the end table. I grab a few and stuff all of them into my pocket but one. With the rubber band looped around my index finger, I pull back and then release.

“Ouch!”

I only succeeded in snapping the rubber band against my own finger.

“Here, do it like this,” Dad says as he shows me how to point my finger like a gun, keeping it angled in a way that keeps me from getting hurt but wouldn’t keep the rubber band from firing. Then, to demonstrate, he snaps me at close range.

“Dad! That’s not fair.”

He aims in my direction again and says, “You’d better run!”

I scoop up the rubber bands that have fallen to the floor and dash into the dining room. I can hear the canned laughter coming from the television set, but after focusing my senses, I can also hear Dad breathing on the other side of the wall. I jump around the corner and fire my first shot. Over the next few hours, we hide and stalk and snap until red splotches bloom on our arms and legs, and our breath is short from laughing. When the headlights from the station wagon flash on the living room wall, Dad looks at me with a little boy’s eyes.

He whispers, “Mom’s home. Where should we hide?”

I am eighteen years old, lying in bed, when I hear the cast iron skillet drop into the kitchen sink. I slink down in the bed and pull the covers up over my ears. The night before, I drank a couple of beers with some friends after work and got a ride home. I figure I ought to get up and explain the situation before my parents notice that my car isn’t in the driveway.

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“Dad?”

He is sitting at the kitchen table in his blue coveralls, making a list of building supplies. He sips his coffee and looks up.

“You’re finally out of bed.”

“Yeah.”

I circle my big toe in the carpet and take a breath.

“Dad, about my car—I left it at work.”

“What’s wrong? Is it the thermostat again?”

Dad has been a mechanic most of his life, so he knows his cars like a mother knows her children. I explain about the beer the night before and how Michael, the designated driver, had been kind enough to give me a lift. Then I wait for the yelling to start. Instead, Dad just adds one more item to his list, stands up from his seat at the table, and says, “Well, I’m headed out to the hardware store in a little bit. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?”

I am thirty years old, sitting at the kitchen table across from Dad, hiding my face with my hands because I am embarrassed by my red, puffy eyes and the mascara running down my cheeks. My mother and I have been arguing about heaven only knows what, and she has retreated to her bedroom. Even though I have three children of my own, my mother and I still fight like we did when I was a teenager.

“You know what?” Dad asks.

He has been sitting at the table watching as my mother and I march through the house, screaming at one another.

“You and your mother are different. You’ve just got to accept that.”

I wipe my eyes and just sit there, not sure what I am supposed to say next.

“Me and your mother used to fight like that, too.”

I remember. I used to be the one sitting at the kitchen table watching them.

“I know, Dad, but she just drives me crazy.”

“Well, she’s been driving me crazy for thirty-five years. I drive her crazy, too. We’re just different.” He scoots his chair in a little closer. “I can’t make her be like me any more than you can make her be like you.”

I blow my nose, and Dad looks at the clock. He eats his meals according to the time of day instead of by the growling of his stomach. He stands up and heads toward the refrigerator.

“It’s almost noon. Do you want a baloney sandwich?”

Dad sighed, and my wandering mind rushed back to his bedside. I looked up from my knitting, expecting to find the oxygen tubing in disarray

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again, but instead, I saw his eyes, bright and clear for the first time in days. He coughed and shifted in the bed as well as he could.

“Sometimes life gets complicated, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah, Dad, I guess it does,” I replied.

I waited for him to speak again, but the small effort had exhausted him. He sighed once more and drifted back into his sleepy haze. I watched for his breathing to ease, and as it did, I took a deep breath and blotted the tears from my eyes. Then I looped the wool back around my fingers, continuing with my work.

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The night I took the test—the fifth one in three weeks—I peed on the stick, then went

to the kitchen and poured myself a shot. I barely had time to down it before I heard Joe yell across the house, “You’re pregnant!” I needed another shot to wash that down. Instead, I met Joe in the living room—he was still holding the plastic wand, and he was beaming.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He held up the box. “Plus sign. You’re pregnant.”

“Shit.”

I quit smoking immediately, cold turkey. I had been a half-a-pack-a-day regular for five years, and suddenly I was a former smoker. I quit drinking. Immediately. Cold turkey. I had been a borderline lush for three years, and suddenly I was a teetotaler.

I started cleaning house, real nook-and-cranny cleaning. I let my hair grow out to my chin and went to the salon to keep it trimmed instead of doing it myself. I wore glasses. I bought maternity clothes. I quit calling some friends

back. I made friends with Joe’s friend’s wife, the only other woman my age I knew with a child. I bought What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I talked to my mother-in-law daily, sometimes multiple times a day. I stopped drinking so much coffee. I ate healthy. I slept all the time. I thought about the future. My future, our future, a future with a baby, a future for a baby. I quit cleaning the cats’ litter box. I told inquiring strangers the due date. I told inquiring strangers the sex. I told inquiring strangers, “This is our first.” In the seventh month, when my hands swelled, I stopped wearing my wedding ring and felt scandalized. I bought a breast pump. I deleted phone numbers. I threw away old notes. I threw away old photos. I started to regret my tattoo. I thought about my previous twenty-four odd years. I wondered if I would ever see myself again.

Then Carroll was born.

And I became a different person.

When my aunts came to visit me in the hospital, they eyed me suspiciously, like I might be an imposter. Like if they looked at me close enough,

Arrive Costumed and Enjoy Fine SpiritsKatherine Parker Lamb

Katherine Parker Lamb can find a lost pacifier anywhere—even amongst the clothing racks at Target™. She can redirect a toddler’s attention in any way—even if that means siccing him on the cats, again. She can predict with frightening accuracy what that toddler is thinking about doing at any time—even while studying for Language Theory. And, when she’s not pregnant or breastfeeding, she can still drink you under the table–as long as the toddler’s at Granny’s. She graduated with her MA in Professional and Technical Writing in May 2011, two months after Carroll’s new little sister arrived.

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I might betray some trace of my unfitness. Like I, the wild child and former black sheep, might not know how to love a baby, not even my own. Then, as they held my son, they must have seen the way I proudly watched. They must have noticed how exhaustion couldn’t keep my elation in check. They relaxed and seemed to accept me as a mother. They gazed down at Carroll and told me how beautiful he was, how much he looked like me.

“And Joe, too,” they added.

A month later I cut my hair and switched back to contacts. Not long after, I dyed my hair black again. After a few more months, I lost enough of the baby weight to fit into some of my old clothes. But the black jeans didn’t look right. And the white t-shirts showed the seams of my nursing bras. The hole in the toe of my Chuck Taylors bothered me for the first time. I bought new clothes. Conservative clothes. Mom clothes. They looked strange, too.

My son turned one on Monday. That’s all I’ve thought about for the past year and nine months. I’ve been the wife eagerly preparing for her firstborn and then the young mother struggling to do everything right and make it all look not just right but effortless. I’ve thought of nothing but Carroll for hours. I’ve watched him sleep for hours, held him for hours, rocked and talked to and sang to and danced before him for hours.

But I don’t want to be that person.

The winter before Carroll came, a minor ice storm hit Conway, and the bookstore I worked at was closed for a few days. Joe still had to report to work, so I was home alone with the cats. I focused on clearing out the master bedroom closet. At the time, I was about seven months pregnant. I cleared out a space in the floor of the closet and somehow, awkwardly managed to sit down, though once I was there, I wondered if I could get up again. As I tossed broken hangers and old shoeboxes through the doorway and stuffed old woolen sweaters I would never wear again into a trash bag, I came across a series of photos from my Great Gatsby Birthday Party. I sat on the floor, huge and uncomfortable, transfixed by the strange familiarity of the images.

Here I was, married and pregnant, home from my joke of a job, living the kind of domestic life I’d stopped seeing for myself. I hadn’t spoken to most of the people in the pictures in a few years. And yet, in my hands, here was another me, the girl from the party house. She grinned at the camera in a mean way, then winked in the next frame. She stood in a doorway and dragged on her cigarette, looking past her conversation partner. I could see the gleam of her flask, tied with lace to her outer thigh. She wasn’t that much younger than me, but she had something I had lost—a glint in her eye, an easy way with laughter. I dug deeper into the box, and there were more pictures from other parties and some of the house itself. I knew what I was looking at. I hadn’t blacked out during any of the photos. But she had become strange to me. I wasn’t sure anymore what I saw when I looked at her smirking in the night.

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At the time, I had been dating Seth, the rebellious son of a politician, for roughly a year. He was a self-proclaimed socialist who idealized and mimicked the original skinhead movement of 1960s England. He taught me how to shoot whiskey and introduced me to bands like The Business and Cock Sparrer. I never took his political affiliations seriously, though, despite all his late-night lectures on unions and underground movements and how evil NAFTA was and lots of other stuff I don’t remember. He’d dropped out of college before we got involved, and I’d somehow talked him into re-enrolling. We’d lived together the summer before. When I left him behind to go on a month-long road trip that summer with an ex-boyfriend, Seth had stopped trusting me. We figured we’d move back in together, and all our problems would dissolve.

From the outside, the house had the appearance of a large, traditional home of a lawyer or businessman from the early part of the twentieth century. Nothing flashy, nothing fancy, just a series of steps leading up to a distinguished, yet modest, front door. Just nine, shuttered windows looking out. Nothing about the exterior revealed that the inside had been gutted and quartered into four separate dwellings. Nothing about the white siding or the immensity of the building itself would hint at the lack of insulation or the structurally unsound second-story floors. From the outside, it almost looked prestigious and homey in an established kind of way. The house was on Faulkner Street, so named for the

Confederate General who wrote “The Arkansas Traveler.” We called it the Faulkner House.

The rooms were big for an apartment. The ceilings were high, and the flooring was old, dark hardwood. The front door didn’t shut right—we had to jimmy the handle until the rusty lock gave. The glass in the windows was warped, and the scene through them seemed to sway as though it were underwater. The toilet hadn’t been installed yet, and the bathroom was still bare drywall. There was a refrigerator but no washer/dryer hookups. There were no blinds on the windows that faced the street and no door on the sizable closet in the middle room. There was a sunroom in back and a back door out. Seth and I moved in mid-October, when the temperature was just starting to drop at night.

In the beginning there was a sense of community. A kind of hippie-ish community, albeit with some pretty obvious posing. The kids who lived in the Faulkner House were artsy. They came from Southern working class families. They wore used Levis™ from the Salvation Army and tight cotton t-shirts. They listened to Bob Dylan and Eliot Smith and Kimya Dawson and a bunch of other weird music I never really got into. They rolled their own cigarettes (I did too) and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon™ or Schlitz™. Understated as a pair of ripped jeans and chic as a dark pair of shades, the tenants of the house were aloof local somebodies. They were the guys everyone else wanted to know.

I’d been a loner since my mother’s death when I was fourteen. Before she died, I was sometimes irreverent, but basically a good, smart kid. I

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was a bit of a smart aleck, and maybe that got on some people’s nerves, but I knew right from wrong, and I was an obedient daughter. After she died, though, our family fell apart. We stopped functioning according to the roles we had once played. Without her, none of us knew who we were anymore. Fourteen is a dangerous age to lose your orientation in the world. During the years after her death, I discarded almost all of my childhood beliefs. I remember that sometimes, like when we’d see something shocking on the news, my mother used to say, “The world is an evil place.” She meant it in a religious sense. By the time I lived upstairs at the Faulkner House, I believed it in an absolute sense.

When we moved in, I remember feeling like I was becoming part of a group; by moving in near them I would become a somebody people wanted to know. I wanted that to happen. Not that I didn’t already think the world of myself; I did. But this was a new version of cool to me, and I was interested. I thought I was going to become a more attractive version of myself there. I thought I was going to have the time of my life there.

I turned twenty-one during finals week that December.

I wanted to throw the party to end all parties, and I wanted costumes, and so the concept of a Great Gatsby Birthday Party was born. I printed book cover images of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and taped words over them detailing when, where, and what. “Prizes will be awarded to the ‘best dressed.’” I photocopied the invitations in the campus office where I was a student worker. When the night came, I wore a golden homemade dress with a chiffon skirt and draped long, golden chains and fake pearls around my neck. After spending hours trying to bleach my black hair, I had to settle for an incomplete

transformation. I came as a raven-haired Daisy. Seth wore an understated gray, three-piece suit and came as Nick Carraway.

Our kitchen table was crowded with dozens of bottles of liquor and liqueurs donated by my friend Brianne’s parents after they “cleaned out” their cabinets. Brianne and I provided a few staples ourselves: a few handles of cheap whiskey and gin. The table, complete with cups, functioned as an open, serve-yourself bar. We

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had two kegs in the foyer and a massive tub of electric green jungle juice in the living room. By 10:30 p.m., our apartment was crowded with costumed people, most of whom we’d never met before, but all of whom looked like people we had met or wanted to meet. The middle room was packed; people smoked and ashed on the floor. The line to the bathroom went into the kitchen. The fridge was raided. Someone turned the lights off in the living room, put in a Pat Benatar tape and dumped the jungle juice out on the dance floor. I was handed off a magnum of champagne, and while I gulped it and sang along, an Armenian exchange student I’d had a class with once grabbed me by the face and kissed me on the lips.

“This is a great party!” he shouted.

Around two, I enlisted the help of some friends in choosing the “best dressed.” They were determined to be a girl I knew who came as Myrtle, and some guy nobody really liked, but who, in the words of one of the judges, “wore a goddamn monocle.” They were each awarded Jack Daniel’s™ boxed sets. Neither of them shared the customary celebratory glass with their hostess. I hated to see the whiskey go.

We floated both kegs. The kitchen table was littered with empty bottles, everything but the very weird and very cheap having been consumed. The jungle juice mixed with countless cigarette butts and ruined the floor. Someone stole my brass knuckles. Two unclaimed coats lay on the floor near the closet. The Pat Benatar tape was mine for keeps. The last person left around four-thirty.

During the middle of another party across town a week later, Seth pulled me aside to berate then break up with me. Tensions between Seth and me had steadily escalated since we’d moved back in together. I realized that he was serious about his political sentiments. We fought bitterly and often. About ideologies. About nothing. About things between our ideological differences and nothing. This time, he’d seen me leaning in too close to speak into one of our neighbor’s ears. Actually, it was one of our neighbors I’d been making passes at for a while. I denied everything, then broke into humiliated tears. Of course, Seth yelled at me some more, then stormed out of the party. I went outside for a cigarette, still crying, and finished another friend’s bottle of wine. The neighbor came over to console me, and I let him console me. Boy, did I let him console me. Nobody knew where I’d ended up that night until months later.

Seth went to stay with a friend for the next week, then moved out of our apartment into an apartment in the back of the building. Oddly enough, the neighbor whose ear served as a catalyst for our breakup moved into that apartment too, along with some other people (it was a big apartment). I couldn’t afford the rent on my own, so I moved upstairs, in the front of the same building, into a three-room apartment that had just been vacated. My new roommate was a girl who’d been a drama major but had recently dropped out of college. We were the only girls in the house (the non-shaving, Yankee feminist from Sarah Lawrence in the back

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apartment didn’t count). We were “those girls that live upstairs.”

Nearly every apartment had someone with a little extra liquor, cigarettes, or whathaveyou, that he would sell when you were in a pinch. Sometimes he’d give it to you, though there was always an unspoken understanding that this, too, was no free lunch. It was risky not to be home on Friday or Saturday nights—if there was a party and you weren’t there, drunk people would get in your apartment and either eat all your food, trash the place, or back up the toilet. The hall and stairway reeked of beer and sweat and the floor was filthy. The heat worked but the walls weren’t properly insulated, and the winter cold slipped in through the cracks. We had barely functional window units, no real air conditioning.

Then, sometime in April, the friction below the surface became more apparent. We just stopped ignoring it. Things between Seth and me were strained, at best, and we basically stopped speaking. We’d walk past one another in the yard, pretending not to see each other. I ignored my door once when I knew it was him knocking. He knew I was in there, and I knew he knew, but I didn’t answer. When the truth came out about where I’d gone from the party after he broke up with me he was deeply hurt. He confronted me at school, yelled at me in a public place, and called me some names. I was embarrassed, but I tried to put on a good show of not caring. The neighbor-turned-roommate thought it was all too awkward. It wasn’t just us three, though.

There was a nameless, widespread unrest. It was the house itself. We’d used it up. It was over.

In a way, I think we all expected it.

During the last party in the back apartment, the cops came, something that had never happened before. No one was arrested, but lots of people ran. The lights were off, and the cops walked through, shining their flashlights around the floor and in our faces. Later on, after the cops had been gone for a while, someone broke a few windows. Someone managed to stomp a hole through Seth’s bathroom floor. He covered it with a large doormat anchored in place with bricks from the back yard. The next morning, when my roommate and I surveyed the damage, we pulled back the rug, and we could see leaves and dark earth below. The concrete back steps were broken during the party, though no one knew how, and a drunk girl nearly knocked her teeth out falling down them. At first, we thought the destruction was hilarious. Fuck ‘em, we thought. They’re a bunch of creeps and assholes. No one bothered to clean up the mess.

A few weeks later, I met Joe at a house party down the street. He looked at me that night like he knew me, which confused the hell out of me because I was pretty sure I didn’t know him, but it also made me want to talk to him. In a few weeks, we’d developed a romance. He helped me move out of the Faulkner House and across town. Two years later, we were married. Not quite two years after that, we were parents.

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When Carroll was seven-and-a-half months old, we let Joe’s parents keep him overnight for the first time. We dropped him off and then checked into the Capital Hotel in Little Rock. It had been months since we’d had a night out together. A mini-fridge was delivered to our room so I could store the breast milk I would be pumping. I pumped, Joe poured us both a drink, and we relaxed and chatted in the room for a while. When we finished our drinks, Joe called us a cab, and we went out for sushi and sake.

We ate until we were beyond sated, until we were uncomfortable. We drank sake until we broke a light sweat (and I made two trips to the ladies’ room to “pump and dump” my “contaminated” milk). I went outside with Joe when he took a mid-meal smoke-break, and I puffed a few drags off his Marlboro™ in the spirit of the moment. We talked politics, we talked current events, we talked gossip. We briefly mentioned Carroll, but for once, we did not linger on him. I asked Joe about the Formula One racing season and about the drivers. He asked me about my classes and the graduate program I was five months into. We drank and ate and talked and fell back into familiar rhythms. In the time after I pumped and before my breasts returned to their clockwork ache, things seemed almost back to normal.

Not everything was the way it had been before Carroll; I wasn’t smashed prior to arrival or at the time of departure. We took a cab back to the hotel instead of driving tipsy. The biggest difference, though, was our endurance. It was

clear once we got back to our room that we were spent. We were both asleep by nine-thirty.

In the morning, I was more hung over than I had been in a long, long time. I slept past our checkout time, and Joe had to call down and clear it with the front desk.

“Katherine, you’ve got to get up. They’ll charge us for another night.”

I dressed in stale clothes from the day before, washed my face, and packed the breast milk. I wore sunglasses to the front desk, and when the midday sun hit me, I closed my eyes. As Joe took us north, to our home in Conway, I reclined in my seat, feeling the world spin from behind my closed eyes.

Breastfeeding and hangovers, when combined, create massive hunger. My case was no exception to that rule. Joe exited in Mayflower and ordered me a chicken wrap at the Sonic™. I took two bites and put it back in the paper bag. Before he could merge back onto the interstate, I sounded the alarm. Joe pulled over on the shoulder of the entrance ramp; I opened my door and puked.

The girl in the picture in the closet has the freedom of going in any direction she wants to, though she doesn’t yet know it. She’s not serious about anything. She’s not looking out for anyone but herself. She hasn’t thought much about the future. She’s lost hope in the world and in herself, though she does not yet know what that really means. She’s young, and she thinks she’s

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arrived. She thinks oblivion is, in some ways, as good as it gets and that the rise she feels from that pull of vodka is happiness. That her laughter in the face of all situations is her triumph. To her, image isn’t just as good as reality. Image is reality.

I can’t party like I used to, practically or physically. My life demands different things now. Going in any direction is a freedom I no longer have. I have things at stake that the girl in the picture has never seriously thought about. I’m still her, in a way. I still like to go wild and have a good time. Only now, I do that by becoming the tickle monster or playing the “Where’s Carroll?” game. I used to be able to drink anyone under the table. Now, my endurance is channeled into dealing with my teething baby and his damned plastic turtle that sings the counting song when its back is touched. I am inexhaustible in a game of “throw the ball” or “bang the pots together.” I love to repeat sounds for minutes at a time. Like Carroll, I cannot get enough of his favorite board books.

When Joe read me the result of the pregnancy test, I wasn’t prepared to give up who I thought I was. That Katherine wouldn’t willingly be pregnant—she wouldn’t be someone you would want to let babysit. She wouldn’t be a mother. But I changed. I hated it every step of the way, and afterward, I wasn’t sure who I was anymore; party girl or nursing mother? I’m still working on it. I’m not the way I used to be, but I haven’t become the way I’m supposed to be. I haven’t become the way my mother was. And, although I can tell you how I used to be and how I am now, neither of those descriptions is completely

accurate. Neither depicts me as I actually was and am. Identity is elusive. It is hard to pin down what it means to be anyone at all, but the people who know me best know me only in two ways. Joe knows me only as Katherine. Carroll knows me only as Mama.

And whoever that person is, she’s all I need to be.

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They said his name was Santana. I didn’t see that name in him, so I named the big red

boy Montana Red. His nickname is ‘Tana. We had gone down to Amity to pick up a couple of horses to help us start our own unwanted horse rescue operation. They asked us to take him home with us, along with the other two horses we had chosen. He was a nondescript red mustang with big feet, nothing much to look at. We really didn’t need another horse, but we had high hopes as a new equine rescue that we’d have no problem moving all the horses we took in. He was as wild as the West Texas wind and wary of human beings. Little did I know that all my years around horses would come into play as I brought him under saddle, the cowboy way. More on that later, but when that unremarkable horse shed his winter coat the next summer, he turned out to be drop-dead gorgeous. I almost sold him for a hefty sum, but I decided to keep him instead. He was one of our first four rescues; we’ve had as many as sixteen at one time. We are down to eight now.

We started 2nd Chance Equine Rescue of Benton, Arkansas, in December of 2008. In June of 2009,

my wife and I received our non-profit status, which means we don’t pay taxes on feed, we can accept donations, and we can solicit grant money. Naïve to say the least, but we stuck it out, and here we are in November of 2010, still afloat, but struggling to make ends meet with too many rescues to handle. And, as you read this, you are probably wondering why we got into this business.

Those of us who know horses intimately know they are reasoning creatures that return much more than we can give them. They are capable of love and affection; they fight, they play, they dance. They show joy, anger, jealousy, and even sadness.

Horses helped build this country. The most diminutive breeds have lived out their lives in “deep earth” coal mines, while the heftiest still haul timber in Tennessee. They have starred in movies, they have carried us to war, and they have died in our service. They’ve run their hearts out carrying mail on the Pony Express. Winston Churchill wrote: “The outside of a horse, is good for the inside of a man.” Yet, when it comes time

Gentle Solutions for Wild HorsesJim Dawson

Jim Dawson is currently attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and works as a Graduate Assistant at the University Writing Center. He is earning his MA in Professional and Technical writing. His thesis project will be an argument for “natural” hoof care (shoeless) and against conventional shoeing. When he’s not at the university you can probably find him working “with” horses, naturally and gently, polishing his horsemanship skills. In the future, he’d like to teach at a junior college, when he’s not teaching horses how to deal with people problems. He is a trainer certified by legendary horse whisperer, Frank Bell.

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to feed and care for them, many would-be horse owners seem to forget how much horses have meant to us, or they simply don’t know how to care for a large animal. Sadly, many people simply have no conscience, and they ignore the horses until they starve to death, never knowing or considering a horse’s intrinsic value.

The United States (and much of the world) is experiencing an overabundance of horses, mules, burros, and miniature horses, collectively known as equine, due to negligent breeding practices and because the US has banned horse slaughter within our borders. The latest recession has further added to the glut of equine. When well-meaning citizens can no longer afford to feed them, the unwanted equine are sold, given away, turned loose, seized by authorities, starved, abused, shot, or euthanized. In addition, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is systematically removing wild horses, Mustangs, from public lands to make room for cattle grazing and for mining and drilling operations. 36,000 wild horses are in BLM holding pens, awaiting adoption or slaughter. That’s three times the number of horses remaining in the wild. The BLM has a three-strikes-you-are-out policy. They truck these horses in cattle cars around the country, offering them up for adoption for a fee. Horses that are not sold in three consecutive sales go to slaughter beyond US borders.

Many of the Mustangs lucky enough to find homes are extremely wild. For the average horseperson, they are simply too much to handle, and their fate will be neglect, abuse,

starvation and a premature death. Montana was one of these wildest of the wild horses.

Each year there are about 100,000 unwanted horses in the United States, too many for the registered equine rescue and sanctuary groups to handle, according to a recent survey by experts at the University of California, Davis. They found that the 236 registered rescue and sanctuary organizations could only help about 13,400 horses a year (The Horse.Com, 2010)

Eight million horses live in the United States, 13% of which are in relocation at any given time. In 2007, the Unwanted Horse Coalition projected the number of surplus equine to be about 170,000, and that was before the US banned horse slaughter. At that time,

• The U.S. slaughtered approximately 59,000 horses per year.

• 37,000 were exported to Canadian slaughter houses.

• 47,000 were exported to Mexico for slaughter.

• 21,000 were unadopted feral horses enduring hardship in BLM holding pens.

• 9,000 feral horses were in the BLM adoption pipeline.

• The remainder are neglected and/or abused (UHC, 2009).

And this is where we come in, the folks who sacrifice their own living to secure a life for unfortunate horses that have run out of choices.

If we divide the surplus horses by the number of contiguous states in the U.S., we have

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approximately 3,500 unwanted horses per state. Thus, Arkansas has approximately 3,500 unwanted equine (UHC, 2009). Only three 501 (c) (3) non-profit rescue organizations exist in Arkansas. 2nd Chance is one of those three. We knew we could not reduce the glut of horses overnight—alone—but we thought we could serve the equine brought to our attention. We could teach others about the inherent value of horses and about the rewards they can bring to loving, responsible owners. We could retrain the animals to become productive and happy equine.

Owning a rescue carries certain responsibilities, the main one being to rehabilitate the horses we bring in. In order to move horses, I had to have good, friendly riding horses to offer potential adopters. No one wants horses they can’t ride. We soon learned rescued horses are like used cars: there’s a reason the owner got rid of them. It behooved me to rehabilitate them as best I could, as safely as I could, for myself and for the horses. In the beginning, learning to retrain horses was not in my plans, but it was necessary if we wanted to move horses.

This brings us back to Montana, wild horses, and gentle solutions. The old-school cowboys I grew up with taught me to simply “get ‘er done.” We thought little about the effects on the horse. Breaking horses was, in truth, bending them to our will. In order to get them to do our will, it sometimes got violent. I was never violent with Montana, and I managed to get him under saddle, but not safely. He got some rope burns, and I got a broken foot, not to mention the many bruises from kicks, stomps, and head butts. When I “broke” Montana, he nearly broke me. I

was not happy with our relationship and neither was he. I got the job done, but I didn’t gain a friend. Montana, although broken to ride, still doesn’t like me. Using archaic methods, I failed. I will have to start over with him. But how? I knew there had to be a better way to bring horses under saddle. I found it in Frank Bell’s methods. Frank is a “horse whisperer,” and he was the consultant for the movie, The Horse Whisperer.

I got in touch with Frank and started buying his training DVDs and reading the information on his website. We exchanged e-mails, and one day he invited me to one of his clinics, at a reduced rate. The clinic was in Tucson, Arizona, November 7–14, 2010. As I write this, I have been home from that clinic for less than a week. I graduated from Frank Bell’s Gentle Solutions program with his blessing to teach his method and to train horses using his method, and my head is filled with new information about horsemanship.

My trip to Tucson was a life-changing event. I learned a lot about myself and volumes about natural horsemanship and proper horse care. Six students came together with three instructors, including Frank Bell, and we made a difference in the lives of six horses. By the end of the week, Frank had taught us to ride our horses with nothing but a string around their necks. I never would have imagined it could take that little to control a horse. But then I’d never been taught to begin work with a horse from the relationship standpoint.

We bonded with each horse first and foremost each day and won their trust. Then we put them

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through exercises designed to teach safety on the ground and in the saddle, and we finished each day with turns on forehand followed by turns on the haunches, or, as Frank Bell calls it, “ballet in the saddle.” Using Frank Bell’s techniques and theories, and following his steps, I brought a horse from a scared Dude Ranch pony, to the point where he followed me around like a puppy on the final day.

Montana is still young enough to forgive me, and lucky for me, horses live in the moment. Although horses rarely forget, they have a greater capacity to forgive than humans do. He’s going to be my Mustang Ambassador. Due to the sad economic state, we are going to reduce our herd. I may not rescue a lot of horses in the future, but I will try to rescue as many as I can, one horse at a time, as a horseman who has traded the old-school cowboy ways for the modern, natural, gentle approach. Starting this weekend, I am going to try to rekindle my friendship with my buddy ‘Tana and show him what I’ve learned about Gentle Solutions for Wild Horses.

Note: Six months later…Montana has become a friend, a wary friend to be sure, but he’s easier to catch, he seems to enjoy our work together, and I feel that very soon, as I continue to bond with him and to gain an ally, we will become riding “partners.”

RefeRenceSIRS, (2010) http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/

article/0%2C%2Cid=96099%2C00.html (accessed November 24, 2010).

The Horse.Com (2010) http://www.thehorse.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=17070 (accessed October 7, 2010).

UHC, (2009) 2009 Unwanted Horse Survey: Creating Advocates for Responsible Ownership. Unwanted Horse Coalition/ The American Horse Council. Washington DC, 2009 (1-33). www.unwanted horsecoalition.org (http://www.equinewoman.com/ (accessed November 18, 2010).