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Leaves in the Wind

The 1st Annual Anthology of the

Denton Writers League

Published byBanana Oil BooksImprint of Cyberwizard Productions1205 N. Saginaw Boulevard #DPMB 224Saginaw, Texas 76179

Leaves in the WindCopyright © 2009 Cyberwizard ProductionsIndividual stories and poems copyright © 2009 by individual, originating authors

ISBN: 978-1-936021-00-0

Cover art and blowing leaves by Max V. Nimos

Editorial Team: Joni Latham, George Avera, Crystalwizard

Library of Congress Control Number:  2009923683

First Edition: Printed and Bound in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher and the individual authors, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews.

Table of ContentsHide and Seek 1Dare to be Different 11Three Poems 16Ice Dreams 17I Have Forgotten 32The Poetry of Jack Pettie 33Flesh and My Blood 41Lulu-Bell and the One That Got Away 42Sky Glow 46My Eagle 47Another Typical Night 49Invitation 55Old Bone Dominoes 57Lulu-Bell and the Great Bar-B-Q 58Arthur’s Successor 62Run 68Curse of the Wicked Witch 69Rhythm Changes 75Hell of a Way to Go 76Lulu-Bell and the State Fair of Texas 85The Listener 90The House... Just Down the Road 91Littlerock Fantasy 93Moon Wolf 101Scorpion 117The Promised Land 118Mystery of the Woman with the Bottle 120There Was a Crooked Man 123The Ball Pit 124Where Moonlight Cannot Tread 131Chance Encounter 133The Cowboy I Can’t Forget 148Unveiled is the Night 149The Gazebo 152

Introduction

When the Denton Writers League began over 10 years ago, it was group comprised of readers and writers brought together to discuss authors and their stories. Over the years the readers gave way to the writers. Now we are a group of writers coming together to learn how to hone our craft, gain the attention of an editor or publisher and, market our novels once they are published. Our members vary from multi-published to just beginning to put their thoughts on paper.

I wanted to give the members the experience of the whole publishing process, from submitting their work, to choosing cover art, to seeing the finished product and marketing it. This anthology shows the wide range of the genres represented by the writers in our group, from fantasy to horror to real-life.

 I want to thank the members of the Denton Writers League for giving us such wonderful stories and thought provoking poetry. I also want to give a special thanks to Kelly Christiansen, George Avera, and Simon Hal for their invaluable assistance in creating the anthology. I hope you enjoying reading our stories and poetry as much as we have enjoyed writing them for you. Joni LathamPresident, Denton Writers League

Hide and Seek

by Lindsey Williams

It’s odd how the things that stick in the collective consciousness of our great country seem to be the bad things. Things like the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Manson Family murders. Thing like Jonestown, and the explosion of the Challenger. I don’t know why, but we remember the bad things with particular relish, and we love to recall them and rehash them, whether it’s person to person discussion or in the more impersonal guise of documentary films.

When I first heard about the hurricane blasting its way toward the Gulf Coast, the one the Weather Service folks had named Katrina, I had a feeling it would be another one of those barbs that stick in the collective consciousness like a cocklebur in a blanket, and I was right. It’s the images, of course. The scenes of devastation, of trash piled high and bodies under blankets; images of people swooning in diabetic shock and of the lines and lines of stranded people lined up and chanting, “We want help, we want help!” Of course, we had no way of knowing how long the aftermath of that particular disaster might last. Now, years later, it’s still not over.

I had a feeling about that hurricane. I wish my feeling had been wrong. What got taken away from us was an entire culture, an entire way of life that I doubt we will be able to recover in its entirety. In a way, the hurricane took a part of myself when it washed away some of the small and picturesque little towns along Mississippi’s shore. I spent a beautiful two years there as a child, enchanted with every blossoming plant and caroling bird, in love with every smell and sensation in the broad, fecund world. It was an enchanting two years, but it’s not those two years I want to tell about. It’s what happened at the end of them.

A few months after Hurricane Katrina, I went back to the little town I remembered with such love and fondness. I wanted to see what was left and what was gone. Mostly, I wanted to see if the tiny parsonage next to the cemetery where we had lived was still there. I wanted to see the cemetery itself. More than that, though, I wanted to see if folks had started dumping their trash and old appliances back behind the cemetery again. As a child, I had been allowed free range over the parsonage grounds including the cemetery, but I was

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strictly forbidden to go near that half-acre where old mattresses lay like rotting corpses and broken ovens gaped like hungry mouths.

It was the Gateway Baptist Church that hired my Daddy back in 1986. I was eight years old then, and I was sure that the little parsonage beside the cemetery was the absolute neatest place in the entire world. I wanted to stay there forever and ever, and I think Daddy would have been happy to oblige me. It was a tiny little house, not made to hold more than the preacher and his wife, but we didn’t have much in the way of belongings to fill it. Daddy let me have the little room that was supposed to be the preacher’s study for my bedroom. It wasn’t much more than closet-sized, but I pushed the head of my bed right up under the window where the morning sun could stream through and wake me in the early hours.

I loved the view out my bedroom window, too. It overlooked the cemetery. Far from being afraid of cemeteries, as most little girls seemed to be, I was at home in them. This was the third parsonage we’d lived in since I’d been born, and I was as comfortable in a cemetery as most children are in playgrounds. I don’t believe most modern moms would dare let their children play in a cemetery. Heavens, no. What if a headstone fell and broke an arm? Or a leg? Or a skull? And what would the neighbors think of a mother who let her child do something so disrespectful as play among the dead?

I didn’t see it that way, though. In my child’s mind, I saw the dead as lonely and sad and wanting company. It was upon these old and weathered headstones that I learned to read and write. When I got tired of the primers my mother had given me I would read inscriptions on headstones, tracing my fingers over the letters one at a time. Jane So-and-So, beloved of So-and-So, January 16, 1867 - September 28, 1899. God Give Her Wings to Fly. Or, Baby So-and-So, March 18, 1902- March 20, 1902.

This last kind made me shiver a little bit; I couldn’t help but imagine if it had been me. Baby Melton, November 11, 1978- November 13, 1978. Rocked in the Arms of Angels. I still get goose bumps thinking about that. Now, though, I think about how it could have been my own precious baby, now seven years old and no longer anyone’s baby. I think of that most often and sometimes I dream about a little girl who was once someone’s baby, a little girl with corn silk hair and a yellow dress, a little girl who got lost along the way. The one I went back to the storm-torn Gulf Coast of Mississippi to visit.

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Everyone has seen the video footage of the wreckage Katrina left behind, but it’s different when you’re there. For one thing, a video can’t convey the smell of a place, nor the broad and sweeping extent of it. It’s like the difference between looking at a photograph of the Grand Canyon (oh how nice; blah, blah, blah), and looking over the canyon’s very rim, down into the millions of cubic tons of fathomless nothing at all, to the very distant and unimaginable bottom. You know the end must be there somewhere. That’s what it was like all along the Gulf Coast. I kept expecting the trauma to end somewhere, to see order and normality peeking out from behind the wreckage like a beacon.

That never happened. I rented a car and drove from the airport to what was once

a sleepy little town of about three hundred nice folks and a few old grumps. Perhaps it had grown in the twenty or so years since I had last seen it. If it had, all trace of that growth was wiped away like crumbs from a tablecloth by Katrina’s mighty swiping fist. Nothing was the same. Old landmarks were missing; entire neighborhoods were eradicated. The streets had been cleared for the most part, and I didn’t have to dodge much in the way of debris.

I found the place where the house had been mostly by accident, driving up and down the side streets and often stopping to get out and try to reorient myself. I didn’t have a good conscious memory of how to get there, but I remembered the feel of the place. It was a little like trying to navigate from a map glimpsed under three feet of moving water. I couldn’t have found it at all if it hadn’t been for the smashed remains of an old concrete factory, glimpsed through a jungle of kudzu. Of course it hadn’t been smashed the last time I’d seen it, but I knew it was the place where I’d turn left and go over the railroad tracks. And then, about two miles farther on was the place where the church had been. Gone now. And another mile, and I was there.

There had been a matronly oak tree in the front yard. It had a large, twisted lump on its side, where someone had once hung a horseshoe. There had also been a tire swing. Much of the oak was gone, but the enormous, twisting trunk was still there. I knew it was the right onebecause of the lump on its side where someone had once nailed up a horseshoe. And there was the grassless patch about six feet from the ruined trunk where so many generations of bare, dusty feet had pushed off.

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I walked up the cracked and buckled sidewalk to the foundation. It was clean of debris. I looked farther out, and there was the cemetery. I’m not sure why it should have remained and not the house, but it was there nonetheless. I made my way to the first row of headstones. Many were missing and more had fallen. There were a few new headstones. Well, new to me, anyway. They weren’t the ones I wanted, though. I followed the old weedy path to the one I wanted. It was a simple stone. The inscription was simple as well. Ruthanne Weatherford had been my best friend for those two years I had lived here. My huckleberry friend.

I stood there, remembering how we used to play hopscotch and jump-rope, or just walk around making up stories about the people who lay six feet under us. We would make up lives for them, how they had lived and why they had died.

It’s funny, but Ruthanne never would come inside the house with me. I didn’t really think much about that at the time, but I do remember asking her why she always wore the same yellow dress and white pinafore every day. She got mad at me then, and she left, not to return for nearly two weeks. When she did come back around again she acted like she’d never been away at all. I didn’t question her anymore, though. I didn’t want to risk losing my friend again, maybe for good. Also, I remembered what Daddy had taught me about the pride of the poor, and I figured her Mama and Daddy must be too poor to afford more clothes for her.

What I remember most about Ruthanne was how much she loved to play hide and seek. I didn’t like it so much, especially since she had the most fabulous hiding place in the world and I never found her. Except once. I’ll get to that.

She always found me, though. She was a good sport. She never peeked, and she always pretended to have a hard time finding me. But when it was Ruthanne’s turn to hide, sometimes I looked and looked until Mama called me in for bath and prayers and I never found her at all. I remember thinking that she’d probably just gotten tired of waiting for me to find her and had just gone home for the day.

Every evening I told Mama all about Ruthanne and what we played together and the things we talked about. One time, Mama sat down with me with that serious look on her face, and I knew a Lecture was coming. I dreaded the Lectures, but at least I knew I hadn’t done anything deserving punishment that day. At

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least, I hadn’t done anything that she could have seen me doing. But that day Mama hadn’t gotten past her opening line of, “Now Elizabeth, I think it’s time we had us a little talk about something,” when Daddy stuck his head around the doorjamb, startling us both, and snapped, “Doris, leave it alone. She’ll outgrow it in time. For now, what harm’s it doing?” Mama pressed her lips together in a thin line and her eyes, usually the softest gray, went all flinty. Mama wasn’t ever a woman to disobey her husband, however, and I didn’t get a Lecture that day after all. Late that night, though, I heard the dim sounds of their voices through the thin wall between their bedroom and mine. They spoke too low for me to know what they said, but I could tell by the sounds of Mama’s brush clattering onto the vanity and Daddy’s shoe heels clacking into the closet that they were arguing about something. I wept a little that night, thinking whatever it was that Daddy hadn’t wanted Mama to say to me was what they were arguing about. It made me feel squeezed and sinful, and I prayed over and over to Jesus to forgive me for whatever I had done to make them fight.

Ruthanne and I mostly played in the wooded lot behind the parsonage. In the summer we picked huckleberries, and she taught me the lyrics to “Moon River.” We sang it over and over together, my huckleberry friend and I, in the wavering unison of children who have yet to learn self-consciousness. The sleepy drone of bees was our accompaniment on those long, green days. Sometimes I wished Ruthanne was my sister. Other times I pretended that she was my sister.

“I know,” Ruthanne would say. “Let’s play hide and seek. I’ll let you go first.” And most times I would roll my eyes and say something like, “Not again, Ruthanne. You want to play that every day and I can never find you. It’s not fair.”

But I will never in my life, even if I live to be a thousand years old, forget the very last time we played hide and seek together. The time I finally found her.

I took my grownup self past the cemetery to where the old dumping ground had been, just east of the wooded lot. Sure enough, I found a broken-backed sofa with upholstery peeling like bad wallpaper and a stack of bald tires. There was also a refrigerator with the doors removed. Despite the heat, I shivered. Goosebumps prickled across my back and arms like an army of ants.

That long-distant year, in the summer of 1986, the 5

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huckleberries had been especially good. I remember taking a pail with me to bring some home for Mama. I was hoping for huckleberry pancakes the next morning. I found Ruthanne where I usually did, playing along the back edge of the wooded lot where it backed up against a small housing development. I had never asked, but I assumed she lived in one of those little tract houses.

“Hi there, Elizabeth,” Ruthanne said to me. “Pickin’ berries?”

“Yep. Wanna help? You can eat ‘em if you want to.”“Okay.”We picked berries in silence for a while, then I began

humming. Soon Ruthanne joined me, and we hummed all the nursery songs and hymns we could think of. And, of course, we

hummed “Moon River.” “I’m gonna take these in to Mama before lunch time. I’ll

come back out and play with you after I eat. Okay?” I said.“Kay. But could we please play hide and seek before you go

in? I’ll let you find me this time, I promise. You could even peek to see which way I go.” Her voice was wheedling, her eyes pleading.

I sighed, more heavily than I meant to, and said okay. I would play. I hid first, under a big huckleberry bush. I could hear Ruthanne’s voice counting, and if I peered hard enough from between the dense huckleberry leaves, I could just make out Ruthanne’s dust-darkened feet.

“All right, Elizabeth,” she called out. “Ready or not, here I come!” She walked away from my hiding place and I stifled a giggle. Maybe this time she wouldn’t find me and I would win. I imagined her calling out, Okay, Elizabeth! I give up! Come out, come out, wherever you are! Then, I would pop out of the bush and say, Here I am, Ruthanne! And we would both laugh and then it would be her turn to hide.

In the middle of this wonderful daydream, the leaves parted over my head and Ruthanne’s earnest round face, framed with its flaxen pixie-cut hair, appeared in the hole. “There you are,” she said. “My turn.”

As usual. I couldn’t hide my disappointment that she’d found me so easily.

“Remember,” she said. “I’ll let you peek, but just until you get to five. All right?”

“All right,” I said. And I planned to count slowly. “Ready?” 6

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Ruthanne nodded. “Okay. One, two . . .” She took off, the bottoms of her feet flashing in the semi-

gloom of the trees. She was headed straight for the junk pile. “Three, four . . .Hey, Ruthie! I’m not allowed to go in there!

That’s not fair! Ruthanne!” I stopped counting and ran after her. It was no wonder I’d

never found her before, if she’d been hiding in the junk pile all the time! I was beginning to get mad. She ran faster than I did, and it wasn’t long before I lost sight of Ruthanne. I called and called to her but she didn’t come out.

I was just mad enough to disregard the rule against going in the dumping ground. I was risking a spanking and I knew it, but it was well worth it to me if I could finally find Ruthanne’s secret hiding place. I stayed mad for about the first two or three minutes, and after that my anger trickled away, replaced with a strange feeling as I peered about at the junk; it was a feeling that was a combination of curiosity, awe, and disgust. The smell was enormous and foul. There were piles of garbage bags which had burst open to reveal the rotting, maggot-festering remains of people’s lives. There were also discarded chairs, rusting bicycle frames, car parts I couldn’t identify, and cans. So many cans.

I was beginning to feel a little scared. I was barefoot. Broken glass glittered like a mad strew of trumpery jewels from beneath the weeds. I could be cut badly. Or I could find Ruthanne. I hollered again but didn’t expect a reply. I didn’t get one. I picked my way as carefully as I could from bare patch to bare patch across the lot.

Then I saw it, and I felt my stomach knot. It was an old turquoise colored stand-up freezer lying on its back behind a tangle of blackberry briars and young mimosa trees. Its door was closed. Daddy said never to play around old refrigerators or freezers because I could get trapped in one and suffocate.

What if Ruthie was in it? What if she was suffocating? I tiptoed faster. I could feel my heart beginning to pound harder and harder, my blood making a funny whoosh, whoosh noise in my ears with each beat. I came around the mimosas and the blackberries. “Ruthanne?” I called. “Are you in there? Come out, it’s not funny!” I rapped with my knuckles on the pale, powdery surface of the freezer’s big door. It left little chalky moon shapes on my knuckles. I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been in my life.

I steeled my nerves and yanked at the door. It was heavy and 7

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it didn’t move at first. I took a good grip with both hands and pushed up as hard as I could, squeezing my eyes shut. I heard the tortured squeal of rusted hinges and a burst of horribly foul air assaulted me. Then I opened my eyes.

There are some things that are so traumatic that they are difficult to remember clearly after the fact. I suppose that’s why we, as a culture, obsess over the natural disasters and mass deaths, the Hurricane Katrinas and the Jonestowns that happen from time to time. It’s like we’re trying to find a way to remember the moment, the very elusive moment, that the horror became reality for us and fix it in our minds in such a way that we can pin it down. Contain it. Quarantine it, perhaps. If the pain and horror are fixed in one spot, maybe they won’t spread to infect all the other aspects of our lives, and maybe we can continue living from day to day as if each one of us does not owe God a death.

I don’t have a clear memory of what I saw in the freezer. What memory I do have is probably a constructed memory, based on the news reports and accounts of what happened as they became a matter of history. What I think I remember seeing was bones. It was the bones of a little girl, and I knew that because of the yellow dress with the white pinafore that clung to it in dirty rags and tatters. It was Ruthanne’s dress, the one she wore every day.

I think I must have screamed because my throat was raw and my voice was hoarse for the rest of that day and most of the following one. I must have run home too, because my next real memory is of sitting on the toilet and sobbing as Mama washed the soles of my feet and doctored the cuts on them with red Merthiolate. I remember the pain and sorrow on her face, and I remember how cool and gentle her hands felt.

I also remember making what must have been a statement to a tall black policeman. He had a deep, soothing voice which reminded me of Daddy’s “sermon voice.” I doubt I made much sense to him, telling my story as if Ruthanne and I had been playing hide and seek together that very day, even though it was horribly obvious to anyone who looked into that freezer that the little girl in the bottom of it had been dead for years. Perhaps decades.

I don’t know how the police identify dead bodies. I’m sure it has something to do with dental records, DNA samples, and missing persons reports. At least, that’s how it’s done on television and in the mystery novels I sometimes read. However it was done, the body in

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the freezer was identified as that of Ruthanne Weatherford, reported missing in May of 1962. Sixteen years before I was born. She had gone out to play hide and seek with her cousins and had never come home. Both her parents were now dead, her mother of leukemia and her father of the drink soon after. There was an aunt, the mother of the cousins Ruthanne had been playing with, but she was very poor and lived a long way away.

Daddy took up a collection from our tiny congregation. Some of the parishioners remembered when the little girl had gone missing. We bought a simple headstone and had her name engraved on it, and we held a funeral for Ruthanne. We buried her in our cemetery. I cried for days.

I think Mama and Daddy were worried about me for a while there. They could not understand about my friendship with Ruthanne. Their faith and their doctrine and their very livelihood did not allow for Ruthie’s existence. When people died, they went to Heaven or they went to Hell. Period. End of discussion. Daddy was willing to chalk it up to coincidence that my imaginary friend happened to have the same name as the little girl I’d found in the freezer. Mama wanted me to see a counselor, but we didn’t have money to be spending on things like psychology. To Daddy, if the answers couldn’t be found in the Bible, then the questions must be irrelevant, right?

Well, I suppose so. Especially if you’re the pastor of a church with about forty steady members and have a paycheck that wouldn’t buy groceries for a bachelor.

I never came to terms with the fact that my best friend for the better part of a year was the ghost of a little girl who’d died playing hide and seek, but I do understand now why she wanted me to play it with her. She had been hiding for a very, very long time and she wanted to be found.

I looked up from the little headstone, realizing that it was beginning to get dark and that I had been lost in recollection for hours. How long had I been standing here? I looked back at the cracked and buckled concrete slab where the little parsonage had been. It was time to leave, but I wasn’t ready to go.

I never saw Ruthanne again, and that still hurt, even after all these years. Daddy had assured me that she had gone to Heaven, that all little girls go to Heaven when they died, if they believed in Jesus. I don’t know about that. I really don’t. I hope she did, though.

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I looked into the edge of the wooded lot, peering into its evening gloom, still hoping to see a flash of yellow dress. I know that’s selfish, wishing unrest upon the dead, but I can’t help it. Ruthanne’s death is unfinished business to me.

The following morning, I went back to my home in New Mexico. My beautiful home that will never be threatened by hurricanes or volcanoes or tsunamis. I left Mississippi with vague thoughts of taking some of my savings and organizing a rebuilding crew. In the end, though, the emotional task was too great for me. To my shame, what I did instead was make a big donation to Habitat for Humanity and a matching one to the Red Cross. So, in a manner of speaking, I paid my tithe like a good Baptist.

I wonder what Ruthanne might be doing right now, had she lived? She would be fifty-three years old. It’s ironic, but if she’d lived, I never would have met her. If she’d lived, she would most likely be a grandmother by now. A grandmother, just perhaps, teaching her young grandchildren to play hide and seek.

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Dare to be Different

by Jamie Engle

Everyone called my Grandma ‘Grandma.’ In many ways she was your typical Grandma: a great cook who enjoyed crocheting and crafting, weepy at weddings and funerals, involved in her church and the community, and unafraid to share her opinions. Raised in Chicago, she remembered that during the holidays Al Capone tossed turkeys and hams from the back of a pick-up truck to poor families in the neighborhood.

But Grandma wasn’t your typical woman of the time. When most girls learned to harness the power of their looks and homemaking skills, Grandma was on the ball field, aiming to hit one out of the park and drive in the winning run.

In a time where “women were women and men were men,” Grandma was a tomboy, a rare mix of strength and femininity. The second of seven children, she was allowed to indulge her need to cut up and be different; sow her wild oats. Surely she’d fall in line once the right man came along.

Grandpa wasn’t your typical city-bred male. Raised on a farm, he knew how strong women could be - had to be - and he valued that strength. The very things that put off others enchanted him. When told of the time Grandma threw someone over the fence for teasing her uncle, Grandpa saw fierce family loyalty. To him, Grandma’s interest in sports and her athletic ability was an indication of her personal strength. Only someone secure in herself could dare to be different.

So different was he from what her parents expected, Grandma continued to live at home and hid her wedding ring (and marriage) from her family. Finally, Grandpa had enough and came to claim his bride and bring her to his house to make their home. That this Irish White Sox fan earned the love and respect of her very Italian family of diehard Cubs fans gives a glimpse of the kind of person Grandpa was.

After marrying, there was little time for athletics while making a home and raising children. But there was always time to root for the home team. Grandma took real, vocal pleasure in rooting for her Cubs. She’d set her ironing board up in front of the TV so she could alternately cheer and harass her team at the top of her

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voice. I’d say cheer her team to victory, but well, we are talking the Cubs here - victory was rarely the conclusion. Other fans may have switched to the South Side boys, the White Sox, but not Grandma.

Grandma’s team loyalty didn’t end with the Cubs. As we grandkids grew up and played on various sports teams, Grandma would come to the games and cheer us on just as loudly as she did the Cubs. Not only did all the players know Grandma, but all the parents in the stands knew her too. Parents being parents, at first they were a bit uncomfortable with the volume. When I was in the stands with Grandma, I noticed the looks and whispers.

“Can you imagine how her grandchild must feel?” they’d whisper. “Can you imagine how embarrassed they must be?”

The first time I noticed it made me angry.“Dad, they’re laughing at Grandma!” I said.Dad looked over, then shrugged. “Don’t let it bother you,

squirt. They’re just not use to seeing it. Grandma doesn’t bother you, does she?”

“No, but…”“Then don’t let them bother you. Maybe they wish they

could be like that,” he said.“You don’t yell like that, Dad.”He laughed. “With Grandma here, I don’t need to.”In truth, it didn’t occur to us to be embarrassed; that was

just how Grandma was. We’d have been disappointed if she didn’t root for us as enthusiastically as she did her Cubs - after all, we were family. Already the days of absent parents were beginning and we were proud our family was there at every game. Teammates didn’t tease us beyond the usual locker room ribbing. They let us know they thought it was pretty great too.

One time I asked Grandma if the looks and whispers bothered her. “Oh pooh, what do I care what they think? You kids need me.”

That was very true. Before each game, almost everyone checked to be sure Grandma was there. Our teammates counted on Grandma’s enthusiastic support as much as we did. When Grandma was there, the stands were louder. Everyone felt freer to cheer louder and more often. It’d start with our team parents and spread to the opposing team. Grandma set the example. By being herself and not caring what others thought, she gave people the freedom to do the same.

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Grandma took her role as number one fan quite seriously. When she yelled, “Get a homerun for Grandma,” and my brother-in-law did, there was no doubt in her mind he hit the homerun because she asked for it. When she yelled, “Throw a strike for Grandma,” and the pitcher did, there was no doubt in her mind it was just for her. When my sister Shari’s softball team went on the road, they always sent a postcard to their number one fan.

Grandma cheered for everyone, especially those trying hard or under pressure to make the plays. But there was no doubt about which was her grandchild. “That’s my Grandchild,” she’d brag, especially after a good play. The parents would smile and nod, and then do the same thing after their child made a play.

When a reporter and photographer were in the stands at my sister’s game, Grandma made sure the reporter had Shari’s complete background and that the photographer was taking pictures of her granddaughter. To their credit, and to Grandma’s, rather than being put off, they sent her copies of articles and pictures from that game forward. They were as enchanted as my Grandpa with this woman who wasn’t afraid to be herself and loved her family so deeply.

Of course, not everyone was so enchanted. Grandma had no qualms about taking players to task if she thought they were out of line. One team in particular seemed to have more than their share of unsportsmanlike conduct. They were the chief rivals of my brother Scott’s hockey team. Despite Grandma’s best efforts during the season, the team didn’t change their style. Scott’s hockey team ended up playing them in the playoffs.

Tensions were high; the score was tight. A bad call by the referee (at least, bad according to Grandma) afforded this team a penalty shot on our goalie - my brother.

“I can’t bear to look,” she claimed. She couldn’t bear not to look either. She alternately wrung her hands and covered her eyes.

The player started coming down the ice. My brother left the net and started going toward the skater. Grandma was fit to be tied. “What are you doing? Get back in the net!”

But Scott knew what he was doing. He all but tackled the guy while falling on the puck. The player went flying over my brother, stick, skates, and all.

Grandma jumped to her feet, shaking her fist.“Don’t you dare hurt my Grandson!”Oh my. We couldn’t help it; we started cracking up. “You

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tell him Grandma!”Even now, years later, people remember that one. It’s become

a favorite family story because it so captures the essence of Grandma: her intent love of the game, her innate disregard for propriety, and her fierce family loyalty.

Earlier this summer, my daughters and I went to Denver, staying with Shari and her family. When going over our plans for the week, Shari mentioned that she and my brother Dean had their first co-ed roller hockey game of the season. I added it to the schedule.

“Are you sure you want to go?” she asked.“You’re kidding, right? Of course we want to go!”Only a handful of spectators were on hand; many players

came by themselves. The game started. The only sounds heard were the puck hitting the stick, the blades rolling over the rink … and it struck me as totally wrong. A hockey game was going on and there was no cheering. It was unnatural.

“If Grandma were here, it’d be different,” I thought.But she wasn’t. She had passed away in April of the previous

year and could be there only in spirit.I looked around at the other spectators watching the game

in silence. I looked at my daughters, also watching quietly. I looked at the rink. The lines changed and my brother and sister were on the ice.

“Come on Shari! Go Dean!” I shouted. “Nice save goalie! Come on you guys, clear the zone!”

“Mooooom, what are you doing?” I knew what my oldest daughter was going to say, but I

asked anyway. “What?”“Why are you yelling? No one else is,” she said.“Because they always play better when someone’s cheering

for them. Didn’t you cheer for the Avalanche when they were on TV?”

“Well yeah, but you’re the only one yelling. People are looking at you,” she said.

I glanced around again, but all I really saw was she and her sisters listening for my answer.

“Oh pooh, what do I care what they think? We use to cheer for our brothers and sisters all the time when they were kids, why should now be any different? They’ll play better and the team needs it.”

14

Leaves in the Wind