Behind A Still Face

Each parfait glass sits empty, lined up with a spoon still resting inside. Maybe the guests even licked the spoons, but they scraped the insides clean of the pudding.

A few of these folks became tired of sitting or they became cramped and thought standing might redistribute air. Perhaps finishing dessert gave an excuse to move away from a conversation. It appears one bald headed man saw an opportunity to move closer to someone with youthful attributes. In posing for the picture, drawing his arm around the back of her chair looks fatherly. She is not his daughter though.

Right above and in back of her, a woman pushes herself into a little corner. Her still face almost seems practiced.

A priest with his roman collar sits farther back. A number of people have gathered close to him. But the woman with a small black hat in front of him seems to know she has a stately bearing; she knows she is still attractive. Behind A Still Face is available at my amazon author page

Blessed Virgins

The churches, schools, and homes of my Catholic youth overflow with the imagery of a virgin mother. The young mother stands with her bare feet suppressing a serpent that encircles a globe.

In many of the pictures, a halo, sometimes multiple halos encircle the head and face of a young, almost adolescent looking girl whose hands are folded or out stretched as she looks down or up. The artist invariably implies a heaven floats above.

The statue on the top of my bookshelf glowed in the dark for a few minutes after I turned off the light. I won it in fifth grade in a spelling bee. Did I throw it away in high school? Maybe I waited until I packed my meager belongings in a cardboard trunk as I readied to go to college. My mother might have not noticed it in the pile of other faded treasures. I can’t remember. In fifth grade though, a slightly radioactive statue of the Blessed Virgin served as an ample prize for good spelling.

Not for a good number of years would I discover the more graphic definition of virginity.

This last fall, my wife and I walked casually along 5th Avenue in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. In the front window of a second hand shop specializing in discarded icons of any and all cultures, we saw a statue of Mary. I immediately saw the snake, and then my wife bent closer and pointed at the missing hand.

A little tag attached to the base had been defaced, but I could read the inscription, “Our Lady of Grace.” I whispered in slight correction, “The Blessed Virgin.”

I did not choose naïveté in 1957. The Catholic culture swaddled me in it. Blessed Virgins is available at my amazon author page

Hurting God

More than a few acquaintances think it odd that I carry affection for my great aunts on my father’s side of the family. But I even brought my little children to their old house near the Wisconsin River. My oldest daughter recalls their swollen ankles. I recall the house dresses. When my brothers and I were becoming young men, we still sat at their table for tea and a baked sweet.

I looked at them then and saw how they looked at us and most often at my oldest brother who possessed an abundance of good looks. Actually, he was beautiful.

It was then I saw their beauty. Their steady gaze admitted to bountiful youth and passion. The oldest sister revealed she was not finished with desire, swollen ankles or not. I fictionalized  her spirit  and weaved a tale she might have enjoyed living. Hurting God is available at my amazon author page.

Special Note: I am especially grateful for my graphic artist, Dawn Gibbs, who brings our ideas to reality.

A Vow of Disobedience

These men stand in a wheat field in western Minnesota during the Great Depression. Although my dad, the young fellow stripped to the waist with his hands on his hips, talked of hard times, he spoke with affection about the hot sun, his fellow workers, the life he led as a tramp.

Most always owning some old guitar, he learned the songs of Vernon Dalhart and Jimmy Rogers. He might play at an improvised dance or simply for and with his companions. Years later he would pick up my guitar, sit next to me on my bed, and sing those old tunes in a muted voice accompanied by his light strum.

He told me how much he loved those years he spent on the tramp. Not really a confidence, he talked of how he loved the girl back home, now my mother working in the old farm kitchen below us. More intimately, and with a voice that warned me to be discreet, he described the hard feelings he held toward his father, my grandfather. I suspect he never forgave his father for the indifference he showed his wife, my grandmother. Regardless, my dad told a couple of stories about my grandpa that said more of his character and the depth of his intellect. Fictionalized, these characters struggle over fundamental issues of morality and church dogma.

A Vow of Disobedience is available at my amazon author page.

An Extreme Unction

For most Catholic school children, the Stations of the Cross were to be endured during Lent. I could not list or describe them other than what I believe was the thirteenth of the fourteen stations. Mother Mary holds her crucified son across her lap. The sculptor has carved the wound from the spear into his side. Centuries later, nuns told us that if the actual process of crucifixion did not kill Jesus, this lancing certainly was mortal. The Crown of Thorns slice into Jesus’s forehead leaving droplets or trails of blood. The nail holes in his hands make me jerk with pain.

I don’t know how any man–I doubt if the Catholic Church ever commissioned a woman sculptor to create the reliefs for the Stations of the Cross–can chisel the face of the Mother of Jesus adequately to show her pain and suffering. Only a mother can know it and she would never be able to chip away at wood or mold brass to find it. Nata, the central character and narrator of An Extreme Unction, might well understand. She’s a mother who anguishes for her sons, errant and wayward, who stray from their Catholic upbringing.

The picture on the cover of An Extreme Unction has been placed in the public domain by the Cloisters, a museum operated by the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York City. A 15th century sculptor worked to darken the skin under the lids of Mary’s eyes. Some type of serenity holds her face together, but wood over six centuries old stays inert. She can’t wail, she can’t scream, she can’t curse god the father or the Romans for the gruesome pain inflicted on her son.

As Nata enters what is death, her body seems inert, but not her mind, not her thoughts. An Extreme Unction is available at my amazon author page.

Corrine

Had I invented the term, panamorism? It does not appear in any of dictionaries I own, and I even own a copy of the Oxford-English Dictionary. I used the word for a working title for awhile. But two minutes into a Google query, and least anyone ascribe the most liberal internet definition, I selected Corrine.

Just who could intertwine fingers after drawing close on a warm and sunny day, a day that required straw hats? Just two friends still chums after high school? Two sisters sharing a trust since childhood? Two young women about to take traditional adult roles?

I know that road, the dense trees that grow to the edge, and the uncultured and untamed banks of the Wisconsin River that are steps away. This is fertile ground for love of many sorts. Most lovers will follow the cultural codes, but what happens if all the codes don’t line up for you? What happens if you want love so much? Corrine is available at my amazon author page.

Holy Boy

Skeptics of organized religion scrutinize most any gesture at exceptional holiness. Experiences might lead one to doubt the saints addressed in the litanies that are chanted in the cathedrals.

A late 15th century sculptor posed St. Sebastian with a scant loin cloth. The sensuality is innate in the art piece owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Offered in archives open for public domain, the digital image can be edited easily to just the head of the saint to emphasize the strong sinews of his neck and the fixated eyes.

In the cover for Holy Boy, a woman keeps the image of the head in the center of her eyes. He requires attention not for the ecstasy the sculptor translated into statuary, but from a severe skepticism she gained somehow and somewhere. Holy Boy is available at my amazon author page.