See, what had happened was …

“Those people went up,” Mama said, “but they didn’t come down.”

I heard my great-grandmother speak but didn’t really pay attention. The night before, a freezing January wind had blown through and had chilled our house to around 40 degrees inside; I was busy trying to find warmth for my bedridden great-grandmother. When my mom had left for work, she’d called me from college across town to come and sit with Mama. The heat wasn’t working because the oil had run out the night before, Mother had to work – of course I would stay.

“Maybe stay just until the oil man comes,” Mother said. “If you get the fire going, Mama might stay in bed until I get home.”

We didn’t have central heat; that was something that had come along after our house had been built and we couldn’t afford to add it, so we used an old oil heater that stood guard in the middle of the house. The unit, with a metal top that burned you and  mesh work on the front to keep fingers away from the even more dangerous middle, had a knob at the bottom to open the flow of oil from the tank and a lever at the top to control the speed of the flow to the stove’s inside. On the side, a mesh door with a latch opened to the middle well, which had yet another door that hid the vat of oozing oil, soot and flames. A wide, corrugated pipe connected to the chimney, taking smoke outside.

We lit it by hand. Mama would  roll a long stretch of yesterday’s newspaper, scratch wooden matches against a box and ignite the paper. The tighter the roll, the slower the burn, and the more time for lighting the oozing oil rivulets. She would drop it into the vat. Five, ten minutes later, when we were sure the fire had caught, we plugged in the blower. The area around the stove grew toasty; the bedrooms, farther away, kept a chill. The floors of the uninsulated house never warmed; if you dared to walk in bare feet, you tempted cold the way Medusa tempted a glimpse.

My feet hit the hardwoods a few times each winter and the cold gnawed all the way to my knees.

I didn’t know any better, when I was small. Cold hardwoods and freezing feet were part of life in the winter.

“They went up, but they didn’t come down.” Mama gave me a child’s gaze. Damn Alzheimer’s.

I continued to tuck covers around her. The wind had subsided. The floors creaked, the only sound besides my steps, her words,  our breathing.

“You know it,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” We had learned to agree as much as possible; it avoided temper tantrums.

But her insistence nagged. What was she talking about? No telling. Alzheimer’s had settled into her brain and had begun its suction of logic, memory, reason. I thought about the first time we realized there was a problem. I was 15, and she had gotten lost on her way home. She’d walked everywhere, all the time. The supermarket, post office and her senior center were within two miles, and she visited each daily until that day – equally cold and unforgiving – a kind woman brought her home.

“She was at the mall,” the woman had said. Six miles away.

I heard the bump and gong-like sound of the oil tanker filling the drums outside.

“The oil men are here,” I told Mama. She nodded, blinked. Again, the child’s stare.

Minutes later, I turned the stove lever to high let the oil flow quickly. I rolled and lit newspaper, and dropped it into the well, praying it would catch. It did.

I returned to the kitchen, flipped the oven to “broil,” put a pot of soup on the stovetop and turned on a game show. As the soup warmed and the oven fought to heat the room, I realized CBS news had cut in with a breaking report.

The space shuttle Challenger had gone up, a beautiful arch into a crystalline blue sky.

And something went wrong.

January 28, 1986, and weeks before the house felt warm again.

Call me a voyeur.

I spend a lot of time watching people and trying to figure them out. For years, I sat in a newsroom and watched. I didn’t write full time for money back then, but I paid attention to nuance. The hubs watches doors and scans for shady characters, hidden weapons, undercover cops and escape routes. I study and stare and try to figure what’s going on behind the scenes.

So it’s a small jump to see I’ve always been somewhat on the fringe of things, a wallflower, and as I age, it’s become a good place to live, but it wasn’t always such. For a long time, I stayed over to the side because I was unhappy and figured everybody else was happier. My friends who had married parents and not a procession of boyfriends for mom, happier. The people who went out for brunch on Sundays, happier. The girls who could get their hair to feather just so, happier.

I drove the streets of my town, looking at houses and at the seemingly warm lighting behind the windows, wondering what went on in the homes. They all appeared cozy and safe. I learned then to distinguish between cool lighting and warm lighting, something that drives me to this day to test and replace with OCD lightbulbs and light fixtures. The warmer the lighting in the house, the happier the inhabitants, right?

I figured then that if we lived in one of those homes with the warm lighting, everything would be better. We would have heat that came from vents in the floors, and not from an oil-laden contraption that died once a winter and left us in the cold and that worked only in the immediate area and not in my back bedroom. We would laugh at dinner, tossing our heads back to roar with laughter, rather than eyeing each other with distrust and anger, or burying ourselves in books so we didn’t have to talk.

If we lived in those homes, I would have the perfect little tush because that’s what those houses made – not the derierre that I tried for years to eliminate.

People in those homes didn’t spend a summer reading headlines about Grandma’s manslaughter charges, or Thanksgiving and Christmas at the state prison. Their grandparents lived in a cottage that had the perfect amount of snow in the yard, the right types of chairs, a perpetual plate of non-caloric cookies on the table.

They didn’t hide from their great-grandma’s tirades, didn’t cringe and bury themselves in the back of the closets and listen to her plan, out loud, a fitting punishment, or beg her to stay when she threatened to die or simply leave home. They didn’t call the police on their family because the arguing had gotten so bad.

But now, more than ever, I realize that theory was so, so wrong, that the perfection was often my misinterpretation of fact, that because humans lived in those houses, and not iRobots, they, too, lay open to life and its unpredictable ways.

They, too, struggled with fears of abandonment. They, too, hid from parents and their fury. They, too, wished for a hug that was meaningful and not for show. They binged and purged. They shot up. Had sex too soon. Fought. Abused pills. They were beaten, bullied.  They wanted different bodies. Better skin. Or they really did have great lives and homes, made good decisions, lived in the glow. Or somewhere, usually, between the extremes. The difference in their lives and mine was only in the details.

In retrospect, what would I have changed?

I had it better than many and realize that now. A mom who, between bipolar episodes, saw to it that I became bilingual in French and English, had ballet lessons, music lessons, summer trips to see relatives. She let me, as a fourth-grade kid, drive the car when we visited cousins in the country. She encouraged questions about faith and didn’t judge anybody else. Eventually, there was a Grandpa who loved me and Grandma; he married her the day she got out of prison and they stayed married for almost 20 years. I had godparents and aunts, real uncles and cousins, and immense freedom, and a family that loved to tell me how cute my shape was and didn’t I want another slice of pie? And I know I don’t want to go to prison.

It’s not to say that everybody was unhappy. But it is worth saying that many people struggled through much and lived to tell the story. The difference in their lives and mine – in the details.

Granddaddy knew.

Granddaddy Simpson wasn’t my natural grandfather. Grandma was good at marrying, and even though Granddaddy had loved Grandma as a young person, they’d each married other people, raised families, and met up again later in life, years after Grandma had stopped chasing Liz Taylor’s title of most married.

Of all the grandfathers, he was The Man, and the only person I ever called Grandaddy.

Granddaddy loved cooking. A cook in the Navy during WWII, he knew how to prepare food on deadline, for large groups, for fancy soirees and down-home dinners. But he loved, LOVED cooking for us, and he loved making sweet potato pie for us. He had wanted grandchildren for years, somebody to bake for and cook with, somebody to keep him company in the kitchen, on rides to the old family farm, on trips to the country church for all-day Sunday revival. And during revival, when we spent the lunch hour outside at picnic tables, he’d top off lunches of cold fried chicken, potato salad, tea and biscuits with a huge sweet potato pie.

Granddaddy eyeballed everything and measured nothing. He knew when a recipe was right, remembered each list of ingredients, and never, ever wrote down anything. When I first made spaghetti, he tasted it and told me to add a tiny dollop of beef fat to the sauce. I did. It tasted better. I haven’t ever forgotten that direction.

One year at Thanksgiving, I asked Granddaddy to bake a pumpkin pie instead of a sweet potato pie. He laughed at me. “Why do you want a pumpkin pie? It won’t taste the same.” But I insisted, and he baked one.

For me, raised on sweet potato – custard, pie, casserole and just plain baked – pumpkin was the worst thing ever. I sat at the table, afraid somebody would force me to eat the whole piece of pie, but Granddaddy slid the plate over to his spot and picked up his fork. He winked at me. Nothing else was said. I’m certain the pie was as good as anything you’d get at a fancy dessert place, but he’d cemented my love of the sweet potato.

His recipe for sweet potato pie was simple. Get about 7, 8 fresh sweet potatoes from good Carolina blackjack dirt. Cook ‘em down – either bake them or boil them. Granddaddy baked his; my great-grandmom boiled hers. I prefer baked. Peel them and mash them up in a bowl. Get out the mixer and blend with a stick of softened butter, some sugar, a little nutmeg, a few eggs (three, four, depends on the size of the potatoes) and cinnamon, a sprinkle of salt, and the condensed milk. Using a mixer gets the strings out. Add more milk for a custardy pie, less for a firmer pie. Add a tiny bit of baking powder for fluffiness. Or not.

Lay out the pie crust in a greased, floured pan, and prick it with a fork (roll it, prick it). Pour the sweet potato mixture into the crust, and bake at 400 until it looks right. Serve with coffee and eat in the warm, quiet kitchen, beside the old iron stove and away from the fancy crowd in the living room.

Granddaddy passed away in 2001. I don’t often attempt to bake his pies very often, even though my younger kid loves baking. She doesn’t know it yet, but tomorrow, we are going to visit cousins in McConnells, and I’m bringing home some sweet potatoes.

Sweet Penn State students, listen up: This is Mama talking.

I hope you realize that this is going to be the biggest lesson you take from school. It is partly about getting the whole story – and we don’t have the whole story yet – and partly about being decent human beings. It is about protecting the ones who need it, and it is about doing what’s right – no matter how hard or unpopular “right” might be. It is about emotions and life, choices and expectations.

It has taken me days to write this because I’ve been going from web site to TV station to iPad app to newspaper, just so I could be sure your sisters, who are news junkies and will not stay away from current events, had their questions answered about what’s going on up there and what they should expect from adults who are supposed to protect them (including their parents). And the news keeps coming.

Let’s pause for a moment and say this: nobody has been proven guilty. These are charges, which means people are accused. Incorrect accusations ruin lives. So can silence.

Have you read the accusations in the newspapers? Use that ABC news app on your iPad and call up some stories. Find out that a seemingly caring, committed coach allegedly stalked, primed, seduced – SEDUCED – children. Find out that he allegedly used his non-profit to find kids. Find out that the reports say he took them for rides and caressed their thighs while in the car. If this is true, he will go to jail.

I was worried about you Wednesday night. You were so upset, and I wanted to know what EXACTLY prodded you to push over a TV news van (worth about $300,000).

Was it the fact that children were reportedly stalked, lured, and raped?

Was it the fact that a grandfatherly man had the power to do more, but for some reason didn’t, according to reports? Was it the general “somebody else will take care of it” attitude that seemed to be pervasive before the meltdown?

Was it the fact that institutional avoidance and high-dollar entertainment, along with a state law that doesn’t require direct reporting of child abuse, seemed to take disgusting precedence over common sense, integrity and humanity?

Was it the fact that everybody who did any kind of reporting, telling, accusing thought they had done what they were “supposed” to do?

I guess you didn’t stop to think until Friday night, when you and your friends showed up at a candlelight vigil for abuse victims, right? And then you all decided to wear blue to the game to show solidarity with abuse victims?

When did it hit you that it’s not about anything that takes place in the Saturday sunshine? And have you figured out that it will take more than wearing blue for one day to move this mountain? Yes, it’s a start, and I’m so proud of you, but you can’t stop here. I’m not saying you have to change majors from environmental science to social work or give up your dream of hiking in Peru. But you do have to consider how, when you are a young person outside of a college setting, you will handle dirty situations. You will face them. What will you do?

By the way, have you read any part of the official paperwork? Do so. Call me when you finish throwing up.

And, dear offspring of mine, you don’t have to be parents to be angry at abusers. No, you don’t need to have children to be furious. You need only to have been a child at some point in your life. And because you still are children, the pure evil of these alleged acts doesn’t anger or frighten all of you the way it does people my age. But know this: plenty of non-parents are in line with a baseball bat and a blanket, waiting for revenge on abusers.

So, this is why the board made the decision to fire the Penn State president and JoePa. When you are the boss, and you might be one day, YOU take the fall for the bad.

By the way, the words “slap, slap” have been mentioned as sounds that people heard during the alleged incidents. If you are in a sexual situation against your will and the words “slap, slap” can be applied, you, my sweets, are not having fun. If you can apply that last sentence to any part of your life, you have been raped and you need to tell somebody. Imagine being 10, 12, 16 and this happening to you. Imagine. If you see it happening, you need to tell. No, don’t put it out of your minds. THINK about it.

Lemme tell you something: You don’t get to be my age without dropping the ball. I’ve failed in many areas. Disappointed in many. I will fail again and disappoint again. But I TRY not to fail. Now it appears that many people dropped a ball that should have been simple to carry. Somebody should have kept talking and telling until somebody listened. And I’m betting that for years, tucked in the back of his brain, each one of those somebodies was thinking “I should’ve done more.”

You wonder why I don’t like scary movies? Because life has real monsters, and my worst fear is that one of them will get one of you.

Remember that. And remember these lessons. They are the most important ones you will have.

As sometimes happens with divorce, the kids and the parents don’t or can’t reconcile until there’s a lot of water under the bridge. The long-suffering hubby (LSF) and his Pops were like that, not speaking for decades, but by the time we were married, they had formed a very shaky truce, which surprised me on LSF’s part. Pops was excited to know that we were having a baby when he found out we were pregnant. It’s not speaking ill of the dead when I say he made some nasty choices over the years, especially during and after the divorce; it’s speaking the truth. I’m still surprised that LSF learned to stay in the same room with him. But Pops always was pleased to see us, however rare it was.

Pops also seemed ill each time we saw him and eventually was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He constantly traveled back and forth from South Carolina to North Carolina to Baltimore, I think looking for some thread that would hold him in this life. He had a new girlfriend who loved him and urged him to make amends with the family who would still speak to him, with his friends he had wronged, and with himself. He went through treatment, eventually wasting from a tall, slim man to a gaunt, bent person who struggled to walk and stand and hold a cigarette. They tell me that he once had been a big, broad person, huge-shouldered and burly, like LSF and his tree-trunk brothers, but when I knew Pops, he was thin. He always wore brown clothes that seemed to have found him by mistake. He looked like a representation and not a true form. We worried. I prayed.

Pops traveled that road to Baltimore for the last time when Alex was a month old. We sent him pictures of her. He died before he met her, when she was four months old.

When she was about 15 months old and I was pregnant with the Mack Attack, LSF had to work an ice storm. We are used to his working ice/snow/hurricanes/heat, but this one worried me. It was the first time I’d ever NOT been able to drive in the ice, and he was out there driving a live truck. Alex and I stayed home, alternately watching the snow and icy rain out the window. I was tired and big and not in any mood to be stuck inside and afraid and I was still slightly unsure about being alone with the offspring. My back hurt. My feet hurt. All I wanted was a break and for LSF to come home.

But then Alex started laughing at … nothing. Giggling, she rolled around on the floor, gazed at something that I couldn’t see, and she’d double up in laughter again, as though somebody had tickled her.

Then she sat up and started babbling to … nothing.

Something caught the corner of my eye. It was tall, lanky and brown. It stayed in my periphery but Alex seemed to focus directly on it.

It moved. She squealed and ran down the hall, came back and laughed and ran toward the shadow, which remained in my periphery. I turned my head, but the shadow moved to the left. Alex ran toward it. I turned again, trying to get a good look, but it jumped to the other side of my vision. Alex ran the other way, following it.

I shrank into the corner of the couch, and the shadow settled into the corner of the room, perched against the doorjamb or against the wall, leaning as though it had no strength to truly stand. Alex plopped down into her Elmo chair, staring outside at the snow and ice. She occasionally nodded and laughed. She eventually wandered to her room and gathered some books and her Pink Bear, came back and made a huge deal about introducing Pink Bear to the shadow in the corner. She talked and listened.

Baffled and nervous, I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The shadow followed me. When I came back, the shadow moved back to lean in the corner.

“You’re welcome to sit down,” I said. It came closer to the edge of the couch while Alex toddled over to grab for my piping-hot tea. “NO!” I said it more harshly than necessary. She got angry and went for it again, and I thumped her little fingers. She melted into tears.

The shadow disappeared. Alex kept crying; I felt like a jerk. I gathered her into a hug, apologized for thumping her, and explained that the tea was hot and she could’ve been burned. She calmed after a while, but the shadow didn’t come back.

Finally – and I felt stupid doing this – but finally I called out: “I’m sorry I thumped her. I won’t do it again.”

The shadow reappeared. Alex climbed off my lap and went back to laughing, reading, talking and watching the snow.

Shadow person stayed all afternoon. I let it know when I had to do a diaper change, and it very nicely gave Alex some privacy. It leaned against the kitchen door while I made dinner. It stayed by the window most of the time, I guess watching Alex watch the snow.

Toward seven, Alex looked at the front door, raised her hand and waved. “Bye bye!” she said. The shadow left my vision. The apartment felt empty.

A minute later, LSF called. “I’m almost home,” he said. “Y’all OK?”

I think the shadow of Pops was sad that he was going to miss out on Alex and the coming baby, that he felt he owed it to LSF to look after us for a while, that he wanted to both give and receive some familial comfort. It makes me ill to think about his last days here.

I’m sorry this story has to be a ghost story. It makes me wonder, however, how many other souls are out there, trying to right wrongs, trying to make amends, and trying to do what should’ve been done.

Somebody well-meaning and apparently rich keeps Facebooking me to take yoga retreats. A retreat is fine. But I can no more afford a retreat to Cancun, Punta Cana, Puerto Rico or any place that requires a plane trip over ocean water than I can justify a year’s membership to the Crazy Horse down in Myrtle. Nor can I justify it to the spouse. “See, I gotta leave town – no, baby, I gotta leave the COUNTRY – to find my true potential in crow. Like you need to leave the house on Thursdays to find your true vodka tonic.” That argument might actually work. Hmm. Hold on.

Nope, didn’t work. So we po’ recession-burned yoga students must find our light somewhere closer to home. My top three choices:

The Elks Lodge: Any Elks Lodge in any town is guaranteed to be 1)small and 2)rentable 3)hot. Seriously, you cannot walk into an Elks Lodge and not start sweating; it is impossible. So if you’re doing a hot yoga retreat, you can leave the heaters at home. The fact that the Elks’ dances typically pack 850 people into a space the size of a college dorm room doesn’t mean yoga students have to cram their mats in. The dance floor, usually a gleaming grain of southern pine heartwood, is perfect for 20 people doing any version of warrior.

Big Mama’s house: Big Mama lives down by the elementary school you used to go to. You walked past her house every day with your snot-nosed cohorts and she yelled at you from the door. “I know you ain’t walking past my house and not gonna stop and speak.” Big Mama prayed for you constantly because she knew you were hoodlum potential and needed help. She kept plastric (yes, plastric) covers on her furniture but she would let you do anything you wanted as long as you respected her space, so if you and your hoodlum-potential crew wanted to build a 10-foot-tall dirt mountain in her yard and carve roads into the side and pour water and sawdust into the mound just to see what would happen, she didn’t care – as long as you didn’t mess up her furniture and y’all weren’t in the streets with the true hoodlums and riffraff. If you and your friends wanted to bake a cake for somebody’s Daddy’s birthday, she’d help you because said Daddy is a good man, lord knows, and he works four jobs and that man needs a day off, a cake and a prayer. So now that you’re grown and hopefully have escaped the fate of being a hoodlum forever, if you say you want to bring 20 non-hoodlum friends over for a retreat, she’s fine with it.

Your play cousin’s house. Your play cousin is usually somebody kin to a person your Mama went to school with and comes over when your Mama and her friends get together. The play cousin is better than a real cousin because the family secrets/issues don’t get in the way of the friendship and the play cousin is too afraid of your Mama to cause trouble when she visits (unlike real cousins). During childhood, the play cousin is at your house either during the week or on the weekends, and you’re at her house during the other times. Your Mama just went on and fed her and bought her clothes because she was always around. She helped you pack for college, came to your homecoming games, set you up with the cute guy when you visited her at her college, helped you stash your liquor, forged your Mama’s name on report cards. She drove the rental car backwards all the way from Columbia to Myrtle Beach because it helped you save on mileage. She will not hold your hair when you are vomiting back up 12 vodka tonics, but she will give you four Tylenols the next morning while telling you how dumb you looked while trying to walk in the five-inch heels you wore to the club. She will take the couch and let you sleep in her bed when you are grown, married, pregnant and mad at your man. She will help you hide the bat you used to smash said man’s crazy ex-girlfriend’s windshield. She will drive the kids to school while you are serving your jail time. She is there for you, girl. Whatchu need? Plow in the living room? She’ll hold the baby for you.

My mom, a classic hoarder, kept all my elementary, middle and high school report cards in a big binder. She also kept my shots records, my ballet recital programs, a few pictures of the embarrassing ballet costumes and some of the napkins that Billy Dee Williams used to wipe his mouth during the filming of some movie down in Chester.

“One day,” she said with a deep, prophetic, Moses-bringing-down-the-commandments voice, “you can show these to your children.”

This weekend, I hauled out the book and presented it to them (mistake 1), certain they’d be honored to be offspring of a musician/ballerina/scout/French-speaking Baptist (mistake 2). They laughed at my first ballet photos (awkward with nasty shoes) and ooohed over my last ones (graceful with feathers and nice slippers). But they ignored the other good stuff and honed in on my report cards. They noted I made A’s in everything but math. Then they focused on the behavior part.

Back then, report cards had a grading system of A, S and U. A – prepare for sorority parties. S – prepare for shop classes, which was an insult back then, and U – Who the hell are you kidding? Go home and start over, girl. There also was a grid with boxes for behavior in general, attitude, cooperation, courtesy, self-control and study habits, which also used the A/S/U scale along with a system of checks. A – teacher’s pet. S – get some bail money ready because the teenage years will be rough. U – hellbent for jail and starring roles in Britney Spears songs about criminals.

When I was kid, I thought I had done a stellar job because a lot of my boxes were checked, but Mom finally set me straight. If nothing was checked, you didn’t have a problem. If the teacher checked a slot, then you needed to work on that area.

Ohhh…

I had not been a courteous, respectful, quiet little self-starter. I was a lippy, out-of-control hell-raiser who cheerfully, effectively, promptly and readily fought authority and rules at every turn and at the top of my voice.

Some of the comments: “needs to keep her mind on her seatwork.” “she still talks too much.” “she still needs to work on her behavior.” “sure to make a U in conduct.” Making a U meant you failed; an S meant you were just  doing ok. That teacher, 3rd grade, Ms. Daisy McDuffie, gave me an S—-. She had hope, bless her heart.

After all the time I’d spent in the Catholic School naughty corner staring at the crucifix, after the times I’d been sent to find my own switch, after all the welts from the belt strap – why was anybody surprised about my school behavior?

“What was wrong with you?” my younger kid asked. “That was just sad. Why couldn’t you just pay attention?”

I thought about it. What WAS wrong? Was I bored? Confused? Starved for attention? Just plain BAD? Face it. I was bad. I was the kid that very few parents wanted to see coming. I wasn’t horrible, just defiant. Always asking WHY? Didn’t care who I offended. At church meeting, I interrupted once to ask “WHY?” and got nasty stares and a pinch from my great-grandma for being insubordinate. After I wrecked my car with a friend in it (in high school), I told the friend’s dad, an Army officer, to step up and get his own son from band practice. When another friend’s parents told me my skirt was too short, I asked them why they were looking. I played with firearms. I raced cars. I cut class.

I worried every year up until college that THIS YEAR would be the one Santa threw in the towel.

The kids are still laughing, and it’s actually nice to have this part of my past in the open, even if it’s cold revenge for my Mom. We can discuss it with logic – when they stop laughing. And when they get lippy/resentful/defiant/bad/etc, I’ll add notes to their permanent records and patiently wait for grandchildren.

www.joespoolhall.blog.com

Our old friends from Joe’s Pool Hall have reopened the doors and are back to their antics. Don’t you like that word, “antic?” It gives a respectable air, rather private-schoolish feel to infamous and continuous stuff that gets people sent to the principal’s office, the nun’s naughty corner or up the street to borrow a switch from Aunt NeeNee. In my neighborhood, folks who perform “antics” are referred to as “thugs.” Folks who convince people to perform antics FOR them are called “pimps.” We have a few of each.

Long story short – I wrote Joe’s Pool Hall originally in the early 2000s. Yes, I’m that old. Yes, I know you’re just being nice. I’m updating some of the stories, so it’s taking a while to get them all typed in and edited. There are 11 posted out of about 40. The characters talked all the way through my two years of clinical depression; when the depression lifted, the characters slowly quieted. I felt, during this period, like an awful mom and horrible wife. Joe’s somehow helped me sort through the crud in my brain. I see a lot of life themes running through the pool hall: mental illness, anger, religion and spirituality, rivalries, abuse, addiction, love, acceptance, friendship.

My good friend Chris Tina took up writing missives to the folks at Joe’s. She posts as Cora Lee Jessup and Miss Hyacinth, both of the grand town of Pontiac, S.C.

I’m not sure where the story line goes. It ended for me because of different reasons, but the characters have remained. The long-suffering husband has suggested that perhaps a play, a book with chapters devoted to each character, or a longer book wrapped around a single story line, could be the routes to explore. I don’t know.

I’m just happy to have Joe resurrected.

I was a relatively new yoga student when my then-teacher announced, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do in this class. If you want to come here and practice savasana the whole time, that’s fine.”

Really? I must’ve looked confused, because she cocked her head at me and said “question?”

“No, no…” I was shy back then. “I get it.”

It wasn’t true. I didn’t get it. We’d paid for this class, and it was an exercise class –right? – so shouldn’t we expect to do some things that we didn’t want to do but would be good for us in the long run? Like studying Latin? Like 100 backhand repeats on the tennis court? Like eating spinach? Or like kissing your Aunt NeeNee, the well-meaning aunt with the vice-like hands who would grab your chin and turn your head from side to side and grunt “you look JUST like your daddy, minus the beard.” The spinach would make things, well, come out OK and kissing Aunt NeeNee got you a crispy $5 from Pops to buy Band-aids to cover up the bruises she accidentally left. The Latin – I’ve heard it helps with the SAT, but you can’t prove it here. My backhand is solid, however.

Besides, Linda was the teacher. Good kids do what the teacher says. If the teacher says OK, lie flat on the ground and try to walk your feet up the wall until you’re leaning upside down like a ladder (which she eventually asked us to do), I was supposed to attempt it. Participation counted, right? What if there was some sort of yoga permanent record that future teachers could see? “Dartinia didn’t participate in the inversions today. Her growth will suffer if she doesn’t make an effort.” It would be like seventh grade all over again, where the math teacher greeted me at her door and said “I’ve heard about you.”

But the day after my first half-marathon kinda changed things in yoga class.

Everything hurt. It hurt to move; it hurt to not move. It was agony to sit in a moving car. It hurt to do anything but chew, but chewing was impossible because it hurt to get to the kitchen and then it hurt to lift food. The kids offered to squeeze toothpaste into my mouth. My biggest hike had been eight miles, which didn’t compute with me that it was five point one miles less than needed until I hit mile, oh, ten, and the only reason I kept going then was pride and the fact that this nine-year-old kid was neck-and-neck with my group and sneering at us and there was no way the little minion would see us drop.

(I’ve since learned that yogis aren’t competitive or apt to call children minions, even if they are.)

All I could think was how much I wanted to hit the yoga mat, but at class, I could barely unroll the mat. Child’s pose pushed me to tears. Trying to get out of child’s pose made me groan and flop face down, nose smushed into the mat, and weep. Linda rushed over. “What on earth is wrong with you?” she asked.

I inhaled the mat’s rubber odor. “I did a half-marathon yesterday,” I muttered, sniffling and wincing.

She patted my back. “What do you need to do?”

“Nothing.” I needed to sit this one out.

“Then do that.”

“OK.” I tried to sniffle without moving.I tried to breathe as deeply as possible, focusing getting as much oxygen into my body as possible, and then focusing on getting just as much out of my lungs. I thought about the whole 13.1 miles, then stopped thinking about anything but the breathing. Listened to Linda teach for a while, then quit listening as I breathed and imagined myself healthy and fit, creative and happy. Then I quit my mental wanderings and let my angry body begin to recover from the abuse.

And a class-long savasana finally made sense.

On September 11, 2001, I drove into town and work alone. Troy had taken the day-care drive and had the kids on the way to school.

I was alone with the quiet. I didn’t get much time with any kind of silence back then. Two small kids, a job at a newspaper – what was silence? I sipped a coffee and smiled at the clearest Carolina blue sky, marveling at the skyline and the new Hearst Tower.

I hit Church Street and began listening to the Tom Joyner Morning Show, where they talked about a plane hitting one of the towers. “Not funny,” I thought.

Disgusted, I switched stations. They reported the same thing.

***

Inside the newsroom, the handful of journalists already there huddled at the TVs, silent as they watched the news reports.

Uptown eventually evacuated. The banks, coffeehouses, restaurants cleared out as we ran a special newspaper edition. By the time I left the paper that afternoon, the roads were clear as Christmas Eve and the city, silent.

Today, while we watched the remembrance ceremonies, the kids asked questions. We have not hidden any details from them; they typically beat us to the paper box, anyway, even back then.

One of the firefighters talked about how oddly quiet it was for a few moments at Ground Zero, in the rubble and fumes, smoke and ash, before the second tower collapsed. Quiet enough for a lone security guard to stand in the dust and call for somebody, anybody, to speak, make some kind of sound, send some kind of sign, so rescuers could help.

***

On Sunday, Paul Simon sang “The Sound of Silence.”

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.