​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​            
            Expectation of moments in tangible form were always present when a roll of film was dropped off to be developed.  It often seemed as if too much time had elapsed from first to completion of thirty-six pictures.  Sometimes I’d actually just take a snapshot of ‘anything’ to finish; then the photo shop could turn out items my hands could feel, eyes could note blurry-or- okay-or perfect.
            Print film vanished and digital was too different for me, the granddaughter of a photographer who carried his cumbersome equipment and had a darkroom where swishes and odors filled the area that turned blank paper into permanent faces.  How might I preserve a loved one’s life as it is happening without a shutter’s click?
            When my third grandchild was born, he was the first who lived in the same small town and I’d be able to watch grow up and not merely make a visit for an event, as happens with planned travel.  My imaginary ‘shutter’ started with sleep-away summer camp; real mail.  Yes, there were often the sentences about the rain, or a swim contest, disliking mandatory archery, enjoying paddling a canoe, but occasionally there were words with feelings of loneliness or delight.  A discarded shoe box, without noticing handwriting and postage stamps, signalled time passing as envelopes stacked. 
            Middle school is often the most disliked part of formal education.  Even from a wooden cabin near a quiet lake, concerns for those classes came by post.  I began to copy the boy’s words from his stationery to my computer and filed them; I also began to type my letters to him so I had a copy.  Time.  Place.  The file was plumping up.
            By the time he began his university education, e-mail was a reality and I knew I was the holder of a life-as-it-is-happening, and that eventual gift to him would be one only I might do as our current society has few pages written in cursive of personal expression.  Would a child born today even be able to read a yellowed hand-written note when postage was a penny on a postcard? 
            Since I taught both high school English and Art, and later, when offspring grown, taught college English Composition, I was asked to clarify poetry, themes and plots of fiction, Shakespeare’s prose, confusion with philosophic readings.  He did not know his words would be a chronology.  I saved my sentences along with his, and each back-and-forth with dates in order had me notice how his language skills, perception, emotions had gone from boy to man.  
            The Bachelor’s Degree had the flare common to all of them, and I sat and thought about the letter he’d sent when he began his sophomore year: ‘everyone looks so young to me’.  That would possibly be a life-phrase now but kept quite secret from others.  And I remembered the twenty-six page paper on Kant's principle of humanity written in his senior year of college and how enlarged his world had become since high school’s commencement. 
            As I made certain the page-order was correct, I paused when I read what I’d sent Sept. 21, 2005    “Do NOT get discouraged in anything at school. Call me or Papa for help, or just to listen to you. Never-ever feel you disappoint anyone; you have only to continue to learn as that will enrich your life. A grade is not the same thing as having learned something. I think you understand that; some people learn for a test, get a good grade, and promptly forget what they studied. I know that as a teacher. You remember, and can recall, and can use what you learn, and that is so impressive.”  He was thirteen.  Boy/Man.    
            I printed the single-spaced pages, took them to a shop to be bound.  This was not a gift for graduation, but a personal thank you for sharing and trusting me with his thoughts and feelings for so many years.  And, for him?
             
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​Hudson’s Bay Company.  A heavy white wool blanket with a color stripe seemed to be a signature warming those beneath the cover.  My exposed coil springs with a mattress on top, and solid red maple headboard/footboard, was only without it during summer months.  Nothing was sturdier nor held in heat like that blanket.  Even when ‘modern’ box springs replaced exposed metal coils, and a bed appeared more ‘finished’ with a sleeker look, the Canadian-made cover remained. 
Since 2013, Hudson’s Bay has owned New York City’s Saks Fifth Avenue.  It may own that store which opened in 1924 with facades of brick, limestone, and cast stone, but, for me, I ‘see’ my bed blanket. But stores, themselves, trigger memories.  
The escalator was modern with its metal separators, unlike the wooden clacking of Macy’s at Herald Square in New York.  B. Altman department store fronted Fifth Avenue at 34th Street and had a restaurant where one could walk in alone, be seated with others, and an unwritten part of the experience was diners talked with one another during the brief meal as if the seaters were friends.  The southern decor was transporting to an experience of mansions and quiet elegance.  I didn’t know then, early 1950's, I’d actually spend a couple of years in Tennessee and find out about life behind those “Gone With the Wind” magical columns and grand landscapes.  Often a table of books was the first thing I saw as I exited the Charleston Gardens. I opened many covers reading the dedications.
I never ate at Lord and Taylor’s The Bird Cage; I had a pet canary during girlhood and my idea of a birdcage didn’t include a restaurant. 
One summer, during undergradschool, I worked at Simplicity Pattern Company.  My lunch break was too brief to walk to Altman’s so it was a quick diner when I was fortunate to get a leather-covered, round, backless swivel-stool.  Minus n available seat, I simply took out the brown bag containing a sandwich and soda and went back to my workplace.  I was happy to be allowed to work for two months, and from my $30.50 a week take-home pay I always saved 50-cents for roses bought at a kiosk near the Long Island Railroad which was inside the grand Penn Station.  Weekly, I carried flowers on the train, walking the several blocks from the depot to my house, and presented them to my mother.  Oh how I thought I was so grown up and got the temporary job on my own; later I learned my dad knew people at that pattern company and that’s why I really was hired for such a brief time.  In those years, sewing lines on patterns were actually drawn by hand; a bin of curved or straight sheets of plastic that had cut-outs to trace lines evenly spaced were held and a worker simply placed that correctly on a pattern, then pushed a pencil-like point through every line.  I realized my co-workers would be doing this for their careers, while I was going on to grad school and whatever I chose.  Opportunity, I learned, was not equal.
Walking after work down to Penn Station, I’d pass Herald Square behind Macy’s, and enjoy the pigeons by the statues that ‘moved’ and rang bells signaling time.  The motion fascinated me, and, being young, the pigeons didn’t seem dirty.
In 1953, open-top double decker busses that ran from Jackson Heights in Queens to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had ceased operations.  I was glad I’d had a chance to experience going from Flushing Main Street’s bus garage to Jackson Heights only to be able to sit atop and have my hair blown by breeze enroute to the city.  My mother always shook her head with disbelief as the Long Island Railroad was only 22 minutes, or I could take the Q-28 bus to Main Street and get the subway to 34th Street in Manhattan. Before air conditioning, what could be more adventurous than the upper deck of a bus that had no roof!  But that vanished.  Eventually so did many specific places from girlhood.  And my father’s life, at age 45, vanished in 1954.
My commute to Teachers College, Columbia University, for grad school was at night.  Alone at 116th Street’s subway platform, I wondered if I’d catch the 11pm Port Washington Long Island Railroad train or if I’d have to take the subway to Flushing, then a bus, then the walk knowing my widow-mother would be waiting up until she heard my key in the latch.  Why hadn’t I thought to find out that grad school classes were at night!  Thoughts were still more at the concept of death being real and not abstract.  No one sold flowers at that hour, nor, I guess, would I have indulged in the expense as my course load was by the credit and expensive for my mother.  I was mindful of that although she continued to figure out how to provide for her three daughters and we didn’t see the juggling that enabled it.
Charleston Gardens.  After marrying a med student who was attending a university in Tennessee, I left New York.  The south looked, in places, like the restaurant’s murals, but it was distressing coming from a northern upbringing to see segregation and I hadn’t realized until my first county-wide teachers’ conference that I was teaching high school at an all-white building.  I was to sit in the front of a bus.  I was to use a public drinking fountain only for whites.  This was not the romanticized B. Altman view I’d so loved.  This, as death, and stores closing, and busses with open tops disappearing, Trolley’s removed from Flushing Main Street, and eventually Penn Station becoming Madison Square Garden instead of elegant, was more beginnings of ‘real life’.  
I read in WSJ, The Wall Street Journal’s Magazine, that was delivered January 19, 2019, that Saks Fifth Avenue will open a restaurant. (Pg. 107, by Joshua Levine)  I live 400 miles away so won’t see it, nor did I experience its installation of escalators years ago.  Even my girlhood skyline has been altered and I’d heard one cannot even peek in and look at the Rainbow Room restaurant in Rockefeller Center because of security; I’d asked a grandchild to snap a picture during a visit to NY but she was turned away.  But I liked the Journal’s triggering memories for me, and imagine even with a Paris-theme that some people eating at Saks may have an experience that stays inside in a special place.   

​Madam Love aka Emma has a problem with her work she doesn’t have customers enough to pay her bills and her “business” is at risk.  She is a fortune teller precisely a matchmaker.  Emma tells her clients what to do to find their soulmate. One radio emission turns her attention and angers her that she makes a call. Lance Parker a bestselling author of Your Soulmate Doesn’t Exist is live on the radio and explains why he doesn’t believe in soulmates.  When Madam Love opposes him live in the air. The radio hostess arranges the challenge Madam Love has two weeks to find Lance’s soul mate.
But, he doesn’t believe that soul mate exists how it could work? Emma thinks that he is an arrogant and impossible man how she could find him someone who will fall in love with him?
OMG! This is the funniest and entertaining romantic comedy that I ever read. I admit this is the first book from Rich Amooi that I’ve read and I promise it won’t be the last. This book caught me till the first page:
“I want a man who looks like Gerard Butler, has deep pockets like Bill Gates, cooks like the Barefoot Contessa, and has the fashion sensibilities of a gay man.”
 It’s about two diametric different persons fall in love, lies and finding a soul mate to someone that doesn’t believe in it.  I felt so strongly for this story, read it in one breathe and laugh out loud.
“Yes, but I want to make sure you know how important it is for my man to have very large feet. You know what they say about men with big feet, right?”
Emma knew exactly what they said, but she wasn’t going there. “It’s hard for them to find shoes in their size?”
Brenda’s high-pitched laugh was like the clucking cry of a goose in the middle of an egg-laying marathon, but the psychotic euphoria was short-lived when she choked on her own saliva.
When Lance accepts a challenge it starts being roller coasting funny.
“Well, darling… I’m really not sure which garbage I belong in, you know, me being a fortune teller and all. I just want to make sure I place myself in the proper receptacle since tomorrow is pickup day in my neighborhood.”
Peter covered his face with the palms of his hands.
“Do I go in the regular garbage or in the recycle bin?” Madam Love said.”Compost, maybe? Unless you think I’m radioactive.”
Emma is a sweet and smart woman, I like it how she talks and deals with the stressful situation.
Also, I like Lance personality which it seems like an arrogant man without a sense of love and serendipity in the first place, but then it shows that he is a believer.
I recommend this book to everyone who wants fast page tuners, laugh-out-loud reads, and happy ends.
 

​My wife and I linger over breakfast coffee in the Peruvian resort dining room. On the lawn, outside, framed by red, yellow and blue flowers, two llamas graze. Adding to this post card scene, a native woman, wearing a round multi-colored hat, a blue shoulder cloth and knee-length skirt decorated in red, green and orange geometric patterns, marches past. She places a small bundle beneath a Eucalyptus tree, walks to the far end of a nearby corn field, and using a short-handled hoe, begins to chop weeds. I glance at my watch. Eight o’clock.
 
Nancy and I are at Hotel Rio Sagarado in Sacred Valley, Peru, acclimating ourselves to the high altitude before climbing Machu Piccu. Nancy is as detailed in trip planning as in her career. The past year has been a momentous one. After forty years as a secondary educator – seventeen as a class room teacher, twenty as a high school principal, three as director of curriculum, she retired. In response to numerous requests for her input and counsel, and to “stay involved” she agreed to limited consulting assignments to school districts in California.
When her ninety-one-year old mother’s health quickly deteriorated, Nancy supervised the sale of the long-time family residence – where her younger brother lived with their mother - ramrodded the purchase and remodeling of an apartment for her mom in a luxury retirement home, expertly juggling furniture moving, airplane flights, and doctor’s appointments to relocate her Mom successfully. We didn’t cancel our long-planned South American trip, as Nancy needed the time away to unwind.
 
This morning in bed, tears filling her soft brown eyes, Nancy said, “I feel guilty. Mom’s been in her apartment for only four days and here I am a thousands of miles away. What if she needs me? She doesn’t know a soul.”
I tried to reassure her. “I understand. But, this vacation was planned before your Mom’s needs surfaced. You’ve done an incredible job moving her in a short time. Enjoy the moment. Your mom’s fine.”
 
After breakfast we returned to our room, the soothing burble of the beautiful Urubamba River just outside our suite, relaxing us both. I read “R is for Revenge,” while Nancy used her I-Phone to purchase a bedroom table for her mother, answered client e-mails and checked our reservations for the evening. The sun is warm on my shoulders. The scent of fresh-mowed grass fills the air. Before I doze off, I see the Incan woman in the corn field, her bright red and yellow hat bobbing in the sun, her hoe flashing. 
 
Mid-morning, Nancy leaves for her massage, returning just before noon. She showers and changes into shorts and blouse. We stroll beneath tall trees to the air-conditioned dining room for a lunch of fruit salad, lobster roll and iced tea, served by four overly-attentive Incan waitresses.
 
Nancy’s meal is interrupted twice by her cell phone. We watch the Peruvian lady walk from the corn field to the Eucalyptus tree unwrap her package and eat. Finished, she quickly returns to the field. Nancy asks, “Does she work all day?”
 
Before I can answer, Nancy’s phone lights up again. She glances at Caller ID. “I have to take this.” 
 
Back in our room, I read while Nancy pays bills and answers emails. The front desk calls. Our driver for the tour of Ollantaytambo’s textile factories, will arrive in fifteen minutes. While we wait, Nancy orders new towels for her mother. When we climb in the van for our tour, we see the Incan woman’s hoe flashing in the sun. Nancy whispers, “Won’t she ever quit?” 
 
After our tour, we enjoy coffee and chocolates on the veranda. I was impressed by the primitive weaving methods the textile workers used to produce beautiful sarapes, blankets and other goods. Nancy watched attentively but resisted all sales talks. “Why,” I ask. 
 
“I’ll buy from a particular weaver when we get to Lima. See this?” A web site blooms on her phone. “Isn’t her work gorgeous? Plus, she’s guaranteed to receive payment for what I buy, since she’s part of the Indigenous Network system.” That’s my bride. Details. Details.   
 
The setting sun turns the hillsides purple in contrast to the white as coconut ripples in the Urubamba River. The Incan lady’s hat still bobs in the corn field. Nancy looks up from her phone. “Today’s a holiday in the States. Labor Day.”
 
I look at my watch. Almost six o’clock. “Two ladies I know celebrated it by working all day.”
                                                               The End

One-Eyed Man and Other Stories by Geoffrey Craig, Golden Antelope Press, 300 pgs, ISBN: 978-1-936135-57-8. $21.95, paperback.
 

Geoffrey Craig’s new short story collection contains twenty-one stories, all of them an insightful look into the human condition. The book is divided into five sections, each with four to five stories. Most concern the lives of minorities—Latino and African-American, and one segment, The Carmichael stories, which have previously been published in Calliope, are about the descendants of Swedish immigrants. The one standalone story, “Morocco,” lingered a long while after I finished it.
            The Blue Heron Lake stories are about a community of Latino workers within the general population and how one, Pedro Sanchez, rises to prominence and becomes the mayor. When, in the story “Upheaval,” he suggests making Blue Heron Lake a sanctuary city, all hell breaks loose. After various threats and a “no” vote by the Council, Pedro thinks seriously about resigning and moving away, but then with the help of his wife, decides to stay and fight another day for what he believes is right.
            The Brandon Forsythe segment is about a young African-American man who is wrongly convicted of a crime. When he is released from prison, he can’t find work and ends up in a drug ring, eventually rising to the position of drug lord. Then he has an epiphany and after the death of his beloved wife from cancer, slowly transitions into a legitimate business person and philanthropist.
            The Snake stories are about a struggling black family in South Carolina and follow them over a period of twenty years, from 1919 to 1933. It is the period of the KKK, lynching and burning, and Craig deftly reveals how hard it is to survive amid a “Whites Only” policy.
            In the story, “Lying in Wait,” the narrator and his wife, Mary, find one of their children bitten by a snake; they rush him into town to be treated—and are refused service at the hospital. They are told to take the boy to the “Negro” part of town where there “might be” a doctor. Unfortunately, the boy dies just as they reach the “Negro” doctor’s office and the narrator compares his child’s death to the lynching of his brother James shortly after he returned from Europe after World War I.
            “Morocco” is about two women, bunkmates on a freighter to Morocco. One woman, Abigail, has lost her entire family in a terrible house fire; the other, Tracy, is a hip young woman, who likes to smoke marijuana, but is grieving over the end of her last relationship, of which there have been many and never successful. The two women, a generation apart, at first don’t understand each other, but eventually lift the veils of their own disappointments and sorrows and end up visiting Morocco together, where they develop a bond after rescuing a little boy being carried out to sea.
            In these stories, Geoffrey Craig has woven a rich tapestry of narrative and dialogue, to create three-dimensional characters, who reveal their strengths, weaknesses, their triumphs and failures, each within its own historical capsule of place and time. This collection spotlights Craig’s growing talents as a writer and the depths of his understanding of the American character. 
            Highly recommended. 
 
 
 
Golden Antelope Press provided a complimentary copy of this collection for review.
​

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​“That’s the last straw” was a statement of disgust during childhood and when I heard it I realized I really was in trouble.
I’d heard the expressions ‘clutch at straws’ and that was sort-of a desperate thing.  In summer camp we drew straws for unpleasant tasks and the person who drew the ‘short straw’ got stuck with the job.  A teacher spoke of a ‘straw in the wind’ when talking about poetry as she thought the phrase had such tone but was not something I could relate to.  Then there was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ but not growing up in a region with camels I never quite understood that since camels were supposed to carry weight on their backs like the donkeys I’d learned about toting items up steep mountains.
There were hats made of straw, and baskets.  I was confused about a fruit called the strawberry as it neither looked nor felt like straw.  And a friend had a birthmark that was called strawberry but it was just a red blotch she was born with.
Straw was not hay; I had a house party and dragged bales of hay into my girlhood house’s  finished basement as all the friends invited also rode horses and were familiar with hay.  Of course I didn’t clean up the mess but left it for my mother to do.  
I had my appendix out when hospitals had glass straws that were bent so a bedridden patient didn’t have to sit up to sip fluid.  I tried to get such after discharge but they were only made for medical issues I was told. Since I had sinus trouble before antihistamines or the like were discovered, I really had a home use for them but still couldn’t buy.  When, in chemistry class, I learned how neon signs were made and bent glass all by myself, I thought about that hospital straw; by then, there were paper ones my mom got in a package.
 “Marvin C. Stone patented the modern drinking straw, made of paper, in 1888", I Googled this.  Hm. My married name is Stone.  Well, they couldn’t have been very good as my appendix was removed in the 20th century and the medical facility only had bendy-glass ones.  And my husband’s dad probably had some long European name before it was changed to something as simple as Stone so I guess this inventor was not related.
Summer camp.  A folksong:  
The prettiest girl
(The prettiest girl)
I ever saw
(I ever saw)
Was sippin' ci-
(Was sippin' ci-)
Der through a straw,
(Der through a straw,)
The prettiest girl I ever saw
Was sippin' cider through a straw. 
Well, a drinking straw has taken on a different connotation, and is now a political issue.  My supermarket shelves sport hard paper that neither bends, nor holds its shape, and, as one sips up cold fluid, the paper begins to break-down causing droplets of paper in the mouth.  Those, wearing plastic to look like leather belts, shoes of the same, pushing strollers with seats made of plastic and a sitting toddler in plastic pull-up pants after being trained from plastic disposable diapers, getting soda or milk housed in plastic containers.... you get the idea.... are feeling like environmentalists since the plastic straws have been either banned or will be.
Some people need to use straws because of disability.  The biodegradable just won’t work well enough.  Oh, well, discrimination isn’t a concern for medical issues but just for university quotas, or housing, or jobs, or ‘whatever’ but definitely not for need, and need is not ‘want’. Maybe the folk song can change lyrics to ‘not sippin cider through a straw’ as that’ll still be catchy but politically correct!