What am I ready to let go of?

  • By Julie Wilder-Sherman

    Well, what am I going to do with all these masks?

    Store-bought.

    Handmade.

    Giants-themed.

    Kitty cats.

    Bejeweled.

    Blue flowers with yellow backgrounds.

    Yellow flowers with blue backgrounds.

    Plain, monochromatic.

    Busy, colorful.

    Cloth mosaic.

    A quilt of masks.

    Wait!

    That’s it.

    A Quilt. Of. Masks.


    Imagine millions of masks sewn together like the AIDS quilt, honoring what we have survived and what we have lost. A memorial, a tribute and dedication to what we have endured.  

    I’m ready to let go of seeing half-faces. Of asking people to repeat themselves. At nodding to those speaking, pretending to understand. At straining to hear the muffled words behind the shield.

    I’m ready to let go of images of cops and robbers. Of old movies with lepers, their faces partially covered. Of images of Isis terrorists with covered faces holding rifles over captives kneeling in front of them. 

    I’m ready to let go of the anger.

    The anger.

    The anger.

    He did this to our nation. You know who I mean, and I won’t say his name. He prolonged it due to his stupidity and ignorance and narcissism and . . .

    But.

    Back to the masks.

    I’m ready to let go and make peace with the memory of the masks. 

    I’ll bundle them up, put them in a bag and wait. 

    Someone will have the fortitude and talent to weave these cloths together and create something beautiful and meaningful out of something so horrific and ugly.

    San Francisco native Julie Wilder- Sherman is a long-time resident of Petaluma, California. She began reading books at an early age, encouraged by her mother, who would allow her to take books to bed when she was as young as two-years- old. Julie would “read” them until she was ready to go to sleep. To this day, Julie reads every night before turning out the lights.

  • By Deb Fenwick

    After fifteen months, it’s time to soar. A hundred, a thousand, millions of voices are calling, inviting us to share in a common song. There’s a brilliant bright light and an invitation to hope after all the darkness—to hope and to imagine possibilities. It’s a resonant call to lift off and soar. And it originates from that other place. 

    It’s a place of community where we remember our interconnectedness. It’s a place where there’s an agreement to work together to make something that transcends what one individual, no matter how magnificent, can do on their own. It’s a place where you work toward something with others, and it takes on its own magic. You can see it in a choir’s chorus or a road crew building a bridge. It’s there as an emergency room team saves a life, and as food pantry volunteers pack boxes. It’s that place where energy is transferred and transmuted as it moves from one heart to another. It’s a place where there’s enough joy to lift a spirit, raise a roof, and change the vibration of the planet, all at once. 

    This new phase can be our song. It’s a second chance. After all the darkness of a global pandemic we squint, almost in disbelief, as we lift our faces toward the light. Yes, we’ve made it. Even if we stumbled through losses no one could predict. Even if, some days, we felt like giving up as we struggled with shades drawn. Now, we can choose to work together to lift ourselves and others higher. Because we’ve traveled through dark times, we reflect and remember. We honor those who didn’t make it by vowing to love more, forgive fully and listen deeply. All we have to do is look and listen because there’s harmony present when we look to the light and listen to the music. Thank goodness for every second chance and every song that makes a heart soar. We’ve made it.

    Writing inspired after listening to “Baba Yetu” sung in Swahili by the Stellenbosch University Choir.

    Deb Fenwick is a Chicago-born writer who currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. After spending nearly thirty years working as an arts educator, school program specialist, youth advocate, and public school administrator, she now finds herself with ample time to read books by her heroes and write every story that was patiently waiting to be told. When she’s not traveling with her heartthrob of a husband or dreaming up wildly impractical adventures with her intrepid, college-age daughter, you’ll find her out in the garden getting muddy with two little pups.   

  • By Kathy Guthormsen

    Vigil

    I hold vigil by the campfire

    Watching dry logs send sparks dancing into the twilight, the west coast version of fireflies

    My prayers winging their way to you

    No more hot tubs under palm trees

    No more drinks with paper umbrellas

    These are distant memories wrapped in protective quilts

    I ask the fire to transform me into smoke that drifts upward

    Tendrils reaching, searching for you

    Forever just out of reach

    I had to let your body go

    But I hold your essence in my still beating heart where I will keep you safe and warm

    As long as I am here

    “Vigil” was created using Prompt #580 on The Write Spot Blog.

    Kathy Guthormsen

    Growing up in Skagit Valley, Washington with its verdant farmland gave Kathy an appreciation for the promise and beauty of nature’s bounty. The Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges and old growth forests offered the magic of things unseen and fostered her fertile imagination. Kathy’s work has been published in The Write Spot: Memories, The Write Spot: Possibilities, The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing, and The Write Spot: Musings and Ravings from a Pandemic Year. All The Write Spot anthologies are available at Amazon.

    Her Halloween story, “Run,” was published in the Petaluma Argus Courier in October 2020.

    When she isn’t writing, Kathy volunteers at the Bird Rescue Center in Santa Rosa, California, working with and presenting resident raptors as part of their education and outreach program. Walking around with a hawk or an owl on her fist is one of her favorite pastimes.

    Kathy lives in northern California with her husband, one psychotic cat, a small flock of demanding chickens, and a pond full of peaceful koi. She maintains a blog, Kathy G Space, where she occasionally posts essays, short stories, and fairy tales.

  • By Camille Sherman

    I glided a knife through an avocado this morning and thought, if I open this avocado and it turns out to be perfect, it’s going to be a great day. I opened my little fortune to see the happiest unblemished green smiling up at me. I ate in front of a vase of peony tulips that have opened so wide they look like lotus flowers, weighty enough to bend the top of the pond, but not enough to break it. I consider the crumbs, dust, and flower petals faintly mapping my floor and relish the open day ahead with which to sweep and wash. A fresh to do list will be poured with a second cup of coffee and the prophecy of my lovely day will continue to unfold its sweet pink petals.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop artistic projects with local artists.

  • By Kathleen Haynie

    Yes, it drives me nuts. They take an English word that has some nuanced meaning for them personally, and they use it to name some untouchable gadget they have invented. And then someone else makes the gadget anew and puts a new name on it. Then it becomes daily language usage.

    She was complaining that her boyfriend didn’t understand her feelings.

    “He doesn’t have enough bandwidth, I guess.”

    That word no longer belongs in Techieville.

    Complement with an “e” gets merged into compliment with an “I” because spell check doesn’t check it. Someone must think highly of me because I am always getting complimentary “one-month free” offers.

    My e-mail gadget is called a program, a file, or a client. My clients usually pay me for my services, but this one does a service for me for free!

    I went to copy some text on my computer to a CD disk. The boxes say rip, export, import, burn, copy. Which is which? Is it a webpage, a site, a platform, or what? 

    And how do I populate a digital screen? If I click “OK,” will it apply it?

    I put my computer desk in my new large bedroom. I had never slept with my laptop before, and did not know that computers, like spiders, are nocturnal creatures. In the middle of the nights, Microsoft updates my windows.

    I hate cleaning my windows. The updates update my task bar so the start icon won’t open and the sound icon doesn’t adjust the sound.

    The techie help support on the phone tells me to fix the problem by first opening the start icon.

    “Oh, that’s right. You can’t do that.”

    Help!

    Kathleen Haynie. This City Girl turned into a Sonoma County Horse Girl, and then retired from decades as a professional in health care. She is now acting out a latent inclination for the dramatic arts as a drama student and cast member of Off the Page Readers Theater. Surprisingly, the journey continues into the newly found delight discovered in written expression. Kathleen felt honored to have her work, What They Did to Alice, performed at the 6th Street Playhouse 2020 Women’s Festival. She has decided that dark chocolate is perfect with a full-bodied red wine.

  • By Camille Sherman

    I’d like to write something charming or insightful or brilliant but the mind is as blank as the page. I scavenge the corners of consciousness, deftly sidestepping the errands and faint reminders threatening to blossom into worry. I search for a road less traveled by, a path in the crevices of my frontal cortex that could lead to my creative promised land. All that comes is the Law & Order theme song.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop projects with local artists.

  • By Jonah Raskin

    My mother always shopped at the A & P in the small town where I grew up. Going there with her was almost as wonderful as going to the Planetarium with its stars and planets in its make-believe night sky, and the Museum of Natural History with its reconstructed dinosaurs. At the A & P I liked the rows and rows of canned goods, and packaged cereals, the smell of the wood floor and the man in the green apron who always helped my mother. I thought of him and the A & P the other day when I went shopping in my own local food market.

    Like the A & P of my boyhood, my local market is small, clean, and tidy. Some of the smells are nearly the same. Walking the aisles, I’m reminded of the smells in the A & P. Before I know it, my boyhood has come back to me, and I’m back in my boyhood on an afternoon shopping adventure with my mother. Indeed, I can remember what she and I bought together: the cans of tuna fish; the half gallon containers of vanilla and chocolate ice cream; and the many products with labels that read “Ann Page” and “Jane Parker”—names as familiar to me as the names of my own aunts.

    The manager of the local market where I shop today reminds me of the man who helped my mother. He smiles, he’s soft-spoken, and he seems like a relic from another age. There isn’t ever a product that he pushes at me, or tells me I have to buy. I like him because he’s never trying to sell me anything at all, whether it’s discounted or not.

    Maybe, too, I like him because he shopped at the A & P with his grandmother when he grew up back East. We weren’t raised in the same town, but we have the A & P in common and we can each describe the stores we knew—which is like describing the same place. Almost every &A & was identical, which was why we liked it. If we went to another town or city, we could walk into the A & P and find what we wanted without having to ask questions, or roam about. Everything about the place was imprinted on our young minds.

    We both have memories of boyhood foods—both store-bought and homemade. We’re both partial to the kinds of foods our grandmothers and our old, old aunts made for us. We both remember the smells in their kitchens, and that we liked to roll out the dough for a pie, peel and slice apples and add brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg that we’d bought at the A & P.

    Just the other day in my local market we were talking about the A & P, and how it was once a strange and mysterious place. We both remembered how we’d learned a long time ago that A & P was the abbreviation for “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.” We’d both also learned a long time ago that the symbol between the “A” and the “P”—the “&” was called an ampersand.

    The manager of my neighborhood market uses ampersands a lot and draws them the way they were drawn in the A & Ps of our boyhood. No one else seems to recognize that particular lettering. It’s something that means a lot to us, something that binds us together, along with our food past and our food present. Then, too, there’s something about knowing the A & P stands for “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” that connects us as though we belong to a secret tribe or clan.

    Of course, the market where I shop today has things that the A & P never had— organic fruits and vegetables, whole grains in bulk, and local produce. It’s a much better store with healthier food, and with much more health and nutrition-savvy employees. Still, I can’t help but feel loyal to the A & P of old and sentimental about it. Not long ago I read that the once “Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” had shrunk from the thousands of stores when I was a boy to just a few hundred today. Maybe like the dinosaur, the A & P will go out of existence. Then all I’ll have will be the memoires of that long-ago time, and the never-to-be-forgotten smells of A & P; nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar, too.

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate my own memories and to enjoy sharing them with friends and family. Once mighty enterprises seem to come and go; memories remain. My friend, the manager of the local market, has moved on to another, bigger store, and while I’m sad to see him go, I remember the stories he told me about food and his childhood. In autumn, he and his grandmother would pick unripe, green tomatoes just before the frost, wrap them in newspaper and put them away in a drawer. At Thanksgiving, they’d remove them, unwrap them and they’d be ripe and red and ready to eat.

    Memories are like those tomatoes. You pick them, store them away, then take them out months and even years later and enjoy them. So, there’s something I think of now as the taste of memory, and I know it can be as nourishing as ripe tomatoes at the height of summer, or in the cold dark days of November. Stores & stories; there’s not much that separates them, and just an ampersand brings them together as it brings together two great oceans in The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

    Originally published in Susan Bono’s Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, Flashpoints 2008.

    Jonah Raskin was born in New York and raised on Long Island. He attended Columbia College and the University of Manchester, England where he received his Ph.D.

    He has taught at Winston-Salem State College, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Sonoma State University (SSU).

    He moved to California in 1975 and began to teach in the English department at SSU in 1981. From 1988 to 2012 he was the chair of the communication studies department at SSU, where he taught media law, reporting, and media marketing. He is now a professor emeritus.

    As a Fulbright Professor, he taught American literature at the University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent. From 1985-2005 he was the book critic for The Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

    He writes for Valley of the Moon magazine, CounterPunch, The Bohemian and The Anderson Valley Advertiser.

    Jonah Raskin is the author of sixteen books, including most recently  Dark Land, Dark Mirror and  Dark Day, Dark Night.

    His other books are:  James McGrath: in A Class By Himself,  Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, and  Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.

    He has published six poetry chapbooks among them  Rock ‘n’ Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation.

  • By Cheryl Moore

    In the many years of a working life, time is too little.

              Too little to be with family and friends

              Too little to pursue creative activities

              Too little to just sit back and enjoy its passage.

    Since retirement there has been time. What have I done with this time?

              Walk to the river

              Scribble in a journal

              Mix up paint on a canvas

              Invent a story from memories

              Settle on the porch with a book and watch the birds at the feeder,

                        crows chasing a hawk high in the sky

              Watch the sun rise and set as it slowly arcs across the sky

              Watch the tide’s ebb and flow pulled by the distant moon

              Watch the blooming and fading of the garden’s flowers

              And the creatures who visit

    Too much time or too little?

              It depends on the day, my energy, my mood and my desire.

    When Cheryl Moore came to California in the early 1960’s, she realized she’d found her home. Moving to Petaluma in the 70’s, she was as close to paradise as she’d ever get. Travel has taken her to Europe and the Middle East. She has written on these memories as well as on the flora and fauna of the local river and her own garden. 

  • By Camille Sherman

    This advice was first shared in a Master Class-style opera workshop where my classmates and I would sing for each other, beginning the long process of working out the kinks in our presentation. The purpose of the vice was to help organize the inner monologue: the running mental news banner that presses into every young performance or audition. 

    Here’s how it goes: standing in front of a dozen peers, preparing to perform the aria you’ve been overthinking all morning, the mind runs wild. Sound good, remember the words, give a compelling performance, impress everyone or face clumsy embarrassment. The music starts and as you stare at a point on the back wall just above the heads of your classmates, your mental tornado flurrying, a thought freezes you into place: what do I do with my hands? Do I move or gesture? You realize as you sing the first lines thaThis advice t you are just standing there, petrified, giving the most uncomfortable and boring performance of your life, and the best thing you can think of to fix it is to take an awkward shuffle forward and maybe raise your arms in some generic, meaningless “singer” gesture, and try to play it off as if everything you’re doing is intentional. Polite applause follows, and then the professor, a veteran opera director, will graciously take you back to the beginning of the piece for a second shot.

    I remember standing there in the crook of the piano, the surreal scene as my professor approached to begin the work. My mind was still racing: the high note was ok. I had some tension in the passaggio, though, and my base of tongue keeps clamping down on my E vowel. The performance was not a catastrophe but I’m glad there weren’t that many people in the room. All of the criticism and comments flowed forth from my own brain before my professor could open his mouth.

    Then the advice came: be more, do less. Try it again, he encouraged me, but don’t worry about what your body or face are doing and don’t worry about how it sounds. Be more, do less.

    This advice came back around throughout my training. Don’t be a singer doing a performance. Be an artist performing. Do less “delivering” of the art through busy gesturing and instead choose to be something that we don’t just see and hear, but we feel. Try to focus on allowing what is in your heart and body to shine out of your face and voice. Over time and experience, the other aspects of performing strengthen and grow under this authenticity.

    Years after that course, after that degree, I sit here in Portland on top of my wealth of elite training. I consider how curious my life is: no gainful employment, an uncertain future in an uncertain industry, a highly flexible day to day with little structure and no guarantees. Why am I not panicking? Why do I not fret, morning to night, on what to do. What do I do with my time? What do I do with my talent? What do I do with my brain, body, skills? These questions brought me back to my 19-year-old self, worrying every moment about what to do, on stage and off. I sit back now as a professional artist and I answer my own questions: I am being.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop artistic projects with local artists.