Tag: April

Yours for Ninety-Nine Cents

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It’s time to dig out the loose change that’s fallen between your couch cushions and put it to good use! From April 23 to 30, you can download a Kindle copy of my latest book, I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree, for just ninety-nine cents on Amazon.

Set against the rugged landscape of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, my anthology of thirty-nine essays (some whimsical, some serious) explores the themes of family, community, authenticity, creativity, and uncertainty before and during COVID-19.

Here’s what one reader had to say: “Focusing on stories from his recent relocation as a full-time Arizona resident, Mark mines his past for insights into his new life, reflects deeper into the after-effects of surviving a health crisis, and even includes poems and works of short fiction. A great new collection from a distinctive contemporary voice.”

Happy reading!

Star of the Show

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Hawks soar in a stiff breeze, palm leaves flutter, bougainvilleas bloom, and palo verde trees dab the blue sky in tufts of green and yellow.

Out-performing them all, under the shade of a fig tree, an unassuming amaryllis reappears outdoors in April. She is the star of the show.

They Pitch Horseshoes, Don’t They?

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Late yesterday afternoon–a mid-April throwback Monday squeezed in before the Sonoran heat arrives in full force–I met John and Len, my full-time, sixty-something friends and part-time Polynesian Paradise neighbors, at the north edge of our community. We played horseshoes.

Two sandy, part-sun-part-shade horseshoe pits (spaced about fifty feet apart) have existed in our condo complex since the early 1960s. In 2021, residents and guests seldom use them. It’s more common for folks to walk by and not think twice about the horseshoe pits and their history on the way to their mailboxes.

That didn’t stop John, Len, and me from reclaiming the space and recapturing a practice that our fathers and grandfathers enjoyed more frequently in the twentieth century. The primitive, low-stress gaming experience was just my speed: slow, nostalgic and gentlemanly. It was a light-hearted, jovial hour of tossing, joking, clinking, clanking, and male bonding. (By the way, John won on Monday. He came from behind with a well-tossed ringer. Len and I will survive. We will live to throw horseshoes another day.)

Anyway, the activity rekindled a memory I wrote about and published in 2017 in a story titled They Pitch Horseshoes, Don’t They? from Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator, my book of Missouri recollections from the 1960s and 70s. It’s available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

What follows are excerpts. The setting? Babler State Park and the rolling rural countryside thirty miles west of St. Louis in October 1961. While the men were throwing horseshoes that day, I discovered a primitive-and-glassy nirvana: marbles.

***

Clink clank clink. Clink clank clink. It was the sound of metal on metal. The men in our family–Dad, Uncle Ralph and Uncle Harry–were hammering stakes into two sand pits about fifty feet apart. They sure do like to fling horseshoes, don’t they, I thought. Within minutes, they were tossing the U-shaped irons from one end to the other, hoping to catch the right angle and rack up a ringer …

On this particular occasion, while the women in our family unfurled the tablecloth and unpacked the meat for grilling, and the men settled into their game and passed cold bottles of Falstaff between throws, I wandered down a path to investigate the picnic area. That’s when I found a vacant campsite nearby and an abandoned plastic bag of multi-colored glass marbles wedged into a gap between the flat rocks of a stone bench.

In my visual memory, this was a To Kill a Mockingbird moment. You know, like when Jem and Scout found Boo Radley’s toys and trinkets buried in the trunk of a big ole tree. In hindsight, I suppose Boo had nothing to do with my glassy discovery. Another child had simply and accidentally lost his or her marbles. For some period of minutes, hours, days or weeks, these multi-faceted marbles were no one’s. They were lost in an unassigned gaming galaxy. But in the universe of fair play, it was Finders Keepers. This treasure was mine …

When I pulled Dad away from his pitching and showed him what I had found, his smiled doubled instantly. It felt like we had discovered a whole new language mined from an archeological dig … In a flash, Dad and my uncles suspended their horseshoe tossing, reverted to their childhoods, and surrounded me with explanations and names for the different marbles–many of them laced with swirls of colorful strands …

Marbles became my forever home of circular undisrupted creative possibilities. After our 1961 picnic was over and the sun began to set, we snuffed out the campfire, folded up the red gingham tablecloth, and packed away our picnic basket. I stepped up into the back seat of our Plymouth with my new marbles in tow.

Over the coming weeks and months, Dad pitched more horseshoes at the farm of Ed and Ollie Puetz near Gray Summit, Missouri, where we picnicked with family and friends and I watched the men drink another round of brews and play the game they loved.

Meanwhile, I added marbles to my glassy collection: aggies (made of agate) swirling with various ribbon patterns inside, tigers (clear with orange-yellow stripes), opaques (milky green, blue, and gray marbles) and cat’s eyes (they look like what they sound like).

All of my marbles became a creative extension of me. I played my instant-game-in-a-bag any time and any place–mostly at home on our basement floor on ordinary rainy days after kindergarten. All I had to do was obey one rule: “Mark, don’t leave your marbles in the middle of the floor.”

Sonoran Sunday Magazine

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Are you missing your favorite monkey? Are you searching for a bridge to a higher plain? Do you need to be reminded that you are beautiful? You’ll find them all here along the Crosscut Canal between Scottsdale and Tempe.

On Uneven Ground

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Now that I have a little more distance from Good Friday, it’s clear how painful it was to witness Gary, my neighbor, die of congestive heart failure right outside my front door. Especially because Gary and I see/saw the same cardiologist. (In case you don’t know, I had my own heart trauma nearly four years ago. My husband Tom was the one watching the calamity unfold that day, rushing to get me to an emergency room in St. Louis on our sixtieth birthday.)

At any rate, if you’re like me, you’ve experienced the wide swings of life. Joy and sorrow. Victory and defeat. Jubilation and devastation. I think the secret to contentment is expecting and accepting both ends of the spectrum, then finding your balance somewhere between the two extremes.

On Palm Sunday, I found myself savoring an author’s dream come true. I was reading passages from my latest book to an attentive audience and signing copies in our community clubhouse. Five days later on Good Friday, Gary collapsed outside his and my condo. A few minutes later, he died in my grasp.

For the next two days–through Easter Sunday–I felt out of sorts and sick to my stomach. I was searching for my equilibrium, battling side effects of shock, and absorbing the protective properties of my second COVID-19 vaccination, as more requests for my book came via texts and front-door visits.

On Monday, I began to find some semblance of my equilibrium. I knocked on my neighbor Bob’s door. He and I had been there with Pat (Gary’s wife) when her world came crashing down. “Milwaukee Bob” (Pat calls him that because that’s where he and his wife Barb live most of the year) is adjusting to what he witnessed too.

Though it is the fig tree Bob and I stood beside, giving Gary and Pat comfort and support in the trauma of that Good Friday moment, he and Barb bought a copy of my book, I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree. They weren’t able to make it to the book signing and reading on Palm Sunday.

On Tuesday morning, I exchanged hugs with Gary’s daughter, Andrea. She had flown in from Chicago with her husband and three children to comfort her mother Pat. Through tears, Andrea thanked me for being there for her mother and father. Her family’s spring Arizona vacation (planned before her father’s demise) was transformed into a mix of grieving, coping, swimming, and horseback riding. Her dad’s remains will be interred in Illinois at a later date.

It is Wednesday night now. I feel stronger again. I realize the tender result of Gary’s sudden death … that, through care and happenstance, I will be bonded to Bob, Pat, Andrea, and her family for life. This morning Tom and I joined a handful of friends for yoga in the park. Between ten and eleven o’clock, we stretched and posed on our mats. I felt the caress of a cool southern breeze under the shade of a tall pine tree. I heard the needles of the pine whisper and the call of the mockingbirds above us. I assumed my tree pose. I felt nature cradle me. I swayed, but found my footing on uneven ground.

Gone, But Not Forgotten

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Gary was a fixture in our community. Nearly every day, through our kitchen window, Tom and I spotted him beyond our fig tree. He sat contentedly on the park bench in front of his condo, wearing his favorite cowboy hat, smoking a cigarette. Our neighbor–an eighty-six-year-old-man with a wry sense of humor and perpetual cough–died last week.

Over the past few years, Tom and I watched Gary’s slow slide and the constant care Pat (his devoted wife of fifty-three years) provided. In recent weeks, Gary’s decline had become more precipitous. We knew it was only a matter of time–days, hours, minutes, seconds–before he left. It happened on Good Friday right outside his front door and ours. He died under our fig tree.

On Friday afternoon, after receiving our second Pfizer vaccinations the day before, Tom was napping in the sunroom. I was feeling fine, writing in our den. Around three o’clock, I heard a thud followed closely by a shriek. Gary had fallen. Pat had just seen it happen. I raced outside. I found Gary crumpled on the ground in the ninety-degree heat next to his Chicago Bears cupholder.

Pat, Bob (another neighbor), and I did our best to lift Gary and situate him in a chair in the shade near the gnarly fig right outside our door. But the color in Gary’s face drained. His breathing stopped just as the Scottsdale paramedics and police arrived. They worked to resuscitate him, but Gary was gone.

For the past few days, I’ve been feeling the trauma of that moment and the side effects of the second vaccine. I remember telling Pat to call 911. I remember my heart racing. I remember consoling Pat briefly, then–after the EMTs arrived–reaching out to hug Danny, a long-time friend of Gary’s who had heard the commotion and looked on in amazement. I cried in his arms. Danny and I don’t know each other well, but I am certain we both needed to feel comfort in that frightening moment.

Until Good Friday 2021, no one–not even my mother or father–had died in my arms. It’s going to take a while before I can process the meaning behind all of this. But, of course, writing about it helps.

I think Pat, Bob, and I did what many people would do. We tried to ease the pain of a husband, a neighbor, a friend, a dying man. As a result, we will be bonded forever by the personal gravity and trauma of the experience.

New Light

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We have endured so much over the past year. We have watched the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths climb, then fall, then climb and fall, then climb and fall again.

We have distanced ourselves from one another to survive. We have led shrunken lives. We have felt constant anxiety. We have agonized over losses. We have worried for loved ones, close neighbors, mere acquaintances, and total strangers.

I’m not a religious person, but I have been praying this pandemic would end. I have looked to nature for signs of hope and recovery. I believe we can learn a lot about ourselves and our world simply by observing the animals and plants around us.

So, when I spotted this mourning dove–looking west and bathing in the afternoon light earlier this week outside my front door–it captured the essence of how I feel. I’m ready to look ahead, especially now that Tom and I have received our second Pfizer shots. That happened yesterday on April Fools’ Day, but there was nothing foolish about getting vaccinated to protect ourselves and those around us.

I’m grateful for science. I’m grateful for the thousands of health care workers who have risked their lives to save others. I’m grateful for the volunteers who waved us ahead to the next station in line. I’m grateful for the nurses who put shots in assorted arms every day and send us on our way.

On this Easter weekend, I’m grateful for new light. It is replacing the long darkness of a dreadful year.

Time Tunnel Fitness

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AtHomeGym_April2020

You know me by now. My propensity to slide back and forth in time. I see an object or hear a sound and I find myself suddenly tumbling through space. Perhaps, I’ve fallen for a Irwin-Allen-directed remnant from my childhood: the 1966-1967 TV show, Time Tunnel.

The series begins in 1968. The U.S. government has given a group of scientists–devotees of Project Tic Toc–one final chance. After years of research, a U.S. senator tells them they have a mere twenty-four hours to prove their untested time tunnel works and will allow man to travel safely through time. (Incidentally, it’s located deep beneath the Arizona desert … possibly not far from where my desert rose is poised to bloom in the searing heat.)

In a last ditch effort to save the project, Dr. Tony Newman (dashing James Darren in a tight green turtleneck) and his sincere scientific sidekick Dr. Doug Phillips (tall, dark and handsome Robert Colbert) spin from one time period to another.

Their colleagues beneath the ground at mission control work breathlessly to “get a fix” on their location and beam them back home. This becomes the team’s quest after Tony’s attempt to salvage their time tunnel goes terribly wrong. He lands on the deck of the Titanic in April 1912, just before it hits an infamous iceberg.

As you may have guessed, Doug travels back in time to rescue Tony.  He succeeds and they escape before the ship sinks. But each week we stay tuned because they are destined to be catapulted into another time frequency fraught with disaster and drama.

This lengthy backstory is my way of telling you I’ve felt myself spinning through time (albeit above ground in Arizona) over the past six weeks during this pandemic.

To help alleviate our anxiety and keep our bodies and minds in shape, Tom and I have fashioned a primitive, throw-back, 60s-style home gym.

Our hand weights, yoga mats and basketball might as well be at-home props–a chair, a broomstick, a couple of cans of green beans–which Jack LaLanne (the original modern fitness and nutrition guru) might have suggested my mother use at home in 1960 if she didn’t have the right equipment.

At any rate, in 1960 three-year-old me sat cross-legged, sucking my thumb and transfixed. The organ music on The Jack LaLanne Show blared. Jack smiled, twisted and shouted wearing his zip-up, one-piece jumpsuit and ballet slippers. Inhale, exhale.

My thirty-seven-year-old mother leaned back to the floor in her pedal pushers and began kicking her heels up and down toward our suburban St. Louis ceiling. She was following Jack’s lead. A bicycle to the sky. Peddling from a tripod position.

Sixty years later, I imagine Jack would be proud of us all. Though our beloved gyms and fitness centers are closed, we’ve cobbled together stay-at-home fitness tools to keep some semblance of our pre-COVID-19 physiques. The ones that have expanded a little in the middle due to sumptuous meals consumed at safe distances behind closed doors.

Oh well. If the gyms stay closed for too much longer and the girth of our bodies gets out of control, there’s an easy solution. All we have to do is keep walking and continue our yoga practice on the sun room floor. Inhale, exhale … Namaste.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll channel Tony and Doug. “Get a fix” on 2019. Step into the time tunnel. Prepare for a trip back to the world we once knew … gainful employment, physical closeness, dining out with friends, life without masks … far away from the trauma of 2020 and the mind-numbing news that keeps us spinning through time.

 

 

From a Distance

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SheepDistance_042320

We can still see each other if we squint. You teetering on the mountain top looking west. Me gazing east from the other side of the valley. Absorbing a few morning rays of sun before the heat rolls in. Shielding ourselves from the most harmful elements that lurk out of our control.

Coexisting from a distance is what we do now. Not knowing what will come next. Wondering when we may be close again.  If only we could fly away together. Begin a new life as unencumbered mockingbirds or desert wrens. No longer afraid. Nesting in the saguaros. Dancing in the sky.

Chaparral High

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Chaparral Park_April2020 (2)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been enchanted by the seductive sound of certain nouns and adjectives:  amethyst, magenta, grandiose, vivacious, lavender, conundrum, veranda, gardenia, daffodil, chaparral.

I can’t explain it, but feeling the rhythm of these three-syllable descriptors and seeding them in a story lightens my spirit. It must be the same high–a chaparral high (not High Chaparral, the exotic, dusty and remote TV western of my youth)–that a  mathematician realizes the moment he or she solves an equation.

Imagine my glee, having the word chaparral appear as the name for a road, pool and nearby park. Home of tanned and true Arizonans. Firm and flabby. Shirtless and sumptuous. Lithe and leathery.  Geese and goslings.

During this prolonged pandemic pandemonium, Tom and I have ventured to Chaparral Park to get our steps in on numerous occasions. We like the warm neighborhood atmosphere–singles and couples working out at safe distances framed by both palatial palms and small-leaved evergreen shrubs you might actually see if we lived on a chaparral.

Psychologically, strolling there also reminds us of our diligent days working out just down the street. Mounting the treadmill and elliptical at the local gym, Club SAR, which we typically would frequent if we and it weren’t shuttered by COVID-19.

Based on visible signs, adorable ducks and geese also feel fortunate to live in the warmth and kindness of our community. It’s written on cardboard for the world to see that someone certainly cares about our critters.

“For the baby geese … Please do not remove.”

Yes, the young ones that began to appear recently, just east of Hayden Road and the shadows of Camelback Mountain, need a ramp to get there steps in. To achieve their chaparral high.