September 18, 2006

• MONDAY READING

  Recently, a dear person gave me a subscription to a magazine called The Sun,
  published in North Carolina, and full of strikingly thoughtful and
  literate articles on many topics.  I’m delighted, needless to say,
  to have a new source for mental refreshment, but I found myself most
  amazed by a section of little pieces sent in by readers called “Readers
  Write.” Here is one of those:

  I grew up along Chicago’s “North coast,” where all the
  blocks end at public beaches on the shore of Lake Michigan.  In
  warm weather my friends and I would spend the entire day on the beach,
  swimming and listening to transistor radios.  In winter I would
  wander along the broken sea walls and rocks that littered the
  shoreline.  Though my mother, my sister, and I lived in a shabby
  old apartment with peeling radiators and scuffed wooden floors, we had
  broad windows to let in lake breezes, and when it got too hot at night,
  my sister and I would run down to the beach barefoot in our nightgowns
  to take a dip before bed.

  After graduating from high school I left home and ended up in
  California, where I rented a cheap place near Venice Beach.  My
  mom moved from our old apartment after gentrification drove up the
  rent.  When I came back to the city a decade later, she was in a
  surburban nursing home.  I rarely returned to the old neighborhood.

  After our mother died, my sister and I poured her ashes into the
  lake.  Mom had spent every summer of our childhood sitting by the
  water on a cloth fold-up chair, wearing her Jackie O. sunglasses and
  reading a thick novel.  She padded into the water only when her
  deep brown skin got too hot.

  Now my sister and I live seventy miles apart, but we meet on the shore
  of Lake Michigan every year to remember Mom.  One year we walked
  past our old apartment and saw a FOR RENT sign.  We rang the bell,
  and a young man answered and offered to show us the empty
  apartment.  We didn’t tell him that we’d grown up in those
  rooms.  He thought we were apartment hunting.

  In my old bedroom, the wood floor was discolored where I’d spilled a
  bottle of Burgundy as a teenager.  The bathroom sink was still
  cracked where I dropped my cassette player in it.  The stain and
  the crack were the only evidence that our family had ever lived there.

  Dana DesJardins
  Skokie, Illinois
  

  ---

  Deep Thought:  “Sometimes
  I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if you
  don’t know what your rights are, or who the person is you’re talking
  to. Then, on the way out, slam the door.”
  Today I am grateful for:  Permission to be here
  Guess the Movie:  “What
  would you do if some miracle happened and we could walk out of here
  tomorrow morning and start all over again clean? No record and nobody
  after us, huh?”  Answer:  Bonnie and Clyde,  1967.  Winner:  thenarrator.
  
  World Marches to Save Darfur
  With demonstrations in 40 countries yesterday, pressure is mounting on
  Sudan to allow in peacekeepers and end a conflict in which 300,000
  people have died
  by Steve Bloomfield  (Rest of article here.)

  • 5:35 pm
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