June 2012 n No. 17

WHO WE ARE TO SUBMIT MANUSCRIPTS CONTACT ARCHIVES

There's no 'writers' block' insidethis issue. Seven writers present

their stories and a poem

BAZAARONLINE

2

Fictional stories written by two newcomers to Author’s Bazaar appear in this issue.

You may be acquainted with the outstanding printing and writing of Clarence Wolfshohl that appear in the American Amateur Press Association’s monthly bundles. In this is-sue, he tells a story about a boy’s visit to Aunt Ernestine’s Beauty Parlor.

When I invited Frank Wright to submit a manuscript for publication in Author’s Bazaar, he replied, “I don’t write for free.”

EDITOR’SNOTE

By Dean Rea

3

That comment didn’t surprise me because Frank is a seri-ous writer who is paid for his work. I pointed out that he should share his gift with those of us who not only write as a profession but also with those who enjoy writing as a hobby. I also mentioned that more than 300 visits are re-corded monthly at the Author’s Bazaar website.

Frank is well acquainted with amateur journalism be-cause I have shared this hobby with him for a number of years. He wonders why anyone would invest hours in print-ing a journal or putting words on paper “for free.”

I always point out that everyone should have a hobby, something that breaks up the humdrum routine of our lives and gives us an opportunity to “smell the roses.”

Eventually, Frank said he was willing to share something for publication but that it might break the unspoken rules in amateur journalism of avoiding spiritual and political topics.

“That’s fine,” I responded. “Author’s Bazaar is about breaking rules as long as the material is something that members of a family may enjoy reading.”

So, you will find “Final Exam,” the first fictional piece in Author’ Bazaar by Frank Wright, who insists on using a pseudonym because he’s writing "for free.”

4

The high ceiling, ornate wood beams and wall carvings seemed more appropriate for a funeral setting than for a classroom. It was not a destination of choice, but I arrived early as if that would excuse my being unprepared for the final exam in a psychology class I needed to graduate.

I had put off enrolling in this freshman class for four years, hoping that I might escape a subject I thought was unrelated to my math major. To make matters worse, spring was not the time to take a lecture class if you were a baseball player and if you were on the road half of the week.

The tutor who accompanied the team was helpful ex-plaining the fundamentals of psychology, but Professor Dillard Zukinski’s accent made it difficult to understand his lectures. He talked a lot about the Gestalt theory of psy-

BY FRANK WRIGHT

5

chology, an approach he said was based on the idea that individuals experience things as unified wholes. I didn’t understand that statement nor the explanation he wrote on the blackboard: “Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior to their smallest element, the Gestalt posi-tion maintains that the whole of experience is important, and the whole is different than the sum of its parts.”

I wondered how that bit of information might help a baseball player like myself keep track of batting averages or to enhance relationships with teammates so superstitious they avoid stepping on the baseline traveling on or off the field?

I’ll never know why I arrived a half-hour early for the exam. Maybe this gesture will unlock information needed by a brain emotionally and exhausted from the rigors of being a student as well as an athlete. In any event, psychol-ogy is not on my “most wanted” list of things to know.

Students begin to trickle into the classroom as I pick up the textbook and thumb through the pages, looking for a hidden fact or principle I can use during the hour-long exam. Has Professor Zukinski included questions about baseball, a topic he mentioned occasionally in his lectures. I wonder whether he knows that I am a varsity outfielder on a team headed to the College World Series and whether

6

that fact might enhance my chance of passing this course?“Can I talk with for you a moment?” says a woman wear-

ing a white dress that stops just above her knees but doesn’t showcase any cleavage. She’s about my height — 6 feet — has short dark hair, a pleasant voice and a smile that would sell any product on TV. She sits in the seat next to mine and looks me straight on. What eyes: brown framed with dark lashes. I had noticed her several times among the hundred or so students in the classroom during spring term. My evaluation always had been “sexy,” a term I dared not voice because of its sexist connotation, but a meaning I held se-cretly in my mind.

“Sure,” I answer. “What’s your name?”“Maggie McLaughlin. I’ve watched you play baseball this

spring, and I need some help understanding what Zukin-ski means where he refers to ‘When you come to the fork in the road, take it,’ and ‘It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.’”

I warm to that task in a hurry and briefly describe the career and humorous sayings of base-ball great Yogi Berra. “But I be-lieve you already knew about Yogi Berra and about baseball,” I

7

say. “You just wanted an excuse to talk to a handsome guy who’s going to ace this exam.”

“Maybe,” she says. “Friends of mine tell me you aren’t dating, and I wondered if you would consider taking me to the Tri Delt dance Friday?”

“Wow,” I answer, my mind racing for a response, “but first you need to know that I’m a Christian. I don’t smoke, drink or sleep around with women. I’m a Democrat, and I’m go-ing to play for a Texas Rangers’ farm team this summer.”

“Okay,” she says as Professor Zukinski enters the class-room. “Pick me up at the Tri Delt house at 7. The dance is formal. You’ll need a car, but don’t expect the evening to develop into a long-term relationship.”

“Why?” I ask.She smiles as she walks away, turns and says, “Because

I’m a Yankee fan.”

8

Those gloriousOregon beaches

9

Before 1950, a handful of beaches in Tillamook Coun-ty remained isolated and rarely visited. These days, Cape Lookout State Park on a blistering summer Sunday may host 5,000 campers and day visitors. But before WWII, the site was at the end of a one-way dirt road with turnouts, and the last mile was on foot across tidelands laced with sloughs, best crossed at low tide.

Today, the park is a living, throbbing city with urban problems, including crowding, noise and crime. No family would remotely consider leaving their camp/picnic equip-ment unattended for fear of losing it all.

Before 1950, Boy Scouts might spend a week there, sleep-ing in the open along Jackson Creek and seeing no person other than members of their troop. The same was true of a handful of other sites in the county. Residents were lucky to be able to enjoy the wild beauty and solitude of such sites.

But Tillamook County, according to the Chamber of Commerce, needed better roads and more visitors like Newport and Seaside in adjoining counties.

Slowly, and perhaps not always for the best, highways improved, bringing thousands of folks from the Willa-

BY PAUL KING

10

mette Valley to the coast on weekends and holidays. The new Wilson River Highway in 1941 created a flood of visi-tors who usually avoided Tillamook Country for its lack of beach accommodations.

Motels sprang up along Highway 101, complete with swimming pools, bars and restaurants and television. These amenities sounded the death knell for public salt-water natatoriums, dance halls and private campgrounds. No more kiosks with electric ranges, pit toilets and rustic table and benches for 25 cents a day. Some very attractive sites, like the picnic grounds in the sheltered pine grove at Neskowin, gave way to motels and condos. Other sites vanished under the pressure of commercialism while oth-ers serendipitously found new life as Oregon State wayside viewpoints.

But retirees will carry their memories of the way it was when they set sail for their final cruise. My parents loved the beach so much that every sunny weekend called out to them to trade the Sunday ser-mon for a sumptuous pic-

11

nic with cold chicken, potato salad and apple pie. My mother stuffed it all in a capacious, but care-worn

wicker picnic basket, filled a two-quart Thermos with cof-fee and folded the beach blankets while my dad gassed up our 1929 Buick and parked it outside the kitchen door. Dad always knew of some sheltered pine grove with wild rhododendrons framing a superb view of a rocky headland or sandy shore. And we were off for Bayocean, now under the sand, Netarts or Oceanside for another glorious day on the Oregon Coast.

Paul's email: pabloelcamino@gmail.com

12

By Lee Kirk

I pull the yellowed seven-inch-square of cardboard from a carton of miscellaneous old paper items, and immedi-ately I am transported.

I’m six years old, my hair sticky and my body slick with perspiration in spite of the thin cotton dress with the flut-tery cap sleeves I wear. My playmates and I have seen the big dark truck pulling into the common yard of the hous-ing project, and we stand nervously near our units, wait-ing. The sun beats down upon us, the dry weedy grass of the yard is yellow and crisp beneath our bare feet, which are covered with dust imbued with the traces of thousands of other feet, human and animal. The dust smells old, but now and then its tiredness is relieved with the pungency of wild chamomile when any of us steps on one of the scrubby

13

little plants that struggles to survive in the packed earth. When the truck lumbers closer, we drop to the ground, pretending to be absorbed in some game while we cast sly glances toward the vehicle.

The square of stained cardboard I’m holding now has a hole punched in one corner with a metal grommet to strengthen it for hanging. This makes a diamond shape of the square. It has a plain black border printed on it, and along with some other information, the word ICE is spelled out in huge block letters between the two center points.

Why, you might ask, should the word “ice” conjure the memory of a hot August afternoon? If you never lived with an icebox, you might well wonder. But if you grew up with one of those inadequate, dripping relics you already know.

Everyone in the Project had an icebox. The units were small and the ugly box stood along one wall, hunkered at the end of an “efficiency” kitchen that was directly faced by an “efficiency bathroom” — a shower and toilet. The kitchen sink doubled as a washbasin. And everyone with an icebox had an ice card. Ours was different from the one I just found. They had the numbers 25, 50, 75 and 100 on each of the four edges. I seem to recall that the card had a large “X” in the middle, although no one can remember for certain. To order the amount of ice you needed you

14

turned the correct number to the top. I often wondered who could be rich enough to have an icebox that would hold 100 pounds of ice.

The box itself consisted of an insulated chamber where the ice was inserted and a couple of shelves for food stor-age. The frightening part of the device, however (at least for a six-year-old), was the drip pan at the bottom. This caught the melt water from the ice and had to emptied constant-

ly. Many a visit or trip was cut short with the words, “We have to hurry home before the drip pan runs over.” And many a time we came home to find a slow steady stream of clammy water spreading across the worn li-noleum. Because my bed was on the wall just behind the bathroom and di-

15

rectly opposite the icebox, my fears of stepping out of bed into a cold slimy pool of water were not entirely unfounded.

There were some advantages to having an ice box, how-ever — at least from a child’s point of view. For one thing, it could not keep ice cream frozen for long so any time that delicacy came into the house, it called for immediate con-sumption. And there was always the somewhat dangerous thrill of listening to my mother empty the drip pan. It was cumbersome to pull it out, filled with chilly water and un-wieldy in its size and shape, and then to lift it and carry it to the sink. More often than not it would slosh onto the floor or onto my mother, depending on how the currents of movement directed the water. No one knows where she acquired her vocabulary, but at moments like that it could become quite colorful and something for a child to absorb in wonder. But the greatest benefit was the one that we children were waiting for on that hot afternoon.

Finally the truck pulls up near us. The driver climbs down from the cab, pointedly ignoring our innocent little group. He is a thickset man with unruly dark brown hair and an expressionless face, and he wears a water-soaked leather pad on his shoulder.

He lowers the tailgate on the truck and climbs in. He moves a block of ice toward the tailgate, then takes a minute

16

to chip the edges sheer and make indentations for the ice tongs. We watch him guardedly, but he ignores us. There is perhaps, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He jumps down from the truck, clamps the huge tongs onto the block of ice and with a magnificently powerful gesture he swings the glistening block onto the pad on his shoulder and heads with meaningful strides toward the nearest unit with an ice card in the window.

By now we are making no pretense at play. We have care-fully watched the iceman’s every move. As soon as he is far enough away that we’re sure he won’t turn around, one of the more adventurous of our group — usually me — climbs quickly into the truck and tosses down shards of ice to the others. By some twist of fate, there are always enough piec-es to go around. We grasp these treasures and run, giggling and guilty, to hide in the shade under a nearby porch and to suck greedily on our scraps of ice.

It was only ice from the ice house, and yet it was flavored with the sweet taste of danger and the tang of guilt that made it delicious in a way that not even a root beer Pop-sicle could emulate.

Lee's email: leekirk@comcast.net

17

By Hugh Singleton

I awakened to feel myself drifting off my bed, so I put my hands over my head, thinking I was falling, yet I seemed to be floating upwards. The monitors attached to my body were no longer beeping and the ache in my legs and feet was gone, although I could not recall getting a recent injec-tion for pain—what was going on?

I glanced around the room to see if my husband was in his customary chair…the chair was vacant. My nurse was leaning over someone in the bed. She stood erect and I saw that she was crying as she hurried out the door. I glanced back at the bed and suddenly realized that the patient lying there was me! “Oh my God,” I thought, “I’m dead!”

At that moment, my nurse returned, followed by her su-

18

pervisor, who be-gan to check my vi-tal signs. I watched her from my posi-tion near the ceil-ing as she verified that my heart was not beating, nor was I breathing. I

was, in fact, dead. She nodded to my nurse, then checked her watch as she headed to her station and began a series of telephone calls.

Cindy, my nurse, began removing the various tubes and attachments that had been a part of me for a month. Tears dripped from her chin as she arranged my body in what would pass for a comfortable position, then she smoothed the covers and tried in vain to make my hair a bit more presentable. I watched in mild interest for a few minutes, then began to wonder what was going to happen.

I drifted down the hallway to the nurses’ station and heard the charge nurse say, “I am so sorry. She is still in her room, in case you and your children would like some private time with her. Let me know when they arrive; I do have some forms to be signed. Thank you, and again, I am

19

so sorry for your loss.” She hung up the phone as she as-sembled several sheets of paper into a folder.

My next thought was of my husband, and instantly I was with him at our home.

He was crying and his anguish was like a gray fog that filled the entire house. I put my arms around him, but it was no use; he could not see me or hear me and my touch went unnoticed. His despair was so great that I felt com-pelled to stay near him while he telephoned the children.

As he regained his composure, I encouraged him to be strong and to realize that I am still here — something we discussed numerous times before my last trip to the emer-gency room. We knew that there was no question of sur-vival, that one of us would leave the other, but that we would meet again in a better place. Finally, he hung up the phone, unable to talk.

Slowly, I became aware of my changed surroundings. I was in a beautiful garden where flowers bloomed, butter-flies flitted and the songs of birds filled the air. “What a gorgeous place,” I thought as I noticed a figure bent over a bed of lilies. I drifted toward her, then suddenly knew she was my own mother! We embraced as she welcomed me home. Then another person appeared; it was my dad! Behind him was Aunt Bertha and Uncle Barney, all wel-

20

coming me with open arms. Others appeared until I was happily surrounded by family and friends who had meant so much to me in life.

“This is undoubtedly heaven,” I thought, as I was wel-comed home by more and more people — there’s Charlie, Aund Margaret and Bill. I had never felt so loved before. I then noticed a familiar and treasured figure standing in the background, smiling and nodding his head; it was my guide, Rama. I made my way slowly toward him through the happy crowd.

“How did I get here so fast, Rama?” I asked. “I don’t recall the tunnel or the light, or any of the usual events.” Rama smiled in his quiet way and said, “You have reached such a level of consciousness that you no longer take notice; you simply go without thought.”

Concern for my husband and children flitted into my mind again, but before I could speak, Rama touched me in his compassionate way, saying, “They will be fine. They know that you are home now, and that one day they will join you here. Can you not feel the love they are sending you?” A warm feeling surrounded me as I gave Rama one of my silly grins and said, “It’s good to be home again.”

Hugh's email: htsman1102@aol.com

21

tangerine tingesbillows of cumulus cloudsspilling over the western horizon

the scent of rainripples upthe Mogollon Rim

wind gustswhip ponderosa pinesdown the red rock canyon

the threatening stormgrumbles acrossEast Verde River

lightning ricochettsoff of green water

spangles the sandbarin diamonds

does its disappearing actinto black

Sheryl's email: slnelms@aol.com

Even

ing

Thun

ders

torm

at P

inet

op, A

rizon

a n

by

Sher

yl L.

Nel

ms

22

Every two months grandma Etta had a hair appointment. Just about the time the hair began to relax from the last permanent so that she lost some of the severity about her head, she asked his mother to take her to town, and she came back looking as if she had clamped on a steel wool helmet.

At seven or eight years of age he began to marvel at such changes in the women around him: he’d see grandma in the morning over coffee with tufts of hair liberated from their curly prison, but when he returned from school that afternoon those tufts were subdued back into their chain-mail bondage. At first, he imagined the transformation was accomplished by the combs and brushes he had seen mama use, but mama’s hair always seemed free and wispy after using those tools. After a day of her cleaning, cooking

By Clarence Wolfshohl

23

and patching his scraped elbows, her hair would be like the bandy’s feathers after an upset in the chicken yard. Before his father returned home and as the daylight faded, she would sit before the mirror and brush her hair.

He especially noticed this ritual during winter, when dusk came early and a crisp blue norther spilled down from the Hill Country rim. In the glow of the bare elec-tric bulb, steam from her nearby coffee cup spiraled up-ward and electricity crackled between the brush and her hair, sometimes raising sparkles and always leaving wisps of her hair to dance in silhouette against the light. So, in his imaginings about grandma’s hair metamorphosis, he thought combs and brushes would not be enough. And they weren’t. He learned that when summer came during his eighth year, and he made the journey with mama and grandma Etta to Aunt Ernestine’s Beauty Parlor.

Aunt Ernestine, grandma’s sister, lived nearly clear across San Antonio, so they had to ride the bus through town and transfer several times before they got to her place. They caught the Broadway line across the street from the en-trance to the San Antonio airport on Loop 13. Here on the outskirts of the city, a few houses and businesses, such as Skipper’s Diner across the way, were scattered over the pas-tures, cornfields and mesquite woods.

24

The bus stop was familiar territory because this was where the children of the vicinity gathered to catch the bus to school. Although during the school year they rode the reg-ular transit system bus, few adults dared ride with the 30 or so kids on the 7 a.m. run. But this summer day, the first time he went with grandma Etta and mama to Aunt Ernestine’s, he was the only child on the bus. The aroma of eggs and

percolating cof-fee hung around Skipper’s across the highway as it did every morning, and when the bus arrived and they boarded, the driv-er’s open thermos

blended with the outside world.The only other passenger was a suited man, perhaps a

traveler who could not afford a taxi and had boarded at the airport terminal. The man sat behind the driver and exchanged a few comments until the bus grew crowded as it headed into the city. Broadway is one of the major north-south thoroughfares into San Antonio, and the stops became more frequent as they neared downtown. Early

25

boarders seemed like them, having some early business in town or perhaps going to visit friends or family in other parts of the city. But some were going to work because they had their lunch boxes or tool boxes. Several Mexican women boarded at the Cementville gate, entrance to the large quarry and cement factory of Alamo Portland Ce-ment. Some rode a few blocks into Alamo Heights, an af-fluent suburb, and some rode farther to their jobs as cooks, maids, custodians. The smell of coffee still in his head, he imagined they were a mixture of café and café con leche, from the dark brown of a thin stream of coffee to the rich khaki of creamed coffee.

A few stops later a man in khakis got on, sat beside one of the Cementville women, said “Buenos días,” and poured coffee into the lid of his thermos. The boy sat enchanted in the colors and fragrances of coffee, the soft murmurs of Spanish, the stop-go rhythm of the bus. The man in khaki wore a coarse-weave straw hat and a tightly rolled bandana around his neck. Most of the women wore head-scarves with only a few strands of their black hair loose about their foreheads or cheeks. One woman’s braid curled from under her head scarf over her shoulder and across her bosom. Its black glistened against the pale blue of her blouse.

More passengers boarded and took the places of these

26

earlier riders. A woman wore a striped pink waitress uni-form; a man wore the military cut uniform of maroon like that of a doorman or elevator operator. A mother with a girl his age and a younger boy crammed into one bench. The girl and he looked at one another as children do in a roomful of adults; then they gazed away at the passing buildings of the city.

Mama, grandma and the boy disembarked when the bus turned off Broadway to wend its way through the one-way streets of the center of San Antonio. They walked a block east on Houston toward Alamo Plaza to catch the next ride that would take them away from downtown. The sidewalks were not crowded: a few people walking to their work, some shops or offices just opening, clerks rolling dis-plays into wide entrances or taping signs announcing bar-gains on the windows. At the Plaza they continued walk-ing abreast of the Alamo grounds with the Cenotaph to the Heroes of the Alamo between. They waited at the stop across from Joske’s Department Store on Alamo and Com-merce. Mama and grandma talked about some dresses in Joske’s windows, but he wished it were Christmas so that the window would be full of the electric train display of a Christmas wonderland. The aroma of coffee floated from the café behind them.

27

They snaked their way south and east from downtown. Along South Presa, the smells of tamales and barbacoa slipped into the open windows of the bus and nearly as quickly were replaced with the fumes of the traffic. Span-ish competed with English on the signs outside businesses. They changed buses several times, and on each were only a few people. Once they passed a bus returning toward downtown; it was filled with passengers on their way to work or business in the city. He guessed that only a few people were going to Aunt Ernestine’s beauty parlor.

Although he had never been to Aunt Ernestine’s, he was surprised his mother said that they were there when they

disembarked in front of a small block-long shopping strip on

Highland Avenue. He had connected Aunt Ernestine with a house, as he pic-tured grandma Etta and

most women of his family; he did not connect them with

places of business.Later that day he discovered that Ernestine did indeed

live in a house — only a few blocks up the avenue with her son’s family — but every weekday she walked down the

28

street to her shop to beautify the women on the southeast side of San Antonio. But as they stepped down from the bus and Mama motioned toward the far end of the shop-ping strip, he saw “Ernestine’s Beauty Parlor” neatly let-tered on her shop window and somehow felt that it was appropriate.

They passed from the bus stop across the small strip of parking spaces before the stores onto the sidewalk that fronted them. A Piggly-Wiggly grocery store dominated the businesses, running from the corner to the middle of the block. After that were small retailers, a fix-it shop, an insurance agent, and next to it, Aunt Ernestine’s. They walked slowly because grandma Etta could not go any fast-er. So, they had a long time to swim in the odd mixture of odors — half coffee, half the ammoniac beauty parlor smells — that seeped from the parlor’s open door up the sidewalk to the insurance agent’s door, where they dove into the odors.

Inside, Aunt Ernestine was already busy with two wom-en. The boy assumed it was Aunt Ernestine although he could not remember seeing her before that moment. She reminded him of Grandma Etta, short and stocky and wrinkled with deep blue eyes. And when she saw them and said “Guten Morgen. Wie gehts?” followed by “How are

29

you?” she sounded exactly like Grandma. The two customers raised their eyes from magazines. Be-

hind one stood Aunt Ernestine holding a strand of hair in one hand and a curler in the other. The woman’s head was halfway covered with completed curlers. The other woman had her head under a drier, which looked like some outer space apparatus he had seen in one of the pulp magazines Grandpa read. As Grandma, Mama and Aunt Ernestine hugged and marveled at how big the boy was getting, he took in the shop. It was a rectangle with large plate-glass windows on either side of the entry door. Ernestine’s was written in large red trimmed black letters on one window; Beauty Parlor, on the other. The words were backward, and he played a quick optical game with the t’s in Ernestine’s and on a Butter Krust bread truck parked back toward the Piggly Wiggly. Three large mirrors covered one of the long walls and made the room seem twice as large. A clock that showed 9:30 was slightly off center above the middle mirror. A few vinyl-covered chairs surrounded a low table with magazines and a couple of coffee cups under the mir-rors. On the other long wall were two deep sinks and cabi-nets with some drawers half open and counter tops cov-ered with gadgets and devices he had never seen before. High on the wall was a tapestry of a scene from Spanish

30

colonial San Antonio. Around a fountain in the center of a courtyard were several figures, mostly idle young men but a few Indian servants. One young man strummed a guitar and all the young men looked up toward a balcony to the left of the scene where a señorita with luxuriant black hair leaned almost weightlessly against the rail. He supposed the young woman’s hair was the point of the tapestry being in the shop. But none of the women in the room had a sim-ilar head of hair. In fact, all of their hair could have been thrown together and he doubted it would have equaled the mass on the señorita’s head.

His 8-year-old curiosity was trying to decipher all of this while wondering if any of the magazines strewn table were like Grandpa’s Weird and Popular Mechanix and while the smell of neutralizer sniped at any other sensation. Years later, he read Proust, and so when he walks past a hair sa-lon and gets a whiff of that odor, a vision of the dark haired señorita of the tapestry and all the details of Aunt Ernes-tine’s Beauty Parlor paralyzes him for a moment, but then Proust and his madeleine’s assert themselves as the editor of his memory.

However, at eight years of age, the delicacies of Proust and memory did not exist for him, but the nauseating smell of the neutralizer and the tapestry’s incongruity in that room

31

— although he could not have articulated his reaction as such — were quickened to his entire world. Had the lovely Spanish maiden — he assumed she was lovely because of the idle young men’s rapt attention and the flowing coif-fure, but her actual face was not clearly rendered in the tapestry — just returned from some colonial San Antonio equivalent of Aunt Ernestine’s where she had gone through the process Aunt Ernestine was now performing on those two ladies?

Had the beautiful Maria or Consuelo’s hair been doused with that wretched smelling concoction? Did women have to submit to this odor to be satisfied with their hair? If so, why? Were they able to endure more offensive odors than men? Or were they engineered differently so that the odor was not sickening? Was that smell an acquired taste as he had heard adults speak about beer and he had learned about okra? So does that happen to girls who begin hav-ing their hair treated at beauty salons? Perhaps, the fumes from the beauty potion chemicals were making him light-headed, but these questions sprang to mind when, just as incongruous and incorporeal as the odor, a voice from be-yond the door that centered the rear wall of the shop asked, “Does anyone want coffee?”

The voice was as enchanting as the señorita’s hair. It

32

lilted. He somehow thought it should follow the question with the lyrics of “Jole Blon” mingling with Harry Cho-

ates’ fiddle because it was a Cajun voice. He had begged many a nickel from his fa-

ther to play that song on the jukebox at Tate Mueller’s Anchor Bar and Barbeque down the road from their house, and he registered the Cajun inflection in his head as much as he did the German he heard among family and the Spanish he heard in the neighborhood and on the bus as this morning. So, he knew this bonne femme who offered coffee from the backroom was Cajun, but who was

she? And then Madelyn entered with a tray of steaming coffee cups.

Later that day he learned that Madelyn was Aunt Ernes-tine’s daughter-in-law. Her son Albert had met Madelyn while stationed at Ft. Polk, and they had married after the war. A decade later he saw a painting of Madelyn in a book on the Pre-Raphaelites. Or her spiritual twin. The wom-an who emerged from the backroom with wisps of coffee steam spiraling in her auburn hair was the image of Dante

33

Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca. Her hair was even more luxuriant than the tapestry señorita’s. It was real and had subtle depth one could hide in. At eight, he did not under-stand the gazes of all the idle young men in the tapestry, and even a decade later he did not fully understand Ros-setti’s yearning in his portrait.

But he did sense the hair. Somehow the coffee that had been the flavor of the air they had been breathing all morn-ing was intensified and became the fragrance of Madelyn’s hair. It was headier, as if the essence of jungle mornings were ground with the beans. The ozone smell of approach-ing rain mixed with the humus, vines and skittering lizards of the coffee plantation. Even the nauseating smell of the permanent solution was overpowered. And although she was still at the rear of the room 15 feet away, when she turned and bent toward grandma Etta to give her a cup, that jungle of auburn hair seemed to brush his nose.

He reached out to grasp it and quickly drew back his hand, glad that all eyes were on Madelyn. It was a jungle of hair, not because of unkempt nature but because of the richness, the energy that ran under the surface. It had the sheen of mama’s hair in those late afternoon brushings, and a few strands almost lifted as Madelyn moved around the shop. But unlike the ephemeral lightness of mama’s brunette

34

hair, this auburn hair had a mysterious weight despite the way it refused to lie silently around her head. All the other women had hair that clung fiercely or lay limpidly —ei-ther naturally or by design, as with grandma’s permanent. Madelyn’s hair was incongruous just as the tapestry and the tapestry’s señorita in that shop. The tapestry was a cu-riosity, but Madelyn — or her hair — was a threat.

After serving grandma and mama, the two other cus-tomers and Aunt Ernestine, Madelyn turned toward the boy. “And here is the big man who needs his coffee?” She placed a cup half-full of coffee on the table before him. The coffee steamed up into his face, so strong that the last faint memory of the permanent solution’s burning of his nose

disappeared. “Do you want it black or with some cream?” A strange urge made the boy almost say, “Black,” although he had never had straight coffee and he knew he preferred the rich cream. The pint of cream on the tray was about three-

quarters full and thin streaks of dribble curved over the bottle rim and ser-pentined down to the raised letters

on the side of the bottle. He licked his lips as if willing those streaks onto his tongue. “With cream,” he said.

35

Madelyn’s brown eyes smiled, and she filled the cup, the brown of the liquid fading from the dark of her eyes to the tan of her skin. She put in two spoonfuls of sugar and stirred, loosening her hair with the movement so that a thick strand dropped over one eye. The suddenness of the hair dropping over that sparkling eye caught his breath. When he inhaled, an indistinct needle of permanent solu-tion scratched behind his eyes. He took a big sip of the cof-fee and buried his nose in the emptiness it left.

Clarence's email: wolfshohl@hotmail.com

36

How toshoot anowlText and photos byGreg McKelvey

37

W hen Bruce Taubert asked me to join him on a May “moon is closest to the earth” evening to photograph Screech owls, I had no idea how we would do it. Is the full moon a help? Do we sneak up on a bush? How big are they? Do they hoot? Yikes, to see an owl photo and to take one, I was all ears, well ears with a long lens, flash, headgear and field boots.

Bruce, a retired Arizona Fish and Game Dept. assistant director and published Friends of Arizona Highways work-shop photographer, called and asked if I could join him on an evening photo shoot on the slopes of the Whitetank Mountains west of Phoenix, Arizona. Having been with Bruce during first-class workshops in the Everglades, the White Sands/Bosque Wildlife Reserve and in Ecuador, I was honored that he felt me a worthy student. I learned that it is a lot safer to work in pairs in the Arizona deserts.

38

So, I said yes, altered a few local plans and showed up at his home around four in the afternoon with water, snacks and more camera gear than I needed.

The idea was to scout out an area he had located six years prior and, with luck, find one specific Saguaro Cac-tus where we might see adults and babes coming out of a hole they commandeered as a nest. A few turns and off-road ventures later, we are at the prime location but are unable to find the special cactus. So, we park, open camera

bags, and I finally get the nerve to ask, “Okay, how do we photograph an owl?”

“Go out and make a sound like an owl and listen,” was his answer. He helped me select the best gear. We wondered around in a last-ditch

attempt to find that cactus before sunset. Gear is basic: Canon 7D, 70 – 200 mm telephoto lens with a 2X extend-er, flash mounted well above the camera, light gear on the head and a powerful flashlight. Oh, and a make-a-sound-like an-owl device. Turns out that is an app for an iPod,

39

iPhone or android smart phone, small external speakers and the right program. Elf and Screech owls live in the same Arizona habitat. They are not nest builders but use holes in the Saguaro made by others or the crotch of a Palo Verde or Mesquite tree.

With the sun casting long shadows, Bruce fires up the I Bird Pro program, and we start the search. It is a soft voice and when you hear the return, it sounds like the owl is miles away. Protective of their space, their faint “ting ting ting ting” hoot warms other owls to say away. Bruce tells me the young are still dependent for food in the spring but are no longer in the nest. With flashlights off, the weak head lamp only on for brief moments, we walk the desert pediment toward the Palo Verde trees. We walk slowly and as qui-etly as one can be at night on uneven ground trying to avoid cholla and prick-ly Pear spines and watching for snakes. Bruce reminds me that baby diamond-

40

back rattlesnakes have not yet learned the fine art of hunt-ing, will strike at anything and will discard a full venom load when they do. Nice reminder, and I find I am soon well behind the master as he sprints toward the sounds.

Bruce stops, shines his light at a tree and whispers, “Do you see him?” Wow, framed in the flashlight beam I see a cute 5-inch-tall critter with yellow/black eyes piercing the night. Apparently, the owl sees our light and fixes on it long enough for us to take a few camera clicks. One of us

holds the light while the other hoists the camera, focuses and snaps. The camera and flash setting will be modified for the conditions. We start with a manual setting, 400 ISO, aperture at 7 or 9, speed synchro-nized to the flash.

Soon we find a young owl and resist being lured away by an adult responding

41

Greg's email: gempress@earthlink.net

Web site: www.gempressphotos.com

to our iPod calls. Seems like a half an hour passes, but it already is midnight. We find several owl families, and I am becoming accustomed to where to look, their soft sounds and the camera settings.

Bruce did not find the photo he wanted of an owl flying out of the cactus. We did, however, snap some nice shots. The trip was a great learning experience for me, and I re-turned home with a few priceless images. The photos here are of the Screech owl. Next time we will try to find an Elf.