YAY SPRING!!!!

photo copyright © 2017 by A.M.Boutte

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH 2017

EXCERPT FROM "RUNNING FOR THE 2:10"

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From my second collection of short stories:

Running for the 2:10

to be published Spring 2017

THE WALL

By

Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte

Copyright © 2017 by Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte

Almost every time I roll on Skyline Boulevard in the Oakland hills, I wonder which tree was responsible.  I haven’t checked them up close, but from driving by I can’t detect any visible scars or marks on any of them that would indicate the violent collision that took my friend Dot’s life on prom night 1967. 

The song “Teen Angel” and others like it depicting tragic accidents were a part of our soundtrack. The songs scared us, but the fear did not translate once we were in the car as teenagers.  We like everyone else our age then and since, thought we were invincible. So when it happened to someone at your school or in your town that you may not have known, it made you think about it, if only for a bit. But when it happened to someone you knew and had seen alive only a few weeks before, it changed who you were.

Dot was an only child and doted on by her parents.  They were middle class people who gave her all they could and that it year included a beautiful dress and matching shoes for prom night. By the time that night was over, Dot would be gone and shock and sadness would arrive at their front door. Dot’s father would later tell my mother that Dot was so mangled by the impact that they would not be allowed to see her.  Ever again. For a long time I had nightmares about that.

My mom and Dot’s mom had been friends since they were teenagers.  A few months older than I was, my kinship with Dot began when we were toddlers and her mother was my babysitter.  I was so close to Dot and her mother back then, I would only eat what Dot ate and shunned my mother’s cooking.  Dot’s mother said I was just mad that mom went to work and left me with her, and then she would laugh that rich resonant laugh of hers.

When Dot became a preteen, her parents gave her an entire wall in the garage to use for “self expression.”  At first couldn’t grasp the meaning of that but Dot knew right away that she would use that blank canvas to write the names of every recorded song she and her friends knew.  In our world at the time, music was central to our very being and since no one else we knew was allowed to write on any wall in the house, it soon became a high honor to be invited by Dot to make an entry on that pale green expanse of drywall.

Dot had many friends but I like to think that because I knew her so early in life that made me one of her best.  Although we only saw each other when my parents visited hers, we had a strong bond that became even stronger by the sharing of our new 45’s and her handing me the pen along with the silent sweet permission to write on that wall.  As soon as I would get to her house, she and I would make a beeline for the garage and play the newest tunes on the portable record player that sat on her father’s workbench as we made our latest entries. One of her parents would always back the car out into the driveway to give us room to write, spin, “Temptation Walk” and stand back to see our handiwork in full. I don’t think I ever saw Dot’s bedroom, it was always about the wall.

We did this for several years and soon it became harder to find a space to write. Sometimes I would see handwriting I did not recognize and I must confess, it made me cringe just a bit.  But then I would look at the entire wall and see that most of the handwriting was Dot’s and coming in as a strong second, was mine.

 I don’t know how many song titles others and we wrote on that wall but it was truly the song track of our young lives.  We enshrined musical and American history with “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Heatwave,” “Uptight,” and “My Girl,” just to name a few of the hundreds of songs that eventually made their way to the wall.

In 1966, I remember clearly writing, “Land of a 1000 Dances,” as my last swirly cursive inscription. I know the song and the year because miraculously I found an empty space to enter it right in the middle of all of those songs.  Dot put on the 45 as I wrote and then we did all of the dances as the life shift took place and then that was that. 

Now full-fledged teenagers, boys and our own personal telephone lines had entered the picture and we saw each other less and less.

It would only be about six months after that last entry that Dot and her prom date would meet their fate with a mean redwood on Skyline Boulevard in the Oakland Hills, probably within walking distance from where I now live.

Years later I would take my husband and my three year old daughter to visit Dot’s parents. The house was exactly the same, but inside the air had shifted and was barely breathable by those of us who understood.  Permanently unmoored, Dot’s parents reached up and grabbed something to make them happy to see us.  And because they knew we were coming and they knew me, the car had already been moved to the driveway.

As I did so many times when I was younger, I hugged them both hard as we exchanged cautious pleasantries.  And then, knowing it was all right, with my daughter in tow, I made a beeline for the garage. 

The space had been freshly painted white, but the pale green wall with all of the songs written on it was untouched. Even the old portable record player was still sitting on the workbench and looked as if it had been freshly dusted.

I told my daughter the story of Dot and me and the wall.  I sang parts of the some of the songs to her as she listened in rapt attention.  I showed her Dot’s entries and I showed her mine.

As we headed back to the living room to join the others, she asked me where Dot was.

For me, the answer was all too clear.

“She’s in the music, baby.  She’s in the music.”

A CHRISTMAS STORY FOR YOUR HAPPY HAPPY AND MERRY MERRY

THE DRESS   

By

Sheryl J. Bize Boutte

By the mid 1960’s my parents had four school-aged daughters to support and a fifth change-of –life daughter on the way. Birthday and Christmas gifts often supplemented outgrown or worn out school clothes along with the begged for doll, bike or skates.  Sometimes we got something special; something homemade, handed down or handed over that always brought a unique and precious feel to the celebration.

It was in this tradition on Christmas Day in 1966, while the color wheel changed the aluminum tree from blue to green to red and back again, my mother handed me a gold- ribboned box.  Inside was a simple frock; a multi-colored, multi-flowered shirtwaist dress with a wide belt and full skirt.  A gently worn hand-me-down from one of my mother’s wealthy acquaintances, the bottom of the hem hit just below my knobby knees and fit my unfinished 15-year-old body to a “T. “ Even though it was a spring dress, I could not wait to wear it to school.  My fingers were already turning the front doorknob, as my mother’s voice admonished, “Girl, don’t you know it is JANUARY? You are going to catch pneumonia in that thin little dress!” But I was halfway down the street and about to round the corner on my usual path to my freshman year in high school before she could finish her second sentence. My inaugural wearing of this dress would also be the day a 17-year old boy would look out of his window from the 3^rd house on the right and see me for the first time.

 I knew I probably wore that dress much too often, but I had never had anything like it. It had the power to make my teenage self feel like a big gown up lady and became the favorite in my sparse wardrobe.  It also made that boy wait for me to pass his house each day and then fall into step behind me.  Stealthy and silent, he walked behind me for the five blocks to school for the rest of the school year. A bookworm and a loner, totally inside my own head as I made my way, I never thought to look back.

On a late summer day, after almost a year of following me after I rounded the corner, the forces emanating from that dress with me in it, would give that boy the courage to ring my doorbell and introduce himself.  “Hi, I’m Anthony from around the corner. Does the girl with the flowery dress live here?” he asked my sister who answered the door.  With her usual eye roll she answered, “ You must be looking for Sheryl.  She is always wearing that old-timey dress.”  She called to me to come to the door and from that day forward the boy from around the corner became my boyfriend and soon after that, my fiancé. 

On a beautiful spring day in 1971, we married in the living room of my family home with only our parents, my grandmother and a few friends in attendance.  Still waiflike at age nineteen, my wedding dress was an elegant non-flowery peach chiffon and silk, the perfect compliment to my new husband’s ruffled peach shirt and coordinating bowtie. Our reception consisted of post-wedding photos taken in my parent’s park-like backyard, while our few guests dined on crust-less tuna and chicken salad sandwiches cut into little squares accompanied by Mum’s extra dry champagne.

Settling into married life was automatic for us and as though it was always meant to be.  I finished college and my husband was at my graduation along with my parents.  Soon after I began my career with the government while my husband continued his climb in the building industry and finished his degree.  During this time, the dress became so faded the flowers were barley visible, and so threadbare it was no longer wearable. Tearfully, I threw it away.

As the years passed, my husband would often come home on my birthday, our anniversary or Christmas with a ribbon-tied box containing an exquisite dress, suit or even shoes, from a small boutique he claimed as his territory for his gifts to me.  Once he presented me with a beautiful white suit and when I asked what the occasion was, he replied, “Because its Tuesday.” He always chose the correct size and only stopped the practice when his boutique of choice went out of business.  But of all the wonderful articles of clothing he purchased, the dress, or anything like it, was never among them. 

Then one rainy December day in 1976, during one of my shopping trips through the annual major department store Christmas wish book I saw it; a multi-flowered shirtwaist dress with a white background, a full skirt and a wide belt. It did not matter to me that Christmas was near and I was ordering a dress from the catalogue’s preview for spring, I had to have it and ordered it right away. When it arrived I was a bit disappointed to find that the fabric had an unworn stiffness to it and therefore not as soft as the original, the flowers were not as vibrant as they had appeared in the catalogue picture, and the belt was a skinnier version of its predecessor.  But after so many years of dress drought, I decided this dress and I would make a pact to stay together, even though we both knew the relationship would never be ideal.

My husband loved me in this dress even though I knew it for the poseur it was. And because he loved it, I wore it to work and out to dinner.  I wore to the movies and to the supermarket.   I wore it with a shawl in the spring and with boots and a jacket in the winter. I continued to wear it after our daughter was born in 1977 and was surprised, yet happy that after I punched an extra hole in the belt for just a bit more room, it continued to fit. I wore it through my daughter’s early school years and into her entry to junior high.  After she told me how much she liked it, I wore it even more. Still, through all of that, this dress could not convince me that it was the one.

Since I could never get enough of how happy it made my family, over time the dress and I had settled into an easy truce. I came to accept the fact that it could not help me to recapture the feelings I had when I wore the anointed original.  And it seemed to know that although it was not the dress, my family’s reactions would make it a most treasured piece in my by now, extensive and often talked about wardrobe. 

Then one day, after 19 years of wear, I put the dress on and discovered I could no longer easily button it, and had run out of room for more belt holes. In defiance, I buttoned it and fastened the belt anyway, breaking a fingernail to the quick as I did so. The dress countered my orders for its cooperation with sharp and intense rib pain and taking away my ability to breathe.  We stood at loggerheads in the mirror for a few seconds before I gave in and feverishly began to free myself from its grip.  My disappearing waistline and the dress had finally conspired to betray me.  With mixed emotions I knew we would have to part ways.

Time went by and dresses with magic flowers and full skirts were often sought but not found. Over the years, I tried to replicate that special dress many times over, but it always ended in disappointment and eventual rejection; sometimes by me, but more often by the dress as the Body Mass Index continued its upward climb. Along the way, I happened upon beige and brown flowered silk shirtwaist and I bought it, but like the substitute garden scene dress I had previously outgrown, it was just not the same. I even tried other styles, and I felt I looked just fine, but I felt nothing extraordinary when they draped my frame and somehow that just continued to feel like a requirement.

From time to time, I would still pine for that original long-lost dress and the power it had to make a shy boy follow me to school, my daughter smile, and strangers stop to tell me how great I looked. Even though I was loved well, had a happy home and fulfilling work, I still wanted the all the dress had given me.

In 1995, our daughter went off to college and we became empty nesters. We moved on with life and the blessings of family and love continued as the years passed without the dress. Then on Christmas Day in 2010, my husband presented me with a golden box wrapped with a golden bow.  We had decided not to buy gifts that year, because we felt so blessed, so I was both surprised at the gift and annoyed that he had broken the pact. In the middle of a hot flash with lips pursed, I launched into my protest, “But I thought we weren’t going to…” I was stopped in mid-sentence when my smiling husband and daughter said in unison, “ Just open it!”  Their smiles grew wider and wider as I pushed through the tissue paper labeled “Zell’s Vintage” and opened the box.

 Inside was a simple frock.

 A multi-colored, multi-flowered shirtwaist dress with a wide belt and a full skirt.

The Dress was back for Christmas.

© Sheryl J. Bize Boutte 2012

This story and others appear in my book, “A Dollar Five: Stories From a Baby Boomers Ongoing Journey” available at Amazon.com and other booksellers

https://www.amazon.com/Dollar-Five-Stories-Boomers-Ongoing/dp/149938310X/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=14

POETRY PUBLISHED

POETRY PUBLISHED

My poem, "Singing Into the Brush" has been published in the fall edition of Write Angles. The official newsletter of the Berkeley Branch of the California Writer's Club, Write Angles also honored me as the "Featured Poet" for this edition.  A favorite at readings and book events, "Singing Into the Brush" will appear in my upcoming short story collection, "Running For The 2:10",  currently scheduled for publication in early 2017.

THE PENALTY OF LEADERSHIP

These words have inspired me for many years.  I hope they do the same for you. The PENALTY OF LEADERSHIP

IN every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. ¶ Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. ¶ In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. ¶ The reward is widespread recog- nition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. ¶ When a man's work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be merely mediocre, he will be left severely alone - if he achieve a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a-wagging. ¶ Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. ¶ Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass, or to slander you, unless your work be stamped with the the seal of genius. ¶ Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious continue to cry out that it can not be done. ¶ Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountebank, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. ¶ Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. ¶ The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. ¶ The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. ¶ Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy - but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. ¶ There is nothing new in this. ¶ It is as old as the world and as old as the human passions -envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. ¶ And it all avails nothing. ¶ If the leader truly leads, he remains - the leader. ¶ Master-poet, master-painter, master- workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. ¶ That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. ¶ That which deserves to live - lives.

THIS TEXT APPEARED AS AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THE SATURDAY EVENING POST ¶ JANUARY 2ND, IN THE YEAR 1915 ¶ COPYRIGHT, CADILLAC MOTOR CAR DIVISION

BUMPER STICKER 1960

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Bumper Sticker 1960

Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte

It was one of those scorching hot September days in Oakland. The treeless avenue allowed the sun to burn through so strongly it made the gray cement sidewalks appear to be white as they radiated the merciless heat, seeming to melt the pink rubber soles on our new white bucks.  Feeling our skins turning to toast was no detriment to our ten-year old constitutions as we embarked on our odyssey from the corner store while enjoying our freshly purchased cucumber dills. My friend Giselle and I just kept it moving; walking slowly to her house as we talked about the Kennedy-Nixon debate we had seen the night before.

With both sets of parents and virtually our entire neighborhood solidly in the Kennedy camp, it naturally followed that we were Kennedy fans as well. But we had totally different reasons for liking Kennedy than the adults did.  We thought he was just so much cuter than Nixon. After all, last night Nixon had been a sweaty, ugly mess and Kennedy had been so cool and poised. We had no idea that Nixon had been Vice President; we just knew that Kennedy’s way of talking and his thick head of hair made him handsome.

With pickles finished and our minds made up about who should be President and why, we began to sing our favorite song of the month, “Rockin’ Good Way” at the top of our lungs. We sang this song and others often as we walked from the store or the movies or wherever we were going or had been, switching off being Dinah or Brooke in this top hit “call and response” tune.

I am not sure who was singing what part when we saw the Nixon bumper sticker on the blue Ford truck parked in front of the new auto body shop. Seeing it at the same time, the sight of it in our territory was jarring enough to cut us off in mid-song. Without speaking we both instinctively knew what needed to be done. We were bent and scraping with our fingernails to remove that offending sticker within seconds.  We had managed to get most of it off when we heard a man’s voice yelling,

“Girls, girls! What on earth are you doing?”

We looked up to see a tall, dark haired young man standing in the wide opening of the shop.

The auto body shop owner had caught us. If we had stopped to consider our exposure from that gaping opening where the man now stood, hot, red-faced and looking a bit annoyed, we might have had second thoughts about removing that bumper sticker. We just knew we were going to jail or even worse, he was going to call our parents and tell them we were vandals.

But he didn’t do either. Instead he invited us in to the shop saying he wanted to show us something.

Now, remember, we were ten and we knew that this could be a dangerous thing, but we were also curious. Plus it was two against one and at least on the schoolyard that was usually an automatic win. And when he told us we could just stand in that huge opening and listen to what he had to say, somehow we didn’t feel threatened.  Young and stupid we didn’t stop to think that there could be others in the shop who could reach out and grab us. So we stood on the steel threshold side-by-side, each with one foot in the coolness and shade of the shop, and the other in the relentless heat of the driveway concrete, poised to bolt if needed.

The man gave us a quizzical look as he turned to walk away. We watched as he went to a nearby table holding a tri-fold poster board with carefully printed words and a few pictures.  Across the top, covering all three boards were the words:

THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

He picked up his pointer and began to make a presentation.  We didn’t know what to think.  We stood there both perplexed and fascinated.  The man appeared to be genuinely trying to teach and convince us that the Republican Party was something we should embrace. Much later Giselle and I would recall it as being in school with a nice teacher who was giving us a lesson on how to disobey our parents. We couldn’t stop listening, but we couldn’t do what he said either.

The man went on and on as he covered the material on each of the three boards. He talked about famous Republicans and who reported to whom in the organization.  He talked about what the Republicans would do for the economy and the war and jobs. We had no idea what he was talking about but kept listening because he was so sincere.  At the end of his presentation he asked us if we had any questions, which we did not. And with that he told us to not take off any more Nixon bumper stickers and sent us on our way.

We knew we had been caught up in something strange that would never be believed, so we never told anyone. Besides we couldn’t really explain it without admitting we had just broken two cardinal rules: We allowed ourselves to be lured by a stranger and we destroyed property. Those two things would get us grounded for at least a year. The trouble we would be in by telling was not worth it especially since nothing other than an odd and impromptu lecture on politics had happened.

When we got a few feet away from the shop Giselle looked over at me and said,

“ I don’t care what he says, I still like Kennedy.”

“Me too,” I replied.

And off we went into the heat of the day, continuing our journey to Giselle’s house, re-starting our rendition of  “Rockin’ Good Way.”

This time I was Dinah.

Copyright©2016 by Sheryl J. Bize-Boutte

From the upcoming book of short stories

Running For The 2:10

A Sequel to:

A Dollar Five: Stories From A Baby Boomer’s Ongoing Journey