Chapter Fourteen Homeland Security Since … 1976

Chapter Fourteen

 

Homeland Security Since … 1976

 

“ … fresh air, sunshine and good water.”

--- Flying Hawk, South Dakota, Oglala Sioux, 1852 – 1931

 

Constructing Grace’s Listening curriculum was nowhere near as involved as even one Halloween, Thanksgiving Day, Bodhi Day, Human Rights Day, Chanukah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwaanza, New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, International Women’s Day, Vernal Equinox or Earth Day celebration and gathering for the Truemaier Boys though.  The last – of – the – year’s holidays were again upon us as they were upon all of the kids and all of their families and neighbors, at school, at Herry’s work, everywhere. 

 

Except Quaker Meeting.  What a respite Quaker Meeting is at this time of the vatican “nation’s” gregorian calendar, that event construct put together and made so fuckingly important by squatty, robed and allegedly holy men.  Only things we Quakers did were four.  Contributed dollars and labor to and served during the Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner.  Served up about 400 of the community and not just the ‘poor’ either.  Not in Ames.  Everyone who wants to eat or scrub pots and pans alongside some stranger comes.  Sang carols at about three different nursing homes.  And held the Frugal at the Meetinghouse, really a usual monthly thing and often hosted in Quakers’ homes during other months.  Usual this particular one was, too, except for the extra event that occurs inside Twelfth Month’s Frugal every year, the White Elephant Holiday Gift Exchange.  The Boys’ and my first time since it was our first holiday season with the Ames Friends Meeting.  ‘Friends’ being the original name of Quakers, that is, we all were first known as the Religious Society of Friends.  Then Friends took on for ourselves as our own moniker the mocking and the taunting that was the term Quaker; but that’s another story, and something we see happen in other areas of life from time to time. 

 

Herry’d come to Quaker Meeting I think three times in Columbia where we had all first hooked up with the Quakers 01 Eleventh Month 1983, on the recommendation of a visiting academic agriculturist / rural sociologist to whom I had been introduced in an international agriculture seminar course which I took there during graduate school and who knew about the Quakers’ humanitarian aid projects through the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers’ domestic and foreign quests.  Herry gloriously and grandly talked – that more talk and more talk of his – of our family of five doing such stuff in Central America, specifically in Costa Rica, the richest, the safest and the most comfortable country in the region. 

 

Instead of that happening at all, Herry and I evolved very, very quickly into the subjects of a Clearness Committee convened by two or three intervening and allegedly neutral Friends Meeting members because Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had requested one.  When I wouldn’t do something Herry wanted – which I don’t even remember which one that specific something was. 

 

When that one certain committee meeting didn’t go his way from its very ‘clear’ git – go, why, Herry quit Quaker Meeting and Quakerism.  Like a hot coal.  Like a “not exciting” – enough female.  Like he quit soccer – coaching us dud – mothers’ kiddies.  Right now.  And never went there again.  He’s never been to Costa Rica once.  Still.  And not to any other Central American country either.  That humanitarian stuff ’d all be just so much ... well, work!  Even with the area’s excused away – as – ‘cultural’ aprovechar and machismo corruption.

 

So I took the Boys alone.  Where before have we all read this chapter and verse in godly men’s instructional catechisms, especially on how to teach their own itty bitty ones on their so heralded and supposedly belovéd and o – so righteous religious canons, edicts, laws and precepts?  Complacently,

as a matter of fact.  If men, fathers, patriarchs themselves are accountable for it.  Women, as far as the children’s learning about the androcentric religions is concerned, have had to do the work of it all –

inside the western world.

 

As far as any of it mattered to Herry, he was a vehemently avowed and very dyed – in – the – wolf’s – wool atheist and had married me some eleven years earlier as only such.  In the Memorial Lutheran Church in Ames, though, during one of my Missouri Synod throwback episodes to Mehitable and AmTaham which

I, back then, seemed to suffer from – from time to time.  And under which same primitive reversions so, so many American adult female children still irrationally operate.  Blindly and blitheringly and blatheringly  following, as they most surely are, with their very own babies in tow Grandma’s and Grandpa’s religious fuck right over the mother – fucking precipice and down to their own and their babes’ utterly and entirely preventable demises.  ... IF only these women, these mamas, had been strong enough to first recognize   that they actually possess and then go ahead and assert their very own ... scientific mindsets!  Their own know–ledge of ... reason!  Of what is and what is not reason–able!

 

Hardly Woodstock – esque our wedding was.  Done up, the marriage at least, all nice and neat and legal and proper and christian – like by a fully ordained and pious guy there called a reverend or a minister or some such patriarchal en‘title’ment who pronounced stuff down upon both Herry and me exactly one week – 18 December 1976 – before that stuff – and – more – stuff event known in christian denominations as christmas day.

 

On that very same date in 1971, somewhere else in the country, Memphis, I believe, Lionel was united in matrimony to Grace and promised there to her all of those very same things that Herod was now just a half a decade later avowing to me back up here in Iowa.  Uncanny, huh?  Elsewhere too, I presume, people were wedding other people about that same Winter Solstice time in 1976, and, as simultaneously as we two were betrothing, they were making solid, unswerving pledges to each other themselves. 

 

How utterly silly this is, I am thinking today.  It is impossible for all the humans I know to actually believe, even at the very time that they are saying this stuff out loud to each other, that they are going to be any different and actually keep true what they’ve just affirmed. 

 

A research study couldn’t be done because of its massiveness; but I would like to know just how many of those couples who plighted themselves to each other that very same day in history, Worldwide, actually kept those promises in all ways and are so connected still today nearly 24 years later.  Key and central to the study would be how, honestly now, do they both feel today and all during the years intervening as compared to how they felt about themselves and the promises that they so freely gave away on that actual day of promising. 

 

No wonder that a few folks do re – vowing, repledging deals at their temples or mosques or blessing circles or meetinghouses or whatever.  All other licensures, certifications and registrations that I can think of have to be redone and revised and refreshed periodically, and actually often those periods are.  It only seems logical to have to refresh this thing called promising each other.  Like really, really often, too.  So folks would not have a chance to forget.  One Simple Observation of the Earth.

 

Since the research would reveal, yes, I venture to speculate, less than 50 percent of couples ‘legalized’ via patriarchally religious or androcentrically governmental marriage on 18 December 1976, able to answer that they are the same and always have been since that first day, then why do we do it at all?  Hoping to up the percentages in Truth in Promising in some century soon, are we?  There’s that hope problem thing again.

 

I don’t mind folks being together.  I’m as much for telling people you love them and enjoying an ecstatic romp in the hay and raising strong, healthy children of reason and spirit together as the next couple.  As the next couple of women and men.  Or couple of women.  Or couple of men.  Just don’t say to me or to each other that it’ll always be so.  It won’t always be so.  And then, you’ll have lied.  When you simply didn’t need to.  Here, that hypocrisy problem thing doesn’t have to be.  Allah or no god. 

 

And then, the minister also pronounced approvals and favor and blessings down upon Zane in the pew off to my left side – his being cuddled there in the matron – in – waiting’s warm arms and now himself just a week away from commencing his fifth month of life.  Wearing his lovely little, but manly of course, white christening suit from several weeks back and sporting the yellow elastic – topped booties.  I couldn’t find the white ones that morning.  Poor, unmatching Z … First portent, perhaps, of an unmatch otherwise, too.

 

So.  For Herod, even though he had promised and promised and vowed and affirmed whatever, First Days meant to him a morning of every single week finally free at last of me and of the running – around rug rats so that he could be home alone with his Sunday paper, the current Playboy and his right hand. 

 

Wine bottle neck mouths for a lot of men, including Herry, weren’t exciting enough then either.  Maybe he was worried about getting his stuck.  And now?  I don’t know about now.  He knew I knew about this hand jive of his though.  Wasn’t like his not knowing that I knew of the cows, dogs, pigs and chickens beasties. 

 

And the incest?  Like almost all women everywhere are never able to have this ‘kind’ of information, I too had no material proof, no witnesses, a dead ex – mother – in – law and no talking sister – outlaws so Lawyer Jinx said that all of this information wouldn’t help.  Even if it had been admissible, I am thinking now, “It didn’t matter.  No one in ‘the court’ thinks it matters.  These men?  Least of all, these men.  These holy, pious, honorable, godly, righteous sons of …. fucked mothers.  They will never think it matters; they never have before.  Jinx and his own Playboy magazines yelling at me.  As I, a mere mama, am attempting to help Zane, for the love of christ, try himself to just be 11 years old!  And Jesse 9 and Mirzah 8!”

 

“A lot of nice people read Playboy, Legion!  You shut up about this sex addiction stuff now, ya’ hear!!  You’re just exasperating!!!” yelled Jinx right up into my face as he slammed shut his mighty fine office door and me, quite literally by his own two palms shoving both of my shoulders, thumped upside of it.

 

Only time it would matter is if … I … had done all those things. 

 

If I’d subscribed to Playgirl and helped my sons to sample its tasty morsels of enlightening pornography.  If I’d tended to my G – spot and to my clitoris more than to my husband’s penis.  If I had tended to my brother Sterling’s penis at all.  If I had permitted there to be developed computer – generated whoring ‘business cards’ with my sons’ contact information on them, they serving as their own mama’s pimps and procurers.  If I had, … well, enough.  Then this stuff would matter and, in the blink of opposing Lawyer Shindy Scheisser’s flashy motioning, it’d’ve all been admissible as well.  Only then. 

 

Dr. Herod Edinsmaier does this all – and I say so?  I am lying, and it does not matter anyhow. 

“Shut up, Bitch.  Shut the fuck up!” 

 

True it is.  O, so head – bangingly true it is.   “ … and besides which, Witch, you know as well as I do:  there ain’t no judge who dudn’t himself surf porn!” chants one so – wise Ms. Rachel in her 20 – something crone’s worth of a Winter Solstice incantation nearly a decade after the disgraces which have come to be known within all ‘the courts’ as the three trials and the two appeals of “In re the Marriage of Edinsmaier.”

 

Same rural isolation and blaming that women always endure.  Golden Rule stuff?  Not.  Double Standard stuff.  Same ol’, same ol’ Double Standard stuff.  Right there in the state district court’s legal system of the good ol’ US of A.  My own lawyer’s office.  The stuff of witch – hunts so alive and so flourishing.  Still.  Of course. 

 

I couldn’t even have a boyfriend Lawyer Jinx finger – wagged, “You stay clean as a whistle.  I’m tellin’ ya’, Woman!  No men!”

 

“But.”

 

“Absolutely none.  I do not give a good goddamn shit what you think you know about the law, Legion. 

No men!  None!  Zip!  Do not, I repeat, don’t you ever be telling me that there’s been just even one over to your place.  Not even one.  Ya’ got that straight now?!”

 

So, then.  End of that.  Never did one come over.  Not one.  Not even poor Láslzó.  One of my closest friends, Láslzó.  And a truer friend I’ve never had.  Láslzó’s gay and even he couldn’t come over!  What a society!  What a (nearly – ended!) 20^th Century, American society!

 

*     *     *     *

 

Where, to escape incest and bestiality, was Detanimod going to run off to – with her five daughters and her six sons and the bazillion Holstein calves and the baby chicks for all of whom she was responsible on the farm?  Exactly where now?  When there are three times more animal shelters in America than there are shelters for violated women and their families?  And about zero such shelters for women with flocks and herds of children, chicks and calves trying to rescue them all and escape the waging war zone o – so silently out there in the rural plains’ and prairies’ countryside?  How was she going to separate and protect sisters, and apparently too, female calves and female chicks from brothers and from ol’ Juggern himself?  Beseech the priests?  When Juggern was himself Fatland’s chief Catholic lay cleric!?  Implore the Republican sheriff of the county?  The sheriff whom Juggern, as the Bass County chairman of its Republican Party, had helped get elected so many terms ago?  “Doncha’ dare be exasperating, Detanimod.  How dare you be vexatious now, Bitch?” 

 

I had walked back in on Herry practicing the Holy Roman Catholic Edinsmaiers’ one certain canon rather quite antiCatholically one Sunday morning, the right one of his hands very busy jiving and the left one steadying and supporting and gripping the chair arm.  The Boys were all seat – belted in, but the car wouldn’t start.  So Herry knew that I knew about that. 

 

From that episode, at least, way back in Hershey when I was taking the Boys those Sundays to the Lord of Love Lutheran Church there.  A love church.  A peace church.  I am thinking, “Isn’t that an oxymoron in christian parishes when comparing its name to the number of wars and battles fought abroad – and to those fought within their own homes – by its present congregants genuflecting peace this and love that – if ever I’d heard one?!” 

 

There were so many other interludes between my leaving a room Herod was in and my later re – entering it that I just lost track of how many “Get OUT!”s I’d had barked at me.  Bone – crushing were the loads of soiled laundry I washed from Herry’s staining.  That year?  The year of the ten –,  now 11 – year – old’s

– – and younger sons’ – – Playboy subscription?  Maybe a little more than usual.  But probably not.

 

The White Elephant Frugal is a good thing.  Most years somebody swaddles something up in last First Day’s colored comic strips – wrapping paper that was a former white elephant from holiday Frugals past.  And, of course, every year there are new fiascoes, fizzles, flops, debacles. And duds for presents. 

 

It’s just great.  Certainly not anywhere near, in me, an atavism to Mehitable and how she would have wrapped something up and termed it a ‘gift’.  Too bad for her.  Would’ve earned her Ancestor – in – Training points if she had.  O, well. 

 

The other good thing about Frugal and ‘this holiday time’ with Friends Meeting is that, for Legion True with the Truemaier Boys, there isn’t any dumping at that one time of the man – made, calendar – year construct now.  They get gifts, sure, plenty of presents.  Sometimes frugally, sometimes not so.  But just not on some specific day of someone lighting candles or praying to Allah special phrases under some allegedly special and godly man’s raised right – hand blessing.  They get their christmas gifts any bloody damn time of the year I frickin’ feel like giving them some stuff.  It is so freeing for me.  And for them.  It appears to me they didn’t even notice the absence of the dump.  Maybe I missed it – and Mirzah, Jesse and Zane were way disappointed and crushed, but I never saw it.  Free at last. 

 

I decorate any time I good and damn feel like putting out secondhand crepe streamers, door ribbons, plastic eggs, snowman candles of gardenia and vanilla almond scents and burning jasmine and lavender incense found at Goodwill or basement bazaars.  Or not at all.  No lights either.  I still can’t see wasting my dimes, dimes meant for landmine elimination and children’s bellies, on tinkling lights’ electricity.  More than a half a dozen times over the years, it might be September, it might be January with a foot of snow on the dead grass, and there’ll be the Truemaier Boys in the kitchen coloring eggs with food dye, vinegar, boiled water and about eight different cups of this stuff atop old newspapers on the dining table.  ‘Til its time to go hunt ‘em down after I’ve hidden them about out there in the snow. 

 

We four really only carved jack – o’ – lanterns in early autumn and at no other time because of the availability of the main ingredient; but I always had Zane, Mirzah and Jesse help me pick through the yucky, wet, slippery strands to save their seeds, then dry them in single layers on cookie sheets about ten days.  After a spritz with olive oil and a soak in a mixture of soya and Worcestershire sauces plus ordinary table salt, I’d bake them up into nut – like, crunchy snacks.  Every October.  Now if I had been any kind of cook at all, as Mehitable repeatedly lamented that I so was not, I would’ve also saved the pumpkin meat itself for pies, bars or cookies.  But, alas, I failed at that, too.  Every October.

 

I have no idea where Herry was while we were working the pumpkin, but he was nowhere near the toil of it and probably not even hanging around the newspaper – strewn kitchen table – just talking – during any of the times of all this labor.  Like I say, I do not remember him being anywhere around during carving times.  I certainly do remember him not fixing up any of the Boys’ costumes.  Times three.  Times umpteen years per October.  Much less, any of the thinking about and the planning for them beforehand.  Kinda like the same amount of no thinking and of no planning that Dr. Edinsmaier put into any hot supper menu from the meat and vegetables frozen solid in the icebox while, every morning though, most assuredly remembering to anoint his sweet – smelling self in anticipation of his high – level hospital cafeteria coffee breaks with whatever female subordinate de jour. 

 

While I stayed home and passed out the treats to our littlest tricksters, Herry did do most of the years’ worth of walking the Boys door to door receiving, of course, the sugary confections and the verbal accolades from the folks up the street and the friends over in the next court and the total strangers whose porch lights were on in the neighborhood.  The acclamations of O! How cute! they all looked and weren’t they just adorable.  And all.  Then, when home, it was time for me to spring into action before the Boys’ hungry eyes overtook their patience and traipse all of the bags over to the local ER for x-ray, then monitor all the candies and wrappers myself for non – radiographic evils.  Alone again.  That was work.  So no Herry there either. 

 

And Herry’s not spading out of the hole in the cold, hard dirt into which to eventually plant the balled and rooted evergreen that was the living tree of christmas 1987.  In Eleventh Month I dug the hole before the hardest freezes came and covered it with plywood, plastic tarp and rocks to keep out the sleet and slush.      I could describe in major detail just how many christmases before this one I had accomplished the various holidays’ celebratory preparations alone – always alone – but I would exhaust myself remembering to catalog them all.  I just cannot do it. 

 

All of them, except that one christmas eve in Columbia when I revolted and refused.  And no christmas at all happened that one year.  Like I was hoping it would somehow materialize Herry – style or whatever. 

It did not.  Hope fails.  Hope kills.  Kills holidays, too, it does.  All the christmas mornings since were just like that first one that I do, at least, remember back in Hershey when three – year –old Jesse uncovered the biggest, the bluest and the most beautifully wrapped present under that live tree type, too, that December.  And the present turned out to be his first very own dolly.  Which he immediately threw down. 

 

And then – later, gradually – picked up again.  And subsequently – a bit after himself – named Peter Jesse.

 

Valentine’s was, in 1988, as before, the same ol’, same ol’ as well.  Just like halloween.  Just like christmas.  Rush, rush, rush, spend, spend, spend.  Then throw away and throw some more away.  Shit, this bothered me so much.  That my sons were learning this fuck, too.  Rush, spend, consume, toss.  Rush, spend, consume, toss.  Then.  Do it all over again the next month.  What a cycling this was.  And then, too, to be worried throughout this all about their personal safety from … other people. 

 

While I really do not know whether Flying Hawk who walked the World as an Oglala Sioux from 1852 through something like 1931 C.E. may or may not have been mean to his wives, whether he was or was not hard – hearted and mean – spirited to them and to other women, he did happen to state something in his old age which AmTaham found worth repeating, “The teepee is much better to live in:  always clean, warm in winter, cool in summer, easy to move.  Indians and animals know better how to live with grace than white man.  Nobody can be in good health if he does not have all the time … fresh air, sunshine and good water.”  So true that is, I know.  But even Ms. Flying Hawk knew back then that her kids especially were not safe from, were not protected from … other people.

 

*     *     *     *

 

Early Spring 1988 arrived.  Its Vernal Equinox was followed in just a greening month’s time by its Earth Day.  One of those other people was about to enter my life, a woman this one was, by the simple name of Li Zhang, a name which probably, right now, labels nearly a million or more people in the World – both women and men alike.  That’s a point.  This not keeping my little self protected from other people can arise from so many, many angles that these unsafe people might as well all have the same name and I not be able to tell them apart.  They’re so alike in several ways, not the least of which, of course, are their own names.  I, to this day, have never met this woman face to face.  She was staying one particular March day and night at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago and, while conferencing there, was apparently victimized by theft of some valuable stuff of hers I was told, a camera or a purse or a microscope.  Something like that. 

 

There’d been a medical meeting.  I believe the umpteenth medical meeting in my and the Truemaier Boys’ lives.  When Herry left Othello Drive for it, I was only given the same ol’, same ol’ as I had been so passively and so wickedly told at the outset of all the rest of the local and statewide medical meetings or national, cross – country trips Herry’d taken and attended before this 1988 one.  That being, at a minimum, two per year for 11 years so not umpteen of them but, as a matter of fact, about 22 or 23 for certain by now, “Where am I going to be?  You don’t need to know that, now do you really?  Do ya’?  If an emergency came up, well, … well, you’d have to go on and handle it by yourself alone anyhow, now wouldn’t ya’, Cunt?  Well, wouldn’t ya’?!” 

 

“Yeah.  Yeah, Herry, I suppose so.”

 

“Well, then.  I’m off.”

 

And that was it.  Gone.  No kiss.  And no telephone number.  He wouldn’t even know himself the names of any of our babysitters, let alone, their home telephone numbers around the towns where we lived:  the Boys’ surrogate caregivers – when their primary caregiver wasn’t I, that person never being he.  In case when he telephoned home to say that his plane had arrived to wherever safely and we four were unavailable or out when he called, then Dr. Herod Edinsmaier could ring up one of them instead with the message that he was okay and ask them to get it back to us.  We didn’t always have an answering machine in those days.  Then Herry could go on about his medical business meeting knowing that we, his loving family, were reassured about his transportation and safe arrival, too.

 

Shit!  For what did I just the hell go and write that down?  He never called back to say that.  No, he never, ever did.  Not even one time did Dr. Herod Edinsmaier call back home or to anyone else near our several, various homes to say anything like that at all – that he was safe, much less, to find out … if we were! 

 

What am I thinking?  Herry never even locked the doors before himself retiring to bed at night.  Actually outwardly stating to me that that was too much work to do, that he was too tired and that it wouldn’t matter anyhow:  if someone really wanted to get inside and do us all in, why then they’d find a way to get that done – with us all locked in or not. 

 

So.  I, every single night of the 12½ years which he, according to mother – fucking society and according to himself, headed up and was socially credited as its bloomin’ lord and master with keeping safe our household, locked all of our homes’ doors myself.  If they were going to be secured at all, then it was up to me – – no matter how tired I may have been, too.  No matter that.  That little itty bitty thing.  No matter that it was every single night.  The man, he is especial, he is, ya’ know, so off to bed he goes whenever, however.  Don’t you be expecting him to do any of the work of protecting and of keeping safe you, let alone, his and your kids, by his having to do the work of remembering to, let alone, then getting up off of his ass and going to the ridiculously stupid effort of locking the mother – fucking doors. 

 

Hell, Dr. Edinsmaier gets to sleep through anesthetized and unconscious women’s scheduled breast biopsies.  Why shouldn’t I be thinking Herry would also get to sleep through basic home security, too?!”

 

“Hell!” I used to think every single time but dare never say to Herry for fear of reprisal, “Mirzah could be dead, Herry.  Mirzah could be stone – cold dead – and … and Jesse and Zane and I have him buried already.  And you would never even know to care to be back in town in time from any of your bloody fucking meetings to kiss him good – bye.  We could actually do that!  We could actually bury for you all – absolutely all of your blesséd children – for all you knew and cared!  Many times over we could actually have done this!  For all you cared.” 

 

But silenced I kept.  Every single trip.  Herry always had at the ready that standard, pat ‘question – answer’ sprinkled with those little extra loving names for departing from me, “Well, Bitch, you’d have to handle it now yourself alone anyhow, wouldn’t ya’?!, Well now, wouldn’t ya’?”

 

Same as everywhere else we lived.  If I truly did need to know the name of the hotel, its phone number    for guest information, the name of the meeting, the length of the meeting, the brand of flight or the route driven or, well, let’s just say if I needed to know squat I would, now 22 or 23 times, have had to call up   Dr. Edinsmaier’s colleagues’ spouses and ask them for all of this information.  “Gosh, Ms. Goldstein, ah, Ella, do you know the name of the hotel where Dr. Goldstein, ah, where Freddie, is going to be?  And they’re taking what flight?  And, … ah, ‘nd they’re expected back, ah, when exactly now?  Gosh.  Thanks an awful lot.  So sorry to’ve been a bother to you about this.”

 

Never, in 22 or 23 times, was there even the illusion to me that if shit happened to any one of us four, Herry’d be like, “Whoa, Darling, I’m there!  I’m on the next flight there!  Just hang on, Love!  Hug the babes and keep your eyes and your arms open.  I’m almost there!”  Never.  Not one mother – fucking time.  Ever.  O, wait a sec!  It did too!  Several times this happened.  But always in Another World … in my Fantasy World.

 

Just like Herry never once called up my folks living very near to Iowa City to ask them if his most belovéd wife and his most belovéd children had made it there to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s okay.  Not one time.  Ever.  When all four of us – alone and always, always without Herry – were traveling to Mehitable’s and AmTaham’s for any kind of those 12½ years’ worth of vacations or holidays or just simple, ordinary visits. 

 

It took one hour to get across Columbia one christmas eve the ice and the wind were so bad.  And it was now dark time. 

 

A normal trip in great weather and with good roads?  Six hours.  Three little itty bitty kids all lined up in the back in their respective car seats and their mama.  Christmas eve and an hour to drive what normally took a mere 10 minutes.  I pulled into a gas station on the City’s north side and rang up mom.  You’d’ve thought our not coming for christmas that year was going to bring down the Fires of Hell on all the little girls’ and all the little boys’ christmases all over the World to hear Mehitable’s response.  “It’s not that bad out.  The reports here are not what you say.  You’re always exaggerating.  You don’t know.  What’s Herry say?  I just know it’s not that bad.  You’re overreacting again.  Just take it slow.  What’s Herry say?  You’ve talked to Herry, right?  What’s he say?  The Boys’ll be sooooo disappointed.  How can you take this away from them?  Herry wouldn’t.  You know he wouldn’t.  You know he wouldn’t say no to them.  You know that.  He wouldn’t soooo disappoint them like you’re goin’ to.”  Mehitable, of course, didn’t right out loud on the phone say Bitch!  Or Stupid!  Or Stupid Ass Heifer!  Or You Don’t Have a Mind of Your Own!  But.  She did.

 

Herry didn’t even look up when we walked back in the door.  At least I told myself, alone, on christmas day, we didn’t go.  I stood alone.  I did not try to go – with my babies – one inch further. 

 

That particular 24 December evening I probably saved all of our lives and the lives of folks I don’t even know and will never know.  Another of those life – altering events that night.  Gone wholly unnoticed and unheralded.  ‘Cept by a mother fucked.  I had only myself to give me thanks.  Which is exactly how Herry would have it.  What I am thinking now is, “How many, many fucked mothers just like me were also trying to do that, that is, trying to do the impossible, that night and every holiday eve before and since?  The World over?  How many?”  Because I certainly know why they are.  And why they and their babies die when they do try to accomplish the impossible.

 

*     *     *     *

 

The medical meeting is all by which I knew it.  Never have I known with what association or agency or pathology college or department it was connected.  A pathology technician of some kind, Ms. Li Zhang was attending the meeting all the way from Australia so it must’ve been a big, big one, an international conference or seminar or workshop, for her to’ve come all the way across the big, big, water.  And to be so alone and so frightened, I’m so sure, when somebody stole something of her personal stuff that day. 

 

Or, more likely, she was a big, big girl having been big enough to’ve just come all that way alone in the first place, and knew exactly what hotel security to contact and report the theft of her stuff to and her fears about it.  As, of course, would Herod Edinsmaier also have been.  That is, big enough to’ve advised her of this as well – had he, say, been asked by her what to do about her theft situation. 

 

But Herry didn’t do that, nor she exactly.  Instead, Dr. Edinsmaier ‘somehow’, and no one I know who

also has this information has it figured out either ‘cept Herry, ‘course, husband already by this time and quite a father of three little itty bitty kiddies and, well, ya’ know, Herry, the Family Guy, how he ended up in Ms. Zhang’s hotel room at 3:00 a.m.  “I was comforting her,” were the exact and only words Herry used when he explained to me how it was that a) he was there in her hotel room at that hour at all anyhow and

b) he, Herry, was this strange woman’s comforter and the hotel cops weren’t.  Which, it turns out, along with the Chicago police and those detectives, were never even contacted about the theft by this time yet at all.  If, as I don’t know, her things were ever burgled or not.  Only Herry was her comforter and Only Herry’s comforting was all that was apparently needed.  O. Henry.  Really?

 

Easter and more decorated egg – hunting, quite appropriately scheduled now, of course, and Quaker Meeting’s Sunrise Walk in the Nutty Woods with a lovely brunch and Silent Worship after came in very early April that spring.  Then our first academic year in Ames with the commute to school was almost over with Little League all set for summer, the Little Majors for Zane, and Jesse and Mirzah both slated for the same __________ Medical Clinic – sponsored Little Minors team.  Just two different ball parks, too, not three, so logistically I could do this.  And wonderfully, Little Majors practice and game days were on two of the different days of the week than the two Little Minors practice and game days so four to six days a week all summer long of ball?  What could be better planned than that?! 

 

This ‘explanation’ of said medical meeting event would never have waved itself across my only functioning eardrum at all, a very usual phenomenon in that ages – old archive called Cheating Family Men.  “The lyin’, cheatin’ sack of shit is here”, Emma Rae identified her sister’s husband and the Doodlebug’s father as in Something To Talk About, I believe it was.  It wouldn’t’ve come to me at all ‘cept that something came instead to poor, poor Herry first.  Through the U.S. Mails.  Actual, tangible, tactile and quite palpable, you could certainly hold this little thing if it ended up in your bare little hands, too.  Not exactly exculpatory “evidence”.  As we have all read now earlier on how it is that the United States district ‘civil’ courts define evidence.  A book.  It was a book.

 

But we were not in court today.  Not yet.  And the evidence wouldn’t have mattered nor helped me Lawyer Jinx also ‘explained’.  Instead it was lunchtime with hot foodstuff always ready for Herry about 12:10 or 12:15 and we were in The Pineapple Room, ya’ know, our flamboyantly wallpapered kitchen / dining room with the sable brown pile carpet in the Family Guy’s very real very bachelor pad, just the two of us as Jesse, Mirzah and Zane were finishing out their Kate Mitchell year still.  It was no different this day, Tuesday, 31 May 1988, the last day of that absolutely beautiful spring month of May when Herry brought around the stone and mortar fireplace island to the table the mail of the day just dropped through that notorious front door slot.  Like pulling a camel through the proverbial needle’s eye it was in the beginning to extract that explanation after the camel had just been squeezed through that mail slit first, but I’m getting ahead of myself – and the Flood of biblical proportions here – a little itty bitty bit.

 

Homeland Security Since 1492, … Aaah, Since 1935, Er, I Mean Since 1976