by Donna L. Emerson

People press toward the light not in order to see better but in order to shine better.—We are happy to regard the one before whom we shine as light.  Friedrich Nietzsche decorated with yellow and red grosgrain ribbon and brass. ―You are of high rank,‖ I said, as I touched his medals. I praised his talk. He put his arm around me in the back seat of the cab.

We talked work, we talked theories, we talked all night. We spoke about children going through divorce—did the break-up have to hurt them? Each of us coming out of long term relationships.

After dinner we danced. I could smell his peach-olive cologne as he removed his stiffer military coat. His medals tinkled when he took it off. His shirt stuck to me while we danced after everyone else went home. He fluttered his eyelashes over my closed eyes. You are the fresh air I need, he said to me as I was thinking this about him.

He asked me upstairs. I told him I would not until he was a very single man. He knew I was right, being Catholic, and from my part of Pennsylvania. We walked and talked until the October sun came up and the breakfast crew began their day. Tell me what you do all day, every day, at home, he clasped my hand. We spoke of our favorite foods while he walked me to my hotel room.

I lay in bed an hour and he called to invite me to lunch. As we walked out of the hotel, he said he had to get something in his room. As I stood outside waiting, he said, Lunch is being served here.

I looked in and there on the white tablecloth were all the foods I‘d described the night before: rare lamb, steamed fresh spinach with garlic butter, Caesar salad, pickled beets, and cherry pie. Each one in porcelain surrounded by silver. We sat down. He watched me eat every bite.

We wrote, sent poems, called, made plans. I want to tuck you in, he whispered at the end of our phone calls. He moved into his own apartment. I stayed in mine. He couldn‘t continue with me after some months because he had many children, complications with his divorce, military missions, responsibilities. He was the President‘s analyst.

As months passed, I drifted away, married 5 years later. He was still managing a messy divorce. We met on Union Street in San Francisco when I was seven months pregnant. I wore a red velvet maternity dress. He loved my belly, patted it. We ate dinner in warm summer air, walked for two miles until I had to go home. We spoke of our counseling work. He spoke of his missions, his duty to the Pentagon and his country. He loved serving.

Letters, a meeting five years later at Letterman, when he came out for an AMA conference. His divorce was final. Mine was in process. I drove to the city to see him. He held a party in his room, one of those Victorian houses for generals and commanders that I‘d always wanted to visit. Old, wooden, three-story clapboards with stories to tell, that I drove by all the years in between our meetings.

I loved him, had loved him for fifteen years; our common pasts tied us together. We wore our morality every day, we were the high standards of our generation, he on one coast, me on the other. Living out our caring of the life we‘d been given through tireless service to children. He pulled me close and said he wanted me on his lap. I moved back, getting my bearings. I could see what he had in mind and wasn‘t sure any more.

We spoke about our futures. He thought he would likely marry the woman who‘d been his secretary; she understood his military obligations, his marriage to his work, his many responsibilities. She wasn‘t a beauty, he said, it wasn‘t a passionate union. We both knew I would ask more of him.

Let me wash your face. Now your feet. I’ve wanted us all my life, as far back as I can remember. He brushed my hair, all my hair.

We made love for all we‘d shared together, all we‘d lost, all the love that needed saying. He discovered me. He recognized me. He watched me sleep. My cheek felt safe against his broad chest. He left at dawn. He called later to say he‘d found a bus, good thing he‘d done reconnaissance in Vietnam.

As time passed, I imagined him holding up the East Coast as I worked on the West. Puzzled a little at no responses to my letters. Certain we‘d meet again.

I found out twenty years later that two years after our lovemaking he died, parachuting into Central America. His obituary said he returned to his duties that day until abdominal pain sent him to the infirmary. I called his clinic. His friend told me he had been on his feet, laughing with the younger, injured men. He had to be airlifted out and died on the way to Texas. I wonder what his last thoughts were. I like to think he held glimpses of me, maybe not that day, but a day before, encircling his legs, touching every part of his strong body, telling him, I’ll never forget.

Donna Emerson, college instructor, LCSW, photographer, writes poetry and prose. Recent poetry publications include Eclipse, Phoebe, Paterson Literary Review. Prose and photography publications: L. A. Review, Passager, Stone Canoe. Her chapbooks: This Water, and Body Rhymes (nominated for a California Book Award). Donna lives with her husband and daughter in Petaluma, near her adult sons.

WRITERS FORUM of PETALUMA

Third Thursday of the month 7—9 p.m. Petaluma Community Center (320 N. McDowell Blvd.) $15 each workshop at the door www.thewritespot.us

February 17, 2011: Zoe Fitzgerald Carter March 17, 2011: Verna Dreisbach April 15, 2011: Matt Stewart May 19, 2011: Sheldon Siegal June 16, 2011: Victoria Zachheim

The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.  John Muir

SEARCHLIGHTS & SIGNAL FLARES

Searchlights & Signal Flares, TL’s monthly online column, is written by writers like you. Join the exchange! Go to www.tiny-lights.com and subscribe to our free monthly email newsletter, Sparks: News & Notes, to keep up with the conversation and get Searchlights prompts delivered to your inbox.

Flares from our August 2010 posting:

When an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?

It would be nice to have access, say on a rental basis as with office furniture, to bomb-defusing equipment for those times when unexpected memories come to call. Even the happy ones tend to leave a smoldering crater in their wake, pointing out as they do that I'm older now, or that blackberries are not in season, or that a relationship that was once caramel-sweet did, as things sometimes do, turn foul and poisonous in the end. A bad memory, of teasing, betrayal, humiliation, loss, or failure, can nag like a mosquito in a hotel room. It's not always convenient, but they can be dispatched effectively by swatting, preferably with a volume of Eckhart Tolle. I would rather they all stayed home and left me out of things, stopped drinking my blood for sport or blasting me out of the here and now into unhealthy comparisons.

The good and bad ones, even those of recent issue, show up dressed as sharp as Mormons and ready to chat. And their approach at the door always reduces me to child size, afraid to talk to strangers or open the door, sensing that they're already oozing in through the screen without my consent. The knob is harder to reach than usual and my movements slow down, as if I'm walking across the bottom of a swimming pool. Light bends and ripples around the cheap film they're projecting on the wall, the short film of my yesterday, losing my temper unflatteringly, the camera giving me fat squirrel cheeks and a drunkard's spongy red nose. Next time I'll remember to fasten the chain-lock, to offer a note from my mother, to tell them I can't talk to last year or the year before because it's all I can do to make it through today, this moment right now. But of course they'll get in; the past always does, and shrinks me back to helplessness with one push of the bell.

Heather Seggel is frequently unstuck in time; if you come visit her and she doesn't answer the door, don't take it personally. Her work currently appears in the anthology Punk Rock Saved My Ass (Medusa's Muse Press).

After plopping a handful of change on the counter of a coffee shop, I was short a nickel. This triggered the memory of a similar situation many years earlier.

I was five when I began my daily visit to the nearby general store by myself. Once in the store, I would ask for an ice cream cone, Dixie Cup, or Popsicle and tell the proprietor, ―Charge it to the Edgers!‖

Few Fox Islanders paid cash for their groceries; instead, everyone had a charge account, which was kept in an account book stored in a big drawer underneath the cash register. Accounts were payable on a weekly basis. The only thing not chargeable was soda pop. It was in a machine on the store's porch and required a nickel.

I didn't drink pop very often because my dentist-father was an anti-pop zealot who pounded dental propaganda into my young brain. However, on especially hot days, the lure of a cold Coke overpowered the fear of rotten teeth, and I would head to the porch to peruse pop bottle tops. Several flavors of soda were kept icy cold in a refrigerated water cooler that held the pop bottles' necks in tracks. The buyer had to guide the bottle of the chosen flavor from its track to a slot that would release the bottle when a nickel was fed into the coin slot.

The only ‗money‘ I carried in my pocket was a collection of tax tokens I had managed to find. Each token had a hole in its center through which I strung a small chain. I knew that I could swap tokens for real money by asking whoever was behind the counter in the store, ―How many tokens does it take to make a nickel?‖ ―Fifteen!‖

Removing the tokens from my pocket, I unstrung them from the chain, putting them into piles of three. I knew that I needed five piles to equal five cents. ―I only got twelve. Can I bring you three more tomorrow?‖ ―I'll tell you what. Keep yer tax tokens, cuz we got enough already. I'll just lend you a nickel, and then later today or tomorrow you can bring me a nickel to make us even. Okay?‖ ―Okay,‖ I said stringing the tokens back on their chain.

Back to paying for my coffee: Among the pile of coins was a wrapped mint candy. Teasingly, the five-year-old in me asked, ―Could you count the mint as a nickel?‖

The cashier answered, ―Keep the mint. I'll catch you the next time you come.‖

Don Edgers lives, writes and drinks his coffee in Port Orchard, WA. His website: anislandintime.com.

When an unexpected memory calls, I pick up the phone and listen half-heartedly, bored by the stale tale I've heard so many times before.

When the doorbell rings, I sense the cold water of dread rising in my gut and realize I'm holding stale air in my lungs. I slam the door shut.

Other times, I'm eager for that sunny visitor, whose arrival satisfies a longing I never knew was there, gladness coursing through my veins.

Of late, youthful memories seldom visit or call. Instead, yet-tobe-formed memories keep ringing and ringing. I resist the urge to answer, willing the machine to pick up.

Jodi Hottel keeps trying to live in the present moment in Santa Rosa.

Share your own illuminating insights with these upcoming questions:

Who sees your work in progress? (01/15/11) What's your idea of an effective cover letter? (02/15/11)

How do you deal with writer’s envy? (03/15/11)

Send to editor@tiny-lights.com Responses will be posted @ www.tiny-lights.com the following month.

Nerissa: When the moon shone, we did not see the candle. Portia: So doth the greater glory dim the less. Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

This Year’s Contest Judges

Colin Berry writes fiction, memoirs, and articles about art and visual culture from a sunny space in Silver Lake, a district in north -central Los Angeles. He is finishing a collection of short stories about men at turning points in their lives. You can read more of his writing at www.colinberry.com.

Jamie Moore is studying for her MFA in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles. She enjoyed interning for Tiny Lights, and loves to help out at the local Sonoma County literary events. She is trying to avoid all those real life responsibilities in order to carve out a writer's life for herself.

Ken Rodgers lives in Boise, Idaho. He and his wife, Betty, tend to be migrants and are making a documentary film about Ken‘s company of Marines in Vietnam. Ken teaches creative writing workshops on ground and online and has an MFA from The University of San Francisco. More about Ken: www.kennethrodgers.com.

Dan Coshnear’s bio has changed very little since last year except this; he was born again to new parents. Of these new parents, little is known. They seem like his old parents, but younger, slightly wittier. Mom was an Olympic long jumper. Dad has six fingers on each hand and he played clarinet. They met in jail. In Albania. On the winter solstice. Daniel was conceived during a lunar eclipse. They say they love him. They write often. Constantly. Email him: dan@coshnear.org

Lakin Khan is the Fiction Director for the Napa Valley Writers Conference, a hat she wears, she‘s been told, with both verve and panache. Her poems, stories and essays have been published locally in zaum, The Dickens, Zebulon Nights and Tiny Lights. Links to her work can be found at her idiosyncratic blog, Rhymes with Bacon: http://lakinkhan.blogspot.com..

Thanks for the courage and patience of all who shared their writing with us. We couldn‘t do this without you. Please try us again. CONTEST 2010 FINALISTS Flashpoint Finalists: "No Adults are Home" by Erin Green; "Scopitone" by Melody Gough; "The Gift" by Ana Chavarria Shore

Standard Length Finalists: "Rapids Recovery" by B.J. Yudelson; "Blue Ticket" by Shae Abbett Irving; "Midsummer Milkweeds" by Alison Townsend; "Stirrups" by Leslie Tucker; "Swimming" by Molly Knox

ENTRIES OF NOTE "Bannock Street" by Ariel Smart; "The Chili Sauce Gift" by Sandy Carrubba; "A Question of Risk" by Sheila Cotton Robertson; "Artists" by Susan Starbird; "Linda's Litany" by Irene Edwards; "Gone in 60 Seconds" by Charlie Long; "Christmas Cactus" by Amy Whitcomb; "Sold! On a Small Town Saturday Night" by Ellaraine Lockie; "Of Birds and Bees and Spiders, Too" by Joyce Deming; "Cheers" by Barbara Toboni; "Coal Hollow Ekphrasis" by Floyd Cheung; "Someone Who Looks Like Me" by Michael E. Reid; "The Basement" by Jan Henrikson; "Meditation" by Tomoko Harada Ferguson; "The Taxi Ride" by Margaret Mary Monahan; "The Last Word" by Colleen Craig; "Teddy's Story" by Shiv Dutta; "Visit to David" by Lucille Lang Day; "Ghost Wings" by Catherine Crawford; "The Writing on the Wall" by Sarah Savsky; "Dementia, Word, This" by Lynne Casteel Harper; "Better than 10,000 Ducks" by Jean Wong

Deborah Garber

FLASH IN THE PAN

Quarterly explosions of brilliance at www.tiny-lights.com. These pieces are from the 21st Flash:

Sounds of Childhood by Shirley Johnson

First a distant, high-pitched note far away wailed octaves above the rhythmic rumble that accompanied its approach. Not melodious, but insistent, gaining in force as it came nearer, changing from an announcement to a warning, and from a single note to multiple tones, like a bellows. Soon all the dogs in town howled mournfully, none more than our two Chesapeake retrievers, who heard all the mortal warnings of mankind and dogdom as the heavily loaded cars rumbled through the town.

In the days of my young childhood, seventy-five to a hundred boxcars loaded with hematite ore bound for the steel mills of Gary and Pittsburg thundered along the way to the port of Duluth two or three times a day, leaving the pictures on our walls askew and the keening dogs quiet after their service as town criers. For those of us who lived in the small northern Minnesota town, the trains became the background noise of our lives, hardly noticed unless a stranger called attention to them. ―Oh, that‘s an ore train from the Iron range,‖ we‘d explain with a certain pride in the reflected glory of being part of the power that fueled the great industries of our country. How mighty those trains were, dangerous and exciting as they declared their importance in that cold land.

The open-pit mines of Minnesota (―the largest open-pit mines in the world‖ we often heard repeated) represented great wealth, like the oil of the Mid-East in the next industrial revolution. My father often said with slightly bitter humor that his grandfather left northern Europe to walk across the state, bypassing the riches of the iron range to settle on swampy forested land. (Golda Maier said something similar when she explained that the Jews couldn‘t be as smart as was claimed having had the whole desert to settle in and choosing a place with no oil.) I didn‘t realize I had carried the sound of the ore trains in my memory, and for years after I came to live near the Pacific, I accepted the ocean‘s roar as part of the orchestral background of my life without questioning its source. These rhythms were totally different but I didn‘t stop to listen until one cold night, when I paused on my front steps, and hearing the pounding of the waves, at last knew that these were not echoes from my childhood but the sounds of the new world I was to live in from that time forward.

Shirley Johnson currently lives and writes in Santa Rosa, CA.

Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real™: www.writingitreal.com Premium magazine and resource center for writing from personal experience

The sun and stars are mine; if those I prize.  Thomas Traherne

Meditation on Age and Anchovies by Laura Blatt

I‘ m dining on anchovies. Not the usual, overly salty stuff you get in tins, but big, robust simmered ones, a delicacy here in Manarola, Italy. From my table, I have a splendid view of fishing boats on the blue Mediterranean and brightly-colored flats nestled on steep cliffs.

Small dogs sit at their masters‘ feet, perhaps tasting a special treat before the bill arrives. The dogs are patient. They have learned that good behavior allows them to go anywhere, from bakeries to restaurants. And there‘s no rush, either for humans or canines.

Today is my birthday or “Oggi è il mio compleanno,” as I say to my waiter, having vowed to speak only Italian or to remain silent. Every night, I memorize a phrase to use the next day. “Cinquantotto anni,” (58 years) I add, proudly.

This meal marks the ending of a glorious day. In the morning, I ate fruit from my hotel‘s lush garden, At noon, I snacked on pungent cheese. Strolling on the boardwalk of the Via dell‘Amore from Manarola to Riomaggiore and back, I listened to the rush of the waves and the murmurs of tourists. Later, a six-mile hike led me down rough, winding trails along hillsides and vineyards. An old man carrying a loaf of bread smiled as I took his photograph.

Back in the USA, my house gathers dust and noxious weeds grow on my one-acre plot. Reports and documents clutter my office desk. All are urgent. But here by the sea, I take delight in my own good company. As for picking up speed: posso aspettare—I can wait.

For over two decades, Laura Blatt was an editor and manager at Wolters Kluwer publishing (formerly CCH) and a web site writer. Now retired, she lives in Penngrove, California. Recently, her work appeared in Tiny Lights and California Explorer.

Going, Going by Cameo Archer

Instead of coming here the last two Saturdays, I visited my grandchildren in Illinois, so it‘s been three weeks since I‘ve helped my dad. All morning I‘ve been puttering around the house, the inside air stale, smelling of old men. I want to run away.

Jerry surprised me by being here when I arrived, although he lives here. He jabbered on about this and that. Finally said, ―You don‘t need to go back to say hello. He refused food this morning. I wouldn‘t even look in there, if I were you.‖

I poke here, poke there, not sure when to do. It‘s too quiet, too different from the days when the kitchen was full of people, when dishes of salad, pitchers of lemonade, plates of chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers floated out the back door to the swimming pool deck where grandchildren cried out, splashed each other, ran back to the bathroom in the house.

There‘s no turquoise water in the pool now—no water at all. It‘s a ridiculous concrete hole in the ground, taking up most of the back yard, collecting trash in the deep end, the diving board taken away long ago as a safety hazard. In the quiet kitchen the dishwasher‘s broken, the stove has only one burner that works.

Our routine has been: afternoons Dad naps, I take a walk; so after eating some lunch, that‘s what I do. I go quickly up Floral, left on Citrus more slowly, turn steep up towards Honolulu Terrace to steeper still. Will this be the last time I halt at the edge of the cliff to look at Catalina Island, see purple fluffs of Jacaranda blossoms decorating Whittier?

After my brother leaves, I look in on Dad anyway. Curled up on the hospital bed, he‘s shrunken to nothing, his skin yellow, his bones sticking out.

I stare. Will the next breath come?

It does, a choking, gasping one—a minute or so later, another. I back away into the next room, hold on to the counter and say to him, to myself, silently, ―Dad, you don't have to stay. We‘ll be all right. You can go to Mother or wherever you expect to go. We‘ll be okay,‖ hoping it‘s so.

Back out on the front steps it's time to relock the door, cross the lawn, the street, start up the car and go. I want to stay, but Jerry insists that I go to this party. From my car I look back at the old place, the flowerbeds weedy, the twenty-five foot tall sweet olive cut down. It‘s well over 50 years since the day we moved here. At least now the windowpanes will stay in, even if the friend who puttied them left fingerprints.

The sky darkens, a cloud or something. My eyes lift to see three black crows flying toward me over the house. They are silent. I have never before seen a crow in Whittier.

I know my Dad is dead.

Cameo Archer lives in Santa Rosa, California, and regularly reads her poetry at the Healdsburg Third Sunday Salon. She’s looking for an agent for her historical novel based on her grandparents’ lives as missionaries in China during the early twentieth century.

Letter to My Father by Dave Kashimba

Pop, I can no longer go fishing with you, yet when I go fishing, you are with me. I can still see you pointing to the watery depths where the big ones are.

I can no longer go mushroom hunting with you, but I'll never forget what you taught me. How the mushroom is only the fruit of a vast network of life beneath the ground which feeds on the dead leaves or decaying branches of white birch trees. I became fascinated by this fungus that turned death into life.

I remember how we walked by a bed of red, orange and yellow leaves under a small forest of well-spaced birch trees. Birds chirped and fluttered from one branch to another. You crouched down and surveyed the area. "There," you finally said pointing under a tree. "Do you see it?"

You crawled under the birch tree and brushed away the leaves weighing down the mushroom's brownish red top. I remember a musty odor as you cut the mushroom's stem at the base with your pocketknife. "I do it this way so the underground life won't be disturbed. If it rains tonight we can come back to this same spot tomorrow morning and find new mushrooms." "This is a red topper," you said holding the mushroom in a patch of sunlight. "It's the most prized mushroom that grows in Pennsylvania, the firmest and best tasting."

I remember looking at your hands—the fingers swollen and rough from a life of hard work. Then I looked at the mushroom. The red topper glowed like a flame in the sunlight but was cool and moist to the touch. Like a priest offering a gold chalice at the altar, you offered the mushroom to the light as though this moist flame might cool the burning fires of the summer sun.

David Kashimba lives in Sonoma County, CA, where he can work in his garden and swim in the Russian River every day in the summer.

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Lighting the path for reflection

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Spring 2011 FICTION E-CHAPBOOK January 1—February 21 2011 No fee to submit. Authors are paid. To read and see guidelines: www.echapbook.com Contact Jo-Anne Rosen: editor@echapbook.com

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Tiny Lights Contest 2010 Editor’s Notes

This winter I‘ve started closing the window blinds as soon as darkness falls. I take peculiar comfort in keeping night‘s eyes out of the kitchen, even though this furtive gesture reminds me of my mother and her obsession with privacy in her last years. Is this another glimpse of the old lady I am fated to become? I note the ways my body is slowing, the places I‘ve begun to thicken and sag. Sometimes I glance down and see my mother‘s wrinkled hands attached to my wrists. My stomach has become delicate lately, so I‘m on an old lady‘s regimen of bland foods, no coffee or alcohol. I talk about my digestion the way a new mother discusses her darling infant‘s prowess.

Just before the holidays, a doctor prescribed a pill to soothe my tiresomely fascinating gut. Every morning I take a capsule that rattles like dice in a cup. It blocks the production of stomach acid, and during our family‘s visit to my in-laws, I was able to eat with the same gusto I enjoyed at eighteen when confronted with all that red wine, garlic and olive oil for the first time. But with every forkful I gulped like a teenager, I could feel my old lady stomach threatening to break through the Prilosec barrier. I knew I‘d be back to brown rice and steamed carrots once we got home.

One of the gifts of our trip south was a Christmas rainstorm that washed the skies of Los Angeles clean. From the cliffs of Palos Verdes, where my husband grew up, I saw Catalina and the Channel Islands to the west, and the snowy San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. They‘re always there, of course, along with the Santa Monica, San Bernadino, San Jacinto and Santa Ana ranges rising above the sprawl, but without the obscuring brown haze that began building in the basin almost immediately after the rain, it was like slipping back to an era even my husband had a hard time remembering.

When we left for the Long Beach airport a few days later, crisp silhouettes of palm trees still stood against a backdrop of snowy peaks, but by the time we got off the hill around Lomita, we were back down in the smog belt and our mountains were invisible. I wish I could say I continued to feel the presence of those mountains the same way I feel night outside my kitchen windows, but as we blasted along the San Diego Freeway, my stomach and I got busy looking for favorite landmarks, like Western Exterminator‘s Little Man With a Hammer statue. Then we passed a car dealer‘s giant billboard with the cryptic announcement, ―There is nothing in the dark that isn‘t there when the light is on.‖ ―Only in L.A.,‖ I said, but until the next distraction, unseen mountains rose up around me.

Susan Bono Tiny Lights Publications