Born out of a formal creative writing class in Anacortes, The Clear Channel Writers Group was formed to help dedicated writers improve their craft. Based on the belief that writing specifically for others to read is a greater teacher than writing by yourself and for yourself, this is a participatory group. To become a member, participants must have excellent writing skills. How else will they be valuable resources to other writers who want to improve? To apply, please send an approximately 600 word,  recently-created piece (in MSWord) for evaluation. As an example of what would be appropriate, you may peruse the samples below. Your piece and any other work you produce should be copyrighted and will appear on this website only if you and we agree the work should be posted.

            The process for group participation will be to assign writing tasks similar to those below, and broadcast the product of the assignment* on-line to members, your peers, for structured comment. If interest warrants, and I am confident interest will, we will meet in person as a group.  The purpose of The Clear Channel Writers  is to improve members' writing skills and to learn from each other. This is not a commercial venture, nor does it exist to promote any member’s published work or personal ego (although some of that may occur naturally).

“Christmas Eve Dinner”                                                   Event ©  Paul Kreider 1/5/11

 
 There were only four of us at the Formica dining table, but it seemed like more because of the cramped apartment, humid with oven heat, loud with television holiday music noise.  The event was Christmas Eve dinner. The place was my 22-year-old son’s “dining room/nook,” short on elegance but long on family and warmth.

My holiday accommodations, a nearby palatial home of a vacationing friend, would have easily provided a more spacious and gracious environment but I resisted that temptation in favor of the potential lessons learned by my son in hosting a family event in his own space. I was not disappointed.

Our collective Christmas Eve Dinner Experience, a minimum of twenty-two formal and opulent family feasts engineered over the years by their mother, stretched down through the years and hovered overhead, poised to pounce on that Formica table top, for critical comparison to the relatively simple meal to which we all contributed in our own way.

 My daughter Lea brought roasted carrots and my son Jesse an oven roasted turkey and some bottles of wine he had been given by his employer. My daughter’s husband Neil brought his appetite and I had prepared the family jewel, rice and sausage stuffing, redolent with sage; a family icon of the holidays.

When the turkey was pronounced ready after its 20 minutes resting on an inappropriate but functional hors d’ oeuvre tray, a hasty search through the jumbled drawers, just like you have in your own kitchen, produced a seldom used sharp carving knife and the initial slices fell to the outstretched plates.

 As we took our random places at the table (no formal place cards at this event!), I raised my wineglass and said some heart-felt words about the economy being in a depression when good and talented people could not find work, and that as a family we would work through the rough times to eventually look back on this as being a happy time.

Even as I was hearing myself say them I wondered if my words sounded trite and hollow. How could this ever be a happy time? I sat at this table with my children, having failed at the business that should have sustained them and provided education and employment. I had lost the home they grew up knowing, the prosperous friends and neighbors. By moving away, I had lost friends and acquaintances that made up my hard won daily experience. I was finally coming to grips with the realization I had lost the love of my life to distance. My life was forever changed and not in a happy way.

 But my family remained, and I needed to be strong enough to be their foundation, even if I could not support them. So we drank the wine, amazingly good, and talked the happy talk of being together on Christmas Eve.

"Harvest"                                               Color  © Paul Kreider 1/19/11

Every year for the past thirty-eight years, as September meshes into October, I have stood in a sunny vineyard somewhere, surrounded by rows and rows of greenback grapevines, each holding its share of burgundy-colored clusters, now ready to be harvested.

 My crews, not the brown professional Hispanic pickers you might find in a large commercial operation, but paler friends and acquaintances who thought doing some real work in a production vineyard would lend some contrast to their normal work lives. Their workdays were mostly spent in chairs behind glowing computers, pursuing abstract assignments in chase of a buff paycheck, spit out into their bank accounts automatically by the corporate controller. This, in the vineyard, was a different kind of work.

 The more experienced of the group, meaning those who had picked with me at least once before, grabbed a canary yellow picking bin the size of a small suitcase from the inverted stack on the back of the truck and started cutting bunches of grapes from the canes with curved orange handled serrated grape knives. The staccato sound “plunk, plunk” of the first picked clusters hitting the bottoms of the empty bright yellow bins was the opening sound of the year’s harvest symphony.  The bright equipment colors served a purpose: you could easily see an intense orange knife accidently dropped in the bins among the ruby grapes, and a bright yellow bin was easy to spot among the green vines, so it didn’t get left behind in the haste to rush the harvest to the winery.

The less experienced listened carefully as they were instructed on which grapes to pick and which to leave hanging... The ground rule was: “if you wouldn’t put it in your mouth, don’t put it in my yellow bin.” The rule was meant to limit the amount of moldy, raisined or rotted grapes that were crushed into the wine vats. The other rule was about color. “We want this dark ruby color in our grapes. They are fully ripe. If they have a greenish tinge, or if they are slightly ruby, they are not ready to pick so leave them hang.”

My pickers moved slowly but steadily down their assigned rows, pausing to enlist another empty bin when their full one was properly hidden in the dark shade beneath the leafed canes. They stopped to shout a question, to regard the color of a bunch, or to wipe the sweat from their faces. We all wanted to finish this task before the sun climbed high in the sky and warmed the ripe grapes, increasing the chance for spoilage. Oh, they’d have something to talk about at the office, come Monday.

 
                                                                 Touch  ©  Paul Kreider 2/9/2011

"November Mushroom Hunting on the North California Coast "

I am walking through the aromatic pine forest, soft moss and pine needles, rotted wood underfoot, the cool, moist air caressing my face along with the occasional brushstroke of a soft tree branch. I cannot imagine being in a place more peaceful or soothing. The sound of the surf is distant but constant in its cycle.  I am here to follow one of mankind’s most aggressive instincts: to hunt food and rip it from its quiet wooded scene and bring it home.

 Hunting and gathering mushrooms has its dangers, so my experience has honed my awareness. The senses of sight smell and touch all play their part in assuring I don’t end up poisoned and needing a new liver.

The sight of a beer can-sized mound pushing up to disturb the smooth landscape of  fallen brown pine needles beneath a huge tree, quickens my heartbeat, in exactly the way a deer hunter’s heart beats faster when a magnificent stag enters his killing zone. The beat is a faint pressure in my ears, a tympanic drumbeat. Dropping to my knees on the damp sponge-like forest floor, I remove my woolen glove and the cool air immediately chills my damp skin. Gently removing the prickly brown needles from the bump and knowing I might just be uncovering a discarded beer can, I am excited to feel the typical shape of the boletus, or prized porchini mushroom I seek in these damp   woods.

Pushing the stiff needles aside with my bare hand, I touch the rounded cap of the mushroom. Smooth and cool as a porcelain coffee mug, dry and cool, my touch confirms the mushroom. Had it been slick and wet, it would have meant a different species. My fingers slide around the top to probe underneath the cap. The spongy, rather than gilled, underside is another confirmation of its edibility. Pulling the base gently, the fungus is released from the damp earth. The surprisingly heavy weight is another testimony to the magnificent prize I have found.

  
 "Yum"                                      Taste, ©  Paul Kreider  February 13, 2011

 
When I was twenty, I lived in a small town in Northern Germany while on a self-designed educational sabbatical, with the intent to improve my German language skills. In the town, a well-used public park lined both sides of the river that ran through it. Late at night as I walked home from a friend’s, crunching along the gravel path through this park, I would stop at Willi’s sausage stand, a small light trailer that was always open for business, surprisingly, at that hour, no matter the season..

 Willi, a rotund, red-faced man in mid-life, dispensed the sausages himself. They were heavenly. Six brown inches of grilled veal and pork perfection, hot from the propane-fired grill that warmed the sausages and Willi, too. The masterpiece was served with a small crusty brotchen bun and a dollop of piquant dark yellow mustard all presented with a small white napkin on a card tray you could hold in one hand while eating with the other as you walked the park path.

You held the sausage, dipped it in the mustard and, ‘snap,’ took a bite through the casing to release the savory juicy meat as it intermingled with the vinegar and salt flavors of the mustard. You used the napkin and finished off with a contrasting bite of yeasty bread.

 This example of culinary perfection and contrasts cost one Deutsch Mark, at that time exactly twenty-five cents.

 Willi’s sausage trailer was the main reason I returned to this small town on the river whenever possible when I was in Germany, first as a tourist then as a businessman, due to my German language skills. Neither sausages nor Willi ever changed. Until on one trip I made from Hannover. He and his trailer were gone.

Wrrite like a child                                                    © Paul Kreider  Feb  22, 2011

                                                                   "The Good Storm"

 High on the wind-blown cliff, a log cabin structure creaks and with paned eyes peeks over the edge at the channel’s sunlit blue water showing white eyebrows on the waves.

 Tall trees waving grass-like in the chill gusts hail the brave sailboats, zipping by all white and razor-neat, trimming the eyebrows and tossing the white hair to the side in the wind.

 An adult, a man, is framed in one of the windows, holding a coffee mug and gazing out at the play. In the near distance, black clouds promise that the water soon will change from blue to gray, and the eyebrows won’t go away. “Too dangerous to go across,” he says “We’ll have to stay until it calms down.” Other adults with planes to catch and places that need their presence groan, while I smile and reach to play another game of dominoes  with my son. This is precious time together, savored by each of us.

The adult reaches up and releases the blinds, and the cabin on the cliff closes its eyes in sleep.

  
"Digging to China"                                       © Paul Kreider March 8, 2011

 
I grew up as the second oldest of six children in a family with few extra dollars to spend on entertainment. We were forced to just have fun of our own making. I learned at an early age to expect nothing to be provided except an annual “vacation” at my grandmother’s house in scorching hot Porterville in California’s Central Valley. Only later as a young adult did I realize that having one or two fewer children running around the house was really a vacation for my mother, as much as a change of venue for those of us reprieved to Porterville.

 As soon as possible upon arrival at my grandmother’s house after the endless baked ride in an open-windowed Plymouth, I shed my shirt and jumped off the back porch into the barely civilized garden. It was cooler there, among the orange, fig and grapefruit trees. Unlike in any other space in my young experience, I was free to create my own world, unfettered by parental boundaries.

 It didn’t take many days of climbing trees, searching for buried treasure and watching ants climb before I was bored and yearned for a large project. Who knows where the idea to dig a hole to China originated. Perhaps from one of the many books I’d read so voraciously.

 After announcing to my grandmother that I was going to dig a hole to China and obtaining her smiling approval, I gathered a shovel and pick and got to work at a spot right off the porch. In the sun and in the hard adobe clay, I realized very quickly. But being one of six kids, I had learned to give up only after a fight, so I picked and shoveled and grunted and sweated until I was waist deep. At this depth the earth became cooler and less compacted, easier to dig. My grandmother came to the back porch to check my progress and bring me an ice cold root beer, the kind she ordered by the case in bottles when she knew grandchildren were on the schedule.

 “Hmm,.” she grandmothered. “Looks like you have a ways to go.”

 Thus validated and refreshed, I continued my endeavors until I was almost fully hidden in the cooler earth. At that point I realized the faulty engineering of the project, as it became increasingly difficult to dig and shovel the dirt out of the hole. I managed to climb out and surveyed the shaft. At that point the boy who lived next door came home and asked if I wanted to run through the sprinklers in his front yard. That suddenly seemed a much better idea than digging to China, an idea he immediately quashed with the information that the earth’s center was molten lava.

 The sprinklers felt wonderful. Later, when my grandfather came home he was less amused by the gaping hole in his back yard. He made sure I was planning to fill it back in, so nobody “fell in and broke his neck.”

Workplace jargon                          © Paul Kreider  March 15, 2011

                                                                 "The winespeak"

“Let’s discuss this red wine.” My wine appreciation class was off to a smooth start. One of my
“students” seemed more experienced than the others and I suspected she would be the source
of the inevitable challenge to the “teacher” by someone who thought she should be teaching the 
class herself.

“Why don’t we start with you, Rae?” What are your thoughts?”

Rae took another sip as if to reassure herself, and perhaps to screw up some courage.
“I think it has far too much tannin to be enjoyed now.”

“Where do you think the tannins come from?” I queried.

“From the grapeskins and the oak extracts from the barrel.”

“What else gives this wine that tannic roughness?”

“The alcohol isn’t integrated yet.”

“Where does that alcohol come from?”

“The sugar is converted to alcohol by the yeast.”

“So the sugar was…”

“High. About 25 degrees Brix.”

“And?” I prompted.

“The yeast fermented it to dryness.”

“Resulting in a wine that…?”

“That is well over 14% alcohol.”

“What about the T.A.?” I asked

“I’d say it was higher than it should be.”

“Telling you…”

“That the grapes were grown in a cool climate, maybe on the coast.”

“pH?”

“Low. Probably 3.2”

“Been through ML?”

“I think not,” she answered.

“So, probably sterile filtered, do you think?”

“Yes, at least .45 microns.”

“Sulfite?”

“40 parts per million free.”

“R.S.?”

“Not much. Less than .02%”

“So, Rae, do you like the wine?”

“No.”

“Does any one else have a comment?”

Silence.

Story about my name                         ©   Paul Kreider 3/30/11

"The Advertisement"

 When I was a recruiter for an international tool manufacturer in the 1970’s, our modus operandi was to place expensive ads in Sunday newspapers in locations where we needed employees. The advertisements included our requirements and an 800-line telephone number potential candidates could call on Monday or Tuesday and speak with Paul T. Kreider, the recruiter. I would conduct a telephone interview and if successful, would set up an in-person appointment at the work location.

 As a result of this process, I spent a few days of each week traveling to and interviewing in places like Jackson, Tennessee, Bismarck, North Dakota, and Orange, Texas.

 The week of this story, we were running ads in Orlando, Florida. On Monday morning my secretary/assistant, whose name was Desiree Savage, information I include here only because it was such an evocative name, rang my office telephone. “Paul, I have a Florida candidate on the phone.”

“Okay, what’s the name?” I enquired

“Paul T. Kreider,” she giggled.

“Very funny.”

“No, really. He says his name is Paul T. Kreider.”

 First, you have to know that my name is unusual. Kreider is of German origin, then Amish, then Mennonite. If you looked up “Kreider” in a Pennsylvania or Ohio telephone book, when there were telephone books, you would have been rewarded with columns of my Germanic relatives. On the west coast, this was not so much the case, usually just one or two Kreiders, often one of my ex-wives or one of my local siblings. So having someone on the telephone with my exact name was beyond unusual. I picked up the line.

 We quickly established the fact that our names were not exactly the same. His middle initial was for Thoracius, mine was for Thomas. Indeed, he was originally from Pennsylvania. To make a long story shorter, although he was not qualified for the job, we had dinner in Florida during which we established that we had common ancestors and similar features. Desiree was disappointed that a long-term family friendship did not develop, but it was the ‘70’s and no one had time for something like that, particularly on the other side of the country..

“Meeting Maggie Grady”                                                ©  Paul Kreider     4/11/2011

Story out of my life

 In my opinion, few people can truthfully say they entered young adulthood on their own terms. Most of us pursued a path chosen by our well-intentioned parents, based on their vision of what and who they thought we should become. My story is about a time that developed by my own personal design, and was executed completely by myself.

 My parents had spent my first twenty years pushing me toward their goal of my becoming a doctor. If that sounds absurd, consider this: the first books I was given were not “The Cat in the Hat” or “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”,    but medical books on human anatomy, and for lighter reading, a brown bound copy of  “The Red Cross Emergency Handbook.” Seriously, my parents wanted me to be a doctor.

 In my second year of college I worked at  a summer job working in a hospital. Never before had I realized medical professionals could be so overworked and unhappy. No matter how well paid these workers represented a course I should not walk. Never before in my life had I ever been, nor have I been from that time forward, so certain of a direction in which I should NOT go. Nor have I ever been so concerned in explaining any other “personal” decision to my parents.

 The conversation with my parents did not go well.  The outcome was, “If you want to do something else, fine. But we will not support you going to college to become some liberal arts major.” Liberal arts were somehow more disgusting than even being a Democrat, which was somehow correlated.

 So, to finance my college education, this story finds me knocking on the door of Maggie Grady, the head of the pathology lab at Kaiser Hospital at Panorama City in Southern California, a few miles from my university. The position was as a lab assistant and while you might find it ironic that the militantly former pre med student was applying for a medically related job, it is where the bulk of my college experience sat on the triple beam balance that was my life.

 Maggie Grady was, seen through the eyes of me as  a 20-something job applicant, a kind-faced woman with a nice smile who was pleased to find a college student (who knew a microbe from a microscope) at her door, seeking employment.

 The same Maggie Grady, seen through the current eyes of a sixty-something adult male is someone entirely different. Maggie, I now realize, radiated an intense energy, some of it intellectual, a lot of it sexual. She was maybe 42 and very attractive in a Midwestern wheat farmer’s daughter sort of way, a way that was completely lost on the job applicant whose idea of an attractive woman was more along the lines of Ursula Andress, or as we called her, “Ursula Undress”.

 After our interview, we departed Maggie Grady’s office for a tour of the lab. I opened the door for her, as I had been taught by my parents. This time they were correct. Maggie looked up at me with her crinkly smiling eyes, and murmured huskily, “Such good manners!”  As my world turned, we became friends and she told me months later that at that moment of politeness she had decided to hire me. That job, a really good one it turned out, paid for the final two years of my college education. Although I worked long hard hours, my life was forever changed and I never had to look back or regret my personal decision to forego medical school.

    Written to a specific group                            ©  Paul Kreider April 18, 2011

"To the writers in this room"

 
You have power in your ability to write; it’s what makes good writers good and as the power increases, even better writers. It is the power to move and cause tears, the power to delight and cause laughter- always magical, the power to create long-lasting images like the farm dust on the windshield of a blue combine, or silly small boys swatting at stinging yellow jackets in a barn, or the image of riding on a packed bus with a smelly casserole on your lap, and the anxious wonder of being an unwilling participant in a bank robbery at a tender age.  Long after you exit this room and move on to whatever room is next in your life, these images and emotions will remain behind, alive for those of us who have paid attention.

 The power of what you strive to create is audible in the background of your mind. It’s like a set of kettle drums beating as you compose the movements of your symphony at your keyboard note by note, letter by letter..

There is power in what you do and it affects those who are in your life. There is an inherent respect for those who can communicate effectively in writing, from the child who “sees” the story being read to her to the seasoned adult who changes her mind because of a magazine article presentation. If you are at some level a naturally talented writer, you might not realize there are people who simply cannot string three words together easily, and they look to you with some awe.   

At a time when I was raising my two children as a single dad, working independently in what can only be described as a non-traditional environment, I wondered how my 9 year-old-son viewed my life. “Jesse, “I ventured, “if someone asked you what your dad did for work, what would you say?” Without hesitation he replied, “I’d say he made wine and wrote books.”

 In another indicator, my daughter, then about 14, purposely left on my computer a poignant  if somewhat brutal short story she had written about a line of little ducklings in the grass being snatched one-by-one by a silent hungry hawk. It was titled “Sudden Death,” but the words that seemed to appear and were in fact the boldest were “by Lea Kreider.”   

 The ability to produce images, emotions and impact in our writing is what everyone in this room is striving to improve. A very wise man once told me the following:  each level of thought was associated with a different level of energy, automatic thinking at the bottom and creative thinking at the top. Someone had the boldness to ask him, “If creative energy is at the top, where does it come from?” His answer, which was unsatisfying at the time, was “It comes from nothingness. You collect it and it is manifest by you and by you alone.” Not satisfying, perhaps, but it has popped into my mind every time I have sat down to create something, be it a love letter, a wine article or a piece for this class. Each of us collects energy and puts it down on paper. And that is a lot of power.

“Beatific”

A brief portrait of someone I knew.                ©  Paul Kreider, April 22, 2011

 When I think of him now, I am sharply aware my view of him is distorted by the shimmering waves of time, as in a crinkled photograph having been stored in a damp place. He was born in July, 1859 and died a week after his birthday in 1950. He was 91 and I had just celebrated my fifth birthday. You might not think that five years is long enough to “know” someone as important as your great-grandfather, but I did know him and in the emotional chaos that was my young childhood, I sensed he was a special person.

 He had a beatific smile which radiated the peace I like to imagine he found in his life. He communicated with me, as I recall, more with that smile, through his pale blue eyes and with the touch of his cool hand on my head, than with his voice.  It had a slight waver to it, so you needed to listen closely to hear what little he actually spoke. I think, like many elderly people he delighted in the vitality of children and found some sustenance in it. We sat together underneath the large fig tree, shaded from the central valley’s hot sun and communicated wordlessly, each in our own way.

 Had I been older, I am sure he would have told me of the trials of being a banker in those early days and of his experiences in the Panic of 1893 and the hard times that no doubt caused some of the lines etched in his kind, always clean-shaven face. There would have been exciting tales, for sure, of wild life in Colorado and Utah and in early California. But I would read of that later, in his memoirs. For the moment it was enough to sit on a warm bench under the fig tree, with his light arm around me in that reassuring way.

A moment I remember clearly

“The Telephone Call”                                                       ©  Paul Kreider 4/30/2011

I picked up the telephone receiver. It was black and heavy, built to last as they were in those days, you might remember.  The earpiece against my ear, my finger in the rotary dial, I turned and released.

Three. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Five. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Two. Tick. Tick.

In a way, teens nowadays are missing the drama of making a telephone call. One push of a plastic button and they are in conversation. No chance to think or fret about what they are going to say. No chance to hang up. This one almost ended that way. My hand perspired and I could hear the beat of my own pulse against the ear piece.

Seven. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick...

One. Tick.

Two. Tick. Tick.

Four. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.               

Pause. The urge to hang up was almost overwhelming. The connection finally happened.

Whurrd.  Pause. Whurrd!.   I released my clenched breath with a loud exhale. “Pooh!”

Whurrd! Pause. Click!  She picked up. She answered!

“Hello.” The familiar soft voice resonated.

“Hi, it’s Paul. Paul Kreider. Um, I was thinking that it um, would be a lot of fun if we went to the dance at school  this Saturday. Together. My Dad could drive us. It would be fun.”

Pause. Forever. My mind raced. Did she even remember who I was?

Finally, “Yes, I am sure it would be lots of fun.  But I think the person you want to talk to is Patricia. This is her Mom.”

Aarrrrrrgggggggggh!

It is apparently not possible to actually die of embarrassment.

a song title                                           © Paul Kreider  May 7, 2011

"Brown-eyed girl"

There was nothing remarkable about her. She was attractive in a normal sort of way. Now that I think about it, handsome would be a better description, female handsome with high cheekbones and dark flowing hair framing a firm jaw, no makeup. She was friendly, but not artificially gushingly so, bright and smiling without being tiresome. Calm with a laugh that was natural and mellifluous. Indeed, I had been in her presence at least five times before I learned her name, Rae, by accident rather than by design.

 This was so different from meeting my last love, Kay, whose quiet entry into the room and into my life was on a broadcast shock wave of sexual energy, wordlessly demanding attention. Every guy in the room and a couple of the women stood staring, transfixed and, I now imagine, nostrils flared. How someone as ordinary as I attracted that prize, will always be a wonder to me. She said it was my tenderness and caring and that I was a soulful kisser and a wonderful cook. We were together for four incendiary years.

 Rae, on the other hand, grew on me slowly. I don’t think I did more than casually notice her until one day I had a document I needed to give to her. She was talking to someone, and must have seen me crossing the room. As I came up to her she swung to face me, alert and attentive, face filled with smiling anticipation and eagerness. Even so, I noticed she did not make direct eye contact. We spoke cursorily. Business finished, I returned to my chair  to ruminate the attentive part of her reaction and to examine how I could have not realized how beautiful she actually was.

 At break a few days later I happened to see her standing alone by a window. I wanted to talk with her about a project we could be working on. This time she looked me in the eyes as we spoke. I have no idea what I said to Rae because those brown eyes captured me in a way I had never been held before. They were like looking into the depths of a warm and welcoming brown cave. I felt, distinctly, as if I could have easily lost my footing and fallen in. Still smoldering from my last experience with Kay, I stammered and stepped away from the edge, safe, at least for the moment.

"Small Town Blessings"                                           ©  Paul Kreider May 20, 2011

 The air was heated by the late summer sun. It was quiet and still, except for the wavy buzz of an early cicada broadcasting urgently for a mate. The wooden screen door slammed, the “thwack” followed by the staccato thumping of sneakers on the gray wooden porch stairs. The cicada silenced abruptly.   Cicada interruptus.

 The worn sneakers dressed the feet of a small boy also clad in faded blue jeans with scuffed iron-on knee patches curling at the edges and a red T-shirt. He ran all out, down the stairs, across the small back yard, out the open gate and up the driveway until he reached the street. Still running, he turned right, zipped past Mrs. Munroe’s rose- covered house baking in the sun and into “the park,” an island of dusty property created by the looping circular street, set with houses that overlooked the unlikely space.

 The town had not improved this space in any way. It had no water fountain, no lawn or grass, no bench or bathroom. Just dusty dirt and a few enormous date palms most likely sprouted from bird-transported fruit from more orderly environs. The park’s main attribute was that the mothers who lived in the surrounding houses could “keep an eye” on their playing children..

The boy ran to the center of the space and was met by his four friends. There were now enough for a game. In any other country of the world, the game would have been soccer. Here in the dusty park, it was kickball, played with all the spirit and energy others played their own games on hot summer days in different countries.

The game progressed with shouts and protestations, each participant trying to outdo the other. Rules were sometimes stretched to fit the situation; you actually needed six players for a real game of kickball. As the sun inched down in the west and shadows lengthened, a sense of conclusion   blanketed the game. It was sealed by a mom’s voice from one of the surrounding windows, “Timmy, it’s time for dinner!” Game over.  The dust settled and, eventually, the cicada resumed his insistent plea.

 Later in his life, when people asked any one of the small boys, now grown, where he was from, his answer, “Berkeley, California” would invariably conjure up images in them of long-haired hippies, student riots, free speech explosions and mayhem. But it never delivered images of small boys playing kickball in a dusty park on a summer’s afternoon.

©  Paul Kreider  Monday, May 30, 2011

"Youth Lessons"

“I just turned eleven. I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself!” Kathy jutted her chin out in defiance, eyes blazing with the strong emotions she displayed so naturally.

 Kelly, her beleaguered mother, blew a wisp of light brown hair from her eyes with a breath that was as much exasperation as anything else. “Well, I don’t care if you are eleven. Until you are eighteen, you will NOT be going to any overnight beach party without my permission!”

 “You are so mean. Everyone is going to be there. I’ll be the only one who is not. I bet if Susan were my mother, she’d let me go!”

Susan was Kelly’s close friend, one with grown children, who lived up the street.  With the admission of the adult Susan as a player into the scene, there was potential for it to escalate into something really dreadful.

“What makes you think Susan would let you go to an unsupervised all-night party?” 

“Because she loves me. She said I could come and live with her any time I wanted.” Having said this, Kathy ‘s eyes got larger as her mother reached into her bedroom closet and grabbed a pink suitcase covered with images of unicorns and tossed it on the bed. “Let’s see about that.”

 With perfect timing who should arrive at the bedroom door, leaning against the jamb, but me. “What’s the problem here?” Both started talking at once.  “Kathy wants to go live with Susan,” Kelly blurted out first. “Mom won’t let me go to the party.”

“Yes,” I replied to both, “I heard all about it outside in the back yard.”

 “Let’s see what Susan says.” The telephone was at hand and on automatic dial.

“Hi, Susan, Kathy would like to come live with you. Is that OK?”

“Okay, good. Good. Good.”

“Will she have to pay rent?”

“Oh, that’s not too bad. She can earn the money doing the dishes and cleaning the bathrooms? Okay, that’s good. I guess we could rent out her room here and help with the expense.”

At this point I could see out of the corner of my eye that Kathy had her arms locked around the waist of her mother who was stroking her hair gently.

“OK we will be in touch. Oh, before you hang up, how do you feel about her going to spend the night unsupervised at the beach with some friends?” I held the telephone away from my ear and directed it toward the two who could plainly hear the loud squawking of protest emanating from the receiver as Susan’s reply.

“Okay, thank you, we’ll be in touch.”

I hung up the telephone and turned to by wife and daughter, who were hugging each other, sobbing, overcome with the emotional tsunami that had engulfed them both at this tipping point of parental control.