“Gray’s Creek Disturbance”
Matthew Levine
Inspiration piece

Doctor Feelgood
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

Eustace Trelawney was 22, married for two years and a red-hot advertising copywriter, when he first developed his reputation as being great at sex.

Mary Louise Pagano, a beautiful, bosomy, blond, 24-year-old, actress, was the woman who first pronounced him. Mary Louise loved sex so much that she had never been able to stay engaged with her partner long enough to get all the way home.

Unbeknownst to her, her first time with Eustace, was his second time in four hours. They both had guzzled quite a few drinks by the time they got naked and got under the covers. What’s more, Eustace liked to ride his partner as long as he was able.

Eustace was happily pumping away when he was startled by a steady, low, guttural, sound that seemed to come from under the bed. Christ! What the hell was it? Was it an animal?

He opened his eyes and looked at Mary Louise. Her eyes were open but she was elsewhere. Her beautiful breasts were spinning melons. Her nipples were taut in extreme extension. She was arched into him. Her hips were pulling him closer and closer. He was banging her harder and harder.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

No, it was not an animal under the bed. It was Mary Louise. Mary Louise!

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Mary Louise suddenly shifted to a high pitched moan. She had never had anything like this. It was going to swallow her up. She was going to die! She did not care. She did not care. She wanted it. She wanted it all.

They went on and on for another six or seven minutes, then Jimmy told Mary Louise he was going to come in her if she really wanted it. Did she? Did she really want it? Oh, she really did. She really, really did want it. “Give it to me! Please give it to me Please! Please!” she groaned. Eustace let it go and she felt it and took it and took it and she came again and again. And again. She was very noisy.

Afterward, Eustace did everything right. He knew it was a home run. He was very soft with Mary Louise. He told her she was wonderful. He opened up a bottle of Champagne. They nibbled on cake and fruit. He reminded her he was married forever to the woman who was the mother of his children. That was his deal.

He put Mary Louise in a cab, paid her fare home, and then he took another cab to Grand Central in time for the 11:37 to Westport.

It turned out that night changed both their lives. Mary Louise discovered her full sex and was very eager to tell the world how wonderful it was. Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! She always gave Eustace full credit.

She and Eustace were an item for nearly three years. Monday afternoons and Thursday evenings were their time. They were very happy together. They had really great sex every time and that was what they wanted.

Mary Ellen got much stronger. She had been quite a good actress, who had been lost. She had been betrayed by her lust. Now she was authentic. The real deal.

Eustace was going gangbusters at work.

They named him a vice president. They started to ask him to pitch new accounts and help hold shaky ones. They gave him a lot more money.

Mary Louise was overjoyed with her new life. She told everyone Jimmy was Doctor Feelgood, the dude who had broken through and saved her. She enjoyed telling the story out. She sparkled as she did it.

Finally, she really had to go to California. That was where her future was. She knew she would be all right and she was. She was famous right away. She married an artist from San Diego. She’s still friends with Eustace. They talk every so often on the phone.

Mary Louise’s tales of how his amazing sexuality had saved her had a tremendous impact on Eustace’s life. After she left for the coast, for the next six months or so, Eustace logged in a lot of hours in Connecticut.

Then, late one Tuesday afternoon, Vicky Green, a married actress friend of Mary Louise, called him right as he was leaving and asked him if he would please stop briefly at her apartment on his way to the station. She had something to give him.

He said okay. He never suspected that Vicky Green had been obsessing on him for more than two years ever since Mary Louise told her that sexy Eustace had performed a miraculous Doctor Feelgood procedure on her.

It didn’t take long. Vicky was determined. Eustace was Eustace. He made the 11.37 easily. Vicky gives him all the credit. For the next few years, Vicky and Eustace had a regular date on Tuesdays.

Eustace had come on a self-renewing, self-generating prospecting system that would provide him with luscious, hot-to-trot leads for decades.

The idea that Eustace could perform a miraculous Doctor Feelgood procedure was very, very hot. He never made the claim. It was seared in the minds (and loins) of beautiful, lusty, bawdy young women by the joyful testimony of someone just like them feeling oh so very good. It was a hot idea with spontaneous power that flourished for decades.

Eustace did well with his career and his sex life for quite a while, but then everything started to go south. He had a series of very high paying jobs with organizations that loved his reputation but couldn’t bear him.

Then he began to drink way more than he ever had. He missed days. He racked up three DWI’s in six days. He went to a series of rehabs and did not get sober.

His wife told him she had found another man and that he must leave.

He left and began a sorry cycle of drug addiction. Two years later, he entered a rehab for extended treatment. This time he listened.

He got sober. It was the greatest gift he ever received in his life.

Of course, he had miles to go. 30 years out, he is still working a program.

It took him some time to realize that he had been as seduced by the fable of being Doctor Feelgood as anyone. A few years back, he was finally able to laugh heartily at the picture he had of himself as Doctor Feelgood.

He lives very happily with his second wife. They have been married for 45 years.

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“Worth Something Someday”
Matthew Levine
Response

The Robinson Ball
By Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

Robinson struck the baseball so savagely that it felt more like an execution swipe than a 2-run, first inning, home run. Jimmy was standing there in Standing Room in the left field grandstand in the Polo Grounds when Robinson connected. It was definitely not Jimmy’s first rodeo. He was an accomplished baseball player. A star lefty pitcher and also an All State outfielder for his high school team.

But he was zapped by a bolt of fear. The line drive off Jackie Robinson’s bat was headed straight for Jimmy’s face. If he didn’t catch it, it would hit him in the nose. He had no glove. What was he supposed to do?

Milliseconds later, he realized he had misjudged the ball. It had started for his face, but now it had climbed fast. The ball zoomed forty feet over him and clanged in the steel girders way up in the roof above.

Jimmy spotted the ball right away. It veered off a beam to his left and headed right. Then it blipped another beam and reversed course. Jackie Robinson had just reached second base. The crowd was noisy. It had been a shock, this home run.

Jimmy watched as the ball dropped straight down in a sudden free fall. It was going to land on the stone stairway right in front of him. Jimmy leaped out and somehow trapped the ball in his right hand just as it hit and held it as he tumbled over and rolled.

A muscular black youth in his early twenties dove on Jimmy and grabbed his arm. Jimmy tore his arm away and stood tall. Jimmy whipped the ball into his pants pocket without inspecting it and confronted the black guy.

“Better luck, next time,” he said.

“You got it?”

“Damn straight. It’s right in here. (Indicating pants pocket.) Better luck, next time.”

As it turned out, that was the game. Clem Labine, a rookie pitcher for the Dodgers, threw a 6-hit shutout. The Brooklyn win tied the playoff series at 1. The next day, Bobby Thomson hit “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” a walk-off home run for the Giants, which won them the National League pennant and a trip to the 1951 World Series.

It was an amazing comeback. The Giants trailed by 13½ games in late August. Red Smith led his column about the game for the New York Herald Tribune: “Now it is done.Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressively fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Of course, Jimmy was a day behind. The game he was at turned out to be a bore. The Dodgers won it easily, 10-0. The Giants were hitless over the last four innings. Jimmy had a lot of fun on the train back to Connecticut. One of the men in the 4-seater he was sharing had seen him grab Robinson’s home run. He asked to see the ball and when he inspected it, the floodgates opened.

Jimmy estimated that at least twenty people came up and asked to see the ball. Everyone had a comment. A pretty woman was surprised the ball wasn’t bruised. A businessman offered Jimmy $50 for the ball. A burly young man in his 20’s said there was no way that was Robinson’s home run ball.

Quite a few of the people thanked Jimmy for letting them handle the ball. It made Jimmy feel good. He was happy to do it.

The next day, Jimmy watched Thomson’s homer win the pennant for the Giants. That was yet another happy ending. Like most people in Connecticut, he would root for the Yankees in the World Series.

On Saturday, Jimmy caught a last second touchdown pass that enabled his high school to tie their archrival. On Sunday afternoon, he was still in bed, trying to shake off the hits from the game.

Then two of his younger brothers burst in his room begging him for a hard ball. They had lost the ball they’d been using in a game in the fallow hay field out back. They had searched and searched for nearly an hour.

The Robinson Ball was right there on his desk. “Okay,” Jimmy said. “You can use the Robinson Ball, but you’ve got to promise me you’ll be extra careful. We’ll get you a new ball tomorrow.”

His brothers solemnly promised to take extra care. It took them just 20 minutes to lose the Robinson Ball forever.

Jimmy was pissed at first but he soon got over it. The next day, his parents bought the brothers two new balls. The Yanks won the 1951 World Series 4 games to 2.

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The Best Christmas Tree Ever
By Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

When Jimmy O’Hara decided on his Christmas tree at the outdoor lot at Home Depot, they gave him a purple ribbon and told him to give it to the outdoor cashier. Someone would then help him get the tree set up with his car.

Jimmy handed in the ribbon. It was $49.34. He also paid for four wreaths and six boxes of lights. Jimmy was feeling pretty good. Usually, he worried that he had picked a wrong tree, but this time, maybe for the first time ever, he felt good about his tree. It was just the right height and it was powerfully bushy.

When he had selected the lights, a Home Depot employee, an attractive black girl in her mid-twenties, had helped him out big time. Jimmy was fumbling around with the light displays and she came up and asked if he needed help. He allowed as how he did. He was stuck.

How could he tell which lights to get? They ranged from $2 to $69. She gave a little laugh and said, “Isn’t it something?” She asked him if he was going to use the lights after the holidays. He said he wasn’t.

In that case, she suggested he buy the $2 lights. He was surprised. “I know,” she said. “But the cheap ones are almost the same. They’ll see you through the holidays just fine.”

She helped him gather up the $2 boxes. The name on her nametag was “Amanda.”

He thanked her sincerely. She had really helped him. He asked her, “Do you know what Amanda means?”

She said she didn’t.

“It is from old Roman times,” he told her. “It means worthy of love.”

“Worthy of love,” she repeated. “That’s nice. I never knew.”

“Well, don’t forget. You really deserve that name. Thanks again.”

It was a nice way to start the holiday season.

He paid his bill and took his receipt back to the tree lot. He handed the receipt to a very big, tough-looking black guy who walked over to the fenced in holding area. There was Jimmy’s tree! It really was a beauty.

The black guy snatched the tree up and shouldered it like it was nothing. Jimmy looked at him again. Late thirties. Big shoulders sloped like an athlete.

He was big but he had gone soft in spots. He wasn’t wearing gloves. Jimmy was wearing gloves. It was cold – the wind was up too – like it always was around sundown. It was the coldest day yet.

“Man,” Jimmy said, ‘This has got to be the coldest day yet. The wolf is out there.”

“You got that right. That wind makes it bite.”

He pushed Jimmy’s tree into a contraption that enfolded it in a mesh of twine. Then he guided the trunk onto a band saw and cut a few inches off. He made a couple of more passes until it was even.

“You got a real nice tree,” he said.

“Thanks,” Jimmy said. He felt really good about the tree.

“You know when it gets cold like this? In April. I’m still umpiring baseball, and let me tell you, in April, when that wind comes gusting off the Sound, it feels like it was generated on an iceberg.”

They walked over to the lot. Jimmy’s Mercedes was parked in a Handicap spot.

“Yeah,” the guy said, “but you play anyway even in the cold and rain. You gotta love it.”

“You got that right,” Jimmy said. “You gotta love it. Were you an athlete?”

“I was a football player. I loved it. I played for years. I could have gone on with the game…but life intervened, if you know what I mean.”

The guy had paused for a fraction before he said life had intervened. Jimmy could tell he was new at telling his story out like this.

“Do I ever,” Jimmy said. “I sure do know what you mean.”

He opened the trunk with his key. There was plenty of room for the tree.

“Plenty of room, no need to lash it to the roof,” Jimmy said. “Just slide it in.”

There was plenty of room. The guy slid the tree in easy. Jimmy gave him a five-dollar bill.

“Thanks,” Jimmy said. He was tempted to say more. “Easy does it.” “One day at a time.” But he resisted.

The guy thanked him and walked away. Jimmy was feeling double good. He drove on home with the best Christmas tree he had ever bought.

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“South Norwalk Nocturne”
Matthew Levine
Inspiration piece

Life Goes On
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

He was a child, then for a very brief while, he was a little boy, and then, forever on, he was a shockingly handsome man.

The actor, James Dean, resembled him. Eustace Tennyson Shaw was better looking. But he had the same glint. All who glimpsed it thought they were the first to see it. A few learned better. Most never did.

For most of his life he was almost completely unaware of his beauty. There is no question his life would have been different if he had known. But he was so troubled — he really couldn’t see it. 

He had been repeatedly abused as a child. His parents were alcoholics.In later years, he would refer to them as, “Good People with a Nasty Disease.” And that was true. His three younger siblings were bent too. But he was the first and his parents learned a little from the mistakes they made with him.

It took him a long time to really understand and accept that the things his parents were doing were not because of him. That was the last part of his story he had to learn. It took him a long, long time to get it and when he did get it, it was rather late in the game. The way they were was not because of him. It was because of them. 

He loved sex the way most boys love sex. His beauty addled many adults into scandalous behavior. When he was 14, the wife of a neighbor, a famous writer, invited him in for a cookie and came and came even before she could get his trousers off. He had cookies with her off and on for five years.

He was not homosexual; he was omnivorous. A number of successful artists lived in his town on the Connecticut coast. Some were bi or secretly gay. In a three-day span, two of them told him, “If I were Michelangelo, you would be my David.”

The forty-something wives of older men pursued him relentlessly. He was surprised they showed him no mercy. When he finally understood what was really going on, he played them ruthlessly and, of course, they loved him all the more for it.

He was married and had a son before he was 21. He was a gifted writer and was soon hired as a writer-producer for a hot new advertising agency in New York City. 

He tried hard with his wife, who was four years older, but from the first, she was frozen by fear. She had wanted him and gone after him. Now that she had what she had lusted for – she was a prisoner. He tried and tried to reassure her, but she wasn’t buying it. 

Finally, he stopped trying and she relaxed. He had a life at home with the wife and child and he had another life at work in the city. He was doing well with the job – the money was coming in good. When he had to stay in the city or go away on business, he gave her plenty of notice and kept in touch. It was good. They moved to a nice little house. Before long, they had another son. 

Eustace liked being a creative guy in the advertising business. Early on, he realized he had to be careful, so he did not start up with any of the women from the agency even though a number of them signaled they were interested.

He had begun to drink a lot more – on a regular basis with colleagues and staff. One Saturday morning in February, he woke up in a big bed in a luxury resort in Puerto Rico. Felecia Rizzo was there in the bed asleep. Felecia was a very buxom platinum blonde in her early thirties. She was the Deputy Director of the Agency’s Casting Department. 

It was his first blackout. 

He checked the Room Service menu to find out where they were. He had jumbled, dreamlike, memories of a frantic cab ride and a plane and another cab and checking in without luggage. Felecia had given the Front Desk her Agency corporate credit card.

He took a shower in the palatial bathroom. More memories kicked in. Felecia had a lot of cocaine and they got stoned. They had sex and sex and sex and she was very noisy. He was surprised it was so good. 

When he came out of the bathroom, Felecia rushed in right by him. She locked the door. She showered. When she came out, she was in one of the complimentary terry cloth robes. She stood in the doorway and told him she had lied to him. She was not divorced. She was married to a banker. Six years. Never unfaithful before. She loved making love to Eustace.

He told her not to worry. They had two pitchers of Bloody Mary’s and Eggs Benedict. Later that day, they flew on back. Felecia paid the way. Before they left, they made considered, expert, love. Eustace enjoyed it.  Afterward, he saw her every ten days or so until she started to pester him and he cut her off – just as she feared he would. 

He did real well at the agency. He wrote and produced a TV commercial meant to be run solely on an interim basis while they reformulated the brand. He did it in 48 hours. The spot ended up winning all sorts of awards. It is still a famous commercial.

He was doing the copy and a lot of the broadcast production for four important accounts. He got some big raises.  Soon he started getting offers from other agencies. He wasn’t at all interested. He loved being with this agency. It was perfect size. It was scorching hot.

They gave him more responsibility and he worked harder.  He was staying in the city a lot more – and drinking a lot more. One night at the pub, which served as the local for the Agency, he left early to catch his train to Connecticut and a drunken, newly hired highly placed executive followed him out and took a swing at him. Eustace evaded the blow easily. The drunk was restrained. “I’ll get you, Pretty Boy,” he screamed. “I’ll get you good.” 

Usually his youth (he was 22 and then 23), and his being a creative, enabled him to stay clear of the senior executives at the Agency. Once, the famous founder of the Agency left a note on Eustace’s desk. “Please tidy this dung heap.” Eustace complied.

He carried an increasingly heavy workload. His heavy drinking was slowing him down. His mornings were increasingly dedicated to relief. He took a later train to the city.  Some mornings he got off the train and went directly to a Schrafft’s Bar. Usually, he was the only customer. He drank two tall glasses of medium sherry. It was a beautiful bar, with morning light streaming through ornate, four-story, windows.

He got buzzed on the sherry. It was enough to see him through to lunch. 

He was producing quite a few commercials and he started to hang out with the directors cameramen and owners of a number of studios. He preferred their company to that of the up tight executives from his Agency. Once or twice a week, he would head out to the racetrack with a few of them, catch the double, and ease on back in to work around 3.

He got so squeezed for time, he started seeing women from the Agency. But he was careful. He was seeing two or three at a time and they knew about each other. He started to date Emily Winthrop, the lead secretary for the Executive Vice President. He really liked Emily, a willowy, brown-haired woman from St. Louis in her late twenties. She was smart and sensitive and starved for sex and affection. Eustace did her with his left hand six ways to Sunday. Emily loved him.

Everything was going fine when one of his studio buddies invited him to a party and introduced Eustace to the most beautiful woman in the world.

That’s how Helene Hurley was known. An actress from London in New York for a feature,she had been a traffic stopper since she was thirteen. Men knelt at her feet in the street. What’s more, she was intelligent and kind. She was 22 and had never, ever, been in love. When she met Eustace, she was immediately completely zapped by the lightening bolt.  

They were together that night and an item there after. He told her straight away that he was married. She said they would work around it. She had a splendid suite at the Plaza. He thoroughly enjoyed being with her. Their schedules meshed so they couldn’t see each other too much. He loved being with her. 

They were a splendid couple. A perfect match. They were very, very attractive. They were very, very happy. 

He overnighted two or three nights a week with her at the Plaza. At first, Helene respected his weekends back in Connecticut with his wife and sons. Then she started to question him. Did it have to be every weekend? Did he know how miserable she was without him? Did he love his wife more than he loved her?

Then people at the Agency found out that Eustace was “the mystery man from Connecticut Helene Hurley adores.” He denied it. They were just friends. But, occasionally, when they were out, at a restaurant or a pub or a concert, they bumped into people from the Agency and there was nothing to say. One look told the story: Eustace and Helene were lovers.

So, in no time, everyone at the Agency knew. Helene Hurley was famous and now Eustace was famous at the Agency as her lover.  She had declared in a number of interviews that she had never known happiness until now.  Helene Hurley was in love with an American advertising executive. Some day soon, she hoped they would marry. 

Now Eustace was constantly being questioned about his relationship with Helene.  Was she easy to be with? How did they meet? How was she in bed? Did she know Eustace was married?

He stuck to his story: they were just friends. He made up a narrative that they were cousins and it seemed to take some of the pressure off. Still, there were questions. Even his clients joked with him about Helene.

Then Emily Winthrop asked him to meet her at her apartment after work. When they met she solemnly told him he had to break it off with Helene. It wouldn’t be long before she demanded that Eustace get divorced. Emily knew that Eustace would never leave his children. Emily loved him so, she was content to be his mistress. Helene was nothing but trouble.

Eustace heard her out. He knew she was right. They made love, terrific love, and then he hurried away and caught his train to Connecticut. 

He didn’t do anything – but the secret was out. Two months later, the film was finished. Helene returned to London. Eustace would start divorce proceedings. After he got the decree, they would reunite. Till then, she would write him every day. 

He took up with Emily as his mistress. He really enjoyed her company and she was happy too until he started seeing other women on the side. They argued. He tried to explain to her that it meant nothing. It was in his nature. She wept. 

He was in Los Angeles on a shoot when he heard that Emily had nearly died from taking too many sleeping pills. He couldn’t reach her at the hospital. He called the Agency and was told Emily had gone home to St Louis on a leave of absence.

Two days later, when he got back to the Agency, he was summoned to Human Resources and fired. They gave him six weeks severance. The reason for his dismissal was incompetence. 

Eustace never answered any of Helene’s letters. They stopped after six weeks. The only time he ever saw her again was in the movies. Three years later, she married a handsome young banker. 

Emily never returned to the Agency from St. Louis. Eustace looked for her on line a few times but never found her. He had a successful career in creative for several agencies and then became a top Voice Over actor on commercials and documentaries. 

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Matthew Levine, “Thinking of Pay Dirt”
Response

Pay Dirt
By Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

Jimmy finally hit pay dirt at the Alanon lunch meeting on his next to last day in La Jolla. Jimmy had eaten lunch there over the past three weeks. Several attractive women in their seventies had openly flirted with him.  That gave him courage.

When the meeting opened and the Secretary asked if there were any announcements, Jimmy raised his hand and said he was looking to rent a room for a few weeks. He said he wasn’t at all ready to go back East and face the emptiness of winter now with his wife gone.

“The fact is, I’m not thrilled with the idea of the chill and damp of February in Connecticut by my lonesome“, he added. There was a murmur of assent. Half of the people at the meeting were snowbirds. Many had dead spouses.

Jimmy said thanks and the meeting started up. He didn’t need to say more. In the three weeks he had been going to 12-Step Meetings in La Jolla, Jimmy had heard five or six “need to rent a room” announcements from older men. There was no need to explain he couldn’t afford to stay in La Jolla, even at cheap hotels.

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Jimmy was unaccustomed to budget constraints. He had been a handsome man all his life. He had married twice. His wives were very rich and deliriously happy to be with him. He had taught Art History at Columbia. He was 73, lean, and still a money threat even in a friendly foursome.

Jimmy and Felecia, his second wife, had ploughed through her trust fund over the last decade. They lived on Mortgages afterward. They were about tapped out on the rainy evening in May when a texting drunk ran over Felecia at 40 MPH in a crosswalk in Greenwich.

Jimmy had been shocked by his grief. He had worried about her all through their marriage. Felecia was a recovering alcoholic. Emily, his first wife, had never admitted she had a problem, and had died suddenly of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills after way more than a few too many.

Now Felecia, an exquisite, petite, raven-haired beauty, had also succumbed to the disease. The drunk who had killed her was in jail. He had no insurance, no license. He was a Hungarian drifter who had overstayed his visa.

When the police came and told Jimmy, he had a sort of seizure. He blubbered. It was way beyond crying. He was bent at the waist and yelling and weeping great gouts of grief from deep in his interior. The cops took a step back.

Jimmy saw himself using his sawed-off shotgun to blow away the Hungarian. The vision gave Jimmy a warm hit. Then he went ice cold again like he had way back as a kid and then again in the Marines.

This surprise made him feel like an utter fool and that made him angry. In the Marines, death was always right around the corner – it definitely was not in a crosswalk in Greenwich Connecticut early on a May evening during a gentle spring rain.

He was terrified again, but he was able to deal with it and handle all the arrangements. His four adult children were very concerned for him. Mark and Joan, his children with Felecia, were shocked and scared much the same way Jimmy was. At the funeral, as the priest talked about his sweet, dead wife, Jimmy absently wondered if a sudden indelible scoop of reality was the gift a sudden, fatal accident gave survivors.

Jimmy scattered Felecia’s ashes in the meadow on the river by their home. The funeral, and the gatherings attendant to it, were festive and very sad. Felecia had been an extraordinary person. Now she was gone forever.

Jimmy welcomed the formalities. He sold the house for much less than he had thought he would get because his close friend, Pete Gelderman, a top real estate attorney, told him to take it. It was just enough to pay the bank and taxes and other expenses. Felecia’s insurance went to the children. Jimmy sold Felecia’s three-year-old Mercedes. He took a room at an extended stay facility. He put the art and the furniture and the books in storage.

He started some disciplined wandering. He visited his children in Boston, Bethesda, Austin and New York. He did New Year’s Eve in Times Square. On New Year’s Day, for the first time ever, he felt old. He suddenly realized he had not had an erection for months. He was feeling very angry and very sorry for himself. And he was cold.

He decided to go to La Jolla, where he and Felecia had spent months every winter at the house of a couple who had become their close friends. Jimmy and the husband had been buddies in the Marines. The ladies had hit it off.  So, even though their friends had been dead for a few years, Jimmy went on out to the pink hotel in La Jolla.

It was just what he needed. The weather was perfect. He went from beach to beach.  He got back in the flow of 12 Step Meetings. The Alanon meeting was particularly helpful. They knew him there from before. He mentioned his wife had been killed and he was coping okay and then he had announced he needed to rent a room.

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Later during the free lunch that followed the meeting, Mary, a squat Asian woman in her late fifties, offered him a room with a bath in the Heights section for $750 a week. Jimmy could tell she had regular takers. She seemed surprised when he declined. But $750 was way more than he could afford.

It seemed he would have to fly back to New York on the red eye after all. He was finishing his delicious, free BLT and was about to leave for the hotel to check out, when Julie Lane, one of the flirts, came up to him and said she had just heard he had been looking to rent a room. She had come late and had missed the announcements.

Julie said Jimmy was welcome to stay at her place on Windnsea Beach. It was a big, old style, Spanish house in pink stucco. It had a rose garden and two big palm trees. Her husband had died in June. It was just her now. There was plenty of room.

If Jimmy gave her $200 a week, it would be plenty. He could have a bedroom with a bath and a little study. He could stay until July when her daughter and grandchild came for the summer.

Three hours later, Jimmy came to the house in a cab with his one suitcase and a duffle. Julie showed him to his little suite and then took him around the house. It was a beauty. It was on a hill overlooking Windnsea Beach – the best surfing beach in La Jolla.

The property had been in Julie’s family for more than a hundred years. Her father owned banks and had also prospered in real estate. Julie’s late husband, Don Lane, had been a
renowned heart and lung surgeon for nearly thirty years and had then headed up the medical school at UC San Diego. is pdoHis

Julie’s daughter, Louise and her daughter, Lulu, lived in St Louis and Washington DC with Louise’s husband Kirk Mallory, who was in his second term as a US Senator.

Julie, at 71, still turned heads. She was a green eyed, willowy, honey blonde with a body that had a surge to it. Men had desired her since she was 11. Women resented her for good reason.

She had practiced yoga daily for fifty years. Five years back, she had retired as the president of California’s largest Credit Union. Julie Lane had not had a sexual thought or desire for more than a year – ever since Don had emerged from a yearly physical with a diagnosis of a metastasized, Stage 4, small cell, tumor in his left lung.

When Jimmy first arrived at her house, they both were stiff and awkward and over polite. By the time Jimmy had unpacked, the sun was setting right in front of them over the sea. The surfers were still at it. Jimmy and Julie sat on a sumptuous rattan divan surrounded by rose bushes and took it all in.

Julie suggested they have dinner out and she drove them into the village to a small, cheery, easy, California-style, place overlooking the Cove. Julie had a Pinot and Jimmy went with a large Seltzer. They looked at the menus and Jimmy leaned on Julie for advice and they ordered.

Then they started to talk.

It has been months now, and that conversation is ongoing. There is still so much they want to say. They kid each other about prattling. They are happily amused by the miracle of their linkage. After that dinner the first night, they went on back and said Good Night, but at 2:30, Julie came to Jimmy’s room and cuddled up with him.

Touching each other with their bodies was a thrilling balm for them. Each of them had been hurting big time for a long time and then they weren’t. Thereafter they slept together in the Master Bedroom.

Everyone at the Alanon Meeting knew right away. It being Alanon, some people clucked, but it didn’t matter. Like it or not, Julie and Jimmy were the real deal. Actually, Jimmy and Julie often clucked themselves. They were amazed they had been completely blindsided by their connection. In fact, each of them harbored an annoying doubt blip. It seemed impossible. The fact was that the could have gone on living the rest of their lives without each other in the grim silence they had grown, oh so accustomed to.

When the doubt blipped up, they looked away and everything was okay. As for the sex, it was just as big a surprise as their connection. They loved making love. They did it a lot. All sorts of ways. They were in their 70’s! It seemed impossible.

Jimmy said it made him think of Martin Luther’s comment that sex was just so monstrously powerful an urge — it was unfair to expect anyone to be chaste. Julie said it was amazing — they both had forgotten sex.

On June 21^st, it was the Summer Solstice and they were sitting by the rose bushes watching the sunset. Julie said she hadn’t told her daughter about Jimmy. She was coming on July 1^st.

“What would you do if I told you to leave for two months?”, Julie asked.

“I guess I would make another ‘need a room announcement’ at the Alanon Meeting.”

Julie winced.

“I’ll call Louise tomorrow and tell her. No, I’ll call her right now. I can’t believe I waited so long. I won the Lottery and I didn’t tell my dear daughter.”

She went inside to make the call.

Jimmy sat with the roses looking out at the sea. He watched a surfer ride a wave in almost all the way to the shore.

He too had won the Lottery!  He would call his dear children tomorrow.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Matthew Levine, “Unfinished Business”
Inspiration piece

Anne Hutchison
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

The moment the artist showed Jimmy O’Hara the watercolor of the space where the bar that had been washed away by the hurricane had stood, Jimmy thought of draft beer and boredom.

He told the artist that a bar had been there run by an old washed up boxer named Cubby or Wobbly and that as a lad in his early teens he had sat there drinking the beer and looking at the glossy photos of the washed up boxers that covered the walls. The place was called, Bat Shanty.

It was Hurricane Carol that got it. Bat Shanty had stood next to a very small bridge over a very small stream that had roiled up during the hurricane and scoured away everything before it.

They built a new small bridge over the small stream but Bat Shanty was gone forever.

Jimmy wondered what it would feel like to be gone forever. Would it feel like traveling through the cold black of deep space on your way to Saturn?

Just the other day, Jimmy had happened on a photo of his Dad he had never seen before. His dad was pretty young – he hadn’t gone bald yet. He was smiling at the camera – he had a winsome look that actually startled Jimmy. There was his Dad, a handsome young man, long before he fell in love with Jimmy’s mother. Long before he became Jimmy’s Dad. Long before he was gone forever.

When Jimmy was a boy around 12, he would play with his friends in the open fields that bordered his street. The fields were a mix of tall reeds and hay. The fields were close to the sea.  They were mostly dry – but when it rained or the moon was full – little, aimless creeks to nowhere would appear. Some times you could just scoop the earth in the field and create a little creek on the spot. Some times your creek would have minnows swimming in it.

It was a kind of magic he and his kid friends took for granted. These fields were their territory. Jimmy never saw an adult in them, ever.

Jimmy’s boyhood house is still there. But the fields are gone. The ground became very valuable. They built houses in the fields. Jimmy heard that some of the houses have problems with water in the basement. But the fields he played in are gone forever.

Of course, the fields still exist in his memory. The fields and the little creeks and the minnows. Jimmy wondered how many of his kid friends from back then were still alive, how many of them remembered.

Only when Jimmy and his friends were gone forever, would those fields be gone forever too. Until then, they were definitely in the here and now. Bat Shanty and his Dad too.

Jimmy is very pleased it is so.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Matthew Levine
“Rip Tide”
Response

By The Sea
Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

Jimmy O’Hara often wept as the crash boat banged through the chop Sunday nights returning him to the mainland, to the railroad, to the city, to his empty apartment — stark, useless and absurd without his wife and children, who dwelt barefoot from Memorial Day through Labor Day in the shack Jimmy rented nestled behind the deserted dunes of Whalehouse Point on Fire Island.

“Wept” is the proper word – although there was no audible boo-hoo accompaniment. The tears would well before the jam-packed crash boat was half way across the bay. Occasionally, tears would trickle down and he would blot his cheeks and blow his nose like it was allergy.

Once he looked up as he was blowing his nose and a man about his age caught his eye and nodded knowingly. It helped not to be alone with his tears. But it was disquieting. The guy understood. But he wasn’t weeping.

From the time Jimmy stepped on the mainland till his return on Friday evening,  he soldiered relentlessly through the week like the veteran mercenary he was.

He worked fiercely at his job, which was unusual, since he was very talented and working hard at his profession was regarded as very uncool.

The truth was he felt an absolute failure not being with his family in the shack behind the dune. When he was done working, he drank in pubs with people he had come to know. He drank hard. He gobbled the pub food. Or he would go on to a restaurant with a few of his drinking companions.

Women frequently asked him up. He was a good-looking, successful, young man. Maybe three or four times a summer, he said, yes. He rarely repeated and he stayed through the night only once.

On Wednesdays, he would catch the last five races at the track. He hung out at the finish line in the Club House with a group of eight men he had known in the Marines. Once in a while, he cashed a big score. Usually he broke even.

This summer, the Fourth of July was on a Friday. Nobody was working Thursday, so he came out Wednesday straight from the track. He was feeling very good. He had hit a nice score –a blind lucky number bet – that was the Triple. He had collected $7,300. And it was a long, 4-day holiday.

He could see his two boys, eight and nine, jumping up and down as the beach taxi headed along the water’s edge toward his shack, which was the only dwelling within a mile. Every week his boys got a little blonder and a little wilder. He hugged them hard and gave them the usual candy bars.

He went in and kissed his wife on the cheek. His wife was not a hugger. Jimmy had learned not to take it personally. He told her it was good to see her. He told her he had missed her and the boys. She didn’t say anything. She was reading The New Yorker magazine.

He kicked off his shoes and socks and took $6,000 in cash out of his sport coat and gave it to his wife. He told her he had picked a lucky ticket at the track and she could put this extra money in any cookie jar she pleased.  She took the wad of money into the bedroom and spread it out on the sheet and carefully counted it out twice. It was his annual salary just five years back. She put the money in the drawer with her lingerie.

It was still two hours till sundown, so Jimmy put on a bathing suit, grabbed the beach blanket and a new novel by an old friend and went over the dune with his boys. It was half tide and the surf was relatively quiet. Even so, it was fierce.

In early June, a 70-foot fishing boat had run on to a sand bar at night just 40 yards off shore. The crew was sleeping and the mate at the helm was drunk. Miraculously, the crew made it to shore in a life raft – but by day’s end, the surf had smashed the fishing boat into pieces.

Jimmy horsed around with his boys in the shallows. They knew to keep close. The fact was that every summer, the undertow, drowned half a dozen swimmers on Fire Island. Just this Memorial Day, a rogue wave had swept away two fisherman right from the water’s edge.

Playing with his boys was great fun. He could hug them in the rough house. They hugged him back. The roar of the surf was an exciting undertone. They were the only people on the beach for as far as the eye could see. It was very private. And wild in a very special way.

After a time, they went back to the blanket. The boys were playing with miniature replica trucks – working on fort complexes in the sand and tide pools. It was about an hour before dark. The gulls were busy. The air and the light of the evening sun were toasty. His wife was still in the shack reading, but it felt like heaven. The memory of times like this was what would trigger his tears in the crash boat.

Then his son’s had a territorial squabble about their forts and the oldest boy went back to the shack over the dune with his truck in hand. Evan, the eight-year-old, kept right on with his construction projects – incorporating his departed brother’s forts into his complex.

Jimmy relaxed. The evening sun felt mighty fine. His towhead son splashing in the tide pools was the epitome of beauty. Jimmy opened the book he had carried out and started to read.

It was hard to read under these circumstances. He would scan a few lines and then check on his son. It was herky-jerky. His son seemed to be doing just fine, so he read two pages through.

When he looked back up, his son was gone. Jimmy stood up. He looked up and down the beach and on the dune. His son was gone! He ran along the water’s edge and scanned the surf. There was no trace of his son. He ran back up the beach and up the bluff and looked at the path back to his shack. There was nothing. His son was gone!

Jimmy felt he was about to vomit. He ran back to the beach and yelled and screamed, for his son again and again. There was just empty beach. The gulls were finishing up. Night was descending. His son was gone.

Jimmy gathered up the blanket and trudged on back up and over the dune on to the path back to his shack. His son was gone. It was Jimmy’s fault. He wondered what his wife’s reaction would be. She would be sad. After a time, she would be angry at him. Very angry. Would she ever be sad for him? He didn’t have any idea.

When he opened the screen door to the shack, he had to step over a mammoth fort his two sons were constructing with their blocks. They were running their trucks back and forth.

Evidently, Evan had slipped away and gone over the dune and returned to the shack while Jimmy was reading the two pages. Jimmy looked at the boys again. Evan was alive! It was almost too good to be true.

Jimmy had never felt so lucky. Dinner was on the table. His wife had opened a bottle of Margaux. She smiled at him. She wearing a short, red satin, off the shoulder, dress he had never seen before.

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Many, many, years later, Jimmy O’Hara sat on another beach and wondered if he would ever feel strong again. He had just been two months in the hospital following radical surgery and chemotherapy for lung cancer. He felt so weak he knew he was still very close to death’s door.

His amazing second wife had pulled some strings and they were ensconced, all expenses paid, at a fabulous resort on the Kona coast on the Big Island in Hawaii. When they first arrived, Jimmy had behaved badly.

When they walked on to the beach and went swimming, the big puckered wounds on Jimmy’s chest and back drew a lot of attention. One couldn’t help looking at them. They were ugly. They were scary. Guests looked – looked away – then stared at Jimmy’s chest.

“What are you looking at?”, Jimmy would yell. “What’s the big deal? Didn’t they tell you to watch out for the sharks?”

After a day or two, Jimmy behaved. But he still had occasional bad days. This morning when they got to the beach, the red flags were out for dangerous surf. But the lifeguards were not at their stations. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition had just been delivered from the mainland and the lifeguards were clustered around a copy.

Jimmy left his wife on the chaise lounge, strode up to the life guards and chewed them out for dereliction of duty out like they were his Recon Marines and he was their bad ass, highly decorated, Captain.

Fortunately, the word had already traveled on Jimmy and the lifeguards heard him out. A couple of them said, “Yes Sir.”

Jimmy went on back to his spot on the beach and his wife on her chaise and told her he had given the Lifeguards the required correction. He wondered if he should speak to the Resort Manager. He felt strongly that competent cadre would never have allowed the Swimsuit distraction in the first place. But he decided to let it go. His wife agreed that was best.

Even though the red flags were up, Jimmy decided to take a swim. His wife asked him to be careful. He said he would be careful.

He looked for a guest he could swim with. Jimmy knew surf. You never swim alone. If the undertow grabs you, you never fight it. If you do, you will exhaust yourself. You relax and go with the flow. Later on, you’ll be able to swim parallel to the shore and come in safely.

There were just a few guests by the water’s edge on the entire beach. Jimmy picked out a guest in his early forties standing by himself about fifty feet down the beach. He was a pale-skinned new arrival.

Jimmy walked up to him and said hello. The man said hello and stared bug-eyed at the scars on Jimmy’s chest. Then he prepared to dive into an incoming wave.

Jimmy said, “You should have seen the other guy.” And dove with the guest into the wave.

But Jimmy had dived to ride the wave out and the guest’s dive was the other way to ride the wave in. When Jimmy came up, he was alone. He immediately felt a raging current. The undertow had seized him. It felt like a wild thing. He had a flash of a horse’s flank under his hand after he had taken the horse on a long gallop.

He was headed out to sea! Next stop, the Marshall Islands. Jimmy tried to swim out of the undertow and back toward shore. He was so weak! Just six or seven strokes and he was exhausted. Just treading water was difficult. The current was so strong and he was so weak.

He looked in at the beach. Everything was normal. Most of the guests reclined on chaises. A few children were playing in the sand. Four college boys were tossing a football around. His wife was looking out at him.

Jimmy realized right then that the surgery and chemo had addled him. He realized he was fighting the impulse to wave his arm at the lifeguards and call for help. He realized that he was seriously considering drowning in the next two or three minutes as preferable to asking those louts he had just chewed out to save him.

Just as he decided he would ask for help, his wife stood up and four lifeguards ran for the water. Two had outsized surfboards to use as flotation aids. When the first lifeguard got to Jimmy, he said, “Just playing it safe sir.” Jimmy said, “Good to see you. I had maybe twenty seconds left.”

It didn’t take long for them to swim him in with the big surfboard. It looked routine. Nobody except his wife was paying attention.  The guests were taking the sun. The birds were chirping as normal. The little kids were busy in the sand. The college boys had gone over to the beach bar for drinks.

“Thanks, men,” Jimmy said. One of his rescuers said, “You’re welcome, sir.”

His wife said, “You really are crazy, Jimmy. I’m glad you didn’t drown.”

Jimmy said he was glad too. Then, he talked to her about how surprising it was that everything on the beach was so normal even while he was seconds from drowning.

Later, that afternoon back in their room, he lay down to rest and a wave of gratitude swept over him for the heroic medicine that had saved him from cancer.

The big sadness came then. And he wept. They had saved his precious life.

His wife let him go and when he was done she hugged him and held him.

That evening while they were in the ballroom dancing, he saw a blonde woman in a short, red satin, off the shoulder dress and he immediately understood for the first time that he was already the luckiest man in the world long, long before he survived lung cancer.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Fox Time
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

Jimmy stood behind a bush with his boys just outside the cage and waved and made monkey sounds at the big tiger lying there about thirty feet away. The big cat looked at him. Jimmy edged a little closer and stuck his hand further through the bush closer to the cage.

“Here, Kitty, Kitty,” he yelled. The tiger blinked his eyes once and continued to gaze at Jimmy.

“Stupid, sleepy, lazy, tiger,” Jimmy yelled.

He was hoping for a big reaction from the tiger so his eight and nine-year-old sons would have a special show. They didn’t have zoos like this in Connecticut. This new zoo in South Dakota featured open, “approachable” cages — landscaped so big bushes grew all around the bars of the cages.

Jimmy was frustrated. He felt a little foolish.

He shouted, “Hey Felix, wake up!” and pushed his hand even further through the bush into the cage.

The tiger blinked again and Jimmy’s hand touched something. A millisecond later, his brain realized he was touching the fur of another tiger hidden by the bush – he yanked his hand back and a big paw smashed into the bars where his hand had been and the people around the cage, yelled, “Whoa!”

**************************************************************************************************

Until the red foxes came into his life, that encounter all those years back had been Jimmy’s only contact with a wild animal.

He had lived most of his life in a Connecticut coastal town. As a boy, he heard the sound of the sea every day. At bedtime, it was a splendid sound to slip away into. Later, he lived a few miles inland in the same town in a renovated 18^th century ferry landing building that overlooked the terminus of the big estuary that coursed through the center of town on its way to the sea.

The estuary isn’t famous but it could be. It puts on a spectacular daily variety show featuring different animals, birds and fish depending on the season, the time of day and the state of the tide.

After he married, he moved two miles inland to a stately, white, “Gatsby” house on acres of rolling meadow running down to a river that feeds the estuary. The river teems with fish and turtles. The meadows are home to a flock of wild turkeys, a big red tail hawk, four crows, an owl and a herd of deer.

It is the last parcel of river bottom meadow left in his town. It is beautiful. Similar meadows along the river had been “improved” with tennis courts and basketball courts as newcomers from New York moved in and put up big houses. Jimmy had a friend with a lock mower cut his fields twice a year and left it at that.

When a coyote den in a nearby town was discovered with a pile of bones and 14 dog collars and 8 cat collars, Jimmy considered surrounding his land with special tall fiberglass fences to protect his pets. But he decided against it.

Jimmy and his wife, Anne, loved the meadows and the house and the old copper beach and the water from their artesian well. They knew they would have to sell and leave some day but when they really had to sell after forty-one years, it was a shock. They were still alive and they were leaving.

Their downsize was in a town up the line and back from the water, although there were still a lot of water grasses and reeds that reminded Jimmy of places where you could hear the sea. They had quite a few near neighbors here – which was sort of a fun prospect. There was a Jesuit university nearby, and just half a mile away, the housing projects of a big city rank with poverty, homelessness, and gang violence.

The good news was their downsize house was in an enclave of well kept eighty-year-old houses on a beautiful, well-maintained street with lovely old trees. There was work to do on the house but they had nice a big backyard spilling past a bountiful apple tree to a tangle of brush that separated their yard from the next property.

The children had gone long ago – and now all the grandchildren were grown and far away. So now, even on holidays, Jimmy and Anne were alone with Duncan, their 3-year old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

Duncan was the last of a long line of Cavaliers Jimmy and Anne kept. As a puppy, he had been shown the ropes by Percy, an extraordinarily beautiful and sweet Cavalier who had suddenly been afflicted by cancer when he was just six. The vet euthanized him. The family still mourned him.

Before they made the move, Anne had the Invisible Fence people do a careful survey of the new property and install their latest equipment in the front and the back. The Invisible Fence trainer introduced Duncan to the new boundaries of his outdoor life in just about forty minutes. The next day, Jimmy and Anne let him out and watched him.  Duncan was safe. He respected the boundaries front and back.

A week later Jimmy and Anne were breakfasting on pancakes on their screened porch, which was pleasantly illuminated by the morning sun. It was spring. The apple tree was blooming.

Anne suddenly screeched, “My God, look at that!”

Jimmy looked out. At the far end of the yard, four animals were lying down in a semicircle. They appeared to be basking in the sun. There were two big ones and two little ones. Jimmy looked again. The biggest one got up and turned and looked Jimmy’s way. It had a wild face. There was a red tinge to its fur. It was a fox! Jimmy had never seen a fox  in person. Now he was looking at a fox family that evidently lived on his property.

Just then, Duncan, banged up against the plate glass door of the porch barking furiously. Now all the foxes were on their feet looking toward the house. Then, they turned as one and trotted off into the foliage. Duncan kept barking. They had to bring him in off the porch to get him to stop.

That was the start of Fox Time for Jimmy and Anne. They immediately consulted the Internet for information on foxes. Foxes mated in the first quarter of the year. They had a gestation period of just 51 to 53 days. They were widespread in the state. Foxes had to live in the open spaces between neighboring coyote’s territory.

Foxes are omnivorous. They prey on mice, squirrel, rabbits, cats and small dogs like Duncan. Some foxes have rabies. Some can spread a fatal form of mange.

Jimmy thought about taking his old, sniper-scoped, Springfield 03 out of the Cosmoline and shooting the foxes. It would be an easy shot. Just 75 or 80 yards.  If he killed the Father fox, maybe the others would run away. But then again, maybe another male would step up.

Jimmy and Anne hoped that maybe the fox family was just passing through. But early next morning, as Jimmy was brewing the coffee, Duncan started barking and yowling – pushing against the porch door.

Sure enough, the fox family was back. The two babies were play fighting with each other. The mother was stretched out on her back in the sun. The father sat on his haunches looking straight out toward Jimmy.

Jimmy was fed up. He pushed Duncan back off the porch, opened the back door and stepped out. He was going to yell – but all four foxes had already plunged off into the brush.

Jimmy and Anne went back on the Internet. Foxes are never a threat to humans. They always seek to avoid confrontations. They do prey on small dogs and cats – but not with humans in the near vicinity.

This information was of great consolation. They began to allow Duncan to cruise the backyard so long as one of them was out there with him.

They relaxed. Then one morning, just as Jimmy emerged with Duncan out the porch door, he started to growl and run toward the back. The male fox was standing there. Duncan was acting like he wanted to make friends! Jimmy shouted, “No!” and the fox bounded away into the bush.

They decided on a new routine. The foxes usually came out for the sun in the early morning. They restricted Duncan to the front yard until noon. It worked. The foxes took the sun on a regular basis in the morning.  Duncan never encountered them.

Anne and Jimmy were now very interested in the foxes. They used field glasses to see them up close. Jimmy was struck by how wild their faces looked. The male fox especially had a fearsome jaw line. He definitely was a biter. The foxes rolled around in the dirt like dogs. They scratched themselves like dogs. The baby foxes were very cute – they were constantly play fighting — just like dogs.

They decided to take Duncan to the Vet to make sure he had all the shots he needed. The Vet’s assistant said Duncan was fine with his shots. She told Anne that the red fox is notorious for having the babies play around to distract a victim – and then the mother jumps out from hiding and kills.

That information really scared them. The fact is they had already fallen for the trick. The babies were very cute. Jimmy and Anne looked forward to seeing them almost every morning. They had become distracted. They had almost completely forgotten that the mother or father would pounce on Duncan if given the chance.

They went back on the Internet and clicked on to Amazon. The very next day they had a shiny, battery-operated, electronic, wildlife-deterrent canister. The brochure said the canister would emit high-pitched sounds that foxes, squirrels and all sort of varmints could not abide.

They set the canister up right where the foxes like to take the morning sun.

The foxes did not appear for two days and Jimmy started to feel a little guilty. All the foxes had been looking for was some morning sun. Duncan’s life would be perfectly fine if he kept to the front yard. Hell, Jimmy walked Duncan for a mile at the park almost every day.

The next morning Jimmy came down for breakfast a little late. He looked out. The Father fox was standing by the canister. He lifted his leg and urinated on the canister. Then he walked to the other side of the canister and urinated on it again.

He trotted back into the bush. Then he trotted out again with the wife and kids. They took the sun as usual.

Anne was out for her spin class. When she returned, Jimmy told her about how the fox had christened their fancy wildlife-deterrent canister – and they had a good laugh.

They decided they might as well live and let live as far as the foxes were concerned. They realized that as long as they kept an eye on Duncan, all would be well.

As the summer wore on, the fox family visited almost every day. Jimmy looked at them with the field glasses quite a lot. The babies were getting bigger. The father’s fur was quite beautiful – Jimmy had never realized how red, red foxes were.

Jimmy took a lot of photos of the foxes with his iPhone. He had enough to fill an album.

Jimmy discussed the fox family with a next-door neighbor at a cocktail party. The neighbor said he often saw the foxes passing through his property but had not realized they took the sun in Jimmy’s back yard. They wondered where their den was.

The next day the neighbor came to Jimmy’s door and told him the Father fox was dead. He was lying in the street about a half mile away just before the entrance to the projects. Jimmy was shocked. He didn’t know what to say.

He told Anne. She was surprised. Unsettled. Jimmy found the whole thing hard to believe. It seemed very unlikely that a fox would be on a busy urban street. Maybe it was a dog. He drove the half-mile up and over to check it out for himself.

There was no disputing it was the Father fox. Jimmy recognized him. He was one dead fox. He had been hit hard – probably several times. He lay on his side with his guts spilling out. His eyes were open. His jaw, was relaxed – his big, red, tongue lolling – his killer bite exposed for all to see. Jimmy took some photos. Then he drove to the other side of the road and took some shots from that perspective.

The fox family has not returned. Three days after Jimmy saw the dead fox, a large male red fox walked out of the brush, lay down in the early morning sunny spot and after about twenty minutes, rose and walked away.  Since then there have been no visitors.

It has been months now. Even so, Anne and Jimmy are vigilant when Duncan is out in the back. But as the days go by, the Fox Time is becoming time they look back on like all those years in their old “Gatsby” home.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Sing Along
By Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

Jimmy O’Hara was 15 when he met Joy Levy, his counselor at the summer camp the town ran at the beach. Joy was a petite, raven-haired, big-breasted beauty in her second year at Nursing School. She was eight years older than Jimmy but at the end of the first day of camp, she offered him a ride home in her convertible. They were lovers before nightfall and then nearly every day throughout the summer.

Joy was a very experienced woman with a boundless sexual appetite. Jimmy enjoyed letting her take control. She was a ruthless, compassionate, tender, grateful teacher.

She often told Jimmy he was beautiful. She would hug him and kiss him on the neck and the lips and nuzzle his throat and his neck and his cheeks and say, “I love you Jimmy – you are such a beautiful boy.”

After a week or so, Jimmy believed he really was a beautiful boy. Joy seemed to be exactly the rare sort of woman who was qualified to make such a pronouncement. She had slept with men as old as his father. In time, she would go on to marry and divorce two doctors. The last Jimmy heard of her, nearly three decades later, she was living in Idaho with two Basque sheep ranchers and eight children.

The last time Jimmy saw Joy was at summer’s end, the night after Labor Day. They made love for hours and it was quite wonderful for her and for Jimmy and, of course, he took it for granted.

Next morning, he boarded the train and returned to prep school. When he came home for Thanksgiving, there was a letter from Joy inviting him to go with her to a concert at Carnegie Hall on Christmas Eve. He called Joy. Her mother told Jimmy that Joy was in California interviewing for a job as a nurse in a hospital in San Diego.  Jimmy asked the mother to tell Joy he had called and to tell her he couldn’t attend the concert.

The mother said she would. “Jimmy O’Hara – you’re one of the youngsters she was counseling at the Beach Camp. I know she’ll be glad you called.”

But Jimmy never talked to Joy again. A year or so later, he heard that Joy had married a Doctor who had been wounded serving as a Marine in the Pacific and then had done college and Medical School on the GI Bill. They were living in Del Mar near San Diego.

After graduation from prep school, when he came home for summer vacation, his mother handed him an LP record wrapped in white tissue paper. It was marked, “To Jimmy.” His mother said it had been left propped up against the front door.

The record was “The Weavers at Carnegie Hall.” It had been recorded live on Christmas Eve, 1955. Inside the album, underneath the record, there was a note on a yellow, blue-lined, paper, with a red stencil title, “Discharge Instructions.”

“Hello to Jimmy, the most beautiful boy in the world. Jimmy, I’m a real nurse. I’m married to a very nice doctor. I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby soon. Just think, I could have had your baby. Some times, I really wish I had. But that wouldn’t have been fair to you or the baby I guess.

Jimmy, I met my husband at the concert on this album. Remember, I got the tickets and asked you to come – but you had to do Christmas Eve with your family.

It was a wild night. I still wish you had been there.

Jimmy, when you play this, think of me.”

She had signed it with a large, scrawled J and four alternating rows of carefully rendered X’s and O’s.

Jimmy played the album and realized right away that not going with Joy to the Weavers Christmas Eve concert had been a foolish mistake.

Surprisingly, the music was very familiar. Jimmy had sung many of these songs with his family back just a few years when he was a child and family and friends would sing together – at family gatherings, in cars, or at picnics, or walking a country road whenever the occasion permitted. The custom had waned and then virtually ceased with the coming of TV to almost everyone’s home.

The Weavers sang with an abandon and joy that kindled Jimmy’s memories of suddenly being linked to others with spontaneous group singing. He felt an instantaneous connection – to the songs, to the Weavers, and to all the times he had sung like this with family and friends.

The audience at the concert was an important feature of the album. They were a noisy, merry, bunch. They knew the words. Their applause and cheers built to a sustained crescendo that was a group song itself. None of the people in the audience had opted to attend Christmas Eve services with their family. This was their service!

Jimmy liked their singing, but he definitely did not like the Weavers. Pete Seeger was a known Communist. Back in the thirties and forties, the Weavers had even been against America intervening against Hitler and the Nazis. To be fair, after Pearl Harbor, they had supported the war effort, but now with Korea, they had gone back over to the Communist Party Line.

But the Album was remarkable. There was a spirit of camaraderie in the singing that Jimmy longed for. And over the years and decades, wherever Jimmy went, he was careful to make sure “The Weavers at Carnegie Hall” came along.

They traveled with him in the Marines and to college and to the apartments and houses of his first marriage. After his divorce, Jimmy lived in a shack by the river – but there was room for his Gerard turntable and “The Weavers at Carnegie Hall.”

Jimmy played the album for a beautiful woman who visited him at the shack and she told him she liked it okay and that she loved him. It wasn’t all that long before they were married up and living in a grand house on the river.

Kennedy had come and gone. And Vietnam. And astronauts to the moon and back. And Medicare, crack, Iraq, Afghanistan and Barack. Children appeared and grew. Old folks and some young had vanished forever. Addiction bloomed in Jimmy and withered everyone who cared for him but his withered wife did not stop caring and kept on with the interventions until he blundered into a blessed, plain vanilla, Recovery.

Now Pete Seeger was singing about the Hudson River just as passionately as he had sung about poverty and bosses and love and war. He had built a schooner and become a river-keeper. Now Jimmy had eight grown grandchildren and the Hudson River was cleaner than it had been in a hundred years.

Then suddenly Jimmy was sitting three feet away from Pete Seeger. Jimmy and the wife were at an invitation-only party of writers, artists, musicians and actors in honor of the singer, Judy Collins. Pete Seeger was at the next table, banjo in hand, with his wife and a cluster of friends.

No one was talking to Pete Seeger. Jimmy caught his eye and he smiled pleasantly. Now was the time for Jimmy to thank Pete Seeger for all the songs. For keeping on.

Jimmy had the urge to start the conversation by telling Pete Seeger he had attended “The Weavers Christmas Concert at Carnegie Hall” way back in 1955. Why did he want to start with a lie! He should have been there but he wasn’t! Actually, because Jimmy wasn’t there, Joy found a doctor and had his baby!

Jimmy wasn’t at Carnegie Hall in 1955! But Jimmy had taken the Weavers Christmas Concert album with him everywhere for sixty-three years. Should he start with that?

Just as Jimmy was about to speak, Pete Seeger brought his banjo to the ready and began to strum it softly. The elegant, special-events banquet room was crowded with elegant, special people, many of them famous enough to draw a crowd on their own.  The bar had been open for more than an hour. It was very noisy. Pete Seeger strummed on.

Very gradually the banjo edged along side of the hubbub. The strumming stayed dead even with everyone’s conversation for a minute or so and then it pulled off and the other sounds were gone and the banjo was all by its lonesome.

Pete Seeger strummed on for a good three minutes after that. Not the one more minute you might expect from a maestro. Or the two due you for being so noisy and so friggin slow. No, it was three, because now that Pete Seeger had his arms around you, he went and helped himself to an extra minute or so for the squeeze.

Then he talked very quietly over the banjo to the crowd. He said he was going to sing a few songs and that he was absolutely counting on everyone joining in when he asked them to join in because when it came down to it, unless everyone was singing with him, he was just a bleating voice.

The crowd did as he asked. By the time he was finished, everyone had joined in the choruses and performed. Other celebrity singers came on for the sing along. Then it was Judy Collins’s turn. Forty minutes on, the party was over.

A crowd clustered around Pete Seeger’s table and his family escorted him out. Jimmy followed along with his wife but Pete Seeger was away in a car before Jimmy could get close enough to say anything. So near and yet so far!

Did that make a difference?

The next day, Jimmy asked Mike Molloy, the Irish actor, who had brought Jimmy to the Collins party what he thought.

Mike said he wasn’t sure. He told Jimmy that a few years back, a young producer had pressed Pete Seeger and Molloy to meet and have an extended conversation. Both men had full calendars, but the kid producer kept pressing and finally Mike traveled up to Pete Seeger’s house in upstate New York and they sat by the river’s edge and talked for more than three hours.

Mike said it had been an utterly delightful conversation. That it meandered along at its own pace and direction. He said even the pauses were pleasurable.

Jimmy told Mike Molloy that he couldn’t wait to hear the recording of his 3-hour  conversation with Pete Seeger. Molloy told him there was no tape. He said he had assumed the young producer was recording them – but he wasn’t.

“All the trouble, he went to,” said Molloy. “And all he wanted was for us to talk.”

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Matthew Levine
“Survivor”
Inspiration piece

One Bad Day
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

The pitch that broke Jimmy O’Hara’s left forearm was an ordinary fastball in the mid-80s hurled by a nineteen-year-old American Legion pitcher. When the ball hit Jimmy’s arm, the immediate pain was shocking. Jimmy ducked away and bent at the waist and embraced his left arm with his right as if trying to hug the pain away.

It didn’t work.

“I’m sorry sir,” the catcher said. “I thought I gave him the signal for a curve ball.”

The pain was escalating! Jimmy couldn’t believe it. He straightened up, bent over and hugged himself again. In all his 43 years as an umpire, he had never been hurt like this. His eyes teared up. He wanted to groan but there was no way he would.

“Are you okay Blue?” The opposing coaches had yelled out the stock “concerned” phrase simultaneously.

“Oh, I’m great,” Jimmy growled.

He looked at the catcher’s coach. “I’d be a lot better if you could teach your players how to catch.”

The catcher said, “I’m sorry Blue. I’m actually a sub catcher. Our regular guy went to the Yankee game tonight.“

The ball had skipped on back all the way to the backstop. “Run it down,” Jimmy barked at the catcher. “Then come back here and play your friggin position.”

The kid hustled back for the ball. His coach, a thin, sharp featured, young man just promoted from the junior team, yelled that Jimmy was way out of line insulting his coaching ability. Jimmy turned away, bent, and hugged his arm again. No dice! The pain was constant and on the edge of unbearable. It was only the second inning!

Jimmy got through the game. Later, a doctor told him it was truly amazing he had hung in there. Jimmy was surprised. It had never occurred to him that he could take himself out of the game. That would have left them with one umpire. And what if Joe Zito, his partner tonight on the bases, hadn’t brought his plate equipment?

So, Jimmy stuck it out. He didn’t know for sure his arm had been broken. Only that it hurt a real lot. (Next day, the orthopedist said it was a “classic billy-club fracture.”)

Jimmy soon found that if he wanted to continue, he had to make adjustments. He couldn’t put new balls into play with his left hand as usual. He had to reach across and do it with his right hand.

He foolishly tried to use his whiskbroom left handed to clean the plate and the pain bashed him. He tried his other hand and had a hard time getting the motions right. (Jimmy would discover over the next couple of months that he was a lot more left-handed than he thought.) In the end, he used his shoe to brush the dirt off. Later, he asked the catchers to use their big mitts to clean the plate.

During the next changeover, Joe Zito beckoned Jimmy out and asked him if he was okay. Joe told him he was definitely not okay.

“I think my friggin arm is broken,” Jimmy said.

“Jesus, that’s too bad,” Zito said.

Jimmy could tell Zito didn’t really believe his arm was broken.

Hell, neither did Jimmy!

He raised his arm so Zito could see. There was an ugly, red, lump, about four inches long, right on the outside bone of his forearm.

“If you kissed my boo-boo it would be all better,” Jimmy said.

“That’s against union regulations,” Zito said.

“Do you really think it’s broken?”

“Yes, I do. And what I want to know is where’s the justice?”

Somehow Jimmy got through the game as it wended along, pitch-by-pitch, out-by-out, inning-by-inning. In fact, he had one of his better games with balls and strikes. When he concentrated extra hard on each pitch, it insulated him from the pain. And he needed relief. The pain had not subsided at all. At one point, he wondered what would happen if he keeled over in a faint.

In the last half of the final inning, the home team, down by five runs, mounted a 2-out rally. Two walks, an error, a hit batsman, and a double were good for two runs and brought the tying run to the plate.

The batter was the sub catcher. He swung at the first pitch and blooped a pop up in back of third. The shortstop, third baseman and left fielder all converged on the ball but it ticked off the fingers of the shortstop’s glove and bounced down the line. Two runs scored and the batter ended up on second. The home crowd was standing and cheering wildly.

Jimmy called time and waved the runners back. “I called that foul,” he yelled. He had raised his arms and shouted, “Foul.” But he didn’t have much energy left and with all the crowd noise, evidently no one had heard his call.

As Jimmy had seen it, when the ball ticked off the shortstop’s glove, the ball was over foul territory even though the shortstop was standing in fair ground.

The home team coach screamed, “That was fair Blue. There’s no way it was foul.” People in the crowd were yelling, “Fair ball. That was fair by ten feet. Bad call. Terrible. Way fair.”

Jimmy told the coach to calm down and to send the players who had scored back to the bases they had occupied at the time of the pitch. As Jimmy talked to the coach, the crowd’s protests grew even louder. Jimmy wondered if maybe he had missed the call. Had the pain blinded him?

Jimmy signaled to Joe Zito, that he wanted to confer. But Zito shook his head. He was saying that he hadn’t seen the play – Jimmy would have to make the call on his own.

So, Jimmy stayed with his call of foul ball and sent everyone back to where they had been at the pitch. It took quite a while. As they emerged from the dugout, the players who had scored stopped at the plate and argued with Jimmy. Their coach, emboldened by the crowd, joined in.

Jimmy told the players to shut up and take their bases. He warned the coach that if he said one more word, Jimmy would eject him. Finally, the batter stepped back into the box. On the very next pitch, he hit a sky high pop up to the third baseman. Suddenly, the game was over.

Jimmy had to walk through the home team’s dugout to exit the field. The coach yelled at him as he went through and even though Jimmy could have ejected the coach post game, he let it go.

“You were in a hurry to get home – that’s why you called it foul,” the coach shouted.

It was a big insult. Jimmy could tell that some of the players were uneasy.

He kept on going out of the dugout and up to the sidewalk away from the field. Now some in the exiting crowd walking beside him were getting their two cents worth.

“No way that was foul!”

“Bad call, Blue.”

“You should have your eyes checked.”

Jimmy finally got to the parking lot and veered away to his car.

As usual, Joe Zito was parked right next to him. Jimmy needed Joe to help him get off his jersey and his equipment. It was an awkward, painful, process.

Then Joe helped Jimmy into a fresh, dry shirt. Jimmy wondered if he would be able to drive but he didn’t say anything. Joe looked freaked out.

“Jimmy,” he said, “your arm is really friggin bad broken. I don’t know how you did it. In case you’re wondering, I thought you got them all right.  On that foul ball, I didn’t see it. Maybe I should have followed it, but I was
checking base tags.”

Jimmy was able to drive home. He took two Advil and ate a little pasta.

As he was heading for his shower, the Chief Umpire called to say the young coach had called and complained. Jimmy didn’t say much. He didn’t want to talk about his broken arm. He was by far the oldest active ump in the union.

He asked the Chief Umpire what he had said. “I told him he was lucky you didn’t eject his ass. I told him that even the best umps can have one bad day.”

Chris thanked the Chief and headed on into the shower.

Two days later his, arm was set in a cast. He floated a story he had been called away on an assignment. He didn’t want anyone to know he had broken his arm. He cancelled his games for two weeks. When he resumed his schedule, he had the plate again, with the same team he had all the trouble with. Only this time, the first string catcher was behind the plate.

Jimmy told the catcher he was glad to see him.

The catcher told Jimmy he had heard there was trouble.

“I hear you got hurt real bad. I hear our coach was a real asshole. I’m sorry. We didn’t think you would be back this season.”

“Well,” Jimmy said, “You’ve gotta love it. Promise me: Nothing gets by you tonight.”

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.