Tag Archives: photograph

Dreams From Italy

Posted on March 6, 2010 | 1 comment

I dreamt of Italy last night.

I was there on a family vacation, but somehow spending a day alone.  I ended up lost in a small town, alone, wandering and trying to figure out how I’d gone so far off the beaten trail.

And that was when I met her, this beautiful woman in a magical world, and she walked right up to me as if she’d known me forever.

“You’re the one I am supposed to marry,” she said, in very good English, considering.

“I am?”

“Yes, you are.  I have dreamt of you every night since I was a young girl.  Everything I did led me to this moment, to you.  I have been waiting here a long time for you.”

I looked at her in disbelief, looked around to see if I was being mugged by gypsies, but when I returned my gaze to her she took my face between her hands and forced me to look into her wide, beautiful brown eyes, and I saw an innocence in them that told me she was telling the truth.

I had finally found her.

She took my hand and led me to a huge festival, a carnival-like atmosphere where the town seemed to be celebrating something.  She brought me through crowds, so many of the elders smiling at us, as she locked her arm into mine, as if they also knew I would someday arrive and marry her.  Young girls followed behind us, giggling and pointing us out to others, who also started to follow, as she brought me to a large table with about thirty people seated.  She said something in Italian I couldn’t understand, and everyone stopped talking and looked up at me.  They looked serious at first, and then slowly smiles took over their faces, and the men started jumping out of their seats and running to me, clapping me on the back.  Older women hugged me and kissed my cheeks, and eventually I found myself separated from my new love, surrounded by her family.

And elderly woman, wrinkles that seemed older than me covering her face, hobbled up.  She was so thin a hug would break her, and she beckoned me closer; I had to bend down to hear her, and even then someone had to translate for me.  She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if this would be her last speech.  A younger boy translated for me.

“It is custom for a new man to find his woman.  She has run off.  You must find her if you wish to marry her.”

“Why?” I asked.

The boy translated for me, and the old woman frowned and responded.

“It is our town’s custom and it has been this way for hundreds of years.  That is why,” he told me.

And so I left and wandered around the carnival for a while, suddenly compelled to leave it and wander a dark road.  I’m not sure what drove me in the direction I chose, whether it was confusion or the love I found for this new woman leading me to her.  I stayed on the road for a bit and when I saw a bus stopped in front of a large, ancient church, I turned towards the building to look around.  It was full of people who traveled a long way just to see this place, and as I walked towards it I stepped through many small, glass jars that littered the ground.  I looked down to find the grass, the path, and all of the land covered with little jars and lids.

I bent down and picked one up, examining the substance that once filled it.  I could tell it was some sort of jelly or preserve, and I stuck my finger in and took out a tiny bit of it, tasting it.  It was delicious.  I placed this jar back on the ground and started towards the building, seeing a line of people waiting to get in.

As I approached the line, an Italian who seemed in charge beckoned me towards the front as if he knew me, and waved me in past everyone.  Nobody gave me dirty looks, they smiled and clapped me on the back as I went ahead of them.  Inside, it was an old church, hundreds of years old, and every open shelf or window was also covered in the little jars emptied of their goodies.

As I continued on I saw a shelf, low to the ground, jars piled on it, but this time they were unopened.  I took one, and a little boy nearby walked up to me and started handing me more.  “Free,” he said, although I’m not really sure he understood what he was saying.  I took a few more and put them in my pockets, and then continued on.

The darkness of the hallway slowly disappeared as I continued towards a lit up opening, which led to a courtyard.  My eyes took a moment to adjust to the sudden brightness as I noticed a woman facing away from me in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by children.  They all began to giggle as I approached, and when I touched her shoulder she turned and I saw those large innocent eyes once again, and she smiled.

“You found me.  You’ve passed the first custom.”  She looked at me with such love that I felt my heart swoon, and I realized that I, too, was in love with her.  I took her hand and kissed it, and the children circled around her and pulled her away from me.

“There is still another custom,” she said, smiling and reaching for me as they pulled her away.

The children all giggled as the girls pushed her towards one archway and the boys began pushing me towards another.  I found myself surrounded by many men of all ages in a separate courtyard.  They smiled at me and continuously congratulated me on finding her, and then they boy from earlier approached.

“Next, you must say to her the traditional words, but you must memory them.”

“Do you mean memorize?”

“You know, you must say them without help.”

“But I’m not from here, I don’t know the words.”

The boy translated to the men and all grew concerned, brows furrowed as they discussed what must be done.  After much talk, the boy came back to my side.

“If you do not know the words, you cannot marry her.  We are taught as young children.  We know them.  We get a little card and we learn it and then we return the card to our parents.  Then on our wedding day, after we recite them, we get the card back, and it signifies our love.”

I sat down, disheartened that I would come so close to the love of my life and fail now.  A man even older than the old woman who first explained the custom to me came up and looked me in the eye.  Even seated I was taller than him, gravity and age had stooped him so much.  He put a hand on my shoulder and spoke.  He was speaking in Italian, but I knew he was telling me about his love, and how long they’d been together, and how perfect his wife was.  I could sense his story as he told it, and at the end he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled scrap of paper with the image of a saint on it, and he handed it to me.

I flipped it over and there were words on it, and I knew they were the words I would have to say.  The men folk of the town all began to whisper to each other, but remained quiet as I read it over and over again, hoping I could remember it.  Then, the whispering stopped, and I looked up to find the old woman again, leading my love into the courtyard, only now she was wearing a beautiful full dress, her hair was down, and she seemed to glow like an angel.

She walked up to me and smiled, and I said the words.  She leaned in and kissed me, and whispered, “You did it perfect.  I love you.”

At this point, my alarm went off and woke me up.  As I rose from bed, my memory of her faded a bit.

As I ate breakfast, I could remember some of the words I’d said.  As I dressed for work, I could remember less of them, but I still remembered the jars of preserve, and the taste.  As I drove to work, all I could remember were her beautiful eyes and the feeling I had when I realized I loved her.  By the time I got to work, the memory had faded, but I still loved her a tiny bit.  And now, I cannot even remember the look in her large, innocent brown eyes.

Original Photo by Charleen Artese  http://www.flickr.com/this_is_she

1 Comment

Posted in flash fiction

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Lamentable Charles W. Berkhouse (A Story of Fiction)

Posted on January 5, 2010 | 1 comment

This is the story of Charles W. Berkhouse.  If you’re looking for a happy tale, one that will make you smile at the end with a fortunate feeling in your heart, you’re in the wrong place.  This is the tragic story of a man’s miserable life, one in which the tragedy starts from the day he was born.

An orphan left on the steps of a nunnery, newborn Charles was found one fall morning wrapped in a blanket with a note pinned to the his diaper, two simple words scribbled messily “Unwanted child” on the back of a coupon for five cents off steak.  The nuns sent him to their orphanage, a bare-walled, refurbished insane asylum rented out by the church for such events.  It was fourteen years before an unwanted Charles would use a different return address, when he would leave the orphanage and get a job in an up-and-coming five and dime store in the city.

Years would pass, small promotions would come, leading him to his career as an underpaid traveling salesman for the same company he’d worked for his whole life.

As an adult, Charles eventually had it all, a wife, a child on the way, a good job, car, house with the white picket fence, everything a man in the 1940s could possibly want.  Until that fateful day when Eunice, his wife, went into labor a few weeks earlier than expected.

They lost the baby; she would have been a beautiful little girl.  They’d prematurely named her Elizabeth if she was a girl, Robert if he was a boy, Betty or Bobby.  But little Betty never had even a minute outside of the womb.  Eunice was devastated.

It wasn’t even two months later that Eunice was hit by a car, driven by another traveling salesman, a competitor of Charles.  The driver was quoted in the daily paper as saying, “I was driving my route, I sell car brakes you know, best in the business, and I don’t even know where she came from.  One minute the road was clear, the next…”

Charles was devastated.  His life insurance company wanted to investigate the accident before they paid out, but Charles quickly told them to forget about it.  He sold the house and poured himself into his job, staying in fleabag motels and dirty boarding homes on the road, never looking back.  He carried his few belongings in a small suitcase he’d bought at a garage sale, which proclaimed visits to Paris, Madrid, Rome and a few other exotic places, none of which Charles would ever see for himself.  All he would know were the small dying towns on his sales route, places long forgotten as time passed.

Every year, at some point, his route would bring him back to Middletown, New York, where both Eunice and Betty were buried.  He would stop by a florists, pick up some cheap flowers, after all, his route wasn’t what it used to be, and stop by for a quiet visit.  He wouldn’t speak or cry, he would just stand for exactly five minutes, timing it on his watch, and then move on towards his next appointment.

It wasn’t until his fifth visit that he first saw the dog, a golden blur shooting by in the corner of his eye.  He spun, looking for it, and finally saw it standing directly behind a nearby tombstone.  It panted and walked up to him slowly, trying to get Charles to pet him.  Charles, being an orphan, never had a pet, even when Eunice begged him repeatedly for a cat every time a holiday came around.  He just didn’t see the point.

And so, he reacted the way he always did when a pet wanted attention from him.  He turned and walked away.  After all, his five minutes were up, and he had to meet Mr. Moskewitz in fifteen minutes.

The next year, once again he found the dog there, begging for attention, and again Charles shunned the poor beast, leaving it whining behind him.  As he left, he saw the caretaker and felt a need to complain.

“Sir, I find it extremely distracting and inappropriate that you allow your dog to just run around willy-nilly like that.  This is a serious, somber place.  Not somewhere for a dog to playfully run around and, ahem, do his business one can only assume.”  The caretaker looked at him curiously.

“We don’t got no dogs here, buddy.  Not allowed on the premises.  Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A year later, Charles once again found the dog near the grave, and once again ignored it.  But this time the dog walked up and started nuzzling his shin, and he kept trying to shoo it away with no luck.  Finally, he decided to look at the tag.  It had one simple letter in quotes, “E”.  He frowned and turned it over, looking for an address, but there wasn’t one.  The dog followed him out, only to get him a scolding from the caretaker, who reminded him that no dogs were allowed in the graveyard.

The following year, he expected to find the dog again, and was not disappointed when, as he approached the gravesite with his yearly small bouquet, the dog, E, once again jumped out from behind a nearby tree.  Charles walked up to it, let it sniff his hand and tried to pet it, at which E backed away from him.  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a dog bone he’d bought and tried feeding it to E, who just backed away more.  He left the treat on a small tombstone and went to his meeting with Mr. Meinheim.

Another year passed, and this time he was prepared with a leash, ready to capture this animal that was surely destined to be his companion in life.  He imagined the dog going on his route with him, visiting parks and fields, playing catch, having strangers take their photograph in each town, and even though he was awkward with animals, he liked the sound of it.  It was surely a sign that the dog was there every year, and that the caretaker didn’t recognize him as a common occurrence.  As Charles walked towards the spot excitedly, playing with the end of the leash in his pocket, he realized he’d forgotten the flowers.  He walked up and started looking for E, only to realize that the dog was nowhere to be found.

1 Comment

Posted in photos of strangers

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Remembering the Worms

Posted on December 11, 2009 | 1 comment

That was us back in the old days, The Worms, on account of Peggy having a huge crush on Ringo and insisting we be named after a bug, and the fact that Bobbie’s main claim to fame back then was that he once ate a worm at recess. So there we were, The Worms, in our first picture. I was holding my ukulele, the first instrument any of us owned. Back then, rehearsal consisted of me playing the three chords I knew, Stevey singing, and the girls just dancing. They even had these awful choreographed dances to go along with the first song I wrote, Do the Worm, eventually released as a b-side even though we recorded it as a joke. Our insatiable fans loved it regardless of how we felt about it.

So this photo is the first, as I said. Of course, Johnny isn’t pictured because he took it, our eventual drummer who, back then, would just bang on a trashcan lid with two wooden spoons he stole from his mom’s kitchen. He was as close to a rebel as we had; he’d even stolen his old man’s camera, his prized possession, to take this. Then we had to wait four weeks for his little brother’s birthday until the roll was done and they finally brought it to the store. His nervous tics, for which he eventually became known behind the drums, were apparent even then. His father always joked about how he wasn’t allowed to hold the camera because he wasn’t steady enough to take a good photograph. Which is clear from how blurry this one is.

But that was the day it all began. It was Peggy’s idea to start the band, and she was kind of the leader of our group of friends back then, since she was by far the tallest, easily a head taller than anyone on the block. I remember our first kiss and how awkward it was…but I digress. That’s not really what this is all about.

Everyone probably recognizes Bonnie right off the bat, since she was the only one of us with glasses. The kids around the corner used to tease her, call her four-eyes, so clever. Some of the same kids were following her around like puppies by the time we hit it big, in high school, begging her for dates. She turned them all down. Good for her.

Then there was Ruthie, before her three husbands, before the drinking, before she’d even picked up a guitar, but as beautiful as ever. And her voice, even back then, could move an angry mob to silence. Even back then, even in the blur that is this photograph, you can still see her trademark single barrette.

Then there’s Bobbie, a character in himself, eventually immortalized in a certain Christmas movie, you know it, the one where the boy sticks his tongue to the flagpole? Bobbie inspired the main character in that film; the author grew up a few blocks away from us. We all went to see the movie premiere, only to walk out, seeing how different the kid in the movie was from our good old buddy, Bobbie.

Those were the days, I tell you. I’m the lone Worm these days, living all alone in my mansion, my friends and my family all gone. And out of all of the memorabilia, the records, photos, magazine covers, famous movie stars, films, everything, this is the only thing I kept from the days with the band. I gave away the gold records to girls I dated, sold the rights to the songs, gave it all up. Once the worms were all gone, and we couldn’t relive the moments of stardom together, I didn’t want to do it alone. No point. The only thing I really want to remember after all of the fame and fortune is the simpler times when we all lived on the same block, were so close, and were only famous in our own minds.

Those were the days.

Don’t forget to check back regularly as I continue the series of short fiction based on random old photos I find!

1 Comment

Posted in photos of strangers

Tagged , , , ,