by Walter Giersbach
My
world had no endings when I was 13 in that Oregon farming and logging town. Only beginnings. Fields and groves were endlessly green,
streams flowed forever and asphalt roads led to new sights. Life was a page of Dylan Thomas’s poetry.
Mornings
began at 6:00 when I pedaled my Schwinn down to the Shell station for my pile
of newspapers. But first, I dropped quarters
in the machines to extract a Milky Way and a Coke. Now fortified, I gave each copy of the
Portland Oregonian two practiced
folds and dropped it in the canvas bag draped over the handlebars. For the next hour I’d pedal miles to stuff
them in paper boxes for my 50 customers.
I was getting rich, at $20 a month, in spite of having to hector
customers who wouldn’t answer their doors when I went to collect.
Life
was good, and eighth grade was a cinch with a really funny teacher who regaled
us about his drinking episodes in the Navy and a strange food called pizza.
But
one April morning a headline caught my eye as I folded papers. My Dad’s name leaped from the front page. It was a story about Pacific University that I
couldn’t understand, a complicated story about the faculty in rebellion. Accusations.
Hatred exposed.
Something
had happened. The faculty had given my
Dad, the college president, a vote of no confidence. He explained it to my two brothers and me over
dinner as we sat in dumb silence. Mom
was trying to hold back her tears. “I’m resigning,” he told us. “We’ll have to think about moving.
 |
| Forest Grove, Ore., my world in the 1950s |
Moving? But I was at the point of telling Judy
Bristow I loved her. Soon, I’d find the
courage to kiss my 11-year-old girlfriend.
Moving meant I’d never again see my pal, Frank Dunham, who double-dated at
the movies with his girlfriend and had actually kissed (he said).
Our
house was emptied that summer as boxes and furniture went into the Allied Moving
Van. Accumulations of papers and
magazines were thrown from the attic window to the driveway. Dad’s library and Mom’s manuscript of Oregon
history were carefully boxed. But my Red
Ryder BB gun, Schwinn Black Phantom and Erector Set disappeared.
Too
soon our family and the cat were piled into our used ’48 Cadillac sedan and we
headed south. Too soon to properly say
goodbye to Judy and Frank or copy their addresses with promises to write.
* * *
Finding
myself in South Pasadena was a shock. I
was a year behind academically. There
were curious classmates — Mexican-Americans — who wore pegged pants and called
themselves Pachucos. And the girls in
our church youth group were all blonde and unapproachably sophisticated.
My
two new friends were geeks who read L. Ron Hubbard and J.R.R. Tolkien and wore
clothes from J.C. Penney. My only
achievement was writing my autobiography by hand, pasting in Kodaks, then
binding the single copy. I got an A from
my 9th grade teacher.
My
brothers and I, Mom and the cat, lived in our rented bungalow and took each day
as it came. For some aberrant reason, I ate
only lunchtime sandwiches of Wonderbread and Kraft Sandwich Spread. But I didn’t die. Dad soon found work as a fund-raiser with the
Volunteers of America before landing a position with the headquarters of the
Congregational Church in New York City.
I
didn’t write except for that handwritten autobiography. I read.
Science fiction, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, the Hardy Boys and
other mysteries. But two things became
clear. One, I was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Like Valentine Michael Smith, newly sent to
Earth after being raised on Mars. Among different people for the first time, I
struggled to understand the social practices and prejudices of human nature
that often still seem alien.
Second,
an internal universe of words appeared.
Writing, absorbing new vocabulary and explaining things articulately were
easy. Numbers came harder. This default writing ability made me an
English-Journalism major at Grinnell College in Iowa. A career epiphany occurred the summer of my
junior year. I was invited to be a staff
reporter for a Chicago suburban weekly.
I covered fires, the police blotter, sports, rewrites, even weddings,
taking my own photos with a Speed Graphic.
At last, it seemed there was an escape into the real world.
* * *
My
first job after graduation was writing copy for new Mobil Travel Guides. Sure,
it was a humdrum task — until I got an unsolicited letter from a woman who said
she was home-bound. She read the Guides to escape into a world that was
out of her reach. At last I had an
audience, and every piece I wrote was directed to my secret spectator.
Three
years of serving as an Army Security Agency analyst took me to Korea and Taiwan. Taiwan brought me a wife and some great
source material I filed away for 30 years.
For
the next three decades I soldiered on in corporate communications, creating,
writing and editing employee publications; writing press releases; managing
exhibits; crafting senior management’s speeches. I embraced it all. Each day was different. No one knew my job description, which allowed
me to define my position and interact with everyone from the CEO to the clerk
or bench worker. They were my audience
that I worked to reach on some level of understanding.
Upon
early retirement I ruminated on why I was drawn to write two anthologies, short
stories and articles. It was
simple: Somewhere there was a person who
would read my words and say, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I’ve felt the same way but wasn’t able to put
it into words.” I could help that person
leave his or her couch or bed and enter another world.
In
the process, I would discover meaning in the world that had turned me upside
down. That’s why I write.
Transformation
by Walter Giersbach
Burt
Forsyth was ready to rip out the fingernails of the girl sitting in the pew in
front of him. That is, after he smashed
her iPhone and shoved the plastic down her throat. While the rest of the congregation stood to
sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the girl sat in her stylishly ripped jeans
and scrolled her manicured nails over the phone.
“Sitting!” he whinnied hoarsely to his wife. “Sitting during the hymn. Texting through the prayers. Eating her damned M&Ms during the
sermon. I could kill her.” His heartbeat rose and he could feel his body
shaking uncontrollably.
“Perhaps it’s her parents’ fault,” Beth whispered. “Not everyone has the upbringing of you and
I.”
“Or two hundred other members of our church,” he steamed.
Rev. Abernathy was praying something about “O God, we seek
the transformation of the world, but we fear the change it could bring to our
own lives,” and Beth shushed him from going on.
Burt had an obligation to the parish as one of its deacons. A duty to maintain tradition. Church was a sanctuary to restore reason out
of chaos, to sew up the raveled edges of behavior among the easily confused. He was a rational man trained in a rational
profession to act in a rational world. If
there was no control of the forces that shaped your life, he would often tell
Beth, then what point was there to life itself?
As a lawyer, he prided himself that the legal profession was the only
thread of tradition that prevented Western civilization’s entropy. And the Presbyterian Church. That too.
God and the Law.
Beth had volunteered to serve coffee after the service, so
Burt stood in the hall off the kitchen nodding to parishioners. He joshed an old timer about his golf handicap,
knowing the man would never play again.
The pastor button-holed him about the Thanksgiving service coming up
before being pulled away by an extremely small lady wearing a fur stole. Burt stared at the lady’s dead animals — 50-year-old,
moth-eaten minks, he believed — draped over her shoulders on a 65-degree day. The animals’ glass eyes glared balefully back
at Burt.
“Mister?”
He turned, bumping into the girl with the iPhone and almost spilling
his coffee.
“A guy there told me you help run this place.”
Burt managed to choke out a “Yes?”
“I wanted to say I had a good time. I never been to church, but my friend kinda
dragged me. So,” she shrugged, “I didn’t
understand a lot, but I texted myself about what I thought was important. So I’d remember later.”
Burt stood a head taller than the girl, looking down at her unruly
hair and the piece of metal piercing her eyebrow. The sound that came out his mouth could be
taken for an affirmative gargle.
“This Matthew,” she said, screwing up her face as though its
parts — nose, eyes, cheekbones — had been bought at a discount store and
hastily assembled. “He was a saint,
right? One of Jesus’ whattyacallits.”
“Disciples,” Burt muttered.
“I’m going to Google him.
If it’s okay, I’ll come back next time.
Okay? My name’s Tara. Who’re you?”
“Burt Forsyth. We’d
love to have you, Tara.” The words came
out as a choke.
“Hey, Burt, thanks..”
She smiled once, pirouetted scarecrow-like, and walked out the door.
There was a vacuum in the room after she’d left, as though a
hole had opened in an airliner that left him gasping at the change in air
pressure. The smell of coffee and
cinnamon rolls weren’t sufficient to replace the sensations that had left the
room with the girl.
“Why are you so silent?” Beth asked in the car, giving him a
curious look.
“Just thinking. Maybe
we need some more young people to season the gentry. Sort of balance the demographics.”
(originally published at Every Day Fiction.)
____________________________________
Walt Giersbach’s fiction has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, CommuterLit, Connotation Press, Corner Club Press, Every Day Fiction, Gumshoe Review, InfectiveINk, Liquid Imagination, OG Short Fiction, Over My Dead Body, Pif Magazine, Pulp Modern, Pure Slush, r.kv.r.y, the Story Shack, Short-Story.Me,and a dozen other publications. He also writes on military history and social phenomena. Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, were available until his publisher ceased operation. He directed communications for Fortune 500 companies, publicized the Connecticut Film Festival, and managed publicity and programs for Western Connecticut State University’s Haas Library. He blogs at http://allotropiclucubrations.
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