Weekly Writing Assignments

SHARDS

2008-04-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for April 7, 2008
Voice

SHARDS

Am I her friend? Look, I flew to her wedding in Pittsburgh for God’s sake. Now, she has a kid. She and her husband and their daughter are in the City for the week-end – staying at her old apartment a few blocks away on 21st and 3rd - and I have invited them here for dinner on Saturday. I pray that the kid will sleep all the time. I know what messes those little terrors can make from visits with my brothers and their families.

My apartment here is decorated just the way I want it to be – all white, chrome, and glass with original art everywhere. And you know what, I am going to defy the baby-proofing gods and set the table with my Limoges, Baccarat, and Jensen. I always entertain with them. And damn it, I am NOT going to change anything for a kid. I’ll just tell Emma that her daughter can sleep on my bed. Emma will understand.

Thank God I asked some other friends over too. I would die if all we talked about was baby bowel movements and diaper services. I don’t think Emma would ever do that, but you never can tell … Marriage and babies do real jobs on people.

……………………

So the kid actually did sleep through dinner. And we all took our drinks a few feet to the living room. After a few minutes, Emma said she heard her daughter and that as lovely as the dinner and conversation had been, they would have to start getting ready to leave. Truth be told, as much as I loved Emma, I was ready for some peace and quiet. Emma whispered something to her husband and walked away to my room to get her daughter and their coats.

Her husband carefully lifted the coffee table over the carpet and away from the couch so that there would be room to spread the kid’s snowsuit on the floor and stuff her into it. I had to laugh – she looked so funny, like a scarecrow on a post. As soon as the kid was all zipped in, he held her in his arms, started to stand up, and turned to look at Emma.

At that moment, one of the kid’s stiff bundled arms knocked over the partially filled wine glass that her father had put down on the coffee table. It shattered against the glass table top and the wine spread and dripped on the carpet. Thank God he had chosen the white wine!

Emma was so upset and apologized all over the place. It was embarrassing. She wanted to replace the glass. I told her it had been part of a set, not to give it a second thought, and waved them out the door. After closing the door, I braced myself against the glass dining room table top. I knew who I wasn’t going to ask to my wedding!

MEXICO, PART I of III

2008-04-03T18:15:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 24 March 2008
Prompt: Shadow Box Technique

MEXICO
PART I of III

Raul

It had rained everyday for the past thirty days in El Progresso. Raul had cut a notch in a branch near his head to mark each one of them. The palm leaves woven into the roof acted like oiled ponchos and the branches were so full of water that they touched. No rain fell on his face while he counted them and thought.

It was morning and Juanita, the sister he shared a hammock with, was still asleep. He could hear morning sounds of his mother making breakfast on the other side of the room and the animals outside, grunting, clucking and snorting. It was January, a month of cold mornings. But it would be warmer when the bus arrived.

His mother was calling them to breakfast – tortillas rolled around the green peppers, tomatoes, guacamole, and chicken they had been eating for the past two days. However, Raul did not complain. He knew that meals this week-end would be better. Millie was coming from America to visit and his mother was going to make some of his favorite dishes for the occasion.

He had been seven when Millie lived with them two summers ago. There were some other Americans who came with her then, but no one as fun. Millie played Monkey in the Center in the waterfalls behind the house, rode on top of the cab on the trucks that swayed up and down the mountain, played Hide and Seek around the houses and mountain paths, clapped her hands when he sang songs, and did not wear shoes – just like him.

Millie was about as old as his big sister Lupe who was in college in Tuxtepec, taller than his mother and father, and fun like his friends. She loved Pepe, their dog. When she went back to her family in America, she sent his family a box of gifts. Two of the gifts were special dog shampoo and a brush for Pepe. Everyone thought that was very funny, but his family had used them and now Pepe looked very nice.

He had overheard the grown-ups talk about the Americans who lived with them that summer. Except for Millie, not one of the Americans had written to their families in El Progesso. This made everyone in El Progresso sad, and they were very happy that Millie was coming to visit today. They had always liked her.

The sun balanced on the pointy top of a mountain to the place west of the lake where it disappeared every day. He and Nita wandered halfway down the mountain to the smooth ground where the bus always stopped before it went back down to Ixcatlan. Their mother had instructed them to wait there for Lupe and Millie.

On the way there, they had picked up two large sticks to stir mud with and to poke at weeds, stones, and each other. Raul also brought the little toy car that Millie gave him two years ago. Except for black tires and a white roof, the outside was all light green. There was a green fin of metal on each side of the back, too.

Now, one of the wheels was wobbly so Raul could only fly it in the air. When it was new, the car would go by itself after he dragged it backwards on the ground and then gave it a short, strong push forward. Raul hoped she was bringing him a new car.

All of a sudden, he and Nita saw the bus from Ixcatlan. At first, they could only see a tiny bit of rusty silver, but as the bus peeked over the last crest this far up the mountain road, they saw more and more of it. It rocked from left to right, puffs of black smoke came out of the end, people and animals crowded the windows, and there was Millie – holding onto the metal bar on top of the cab with one hand and waving with the other. Her pack was held down by ropes. A new car could fit in that pack – easy.

Juggling

2008-03-31T15:17:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 31 March 2008
Use Juggling Technique

JUGGLING

It was a dry and sunny morning. Streams of icy wind whistled around the skyscrapers and down the canyons between them. The City’s thousands of windows magnified the early red and gold rays and returned them to the sun.

With teary ears and whipping hair, Yidi pushed her face into the frigid gusts to peer over her left shoulder and squint at the scene below.

This was always the best part of the job, seeing everyone and everything down there, below. The people looked and ebbed like the iron filings in an Etch-a-Sketch and packs of bright yellow taxicabs jerked and jockeyed for space in the rush hour traffic. Here, in the center of the city, the streets and avenues were laid out in a tight grid. At the edges, the rigid pattern unraveled.

She felt like God must feel when looking over earth; sometimes laughing softly and kindly, sometimes frowning with head shaking.

About God - all she could say with full confidence is that she did not know, and she was just fine with that. It seemed that most people needed to explain what they could not see, however.

Quickly, Yidi did a mental check of her equipment. The cables and platform of the unit looked fine and her safety harness was secured. Safety helmet, tool belt, first aid kit, buckets, squeegees, rags, extension pole, lunch - all there.

Acknowledging the possibility of God? - Fine. But insisting on explanations? And why did people come up with so many different explanations for what they can not see? Why did they use these differences as reasons for wars? Why did so many people always seem to support the wars?

If Yidi had her way, she’d put all the leaders of wars inside a cave, block the entrance with a boulder, and let them duke it out while the rest of the world went on with the business of living. But it wasn’t up to Yidi.

One day, people might not use religion as a reason to destroy civilizations. Not in her lifetime for sure, but perhaps one day – if people didn’t destroy themselves first.

Uh- Oh. If anyone heard her thinking like that, they’d look at her funny and laugh in that nervous way that they did. Why, she could be blacklisted. But they couldn’t hear her. She was alone up here with the sky and the pigeons. That was another part of this job she treasured – the time to think through whatever she wanted.

One more floor to go and she could start polishing glass. Whoa! Her safety harness dug into her armpits as it took her full weight and for an instant, she dangled seventy-nine stories above Manhattan. The platform she had been standing on had dropped a few inches; part of a cable had snapped. A polisher’s worst nightmare; high winds and metal fatigue on-the-job. As soon as Yidi felt comfortable sizing up what had happened, she shifted her weight upwards - away from the weakened cable, readjusted her footing, and radioed for help.

A Park in Brighton

2008-02-25T06:15:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment
February 25, 2008
Prompt: “…it is the moment that lends significance to things.” - A.J. Heschel

A Park in Brighton

1987

When I was first married, I moved from an apartment in Houston to my husband’s apartment in Brighton. Human storage modules, that’s what my husband called the apartments there. The building was six stories high and all units had three levels, parquet floors, floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, and connecting balconies overlooking a small triangular-shaped park. Except for glass windows and metal railings on the porches, the entire building was water-stained gray concrete. In the cavernous lobby, a huge goose-in-flight was painted on the part of the dropped concrete ceiling that angled down and over visitors and tenants.

Cherry trees and a black wrought iron fence circled the entire perimeter of the park. Commonwealth Avenue ran along the outside. Once-elegant row houses and a synagogue, B’nai Moshe, faced Sutherland Street on the opposite side of the park. The Bluestone Bistro, a pizza house, Little Korea, a restaurant with displays of plastic food in the curtained front window, and Chiswick Arms, our 1960s-vintage apartment building, fronted the narrowest and shortest side, Chiswick Road.

Most of the park was grassy, dotted with saplings, and crisscrossed with gently rolling paths. Playground equipment was scattered over the sandy strip of the park nearest our apartment building. Peeling green benches, cultures, and generations mixed in the park.

1989

Every week day morning at ten, children and young teachers from B’nai Moshe’s new preschool would hold hands, form a line, and thread their way into the park. The few other park regulars tried to arrive early in order to have first dibs on the playground equipment.

Russian grandmothers would bring their grandchildren. If the grandmothers did not live nearby, they arrived by an early morning T-train; there was a stop a few yards away from the park. The children played in the sandbox and on the jungle gym - always keeping an eye out for an empty swing. The grandmothers would find nearby park benches facing the sun and sit there all day. Plastic bags of carrot sticks, tubs of whitefish and eel, crackers, knitting, and band-aids bulged their dress pockets and cloth bags.

It seemed that all Russian grandmothers produced at least one apple a day. They pared the apple in a single continuous and spiral motion, cut the pale globes into sections, and called out to grandchildren – all of whom came running. I would mime my desire to try to pare an apple like they did. Instead, the grandmothers just smiled and proceeded to teach me how to count in Russian and when to say “Dosvedanya” and “Spasiba”.

Before dinner, the young Russian mothers would arrive at the park from their jobs. All of them would be smartly dressed and coiffed. Unlike their mothers, the young women had learned to speak English well. Most had been professionals in Russia, doctors and engineers, and none had licenses to practice their expertise in the United States. Until they would, they worked as computer technicians or manicurists.

One late afternoon, after I crossed the park and headed for the gate nearest my apartment building, I stopped to greet the six or seven young Russian mothers sitting on the two most shaded park benches by the sandbox, talking animatedly. One of them invited me to join them. As soon as I smiled and replied “Da”, they all welcomed me - and slid into English.

In the early evening, the Russian fathers and the fathers of the most recent neighbors, the Brazilians, would return from their jobs and play with their children. On one particular evening, Boris felt that his son had been slighted by Bruno’s son and each man threatened to fight the other. I don’t recall that their confrontation was any more than raised fists and loud threats, but soon after that incident, the Russians moved away from the park.

The Brazilians lived across from the park in the old apartment buildings with ornate plaster trim on Sutherland Road. Except for preparing meals or orchestrating parties, the Brazilian mothers were in the park with their children almost all day. After dinner, the fathers and their children would return to the park to play until dark.

On spring evenings, the scent of cherry blossoms mingled with hot fragrant steam from red beans, rice, steak, and plantains which wafted across the park from the Brazilians' open kitchen windows. Twilight shadows embraced the park, the globes of light from street lamps, the cars parked bumper-to-bumper along both sides of the streets, and the chattering pedestrians. On such an evening, I joined Barbara, my good new friend from down the hall, on her balcony. Hanging over the railing, Barbara sighed: “Doesn’t it look just like a Hollywood movie set? … This is why Harold and I can never move from here. It is so beautiful.”

Marianne and her younger brother, Eduardo, adored my curly-haired one-year old daughter. Eduardo thought she was a doll. Often, he would clutch her in a bear hug and tote her about the park until she wriggled free.

Marianne and Eduardo’s parents invited our family to Marianne’s twelfth birthday party. On the evening of the party, my daughter wore a nice but not fancy dress. My husband and I dressed casually – jeans and a skirt. When Marianne’s mother answered the door, we smiled and handed her our birthday present. She ushered us into a living room packed with gifts, music, food, and their many, many friends and family from Brazil. Both adults and children were stylishly dressed for the birthday party. The guests scrutinized us with polite curiosity, smiled at us, and mingled with the others. The children moved into Marianne and Eduardo’s bedroom to jump on beds and scream with abandon.

1990

In the spring, a Japanese mother and her child and some Korean families joined us in the park. The Japanese mother’s husband was interning at Beth Israel and the Korean families owned the nearby restaurant, Little Korea, and convenience store, The Huntington.

On Halloween, we – the Brazilians, the Koreans, the Japanese, and my daughter and I - met at Eduardo and Marianne’s apartment. My husband stayed at home, lowering an Easter basket of candy from our balcony to the few trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk below. The little Japanese boy – a baby, really - was dressed as a Japanese spirit in a white pillowcase with three slits for eyes. His mother told us that in Japan, the third eye was for good luck. My daughter wore a NASCAR mechanic’s jumpsuit from K-Mart. Everyone else was either a Disney-fairy tale character or an American Superhero.

The following July, on the afternoon of my daughter’s second birthday party, the Brazilian mothers helped me tie blue, green, and red balloons to branches of trees in the park, the Japanese mother helped me serve the cake and ice cream to anyone who asked for some, the Korean families from Little Korea presented my daughter with a large construction-theme set of Du Plo blocks, and the Bluestone Bistro owners brought over a tub of dry ice for the theatrical effect; they thought the children would get a kick out of it.

That fall, our Brazilian neighbors began moving to new homes away from that neighborhood in Brighton. Barbara died, and Harold asked me to sit shiva for her. We moved a year later.

Manhattan Neighborhoods & Points of View

2008-02-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment, Points of View
March 2, 2005

Manhattan Neighborhoods Host a Protest March
Saturday, 15 February 2003

In The Beginning, Maynard, Massachusetts
First Person, Present

Before the telephone conversation with my old friend Ashley, I had planned to buy a ticket for a ride in a bus full of strangers. Then, Ashley told me that she, Charlie, and their son, Harlan, planned to drive into Manhattan themselves for the protest march, I was amazed. Not that they shared a conviction that this was an important thing to do, but that they all agreed to do it. When Ashley offered me a ride with them, I was grateful and very pleased. I looked forward to spending time together with old friends and yes, to the luxury and comfort of a free ride. The Lieberman-Berg family and I shared a strong feeling that this protest march was very important. The Lieberman-Berg family went to NYC. I went with them.

Leaving Massachusetts, Manhattan-bound
Second Person, Present

It is Friday evening and you have decided to join old family friends the next morning for a day in Manhattan. Your own family is riveted to the TV screen in the darkened family room of your home. With ghostly TV images dancing across their upturned faces, your family lets you know that they are not in the least interested in sharing the experience.

The wintry weather is bitter cold and windy so you go to the local clothing store to buy extra thermal socks and multiple heat packets for hands and feet. The bedside alarm beeps at 4 AM and you depress it quickly before any family member is awakened. You dress hastily, but with care not to forget your medicine and your warm hat.

An hour later, you park on the street outside of your friend’s home, the passenger side tipped up on the snow heaped on the curb. They, mother, father, and pre-teenage son, are just about ready to leave – foraging for the misplaced shoe and checking supplies –water, snack, blankets, and pillows. The day’s first rays of light hug the horizon and bleed into the dark morning as you pile into the white SUV. You are going to a protest march.

Later in Manhattan, United Nations-bound
Third Person, Past

She had not intended to go, but so many of her friends were backing out because of the government’s code alert for the City that day. Although the weather was frigid, she believed people’s fear of terrorism was their main reason for staying at home. And although a shadow of a doubt about the safety of it all nagged at her too, she decided to join the march. It was a surreal day. From the dark of an early winter dawn to a ride in a lavishly equipped SUV from a home in Newton, Massachusetts to a private garage in Manhattan.

At the beginning point of the march, NYPD checked all banners and confiscated any poles which were not hollow cardboard tubes. The avenues were empty of vehicles and packed with masses of people. Sometimes people were scattered, sometimes the crowds of them were dense. Except for occasional bursts of chanting, the marchers were relatively quiet and orderly. They ambled along the route with a level of banter similar to a Saturday crowd at a shopping mall.

Surrounded always by police in full riot gear - many poised on shiny black police motorcycles, the marchers were funneled along the avenues and streets by way of many yellow barricades erected nine blocks at a time. The only airborne traffic was police helicopters. Looking around, she stood in awe of a Manhattan without the drones and squeals of air traffic, the incessant honking of cabs, busses and passenger cars, the blaring of police cars, ambulances, and fire engines.

Having lived in Manhattan, she was both surprised and heartened to see businessmen welcome marchers all along the route through Midtown and the Upper East Side to rest and warm themselves in their shops.

Well bundled and healthy, tired and freezing, marchers huddled in storefronts along the way. Through the double glass doors to a deli, she noticed a father kneeling in a corner to change his child’s dirty diaper while his wife tied her daughter’s shoe.

Although the tall buildings cut down on the reception of her portable radio, she still heard announcements contradicting what she saw and underestimating the size of the march. Unseen loudspeakers, sporadically positioned along the route, amplified the guest speakers and entertainers broadcasting from a stage near the United Nations. Save for a handful of children, she noticed that most of the marchers were older.

Rivulets of red stage makeup dripped down the faces of two women who appeared to be mother and daughter. With fake blood and strips of white linen wrapped around their heads, the women held high a sign that read, “No Blood for Oil”. Several other marchers displayed a large sheet with “Not in My Name” scrawled on it in red paint.
Obviously, they knew about the hollow-cardboard-tube rule.

Later, on 71st Street between 1st and 2nd
Third Person, Past

Even though the weather today was horrible, I was glad to have finished a lot of errands. Collette squeezed me in for a cut and touch up and Renee found time for both a pedicure and manicure. On the way back to the garage, I stopped at Saks and bought a stunning Chanel. Then, the day fell apart.

I parked the Benz by the curb in front of our place just long enough to run inside and hang my new suit in the foyer, and was back at the wheel of my car when a solid mass of scruffy looking people with banners spilled over and around a police barricade at the end of the block on Second. It was hopeless. There was no way I was going to be on time for the consult with my interior designer. So, I just sat there. The sun’s rays set off our brownstone to advantage. My car window was open on the driver’s side. They kept gawking at me; so, I told them that I lived on this street, that I was rich, and that I was not happy. They didn’t care. Just walked around my parked car and on to First Avenue – like lemmings. Good thing they didn’t scratch the Benz, or Jonathan would have had a fit.

Still later, ending at 57th Street and Central Park West
Third person, present

She looks at Charlie, Ashley, and Harlan; her two old friends and their child. All bundled for the cold weather, all tired, all miserable, and all together, they call it quits for the day. The four of them stroll westward to the garage where the SUV is parked, planning to meet midway at Charlie’s friend’s apartment. She and Ashley buy trinkets along Central Park East. Charlie and Harlan cut through the Park. They all meet at a glistening hi-rise apartment building near some new construction on Central Park West. Charlie’s friend, Tom, lives on the 21st floor.

Tom ushers them into his spacious, sun drenched, and very white apartment and immediately, she is overwhelmed by a fedora-adorned Michael Jackson dancing jerkily across an oversized flat screen TV to his musical hit, “Thriller”.
As Charlie and Tom pull out their laptops and serve up volleys of technical jargon, the others gaze impatiently through windows at vistas dominated by more tall buildings. Eyes always riveted on his laptop, Tom asks her what brought them to NYC for the day.

When she tells him about the march, he responds absentmindedly, “Oh? I think I heard something about that. I didn’t know it was today.”

The Wedding Announcement & Subtext

2008-01-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 14 January 2008
Prompt: Subtext

Subtext to Costas Christulides and Paige Veach's Wedding Announcement

« Πоυ̃̃ εĩναι τо μπάνιо » (Pwieenai toe banyoe?) It was merely the phonetic pronunciation of the Modern Greek for “Where is the bathroom”, but it impressed Costas Christulides
- Paige

I first shook hands with Costas over a Manhattan conference table two years ago as we started negotiations for a mega merger among several international corporations. The largest of them had hired me, a partner for Davis Polk, to represent them. Costas managed the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch. After a few weeks, Costas and I started to dine together between the workday meetings and burning the midnight oil. It was a good time to talk about business in a more relaxed atmosphere. That’s when I tried out my college Greek.

Costas was second generation Greek from Detroit. In 1960, his parents had emigrated from small towns on mainland Greece. They met in Grand Central while waiting for the Detroitian. Mr. Christulides had worked his way into national management for General Motors in Detroit. He died several years ago. Costas’s mother retired from teaching last year and works as a docent for the Art Institute of Detroit.

Like Costas’s parents, I was from a small town. Unlike them, my hometown was in America and in the Deep South at that - Halprin, Georgia, to be exact. My father is the president of a real estate company and my mother is a teacher.

Like Costas, when I was living with my parents, I wanted nothing more than to live far away. Costas attended Dartmouth and MIT’s Sloan School. I attended Harvard and Yale’s law school. We both moved to Manhattan for our careers.

Anyway, in the last weeks of the merger-negotiations, our dinner conversations often ended with Costas talking about his wife and how she refused to grant him the divorce he wanted. The Greek Orthodox Church took a very dim view of divorce.

Although Costas did not talk about his marital situation as much as I am afraid I have suggested, he talked enough to try my patience – which I do not have a lot of. I asked him whether he would like to meet a friend of mine who had a very good record of negotiating successful divorces. At first, Costas did not seem at all interested and he talked about the joys of dual citizenship and of crewing a company yacht around the southwestern coast of Turkey. But when we parted for the evening, he asked to meet my friend. To make a long story short, Costas’s divorce was finalized six months ago.

When we announced our engagement, mother and Daddy were their usual gracious selves to Costas and Mrs. Christulides. However, when they were alone with me, they made it quite clear that they did not approve of Costas’s religion. As far as my parents were concerned, Greek Orthodoxy was worse than Roman Catholicism. You see generations of Veaches have had a pew in Halprin’s First Presbyterian Church.

I thought my parent’s objection was just silly, but Costas said that he would readily join the Presbyterians – no problem. After all, he said, it was not a matter of conversion, but only one of switching denominations. Besides, he was not the only son. So, we reserved the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church for a December wedding.

Mother and Daddy had a marriage announcement placed at the top of a page in the Sunday New York Times. The photo of us that headed the announcement was not entirely to their liking – Costas’s jacket collar gaped and his hairpiece was too obvious – but I was positively glowing and they could not resist. Besides, no one ever looks at the groom.

Costas’s ex-wife worked in the newsroom of the New York Times. When she heard about our marriage, she hacked into the pages of wedding announcements and added the following sentence to our blurb:

“The bridegroom’s previous marriage ended in divorce.”

Costas’s mother and my parents were horrified. He and I rolled our eyes and as soon as we could get our business affairs in order, we spent our honeymoon exploring the ruins and mountains of central Turkey.

Mary-Ad

2007-11-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for November 19, 2007
Prompt: “Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces” & Dialogue

Mary-Ad

When I was a child living at home, it always used to distress me that my mom treated her aunt Mary-Ad’s frequent phone calls so casually as to seem disrespectful. Mary-Ad would call several times a week, sometimes several times a day, and often when my mother was preparing dinner.

Mary-Ad would talk and talk and my mother would hold the receiver on her right shoulder tucked between her ear and her chin and listen, uttering a few words here and there so that her aunt knew she was still on the line. Standing near my mother, usually by the sink, I could hear my great aunt talk away and it did seem that she was oblivious to whether her niece was really there. Usually, she talked about things that worried her.

All this time, my mother would be rattling pans, running water, chopping, and cooking within the area circumscribed by our brand new twelve foot curly telephone cord. Sometimes, she would get all tangled up in the cord. Sometimes she would roll her eyes. Most times, Mary Ad spoke loudly enough that I could hear her.

“Louise, I can’t believe you are letting your children learn to drive on the junkers that Jake insists on keeping. It is so unsafe. It worries me so.”

“They’ll be fine Mary-Ad.”

“Louise, I can’t believe that you are taking the children to that optician in the run down town near you. That place seems shady to me. Well, not so much shady as that the optician does not seem to be terribly skilled. I’ve never heard of her. You don’t want to fool with eyesight. I hope you are not doing this just because the price is lower. After all, you get what you pay for.”

“True, the town has seen better days, but I like the optician and I know her mother – the best science teacher in our high school.”

“Louise, I can’t believe that you take the children to that orthodontist for braces. I know braces aren’t cheap, but I have never heard of this fellow. I mentioned his name when Mildred and Fred came over last night for cocktails and they both raised their eyebrows. They didn’t know him either and they have heard all about the city’s best orthodontists because their daughter just researched them for her own children.”

“Well, Jake’s nieces and nephews all went there and their teeth look fine.”

“Louise, I can’t believe that you are putting Betsy on a city bus to get to her tutoring sessions this summer. That neighborhood is very dangerous. I don’t want her standing out at a bus stop in the evening. I know that this is Jake’s doing. I’ll buy passes to Yellow Cab that she can use for the summer. You just tell them where to be when and they will have a cab waiting for her.”

“That’s very generous of you, Mary-Ad. Thanks”

“It’s the least I can do, Louise”

“OK. I have to run now. Jake and Johnny are leaving now to pick you up. I see them backing down the driveway. They should be there in about fifteen minutes. Just wait in the lobby and watch for them. They’ll pull up to the front door.”

“Alright. I’ll watch for them. Only fifteen minutes? I hope Jake drives carefully. And Louise, I made some meringues for dessert.”

Dragon Lady

2007-11-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for November 5, 2007
On Specifics and Character

Dragon Lady

- Sylvia, her regal profile would have graced a Roman coin with distinction

Houston, Texas - It was near the end of a week day in 1981. I was sitting at my desk, gazing out the window at the cityscape below, when the phone rang. It was my friend, Sylvia. Her voice, usually strong and mellifluous, was weak and wavering. I switched from a speaker phone to a conventional phone. “Elizabeth, Jim just put me on four weeks notice.”

Sylvia worked at Oil Partners, a small independent oil company in Houston that specialized in buying land leases. Her news was simply a sign of the times - the price of crude was $13 a barrel and business was slow, lines for unemployment checks were long. But she was undone and I had never before heard her so distressed.

What could I do?

The nicest restaurant closest to both of us was the Rainbow Lodge, a restaurant that Sylvia had recommended to me once. Since then, I had booked my favorite table there whenever I wanted quiet and elegant comfort.

“Sylvia, meet me at the Rainbow Lodge at 6:30, my treat”

At 6:30, the hostess ushered us to the table in a small windowed alcove overlooking the grounds. A stream cascaded down strategically placed rocks surrounded by plants and trees decorated with strings of colored lights. The interior looked like a great hunting lodge and massive beams hovered high above linen-draped tables. Usually, the clash of the riotous external décor with the high caliber of the service amused me to no end, but my attention was elsewhere this time.

Both Sylvia and I ordered bourbon on the rocks with a splash of water and a twist. After the server brought us our drinks, Sylvia began to talk.

“Jim was not only like a father to me, he was a good friend. He and Helen, his wife, had me over to their place for dinner many times. I guess I could have seen it coming. Times have been hard in the oil business and Jim’s company is small. He held off for as long as his partners let him. I have never seen him as upset as he was when he gave me notice today. He says I can use the company’s resources for as long as I need to find a new job.”

I nodded in empathy. As I studied the candle flame, I noted Sylvia’s hunched shoulders and wet eyes.

“I grew up in Brooklyn. All of my relatives lived nearby. If I fell and scraped my knee anywhere, I knew that relatives lived on that block and I could just go to their door for help … Back then, I wanted a store-bought dress more than anything. My mother made all of my clothes; such fine hand-stitching and finished inseams and hems. When I was thirteen, I was allowed to buy dresses off the rack and I was amazed at how poorly they were made; such sloppy workmanship … I got married when I was seventeen. I had just graduated from high school. Even though my parents had married at the same age, both of them wanted me to wait until I finished college. So, I promised to get my college degree … My husband was very successful and my parents adored him. Daddy started to carve a cradle for his first grandchild.

“After I graduated from Barnard, I worked at Davis Polk in Manhattan …”

“Sorry Sylvia, I know I should know but I don't. What kind of a firm is Davis Polk?”

“…Oh – the biggest law firm in New York. You know, the baby lawyers there called me the Dragon Lady”, she chuckled softly.

I chuckled, too. We ordered dinner and our server took our menus.

“Anyway, I worked there as the head of legal assistants and mentor to new lawyers. At our first few regular meetings, they always tried to impress me with their positions. Very soon, they realized that I knew more than they did about the law and about the firm. Very soon, they realized that except for meetings with me, they would be doing nothing more for the first year at Davis Polk than carrying partners’ briefcases.”

I laughed at the image of Sylvia herding baby lawyers around Davis Polk.

“After ten years, I finally accepted that my husband did not want children. We divorced and I moved to Houston. At Davis Polk, I had worked with a big firm in Houston that always wanted me to head up their staff of legal assistants. The baby lawyers in Houston called me the Dragon Lady, too.”

Smiling, I shook my head slowly and commented, “I think that male lawyers do that when they feel threatened by a competent woman.”

“Anyway, on the plane to Houston, I sobbed like a baby. The man sitting next to me was Jim. He listened to me and bought me drinks. Usually, I did not drink so I felt rather tipsy when the flight ended.

Later, after I had been working at the law firm in Houston for a year, Jim called and offered me a job with his new company, Oil Partners.”

“Uh-hmmm”

“Tonight is the first time I have cried in public since that plane trip from New York. I feel much better now. Thanks, Elizabeth.”

Our dinners arrived and somehow I knew then that Sylvia would never again tell me so many stories about herself.

Dedicated and Stray Neurons

2007-10-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment, 21 October 2007
Detached Autobiography with the optional prompt of food

Every evening before joining his family at the dinner table, the father descended into the cellar for a bottle of his self-prescribed barley beverage. Then - he, the mother, and the two children took their seats at the dinner table.

Both children looked at their plates. One ate most of the food, the other mostly played with it. The father nursed his barley beverage with great relish, ate a piece of the steak and half of a baby red potato. As usual, he did not touch the fresh vegetables and salad. The mother looked at all three of them, and picked at her food.

She visualized coloring in the spaces of the moment. She imagined their shapes to be dynamic, pulsating electric reds, oranges, greens, and yellows. She wondered: Wouldn’t it be cool to visualize moments like these through electron spectroscopy.

The only sounds in the room were: overplayed jazz from the 1960s and 70s on the CD player, the intermittent hum of the baseboard heater, and her questions and comments. Invariably, any of her words would hang over the dinner table as if in suspension - before falling with a thud. Sometimes, the father would talk – IF she asked him about himself. Then, he would tell her about his work at the office. At this dinner, he responded to her query about his day with:

Pretty much what I’ve been working on these past few weeks. You know, OCV and OCR, mostly in a 32-bit environment, some in a 64-bit environment. I was working on manually updating the edge-width parameter control which was unique amongst all the controls within this tool edit control in that it was not a property-provider-based parameter. And so this meant that I had to implement electric mode by hand as well as subject-delegate queuing. Just so.

The fact that she knew what he was talking about made her laugh – a genuine and kind laugh - and prompted him to smile. This time the tight thin lips turned up slightly at the corners. For just a nanosecond – a shimmering of lime green space, the four of them breathed together.

Where I Am From

2007-10-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for October 13, 2007
Where I Am From

Where I Am From

I am from clouds and from my family
From hydrogen and oxygen, evaporation and condensation
From a tapestry of stories.

I am from my adult-size playhouse perched on the hill in the backyard
(gleaming windows without curtains set in wood painted red.)
The Green Room for my theatrical productions

I am from Verbeena and Lilac bushes, Bleeding Hearts, and purple Baptisia
I am from the mesquite bush
Tumbling freely with the wind

I am from black tea and white coffee
From Tracey and Proulx
From the big house and a constant stream of parties
From loud dinner tables
and always doing-and-going.
From extra chairs at the table and open arms.

I’m from Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost
until the Waldorf Bakery closed.
From searching in earnest for Gloria Patri,
Always on Sunday’s program, Never to be seen.

I am from Athena, Monty Python, and Oscar Wilde.
From prosciutto, escargot, and the driest Chateau Steiner.
I am from my uncle’s murmuring heart and flat feet
From one grandfather’s rocking chair, silver hair, and pocket watch - always ready to gift his grandchildren with a coin hidden in his pocket.
From another grandfather’s country house, furrowed fields, beloved dog, duplex in the city, and aromatic pipe tobacco.

Shoeboxes crammed with personal correspondence hidden in my sock drawer and closet.
First, letters and birthday cards from camp friends and from relatives.
Later, also from fellow students, teachers, and beaux.
Sometimes, I re-read them
To remember and imagine
Me and Them
Past, Present, and Future.

Two Americans, 1974, Great Britain, and Ireland

2007-03-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 5 March 2007
Prompt:“All that road rolling and all those people dreaming in the immensity of it” Jack Kerouack

The End

That morning in County Kent, somewhere north of the English Channel, the sun peeked over the ancient emerald hills threaded with single dirt lanes. A solitary yellow VW Bug buzzed into the dawn, headed for the hovercraft back to Le Havre, France. As if on cue, “Here comes the Sun” by the Beatles began as they crested a gentle hillock.

From the Beginning
Day 1

Two hostellers from America stood in London, the hub of the vast web of hostels covering Great Britain and the Irish Republic. Their plan was to hitchhike or travel by rail across the Commonwealth for about three weeks and meet back in London. They rode the Underground as far west as they could, climbed the stairs into the sun, held out a piece of cardboard marked for their destination, and stuck out their thumbs.

A uniformed chauffer in a shiny black car picked them up. After they settled into the back seat, he asked: “Aren’t you two embarrassed to use other people’s energy to get around?” For a moment, an awkward silence like a kinked leash, hung between them and the driver. The chauffeur drove them to a bed & breakfast owned by a widow who was a friend. That evening after supper and a shower, they dried their hair next to a roaring fire.

Day 3

In a castle-turned-hostel near Inverness, alabaster statues loomed haphazardly throughout the wide halls. Their blank eyes seemed to follow the hostellers as they marched to their assigned dormitory. Once there, the hostellers tossed heavy backpacks next to iron bedsteads in a large white room. Its huge windows looked out over a valley and into a mountain on the other side. Far below, in the middle of the valley, a train puffed along a track that ran by the river.

The hostel’s warden wore a plaid kilt, grinned cheerfully, and regaled them with stories about the original owners, Lord and Lady Sutherland.

.... His Lordship speculated in developing the Highlands (the part of Scotland north of Inverness). To that end, he owned the railway that ran daily below his castle. He also had all of the trees in the Highlands cut for his sheep grazing ventures. When the Lord and Lady divorced, she kept the castle. He kept the train and the Highlands. She ordered the servants to lower the blinds whenever the daily train came through the valley.

Early in the morning, a painfully loud amplification of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony roused the hostellers from their beds. The warden wanted to be sure the hostellers would have time to complete their housekeeping chores before packing up and moving on.

Day 6

The Americans’ new Scottish friends convinced them that they must see the highest pub in Scotland. After seeing the pub, the Scots took the Americans to camp at the base of a mist-shrouded mountain in the central highlands. In the evening, a majestic stag with broad shoulders and a trophy of antlers surveyed them and their campfire near a cold clear brook. The American’s new Scottish friends had chosen the site for its beauty. In hushed voices, the Scots spoke of the lore of the heavy mists of the mountain. They told the travelers that many a man had perished in those mountains for want of the direction home.

Day 7

On a hill on the island of Skye, sandal and sneaker-shod hostellers with faded blue jeans, flannel shirts, and worn backpacks sprawled across the wide steps of the large white hostel. The Americans were trudging up the path to the hostel when two voices they recognized from another hostel, called out, “Hey, it’s the Americans!”

Day 8

Near the dock for the ferry to the Outer Hebrides, a large Celtic cross marked the hilltop grave of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The cross, rooted in the Isle of Skye, faced the Isles of Lewis and Harris to the north.

Day 10

On Lewis, the southernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, about seven hostellers, including one of the Americans, ventured out into the harsh cold and hiked west the few miles of dirt road that meandered across the island to the Atlantic Ocean.
Foraging sheep and goats clambered over stingy gray rocks, craggy and worn, both. Some were loosely wandering, others in small knit groups, and all painted with colored hatch marks for identification.
Save for a single woman and several widely spaced, low slung peat cottages, the area was eerily empty of humanity. Celtic songs and prayers clung to wisps of hearth smoke. It was Saturday, a day for religious observance for the area. In layers of faded black dress and with an embroidered white head scarf framing her weathered face, the lone woman politely returned the hosteller’s greeting in Gaelic. When she saw they did not understand her, she looked very sad. They reminded her of all the young folk who fled to the mainland every year for better jobs, leaving the older ones and the children behind. In halting English and great earnestness, she sighed and gave the hikers her most sincere condolences for poor John Kennedy.

After the hostellers arrived at the western coast, the two blond Norwegians swam in the ocean. Fine pale sand defined a shimmering boundary between the ocean and the shore. Wildflowers blanketed the many low-slung hills and the Gulf Stream warmed the air. Like dazed foreign sentries, the other hostellers stood stiffly, sniffed the salt air, and gazed at the horizon.

Day 13

One of the Americans had a few hours before her train left Belfast for Dublin. With all of her possessions were crammed into her backpack, she wandered into the center of the city for a look see. There were great arched iron gates that contained the violent heart of the city. The only person in sight was a solid policeman several blocks away. He looked in her direction and good-naturedly shouted, “Hey you! Tell me, did you ride your bicycle all the way from America?” They both laughed, nervously.

Day 14

The hostel in Dublin was a tall brick building worn down at the heels and fronting on Mountjoy Square, once a very distinguished neighborhood. In 1974, Dublin’s prison was there and children entertained themselves by bashing parked cars with sledgehammers and pelleting them with their thin hard bodies. Gunfire, sirens, and flashing red lights scarred their nights. In 1974, many of Dublin’s children were bussed to the countryside for vacation.

Day 17

The Valencia Island hostel was a former Coast Guard Barracks off the southwestern coast of Ireland. When one of the American hitchhikers arrived at the hostel that evening, there was no room for her in the main building. She was assigned her own little cabin. Cold rains driven by high winds beat on her cabin that night when a battered looking backpacker stumbled inside. She was an American hitchhiker, too. She had been sporting a bright orange Barnard University sweatshirt in the green Republic of Ireland and could not understand why no one would give her a lift. Nonetheless, the two would often hitch together for the rest of the summer, even though they knew very well that a woman hitching by herself always got rides faster than two women together.

Day 21

At the end of their adventures in Ireland, the two Americans met on dock in Belfast to catch the ferry to Liverpool. Because paying the pedestrian fare for the ferry was a hardship, they approached a young family traveling by car. The family agreed to drive them onto and off of the ferry. In between, the Americans lunched on dry soup from their backpacks and hot water from the ferry’s kitchen.

At Liverpool, they thanked the family, navigated the city by map, and found Beatle Street - a very narrow and uneven cobblestone street sandwiched between two walls of tall, drab brick houses. Hanging over a nondescript wooden door in one of the buildings was a plaque with three dimensional figures of the four Beatles underscored with the words, “Four Lads Who Shook The World”

Day 22

The walk from the train station in Bath was long, downhill, and shaded by a canopy of shimmering green leaves. British tourists arched their eyebrows in disapproval of the two Americans as they soaked their tired feet in the largest of the Roman Baths.

Day 25

The Americans ended their adventure at the home of a new friend and his guests: a respectable white townhouse in King’s Cross, London and two other hostellers. Early the next morning, they crammed into a small car and, sharing a sense of adventure and a free ride, drove off into the sunrise to the ferry at Portsmouth.

Steven Strange

2007-02-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

Writing Assignment for 19 Feb 2007
Prompt: A First Time [for anything]

As I was returning the telephone receiver to its cradle, my mother asked, “So, who is this boy?” “His name is Steven Strange and I think he is a senior.”

Steven had asked me to go to the movie playing at the Regent Square, the local movie house. I was fifteen and it was my first date.

On the eve of the date, my father paced the forty feet stretching between the fireplace in the living room and the bookcases in the music room.

Carved into the dark oak of the fireplace mantel in the living room were the words, “Old Wood to Burn, Old Books to Read, Old Friends to Trust”. In the music room, large bronze busts of composers perched atop built-in bookcases and gazed protectively over the two baby grand pianos.

My mothered fluttered about, trying to look nonchalant. I hovered and tried to look nonchalant, too. My four siblings – all of whom were younger – hung over the walnut banister perpendicular to the front door. We were waiting for the doorbell to chime its familiar tune. When it would, my family would watch me open the door and they would all stare at Steven - the guy with the funny last name.

I knew they would be under whelmed. Steven was the smartest kid in school. In spite of that, I took solace in the fact that he was a senior. And because he said he would be “picking me up”, of course he had a car. I didn’t really care what it looked like – it was superficial to care about things like that and so not me. Still, I hoped his car was decent.

Where was Steven? It was 7:34 by the big clock in the front hall. “He said he would pick me up at 7:30. Maybe something is wrong with his car.” My father clenched his jaw and paced faster. At 7:35, the doorbell rang. Steven had arrived – breathless, in all of his thinness, gawkiness, and really bad acne. Standing in the foyer next to my father and under the scrutiny of my entire family, Steven looked very small.

My siblings, whose visible presence was predicated on their agreement to be silent, giggled very quietly in the background. My parents told us to have fun. And Steven and I stepped out into a balmy spring night. While keeping up a pretty meaningless stream of chatter, I looked for a car parked near my house. There was none. Then, in my best attempt at covertness, I looked up and down my street for parked cars. I didn’t see any. I tried to mask my disappointment with a strained smile. I exclaimed to Steven, “Oh – I thought you were driving tonight!” Although it was dark, I am sure Steven blushed when he responded, “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t drive yet. I thought it would be nice to walk to Regent Square.” Embarrassed, I blurted, “Oh, that is alright. And it certainly is a beautiful night to walk!”

We kept up a brisk pace for the mile walk to Regent Square, arriving just as the trailers were rolling. The only available seats together were the two farthest left in the front row. Steven apologized for the bad seats and gestured to me that I should take the seat furthest from the wall. I smiled, gestured that it was no problem at all, and prepared for a crick in my neck. The movie was Cool Hand Luke and we were riveted to the screen until the lights came back on.

Steven walked me home and never once spoke of his bicycle. However, I know he had cycled because the next day, I found some broken branches in the bushes near the pergola over the driveway.

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

The day after the date and forevermore, my father would laughingly relate that as soon as he saw that Steven was breathless, he knew I would be just fine.

The Hungarian Chemist and The Chair of the Board

2007-01-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
29 January 2007
A dialogue created by combining one side of two random conversations

He looked to be in his late 70s or early 80s. He was over six feet tall and rangy with bright and intense brown eyes, unusually small and beady. He smiled a lot and his smile was relaxed and genuine. Although his jacket was cloth, it was not tweed or corduroy and it did not have elbow patches – clothes often associated with academia. His slacks were not rumpled. His dyed black hair was combed back from his forehead. The strands of hair were longish and the haircut was short, neither severe nor styled.

She looked to be in her late 40s or early 50s. She was about five feet, seven inches with blue eyes, a clear complexion, dark arched eyebrows, and straight blond hair streaked with gray and white and held back with a scarf. She too smiled a lot and her smile was relaxed and genuine, also. She wore tailored clothes, had the poise and demeanor of a successful prosecutor or talk show host, and the easy charm of a kind and secure person.

He said:
Like all of the Jews living in Budapest in 1945, my parents had been rounded up by the Nazis and shot. My grandfather had been a great war hero in World War I, but that did not do him any good. Between my wife and me, we lost thirty-six family members. I hate Hungary. They say that the only thing Hungary is good at is always being on the wrong side of a war.

She said:
Do have some tea or coffee, my husband is English so tea is very important in our house. Scones, fruit, and peanut-free truffles are on the table. Please help yourself.

He said:
I used to swim, play soccer, ski, climb, and more. You know, one time I was through with studying for the day and it was such a beautiful winter day and I went skiing – by myself. Let me tell you how I got the wind knocked out of my sails. I had just skied down a very steep hill and I was very proud of myself and then looked backwards and saw this 12 year old boy skiing the same hill and so fast and as he came down the hill, he picked up each red flag! That cut me down to size alright!

She said:
Now, we need two or three questions for a letter to the membership. What do you think? OK, it sounds as if we want to ask this and this and this. OK? Now, I seem to recall that a speaker has been lined up for a meeting, but just in case this is not the case, I was thinking that Michael Thompson might be good. What do you think? OK then, does anyone know Michael?

He said:
My wife is a very good psychiatrist. She went to the University of Pennsylvania. We have been married for 63 years. Do you know the secret to a good marriage? It is the three “C’s”: Communication, Consent, and Compromise.

My wife and I are very different in a way. She believes that everyone, no matter how miserable, deserves empathy. I do not. If I do not like someone, I do not talk to them.

She said:
I will contact the person who I believe may have already lined up a speaker for the next meeting, and if she hasn’t, then I will e-mail you so that you can call Michael. I realize that he will want to be paid, but we haven’t any money for that. What we can do is promise him an audience of independent schools and publicity.

He said:
Do you know why things dissolve in water? Let me draw you a picture.

She said:
Oh yes, have you seen these triptychs of my boy? The photographer captured those darling conspiratorial expressions and poses after he asked them to think of a time that they would never tell their mother about! The eldest is going to Harvard next year. My younger son is a junior at Groton.

He said:
You know, not all of the music of Mozart and Beethoven is good music. For example, Mozart’s 21st Concerto and Beethoven’s 4th are very bad. Mozart’s 20th is good, though. But you need to listen to the performance of Rudolf Serkin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Liszt was not very good. One good thing by him, however, is Music According to the Sonnets of Petrarca.

She said:
One day, when I was showing one of my sons the steps to swing dancing, I asked him to show me how to grind. I had no idea what that was. Well, he looked at me in horror and said, “Mom that is NOT something you do with your mother!”

He said:
You know the commandment that says thou shall not kill. It does not say that. It says thou shall not murder. I know because I have read it in Hebrew. Now, if I had been a Catholic, I would be a priest today since I grew up hearing the Latin Mass and I know it perfectly. I am a very serious student of the Jewish religion because we have paid with our blood. So much, over thousands of years. And I am a quiet Jew. The most beautiful city in the world is Jerusalem. Everything is there and so much history next to so much new. Now, you really should read the Old Testament and certainly Ezekiel and the Dry Bones. It is beautiful.

She said:
Excuse me while I put the dog in the garage so that we are not bothered by his barking. I don’t know what has got into him!

He said:
Oh, another good piece of music is Boccarini’s Nights of Marguerite. Also Edward McGee’s Indian Sonnets. And Wellington’s Victory and Consecration of the Horse, St. Stephen’s Overture.

She said:
So, we hope you will join us as Membership Chair for the next year. As you can see, this is a really great group!

He said:
Would you like to write down my name?
[And he writes] Geza Szonyi.

She said:
Do have some of the truffles. Please take some home. Now, who would like to go out for lunch?

He said:
You know about Malaria. It was wiped out in the US and the Panama Canal in the early part of the last century via constant drainage, netting, and lots of quinine (he pronounced it ‘queeneene’). It could be wiped out in Africa, too. The formula for it is very simple. [He draws me two pictures of cells and he points excitedly to two little circles within one cell.] See these two little circles? They are the answer. But nothing will be done about it. The governments in Africa are far too involved with themselves. It is not at all in their interests to eradicate malaria.

She said:
I am afraid that I can not stay long at lunch since I am having thirty for dinner tonight for another board I serve on.

He said:
Do you like jokes? Here is a joke about how a Biologist and a Chemist look at DNA differently. Biologists look at DNA and talk about the beauty of its structure. The chemists look at DNA and say: “Yeah, four compounds. What’s the big deal?”

She said:
Now drive safely. This morning’s dusting of snow can be deceptively slippery.

Tea Dialogue

2007-01-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth S. Milligan
Writing Assignment for 7 January 2007
Straight Dialogue that Describes a Place

Oh, hello! Just let me sweep the snow off the steps here and do come in.
Tobias, don’t jump on Pamela.
Bad dog!
Now love, do come in and leave your coat in the front hall.
Can you stay for a chat?
Unfortunately, I have to leave soon.
I have to get Harry to Cambridge for his Chaucer course, but we can visit for 10 or 15 minutes.
Can you do that? We can have a proper visit later.

If it is really OK with you, yes, I would love to stay and visit.

Can I get you something to drink? Tea or coffee?

Tea would be just fine.

It’s all organic, you know. I hope that is OK.

Of course.

Caffeinated or decaffineated?

Decaffineated would be just fine, thanks.

Something that gives you a mild buzz or something that relaxes you?

Oh, definitely something that relaxes!

Why don’t we sit in the dining room – it is so much cozier.

Sure.

Now, let me get our cups and saucers first.
I have to apologize for all of the boxes on the floor.
I have barely unpacked from my last trip to England.

Please… No problem at all!

Well they are a bother.
But there are lovely things in them.
It is like Christmas everyday.
Why – here are some new cups and saucers that are perfect for our tea today.
They used to belong to my great grandmother.

Oh – they are so lovely!

You know, everytime I go over to see Uncle Timothy, he insists that I bring things back.
He is trying to make more room in the house so that it is easier for him to get around.
He does want to stay in his own place, you know.

He is very lucky to have you. You’re always there for him.

Well, Harry and I enjoy visiting him.
By the way, I fear that the chairs are too hard.
I have neglected to put cushions on them so they are not very comfy.
We are so used to them that I rarely think about that.
I hope you don’t mind….
I usually sit in this chair because it is closest to the kitchen.

And I will sit right here at the end where I usually sit.

Oh those birds are certainly noisy today!
Why, I feel as if I am in the jungle!
Harry, the birds are out for their exercise; please hold the cat.

Did you just take the blanket off of the cage?

Oh no, we only keep that on at night.
They are particularly excited today.
I don’t know why.
Is the sun in your eyes?

Not at all.

You take cream in your tea – right?
Anything else?
I am afraid that all I have in terms of anything to eat is a loaf of brown bread that I baked this morning.
Nothing more exotic.
Can I cut you a slice?

Sure.

Jam or Marmalade?

Oh, Marmalade, please.

Now, I did e-mail you an invitation to our annual solstice bonfire, didn’t I?

Jack Mendelsohn & The Red Hat

2006-11-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for Nov 20, 2006
A Character and an obstruction in his path

As usual, my friend Jack and I met for coffee at a local coffee house and discussed the news. I liked caffeinated coffee with cream, no sugar. He drank black decaf. Because his hands shook because of Tremulous Nervosa, he sipped his coffee through a straw. That day’s morning edition of the New York Times was opened on the table before us.

Below the fold on the first page, a photo frames a somber, almost biblical, assembly of dignitaries and celebrities at the groundbreaking ceremony for MLK, Jr.’s memorial. The photo has no accompanying story. Except for one white person and one bright red hat, complexions and clothing are shades of brown and black.

The entire ceremony had been televised the night before and Jack had watched it. At the coffee house the next morning, he sighed and exclaimed: “How I wish I could have been there! So many of the old gang!” He pointed to his old friends who were in the photo, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and John Lewis.

Jack remarked that Jesse and Andrew had known MLK, Jr. well, had admired him, and had been with him when he was assassinated in Memphis. Jesse had been standing at the ground level of the hotel where MLK, Jr. was staying when he was shot from across the street. Andrew was in the room. As soon as he heard the shot, Jesse ran upstairs and held the fallen MLK in his arms.

John Lewis, one of MLK, Jr.’s lieutenants, had led in the front lines of the march to Selma. In the photo, he stands below Jesse and Andrew, head in hands. Standing in front of Lewis, the lady-with-the-bright-red-hat looks up at Jesse as he consoles Andrew. Her head is tilted backwards so severely that her hat looks like a red plate with a flattened upside-down red bowl in the center.

Not present for the photo was Louis Farrakhan. Born and educated in Boston, Farrakhan led the national black separatist movement, Nation of Islam. More recently, he organized the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. – a massive rally of black American men,

That morning at the coffee house, Jack recalled a decades-old shopping expedition with Louis in a Syrian souk. Mrs. Farrakhan was very fond of beautiful hats and her husband hoped to buy one. Jack and Louis were killing time until the Syrian government told them how they were to leave the country.

And then, there is the sole white man in the photo. The caption identifies him as Tommy Hilfilger, the well-known clothing designer. Hilfilger had cultivated a fundraising network of celebrities and corporations whose combined efforts have raised two-thirds of the funds needed for the $100 million memorial.

The site of the proposed memorial to MLK, Jr. is on the Mall in Washington, D.C. between the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial. A view described by Farrakhan when he spoke at the Million Man March.

Tucking his memories away, Jack folded and smoothed the newspaper. Before he departed for his physical therapy appointment, we both wondered aloud: “So, who was the lady with the bright red hat?”

Asters do Bloom in Vermont at Night

2006-11-03T18:29:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment, 3 November 2006
Character Sketch

I of III

All of them were her guests that day. Some had arrived early and the anxiety of the morning had evaporated. This was the first unveiling ceremony without her husband, Steven. Linda, his widow was calm; some might have said even regal.

The annual unveiling of the Anthology, was held in the parlor of their house; a dark brown clapboard building over two hundred years old. A weatherworn picket fence marked the boundary between the narrow strip of gently tangled flowers between her front door and a sidewalk off of Main Street.

Hidden under a linen cloth, the twenty anthologies nestled in a basket on Linda’s lap. Each volume contained award-winning poetry and prose that had been submitted to Vermont Writers, a group that she and Steven had started in the local library twenty years earlier. After saying a few words about each of the slim volumes, Linda reverentially circulated them among her guests. When the volumes had completed the circuit, Nancy, her overnight guest lit a candle in the candelabra.

All of the guests sat in hard-backed chairs lined up against the white horsehair plaster walls of the parlor. Tall built-in shelves of books, threadbare woven rugs, unmatched wooden furniture, and three many-paned windows surrounded them. Most of them had had poems published in the current year’s anthology and were waiting respectfully to read them aloud.

The fire-eater and his poetess arrived together and late. The poetess took the last empty chair; it was near the front door. Linda recognized the fire eater from a carnival on Main Street earlier that week. He draped his tall frame along the doorframe nearby, ready to listen to his poetess read her poem, "The Sphinx".

II of III

Later, in the evening after all the day guests had departed, Linda showed Nancy a framed photo of herself as a pigtailed child grinning over the rim of a large metal washtub on her family’s farm in northern New Hampshire. She had just been found out in a game of Hide & Seek.

As a child, Linda knew only that members of her family rarely spoke to each other and that money was scarce for them. She knew that with a dipper full of water, she could mold the hard-packed dirt on the farm into all kinds of shapes. She also knew that with a little water and a five & dime watercolor set, she could paint anything.

"My brother and I would drive two hundred miles without saying a word and we would think nothing of it…. When I was older, I studied art at the state university. I did not know what else to study.

I was very shy. When my mother saw that I had earned all A’s, she remarked that she would rather I make B’s and C’s and be well rounded. That comment was devastating to me. From then on, I scraped the bottom, academically. My self-esteem was very bad. Later, I learned that my mother had never earned better than C’s at her prestigious woman’s college. Perhaps she was jealous. I don’t know. In any event, you see how a single comment can be such a blow to one’s self esteem.

My first marriage was to a fellow I met at the university. He was a very talented painter and potter. He was very emotionally needy, as well. We divorced when our son, our only child, was twelve. It was devastating. He is all grown up now and living in VA where he is a eye surgeon. I have not seen much of him. Now that Steven is not here, I hope to see more of my son. I hope to have a private conversation about the pain we both went through at the time of the divorce.

I met Steven at an auction not far from here. He says that he knew he had to meet me when he leaned over to pick up a pencil and saw my long legs in the back row! He really was such a joker! Also, he tells people we know that when he met me, I never spoke. It’s true, I was afraid to speak. It took twenty years, but I do speak, now!

Several years after his divorce in the 1970’s, Steven bought this house from a painter and Francophile. See, that entire wall is painted with a map of Paris. We have a lot of the previous owner’s paintings hanging on the walls. One day, we found a big box of various letters addressed to the previous owner. We sent them to the owner’s son in Boston and he in turn sent us two of the owner’s woodprints. As you can see, one of them is the cover of this year’s Anthology.

Steven earned his Masters in English at Williams and he is a big reason there is now a Masters program there in Creative Writing. He got his PhD from the University of Iowa. I sat in on all Steven’s PhD classes; so really, I almost have a doctorate, as well.

Because of Steven, I earned my Masters in Social Work at the University of Vermont. It was rough at first, getting used to being a student again, but after that rough part, I earned good grades. I wrote about my grandfather, the founder of homeopathic hospitals in this country. The people at the univerity liked that. Then, when they learned that I had transcribed all Steven’s interviews, interviews with people like Margaret Mead, Noam Chomsky, and John Kenneth Galbraith, and had them archived at Williams; when they learned about how I worked with Steven to create Vermont Writers, they asked me to write about them. So, I did. They liked what I wrote so much that they gave me three credits for each paper – that meant a big savings for me – and they published excerpts from my work in their literature. I don’t know that I could have survived Steven’s death without having had the confidence booster of earning my Masters.

Yesterday, everyone who came to the unveiling was such a special person and all of them were the very people who most needed to be there. I was truly amazed. And they all brought food and flowers, too! Altogether, there were twenty people here, one for each year of Vermont Writers. The prize winner who came late and her fire-eater boyfriend made twenty-two, the same number of years that Steven and I were married."

Then, the two women rose from their seats and busied themselves with cleaning up. Linda swept the rugs with a broom so that the mice would not be tempted, packaged uneaten food suitable for leftovers, and scraped the rest for composting. Nancy washed and dried the cutlery and crockery.

When everything was put to rights, Nancy climbed the narrow steps to the spare bedroom. Linda, new sole Director of Vermont Writers, fastened the three locks on the front door, and retired to her makeshift sleeping room on the first floor. As her window darkened for the night, the asters outside began to bloom.

III of III

The next day, after the drive home to Massachusetts, Nancy started to tell her family about her week-end in Vermont. Her daughter glanced at her and asked incredulously,

“How can you be in the same room as a fire-eater and not ask how he can eat fire?"

Redemption

2006-10-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment: 1st Person POV
October 18, 2006
Prompt: “What a strange trip its been …” – Jerry Garcia

If I had one wish in my life, it would be that World War II had never happened
- Charlie

I was the black sheep of the family, born in 1925, and the youngest of four children. We lived on a hilltop farm in a bucolic small New England town. My mother was chiseled and stern; my father, shadowy and quiet. Every Sunday, churchgoers parted and created a path for us to our family pew.

During the war, I ran away and enlisted in the Marines. They sent me to the Pacific Theater. Although I fought in many battles, I never killed anyone.

I always rebuked the Brass for bad decisions - there were a lot of them – and always proposed a better way. Had anyone heeded a particular one of my proposals, hundreds of lives might have been saved.

In 1945, except for me, all combat Marines washed their uniforms and helmet cloths in lye and hung them out to dry in the tropical sun which bleached them medical white. Except for me, they all looked spiffy in dress combat parades. Me? I soaked everything in water overnight. I told the commanders that the white made the men sitting ducks on the battlefield. For my impudence, I was ordered to clean latrines. Afterwards, I was assigned to help take the island of Saipan to secure Iwo Jima for invasion.

I was crawling on the ground when a Japanese grenade exploded in front of me. People rushed me to the ship’s surgery and strapped me to an operating table. There was a big storm where we were in the Pacific and no anesthetic on board. The ship tossed and turned at the storm’s whimsy and four men held me down while the surgeon operated on my head. My wounds kept me out of Iwo Jima the next day, but I was sent a Purple Heart and a Bronze Medal just the same. Thirty years later, I gave all of my military decorations to a US Senator to throw over the White House gates, but that is another story for another time.

According to official Marine footage of Iwo Jima after the battle, the volcanic ash island looked like a dump with wisps of newspaper floating about and, if you looked hard enough, hundreds of strange white shapes that looked like bowling balls.

After the war and after my wife divorced me, I decided that I wanted to see all 50 states in the Union. And except for the Dakota’s, I did see all of them. In Minnesota, a Japanese businessman paid my bill at the Mayo Clinic. Later, I found a Japanese Buddhist colony in western Massachusetts and stayed there for ten years, most of the time helping to build a temple - the second largest in the country.

In several New England towns, I ran for Selectman. In Lincoln, Massachusetts, I set up campaign headquarters around a crate at the town dump and invited everyone in town to visit me and talk about what was important to them. I figured they all came to the dump anyway. I almost won that election.

One of my last homes was in a town nearby where my daughter lived. As a volunteer in this town, I became very involved with the local government and community organizations. I donated a lot to the town: time, work, and often, money from Mother’s trust fund for me. Some influential people in town government did not like me. They had me declared legally incompetent and committed to a psychiatric ward.

A series of Veteran’s Hospitals, defibrillators, and walkers followed. In the last town I called home, I got myself to a park to hear free weekly concerts and to a local soup kitchen to help ladle soup for the homeless.

My burial was in a cemetery near the home I ran away from over sixty years earlier. After Reverend Kathy bowed her head, after the Marine Color guard fired volleys, saluted, played Taps, and presented my grandson with a tightly folded US Flag, my friends from the soup kitchen in Waltham and two of my children cried, my friends from the House of Peace in Ipswich prayed, and my friends from the Japanese Buddhist colony in Leverett drummed, chanted, and burned incense on my grave.

Although I knew I could never make up for the horrors of World War II, I did what I could.

Most of the above is from Charlie’s personal letters to and conversations with the writer. The rest is from his obituary and from stories told by his friends and family at his burial. Charlie died on May 1st 2005.

My Homeland (in Ten Lines or Under)

2006-10-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
2007
Write about your Homeland

My home land is inside of me.
It is of infinite rooms.
It is fortified and emblazoned by the life outside of me.

My homeland is a tapestry of tales
Of stories about choices.
About rooms explored and doors only opened a crack and then shut,
Or never opened at all.

My homeland,
Where life’s seductive dust and noise are relegated to a sane perspective.

Like a Lily Pad on Tepid Waters

2005-11-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 30 Nov 2005
Prompt: Two People eating together, with particular attention to voice

Like a lily pad on tepid waters, the waitress sashayed across the restaurant and careened into our table. "Excuse me ma’am and ma’am, my name is Denise and I will be your waitress tonight. Tonight, we are featuring boiled crab escargot, caressed with a delicate mussel white sauce, served with a side of torpedo fries and a dollop of sour cream ranchero. And may I suggest our house wine, a sweet domestic red from the vineyards just down the road; I think you will find it amusing. What can I get you all?"

Woman #1:
Well, Denise – I would like the filet mignon, medium-rare, with a baked potato – plain; no sour cream or butter, beans almandine, mixed greens with basil vinaigrette dressing, and a carafe of the house burgundy.

Women #2
And for me, I would like the same, except please substitute mousaka for the filet, rice pilaf for the baked potato, and some Liebfraumilch for the house burgundy. Thank you, and here are our menus.

Denise
Very good, Mesdames.
(Denise turns and sashays back to the kitchen)

Woman #1 to Woman #2
(gesturing toward the centerpiece: a woven plastic basket with many white plastic eating utensils)

Could you please hand me a set of cutlery?
How DO they make storks out of paper napkins?

Woman #2Sure.
(Passing #1 the cutlery, the handling-end, first)
Here you go. No salad fork, though. So, just lick the dinner fork clean, I guess.

The stork figure sure is clever, isn’t it?
I have no idea how the paper holds the creases, though.
Wish I did. I would love to be able to make origami-napkins at home.
It would be such fun!

Denise
Hi, Denise here.
Here are some hot damp towels for you.

Woman #1 and Woman #2
What?

Denise
(Standing by the table and demonstrating how to use the towels)
Oh – you aren’t from around here, are you? Well, folks around here like to wrap their hands in them before eating; they find them soothing and hygienic at the same time.

Oh – one other itsy bitsy little thing; people around here scoot their legs into the sunken space under the table when they eat out, just like they do in Kyoto. In their homes, though, people here just kneel or sit cross-legged like our Native Americans.

Well, here are your dinners, cooked to perfection by Chef Don in the back there. Hope you all enjoy! And if there is anything I can do for you, please just call me. In case you forgot, my name is Denise.

Women #1
Thank you, Denise.
(Slight Pause)
And since you asked, could you please massage our necks and shoulders before we begin dining? It would enhance our gastronomic experience immeasurably. And then, could you please ask Chef Don to rustle up a birthday cake in dark chocolate, trimmed with chocolate roses – a shade lighter – and adorned with twenty-nine blazing candles? And could you please arrange for several members of the wait staff to assemble around us and sing Happy Birthday, with gusto and reverence, simultaneously?

Denise, the dinners look lovely.

And again, thank you, Denise.

Denise
(Standing and hovering, wide-eyed and visibly trembling)
Oh. Am I that easy to read? I may as well cry then right here and now.
My baby son was kidnapped last night. This morning, my beloved mother was run over by a train before she passed on the secret family recipe for her blue ribbon apple pie, and my balladeer husband ruined all of us with his gambling, drinking, and fee landering. The only silver lining is that he is out of my life for good. I think I need a drink.(pulls a chair up to the table and pours herself a glass of the house red. Dabbing her teary eyes with the corner of her serviette and turning to Women #2, Denise adds)

Oh – and dear, a very happy birthday to you! I hope I look as good as you do now when I am 29. And while you are in town, I hope you catch a show or two.

The Yellow Robe (Part I), Faith

2005-10-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment, 5 October 2005
"I felt the consecration of its loneliness." - from Jane Eyre

A ten-year old girl hooked her thick eye glasses over one of the metal spokes on the underside of the beach umbrella. She memorized the colors of her cousins’ bathing suits and ran after them towards the ocean. As always, her father had draped his screaming yellow beach robe over the top of the umbrella.

Moments later, after breaking through the white foam of a big wave, she realized that her cousins and their bathing suits had already melted into the folds of loud children playing and shouting in the ocean. She was alone.

Standing waist deep in the cool ocean water, hands shading her eyes, she searched the shoreline. All of the buildings behind the boardwalk looked pretty much the same – a stretch of white and pink rectangles and squares. She squinted and peered, looking for the beach umbrella that was draped with her father’s yellow beach robe.

“Where was it?” She had made a mental note of its location when her family had established a beach head that morning. Usually, that extra checking was enough to guide her. However, it didn’t look as if it would be enough this time. This time, she had lost track of her cousins, too

Hopefully, she thought that maybe they would lunge up out of the next wave. Then, she would recognize their shouts of glee and look in their direction and identify their colors.

But there were no familiar shouts of glee or familiar colors. With heart pounding, she covered her left eye – the weaker eye – to better focus. Her view changed from a complete blur of colors to a more focused blend, enough to allow her to distinguish individual colors. Out of the bewildering patchwork of a public beach, she was able to make out the screaming yellow smudge flagging her family’s location.

She was safe again, and no one would know that she ever felt otherwise.

The Treasure

2005-05-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 25 May 2005
A story sandwiched between a random sentence from two books. I used Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
\

THE TREASURE
“Not at the station, at Plastunov’s, at the inn, it’s a way station, too.”

It was a dark and dreary winter night and we had a week to covertly transport the treasure from Casca across the continent to Trevi. Stella knew that it was important to stay hidden from the robbers and that robbers hung out near way stations – making travelers who stopped there easy prey.

Discovering the treasure was such an intense twisting and turning of events. Where to begin? I’ll begin with Stella (that’s me) and my friends. We lived in the dreary streets and alleys of Casca. We were, what you call, pretty low profile. Only the police noticed us.

Several years ago, we befriended Rosie when she wandered into our life and made it better. Petit, wizened, and gray Rosie always hid behind sections of greasy, gray streaked strands of hair. She never ever parted with the plastic shopping bag, the color of Dijon mustard except for the green and blue flowers covering it, slung over her good shoulder. Somehow Rosie knew exactly where the police would be, when they would be there, what they were or were not allowed to do, and how we could talk with them so that they left us pretty much alone. We exchanged cell phone numbers and always alerted each other of police-on-the horizon.

Late last night, at one of our regular head counts, we found Rosie dead and frozen in a recessed side entrance to the Cia’s department store. She was curled tightly in a corner for warmth, her knees tucked under her chin. Her gnarled hands clutched the plastic bag, still on her good shoulder, in a death grip. Believe me, it was no easy task to get that bag away from Rosie so that we could see what was inside. We were disappointed.

All we saw was a bundle cocooned with layers of ragged gray cotton and linen like the tattered clothes Rosie always wore. Although it was tempting, we did not scatter to search out heat vents. We blew on our hands for warmth, wrapped our clothes around us even more tightly, and peeled off the layers of cloth swathing Rosie’s bundle. We started to feel packets of bills; lots of packets of bills. We were amazed. We were freezing, too. Our fingers were cracking from the cold and we could not feel our brilliant red noses and ears. We moved our investigation to the closest, best sheltered, and least policed heat vent.

There were 27 bundles of ten $1,000 bills each wrapped with soiled white paper. And there was a note from Rosie. She wanted us to take the money to her old orphanage in Trevi. All of it except what we would need to spend to transport it and to buy ourselves warm clothes, new shopping carts, and medical insurance.

I edged a cell phone from under the torn lining in my jacket sleeve, called information, and got the number for the only orphanage in Trevi. I spoke with the Sister Superior of the orphanage, told her that we were coming, why we were coming, and that she could expect us in about a week. You know what she said?

“Dear Lord, she begged, Make us poor again the way we were when we founded this town so that you will not collect for this squandering in life.”

The Yellow Robe (Part II)

2004-12-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment, 30 December 2004
An experience with water

In my old neighborhood, I held the record for holding my breath longest. My best times were clocked underwater in the bathtub at home. It was a big deal to me, like when I showed off my few really fancy moves in ice skating. That is, until I spun out of control and cracked my skull on the ice. The seizures began soon afterwards and it was the end of show-off ice skating for me.

This particular afternoon in my new neighborhood was warm and sunny. The sky was blue and dotted lazily with puffy clouds. I was fourteen. My family and I had just moved and this was our first day at the town swimming pool. Everyone was poolside.

Bright towels quilted strips of lawn everywhere. The flat area was for families. The sloping lawn was reserved for the bikini-clad “clickers” – the most popular teenagers. A stockade fence kept everything in place, inside and apart from the houses, trains, and roads.

There I was, the new kid – wearing a blue one piece bathing suit, trying to fit in. I was holding my breath; feet waving in the water, eyes stinging from chlorine, hands groping for the stream of water bubbling into the pool from the bottom, and long brown hair streaming eerily upwards from my head.

Suddenly, the water around me churned crazily and spit out millions of air bubbles. I sensed that a very large object had fallen into the pool. Through the distorted water, I saw not an object, but thin white legs and billowing yellow cloth.

My father had jumped into the pool fully dressed in his long yellow terry cloth robe, CIA-style black sunglasses, large-brimmed straw hat that looked like a sombrero with tentacles, and worn black flip flops. He grabbed me with one hand and pulled me sputtering into the air. I was mortified.

A split second later, when I could stand upright in the pool on my own two feet, I demanded, “Why did you do that?” He told me he thought I was having another grand mal seizure.

He was just trying to save my life; but I doubt that anyone at the pool would remember it that way.