here it is:
http://saphiza.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/39/

Bob shared a small island in Canada, just outside of Espanola Ontario, with the Desanti’s — an Italian-Canadian family. On it was a small log cabin, a dock, an ice house, and an outhouse — all built by my father and Aldo, the patriarch of the Desanti family.

Amelia Desanti made spaghetti by hand, and would hang it to dry next to the cabin’s wood-burning iron stove, on wooden towel racks. Her homemade spaghetti was always the departing meal when we returned to the states. I was always so sad to leave.

We went to that Island twice yearly in our wooden fishing boat, the beginning and end of summer, carefully navigating the rocky narrows through a ten-mile chain of beautiful lakes. We embarked from a small wilderness outpost called Leyman’s Landing — 15 miles of rocky dirt road from Esponola.

I loved that island, and I loved my adoptive father. He taught me well how to fish. I cried when he died.

http://freckledwriter.blogspot.com/2009/08/liturgy.html

Apologies for the late commenting, but I was in Missouri/Illinois/Indiana on Thursday without Internet. Hurrah!

http://namingconstellations.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/indecisions/

Thanks for explaining about the comments. I read your Torah poem, Interesting.

Marianv

Perry Street was not what I set out to write in response to the prompt. The first 4 stanzas were focused at the prompt, but I got stuck. In breaking through the block, the door opened onto the darkness that is always nearby – and mostly kept at bay. But this night I stepped through and there was no going back… demon-driven free verse.

And yes, I loved party lines — frustrating at times, but fun. Our first phone number was JAckson 2738. My very earliest childhood on tree-lined small-town Perry Street remains a sweet oasis.

We had them at our lake house, which was actually a trailer. But my mother insisted we call it a mobile home, because we were classy.

Then eventually it was a house, because — long story long — my father sold the trailer and went into a terrible depressive funk, so my rich great aunt Gladys — who had raised my father when his parents gave him away to her during the Great Depression (but kept their other son, the effeminate one they dressed like a girl) — bought the house for him to cheer him up.

He’s the reason she was rich, after all, having used his business acumen to help her invest her oil money wisely. So the house seemed like a reasonable enough gift, and it made my father happy.

It made all of us happy until, while he was docking his boat on a trip he’d taken alone, he cut a deep gash in his hand that spanned his palm from index finger to wrist. It was his last trip to the lake before his heart attack killed him later that year.

He made it back up to the house to call out on the party line, blood spilled like blackstrap molasses all over the side table where the phone sat and even on the nicotine-stained off-white chair next to the table. My mother and I didn’t come across the blood until years later, when we worked up the courage to go back to that house. Neither of us could bear the thought of being there without him.

Or the lake without him on it, pissing in the water and listening to eight tracks of Barbara Mandrell. He always loved the female country singers, and sometimes I wondered about his motives. He couldn’t resist the looks of a beautiful woman. I wondered what he wanted to do with Crystal Gayle’s miles of dark hair.

To his credit, he was offended by that one talentless Mandrell sister, Irlene, the attractive one who couldn’t sing. He grumbled about her every time “Barbara Mandrell and The Mandrell Sisters” was on TV. Irlene didn’t have the talent of Barbara and Louise, he would say. She didn’t deserve to be on the show. Though he loved attractive women, he hated to see women getting something based solely on their looks or building their lives around their looks at the exclusion of creative and intellectual attributes.

He also once stormed out of a room, as angry as I’d ever seen him, when the main character in the movie Silkwood was portrayed as flashing her male co-workers. That wasn’t her, he said. That isn’t the way she would have behaved. He refused to watch the rest of the movie. He was especially protective of Karen Silkwood because she was from Oklahoma, just like him. Like us. You could measure his level of anger by how hard he slung ice into his glass when pouring an anger-management cocktail. Nearly broke the glass that day.

I loved that scene in Silkwood. That was the difference between me and my father. I wanted to be Karen Silkwood because of that scene, without the death: brave enough to lift my shirt and expose my soft, bodily armor to shut unkind men, or even women, up when warranted.

My father had this same ferocity when it came to my mother’s character. He would have laid down his life for it. He saved her from her demented family, from the brother-in-law who molested her when he was in his 30s and she was just 14 and from a mother who chased her with an axe. He refused to have her be part of that life, a refusal she welcomed.

But he also imposed on her his idea of what a woman of character should be and do. That imposition limited and shaped her — too many voices on her party line, their lines crossing in her head, nothing decipherable in the end.

My father loved Willy Nelson, too, though I don’t remember him listening to Willy on the lake. He did listen to Woody Guthrie. I liked to run my fingers along the eight track’s label, which showed Woody holding a guitar. I would pretend I was related to someone like him, someone talented and famous. Someone with better things to do than play Yahtzee later with parents who were listing into evening, drunker and drunker as twilight strummed its diminished chords until the refrain of darkness.

When my mother and I finally did go back to the lake after my father’s death, there was his blood, not unlike a crime scene. Evidence he’d lived, once. That he was alive and fragile and capable of being damaged as well as healed. I imagined how a lesser man, once he wasn’t able to get anyone on the party line, might not have made it out the door and to the car.

Might not have managed to drive himself one-handed down the gravel roads all the way to The Corner Store, which was, appropriately, located on a corner. (They don’t pull punches in the country: They tell it like it is.)

Another man, another husband and father, might not have convinced the store’s owner to take him the rest of the way to the hospital where he would be stitched up and returned to us, as crisp and precious as a $2 bill.