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Memories

Merchants and Masterpieces

Sticking Together

Excerpted from When Grief Calls Forth the Healing

In our double carriage with Pat, Central Park, 1940.

In our double carriage with Pat,
Central Park, 1940.

“We get out now. See bears!” Michael’s eyes gleam in his small, round face.

“Not today,” Pat replies, no allowing in her voice. “I’ve told you, not until we reach the playground. We’re just walking through the zoo.”

“Now!” I echo Michael and throw my mittens out of the carriage.

Michael looks at me, then at his mittens. He pulls them off and throws them, too. We giggle and begin to pull at our woolen hats.

Growing Pains

audio_iconExcerpted from When Grief Calls Forth the Healing

Photo by Ilse Bing, 1945

Photo by Ilse Bing, 1945

Michael has “growing pains.” That’s what Mother calls them. They come mostly in his legs. He is small for his age. I know Mother and Pat are worried he won’t grow—I heard them talking about sending him to a doctor. Maybe Geedie’s bones are trying hard to stretch and get bigger, and all that stretching is what hurts.

House Fire

Excerpted from When Grief Calls Forth the Healing

“Let’s play with our dolls,” I say to Michael. “Where are their beds?”

Michael pulls them from the toy box under the window in our bedroom, and I pick up the falling mattresses and the little pillows. We search among the toys for the quilts.

I have a girl doll, and Michael, a boy doll. His has short pants, mine a skirt. The boy’s hair is blond, the girl has brown braids. Their hats are the same. Both dolls’ clothes are made of green and red plaid. Pat says they are Scotch. We’ve named them Mary and Michael. We play with the dolls a lot and put them to bed at night.

Treasured Find

Excerpted from When Grief Calls Forth the Healing

Photo by Michael C. Rockefeller

Photo by Michael C. Rockefeller

Bill and I moved back to New York City, spending two years in a beautiful apartment belonging to a cousin, which overlooked Central Park. Before we moved in, we stayed for a week in my old home in Pocantico Hills while I packed my things left from my life before my marriage. Throwing out old papers from my desk drawers, I found a brown envelope marked with Michael’s name in his handwriting. Inside was a beautiful photograph he had taken of a screen door with two small lizards on it; one on one side of the screen and one on the other side—two lizards trying to reach each other separated by an impenetrable barrier.

That night I had a dream:
I am tiny; I’m trying to follow the little lizard and his voice up and down the hills and valleys of the Quonset hut’s corrugated tin wall. I cannot keep up. The high, twittering voice fades and drowns out in the wind—the waves of tin become the ocean—I cannot swim . . .



© 2014 Mary R. Morgan