Good Girl!

And Wonders Will Meet Us

By A.E. Bayne

The journey remains today,
our minds less on goods than
last, last, last.
This nation’s standing unpleasant
time has passed.
We be
the state of the economy.

We are not undiminished standing interests,
or passed off goods;
No work needed,
or last picked decisions.

Everywhere, work will build the new lines;
and we will, we will
meet the new soil;
and we will, we will
state the foundation of
rightful wonders and rightful place.

Narrow again we remake the journey.
Prosperous,
we will restore the digital Earth
all bold and standing,
starting,
needing rightful growth.

Our selves restored,
to begin the work of America.

Barometric Pressures

By A.E. Bayne

“Temperatures are hovering in the teens, winds moving out of the southwest at 30 mph. This storm we’re tracking is setting up to be a monster, so we advise people in the viewing area to take precautions when going out in the morning. Stay indoors if you don’t absolutely have to get out in this mess.”

Snow. That’s what Tad the weatherman just predicted, and a lot of it. Tad! What a jerk-off name. Thaddeus is even worse. Thaddeus Van Hoffenberg. I went to school with good ol’ cock- of- the- walk Tad.

“Ptew!”

I spit at the screen. The gelatinous loogie made a slug trail across Tad’s affable face. What an asshole. Every week, end upon end, I’ve watched his bullshit weather reports, craving some continuity, longing for a modicum of accuracy. Is it such an enormous thing to ask for a weather report upon which I can rely; to be told, “Yes, rain tomorrow, a 50% chance of showers in the morning, ending by noon,” and then to actually wake to rain sloshing through my gutters; to whistle while I pull on my Gortex raincoat and unfurl my golf-sized umbrella with the Sunday Times printed on it? I don’t think it is.

I didn’t always feel this way about Tad, truly. Tad was an amiable guy through school, if a bit simple. He was an average Joe, making his way through the daily montage of gossip, teen angst, and jockstrap noogies in the locker room. He and I were even lab partners during our year in chemistry class. When I saw the screen pan over to him while watching the weather last year, my initial thought was one of gleeful surprise; hey, I knew that guy, Tad.

Tad had developed a certain charisma in the years between high school and his career in meteorology. Gone were the wiry glasses and forehead pimples, the too-long pieces of stubble and the mottled cheeks. No, this new Tad was tan and bleach-tipped, with sparkling green eyes and DayGlo dentures. This tad wore Armani and spoke with the crisp accentless dialect of a newscaster. He gestured fluidly to the green screen behind him, flawlessly pointing to Colorado, then Michigan, then Florida. This Tad spoke with authority, the voice of the gods, “The weather tomorrow will be…” And so it was, for a while.

I remember Tad’s first miscalculation last spring because I felt it as keenly as if it had been a personal affront. It was early April and I had plans to go golfing with my father who was battling esophageal cancer. Dad had just come through a second round of chemo in January, and he was gradually feeling steadier on his feet. Instead of wallowing in lethargy on the sofa each day as he had since the chemo ended, he had started to travel around a bit in the house over the past week, moving from room to room with the padded shuffle of his Dearfoams. I thought it might be beneficial to his spirits to take him over to the golf course for a half an hour, drive him around and let him watch me knock a few across the greens. He was up for it, so we flicked Tad’s report on the night before we headed out and hoped for the best. Tad was on our side, for he forecast clear skies and a light crisp breeze to temper the 80 degree day. Dad smiled; I smiled; Tad beamed.

The next morning, light filtered in through the curtains in the kitchen window, projecting a lacy pattern on the countertop to its left. I peeked outside and was satisfied. There were a few stray clouds playing tag across the saturated sky, but none looked a threat. I gathered Dad’s catheter bag and I.V. stand, helped him on with his windbreaker and brown felt fedora, and we made our way out to the car gingerly, tentatively.

We drove in relative silence, only remarking that we lucked out with the weather. Closer to the golf course I shot a wary eye out the window, for the random playful clouds of just an hour before were gathering like gawkers at a crime scene, joining and breaking, then rejoining the fray. Dad noticed my nervous glances and sucked in his breath in disgust.

“Damn,” he cursed.

“Naw, Dad, come on. Tad reported clear skies. They’re just passing clouds. Hey, every cloud and silver linings and all that. Maybe it won’t be so hot.”

Dad nodded furtively, bobbing his head at uneven intervals, his I.V. bag bouncing with each movement.

I pulled up to the front portico of the club and a staff member rolled a wheelchair to the passenger door. After a bit of lifting and positioning, we had the chair, catheter bag, I.V. bag and my father situated. I tilted my head up to the sky to witness grey nimbus clouds blending with the crisp white borders of their cumulus cousins.

“Did the forecast change?” I asked the staff member, Chip.

“Not that I know of,” he said, “Last night they called for clear skies.”

“Who called for clear skies?” I asked.

“Excuse me?” He looked perplexed.

“Who, exactly, called for clear skies last night?” I pointedly stared into his quizzical eyes.

“Um, you know, the guy, the one on the weather.”

He turned to push my father up the wheelchair ramp.

“You mean Tad.”

“What?”

“Tad, the guy, the one on the weather,” I mimicked back.

Chip furrowed his brow, cocked his head and curled his lip, “Um, yeah, that one.”

Tad! I expelled his name like a curse. How could he? He knew my father. He’d been to my house, for god’s sake. How could he come out with such an undeniably wrong forecast? Was this some kind of sick joke? My face grew hot and I hugged my arms tight across my stomach with elbows grasped.

“Let it go,” my father said softly.

Chip waited for me to follow. My father’s pleading gaze pulled me up the ramp to fall in step, and I acquiesced out of respect for his condition.

By the time we rolled Dad across the club’s foyer and into the restaurant that overlooked the outside dining area and greens, large drops had begun to plop onto the flagstone between the stately covered tables. We decided to wait it out for a bit, but my father’s strength waned and he soon asked to go home. It was the last time he left the house until the day the ambulance carried him to the hospital to die.

Now, you could make the case that anyone can make a mistake. Meteorologists are often sketchy at best with their predictive powers. I ask you to consider this though: with all of the technology that backed Tad Van Hoffenberg, how could he have called a perfect day from what turned out to be a 48 hour deluge resulting in mudslides, flooded streets, and downed power lines? What act of God materialized out of the miasma of the cosmos to turn Tad into such a charlatan?

Unfortunately for Tad and everyone in our viewing area, this was only his first of many faulty predictions.

The summer following the golfing disaster, Tad called bright skies and balmy breezes on July 4th. Multitudes gathered at the local soccer fields to watch rockets flare and to barbecue with family and friends. At approximately 8:45 P.M., lightning shot across the sky, first at some distance and then closer, painting the sky a crackle glass finish. The crowd darted across the open fields like mice in lamplight, but the lightning took no prisoners. In just twenty minutes, four people died and ten others were seriously burned by Thor’s wrath. The next day, Tad was back on the television giving an ambiguously technical explanation of the freak storm. Atmospheric conditions right for the event my ass! You made a mistake, Tad! Just admit it.

In September of the same year, Tad showed graph after graph of hurricanes through the ages, explaining that conditions were primed for it to be one of the worst tropical weather seasons in recent history, if not all of recorded history. In fact, he said, the storm center was tracking a behemoth as he spoke. The camera switched to a monitor showing a swirling vortex off the Atlantic coastline, barreling toward Cuba. Tad recommended that people living in coastal areas flock to the stores like so many flamingos and buy all manner of supplies and lumber to barricade their homes and stock their pantries. Lowes and Home Depot sold out of plywood and Duct tape in three days. Grocery store shelves were bare of milk, bread, and eggs. News broadcasters jumped on the lead, sending up-and-coming reporters to the east edge of America to be buffeted by gale-force winds and whipped by sheets of rain and hail. Then, nothing. We waited, holed up in our houses with candles and generators ready. The storm never came.

Tad explained the next day that the storm had decidedly turned north, fickle sea anomaly that it was, and would coast its way up toward Nova Scotia over the course of the next two days. The meteorologists in New England would take it from here. Smile. No worries. Grin. Wow, we really dodged that one. Chuckle.

Lowe’s would not take my plywood back, and the extra milk and eggs I bought with my last $20.00 went bad.

Tad!

I considered that there might be others like me; people who were frustrated by Tad’s ineptitude at weather prognostication. I flew to the Internet, searching for chat rooms with names like “Tad the Big Turd” or “Townies against Tad.” I found only two negative comments about Tad’s weather forecasting: one from a woman who didn’t like the way he pronounced her home town, and another from a viewer who commented on the number of times that Tad used the words “weather event” during a show. While I have to agree that the latter complaint was fair, it didn’t support my vehement feelings of disenfranchisement and injustice in light of what was supposed to be a higher power that was in the know about all things weather related.

Since September, Tad has made a few minor weather faux pas: a miss on a first frost that cost the orange growers millions, a snow shower that turned to rain, and a month of warmer than usual dry weather that contributed to two out of control brush fires. But now, he is back to his old grandiose predictions. A blizzard of the century such as we have not seen in our generation. Snow up to window sills; roads closed for days. Stock up on fire wood. Pull out those old generators from September. Buy the milk; buy the eggs. Bring in your pets. SNOW!

I open my front door and breath deep the winter night. The scent from the moldy, ashen leaves tingles in my nose, and a waxing gibbous bobs high above the trees. There are clouds, streaming in from the distance like smoke from chimneys. Their tendrils are spider legs stroking the sky, crawling forward and pulling the larger front that follows. Tad, could you be on to something? I close the door and consider the alternative. We are all just gods in our own right.

Art Deco Amy

Keeping Up with the Smart Kids (reiterated)

By A.E. Bayne

I am sitting in my assigned spot, in the midst of a six hour seminar on teaching honors level English, in a room filled with years of scholarly intellect and insight. The topic – analyzing poetry at the college level with students who are on track to take AP courses during their senior year in high school. Why am I, an eighth grade teacher, worried about how a twelfth grader might analyze a Shakespearean sonnet or a ballad by Keats? Well, my dear friend, in this day and age it is vital that children be guided through the honors system just as they cope with raging hormones that cause them to act the fool for the rakish boy or comely girl down the hall. That is why I am here, in this scholarly environ, to learn how to move them from knowing to understanding; or, more commonly known as passing the AP English exam with a grade of four or higher during their senior year in high school.

Terribly interesting as this might be, the thing I find most compelling at the moment is the fact that not one of us in this room, no matter how professional or educated we are, is a bit different than when we attended that very same institution. When we are confronted with an overwhelming sense of inferiority among our peers, we defend with tenacity. Consider the question one rather scholarly twelfth grade teacher raises about the definition of antithesis presented by the facilitator.

“Why I thought that antithesis was a negation that presented itself to prove a point, such as, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country’.”

Wherein, the facilitator throws out a term to define this quote that no self-respecting eighth grade teacher would attempt to drill into the noggins of his or her hormonally challenged pupils. And just like that, an eager young teacher from the eleventh grade supports the facilitator’s assertion, giving the classic Miltonian example of antithesis from Paradise Lost, but flubbing it at the end as if she is not quite sure of herself and is terrified to be wrong in the eyes of her peers.

It is in this hesitation that I recognize her insecurity, and acutely feel her painful need to be accepted as a fellow scholar in what should not be a competitive, but rather a collaborative, environment. Here, where we all come to the table with years of schooling and professional development, years of experience and age, in this place that should be as far removed from high school as the cliffs of Dover are from Delaware, I find myself reflecting on the very familiar need to prove oneself as ‘more than’. In this bright, articulate, qualified woman’s very insecure comment lies the true future for these AP, IB, and honors students – a life of fear of making a mistake, fear that one is less than one’s peers, fear of being ‘normal’. I can recognize the desperation in her voice, pushing her to appear better than her peers, her clever dialogue climbing a ladder whose top she cannot see, and I feel pity for our students who are about to embark on this path.

Genus Species Class

Resonating deep between the broken glass trinkets, there sat a bold beauty who flashed no grin at the people walking by in a slow procession beyond the rip in her universe. Her infinitesimal, upturned sensory mechanisms quivered at the pungent bite of designer perfumes rising through the air like humid pockets of putridity. Zap! The scents tingled her spine down to her appendages, tittering fingers that ran to the ends of her nervous system. No way to hide from the bombs of Chanel, Passion, and Beautiful. The temptation had been looming for what seemed like a millennium, nesting itself in her mind the way she nestled into a nourishing meal. It would have been inconceivable if not for her new, stronger legs that had danced readily across the surface toward the brilliant yawn in the darkness – had skittered dreadfully toward a future where she would finally know, positively, what was out there.

Before falling out of her world and into this new enterprise, others had shuffled past her in great lines that ended only at points east and west. Some carried food; others rushed off to the breeding grounds. She felt as if she stood at a juncture that stretched beyond their existence. She faced their swelling rows and the brilliant depth of the opening with her new assortment of body parts and wanted nothing more than to jump into the passing pull of bodies. She fought the inbred need to belong and clambered over them until she was on the other side of the eternal commotion that had, thus far, separated her from another reality.

Pausing to catch her breath, she moved herself in a semi-circle and faced the great juxtaposition of collective stability and cosmic uncertainty. She strode the millimeters to the great chasm in mere seconds, and stood on a precipice of blinding chaos. The movement, the sheer magnitude of the objects that moved beyond that portal, boggled her senses. Like heavenly bodies, they swung past in varying arrays of speed, color, sound, and scent. A strange symphony erupted from their cacophonous mutterings; the timber of their voices rollicked through her body. The variegated spray of pigments at once burned her eyes and opened her mind. What did it all mean? How could this have been just beyond their collective reality and not one of them had ever ventured out to acknowledge it, experience it, or attempt to understand it? Seeking the answers, she meandered her way beyond the edges of darkness and light, out onto the surface of a glass counter top.

After exploring only a few steps, an elegant leg, longer than any she had ever seen, wound itself around her midsection as if to pull her into an intimate dance. She turned and attempted to maneuver herself into a position that would allow her to communicate with the owner of such an impressive appendage. After all, where she had come from, the length of one's appendages were a mark of beauty and privilege. Upon turning to face it, she found that the leg was a gossamer thread, detached from body or host, that stretched ten times the length of her own stunted ambulatory means. Fascination gripped her as she moved the entire length of the disembodied leg. To what creature could this exquisite apparatus have once belonged?

As she considered pulling the leg back toward the crevice, for it was quite light,an opaque and solid darkness flew crushingly across the surface of the counter top, grazing her body, shoving her to the ground, and sweeping the unbelievable appendage over the edge of the horizon. Terror melted her as the object slung back across the counter, this time landing to her left only centimeters from where she crouched. Like a vast obelisk, this astoundingly large mass sat stationary, oblivious to the detriment it had placed upon her.

The crevice, mere inches from where she was immobilized, beckoned to her. She darted left, then zipped and zagged around the broken horizon of the counter top. Back, back from whence she came, the giant chasm in the reflective plane before her. To reach it, she would have to stealthily run along the gargantuan monstrosity and fling herself into the cavity, back to the safety of a world she knew. She darted to the side of the monument, rushing with tapping feet along its wall. The chasm was here; she stood on its edge, but could not jump. In her rush, the behemoth at her side had moved ever so slightly and trapped her hind appendage under its massive girth. No matter how she strained at her leg, she could not disengage it from under the weighty monster. A last moment of pressure, of pleasurable understanding, and pain ripped her as she pummeled into her world leaving her own appendage as a token.

Reconciliation Song

Just got back from Baltimore,
Spent the day at the Inner Harbor,
and I heard your message on the machine.

Said she is young, said she is witty;
Ran into her while you were in the city.
It's the first I've heard from you in ages;
what does this all mean?

Now I'll make some time to take that tumble.
Swallow my pride, allow myself to stumble,
because the years keep moving us further
and further from where this plan began.

And it's all right,
oh, it's all right,
to search for that starting point tonight.

Pulled out a box filled with your old letters,
poems, notes, an old college sweater.
I guess I keep them to remind me
of the man that you once were.

We were honest when we were twenty.
Halos rounded us, two bright pennies.
We held each other's futures tight
and marched together into the light.

But now I'll make some time to take that tumble.
Swallow my pride, allow myself to stumble,
as the days keep moving us further and further
from where this plan began.

And it's all right,
Mmmmmm, it's all right,
To search for that starting point tonight.

We had a home once; we had a child.
Another lifetime, a thousand miles;
but I can't say that these years apart
have been that sad.

Our lives are twined growing ever longer.
Don't know you lately, but once I knew you;
would be grateful to feel that close and trust you once again.

For now I'll make some time to take that tumble.
Swallow my pride, allow myself to stumble,
as we keep moving further and further
from where this plan began.

So it's all right,
Yes, it's all right,
to search for a starting point tonight.

Trees at Dusk

Now the day is done
and the moon rides high,
and I feel just like a shadow
racing after twilight
facing the night.

I'll lose myself
like I lost you,

and I feel just like a shadow
chasing twilight.