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2007-11-22T23:11:00.001-08:00

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2007-11-15T20:52:00.001-08:00

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2007-11-12T02:04:00.002-08:00

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The Pilgrims - Charles Kaufmann

2007-11-12T01:54:00.001-08:00

Even after just one night, John could tell he would not like the night nurse. She was thin. Her skin was leathery, her hands rough. Her voice was gravelly. She was an unhappy sort of person. She didn't like her job. Moreover, John didn't feel much like cooperating with her.
Taking up residence in this - what was it? Loony house? - hadn't been his idea, but he guessed he'd put up with it. He assumed there was reason behind his moving in, and he'd simply have to trust his son. He supposed this was the right place for him. He imagined he wouldn't be here long.
The morning nurse, a big, jovial woman, was very pleasant, though. And there was something else that was pleasant about the place. Separating the slats of the horizontal blinds of the one window in his room, peering out, he said to his son, "Did you see the Pilgrims?"
"What, Dad?" His son was unpacking books from a cardboard box, aligning them in neatly ordered rows on shelves.
"The Pilgrims," he said, again. John was a physicist. He believed in scientific method - phenomena were explainable. Increasingly, though, he found himself dealing with remarkable thoughts that, if true, demanded a new sort of logic. He turned to his son and repeated what he believed was one of these new, strange, self-evident truths: "There is a family of Pilgrims living in a little house just outside my window, at the top of the meadow, just at the edge of the woods."
His son pretended - at least - to take a careful look. He joined his father at the window, squinted through the space between the slats. He furrowed his brow with the quizzical, appropriately-concerned expression John was seeing more and more of, and said, "I don't see any woods back there, Dad. What I see is the parking lot, and the service road. There's the U-Haul I rented to move your things. A large, green Dumpster. A couple of the maintenance folks. I see asphalt - lots of it. But, no meadow, no woods, no Pilgrims."
His son seemed to be taking his father's oddness very pleasantly. He supposed he, too, would have to resort to pleasantness whenever he found himself at the dead end of an illogical thought.

*

John didn't tell everyone about the Pilgrims. Not the chronically perplexed old woman across the hall, who kept asking, "Where am I?" and, "Will you please take me home, now?" She was a little batty. Poor woman. No answer to that question, now, not in this place.
John didn't tell the night nurse, who was not kind when it came to needles. Oh, how a needle could hurt in her hands.
"You aren't taking your medication," she said to John.
"I've had enough, thank you." Rebelliousness would get him into trouble with this one. But how would he know if she were giving him the correct dosage? The proper prescription? For such a thin woman, she was as strong as a bear. John's thin frame was no match for her, and her needles left large red and blue bruises on his arms and thighs.

It was childish nonsense - the chimerae of frazzled ganglia, or the unadvertised side effect of an anti-psychotic drug - but over the course of the summer, John and the Pilgrims became friends. John would have found comfort in the duplication of these visions by a witness, in the customary manner of peer review. John made sure to ask first thing each time his son visited: "Do you see the Pilgrims out there?" He'd repeat the question two or three times, even after the son had replied, "I don't see anything, Dad," because this was a very important question: "Do you see the Pilgrims?" and "Are you sure you can't see the Pilgrims?"
Behind the window was a meadow with tall, lush grass, and wildflowers. There was a narrow dirt path that led directly through the meadow to the door of a quaint-looking house built at the edge of the woods. This was where the Pilgrim family lived: father, mother and young boy. John watched them daily.
The boy's hair was light brown and cut very short. His shirt and pants were made of coarse fabric. Usually, in the morning, barefoot, the boy followed the cow into the meadow, disappeared beyond John's view, and did not return until dusk. The father wore a tall, black Pilgrim hat with a silver buckle. At the evening meal, and afterwards, he sang songs to the family. The mother seemed too young and too frail. She had a habit of taking a hand and brushing away the strand or two of rusty hair that refused to be confined under her white bonnet. She seemed gentle, yet indefatigably determined to survive. She was a good wife. They were good people.

-end of extract; read more! at http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/

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"I've had enough, thank you." Rebelliousness would get him into trouble with this one. But how would he know if she were giving him the correct dosage? The proper prescription? For such a thin woman, she was as strong as a bear. John's thin frame was no match for her, and her needles left large red and blue bruises on his arms and thighs.

BOLD, STRONG, UNDERLINE, ITALICS, EM & NORMAL. (:

Plagarism

2007-11-09T20:56:00.001-08:00

The "Great Depression" was a time of unprecedented despair. After the 1929 stock market crash, America (and many other countries) endured long, trying years of economic downturn, lost fortunes (the link is a picture of the stock exchange floor just after the crash), and personal tragedies.

People were uprooted when out-of-work families packed up everything they owned and moved to California. By 1932, the worst year of the depression (follow the link to see the dramatic downturn in U.S. rates of production), nearly 25% of the American work force was unemployed. Without means of transportation, people had to walk miles just to see their families. Living in squatter’s camps (called “Hoovervilles”), dislocated families tried to stay together.

In other parts of the country, men left their families “at home” while they went to the industrial north to find work. Their “bachelor cabins” were nothing more than shanty towns. But there was also “No Work” for people in the north. The bustling docks of New York City were quiet.

Before the days of the FDR along the East River, and the Westside Parkway along the Hudson, an artist (like Russian emigre Raphael Soyer) could walk to the water’s edge where he drew images of human hopelessness. Employment agencies in New York City were inundated with applications from well-dressed, out-of-work people. The “land of plenty” had become the land of hard times.