One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] Read Online Free PDF Page B

In the stands were Lyndon Baines Johnson, George Herbert Walker Bush, and the reigning Richard Milhous Nixon, and one row back, a pair of trademark black-rims. The Very Reverend Billy Graham prayed over all. The field was all-white.
William Jefferson Clinton listened on shortwave from Oxford.
But the band didn’t play “Dixie.”
Come again.
Only that the band didn’t play “Dixie.”
Just a few days into the draft lottery. A few days after the Peace with Justice Resolution. [Peace with Justice for whom do you think.]
Clinton drew #311. [But he was already 1-A.]
Same day the Big Bear set off a nuclear test and the Stones played at Altamont. [It was the end of something was it not.]
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HER FRIEND BIRDIE: She was never a whiner or complainer. She might rage for a minute in the most colorful language and then that was that. Back to the more interesting conversation she preferred.
Did she have a priest at the end.
I had to tell her that I thought a priest would enter at his own peril.
Hahahahahaha, Birdie wrote back.
BIRDIE: I did not see her again after she crossed over.
This was when the hotdog wagon doubled as a whorehouse on wheels.
[Picture that if you can.]
Temperatures are in the 90s even after a shower.
The threat is coming.
This belonged to her mother. Though she had no memory
of the woman and she may have never worn it. And this,
her father’s. In his vest
when he fell, draft of a poem in the hand
of one Thomas Merton to one grey-eyed nurse, M,
his midsummer secret.
These were the pictures on one shelf in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment [from books or newspapers or postcards]. In one frame, from left to right: Wilde, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Blake, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Proust—her gang of guy scribes.
On the same shelf: a clipping of the four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing; pictures of Malcolm X, Trotsky, Castro in 1959; a Palestinian killed in Gaza, an AP image from the Louisville Courier of the last day of the Vietnam War [a picture I borrowed from V to use on the cover of the first edition of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by the poet Frank Stanford].
Two family photos, one of her father, a prominent [besotted] lawyer who headed up the regional immigration bureau. And one of Wordan who worked on the family farm and moved with them to Louisville. He left once and moved to East St. Louis. His wife was murdered there. He was alone again. Wordan came back.
It was a lonely childhood to say the least. Mother dead. Stepmother removed. Father more remote. Grandmother severe. And Wordan, sole companion to the little blond girl. He was not Mr. Bojangles. She was not Shirley Temple.
RETIRED WELDING TEACHER at the Colonel’s: My brother had an injustice done to him. He was wrongfully accused. Wrongfully charged. Wrongfully prosecuted. Convicted. My brother was innocent. And that wasn’t the worst. They knew. They knew it all along. But he was out there. He had a little old job delivering groceries. He was on his bicycle. Sacks in the basket when they picked him up.
This boy and this girl were caught kissing. Caught by an uncle who screamed rape. And the first young man the police saw on their side of town—my brother, pedaling his bicycle, they picked him up. They picked him up. Kicked. Clubbed. Cuffed. Charged. Convicted him. Just like that. The girl never took the stand. She was never in the courtroom. Her uncle. We don’t know what he did to her. We just know what he caused done to my brother.
THE BROTHER TO WHOM A CERTAIN INJUSTICE WAS DONE [who lives in Reno]: One night after the conviction, the police let me go in the middle of the night. Just like that. I showed up on Mother’s porch. The police told me to get out of town before dawn. So the family pitched in and bought me a one-way ticket to San Francisco and I went. Believe you me, I went.
How did you feel when you first saw those golden gates.
You got me there.
People wore purple pants.
Come again.
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