Volcanoes Erupting
Feelings…
…unacknowledged since childhood
are erupting
like open wounds
not properly cleansed with antiseptic.
Mourning my losses
resolving my fears
become the purpose of each day.
Emotional scars
ignored too long,
forgotten,
locked away
deep in ones’ subconscious,
not dealt with,
stuffed so deep
one hardly remembers…
…becomes the molten lava,
expanding from inside out,
ultimately,
irrevocably,
pushing away
all those relationships
that finally come to us
with open arms.
All rights reserved. ©2009 by Sara Fryd
Thanksgiving
These wonderful pictures are by Tanja Askani. Enjoy and have a beautiful Thanksgiving.
Nothing to Prove
You had nothing to prove
To me…
It was love at first sight
How could you not love that face
Blond hair, piercing blue eyes, wearing red
Be still my heart…
Wrote you a poem on your birthday
Which I left amongst the papers
On that big desk
“The biggest desk in the building,”
You reminded me smiling.
“Bigger than the President’s!”
Another story, another lunch
In a yellow bug convertible with the top down
I thought…
I was the luckiest girl in Orange County
You wore your new black cashmere coat
You kept on the special wooden hanger
On the back of the door.
You always thought you had something to prove
Not to me, though to yourself
To feel you had finally arrived.
The need to climb Mt Everest
And you did, and you have
You have proved it all
Said goodbye to the naysayer forever
Just so you know
You never had to prove anything
Not to me…
I always wanted to call you Jimmy
Though I always called you Jim.
All rights reserved. ©2009 by Sara Fryd
The Coincidental Cricket
Written by Sara Fryd / Illustrations by Emily Tran
“Papa, there’s a spider in the bathroom,” screamed the little boy! I’m too little to catch it. Come quick! I can’t take a bath. I’m too scared.”
Papa walked down the hall with a plastic container to fetch the spider and toss him out in the garden where he belonged. He didn’t like spiders much; however, they were one of God’s creatures and had their place here on earth like everyone else.
“I don’t like spiders, although, I am very fond of crickets,” Papa said. And Erez came running up the hall to the living room clearly jumping for
~ J O Y !!!!
He had heard Papa’s stories hundreds of times and couldn’t wait to hear them again. “Papa tell me the story again”, Erez said while climbing into Papa’s lap chattering non-stop like most 5-year olds. “Tell me the story again, please, please. Another story about the Israeli Army where you guarded missiles, with bird names in the North. Can I serve in the Israeli Army when I’m old enough? Please, Papa please.”
“That will depend on the Israeli Defense Forces,” Papa winked.
Sitting in his favorite big chair, Papa made a face while scratching his beard, “Okay, I’ll continue if you promise to go take your bath and climb into bed as soon as we are finished. Mama is very tired after a long day at work, so we have to help out tonight.”
“Yes, yes,” Erez responded immediately. His dark eyes lit up like fireflies in summer in the mid-western USA from where Papa had emigrated after high school with his family. He bounced on Papa’s lap till he found that comfortable familiar place to curl up in.
“Me too, me too, giggled Libby. How come he always gets to sit on your lap and hear stories and I don’t? I’m almost 5, she smiled! That radiant little girl smile that manages to throw darts at a father’s heart; usually getting little girls what they want every time.
“I don’t like spiders very much…although…I am very fond of crickets”, Papa began. “And here’s why”, he continued. “Wouldn’t you know the Israeli Army always sent me North in the winter and South in the summer, until I transferred to a research & development library in Tel Aviv.”
“Occasionally, I was assigned to guard a Hawk missile site near Safed. Every night a cricket would keep me company. He would chirp, chirp, chirp by rubbing his legs together. And I would not feel so alone out there in the dark all by myself when I was only nineteen.”
“I named the cricket “Coincident.” For with all the creatures Hashem could have sent me to keep me company, why did he send me a noisy cricket to keep me up when I’d rather be taking a nap. After all, what on earth did I need a cricket for when I had an Uzi?” Papa winked.
Then wrinkling his brow for effect, with two enthralled children sitting in his lap, he continued, “One particularly dark, almost moon less night, I was on guard duty alone, when suddenly…(Papa’s voice got really low and both children jumped), my friend the especially noisy cricket “Coincident” stopped chirping.
I looked at the area on the far side of the cricket and saw a wild cat approaching me. This cat was about the size of a Florida bobcat. Almost the size of a small lion. Big enough to eat me in one gulp! I didn’t want to fire my Uzi at one of Hashem’s creatures, so I picked up a fist-sized rock and I threw it hard to the ground just left of the bobcat, which ran away very fast towards the Northeast. Out of sight of the cricket and far away from Papa, Baruch Hashem (Bless God)! And I’ve been fond of crickets ever since, though I still don’t like spiders very much.”
“Tell it again, tell it again,” the children shouted falling off of Papa’s lap. Libby grabbing the beard to keep from slipping too far.
“Maybe tomorrow night. Right now it’s bath time and there are no spiders in the bathroom, so no more excuses,” Papa explained detaching his beard from one little girl’s fingers and placing her on the floor with one deft hand.
And two ecstatic children raced each other down the hall laughing till Papa could hear the water splashing; warmly watching while leaning against the wall with a smile that remembered, “The sounds of crickets still make me smile, though the sounds of my children…well, we’ll just have to save that for another bedtime story.”
All rights reserved. ©2009 by Sara Fryd
Yartzeit for John
A generation of hearts
Died with you November 22, 1963.
All these years have passed
I close my eyes
I hear the radio playing
In the Phoenix College cafeteria
Two thousand students eating lunch
Deathly silence, only hushed weeping
Walter Cronkite barely whispering
Incredulous “The President is dead…”
I don’t remember the rest
Maybe if I keep breathing the tears will stop
Maybe if I keep moving my feet
I will find my way through the parking lot
I will find my car, find my way home.
Where is my car?
Where is my home?
What has happened to my world of hope,
Of possibilities?
What has happened to my joyous country?
The generation who believed…
Believed that we could make a difference
Had our dreams, our lives, our hopes shattered
Buried along with you in Arlington
And nothing much has seemed familiar
Since the world stopped spinning in 1963.
All rights reserved. ©2009 by Sara Fryd
I Saw a Mountain
I Saw a Mountain
© by Moses Schulstein
I saw a mountain
Higher than Mt. Blanc
And more Holy than the Mountain of Sinai.
Not in a dream. It was real.
On this world this mountain stood.
Such a mountain I saw–of Jewish shoes in Majdanek.
Such a mountain–such a mountain I saw.
And suddenly, a strange thing happened.
The mountain moved….
And the thousands of shoes arranged themselves
By size–by pairs—and in rows–and moved.
Hear! Hear the march.
Hear the shuffle of shoes left behind—that which remained.
From small, from large, from each and every one.
Make way for the rows–for the pairs,
For the generations–for the years.
The shoe army–it moves and moves.
“We are the shoes , we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam.
And because we are only made of stuff and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.
We shoes–that used to go strolling in the market
Or with the bride and groom to the chuppah,
We shoes from simple Jews, from butchers and carpenters,
From crocheted booties of babies just beginning to walk and go
On happy occasions, weddings, and even until the time
Of giving birth, to a dance, to exciting places to life…
Or quietly–to a funeral.
Unceasingly we go. We tramp.
The hangman never had the chance to snatch us into his
Sack of loot–now we go to him.
Let everyone hear the steps, which flow as tears,
The steps that measure out the judgment.”
I saw a mountain
Higher than Mt. Blanc
And more Holy than the Mountain of Sinai.
Shades of Blue
Remembering shades of blue is learning to speak the truth and writing in a universal language. As I often felt my singular biggest problem has been – being misunderstood. I get furious because I assume that other people know what I mean when I say something and they don’t. Then I conjure up they are intentionally giving me a hard time because it’s much more enjoyable to be difficult than to attempt to understand what I’m saying. In other words, they’re giving me a hard time on purpose.
Heaven forbid that I might be communicating in a manner that is frustrating to them or they really do not know what I mean. Or that I’m doing my usual going in eighteen verbal directions at once, always knowing where I am, but seeing in their eyes that they are lost. How can my family members not know, when I’m perfectly clear and intelligent? Huh? After all they’ve know me forever, right?
It’s Saturday morning in Long Beach where you can find me painting yet another wall in my dinning room of the 1932 California bungalow house I love with the red oak floors and fifty year old rose bushes. I’m a nester and have been since I became an adult. All those early childhood years in a refugee camp took there toll on me. Having a special home to live in is about the most important thing on this earth to me.
I love painting, arranging, decorating, and have only recently given up hanging wallpaper. Mostly because I could have taken an African Safari or a trip to Paris for what I spent in the Laura Ashley store at South Coast Plaza for twelve years.
It’s the mid-eighties and once again I am revising the color of the dining room. What with Josh’s Bar Mitzvah taking place at the end of summer, the dining room with wanes coating dividing every wall that used to be duck egg blue with two tone striped wallpaper, will become the hot new style Country French in Wedgwood blue. Everybody is coming to the Bar Mitzvah and I want to show off my beautiful house, changing my mind yet again from two tone stripes to two toned flowers.
Personally, I was the profit margin for Laura Ashley, Ralph Lauren, and Home Depot. Their stock dropped considerably when I left Los Angeles in 1992. Saturdays were spent painting and Sunday mornings were spent at Home Depot finding a new project for the following week. If not for me these stores would go bankrupt for sure. Look at that, I’m helping the American economy all by myself. I am a heroine. An exhausted one as I work full time driving an hour each way to and from work on the LA freeways, but a heroine nevertheless.
“What are you doing,” the voice asks as I pick up the receiver Saturday morning?
“Hi Moishe, I’m painting the dining room.”
“Again,” my brother says incredulous. “What color are you painting it this time?”
“Wedgwood,” I respond.
“What, what the hell color is that,” questions Moishe getting ready to be miffed?
“You know, Wedgwood, the color of the plates.”
“What plates?”
“Wedgwood plates, the ones made in England.”
“Well what color is that,” says Moishe, seriously beginning to lose his patience with my obviously moronic behavior. Obvious to everyone but me.
“Well, it’s a kind of blue-ish gray. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, you know Wedgwood,” shocked that he does not fathom what I mean.
By this point the brother who called to ask me to breakfast would like to put his hands around my throat and squeeze. We do a little more “who’s on first” and I finally say, “It’s a shade of blue!”
“Why didn’t you say so in the beginning,” says Moishe shouting ?
“Because there are 5000 shades of blue,” say I even louder.
“You’re breaking my ear drum, why are you always screaming at me?” says Moishe.
And there is the rub, the dichotomy, the yo-yo. We’re smart, we’re clear. We understand how these 26 letters combine and twist and turn and what they mean. Why we’ve been using them our entire lives. We certainly know what we mean! Don’t we? How can the person standing next to or in front of or on the phone not get it? We even spend thousands of dollars, time and effort going to therapists whining about how we’ve been wronged using even more words, with more meanings.
So the conversation continues for at least thirty minutes with each of us batting the badminton back and forth across the airwaves for one to whack back to the other with each return louder than the other. All that lost energy and time discussing shades of blue when we could have been eating eggs benedict.
All rights reserved. ©2009 by Sara Fryd
The Little Prince teaches “words are the source of all misunderstandings.”
Madagascar
Forty-three feelings of the day arrive
Or fifty-two
In this place in my middle
below my left ventricle
behind, a little to the right,
above my navel
pressed up against my spine.
A place where I know
Antananarivo at Sunset by Steve Evans
just know…
That self pity destroys the perpetrator
Complaining falls on deaf ears, and
Hurting is a contagious disease
you catch yourself
For which…
only you have the vaccine.
As I microscope my evaporating life
that left in a heartbeat
I know that I did not plan,
At least not knowingly,
Much of what happened to me
Yet, I know I did.
While pretending that
I do not have the answers
Refusing to unlock the door to let them in…
And Madagascar is an island
Off the Eastern coast of Africa,
And I can find my way there
Any time I please.
All rights reserved. ©2009 by Sara Fryd
*For Dr. Martin Bravin, a professor, teacher, and friend who passed on. He used to play a game with his students. “Want to change your life? You have three minutes from the time I start the stop watch. One, two, three. What is the capital of Madagascar?” he asked clicking the start button on the watch. “How you play the game is how you run your life.” He also had me read the Estachological Laundry List.
Seattle On Sunday
Are you ever going to see
Or even get to read
All these letters I write to you
On Sunday mornings,
Early…
Before the sun comes out of hiding?
When we should be sharing our bodies
warm and wanting.
S…T…R…E…T…C…H…I…N…G
Like lazy cats on summer days.
All these feelings spilling out on paper
instead of on to you.
Sitting here…
…alone.
Drinking coffee
staring at a gray sky.
Dreaming thoughts of you and me
Sharing our bodies, early
On Sunday mornings
Warm and wanting
hungry…
so hungry…
With thoughts and feelings of you.
Far Away Friends
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