obituary | renay mandel corren

Obituary

Renay Mandel Corren 

El Paso, TX

A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.

 

Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news. In which case have I got news for you: the bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it. This was not good news to Renay Mandel Corren's many surviving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom she even knew and, in her own way, loved. There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, PA, Renay's birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, NC, where Renay's dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, FL, where Renay's parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep. Renay was preceded in death by Don Shula.

 

Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren at the impossible old age of 84 is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent. Often frustrated by the stifling, conservative culture of the South, Renay turned her voracious mind to the home front, becoming a model stay at home parent, a supermom, really, just the perfect PTA lady, volunteer, amateur baker and-AHHAHAA HA! HA! HA! Just kidding, y'all! Renay - Rosie to her friends, and this was a broad who never met a stranger - worked double shifts with Doreen, ate a ton of carbs with Bernie, and could occasionally be stirred to stew some stuffed cabbage for the kids. She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped. At one point in the 1980's, Renay was the 11th or 12th-ranked woman in cribbage in America, and while that could be a lie, it sounds great in print. She also told us she came up with the name for Sunoco, and I choose to believe this, too. Yes, Renay lied a lot. But on the plus side, Renay didn't cook, she didn't clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here's what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said she read them for the articles, but filthy free speech was really Renay's thing. Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot. Renay has been toying with death for a decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova. Covid couldn't kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70's, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60's. Renay was preceded in death by her ex-boyfriend, Larry King. Renay was also sadly preceded in death by her beloved daughter, Cathy Sue Corren Lester Trammel Webster, of Kill Devil Hills, NC, who herself was preceded in death by two marriages, a fudge shop and one eyeball lost in a near-fatal Pepsi bottle incident that will absolutely be explored in future obituaries. Losing her 1-eyed badass b**** of a daughter in 2007 devastated Renay, but it also made her quite homeless, since Cathy pretty much picked up the tab. A talented and gregarious grifter, Renay M. Corren eked out her final years of luxury (she literally retired at 62) under the care, compassion, checking accounts and, evidently, unlimited patience of her favorite son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Lourdes Corren, of world-famous cow sanctuary El Paso, TX. Renay is also survived by her son Jeffrey Corren and his endlessly tolerant wife Shirley, of Powell's Point, NC; Scott Corren, and what's left of his colon, of Hampton, VA; Marc and Laura Corren, the loveliest dirt farmers of Vernon, TX (seriously, where is that); and her favorite son, the gay one who writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy Corren, of - obviously - New York City. Plus two beloved granddogs, Mia and Hudson. Renay was particularly close to and grateful for the lavish attentions of her grandaughter Perla and her great-grandchildren Elijah and Leroy, as well as her constant cruise companions Sam Trammell of Greenville, NC, and Adam Corren of El Paso, TX. Renay took tremendous pride in making 1 gay son and 2 gay grandchildren, Sam Trammell and Adam Corren.

 

There will be a very disrespectful and totally non-denominational memorial on May 10, 2022, most likely at a bowling alley in Fayetteville, NC. The family requests absolutely zero privacy or propriety, none what so ever, and in fact encourages you to spend some government money today on a 1-armed bandit, at the blackjack table or on a cheap cruise to find our inheritance. She spent it all, folks. She left me nothing but these lousy memories. Which I, and my family of 5 brothers and my sister-in-laws, nephews, friends, nieces, neighbors, ex-boyfriends, Larry King's children, who I guess I might be one of, the total strangers who all, to a person, loved and will cherish her. Forever. Please think of the brightly-frocked, frivolous, funny and smart Jewish redhead who is about to grift you, tell you a filthy joke, and for Larry King's sake: LAUGH. Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.

 

RIP RENAY MANDEL CORREN 10 MAY 1937 - 11 DEC 2021

 

Posted online on December 15, 2021

https://www.fayobserver.com/obituaries/m0028451

Published in The Fayetteville Observer, Funerals Today

truffaut | fahrenheit 451 shooting diary

 

apr 13 1950 | ridge theatre grand opening!

     It is not too much to say that the new Ridge theatre, 16th and Arbutus, is the result of a half century of research and inventiveness by the world's foremost designers and architects in cinema art. 

     Situated in the Arbutus Village, a name coined by newspapermen when David and Walter Macfarlane set out to provide a "civic centre" for the new Arbutus Ridge home development, the Ridge has 842 comfortable seats, beautiful design and decoration, a "crying room" for mothers with difficult babies, and a projection room with every conceivable device for for showing good pictures well.

PARKING AREAS

     People who attend will appreciate the extensive arrangements made for parking, and shoppers in the group of modern stores of the Village will make good use of these facilities. Three paved lots, each a block long, are provided, and wide sidewalks, bright lights and attractive stores make this area an attractive adjunct to the Arbutus district of all new homes. 

     Hundreds of imported plants beautify the shopping area and the theatre foyer. The Ridge theatre itself, in the opinion of the owners, has no counterpart in any of Canada's suburban areas.

GIGANTIC MURAL

     Hundreds of feed of mirror, exotic lighted plant arbors, most spacious deep foam-rubber seats and luxurious carpets, a gigantic mural of an arbutus tree, are included.

     Pastel soft leather powder room with mirrors and lunges . . . the new babies' and children's crying room on the colorful mezzanine floor. All the foyer and concourse and theatre interior scintillates with orchid white indirect lighting, and cunningly hidden spots.

     The smooth white stairway in chrome and bleached mahogany set off with entire wall towering sparkling mirror.

     In the brilliantly designed auditorium the very best in newest equipment is installed. The Riddge has had the new Gaumont-Kalee "President" projection equipment installed. These projectors, two of them, are a masterpiece of theatre development. The sensationally new "activated nylon" screen is the only one of its kind in Canada, and is only now being installed in some of the leading showhouses in America. 

     Many hours were spent by the engineers perfecting the sound equipment, and the acoustics are perfect. 

     A handsomely appointed candy bar is located on the foyer, done in mirror, leather, chrome, and gold tinted cedar and mahogany woods.

Feature published in the Vancouver Sun Wednesday, April 12, 1950

Grand opening Thursday, April 13, 1950

photo | kevin clark | medicine hat

 

thomas merton | the hope of results, the fallacy of success

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

pictured: Thomas Merton's hermitage

imperative | scott cairns

The thing to remember is how 

Tentative all of this really is. 

You could wake up dead. 

Or the woman you love 

Could decide you’re ugly. 

Maybe she’ll finally give up 

Trying to ignore the way 

You floss your teeth as you 

Watch television. 

All I’m saying Is that there are no sure things here. 

I mean, you’ll probably wake up alive, 

And she’ll probably keep putting off 

Any actual decision about your looks. 

Could be she’ll be glad your teeth are so clean. 

The morning could be full of all the love and kindness you need. 

Just don’t go thinking you deserve any of it.

tom waits | don't plant your bad days

"Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing." 

Tom Waits

"and where there's doubt..." | the prayer of somebody who's not st. francis

"The anonymous text that is usually called the Prayer of Saint Francis is often associated with the Italian Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1182 – 1226), but entirely absent from his writings. The prayer in its present form has not been traced back further than 1912. Its first known occurrence was in French, in a small spiritual magazine called La Clochette (The Little Bell), published by a Catholic Church organization in Paris named La Ligue de la Sainte-Messe (The League of the Holy Mass). The author's name was not given, although it may have been the founder of La Ligue, Father Esther Bouquerel." 

slightly paraphrased from wikipedia

jeanne murray walker | flight

The angel speeding down the runway pulls up
her wing flaps, and, wouldn't you know it, wobbles, 
then dribbles to a stop. She stands on the windy 
tarmac, embarrassed, brushing her blond hair 
from her eyes, trying to remember how to elevate 
herself, wishing she'd worn jeans instead of 
the girly skirt that looks good when she's flying.   
It's gravity's old malice, showing up in the strangest 
places, now at the corner, where the fortune cookie truck 
forgets how to turn, tipping gracefully, sliding on 
its side as cookies spill into the summer night. 

Then mercy stalls in every precinct of the city 

and we're just bodies, only protoplasm for a wasp 
to sting. Even love is a sad mechanical business then, 
and prayer an accumulation of words I would kill 
to believe in. There's no happy end to a poem
that lacks faith, no way to get out. I could go on, 
mentioning that doubt, no doubt, is a testing. But
meanwhile the bedraggled angel glances towards 
the higher power, wondering how much help she'll get, 
not a manual, for sure, but a pause in entropy perhaps, 
until she can get her wings scissoring. Call it cooperation 
that helps a fledgling rise to build, sustain itself, and 
lift her past the tree line. And then she knows she won't 
fall, oh holy night, can't fall. Anything but. 

shakespeare + st paul | image and imagination

"Christ is the visible image of the invisible God." Colossians 1:15

“And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen 

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name” 

A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare

william least heat moon | when you start feeling good

"You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad."

Blue Highways, pg 51 

photo | redemption center

 

naples, usa

amor towles | the difference between everybody and nobody

   "So," said the Count, "are you looking forward to your visit home?"
   "Yes, it will be nice to see everyone," said Nina. "But when we return to Moscow in January, I shall be starting school."

   "You don't seem very excited by the prospect."

   "I fear it will be dreadfully dull," she admitted, "and positively overrun with children."

   The Count nodded gravely to acknowledge the indisputable likelihood of children in the schoolhouse; then, as he dipped his own spoon into the scoop of strawberry, he noted that he had enjoyed school very much.

   "Everybody tells me that."

   "I loved reading the Odyssey and the Aeneid; and I made some of the finest friends of my life..."

   "Yes, yes," she said with a roll of her eyes. "Everybody tells me that too."

   "Well, sometimes everybody tells you something because it is true."

   "Sometimes," Nina clarified, "everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did everybody write the Odyssey? Did everybody write the Aeneid?" She shook her head then concluded definitively: "The only difference between everybody and nobody is all the shoes."

Amor Towles

from A Gentleman in Moscow

thornton wilder | every good and excellent thing

"Every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for."

the nancy drew mystery game

 

f.h. varley | self-portrait

 

dietrich bonhoeffer | music, friendship, games, happiness

Who is there for instance, in our times, who can devote himself with an easy mind to music, friendship, games, or happiness? Surely not the 'ethical' man, but only the Christian.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

Letters and Papers from Prison (192/193)

luci shaw | no, i'm not hildegarde

I'm merely a floater in the eye of God,
a flake of his winnowed chaff. A twig
from the tree at whose root his ax is laid,
if you believe Luke, and I do. I am a wisp
of the fog that blinds my world this morning. A drop
from a leaking tap. An odd button. A blot.

I'm less than the smallest bone of St. Catherine's
withered fore-finger; in Sienna it's preserved
behind glass and I'm not. I'm a loose tooth.
A hesitation of wind. The lost coin never found.
A river wrinkle come and gone. An eyelash
found by an ant in the dust. A blink.

father thomas hopko | six maxims

Never bring attention to yourself.  

Be an ordinary person.

Do your work, and then forget it.

Be simple, hidden, quiet, and small.  

     (The Holy Fathers say: “If you want to be known by God, 

       seek not to be known by people.”)

Don’t seek or expect praise from anyone or pity from anyone.

Give advice to others only when asked or obligated to do so.

 

Father Thomas Hopko

 

irish signs

 

a letter from little thea | c. 1991

 

g.k. chesterton | saying grace

You say grace before meals.

All right.

But I say grace before the play and the opera,

And grace before I open a book,

And grace before sketching, painting,

Swimming, fencing, walking, playing, dancing;

And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

G.K. Chesterton

From an unpublished poem in Chesterton's notebook, called “A Grace” 

lewis | read them with fear

We ought to read the psalms that curse the oppressor; read them with fear. Who knows what imprecations of the same sort have been uttered against ourselves? What prayers have Red men, and Black, and Brown and Yellow, sent up against us to their gods or sometimes to God Himself? All over the earth the White Man’s offence ‘smells to heaven’: massacres, broken treaties, theft, kidnappings, enslavement, deportation, floggings, beatings-up, rape, insult, mockery, and odious hypocrisy make up that smell. 

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

martha graham to agnes demille

 

susan alexander | three poems about summer jobs

Making Beds with Cordelia at the Avalon Motel in Osoyoos: Summer 1973                                                                      

She could sing Desperado just like Linda Ronstadt.

I showed her hospital corners and how to 

smooth sheets like my mother taught me. 

She didn’t have one – a mom.

 

Thrown out of the house – for nothing 

according to her and I believed her, 

believed the worst of fathers in general, 

temper tantrums, hard hands and drinking. 

 

She wouldn’t talk about him, not a thing,

but I remember something about two bitchy sisters – 

one with a name like venereal disease 

while Cordelia,           

                          she walked right out of a magazine

with her long legs and sort of private smile – 

smart too though she didn’t show off like I did 

or mouth off either. 

                                 I taught her how to

tuck a bedspread under pillows then curve it 

snug like a tight t-shirt. She had the knack. 

 

When she wasn’t around I tried

to talk and dress and wear my hair like her,

be patient with my little niece, be nicer 

than I was or am. 

                             She lived alone 

in our trailer out back of the motel 

beside the slough we called a lake – 

saving up for university she said. 

 

Sometimes after work we’d lie together 

under the walnut tree. I’d play with her hair 

while she read Tess – rich green leaves 

breaking the heat of an Okanagan afternoon. 

 

I always thought she’d get discovered 

like that dairy queen girl, that she’d marry 

a millionaire. 

                       Strange thing is 

 

I was the one who kind of made it in the end,

the one with the house and European holidays. 

But Cordelia,

 

                       she was making her way for awhile, 

then somehow it went bad again – a man, 

some dark angel, following her.

                              *

The Avalon

 

It was a fast food joint on Highway 3 

where it turned into Main Street. 

Picnic tables in the breezeway, Creedence

screaming up around the bend on the jukebox.

No drive-thru windows like today. 

People had to park, get out of their cars.

 

My father was boss, shape-shifted 

from grease monkey in his own garage

to short order cook.  Short temper cook 

more like it. Hotter than burgers sizzling 

on the grill. Hotter than chips in the deep fat fryer. 

Him and his shout and his bottomless rum 

and coke just inside the cooler door. 

 

Scariest thing for me was making 

chicken dinners when he was crazy 

busy and the grill was packed. I’d crank 

up the flames under the pressure cooker

in the back, drop thighs, legs, breasts,

wings, into popping oil then twist 

the metal top on tight as I could.

 

Timing was critical and I was racing 

up front with customers at windows, 

making change with fingers burnt

from bagging burgers. Milkshakes 

whizzed on metal sticks while I erected

dazzling ziggurats of soft ice cream cones. 

 

All the time at the back the pressure 

built. Always I expected the explosion. 

My father’s holler. Flying metal, boiling oil. 

Fast food shrapnel. Casualties.

 

When the cooker’s valves got flipped up,

they screamed like murder, smeared the air 

with steam and grease. I served up impossible 

crispy gold in a cardboard container. 

 

For years I wore burn scars 

on the soft insides of forearms.

They are faded, almost gone. 

So is my father. 

Nowadays summer never gets that hot.

 

                              * 

 

Sorting Cherries

 

We sat in lines on either side 

of the belt’s endless loop. Across from me, 

a woman in her fifties, black hair dull with dye, 

flanked by cronies. She listed infirmities 

as numerous as the cherries rolling by. 

Her hands darted, deft as a lacemaker, 

picked out the split and the bruised. 

 

Beside me, the tough girls I drank 

with in high school. The ones who still smoked, 

who had sex in the back of Camaros 

belonging to boyfriends who worked 

at the mill. Girls who weren’t headed

to university when summer was over.

 

After eight days, the whistle blew for break 

and the belt stopped. I fell off my stool. 

Mesmerized. The foreman moved me 

up the chain. Alone. I pushed boxes of Bings 

around a corner. When that crop was done,

we all got laid off until the next call came.

I never went back. 

 

Some nights before sleep, I see them glide by, 

a stream of profligate hearts. 

premier league mascots

Fred the Red loves a hug with the manager. 

Buzz and Buzzette, giant furry bees, had a surprise when a 38-year-old on his stag joined them in full kit for their match-day rituals three years ago. Bertie Bee once rugby-tackled a naked streaker, who ended up somersaulting to the ground. Harry the Hornet is a cheerful, drum-bashing, man-sized wasp with a predilection for winding up Crystal Palace managers. He has been labelled "out of order" by Sam Allardyce and "disgraceful" by Roy Hodgson. 

Stamford the Lion has looked much happier since the arrival of his female companion, Bridget. Filbert Fox has been to every home match since 1992 but his two erstwhile sidekicks, Vicky Vixen and Cousin Dennis, disappeared together years ago. Hmmmn.  In 1998 the fan who dressed up as Hercules the Lion to entertain the crowd on match days was relieved of his duties following a half-time kerfuffle with a beauty queen. 

Moonchester and Moonbeam surely hail from a place called Blue Moon as they are, yes, blue and, yes, Blue Moon is the club anthem. Unfunny foam creatures have never caught on at Everton, thankfully, but the tradition of a Toffee Lady throwing sweets to the crowd before kick-off is alive and well.

The death of much-loved mascot Kayla the eagle last year was greeted with an outpouring of emotion from fans. Many made donations to her former home at the Eagle Heights sanctuary near Dartford that have helped it to survive the pandemic. 

Sammy the Saint made a name for himself with some dad-dancing in 2012, performing a half-time rendition of Gangnam Style. 

Captain Canary has been rebooted for the 2021-22 season. Thinner, yellower, smilier, he now comes with massive eyebrows. Chirpy Cockerel was remodelled after a more sinister previous look. Remember the dead eyes?

from The Manchester Guardian pre-season team profiles, 2021.

pictured: Fred The Red embracing The Prince of Darkness, Jose Mourinho. Jose has since been sacked and exiled to Italy, while Fred is still going strong.

Mascots and their Homes

Hercules the Lion, Aston Villa

Buzz and Buzzette, Brentford
Bertie Bee, Burnley
Stamford the Lion, Chelsea
Kayla the Eagle, Crystal Palace

The Toffee Lady, Everton
Filbert Fox, Leicester City
Moonchester and Moonbeam, Manchester City
Fred the Red, Manchester United
Captain Canary, Norwich
Sammy the Saint, Southampton
Chirpy Cockerel, Tottenham Hotspur
Harry the Hornet, Watford

aug 8 | the holy crossing

 

refuse

 

raymond chandler, poet

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

She had eyes like strange sins.

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine.

I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall.

I’m all done with hating you. It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.

“I don’t like your manner,” Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

Leave us do the thinking, sweetheart. It takes equipment.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee.

Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.

Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.

diane tucker | three poems from 'nostalgia for moving parts'

Three poems about childhood that made me cry. From Diane Tucker's new book, Nostalgia For Moving Parts. So particular, so much compassion. Get yourself a copy. I'm not kidding.

Love the sad men

The small, huge things that sad men do, sad

men who build with everything but words.

Build dollhouses, train sets, HO mountains

from cereal boxes and plaster of Paris,

building the mountains they can for their sons.

For daughters they build scroll-sawed

shelves to hold phalanxes of dolls, blown-glass

animals, Barbie barns above the bed’s blue lace.

Sad fathers who’ve eluded words carve magic

circles in their back lawns for swimming

pools. They sieve stones out of the soil circles

so nothing will nick the pools’ thin blue skin.

This is the testament of sad men who live

starved of words: drywall, carport, pickle jars

of nails, lawnmower, farmer’s tan, house paint,

apple tree, soldering gun, handsaw, wood plane.

Wood shavings falling from the vise,

wooden curls on the cold garage floor,

wooden curls warm on little girls’ ears.

*

Danny

Skipping ropes at school, their woven heft.

Steel poles around the roofed playground, the rain

running down them luminous, metal-melting.

I’d press my tongue against a pole and drink.

School was a world of delicious new textures:

fat crayons, creamy manila colouring paper,

notebooks, worksheets stacked fat as animal bodies.

Tables and chairs with shiny metal tubes for legs.

Even light at school felt stronger than at home.

They showed us filmstrips of marmalade leaves

against a blue blue sky, all technicolour-crisp.

How I loved those glowing celluloid leaves!

Then the cloakroom hooks’ imploring curves,

parallel silences in calm, rectangular shadows,

the pavement tap-dance beat of skipping ropes.

How I loved school, the sweet order of desks

in grids. So I wasn’t totally upset when, in grade

two, Danny with the French last name tied me to

a pole with a skipping rope so he could kiss me,

Danny with the round eyes, a cherub’s mouth,

curly hair. He was small even among the small,

as I was. No doubt I’d flirted with him, grade-two

style, cute and clueless. I thought myself a lady.

Were kisses procured? I bet there were a few.

Soon the rope loosened and I made a dash.

But Danny pushed me back. A metal pole I loved,

from which I’d drunk the rain, rushed up

and struck me in the bone below one eye.

A shiner it was called. I had a shiner. I’d seen

them on TV, cartoon-red beefsteaks on faces.

Danny got the strap then, or another time, or both.

He came back to class subdued, his crying

eyes swollen. As if a hiding could patch up his

love-starved soul. He chased girls, he lifted skirts,

he stole kisses, and the grown-ups just spanked

his ass? Poor Danny, tiny paramour, tiny batterer!

As long as I knew him, Danny chased the girls,

staring expectantly through big brown eyes.

Whatever makes boys seize girls roiled in him.

That yearning he had, no strap could smack it out.

And no black eye stopped me flirting. I was seven

and had imprinted on romance like a baby bird.

I followed its Hollywood promises everywhere,

persistent and imploring as a cloakroom hook.

*

Beautiful grade four teacher

always wore his shirt half open,

had dry-look hair and eyes bigger

than Donny Osmond’s. Sometimes

he used swear words in class.

I fell hard in grade four love.

I remember the day I had to wear

the hand-me-down dress to school.

Polka dots, pleats, Peter Pan collar.

1974 was bell-bottoms, feathered hair,

Three Dog Night and Doodle Art.

It was neither pleats nor polka dots.

It was in no way a Peter Pan collar.

But crushy teacher, lounging atop a desk,

fixed me, with round, pale eyes, in his stare.

He grafted two trees to a single rootstock,

kindness twinned forever with desire.

You look smashing, he said, in that dress.

The world lit up. I clutch that moment,

talisman still, the heat that flowered when he

noticed my smallness, my sadness, and spoke.

Nostalgia For Moving Parts is published by Turnstone Press, 2021. Copies available through their website.