This is the final part of my fictional story “When Now is Gone”. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

I decided to go for a run. I didn’t eat breakfast. I drank a glass of water and stepped outside. Cash stood in the street with his hands in his pockets. He smiled. We walked together wrapped in silence, the way the fog wrapped the air. Along the river’s path a violinist strung his heart in slow gasps, like the fleeting breathes of a dying man. We stopped under the branches to watch. Tears fell down his hairless face. His hands were pale, lips thin and grey, brows and lashes shadows of the fallen past.

Cash said, “I missed you.”

I wanted him to stop talking, stop moving, stop it all so I could listen, so I could see. He walked away and found a bench. I followed him and sat. He looked peaceful.

Cash pulled out a cigarette and said, “Do you have a lighter?”

I turned away. I turned back. I felt his breath against my cheek.

Then it was gone.

 • • •

During the drive to Seattle a three car wreck slowed traffic down to a standstill. After two hours I passed the flashing lights and mangled metal. I watched it and drove on. Western Washington had received steady rain for the past two weeks. Some areas had possible flooding. I did not plan to go to the funeral. I wanted to see his mother. I wanted to tell her how much Cash loved her. That he did not die sad or in pain. When I imagined her loft I saw myself standing near a window viewing the water. The sun would shine and I would hear Cashmere laughing with her. He called her Mon Fleur. But the clouds blocked the sun and Cashmere was not here. He could not say her name.

At the street entrance stood a man who asked if I was here to see Fleurette. He led me to an elevator and once at the fifth floor down the hallway. He knocked twice and an elderly woman opened the door. The man left me and the woman took my hand and sat me down on a couch. A group of four women talked around the kitchen island. A box of tissue and an ashtray was in the middle. They drank coffee. The woman asked my named.

I said, “Madeleine.”

The women in the kitchen looked up. One of them asked, “The girlfriend?” I nodded.

The elderly woman said, “Let me get you some tea.”

 • • •

They sat around me and told stories of Cashmere as a child. How he wouldn’t go to sleep at night, wouldn’t take a bath, wouldn’t eat applesauce. Stubborn as a mule. Two of the women were Fleurette’s younger sisters. The other two distant cousins. The woman who led me in was a friend from Spokane. Her hand shook as she handed me a cup of tea. She pointed to the coffee table with glass bowls of sugar and cream. She sat next to me and pushed the box of tissues closer. She said, Fleurette was resting. She would be out soon.

Someone arranged pictures of Cashmere on a table in the living room. In most of them he was playing baseball or posing in his uniform, holding a bat or a glove. Trophies and plaques were displayed, autographed baseball cards and a baseball with the words, “First MLB Homerun” written in black marker, a framed copy of a check for three-hundred thousand dollars, a hand-written poem titled, “Mon Fleurette,” written in French. The last line “Love, Cashmere.” I turned away from the table and out the window across the room dark clouds brooded over Elliot Bay. Rain fell like dirty shreds of cotton. The water churned an ugly gray. A woman started crying. A door opened.

Fleurette was a lithe woman with striking black hair. She moved fluently across the room and took me in her arms. The women around us started crying. Fleurette, however, did not. She pressed herself hard into my body and then stood back and held my shoulders. She smiled.

She said, “He talked about you often.”

I tried to smile.

She said, “I have something to give you.”

I followed her into a bedroom. On the dresser sat two shoeboxes side by side. Fleurette opened one and took out a letter.

She said, “Cashmere wrote me while he was on the road. He stopped writing the last month. But I wanted you to hear his last letter.”

She unfolded the letter and started to read.

I said, “No.”

She looked at me and I sat down on the bed.

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’m sorry dear.”

She folded the letter back up and placed it in the shoebox. She placed the shoebox next to me on the bed.

“You don’t have to take them if you don’t want to. He mostly wrote about you. That is why I want you to have them. To remember.”

Fleurette went to the mirror and dabbed at the makeup under eyes. She applied lipstick then wiped it off.

She said, “What’s the use?” And sat down next to me. She held my hands in hers. “You are much prettier than I imagined. You made him very happy.”

I wanted her to stop talking. Stop remembering. I hoped to tell her what I didn’t tell Cash before he died. But I knew I couldn’t. She was not Cash. She would not understand the way he would. We sat on a bed in Seattle, not a park bench in Portland. It was not morning, not cold, a violin did not play, no dogs barked. When I turned he wasn’t there. He would not be any longer.

I said, “Can we look at the water? I want to look at the water with you.”

Fleurette held a hand to her face and took mine with the other. We stood by the window looking out at the clouds falling into the bay. The women made food in the kitchen. Someone opened a door to let the cigarette smoke out. A teakettle steamed. Someone dropped a box of tissues and apologized.

“As a child my father would take me north up to the Buffalo Pound Lake above Moose Jaw and Regina. We traveled in his truck and the exhaust would come into the cab so we drove with the windows rolled down. It was summer so we didn’t freeze. The roads were these long stretches of open fields and trees lining the creek beds. I felt like I was the only girl in the whole world. Inside the empty space.”

“What was your father’s name?”

“His name was Robert. He called me Fleurette because I was his only flower. Down one of those empty roads, in the middle of a bare field stood this wood shack, the windows bare, strips of wood missing, and it leaned. I would watch it for miles hoping it wouldn’t fall over. I’d hold my breath. During winter the snow covered it completely and all one could see was a big bump in a white field. And then my mother died and my father started drinking and I left as soon as I could.”

“Cash didn’t tell me much about your childhood.”

“I told him little. I never told him about the shack in the empty field.”

“I think he would have liked it.”

“It’s funny. Whenever I think about that shack now, I want it to fall over. I hope it’s fallen over. If feel like it’s all fallen over.”

The next day at work Fadi’s office was empty. His secretary told me he refused to give up his contact for the Cashmere story to Danny. The guy who bought his steroids. With the Senate report due out in a few days and Cashmere’s name rumored to be on the list of players named the story needed to be out before the report.

I went to the café and found Fadi. The ashtray on the table smoked from unfinished butts. He held a cup of coffee in both hands and sat with one leg crossed over the other. I sat down. It started to rain.

He said, “I changed my mind on who I’d give my money to.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The park ranger’s wife or the gorillas. I said I wouldn’t give my money to either, but I changed my mind. I donated it to the woman whose husband was shot. I did that this morning and now I regret my decision.”

“Why? She will take your hundred dollars and buy groceries with it. She will feed her children.”

“What good does that do?” He stood straight up in the chair and set his coffee on the table. He put a cigarette in his mouth. His pupils grew inside his glasses.

I said, “It’s a piece. When it all falls apart and shatters we don’t know how to put it all back together. When other people help with the pieces sometimes we find hope.”

Fadi sat back and inhaled a deep breath of smoke.

I said, “You can write your story. It doesn’t matter now.”

Fadi said, “It’s all that matters now.”

 • • •

On my street the neighbor kids kicked a soccer ball. They used a garbage can for a goal. One boy wore an oversized Inter Milan jersey. The rain continued to fall. Drops of water slid down their faces. The ball landed in front of me in a puddle. The water splashed my ankles.

They said, “Por favor senora. Por favor.”

I reached down into the water. Reached like the Italian fishermen into the Mediterranean, reached like the violinist with his song, like the gorillas for their children, like the widow for her husband, like Fleurette toward the leaning shack. I reached the way Cashmere reached for me.

I drop kicked it over their heads. It sailed up, up, up.

Now.

And then it fell.

This is part 3 of my fictional story “When Now is Gone.” Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

He would say, “I talked to my agent today.”

I’d ask him about his mother.

He’d say, “I can’t wait to see you. I have to go to bed.”

“ Cash, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

And he’d say, “Don’t worry baby. I’ll be home in a few days. At the end of the season I’ll have a new contract. You can live with me in Oakland or Baltimore, maybe even Boston.”

I’d say, “Cash, I don’t want to.”

 • • •

I lived above the garage of a widow whose only son was killed in Afghanistan. She said I could call her Gigi. She said that’s what he grandchildren would have called her. She was rarely home. I believed she had a lover and didn’t bring him here. Here, where there was no dishwasher, no washer or dryer. She offered to take my clothes with her to the Laundromat. I declined. She left milk in the refrigerator. She said it was because her son loved milk. Drank three large glasses a day, not including with cereal. I gave it to the cat in a little bowl.

Our street was a gravel road with potholes full of mud and water. There was a black family whose children raced plastic boats in the puddles. One time the smallest boy was sat in the road with a toy fishing pole.

“Catch anything?” I asked.

“Damn things won’t bite,” he said not looking up. A handful of worms crawled at his side.

Next door lived a Hispanic family with low riding Lincolns in the driveway. Sometimes at night they would play music out of them with the doors open. It helped me fall asleep. The children walked to school holding hands, except for the two oldest boys who led the way.

I used to think I lived in the neighborhood because it reminded me of home. Reminded me of the walks I took with my mom and dad. It carried the same smell of coming rain, of charcoal barbecues and marijuana, of thick dust and freshly cut grass, of rotting apples and cherries. But I no longer believed that was why I lived there.

 • • •

I watched traffic from the conference room on the thirteenth floor that was never used after a secretary found human excrement covering the table, the walls, the ceiling. They said it was a disgruntled former employee and that the smell never left. I was usually alone as I looked out the window over the city, except for today. I noticed someone from the corner of my eyes.

He said, “I can tell a lot about a man the way he looks out these windows.”

I said, “It’s a good thing I’m a woman then.”

Carlos smiled. He wore brown loafers, black slacks, and a blue oxford. “Maddy, I need to warn you, not as your editor, but as your friend. They’re doing an article on Cashmere once the Senate report is released. Fadi is said to have a source who helped purchase Cash’s steroids. Danny is ready to nail him and I can’t stop it now that it’s rolling.”

“You mean you don’t want to.”

“I just wanted to warn you.”

I grabbed my purse and walked to the door.

Carlos said, “Some people watch is close, either to see it fail or to figure out how to fix it. That’s how I Can tell.” I opened the door. “Why don’t you want to fix it Maddy?”

I turned and looked at him. He had his back to me and was watching the clouds creep across the sky like old men in a hurry.

I said, “It smells like shit in here Carlos.”

 • • •

I parked my car next to the curb and Fadi dashed across his yard and pulled me out by the arm.

He said, “We’re late. We have to run.”

“Why don’t we drive? And you said seven.”

“There is no parking and the game starts at seven.”

I jogged behind him trying to zip up my jacket. He took my hand and told me to hurry.

He said, “Your hands are cold, take my gloves.”

He gave me yellow mittens.

I said, “You knit these yourself?”

He smiled.

The bar was packed with groups of men sweating, smoking, smiling, and growling. Hands and fists hammer the air. Many wear black and blue striped jerseys. Chants mingled with the smoke rolling and climbing to the rafters. Fadi took my jacket and put his hand on my back leading me through the throng. At a table sat four men staring at a television fixed from the ceiling. A lone woman smiled at Fadi. We sat and he introduced them. Abdul, Jalal, Sadd, and Nabih. They didn’t look down. The woman’s name I couldn’t make out over the crowd, but I smiled and mouthed an exaggerated, “Nice to meet you.” She reached her hand across the table and pulled me close to her.

She said, “What the fuck are you doing with Fadi?”

I pulled my arm back and knocked over a glass of beer. No one noticed. The men were fixed on the game. A man with an apron emerged from the crowd and wiped the table down and set a fresh glass in front of me. I drank it all then stood up and pushed my way through the crowd to the restroom. I stood at the sink and half expected the woman to follow me. I press my head into the mirror.

I sank back into the throng of men and grabbed another beer at the table. Fadi winked. I headed for the big screen television where the men pushed and shoved.

They chanted, “Inter—nazu—ale! Inter—nazu—ale! Inter—nazu—ale!”

We shook our fists and spilled our drinks. Thunder clapped and my ears rang. Men leapt into the air. I looked at the game. Nothing happened.

I yelled, “We didn’t even score!” They looked at me laughing. “Nothing happened. Stop celebrating when we miss a shot, when we make a pass.” Someone shoved another beer into my hand.

We sang. We screamed. We celebrated. The men shrieked and kissed cheeks. We danced. It was all a dance. The way the athletes on the television moved, passed, ran. And we moved and flinched and yelled in synch.  Back and forth, side to side, up and down. The world laughed and bellowed. And I was just a little girl running down the street. All I wanted to do was dance.

My face was in the toilet and my toes curled against the cold tile. I searched for my purse. I walked down a street.

“Fadi, where’s my jacket, I’m cold?”

“You’re wearing it.”

“Fadi, we scored.” I threw my arms in the air. Fadi stood me up straight.

“Stand Maddy. Stand up.”

We were at the passenger side of my car. Fadi searched through my purse.

“Maddy, where are your keys?”

I said, “Take me inside.”

This is part 2 of my fictional story “When Now is Gone”. Read part 1 here.

Growing up I played every sport. I swam, ran track, played basketball and volleyball. Once, I came home from school kicking a soccer ball. My father picked it up, turned it over in his hand, then went to the kitchen, pulled a knife from the drawer, and cut it into a few pieces of plastic. I played baseball until the Babe Ruth president knocked on our door one evening. My father told me to go to my room and do my homework. It was summer. I slammed my door. After that I played softball. I played in the outfield because from the fence I’d hit the catcher in the throat with a flick of my wrist. My father went to every game.

He would ask, “Did you have fun? How did you feel?”

I’d slam my door, open it back up and yell, “The ball is too big,” and slam it again.

When I was a freshman in high school I showed up for the first day of football practice. The morning before I cut my hair short. I streaked eye black across my cheeks and muddied my face. I stuffed as many large pads as I could fit into my pants. I threw the ball farther than any freshmen. It was raining and the field was muddy and a boy had thrown up. We ran lines, my father with a whistle in his mouth, a wet camp pulled over his head.

Afterwards I ran home. But he saw me caked in mud. He parked his truck along the road and ran after me. I tried to outrun him. To show him I could do it better than any boy, even if it was him. When I stopped I turned and hit him, wrenched my fists into his chest and stomach. He curled me into his arms, walked me home in the rain as I cried and struggled. In the morning the pads and helmet were gone and after school I made fun of the soccer team as they practiced.

• • •

On that rainy day at the ballpark as Danny drilled Cash with questions about his steroid use, he kept looking at me and smiling. And then I asked my question I wasn’t supposed to ask. And then Danny started asking more questions.

Cash said, “Can I take you out to dinner?” I was busy avoiding Danny’s eyes when he elbowed me and nodded toward Cash. I looked up and saw him smiling and he asked again.

He took me to a steak restaurant where the lights are dim and the tables and chairs and walls a deep maroon, where the waiters walk with a stick up their ass. He told me about his mother and the different cities he’d lived in, the high school he attended.

He said, “At the park I couldn’t keep my eyes off you”

I said, “I only accepted your offer so I could write an article about you.”

He tried to smile. He asked the waiter for the check and then said, “Well Madeleine, it’s been a pleasure.” He stood up. I followed him to the door

I said, “Can we go back to your place.”

• • •

I told Fadi about the endangered mountain gorillas whose national park in the Congo had been overrun by militia rebels. He watched me while tearing off a piece of his baklava. A park ranger was shot and killed.

“And the gorillas?” He asked.

“Some are missing.” I watched a drop of rain fall into my coffee. I looked up at the sky. “What I was wondering was who I would give my money too?” I looked back down and Fadi chewed slowly. Someone at another table dropped a mug and it shattered on the cement. Someone laughed. “If I had one hundred dollars who would I give it to?”

“You mean you want to donate your money to the gorillas?”

“Well the national park that takes care of them. Or I could donate my money to the park ranger’s widow.” I looked back up at the sky. “Who would you donate your money to?”

Somewhere above me moisture was forming, gathering. It hung there, suspended in the sky, pausing for an instant. It’s an that moment before gravity pulls the elements into their place, balancing the world on its finely tuned edge, that I said, “Now.”

Mountain gorilla live in families where an alpha male mates with up to five females. If the alpha male dies and an offspring doesn’t replace it, alpha male from another family will assume position, often killing the young ones and taking the females. I was afraid that right “now” rebels were killing the gorillas, unbalancing the social structures and causing infanticide among the gorillas’ fractured families. But I don’t think about the widow whose husband was shot in the stomach when he heard a suspicious noise in the bush and went out to investigate. I do not worry that other males will kill her children or make her their wife.

Fadi said, “I would not give my money to either the widow or the gorillas.” He had finished his baklava and sat up straight. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want the rain to fall. I wanted to fix the broken pieces on the cement. But it started to rain and “now” was over.

Continue to part 3.

I was encouraged by a few people to share some of my fiction. I don’t know if people read fiction on blogs. This will be in four or five parts.

            I woke to mornings like that. Where the languid fog floated, brooded through the oaks like a hearth’s lulling heat. I bristled next to it, smiled and said hello, passed it with indifference. That was morning to me. The park rolled in mist and the trees still in slumber as the birds bounced like excited children. The river rolled at its unguarded pace. A breath. I turned as the moisture caressed my skin. Then it was gone.

• • •

            I said, “Are you in Albuquerque?” 

I knew where he was. I knew he’d be there for a five game series, catch a flight on Monday, land in Colorado Springs until Thursday. Then Tacoma. Then back in Portland for a homestead.

            He said, “I’m seeing the ball well.” But he struck out twice on Wednesday. By Friday he’ll have a double.

            He said, “I can’t wait to see you, Maddy.”

I know he’ll be released in September when the team’s previous year top draft pick is called up from double A. I know because my father would know. He’d know that Cash was a liability with his knee. That no team needed a left fielder who couldn’t run or be converted to first base, whose only thirty homerun season came before the steroid crackdown.

            He said, “I talked to my agent.”

            I said, “He dropped you two months ago.” I said it the way I told him I bought shoes. “They were pink.”

            He said, “You look good in pink.”

 • • •

            Cash is short for Cashmere. His mother was an Olympic high jumper from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She ran away from her father’s dairy farm after high school. Met a charming law-breaker in Montreal who sent her poetry written in French from prison. She didn’t read French, but she kept every letter in a shoebox on a shelf in her living room in Seattle. The poet dropped out of the picture somewhere. Cash was drafted out of high school. I met him last season during media day at the ballpark.

            Danny Bourne, the Portland Post’s sports editor, had an equivocal smile as he drilled Cash about his waning career.

            “After a thirty homer season, when the league commissioner begins adding harsher penalties for steroid use, you drop twenty pounds, go out with an injury for half the season, and now you’re no longer in the majors. Is this just a case of bad luck?”

            Cash said, “It’s just a slump.”

            “What about the upcoming Senate report on steroid use in professional baseball. There are rumors it will name names. Are you worried?”

            In my head I saw Cash smile. He doesn’t. But I see him smile and I can’t put it all together; his baseball cap sitting high on his shaved head, an obnoxious wrinkle in his brow. It had rained that morning and the turf was wet and the balls during batting practice threw off sparks of water rolling across the carpet.

            I asked, “Do you like living in the Northwest?” I asked that because I was not supposed to, because I’m only tagging along, because I’m just a staff writer in the world news department. Danny threw me a wry smile.

            “Yes. I like the smell.”

And that was Cash. Country-boyish simple and he never lived on a farm. Before high school he hopped with is mother from Baltimore, Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, Spokane. High school ended and he became a professional.  A professional at hitting and throwing. He was paid money for that. At one time lots of it. And that’s why his mother enjoys a view of the Puget Sound from her two-bedroom loft.

• • •

            Being a staff writer meant I knew a little about everything in the world. What I didn’t know I read or asked Fadi, the assistant sports editor. I asked him to buy me coffee. He bought baklava, either because he liked it or because he knew I didn’t. We sat in metal chairs, our table rocked from an uneven leg. People walked by in shorts and white legs. It was the first warm week in April. I asked Fadi to tell me what he loved. He offered a cigarette while he thought. His black hair was slicked back with a coconut smelling gel. He folded one leg over the other and slouched in his chair, but still appeared tall. His olive eyes floated behind his glasses, almost outside of him, like he could see in all directions, through thoughts. But it was unassuming and warm. His pupils shrank.

            “I love Inter Milan.” He saw my blank expression. “Football club.”

            My father said soccer was boring so I say it’s excruciating. Fadi told me Inter Milas had won the Italian football league championship the past two seasons. One year because Juventus and other teams cheated, bullied managers, paid of referees.

            I said, “Are you Italian?”

            “No,” he laughed. He didn’t say what he was. I didn’t ask.

            But I did ask about the Italian mafia. He shrugged. I knew about the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and how they controlled the futbol clubs’ money flow. Where families in the southern province of Italy killed each other over minor misunderstandings and clear understandings. Wives were shot pointblank in the streets of Rome. Sons and cousins gunned down in pizza parlors in Germany. Hot it’s all connected to the cocaine floating across the Mediterranean from Columbia, unloaded in Sicilian ports overcrowded with immigrants from Sudan, Ghana, Morocco. Tunisian fishermen arrested for saving groups of drowning Ethiopians. Desperate Romanian women selling themselves to Italians driving Audis. They’re found in an alleyway. An Eritrean’s neck is cut open with a broken wine bottle. It’s said to be accidental.

            A woman walked by in thick heels, pounding the sidewalk, announcing to the pedestrians three blocks away that she was coming through. I blew smoke in her path. Fadi’s pupils grew.

            I don’t know where he was from and I didn’t ask. I was afraid to ask. I knew he was an editor at a local Arabic newspaper. That he went under heat for an anti-Semitic article. I knew this because Danny told me.

            Danny said, “I don’t trust him. But we need him. Need him like the others.” He said this looking at the secretary. I thought he was saying this because she was young and beautiful and that we needed more young and beautiful people with new ideas and new energy in the newsroom. But the secretary was black and that was why he said it. He was saying it because the Editor in Chief, Carlos Gutierrez, was Hispanic. And the Post did an article about the Mexicans waiting for work along Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and the city tortilla factory that occasionally didn’t pay their employees.

            Fadi said, “Men go through my trash at night.”

            “Bums.”

            “No,” he said. His eyes grew.

To read part 2 click here.

A twenty year college professor is leaving his job because:

…most of today’s college students, especially those that come to college straight from high school, are unnecessarily coddled. Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.

[here via PW]

Since I don’t get the chance to pick up a copy of Christian News Northwest anymore I have to switch my local newspaper update to The Southwest Community Connection. I want to point out the Faith Forum articles in the October and November issues.

October featured Scott Kolbet, the pastoral associate at St. John Fisher Catholic Church. He talked about the word mercy and its Latin root misercordia which means “taking the misery of others into one’s own heart.”  Kolbet writes, “A merciful God takes our miseries into his heart. If we are merciful, we are taking the miseries of others into our hearts…It is about God being present in my life and taking my life, my miseries and my joys into himself.” 

On the complete opposite spectrum, the November issue featured Andrea Furber, a certified Pranic Healer, who talked about moving our hands in long circular motions and “removing energetic blockages that are hindering the flow of fresh, clean energy into the energy field of the person who came for healing. This fresh energy allows the body to do more rapidly what it always does–heal itself.”

I would much rather have the mercy of a loving God then me waving my hands around trying to heal myself. What about you?

I saw this painting over the weekend. Was struck by it. Spent fifteen minutes trying to describe why I was struck by it and then finally gave up. The artist is Mackenzie Bartels, a local Portland artist, and her website with other works is here. This piece is called Eve.

My sister played in her last high school volleyball game this weekend. I passed up on the Oregon State vs. Arizona state football game for it, but I was glad to be there anyways and see my family. My brother is a photographer and he positioned himself on the opposite side of us in the student section. As game time grew closer and the students arrived he kept having to move up the stands farther so they wouldn’t be in his way. It kept distracting me because he was carrying his camera and his bag and trying to move up the steps and over seats and finally he found a place without any obstructions.

A few minutes into the game a young girl entered the gym with her mom. She was wearing a cheerleading skirt over her jeans and was obviously disabled, Down syndrome or something. Her mother lead her to where the other cheerleader were standing and she hugged one and the stood behind them. But she didn’t watch the game or even pay attention to the other cheerleaders. Instead she watched the crowd of students as they cheered and chanted. She just watched them.

On Sunday I went to a new church for the second time. After leaving the church I was working at I thought I knew which church I wanted to start attending, but then I didn’t really know. This church has about 20 rows of seating and a balcony with more, a large wooden stage with a full band and a piano. They’re moving offices to make room for the bursting amount of children. The head pastor is soft spoken and funny and a good speaker.

I was sitting in my seat during communion, watching the people as they went up to the table for communion, and the band is playing music and everyone is singing. And I felt like the girl with Down syndrome in the cheerleading skirt the night before. Just watching the crowd. I felt like my brother a few more rows up taking pictures. Who can’t get hired at a job because he’s too disabled. Even when he’d do the job for free. Because he watches the world and he watches his brothers and he just wants to belong.

Just to belong.

I finally decided where I’m going to apply to graduate school. I want to get my Master of Fine Arts in writing. It’s a terminal degree so you can teach writing in college with it. It will allow me to focus on writing for a few years while giving me the credentials to teach it in the long run. Which is a smart thing since it’s hard to make it as just a writer. I’m probably going to apply to a seminary just in case I don’t get into any of the MFA programs.

It’s a long process, lots of paperwork and forms to fill out. The most important aspect of the application process is the 25 page writing sample. It’s what gets you in or not. I have about 15 pages done. So keep me in your prayers.

A few days ago I wrote a new scene for a short story I’m working on. I liked it so I might post it on here. It was actually the first time I was able to write for an extended period of time. It’s nice to be back in a groove. It was also the first time I prayed for an extended period of time so I think that had a lot to do with my writing.

Where my head becomes my neck I have this bad dandruff on my scalp. It itches like the second time I got crabs (blatant movie reference). I bought a bottle of extra strength shampoo with special ingredients. The ingredients are so special the warning on the bottle said some chemicals are known to the state of California to cause cancer. I almost didn’t buy the stuff because of that reason, but then I realized I live in Oregon so it’s completely safe.

Yesterday I wore my pink shirt that I got when some breast cancer organization sponsored an event. I received the expected mocking from guys about wearing a pink shirt. And so I told them, “I wear it for a good cause. I support breast cancer.”

My roommate bought a bright orange shirt at Value Village for his Halloween costume. I bought a mullet wig. We’re dressing up as the two cool dudes in this music video.

My roommate and I are also addicted to the television series Las Vegas. We watch two episodes in the afternoon before hockey practice. We really relate with the characters. I’m the funny black guy, Mike Cannon. And my roommate is Ed Deline, the guy that’s head of security and who ends up being replaced by Tom Selleck in the last season before it was cancelled.