Author’s Note: “My love for Baltimore is fierce; I’m proud and protective of my city. I’m also impatient for us to improve, for Baltimore to be a place people won’t be so quick to criticize. This vignette captures the discouragement I sometimes feel that we’re so far from where we should, could, be.”

Baltimore Is Where

IF I STOP BELIEVING IN PRAYERS, it’ll be Baltimore’s fault.

Baltimore is where I learned when to pray: before dinner, at bedtime, kneeling during Mass. Back then, it felt like magic, a longer version of the wish I’d make blowing out birthday candles. Praying made me feel powerful. The Creator, Nurturer, Protector of all things was listening to me say I love you. I hope for. I’m afraid of.

Thank you.

At first, I was too young to even imagine receiving a response. But when, eventually, I discovered prayer is supposed to be a dialogue, I became eager for the holy half of the exchange. God doesn’t just hear. God answers.

Even me.

Baltimore is where I learned the quietest part of prayer: how to listen, discern, receive. I practiced waiting instead of willing. Once I’d trained my ear, I delighted in the clarity of these conversations. Even when I didn’t like what I heard, I never again felt like I was talking to myself. Baltimore is where I came to expect divine answers.

Except when Baltimore is why I pray. Then, it’s as though the line has been severed. I’m again alone. While wrapping myself in words, I wonder if there’s a reason these particular prayers don’t seem to make their way to heaven.

dddddGod, I just want blood to stop staining our streets.
ddddddddddGod, please don’t make anyone else choose between eating and electricity.
 ffffddfddfseffefdfdGod, when will our children know they are legends?

I pray any and everywhere. Running before breakfast, waiting in line, leaving work, I pray. I pray I pray I pray.

Sometimes I want to give up—until I remember how much I love. God. Baltimore. People. So, at least for now, I’ll keep saying prayers like they’re candles on a cake.

⧫

Kerry Graham is a Baltimore-based writer, book coach, and former high school English teacher. Her newsletter, Real Quick, is a monthly glimpse into her writer life. Kerry is a Creative-in-Residence at The Baltimore Banner. This “vignette” was published in the current Delmarva Review, Volume 15.

The Review selects the most compelling original nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. The nonprofit literary journal is designed to encourage fine writing from authors everywhere. Over forty percent are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. The book is available from Amazon.com and other major booksellers. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: “When I saw an old ‘Visible Woman’ in a battered box at a yard sale, vivid memories of the one I received for Christmas arose and prompted this poem. Having access to the nude anatomy of a grown-up woman felt thrillingly transgressive back then, though I had parental approval. The transparent plastic model was a sort of key to unlock the mystery of my own changing body, even as the prevailing model of womanhood was being questioned and disassembled.” 

Girls and Dolls

The anatomical model of the female body
Santa left when I was ten was no Barbie doll. 

The plastic lady came boxed with a skeleton,
vital organs, and the (optional) “miracle of creation”
transparent uterus complete with baby
that I could click in and take out,
although I didn’t know how a real baby
got in and out, or what to call a vagina and vulva,
parts I vaguely had but she didn’t:
she was plastica intacta down there. 

The see-through Visible Woman
wasn’t visible at all except for her insides.
She (totally) could have opened the door
wearing Saran Wrap and a glassy look
of biological destiny on her non-face,
but like Barbie with those working girl outfits
the VW wasn’t intended to show me
a person to be reckoned with,
or to model the actual real
doing disagreeing choosing
the-hell-you-say visible woman
her bold title prophesied
and who was coming into view
the year I was ten. 

Nevertheless she showed me
the sturdy bones of my durable body;
she showed me breasts and ovaries
and female embodiment;
from then on, from ten on
I was learning that it is vital
—listen, Invisible Girl—
to put in and take out,
to investigate and create,
to stand and show up in
my own visible, my own
miraculous self. 

⧫

Marda Messick is a poet and theologian living in Tallahassee, Florida on land that is the traditional territory of the Apalachee Nation and other indigenous peoples. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Christian Century and Literary Mama. 

“Girls and Dolls” was published in the Delmarva Review Volume 15, a nonprofit literary journal that selects the most compelling new poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available from Amazon.com and other bookstores. The review is designed to encourage outstanding new writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “Stranathan’s was the name of the barber’s shop in the town where I grew up in Northern Ireland. My essay is, in part, a recollection of this fondly remembered place, where my brother and I were regularly taken for haircuts throughout our childhood. But it’s also a meditation about something that has fascinated me for years – the nature of memory, and the relationship between remembering and imagining.”

Remembering Ramathan’s 

Memories are all we get to keep from our
experience of living, and the only perspective
that we can adopt as we think about our lives
is therefore that of the remembering self. 

Daniel Kahneman,

Thinking, Fast and Slow 

IT’S MAY 2020 IN ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND. I’m sitting in my kitchen on a sunny morning in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown. My wife is cutting my hair, grown longer than accustomed—or wanted—over these weeks of seclusion and social distancing. Her barbering prompts a memory I wasn’t expecting. Instead of making me remember how she used to cut my hair when we were students or think of the plight of my usual hairdresser—business closed and undertaking strict shielding measures because of an elderly parent’s vulnerability to the virus—the rhythmic clipping of the scissors summons something far more distant. I picture Stranathan’s, the barber’s shop in Lisburn, the town in Northern Ireland where I grew up. My brother and I were regularly taken there throughout our childhood. The hair that fell around me then was dark, undusted by the gray that now runs through it. It’s hard to believe how long ago it was that those two little boys used to delight in feeling the prickly stubble on the back of their heads as they emerged, newly shorn, from the shop. 

I don’t remember the name of the man who used to cut our hair—in fact, I’m not sure we ever knew it. He comes back to me in fragments. Much of him is missing. He’s full-lipped—his most memorable feature—with black hair slicked back in a brilliantined wave. The breast pocket of the white coat he invariably wore is filled with razors, combs, and scissors. Once, when he stooped to pick up a bottle-top, they all fell with a clatter on the lino floor. He said nothing but simply knelt and picked them up one by one, carefully brushing and blowing the hairs off them before replacing them in the same pocket. His complexion is sallow yet overlaid with the pallor of indoors. He wears more rings than most men did back then, and his shoes are sufficiently pointed and polished to qualify as “winkle-pickers.” His style suggests Teddy boy, though he’s in his early thirties and should therefore be, as my mother put it, disapproval of him evident in her voice, “old enough to know better.” 

These remnant details only add up to a partial picture. If it were a portrait, most of the canvas would be blank. Such incompleteness is tantalizing—it offers a sense of this individual, but one that won’t come into proper focus. Alongside this patchy recall of my boyhood barber, a much clearer image comes to mind that sums up the nature of the fragmented memories I have of him. I think of the candyfloss accumulations of spiders’ webs that fur the windows of my garden shed. Their nets of dirty gossamer strands are like cotton wool thinned and soiled, flecked with an array of insect debris, a record of predation presented in a kind of dry pointillism worked in tiny body parts. What I can remember about my first barber is like these dried-up bits of insect—antennae, wings, mandibles—a peppering of particles caught on memory’s web. There’s not much left, yet the pieces still manage to conjure echoes of the living person, in the same way as the shards held in the woolly ossuary that crusts my shed’s windows still summon whispers of the butterflies, moths, bees, and flies they came from. 

Trying to reconstruct from these fragments a fuller picture of Stranathan’s barber shop and the full-lipped, white-coated man who used to cut my hair reminds me of a scene from Homer’s Odyssey. Descending to the underworld, Ulysses meets the souls of the dead. Before they can regain their memory and recognize him, he needs to provide them with the blood of sacrificed animals. Only after drinking this life-imbued liquid can the dead be parleyed with. The blood restores a level of consciousness that allows them, albeit temporarily, to communicate again, recalling enough of life to connect with the concerns of those still living. 

Given the mnemonic potency accorded to blood in the Odyssey, it’s ironic that the memories awoken by my wife’s lockdown cutting of my hair are focused on a barber’s shop. Stranathan’s had one of those red-and-white-striped poles outside the shop,  

an internationally recognized sign of a barber (see Note). Theirs was a modern version of this ancient symbol. It was fixed like a flagpole above the shop’s front door. Encased in a kind of elongated bell jar of glass or plastic, the red and white spirals must have been electrically powered. Turning endlessly, even when the shop was closed, the moving helix drew the eye with the illusion of infinite repetition, the prospect of perpetual continuance, red and white appearing, disappearing, reappearing without end.

[Note: Red and white are the traditional colors for barbers’ poles in Europe. The addition of blue in America is variously explained. Some suggest it stemmed from patriotic motives—introducing blue so that the pole echoes the colors of the US flag. Others say it’s an extension of the original symbolism with blue representing the color of veins opened during bloodletting.]

 

The reason for the red-and-white-striped spirals on a barber’s pole is all to do with blood. The poles are often capped at the end with a kind of bowl-shaped cup—Stranathan’s glass bell jar was topped with just such a device. It, too, is blood related. Only a few centuries ago, barbers didn’t just deal in coiffure. They offered surgery, bone setting, and tooth pulling. Bleeding was relied on as key therapeutic measure in the 

treatment of many ailments; barber-surgeons used to bleed their customers as routinely as they tended their hair and beards. The pole represents the stick customers gripped tightly as they underwent this procedure. The red in the spiral stands for blood, the white for bandages. The shape that tops the pole represents the bowl into which the blood was drained. Some poles have a second bowl shape at their base, representing the container in which medicinal leeches were kept. 

Though bloodletting has long been abandoned by barbers, something curiously elemental still attended our visits to Stranathan’s. Perhaps the skillful wielding of sharpened metal implements at close quarters suggested something less quotidian than cutting hair. Or perhaps the strange mix of intimacy and distance conferred a special quality—the way the hands of someone scarcely known touched our heads, those warm receptacles of what we thought and felt. I find an almost elegiac note accompanying the realization that the full-lipped barber used to touch the head that, all these years later, is writing about him and still holds fragments of him in the invisible embrace of memory. I can’t help wondering how many other minds he’s held in. If I could access the way in which all the little boys whose hair he cut stored him in the mazes of their minds, would that bring back a fuller picture or just further fragments? And how did he see us? My brother and I were just two among droves of little boys brought in for haircuts (girls were taken to an upstairs salon). He may scarcely have distinguished one from another in this crowd of juvenile customers, or perhaps he remembered via a kind of phrenology, his memory holding a whole array of contour maps for the different shapes of heads he felt beneath his fingers. 

Is there any equivalent to Ulysses’ sacrificial blood that I could offer to the fragmented shades from Stranathan’s that roam the underworld of my remembrance, something that might make more whole the memories they represent? I don’t think there’s anything straightforwardly efficacious, no magic pill, no obvious medicine to take, though perhaps writing this kind of reflection is a type of self-bloodletting that makes an incision in the psyche’s store of what has passed and collects what flows in its bowl of words. I’m not sure how seriously to take that conjecture. But whatever’s made of it, there are two more prosaic strategies that can help. 

The first involves an almost meditative focusing and disciplining of the mind as I imagine myself returning to that point in childhood. I think through the years, reach back and back again, try to discount distraction, let the noise of the present fall away until I’m there again in spirit. I hope the spectral touch of this kind of concentrated attention can nudge some of the particles of remembrance into new alignment, send a pulse of voltage through them so that they can come together, cohere into more viable patterns, even jerk back into momentary life. 

The second strategy is more straightforward. It simply involves asking my older brother what he remembers. We were always taken to Stranathan’s together, which means I can tap into a second perspective, access another set of memories to lay beside my own and see what tallies. Using the whetstone of his independent recollection offers a way of sharpening my version of the past, giving it a keener, truer edge so that it can cut through the years more cleanly and see those vanished days again, cleared of the overlay of time that’s passed since they were present. 

Putting these two strategies into play has helped me to imagine going through the door to Stranathan’s again, passing under the endlessly turning barber’s pole. My brother and I are ushered in by a parent—we don’t agree whether it was our mother or father who most often accompanied us. The three of us sit down, side by side, in the row of chairs arranged against the back wall, waiting for our turn. There’s a warm, sweet smell of perfumed oils and lotions. As for noises, the snip-snip of scissors, the buzz of electric clippers, and the sporadic conversation don’t quite blot out the sound of clumps of hair falling on the floor in featherlight swishes. If you listen closely, you can hear this gentle 

punctuation every now and then, making a sound that’s reminiscent of wire-brush drumsticks touched gently to a cymbal. The single window in this back room of the shop is always closed. Its lower half is net-curtained, its upper half is misted with the heat of the muggy salon atmosphere, blurring the view of nearby buildings. On the windowsill sits a large valve radio. Is it switched on? Is there music playing? My memory is of it being tuned to a sports channel with commentary on horse racing. But my brother doesn’t remember there being a radio at all, so perhaps my mind has conjured it from somewhere else, and those excited cadences of the commentator’s voice as the horses near the finish line are not part of the aural background of Stranathan’s at all but have strayed here from some other fragment caught on remembrance’s candyfloss web of pieces. 

We both agree that there were three red leather swivel chairs with silver levers for adjusting their height and angle. Each chair is facing a large, rectangular mirror. The mirrors are fixed to the wall by screws at their corners. Each screw is covered by the small domed globe of a shiny, gold-plated head. I’m fascinated by the missing screw at the bottom left of the center mirror. It reveals a small dark hole that I imagine some secretive insect creeping out of once the shop is quiet. Perhaps there’s a whole warren of tunnels hidden behind the mirror’s surface. When customers sitting in the red leather swivel chairs look at their reflections, they can also see the row of chairs behind them where my brother and I—and often one or two others—sit fidgeting, waiting for our turn. Under the line of mirrors, there’s a shelf that runs the full length of the room. It’s littered with combs and brushes, scissors and clippers, shaving brushes, cutthroat razors and the leather strops used to sharper them, bottles and tubes of hair oil and brilliantine, all the tools of the trade. 

Of the three barbers who worked in Stranathan’s, we remember the full-lipped Teddy-boyish one so much more clearly than the others that it’s almost as if he’s in color while his two colleagues are in washed-out sepia or black and white. He always worked at the middle chair, between an older, balding man—possibly called Billy—whose station was the chair beside the window, and a younger man about whom all that we can summon now is the fact that he was younger, and of slighter build, than the other two. He was so quiet that the silence could be uncomfortable on those rare occasions when he cut our hair. 

Is it possible to be sure what’s accurately remembered and to distinguish it from what may have been invented? By “invented,” I don’t mean something deliberately fabricated in order to deceive, but rather something generated automatically by the mind in passing, without thinking, as it strives to complete the patterns that are hinted at, finding the missing pieces in the jigsaw of recall. I’ve tried to reconstruct a picture of place and people from the traces of them that remain in memory. But for all my sense of being there again, there are many gaps in what comes back, and I know that it is exactly these kinds of spaces that the imagination is quick to fill and gloss over, supplying absent detail that may not match the way things actually were. 

I wonder what befell my full-lipped barber. In one sense, I already know the answer. Since he was in his thirties when he cut our hair, he’d be a very old man now or more likely dead. A common fate awaits us all. In that sense, there’s no mystery, no enigma. I can be quite certain about the outcome. What I wonder about is not so much the inevitable conclusion of his life as its unique texture. What twists and dips and camber marked the unfolding of his days? I’m interested in the specifics draped over the generalities we all encounter—desire, pleasure, pain, fear, regret, longing, satisfaction – our whole repertoire of feelings— the particular weave of one person’s fabric of experience that results in the precise contours of the peaks and troughs that shape the map of who they are, the seismograph that marks the meanderings and undulations of the paths they followed. And this is precisely what’s lost—or what, in truth, was never known. For even as we watched him in the mirror as he cut our hair, we knew little more about him than what’s suggested by the fragments lodged in memory, fragments that seem so hollowed out and substance-less that they recall the husks of insects in a spider’s web. Memory has preserved a sliver of what only ever was a sliver. The intimate texture of his life was invisible to us then and is now vanished beyond hope of any full-blooded retrieval. 

How memory operates is something that has fascinated me for years. It’s easy enough to see why some things are retained— they fall upon us with such force that we’re permanently imprinted with their signature—but with others, there’s often no obvious reason why the mind has latched on to them and preserved them from forgetting. Clearly, it would be impossible—and undesirable—to remember everything. We’d soon capsize under the weight of such a cargo. But it’s often hard to fathom what criteria have been applied so that some things are salvaged and others cast aside. What algorithm was in play to result in the few details of my full-lipped barber being kept while everything else about him was let go? 

As I’m writing these reflections, I remember the expression “harking back.” It means to turn back to an earlier topic or circumstance, to go back to something as origin or source. It stems from “hark,” an ancient word meaning “listen.” Originally, it was a call used in hunting. The master of a hunt might shout “Hark forward!” or “Hark Back!” directing hounds and hunters to where it seemed the quarry’s trail was strongest. The cries became set phrases. A hark back is a retracing of a route, a turning back along the course a hunt has followed to try to find the scent again. From its use in hunting, figurative meanings soon developed. I’ve directed the hounds of memory to hark back to Stranathan’s. But the dogs are tired. Beside them run the unruly mongrels of the imagination. The scent has all but gone, and I worry that I’ll end up chasing something that was never there. 

If I’m not to end up with a hybrid—a chimera—where garden shed cobwebs and the barber of my childhood merge into a single macabre figure, I need to keep apart the strands of memory from those woven by the imagination to create a metaphor that shows what this particular instance of remembering is like. The full-lipped, Teddy-boyish barber is remembered. The open fibrous sarcophagus of the garden shed cobwebs is something pressed into service as an image that represents the nature of the remembering in which he’s held. Or, to use a different image, what’s left of him is like shrapnel created by the detonation of moments exploded long ago as they came into what was then the full glare of my present experience. I’m not sure how feasible it is to reconstruct from these fragments an accurate sense of the force of the present as it lit my youthful consciousness back then. Can I regain anything of the luminescence of its immediacy, the bright light of its passing, as it struck me all those years ago? However much I reach back through the psyche’s store of memories, however much I check the details against what my brother recalls, there’s a sense of an elusive something that has slipped away or that perhaps was never there in the way I now imagine it. 

We know so little of each other. What did my full-lipped barber feel when he woke in the middle of the night and looked out at the stars? What did he most desire? What was his idea of a perfect day? What was he proud of? What made him ashamed? Who was the person he loved most in all the world? Was the gap between how he wanted his life to unfold and how it did unfold, such as to allow contentment to warm his psyche, or did it breed the acid of resentment, regret, and disappointment? How far could he be trusted, relied upon? Had his heart ever held hatred in it? Was he loved? Had he ever written a poem? Listened to Beethoven? Read James Joyce? What favorite places soothed his spirit and made him feel at home? What was the last dream he ever dreamed? Who was the last person he ever thought of? 

Stranathan’s has long closed. Its premises have seen various other businesses come and go. A gap of decades yawns between now and when the full-lipped barber cut the hair of the little boy I was. Thinking myself back, and talking with my brother, has led to a sense of the place flickering into the light of consciousness again. A great deal has, of course, been lost; there are many gaps in the picture I can summon, and I have no sacrificial blood to revive the shades that stir in memory’s underworld. Yet despite this, I find, to my surprise, that underlying all the loss and absence and forgetting, all the uncertainty, I can still savor the feeling of being there. A sense of the place’s atmosphere has been rekindled; I can feel its notes playing out excerpts of a signature tune I recognize, sounding in the same register I used to hear back then. In the end, the strongest image that remembering Stranathan’s leaves in mind is of a barber’s pole, turning and turning without end, bright with the possibility of retrieval and meaning. 

⧫

Chris Arthur is an Irish essayist currently based in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of several books of essays, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018). A new collection, Hidden Cargoes, was published in 2022. His awards include the Sewanee Review’s Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize. Website: www.chrisarthur.org.  

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal that selects the most compelling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of unpublished, new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

 

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: “In grade school, I remember encountering Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and leaving with the false impression—encouraged by well-meaning teachers—that the poet was exhorting his readers to follow the road ‘less traveled by.’  In hindsight, while this reading of the poem is rather simplistic, I have continued to find myself fascinated by paths never traveled, alternative realities that deviate slightly (or greatly) from my own, and the increasing recognition with age that much of life is shaped by roads not taken and doors closed by choice or circumstance.  My parents deserve credit for opening doors for me, but also for closing them, as this essay reveals….” 

Closing Doors

IN KINDERGARTEN, FIRST GRADE, SECOND GRADE, infinite futures opened before us like the automatic doors at the Pathmark—some leading to fire stations or ballet stages, others as far as the moon—and then suddenly in third grade, at Miss Spillman’s command, we found ourselves forced to choose. Our teacher’s decree arrived in the form of a dittoed handout, purple ink still pungent with methanol from the duplicator, instructing us to decide upon a career and depict this vocation on an oak tag poster. Alas, I was not one of those striving nine-year-olds endowed with detailed fantasies of becoming a big game veterinarian, or a Ringling Brothers clown, or of replacing Bucky Dent at shortstop for the New York Yankees. Any musical ambitions I might have nurtured had been dashed earlier that autumn when my parents arranged a “bedtime talk”—a formal affair—to reveal that Mrs. B., the Swiss taskmaster responsible for my weekly piano lessons, had abruptly carted up her instrument and relocated out-of-state. Around that time, as I recall, having stumbled upon a historical atlas, I’d voiced an interest in cartography, only to be met with disdain: the eldest sons of nephrologists in bedroom suburbs might reach for the stars but not chart the earth. 

Of this point only was I certain: I did not wish to become a doctor. My father, who was a prominent kidney specialist, had ensured my resistance during a hospital visit in the late 1970s: We’d gone together one weekend afternoon to check up on his dialysis patient and, while he demonstrated the “lost art” of physical examination, a faulty catheter in her groin led to geysers of blood. This was before AIDS, largely pre-PPE. I remember being ordered to a corner, stunned and in terror, until the unfortunate woman could be stabilized. Yet only a portion of the responsibility for my negative impression of medicine belonged to my father’s crimson-splattered glasses. Stories handed down from my grandfather, a one-time military psychiatrist, deserve a share of blame: how he’d treated servicemen who’d butchered their own commanding officers, how he’d later performed electro-shock therapy in his home office on a table also used for family dinners. The Lord’s work, maybe, but not exactly Marcus Welby, MD. 

So that was my poster: “NOT A DOCTOR.” Sensing that my parents might not approve, I conducted my drawing clandestinely in my bedroom. Today, I might have depicted maniacal surgeons, eyes and bone saws equally agleam, or possibly medical atrocities like Tuskegee and Willowbrook. At nine, my approach was to depict doctors in action, stethoscopes dangling, white coats crisp, as though I did intend a Hippocratic adulthood—and then to slice through my creation with the red circle and backslash of universal prohibition. In the end, my poster proved as clear and decisive a rejection of the medical arts as could be hoped for, and no grade school Picasso has ever been so proud, or rightly so, smuggling his masterpiece to school in a cardboard tube. 

Miss Spillman, to her credit, didn’t fail me outright. She was one of those old-style elementary school educators who carried with her an aura of perpetual amusement, and her teaching style, while not exactly Socratic, involved asking naïve questions: What kind of training did one require to ‘not become’ a doctor? Did a person need a license? A uniform? She pressed her broad flat palms together in front of her lips, as though deep in reflection, and it was almost as though she were winking without moving her eyelids. And what, she asked, would I do with all my free time while I was not being a doctor? In the end, I agreed to craft a second poster. 

I believe this magnum opus remains preserved in my parents’ attic, awaiting discovery by twenty-second-century critics. Or possibly termites. I fear that upon this one masterwork hangs my hope for posthumous artistic glory. Its theme: “NOT A PSYCHIATRIST.” 

READER, I BECAME ONE. Despite my most valiant efforts— and even a detour through law school—I now earn my keep as a headshrinker, a trick cyclist, a couch quack. What the Germans call a Seelenklempner or “soul plumber,” and my mother, for whom I remain her son-who-is-not-the-rabbi, terms “almost a real doctor.” Whether as a result of predestination or Brownian motion or free will, I stumbled through the gates of Aesculapius and never looked back. In contrast, I am not a pianist. By not a pianist, I don’t mean not a rival to Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubenstein, nor even Victor Borge, but rather three-thumbed and tin-eared, no longer capable of playing “Jingle Bells” or “Frère Jacques” with the sheet music. Mrs. B.’s mad dash for the state line had managed to block permanently my path to Carnegie Hall. My own floundering efforts merely obstructed temporarily the asylum entrance without managing to padlock its gates. 

Closing doors is no easy business. Even edging them shut a few inches can be challenging for many contemporary Americans, especially those of the middle and upper classes, trained from childhood to keep their options open and to reach for the moon. Our ambitions may be Caesarean, but the underlying mantra is pure Cassius: if we do not achieve stardom, the fault lies in ourselves for failing to preserve our opportunities. Alas, these goals—more choices, higher aspirations—are often incompatible: With a few rare exceptions, maybe Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, success comes from specialization—from targeting relatively narrow but worthwhile objectives and pursuing them relentlessly. Usain Bolt may try his legs at the 100-meter sprint and the 400-meter dash, but he doesn’t also pursue medals in archery and curling. To master the clarinet, Benny Goodman had to forgo the French horn and the sitar, as well as training in astrophysics and architecture. For all Emma Goldman’s talk of dancing after the revolution, she kept her nose on the anarchist grindstone and left Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers. 

In fact, closing doors is essential to well-adjusted living. Pursuing a career in law or medicine generally means waiving the other, and failure to do so risks the fate of Richard Carstone in Dickens’s Bleak House, who trains in both professions, yet is able to practice neither. When a bride and groom stand before the altar and declare, “I do,” they are presumably also proclaiming, “I don’t,” to countless other former passions and prospective suitors. Love itself is the supreme act of door slamming. Of course, we all know lotharios who adopt the collect-them-all approach to romance, like ice cream aficionados taste-testing all thirty-one flavors at Baskin Robbins, but at some juncture, failure to commit becomes self-defeating. Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, who died unwed and childless after a record-setting course of regretted promiscuity, serves—by his own admission— as people’s exhibits one through 20,000. 

When medical students approach me for career advice, which is a staple of my work in academic psychiatry, I generally avoid discussing Wilt the Stilt’s sex life. In any case, I suspect many would not recognize his name, and a few might even mistake him for Winston Churchill’s predecessor on Downing Street. (To anyone doubting that fame is fleeting: I’ve already encountered students who believed Lou Gehrig’s disease took its eponym from a neurologist.) But these young men and women— in their own modest way—are fighting to win a version of the battle that Wilt lost 20,000 times. They have discovered that becoming a transplant surgeon means not becoming a pediatrician, and that becoming a pediatrician means losing the opportunity to procure livers and implant kidneys, and for some, still struggling to fit into their psychological white coats, that embracing either may preclude writing plays for the stage. 

Helping this last group is often the most difficult. Medical education, an in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound enterprise to the tune of many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, does not make second-guessing easy. How does one advise a student to jump off the Hippocratic conveyor belt? And when? Should they complete their degrees? Finish their internships to acquire licenses and prescription pads? Stick it out long enough to pay off their loans? These questions are all the harder when approached with a mindset that equates closing doors with failure. Among the many words of wisdom attributed to deaf- blind activist Helen Keller, mostly false, she apparently did write: “Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” This is the fate of Lot’s wife on the plain of Jordan, of Miss Havisham in the darkness of Satis House. I can echo this sentiment firsthand: I hardly ever encounter a piano, whether in an upscale parlor or a cocktail lounge, without thinking of Mrs. B. and her distant betrayal. 

THE MEDICAL STUDENTS often ask how I became a doctor. I rarely mention my contribution to Miss Spillman’s occupational gallery, the row of tagboard sketches that hung like laundry across the back of her classroom for much of that winter. One of my classmates, in my memory, aspired to rescue elephants from poachers. Another planned to become the next Michael Jackson. (I wish I could attach a name to these remote dreams—to track down my erstwhile classmates to assess their prognostic skills, or just for a good laugh—but you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to realize that surveying your former third-grade classmates on their dreams derailed is a sign of an incipient midlife crisis, or at least far too much time on your hands.) I see no upside in relating to the students Miss Spillman’s response to my second poster: how she stood, arms akimbo, as though at the unveiling of the Mona Lisa or Washington Crossing the Delaware, and then served up a silent nod that I took for approval, but likely represented calculated resignation. 

What I do tell the medical students about is Robert Frost. Particularly, Robert Frost’s celebrated poem, “The Road Not Taken,” which Miss Spillman recited to generations of grammar school students as a paean to individualism. We had read the poem previously as second graders in Mr. Minard’s class, alongside standards by e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, there being considerable curricular overlap in the era before relentless standardized testing, but for Bob Minard, the poem had been about roads. I vaguely recollect an exercise that involved drawing hobos carrying bindles. For Ruth Spillman, Frost’s verse was all metaphor: “Two roads diverged in a wood,” and by choosing “the one less traveled by,” we might someday become the next Edison or Einstein or Earhart. She was a lovely woman, Ruth Spillman. Hopeful, encouraging, and authentic. (Decades later, I sent her copies of my early novels, and following her death, her partner approached me at a public lecture to thank me.) I still have no idea whether she misrepresented Frost’s lines intentionally or had absolutely no idea what they were about. 

The poem serves as an ideal mirror for the questioning medical student. Frost’s point—as elucidated in David Orr’s well-known Paris Review essay, “The Most Misread Poem in America”—may be that both roads hold equal promise. Only in hindsight does the road we choose, for better or worse, make “all the difference.” According to an alternate reading considered by Orr, “the poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” When I broach the century-old stanzas with future doctors, my goal is for them to recognize their good fortune: Many of the roads before them lead to auspicious futures. A contented pediatrician does not suffer nagging doubts about the transplants she never performed any more than a happily married husband reflects with regret on the countless women he never accompanied down the aisle. 

Life does not offer one right answer, just multiple good ones. And poor ones too, of course: anesthesiology and obstetrics may both lead to distinct yet rewarding lives; murdering strangers on contract bodes less long-term joy. I used to recommend that uncertain medical students read Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide (2009), which argues that some choices are best rendered on emotion and instinct. He suggests this gut check is a good method for buying a home. I also find this approach works well in choosing a medical specialty. Alas, the decision to recommend the book was taken away from me in 2013 when its author was accused of plagiarism and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt yanked the volume from bookstore shelves. Now I just tell the medical students to make a visceral decision and try not to second guess themselves. 

Some doors are shut to us from the outset: several billion would-be heirs apparent, for instance, likely stand between my Ashkenazi-Jewish head and the English crown. Others close of their own accord. It is too late for me to win a Rhodes Scholarship or become a Navy SEAL—neither of which accept candidates in their forties—although the army did allow my grandfather to enroll in middle age after Pearl Harbor, so I suppose exceptions do remain possible. Even with daily lessons and first-rate coaching, I am no longer likely to sing Turandot at La Scala or play Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” to rival Glenn Gould. Yet most of my successes in life have resulted from paths that I have consciously shunned: rejected professions, third dates that didn’t follow seconds, essays that never met a printed page. Miss Spillman feared her students might lack the courage to open doors; my fear is that my own students won’t possess the confidence to close them. 

Would Miss Spillman be pleased to see me a psychiatrist? Disappointed? I do not sell widgets for a living or ride a commuter train to Stepford, but I’m also not exactly the Wizard of Menlo Park nor will I be flying a biplane solo across the Atlantic anytime soon. I can’t help wondering if there is a parallel universe where Mrs. B. never moves away, and I grow up to become not-a-psychiatrist, licensed and uniformed, and Miss Spillman spends her final days listening to my classical piano recordings. He took the road less traveled, she tells her partner. Like in the poem. Shame on me for thinking he’d give in and end up shrinking heads…. 

I DIDN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND how I’d become a psychiatrist until several years after completing my residency. We’d gathered for a Thanksgiving dinner at my boyhood home. Upon entering, one immediately encountered a cased archway leading to a low-slung sitting room that remained frozen in the final days of the Carter administration: tight plaid upholstery in earth tones, hard-backed copies of American Heritage and Horizon shelved on rosewood. The piano, too, stood precisely where I’d left it decades earlier, a console model, although now it served primarily as an oversized plinth for family portraits and greeting cards. Someone, most likely my aunt, had deposited her coat and purse atop the bench. I doubt anyone had played the instrument since the evening before my final lesson unless one counted contests my preteen nephews had to gauge who could bang its keys the loudest. You’ll find similar relics all across the suburban landscape, untuned testaments to the aspirations of men and women whose parents had escaped Pinsk or Palermo—and later fled integrated blocks in Morrisania or Brownsville. For couples like my parents, what mattered was owning the instrument, not playing it. On the remote chance you wanted to listen to a Grieg concerto, or “Stairway to Heaven,” you turned on the radio. 

In the weeks leading up to the holiday, I’d been contemplating tracking down Mrs. B. As a psychiatrist, I find myself attributing the behavior of others, and my own, to the ordeals of early childhood, and—for whatever inexplicable reasons—the abrupt end to those weekly musical forays loomed large in the rehashing of my personal history. Or maybe my interest was mere self-deception, a twist on Professor Orr’s reading of Frost. If those who chose a less traveled road of their own creation could take credit, why shouldn’t others (like me) who had opted for the opposite fork—at least in hindsight— castigate themselves? Why hadn’t I argued for a new piano teacher rather than accepting Mrs. B’s departure as decisive? Somehow reconnecting with my Swiss piano instructor seemed essential for closure. Assuming she were even still alive. Ruth Spillman had passed away the previous June in her mid-eighties, but I’d only learned of her death that autumn, adding to the urgency of my quest. In my memory, Mrs. B. had been as ancient as music itself, although in hindsight, she’d probably been younger than I am now. 

The challenge was that I didn’t know Mrs. B.’s first name, nor even the precise spelling of her surname, so my only hope was to recruit my parents into my efforts. I did this gingerly— with some trepidation. My parents are not ones to dredge the past, and earlier attempts to track down the previous owners of their home and to locate long-lost relatives of my grandmother had both been met with indifference. Sometimes people drift apart for a reason, my dad had said of the abortive hunt for Grandma’s second cousins. Why spend your time on that? Think of all the people you could be helping instead . . . .So I waited until a post- prandial lull in the conversation, hoping pumpkin pie and apple cider might help them swallow my question. 

“Do you remember Mrs. B.?” I asked. “My piano teacher….” 

My father glanced up blankly from his dessert. “Did you take piano lessons?” 

“With that Swiss woman,” replied my mother. 

“For three years,” I emphasized. “Do you remember her first name?” 

My mother shook her head. “I don’t think I ever knew it….” 

Then she ducked into the kitchen to retrieve fresh coffee for our guests and the conversation drifted back to vacation plans, gardening, whether my aunt might retire. Case closed. Had the meal lasted until the Pilgrims returned to Plymouth Rock, nobody would have inquired why I’d suddenly sought the name of a piano tutor not mentioned for nearly four decades. 

I tried a different tack. “I’m thinking of tracking her down,” I said. “Mrs. B. To ask her why she moved away so abruptly….” My mother had returned with more coffee cups than she could safely carry. She’d taken piano lessons as a child herself, I knew—so maybe she could empathize. We still kept her old metronome and several of her method books. Had she laughed off my questions, I’d have taken her lack of interest in stride; to my surprise, she responded with silence. I could see her trying to draw the attention of my father, who was busy regaling my date with a joke.

“Maybe I can find her without a first name,” I pressed. “You don’t happen to remember where she moved to….” 

“She didn’t move anywhere,” said my mother. 

“Yes, she did,” I insisted.

“No, she didn’t. We just told you that.” 

A hush had descended upon the table, as though my extended family had sensed the relative unimportance of their own conversations; even my dad had resisted another joke. Suddenly, my mother found herself with an audience. “We’re talking about his piano teacher….” 

“I thought she moved away,” I said. 

Now my mother smiled, as though recognizing a dose of unanticipated humor in the episode. “She called us and said you were one of the worst students she’d ever encountered—that you couldn’t hear when you made a mistake—and no amount of practice could fix that.” Even vicariously, after half a lifetime, the critique stung. I had practiced. Religiously. I’d curled my fingers precisely as she’d instructed and always sat up straight. “She said we were doing you a disservice,” Mom added, “by letting you continue. I can’t believe we never told you….” 

“When would it have come up?” I asked. 

Yes, when? Only on the literally thousands of occasions I’d had dinner with my parents between the ages of nine and forty- two. But the dark comedy wasn’t lost on me. If fate had steered me away from Carnegie Hall, it was on account of my own innate dearth of talent—not a-man-with-a-van who’d hauled off Mrs. B.’s piano. For all I knew, if she were still alive, she might be residing at the very same address, even giving lessons on the same baby grand piano. That interested me much less. What was I going to do? Knock on her suburban door and ask: Remember me? Your worst student ever? 

So that was that. I suppose my musical career would have ended anyway, sooner rather than later, but somehow Mrs. B.’s rejection towered over my future choices like a Mount Rushmore of Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms. She had closed the doors of virtuosity, driving me along the well-worn path that led to medicine and then head-shrinking. How could anyone have been so heartless? I asked myself. And what could I possibly do to thank her? I forced a smile, trying to brush off the shock. “Glad we’ve cleared up that mystery.” 

Only there had never been any mystery. Only the echo of doors: closing and opening, opening and closing. Maybe a pair of tin ears had kept me from hearing the din. 

My mother laughed. “We’re just not a musical family,” she said. 

⧫

Jacob M. Appel is a physician, bioethicist, American author, lawyer, and social critic in New York City. He is the author of twenty volumes of fiction and nonfiction, and most recently the novel “Shaving with Occam.” He is also known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Website: www.jacobmappel.com 

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal that selects the most compelling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of unpublished, new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: “My father lived alone for many years by the beach in Southern California a couple of hours from my house, and he loved my visits. Every couple of weeks, we would grocery shop and then go out to lunch. He grew tomatoes in planters by his small apartment. He died after a month-long stay in the hospital, and for many years I could not drive through the town where he lived. When I finally did, this image occurred to me.”

A Memory

It was just a drive on the 5 Freeway,
the ocean to our left, when I recalled
your apartment to our right and down
a couple of streets, the little stove
where you made spaghetti, tomato
plants by the porch, the screen
door revealing only your silhouette
when I knocked as you got up to open it,
and I knew you were smiling to know
it was me, your daughter, coming to see
you, coming to see you again.

⧫

Carla McGill’s writing has been published in The Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Bryant Literary Review, Euphony Journal, The Hungry Chimera, The Penmen Review, The Alembic, and many other literary publications. She lives in Southern California where she writes poetry and fiction. 

Delmarva Review selects the most compelling new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: Especially at tax time, I like to consider the Church and State economies I grew up in. The Gospel says to give to Caesar the coin that bears his image. As a fundraiser, the Church has mailed out gold-colored coins bearing the image of a wide-winged angel. In the poem, I’m playing with the several meanings of saving and accounting, guilt and relief, worth and impression. What balances a budget? How much depends on the flip of a coin?

SAVINGS

Tax time, only two solids on the spectrum:
black and red. Gold glints in the periphery,
spectral. You think it might be dollar coins
edging from the stash hidden from burglars,
the IRS. No, it’s the light cache of medals
mailed by Catholic Relief, guilt-raising funds.
Flip them and you’ll see: On both sides of each,
an extraordinary angel, from a ledger you dare
not call worthless or unaccountable, is impressed.

⧫

Jeanine Hathaway is professor emerita of English at Wichita State University and a former mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA Creative Writing Program. She is the author of the novel, Motherhouse (NY: Hyperion, 1992), The Self as Constellation (UNT, 2002), winner of the 2001Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, the chapbook The Ex-Nun Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Long after Lauds (Slant Books, 2019) winner of a 2020 Catholic Book Award for Poetry.

Delmarva Review selects the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “Ode” has its origins in two things that happened the same week at about the time I turned seventy-four. First, in one of my writing groups, there is a retired nun who spent much of her working life in Africa caring for people who were dying of AIDS. She knows I am a non-believer but said to me, “There are many different ways of believing.” Also, my wife told me I should get an extravagant car while I could still enjoy it. The poem represents my psyche bringing these comments into relation with each other.

Ode

I’m at the age I want to believe,
even though it’s unlikely
I ever will. But if I did, it would

have a touch of the Christian to it.
The part about hope and in that hope,
joy. I hear it sometimes in buskers,

those singing on the streets because
they have to sing, and they have to sing.
It echoes too in the valley of my wife’s

deep tenor when she sings Raglan
Road or The Parting Glass for me.
Lately, I feel it in my body as I begin

to recover from physical failings
that might have been permanent.
And I hear and feel it on the weekly

face-to-face calls with my children
and theirs, a late reprieve from
keeping so much to myself. It might

be that they’ve forgiven me, at least
a little. I even feel the ironies in my
wife’s thought that I should get

a new, extravagant car, just this once,
now that the end is closer. She fears
for me and hopes for me. What more

at this age could I ask?

⧫

Arnie Yasinski is a retired college administrator, born in American and now living in Ireland with his Irish wife. He’s a father and grandfather with a PhD in English and BA from Indiana University. He wrote his first poem at fifty and has published poetry in four dozen US journals. He has two collections, Proposition and God Lives in Norway and Goes by Christie, both published by 21st Century Renaissance press in Ireland. He earned an MBA in finance from University of Michigan. Website: www.arnieyasinskipainterpoet.com

Delmarva Review selects the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “When I was an infant of six weeks, my parents took the decision to leave Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born. The family—my parents, grandparents, my brother, and myself—journeyed from Alabama to Indiana south of Chicago. From there we moved again, this time to Illinois. “Weeping Willow” is inspired by my early experiences attending school as a transplant with a family from the Deep South to a place where the regional differences in speech were markedly different.” 

Weeping Willow

. . . I beat you with a stick, voice, beat you //
until you speak, until you
speak right. 

-Ilya Kaminsky 

In the first grade—my first opportunity
to become a part of a group outside
and seemingly larger than my family,
as a willow is part of the riverbank
with the river, somnambulant, moaning
beside it—I was removed from the room

where all the other children sat at desks,
some crying, some laughing, some
pulling papers out and drawing pictures
of lions and cars and forests, and I was sent
to a cavernous dark room with walnut walls,
a black tiled floor, where windows shed 

a painfully diffused light, sent there alone
to meet Mrs. Parsons for a private lesson,
an hour every day, five days a week,
where she taught me pronunciation, how
to speak as the other children spoke
who were not the offsprings of my mother,

born and raised in the Deep South,
who had not been hearing my mother’s
particular voice, which I had learned,
and whose inflections I had emulated,
who must have seemed as foreign to her
Midwestern acquaintances as this 

first-grade boy had seemed to the teachers
in my school, to the students in my class.
For day after walnut-paneled day, I felt
then like the sole willow weeping in a grove
of sturdy oak trees. But I found myself,
my tongue rooting into the bank of speech. 

#

V. P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, 2021), The Green Cup (winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, 2017), The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Heaven Changes (Pudding House, 2007). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals. He lives in Maryland.

Delmarva Review selects the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “When our children were young, we would spend our summers on Virginia’s Eastern Shore — a much different world from our suburban Delaware existence. Of course, children grow up and away. That is the plan. Writing about this magical time together helps me feel closer to these far-away adults and reminds me to be grateful. Grateful for past adventures and future possibilities.”

Skimmers: A Love Story in Three Parts

I.

WE FIRST MET THESE BIRDS at the end of a hot summer day. Coastal Virginia hot, when it feels like you’re breathing through and wearing a wet wool blanket. We’ve been outside for most of the day. Laughing. Swimming. Fishing. A little sunburnt. Sure, we used sunscreen, but how can you protect so many freckles? Have we had dinner? I hope so, because salt and crumbs are the sole survivors in our Ziploc snack bags. We are quieter now, moving toward stillness and the evening. We take longer breaths. 

The sun is low and dipping behind the water. That time of day when sunglasses make the world a little too dark, yet without them, we all squint. Look at these colors. Everything washed with a pearl finish. Pearly green water meets pearly blue sky. A thin, nearly invisible line marks the horizon between the two. 

The birds are busy. Ospreys high and terns lower, both diving for supper. The noisy gulls provide our summer soundtrack. We sort of miss them when they are silent. Sort of. 

Then we see them. Something different. Steady horizontal flight. Black backs on a white body contrast with this pearly scene. Flying so close to the water their bill drags through it. Rhythmic. Focused. Truly skimming this thin line between sky and bay. And that crazy bill. Red with black. They turn together, ignoring the people, the boats, the gulls. Skimming the surface, riding the in-between. One two three four strokes and turn. One two three birds. 

We inhale. We stare. We hold our breath.

I look at our son and daughter. The dusk glow gives them rosy halos. They are following the flight, and I am following them. 

We exhale, widen our eyes, raise our eyebrows, and look at each other. We remain quiet, our expressions asking the questions—Did you see what I just saw? Did you see those birds? 

We are smitten with these creatures. 

Related to gulls and terns, black skimmers (Rynchops niger) are found exclusively in the Americas and nest on Virginia’s sandy shoreline. 

Resting on the shore, their size (medium) and coloration (black and white) combine to blend them into the shorebird background scenery. They might be easy to miss. Look a little closer, though, and the bill emerges as a differentiating feature. Awkward. Heavy. This is definitely not a gull. (The genus name, Rynchops, is derived from ancient Greek for bill and face.) With a pair of binoculars, you may get a good look at the eyes. Large pupils help maneuver during low light. Keep the binoculars steady, and if you’re lucky, you might see the eyes close vertically to slits to protect from the harsh sun. They are ready for whatever light they encounter. 

Once on the move, no binoculars are needed to witness awkward anatomy morph into graceful flight. The skimmer’s strong wings are set high on the body. Long upstrokes and short downstrokes keep the bird merely inches from the water. Now we begin to understand that bill. A skimmer flies so close to the water that its larger lower mandible drags the surface. Once the skimmer feels a fish, the upper mandible clamps shut. Small groups of skimmers will often fly in lines, turning in unison, back and forth over the same area. Many scientists believe that this rhythmic patterning actually lures in fish. Skimmers are considered crepuscular, meaning they are most active at twilight. Bright light isn’t needed for their technique, and evening fishing usually promises calmer water and more surface prey. Fishing by feel. A uniquely skimmer approach. No other birds behave in this way. 

The urge to dive must be strong. I respect the courage of the tern and the power of the osprey. They need to know exactly where to go and then commit to it with their full body. The skimmer, however, seems more accepting of the present moment, more likely to say—Let’s enjoy the water. The air. The in- between. Let’s just see what will happen. 

II .

ASSATEAGUE. WALLOPS. ASSAWOMAN. Metompkin. Cedar. Parramore. Hog. Cobb. Wreck. Shipshoal. Myrtle. Smith. Fisherman. 

These islands form a seventy-mile outer barrier along Virginia’s Eastern Shore from the Maryland-Virginia line south to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. South of Wallops, there is no road access; boat travel is the only way to visit. The islands are harsh natural environments. Homes and other structures that were built by hopeful settlers have long ago succumbed to wind and waves. The narrow sandy stretches earn their “barrier” title by absorbing storm waves and tides, protecting the marshes and mainland behind them. 

These islands and their accompanying bays became our family’s summer escape—our wildness, our adventure. 

During the school year, we lived in suburban Delaware— famous for tax-free shopping and now Joe Biden. Good schools and generous employers made it a wise choice, a safe choice for our family—albeit a little stiff, a little stale. 

Summers always offer an awakening, a welcome respite from routine. Wherever it happens. However, the time is spent. Summer takes the lid off most pots, relieving some built-up pressure and hopefully stirring some stuck routines. Our summers did that and more as we headed south for a season of adventure and possibilities on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. 

True, there is nothing on television. Grouchy reception allows us one or two stations at best, and only if it isn’t windy. And yes, school friends are four hours away. Soon enough, that will matter. But not yet, not now. We had all we needed and wanted—books and boats and time. Time to stay up late, and time to sleep in. Time to explore, to get muddy and messy. 

Sometime before our two beautiful children grew into adults that moved away, before they became teenagers that pushed away, lived the sweet spot of Shell Beach. 

Who wants to go to Shell Beach today? While the short answer is always a quick “yes,” the longer response involves variations on the theme of “have you seen my stuff?” and “can you help me find it?” Hats, sunglasses, and sweatshirts enjoy their own summer adventure by hiding from us. 

With more than three years and several inches in height over her brother, our daughter often assumes a natural leadership role and today helps him collect what is needed. I know we are almost ready when she asks, “Is it the last minute yet? I’m going to the bathroom at the last minute.” 

Bags finally packed with towels, buckets, and extra clothes, we trailer our small gray skiff to Gargatha Landing, always with a stop for our traditional Fig Newtons. 

The sun bakes the parking lot, and there are no trees to shade us. We are patient but uncomfortable as the ritual of launching the boat unfolds. Put the plug in. Undo the straps. Bags in the boat. Hand signals to back up the truck—not too much, a little more, a little more, you’re good now. 

It’s low tide, so once in the boat, we are looking up at the tall green marsh grasses. Each time we launch, the creek looks a little different. Today, we are riding low on Gargatha Creek, taking the turns wide. As we pick up speed, the kids and I yell into the wind and try to match the engine’s noise. The boat bounces us, and anything not secured might fly away. Our daughter’s thick mane of red hair whips around her face. A gust snatches her hat, but she catches it just in time. Our son sees this and quickly removes his Michigan hat. “No way I’m losing this,” he mutters. It’s a beloved accessory, especially after weeks of folding the brim to create the perfect angled look. 

We pull up on the creek side of the island, close to the inlet. Just a low stretch of sand here. One anchor in the sand and one in the water. We tease and tug and adjust until it is just right. Just enough slack. Just enough tension. 

We’ve arrived. 

Metompkin Island will always be Shell Beach to us. On our first visit a few years back, we discovered it was impossible to walk there without stepping on seashells. Sometimes angel wings, sometimes sand dollars. Often jingle shells, limpets, moon snails, scallops, and slipper shells. And always whelk shells. So many whelks. Knobbed and channeled, from thumbnail to nearly forearm length, their colors all the more beautiful because they are muted. You have to look closely to appreciate the pale mauves and peaches swirled with creams and grays. 

Our first few trips there, we wanted them all. We quickly filled buckets with whelk shells, emptied them into the boat, then filled again. It took a full summer of frenzied collection to exhaust the urge to own the beach. Now we limit ourselves to one or two perfect treasures each. Today’s contest has our son and daughter scouring the beach for both the smallest and the largest whelks they can find. 

We leave our shoes and bags near the boat and begin to walk toward the inlet. Dad drops his fishing bucket in the sand and scouts a good place to cast. He tells us he’ll catch up with us later. The kids and I walk along the inlet and turn towards the ocean beach. 

The Atlantic Flyway is an important north–south highway for migrating birds and it passes right over Virginia’s coast. The shape of the Delmarva peninsula, in general, and Virginia’s barrier islands, in particular, create a unique funneling section of the flyway. In the spring and fall, over one hundred thousand birds, from the largest hawks to the smallest songbirds, pass through for a quick rest-and-recovery feed stop. 

But it is summer now, and migration is over. Local birds have settled in to court, mate, nest, and create families. Plovers like to nest on Shell Beach, along with oystercatchers, terns, knots, and, oh yes, our beloved skimmers. So many birds. Being such a critical nesting habitat, the dunes on Shell Beach are closed to foot traffic during nesting season. That’s no problem for us. We walk along the edge of the surf and keep our feet wet. 

Our son is the first to hear a strange buzzing. “What’s that? Listen, guys.” 

We pause our shell scavenging. Initially, the sound is faint, but with just a few steps toward drier sand, it quickly crescendos into a din. Mostly higher pitches, but with lots of different calls. Somewhere in that cacophony is a lower tone. Sounds like a hacking cough to me. Those must be our skimmers. Their strange barking cry has earned them the nickname “seadogs” in some regions. 

We walk just a few steps toward this rowdy avian orchestra, being careful not to get close to any protected areas. We know better. We don’t want to disturb these shorebirds during their vulnerable nesting time. 

And then, finally, we see them. So many birds. There must be hundreds of them. Most are standing sentry on sand. A few are taking short flight above the dunes. Even without binoculars, we can identify some of the larger species: laughing gulls, oystercatchers, and, oh yes, our beautiful black skimmers. 

Skimmers seem to follow the “strength in numbers” motto. They nest in large social groups, often near tern colonies. Terns— island bullies who are small and yet quite aggressive—help protect their nesting neighbors from predators. And the bullies are here in force today. A handful quickly take flight together while we watch our skimmers. They separate from the mob of birds and fly a little closer to us. 

These are least terns, identified by their compact size, yellow bill, black cap, and white forehead. They are hovering near us, almost hummingbird-like, watching us watch them. 

They begin making a strange chirp-like noise, sounding like a frustrated teacher reprimanding the class with a tsk-tsk. 

How cute, I mistakenly think. 

Their reprimands quickly become louder, however, and the tsk-tsk chirping even more insistent, more annoyed. They move in and hover even closer to us. 

I see my son’s worried face and my daughter’s raised eyebrows. 

Before the kids even get a chance to ask, “Are we okay?” the terns begin to repeatedly dive-bomb the sand near us, and with each dive, they move in that much closer. The air around us swirls with buzzing and diving small bodies. 

Reflex kicks in, and our bodies react. 

“Aaaah!” we all scream, covering our heads with our hands and sprinting away from the tern attack. We run toward the inlet and don’t slow until we no longer hear the tsk-tsk reprimands. By the time we stop, we’re winded from running and laughing. The terns are nowhere in sight. We feel equally triumphant, silly, and safe. 

The children’s patience for birding, however, is now understandably gone. It’s hard to follow up the tern debacle with simply standing still and watching skimmers from a distance. 

It’s a short walk to Dad and his fishing gear. The kids move on, but I remain. They are drawn to flight, and I am drawn to the nest. 

I wait, and I watch. Once the terns settle down again, I can get a better look at the adult skimmers. They seem to be standing, guarding their nests, but even with binoculars, I can’t see much detail. Skimmer eggs and nests are nearly impossible to spot. Look for them, and you won’t find any traditional nests here made of twigs, protected high in a tree. On barrier islands, vegetation is scarce, and trees are notably absent. So skimmers nest directly on the sand: vulnerable, exposed. Males scrape saucer-shaped depressions that typically hold four brown-spotted cream eggs. Both parents tend to the eggs, and after about three to four weeks of incubation, the hatchlings emerge. 

Don’t be fooled by a baby skimmer’s appearance of maturity. Despite the hatchlings’ open eyes, and their ability to immediately stand, these down-covered chicks are quite dependent on their parents. Both parents work together to feed and protect their babies for about a month. After four weeks, the young skimmers begin to fly, and after about five weeks, they can fly well enough to fish for themselves. Family units stay together for the season, with the young birds growing stronger and sharpening their fishing skills. 

As I watch, four adult skimmers fly to the surf. Strong black wings. Rhythmic, graceful flight. Up down, up down, and turn. They stay in a line, working the water for a few minutes before returning to their hungry hatchlings. A brief pause on the sand, then they’re off again. I understand this parental imperative. 

The sun is high now, and I’m getting uncomfortably hot. I turn from my vigil and head toward the inlet to find the kids fishing with their dad. 

Everyone is looking a little weary. Time to go home. 

It’s a short walk along the creek side of the island to where we anchored. We load our bags, then climb back into the boat. Our son wins the contest for largest whelk. Our daughter, the smallest. All is well. 

Anchors and lines stowed, we head back. The tide is up now; we ride higher and can see farther where we are going. The wind has picked up, too. We’ve got a bit of chop. Our daughter bounces on the front bench, and our son gets sprayed in the back. Both sensations are welcome, so there is no haggling over seating arrangements. We are subdued, the fast turns provide a breezy refreshment we enjoy privately. Quietly. 

Back at the landing, our ritual unfolds in reverse with hand signals and tie-downs. We load our bags into the truck, and try to wipe sand from our feet before getting in. We’re tired, though, and there’s just too much stuck between our toes. Good enough. 

Soon our children will be pulled into migration mode—off to college, to jobs, to kids of their own. But not yet. Not today. 

We return. Back to our shelter. Our home. 

For us, it is still nesting time. 

III.  

BEAUTIFUL FLIGHT. Rhythmic wing beats.

Up down. Up down and turn.

Up down and keep going.

Migration pulls our Virginia skimmers south, to overwinter and fatten on the southeastern coasts, from Florida all the way to Central and South America. Global habitat loss is a pervasive and powerful threat to all wildlife, and despite Virginia’s protected nesting grounds, skimmers are not immune. Vulnerable, but not considered endangered, skimmers are classified by the Commonwealth of Virginia as a “species of greatest conservation need” and by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as a “species of high concern.” Both are curious but rather benign designations with little accompanying policy protection. Labels that seem to translate loosely to “let’s just keep an eye on them.” 

Better than nothing, I suppose. 

Migration pulled our children from home as well. Which is as it should be. 

Our daughter followed the Atlantic Flyway a few hundred miles north for love and work and family. Her nurturing role continues—for her spouse, her children, and her students. Middle schoolers can challenge even the most experienced educators, but she offers her classroom a successful and dynamic mix of empathy, respect, and humor. 

Our son flew against the prevailing westerlies to establish his nest, finding love and purpose three thousand miles away. The Michigan hat is long gone, but his deep compassion remains and is now fully matched with self-confidence. A powerful mix. He is drawn to union organizing and is fully committed to helping workers find and strengthen their voices. 

True, neither of them is endangered, but they will always remain my “species of concern.” 

I see them all much less often now, kids and skimmers alike. 

Behind our current home, our floating dock lazily rides the three-foot tidal pulse of Mattawoman Creek, a small finger-like extension of Chesapeake Bay. At high water, we have just enough depth to launch our small Whaler. Low tide reveals mud flats and secrets that were covered only hours ago: oyster clumps, raccoon tracks, and fiddler crab holes. We watch great blue herons and great egrets feeding in the shallows. Our skimmers are nowhere in sight. They much prefer to keep their feet clean and out of this soft marshy muck. 

Certainly, memories loom larger as visits become less frequent. It’s been many years since our last Shell Beach adventure. I can always close my eyes, though, and see freckled faces warmed by the sun. Kids exploring and splashing. Skimmers feeding with that meditative movement—up down, up down, and turn. Skimming versus diving. 

Diving requires a goal that is clearly defined and aggressively pursued. I would like to say my diving days are over, but that isn’t fully true. I’m learning to let go, but I still feel the seductive pull of a well-crafted list and the inflated satisfaction of items ticked off. 

Increasingly, though, my lists shorten. Skimming makes ever more sense. Recognizing the tension between possibilities. Enjoying the transitions. Sea and air. Land and sea. Pulling tight and letting go. Nesting and migrating. Childhood and adulthood. Adulthood and elderhood. Skimming the in-between. Up down, up down, and turn. Let’s see where this will take us today. 

⧫

Patty McLaughlin is a retired educator, currently living on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Delmarva Review is pleased to publish her first essay in its 15th anniversary edition. 

Delmarva Review selects the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: “I believe I started writing ‘The Bricks of Baltimore’ after I read an article in The Baltimore Sun on the 10th of March 2021 about the deconstruction of Baltimore through the removal of bricks from Sparrow’s Point and a variety of other sites in our city. I was especially moved by the fact that the bricks were then taken to Washington and used for purely decorative purposes in expensive condominiums. I was further astounded by the fact that one could ‘source’ the bricks to different neighborhoods through a variety of colors and striations. By the end of October the poem had undergone six major revisions and was accepted for publication by The Delmarva Review.”

The Bricks of Baltimore

Forty miles to Washington on Route 95,
the bricks go south a truck at a time
in a funeral procession to their final rest
in the false facades of other peoples’ homes,
their faces power-washed and dried by hand.

In the apartment blocks of the rich the bricks
of Baltimore are more than a painful metaphor
of how a city of wasps has sucked out the wealth
from its darker sister like a carnivorous insect.

The city’s ruination began when Beth Steel closed
its giant plant at Sparrow’s Point
and thirty-five thousand good-paying jobs left us
a town of spavined rowhouses with marble stoops
and neighborhoods emptied of workers.

You can guess their origin by a brick’s color and heft:
orange examples from a dumpster on Chase,
the oldest looking born on Federal Street and a few
with vertical stripes from Fenwick Avenue.

The folks in the DC condos are deaf to any rumors
of a past, our old bricks serving for surface decoration
don’t carry the weight of the walls as they did
when the national wealth was more equally spread
when the sixth largest city always had more, not less.

⧫

Michael Salcman is a retired physician and teacher of art history in Baltimore. He is past chair of neurosurgery at University of Maryland and past president of Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. His poems appear in Barrow Street, Cafe Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review and Smartish Pace. Collections include The Clock Made of Confetti, A Prague Spring, Before & After (Sinclair Prize), Shades & Graces (inaugural winner Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize), and Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). Website: www.msalcman.com

Delmarva Review selects the best new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of original submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org