Shopping at the A & P

  • Shopping at the A & P

    By Jonah Raskin

    My mother always shopped at the A & P in the small town where I grew up. Going there with her was almost as wonderful as going to the Planetarium with its stars and planets in its make-believe night sky, and the Museum of Natural History with its reconstructed dinosaurs. At the A & P I liked the rows and rows of canned goods, and packaged cereals, the smell of the wood floor and the man in the green apron who always helped my mother. I thought of him and the A & P the other day when I went shopping in my own local food market.

    Like the A & P of my boyhood, my local market is small, clean, and tidy. Some of the smells are nearly the same. Walking the aisles, I’m reminded of the smells in the A & P. Before I know it, my boyhood has come back to me, and I’m back in my boyhood on an afternoon shopping adventure with my mother. Indeed, I can remember what she and I bought together: the cans of tuna fish; the half gallon containers of vanilla and chocolate ice cream; and the many products with labels that read “Ann Page” and “Jane Parker”—names as familiar to me as the names of my own aunts.

    The manager of the local market where I shop today reminds me of the man who helped my mother. He smiles, he’s soft-spoken, and he seems like a relic from another age. There isn’t ever a product that he pushes at me, or tells me I have to buy. I like him because he’s never trying to sell me anything at all, whether it’s discounted or not.

    Maybe, too, I like him because he shopped at the A & P with his grandmother when he grew up back East. We weren’t raised in the same town, but we have the A & P in common and we can each describe the stores we knew—which is like describing the same place. Almost every &A & was identical, which was why we liked it. If we went to another town or city, we could walk into the A & P and find what we wanted without having to ask questions, or roam about. Everything about the place was imprinted on our young minds.

    We both have memories of boyhood foods—both store-bought and homemade. We’re both partial to the kinds of foods our grandmothers and our old, old aunts made for us. We both remember the smells in their kitchens, and that we liked to roll out the dough for a pie, peel and slice apples and add brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg that we’d bought at the A & P.

    Just the other day in my local market we were talking about the A & P, and how it was once a strange and mysterious place. We both remembered how we’d learned a long time ago that A & P was the abbreviation for “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.” We’d both also learned a long time ago that the symbol between the “A” and the “P”—the “&” was called an ampersand.

    The manager of my neighborhood market uses ampersands a lot and draws them the way they were drawn in the A & Ps of our boyhood. No one else seems to recognize that particular lettering. It’s something that means a lot to us, something that binds us together, along with our food past and our food present. Then, too, there’s something about knowing the A & P stands for “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” that connects us as though we belong to a secret tribe or clan.

    Of course, the market where I shop today has things that the A & P never had— organic fruits and vegetables, whole grains in bulk, and local produce. It’s a much better store with healthier food, and with much more health and nutrition-savvy employees. Still, I can’t help but feel loyal to the A & P of old and sentimental about it. Not long ago I read that the once “Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” had shrunk from the thousands of stores when I was a boy to just a few hundred today. Maybe like the dinosaur, the A & P will go out of existence. Then all I’ll have will be the memoires of that long-ago time, and the never-to-be-forgotten smells of A & P; nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar, too.

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate my own memories and to enjoy sharing them with friends and family. Once mighty enterprises seem to come and go; memories remain. My friend, the manager of the local market, has moved on to another, bigger store, and while I’m sad to see him go, I remember the stories he told me about food and his childhood. In autumn, he and his grandmother would pick unripe, green tomatoes just before the frost, wrap them in newspaper and put them away in a drawer. At Thanksgiving, they’d remove them, unwrap them and they’d be ripe and red and ready to eat.

    Memories are like those tomatoes. You pick them, store them away, then take them out months and even years later and enjoy them. So, there’s something I think of now as the taste of memory, and I know it can be as nourishing as ripe tomatoes at the height of summer, or in the cold dark days of November. Stores & stories; there’s not much that separates them, and just an ampersand brings them together as it brings together two great oceans in The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

    Originally published in Susan Bono’s Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, Flashpoints 2008.

    Jonah Raskin was born in New York and raised on Long Island. He attended Columbia College and the University of Manchester, England where he received his Ph.D.

    He has taught at Winston-Salem State College, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Sonoma State University (SSU).

    He moved to California in 1975 and began to teach in the English department at SSU in 1981. From 1988 to 2012 he was the chair of the communication studies department at SSU, where he taught media law, reporting, and media marketing. He is now a professor emeritus.

    As a Fulbright Professor, he taught American literature at the University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent. From 1985-2005 he was the book critic for The Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

    He writes for Valley of the Moon magazine, CounterPunch, The Bohemian and The Anderson Valley Advertiser.

    Jonah Raskin is the author of sixteen books, including most recently  Dark Land, Dark Mirror and  Dark Day, Dark Night.

    His other books are:  James McGrath: in A Class By Himself,  Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, and  Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.

    He has published six poetry chapbooks among them  Rock ‘n’ Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation.

    Marlene C

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  • Be more, do less.

    By Camille Sherman

    This advice was first shared in a Master Class-style opera workshop where my classmates and I would sing for each other, beginning the long process of working out the kinks in our presentation. The purpose of the vice was to help organize the inner monologue: the running mental news banner that presses into every young performance or audition. 

    Here’s how it goes: standing in front of a dozen peers, preparing to perform the aria you’ve been overthinking all morning, the mind runs wild. Sound good, remember the words, give a compelling performance, impress everyone or face clumsy embarrassment. The music starts and as you stare at a point on the back wall just above the heads of your classmates, your mental tornado flurrying, a thought freezes you into place: what do I do with my hands? Do I move or gesture? You realize as you sing the first lines thaThis advice t you are just standing there, petrified, giving the most uncomfortable and boring performance of your life, and the best thing you can think of to fix it is to take an awkward shuffle forward and maybe raise your arms in some generic, meaningless “singer” gesture, and try to play it off as if everything you’re doing is intentional. Polite applause follows, and then the professor, a veteran opera director, will graciously take you back to the beginning of the piece for a second shot.

    I remember standing there in the crook of the piano, the surreal scene as my professor approached to begin the work. My mind was still racing: the high note was ok. I had some tension in the passaggio, though, and my base of tongue keeps clamping down on my E vowel. The performance was not a catastrophe but I’m glad there weren’t that many people in the room. All of the criticism and comments flowed forth from my own brain before my professor could open his mouth.

    Then the advice came: be more, do less. Try it again, he encouraged me, but don’t worry about what your body or face are doing and don’t worry about how it sounds. Be more, do less.

    This advice came back around throughout my training. Don’t be a singer doing a performance. Be an artist performing. Do less “delivering” of the art through busy gesturing and instead choose to be something that we don’t just see and hear, but we feel. Try to focus on allowing what is in your heart and body to shine out of your face and voice. Over time and experience, the other aspects of performing strengthen and grow under this authenticity.

    Years after that course, after that degree, I sit here in Portland on top of my wealth of elite training. I consider how curious my life is: no gainful employment, an uncertain future in an uncertain industry, a highly flexible day to day with little structure and no guarantees. Why am I not panicking? Why do I not fret, morning to night, on what to do. What do I do with my time? What do I do with my talent? What do I do with my brain, body, skills? These questions brought me back to my 19-year-old self, worrying every moment about what to do, on stage and off. I sit back now as a professional artist and I answer my own questions: I am being.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop artistic projects with local artists.

    Marlene C

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  • Turtle Regains The Pond

    By Lakin Khan

    Layers of mud kept Turtle warm and secluded all through the winter hibernation. Occasionally a bubble escaped to the top of the pond, but usually, no.

    A spring sun glanced across the serene surface of the pond, riling up the water insects, generating a small current that brought fresh smells to Turtle’s blunt, beaky nose. Cinnamon, he thought, and hot cross buns, he considered, the memories of days kept at a house weaving into his rising consciousness. Time for business, he thought, and scrabbled against the twigs and leaves that the mud held against him, claws working to free him up out of his encasement and into the cold bottom water and then up, up, up into the gradually warming surface, into the feral spring.

    Two months ago, wild horses couldn’t have dragged him out of the bottom of the muck, but now Spring itself was galloping toward the yin-yang tipping point, when equal parts sunlight and shadelight split the hours. His blood surged and expanded, he was greedy for the light, for the bugs, for the feel of marsh grass against his scaly legs. He was greedy to breathe and gulped his way to the surface of the pond.

    Note: “Turtle Regains The Pond” was inspired by two prompts: Five Random Words: glare, serenity, feral, turtle, layer, cinnamon and the prompt wild horses.

    Lakin Khan writes and walks in the North Bay, enjoying the woods and the ocean, the mountains and the marsh-trails of Marin and Sonoma Counties. She leads Jumpstart Workshops online and posts on occasion to her blog, Rhymes with Bacon. 

    Currently, she is working on a collection of nature and animal essays titled Home Turf, A Beastiary of Sonoma State, illustrated by well-known printmaker Shane Weare. Her essays have been published in Tiny Lights, a Journal of Personal Essay, her fiction in the anthology Zebulon Nights, and various poems in online forums. She is always surprised by the stories that arise out of the fermentation of random words or images.

    Marlene C

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  • History Lesson

    By Susan Bono

    I’ve been rummaging around in already full closets lately, trying to find space for all the stuff I brought home when I emptied my parents’ house last May. It’s been rough going, but I stopped wondering why when I realized Mom and Dad lived in their house for thirty-seven years, only eight years longer than we’ve lived in ours.

    Our youngest son often encounters me staring into space clutching a quilt, wood carving, or photograph. I think my uncharacteristic attempts at organization are making him nervous. “What are you doing? What’s that?” he asks.

    “Oh, this is some of your Great Aunt Emily’s needlepoint,” I tell him a little too eagerly. “These are my Barbie clothes, and here are the baby rompers your great grandmother made for your grandfather back in 1925. You wore them once yourself.”

    I give him these family history updates knowing full well it’s all drifting into one ear on its way out the other. At twenty-two, he doesn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. But as long as he keeps asking, I continue to supply the disregarded answers.

    Telling these stories is a kind of test. I’m trying to figure out how much I actually know about the Scotty dog napkin ring, the china baby doll, the anniversary clock, the piece of Native American pottery. If I don’t remember what my parents told me about these things, what can they really mean to me?

    “It’s just stuff,” I heard myself say as I watched people carry off Christmas decorations, books, camping gear, and clothing from the garage sale I organized to clear my parents’ attic. But I might as well have said, “It’s just stories.” Stories that connect me by an ever-thinning thread to a world that is disappearing.

    I remember asking my own mother, “What’s that?” and “Who are those people?” when I caught her sorting drawers or photographs. I thought I was listening to her explanations, but I didn’t retain much. The tiny, mirrored powder box with the ostrich puff, that silver thimble—I know they were her mother’s, but what about the rest of the story? I’m sure she told me more than once, each time straining to remember what her own mother, dead before I was born, had told her. It’s only now that I understand how the story of an object becomes more precious than the thing itself when there’s no one left to ask about it.

    Susan Bono, a California-born teacher, freelance editor, and short-form memoirist, has facilitated writing workshops since 1993, helping hundreds of writers find and develop their voices. Her work has appeared online, on stage, in anthologies, newspapers, and on the radio.

    From 1995-2015, she edited and published a small press magazine called Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, as well as the online component that included quarterly postings of micro essays and a monthly forum dedicated to craft and process.

    She was on the board of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference for more than a decade and was editor-in-chief of their journal, the Noyo River Review, for eight years. Susan often writes about domestic life set in her small town of Petaluma.

    This essay can be found in her book, What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home. Find out more at susanbono.com.

    Originally published in Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, Editor’s Notes, Contest 2009 issue

    Marlene C

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  • 2021 Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest

    Poetry Contest news from Alan Lowe:
    Inviting All to Enter

    2021 Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest

    Wishing you good health and peace during these difficult and confusing times. Looking on the bright side,  the 17th Annual Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest is open to young and old.

    Contest theme: If Life Were A Game Show, What Would Poets Say?

    The five contest categories:

    • Let’s Make A Deal   
    • To Tell The Truth   
    • The Price Is Right   
    • Family Feud   
    • Who Wants To Be A Millionaire

    Poets may submit a maximum of three poems, no more than one in each of three of the five contest categories.

    Everyone is encouraged to enter the contest.

    Poets do not have to live in Lincoln, CA to be eligible.

    There is no entry fee.

    Young Poets, 18-years of age or under, are encouraged to submit poems and will compete in a special “Young Poets” category.

    “Rules and Entry Form” can be downloaded, found on the blog, or through an email request to Alan Lowe: slolowe – at- icloud.com

    All poems must be received no later than Tuesday, July 20, 2021, at the address on the Entry Form.

    Note from Marlene: What a great writing prompt: If Life Were A Game Show, What Would Poets Say?

    Marlene C

  • Calm

    By Kathleen Haynie

    I drive by her turn-out, roll down the passenger car window to greet her with my best whinny. I can see her whinny ripple through the flesh of her sorrel and white soft muzzle. That muzzle will soon be buried in the red wheat bran she knows is coming. This time it is laced with bute to ease her pain from her sprained right knee. I hope the alfalfa sprinkles camouflage the taste of bute.*

    She is not too distracted with the hay and grain to lift each foot in turn so I can clean out the V ruts of each frog. After seventeen years, we know the drill. The curry comb pulls off twigs of the white winter coat on her back and haunches.

    Somehow the earth tells her body that it’s time to start letting go as the days grow longer. Yet the nights are still so very cold. Her new coat is a little whiter, a little redder, a little softer to touch. I have to lean down to nuzzle in that soft dipped curve between her shoulder and neck in order to take in the smell of sweet salty horse sweat. At nine years of age my nose was at the same level of that spot.

    Now I look up at the open blue sky and see a few puffs of white cumulus, and feel on my face the crisp ocean air coming across the valley. The constant rhythm of her teeth grinding the grain soothes the time. A desperately needed calming moment.

    *Phenylbutazone, often referred to as “bute, “is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug for the short-term treatment of pain and fever in animals. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylbutazone)

    Kathleen Haynie. This City Girl turned into a Sonoma County Horse Girl, and then retired from decades as a professional in health care. She is now acting out a latent inclination for the dramatic arts as a drama student and cast member of Off the Page Readers Theater. Surprisingly, the journey continues into the newly found delight discovered in written expression. Kathleen felt honored to have her work, What They Did to Alice, performed at the 6th Street Playhouse 2020 Women’s Festival. She has decided that dark chocolate is perfect with a full-bodied red wine.

    Marlene C

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  • A Patch of Joy

    By Christine Renaudin

    Slowly the idea grew from seemingly random pickings at the local thrift store a month or two ago, to design a painting along the seams of a small piece of patchwork discovered in the sewing notions section. Bold colors and markings drew me in, sharp contrasts, black acting as prevailing background: yellow on black, and vice versa, bright colors in between, the kind I have dreamed of playing with but never dared throwing first thing together on canvas. Circles and crosses, stars and stripes, straight and curvy, thin and think, flowers, abstracted and not, leaves, pink and red, bees and dragonflies, plain black on white: all patterns placed side by side in surprising, shockingly daring ways that made my mind bubble with joy, and my heart dance with the desire to play along.

    I bought the small rectangle of motley fabric and brought it home, where it sat abandoned in my grandmother’s wicker basket for a few weeks, thrown half folded with its price tag hanging over the brim, not so much forgotten as left to gather worth under the dust, each glance adding to the marvel of a whooping four dollars for a treasure— a steal, really— before making it to the empty wall of the study, where it suddenly hung, secured by three wooden push pins, for me to see, absorb its charm, and succumb to the second calling. 

    “Yes, beautiful, clever, and curious one,” it said in a soft, almost childlike voice. “Don’t you be so shy,” coaxing me, “there, not so shy. Come closer. Closer still. Linger with me here by the wall under the slanted western light. Let me talk to you silently and sprinkle fairy dust in your brain so it may grow fireworks worth writing home about.”  Instantly, I was a child again, bursting out in protest.

    “I don’t believe in fairy dust, and I do not have a home left where to send letters. Nobody sends those anymore anyway.” The patchwork bit seemed to shrivel for a moment under the pinch of the three pins, flat and mute against the wall in the declining light, as a passing cloud shaded the sunset glow. Sadness hung where joy had bubbled before. I felt the urge to leave the room, go cook dinner in the kitchen. 

    At dawn, I saw the piece wake up, unfold its colors like wings under the oblique and cooler eastern light flooding through the study, my breath a mist of everyday magic blowing a warmer drift into the frigid room. I wanted to apologize, but felt timid and did not. But the strip of patchwork heard me just the same and said in a voice that felt slightly older: 

    “No need. There is no need to apologize, my sweet. Fairy dust is not for everyone, especially when you’ve grown up without a television. I should have guessed by your wrinkles and graying hair, but I was fooled by your curious appreciation, and the exuberance of your heart.” 

    “Now this is a phrase I do not often hear.”

    “Because you don’t listen properly. What do you think I hang here for, if not for your eyes and yours only. You picked me up out of a dusty crate and absolute oblivion. You gave me a place on your wall, like a mirror, to send you back a new life. You, who are starting to listen at last, and smile a little, I see. Don’t be shy. Don’t hoard the joy inside, or it will choke you. Believe me, you do not want to drown in a few inches of bliss at the edge of the lake. You want to let it move your brain down to your heart and follow the odd bedfellows with pen and brush, or both, and dance with them until you have something to . . .” 

    “. . . write home about?” I heard myself interrupt in a voice that didn’t quite sound familiar. “I told you there is no one left there to care about the miracle of my life. No one to . . .” 

     . . .   read and listen?” I swallowed the bitter end of my remark and paid attention. “ You, older younger person, need to listen again, harder. Home is wider, way stranger than you think. Home is here, under your nose and feet. Writing is not overrated, nor is care. You chant and cultivate the miracle of your life, you take it out there, and move forward what you have to give to the world. I see you want to share the joy that I give you. Go do it. I’ll stay and watch from this wall in the empty study. I’ll hold the fort for you. Go send your letter out into the world.”

    Christine Renaudin’s writing has been published in various publications from The Sitting Room, as well as in The Write Spot to Jumpstart Your Writing: Discoveries, available on Amazon in print and as an e-reader.

    Christine lives, writes, and paints in Petaluma. She is also a dancer and performs occasionally in the Bay Area—last seen on Halloween sweeping the entrance of the De Young Museum with a pride of witches. She likes to mix art forms, see what comes out, and share.

    Marlene C

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  • Fear. Comfort. Prompt #578

    List five things you have feared and five things that have comforted you. Choose one and write.

    Marlene C

  • Fruit Tree

    By Camille Sherman

    I will plant a fruit tree and she will be my legacy. The neighborhood children will recognize her stature, her fullness, as a landmark. They’ll traipse over her fallen blossoms in the spring, ride past her on their bikes, see her from their windows. They will think she has been there forever, like the houses and street signs watching over their restless afternoons and summer evenings. They won’t know she was planted by someone who was once a child too. They will stand at her base and look up at her, thinking that she, like their mothers and fathers, has always been this tall.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop projects with local artists.

    Marlene C

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  • Too much or too little. Prompt #577

    Write about having too much or too little.

    Marlene C