Issue 08

Editor’s Note: Issue 08

Those familiar with the magazine may already know of RUMINATE’s affinity for “benedictions” (which in Greek translates to “a good word” and in English “a blessing”). We devoted our entire fourth issue to the theme of benedictions, and I am still fascinated by this etymological discovery— that others have translated words into blessings. In fact, this idea that good words are indeed blessings has become a cornerstone of our editorial philosophy, truly shaping RUMINATE. I (along with the other staff members) long for good words, for the words to understand good things, and we don’t think we’re alone. And because this issue is an open theme, I thought it the perfect opportunity to share an inheritance of benedictions that has fed and shaped RUMINATE.

At sixteen I found myself stumbling backwards through a half-open door, my feet clumsy with embarrassment. I had discovered my grandparents kissing. She, sitting on the edge of the pink leather sofa, and he, kneeling on the floor and leaning in with an arthritic back and a half-century’s weight. Kissing. A couch-kiss.  They didn’t even notice me, and for the first time I felt as if I had truly noticed the weight of their love. Quietly shutting the door, I walked along the gravel driveway towards the car and thought about kissing the air, creating my fidelity with a four-billion-year-old atmosphere, air that had seen many marriages, inexplicable and unaccountable numbers.

And ten years later I think about that moment, not because of my awkwardness but because of my shock. It was shock that pushed me back out of the door, shock that a fifty-year-old marriage could still produce those kinds of benedictions. In a letter to me a few years ago, my grandmother wrote about their love and said: “He cupped his hands around me.”

My grandmother—who died two years ago, two years after her husband’s death—she and I, our souls were made of the same stuff.  In another letter just before her death, she wrote: “In many ways Brianna, we come from the same planet.” Now that time has handled the rawest kind of grief, I find myself grasping for a way to continue this connection, to form words about her goodness, her rich stories.

A few days after she was gone, we were cleaning out her kitchen drawer and found a journal she had started: a few lines from a Wendell Berry story that she had copied down, a poem by Denise Levertov, and two or three pages to her husband. That’s it, and it broke my heart. How can those scant words of a fifty-year marriage count when husband and wife are dead? My father read those post- humous notes aloud, delivering her eulogy, her words to the Methodist church in Cortez, Colorado, scattering their fidelity upon the ears of those listening. I count the years between 1951-2002.

Oh, fifty-one, I say.

I suppose I am searching for benedictions because the unknown and known arithmetic become so heavy. Like turning twenty-six last month, twisting into my place marker—a quarter of a century plus one, these fractions that flounder to make sense. And more numbers: birthing my eight-pound son—the weight of a heavy bag of groceries, my milk, spinach and sourdough. He is now thirty pounds and I still have phantom pregnancy feelings, a kick here, a flip there.

Or as Wendell Berry writes in my grandmother’s journal: “It was as though Burley stood in full view near by—as though Danny could see him, but only on the condition that he not look.” I know this is how she felt about her dead husband; there are so many phantoms, so many “as thoughs.” But what if we look? What if we claim the “near by,” or that one week when she got to hold and smile and wonder over her first grandson, my first son.

There is another number: Jonathan and I will be married for four years this week. I think about what a little number this is, barely here, now, barely married. For how can four ever become fifty, and where along this timeline does it become blessed? I want to know.

This is a dream I return to: to receive a couch-kiss. Oh, how I will stoop to my young tired knees and join the ground, face tilted upward, and lean in with lips pursed, or as my son kisses, mouth loose and open, slobbery and kind, both benedicted and benedictor.  My grandmother writes, “To be generous has to involve giving—our love and all things good that we can share.” I know she is speaking about the need to give generosity, but I want to receive it.

So many words have gifts waiting to be received. I suppose I can choose mine. These are my italics. This is my chosen word: now. And this is my other word: slobbery.

How many words are in a blessing, I ask, as I say pink, and then, where?

Benediction recurs, like numbers recur—years, pounds, and seconds. I received an email from a past professor, who tells me there were copies of People magazine in the small Karen village we visited a few years ago. I picture the village, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, with its old copies of People sitting atop a wooden table.  A Minnesota-man-turned-local shuffles through the pages with horror and disgust. Not here. Not those people here. Maybe we all pray for Himalayas high enough to bear new pages.

In another letter, Grandma copies down a few lines from Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinket Creek, telling me how much she loved the image of “the creek run[ning] on all night, new every minute . . . as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper its own inexhaustible tale.” I wonder if she was thinking about her own inexhaustibility, pointing out my heritage and the pages and pages that have already been written.

Two years ago—half-brave and half-naïve—I started this literary magazine and named it RUMINATE. We dedicated the first issue to my grandmother and created an annual poetry prize in her name—because she was the magazine’s muse, its inspiration. Although they don’t reach the Himalayas, these are my new pages, small pages, created out of my inheritance, out of the basement of my house and fits of sleepless nights. They are pages with words from the pheasant farmer in Montana and the mother in Florida who dreams about living in tree houses. And as I said before, “benediction” was the theme for last summer’s issue, and it seems that the magazine itself has become a continuous search expedition for good words.

But what about the things you search to remember? I say.

Perhaps remembrance is more about absorbing the old pages in order to create anew, rather than simply creating ex nihlio. We are not God. Is this a life-long kind of chant? Old absorbed into new. Old absorbed into new. Old absorbed into new. There are so many things that can be held, cupped.

I have decided. I will eat the floundering fractions, their fidelity—fifty holding four. 4/50. I open my mouth, chewing, ruminating.

My story circles around the line breaks / kneeling / counting all eighteen vertebrae / creating the benediction / healing / shivering. And now, as if the circling has finally found its center, and because I have been reading the histories of Levertov and Dillard and Berry, I find myself uttering new words, like inexhaustible, and near by. And because I am eating my own dead inheritance, I whisper pink and planets. I wonder if this is what it means to couch-kiss the atmosphere. Our husbands. Our sons. Our souls.

With peace,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief

Julie Hensley

My Mother with Horses

It started in Big Stone Gap in the front yard
where my sisters and I fashioned whatever we could find—
tricycles, broom handles, a leaf rake—into a kind of dressage course.
She lay with a book by our plastic pool,
shaded her eyes and watched us weave through on stick ponies,
clicking our tongues, avoiding the holes
the dog dug by the porch and along the wrought iron fence.

We rode the school bus to the public library where she worked,
where there was Misty of Chincoteague, The Red Pony and Billy and Blaze.
If she was busy or we were loud,
she would sit us in the back on the blue carpet
to watch filmstrips about Pony Penning Day.

She wanted those two pinto ponies, lesson animals
who knickered when we leaned out the car windows,
who licked sugar from our palms.
For years afterwards she thought she saw them down dirt roads,
ordered my father to have a look
on the way home from Sandbridge or Buckrow Beach.
Finally a Welsh saddle pony—
old and nearly unrideable—was the first we could afford.
There is a picture of her in my father’s drawer, hair wild,
hips small in brown corduroys, holding the halter
as my youngest sister and I lean off an abandoned hay wagon
to caress the brown fur.

I was still young when she found the Arabian Quarter horse mix,
a mare who had miscarried many times.
That winter I held the cord of a sled that would not move
across the half inch of frozen snow.
I sat next to my sister—both of us stiff in snow suits—
watched her drag cinder blocks
and a rotting fence post from behind the barn,
watched them rise together,
the horse’s tail spreading like light against the gray sky.

This is how she washed our hair:
She pulled a wicker bottomed chair to the kitchen sink
leaned into our backs, one at a time,
lathered and rinsed Prell from a green bottle,
then held each of us, squirming, between her knees
and worked out the snarls with a wide-toothed comb.

She awaits the first birth in a house without daughters,
a foal swelling and turning inside
the brood mare she gave her only girl grandchild.
I imagine she takes her time now,
moving the curry comb in slow circles,
letting the winter dander float
like milkweed from her fingers.

Julie Hensleygrew up in the Shenandoah Valley, but she currently makes her home in Kentucky with her husband (the writer R. Dean Johnson) and son. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Her poems and stories have been published in many journals, most recently in Western Humanities Review, Redivider, Quarterly West, Ellipsis, and Talking River.

Joe Moffett

Church Chocolates

In church the Decalogue rings out and I go
down the list of sins committed.  Even though

years go by and slowly shake color from my hair,
I still have my share of deeds to regret.  But at least

the irony does not escape me of the woman
who sits in front and rapidly eats tiny chocolates

while the priest delivers his sermon:  the chocolates
will mix with the wafer she soon will receive, the priest

in his trembling old age will shakily place upon her tongue:
will Christ’s body be diminished as a consequence?

Or, perhaps better: Can his blood wash away
the sweetness in her mouth?

Joe Moffett is Assistant Professor of English at Kentucky Wesleyan College.  His book The Search for Origins in the Twentieth-Century Long Poem was recently published by West Virginia University Press.  What little time he can find for his creative writing usually results in work that carries a spiritual theme.  Among writers concerned with spiritual matters, his favorite might be Charles Wright.  The product of Joe’s study of Wright’s work can be found in his book Understanding Charles Wright, slated for a late 2008 or early 2009 release by University of South Carolina Press.

Frederick Buechner

Our Last Drive Together

EXCERPTED FROM ISSUE 08 . . .

It was while my mother was staying with us in Vermont that the fatal phone call came. It was from Incoronata, the woman who for years had been her factotum and mainstay in the New York apartment that she rarely left except for occasional visits to us or trips to the doctor or the hearing aid people who were always selling her new models, none of which, she said, were any damn good.

Incoronata must have spent hours working herself up to it because I’d barely lifted the receiver when she dropped her bombshell. She said she was quitting. She said she’d had all she could take. She said there was nothing more to say. And then she said a good deal more.

She told me my mother said such terrible things to her that I wouldn’t believe it if she repeated them. She said she had to work like a slave and never got a word of thanks for it, let alone any time off. She said her live-in boyfriend threatened to walk out on her if she stayed on the job a day longer because in her present state she was giving him ulcers. She was getting ulcers herself, she said. And no wonder. She said she had left the key to the apartment with one of the doormen because she would not be needing it again to let herself in. And that was that. She said she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

I could feel my scalp run cold at the thought of my mother’s reaction and said everything I could think of to make Incoronata change her mind. I told her my mother was devoted to her no matter what terrible things she said. I told her the whole family was devoted to her. I told her that when people got old and deaf and started falling to pieces, they said things they didn’t mean and then felt awful about it afterward. I said I didn’t know how my mother could possibly manage without her, how any of us could. I said we would give her a raise and see to it that she got more time off. But by then she was so close to hysterics I don’t think she even heard me.

So I changed my tactics and begged her at least to stay on till we could find somebody to replace her, at least to be there when we got back from Vermont to help my mother unpack and get resettled. But if she did that, Incoronata said, she knew my mother would find some way to make her stay, and with her nerves the way they were she simply couldn’t face it. So there was nothing more to say, and we finally hung up.

The question then became how to break the news to Kaki, which was what her grandchildren called my mother as eventually all of us did. To have told her then and there would have been to ruin the rest of her visit for all of us, so we decided to wait till I had managed to find somebody else to replace her and then not breathe a word till we had gotten her back to her apartment where there would be another Incoronata waiting to welcome her and she would simply have to accept the new state of things as a fait accompli.

My brother Jamie, who lived in New York too, came up by bus to help with the historic drive back. There was the usual mound of luggage piled out on the lawn—the suitcases with bits of brightly colored yarn tied around their handles to identify them, the plastic and canvas carry-alls, the paper shopping bags from Saks and Bonwits stuffed with things like her hair dryer, her magnifying mirror, extra slippers, and so on. There was the square Mark Cross case she kept her jewelry in and the flowered duffel bag with her enormous collection of pills and assorted medicines together with a second like it which was full of all the things she needed for making up her face in the morning. She said it was all of it breakable so for God’s sake not to put anything heavy on it and to be sure to put her long black garment bag in at the very end so it could lie flat on top of everything else and her best clothes wouldn’t end up a mass of wrinkles.

We put her white plastic toilet seat extender behind her on the back seat like a wedding cake in case she needed it on the way. She kept her straw purse on her lap with things she might want during the journey like her smelling salts and Excedrin and the little flask of water in case she started to choke. She also had me put a can of root beer in the cup holder because she said root beer was the only thing that helped her dry throat. The final thing was to get Jamie to stuff her little velvet, heartshaped pillow in behind the small of her back because she said he was the only one who knew how to do it properly.

She had one of her many chiffon scarves around her neck to keep off drafts and another one, just for looks, tied around her melon-shaped straw hat with her crescent-shaped diamond pin to hold it in place. For shoes she wore her usual suede Hush Puppies with crepe soles to prevent her from slipping and kept her cane within reach at her side. Before we started off I told her not to forget to fasten her seat belt, but she refused. She said she sat so low in her seat that the strap went across her face and almost knocked her dentures out, and that got all three of us laughing so hard I was able to click it into place without her even noticing.

. . . READ MORE. PURCHASE ISSUE 08.

Frederick Buechner is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and non-fiction. He has been a finalist for The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His many works include Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABCs, The Book of Bebb, Godric: A Novel, and, more recently, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner. “Our Last Drive Together” will be included in Buechner’s upcoming collection The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany, to be published in July 2008 by Westminster John Knox Press. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Maggie and the Beasts

Steven David Johnson. Maggie and the Beasts. Tralfamadore Farm, Virginia.

Steven David Johnson is associate professor of visual and communication arts at Eastern Mennonite University. He lives in an 1890’s farmhouse across the street from the North Fork of the Shenandoah River with his wife and artistic collaborator, Anna Maria, and their two children. Visit stevendavidjohnson.com to view more images from this series as well as Anna Maria Johnson’s mixed media response to the theme of place.