My Bobble Head Dashboard Deity
In the hours before dawn, on a desolate Mojave Desert highway, I ask my bobble head dashboard Buddha deity, his once bright colors faded, nose melted by furnace-like desert heat, his bloated, smiling head bobbling like an old man with a neurological condition, whose God is the right God? He bobbles amiably, as he so often does when asked the unanswerable, gyrating his distended belly. Been with me for 30 years since I Crazy Glued him to the shiny, oiled, fake leather dashboard of my 1975 Dodge Dart; now a car show classic. Just like Mother Theresa, near the end of her...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of June 24 (Back in Time)
This week, Wild Violet’s contributors take us to different time periods: In Patricia Polak’s poem, “Zum Zum,” a German restaurant in Manhattan evokes memories of the 1960s. In Barbara Kussow’s story, “1984,” the arrival of a computerized card catalog causes trouble for a closeted lesbian couple. In Judy Bebelaar’s poem, “Stern Grove,” a concert-goer is reminded of previous concerts, decades ago. In Robert C. Hargreaves’s essay, “Mississippi Freedom Summer – 1964,” he recalls a summer spent...
Read MoreTime Travels of the Older American Poet
Today on my way to see The Surrealistic Adventures of Women Artists, I tripped and fell into a hole of sky, tumbled up, and landed at the Locke Insulator Company, Victor, New York, circa 1903. I saw my baby grandfather James held in the arms of great-uncle Fred, ...
Read MoreMississippi Freedom Summer – 1964
In my Army days a black sergeant told me that if he had a choice between a house in Mississippi and a house in hell, he’d take the house in hell! In 1964 I had the chance to go to Mississippi as a civil rights worker and see for myself. I wanted to be a missionary and considered this a good opportunity for cross-cultural experience. I was totally unprepared for what I found. It wasn’t just segregated buses and drinking fountains. The whole society was segregated from top to bottom, with blacks getting nothing but leftovers. Hospitals and ambulances were segregated. Even the Red Cross...
Read MoreStern Grove
We are all women of a certain age— at seventy, mine more certain than others’. I’ve been somewhere much like this eons ago: Love-ins, Be-ins, we called them then, but the young girls in short skirts or long, the couples, the children, the music: almost the same. We filed down a steep, shady path, orange nasturtiums lacing through dark ferns on either side as if lighting our way to where musicians are setting up on a stage under tall redwoods. On either side of us the earth angles up, terraced to the west for seating on the ground. We’re early, but every space is full, blanket to...
Read More1984
The day the new online catalogs arrived in the library marked the beginning of the end of Mrs. Lilah Lamb’s 25-year-library career. Or perhaps it was the day Mr. Chesterton, the new director, stepped into the library a year and some months earlier, in January 1984, a year for technological bodings. Mr. Chesterton was leading the Irving Public Library into the electronic age with the library board’s blessing. He even tried to make the transition to automation as painless as possible. To let patrons and staff get used to electronic browsing gradually,...
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