A pacific force in the turbulent school yard. A smiling dunce who
took the swish and smack of the blackboard pointer even on his knuckles
with a placid smile. Because I had often committed the unforgivable sin
of using big words in public, I was picked on a lot. Sometimes a term I had
used in passionate argument, “contingent” for instance, would cause such
widespread ire even the altar boys who were already practising saintliness
found ways to make me pay.
We used to play a game called boxball. It was set up like the infield
of a baseball diamond, but, of course, smaller, and you had to hit the pink
rubber ball on one bounce with your hand. A good pitcher could make it
skid and jump and go any way but how you expected it to. A fly out of the
infield was an out, so you had to cuff it with enough topspin to keep it low,
and get it by the fielders. For some reason known only to God and maybe
Sister Violeta, I was a serious hitter. This, along with my adult vocabulary,
provoked a gang of eighth-graders to stand around behind me as I came
up to the home plate we had drawn with stolen blackboard chalk on the
concrete. (It was exactly the same size as the plate on the diamond in No.
5 Park where the triple A teams played on weekends and passed around
the hat.) As the ball hit the ground and bounced, they would grab my arm
then let it go, and everyone would laugh when I missed.
After three humiliating at bats, I figured out a way to fox them.
There was no rule that said which hand you had to hit with, so I cocked
my right, but let them take it, then slapped up with my left, backhanded,
catching the ball with my stiffened knuckles and blasting it, on one bounce,
through the hole between third and short. But when I took off toward first
base, one of the boys stuck out his foot, and I fell, scraping my knees and
elbows on the concrete. I got up and kicked him in the crotch. Further
developments were curtailed by the recess bell, but they caught me after
school, and Louis, the one I had kicked, was burning my eyelashes with
the tip of his cigarette when Danny Amoroso ambled across the school
yard, smiling that mild, empty smile as he slapped and chopped and kicked
them away from me.
When he’d beat them off, he looked at me with such a look, I could
hardly understand it. It scared me. But it made me feel good too.
“Pawsy,” he said, “You have to be my best friend now.”
He always called me that, and he always smiled when he said it. I
could never figure out why, so one day I asked him and he said he liked…
Day: 12/29/2025
Wellspring of Love
excerpt
As he climbed onto the tractor seat, he took a deep breath, drawing
in the earthy smell of freshly turned sod. Robins, newly returned
from their winter home, danced over the furrows searching for earthworms
turned up by the ploughshares. A few crows hovered overhead,
disturbing the stillness of the spring afternoon with their raucous
cawing.
Ronald reached for his thermos in a metal box at his feet and took
a long drink of refreshing well water. He needed to stop worrying
about Rachael so much. She was Tyne’s and Morley’s responsibility,
and they had done a great job raising her and Bobby. Although the
children had been older – eight and almost five – when their natural
father had given them up for adoption, the Cresswells had loved them
as their very own right from the beginning. Even when the twin girls
had come along, Rachael and Bobby were as much a part of the family
as if they had been born into it.
Ronald knew it had been a challenge for the Cresswells. Rachael
had come to them as a disturbed child, distraught over the death of
her mother, emotionally bruised from her time in the home of her
aunt and uncle, and full of anguish about her part in getting Bobby,
Ronald and herself lost in a blizzard. But their faith in God, and
dependence on prayer, had given Tyne and Morley the wisdom and
compassion to bring about the healing that had to take place in the
child’s life and heart.
He put the John Deere into gear and engaged the plough. The
memories would not let him go today. Not only Rachael had needed
healing, he had needed it, too. And he had found it through the
patient love of Millie Harper – Tyne’s aunt – who had taken him in
when he was not quite twelve years old, still suffering from the effects
of the storm that led to his disfigurement, and terrified of returning
home to the Harrisons whom he had always thought to be his
parents.
He would never forget the shock of learning that Ruby and Bill
Harrison had taken him as a baby to raise as their own child.
Impulses
Efforts
Your voice dyed in the color
of the woman’s blond hair
brunette or any hue
covering gray like your need
to change your
flow to match the spring wind
brushing white cheeks and
soft nipples like ornamental
whisper of cicadas just
before they pair in July
preserve their status
such as the one-legged man attempts
to couple with a hot flirt
against the school yard wall
Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems
The Hawk
A woman’s laughter is heard at a distance. A lady laughs somewhere and the wind echoes her laughter here. Up to here, on this deserted shore, under the leaden sky, near the frothy waves, on a position “Three philosophers by the seashore” we live in catatonic loneliness. Wings grow slowly on our shoeless feet. Perhaps we are that winged Hermes in his youth. Ah, that horrible loneliness! Since, there is no doubt that we are alone, all alone, always alone, eternally, painfully alone. All of us. All of us. We, you, all of us. However, I’m the only one who doesn’t accept this wretched sentence and I protest, and I hit myself and I shout about it. Only I. And a detail: the lady didn’t laugh, she cried. The wind fooled us. The wind changed the sound. Birds fly in the leaden sky. A craft fights on top of the frothy waves. It is far away but it comes closer slowly.
Hellenic Canadian Literature 