Something to Crow About: Memoirs, Short Stories, Parables and Poems

By Lucy G. Saroyan

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456819521

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Something To

Crow About

Memoirs, Short Stories,

Parables and Poems

Lucy G. Saroyan

Copyright © 2010 by Lucy G. Saroyan.

ISBN: Softcover    978-1-4568-1951-4

ISBN: Ebook        978-1-4568-1952-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

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CONTENTS

About the Cover Artist

Introduction

MEMOIRS

1.    Mrs. Bender’s Boarding School

2.    The Love Seat

3.    Buried Alive

4.    A Classic Car in the Land of the Big Sprawl

5.    Adventures in Yellow

SHORT STORIES

6.    Henri Catches a Thief

7.    If You’re a Tiger Anytime . . . 

8.    Running Water

9.    The Terrible Snerl

The Bird’s-Eye View Series

10.    The Woodpecker and the Wisdom Tree

11.    Flamer’s Feather

12.    To Catch a Thief

13.    Instinct Rules

14.    The ID Crisis

15.    The Challenger

PARABLES AND PARAGRAPHS

16.    A Symbol Is a Symbol, Is a Symbol

17.    The Need to Be Acceptable

18.    The Pushy Pickle

19.    Ancestral Odyssey

20.    The Minister, the Bread Thief, and Me

21.    High School Exit Exam

22.    The Chase

23.    Christmas is Coming

POEMS

24.    Out of Balance

25.    When the Pattern Doesn’t Match

26.    A Seaweed Fantasy

27.    Clawing at the Wind

28.    Kiosk Bread

29.    Depreciation Blues

30.    A Hierarchy of Hearts

31.    Leaf Boat

32.    Zero

33.    Urban Gangs

34.    High Humidity

35.    Epitaph in Mohair

36.    Man Overboard!

37.    That’s No Concern of Mine

38.    The Legacy

39.    Gettysburg

40.    The Dawn Wind

41.    Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary

42.    Famine

43.    Assumption of the Risk

44.    Consumers’ Ed for the No Child Left Behind Crowd

45.    Call Waiting

46.    The Cottage Witch

47.    Santa’s Last Stop

48.    The Other Side of Here

RESOURCES

Suggested Reading

Acknowledgments

With love, to my three children.

About the Cover Artist

Peta Sanderson was born in California and raised in Australia. She has previously shown her paintings and sculpture in Sydney, Canberra, and Hobart, Australia. She works in oils and describes her paintings as photo-realistic and at times allegorical.

Peta says: My work focuses on those things in life that so brim with meaning they may be experienced as symbolic. I seek to express this journey to symbolism by investigating the ascension of the mundane to the archetype and icon. In this sense, cliché fascinates me as deeply as the most epiphanous religious iconography.

Examples of her work can be seen at petasanderson.com.

Introduction

In the beginning, when man first began strutting about on two feet, the other animals were leery. From burrows and tree tops, grasslands and waterways, they watched him closely, uncertain what to make of him.

He’s sure to lose his balance, said the flamingo. I can stand on one foot, but it takes knowing how and my great skill. He has four feet and refuses to use two of them. He’ll fall.

And the flamingo was right. Man did lose his balance, but not in the way that bird thought. He grew lopsided, becoming light on what mattered, and heavy on what didn’t.

He has puny teeth, a weak jaw, and no claws, said the lion. He won’t be able to kill his prey. He’ll have to eat disgusting vegetables.

But the lion was wrong. This new animal grasped stones, made clubs, and became an excellent killer.

He’s losing all his hair, said the lamb. He’ll freeze to death, come winter.

And the lamb was right. Man did freeze to death until he learned what skins were for and made his neighboring animals super-useful by skinning them after he killed them.

He can’t defend himself at night, said the wolf. He won’t be able to escape predators like me.

And the wolf was right. Man was eaten by night prowlers until he rubbed two sticks together, got a spark, fanned it into a flame, and made a fire.

The way he multiplies, he will use too much water, said the elephant. Then how will I fill my trunk?

And the elephant was right.

He has no tail, said the skunk. He won’t be able to cover and release a big stink.

Thank heavens, the other animals exclaimed, shushing him. You, Mr. Skunk, should get rid of your stink and become like him.

But they were wrong. They didn’t know man could and would create a big stink, just not the kind they imagined.

MEMOIRS

Mrs. Bender’s Boarding School

Broadway Burlingame, California—1939

You’ll like it here, Mother told us as we approached the boarding house. It’ll be good for you. She was trying to hold my hand, but I pulled away. I didn’t want her touching me. Mrs. Bender’s has a great reputation, she said.

I was only six. What did I know of reputations? But I didn’t like this place. It was monstrous big and had scales like the dragon in my coloring book. They were shingles, not scales, but I couldn’t make the distinction. Such a big place was sure to have a basement. At the last foster home, I’d been locked in the basement. I darted away from my mother and sister and ran beside the building to see if this basement had any windows. Catching my foot on something, I bumped against the wall and looked up. Red stuff was dripping down the white shingles from a second-story window.

Blood! I yelled, running back as fast as I could. Mother and Olivia rushed to where I pointed.

That’s not blood, silly, Mother said. It’s bougainvillea, but it does look strange in this fog.

See, it’s harmless. Olivia stood on tiptoe trying to pick a blossom. The vine obliged by clawing her and drawing blood.

Bougainvillea has nasty thorns, Mother said. Don’t touch it.

Once inside the house, she introduced us to Mrs. Bender. The two of them spoke hurriedly, and then Mother left for the 2:00 train to San Francisco. I’ve got to get back to work, she said. She didn’t hug us. She wasn’t capable of showing affection. Neither were we. We stood like sticks or backed away when people tried to hug us.

Mrs. Bender looked us up and down as if she thought we’d jumped out of my monster coloring book. Then, without a word, she blew the whistle hanging from her neck to summon Diane, one of the older boarders.

This is Diane, our star boarder, she announced. Diane, you can take Olivia and Lucy to their rooms, and be sure to put them where I said. Do you remember what I told you?

Yes ma’am.

Then go. Dinner’s at 5:30, as usual.

Diane’s dark eyes sparkled. She sure was tall, and her teeth were moon-white against skin as brown as my shoes.

What are you staring at? she snapped. Haven’t you seen a Cheyenne Indian before? Button up your eyes and follow me. She was tapping her foot and leaning against a door when we trudged up to the second floor with our suitcases. The door opened on a big room with several bunk beds. She gave Olivia an upper berth.

We share this room with four other girls, she told her. You can store your clothes in that locker. Here’s the key.

She took me to a sort of closet at the end of the long hall. You get this cubby hole all to yourself, she said. Since you’re a baby, Mrs. Bender doesn’t want you in the dorms. You’re the only one starting first grade. In her third-grade wisdom, first-graders were babies. But you must join us Monday for the initiation. Be in the backyard with your sister. There’s your locker. She handed me the key and left.

That evening we followed Diane to the dining room and sat at the long wooden table, six of us on each side. Mrs. Bender was at one end, and a young woman at the other. We weren’t introduced. No talking was allowed at meals except for please pass the . . . and thank you. It was a grim room. The marble slab on the tall sideboard looked cold to the touch. The candelabrum was pretty but just for show. Two wall sconces illuminated the table with such dim light that I was sure a light-eating monster hid behind the heavy maroon drapes. In the half-dark, I toyed with my lima bean soup. How long would we live here?

When we went to bed, I wasn’t unhappy being alone. It was a relief that Olivia couldn’t scare me with her bedtime stories about goblins chasing us on the moon. For the past few months, we’d stayed temporarily with our folks, and she’d told me a horror story almost every night. We weren’t at all close. When her horror stories made me cry, she said, Serves you right for throwing glass in my face.

It did serve me right, and I’d been whipped. But I’d gotten to Mother and Daddy’s house first after Grandmother paid an unexpected visit to my last foster home and found me locked in the basement. It was a month before Grandmother brought her. So these were my folks, not hers. How could they thrust her in my face like that? I’d almost never seen her. She was three and a half, and I was six months old when Grandmother removed us from home. Right away she got to live with Grandmother at the Fairmont Hotel for two whole years. Then she went to a boarding school. I’d been farmed out to foster homes from the start.

How I’d loved Mrs. Hannah at that first foster home! But on a visit when I was four, Mother heard me call her Mama. That did it.

You’re not to call anyone except me Mama, she said, although I prefer being called Mother. I’m your mother. Understand?

Y-yes, I muttered, trying not to cry, but she took me away from the Hannahs anyway and put me in that home with the horrible basement. And now Olivia and I were here together waiting for public school to start.

It