As a child growing up in South Africa, my toast was made almost exclusively with whole wheat bread. It was coarse and rustic; better toast than I have tasted anywhere since. I loved butter and fig jam, or butter with Anchovette paste which always tasted better when my mother cut my toast into “fingers.” My other favorites were dark, pungent Marmite and hard yellow cheese covered with a thin film of strawberry jam. On Saturday mornings, my toast was usually made from the leftover light, white, slightly sweet challah bread that graced the Shabbat table the night before, best with butter and honey.

Inhaling deeply, the smell of past-tense toast inexplicably stirred in me a turmoil of all-at-once emotions: a melancholy ache for times and places and people long past; a joyful lurch for my solitude; gratitude for family and the warmth of a kitchen where I can return .”

After college, I spent a year on a kibbutz where we would gather around standard-issue electric heaters repurposed to toast slices of white bread we had ferreted from the communal dining room earlier in the day. We’d burn them to a golden crisp and spread the hot toast with butter and cinnamon sugar or hashachar ha’ole, a sweet chocolate spread.

As a young working woman, I’d swig my coffee and shove toast down my gullet while rushing to catch the bus. Burned, under-done, dry or buttered. No matter. Sometimes it was so gravelly it would scratch just one side of my throat going down, and leave it feeling raw and sore for the rest of the day.

Married with children now, it’s neither the toast nor the toppings that gets me.

It first happened when my kids were young, post-whirlwind, after the morning rush to school. After the pets had been fed, after schedules discussed, forms signed, arguments mediated, lunches packed, milk splashed from bowls of Cheerios, toast toasted and coffee slurped against the backdrop of All Things Considered. On the drive home, my shoulders still up around my earlobes, I’d turn the music from their favorite to mine. I’d let out a long, slow, quivery breath, feeling like I’d already completed a day’s work by the time I step through the back door and into the kitchen, clanking my keys onto the counter.

That’s when it would hit me: the lingering aroma of ghost toast. Inhaling deeply, the smell of past-tense toast inexplicably stirred in me a turmoil of all-at-once emotions: a melancholy ache for times and places and people long past; a joyful lurch for my solitude; gratitude for family and the warmth of a kitchen where I can return.

My children are teenagers now, our breakfast routine though still rushed has mellowed. But when the house is finally quiet, the sun streaming through the window, the dog peacefully basking in its warmth, the cat lazing alongside the dirty breakfast plates and cups poised like a still-life on the counter and all around me is splendid silence, there it is: the after-aroma of toast already toasted, already buttered, eaten and gone.

It’s scent reminds me that moments become months, that life passes by. In the blur of hundreds of hurried mornings, the essence of after-toast captures what is ephemeral.

Nina Kavin grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and now lives in Evanston, Illinois. This is her first published piece.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016.

I first saw the unlucky number 169 taunting me in the newspaper on July 2, 1970 under the headline, “Results of Draft Lottery for Those Born in 1951.”  Of course 169 was unlucky. It’s 13 squared. Worse, it was not a high enough number for me to exclude the calamity of being drafted after I graduated college. The induction possibilities ran from 1 (likeliest) to 365 (unlikeliest).

He had been my Greatest Generation father. Now maybe he wasn’t.”

I was 19 years old and barely surviving college. Scared of heights and lacking alcohol-infused courage, I had already chickened out of my fraternity’s water tower climb. I couldn’t imagine tumbling into the basic training rabbit hole, populated with sadistic drill sergeants and teeming with opportunities to become maimed, mentally or physically, by live bullet obstacle courses and 50-mile hikes. If I survived boot camp, there would be a possible trip to Vietnam. Even the National Guard option, the best case scenario in my mind, would be a direct grenade hit to a smooth young adult existence with six months of active duty and five years of potential call-ups.

I turned to my father for solace regarding my lottery number. He was a World War Two veteran. But he was a vet with no front yard flagpole, so I didn’t expect him to go patriotic on me. He said, “Don’t worry. The way your left foot sticks out, you’ll never pass a physical. Then he introduced a backup plan. “I have connections. We’ll find some way to keep you out.”

I had no doubt that my father could orchestrate a draft-dodging episode for my benefit. He was an “I can get it for you wholesale” type of guy, a master parking ticket fixer, but I hoped I would never have to use his abilities for draft avoidance.  “4F” for medically unfit because of a skeletal defect would be preferable. But I was still a little surprised that he unabashedly offered to keep me out of harm’s way.

As much as military induction was nightmarish to me, it was not my dream to dodge the draft. I was no pro-war hawk, but the war was not Mr. Johnson’s War. It was America at war.

The Cambodian Incursion and the tragedy of four Kent State war protesters killed in 1970 had filled my college gym bleachers. We listened to faculty clamor for a vote to shut down the school and join the surging anti-war tidal wave. As I sat there with my conservative fraternity brothers, I felt more like an observer than a participant. The vast majority of my classmates applauded the pro-strike speeches with pep rally fervor. Certainly, it looked like the work-shirted professors were preaching to the choir. But the rhetoric didn’t sway me. Short of a mononucleosis outbreak, I wasn’t going to vote to close down the school.  My parents had paid for me to finish the semester and suffer through finals. Sure Vietnam was a quagmire, but in my mind, it was not enough of a disaster to sink a whole college semester.

Shortly after the rally in the gym, the entire school voted on whether to strike or not. The final tally was 1010 pro-strike,117 anti-strike and 32 abstentions. I was one of the abstentions. I was just being myself, someone who was not politicized enough to obscure his own feelings. But being 169 would haunt me more, as I could not envision potential draft evasion as an act to save the country from itself. It would just be an act to save my frightened ass.

On January 27, 1973, Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War. The draft was over and so was my keen personal interest in the war.

It remained uninteresting to me for the next 40 years. I didn’t stock my shelves with Vietnam War histories or memoirs. The only remnant of those years was the unfairness of student deferments.  Every matriculating student who was healthy should have been draft eligible.

Then, my father, who was 93 at the time, reframed my Vietnam-era memories.

We were in his assisted livingroom suite talking about his World War II days, where his memory was most fertile. He was telling a story about how his uncle knew this army officer who could ensure cushy clerk-typist military assignments or better yet, no assignments at all.

“Eventually, this officer got caught,” my father said with a trace of regret, implying that this crook could have helped him. He then went on about how he proactively tried in vain to get out of doing service time during the war, searching for a someone with selective service connections to help in this quest. It didn’t appear that he wasn’t ashamed of these draft dodging activities. It appeared that he was only disappointed that he couldn’t pull it off.

He had been my Greatest Generation father. Now, maybe he wasn’t.

I Googled “attitudes of conscripted men WW II” hoping to find some sort of cover-up in down playing draft dodging inclinations, but I didn’t find anything.

In my father’s obituary in The Boston Globe, there was no military star next to his name. I had forgotten to tell the funeral home to include it. My father might have gone in the service reluctantly, but he earned his ruptured duck, his honorable discharge pin.

And all I earned was a college sheepskin.

Bill Levine is a freelance writer residing in Belmont, Massachusetts. His essays have been published in Animal Wellness, The Boston Globe and Praxis Literary Journal.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016. Archival military items courtesy of Sean McNamara Rosemeyer.

 

 

 

 

I ask my wife, “What language do they speak in Macedonia?”

It’s a Friday morning. This is our pre-breakfast quiet time. Usually we don’t say much early in the morning. What is there to always say? She’s reading a book about the Spanish Civil War and drinking her first cup of coffee. I’ve just clicked off the New Yorker, which I’m partially reading online these days. Anthony Lane has yawned at “Black Mass,” the new Johnny Depp movie, comparing it and Depp, unfavorably, to “Taxi” and James Cagney. I’m about to spread fig jam on a slice of toast.

 

She taps her spoon against her cup. It’s code. More coffee. I’ve told her she should just say “Coffee me!” when she wants more, the way, back in college days, guys would shout “Beer me!”

She turns a page. “Macedonian? Or maybe Greek.” She looks up. “You really should read this book. You never read the books I suggest.”

“I read The Swerve,” I say. “I started to read The Skin.”

“Started.”

It’s a new jar of jam. The jar pops when I twist the cap off. “Brian’s Fig Marmelade,” I read aloud. “From Macedonia. You wouldn’t think there would be a guy named Brian in Macedonia.”

She picks up the jar, squints at the fine print, and hands it back.

Between slices of toast, I borrow her iPad. “You’re right, Macedonian. It says the Macedonians are slavophones.”

She nods.

“Slavophones,” I say, waiting for her to make eye contact. “I would hate to be called a slavophone.” Another pregnant pause. “How about you?”

She taps her spoon against her cup. It’s code. More coffee. I’ve told her she should just say “Coffee me!” when she wants more, the way, back in college days, guys would shout “Beer me!” That was fun. Verbing the noun added to the casual derangement you felt on a beerful afternoon.

I make her a second cappuccino. This morning, thanks to “coffee me,” which my wife refuses to say, and thanks to Mount Everest and the New Yorker, I’m thinking about verbs. Anthony Lane also reviewed the new movie “Everest.” Too many characters, he writes, most of them under-developed. “The one thing they have in common,” he observes, “is the indomitable urge to use the word ‘summit’ as an intransitive verb. That takes guts.” As in, I would guess, We are here to summit, guys! Or: No, you go first. I’ve summited a few times already.

“Here you go.” I set her coffee down, admiring the foam. “Enjoy.”

“You know I hate that.”

I know she hates that, the universal server-ism you hear in restaurants these days. The plates are all delivered, the wine glasses filled, we’re ready to eat, and the server says, “Enjoy.” Not enjoy your dinner. Not enjoy yourselves. Just enjoy. The locution irks her no end.

It irks me too, but not to no end.

Later in the day I’m driving over to the blood depot, a couple of miles from the house. Every eight weeks I shed a pint. I do it both for the common good and for my personal benefit. (Back in college, the old beer-me days, I learned to call this psychological egoism. There’s no such thing as a selfless act. You beered your friends knowing they would beer you back. It was a social contract.) According to The American Journal of Epidemiology, blood donors are 88 percent less likely to suffer heart attack. Old blood has higher viscosity than the new stuff you make. So bleed me. I’m happy to give.

On the drive over there, I stop at a light behind a car with a personalized license plate: Be Well. It reminds me of an old friend, David Marvin Cooper, a laid back guy who always used to say, Be cool. It meant go with the flow, be open to the universe, or, sometimes, a little more sternly, don’t be bogue (dude). Be well says much the same thing, maybe more. Roll down your window and smell the roses. Dial down the Rush Limbaugh and turn up the Mozart. Accept road work as a part of life. It’s a philosophical concept. It gentles us, reminding strangers to be mindful. This driver is concerned, in his or her generalized and impersonal way, with way more than my wellbeing or my wellness.

A physician I saw for a short time, whenever I left her office, would touch me on the shoulder and say: Feel better. She also said apply ice, take your pain meds, no stairs. But then she capped it off with a holistic prescription that went beyond mere better-getting.

These are the soft state-of-being imperatives available to us today, helping us to be well and good.

The blood center is packed. I’ve made an appointment, but I still have to wait. I pretend to read the Red Cross book for a few minutes, picking out some diseases I might want to check up on (babesiosis, filariasis, spondylosis), then look at old news in used magazines, too many of which are about golf. During the interview and Q and A, the nurse takes my temperature and blood pressure, examines my arms. She asks me if I had a good breakfast, if I’ve had plenty of liquids. I tell her about Brian’s Fig Marmalade, trying to remember, as I do, if Macedonia is on the list of places the Red Cross is not cool with.

“Right or left?” she asks, meaning, Which arm?

I tell her I’m left-leaning. For me, it’s part of being well.

On the table, I make a fist. She inflates the blood pressure cuff and says I have nice veins. When the bleeding starts, I relax and roll the thingie in my hand. I watch local news on TV and try to dislodge a few fig seeds from my teeth. At one time, giving blood made me light-headed. Donating at work one day, I sat up too fast and felt a radical wobble in my legs. A blue shirt sat me back down and made me put my head between my knees. Another time I got the paper bag treatment. That was then. These days I’m manning up. I can give and give.

The nurse comes by again to check on me and my bag of blood. “Almost done,” she says. “You doing okay?”

I tell her I’m good. And well as well.

Wrapping my arm when it’s finished, she points to the juice and cookie table. “No strenuous activity today,” she says. “Watch a little TV. Do a little reading.”

On the way home I see the usual guy on the usual corner, holding a cardboard sign. In black felt pen he has written “PLEASE HELP.” Word has it there’s a meth ring going around. This guy might be an affiliate. Wouldn’t you know it, I come to a full stop right next to him.  “Look at their teeth,” I’ve been told. But I can’t. I just sit. Between me and him, a few feet, a universe. Somewhere in between the two categoricals—Get a job! Feed the poor—is the soft imperative, an intransitive zone.  Be well. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him wave his little sign. There’s no telling what help is, what’s good for both of us.

The light changes.

Go.

Rick Bailey is a writer who divides his time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino. His collection of essays, American English, Italian Chocolate, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017. 

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016.

 

 

One sunny Monday, moments after I pick up my toddlers from preschool, hand them each an apple and tell them to go play in the backyard, I hear the screech of tires on pavement.

They are criminals who could have killed my children. They are also children themselves, their cheeks still round and smooth.”

Then, an explosion. Billows of gray dust float over my yard, a debris field of concrete, metal, and glass. My body clenches. Fifty feet of our wall is obliterated. At ground zero: a crumpled white BMW, nestled against my children’s swing set.

“Where are you?” I scream through the dust. There. They’re safe by the house, mouths agape, apples on the ground by their feet.

I turn my attention to the car, expecting blood, tangled limbs, wailing. Instead, I find a pale, lanky, teenage boy, drunk and high and climbing out the driver’s side window.

“I’m so fucked,” he yells.

Two more teens tumble out the passenger window, thin lines of blood trickling down their cheeks, cell phones in their hands, texting and cursing.

                                                                                  *

I didn’t want to move to Arizona. It was 2010. The recession was deep. The climate was boiling, and the ink was still wet on SB 1070, the anti-immigrant legislation that had all the good Coloradans boycotting. We crossed the Rockies for a job that promised security and comfort.

We bought a custom Spanish-style home below market value – not for its size or features – but for its proximity to a desert preserve etched with long ribbons of trails, reminders of home.

The day we moved in, my son cooing on my hip, my daughter riding her tricycle in circles, our new neighbor issued a warning: Watch out for the Mexicans.

“The Mexicans?” I asked, picturing a throng in sombreros marching down the well-manicured street like a mariachi band, like a welcome committee. I couldn’t imagine how this was dangerous.

“You know, the illegals,” my neighbor said, nodding to a white pickup truck across the street, a landscaping company’s logo on its side. Latino workers wearing spiked shoes shimmied up palm trees and trimmed the fronds.

They pillage the neighborhoods, he said. Your kids aren’t safe playing outside.

Never mind that he was paying those Mexicans to groom his yard and clean his pool.

I smiled and waved to the landscapers. I’m new, I wanted to say. I come from someplace different too.  

                                                                                 *

I was in an accident once. Sitting in the passenger seat of an SUV, I remember glancing out the window and seeing the chrome grill of a large truck. Then sky, pavement, sky, pavement, and sky. My mouth, which I’d opened to scream, filled with chunks of windshield glass, like pebbles. Waiting for the ambulance, a kind stranger pulled debris out of my hair and offered me her canteen; it was then I knew I would be okay.

Reflexively, I ask the drunk teens if they want some water.

As they gulp it down, I realize my mistake. There it goes: coursing through their bodies, diluting the drugs, sobering them up before the police arrive.

“You know who could have been fucked?” I ask them. “My kids. You almost killed my kids. Then you’d be really, really fucked.” The teens squirm and stammer. Their discomfort pleases me.

I replay the tape over and over, panic and relief cresting and falling: Had we arrived home a couple minutes later, I might have turned my car directly into the BMW’s path. Moments sooner, my kids would have already been playing on the swing set.

Despite the water, the driver fails the breathalyzer, and a blood test confirms drugs, too. He’s pacing, tugging at his hair and cursing as the cops read him his rights. I wonder if he’s always so petulant or if it’s the drugs.

                                                                                     *

The next few days, reporters knock on our door. The image of my kids’ playthings covered in dust and glass makes for good television.

A 20-something brunette woman in a lilac suit wants my copy of the police report. It has the names and addresses of the teenagers. She wants to knock on their doors next.

I can’t articulate it at the time, but for the same reason I gave the teens water, I withhold the report.

They are criminals who could have killed my children. They are also children themselves, their cheeks still round and smooth.

Someone like me loves them and is wondering where she went wrong, how they could have ended up here.

It was never the Mexicans I needed to fear. Complacency, privilege, entitlement are more sinister.

“It’s a good thing your kids are so little,” the reporter says. “With any luck, they won’t remember this whole thing.”

With any luck, they will.

Gina DeMillo Wagner is an award-winning journalist and writer. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Hakai, The Mid, Role/Reboot, and The Best of Philadelphia Stories.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016.