A dean's secretary left an anonymous message when she heard the greeting which I recorded for my answering machine: "Are you sick?" She denied to the dean that she had left it. I shocked them by documenting the call with one of the first caller id gadgets in northern New Jersey.
Someday Dark Brown eyes
I take long walks wherever I live. In this instance I was living in Orangeburg, SC in a house built for rich slave owners in a neighborhood now occupied mainly by descendants of their former slaves. What goes round comes round.
The Way I Walk
This is an attempt to preserve in prose poetry the powerful and holy presence that my husband's aunt still has in our 41-year marriage.
Louie Clay, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers, has received three honorary doctorates citing his writing (2,426 items to date). He has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation and at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. In November Seabury Press will publish Letters from Samaria: Poetry and Prose by Louie Crew Clay ISBN-13: 9780819232199. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Crew
Someday dark brown eyes will stare
at your carved banister, wondering whether it is The Spirit That Controls
the Cockroaches that will hide behind your marble bath. An old man will
sleep on a mat in the nursery. Three families' children in the pantry
will eat lead paint from shelves that store your marmalade. It won't be a
rich folks' house then, and no one will care that your foyer matches one
in Florence or that one niche holds a medieval madonna.
Baby, didn't they ever get to you? I asked my husband.
Hmmm. I remember once.
I was visiting Aunt Jesse in Florida;
I must have been 9 or 10 years old. Maybe 12 or 13,
I'm not sure. One day at the playground,
the boys teased me about the way I walked.
“What do you mean? What's wrong with the way I walk?”
“You walk like a girl,” they said, laughing.
“'Like a girl? What's like a girl about the way I walk?'"
They would not let me play with them.
Embarrassed, on the way home I walked this way,
and then that way, and then this way.... unhappy with any of them.
Aunt Jesse saw me from the screened porch,
but I couldn't see her.
"Boy, what are you doing?" she said
as she joined me in the yard.
I lowered my eyes, looked to the ground,
and said, "Ma'am?"
"What are you doing?" "Nothin."
"But what are you doing?" "Walking."
"Walking!?" "Yes ma'am, just walking."
"Son, you been here how long?” “Eight weeks.”
“I been watching you go over to that playground every day. You never
walked like this! What you are doing now is not walking!"
"Yes ma'am."
“She put her arms around me and asked, 'Son, did they tease you down at
the playground?'
"Yes ma'am."
"About the way you walk?" "Yes ma'am."
"Son, God gave you the legs you have.
And you've been walking on them pretty well until today.
You can't be walking on nobody else's legs.
God loves you just the way you are! You hear me?"
