I’ve been looking for my sense of humor. I lost it shortly after 9/11. And I’m trying desperately to find it. Desperately. That’s the key word. You don’t find humor by searching desperately. Its like love. It sneaks up and grabs you when you least expect it, when you’re just wandering around doing hardly anything except being you. I’m writing fairy tales because I believe in magic. Not kid magic, but the corny kind - like love and faith and friendship - that transform desperation into Eden. And right now I’m in need of transformation.The story I’m about to embark on is a search for myself – the truest, finest, grandest and funniest myself that there is.
I wish for all of you that you find your truest, finest, grandest, funniest selves… and maybe you already have.
February's story
Max and Savannah were married in a gully just outside of Yankton, South Dakota, and they spent their honeymoon visiting the corn palace in Mitchel. Max and Savannah had seventeen hours for each other. After that, they had to be at work – he driving a bus, and she, waiting tables at the VFW. At his wedding, he wore denim trousers, suspenders, and a thick leather jacket; she wore gold hoops dangling in her ears, and a sarong around her waist standing in for a skirt.
“I love you,” Savannah told him, “and I promise I’ll always be beside you - no matter what. I offer you this present as a token of my love.” The present was an afghan which she had designed and crocheted – a lap robe for the cold Dakota winter. A flock of cranes flew before an orange sunset, all against an intricately woven pattern of crosshatches and crochet work.
“And every time I sing, know that it’s my way of showing how much I love you.” She was always singing – anything and everything. “Amazing Grace, “Louie, Louie,” La Boheme.”
Max’s present to her was a miniature city constructed of copper coils, tin sheets, and tiny slivers of wood, and scraps of plastic, glass, and steel – all housed inside of a hubcap. It was decorated with nails, gaskets, and anything else that caught his artist’s eye.
He gave it to her, and kissed her, cupping a warm hand against her cheek.Her skin was black, and his reddish brown. A black woman and a Sioux, two likely targets for turning heads in Yankton, South Dakota. They drove a twenty-four-year-old, rust-colored mustang, held together by duct tape. Her bumper sticker was a Jesus fish sticker; his read, “Militant agnostic. I don’t know and you don’t either.”Savannah sang, and went to the Methodist Church. He watched football on their twelve-inch screen and drank beer when they could afford it. “Poverty keeps me sober,” he used to say.
She decorated the inside of their apartment with origami cranes flying from fishing line tacked to corners of all the rooms, and she hung a canopy over the bed – made from bedspreads she’d picked up at garage sales. He made sculptures out of steering wheels, cylinder heads, and other spare parts from old cars. Sometimes he sold them, but most of them ended up decorating their living room. He’d have collected the old cars if he could, but there was no money and no place to park them anyway.
"Brought you a present,” said Max one day. “Some kid left it in the back of the bus. And you know how you’re always singing and, well, anyway, here.” It was a small tin flute. A dime store horn. Savannah washed it off in the kitchen sink, and dried it carefully. She fitted her fingers over the holes, and blew, trying to find the secret fingering code that would bring the flute to life.
“That’s wrong,” said Max after a sour note.Savannah kept practicing with the flute, experimenting till she got the scale figured out. Then she tried ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. “Wish I could figure out the black notes,” she said. "Then I could try Bach or Handel.
“Do you suppose that there are angels walking around like ordinary people?” Savannah asked.
“More likely there’s ordinary people walking around like angels.”
Outside, some rowdies were giving and receiving punches along with a little blood and a few “mother fuckin’ bastards”s. Max kicked the door open in time to see two thugs rolling a wino. “My wife just called the cops,” Max yelled. “Get your asses out and away while you can. I’ll tell ‘em she’s crazy. That it was just a couple of dogs she heard, knocking down cans and things.”
The wino turned out to be a sorry wisp of a man. “I go by the name of Gabriel,” he said, as Max and Savannah rummaged for towels to stop the bleeding.“Say, you don’t happen to have something to drink?” he asked hopefully, but was disappointed when Savannah handed him a mug with milk.
“We’re kinda down on our luck,” said Max. “But you’re welcome to white bread and beans.”
“You a car man?” asked the wino, picking up the miniature city inside the hubcap.“
”Had a fifty-three Ford once," said Max. "Sweetest little car.”
“Mine was a Ferrari. Yellow. Cruised like the wind,” said Gabriel.
“What happened?” asked Max.
The wino shrugged. “Corporate takeover,’ he said. He sniffed the air above the simmering pot of beans, replaced the cover and walked out.
“I wonder if that was an angel,” said Savannah. “Sometimes angels show up at your door, and if you take them in and feed them, God bestows his blessing on you. Wish he’d had something to eat. We could use a dishwasher about now.”
“Or a yellow Ferrari,” said Max.The next day, Savannah had to work a double shift. Maggie, another girl at the VFW, called in sick and Savannah had to pitch in. That night, her feet ached up to her eyebrows.Max had been drinking beer since noon, waiting for Savannah to come home.
“Well, I just got fired,” he said. He speared a ketchup-stained electric bill with a kitchen knife and threw it against the wall. “My bus broke down today, and it turned out that there was no oil in the crankcase. So they blamed me for it. They said I should have checked. The maintenance guys at the bus barn had missed it. None of the other drivers had checked the oil. But it didn’t matter. I was driving #24 when it broke down, so they said it was my own damn fault that the bus had no oil. So they fired me.”
“You cook,” said Savannah. “At least I made good tips today. Over forty dollars. That’ll go towards something. But man I’m beat.”
“We got corn, and a can of beans, and white bread, and mayonnaise in the fridge. And thirty-three dollars of that tip money’s got to go towards the electric Bill. How’s about I toast the bread and pour the corn and beans on top. We’ll save the mayonnaise for a special occasion.”
Max religiously combed through the want ads. Savannah burned incense and chanted African prayers and songs. “Angels of God protect us, and if it isn’t too much trouble could you get Max a job?”
“That was some angel of yours,” said Max. “First he’s too good to eat our beans, and then he gets me fired. And what the hell is that in your hand?”
”Just a crystal.” Savannah had meant to keep it hidden.
“What’s that good for?”
“It channels and focuses energy.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“Fifteen dollars. Why?”
”Cause you fuckin’ shouldn’t have bought it until I get a job.”
Back at the VFW Savannah smiled, carried hash, and got her butt pinched. Max looked for work and watched his twelve-inch TV screen. He saw the twin towers come down in a panicky newscast of crashing rock and falling bodies. Shifty-eyed Arabs filled the list of America’s most wanted. American flags fluttered from cars like swastikas.
“Do you suppose someone might mistake me for an Arab?” Max asked.
“Try boarding a plane and find out.”
The twelve-inch TV broke, so Max took to prowling through the Yankton Herald for news. And while he searched through the want ads, Savannah came into the living room skipping. “Life I love you all is groovy, la, la, la, la, la, la, feeling groovy.”
“What’s lighting your fire, Baby? You haven’t sung in a long time.”
”Oh, please don’t be angry, Max. I know we can’t really afford it, but…”
“Christ Savannah, don’t tell me you bought another crystal or some other dumb gadget. Whatever it is, take it back. We just don’t have the money right now.”
“It’s not a crystal, and it’s not another dumb gadget, and no, I can’t take it back.”She bit her lip and ran into the kitchen. “it’s…well, …I’m pregnant.”
“Oh , my God, Savannah.”
She came back into the living room. “Are you happy? Please, please be happy. I know we’re a dime away from living under the freeway.”
”Just get an abortion.”
“But, Max.”
“No buts. Get an abortion. We can’t fuckin’ afford a kid right now.”
“Stop talking like that. I really hate I it when you do that.”
“I’ll fuckin’ talk any way I please, and you can’t fuckin’ tell me how to talk.”
“And you can’t make me get an abortion.”
That night the toilet plugged up and Savannah poked at it for some time with the tin flute before she gave up and used the plunger. And she mopped up the toilet water with the lap rug she’d made for him.
Max got hired at the Alcoa extrusion plant in Yankton. It was his job to help muck out the still bottoms in the chemical tanks. He wore a sweaty chemical suit with a scratched-up face plate, and the suite was attached to an air hose that supplied breathing air, the kind of air you’d breath out at the mud flats. Much of the time he worked hunched over scraping hardened bilge off of blades which were, hopefully, locked immobile. Most of the spaces were too cramped to allow Max room to stand up.
One day, the hose line snapped. Hank was supposed to be on watch, but he got called away earlier to man the packaging plant because there were seven rush orders to be filled by the end of the day. The chemical smelled sweet, and it made Max feel dreamy. His arms and legs were heavy; they didn’t want to move and neither did Max. His mind told him to back out of the tank, and he did it reluctantly. A scratchy tingling, and alter a burning sensation in his throat and chest were the only clues that something was very wrong.
Max spent a week in the hospital, then another month at home recuperating. “Your lungs are badly scarred, and you’ll be getting less oxygen with each breath,” the doctor had told him. “So you’ll have to push yourself harder when you get back to work.”
According the the Chamber of Commerce, Yankton is a small town of about 10,000 warm, friendly folds. It has the lowest rate in the nation of unionized labor, and the lowest rate of workers compensation claims. Yankton imposes no business tax and no inheritance tax. It’s a great place to live and work.
“I’m not going back to the plant,” said Max. “No one’s watching my back over there.”
“You can’t just not go back. We can’t live on my pitiful little salary, and if you quit, word’ll get out that you’re a coward and an unreliable worker, and you’ll never get another job in Yankton.”
Max couldn’t hear her for the sound of the slamming door as he walked out into the street.Outside, a fourteen-year-old thug-in-training was rolling a wino. Max booted him on his rump to start him running down the street and came over to the wino to check him out. The wino turned out be Gabriel.
“Can’t you find any place besides the front of my apartment to get beat up in?”
“Any place else, and I’d still be getting beat up,” said Gabriel.
“My wife thinks you’re an angel. That you can grant three wishes or something like that.”
”That’s the genie department, my friend. Say, you don’t have any hooch on you by chance?” Gabriel looked hopeful.
“Sorry. Is that what you’d wish for if you met an angel?”
“Either that or world peace. No I’m joshin’ you. I’d wish for hooch. How about you?”
“I guess I’d just wish for my wife back.”
“I can grant that one. Just turn your stupid ass around and walk back through the door, you nimbus.”
Well, he did. But Max and Savannah didn't speak for the rest of the evening, and they left for work the next morning without a sound or a touch. As it turned out Savannah didn't need to get an abortion. Instead she miscarried after serving lunch at the VFW. It was a bloody afternoon spent in the ladies room doubled over with cramps. She was hot, then cold, then hot again, and she couldn't find a way to get comfortable. But it wasn't just the fire in her belly; it was the knowledge that something more than just a part of her was lost forever.Maggie gave her some Kotex to see her through the afternoon. Savannah thought of going to the hospital, but decided against it.
The car wasn't running, so Savannah had to walk home. It took her almost two hours. She expected Max to beat her home, but the apartment was empty when she finally limped up to the front door and shoved it open. And she plopped on the couch, all her energy spent, and that was how Max found her when he came home that night. He pulled the door open wide, and pulled a box through it, something heavy and awkward, and topped with a large red bow."It's not much, but I found it and, well, sort of fixed it up," Max said, and then he stopped talking when he saw how pale her face was.
For a long time, Savannah couldn't say the words. Max held her in his arms, and stroked her hair, and her skin was damp against his cheek. And finally she told him. "Max I lost the baby." Max held her for a long time, before setting her back against the couch cushions to fix some soup.
While he was puttering in the kitchen, Savannah asked him, "What's in the box?"
"It's nothing. Just a dumb idea I had," he said. "Don't open it now. You don't want to know." But Savannah had already pulled down a flap of cardboard. Inside was a baby's crib, about fifty years old but scraped clean. On the two ends, Max had painted the Dakota black hills at sunrise, and the words, "We love you, tiny one."
She flew into the kitchen, and hugged him, crying and kissing his mouth all at the same time. "You dear, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man," was all that she could say.
I wish for all of you that you find your truest, finest, grandest, funniest selves… and maybe you already have.
February's story
Back in Yankton
Max and Savannah were married in a gully just outside of Yankton, South Dakota, and they spent their honeymoon visiting the corn palace in Mitchel. Max and Savannah had seventeen hours for each other. After that, they had to be at work – he driving a bus, and she, waiting tables at the VFW. At his wedding, he wore denim trousers, suspenders, and a thick leather jacket; she wore gold hoops dangling in her ears, and a sarong around her waist standing in for a skirt.
“I love you,” Savannah told him, “and I promise I’ll always be beside you - no matter what. I offer you this present as a token of my love.” The present was an afghan which she had designed and crocheted – a lap robe for the cold Dakota winter. A flock of cranes flew before an orange sunset, all against an intricately woven pattern of crosshatches and crochet work.
“And every time I sing, know that it’s my way of showing how much I love you.” She was always singing – anything and everything. “Amazing Grace, “Louie, Louie,” La Boheme.”
Max’s present to her was a miniature city constructed of copper coils, tin sheets, and tiny slivers of wood, and scraps of plastic, glass, and steel – all housed inside of a hubcap. It was decorated with nails, gaskets, and anything else that caught his artist’s eye.
He gave it to her, and kissed her, cupping a warm hand against her cheek.Her skin was black, and his reddish brown. A black woman and a Sioux, two likely targets for turning heads in Yankton, South Dakota. They drove a twenty-four-year-old, rust-colored mustang, held together by duct tape. Her bumper sticker was a Jesus fish sticker; his read, “Militant agnostic. I don’t know and you don’t either.”Savannah sang, and went to the Methodist Church. He watched football on their twelve-inch screen and drank beer when they could afford it. “Poverty keeps me sober,” he used to say.
She decorated the inside of their apartment with origami cranes flying from fishing line tacked to corners of all the rooms, and she hung a canopy over the bed – made from bedspreads she’d picked up at garage sales. He made sculptures out of steering wheels, cylinder heads, and other spare parts from old cars. Sometimes he sold them, but most of them ended up decorating their living room. He’d have collected the old cars if he could, but there was no money and no place to park them anyway.
"Brought you a present,” said Max one day. “Some kid left it in the back of the bus. And you know how you’re always singing and, well, anyway, here.” It was a small tin flute. A dime store horn. Savannah washed it off in the kitchen sink, and dried it carefully. She fitted her fingers over the holes, and blew, trying to find the secret fingering code that would bring the flute to life.
“That’s wrong,” said Max after a sour note.Savannah kept practicing with the flute, experimenting till she got the scale figured out. Then she tried ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. “Wish I could figure out the black notes,” she said. "Then I could try Bach or Handel.
“Do you suppose that there are angels walking around like ordinary people?” Savannah asked.
“More likely there’s ordinary people walking around like angels.”
Outside, some rowdies were giving and receiving punches along with a little blood and a few “mother fuckin’ bastards”s. Max kicked the door open in time to see two thugs rolling a wino. “My wife just called the cops,” Max yelled. “Get your asses out and away while you can. I’ll tell ‘em she’s crazy. That it was just a couple of dogs she heard, knocking down cans and things.”
The wino turned out to be a sorry wisp of a man. “I go by the name of Gabriel,” he said, as Max and Savannah rummaged for towels to stop the bleeding.“Say, you don’t happen to have something to drink?” he asked hopefully, but was disappointed when Savannah handed him a mug with milk.
“We’re kinda down on our luck,” said Max. “But you’re welcome to white bread and beans.”
“You a car man?” asked the wino, picking up the miniature city inside the hubcap.“
”Had a fifty-three Ford once," said Max. "Sweetest little car.”
“Mine was a Ferrari. Yellow. Cruised like the wind,” said Gabriel.
“What happened?” asked Max.
The wino shrugged. “Corporate takeover,’ he said. He sniffed the air above the simmering pot of beans, replaced the cover and walked out.
“I wonder if that was an angel,” said Savannah. “Sometimes angels show up at your door, and if you take them in and feed them, God bestows his blessing on you. Wish he’d had something to eat. We could use a dishwasher about now.”
“Or a yellow Ferrari,” said Max.The next day, Savannah had to work a double shift. Maggie, another girl at the VFW, called in sick and Savannah had to pitch in. That night, her feet ached up to her eyebrows.Max had been drinking beer since noon, waiting for Savannah to come home.
“Well, I just got fired,” he said. He speared a ketchup-stained electric bill with a kitchen knife and threw it against the wall. “My bus broke down today, and it turned out that there was no oil in the crankcase. So they blamed me for it. They said I should have checked. The maintenance guys at the bus barn had missed it. None of the other drivers had checked the oil. But it didn’t matter. I was driving #24 when it broke down, so they said it was my own damn fault that the bus had no oil. So they fired me.”
“You cook,” said Savannah. “At least I made good tips today. Over forty dollars. That’ll go towards something. But man I’m beat.”
“We got corn, and a can of beans, and white bread, and mayonnaise in the fridge. And thirty-three dollars of that tip money’s got to go towards the electric Bill. How’s about I toast the bread and pour the corn and beans on top. We’ll save the mayonnaise for a special occasion.”
Max religiously combed through the want ads. Savannah burned incense and chanted African prayers and songs. “Angels of God protect us, and if it isn’t too much trouble could you get Max a job?”
“That was some angel of yours,” said Max. “First he’s too good to eat our beans, and then he gets me fired. And what the hell is that in your hand?”
”Just a crystal.” Savannah had meant to keep it hidden.
“What’s that good for?”
“It channels and focuses energy.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“Fifteen dollars. Why?”
”Cause you fuckin’ shouldn’t have bought it until I get a job.”
Back at the VFW Savannah smiled, carried hash, and got her butt pinched. Max looked for work and watched his twelve-inch TV screen. He saw the twin towers come down in a panicky newscast of crashing rock and falling bodies. Shifty-eyed Arabs filled the list of America’s most wanted. American flags fluttered from cars like swastikas.
“Do you suppose someone might mistake me for an Arab?” Max asked.
“Try boarding a plane and find out.”
The twelve-inch TV broke, so Max took to prowling through the Yankton Herald for news. And while he searched through the want ads, Savannah came into the living room skipping. “Life I love you all is groovy, la, la, la, la, la, la, feeling groovy.”
“What’s lighting your fire, Baby? You haven’t sung in a long time.”
”Oh, please don’t be angry, Max. I know we can’t really afford it, but…”
“Christ Savannah, don’t tell me you bought another crystal or some other dumb gadget. Whatever it is, take it back. We just don’t have the money right now.”
“It’s not a crystal, and it’s not another dumb gadget, and no, I can’t take it back.”She bit her lip and ran into the kitchen. “it’s…well, …I’m pregnant.”
“Oh , my God, Savannah.”
She came back into the living room. “Are you happy? Please, please be happy. I know we’re a dime away from living under the freeway.”
”Just get an abortion.”
“But, Max.”
“No buts. Get an abortion. We can’t fuckin’ afford a kid right now.”
“Stop talking like that. I really hate I it when you do that.”
“I’ll fuckin’ talk any way I please, and you can’t fuckin’ tell me how to talk.”
“And you can’t make me get an abortion.”
That night the toilet plugged up and Savannah poked at it for some time with the tin flute before she gave up and used the plunger. And she mopped up the toilet water with the lap rug she’d made for him.
Max got hired at the Alcoa extrusion plant in Yankton. It was his job to help muck out the still bottoms in the chemical tanks. He wore a sweaty chemical suit with a scratched-up face plate, and the suite was attached to an air hose that supplied breathing air, the kind of air you’d breath out at the mud flats. Much of the time he worked hunched over scraping hardened bilge off of blades which were, hopefully, locked immobile. Most of the spaces were too cramped to allow Max room to stand up.
One day, the hose line snapped. Hank was supposed to be on watch, but he got called away earlier to man the packaging plant because there were seven rush orders to be filled by the end of the day. The chemical smelled sweet, and it made Max feel dreamy. His arms and legs were heavy; they didn’t want to move and neither did Max. His mind told him to back out of the tank, and he did it reluctantly. A scratchy tingling, and alter a burning sensation in his throat and chest were the only clues that something was very wrong.
Max spent a week in the hospital, then another month at home recuperating. “Your lungs are badly scarred, and you’ll be getting less oxygen with each breath,” the doctor had told him. “So you’ll have to push yourself harder when you get back to work.”
According the the Chamber of Commerce, Yankton is a small town of about 10,000 warm, friendly folds. It has the lowest rate in the nation of unionized labor, and the lowest rate of workers compensation claims. Yankton imposes no business tax and no inheritance tax. It’s a great place to live and work.
“I’m not going back to the plant,” said Max. “No one’s watching my back over there.”
“You can’t just not go back. We can’t live on my pitiful little salary, and if you quit, word’ll get out that you’re a coward and an unreliable worker, and you’ll never get another job in Yankton.”
Max couldn’t hear her for the sound of the slamming door as he walked out into the street.Outside, a fourteen-year-old thug-in-training was rolling a wino. Max booted him on his rump to start him running down the street and came over to the wino to check him out. The wino turned out be Gabriel.
“Can’t you find any place besides the front of my apartment to get beat up in?”
“Any place else, and I’d still be getting beat up,” said Gabriel.
“My wife thinks you’re an angel. That you can grant three wishes or something like that.”
”That’s the genie department, my friend. Say, you don’t have any hooch on you by chance?” Gabriel looked hopeful.
“Sorry. Is that what you’d wish for if you met an angel?”
“Either that or world peace. No I’m joshin’ you. I’d wish for hooch. How about you?”
“I guess I’d just wish for my wife back.”
“I can grant that one. Just turn your stupid ass around and walk back through the door, you nimbus.”
Well, he did. But Max and Savannah didn't speak for the rest of the evening, and they left for work the next morning without a sound or a touch. As it turned out Savannah didn't need to get an abortion. Instead she miscarried after serving lunch at the VFW. It was a bloody afternoon spent in the ladies room doubled over with cramps. She was hot, then cold, then hot again, and she couldn't find a way to get comfortable. But it wasn't just the fire in her belly; it was the knowledge that something more than just a part of her was lost forever.Maggie gave her some Kotex to see her through the afternoon. Savannah thought of going to the hospital, but decided against it.
The car wasn't running, so Savannah had to walk home. It took her almost two hours. She expected Max to beat her home, but the apartment was empty when she finally limped up to the front door and shoved it open. And she plopped on the couch, all her energy spent, and that was how Max found her when he came home that night. He pulled the door open wide, and pulled a box through it, something heavy and awkward, and topped with a large red bow."It's not much, but I found it and, well, sort of fixed it up," Max said, and then he stopped talking when he saw how pale her face was.
For a long time, Savannah couldn't say the words. Max held her in his arms, and stroked her hair, and her skin was damp against his cheek. And finally she told him. "Max I lost the baby." Max held her for a long time, before setting her back against the couch cushions to fix some soup.
While he was puttering in the kitchen, Savannah asked him, "What's in the box?"
"It's nothing. Just a dumb idea I had," he said. "Don't open it now. You don't want to know." But Savannah had already pulled down a flap of cardboard. Inside was a baby's crib, about fifty years old but scraped clean. On the two ends, Max had painted the Dakota black hills at sunrise, and the words, "We love you, tiny one."
She flew into the kitchen, and hugged him, crying and kissing his mouth all at the same time. "You dear, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man," was all that she could say.
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