Art Alley

Twilight time.
I wander into this gallery,
see, and just as I step inside
I pause, mid-stride:
Art Alley by Bonnie,
Artist's Personal Collection.
The patrons before me
are so captivated
they’ve become
one with the paintings,
flesh and muscle and bone
and tissue flattened
into canvas pigments,
digital brush strokes,
creation’s DNA.
I think that’s weird,
twilight zone at twilight time,
but I pause too lo--.

This poem is submitted for Friday Poetically with Brian Miller at One Stop Poetry. To see other poems, please visit the site.

Digital Image by Bonnie at Original Art Studio. Used with permission for One Stop Poetry.

Travis Thrasher's "Gravestone"

Travis Thrasher has written a number of novels, in a number of genres – romance, suspense, contemporary adult and (borderline) horror. Last year, he started a four-part Young Adult series with Solitary. The second novel in the series is the recently published Gravestone, and I devoured it, and on Kindle, no less – the first book I’ve read on Kindle.

Chris Buckley is a high school junior living in Solitary, North Carolina, having moved with his mother from Chicago following his parents’ divorce. Solitary is a strange town, and the longer Chris is there, the stranger it gets. In Solitary, he has what he thinks are the typical new-kid-at-school experiences – the bullies, the looks, the giggles. He meets and falls in love with a girl named Jocelyn. Gradually he comes to understand that nothing is what it seems in Solitary. Nothing. And instead of small-town life, Chris finds evil. And evil finds Jocelyn.

In Gravestone, Jocelyn is gone, mourned and missed by Chris. And the evil is growing more intense. His alcoholic mother claims to be threatened – by people in their own house. One of Jocelyn’s friends and her family move away, suddenly. Another friend comes to understand what has happened to Jocelyn, and tries to help Chris. And there’s the pastor of the town’s big church, whose wife isn’t seen any more and who – as far as Chris is concerned – radiates evil.

It’s not all bad. Chris goes to work for an elderly woman named Iris who operates a remote inn, and she's completely different. He meets a girl named Kelsey in his art class, whose family is refreshingly normal. And the son of his missing Uncle Robert finds him, and wants to help him.

Part of Gravestone is Chris having interior conversations with himself, much like any teenager would, except most teenagers don’t have these kinds of experiences to live through. The novel is fast-paced and action-packed, and the story itself is riveting. Best of all, Thrasher is a fine writer. The creepy characters have just enough humanity in them to avoid stereotypes, while the good characters have their flaws and failings. And the novel keeps packing a punch and never stops.

Gravestone may be aimed at the Young Adult market, but this older adult was wowed by a great story.

Related:

My review of Solitary.

Travis Thrasher's web site.

Learning in Times of Whitespace

As I’ve mentioned before, I threw my back out a couple of weeks ago while working in the garden. I’ve done it before – but this has really been taking a while to heal. It’s better (thank you for the prayers) but it’s still not 100 percent. I can tie my shoes by myself now, though.

When it’s difficult to move around, doing normal things like getting in and out of a car or rising from a chair (not to mention washing your feet in the shower – you should have seen that contortion, uh, no, maybe you shouldn’t), you become acutely aware of your body and movement. You learn to do things in different ways; yes, I’ve actually closed the car door from the inside of the car with the end of a cane.

Biking is out right now, but I can take walks. I’m doing physical therapy (that poem on Tuesday was not something I made up) and I’m doing exercises at home. I also read a book called Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno that tells me I need to have arguments with my brain. He may well be right.

So things I normally do, things I don’t even think about, are beyond my capabilities. So it’s a kind of “whitespace time,” waiting for things to return to normal so I can get back to taking everything for granted.

I’ve learned something, though.

I don’t begrudge the accommodations made for disabled people. They need those wide parking spaces near the entrances of stores. They need sidewalks that slope to the street. They need ramps to get into buildings. The American Disabilities Act may drive a lot of businesses, governments and other organizations crazy in its implementation, but until you’re disabled yourself, you don’t realize how important access is. You don’t even think about it.

Yes, people survived and made do for centuries without the ADA, but those simple accommodations mean the difference between “close to normal” and “something less than close to normal.” Yes, laws like this can and will be taken to ridiculous extremes, but they’re still important and needed.

So for a few days I was allowed to park in the visitors’ parking lot at work, and it meant a short walk and – best of all – no stairs to get to my office. I didn’t even consider the stairs I had to climb from the regular parking lot to my office (some 55 steps distributed among four flights of stairs). I learned to appreciate a computer bag with wheels, even if it looked dorky – I could easily take my computer home (we’re required to do that) with having to inconvenience someone to carry it for me.

There was an unexpected benefit, too. I can’t sit for very long in a meeting, so I explain to people and then stand. Perhaps it was my imagination, but meetings became shorter. You should try it sometime, even without throwing your back out.


This week at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is talking about whitespace – and what you learn when you find yourself in life’s whitespace. To see more posts, please visit Faith Barista.

It's for Life

Years ago, at another church we belonged to, the wife in a fairly prominent couple stopped coming to church. She moved out the family’s home. She told pastors and friends that she had fallen in love with someone else, and God wanted her to be happy. The marriage ended in divorce.

At the risk of sounding anti-American, I have to say she missed the point. Marriage isn’t about happiness. It’s never about happiness. That’s a non-existent magic elixir that doesn’t exist, sold by the boatload by movies and television programs, and not a few books, not to mention the Declaration of Independence calling the pursuit of it an “inalienable right.”

The Christian view of marriage, says C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, is also not about a feeling of love for someone. Feelings are transient; they can change, ebb, flow and disappear. If marriage was based on feeling, even a feeling of love, then every marriage would be doomed from the beginning.

Some marriages, some good marriages and some good Christian marriages, break. The church I was raised in – the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod – accepted only two reasons for divorce – the same two Jesus recognized: adultery and desertion. Some churches accept no grounds for divorce; others fling open the doors to any and all reasons. But I believe a stricter definition is better.

Marriage is about a commitment, a serious commitment. Marriage is about being faithful to a commitment, a commitment to your spouse and a commitment to God. As Lewis points out, you may make that commitment in the flush of young love, but it is still a commitment.

Next month, my wife and I will celebrate 38 years of marriage. When we married, she had just turned 21 and I was two weeks shy of 22. While we were both ignorant of what that commitment meant, I was more ignorant than she was.

We learned something early on: marriage is hard. Romantic expectations will likely be disappointed, and early on. We’ve had our share of arguments, misunderstandings and disappointments, although I usually cornered the market on doing stupid stuff.

At some point over the years, it got less hard (I didn’t say easy: I said less hard). We became more understanding, more tolerant of each other’s weaknesses and failings. We began to understand that marriage wasn’t about changing the other person but about loving the other person, even when they were at their most unlovable. Marriage isn’t about my needs being met, but working together, being “one flesh,” to do the things God sets before us.

We still screw up (particularly me; it’s a best practice). But she loves me anyway. And I can’t imagine not being married to her. I just can’t. We become too much a part of each other. I’m more in love with her now than when we first met. I always will be.

And our marriage is for life.


Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been hosting our discussion of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. This week’s chapter is “Christian Marriage.” To see more posts, please visit Jason’s blog, Connecting to Impact.

Anne Overstreet's "Delicate Machinery Suspended"

My review of "Delicate Machinery Suspended:Poems" by Anne M. Doe Overstreet has been posted over at TweetSpeak Poetry. It's a wonderful collection published by T.S. Poetry Press.

You can find the boook on Amazon here.

Physical Therapy

Shift your weight,
she says, to the left,
breathe deeply
to lift the right;
my brain laughs
at the novelty
until I laugh back.
Focus. Left. Focus.
Re-teach the brain.
Re-learn, brain,
counterintuitive
as it is. Lean into
the pain, she says,
place the weight
on the pain. Don’t
fight it; move into it.
Surprised, the pain
complies.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see more submitted poems, please visit One Stop Poetry. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time today.

Charlie White's "Fatfingers"

I was born and raised in New Orleans, a city utterly unlike any other in the United States. Its culture has always been more Caribbean than American, with a rather high tolerance for political corruption, for example, that’s distressing but factual (remarkably, Illinois – the “Land of Lincoln” – seems to have captured that dubious crown worn so long by Louisiana and New Orleans).

Undergirding this tolerance in New Orleans is a kind of dark humor. Hurricane Katrina was barely over when the first t-shirts showed up in French Quarter souvenir shops, sharing choice comments about Mayor Nagin, FEMA and its hapless administrator, Michael Brown, President Bush and then-Governor Kathleen Blanco. That’s New Orleans – laughing in the face of calamity and making a little money on the process, while washing down a shrimp po-boy sandwich with a Dixie beer.

Welcome to Charlie White’s Fatfingers, A Tale of Old New Orleans. It’s a historical novel that’s shot through with that classic and contemporary sense of what New Orleans is.

It’s the 1760s, and the British are beginning to expel the Acadians from Nova Scotia. Pirates roam the Caribbean, the Spanish have taken over Louisiana from the French and the British can also be found in nearby Pensacola and Florida. Hapless carpenter Etienne Gaspard works in a Nova Scotia shipyard under a cruel and vicious taskmaster, Thomas Cudgel. Etienne and his brother-in-law Jacob are forced into hiding and eventually expelled. They travel with other expelled Acadians southward, stopping for a time in Charleston, South Carolina before alighting in Santo Domingo, or Saint Dominique.

Somehow, Etienne’s nemesis Cudgel ends up in the same place. Mishaps and upheavals ensue. Etienne and Jacob, accompanied by two women they meet, find their way to New Orleans, where they --- what else? – open a restaurant. Cudgel ends up in New Orleans as well, working as something like a sheriff or police chief for the Spanish authorities.

This story of Etienne and his friends is rollicking, and simultaneously dark and humorous. It’s populated by finely drawn, vivid characters who occasionally wonder how they’ve managed to get themselves into such a tale. Most of the characters are fictional, but some are historical, like the Spanish governor Ulloa and General O’Reilly.

The story moves geographically – Nova Scotia, Charleston, Saint Dominique, New Orleans, Barataria Bay, Pensacola and Havana, before returning to Louisiana – much like the times moved; the stories of empires and competing empires are stories largely of geography. And the details author White includes – both real and fictional – are marvelous, including lessons on sailing ships, indigo production and history, and rather tongue-in-cheek speculations on the origins of the Poor Boy (po-boy) sandwich and Southern Comfort bourbon.

Fatfingers is a highly entertaining story. I haven’t read one that so captures the New Orleans I know since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

And I don’t know whether to laugh or shudder that the characters of the novel are like the people who are among my own forebears, and Fatfingers is a kind of family history.