Episodes 15 and 16: The Girl at the Tiller

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“Hubert" - modeled by Charlotte Rains Dixon’s beloved Chip. Charlotte is an author, writing coach, and friend - check out her substack at https://wordstrumpet.substack.com/ and the website for writing workshops offered by Charlotte Rains Dixon and Deborah Guyol at https://www.letsgowriteworkshops.com/

Episode 15 begins: Celia Prewitt has a secret. The episode follows 81-year old retired highschool teacher Celia Prewitt, her granddaughter Olga, and her ghost-dog Hubert.

Episode 15 Excerpt

It would shock just about everyone to discover she has a secret.

It isn’t that she used to play the trumpet and the trombone, making a big cheerful sound at rallies and parades and even, for a few years, as part of the orchestra for the Looser Island Community Theater. Most people know about her musical background, and even if they didn’t they could have guessed from the fact that she still gives music lessons to a few select students. Anyway, far from shocking anyone, the islanders are tickled to think of diminutive Mrs. Prewitt tootling on the trumpet or blasting on the ‘bone.

And it isn’t that she used to be a teacher at the Looser Island High School. During the decades when Mrs. Prewitt was teaching, that was almost the only career open to a woman who worked rather than staying home with her children. Also, many of the adults who grew up on the island were her students, once upon a time. She was very strict, according to those who’d had her as a teacher, especially with the boys, but you have to be strict if you want to get anything through those thick skulls and raging hormones, Mrs. Prewitt always says.

Most people even know what she wanted to teach was math—algebra and geometry and pre-calculus, “the logical arts”—but that wasn’t what women did in those days. Women taught English or home economics or French or Spanish. So she taught English Literature and Spanish, and if some of Shakespeare’s more lyrical and powerful scenes got short shrift in her Lit class, and the students in her Spanish class never learned to trill their “r”s properly, well, that was what came of having a shortsighted principal who assigned classes according to gender rather than the teachers’ talents.

Really, Celia Prewitt doesn’t seem the type to have secrets, but if anyone had known she was hiding something, they might have wondered if it was somehow related to her granddaughter, Olga.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe here https://sharilane.substack.com/p/episode-15-the-girl-at-the-tiller

Episode 16 Excerpt

It’s now the week before the Fourth of July, Charlie’s last chance to find his muse. He appears in Mrs. Prewitt’s living room again, and this time he plays “America the Beautiful” with fewer mistakes.

Mrs. Prewitt praises him, and he glows at her praise, a pinkish light like sunrise on his acne-scarred cheeks. She suggests he let the parade organizers know he’s ready to play in the parade, and he says, bashfully, Okay.

Realtor, Water District Board Chair, and unofficial Island Siren Cherry Duluth is heading up the parade committee this year. Mrs. Prewitt knows Cherry is just this side of terrifying to Charlie, possibly because of rather than in spite of her sexual exploits. On the other hand, both teacher and student know one of the many lovely aspects of living on a tiny island is that (almost) everyone is supportive of the island’s young adults, who are practically an endangered species, and (almost) everyone will cheer long and loud at Charlie’s attempts, regardless of his success and his skill, or lack thereof.

“Shall I r-r-run through the song again, Mrs. Prewitt?” Charlie says.

“Yes please,” Mrs. Prewitt says.

This time, Charlie’s rendition is even better, the tune almost recognizable.

“Excellent,” Mrs. Prewitt says.

“B-B-But Mrs. Prewitt?” he says.

“Yes, Charlie?”

“I s-s-still . . . I still feel patriotic.”

And Celia Prewitt feels an almost perverse pride in his statement, and relief, knowing that she hasn’t stolen Charlie’s innocence, and more importantly that he’s making his own decisions, not adopting others’ ideas indiscriminately.

See? Hubert says, wandering over and curling up under the piano bench where his ghostly form is barely visible against the old beige carpet. I knew he’d find an even keel, given enough time and patience.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe herettps://sharilane.substack.com/p/episode-16-the-girl-at-the-tiller

Photo by Lord Runar from Getty Images (adjusted to match the story line)

Episodes 13 and 14: Jazz Man

Image by MarthaHinz from Pixabay (text added)

Episode 13: Jazz Man - Music at the Mini-Mart

Excerpt

Arnold quietly laments that he is not named something other than Arnold. Something like Thelonious or Dizzy or maybe even Miles.

Arnold plays The Sax. He always has at least one (bari, tenor, alto, or soprano), and often more than one, behind the counter at the Mini-Mart where he works. The instruments are a little battered, and a little tarnished, except right after he polishes them. The pure, painfully beautiful strains can be heard wafting across the small, graveled parking area in the early mornings, and more than one tourist has been surprised, when stopping in for a cup of bad coffee or a package of Donettes, to find the lovely sounds aren’t coming from a Muzak system but from the heart and soul of a smallish older man standing stoop-shouldered and closed-faced behind the counter.

Mostly he plays the old standbys that casual jazz aficionados will recognize: “Stella by Starlight,” “Take Five,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “God Bless the Child.” If he’s feeling particularly melancholy—he is a musician, after all—it’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” or “Flying Home.” The be-pimpled adolescent whose shifts follow Arnold’s (he can never remember the kid’s name, but it might be one of those Looser Island names like Dandelion or Sea Star) sometimes gives Arnold an inscrutable look when arriving at the store, but Arnold ignores the look. Arnold is old enough to understand the phrase Kids these days in his bones and in his gut.

Like most of the other island residents, Arnold is accompanied wherever he goes―even to work―by his canine companion. Gus is an aging Basset Hound, a gentle foil to his human’s curmudgeonliness who, as is good and right and proper for a jazz man’s dog, is a music-lover and an enthusiastic audience. Luckily for Arnold and the Mini-Mart customers, Gus shows his appreciation by smiling and wagging his tail rather than howling along.

Arnold is not Black―another misfortune for a jazz musician, in his mind, another injury to his muse. He is plainly white, with a narrow face framed by long yellow-white hair that he wears in a single braid reaching almost to his skinny behind. He has wild white eyebrows but no other facial hair to speak of, having decided long ago to give up on the dream of a ZZ-Top-style beard to match his braid. In spite of his oh-so-ordinary name and the decidedly pale cast of his skin, Arnold was moderately famous in his youth and even into middle age, a fact none of the other islanders knows or would have guessed.

Read the rest of the Episode, and subscribe, here.

Episode 14: Jazz Man - Going Home

Excerpt

When you are young, the body absorbs emotional trauma, and hides it behind smooth skin and clear gray-green eyes and wispy flyaway hair the color of a chestnut nestled in a dimple in the soil, a chestnut that fell from a tree and rolled to rest near the grave marked by the most expensive tombstone Arnold’s parents could afford. It’s not a jazz song per se, and Arnold is generally a purist, but when thinking of his sister’s death the soundtrack is always Peter Gabriel’s “I Grieve.” He can’t remember the words (the tune is stuck in his head on an endless loop), but he knows it’s something about how life goes on and on and on and on.

The body soldiers on as if nothing’s happened, but all those traumas must come out some day. The memory of the elfin body of his sister being lowered into the ground, the job in the warehouse that he didn’t get and didn’t want but really needed, the dog who ran into the street at just the wrong moment, the coffee spilled on the new pants he’d coveted and saved for, the lymphoma that ate up his mother’s stomach from the inside like some voracious Pac Man, the girl he liked who said No when he asked her out, the liver failure that took down his father after rage and despair had hollowed out what was left of his heart . . . each has its own malignance, the petty anxieties and life-wracking tragedies working a dark magic on the exterior. Each moment and string of moments muscles its way, over time, to the surface, and leaves its mark.

And who wants to look at a map of his own grief and disappointment every day?

(Gus always points out making joyful music and laughing with friends in the Louisiana sunshine also have a time-stamp, which Arnold grudgingly concedes. But still.)

Read the rest of the Episode, and subscribe here.

Episodes 11 and 12: He Who Stays Put

Jenny and Seth and Jerry Garcia

Many thanks to Gini Chin (again!) for the marvelous photo

Excerpt of Episode 11:

Seth means many things. One of them is this: “He who stays put.”

In her first twenty-two years on this earth, Jenny drifted from place to place. Her mother, whatever-spirit-there-may-or-may-not-be-rest-her-soul, was a self-proclaimed hippie who didn’t want to be tied down. After her mother passed away, her father moved frequently in an attempt to find some place that would fulfill his longing for space to breathe, he later told Jenny, but also where he would feel he was meeting the minimum requirements of fatherhood.

Jenny emancipated herself at the age of seventeen and then continued as her parents had begun. She couldn’t tell if she was peripatetic by nature (on her mother’s side) or just by habit (on her father’s side), but either way she couldn’t seem to settle, until she found herself on Looser Island, pregnant, alone, but somehow, finally, home.

So she named her baby Seth.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe here https://sharilane.substack.com/p/he-who-stays-put

Excerpt of Episode 12:

Jenny and Seth were vegetarians, and she worried they’d have nothing for a carnivore, but the dog seemed quite willing to join them in their lentil stew. He ate and ate, and and allowed them to rub away some of the mud and the stench with warm wet towels soaked in castile soap. Then he fell asleep. Seth sat near him, resting one hand on the dog’s head or his hind quarters the whole time.

That night, the dog slept in Seth’s bed.

They did the responsible thing, and put up posters, copied on the post office copier without payment (though that thought hardly made a dent on Jenny’s conscience, under the circumstances). Jenny also notified Genevieve Macy of the online Looser Island Bulletin, who included a note in the next bi-weekly newsletter.

No one claimed him.

Fourteen years after becoming a parent, Jenny decided it was time to act like an adult. She brought Jerry Garcia to the vet for shots and to get the gash on his leg looked at, treated him for fleas, and even registered him with the county. In fact, Jerry Garcia was probably the only dog on Looser Island who was registered, and Jenny felt inordinately proud of herself.

When it was time to choose a name, Seth wanted to call him Fred, or maybe Leon, but this time it was Jenny who put her foot down. Her father loved the Grateful Dead, raising his daughter on “Ripple” and “US Blues.” She declared the dog would be called Jerry Garcia, and she brooked no argument on the matter.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe here https://sharilane.substack.com/p/episode-12-he-who-stays-put

Episodes 9 and 10: Homesick

Alessandra, Ralph, and Barbara’s Breakfast Bar

Excerpt of Episode 9

“It takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.”

Thus spake Alessandra, in her speech to the mostly-white-haired Board of the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade. (That’s how Alessandra thought of her speech—at sixteen, she was a budding nihilist, misunderstanding Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a call to rather than a warning against a philosophy of nothingness. She was well on her way to driving her parents crazy with her philosophizing, and if they complained, she shot back with “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task,” and other exasperating Nietzsche-isms.)

Alessandra was a homegrown islander, and so, although love and creature comforts were available to her in moderate supply from the day she first graced this earth, she spent almost the whole of her childhood longing with every fiber of her being to get away.

The Junior Foreign Aide Brigade, or JFAB, seemed as good an escape plan as any.

Read the rest of Episode 9 here

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Excerpt of Episode 10

“I am leaving the pension,” her landlady says one day. Her landlady likes to practice her English with Alessandra, though she speaks it thickly, hesitantly. “I do not know if the new owner will rent to you.”

“Why?” Alessandra says, confronting the misery of change externally imposed. Is this what it feels like to be an adult? The constant thrust of unasked-for change?

“I am going to help my son start the wheat farm,” the landlady says.

“But you have no experience with farming,” Alessandra says. As if her landlady had asked her permission. Or even her opinion.

“Ah, Alessandra, all it needs to make the wheat grow is the sunshine, the dirt, the rain, the love.”

There is no rhyme or reason to it that Alessandra can divine, but suddenly there are tears streaming from her eyes, and then the tears turn to wracking sobs. She was wrong, all those years ago, declaiming to the JFAB Board, and now she knows it, and it’s too late.

Read the rest of Episode 10 here.

Episode 7: The Many Uses of a Meat Mallet

How Gloria - and Mo - came to Looser Island to run The Dog House Cafe

Excerpt

Mo is a Great Pyrenees—a mix, Gloria is quick to say, because on Looser Island owning a pure breed is considered just this side of shameful. It is pretentious, a sign you think of your pet as a status symbol, like a flashy car or an expensive piece of furniture. (And therefore it comes as no surprise to anyone that Cherry Duluth has a purebred Pomeranian). Mutt is the preferred type, though the Coombs’s greyhound is forgiven, because she’s a rescue from racing. Anyway, whatever Mo is mixed with, the percentage of non-Great Pyrenees must be very, very small; the dog reportedly weighs in at one hundred fifty two pounds. His outer coat alone (he has three coats) consists of six-inch-long hair. That’s how he got his name, Gloria explains to anyone who asks. Within a week of adopting Mo, Gloria and every item of clothing she owned was covered with a layer of beautiful white hair, and she decided if she called him Mo she could say she was wearing mohair.

Together they get the proverbial double take, like a team in a slapstick routine or a child’s picture book: Tiny and Mr. Big Go for a Walk.

At some point—no one can remember when—Gloria took over the island’s only fine dining establishment and renamed it La Maison du Chien. If you don’t remember your high school French, that translates as “The Dog House.” Pursuant to the unwritten rules of the island, everyone refused to use the French name, and insisted on calling it The Dog House Café. Within a year after Gloria commissioned the sign, with its French words and curlicued letters, and hung it over the entry, the sign was completely covered by clematis and other greenery, and the islanders quickly forgot it had any other name.

Read the rest of the episode, and subscribe to receive episodes by email, here.