Is My Mother Calling Me?
By Beatlick Pamela Hirst
Before Daddy died, I can remember Mama at the ironing board, ironing sheets. This was before air conditioning and the white nylon sheers puffed wisps of warm atmosphere through the bedroom window, which was dim to my eyes, after leaving the dazzle of June daylight.
I could smell the new steam iron for which she bought special distilled water. No tap water. Mama was a nurse, she made hospital corners and she had a way of turning down the sheets and fluffing up the pillows that made my bed look so inviting. I just wanted to jump in, asked if I could and she generously nodded.
I did jump in the bed but the appeal was illusive, it was hot under the covers and quickly I threw them off to go back outside, to lay in the grass, under the peach tree and watch the clouds.
Without complaint, Mama remade the bed.
After Daddy died I remember Mama in her bed and like Sylvia, as Ted charged, “into pillows sunk her head.” Only forty-four mother retreated into crossword puzzles, crocheting and Perry Mason on Thursday nights.
At ninety, when hospice care brought her home from the hospital Mama practically sprang into her bed so deftly crawling home to glory and there she died, eagerly.
Shhh, listen, is my mother calling me? She did call, she screamed: “Call the police, he’s trying to kill me!”
And my ten-year-old body was paralyzed still as stone. I lay there, helpless, ashamed. I didn’t do a thing to help mama. My little sister Debbie never woke. Next morning my mother walked into our bedroom. Blythely she trod. As if nothing ever happened. I went to sleep thinking she was dead.
“I hate Daddy!” I screamed at her. “I wish he was dead!” Genuinely hurt, Mama whispered, ”Oh, you should never say that.”
Two days later she woke up Debbie and me. “Your daddy’s not coming home anymore,” she said.
He had died in a car crash at 1:30 a.m., five blocks from our house.
Debbie cried, but I was scared, amazed at my own power. I just got rid of daddy.
Formerly known as the “Godmother of Poetry” in Nashville, Tennessee, Pamela A. Hirst was publisher of Beatlick News: A Poetry & Arts Magazine for 22 years. She relocated to New Mexico and founded Beatlick Press in 2011 in Albuquerque 2011, to post-posthumously publish the works of her partner Beatlick Joe Speer.
THE LOWDOWN ON HIRST
Known as the Godmother of Poetry in Nashville, Tennessee, Beatlick Pamela Hirst relocated to New Mexico in 2003. Publisher of “Beatlick News Poetry & Arts Newsletter” for 22 years, the newsletter ceased publishing hard copies in 2010 after the death of editor Beatlick Joe Speer.
Beatlick News continues online at www.beatlick.com and Beatlick Press was established in Beatlick Joe’s memory in 2011 to publish his only book: “Backpack Trekker: A 60s Flashback”.
Beatlick Press has published eight books since Speer’s death and was nominated for two literary awards by the New Mexico / Arizona Book Awards winning first place in anthology in 2013 for “La Llorona.”. “Backpack Trekker” was a 2013 travel book finalist.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
