Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Lions at Lamb House Review of Jamestown Review of The Children of Húrin Review of The Politics of Life Film Review of "300" Creative Nonfiction Home By Marion Agnew One Foot and Then the Other By Greg Coykendall Poetry Hannah Plays with Light By Kristine Ong Muslim Caricature of an Early Planter By Michael Lee Johnson Comes a Push-Cart Down a Long-Ass Ghazal By Levon DeBranch Modern Day Moses By Bob Boston Squares (2) Plaza De Armas, Santiago, Chile By Graham Burchell Fiction The Larchmont Campaign By Zain Deane Body Warmth By Louise Kantro The Good People Up North By T.M. Spooner Triple Word Score By Patricia C. Meringer Texans Abroad By Franklin Strong Hunting for Manhood By Jason Sizemore Staten Island Zen By Michael Enright About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
Notes from a Journal III “You’ll end up with your diamond before I’ll get mine,” a friend of mine said, maybe a little bitterly as we talked outside a local ice cream shop. “I don’t know…” We went on talking about future plans and our kids as my son chased her daughter and another little girl around the building. Only a little while before that my mother had been saying how well behaved my son was – amazing what the addition of a couple female targets could do to even a young boy. Milan Kundera enjoyed exploring the oddities of human relations, particularly between men and women. “The Hitchhiking Game” is one that I keep thinking about – a story about a couple who play-act at being strangers on the road with disastrous results. The man and woman keep playing the same game, but with radically divergent concepts of the mechanisms and rules – neither says what is actually thought or felt, leading to severe misunderstanding. The lack of communication and the assumptions that wordless communication is actually understood is a recurring theme in my life these days. “She experienced this same anxiety even in her relations with the young man, whom she had known for a year and with whom she was happy, perhaps because he never separated her body from her soul, and she could live with him wholly. In this unity there was happiness, but it is not far from happiness to suspicion, and the girl was full of suspicions…. She wanted him to be completely hers and herself to be completely his, but it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something: the very thing that a light and superficial love or a flirtation gives a person.” I watched my son and his flirtations with the older girls, wondering if I was overstepping some unseen boundary by considering his game of chase flirting. Wasn’t he too young for that sort of thinking? He wasn’t thinking like an adult, but no doubt there would be a Freudian analyst out there who would make sexual connections in his behavior. “I thought you weren’t getting married,” my friend’s voice broke through. “Last time I talked to you, you were calling it off.” I nodded. “True, but I always come back to saying I want to be married to him.” “There was nothing the young man missed in his life more than lightheartedness. The main road of his life was drawn with implacable precision: his job didn’t use up merely eight hours a day, it also infiltrated the remaining time with the compulsory boredom of meetings and home study, and, by means of the attentiveness of his countless male and female colleagues, it infiltrated the wretchedly little time he had left for his private life as well; this private life never remained secret and sometimes even became the subject of gossip and public discussion.” We talked a little more about inconsequential things, but I was thinking about the arguments that were looming on the horizon for me. Life for me has been getting less and less private, and I’m learning to despise the spotlight, no matter how dim. I was considering whether or not it was a mistake to have colleagues who were also friends – friends who felt they had reason to be jealous of any man in my personal life. “Did you decide on dresses?” my friend’s question caught my attention. Nodding, “Yes. I found a pattern. Wide straps and it can have a jacket of lace or sheer fabric.” I added, letting her know I had heard her objections to previous choices. “That works for me. What about length?” I thought for a moment, “Anything from floor length to knee.” “Have you picked colors?” “Not yet.” “The conversation was proceeding to still greater enormities; it shocked the girl slightly, but she couldn’t protest. Even in a game there lurks a lack of freedom; even a game is a trap for the players. If this had not been a game and they had really been two strangers, the hitchhiker could long ago have taken offense and left; but there’s no escape from a game. A team cannot flee before the end of the match, chess pieces cannot desert the chessboard, the boundaries of the playing field are impassable.” My friend and I have been dancing around the concept of marriage with our respective men for a very long time. Both of us have been married before, and have definite feelings about getting it right this time. We’ve questioned our current choices, including straying to see if the grass was greener – perhaps we’re paying now for that exploration. She is more stubborn and I am more insistent, but we’re both playing the same game. We each have our moments when we question ourselves. For my part, I can only say that I’m not heading toward what Kundera’s “hitchhikers” did – I will not rely on wordless communication anymore. Elizabeth Ross * Excerpts from “The Hitchhiking Game”, Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera, 1999 Harper Perennial. |