Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Today's story was chosen as an Honorable Mention piece in this year's Write a DearReader Contest. Congratulations to Maryann Severino, who shares a major accomplishment...

Requiem for a Reader
  
I was born and raised in 1950s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My mother was a housewife (stay-at-home mother hadn’t been coined yet) and my father was a tradesman. All the children in my world lived the same life: school, play, chores, church, and a Sunday visit to grandmom’s house. I am not sure how the others spent their Saturdays, but I would like to tell you how I spent mine. My corner of Philadelphia had row homes, penny candy stores, grocery stores (which my mother went to once a week when she could use the family car) and a big old library. On Saturday afternoons, once my chores were done, I rode my bike to the library. I got as many Nancy Drew, Henry Huggins, and Little House on the Prairie books as I could hold in one hand while steering my bike with the other.  
 
Back at home reclining on my freshly-sheeted bed, I would read. I would read until the shadows on my bedroom wall started to form. I would read until the aroma of dinner got my attention. I would read until my arms turned numb and I had to shake them out over the side of the bed. It was pure heaven!
 
Happy childhoods have a way of dissolving away. Our neighborhood dangerously changed. Our residence changed, as my parents moved us to New Jersey. And my mother changed. The monotony of housewifery caused her to pursue meaning (I guess) in her life. This occurred just as I was becoming a wife and mother myself. Gone were the days of reading for pleasure. According to my mother, reading books was likened to laziness. “You must not be cleaning your home properly or making decent meals for your family.” These were her reprimands. Also, her pursuit of “worth” resulted in becoming an aspiring author.
 
How could I possibly read now when SHE was writing? If I broached a topic of a book I was reading, she had no interest. How could anything be as interesting as the chapters of her book?  
 
So, I gave up reading books…for years. However, that did not stop me from encouraging my children to read. Several times a week, my young ones and I lugged books home from our little library. We brought them home, not on a bicycle anymore, but in the back of a baby carriage! They loved the Beginner Books series. I remember the book “Are You My Mother?” It was one of their favorites. 
 
Years passed again. On family vacations, I would notice people sitting in sand chairs, idle fingers turning the pages of some paperback novel. Emotions stirred in me. How could they sit there? Why weren’t they cleaning something or cooking something or washing something? It didn’t make sense. I had been programmed to never sit idly. I could never allow myself to escape into a wonderful book.
 
Some of my happiest memories with my almost-grown children were touring college campuses. I got to spend one or two nights sleeping in a dorm room that would be my child’s home until graduation. All four of them were accepted into and graduated from Virginia universities. Although I was thrilled for them and applauded their accomplishments, I also wished I could join them. I wanted to know what a syllabus was, what would it be like to sit in a lecture hall, how it felt to wear school sweatshirts that didn’t have the word “Mother” emblazoned on them!
                                                                                                                        
Fast forward to the 2000s. My children are grown and married with children of their own. My husband and I are retired now. Those buried emotions stirred in me once more. With the encouragement of my husband, I enrolled in college. I am reading! I know what a syllabus is! And in July, 2025, I hope to graduate magna cum laude.

– Maryann Severino
Honorable Mention, 2024 Write a DearReader Contest

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Fox: A Novel by Joyce Carole Oates. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

PROLOGUE

There was never a time when I was not in love with Mr. Fox. There was never a time when Mr. Fox was not my life.

Because before Mr. Fox came into my life our souls knew each other in the time before 'where there is no time.

Because we are born of such knowing. Of the time before as when waking in the morning we carry the memory of the beautiful dreams we have lost in waking.

In the time before there is no time as we understand it on Earth, it is a great void like the ocean in which droplets of rain fall & vanish.

In the time before we are children together, there is no "age" that separates.

This, Mr. Fox explained.

Saying, My darling there will never be a time when our souls are not joined.

Saying, Our (secret) pledge will be, we will die for each other if that is asked of us.

We will never reveal our secret, we will die together & our secret will die with us.

For there is no Death in the time before. Souls are joined in love in  the time before.

This, Mr. Fox explained.

To me only, Mr. Fox explained.

I

WIELAND POND NATURE PRESERVE

SOUTH JERSEY 2013

THE TROPHY

WIELAND POND 29 OCTOBER 2013

It will be no ordinary morning.

Heavy rain has fallen through the night with a din of crazed castanets. The sky at dawn is clotted with dark tumors of cloud through which a sudden piercing light shines like a scalpel.

In the mud-softened service road leading to the Wieland Township landfill, shimmering puddles in long narrow snakelike ruts. A smell of brackish swamp water from the vast marshland beyond and in the near distance black-winged turkey vultures like flattened silhouettes high in the air silently circling, swooping with a look of grisly frolic.

At 7:36 a.m. in the adjacent nature preserve there comes jolting along the service road a steel-colored vehicle with four-wheel drive to park at a trailhead fifty feet from the murky still-standing water of many acres—choked at shore with rushes, cattails, barely submerged trash, a rumor of leeches in its black-muck bottom—known locally as Wieland Pond in rural Atlantic County, New Jersey.

The driver of the steel-colored vehicle cuts her engine, headlights. Glances about the clearing to see with evident satisfaction that she is alone. No reeking sanitation trucks lumbering out to the nearby landfill at this hour, deepening ruts in the roadway. No fellow dog- walkers, hikers. No one with whom P. Cady will be obliged to exchange inane greetings.

For it is the purpose of driving out to the Wieland wetlands at dawn, on the average of five times a week, to exercise her high- energy rescue animal of mixed ancestry (terrier, hound) from the Wieland Township Animal Shelter, and to exercise herself, alone.

"Here we go! Good girl."

Opening the passenger door of the steel-colored vehicle out of which leaps as if catapulted by force the small wiry dun-colored dog in a paroxysm of excitement, barking, yipping, whining, pleading, tail slavishly wagging in seeming deference to the tall bossy individual gripping the leash, her human, gripping the leash on 'her' neck, speaking sternly yet not without affection as if anything uttered in fatuous human speech could have the slightest interest for the eager little dog at this crucial moment.

"This morning, you will behave."

Large limpid brown eyes brimming with facile promise—Yes, I will behave.

"You will come back when I call you. You will not run wild." Oversized hound-paws scuffing frantically in the wet leaves, shameless whining, whimper—Yes yes I will do anything you ask.

"And not in the water! D'you hear?—'not in the damned water.'"

Sniffing sodden leaves at her human's booted feet. Stubby tail furiously wagging, bony rear shimmying, how then could her (naïve, trusting) human not believe such slavish deference, doggiedevotion—Yes of course, I will obey. Just let me go!

"I'm warning you—do not run wild."

At last released from the leash, a panting yelp of gratitude before turning to bound joyously away, stopping within a few yards to sniff at underbrush, lift a leg to urinate, but fleetingly, for there is no time to tarry, these early-morning hikes under the command of her human are rarely more than forty minutes to an hour; restraining herself to remain on the trail at least initially, trotting in the direction in which her human habitually hikes on the 2.5-mile loop around the pond that will return them to the vehicle parked at the trailhead; but soon then, within fifty or so feet, even as her human calls after her in a voice of chiding concern the eager little dog has trotted off-trail to investigate something small scuttling in the underbrush—(rodent? black-feathered bird?)—splashing through puddles, very muddy puddles, paws sinking into muck halfway up her forelegs, still she takes time to pause every few yards to sniff, lift her leg, urinate in quick agitated dribbles against underbrush, mounds of leaves, trunks of stunted trees in a haze of great happiness seeming scarcely to hear her human now shouting after her in a voice of outrage and indignation 'Come here! Come back! Princess! Now!' as inexorably as gravity she is drawn into the marshy woods off-trail where the most delicious odors waft to her sensitive nostrils.

On this morning in late October there are a half-dozen red-winged blackbirds taunting her from six feet above, razzing her, a trespasser in their territory, if they were but large enough they might attack her, stab their sharp beaks into her, failing to find at all "beautiful"-"adorable"—her somewhat coarse brindle-brown short-haired coat, greedily they would peck out those caramel- colored moist eyes her human finds so "intelligent," captivating.

Bravely and defiantly she trots on, she is a trespasser, a hunter. Literally, a born hunter! Ignores the noisy bullies for these are not local predator birds (hawk, owl) large enough to carry away a small dog in their talons, and devour her.

Soon then the pleading voice somewhere behind the little dog has faded, becomes inaudible amid the cries of swamp birds and the sound of her own panting, the tumult of smells assailing her nostrils, overcharging her thrumming brain, her human's cry irrelevant as artificial light on a blind-blazing-sun day.

* * *

WHAT IS THAT AHEAD?—A sudden movement in the still water, splash and ripples in the still dank water, mallard? turtle? water snake?— as she approaches on her disproportionately large paws, with a clumsy sort of stealth, crouching, preparing for the pounce, the kill, whatever it is, or was, a living thing like herself, but cannier than she, more cunning, desperate to survive, seems to have disappeared.

Cautiously exploring the dank interior of the marshland amid fallen and calcified trees, weak eyes lowered in deference to her exquisitely tuned nostrils, terrier-ears pricked upright, all of her senses alert, thrilled, her small brain near to swooning with overstimulation after seven hours of confinement in the dull- darkened house of her human; it's as if whatever force fierce as a vacuum's suction catapulted her out of the steel-colored vehicle continues to draw her forward venturing—recklessly, naughtily—ever farther from her human, or rather the memory of her human, the tall stern-voiced individual whose smallest, most petty commands she is obliged to obey, and surely will obey again, except just not yet, not now, not while trotting eagerly in this dazzling place where the most thrilling-reeking smells rush at her, some familiar, some unfamiliar, it is the unfamiliar that draws her, the tantalizing- new, new odors of carrion, irresistible as food to a ravenous beast.

Many times she has dismayed her overfastidious human by reveling in carrion, rotted flesh, stained bones the most luxuriant sensation, leaping into what she has discovered in the woods, what has seemed to be lying in wait for her to discover, rolling in it, excitedly barking, yipping, growling deep in her throat in ecstasy, the most profound kinship with whatever it is that remains of a living creature like herself, yet not-herself, deer carcass, fox, raccoon, another creature like herself: dog, most wondrous: dog: a carrion- cloak in which to wrap herself, myriad drunken smells swarming into her brain, overcharged as an electrical socket. Many times she has incurred the disgust of her human, unmistakably the human words signal the most extreme disgust, no disgust other than the human, as there are no words other than the human. At such times, discovered, reviled, chided, despaired-over, and needing to be thoroughly bathed (by her human, or by the groomer with the deft kind assured hands), she has been quick to express remorse, or has seemed to express remorse, for upsetting her human, for this is expected of her, this is her responsibility to the (needy) human, her pledge. In her doggy soul, she understands.

(continued on Tuesday)

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