Preparing to Live
an excerpt

Facing north, Marley looked across the top of her computer to see autumn sunlight streaming through dingy windows. The beams highlighted groupings of desks pushed together in groups of four or six and arranged across the room, with a row of desks lined up in front of the windows. This was the Hanford Herald newsroom.

Desks closest to Marley’s, separated by an unmarked aisle that cut through the center of the room, formed the lifestyles and business section. Lori, Diane, Robert and Mr. Shaw sat at desks pushed together into a little pod. Beyond them columnists, the cop and crime reporter, as well as the political and government reporter had their desks lined up under the windows. In summer they sweltered, and in winter they froze, but they clung to the prestige of a window office.

Outside, High Street unfold. She could look down from this second floor space onto “Sam’s Barbershop” with its traditional striped pole and a throne where usually men, maybe a couple of women, would sit and the barber’s son or hired boy would shine their shoes. Sometimes Sam laid down his clippers and picked up the shine cloth himself.

Her Dad had earned a living shining shoes, or so he told her. It had been a tough life. He started working as a child to help keep his parents and brothers and sisters from starving. He sold newspapers, delivered telegrams, and anything else he could get paid to do. He dropped out of school and joined the Army, went to fight in Korea and woke up for the rest of his life from war dreams. He never would sleep in a sleeping bag, even though they constantly traveled and slept under the stars. He said he watched too many of his buddies killed because they couldn’t get the damn things unzipped.

When thinking about those years, he would shake his head and look at her mother and say, “Thank god you came along. One bright thing to put everything into perspective.” He would laugh and say war sick GI meets beautiful Geisha and they live happily ever after….It didn’t matter that she was the daughter of a Scottish scholar who studied antiquities while on leave in the Orient from Oxford and one of his Japanese students.

When they both arrived in the United States and married, they began their life with little more than the clothes they wore, a satchel of food and a bottle of wine and a beat up old Indian motorcycle.

They traveled the width and breadth of the United States on that bike and met others doing the same. They formed a commune, a family, and watched out for each other. It was a violent time. Many of the members were veterans who could never totally leave the battlefield, never be free of the evils of war and killing. Together they eased each other’s fears and pain.

Drunks and druggies found temporary shelter there, but no reprieve from their sufferings. Homeless would lay in doorways, just beginning to gather up their meager possessions and move along when she turned into the parking lot at the Hanford Herald newspaper office and before the beat cop walked by.

Another town, another time, she would have known some of those drunks and druggies and homeless men and women by name, maybe she had road with some of them, maybe they were once clan members. But these days the clan had split – some falling into addiction and poverty, others moving into traditional circles, becoming part of the establishment they spat on when she was born and was a child growing up in the 60s. Being a biker in 1994 was a lot different than it was in 1964. Still she felt the tug of the open road and the closeness of the commune of families that had been her family for the first eighteen years of her life.