Yesterday(Martin Green) 2023Yest

Yesterday

This happened yesterday. Raya, my Ukrainian cleaning lady of many years, came at eleven. Her teen-age daughter Diana came with her. I was glad of this because Raya’s English isn’t too good. I’d been donating my wife’s clothes to Raya to go to Ukraine. Donating was for me a slow and painful process. I told Diana that I didn’t have anything this time because I hadn’t gotten around to it. The truth was that for some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I said I’d have some next time. Diana said she’d tell her mother.

I asked Diana if she was off school today. She said she didn’t have any classes or homework. I asked her what school she was going to and she said American River, which was a junior college. I told her all three of our sons had gone there and then on to a four-year college. I added that after I retired I had also gone there. She asked me what courses I’d taken. I said a course in Shakespeare and one in creative writing. She herself was taking scientific courses as she said she wanted to be an ultrasound technician, which I guess is an occupation nowadays.

Later that day I found the American River Literary Review, a publication from my time there. I looked through it and there were two poems I’d written, one of which I’d completely forgotten. I then found two of my stories that had been selected for the publication. One I’d called The Happiest Time and it was about the time I was 12 or 13 and had become such an avid handball player I’d walked a mile or so every Saturday and Sunday from our tenement apartment in the Bronx to the handball courts in Crotona Park. It was the happiest time because it was before having to work and an awareness of sex (this was an innocent era) came into my life. For purposes of the story I gave the narrator (me) an older brother. I don’t know how good the story was but it must have sounded plausible because my creative writing teacher asked if I’d really had an older brother.

I read the two poems and the two stories, written many years ago, and then looked out over my back yard and the trees and sky beyond it. For some reason there were tears in my eyes. I didn’t know why but I cry easily these days.

###

---