THE HIDDEN TRACK

The following passages are dedicated to Leopold, to the vernacular, to certain evil women (you know who you are), to certain wonderful people(they know who they are), to soft afternoons and quiet Sunday evenings, to Fall and seeing your breath for the first time since Spring, and to Isabelle Ya Feng ... a soul slipped by like two ships passing in the still, moonlit sea.
-- Abraham Ahmed, the Surfing Beatnik



A Mother's Struggle...

A chip of paint from her fading painted fingernails flakes from her index finger and falls slowly to the tile floor of the family doctors' office.

Her children, three in tow and all less than 4 years, conduct unruly business commonly seen only in a jailhouse setting vice that of the quietness expected from a medical office waiting room.

"Stop it, and sit down!" she instructs the largest and assumed one in-command.

The boy looks up with eyes half-crazy and red kool-aid-stained upper lip in full display and cheerfully cries out an unsympathetic "no."

"Little bastard," I think to myself.

The woman's tired eyes are shadowed only by her sagging shoulders of ages of spent convincing child one, two, and three to act accordingly.

This is unreal; yet, this is all too real.

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