The Scheherazade Chronicles

It’s all the smoke …

My friend R urged me to read Mark Twain’s “How to Cure a Cold” as point of relevance for my sometimes style of writing.

I read “How to Cure a Cold”(1) and downloaded it to save in my computer. It does remind me of something I would write, other than that Twain uses, of course, the language of 1863 when he wrote the essay. Interestingly, I believe I had that same cold last summer as he. It lasted all summer and with a cough that dragged across months. I tried every possible remedy and my doctor was so afraid to let me visit his office, we had to communicate by telemed calls. Wine helped. I would recommend it. I spent most of the summer languishing. I had been thinking maybe I should go to San Francisco, as Mark Twain had, but I already know from living on the coast in Southern California, that fog, which he encountered, congests my lungs. Especially in June, the season of the June Gloom. (It sounds like a person, doesn’t it? A woman you’d likely try to avoid like the plague.)

I had lived my whole life, 25 years, in the northeastern United States where it’s very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. In the spring and fall you get a nice month or two. I got married and the U.S. Navy sent us to Southern California where my husband would undergo training and then be shipped out to the South China Sea. This was during the Vietnam war. My husband and I packed our suitcases and with our four-month-old daughter drove out there along the actual, pulsating Route 66. There existed no system of interstate highways back then.

We traveled all across country, in June 1967, across the Mississippi River, past the newly constructed Gateway Arch in St. Louis, over the plains and over Wolf Creek Pass in the Colorado Rockies where the snow still on the ground in June amazed us, and across the desert and through Monument Valley. The temperature there was 115 degrees. The incessant hot sun made our skin and hair feel like parchment; our daughter’s little face was red and we were thirsty. And then we arrived in Southern California and it was cold and we had to dig out of our deep trunk winter clothes to warm ourselves in the fog and drizzle. Oddly, newly arrived there in June, I asked a woman in a bar when one wears winter clothes in supposedly sunny Southern California. She looked at me like I was depraved.

Buy me a coffee …

Well, the June gloom didn’t make me sick that year, only congested and chilly and I didn’t experience my first earthquake for four years. After the first four months, the fog and sea mist lifted and I saw from our apartment that the fog barons had set out Santa Catalina Island in the middle of the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains up the coast. For four months I hadn’t known they were out there, on a clear day visible from our high patio on the hill.

I’m back living in the U.S. Northeast now, not far from Washington, D.C., and last summer the smoke from those devasting wild fires all over the West and Canada reached across the continent to us. You might have thought the White House had been set on fire, as Mark Twain alluded to when he got sick while he was in Virginia, probably from the smoke from the White House fire.(2) That smoke must have reached across the decades, for Mark Twain was in Virginia years after the Brits burned the White House (unless they were burning trash out back) on August 24, 1814, in retaliation for tariffs acts of destruction American troops did to the Canadas during the War of 1812. Last summer I got sick from the smoke, which, as I said, did blow here in part from Canada, chest congestion and an unrelenting cough and couldn’t rid myself of the beleaguerment. Even now, it keeps coming back. Besides, I was and am very tired, sick of this siege, really, lacking the energy to concoct a remedy to this overall dizzying drama. To concoct, for my now faded eyes, a remedy, other than to get out of this century, someplace where it’s not been so hot, someplace where one’s money extends far beyond sneezing and coughing, maybe someplace like the 1970s.

~Samantha Mozart

1
Published September 30, 1863.

2
Mark Twain said he was staying at the White House, there was a fire in the room under his and he jumped out the window. He had commenced his regular letter to San Francisco but was never permitted to finish it, therefore. [San Francisco Daily Call/July 30, 1863] I can only add here that I apologize for being late publishing this letter to you, because a couple days ago I was at the White House and the same thing happened. All that smoke choked me.

I took Nora Ephron with me to the nail salon the other day so I could have someone to chitchat with while I was getting my pedicure. She told me about a meatloaf that a New York City restaurant named after her—Nora’s Meat Loaf—and she gossiped about Lillian Hellman. Apparently Julia, of the Oscar-winning movie of the same name, was not a real person, but rather for a chapter in her book Pentimento, Miss Hellman made up the lifelong friend who fought against the Nazis. It so happened, said Nora, that one Muriel Gardiner wrote a book about her life as a member of the Austrian underground until the onset of World War II. Lillian Hellman stole her story. I was reading Nora’s book, I Remember Nothing. The comforting Christmas tree in the middle of the salon and these pages made me want to go home and make a meatloaf.

I’ve been practicing building my concentration skills, reading amid three TVs going while simultaneously an internet radio music channel voiced over the whole thing against the peripatetic salon backdrop, and Nora’s book provides light reading for the practice. Listening to Nora’s lively, humorous conversation is a good place to start upgrading one’s concentration skills. She’s easy to listen to. You’d think she was right there sitting next to you, getting her own pedicure, while you chatted about both the juiciest and the most annoying stuff.

 Buy me a coffee . . .

Nora waxes nostalgic about the early days of email—Wow! I’ve got mail! It’s instant. An instant message!—a pleasant way to spend a few moments with a friend—to present day despairing of an overwhelming information glut warning you of the dangers of eating too many leafy green vegetables to offering you a way to extend your penis two inches, if you’ve got one, to letters from Carol Ling admonishing me that she hasn’t heard back from me regarding the resumé I sent her (she dreamed it) and that, consequently, I, the writer, am in jeopardy of losing my big chance to begin my bulldozer operator remote apprenticeship, for which I am a perfect match .

Nora continues . . . All writers have flops, you know, or what no one wants to publish—doesn’t quite fit—even though the writing excels. No writer wants to talk about these rejections. We’d rather shove them into a drawer and forget them. But, reshopped before the right editor, they may turn out to be extraordinary genius and the original rejecting editor has to eat her words. The movie Heartburn was such a flop at first, or so they thought, because an early critic panned it, and it sank. Nora blamed the casting; it couldn’t be her writing. A year later, another New York Times movie critic, Vincent Canby, wrote high praises about Heartburn and ultimately the movie was resurrected to great success. The casting was stellar.

Friends encourage me to submit my essays to literary magazines. I renege on their urging, though, because what are the odds my work would be chosen among the hundreds of submissions they receive each month; nevertheless, I decide to send my darling out into the world. What could it hurt? Like the first day of school: “Be sure and wear your sweater, honey, it’ll be OK.” Two or three months go by and I get a response: “We’re sorry, but your piece didn’t quite fit. Please don’t think it’s your writing; it’s just not a precise fit.” It’s like breaking up—“It’s not you; it’s me. . . .” All the editors are zillennials, well, most of them. What are the odds of my being a precise fit with zillennial mentality? I take heart in magazines rejecting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories even after the success of The Great Gatsby. A story simply wasn’t a good fit, or in the case of “I’d Die for You,” too dark, or in a more well known case, The New Yorker rejecting “Thank You for the Light” in 1936 but then electing to publish it in 2012. During those times the stock market had crashed and nobody wanted to read about rich people and partying or stories about suicide. The writing was good, though. That these tales couldn’t find a market in their moment, according to The Guardian, is not necessarily because of aesthetic shortcomings.

Although Nora Ephron goes with me to the nail salon, I am also two-timing her with another author, reading a book chronicling the experiences of three Dubliners in a day, James Joyce’s Ulysses, I don’t think James Joyce would be the most delightfully companionable person to accompany me to the nail salon. Because, well, would he even like to get a pedicure…? It would be hard for me to keep up with him, his language as peripatetic as the salon’s comings and goings—two or three languages within one short sentence, correspondences to and allusions to Hamlet, human sexuality, Dante, Don Giovanni, Jesus, antisemitism, Irish nationalism, Catholicism. . . . Maybe a subject or two would waft into the occasional listener’s scent —Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.—*, they’d look up, tilt an ear (if they could hear over the stream of consciousness white noise of the salon), but soon they’d go back to their smartphone. So I left James Joyce at home. Besides, I walked to the salon, and 500 pages is weighty to carry. Another Nora, Nora Barnacle was James Joyce’s wife.

Nora Ephron and I were born in the same year. I want to tell her that the older I get the harder it is to open containers. I tried to open a pint carton of cream this morning to pour into my coffee. The carton came with a twist-off cap. It wouldn’t twist. Finally, I flattened the top of the carton so making a level surface and took a pair of scissors with serrated edges on the insides of the handles, made for just this twist-off purpose, and twisted. Voila! The cap unscrewed. I hadn’t anticipated the flip-top cap beneath, the kind with the loop that you pull. So often these loops snap off and then what do I do? I’ve had cans of tuna fish where I’ve encountered such tops. The loop snaps off and then I’m stuck with a can I can’t open and I want to make a tuna sandwich. I have to employ a can opener for a can not intended to be opened with a can opener and/or a knife, being careful not to gash a finger in the process. I recently bought a small jar of nutmeg and, try as I might, could not remove the twist-off cap. It just wouldn’t turn, not even with a wrench. Later, someone said, put a rubber band around it. That might have helped. This jar had a flip cap affixed to the top of the twist-off cap. So I raised the flip cap, took a fork and, through the sprinkle holes, poked holes in the sealing paper underneath the cap. That worked. I was able to pull the loop on the cream carton successfully without it snapping off. It only took me 20 minutes to pour a dollop of cream into my coffee. If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s probably because I’m struggling to open a carton or a can or a jar of something somehow, somewhere.

Sometimes Nora Ephron goes with me to my doctor’s appointment. Another opportunity to practice my concentration. There’s a big TV on the wall, dialogue loud enough for hard-of-hearing seniors to get. Nora’s telling me about a Christmas party. Not a fan of daytime TV, I look up and note that Rachael Ray has put on a bit of weight. She might be making meatloaf. But, Nora’s telling me she and a group of friends got together every year for a potluck Christmas dinner. In advance they designated who was to bring the hors d’oeuvres, the desserts, who’s making the main course. Nora’s talking about food, so is Rachael Ray.

My friends and I used to get together for holiday parties. I lived in California, on the West Coast, and my family were all in Delaware, on the East Coast. So my friends and I became family. I loved hosting these dinner parties at my house: The kitchen had a spacious U-shaped counter and a luxurious six-burner stove with a double oven, so there was space for everyone to do what they needed to do to finish preparing or heat up their presentation. On the occasions we’d go to someone else’s house, my friend would drive me and as soon as we arrived, he’d make the grand announcement to the party, “I always love bringing Samantha to these events. She likes to eat.”

~Samantha Mozart

*James Joyce, Ulysses

This is a story I published in my book, To What Green Altar: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal, Volume II. See the story and Amazon link to where you can buy the book.

My aunt, Butch and me.

October 6, 2011 — When I awoke this morning, down the hall bright sunlight streamed into Emma’s bedroom, splashing elongated diagonal yellow windows across her rose-colored carpet. Of course, Emma no longer sleeps in that room. She sleeps downstairs in the hospital bed in the living room, the proximity of the Victorian houses on either side of ours blocking much of the sunlight there. But, I remembered this morning how Emma loved the sunlight and how she would arise on a morning, greeting the bright sunny day, cheerful, feeling renewed. She’d greet me with a bright smile and a singing voice “Good morning, Mary Sunshine!” And then, when she had overnight guests at her house on the beach in Avalon, New Jersey, plug in the percolator and rustle up the pots, pans, egg beater and spatula, and whip up scrambled eggs, scrapple, sausage, toast, fruit and orange juice for everybody before they headed for the beach.

This morning, the sunshine was there for Emma, but she was not.

I am always amazed at how bright, cheerful and energetic Emma—and some of my odder friends—could be at the ungodly hour of nine. I have never been one of those morning people.

Maybe this is because I was born in the afternoon. Even that day, I wasn’t into getting up and out too early. I was supposed to have been born on Emma’s birthday, but I showed up two days later. I’ve been pretty much late for everything since. Better late than rushed, my philosophy.

Emma died when I was born. She forever held her doctor in the highest esteem because he brought her back. She nearly bled to death. My father, my uncle, my aunt—the whole family were there in the Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital outside Philadelphia giving blood. I came out blue with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. So, you could accurately describe me as a claustrophobic late person. I might point out here that Emma was late for most occasions, too. The family called her “The Late Mrs. S—.” And she’s still here, on this planet ninety-seven years, sans sea breezes and morning sunshine, but with me, Mary Sunshine.

Today would be my dog Butch’s birthday. We got him when I was two. I remember the ride home with him in the back seat of the black Packard with my grandfather. My uncle drove. My father, his brother, sat next to him in the passenger seat. Butch was a collie/shepherd mix, with black long hair, tan lower legs and a white, ruffled “shirt.” The family retold the story over those early years of this puppy sticking his paw in my grandfather’s coat pocket. Well, Granddaddy got sick when I was six and was confined to bed. I asked if it was because he hadn’t eaten his lunch. They said no, it wasn’t that. He died in October that year. I was just seven.

Granddaddy didn’t drive; until my uncle was old enough to drive, Granddaddy had a chauffeur, who, they said, polished only the side of the car when it was parked in the driveway that faced the house. Granddaddy worked at a bank and had true banker’s hours. When I was about three or four and visiting my grandparents, he’d ride the bus home from work. He’d get me up from my nap and announce that he was taking me out with him, leaving my grandmother and aunt appalled that they hadn’t had time to brush my hair. He took me for rides on buses, trolleys, trains and the passenger ferry across the Delaware River. I remember standing beside him, looking up at him, talking to him, probably asking questions, at the bus stop. When I was two and we were staying in the family Sea Isle, New Jersey, summer home, he walked me to the corner store to buy the Sunday paper. He gave me the rings from his cigar wrappers and I put them on my fingers. He took me everywhere with him. To this day, I don’t know what he died of. As much as I asked, the family always passed it off. He had a drain in his back. That’s all I remember.

In later years, my job was to walk Butch. Butch was my buddy. I took him everywhere with me. When I was eleven, I came home from school one day, looked for him, said to Emma, “Where’s Butch?” “Oh, we gave him to the SPCA,” she replied. “He was too much trouble, cleaning up his dog hairs all the time. He’ll go to a good farm.” I cried for three days.

Buy me a coffee  If you like this story, please consider a small tip to help support my writing more stories, and to keep me from nodding off before I finish this one so you know how it ends.

My Nana, Emma’s mother, as I’ve told in a previous chapter, frequently took her rugs out and hung them over the clothesline in the back yard and beat them with a big club, a rug beater—it always made me think of the ace of clubs on a deck of cards. These were big, nine-by-twelve living room and dining room, gray-patterned wool rugs. She’d roll them up and somehow carry them outside. (In-between these occasions, she vacuumed them with the Hoover upright with the headlight, when she wasn’t washing her long Victorian windows inside and out, upstairs and down.) Emma would have pulled the rug out from under me a year or two after we moved into our house here, before I had saved the money to return to Southern California. She was looking into assisted living quarters. But, then, she got dementia and forgot.

It was October 1967 when I stepped out onto my patio in Redondo Beach, California, where my husband, baby daughter and I had moved in June when the United States Navy deployed him to the South China Sea, and saw the mountains across the Santa Monica Bay above Malibu for the first time. The perpetual sea mist had lifted and there they were: the Santa Monica Mountains, as if they had been mothballed and someone had set them out for the first time in months. I hadn’t known I had a view of them.

Today, so many people don’t look beyond the patio of their smart phones to see the sea mist lift. Too busy walking, heads down, texting, they never notice the cardinal in the dogwood tree laden with snow, never see the chattering squirrel running along the wire, never hear the robins chirp to one another on a summer evening, never see me sitting on my green and white front porch behind the walnut tree the squirrels planted in my flower bed there, watching them. They lead gray, superficial lives filled with pages of ticked off boxes on a form; their days covered in a layer of high, thin clouds through which the sun struggles to shine in a hazy glare.

Butch would be sixty-eight today, old even in non-dog years. E. M. Forster, notably in two of his novels, A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread, gets his characters into a crisis; they debate which way to turn to resolve their dilemma. Then a wise one says, “What does it matter which you do? The outcome will be the same.” That outcome is not one the reader—nor characters living real lives—might expect. The point is not to get so stressed about it, to just flow with the events in your life. I think should I heed this advice, I would learn patience. My friend, a spiritual teacher, who just married the love of his life, said to me today, not particularly speaking of his own situation, that regarding the one you are in love with … “what’s age got to do with it?” Oh. True. His supportive comment and incisive truth extracts a huge obstacle to a union.

My dilemma is this, though: Once this hospice thing is over, this team of aide, nurse, social worker, music therapist, chaplain, volunteers and doctor will no longer have contact with me; the circle of light closes and they just fade out. The title reads, “The End.” I’ve told them I don’t want to never see them again; I have made friends with them, as I have with many of my business associates over the years. It seems natural: if you really like someone and you share common interests, oneness of mind, that you’d want to become friends. So, when I lose Emma, I lose everything and everyone. I am trying to give myself a spiritual upgrade here, about this. How can I watch them walk away and, myself, go with the flow? Somehow, this potential situation, to me, flies in the face of the human condition.

Our planet rolls from the golden sun of morning to the bronze light and long shadows of late afternoon, and as it continues its turning, pulls out the rug of the earth from under the sun, and then it is night, dark, pitch black; and out of those dark energies, slowly appears the moon. “Go to it,” a voice says from somewhere over my shoulder. And I go to enter within the embrace of its tender, silver and blue arms. In that place is a time for reflection. Maybe this is a mystical experience. As the sun sets, the sun also rises.

~Samantha Mozart

As it turns out, I have remained friends with our hospice nurse and social worker/bereavement counselor. The three of us go to lunch together and we laugh and laugh as we always have. And I still live in my wonderful Victorian home, although the green and white porch paint is peeling.

I invite you to visit and subscribe to my Scheherazade Chronicles publication at https://samanthamozart.substack.com.

And after that the dark!

Buy now: To What Green Altar: A Dementia Caregiving Journal, Volume II

“I forgot how to use the microwave,” said Emma one evening in 2005.

Emma was beautiful, petite and feminine, loved travel, entertaining and humor. Multi-talented, she played the piano and electronic organ and was an accomplished watercolorist. She raised toy poodles, one of them becoming a champion. She loved hosting dinner parties and long weekends for family and friends at her beachfront home in Southern New Jersey. Her friends raved about these events until their dying days.

Even a tip helps support my writing (OK, and helps keep me awake so I can finish writing the piece): Buy me a coffee . . .

Then Emma was diagnosed with dementia. She was 90. She needed help. There was no one but me. I felt the floor of my chest open and my heart plunge into my stomach. My lifestyle and the self I knew ceased to exist thenceforth.

Thus began my mother’s and my decade-long trek through murky tunnels and craggy paths. I stumbled often. Emma simply fell: I ran and got neighbors to help pick her up. I, the unpaid sole caregiver, often found no response of help from state and healthcare agencies. There were days when I told healthcare aides to leave and never come back, days when the aides left Emma alone for hours without telling me.

Only near the end did we find the extraordinary support team we needed. For me the experience was spiritually life changing.

I have invited poet John Keats to help me begin the story of the slow, ravaging remains of our long journey, Volume II: To What Green Altar.

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both, …

… Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest …

… Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—John Keats

Excerpts from

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Published in 1820

The odes are said to be Keats’ effort to discuss the relationships among the soul, eternity, nature, and art, the Romantic era perception of the mind as an imaginative synthesizing, not analytical, power.

They rode horseback into the great Central Valley of Alta California and the Sierra Nevada foothills. Lieutenant Gabriel Moraga and his expedition sought suitable sites for Spanish missions. Hot, dry and dusty, they had traveled long without water. Mercifully, on September 29, 1806, the thirsty men and their horses came upon the banks of the river. Gratefully relieved, they named the river El Rio de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, The River of Our Lady of Mercy.

Front cover photo, “To What Green Altar,” Merced River, Yosemite Valley, California. The book is available on Amazon.

The first part of our journey ended thus: And so, I gently set our little boat into the stream. I light the candle on deck. Ahead, Emma’s condition takes a sudden turn after she has become too weak to climb the stairs to her bedroom. There she had been surrounded by her own things—her silver comb and brush set she has had from childhood, her fine furniture, her king-size bed and her sumptuous white comforter with the eyelet border, all her pretty, feminine things. Now she will be sleeping in the hospital bed in the living room; she will continue to use her walker, eat at the dining room table, and be given sponge baths in the downstairs powder room. Her Dr. Patel predicts that she could remain on this plateau for up to six months, from the end of July until around Christmas. So far, his predictions have been accurate.

That was in August 2011, a month before Emma’s ninety-seventh birthday. Just after Christmas our little boat sailed around a sharp bend, and there we encountered the rapids.

Emma became agitated. One night I sat beside her until dawn, holding her hand; that calmed the storm that night. Yet the storm persisted throughout the month of January. She didn’t know how she got on this boat, and she wanted off; she wanted out of here: “How do I get out of here? Can someone tell me how to get home?”

To hear this cry is heartrending. Maybe this plight is heartrending for us both. Imagine if you were she.

When she was a child, Emma loved spending her summers at her Aunt Mary’s little farm across the bay from Atlantic City. When I was a child, Emma sent me to spend a week some summers at Aunt Mary’s farm. On her bedroom wall, opposite the foot of her bed, Aunt Mary hung a framed poem that Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in 1889, near the end of his life. Even at eight or nine years old, I stared at that poem; it gave me thought: I observed myself, born eight years ago, and Aunt Mary, born a few years before Tennyson wrote his poem; I was beginning, she was ending; I reflected on the impermanence of Tennyson’s life, the immortalization of his words. I wondered if each night while drifting into sleep Aunt Mary contemplated those words hanging steps from her bed there in her bungalow with the little produce stand out front at the side of the road, with the blue hydrangeas beside the low front steps, the deep, screened porch, the hanging swing, and the rocking chairs that you didn’t dare rock when they were empty—an empty chair rocking bespoke death.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

—Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1889

I am thrilled to announce that my play “Jane Austen Readings for Readers Theater” will be performed at Readers Theatre Gresham, Gresham, Oregon, on April 1, 7:30 p.m. (So, if you can’t get a plane ticket in time to fly out there, the book is available on Amazon in both ebook and print format.) My play was first performed on the stage of the historic Smyrna Opera House in Smyrna, Delaware, on the afternoon of June 3, 2017 where guests arrived in British Regency era costume and enjoyed a buffet luncheon of food and beverages Jane Austen might have eaten while listening to piano music Jane Austen herself might have played.

Buy now on Amazon

appoquinimink friends meeting house

Appoquinimink Friends Meeting House

July 24, 2015 — They rode beneath vegetables in hay wagons; they came packed in shipping crates; they ran through the swamps in the night, reaching for the light in the distant window, the bounty hunter hot on their heels. The Appoquinimink Friends Meeting House, in Odessa, Del., provided a safe hiding place when you were a slave running up from the South for your freedom, where you could get food, clean, dry clothing, money and be guided on your way to the next stop. The Meeting House, added to The Network to Freedom in 2008 by the National Park Service, was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

This, one of the smallest Friends Meeting Houses in the nation, placed on the National Historic Register in 1972, has just one room with a small room upstairs.  There are no windows along the pent eaves on the sides of the building. Local Quakers, some at the expense of getting caught and losing their own property, hid runaway slaves in a small alcove under the eaves, pictured here.  Prominent among them was conductor Thomas Garrett, born in 1789 on his family’s farm, Thornfield, west of Philadelphia. The Garrett family held abolitionist beliefs. When Thomas was a boy, a family paid servant was abducted by men intent on selling her as a slave in the South. The men were tracked down and she was returned. Thomas never forgot the incident, though, and it served to intensify his abolitionist beliefs. Coincidentally, I grew up in Drexel Hill, Pa., on land that was once Thornfield. The Garrett home still stands and is open for tours.

You might imagine then, what a curious phenomenon I found at age 10, when our family in 1951 moved from Drexel Hill 30 miles south to Wilmington, Del., to encounter segregation — separate water fountains, restrooms, schools, movie theaters…. Delaware was a border state during the Civil War, divided. Indeed, before the War, many runaway slaves hidden in the Appoquinimink Meeting House came from plantations in lower Delaware and the adjacent Eastern Shore of Maryland. Here is a link to the magazine story I wrote about The Appoquinimink Friends Meeting House and the Underground Railroad: The Quest.

 –Samantha Mozart

April 29, 2014 — Five years ago I wrote a story about the Network to Freedom, the runaway slaves and the abolitionists who risked life and property along the Underground Railroad. Recently, I watched the film 12 Years a Slave. The film is based on the 1853 memoir, available on Amazon, Twelve Years a Slave, of Solomon Northrup, a free black man abducted and sold into slavery. This is the story of one man’s quest for equality and dignity. There are many such stories, and they haven’t ended with antebellum America. Yet today, humans suffer in bondage. Never is it untimely to recount the human quest for equality and dignity. I published my story under my byline in Middletown Life Magazine, Middletown, Del., in December 2008. Here is the link to that story: The Quest for Human Equality and Dignity.

Underground Railroad Terminology, Workers and Statistics

Pilots ventured south to encourage slaves to run away and gave directions along the way. “Stockholders” donated money. Agents directed fugitives between stations. When the “cargo” reached a “station” or “depot,” the stationmaster gave not only shelter, but food, clothing and care for broken bones, cuts, and sometimes bullet wounds. The conductor’s job was the most dangerous of all, overseeing a fugitive’s safe journey from station to station to final destination. That final destination was most often Canada, out of reach of the long arm of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act ruling runaway slaves stolen property and therefore liable to be returned from the North to their masters in the South.

The enactment of this law coincided in 1793 with the invention of the cotton gin making cotton and the slaves more valuable. By 1840, cotton was the most valuable commodity in America, and rewards for captured slaves were high. Moreover, Northerners benefited from slavery by finishing raw goods from the South and returning them to the South. This economic climate notwithstanding, from about 1810 to 1860, the agrarian economy in lower Delaware shifted from labor-intensive cotton and tobacco crops to the capital-intensive crops of grains and fruit such as peaches, making owning slaves a liability; so, slave ownership dropped from about 95 percent to around 24 percent.

Workers along the Underground Railroad came from all walks of life – shopkeepers; farmers; Quaker Indiana businessman Levi Coffin, often called the president of the Underground Railroad, and with his brother and sister-in-law, said to have started the Underground Railroad in North Carolina; millionaire Gerrit Smith, who twice ran for United States president; and former runaway slaves like Harriet Tubman, who returned at least eight times to her native Maryland to free others. Only about five percent of fugitives made it to freedom in the North, according to the video documentary Whispers of Angels.

–Samantha Mozart

February 25, 2024 — Britain’s involvement in slave trade from West Africa to the Americas began during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), when the Tudor queen gave a large royal ship to John Hawkins, a slave trader, in 1564 in exchange for a share of the profits of the voyage. In North America, the first West African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They were Angolans kidnapped by the Portuguese and bought by English colonists. But slavery had existed long before that, in Egypt as far back as more than 1,000 years B.C., so historical documents tell, brought up the Nile as prisoners of war and used as domestic and supervised labor. Plainly, the profitability of the idea caught on.

That the Tudor queen was involved in all this came new to me when I heard it mentioned the other night when I was watching the Harry & Meghan documentary on Netflix. It served my mind to note that February is Black history month and also shed light on a packet in my brain in which a memory of magazine stories about the Underground Railroad I had researched and written was stowed away. So, I thought, fittingly, that this would be the time, before Black history month gets away, to revisit two of my posts with a link to one of my Carol Child byline stories published in Middletown Life Magazine. Never is it untimely. I have reposted these stories below. This is the link to my magazine story.

–Samantha Mozart

In my capacity as publisher of Scheherazade Chronicles Classics I have formatted for ebook and published for sale on Amazon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Here is the look and the link:

As neither an accomplished musician nor an orchestra director or music critic, I have decided to write about music, anyway.

My blogging friend Silvia Villalobos (Silvia Writes), writes that we all want to belong, all need our own tribe of similar minds and pursuits, despite life’s quotidian demands crescendoing to mute our deep aspirations, https://silviatomasvillalobos.wordpress.com/2023/02/08/belonging/. Silvia’s thoughtful blog discourse prompted me to comment in such sostenuto about the tribes I belong to that I came near to writing a blog post on her blog. So, I thought I’d better come here and compose these thoughts on my own page.

Music is my first love. Musicians and music lovers constitute a tribe I belong to.

I do play a little piano and my guitar, and I have a massive music collection. I minored in music in college. As many of you know, the Phantom of My Blog, Moriarty, plays the banjo and is taking zither lessons. But, he doesn’t dust. He’s been away lately, though, overseas, visiting none other than another member of our music tribe, Erik, the Angel of Music, the Phantom of the Opera, the Paris Opera.

Last night I watched the documentary ¡Viva Maestro! about Gustavo Dudamel. You can find it on Amazon. I have been following the career of Venezuela-born Gustavo Dudamel since before he came to direct the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009. When he was around six years old he would line up his toys and conduct them. He studied violin and conducting. Currently he is the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the Paris Opera. In 2026 he will leave the L.A. Philharmonic to become the director of the New York Philharmonic. There is much more to the story of this 42-year-old’s meteoric rise to fame. And I struggle to write a blog post here and there, in between dusting.

Gustavo Dudamel’s musical, philosophical and social comments support my beliefs on the importance of music and the arts in culture and society, confirm why I engage in certain “tribal” activities and inspire my comments that follow.

I have tribes:  My groups of friends—thought groups, soul groups; a kindred spirit group of two; writers groups; musician friends and music lovers—yes, music is my first love: the Smyrna Opera House, here in Delaware, where I chair the volunteer Guild. And there’s my blog—my peer bloggers and readers; my fellow ballet dancers with whom my daughter and I studied for years; and I enjoy bringing my friends together, introducing to each other those who have not met and might enjoy each other. Many of my friends are thinkers; that’s a tribe: thank you, Silvia, for this lovely prompt. I welcome the exchange of information and ideas.  That’s what we’re here to do.

Music is the agent of socialization: e.g., José Antonio Abreu’s/Gustavo Dudamel’s El Sistema/Youth Orchestras (founded to combat poverty, get kids off the streets, raise cultural & humanities awareness); the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in 1999)—both music organizations bringing together cultural understanding and pushing toward world peace; Yo-Yo Ma, collaborator with musicians of various genres, nationalities and ethnicities, a United Nations Messenger of Peace; and, not least, Bono, social justice activist.  The Russians believe that their state support of the arts got them through the 20th century, held Russia together. If people picked up violins instead of pistols, think how harmonious and beautiful the world would be.  When you play music with others, you have to listen to them and imagine and strive for the possibilities.  That’s power, as Gustavo Dudamel says—of the individual and the tribe; in this case, the orchestra or rock band.

Samantha Mozart
February 9, 2023

I hope you enjoy this excerpt from my upcoming book, Leftover Bridges. I originally posted this story on my blog in 2016.

I have come to my blog this afternoon. I haven’t been here in a while. Maybe you noticed. The place is incredibly dusty. Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog, does not dust. He sweeps up after parties, hangs new headers, and cooks borscht, but he does not dust.

I walk over to the round table. Even the orange candle in the bottle we keep in the center of the table is dusty. Someone has scrawled “Dusty Destry rides again” in the dust on the table surface, and, “Meet us at Bottleneck.” “Oh, so funny,” I think, dryly. “Moriarty.”

I open the windows and let in the light and air. I go into the kitchen. Fingerprints pepper the dust all over the black stovetop, and a stippling of dots, like someone has sneezed. There are a couple of corks on the stove, but no companion bottles. A pot of leftover chili sits on a burner, still warm, the handle of the big spoon sticking out at the rim of the lid. Moriarty must be here. I go into the back kitchen. Fingerprints are in the dust all over the old black stove here, too, and paw prints on the top front edge. And bird claw prints. Odd. I find a couple of rags in a drawer, dampen them and begin dusting. I climb to the catwalk. While dusting the apparatus, ropes and wires along the open spaces, I hear music – Moriarty’s banjo – and then peals of macabre laughter reverberate through the beams and railings. I stop. No … that’s not Moriarty. He doesn’t laugh that way. Silence ensues. A chill runs up my spine. Goosebumps rise on my forearms. This is my blog. I welcome visitors. But this – who else is creeping around in here…? A stranger listening for me? I’ll never get done dusting if I stop and wonder. I certainly do not want to be in here till midnight. I continue dusting. Once or twice I hear a dog bark – Moriarty’s black, fluffy dog, Dickens?

Now I am hungry and the chili back there on the stove smelled good. I come down to the kitchen, rinse out the rags and take a break. I reheat the chili, sit at the round table and eat what is left. In the gathering gloom I think I hear again the evil laughter. I listen; then, stillness unbroken. I look around. I see no one. I get up, go into the kitchen and wash the dishes, chili pot, and the stoves in both rooms. I stay at my blog until well after dark, dusting. Finally I am done. I close the windows. I am ready to go home.

I think I hear Dickens barking. They must be in the cupola. I am tired and want to sit and relax with a glass of wine and good conversation. In the kitchen I find a wine glass but no wine, just bottle corks, and no cheese and crackers. The cupboard is bare. Unusual. I should visit my blog more often.

I climb the creaking, winding staircase, carrying my empty glass, and, brushing peeling yellowing paint off my sleeve, remember that I must get Moriarty to put a fresh coat of paint on these walls.

At the top, the cupola door is shut. Beyond the door I hear muffled voices. The door sticks a little, but I push it open wide. Dickens rushes to me, all wiggly, nuzzling me. He sniffs my hands, to see if I am bringing food, and my clothes. I probably smell like moldering rags. He sneezes.

Moriarty lolls in one chair and across the space, in the half-light, I see a dark-haired scrawny man sprawled in another. The man’s face is sallow, bony and crumpled, uneven, like whoever planned this face hadn’t laid out the parts on a grid first. He has a small mustache and random curls drop over his high forehead. His eyes are sunken, yet bright and beady, like small black grapes. He is dressed all in black, a black turtle neck sweater, with a scarf wound tight and tied about his neck, and jeans. He wears black loafers but no socks, the mark of a Southern man, or one who has lived for some time in the South.

“Samantha, this is my friend, Poe,” says Moriarty.

“Poe? As in Edgar Allan?” I ask, still standing just inside the door, staring at the pair. Poe fixes his eyes on me. They shine with dark intent – mysterious glinting blades. I reach to the doorframe for support.

“Poe is my first name,” he answers. “Edgar Allan Poe is my ancestor. My mother named me after him. He is my ancestor on my sister’s side.”

“…What? Your sister…?” I ask.

“Yeah. Paula,” he says.

I don’t pursue the conundrum. He seems a bit wacky to me. And he is creepy looking. I hear a whirring. Suddenly, a large bird swoops down, close in front of my face, and perches on Poe’s shoulder. I start. It is a raven, having apparently been perched on the frame over the doorway, right above my head: the explanation for the bird claw prints on the stove.

“Come in. Sit,” says Moriarty, waving his arm toward the remaining empty chair. “I see you found my message.”

“The one in the dust about meeting you at Bottleneck?” I say.

“That one,” says Moriarty. His banjo stands against his chair.

“Where’s the wine?” I ask. “I’ve been dusting all afternoon and I’m ready to near-drown in a glass of Zinfandel armed with cheese and crackers serving as floaties. Where’s the wine?”

The two gaze at me blankly. No, sheepishly. Then I spot over in the corner, and lining one wall, even in the gauzy light of the few candles Moriarty has brought up to the cupola with him, a contingent of Zinfandel bottles. They are empty. All of them.

My eyes widen. “You drank all the wine?!”

“We’re having a frightfully good time,” says Poe.

“We’re telling each other spooky stories,” adds Moriarty, “and then singing them.” He sniggers.

I don’t find these two boys particularly amusing. I’ve been scrubbing prickly cactus on a dusty desert all afternoon, reaching precariously over the edge of the catwalk, filling my lungs with dust and my ears with reverberating peals of macabre laughter seemingly out of the ethers, I am moldering and thirsty, and I want at least one glass of wine, a large one. Filled to the rim.

“There’s no more wine anywhere?” I say.

“It was a faulty case,” says Moriarty.

“Now, wait a minute,” says Poe, indignant. “I didn’t think the case in my detective story I just told you was faulty.”

“No, the case of wine,” says Moriarty. “The bottles all had leaks.”

“We should have brought a cask,” says Poe.

“I’m sure,” I say, flatly. “And, no cheese and crackers?”

“Nothing more,” says Poe.

Dickens walks over and sniffs the empty plate on the floor next to the bottles. There isn’t even a crumb for him to lick up.

The raven burps. Dickens trots over to the bird and begins barking up at it, still perched on Poe’s shoulder, Dickens commanding, as if to say, “You ate ‘em all. Cough ‘em up, buddy.”

But, I suspect it was Moriarty and Poe who ate the greater balance of them.

The candle flames flicker in the bare draft whispering through the open window. The curtain rustles lightly. We sit in silence. Poe stares down at the shapeshifting shadow specters dancing a fantastic fandango across the candlelit floor. The raven blinks. Moriarty watches Dickens settle onto the worn red Oriental rug, against my chair. A distant bell tolls.

Poe sits bolt upright. He peals,

“‘And the people–ah, the people–
 They that dwell up in the steeple,
    All alone,
  And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
    In that muffled monotone,
  Feel a glory in so rolling
    On the human heart a stone—,’

“I think I’ll write a poem about that,” he muses, “something about bells. It has a nice ring, don’t you think? It just rolls – rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls – rolls lightly off the tongue. A tintinnabulation.”

“You’re making me hungry,” says Moriarty. “Rolls and butter.”

“It’s already been written. By your ancestor on your sister Paula’s side,” I point out. “It’s called ‘The Bells.’”

“Ah, iron bells.” The rusty tone of his voice rises from a deep well within him. There is a peculiar, dark nervousness about this man. He twitches and fidgets and then suddenly he is calm, strangely calm, glassy. Then, I notice his eyes are not black, but light, yet acute, and sad, yes, sad. And, every time he twitches and fidgets, Dickens watches, amused, as the raven puffs its wings, roughs its feathers and shifts its position.

“Has Dickens been fed?” I ask.

“Well, smooth, sweet nepenthe. Of that I must have more,” says Poe. “I must get my hat and depart thee. I must get to the store. Then, I am headed to my chamber. I feel an urge, a pressing urge to write ever more.”

He rises, turns and then stops. He stoops and reaches into one of the bottles, the raven hopping, turning, adjusting its wings and claws on Poe’s shoulder for balance. “Look at this. It’s a message.” He sticks a finger into the bottle neck and coaxes out the paper. “A message in a bottle. Cool.”

He unrolls it. “Uh-oh,” he says upon examining it. “I wrote this.” He hands it to Moriarty. I read it over his shoulder. It is faded and hard to read in the feeble candlelight, but I can make out the title, in large print: “MS. Found in a Bottle.”

“You just gave yourself away,” I say. “You’re the real Edgar Allan Poe, not some descendant on your sister Paula’s side.

“I won a literary award for this,” says Poe, “my only one. In 1833. I entered it in a fiction contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter [sic] newspaper. Fifty dollars, I got for my short story.” He reaches and pulls his black cape off the back of his chair, sweeps it around his shoulders, turns and heads down the winding staircase, the raven teetering as they descend as one. He waves a hand over his shoulder, “Ciao,” he says, and he and his raven vanish into the murkiness of the hour.

I turn to Moriarty. “You, my dear Phantom, have an intriguing menagerie of friends.”

Moriarty smiles.

The scent of fresh, wet earth rises as a soft rain begins to fall. Moriarty pulls the window closed and extinguishes the candles save one. He carries it to light our way as we descend the winding stairs, Dickens leading. Our shadows in the lost light glide alongside us like leviathan grotesques navigating inside a diaphanous wall.

“Remember, I asked you to paint these walls,” I say. “Would you do it soon? Please?”

“They have to be scraped first,” he says, “sanded down, to reveal the bones beneath.”

–Samantha Mozart
October 20, 2016

Every April writers and bloggers come together to take up the Blogging From A-Z Challenge.  In 2015 and 2016, I took up the challenge, too, along with this annually growing group.

Each day we write a blog post themed on a letter of the alphabet, beginning with the letter A on April 1, continuing to the letter B on April 2, the letter C on April 3 and so on.  We take Sundays off.

This one I published on April 27, 2015 deserves reposting, I think, because Alexandra Streliski’s moving music –which I’ve set as a soundtrack here —  lends such depth to an already poignant piece and for which these accompanying words could serve as a libretto:

The View from the Cupola

There’s a piano piece called “Le Départ,” “The Departure.” by Alexandra Streliski, a pianist and composer from Montreal.

One commenter of the YouTube video I have placed below said, “This music describes eternity.”

When I stand at the window in the cupola of my blog and gaze out over the tall grass meadow down to the stream and the woods beyond, I think of those I have known who have departed this life before me.

When my grandmother was in her sixties, I remember her sitting in a chair in the living room and saying wistfully, “All my friends are dead.” I’ve never forgotten that. It is one of the reasons I value my friendships so closely. I haven’t forgotten my grandmother; I haven’t forgotten either of them, nor any of my family members that have gone on ahead of me.

Often, near the end, the dying enter a process of departure, still here and already there. I often wondered where my mother Emma’s soul or spirit went in her final stage of dementia. Sometimes I actually sensed her hovering around – usually her former bright and cheerful self getting up in the morning, yellow sunshine streaming through her bedroom windows, and having things to attend to around the house, her toy poodles to feed, or clothes to choose and lay out to wear for a luncheon with her friends, or telling me something. It was as if she got up out of her body and came around every now and then. And this I experienced only in the last two weeks of her life. Maybe, too, it was my letting go, a clearing.

Caregiving doesn’t end with the passing of the cared for. Suddenly, there’s this person standing in your midst, and it’s you. It’s like meeting someone who’s departed on a long journey and has now returned unexpectedly. You have to get to know yourself again; for, although caregivers are repeatedly reminded by the observers to take care of ourselves, take time for ourselves, we don’t. There really isn’t time. So, you begin a new relationship with yourself. And, then, of course, there’s the family to contend with, who may have found fault with everything you did caregiving in their absence, and the paperwork and finances — all the fallout. It takes four years to regain normalcy, say most former caregivers. I am finding it so.

Of course, there’s the grieving. There is no set limit to the length of time for grieving. Some say the second year is harder than the first. Thus so in my experience. Realistically, you never stop grieving the departed; the process just changes. You never stop caring.

Some of my friends have passed on. I miss them very much. I wish I could pick up the phone or turn to them and say something. When I think of them, is that like posting a thought on the wall of the universe, and somewhere they’ll pick it up? I miss many friends whom I presume are still living. The winds of change over the years drove us apart. I have forgotten none of them. Some I connect with on Facebook after years gusting by like lifetimes. It’s like, “So, hey, how’re ya doing in this lifetime?” It’s very cool. A happy reconnecting.

–Samantha Mozart
Self-appointed librettist