Togehter Agen

 

            “Don’t cry, Honey—she’ll be just as happy as she’s always been with you….”

            That was Mommy’s logic to her daughter, seven going on forty-two. Well, Mom was forty-two, at least, and wanted everything to go as planned—each increment of seven years a battle between feeling blessed and feeling damned. The daughter’s name was Tabitha, and boys at school would tease her for that name, naïve to witchlike prejudice; they rather thought it sounded babyish—Tabby, Tabby, Tabby as the babble they’d exchange.

            The fact she brought this doll to second grade—second grade!—instead of something sleek like neon-flashing sneakers or an iPhone 17—made the kid seem ancient, out of touch. At recess, then, these boys would trade their game of peacocking a football for the chance to kidnap baby Tabby’s baby doll, run it to the bushes and negotiate her ransom. 

            Twice this happened before a teacher’s notice; threats were levelled at the boys, but their apologies appeared ingenuous—even smileworthy from the teacher’s point of view, as school attempts holistic learning, and what more perfect tool than the playground and decision-making there.

            The fourth time came and went without such witness, and instead of bushes, the heftiest of boys stuffed Dolly down his baggy pants. Tabitha had seen this act, and for all her years of reticence, determined she had been abused enough.

            She kicked him in the nuts, well aware she might be maiming Dolly, too. The teacher now took notice and did not think it ticked a box of something ‘teachable’. She hollered everyone away and grabbed poor Tabitha by the biceps to march her to the principal, where Tabitha would have to stay until her mother came to pick her up.

            The rhetoric was limited—the principal would not call the burly kid to ascertain his point of view, as that might victimize him twice. And Tabby’s claim about the doll did not make sense: upon inspection of her cubbyhole, there it was—more or less intact. Sure, an arm was missing, but how would school keep track of private property? Anything that came or left the campus was at the bearer’s risk. That’s the way the real world works, now, isn’t it?

            A girl name Agnes wrote a note and folded it into the passing hand of Tabitha, suspended for the coming days . Do not wory [she misspelled the double ‘r’], I will find the arm and we can stich [one ‘t’] her back togehter agen [quite a feat for second grade].

            And though she didn’t read this to her Mommy, both had learned today that tears were not exclusive to one’s pain.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2025)

Catastrophe Training for the Disinclined

 

                  I had booked an excursion to Pompeii several months before Etna blew its top, and while I could cancel to enjoy more time in downtown Naples, I figured, ‘what are the chances Italy would suffer so much bad luck in the prime of tourist season?’ Besides, the new pope had put hope in the air and I was a fellow White Sox fan—divine intervention would surely prevent my stumbles down a burping-to-explode mountain, if it came to that.

            Another thought haunted me, however: what if I witnessed the opposite? What if in the peace and majesty of the successful climb I encountered a suicide like Beck alludes to in the final song of his album Modern Guilt: “and I heard about that Japanese girl who jumped in… to a volcano…. Was she tryin’… to get back… back into the womb of the world…?”

            Would I intervene with such a stranger’s goal? I am far from divine and would probably act (or not act) according to how I felt, for heaven’s sake.

            Another detail about this trip: I had already been to the top of Vesuvius with my then young children. They loved it—especially having visited the walk-about museum of the victims of Pompeii. “This is like living history,” my ten-year-old quipped—perhaps a phrase he had learned through his 4^th grade curriculum. I felt extra responsible as a dad: giving them a unique experience, helping them connect the dots of ‘acts of nature’ and ‘acts of humankind’ (I never like the designation ‘acts of God’).

            Now my children were in their 20s and ‘doing their own thing’. My wife was harried with work and said, reasonably, “we already went there. Why do so again?” But this time I was extending a business trip in Rome, and as much as I had wanted her to fly down after my conference for some R&R, I could see her point-of-view. It’s a ghoulish place, Pompeii, and Vesuvius is a hell of a hike toward an infernal sun.

            On the way up, then, this second time in all thoughts spanning from Etna to Japan, I tried to concoct a theory—something about ‘catastrophe training for the disinclined’. Let’s say you’ve lost your wallet—credit cards, driver’s license, small keepsakes, the works. It’s a shitter, to be sure, but a catastrophe? You’d need to cancel key accounts, make appointments for reissues, take a lot of time to redress the situation. But you’d be no worse off for the wear. Even if you we’re mugged: you’d give up that wallet to ensure you were physically unscathed. Mentally? Emotionally? Here’s where ‘catastrophe’ may apply its heat-seekers. And a balanced life should be prepared for that.

            Call me impetuous, but I decided to test where I was at. I got to the top, tried to find an inconspicuous spot so as not to make a scene—didn’t want witnesses, perhaps like that Japanese girl—and held my somewhat fat wallet over my head like a grenade. I counted down from three-two-one as if I were back on the high diving platform eons ago in my Chicago neighborhood swimming pool. And with no second thoughts, I chucked the stoic thing as far as my midlife arm could manage—probably just 2% the diameter of the monster mountain, yet irretrievably sinking into the steep drop of ancient ash below the volcanic rim.

            Naturally, some tourists saw what had happened, and one yelled something like ‘vandal!’ I hadn’t exactly imagined my capacity to pollute such a protected area, so I blushed in that guilt (wondering again what Beck had in mind). But as for my feelings for this contrived catastrophe… I wasn’t sure what they were. I knew I had my passport back at the hotel, and I still retained my smartphone—wasn’t going to toss that away for this stupid experiment.

            I looked at the imperceptible trace of disturbance where the wallet had landed and wished it a good eternity. I sucked in the air of these heights deeply, smiled at some tourists, and made my way back down to earth. Satisfied, I guess.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2025)

At the local Applebee's

 

Granny’s birthday was big, if limited to five guests and herself,

a hundred years and counting. There was Uncle Jack, her son of eighty years, 

and me, age sixty; my cousin’s kid Mathilde who joked last month, “now at forty,

where’s that hill you say I’m over?” Then my kid named Xandy, half her age,

and a baby sort of everybody claimed, now being raised by Uncle Jack (the story

being too intricate to rabbit-hole right now). Granny raised a toast:

 

“To all my DNA, and even you—” she tipped her cup to Xandy, who

had been adopted by my wife and me for struggles with fertility. Granny smiled

with wizened eyes: “you are reasons not to die.”

 

We laughed at that (Jack and me, at least) and toasted back the road

rise up to meet you kinda shite. Mathilde, though, was shifting in her seat:

“reasons yet to live, how ’bout? We’re in the thick of courting World War III,

with litmus tests and loyalties to no one but the corporate king.

Granny, you survived those dicks; tell us how to cock-block ours the same.”

 

“Whoa, whoa,” interjected Jack. “The baby shouldn’t hear profanity like that!”

 

Xandy, who had grown up awfully fast through memes and snaps and chat,

weighed in: “depends on definitions not for you to set. We don’t know

their point of view on any signals yet.”

 

“Their?” asked Granny, “aren’t we referencing young Salvadore?”

[as the baby’s mom spelled out in shaky script upon her doorstep note].

 

“Or Sally,” said their aunt, “or a question mark, like the artist labelled ‘Prince’—”

 

“—Rogers Nelson, to be exact, then whittled down to ‘Prince’;

then, for seven years, a symbol that defied an alphabet. Pretty rad,”

I thought to add, “coming from a Boomer, after all.”

 

“And how do you identify?” provoked Mathilde, “as Generation X to answer

for this mess?” She smirked at me, of course, but threw a glance at Uncle Jack.

 

“I am literally a bridge between the Cold War and its consequence. 

The use of landline phones against the ethos of the internet. 

The paperboy going house-to-house in deference to echoes of a cubicle. 

The need to know beyond a Google search—”

 

“And mansplain everything,” said Jack, surprisingly, as if I’d taken him aback.

Xandy nodded; Granny laughed; Mathilde stood up to check on Baby S.

And I reflected on that bridge—not literal at all, it seemed, at least for now.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2025)