AUR LitPut III Spring 2023 - From Now To Then
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria. The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced). The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta. Rome, May 2023
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is
having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria.
The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced).
The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta.
Rome, May 2023
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Memoir<br />
stretcher in the backyard, she told him (my dad lifted his finger and pointed to my sister and me while<br />
imitating his mother in a raspy voice) to never, ever trust a woman. My father repeated her words as if<br />
they were a prophecy and it would be years before I realized the significance of this incident.<br />
In El Paso my dad pulled over at a rest stop for a nap. He smoked a joint inside the car with<br />
the window up, a commonplace occurrence that he’d justify by explaining that new research was<br />
dispelling all the old propaganda regarding passive smoking. I loved when my father smoked. In many<br />
of my memories his laughing face is peering back at me through a thick cloud of suspended smoke. I<br />
loved the way I would relax as the vapor descended upon me and I heard my dad’s big teeth chuckling<br />
in the warmth of a muggy room. My siblings and I were distraught if he didn’t have money for pot,<br />
knowing that his temper would return with great force. For this reason, we were constantly encouraging<br />
him to smoke or to buy more if he’d run out. In the car beside me my sister was already sound<br />
asleep. I too could now close my tired eyes knowing that we were parked while the heavy rings of white<br />
danced towards the roof of the interior.<br />
It was again dark once we were close to Show Low. When we entered Pinetop, my father began<br />
again to spout off information about his childhood in Arizona. He was telling us about his primary<br />
school in the mining city of Wilcox when his body tensed up as he caught the reflection of blue and<br />
red flashing lights in the mirror. I shot my sister the I-told-you-so glare as my dad brought the car to a<br />
stop. The police officer didn’t bother to ask my father if he knew how fast he was going, as I had often<br />
seen in the past. Instead, he firmly informed him that he had run a search on his plates and that he<br />
ought to charge my father with a felony for the number of times he had been pulled over for speeding.<br />
My heart sank. I waited for my dad to begin reproaching the officer, yelling perhaps, but he threw on<br />
a tone I had heard him use only at parent-teacher conferences and when he would try to impress men<br />
obviously more successful than him. I was waiting for the dogs to leap out of the patrol car and locate<br />
my dad’s stash. I was waiting for the officer to press dad’s big body to the hood of the car and handcuff<br />
him. I was waiting for dad’s girlfriend to turn around and tell me that it was going to be okay,<br />
that she’d fight for my sister and me to stay with them, that she’d take care of us if my father couldn’t.<br />
Instead, the officer handed my father a ticket for a moving violation with a look of hopelessness as he<br />
peered in at my sister and me.<br />
Twenty minutes after the incident we were pulling into my grandmother’s driveway. She<br />
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