from Gene’s Notebook

She was not the first white woman from Kentucky married to a migrant worker from Mexico who she met when he was working tobacco. And like many of those women, the early romance failed and she was left with a kid, and a smashed-in face, not that the hitting is as common as kids.

She had been robbed in Mexico, and was making her way back to central Texas - too long a tale to explain why there instead of Kentucky - and I helped her out with several dollars since her son and she had nothing left to pawn in downtown Brownsville’s pawnshops.

I sit next to her on the all-night bus to San Antonio. She lets me huddle under a Kentucky made quilt as the bus’ AC turns icy. That patched quilt, warm, spoke of home, spoke of decades before.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, with lights from the opposite lane streaming across the bus’ blunt front, through the cracked windshield, over the driver and then onto the sleeping passengers, she whispers to me while staring forward, wondering about what is next in life and how she can get from San Antonio up to a tiny central Texas town where there are no buses, “You know, at this hour (between 2 and 3 a.m.) only truckers and fuckers are on the roads.

Her words wake me from my bus-induced sleep and I say, “Hey, I never thought of that, maybe I’ll use it in a poem or ’slice of life.’”

And, I just did!

Ride on, Kentucky woman!

Ride on your son!

May your steps be easier, and, free of slaps and punches.

Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky
August 25, 2008