by Naomi Rayman

Posts by Naomi Rayman

Landline

Posted on February 24, 2017

I had a funny feeling. Friday, February 22, 1966 didn’t start out right. For one thing, this wasn’t the plan. My mom and I had strategized the after-school itinerary before I left for school in the morning. I had a lot on my mind: my eyeliner, for example, hadn’t gone on smoothly. The hem on my mod, mini pleated black-and-grey wool skirt was falling out, and to make matters worse, I was not all that prepared for my oral book report on “Kon Tiki.” So, the plan we had formulated over my morning pop tarts was not, at this moment, so relevant to me. On the other hand, and from my perspective as a high-school freshman, our plan was all that my mother had…

Categories: Writing

Posthaste

Posted on January 13, 2017

This might surprise you: I have a Master’s Degree in communicative disorders. That translated on a paystub to speech-and-language therapist, and the disorders I expertly remedied were maladies like lisps in the young, stuttering among the adolescent, and aphasia with stroke patients. Now, however, in my retirement from that field, I’m ironically colliding with more and more communicative roadblocks—which I find disorienting. I have become my own disordered client. I miss my days of fluency; I long for the time when I could retrieve a word the nanosecond I needed to use it. I am trying hard not to blame my chronological age. I prefer to blame the age in which I live. As for communicative elegance, I miss the old tried-and-true forms of…

Categories: Writing

In Left Field

Posted on October 28, 2016

It was a great day for women, I suppose. The news came in 1972 that institutions of higher learning were now legally bound to provide equal athletic opportunities for women as they had been doing for male students since Ben Hur drove his chariot around the track at his homecoming game back in the 1st century. Before the federal law was passed, athletically enthusiastic girls had two sports to choose from: cheerleading and, in my high school, hula dancing. As the new law took effect, brand new women’s locker rooms, many of them with running water, were built in schools across the U.S.; female coaching staffs were hired and given shiny new whistles to wear around their thick necks; and scholarships, long the only…

Categories: Writing

Boxed In

Posted on September 16, 2016

“Those damn Shapiro girls,” my father said as he drove my mother and me to one of his sibling’s Oakland homes on a Sunday afternoon. “Why don’t those pushy women let my brothers drive through the tunnel to come see us for a goddamn change?” he asked no one in particular. Sitting side by side by side on the front bench seat of my dad’s brand new 1960 powder-blue Cadillac, with the champagne-colored leather interior, my mother indicated to me with an elbow to my ribs to turn up the volume on the car’s radio. I could see why these old people I called my aunts and uncles would fear any excursion through an ominous bore drilled into a mountainside just to get to…

Categories: Writing

Code Blue

Posted on August 19, 2016

I spent most of third grade in the hospital and the rest of my life, up until now, trying to avoid going back to one. Of course, anyone who has given birth in modern America or sat vigil next to a dying parent or a premature baby or explored the stark and sharply lighted and often overcrowded halls of an emergency room waiting for stitches on an arm, a forehead or shin has been in one. And, everyone probably feels the same way as I do–harboring the same repulsion for the place and forever grateful to have a first-rate one nearby. But about that third-grade year… It was a hot October afternoon and in a futile attempt to drum up some wind currents to…

Categories: Writing

To My Granddaughter

Posted on July 29, 2016

There are a few differences between us: age, of course, is one. You are adorable; I’m presentable. You are short but average for your 3 years; I’m just a runt. You speak two languages, and I can manage only one. You could be a kindergartner when a woman is president of the United States; I was born when Truman was in office. By the time I was in kindergarten, Eisenhower was in the White House. At two years of age, I kissed Ike as he stood waving to the press before boarding a plane. So, that’s another thing: I could get very close to a U.S. president back then, and ANYONE could board a plane without going through security. The trade off, though, was…

Categories: Writing

A 1967 Rose By Any Other…

Posted on July 15, 2016

Name. He just asked me for mine. He’s so cute and I’m so not worthy. But here we stand, me pulling on my long red hair with one hand, tugging at my mini skirt’s hem with the other. He is shifting his weight from side to side, hands clasped behind his back, in a futile stab at coolness. He doesn’t know his fly is down; I’m not sure how big the sweat marks are under my armpits. The cavernous room’s lights have been dimmed, but not so much as to prevent me and my fellow teenagers from employing our pinpoint laser night-vision assessment capabilities. And it’s certainly light enough for the adult chaperones to be on the lookout for premarital sex. Wait! Is that…

Categories: Writing

Muddy Waters

Posted on May 27, 2016

Mostly, we came for the music. Our Southern Music Crawl, how we pre-labeled this recent adventure, took my husband and me on a two-week expedition through Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. I now have securely cemented in my cortex both the spelling of these 3 states and their locations on the U.S. map. Prior to this adventure, both tasks were equally tedious and easily dismissed; or, shall I admit, easily handled by spell check and Google maps? Come on now. Unless your grandma lives in Friars Point, who the hell really cares where Mississippi is? The music we came to hear was not only found in the multitude of honky tonks, bars, clubs and restaurants where we wiled away our Southern evenings but also on…

Categories: Writing

I’ve Been Framed

Posted on April 29, 2016

Can I see a show of hands? Who here has been to an art museum in any city in the world, stood in line for over an hour–maybe longer if you are expecting to see that blockbuster show? I’m talking about that exhibition, you know the one: The A-listed spectacular depicted on the flamboyant screens that are hanging off the sides of light posts on the city’s streets. Banners of commercialism reminding you, at every traffic light, to get yourself some culture…quickly. Don’t miss out. Everyone is raving about the artist…wait, what’s his name, again? Maybe, as you catch sight of the mass of humanity outside the museum ahead, you quicken your pace while deliberating the advantages of joining the museum for $185/year and…

Categories: Writing

Driver’s Ed

Posted on April 15, 2016

Walk on By You can take the A train. I, however, prefer to drive. It’s part of the double helix of my DNA…the molecular structure based on growing up in California. That and the fact that except for the sporadic Saturday excursions to the miles-from-home shopping district via the local Greyhound Bus, I knew nothing first hand about public transit. She’s About a Mover What separated our suburban village from the great urban sprawl known as Oakland was a mountain, which was about two miles thick. Now this East Bay alp has 4 bores through the rock to hasten commuters from the hinterlands into the more-or-less metropolitan communities close to San Francisco. But back in my day, only two holes served up the traffic.…

Categories: Writing