I cut my fingers
raw on you. Deep trench in the
soft tissue, I wince and fight
the urge to pull back, press instead
into the resonant sinew, press
on. It never toughens
or it has not yet
despite callous
feint and cool. It is still inflamed
in those places. Strings
bite. You don’t
pull back so I won’t.
We make this chord.
It is the first one, the only one
Now, the only one
two three notes to twine this way
ever. This stroke is all
we’ve got. I with you, we lay
ourselves bare against fret
and neck, stay there, suck teeth,
let it sting. Hear the thrum
on vein, the way sound
is wave swelling up
from grain and hollow
belly driving me against you,
plunging us
into us.
Tag: beginnings
4:50 pm, Pink Floyd
Tulips bend to paint a corner of Washington
Circle with candy tongues
tied, twisted police tape slaps at a strutting
breeze, a whir of wheels, skin and spandex sheathing
viscera pulsing femur tibia and tucked wing of
earthbound flight. A checkered cap tops
the pile on a table by an escalator
ringing like a miscalibrated telephone, unheeded
warning every third or fifth body rushing
up to open air, no one turning. Back
after back in suit jacket, wilting and shedding
finally revealing damp shoulder, furred forearm
freed from cuff. Lime-green
chrome and finned convertible
on oversized whitewalls takes the corner,
watering eyes and turning heads.
Delayed train, detour, an extra mile
on foot west, sundog flares against the curved city
bus merging with a hiss. I thought I knew
the way, thought I’d thought of every
contingency but I never imagined him
in the everything
grazing the tips of my fingers, him
in the everything holding me fast
To these teeming streets. Nothing to compare
to this belay. No metaphor, no halo
of light, no vapor trail threading sky
is anything like the music
making me skate an inch
at least above the skin of the planet
and so it should come as no surprise
(except that’s exactly what it does) to find
I learn to fly
the instant I give up
trying.
Hello Here
On the brink of leaving this home for the next (inshallah), and I still don’t know what I’m after. Place? Family? Community? Safety? The list is long and it changes with the breeze.
Ambiguous purpose calls for simple acts. I turn to my son and say, “Let’s go outside.”
These days, he joins me. This is new. It used to be a struggle, cajoling and begging before demanding or giving up. Now, he pounds down the stairs, “I’ll put her leash on! Here, let me!” He throws open the sliding glass door and calls her with his quasi wolf-whistles. She is suspicious of his intentions but ducks inside, unable to resist the word “walk.”
Flexi-leash in hand, Bug races down the driveway dragging the dog. She tosses a few desperate glances back at me but I’m no help to her now. Bug has finally learned to slow long enough to let her have a break for her bladder. It rarely lasts past the last drop so she forgoes all olfactory temptations gets down to business. They lope down the swath of grass between the fences. At the bottom where the year’s accumulated leaves lay in drifts, Bug snaps off her leash and she tears off into the trees. He squeals in delight and tramps after her, knee-deep in brambles.
The dog is the leader but doesn’t know it. Winding and snoofling through brown tangles, she takes us on a looping journey up and back down the hillside. Scattered clumps of daffodils poke their way up into patches of sun and purplish flowers unfurl from buried brush. Light threads its way down through dry spindles scratching the sky. I carry a plastic shopping bag and collect the crumpled cans and muck-filled Corona bottles that peek up through the leaves.
I follow Bug. Bug follows the dog. The dog follows her nose. We come upon a creek snaking out from under a neighbor’s chicken wire fence. Across the way is a clutch of bamboo as high as a rooftop. It bends against the breeze. The road beyond is near enough to keep me vigilant. Bug fords the brook with a single leap and slips up the muddy bank beyond. He picks his way through the deep green flutes, swishing them low. Feathered leaves stroke the water’s golden skin.
“I’m in the bamboo jungle! There is a tornado coming! Get out of the storm, Mommy!” I duck across and hide with him in the cool dark there. Cars roar just feet from our back and I holler the dog back from the roadside. She bounds into the creek, splashing us with wet silt.
When it is time to go, we gather leash and garbage and assorted leafy treasures. I urge. Bug dawdles. The dog drips. Eventually we shimmy into a dry creek-bed and follow the tracks of raccoons and deer back to the trail into our neighborhood. Just as we start up the hill, we turn and see a strange sight. In all our years of walking here, we have never come across such a thing.
A boy.
He is making his jerky way over the buried roots up to a log that bridges the dry trench. His black hair and pale skin trace a ghostly curve over the hillside. He looks up and sees us. I wave. He pauses then waves back. Bug and dog and I are poised on the forest edge ready to go home.
“One second, Mom,” Bug says. And he is off. He plows straight through the weeds and pricker bushes and heads straight uphill. The boy leaps off the log, starts to climb, and then slows. Bug is talking to him. He turns and responds. In a blink, they are deep into it. By the time I have gotten the dog turned and have approached the pair, they are discussing the bamboo forest and the forts up on hilltop that some older kids built years ago. “We come in here all the time,” the boy says.
“So do I!” Bug cries.
They talk pets. Neighbors. Teachers. Movies. Books. The boy is into the Warriors series and Bug is reading JK Rowling. I hang back and marvel at their ease. They compare notes on the best scenes from the last Harry Potter movie. Bug seeks and seeks a common footing. The boy, a few years older, is happy to oblige. They giggle about an explosion at a quidditch match then giggle some more when the dog grunts and tries to lick the boy’s hand off.
The sun is sinking and it is past time for dinner. Bug manages to tear himself away. We plod back up the swath of grass. Bug watches the boy return to his own porch and join a group of children there. A grown man sees us and waves a big Hullo. I return the greeting.
“We come in here all the time,” the boy had said. We had never seen him, yet here he was. We have paid attention to this place for years without looking for anything. The dog’s nose has been a truer guide than our own intention. Only in today’s purposeless looking do we stumble upon what we didn’t know we’d been after: a person who shares our place and a similar way of wandering through it.
My son’s bold delight stuns me. Even with no idea what he will find, he bridges the distance to meet what glances against his sense of wonder. Call it innocence. Call it courage. Whatever it is, in our new home (inshallah), may that wide-open not-looking to guide us to what we seek.
Happy 100 Days: 58
This must be what the snake feels
when her skin starts to peel
back from what has been
tucked away
asleep.
Which of those coiled
selves will push
aside the rest, confine
them to another dormancy
while it becomes
the whole of what the living
thing knows
of stone and meat and predator
and mate
(and, of course, all of what they know
of her)?
Only one
will feel the next rake
of earth
against fresh belly.
Such a crap shoot.
She has so little say.
The manner, perhaps,
and place,
but not the timing
and certainly
not the fact
are hers to choose.
No wonder she goes
so still
when the husk
makes its intention known.
Who in her will suffer
the singular pleasure
of being
born?
I Hear that Train A-Comin’
When I hear that whistle blowin’
I hang my head and cry.-Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues
Bug has been in the Froggy class since January 2011. Same songs, same routine, even some of the same classmates. The wide-windowed preschool room with its labeled cubbies and bins of blocks has been a security blanket during a time of adjustment for his family. On Tuesday morning, all of that changes. Bug will walk into before-and-after-school care in a whole new place with kids he has not met yet. He will board a bus he has never ridden and start kindergarten with a teacher he has only seen at half glance from a face buried in my side.
I took the day off work last week to accompany my little boy on a final visit to both schools. He lingered in the doorway of each new classroom, hanging back from the buzz of activity. He clung to my arm and pressed his body into mine as if trying to crawl back inside.
That safe place is no longer big enough for him.
“Mommy,” Bug said to me on the way home. “I think I’ll stay in the Froggies for one more year.”
He is already going to be one of the oldest kids in his kindergarten class, with a birthday falling just five days after the county cut-off. He is a lumbering giant, tall and lean and towering over his peers as he roars around the playground. There is no “one more year.” This is happening. The train has left the station.
I tell him I am going to help him through it and that it is a big change but new friends and adventures are waiting for him. I tell him that his daddy and I aren’t going anywhere. That his doggy and his grandparents will still be waiting for him every night.
All of this telling is just white noise. His experience will be his own, and it will look entirely different than anything I try to craft. I understand that reassurance does not live in the picture I try to paint of how this will unfold. Rather, it is simply in my presence. If I can offer any comfort, it is in staying calm and standing loose when he turns back towards me to find his home base. It is in the sound of my voice, chattering out its quiet encouragement. It is in the three books at bedtime, the three songs, the way we walk the dog every single day whether we feel like it or not.
One of the greatest gifts of childhoods is one we most lament when we are young: we don’t have any say over our lives. I remember being little and hating the sense of powerlessness over my circumstances. When we are small, so many of us want to be grown up so we can decide for ourselves what to do or not do.
Alas, having a say is overrated. While Bug has no freedom to fight the change coming next week, he also has no obligation to initiate change of any sort. His freedom, then, is in being released from the struggle of having to make the tough decisions. The new beginning is here. My little boy is already packed up. The Powers that Be have bustled him aboard. The whistle blows, and off it chugs.
For the lucky ones, being young means not having to check the timetables or even agonize over taking the trip in the first place.
Of course, Bug is anything but powerless. He has a great deal of say in how this journey goes. Does he adapt to the rhythm of it, or does he fight momentum? Does he find a new set of travel companions in the dining car, or does he sit in a corner booth, yearning for what was left behind? In some ways, the capacity to determine the quality of an experience is more powerful than any illusion of authority. After all, we each move along a path only fractionally of our own making. Perhaps the only real influence we have over any of it is how we choose to behave at exactly the point where we find ourselves now.
In any event, Bug will be grown up soon enough. Give it another blink or three, and he will be the kind of free so many of us are: free to grow or stagnate, free to take risks or stay safe, free to lift his gaze or put on blinders. He will make choices that will have long-term consequences, and I will be unable to protect him from harm. Also, he will do breathtaking things I could not have imagined. Like all of us, he will occasionally hunker down in his personal version of the Froggies long after he should have hefted his knapsack and struck out for something more his size. Like all of us, he will occasionally board the wrong train altogether.
So, I tell Bug that he is starting kindergarten next week, it is happening, and he will find his way. My firm tone belies a roiling beneath. Down under my words, I hear another voice whispering. It asks a question for my ears alone:
If no one is here to tell me the next step is inevitable and that I have no choice in the matter, how do I determine it is time? If I can choose to stay here, buried in the warm folds of my own security blanket, how do I will myself to let go?
I can certainly allow myself to continue moving along familiar pathways. Looking and looking for a way to let myself off the hook, I retreat from the most frightening choice. I cross my arms, plant my feet, and say, “I think I’ll stay in Froggies for one more year.”
It is easy to find permission to persist in doing what I have always done. The problem is that the room does not have chairs big enough for me and the bins of blocks no longer challenge me. Outside those wide windows, something is coming my way. Even with my fingers stuffed in my ears, I can’t block the sound of that whistle blowing.
If that railroad train was mine,
I bet I’d move out over a little,
Farther down the line
Maybe it’s time to decide. If my little Bug at a mere five years old can step on board, perhaps his mommy is brave and strong enough to do the same.
If a Tree Falls
We climb to the top. He hangs on my arm and wraps his hands around my thigh. “Mommy, I’m tired.” He drags at me, trying to make me stop. He has no idea. Gravity has no effect on me. I am stronger than he can imagine. His fifty pounds are a ball of cotton, a cheesecloth sail. I can carry him to the top. Down the crevasse. Hoist him back up. I can lift him into the branches of an oak. I stand below him and know he will not fall because I will not fall.
I will not fall.
The hands under me are not visible. Are they any less present? Are they any less real? I have skidded and tumbled but still, my body is not broken. I rise every day. The smile comes, even it is forced. Music whispers at my throat. The legs walk on.
A good job, a good living. All there is? No, I still believe. Maybe that makes me a romantic idealist foolish idiot. Maybe small minded and smaller hearted. Maybe unable to accept the world as it is. Maybe? Maybe not believing in this one approach to things. Maybe ready to welcome the self that is becoming and not just the self that has already become.
It could have been beautiful, but then it was not. I left one when he was as ugly as I am now. When he could not get up and out of himself. When he got stuck. This is karma. It shows no mercy. It is a pitching machine. It hurls its force at a guilty spirit. It is deaf to the pleas. It is blind to the body, curled in a ball.
Get out of the cage. Just get up and out. It only hurts if you stay inside.
What is this jail? I built it. I put myself in it. The key might be right here in my pocket, but all I find is an ID card, a mobile phone, lint. I find the inside of the pocket. But there, a tiny thread, a small tear in the making, the skin of my thigh there, warm. Alive.
Who will come if I wait here? A chariot? A winged horse? Icarus, maybe? I would dare him to fly even closer to the sun just to feel its heat.
Up, away. Through the rent fabric, I feel my own leg. I feel the possibility of rising by my own volition.
This is what’s begun. The end. We unravel. We fray. The edges were never bound. It was all just us pressing the hems into one another, holding it up. The thread was not real. It was spit and prayer and no sudden moves. As soon as the twist was 180 degrees, the whole garment split and fell away. We were as naked as the emperor.
I could have gathered up what was left. I could have brought it to our naked breast, covered the soft place there before the broken branches had their chance to pierce
Our poor torn heart
Hearts
There were three there, inside that one body. Three bruised and busted creatures in need of a gauze, a soft wrapping and an untouched room with a curtain at the window to soften the glare.
It was not in my hands. I did not reach for anything but my own rope. I let the others slip down under, grabbed only the hair of my son.
I am single again. It is sweet nudity. It is defenselessness. He is not coming to get me again. This is not his job, and I must grow up enough to know this is the way it is.
Grow up. Bear down. Bare truth.
What is the thing you still believe even though you know it is false?
You have all the time in the world. You will get there someday. Being beautiful will make you happy. Having things will bring you peace. You can live a halfway life and still be whole. You can have it all. You deserve better. You deserve worse. You are a piece of garbage. Someone will write to you even if you do not write first. Doing more will get you more. People will change. Your criticism protects you. Love is unconditional. The number in your bank account is based on hard work. You can trust your neighbor. You’ll have another chance. You’re out of chances. People forget the words you say. People remember the words you say.
In which myth will I place my faith today?
You can live through your children. You can live without music. You can live alone. You can live without making something of yourself. The way will appear if you keep walking. The voice will guide you if you shut up and listen.
Which myth?
Swallow it down. Choke it back. Squeeze the muscle and contract. The only way to the woman I am becoming is to punch through to her, rip the torn place wider, shape her, make her, smooth her into being, breathe in life life life. Oil her. Wet her. Paint her with a paste of pollen and creekwater, gather the milkweed fluff and tuck it between her thighs. Draw down the branches of the hemlock tree. Weave moss and bough to shape the organs that beat her blood into breath.
Whatever is haunting me, I have to perform this exorcism alone. It is not the job of any man to boil down the sap of me into something sweet. He cannot discern the obscenities of the ghosts. He only hears their echo called back through my own flailing limbs.
A wise woman once told me, do not adore your man. She meant to be cautious of idols. We deify our lovers. We pray to them to shoulder the burden and quiet the demons, to absolve us of our sins. This is too much to ask of anyone. When I left the man I married, I merged into the first one I found waiting. He promised he would come for me. They all say this: I am here. You are not alone. But it is impossible. No one can get as close as would be required to inhabit the place where the dark chill lives. To unfurl the buds. To bring the spring. They would have to press themselves entirely into the skin I call my own. They would have to squeeze me out and become the skeleton of me. This is what the one adoring dreams of. Obliteration. Complete.
Now, here, I release the myth of disappearance. The only story I can live is this one. It is not for me to make this into anything other than what it is. The paycheck comes. The child is fed. He climbs, he runs. The work waits on Monday morning for me to arrive, for me to claim it as mine. This is mine. This is the only narrative, and here sits the only protagonist, inside the arc. I never thought of myself as anything other than an independent woman, but I have lived for 20 years as one who cannot get through a day without fantasies of rescue. This is the cage.
Giovanni will, alas, not be the last man I love. But he will be the last I dream of saving me. No one is coming. I save myself.
Maybe there is nothing to learn from this. Maybe it is the same lesson after all, returning like the first leaves. Falling is a choice. So is growing. So is stepping out from behind bars. So is opening to the sun.
Cessation
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
-Marianne Williamson
When he was eighteen, Giovanni’s father offered him $1000 to quit smoking. The kid refused. “I didn’t want to quit,” he says with a shrug.
My own parents never ponied up cash to entice me to kick the habit. Maybe if I had grown some cojones and smoked in the open, they might have given bribery a whirl. I have no doubt I would have rejected their offer. It was not until I was in my twenties and weary from the merry-go-round of quitting and starting that I finally found whatever storehouse of desire I needed to be ready to stop.
A pregnancy scare accelerated my readiness. The moment I had even a crumb of suspicion I might be carrying a child, I quit. This was before any confirmation the crumb was an it or even if I would keep said it should it come to fruition. The details were irrelevant. My sense of responsibility for giving that little being its best chance trumped all my self-deluded chatter about dependence and ill-gotten pleasure. I stubbed out the smokes, flat and hard, and tossed the pack.
A week or so later, my body sent a clear signal that the phantom child was never more than a slip of the clockworks. I could have launched an America’s Cup contender with the force of my exhalation. As I made haste to the corner store and stood outside lighting up that next cigarette, I considered the object in my yellowed grip. Sure, I was no longer – in fact, never had been – carrying a child. Did that change anything? If not that life, what of this one? What was I to do with the pesky problem of the beloved being in my care, still me?
The sudden arrival of a sense of duty for the small, mighty force living in my skin was most inconvenient. Also, I had been able to forego the smokes without a moment’s hesitation. That pesky fact was a hungry dog that kept following me home.
I puffed away feebly and with an increasing sense of dissonance for a few weeks until I realized I could not stomach the dithering. Was I a smoker or not? A choice had to be made. I could either return to the fiction that nicotine is both more valuable and more powerful than I am, or I could give it up.
The terrible truth was that I loved life more than that cigarette. The mind games came to an end. For too long, I had been singing that stale refrain, “Oh, I would love to reach a point where I could just enjoy a cigarette at a party from time to time.” Forget it. One becomes ten, and I am back at a pack a day. Even if I could just light up here or there, the gratification would not be worth the price. I knew as plain as day that I did not want anything to hold that kind of sway over my mind and body. Lasting pleasure is never so easy. Vices are gingerbread houses. They get you every time.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
– Alice Walker
So, that was it. When I crushed out that last American Sprit fourteen years ago, I said, “I will never smoke another cigarette again as long as I live.” It was a commitment between me and my very own juicy, living self. I have never once faltered. Why would I? It has been so much simpler than I ever imagined it would be. This, I have come to understand, is how such things work. When the path ahead becomes clear, confusion falls away. The only hard part is in willing oneself to lurch up out of paralysis and begin walking.
What do we grasp? Since dispensing with cigarettes and television, what I notice is that the conceptions I lug around are a greater drain than any single behavior. I see myself as only just so brave, only just so capable, only just so energetic. Or worse, that I deserve special treatment and that the normal rules do not apply to me. I fool myself into thinking these ways have laid claim to me, even imprisoned me, when I am the one with my arms threaded through the bars. The reward is $1000. The reward is $100,000. The reward is a treasure chest inlaid with golden beetles and inhabited by a family of genies. I refuse to open my grip. The reward is my own full and electrified power, and still I hesitate. What can possibly be the compulsion? What hold does this thing I keep pressed between my stained fingers have over me, even after the satisfaction has burnt away, even when the Everything is right there for the taking?
I picture Aron Ralston again, sawing away when it became clear his attachment to his own arm was killing him. He cut off a part of his own body. He did this unimaginable thing, just for piddly ol’ life. No one offered him a dime.
Of course, kicking a habit only gets you so far. Sustained practice writes the epic story. Letting go is just a clearing of the clutter and an opening of the blank page. The joyous discipline that follows makes it possible to ink into being the scholar, painter, athlete, nurse.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
– Audre Lorde
We all know it, though. Deep down, I know it, and you do, too. Nothing is more precious than the next glorious incarnation waiting on the other side of the abyss.
No one among us is innocent. No one has more than a brief, long-forgotten visit to the garden before crashing into the first of many nauseating, bottom-dropping-out transitions. Every time through, you learn your power. You become fuller, and your vision sharpens. Like a stone cut and cut again into impossible brilliance, the in-between chisels you into an ever more distinctively patterned version of yourself.
It beckons. That other self over there, it calls. Drop that banged up old satchel. There is nothing in there you need. Set it down, and leap!
Giovanni was onto something at eighteen. Rewards mean nothing if you do not want what comes next. Once you arrive at the lip of the cliff, rewards still mean nothing. Only the wanting matters. Only the courage to want will lift your foot and send you over that edge.
Make Shift
Candles are cliché. Shopping, a bore.
Practicing signing the childhood name
is just picking at the scabs.
A run is too lonely. A book, too removed.
Vows of poverty smack of desperation
and prayers fall on deaf ears.
Road trips are dangerous. Housework numbs.
Fasting hollows you. Feasting bloats.
Whiskey just makes you throw up.
Movies are escapist.
Scrapbooks sting.
Baths are too girly. A hug, but from whom?
Confession requires a witness.
A red-eye to Vegas is far too expensive.
Animal sacrifice, much too involved.
Throwing a party takes an awful lot of work
and incense sets off the smoke alarm.
Trying on his old clothes
might work if you’d kept them.
The ring might still fit
if you dared.
Go to bed early.
Cry if you must.
Before it’s all over
sing just one song.
Choose
from among those you loved
before
you chose to love him.
Sail Cloth
It was one of many, undoubtedly, but it is the one I remember best. The costume was made of bright, sky-blue gingham. My sister’s was green. Knowing our competitiveness and our proclaimed “favorite” colors, mother bought matching fabric in different shades. She sewed the collars and cuffs, the puff-balls and buttons. They were billowing things, wide-legged bloomers in a single piece up to the ruffled neck. Then she painted on our faces. Mine was a smile and my sister’s a frown. Or was it the other way around? It is odd I consented to be a clown considering how frightened I was of the things. Halloween gives us permission: embody that which you fear most. For one night that year, we roamed the neighborhood at sunset, throwing the demons off our scent and demanding our spoils.
In the chapter following childhood but preceding parenthood, I approached Halloween with a much more improvisational attitude. Patterns and forethought gave way to 11th hour leather, sequins, and duct tape. Keys and washers could hang from chains. A sharpie can turn a bedsheet into a flag or cape. Like concocting a dish without a recipe, all you have to do is open the cabinets and make use of what appears. Mash it together to yield something outlandish and utterly unrecognizable. Partake regardless.
“Leap, and the net will appear.”
“Do what you love, and the money will follow.”
“Built it (or, don’t even build ‘it,’ Just build) and they will come.”
Pick your dime store proverb. Any old one excuse for immersion will do.
Unfixed is still my preferred gait. If the activity involves a voyage and a bit of play, I give over and let the doing of it offer up what it will. This is why I have bins in the basement full to bursting with filled journals, but only a single publication to my name. It is also why my resume reads more like a ransom note than a character study. Whether dancing, dating, writing or earning a paycheck, I follow impulses and revel in processes. The product is only an afterthought.
This time of year, the folks walking the streets as pinball machines and chess men are marvels to me. It is not my habit to set a goal and work it into being.
Like so many of us, I was fortunate – or so I believed – to find a companion as open to adventure as I was. The waters below so captivated us, we could not turn our gaze to the stars. Immersion failed us. In the absence of a navigator, our meandering course led us right into the Bermuda triangle.
But I digress. (As usual).
A freewheeling approach to craft and learning has served me well as the mother of a very young child. Want to play with clay? Let’s cook some up and see what happens! Paint? Here’s some chalk and glue. Go smear it on the driveway! Young children are enamored of materials and processes. Where other parents might grow impatient with the purposeless messes, I have found it easy to encourage Bug to make magic from sources at hand. Play with sounds, spices, worms, words. Mix the media. Simmer, stir. See what bubbles up.
The problem is this: On Halloween, you cannot dress your kid as a half-written sonnet.
Bug is no longer among the “very young” category of child. When this transition happened, I haven’t the faintest idea. I notice, though, that he is less interested in the path and more focused on the destination. My child begs for the concrete. When we break out the play-doh, he wants a gryphon or a sword. When I hum, he wants to know the words.
This year, Bug’s desire for a predetermined image at Halloween has me squirming. Yes, our overstuffed closets have supplied a robe and glasses, and my crafty mother has crocheted us matching red-and-gold scarves. It has, however, been painful to make real the pictures inside my boy’s brain. Somehow, he conjured up a picture of Harry Potter with a lantern. Despite my best attempts to replace it with something we had on hand, he dug in and stood firm.
I may tend towards open-ended processes, but I want my son to learn the beauty of drawing the vision to life. Knowing how to map a course towards a point on the horizon will serve him when we his parents are no longer at the helm. Like all of us, he needs to trust in his capacity to secure vessel, sails, skills, and crew. Ambition does not come naturally to either Tee or me. This means I have to (get to?) turn out of the current and harness the wind.
In the end, we took out pen and paper. I had Bug draw this imagined lantern then describe the parts of his drawing. A five-year-old’s sense of dimension is screwy. To give his image depth by comparison, I took out oatmeal canisters and cookie boxes. Once his rectangle rose up off the page, we discussed handles and doors and reinforcement.
“How will it light up?” I asked. Bug had to wrap his mind around lenses and power sources. He may be dressing as a wizard, but light and object do not spring fully formed into being. Everything in this world came about by way of a process – chemical, physical, human – and the mechanics can guide us as we attempt to assemble our own creations. The lantern from cardboard and paint. The child from flesh and love. Our home from land and frame and mortgage payments.
I would like to believe that surrender to craft and chance would yield something more than just a mastery of the doing. Such faith is costly and not without its risks.
I cannot house my kid in a half-written sonnet.
I also cannot build a whole new life today. This is worth bearing in mind. If it is true that all of creation is the result of processes, then it follows that creation is itself ongoing. Genesis, germination, fruition, decay. Even those costumes my mother made have long since frayed. Back to mice and moths. Back to the threads. Back to beginnings, as Bug and I are now. As all of us always are. The fixed idea still demands surrender to the pace of its own becoming.
I would like to learn from my mother’s way. Choose a pattern, and take up the cloth. Piece something together. As imperfect and fleeting as it may be, clothe my child in it. Finish it. Believe my own hands capable of such a thing.
Shannon E. Williams 