Tag: creativity

Children, Mindfulness

Signs of Spring

smirkpretty

Signs of Spring

He shoots hoops while I sit on a bench bent over my journal. Evening sun streaks across the blacktop. “Hey Mom, catch!” He fake pumps the ball at me and laughs before really tossing it up in a high arc. I pluck it from the sky and dribble it down the path towards the car.

“Can I write in your journal?” he asks.

“Sure.” I hand it over. He flips past page after page, not a stitch of notice snagging on the thickets and knots penned during a cramped daily metro commute. He finds a blank space, plops into his seat and starts writing. His grip on the pen is both loose and sure. We are only blocks from the house which is just far enough for my boy to fall into flight.

Riding some current that’s his alone, Bug ignores my bustle and opts to stay in the car long after we’ve parked.  Continue reading “Signs of Spring” →

Children, Music

Jamming the Signals

smirkpretty

He won’t stop talking about them. “In Animal Jam, my daddy plays on his laptop too and I made another pet who is just like the fox, and there were these phantoms I put in a crate, and. . .” The mere possibility of more screen time before bed reveals this unrecognizable boy who:

  • plays 45 minutes of basketball at the park and even shares his ball with a neighbor
  • finishes his spelling words (15 right, no mistakes!)
  • reads two chapters of his Bunny Private Eye book out loud
  • finishes dinner too fast, including all the broccoli
  • lets mama clip his scraggly fingernails
  • brushes teeth
  • changes clothes
  • does it all without a moment’s hesitation by 7:40 p.m.

“Yes!” he shouts as he jets across the living room. “Twenty minutes!” He plops himself down before the the growling, pinging machine and goes from dervish to droid in half a blink.
 
Seven years, and I finally gave in. Video games now live on the computer and my boy has a hand-held tablet at his disposal. It was only supposed to be weekends. Or maybe it was only supposed to be in exchange for reading. Or maybe on a timer-measured budget. Whatever model-parent solution I meant to try, we ended up here. The boy deliberates vocally about his moves while we’re dressing. Plans strategies in the car. Describes in excrutiating detail what he likes about the characters as we eat waffles. Lists the games he wants next and outlines their endless benefits as I brush his hair.
 
He talks. And talks. And TALKS about video games.
 
We keep the gaming down to little pit stops along the winding adventure of our days. We go ponk a tennis ball around a court or ice skate or visit friends. We slop around a trail or bake cakes or scoot around the block. We blare music and read joke books and draw. Then and only then does is Bug free to travel to pixel world. I hate seeing his turbo-charged engine idling to a stall as he hunches over his latest visual fixation. This kind of play may require cognitive engagement and it sure beats TV and cheetos, but here is what gaming isn’t:
 
Motion. Friends. Planting. Body. Magic.
 
Pulse.
 
Seeking.
 
Song.
 
Yet for all it is not, Bug’s new diversions prey on his attention even in their absence. Especially in their absence. Their sirens call. He talks and talks more until I finally bark,
 
“Enough. For every minute you talk about video games, you lose one minute of playing them.”
 
Which is unfair and childish, but oh, how badly I wanted a home free of that electronic static. I wanted no static. All dynamic. All flesh and soil and story. But this is not my home. It is our home, Bug’s and mine. My son will have his loves. Some will baffle me. Others will make my skin itch. In any event, this kid should be free to feel his way and free to talk about the shape his desires take.
 
Still. I don’t take back the threat. Not yet.
 
In bed, we have finished books (one about Hieronymous Bosch, for god’s sake) when Bug turns and says, “One day, I’ll have a house with nothing but video games. Computers and ipads and video games.”
 
“Yeah?” I look at him. “One day, I’m going to have a house with 37-foot ceilings and a giant swing hanging right in the middle. And a three-story treehouse bed you have to climb a winding ladder to get into. Do you know what will be at the end of the bed?”
 
“What?”
 
“Big jars full of paint. So you can paint right on the ceiling above the bed what you want to see when you are dreaming. And my house will have an ice cream factory right inside with all the stuff for any flavor anyone wants to make. And a trampoline floor. And above the trampoline, a trapeze.”
 
“A bunch of trapezes,” he says. “So you can go down, and bounce up again, and swing.” He is arcing his stuffed polar bear through the air. “And go down and up and down and up and. . .”
 
“And a basketball court. And I’ll be able to make it really cold and turn it into a ice rink with flashing lights.”
 
“And 38 dogs,” he adds.
 
“Right. And a pool with a glass bottom so you can go under and see all the people swimming with all the dogs, and it’ll be just like the water-bowl-cam on Puppy Bowl.”
 
“And we’ll have the kitty halftime show.”
 
“And a whole room full of musical instruments. Anything you want to play, anywhere.”
 
“Except when you’re pooping,” he says.
 
“Are you kidding? Especially then. We’ll have a violin right there next to the toilet.”
 
“Not when you’re playing basketball.”
 
“Why not? I’ll put bells on everyone’s ankles so when they’re playing it’ll be like ching-ching-da-ding SWOOSH!”
 
“Is that someone making a basket?” He asks.
 
“Yep, and all the other players will be all jumping and jingling when you score the 3-pointer, it’ll be all jing-ding-a-ding-jing, like jazz.”
 
“What’s jazz?” Bug asks.
 
I explain that jazz is an American musical form rooted in the. . .
 
“No, how does it go?”
 
I attempt to bop-hmm through the opening bars of Charles Mingus’ Prayer for Passive Resistance. “Sorta like that.”
 
From who-knows-where, he asks, “What’s the blues?”
 
I turn and face him.
 
Well I woke up this morning. I reached across the bed. I went to hug my baby but I hugged a cold teddy bear instead.
 
I give his bear a limp squeeze. Bug is looking a little sideways at me. I kick it up.
 
Oh, I got so hungry for a sweet pickle but there’s none left in the jar, my baby got up in the night, ate the last pickle and drove off in my car.
 
Where the hell is this coming from? I belt it out before my mind can catch it.
 
Oh, I know she done left me because I’ve been gettin’ home late, I ain’t helped with the dishes and I left old cheese stuck to my plate. O-o-oh I got the blues. I got the empty bed, no pickle, teddy bear blues.
 
Bug bounces his polar bear and grins. I tell him the blues are usually about someone leaving.
 
“Like what?”
 
“Like. . . ”
 
I woke up this morning.
 
“The blues are always starting when you wake up.”
 
Looked for my panting dog. Ain’t no fuzzy tail a-thumping and the house is cold as a fallen log. I got the blues. I got the dog-gone-to-leprechaun-heaven blues.
 
“No, she didn’t go to leprechaun heaven.” He looks at me then tucks his head and sorta-smiles. Our pooch died on St. Patrick’s day. “That’s right. I forgot. Okay. Sing more.”
 
I reached for my furry lop-eared girl but she’s not there to warm my hands. Ain’t got no one to wake me up or lick bacon grease off the pan.
 
“I could do it,” Bug volunteers.
 
Oh, we got the blues. I wrap both boy and polar bear in a squeeze. The no Fenway in the morning, fallen-log, dog-gone, teddy bear blu-u-ues.
 
“Look,” Bug says. He pulls a tangle of Fenway’s black fur from his polar bear’s coat. “She left this.” He hands it to me and I rub the little remnant of our dopey girl between my fingers. Bug turns and curls around the bear. I tuck the fluff into my back pocket and curl around him.
 
Mama’s feeling good. For the moment, her boy’s absorbed in something. It’s raw and sweet hits the blue notes. And it sure won’t fit on a screen. Not even this one.
 

Art, Home

Tack in Place

smirkpretty

He asked, “What’s your style?”

Style. . . ?

“Decorating. Design. What do you like?”

“Um.” Catalog pages, gallery spaces, antique shops. It all fluttered and slipped around in my uncertain brain. Is Pottery Barn a style? If it is, it’s not mine. Bauhuas? Gothic? I don’t even have vocabulary for these things.

“Well, I have these friends. . .”

These friends. An couple of artist-writer-dancers, old as the hills. They live in a shambling D.C. house crammed with faded velvet chairs, books to the ceilings, creeping plants and instruments enough for a chamber orchestra. On the windowsills, dusty bottles jostle for light with the wire and stone treasures from Egypt and India. The thrum and jumble cascade out to the stone limits of the property. The back yard is a fairy garden. Tea lights and whirligigs, mismatched wrought iron chairs and labyrinthine shrubbery housing whole communities of pixies.

I tried to explain to him that this is what I envision for a home. I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, though, let alone my words. It seems so cluttered and non-functional, and anyway, how does a person decorate “bohemian”? You can’t find it on Amazon.com. It takes living along a certain edge, seeking-making-stumbling upon bits and bobs among the X-marked meanderings into the neverlands where treasure like that begins.

Who has time? Space? This is a condo, for Pete’s sake. Between the spider plants and the Japanese fishing buoys, where would a gal store her financial records? And let’s face it. There will be no trips to Morocco for a samovar and silk curtains anytime soon.

My style? Dorm-room cast-off on a Goodwill budget.

Five weeks in the place and clueless as to how to proceed, I attend to the basics. The scarred molding is out. With the help of a borrowed miter saw and a day off work, I’ve just about finished hammering in the new strips. Hooks are hung near every door. Kitchen is sorted. Bookcases and desk are all up in Bug’s room. Bathroom shelves hold the guest towels.

Progress is measurable but the yardstick is chilly to the touch. Form exists for function alone. It’s as if this home and I are on an extended first date. The interaction is all halted conversation and nervous tics.

Moving through the house like it’s a museum rather than canvas, I place each item an inch from the wall. I anchor nothing. The single photograph displayed — a shot of the Colorado sand dunes taken by a friend and hand-framed in rough wood — sits balanced on the mantle in a sort of half-squat. The bedroom walls beg for splash but every color seems wrong. The thought of choosing curtains paralyzes me so the hideous black ones left by the previous owner still scar my bedroom. Everywhere I look, bare space blinks back at me.

So? What’s your style?

Today, Bug and I made the trek over to Maryland to visit an old friend who has just landed here. Divorce and custody battles forced him into an 11th hour move over 500 miles to a place where he had no connections, no work, no place to live. All of this so he could be near his kids. He found the only decent apartment he could afford in their school district, signed the lease and unloaded his U-Haul. He’s been here a week.

I stepped into his place and fell open.

It was home.

Floor-to-ceiling kids’ paintings. Lush and spindly greenery spilling from every corner. Books and jumbled art and gorgeously scarred furniture. Wood and toys and color. Mason jars for water glasses. Everywhere, texture.

What’s your style?

Everywhere, life.

The boys played at perfect pitch. In between refereeing lego skirmishes, my friend and I talked easily. I nestled into overstuffed couch and felt rocked from all sides as if by the sea. Orientation, at last. Breath cracked open the closed place in my chest and light caught a corner of the treasure down in there.

When my kiddo and I landed back at home, I plopped him in the tub and started poking around. All of our art supplies and Bug’s drawings are still back at my folks’ house, but we had to have something. Where to begin? I pulled a wobbly shelf back into the living room. Playing around with angles, I gave it a home and unpacked books of poetry. I raised lights. I tucked away cable cords. After stories and songs, Bug conked out and I found my second wind. Perhaps my first? An old calendar of bright family photographs was crammed into the bottom of a drawer. I dug it out and started cutting.

I have no frames or picture hooks. I have no gallery pieces. But I have scissors. Colored paper. Thumb tacks. Inspiration.

I have a style. It’s pushing back out from its deep, sunless sleep. Taking my hands. Tacking the boat. Placing the brand. Claiming the place.
 

Art, Divorce

June 11, 2005

smirkpretty

Wedding Cake

My son wants to know what the plastic box contains. It is in his room on the dresser where I have stashed it in the hopes of a near-future move. We lift the lid and I show him the colored paper. The stack of card stock is a jumbled rainbow of hues. Inside the lid is pasted a stylized directive: Please place completed scrapbook pages here.
 
Bug reads it out loud slowly. “What does that mean?”
 
“The box was from our wedding,” I explain. “Our guests drew pictures for us so we could remember them.”
 
From the bottom, Bug fishes one of the blank pages left from that day. A goldenrod square is pasted onto a larger lavender piece. A tiny stamp in the center of the smaller frame reads, “Your photo will be here.”
 
“How?” Bug asks.
 
“Like this.” The scrapbooks are all in his room. Weddings, pregnancy, first tooth, first steps. Tee and I hug in faded sepia on the front of one. I pull it down and nestle with my son on his bed. “We made two books because we had so many creative wedding guests. One is for family and one is for friends. This is your family too, you know.”
 
We flip past all the announcements and shower invitations. In a save-the-date , a silhouette of Tee and me leaps against a Lake Michigan sunset. A handmade flower-petal paper sports its indigo raffia bow. The booklet from the wedding day slips around in a plastic sheath that protects the lyrics to James Taylor’s “How Sweet it Is” alongside the cowboy-hat story of our first meeting.
 
Someone had the bright idea to use one of the tabletop disposable cameras to capture a few shots of the scrapbooking table. A violet satin cloth is littered with stamps, stickers, pens. Everything is so very bright. Sunburnt guests brandish markers and grins. The daisies my friend planted months in advance pop from their hand-painted pots.
 
I point out cousins my son knows now as older. He has me read their wishes to us.
 
“Was I there?” He asks.
 
“You were the reason we were all there, but no. You weren’t born yet.”
 
He turns another page. “Nelson!” he cries. “He was there!”
 
“You know Nelson?”
 
“Of course,” Bug says. “He lives at Daddy’s house.”
 
Nelson. A stuffed plush banana slug from a trip to an Olympic Peninsula lodge was a key player in Tee’s and my courtship. Nelson was present at the third and final proposal. Sometime during the wedding reception, Tee snuck the slug out of his jacket pocket and propped him onto the cake table. Nelson’s big-eyed welcome is now a sunny flourish against our melting, blue sky confection.
 
Bug slips down from the bed and goes back over to the box of blanks. He pulls the lavender-and-gold card stock from the top and settles down at his desk.
 
“Are you going to make one?”
 
“Mmm-hmm,” he murmurs. He is already in the flow. He outlines the shape of a purple butterfly with his marker. A red flower. I let him draw for a few minutes as I turn back through the album. A few cards at the back sing out their happy wishes. The rooftop group shot with all of us jumping is a cascade of smiles. Grandparents, siblings, all so much younger. They glisten and wilt and whirl and bounce.
 
I try to feel sad but I just can’t tap sorrow. It was a gorgeous day. Tee and I were giddy. I couldn’t stop giggling as I walked down that makeshift aisle my mother rolled out on the grass from a bolt of rainbow upholstery fabric. The sunflowers arching behind fiancé and friend opened their delight to me. Happiness still pulses there, beating in a subdued major key.
 
“When you are done, baby, do you want me to find a picture of you to put on the page?”
 
He nods but does not turn, still bent to the task of making his garden come to life. “Yep. And then put it in the book.”
 
“Okay. We can make room for you in there.”
 

Creativity, Poetry

Economy Class

smirkpretty

Here’s my kid in his Jack Sparrow
goodwill T-shirt, belly-down
in a spill of hand-me-down legos
pressing flat planes
into airplanes
singing
“I’m gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket.”

What what?

The contraption has train wheels
on the front end and truck tires
backing mismatched engines
but it takes wing
with guns blazing, enemy fighters
crashing in a fiery screech,
no match for the patchwork leviathan
my kid is smoking
like threads
like foes
like the beat he pulls
with a what what
nod
from the hole
in his pocket.

—

Apologies to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Thrift Shop.

Creativity, Happy Days

Happy 100 Days: 7

smirkpretty

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, everything was exactly right. Everything, that is, except for one little burr under my saddle.
 
The cheese grits and cranberry sauce were prepped and ready for morning. Presents were heaped under the tree. Shrek on the TV was babysitting my kid while the grownups sat in a circle around the kitchen table gabbing about things that were of no interest to him. The cousins who happen to be near Bug’s age were off with their other grandmother for the evening. The only other big kid in the house had grown up so much, he was more interested in finishing up Ulysses than in playing cards or hide-and-seek with the resident 6-year-old.
 
Between the raucous stories in the kitchen and Shrek in the living room, everyone seemed content.
 
So, why was I feeling like the Grinch?
 
This Dallas gathering has been a bright cacophony.  We are immersed in family and busy-ness, yet somehow, I am unsatisfied with the familiar chaos. Something is missing. Of course, this is the first time I have had Bug at Christmas since Tee and I broke up. But it is more than just not being with Bug’s dad. It is also the loss of ways we had created together when we became a family. Where are the Christmas carols? The nighttime walks? The outings for ice skating? The group games?
 
Why won’t anyone here sit down with my kid and play with him?
 
One thing about Tee that attracted me to him was his tribe.  They have created ways of being together and being in community that expand a person’s spirit. Hell, the first time I met his family, we attended his older sister’s wedding which took place at a YMCA camp. We celebrated her marriage with canoe races and zip lines. Tee’s family’s annual caroling party is a city-wide epic undertaking. Every holiday is an endless string of group sledding adventures and multi-generational board games. These activities are not grafted on; they are woven deeply into the fabric of their family. A person barely has to try. It is all there for the taking.
 
Of course, I couldn’t stay married just to his family. It’s a package deal. The just-add-water approach of patching a new name onto the end of my own is not an option (and didn’t work, after all).
 
The holidays are just another reminder that even in the midst of the chattering, loving embrace of my extended family, I do have to grow up and figure out how to cobble the new ways together from whatever I have on hand.
 
I know that in the coming years, Bug and I will be on our own for the holidays. We can make our own traditions. It’s just that I don’t want to wait. I wish I knew how to break familiar habits, or at least bend them enough now to put into place some of the activities I would like us to nurture in our home. It is so hard to push against the settled ways to create room for these things. It gets tiring to suggest them and to face a wall of derision and resistance. It isn’t just me. I have seen others try before me and eventually give up.
 
As the movie wound down, I pulled out paper and crayons.
 
“Sweetie, what are we going to do for Santa?”
 
Bug scooted off the couch and started re-arranging things in the den. He hung his stocking, clearing the conch shells and driftwood out from the unused brick fireplace so Santa wouldn’t knock them over. He put out the milk and cookies. Then, he sat down and wrote the note.
 
“What about the sugar?” He asked when he was finished.
 
“The sugar?”
 
“Yeah. For the donkey.” He explained that Santa has a donkey who travels with the reindeer and helps fly. Something about keeping Rudolph company up front? It was all very vague, yet Bug was firm in his knowledge. This revelation required us to fill a bowl with white sugar to feed Santa’s donkey. We also put out ten baby carrots for the reindeer. Bug arranged all of these treats in a circle around the note on the coffee table in the den.
 
“Alright, buddy. Bedtime.”
 
Bug raced to the back bedroom, leaping onto the bed, bouncing and singing nonsense.
 
“Dance, Mommy!” He had music in his bones. He shook his rear end in my direction and giggled hysterically.
 
“Where’s that iPod of mine?” I asked.
 
We found it and clicked on Bug’s favorite new tune from One Direction, that unavoidable pop number, “That’s What Makes you Beautiful.” Without speakers, the boy-band’s voices came out even tinnier and, well, tinier.
 
Bug marched around the mattresses on the floor in his jammies, bopping his shoulders and spinning in circles. Then, in a burst of excitement, he threw open the door and raced down the hallway.
 
“CHRISTMAS EVE DANCE PARTY!” He grabbed my mom from the kitchen. “Come ON, Gramma!” He dragged her into the bedroom. “DANCE!”
 
Laughing, she swayed her hips. “I can’t even hear it! What are we listening to?”
 
Bug didn’t stop to respond. He just clicked the iPod to repeat and cruised out the door.  “I’m going to get more people!”
 
One by one, he dragged every member of the family into the bedroom. First an aunt, then another, then my dad. The big cousin. An uncle. Eventually, even his ancient great-grandmother was balanced on her cane in the doorway looking both confused and delighted.
 
“Dance, everybody! It’s a Christmas Eve dance party!” Bug called. He leaped and spun and sprang across the floor, weaving between his assembled family members. Everyone swayed and grinned and made embarrassed faces at one another. As the song wound down, they began to disappear.
 
“Whew, that’s enough for me,” said one aunt.
 
“Me, too. I’m pooped!” The aunt’s boyfriend followed her back down the hallway.
 
Chuckling, folks called “Merry Christmas! Good night!”  My mom and one aunt, true troopers, stuck it out to the last chord. Then, pink-cheeked and breathless, everyone said goodnight and I shut the door.
 
“Let’s get ready for sleep, Buddy, so Santa can come.”
 
“Okay!” He said, and collapsed onto the bed.
 
My boy, not realizing that such things are not done, broke the rules and created something new. Santa’s entourage includes a donkey. At Christmas now, this member of the team simply Is and Always Has Been.  Might the same be true for bringing music, dance and play to this place? Perhaps we do not need to wait. Maybe we don’t even need to try. It might be as simple as saying, “This is what we do. Come on! Join us!”
 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 74

smirkpretty

You Will Be Sorry to Go In Here
 
As soon as we walk in the door, Bug grabs the scissors and scrap paper and scoots a chair up to the kitchen table. He first draws a monster and then pushes that aside to create a row of pumpkins on orange paper. He asks me how to spell out a warning to the trick-or-treaters. I help him sound it out. He writes “Boo Boo Boo Boo” all on his own.
 
“What are you going to make, Mommy?”
 
Uh, dinner? And a bath? I force myself to leave the dishes for the moment. I pull up a chair and join Bug at the table. “Hmm. let me see. Something scary.” I draw a witch on a broomstick, snip her out, and paste her on a background of black construction paper. This satisfies my boy for now.
 
Dinner is ready. I heap the brown rice noodles and spaghetti sauce in bowls, hiding a few spoonfuls of cooked squash in the glop. Bug wolfs it down and even finishes his broccoli. I begin to peel an orange to add another serving of the good stuff to the meal.
 
“Wait!” He blocks me. “Don’t take the skin off! Can I have it?”
 
“Sure,” I laugh. I hand him the orange and take the second one from the bowl. “Can I peel this one?”
 
“Okay, yeah,” he says, but he is not paying attention to me. He has pushed his plate aside and taken up the marker. He draws on the orange and then cuts and colors a little strip of paper. He finds the tape under all this mess and sticks the little strip onto the top of the fruit.
 
“There!” He says, a big grin brightening his face. He turns the orange towards me. He has drawn on a triangle-eyed face and attached a makeshift stem. I laugh.
 
“That’s awesome, buddy! You made a jack-o-lantern!”
 
He goes back to eating his dinner. “Let’s make Halloween things all night,” he says.
 
“That’s a great idea,” I say.
 
After dinner and bath, we paste a few of our scary pictures on the front door. In bed, he takes up his clipboard while I read, drawing first a ghost, and then a vampire with red fangs, and then a leprechaun hiding a pot of gold behind a stone wall.
 
The papers flutter to the ground, one after the other, carpeting the bedroom floor.
 

Uncategorized

Happy 100 Days: 80

smirkpretty

So hard to find my way
Now that I’m all on my own.

I make the first model for the lego cake myself. With the 8-blocks and the 4-blocks, I show Bug what I can do.
 
“Why don’t you add one more there?” He asks, pointing to a space in between.
 
“Well, a square four-block won’t fit.”
 
“No, I mean, you could do a two-top block.”
 
I look at the little model and consider the slabs of cake in the fridge. “Well, I guess I could cut one of the squares in half and make a two-top.”
 
We work together to make a second model. This one has an extra blue two-top in between. I wonder out loud how I will squeeze a narrow chunk of cake in between. Frosting is a little stickier than plastic, after all.
 
“Let’s try it,” he says.
 
The “us” inferred here is pretty much “Mommy.” I have been working on this cake since 8:30 last night. The real process started two weeks ago when I stumbled across block-shaped candles at the supermarket. The ideas fell like rain and were just as hard to catch. I bought a bag of block candy at the specialty sweet shop, three colors of decorative icing at Joanne’s, and four boxes of backup cake mix during my last run to the grocery store.
 
This whole undertaking is ridiculous. Surely, better options exist. A frosted sheet cake with a little “Happy 6” flourish will do the trick. If we have a hankering for something fancier, everyone assures me that Costco has a fine bakery. Last year, I commissioned a friend at work to make a pirate treasure chest cake for Bug’s party. Candy necklaces, lollipop rings, and chocolate gelt spilled out from under the fondant-coated lid, and the cake itself was delicious. Even with a price tag of nearly $100, the masterpiece was a steal.
 
I can’t afford bargains of that variety anymore. I couldn’t then. Also, “fancy” is not the objective, which begs the question: What is the motivation for this two-week long undertaking? If not expedience, expense, or keeping up with the Mrs. Stay-at-Home-Jones, then what?
 
It’s hard to say. I guess I just like the idea of making things by hand. Even though I never have time and it wears me out to do it, I still try to make the holiday ornaments, invitations, and napkin rings myself. For Bug’s party tomorrow, I coated two giant sheets of cardboard with tempera paint and decorated them with bright letters and patterned duct tape. It would have been a lot less time consuming just to use poster board and markers, or to have spent $2.99 on a pre-cut birthday banner. I just couldn’t help myself. It’s as if my right brain has not bothered to open a paper in a few years and is oblivious to the news that I am now a working single mom. My brown-eyed girl is still out slipping and sliding all along the waterfall, trying to catch a rainbow.
 
She is also the one who is awake here at nearly 11:00pm waiting for the sourdough bread in the oven to finish rising. She thought baking a fresh loaf from scratch while also cobbling together a two-tier lego cake for Bug would be “fun.” Every time I try to explain to her that I am applying for a home loan, too, and that somehow in all of this, I still have to raise this child and earn a living, she just sort of wanders off in the vague direction of the misty morning.

Do you remember when
we used to sing?
Sha-la-la-la-la . . .

Something is undoubtedly going to give (something undoubtedly already has), but today, I am making a lego cake. My only moment of existential doubt arrives when I am trying to frost frozen marshmallow halves and they keep sticking to the fork and spatula, flipping over upside-down and smearing the cake. I look down at the glop of red-beet-dyed pink glop smearing my fingers, the counter, and everything but the marshmallow, and ask, What the hell am I doing? I have already snapped at Bug a half dozen times today and at Giovanni seven more, assembling a neat baker’s dozen of profanities. What I am teaching my son? That celebrations are stressful? That cooking is drudgery? That anger is a suitable sidekick for unchecked perfectionism?
 
I am nearing the point of tears when Bug walks into the kitchen. “What is that, Mommy?”
 
“Hands at your sides, kiddo. No touching.”
 
He steps up onto a stool and considers the multicolored blocks on the counter. With effort, he keeps his hands down. Then his face breaks into a grin. “That’s the cake!”
 
“Yep, it is.”
 
“What are you doing?” He looks at the pepto-bismol pink glop and the dripping skewer in my hand.
 
“Marshmallows.”
 
He thinks for a moment. Then, “Oh! I know! Those are the little knob things that make the legos snap together!” He gazes at the mess, watching me back-flip one circle into place. “Can I help?”
 
“Oh, why not.” So much for perfection. I find a few extra knives and toothpicks. Together, we mangle a few pink marshmallows and then start on the chocolate ones. Bug is diligent, spreading all around the edges and even the bottom to help everything stick together. He looks at the cake now as if seeing it for the first time. “Is that going to be the blue two-top?”
 
“It sure is.”
 
He steps down and finds the two mini models we made, one with the extra blue piece and one without. He holds them up, comparing the two miniatures with the massive cake. “You made it fit!”
 
“Yeah! You said I should try it, so I did. And it worked.”
 
Bug can’t stop ogling this creation. “Wow,” he says. “That is so much cake.” He is really smiling now. He picks up another marshmallow and starts back to work.
 
I see now. I see what he sees (which is what I saw and then promptly forgot). I see the way inspiration can fall like rain. So much, so fast, so free, so very hard to catch. And when it lands in the vicinity of your hands, you don’t wait until you are better rested or better employed or better situated. You open them to it. You follow its lead. You make whatever something is asking to be made.
 
—
 
Many thanks (and apologies) to Van Morrison for Brown-Eyed Girl
 

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Happy 100 Days: 94

smirkpretty

 
At the Colonial Farm Park, we walk back into 1771. It is all bonnets and woolen trousers. The family living there hangs tobacco in the barn to dry. The cast-iron belly of a pot hangs low over a fire that heats a potage of turnips, onions, and potatoes to boiling. The children are at work pulling “mile o’minute” from the fence with large wooden rakes. The skinny black cat is stuck in the tree, but one of the women uses a thick branch to help him down. As soon as he is back on the ground, he races off to terrorize the chickens.
 
Bug and his friend scoot around the corner to get in on the action when the clutch of young people returns from rounding up a loose piglet. A boy tosses darts made of corn cobs through a hoop. The girls spread their skirts and rest in the shade before supper. They show the two children from the future their dolls made of twisted corn husks wrapped in scraps of hand-dyed wool.
 
The place is inches away from one of the most congested metropolitan areas in the country. Or rather, what will become such a place in another 250 years. My friend’s little boy points out a cumulus cloud. A leaf falls into the collar of his shirt and he giggles. I hear the geese jabber at someone passing over the hill.
 
Time passes. Maybe a long time, maybe not. My friend and I talk, sitting on stumps outside the warming face of the log house where garlic dries in the rafters. Bug and his buddy are somewhere out of sight. A chicken squawks its disapproval at the relentless kitten. Eventually, Bug comes around to see me.
 
“Mommy, do you know what we are doing?”
 
“I have no idea.”
 
“We’re building a dollhouse.”
 
We rise and shake of the torpor. Indeed, he and my friend’s daughter have collected fallen sticks and sleeves of bark, gathered stones, overturned logs. They continue to balance these mismatched building block across one another, higher and wider. All around them, the skirts spread, the bonnets loll. No one speaks. Somehow, the house is erected.
 
My friend and I sit some more. Later, we wake, and 20 years has passed. The sun has moved our rough seats into the shade. We shiver a little and pull sweaters back over our sunburned shoulders. When we leave, we find the children have assembled the corn-husk family in its new quarters. The rooster struts past, swishing his black-ringed tail. The kitten watches from a distance. Everyone is ready for winter.
 

 

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Happy 100 Days: 95

smirkpretty

After days of considering his options (Pirate? Harry Potter?), tonight is the night for the big reveal. “I know what I want to be for Halloween,” Bug announces at bedtime. A great pause follows, as if the moment requires a final gut-check. Then he tells me. “A leprechaun.”
 
I grin but hide it. If he knows I am happy, he will walk away and never look back. I nod slowly, forcing a poker face. “Hmm. I guess that could work. How are we going to do it?”
 
We have been reading a library book which is probably long overdue now because we can’t bear to part with it. The Leprechaun’s Gold by Pamela Duncan Edwards is a story about a kind old harpist who goes on a journey with his more ambitious protege. The harpist’s willingness to help one of “the little people” who has landed in a tight spot serves him well in the end. Four-leaf clovers are hidden among the illustrations, so Bug really examines the pages while I read. I like that the story offers up hope that generosity can beat out ruthless self-interest. Bug likes the Irish accents that I mangle as I read.
 
Bug does not know about my side trip to the Goodwill two weeks ago when I dropped nearly $40 on every green article of clothing I could find. An olive straw hat, a woven tam o’shanter, leggings, a fleece vest, a full-length silk overcoat in mint, a leather handbag, and a few other odds and ends. I came home and hid these items in random spots in our rooms.
 
“Leprechauns need something. . .” he says to himself. I do not fill in the blank. He opens his closet and gasps as the glimmering coat appears. He touches it. “That’s green,” he says.
 
“Let’s see what’s in my scarf bin,” I suggest. He discovers the two hats and he turns them around a few time in his hands, looking at them from every angle. In my bag drawer, he digs out the green handbag. He collects all these things on his bedroom floor, unzipping the purse and examining it. A few minutes later, I find him scrounging under his bed. He pulls out a cigar box where he has stashed all his “pirate gold,” an assortment of foreign coins Tee and I have let him squirrel away over the years. He begins to stash the coins in the zippered pockets. Before coming to bed, he picks up a crayon and a brown marker and starts writing on the side of the purse.
 
“What are you doing?”
 
“I’m drawing a four-leaf clover,” he tells me. When he is finished, he drapes the bag carefully over the corner of the chair and climbs in next to me.
 
“What else do leprechauns have?” Bug asks, eyes drooping.
 
“I don’t know,” I say. “Should we go to the library tomorrow and get a few more books about leprechauns so we can see?”
 
“Yep,” he says, ooching up close to me. “You can read, Mommy,” he says with a yawn. He opens the book for me.
 
Long ago, before even your great-great-grandfather was born, there lived in a small village in Ireland a man known to all as Old Pat.
 
This is one of those moments in which the payoff for the years of effort makes itself known. This is tonight’s truly big reveal: It does not even occur to my son that we will buy a costume. Bug knows in his bones that in our family, we rely on our inspiration and follow it up with imagination. Then, we use our hands.
 
The part he does not yet know is that we also stash the charms in exactly the right spots for being found when the moment calls for a little luck.