February | 2015 | pull up a chair

February 27, 2015

life: the one-time offer

wise souls have been preaching it, teaching it, imploring, beseeching, practically gluing the words onto billboards tucked by the sides of the busiest highways: “this is your one short life. don’t waste it.”

the original disappearing act; with every day lived your sum is shortened. a beginning with built-in end.

we bow our head, nod along, swear out loud we’ve gotten the message: we’re paying attention.

and then, in the hum and the thrum of empty refrigerator shelves, and school buses that rolled to the corner before you had your shoes tied, in the numbing blurring cacophony of laundry piles, and deadlines, and forms that must be signed and scanned and sent back whence they came, we watch all our promises flitter away, like so many dried paper flakes, antiqued and yellowed and lost over time.

but then, we wake up one monday morning, and we find these words from a friend:

“I have learned one thing that I want to emphasize more strongly than I typically do: Your whole life can change in a moment. One phone call out of the blue, one consult from the doctor, one misjudged stoplight, one thoughtless word, one head turned in the wrong direction and boom. Life as you knew it will never be the same. I know this and I am living it right now.

“So this is my advice:

“If you are sleepwalking through your life wake up, before the universe does it for you.

“If you are unhappy, figure out why, and put together a plan to change the circumstances causing it.”*

she goes on. brilliantly. and her words shook me to my core. sobered me. so sobered me.

because they slipped right into the crack in my heart that had been wedged wide open. opened because just the day before i’d been sitting at the foot of the couch on which a dear and deeply beloved friend was draped, under blankets, her head propped on pillows. her eyes as animated as they’ve ever been. even though she was recovering from brain surgery. even though she’d gotten news just the week before, news of the sort that does one of two things: crumples you into a ball, or rocket-blasts you into the clearest-eyed vision you’ve ever seen.

my friend went with the latter. she said, as we sat at her feet, that the whole reel of her life had been passing before her eyes, and she’d spent the weekend telling her beautiful children the few things she wanted them always to know. “i was making pronouncements,” she said, making it sound like she was some sort of moses on the mountaintop, bellowing into the lungs, and the hearts, of her kids the few short prescriptions she held for living a deep and meaningful life.

the sorts of words you might whisper as you watch your little girl, suddenly grown and deeply beautiful, slide into her bridal gown. the sorts of things you’d want to say as you cradled your just-born grand baby for the very first time. the very words that would spill from your lips as you watched your firstborn, or your last-born, walk across a stage at graduation. or, perhaps, the sorts of things you might say when you’re simply chopping carrots, side by side on an ordinary tuesday. or as you sit under a star-stitched sky, wondering, wishing, weaving the night with whatever it is that rises up from your heart.

my friend didn’t know anymore if she’d be there, for moments so big or so small. she didn’t know if she’d make it to those times when you squeeze the hand of someone you love, and proclaim the scant few words that say everything, when each little word is the vessel for volumes: i love you. i am so proud of this flight that you’ve taken, the way you’ve spread your wings, seized the moment, believed in the possible, fought for what’s right and what’s good. i’m so blessed by the whole of who you are. stay steady. go with God. do not surrender.

and then, after that sunday at the foot of my friend’s couch, where she covered the still-raw scar at the back of her head in her brown-hooded sweatshirt, came monday, and the words up above from my friend:

“If you are sleepwalking through your life wake up, before the universe does it for you.”

and then tuesday, late tuesday, came word of another friend. another friend who’d been wheeled into another surgery. the news from that surgery was the sort that wakes up the sleepwalkers. the sort that rattles you, and leaves you gasping for breath. the sort you never expected to hear, or to read as it trickled in in an email, one of those emails sent to a small circle of friends. and you sit there staring at your computer, reading the words over and over. because tears are clouding your eyes.

and so all week, all i could think about was how the universe is hellbent on waking us up. and we’d do best to pay attention. long-lasting attention.

because friends whom you’ve known forever and ever it seems — friends whose newborn babies you’ve cradled, friends whose weddings you’ve danced at, friends whom you’ve held as they buried their mother or their lover, as they’ve struggled to glue back together their own broken hearts, friends you only ever thought of as invincible and unbreakable — those friends are facing the climb of a lifetime. climbs that involve hope upon hope. and unending faith.

and you can’t help but wonder why the universe thinks you need to hear it in double-time. and why, maybe, please, they couldn’t both be spared all the suffering.

and then, because life is ever mysterious and always breath-taking, you stumble across lines in a book you just happen to be reading for work. lines like these:

“teach us to number our days,” cried the psalmist. “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

or, saint augustine: “it is only in the face of death that man’s self is born.”

or annie dillard: “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

and so you pull your weary and broken self off the couch. you rise to the occasion, the occasion called life. you cook and you freeze for your friend. you notice the snowflake tumbling. you fall asleep counting the mercies and wonders the day brought to you. you climb the stairs one more time when your little one calls to you, “mom, can you come talk?”

you live and you breathe, and you lift your friends’ struggles onto your shoulders. you vow to bend over the sickbeds suddenly before you, and moisten parched lips, and drink in pronouncements. you will fight for tight parking spots on the days when you drive them to hospitals. you will walk with those friends for as long as it takes.

and along the way you will make clear to the universe, and to the depths of your very own soul: these hours are precious, are sacred, and with all of my soul, i will fill each and every blessed one with the purest, clear-eyed attention to beauty and wisdom and all that is so deeply holy.

i promise. we promise.

with all of our hearts, amen.

just last night, as i was shuffling off to bed, i got a note from a dear friend of the chair, one whose tenderness is measured in part by the way she strolls the farmers’ market in summer filling bag after bag with organic lettuces and various greens for her decades-old hard-shelled friends, tortoises she’s tended for as long as 40 years (if not longer). and that dear friend, who also has tended lovingly to her aging papa, and to his rose bushes and his plot of home-grown tomatoes, she wrote to say that her papa had died this week. and so, for her, we send love, and deepest sympathies. as she wrote in her note: “it was the day i’d been dreading for 20 years.”

for everyone — and the someones they love — who is suffering, or struggling, or desperately straining to stay afloat, we hold you up in light and in love. in prayer and petition without end.

* the beautiful wise words above came from my dear friend who writes the beautiful blog, “on the wings of the hummingbird.” the link to her post is above…..

a question hardly seems proper, but knowing it will unearth bounties of wisdom: what woke you from the sleepwalking?

17 Comments

February 20, 2015

when the past pops out of nowhere: “can you help?” a search for motherlove

the message popped up out of nowhere late saturday afternoon. this is what it said:

Are you the individual that wrote the article in the Chicago Tribune back on March 10, 1987 – Titled, “Police Hunt Mother of Abandoned Baby”? If so, I wanted to ask you a couple questions. And by the way…, I am that baby!

my heart nearly pounded through my chest. i wracked my brain. i couldn’t for the life of me remember writing the story. how could i not remember? i typed the words into a google search, and sure enough, up popped this:

Police Hunt Mother Of Abandoned Baby
March 10, 1987|By Barbara Mahany.

that was me, all right. so i started to read:

Baby “Patrick Doe,“ oblivious to the stirrings about him, lay docile in his incubator at Central Du Page Hospital Monday, interrupting his sleep only for bottles of baby formula every four hours–or an occasional grimace for one of the many news photographers parading with cameras through the nursery.

Outside the nursery, Glen Ellyn police undertook their first-ever search for “a missing mother,“ said Lt. Dennis W. Jamieson, and the bureaucratic machinery was put in gear to assure safe-keeping for the baby should his mother not be found.

In the western suburb, a team of police investigators was dispatched to track down “a recently pregnant woman, . . . no longer pregnant and without a newborn,“ Jamieson said. Police were distributing flyers with black-and-white photographs of the baby, and a teletype bulletin to neighboring police departments had been sent over the wires.

Baby Patrick, a healthy white infant thought to be 4 or 5 days old and weighing 7 pounds, 10 ounces, was found early Saturday morning lying next to a redwood planter along the driveway of a home in an affluent Glen Ellyn neighborhood.

The baby, wrapped in two nightgowns and a plastic diaper bag, was discovered at 9:37 a.m. by George G. Dickey, of Lorraine Road, in Glen Ellyn. Dickey told police he first saw two plastic bags in his planter at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday, but thought someone had dropped garbage there.

When he went outside three hours later, he saw the baby`s head poking out from one bag. The other bag was filled with five disposable diapers and diaper pins.

Dickey rushed the baby inside, his wife changed it out of its soaked nightgowns. The couple then called the police and the infant was taken by ambulance to Central Du Page.

He was initially considered at risk because his temperature registered below normal, 96 degrees Fahrenheit, but doctors said Monday that Patrick was “in very good health“ and listed him in good condition.

Because the baby`s umbilical cord was tied with a rubber band, hospital officials and police surmise the baby was not born in a hospital, preventing them from tracking down his mother through hospital records or birth certificates.

By mid-morning Monday, calls from prospective adoptive parents were trickling into the hospital in Winfield, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and the Adoptive Infant Center of Illinois.

“As far as prospective adoptive parents are concerned, this is a dream come true,“ said DCFS spokesman David Schneidman. “But for the poor soul who decided to leave this baby for adoption, this is the biggest tragedy on earth.“

On average, DCFS gets involved in about two abandoned infant cases each month, Schneidman said. But, he added, those babies are rarely Caucasian, and “never before from an affluent suburb like Glen Ellyn.“

Officially, DCFS is now the baby`s legal guardian, Schneidman said, and if the baby`s mother is not found by the time Patrick is discharged from the hospital at the end of the week, DCFS will coordinate foster care and eventually recommend the baby`s adoptive parents. If the mother is found, DCFS will be one of the complainants in a child neglect suit, and if deemed advisable, will assist in counseling the mother.

For now, though, the curly-haired baby is content to lie sucking his baby bottles, lullabyed by a crew of doting nurses. It was one of them who thought “Patrick“ to be the perfect name for a babe born so near the feast day of the Irish patron saint.

nearly 28 years ago.

and, through mysteries and miracles of this cyber-age, the baby, now grown, now wise to the ways of the internet, had found me. he’d been banging on doors, getting no answers. he was trying to find his birth mother.

he found me.

for the next couple hours, a flurry of emails zipped back and forth. he told me what he knew. i leapt into reporter mode. and, most of all, mother mode: i too am a mother now. and i have a boy of my own, two boys, the older of whom is a mere six years younger than “baby Patrick.” i couldn’t imagine my boy trying to find his mother. i couldn’t imagine how achingly dark and lonely it felt, on the cold february night when “baby Patrick” wrote me, to be emailing strangers trying to find a shred of hope, a thread that just might lead back to his mama.

every word i typed to “baby Patrick” i tried to type as if i were a long-lost mother, searching for my long-lost boy. i tried to fill each keystroke, each space in between, with all the love a mother would ooze, if she’d been away for nearly three decades.

in a stroke of sheer miracle by the end of the evening, i found the detective who’d worked the case. he’s retired now, lives not far away. i promised “baby Patrick” i’d call the very next day, sunday, when it wouldn’t be so odd for the phone to ring. when i stood the best chance of squeezing in the words, “former tribune reporter,” the only words that i thought might get my foot in the door, might keep the call from clicking into the hopeless drone of the dial tone, the sound of getting nowhere.

i called, not long after church on sunday. after two or three rings, someone answered. hope rose in my chest. i heard a “hello.” i shot right in with, “Lieutenant Jamieson?” using all my reporter politeness, using all my don’t-hang-up-on-me hope. i figured the lieutenant might warm to being remembered by his rank. i was right.

he warmed, all right. and, as soon as i explained the story, how i’d gotten an email from this blessed kid, this kid searching high and low for his mama, soon as i explained how the kid was getting nowhere, couldn’t get anyone to return his calls, how we had to try to help, and i wondered if maybe he remembered if there’d ever been any leads in the case, had anyone ever gotten a whiff of the mother, the lieutenant wrenched open the file cabinet of his memory, and promptly riffled straight to the folder marked, “baby Patrick, 03/87.”

in piercing detail he told me everything he remembered. how the particular house where the baby was left was one tucked back from the road. but, he explained, there was a planter, a flower pot, he called it, down by the curb. “good place to leave something if you want it to be found,” the lieutenant offered.

but here’s the part where you might wince: the fellow living in the house could see from the window something sticking out of the pot. “he thought it was garbage,” the lieutenant recalled. the fellow walked down the drive — three hours later — saw two plastic bags, and that’s when he saw there was a baby in one. a real live squawking baby.

far as the lieutenant knew, no clues had ever turned up. he was pretty sure he would have known if they’d found the mama, or any hint of the mama. he even mentioned how, over the years, he’d driven his wife by the house, thought of “baby Patrick” every time. and since i asked, since i’d called on a quiet sunday afternoon, made him think back over the decades, he did have ideas of where “baby Patrick,” now all grown up, having been adopted and deeply loved but still in search of whoever it was who dropped him off at the flower pot, the lieutenant had ideas of where “baby Patrick” could turn. in other words, at least a trace more hope.

sure thing, i hopped off the phone and wrote “baby Patrick” as swiftly and furiously as i could get my fingers to type. i drenched each letter of every word with all the love i could muster, with mama love.

i wasn’t his mother, not remotely. heck, i’d barely remembered the story at first — a fact that rinsed me in shame. but in the hour of his darkness, in the hour of his hope beyond hope, i could imagine — piercingly — just how deeply his mama might be typing if she were on the verge of finding her boy.

so i infused every word with mama love. i prayed mightily that that love might — through some wild-eyed, otherworldly, transitive property — flow from his faraway mama’s heart to mine and to his.

we signed off, at the end of 24 hours, with what i hope was a lasting trace of something that felt a wee bit like mother-and-son connection. but, honestly, i worry it might have left him emptier than before.

it hurt to tell him that there’d never been a trace. it hurt to tell him the part about the man in the house seeing what looked like garbage bags. (i couldn’t bear to type those words, “garbage bags,” so i didn’t; i wrote, “i think of how your mama loved you enough to tuck you in what she thought was a safe place..”)

it made me think how in life we never know when we’re called on to be the instruments of love, of stitching together a shattered heart. it made me think about how, in a story i’d not even remembered writing, there was a someone who found in it the one trace of hope he so needed.

it made me think how much it all matters.

i wish like anything i could have helped him find his mama. and, short of that, i’m so deeply grateful that for one short day, and a flurry of a few dozen emails, i could imagine the love and the fear that would have riveted that mama’s heart as she left her newborn curly-haired boy on the side of the road, in a place she was sure he’d be found, with the few bits she could gather — the extra sleeper, the five disposable diapers, and, most of all, the prayer that must have slipped across her lips. and lasted forever in the deep down crannies of her heart.

and that was sunday, the very same day we found out a dear dear friend was in the ER, and would likely be going in for brain surgery. which happened wednesday, her daughter flown home from her first year of college, her highschool-aged son sitting tight, on a hospital couch, pressed against his papa’s side, all through the very long day that stretched into the night. it’s been a week in which all i could do was pray, and pray, and pray. an apt beginning to lent, the season of repentance on the road to redemption.

the reasons for prayer are many this friday morning. and the question to ponder is this: have you ever discovered that you were an unsuspecting player in one of life’s core dramas? and did that discovery make you remember, all over again, how very much it matters that, at every turn, we live a life of pure attention to all that is holy and good and filled up with love?

22 Comments

February 14, 2015

special edition: love that colors outside the lines

because this day of love just tiptoed in, and caught me breathless, i decided i need to post a love note today. to say thank you to all of you who have so lavished my heart — all our hearts — with so much tender hearted care. because you’ve illuminated otherwise shadowed nooks and crannies. because you’ve allowed this to be a carefully-curated corner of the world (cyber turned real) where what we practice is a love that colors outside the lines. that allows for the unorthodox. that sees no divisions, no divisions of hard-heartedness anyway. that invites the unfurling of our most tucked-away places, the places that are only just beginning to find a voice, a stammered whisper, as we put breath to words for the very first time. that ever ever holds up our hearts — our wobbly, not-so-certain, sometimes scared hearts — and declares, “you got this.”

because through the mysteries and miracles of time and wonder we’ve found our way to this place, this place we’ve carved out, like rivulets of stream to a river rock, it’s one place i’ve come to count on for sustenance of heart and soul. i put words out on the table. and, in holy communion, you lift them up, sift through, search for some nugget that speaks to you, and you in turn, in kind, lay down your wisdoms, your poetry, your bits and your snippets of radiance and grace. and by and by, we’ve got wisdom stew bubbling away. we’ve got love that colors outside the lines. we’ve got that little squeeze of the hand, of the shoulders, that chases away the cold. that propels us on. even on days when we’d otherwise crumble.

happy blessed day of uncanniest love. of all of us finding our way, here where love comes fierce and comes gentle, but always always washes over us, and bathes us in deepest-down holy.

15 Comments

February 13, 2015

the stories we carry close to the heart

i was late getting to the old maple table this morning. late, because i was drawn to another kitchen table before i could get to my own. some mornings are like that. some hours are like that.

i was drawn to a table where a mother i love wanted to talk. fueled on fresh-poured coffee, the tears soon enough flowed. the mother to whom i was talking buried her beautiful daughter just 20 months ago. we talked about grief, and the state of the heart after the dying. she talked about her blessing, the blessing of her daughter having had the time to wrestle her demons, and make peace before dying. she talked about another mother’s absence of blessing. a mother whose daughter was knocked dead in the dark of night, at a bitter cold bus stop, when a drunk driver — one who forgot to turn on the headlights of her car when she tumbled out of a tavern and slumped behind the wheel — drove into a tangle of college kids on the snow-piled side of a road, and so the mother of the beautiful girl who died — a “songbird,” my friend called her — never got the chance to have the last conversation you’d have if you knew in your heart this was the last. she worried that the last conversation between the other mother and child might have been more of the sort that mothers and children so often have: “did you remember to make your reservations for spring break?” “don’t forget to check your mailbox, i’m sending the boots you left under your bed.” or, maybe: “oh, sweetie, why don’t you just tell your friends how tired you are, and stay in and catch up on sleep tonight?”

the thing is, if you bumped into my friend in the grocery store, if you watched her tossing bunches of kale into her cart, while tossing rejoinders over her shoulder, witticisms that made anyone in earshot break into giggles (because she is that funny, and most often in high animation), you’d never in a million years guess how much heartache she’s borne. you’d not know that, after four hellish years battling the rarest of cancers, she buried that daughter, and has a son who won’t ever walk, nor utter a word, and whose meals are zipped in a blender and poured in a tube that goes straight to his belly.

my friend is but one of the ones who carries a story, a volume of stories, close to the heart.

she’s not alone. we all have a story. every day, chances are, there is one something weighting us down, bearing against our chest in ways that make it harder to breathe. it’s not always life shattering, but it might be the sort of worry that infuses even your sleep, wakes you up with a start, spares you no break from its drumbeat.

this week, on one particularly extraordinary morning, i found myself amid a circle of women who, one by one, let on that they too carried a story. and that’s what got me to thinking about how many of the myriad souls we bump up against in the course of the day are waging some unspoken battle, the likes of which we’ll never know. never imagine.

and thus, as wise philo of alexandria, the greek-speaking jewish philosopher, instructed: “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

there was, first, the woman i’ve known for years, though not too terribly well. i’d once written a newspaper story about the children’s choir she long ago ran with clockwork precision. then, years later, when i wrote about my own mother’s breast-cancer battle, that same woman reached out and wrote how she, too, had been diagnosed the very same week, and knew by heart the battle. when i bumped into her just this week, she was sporting two very black eyes. she’d fallen, she said, changing a light bulb. seems after three bouts with cancer, she’d developed some bizarre syndrome that left her numb from the waist down — and apparently, it hasn’t much slowed her. and it was only in passing that she mentioned something about her son, mentioned for the very first time that he was quadriplegic.

“oh my gosh,” i interjected, “you have a son who is quadriplegic? was it an accident?”

she answered, softly, but hardly a whisper: “failed suicide. he was a freshman in high school. thirty-five years ago.”

i inhaled a very big prayer as i soaked in her words.

and then, just minutes later, after eggs and coffee were served, after i’d turned to my right, continued talking to a lovely woman i’d met three months earlier, this woman mentioned matter-of-factly that her upper chest was sore, and she’d be heading home to ice it. i asked if she’d pulled a muscle. “no,” she said, “i was diagnosed with breast cancer just before christmas. i had a double mastectomy four weeks ago.” and all morning, i’d only been thinking how elegant a figure she cut, with her sleek gold-buttoned black suit, her streaked-blonde bob, and her eloquent animated conversation.

we never know the stories carried close to the heart.

we never know when we’re sitting next to a woman who, day in and day out, worries about a son who can’t move a muscle. and who got there from the depths of unspeakable pain.

we don’t know that from the time we last spoke to someone till the moment we’ve once again bumped into that someone, she’s suffered the full-throttle blow of life turned on its spine: being told she has cancer, weighing the options and outcomes, and being wheeled off to surgery that will forever alter her God-given life-bearing body.

when you’re listening, when you keep your ear to the heart, these stories come and come swiftly. the calls from the doctor. the unexpected email. the squawk from the bedside radio, first thing in the morning. the reminder, over and over and over: these hours are precious, are holy. live as if each moment matters. because, the truth is, it does. and walk in radiant grace because we’ve really no clue who in our path is shattered, and broken, and deeply in need of the life-giving love with which we might bathe their wounds. or embolden their march into battle.

oh, goodness. it was either write about what really stirred me this week, or count up the 50 ways to really, truly tell someone you love them (in light of tomorrow’s feast of love, valentine’s day). seems i went with the truly stirring. forgive the darkness. the point is the light: the instruction to hold each hour, each encounter, each blessed someone, up to the radiance. life will come without pause, without bumpers to soften the blow. the instrument of healing, of love, is ours and ours alone: we can choose to tend with tender loving care. we can choose to be ever aware of who among us might bear more than we can imagine. we can lighten their load, and pray to God the favor’s returned when the load that needs bearing is ours.

how are you stirred by philo’s instruction: “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle”? or, alternately, might you tell a bit about the unwitting saints who’ve lightened your load at the very moment when it all seemed unbearable?

16 Comments

February 9, 2015

the original mother nature (appearing elsewhere…)

a note: a dear writerly friend of mine, laura lynn brown, author of “everything that makes you mom,” and the award-winning essay, “fifty things about my mother,” published by iowa review and slate, has carved out a writing place for all things motherly. it’s called “makes you mom,” and in her ever generous ways, she asked if she might pick something i wrote about my mama and post it there, as she begins her library of motherliness. i would do anything for laura, so i said yes. it’s posted there this morning, and in hopes of helping more readers find her newfound corner of the cyberworld, where soon enough laura and her team of writerly compatriots will be accepting submissions, i’m pointing you toward laura’s lovely new botanically-bedecked site. and even though a monday post feels a bit like getting out of bed and forgetting to change out of my jammies, here’s the pull up a chair post (originally written in 2007) that dear laura chose to post. i’ll include the first few grafs here, but to read it to the end, you’ll need to click the link. that’s how the cyberworld often works. and how it works this fine and foggy monday morning…..

we didn’t know it, her little brood. we thought everyone’s home movies had pans of tree tops, flashes of scarlet tanager in between the frames of children waddling, waving, being silly for the camera.

coulda fooled us. didn’t every mother teach her hatchlings to hush when an oriole was in the yard? to rush out and scatter halves of oranges, the winged things’ sweet reward for populating her old oaks.

doesn’t everyone get daily, heck, hourly if warranted, phone calls with the up-to-the-minute news of the baby screech owls whose mama pirated the wood duck house, high up in the trees, and taught her babies to fly, right over my mama’s head?

when you grew up with my mama, you took these things for granted. you had no clue how much you’d learned, how much she’d taught you about the world of God’s creation while other children were merely trying to memorize the capitals of algeria, and bolivia, and, perhaps, the republic of congo.

it came slowly to my attention one day sitting in the newsroom, when an extremely intelligent friend of mine, a friend who grew up in queens, was wondering what the red bird was, not the one with the orange belly, she said, but the one that was red all over.

you mean the cardinal? i asked, as if she’d asked which letter followed C.

but you didn’t even look that up in a book, she cried, unnecessarily impressed.

well, no. but my mama is the original mother nature. or at least my original mother nature, my very own earth mama. and some things, you just absorb.

(to keep reading, please click the link below….)

http://makesyoumom.com/original-mother-nature/

blessings, and see you friday, when i will remember to get out of bed and change out of my jammies…

and while you’re at it, please tell your friends about “makes you mom,” and the lovely work my dear friend laura is unfurling…..

8 Comments

February 6, 2015

heartbeat home

it’s quiet here this morning, too quiet. it’s been that way for 10 long weeks.

the only sound is the susurration of the furnace. poor overtaxed furnace. burning kilowatts to try to keep us warm, to keep the goosebumps at bay.

the missing sound is the tick that follows the tock that follows the tick. and on and on and on.

there’s a clock, an old old clock, one once packed up in a florida house, laid carefully atop a formica-slabbed kitchen table, not unlike a baby after a bath, wrapped in towels, slipped in a box, and carefully carefully sent from west palm beach to chicago. where, once it arrived, we lifted it, hung it, wound it, and listened.

i’ve been listening ever since.

i’ve aligned my heart to the tick and tock of that old clock — a clock whose provenance we have only guessed at. i thought dutch. a clocksmith told me “mexican.” what i do know of its provenance is that my beloved, that tall bespectacled fellow, had a grandpa who loved clocks. and that grandpa’s pride and joy — or the ticking one, anyway — was his wall of clocks from across the time line and the world map. that wall, in that house down florida way, it clanged and squawked and chimed, a ticking-tocking quarter-hour reverie.

i never met that grandpa, but the grandma to whom he’d long been paired, she became, in one fell swoop, the dearest grandma i ever knew. i might have spent the rest of my happy days bopping around as the irish catholic granddaughter of a teeny, wrinkled, jewish fireball, but she died 11 years ago this week, far too soon even though she was pushing 93 and change. they called her the “teaneck tornado,” my jewish grandma, the one who took college classes into her eighties, the one who once threatened to fly a slab of cow in her suitcase so she could teach me how to make a brisket. the one whose squeaky “barb!” — a puncturing pronunciation that launched every long-distance rapid-fire tete-a-tete — i still can hear, without even closing my eyes to crank the long-gone volume.

that grandma — her name was syl — she shipped off the clock, and twice a week for 23 years, i wound it. the rest of the time, i counted on it to keep the rhythms of my hours, to be the heartbeat of our house. it moved, in the back seat of the station wagon, from our city house to this old house out where lanes are leafy and the lake is near enough that, on a windy day, i can make out the rhythms of the waves shooshing against the shore.

and there’s no sound that says “i’m home” more certainly than the tick and tock and quarter-hour chime of that old timekeeper.

so when it slowed to the silence that follows the tick, when i realized the tock was not coming, we all stared wide-eyed at the wall. as if there’d been a death in the family. certainly, there’d been a silencing. the heartbeat of the house was gone, erased, snuffed out. and in a house where these days most every purchase is weighed, is considered, we didn’t take lightly the news that this clock’s stay in the timekeeper’s infirmary would tally quite a bill.

but, not unlike the ancient cat who prowls the soft spots of the house, the house’s heartbeat is beyond domestic calculation, outside the accountant’s domain. if your striped old cat is ailing, you wrap the furry fellow in a towel and you ferry him to the vet. so, too, the clock.

i swallowed hard as i lifted the old clock from the wall. and, yes, i wrapped it in old bath towels. i parked as close to the door of the timekeeper’s shop as i could get — anything to slash the chance of me and the clock skittering to the sidewalk, in a thousand irreparable pieces. and i turned it over with all the solemnity of a mother sending off her little boy for a tonsillectomy (okay, maybe minus the tears, but trembling nonetheless).

we endured a christmas without a clock, and the new year too slid in without the ceremonial clang-clang-clang (our old clock never has been aligned with the hours). heck, we bumbled right through ground hog day without the metronome of time passing audibly. and here we are, the clock is coming home today. any hour now, i’ll strap on my snow boots, maybe even add the yaxtrax to keep from slipping on the ice, and i’ll plow through mounds and glide on icy patches to fetch my clock and bring it back where it belongs — home, hanging on the red-red wall that’s been achingly absent its old, old ticker.

all this, of course, has got me to thinking. thinking about how it is that humans are hard-wired to the song of the heartbeat. how it’s the first of the sensory awakenings in the unborn child. long before the eyes have anything to see, the human eardrum begins its lifelong percussive beat (if, God willing, the auditory system is developing as hoped and prayed). somewhere between the 17th and 19th week in a mama’s womb, the unborn baby’s world is wakened to the sound of breath and heartbeat, rhythm and vibration at their most elemental, most soothing i’d imagine.

the wonderful scientists who study these things have found, among other pulse-quickening wonders, that the baby’s heart echoes the mother’s response to music. when the mama hears soothing dulcet tones, her baby’s heart settles into slow steady intervals. when the mama is jarred by cacophony, by dissonant screeching, the baby’s heart rate accelerates, startles.

hearing, we know, is the last of the earthly threads to be severed when death is but a breath or two away.

so is it any wonder that in the blessed interval between in utero and death, we humans turn to heartbeat — be it of a clock, or the drip of rain, or our own ear pressed against the chest of whoever it is we love deeply enough, tenderly enough, to be invited to the chest wall’s quiet ticking?

and is it any wonder that some of us are soothed by whatever brings us back in time and rhythm to that one first murmuring, that percussive pounding, that told us we were safe, enwombed, nestled up against a mama’s ever-pulsing heart?

what are some of your favorite soothing sounds?

long ago, back in 2007, on the jewish “new year of the trees,” known as tu b’shevat, which we marked this week, i wrote a meander called vernal whisperings. because it’s a moment of the jewish calendar that i find especially breathtaking, i’m offering it back here at the table.

here’s a bit of tu b’shevat’s deliciousness, as taught by 16th century mystics:

“known as the kabbalists, these deeply spiritual thinkers believed that we elevate ourselves by the eating of certain fruits on tu b’shevat. if done with holy intention, they taught, sparks of light hidden in the fruit could be broken open from their shells, freed to float up to heaven, to the great divine, completing the circle of the renewal of life.

“oh my.”

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Month: February, 2015