pull up a chair

the census at this old house shifts daily of late. a sliding scale of up to four, oft measured in half-drained glasses on the counter, beds unmade and sorta made. pantry shelves are raided in the middle night. and late-night laughter rises, swirls, up the stairs and round the bend, certain as the steam from a pasta pot. that laughter lands, every time, right where it belongs: tap-tapping on the chambers of my heart—no matter how deep i am in my very own dreamland. no dream comes sweeter than the bellow of boys, brotherly boys, from down below.

this old house is playing out its second act in way-station ways. boys come, boys go. one gets a fever and the aches; we scoop him up and bring him here: gingerale and saltines are best doled out by good ol’ mama. the other boy, the professorial one, is in the thick of putting down midwestern roots, back in the heartland after so, so many years away. and this old house is just the place to plop your duffle down whilst you re-acclimate to the city of your birth (and shop for your own places to call home).

in real-time, i hear just how the date unfolded, how the phone call went, and who makes whom laugh aloud. and i am there to wake someone with a kiss instead of a phone call when i’ve been asked to be sure that someone is awake by 9 a.m.

just this week, with my bespectacled fellow off and faraway, i’d thought i just might find myself amid a stretch of days where i alone dwelled here. where i might slather my face with goo, and not feel the urge to hide. or serve a mixing bowl of lettuce leaves and call it “dinner.” or plug in the vacuum at dawn cuz that’s when the spirit stirred me. but then one boy got sick, and the other snared a date. so the arithmetic this week never equalled one, and now is back to three. with four soon on his way.

i couldn’t wish it any other way.

random glasses, messy rooms, be damned!

two januaries ago, when i was feeling especially afraid, and on the brink of highly fragile ice, i prayed with all my heart for one more birthday candle to extinguish with my semi-feeble lungs. and what i really meant, and what i really wished, was the deepest prayer i know: dear God, let me be around to catch a few more episodes of Growing Boys: The Sequels. 

in a rapids-rush the likes of which would make the colorado river run green with envy, that wish (plus one more candle since) has come oh-so-surely true. i get dizzy thinking all that’s come and gone since that cold, cold winter’s day. the fear of losing me, truth be told, prompted boy one (the professor) to pick up the phone and plot his way back chicago way. (think not that it was anything short of soul-testing and against plenty odds to earn a full-time tenure track slot as a law professor at a pretty darn-good law school within a two-hour drive of home sweet home.) and boy two has more or less called on me to join him in the journalism trenches, as he plies his gift for seeing to the pulsing heart of every story but finds himself in need of chief copy editor and fixer of misplaced commas.

not a day, not a phone call, not a late-night dash downtown, passes by without me praising the holy heavens, dumb luck, or pure fat chance for bequeathing me these moments to slip like precious beads on the rosary string i call my life.

if we’re here on earth to learn to love, to love in the holiest, humblest way possible, the way that makes our life just one little tool trying to turn the crank toward a universe of radiance, then for me there’s no tougher school, no steeper curriculum than to be in the very trenches of life with the lives i’ve labored through and birthed. they demand more of me than i ever knew was in me. they look to me to put my hoity-toi teachings into real-life practice. and should i slip up, should i prove to be a preacher of empty aspirations and hypocrisies, they’d be the first to know. and i’d be rightly crumpled.

my boys keep me honest. my boys keep me true. my boys, my boys . . .

i fall to my knees in eternal forever thanks. i know full well the due, the bliss, the wonder—the flat-out miracle—of the two who call me mama. and with all my soul, i know: the gift this mothering day is mine.

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my mama, bless her, is very much here. and, truth be told, yearning to go “home.” when i miss her, which is often, i motor over to where she lives (a mere nine minutes away), and—truth again—i often don’t find her there. she is off “at programs,” the curiosities and delights that animate her day. or populate it anyway. she might be listening to a book, or sunning herself in the adirondack chairs out front, or out on one of her circumnavigations around the acreage. if i can’t track her down, i leave her notes. i leave her ice creams in her freezer, and the short litany of things she hungers for: cheese and crackers, clementines, the tall bottle she keeps under the kitchen sink.

but so many i know miss their mamas. and lucille clifton, a poet i hold close to my heart (in keeping with the lines below, i should say i hold her close to my bosom, but i don’t have much of that, so the term is rather lost on me; it’s aspirational at best. and once upon a time i must have wished for a bosom, the sort my grandma had, though those days now are long gone and far away). i love that God here is “antic.” i love that the mama lucille yearns for is the one from half her life ago. i love the whole sensual tableau into which lucille invites us. her song, her scent, the scratch of her wild hair. it’s a moment still in reach. how wild, the human mind, the capacity to reach deep into the long-ago, to bring it near to life. no AI robot will ever ever do that for us. score one for humanity. in all its messy glories.

here is lucille clifton for all of us, but especially for the ones who miss their mama on this mother’s day upon us…..

“oh antic God”

oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties   
leaned across the front porch   
the huge pillow of her breasts   
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams   
at night.   return to me, oh Lord of then   
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
—Lucille Clifton

inspired by lucille, here’s my mama from long-ago and not so long-ago. as my mama adds numbers to her years, her strength, her immutable strength is what looms at the fore. i love how deeply deeply present she has always been for me and my boys. my boys who love her so….

love you, mama. xoxo

p.s. i got a peek just yesterday at what will be the cover of my next book, a book whose title is Broken Open. i wish i could show you the two choices, but they’re under wraps till one makes the final cut. it all makes the book very, very real feeling. and i was duly blown away by the two choices. one made me cry. i am guessing that will be the one we pick.

who are the blessed mothers in your life, and what indelible lessons or stories are you remembering this mama day….??