pull up a chair

let’s see, that would be quirk no. 313 in the big book of odd notions that are mine, all mine. and it would be filed under O for outside-in, aversion. or maybe P for pluck. to pluck or not to pluck, that is the pressing postulation.
what this alphabetical quandary is all about is this: queer, yes (oh, look, a Q), it seems i am wired with unnatural natural reticence (UNR) to bring the outdoors in. not in winter. not in fall. but, yes, oh, yes, in spring.
i am quite stricken (QS), i must admit, when it comes to displacing blooms from where they bloom. quite stricken, too (QS2), when it comes to bringing them in to where i can, well, A.) gaze upon them as i burn the broccoli (an almost every day occurrence, i am loathe to tell), and, thus, B.) bury my nose in them while scrubbing black off the bottom of said broccoli pot.
quick disclaimer (QD): i have no inhibitions whatsoever when it comes to gathering the garden’s wounded. in fact, the little ledge above my kitchen sink is, every spring and summer, a rather crowded flower infirmary.
the injured, the lame, i line them up, in a hodgepodge of tiny vases and shallow bowls. a drink for this, a splint for that. i love nothing more than to put my nursing skills to good use, rehabilitating broken stems.
a little aspirin, a little love, i patch them all together again. if my triage doesn’t take, i am consoled by the fact that the fallen let out their last gasp in my most heart-felt company.
ahh, but the well ones. that is where i fall.
i know it makes me the lone bulb in the bag, but it is the sturdy blooms that unsteady me. the erect that topple me. the ones perfectly content to stick their necks out, to reach high and mighty, undaunted, truly, for the sky.
who am i, i wonder, to wander by, sharp blades in hand, and snip to heartless heart’s content?
as one who cozies rather close to those whose creed is consume not anything that’s ever had a face, my logic, it seems, follows straight to the garden’s edge. and that is where my sharp-edged dilemma has me rather dammed in this here dirt.
is it, or is it not, cruel fate for flower stem to be felled? to die a sooner death, sucking waters, in the shaded kitchen, than to live out one’s final numbered days soaking in the sun’s undiluted rays, blowing willy-nilly in the breeze?
could it be the perfection of the tidy rows that i dare not dislodge? decidedly, it could not. as the rows are neither rows nor tidy. it is all rather hodge-podge and disheveled in my earthy beds.
could it be some bizarre, as-yet-unnamed, botanical neurosis? oh, great.
perhaps, the fear of rattling mother nature?
could it be i think it stingy to gather up the season’s beauty, steal it from the birds and bees, bring it in for me and me and only me?
was there some trespass in my past, a petunia perhaps, that i poached from mrs. crochet down the block? was i rapped on all my knuckles for the venial sin of coveting someone else’s lily-of-the-valley?
hmmm. a psycho-horticultural conundrum to be sure.
coaching myself through self-constructed 3-step therapy, i decided just the other day to give the other side a try. to do some cutting, and some gathering, to bring some stems in through the door.
it all started without much premeditation. the day was bright. the lingering bouquets, plainly dead.
i gathered steam. i mustered courage. i coached myself at every garden turn.
i reached, first, under the sink. i grabbed for felco no. 2s, the snipper that knows no stem too thick to cut off at the neck.
i decided to dip in easy here. i snipped the viburnum, the one that makes me swoon, the one i would bathe in if given half a chance. bringing in a stalk or two of that was not one bit disturbing, and besides i slithered through the crack in the fence and cut the blooms that crossed the line into my next door neighbor’s airspace anyway. i’m sure they didn’t mind me tidying up my messy bush.
now on a roll, i did in a few stems of virginia bluebells. but, pansy me, i did the dirty deed back behind the boxwood where no one but the wrens, or my hungry cat, could see them in the first place.
then, giving in to inner pang to round out this mass of baby blue and oyster-pink, i tiptoed out to where the daffodils, frozen stiff weeks ago, still lay. poor petals imitating old crepe paper, but yellow through and through. good enough for me, since this was, at best, mere starter therapy.
against all odds, i brought in my newly decapitated blooms. i dumped the old green almost-goo from the cracked milk pitcher, the pitcher that most recently had been holding well-past-expired grocery-store tulips, the ones i now feel guilty buying, but that’s another quirk we’ll not explore today.
i plunked, stood back and gazed.
i must say i was rather charmed by the misshapen stems, the drooping heads, the leaves with little nibble marks. there was something wholly unsterile, un-store-bought, about these blooms that bloomed the natural way.
it made me think: could it be, after all these years of not daring to disturb the grand outdoor’s design, that dear mother earth is, in truth, one indulgent mama, and more than willing to part freely with whole armfuls of her many varied stems?
it made me think that all these years i had been seriously bound by cockamamie notions, all of my own making.
it made me wonder what else is buried deep inside my inner gardener that i might soon dispel with just a little coaching.
and of course my felco pruners, which are more than suited for cutting any ties that bind.
(and filed under F should you need to find them in my alphabetically constrained house.)

okey doke, now you know my latest quirk. anyone else think twice before gathering what blooms and hauling it in the house? am i—no, make that, was i—all alone in my disinclination to disturb what creeps up from deep below? raise your hand if you think you too could use a little felco pruning therapy. in any area of your inner garden…

“psst,” i can hear them saying, nudging with their wings, “down there,” now pointing with their beaks. “dive-bomb,” one whispers to another. “take a hit. the lady’s cracked open the jelly and the oranges. and not just any jelly, pal. she went for smucker’s. dang.”
it’s pay day for the orioles. the baltimore orioles. and, nope, not the men who run in circles, swing at flying balls, get paid more than you and i will probably ever see.
i mean, of course, the orange ball of feathers that will make you gasp, will make you rouse the children, rouse the dead most likely, when you see one settling down at the oranges and the jelly you’ve left out for them, your diner always open.
the class today, as promised some time back, is migration 101. we are learning together, you and i, so i promise not to get too over-your-head. only so much as to make you swoon, like i am. i am in full swoon over here.
this here, from just the other day ‘til end of may, then trickling into june, is the thickest of the thick.
these are the days when birds are crowding in the clouds, nudging, budging, making way to make their northern nests and spend the summers lolling in the shady woods. sort of like you, perhaps, headed off to your northwoods cabin, except without the fishing poles and the bug spray.
the first, best thing you need, should you decide that swooping orangeballs will set you right this spring, is rather straightforward.
one quick trip to the grocery should do it. you can leave the kiddies in the car, if they’re not of an age that would leave you under lock and key, behind bars, making your quick trip to the grocery not so quick after all.
you’ll dash for just two goodies: a bag of oranges, any sort will do. just so they’re orange, and not greenish-orange. no self-respecting oriole will go for orange of other color.
next, please, traipse (skipping works fine, too, try skipping through the grocery, see what happens when you skip) to the jelly aisle. there, you will pass over all the other concord grape concoctions, you will settle only–finicky, yes, but this is for the orioles, after all–for the smucker’s.
in birdie circles (which we now are in), smucker’s is the whispered, venerated brand for which there is no substitute.
it is, plainly, the opiate of the orioles, if you really want to know. which of course you do.
“the birds go nuts,” says our old friend t.j. , the bird man, the one who teaches much. “some people swear by smucker’s. isn’t that ridiculous?”
to think a beaked thing would be so discriminating. perhaps they ptu-ptu the lesser grapes, spit out mere mortal brands.
but enough with all this high-brow jelly. what you want to do is tuck it into little jelly cups–yes, you read that right–for your little flying friends. pyrex works well, says t.j. and i’m sure they wouldn’t turn up their beaks at spode.
next, slice oranges. leave them on the ground, or lying on your fire escape. if you want to get ahead of the class you could pound a long nail through a 2-by-4, and impale the juicy half. this little trick keeps the ol’ greedy squirrels from making off with your navel. oh my.
in case you wondered: not only are your oranges there for all their juice, they are there as can’t-miss-from-the-clouds fruity billboards, backyard beacons to the sky.
as all the winged things are flap-flap-flapping on their birdie byway, en route, say, from the andes mountains or the yucatan, they’ll zero in on flash of orange and come diving from on high. sort of like the “open” sign flapping on the diner door.
the one last thing you want to make absolutely sure you always have enough of in these dry migration days is water, water, water. can’t have enough. the little birds, just think, have been flapping for miles and miles and miles and their little birdie throats are rather parched, to say the least.
so those, my fine-footed friends, are the to-do’s on your bring-on-the-birds migration list.
here is the why, here is where i swoon:
far far away, in thick jungles and tropical forests, the light of spring begins to change. the days are longer. the light, brighter.
little molecules of light, it seems, poing a little spot in the back of the birds’ brains. that spot, a switch, then lets loose a surge. their little bodies are filled, are flooded, with hormones that tell the birds: go north. build nest. get yourself back to where you and your mama and your mama’s mama once hatched.
and so, at nightfall, when winds are calm, when predators are few, when air is cooler and thus less dehydrating, the winged things take flight. sometimes by the tens and tens of thousands. often, they catch the updraft of a warm front, and come wafting in on southerly winds. no fools, they don’t flutter upstream, like those silly salmon.
my friend t.j. tells me that, true to the book, night before last, whole swarms came in, came in on the warm front that made us wake up without need for sweaters.
and, thus, when my mama called first thing to say. “the warblers arrived overnight,” she was right. my mama who knows the birds the way she knows her breathing, she woke up and knew the warblers came.
time-out to connect a dot: our rabbi, when asked, but how do you know there’s a God if you can’t see God, always comes back with this simple question, have you ever seen the wind?
all the warblers floating in on the warm front makes me think that one night, every may, the answer to that question is, yes, i saw the wind the night the golden-throated warblers, by the thousands, blew in.
t.j. tells me the birds will fly six to eight hours at a stretch, through the night. some birds will burn a quarter of their body fat in a single night.
as night gives way to daylight, as the first scattered rays of sunbeam peek over the horizon, the birds, exhausted, parched, famished, begin their dawn descent.
they look for sumptuous plots of land, a cherry tree frothed in its springtime meringue, an old dead river birch where bugs by the billions will make for a bottomless all-you-can-eat buffet.
they settle into limbs, nod off in birdie naps. but, mostly, intently, they inhale the fuel they need to flap again. for some, this is the byway’s end. your backyard might be their summer cabin. for others, there are miles to go before they finish flapping.
they’ll look for water. and oranges. and if they hit the jelly jackpot, little pyrex cups of smucker’s concord grape jelly.
indeed, it’s thick out there these days. so thick, and so raucous with all the birdsong, crazy people like t.j. and my mama, and now me, can’t get anything done.
we here along lake michigan–and that’s all of chicago–are smack dab in the fast lane of the flyway that stretches from south america to near the north pole. there are four main flyways through the united states: the atlantic, the pacific, the mississippi (that’s us) and the central, which is midway between the mississippi and pacific.
you can actually trace where we are in the migration by what birds are landing in your yard. the day the orioles and rose-breasted grosbeaks roll in, you know the great migration has begun. for the next three weeks the trees will be alive with bouncing, bopping birds. the air, dense with flitting, flapping, blue jay swooping, warbler darting.
but best of all, just stand outside and listen. in fact, you needn’t even go outside. just stand still. just listen.
it is the season for keeping open all the doors and windows.
there is the sound of heaven right within your reach. and it will come winging to you for just a little jelly spooned into a cup.
all the more sweetly if you make it smucker’s.

class dismissed. any questions?
p.s. thanks for putting up with my bird-brained madness.

only 18 more pb & j’s to go. only 18 more mornings where i am called to the bed of mister sleepyhead, where i plant his face with kisses. and, slo-mo, we wind into the day.
on hip, or hand-in-hand we make it down the stairs, plunk waffle into toaster, make nest of blankets on the floor. spin the dial. decide just what the day will bring before the yellow school bus lurches to the curb, brings a close to the latest episode of me and little t, the p.m. kindergarten story.
just yesterday, he was one-eyed pirate, and i was hiding buried treasure. he was argh’ing all over the mighty tossing seas. i was swabbing the deck, otherwise known as the stove, splattered from the spitting sauce the night before.
lunch we ate outside, on the deserted island that is the screened-in porch. he astride his two-wheel pirate ship, still with training wheels. me, i was aiming pb triangles toward his open mouth, in between the arghs. he, not willing to put down sword or eagle, which filled in nicely for the parrot we did not have.
we are quite a pair, my little mate and i. and now, 18 days and subtracting, our mornings that i thought would never end, are drawing to a close.
my little kindergartener tells me every day. five weeks, four weeks, soon just three, ’til i’m in first grade, mommy.
no more mornings, he and i. no more no one in the house but he and i, doing whatever it is we fancy.
funny how what once made you wince now makes you ache to let it go.
i remember the afternoon the stripe turned pink, and the dream i’d had the night before, the dream that i, at nearly 44, was, despite all odds, with child in my womb, i remember how the dream turned real and rather sobering right before my very eyes.
and i remember, truth be told, i gasped. not wholly out of joy. partly out of oh-my-god, here i go again.
i felt the shiver up and down my spine. of nursing through the night, here comes another round. of can i do this, can i muster what it takes, can i start this show all over? of needing once again to find a sitter for the days i work. of mornings that would not be mine. of a dream job that i’d just gotten the afternoon before, which now, now that the dream came true, would not be mine after all. oh well.
there were days, i tell you, when i could only imagine a morning to myself. invitations i turned down because i had a little person not always welcome in the land of grownup chatter. doctor’s appointments i couldn’t make because where do you put a very busy two-year-old when they’ve got you up in stirrups.
but now those days are numbered, just two digits and dwindling. and i, once again, find myself milking every morning for all its worth.
i am licking every drop from the bowl that is our breakfast together. i am sucking all the marrow out of our expeditions to unearth the earth worms, study cicadas under magnifying glass, find the alphabet letter on the butterfly’s wings. (he tells me his kindergarten teacher insists every butterfly has a letter on its wing. hmm. so far we’ve not found so much as a single dotted i; but then the joy is thoroughly in the chase when it comes to butterflies.)
oh sure, we’ll have summers, at least the weeks that bracket camp, now that camp is what you do instead of taking to the woods and sidewalks for the summer.
but never again will he and i have our mornings in the way we have them now: peanut butter and jelly for two, please. and we’ll have a long tall milk to boot. and could you seat us in a booth? one of us occasionally still slithers onto the other’s lap.
true, too many mornings i’ve been holed in here away from him, shooshing him off to play because i had a.) a deadline, b.) a phone call, c.) no good reason, really.
just across from where i type i have an old pine writing table, the kind with a slanted lid that opens and closes and holds a writer’s paper at just the right angle so he or she can dash off a missive while standing on two feet, the way it used to be.
there, on the pine lid with the little lip that keeps the paper from gliding to the ground, i keep tucked the hand-made pink paper valentine he sprinkled two years ago with piles of red glitter, tied with a sparkly green ribbon, and onto which his preschool teacher penned the words he dictated: “dear mama and daddy. i like you. i want you to play with me when you’re not busy. i love you.”
ouch. i have kept the scorching truth out for all to see, most especially for me, since the day he slipped it in my hand, when he was merely three and calling it just exactly as he saw it.
it’s been my shameless reminder ever since that these hours are treasures, these days are fleeting, and now the fleeting’s nearly done.
the pb from here on in will be packed and tucked into a paper bag. the mornings i’ll spend all by myself. the only argh’ing this house will hear will be me growling at my lonesome state.
the mornings i thought would never end will now, each one, feel like forever, but only because i’ll be keeping one eye on the clock, wondering what my little mate is up to, far far away in a land where mommies dare not lurk.
excuse me, i’ve got a cheek upstairs that is waiting for a kiss. or at least i’ve got lips that long to plant a wet one (or two or three) on that rosy little cheek. before it goes and turns into a first-grader.

tell your tale of aching as you let go of one whole passage of your life, your child’s life? isn’t it odd how sweet the days become when you know the days are dwindling? people tell me the beauty of sending high schoolers off to college is that seniors have a way of making everyone in the house oh-so-ready for the departure. i can’t imagine.
i know i’m wired oddly, but i thank God i jump the gun when it comes to aching in advance because somehow it makes all the days count for so much more when you feel them slipping through your fingers….don’t you think? or not?

p.s. prayers, please, for a little baby girl from ethiopia, named anna, now living in chicago. anna’s mama asks that we all storm the heavens. her little fighter, who already survived tuberculosis, meningitis and pneumonia while in ethiopia, was just diagnosed with something called infantile spasms, and the neurologist tells the mama the prognosis is not good. i have laid eyes on this sweet baby girl; she is heaven sent.

decidedly, they came from heaven. of that, we were unshakably convinced. God must have been wafting by, clutching bright bouquet of nine balloons, decided we needed a little color.
and of course we did.
who doesn’t need just a little bit of magic, a little bit of mystery dropped into an otherwise ordinary morning.
it was, of course, the little one who found them. traipsing down the path, on his way to check out the mountain of dirt that had been delivered just down the alley, he stumbled upon the inflated rubber bonbons, and he did the most natural thing a boy could do: he yelped.
it was the usual, mama, come, quick. but supercharged with sense of urgency.
sounded like something far more interesting than pulling weeds to me, so i loped. well, whaddya know. “oh, my gosh, those must be from God,” i said, playing with my little guy, who is far too innocent and far too trusting to realize i was sort of kidding around.
“do you really think God put them here?” he asked, wide-eyed.
“hmm, either that or some poor little kid was walking down the street, far, far away, and he stooped to look at a bug or maybe a rock, and he forgot that he was holding on to his balloons, so he let go just for a second, and whoosh, the balloons took off, took a little balloon trip, and now they’re tired, so they landed here.”
we both whispered a little prayer for the kid who might have stood there, tears washing down his cheeks, heart in his throat, watching the balloons get farther and farther from his hand, get smaller and smaller against the sky, until finally, tears stopped, specks of color no longer seen, the poor little guy and whoever was the big person with him, might have stopped, maybe for an ice cream, to sop up all the hurt.
and here we were, the ones who found the poor kid’s sorrow twisted, knotted, on the mirror that sticks out from the side of my little boy’s daddy’s car.
sometimes life is like that.
i felt rather convinced that we had stumbled onto some sort of serendipitous sky-shower, and we needed to take extra special care of those wayward balloons. so we brought ’em up close to the house. first we brought ’em in the house. but then we noticed they had a funny smell. we realized those balloons had taken quite a journey. and they might not have had access to a shower. or a good hot meal.
“yuck,” said my little one, as he carried them outdoors, where they spent the night, harbored by our house. free to go if they so chose. but they didn’t budge. except to wiggle in the breeze.
this whole thing made me think of the poor little guy down the block, who had a most beloved stuffed cat. and, one day, a helium-filled balloon.
now this is a kid, the one with the cat and the balloon, who likes nothing so much as a science experiment. or a story oozing with imagination.
so he was in the midst of pretending his little cat was an astronaut, and he tied the balloon onto the most beloved, slept-with-it-every-night cat’s back, and, yes, you know right where this is going. the little cat, the red balloon, both, escaped, went skyward. faster than the little guy could catch it. could leap from launch pad, wrap hands around beloved cat’s tail, clutch him in the nick of time, save him from a dismal end on the wrong end of itinerant balloon.
that’s about when we came upon that sorry scene. experimenter aghast, in tears. mother, father scrambling. trying to get the drift–of what had happened, as well as where the wind was blowing.
we all set out, running, dashing, trying to figure out if we were balloons, carrying a kidnapped cat, which direction we would blow. we covered the neighborhood. we put up signs. someone had the bright idea of launching yet another balloon, this one with a note: “if you find golden-striped cat tied to red balloon, please call….”
as if one balloon would copycat another.
a balloon, i tell you, is apt to get into all sorts of trouble.
i don’t think i’ve ever before been on the finding end of someone’s heartbreak. not balloon or boy, not anything.
and, small as it is, it did add quite a tingling note to the day: something bright and beautiful fell from the sky, and twisted itself into the midst of our ordinary morning. all day, we watched the sleeping balloons, watched over them for the treasure that they are.
and besides, no one told my little guy they might not be from God. so he is under the distinct impression that God, for no good reason, drops bright balloons in your otherwise humdrum day.
which, come to think of it, is pretty good theology for a boy not yet out of kindergarten.
geez, i sure hope no one whispers in his ear that they might just be escapees from some real estate open house a few sorry blocks away. that would sorta take the air right outa this little story, now, wouldn’t it?

friends, forgive the littleness of today’s meander. i was just captivated by these wandering balloons, and swept up by the possibilities of how they landed in our laps. sometimes filling your head with little not-so-important mysteries is a delightful way to while away a few hours. have you ever stumbled upon someone else’s lost treasure? what sort of stories did it trigger in your sweet head? were you able, in any way, to come to the rescue of some broken heart and return the treasure?

as always, ‘tis monday, lazy susan spins afresh.

and, this just in from the international news desk: the table, thank you, is now transcontinental. our fine friend bgt moved to london a little while back, carried us in her trunk, and over the weekend posted on the case of the pink streaked heap, thus, she pulls up a chair across the pond. seems to me yet another treasure landed in our laps…

growing up, the table at my house was rather crowded. there were five of us little people, four of us bunched every other year, and then, enough years later to surprise the dickens out of me the day we got the news of the impending arrival, the so-called caboose. blessed caboose.
at the head of every dinner table, in the door like clockwork from the 6:20 train and plunked at the south end of the table, a man who made his living with a typewriter that he pounded late into the night, and a microphone that he carried ‘round the globe.
i cannot for the life of me remember much of the chatter. but i do remember that there was plenty. and i seem to recall that it was hard to get a word in edgewise.
i remember plenty of spilled milk. and the occasional night when i was left to contemplate the peas, the peas that i did not want to eat, the peas that i had so artfully—i thought—tucked beneath the rim of the plate. but eagle eyes herself, my mother, didn’t miss that sleight of legume. so there i sat, silent, miserable, convinced i was the only child in the world left to wither overnight staring at my uneaten, unwanted mushy peas.
i remember in high school a few dining room debates with my father. i was on the side of world hunger. he, ad man for mcdonald’s, was going to bat for big mac. how dare they, i wailed, blaming the golden arches for all that was wrong on the starving continents of the world. how dare i, he thundered back. only, come to think of it, i don’t think thunder would be my father’s verb. i think he was, maybe, solid wall of atmospheric front. not budging, firmly stationed. but not too terribly noisy, either. he made his point, in fact, without too much thunder.
mostly, i remember that he was the most amazing tightrope walker i had ever seen. only his tightrope was a string of words. puns, punch lines, quick wit, those were the tricks with which he dazzled while edging along the taut fine cord strung from one end of the table to the other.
if you could play along, he reached out a hand and lifted you too onto the tightrope, the high wire. you too could swing on my papa’s verbal trapeze. but you’d better be quick. better yet, you could shine if you could match him, come back at him, hook your foot to word cord, and do a loopdy-loop.
it was hard sometimes to make it through a meal. you’d be out of breath, just trying to keep up. it was exercise, getting through the word play that was my family dinner.
i got a workout, all right. but it took a long, long time ’til i found i had a voice, a true deep voice, that i could bring to the table.
the first place to which i brought my voice was blank, blue-lined notebook paper. i wrote in pencil, then pen, long before my fingers knew to land on a, s, d, f, over to the left, and p, l, m, n, cascading down the right.
i remember, long ago, realizing i had become a writer because i finally found a voice. i had found it hard, very hard, to speak deeply from my heart at my dinner table, what with all the tightrope walking and debating all-beef patties versus kwashiorkor’s swollen-belly babies.
i remember, vividly, the night i took a seat at my little maple table. and the man on the other end of the table, a man i’d never eaten with before, a man i’d never before offered a chair at my table, asked me what i wanted in my life. i remember leaning back, laughing, thinking, saying, all at once, “i feel like i could talk to you the rest of my life.”
that man, now my husband, still sits across from me nearly every night at dinner. almost 20 years later, i still laugh, say the same thing. we’re still very much talking.
the amazing thing when you marry is that you get a chance to study closely yet another family. one of the first—and most lasting—things i noticed about my husband’s family was, is, how they sit for hours at the table, really talking, really listening.
is it any wonder, i sometimes wonder, that i was drawn so deeply to a man who so easily, so finely, really, brings his voice to the table. and, most of all, makes room for mine.
it is, of all the gifts we give our children, the one i’d pencil in way, way up, seriously high, at practically the sky-scraping top of the list. it is the gift of being heard at the dinner table.
over the years, as a gatherer of newspaper stories, i have interviewed some truly amazing human beings. the refrain, so often–when asked, what was the elmer’s glue that held you together, that made you who you are–was, time and again, something about always sitting down to dinner. as a family. no matter the hour. no matter the menu. what mattered was that everybody had a place and a voice at the table.
now, i am here to tell you that the eight years between boy 1 and boy 2 at our house make for some rough sledding at the dinner table some nights.
while we zero in on boy 1, intent on probing deep into his oh-so-thoughtful soul, boy 2 decides to slide off his chair and play puppy dog, licking at our legs. or, for variety, he might drop spaghetti, strand by strand, onto the floor, until someone notices the heap and, inconveniently, hits the pause button on what had been boy 1’s careful analysis of al gore and his global-warming truths.
and some nights, i kid you not, it all gets messy. and i don’t mean the scraps dropping to the floor. conversation, when it’s real, is not all clean and tidy. and there are nights at our house, when salty tears add flavor to the food.
but we won’t relent. won’t back down. won’t give in to puppy dogs under tables, or spaghetti balls piling higher with every passing sentence. tears are dried. turns are taken.
the little one, up off the floor, gets his turn. he always does. the little one has 12 more years of family dinners, before he heads off to have his dinners elsewhere. God and admissions boards willing, in some college cafeteria. the big one has only four more years.
the one thing i pray for both my boys is that they look back at the maple kitchen table, or the cherry one in the dining room, and they remember that there, at their places along the east and western edges, they might not always have brought clean hands but they always brought their voices. their deep, rich, steady voices.
and at those tables, the voices always had a place, room to stretch out, to try out new ideas from different angles, to practice thinking. to be heard.
yes, most of all, the table was a place where voices, soft or loud, it didn’t matter, were always, always heard.

certainly, it is the essence of pull up a chair. finding a place at the table where you can boldly bring a voice. where you can pour your thoughts, your heart, your soul. what is dinner like at your house? where, at your house, do you find the fine art of conversation most freely unfolds?

cookbooks we’ll discuss another day. today, instead, we’re tuning in. i have a feeling i’m not alone.
when no one’s around, when no one’s paying attention, i like to mosey into the kitchen with ina, or better still, nigella. i’ll take giada, or paula deen.
i’d rather not with what’s-her-name, the perky one, the uber-perky one, the one who sort of scratches nails on my chalkboard, the one who’s always taking shortcuts to get to dinner on the table in less than 30 minutes.
i make dinner in less than 30 minutes most every single night. i need little inspiration in that department. i am looking for the real thing, the sensual thing, the wrap-your-ample-arms-around-my-shoulder-and-teach-me-a-thing-or-three. that thing.
it is, most days, the only thing i ever watch on tv. and i only watch while i walk. it is, by now, an old bad habit. like blindly stuffing potato chips from bowl to fist to mouth. rather mindless. i walk in circles, horizontal circles that never get me anywhere.
and while i walk i learn to cook. i time my walking so i can walk while ina’s cooking. she lulls me into such a dreamy state i don’t even notice that i’m plodding. she purees, i perambulate. she sautees, i sweat right along.
there is the butter in her throat, the way she talks i mean. and then there’s that salt-worn shingled house with all the sunlight streaming in. i love the way she sets a table. makes it look so easy. makes it look so bountiful. so understatedly over-the-top. so gosh-i-wish-i’d-grown-up-beside-her-stove.
i want ina to invite me over. i want someone to cook for me the way ina cooks for everyone she loves. and she sure loves everyone, it seems. her table, i’m telling you, is practically an orgy. one i want to squeeze into.
i watch ina often as i can. nigella i only watch when my dear friend sandra passes off a pre-recorded tape. i love reading nigella. she flings words as easily as she flings mousse around a silver bowl. watching her rocket-blasts me into orbit. she is something of a seductress. the way she whips an egg white even. or pops the garnet gems out of a pomegranate. no wonder she wears no apron in the kitchen.
i love how she sneaks downstairs in her silky robe, reaches in the midnight fridge, sinks a spoon into something lustful lurking in the shining light of the chilling, sleeping stainless box. licks like the goddess that she is.
i have a confession to make, which i will make because we’ve been pulling up chairs for a while now: i watch ina and nigella in particular because they are especially good at teaching what i’m trying to learn. and not just cooking.
they are teaching something you would maybe never guess needs to be spooned out in half-hour lessons. they are, i pray to God, teaching me how to understand that i needn’t be afraid of cream and butter, avocado and, oh my God, a dab of sugar.
they are teaching me to breathe in the kitchen. not just breathe. maybe even dance. imagine dancing in the kitchen.
i watch them so easily cook and feed because i am trying to learn how to feed myself in the very way that i feed the ones i love so much: i am trying to teach myself that i needn’t choke or sputter when someone steers a crème brulee my way.
i am trying to teach myself that after all the years of being at war with food—starting back when i was 18 and shrank to under 90 pounds then held steady before ballooning at the mouth of the soft-serve machine in my college cafeteria, then whipsawed up and down for years and years—i can, at last, lean against the sturdy shoulder, sink into the ample bosom of my cooking friends ina and nigella, and let myself slowly open to the gentle notion that what comes to me on a spoon will feed me in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with calories and fat grams, things i used to count obsessively, things i’ve now long left behind.
but still, i’m not as far along on this curriculum as i’d like to be. some day i’d like to taste a bite of my little boy’s birthday cake. or my own.
are you surprised? me, who talks so convincingly about feeding everyone all around me? you shouldn’t be. i’ve spent 32 years studying how it is we eat and feed the ones we love. i know more about the metaphor of food than just about anyone i know. i feel it in my bones. i ache to be fed—to feed myself—in the way i so easily imagine feeding.
my blessed friend jan once did so. i was lying in a hospital bed, stitches running straight across my middle. she came to bring me lunch. she didn’t serve just any salad in any tupperware. she brought blue-and-white china. and real silver. she packed that salad with every bit of goodness that she could gather.
that jan can cook, we say around here. she fed me that day in a way that i can taste even as i type, years later. she fed me through and through.
jan is like ina and nigella. she makes it look easy. and she, unlike the friends i tune into on the screen, is wise enough and knows me deeply enough for me to truly trust. i have been fed in the way i long to feed myself. without fear, or ducking in and out of rules for what’s allowed, what’s safe, what’s not. it happened once—maybe twice.
i tune in to ina and nigella to see if i can gather up the steam to make it happen three times a day.

okay, people, this is about as scary as it gets for me. to lift the veil on the deep and mystifying struggle i have struggled with for, geez, two-thirds of my gosh-darn life. struggles come in many, many forms. to struggle with something so essential–something so potentially rich and filling in wholly non-caloric way–is poignantly difficult. you can’t ignore it, lock it in a cupboard and never worry about it again. it comes at you as many times a day as there are reasons to feed or be fed. it is so simple, i tell myself. but then, midway with fork to mouth, i’ve gotten stuck so many times. turned down so many slices of cake, it’s amazing the baker’s union hasn’t come and shut me down. i wince every time, worry to death that i’m offending. my aim is not to offend–oh God, the hours i’ve wasted worrying that i’ve offended; my aim is to come to peace.
you know i would love to hear your thoughts. anyone else get over this or any other hump they care to bring up here, at the old, banged-up maple table?
by the way, thank you for making this a place where, tremblingly, i could tell the truth.

what with all the hubbub out my window yesterday, it was darn near impossible to get anything done here at the little keyboard that is my thinking life.
that’s mama up there, with the long scrap of muslin hanging from her beak. someone’s old bedspread, i’m pretty sure.
not much later, it was yet another beak and yet another bit of hand-me-down bedding.
the sparrows, it seems, have moved on from simple sticks and twigs and grasses. they are feathering their nest in earnest. deep earnest.
and when not flitting back and forth from wherever their scrapyard is, they were making layovers on the serviceberry and rhododendron right out my window.
lucky me. lucky rhododendron.
for not only were the sparrows deeply engaged in bedding for their babies. they were deeply engaged in, apparently, making those babies.
she would perch, innocently enough. catch her breath, it seemed. he would flutter over. arch wings. ascend. oscillate. again and again. perch. flutter. arch. ascend. oscillate. oh my.
right before my very eyes. all morning long.
so many times i nearly started aching for the mama. i thought about calling out the window, asking if she might want to come in for a little respite. spread her wings, put her feets up. take a gosh-darn break.
but i didn’t.
i let nature hold its sway.
my bird friend tj, he told me. warned me. let nothing get between a sparrow and her intent on multiplying the species.
it seemed, indeed, that something fertile was in the air. ‘twas may day after all. and the moon is full. for the first of two times this month, i’ll have you know. it even smelled, well, ripe outside. this is propagation season.
and i, just the other side of the glass, got to watch it all. got to feel, for a while there, that i was smack dab at the epicenter of the re-creating universe.
while some spend their day glued to CNN, i spent my day tuned into the sparrows. i admit, at a few deeply personal moments, i felt a bit like mrs. kravitz, the nosey-body who minded everybody’s business back in the old days, on “bewitched,” just one of the black-and-whites that i was weaned on.
but mostly i felt blessed. this is, if not quite sacred, rather filled with something anointed by the heavens. i was mesmerized.
far as i know, though, the little sparrows paid no mind to me. they certainly never paused. never tap-tapped on my window, to ask if i might please close my eyes, look the other way, perhaps. they carried on as if i wasn’t there.
how odd, it made me think, the distinctly parallel universes that make up this busy world. especially in the spring. the air, it seems, is buzzing. thick with drama.
no wonder when you open up the door, step outside, listen to the softer sounds–not the city buses, the jackhammers, the screeching tires–but the bird chatter, the calling back and forth from limb to limb, it’s downright action-packed.
only, mostly, we don’t notice.
there is so little intersection between the worlds of us and them. and we, at least, are missing much. they, i fear, are missing little. we are not a species setting such a good example. if only we would stop. if only we would listen.
yet again, i pound that drum: shhhhhh. tiptoe. the world’s unfolding at our feet and at our fingertips. it is ours to gulp. to inhale. to fill our lungs, our hearts, our heads.
the birds, the bees, the buds. they are deep at work, and theirs is the task of recreating. they go about their business without the mayhem that we two-legged, reportedly-bigger-brained creatures seem so particularly adept at these days.
the sparrows have no wars, no school shootings.
they carry on, as they’ve done for hundreds of thousands of years. each spring, as the sun inches ever higher in the sky, as the full moons of may keep the night from turning dark, they dig for worms and bite-size spiders, they tuck their little heads into their wings, they sleep, they lay and warm their eggs.
they pay no mind to the lady watching from the window, the lady who knows full well how rich the show, watching all the world continue on in earnest.

anyone else captivated by the drama out the window? anyone else getting a bird’s eye view of what it takes to propagate the species? anyone else wholly distracted by the fluttering of bird wings?

by any chance, when you rolled out of bed this morning, did you think to stumble out the front door, swipe your hand across the tippy-tops of grass, collect a few dew droplets, smush ’em all around your face?

oh, you didn’t?

i’m so sorry.

it’s an ancient rite for may day. only, silly me, i’m just letting you in on it now.

i’m wondering, do you think we could extend the statute of limitations here, get tomorrow rolled into the equation, and maybe all of us could meet on, say, my front lawn? we could do a little dew dance. wiping and swiping dewy drops all over our visages?

hmm. just a thought.

but i am getting decidedly ahead of the story.

the story is this: it’s may day of course, the most ancient religious festival in the northern hemisphere.

hoh, boy, what a festival it was. until the puritans came along in 1644, that is, and settled the whole thing down.
but let’s back up some more here.

depending on your country of origin, you did may day one of a few ways. to the romans, it was a celebration of the start of summer. they leapt and whooped it up for flora, the goddess of flowers, the bride of west wind.

in france, for some reason, they paraded cows with daisies tied to their tails, poor things. actually the reason why is rather charming: because the grasses by may day had grown so lush, the cows could now be milked three times a day. thus, the anglo-saxons called the day, tri-milchi. and thus, they touted all their happy bulging cows.

if you hailed from parts a bit chillier, say up ireland way, you were a celt and you whupped it up big time. the celts called it beltane, and for three days they honored fertility in very fertile ways.

of course you know of the maypole. did you guess that it was phallic? and, according to a little deep reading i was doing, the may basket, yes, it’s true, would be the female part of the reproductive equation. i kid you not.

and you thought dropping may baskets at your next-door neighbor’s door was a sweet and innocent thing to do on the first of the merry month of may? silly you.

they did not stop there, though, those frisky celts. nosirree. but thank goodness we have the puritans to thank for reining in the raucous.

before the prissy puritans, who in 1644 deemed it illegal, a big part of the beltane, besides the ring-around-the-phallic-maypole, was the frolicksome habit of all the young couples sleeping under the stars, preferably off in the woods.

oh, those fertile celts. is that why all the irish catholics had such big families when i was growing up? some latterday sleeping in the woods.

the other curious celtic tradition was the setting of bonfires for beltane. some wild irish dancers, the morris men, would go leaping about the flames, in hopes that they might assist the gods in heaving the fireball known as the sun high into the summer’s sky.

and then we’ve got the dew.

the dew, of course.

the dew, i told you, is the thing.

the dew of may day is not just any dew. it is magical. all the young maidens dashed into the fields on may day, searching for the little droplets of the dawn. once traipsed upon, they dropped to knees, and smeared it all over their freckled, pocked, or rosy faces.

it was the elixir of the beauty queens. it was thought to do away with spots and pimples, pox and blackheads even. okay, maybe not the blackheads. but all the rest.

as you know, in all these months of pulling up a chair, i’ve not once mentioned any sort of beauty tip. i do not spend my days pondering much the notion of beauty of a facial kind. but this, folks, is one beauty tip i’ll not let scamper by, unnoticed.

i’ll have you know that shortly after crack of dawn, this very morn, i furled back the covers, tired bones be damned. i was a woman on a mission. the groggy lump beside me questioned where i was off to in such a gosh-darn hurry.
“i am in search of dew,” i announced, as if i was going off to battle.

fumbling for my dew-hunt clothes, he beat me to the punch. he was dressed, and armed with bike helmet, while i was still stumbling from the bathroom.

by the time i staggered out the kitchen door, open palm at the ready, he was still two steps ahead. as he sauntered toward his waiting bike, he tossed me this: “dew’s out in front.”

(how dear that he goes along with all my madness, wouldn’t you agree?)

aha. i ran. i crouched. i swiped. i am waiting, as i type, for the dewy beauty to set in.

all i know is, as i ran my fingers over sodden stalks of grass, i thought, geez, sure hope the fertilizer from next door didn’t blow my grasses’ way. that would nix the magic of the dewy potion, would it not? i bet the celts didn’t have such toxins to contend with. worst they had was maybe a little cow dung.

and so, my friends, i have now passed along my first, and probably last, beauty tip, here at the table. had i known ahead of time, i would have tipped you off. i’m sure the dew of may 2 will work nearly as well.

if not, there’s always next year, when i will be sure to send out dew alerts in due time.

please, please let me know if you happen to catch a dab of dew before it’s sucked up into the dry old day. or dew tell (irresistible) of how you plan to spend the first of may? and remember, next year, my house, dew fest. dew put it on the calendar.

it’s truly birthing season right in here. today, a most delicious dewy birthday to one of the loveliest young maidens i’ve ever known and loved. she turns 14 today; i swear she was just born. so does her mother….

there, there, don’t you feel better already about your monday morning?
bet you didn’t find a heap like this piled on your basement floor over the weekend. my disaster, friends, is your dodged bullet. i offer up my misery in the aim of making your monday just a little bit, um, rosier.
you can now whistle your way through washday monday, with a wee little laundry chip on your shoulder. you can feel smug even. you can think: dang good thing at my house we know how to do the laundry. good thing at my house we’ve got “no trespassing” signs plastered all over the dryer. no interloper of exotic hue would think of sneaking in the wash at my house. otherwise we’d be left like that pathetic chick who forgot to check the pockets.
here’s the sorry tale:
it started out a saturday with slender shred of hope for turning things around. the rains had stopped. the long, sad week was over. i thought i’d spin a load or two, make sure the little soccer dude was not sans shorts–again. nothin’ to it; i do some hundred loads a week. or so it seems.
i had no inkling what was lurking in the not-so-soggy wash.
until i opened the dryer door, reached my hand in the dark black drum, i was clueless.
oh, how quickly clueless crumbles.
rather like the red crayon that took a ride, round and round and round, in the hot, so-hot-it-could-melt-you-if-you-were-a-crayon dryer insides.
that little crayon must have thought it was at the carnival, don’t you think. squealing, laughing, tossing round and round. must have thought it was really funny as it banged, mightily and often, into the little bundle formerly known as my undies. must have let out quite a scream as it skidded over the now-pink black dog t-shirt, the brooks brothers boxers–tee hee, i can hear it now–the socks, the socks, the sweatshirt and the little gray sweatpants that started it all.
there is a pocket in those size 5-6 sweatpants. a little pocket. not big enough to hold anything much bigger than, well, a half a crayon. a half a red crayon even.
good thing these days i always have a camera at the ready, otherwise i might have wept when i pulled the first handful of dried, caked-on pink with streaks of bloody red from the dryer. the more i pulled, the more my eyes grew wide. then wet. oh lord, i cried, in the middle of an otherwise mild-mannered morning.
you know how your brain doesn’t quite click click click all the time? like, say, when you are holding red-streaked undies, thinking what the heck? but then, this little flicker of a brain wave shakes itself from slumber, shouts in your other ear, yo, mama, remember the other day, when your blessed mother tapped on office door, shoved cupped hand through door ajar, showed off red waxed specimen, said something to effect of, “honey, look what i found in the laundry. that would have been a disaster.”
cluck, cluck. oh, yes, a disaster, you remember saying swiftly, as you turned your eyeballs back to the keyboard before you.
eek. it dawns on you: you are, standing here in cool dark pink-streaked basement, deep in the middle of aforementioned disaster. you stick your head in the dryer, and you see that you now have a pink dryer drum.
you realize that that red crayon you saw the other day was only the half of it. its twin took quite a tumble.
you go berserk. you call your very smart neighbor, thinking maybe she too has tried to dry a crayon. with poor results.
you get, instead, her husband. he’s a guy who spends his life designing something called artificial intelligence. maybe he’s the guy for you. he, intelligent man, artificially intelligent man, tells you to google it. this reminds you that the time you had the bats flying all about your belfry, he and your loyal bat-fighting husband cowered in front of the computer, bike helmets on their heads, tennis rackets at the ready, googling “bats, how to chase away.”
oh well. what’s to lose. you google “crayon in dryer.” poof. you get the word. congratulations, lady, you have just scored one of the top seven laundry disasters.
your computer tells you so.
hmm. they recommend wd-40, which last you checked had something to do with squeaky wheels, or at least you think so, since you’ve never really used it.
you toddle off to the neighborhood hardware store, an old-fashioned place with workers who seem to have faced every disaster in the books and always have a fine idea for how to fix things.
you tell the nice lady behind the counter why you’re there. she shakes her head. she goes to get her brother in the back. he too shakes his head. but he adds this: “horrible. horribly bad.”
he says never mind the wd-40. what you need, lady, is floor stripper.
huh? floor stripper in my all-pink dryer? you think this is slipping fast into the toxic waste dump of your life. you picture yourself descending to the cellar in puffy spacesuit, the kind they wear when clearing noxious poisons in the filmstrips about what to do in case of nuclear spill.
the nice man insists. you, dutiful, take home your stripper. and a pair of pink rubber gloves. going with the color theme, of course.
you are deep inside the dryer drum. the hot dryer drum, mind you, inhaling noxious stripper, rubbing hard, when suddenly you hear little feet stomping up above. the little one and his papa are home from saturday morning t-ball. they let you know that they are back. they ask what you are doing in the basement.
you tell them that a crayon, it seems, crept into the dryer.
the little one, sounding jolly, even proud, shouts back: “that red crayon was mine!”
how, you ask, did it wind up in the laundry?
“oh, it just fell in my pocket,” he says nonchalantly, as if kindergarten is a place where art supplies take flying leaps all day. dive-bomb into pockets, small dark places where mothers on the move might not think to look.
and so, you spend the next two hours stripping crayon out of your dryer drum. because it’s a beautiful saturday morning. and you can think of nowhere you’d rather be than with your head stuck in a dryer, getting dizzy as you rub.
the pink laundry, you soaked and soaked. you sprayed and soaked some more. you ditched the undies. you now own your teenage son’s fine pink black-dog t-shirt. and the boxers? except for lasting bits of crayola red, polka dots to remind you of the day you forgot to check the pockets, they are resting comfortably in the bottom of a drawer.
and you, head cleared, are recommending this: keep on hand a quart of floor stripper, for you never know what lurks at the bottom of a pocket.

moral of the story: hmm, you tell me. or rather, just tell your favorite laundry disaster tale. or perhaps you’d rather talk about 101 ways to put floor stripper to good use. have at it.

and it’s monday, check the lazy susan. she spins anew.