firstborn | pull up a chair

December 12, 2025

oh, the places we’ve come . . .

winter, i’ve always sensed, is the curling-in time, the season of unseen stirring, and in an octave of dawns, dusks, and nightfalls, winter will be upon us.

but even now, it’s a season for quieting, for simmering thoughts as well as saucepots of cinnamon stick, star anise, and clove. my simmering for the last nineteen years picks up the pace as the page turns on another year of pulling up chairs to this imaginary old maple table, one where the indentations of long-ago math homework are pressed into the grain, where so many coffees and juices have been poured and sipped and spilled and sopped up with sponges. over the course of these nearly two decades, it seems i’ve developed a knack for simmering while tapping away at the rows of alphabet keys—some 1,255 simmers and counting, all under the name “pull up a chair,” now tapped, posted, and filed away.

only a handful of the very first chairs—bless them, those stalwart humans—still pull up a chair, at least every once in a while. but along the way, so many chairs have been added, and multiplied. and our polestar has never shifted: to carve out a sacred space where questions are asked, and stories are told, where hearts are bared, and above all where gentle, gentle kindness is the metronome by which we set all our rhythms. once in a while, over all the bumps and bruises encountered along the way, we’ve been known to bow our heads and pour out our hearts in holy, holy please God, pray for us.

on the twelfth of december, 2006, our firstborn had just been bar mitzvahed, and our then so-called “little one” was but a kindergartener, not yet reading or writing but melting my heart by the minute and filling our notebooks with his stories and antics and an encyclopedia of unforgettable “teddyisms.” (some kept alive to this day; for the sheer pure joy of it). the firstborn, now law professor, insisted at the dawn of the self-published blogging age that i, his little old mother, could figure out how to “blog,” a verb that’s always sounded to me like a crude guttural effusion, a burp perhaps. and back in the day, he gave me his hand-me-down laptop to do it. to prove i could blog, that is. (as has so often been the case, he even then was wiser than me…)

back then, the question that had captured my attention was the simplest of notions: i believed, after a few years of keenly observing, tagging along with, and writing long newspaper stories of families in the thick of life transitions as a reporter for the chicago tribune, that life’s biggest questions aren’t reserved for colloquia and global summits, nor do they wait for podiums and percussive applause. they are the stuff of the everyday. and if we watch closely, pay keen attention, we can lift those universal, deeply-human questions and struggles from the quotidian stream, hold them to the light for closer consideration, and reap their wisdoms and epiphanies in real time. now, before the moments pass us by and we come to the saddest realization of all: that it’s too late, and our chance at most wakeful living has slipped into the distance.

all these years later, life certainly has galloped along here at the table. this ol’ chair has seen the growings up of two boys, buried parents beloved, moved another from her home of sixty years. taken a tour of cambridge, mass., and a second helping of college. trekked across the pond, set our sights on war zones, and been rolled into surgical suites and recovery rooms. we’ve feared for our country, for humanity, for civility, and plain old decency. and we’ve refused to surrender to the crude and cruel ways wielded by those who seize power. we’ve kept our minds opened, and tried—oh, we’ve tried—to emphasize the imperative of objective, double-sourced truth, and the slaying of hearsay and heresy. we’ve laid out worries here, and plenty of joys; we’ve marveled and wondered and been gobsmacked aplenty. i’ve pondered cancer and the physics of time, and the holy shimmering presence i know as God.

lately i seem to have taken to gathering up wisdoms far greater than mine will ever be. i am, as a beloved friend of the chair once put it, something of a magpie. a magpie mostly attuned to seeking the sacred amid the plainstuff of living. the idea of the commonplace book is one i heartily embrace: bring on the poets and sages and prophets, and let me invite you into their brilliant notebooks and minds and unfurl for you their passages and poetics that take away our collective breath and find a way of percolating for hours to come.

this ol’ chair has given me a place to keep on tapping away at the keys. i realized long ago that i untangle the knots of my life by stringing out sentences. and trying on thoughts. thank you for indulging me, those of you who choose to read along. thank you for pondering the questions at the end of each post, in the quiet of your own soul, or by leaving a note at the table.

you are, collectively and individually, humans who restore and buck up my faith in the inherent majesty and wonder of the shimmering undying spirit that populates this earth with more than a modicum of heaven’s best offerings.

bless you, bless you, a thousand times thousand, bless you.

this week i am bringing a little birthday bouquet of beauties that struck me across the week, all of them tied together by the beautiful idea that the birthing of holiness is a sacramental act of which we must partake. it’s one that entails unlocking our hearts, making room in the manger within, and allowing the Holy and Sacred to form within, and to birth it with our words and our love in the act. it’s quite the trinity here: a benedictine monk who practices and teaches meditation in the french countryside at a monastery known as bonnevaux; st. john of the cross, the great mystic, as translated by the poet daniel ladinsky; and the late, great luci shaw, a beloved british-american poet and essayist who died at 96 on december first.

first up, the idea of birthing God within us from the benedictine monk, laurence freeman, whom i’ve been learning from for years…

In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart enjoyed waking people up in his sermons by expounding some uncomfortably new perspectives about their standardised faith. He must have stirred a few dozy parishioners when he asked: “What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, that it should take place within myself, is really what matters.”

Actually, the great Augustine had asked the same question a thousand years before and added that if we are the children of God, we must become God’s mother as well. If, he said, this birth of the eternal word as Christ in the soul is to happen, our heart – the deepest centre of our being – must become the sacred manger. If we are filled with egocentric distraction there is ‘no room at the inn’ and so the heart must become that empty and open space where the birth takes place and through which he is welcomed into our world.

In today’s gospel, John the Baptist is usually and badly translated as saying ‘repent, for the reign of God is close at hand’. Basileia, the Greek word we think of as ‘kingdom’, is feminine and so could equally well translate it as ‘queendom’. It doesn’t mean a juridical area but the space in which the presence and grace of God is acknowledged and welcomed. The gospel word, badly translated as ‘repent’, is ‘metanoia’: a change of mind and heart. It is not about feeling sorry for past mistakes. It means spinning round 180 degrees and entirely changing your perspective on and approach to reality.

Living in the desert, wearing a garment of camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey, John seems to us a bit extremist. People who reduce waste and get back to essentials are often called crazy. But because of his spiritual sanity he drew the crowds who asked him ‘what shall we do?’ because, like us, they lived in confused, divided and dangerous times. He told them simply to live honestly and justly but that this lifestyle would prepare them for the imminent – and immanent – coming of the great transformer of all things.

Meditation is the great simplifier. It reduces the way we waste both time and life’s opportunities. In daily life it is the catalyst for ongoing metanoia. The medicine that loosens the grip of illusion. Usually, we start enthusiastically but before we get to the full 180 degrees we slow down and say, ‘this is quite good, let’s stop here’. Fortunately, if the birth process has already started, it will not allow us to arrest or deny it. We have to see it through until it breaks through into our world and we are happy and lucky if we do.

—Laurence Freeman

and from the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross there comes this interpretation/translation of what daniel ladinsky calls one of his “love poems”…

IF YOU WANT

If
you want
the Virgin will come walking down the road
pregnant with the holy,
and say,
“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,
my time is so close.”

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime
intimacy, the divine, the Christ
taking birth
forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us
is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yet there, under the dome of your being does creation
come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim–
the sacred womb in your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is
His beloved servant
never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking
down the street pregnant
with Light and sing …

—St. John of the Cross, “If You Want” in Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (New York: Penguin Group, 2002), 306-307.

and, in closing, here’s a classic from blessed, blessed luci, whose great contribution to the canon of Christian poetry would be her capacity for drawing big truths about God and human experience from viscerally pulsing fine-grained images and objects. she is the perfect voice to close out this nineteenth year of the chair….

Kenosis
By Luci Shaw

In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.
He is so new, his silk skin has not yet
been roughed by plane and wooden beam
nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.
He is in a dream of nipple found,
of blue-white milk, of curving skin
and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb
of a warm heart’s repeated sound.
His only memories float from fluid space.
So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,
broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,
wept for the sad heart of the human race.

amen.

may this blessed week bring softening to the walls of your heart, and a widening within those chambers so that Holiness, however you name it, might be birthed there….love, b.

25 Comments

March 1, 2024

time travel

the other morning, when the clouds were especially bumpy, i boarded a plane, paid no mind to the bumps, and flew 612 miles to turn back the clock to “before time,” and seize a few of the most important days of my life.

what might those days be, you wonder? those days are nothing so fancy as plain old ordinary quotidian days side-by-side with a law professor who happens to be my firstborn. and whose life all those hundreds of miles away from where i usually lay my head on my pillow feels too far for a mama trying to seize every blessing from every old day.

i count myself among the blessed, having birthed a human who happens to be one of my favorite of the whole species. he is 30 and i am double that-plus. and all these decades in, i still purr like a happy cat when he and i are curled like bookends on either side of the same couch. or side-by-side in the front seat of a car, him at the wheel, motoring hither and yon as together we trace some curiosity. or attend to a plain old errand.

a year ago at exactly this time i was here slicing open boxes, stacking sheets on shelves, and filling a fridge, moving him in at the start of his professorial life. it was just weeks before i had surgery, and before i had any idea what the surgeon would tell me as i lay there coming out of an ethereal fog. in fact, it was during my week here in DC that i tried to casually mention that i was going to be having a little surgery. and so, this week in time and place holds some sort of magical power for me: it allows me to suspend time, to return to “before,” and to savor the simple insatiable union of mother and manchild.

only, truth is, there’s a twist this time round. and that twist takes it up a notch. or many a notch.

i know now, in a way i didn’t know then, how very precious even one day is. and how, if you told me i had only a certain number of days, and then asked me how i would want to seize the most of those days, i would tell you the one thing i wanted most emphatically was to be as close as i could be to the people whose lives have left the deepest mark on me.

this year, i know a bit more about the arithmetic of life. and how, no matter how many days there are, there are a precious few categories for which there are never enough. and how, simply hearing the sounds––even the humdrum ones, maybe especially so––of someone you love shaking off the bedsheets in the other room, awaking to another day, watching that someone in real time, in the flesh, go about the unspoken routines that make for a day––grabbing the keys from the bowl, looping back for one last chug of coffee, turning down a particular street to get to work, all those incidentals that make a life a life––those are the things i want to take in in real time. to press them to my knowing. to be entwined with.

and so, as the calendar rolls back to that seminal season when everything changed, i wanted to slip in between time and enter a netherworld in which i could plant one foot in “before time,” when i wasn’t someone who’d been told she had cancer, and “after time,” another name for now, when i do know that the blessing of cancer, or any leaden-weighted diagnosis, is that nothing means more than time. unfettered, ordinary, spectacular, magnificent hour-upon-hour doing the things that make a life a life.

because these are the hours i will never ever regret or forget. and i don’t ever want to wish i’d made more time for time.

while i marinate in the hours and days before me, before i board the homebound plane, here are a few things worth pondering. all of which make for this most beautiful mosaic we call our sweet fine lives. . .

this sweet gem is an excerpt from the very lovely susan cain’s Bittersweet:

Franz Kafka was one of the great European novelists of the twentieth century. But there’s another story, this one written not by Kafka but about him, by the Spanish writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra. This story is based on the memoirs of a woman named Dora Diamant, who lived with Kafka in Berlin, just before his death.

In this story, Kafka takes a walk in the park, where he meets a tearful little girl who just lost her favorite doll. He tries and fails to help find the doll, then tells the girl that the doll must have taken a trip, and he, a doll postman, would send word from her. The next day, he brings the girl a letter, which he’d composed the night before. Don’t be sad, says the doll in the letter. “I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” After that, Kafka gives the girl many such letters. The doll is going to school, meeting exciting new people. Her new life prevents her from returning, but she loves the girl, and always will.

At their final meeting, Kafka gives the girl a doll, with an attached letter. He knows that this doll looks different from the lost one, so the letter says: “My travels have changed me.”

The girl cherishes the gift for the rest of her life. And many decades later, she finds another letter stuffed into an overlooked cranny in the substitute doll. This one says: “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”

and, lastly, this: wisdom from The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures.

With gentleness overcome anger – with generosity overcome meanness – with truth overcome deceit – Beware of the anger of the mind – master your thoughts – Let them serve truth – the wise have mastered body, word and mind – the wise harm no one.
The Dhammapada*

“the wise harm no one…” let us be wise, be gentle, be generous.

and speaking of generosity one of our beloved beloved chairs who lives not far from where i sit typing here in DC motored over yesterday to spend a good chunk of the day traipsing through a franciscan monastery that took our breath away (and not only because of the paths up and down hills) and who delivered this glorious berry-filled galette to me and my sweet professor, whom she knew when he was a mere wee lad of kindergarten age…generosity abounds at the chair, and i love you all for it.

pjt’s very magnificent very-berry galette

and how might you choose to seize a day, any old day, in the magnificent story of your sweet and blessed life?

11 Comments

March 3, 2023

a mother’s heart finds its place in a canyon of moving boxes

dispatch from 20009: in which canyons of boxes in every room are ours to conquer, moi and the one i birthed first. . .

i write to you this dawn from the singular place on the planet i wanted to be this week, a point on the map now highlighted in illuminating shades of radiant. a kid i love is a professor now, and i am here where, in my book, a mother belongs: by his side, tearing open his boxes, tallying the lost and found, turning a blueprint of rooms into a place called home.

i’ve planted the kid in five points on the map since the day he left home for college, and each one for its season became a place i peered in on, checking the weather, counting the miles, watching police reports. his dot became mine by extension.

i’ve spent years now considering places called amherst and new haven, portland, manhattan, and now the nation’s capital, specifically adams morgan, a neighborhood where RBG graces the banners that waft from the light poles, with the words “live your truth.”

the kid has decidedly hopscotched across the country over the course of the last decade. but his itinerant days might be over, as a tenure-track post prompts me to think i’d better get used to the latest in zip codes. and, anyway, unpacking boxes, finding places on shelves, has become my sub-specialty. it’s a task i take on with all the love in the world. i don’t think i’ll ever extinguish the place in my heart that tells me my number one job on the planet is to soften the blows, trod the circuitous path, keep stretching my arms clear across the landscape, and always, always find space and time for side-splitting giggles and tears when they spill from both of our eyes.

the kid is 29 but nowhere in the manual i was handed in the delivery room can i find a line telling me there’s a time when the mothering stops. mothering over the decades is a three-dimensional wonder: it deepens and widens, is layered with strata of life’s most wrenching and glorious moments. just last night as we were giggling and whispering our way to sleep––me on un-sheeted bed (we’re working our way from kitchen to bedroom), him on inflatable mattress––i told him how even though i see the professorial glasses he wears these days and feel the heft of his six-foot-three pillar of flesh and bone when he wraps his arms around me, i also see plenty often a flashing picture show of his life at various points along his continuum: i see––clear as clear could be––the wet and squirmy little thing placed in my outstretched arms the very first time; i see the six-month-old who let out a belly laugh for the very first time; i see the toddler who looked up from the kitchen table one breakfast and asked, as if it was the most ordinary of questions for a three- or four-year-old, “mommy, what is facetious?” meaning what does it mean, this very long word not normally found in preschool vocabulary. and, yes, i see the kindergartener who set up a lecture hall in our living room, with a circle of stuffed-animal pupils, a chalkboard and easel, and 26 spongy alphabet letters. the professor wore suspenders and tie and bare feet, and instructed his class on the fine points of D, O, and Q.

it’s a curious thing, this mothering the grown human being. there are those, i’ve been told, who believe a mother’s role is to step into the distant background, loosen the grip on the ups and the downs of those you’ve loved every day of their lives. i’m not among them, though i can go––and i have––whole weeks without more than a short burst of texting. i find it only gets richer and richer, the closest i know to “love as you would be loved.” mothering to me is a spectacular testing ground: day after day, i re-define and refine the extraordinary intricacies of loving, of where to position myself in the tableau of his life, how much of the weight to bear, and when to stand silent and when to come running.

what i know, after a lifetime of fumbles, of occasional hits and plenty of misses, is this: the width of my brain has only grown wider over the years, as each of my boys carry me into realms i’d otherwise never explore. and my heart and my soul, they’ve at once defied the laws of physics, both deepening and rising to depths and heights i’d never ever imagined. and so, as long as i’m needed and able, i shall tear away the endless strips of packing tape till my fingers are raw and my boy has a place to call home, his very own faraway home. six hundred miles from mine.

since i’ve been busy unpacking this week, i’ve not had much chance to gather up a commonplace-y bouquet. but i did find this, from the late great bard, leonard cohen, on sainthood:

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.”
Leonard Cohen

“achieved a remote human possibility. . . ” contemplate that for a while….

in book news: it seems hard copies of The Book of Nature have been plopping onto front stoops all over these united states, and heavenly folk, especially friends of the chair, have been sending along snaps, each of which makes my heart do a little bit of a gallop. it’s still a couple weeks till the official pub date––the vernal equinox, march 21; bring on the springtime, bring on the book!––so these early sneak-peek arrivals are both surprise and delight. and i am hoping to set that book soaring with a grand circle of chairs, as night falls on that first day of spring. see here for more details, should you be so inclined. (we’re gathering on march 21 at 7 p.m. central time, via zoom, one of the rare silver linings to emerge from our years in pandemic––or at least i count it as a silver lining, bringing me poets and thinkers from all across the globe.)

before i get back to uprooting books from their boxes, here’s the question (to ponder or drop us your thoughts): of all the mothers you’ve known or watched from some distance or close proximity, what are/were the defining qualities that allowed you to see and see clearly just what it means to love in the deepest mothering way? (and, remember, mothering for me is a verb not tied to any particular gender or state of procreativity, but rather to any and all who love with a tender loving attention and care, and the undying prayer that in some way they might both lighten another’s load and magnify the wonder of being alive…)

19 Comments

November 12, 2021

equinox of the heart

at almost sunset, the pair of swans who live on Shippee’s Pond, glided out for supper, in plain sight from the blessed old house

My heart is in equinox. Equal parts light and shadow. That’s not necessarily an out-of-the-ordinary state of affairs for the human vessel that holds all we feel in a day, in a lifetime. But it’s not usually so amplified, not usually so stark.

On the one hand, I am counting down the hours and minutes till a boy I love, the first one I birthed, comes home for the first real time in years and years. The first time in as long as I can remember when he won’t be squelched by the pressures of (in reverse chronological order) bar exam, law school, admission to law school, wrangling a classroom of hellions for the year he was teaching on the mean streets of Chicago, and before that pushing against the deadline for an honors thesis that somehow stretched to 300-plus pages. He is—in three days and two hours—packing a Portland apartment into a moving van, and one day and six hours after that he’s boarding a plane, crossing the Rockies, the Great Plains, and the checkerboard of farmland that is preamble to landing at Chicago’s O’Hare International.

He’ll be here—for the first time in six years—for the Thanksgiving feast. And Christmas, and the turn of the new year. Then he’ll move on, to New York City, where once again he will take up his pen and his law books and clerk for a federal judge. And all that time, all the weeks when he’s here, the first order of business will be simply to breathe. To sleep in the old room at the top of the stairs, to trundle down to this old maple table, to cook by my side, and walk along the lakeshore where we all go to think when our thoughts—and our souls—need every square inch of the infinite sky.

And, on the other hand, the man I married three decades ago, the man whose life has unspooled next to mine for the best of my years, he’s off on the Jersey Shore, in an old quirky-but-endlessly-charming house at the edge of a pond. He is there all alone, except for the movers who are coming in shifts, day after day, to empty the house of every last trace of the long lives lived there. The house will be bulldozed before spring turns to summer. And it’s his job, as the only son, to attend to its final hours. He is packing up the last of the dishes found tucked in a cabinet no one had known, finding nearly lost treasures slipped between books on the shelves (his parents’ ketubah, or marriage “contract,” signed in ink in January of 1955, and almost sent off with a load of donations), taking one last long look out the living room window, watching the sunlight and the swans on the pond.

It’s a house that has played an anchoring role as a central character in the narrative of the long lives lived there. No one ever imagined it wouldn’t be there, high on the ridge at the top of the slope, peering down on the pond. The footfall of at least a century and a half are pressed into the stairs that twist up to the bedrooms. Sixty-five of those years belonged to my husband’s father and mother—he in his white bucks or his Keds, a gentleman of old-school sartorial splendor; she in her size-10 flats (never heels, for she never wanted to tower too tremendously over the little children she taught, as a woman of considerable height).

My husband, who has long taken to heart the tenet that architecture shapes lives as lives shape the architecture, is not one to bid farewell to timber and bricks (both of Revolutionary War vintage) without a significant lump in his throat, and a piercing in his chest. I saw how his eyes went dark, the sadness not hidden, when he said to a friend the other day, “It’s like another death.” It’s the last one of its chapter. Six years ago, the sartorial one breathed his last, and just this July, so did the schoolteacher. Each time, my husband and his sister scattered the ashes along the holy ground that is the edge of the pond.

I can barely imagine how hard it will be to turn the key in the door that one last time. To walk down the steps, turn, take one last look. To drive away, down the lane, the white clapboard gardener’s cottage disappearing into the distance. To know, after 64 years, he’ll never come again.

And so the shadow is thick on the walls of my heart, and the light, too, is dappling, is falling in splotches. The equinox of the heart is not uncharted terrain, but oh it makes for gingerly treading.

Thank you for listening. It is hard, so hard, to say good-bye.

funny that i wrote this in caps, up till now. i’ve been writing and writing all week, and i guess i’ve fallen back into work mode here on the keyboard. for me caps are like wearing my big-girl shoes, lower case is kicking ’em off, shuffling around in my slippers. i’m letting it stand, as a salute to the ones i love…

photos above by blair kamin, on Shippee’s Pond, fair haven, new jersey.

the boys i love, the one coming home tuesday on the left. standing in the front yard of their grandparents’ house on the day of their grandmother’s funeral.

how often do you live in equinox of the heart, and might it be–in many ways–the natural state of the vessel that contains so very much of our love, and our joy and our hurt? so much of our lives are equal parts light and shadow. how do you find a stillpoint?

12 Comments

September 5, 2014

tracks to my heart

the email slipped in with no more than the ubiquitous ping. it came from my faraway brother, the one with a boy of his own now, a fine little lad rounding the bend toward two.

the email couldn’t have been clearer:

“Hey Babs, we are thinking of getting a train set for milo. I recall you guys had a great Thomas Train set up. If you still have it, would you be open to our borrowing it for couple years? We would pay all packing and shipping both ways. Saves us buying new. I totally understand you might not want to let it go. Just wondering.”

in an instant, the snapshots came tumbling: my own firstborn’s second birthday, a summer’s day so hot and sticky he wore just a onesie as we tiptoed down the stairs to see what the birthday fairy had tucked in the living room corner. my heart nearly burst as i handed him the very first box i’d ever gone out and bought for him. it was a box so heavy the little guy couldn’t lift it. he needed his papa and me. inside: an oval of track, wooden track; one ivy-wrapped train station; and a little blue engine named thomas, thomas the tank engine, a train who’d ascend to a starring role in the celluloid loops of one boyhood.

for years and years, the consummate posture in our house was a boy perched in a crouch, his fine little fingers curled over the spine of a train as he moved it this way and that, spinning tale after tale, spewing noise after guttural noise (for that’s what trains do when they speed or they crash). one by one, we collected engines and track and bridges and tunnels. we collected stories, and friendships there on the floor where the tracks morphed from circle to oval to intricate geometries that looped and ducked and rose and forked. back in the day, the little TV by the kitchen table played over and over the tales of the trains of the island of sodor, all told in the lilting tongue of one ringo starr, who to these children was simply mr. conductor, while to his parents he was the rockstar drummer, now curiously cast as trainman. (ringo gave way to george carlin — or maybe it went the other way, carlin to starr — either way, a bizarre bit of telegenics, one that endears both gents forever.)

our sweet boy loved trains more than anything. for years, we rode them cross country, falling asleep to the sway of the bunks as we rolled through the heartland, the hudson river valley, or the rise of the rockies. we drove to where we could watch the lumbering locomotives, switching back and forth on the side tracks in the yard where they were hosed down and polished. we climbed aboard on sundays and rode up and down the “el” line, or around “the loop,” chicago’s train set for grownups.

more than once, our little trainman plopped his head to the pillow and drifted to dreamland clutching one of his engines. he rarely left home without his striped engineer’s cap. and when he was four, and we drove to a farm to fetch a striped six-week-old kitten, our little trainman inserted “choo-choo” as the mewling’s middle name.

one christmas, the very same brother who now wonders if we might send our train set his way stayed up the whole night, sawing and pounding vast planes and chunks of wood, a train table with sawdust-sprinkled landscape, one that stood on four stout legs, and rose to the precise height of one little boy’s waist, for maximum stretch of his train-steering arms. that blessed brother’s all-night labor made for a christmas awakening never to be exceeded.

and then one day, the train table was collecting dust. the trains hadn’t moved one inch in the yard. they were tumbled all in a pile. and, in time, tossed in a bin and tucked at the back of the toy shelf.

for years now, they’ve cowered in the dark. too treasured to be relegated to the attic. too forgotten to see the light of the murky playroom downstairs.

but still that bin holds so many sparks of a boyhood, i can nearly hear its whispers. maybe more than anyone in the house, i’m the one still clutching the tracks and the sweet-faced engines.

but around here we believe in hand-me-downs. and not only because it stretches a dollar. because a hand-me-down is history. is layers of story. of love. is animated even its stillness.

and so, this morning, i will sift through the train bin. i will pluck out thomas, the blue one, and james, who is red. edward, i recall, is the kind engine (and thus, always, my favorite). and toby is a troublemaker. how could you not love the cast of your firstborn’s childhood? how could you not treasure the trains that, often, came to dinner? made lumps in the bed clothes? filled little-boy pockets? spouted faucets of tears if left behind, ever?

that little train man is far from home now, 1000 miles away from the train table that is no longer. he’s all grown, and he told me just last week, with a thrill in his voice, that the window of his senior-year dorm room looks out on a train track that runs through the woods of his leafy new england college.

and just a bit farther north and east, in the little town of south portland, maine, there is a little boy who doesn’t yet go to sleep dreaming of trains. but he will. oh, he will.

as soon as i slap the shipping tape onto the cardboard box that waits in the basement. soon as the nice mailman scoops up the parcel and plops it onto a faraway stoop. soon as sweet milo crouches down in that way that boys do, and curls his fingers just so, round the spine of the train. and, full steam ahead, chugs through a childhood.

bless the tracks and the trains, and the boys who so love them….

what are the treasures from your childhood? or the childhood of someone you love? do you recall bequeathing that treasure to the next keeper of treasure?

17 Comments

August 2, 2013

loopy days

for three short weeks — one down, only two to go — there’s a new rhythm in this old house. it goes like this: ’round late morning, i hear a swoosh from up above the kitchen ceiling (that’s the bedsheets being whipped aside); then i hear a thud, followed by a parade of thuds, thud-thud-thud down the stairs. as the thuds round the bend, lope into the kitchen, i look up and see a bed-head. my beloved boy.

he begins his morning forage through the fridge. as he piles tubs and cartons on the countertop, he lets out with a “whadda we got for breakfast, mommo?”

that’s my cue to begin the litany, all within the confines of high-protein, low carbs, healthy, delicious, and filling.

hmm. let me know if you’ve got ideas.

it’s at about this point that the eggs are being cracked, he’s begging for mushrooms, and wants to know if i remembered to get the mozzarella at the market. as i watch egg whites whirl toward the kitchen walls, i leap up from my typing to play at being his sous-chef (though really all i am is the wiper-upper of kitchen splats).

he whips up something grand, something delicious, and always spilling over the sides of his plate.

we mosey back to the table. or, well, he moseys, and i finish up the de-splatting. then we sit, and the loopy days begin. we dive deep. quickly.

waste little time on folderol and fluff. we’ve got a year’s worth of college life to pour over (we’ve been known to take in two years at a gulp, retreading over year before last, if pertinent) , and there’s the year ahead to consider, too.

we loop round and round, drop threads, follow new ones, circle back — hours later — to the thread we’d left behind. it goes like this for half the day.

now, not all college kids go off the way mine has. i’ve heard tales of kids who text many times a day. i’ve even heard stories about college kids who dial phones. call home. to be fair, that happens here too, but not so very often. and, when it happens, it is sometimes very very late at night.

we seem to have birthed a college kid who takes his college full-throttle. unless it’s dire — and on occasion, it’s been vaguely that — we’re pretty much the side show. oh, there are insistent “love you, mommo”s. and there are (astonishingly), “do you remember where you put my sewing kit?”

mostly, i, um, never ever doubt, not for any longer than five or 10 minutes, that he appreciates my unbroken love and care.

but, really, it’s these sacred hours when he’s home, when the two of us are circling in and out of each other’s footspace and quarter-hour time slots, that we make up for lost time, and seal the deal for the long whitespace ahead.

these hours, the ones where he might sink down low inside a bean bag, while i trod for miles on the treadmill, the ones where i sous to his chef, these are the ones that knit us deep and thick and forever at the heart.

love in every house spills out in idiosyncratic ways. and it changes over time.

at my house now, i am licking up these hours of deep and winding conversation as if the ice cream melted on my cake plate.

i am whispering thanks to the heavens above that, right now, for this short interlude, i can do my typing here, not far from where the thuds patter down the stairs. so that i can weave my sentences in between his stories. so i can be here to catch the loop-de-loops of conversation as they unfurl. in slow time. unhurried time. whip-up-omelettes-while-you’re-talking time.

because i’m long practiced in the art of asking questions, allowing long spells for replies, i find this a part of motherhood to which i take a particular shine. play time on the floor, i flunked. so, too, chutes and ladders and monopoly. i wasn’t bad at crayons and paper. but really.

the deepest glue i know is the one that comes from unfurling the whole of the human heart. the nooks and crannies. crests and high plains.

so it’s what we do here. for three short weeks. in the mid-day hours when no one else is home. and my brain’s at full attention. and my work can wait till dark. for these hours are slipping through my fingers. and i am plumbing the depths of each and every one.

loopy days, i find, are the summer’s sweetest offering.

do you practice the art of the slow-unwinding conversation? the one with someone you love that stops and starts and plumbs the depths for days and days on end? and carries you across long dry deserts of barely enough time to really, really talk?

and because i promised a bit of cerebral uplift, i’ll begin what i’m calling the marginalia department, where i scribble in the margins of whatever page i’m turning, where i recount for you the lines i’ve scored and underscored.

this week from rebecca solnit’s “the faraway nearby,” a line to chew on for a time:

“Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.”

or this….

“Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.”

i am especially keen on the first, about difficulty school, and the option of learning from it. it’s a thought that carried me to sleep last night…..and it’s a book that came highly recommended by one of my very favorite reader friends…..

2 Comments

November 24, 2012

never enough…

dispatch from 02139 (in which we’ve returned “home” from our swoop down the eastern seaboard — a grand thanksgiving repast in new york city, in the brownstone at 94th and lex we have come to know and love for its grace (and wild rice salad, and indian corn pudding, and oven-browned brussels sprouts), followed by a zip through the lincoln tunnel to one fair haven, and my tall fellow’s ancestral home, the 1789 gardener’s cottage where, to this day, his heart ticks at its fullest, its soundest)…

i should have mastered this. should have figured this out. should have, should have, should have.

but i haven’t.

not when it comes to saying goodbye, not when the goodbye is to my firstborn, grand thump in my heart, big brother to the little guy, the one who’s been away, off at college for nearly three whole semesters now.

you’d think i could get through it without the preamble rumble down in my belly, without the pounding in my heart, without the tears welling and spilling.

but i haven’t.

each time, i swear, it feels like someone is unplugging a cord that keeps my glow up and glowing. that has something to do with how i breathe. that puts the purr in my heart.

each time, in the hours before, as i start to feel the yanking, the turning and twisting of parts deep inside, as i start to picture the hours and days ahead without him, without the unspooling of conversation that comes, unexpected, as i chop in the kitchen, as i fold laundry, as i tie my shoes and head out for a stroll, i start to see the color draining away.

i start to feel empty all over again.

i think back to the days of villages, when a mother and son would never be farther than a few cottages away, down behind a waist-high stone wall, through an arched timbered doorway, in a room where embers on the hearth burned orange, persimmon and red.

i wonder why, nowadays, mothers and children need live miles and miles, whole ZIP codes, away.

oh, of course, i settle back into my rhythms. get used to plowing through the day without the flash of his million-watt smile. without dinners fueled by his stories. (fact is, i don’t mind, not one little bit, seeing his bunk smooth and unrumpled. don’t miss the volcano of clothes he spills on the bedroom floor.)

we left the boy back in new york city. he’s a man now. my last glimpse of him was under a streetlight at the corner of 94th and lexington avenue. he filled out his shetland sweater, his chest now strikingly, breathtakingly, the shape and size and velocity of my own papa’s. a chest i always loved. a chest that made me feel safe against the world. and now that chest belongs to my son, my sweet boy, my strapping 6-foot-3 chunk of a man.

as i stepped back from his hug, from his long arms, broad shoulders, soft hands, i felt the pull like stretching of dough. i, into the distance. he, into the thick of his life. a whole weekend before him, a weekend with his beloved cousin and aunt, a weekend romping through the best of new york, a new york i’ll never see.

fact is, it’s his life he lives now. whole chapters and verse distant to me. unknown. uncharted.

as it should be. as it’s meant to be.

but that does not make the parting of mother and child one drop easier. not for this mother anyway.

it’s not that i want him tucked by my side. God, no. this is why and how i’ve raised him — to spread his arms wide as wide can be, to wrap in as much and as deep as he can, and then to soar high.

it’s just that along with that soaring comes the fact that mama bird’s back in the nest, or up on some other limb, watching the sky, watching the loop-de-loops. wings on alert, ready to spread, to enfold, in case there’s a fall, a need to harbor, to shelter again.

and that airspace between mother and child, that life space, it just seems to take — every time — getting used to.

i always think, i’ve never my fill of him. never enough of his stories. never enough of his heart. never ever enough.

and then, not long after i’d swallowed my goodbyes, i watched my own tall fellow, the one i married, say goodbye to his mama, down in fair haven, on the jersey shore. and i wondered if she too always feels it. that it’s never enough. that one more breakfast together. one more walk to the river. one more, one more, would finally fill the hole.

but truth is, i think it’s a hole that will never be filled. it’s a wanting that goes un-sated.

it’s a yearning, a hunger, a please-come-back that lies at the heart of deep love. most especially, at the heart and soul of mother love.

who in your life do you never ever get enough of?

photo way above is my boys, big and little, plotting their flag-football moves in a game against the cousins, played on the lot behind the tall fence at hunter college on new york’s upper east side. i can’t get enough of watching the two of them entwine the whole of their lives….

photo below is my firstborn at his ebullient best.

happy blessed season of thanks, and beginning of advent, the season of waiting…..and now i am off to a long day of writing….classes wrap up in the next couple weeks. where did that first semester go???

11 Comments

June 22, 2012

birthday fairy steps aside

happens every day. all the best of ’em come to that square on the game board called life when they know it’s time to go. hang up the hat. hook the keys on the nail. tiptoe quietly off to the wings.

happened here last night. i swore i heard the swoosh of her wings, the birthday fairy, as she peeked in the window one last time. pressed her delicate pink nose against the glass, blew a kiss, and flew on.

for the first time in 18 years, the blessed balloon-blowing, poster-wielding, crepe-paper-draping fairy of birthdays did not wreak havoc beside the twin bed where my firstborn snoozed. she did not wind ribbons of crinkly crepe round his bedposts and doorknobs, she did not weave and dodge and try to slither out without waking the dozing log of a boy, who year by year got longer and longer, slept more and more soundly.

for the first time since the year he turned 1, she did not romp through the night making merriment.

it was time, she realized, for the big strapping lad to get on with his life without her.

poor thing, she’s probably curled up on some lily pad this lonely morning licking her wounds.

it’s not easy to give up a post you’ve loved, with a boy you long ago tucked tightly under your wing.

oh, if you peeked in his closets you’d find posters counting up every last year. “top 13 reasons you are loved.” “happy 4 we love you.” “why we love you….(continued from ’06)” and on and on it goes. a numerical stair step through childhood. a boy loved beyond words, but not beyond magic markers and poster boards and his very own fairy’s whimsical ways.

all the way to 18, she kept at it. each year needing to schedule her visit later and later, to account for the nocturnal ways of a teen hurdling toward adulthood. she carried him — oh, yes, she did — right through to the ledge, where little boy ways are folded up and tucked into memory boxes, and voting and driving and first sips of scotch slide onto the landscape.

so last night, despite the tugging there at her heart, despite her teetering back and forth, wondering if maybe one last time she might crank up the markers, haul out the rolls of festooning, she thought back over the subtle signs of the last year, the year far away at college, and all the ways she had come to realize, to know through and through, that it was time to honor the grownup in her midst. to let go of what was, and find a whole new way to embrace the whole of him.

so, for the first time, there was no mad-dash scrambling of pens and puns and ways to spell out “i love you” in numbers and words and silly scribblings.

instead, there was a mama who sat down at her typing board, and typed out a letter, every last word of it moistened by the tears that started to fall and would not stop, not till after the two typed pages were paper clipped, folded and slipped into the envelope marked with a hand-drawn red heart.

this time, on the eve of 19, she did not hide behind fairy wings and bright colored markers. nope, she told him the one thing she wanted him to know: that from the beginning till beyond the beyond, she was the one who loved him like nobody’s business. she was the one true place to which he could always turn, no matter what life throws his way. she will forever be the beacon burning on the hill, over the harbor.

then, when dawn broke and the birthday sky brightened, she hopped in the old wagon and drove to the diner with the cheesy hash he so loves. she scooped up a platter to-go, along with a bacon-cheese omelet, and plunked it all down on the bright red birthday plate, the same one she’s set on the table since back on the day he turned 1.

good thing for that sweet old fairy, there is one more lad in this house, snoozing up in his bed. and he is not yet 11.

our fairy, her load might be lessened, but we’re not done with her yet. she’s got miles of markers before she sleeps, miles and miles of markers and streamers and a rare gift of joy that will never ever grow old.

happy, happy birthday, sweet beautiful will. love, your very own fairy.

what are the life markers you’ve had to retire at your house? and what ones do you forever cling to?

13 Comments

May 18, 2012

of fatted calf and endless tide…

we come to you this week from the bowels of the laundry room, where we’ve been holed up all week long. night and day, day and night, we spin and tumble, then fold and stack and ferry.

a curious creature landed here the other eve, at the start of this fine week. the fatted calf had been procured, the table spread to groaning, in anticipation of the firstborn’s gosh-darn home-returning.

scruffy-bearded man-fellow, he arrived bearing duffle upon duffle of clothes, of hats, of sweats and slippers, last laundered lord knows when. it is apparently a point of pride among the dwellers of a college dorm to see who can go the longest without plunking pocket change down the gullet of voracious college washer. why waste beer money, the soon-to-be-educated seem to reason, when you can go all year without sacrificing coins to suds and rinse a single X-L twin, that flat or fitted cotton shield, thread protectant that bifurcates you and grungy mattress.

when not ensconced in laundry room this merry week, i found myself spilling vials of ink, scribbling grocery lists, making run after run to restock icebox shelves. why, i swore we had a quart of milk, hiding there behind the juice. oh, my, there is no juice. nor bananas, cheese, or eggs.

for months now, i’ve been curiously absent from my well-trod checkout lanes. barely kept up the long-running tete-a-tete with the checkers i adore. they ask, when i do dash through, where have you been, old friend? to which i simply answer: the hungry boy’s in college.

they duly nod. they understand the shorthand.

but, now (break out the hallelujah chorus here), the boy and his bottomless pit have found their way back home. and, as i type, i hear the vacuum-sucking sound of a house being emptied of its larder. holy cow, that kid can eat. and eat. and eat. and eat.

it didn’t take me long — mere minutes, as a matter of fact, as he wasted little time before cranking the hip-hop tunes to full wagon-rattling volume as we motored to the soccer field to fetch the little bro’, and drivers right and left turned to gawk at the wholly un-suburban rhythms — to realize that the smartest strategy for surviving this summer is to play like i’m an anthropologist, studying this curious phenomenon, the post-freshman progeny.

he hasn’t quite caught on, but the hard truth is i am all but scrawling notes. i stand in pure amazement as i chart the curious behaviors of this just-home-from-college species.

the light burns, night after night, till 3 or 4 in the morn. he is stretched out on his old twin bed, taking in hour upon hour of what he swears is HBO masterpiece. (for this we sent him off to college?)

he stirs round noon (or later), and descends to the so-called cook house. there he begins rustling, peering in the fridge, clearing off the shelves. i’ve seen him down fried-catfish bits, and eggs and cheese and half a baton of kosher salami. i’ve watched whole jugs of juice go gurgling down his throat. i’ve seen bananas by the bunch simply up and vanish. he is, indeed, a boy full of prestidigitation.

when i hear him clanging pots and pans, i put down what i’m doing, and tiptoe on the scene. i stand amid the clanging, a portrait of pure maternal innocence. you’d never guess i was gathering classified intelligence. i make like i’m the sous chef.

ah, but as i fetch the vulcan salt, or shake the cayenne pepper, i ask open-ended questions, and without arching a telltale eyebrow, nor flinching even once, i soak up all his long and winding stories. i nod and murmur at apt punctuation points. i am hard at work charting the landscape of the modern-day quasi-enlightened nearly-19-year-old. my journalistic instincts do come in mighty handy.

i’ve found out, for instance, that he put his AP number skills to great good use: why, instead of laundering said bedsheets, he merely divided the school year into thirds, and applied fractional equation to the changing of his bedding. thus, with two swift flicks of brand-new sheets, he made it through two whole semesters (and a month between) without ever once employing the laundry skills i so ardently instructed on sultry afternoons that long-ago summer before college.

i’ve learned a thing or two about what amounts to higher-ed entertainment. i now know that on a saturday night before the lights go dim, and the bump-and-grind, er, dancing spins, the boys and girls, in separate rooms, partake of dancing warmups. no, they do not practice their plies and arabesques. i’m inclined to think the warmups are rather liquid in nature. he does leave parts of the narrative to my uninhibited imagination, where i duly fill in the blanks.

while it’s all been great good entertainment, i have come to realize that my best tactic here is to take it all with a great good dose of humor. the fact of the matter is that over the course of the last nine months, the boy i left at college is not quite the one who came loping up the sidewalk, all beaming smile and arms spread wide for wrapping round me.

i was, for a day or two, just a wee bit uncertain if and where i — a silver-haired mid-century mama who bumps along in a decades-old swedish wagon — fit into the tabletop jigsaw puzzle of my firstborn’s life. why, i’d sent heartfelt missives all year long, and barely heard a peep in reply. i’d boxed up cookies and turkey jerky and half my heart besides. and for all i knew, they all still idle at the college postal station, unclaimed and, frankly, orphaned.

as is my inclination, i burrowed deep inside, and pondered. i feared the worst. decided he might have no need for the mama who’d been there high and low and every hour in between. maybe he’d make the break clean and swift and sudden. maybe i’d get twirled down the drain, where his laundry suds have yet to go.

but then, in a flash of inspiration (or perhaps the outstretched hand of some patron saint of motherhood), i realized that a load of laughter goes a long way to linking back two hearts.

so now, instead of fretting, churning, turning over worry after worry, i am practicing the art of letting it be. and instead of figuring how to phrase the burning question in my heart — do i matter still? — i am letting the tales unspool, and the peels of great good laughter fill in the empty space between us.

egad: this meander seems possessed. great chunks of it keep disappearing, as if someone’s taking a bite and swallowing whole. i’m not quite sure what’s happening with this grand computer hiccup. but if you read, and found oh 12 paragraphs not there, well then, you witnessed the hiccup. i will now try again. crossing my fingers….

as a practitioner of open-hearted mothering, i’d be among the first to admit the not-so-secret inkling that it takes some readjusting to navigate the landscape of the growing-up child. i’ve not found it simple over the course of this past year to figure out just where i belong in my college boy’s faraway life. all i’ve ever wanted was to be a harbor, a grounding rod for him, and an infinite source of love and understanding. who among you has found that parenting demands redefinition along the way? and what is your secret for keeping the channel always open?

6 Comments

May 3, 2012

under the wire

at some point, in all my years of imagining, in all my years of trying to wrap my feeble brain around the hard-core notion that my babies would one day grow old enough to pack up their belongings and head off toward so-called higher education, i’m certain i once had visions of pitching a tent just outside the dorm, maybe off in the bushes, where not everyone would notice.

maybe i could rig up a pulley, slide up trays of OJ and tea, from just outside the window. maybe i could doze in the honeysuckle, but be within earshot if the boy ever took sick. or stayed up too late. maybe i could fool everyone into thinking i was just another bushy-haired varmint, burrowed there where the earth met the great gothic wall.

but then, in real time, the boy i love, my firstborn, he up and did leave for college, and i knew well, knew from the very first instant i saw him leap from the car in the deep of night to grab his key from the campus police (where, due to impending hurricane, all keys had been moved), that this was his landscape, this was his place to stretch and grow and discover and deepen. this was his canvas.

and, for the first time in our deeply tethered existence, i didn’t belong.

i remember quite precisely how much that stung, the feeling of being pushed some distance away. oh, i know that’s the way it’s meant to be, but i can’t say that it didn’t take some rubbing of salve to the wound. i clung to the balm that the closer we’d been, the harder the push needed to be.

and i waited it out.

i swallowed hard the day on the phone when he said it might be better if we not make the trip for parents weekend. after all, he reasoned, he’d soon be home for thanksgiving. i’m pretty sure, once we hung up, i sat down and cried. but i didn’t let on. i just prayed without end.

and once he was home, indeed, it was just like the old days — me, laughing so hard at his stories and antics i could barely chop through an onion without fear of surrendering a digit to a sharp and flailing knife. him, curling up in an armchair the very last night he was home, asking if please, could i stay up and talk for a few more hours.

deep in the winter, when i was scraping the pit of my soul, trying to decide if i should leave my long-loved newspaper life, i dangled one dazzling dream in front of my weary eyes: i’d take a trip, all by my lonesome, to visit the boy who i love, to absorb this new world that was his.

that would be my hallelujah valedictory tour: to walk, arms looped elbow-to-elbow, under the tree limbs, through the quad, in the new england town whose night sounds are his now.

but then, abruptly without a paycheck, i convinced myself i couldn’t afford it. couldn’t afford one sweet slice of heaven on earth.

and then, suddenly, it was spring.

for weeks, as the trees turned lacy and green, i was getting reports, eye-witness reports, from all sorts of friends who’d stumbled upon him, friends who’d swung through that new england town as they took their own babies, now juniors in high school, on that modern-day rite of spring, the spring-break college tour, in which you pile as many campuses as you can into your five-day cross-’em-off-the-list itinerary.

why, they’d bumped into him in libraries. shared pizzas with him. taken him out for feasts without end. and with every encounter, came the glowing accounts: how happy he was. how, wherever he went, he was greeted with shouts of great joy. how at ease he appeared, most of all. how he certainly seemed to be thriving.

with every report, my itch grew and grew: i needed my own first-person account. never again, i told myself, could i catch this first year unfolding. it was all slipping swiftly away.

and as i looked at the calendar, i knew i was running out of weekends.

a not-so-secret truth about me is that i am, through and through, a homebody. plane tickets and rental cars, and getting up at wee hours to make flights and drive through parts unknown. these are not a few of my favorite things.

but, more than anything, there is a boy i love. and he is beaming these days.

and, as a mother who was there in the darkest hours, as a mother who held him tight so many nights in the kitchen when the tears wouldn’t stop, as a mother who whispered in his ear time after time that some day it would be a glorious thing to be him, a boy forever wise beyond his years, as that very mother i needed to take this all in for myself.

i needed to trace all his joy — his abundant new landscape — into the contours of my heart.

the so-called reason for this last-minute trip, the one, yes, i’ll be taking tomorrow, is that there is a championship rowing regatta, and his boat — undefeated for the season — is seeded no. 1, meaning that for the very first time in his not-so-athletic life, he stands a chance of (shhhhh…) not being crushed in heartbreaking defeat. and i stand a chance of hollering my lungs out, swatting back tears, there on the shores of lake quingsigamond.

but the real reason i’m waking up at 3 in the morning, tiptoeing out to the cab in the dark, leaving spelled-out instructions for the little one’s 48 hours without me, is as simple as simple can be: all i want is to be there.

all i want is to walk the paths where my firstborn so easily trods. to catch the dappled light on my own face, as it has dappled his all these days, weeks and months. to look into the faces of a sea of kids who know my boy by his name and his joy. to absorb the geography that is his now. i want to smell it, taste it, hear it, touch it, commit it to full-body memory.

it’s the very last day of classes tomorrow. his freshman year ends in less than a week. i am getting there just under the wire.

lucky for me, i’m married to a man whose motto is one i still need to work on: “98 percent of life is just showing up.”

i think he knew, without me saying a word, just how close i’d come to talking myself out of the trip once again. i’d come up with 58 reasons why it made more sense to stay home. but he gently and firmly kept me on course. just this morning i found he’d typed out a whole road map to steer me through what might have been bumps along the way: which concourse i’d need to trek to, how to pick up the rental car, the tricky turns on the road to the college. he even made sure i’m staying at the bed-and-breakfast across the lane from emily dickinson’s house.

and once again i am learning: life is ripest, is sweetest, if you dare to take a front-row seat, and not keep watch from the shadows.

even if it means you slip in right under the wire.

just so you get there, where you can take it all in, body and soul. and forever.

so there you have it: i am past the mid-century mark, and still i must talk myself out of my comfort zone, and into the halls of courage. it’s a funny thing how we all have our stumbling places. what propels your courage? what gets you up the mountains of your life?

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Category: firstborn