brothers | pull up a chair

breakfast of champions

the little one was shlurping up the last bit of waffle a la jam, running way behind this morn, when he called out, “excuse me, can i have my sports section?”

he didn’t seem to mind the strawberry dribble running down his cheek. but he did mind when i–the one charged with shushing him out the door and down the sidewalk, somehow sweeping to the schoolhouse door before the whistle blew–did not oblige.

demurred, in fact, with a simple, and emphatic, “no, sweetheart, we’re late.”

still gulping, he protested: “but you can’t interrupt my morning schedule.”

oh. so sorry. hadn’t realized, sir, that what we had here was a routine, a way of being, a moment on which the day depended.

of course i’d noticed that, morning after morning for the last few days, while the rice chex soak up milk, you, my slugger sweet, soak up RBIs and ERAs and all those alphabet equations that long ago and always have escaped me.

but i had not heard the sound of cement drying, and this becoming what it’s been for ages long before you and who knows how long into the beyond: the rite of little boys and sometimes girls obsessed with all things round and flying through the air, cracking off of wooden sticks and diving through the dirt.

you have joined the ranks, my little reader, of those whose day begins with the shaking out and creasing of the pages where all the world’s a horserace or a ballgame or a wobbly putt rolling toward what might be a rodent hole but, in fact, was put there for the purpose of men and women wearing god-awful-colored pants and shoes with little nails jutting out from underneath the toes.

you, too, now scour the front page, search for what you call the headline, the score of last night’s game. and then, you bore inside. you up and rise off your stool or chair, you dive head-first into the somethings you call “the standings.” you report, out loud, all sorts of names and numbers. and by then i’ve lost you, i am sad to say.

just this morning, as i combed the house for keys, ran back for one last swallow of caffeine, you were broadcasting in spanish, no less, spitting out the scores–“quatro to uno,” you barked–for those who cared not to know in english.

quite impressive, little boy. you who months ago could have cared no less for all those scribbles on the page. you who thought you’d never read a number or decipher all the letters crowded there together, a herd masquerading as a word.

in a world where newspapers are whirling at the center of a storm, where few and fewer see the economic sense of printing news on paper and plopping it on your doorstep–such service, and such fear, will we go the way of the milkman and the knife sharpener, those door-to-door deliverers of goods and service, long lost–someone needs to understand the power of the third section from the front. the one marked plainly, sports.

it is from here that whole lives of depending on the news are born, are launched, are set in motion.

i have watched it time and time again. my brothers, four, my own boys, first one, and now the other.

it is reading, yes. but it is so much more. it is learning how in this dog-race world you measure up. it is boiling down the game of running bases to charts and graphs and teeny-tiny type. it is drama on the field–and life–condensed to bare-bone stats.

it is the way a boy with spoon in soggy flakes first reaches out beyond his little world, into that of world beyond.

what’s on the screen at night, becomes his in the morning, there in black-on-white, just beside his cheerios and wheaties, his waffles and his raisin toast.

it is the breakfast of champions, with a splash of milk. and orange juice on the side. hold the pulp, please. pass the syrup.

i find it wholly charming to watch as little boy begins to sift through all the chaos of the world, and claim as his the simple practice of nose-diving deep into the sports page.

at least you get no grass stains sliding into home.

do you make sense of your world through daily rituals? how and when did you learn to order your day through the religious practice of some sense-making routine? do you too have your breath taken away watching little children grow, take on the ways of grownups all too soon?

10 Comments

March 26, 2008

when dreams take wing

he called last night, my firstborn did. he’s far far away in the land of his dreams. he is, as i type, tromping the streets of the city he worships, the city he hopes some day will be his.

you might know it, it’s new york city, noisy place just north of new jersey. that child of mine was born of a city, and to a city he must return. this stint in the ‘burbs, here on the leafy north shore, he endures. but he can’t wait to get back to the holy ground. figures he’d pick the biggest, busiest metropolis around. the one where a bagel, with shmear, will set you back a few bucks. and that’s from a pushcart right there on the sidewalk.

the boy, at 14, has set his sights. it’s not just the whole of new york he’s so keen on, it’s the part he told me last night is “the academic acropolis,” the top of some really steep hill, he tells me, on the upper west side, where a whole stockpot of smart places are stirred into one intellectual soup.

now, that sounds, for the first time in his short little life, like a place to make his blood gurgle and slosh. and mine, right along.

see, this is a child who, as he stood in the kitchen in tears night after night in sixth grade, i consoled with the truest truth i could muster, and the only words i could think of to help: “sweetheart, i know being you as a kid is really really hard, but i am positive being you as a grownup is going to be wonderful.”

in t-ball in kindergarten, when other kids worried about sliding to home, my firstborn stood in the outfield, back to the pitcher’s mound, pointing up in the sky, shouting, “hey, look, it’s venus.”

when al gore lost the supreme court vote, way back in the 2000 election, my second-grader crumpled himself on the stairs, and cried for a good part of an hour. “but that’s not fair,” he kept saying. “the supreme court is supposed to be fair. how can you get more of the votes and not be the winner?” he knew the names of every supreme court justice and which way they’d voted, and he was beside himself at what he called “the justice injustice.”

in short: it’s been a long road, with patches of bumps, for a boy with his eye on matters a few years–heck, a few orbits–ahead of his time.

and so, no wonder, when a teacher he loves, a teacher who knows him quite wholly, looked him straight in the eye a year or so back, and said, “this college is the one where you’d thrive,” he bought it. gave it his usual deep probing study, and, bing, signed off on the deal.

seems, maybe, on the long nights of homework, and on the saturday eves when the phone didn’t ring, he’d sit up in his room and daydream of the one place on the planet where he thought, after all, he might really fit in.

oh, we’ve tried to distract him. spewed off the names of all sorts of fine places. even cooked up some dinners just to change the whole subject. but with a child set in his ways, there’s only so much you can do. he has, since back in the days when he lived, ate, and breathed small wooden trains, been a child of serial obsessions. this college is simply the latest.

and since we happened to have a new-york-bound ticket, one that had to be used, we figured why not give him a taste. either it sticks to his ribs, or he spits it right out. and besides, the whole of new york makes for a mighty spring break.

well, the phone rang last night, and i knew right away. heard it in his very first syllable, uttered across all of the miles.

he was, flat-out, gushing. here’s a snippet or two:

“at first i had to convince myself it was real, then i had to convince myself, not only was it real, i was here. oh, man, this is heaven.”

and then this:

“we went in this pizza stand for a huge slice of garlic pizza, and dad and i were like the only caucasians in the place and i felt totally at home.”

and this, of the library:

“it’s like the parthenon, except instead of savage gladiators ripping each other to threads, there’s books inside.”

he nearly melted, he said, when they stepped inside that ol’ book vault, and saw a sign indicating the whole first floor was devoted to philosophy, law, medicine, and theology. he was incredulous; row after row of thinkers, and all shades of believers. why, it was a world he would have drawn up himself. probably did, up there in his room, where he keeps on the light till late in the night.

it is, i tell you, a spine-tingling thing to hear your child, at last, find his place in the world, and to find it so deeply, so unshakably. in merely three years, the place could be his (i could swear, just yesterday it was lightyears away). and if it is not, he says, he’s willing to wait, take a year building wells in africa, maybe. all that matters, it seems, is he knows, after all, where he belongs. that he belongs, mostly.

now, i’m less of a pragmatist than anyone else in this house. more of a gauzy-eyed dreamer. i’m less apt to worry about that alphabet of obstacles, ACTs and GPAs. more inclined to think they’ll look at his soul, open the door. heck, i would. so, far as i care, the ping in his voice makes me think it’ll happen. my own personal magical thinking.

and besides, i’ve never been worried, not once–okay, not twice–that my odd-fitting boy would someday, somewhere, fit in. celebrate the eccentricity, his father once said, proudly, with a faint wash of tears in his eyes.

for every child, and every grownup, who’s ever worried, who’s thought they didn’t belong, at least not in their little slice of the pie, this then is a hallelujah, and a reminder: don’t give up, and don’t give an inch. be who you are, and fill your lungs wholly.

for every child, and every grownup, who’s marched to a tune all alone, keep the rhythm. there is, some place on the planet, a place with your name.

lord only knows, it might even be in the stacks upon stacks of philosophy tomes, at the top of a hill, in a very big city. that’s where my firstborn might now never leave. but at least now i know where to find him.

not sure i quite said all i set out to. this was supposed to be less about a particular place, and more about the pure act of finding your seat in the world’s musical chairs. and even more, about what it feels like to be the grownup of a child who at long last has found that extraordinary, elusive somewhere. the boy was giddy, and so am i. have you taken a long and winding road to the somewhere you belonged? or, maybe, did you know well before your time, just where you wanted to land? what helped you believe in yourself along the way? p.s. i just have to say, in case it’s not clear, my child is odd in what i’d say are very fine ways: he is smart, and he’s funny. it’s just that he thinks in ways that are wise far beyond his few years. and he won’t play the games of most of his peers. dear college-of-choice: don’t hold that against him. but that, i think, is getting well ahead of the story…

9 Comments

March 25, 2008

get better box to the rescue

at last, he’s asked for it. that might mean–after a long stretch of nights on the bathroom floor, after middle-of-the-night calls to the doctor when his hot little body started to shake and could not be stopped, after two rounds of mean nasty medicines–he’s finally coming back with the living.

(i should mention right off that this has nothing to do with the ol’ easter story–that most recent mention around here of a return to the living; rather, this is simply the tale of a boy and a bug and a box that seems to hold magical powers.)

it’s the get better box, and it lives on a shelf in his bedroom. way up high, where only a mama on tippiest toes can get at it, where she’ll blow off the assemblies of dust, lay it down at the side of his bed, or the couch if that’s where he’s stretched.

it’s a box that comes out only on days when there’s nowhere to go, and not much to do, except maybe to gauge the rise and the fall of the mercury there on the stick your mama keeps shoving under your tongue.

it’s a box that in our house is the nearest thing to wizardry, imbued as it is with the pure healing powers of trinkets and bits and thingamajigs. like the doctor’s black bag of long long ago, whatever’s pulled out from its shadowy insides is certain to fix you, or at least to distract you till the fever retreats.

it is all part of the witchcraft of healing a child. four tablets of fever-fighters, washed down with the voodoo of playthings reserved for the sickbed.

whatever it takes, is the mantra of grownups charged with the curing of limp, pallid bodies. of mouths that won’t open even for ice cream, mouths that seem only to moan. of foreheads so hot you worry whatever’s inside will be singed.

why, we wring washcloths and lay them on heads. we draw baths at 2 in the morning. we soothe and we coo and we rub. and all that we get, often, is more of the groaning.

until, at last, at our house, at least, that box is unearthed from the highest of heights.

if you cracked open the lid, peeked just into the shaft of light you’ve let in, you would see there before you an inventory of the ordinary: stickers, and play-doh, and puppets to slip on the tips of your fingers. you would see pencils the size of a toothpick, in a rainbow of colors. and small slips of paper to fold, or to scribble upon. you would see a stone rubbed smooth at the edge of a lake. and a feather or two, plucked from the trees, where a disrobing bird might have left them behind.

what you would not see is the incandescence its contents bring to the face of the boy who, at long last, looks up from his pillow with the faint light of joy there in the black hole of his eye.

it is the first sign of hope, and it comes from the box, i swear on a Bible.

just now i hear humming, clear from the couch. where the boy is at play with a whole troupe of puppets. it’s been nearly a quarter of an hour since he last called my name, which given the most recent days in our house, is quite rather a miracle.

the idea was not mine, nor did i have such a cure-all when i was a child. a dear and wise mother i know, one whose charm was, in good measure, the make-believe world she built for her children, she gave me instructions long long ago, and assured me the powers the squat box would bring.

and then, leaning in, she whispered the part that mattered the most, she insisted.

“when your little one’s better you must, together, take it outside, lay each ingredient in the sun, and explain that the ills are escaping and pure healing sunlight is being absorbed. it is the ritual, as much as the rarity of the box, that makes it so special,” i remember her saying.

ever since, it’s as much a part of our sickdays, as is the rubberband on the glass of the afflicted, and the folded-up washcloth there on the brow.

i can hardly believe i once wore a nurse’s cap on my head, but never had heard of the get better box. only once admitted to the ranks of motherhood, did a mother i love whisper the surest cure in the books. one so certain to cure, it’s not written anywhere.

until now.

the sad truth of the get better box story is that the mother who first spelled out its magic is now nursing a daughter with very bad cancer. not all the get better boxes in the world seem to be working. so on this day, when her magic is casting its spell here at my house, i wish and pray i had something to offer to her. i send love. i send light. i send prayer. what healing rituals did you grow up with, or have you birthed for your little ones?

5 Comments

March 19, 2008

not too big

any day now, it’ll evaporate.

i’ll look out the window and not see the little boy bundled in snow suit and puffy snow pants, the one too little to know it’s quite little-boyish to pull up that hood, pull it so tight, so only his little boy cheeks, all rosy and round, poke out from the layers of puff upon puff. i won’t see, anymore, how he kicks that one chunk of snow all the way home, from bus stop to house, a 10-minute meander that has him winding and spinning and kicking and scooping and, yes, ykkh, licking that snow.

any day now, i won’t walk in his room to kiss him awake, only to find at the foot of his bed, an old cardboard box he’s made into a house for his little two rabbits, who he’s tucked into bed, maybe read them by flashlight a story, whispered their prayers, then kissed them goodnight.

any day now, he won’t fit on my hip, that perch of old bone that was built, i’m convinced, to hold up a child in tears, or in heartache, or, every once in a while, in deep cuddling mode.

any day now, his legs will get longer, his words will get less of a little-boy lisp. and the occasional lapse into pure make-believe will go poof, will vanish away, overnight.

there won’t be a bear with a name. we won’t set a place at the table for that wild-haired lion named leo. (a cat who insists, by the way, on rice chex topped with bananas, more milk, please; a diet eerily close to the one thing his trainer could eat–and does–morning, noon and most every night.)

any day now, he’ll be all gone, my sweet little boy.

he’ll be replaced by a model less likely, i’m supposing, to give me a rub on my back for no reason besides that he still loves the feel of my skin. he won’t want to climb in my bed and play 20 questions on saturday mornings. and i doubt he’ll hand me the phone and ask me to dial because all the numbers just mix him all up.

so, right now, and right here, i have every intention of cupping it all in the palm of my hand. like sweet and cool waters, there at the edge of the stream on a day that’s unbearably dry.

i’ll suck it all up, suck every last drop, before it slithers away, slips through my fingers and back to the stream, where it rushes away.

i won’t get it again. this water comes once, comes in a rush that at first feels too much, and too hard to swallow, even in gulps. but then as it goes, as it trickles away, down your wrists, down your arms, back to the stream, you feel, already, the parch in your throat.

of late, the pangs come often, come hard. i miss him already. i long for these days, and they’re not even gone yet.

it’s a trick of the brain, a trick of the heart. and it’s not just a trick for the mamas among us. all of us, each, every one, we know what it is to miss someone we love before they’re not here anymore.

i really don’t think i’ve some special equipment here in my brain, the gymnastic button that lets me leap forward in time, and somersault back. it’s all of us, i’m pretty sure, with that human capacity to long and to miss, before it’s the time.

it’s the thing, is it not, that churns deep in our soul, propels us to love and love deeper. to cherish. to know, in our blood, with the swirls of our fingertips even, that what’s in our midst is sacred, is holy, is never forever.

and so, i go through my day with one extra eye. it’s trained on the child growing before me. i reach out and grab when the moments are sweet, and then all the sweeter.

the boy with the bear. the boy who climbs, still, on my lap. takes my hand in a crowd, squeezes it tight. the boy who calls out my name in the night, and awakes curled in a ball in the morning, all flannel and cowboy pajamas, and rosy and toasty, and playing like a ’possum.

it is a hard thing in this world to know just how to ready a child for all that awaits, a planet of wars and digital overload. a world where too many children are bounding toward grown-up, skipping right over the parts that teach them tender is golden, is good, is–in my book–truly essential.

so i stick with the basics, with what i know best, and what i believe with all of my whole. and i let it all play in the slowest of slo-mo.

i relish the old cardboard box, and the chance to tuck in a bunny to bed. i aim for the winding way home. and a sweet little boy in no hurry to harden.

i’ll savor each drop of each day. and know, soon enough, i’ll be ever so thirsty. and my sweet little boy will be big. too big for my hip. but never, my heart. which grows right along with him.

if this old chair has brought me anything, it’s brought me a place to pour out my love affair with my little one. forgive me the days i get sappy. i can’t really help it. see, if nothing else, some day that child will have all these pages to pore over, to read once again how his mother, she loved him. not a bad thing to bequeath, so i’m penning it now, while it’s bright in my eyes. the other thing is that writing about him has made me savor him in ways that might escape me if i was only tangled up in his moments. to write is to step back, make sense, untangle, see clearly. feel the pang right there in the heart. and so it is, and so i write. and you, if you choose, if you care to, you read along.

do you have that gymnastics button in your brain, the one that makes you leap back and forth in time? the one that propels you to a deeper grasp of the fact that what’s before you really is precious, really does deserve your fullest attention? how does it work for you?

and oh, by the way, that ol’ lazy susan is spinning afresh. not quite spring. but fresh, none the less. give it a click.

5 Comments

March 7, 2008

boy school

it’s a class to which i’ve not been admitted. but i take notes. the tests will never be mine. but i keep watch from corners, wince when learning takes its lumps, and savor all the triumphs.

it’s boy school. and i think we might be up to some new level here, the 300s, maybe, the ones for upper classmen, even though the boy enrolled, the one up yonder trying to tie a knot before dashing to a train downtown last eve, is merely a high school freshman.

the headmaster, and chief instructor, is, no doubt, my firstborn’s father. there are, of course, visiting professors–uncles, teachers, men with roles to model. but mostly–and of late–it is one-on-one tutorial, and it might well last a lifetime.

it started, long long ago, with blocks and building towers. the little one i loved–now a manchild–sat for hours on the floor with his tower-loving papa. they stacked oblong blocks of maple as high as they could go before the whole thing toppled. the little one learned the intricacies of load and balance, and eventually, how to sweep his heart up off the floor when the tower finally crashed.

there was, for a semester that stretched across quite a string of springs and summers, baseball for beginners. that pitching thing never came too easy to the one who now dreams of being a philosophy professor.

his papa tried, oh, he tried. i can still hear the ball banging against the house in our teeny tiny city yard. can still see them out the window, in the mostly-empty lot next door, running bases, steering clear of the apricot tree sheared to only stump and sawed-off limb, smack dab in centerfield. that sorry stump had once bloomed, like real live inhale-able art right outside my window, but one odd afternoon it was attacked with saw and hatchet by the wild-haired lady who let the players play there, and gave them lemonade when the inning finally ended.

i watched as father and son became obsessed with collecting baseball cards. i was there when the banged-up rusty scarlet tin came home from the papa’s boyhood bedroom. i remember…

how the two of them sank deep into a world of names and numbers (some in print so small i could barely read it then, and that was before the old-lady glasses became essential to my getting dressed each day). how that child, and his dear best friends, could trade all day and night. how the numbers seemed to mean something. and how they knew them all, upside down and sideways. and how the man i married seemed to have some uncanny storehouse of knowledge i’d never known about. he remembered plays–you know, who threw to who, whose feet slid where, who swore, who was a sorry loser–from ancient times, but re-told them as if he’d just then seen them on the TV.

i shook my head, and kept right on wiping down the stove. or cleaning out the sink. or maybe even opting for a game of solitaire. bleary-eyed at all the ball talk.

ah, but now, now i’m listening in.

the lessons these days are like the peeling back of the genetic code. the lessons here are all about how to be a man. and i don’t mean some global sweep. not the politics of manhood. nor any sort of wretched macho diatribe. there’s no room for that in the raising of a thinking, feeling soul–at least i don’t think so. and if there is, i’ve closed my eyes and shut my ears for the imparting of such stuff.

what i’m talking here is far more charming. it is all the basics: how to hail a cab. how to stanch a nick while shaving. how to shine a pair of shoes (and mind you, the man i married was first described in adoring terms by my mother as “old shoe,” a phrase born perhaps of the gaping holes in his penny loafers, and the less-than-ironed shorts that had long lost their hem).

what color belt belongs with shoes of black, and shoes of brown. (these things don’t come intuitively with the gene pool here, i tell you, it involves some teaching.)

why, i’ve heard whole paragraphs on the navy blazer. and the essential nature of what i heard referred to as “the uniform,” and how once you had it assembled (preferably on hangers, not heaped on closet floor, i pipe in, my maternal contribution, in case anyone is listening), you could just about go anywhere, do anything, your growing heart desires.

if it sounds intensely sartorial, it is not. there is in this comprehensive course something so sweet, so loving, i know men who would weep at hearing of it.

i know men whose fathers loved them very much. but somehow they never got this all spelled out. and what was lost was not only a sense of how to get your socks on in the morning, but the very notion that along the mountain climb they had both guide and hand behind their back.

in the whole of parenting, there is occasional mention of teaching children how to ride a bike, or swing a bat, or mix a chocolate cake.

but this art of steeping a child in how to step into a civilized, grown-up world, it is often overlooked. it’s quite easy to miss.

sometimes, with all the shepherding and signing-up of children, the most essential thread of parenting–the teaching, day in and day out, for years and years and years, through every phase and tumble down, and every scraping off the floor–is simply barely given airtime.

but to miss it, don’t you think, is to wholly miss the point. and all the grace. and noble beauty.

one generation trying with all its might, and accumulated mistakes, to smooth the bumpy road for the next one up the pike.

if i were not the mother here, if i were not hearing bits i’ve never heard spelled out, i might, too, miss all this. i know, as the only girl among four brothers, i never heard such things. perhaps, a sister pays no heed in quite the way a mother studies how her boy becomes a man.

perhaps, too, it is in hearing all this acquired knowledge being passed in chapter and in verse, it rubs raw, just a bit, the fact that i’ve no girl to whom i can whisper all the things i know about trying to be a woman. geez, what to do with the little bit i know about mascara?

it is tender stuff, this transferring of time-tried truths. it melts my heart to watch the father of my firstborn care enough to shine the child’s shoes before his first high school dance (never mind that he got the polish all over the kitchen floor, or that he tried to do it without a cloth, and thus his pointer finger was black as night for a day or two).

i nearly wobble as i hear the ping-pong volleys late at night, punctuated by all the talk about what to look for in a college, and how one fine prof might just change your life.

it is at once heady and knee-buckling, this esoterica and plain old sidewalk smarts.

it humbles me to hear it. i wonder, did i have some deeply buried clue when i fell in love with him, that the man i married would so finely, keenly raise a son?

just last night, i watched the child shave without a nick. i peeked around the corner as he tried, and tried again, to knot his father’s tie. i tried not to sigh as he slipped on that navy blazer, became a man, grabbed his nearly-tattered tome, the odyssey, and bounded down the stairs, and out the door.

the train downtown–to meet his father for a worldly sort of lecture at a club where that blazer was expected–he nearly missed. in fact, he hurdled up the ramp with just a minute and a half till that hissing hulk lurched into the station.

that class, train catching on time, he’ll try again. a boy does not become a man without a few retakes along the route.

and, if he’s truly blessed, a teacher who wholly understands the art of knowing when to turn the page, and when to let the pupil learn the hard way.

trusting all the while that someday the student, by then a man at last, will be the sort who, in turn, as he once was taught, will impart his very best to some young boy who has no clue what to do with razors and blazers and all those manly mysteries.

have you watched a child–boy or girl–learn the ropes tied to adulthood? are you, like me, without a child of a gender that’s your own, so all that wisdom–most of it learned the hard way i assure you–has no place to go, no deposit box? do you remember being pulled aside and showed the little things that made you feel the world was a place you belonged, and just maybe could conquer?

9 Comments

February 14, 2008

the trouble with valentines

hmm, well, it seems we’re in a pickle, here on the brink of the 24-hour timeout for ooey, gooey, goopy love.

i’ll reel out the dilemma:

the house–thanks to a bodyclock that manages to run on little sleep when a big hour is at hand–is all laid with the trappings of that national feast day of construction paper and glue. oh, and i do mean trappings. nearly slipped down the stairs, i just almost did, when my heel caught and slid on a red paper heart. or was it a pink one? hard to tell in the dark. i’ve got hearts scattered like puddles after a downpour in april.

up to that point in this cupid-pocked tale, there are no protests. not a one from the one particular inhabitant of said house who went to sleep with a fear in his head, and a rumble down in his belly.

nor will there be picketing when it comes to the old maple table, the one now bursting with hearts in pink and in red. the one with hearts that are shimmering. hearts that you’d better not shake for they’re losing their glittery scales like a snake on some sort of diet.

no shouts of protest when breakfast is served in red-plastic heart plates. nor when young hungry folk see that the star of the table is the fat giant cookie their papa brought home from the store, in the cover of darkness, i think, when no one was looking. although i must pause and wonder what the cashier must’ve thought, when she saw a tall man with glasses and puffy old snow coat trying to pay for a chocolate chip cookie the size of a championship frisbee, iced with the words, “kiss me hot stuff.”

hmm. no wonder we’ve got just a bit of a valentine’s problem.

the problem is this:

the little one, the one who loves everything about the day when he wakes up to the paper-heart trail, the one that leads from the edge of his bed, out his room, down the stairs, round the bend, into the kitchen, and straight up to the table where sugar comes in a few extra forms, well, that very little one is adamantly lobbying that he–along with the rest of the first-grade boys–should be excused from school this very fine thursday.

now, why, you ask? why would a boy want to skip out on a day where cupcakes are served, and brown paper bags are hung at the edge of each desk. why would a boy want to miss out on the foil-wrapped chocolates that might get dropped in that bag, along with, say, a valentine?

ahhh, the v-word. that there is the problem.

i’ll let the little one explain, as he did last night at dinner, while popping clementine moons into his mouth, delivering the occasional swift kick under the table to his big brother who could not wipe the giggle off of his lips:
“all the boys don’t want to go to school,” he began, “because they think we’ll get cooties.”

what are cooties, the little one’s mama asked, coolly, without so much as a flinch. (poor child is tied with a long-historied inquisitor for a mama. when it comes to questions, he gets ’em rat-a-tat, till there’s not a thing left to wonder. fear not, the child can take it.)

cooties, he explained, are: “things on your face.”

popping a clementine, he refined his definition: “just like dimples.”

[note to reader: we think he meant pimple, but when you are six, consonants slip-slide all over the place, wind up where they don’t belong all the time. we pay no mind to trespassing consonants. we take them in stride.]

how do you get them, we asked of the dimple/pimple/cooties?

“you know,” came the two-syllable answer, rounded out with a roll of the eyes.

“girls,” came the addendum. delivered with a swift and certain kick to the shin of the big brother, who by then was near bursting with giggles he knew to contain. apparently, he didn’t contain them nearly enough, for the little one, suddenly, out of the blue, teetered on tears.

“only if a girl kisses you,” he explained, unprompted.

and, apparently, the mere thought of a classroom of puckered-up girls pushed him over the edge. there were tears everywhere suddenly.

tears mixed with clementines. tears mixed with what appeared to be punches into the arm of his nearly-choking, trying-so-hard-not-to-laugh big brother’s baggy sweatshirt. and finally, tears buried in the chest of his mother. who, for the record, is not a girl, and was allowed to very much kiss him to try to make the tears go away.

so here we are, right here on the brink of the moment itself. any minute now, that sweet dreamer will awake, will be swept by the hearts at the edge of his bed, down the stairs, and into the insanely overdone table. he will romp with the reckless joy of cookies for breakfast, along with his pink scrambled eggs, and his strawberry floating in orange juice.

but then, the moment will come. he will freeze. mid-bite, probably. he will writhe. he will try, one more time to wriggle his way out of going to school on the day when the cooties could come.

ah, but his mama, being a meanie, she will knowingly, glowingly, send him anyway.

a boy’s got to learn, now doesn’t he, that a little love surely won’t hurt him.

and if he gets a cootie or two, well, he’ll learn about clearasil, too.

big day for six-year-old boys, this day packed with cut-paper hearts and rampant, out-of-control possibility.

to be loved, is the point, is to be at risk for all sorts of troubles. you might be drawn to places you’d not dreamed of. you might tap into bits of your soul you’d never explored. you might find yourself falling for someone who urges you to become more than you ever knew you could.

not a bad lesson for first-grade.

not a bad lesson, at all.

and my wish for each and every one of you: that you too get into the trouble of being loved. and may this day of hearts and random, lurking cooties bring you unexpected giggles. and even a chocolate or two. or maybe just the biggest fattest juiciest strawberry you ever bit into.
did you ever worry about cooties? do you have a heart’s-day tale to tell? do you, like my friend emb, live to scatter hearts today the way i so often scatter bird seed?

11 Comments

February 8, 2008

when words spill, finally, from lips

it was the very last thing he told me the other night, as i hugged him extra tight after a flawless and dramatic flashlight reading–his reading, by the way, not mine–of that not-quite-classic “morris has a cold.”

i had tears before he even told me, just huddled there beside him, listening to his intonations, taking in his little asides–“this is really funny,” says he, offering his literary critique in whispers in my ear–hearing him growl when the bear talked in capital letters, shouting when an exclamation mark allowed, encouraged, insisted.

when he got to the end–the outline of a smile stretched from ear to ear across his face, half-lit in flashlight shadow– i couldn’t keep from burying him in arms and heart that couldn’t be contained. (a fine thing that comes with mamahood is, sometimes, you don’t have to keep your hands to yourself.)

i started to tell that blessed child that i knew, oh, boy, i knew, how steep that mountain climb had been, how i knew it was really, really hard to be the almost only one in all his class who could not get the letters to behave, to fall in line, who had not yet found the on-switch inside his brain to make the words spill from his lips.

i told him i was so, so proud because not once did he slam a book. not once did he burst into tears. he just kept trying. sound after sound. word after word. page after page. determination upon determination,
and look, sweetheart, i said, you made it to the mountain top. you are reading now. and you’re not only reading, you are telling me a story. you are making me see and hear that silly moose and goofy bear. you are making me laugh out loud.

that’s when my little mountain climber–the one we always say is “the egg who wouldn’t take no for an answer”–that’s when he softly, proudly, said, “i’m not in reading group any more.”

which prompted a not-so-poetic “what?!” from me.

you see, he’s been pulled from class every morning of every school day to try to jumpstart those reading pistons. and it had not escaped him that it marked him as, in his eyes, “not so smart as all the other kids.”

said he, upon my yelping: “mrs. patrick took me in the hall today and we had a little talk. she told me i don’t need reading group anymore so i can stay in my classroom now and not miss morning tally.”

by the light of the flashlight beam i caught the glow coming from his smiling cheeks. he saw my face. he saw my tears and smiled even harder. he’d kept his big fat secret till the lights went out. maybe till the time when dreams click on in sleepy heads.

i was shrieking, calling for his daddy. and that’s when he asked, too, if i would get his brother. “i want to make an announcement.”

we all gathered, yes we did, and circled all around the little boy in bed. he was busy tracing arcs of light across his ceiling. and then, with just a moment’s pause for drama’s sake, he spilled the news.

which, considering just months ago i was wondering if maybe he’d repeat first grade, was, well, sweet and stunning all at once.

we whooped. we hollered. both brothers rolled–all arms and legs and sheets–and giggled. i galloped down the stairs to send a note to mrs. r., the amazing first-grade teacher, to find out if this was true, or simply wishful fiction.

upstairs, surrounded by morris (moose), boris (bear), and a beaming flashlight, the triumphant reader finally fell asleep. bushed, no doubt, from all the reading ruckus.

when morning came, so did word from his amazing teacher. it’s true, she wrote, he got to where he dreamed. he is reading, word for word, with all the rest.

to witness such determination is wholly rather humbling. just weeks ago when buttoning his pajamas, he looked up at me and told me kids often called him “stupid.” he told me more than twice that school was really, really hard.

but he was blessed, that child was, with one or two amazing teachers, both of whom stoked his little reading motor. kept him from being swallowed whole by a big bad sentence. or just a stubborn syllable.

mrs. r., i know, wrote him love notes, tucked them in his desk. pulled him to the side, whispered in his ear. reminded him, time and time again, that he was a hero for all the work, and mighty thinking, he was undertaking.

now, i know that he’s not the only one to whom she said these things. but i also know that hers is the gift of making each and every thinker think that her or his cogitation is rather something special.

and the greatest gift of all: someone, besides his mama and his papa, believed in him when he could have fallen down. she wouldn’t let him. she guarded the ledge. kept him climbing till he got to where the words came tumbling from his lips.

standing back and watching, sitting side by side, night after night, book after book, was to snare a front-row seat on the bumpy flight of a kid who wouldn’t be a quitter.

doesn’t matter to me if it’s a boy and a book, or a guy without a leg who rides a bike. there is, in all of us, the capacity to be inspired by those who won’t back down, won’t stop believing that through sheer determination, and a wingspread wide enough to catch the updraft, there’s no challenge that can’t be conquered.

i know my little boy who learned to read–who now tries to make his way through every word in sight; cereal box, passing street sign, names on back of football jerseys, doesn’t matter how or where the letters fall–i know what he taught me this week: don’t slam the book. don’t walk away. a world of never-ending story is just around the corner.

and it never hurts to have a most amazing teacher in your corner, either.

this one’s for my little one’s new jersey grandma, she who lives to teach to read. and kept close eye on all the chutes and ladders of this reading climb. it’s for his teachers too. the ones who worked one-on-one, nearly every single schoolday. and especially for the one named mrs. r, who never stopped believing that she could get him up the mountain, where he now sees the whole wide world of words. most of all, it’s for him himself. and for you who’ve read along, the saga of the struggling reader, i promise–at least i’ll try–no more reading stories. this is the end. and we’ll all turn pages, happily ever after.
sometimes though don’t you just wish you had a billboard to shout hallelujah when you watch a holy triumph? thank heaven, then, for that billboard called the blog. happy half birthday little reader, just in case you read this…..

20 Comments

January 30, 2008

mama hunger

still happens at least once a day. my baby boy, the one now tipping 50 pounds, climbs aboard. he sinks into my hip, grabs on tight around my neck, washes me in kisses, or simply leans his curly head right against my neck.

it’s often first thing in the morning, when he is drowsy still, hasn’t dusted off the sleepy eyes. but sometimes, like yesterday, as we waited for the snow to fly, it’s simply because we still get hungry for each other’s skin.

oh, goodness, that sentence almost sounds like something you would read someplace far from here. but i trust you know me well enough to know perhaps just what i mean.

it could not be cleaner, this hungriness for skin-to-skin. this mama hunger for the baby who once was. for the baby evaporating right before my eyes.

it will all be gone soon, i know, i know. but now, there are wisps of it around, and i am all but licking it from the spoon.

i ache to think that someday not too far from now i will wake up and the baby will be gone, all gone. perhaps it’s that, that makes me so very hungry now. i am committing the baby bits of him to somewhere deep inside me. it’s a dream, perhaps, that i never want to wake from. but, of course, i know i will, and as i drift awake, as he gets big before my eyes, i hold on tight, i cannot get my fill of his deliciousness.

sometimes, i’m overtaken. i cannot keep my nose, my lips, from nuzzling in his baby cheek. cannot keep my hands from reaching out and swooping him to the hip that can barely keep from caving in under the oh-my-goodness growing weight of him.

oh, he is six, all right. very much a big boy. can’t tie his shoes, not quite yet. still stumbles over syllables, when they come one piled on another.

but if i nuzzle close enough, if i hoist him the way i used to do, pretend that he’s not 50 pounds with legs that dangle to beyond my knees, i can catch one last whiff of baby boy before he slips away.

more and more these days i catch myself drinking in the whole of him. i look down, i see legs still in little blue jeans. almost comical those elastic-waisted jeans, as if trying hard to make like big boy pants while winking at the truth.

i see puffy baby hands. not the muscled ones of big boys, or his papa. these hands, round with one fading dimple yet, still fumble with a fork sometimes. still can’t cut with scissors, not without looking as if a gerbil had at that paper, all ziggy and zaggy with dangling bits of cutting that would not succumb to safety blades.

and the cheek. the cheek, all rosy often. and soft and fuzzy still. not fuzzy like the manchild’s; in fact, i’d call that one prickly now, the cheek of he who puts a razor to it once a month or even twice.

no, this is soft like, well, yes, velvet rub of peach, or underside of kitten’s neck, or petal of a summer’s rose. this is soft, but even more, it is irresistible. once i start to sniff it, kiss it, rub my cheek against it, it takes everything i’ve got to stop and breathe again.

it is, i know because my other one’s a man now, a chapter that will pass me by, any day now. and i’m not ready yet. don’t know if any mama ever really gets her fill.

i think it’s how we’re wired. my baby-making years are gone. i look old and older when i look into the mirror. but still, there is someone soft and little in my house. it’s as if, if i taste the sweetness of his skin, if i memorize his weight against my weary bones, i’ll always have him somewhere deep inside. where, after all, a mama’s babe belongs.

do you hunger for your little one, or for the days when your big ones were little? were you mad for the soft spot at the nape of their neck? or was it their toes that sent you to the moon? do you have a nuzzler? did you? i’m not saying, not at all, that there are fewer merits in the ones who drop their stinky shirts and socks all over their sleeping pits, i’m just saying, of course, that as the little ones slip through our fingers, there stirs a hunger that’s hard to fill. how ‘bout you?

14 Comments

January 23, 2008

seed scatterer

somehow, the other night, i swallowed wholly one of the truest truths of growing a thinking child from scratch.

mighta been one of the hardest ones to swallow, too.

but in the end, i am convinced, i’m one inch closer to a place that’s wiser. even if the getting there was bumpy going down.

you see, somewhere deep inside my head i think i thought that passing on the flames you hold most deeply, dearly, was a matter simply of holding up the wick, turning to the ones we nurse, we diaper change, we spoon feed, we wipe off, bandage, and shuffle on their way. the ones whose ears we whisper into, the ones whose shoes we tie, the ones whose pencil grip we help to rearrange. the ones whose papers we are no longer asked to read, for they are thinking now wholly on their own.

to pass the flame, i thought, was merely this: we turn and touch our kindled wick to theirs. and, poof, the burning light continues.

only, the other night, deep in thought and conversation at the kitchen table, deep in one of those tete-a-tetes that starts out slow, builds, spirals and suddenly is way up high on some perch where air is thin, and grip is slipping, i realized that not all flames are so easily lit from soul to soul.

not when you have, all your life, raised your child to think, to ask, to sift through what he’s told, to make his own only what sinks deep down to a place where what fits is weighed, is looked at from all sides, is held up to the shadow-casting light.

the subject, more or less, was religion. and in this house that’s a subject that comes with many threads. we weave here. we are braiders. we sift for golden strands, we entwine. we understand that some are shared, and some are wholly different, depending on whose birth threads we are holding.

more than religious, though, i am of the spirit. i find God in the scarlet flash of papa cardinal in the snowy boughs. i feel the shiver of the holy spirit when i watch the moon shadow play upon the window panes, and spill onto the bedclothes that bundle up and over my baby boy.

i whisper the hail mary, but i brush away a tear when lost in prayer on yom kippur. i feel the breath divine in hebrew, latin, or plain-old sidewalk talk. i needn’t be in church to know that holiness is near.

and so, it was the burning flame of spirit that i assumed–no, i counted on–i’d pass to my firstborn.

as clearly as he got my curly hair, the dimple of his father’s cheek, i thought the one most precious breath i have, i’d turn and breathe easily, wholly, into my soulful child.

oh, he had it when he was little. looked up at me one night, when he was all of two, and asked, “who puts God to bed at night?”

he had it, just a year ago, when he stood on the bimah, proclaiming the words of the Torah at his bar mitzvah, brought down the house, i tell you, with his grown-up understanding that nearly made the rabbi’s pale.

but now, now he’s taken history for thinking children, he’s heard word of wars fought in the name of God. and philosophies that stretch his mind into interesting new shapes. he is, right now, in this interlude, not so certain anymore.

and as we talked, i ached as the words he spoke fell upon my ears, sifted down to where my soul does all its breathing.

i tell you, it hurt to swallow, and, yes, to breathe.

but he is mine, and that’s unshakable, and, besides, i believe i’ve glimpsed the outlines of that soul. even if, right now, he calls it something else.

late that night, tossing, turning, in the way a mother sometimes does, it came to me, the image of the seeds.

i realized that what we do, in the long, long years of planting, is we are merely sowers of the seed. we scatter all life long, the bits of truth, of hope, the few scant things we know.

we scatter as we turn the words, in conversation after conversation. we poke a fertile nugget deep into the soil as we take our children by the hand, show them places and faces unlike the ones they would otherwise know.

we sprinkle seed through the books we read them when we pull them on our lap, turn pages. and then, years later, leave tucked beneath their pillow, just in case they find a minute for inhaling thought before they fall to sleep.

and after all the sowing, i realized, we can only stand back. pray for rain and sunlight. keep watch on what’s out where we have laid our lifetime’s crops.

hmm, is that a little bit of green, poking through the loamy soil? is that a tendril, reaching for the sky?

we’ll not know the harvest for some time. but we will trust that all the planting, tending, praying, was not in vain.

some seasons, what comes up is rich, is plenty, fills the bins. some seasons, what you put into the ground, isn’t what comes up at all.

but there will be a reaping. and, God willing, it will be more than you had ever counted on.

that’s the way it is when it comes to growing a thinking child. we’ve no flame to simply light their way, only seeds to scatter on their path, and wait–and hope–for blossoming to come.

what hard lessons has parenting brought your way? what, in life, did you set out thinking would be a cinch, only to find it was not the way you’d naively imagined? how have you made peace when the lessons you hoped to teach didn’t sprout in quite the way you’d planted? for those of you who’ve forged this trail already what were moments when you knew, oh you knew, that raising a thinking child held glories all its own. even when their wisdom caught you by surprise?

and by the by, today’s the blessed day of our resident mountain bird, the one who sings as if a warble-throated mama bird. here’s to sweetness, pure light and heart-melting goodness. in song, in deed. happy blessed day, pjv-az.

13 Comments

December 26, 2007

dear santa

i know, i know, it’s not standard practice to send off a missive the day after christmas. but, geez, santa, i have been known to make my boys sit down and scribble their oh-my-gosh thank yous to you and the elves, and, well, this year, seems i too felt a bit of the great oh-my-gosh.

i had every intention, on christmas itself, of tiptoeing down at the crack of the dawn, of plugging the tree in, shaking the cinnamon into my coffee, pulling a chair up to this old french pine table here where i do all my typing, penning some thoughts and sending them off to the pole.

ah, but then in the stillness, in the part of the story where ol’ clement c. moore writes, “not a creature was stirring…” well, there was a stirring, all right. more like a clomping, right outa bed, onto the creakiest floor board in this creaky old house.

the little one was up, was ready to dash down the stairs. but the big one, the one who at 14 is a little less–but only a little, i assure you–eager to rise in the dark, grope under the tree to see what maybe you dropped from your lumpy red sack. well, he couldn’t be stirred from deep in his forest of slumber.

and around here, there’s an unspoken code: it’s all or none in the lunge for the tree, come christmas morn.

so i had my hands full for an hour or so. read every book we could find to try to distract the little one. (by the way, speaking of dear mr. moore, the early riser refused to let me read for the 98th time this season, “the night before christmas,” saying it was no longer the night before, and he had no patience for a tale whose prime had expired.)

then, poor thing, sated with stories and turning of pages, he just stood at the door outside the bathroom while the big one took a shower, brushed his teeth, did everything ‘cept slap on the aftershave to draw out the minutes into nearly half of an hour.

the poor little one drummed his fingers, he did. so did his papa. it was an exercise in delayed gratification, yes it was, and the child managed, just barely, to make it.

at last, both boys, their buffalo footsteps in tandem, tore down the stairs, shook the old timbers, and wasted no time exploring their respective small mounds.

well, let me just say, santa, that the child was bowled over by your goodness. he must have said 85 times, “that santa is the sweetest best person in the whole world.”

and, well, as the whole sparkle-filled day kept unfolding, as the shoulder pads that he’d asked for were squeezed over his head, as the big one clicked the new lens for his camera, as all of us reveled in the day that finally had come, the day of going nowhere, doing nothing but reveling in the completion of yet another cycle of waiting, preparing, occasionally running like mad, well, i couldn’t help but think that the whole notion of santa really is paving the way for a knowing the God who is good, who is full of surprises, who delights, who draws wonder, who gives what isn’t even thought to be asked for.

and well, that really is reason for me to believe in the believing in santa. to watch little eyes light up. to see a six-year-old swirling in smiles.

oh, i know christmas isn’t about santa. i know you’re just an add-on to the main event. i know, i know.

but watching the little one bathe in a warm tub of wishes-come-true, i couldn’t help but feel blessed that he knows what it is to believe in invisible goodness.

to believe in the power of someone who comes in the cloak of the nighttime, who leaves not a trace, except for the white filmy rim there in the milk glass, and the crumbs on a plate where, just before bedtime, cookies had been plucked from the tin with serious thought and a level of care that managed to push back the climb into bed by at least five or 10 minutes.

it’s not a bad start for a life of believing in things we can’t see. in a goodness that, time and again, will bring us our wildest dreams. and then some.

not a bad start for knowing that out in the beyond there is a someone who’s there whether we’re looking or not. who is there to tap on our shoulder, to put a hand to the small of our back. to reach out a hand–even two if we need it–to drag us up from the depth of our depths.

not a bad start, and not a bad middle.

here i am, here at my mid-century mark, and once again, all over again, i am marveling, believing in the jolly old elf with the belly that wiggles like a bowl full of jelly.

merry christmas, ol’ elf. merry merry.

i know i didn’t write you a letter this year, didn’t ask for even one thing. but you delivered, you did. what you brought came plain on the face of a boy with eyes all aglow, and heart all atwitter. ‘twas breathtaking, my friend. and thank you is all i wanted to say.

so, thank you, dear santa. thank you so very much.

love, year after year,

the little one’s mama

merry boxing day, anyone who’s taken a minute to make it over here to the table. i sure did mean to get out my merry christmas ahead of time, but well a strep germ rather got in the way. did you have a magical moment of believing at your house yesterday? did you see something in someone’s eyes that melted your heart?
as i lolligagged my way through probably the sweetest christmas i can remember, i realized that christmas is a day that bubbles up what’s deepest in our hearts, whether that’s grief or loneliness or–if we’re lucky, if we’re incredibly blessed–just pure joy. can’t say as i’ve ever had a christmas before that felt quite so full. christmas, for a very long time, has been one with a big gaping hole. something wonderful is filling in that empty space. maybe it’s a bit of what we’ve created together here at the place where the chairs are pulled up. for that, i say thank you to you and thank you on high. merry everything. love, the chair lady

3 Comments

pull up a chair

Category: brothers

May 21, 2008