caretaking the world | pull up a chair

September 4, 2015

never again, we promised

i don’t often bring world news to the table. not because i don’t pay attention to it each and every day. mostly because most of the time the holiest way i know how to live is to saturate the moment, the space before me, with all the heart and soul i can muster.

but there are moments and images that shatter. that land on my kitchen table with the plop of the morning’s newsprint. that stop me cold in my tracks. that propel me to drop to my knees, or tumble me out the door, where i stand beneath heaven’s dome, and i open my heart and my prayers, and i beg for an answer: what can i do? what can we do? how can we gather up this suffering, how can we put balm to the wounds of the world, how can we heal the broken children, broken dreams, broken hearts?

dear God, how can we make a drop of a difference?

so it was when i saw the photo of the turkish policeman lifting the little syrian boy who had drowned in a moonlit sea. drowned when a boat built for 10 had been loaded — overloaded — with 17, too many of them little children. not long after setting out across the aegean sea, escaping from the war-torn hell that is syria, hoping to make it to kos, the island off greece, the little boat capsized, and 12 children, aged nine months to 11 years old, were lost, drowned in the dark, dark waters.

i’d seen the photo the day before of the limp little boy, face pressed against the sand, bare little legs, sensible shoes buckled, still buckled, after he’d washed to shore.

and then the next morning’s news — on the front page of the wall street journal, a paper held in the hands of decision makers around the U.S., around much of the world — showed the next frame in the story: the turkish policeman lifting, cradling, the little boy. the legs limp, bent at the knee, a little hand folded across the little boy’s tummy.

dead and alone at the edge of the sea, chased away by a war that won’t stop.

little boy, being lifted too late.

and so we need to pay attention, all of us.

amid the first light of dawn, i offered a prayer for the little boy, and all of the others.

truth is, i don’t know what to do, and my prayers feel too hollow. not that they’re not prayed with fiercest urgency. but what i want is to airlift myself to the syrian shore, where throngs of terrified mothers and the children who cling to them are emptying their pockets and purses of whatever currency they can manage to scrounge, climbing into rickety boats, and setting sail under the light of the moon that glistens across the water, and falls, too, across my backyard, falls across my collapsed black-eyed susans and the anemone that nod through the night. (is there not some mystical unifying force — lunar pull — as the beams of the same gibbous moon shine down on all of us, syrian refugees adrift on the sea, and, halfway across the very same globe, our own ramshackle gardens?) i want to walk through the train station of budapest, where babies are cradled against mamas’ chests, tucked under arms, made to sleep on the hard station floor, or out in the city square, where one family — a syrian refugee father, his wife, and their baby — threw themselves across the train tracks in protest, and would not be moved. i want to reach out a hand, offer my home as a place to sleep and eat and be safe, find their bearings in this terrible world that’s chased them from their home, their life, the world as they knew it and loved it.

i’m certain i sound naive, my too-simple solution, my impulse for healing the wounds of the world. but how can we believe in the power of love, the gospel of love, and not believe in trying?

so what will we do, those of us captured by the image of the drowned little boy, haunted all day by the shrieks followed by silence?

there is a river of humanity — women and children and the men who love them — pushed from their homes; rickety boats succumb to roiling seas, and trains refuse to budge, won’t carry the war-torn to safety. the world is watching. we have promised and promised again: we won’t stand back and watch horrors unfold.

horrors are unfolding. voices are crying.

never again, we promised. so how are we keeping our promise?

the question is literal as much as rhetorical, what can we do? what wise response might we muster?

14 Comments

June 26, 2015

the blessing of being called to the rescue

sometimes, mama nature beckons us. she plops her unfinished efforts right before our eyes. she stirs us to dig deep into our tender parts, to pull out all the stops, to tend and nurse and care for whatever it is that has fallen, gone limp, lies broken.

so it was the other afternoon when my little phone made a noise, and there popped a text balloon from my little fellow. he was tumbling out the door to soccer, lacing up his cleats, when suddenly he looked down and saw something amiss. he took me two pictures and typed, without pause for punctuation, apparently: “Hi mom I just saw a baby bird as I was sitting on the porch go look behind the pot of flowers I’m not sure if he is hurt but here are a couple pictures I would take a look”

“When you get home,” he wrote, “we should check to see if it’s ok”

by the time i got home, the one little fledgling had company. now there were two fully-feathered, eyes-still-closed baby birds cowering behind the flower pot on the front stoop, a good seven or eight feet down from the nook behind the front door’s moulding where, every year since we put up the lovely fancy woodwork, those old birds have deigned to birth their young. and this despite the fact that up beneath the eaves of our old house we built the feathered flocks an ample nine-hole aerie for their avian pleasures.

those birds could live here…

but instead they chose their hatchery here, tucked behind the corner just above the dentils…

tis the truth of the month of june, at least on this upper half of the globe, this is the stretch of days when those baby birds have tapped their way out of their itty-bitty eggs, they’ve puffed up on a steady diet of worms and fly parts, filled out a thick armament of feathers, and, after days of perching on the precipice of the nest, dared put wind beneath their wings.

and, often, that first flight tumbles to the ground.

which is, often, where we come in.

we are, if we choose to be, the baby bird worriers. we’re the ones who fret from first spotting till at last the baby birds find their way, their flight.

so it was the other day, and through the long and rainy night at our house.

once we found our pair of nestlings, our tumbled duo in distress. (i imagined that, perhaps, the one birdlet, still safe on high, heard his little feathered brother’s squawks for help from way down below, and there, from the above-the-door hatchery, called out something to the effect of, “fear not, little fellow, i’m coming after you!” at which point bird no. 2 — the more cautious one, the one who knew that first flight wasn’t such a smart idea in the first place — he strapped on his bravery suit, stretched his wings, and promptly tumbled down to where his fallen brethren lay flummoxed and without a plan for updraft.)

that’s when we, the bird worriers extraordinaire, sprung into rescue mode. that’s when we spied the baby birds, stranded inches apart, shivering in fear — or so we imagined. and, indeed, there’s nothing like a fear-quivering baby bird to get a mama’s juices running — even when the mama is of the human species and not the feathered kind. we mamas pay no mind to whose baby is in distress; we’re all for one, and one for all in the mama-rescue department.

we leapt into action, me and the fellow who first eyed the distress. we tried to do what little we could do: a bottle cap from a 2-liter jug of birthday gingerale served as the trough for the one farthest from home, and a yogurt tub, cut down to eighth-inch height, served as the watering hole for the other, with room to boot should they decide to share a drink.

darkness fell, our worries rose. the soccer-playing rescuer, he worried that a hungry cat might make a midnight feast of our little pair. i chose to worry about the rain. and so, with the first pit-a-pat that soon became a tumult of down-pouring precipitation, i was up and out of bed. i sprung open an umbrella, perched it just so, teetering between the flower pot and the stone wall of our old house, in hopes of keeping feathers dry. i imagined mama bird, up high with all her others, and i did what i thought she might do — short of opening my beak and plopping in a portion of a worm. (we all have our limits, you know.)

by morning light, the pair was gone. nowhere to be seen, though i’m certain i heard them squawking thanks, from back in the nest. my little guy remains unconvinced that they weren’t someone’s tasty snack, but i contend that the lack of feathers is proof that a happy ending was had by all. he tried to counter that they might have gone down in a single swallow, with no feathers to be strewn. i, frankly, couldn’t stomach such demise, so i choose to end the tale with all birdlets safely ensconced back in their duly-ornamented hatchery.

even though this particular rescue was relatively drama-free, and rather swift to boot — and cost little more than a couple hours’ sleep — i am ever grateful for the blessed moments when mama nature opens her book and lays a lesson at our feet. it’s a chance, every time, to exercise our hearts, to put muscle to our empathy machines, to understand more deeply just how much we all depend on each other.

it’s a blessing, every time, to be called to someone’s or something’s rescue. in a world in dire need of tenderness, in a world where we’re pummeled by the atrocious (word just came in of atrocities on three continents), it is a fallen baby bird who might stand a humble chance of returning us to, reminding us of, this lasting truth: to reach beyond the walls of our own hearts is to tap into our surest, truest care-taking selves, wherein we get a glimpse of our immeasurable capacities, and wherein, God willing, we begin to understand that we are called, all of us, to be the first line of this world’s tenderest defense.

and better yet when we can share that lesson with a child who is keeping watch on how deeply we keep that promise.

i’ve not yet mustered the courage to go read the details of what’s unfolded around the globe this sad morning. i heard of a beheading, and felt my knees give out. can we rise up and quash the madness with the few small bits we know: can we love more wildly, more wildly than one mere week ago? can we staunch the hate? can we find a way to rescue the globe in need of love?

what tender acts of mercy have you entered into this week?

3 Comments

May 8, 2015

because in the annals of saints, nurses are among the holiest…

i went back to my old hospital yesterday. my long-ago, very-much-loved hospital. i went because it’s nurses week, and someone asked if i might wander back and whisper love notes to the nurses. i couldn’t have been more tickled.

even though it’s changed its name — from children’s memorial to lurie children’s — and it’s moved — to the glimmering gold-coast streeterville, in the shadow of the john hancock center, from its old spot at the triangle of lincoln, fullerton and halsted, it’s still the place that’s a beacon to some of the sickest kids on the planet. it’s a place, i’m convinced, where the nurses who work there are nothing short of not-yet-canonized saints.

some of the searingest moments of my life were seared in the chambers of old children’s. i still remember my very first day on the floor where i would work for the better part of three years. there was a six-year-old named pebbles. she had cystic fibrosis, so her lips were blue and her lungs rattled and heaved with every in and out breath. the day i started work at children’s was her birthday, so all the nurses swarmed around her hospital bed, and started to sing. i started to cry. stood at the back of the crowd that ringed her bed, and could not stop the stream of tears as i absorbed the whole of all of it. i was new, was raw, and hadn’t yet figured out how my heart would absorb the inevitable, the heartache, that so often comes when you spend your days keeping kids as alive — for as long — as is possible.

i remember, just as vividly, the moment when the first kid who i’d loved died. his name was joe, joe thornton, and he had one of the cancers of blood — not leukemia, but one of the even more awful ones. i’ve now been present at births and at deaths, and i can tell you that both are equally vaulted moments, moments so sacred you feel the distance all but evaporate between heaven and earth; you dwell, at each end of life, in an in-between space so anointed you can practically feel the breathing of angels at the back of your neck. but joe’s was my very first death, and i didn’t know how it would be. when it came, when his last breath never gave way to another, it was as holy a moment as i’ve ever witnessed, the slow, and silent, and soft-petaled ebbing of life, of heartbeat, of breath. i remember feeling blanketed, as if the softest most blessed space — some new dimension of timelessness — had draped around my shoulders. i remember bathing him, bathing away the last bits of the earthly struggle that had been left behind. i remember the sound of the washcloth swirling through the tub of warm water. i remember the sound of his mama’s wail.

i remember, too, julie joiner, the 14-year-old with the spinal tumor that had left her unable to walk, the sweet girl up above in the black-and-white photo. i remember the moment she called me into her room because she’d been hard at work on a top-secret papier-mache pumpkin head. she’d painted it shamrock green, draped it with orange yarn (aka hair), carved out triangular eye holes, and called it “the irish pumpkin queen.” she made it for me, and she very much wanted me to spend the rest of my workday wearing it. i remember the way she laughed when i first slipped it on. she was a kid who didn’t laugh easily — and who would, with a tumor pressing against your spine, and your mama up and gone for reasons you never knew? reasons that left her papa alone to mind over her and her two other siblings — but she melted like butter once i put that hollow green pumpkin over my head.

children’s was like that. is like that. story after story. heartbreak upon heartbreak. only, they tell me it’s even harder these days to work there because kids are sicker, the socio-economic safety net more unraveled, and medicine, far more complex. the nurses at children’s expend every imaginable super power.

so my heart was triple-timing when i walked in there yesterday. when all the nurses started to trickle into the room. when, one after another, i looked into faces i hadn’t seen in 30-some years. because here’s the most amazing thing i discovered yesterday: as tough as children’s can be on your heart — as many times as a nurse’s heart can be shattered and trampled and left gasping for air — nurses don’t walk away. they stay. for the long haul.

it’s as holy a calling as ever could be.

there are nurses i worked with, side by side, back in 1979 till 1982, and they are still there. still making kids laugh. and burying sobs against their chest. still helping parents decipher very bad news. still carrying home heart loads of worry, and plenty of stories that make you spit out loud laughing. because kids are like that. and sick kids are just like everyone else. only a heck of a lot braver. and more likely to make you go weak at the knees.

and sometimes they’ll say things you’ll never forget.

like the kid whose name i can’t remember, but i do remember this: he was a very sick kid whose mama had finally gone home for a night; she lived far away, in indiana, i think. turned out he took a sharp turn for the worse that very night. he was dying. so his nurse was the one who sat close beside him, who took his hand, and just held it, all through the dark of the very long night. as the little boy’s breaths came shallower and shallower, he started to talk to someone the nurse couldn’t see. said something about how he was ready; he’d take his hand now. then, suddenly, the kid who’d been barely catching each breath, he startled, opened his eyes and said with the most animated, radiant face the nurse had ever seen: “you can let go now, i’m taking God’s hand. i’m going to heaven.”

and then he let go of the hand of his nurse, and he died.

and that’s why i looked those nurses straight in the eye — and the heart — yesterday, and i told them this: “you, nurses, do the holiest work: you heal the wounds of the body, but also the heart and the soul. you listen. you troubleshoot. you make the impossible possible.”

and each and every one belongs in the canon of saints.

if you’re a nurse, what drew you to become one? if you’re not, do you have a story of a time when a nurse pretty much ushered you — or someone you love — into the inner sanctum of all that is holy and hushed?

and happy blessed day of mothering, a definition i believe in because the verb, “to mother,” is all inclusive, and counts anyone who’s doled out the great gifts of nurturing and attending, and loving and doting, that define motherhood.

photo credit to my beloved nursing colleague, claire dassy, photographer and archivist extraordinaire. i never knew that picture existed till a few months ago, when dear claire melted me and sent it my way…..

20 Comments

May 2, 2014

of may bugs and the wonder of footsteps above

he was gone by the time i started bumbling into may bugs. i found them crawling across the old pine hutch, the one i almost burned down one night long ago when a candle took a fancy to the century-old wooden knobs. i found the spotted-back bugs slithering across a chinese bowl in the living room. i found them parked and preening smack dab under the daffodils on the dining room table.

they were but the latest charmed import from the charming fellow who called this old house home for the last two weeks of chilly, drizzly april.

he’s gone now, our dear friend bernd, father to jan luca, the blond-haired lad who two years ago was here and stole my heart as, each day at dawn, he tiptoed down the stairs, splayed his stash of colored pencils and his writing papers across the maple table and sat beside me at the morning bench, crafting yet another page in the latest of his illustrated storybooks. (had i ordered this sweet child from bavarian central casting, i wondered? had he dropped into my heart from a puffy cloud of dreams, one that had wafted across the atlantic and settled down along my lake shore?)

and — in a role we’ll never forget — bernd was also the big-hearted papa who late into the lonely nights last summer sat beside our little world traveler, the one who’d trekked to germany and found himself topsy-turvy. even as the midnight hour came and went, bernd never left our little fellow’s side as he heaved his traveler’s tummy and wanted, more than anything, his faraway (and passport-less) mama to airlift him home sweet home. you don’t forget a man who soothes your child’s tangled heart. who, for days on end, pedals beside him on miles-long bike treks through munster’s leafy arbored tunnels. and buys him ices at the finish line.

it’s a multi-chaptered friendship now, what with all the criss-crossings of sea and sky. and the shared knowledge that we’ve loved each other’s children as if our own, for the few short weeks they’ve been in our care. and this time round, we got to be the ones to unfurl the welcome mat for bernd. to tuck spring beauties by the bedside, wrap the empty mattress in the softest flannel sheets, fill the fridge with meats and cheese and toothsome breads, because we’d been schooled on how to feed a touring deutsche mann.

the bed is empty once again, the footsteps now are stilled. bernd, one of the liveliest minds i’ve encountered in quite some time, has packed his bags and climbed aboard a train, leading his flock of westphalian schoolchildren down to where abe lincoln roamed.

but for the better part of these past two weeks, we shared our house, and felt our hearts wedge ever wider. it’s what comes when welcome lasts for days.

it’s that rarest of alchemies, the one that tiptoes into your very soul, and settles in at the comfiest nook. it’s mixed and poured in the shared pulse beat and the daily rhythms ticking through the hours: the soon-familiar rustle of bare feet on bare floor above. the flushing of the morning drain. the coming to know that the extra coffee mug now queued beside the pot is the one that takes a glug of what you now know to be vollmilch, whole milk.

(you actually manage to pick up a word or three, over the course of your 10-day german immersion, and you thank your lucky stars that your houseguest is the english teacher at the german school in telgte, north rhine-westphalia, and can converse with depth and nuance on any subject you introduce, from the strife in ukraine to acupuncture as a cure for allergy.)

it’s something sacred, i swear, this slow-unspooling tête-à-tête and cœur à cœur that comes only when circling in close proximity over the course of added-up days.

and, like all that matters most in life, it’s an arithmetic of the most elemental units, combining to intricate — and breath-taking — calculus.

when we inhabit the same four walls, when we come to know by heart the waking up and slumber, when we pass a bowl of lumpy potatoes across a table, swap sections of the news, when one conversation circles back and round again, when we are interlaced across the span of sunlight and moonlight, when we share the itty-bitty worries of the day (was any school child lost in the trudge across chicago’s loop?), and when one of us applies the ice to the other one’s purpled and twisted wrist (after a spectacular late-night fall that’s left me typing with one hand), we are more than simply friends.

we are bare-hearted humans who inch closer and closer to a shared vision of the world.

sympatico, “having a fellow feeling;” sym derived from syn (greek, meaning “together with, at the same time”) + pathos (again, greek, for “suffering, feeling,” or “a quality arousing pity;” related to penthos, “grief, sorrow”).

it is what happens, over hours and days, over the pirouette at the refrigerator door when one reaches for juice and the other for cheese, over the turning out of the kitchen light when at last it’s time for bed, over the considerate hauling out of the trash, and the remembering to keep the cat from the allergic guest’s pillow.

it is what’s bound to come — a sort of elmer’s heart glue — that’s applied in drips and dabs across the days. it’s our natural inclination to harbor the wholeness — the light and shadow, the fine-grained and the sweeping brushstroke — of those with whom we share dirty dishes in the sink, whose toilet paper rolls we make certain are plenty, whose soggy socks we whirl through the dryer.

it’s as if we’re erasing, hour by hour, the walls that keep any two humans apart. we realize — because we hear the gurglings of everyday life, we scour the sink of another morning’s whiskers, we laugh out loud at the same wacky lines on SNL — how very much we inhale and exhale the same few molecules.

and, thus, we get that rare peek at the truth: we are all but a bundle of quirks and soft spots, we all get goosebumps when it’s cold, and our tummies growl when they’re empty. and beneath the physiologic kinship, we unfurl the thoughts and ideas that animate our imaginations, we hold our native lands up to the light, and we discover that the globe is a very small orb, and our hearts are at their glorious best when we remember once again how deeply connected we all really, truly are.

to say nothing of the rich parade of chocolate bugs that melt across your tongue, and leave a lingering sweetness that won’t go away anytime soon.

the chocolate lady bugs, it turns out, are a may day tradition in germany, when kinder (that’s children) wake up to find a trail of tucked away “may bugs,” all begging to be found. not unlike our easter egg hunt, and similar in spirit to our long-ago may-day tradition of secretly dropping a basket of spring beauties on some unsuspecting someone’s doorstep, it’s a hide-and-seek i’m now adding to my annual repertoire. and every time, my heart — like the milky chocolate — will melt, thinking of dear beloved brilliant bernd. who made our april not dreary at all. despite the temps in the 30s and 40s, and the rains that would not go away.

do you have tales to tell of long-term hospitality, the gift of opening your home and finding a new inhabitant at the tenderest spot of your heart?

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January 24, 2014

tea therapy

against the arctic whistle on the far side of the glass, the shrill siren of the tea kettle is all but marking shift change, with its regular rhythmic blasts. here at the old maple table all week, it signals: “in session.”

it’s the steam-driven bellows of the mugs of teas that punctuate a holy ritual taking place here. almost as if a shingle had been hung, with red neon arrows blinking, pointing up the bluestone walk, past the paned front door in shade of oceanic blue, lighting the way past snow drifts to the tucked-in table where the talk unfolds.

it’s been a blessing of this month of college interlude. my own sweet boy is long gone, now back in classes, but a host of other college kids, kids with heavy hearts and twisted potholed paths, kids who’ve lost their way, they are finding their way here, to this table, to this ample-bellied teapot where the water never empties and the teas are always spiced. my bowl of clementines is at the ready, so too the cookies under glass, where a swift lift of the domed lid offers sweet accompaniment for salty tears.

i find it a whisper of a miracle that kids have figured out they are always welcome here, and that there’s a heart who will listen without judgement, who makes a place for them to dump their worries and their fears. and who lives and breathes the promise that these dark days will end; there’s a grownup — right here in the flesh — who’s known the shadow and the great abyss, and who — with skinned knees all her own — found her way up the side of the steepest trail.

“it’s the 10-minute rule,” one wise tea-sipper intoned. she meant that she’d been taught to take on her overwhelming dread or angst or out-of-this-world anxiety in 10 minute chunks. endure it. know it has an end, and will not swallow you whole. and in a good 10 minutes, something deep inside will shift. or not. and you’ll enter into yet another 10-minute exercise in sheer survival. and soon enough, sure as sure can be, it will pass. the vista will change. and those baby steps — those 10-minute triumphs of straight-up enduring — they will, through simple additive powers, combine into hour- and then hours-long stretches of breathing. curled in a ball, perhaps. or with the self-propelled motivation to pick up a book, climb on a treadmill, call a friend, tiptoe to the kitchen to see if warm company might be found.

i’ve seen the gamut here this week, had kids whisper words, and follow swiftly with, “i hope that doesn’t shock you.” no, it doesn’t shock. no, no. never. it only breaks my heart that smart kids, gorgeous kids, kids with hopes and dreams are nearly train-wrecked by the vicissitudes of hurdles set too high, of broken promises and betrayals, of a world in which no sin goes un-broadcast and there’s too little wiggle room for the fine art of making honest mistakes.

so while i steep in my own brand of guilt for not raking in freelance assignments, and while my bank account is on the decline and not the rise, i find more than a dose of solace that the pages of my life flipped forward to the chapter i long ago dreamed of: where i’m the old lady at the maple table, the old lady (not yet hunched-over, thanks be to the pharmaceutical gods who give us bone-boosting weekly white horse pills) whose shoulders are wrapped in the woven folds of woolen shawl, and who with lumps of sugar and dollops of milky cream doles out vast acreages of her heart and what scraps of wisdom she’s tucked into her apron pocket all along the way.

at long week’s end, i find myself bowed in prayer for these children, these wide-eyed pilgrims trying so hard to find their way, to find the shafts of light breaking through the tight space between the rocks. and i find myself so deeply grateful that my years of being lost now pay me back in solid company where it matters most: here at the old maple table, where hope is served around the clock.

no need to knock: i promise you, the door is always open. and so’s the heart.

word of the week: i believe i’ve let languish a promise made back in 02139 to bring you a delectable word of the week. well, here’s one for this week — salmagundi (provenance: nigel slater’s “notes from the larder”) a hodgepodge is what it means, and it comes from a literal mix of chopped meat, eggs, flavored with oil, vinegar, anchovies, and onions. but used freely far beyond the bounds of the kitchen, as in “they were a salmagundi of old and young, wise and fool.”

and before arriving at the query of the week, another bit of poetic thought picked up last week in my online “poetry in america: walt whitman,” class, taught by professor elisa new of harvard college. in her introduction to poetry lecture, she riffed on poetic language, and its powers. i thought you might find it worth pondering, and so i snipped it to bring to the table, though i forgot to leave it here, as last week’s recipe took up so very many lines….here tis, from elisa new, harvard’s powell m. cabot professor of american literature (and wife of former treasury secretary and former harvard university president larry summers):

Poetic language is language worth pausing over. It’s language that slows down time. It’s language that takes us into corners of our experience we might have overlooked. It’s language that is conscious of itself as language. It’s language trying out and expanding and pressing at the borders of what language can do, just as in other media, in painting, painters think about how to use paint in new ways. In the world of music, musicians think about how to use tone and sound in new ways.

Poetry is language curious about language itself. To say that is, in a way, to put poetry at the very center of the humanistic enterprise, since human beings are the creatures who use language. When we study poetry, we think about what it is to be human, the ways in which our existence is mediated and created and advanced and expanded by language.

oh, to be so supremely conscious of the words we choose, and how we push the boundaries of human connectedness….

where do you dish out your best counsel? the kitchen table, the cutting board, the cookstove, the couch, the driver’s seat of your mobile, the bedroom, the work bench, the miles and miles upon which you walk?

7 Comments

September 13, 2013

joy of one

sooner or later, it happens. to anyone who’s assembled a tumbled lot of kids. housed them. fed them. worried through a night or two.

it’s the law of simple arithmetic. subtraction, actually.

x – 1 (to the nth power, depending how many you’ve accumulated) eventually = 1.

for all the momentum you’d once acquired under that one shingled roof, for all the noise once collected over forks and spoons and spilled milk, there comes a day when there’s only one poor child under your sights.

poor child, indeed.

that one and only kid is unshakably under the steady gaze of eyes that have no distraction, that aren’t too often pulled hither or yon.

that poor kid is all alone in the glare of your watchtower.

and in our house, the grownups come in pairs. so in fact, he’s under double glare.

he wakes up some fine mornings to not one but two tall people tickling him from slumber. one’s armed with warm, moist washcloth (the turkish spa treatment, you might rightly think). the other employs soft circles to the hollow between the bumps where angel wings were supposed to sprout.

he saunters downstairs to made-to-order pancakes and bacon. on mornings like this morning, when all that slumber was hard to shake, one of the tall people caves and offers a ride in the little black sedan. complete with concentrated conversation, the rare sort that comes when the interviewer is truly deeply interested in all that lurks deep down inside your soul.

now, you might be retching right about here. thinking, holy lord, what sort of overindulgent parenting is this? where’s the rough-and-tough school of hit the “eject” button, hightail ’em out the door, stuff a granola bar in their pocket, and kick ’em in the pants, with a casual, “have a good one,” tossed over your shoulder as you slam the door behind ’em?

well, there are rare few chances in this boardgame called “a life,” in which to pull out all the stops, to give it everything you’ve got, to score one more chance to do it right, to love with all your heart.

so that seems to be the m. o. over here.

by accident of gestational bumps and broken hearts, we’re in our third chapter of parenting over here. we had the one-and-only round one (a round we thought would never end), the oh-my-gosh-it’s-two (yet another round i seemed to think would never end), and now, thanks to a very far away college quad, we’ve got one-and-mostly-only.

day in and day out, it’s a ratio of 2 to 1.

and perhaps the most beautiful part of being the mama of a 12-year-old when you yourself are 56, barreling toward 57, is that you are wise enough to know: there is no more sacred incubator in this blessed gift of life than the one into which you pour your heart, and whatever accumulated wisdom you’ve scraped up along the way — that holy vessel called a growing, stretching child.

doesn’t matter to me if the child comes by birth or by heart, or simply wanders down the sidewalk and finds a place on my couch. it’s a nasty speed-chase out there, with cars flying into ditches right and left. if the walls within which i dwell happen to offer rare respite, time-out, breathing room, a place where dreams can be launched, and hurts aired out to dry, well then i’m posting a shingle on my doorpost: “time-out offered here.”

even after all these days — and there’ve been 4,420 — since that sweet boy landed in my arms, i consider it a miracle of the first order that he’s here at all. never mind that mop of curls. or the bottomless smile and the matching dimples. or the tender way he takes my hand and gives it a squeeze in the middle of driving from anywhere to anywhere. never mind that, mid-lope out the door, he hits the brakes and circles back for a goodbye hug — one for each grownup.

never mind all that.

it’s just the rare precious miracle of the chance to rocket-launch one more sack of hopes and dreams and heart. to try to pack in all the love and goodness and tender toughness that just might add a shard of light to this sometimes darkening planet.

i’ve always said he seems to know, deep inside his soul, that he was a last-chance baby. the one who beat the odds. the one who left his mama jaw-dropped and quaking at the news. those sterile hens in the bible — sarah (90, when she birthed isaac), rebekah and rachel, to name a few of the so-called “barren” — had nothing on me when it came to being flabbergasted at the revelation (although my shriek came upon seeing the little pregnancy plus sign turn pink, which i don’t think was part of the biblical story).

and so, he seems to indulge us in our over-lavishing. fear not, we try to keep it in check. at least when anyone’s watching. but i happen to have married my teacher in the tenderness department. in patience, too. that man has never once uttered a note in the tone of shrill, a tone i know by heart. used to be i didn’t stop myself till he shot me a withering glance. that stopped me, rattled me back on track.

but over all these years — and there’ve been 20 in the parenting corral — i’ve learned to take his lead, and not auto-leap — well, not every time — into the role of mrs. harsh & overhurried.

once upon a time you would’ve thought the world depended on our getting to the nursery school on time. and i still have trouble reminding myself that a tornado-strewn whirl of clothes heaped on the bedroom floor is NOT the moral equivalent of hauling swine flu into the country, hidden in a clandestine stick of salami.

i think often — expend a bumper crop of brain cells — on the subject of growing kids. it’s religion to me, the holiest sort. it matters more than anything else i will ever do. closest thing to curing cancer. because it boils down to taking the heart and soul you’ve been handed, and tenderly, wisely filling it with light. considering it a stealth missile of planetary illumination. the answer to a peace-prize prayer.

oh sure, the darkness will come. we can’t keep that at bay. but we can give the gift of buoyancy. we can keep the boing in the human spirit. the bounce-back machine that takes the wallops, and rights itself again.

there’s not a creature on the globe who wouldn’t pray to be loved deep and pure and forever after. it’s the highest hope of all creation.

and at our house he only wishes for someone else to please steal our attention. especially when we double-team the launching him from bed.

here, on this crystal clear morning before the day of atonement, at the end of a long week of wondering where my next writing assignment will be, the one bit that bubbled up was my poor outnumbered child. he weathers us well. has a stable of distractions. there are two particular readers, readers on the jersey shore whom i happen to adore, and this one was, in good measure, for them. forgive me for indulging in family lore. i know that nothing matters more to them than knowing their sweet boys — five grandsons — are in good-enough hands.

what do you consider the holiest work you’ve been asked to do?

love, bam

9 Comments

December 14, 2012

the days when we drop to our knees

dispatch from everywhere, as there are no geographical boundaries today. we are a world united in pain…

there is so little to say today. words escape what we hold in our hearts. if there is anything left in our hearts, anything other than oozing, breath-taking pain.

we ache today. throb.

throb, as we dare not glance at the screen. throb for the children. throb for the ones who love them. loved them.

lord, God, bless them, the ones who are gone now, the ones who watched, who heard, who lived an unimaginable hell.

lord, God, bless every last everyone torn by this terrible moment in time.

i had no notion that i would be writing these words today. i was riding the T this morning, or was it the brink of afternoon, when the first words shot across my pocket-sized screen. “school shooting in connecticut.” the numbers rose each time a new email dropped. 2, then 18, then 20, then 30.

i have flimsy grasp on the details, because i couldn’t bear to look. couldn’t bear to read a word. but i watched the president brush away tears. and that’s more than enough to begin to grasp.

i’ve spent the week with a brilliant three year old, and her brand-new just-unfolding baby brother, a soul-filling interlude that swept me away from the cares of the world, that kept me enchanted inside the glimmering veil of a world without horrors.

i can barely begin to fathom the five-year-olds in that kindergarten, the children’s garden gone ugly, gone utterly wrong.

on a day like today you abandon whatever it is you thought you needed to do.

you need do nothing but inhale the sacred all around you. you need do nothing but tell the ones you love how fiercely you love them.

and when they come home at the end of the day, or however you reach them, you tell your children in no uncertain words that they are your breath and your life, and you’ll do whatever it takes to keep them safe, to shield them. and under your breath, inside your heart, you’ll know that you can’t.

you know that in 20 some bedrooms this morning, mothers or fathers were waking up children. were kissing their heads. were scrubbing their cheeks, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. were putting out breakfast. were trying to get them to hurry along, tie their shoes, change their orange-juice-stained shirt, remember their mittens. dropping them off at the curb. thinking they’d see them again. hear the chatter, again and again, from there in the back, from their car seats. these were children still strapped into car seats.

these were babies. not far from the womb.

the cries and the questions that rise from our hearts, they come without answers…

these are the days when, as much as you possibly can, you erase whatever was on the calendar.

once the cloak of night falls, you gather the ones you love in the tightest circle you can. you kindle lights. you steam up the kitchen windows, with whatever is hot, is delicious, is fumbling toward comfort.

you close your eyes and open your heart in unfiltered prayer.

you pray for this world. you pray for the children, the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters. the ones who are lost now, forever lost.

it’s all we can do.

there are no words. and whatever else we thought mattered, it really doesn’t. not at the end of this very long day.

dear God, bathe us in some shard of light, break through the shadow and fog of despair. deliver us from this evil.

this was not the dispatch i planned to write today, though the one i was going to write would have been called, “the days we don’t tell our children about.” which would have been eerily fitting. sad thing is, the children will know. the horror will seep out in this news-porous world, where headlines can’t be kept from young minds, and tender souls. much happened this week, but it will have to wait for another day. baby milo was born, and i beheld the miracle of watching his mama fall deeply in love all over again. i was there in portland when he arrived, was standing there at the door at just after midnight when my brother and becca waddled out, knowing he was coming. not knowing it would be in less than an hour.

and that’s not the only occasion of this week. the chair turned six on 12.12.12. i marked it by sending a love note to the beautiful boy who first built the chair and the table, who told me i could do it, and left me alone to try. i told him he’d brought me an infinite bundle of the best my life has given me.

and none of that is what holds our attention as afternoon is shadowed by nightfall. i can’t quite come up with words on a day like today. so i’ll trust, as always, that here at the chair we are joined at heart and in words hurling toward heaven….

how will you hold the ones you love tonight? at our house, it’s shabbat, and the challah awaits. so too the menorah, where tonight all but one candle will burn.

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April 20, 2012

hole in my heart

soon, but not too soon, i will take down the welcome sign. i will tuck away all the index cards, our bridge back at the beginning, the guideposts that brought us together, each one a noun in english and german.

soon, but not too soon, i will figure out what to do with the big box of froot loops that now sits in the pantry. and the doritos beside it. the little boy who discovered both of those adventures in american eating, he is gone now.

i just took him to the train. i just cried a stream of tears that would not stop. i just walked back in to the emptiest house. a house that echoes with too much quiet now.

i can’t hear the scritch-scratch of his pencil, as he sat at the table each morning, writing his book, illustrating it. i can’t see the way his cheeks turn to pink when he laughs at me and my clumsy pronunciations. i can’t see his deep blue eyes, eyes like the sky on an april morning. i can’t see his smile, the wordless language that pulled us together. paper cards irrelevant, after all.

it had only been 10 days. but i found out, once again, you can fall in love in an instant.

especially when it’s a child who is in your care, tucked under your wing. especially when you discover, uncannily, the child is very much like you when you were a child.

my little friend from munster in germany carries with him wherever he goes stapled and folded pieces of plain white paper, his “books,” each one exquisitely hand-printed, and illustrated, the first letter of each chapter a postage-stamp-sized work of pencil-drawn art.

he has 20 books in all, so far, at home on his bedroom shelf, and it’s his daily practice to unfold his blue canvas pencil case and put no. 2 lead — in black or in colors — to paper.

“my dream,” he told me in his beautiful little-boy english, “is to be a writer.”

and so, every morning, for the past nine mornings, he and i would sit in bliss-soaked silence at the kitchen table, both of us writing for however many minutes the morning allowed. we carved out sacred time for a dream that both of us share, even though decades and miles and culture and gender might have made us, by ordinary measure, so far apart.

last night, when we took our sweet friend to the pancake house at the top of his must-do list, we asked him what he loved most about his visit to chicago. “your family,” he said, the words tumbling right out, without even a flash of a pause. “and the willis tower,” he said, second. “and the pancake house,” he said, wrapping up the short list.

he is too young, too pure, to have slanted those answers for the sake of diplomacy. i knew when he said it that the words sprang from his heart. and that’s why tears sprang in my eyes. because those words were a peek into his heart, into a heart that is rare, a heart that i came to treasure.

in 10 short days.

it started out, this adventure in trans-atlantic connection, as simply a chance to welcome a kid from far away. we had no clue who might come to our house. all we knew was that he would be german, and that we had an empty bed and a bathroom just for him.

and, now, the adventure behind us, we’ve all discovered, all over again, the miracle of falling in love. we’ve all remembered that love is something that happens without expectation. it’s pure surprise. it’s physical. it’s falling, like body through air. it’s not being able to stop. not planning the fall, not mapping the trajectory.

you just feel your heart opening wide, and kaboom, there you are, with all sorts of sparks and electrical currents surging through that place in your chest — if that’s where it dwells, really. if that’s where the love is tucked away, lined on the shelves, perhaps, wrapped inside itty-bitty boxes, each with a sumptuous bow, each ready to spring open, once the magic is airborne, is launched, once it does its unlocking, and the undiluted love escapes, twirls and whirls all through you, making your head spin, making you melt deep inside.

it’s not common, not something that happens, say, just because you like to laugh with the fellow ringing up your groceries. or because the lady down the block is pleasant when she walks by with her dog on a leash, when she looks up and waves.

love, it seems, is more demanding than that. it requires a plunge, diving deep beneath the surface. it requires exposure, peeling back the tough outer skin, revealing the place deep inside where the pulsing comes, where the dreams flow. where we say who we are, where we listen, where we discover a charm or a trinket, miracle or marvel, that schwoops us — both of our hearts — into a vacuum-sealed lock. one where age or country of origin dissolve into bits, don’t matter. we are merely two living, breathing, dreaming souls who discover that we understand each other in ways we never would have imagined.

and so it was, so it is, with my little friend and i.

and i’d never expected it.

and now, now that there’s no one to gobble the froot loops by the bowlful, now that my little one (the one still asleep in the bed at the top of the stairs) is left to plow through the snack-sized bags of doritos all by himself, i find i’m in need of a needle and thread here.

there is a hole in my heart this morning, one that already misses my sweet little friend at the kitchen table. misses the way he politely announced each night, at minutes to nine, “i am tired, may i go to bed now?” and awoke with a smile, and tousled blond hair, then climbed down the stairs awaiting his bowl and his spoon and his froot loops.

i’ve no one to sit with at the kitchen table. no one to write alongside. but now, in that hole in my heart, i’ve a treasure to tuck deep inside: i know there’s a beautiful boy, with writerly dreams, and pencils and papers. and wherever we go, whatever the day, no matter the thousands of miles away, he and i discovered together one of life’s unshakable secrets.

love doesn’t tell you it’s coming, doesn’t announce its destination. it merely up and entwines you, and forever thereafter, it is the thread that keeps you so deeply, unstoppably stitched at the hearts.

so that’s my fumbled attempt at mapping out love and the way it grabs us. how would you describe the fine art of falling in love, and when in your life has it happened?

the picture above is my little friend’s breakfast place, as it awaited him this morning, with a love note penned and perched in his bowl. “thank you for your words,” he said, after reading the love note, before pouring two last mounds of american froot loops.

32 Comments

April 13, 2012

how you say?

the index card, it turns out, is a benevolent slip of paper. scratch that; make it “essential.” the index card, goshdarnit, is wholly and utterly, upside down and sideways, an essential slip of paper.

singular or plural, the card — all alone, or in a stack — is not merely one hot commodity at our house this week.

it is, they are, three days into this experiment in trans-atlantic comradeship, our deeply-held lifeline, our saving grace, the very bridge between blank stares, jet-lagged silence, flat-out confusion, and bumbled attempts at groping for the missing word.

were it not for those blank-faced 3-by-5’s, we might still be standing by the fridge, the cold air swooshing out, trying to figure out if our little german friend was asking for the milk (Milch) or the juice (Saft). or, perhaps, all he wants is one shiny red apple (glänzender roter Apfel).

see how tangled this might make you?

for months now, ever since the german teacher sent home a note asking if anyone had a spare bedroom, or an extra place at the table, for a little german friend, our new-to-german fifth grader, a boy who just this school year found himself without a brother in the house, has been counting down the days, till his occasional penpal arrived from Deutschland.

and arrive he did the other afternoon, as that great blue-and-golden bird, the lufthansa 747 glided onto the runway, and unfurled our little friend.

he marched through customs, backpack on his slender shoulders, through the swinging doors and straight into our hearts, my little one’s and mine.

he is blond and sweet and oh-so-shy. he is not so certain of his english words, and we are nearly clueless when it comes to german. he giggles and his cheeks turn pink as i try to figure out the words, try hard to use the sounds that he uses when he says what’s what — time and time and time again.

so no wonder, then, that i have grown quite fond of my ever-dwindling stack of index cards, and pen and sticky tape.

before i’ve even bumped into a noun, i am grabbing for my card and pen, scribbling english, and awaiting its german twin.

thus, two tongue-tied boys and i, we’ve turned this house into a veritable post-it board, with white cards dangling from every surface, candlestick and knob. we’ve slapped a name on everything from OJ carton (remember now, that’s the Saft) to the morning’s newspaper (Zeitung).

it is a bit clumsy, of course, and makes for conversation interruptus. but, all in all, it works. and we are getting along, if not smoothly, well then beautifully and bumpily.

it is quite a gift (one that’s landed in our laps), we’ve swiftly discovered, to open up our house to a little lad from far away. it stretches the human heart in ways this world so deeply needs.

i shouldn’t be surprised to find that, yet again, my mama-hen instincts have kicked into high overdrive. i lie awake at night worrying about the little fellow. listening hard for any peep. i dash to the grocery store to fill the bins with everything i’ve figured out he likes (yes, salami, chocolate, and apples; no, to ham, bananas, raisins). and i ask him endlessly if he is tired (müde), hungry (hungrig), and Gut geschlafen (did he sleep well)?

i am, after two nearly sleepless nights, considering a simple cure for all the world’s ills: what if we left it to the mothers to construct a paradigm for peace?

what if we all reached our chubby hands into some global hat, and plucked out the names of other mother’s children? what if we took them in, for a week or two at a time, and felt the thump in our hearts as we worried over them, as we fed them, and smoothed their sheets?

what if we all struggled to not only learn each other’s words, but also to see the world through each other’s eyes? what if, deep in the dark of night, we heard a child whimper, a child who was not our own? what if we tore off our bedsheets and stumbled to where that sound came from, and pulled someone else’s sleepy child’s head into our own tender ample arms?

what if we loved each other’s children as if they were our own?

might that not glue this shattered globe back into the solid whole that it was meant to be?

i am thinking much about that as i stumble my way through these 10 clumsily translated days.

my little one has found a friend, one who doesn’t speak in paragraphs or even sentences at a time. but one who does speak the universal language of the soccer ball and smile.

and i’ve found, i do believe, an ancient and timeless truth: love a child, any child, and the keys to heaven belong to you.

even if that needs be scribbled on a humble index card — liebe ein Kind, jedes Kind, und die Schlüssel zum Himmel gehöre zu dir.

have you ever found yourself feeling tender of the heart toward someone else’s holy blessed child?

18 Comments

August 20, 2010

humming my song

i’ve never thought i’d make the cut.

the hummingbird cut, that is.

the wee things, the size of thimbles, the weight of five extra-strength aspirins, it’s been said, flap-flap-flap their wisps of wings some 2,000 miles, nonstop across the oily gulf of mexico, praise be the thinkin’ birds.

en route from way up north in canada to down in costa rica, the little darlings keep their eyeballs peeled for a comfy place for roadside grazing. if you flapped your wings up to 80 times a second–do the math, that’s 4,800 times a minute, nearly 7 million flaps a day–you too would wanna drop the landing gear, suck up a jug or two of nectar.

and, i’m told, the wee things have braincells that do not forget. should you put out the welcome mat, but then forget to keep the sugar water fresh, those birds will cross you off the list, never forget that your stale waters made their wee, wee bellies ache, and never ever stop again.

you’ll be blackballed by the hummers, i was told in unforgiving terms.

so that made me 1.) worried, and 2.) afraid to even try.

i couldn’t stand the thought of my ol’ house and garden being X’d off in the hummingbird map across america.

so i did the wimpy thing: hoped they’d like my nodding flowers, and left it at that.

oh, i might have caught a glimpse here or there, one popped its nose in the rhododendron a spring or two ago. then maybe, by the black-eyed susans, at the end of some summer, i might have seen another.

but, well, my mama, she’s no chicken. no feeble-heart is she.

she reached right in the cabinet where she keeps her bird supplies and she marched up my walk with the very bright red feeder i’d not long ago given her.

while the feeder itself came in a box, complete with “hummingbird solution,” a mix of this and that that came with darn directions (thus ever raising the bar on whether i could make the cut, could cook up the holy nectar for the passersby), my mama pooh-poohed all that.

said, sugar and water is all you need. change it once a week, even every 10 days. none of this make-it-fresh-before-the-crack-of-dawn-each-day-or-your-birds-will-keel-and-X-you-off.

up she hung the feeder on my tree. and back she stood to watch the hummingbird brigade.

i dared not hope.

but then, out of the corner of my doubting eye, i spotted a large cicada darting through the trees.

or so i thought.

the large cicada, hovering, stuck its nose down the gullet of the pale pink anemone.

and then i realized: that was no cicada.

that was my mama’s promise come to roost.

ever since, it’s been hummingbird haven around here. the little things are darting here and there, practically coming to my nose. they fly forward, backward, up and down.

even the cat has taken to watching all the aerobatics.

and i’ve not yet been scolded by a hummer for letting all the sugar water go sour. or dry.

fact is, i think they’ve taken a shining to my little bird hostel. they’ve been sipping and darting now for nearly two whole weeks.

and i have found my end-of-summer bliss in the watching of their antics. they come so close, they dart so quickly, they seem so downright unafraid, i can nearly imagine the cartoon clouds coming from their little beaks, the bird words spewing, as they chatter back and forth. chase away the big birds. never mind the cat. order up another batch of hummer’s brew.

they are said to be pugnacious, and pugnacious they are. who would think it of a flying thimble?

and i have come to delight in their fearlessness. marvel at it, really. have tried to absorb a drop or two, from their lesson plan: how to rule the world, even if you’re no more imposing than a gardener’s thumb.

i’ve no real clue how long this show will last, before the sun and wind and moon call to the wee ones, beckon them to return to their long flight.

i’m told, though, that the flip side of that brain that won’t forget is that they’ll remember. they’ll come back. these very same winged blessings. they will remember, perhaps, the blue table where i pull up my chair, where i sit beneath the trees, where i keep watch, and whisper sweet thanks.

they will remember the long-necked anemones they drink from. and the bright red feeder my mama hung so boldly, so believingly.

they will be back.

and i’ll be ready. bold and believing, just like the birds who cross the globe, knowing they’ll find sweetness when and where they need it.

i sat down to write this morning but first found word from my beloved little brother that his most beloved golden retriever, max, might not make it through the night. if dawn came, they’d be driving max to the nearest best big city and hoping the vets could work a miracle. i cannot tell you the depth of ache for my brother who has already buried a retriever he loved. and who took years before he was ready to love another so dearly. my little brother had just turned 13 the day my papa died. he was the one who walked in the hospital room as they tried to save my papa. please whisper a prayer for my sweet bri, and for max, the dog who has been his dearest friend these past few years….
heartache comes in so many forms. and all we can do, besides wrap our arms around the ones we love, whisper hope in their ear, is keep prayin’ and loving.
for all the heartaches gathered at this table. and all the moments of rejoicing. amen.

so what life lessons might you have learned from winged things, or dogs that nuzzle up beside you?

and, p.s., in case that photo up above proves to be an optical delusion, there is a wee hummingbird just to the left of the red feeder. see him, pointing his long nose toward the hummer nectar that i cook up? the shadowy little thing in front of the willowy pink anemones?
oh, and in case you too want to cook for aerobatics, it’s simple: 1/4 cup white sugar to 1 cup boiling water. stir sugar till dissolved, let cool (hummers don’t like to burn their two-pronged tongues) then pour into a hummer feeder, or i am sure there is some alternative feeder, just something into which they can stick their long noses…..

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Category: caretaking the world