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where wisdom gathers, poetry unfolds and divine light is sparked…

Category: savoring moments

February 18, 2008

the dinner party

it started with a phone call one cold sunday afternoon, not so long ago. are you free next saturday night, was the plain-and-simple question.

yes, came the answer, after the requisite checking of calendar, double-checking with spouse, most likely checking in with kiddies to make sure they too could pencil it in. or tap it in, or however it is cyber-tots lock in a date these days.

once secured in the affirmative, another phone call was made. same question posed, left there on the recordable secretary.

and so began the cobbling of souls, the making of lists that for me is, well, about the hummingest hum i know.

i am, it seems, never so quick in the pulse as when i am deep in constructing a dinner party.

if given one more day of my life i think, yes, i do, i would call up everyone i love, and plenty of folks i don’t even know but would love to. i’d order up as many leaves for the table as i possibly could, break down the living room wall if i had to, to make room for all of the chairs. and then i would cook, cook, and cook some more.

oh, did i mention i’d borrow plenty of knives? for, darn it, i only have nine. although, somehow, in the spoon and the fork departments, i am swimming. i think when we were married, when slim little boxes came in many-a-day’s mail, there must have been some sort of 2-for-1 sale on all the parts of the place setting, except for the parts that do cutting. which means you might come for soup, and maybe some ice cream, if you come with more than eight of your friends. and surely, hopefully, some day you’ll come.

for, surely, positively, this is the truth: i would if i could spend the rest of my days dreaming up, doing, yes, even drying the dishes from dinner party piled on dinner party here at my drafty old house.

in fact, so nutty am i for le diner that i looked up from my vacuuming the other afternoon to tell my sweet mate the very something i was thinking at that very moment. then i stopped myself. said, “oh no, that’s too irish.”

to which he urged, “no, tell me.”

i hemmed. hawed. then spilled it: “when i die, skip the wake; just do a dinner party.”

to which, of course, he moaned.

and i went right on vacuuming fur balls.

so it was, all day saturday i found myself humming. humming, you should know, is me at my, well, purring-est.

i was, all at once, cooking, setting the table, imagining the conversations. i was deciding who would sit where for maximum conversational flow. oh, and i was putting out proud tall candles, and snipping the stems of tulips. red ones in february.

to lay out a table for a dinner party is to be bold. is to be alive, really. to be filled to brimming with all sorts of possibility.

it is, i realized, as i lifted the lid on the steeping, steaming coq au vin–my idea of the perfect february dinner party dinner–the most sacramental moment, perhaps, in this holy place we call home.

it is gathering friends, and sometimes near strangers. it is paying no mind to color or age, or political side of the table. it is inviting muslim to sit down with jew. it is asking the atheist to join hands as you stop and offer a few words of grace before picking up fork and, well, keep from jabbing.

it is detente over dinner. it is catching a gleam in the eye as you pass down the butter. it is laughing so hard over salad, you wipe the tears from your eye–and not at all from the shallot.

try not feeling fondly toward the one who pours a splash more merlot in your glass.

it is, wholly, the breaking of bread, and all that that means going back to the dawn of civilization.

it is eucharist, small “e,” defined: bread and wine, yes, but really, “the giving of thanks, offering graciously.” leave it to the greeks and the romans to give it a name, to launch it. the french to refine it. you and me to make it our own.

it is unfurling ideas and stories there at the old family table. it is drawing out thoughts from those you’ve asked to pull up a chair. it is listening. it is returning the thought with a question. and maybe another, and another.

it is, before you even get to the table, making the house come alive, igniting its reason for being. kindling lights. cranking the stove. making a fire. putting on mozart. or muddy waters. it is opening the door, with a gust of warm, wine-sodden air that can’t help but sweep in those shivering there on the stoop.

and for the one doing the inviting, it begins long before the bell rings.

it begins, for me, as i pluck from thin air the someones i’m dying to know, or simply to gather again at the edge of my table. the ones who i think will make for fine conversation. whose stories we might not yet know. whose ideas might rub off on my children.

a dinner party with children, i’ll have you know, is the height of my dinner-party definition. oh, i love a gathering of grownups. but i believe in bringing the children, more than once in a very scant while.

it is there, where the art of the napkin is figured out, that life’s lastingest curriculum is spread.

i am not, never have been, one to segregate the little people. i don’t believe in banishing the squirmers off in the kitchen. oh no. let them squirm right here among us. let them learn how to listen. let them learn the art of unspooling the story. let them follow words to a simmer, then rise to almost a boil, but right then, before the lid blows, let them absorb the knack for cooling it down to a slow gentle bubbling again.

and so it was, last saturday night, that i laid out a table for 12. spent the whole day, and part of the one before, toiling away. picking out cremini mushrooms. uncorking bordeaux. mismatching old plates. scribbling names onto red folded cards.

not a minute felt like a chore, or anything close. it was joy, only joy, pure, simple, undiluted.

there is something, i swear, to making a table that sparkles. to filling bowls and baskets and platters to spilling. to stoking the evening to come.

there is dinner. and then there is feasting.

saturday night at my house, we feasted. till our bellies–and hearts–were stuffed near to bursting.

when it was over, the last napkin tossed down the chute, the last bit of cake tucked away, i only had room for a very full sigh.

ever since, i’ve been licking my lips on all that’s leftover. and i don’t mean what’s in the fridge.

do you too love a dinner party? are you daunted sometimes by the notion? or have you mastered the grace of making it seem effortless? like something you do at the drop of any old reason? what are your secret ingredients to a dinner that lingers long after the lights are turned out? do you have a tried-and-true menu that works every time? or do you indulge in experimenting on company? is there a dinner you’ll never forget, and why?

13 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
December 5, 2007

the sound of snow falling

sound of snow falling

it is december’s gift. a world now hushed, now left to whispers. a world caked with white meringue. as if all the eggs, sans yolks, and all the cream of tartar were whisked into the froth that kept on coming.

whole clouds of it fell last night. started with a flake or two, barely noticed, in the gray of afternoon. by dinner time, the limbs, the walks, the feeders for the birds, had lost their definition, were taking on a girth that might have made them groan.

except the world was wordless.

the world, when i slipped on my snow-exploring shoes, zipped up my puffy coat, was so silenced by the spilling from the sky, i could, without straining, make out the sound of snow falling.

it’s a sound, quite truly, that makes your ears perk up. and your soul, too.

unlike the pit-a-pat of rain, it is wholly unexpected. wind we know is noisy. humidity, except for moaning of the ones who find it hard to bear, is not. but that comes as no surprise.

the sound of snow falling, then, is singularly soothing and startling. it is a titillation for the ears, a tickling of the nerves that makes them, well, stand at full attention.

a sound not heard so often, certainly not in months and months, it came like water to a thirsty traveler. and i could not get enough.

i cocked my head. stood still as still can be. i took it in in gulps.

while drinking in the pit-pit-pit of falling bits of icy snow, i opened wide my eyes. without moving a whole muscle–save for the ones that shift my eyeballs–i was a machine in complete and total operation.

except the machine–the hearing, seeing parts–served one function only: the talking to my soul.

there is a stillness in the first of every winter’s snow that feels to me like coming home. it is in that unrippled place, that place where quiet is complete and whole, that i, and maybe you, feel as if the hand of God is reaching down, is showing me the way through snowy woods.

sometimes, too, i think i hear the sound of God, putting gentle finger to soft lips, shushing.

shhhhhhh, i hear God say. be still. be filled with only what is sacred.

what else, i wonder, could slow a world that can’t move fast enough? who else can keep the cars off of the road? the cell phones from incessant baying?

there was not a soul outside last night, not when i was there at least, and i was there for quite a while.

this morning, then, is quiet squared.

not even snow is making sound. it is simply, i suppose, taking in its new perspective on the world. used to be way up high, now it’s down where mortals play. and it looks intent on staying put.

not a bird is anywhere in sight. i think they know what the weather seers know, only without all the supersonic radar. i think all my feathered friends are safely tucked in cozy places. at least i hope so. i would like to think the birds are in their checkered armchairs, nestled by the fire, sipping cocoa, like i intend to do, any minute here.

it is december’s gift, this early snow. it is just in time to serve its highest purpose. to shush a world in full staccato. to make us perk our ears, to see if, this blessed day, we might hear the song of snow falling.

my snow-flaked friends, your thoughts this morn…
as i type now, one boy up and fed and off to school, the world has rustled from its sheets, thrown off the blanket, the world is hardly quiet. dang. that didn’t last nearly long enough. i hear the sound–the dragon mouth–of snow blower somewhere down the street, and the scraping of the shovels against the walks. but i also hear the solitary cheep-cheep-cheep of the scarlet papa cardinal come to scout around.
did anyone else hear the snow falling last night? did you take to your boots, and like papa cardinal himself, do some scouting in your ‘hood?

oh, a word about the magic pictured up above…that’s a gingerbread house just around the corner from me. when we moved here i realized i could see it from my bedroom window. i thought, well, lucky me. if i can’t live there, i can at least spend my life gazing at its cheery face. and if i lived there, i couldn’t keep an eye on it all night or day. the streetlamp, the snowy branches, the ginger cottage strung with little lights….hope you too found it delightful. and caught, perhaps, the sound of which i write….the magic sound of flakes aflight…

4 Comments
November 16, 2007

teaching to see

he rolled out of bed the way he usually does: somersault off the pillow to sprawled on his back at the end of the mattress, head dangling, flopping like some sort of upside-down rag doll, not too far from the ground. a perfect inverted perch, he decided, for keeping watch out the window.

that’s when he called me. “papa is out on the roof. he’s hopping around. i think maybe he’s looking for breakfast.”

papa, for those who’ve not hung in this house maybe so long, is not the little one’s name for the tall guy with tortoise-rimmed glasses. it was not he who was hopping around on the roof, although i too would have come running for that. rather, it was the red bird, papa cardinal, a character here who goes by only one name.

after broadcasting every breath papa was taking, out there on the roof that juts just below the window through which he was watching, the little one reached for the ledge. or maybe i reached there first. the point was, one of us reached for and grabbed the binoculars.

suddenly, the boy hanging there with his curls topsy-turvy, wanted to learn how to look through the little glass circles that, through the wizardry of optics alone, bring the world as close as the end of your nose.

as i tried–it’s clumsier than you would imagine, believe me–to line up the circles, tried to narrow then widen the space in between so it fit the very same space on the face that is his, as he attempted to make it all clear, and not blurry, not too close, not too far, not staring down at the gutter, but trying to get that ol’ bird in his lens, i realized really i was teaching the boy how to see.

how to regard. how to watch. how to take in the world without any words.

how to notice the pinhole there on the side of papa’s small beak. how to study the feathers he fluffs when it’s cold. how to see the ballet of the leaves in the trees as they shudder there in the november wind.

he was, for a while, finding it hard. the bird was nowhere in sight. all he saw were the nail heads there on the shingles.

not quite the subject of choice for intro to looking, a beginner’s class in the fine art of things to do with your eyes.

ah, but once he got papa there in the cross hairs, he didn’t move. didn’t flinch. just froze like a boy with a bird in the palm of his hand. which, almost, it was.

he might still be there now, only the clock nudged us on, the clock and the notion that school had a bell that soon would be ringing.

but, like clockwork, each morning since, he somersaults off the end of the bed, grabs the looking lens from there on the ledge, and begins again to scan the sky, and the trees, and whoever decides to land on the roof.

he’s even tried it at night. though it’s a little bit hard to make out a star with a mere binocular lens. i explained that’s where the telescope comes to the rescue, but that would be the next class in the series, and we’re only just fumbling with this.

last night, drying off from the bath, he explained that really he’d like to see clear to africa. he was hoping perhaps he could raise the lens to his eyes and see faraway.

far, faraway, he explained. he’d like to see maybe a lion or cheetah. and surely a tiger.

“and some day, when i’m 7 or 8,” he informed, “i’m gonna get real binoculars and try to find any sorta kinda nest. so i can look at a fox’s nest, or a bird’s nest, or a squirrel’s nest.

“i would really like it,” he went on, sliding a leg into his red flannel pajamas, “if papa cardinal would just stand there, and didn’t move completely.”

it needn’t be exotic, i’m thinking he knows, for what you see through your lens to be utterly gripping.

i couldn’t be more tickled that he’s taking so deep a fancy to a sense that can take him so far, a sense that will bring more wisdom and glory than he or i or any of us, really, can ever imagine.

to see is to know, is to understand, is to absorb.

to see is to take in, from the thinnest strand of a spider’s web laden with dew to the last dying ember of a star as it streaks through the cosmos, the whole of God’s breath.

and i mean that without the d. although the breadth and the breath aren’t far from the same. but if we consider the whole of creation one deep exhale from the in and the out of something like lungs wholly divine, then really it’s all, well, supremely breathtaking.

and it is not every day that any one of us gets a chance to instruct in using the eyes for all that they’re meant to take in: the way someone fidgets a spoon while making a point at the table. the color of sky as the last beams of the day paint it a pink you’ll never forget. the glint of the moonlight on a pine branch heavy with snow. the gleam in the eye of someone you love.

and, oh, what of the things we can’t teach, the ones we only can pray they learn on their own: how not to miss the twinge of the hurt deep in the heart; the sparkle of love blooming; the look of intent, of paying attention; how to notice a soul draining toward empty.

really so much of it is only just seeing by feeling. it’s braille, after all. so much of the seeing that matters. it comes through the gift of the eyes, but also the touch of the skin and the skip of the heart.

but, alas, in these mornings of teaching to see, i realize i am bound, i am tethered to only the lens bobbing there on the end of the cord that slips over his head.

the rest of the teaching to see i will teach without lenses. i will teach, day after day, for as long as i’m here. i will teach my children to look and look closely.

i will teach them the glory of God is there through the lens. but they must open their hearts, as well as their eyes, to soak in the sights.

it is the often unnoticed to which i must teach them to pay the closest attention.

the five senses, most of the time, come already installed. but not always, and in the absence thereof we notice how much of the world we get or we miss through the eyes and the ears, the palate, the skin and the nose. and even in cases where all senses are up and running, still there is refining and learning sure to be done. if we pay close attention. far as i know, it’s a lifelong dedication. did someone or something teach you, unforgettably, the fine art of seeing, of watching, of looking quite closely? what are some of the fine points of life you’d so miss if not for the grace of your eyes in the first place?

today is the day of the birthday of my sweet cousin julie. and tomorrow, my mother, the one who i realize, so many mornings as i sit to start typing, has informed so much of the way i see through my lenses onto the world. to both, i send the deepest of blessings and prayers for a year just ahead that is filled with great sights. and the knowing, deep in both of their hearts, that you are so loved. happy day of your birth. be full of joy.

2 Comments
September 24, 2007

what if…

what if

i was lurching to a stop, at a light leaping toward red, and that’s when the thought was birthed in my head. oh, it had been pulling at me all morning. i felt the weight of it from the moment my eyes opened, let in the light.

i was having trouble letting go of the great sacred hours of saturday. it had been a day of pure oxygen. i had nowhere to be other than prayer. i did nothing worldly.

i only drove at the end of the day, when the dark came. all day i walked to the place where the prayer was in pews. i walked with my boys; we weren’t in a hurry. the little one filled his pockets with acorns, sat off in a corner when we got there, played games with the corns and their caps. the other boy, wrapped in his prayer shawl, stood beside me, sat beside me, prayed beside me. their papa, this year, was far far away.

we spent enough hours in the place where the prayer was–coming and going all day–that we followed the arc of the sun.

the morning light, white, filtered through glass the color of cafe au lait, poured in from the east, lit my pages of prayers from the top, spilled toward the bottom.

by late afternoon, the light streaming in from the west was golden. some in the pews wore sunglasses. i let the sun in without filter, practically blind me.

when the sun fell, when the light fell, the rabbi lit a bright candle. for a few minutes, it was the only light in the great-ceilinged chamber.

then, it was over and we stepped out into the twilight. walked home one last time.

it was the light and the words, and the pushing away of the everyday, that drew me into a place where i want to return. the rabbi kept saying yom kippur is the one day, the one 25 hours of the year, when we brush up closest to God; we taste paradise, he told us. i believed him. i felt the stirring inside me.

i felt the touch of the fingers of God, up near my temples, up where the prayers settle and launch back into orbit. up where my thoughts rustle like grasses.

i felt time itself transform. it was not a staccato of chock-a-block minutes. but, rather a plane with no beginning or end. it was a mist that carried me. took me deep into a place where the world could not enter. it was sacred and slow and without measure. i had no hunger. other than that of wanting the day to last forever.

and then came the next day. and everything about it, it seemed, was hard. there was breakfast to make and errands to run. and a whole week ahead. i felt the wallop of monday galloping towards me.

i was on my way home from the mall where i’d gone to buy knobs for a door that resisted the ones i’d already bothered to try. that’s when the words came.

what if?

what if we let go, just for a spell, of all the constraints and let time return to its essence? what if we put out our hands and cupped as much as we could? what if these were our very last hours? what if we allowed each minute to sink deep into our soul?

would we be racing to malls? or would we be breathing? filling our lungs with the warmth of a sun that hasn’t gone out yet.

would we know if a monday followed a sunday? would we care? we have lassoed the moments of time, coerced them into ill-fitting forms.

oh, i know, i know. we have lives to lead, jobs to fulfill, mouths to feed.

but might we maybe have gone overboard? gotten so locked into clocks and calendars that we never, only maybe once a year, and only if we must, tell time we’re not paying attention.

we are, instead, wholly indulging in the gift of the light and the breeze. we are sinking our hands and our heart and our soul into the timeless. we are digging holes for a bulb, kneading bread dough, rocking our children. we are watching the waves, holding a butterfly, listening to air flutter the leaves of the trees.

the gift of shabbat and the sabbath offer that very reality. one day of each week. from sundown to sundown. for years now, i’ve said i wanted to follow the laws of the sabbath: not drive, not do any labor. pull into a place that knows no end or beginning. knows only the light of the sun and the stars and the moon.

what if each day we honor one blessed hour, or one blessed chunk of an hour? what if we give time its due? not lock it, and chain it, and wrap it around us.

but rather, allow it to flow through our hands, each sacred drop tasted for all that it is: the closest element in the world to paradise itself.

if we give it a chance.

if we let it sink into our skin, in through our eyes and our ears. if we taste it. if we suck on the marrow of time. if we stop and we marvel. the difference between any one moment and the next might be the difference between life, and life no longer.

each moment is sacred.

if only we notice.

if only we live as if we grasp the whole of that truth…

it’s my job to go out on a limb. it’s my blessing to have a place to do so. to say so. i netted this thought before it floated away. here it is now, you too can enter the thought. it’s ours now to share. to look at, consider. to release or let flap for awhile. do any of you make a practice of releasing time from its trappings? how do you do so? do you long to do it more often? what ways do you strip the world from the worldly? seek just a taste of the divine, the everlasting?

a word of deep sadness: a boy who filled a room with his strength and his sunshine died on saturday afternoon. in his mother’s arms. his name was nick. he had just turned 16. he and i shared tuesdays in a small room where we tried to get our bones stronger. he’d been fighting the ravages of cancer since he was four. but he never let on. my little one loved him. so did i. you couldn’t know nick and not love him. maybe nick is part of why each moment feels sacred today. be at peace, sweet friend. be at peace. your mama, and papa and all those who love you, peace to you too.

and finally, that photo up there. it’s from my will. the boy who’s a manchild these days. i usually don’t tell you his name. but the photo is his. and you should know where it came from. i asked him to go out with his lens, and catch a moment that felt timeless. full of light. inspired. up there is what he brought home. i could stare at that moment all day…thank you, sweet will.

5 Comments
April 11, 2007

thinking in circles

last night, while i scrubbed the onion burn off the bottom of a pan, i dove in deep in conversation with a mind i have known since delivery, which i think was just the other year.

heck, i can close my eyes and see that brain unborn, an ultrasonic skull, white-on-black on screen, the fuzzy outlines of cerebrum, the big black space i once mistook for lack of brain. until the radiologist talked me off the ceiling. i’ve had my eye on that gray matter since way back, in the beginning.

only last night, suddenly flashed forward, we parsed evil versus harmful. evil, he pointed out, is big picture; harmful is far less sinister in scope. next, he told me why he worries about organized religion; he worries that too many are too judgmental. who do people think they are, he asked, judging other people? it simply makes no sense. the God he knows forgives.

then he tossed out this: “people say you’ve gotta be good because you’ll go to heaven. it’s not about heaven,” he said as if that’s plain as day. “it’s about how you’ll impact other people.
“oy!”

not a heartbeat later, he’d moved onto deep forgiveness and i’d moved onto the pan that steamed asparagus.

he circled the sink and me, the boy who’s walked in circles as he thinks ever since he started thinking, which might have been the original day he lifted foot from ground and placed it back again. nearly 13 years, he’s walked circles ’round me; now, i realized as i grabbed for towel to dab at dripping pan, he thinks circles ’round me too.

when all the pots were clean enough, he and i indulged in sweet dessert—even deeper conversation. we retired to the maple table, we pulled up chairs, an after-dishes tete-a-tete all too rare in the world of over-busy, overburdened children. a tete-a-tete that might be required should anyone ever think to license those who sign certificates of birth.

while he ticked through list of one to twelve, a ranking of degrees of evil, each culled from news reports of recent years, i couldn’t help but note how on the days the news had happened, i’d so fiercely blocked him, little thinker, from this very litany of horrors—columbine, timothy mcveigh, the east texas worse-than-lynching death of james byrd, jr., the black man tied behind a pickup truck and dragged down a country road (my thinker’s pick for evil no. 1), and of course 9-11, which unfolded just minutes after i’d put him, then third grader, on a 12-seat van, newborn in my arms, his first solo ride to school on the far side of the city, a ride that, torturously that september day, coursed him through the shadows of chicago’s tallest towers.

back then, not long ago, i’d not wanted him to know the world could hold such hell.

and now, just minutes later, he was almost-man equipped with mind that studied every shade and shadow of every real-life horror story, probed for what it meant well beyond the news. a mind, i couldn’t help but notice, i could drink like desert water for the rest of all my days.

i shook my head, although he didn’t see me shaking. how, i wondered, did we get to here so fast? how is it that all those bedtime prayers, and all those late-into-the-night conversations, the ones where tears were wiped, the ones where stories told and questions asked sometimes felt like brill-o to my heart, how is it that while i was keeping watch, i swear i was, he had unfolded from little thinker of big thoughts into this mind, this soul, who, as i watch, is sharpening that tool, the way a carver sharpens knives, so he can use it to try to rid the world of what he sees as evil and injustice.

there are not, it seems, too many moments when you freeze the frame, see what’s taking shape before your very eyes. not on-stage moments. not graduations. not holding up a torah, or taking first communion. but right there, at the kitchen sink and just beyond, at the same maple table where you once set your elbows and launched a life of asking big fat questions.

there are a million moments along the road to that maple table and the parsing of degrees of evil that are, simply put, not a lot of fun.

there were fevers when the mercury shot to 105. and back at the beginning, weeks of rocking him beside the tub with the water running hard, something about the rushing sound that soothed (hmm, wonder if that’s why he now takes showers that could go on for hours).

there were schooldays when i heard all about how he’d stood alone on the playground, or perched on the roof of the climbing house, keeping watch on all the other children playing games without him.

and then we up and moved in the middle of fourth grade, and he endured a whole semester as the new kid from the city, the kid who in a town where baseball truly mattered, barely ever got on base, and swung at nearly every ball.

but sitting at that table, watching how he thinks, realizing that i was talking to a soul i couldn’t have designed to be more nourishing to my own soul, i couldn’t stop the warming down my spine: i’d do it all, all over again. in a blink, please sign me up.

it is perhaps the sweetest after-dinner morsel i’ve tasted in a long, long time: half an hour being circled by my firstborn child.

might i mention that it is exceedingly hard to write about how you love your growing-up child. i groped my way through the dark just now. i do it not to say how wonderful he is–that’s not the point at all. i do it to hold up the fact that here we are, some of us, in the very blessed front-row seat, watching the spectacle of true creation. it is almost unspoken, shared perhaps in pillow talk, the truth that what we’re watching takes our breath away. this is, i hope and pray, a place where we can whisper out loud the things not spoken often elsewhere. it is majesty, in rawest form. and though it’s hard as heck to put words to God’s most divine creation, i thought it worth a take. this, after all, is life in roughest draft. as always, i pull in close, i would love to hear your thoughts…

and while you’re at it, please, keep my blessed friend susan and her mama in your prayers. they could use a few today.

4 Comments
April 5, 2007

being e. bunn

when i signed up for this being-a-mama thing, there are many points i failed to adequately ponder.

(we’ll not dive, not today anyway, into some of those matters that i might wisely have run through the almighty thinker, that mass of cells between my ears, that might better have equipped me for this madre job. we’ll leave that for a less auspicious day. this, after all, is countdown week for judy garland belting song of easter bonnet and said parade.)

certainly, in days b.c. (before child, that would be), i never grasped the charm, the pure delight, of packing joy, delivering it, complete with jelly beans, in a straw-braided basket. the easter basket, of course.

the santa thing, i might have given thought. you know, some winter’s afternoon, as a pouty post-believing child, flung (with requisite drama) upon my bed, legs cocked at the knees and crossed, kicking foot up in the air. thinking: when i grow, i’m going to be one heck of a santa. i’ll not forget the china teaset, the one with tiny painted flowers.

but easter? who spent much time considering the occupational upside of mr. e. bunn, esq.?

the basket, while i do recall a spectacular sponge paint set when i was 5, was, in the house where i grew up, more pure sugar rush, ten grubby little hands racing to the pink-and-purple plastic baskets, inhaling beans, then dashing off to rest of resurrected morning.

i failed to grasp the paschal possibility.

i would say i rather stumbled into the rabbit hole, into the unexpected magic of tiptoeing through the night, leaving trail of cut-out bunny feets, and hiding the basket of just-hatched tenderness in a place that, come morning, little feets would have to find.

there is something, something far beyond charming, about slipping inside these make-believe, oversized, dispatchers of joy, be it the one with wiggly tail or the chap with jiggly belly.

there is something that almost takes your breath away when you realize, poof, you’re all grown up, and you now are the one who, with your brush of many hues, shades and colors the someday stories, the memories, of what it was to grow up in the house where you preside.

it’s up to you, you realize, you who tucks tenderness in a basket, to tenderize the hearts of those who traipse through the land where children romp. at least in your house.

but, indeed, i have discovered, and now, myself, i practically jiggle with the wonder that it brings, that nowadays i get to pack the baskets for those little sparkling eyes, the ones that, certainly, will be up and out from under covers, rubbing, shouting some early-morning merriment, as they stumble down the stairs and round the bend, ultra-sonic easter radar leading them without wrong turn straight to where the sugar, in several forms, awaits.

before we get too far on that sugar thought, let me toss this sad disclaimer, admit this thing that might make you sigh a sigh; say, phew, thank heaven i wasn’t born to that ol’ mama. here’s the sorry truth: i don’t do unending sugar at easter. it’s not about sugar in this house.

it’s about something far, far sweeter.

and that, i think, is why i love it so.

i have a someone, a sandra sweetpea, who taught me how to do easter. instructed me in easter basket 101. like many things she taught me, she hasn’t a clue, really, how deep the lessons she imparted. there was no hand-out. no quiz, or chapter review.

instead there was a little shop, a shop called sweetpea, a shop of natural toys and classic books, a shop where imagination unlocked the door and set the stories spinning. sandra was the shopkeeper. and if you studied the way she gathered things, the tender, earth-spun beauty she gathered in her shop, in baskets, on antique bookshelves, tucked in woodland scenes that you swore the fairies might have visited, then you learned a thing or ten about quietly offering a whole other sort of being a child.

being a child–or a mama or a papa or a someone with child heart–who listens to the rhythms of the season, who understands the gift in playing richly with simple child’s toys, who breathes in the magic of a beautifully spun storybook.

it was like a refuge and a respite from the worldly, that little shop on southport in chicago. i’d pull back the door, a bell would tinkle, and then, surely, sandra would appear from behind a curtain, all sparkling eye and wisdom. quietly, without words sometimes, she’d lead me by the hand to something full of beauty. she would laugh her marvelous grown-up-little-girl laugh, and i would see the magic. then she might spend a minute telling me about the marvelous soul who tromped the woods, carved the elfin house, spun the wool, dyed the cloth from flower petals or vegetable scrapings. i would stand there, spell-bound.

my children’s toy chests were never stuffed. but they were rich in things–an elf’s tree house, rows of books, simple blocks–that will last forever.

and so it was sandra who taught me easter baskets, too. to go to sweetpea for easter, my pilgrimage each holy week, was to come home with a finger-sized bunny so sweet i’d want to carry him to bed with me (or feed him itsy-bitsy carrots). a book or two, the pages splashed with springtime colors. some little pack of seeds, forget-me-not, or carrot. just enough to whisper, the earth is waking up from winter’s slumber. all life is new, rejoice.

and so it was the other day that i wandered back to where sandra now presides. the sweden shop, it’s called, but i like to think of it as the swede pea. for it seems she’s transplanted plenty of her magic there. (her sweetpea, sadly, closed.)

the little bunny smiling from above–sandra, who is quite something with thread and needle, made him. stuffed him first with lavender, real lavender, from someone’s garden. then she stitched him up. when you rub his belly, lightly, with just the press of your finger, the lavender wafts. i bought two. one has little button eyes and nose. of course, i bought a book. a book from green tiger press (collectors of breathtaking, knee-buckling illustrations from days past), a book called, “the truth about easter rabbits.” of course, i bought a pack of carrot seeds. and a big fat orange carrot stuffed with all orange jelly beans.

come saturday night, when all is clear (i can’t promise quiet, since my littlest rabbit has made quite a habit of hopping out of bed in recent weeks), i will make like e. bunny himself, and gather my new-life wares. i will tuck simple magic in a basket. i will smile all the while. it is hard not to melt when tucking easter in a basket.

i will make one basket for each boy in this house, and then i will tiptoe to a hiding place. when all is finally still, i will sprinkle pink construction-paper rabbit feet and baby carrots from edge of beds through the hall, down the stairs where the trail will then diverge, one branch south and one southwest. each boy is on his own to find what easter brings.

and i’ll stand off in a corner, softly soaking in the joy. no one told me how sweet it is to play the easter bunny. and that, perhaps, is the sweetest secret ever. one i’ll not stop, ever, believing wholly in.

oh, if only i could, i’d make a lovely basket for every one of you. the house would be so filled, there’d be lavender wafting everywhere. and plenty of old-fashioned carrot bunches, complete with carrot tops, those leafy greens that are, perhaps, the crowning glory of every bam-made easter basket.
do you, or you, or you, find joy in being a big invisible bunny? and do you have any secret things you always search for in a basket of your own making?

4 Comments
March 28, 2007

gulping sky

it is best practiced on your back. a blanket comes in handy. you can do it in a chair, or standing like a soldier. only then your neck gets sore.

it is eyes locked on heaven. it is watching celestial shadow games, the sun and clouds the players.

it is what happens, unless you live in a house of skylight after skylight, when cold and snow is ended and you finally step outside. into God’s cathedral.

louis kahn, the architect i love because i love his thoughts though not his buildings, talks about the treasury of the shadows. he writes: “light, the giver of presence, casts its shadow which belongs to light. what is made belongs to light and to desire…”

he writes later: “the structure is a design in light. the vault, the dome, the arch, the column, are structures related to the character of light. natural light gives mood to space by nuances of light in the time of the day and the seasons of the year as it enters and modifies the space.”

and so it is with clouds. clouds, i think, are heaven’s vault and dome and arch and column.

i watched the sunbeams play with clouds the other afternoon. i watched the light play peek-a-boo. first, absence of shadow, all light the same, as sun was captive to the clouds. then, as cloud skittered north and east, the rim shone piercing white, a ruffled edge illuminated from blinding light behind the vapored curtain. then, pop, sunbeam re-emerged and shadows danced again.

on and on it went. i was lost in clouds for the better part of an hour. my boys romped. one with camera, the one who caught the clouds above for me. the other one with sand and hands. each one of us lost in time. each one of us transfixed by light and shadow, sand and lake.

it’s what happens when you surrender to the calling of the blanket. the blanket that made you turn the car, and park, and haul it to the sands.

i am, as always, and as so many, many before me, very much a ready student in the great school of God’s world as it surrounds me. i am, me and my home-bound suburban life, hellbent on breaking out, breaking open the fragile and the monumental offered up by nature. be it clouds and light and shadow, or tender shoots refusing to be barred by crust of earth, i am seeping up the lessons, taking in the truths. there is metaphor all over. it’s deep and it’s profound.

and sometimes, when the clouds and sunbeams do their dance, it’s simply pure delight. it made me draw my breath, gulp the sky. it made me call the boys. “come watch this,” i shouted. “here, lie down.”

so the three of us, three logs in a row, we lay there on the blanket, we played a guessing game. when was sunbeam breaking through? when was shadow coming back?

the little one played his own game. he was playing circus in the sky. he saw a fire-breathing dragon. and then an elephant with trunk that poked the dragon in the bottom.

i particularly loved watching the parade of clouds through the filigree of branches bearing buds. it made the sky seem even more immense, made the clouds more beyond my touch. it made me feel so little.

i think, sometimes, that feeling small, in the face of God’s creation, is an extraordinary blessing.

i only wish i took the time to put my spine to earth, my eyes to sunbeam dance, every single day.

anyone else catch the clouds the other afternoon? anyone make a daily practice of gulping sky as celestial exercise?

photo credit: sweet will, once again. lesson learned: don’t leave home without your lens.

5 Comments
March 27, 2007

emergency blanket

it dwells, as too many things do, in the back of my old blue station wagon, the one so old it pre-dates the cupholder as standard feature.

it once was a wedding present from a friend i dearly love. for years and years it covered our bed. then the bed of the boys who came two and 10 years after the wedding. then it started getting so holey i thought it might wend its way around the little one’s neck some night, so off the bed it came.

in the back of the car it landed.

which, it turns out, is a most essential thing.

the blanket, now, has a much more important job than keeping arms and legs and little pink toes covered through the night.

the blanket, now, is in charge of instant, spontaneous, unanticipated (have we sufficiently pounded home that point?) taking time out. the blanket, indeed, is for emergencies.

emergencies of most essential non-essential nature.

see, the sad thing about me–or one of them, at least–is that i am not a natural-born heehaw girl. no, no. that would be some other self, a one i’ve never truly caught up with.

i remember long, long ago being home for spring break and being holed in my room for like 10 hours straight, memorizing every blessed function in the human body for a doozie of a physiology exam. i remember my papa, a man known to keep his fingers to the keyboard for sessions that routinely went late into the night, i remember him coming to my room, practically nabbing me by the scruff of the neck, offering forth one of his famous gene-isms: “the wise man says, a nose to the grindstone only leads to one thing, a sharp nose.”

and so he ushered me out the door, down the stairs and off to some silly movie.

i still need prompts. i still need post-its stuck around my life, reminding me that not every hour need be for getting something done.

i still need, basically, someone to grab me by the neck, point me down the stairs, turn me in the direction of silly movies.

my papa’s not around, so i keep my blanket near at hand. you, like many who’ve glanced in the back of my wagon, might wonder why i travel, 12 months a year, with my holey blanket.

well, the reason, one of them anyway, made itself duly apparent yesterday when me and the ol’ wagon and those two boys turned in at the lighthouse parking lot instead of driving by. i lurched the car into park (if you’ve ever driven with me you know i don’t choose these verbs randomly, they are plucked with true precision), slung backpack over shoulders and, while wondering eyes absorbed the shock, i hauled blanket from the back.

“c’mon boys,” i shouted over my shoulder, headed down the hill. “we’re going to the beach.”

mind you, our beach was less than a mile from our house, but we fell into communion with all those around the globe, many of whom started out from here, the town that’s been deserted, stretched out on sands, slathered under sunscreen.

oops. i forgot the sunscreen.

ah well, the blanket, you recall, is prompt for unintended fun. it has no duties in the practical department. that would be another post-it i’ll need to leave around: don’t forget the sunscreen.

before i leave you stranded on the beach, though, my whole point in bringing up my blanket is the most essential grace of stopping time sometimes. hitting the proverbial pause. even if, especially if, you’re not a million miles from home, and you’ve not packed a suitcase.

the zen buddhists teach us well, and muslims too: take time out of your day. carve deep places for quiet contemplation. and don’t forget the prayer of the unplanned picnic.

to gather on a beach, to bury legs in sand. to watch the waters ebb and flow. it can be a holy moment. the sacred sound of laughing with your children, or anyone you love.

there is unending grace, it seems, in allowing an ordinary moment to turn itself inside out, to expose the whimsy of an hour when all that really matters is that you’re not doing the thing you thought you would have been.

so here’s the prompt: be ready in an instant. don’t leave home without your holey blanket.

tomorrow: what happens when you stretch out on holey blankets.
photo credit: my sweet will, armed with camera, whereas i was not, indulged me–and all of you–with the image up above. sumptuous, is it not?
and now, your turn: how do you remind yourselves to take time out for unadulterated joy? are you, unlike me, good at skipping class?

4 Comments
March 26, 2007

last one out, turn out the lights

 

so here we are, supremely home alone. whole town, it seems, is up and gone. destinations: distant.

not us. we’re here, hauling in the papers, the mail. feeding home-bound cats. keeping an eye out for wayward packages.

we are the stay-at-home brigade. and we’re rather practiced at it. except for once in four years, when we made an emergency crash landing at my then newly grieving, widowed brother’s, we’re the ones who hold down the block, every spring break.

mind you, it has its advantages. other night, i was the only one in the checkout line at jewel. matter of fact, i was the only one in the store. the checkers were holding a little dance contest when i rolled in, needing strawberries and milk and pretzels stuffed with apples (the finest bedtime snack, made, it turns out, by my pilates buddy kim; we twist like pretzels together, she makes them for a living).

if we wanted to take our pretzels to the street, plunk down in our jammies, with our glasses of milk and our puffy twists, we could do that. no one would honk a horn. we could sit there dunking pretzels for a quarter hour, in the part of the street where the cars zoom back and forth on an ordinary evening. but not this week, oh no. no one, not a single headlight, would come shining down the lane.

i’m telling you, we’re all alone here.

it was quite something, the wind-up to this solitary adventure. first the calls started coming in: could you bring in our mail? could you feed the cats? scoop the cat box? funny, no one even asked if we were leaving; they just assumed, as always, we’d be here.

then the afternoon that school got out for the last time in a week, all these funny trucks started pulling to the curb. trucks with “stay,” blazoned to the side. seems all the mutts on the block were getting escorted to spas for spring break.

wonder if i coulda jumped in? done a little panting? drooling, perhaps? made like i was just another mutt.

ah well. the stay mobiles departed, then black cars arrived. no one, it seems, drives to airports anymore. they let the black cars do the honking. they made no noise on my block, the black cars did not. they quietly opened up their doors, flipped their trunks, then carried off the folks who’d packed up all their sunblock.

i waved, from here on the curb. then i got to making my calculated chart. figured out the rounds, which cat when, which mail where.

but now we’re settled. now we’re having fun. we’ve got the whole movie store to ourself. we can have any flavor we want at the baskin-robbins. and just yesterday after a long family bike ride (yes, the one who once fell off, remounted and rode again, much to his mother’s pounding glee), i dashed inside, poured big mugs of pink lemonade, piled high a basket full of pretzels, carried it outside to where the boys were waiting.

tell me, i began, what bed & breakfast would serve pink lemonade and pretzels in the middle of a sunday afternoon?

with that, the easy rider curled up and took a three-hour nap. there was no noise to wake him. only the sound of his mama being home alone.

and if you’ll excuse me now, the bed & breakfast is serving the boys’ most favorite french toast, and someone around here has to get the griddle going…..

anyone else around this week? or are you tapping in tahiti?

also, i noticed over the weekend, a truly wonderful lacing of comments being added to days past. please, never feel like a subject is closed once the next meander rolls along. the conversation, like a good broth, gets richer for the simmer, the adding of ingredients. take a glance back. add more thoughts. this chair endeavor is best when the thoughts keep building. i am only here to get the broth on the burner. you are the ones who make it worth savoring……and for that, of course, i thank you deeply…

4 Comments