pull up a chair

really, it’s dew caught in the act. each blessed bead, huddled along edge of the leaf, clinging to blade of the grass, a colony of whatever it is that swirls in the morning’s first breath.

when dawn, that great exercise in redemption, lets out its first puff of relief–we made it, we’re risen again, one more chance, start again, try harder, or try not at all–it’s the soft mist that laces what falls in its midst.

the cold of the chill night air, the black ink poured with no warm notes, it snaps it, captures it. holds it tight in its lock. until sun, the keeper of calm, protector of light and of heat, rises, inches up over the bend of the ball that is earth, promises release.

melts away what is hardened, what will sting the skin of your toes, if you, like me, foolishly dash out the door. thinking a quick jaunt to the feeder, where the birds, hungry, half-trained, await the dumping of seed, will be painless.

it is the calling card of autumn turning toward winter. the thing that reminds us that autumn is more than a really fine reason to walk in the woods, collect leaves like medals of honor.

the frost, in restaurant terms, is the ameuse bouche, the delightful first bite, that readies you for all that comes next.

as the original winter baby–not one shussing down slopes, not one who straps on the blades and takes to the iced-over pond, no not that one at all, more like the one who finds poetry in stark limbs stripped of their shimmery summery threads, who thrills to the silence of a woods stilled by the very first snow–the early mornings of frost, of waking up to a world that is barest of white, a world that melts at the touch of a finger to leaf dusted with droplets of dew frozen over, it stirs something akin to a purring deep, deep inside.

it makes me want to reach deep in my closet, pull out my mittens and extra-thick sweaters. makes me eyeball the rich chunks of beef there in the butcher shop window. think of wine in colors of crimson. makes me dig for the roots of the garden, potato and carrot and onion and garlic. they all belong baked in that crimson-tinged heap i call my beef stew.

when the frost drapes over the outside, over the trees and the leaves and the grass, even the rocks cannot dodge the lacing of crystalline mist, i am stirred to grab hold of ends of the blanket. pull tightly.

i feel safer, somehow, in the frost side of the year. i am the proverbial nose pressed against glass, with an etching of artwork of dawn. frozen mid-breath.

it gives me reason to crank up the stove, haul out the woolens. kindle the wicks poking from columns of bee-bundled wax.

light comes from within in the winter, in the season we are lumbering toward. and i cannot wait.

so i take my autumn in big heaping spoonfuls. i start gulping when frost comes.

it is the sugar i heap on my porridge.

time to batten the hatches, bring in the hoses. line the rugs at the door. the frost is the call to attention.

only it comes in a whisper. and it lasts for merely one or two hours.

to catch it, to take in the sweep of its early dawn dusting, you might need to rise from your bed in the just-brightening hours.

it waits not for the laggard. it’s gone, disappeared, if you huddle there under your covers.

it is reward for those who leap, unbracingly, into the day. it is the lace of the autumn, and it unfurls at the dawn, at the hour when dreams are just stirring. when only a fool would roll over and miss the occasion.

did you catch the frost yet? does it stir something in you, too? does it get you to ticking through things that you love about the seasons when ice is among us? or does it depress the heck out of you, summer babies?

the coffee kept coming. the chocolate pumpkins, finally, were peeled of their shiny aluminum shells. picked at, nibbled till tummies cried ouch.
the breakfast was over, the morning was slow. was going nowhere but right where it was.
it was that most sacred of hours, the time so elusive these days. it was catch-up, pure and simple.
and i’d not seen it coming. wasn’t scheduled, or penned on the calendar. it simply unfolded. and, given the weekdays that bump by in a blur–i’ll be late, pick me up, i have a rehearsal, i need to go early, can you drive me–it felt more than essential. it felt like a beacon of unfiltered light.
it was light, i am certain, that both of us need. it’s how we are wired. it’s a light that opens the heart, sifts through to places that need light to breathe.
with a boy who, by the hour, slips toward a life all his own, with a boy being pulled in so many directions, this catching-up time is the one patch of still water in seas that could rock us apart. i cling to the life rope, i cling to the time that carries us over the waves and the winds and the storms that might brew.
questions are asked, questions that can’t be cobbled on the fly, out the door, with one eye on the pencil solving quadratic equations.
questions that, one after another, sink deeper, mine places that only come out of the shadows there in that unfiltered light.
thoughts come too. new thoughts. dots connected. we are, neither of us, racing to come to conclusions. we are thinking together. and together, sometimes, we stumble on truths, on visions, on notions that would have escaped us had we not been digging together.
it is the difference between a dash through the woods and a meander. you get to the other side, either way, but you might miss the mushrooms there by the trunk of the tree. and you might not catch the glint of the gold as the sun pours through the now-amber leaves.
in some houses i think–and some times of the year, even at ours–the weekends are more of the blur. blur upon blur. no wonder we’re gasping for air.
but i fight back. i pull every trick in the book to keep spaces of time unchained, unclaimed, unbooked. i have no agenda for those hours. don’t know, even, how they’ll be used. but if they’re not there in the first place, there’s no chance for catching-up time. breathing time. no time for connecting the dots of a week, and a world, that desperately need interpretation.
since the invention of time, really, since genesis, since in the beginning, there’s been a knowing that time requires two speeds: the time for creation, the mondays through fridays, do-your-job, make-the-land-and-the-seas, don’t-be-late, carve-the-beasts-of-the-jungle, the-birds-of-the-air, turn-out-the-light, set-the-alarm; and the time for just being, the blessing of sanctified time, sabbath defined.
so what are we doing, so many of us, so much of the time, thinking we can trump all the slow time? take a short cut, a by-pass, speed things up, ignore the moments when nothing much happens.
but really those are the moments when we sink, surely we do, into the core of the matter, when we go into the parts where the being is done. past the mere interstice, the blank spots and hollows, into the organs of thinking and feeling. where sense–and soul–dwell.
i found myself all weekend feeling blessed for the power of catching-up time. that whole notion of daylight savings time, of setting the clocks this way or that. it’s really, all of it, just a reminder that time is a gift.
we can take it and savor it. hold it up to the light. we can sit with the ones who we love, pick apart chocolate pumpkins, decipher the world as we see it, mine deep into each other’s heart.
or we can pant right through all of the hours. check our digital watches. hit the gas. find ourselves at the end of the day, and the week–even our lives, if we don’t watch it–hardly knowing where all the time went.
that’s not the way i want my days to end. not the way i choose to watch time pass me by.

where and how do you find catching-up time? do you shove aside all sorts of obligations and requests and demands? do you say, sorry i’m busy, even when you’re not? just so you can savor the gift of time by yourself, or time with those who need nothing more sacred than to breathe the same air in the very same room? to chew the same thoughts?
today is, by the way, a most sacred day. it is the birthday of the girl i so love. she’s bright light defined. no wonder her name is sweet claire. she is 17. and she is the girl i sometimes pretend is more than a friend, more like the daughter i never did get to hold in my arms. happy blessed day, bright light in so many lives.

every time i reach in my closet, there it is. often when i reach for one of the ones underneath, it falls on my head.
it’s the first thing i saw, draped over the back of the last chair he sat in, that cold snowy night when we walked back into the house. without him.
really without him.
forever without him.
and there it was, draped. flung. i could see–still can–the cock of his wrist as he flung it. he was just off to tennis the morning the pain came to his chest, to his heart.
my mama, a long-time knitter, of socks when he was off in the army, and blankets for each of her babies, and that sweater for him, for the love of her life, she’d made it. knit, purled, and cabled. i remember the cable was rather a triumph.
and i remember, that night when he died in the midst of a blizzard, the first thing i did when i walked in the house was i reached for the sweater. reached for its cables. its V-neck in red, cream and blue. i took it and wrapped it, and i dropped on the couch.
i had no interest in breathing. did not want, for a minute, to ever take in a breath from a world he wasn’t a part of. i sat there, wrapped in the yarns of my mother and father, for as long as i could. then finally i had to. had to take in a breath, fill my lungs with air that felt missing of something. something essential.
ever since, that sweater, the soft woolen yarns that wrapped me, that shielded, kept me warm as i shook in the wake of unstoppable grief, i’ve carried it with me. moved it from apartment to apartment, to house and to house and to house.
now it sits, at the back of my closet, just out of my reach. but not wholly. if i stand on my toes, and then on a shoebox as well, i can swipe. barely graze it. make it fall on my head.
mostly, it’s just there for the glance of my eye. i wouldn’t be home without it. but now, now that the grief has been washed like a stone at the cusp of a river, now that it isn’t so sharp, not so rough, not so riven with crags, i needn’t grab it and wrap it and rock under the warmth of it. the spell of it, really.
but i do need to know it’s there at the back of my closet.
it keeps the soul of my papa there in the thread of my everyday.
i keep bits of the people i’ve loved all over my house. there’s my grandma lucille in the very top drawer of my dresser. there are her black leather gloves. and maria, my landlady-sister-my teacher of so many things, she is flung over a chair right here by my side, in the old square of lace i always leave out. just because. because there’s no point to put it away.
i have a friend whose mother just recently died. she keeps all her letters right there in the drawer where she keeps all her bills. she needs them nearby. for now, at least.
it’s what we all do. we stitch our whole house with knots of our past, of our heart, of the communion of souls no longer among us.
today in the church i grew up in, today in the church a part of me loves while the other part of me is rather not so enchanted, today is all souls’ day, which really is back-up to the day just before, to the day of all saints.
the souls, apparently, are not yet of the same status. the saints get the first of november. the souls get the second. officially, the souls are defined as the faithful departed. they’ve not proven their sainthood.
oh, all right, then, i’m not going to argue. i am merely the messenger here, letting you in, on the way things are working.
the point is, today is the day for remembering. well, i remember all of the time. because i set up my house like some sort of history trap. it’s a minefield of memories. and i like it that way.
i like to be reaching for that old irish fisherman’s knit. and have my papa fall on my head. or at least the arms of the sweater he wore as he hollered and ran for the net. we can all hear it now, how he let out that shout that made you think someone had died. only it was just him, and the ball that he narrowly missed, before awaking the dead, had any been buried just underneath the court where he played.
i take one look at that sleeve, or the V-neck, and it all rushes back. the good and the bad. the times when my dad in that sweater made me squirm, roll my eyes, want to hide, slink out of my seat. and the time when that sweater, without my sweet papa, made me weep.
it’s all in a swirl. it’s the sweet and the sad.
that’s why the world comes in octaves. our hearts play the notes, low ones and high ones. but without the old knitted sweater, there at the back of the closet, i might not remember the song.
and that would be an unbearable silence.

do you lace your house with snippets of those you have loved? do you find yourself reaching in a drawer for a trinket, stumbling first on something you stop and hold onto, just for a minute, a something you cling to, a something from someone no longer? how do you honor the souls of the ones who you loved?

growing up as i did, putting head to my pillow night after night, plotting the ways i too might stretch a fist toward the heavens, palm a star, take it home in my pocket, i’ve been a student, for a very long time, of this saint thing.
over the years, and there’s now been nearly half a whole century (i’m excluding the year before 1 in my counting, thinking i’d not yet started my saint watch, certainly not before i escaped from my old maple crib), i have scanned not only the heavens but also the earth.
i have looked in the unlikeliest spots. picked through crowds motley and noisy. spotted the sole possessor of what could only be called saintly demeanor.
the one soul in the room who walked with the grace of an angel, who did immeasurable good with nary a flurry. just wafted through life, sprinkling a dust that might be called golden. only really it’s the dust of a kindness that’s quiet, that’s real and that changes the course of the day and the week and year after year.
or perhaps it’s the radical loudmouth. the one who will not be still, not till justice is done. hallelujah, i say, to the one not afraid to ruffle the feathers.
either, or. in between. there are those who inspire, who stir, who dig deep inside, and rise up triumphant.
i am a student of all.
yes, it’s true, and i’m saying it now, i have, all my life, looked for and collected stories of saints the way some might collect maybe a shell on the beach. or a small metal race car.
only the saints that i’ve sought, the ones who i’ve watched and i’ve studied, are not off in some dusty old tomes. no. they’re right here among us.
in my brand of religion, in my excursion through living, i am drawn to the study of decency down in the ditches.
i am not so caught up in the tales of the medieval saints (though i do find the story, say of christina the astonishing, she who pinned herself to a windmill, to escape the stench of human sin, well, rather astonishing).
nor do i get too bogged down–not at all really, vehemently not–in the twists and the tangles of tape that declare, in white puffy smoke, so-and-so is a saint.
blkkh. a saint is a saint is a saint. i know one when i see one. and i don’t need a committee to tell me.
i know, when in the presence of someone who’s saintly, that some sort of peace settles the waves of the room. or sets the waters to rocking.
either way, soft or loud, hushed or blasted through megaphone, it is as if some fine inner core is tapped, is let loose, and everyone breathing the air–everyone with a nose for these things–suddenly is filled with a rarefied mix of poison-free breath.
there is, in the saintly, an eye on the prize that is wisely removed of personal gain. it is as if she or he is operating purely for good. no strings attached.
take, for instance, one of the saintly i’ve gathered in just the last week: the soccer coach who started out substitute teaching in one of the toughest schools in chicago, realized the kids had no gym class, started early morning soccer. then realized kids, first to fourth graders, were coming to school with no breakfast. so he started to feed them. he’s not even 30, and he says he feels like he has a family of 50. the kids call him at all hours of the day and the night. and he always answers.
or maybe it’s merely the friend who came and who got me, took me away. took me out to the country. took me away from the things that had been filling my head, weighing down my heart.
or the lady i know, who week after week, brings dinner to this friend or that. to friends who are old, who never get out. and she’s able, so she cooks and she drives and she fills their saturday nights. with small talk and deep talk. whatever they want. she tidies their kitchens, and then she drives home.
you might say, well your bar is not high. certainly any one of those souls had a good day, followed by a bad day. yes indeed that’s the point, now that we’re moving along here. i don’t know anyone flawless. don’t expect it.
but i do know that each of us has what it takes, to reach down inside, to pull out a turnip of goodness. of bigger than bigness. we each, all of us, possess sparks of divine.
the point then is to kindle the light. touch one flame to another. to get this ball burning. before it gets dark.
if we each spend one minute, one spark of the day, living beyond our small little selves, well then fairly soon we’ve gone and we’ve ignited a bonfire. a fire that will not be stopped.
so in the end we seek not to become enrobed in all white, wafting perfumes of the heavens. heck, no. we aim to become big in small little moments.
we put down the long list of things we must do, and instead we call on a friend. a friend who is hurting. we don’t call, we just come. we sit where their sorrow is spilling. in a hospital waiting room. or there on the stoop of their house.
we lift their load. we make them a big pot of soup. we make their beds. we take off with their children, just to give them the peace of an hour.
or maybe we’re saintly with even a stranger. maybe we look in the eyes of the man who is begging for dollars. maybe for a minute we imagine what it is to be cold and alone, to have been a young child, of 7, who woke to a place where no one was home. who walked down a stairwell that reeked of bad smells. and getting to school was a matter of life and possible death. who knew any minute furor could strike.
or maybe the stranger is there in some fancy shop. but you find out from listening that really her life was as sad and as empty as the guy up above. how she grew up in a house so huge she could be lost for hours on end. and no one, not the mother who drank, or the father who worked till late in the night, ever came looking, to feed her or hug her. how she doesn’t remember one single hug from her mother. and her mother just died.
today is the day called all saints. every year, growing up, we stopped and we honored the saints.
i honor them now. but not usually the dead ones. i study, i watch and i learn from the very alive ones. i take mental notes. i scribble on paper.
there are saints all around. and if you collect them, your world will be shiny. and so will your heart.
it’s a soft gentle glow that you seek. or maybe a bold one that blinds you. either way, you’ll know when you find it.
and who knows, there might be a scent in the air. it might be that of the heavens.
might as well reach for the stars, pluck one and carry it home.
imagine the scrap book of saints. those are pages i do want to keep. want to turn. want to soak into my heart.

here at the chair i often go out on a limb. take today, for instance. might as well launch a campaign. a saintly one. canonization begins here. feel free to scribble your thoughts on the saintly among us. nominations are welcome. or just keen observations on those all around you who make you more than you were before they criss-crossed your path. may your all saints day be blessed.
and bless those of you, who in very big ways, teach me, day after day, what it is to be saintly on earth.

if i cranked up the wagon and cut–illegally, mind you, there’s a sign scolding you not to–through the alley, bumped just two blocks toward where the sun sets, i would screech on the brakes–everyone does–at a shrine to the season, the one glowing above, the one that chews kilowatts as if they were candy, all through the most hallowed night.
glows for weeks and weeks in advance, really. the lady who lives there must use up her whole carbon footprint in the instant she plugs in her nine million cords. she’s got every light in the world, and an army of billowing creatures, each powered by fans down below. at least i think so. i hear the sound of something that’s whirring, and i don’t think it’s her, sprawled on the ground, blowing with all of her might.
i imagine the beds at that house are all tucked with sheets that are scary. and not just from the holes that no one is mending. i’d not be surprised if the papier de toilette unrolls with the faces of goblins.
expect no such hysterics here.
not at my house.
we did manage to carve the requisite pumpkin. and my children will not go naked to school (or that wasn’t the plan, anyway). at least one will go off in something approximating a costume.
but if everyone in the world gets just one holiday pass, one time where they can be a scrooge or a grinch or a plain old bump on the log if they please, well, then, i’m in the line awaiting my little orange ticket.
i am, contrary to the river of halloween madness swirling out there, decidedly au contraire. i am the halloween minimalist.
give me a pumpkin and a deadline. tell me i must get it carved. or my children will never forgive me. all right, all right, then, pass me the knife. but make sure it’s a dull-bladed one, so i can curse as i try to impale the sacrificed flesh of the seasonal vegetable victim.
guaranteed, you’ll not find one of those whizbang carver’s deluxe ensembles at my house, the ones i’m certain they sell. with intricate blades to do intricate tricks on the face of the poor bulbous gourd.
at my house it’s strictly euclidean geometry. triangle eyes, triangle mouth. this year, because the little one insisted, because he saw something like it on the neighbors’ front porch, we did add a triangle carved in the cheek. he called it a scar. i played along.
it seems to get worse every year. not that i’m getting worse. really, i’m not. i’m standing still, nonchalantly ignoring the madness.
it’s just that the madness gets madder, gets earlier, gets brighter. and with each string of lights strung on somebody’s porch, or each ghoulish scene staged in someone’s front yard, i sink deeper into my season of seasonal ennui.
a french diagnosis, i tell you, makes even the dreariest syndrome sound just a wee bit exotic. hmm, ennui, mais oui, i feel better already.
i think, doctor ghoul, it goes back to my youth, that place where so many troubles seem to be hatched.
there was annual angst, once i outgrew the suffocating, hard-to-see-through, red-riding-hood mask someone kindly bought at a store, of what in the world i would be. (such are the existential quandaries of adolescence, even if it’s a matter contained solely to the subject of costumes.)
you see, this whole dressing-up thing plays to my deficit. i am, day after day, not so smart in the fashion department. holidays make it no better. certainly not the one that’s upon us, the one that demands sartorial know-how.
except for the year i paraded as a picnic table, complete with red-checked cloth and a marching battalion of ants, i seemed to replay the same humdrum tune year after year. my needle was stuck on bum upon bum upon bum.
take old ratty clothes, add charcoal briquet rubbed on the cheeks. bingo, you had it. license to go bag some chocolate.
and therein lies issue no. 2. i am not, never have been, much of a chocolatey girl. i know, it’s a birth defect. i did manage to make up for it, for a spell there, with bag after bag of what might have sufficed for a food group in college, that ol’ candy corn, three-stripe trifecta of fructose and sugar and syrup of corn.
but without incentive, i ask you, what is the point? why go to such trouble?
as predicted, there i was on the eve of the eve, just last night, begging my mama with needle and thread to please hem the pants of the halloween beggar–i mean child–who switched, at the very last minute, of course, from star wars to football for the costume brigade.
and, oh, do not tell me, here he is at my side, half naked, the player of football. egad, could it be, yes it could, the essential jersey is still rather, um, moist down in the sudsing machine, not yet in the dryer. did i mention it’s quarter past eight and we leave for the school in less time than it takes to spell b-u-s-t-e-d, as in “i am so…”?
that’s not the least of it. after sprinting to the on-demand costume parade, i’ll be scrounging the shelves of the grocery, in search of the elusive and oxymoronic halloween snack that is healthy, a teacher request that i’ll heed out of sympathy, deep and undying.
and then, mr. weather man, he who reads clouds and rains on parades with astonishing regularity, he tells me there’s cold and there’s drizzle in my immediate bone-chilling future. oh, how splendid.
anyone mind if i sit this one out, or at best shuffle slowly behind the one, hopefully fully clothed by the bewitching hour, who is dashing to doorbells, filling his sack with foodstuffs sure to give him the jitters, keep him awake till the saints roll in on the morrow?
oh sinners and saints, i implore you. please give me a nice quiet night with only the glow of a pumpkin. i’ll take a moon, if you will. and maybe an owl. or a wolf off in the distance. that there would be to my liking.
but it’s a notion that seems to be lost in a forest of over-lit trees.

any other hallow’s eve grinches, or less-than-eager participants? step right up, let it rip. or, if, on the other hand, you are gaga for all that is ghoulish, if you live for this day of disguise, if you can’t keep your mitts out of the candy bag, by all means, defend it. speak up for yourself and your holiday. all’s fair here at the table. but don’t expect cute pumpkin cookies, or cupcakes bulging with eyeballs. we’re taking our holiday straight up here. coffee’s black today. (pssst, if you look in the sugar bowl, you might find some corn. candy corn that would be. but of course.)

it certainly wasn’t fancy, and it certainly wasn’t planned. it just so happened that somewhere ’round the middle of the day, the two of us happened to be home, and we happened to be hungry.
he sat with his mac-n-cheese. i sat with my cottage cheese on toast. and on an ordinary monday, with no one else around, we sat and finished thoughts.
for two whose lives, from dawn till dinner time, are normally so distant, so very far apart, this was nothing short of revolutionary. nothing short of sweet.
and for one–that’s me–who spends long spans seeing not another soul, save for the mailman, the meter reader, and maybe someone come to patch the house, the blessed communion of breaking bread with the father of my children was wholly nourishing.
truth is, most days, i relish the long hours of time alone. it is a blessing earned, i tell you. no chasing toddler. no big bird and friends squawking in the background.
it is so quiet here i can hear the clock tick. i can, from 9 to 3, put something down and find it hours later. i think that i’m still letting out a sigh from finally being alone. all the years and years and years of not a minute to myself.
not so long ago, it seems, i was stingy with my hours. if i sniffed a fraction of a quarter hour in which the house was mine, i all but barred the doors.
but now i’m not so stingy. i needn’t cling to seconds unattended. the tide of life has flowed my way, released me from the sound of footsteps always at my side.
and so i found the softness of the typing in the other room a perfect pairing to my own. heard the whistling of the teapot and welcomed its shrill drowning of the tick and tock.
if a year unfolds in seasons, so too does marriage. there’s been a changing of the colors in our leaves, it almost seems. i’d call it golden tinged with crimson.
we’ve borne enough, been around so many bends, we know each other from nearly every angle. and through and through and through. and still i find the man i married the truest soul i might have ever known. i would not be whole without the women of my life, some of whom are the sisters of my deepest heart, the very breath of life itself. but there is a man, one man, who sees and speaks so clearly, he is my beacon in the fog. and, besides, he makes me laugh.
by blessed accident of nature, or by flat-out divine design, we’ve got a little one just cobbling three-word paragraphs, while the children of our friends are penning college essays. but in just another year, we’ve got one who will be learning how to drive. so it’s not so out of sight to realize these here are the years to seize.
as we scrambled in the kitchen, he to grab his macaroni from the little box that zaps it, me to peel an orange and rinse some berries, it dawned on me that this interlude, this time alone, this time of sharing a holy hour, was a marker along a trail.
take time, i heard a whisper urge. don’t let it slip away.
oh, if every day and not so long between, we could find a way to push back all the expectations that pull us far apart. and hold, as if some golden syrup, the sacred moments that, one upon another, drip, drip,drip to fill the vessel of our life. we’ve not a clue how vast this cup. and all i know is company for lunch, simple as it was, left a sweetness in my soul and a hunger i should sate.
take time, i heard a whisper urge. don’t let it slip away.

it needn’t be a mate who comes for lunch. it might be a stranger even. the point is pausing, rearranging the day to allow for someone’s thoughts and heart to flow across your table. even a monday, it seems, can be the start of something far beyond the mad dash toward the weekend. interrupt your regularly scheduled programming. turn up the teakettle. invite someone you dearly deeply love. or someone altogether unknown. a tuesday, too, might be a fine day to do the same. have you had, of late, the unexpected company of someone who made an ordinary lunch into a feast you won’t forget?

it doesn’t know, apparently, what the little box on the calendar says, what it insists. doesn’t know the frost is due any day now. it sticks its bold blue neck out. damn the proscriptions, it shouts. in its wee little glory of morning soprano.
it’ll bloom when it darn well pleases. and apparently it pleases now.
pleases me, too.
startled me, caught my eye, made me stop, turn, go back and kneel there. i knelt at the feet of that blue burst of i’ll-do-it-my-way. a something worth kneeling for, if ever there was one.
i’d been loping, as i often do, from one spot in the alley, down to another. taking a shortcut. scooting along.
the alley, as all alleys are, especially at end of october, was mostly all gray, with long stretches of shriveled-up leftover green. or brown. the mint gone to rangy. wild asters seeded, collapsed in exhaustion. the golden rod splayed, as if it too merely gave up the ghost, laid down and gasped its last breath, there on the cracks of the asphalt.
garbage cans, even, were tossed willy-nilly. it’s been windy of late, and the cans leap into the melee, join the percussive parade, rolling and banging, scattering this way and that.
and then, that one recalcitrant bloom. as blue and as bright as a midsummer’s fine afternoon. one where the sky and the lake seem not to know there’s a difference. the blue just bleeds from below to above. not a cloud mars the tableau. it’s blue, as far and as deep as can be.
that ol’ morning glory minds its own clock. it bloomed when it was darn well ready. and not a minute before.
all the rest of the morning glories are long shriveled, and dropped from the vine. they’d had their moments of glory, way back in august, maybe early september. but not this one. she waited till nearly november. and she paid no mind to the morning that is, after all, her first name. heck, that sun was near as high as it gets at the end of october, it was just after 2, maybe 3, on a day that demanded a sweater.
but there she was. in all her glorious glory. how could i not turn on my heels, do a 180, slow down and take in all that she offered?
she offered much, that five-petaled promise of heart-skipping joy amid autumn’s not-so-showy attempt to pack up the goods, put it away for the winter. there is little poetic, i tell you, in shriveled-up weeds.
but there is a whole sonnet, maybe two, in the lone blue bloom, the straggler who reached out to me.
sometimes–almost always, truth be told–i am convinced that these out-of-the-blue whispers and sightings and knocks on the head are love notes from way beyond clouds. i call them Divine, with that rare capital D.
the way my curly head pictures it all, it’s God who’s loping the alley in front of me, looking here and there for places to drop just a sweet little morsel, a reminder, that grace and beauty are right there around the corner, if only we allow them, the cousins divine, to seep into our peripheral vision.
that’s what i felt the afternoon that glory of morning just leapt out and grabbed me. it was a whisper, or maybe a shout, a sign from above or beyond or within–wherever you place the great gentle goodness that i happen to call by the simple name God–pulling me wholly out of my lope down the alley, telling me simply, there is good.
i needed to hear it. we all do. there is, far as i know, not a one of us, anywhere, who needn’t regular infusions, reminders, that we are not alone out here, adrift, dangling from strings without anyone minding the cords.
it’s almost a game that i play. looking for God in unlikely places. there on the bloom on a vine. or there in the branch in the tree where the cardinal is calling.
i’ve spent whole spans of my life connecting those dots. there’ve been rich spells and dry spells. spells where i knew not a thing. but then, on a whisper of wind, a moonbeam, a shaft of bright sunlight, i’d feel that tap on my shoulder.
i’d turn and behold what could only be something bigger than me, but delivered in quietest, softest of telegram.
i learned of this naturally, growing up as i did at the hand of a mama who, as i’ve mentioned before and again, keeps one eye on the limbs of the trees, the other scanning for God. she connects dots, every time. in a hawk that circles her head. in a bluebird she finds in the woods. in a tissue-thin lily that pokes from the ground in a place where she didn’t plant it.
so do i.
i am, after all of these years, a disciple in her brand of religion; a beautiful thing, the finding of God in the leaves underfoot, the wings overhead.
and that’s why the bloom in the alley, that’s why it took all my breath. it reminded me that out of the blue, when you’ve felt all alone for day upon unending day, when all has been gray, has been dimmed by the shadows, there is the brush stroke of God, handing you, if you stop and you listen and look, the undeniable knowing that you are, not for a minute, left to dangle on strings.
there is, very much, someone to keep you from falling, from getting too tangled. i think that someone is God.
and the morning glory reminded me.

do you look for or find God in blooms in the alley, bird calls at the dawn? what might you have stumbled upon lately? do you have a someone who taught you their brand of religion, a way of taking the big sweeping picture and stitching it into your every day?
be sure to check the lazy susan. it spins anew for this, the season of pumpkin. there is a roasted stuffed pumpkin, a jolly fine orb to bring to the table, you might want to give it a try. i know, at my house, it’s not autumn without it.

i’ve been clangin’ up a ruckus all week around here. pots hauled from the shadows. pans doin’ doubletime. little gizmos and doodads–squeezers and peelers and plug-ins that do all the work–let loose, some of them, for the very first time.
if it was steamable, roastable, sauteable, i had my hand ‘round its neck. i was plunking sprouts into boiling water. turning legs of poor little lambs into fuel for the masses. i went so far as to drown a chicken in half a bottle of wine.
i was, believe you me, cooking to soothe, to forget, to pretend that the world is the one that i lay on the table.
the urge, really, was unstoppable.
i’ve not been such a cooking tornado maybe ever. did not do that thing with the baking while timing contractions, those stories you read in the expectancy books or laugh through on reruns of ol’ i love lucy. nope. not me. i was too green at the gills, too rumbly of tummy, to ever care much about flour or sugar or whipping or beating there on the brink of delivery.
but this was different. this was me locking the door, wrapping the blanket, standing up to a world that ruffled my feathers. this was me claiming one piece of the planet where all could be as i cooked.
dinner would roll onto the table in courses. why there’d be main dishes, grownup ones, the kinds that often escape me–roast beast, that fine drunkard chicken–and side dishes, too.
i had my best cookbooks off the shelf. and usually that means the ones where the scribbles are all down the page, or tucked onto scraps with the barest of thoughts.
i pulled out the stops. if i could think of a something my children loved, i made it. pears sliced and simmered with cranberries, check. cherry pie. ala mode. you betcha.
i even invented a few things that now will be made on demand. eggplant roasted with baby tomatoes. drizzled with olive-pressed oil, showered with salt of the sea. the last of the rosemary from one of my pots. a pot now on hiatus till spring.
it is autumn, the season for taking out screens, letting the sun pour in unfiltered. the season for slipping on leggings, sneezing through dust that settled all summer on all of your sweaters.
it is autumn, the season for stews and simmering fruits.
but that wasn’t the thing that drove me this week. it wasn’t just autumn. it was aftershock.
it was, and it is, the lovingest thing i could think of to do. for myself and my children and the tall one who stood right beside me.
i would if i could spread my table as far and as wide as the world. i would set a place for every last soul on the planet. even the lost ones.
but that’s just my imagination running amok. and my heart. i keep learning, the hard way, this is not that fine world. i cling like a fool to the notion that redemption is right around the next bend. that we could stitch back together even the most broken heart.
but then there’s the other voice in my head. the one that says, give it up. you do what you can, and then you let go.
well, maybe then, that’s why i’m a mother. because here in my kitchen, at the table i set, i can make mistake after mistake. i can burn the broccoli, raise my voice, undercook the lamb, slam off the tv, but still i can lay out a meal.
i can fill tummies, and repour into the vessel known as the heart. i can crowd the table with foods that whisper, somebody loves you. i can kindle the candles, watch the plates and the faces glow in the dance of the flame, flickering.
i can cloak the ones i most love with the one inexhaustible foodstuff: i can spoon-feed them comfort and love, a cook’s prerogative.
i can close off my eyes to the world just beyond the edge of the table. at least for the minutes it takes to hold hands, drop heads, whisper grace, lift forks, clean plates, and then linger. over pie ala mode.
it’s the ruckus i made in my kitchen this week. and it was, a most beautiful riotous sound.

do you find you too cook for comfort? the distinction i didn’t even get into is the cooking, not eating, for comfort. long long ago, i ate for comfort. overate. ate to go into trance, really. is it a sign of evolution, progression, that now i partake of the communal? i cook to comfort. rather than simply consume. if that’s not a notion you care to nibble on, and since the subject of food always seems to rouse comments galore, feel free to stick to the no-muss-no-fuss, what might be your most essential comforting recipes?

i am home now. home and wanting only to curl. to curl into a chair, under a blanket. let the dappled light bathe me, perhaps, sprinkle me.
as if seeds, maybe, of sunlight. as if seeds of something that might lick the wounds, soften the places that hurt, sprout something that heals.
i’ve been before to places that hurt. i’ve been opened and cut. i’ve come home without what i wanted–a father, a baby, whole parts of me, really–when i walked out the door.
but i’ve not before been to a place like a courthouse. not where, when you say, “i’m the victim,” a vernacular they insist that you use, to identify why you are standing there at their window, they ask, “domestic violence?” to which you shudder, and think, no, no, thank God, no. that’s not why i’m here.
i am here because i don’t want to be here. i am here because there i was minding my business. not even my business really. someone else’s. i was cooking for people i’ve come to think of as friends. friends i want to do right for.
and that’s when, out of the blue, the man came and took what wasn’t his. what was mine. and now, here i am in this courthouse.
it is a beautiful morning. a golden one. with light not seen in the courtroom marked 106. not in the room where the machine churned. one after the other, justice on hold. continued. rescheduled. delayed. no lawyer. no defendant. no witness. always, it seemed, someone or something was missing. the machine could not move. instead it started and stopped, in fits and starts. in sputters and coughs.
they bark out your name. mispronounce it. make you feel like you are the one who’s done something wrong. something unseemly. like really you must be a lowlife to be here at all.
“domestic violence?”
no no, i said, no not that at all.
what, i’m a well-dressed white woman, that’s the obvious choice?
how very sad.
i can’t say, really, because maybe i shouldn’t, what happened. but they did finally call me by name. and someone else too. someone outfitted in khaki pajamas. or so it seemed. a face i just barely glimpsed. a face i don’t want to remember.
they asked me in bits and pieces to tell my whole story. or at least the part of the story that mattered to matters at hand.
i was told to stick to the bones.
but i did manage, because i went with my heart, to say, “bless him,” referring to the man in the khaki pajamas. did manage to say it out loud to the judge and the lawyers and most of all to the man himself, in telling them all how, after much hemming and hawing, he went, bless him, and retraced his steps to my backpack, where he had dropped it, off in some bushes. i’ll not forget that he did what he needn’t have done.
and i got to say what i needn’t have said.
but i did very much want to infuse or inject just a word from a whole other plane. a plane i believe in. a plane i desperately wish i could bring to that man. that man who, i think, already knows it, at least some of the time.
all my life i have searched for and found the divine in each soul i encountered. it’s no different here. only i don’t think it looks that way. i think it looks like i am a white woman seeking revenge. like i am trying to send away the lost soul who did a dumb thing. a stupid thing. a wrong thing.
if nothing else, it’s those two words–“bless him”–that i hold onto. that’s where i distinguish myself from the system. where i lift higher than the bar they set rather low.
it is a system that strips men of their clothes, and all of us of our dignity, whatever scrap of it we manage to bring in, in through the metal detector and the river of life that is messy and mostly in trouble.
so i’m home now. back in my house where the light comes in sprinkles that spill on the oak on the floor, and the cushions on chairs.
i am next to my chair with the checks and the blanket. i think i’ll climb in in a minute. pull the wool tight around. let the tears spill. i feel a need for a cleansing. the cleansing of tears. and the lifting of prayer. i have no other way for the man in the khaki pajamas to know i wish him no harm. quite the opposite.
bless him, i said, and i meant it.
bless him, dear God, for he knows not what he’s doing. those are words, once spoken from up on a cross, now recited, now prayed, year after year.
they take on new meaning, on a day in a week when your actions and those of a man in khaki pajamas mix in a terrible stew. and he is in jail and you are wrapped in a blanket by a window where the light comes in golden-strewn seeds.

all i ask is you whisper a prayer. for him, or the whole sorry system. it might be the best that there is, but, whoever you are, it’s hard to walk in and come out feeling whole.

when you are six, cops and robbers belong in books, on TV screens, maybe in your imagination, the games you play on rainy days.
you should not have to close your eyes and see real scenes of cops with guns, and a man you’ve given ice cream to, now clasped with cuffs, being loaded in a jail on wheels.
but the little one, the one who gasped for breath between his sobs, he saw it all. and he needs to know that sometimes people with tender smiles make mistakes. even people who you’ve been buying papers from since you were one or two.
turns out the fellow i chased through streets, the one whose face i couldn’t see the whole time we were running, turns out he is the very one who sits outside our grocery store. a hundred times, at least, my little one has asked me for a dollar bill, rolled it up, handed it, with a smile, to a docile fellow who smiles back. we kid around. i always tell him–and now he knows–that i hardly have a dollar. i live on one single credit card. now, now that he’s rummaged through my pack, he knows i wasn’t kidding. poor guy got the single dollar bill and the little bag of dimes and quarters, and a lot of pennies.
i’m not dwelling, not at all, on the fact that he’s the one we called our friend. he’s taken in enough, my little one, without that sorry fact.
but still he’s got ideas, my little law enforcer.
when you are six, and sitting in a squad car, when your driver is a guy with loaded gun, and all the grownups are taking way too long to fix things, you have ideas.
“he has two choices,” my little one said loud enough for all the cops to hear. even the tough-faced plainclothes cop, the one leaning by the car door, he cracked up. wholly melted at the clear-eyed justice of the backseat thinker.
last night in bed, combing through the stories of the day and the night before, he spelled out the harshest punishment: “when you see him next time at soup kitchen you shouldn’t give him any food,” he ruled.
a variation, of course, on that age-old “go straight to bed without your supper,” a line he knows from maurice sendak’s “the wild things.” it’s not a line i’ve ever used. i don’t believe in harsh, which is why of course this is all so hard. my six-year-old, it seems, is clearer here than i am.
“God must be mad,” he said in passing of the back-pack escapade, before moving on to the real worries of the day, the third-grade boys who fill the halls at school, he says, with “swear words.”
the swear word, he tells me, is s-h-u-t-u-p. he didn’t spell it, but rather sounded it out, a letter at a time, the way he’s learning how to read, for fear he too would pay a price if he said the sounds, slurred into the word itself.
while bedtime here is often slow and soft, last night i made sure to take as long as that boy needed.
fact is, i was taking as long as i needed too. he’s not the only one whose world feels upside down. lying next to that little guy, his legs all bumpy in his winter longjohns, made me feel warmer, safer, than i’d felt all day.
i truly sighed when at last we pulled up the covers, and my world was no bigger than the mattress of my grandma’s old old bed. taking care of the little one log-rolled beside me felt like something i could do, at the end of a long day of feeling torn and worried and not so clear-eyed.
fact is, that mattress is a two-way street. he too took care of me. as i lay there soaking up his simple justice. and saw the world where swearing third graders trump a guy who stole a backpack, any day.
that seems to be a world that even i can handle.

gotta run here this morn. up way too late talking to a teen, who then needed a ride to school. and at the crack of the workday i am heading off to meet up with the other newspaper guy in this house. we are aiming for our third-ever double byline–and the first two are the boys mentioned above. we are off to review a brand new women’s hospital. a birthing hospital. and he thought, wisely, i might know a thing or two in that dept. he asked me to come along. to pen my critical thoughts right beside his. so stay tuned….coming soon in your chicago tribune.