pull up a chair

the bag is home now. is nestled at the top of the stairs, off where no one can see it through a window. it felt safer that way.
so did i.
that bag had quite a chase last night. three blocks through streets, a gravel parking lot, a long alley. for awhile there i was hot on its trail, just a half a block behind. then in the gravel lot beside a bank, it went one way; i, the other.
or maybe i was just too slow. when i came through, onto the sidewalk on a busy street, when i yelled, did anyone see a guy running with a flowered backpack, all i got was hunched shoulders, a collective shrug.
no one saw a thing.
that’s when the cops came screeching to the curb, yelled to me to get in, and we chased some more. darn red-flowered bag. made it kind of hard to hide, eyes everywhere were peeled, looking for the child’s backpack with the big red flowers.
guns drawn, flashlights combing shadowed nooks and crannies, that’s how policemen seem to look for things. they wouldn’t let me out, and all i could think, was, oh, my mom, and T, the little one, they must be scared to death, back at soup kitchen.
that’s where it all had started. back at the big church kitchen where we always cook. every third sunday of the month, there we are. been doing it going on five years. i always stash my bag atop the freezer, not too far, i realize now, from the locked back door.
what happened is i got there early. decided this time to do some cooking from whatever was sitting in the fridge. i was alone for quite a while. my mom came later, and near 6, my 6-year-old. he got hungry around 6:30, still half an hour before we fed the folks. i made him a little plate of things he might actually eat, the corn, the stewed apples, a roll with pbj. my mom was hungry too. she made a little bowl of the stew bubbling on the stove.
since i was ready, since there was nothing left to do, except wait for the big clock to slide to 7, when they’d let the hungry in, i decided to leave my post for just a minute. to be hospitable instead of busy, to sit with the two early diners, my mom and T.
soon as i sat, i heard my mom call into the kitchen, “hello.” someone just walked through, she said. so up i leapt to see if i could help.
not a soul was there. and then i saw, neither was my bag. i went straight for the door, saw someone running with what i thought looked like my bag. hard to miss those big red flowers. i ran and yelled. hey drop that, you’ve got my bag.
when i rounded the corner, i saw some folks, did you just see a guy with a bag? uh huh they said, and pointed toward the street that ran along the tracks.
i ran too. running, yelling. one guy in a white mercedes wagon even made a U turn to chase him in the gravel lot. someone along the way must have called police. someone saw him close enough to say, later on, that’s him.
all i knew was i was chasing navy pants, and a navy-grayish top. and a flowered bag that wasn’t his.
what happened next is we thought we’d lost him cold. they finally drove me back to the soup kitchen where it started, where my little one was sobbing, and my mama rather shaking.
then the cops came back, said we picked up someone who matches the description, you need to come for ID. so in we slid, into the back seat, me, my mom and T. he was shaking to my left, my mom and i squeezed hands on the right. this is not why we spend the week planning menus.
the police pulled up to a leafy corner. there against the fence was a guy in jeans and a navy-grayish shirt. my mom, who’d seen him in the kitchen, said right away, “that’s him.” so did another couple who they brought back, who’d seen him running right along their side.
right away, my heart sank. i thought i knew who it was from the years at soup kitchen. and i thought i knew him too from selling papers (a newspaper written and produced by the homeless) outside my grocery; i’m pretty sure he’s a guy i often talk to.
i said, to the plainclothes cops, just get my bag, and i won’t press charges. i just want my bag. i had realized how very many pieces of my life would be lost; nothing that really mattered, my work ID, a credit card, a driver’s license, that little bag i love.
once the other folk said it was him, 100 percent, they slapped on handcuffs, walked him in the paddy wagon. the plainclothes cop got a call. said it seemed, from inside the wagon, he was talking. next thing we knew, they were walking him, in cuffs, down the block to get my bag, they were fairly certain.
bless his soul, i say, he went and showed them where he dropped it. all the pieces of my life i wouldn’t have to retrace and chase.
but then the cops, oh, eight or nine, came to where i sat in the back seat of the unmarked squad car, they said he had 30 previous arrests, had twice been let off for similar thefts inside churches. they wanted me not to drop any charges. the commander, a big gruff guy, did all the talking.
hey lady, he said, we’ve had half the force out here for the last hour. you let him go, it gives him carte blanche to keep stealing.
i asked, they denied, had they made a promise, that if he gave me back my bag, i’d let him go? i don’t like to double cross. it’s not why i spend the week planning menus.
i was lucky, they told me. no one got hurt. next time, it might not be so lucky. someone might get hurt. the right thing, one or two or three said to no one in particular, was to not let him go again.
i sat there churning. i thought i knew this guy. i thought i like him. and for heaven’s sake, he gave me back my bag.
but in the end, with eight cops looking me in the eyes, i finally nodded. go ahead.
late last night i got a call. it was one of the arresting officers. he said i need to be in court on thursday. said the charge is felony theft, as his record leaves them little choice.
i asked where he was, the guy who took my bag. in jail, at the police department. then he’d be moved to the county jail. a place i wouldn’t wish on anyone.
i climbed into my bed a couple hours later. that comforter felt soft, too soft. i thought of him, the man i am now maybe sending off to prison.
i am feeling sick. and torn.
like i said, it’s not why i spend the week planning menus.

talk about real life ethics. not even the jesuits, got me clear enough for this one. i think of my brother, once carjacked at gunpoint. i remember he wrote letters for years to the guy in prison. i remember the hope for redemption. i have the same thoughts. think in some ways a night in jail beats a night on the street. in other ways though, it beats not a thing. i’m too close this morning, to think much besides the details of how it unfolded, and how i had no intention of going to court when i walked in that kitchen to feed the folks so very hungry. any wisdom out there?

sometimes i think i must be living in a land of secret handshakes and furtive whispers. all around me, i find out, there are phone calls people make and places where they meet.
it is enough to give a girl the willies. and make her want to hide behind the curtains–if only she had them, that is. (i think there might be a curtain fairy; she delivers in the night, yards and yards of flowing silk, drapes it over rods, lets it puddle on the floor. but apparently she never got my address. because my windows, alone in all the land, are buck naked, sans the puddled silk.)
take the requisite front pot. you know the bulbous vat, dumped with mud, the one that tries so very hard to stay abreast of seasons. the one positioned just beside the door that in our case we always use. though sometimes, i am certain, it is just for show, and all the traffic flows in some hidden entrance. the kind for which you punch a secret code. i’m telling you it is the land of secrets.
which brings me back to that ol’ pot. you see above–because this is really simply grownup show and tell–that my pot is probably behind the times. limping in a land of sleek and muscled tri-athletes. poor pot, it really tried.
it’s just that, well, i guess it didn’t meet the code.
my mother, bless her heart, tried to be my pot maid. she pulled her car right off the highway entrance ramp. left it idling, while she trudged into the weeds, clipped some cattails and swishy grasses.
why, we even snipped a blue hydrangea from the bushes out in front, sacrificed its pretty head for the sake of that fine pot. we tucked little pumpkins, just for color. but now they seem to have been gnawed, by buck-toothed rodents hungry for a nibble with their afternoon’s spot of tea.
for nearly five years now, i’ve been motoring around these leafy parts, here on the shore of that great and vaunted lake. i’ve seen through all my travels pots supreme. pots not at all like my front pot, my pot my mother filled with what she borrowed from the swamp.
i’ve seen pots that looked as if they belonged at versailles. and pots that would have fed an army, stuffed as they are with all the food groups, except for maybe steak and cheese.
i’ve seen pots that make me want to pull over to the curb, set up easel, start to squeeze my tubes of oily paint.
i’m telling you these pots redefine rococo.
and every time i see one i think, holy cow, how do they do it? do they have a little corner of the garage, just for all their pot accessories? do they haul home shopping carts, just to fill their pots? and how, i want to scream, do they get those itty-bitty eggplants to keep from falling off the gourds?
those are the thoughts, and the rat-a-tat of questions, that a simple brain might spew.
but nothing here is simple. and this is how i tripped upon the truth:
just the other afternoon, i traipsed down someone’s walk. i had something to drop off. i rang the bell. the man of the house pulled back the door. wow, those pots are really something, i exclaimed, pointing to a pair piled high with kale, and chili peppers, pumpkins and some squash that could have used a visit to the dermatologist, what with all its many warts.
“oh, that’s the pot lady,” he said, not knowing that he’d slipped, divulged a deep dark whisper, the sort that draws a line ’tween us and them.
“she’s like a fairy,” he chirped, confirming my suspicions about that there curtain lady too. “i think she comes in the middle of the night, takes the pots, brings ’em back, looks like art.”
uh huh, i mumbled, backing off the stoop. i wanted out of there before he realized his grave error. he’d let me in on a big fat secret, a secret kept from those of us who for whatever reason haven’t made the grade.
had the lady of the house been home i am 117-percent certain she would have said, “why, thank you,” when i said the pots were something. she’d have kept a lid on full disclosure. she’d have known i didn’t know the password for admission to the pot club.
but now i know. and now i’m not so giddy. i am lurking, skulking, tree to tree. i am thinking there are other secrets i don’t know, here, where pots are perfect.
i remember now how when i mow the lawn, push my little roto-blades, the ones that make the clip-clip sound, a purr, i like to think, how odd it was when the lady down the block came to tap me on the shoulder, ask, as if i were a species near extinct, if i found delight in cutting grass? or did i merely like the taste of sweat?
she’d not seen in years, she said, someone inclined to cut her own. my mother, too, says cars come to a crawl when she is out doing her yard work. she digs in mud, hauls a bush from here to there, because she likes it, frankly. can’t imagine not doing it. where’s the joy, she asks, in pawning off the job?
apparently, we are of the lineage that is losing ground. we are of a mind to do the work our very selves.
but now i see that there’s a downside. your pots look like, well, they’ve been standing in the rain, making lunch for squirrels, and your neighbors down the block appear as if they’re in the running for ol’ martha’s glossy spread.

i do believe this to be a quirk of my corner of the world. or have you spied the handiwork of someone like the pot lady? do you find yourself in the dark, sometimes, not knowing all the secrets? what jobs do you like to do all on your own, when all the world is calling in the experts?

oh, we’ve always dabbled. cracked the occasional egg. picked the shells out of the bowl of orbiting yolks before they got in the brownies, down the throat, into a cranny where they might not be welcome.
we’ve supplied little hands with cutters. watched dough turn to abstract-art cookie. we have certainly poured sauce from a jar to a pile of cherry garcia. made concoctions that started with yogurt, but then took a turn, a sharp one, that resembled a goo–a primordial swamp, maybe–that you’d not want to spoon on your innocent tongue, your tongue that did nothing to deserve such a lashing.
but until now we’ve not had reason to put syllabus to the science of measuring, mixing, making what passes for rations.
good thing, though, i travel through life with a phalanx of sensible folk. they keep me in line. tie me down like gulliver and all of those wires. (i remember distinctly the drawing from long long ago, of the very big traveller ensnared with dozens of cables, courtesy of the little people in the land of faraway lilliput.)
i’ve an old old friend from the news biz, you see, and she now makes a living wholly in kitchens. at the moment she cooks at the right hand of that fellow who’s made quite a name taking mexican food to very high art. he has cookbooks galore, and a tv show too. you might know his name; it rhymes sort of with payless.
but long ago, when i went to a newsroom each day, my friend typed just over the wall of the cubicle that backed up to mine. mostly because i happened to sit–a mere accident on the seating chart, i assure you–next to what’s called the test kitchen. so my friend jean marie, decked out in her apron over working girl clothes, cooked a little, typed a little, perfuming the room with eau de onions and garlic.
as a matter of fact, in the first weeks after my wedding, that dear blessed soul supplied me with nightly lessons on how to get food to the table.
now she’s back writing again. a dalliance i suppose. since she’s busy cranking out cookbooks, jetting all over the globe.
and she wrote, not long ago, that it is imperative children learn to feed their sweet selves. or else, she warns, they’ll starve off in college.
she lays out five easy pieces.
read recipe, gather ingredients, make sure teaspoon does not turn into tablespoon is class no. 1.
next, boil water. three, preheat the oven. and learn how to wait till it’s really, truly hot enough to roast a fat hen. four, she insists, is fry a potato. five, scramble eggs.
you’ll never go hungry is her sensible motto, what with those little tricks in your pocket. you can fill up from sun-up to sundown, day after day, if you don’t mind a perpetual run of eggs and pasta and a hunk of some bird.
i’m not so ambitious. i started my boys with toast. how to, the verb. how not to set thin slabs of bread to smoking the kitchen.
i skipped over boiling; visions of saints and sinners dunked in cauldrons of bubbling solutions might have steered me away. (i’m telling you, catholic school fills a head with colorful pictures.)
in our defense, eggs a la hot sauce was long long ago a weekly adventure for boy no. 1. like some sort of astronaut launching toward space, he cleared the deck of our old maple island, lined up his beakers and flasks, and had at it, following religiously every step of dear mollie katzen’s “honest pretzels” (a fine children’s cookbook, one i would recommend) prescription for plain scrambled eggs.
i’ve not seen those eggs, though, since he needed a stool to see over the counter.
hmm. maybe it’s my fault; i have been accused of babying my boys. maybe ouef a la neuf, served on doily-draped trays, as i puff up their pillows in their beds in the morning, is, i admit, just a little too much.
but after reading my friend, i stepped up to the cutting board. we got serious. filled in the blank spots in their schooling. which means i tried to teach boiling.
the stove, there, got in the way. see, we have a model that belongs in a fire house, or maybe a diner. just yesterday, in fact, the lovely people who make it informed me i shouldn’t have it here in my house. i might want to sell it on ebay, they kindly suggested. seems the level of flames on a commercial old stove could singe the hairs off the arms of a child. even a child who’s not yet a saint.
so for now, we are skipping that lesson, taking the fast track straight onto roasting. but then again, that nasty hot oven might singe some more hairs, so maybe we’re back to a refresher in eggs.
the little one, though, has his own kitchen plan. he would like to start and stop in the dessert dept. he thinks pie a la mode is the height of his reach. thinks it will put him through at least community college.
he suggests whipped cream–how to push down the nozzle, squirt a spiraling blob–makes for a sensible next step.
the boy, basically, is rewriting the cooking school curriculum. back on the day he enrolled, he leapt straight into lemony squares. found the dusting of powdery sugar a climatological trick he’d not tire of, as long as it coated his tummy, his tongue, and half of the kitchen. why bring out the snow shovel, please.
next day after school, he enlisted his grammy to teach him the fine points of making that pie. the filling, he learned, comes from a can. the strips you make with a wheel zoomed through some stuff that comes in a package. how thoughtful, he thought, for some faraway stranger to go to the trouble of starting his pie.
criss-crossing the crust did get a bit tangled. but oh, well. at worst, he discovered, you just lick the canned goo off your pinkie and thumb.
i though am worried. unless we kick it all up a significant notch, we are destined to a long life of eggs ala tabasco, polished off with a spinning case of desserts that might never stop spinning.
it is not, not at all, what my friend had in mind when she insisted we head off to school there in the kitchen.
but at least we’ll be fed. and no one will starve off in a dorm with a bunk and a keyboard, and our own personal requisite: the wheel that makes highways of pie crust.
i can’t imagine a single professor who wouldn’t trade lattice-top pie ala mode for a pass on a paper turned in a day or two late.

what essential lessons would you count in your cooking school? have you already tried the fine art of teaching your children to fend for themselves? who taught you? what are your most unforgettable kitchen triumphs or fallen souffles?

while the rest of me is not so, i would have to say my eyes are rather loose. yes, i mean it that way. quick to fall in love. fall hard. not let go.
hmm. i suppose the psychiatrist would say obsessed. but not in any dangerous way, so don’t be worried.
what happens to me might happen to you, might be the thing that drives the world’s economy. or the western world’s. certainly the half that is amazingly astonishingly acquisitive.
what happens is something like this: there i am flipping along the pages of some obscure publication, say the thos. moser cabinetmakers catalog that comes a couple times a year. i am minding my own business, turning pages of chairs and tables i might never afford. and then a little something calls out to me, catches my loose eye. i am struck. and stuck.
i think that thing, say the cobalt-blue glass chandelier dangling up above, is the loveliest thing i’ve ever seen. i immediately transport it in my mind, see it hanging right there above the table where we partake of all our not-so-ordinary meals.
i decide, especially when i see it’s not for sale, it is a thing i have to have. i weigh the one i have and the one i’ve no idea how to find, and, hands down, i am yearning for the one that’s hard-to-get. (note the pattern here, i think to self, between the objet of my deep desire in the housewares dept., and the unrequited loves that gobbled up so many gosh-darn years in my distant past.)
i do believe it’s the chase that thrills me, but also some romantic notion of all the many meals forever dappled in that cobalt light.
the chandelier that hangs there now has never been a one that stirs me. if it’s brass, and it might be, it’s a tinge too greenish-brownish, too blkhh, for my own taste. it’s one of the leftovers that comes with buying an old house. it might be the one the doctor’s wife, half a century ago, thought was vogue. (and she might be the same one who liked the godawful orange-brown tile that steamrolled straight across the kitchen floor and halfway up the walls.)
i never knew cobalt glass could be bent and blown to hold up lights. oh goodness, i am enchanted.
and i have friends, it turns out, far wilier than me. which is how i got to here, completely hooked and deep in pursuit of deep blue light. light i’m now convinced i need.
turns out my friend elizabeth is a tried-and-true accomplice. she tracks down trinkets for her day job. so when i showed her the page above, she set to work. i didn’t even ask. she called moser, talked her way to someone in the know, asked where the dangly thing was from, then called the little shop in somewhere maine. it was an antique shop, and the chandelier was sold. dang. and what a price. a price you would not believe. not nearly what a chair from moser costs. which means i might afford that cobalt light.
if only i can track it down. and believe you me, i will try.
i once drove halfway through the night to a man i’d never met, because he had a bench with birdhouse arms and back. for all i knew, he could have been the boston strangler. ah, but we are blind in hot pursuit.
i’ve spent days tracking just the schoolhouse clock i’d set my sights upon. would not let go, like some mad bulldog.
what intrigues me here is how we fill our homes with points of fancy, points of light, that speak to us as if possessed. we are driven towards beauty, towards comfort. we are nesting, all the time. it is as if we can’t pull the blanket tight enough. we are ever searching for the perfect feather to soften, to lighten, to tweak a mood.
it might be some old chair you discovered in a garbage dump, or a birdhouse fallen in the scrub. or it might be cobalt glass you sniff out across the country.
we are, all of us, simply hauling home a whole collection of things that speak to us, not unlike filling pockets with gold and scarlet leaves when walking through an autumn woods.
for those of us prone to daydreams, for those of us with deep domestic roots, it is not about living in a movie-ready set. it is something wholly deeper. it is real, for starters. we build cottages in the woods, or turrets on a mountain, because we are living out a story. each day, a page. a book we simply can’t put down.
we are stepping into something once-upon-a-time. but it’s not make-believe. it is true, and it is this: we live aswirl in light and color. patterns, textures stoke our rich imagination.
we feel a tingling down our spine, just by curling in a red-checked chair. we exhale when we finally make it through the door, lay our weary head on antique lace we discovered in a musty drawer.
the world is brutal, cold and mean. the homes we make are the patchwork quilt, the potbelly stove, the gentle ticking heart that keeps us safe inside.
which sometimes means we are destined for a wild goose chase.

have you trekked mountains, or continents in hot pursuit of some fine thing, some thing you determined you had to have, for cockamamie reasons? do you have adventures of which to tell, the sort that had you chasing after certain chairs, or plates, or rug, or colors for your wall? do tell. it’s a fine day for feeling cozy at the table….

i come from a long line of cheaters.
it’s true. long ago i learned that a snowfall of sugar atop a freezer-case pie, makes it a cinch to pretend that you just hoisted the dome of flour and lard straight off the so-called pastry board. cinnamon on jar applesauce approximates authenticity. hard-cooked eggs sliced, pin-wheeled around the deli potato salad–ditto.
parsley and paprika, perhaps, a cheater’s best friend.
i believe it was my grandmama who first taught me the art. a fine catholic woman, a woman who said her rosary, pinned the veil to her head before walking to church, she thought nothing of cranking open a half dozen cans of reese’s potato salad, dumping into a bowl the size of a sink, then getting to work.
hard-cooked eggs; check. parsley she tucked in little bouquets, or sprinkled like so much mown grass. paprika, somehow, signed off the deal, sealed the lid on the notion that from peeling to boiling to slicing and mixing, not a soul knew the shortcut that lurked in the pantry.
my mama picked up the curriculum with mrs. smith’s hot apple pie. she taught me the sneak peek over the shoulder, make sure no one’s looking, then lunge for the sugar bowl. dip spoon and tap in soft little drifts that disguise the factory origins.
and so, living up to my dishonest roots, i carried on yesterday noon in a way that would make them both proud. i was bushed and exhausted, for starters. but seeing as i’d left them all in a lurch over the weekend, had jetted off to the desert, left them to fend for themselves at a.) a pancake house for friday night dinner, b.) a chicken shack for saturday dinner, and lord knows what in between, it seemed we needed what the commercials of old called a good square meal (where the geometry comes in purely escapes me).
poor boys, inhaling all of those triglycerides and trans fatty acids, what they could use was a mama to stoke them with slow-cooked deliciousness.
or at least that was the aspiration.
the reality fell something short.
it was the pie that i spied that got me to cheatin’. there in its plain cardboard box, on the shelf where the cheater pies squat, it couldn’t have feigned any more innocence. all it was was a crust and a heap of squash innards. the squash of the season, of course, la pumpkin. but there was a sheen, and a barely burned crust.
why it looked as if i’d done it myself, let it go just a minute or two too long in the oven. mais, parfait.
not wanting it squished i tucked it under the cart, down where the toilet paper usually goes. i swear it was not that i was trying to hide my bakery debauchery.
once home, i found the sweet scalloped stand that makes every baked thing an occasion. i tucked it off in the corner, feeling so smug that at the end of the dinner, at the end of a very long day, i could saunter over to my pie-staging corner, lift, twirl, and present.
i’d say not a word about its provenance. fact, i found myself suddenly and wholly subscribing to the u.s. army’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell line of thinking.
it was all in pursuit of one simple thing: to wrap the meal and the day in that home-baked sense that there’s a someone who cares enough about you to sift, roll and swear at the bits of the pastry that stick to the counter.
i do think it worked. as a matter of fact, the little one invited a friend to come just for the pie.
turns out i did not have to lie. no one asked, i didn’t tell. all they cared was could i please cut them seconds.
i felt my grandma swellin’ inside my ol’ cheatin’ heart. last night i dreamed it was raining hard-boiled eggs, followed by downfalls of sugar.

do you too cheat in the kitchen? take shortcuts? legitimate sneaks through the alley? cough it up, spill the tricks i should know….

the sign didn’t wait. didn’t wait till i got home, shoved open the door, threw down my bags, ran poking my head into rooms, searching for the faces i’d missed so very much.
nope, the sign came to me. the sign, and the boys, and the hearts that it completely spelled out.
they were there in the driveway of a very old friend, a dear friend who shared a cab from the airport.
as the cab pulled close, i saw the old wagon, waiting there in the driveway. and then, before i could scramble to throw on my backpack, the one with the sign leapt from the door where the driver sits.
he just stood there, beaming, holding the sign for all the world to inhale. and i did, believe me. exhaled too, finally.
you see, i’d been holding my breath for weeks really. holding my breath for all sorts of reasons, not wanting to leave home in the first place.
but the minute my eyes, and my heart, took in that sign, i knew what i know more than anything else in the world: i was home, am home, completely home with a man, two boys, and a cat.
a man, by the way, who is 50, but not too old to walk down to the basement, dig into the art supply cupboard, haul out the markers, the poster, and put words and primitive art to paper.
how, i ask you, can a girl who’s been holding her breath so long and so deeply her lungs might cave in, not be over the moon for a man who pulls up to the kitchen table, sits like a schoolboy and scribbles orange squiggly sunshines? and not only one, but a perfectly matched set?
sometimes in the to and the fro of the everyday, in the tangled schedules, late trains, missed meals, you can forget, lose track, lose hold of that place in your heart that knows it has carved out a very safe home with a heart that now makes it whole.
but then, not too proud to stand in the driveway of strangers, the owner of heart up above leaps from the car, boldly takes hold of a sign he’s not shy to show.
we all melted. every one of us who saw him standing there.
it’s why, i would tell my dear friend looking for answers to why marry. it’s why i went for the free fall, into a place i didn’t know but trusted would make for safe landing.
and there he was, in the driveway, holding a sign, and once again and again, the landing was oh-so-safe, oh-so-soft, oh-so-sweet.
coming home, i realize, can only happen by going away. you only can feel the cushion of sinking back into softness if you’ve left in the first place.
it is not a bad thing, not at all, to look in the eyes of the one you so love. to see his hand all over the silly stick drawings. to take in the orange and the blue and the green of the crayola washable markers.
thing is, we often make signs around here. we are a sign-making family. and a note-leaving one too. before leaving i’d tucked notes, like autumn leaves on a sidewalk, all over the house. wherever i thought they might peek, i’d left a post-it. in the fridge. in the pantry. on pillows. under pillows. even in a soccer shoe.
it is a sweet thing to be in the business of leaving word trails, and welcome home signs. to tell the ones who you love, in all sorts of colors and scribbles, that the words that are put onto paper are the words that spill from a heart that knows the unshakable truth: you are home in a place where the people you love can’t keep from spelling it out.

this is late this morning, so sorry. fact is, this landing was not only safe but exhausting. while i settle in, tell me a tale, if you have one, of sweet homecomings of which you’ve been a part. bless you to every one of you who crossed fingers, whispered a prayer for a safe and a solid return. xoxo

i checked the bylaws. nowhere in the constitution of parenting does it say that l’il mamas are decreed to stay by the sides of the wee ones.
well, here’s a confession then: i stuck anyway. yup. here i am, mother of 14-year-old, mother of 6-year-old, and today, for the very first time, i step on a plane, wave adios out the window.
cumulatively, and for effect, i think i can wring that to seem i’ve not been away in two decades of parenting. not flown away. i did have that little road trip to pick up the limping-along camper, back in the summer. and i have had a few spells in a hospital, that luxury inn that includes railroad-track stitches in its special spa package.
but on a plane, looking out over clouds? without refereeing who sits by the window, who sits in the middle? just moi and a book? for four hours? you’ve got to be utterly kidding.
now the other side of that dizzying equation, of course, is that if i’m leaving the boys, the boys then are home without me. (i was always something of a whiz when it came to those flip-flop properties–transitive, commutative, and all their switching-around cousins. and, besides, who’d miss a chance to show off the sharp edge of her sorting-out skills?)
the prospect of three boys (one, technically a man, another technically close) alone in a house with a stove, a drawer full of knives, and a smoke alarm that’s, well, fidgety, might make for a, um, fidgety mama.
me? n-n-n-noooo. n-not at-t-t all.
there arises then, a bit of a quandry, the sort that some of us mamas love to chew, like trident till it tastes like leftover unscented rubber.
do i leave said boys to fend wholly for their sweet little selves? do i throw bag in the cab, bid them adieu, and think not another disjointed thought for three days?
or do i do what many a mama has done–i’ve seen it myself, yes i have–where she maps out each and every minute of each and all possible manipulations of time, space and energy, too?
i’ve heard reports of color-coded manuals, flip charts, bar graphs. heck, maybe by now some mama somewhere’s whipped up a power point. complete with background thrashing. and clanging of pots and pans. just so no one gets homesick, i’m sure.
i’m tellin’ you, the life some of these mamas are leading makes for very thick mapping. depending on degree of control of the one who most often pushes the dishwasher ON button, there is no end to the spelling out of all sorts of no-budge items on the family agenda.
“be at 41.86 N latitude, 87.68 W longitude at 1818, greenwich mean time. not one minute late,” a type triple-AAA might insist in her typically overwrought way. (whereas you might say simply, “be in chicago, 6ish.”)
indeed, handing off the lives of the little ones is no simple task in the houses of mothers whose minivans zoom infinite laps in perpetual marathons, each beepin’ day.
lucky for me, i drive an old wagon and it sits at the curb, idle, for hours on end. days, even. we’ve not yet gotten with the overdrive program.
so of course, given the latency of our ho-hum, mid-lane life, i opted for a handoff somewhere cozily in the middle.
they–that would be the boys–got one typed sheet. three days bulleted. a line or two (like don’t forget the water bottle for soccer) got emblazoned in bold. sort of like nagging in print, i suppose.
i stocked the fridge with all the essentials: milk by the gallon; oj; challah; cherry garcia; chicken breasts; cherry garcia; stouffer’s mac-n-cheese, garcia again.
what else could they possibly need? they know my cell phone. i just have to remember to pack the recharger.
but, jeez, i really do think, by now, after peeking over my shoulder for all of these combined 20 years, you would think they’ve got the idea. think there’s a bit of a rhythm even they grasp: get up, eat, play, eat, play, eat, play, go to bed.
whatever, however, those details are blurred, stumbled over, done in their very own way, will be their business to know, mine to salute.
it is really a mighty fine lesson in just letting go. the house will still stand. the dishes will be there, sticky with chocolatey cherries perhaps. but nothing that cannot be scrubbed.
the weekend is theirs to frolic, and do as they please. i’ll get reports, i am certain, of just how exotic it was to do it their way.
as for me, i will miss them terribly. wholly. completely. they are, more than even i know, my ballasts. they keep me afloat. keep me, some days, from taking on water.
i can’t quite imagine a plane without them nearby. can’t remember what it is to not see the light in their eyes as we squeeze hands for take-off and landing.
i guess, in the end, the truth of this tale is that each of us, in our very own way, must put a toe in the water of winging it all on our own. it’s not a bad thing to try on for size the world without the ones we assume, day after day, will be there to breathe the same air, to know the steps of a dance that all of us dance, without instruction.
just so, at the end, we can fall back onto each other. can hear the sound of our laughing. as we tell the stories of the world as it washed over and over us, on the days when we winged it alone.

late breaking report: i just said goodbye to boy no. 1. that wasn’t so hard. it’s the one up in bed still. the one who still squeezes my hand as we walk down the street. the one who has tagged along every trip to the place where i’m going. he was there when we rushed out for a funeral. he was there when we went shortly after, to fill the house of my brother with sound other than that of a heart that was broken, was spilling. today i head out to a wedding. that very same brother, once lost and alone, is now brimming with joy. we couldn’t all get there, so i go alone. carrying all of us very much in my heart.

see you monday, cross your fingers….

oh, no. it wasn’t that knock at the door. the kind that has your heart in your throat, your middle-of-the-chest muscle galloping like some sort of a horse making tracks out of the pasture.
this was the humdrum, there-you-are-trying-to-return-to-the-business-at-hand, the-business-of-living-your-life, shoving-your-worries-aside. it was that sort of a tap-tap-tap at the door.
truth was, before you heard the tappety-tap, you weren’t really doing such a fine job of pretending. pretending all in your life was just fine, peachy, swell, pick your positive adjective.
oh, no, but you were duly going through the motions. typing your sentences. looking up spellings. heck, you even remembered to call for the oven repairman.
ahh, but your friends are the smart sort. they know trouble when they smell it. they know the days when you should not be alone.
so they come a-callin’. they come, uninvited but thoroughly oh-my-gosh so very welcome.
they tap-tap at the glass. you drop what you’re doing, or pretending you’re doing. and you hop, skip and leap to the door.
there, in her golden-haired beauty, for instance, is one of your friends who you think is an angel. and you mean a real one. not a nice person masquerading as angel. but a real, certifiable, straight-from-the-cumulus-clouds sort of angel. her driver’s license probably has clues. like maybe her birthdate is all zeroes. hmm. that would certainly suggest otherworldliness.
so anyway, there she is. standing there, beaming. she has come with a trail from her garden. at first you don’t see the abundance. at first you see only one beautiful vase. a blue-and-white porcelain cup spilling with snapdragons, the last from her garden, she tells you. and as you are busy sticking your nose in the posies, she pivots and swoops to the ground.
there you see, a whole parade of posies in a charming collection of vases. there are soda bottles from which zinnias emerge, like red-and-white painted antennae. and a fat squat pitcher of zinnias in every imaginable color.
you stand there melting, you do. because this friend of yours has gone to the trouble of clearing her garden, scrounging up portable watering holes, and steered miles and miles out of her way. just because she smelled trouble. and she would not leave you to suffer alone.
now, depending on the day, suffering for all of us can come in 101 forms. it might be a child we’re losing sleep over. it might be a friend down the block who’s acting bizarrely. it might be some faraway drama that’s churning our tummy. it might just be that we’ve a touch of the flu.
and then, if we’re blessed–mightily, wholly, supremely blessed–we’ve a whole army of warriors who do not leave us alone, writhing out on the battlefield.
they come, like the cavalry, to our rescue. they are there at the door with their pluckings, their stews in a pot. they are on the telephone, checking in, offering wisdom. they send prayers, strong ones. the ones that leave smoke in their trail.
but the point is, no matter the solace, they’ve not left us to wither. they offer their hearts, considerable acreage there, let me tell you. they offer their intellectual muscle.
i’m just saying that on the days when you’ve reached the end of your rope. on the days when you think you are through. finished. kaput. that’s when God sends in the troops.
that’s when in the form of a red-and-white zinnia, now poking its nose in the air beside this here computer, someone divine comes in to prop up your parts that are drooping.
that’s when, in the soup that you spoon in your tummy, you are stocked not just with vitamins but the stuff of a friendship that some days feels like the difference between living and dying.
it’s not easy, not in these action-packed days, for anyone to shove aside errands, redirect routes from point A to point F. but even–especially–in a world where so very much is so very virtual, there are some sounds that still speak to our heart in ways we’ll never forget.
the sound of a rap at the door is one of the loudest there’ll ever be.
it’s the sound, so help me God, of the Divine One making a housecall.

may you all be so blessed, and i know that you are, to have a friend ride to your rescue. the mission needn’t be fancy. sometimes all it takes is a hug and the tears and the laughter that come, there on the stoop, or pulled up to the kitchen counter. this world here at pull up a chair, we are all about circling the wagons. taking the time. extending the hand. reminding each and every sometimes-aching, broken one of us: we can’t do this alone. we’re in it together. there are humps and bumps in the road. and God gave us two legs, so when one is limping, we could lean on the other. same thing with our hearts. only with hearts, we need to borrow from friends….
tell a story, if you care to, of a knock that came to your door when you needed it most, or only a little…

and even though she’s not here anymore, happy birthday to great grandma syl, the best adopted grandma a girl ever had. she once brought me a brisket in a suitcase from florida, just so she could teach me how to really feed her no. 1 grandson, the boy who’d become my no. 1 mate.

i’d been wandering by for days. ignoring. thinking it might go away. stop misbehaving.
it had gotten to sending out shoots, trying to trip me. then, shoots on top of shoots, tangled. trying to trap me.
it was a garden gone mad. and it demanded attention. the black-eyed susans were black, all right. desiccated is more likely the word. the goldenrod, one of the weeds i pretend, for now, is a perennial, just lay there. draped, theatric. the fair maiden who’d been slain and fallen on top of the stage. probably let out a wail, had i been listening. one certain to rustle attention. only i must have been off cleaning my clippers.
and then the roses. thorny old things, willing to hurt if you let them. they’d let go of petals, one by one lazy one. rather stark, or maybe poetic, the way they stood there disrobing, dropping their skirts to the ground.
and then, in a fit of the autumn pretending it’s summer, i succumbed. got down on my hands and my knees. started to tend to the garden of my discontent. did the thing the black susans were begging for–i cut off their heads.
goldenrod too. i cut and i cut and i cut. i tried to bring form to the disheveled masses of summer gone limp, gone dark, gone gaga.
and the whole time i employed my trusty ol’ clippers, my felco no. 2s with the oversized mandible and the appetite that cannot be sated, i whispered the words of my promise.
next year, my sweet, i said to the buck-naked rose. next year i will give you attention. lavish you. feed you bonbons, if that’s what you want.
the dregs of the delphinium, failed experiment no. 4, i took by the neck and i tugged. serves me right, i couldn’t help thinking. i barely tend her at all.
these past few years, what with all the hammering and sawing and nailheads flying like hail, i’ve been rather a recalcitrant gardener, which might be a too-kind diagnosis. my garden might call me a wretch.
this past year, for instance, i did next to nothing in my perennial patch. oh, i watched the poppies come up, go limp. fall this way and that, as if some raccoon was using them as a mattress in the deep and the dark of the night.
i watched the meadow rue go mad. boisterous ol’ stalker. just pushes and shoves, makes its own path. cares not a whit if it does in the chives, bamboozles the basil.
if not for the old faithfuls, the black-eyed susan, the yarrow, the rose, i’d have had nothing but failure heaped upon failure.
see, you can’t wholly ignore the patch of the world you claim as your garden. there are citizens–a.k.a. weeds–seething to trespass. give ‘em an inch, they’ll take the whole plot. and creep into the brick walk besides.
it’s just that, well, this ol’ patch of suburbia is not quite the quaint little garden i had tucked back at my old house, my city house. there, i did petit point (teeny tiny stitches in a teeny tiny canvas). and i did it quite well. i had small little trees. curlicue bushes that to this very day i so miss. i had thyme tucked between stepping stones. i had a so-called water element. (that’s garden talk for a makeshift fountain that made the requisite dribbly sound.)
it was my first garden, and thus my first love.
i carried a few bits of it up here to this sprawling (by comparison) plot. but it’s just not the same. and i’ve not sunk my soul–not yet anyway–into this fine patch of earth.
oh, i’ve dabbled. gone through the motions. but it hardly speaks to me other than to yell at me, scold me, remind me i am doing a terrible job keeping up with mrs. nelson, just down the block.
now she is a gardener. she is out there in moonlight. her knees are muddy more often than not. yet her garden is not some manicured thing. just a well-loved one that seems to swoon, puff up its chest, whenever she’s out there. which, i swear, is practically always.
and so, once again, the garden i disregard stands ready to teach me, to offer forth truths if only i would get down on my hands and my knees, pay it some mind.
it’s been ignored long enough. like the beleaguered baseball fans now packing up dreams, i look to next year.
next year no hammers will pound. next year no bent nails will rain on my yard.
next year, i make sense of my garden. and plant it with plenty of heart.
it’s not a bad thing to admit your short-fallings. not a hard thing when they try to trip you each time you haul out the garbage.
there are pockets of our lives that we just cannot get to. so we hobble along. we cut back. we do what we can. we make promises, but only the ones we intend to keep. we sink our hopes into second chances. and third. and fourth. and fifth.
the garden is willing. it patiently waits. it forgives in abundant bouquets. all it asks is a chance to break through the earth, to lift up its heads, to drink, to bask in the light.
and come january, the catalogs once again will spill from the mail slot. and i can start plotting my promise.

do you have perennial hopes for some chunk of your life you do want to get to? do you get tangled in the reminders that you’ve not yet done so? are you able to find the beauty in the promise not yet fulfilled?

and speaking of mrs. nelson, that heavenly gardener, it’s her birthday today. for all the beauty she plants, in her patches of earth, or her kinder garten, or just my own heart, blessings my friend. and thank you.

i remember the lemon-poppyseed scones. i remember tucking cellophane just under the edge of the plate. i remember the phone ringing, thinking nothing of it. i remember the voice.
on the other end of the line, there was a woman i didn’t know. she had my son, she was telling me. they’d found him. lying under his bike on the trail where he’d gone, just an hour or two earlier. a crisp autumn day, columbus day. a day when a boy and a bike saw nothing but promise and a golden-leafed trail that seemed not to end.
i remember the woman, a mother she told me, she said he was fine. but really, she urged, i ought to come get him. ought to come now.
so i did. not any more worried than a mama set out to pick up a boy with very skinned knees.
i remember pulling into the train station lot, where we’d agreed they would bring him. i remember the moment when my brain fell apart. when what i was seeing and what i had heard no longer matched up. there was a child quite bloodied, an arm held at the oddest of angles. and once he knew i was there, moaning i’ll never forget.
i remember driving and shaking. i remember trying to stay calm. i remember him asking, “mom, am i going to die?” i remember the wails, muffled, and trying to be brave, from the little one i’d strapped in the back, long long before, back when we’d thought this was just an unscheduled errand suddenly stuck in the day.
i remember the alarm with which we were met at the hospital door. i remember a stretcher, a head board, being whisked down the hall.
i remember the fingers of the little one, clawing my chest. holding on for dear life. and then some.
i remember how we all laughed when the boy taped to a stretcher, the boy who’d been out like a light, then foggy and blurred, suddenly perked, “oh, i remember. it was a chipmunk.” a chipmunk, it seems, had darted, and the boy on the bike had swerved, hit a pile of leaves and gone flying, face first over the handlebars, smack into the asphalt-paved trail.
i remember, not long after, after much peering under sheets, asking the boy to squeeze, to wiggle, to push as hard as he could, i remember the doctor with the boots and the gold dangly bracelet.
i remember the words: “we have a window, an eight-hour window, and we need to move now.”
i remember the electricity in the room suddenly changing. and every conceivable hope being sucked down some hole in the hard-tiled floor.
the neck of the boy that i love was broken. less than a fraction of an inch from the cord in his spine. his feet were tingling, were numb, were losing their muscle. so were his arms.
there was talk, insistently, urgently, of mega-dose steroids. and airlifts and scans to look into that place where the nerves run, where the thoughts are sent down the tubular highway. where a crack in the pathway spells out disaster.
not long after, when a one-hour scan turned into a three-hour scan and the technician who’d peered in through the MRI screens didn’t realize his whispers were heard by me, the mother standing just around the corner, right by her child, there were 45 minutes when we thought the news was impossibly bad.
when it seemed the crack ran through the cord. when i stood and i paced in my clogs. rewriting the script of our life.
only 10 days later did we see, in a black-and-white image, how close we had come. and then the words of the neurosurgeon, telling us what would have been had the crack in the vertebrae jiggled just one tiny bit: “quadriplegia.”
not one of those limbs, not even a finger, moving again.
no wonder each blessed time i see those strong legs, or those hands twice as long and as wide as the ones that once held him, once nursed him, once cradled him wherever i went, no wonder i whisper a prayer of deepest thanksgiving.
today is the day, the warm autumn monday, when our world brushed terribly close to disaster. to a life i could barely imagine.
we escaped by a hair’s breadth. that crack in his cervical spine was as close as the distance it takes to spell out this word, to the unparalleled bundle of nerves that controls every move, every flinch, every breath in his body.
it is impossibly hard, just one year to the day after the fact, not to feel the hairs on my own back standing at serious attention. it is hard not to walk in his room, run my hands over those toes dangling well over the end of his bed.
next year i might not retell the story quite so vividly. i might forget the poppyseed scones. might not remember every red light of the ambulance ride.
but for a very long time, i think, columbus day, that october monday when school is closed and bike trails are scattered with leaves, i will keep my own private vigil.
will mark the day, at least in my mind.
we all have days we’ll not soon forget, days whose details only fade over time. days we mark rather alone. days not sealed with a cake. or candles. or even a prayer shared aloud wherever we pray.
they are the days that belong in our own private shadow box. the day of a miscarriage. the day our mother stood at the sink, and mentioned in sort of a whisper, something about a tumor, and how it’s malignant, an oh-by-the-way that leaves you gasping for air. the day we buried a stringbean of a baby whose DNA had been horribly scrambled.
the day our firstborn fell off his bike, nearly was sentenced to an immobile life.
they are the days that rewrite the scripts of our lives, that for a spell bring on the gloom and the heartache. but that don’t forever twist the plot. they are the days, the moments, that add shadow and depth to our story. but don’t blacken it. eclipse whatever comes next.
we recover. move on. put one foot in front of the next. but the story lingers. it fades slowly. it lasts long enough to remind us something or someone we love was lost, or nearly lost. and what wasn’t lost is held dearer, closer than ever.
we mark the days in ways only we might notice. we open a book. run our hand over words etched in a moment of heart-piercing sorrow. lift the lid of a box. pick up the white plastic square that once told us we were having a baby.
or we walk in the room of a sleeping manchild. we tickle his foot. watch it flinch, jerk, pull under the sheet. and we stand there marveling. imagining if it had never once flinched again.
we stand there, for a moment, on the morning of the day a whole long year later, and we thank God for the ticklish toes. and the whole rest of the story that ended so blessedly whole.
amen.

do you have days that you’ll not forget? did it ache to mark it alone? or did you relish the remembering? do you marvel at the healing power of time, how the sharp edge of a story softens, and only the few strong paint strokes remain on the canvas? how do you mark the days you won’t forget?

i must add one thing: because of the boy whisked by ambulance from the ER near here to the children’s hospital downtown, to the ICU, where they poked him with half a dozen IVs, there came to my bedside a gentle-faced woman who said she was the chaplain on call. we dove deep into sacred conversation. she brought me a carton of milk, and a blanket. she whispered a prayer over the bloodied, broken body of the boy who still managed to smile. that chaplain, through a long series of links, is today one of the most sacred souls in my life. you read her here often. she is slj, and she came into my life on the day that could have been a disaster. God works in mysterious ways. and for that, i want to say thank you. and to slj, you brought so much more than sustenance and comfort in the form of milk and a blanket. you bring, every time we share words or thought or a piece of our hearts, food that will feed me forever. and you wrap me in a cloth that can only be divinely woven.