pull up a chair

on a day when the sun, i swear, was trying to make soup out of candles, i wandered off to a garden. a locked garden. a garden you need to get into through the swift punching of buttons in a particular order. and then through a lock and a key on your particular plot.
it wasn’t my garden. i don’t have to lock what i grow. but my old friend irene does. she locks what she grows back by the gravel yard, back where the garbage once rose, in the old city dump. back where when she first started digging, 35 years ago, she dug into radiators and stove parts, old shoes and tin cans.
“pure gray clay, two feet deep, and that’s how i met my first chiropractor,” says irene, who is 80 next week. irene, who lives in public housing. irene, whose father, long ago, invented a kind of a camera, a swell camera, one with bellows and a really fine german lens. a camera that bought them a penthouse and three live-in maids. but then the depression came, the family split up. irene moved with her mother to a cold-water flat.
ever since, irene has been using that gene from her father, the inventing gene, to never take no for an answer, to think and to think and come up with ingenious devices. ways to get around all sorts of obstacles.
ways to grow gardens on dumps.
you should see what she grows there: comfrey and gooseberries, butternut squash, and a squash from somewhere in asia. she can’t remember. korean yellow watermelon and amaranth that’s purple, russian seaberries and fennel and even plain old tomatoes. okra and jerusalem artichoke. globe artichoke, too. red currants and asparagus and some italian zucchini, called zuccetta rompicanti–or trombone squash–that the nasty old squash borer, a pest if ever there was one, leaves all alone.
her plot, by the way, is maybe the size of two double beds. she grows so much that over the years she’s had to splurge and rent her an annex of sorts. that’s another $55 a year, which for irene is rather a lot.
but she feeds herself for the whole year from the two little plots in the community garden. and these days she’s feeding the homeless as well, and that’s part of the reason i went off to see her. for my dayjob, you see, i’m telling that part of the story. (and, sorry, but you’ll have to wait.)
irene, who swims in the lake every morning, for years has ridden her bike to every starbucks around to pick up free grounds for her compost. she now makes a tea for her garden, mixing weeds–thistle and comfrey–and water, and letting it steep for 21 days, till its perfectly heady.
she read that in a magazine, one of her organic magazines. and she decided to follow the recipe. now, in a 54-gallon drum she recycled from somewhere, she keeps a tub brewing smack dab in the midst of her amaranth.
a young chemist, she explains, was hellbent on finding “some way to capture the goodness and essence of weeds,” to put it back in the garden.
irene, a disciple of any such thinker, is most pleased with the tea. thank goodness she didn’t ask me to sip some. irene is always sharing whatever comes from her garden. i would draw the line, though, at a bubbling brew in a recycled industrial vat. ykkh.
this year has been a rough one for irene. way back in the spring she took her first vacation in years. went out to california to stay with some friends, and came home with a wrenched knee from cross-country skiing. she couldn’t walk for nearly two months. had tears soaking her leathery, deeply-lined cheeks.
that set her back a few weeks when it came to getting her tomatoes in. and while she was gone, someone broke in her apartment. stole all her heirloom tomato seeds, her jeans, warm socks and two packets of beans.
not long after, out in the garden, someone up and dug up her raspberries. helped themselves. to a whole bush. two bushes, in fact. “they knew mine were the best,” she explains, matter-of-factly, almost proudly. without one drop of guile.
then the heat and the rains came. so too did the corn-root worm beetle, which did in her plain old american zucchini, and most of her cukes. and one night in august it dipped down to 50 degrees. that did in the basil.
“so it went into the compost,” says irene, over her shoulder, pushing a vine right out of the way.
nothing is ever a defeat in irene’s garden. she learns from every wrong turn, finds the triumph in experiments that you might call botched. she tries again. tries a new angle. keeps getting smarter, uncannier. and when all else fails, there’s always the compost pile.
pretty much, that’s the metaphor for her life. if she can’t get around the corn-root worm beetle, can’t stop a cold night, well then, it’s heave-ho to the compost.
ah, but that’s where her black gold comes. that’s where she throws down the dead stuff, waits for decay to draw out the life, so she can put her foot to her pitchfork and turn it back in. resurrection, quite plainly. she uses the velvety born-again soil to bless all that breaks through the earth, pushes clear to the sky, in her garden.
that’s what i love about irene. irene, who, by the way, puts in 10-hour days under the sun, plenty of days. four hours, she calls a short day. she never sits still because she is intent on coaxing the best from this earth, from this lifetime.
irene understands something essential, something worth learning. there’s not a day in her book, not an hour, that’s wasted. not, say, a recycled jungle gym that makes for a fine cucumber trellis. someone was throwing it out. it was rusty and bent, and tossed to the curb. she saw its beauty. possibility, too. she hauled it off to her garden. made it stand, proud and tall. now covered with curlicue tendrils and the start of a few baby cukes, it is irene at her best. it is stunning.
irene who has little is one of the richest women i know.
and that’s why i took you out to her garden today.

maybe some day when we all pull up chairs, irene can supply the tomatoes. or the italian zucchini. you would love her, her and her deep gravelly timbre. way before caller i.d. (which i have but don’t ever use), i knew it was irene on the line, because of the way she says, barbara. if i grew a garden of people, irene would be the vine that climbs over everything, stops at nothing, goes for the sky. and is breathtakingly lovely. do you have someone in your life who teaches you things worth putting on paper? lessons on making something from nothing? who is someone you’d grow in your garden?

most importantly, today is my big brother’s birthday. my california brother, the one who flies high for a living. the one who signs every letter and card, “blue skies.” that means way more than love to him. that means that’s where he goes to touch all the heavens. he’s a soul more at home in the sky than down on the ground. we all love him. so, happy birthday, uncle airplane. from us on the ground.

oh geez. i slept through the buzzer. i promised you, weeks ago, i would send out a certified letter when the season arrived, when the red tide was upon us. was drowning us. pouncing us. ripe on the vine.
oh geez. were you waiting? were you there at the table twiddling your thumbs? thinking, hmm, sure is getting late here? i could swear i smell that fruity tomato. sure looks like everyone else on the block is feasting. is drowning. where is that certified letter?
well, people, here it is.
it’s official: we are deep in the season we wait for. the one that covers the inside of our cheeks in canker sores.
yes, dang it, i’ve downed so many of those acid-y fruits i have spots all over the tender insides of my mouth. spots that shout, “ouch,” each time i bite in a ’mater. but never mind. never fear. the rest of my mouth shouts much louder. the tomatoes win every time.
i’ve got the whole rest of the year to heal those ridiculous spots. those spots that dare to protest at the volume, the quantity, the unending river of red that seems to run straight toward my mouth.
i eat them for breakfast and lunch and then dinner. i eat them all day in between. i believe you might call this a binge. but far as i know, it’s understandable. it makes seasonal sense.
it’s a binge that’s not secret and furtive at all. oh, heck, i am right out there, on the front stoop, i tell you, shlurping tomatoes. i’d shlurp down the highway, if i could hold onto the wheel and swipe juice from my chin.
that there is a problem. the one seasonal drawback. i’ve got tomatoey spots on most of my clothes now. on my shirts, on my shorts, even my clogs. good thing my skin doesn’t stain. i’d be red-faced, and not from the shame.
no shame about it.
i don’t know about you, but it seems that, like most addictions, i’ve sniffed out some partners in crime. i’ve a friend down the alley, she pops ’em like candy she says. and here’s the best part: she’s become my supplier.
she comes up the walk in the back, maybe so no one is watching. she carries a brown crinkled bag. it is bursting with all of the goods. she says not a word, just ferries the stash from her vines to my mouth.
she is sweet, and so is her produce.
she is near drowning this year. tried a new-fangled trick. laid red plastic–it has to be red, cannot be green or aqua or yellow–onto the soils below. a half dozen tomatoey bushes, each wearing a red shiny skirt. the other half are buck naked. just the soil, the vine, and the leaves. this is science, you know. one half’s control, the other is out into the future.
you’ll not be surprised to hear that the future is now, and it sure beats the past. three to one, by my count. by the most pregnant vines that are gestationally-challenged right now, that are drooping and bending and sagging under all of the weight. sort of like me, six years ago, in the ninth aching month.
yes, indeed, the future of growing tomatoes is spilling all over the alley. there is something about the red of the plastic, the way it reflects onto the vine that makes the little red fruits want to grow in stunning abundance. they cannot seem to contain themselves. it’s like someone flicked on a tomato machine.
the sweet things are poppin’ all over. the squirrels are having a picnic an hour. chipmunks too. and those of us neighbors, apparently, thankfully, who share a thing for Lycopersicon Lycopersicum–hmm, that sounds like tomato tomatoes to me, but that’s what the taxonomists call the fruit of our dreams.
perhaps my lack of imagination will show here. but i’m plumb running out of ways to consume them. i eat them as is, or sprinkled with sweet, syrupy, purple-y balsamic vinegar. (i have one select bottle at the back of the shelf, one lugged back from a friend’s trip to italy; i reserve it for this time of year. you’ll forgive me a bit of elitism, but the grocery-store variety balsamic just doesn’t come up to snuff. it does not cut the tomato.)
need i mention the salt and the pepper? that’s de rigeur. a tomato without salt is a tomato i might rather spit out.
it’s the twang of the salt and the sugar. it does a jiggity-jig on my tongue, down my throat, straight into my tum.
oh, boy, all this talk of tomatoes is making my tumbly quite rumbly, as dear old pooh likes to say. as we say around here.
i might have to run, have to pant to the kitchen. i hear the sweet fruit of september calling my name rather insistently.
here goes another shirt, sacrificed at the holy altar of Lyco whatever that was.

yo, people, i need help. i need ways to eat my tomatoes. i am not much of a canner, juicer, prairie girl. i am lacking those skills. i am more of a slice ‘em, dice ‘em, make a fine sauce. do you cook them with chicken? grill them? sign up here if you too are a card-carrying member of the not-so-secret tomato society. is this not yet another reason to savor september? any other seasonal thing you go quite so mad for? early asparagus maybe….

the advance scouts had gone out the night before. had gone out into the moonless pitch black.
well past bedtime in my book. in fact, i was in bed with a book when they called up the stairs, let me know they were off to the lake to see what they could see.
they came home to someone asleep on her book. i woke up to the scouting report that the moon was on late shift, the moon rose as they stood there. and it was a sight i needed to see. we needed to see, they decreed.
so it would be. the whole family, all day, planned for the moon rise there on the beach, over the lake, at the end of the way-too-short summer.
the little one, as always, was in charge of provisions. you never know how long the moon might keep you waiting. you might stir a hunger there on the cool night sand. so he packed us a bag–pepperidge farm cookies, cheese nips and animal crackers.
he thought of everything, the supply chief. there were flashlights in several sizes. and a basketball whistle. “in case we get lost,” came his perfectly sound explanation. he had seen my raised eyebrow, the look on my face that he must see quite often, in the lag before comprehension. sometimes us mamas are slow. so very slow. we need the most rudimentary tutorials. maybe a primer would help.
we’d checked the back page of the paper, the weather page, the one that narrowly loses to the sports page, when it comes to pages fought over. the moon, we were told, would be up at 10:02. we penciled it onto the calendar.
that morning, the morning of the trek to the moon, we happened to be out on the road, taking a drive across town. the little one looked out of his window, noticed the moon. still hanging. in broad daylight. it was 11 o’clock in the morning, and that moon was basically loitering, way up in the sky, barely moving.
“it’s probably setting,” said the back-seat astronomer, matter of factly, as if he’d been up all through the night reading moon books, brushing up on facts that would astound and amaze you.
“the moon always has to go slow,” he explained, “or it will crash into a plane or a astroid,” (psst, that’s how he said it, minus one of the syllables). “the big rock in space,” he added, probably realizing that he knew more about asteroids that anyone else in the car. this was remedial moon class.
all day long, that moon child kept close track of the time. he did not want to miss what the moon scouts had assured would be well worth the missed bedtime. (mostly i think he was thrilled to have a scientific excuse to stay out of bed, to wiggle his toes in the beach instead of under the sheets.)
since everyone else was hauling a camera, he too thought he needed one. a zoom one. so we got one, one of those cardboard toss-away ones. don’t want to thwart a budding moon scientist.
problem was, when we got to the beach at close to the appointed hour, close to the moon rise, all roads were closed. decidedly, emphatically blocked. we had to park on the shadowy side of some very thick trees, and trek in.
hey, no one said trips to the moon came easy.
only, the little one froze. remembered the profusion of skunks that have been clouding these parts all through the summer. seriously considered sitting out this here moon show.
“wish i brought my light saber,” he said after i finally convinced him to unlock the door and please take my hand. barely two yards later, he stopped in mid-step. “i just saw a bat. it was soaring,” he whispered, and shot out his arms to make like a very big bat.
this trip to the moon, i suddenly realized, could take all night. we might get there by sunrise.
as we crossed onto the sands, just where the dune grass and cottonwoods give way to the thin strip of sand that gives way to the lake, he thought he smelled wolf.
i gave up. mostly surrendered. plunked down to the sand right then and there. decided this here–what with the skunks and the bat and the wolf–was the most perfect place to watch for the moon rise.
by the way, i was skeptical. it was blacker than black there on the beach. except for the parking lot lights off in the distance, and a few twinkling stars, there was no speck of light. certainly not out on the horizon, where the black of the night melted right into the black of the lake.
i was sure this was some ruse to get me and the reluctant sleeper out of our nice comfy beds. for all i knew, the clouds, once again, would get in the way of a celestial show. and within minutes, we’d pack it all up, take home our cameras, have nothing to show. not a moon beam. not a twinkle.
but then, with utterly no drum roll, no CNN crawler spelling it out at the pit of the screen, there, out in the distance, a tiny red spot. then a buoy of red. then a sail. then a spinnaker all puffed with wind.
it was the red moon and it rose. bigger and bigger, higher and higher. it turned orange. then yellow. then white by the time it was drooling all over the water. a buttery trail from the sky to the rippling waters, straight to the beach, where it lapped in and out.
we all leapt. we cheered and we pointed.
we stood there quite taken by watching the moon rise. by feeling ourselves and our place on the planet shrink smaller and smaller. the bigger the moon got, the more we were humbled.
it’s not every night that you stop to watch the world as it works. this was no headline-stealing spectacle. no lunar eclipse. no once-in-a-zillion years sky show. this was your basic, every night, spectacular moon rise.
only, we stood there together. only, we watched. each one of us, in his and her very own way, we took in its story. we took in its power, its glory. the unshakable truth that there on the brink of the globe, night after night, there is a chunk of the heavens. and it glows.
it gives no warning, no warm-up. it goes from black to red spot to the thing that lights up the night. it hoists itself up out of the water. or whatever’s beyond. is that where God lives? is the moon hanging with God, before the show comes? are they whispering off in the wings?
i think that’s why maybe we got so quiet, watching the moon rise. you kind of think maybe you’re out there where God is. you half expect to turn and see some other footprint there in the sand. or feel a hand on your shoulder.
you kind of get goosebumps thinking these things.
i could only imagine the power that long, long ago those who kept watch of the moon felt, when the night turned from black to red ember to full-throttle glow.
we stayed and we watched till the moon perched quite high in the night sky. we gathered our cameras, and even our uneaten cookies. no one was hungry. someone was tired.
to stand at the edge of the planet, in the deep of a cool summer’s night. to take in the moon rise with the ones who you love. to think that maybe you’re out there where God walks at night.
seems like a mighty fine end to the summer of ‘007.

how will you mark the end? the end of the season that brings us the great gift of toes in the sand and moons without sweaters? have you watched the moon rise lately? not hang up there, tucked by the stars, but actually hoisting itself up out of the water, off the horizon? unlike the sun, which sends maidens of light to precede it, the moon comes all alone. no entourage in a moon rise. just the pure shining thing all by its lonesome. it’s part of what makes it so breathtaking. there it is, out of nowhere and nothing. a night light, keeping us out of the dark. hope you catch one, sometime soon….

i’d just dropped him off, had gone to the classroom door, kissed him, reminded him–because he looked stricken–of his bus stop. where it was, the corner he suddenly couldn’t remember, the one he’s looked out at nearly five-sixths of his life.

i turned then, headed for home, me at 5’ 4”, pushing a bike and a helmet and the training wheels too, all of which came to maybe 30-some inches. so i was listing, had a crink in my side, as i bent and i pushed. and every once in a while the wheels, over the bricks on the streets that are cobbled, decided to go a way all their own. so i’d get jammed in the shin.

it was right about then, crossing not far from the church with the steeple, that i heard my name called.

oh, not in the way that you would have turned too, turned to see who in the world wanted to go out for coffee, say hullo, otherwise check out the world as i knew it. no, not like some shout that ruffled the calm of the morning.
what i heard startled me, made me turn. but you wouldn’t have heard it.

it was the church. the church called me. said, psst, get over here. you and the bike that is banging your legs. cross the street.

so i did. when a church calls your name you do what it says. trust me. who knows who’s doing the calling. and there’s not a soul, not a soul i can think of who calls from a church, who i’d not want to do as they say.

i left the bike and the helmet there at the door. i yanked on the door. it was open, unlocked, a marvel given the way things are in the church, in the world. believe me, there’ve been plenty of times when i needed a church to be open. and it wasn’t. no matter how hard i yanked i could not get in.

do you know what it feels like to be standing with your hand on a tall wooden door, a door that feels like a plank to a castle, and you can’t budge the hinge? can’t get a crack of a chance to get yourself in, settle down, pour out your heart to the God who you know is right in there. but the folks who run things seem to have forgotten that, sometimes, not at mass times, there are folks on the street who need to, who have to, get in. we have our reasons, you know.

well, bless the church by my house that thought to leave open the door. and had candles besides. real ones. not those faux ones that hum because they’re lit by a battery. and forgive me, but battery-operated prayer does not cut it with me. what if it runs out of juice? does my heart-felt petition go up in vapors? pffft, into the dark?

i knelt me right down. right up at the front, off to the side, under the carved marble feet of mary. you know, the blessed virgin. let me tell you, there is–to my liking–hardly a place in the world where a mama can feel quite so embraced, so understood, as there looking up at the very big toe of dear mary, the most blessed mother.

she soaked up my load like one of those paper towels you see on all the commercials, where they dip the tip of the towel into a puddle of kool-aid, and shhhhhlllpp, soaks it right up.

mary did that right to all of my worries. i gave her the whole wad, every last thing i could think of for all of my boys. the one i’d just left with the quivering face. and the big one, the one off at the high school, where he seems to come home every day with a smile i’ve not seen before. he is happy right now, but the place can be tough, and i thought it smart to stock up on prayer and protection.

i learned long, long ago that to be all alone in a church at the start or the end or even the middle of a day, is a most holy thing. i know God does not really live there. not only there, is what i mean. not exclusively there, not nowhere else there.

but still, to be alone in a cavernous place, especially the one where i knelt beneath mary, a place where a long row of stained glass makes the light pour in in a cocktail of colors. a place with a particular quiet that is not like that of the woods, or even the night. a place where, despite all logical thinking, you are certain God is right there in the shadows, heck, just there at your back. and any darn minute you might feel a brush of the wind, or a finger ever-so-lightly there on your shoulder, and you’ll turn, and there will be God. there will be the face of the one you have prayed to all of your life. the one who’s dabbed all your tears. oh, my God, think of the kleenex. the one who’s put air in your lungs and wind to your wings. the one who, really, you live for.

only you’ve not seen him lately, because you keep forgetting to stop in the church. you’re not so keen on the church, at least lately, when everyone’s there. you like it best when it’s just you and the light and the colors and God. mary, too. mary is welcome.

so i sat there after i knelt there. i just soaked up the sense that really that place is a good place. is a place i really should visit. it’s a place on the planet that feeds me like few other places. especially when no other soul is there right beside me, is blocking my prayer with some hat with a brim and too many flowers.

after a while, i knew that my visit was over. as i got up to leave, dipped my hand into water that’s holy, that’s blessed, that i splash like some kind of a mad woman, over all that might need it–my lips and my eyes, my heart and my head, even my ear lobes–i thought how i might have just found me a new way home in the morning.
i thought how i might have just found the way home.

i felt rather blessed, and most delighted, that, hobbling toward home, i heard that church call my name. now i know how to get there, and who’s there when i yank on the door.

do you have a sacred place where you don’t often go, but when you get there, you know that you’re home? or do you have a sacred place you go often, because it so fills you? have you ever been away from a place for a while, and been stunned at how home you feel, right away?

i’m sure if i can dig up the contract, if i can find where i tucked it–hmm, maybe under the pillow–i can figure this out.
i’m sure there aren’t too many folk in this odd little predicament, this strange hidden corner of the salle de bain, requiring dual coverage from the winged thing who comes in the night, the one who leaves bright shiny quarters for all blood-drawing procedures. or at least the ones in the mouth.
what i’m not sure of is what of the nicks on the neck? do i call in some fairy with post-graduate work?
i seem to have no one to ask. i seem all alone in this quandary. it seems rather a stretch for the fairy, covering quite so much breadth. most folks i know have their kiddies in bunches, don’t put such hyphens into their pediatric constructions. so their fairies aren’t put to such tests.
i mean maybe in the old days. maybe in the days when a nice catholic girl and her mate got started on the honeymoon, didn’t stop till what they thought was well after “the change”–code word for a body function you did not want to spell out, not in polite company anyways. oh, my heavens, what would they think at afternoon bridge?
back then, heck, it was nothing to have a whole string of saint’s names tucked in your beds. nothing to have one kid in need of a shave, while the apostrophe, the afterthought, the caboose, was way down the line with a wiggly tooth.
maybe back then, maybe when milk came in big gallon bottles set by the door in a box in the night, maybe then it was nothin’ for son no. 1 to holler for burma-shave (and quickly thereafter the band-aids) while down in the kitchen one of the little ones–say, son no. 6–was flapping like a hen, a bloody old kleenex stuffed in his mouth, soaking up what comes at the end of a wiggly tooth that gets yanked.
ahh, but this is not the old days. this here’s my life. my odd, unusual, often comical, split-screen of a life. my life straddling the canyon that comes with eight years between delivery-room visits.
on the one hand, there’s the fellow up till heaven-only-knows how late in the night, writing some essay on voltaire’s pithy little quote that history is the lie commonly agreed upon, while the other one, the little one, kept roaming the halls looking for anyone who would listen to his rumbly tummy, charging with butterflies, on the eve of first grade, which starts any minute now.
and so it was that this weekend, the one that’s no longer, held high drama of so many kinds.
one night, the little one was off crossing the alley for what was planned as the first-ever sleep over (although as he tucked his bear in the bag, his lower lip quivered and he remarked that this might be merely a sleep-under). and before i’d even settled in for a long night of quiet, the phone jangled. i was met with the news that the young boy was bloodied and now missing a tooth. i dashed, camera in hand, not wanting to miss for a second the very last time a first tooth would be lost.
bounding into the kitchen of an otherwise innocent family, chomping on chicken and fries, i spied my littlest angel, bloody wad of a napkin stuffed in his mouth. he removed it long enough to show me the evidence. long enough for me to squeal, carry on just as you’d imagine. i took pictures. i flapped. said again and again: “let me see, let me see.”
the mother of said innocent family, a doctor it so happens, had already dutifully slipped said bottom-left front tooth into a zip-top bag for instant inspection.
there it was, a speck of a thing that could be mistaken, so easily missed, for a kernel of corn that never did grow. (hard to believe that little thing, that chip of a thing, made me let out a yelp when long, long ago i discovered it as he was nursing.)
it seems a chunk of fried chicken had wedged by that tooth, and as he yanked on the chicken, out came the tooth.
sure enough, when that boy toddled home at 10:30-something, when the call came confirming he was not sleeping over, we extracted said tooth and said baggie from the pocket of overnight satchel, and tucked both straight under the pillow.
bingo: two shiny quarters by morning.
perhaps it was that, the notion of coins under the pillow, that stirred the big child to ask for a razor.
or, come to think of it, it was his father who’d done the insisting. “time to shave, son. time to banish the ’stache.” or words to that effect.
anyway, next thing i knew there we were waiting for blood once again. i flapped, to be certain. only this time, there at the bathroom’s thin door, watching this spectacle of father passing along intimate knowledge, as the faucet ran hot and the blade was duly examined.
the littlest one dressed for the occasion, outfitted himself in full storm-trooper regalia. spent half the first shave with weapon aimed at the razor. should his dear brother be attacked, perhaps, by the blade, and need someone to come to his rescue.
never mind me and my camera, i was too busy recording the moment to even have noticed if he’d drawn any blood.
i found the whole thing quite charming. never had seen such a thing. felt like i was being let in on some secret society of shaving.
oh, the tricks i picked up. all sorts of facts about hot water and cold. the thermal equations, and how they can sway the whole chemistry of the day. and i thought a swipe of mascara remover got me jazzed in the morning.
the boy, er the man-child, is now clean as a whistle. the sinister shadow just over his lip is now gone. no longer do i think, “snidely whiplash,” whenever i glance his direction.
i have one who is toothless and one who is stripped of his whiskers. i myself, the mother of both, would be utterly puffy-chested, if not for the one dangling thread, the unanswered question.
i put in a call to the tooth fairy, i did. but, dang, two days later and she’s till not rung back. it’s not like it’s hard, it’s not like i’ll take much of her time.
the question is simple, the question is this: does she or does she not cover the very first shave, as well as each tooth?
i have two boys and two pillows. one has two quarters he’s already kerplunked in his firetruck bank. the other is drumming his fingers.
this tooth fairy, does she expire?
and if not, what might she deliver?
band-aids, we think, might beat even the shiniest quarter.

anyone have a tale of a parent passing along some secret growing-up rite? for me, i recall the ironing board and my mother and a whispered exchange about baby-making and how it was beautiful, complete with the subsequent taking down from the bedroom shelf of the blue box from the makers of kotex. anyone with a tale of a first lost tooth, or a first flick of the razor? anyone draw blood on either occasion? anyone else find themselves oddly straddling two distant-enough planets of parenting? one where teeth wiggle, one where whiskers fall by the wayside?

the name, i think, says it all. there is a garage, just down the alley, and twice a summer–once for the matinee, once for the twilight performance–it takes on the makings of a theater.

curtains are strung, the old theatre sign is hoisted. the sound system, such as it is, is rigged. the battery-operated keyboard is slid back where the bikes and the so-called antiques–broken chairs, a whole herd, a dresser, a table whose wing does not flap anymore–are stashed in a corner.

ah, then come the players. the children of house after house, the houses that flank the street that is ours. a wholly egalitarian troupe. all inclusive. for each child, a part.

the ones who might otherwise stammer. the ones just beginning to read. the ones who not long ago cowered off in the wings. and then the occasional one who, given a mike and a hat and a song with mighty fine lyrics, belts it out like, well, there’s no tomorrow.

this year there was a tomorrow, a loud one. an off-key one, depending who was doing the singing. this year the big show was annie, complete with the neighborhood lassie-look-alike playing–remarkably well, by the way, not a bark out of line, not a whimper–the part of sandy the dog.

for a while there, a flood plan was mapped. we all prayed the trees that went flying would not crush the garage, or land with a thud on the cardboard-box sets that had been painted and stacked center stage.

ah, but the theatre gods must have been listening. must listen to prayers of thespian children. the rains stopped, all right. or at least they slowed to a manageable drizzle.

the river that had been the alley receded. and even if it hadn’t, the show, of course, would have gone on. we would have rowed in the players.

there’d been a moment, during a dress rehearsal earlier in the week, a rehearsal under a threatening simmering sky, a sky the color of soot, that made for unscripted irony–and underlined the unblinking optimism of this little company–as the troupe belted out, “the sun’ll come out….” and the thunder rolled in the offing.

the builders at my garage, just down the alley, put down their hammers and laughed.

that’s how it is with the alley theatre. what’s unscripted is what you’ll never forget.

this year it was the tap shoe that flew off a foot–and i mean think high-arching field goal–and into the crowd.

and the young agent I–he of the three-player ensemble, agents F, B and I–who seemed to be playing charades, or doing some sort of sign language, with his grandma clear back in row three, and would not exit stage left, not for a very long minute or two. not till some serious whispering and finally a yank got him to do as directed.

in the past, there’ve been pirates who got lost in a sword fight clear under the tree swing on the far end of the yard, and never did hear their cue, never did make their scene, which rolled by wholly without them.

it’s what happens in old-fashioned neighborhood dramas. although, ’round here it’s always a musical.

the girl who’s in charge, the one who spends months planning and plotting, scouring second-hand stores, using her own piggy-bank money (often earned peddling lemonade out on the sidewalk), is keen for the song and the dance.
so she does what she must: she teaches and coaches, gives up enough high school doings that her mother gets worried. but she is a directress tied to her company. and they, to her–yes, indeed. she is, frankly, adored.

i happened to catch her as night fell the bedtime before showtime, tiptoeing around the lakes in the alley, carrying a little pink basket of curlers. she was off to the house of each of the orphans, off to set little girls into dreams with heads in neat rows of pink spongey curlers.

she is a director who makes house calls. she tends to every last detail. she is at once director, producer, lyricist, choreographer, costume designer, set builder. and i’m sure i’m forgetting something.

this year, as always, she and her troupe had spent months stuck down in a basement. this year they learned how to tap. even a 6-year-old slugger, a boy who is fluent in tackles and touchdowns, he spent plenty of afternoons strolling the sidewalk in hand-me-d0wn tap shoes tied with orange polka-dot ribbons.

oh my.

that boy was not mine, by the way. mine draws a line, yes he does, and he does not do what he does not do. and tapping, he seems to not do.

mine did, though, succumb to the goo in his hair. did appear on the stage looking slicked down and parted, a little lord fontleroy. though, of course, he squirmed when they gooped him. and, trust me, once he’d taken his bow, he dashed down the alley into the house, up to the sink where he proceeded to splash quite a pond, there on the powder room floor, as he raced to return to the boy with the curly-haired top.

it is, all of it, the no. 1 luxury that came with buying this house. you can have your media rooms. your bathrooms that look as if built for zeus and apollo.

give me a garage and an alley, a warm summer’s night. give me the moon rising over the roof, over the tapping of 28 hoofs. give me the crickets drowning out lines. give me the mamas and papas wiping their eyes. and strangers, too; it’s that sweet, that irresistible.

give me the garage-in-the-alley theatre. any old time. make me feel more alive while i take in that show than should be allowed, should be possible, for a chest with a heart that thumps right through the walls.

to the girl with the dream, and the heart to go with it. the girl who is oxygen in a world that’s gone stale and polluted. you are, i am certain, as close to an angel as a human can be. you are heaven among us. and you should be draped with all of the stars and the very full moon. you are blessed, sweet claire. you are beloved.

this one’s a reminder that if we but look, we can find swatches of heaven on earth. we don’t petition for them. they just land in our laps. one of us is not more deserving than another. we just get blessed, without warrant or reason. have you had a taste of heaven this summer? if so how, or who? do tell. the curtain on summer is closing. and we’d not want to miss a really fine show.
to all the faraway family and friends of g-i-t-a players, it really was something. i was not alone, not hardly, in having my breath sucked right away.
this was the third year of alley theatre, and it’s not over yet. not till sweet claire is whisked off to college. and even then there’s a chance, if our blessing extends, it won’t end.

i hadn’t realized how long we’d been waiting. but now that they’re here, now that the big green truck lurched to the curb, ever since jose, the really nice man with the clipboard and the little phone in his ear, ever since he got the big boxes down off the truck, onto the dolly, rolled up the wiggly walk, ever since i saw my very own brother’s words on the side of the boxes, ever since the tall grownup i live with hoisted them out of their boxes and all of their miles of soft paper padding, ever since they were lifted and carried to right where they sit now, lifted like some sort of offering up to the altar, i realized we might have been waiting since long, long ago when we decided to make us a family.
what they are, elementally speaking, is two stools. one for each boy. carved, bent, fitted, sanded and waxed by four of the lovingest hands in my world: my brother david, and his beloved wife, bec. the seat and the crest (you might call it the back; i did until i was otherwise told), are of cherry; the legs and the spindles, of ash.
they are thomas moser-designed, david mahany-and-rebecca neumann-constructed. thomas moser, you might know, designs some of the finest american furniture. he is in a line with hitchcock and stickley, both new england chairmakers of earlier centuries. for more than a year now, my woodworking brother has lived up in maine, building for moser. a moser chair, or a stool, is something to dream for.
believe me, that tall guy with the eye for design, the one who lifted each stool as if bread to the gods, he’s been dreamin’. could not wait to see the bent cherry peeking over the counter. could not wait to run his palms down the spindles. could not wait, not at all, to slide his bottom onto the seat that fits like a fine pair of pants.
he knew, because he knows these things, studies these things, lives and breathes for these things, that the stools at once brought art and place to our old farmhouse kitchen.
place, as defined by the tall guy, roughly translated by me, is the invisible carving of space, the creation of some spot on the map with a particular function. a blip of a room with a purpose. a corner, perhaps, where you curl up to dream.
or a stool at a counter where you pull up for wisdom. or consolation. or confession. we joked, right away, as i leaned by the sink, and the manchild sat in the stool, unspooling his worries, that the only thing missing was the sound of the little door sliding inside the confessional box. so we mimicked that sound, sliding the screen door for effect, back and forth a few times.
it was immediate. soon as those stools were stripped of their wrapping, two bottoms slid in. planted elbows. demanded grilled cheese.
my sink, the sink where i spend so much of my day, is right there. right across from the stools whose fine cherry tops–i mean crests, please excuse me–now peek over the counter.
i’ve a feeling that i will remain at my water-splashed post. the priestess to those in the stools.
i like that.
now, thanks to the fine carving and waxing of four hands in portland, there is in our house a place set aside for planting your worries. come to the counter. take a seat. spill your heart. have a pop-tart. or a big bowl of rice chex, right before bed.
while i cook and i chop. while i scrub and i rinse. bring me your worries, your stories, your heart’s heavy load.
i can think of no rail for communion i’d rather preside at.
a house is a holy thing. what unfolds there is decidedly sacred. what is carved and boxed and sent far away is, well, far more than a stool, it’s a seat for the soul to be honored.
and both my boys now have a place that is theirs for the rest of their lives.
thank you david and becca. thank you with all of our hearts. and all of our bottoms besides.

do you have a place in your house where you always sit to unload your worries? did you have such a place in your growing-up house? what other sorts of nooks and crannies call out your name? have a particular purpose? the place you dream? the place you cry? the place you pound out your stories, give wing to your fancy? any one else know the great gift of having someone you love build, or sew, or mold, or paint, a piece of your home that you will always carry with you? as much a piece of your heart as your kin?

never mind clean underwear and new no. 2 pencils. i’m fairly certain, as certain as a laundress can be, that he had the former. saw ‘em stacked there on the chair. where i–i mean the laundress–had left them. the latter, the pointy-tipped pencils, he’s long outgrown. outgrown till he gets to the SATs, which, the way things are speeding along here, might be tomorrow for all i know.
my baby just left for high school. i know, i know, you’re not here to hear me whine. i won’t. i promise. i did not shed a single tear, i’ll have you know. not like in kindergarten when i gulped and hung in the hallway, peeking in through the cracks with all of the other over-bred mothers. or first grade, where i’m sure, though i cannot remember, i repeated the scene.
well there was the day last week, come to think of it. he had some gathering with all of his homeroom. called the advisory, here on the chi-chi north shore.
i let him out at the curb, after our usual goodbyes for such an occasion: ”love you,” says i. “love you,” says he. “more than life,” i come back. “more than life,” he confirms.
then i watched his long lanky body, the one with the curly-haired mop on the top and the brown-colored skin all over the rest, watched him lope down a sidewalk, watched him steer toward a coagulation of boys-verging-on-men.
“he’s going to high school,” i heard the little voice in my head announce. and then, on cue, the tear kicked in. oh, all right, maybe it was more than just one.
but he is my firstborn, you know. he is always the one who does everything first. and drags me right along with him. never before have i been the mama of a child four years from college. or, as he reminded me the morning he woke up 14, two years from driving a car, one year from taking the wheel, practicing on high-speed expressways where they do not save a lane just for your little boy.
dang. maybe i will shed a tear here this morning. after all.
but nope. i’m stayin’ dry-eyed. no precipitation from this mama’s eyes will do one thing to alter the outcome there at that high school.
he’s on his own.
we did all we could here. besides putting out the red plate, the you’re-special-today plate, and the waterford goblet for o.j., besides the three-egg-bacon-and-cheese omelette, made by the tall grownup who now calls himself the omelettizer, there wasn’t a whole lot of use for us old folk.
oh, sure i wrote him a note. but mostly i wrote all of the things that he’s taught me in the last coupla weeks, since he came home from the woods with the mantra, “walking is putting one foot in front of the other.” just reminded him of a few others.
like that light is the divine animator, and he is illumination, defined. that boy, i’m tellin’ ya, has a light, much more than a double-dd beam, shining from back of his eyes, back where his soul is.
can’t claim any credit for that. he was born that way. way i see it, all we could do all along was recharge the batteries. i did that each night on my knees, way back, from the beginning. once he could talk, me and his papa, and plenty of others, we did the recharging through umpteen gazillion hours of long conversation.
puttin’ that kid to bed, even back in the old days, meant you were in for a two-hour philosophical jaunt through the woods. listening to where his mind poked around, always being there at the bend, ready to shine our own sort of light on the answers he sought.
it’s all of that that we sent out the door on this fine august morning. it is all we ever can do. in the hours we’re given, in the hours where our shoulders can touch, and our fingers entwine, we pack in what little we know, and we pray for the rest.
there is, i realize, a whole bunch of catch-and-release in this parenting. you catch ‘em just before falling. you hold ‘em, embrace them, whisper soft words in their ears.
you let go, with ever-increasing frequency, it sure seems. we are thick in the letting-go years here. we are left, many a morning, murmuring there on the doorstep.
good thing the good Lord knows how to decipher all of the murmurs.
at my house, they go something like this: make him the light of your love, God. make him the light.
and should the batteries dim, come to me. i’ve got a whole closet of back-ups. and, just in case, i’ve got knees that’ll never wear out.

gracious me, i had no intention of bothering you with my letting-go thoughts. i had every intention of telling you all about something altogether other. but some mornings i just listen to the pounding of my heart. and this morning, my heart pounded one song, the song of the boy on his way into the halls of the high school. once again we strike up the letting-go theme. what are your thinkings when you send the ones that you love off into the world? how do you play catch and release?

the lemonade is drained. the calendars, dragged to the table. it’s time for check, cross-check, triple cross-check. aligning the dates and the schools. aligning my life. getting over the hump called back to the classroom.
i thought it was over. thought the days of butterflies in late august were a thing of the past. thought i put them away the very last minute i worried about GPA and exams and who would be in my homeroom.
but, dang.
it comes back. in duplicate at my house. triplicate or beyond at others. with each kid, comes a whole herd of butterflies. theirs and mine.
this year i’ve got one worried if he’ll find his way through a campus that holds nearly a fourth of the alphabet, buildings A through F, far as we know. plus a few side shows.
the other one, the little one, is worried about putting pencil to fist and free-forming those very same letters. the B gets too wobbly, even for his taste. comes out looking like P with a goiter. a really big one, or one that’s too little, more like the lead took a detour.
the brand new packs of markers and notebooks are tossed in a bag in the pantry. soon as i dig through the pile of papers that came over the weekend, in fat envelopes that shouted OFFICIAL, that gave me the willies, they did, i’ll know how to plot my way through these woods. know what to buy. where to be. oh, and when. it helps, i have learned, to be there on time. oh, the rules.
the only way through the maze that is right here upon us, is with tri-colored markers, and calendars splayed all over the table. i feel like some general, lining up troops. only, mostly i feel lost in the desert.
i am not ready to go back to school. not ready to give up the long evenings, the lazy strolls under stars. not ready to hang up hanging up dripping wet suits, when the boys come in from the pool, smelling like chlorine, looking all wrinkled.
today, at our house, is summer’s last call. on the morrow, the alarms will be clanging, the buses will roll to the corner. high school will start, and right behind, all the rest of the schools.
summer, tomorrow, is over.
so today is the day we pack in every last bit of the summer. we slept later than late. we awoke knowing day after this, at this late morning hour, one of us would already be in world history, diving in to ancient civilization. or maybe just trying to find the lost classroom.
as i type, fresh hot scones are out on the table. the other grownup around here took the week off, a major concession to summer’s end, and the need for four hands to get us up over the hump. he’s got a day packed with fun, one last blast of all that makes june, july and a good chunk of august worth sticking around for.
and we’ll end, we’ll wind up the day and the summer’s vacation, as we always do, at a joint that sells burgers and oniony rings. a whole loaf of ’em.
makes your tummy squirm sometimes. but then at least one of the tummies ’round here is already doing that. might as well gulp down the onions to feed all the butterflies.

before i wave summer goodbye, before i turn the page on this long stretch of lazy old days, i might quell the flutters with the litany of all that’s been rich:
the melons so sweet i licked down my chin, the sound of the crickets that lulled me to sleep, the cicadas that came from some faraway planet. the night that i slept on the root in the woods, and counted the hours till morning. the pages of books that told me fine stories, took me to places i’d never imagined. the real-thing tomatoes that i cannot stop eating. just some salt and some pepper, i’m set for a meal. the delphinium i bought, once again seduced by that blue beyond blue, then watched it all shrivel away. the baby bird that took to the breeze. the camper i plucked from the woods. summer rains, soft and soaking, or, some afternoons, rambunctious and streaked full of lightning.
good thing, i think, that real summer is not over yet. just the part that feels the most like it. the part that ends with the school bell. which rings, now, in less than 24 hours.

what parts of summer will you carry into the school year? which moments are you not yet ready to whisper goodbye to? anyone else suffering back-to-school butterflies? do you have a sure cure? or at least a good dose of wisdom?

i cooked up a storm. well, i got lots of pans dirty anyway. not sure though if the transitive “cook” quite applies to cranking the oven, cranking the stove, making miles of smiley fries, and pans of those faux chicken legs that taste to me like mush with some breading. oh, i skinned kernels from corn, tossed in some mom food–the requisite carrots, peaches and grapes. made them drink milk, just cuz i’m mean, and wouldn’t do cherry juice for saturday dinner.
the way i was cookin’ you would have thought i was feeding a whole army of children. really, it was only one extra. but, apparently, it was enough–on a saturday night–to make me think i had finally scored me the gaggle of kiddies i’d always wanted.
see, i grew up at a crowded kitchen counter. where elbows routinely engaged in a duel for space. to plant your elbows (and incur the wrath of my mother who would clomp them, remind you that elbows are not to be seen, not perched on the edge of the table anyway) was to have claimed victory over all the encroachers.
spilled milk was taken for granted. what with all the elbows perching and clomping and reaching for things, there was always some appendage knocking some glass and spilling its contents.
somehow though, despite the chaos, it made me want to grow up and repeat the scene. at least the math part of it. the numbers. i too wanted kids by the gaggle.
ah, but that was not to be. i am the mother of what was unheard of in my growing-up ’hood. i am the mother of two. a mere two, a duet, one then the other. maybe one’s hiding, look under the couch. must be a runaway ‘cuz just two is impossible.
running my old brain up and down the whole street where i grew up, the whole half mile winding through the woods, i can only think of one house where there were less than four children.
before i got married i said i wanted 13. then i downsized to a reasonable six. then, for the sake of a future with the man of my dreams, i settled on three. i was giddy, in the end, when i got two.
for a long time, maybe since i grew up next to an old orphanage, i said i too wanted an orphanage. wanted children from all over the world to come into my big old house. i wanted one on each hip. think angelina jolie minus the lips, i suppose. minus some other parts too. oh, never mind. scratch the image. just picture kids of all colors and kinds, home with their curly-haired mama.
well, lately, i’ve been revising that plan. i’ve got ideas. i am thinking i will be a way station for grownups who need a bit of alone time, and, even better, a place for kids who i love to come spend the night, or the weekend, or even a week.
way i see it, it’s win-win, all around. my boys could use the occasional substitute sibling. sort of a saturday night replacement for the same-old-same-old. mix things up a bit. change the dinner conversation. get more smiley fries.
i could finally get me a girl. i could stand right beside her, teach her the few tricks that i know in the kitchen. most likely, she would teach me. we could pick movies. girl movies. and for once, i wouldn’t automatically be outvoted. a weepy girl movie might air in this house at an hour that is not single digits, me waiting till all are asleep to settle in with my kleenex and my hugh grant, or even better, french with subtitles. ah, oui.
i would like that. i like my grand new idea. we could fill this old house with all sorts of other people’s children. i always wanted to be the house filled with everyone’s kids. but so far that hasn’t happened. so maybe i’ll do the inviting. like i did this weekend. a dear friend of mine is a single mama, round the clock, no time out except for the babysitter at 10 bucks an hour. that’s daunting, especially on one paycheck. i love her kid, and even though he doesn’t really know my boys, and my boys don’t really know him–or didn’t, that is–we knew him to be a fine lad. a lad you might want to have come for the night.
so he did. packed his bag, hauled his sleeping bag. i liked being his mama for the night. didn’t even mind that he wakes hours earlier than me or my boys. enlisted the other grownup in the house to handle that, to handle early-morning ping pong. (they played for two hours.) didn’t mind that he would have nothing to do with the smiley fries. or the corn. all he wanted was faux chicken and milk. fine with me.
that’s the thing about caring for other people’s children. their quirks are your delights. they’ve not been under your skin long enough to drive you batty. you find them wholly enchanting, engaging. delightful. maybe it’s sort of like grandparenting, which i have no clue if i’ll live to see. you send them home at the end of the visit. be it a night. or a week. or a weekend.
give them a hug, maybe a kiss. send them on their way. invite them back. cuz you happen to love kids any old way.

call me nuts, but is this not a fine plot: sort of a library of children. borrow them for a while. return without fine. it seems a grand way to spread around sanity. i know plenty of friends who really could use a break. i could too plenty of times. what if we all took turns? cranked up the ovens, crisped up those nuggets o’ chicken. played games that aren’t boring to whoever’s new? watched movies. pretended, before our time, that we were wonderful marvelous grandparents you couldn’t wait to go visit.