pull up a chair

it feels like a day for genuflection, yes it does. down on your knees, outa bed. bowing to the sun.
of course, to the sun. to the rising, shining, barely-inching-anywhere-today sun. the sun that, dang, seems stuck up there.
hello, hello, someone check the sun. perhaps it’s broken. it is barely moving, i am certain. it’s in the exact same spot it was in yesterday, i swear. it is standing still up there, yes it is.
the ancients thought so too. thought the sun was stuck on the today of long, long ago. so much so that they named today after the sun that would not budge.
called it the summer solstice. which, like many old things, is a word with latin roots. sol, of course means sun. and sistere, means to cause to stand still.
i am not the first to think the sun has gone on strike. is standing still. and will not move. it has found the highest perch it ever gets the whole year long, and apparently, it does not want to give it up.
yes, at 1:06 p.m., chicago time, today, the great red ball, the one we draw as yellow but really it is fiery fiercely red, will reach its apex for the year, the tip-top spot, the northernmost way station, from which it shines.
which makes today, the day of longest light, a day for celebration all around the northern half of this ol’ ball we call the globe.
today’s the day we here in the middle of america get a whole 15 hours, 13 minutes of sun, pure sun. unless of course it decides to rain, and then the clouds will block our solar-powered fun.
today, my friends, is a day to bask in summer sunbeams. play shadow games. count your freckles. scatter sunflower seeds to the wind. watch the sun make them grow. watch them turn their heads as if to nod their thank yous.
for heaven’s sake, put a plain old ice block out to pasture. watch the sunshine do its tricks. watch it turn the ice to water. it is, from sun-up to sun-down, a day to frolic. a day to marvel at all the things the mighty sun can do for little us.
indeed, as long as there have been human folk keeping eyes on the sky, there have been worshippers of the sun, and frolickers of this very sunny day.
stonehenge, of course, got this party rockin’. those ancient souls, some 5,000 years ago, set their stones in a fine circle on a broad and barren plane, so they could track the sun. so they could whoop and holler on the day of summer solstice.
they weren’t the only ones, though, who set stones according to the sun. in ancient egypt, the thinkers there built two pyramids not far from the great sphinx. if today you stood at the great sphinx, you would see that the sun will set smack dab in the middle of those two pyramids. a perfect measure of the solstice. probably done without a compass.
in the first century of the common era, the essenes, the only jewish group who used a solar calendar, built a large room at qumran (the site where the dead sea scrolls were found) with windows precisely placed so that on the summer solstice, the slant of the setting sun through those windows completely illuminated the eastern wall.
sun worship, apparently, is nothing new. and all around the globe, in fact, this day of days has been the high point, the peak, the pinnacle, of sunlight celebration.
the ancient swedes put up midsummer trees in every little town. they decorated its boughs, and then all the maidens, fair and otherwise, took the plunge. they bathed in the nearest river, a rite thought to bring on the rains, once they’d bowed to summer’s sun.
the celts, never missing a good excuse for a party, celebrated the apex of sun light by crowning the oak king, who was considered the god of the waxing year.
in ancient china, the summer solstice was a day for honoring earth, the feminine and the yin, whereas the winter solstice was the day they honored the masculine, the heavens and yang.
the ancient germanic, slav and celtic tribes were big on bonfires for the summer solstice. pairs of lovers leapt through what were thought to be luck-bringing flames. apparently, the higher you jumped, the higher the crops would grow. good thing, no one asked me to leap through fire. we might wind up a little hungry by end of summer.
so whoop it up, people, invent a sunny thing to do. the solstice will begin its sweep across the country any hour now.
and while you’re at it, bow your head, and raise your arms. good thing the God who made the world thought to utter, let there be light. thought to add a sunshine to the picture.
today, the day of longest light, is surely time to revel in the glory and the power of the brightest light there is.

and how will you mark the epitome of sunlight? the longest light, the shortest shadow of the whole year long?

p.s. i snatched the sunset up above, as i drove through the cornfields of downstate illinois last night. i was down on the farm for the day because i am blessed to have a dayjob that takes me amazing places, into amazing hearts and souls. soon as i can i will tell you all about my new farmer friend. but the tribune gets first dibs on the story, so i have to let them go first. trust me, i am bursting to tell. in a word, “heaven,” is what i witnessed yesterday. you’re not surprised, i’m sure, i am the closest thing to a wanna-be farm girl that there might possibly be. i wanted you to see the longest light as the sun set at nearly half past eight, just to the west of the highway they call the double nickel, I-55, that is…..
p.s.s. it’s also why this post is a little later than usual. i could pretend i was waiting for it to be the exact hour of the summer solstice (i’m actually an hour early for that), but really it’s because early this morning i was getting our little world back in order after being gone for the day….

the jar i keep at the ready. it is my firefly jar, and like any bug collector worth her wings, i equip it with essentials. it is full-service, my firefly catcher is. there’s grass and leaves and holes for air, poked into the lid.
i always let the critter go; all i ask for is one good blink from there inside his glass-walled confinement. then he’s out, no bail, scot free. he’s out to blink in cool night air.
i have long been a collector of the firefly, the lightning bug, the glow worm. take your pick, the name that is; the blinking-bellied beetle is, for me, the very definition of a busy summer’s night. and any hour now, summer is the thing that will be upon us.
so let us start the summer rumble with a romp for blinking things that light up the night. in short staccato bursts of golden yellow glow.
when the softlight of the evening goes to violet-gray, the blink-blink bugs begin their nightly show. one minute all is as is. the next, there is a flash, a blink, a flying thing with belly all like a lantern.
is it not the darnedest thing that, when sitting at the drawing board, God thought to make a bug with taillights? a gentle nudge if you’re out in darkness that just like that a burst of light, of hope, will come. a promise blinking in the distance. don’t give up. hope is here, the taillight tells you, even when you cannot see it. and then, the flash. the chase for light is on.
just the other night, not thinking anything at all of the summer’s blinking business, i caught that telltale flash out of the corner of my eye. oh my goodness, i hollered to my boys, the lightning bugs are back. quick, go get a jar.
i stalked the here-one-minute-gone-the-next Photuris pyralis, p. pyralis for short, the only insect known to humankind capable of turning off and on that beacon.
that night i came up short. never did fill my jar. but just last night, out of the violet-blue, i caught a blink right over my shoulder, cupped my hand, swooped, trapped me a momentary prisoner for my ball jar jail. darn thing never did let out a blink.
most likely, i was not his type.
the blink, you know, is all about romance. yup, it’s true. or as much as romance traipses on the scene when we are talking flying bugs.
the blink is more or less morse code for come on baby, light my fire. hmm. wonder if ol’ jimmy morrison was thinking firefly back in ’66 when he penned those blinkin’ words? who knew the doors were putting words to mr. p pyralis?
here’s how the blinking goes: boy bug blinks. girl bug, crouched down near the ground, waits the pre-determined pause (5.5 seconds in one species). she blinks back. he blinks and blinks and blinks. he has, as it were, found what he’s looking for. a girl with which to do the blinking thing. and then the blank-ing thing.
here’s how you can tell if your firefly is a he or a she: if he flies and blinks, chances are he’s a he. she, proper lady, perches, waits. stays low to ground, sometimes blinks. he flies and blinks like a fool for love, which in fact he is.
so here’s your he/she quiz: if it’s an airborne off-on beetle, it is a _______(fill in the blink).
there are, i’ll have you know, some 136 species of fireflies. each one blinks in its own way. if we studied fireflies, you and i, we could tell which species by the way he blinks and she blinks back.
some firefly he’s flash what looks like the letter J. some flash in rapid-fire flashes. in the former, she flashes back but one flash. in the latter, she deigns to give him double flash. sort of, one if it’s me, two if it’s not. it’s as if paul revere, too, studied the lightning bug.
oh by the way, not only is it the he’s who do most of the blinking, there are, jiminy cricket, 50 he’s for every she. the she’s are vastly outnumbered. which is why she can sometimes be so blinkingly evil.
say she’s hungry. say she sees a blinking thing who is not her kind. sly devil, she; she might blink in pure downright imitation, and make him think she is another. so, when in he swoops, she lets him have it. she zaps him with anesthetizing juice and then sucks his insides out. egad. the bug world is so nasty.
all because of a blink gone blooey.
i have no clue if you, like me, have ever wondered how the blinking works, but just in case, i did a little digging. it’s really rather simple. and quite astonishing.
seems the firefly has a light-emitting organ just below its belly. in a simple chemical soup stirred inside that very pot, a chemical called luciferin, is triggered by an enzyme called luciferase. plain old oxygen provides the fuel, and a blast of energy found in every living cell, something called atp, creates the flash.
kaboom, it’s flying bioluminescence. which, by the way, is a big fancy word that basically means inner glow.
because the flying things are not willing to divulge their little secrets, no one’s sure if the on-off switch is due to the firefly controlling the oxygen supply, or if there is some little nerve cell that triggers all the blinking.
seems i am not the only one mesmerized by the night lights.
the ancient chinese caught piles of them and stuffed them in nearly see-through lanterns so they could see where they were walking in what otherwise would have been the dark.
the aztecs, enchanted and enlightened, are said to have used the term metaphorically, meaning “spark of knowledge in a world of ignorance or darkness.”
europeans, superstitious lot, thought that if a firefly flew in a window, it meant that someone in the house would die.
native americans, meanwhile, smeared the glowy goo on their faces and chests for decoration.
it is, you see, a most versatile bug. and not one bit dangerous, not unless of course you happen to be a male p. pylaris. then you’d best beware of blinking lights low to the ground. be careful, buster, upon whom you pounce.
there is much, so much, more to say, about the little blinking lights of summer nights.
did you know, for instance, that there is rarely seen a lightning bug west of the middle of kansas, making the firefly a purely eastern entertainment?
and can you imagine that the two rare chemicals, aka the lightning juices, luciferin and luciferase, are highly sought-after (a st. louis chemical company will pay a penny per lightning bug, with a $30 bonus if you get up to 75,000 bugs) and they’re being used in cutting-edge research for cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis and heart disease?
it is all too much, it makes me woozy. this little bug is so amazing. and you just thought it blinked and blinked like some old roadside sign.
good thing my jar is always at the ready.

firefly collectors unite. anyone else keep a jar with holes poked in the lid, always at the ready? any little people care to come join me for a firefly romp? what better way to start the real true summer? i’m thinkin’ there’s at least one firefly/lightning bug tale tucked up in a jar somewhere, high up on a shelf in the hall closet. and while we’re at it, can anyone west of the middle of kansas tell us if it’s true, the blinking things go dark once they get near the rockies or beyond? dang, if true, i am so sorry. i cannot imagine a summer that doesn’t blink.

pssst, over here in the backyard. quick before they catch me. this here is a secret meeting of the clothesline inclined. er, well, the conceptually clothesline inclined.

can’t say that i’ve got much practice here under my belt. but i do know how to string a rope, and i do know how to work a clothespin (do not laugh, i have seen a human stymied by what to do with the little springy wooden thing).

as evidenced by the pathetic excuse for hanging out the wash, (yes, yes, up above, that is the wash, it is not a bad example of a pup tent without the pup) this here is a class for the starter-outer.

but what the heck, the countdown to summer solstice is on, the great white clothes dryer in the sky was high, was burnin’ the other afternoon, and i’d just dunked a few years’ dirt off an heirloom that started out its life under the hot aegean sun in a little greek village, long long ago.

that ol’ cloth was yelping to be laid out where it belonged, where it could bask once again in the noonday sun. never mind that the bright light around here is a paltry shadow of its big fat greek cousin, that cloth was yearning to be sunned. i know it was. i heard it with my own wholly un-greek ears. some things you understand in any language.

that cloth, given to me by my landlady maria who started out handing me a set of keys to the upstairs of her little worker’s cottage and went on to become a mother/sister/best friend before she died too, too young, was made of cotton picked by her mama back in greece. her mama pulled and twisted the cotton into threads, set it on a loom, made the long smooth swath that is its middle and, then, crocheted the ends.

it’s been mine since the day maria cracked open the trunk she brought with her when she came to america, and carefully lifted out her mama’s blessed handwork. you would have thought she was handing me a newborn baby, the way she lifted, cradled, laid it in my open arms.

it was not about to be tumbled in the orphan-maker dryer in my basement. i say orphan maker because my dryer has a way of eating socks, and thus, piled atop the dryer now there is a little pile of socks who’ve lost their mate or who have had a hole bitten out of their big or little toe. my dryer is not picky; it gets hungry sometimes and takes a bite out of whatever it is tumbling.

i was not about to feed maria’s mama’s tablecloth to my dryer. clothesline 101 was in session.

now, i am enough of a clothesline girl to have my very own bucket of clothespins and what was once a respectable coil of rope. seems the rope’s been snipped over the years, for this backyard tent and that emergency suspension bridge. but there was enough for me to tie two girl-scout knots on the backs of two lawn chairs, and tug.

besides being just long enough to fit maria’s mama’s tablecloth, my clothesline had one other big thing going for it: it was deliciously inconspicuous, which here on the leafy shore where they might fine for such backyard nuisances, was a very good thing.

i could hang out to dry without the neighbors even noticing. and for a starter-outer that’s a wise beginning.

don’t tell the neighbors, but i could get hooked on hooking drippy clothes over droopy lines (note to self: work on those girl-scout slip knots; mine were rather, well, slippy, too slippy, indeed).

i could feel that old cotton soaking up its long-overdue doses of vitamin D with every passing hour. i watched that cloth transform right before my eyes, from limp, wet could-be-bedsheet to stiff, white heirloom soldier, ready once again to take on my table.

imagine what the sun could do for my undies.

oh, speaking of undies, in the olden days, the ladies taught their clothesline tutorees not to hang them out where all could see. they instructed that a girl who “hangs a proper line,” always pins her undergarments to a private line, one strung just beside the furnace where they’d be free to drip and dry unexposed, with a proper dab of dignity, puh-leez.

i am sure such a code exists today for those who’d dare to dry their undies here on the leafy edge of lake michigan. although just the other day, here in leafy land, i saw a woman, yes i did, strip off her undies, stand buck naked at the corner, while i hurried my little fellow quite quickly to the other side of the street, my hand over his eyes, as he asked and asked, as one then two squad cars screeched around the corner, racing to the scene, are they taking her to jail?

oh goodness, it gets rather shocking here on the leafy shore. i finally had to tell him that, yes, they might be slipping handcuffs on her naked wrists. for you are not allowed to take off your undies in the middle of the street. and not just because it’s leafy land. which gives me pause when thinking what could happen around here if you thought to string your thong on some taut rope. an outdoor rope, i mean.

oy. back to clothesline class. did you know that until the 1800s there was no such official thing? oh, sure, whoever did the wash might have draped it over bush or tree, perhaps a covered wagon.

but those who know these things, suspect it was a sailor’s wife, or at least his lady friend, who thought to yank a cord between two poles and hang her sheets like sails.

the first clothespin was patented in 1832. and, according to the u.s. patent office, more than 150 clothespins were patented between 1840 and 1887. imagine all those laundry ladies believing they’d dreamed up a better clothespin. drawing pictures, making mockups, sending letters off to washington, waiting for reply. oh, i just love a good invention. makes me want to whistle yankee doodle dandy. or something.

the clothespin itself was made into art, which you can see if you too take a trip to the nation’s capital and stroll through that wonder of wonders the smithsonian institute. before the days of cellphones and headsets, people took the time to carve birds and flowers into the knob tops of their clothespins. you know, the little clothespins without the springs, the original ones, actually, the ones that look like a head, slumped shoulders and two long legs.

it is worth reclaiming, at least on a breezy sunny day, the tranquilizing act of plucking freshly laundered soggy clothes from a wicker basket, giving them a shake, reaching for a clothespin, pressing the back-up between your lips, pausing to watch the passing clouds, then hanging up your jeans, your bedsheets, heck, your all-cotton, waist-high briefs (no tantalizing the neighbors there, i assure you).

after that, step back. let the sun and breeze do their thing.

who needs prozac when there is laundry to be hung?

who cares, anyway, what the neighbors say.

ladies and gentlemen, rev your laundry engines. i know my blessed mother-in-law is an ardent believer in the power of the clothesline. heck, i think she’ll even take a sunny day in winter. anyone else with a clothesline tale to tell? or a story of spotting someone strip down beyond her undies? all’s game in clothesline 101.

just three minutes ago, i swear, it was me with my feets up, lemonade in hand. a whole long freeform summer swirling in my view finder.
that was then.
this is today:
lunch packed, check. camp form signed, ditto. emergency contact assigned, oops. (note to self: do that. let so-and-so know she’s on the line should the little one crack a bone while playing summer camp).
and it’s not yet 6 o’clock. in the morning, people!
oh my gracious goodness. that was quick, that week of summer. oh, we did it to the hilt. lemonade by the gallon. library books guzzled, too. one of us even took a stab at catching fireflies, that archetypal joy of summer.
but now it’s time for camp. dang. it is with no small degree of butterflies and dragging summer sandals that i, the mama, lead this march toward structured days and all-new counselors and whistles.
i am perhaps the least eager camper that there is. i, like throngs and throngs, long for days when summertime meant sliding out of bed, slurping cereal and being off for the day. through the sliding screen. into whatever the woods, the basement offered.
we might slide home for lunch, but better yet it was cold raw hotdogs eaten out of the fridge in martha hackney’s kitchen. everything tasted better at martha’s because we could get away with things at martha’s that we could not do at home.
we’d roll in, a little muddy, a little scratched-up from the woods, freckles popping like fireflies in the night on our sun-brushed little cheeks.
but not until my mama rang the dinner bell, and our day of fun need pause. long enough for chops and greens and starch, then back ’til dark for kick-the-can, ghosts in the graveyard, and all those summer games that pitted the big kids against the littles.
(and taught me lifelong lessons on how it is when you’re not cool, and the big boys down the block, the ones who ruled the street on souped-up sting-ray bikes, could make you feel like such a loser.)
my personal summer joyfest, summer after summer, was what might be called my cardboard box period. again, martha hackney in a co-starring role. we would take a box, me and martha dear, and we would spend every single day of a whole long summer, building, decorating, making homes for little dolls. i do not remember the dolls. but i do remember making teeny tiny tubes of toothpaste from rolled up bits of tinfoil.
even now, give me a box. give me cardboard and scissors and a pile of many fabric swatches and i am lost, would be lost, ’til i heard the dinner bell, and my mama calling round the bend and through the woods, for me to come home for something sensible, something other than the things we snuck out of martha hackney’s fridge.
it’s a different world now. it’s a world where if i kept my little one home from camp he would be whining all day long, because there is no one, far as the eye can see, for him to play with. and his mama spends three days a week chasing, typing stories.
i swear there’s something lost. and it pains me to say so, to know so.
all night last night, i had visions of just plain calling it quits, pulling the plug on summer camp, letting the little guy stay home, fend for his little self, backed up by his fine imagination.
but an imagination, at 5, can only go so long without a playmate. and thus, the trouble here.
so the lunch is packed, the suit and towel tucked in the backpack. and the sunscreen (phew, i remembered) is at the ready. we’ll be out the door by half past eight, and driving to the other side of town, a town away, a leafy lovely town where we hardly ever go. we know no one. it will all be new.
oh, boy, how fun. God help me as he clings on tight. God help me if he cries. the tears of summer should not be a boy, a mama, dragging heels to camp.

okay campers, line up here. weigh in on how you feel about the finest ways to spend your days in summer. the pros, the cons of all-day camp. i know at least one camp hold-out, who has all sorts of plans for how to while away the languid days. any other takers?

lazily, the lazy susan will get restocked later on today. i think. that’s the plan. but this is summer, so it’ll be whenever the day gives me a little breather. which, geez, might not be ’til late tonight. go summer….

a hundred years ago, or so it seems, a man i know, a man who at the time was on the brink of becoming the father to our firstborn son, fluffed the pillow under his head and let fly with this: “you’ve never seen the side of me that’s coming. i am going to be mush.”
his point, a point that made me sit bolt upright, or at least as upright as a woman at 38 weeks gestation is able, was as if God had rolled back the tincan lid of tightly packed rainbows, and given me a peek of the indigo and violet to come.
“mush, eh?” i remember mulling the words around and around in my head. i wonder what that means.
now, mind you, when a youngish woman (okay, so i was 30 when i met him, and 34 when i married him, but for the sake of story, and relatively speaking, let’s call it young) is out there in the game of love, she is not probably carrying around a checklist, which, in the top three slots, lists “must be mushy for the children.”
no, i’d say i was more taken, at the time, by his holey loafers, and the seersucker shorts, rumpled with the hem hanging down on one leg, that he wore to meet my mother. (she was wholly taken, pulled me aside, whispered, “he’s so old shoe!” which in her book was/is the highest form of desirability.)
so, yes, i carried on with this old-shoe fellow for quite a while. i believe i was mostly taken by his way with words and his holey loafers. and the fact that i felt i could talk to him for forever.
i did know that i adored his papa, yet another old-shoe fellow. an old-shoe fellow who had a charming habit of inhaling stacks and stacks of newspapers, and loaves of challah at shabbat dinner, and who, too, had a remarkable knack for listening and carrying on hours-long, heartfelt dinner conversations.
(note to mother-in-law: i adored you too, but this is about papas. today is papa day here at the table.)
i don’t believe i thought much about what kind of papa will this long, tall, holey, dapper, son of newspaper fellow be.
until the morning he made the comment about the mush in the making.
that got me wondering. that made me want that baby to come right then, so we could do away with the distractions and get a real live look at mush in action.
sure enough, the baby came.
although, given that, in the thick of the child’s laborious arrival, the papa of the impending child was drawn deeply and distractedly into the chicago bulls three-peat celebration on the little labor-room tv–so much so i had to ask him if maybe we could pay attention to the seismic contractions coming from within me–i might have suddenly wondered where his definition of mush and mine parted ways.
but i was too busy pushing out that irish-headed child. (psst, for you who’ve not pushed out an irish-headed child, the term is code, as i shouted out mid-push, for a big head that’s going to hurt like holy flames as it escapes the womb.)
but we digress.
to telescope the story here, to bring it down to size, is to say that you sometimes have not a clue, just an inkling maybe, of the sort of father to your children you are taking on when you wander down that wedding aisle.
in ways i never would have guessed, i have learned to be a better mother watching my mushy mate be a father to his sons.
two things leap to the front of my brain: midnight snakes and captain fun.
midnight snakes would be the time-honored tradition around here of man and boy coming down the stairs when all is dark, lifting box of cereal from the shelf, pouring little o’s and milk, spooning.
and while they spoon, they talk. they giggle. they share the day. it is a rite the man i married shared once upon a time with his grandpa. and nearly every night around here, i see his grandpa come back to life in the form of a bowl, a spoon, and a shared placemat at the table.
you see, the man i fell in love with because we could talk forever, about really important things, about things that matter, well, he does the same with the boys i birthed.
so i have learned from him the fine art of not rushing to bed because it’s bedtime and the clock says that children need to be asleep. but rather to honor that the day is drawing to a close, and closing a blessed stretch of hours with crunchy o’s and milk and conversation is a consecration of the day that’s worthy of momentarily delayed slumber.
and besides, it tells a boy that he is worthy of his father’s full and complete attention before he nods off for the night.
then there’s captain fun. there is no fluttering cape involved in this. no phone booth either. just a papa who picks up the slack in the mama’s less-than-spontaneous department.
whereas the mama might say something wholly lame, like, no, let’s stay home and weed the garden, the papa will be digging through the stack of maps and guides, plotting out some eye-opening adventure, taking this show on the road.
the duties of captain fun include spins to dairy queen, hikes in the woods, museum outings. banging buckets of golf balls, riding amtrak trains across the country, or just downtown (when the metra train, a reasonable alternative, is closer to home by a few miles, but nowhere near as romantic–to a locomotive-loving little boy, that is).
of course it is not all fun and games around here. but i am only saying that those boys had better get on their knees and thank God they do not only have a mama because if she was plotting out the days, they might be short on all of the above and long on chores.
or ticking through the list of to-dos so that some day, some godforsaken day 100 years down the road, there might be a chance of carving out some fun to go along with all the drudgery.
the man i married has taught me the incandescent beauty of up and making room for adventure, and laughter, too. as hardworking as he can be, he can be pure unbridled escape.
i sometimes wonder if it is born of a deeply-steeped jewish sanctification of the holiness and blessing of every drop of light and life. as opposed to my deeply-steeped catholic inclination to scrub my soul of all my sins before i can even think to knock at the gates of paradise.
while i spin that notion around in my tumble dryer, the one at the top of my neck, let me say simply this: while i never knew it was coming, hadn’t a clue ‘til i first heard word of the mush, i am so delighted, and so deeply eternally blessed, that i signed on for a lifelong stint with captain fun and the midnight snakes.
and my boys, especially, oughta high-five me for that one.

see, it’s a blessing, ain’t it, that whoever invented human procreation realized, unlike worms, it takes two to tango. that often means that one is yin to the other’s yang. and, baby, i got some yang that needs yinning. in your house, or in your life, how do the grownups balance each other out? or, if you’re doing this whole thing solo–and God bless you if you are–how hard is it to strike your own personal yin and yang? what fine traits, or traditions, have you seen passed down from one papa to the next?
and while we’re at it, happy blessed fathers day to all those who father, a verb that might be pinned to either gender, as to mother is to all who tenderly embrace the world. to father, i suppose, is to absorb the shock of the tough, cruel world, to shine a flashlight on the wisdom lurking out in the dark, and to teach a thing or two about sliding into home. feel free to add your own definitions down below…..

the rose of sharon, i believe, laid down its life for our tepee. since the day we moved here it was a ragtag of a bush, a wanna-be tree. mostly it was naked branches, with a few crepe-papery pink-to-rosy-pink blooms that emerged but two weeks a year. call me heartless, i called it a space holder.

my mother, chief gardener around here, kept calling it dead. i was not so quick to give up on it. despite the lack of evidence to the contrary. despite the fact that i didn’t even like it.

not so many mornings ago, wielding a saw that could take your leg off with one quick flick of the wrist, she all but signed the death certificate. she marched right toward it with that zig-zagged blade. and we, no fools, stood back.
george washington, masquerading as my mother, took it down. in six swift flicks, with maybe a little tugging and pulling besides.

bingo. a light went on. synapse met with synapse, Idea was born. what with six long, clean branches lying there on the ground, a heap headed only for the curb, someone’s well exercised recycling gene kicked in: “make a tepee,” that someone shouted.

and so, my mama did. she taught the little one how the native americans did it.

while they were gathering the goods, i pointed them to the most sacred spot around, a clearing under the great blue spruce, on the eastern edge of our backyard, where the slant of firstlight comes early, comes poking through the cracks in the next-door neighbor’s cedar fence. it’s a place i call “the magic place.”

i always say, it’s the reason we bought this house. or at least my reason. my heart belonged to that place before a single paper was signed.

if you believe, like i do, that every child deserves a thinking place, a cove under the pines, where you can look up and barely see the sky through all the boughs and all the needles that make the light play peek-a-boo. if you believe that God made rocks as perches for endless contemplation, then you too would understand why i saw the space and heard my name being whispered.

you too would understand why i cared nothing about bedrooms or bathrooms, and certainly not about water heaters or air conditioning, because this was a house with a magic place, and i knew, as my mother and my little one carried their pile of sacrificial branches, that this would be the magic place for our little tepee.

my mother, hardwired with engineering skills that wholly escaped me, had it up in no time. tapped the builders on the shoulder, asked if they minded donating an old blanket to the cause. it was a blanket that was keeping my couch from getting splattered but we–the couch, the builders and me–offered it up for the high purpose of a tepee.
if we’d had a little deerskin, like the woodland natives, we’d have wrapped the sticks in that. but we are short on deerskins this season.

in theory, this was a tepee for the little guy. and just the other day, he humored me and spent some time in there.
but, fact is, it’s mine. i’m the one who can’t seem to stay out of there. i’m the one with my too-long legs all hunched up under me, trying to fit inside without knocking down the tepee poles. i’m the one who cannot keep my eyes off the undersides of all the pine boughs. i’m the one enchanted by all the chirping that surrounds me.

among the long list of secrets of parenting, there is this: the little person, often, is a front, an excuse, a bold-faced oh-no-it’s-not-for-me-it’s-a-tepee-for-my-little-woodland-warrior sort of fabrication. yup, that’s the truth, now, isn’t it?

so the little tepee that was intended to give my little person unbroken hours of imagination and forest-floor picnics and a cool place to curl up and turn the pages of a picture book, well, it’s giving me a place to pray.

it is impossible not to pray when you are curled up on the bed of soft pine needles there against the hard, cool earth. and all around you shafts of light are beaming in. the light, the way it’s filtered, is filled with floating bits; it is almost as if each particle is drifting down, as if a molecule of light was yours to reach, to grab, to close inside your fist, as if a firefly.

and then there are the wrens. just beyond the clearing, just beyond the pines, i have an old white bird house standing on a six-foot perch. it does have a short, squat cupola on the peak of its rusty coppery roof, and i always thought it was a schoolhouse. my little one corrected me, “it’s a church.”

and it seems a whole brood of baby wrens were hatched inside that church, and you can hear them chirping. especially when their mama or their papa comes to the little gothic window on the side, offers them a seed or spider.

“they are praying,” my little one whispered to me just yesterday, when he was in there with me–in the tepee, that is, not the bird church.

“what are they praying?” i whispered back.

“don’t let us get killed by the cat. don’t let us get killed by the cat,” he again whispered, this time with the fervency of baby birds who might have eyed the gray-striped jungle cat who makes his home outdoors in summer, and licks his lips a lot.

an apt prayer in the land of the ever-prowling cat.

my prayers there are not so explicit. my prayers are more hushed and awed. i feel my soul filling as i sit there, take in the light, the sound, the softness all around me.

emily dickinson, in a poem i know nearly by heart because i heard my mama reciting it so often, writes: “some keep the sabbath going to church; i keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.”

i second the motion, madame poetess, sitting there in my prayerful tepee under the pines.

only my chorister is a house wren. and the choir is all the chirping babies. a mottled rock is my kneeler. the scent of pine, my incense. my holy altar is the wren’s chapel and birthing room. a sacred chamber, all around.

“God preaches–a noted clergyman, and the sermon is never long,” emily writes.

“so instead of going to heaven at last, i’m going all along.”

amen, sister. amen.

my holy tepee, the place i pray these days, is taking me to heaven, all right. its strong straight branches wrap me all around, its tippy-top points me toward the the puffy clouds where little children sometimes think to look for God, sitting on a shiny throne.

my little tepee under the pines is indeed a rocketship for prayer, and i’m strapped in for the holy blessed ride.

blessed holy chair friends, do you have a prayerful place, a sacred clearing where you can’t help but fill your soul? did you have a place when you were little that filled you with wonder, and thus with the Divine? i am sitting back, holding my breath, waiting for the beauty of your stories…

i was feeling faraway the other night, so i pulled out my little jar of pushpins and made me a map.
that would be my village, right up there, sticking up from the puzzle piece of the fine ol’ u.s. of a. a piece i could trace with my eyes closed, the little stocking foot for florida, the turkey neck of maine, the round smooth back of the california coast, and, i guess, the dangly belly of the lone star state. poor texas. poor dangly-belly texas.
i just now did the math. if i hopped in my old wagon, if i packed a case of water bottles, threw in some granola, and a banana or two, if i started driving, heading north, north-east for starters, and kept driving ’til i waved hello to all my brothers–there are four, you know–i would clock 5,304 miles. i would be on the road, without potty breaks, mind you, for 81.6 hours, or 3.4 days.
and that’s clippin’ along at 65 mph, not catchin’ a single wink. not even a Z. let alone a little string of zzzzs.
no wonder i hardly ever borrow a cup of sugar from the one who lives in maine. or long beach. or prescott valley, arizona. or, heck, not even toledo, a mere 215 miles, door-to-door. because blessedly my baby brother picked the toledo in ohio and not clear off in spain.
now, once upon a time, we all lived in the same area code, but that was so long ago the area codes hadn’t been broken into a hundred little chunks per metropolitan area. and as recently as just last year, when i put out the call for family dinner, i could count on my doorbell ringing a full three times. i set nine places at the table. we were a raucous noisy crowd.
but now, one year and two days later, i would call only my mother. at eighth-grade graduation last week, we did our very best to keep up the noise. my mama, thanks to a fine sauvignon blanc, had us in stitches, she truly did.
but some times, some times when i hang up the phone, i feel so very far away. and it gets me to thinking how odd it is that the very dearest souls in my life are spread across the map.
i’m not there to bump into them on the sidewalk. can’t look into their eyes and see the heavy load, the one that’s wearing one to the bone. can’t reach across the table, and give a hand a squeeze. geez, i couldn’t even see the sparkly ring one just gave his true love. i had to twiddle my thumbs while the airlines took a reservation, cleared two seats, flew them clear to here from the desert far away.
too far sometimes.
and then there is the circle of oldest, dearest friends. heck, you would think someone took my heart, tossed it in the air and watched the pieces come down coast-to-coast. there’s the one i love in key west. another handful in new york city and environs and two off in the city of angels.
of my best old friends, two, i kid you not, do not have computers. fool me, falling for the types who would do without technology in a world that’s nearly wholly hard-wired.
that means we are left to letters. oh, yes, let me sit right down here and squeeze some letter-writing into the day. and phone calls. and i don’t know about you but even a phone call these days is pressed for chance and time.
some weeks, when one of us is feeling lonely, the back-and-forth phone messages can last all week. can constitute a hyphenated sort of stringing together verbal bits. the pressing matter spit out in 60-second sound bites, or longer if the phone machine does not rudely cut someone off in the middle of a heartache.
and, fool i am again, i barely use a cell phone, so to catch me you have to catch me in my kitchen. before i am tossing around a skillet in the narrow window of 5:55 to 6:25.
how, i ask you, in a world in which to circle the wagons is to operate in four time zones, countless area codes, and even more ZIP codes, is a soul supposed to be there for the silence between the syllables? know the joy of hearing the other’s footsteps come bounding up the walk? catch the raised eyebrow that hints, this here is a tease, or a really important point, one you might want to lean in for, one you do not want to miss by getting up to clear the plates?
i miss the ones i love. i miss them deeply and achingly. i miss, most of all, the waking up to the possibility that on any given day i might take a taste of one’s fine balsamic dressing, hear the other one pounding out some bach or brahms, find my boys climbing over them like ants to a popsicle.
this long-distance needs a spin through my dryer. maybe i could shrink it. reach out and hold on tight to the ones i love.

how bout you, people? how long and far and infrequently do you connect with the ones who truly make you who you are? do you, like me, have a global village that takes a dsl to bring you close? do you miss the plain old touch of a hand across the table? the spontaneity of a long tall glass poured there at the kitchen counter, walked out to the front stoop, where, together, you can watch the world go by? i know we’ve spent time talking about the little things you can drop in the mail, and the way you can fuss when someone’s coming in from out of town. but heck, some days there is no substitute for the real live thing. and right in here, as one school year ends and a summer begins, it can get a little lonely, eh?

they even gave me popcorn. a little cellophane-wrapped folded-up bag of unpopped kernels, to tuck in the microwave and listen to it do its rat-a-tat.
and a purple folder. and a recommended reading list. and all the rules.
oh, yes, oh yes, they did. and i am, you can maybe tell, as giddy as a girl in pigtails bouncing down the library stairs.
which is what i used to be. which is, all the doctor phils of the world would tell us, who i am today. my inner child must be a little girl who knows no grander glee than signing up for the summer reading program at the local library.
it’s what we did yesterday, me and m’ boys. it was the highlight of our first official monday of this here summer vacation, the start of the first full week of the 11 or 12 we’ve got (no one in this house seems to know just when this grand spell ends and we are in no hurry to check it out, i’ll tell you).
it was a toss-up: beach or bookshelves. and the bookshelves won. handily. the sand, we figured, will always be there. the little chart that counts the summer reading books, they might run out, you never know.
we all signed up, both boys and me. oh, yessiree.
the little one in the read-to-me plan. nestle in, sink your elbows and your shoulders in your mama’s side, turn the pages, take in the story, one book at a time, and you get an ice cream cone after 25. how fine is that?
the big one, the one who’s reading nietzsche and marx and everything under the sun about cameras, lenses and light, he went straight downstairs to where the grownups go. he got the popcorn too.
i imagine the two of us, inhaling handfuls of popcorn as we inhale our books. we’ll be sure to share with the little guy. long as he gives us a lick of his ice cream. can a summer get any more delicious?
i can see it, clear as if it wasn’t 40-something years ago, the little white folded sheet of librarian’s paper. an underwater scheme. and every time i read a book i got a little submarine stamp on the chart with my name on it. the one they kept, so proudly, right there on the library counter, in some sort of shoebox with alphabet dividers. i remember walking up to that librarian’s desk, there in the children’s section, announcing my name, reporting what i’d read since last time.
it was the honor roll of all honor rolls. i remember the end-of-summer reading party. we all got little cups of ice cream. vanilla. with a wooden spoon.
but mostly we got afternoons of reading. and reading. we got to bury our little noses in lewis carroll, and laura ingalls wilder. and best of all, frances hogdson burnett’s secret garden.
it was a rite of summer, it was a rite of being my mother’s child. my mother was a reader. and thus, we read too. like little ducks, we waddled in behind her. she split off to her corner of the library, we split off to ours.
we waddled out, an hour later, maybe longer, our arms growing, stretching, coming loose at the socket, under the weight of so many books. piled high, like up above. so many books you sometimes had to peek around the stack, to keep from tumbling down the steps.
and so, i’m the mama waddler now. i want my children to know, to love, the thrill of counting up the book list. to conquer ice cream maybe, but to conquer something more. to understand that to spend your summer afternoons tucked in a book is an adventure ride you’ll never ever, not in a million, or 50, years forget.
there is, i think, something to the structure of the summer reading program. the signing-up and all makes it feel official. like getting a driver’s license maybe. before you could ever reach the gas.
and then watching all the little stars–this year at our library it’s outer space and rocket ships that are the theme, there is always a theme, i can imagine the librarians meeting over sandwiches and coffee to come up with a theme to hook you in–and, one by one, the stars get colored in.
it makes it not so overwhelming to spend the summer reading books, when you count, one star at a time. and then, before you know it, you go back to school that much more in love with what’s tucked between the covers.
it is a heady thing, when you stop to think that once upon a time someone in this thing called civilization stopped to think it worth building whole temples to books and words and ideas. someone built a special house just for the love of letters.
and then, much later, some librarian looked at the whole long summer and realized that a little piece of folded-up paper, with stars and shapes to color in, could make the whole big temple come down a size, to fit in the palm and the heart of a little child, who thought it rather grand to sign up for a starship ride to books.

dear chair people, today marks six whole months, half a blessed year of meandering monday through friday. we have coursed many ups and downs, around some bends as well. i myself have had my breath taken away, more than once. it has been my daily intention to feed us all, to give us place and time to pause, to consider the not-oft considered. as it’s summer now, i am thinking we might all relish the lazy days before us, in the very best way. as one fine mind suggested, i might move the kitchen table outside, into the sunshine, make it a picnic table. if i’m so inspired i will pound out the usual meandering. but i might put out a recipe, a really juicy one. a one that shouts of summer. or maybe i will share some photos. my will, a.k.a. the manchild, is making art of what he sees around him, and you might like to see it too. if i find a really delicious paragraph in what i’m reading, i might lay that out for all to take a taste. or we might, perhaps, have another voice pull up a chair, with a meditation by someone other than just moi. it seems a right thing, a divine thing, to honor the season’s tempo and let things unspool here the way that summer does. each day there will indeed be something fresh and something new. but heaven only knows what will inspire us each day. for the six months past, with all my heart i thank you. this has been a little piece of paradise.

now, does anyone have anything to say about summer reading, the best, perhaps, that there is?

it had been the summeriest of weekends. farmer’s market saturday morn, followed by a hike in a woody place where a fawn, not knowing it should be afraid, up and tiptoed into my shadow. a grand dinner in a friend’s beautiful bountiful garden. strawberry rhubarb pie for breakfast, i kid you not, in the summer porch where the breeze and the wren warbling made me want to stay all day. screens washed and tucked in windows, so the breeze, the one that swept through the pie-in-the-porch breakfast could also cool our nights. a stroll to the beach where a 3-year-old we love decided she had no need for a sandy-bottomed bathing suit, so off it went, and she romped naked, much to the 5-year-olds’, there were two of them, giggly discombobulation. heck, the weekend was so fine, even the last-minute grilled chicken came off juicy, down to the last sun-dappled bite.
so, as the great orange orb went down in the west, and the cicada turned down the sci-fi channel for the night, the one i love, the one who has a license to do so, jangled the car keys in that way a papa sometimes does, making the ping of the keys an invitation without words.
then came the words: “who wants to go for cicada ice cream?”
a question, of course, that can only be met with squeals. and little feet running out the door. straight toward the car.
the little one, hearing the words “ice” and “cream” in the same breath, was on for the mission. regardless of whatever ol’ modifier got in the way there. the big one, curious, vowed to stick with water. but he buckled in anyway.
the one with the keys started the car.
“do you think it’ll be kind of orangey, with crunchy little wings in it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.
let us explain where the man on a mission was headed: there is a fine old ice cream parlor nearby, a place so beloved that when the owner died a couple years back the sidewalk was so packed with bouquets and hand-scribbled letters from children, children who wrote about the joy of walking in a shop where, no matter how the day had been ’til that minute, the man with the scoop behind the glass counter, the man with the phalanx of tubs lined up before him, the man willing to give a whole spoonful for free and call it a taste, the man who always knew you by name, or found out right away if he didn’t, well, you couldn’t get around the mountain of sadness there at the curb.
you couldn’t get around ’til they opened the door and starting scooping again. and, being that this is the summer of the cicada, at least around here it sure and crunchily is, they posted a big sign on the door, advertising cicada bug ice cream.
and what with all the talk of cicadas for lunch (a friend of my manchild brought them one day, right into the junior high cafeteria, all battered and fried and chasing the girls away), why not add that certifiable cicada crunch to the creamy vats of vanilla?
thus, as he rolled through the darkening lanes, and turned right at the light, the one with the keys was upping the ante, all right.
“you mean you’ll come along for the trip but you won’t take the cicada challenge?”
this to the boy who just nights before had a snail dangling from the end of his petite little fork.
apparently, the boy draws the line at wild things with cellophane wings. the boy will not bite into bugs with red eyes.
the little one, he leapt from the car. once we got there, that is. could not get into the ice cream shop fast enough. me, i dallied there on the sidewalk. though i was more than game to be family documentarian.
the little one took one look, and opted for superman ice cream, a royal-blue-red-and-yellow concoction that despite a few minutes of rubbing with washcloth still sent him to bed with royal-blue lips, and royal-blue tongue.
the one who’d vowed water, in the end went with root beer; one scoop, sugar cone, please.
and mister cicada challenge himself tiptoed, ohyessiree, into the uncharted terrain, mind you, this is a man whose idea of the perfect bedtime snack is a pop-tart straight from the aerospace foily packet.
he asked for a taste. he dangled the spoon in the air, then he bit.
pffffffft, you could see the air leaking out from his cicada balloon. there were no red eyes in there. no wings. and no crunch. no crunch from the genus magicicada, at least.
the crunch, it turned out, was that of the ho-hum southern pecan.
the tub of so-called “cicada bug” ice cream was nothing but vanilla with swirls of chocolate and caramel and a few pecans thrown in the mix.
“i’m bummed,” said the one left licking the spoon. “no real cicada. no edge. no frisson. just bourgeois fudge swirl.
“it’s all marketing. the triumph of marketing. a metaphor for our civilization.”
he up and ordered rainbow sherbet, he did. and the cicada challenge was put to a rest, where it will lie, deep underground, for the next 17 years. until a gent, just past retirement, hobbles back to the shop with the taunt on the door and tries once again to take a bite of the creamy cold bug with red eyes.

sometimes summer is just for the tale of it, no burning point, no deep metaphor, despite mr. cicada cone’s quip up above. so it is with this tale. just a slow gentle start to the week. how did you spend this summery if-not-yet-summer weekend?
p.s. should you care to cruise for some of the finest dairy-made ice cream there is, point your mobile toward hartigan’s ice cream shoppe, 2909 central street, in evanston. or check out their site at www.hartigansicecream.com. you can always bring your own ‘cadas, and bury them deep inside the cone. anyone out there in chairland try the flying winged thing said to taste like cold canned asparagus? ykkh. tantalize with your tales…

the little one dashed in the door. “i’m in first grade now.” the big one slept ’til noon. it’s official, we’re out of school. the summer can begin.
bring on the lemonade. the stalks of mint pirouetting out from every icy glass. bring on the pb&j, smeared, sliced and delivered in one fell swoop. no more lunch bags. bring on the big fat book, the one whose pages will be ruffled, worn, splashed, dried, splashed again, before the story ends.
bring on the wide-open unstructured days. the days when no schedule whatsoever might drive a mama mad, by, um, 10 a.m.
gulp. here we go. time to fill the days, the weeks, the months, with the stuff that summer’s made of. the stuff your kiddies count on. the stuff that puts summer up in lights, makes it the thing that children locked in school desks dream of, the stuff that gets the breathless mamas ’round the final bend.
knowing, any minute now, there will be no more, no more.
no more keeping track of papers and permission slips. no more rolling sleeping tree trunks out of bed at dawn. no more light seeping out from under the bedroom door well past midnight because there is a kid and a computer, racing to beat a morning deadline.
no more friday folders, the thing we’ve come to love, to count on, when a week of kindergarten work gets poured onto the maple table and we all sit around and ooh and ahhh. and a little boy feels so very proud.
i do believe this is a twisty time. on the one hand, breathe. on the other, oh my goodness. what now?
i wonder, i really do, how many minutes it will be ’til we’re in tears here. ’til the training wheels get wobbly, or the ice cream rolls off the cone. or, lord, oh lord, it is so hard for sweet delicious summer to live up to its bright and shining billing.
already, my big one, the one who heaved a heaving sigh when all was done, well, already, he has mentioned that it is strange, and sort of lonely, to be left alone all day with just your thoughts, and no bumping into friends every five seconds in the crowded hallways where good company, ever-changing company, is just a locker or a classroom or a lunch table away. and where a phone call is not a part of the equation, of the exchange. where your mama and your kid brother might be the only other humans you bump up against all day.
summer is like that. an ample dose of shadow with the sunlight, the never-ending sunlight. it is a law of physics, of nature, of the divine. let there be light. let there be darkness. so sayeth the holy book.
for every night out under the stars, there are swarms of mosquitoes. for every jingling of the ice cream truck and its distant drawing-near-you bell, there is the chance that you won’t hear it, won’t find your wallet, ’til the truck is past your house and around two corners, and you are left with an ice cream believer in tears, there at the empty, cone-free curb.
on the kid side of the equation, summer is infinite, and fairly endless, too. it is day after day of decisions no bigger than strawberry or raspberry jam with that peanut butter.
but to a mama, egad, look out. it can be daunting when what’s expected is pure, 100-percent, old-fashioned fun. planned by you, the cheery tour director.
not in this house, people. i find myself wanting. i find myself coming up short in the summer fun department.
do i pack a picnic every sunny day? i do not. do i haul my kiddies back and forth to the pool every blessed afternoon, like some of the other mommies? i do not. do i remember sunscreen? no.
heck, two-to-one, i forget to stock up on buns to wrap around the hot dogs that are dozing in the meat drawer of the fridge.
why the big harrumph here, you ask? why the grouchy, grumpy grumbling?
did we not just barrel down the pike, finally reach our exit, pull up the ramp, find a shady spot to park there under the pines?
geez, i don’t mean to be a gnat dive-bombing your drippy popsicle. hate to be the chill wind that brings you goosebumps there in your sensible swimsuit, the one with the little skirt that hides those cottage-cheese thighs.
guess it’s just, well, i’ve been here before, started out the summer daydreaming of all that might be. only to wind up, down the road in august, wistful for what wasn’t, feeling sunken, ship-wrecked, for all i did not do.
so here’s to a summer of realistic, reasonable intentions.
i will surrender to the easy ways.
to afternoons in the summer house, not minding that half the screens have holes so the bugs can cozy in beside me.
to lemonade stands, with lemonade stirred from powdered drink mix.
to naked hot dogs.
to random, not regular, trips to the library, the ice cream store, the beach—those stalwarts of summer, each, but ones that lose their joy if provided on calculated schedule instead of whim.
i will not flog my sorry self for not lining up the A+ summer jaunt, the sunrise trail ride, complete with blue-corn flapjacks and cowboy ghee-tar strains.
i will not wince when we finally pack a picnic but leave the drinks in the cooler back in the garage, where we put them down, so we could haul out the junk from the station wagon to make room for the wicker basket.
i will not beat my breast because another summer’s passed me by, and i’ve yet to make it to the ferris wheel that calls my little one’s name every single time we drive zooming by.
it’s been a really, really long school year. it’s had its ups and downs, its scrapes, its spills.
excuse me while i sit back and let the summer merely be.

summer forecast: accumulated clouds with plenty of sunshine. occasional storms. a rainbow once or twice. not such a nasty forecast, is it? what do you hope to do this summer? what tales of summer letdown do you have to get the good times rolling? and what about school’s out traditions?
we buy a book. go somewhere silly for lunch. last night, as it was afternoon kindergarten we were winding up, we went for hot dogs and lollipops. the night before it was escargot for the eighth grader. my boys are from opposite sides of the moon, what’s a mama to do? love them each madly, the snails, the lollipops, both…..