pull up a chair

so i tiptoed into the junior high gym last night, wielding a cigarette tray of glow sticks.
it was my ticket in. i took it, gladly.
it was my boarding pass into the realm of the boy-meets-girl, girl-asks-boy-to-dance, girl-mob-rushes-boy-mob that passes these days for the eighth-grade graduation dance.
i had signed up weeks ago. months ago, probably. as one who loves an archeological dig, especially one in real time, one in the now, this, i knew, could be instructive.
i might, i figured, pick up a few tidbits i could use. like how in the world it is that boys and girls grope their way through the uncertain world of beginner romance. especially here on the leafy over-the-top north shore in james bond’s big, big year, the real deal, ’007.
(the decorating mamas took that one to the limit, parking a jet black ferrari, i kid you not, on the school’s front lawn. an interpreter had to explain to me that bond always drives a ferrari. oh. a local police officer spent his shift guarding the shiny car. good thing wednesday night is not a big night for crime around here; the officer was otherwise engaged, keeping pawprints off the pricey hood.)
i also knew i might discover what sort of trouble these little darlings might get into in, say, the bathroom, where i was told to keep my eye out for more than two feet in a stall.
it all sounded like news i could use.
and, oh, it was.
but, alas, i got the beginner tour. i was on the early shift, where mostly there is lots of boys with boys and girls with girls, and a curious abundance of jumping up and down.
i missed the advanced class, the end-of-night shift. that’s when, apparently, the slow dance kicked in. that’s when i really might have learned things.
oh, well.
blessedly for my manchild, i barely caught a glimpse of him all night. saw him whooping into the gym, arms flailing. but that was it. i stayed my distance.
and besides, it was my job to pass out glow-stick bracelets from my cigarette lady tray. i was mobbed, i tell you.
children on the verge of high school seem to like to grab the candy-colored straws, the ones that look like you could suck out the kool-aid powder from inside. only this kool-aid glows when you crack the straw.
the eighth-grade children didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t kool-aid. they draped their every body part in glow. there were kids, by the time my shift was up, who were walking serpentines of neon.
it was rather psychedelic, if i dare say so, if saying so doesn’t date me from the days of woodstock and just beyond.
but anyway, back to why i was there in the first place. as one who long stood on the edge of a dance floor, combing the crowd for bits of telling detail (for work, mind you, not for personal entertainment, although i’ve always found it highly entertaining), i thought this scene might be ripe for a cherry-picker like me.
and besides, we have entered a whole new world over here in the boy-meets-girl department.
once, not long ago, girls were stationed firmly on the other side of the globe. as if a line had been drawn across the hemisphere, and Y chromosomes dared not cross the line. girls and boys steered clear. did not speak. barely even at a family dinner where the boy and girls had known each other since they were drooling, since back in the days of diapers changing willy-nilly next to each other on some rubber mat, their mothers randomly yanking naked little legs into the air, wiping bottoms.
but that familiarity was ancient history. the deep freeze of at least third through fifth grade meant that all exchange of word was odd, was fraught with tribulation.
in our house the thaw did not arrive in earnest until perhaps last year. and while i’m barred from saying much in this department, let us say that it is now a subject that tests my very finest tea-leaf-reading skills.
there is much, too much probably, eighth-grade group analysis of who likes who and who should ask who out. and rather than leaving the matter in the hands of the interested parties, there is the unfortunate inclination to take matters into group hands and mob the poor, dear once-interested parties to the point that all interest crumbles into ashes on the floor.
it makes for broken hearts and much head scratching. what to do. what to do. how to mend the broken fence.
i tell you the sight of a heavy-hearted manchild at the breakfast table is enough to leave you soggy in your cornflakes. no wonder i broke out in shingles.
so it was with some hope of getting a bead on the eighth-grade social whirl that i set out to be a chaperone. i hobbled home knowing little more than when i first hoisted the glowsticks.
i know that eighth-grade girls are beautiful. and the boys, so handsome in some cases you can hear the hearts acrackin’ down the road. i know the sweetest sight i saw all night was the girl who walks with braces and a walker dancing hands-to-shoulder with another girl who took the time, who had the heart, to not leave the one in braces alone, off to the side of the gym. i know that i would like to nominate the sweet heart for a nobel prize.
i found out later that i missed the slow dance. missed when one girl leapt up and twirled a boy i know onto the dance floor, only to motion to the one he used to, sorta-still-maybe likes. and she, the used-to-sorta one, shook her head no, and refused to dance.
so this morning at breakfast there just might be a heavy-hearted someone across the table from me and my soggy cornflakes. i wish i had some wisdom. but all i’ve got are glowsticks that have lost their glow.

some of you, i know, are far advanced in all of this, and i don’t mean because you yourself have suffered through. i’ve done that myself. what i mean is you have been the grownup in a house where children’s hearts are twisting, breaking. and you are left to sop up all the sorrows. or at least the ones you can. anyone got wisdom on how to chart these bumpy waters? anyone with a funny story from an 8th-grade dance? i could use a good guffaw today…….

i am firmly a believer in this truth: every blessed soul on earth is a story, has a story, is worth sitting back and listening to. if only we all took the time. if only we all stopped all our talking, and tuned in to what some say is a dying art, the art of listening.
this might seem a funny place to begin on the morning of my firstborn’s first real graduation. but it’s not really. it’s all about all the stories that will walk across the stage, will be handed a diploma.
it is even, it is especially, about the stories of those who won’t be walking, the ones who didn’t even make it to the eighth grade. one blessed girl in particular. it is impossible for me to live this day and not think of another mother who must be aching, rocking, holding herself against the pain, because all around her eighth-grade kids are blithely slipping on their gowns, and her eighth-grader is no longer, is buried not too many miles from the graduation stage.
forgive me. days like today are days for remembering. and i cannot forget.
there is one boy’s story i know well today. i have, these past few days, been reliving every frame. today, more so. more than in a long, long time.
and while his is the story that i unspool, that i pore over frame-by-frame, i merely make the point that each graduation gown is draping someone’s story. underneath the yards of shiny polyester there is hope and heartache, there is triumph and defeat.
i only make the point because to understand the pomp and circumstance you really need to tune out the hoots and hollers, you need to telescope the lens and try to contemplate the wrinkles and the heart beat pounding there beneath the folds of cloth.
maybe it’s why i am often misty-eyed. maybe it’s why they call me sappy mama. i am always considering the unspoken, i am always imagining the story that’s not told. i am always divining the universal in the particular, and the other way around as well.
and so, when i see the streams of blue-gowned eighth-graders pouring in the auditorium i will know that each and every one has a story worth listening to, worth telling.
i will know that once upon a time a woman standing, perhaps, in a bathroom, saw a pink stripe appear on a little plastic disc. the mama knew, right then, that she was on her way to having a baby who, if she’d done the math she would have known, would be in the eighth-grade class of ‘007.
i will know, too, that she, like me, felt overwhelmed in those early days. like the first morning the papa went to work and the baby in the baby seat just squawked, while the mama tried to figure how in the world to shovel in the cereal—in her own mouth—fast enough.
i will know that somewhere around kindergarten there might have been a kid who hung off to the edge of the playground, who climbed to the roof of a little playhouse, kept an eye on the proceedings, tried to figure out how he’d ease into the world where everyone else already seemed so adept at playing games he didn’t know.
i will know that someone else might have once spent a whole semester being the new kid, once again trying to figure out the rules of a whole new world where playing baseball and soccer seemed to really matter. only he was more interested in al gore, losing the election.
i will know that there were late nights in kitchens where there were lots of tears. where a kid who sat alone at lunch came home crushed.
i will know that another mother ached. that she lay awake and tossed and turned, trying to figure out a way to lift the load, to show the kid the light at the end of the long tunnel, to make him understand that this middle school drama was really hell but some day he would be a grown up who owned the world. because he knew the stuff, already, that really mattered.
i will know that somewhere along the line, there came a wind from the holy blessed south, a warm wind, a divine wind, and it blew right up to and touched the small of some kid’s back. suddenly, he raised his wings, and he was soaring. he spoke out and kids around him started to listen, started to understand that he was no non-essential person.
he was funny, he was smart, but most of all he stood up and named injustice where he saw it. pounded out a note to the principal. named names, signed his own. didn’t flinch. would not stand and watch a kid get taunted. not any kid, not even ones he didn’t particularly like.
after all, he’d been watching, studying injustice for a long, long time. since the roof in kindergarten at least.
and in the end, at least as far as this story so far goes, he was the kid they voted most likely to be the president. he showed me just last night in the yearbook. underneath the note from the principal thanking him for being a kid who taught him so very much.
i will think of all those stories as the kids come streaming in. and i’ll, once again, be the mama crying. the mama lifting her every blessed breath to the God who long ago turned the blue stripe pink and landed that precious gift of life into her very heart. where it will reign forever.
amen.

as well as stories, i believe in prayers. on this morning of the end of grammar school, i whisper mighty prayers to all the teachers who got my firstborn here: the kindergarten p.e. teacher who taught life lessons with every game of mouse-and-cheese; to the first-and-second-grade teacher who taught him all about the monarchs and gave him spotted wings to fly; to the third-grade teacher who kept him safe and unafraid on 9-11; to the fourth-grade teacher who lit the burning light under u.s. history and made it achingly hard to leave the laboratory school; to the fourth-grade teacher who welcomed him with open arms, who opened up the classroom over christmas break and brought in a friend so the first real day wouldn’t be so very hard; to the fifth-grade teacher who made him laugh; the sixth-grade counselor who got us through the year, promised light was coming and it came; the seventh-grade team who cranked up all the gas, delighted in the kid who found his voice and the power of his intellect, then sat back and let him roll; the eighth-grade reading and science and math teachers, and the drama teacher too, and the retiring social studies teacher who was there at woodstock, had friends in the sds, and planted a few radical ideas along the way. to each and all and beyond. i thank God for the power of your vision, the unspeakable gifts you bring to every classroom, and the love of learning you infused into one very thirsty sponge. bless you.

p.s. about the photo: it is a giddy thing, some times, to be a blogging mama with a camera. you can turn up the sap and no one’s there to stop you. thus, i cracked open the save-forever box and hauled out the baby shoes, the first overalls and the first backpack my little schoolboy ever wore. laid out on his size XXXXXXXXX blue graduation gown, it tells a story all its own. bless you for indulging me. bless him, when he sees what his mama done….

it is, from my seat off in the bleachers, a game of which i am solely an observer. what’s on the field, what i’m taking in, is an extraordinary rite, a passage, an entwining of father and son.
and you get in, you join the club, with a single 3.5 x 2.5 cardboard card that often smells of bubblegum.
or at least they did, back in the 1960s, which is where this story and this club begins.
back then, in a little town along the jersey shore, a long-legged skinny boy somehow got his hands on his very first baseball card. i imagine him pedaling to the five-and-dime. can see his little hand sliding across the counter. ponying up the change, in buffalo nickels and maybe a dime. sitting on the curb, tearing off the wrapper, breaking into the smile that i love, that i married. a boy does that, breaks ear-to-ear in grin, when he gets a card he’s pined for.
i know. i’ve been watching. we are living deja-vu all over again over here. if we were a radio station we’d be all-baseball, all-the-time.
like a light switch, it just flicked on one almost-bedtime ‘bout a week or two ago. the little one was in the big one’s bedroom, when he spied the big fat binders on the shelf.
somehow, the little boy and a big fat binder got together on the floor, and as he flipped the see-through plastic pages, the ones with all the little slits for the baseball cards to line up, at full attention, i saw a light go on in his little boy eyes.
i believe i saw the turning on of the gene that, for a few short years, lives for baseball cards.
i’ve seen it once before. i can only imagine its beginning. because the boy who started all the collecting, the boy whose parents just five or six years ago climbed the steep attic ladder, unearthed the banged-up rusty red tin, the tin filled to brimming with a couple decades of the best that baseball offered, and a smattering of football, and somehow elvis too, was far away from where i was a little girl with four brothers and a father who i don’t remember being so over-the-outfield-wall for packs of cards with bubblegum wedged inside.
but in new jersey, in the white house that was once the gardener’s cottage on some grand estate, there was the little boy up in his room, ordering and re-ordering his every blessed card.
each one spoke to him. the guy in batting pose on the front. all those teeny-tiny numbers on the back. the little biographical notes, like the one that mentioned, on a football card he still could show you, that ben davidson, a defensive lineman for the oakland raiders, worked construction in the summer.
“they’re cultural artifacts,” he told me just the other day, driving down the highway in the midst of a reverie on what the cards are all about. “no one in the NFL is working construction in the summers any more.”
it’s been getting awful thick in baseball cards around here of late. the little one has his stash of 31 cards. hauls them to the kitchen table, tucks them right beside the cereal bowl, making certain not to splash. has stood outside the comic book store with a sweaty dollar bill in his fist, waiting for the man to unlock the door so he, like his papa long ago, could slide the money across the counter and get a fresh pack in return.
the two of them, father and son, suddenly talk baseball all the time. they shuffle through the cards. they read books about the cards. they watch the game, the two of them lined up like hotdogs on the rug, beneath a blanket, their curly heads sharing a single pillow.
i’ve seen it all before. last time, it was a second through fourth grader who talked baseball all the time. who collected upwards of 3,000 cards, including the old red tin hauled down from his daddy’s attic. who lived and breathed for the trade. who got to know a guy named bob whose belly jiggled as he eased behind the counter, at some far-flung card shop where father and son made frequent pilgrimages.
it is a rite that once again needed some explaining, so i took notes while the original collector steered down the highway.
“first of all there’s the suspense of who’s in your pack,” he told me, just warming up. “and the bubblegum. in the old days, the bubblegum was right next to the cards. the cards even smelled of it. they were called bubblegum cards.”
he talked a bit about the bubblegum, how it’s back now, after a hiatus that left the packs stark naked, the cards without the gum. but now, he tells me, the pink slab of sweetness is wrapped in cellophane and sugarless besides. how emblematic of these times.
“baseball is a game of numbers and statistics. the back of the cards…”
“tell you how many home runs or strikeouts or hits,” chimed in the little one, from his back seat booster, easily completing his daddy’s thought.
“the other thing, the really big thing,” said the one with hands on wheel, “is baseball is a game of memories. and the cards are part of the layer of memories.
“they’re touchstones to things that happened when you were a kid, a teenager, in your 20s, your 40s. they evoke all these memories. cards are fragments of moments in time.
“all those things are wrapped up in a little piece of cardboard that’s two inches by three inches long. it packs a lot of memory.” he drove without saying much for a minute or two. then he started in again.
“it’s also part of a chain. passed down from one generation to the other. my collection started, i don’t even know. my oldest card is from 1950. i was born in 1957. one of my cards is johnny ‘red’ kerr, who’s one of the announcers for the bulls. it’s a card from when he played for the syracuse nationals. that’s like ancient history in the NBA.
“it’s called memorabilia for a reason.”
he talked about how cards teach trading skills and the value of something. mentioned that of all the voice messages saved at work, including one from 9-11, he’s still got the one of the now-8th-grader who called long, long ago to tell him his best friends matt and charlie had finally given up the shawn green card, his baseball hero because he was jewish and in the big leagues, where at the time, he hoped to land.
that told me plenty. that of all the snippets of all the years, one of the ones worth keeping always, was the voice of his young son, triumphant, having scored big in the game of baseball cards.
it is a game, it is a club, for which i am happy to be a front-row fan. even if i don’t yet have a card to let me in.

boys, your baseball stories? your trading tales? girls, what are the games in your house for which you watch but do not play? is there any such collecting that a mother and a daughter are wont to do? i haven’t got a little girl, so i am off the mound in that department.

don’t fuss, the old line goes. please, don’t fuss.
it is the insistent plea from one who’s been invited to one who’s swinging wide the open door. it is, i’m certain, deeply meant. don’t go to trouble. break not your stride. it’s just a little visit, don’t mean to make you harried.
well, i am here to tell you that nothing in the world has me purring quite so contentedly as fussing for whoever is en route, coming ’round the mountain, heading my direction.
it is my deeply soothing feathering of the nest. it is clearing out the dust, making way for those you love, you miss, those who can’t get here fast enough.
if there is a single domestic art that lulls me into buddha bliss, it is this. pure, unabashed, whole-hog hospitality in the form of fussing. flitting here to there. atwitter. abuzz. delightedly so, i swear.
i found myself fussing the other afternoon. and i couldn’t have been humming more merrily. i was, i am tickled to report, going mad with clippers. seems i’ve gotten rather over my dread of bringing outside in. this season finds me snipping like a fiend.
i filled vases, jars and tiny vessels with all sorts of oddly matched bouquets. there were smelly chives tucked right beside bright and cheery mint. waning pansies, the perfect je ne sais quoi crouched beneath the listing spanish bluebells. a big fat fuchsia peony, the first one of the almost-summer, is squatting soundly in the middle of my kitchen table, ants and all. which, of course, my little one made sure to protest when he discovered a wee black crawling thing mountain-climbing up his pizza crust.
because my garden’s not yet full-tilt, i had to pluck some blooms from that flower patch that offers three stalks for four bucks just inside the swinging door of my local grocery store. i got the sweetest, smelliest rubrum lilies i could find. picked out the nasty burnt-orange fuzzy parts, the parts that stain every single thing they touch, from their middles, and left them to fill the house with their clouds of lily fumes.
i was fussing for my sweet beloved brother, the one from arizona. and the girl who’s fetched his heart. i was about to meet my newest will-be sister, and for a girl who never had one growing up, a sister is a sacred blessed trust. a sister is a thing to fuss for.
heck, i hauled out the vacuum. tried to shoosh away the dust that’s been collecting in the not-so-little piles as the builders once again take their hammers to a wall. i wasn’t really cooking, as a deep-dish pizza was the windy city thing they wanted. but still, there are ways to put out noshes that say you really care.
i imagine, yes i do, that more than one or two of you are fussers also. fussers stick together. fussers keep an eye on how it’s done, and then, like lint, forever follow suit.
i can tell you that to be fussed over is to be swept right onto heaven’s cobbled walkway. i close my eyes, i think of cheryl, who once lived miami way. cheryl, who graces public radio when not gracing me and hordes of others, mentioned once she’d love to write a book on hospitality. she already did, i tell you. she wrote the book.
the time of which i’m dreaming was in fact the first time i’d ever left my firstborn (never mind that he was 4 or 5). it was just one night, but he and i both cried. silly us. cheryl soon made me forget that i’d been torn.
i can, to this very day, still feel against my palm the finely threaded pillow case she’d left upon my bed—her bed, really, as she’d insisted on the couch. can taste the jalapeno kick in her gazpacho. can hear the jazz, syncopating off the walls in the sanctuary of a little church under swaying towering palms.
i remember feeling wrapped in her cocoon. all my cares i kicked off at the doormat, at her gentle unspoken invitation to do so. i was, for the 24 hours i spent under her wing, a woman drinking deeply of the milk of friendship. not a mother missing her only child.
it is that cocoon, and others like it, others of those in my life who know the art of leaving a basket at the bedside, a nosegay on the nightstand, a stack of puffy terry towels, that i set out to spin myself.
it is a busy harried world. our visits, all, are far too short and far too long between.
to fuss is to consecrate the time and place. to make holy the altar of our communion. to lift up the bread, the wine, that is our history together.
you do not come into my house, my heart, unwrapped.
i will fuss as merrily and mightily as the day is long, for you to know how deeply your presence lifts me from the merely worldly into some other sacred orbit, a sphere where truly dove-tailed souls shine softly on each other.
it is a sacramental thing, the blessed holy work of fussing.
to that i say, amen. and hallelujah.

a finer way to end the week i can’t imagine. a moment’s pause to ‘fess the stories of those who fuss with all their hearts and make us taste of heaven. you can tell one on yourself, if you have particular ways of feathering your nest for company. or you can tell of times you’ll not forget, the fussing fed you heart and soul so deeply….

the moon, it seems, is full of puzzles. the blue moon, in particular.
and if you shuffle out the door tonight, if you sit upon a lawn chair, crane your neck, look up, what you’ll see is something you can only see, well, once in a blue moon. the moon tonight is blue, you see. not blue in sense of hue. but blue in terms of not so often.
once every 33 months. or so. to be precise.
this makes tonight so very special. this makes it worth a finger to the phone, punch punch punch, call all your friends, shout loudly through the phone: yo, look up, the moon tonight is blue. at least in north america it is.
over there across the pond the blue moon isn’t yet. it will be in june. down the pike in june. moons are like that, you know. they slip and slide across the time zones. what’s blue to you, is not to merry ol’ england. and vice versa. sorry, friends in london town, you will have to twirl your thumbs. your moon is on the rise. your moon is coming ’round the bend. your moon, tonight, is june all right. but blue it will not be.
ours though is way up high. is now. is in the month of may. is blue and getting bluer by the hour.
now what about this lunar puzzle? a perfect thing to ponder while gazing from your lawn chair.
it seems the moon of blue was first referred to way back in 1528, if you believe almighty, omniscient OED, the dictionary of true distinction, which tells us it began thusly: “yf they say the mone is belewe…”
“belewe,” the scholars tell us, meant “to betray.” thus, the old english might have meant something about the moon betraying the usual perception that there is only one full round one in a month.
which is true 32 times out of 33. the last time the moon was blue, or full twice in a month, was back in 2004. july that time.
but wait. despite the old english “belewe mone,” it seems the term, meaning the second full moon in a month, got lost in vapors until just two decades ago.
if, say, you’d pointed to the sky in 1961, and called a full moon blue, people might have rushed to check your brow for fevers. they would not have a clue. they would have concluded you’d been drinking pre-elizabethan waters.
but then, thank goodness for the sake of so-called lunar folklore, along came the board game trivial pursuit, genesis II edition, in 1986.
it firmly pinned the blue on full moon no. 2 in any given month. alas, that trivial little factoid is traced back, actually, to a boo-boo in a 1946 edition of sky and telescope magazine, which erroneously garbled a reference in the maine farmer’s almanac of 1937. it’s more or less by mistake that we call the blue moon blue.
i tell you, it’s enough to make you pull your hairs out, all the blue ones, that would be. this blue moon lineage is oh-so-loopy.
it’s downright lunatic, which of course refers to luna, the goddess linked with insanity, which has long been tied, sadly, to the moon.
apparently the moon was the big question mark in the sky to the ancients.
a few consternations: it changed. worse yet, it changed in a cycle that seemed to mimic, more or less, the womanly fertility cycle. twenty-eight days, you might remember. i have a distant recollection.
this was scary stuff, apparently, to the early charters of the heavens. imagine a shining thing on high whose ebb and flow matched that of all the charters’ wives and girlfriends.
egad. grab the smelling salts.
the other unsettling thing about the moon had to do with all the shadows. all the looming blackened patches on the face of ol’ man moon made the charters scratch their furrowed brows. the heavens, they presumed, were perfect. so what to do with shining orb that wasn’t only bright?
they made up stories, of course.
the hindus had a legend that involved a hare throwing himself on the fire, from which the crispy bunny was plucked by the god indra, ruler of the heavens, and laid out upon the moon for all to see.
the danes decided the moon was not celestial but simply a wheel of curing cheese.
although the subject here is blue moons, the danes did not go for blue cheese in their moon; they determined it was fromage vert.
a few blue moon crumbles:
if you are a dame and you’d like to ask a mate to marry you, today’s the day. today or leap day, which was written into scottish law in the year 1288 as a day when girl-types could do the proposing, i’ll have you know. legend has it, betrothal tables turn when moon is blue or year is leaping. the question’s yours to pop, sweet lady.
also, according to undetermined random folklore, when the moon is blue it has a face and talks to whatever is in its moonlight. go stand in a moonbeam tonight and you will start to howl. back and forth with mister moon.
there will not, has not, ever been a blue moon in february. the month’s too short. a mere 28 days. it takes a moon 29.531 days to do its lunar thing: to shrink to wax to shine in full.
apparently, in 1950 in germany, the moon was truly blue. although i was not there to swear on that. unusually heavy forest fires that summer led to cast of lunar blue. a german astronomer said so. ditto back in 1883, when the famed indonesian volcano krakatoa blew its lid, turning sunsets green and all moons blue. for two whole years.
certainly the rarest rare blue moons.
one you’ll not see if you look up tonight. but it’s worth a gaze anyway.

rarer than the rarest moon of blue, blessed becca is.
and so, to bec, whose moon is shining over casco bay, the biggest bluest birthday moon we wish for you tonight. our love for you shines on….

step right up, he mighta said, when he lured me off the couch, out to hunt a rug. strike the circus tunes while you’re at it. grab some peanuts, too, this might be a tale that twists and turns before it’s through.

the day was monday, a day we’ll not forget. given that it was memorial day, a day for not forgetting.

don’t know about you, but every once in a while the mate i live with up and roars about the lack of progress on this house. the piles of laundry clogging stairs, the dust that makes me cough, he never sees. but once in a while, there is a something that stirs inside him, that will not let him rest until he lurks the jungle, tracks the thing for which he hungers.

monday it was the rug. the rug that never has been in our living room. the curled-up, frayed-edged thing in the room they call the family room. the one lugged from bachelor pad to honeymoon cottage to house to house. the one expired years ago, but we couldn’t find a worthy replacement.

which is how we found ourselves in a circus tent of rugs on memorial monday.

but let’s wind back, just a frame or two.

the rug hunter and i had done the persian rug store thing dozens of times. have hauled home loads of rugs, rolled up like so much fruit leather. furled, unfurled, they never worked. too dark. too skinny. too too.

the rug hunter had it in his head that the big department store, the one that used to be marshall field’s, might be the way to go. for a century, field & co. peddled fine wares. reputable wares. they combed the globe, they brought home what was good. if a rug wore a tag saying persia, you could bet the rug was truly persian. not north carolina, with a few zeroes slapped on the tag. for effect.

so mr. rug hunter, a man who likes to read his newspaper, spotted a big rug sale at the big department store. he’s from new jersey where they love to say, “the mall.”

“let’s go to the mall,” says the rug hunter. “let’s hook a rug.” he might not have said hook, but for the sake of the story, let’s say he did. he probably said, get. let’s get a rug.

so off we rumble in the station wagon. me and my shingles to the right, the rug hunter at the helm.

we pull into the so-called mall. we see a circus tent pitched in the middle of the asphalt. not thinking (a refrain that picks up here), we steer toward tent.

i think, oh, the big department store has pitched a tent for rugs. how convenient. i think the rug hunter thinks the same. you would think we’d just come in from picking corn out in the cornfields.

right away, before the car’s in park, i see a rug. it is hanging off the circus pole. or, rather, the circus tent pole. i like the rug. it has all the reds and blues that i’ve been seeking for years and years and years.

a man with painted-on eyebrow, a man whose name we never really caught, comes to lead us through the circus. at first i only see the rugs.

the eyebrow fellow and a chap named ash come to flip the rugs. one by one, they flip the dusty so-called persian rugs, so we can eyeball every one. i like the one on the tent pole, i say again and again.

“you never know. you might see another,” says the eyebrow fellow, who then goes on to tell me how his bride saw the wedding gown she wanted, tried on dozens, then walked out, hours later, with the first one that she wanted. “and i rented a tux for 45 bucks,” he says, laughing.

while they are flipping rugs, ash tells the rug hunter that he could make a deal. we could have two rugs for the price of one. is there any other room, he asks, where you would like a rug?

by the way, by now it’s been established, the flippers of the rug have no connection whatsoever to the store that once was fields. they leave it rather vague just how it is they landed in this endless lot.

it is at about this point, as ash is barking two-fer-one, that i let my eyeball wander. i notice, to the south and east, a corner of the tent is crowded not with rugs. but with so-called art.

i notice there are naked women. and a skyline scene or three. how amazing, the skyline is of the biggest city near where the rugs are being sold. i start to think, i’ll bet there is a skyline for every city where the tent is pitched. a revolving wheel of city skylines. circuses are like that. full of circus tricks.

oh, did i mention, this was the last day of the sale? ash and eyebrow, somewhere in the middle of the rugs, made clear that they were on the road. the tent was coming down tomorrow, they were rolling on.

peoria next stop.

it was then, again, that i noticed winnebagos, back behind the rugs. these chaps who flip the rugs, i realized, are plain old circuit peddlers. they are magic carpet carnies.

they pitch a tent. they flip some rugs. take down the tent. roll on. to yet another dot on the never-ending map. parking lot after parking lot. rug after rug.

turns out a guy named lou is the rug ringmaster. lou, who wears black safari shorts, says he works with importers in new york. but he works from a warehouse down clearwater, florida, way. says he likes the freedom of the parking lot. he pays big rent, he says, to pitch his tent, to peddle rugs. and cheezy art in god-awful frames.

well, whaddya know. we find two rugs from the rug carnies. three, actually. next thing we know they are offering to haul the rugs right to our house. to let us try them out. too bad for you, they tell us, you only get an hour. today’s the final day. the tent is coming down.

i notice on the rug a drib and drab of spill. “oh,” says ash. “the only persian rugs these days are used. from estate sales. you know a rug’s authentic, if it has some spills.”

my eye drifts back to the naked ladies in the corner. i start to wonder if these clowns make us out to be the biggest fattest marks–that’s carny talk for gullible–they’ve seen all day, all week, all month.

next thing we know, ash has all three rugs loaded in his unmarked truck. he is trailing us. turn right, turn left, right to our curb.

there’s no denying: the rugs look great. while ash is sipping orange juice on our stoop, i am whispering madly to a friend i think will know a thing or two about oriental rugs.

out front, on the stoop, a deal is struck. i think that might have been, as well, where ash mentioned that back in alabama, he’d “gotten in a little trouble.” the rug hunter forgot to mention that to me, ’til later down the road.
we follow ash back to the tent, back to the credit card machine.

i see there on the money table a little book, written by lou. magic flying carpet ride’s ten steps to happiness, or something close to that. stacks and stacks, free with every so-called persian rug.

i see a pile of oil paints in tubes. “do you paint?” i ask as ash adds up those digits for our rugs.

“no, i touch up the art,” he says, without a blink. off to the left, i see the eyebrow fellow with a gilded frame, empty, teetering atop the rugs. he is dabbing bits of gold in a corner of the frame. hmm, i wonder, do they also touch up rugs?

as we shake hands to leave, dear ash makes sure to say we were really nice folk to deal with. was that code, we later wondered, for, you fools, you did not deal me down. you took the line, the hook, the sinker. you bought the bit about the persian spills.

so off we roll, my rug hunting mate and i. two new rugs upon our floors, a swirl of questions in our head.

“i got a bad feeling,” the rug hunter said again and again, as we strolled the mall.

are the carnies and their rolled-up rugs and tent laughing all the way to pe-or-i-a? howling down the highway, yet another couple from the leafy lakeshore sinks a lot of zeroes in some rip-off chinese rugs.

that night in bed we tried to sleep. but visions of synthetic threads were dancing in our heads. the naked ladies, the tubes of paint, the alabama trouble. it bounced and swirled, it made us sweat. were we schnookered, fools for rugs?

by dawn, due diligence kicked in. the rug hunter hit the computer. didn’t find a thing. i grabbed an innocent friend, one who happened to ring the bell. i had her on her hands and knees, inspecting the alleged hand knots. she spotted scribble down below, noted it was arabic. aha, a sign. a hint of authenticity. much moreso than the dribbles up above.

at last, a call from santa fe. a woman by the name of audrey. she is nearly 80. the epitome of street-smart elegance, if there is such a thing. she has been weighing in on every aspect of my life for years and years and years: who i married, how i made my matzo balls, and now the rugs upon my floor.

aw, heck, she said, it hardly matters. the size, the color, that’s what counts. never mind the tent, never mind the trouble. “you got a deal!” she bellowed.

this tale is spinning far too long, so i will end it soon. with blessing from dear aud, the rug debate was closed.
without delay, i dialed mr. rug hunter. passed on the word in audrey’s vibrant color.

and then i hauled out the vacuum. the rugs were here to stay. i’d have no crumbs on my authentic circus rugs.

step right up, people, tell your circus tales. have you ever fallen for a spiel, in the heat of the hunt, only to awake in sweat that’s cold and clammy? today’s the day to seek the sucker prize. best deal wins. and the winner gets, an authentic dribbled rug…..

i chart uncharted terrain here. the topography of bedsheets smoothed and covers heaped, pillows mounted here and there. holding up a head, a spine of book or self, it doesn’t matter.
of late, i have spent good chunks of days supine, creased at the middle, a human demonstration of the 100-degree angle, not quite upright as i lean against my cove of pillows, intent on waiting out the siege.
i have brought to bed a whole catalog of friends. the two annies, dillard and lamott, are to my left. barbara kingsolver is straight ahead. she is perched atop the pillow perched atop my knees. she is who i intend to immerse my healing in today.
the annies got me through the weekend. ms. lamott, as she is wont to do, made me laugh out loud. laughing, i am fairly certain, makes the shingles go away. or at least they’re looking not quite so leper-like.
besides splitting sides with peals of laughter, annie l. was prompting me to pull out my pen. i read with a pen. have done so, probably, since high school. when the pen was required by a bellowing english master, mr. crouch, who insisted we make sausage in the margins, push big ideas, our own, the author’s, through the grinder, add spice, squeeze into the casing of the half-inch blank along the edge of every page.
i still make margin sausage. i still scribble as i read. and underline for amplification. underline so that, like now, i can flip back through the whole 253 pages of “grace (eventually): thoughts on faith,” and pull out for you every line that had me cooing.
like this one: “grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.” (page 58)
or this: “God recessed the neck for a loving, caring reason. while the face is right out front, She set the neck back, out of direct light, in the shadows….it’s like the thighs of the head.” (page 75)
when at last i lumbered out of bed, tucked my pen back in its cap, so as not to leak all over my black-on-white-on-white-on-white book-in-bed terrain, i recuperated through that hole in the head known simply as the mouth.
i ate. i fed myself deeply and plentifully with the bounty of the earth and the chicken coop that my friend terra delivered to my door. still wearing the drops of rain that had fallen in the night, whole bags of greens, each one bursting with superpowers, i was certain, cascaded through the open door.
cartons of farm-fresh eggs, still warm from the underbellies of the hens, so help me, made for hefty launch pads for the greens.
i cracked each orb, the shells a study in subtle browns, plopped the yolk, the very definition of what a yolk should be, golden orange to sunset orange, upright, firm, not all slip-slidey, not an egg without a purpose. ah, no, the eggs i cracked meant business.
then i stirred and poured. i had me a perfect puffy yellow mattress for my vibrant sweating greens.
with each bite, i felt a wholeness that does not come from ordinary eating. this was eating to be well. this was eating with intent.
the recuperative powers of the spinach and the asian flat-leaved chives, the tarragon, the baby beets, were evident in every bite that tasted of the earth, the rain, the mighty sun that had coaxed them from the seed.
all weekend then, i spent inhaling one way or another: the farmer’s bounty, the literary feed. and great good doses of friendship.
besides terra with her house call of organic greens and eggs, there was julie who arrived with her dearest angel and a loaf of foil-wrapped banana bread, the chocolate chips, charmingly, plucked right from the top, as if a bird had been pecking down a row. blessed jane came bearing steak. red meat, they say, will make you strong. will make you shed the shingles.
i was fed, indeed. i was bathed as well. bathed in oatmeal, if you really need to know, but better yet, bathed in those i love.
as i said, this is rather new to me. this is strange. slowing down is not a thing i do so well. taking in goes against my grain.
but it seems i have no choice. my legs, my trunk, all are shouting to my head: slow down, you fool. take in.
to recuperate, the big book tells me, is to obtain again. it is a word with latin root, recuperare. i must obtain again the few necessities for going forward: strength and vigor, a leg that doesn’t limp.
as i crawl back under cover, i chew on this: it seems blessed holy work, to point your very self toward health, toward wholeness, the moth to light, the sunflower to the sun. to deeply understand, with your every pore, that your purpose is to mend, to stitch together. you are no good for no one if you limp and hobble. you do dishonor, don’t you, to the purpose of your very soul.
and so, i eat, i read, i bathe in friends. sounds like a doctor’s order, a divine one, i can live with.
oh, one last thing. back to my friend annie; lamott, again. page 252. she weighs in with this:
“the best way to change the world is to change your mind, which often requires feeding yourself. it makes for biochemical peace. it’s almost like a prayer: to be needy, to eat, to taste, to be filled, building up instead of tearing down. you find energy to do something you hadn’t expected to do. maybe even one of the holiest things: to go outside and stand under the stars…”
tonight, then, i take in the stars.

how do you recuperate? what are the things that fuel you, when you are feeling less than vigor? are you wiser than me? do you take time for recuperating in the course of the every day? or do you wait until you too break out in splotches?

today feels like a day for tiptoeing to the attic, unsheathing old papers, nearly crumbling, yellowed papers, papers long ago put to rest.
because the papers tell a story, and the story cannot breathe, cannot be dappled in light and shadow, if not brought down from the attic, not unearthed so as to be told.
today is a day for telling soldiers’ stories, today is a day for bringing the dead to life. if only in the scraps of biography. if only all we know are bits and pieces. and we are left to fill in all the rest, to wonder. to remember.
this is the soldiers’ day, and not to stop to pause to tell their story would be a dishonor i could not live with.
we are only kept from cobwebs, only kept from obliteration if someone stops to tell our story. even if only in bits. even if only culled from family lore, and cemented through the most basic rudiments of life story, a birth date taken from the roster on the inside page of the family bible, the surest method long ago of recording someone’s place and time here on earth.
the only soldier story i know is one that haunted me all my growing up. it is the story of my uncle danny. my uncle danny, so the story goes, was tall and brilliant and had the world ahead of him. he was some 15 years my dad’s senior, more a father than a brother to my papa.
his mother, julia, had died in childbirth, on christmas day, the bible tells me, as she birthed her fourth child.
my papa, born 8 1/2 years later, was the only child of danny’s father and my grandma mae. so my papa was danny’s baby half-brother. and the way i’ve heard it told they were close, mighty close.
uncle danny ran a horse farm, a big one. if you ever baked a cake, you probably used calumet baking powder. calumet was the farm in bluegrass country, just outside paris, kentucky, my uncle danny ran. little gene, my papa, romped like a foal at his side.
folks said, i’m told, that danny mighta been the governor some day. or a senator. he was that smart. that full of promise. now, where these bits of lore begin, i have no clue. but that was the story they told, if you listened. and i was always listening.
uncle danny, like all young men in an age when a draft cut a wide undiscriminating swath, or so it was supposed to, was called to serve his country. a war was going on. the big war. world war II.
my papa, then just about the age, maybe a year or two older than my older one, must have gulped and cried when he said goodbye to his hero, his big half-brother who was like a papa, who let him brush the horses, feed them oats or lumps of sugar. i’ll bet my papa curled in a corner of the barn and heaved some sobs.
uncle danny left. uncle danny fought the war. and, of course, the war fought back.
i don’t know long bits of the story, but i do know this, was always haunted by this: my daddy was the one who came to the door, when the air force people rang the bell. my daddy was the one they told, when they said, “we are so sorry.”
my daddy was the one they handed the telegram. my daddy got the news, alone, that his hero was now a fallen soldier.
uncle danny died on iwo jima, he was sleeping in a tent, the story goes. the japanese came over a hill one dark night and ambushed uncle danny’s tent. he died in his sleep, they say, maybe more hoping than anything. you can only hope.
for dying amid his dreams, for dying there on iwo jima, they gave my uncle danny a purple heart. i’ve never seen it.
it kills me that i don’t know much more about the soldier in my story. i couldn’t even find a picture. only one of my papa, about the time when he was told his brother died.
i did find the page from the family bible with all the birth dates pencilled in. i know uncle danny was born on christmas day in 1912. and his mama died on christmas day, 1919. he was only seven when he lost his mama, on his birthday and christmas all at once. i can’t even find a piece of paper with the date he died.
all i can do is sift through the bits of story i do know, and roll them out. and stop to consider the holes a war puts in a family’s story. in what might have been.
“he never got over it,” my mama says of my papa and the day the telegram came.
to date in iraq, 3,455 american troops have died, the latest just yesterday. someone else, maybe today, not recorded yet. besides the soldiers, at least 64,000 iraqis have also died. i cannot ignore those numbers; all the holes of war.
the holes in all the family stories are nearly incomprehensible.

do you have a soldier story you’d like to tell? we’re listening…

ohhhhh, i said to no one in particular, as the parade of red spots made itself most apparent, marching boldly down my thigh. now i get it. now i know why, all week, i was having visions of my bed. with me very much flung upon it.
it appears that i’ve been shingled. by now, up and down my whole entire leg, the one that’s walking rather stiffly, as if it were a peg and i was pirate peet.
it had started days before. i’d been in a blur all week. but, until now, there’d been no spots, no way, no how, to connect the dots.
when i awoke on saturday i thought there was something burning on my thigh. first it tingled, then it stung. then it started moving. not one to mess around with mamby-pamby dramas, i went straight for melodrama. i am good at melodrama. been at it all my life.
i decided before the sun was high that i had a little traveling blood clot, oh yes i did. (feel free to click me off at any time if you, rare thing, have no hypochondriacal tendencies; but if you too make mountains out of molehills, read along, misery does love company.)
i kid you not, by the time i tiptoed up to bed, my left thigh burning deep within, i kissed my children extra hard, whispered words that i would want them always to remember.
as i cast myself upon the sheets, every bit tallulah bankhead, i swiped my brow, i uttered this: “this might be it. good night.”
my sweet beloved mate, he humors me, and plays along, groaning only sometimes. when i awoke on sunday, he rolled over, remarked, chipper as all get out, “well, well, look who did not die.”
close call, said i, as i rolled right out of bed. achy. limping like old rhymes-with-tart.
i made my way through sunday, stumbled through all of monday.
by now, i tell you, i had all but given up the ghost. i was feeling crummier than crummy, my thigh, my middle, all felt as if on fire. but there were no red dots, nothing to connect. so i just decided i was weary. worn out from month of may.
and then at last on wednesday, when either disc had slipped and sciatic nerve was making like a lightning strike, or i was going nuts, the little dots at last popped out. phew and phew and phew.
it was, it is, a blazing case of shingles.
praise the lord for neighbors down the block who took the med-school route. my beloved doctor friend, a mother of five when not diagnosing spots, came running to the rescue, made a real live house call, she surely did. took one look. consulted anatomic chart. pronounced it time to get the super meds.
next morning my back-up doctor called, the one who’s not yet realized how convenient it would be to move into the ‘hood. she told me many things, but the one i liked the best was this: dave letterman, one of my nighttime heroes, or at least he was, last time i bothered to turn on the tube, was off the air for three whole weeks with shingles on his face.
youch. i doubt my little dots will keep me from anywhere. certainly not from here, since they’re not on my typing fingers. not yet anyway. if there comes a loud silence from the chair, just know that i am upstairs trying to make these dots somehow disconnect.
but while i’m here, as long as i am typing, what of the human mind that zigs and zags on its way to making sense? how often in our lives, before we see the truth for what it is, do we read all sorts of plots into what’s not truly there?
what a treasure it would be if we could simply let the story line of life unfold as is, without mucking up the works, making melodrama where there are only dots. waiting for the wisdom that will connect them, dot to dot to whole clear picture.

do you sometimes draw lines from A to G to R before returning simply to letter B? does your head go wild places as you wait for what’s unfolding? and by the way, anyone have a shingles tale to tell. my doctor told me everyone’s got one. i had none ’til now. and i’ve just told you mine, so now it’s your turn…signed, spots…

oh, deary me, in my spotted-ness i nearly forgot to say: the most blessed of birthday wishes to the magnificent and uber-wise jan oh jan. tomorrow is her day. but today is of course the launch pad. for the richness she brings to all of life, and to the table, we hold her up. in highest honor. with much love. may we grow to be as wise as you someday….

out of the corner of my eye, while i was typing at my keyboard, i saw the little legs come running up the walk. i heard the banging on the door. and then the wail. “mama,” he let loose, and then, like that, the tears.
the sobs began to heave. the baby finger, exhibit no. 1, held up, displayed, for me to catch a fleeting glance of the body part in question. the one that oozed with blood. the one that shook, in that way that something shakes when there is something rather out of place.
in one fell swoop he was in the door and flailed upon the floor. i groped, trying to get a closer look at the sorry little finger. hmm. i wondered, while i dashed to get a paper towel. and then cold water. and ice. the squishy little mama-saver they call the boo-boo bag.
i wiped his tears. i smoothed away the sweaty curls. i kept at the bleeding finger. tried hard to get a chance to diagnose. to see if underneath, there might be something broken.
the babysitter filled in the blanks in the story that was coming in between the sobs. something about a scooter. and a fall. smack dab, full force, on that baby finger.
never mind the not-so-breaking story i’d been tracking in the other room. never mind the sentence i left hanging, in the middle of a verb.
this very thing–the pains, the wails, the broken skin–is the reason long ago i decided i could only work from home.
i am lucky. i am blessed.
i say that not in hollow nod to those who have no choice. i feel the struggle of the woman just across the street, a single mama, who leaves the house at half past six, in her nurse’s whites, and pulls back to the curb, wiped out, at nearly 4, her gaggle of three already waiting and very much insisting on a piece of her.
it remains, in many circles, the pachyderm in the room that is tiptoed all around, in tentative baby steps. where a mama works, at home or not at home. whether she works, for pay or not for pay.
it is among the most private choices that a mama ever makes.
yet there’ve been trees felled and ink spilled by the tanker, in the national froth, still frothing, about what is right and what is wrong, in the domestic ring and the box the mama checks when asked the simple, “occupation?”
if it was true concern for women and children, if it was the personal pole-vaulted into the political, as means to put in place the underpinning of public policy that would ensure women the right to earn a decent living without worrying that their babies were left to God-knows-what or whom, or maybe even slipped a passport to rich and solid care, i wouldn’t mind the noise. i’d welcome it. but too often it is finger jabbing behind the mama’s back.
i suppose the only way to get at the nettling point is to, first, put down all the fingers, the pointing, jabbing fingers. and simply say out loud that there is no point in all the frothing.
it’s no one else’s business, is it? so why is it that how we choose to run our very personal lives becomes the fodder for so much political and playground debate?
i only know that in my house, long, long ago, when this equation rumbled to the surface, i had a baby boy who nursed and would not take a bottle. try leaving a babe like that home with sitter. see how far you get before a carrier pigeon is sent out to fetch you. for that was in the day when there was no such thing, at least in my price range, as a cell phone slipped lightly in your purse.
i made a choice that wasn’t cheap.
i gave up plenty over the years. i am no longer a player, not much of a player, anyway, at the newspaper i’ve called my home for the last quarter century. i have stood at fancy newsroom shindigs, and watched up-and-comers pass me by. because i was no longer someone who could get them where they wanted to go. i was only a mama who wrote stories, far from where they set their sights.
i have accidentally dropped a disposable diaper on a conference table, thinking the slim object i was pulling from my backpack was a reporter’s notebook. ooops. i watched the editor running that meeting roll his eyes. i heard him once tell me i knew nothing, i worked outside the tower. and that’s a quote.
but i did not give up the chance to be there when my boys bounded in the door from a bumpy day at school. and i did not give up the chance to wiggle loose the tooth that met with some resistance when it sunk into the hard-core apple. and i did not give up the chance to be the lap that sopped the tears when my little one came running in, his pinkie finger bleeding, swollen.
had it been dangling, the way i thought for a minute there it was, i would have been the one who grabbed the keys, played the ambulance driver.
i wouldn’t want it any other way.
i want the remedies the day demands to be the ones i minister right here at home.
it is delicate conversation, the heart throb of where a mama does the work she needs to do. it shouldn’t be debate.

no matter where or what you do in the course of every day, whether you mother, or work with mothers, i imagine you’ve given this some thought. i invite you to be polite, to listen in, to carry on a kitchen-table discourse on the ups, the downs, the sideways of the question: where and how for you is it best to ply the remedies that truly stir your heart? be they ones that heal the world, or the pinkie bleeding right before your eyes? i know, too, that what’s right at one point in our lives, might shift and change. it is a sad thing to me that women of my generation had so few models to look to, to learn from. and now, i ‘m told, women getting out of college look at us, the ones who’ve squirmed and wiggled, tried to do it all, and decided that we pretty much messed it up. they are choosing to get out of college, get married, start having babies. wham bam. wasn’t that the way it was half a century ago?