pull up a chair

as much as i kicked and screamed and cried when told i would be leaving my little old french pine table, and the turn-of-the-century lithographs of little bo peep and her sheep that grace the walls here in this once-garage.

as much as i still ache for the hours of being alone here in this old house, of starting a slow-cooked stew, or tossing in a load of darks when the laundry basket groans under the immensity of all the piled-up sweat and stain that comes from three boy bodies.

as much as i miss looking out the window, catching shifting shadows, watching birds pop worms into each other’s mouths, marking seasons come and go.

as much as all that, i have discovered for the first time in a long time that rare gift of slipping into a circle in which the inhabitants all hold each other up; not only understand each other’s lives, but in varying shades and combinations live that very life.

at the place where i type three days a week, we have, all of us, found ourselves plonked into pre-assigned seats, complete with chair, drawers and computer.

oddly, curiously, the cluster of four part-time working mamas are assigned to desks across the great divide from nearly all the others. right off, we felt sequestered, whispered to ourselves that we’d been banished to some siberia.

we call our cove of desks “the cul-de-sac,” and while we hear the chatter from beyond the great divide, hear the peals of laughter from the jokes they seem to share, watch them come and go to lunch, pass bonbons as well as bon mots, we’ve come to not mind, really.

you see, in between the typing and the phone calls, we’ve begun to weave together the interstitia of our lives.

we know who was up at 3 rocking her baby, and never did get back to sleep (while the baby’s father, mind you, snoozed the night away). we see how the tired one now sits listing in her chair, wearing washed-out pallor with her sharp black boots and sweater, in the phosphorescent glow of the grey-green office light. and, each one of us having been there once upon a time, we all but race to her side, prop her up with dark chocolate and deep sighs.

we all gasp, collectively, when the call comes in from the school nurse, and one of our little ones has succumbed to a head bump, complete with spurting blood. and stitches, suddenly, are the order of the day. and we put our heads together, counsel on the virtues of pediatric plastic surgeon versus run-of-the-mill ER doc, when it comes to sewing thick black thread through the gash in that once-flawless. still perfect, kindergarten face, the one we all know from the pictures that ring his mommy’s desk.

we laugh, or else we’ll cry we decided, when lamenting the heartache that will come when the one whose husband lost his job has to take on full-time work, leaving home a baby not yet six months old, because the home economics hold no room for only working three days, no room for two extra days a week cradling that baby whose smiles she can’t bear to miss. for even one hour, let alone the extra 16.5 she’ll have to lose. (we have done the math, down to the minute, racking our brains to shave a half an hour here or there.)

and sometimes, in between the triumph of a masterfully crafted sentence and the groans of a deadline we can’t meet, the snippets of conversation, the truths exchanged, are so truthful, and so stirring, i find myself tossing them round and round my head for days after they are uttered.

just this week for instance, or maybe it was last week (the days all blur, i tell you), i’d been recounting some homefront frustration, the barely-capped angst with which i met the morning’s revelation that a winter coat was, um, left across town the night before, in a gymnasium, now surely locked, where i would have to knock in vain (and wintry cold) in distant hope of retrieving said essential garment.

somehow, i can’t remember quite the line of questioning, i looked up and asked the sleepless one, who has a girl of four besides the baby, if she had ever raised her voice at that blessed child, the four-year-old. ever?

she paused, thought for a good while, sheepishly smiled, then answered, “no, i don’t think i ever have.”

quickly, she blamed it on her particular four-year-old. “she’s sooo good,” said the mama, brushing off any credit for this stunning revelation.

i sat stunned, all right. still do, pretty much.

ever since, i’ve been walking through my waking hours, especially here at home, reaching for her placid heights. i am channeling, with all my might, her very gentleness, her calm.

“if she can do it–not raise her voice in four whole years–i can try to get through just one morning’s rush out the door and off to school without the knee-jerk rise in decibels, the clipped syllables, the huff and puff that comes from hurry and the dread of missing that old school bus.”

i repeat it like a mantra, hour after hour.

and as the days and weeks go by, i’m coming to realize how very much i carry home the company of splendid women who fill my downtown days.

i find that not only do they bring me solace in the typing place, but here at home, i’m inspired too. trying to live up to the good grace of the one who does not yell, the smarts, the dead-pan funny of each and every one.

i’ve found, once again in my most blessed life, that being surrounded by a phalanx of smart strong women is, of all the prescriptions i know, among the surest for getting through the bumps, the curves and full-out tailspins that come at any turn.

tell me about the company of women (or men) who are your saving grace….

it’s rare in this house for both boys to be on the same page.

one is paying attention to grade points and the calculus of getting into college, the other struggles every day to turn that loopy shoelace into some sort of tangle to hold him all day long.

one reads nabokov and sartre, philosophers and existentialists. the other asks each morning if i can help him fold the sports page, where he’ll inhale the itty-bitty numbers, the rise and fall of grown-up men who bang around a ball.

and so, the other evening as i looked up from washing dishes, i saw two boys at work, two boys with snacks and pages open wide, two boys whose worlds had momentarily aligned.

mind you, when you accidentally give birth eight years apart, when you did not set out to span a half a decade with your offspring, it is a fundamental truth of your wobbly existence that you find you live not in instant replay, with one child sliding out of diapers as the other storms the scene, but rather you dwell in time delay.

whole chapters start and end between boys 1 and 2. one has journeyed off to summer camp, barely sent a single postcard home, while the other holds your hand and toddles up to bed. one has started shaving while the other learns to squeeze the toothpaste on the brush without it splurting in the sink.

one sits at dinner talking emerson and frost, the other squirms and tries to feed the meatball to the cat.

only now, eight years into this experiment in dual children, are we discovering the joy of occasionally, rarely, unpredictably, dancing cheek-to-cheek.

or at least hearing strains of the same music.

it’s new enough around here that still it takes our breath away, when the little one for instance pipes in with his opinion on which college his brother might consider. or, adds a cogent thought to a discussion about iraq.

and vice versa, it is stunning for the bookish older one to weigh in on some football matchup, or to lament a limping quarterback.

who knew they ever tuned in to each other’s world? apparently, they’re listening.

and just as they randomly begin to bump into each other’s orbit, we look toward the summer after next, and realize once again we’ll be a dinner table of only three.

which makes these days ones to milk for all they’re worth.

we’ve finally got a pair of bookends who line up on a single shelf. one’s reaching beyond the elementary, the other’s wise enough to find a common ground. (and occasionally haul the little one on his lap for a boa-constrictor squeeze.)

in the days and weeks and months ahead, i’ll not tire of the moments when i catch the pas de deux of brothers deep at work discovering the joy of sharing the same page.

in fact, i’m standing ready with the apples and the pretzels to fuel their kitchen study hall.

where, with any blessed luck, they’ll look up from homework page to see a fellow traveler they’ll choose to spend their whole lives long coming home to.

or at least dialing long-distance.

i almost ditched this in midstream, but then decided to keep on writing. no universal theme here, except perhaps the joy of discovering a sibling is not merely someone who sits across the kitchen table a couple times a day, but rather a someone whose particular gene pool makes for soulful kinship. when did you discover the many gifts of a someone who shared your own last name?

it wasn’t long ago, was it, that i was the mama, leaning in, looking into the sleeping place of my little one?

it wasn’t long ago, i swear, that i was the mama whose chest heaved a heart-filled sigh, that whirl of thanks for peace at last, peace short-lived, that rush of knock-me-over, make-me-wobbly love, that is the motherlove of a mama looking down on her restful, dreaming child.

bliss be ours, the ones with babies napping.

the baby isn’t mine this time. she’s my ella girl. my faraway love, the one i watch grow up through pictures, frames that sometimes nearly burst through my computer screen they are so filled with the lifeforce that is ella.

ella’s mama sent me this just the other day, and at once i was there, leaning over the rails of the crib my boys never once took to.

and yet, in the same swirl and whirl of heart and breath, it made me realize my days of leaning in, of breathing, catching breath while the baby sleeps, those days are gone for me……

and it made my chest pound hard, and heaviness drop down around my shoulders.

how swift the timeline sweeps. how soon we’ve made it past the days we thought would never end, the chasing and the diapers and the naps that won’t be taken, and the endless and sometimes sisyphean upside-down and inside-out repetition of the tasks.

but then, suddenly–and much beyond nearly all my peers, the ones who now show me pictures of their grandbabies, while i tend to spelling lists and the tying of shoelaces–i find i’ve passed the days i dreamed of. the days so sweet. so long and short at once.

i am now one rung out on the circle of new life. i stand behind the mamas young and fumbling. the ones trying to sort it out, make sense. the ones who stumble, cry, and wring their hands.

i am the silver-haired auntie, even if that hair is rumpled, wild, and most often unruly.

i’m caught short, my breath is too, by the finding out that life has passed in frames i can’t re-spool in real time.

from now on, the bottoms in the air, and the up and down of dozing babies’ chests, will be not ones that are mine to chase, to scrub, to know of every bump and rash.

i am slipping from that rare illuminated spot on the centerstage of life, the one where we move so fast we sometimes miss the poetry.

here i stand now, looking in on the ones who look in on their sleeping babes.

and from here, though, i feel the full force of the literature of life, as the chapters of my past come swirling at me, and in the distance that’s now mine, i discover stanzas and truths that once escaped me as i strained to merely catch my breath.

this time, looking in on the ones who look in, i am bathed in the tender wholeness of it all. and for that, despite the twinge and ache of grasping back through time, i know that i am blessed for having been there.

God bless the mamas, full of heart and wonder, as they strain to catch their breath.

a wee muse on moving on. as all around me this week i was filled with news of babies born, and babies reaching milestones, or simply snapshots of babes doing what they do so finely. and all of it made me miss those days, so long and not so long ago……

do you ache sometimes for the days, the hours, the moments, that have slipped away?

a bit of housekeeping: i’ve been washed over with a sense lately that i might need to pause my typing here sometime soon. i feel i’ve said plenty, and it might be time for quiet. i’m torn, of course. but this table has always honored seasons, and i am wondering if the season of quiet is upon me……

finally, a most blessed happy birthday to the mother of the bride out arizona way…..pjv, here’s to you, darlin. xoxoxo

p.s. i have come back to the table to take extra care of my most blessed little one. i have shrunken the snapshot above and blurred the edges, so you still might feel a touch of the innocence, the pure pang of heart i felt as i peeked in on her napping, but she is wrapped, i hope, in a blanket of safety. i want nothing less for my sweet one and those in whose arms she is cradled.

one of us had worked herself into such a froth of worry that a pounding headache had taken hostage her noggin. moved right in beneath her skullbones and hammered away for days and nights on end.

seems it was a worry headache (either that or i’m allergic to snow). worried about the tall fellow, the one who lives here, who was off wandering the desert, looking skyward, in the land they call “the vegas of the desert.” the arabian desert. far off dubai.

oh, there was all the flying back and forth. apparently, the world no longer travels in sailing ships, the kind that bounce upon the waves. we go for big metal tubes, with wings, we climb in and confound gravity, bump above the clouds.

these days, besides the litanies of prayer for gravity to hold on tight, not give out, not surrender its airborne cargo, we’ve all sorts of crazy other things to pray about. hope no one climbs aboard with powdery explosives in his undies, for cryin’ out loud.

so, yes, all those worries climbed aboard, settled in, made themselves most at home inside my head, and set me throbbing for days and days on end.

which is a long-winded way of saying we had our eyes wholly set on the little box on the calendar that said the fellow from the desert was, at last, after nine long days that stretched way back before the new year, coming home, just last night.

in fact, the eve before his homebound plane even rumbled down the runway, we got down to the business of welcoming, called a meeting of the full committee.

made signs, a whole sheaf. taped ’em to every nook and cranny we could find. strung streamers far and wide, strung a veritable web, a trap for getting here to there, anywhere that involved the front hall and doorway. poor children were on their knees, shimmying to the stairs. had to come in from school the round-about way, trudging through the snow, clomping through the garden path that runs beside the house, climbing in the back door where no crepe-paper traps had yet been set.

but, oh, that tall fellow was being welcomed verily.

while we waited for the plane to zoom in beneath the blizzard clouds, i set about the business of cooking up a welcome feast.

my mama, who’d early in the day decided no one ought be out upon the icy roads, showed up anyway, round noon. carried in her little cooler, filled with all the fixings of the fellow’s favorite middle-of-the-winter dinner, a chicken, rice and mushroom concoction that is pure comfort food, and named, in honor of the cook, chicken rice grammy.

at last the phone rang. he’d landed.

and like that the headache started lifting.

miracle cure for worry: just land the plane in one piece, and hear the voice of the one you love without the crackle that comes while overseas.

oh, it was sweet all right. when the cab pulled up, and all three of us–the ones he’d left at home–nearly leapt out the door, into the blowing snow in our holey socks. we hugged him so tight, it’s notable that he didn’t topple down.

and now, fed and rested, he is home.

as i type i hear the sweet sounds that are as much the heartbeat of this house as the sputters from the furnace and the creaks of all the floorboards. i hear him clearing his throat in that way he does. i hear his fingers at the keyboard, a staccato that is his and his alone. i could tell you who was typing five rooms away, because each one of us has a signature tap-tap-tap it seems. and i know his.

i’d thought this meander might be a meditation on coming home. how there’s nothing like the feel of your own sheets, the lump in that same old spot on the mattress, the one there before you left and still there upon return.

instead, it’s mostly a postcard to those who know and love the tall one, who like me held their breath the whole nine days. who tracked his flight, his comings and his goings. his stories splashed across the news.

our world was suspended for those days, while we hoped and prayed that he’d come home. while i, for one, sent up prayers each morning, noon, and night. and a hundred thousand times between.

the world is right again. there is no missing piece in our midst. all four chairs at the table are filled again. the laundry’s piled high, but i don’t mind. the juice glass is left on the counter. the toothpaste is smeared beside the sink.

but after nine days so far away the phone lines from here to there wouldn’t reach, i am quite content to wash an extra glass or two, wipe down the bathroom sink. and smooth the sheets from where he slept.

he’s home, and that’s the only thing that matters.

among the dozens of signs we made with construction paper and markers, the one above is the one that melted me the most. my little scribbler made it, words that if you knew him would melt you through and through. he is always, always pining for a donut, that little one, and so, when i looked down on his drawing pad, and saw the love poem up above, “love you more than donuts,” with a carefully drawn and sprinkled ring of dough, well, i knew that was the sign that belonged in front of all the rest, taped to the front door, the first thing our desert traveler would lay his eyes on upon return to the house that loves him like no other…

no questions today, just a simple sigh of relief and joy. and now i am scurrying off to spend some time with the tall, gentle giant in our lives.

may you too cherish the ones with whom you spend your blessed holy hours.

there is a crispness to this new year, to any new year, that like a newly laundered bedsheet, pulled tight around the corner of the bed, invites us in, to fling our tired selves upon its smoothed-out softness, to refresh, shake off the cobwebs, give it yet another try.

the new year, the dawn of january’s oneness, is clean, unscratched. like those new white p.f. flyers you got when you were six, the ones in which you tried to only tiptoe for a good few minutes, see how long you could make it before you left a smudge of dirt, a scrape upon the rubber bottoms. until you forgot, started running. dove in hard and muddy, those once new shoes.

and so it is with the turning of the calendar, the clicking up of yet another year, a shiny digit added to the nameplate that sits upon the desk in the department of the year.

in my geometry, it’s yet another spiral–not a circle to which we’re forever confined. we round the bend, see how sights have shifted, what’s there we’ve never seen before.

i’m not so much for resolutions, would rather merely keep up the climb. take one moment’s tender triumphs, another moment’s sorrows, the joys, the disappointments, call them, “oh, well…life.”

i am wholly and fully awake to the truth that every year brings unexpected twists, brings heartache of sometimes immeasurable proportion. and so i’m braced. always half holding my breath, i do admit.

for this one unscuffed morning, though, i might stoke my january self with the delight of scribbling one short list, a list worthy of concentrated effort at one point or another as the year unfolds.

and so, in the spirit of that freshly laundered, unwrinkled bedsheet, i’ll hope to encounter these few holy triumphs:

i’d not mind more gatherings at my table, dinners long and animated, breakfasts that somehow spread all the way till darkness steals away the shadows. till we look up and realize we’ve spent the whole long day shifting from the table to the kitchen to the couch and back again to the table.

i look forward to the moments when someone launches into announcement with the preamble, “good news!” words that always spark my ever-eager heart.

i’ll delight, perhaps, in spying on a nest of baby birds, and absorbing all there is to learn from the mama bird who flies in worms, who withstands of the heartache of the one wee thing who falls from that nest, doesn’t make it. for i know the arithmetic of nests and it is sobering.

i’ll await the sound of rain pit-a-patting on my windows.

and the holiness of candles, wherever they burn. church or table, in particular.

i’ll hope for a long walk in the woods. hearing the crunch of leaves beneath my soles, feeling the expansion of my lungs and the pounding of my heart, besides. dodging in and out of dappled forest light.

i will savor the days when all the boys i love are falling asleep in the same darkened house. when i needn’t worry because one of us is far away, too too far away.

i can’t wait to hear the tales of my ella-bella-beautiful, the little little girl growing up too far away. i hope i’m by her side when she turns one, when a cupcake and single candle is more than plenty for those chubby little hands and the bright and shining eyes.

i look forward to one fat red tomato, one whose juice runs down my chin. and is sprinkled with kosher salt and fresh-cracked tellicherry pepper.

i hope and pray this year brings me the chance to sit outside just after dawn, listening to morning song and wind blowing through the branches.

i await the end of day some day when my shoulders ache from digging all day long, from hauling rocks, cutting limbs, learning once again that the best tools i own are the ones i was born with.

i look forward to a great read, wherever i stumble upon it. and along with that i hold my breath hoping for the moments, holy ones indeed, when i am listening to the plaintalk of an ordinary someone and out pours poetry and once again i am stunned at the power of the human mind and its capacity for story and storytelling.

i count on this year to bring me long walks with the boys i love, the tall one with the big big ideas, the little one who every time takes my hand in winter to keep me from falling on the ice, his tenderness and caretaking always just beneath the surface of his 8-year-old busy busy self.

i’ll leave it there–for now…and make a wish for all of us to find blessing in the days ahead, and strength to stride the potholes. happy blessed new year, indeed.

carry on, friends. what would be the moments you await and hope for?

the eggnog bread pudding just came out of the oven, making its sweet presence undeniably known as invisible bits of it swirl through the kitchen and up to our noses.

the brown sugar bacon has taken its turn in the very hot box, is now sizzling there on the old oven racks.

the boys–bass and soprano–shriek from the basement, playing a game found under the tree. bach pours from the radio, tucked on the ledge.

it’s been quite a morning already.

it’s the morning i love so very much, for its quiet indulgence, its unscripted joys.

what i love about christmas as a mama who loves tending her boys is the chance to lay down deep chords, to wrap them in ways that will forever inform their vision of christmas.

even if, just a while ago, the older one mentioned how some christmas he wanted to go the cheap-chinese-and-a-movie route, to try out being jewish for christmas. i laughed, then got teary eyed, said, “wait till i’m dead.” (not a moment later, mulling it over, we struck this religious detente: christmas morning we’ll keep, and at 2 some christmas afternoon, we’ll give it a whirl, shuffle off to chow mein and a movie.)

oh, the joy of christmas.

ah, well…..

while i purr like a cat, puttering about the kitchen, making merry with sugar and cinnamon, egg nog and spice, i leave you this little tale that i wrote for the tribune. seems like just the right bit for this christmas-y morn…

Long, long ago, I figured out the Christmas morning secret: Before the sun peeked up, I would tiptoe down the stairs, guided only by the light of stars and moon, if I fancied half a chance of getting there before Santa’s shiny boots landed with a thud.

After all, once the jolly fellow in the all-red duds arrived, it would be bright lights and crinkled paper hurled beneath the tree. And if I wanted what I was after, well, I practically needed to slide down the banister before another creature stirred in that old house.

Oh, this wasn’t back when I was a child. But, rather, as the mother of a sleeping babe.

It was there, in the kitchen, as the windows clouded up with steam — as heat from the oven met with bitter freezing cold just beyond the panes — that I discovered the joy that, for me, comes on no other morning of the year: Christmas tunes on the radio, tree lit bright just for me, I haul out the makings of my tried-and-tested coffee cake, I get the cocoa bubbling on the stove, I set the table with a handed-down set of merry Christmas plates and cups and saucers.

It is the gift of making joy in the morning, wrapping my every sense in the magic of the season, and then, once the footsteps come — not so long ago, padded toddler feet, now the clomp of boys who’ve grown to nearly man-size — I get the best unwrapped gift of all: I behold the face of pure delight as my most beloved boys dive into what’s become of my pre-dawn puttering.

They needn’t say a word, needn’t whisper thanks. The thrill comes for me in watching tradition replay its fine refrain, the candy canes lifted from the cocoa, the clementines passed around the room (and occasionally tossed as if baseballs), the Christmas stockings unceremoniously dumped.

This is a mama’s heart’s content: to lay down the stuff of dreams, and weave golden-threaded memories for all the yuletides yet to come. Mine as well as theirs.

***

from my steamy kitchen to yours, i wish you the utter contentment that comes, wholly and purely, on the most blessed of christmasy morns.

xoxoxo wherever you are…..

p.s. instead of snow we’ve buckets of rain here this christmas, thus instead of white it’s a wet christmas….

soon as the snowflakes started to tumble from the sky, i threw on my puffy old coat, slipped in my boots, went out to play elf, quite early this morning.

never mind that the sun wasn’t yet out from under its covers. sleeping in, that sun was.

i’d been up hours already–16-year-old pulling an all-nighter, 8-year-old burning up with a fever (the yin and yang in my house really is something sometimes)–so why not shuffle through snowflakes, make my deliveries, greet the dawn with that rare, lung-filling mix of seasonal tiptoeing around.

might as well finish the job is more or less what i was thinking. fact is, i’d been up late into the night, filling my sacks with holiday breads, studded with cranberries, swirled with almond-y paste. i’d dropped in a helping of clementines, enough for every house along my way. and candy canes, too.

such was my merry christmas this year, up and down the alley. draping the bags over the knobs of so many doors.
christmas is simple this year. simple with purpose.

seems right to pare down, for a whole host of reasons. indeed, so says the look from my mate who happens to think not so much of the giving of holiday gifts. oh, don’t take that wrong. send him off to the store for a little something, he comes back with a thoroughly thought-out, utterly generous choice.

it’s just that, well, he does not–in any way–equate the giving of “stuff” with holidays. (sorry news for the two boys in this house who are living rebuttal to the notion that all jewish-catholic kids are holiday double-dippers. alas, they escape with not much more than hanukkah gelt and a christmas sock stuffed with an orange and various old-world trinkets.)

but that doesn’t stop me from wishing.

i wish, i wish this time of year, my head filling with a list that goes on and on.

oh, no, it’s not what you might be thinking. it’s not for me i’m wishing.

what i wish, darn it, is that i could be the merriest elf that ever there was and give and give till my old heart’s content.

i seem to find my december delight in thinking back over all the year, and wishing i could fill the arms and hearts of all of those who’ve sprinkled some sort of magic dust here upon my path……

i wish i could fill a basket, first off, for my little one’s teacher, a teacher who buried his very young wife, not even a year ago. i’d give him a blanket, and home-cooked breakfast, i’d wipe away the tears that surely will spill plenty of times in the long weeks to come.

i wish i could wrap up a house with an orchard and mail it off to the brother i love up in maine. i wish i could do the same, sans the orchard, to my very best friend in sunny LA, who feels very cramped in her tiny apartment, with a dog and a daughter besides.

i wish i could make the cancer go away for my across-the-street neighbor.

and i wish i could find a job for my friends who have lost them. especially the one with the newborn, and the wife who can’t bear to leave that baby for 10 hours every day, but will if she has to, if he can’t find work before this hard year ends.

i wish i could knit a sweater for the old man who lives next door, who tells me how his wife is dying, as tears run down his very sad face.

i wish i had time to bake beautiful cookies, and wrap them in bright shiny paper, for each of the very good souls who sit beside me on the days i toddle off to work, all of us typing away in what might be the end of the newspaper era.

i wish i had enough left-over sweets to make one heaping platter for the wonderful man at the front desk of the tower where i type, a bear of a man who greets me every morning with a heart-melting smile, and gives me reason to not mind the 45 minutes it took to get there.

i wish that each one of you could come to my house, pull up a chair, and dive into a big bowl of oranges, pour the coffee, slice through a nutty cinnamon cake.

i wish we could sit and watch the birds flutter by. i wish you could see the sunlight begin to filter in. and the candles flicker.

i wish, in one last outrageous wish, that i knew the address of the wee little boy who sat beside me on the train the other night, showing off his brand new construction boots, size 3 at most. i wish i could knock on his mama’s door, and hand over a tree, and a basket filled for christmasy dinner. and a bright shiny something for that kid who made the whole train car laugh out loud.

i wish for all the world to be blanketed in a holy comforter of peace. i wish for houses filled with joyful noise. and the utter silence of two dear friends who needn’t say a word.

i wish for whatever’s deepest in your heart to please, please, please come true.

i wish you merry almost christmas.

what do you wish for? let the wish list begin….

we count, some of us, to keep track, to order, to line up.

we count, some of us, to make sense of the sweep of history.

we learn to count on stubby, chubby little fingers, fingers so plumped-up there are dimples where the knuckles ought to be, will be some day, before the gnarly knots set in when we are old, very old.

we count, early on, with cheerios. or raisins. or pebbles on the sidewalk. we count watching clouds scuttle by. we count our eyes, our nose, our toes. we learn that we are whole while counting.

and then we go to school. we learn to count forward and backward. we learn that numbers jump and leap, crumble into bits, and hurtle ever higher. we learn there is no end to counting. we try. anyway.

we count as if to shove tidy, sharp-edged bookends on the sloppy shelves of our lives.

and so i count.

and here we are, at three.

three years ago this day, my not-yet-highschooler, pushed me to the edge of where words and screens came tumbling into this new odd invention, the blog. sounds like someone burping, that word.

you should do it, mom, were the words, as he shoved me off the diving board, into the deep waters of the world of clicking buttons in the dark, in the quiet of this little room where i type, where you, all of you out there in readerland, you find those words, give ‘em a taste, swirl ‘em around in your mouth, maybe in your heart, and then, through a mix of alchemy and voodoo, we are joined. our hearts march along a little mountain trail, together for a while.

closest thing to friendship some days. you can wrap your hands ‘round a mug of steaming tea, or you can click a comment box, send words, connect.

too often, maybe, we click.

maybe there’s not enough time made for teacups at kitchen tables.

but we are living now in the chapter of the in-home computer. in-home, heck! on-person. there are folks, i know, who haul their little box to bed. tuck it underneath the pillow. who knows, maybe news comes in the middle of the night.

for one whose father long long ago now, once said, “you have a sense of history,” leaving me at the time puzzled, a bit let down, this blog that sounds like burp is in fact a blessing. think of all the sharpening of pencils it saves. and the reams of paper.

then stop and think of all the places and the souls to which this world without wires has carried me. and us, the lot of us who make the chair a stop along the way.

makes me scratch my head, and count my lucky stars.

it’d take a lot of postage stamps to get to all of you the old way.

so here we are: three years later.

there’ve been births and deaths and diagnoses this year. there’ve been friends i love, wholesale fired, shoved out the door, their worklives packed into boxes with other people’s names already scratched out.

i no longer get to work where i live. no longer get to simmer winter stews while i talk to smart and newsy people. can’t run out and peek in on the tree peony, minutes away from bloom. don’t mark my days by the way the light pours in. don’t hear my little one bounding in the door, ready to spill the stories of his schoolday, now a third-grade day.

but still, despite the changes all around, i’ve cleared my friday mornings, made this a time to type the keys, watch what spills, sometimes wonder where it came from, sometimes wonder if the words are even worth sending on their unseen voyage.

but send i do.

and i am grateful for the chance to reach out and grab a swatch of life. to try, with all my heart some days, to lay out what it looks like, feels like.

like catching butterflies, or moonbeams, the art of trying to write your life. or at least wisps of it.

some day, long long away from now, someone with ties to me, might look back, and read, come to understand this time, this heart. mostly, i think, i write for my own two boys. i write to leave them a record of how they were loved, how they lived in the old house where they grew up with a mother who was always watching, always looking out for their hearts, their sense of wonder. who tried to stitch the beautiful into their everyday, and somehow found her own salvation.

i write for all of you, kindred souls. you who take the time to trace your eyes across these words. you who write back–or not. i write because in this wee small circle we’ve discovered that we’re not alone. not always anyway.

in a world with not enough teacups and kitchen tables, not put to good use anyway, i write here so we can all–all of us who long to share the good company of our tender hearts–i write so we can, each of us, pull up a chair, find the closest thing to joy and gentleness we know how to offer.

thanks for stopping by, all these many many weeks—156, and counting….

no questions, today. but listening, as always….

until a few minutes ago, my day was humming along. i sat here typing. about snow. about a dusting of snow that came before dawn.

then the phone rang.

it was my oldest best friend. the one who has been through every twist and turn of my heart in the last 33 years. the one whose voice has always been balm to whatever ails me, the voice of tenderness itself.

the best friend who long, long ago, taught me, perhaps, the lastingest lesson about just how to love, when the one who needs love is your very own self.

“i have breast cancer,” she said, minutes ago.

just like that–no preamble–that’s what she said. those words that pierce and destroy.

i’ve heard them before. heard them too many times.

once from my mother. once from my east-coast best friend. to name but two times in a long, hollow litany.

this though is the best friend who moved down the hall my sophomore year of college and wholly captured my heart, who i lived with back when we were young and, often, spinning in circles, who was maid of honor at my wedding, who is godmother to my little one, the one i call my miracle.

she has had trials already, my very best friend. melanoma, among them, just a few years ago.

and now, this lump in her breast, a lump discovered nine months ago. a lump, checked right away and mostly dismissed. not by my friend though, she kept close watch. and that lump, just a while ago, it decided to change.

this time the test came back with these words from her doctor: “this is not the news i was hoping to give you,” he told her.

and so my best friend called me.

that’s what best friends do. we hold each other up. we share one deck in the cards of life. she’s dealt a card, it becomes mine. and vice versa.

we don’t shirk, run or hide. we step right up, we do the lifting. we hold each other’s hearts, often, more firmly than we hold our own.

we don’t edit our thoughts, or our words when life is upturned and one needs the other. we spill as it comes, knowing every last drop will be sopped up, taken care of.

the chamber in which we talk is the place where knowing comes swift, where silence is filled with deep understanding. the beauty of friendship, when it’s deep, when it’s real, is that it is the essence of life itself.

we are, through our history, through our ups and our downs but always together, pulled into a primal language of love leaning up against love.

you needn’t hold back, needn’t protect, when you’re deep in the work of propping up your very best friend.

right away, she said, her thoughts turned to the one thing that mattered the most: her daughter, her long-legged, blond-haired, brainy, 12-year-old molly.

“it wasn’t, ‘oh, i can’t handle it,’ or ‘poor me,’” she said, as i scribbled her words, an old habit picked up from years of recording whatever folks say.

“what tore me apart was molly. it’s the mother in you. i don’t want her to be afraid, i don’t want her to have a sick mommy.”

and so i just listened. woulda leapt through the phone if i could.

couldn’t stand being half a country away.

what is it with this damn cancer?

i’ve been following a friend in new york, just barely 30. two weeks ago, had a double mastectomy.

other best friend in new york, mother of three on long island. she called and said the same thing, years ago now. she had the surgery, the chemo, weeks of radiation. she still holds her breath. every year, every month, every day.

there are women who come to this table, who count themselves among the survivors.

they know what it is–as my young friend in new york wrote just this week–to be afraid that every mole, every headache is cancer.

to wonder, quite realistically, who would care for their kids, who would give them the talk (quaintly put: the one about the birds and the bees), who would shop for the prom dress, who would recount all the stories from when they were babies…..

my best friend is now among the ranks.

and i, once again, am praying like mad, and doubling my heart. i’ve got a faraway friend who needs me again.

she needs me to be strong.

to believe.

to listen.

and to tenderly care for her heart, as she gets on with the business of beating this cancer.

today turned out to be more of a ramble, than a meander. it’s what happens when you are knocked flat, find yourself trembling…..i trust you understand……so here are the questions…

who and how have you held up the ones you’ve most loved? who held you, when you needed the holding?

and, p.s., whisper a prayer for mary mullane, an angel without the wings…..

that slip of paper, long of my wallet, now stashed at the back of the drawer beside my bed, somehow slipped into obscurity, somewhere over the years.

it’s expired, they tell me.

while i was busy chasing crooks and fire trucks, a lifework i picked up along the way, that license to practice what i love, that stamp of you’re-okay from the state board of declarations, well, it got dumped by the wayside.

all those long nights in the library, all those hours at the bedside, washing the dying and the newborn, depending on the day’s assignment, it’s washed away. or at least on paper, it’s no good.

except for days like today, when all the pages and hours and hopes come rushing back. when i might as well sling on my cape and cap, haul out that ol’ stethoscope from the drawer.

i swing into nightingale action when the ones i love go down.

no board of examiners, far as i can tell, is hiding in the wings, keeping watch on how i do. long past are the skill tests on how to fold a bedsheet with hospital precision (though i still make a mean tri-fold corner).

i am left to my own deep sense of tending to my firstborn, who any hour now is going under, to have his four wisdoms taken out. those would be his teeth, of course. the only wisdom he’d ever relinquish.

and i, as the resident nurse on duty, i am armed, already, with prescriptions, ice and popsicles, the holy triangle of recuperation from oral surgery.

mostly though it’s the rare chance to once again slide into a calling that still calls out my name.

i am not ruffled, much, by blood or body fluids. comes with the territory. comes with reaching out and taking the hand of the one who’s hurting, or afraid, or losing hope. comes with saying–most often, without words–i won’t leave your side, i’ll get you through this valley, back to where the sun does shine, and where your mouth, your head, your tummy doesn’t throb.

i have counted, over the years, whole flocks of children who were mine to care for. children with terrible horrible cancers. children who died. children who writhed in pain. children who fell to the floor and lay there, shaking.

oh, i cried a lot. i held hands. and whispered prayers. i gave meds. hung transfusions. sat down on the edge of beds and talked the night away. i walked long halls with parents. shared cold cups of coffee, poured in styrofoam cups.

i drove to small towns for funerals. went to dinner with grieving fathers whose tears would not end.

i loved those years, those hard, hard, inconceivable years.

and now the children i’m left to care for are my own. don’t need a license. curiously. don’t even send us home with instruction manuals, when they are newly born, for crying out loud.

we are, all of us, left to what our mothers taught us about how to cool a fevered brow. how to hold a child retching in the toilet. we know that rubber bands go on glasses of a child with a cold. and ginger ale is the surest cure for a rumbly tummy.

but those of us who’ve walked through nursing school, we’ve got an extra edge: we rise up when our babies go down. we swell our chests, feel that thump again in our veins. we were schooled on how to heal the wounded, how to soothe the pain, and dash the rising fever.

it’s in our blood: we swoop on the scene, we make it right. or at least we do everything we can think of to try and do so.

and so today, any minute now, i’ll never mind the folks who say that i’m expired, who say my license doesn’t count.

i’m armed, and ready, and we are heading off to surgery, my firstborn and i. i get to be a nurse today.

not exactly the post-prandial walk in the woods, we were hoping for, but my man-child’s gums started throbbing, so i peeked in, and saw the stumps of wisdom teeth. and the ol’ doctor said he’d yank em out. today. all four. impacted. egad. not quite the soothing post holiday agenda. but we’ve readjusted, lined up movies and popsicles and plenty of ibuprofen. i’m dashing this off, and will be back for adjustments. in the meantime, hope your turkey day was calm and filled you to the brim. one way or another……