pull up a chair

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

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

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

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

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

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

a.a. milne wrote a poem about it. called it halfway down. “halfway down the stairs/ is a stair/ where i sit./ there isn’t any/ other stair/ quite like/ it./ i’m not at the bottom,/ i’m not at the top;/ so this is the stair/ where/ i always/ stop.”
it goes on. talks about how it’s the place where all sorts of funny thoughts run ’round his head.
it’s a poem i don’t have to dig out from a book. just from that little tucked-away place in my brain where i store all the essentials: my growing-up phone number, the feel of the velvety collar of my first scarlet coat, the poems my mother recited to me when the bees stung, the lightning cracked or i plain felt afraid.
many a night, here in the house of the peripatetic won’t-go-to-sleeper we act out the poem of the author of pooh (milne is, i suspect you would know, the one who penned the adventures of that silly old bear in the first place).
it happens like this: the prayers are said, the sheets are tucked, the head is kissed, the lights turned out and i climb down the stairs.
i round the bend, sigh a sigh, think thank God another day now safely put to rest.
and then the hoof beats up above. kerplunk i hear a sword or saber crashing to the floor. and then the little feets tumbling shortly after.
there is a moment’s pause sometimes. perhaps he’s gauging consequences (although that most likely is a mother’s far-fetched thinking, for it’s not yet clear if this sweet child worries much what’s around the bend in that department; he seems unfazed).
and then, of course, the pitter-patter comes. it’s soft, sometimes, as rain landing on a petal. other times you think the buffalo have returned.
often it stops. a trip to somewhere is suspended. or maybe it’s where he intended. safe landing, after all.
when the silence stretches long enough, the turn is mine.
i tiptoe then, around the bend, and nine times out of 10, i find him sitting there. on the step that pooh’s inventor put so utterly, trippingly to words.
he isn’t at the bottom, and he isn’t at the top. in fact we counted: he’s six from the bottom and nine from the top.
the stories that spill there are the ones that seem to have sprung like a seed in rapid-vision. some little speck of a worry, planted hours and hours ago, suddenly a fully-opened daisy there on the stair. ready to be plucked. needing to be plucked, petal by petal, as he recounts in precise sequential order just what happened and just how it hurt.
whether it was the boy who told him he cheated with that kickball, or the one who called him “the S word,” this is the place he is pulled when the stories need telling, need airing out before bed.
seeing as he’s my on-the-ground reporter for the inner life of the 6-year-old head, he explains how it is that he’s propelled out of bed, night after night, not long after the lights go out.
it seems, in his rube goldbergian thinking, that the light switch flicking down, triggers some rumbling up in his brain. the rumbling, in turn, makes the toes sort of wiggly. the wiggly toes lead to squirmy feet, which then, without conscious thought, begin ambulation.
“i just randomly go there,” he reports. “daydreams, nightmares, all kinds of stuff, that’s what comes in my head. usually my daydreams are happy, but my nightmares are not.”
and why, my inquiring self finds myself inquiring, do you plop on that particular stair?
“i just do.”
is there some unique aesthetic to that step, some je ne sais quoi that makes it so fitting to the bottom and brain that so often settle there, i ask my interviewee?
he shakes his head in the affirmative way; oh, golly, i think, something good might be coming.
“because,” he uncorks, all of one word.
hmm. oh well.
no one said 6-year-old analysts were deeply revealing.
being 44 years his senior, i of course have my own thoughts on the matter. first, i find it so apt that the stair is the place that he stops. in the interlude between night and day, it–the step–is neither here nor there. depending how you approach it, it’s the tumbling down of the day, or the spiraling into the nighttime.
it’s the nethertime, and he is traveling to a netherplace.
being perched on a stair, as opposed to a pillow, offers a few vantage points. (besides the fact that you can look down on your mother, who herself is primly plopped on the fifth from the bottom, the tenth from the top.)
he is just a bit closer to the action of the house that’s not settled below. how unfair it must seem, night after night, to be the first dispatched to bed.
and then there’s the innate architecture of a stair. it is a structure that begs the cascading of whatever’s tucked deep inside. it practically demands the step-by-step telling of stories.
and besides, it’s all rather tight and cozy. in the midst of ascension itself.
i myself spent many a night on the stair. but my preferred raison d’ stair was not storytelling so much as spying.
i loved nothing so much as to sit at the top on the nights when bridge and its better half, adult conversation, murmured below. the cigarette smoke. the crunch of the cashews in the cocktail mix, those nuts in the blue-colored can. the guttural laughs of the men and giggles from housewives dressed up in their lipstick and stockings. it all wafted up, swirled, made me dizzy for a world where i wasn’t admitted.
which makes me think that perhaps to a boy who is trying to get a grip on the world, there is indeed something more than appealing in finding a place on the map where you can look out, scan something of a horizon, set your dreams sailing on the landscape beyond.
it’s the pirate up in the eagle’s nest. the climber high in the tree fort. the man on the side of the mountain. we go to a place with a vista when we need to see things not quite so blurry.
and heck, it sure makes it easy for me. i know, if i can’t find him in bed, i need only turn to the stairs. chances are, there he’ll be, the boy with the dreams and the nightmares, sitting bolt upright. not at the bottom. not at the top.
right at the stair where the day gives way to the night.
when he gets sleepy enough, when we’ve talked it all through, then, only then, is he willing to stand, to relinquish his stair, and return to the bed where once, long ago, i had left him.
i tuck him again. kiss him quite softly. then it’s off to the land where there’s no need for a stair to make sense of what spills through your noggin.

have you a stair? a stoop? a perch where you too look out on the world? had you one as a child? have you a child who has one, or had one? tell your stair stories. let them tumble below….
it all makes me wonder, the prayer place yesterday, the story place today, what it is about the human essence that draws us like magnets to a particular place for a purpose that’s often repeated. how is it that a particular function of the soul, or the mind, is best lubricated in a single location? these are the things a soulful architect might ponder. i think i know one. maybe i’ll ask him. (although he is not an architect, he’s a critic of architecture, which in my book means he actually thinks these things through rather than sketching them…..)
have a lovely weekend. see you monday.

the people here first, the people long long ago, the ones who were blessed, who lived off its forests and lakes, the ones whose very skin knew the touch of the divine all around, the ones who gave names to each tree and each dip in the path, they would have had a name for this place. a name that rolled off the tongue.

my name is not so poetic. my name is simple. i call it the place where the prayers come.

i am pulled there, to the tall grasses that grow in the sand at the edge of the lake, the great lake. i am pulled there like some sort of tide in reverse.

the waves roll in one way. i roll in from the other.

especially these days. especially here in the autumn when the sun is offering up its very being. solar balm, just barely diluted. just enough so you can take it in doses longer than that of the summer.

it whispers, it pulses, the sun does, the promise of healing, of filling us up for the long winter ahead.

come now, i feel it saying. come to the place where the prayers come. come to the place where the wind whispers, too. where the wind in the grasses rustles and stirs and tingles your spine. and the gull cries. and every once in a while the geese fly, in their uncanny lines, with the one in the front squawking and honking like nobody’s business. like some bossy old thing i’d be tempted to bump out of line. go sit in a corner, i might want to tell that unruly gander, till you learn to behave. but then no one said it’s easy being in charge.

the october sun lures: come to the place where the lake never stops. some days it crashes, others it tickles. but the sound is incessant. no matter what else, there is always the play of the water on sand.

it’s a place where the sky is the dome and the vault is forever. the church has no walls. its very architecture demands the propelling of thoughts. there’s the rustle within, and the catapult beyond. a horizon that’s infinite. that has room for whatever flows.

there is no feeling cramped in the pews in this place. you can wiggle your toes in the sand, for crying out loud. you can feel like a ladybug, too. nestled there in the grasses that bob in the sun, play catch with the rays, turn golder than gold. and then dim.

you get caught up in the swirl here. in the sounds and the sun and the sand.

there is no sign that’s posted. other than the one about keep off the ice. but that belongs to a whole other season, and i pay no mind.

still, i notice, time after time, that i’m not the only one called here. there’s a sprinkling of others. all of us joined in the hushed and holy communion of publicly dropping our guard, unspooling what lays in our hearts.

oh, not a whisper is spoken. it’s quiet as any cathedral. at least in terms of the noises of humans.

it’s as sacred as church. maybe moreso. there is an unspoken knowing our thoughts and our prayers are not to be jostled. there are no interruptions of everyday small talk. that would be sacrilege.

some slip their fingers down the edge of a page, turn it slowly. others, like me, bring their prayers in free form.

there are benches for those who don’t favor sand. but me, i bury myself there in the grasses. like a quail in a rush, i go as small as i can. i like to feel little. against a sky and a God without beginning or end.

it makes me feel wrapped, held in very big arms.

as much as i love the tick-tocks and hum of my house, there is, i must admit, something about being out under the heavens. about being enveloped by the most blessed earth. even the sharp edge of the grasses serves to awaken some place deep inside. and there is no softer softness than the bump of the beach under your bottom. it’s as if i’m surrounded by a choir that won’t call it quits.

i never stay long. i don’t feel the need to. the fuel that comes there, in the place of the prayer, it is rather intense. it fills me quite fully. and it lasts.

till the whisper comes once again. come to the prayer place. come to the place where the prayers come.

and so i start walking. i never can wait till i get there. it’s as holy a place as i know.

and i think that the people from long long ago, i think they knew, too.

i’m not the first one, nor the last, i imagine, to be called to the place where the prayers come.

how blessed that amid all the horns and the sirens and the buzzing cacophony we’ve brought to these once sacred woods, i hear the whisper, i follow the call.

my beautiful friends, do you have a place where the prayers come? a place out under the heavens? tell us the tale of your place, one of now or one from long long ago…

if not for the culinary peculiarities of the little one, who demands them shamefully often, they would live on a shelf with all the emergency supplies–the flashlight, the batteries, the coil of rope.
and the nuggets. dehydrated, faux breaded chicken parts, cut in coy little legs to make you think you’re eating the very real thing. they too would be off with the back-ups. banned from public consumption. except in the case of a hurricane.
reserved for nights like last night. sad, pathetic, make-your-heart-pound nights like last night.
nights when dinner pulls every trick in the book in its wily attempt to escape.
ah, but it knows not who it’s up against.
i am fierce, i am nuts, when it comes to defending the dinner hour. i am, admittedly, a kook about gathering all of us, sitting us ’round the same maple slab, holding hands even, saying grace, digging in.
in to the occasional whining and actual snippets of real conversation. into the boy who’s been known to sink under the table. or the long stringy pastas that slide faster than he does in a race to the floor. it must be a game, see who gets there first.
oh, some nights it’s not pretty. but it is dinner, and it’s the knot in the cloth of our life where all the very loose threads come together. we twist. and we talk. and we tell all our stories.
given the age span, given as we dig into peas we are hearing who called whom “stupid” in kickball, and as we move on to noodles, what horror is being targeted by the global activist club, it can make your head whirl, boing like a little white ball, from one side of the plate to the other.
sometimes even the grownups get a chance to jump in. we might hear how the donald hung up on the daddy. or how mommy forgot, once again, to cancel the milkman because the global activist does not like the dairy man’s politics.
no matter the madness, there is a method. a crux of the matter. it dates back over a decade.
long ago, for my day job, i spent a very long time talking and listening to a truly fine family. i spent months, actually. i was there to record the emptying of their once very full nest; four children, busy lives, and then suddenly, two grownups alone in a very big house.
in the midst of reporting that story, the father once told me the single most fundamental thread of their incredibly tugged-apart life, a life that remained as entwined as any french knot, was their religious commitment to dinner, family dinner. if it was 9 o’clock before all stumbled in from wherever they’d been, they still made it happen.
the non-negotiables were these: a meal, a table, a carved-out hour at the end of the day. full attendance.
i had only one very young boy at the time. already, most every night we pushed that high chair up to the table, ate all together. it made as much sense to me as turning a spigot to fill a glass full of water.
but sometimes, even when you already know, the teacher speaks and the lesson is sealed. mr. grabowski, that was his name, is my muse for the coming together at the end of the day.
he didn’t let baseball or debate or that godawful soccer that seems to think it owns the hour from 6 until 7 get in the way of whatever was slopped on the plate, and spooned down besides.
and neither will i.
darn thing is, it’s not getting easier. the forces, it seems, are gathering. doing all they can to pull me and the dinner apart, into so many nuggets sucked down so many throats.
i’ll be damned.
last night it was the school newspaper. layout stretches right through the dinner hour, or so we’d been told. the budding young journalists move headlines, crop pictures, chomp pizza.
i had made a swift but lovely dinner for the rest of us. had stopped my workday with time to chop madly, saute, and let simmer. i even steamed up the broccoli, a famously ridiculed stand-by in this house. we managed to walk to the train to meet the commuter, sauntered home for a short respite before i dashed off to a book circle.
that’s when the phone rang. it was the manchild who’d been editing stories. he was ready for pickup, he informed. i looked at the stove, the pots and pans bright with so many colors. i looked at my husband, grabbing his keys.
that’s when my jaw dropped. that’s when i thought, no way, not now. can’t he wait? i mean i’ve gone to this trouble. can’t we sit down? can’t we at least shovel the food, pretend that we’re dining?
but i said not a word. he was gone before i could manage to banish some nagging counter-thought that of course we needed to pick up the child who’d gone off to school with three measly hours of sleep, a biology test and a 20-page paper to boot.
but then the phone rang again. it was the boy journalist. seems his eagerness to get home, to climb into bed perhaps, was a bit premature. he’d just been advised by the teacher in charge that it would be at least one more hour.
oops.
well, this is a world where we are all cellularly connected. except when we’re not. except when i dial the cell of my mate, and i hear it singing its song in the drawer in the desk in the kitchen.
oops. and oh no.
i had two choices: let the man wait by the curb at the school, wondering, not knowing, not having the means to call for a clue.
or i could haul the little one, hop in the other car, and drive like a madwoman to cut him off at the pass.
that’s where the nuggets came in.
the bright colored foods in the pot were not portable dinner. surely would slosh from the plate to the lap to the seat there in the back of a car being steered by a madwoman, a crazed woman, a woman who just wanted one thing from the day: a nice quiet meal before all of us spun our own ways.
alas, i zapped a few lumps of phony poulet, tossed the plate to the boy, and took off after the wagon.
so there’s me, the one who believes with every cell in her body, that dinner together is a very good thing. and i’m driving past one high school on the way to the other. i am passing very long lines there at the school, all these supersized vans filled with supersized carryouts, i wonder. given that it’s their dinner hour as well. and i am amazed at how many folks are not at their homes, at their tables, but there at the curb of the school, waiting.
but as i am thinking, i’m zooming. i too am clicking the clicker, turning the wheel at the hour that’s supposed to be sacred. the whole ride i am listening to a voice in my head, telling me, loudly, that i really have lost it. why not, it practically shouts, wave a white flag? why not let the dinner dissemble? why chase the man from the other side of the table back to the table? why the insistence on sitting, as many as we can possibly manage, together in that very fine circle?
because i am stubborn is why. because i will not let the world take away the one thing i deeply believe in, the sacred communion of slowing, of passing the bread, of pouring more milk. of asking, quite simply, so what was the best part of your day? what was the hard part?
i won’t give up listening. asking for seconds. or thirds, when it comes to the stories that simmered all day. that stewed. that are ripe, as we gather, for plucking.
we got home, yes we did. all three of us sat and we supped (the nuggets were starters for the backseat rider, who when we got home wanted more, i am sad to report).
the colors weren’t bright anymore. the sausage not terribly warm. but it was good. and it filled us, it did.
i might put in a call to mr. grabowski. ask him how in the world he so managed.

this here’s fightin’ words. anyone else fierce about guarding that hour? how do you do it? what grace do you find at the table? where and how did you learn that what unfolds as a family at dinner is, perhaps, the single most essential nutrient?

the reason my heart skipped, twirled, did a jig ’round the curb, is, i’d been waiting. holding my breath. praying. beckoning guardian angels to please get him home.
not ’cause i’m some sappy ol’ wife with nothing to do but wait by the curb in my curlers with bonbons.
heck, there were children to tuck into bed. and dishes to scrub in the sink.
but after the phone call, none of that mattered. not so much anymore.
you might recall–it was yesterday only–that the man who i love, the man we’ll call mr. parallel life, had grabbed the keys off the ring, hopped in the ol’ wagon, taken off for parts 200 miles away.
well, mr. parallel, late in the day, had wrapped it all up, was minding his business, steering for home. when all of a sudden there sounded a rather loud boom. that boom, he soon realized, had just come from him. or his left rear tire, that is.
thing was, he was out on the interstate where 18-wheel rigs think nothing of rolling by at, oh, 800 miles an hour. or so it felt. tucked off to the side, just after a bend, where the road starts to come up what we in the middle parts of the country call a hill. really, it was the slightest of slopes.
or so i know because i grilled him for every last detail.
but that wasn’t till later, when he and the tire in shreds had come through the fog, into my jiggety arms.
the hours between were, like the cumulus clouds of mist that rolled in, sifted through trees, settled on lawns, made of the street a scene from an old hitchcock movie, eery and quite rather scary.
he called right away, just before dinner. called to say, well, all is fine except that i’ve just blown a tire, and i’m out in the middle of nowhere, and the darkness is just ’round the bend. the trucks barreling by seem to think this is that stretch of ol’ indiana where the 500 revs up its engines.
and then maybe he stuck the phone out the window, ’cause all the way here, i could hear how those semis shimmied and shook down the highway.
let me just say, a girl with barely an ounce of imagination might see pictures of very big trucks veering awfully close to that shoulder. not me. i have imagination overdrive. i pictured right on to the front page of the newspaper, gathering the kiddies, draping my sorrowful self all in black.
oh, lord. time started ticking in very slow motion. here i was, scared and basically helpless. there he was, on the side of the interstate, in the dim-turning-to-dark, waiting for a tow truck to rumble out of the blackness.
i called here and there. tried to be helpful. offered to go buy a tire, drive it down there. called my friends at the gas station, who assured me the measly round object in the back of the volvo–the thing that looks like a make-believe tire–could actually safely hobble him home. thing was, he’d have to get off of the interstate. drive home straight through gary. which, if you were from this part of the world, you might know is not exactly a traipse through the candyland forest.
and so began the vigil for someone you love. that close encounter with what might go wrong that reminds us how essential is their breath in our ear.
we have, i imagine, all waited. and worried. not known how or when a drama would end. we have, some of us, seen dramas end achingly bad. we have stood in hospital hallways. heard doctors summon unspeakable words.
“i’m so sorry,” is all the doctor once said. i had to ask, “is he dead?” spell it out, tell me, because at this moment there’s fog and i am finding it terribly hard to wrap my head around what you are saying.
i have not yet–but i know it’s coming, can feel it too breathing right down my neck–waited for a child with keys and a car and a curfew that’s blown. maybe i’ll be lucky. maybe mine–the older one, at least–won’t blow a curfew. but still there will be minutes that turn into hours, where i am waiting. remembering news headlines. imagining.
maybe i’m wired with just enough fear that i am often tamping it down. putting out sparks before they turn into fires. i have a mind that takes off like a kite in a hurricane. it pitches and swirls, it crashes and splinters in pieces. it needs some sort of leash. and a short one, if you’ve got one just lying around.
to wait for someone you love is to sift through the core of your life. to realize the threads of the net that they weave, the net that keeps you from flailing, from falling.
you hold hands with your children at dinnertime prayers. you squeeze a little harder, remind them you’re there, and, while you’re at it, so is the God you are asking to bring home their papa.
you look then out the window. you see that it’s gotten all blurry. and no, it’s not you and your worry. there’s a fog, a thick one, rolled in from the lake. and it’s ratcheting up the equation.
now you have a husband hobbling home on a make-believe wheel in a fog thick as smooshed peas. and he’s taking the side roads, besides.
drawn somehow by the spine-tingling beauty, the mystery, really, of these clouds that have reshaped the landscape, this fog that has smoothed all the harsh edges, wrapped halos on each of the light posts, you step into it.
leave behind the warmth of the house. find yourself staring straight down the street, into the mouth of the darkness. you are imploring now. you think of the song you sang so long ago. “come home, daddy, come home.” you walked to the corner and waited to see his little blue falcon. the car that magically brought home your hero. every time. except for the last time. when the doctor answered, “yes, he is dead.”
you stand in the fog in the street. you know, any minute, you’ll see the lights in the distance. the little round glow, two glows actually. and the glow will come near you, will pull to the curb. and there will be someone’s daddy. someone wide-eyed upstairs in bed. ’cause his daddy was due hours ago. and he’s only just now coming in through the door.
the vigil is over. the headlights did come. they broke through the fog. they shimmered with halos the whole way down the street.
the one that you love made it home, wrapped in white light.
precisely the prayer you had prayed.

have you waited lately? or ever? do you find your mind racing into dark corners? or do you have some secret serenity, some faith that all will work out, until proven otherwise? do you remember waiting as a young child? do you recall how sweet the embrace when the vigil is over?

finally, the lazy susan is restocked with a nod to october. give it a whirl.

and now, tell me your stories of waiting…..

any minute now, in the pit-a-pat of the pitch black of a rainy morning, the man i love, the man i weave my life with, will grab the keys off the ring, walk to the curb and drive 200 miles away.

i will get boys out of bed, off to school. i will go into a classroom. work with first graders learning to read. i will see first-hand who reads and who doesn’t yet. i might well be alarmed. i might walk out of that room, thinking, hoh boy, we are sunk. or sinking.

the man with the keys and the old volvo wagon will be driving still. will be on his way to the world’s first green museum. often, by day, he fills his hours with the world’s first this. or the latest architectural that. he talks to people all day with broad sweeping visions. often, of late, he talks to that fellow from tv who builds very tall buildings, fires his minions, right there on the screen, goes by the name of “the donald.” you know, the one with the very bad hair.

sometimes i too talk to souls with incredible visions. sometimes my day job fills my hours with thoughts far, far away. but i layer my day jobs. i’ve got more than just one. oh, sure i write newspaper stories. and i care very much about every last word.

but the fact of the matter, the job that keeps me awake is the one that draws me to classrooms, to cafeteria lines. the one that has me keeping very close watch on the souls who are growing inside of this house.

that’s the one, i think, that takes every ounce of my intellect, and more of my soul than i ever imagined. that’s the one that has me sifting through sands, searching for stones on the side of the path, the ones left long long ago by the wise souls marking the trail. some days i feel lost in the woods; others, the direction is perfectly clear. even if lonely.

what amazes me is the invention of what we’ll call marriage, but really is two lives daring to buttress each other. the fact that two souls can lead such different lives by the day, yet come home, night after night, to the same table, the same couch, the same bed.

there are days, plenty, and especially of late, where our worlds just barely connect. he is off in a newsroom, battling battles. and i am at home worrying about consonant blends, how to teach that c and h sound like a train, s and h remind you to whisper and c and k echo each other.

there are days, spans of days really, when it feels as if whole chapters roll by. not a paragraph shared. oh, sure i know the essentials. what train he’ll be on. if he’ll be late.

but do i know the ins and outs of his soul?

often i do. not often enough, it might seem.

does he know mine? not unless he sits down and reads what i write here. (just a joke, just a plug for the chair, there.)

do i know at this minute, what he is thinking? how he lurched on the brakes because a car in the rain nearly collided with the one just in front? do i know the questions he’s thinking of asking, or why this museum is worth a three-hour drive?

the state of a marriage in the thick of these years, must be such that it can get by on fumes and wisps. for fairly long spells.

but then, in the unscheduled serendipitous sentence, in the sharing of a story, or hearing how deeply he listens, when really it matters, the whole deal is sealed. i remember why i, who clung to my all-alone time, gave it up. i recall how it is that he makes me more than i am, all on my own. i remember the feeling of spreading my wings. catching the updraft. some days, he is my wind.

it is, at best, an exercise in extreme empathy. putting yourself in the place of the one who you love. imagining the world as it comes crashing toward that other one’s soul. while keeping yourself as adrift as you can.

i choose–by mutual consent–not to explore here the ways it does not work. that is the subject of some other place. what amazes me though, what is worth examination, is simply the marvel of spiraling, always returning. how we find, in the dark of a cool rainy dawn, that place where we both draw our breath from the very same air.

how our keys can dangle in parallel, on two separate rings. we can go off for very long hours. and still want, very much, to come again to the same table. to intersect. to share the stories that over the years weave us together. to know there is much that pulls us apart, the drama of days, the simple equations of physics and math.

but to know, as sure as we know there is oxygen out there, that there is reason for both of our hearts to proclaim this the place where we lay down our heads and our dreams and our prayers. we’ve birthed more than two children.

we’ve birthed a path up the mountain that promises this: some days, we diverge, we climb over rocks, barely hold on in slippery places. but once in a while we meet up and look out together. what we see, it catches my breath. it holds it and draws out my lungs. but then it fills up.

then i know i am breathing the very pure air of parallel lives intersecting for one simple reason: together we climb to a place we’d not climb alone, not a chance.

marriage is not often the subject of discourse here at the table. i was simply struck, as we both stood in the dark, diving into our day, at how different are the lives that we lead for much of the daylight. yet somehow, we always find union. i think it worth putting out there because of souls who i love at various stages of union: a dear friend who after many long years has fallen in love, and has sent out a series of questions about how it is that we negotiate the deep and not-so-deep matters of this married state; another friend who seems to be circling ever closer to becoming betrothed; another dear and beloved friend who is in the depths of “un-marrying,” as she puts it. all three are souls who take nuance to heart. who mine all of life at its depths. i am groping, but the state of the union–the freedom to live parallel lives, the miracle of coming together, the negotiating and re-aligning so those paths don’t too widely diverge–is worth considering in the way that we do here…..if you can, if you care to: do you marvel, ever, at the contrast in texture and content of your day and that of your mate? is a married life one that holds virtue for you? how has yours buoyed you? or pulled you down under? what is it that reminds you of why you are there in the first place? what of the love that sustains you? what great marriages have you known, learned from, aspired toward? what seem to be the lessons worth carrying forward, taking to heart?

the cat, with his insistent little pawing at the side of the bed, beckoned me at what i started to mutter was some godawful hour last night. one of those hours where there are not enough digits to fill the face of the red-numbered clock that keeps me cued in to my risings and fallings.

2 something, it was. and i would have been cranky the whole way down the stairs, around the bend, through the kitchen, to the door in the back.

but right away i noticed the spots.

oh lord, i thought. now what? now what is wrong with the world? there seem to be splotches of white all over the yard. it’s the pox in reverse.

but then i rubbed my eyes, just long enough to make sure what i was seeing was real, and not some foreshadowing of the opaque-ing of my eyeballs there at the back where the light does or does not get ushered in.

this was real, all right. this was moon lace. and until you’ve had a cat with a hankering for full moons, or a baby who howled through the whole lunar orbit, you’ve maybe not seen what i mean.

you might want to set your alarm. to the cat-scratching hour. then maybe set out a lawn chair. on your deck, in your grass, on the escape of your building, perhaps. climb to the roof if you have to.

but i’ll warn you right now: this experiment might not be quite so successful if the moon in your ’hood is hardly the brightest bulb in the street. if, say, ambulance shinings and cat-burglar flashlights get in the way of the light of the moon.

you might want to borrow the moon from one of your far-out-there friends. someone like me. who lives where the moon gets its due. which was not quite the no. 2 reason i moved here, but, gee, seeing all the free entertainment i get, it sure was a bargain.

okay, so now that you’re perched, now that it’s 2 in the morning and you’re out there in your jammies, do not look up in the sky. that’s not where this show is.

oh, all right, if you must. but don’t dawdle. okay, see it? that there is the full harvest moon. but really, class, i’d like to direct your attention to the ground.

see them there puddles of white? it is not some oozy infection. it is, as i told you already, if you were listening, paying attention, it is the lace of the full harvest moon.

and it is something. beats chantilly, far as i care.

it is full-strength moonbeams, people, nipped and tucked by the leaves and the boughs on the trees. where the beams are not blocked by the shadows, there spills the light.

it makes you suck in your breath. it makes you think, what if i missed this? i wonder what else in the world is unannounced beauty? there were no ads, no spots on tv. no billboards along the expressway. tune in, they might have said, you won’t want to miss this.

not a word whispered. just a beautiful breathtaking something draped all over my yard. my very own grass and my garden dappled in inside-out shadows.

so, of course, there at the door with my hand on the knob, tapping my toe for the cat who is now mamby-pamby about going outside, i am not sated. staring through glass is hardly enough.

i was one of those kids, must have been, who, back before kindergarten, didn’t stand at the water table and just watch it. i’m sure if they’d yet invented a water table–or its cousins, the rice table, pasta table, sand table, marble table; you get the drift–i dove right in. got my dress soaking wet. right down to my sweet mary janes.

same with this moon lace. i didn’t care what the clock said, or that i was wearing my stripey pajamas. i opened the door, and along with the cat, out i pranced. leapt around like a kook under the moon. which, come to think of it, is just what i was. no simile about it.

leapt from white splotch to white splotch. tried to take pictures.

hmm.

seems i do not have what it takes to take filigreed moon light. so i took the cheap shot. point and click. hard to miss that ol’ moon up there in the trees. and it did set the mood. more or less. maybe less.

oh, and that’s when the bush moved. holy cow, i jumped practically right over that moon.

i never did see what it was, all lacy and white, with very big teeth, i assure you. i scrammed like a cat being chased. which, again, is hardly a simile. there was something furry, and it was rather unhappy.

i mean what wild thing expects his or her nap on the harvest moon night to be so rudely disturbed by a lady leaping through what she thinks is lace. when really it’s the same old, same old, that you, the sleeping wild thing, see month after month. what’s up with these two-legged leapers?

i’m pretty sure that’s what that critter was thinking, as it hurried me into the house.

then, once i was there, catching my breath, feeling my heart thump through my jammies, i do believe the whole backyard went back to its pre-moondance state of affairs. which means the wild things returned to their slumber. or their nosing through garbage. making midnight munchies of whatever littler, feebler creature they found. i’m telling you, it is wild out there.

and the moon, through it all, kept on shining.

now the very cool thing about the ol’ harvest moon, the one that’s starred–or should i say mooned?–in so many songs, is it is famous for being very big and very orange, early on in the night. much earlier than my cat bothered to bother me.

so while i missed that part of the story, it is a continuing saga, a moon show with nightly installments. and for the next few nights it’ll shine big and orange and downright delicious just for you, too.

the reason is this: this moon rises just about the time of the sunset. something about the angle, and catching more of the sunbeams. the moon is a really big sponge, don’t you know.

so if you’d like a really fine show, you will again need to haul out your lawn chair. and head to a place where the moon comes over the edge of the world. this time you will want to keep your eye on the sky. and stay put; you have nothing to do. it’s just like waiting for a pop-tart to come from the toaster.

depends where you live, but somewhere around 7 o’clock chicago time, is when the pop-tart will pop.

so there is your homework. you can do either or both. or, as always, none. a lawn chair and snacks is all you will need. oh, and access to the sky. if you cannot see the sky from your house, then, a.) i am so very sorry, and b.) it won’t work.

i promise you, whatever you do, if you do anything at all, will be worth the trouble it brings you. while the moon shines, somewhere, night after night, it is not always the full harvest moon. and the lace that is out there, you will wish you could wear it.

sewn onto your jammies, perhaps.

you can now see for yourself what a little moon dancing does for the morning. and for reasons that wholly escape me, i have not even made coffee. maybe i had too much of it yesterday. who knows. but i do know that i’m wondering, did i have any company? was anyone else out leaping through dew-sodden grass? being chased by big-enough furry things? or for those of you who dwell in big cities, did anyone call the police because of you and your lunatic antics? who’s on for tonight? 6:56 central standard time. set your clocks. moon rises. lace hits around 2, i assure you.

and the happiest of birthdays, to a true harvest moon of a friend. she is bright and beautiful. if not orange. mes, with the most blessed september birthday, mwah. that’s a big kiss. as dear friend jan says….

last thing: the full harvest moon, as always, marks the start of sukkot, the great jewish harvest festival, where a sukkah, or shelter, is built, and all meals are taken outside. considering what hangs in the sky, it’s no wonder the very wise jews thought to create the original cafe al fresco. we too shall be dining by moonlight as much as we possibly can. amen to the moon….