pull up a chair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

oh my.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

trust me, i know all the tricks: the sniffing out places you can be left all alone. the making up reasons to take the car on long errands. the squirreling away in your room, door closed, flung on the bed. the staying up till all hours. the quiet that blankets the house.
only this time, the binge is a book.
oh my soul, there is little so fine as a book that you cannot put down. a book that creeps into your dreams, takes over your day, erases ambition for anything else. a book that suddenly constantly tugs at your sleeve. like a toddler minus the whining, i guess.
“get back over here,” it insists. “psst, take a peek ’round this bend. i’ll tell you the secrets, tucked deep in the story. even the ending. but you can’t put me down.”
as long as there’re pages, it’s pulling you back. and then when it’s over, you’re empty. you’re spent. you are aching. the after-binge, unlike food, has you hungry for more.
but there’s nothing. you nibble on words, baked, sprinkled with salt, on just about anything. you read flyers, for crying out loud. anything, looking for just the same rush as the book that just drove the binge.
but they’re rare. they come, usually, unawares. without fireworks and marching bands. they wait, politely, silently, straight-backed, there on the bookshelf, just like all of the others, the second-class books that really should be scattered off elsewhere. but libraries are small-d democratic. librarians take an oath: equal rights for all citizens. no hierarchy. no special dormitory for fine books, books that could change your life. certainly add shadow and light where before you never knew it.
you browse down the library aisle. see a title. think, oh, i always wanted to read that. you lift it, cradle it, carry it off to the check-out. nothing compelling there.
but then, you crack open the seal. you glide into the story. you are hooked. you cannot, cannot be sated. you imagine, if you’re me, spending the rest of your life lost in that book, the loop of its plot replaying and playing. you will commit it to memory, unspool every last line for the pure total joy of it.
happened ’round here just this week. happened to two of us at the very same time. we were bingeing in stereo. tiptoeing around. sneaking behind doors. hoping not to get caught. once again, with the book splayed in our lap.
the wounded camper, the one with the knees still twice their regular size, found his joy, his delight, in the last of the books that stretch through most of his life, his reading life anyway. harry potter, the end. he guzzled most of 759 pages in a day. had had a few under his belt from some sleeping-bag reading up in the woods. but mostly he sucked down that story like some kind of cherry juice through the throat of a straw. for a whole day, wherever he moved, the book moved with him.
for me, it was–still is–toni morrison, and sethe and baby suggs and denver and paul d and beloved. sure is, “beloved,” the novel. just now i woke from a dream with sethe right in it.
it’s been years since i was so hungry for words in a book. i started on tape, listened the whole way to the tip of north michigan. got snatches on monday as i drove on long errands, made up faraway places to go. it wasn’t enough. by tuesday i had the book in my hand. from the library. but i know there’s a book store in my immediate future.
this is a kind of the book i love best: this is a book i read with a pen. this is a book i want to make lists from. i want to scribble down every last phrase that sent me to heaven and back, had me swerving there on the highway, hitting the rewind button. just so i could hear that sequence, that stanza, again.
best part here is toni’s reading it to me.
don’t know about you, but i fall in love with a writer like this. imagine bringing her tea, fluffing the pillows under her feet. whatever it might take for me to sit in her presence. dwell there. soak up the wisdom, the poetry that propels her. i could, i think, listen to her for the rest of my days. maybe i could be her gardener.
i want to know how her knowing is so immense. she writes with omniscience. and not just of sethe and suggs. way beyond that. she knows more about life than i think i will ever find out. she makes me feel little. makes my words seem like clay, dumb lumps of it, whereas hers, they belong in museums.
that’s why her voice, hearing her read to me, is rather like curling under a blanket, having your brow stroked. velvetly. until you drift into sleep.
i like hearing the story just as she hears it. like knowing the ways she says her characters’ names. not mangled, like maybe i’d do, if left to my own.
but after a while it wasn’t enough just to listen. i had to see it. i had to take in those words with my eyes. i would have smeared them like butter all over my toast and consumed them, if i could have. they are that delicious. they are that soul-opening.
i thought i knew of the horrors of human nature. thought i knew how hateful white folk–heck, any oppressor–could be. then i listened to page after page of “beloved”; i went weak in my knees, i tell you. even there in my old car’s front seat.
literature does that. we all know that. but to run your fingers over it. watch your heart take off like a kite. put to memory words and scenes you will never forget. well i don’t know if there’s a calling that’s higher.
if story can pull us together. span time and geography. slip us inside of the heart and the soul of some other being. well, then, don’t we go to our death a little more one with all of creation?
isn’t that, in the end, the whole point here?
if that is what comes with a binge, then bring on the next one. bring on the story, the poem laid out in prose. bring on the words that cannot be stopped; once you’re full, you’re still hungry. you cannot be sated. so is the joy of the binge of a book.

have you binged lately? if so, what flavor? what tickled your fancy? do you have a shelf just of books that transformed you? do tell. i’ve got my pen. i’ll take notes.

they come with the nightfall, as if the chirpity blanket that tucks in the darkness. or, maybe, some creaky old rocking chair, the one on summer’s front porch. or, perhaps, it’s the bugs’ busy signal, the one that seeps in through the windows, hides not the fact that they’re deeply engaged. care not a whit that we’re listening. listening in on the lovemaking. if tonight that’s the pulse of their call.

they’re there now, as i type. the light of my desk, the glow maybe that calls them, the beacon.

maybe they think i’m a firefly. maybe they’re chirping for me to scram, to leave them in peace. to sing till they’re sated.

they are the midsummer’s night chorus: the crickets, cicadas and katydids.

they are, in the pantheon of bugs, the ones with the throats–well, you’d not be a fool if you thought that, thought it a throat that’s making that racket, though it’s not.

it’s actually a wing with hard ridges, some 50 to 300 bumps, if you’re counting. and the tip of the other, the plucker. right wing rubbing the left wing. that’s all it is. like a fingernail pinging a comb. or a fiddler picking a whole mess o’ strings.

it’s a hoedown of crickets out yonder. there must be a fine doh-si-doh. or some sort of orthoptera reel.

they’re the bugs who wake up the babies. put the old folk to sleep. the ones who squeak through the night: “it is august. summer is slipping. savor it now while it lasts.”

they are ancient, and so is their song. in china, in the tang and the song and the ming dynasties, they were worshipped. concubines, holed up in palaces, it is said, carried them to their night pillows. kept them locked in gold cages. felt at one with the loneliness of their song. serenader and serenaded, both knowing the ballad of the caged and empty heart.

when not serenading, the crickets were put in a ring and left to fight to the death. poor things were starved before matches, to make them mean and quicker to bite the other dude’s head off. dang. cruel sport.

in 13th-century china, in fact, there was an infamous cricket minister, accused of dereliction of duties due to his obsession with cricket fighting. and two centuries later, the cricket emperor, ming xuan-zhong, whose zeal for the sport prompted all sorts of trouble.

the little bug with the big noise made for hot handling, big bucks, untimely demises–and not only the crickets’.

one chinese scholar writes: “each year, thousands of carefully selected crickets were sent to the capital where many people’s financial fate was placed in the mandibles of these insects.”

he then recounts this sorry cricket tale, as it was written in what’s known as the minor history of the ming dynasty: “when he saw a good cricket, an officer of the local rice granaries exchanged it for his best horse. while he was away, his wife opened the pot to peek at the special cricket which promptly jumped out and was instantly eaten by a cockerel outside. the lady was so scared that she committed suicide. her husband, upon returning and seeing his dead wife along with the missing cricket, also took his life.”

no wonder, when the cultural revolution rolled along under chairman mao in the radical 1960s, the crickets went underground, abandoned as too bourgeoisie. but they’re making a comeback.

heck, if you happen to be in beijing, say tomorrow, feel free to flip through the yellow pages. guaranteed, you’ll find the association for cricket fighting right there in the listings. only you’ll have to look that up in chinese.

when you do, when you call them, they’ll be able to spill you the skinny on the next big cricket match (and i don’t mean the one with the stick and the ball).

stars here are the bugs. and it’s truly high tech. think vegas with bugs. they use zoom cameras, i’m told, to catch every kick and that fateful last bite. they broadcast on super-sized screens, so no one misses the thrill.

frankly, i’d rather watch fly-fishing. but no one’s called me to ask.

think not that china is alone in its cricket fixation. all over the world, the singing night bugs of summer hold particular powers. in brazil, a cricket’s chirp means impending rain, or financial windfall; take your pick. a black cricket in the room, though, bodes illness; gray, money; green, hope.

in northeast brazil, it means death. so a cricket that dares to chirp in the house is, quick, put to the underside of the swatter. a bit south in brazil, along the atlantic, a constantly chirping cricket means someone is pregnant. but one that pauses tells you money is coming.

in barbados, a loud chirp signals the coming of cash. you’d be a fool to quash or evict a cricket in bridgetown. fact is, if you’re a cricket and you can’t keep it down, catch the next plane out of brazil. hightail it off to barbados.

the ol’ bugs, plainly, are mighty amazing. for starters, the inch-long squeakers with the power thighs and the loopy antennae lay eggs in the thousands, a statistic that earns the ol’ girls more than a bit of alpha-girl status out in the bug world.

the katydid, a close cousin, was considered an aphrodisiac of the first order back in the annals of chinese medicine in the 16th century. if you were, um, lacking in that department, you might be instructed to take one katydid and call the good doc in the morning.

and that’s not the least of it: a cricket, without a running start even, can jump 20 to 30 times its body length, three feet in the air.

by day, the noisy things hide–under rocks, clumps of dirt, the tuft of a plant. ah, but when night comes, those boys get to thummin’ their wings. the girls, they simply listen. their ears, by the way, are tucked under their elbows, or more precisely, a tympanic membrane just below the joint on their front legs, which really are arms, thus the term elbow.

people who decipher these things tell us the cricket chirp range is one octave higher than the highest on a piano. and depending on what it’s signaling–love, alarm, fightin’ words–it breaks its call into code, anywhere from five to eight pulses per chirp.

but i think the no. 1 cool cricket thing is the fact that a cricket can play thermometer.

check this out: it’s called dolbear’s law, and it works like this. count the number of cricket chirps in 13 seconds, add 40, and you’ve got you the temperature. if you live in the western u.s., your formula is tweaked ever-so-slightly: you count chirps in 12.5 seconds, then add 38.

the national weather service forecast office will do the work for you. just click here , and you’ll land on their handy-dandy cricket chirp converter.

ah, but enough with the science.

time for a little cricket literature. nathaniel hawthorne called the cricket song “audible stillness,” wrote that, “if moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that.”

john keats, in “on the grasshopper and cricket,” wrote that “the poetry of earth is never dead.” emily dickinson says that “the crickets sang/and set the sun/and workmen finished one by one/their seam the day upon./and so the night became.”

if i had to vote for the best cricket bound in a book, i think i’d pick chester, from george selden’s “cricket in times square.” chester, who makes his way into the story in a picnic basket, has the amazing capacity to imitate any music he hears on the radio.

imagine a million chesters just outside your window. august, indeed, would be a month of undying delight. instead of just plain squeaky.

all righty, cricket lovers, sign up here with your tales of cricket swooning. your favorite cricket poems, perhaps? whatever moves you, let it rip. and for your listening pleasure, friends, the just-home-from-camp technical committee has dropped in this little cricket chirp for your midsummer’s delight. just click down below. let your heart go. chirp. chirp.