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March 18, 2011

the magic of mexican fried steak

it’s not happened often, but every once in a while, a boy runs out of gas. tank drained. big empty. not one ounce left.

and so, you tuck the boy in bed. even when he’s longer than the old twin bed. even when his past-noon* feets dangle over the edge.

you tuck him in and let him sleep and sleep and sleep.

you worry about his weary self. you check on him, from time to time, just as when he was a dimpled little boy. you touch his brow. and when you’re sure he’s in a deep, deep sleep, you kiss him on the stubbled cheek.

while he dreams the morn away, you wend your way to the butcher shop. you browse the steaks, the marbled slabs of muscle. you pluck one that’s on a bone.

you decide that in the hierarchy of mother’s magic potions, you are well beyond the need for oatmeal, you’ve climbed the charts to up where red meat looms. only cure that’s surer is one involving hypodermic needles. and needles make you queazy, so you stick to steak and its soul-restoring powers.

this is wise, because when you dare to rouse the sleeping man-boy, you have arsenal in your defense. you have new york strip to dangle.

why, you’ve seen the circus trainers do the same: dangle steak in front of cats, big cats, cats with killer teeth, to turn them into docile kittens.

not that any boy i know would growl or snarl or bite my head off. but when awaking worn-out, on-empty man-boy, i find a steak is handy.

and so on the edge of bed i sat, whispered words of red meat. i saw the smile spread across his lovely face. i saw the eyelids flutter open.

“if it’s too much,” i said, “we can go with oatmeal.”

ah, no, he answered rather sprightly. “au contraire. quite the opposite.” a steak, he said, was in his dreams.

but not just any steak: a mexican fried steak, was what he had in mind. so, with the click of that magic phone that coughs up all the answers, he typed in spanish words, came up with the abuela’s path to steak perfection, or in this case milanesas empanizada. that is, mexican fried steak.

with one swift leap, he was out of bed and down the stairs. he was talking bread crumbs, garlic, egg bath. red meat. meat so red i swear it moo’d.

we put our little heads together, he and i: grabbed a loaf of challah. swiped off the shelf the dusty mini-processor, a chopping-blending whiz my adopted jewish grandma gave me once upon a time.

we splitzed in bread. we added cloves of garlic. we inhaled. we sighed aloud.

we cooked our way to cure. we shook in cumin, poured in salt, cracked pepper. for good measure we added a little packet of something called “milwaukee avenue steak seasoning,” a smoky rub named for a windy-city thoroughfare where you can’t help but stumble over steaks of every stripe and cut.

“it’ll be chicago mexican fried steak,” declared the sous chef, smiling down on me.

and so, through that alchemy that is the holy work of kitchens, with a little splitzing, the cracking of two eggs, and the bathing of that steak, first in yolky goop and then in silken challah-garlic-cumin-milwaukee crumbs (that sous chef dabbed on quite a blanket there of crumbs), we turned the noontime into one of pure true joy.

we were cooking side-by-side. we were laughing, leaping out of sizzling oil’s way. for that deeply adorned steak, what with its eggy under-garments, and its crumby top-dressing, it was dropped in pool of hot corn oil, and it was turning into resurrection breakfast, served at 12:15 on what would have been a schoolday, restoring life to the once-nearly lifeless.

i never cease to marvel at the powers that rise from stove or oven. how what goes on there truly fills our pores, our weary bones. and most of all the tickers deep inside.

by lunchtime’s end, as the man-boy rubbed the last red drop of beefy juice right off his plate, as he sipped the last of his orange juice, he was joyful once again. he was ready, one more time, to take a lap on the track called life.

i rinsed the plate. i put away the fixings.

and i whispered a thank-you prayer to the abuela who’d led us to the restoration grotto, where miracles come to those who wield the fry pan.

* “past-noon” referring to the size of a foot is a favorite family expression, coined by a state-street shoe salesman who once measured my husband’s size 13s and declared, “oh, you’re past noon,” meaning higher than 12s. we have loved that phrasing ever since. and now two of three boys around here are past noons. and one is approaching as swiftly as he can…

what foods in your arsenal hold the holy cure? for the days when those you love can barely make it from the bed? and why do you think the kitchen is one room that holds such mystic powers??

oh, because we’d never keep a cure from you, here’s abuela’s milanesas de res empanizadas, as translated from the original.

ingredients:
1 / 2 Kilo of beef for breading Steak (that’s just about a pound, people)

 2 eggs  Bread for breading (we used three-day-old challah) 

Ground Pepper  Salt  Oil
(we added a dash of cumin, two cloves garlic, and a few shakes of milwaukee avenue steak seasoning, a heavenly smoky rub from the spice house in evanston, ill.)

preparation:
for perfection, you want to toss bread, garlic, and seasonings into mini food processor. splitz, or blend, in pulses till the aroma makes your knees wobble, and you consider stuffing fistfuls straight to your mouth, skipping the steak altogether.
 Season the steak with salt and pepper.   (you’ll want two bowls: one for eggs, one for bread crumbs; this is a two-bowl process, although abuela won’t tell you so.)

The eggs are stirred well with a fork, and the steaks are passed in the egg, then go through the bread crumbs and fry very well on both sides.   Served and garnished with lettuce, tomato slices, onion slices.

you feel better already, now don’t you?

2 Comments

March 11, 2011

freeze frame

i am holding onto moments, freezing frames, as if compiling a loop of kodacolor film i will hold, rub my thumbs along, raise up to the light, memorize, when he is gone.

i am stopping at the edge of his room, soaking in the tableau–the jumbled socks, the soggy towel–knowing that in half a year, there will be no messy room.

i am driving to his school, climbing stairs, entering the gallery where his art hangs on the wall. i am standing, neck tilted back, looking up, eyes wide, soaking in the art, his words, his name on the label on the wall.

i climb downstairs, take my seat in the dim-lit auditorium, look toward the stage, see the curl of his bass, the slick-down curls of his own head, still wet from the shower after rowing.

i lock my eyes on his silhouette in the darkness, as the stage lights come up from behind, as i study that head that i have held, have known, since the hour when i reached for him, newborn, and took him in my arms.

nearly 18 years i have loved him more than anything, have been a player in the story of his life. have known the scenes, most every one. and now, the ones i enter into, i hold onto in my mind, in my heart, as i commit to memory, yes, but even more to soul, the whole of this chapter of mothering. of being the moon to his orbit, his every day rotation.

i hear the drumbeat in the background. soft at first, muffled, but getting louder by the day. as if the dial’s being turned.

the last this. the senior that. final season.

two months and two weeks till graduation. all around me, high school swirls. he swirls. my firstborn, love of my life.

i pore over each and every frame. take time. stop, in mid-conversation, as he lies, stretched out at the end of a long day, reaches for my popcorn, tells me silly stories. i stop and marvel. take in each syllable, but witness too the quirks and gestures i have known for so very many years. the way he taps his thumb, crosses his leg and kicks his foot.

i marvel at the mere fact that at the end of these long days we can unspool together, i can hear in real time, without phone line or typed email. i can, for a few more short months, take in his life in 3-D, full-plane topography.

and so, as if storing for the future, for the days when he won’t be here, won’t be coming home soon. for the days when i ache to see his shining eyes, when i’ll give anything for a jumbled pair of sweaty socks to be dropped across his room…..

i am gathering the frames, the moments of his wholeness, one facet at a time. i am doing what we do when someone we love is leaving, and we are making room inside our hearts to store the memories, the sense, the wholeness.

i am holding onto time as i feel it slipping through my fingers. i am scaffolding my heart for when it’s aching, and these days are no longer……

the window up above, with the candles and the russian cross, that is one of will’s six photos in the art show. or it’s a part of a photo, taken at a louis sullivan russian orthodox church on chicago’s west side. i sat up in the choir loft as will clicked away in the jewel-box of a church, where sunlight played on golden threads and gold-painted doors.

as i try to wrap my head around this leaving, around this chapter coming to a close, i can’t help but reach for words, to try to shade in the outlines. i know there are those who’ve walked this way, did the letting go settle in slowly? did you keep watch as the time drew nearer? or did it come up from behind and catch you unawares?

12 Comments

March 4, 2011

pulling rabbits out of hats

it is what mothers do. on a rare day, on a day when stars and moons and jupiter and venus all align.

it is what mothers wish they could do every breathing day–make it all all right again. pick up the pieces. clean up the mess. shake off the bits of gravel from there on the sidewalk, where the grit scraped the knee. kiss the hurt, slap on a bandaid. make it all right again.

we know, those of us with half an ounce of living, that more often than not, we can’t right what’s wrong. can’t make the mean girls go away. can’t shift the score of the ballgame. can’t even chase the mean coach into a corner, make him tremble for what he’s done to someone we love.

but, once in a while, when the pile of wrongs piles too high, we swoop into action. we make like houdini. pull rabbits from hats.

and so it was the other morning, when i got to breathe deep of that rare sense of glory, of having triumphed, mended a hole in the day of a kid i happen to love more than life.

here’s the simple story, told only to remind me and you that we really can, every once in awhile, grab onto our britches, dash out the door, and make like a hero for someone we love. and of course it’s not about being the hero, it’s about that rare chance to do as we wish others might do for us, be for us. that rare chance to live the magnificent, luminous goldenest rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

how often have we found our sorry selves at the end of our ropes, and wished upon stars that someone would leap to our rescue? and what a beautiful thing when we find that we can do just that. for no reason other than through-and-through, inside-and-out, plain pure love.

so this boy who i adore–you’ve heard me write of him over the years–he is this week about as neck-deep in plain old unfiltered stress as a senior in high school can be: he is in the thick of tryouts for crew, a sport that has kids pulling on oars till they literally see stars and crash to the floor (don’t get me started); he is also in dress rehearsals for the spring musical; and cranking out not one but six art pieces for AP photo class, with a gallery show opening next week.

and so of course this is the week his phone, a fifth limb if ever there was one, decided to sputter and gasp and utterly die.

now a boy without phone is, i quickly realized, a boy whose life is verging on crumbling.

for one, he had no way to wake up in the morn, as that phone serves to jangle him from deepest of sleep, with its haranguing alarm that wakes the whole house–except, of course, for the intended sleeper.

for two, since the world has been stripped of pay phones, he couldn’t call for a ride, or tell me what time to be where.

and the mere look on his face, the oh-my-god-if-one-more-thing-goes-i’m-going-too, it stirred me to muster some forces.

as i dashed in his room that dreary morning, just after he’d trudged off to school, and suddenly i spied the dead phone stiff on the desk, i charged into supernurse mode. i dialed the phone store (from a phone with a pulse, thank you). i made an appointment. i squeezed in a triage, smack dab in the thick of a workday. the dear man at the store, he pulled out a toothbrush, of all the high-techy tools. he oohed and ahhed at all the gunk that had nestled into the cracks of the phone. and then, in unsparing words, he looked up and declared: “this phone has come to its end.”

he rattled through options. i attached price tags to every last one. but then i thought of that kid, i thought how little he asks and how hard he tries.

i told the man i’d like a replacement, didn’t care much that it’d cost more, by a long shot, than popcorn and movies.

the nice man played a rare card: without my even asking, he rang up the bill, and as he punched in the buttons asked me something about was the battery working. i said i really didn’t know the state of the battery, but then when he showed me the final sum, he’d sliced off a whole $120, because he deemed it a “battery issue.”

then he handed me a brand new phone, and i brushed the tear from my eye, sprouted due to his kindness and the mere fact that not even dollars would keep me from fixing a hole in the skin of my kid.

i walked out of that store as if on a hovercloud, my chest nearly heaving at the rare joy of success, my mood downright giddy. what had felt like a mountain just hours ago, was now whittled down to a clearing. i couldn’t subside the pure joy of lifting the load from my boy. knew, through and through, there’d be more times than not that i’d stand on the sidelines helpless, while the stretchers were rushed on the field. but for now, there was only delight.

and that night, when that tired tall kid strode through the door, expecting to spend yet another long night without phone, he looked at his bedside table, and there, lit up and flashing the time, he spied the fruits of my motherly labors.

he practically rubbed at his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw: the one thing he wished for that day, the one thing he couldn’t possibly have carved out a minute to do, it was lying there, shiny and new, just waiting for him to pick up and text.

it’s a rare and heady day. but oh how glorious a gift to get to play like a mama magician and make one bumpy life all smooth again.

no old hare ever looked so magnificent, no matter the hat from which it was pulled.

have you yanked any rabbits out of hats lately? anyone pulled one out for you?

3 Comments

February 25, 2011

homey home

i didn’t find the squat yellow square right away. i wasn’t intended to. the someone who had scribbled it had tucked it away. left it in a hard-to-find place where i’d bumble upon it, oh, heaven-knows-when.

it was in the stack of post-its, when i eventually found it. not at the top where a name and a street address had been scribbled. it was one sheet down. quietly awaiting discovery.

actually, it was right on my desk, nestled beside my computer. so it wasn’t intended to take forever to find. just long enough. just enough to come up and tap me quietly on the shoulder. to say, psssst. here’s a message.

the message read: “you have a very ‘homey’ home!!”

i glowed when i read it.

especially because the someone who wrote it spends plenty of time here, but doesn’t live here herself. and i grew up in her house, a house i never really thought of as homey or not. it was simply, completely, capital-h Home. the place where most of my stories are rooted.

my mama wrote that note. my mama who is more inclined to note the beauty of a bird’s feather than to pay close attention to wallpaper. who cares more about tromping through the woods, in search of a bluebird’s nest, than picking out pillows for any old couch.

my mama, you see, grew up in a beautifully appointed house. a house where the living room was not to be touched. where nicknacks were to be tiptoed around. where when you sat down on a velvety cushion you tried not to move, lest you crumple the nap of the velvet.

i, growing up under the wing of these two house-makers, one spare, inclined toward the natural, the other well-upholstered, in a house with nooks and crannies that took my breath away, well, i seem to have landed plop in the middle.

give me a nook any day. give me a corner dripping with charm. but don’t over-upholster. and do bring the outside in.

the number one aim of this house that is ours is to make it feel like two out-reaching arms, arms that fold you in, hold you close to the bosom. arms that offer you tea, and maybe a crumpet, when the skies up above are gloomy and cloudy.

if that’s the very definition of “very homey,” and i think that it might be, well then, the words on the post-it did make me glow.

and to think that my mama, my mama who spends long hours here two days a week, hours when i’m not here, to think that she’d picked up on that bit of my heart, that one dream that i’ve sought out to catch, well, to say i was tapped on the shoulder, caught by surprise, made to blush, and glow just a bit, that might begin to capture the feeling.

i spend my workdays sometimes talking to folks about houses, how to unclutter, how to appoint. every once in a while, i’m told to gather a page-full of pictures of beautiful things, baubles, or doormats, or pillows. and now, don’t tell my bosses, but often, i couldn’t care less. it’s not what i’m after, not here in my house.

if there is any one thing i’ve worked hard to make here in this house is to make it be a someplace to come home to, a someplace where storms can’t come in, where the tock of clock, or the sharp scent of clove simmering on the stove are the soft things you just barely notice. notice enough to slow down the race in your heart, soothe the jaggedy edge of your nerves.

i want armchairs that hold you in their wings. and blankets so cozy you don’t want to move.

i want logs in a fireplace that crackle. and soft round cookies under the great glass dome on the kitchen counter.

i want neat and clean, yes, but only because i find it calms me. i want bits of the garden on my old kitchen table, even in winter.

i want candles on the table, and i want them most when they’re flickering, casting their soft seeds of light on plates filled with food.

if all of that makes me the poster girl for homey homes, well then bring on the cameras, slap me up on the telephone poles.

because long long ago, curled up on the patchwork quilt of my little-girl bed, daydreaming out a window, staring up through the branches of the oak that framed my view of the stars and the clouds, and mostly the heavens, i knew what i wished for when i was all grown: a wee cottage in the woods where the storybook could end happily ever after.

and my old gray-shingled house, under the limbs of an ash and a locust, it’s the closest i’ve come to that long-ago dream.

it is, at last, my homey sweet home.

what’s your definition of homey home? what parts of your house tickle your fancy, stoke the flames of your heart?

2 Comments

February 18, 2011

deep-breathing the beautiful

all around us, sometimes, the walls of the world seem to be crashing in. i read the pages of the newspaper, and soak up stories from faraway and not so far. stories of thugs and mobs and rapes and shootings at close range. i read of fathers who kick children with steel-toe boots, and dump lifeless toddler bodies in bags in the woods.

it gets to be deadening. to the spirit. to the soul. to the sparks of the hope that won’t be snuffed, not yet anyway.

and so, with a world whirling around, a world scaring me, making me wonder, i find myself clinging–like oxygen straight from a tube–to the wisps and the inkblots of God’s world that won’t be daunted, won’t be dulled, won’t be wiped away.

the great orange glowing orb of a moon that clung last night just over the skyscrapers along lake shore drive.

the clouds that skittered by, played peek-a-boo, made faces along with the moon.

the wisp of green, lime green, spring green, starting-all-over-again green, here on my kitchen table, branches clipped and brought in from the cold by my dear neighbor who must have known that by week’s end i’d need an infusion.

it is these scant stitches of beautiful, of infinite, that hold me in place, that keep me from sliding off into the pitch- black abyss of human nature gone haywire, and the aftershocks that do in souls like you and me.

there are readers and listeners, i suppose, who take in the day’s news and scurry along, undaunted, undented.

i am not one of them.

last night, riding home on the el, the clackety train that is chicago’s–and my–answer to swift public transit, i pored over the dispatch of nicholas kristof who found himself on the streets of bahrain, in the capital city of manama, and who wrote: “as a reporter, you sometimes become numbed to sadness. but it is heartbreaking to be in modern, moderate bahrain right now and watch as a critical american ally uses tanks, troops, guns and clubs to crush a peaceful democracy movement and then lie about it.”

he writes of seeing corpses with gunshot wounds, of a promising and prominent plastic surgeon who went out on the streets to tend to the wounded and wound up bloodied, unconscious, and nearly raped (the police pulled down his pants, threatened to rape him, before the idea was abandoned and an ambulance allowed to rescue him).

he writes of ambulance drivers pummeled, guns held to their heads. of hospital corridors full of frantic mothers searching desperately for children gone missing in the attacks.

i shuddered, sank low in my hard plastic seat on the el.

but then i glanced out the window, as the train emerged from its underground tunnel, began its rapid ascent to the tracks that run above street level. a bright orange something caught my eye. hyphenated by all the houses and towers the train passed by, i had to hold my gaze to catch that orb again and again.

it locked me. i couldn’t keep my eye from searching the sky. i wanted to tap the shoulder of the long-haired woman next to me, the one plugged in to her wired-in sounds. i wanted to say, “isn’t it beautiful?” but she wasn’t looking. wasn’t open for business. she was locked in her unnatural bubble.

at last i emerged from that train, stood for a good long while on the platform, waiting for the next of my trains. i didn’t mind.

the wind blew. played with the clouds, that played with the moon. while i stood watching, witness to the unending beauty, the light, the certainty that reigns in the sky.

that same moon, i thought, is the moon shining down on bahrain, on egypt, iraq and iran.

it’s the one constant. the one shared link i have at this moment with those souls on the streets, those frantic mothers searching for children.

and here on my table for the last two days, the serviceberry branches, laid on the counter when i wasn’t looking. now upright and sipping up waters, opening, unfurling, reminding: life comes again. the cycle begins, returns, life comes from death.

i find myself returning my eyes to the branches. i can’t get enough. i seem to need to remember, need evidence. i seem to need to deep-breathe the beautiful.

it’s the one thing bigger than us, even in the utter humility of its whispers, the moon in the nightsky, the branches unfurling weeks before their time, coaxed along by the warmth of my house, by the vase full of waters.

it is the beautiful that is eternal, ever here and always.

it is more breath-taking, perhaps, because we need to search for it, peek behind branches, poke through the woods.

once found, though, it sustains us. fills us. offers its grace to all of our emptiness, our shadow.

it is the hand, i am certain, of the Holiest.

it is offered for those of us who get light-headed from all of the darkness, who can’t read the stories and carry on as if all’s well with the world.

when it’s not.

thank God for the balm that comes with the gracenotes of beauty. for the whispers that remind: beauty won’t go away. it’s there, deep in the heart of all that pulses and breathes. and we can’t let the darkness take over…..
where did you find the beautiful this week?

2 Comments

February 11, 2011

the hours that matter the most

as i sift through the grains of my week, of my year, of my long stretch of motherhood, i’ve come to know that the grains i hold a bit longer, the grains i hold up to the light, are the fine simple hours that come, often, right after school.

when the boys who i love are bothered, are troubled, are weighed down with the grit of the day.

when suddenly the chairs at the table are pulled. bottoms splot onto cane-woven seats. when tea cups are cradled in palms. when oranges are peeled, piled in sections.

when the talking begins.

of all the scores of things i might do in the course of a week, of a lifetime, nothing perhaps matches the wholeness of those holy hours.

the boys who i love are sifting through their own hearts, laying their troubles there at my chest, at my heart. they are trusting not my mouth but my ears.

just listen, you can hear them hoping.

just hear all my words, spoken and not.

just listening alone will heal, will soothe, go a long way toward fixing.

when days are bad, when hours are bumpy, most of the time we aren’t looking for quick-cures or band-aids. all we want, really, is someone to sop up the hurt. to listen to worries.

all we want, often, are eyes that look deep, look gently. eyes that listen. not words that cut off. not words that dismiss.

just hear me, you can hear the hearts saying. if you listen. just listen.

and so, unscripted, unplanned, the scene plays over and over. one minute we’re there at the sink, i might be chopping or rinsing, a child is circling the kitchen. the talking begins.

the kettle is cranked. the tea bags and cups, pulled from the cupboards. tea kettle whistles. stories are spilling.

i walk to the table, two teacups in hand. chairs are pulled out. each of us sits. i lean in, my chest pressed against the edge of the table, tilting toward the one who is talking.

the quieter i sit, the more wholly i take in the words, the deeper the place from which the words come.

it’s a curious algebra, the one of the heart.

on the surface, perhaps, it appears to be one-way. but in fact, the art of listening is a most active one. you take in, you sift, you turn each morsel of thought, you examine, allow the questions to rise. but you wait. you hold your questions off to the side, in a queue, on hold. patiently waiting their turn.

when it’s time, when the pause comes, you reel out the questions, one, or maybe a string. you sit and you wait.

a question, constructed with care, unspooled on the river of talk, is one that sinks deep, one that says, “i am with you in thought. we are in this together. our heads and our hearts entwined, teamed up. you’re not alone. i wonder, too.”

no solution need come. no answers, plucked from the current.

a deep conversation is not one in which the success of the time in the water is measured by number of fish in your bucket. there’s no scale at the end. no photo of you with your whopper-sized trout.

in fact, it might not be till later that night, or a week or a year down the road, when the one who you talked to realizes that all those hours, strung on a line that never breaks, have woven themselves into a cord that connects. a life-string that keeps you from drowning, from sloshing alone in the deep.

it’s what you hold onto, there with your ears and your heart wide open, and your mouth rather hushed.

you remember how deeply you prayed that someone would listen.

you cradle that cup till the sides grow cold, till the sun sets, and the clock inches along.

you know when it’s time for homework to start, for dinner to simmer along in the pots.

but in that holy interlude where one heart’s ache is offered up, received by another, the weight shared, burden lifted, those are the hours that matter the most.

those are the hours that answer our prayers.

the ones we’ve prayed all our lives.

the image up above, a boy and his cat, on a cold snowy day is one that i cherish. i love how the two of them lean in toward each other, touch forehead to forehead. a good afterschool talk is like that. and yes, one of us purrs.
what holy interludes of listening have you had this week? who taught you how to listen?

4 Comments

February 4, 2011

mr. mousey’s snow picnic

of all the mounds and miles of snow, of all the ice rivers and hurling winds, of all the times i thought my front door might blow wide open, off the hinge and dangling in a tunnel of arctic gusts, of all the jaw-dropping majesty that whirled and swept and fell and blew, the moment that caught me most stilled this blizzard-piled week, most falling-to-my-knees, was when i discovered the fat gray lump in the snow mound just outside the kitchen door.

it was not at all what i’d expected when i first eyed it from across the room, what i’d thought i’d seen a hundred times before. no, it was not a junco, one of those gray-topped snow birds with the pure-white waistcoat, the darlings who romp in the snow as if dressed for a mid-winter ball.

no, what it was was something i’d never before been invited to watch from a front-row bleacher seat, to share a long winter’s afternoon, enchanted.

it was a fat little mouse, soon addressed by the surname mousey, as in mr. mousey, with the biggest roundest ears i ever knew a mouse could have, and the busiest itty-bitty teeth as he chewed and chewed through the cornmeal mush i’d tossed out for whomever was hungry after the storm. er, blizzard. make that, blizzard-of-the-decade.

for the better part of an afternoon, i watched the little fellow, watched him up close like he had walked into my unwitting science experiment: mouse tunnels 101.

why, that hungry boy, he’d dug gazillions of labyrinths in and through and under the snow. what i’d mistaken for a hole put there by a falling clump of ice, was in fact mr. mousey’s grandest opening, the launch to all his under-snow festivities.

he showed me how it worked: he’d nibble a while, and then when his belly was full, or perhaps digesting an especially granular cornmeal chunk, he’d take to the entertainment part of the show, and wiggle his little self up and down and sideways through all of his underground pathways, punctuating every passage with the POP! of his sweet little head (and ears) out through the peek hole. why, he showed me just how industrious he’d been since the snows started falling–or perhaps once they’d stopped.

there must be a good half dozen crisses and crosses in that undersnow highway of his. and every last one leads back to the prize: the wide swath of cornmeal i tossed to the winds.

and somehow, despite the fact that the backyard was aswirl with all of my flocks, despite the fact that i’d stood there among them one cold afternoon, shortly after pouring a bucket of seed, and felt the flap of their wings, so close to my head did they swoop and chatter and make like noisy carousers at a mid-winter’s feast, it was one wee mouse who most captured my heart.

i’ve not seen a mouse in such close action, not outside of a cage. oh, i’ve seen swishes of tails now and then, heard the scampering of little mouse feets, but a mouse out in daylight, a mouse undeterred by the gaze of a curly-haired person, a mouse willing to show off his tunnels, why that was a mouse who got me to thinking.

it was as if the blessed cloak of nature—sacred wrap that it is, stitched with spools of mystery and wonder–had been pulled back, amid the extremes of snow and cold, and allowed me a rare peek inside, into all the ways the little critters stay alive, fend for themselves, ingeniously employ the snow to their advantage. and rely, on occasion, on the whims of souls who consider it among their holiest duties to scatter seed and oats and grains, and plumped-up dried fruits when cupboards allow, to nudge them along through the cold hard winter.

it’s a holy equation indeed, a sublime one. for the cost of a few cups of seed, of cornmeal, of suet cut from the beast, we offer feed to the flocks, the winged ones, the long-tailed-big-eared, the soft and the fluffy. and they, in return, throw caution to the wind, they seek out sustenance even if it means baring their ways to the humans.

one wee mouse, now claimed by my little one as his very own mascot and pet (and thus the name), brought me to my knees yesterday, and i watch for him again this morning.

he reminds me, without words, how very much we are all a tethered web. and how we need each other, mouse or bird or human, to weather all the storms that blow and hurl through the thick of our lives.

what little miracles did you witness this week?
and, out into the vast whiteness, i send the deepest birthday wishes to my brother who will always be my little one, the one whose birth felt so much like a dream come true. a miracle every soul should get a chance to brush up against. and lucky me, i did……

January 28, 2011

angels among us…

might as well find feathers falling past your windows, that’s how rare it seems these days to find an angel in your stepping path.

but, oh, when they appear, wings spread wide, head cocked at full attention, offering up the whole of their heart and soul and thoughts, well, it’s enough to take your breath away.

and inspire you to be the same: be the angel in the hard-trod path of someone else’s life.

and so comes the tale this morning of the doctor, the medical doctor with the jam-packed calendar. so hard is it to score an appointment, or even a phone call with this busy bountiful someone, that you will pencil in her name on your calendar after turning page upon page. or you’ll wait days for a call to be returned.

it’s not–not at all–that she doesn’t want to fit you in. it’s that she can’t. she is too darn booked.

so imagine this: in an email dispatch sent across the wires on a sunday, no less, she asked if perhaps a certain boy i love might meet with her for coffee on a thursday evening. it would be a fine time for them to catch up, to see how things are going, to see if perhaps there is any tweaking she can do to his medical plan.

imagine that: a coffee call.

in an age when house calls are all but extinct (try finding the box to check on the insurance forms for that one), a revered and blessed doctor–one who surely trekked off to med school to join in the art of healing–offered up a winter’s evening, to share tea and words with a teenage child.

in my book, that’s an angel all right.

can you imagine the message it sends to a kid? you are important enough, i care about you enough, to give up an evening of my time.

not because you are paying me. not because the insurance company will have a clue what to do with any sort of billing code–as if she’d submit one.

because you are a patient—a human soul and body that needs a tad of tinkering to make things flow as they should flow—and i, as a doctor of medicine, have the knowledge and the life’s practice to steer you on that path.
imagine that.

i, for one, cannot stop thinking about it. i can’t forget the smile spread across my firstborn’s face when he bounded in the door, snowflakes on his shoulders, ice clomped on his boots. he had a deeper understanding of how things worked, and how the medicine might be calibrated to fine-tune the machine that is his lovely self.

it makes me wonder just how many angels are out there, sprinkled on our paths.

it makes me want to start to track them, their meanderings through our days and nights.

for surely, they are here. planted unsuspectingly among us, for the work to be done here, can’t be done by mortals all alone.

i am starting here, a list of angels and their stories. we might all sprout wings, if we begin to understand that the fine line between heaven and earth is bridged by those among us who live with wings spread wide and luminously.

add your angels here:

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January 21, 2011

survival seed

the warnings come with breathless urgency. we brace ourselves, tell bones and muscles to stay strong, bear the cold. then we zipper up and face it.

standing on the train platform, winds hurling past the naked patch of flesh that is our nose, our cheeks, our lips, our bare sliver of forehead, we think siberia’s got nothin’ on the north side of chicago, in the dark and bitter exodus from work to igloo.

and that’s before the real cold comes. we’re racing home to beat it. to hunker down, stuff rags where winds creep in, turn on faucets to the steady drip that tells us pipes aren’t frozen–yet.

the weatherman, making like he’s our wise and worried uncle, is talking upper-case-and-exclamation-mark negatives, double digits below zero.

take to the blankets, the call goes out. don’t leave home if you don’t need to.

the children pray for day off from school; they go to bed, hoping for the coldest cold.

grownups only hope they don’t awake to the sound of gushing water, from a pipe that’s gone kerpluey.

last night, doing as i was told by uncle weatherman, i wrapped myself like a taco in my fuzzy blanket, the one that comes out for emergencies. like when it’s 20-something below zero. and words like SIBERIAN get splattered on the weather map.

i was dozing deeply–and, oddly, dreaming of picante sauce–when the cat meowed, as he always does, at 3 a.m. (clearly, he’d dozed right through the weather alerts on the nightly news.)

dutifully, i flung back the blanket and followed the ol’ cat’s pit-a-pat, straight to the kitchen door, where he made his exit wish in no uncertain terms: i let him out, under the silver moon, for his prowl around the ‘hood. but knowing, as he did not, that his little paws might screech in pain, i waited at the door. and waited. while he took in the frozen tundra.

when at last he trotted back, a full 20 minutes later (darn cat!), we shuffled back to taco blankets, cold cat and i.

i couldn’t bear to stay in bed much longer, though. i knew the trees outside were filled with all my half-frozen friends, the hardy feathered ones who must wake up on days like this and wonder why their forebears were not the tropical variety, the ones who would have had them harbored in banana groves and rain forests, straight through the so-called winter.

alas, the poor things are northern birds, and with that comes a tender tie to those of us who make it our business to shuffle out the door with banged-up coffee cans and old ricotta cheese tubs, serving platters for the seed and suet clumps that we pour into the troughs.

even though the dawn was still—not a leaf fluttering, not a bluejay’s squawk or sparrow’s chirp–even though my fingers nearly stuck to the water jug as i poured it in the bowl where my birds bathe and drink, both at once, i crunched across the crusted snow, i dumped my vittles, and before i’d reached the door handle once again, there was a red-headed beauty pecking away at the seed.

survival seed, i call it.

it’s imbued with animation, the sparks of magic, surely. not a minute after it’s been dumped the yard’s aswirl with sound and stirrings.

on days like today, it’s the least we can do, to stoke the hearts and bellies of the birds who give flight to our days, who fill the boughs and branches with their scarlet feathers.

truth be told, i’d like to fling wide my doors, and invite the chilly flocks inside. come to my table, feathered friends, have a plate of seed. survival seed, indeed.

for each and every one of us.

oh lord, i must dash to RECESS duty, be still my frozen heart. tell your weather tales here. be back, once i thaw….

January 14, 2011

sometimes we forget the power of a hug

it was last friday night, i am nearly certain, when my little one, who sometimes is a prophet, climbed into our bed. he wanted snuggles, he said.

and then, as he was wrapped from both sides by arms that have held him since the shaft of light in the middle of the night shone that long-ago hot august vigil on his slippery, pink, eight-whopping pounds, he spoke the words that have blanketed me all week:

“i like when you hug me. i feel like the whole world is around me, and i feel like nothing could ever hurt me.”

i know that’s what he said, because as he spoke those words in that pure-hearted voice of a boy who doesn’t censure a syllable, the words–a mere two dozen, swiftly chosen, unfiltered words–pried open my heart, whirled to that place where they will forever live, and i let out a sigh.

it’s not every night you find yourself wrapped around poetry.

“i like when you hug me. i feel like the whole world is around me, and i feel like nothing could ever hurt me.”

i am certain those are the words he spoke because i wasn’t about to leave anything to chance, there in the dark. or to the soft spots in my memory.

i asked for the phone (yes, in the dark). i dialed my number at work. and i recited the words into the phone, knowing i’d etched them into the digital memory that is my work voicemail.

that sweet little boy didn’t know—nor did any one of us–how powerful those words would forever ring, especially as they came just 12 hours before a madman lifted a gun called a glock (a name that sends shivers down my spine, the sound of cold-blooded crime locked in its clipped hard-edged consonants), and sprayed bullets into a crowd, into the heart–yes, the heart–of a 9-year-old child.

“i like when you hug me. i feel like the whole world is around me, and i feel like nothing could hurt me.”

so we hold our breath and pray.

so we wish.

so we fool ourselves every time we wrap our arms around the ones we love.

as if it’s a shield that cannot be shattered. as if impenetrable walls are forever wrapped around the ones we love, the vulnerable ones, the ones who do not–do not–have rhyme or reason to be taken away.

lord have mercy.

my little boy’s words, now a refrain that i tumble round my brain, like some succulent fruit whose juice i cannot get enough of, his words are what we pray for.

his words are what we need to remember.

isn’t that the prayer at the heart of all our comings and goings?

“i like when you hug me. i feel like the whole world is around me, and i feel like nothing could hurt me.”

we are, sadly, old enough and battered enough to understand the limits of those words, a child’s words, to run our fingers along the sharp-edge where our prayers fall off, and pure chance reigns.

but the words are worth remembering: it’s our place in the world, our place by the gift of being grownups, to wrap our arms around our children, around all those we love, the ones whose breath we depend on, the ones whose stirrings matter.

it is all our children ask of us, in the end, to be their shields from the darkness, to chase away the ghosts and goblins, the creaks in the hall in the thick of the night, the ones that scare them to no end.

they lean their little bodies into us, into our soft chests. they ask for so little: wrap me, make me feel safe, shoosh away the monsters.

and while there might always be madmen, and madwomen, who steal the light, who shatter the morning’s hope, our jobs do not cease.

our arms are forever needed, and the hearts that beat in the middle:

“i like when you hug me. i feel like the whole world is around me, and i feel like nothing could hurt me.”

make it your job to hug the ones you love today.

even when they don’t put words to it; the little prophet reminded me the other night in the darkness.

who did you hug this week? how did the heartbreaking news of the week toss and turn in the shards of your heart?

as promised last week, when i feel the rumblings of something to say, i will put fingers to home keys. i will write as long as what’s here doesn’t feel too lean. and bless all of you who took the time to let me know you are out there….i can’t give up on a place where civility and deep thinking and heart have always reigned. bless this place in the world, and my prayer is that we can take it beyond.
i found myself this week making it my personal mission to add extra doses of decency and kindness. i looked more people in the eye, other riders on the el; i said thank you in a deeper way to those who unfolded kindnesses, large or small. i can’t turn around a nation’s civility (or lack thereof) but i can make sure i act with wholehearted dignity and grace. at every turn.
how bout you?

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