pull up a chair

consider the toes above the official portrait of the start of summer. full of sand, soaked in lake wash. the aftermath of a long hot afternoon romping on the beach nearby with at least two dozen romping boys, fueled by chips and twizzlers, at best a half a PBJ (and that, only after persistent mama pleading). oh, lord, what were we thinking?

i worked from home the other morn, so i could be there for the noisy school bell, the last one of the year, the one that sends the goosebumps down my spine, every time, every june.

the one that says, summer starts here. right now. this whole delicious minute.

when not a second yet’s been shaved, worn, wasted (as if a minute of time could ever be wasted).

when i’ve not yet heard the wail, “i’m bored. there’s nothing here to do.” (glory be to boredom, the birthing place of big ideas, if left to stew for long enough…)

you don’t hear that siren song on day one of summer. not for the first half hour anyway.

and, as always, i wanted to be there to soak it in, to watch that beaming face come bounding out the door, the weightless backpack flailing from my little one’s shoulders.

my little one…..a phrase i might just have to hang up for good, on the hook in the front closet, along with this year’s ratty backpack, along with the lunchbox he’s outgrown, the one with superman’s cape, flapping from behind, the one he’s had since first grade, but now hides if i forget to instead use the plain red square one, if i pack it with his PBJ, and god forbid a love note tucked inside.

it hit me wednesday morn. hit me harder than the fact that my older one is now a so-called “rising senior,” will soon be in his last year of high school.

somehow, that doesn’t make me wobble quite as much as the little one moving on, on his way to fourth grade, the oldest grade of kids at his little school, the starter school, the one where reading’s secrets are unlocked, the one where kids learn about lunch lines and recess bells, the one where mamas hover by the schoolhouse door and aren’t yet greeted by rolling eyeballs, cocked shoulders, the air of you-embarrass-me.

my so-called little one, come end of august, will be–at last/so soon–among the big kids, one of the lanky stretched-out ones the little kindergartners look up to, crane their necks to see above the waist, so seriously do they tower over brand new 5-year-olds trying to find their way, somehow, to the boys’ or girls’ bathrooms, or, wait, was it the nurse’s office they’re searching for?

my little one might be no more.

oh, sure he’ll by my littlest one forever and ever amen. but little by little, the little part is slipping away. he’ll hold hands still–but only if it’s pitch-black dark, and we hear rustling in the bushes. if i slip and call him sweetie anywhere in earshot of another human 8- or 9-year-old, i get the dagger glance. how dare you? the hazel-brown eyes ask, subject me to such humiliation?

but that’s not the whole point here.

the point, mostly, is summer. and how i am longing for the seasonal distinctions that tell me something’s changed, we’ve shed the weighty school year, we’ve slid into the carefree days.

and while i did notice how bedtime hasn’t been a worry these past two nights, and while right now i’ve two sleeping boys in rooms just above my head, i am longing for the kind of summer that i only remember.

i am longing for a summer where my little one needn’t be rushed out the door, and into a carpool, headed off to camp.

i’m longing for the days of old, when caramel-colored little boy legs, all scraped around the knees, with cotton boy-print pajama shorts, came traipsing down the stairs, into the kitchen, and sat down to the sports page and a bowl of cheerios. when there was a fort in progress out back. when once those boys wolfed down the last little O, they’d be back to where they left off the night before.

the boys who inhabit that picture show are not my own, they’re my brothers. and the construction site in that ever-looping frame was the thicket down by the fence, near the gulley. or across the creek in the woods.

i am longing for popsicles, made from kool-aid. or, considering the calendar, the fact that this is 21st-century frozen confection and kool-aid has been deemed 100% artificial and thus bankrupt, i suppose we’ll go with fruit juice, and berries floating down below, before the freezing comes.

i am longing for twilight suppers, lit by fireflies and dripping candles, inside the summer porch, where the breeze wafts through screens, and we take our time, because no one’s in a hurry.

because in summertime, there are no worries. or at least not the way i wish summer to be.

i am, as always, longing for long afternoons curled up in the shade with a book i can’t put down.

i am longing for a fat tomato, and the juice dribbling down my chin, splattering my t shirt, a red badge of summer honor.

i am longing for corn on the cob, each yellow bump type-set across the row bursting with the taste of sun and field and america’s heartland.

i am even longing for long hours to yank weeds from my garden, where the pushing and shoving among the roots and stems is getting out of hand. and the weeds seem to stand a chance of winning best-of-show.

and more than in the winter, spring or fall, i am wishing on a star that my typing job didn’t call me way downtown, so far away from all that summer wishes it could be.

maybe i should call in sick for all of summer.

this is less meander and more just scrapbook. a compendium of thinking from the week. but here’s where you come in….what’s on your list of summer longings, and how will you make dreams come true?

the hard past of day one, summer, was that i didn’t get to stay at the beach with all the other carefree mamas. i had to get back to the keyboard. i left my little one under someone else’s wings. and i need that camp carpool because–despite his protests–camp serves as summer childcare. drat.

finally, a plea for a prayer or three for my dear mother-in-law, a loyal chair reader, who has an appointment with a surgeon come monday, and we want to whisk her straight to bump-free recovery. sending love. of course.

antibiotics are one thing. they work, as i’ve seen zillions of times, when your throat is raw as if sandpaper-rubbed.

they manage to quash all sorts of bugs. the ones that bring fevers deep in the night, the ones that make bones feel practically poisoned, what with all of the aching and all of the shaking.

oh, they might come in horse-pill dimensions. or in thick goopy glop that your children must swallow, after they’ve scared you with all of their gagging.

unfortunately, all of life’s pains are not the bacterial kind.

every once in a while the wallop is brought by nerves that are shot. so tired. so spent. so flat-out-of-steam.

it’s been one of those weeks around here. make that, one of those months. oh, go wild, call it one of those schoolyears.

in simple declarative terms it is this: junior year of high school, at Big Pressure High, when the course load is thick, is intense, is wholly immense.

without spelling out the hair-pulling moments, without counting off the nights without sleep, let’s assume for the sake of discussion that there have been plenty of both.

gobs.

mountains.

heck, whole pyrenees ranges, stretching clear to barcelona.

and as i sit here typing, i have reason to think that phase one of the torture might just have lurched to a close. a young lad i happen to know, one 6-2 and counting, he is, at this very hour, lifting the flap on his messenger sack, extracting 12 pages of thesis from there in the depths, and plopping said load on the desk of his teacher.

no more worrying about that.

the junior theme, now typed, paper-clipped, bibliographed, is checked off the life list.

and so, people, we inch our aching, tired, slumping mortal frames into recovery phase.

there is only so much of a siege that one little house can endure.

and the typing all night seems to have hushed. i hear only the sound of my keys, the ones at the ends of my bone-tired fingers. there’s nary an echo from that room up above.

how then does one begin to salve the worn-ragged nerves of a parental unit (a pair of those, thanks be to God) now spiraling down from highest alert?

one begins, i suppose, by emergency airlift to the grocery store. who let the milk jug run dry? and where is the bread to smear with the butter that’s nowhere in sight?

why, lordy, this cottage has gone to the dogs.

everywhere i look i see blackened nibs of eraser. crumpled up bundles of paper. the evidence of a house stumbling through finals.

no, wait, the finals aren’t yet.

that’s phase two of the torture.

but for now, for this one brief moment in time, we are here at the end of our rope. ooops, i mean, grind. the agony is, for the weekend at least, temporarily lifted.

and i’ve 48 hours to pull it together. to fill up the fridge. to soak in the tub. to indulge in the alka-seltzer fizz that comes with returning to normal.

okay, so it’s relative normal. (and might look to you, if you peer through the windows, just this side of hysterically nutty.)

take a deep breath, dears.

ah, yes.

what’s ahead of me now, as i sit here and practice the fine art of breathing, is a day of unscheduled calm. block after block in the appointment book left utterly blissfully blank. (who knew if we’d be screeching the car to the curb, as we delivered the paper, with seconds to spare? a trick i’ve perfected, learned back in the day when the name on the paper was mine.)

the task that’s upon me, you see, is to prop myself up like a couch pillow, one that’s been thumped with a fist.
i need here some restorative tricks. the emotional equivalent of a russian masseuse to bang on my door and order me down on the rug.

i’ll begin, i suppose, by sticking my nose in the lilacs.

my dear blessed mother, she left me a jar by the sink. she’d gotten a call from deep in my darkest hour. when i was nearly at wit’s end with this paper that would not get done, and the distress was starting to steam from the holes in my ears.

she did what mamas do: she listened, and hmmm’d, she attempted to soothe. then she went to her yard and snipped off the necks of an armload of lilac.

perhaps, like the nosegays of victorian times, the ones whose primary purpose was eclipsing the bodily odors, i ought to pin on a clump, somewhere up by my collar. perhaps a walking stalk of lilac would keep me from feeling so woozy.

and perhaps after that i’ll head out for some trowel therapy. that always works, to dig in the mud. and today, with the rain, it is muddy. the ooze might do me some good.

a tall mug of soup would be fine. one that’s laced with herbs from my garden. the chives at the moment are wholly in bloom, and carry a stiffening bite.

a trip to the farmer’s market is surely on the docket. as is a sacred shabbat after sundown, and a whole afternoon to prepare.

i am blessed, utterly, truly, to have at my reach a whole apothecary of emotional fixes and soothers of nerves.

i do believe that what’s ordered is a day of whispering quiet. i will tick through my thanks for getting at last to this day, one circled in red on my calendar.

and as i wrap my tired aching self in a blanket of vespers i will putter around, putting myself back together again.
so that when monday rolls around, i’ll be primed for the slam of phase two, the torture continues.

what are the fix-its that line the shelf of your emotional apothecary? what do you do to recover from an overdose of stress, and too many sleepless nights?

as often happens around here, i was neck-deep in writing, pounding away on the keyboard, sweat beads practically pouring, i was thinking so hard. wrestling sentences into their pens, trying to catch wayward thoughts, haul them back from the pasture.

that’s when the knock came. actually, it was the second knock. i’d typed through the first, wholly escaped it.
at last, as the rap grew bolder, more insistent, i finally connected, realized the banging on glass was a knock on the door.

someone, apparently, wanted to chat. either that, or a stranger needed to borrow the salle de bain, to powder her nose before ambling along.

so up from my chair i stumbled. nearly tripped on the rug (writing intensely is dangerous business, do not believe otherwise, people…).

as i rounded the bend i saw not a magazine peddler, nor a sharpener of knives. no, no. twas my dear beloved garden archangel, my beautiful neighbor who lives in her garden clogs, 24-7, who forever is wearing her gardener’s kneepads, who’s never met a puddle of mud she wasn’t apt to sink, swim or splash in.

she works in her beds for hours on end, humming along as she hoes, i assure you. has a sweet little pug, a doglet named raisin, (here’s a marvelous thing, a tangent of course, but what beauty is life if not for the tangents we take: ol’ raisin? her middle name, truly, is ettes. raisin ettes. get it?).

back to the story:

raisin, whose legs are maybe two inches long, and whose belly circumference might be, oh, 24 inches, making her decidedly a walking defiance of gravity, she is the official garden dog of the ‘hood. she is adept, really, at tiptoeing around the delicate things. never once have i seen her squish a tender stem, or flatten a bloom with her bum. i don’t believe she’s yet learned to fetch whatever it is that her archangel needs, but i’m sure she’s practicing madly.
the thing about raisin is, she needs breaks. she cannot be expected to dig up bare roots, lounge in the daisies for hours on end. she needs to exercise those wee little leg muscles. she needs to waddle.

so, not only is her archangel a master of her own garden, she keeps a close eye on everyone else’s.

mine, for instance.

and so it was that while i sat feverishly typing, pounding out vowels, reaching for consonants, the archangel of gardens discovered something magnificent right under my nose.

something i’d utterly missed.

once i got to the door where she paced, i knew right away there was news.

perhaps another house had been tumbled, i suddenly feared (they seem to be felled with alarming rapidity).

perhaps her petunias were deep under water (the rains poured mercilessly night before last, burying this fine little burg in gallons and gallons–whole hectares–of water).

as i opened the door, she began: “have you seen your tree peony?,” she practically shouted.

“why, it’s the most beautiful shade of peach i might ever have seen. it stops you on the street, it’s impossible not to marvel.”

i looked up, sheepish.

i had no clue it was out there.

last time i’d paid attention, the darn thing was merely a bud. a fat one perhaps. a swollen one. but hardly a bloom to pull folks in off the sidewalk.

apparently, in the thick of the rains, it did what blooms do: it unfolded, eased back its brilliant pink-flamingo petals, gulped heartily of the drink from the skies.

it wasn’t shy. didn’t cower under the rainclouds.

it bloomed, hallelujah. put on its own personal fourth-of-july pyrotechnics. (never mind that it was the 13th of may).

and i, intent on making sense of a story. intent on cleaning the kitchen, getting the kiddies straight out the door and onto the schoolbus, i’d missed it completely.

made me wonder, as i tiptoed back out later last night, under the light from the porch and the very few moonbeams that poked through the clouds, as i studied the crepe-paper crinkle of each of those sumptuous petals, as i marveled at petticoat-ruffle-upon-petticoat-ruffle (no quinceanera ballgown, the ones in lollipop colors that hang in the shop windows and beckon young girls in from the sidewalk, has ever equaled the volumes of ruffly fluff), it all made me wonder just how often i miss the beauty right under my nose?

how can something so short-lived, something so utterly breath-taking, be so veryclose, but not noticed?

are we typing too madly?

rushing too mindlessly?

are we missing the prize that quietly blooms, right under our gaze?

yesterday, were it not for the knock at the door, were it not for my blessed archangel of garden, i’d have missed the beautiful.

i’d have missed the holy.

i am haunted, and slowed, by the peony that nearly exploded and shriveled and vanished, before i’d paid one ounce of attention.

what beauties have you missed of late? what tales of narrow escape have you to tell here? do you have an archangel who taps at your door, reminds you to notice the beautiful?
bless the archangels….

it happened, i swear, with just a few notes criss-crossing the country. a what-if turned into a plan. a maybe turned into a yes. just like that, propelled by the heart.

date was picked, for no real reason, other than it was two fridays after the baby turned one. good enough reason in all of our books.

erasers were pulled, whatever had been inked onto calendars was swiftly rubbed off. just like that. propelled by the heart.

for one sweet weekend, according to improvised, multi-pronged plan, all of us, 16 of us, would be in one place, sit down at one table (okay, so that turned into two), come back to the roost where our mama is hen.

one by one, planes took off all around the country. one in maine, another in california, a third in arizona.

the people i love were on those planes.

on one, the one from california, sat a woman i’d never met. but already love. seems she’s found a soulmate in one of my brothers, my oldest brother, the one who’s been searching a very long time.

the plane in arizona was filled with the happy-go-luckiest clan that maybe ever there was. kids hauled their schoolbooks, ma grabbed a few days off work. pa, the brother of mine who leads with his heart wherever he goes, he pointed northeast, started flappin’ his wings.

up nor’east, in south portland maine, the baby was packed. and with her the ma and the pa, the car seat, the stroller. packin’ a baby is no simple task. thus, this was her first trip to chicago. my brother never had been back home as a father. never lulled to sleep his little girl in the room where he grew up.

while they all headed this way, still one more brother packed up the wagon, made room for his wife. left max, the beautiful dog, home in the kennel. drove in from ohio.

one by one, my mama’s house got more and more crowded. crowded in a way it’s never been before. each one of us glowed.

we were uniting for no particular reason. no funeral. no wedding. just the realest reason that ever there was: we all just happen to miss all the noise, all the laughter, the sharing of stories that thread through our lives. the ones the kids know forward and backward, even though not a one of them was around when all of it happened.

off and on for 30-some hours, we ebbed and we flowed. we were an amoeba with multiple parts, coming and going and swirling. soaking up all there was to soak up. every last drop. every last morsel.

without notice, the whole darn crew, or most of ‘em anyway, appeared at the sidelines of soccer. my little one, on the field with his head full of curls, he just beamed. especially when uncle piano, the arizona uncle, let out a cheer, spelled out the little one’s name in a cheerleader way. loudly. from the side of the field. the whole crowd roared at uncle piano’s inimitable bursting with joy.

at dinner saturday night–after scotch on the rocks for a few, and precision grilling for others–we all ended up packed in the dining room where, over the years, we’d all always taken our places, as if seat assignments don’t change, not from birth till that last christmas dinner.

never mind that this time there weren’t enough seats at the table. there were plenty of chairs. and plenty of stories. one after the other, till our bellies all ached.

that night when i tucked the little one in bed, he sighed. wanted me to tell him more tales. had been utterly swept by the magic, the power of story to tell who we are over time. when i told him just one hurried tale, he sighed again, worried.

“darn,” he whispered, “now there are no stories left for tomorrow.”

oh, i assured him, there were stories aplenty.

“make a list,” he called out, as i turned out the light, turned down the stairs.

and indeed the next night, the last night before bags were packed once again, there were stories. and birthday candles and cupcakes for the girl i call my delicious cupcake.

that’s when the tears flowed.

a few us, certainly me, ached for the knowledge of what we were missing. the depth and the breadth of the everyday. the growing up without intersecting in the dew of the dawn or the twinkling of night stars.

there is no substitute–not the most wizardlike phone or screen of computer–for living our lives just down the block. i cannot run and take that little girl’s hand. can’t show her the bird’s nest. can’t bury her nose in the rose’s perfume.
we are left to hold onto threads, snatches of story. the echo of laughter.

all week i found myself wandering through my house, knowing that was the book nook where the cupcake sat on my lap, played with the puppet.

there was the keyboard where music did flow.

there was the bench where my big beautiful brother wrapped his arm ‘round the girl of his dreams.

late sunday night, as i cleaned up the kitchen, i found in the corner the pink number one candle i’d tucked in the strainer of berries (the cupcake of choice for a girl who gets hives from eggs, milk or icing).

i held onto that candle for a minute or two. contemplated mailing it off, but then set it down in a basket of seeds by the window. i’ll send it some day, surely i will. but for now, i’ll keep it nearby.

it’s all i’ve got left of that short, sweet, magical weekend.

when for no practical reason–simply the mere fact of love–we all squeezed up to the table. and told tales till the clock struck good night.

a week ago today i was down on my hands and knees, crawling behind that sweet baby girl. my heart is wrapped up in hers, and in all of my brothers and the loves of their lives. here we all are, back in lives at full speed.
i’m not sad so much as washed over with the tenderest sweetness for a gift that came and went, in the blink of an eye.
how is it that so many of us live lives far from the ones we love the most, have loved the longest? who else longs for the village?

grrrrr, was mostly the sound rumbling ‘round the garden.

it was rising from me. i happened to notice, once i saw what someone had done to my cloud-seeking missiles of yellow and red, and just-barely-brush-stroked-with-pink.

at first, as i galloped down the path, late to the train one morning this week, i saw only one. stopped me cold in my tracks, though.

clipped at the neck, the red beauty lay there, gasping.

its last futile breaths reached my ears, then my heart. my own gasp echoed the one that rose from the slack-jawed tulip, her petals all splayed, her innards stripped bare.

no time to attend to this merciless maiming, only to pause and mourn in double-time, make note to call back-up gardener and tuesday-afternoon nanny (aka my mama), ask if maybe just maybe, when she arrived at the scene, she’d rescue the poor decapitated darlin, swoop her up from the mud and lay her to rest, and maybe resuscitate, there by the sink in a stretcher of waters.

and so the day unfolded, certain was i that all would be well once the rescue ensued. i muscled on, didn’t give it even a wisp of a worry. figured that one random loss was hardly a crime spree. maybe merely my cat acting naughty. or just out-and-out hungry for whatever it is in a tulip that makes a cat go utterly bonkers.

why, i’ve seen that cat leap to the counter, just when he thought that no one was looking, and chowdown a feast of a dozen fat tulips that someone had generously, innocently, not-knowingly brought me.

see, thing is, i learned long ago to make do without tulips. in the acreage that is mine there is no tepid coexistence of cat and tulipa major or minor.

the only tulips that come to my house, more often than not, are ones handed to me by unsuspecting folk who’d have no reason to think that to bring in a tulip is to unleash the lion that lurks in my voracious striped cat.

and the ones that grow in my garden are ones that somehow, mistakenly, got there by accident. before i realized i had no future in the tulip department, and buried the bulbs back in the day when hope was my middle name.

either that or the squirrels here in the ‘hood noticed the absence and set out to fill in the blanks. impolitely and unceremoniously (i’m certain of that) pawing the dirt in beds down the block, and, under cover of darkness, they did what squirrels do: buried a mid-winter snack, then promptly forgot where they put it.

so every spring, a scant crop of tulips erupts. and love them i do. marvel at the gentle curves, the slim cup of a profile. wait for the day when the petals let go, ease back a bit, let in the sun. open their mouths, say ahhh, so tulip-mad mamas like me can gaze down their throats, count all the tonsils.

mostly, when that fine week of tulip eruption arrives, i hold my breath. try to coax the cat away. fill him with tuna and handfuls of treats. anything to steer him clear from the few brave stems that rise from my dirt, dare show their colors, dare toy with my heart.

so far this season, except for that one, i’d noted not a single gnawed-off stem. not a head dangling. i was dumb-founded. and truly delighted. perhaps the cat had moved on to a new garden fixation.

but then i rounded the bend. loped into the garden, from a long day at work. and there before me, the horrors.

here, there and everywhere except for on stems, there were tulips in shreds. their bright shining parts all askew, and every last one piercing my heart.

oh, i gasped, all right. let out a yelp.

then came the grrrrrrrr.

but before i could mutter a long list of swears (as my little one calls those words that shouldn’t be heard), i glanced at the face pressed up to the panes of the doors at the kitchen.

there, wearing his please-let-me-out face, was my dear gentle cat.

hmm. i thought, if he is inside, has been cooped there all day, who in the world was out wreaking havoc here in the once-tulipy bed?

without nod to the puzzle, i swept through that garden, gathered petals galore, and the few intact heads that i managed to find.

i carried them in, the near-dead and hopeless.

and that’s when my mama, she let the cat out of the bag.

turned out the cat was not the culprit here. fact is, she said, she’d just been out in the garden and those tulips were right where they belonged. doing what all good tulips so often do: they clung to their stems, they grew toward the sky.

but then she mentioned there had been a rabbit, a cotton-tailed fine one, hopping around in the yard down the way.

seems that when my mama turned to come in the house, that smart little bun, he made for the cafeteria that is my garden. started with a mouthful of reds, moved onto yellows, wound up with a whopping morsel of pink.

somehow, though, he left untouched a last batch of yellows.

maybe he had every intention of retracing his hops, in time for a bedtime refueling.

well, i’ve never let an angry thought cross my noggin–uh, ‘scuse me, correction: okay, not in the nature department, and not unless you don’t count the cussing i’ve done when a hawk eats a bird, or a someone eats a nest full of babies…

but i’m tellin’ you, seein’ those scattered petals of tulips. lookin’ like someone made salad of my vernal bouquets, well, i channelled my inner mr. mcgregor, and i remembered that page of the book, beatrix potter’s original peter rabbit, and i thought of that watering can, the one old peter got caught in, and the way mr. mcgregor chased ol’ pete with a hoe, and then the poor dear got his blue blazer caught on the fencepost, and well, after i thought through all that i was calmed down just a bit. and i never would hurt any rabbit. not even one who made porridge of my petals. but i did suddenly remember that deep in my cellar there was a bottle, a spray bottle of some organic rabbit chaser, and before i could kick my clogs into the next yard, i was down in that cellar, and i pulled up the bright red, the stop-sign-red bottle, and i spritzed every last still-standing tulip–alas, there only were five–with that mix of whatever it is, some sort of herbal concoction that apparently works.

it’s been three whole days now. and i still am the proud protector of my rather pathetic patch. i’ve got five yellow spears, pointing straight for the sky, opening soon at a theatre out back.

and i’ve not seen the hungry rabbit.

but if he comes anywhere close, i’ve hatched a bit of a plot. i’ll make a trail of carrots and lettuce. lead him straight to the kitchen where i’ll sit him down for a rabbity feast. and a very long talk about leaving my tulips alone.

or else, i’m calling mr. mcgregor.

this has been one stop-and-start meander, as i am in the thick of an all-family reunion. spent the afternoon with my baby girl, met my oldest brother’s everlasting girlfriend. oh what a day. kinda hard to think straight, let alone type. but type we must to keep these fingers from rustin’…..

anyone had to chase any critters from your springtime beds? the ones where the flowers grow, or to turn up the interesting meter, how bout the one where you sleep? i’ve got a tale there too. but i gotta run, as babies and girlfriends are waiting….

we were all up early this morning, making sure the crew bag was packed, not an oar was left behind.

i was stirring oatmeal, the complex carbohydrate requested as regatta fuel. oh, there was a long bus ride before the rower put boat to water, but since we weren’t going along, since this was the first such big-time race, and since all this is new, well we all had a little vrroom in our morning’s engines.

we’d been tugged from the start about not being able to go along. plenty of parents do. why this crew crew sets up a tent, cooks hearty breakfast, hot lunch, back-to-back, for all the hungry, waterlogged rowers. “like throwing a two-meal wedding every weekend,” was how it was described, the night the rower’s papa sat scribbling notes in the meeting for the rookie parents.

doesn’t matter, not one bit, to these dedicated folk, that the rivers and waterways where paddles are put to current are halfway across the country. they just set the alarms a little earlier, start driving deeper in the dark, get there in plenty of time to hoot and holler from the riverbanks.

but, well, we couldn’t ride along in the caravan of cars. this time, this first time, here we are. and there he goes, our young rower, who now sports the purple heart of every fledgling rower, a literal bruise mid-chest, one that makes a mama wince, but one that he wears proudly. proves he pulls the oar hard, smacks steel to flesh, doesn’t slow for pain.

oh, yes, all this is fresh here in the house where we are used to painful all-night studying and typing till the wee, wee hours. but going through a box of band-aids a week, what with all the blisters. swallowing hard every time i see that purple heart. oh, geez, this is different.

so while i dropped raisins by the handful into that bubbling pot of oats, i turned and saw the man i love with pen in hand. i’d thought he was paying bills, scribbling zeroes onto checks, but then i glanced again. grew curious enough to ask, “who you writing?” wondering what correspondence needed attention so very early in the morning.

in one swift syllable, he answered that he was writing to our firstborn, the rower with the duffel by the door.

that’s when i heard my heart go thump. thump-thump, even.

see, i’m the one around here who can’t keep pen from paper. for years now, i’ve tucked love notes into lunches, slid them under pillows, dropped them like rose petals onto desks aswirl in papers.

i’m most often the one streaming streamers high and low, for birthdays, for triumphs of even minor proportion. so much so, i now have to apologize when i forget to whisk away the shreds of evidence and, oops, high school friends come by, might rib him just a tad, for the over-the-top mother who is his.

if there are stacks of notes and envelopes stashed in his drawer–and there are–nearly every one of them is in the boxy, ample cursive that is mine, not the tight-held pen of his father. not so many anyway.

and so, while i stoked my rower’s belly–and hopefully his heart–with oats and raisins, it seems his papa felt inclined to reach into the box where he keeps his heavy-weight ivory papers, the ones with his name inscribed in manly gray.

while i stirred and prayed for safe return, his papa pulled up to the breakfast table, and penned words that i’ll not get to read.
this was, whatever it was, between father and son. this was something that stirred straight from his heart, and onto paper, courtesy of black-ink pen.

i’ve gotten notes from that pen myself. keeper notes. notes that take my breath away, because often, amid the well-picked words, there is one sentence with such deep knowing, it leaves me gulping, swatting back a tear.

to be known, after all, is to be triumphant in this race called life.

you can live a whole life long, and not know that someone’s paying attention, someone’s listening.

sometimes that’s all it takes to make the difference between life and death. life and death of the soul, that is. that part of us that is so darn hungry to be known, heard, seen in all our bumpy, stumbling glory.

oh, we’re not cover girls or movie stars, not most of us. just plain old lumpy humans who make mistakes by the hour, who screw up, forget, fudge the story, bounce the check, come home from the grocery store without the one thing we set out to get.

but we all can dream. and dream we do. fact is, we get up most mornings trying to get it right, at least one something before the day goes cold and dark.

and sometimes, it’s ink on paper, it’s someone wise, someone we look up to, taking the time to sit down, put it in writing. it’s the closest thing there is to hallelujah.

and what the rower’s papa wrote, i’ll not know.

nor does that matter.

what’s touched me here, what made my big bass heart go kaboom, is that clearly there’s a river flowing, from a father to a son. and whatever words he wrote, i’ll guess there’s a fatherload of pride.

that papa rides the kid hard sometimes. expects plenty in the report card department. has been known to growl.

but watching that kid come home from sweating in the gym, freezing on the water, night after night, week after week now, so exhausted, so achy shin to shoulder, seems to stir something altogether else in his papa. something mamas might not wholly comprehend.

i wince, run from the room when he flips back the bedsheets in the morning, when that damn bruise is bared.

not his papa. i think he might swell with new-found atta-boy.

not sure what he wrote in that two-sided note, the one he proofed, read top to bottom one more time, before he slid it, sealed it in the envelope.

all i saw, penned onto the front, was the name we gave that boy long, long ago when he was but a dream and a bump in my belly.

i saw that black-inked name, on the white-faced envelope, lying on his crew bag, the one he swooped up from the front hall when the ride came, the one he slung over his shoulder as he waved, pulled his long legs in the car.

as i wiped away a tear, whispered words of prayer, one more time, for safekeeping.

and then i turned, closed the door. and the boy with the note from his papa rode away.

i’m fairly certain, of all the words i don’t know on that slip of paper, that i do know one part.

it was signed, i’m sure, love, dad.

and what other words could matter more?

did your papa, or your mama, or someone who really mattered ever tell you that he or she was proud? if it wasn’t in writing, how’d they let you know? do you remember how it felt? have you told the same to someone you love lately?