Spending the Day with Wonder

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Wonder is my grandson. He is a running, talking, eating, sniffing, grabbing, singing, lunging, throwing, two-legged, two-handed, two-year-old with a seemingly boundless supply of both energy and curiosity coupled with a an imaginative and fearless questioning of everything.  I mean everything.

Spending the day with Wonder is an education in how to live. Everyone is his friend. He doesn’t know how the curly-headed little girl at the playground voted and he doesn’t care. He can create a rousing game of PJ Masks with almost everyone, and they are all on the same team–interconnecting to “save the day.” He delights in a Charms Blow Pop for lunch and left-over pumpkin pie for breakfast, but he also gobbles eggs, butter-topped bagels, and barbecued pork with equal vigor.

He notices everything, that one.

So yesterday morning, I noticed everything Wonder-style.

We sat on the sidewalk and traced orange stripes marking power lines. We slapped the corresponding orange and yellow flags on their spindly wire posts.

We threw sticks in the creek behind Pat’s house and kicked hundreds of leaves up into the air.

We ran. And ran. And ran. You see Wonder taught me yesterday that it doesn’t matter how dorky you look if you run, running feels good.

We pulled a thick dead branch from underneath the leaves and stood it up well over our heads and let it topple over the side of the creek.

We held hands. Wonder’s hands are small and warm.

We tossed squirrel-halved walnut shells into rippling water.

We sang silly made-up songs because that is a specialty of mine.

We talked about white cars and blue cars and Cat Boy (Wonder is a huge fan) and Po’s 1990s era red Ford Ranger and Christmas and the way leaves sound when you crunch them into the ground.

We noticed Cardinals and Robins and Dark-eyed Juncos and Sparrows, and did I mention the leaves–they were everywhere beneath our feet and in our hands and still floating down from the trees or hanging onto stark limbs waiting for a big wind.

We found a very old stone deer in a pile of leaves, and before I knew it, Wonder took a ride! Continue reading →

Me too

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Yesterday, I posted my own Me too status. I didn’t do so lightly because for the last 30 years the sexual assault I know occurred has been diminished over and again by the naysaying voices residing inside, as well as outside, my head. “Did you say NO?” they question. “But you didn’t say NO, right,” they assert.

I didn’t say No.

But yesterday, there were so many Me toos, I was compelled to add mine. The unuttered NO that stuck in my throat didn’t excuse the abuse of power, did it. That unuttered No did explain the crushing acceptance of blame and inevitability. I’m not all that brave, but I hate being vulnerable, and I had to get pretty damned vulnerable to post that status.

Today there’s been a wee bit of backlash—folks comparing Me too to the ubiquitous Facebook, Thoughts and Prayers.

When I first read a comment from a writer I admire, a writer who pooh poohed all the Me toos, I experienced the familiar old wash of shame, that warm liquidy feeling that starts in the gut and rushes up to the red face, accompanied by those same naysaying voices, Who do you think you are? What are you trying to prove?

I wanted to take it down—my Me too. I wanted to erase it. But I recognized those damned voices. I recognized the shame. And you know what—I remembered something Brené Brown teaches in her book and online course, Daring Greatly.

Shame cannot survive empathy.

Me too is empathy. Me too is witness. Me too is sharing our stories.

So Me too

for the woman pushed up on the hood of her own car, while the cop she called for help pulls her favorite shirt apart, popping all the buttons off.

and Me too

for the woman who stood bruised and helpless in front of the States Attorney who commanded, “Show me your bruises,” and “I know the man you are accusing of rape and I don’t believe he could do this.”

and Me too

for the 12 year old pushed into a corner of an empty gym by the cute dark-headed 8th grader with the deep brown eyes, the one who leaned in and assaulted her with his eyes while saying, “Have you ever been kissed?”

and Me too

for the multitudes of girls and women who were preyed upon in their own homes by their dads or grandfathers or uncles or or husbands or brothers or brothers’ friends or sister’s boyfriends or brothers-in-law or child-care providers or friends of a friend of a friend.

and Me too

for the 20 year-old student who believes she has made too many mistakes to stop her best friend from pushing her head into his lap while he unzips his pants.

and Me too

for any girl or woman who has crossed the street or turned around or sped up her heart smashing around the cage of her chest because the man in front of her or behind her might not be safe.

and Me too

for the woman who couldn’t say No because she needed the job, recommendation, money, drugs, shelter, pap smear, protection, food.

and Me too

for every woman who did say No and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
for every woman whose rape kit is stuck in a warehouse somewhere untested.
for every woman who can’t write Me too yet and for all those who just did.
for every woman who tells her story and for every woman who can’t.

Me too

if you have been fighting this battle for years.

and Me too

if you started fighting this battle only yesterday.

and Me too

for our daughters and nieces and granddaughters and sisters and mothers and aunts and friends who have by some stroke of luck avoided sexual assault and for our daughters and nieces and granddaughters and sisters and mothers and aunts and friends who have avoided nothing because together we can bear witness to and share our stories

Me too
Me too
Me too

Enough

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What do you write the day after a white man (and yes, I do believe this is important to stress) kills at least 59 people and injures 500 more? With guns. With an arsenal of guns.

What do you write when your heart is broken? When you cannot understand how anyone, ANYONE can believe it is fundamental right of people to own weapons that can mow down that many human beings in minutes?

What do you say to your dad who has an NRA sticker on his truck window, to your Indian neighbors who are heaving a sigh of relief that the shooter wasn’t a person of color, to your daughter whose husband went to Afghanistan and Iraq for a country hell-bent on protecting Stephen Paddock’s right to bear arms but not his family’s right to healthcare?

Enough.

Can we say ENOUGH?

Can we say ENOUGH to the oft-touted bullshit that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Of course, people kill people, but killing is much more efficient with guns. GUNS.

Can we say ENOUGH to a society that demands protection for gun rights, but refuses universal healthcare for its citizens.

Can we say ENOUGH to the NRA buying our politicians with their big pockets.

Can we say ENOUGH to a culture that demonizes people of color but willfully ignores the misogyny, machismo, and white supremacy that is the fertile growing ground for these mass killings.

Yes. ENOUGH.

Now is definitely the time to talk about this. Now is the time to politicize these deaths. We must.

Say ENOUGH! Please go to Everytown for Gun Safety.  You can study the issues–did you know that Americans are 25 times more likely to be murdered by a gun that people in other developed countries? Did you know that between 2009 and 2016 there were 156 mass shootings and since June 12, 2016 when 49 people were shot and killed at an Orlando nightclub, there have been 521 mass shootings?

Let’s say ENOUGH.

Please visit Everytown for Gun Safety and take action right now.

 

Is hope the thing with feathers?

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Yesterday morning, I sat outside while it was still cool and the air was full of song–I wish I could approximate the warbling trills, the notes and the way they quavered in the whispering trees. I sat there long enough that I began to see the birds, hopping from one slender limb to another in the still full lilac bushes.

It’s funny how that happens isn’t it. First you hear the song, full and expansive, and then you hear the single notes, and finally you begin to see. It takes a while. It takes a certain sort of stillness, an attention to the moment at hand.

Anyway, I had my eyes on a tiny little bird I thought might be a chipping sparrow. To tell the truth, a friend mentioned a chipping sparrow to me one day, and I fell madly in love with the name–chipping sparrow.  I love the sound of that word–chipping. And while I never looked the bird up, I imagined I saw her everywhere. Anytime I saw a little bird, I thought to myself–I wonder if that is a chipping sparrow.

So I watched this little bird flit around in the green of the lilac bushes and I thought over and over–chipping sparrow.  It’s likely that I even greeted her in my own sing-songy attempt at morning glory, “Well, hello chipping sparrow,” I probably said because I have taken to speaking to birds and trees and even rocks and cicadas and worms trying like hell to make their way across the massive concrete slabs we call sidewalks.

At some point during this birdsong/cool air/ sun-shining-through-the green-tops-of-pine-trees series of moments strung together in what almost seemed like a prayer, that little bird flew up from the lower branches of the lilac bush and lit on the chair directly across from me. I could have touched her.

I didn’t try. I still remember the day I ran around my grandmother’s yard with a salt shaker because my father told me if I could salt a bird’s tail, I could catch him. Let’s just pretend that only happened once.

“Look at me,” she seemed to be saying as she gingerly danced her teeny little bird feet on the chair’s back, giving me a full view of her chunky little body, her long beak, her warm cinnamon-colored back, “do I look like a chipping sparrow, lady?”

I’m not a birder, but I’ve had wrens in my hanging baskets before, and I knew this little chirper was a Carolina Wren. And as soon as, not a moment before, the knowledge came to me, as soon as I felt that delight and wonder at being able to name such a delicate and wild thing, Ms. Carolina Wren flew off (no, I do not know she was a she, but it’s my story). She didn’t fly far though. She flew to the ground beneath the lilac bushes, and she rustled around with a sister or two in the pine needles foraging for wren things, I suppose.

I sat there for a very long time or for a few minutes. Time slowed down or perhaps it sped up or maybe it did just what time does and kept marching on and soon I found myself mired in the day at hand.

And the day turned out to be a doozy. Last night, my daughter, Peanut, received some very sad news–two of her childhood friends were involved in a tragic accident. I sure would like to bring this essay around, to bring the little wren back, to illuminate the harsh wonder of the world we live in, but I can’t twist the story to my liking, can’t stitch it up all neat and fine.

All day long, after my encounter with the little wren, Emily Dickinson’s poem was in my head:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

 

*****

I have always loved that image–of hope being a winged thing–but this morning I am wondering if we do hope a disservice by imagining it thus. Hope isn’t ethereal at all. Hope is dogged and rough and resilient. Hope resides in the dimmest doorways and the darkest corners of our lives. Hope grows up from the disaster and the dirt, the fertile floor of grief.

Hope demands of us, we would-be-practitioners, determination. As Vaclav Havel wrote, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

I would contend that hope is in that late night knock on my door. My daughter reaching out for comfort when there is none to be had. That’s where hope settles in, that is where hope begins the growing of wings.

Living in Questions

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Last night I lay in bed, my head bursting with words. I wrote essays, letters, an entire book! I couldn’t sleep for all the words.

And all the peeing. Yes, my overactive and underperforming bladder got into the act too. I don’t think it’s her fault–my bladder I mean. She must be squished from all the baby-growing and child-birth I put her through.

Point is–it’s hard to sleep with words in your head and a bladder that will not quit.

Does anyone else out write in her head? If only I had all the essays and books and letters I’ve written at night while trying to sleep. The words in my head are always so clear, so brave, so brilliantly bound–each one a stepping stone across a wide roiling river.

And then I wake up and they have dissipated into the ether of a morning come too soon.

Point is–this blog post was much better when I wrote it in my head last night.

***

Two days ago, I visited my local liberal florist and ordered a bouquet of flowers for my oldest friend who’s always been a speak-the-truth-until-your-voice-shakes sort of gal. She’d recently (again!) spoken out when swigging her beer would have been simpler. I won’t go into the details except to say that she referred to our president as a pussy-grabbing asshole who made her fucking sick. This wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been on my back porch with that beer, but she wasn’t. She was at her mother-in-law’s house, and her mother-in-law voted for and supports the president.

I don’t write here as often as I once did because I’m a wee bit angry, and I do not live in a community where trump support is an anomaly. It’s the norm. This is a problem if you are a wee-bit angry, usually out-spoken, leftist 50-year-old trying like hell to be authentic and honest.

I believe in love. I really do. But it’s a lot harder if I say something that incites someone I love or like or hell, even know, to espouse support for the orange monster in the white house. I want to continue to love, like, and know people.

It’s why I’ve been so quiet. I’m stunned.

Kind of like that bird who thuds against the front porch window thinking she would check out that shiny bottle of water on the coffee table–stunned.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  Most of the time, I’m able to pull this off with a little work–okay a lot of work.

Here’s where I’m having trouble. How can a person both be good and have voted for and still support donald trump? It’s the still supports part that hangs me up. I can accept that good people voted for the guy, but I don’t get it, don’t understand how any good person can still support him, can still defend him.

And I know A LOT of good people who do.

I LOVE a lot of good people who do.

Maybe the problem is me. Maybe donald trump is only a window into a world that existed all along–a world that because of my whiteness, my middle-classedness, my small-townedness I’d only visited off and on as a woman.

I imagine there are lots of folks who have been thinking these past 7 months, “welcome to my world, lady.”

***

When I began this blog, the 49th year, I was pretty certain that Hillary Clinton would be the next President of the United States, but I intended to live in the questions. I just had no idea how big and elusive would be the answers.

All this to say–I’m done. Done with the quiet act. Done worrying. Done pretending. Done half-heartedly laughing about our differences. I won’t avoid a tough conversation, but I will no longer deny that the cavern between us is deep.

Like my old friend, who loved the flowers by the way, it makes me fucking sick that our president said he could grab pussies at will because he was a superstar.

It’s that simple.

 

 

 

Beckoning Lovely–St. Joseph School Style in Memory of Amy Krouse Rosenthal

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I made a video.

Actually I compiled the hard work and love the staff and students of St. Joseph School shared with me and other folks who live in Olney, Illinois last May. So I made the video, but they made and then gave away beauty, love, and joy.  In other words, they “beckoned the lovely.”

Let me back up a minute. “The Beckoning of Lovely” is a project Amy Krouse Rosenthal initiated on 8/08/08. Hundreds of beckoners met Amy at Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate (the Bean) sculpture in Chicago and participated in an event where they made and beckoned the lovely. It resulted in this video and in subsequent events in later years.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal died this year of ovarian cancer on March 13, 2017. She left behind a loving family–read her New York Times “Modern Love Column.” If you have read my blog, you will know that even though I didn’t know Amy, I consider her a mentor. She continues to mentor me with the books she left behind.

Amy called herself a “person who likes to make things.” This is a simple way to describe a life of creativity, a life devoted to making and giving away beauty. In a world where good and bad people are devoting great chunks of their lives to the acquisition of stuff, I’d say that Amy’s way of being in the world was and can be revolutionary.

I don’t know what sort of revolutions are in our future (I fear that there might be one or two), but I know that this is one I can get behind. Make things, make beautiful things and give them away. When you do this, you “beckon lovely.”

***

So the video.

Well, here’s the story. Last May, the staff and the students of St. Joseph School in Olney honored Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s life by “beckoning the lovely.” They chalked messages of encouragement on the sidewalks in town. They painted stones and left them around as gifts. They created signs of love and encouragement and sat along the streets and waved them to passers-by. They created bird-feeders out of peanut butter and seeds because they didn’t want to forget out birdy friends. They walked to local business, singing on the way and then serenading employees. The littlest ones blew bubbles. Bubbles! I think that is genius! At the end of the week, they held a dance party/ band concert/ sing-along on a public lawn.

So yeah, I made a video with a little help from 200+ friends.

 

 

 

 

In Thanks For Teachers Who Start the New School Year with Smiling Faces and Open Hearts

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This morning I had the great pleasure to spend 45 minutes with some of the best folks in town–a small dedicated group of teachers at St. Joseph School where my sister is principal. I have a long history with this little school I attended from 5th through 8th grade. It’s where I and my children learned to laugh and write and share and reason and love, and my grandchildren will know many of these same special people, walk these same wide and welcoming hallways.

I’ve written here before about two of my favorite authors, Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Brian Doyle, and how both died this year way too early. I remain shocked and saddened by the loss–for their families and for the world at large. We need their big love, their creative gifting, their exuberance and unbridled joy now more than ever before.

Earlier this summer, I shared a couple of Prayers for Ordinary Things that my friend, Julie and I wrote one morning in a coffee shop. We modeled our prayers on the delightful, funny, heartfelt prayers Doyle wrote and collected in A Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary. Reading Doyle’s prayers and then writing my own lifted my heart still smarting not only from the disastrous election but from the rise of intolerance and hate. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember how lovely the world remains. It’s called cultivating gratitude, and it’s an essential practice for me these days.

So when my sister asked me if I would lead the teachers in writing their own prayers of gratitude as they enter the new school year, I said, “Yes,” even though I knew it would require me to stand up in front of people and admit, even espouse how much I love writing and reading and poetry. Why is this so hard?

It’s vulnerability, of course. Still at 50 years old, I don’t want to be seen as a dorky poetry geek, even though I am indeed a dorky poetry geek and not the least bit cool. It’s hard to share our hearts with others. And yet, it is the most important thing we can do. This morning those teachers and their writing blew the top of my head right off. They wrote the most beautiful poems/prayers and they read them with laughter and tears and a little shyness and tremendous vulnerability.

So as school resumes, I give thanks for teachers who start the new school year with smiling faces and open hearts, who will spend the next several months wiping noses and calling out bad behavior and shining light on good deeds and listening to ridiculous and silly stories; who will walk the perimeters of playgrounds holding small gloved hands; who will chase loiterers out of bathrooms and rouse sleepers at their desks; who will stay up late grading papers and creating accessible lessons and tests and assignments that will not only stimulate eager minds but also open them to bigger and wider possibilities; who will make the hardest tasks fun and the funnest activities meaningful; who will laugh with and cry over and sometimes yell the tiniest bit at the students who have burrowed their way like small wiggly worms into their unsuspecting hearts; who will foster friendships and cultivate collegiality and model restraint and passion and goodwill and hope and joy; who are the bravest of the brave for the love they offer again and again and again against all odds to our lucky children entrusted to their great and devoted care.

Pre-existing Conditions Revisited

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I  haven’t spent much time here on the blog this summer. Vacations, family, kids in and out, badminton tournaments, long walks, and a new baby (a beautiful black-haired girl came into our lives a week ago thanks to my son and his lovely wife)–all of these hot-weather joys have quieted my yearning for expression. Instead I’ve been basking.

I’ve even tried to eschew the news and haven’t done a bad job. But this damn healthcare business won’t stop. The people whose healthcare won’t change are determined to make the American people pay for the hollow promises they’ve spent the last seven years making. Their brazen disregard for the elderly, the sick, the unemployed is mind-boggling. In fact, it’s so mind-boggling lots of folks are immune to it.

I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had with folks about healthcare that ended with someone saying with cynical shrug of shoulders, “It won’t happen.”

I guess I’m not that cynical. I believe that they will, if they can, take healthcare coverage away from the most vulnerable among us. And we are all vulnerable. High blood pressure, heart disease, anxiety, pregnancy, diabetes, cancer–if we don’t think we have pre-existing conditions, we are sadly and dangerously mistaken.

My daughter has Type 1 Diabetes. My father has life-long heart disease. My sister has a thyroid condition. I had an eating disorder when I was a kid. It’s time we took the legislators seriously. They are out for our healthcare.

Call your senators people. Call them now. Call them repeatedly. We must keep up the pressure.

The 49th Year

63 years ago, an 11-year old boy who loved baseball sat right next to his mother while a kindly old pediatrician explained to him–you have a hole in your heart. This meant for that young boy, no baseball, no track, no basketball.

I imagine this appointment broke that little guy’s heart, and his mother’s too. They didn’t have a lot of resources, and whatever disappointments they were handed, they took chin first. I have a picture of them in my mind, sun filtering through a high dusty window–dust motes flickering in the air. There were no tears.

Not quite 20 years later, my dad had open-heart surgery at The Cleveland Clinic to repair that hole in his heart. He had a scar that began at his belly button and traveled up almost to his collar bones. My mom remembers seeing him for the first time post-surgery, the breathing tube…

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In Gratitude to Brian Doyle–Prayers for Ordinary Things

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Brian Doyle, who penned two of my all-time favorite essays, Joyas Voladorous—a tribute to the beating heart, and Leap, died at the end of May. I love Brian’s writing, especially his essays–they are exuberant and joyful and magnanimous and funny and thoughtful and always probing into the workings of what it means to be human in a world both bewildering and beautiful.

Brian Doyle wrote about being Catholic in a way that made me glad to be Catholic. His writing helps me appreciate both the mess and the glory of the church, makes me glad for the sacraments and the ritual, prods me to hold more than one truth in my trembling hands.

Brian Doyle wrote so many things in his way-too-short life–essays, fiction, poems, and prayers–oh how dearly I love his prayers. In fact, since his death, I have taken to carrying around a small but powerful book, A Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary. This little book, published in 2014, is a miracle in itself–a reminder to cultivate gratitude. The titles of the small prayers are reason enough to pick it up. Here are a few:

Prayer in Thanks for Decent Shoes

Prayers for Cashiers and Checkout-Counter Folks

Prayer for Women Named Ethel and men Named Elmer, for We Wiill Not See Their Likes Again

Prayer of Thanks for Hoes & Scythes & Spatulas & Toothbrushes & Binoculars & the Myriad Other Tools & Instruments That Fit Our Hands So Gracefully & Allow Us to Work with a Semblance of Deftitude

Prayer of Bemused Appreciation for Handheld Mobile Devices

Prayer of Thanks for Suntan Lotion

***

Last Wednesday I visited my good friend and walking and writing partner, Julie, in New Harmony, Indiana where she was attending the West of the Moon Creative Retreat led by the equally fantastic Terry Price and Dave DeGolyer (known in literary circles as Lafayette Wattles). If you haven’t visited New Harmony, you are missing out. Lucky for me, I live an hour up the road, so when Julie invited me to visit, I said, “Hells Yes!”

I arrived in New Harmony in time for the West of the Moon Reading at Sara’s Harmony Way. The abundance of talent, spirit, and soul in that room blew me away. I love readings and the chance to hear original poetry, fiction, and essays in a small venue. Dave and Terry have created something spirited and soul-tending in their creative retreat.

After the reading, Julie and I got a bite to eat, and then we went back to the hotel where we started pulling books out of our bags, and guess what–we were both carrying the little book of prayers by Brian Doyle. It shouldn’t have surprised me as this sort of thing happens all the time with Julie–we are forever reading the same book at the same time without knowing it. We often have the same books in our to-read piles. Just two weeks ago, Julie sent me a book I had been wanting to read but had yet to buy.

We laughed sitting there in the small room holding the same small book in our hands.

The next morning, as we drank coffee and tea back at Sara’s Harmony Way, we decided to write our own little odes to Brian Doyle’s uncommon prayers. I thought I would share the exercise and our prayers here. It’s fun. If you give it a try and would like me to post your prayers, I would be delighted. I plan to write a few more myself.

Here are the instructions for writing Prayers in Thanks of Ordinary Objects:

  1. Set your timer for five minutes jot down a list of ordinary objects.
  2. Look over your list and choose one.
  3. Set your timer for ten minutes or as long as you like and write a prayer of thanks.

 

Here are the prayers we wrote that morning:

A Prayer of Gratitude for Cloth Napkins by Julie Stewart

Thank you for cloth napkins, the washed softness of them on my cheek when I wipe away the errant dab of mayo. For providing a home for my daughter’s outgrown calico dresses, so that each time I pick you up from your place at the table, I touch her childhood again, what she was wearing when we sat outside on a blanket sharing a bowl of popcorn and a grape popsicle, the meal that consoled us earlier that day I had thrown a sippy cup at the wall and popped off the top and spilled grape juice, staining the white wall purple. Thank you for being small enough that I could salvage the section of fabric that remained unstained. Thank you for folding yourself up, crisply ironed, so that each time I retrieve you, it is like starting again, a new day, a change to nourish myself and clean my face of any messes I leave behind. Thank you for nestling the knife and spoon, waiting to meet the fork that stands guard on the left. Thank you for being square, for having sharp edges and straight lines, when so much of life is complicated, for being able to be folded in half once and then again to make a neat rectangle, but when life gets fancy, for being able to become a flower or fan, for being both beautiful and useful, the true measure of thing’s value. Thank you for coming back to the table again and again, never letting yourself be tossed away because life got a little messy.

A Prayer in Thanks of Spoons by me

Thank you for spoons, for their slightly ovally cupping. For their perfection in soup and sauces, for the way they make tasting easy, the way they hold liquids aloft and towards your lips, for their scooping and stirring and scraping. For big spoons and wooden spoons and plastic spoons, for those tiny spoons covered in a soft material that changes colors when the food is too hot—imagine a chubby baby without a spoon in his little curled up fist–eyes poked out, food not eaten if there were no spoons. Wait, imagine ice cream, yogurt, creamy tomato soup, oatmeal, milk shakes, banana pudding without a spoon, imagine iced tea in need of a little sweetening without a long handled spoon. Think of hot gravy, steaming in its boat on Thanksgiving without a sweet ladle to puddle it onto mashed potatoes and corn. Oh good glory to spoons and the way they feed us. The way we take their image into our beds, the way we shape our bodies in their likeness to hold each other close. Oh spoons.

 

 

 

 

 

Times They Are A’Changing

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It’s true what they say–the less you write, the harder it is to write. It’s been a month since I’ve written here, and I suppose it’s about time.

The past month has been one of enormous change. But aren’t they all? We like to think we’ve got a handle on living, a sense of what’s coming, a method for navigating our particular circumstances, but that’s an illusion–or at least I think it is. Things are changing all the time. Things are enormously changing all the time, but mostly we don’t notice.

Take Peanut for instance.

In the last month, Peanut graduated from high school, enrolled in college, and flew off to New York for a quick five day trip with her lucky mama–that’s me. I hadn’t spent that much alone time with my girl since those first almost three years of her life–her older siblings were in school every day and her little brother hadn’t been born yet.

Peanut was not what you’d call a “good” baby. She cried a lot. She wanted to be held non-stop. But I had time, so I carried her with me everywhere, and I taught her to love the up and down motion that occurs when your mother is doing squats while holding you. This turned out to be a pain in the ass–MINE–pun intended.

But you know what else those early years with children taught me?

You never get it right.

Babies and toddlers are constantly reminding us that we have to go with the flow. And things are always flowing with those tiny growing beings. Just when I thought I had Peanut on a sleep schedule, she got a cold and the sleep schedule went out the window. Just when I thought I had a pretty good meal plan going for Sheldon, her little brother, he tossed his chopped broccoli sopping in butter to the floor and has not since eaten a green thing.

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, in one of her many books or interviews or online classes says that change is always occurring–at the cellular level. IN other words, there is no stasis. (Forget for a moment that I did not direct you to the quote or section in her work and decide for yourself that you will look her up, order one of her books, listen to one of her many teachings on the Internet, and you will be forever changed although according to Pema, you already are.)

We cannot stop the march of time.

Cells reproduce and die, neurons snap, wounds heal and reopen and heal again. Children throw gloriously ridiculous purple faced fits and then sit calmly for hours. Hawks hatch from big hawk eggs in a nest down the street and fly away before you can zoom your binoculars in to get a look. Bird shit is washed away in the next rain and you’ll never find that nest again. This is the way it goes.

I fight change all the time. And fighting change is a hopeless endeavor, a losing battle.

I tell myself all the time–you’ll never get it right. I know it sounds pessimistic, but it’s actually pretty damned freeing.

A long time ago, when my two oldest children were toddlers only 15 months apart, Anne Lamott told me (no, not directly, but I like to pretend we are friends) that I was going to fuck up. It was a revelation to me. I remember nodding my head in wonder and relief because I was an uptight little mother worried about every tantrum, every banana not eaten, nap missed, watering eye, runny nose, all the scabs and bruises and those breathless NOs screamed with a demonic ferocity before red-faced and tightfisted my child collapsed into a writhing mess on the dirty vinyl floor.

I’m gonna fuck up, I thought. And everything changed. If I was going to fuck up, I might be able to just enjoy this glorious mess we call life.

Of course, I never remember this, but I’m a wee bit lucky because my kids and my husband are experts at reminding me that we all fuck up.

I hope they never stop because when I stop worrying about fucking up, I start looking around, amazed and awed by the ever-changing landscape that is life.