Meditations. Reading Out Loud to People

Singing Madonna and Child Brian Kershisnik 2007

It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.
Trollope

I like to read to people.
I must have read to the little sisters; certainly every babysitter, as the end of the rope draws near, has taken a stack of books and begun reading aloud, thinking grimly that this can be made to last till the blasted parents arrive. I am the oldest. I must have read to my sisters.
But I don't remember.

I remember cold readings. Auditioning with lines you've never read is in every way the antithesis of reading out loud to people except for the bare fact that you are reading out loud to people. Cold in every sense. No joint movement through a story, no shared laughter or gasps, no mild amused understanding at stumbles, no companionable impatience to return to the story once interrupted. No companionship of any kind. Just you, alone, with some unknown other who watches through narrowed eyes and wants--what? A mystery. I always at least explain what I'm looking for at auditions. But I do sometimes make people read cold.

I remember reading to Brian.
As a child Brian traveled the world. I lived in a tiny town and read during at least fifty per cent of my waking life. This made us similar in important ways, except that I hadn't been anywhere and he hadn't read anything. He decided he would travel me about. I decided to read to him in the car.
We began with Dickens. That way you only have to pack one book. No matter how long the drive.
Now he listens to books on tape. I had a prejudice against them, but Jim Dale bowled me over.

I read to my oldest baby for hours and through stacks and stacks of books. He never, ever got tired of it. I did. I didn't read to my next child like that. Was that because she didn't like it? She wanted to watch movies. The Magic Flute. Much Ado About Nothing. Sarah Plain and Tall. Over and over. But not the reading, the snuggling and page turning. She jumped up and ran away and I became afraid I had lost the access to her imagination to too much housework, too much cooking, too much busyness, too much of too much else. That the golden door somehow closed before she had sufficiently glimpsed the wondrous garden beyond. That she would never sink into a story, losing her other, real world moorings without a thought, without a backward glance. That books would be lost to her and that it would be my fault, my murderous carelessness. Or was she just not that into it?

I carefully read a great deal to my youngest. Who liked it well enough.
Maybe the firstborn had been lonely. Looking for a more populated world.

Our best readings are at bedtime. For years, every night. Whether their father understood or not. First to the youngest, most inclined to early sleep, then to the older one or ones till everyone was unconscious, including their father the painter. He thinks his job is to occasionally stroll through the reading asking questions to catch himself up on the plot till he finally gets in bed and goes to sleep, but he is wrong about this. That is not a job, it is a moral offense. His real job is to be awakened after the last chapter is over and walk everyone to bed. The oldest child, once roused a bit, will take himself off to bed, but the other two have to be moved one at a time. They are deep sleepers and perfectly capable of getting halfway to their rooms and then snoozing indefinitely against a wall for, well, I don't know for how long. We never left them there.

I have been writing this with a sigh. That paragraph should all have been written in the past tense. That is not how it is, that is how it was. In the flow of my real life, not the resting of ideal memory, my oldest is too far away to read to and moving too fast to listen long enough. He stopped listening to books the summer before his junior year in high school. He felt it coming, felt his new driver's license and the equally new curfew it wrought warring with our bedtime reading. He struggled sometimes for the sake of appearance, sometimes in reality, for a long time before he actually, finally stopped coming in to listen, wrestling with wanting to sacrifice the time, make it home before I turned my lamp off. He couldn't walk away in cold blood from the last book, but that one took a long, long time to finish. I think he worried about hurting me. I remember realizing it would be the last book with him, as he, firstborn, led the way into the first of the last of many things.

My next child is not as easy to touch, to talk with about feelings and dilemmas, to read to. I read to the youngest her own books first so she could fall asleep, then to each of the others in ascending order of age. But this middle child always contested with her younger sister who should be the first of the three asleep. She protested that she liked to listen but couldn't stay awake (couldn't be bothered?) even for the fairly stiff suspense tales I eventually used to try to get attention. After eighth grade she just wasn't hearing me anymore. It made me a little sick. I didn't really know how to mourn this, this apparent rejection of the most personal gift I ever offered her. I blamed myself all over again for failing, for getting distracted at the crucial juncture, and by what? By stupid life. Then one day without warning her teenage self just began reading. For fun. In a used book store in York I realized she was weighing books and comparing sizes, knowing whatever she bought she would carry on her back for the next two weeks; juggling prices to get as many books as possible even though her precious spending money was running out and there were still clothes to be purchased. I see my fingerprints all over her taste in books. She wants to talk. She likes and dislikes, she defends opinions. Now that she reads alone, we share the books together. Her read-to-me-always older brother almost never reads for pleasure, though he dearly loves a good book on tape or a good storyteller. So I am confused, but not so lonely.

Now I only read to my youngest. And I can feel that slipping slowly away as she reads more to herself; as she reaches out beyond our house to the world of peers, girlfriends and boys; as my life keeps me away too late and I find her asleep in my bed where she's been waiting. That happened when she was young, of course, waiting for a mom who was just going to move the laundry one last time, it happened with all the children, but you don't feel it so much when they are younger. They fall asleep all over the place, sweaty on you in church, draped oddly in shopping carts, mushed up against backseat windows of cars. When children are little bedtimes stretch out to and past the most distant horizon. Rather than hoarding them you just hope you can bear up under them. You certainly wouldn't count one missed bedtime reading as irreplaceably precious, lost from a finite and dwindling number.

We read demanding stuff and fluff. Right now we are deep in a love story. I have noticed the love story's growing popularity with the bedtime audience. Cyrano was a huge hit. Now we are reading Freckles. I practice reading with a straight face and utter conviction, good for my acting skills that lie dormant and grow rusty. I am as much an eleven year old girl as I ever was and we are an unabashedly romantic people. I recently read a mother's meditations on her twelve year old son, marveling, now that she knows one as well as she knows him, that she ever believed, when she herself was twelve, that her male cohorts could feel as romantic and misty as she could. To be exact, she could scarcely believe that she ever really expected meaningful Valentines from a twelve year old boy. Hmm. Well, I was a girl who seriously hoped for those marks, those signs, of dawning, meaningful interest. Maybe not from twelve year old boys, exactly. But from some boy, some day. Fourteen years old, or perhaps even sixteen. A boy like the ones I had met in books. OK, only in books, but, still. My little girl, much like the girl I was, was very sad this year that her class Valentine party was canceled because the day fell on a Sunday marooned in the President's Day weekend. She knew it would be her last Valentine's Day party till--well, till it would matter too much, in a different way. I realize I am actually trying to help. I am teaching her how to find boys in books. And illustrating, shamelessly, the sort of boy she should try to find.

Burning Book Brian Kershisnik 2007

I have this unimpressive paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The very first time I read that story, and the hundred or so times after, I read that particular copy. I read it to Brian in the car in the first year of our marriage. At bedtime I read that copy to each of our children in their turn. From the words in that book, the marks on those pages, we discussed. That talking made the book precious. As precious as reading made it. All those first times, all the wondering and sorrowing and asking and deeply felt contentment are soaked into the pages of that particular copy. Not just that it has been read, but that it has been read aloud. If my house burned down and just our stuff was lost and someone said, "well, it's just stuff," I would still cry forever for that copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's not just reading a book, it's the moment when you close the book, then close your eyes to try to realize what's just happened to you, then open them to look for the person to hand the book to, who can get where you've been as fast as possible so the two of you can talk. Sometimes, for a miracle, it's read out loud, so the two of you arrive together; so you can turn to each other, breathe, smile or frown and say...well, whatever you have to say. That's the point. Whatever you have to say.

My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.
Abraham Lincoln

I'm probably reading. Just bring a book you want to read together and we'll talk.
Then we'll sleep.

Asleep at a Party Brian Kershisnik 2008

Stories. Maybe the Only Dog Story

Mother and Child with Dog Vomiting, Brian Kershisnik

When I was very small my grandparents on the distaff side raised dachshunds. I can hardly remember anything about those dogs other than that they were in all the houses on my mom's side of the family. That's honestly how I was first able to tell for sure which cousins were which. Gretel and Danke are the only two dog names I remember, though I have a hazy memory (I don't research these memories before I write them, because that would be recording family history, and I don't do that) of my dad calling someone (not a sister) Puddle. Or Piddle. Maybe Tinkle. Till I was an adult I had this hazy assumption that Danke meant something along the lines of "Pees on the Floor," (a Native American/Germanic name) even though I had been using that word to express thanks for forever. I don't remember caring much for these little creatures but I did love their puppies. All puppies are darling, but dachshund puppies are a special intervention of nature. A more improbable baby can scarcely be imagined. On one visit to Grandma's house I found my three year old heart breaking for them, for snaky little puppies to carry, to squeeze, to rub against my face, to chase and to fall over, laughing to death while they jumped and nipped.

My cousin Laura was at Grandma's, too. Laura was my most beloved child friend. She was also my blessed and everlasting inferior, having had no more sense than to be born six months after I was. I was always going to be older. The Oldest. Period. No appeal. Must have been awful, as I am not one to rest humbly on any sort of laurel. But Laura took it out of me in myriad ways. One of my very, very earliest memories is of her smashing my head onto the fender of a car and making one of my front teeth disappear. It hurt. I cried. My father was very surprised and upset. So was my mom. I kept looking for my tooth with my tongue. My parents looked for it on the ground. Then my uncle looked at my mouth and said my tooth was still there, it had just gone "up," and would come "down." Which I guess it must have done. Laura I loved as a part of me.

Laura ached for puppies, too, and went with me to ask Grandma to please have the dogs make us some. Grandma laughed to us in her special way, as though we were tiny darlings and as though she had heard not a thing we said. She would respond in that particular way to most of what we said to her all her life. Listen kid, she told us in her brisk, slangy grandma tone, the dogs can't just make puppies. They have to be bread. But, Grandma continued, in her special way that somehow led you to believe she was now addressing a new person , someone you were not altogether smart enough to see, we don't want the dogs to have puppies right now, do we? Who's we, white Grandma? But anyhow, who cared what she thought? She had tipped her grownup hand and now the secret was out. We knew how it was done.

Food magic.

Laura and I conferred. The solution to our puppy hunger, as accidentally explained by Grandma, was laughably simple. We didn't even think we needed to try to hide our actions. Just as well, we lacked the experience for successful deceit. I think our combined age was maybe six. We were not skilled (yet), rather, we were lucky in that most of the time no one looked at us. We strolled into the kitchen, pushed something movable and stable, maybe a chair, over to the counter, climbed onto the counter top, opened the cupboard, removed two loaves of whatever end-of-the-sixties-sliced-bread-in-a-bag my grandma had up there (not a baker, she) and went into the backyard to bread us some puppies. Two loaves so we each had a bag. It seemed an embarrassment of slices. Still, doesn't do to scrimp on spells to make offspring. Plenty of fairy tales preach the perils of that sort of miserliness. We commenced making the puppies, flinging bread in the soft southern California sun, happy in Grandma's backyard, almost knee deep in the ocean of her two heaving dachshunds. It was a idyllic moment of animal husbandry. We pair of blissful cousins, casting slices wide, cheerfully counting our puppies before they hatched, naming and apportioning them; dogs in a frenzy of adoration for us, gulping and snarfing processed white flour like they might never eat it again.

It seems a fair surmise, judging from events as they unfolded once we were noticed, that we were killing the dogs. With malice aforethought and extreme prejudice. We had certainly murdered some body's plans for lunch. Parents and other relations poured out of the house, summarily separating us from the dogs and from our bread before we knew what we were about and certainly before the spell had a chance to take. Carried shocked and sobbing into the house, I watched over some adult's shoulder as the useless, grownup dogs bobbed away into the distance with nary a puppy in sight. Nevernevernever, I mourned and hiccuped to myself, there will nevernevernever be any puppies now because Grandma doesn't want the dogs to have bread and she never will ever again. Noooo puppies. Too sad even to contemplate such a dark future.

To their credit, aside from the damage they had already done, they didn't officially punish us. I think they were a mite surprised at the screaming, lunging and grieving following our apprehension. (Good thing I grew out of all that. Sheesh.) They let us roll about for a bit, work it through our systems, then asked us, carefully, what exactly the matter was. That we answered, and answered truthfully, shows how terribly young we were. Later, we got older. While we explained, accused and told in lurid detail the terrible thing they had done, the adults started glancing quickly at each other in that dumb, sneaky way they have when they think they might laugh while somebody tiny is dying of a real problem that they have grown too big to remember isn't at all funny. This was a strange response and we faltered, our tale petering out in the face of their badly controlled amusement. What? Laughing at us? At thwarted but serious food magic?

"No, no, sweethearts," they explained, "that wouldn't have worked. (Gasp and giggle.) It isn't bread like that. It has to be with other dogs. Now, we know how much you love puppies but blah blah blah..." and they were gone in a swamp of fake understanding and trite comfort. It didn't matter. Laura and I exchanged looks of our own, tears stemmed as if by magic. We had the clue, the next part of the riddle.

Other dogs.

Life. Cleaning up messes

Painting, Brian Kershisnik

Some messes grow over time. Given: that you need costumes for twenty children who will be presenting Twelfth Night; in a fatal distraction you settle on a time period for which you have nothing, not a single greatcoat or corset. After enough weeks of coping with that, mess results. A settled mess, deep, with strata and topography. Excavating later, you come upon that layer where you changed your mind about the fur or, here, unexpectedly ran out of the red satin or here, this knobby and blackened layer where one midnight you realized, wait, twins. Two identical sets of everything.

Other messes seem spontaneous, to defy time. A mess can materialize out of the clear blue sky with a suddenness and style to which freak weather can only hopelessly aspire. A car accident. You misjudge the depth of a refrigerator shelf or are jostled while applying mascara. And illness. Especially. Illness can sweep the pieces off the board, knock the board across the room, tip the table and the chairs, rearrange the players and cast into question the whole point of the game.

I remember very clearly watching one of the little sisters throw up in the kitchen and observing all of everyone's plans change. Instantly. Permanently. One parent at once reached into the charged circle and, straight armed, lifted the shocked, wide-eyed sister out, carrying it away for a drink and a cleaning and a changing. The other parent said "Don't get in that! Hold the baby!" and with no other outward sign of resolution, of drawing together powers or of preparation set to work cleaning up what was a very impressive mess. Of the quick kind. Most of what I could see had become involved and most of that was involved up to almost the level of my eyes (probably not a yard off the ground, but, still). My tiny self was amazed at the speed, duty and courage, the muscle memory and skill sets. This is what it means to be adult, I thought, knowing how to clean up any mess without help. Some day, I will be like them.
Awe.

One day my tiny son filled not only his tiny diaper and tiny clothing but his tiny car seat with yellow baby poop. In the middle of New Mexico he did this, with nary a trading post in sight and who knew how far till the next one. (Brian insists this happened in Colorado but he does NOT know what he is TALKING about. They don't have trading posts is Colorado. Hush, Brian.) Gazing at my happy little son, cooing and purring at me as he wiggled in the stuff he had made for us, I had (and not for the last time) that desperate babysitter feeling. Where the heck are your parents? What could possibly be keeping them? This was the moment my adulthood came upon me, there alone in the wilds of the American Southwest with only Brian and this stinky baby and not enough, oh, nowhere near, nothing like enough wipes or paper napkins or boiling water and clean sheets and towels. This was my mess to clean. It had slammed into my life like a runaway semi truck. The time of preparation was past. Whatever I had with me was all there was going to be.
I was a big girl, now, and I was going to clean up the messes.

That was not fun.

My son is now on his own in Hong Kong and recently wrote that he has learned why you feel so great for a few moments after you are sick. It's so you can clean up your mess.
Hurry.
This is what it means to be an adult.

Illness is no fun.

Fun is what children exist to have, to gain, to get, to spend. The first sort of messes (the organic, slower sort) sprout, root and spring up in the heat and damp of profligate fun. They happen in the thick of the glory of it all and no one quite sees how it was done or why it happened and can therefore, when the fun is over and done, honestly claim total irresponsibility. In an ideal world, fun properly had wouldn't leave so many trails and marks that end in recrimination and retribution.

In an ideal world there would be better planning. Think before you mess. Clean as you go and no one will know.
Plans. Everyone plans not to get sick.
Sick is a mess that wipes out yards and miles of fun.

The other day the youngest of my children sat up suddenly in the car, speaking in that thick voice that comes out of a deep sleep. "I think I might throw up," she said, taken completely by surprise. In the next few moments a lot of people were going to be surprised.
We were at that instant in the middle lane, on the freeway, in heavy, fast-moving end-of-three day weekend traffic. Thinking more clearly than sometimes happens, Brian advised her to roll down the window. At once. She obeyed with alacrity and availed herself of that void.
This is where the surprises begin.

One of the first surprises was that the her window, having become ensorcelled in a child-safety nightmare, failed to go completely down, so that as she rushed toward what should have been an absence and a release, the glass sort of met her halfway. I suppose it was, in an inanimate way, only trying to help and we do comfort ourselves that she wasn't even close to being thrown headlong out of the speeding car and onto the asphalt.
I was driving in dense difficult traffic, trying to help my youngest child, ignore my husband, figure out how to pull over safely (this is where the ignoring is so very important) and unhex the window. Blessedly, I mastered the driver's side window controls before the second assault.

The next difficulty was only truly a surprise for the less experienced passengers in the back seat. The older people riding in front knew, as you do, that at freeway speeds, a liquid ejected from a car window will, upon meeting the airstream outside, be at least partially borne back into the car.

Re-entrance of throw up set off her older sibling. Like a car alarm. This was not at all a surprise. For a good time, put a bit of seaweed on the older sister. Or a bug. Any old bug will do. In fact, you can just say you have a bug, mime a bug. Or come up behind her with something that in no way resembles a bug, say, a piece of paper. Depending on your favorite flavor of humor and ability to withstand extreme noises, these actions can be very enjoyable and quite bracing. I am endlessly diverted in these maneuvers.

After a bit the action inside the car sort of died down. We were no longer producing, um, plot, and except for the new atmospheric conditions, everyone was quite well. Mostly. We were pretty freezing because, chilly day though it was, we found ourselves more comfortable with all the windows all the way down. My poor baby had gotten well and truly plastered, her sister and her little cousin (yes. there was a cousin. they were supposed to go play together. have fun. change of plans) were leaning away as far as they could while the older one of them executed a truly dazzling vocal display. I believe she was performing echo location of all the scattered throw up and at the same time providing color commentary ("Eew! It's in your eyebrows!!!"). The painter, issuing orders right and left, was also stretching his vocal abilities because his wife hadn't yet pulled over. We were nearly home and I didn't see the point. By now I have knowledge borne of long experience and despite frantic, loud advice from husband and older child, I knew there was no way we were going to do any cleaning worth the name on the side of the road with two napkins and no water.

Besides, I was laughing too hard to do more than (barely) drive in a safe and responsible manner.

We dropped off the cousin.
We stopped at a light and I could look back fully at my sweet youngest child. She smiled at me (feeling good for a moment) and said, "I feel so sorry for the car behind us."

Surprises.

The whole time I was remembering the night I had filled the back seat of my parents' car with sickness from horrible, terrible stage fright. On the way to the end-of-the-year program in sixth grade. It was the first ever end-of-the-year program at Fillmore Elementary and our class was to dance the jitterbug. My mom had located for me a bright purple fake-o flapper dress with mmmiles of white fringe. Piles of beads. Feather stuck in the headband in my (waist length) hair. Makeup. I was the real deal. The bee's knees. And I was paralyzed, breathless and witless, squeezed by the terror that slammed into me before every important event in my life up to that minute.

And I told my dad to pull over.
Not quick enough.
You've got to hurry, some messes seem to defy time.

My mom tried to clean me up but we just weren't equipped. For some reason now forgotten I had other clothes with me, church clothes. My mom told me we would have to go home, things being what they were I could never perform. But I was feeling good, now, and I started directing. Maybe for the first time, really. (Hmm. I see we are in an abyss. Well, let's just think a minute.) I told her we would make the best of this, I would perform in my other clothes. After all, I still had my beads (untouched) and my feather.
We got back into the car with my understandably offended family and drove in (chilly) silence and heavy atmosphere to the school. And I joined my class.
Late.
(as did my sisters, I guess, but I don't remember them at all. I suppose they had lives, too, but I was distracted.)
I had the sudden, fixed, whispered attention of all the sixth grade girls. You met these girls in an earlier memory, the ones I once told ghost stories to. They knew I had a costume, they had seen it, but now, now I didn't have it on. They sensed plot. Tragedy? Failure? Disgrace?
I lied.

The jitterbug was so so so much fun. I had no time to get sick again before we went on as I was still floating in that strange, after-disaster euphoria. I danced my heart out, danced in my a line navy blue skirt and button-up white shirt in a sea of lace and fringe, danced not like no one could see me but like everyone could. And sat down afterward and thought about the evening and all the self knowledge it had brought.
I was surprised.
I had Learned a Lesson.
Nothing was as bad as being scared of it.
Nothing was worth getting destroyed by fear.
Performing in front of people was fun.
Getting sick was no fun.
I planned the rest of my life right then.

So well did I plan that I completely lost my stage fright. In order, later, to drum up any approximation of nerves, the lazy performer's shortcut to good energy, I would have to resort to strange techniques like eating only sugar on the day of a performance.
I was never sick again.
I was triumphant. But I was still a child.
My mom cleaned up the mess.

So, here I am, now, looking at my car, my own car and it was stunning. The entire rear was affected, coated and wrapped almost around to the other side.
I sent my small girl directly into the shower. She dropped her clothes in the laundry on the way (and, incidentally, her ipod, which was in a pocket. she informed me later, eyes full of tears, that she had Learned a Lesson). I stood and considered the car. Should have gone to a professional establishment. But, no, I had too long ago become the mother. There was no one to help me. The painter took off at once as he was now almost late for a speaking engagement. The older sister wickedly hotfooted it next door to inflict her innocent sister's tragedy upon the neighbors. Who laughed and guffawed in a most unsportsman like fashion. This was not cricket and created a score that I, in my role as Parent Divine, shall take upon myself to settle. Come to think of it, a cricket would just do it, but I haven't one to hand. What's that little black thing on the floor there? A feather? Hand it over here. Lovely. I'll just tuck it into her bed. Yes. Perfect. Now, where was I?

Oh, yeah. How do you get throw up out of a car door? Out of the inside?
I really should know. I'm the mother. That's what it means to be an adult.
Where are these children's parents? Shouldn't they be here by now?

Noah's installation and photo

Houses: one part; the winter hut

home, n.
1. a dwelling place
2. the place where one was born or reared
3. the place where something is or has been founded, developed; the seat
4. the grave; death
9. in some games, the place of beginning and ending

Webster's New 20th Century Dictionary

House, Brian Kershisnik, 1990

When I was little I made houses for myself all over my yard. Huts, to call them by their true name. Our acre and a quarter adjoined my grandfather's lot so there was quite a bit of land to develop. I had a wonderful sailing ship made of the hay derrick. Until my dad rescued the grapes and despoiled my abode, I had a vine house under and within a collapsed grape arbor, sweetly scented by the juice I was pressing with my knees as I played under the vines, grape clusters outlined between me and the sky. I had a sliverous and spidery playhouse in the attic of the granary where the pioneers who first owned our lot lived till they built a proper house. I had labyrinthine hot August rye houses stomped into the tall, dry grasses on our back lot like clumsy, lumpy crop circles. Paramecium. Crop blobs. My lovely summer house under an apple tree in Grandpa's orchard was partially formed by what I later realized was an overturned chicken coop of sorts, face down so the cage doors opened up from the bottom and could be propped up with sticks making unstable but sweet shelving. I spent a lot of the time there setting things back up. My winter home was a straw bale house between the granary and the blacksmith's shop about midway on our backlot and three hundred miles from any other human habitation. I might hear Forrie Paxton calling to his wife from his out buildings west of me, but I couldn't see him or anyone else and no one could see me.

Nine straw bales formed the winter house. I found them sort of tumbled together right where I made them into a house. It was odd, them being there, but not the sort of odd I would have found troubling. Just out of place. No animals around to justify their presence. The stack was old and not really a stack anymore. If you used three of the bales as a wall on the west side, stacked on top of each other and running north to south and three on the east you could stand one on end on the north side, filling half the opening there. Then the last two stacked on each other on the south side, toward the granary, made a wall with an opening perfectly sized for one of the old three-paned drop-down basement windows my parents had taken out of our house (replaced by a brand new aluminum-slider). Piece of sheet metal scavenged from...the...ground with what I guess must be described as a two by two nailed across one end for a perfect roof. The two by two sat across the top of my window and held it upright and in place. Then some plywood, also from...the ground, for a door. Building materials were everywhere. You just had to hunt with an open mind and not give up till you had the perfect thing. It might take some days, but what else were you going to do? Dad almost never came looking for anything, so that was good.

Inside I made a fireplace (stay with me here) out of two by fours that came nailed into the correct shape. It was seeing them in their finished condition that revealed to me my need for a fireplace. Not that I contemplated for a moment lighting a fire. No. Well, I actually contemplated it often, in a wistful way. This was, as I mentioned, my winter house and it's cold in Kanosh in winter. But not contemplated it in the way like get matches off the big house mantle, grab kindling and logs from the woodpile fifteen feet from my hut and build a really burning fire against the wall on the wooden hearth in my house of straw. Burning my dad's stuff would have gotten me in a lot of trouble, but worse, it would have wrecked my hut. Otherwise I would have done it. Fire was pretty much a constant in my life then. Burning the family trash was my daily chore for years and our real house was heated with wood. I wasn't stupid. No, sadly, my winter hut was unheated (like my real bedroom and that's another story). I needed a fireplace so I could have a mantle. I had learned from my mom that display is the essence and heart of homemaking and all my huts were finely put together. Wall art, shelves for ornaments, floor coverings. Like I said, you just had to look around. Straw walls are great, anything will stick into it and stay there.

Another great advantage of having a fireplace is that it gave me a focus when I was in my house. This was not a large abode. I was not a large person, so that was sort of OK, but when I was in the hut, sitting hunched (cold) on the log that was my only furnishing, I sort of exhausted the space. Basically I could turn my head and observe my clever house building or stare in front of me into the fireplace. You do that in a real, big house, in a room with a fireplace, even if there is no fire there. Sort of like people will still look and look at a TV that is turned off. Saves having to figure anything else out. So I spent quite a bit of time staring into the space formed by those two by fours, sometimes thinking about how nice it would be if there were a fire in there because, here's the thing, I was in that hut a lot. And there was not one chore to do.

Summer, spring and fall huts have myriad important tasks that require daily vigilance if you are going to run them properly. Cleaning, repair, harvesting, storage, warfare, expansion, the list is endless. But a winter hut is different. No planting, no harvest. No visitors, no invaders. You can gather wood for your fire, but only once unless you return it to the woodpile every time you leave and that would be mind numbingly tedious. Or unless you make real fires which, as I've said, I didn't. I began building the hut too late in the year to lay in stores other than a few token rose hips, black walnuts and pecans from the four ancient pecan trees at the very northern end of the lot. Everything else was covered in snow. In my experience, necessary hut repair consumes most of a day's available playing time but this straw hut was really stable. I can see why people decided to live in houses made of bales. They just don't fall apart or get blown over or knocked down by dogs or grow up to be something else by season's end. You have lots of time for contemplation in a house of straw.

I spent a great deal of time that winter bunched up on my log looking into the fire. Place. I chatter and shiver in the cold, so I did that, too. And I thought. I thought about being cold and being alone. I thought about how no one else was anywhere around (and, man, no one was. I really don't know who was taking care of the neighbors' outside chores that winter because it was empty out there). I wondered why, then wondered why I was sitting out there and why I didn't go into the house, the real, big house. I know that part of what held me was that absolutely not anyone knew where I was or would think to look for me there. I could (and about twice, did) just not answer when called and hold my breath, courting terror and disaster, but pretty sure that I would not be found or later held to account. Being out of hearing happened, for real, all the time. Sitting in frozen stillness, listening to my dad occasionally messing around in the granary or doing brief tasks in the yard, close enough to hear me if I even thought too hard but I didn't and he went away without knowing. Staring at straw, pondering. Toying, in my child's mind, with questions of irrevocable separation and isolation, of permanence and even of death. Not of suicide, nothing morbid or self-indulgent, but of endurance for the queer sake of itself. How...long...till...they...notice...I'm...not...anywhere. How long do I wait if they never notice? I don't know that I've ever felt a tug on my heart more powerful than the pull to stay, to watch, to wait. To see. A winter of most afternoons spent silently freezing in a straw hut, watching darkness grow and wondering why I was waiting for someone to notice. To find me.

One early spring day, one warming day after the crocuses came out and when I had not been to my winter hut for a few weeks of my childlife and had therefore nearly forgotten I had ever been at all, my dad came and got me. He was looking at me oddly, but not so oddly that it set off alarms. He said, put on your boots for a minute and come look at something. I did and he took me to the winter hut between the granary and the blacksmith's shop. Oh yeah, I thought. Look at this, he said, do you know what it is? Yes, I said. Did you make it, he asked. Yes, I said, getting nervous. No reason, just a reaction to too much adult attention. He stood, looking at me oddly. He opened the door. Did you do it all yourself, he asked. Yes, I said, confused and therefore more nervous. It's kind of amazing, he said. I was complimented and offended. Thank you and of course it is. It's a hut.
Have you been using it, he asked.
(Being careful now.) Used it. Yes.
Have you been in here all winter?
On and off, yes.
Is this a fireplace?
(Ah ha, that's where I thought this was going and don't play dumb, Dad. You know a mantle when you see one.) Yes, but I wouldn't burn up my hut.
No. Looking at me oddly. I know that. Were you in there a lot and no one knew?
(what? what?) Yeah? (It's a question and an answer. What gives?)
Silence. Nervous. Cold. (What the heck?)
Don't you remember what these bales are used for? Why I have them here?
(Quick look to be sure I haven't ruined anything...no...looks fine...I can't possibly have harmed the straw. It's straw.) No.
Strange, strange looks.
Target practice, he says.

He's an archer.
I shoot, too, with him. Got my own bow for Christmas when I was about five. But it's too cold to shoot much in winter.
Ever seen an arrow go through a stack of straw, between the bales, and come out the other side? We shoot along side of the granary, but that's in summer, usually. A thousand years ago. Sometimes arrows would get stuck in the wall of the blacksmith's shop. We hated that.

homing, a.
2. having to do with guidance homeward or to a goal, target, etc.

Find me.
White Boat, Brian Kershisnik, 1995

Stories. Good for Me

Unknown Allegory with a Man Dancing in It
Brian Kershisnik 2008

Sunday I cooked some brussels sprouts. Or, Brussels Sprouts. There's a disagreement as to whether they must be upper case Brussels. But they are not brussel sprouts, as I thought when I was a child. I tried, as a child, not to think much about them. My daughter, the older one who is more vocal about her foodities, swept into the kitchen to tell me how glad she was I was making "sprouts." "Sprouts," she called them. On a first name basis. "I love them like this! I love it that you fry them with bacon!" She swept away, but not to set the table. She had a school assignment to create a cityscape on paper. She had been drawing every tiny window, every architectural doodad for as long as...recent memory. She was, apparently, required to work at our dining room table (funny, because we don't have a dining room, just a table) and I was going to throw her and her labors off of it so our guests could eat with their plates off the floor. She needed to work every moment till the eating began and would therefore be unable to help. Obviously.

I know she likes it when I tell her about my childhood, so I did.

One time, my mother served us Brussels Sprouts.

Like every other vegetable I ever met before I was eight, they had been blanched in a processing plant somewhere, frozen with probably one half pound of their fellows into a block the shape of the box bearing a three by five glossy of said sprouts, purchased by my mom, dumped (still in their block form) into a pan of boiling water, cooked till, well, soft and served on our table where we were expected to eat them up with margarine and salt. Pepper, in those days, was a dangerous spice reserved for fathers. If you accidentally got some pepper on you plate you could exchange that now spontaneously combustible food for new, safe food, no questions asked.

This cooking arrangement did not show the sprouts to their best advantage.

To be fair, it did not show much of anything well. It was not a time or place (brand new California housing development, 1970) that valued interesting or witty presentation of veggies. Or toothsome presentation, for that matter. I think my very early love of green beans and peas may stem (heehee) from their amenability to this cooking method. Carrots and potatoes were good because they were raw when they went to hang out with roasts. And potatoes are hard to kill anyway. Baked, boiled, fried, they smile kindly upon us. And winter squash and artichokes went into the boiling bath fresh so they came out yummy. But frozen, broccoli suffered. As did cauliflower and spinach. And peas when mixed with carrots and Lima beans. And most everything else.

To be even more fair, my mom does not like to cook. I didn't find this out till I was in college. It explains a lot. Tuna Rice Pie, Tuna Roll, Tuna Loaf, Tuna Casserole, Creamed Tuna on Toast and many recipes with the word "Surprise" in their titles (i.e. "Tuna Surprise"). My mother wasn't in any way looking for more or better things to do with veggies. They were good for us, it was our duty as prosperous Americans to eat them and we ate them. Dutifully. I remember eating green salad with just some salt on it, as fast as I could, sort of holding my breath, because I had to since it was good for me and Ranch dressing hadn't been invented yet. Ranch dressing would probably have helped me through the duties of many family dinners. I know it works great for kids nowadays.

So this one time my mom severely tried our duties with Brussels Sprouts. Note the use of the upper case.

My dad just ate them. He had had a lifetime to get good at holding his breath and besides, he was slinging pepper like crazy. My mom seemed to either eat after we left the table or before we got there; the normal rules didn't apply. One sister was a baby who was still being encouraged to form a fondness for food whether it was good for her or not and one sister had so recently stopped being a baby that she only got one required sprout. That was the rule. There was a number of veggies on your plate, a minimum mealtime requirement that equaled "good for you" and if you didn't eat those...something terrible. Once you had eaten them you could have more. As if. I think my middle sister cried so much she started spitting up and was excused from her sprout. That left me and my duty.

I had tried to eat one but when it came to the swallowing part I couldn't master myself even when I was holding not only my breath but my actual nose and the chewed sprout came springing out of my mouth. Fortunately my gallant napkin sprang forth, ready to receive it. I was alone at the table at the time and no one had witnessed that singular moment. The napkin and its cargo now reposed damply and quietly by my plate. I was six and not yet the food cheater I would become. It simply did not occur to me to toss the other sprouts over my shoulder into the living room or hide them in my pockets or my napkin, for heaven's sake. That first one had been an accident. Orchestrating more accidents was a learned behavior that would have to wait a couple of years to flower. My mom came to the table from wherever she had been keeping herself to inform me that I could eat them or sit there and that was a relief. I was sitting there so I felt I knew the worst.

She hadn't been too rough on me. I had I think three sprouts or possibly five but not four because my mother's sense of design would not have allowed that. Subtract the carcass in the napkin and it leaves me only two or four more.

My dad was watching TV right behind me and I don't think my mom would have allowed me to watch while I sat there dutifully, but I can't imagine being tempted. It would have been Sixty Minutes. Whenever my dad turned on the TV it was always Sixty Minutes. Magic.

After a very long time the margarine I had applied to assist me in my duty hardened into little discs that I could push around with my fork completely independent of the sprouts themselves. This was a nice pastime and interesting, too. Sixty Minutes turned into The Nightly News. The little sisters became ready for bed. I watched my parents perform closing-down-the-house-actions that I had never seen before. I don't remember that it was interesting, only that it was new. As a matter of fact, so was The Nightly News. It was time to kneel for prayer. The sister who was old enough to be any good at thinking was looking at me from the rug where we prayed every night and I was looking at her from the table. My dad was looking at my mother.

My mom came and sat across the table from me. She looked at me for a long time and then asked me how long I was planning to sit there. That was not what I was expecting and was a real poser. My "plan" was not to ever eat the sprouts and she had said I could eat them or "sit there." I didn't think it was my turn to make plot.

My dad sighed and my mom took away my plate with the sprouts and that was all. They never came back. She threw away some sprout blocks that were in the freezer (she had invested, apparently) and we ate peas and beans for a while. Spaghetti sauce, too, because that was a vegetable.

Now my daughter sighs too, gustily, over her cityscape. "I've heard that story. Lots of times."