Life. Tricking.

At my mom's house there's a photo of me, my little sister, two sheets and two amazing masks. The little sister and I stand close to each other, little white bodies against a white wall, completely obscured in costume except for the smiles on the bottom halves of our faces. We could be anybody. We are dressed as what, ghosts? Wrapped completely in white, swathed and twisted, we're mummies? Masked accident victims? We're David Linn people. The masks are are flame-shaped and elongated, galactic cat's eyes, metallic green and gold and pink and silver. I think, as masque and draping fell to her, maybe those masks were my mom's idea of a perfect costume, unusual, beautiful, showstopping and baby, you just buy it, plunk it onto a sheet and call it wonderful. Never mind what it may or may not represent. This year you're going dressed as Halloween, kids, as Masquerade itself.

Or maybe it's Mardi Gras.

I don't remember trick-or-treating in those costumes, I do remember my dad taking us around our block in the semi-dark, soft San Diego air, passing older, bigger trickers who seemed to me very serious, professional. They scared me not because of their costumes but because of their competence. Not that their costumes weren't frightening, glimpsed through the deepening darkness as the big kids brushed past they were frightening, truly. Semi-clear masks, altering face but revealing enough feature underneath to slide the whole countenance sideways into a vague nightmare place. Painted faces, with wounds and trickling blood. Demons, witches, murderers, dead people. I was seeing dead people and my dad just walked on among them, parting the current, his hands at our backs when the going got thick. I remember one group of boys, some seemed nearly as tall as my dad, dressed up together as a graveyard. Most of them were tombstones, painted cardboard front and back, there were a couple of ghosts, an amazing dead and blackened tree-boy with a hangman's noose dangling from one of his branches who was so cool I wanted to give him some of my candy and then a terrible, hunchbacked old man with only one eye, carrying a lantern and a shovel. I had no earthly idea what he was supposed to be or what he was doing hanging around with the rest of the graveyard but I knew for sure I never wanted to meet him again, ever, waking or sleeping. It never for a moment occurred to me he had to be a young boy, like the rest. I couldn't look, couldn't look away. Last night I watched my youngest swirl away in the darkness in a group of friends and realized the graveyard boys must have been about her age, just out of elementary school. Their tombstones bewildered me.

The little sister and I walked carefully down our sidewalk, on this night become a river of the undead and the unholy, the impossibly sparkly and improbably muscled and we hoped, assumed, my dad would steer us safely; I knew he could on any other day, but Halloween dissolved and shifted boundaries, altered my child-real. Nobody I was related to ever walked these sidewalks in the dark, we certainly never knocked at a door unless we already knew who would answer. But here was our dad, pushing us to walk, alone with only each other, through the dark and scary ten or fifteen feet up the tributary walk from the sidewalk river where he said he'd be waiting, to the looming stranger door, our passage lit only by street lights, bright windows, porch lights and glowing pumpkins. Anything might have happened, we might have had to pass unaided, tiny and trembling, close by horrifying big trickers leaving the door with their take, or we might have stumbled all unawares upon a bony and strangling something just the far side of the bushes from which those colored lights and scary music were emanating and been devoured before our dad could take the five steps to save us. But there was candy behind that door, or we had reason to believe it was there, and the strangers of that house wanted to give it to us, and our dad wanted us to take it! And everybody else was doing it! Delirious, feverish. Some of those doors now, Dad came all the way up to them, ward against some elusive danger only he could sense. We knew then that here, this door was some way stranger than the others, here we went into peril for the candy. We were grateful he navigated the river for us, wise to snags and bars.

Back home Mom was watching over the baby too young to gather its own candy and she was handing out candy too, to who-knows-what might be outside when she opened the door. She told my father stories that really were not for our hearing, after we got home, after our legs were aching and our fingers were nipped by the evening chill (whatever. We thought it was cold. We were little, we lived in California and we had no idea) and tired from hauling our loot. Mom told our dad of mean and pushy teenagers, demanding more candy, asking if she didn't have something better. They came from some other neighborhood, these brash and pushy big kids, not from our well behaved newly built housing development. You may have stay here to give out candy next year and let me take the girls, she told him, and at her words we paused in our cataloging, inventorying and eating. Could she? Could our mom, could any mom, part the stream, the hoards and crowds of over-painted evil and cloyingly glittering good to get us from house to house? Could she sense the hidden dangers which might require her to walk the whole way, accompany us from the main sidewalk clear up to the most scary doors? But, then, if it were too frightening for her to be at the house alone with trickers making menacing requests for better treats...and there was that baby to think of...we were conflicted, we were exhausted. We had to just brush our teeth and go to bed, trusting to inevitable, returning sunshine that makes everything right and normal and boringly safe again. But the morning stunned and betrayed us, our pumpkins smashed and scattered, the bodies hastily gathered and hidden by our parents, almost as it the bits and pieces were the mortal remains of family pets, tortured and dismembered in the deep of the night. Halloween lingered, twisting itself into the real of day and the normal of routine. Who would do that hideous thing to a nice pumpkin that belonged to a family, a pumpkin we had chosen for our own, labored over, given a face and purpose and almost a name? Frightening, truly, and we mulled and brooded but only to ourselves, silently, feeling much less at home in the world while simultaneously and conveniently disregarding our own gutting and dissecting of the family pumpkins.

Pumpkin victims into the trash cans. Costumes into the linen closet and the toy box. Candy checked for altering and tampering, these being the days of razor-blade-in-your-apple stories, LSD in your chocolate, all the more reason our dad took us to the doors, made careful calculations. Once approved, our candy was saved and was savored, in the flow of the year we didn't see much candy. And it disappeared more quickly than seemed right, possible. More was coming at Christmas, fortunately, the Christian calender tipping wildly between stiff arming evil and embracing newly born, soft and holy saving goodness, both ends of the swing tipping generous piles of sugar into our open mouths and reaching hands. Mardi Gras it was to us, Fat and Unholy.

Why The Wizard of Oz, so perfectly attuned to this darkening and unsteady time rather than to the stabilizing and happifying Yule, made its yearly television appearance at Christmas instead of on All Hallows Eve was a mystery. Mean adults who turn into witches, wildly costumed bigger kids who turn out to be best friends, flowers that make you sleep, flying monkeys that make you crazy. And that movie was so scary! With Wizard crashing our Christmas parties we'd have to wait all the years till The Watcher in the Woods before there was a safe-to-watch Halloween companion for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, that one also too scary for me to watch except from between my fingers. Charlie Brown felt more like it belonged at Christmas, friendly and safe and only slightly depressing, not scary. Sincerity, we all knew, was the passive sort of virtue which resulted in a delightfully filled but limited stocking, whereas pressing on against physical weariness and freezing temperatures (remember, we thought it was cold) while constantly risking attack and abduction by evil forces, these efforts put the candy in your pillowcase no matter what that blanket-carrying weirdo said, and only the limits of your own endurance determined the size of your prize. No, Dorothy defined my childhood Halloween, where everything felt terrifying but was mostly alright in the end and turned out to be actually sort of run by the friendly adults hanging out behind their curtain, except for the sorting out of the witches of course, that the kids had to manage on their own. I felt a strange sadness when we bought our kids a copy of The Wizard of Oz, stripped it from its steadying spot in the calendar. I wondered if they could possibly grow up balanced and appropriate, watching it any time they chose, never looking forward to any terror, albeit through their fingers. But it was too scary for them, as it had been too scary for me, and I felt almost gratified when my children drifted into watching it in the fall of the year, in the murk where things settle when they can't help being scary.

And then I got old and it was right to push the kids to walk ahead, in the dark, alone, but to walk all the way up to some of the doors with them, to skip some houses altogether, to tell little people three more houses and we're finished, to bring inside our home any pumpkins we had labored on too long and too lovingly to bear their untimely and violent deaths at the hands of strangers. Last night I tricked with some baby cousins, the three year old butterfly chugging steadily from house to house, complaining that her purple plastic pumpkin was getting heavy and banging her knees, informing us where the witches lived and where the dance party was being held. She looked around at us all, walking along on the wet, wet street after the rains passed over (in answer to a thousand, thousand, baby prayers) and said authoritatively "No one here is tired or cold." One year, ages ago, I made costumes for some little boy cousins and for my youngest sister, so they could go tricking in a group. My sister was Dorothy and you could see the ruby glow of her shoes even in the dark. Noah was the lion. Cute? Oh baby, you should have seen them. You could have peeked from behind your curtain, watched them walk cautiously all the way up your drive, plastic pumpkins held out as wards, as signs. We come in peace, give us candy. You'd have seen me, waiting alone in the scary night for them to come running back, ready to chug on to the next house, willing to trust me against the dark.



some Halloween photos

Meditations. About Secrets

Sing your life
La la la la la,
Sing your life
La la la la la

Recently, for a reason, the painter and I were discussing a friend of ours, who I will call Friend. The painter was noticing, suddenly, that in many ways we haven't come to know Friend well though we really, really like him. This is because, while Friend will gladly talk to you endlessly and gracefully about lots of interesting and distracting subjects, you will realize, if you think back, not one word will have touched any of the personal life he must be carrying around inside his head. I mean, right? Smart, funny people have an interior life, that's a given, isn't it? Friend tells stories, he is a Storyteller, but all his stories are of other people's lives or of slight, charming, wandering moments of no import, funny to hear and cleverly told. These things being what they are, at the end of the day you don't know him as well as you might if things were different, if, for example, he ever came clean about having any personal likes and dislikes, problems, trials, doubts, stuff of that sort. The apprehension of not knowing was startling, unbalancing, to the painter, a surprise to him that, when closely examined, Friend was so closed, so private. The painter sort of assumes he has come to know people by occupying the same room with them and talking to them about himself.

Sing your life.
Walk right up to the microphone
And name
All the things you love
All the things that you loathe.
Sing your life.

*****

Another day I was talking to another friend who, perhaps in small part because she is a girl, a smart girl, a beautiful, creative girl, a broken-and-repaired girl, an embrace-the-world-and-then-stagger-home-to-sleep-it-off-with-a-fever girl, a girl grown so used to alone days she must at all times hear the beating of her capable, breakable heart, perhaps because she is such a girl, wants awfully to be known and needs deep knowing of others by turns but this is hard, hurts her. I watch as she breaks herself against being known, as if a sharp and dangerous rock stood between us two, a rock only she could run against since only she can perceive it. Strangely one-sided for me to watch, like seeing a person miming an inability to connect. She throws lovely words out desperately, hopelessly civilized, utterly alone. Our talk is important to me, too, and she makes me sleep hard because I have to think so much. I send her ornately worked messages in corked bottles borne by carrier pigeons. On this day our words, I can't remember how, turned to claims of secrets held and kept. When I told her I was a secretkeeper from of old and she told me she was one too, we were not trying to gain the other's trust for sharing but trying to one up each other. We both assured the other that the secrets we each carried, secrets we would never tell, no matter what, were huge, staggering, more impressive, in fact, than any paltry, token confidence the other might carry in her heart's pockets. It became a game, a pointless game since by its rules neither one could put forth evidence, could clinch, could score. We played with gusto, anyway, both assuring the other that one day when it all came out, one day when all was known, the weight and strangeness of our hoarded mysteries, the careful guarding we had given, would vindicate us before the other and each would be brought to confess the other had born the greater burden. Now, we are Christians, believing in an afterlife, a judgment, rewards and retribution, but why, I wondered suddenly, do we both hold the deep and unexamined belief that on some day all will be made known? Every silent, hoarded confidence spoken, hung in the bright open air for all the world's ears to hear? That each little lead secret people have lobbed at us, here, catch and don't you ever tell, all of them rolling weighty and separate in our souls, each secret which we obediently lugged about ever after, listing from them, sinking, straightening step by step, would one day be spoken and shed? Shouted from the rooftops, as the scripture says. Do I believe in that God, I wondered? A God who would one day look at His divine timepiece and intone, "IT IS TIME. SPILL," and everyone would split, heave, cleanse, gush out all the things they promised never, ever to say? Do we take up a forever-secret with a half-formed notion that this ugly or lovely little thing sits in our hearts only on a hundred year lease and one day will be flung free to find its own way, good or ill, to its true owner, whoever and however far removed from the original teller that may be? Are we willing to salt down the secrets because we bargain with ourselves, alright, this for now, but one day...
And won't they all be surprised.

Make no mistake my friend,
All of this will end
So sing it now.

*****

Secret people all around me, never saying what they really think, except those crazy few, harrying us all, trumpeting their whims and passions, fancies and follies, orders and half-cooked, half-cocked notions, poems and philosophies no one outside their originator's heads should ever, ever, hear.

I watch a woman issue orders, marshal her dinner guests, form us up into troops of fun-havers, and I think, ooh. And then, is this me? Am I this person? I have parties, I run things, I'm a director, for crying out loud. Is this me? I could ask my friends, of course, and of course that would be just too much to ask of friends, they couldn't tell me. Am I like that, I could ask and I can hear the answer, good heavens, no, do you think if you were we would...

Do you think if you were we would tell you?

It'd be a secret.

Do you like my hat?
Does this make me look fat?
Do you like him?
Is she pretty?
Have you read anything good?
Don't you love this song?
I made up the recipe, isn't it fantastic?
Does that sound crazy?
Did you like...
Have you met...
Do you remember...
Would you be worried...
Would you have time to...


Lies I tell.
Truths I will never speak.

"It's like this," I said once, to a man, "it's always like this. No one ever says what they really think or we'd just solve things and there'd be no drama, no texture to life. Every Jane Austen novel turns on this point, no one ever saying what they really mean, what they actually think. That's where plot comes from." It was ok to say this to him, he knew Jane Austen novels. And it's true, what I said to him. In books for small children, events move plot, things start happening for better or worse when one or more parent is removed, when the shield parents wield against plot both in life and in art is riven. The moment, however, we step out of childhood into an adult world it will be our words that kidnap us, ensorcel us, dangle us helplessly bound and impotent. My daughter comes home from high school seething at a tiny melodrama, not a teacup tragedy, more of a sports drink drama, spinning out from a girls' choice dance and what came of it; one girl who gave a certain answer to be "nice," and, disliking the consequences, became nasty. "You should have told the truth," my daughter recounts herself saying, "or shut up about it. If you're going to be "nice," you have to keep being "nice" all the way through." Sounds like she speaks her mind, doesn't it? But that's an illusion; the drama spins out and out and my daughter is also piqued that she herself was "nice" and went along with someone else's plan which was rotten, went sour, left all the girls holding sour, rotten feelings and tangled in it all, not able to speak the truths that would free them, send them all crashing into reality. You should have told the truth, or shut up about it.

Others sang your life
But now is a chance to shine
And have the pleasure of
Saying what you mean
Have the pleasure of
Meaning what you sing.

*****

I am the oldest sister and of the many specific functions I have held among the sisters, secretkeeper was never one, with a single, marked exception. Not as a confidant for the older two, they never told me anything and that became a lifelong conversational setting. I am not, in any group, church, school, business or social, one who knows. Ask somebody else, there's always someone who knows, who's heard the latest. No, among the sisters I was only entrusted with a specific set of secrets. They used me as a testing ground for medical issues. It went like this.
A sister would approach and, by way of conversational opener, request that I keep an unnamed secret and never, ever, tell. "Suzanne, there's something I have to show you and you have to promise you won't tell Mom." My automatic internal reservations flared even as I gave the requisite promise. The fact that I had those reservations probably completely explains why they only ever shared health-related secrets with me; I truly could not (can not) be trusted, I really would tell if things were bad, and while that would preclude any confidences touching moral or legal concerns, in a backwards way it was just what the doctor ordered, if a doctor were required. "OK, I promise not to tell."
"Do you swear?"
"Yes, I swear, of course I swear. Show me," and the sister would present the owie. Most of these just got a pass and a caution to wash it with soap and I never told what I had seen, just as promised. No one would have cared, so I never had to tell. Some, however, like the large, yellow abscess above the eye tooth or the jellybean sized and shaped black and purple cabochon on the bottom of a foot the sister said was a "sliver," produced instant, unconsidered, unapologetic breach of contract. "MOM," turning from the shocked and outraged (heavy on the rage) sister, "MOM. C'mere." Medical intervention followed, with the sister screaming from over or under parental arms and shoulders, "YOU PROMISED! I'LL NEVER TELL YOU ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!!!!"
I had told, I explained again and again after the trauma was cleaned up, because I had to. "It was bad. Mom and Dad had to know," I pled to the back of a sister's head that would never, ever, forgive me. And never did forgive, but most assuredly told me the next time there was real worry for life and limb, knowing I would do just as I had done before. You always told, they still say, grown up and sort of laughing and sort of mad. Yes, I did, and look at you now, with all your fingers and toes and teeth still attached.
I am still one people come to when they are scared for life, and I still make them tell, when I think it's bad.

*****

Once, in a hostel in Liverpool, Leah and Zoe were too short to be real people. Their heads were below the range of the light sensors in the showers. We didn't know this at first of course, didn't know it till the screaming started in the shower after the automatic timer had ticked away the grace period since it had last sensed anybody large enough to be real and total darkness engulfed them, and then we had a tough time figuring out what was happening only to them. The moment anyone else (everyone else was taller) entered the bathroom their superior height accidentally ended the crisis. Hard to know, when we did get it sorted out, how to help them; they were flatly uninterested in taller company during their ablutions. In the end we had to leave them to shift as best they could, screaming (which didn't help but which relieved their feelings), jumping and waving their arms when the dark overtook them, defiantly asserting their reality. Too small too be sensed mechanically. Secret people.

*****

In a Chinese restaurant I make everyone read their fortunes out loud (make them, I really am that terrible sort of bossy, arranging woman and no one is ever going to save me from myself because it's a stupid secret) till I open mine last. Everyone is laughing and teasing so when I see the tiny words there, words that drill me and expose me and reveal me, no one notices. And since I cannot read this secret out loud (does God control fortune cookie fortunes? and if so, did He think this was some kind of funny?) I do my best dissolving act, which is very, very good. Some people think they are good at dissolving; I truly excel. No one can see me anymore and no one notices since I was the one making the reading happen and no one else cared. I take the charged paper home and hide it.
Secret.

Don't leave it all unsaid
Somewhere in the wasteland of your head, oh
Head, oh, head, oh, head, oh,
Sing your life.

*****

The painter and I sing in the car. We work at it, hard. Or rather he does, making harmonies for himself to twine around my melodies, since that's all I can ever hear. Don't toss me a note and expect me to toss it back, it'll just land on the ground where we'll both regard it sadly and feel disappointed in each other. Sing a phrase so I can catch the melody, till I'll be able to sing along and then alone and you can go do your harmony thing and I'll be solid in the one thing I can do. Only this will never happen because I'll never, never sing with you. Singing with people, where they can hear me, isn't natural to me anymore. Every child sings its way into the world with a brave and natural voice but not every child grows to be a conversant, singing adult. The painter was the first person I ever tried to sing with, rather than alongside of, and it wasn't easy. Truthfully, he was awful about it. This was long ago, back when he was specializing in awful. Though things are better now I learned then that singing is a place of peril and danger. So, ever one to slay all my dragons silent and solitary by my lonesome, I no longer hazard it, no longer sing in front of people. I sing alone and alone with the painter. For all anyone will ever know of it, our work with words and notes might never have been, since, thanks to me, no one ever hears it. If you catch me unawares, if you lull me into confidence, if you dissolve completely into a background blur, maybe, maybe. Oddly, funnily but not funny, the person most upheaved by my locked down voice is the painter, he wants to sing for people, sure they want to listen. His frustration, gently expressed nowadays, feels very distant to me, very removed. This is the bed you made, I think, and you must lie in it. Odd, too, that he sleeps there so much more easily than I do.

So sing it now,
All the things you love,
All the things that you loathe,
Sing your life.

*****

Here's the truth about Friend. I nearly never became real friends with him because of all this not-truth-telling. He was nice enough from the start, a friend of the painter and a great guy, but not for me, not my style. Too much of that bland niceness spreading out in waves and billows, like thick butter over every food, like boring, sheer curtains softening every view. A relationship where I'd have to do all the serious honesty work, all the heavy lifting. No grit, no tooth to his conversation, just big happy smiles, genial, appreciative laughter and pleasant agreeableness. Who needs that? Nothing to get a hold of so I was always sliding off, slipping away into not having this conversation. Oops! Sorry, forgot you were still in the room. Of course I'd never voice any of this. Never challenge, never ask if there was anything he didn't like, didn't agree with, wasn't amused by. I'd walk my distance secretly, my dishonesty as great as his, no one ever saying anything real, anything from inside. Don't want to raise any eyelids, the painter said once, misspeaking and making wonderful, terrible meaning. Double portions of politeness all round, another helping for my friend here, this one's on me. The two of us, ships slipping away, coasting by, unchallenged, unhailed, in a sea of oily unreality. Where's the tragedy in that? Happens every day, in fact, it's what happens. No monster storms threatening off my bow to send me seeking or offering aid, no sprung water barrels forcing me to send up a flare and I'm not a pirate, grappling, boarding, claiming, gaining the intimacy born of violence. At the last possible moment, just before he disappears over the horizon, just before I fall asleep forever and miss him entirely, Friend mentions, through a toothy grin, how he dislikes certain of his relatives. Crunch, grind, shudder and we have run aground.
Land ho!
Hmph. Now you tell us.

Saved.

But before you go
Can you look at the truth?
You have a lovely singing voice,
A lovely singing voice.
And all of those
Who sing on key
They stole the notion
From you and me
So sing your life.

Morrissey
Sing Your Life (slightly rearranged)




Noah's photos

One, Two Three. One, Baby.

More than a year, now, since I saw him.
When he was born his hair was black and silky and he looked just like my dad. I mean just like. Just like my dad looked at the time Noah was born. Newborn Noah looked like a grandpa. The doctor said, "He's a boy!" and the nurse said, "And he has dimples!" Eight dimples we counted in those first weeks, five a few years later. Three now, I believe. None of them in a set.

Just a few days after his birth his other grandpa, Papa, had open heart surgery. When Noah's lifespan could still easily be counted in hours, his paternal grandfather lay gravely ill, blood clot in his lung, pneumonia. The family came, we drove with tiny Noah screaming out the miles from Austin to Houston, strapped in his car seat, black-faced with rage. They should have said in the hospital, it's a boy and he's got a temper! His father and I watched, big eyed, with hands to our open mouths, as week old Noah dragged himself, army style, a foot and a half across our bed, shrieking and spitting in fury. Wow, we said to each other through our silent, awed and scared parent eyes, can he really do this? He really could. Holding him tight, a thrashing toddler, saying yes, that boy wasn't nice, was dishonest, was unfair but you aren't allowed to scream. And later trying to make him see that when he lost it, they won. It was injustice that got him, not being punished for something he'd actually done. Being unjustly accused. It was the awfulness of other people. So he fought with his sister, impotent and incensed, and she quietly, joyously, watched him twist and writhe. He argued heatedly, endlessly with his father over points of view. He writes from China that he is learning to control himself, his tongue, his heat. As we knew he must, or flame up and burn out. We trusted God would help him get a grip on this anger for the rest of his life. That's what you hope for, why you'd ever let them go. And the oddity of it all, that we almost never saw this side of him, that he was nearly always sunny, calm and gentle, tender and a natural defender of the weak. Just don't strap him in a car seat.
I sat on the sofa in the big bright living room in the house where Papa was so sick, the house the painter left every morning on his way to the American years of high school, holding my tiny son and looking out the huge windows at the live oaks in the June sunshine. Someone, a voice, told me, pay attention. Hang on to this. Never forget. I closed my eyes, turned my face to my tiny son's face, curled my whole grownup person around that dot swaddled in flannel, and stored him up. The weight, nine pounds by then, the shape, humped and tight like a football or like one of the armadillos the painter's dad chased around the yard with an ax, the sound, tiny and sure as he breathed steady as a clock, smell, smell, smell. What does a new baby smell like? Heaven? Paradise? Home? His hair sliding softly away as I stroked his ridiculously small head with my cheek. Never forget.

A year ago he walked away from me and never looked back.

The black hair fell out and he was this bald person chugging around the floor of our student apartment, taking everything and himself very seriously. We called him the growlin' ferlie. He did growl, all the time, concentrating on everything, and as the painter was passing through a brief Bobby Burns phase, all his conversation processed through a strange, thick brogue, there became a poem that went with the baby.

The ferlie growleth wi' his might
An' wi' his main and a' together.
Bewails the shortness o' his sight,
The scanty milk, the smuggy weather.

Texas, you know. Hot in the summer, when the ferlie was born. The milk could not have been so scanty as all that, the ferlie grew like a crazy baby. He wanted to take everything apart, turn it, spin it, see it, bend it. He had a playset of a sort I am told was discontinued so that babies could be completely safe and grow all the way up. Well, at the time we had no idea the danger, but recklessly disregarding unseen threats to his safety, he grasped danger and the main chance in both fat little hands and loved that toy to a distraction. It was like a doll-sized swing set, with Disney characters hanging on tiny swings and all sorts of spinners and twisters and reflectors and bells and whistles. He would growl at it with a gusto, working himself around and under it, over and over, putting it through its paces. (Reminds me a bit of the way he now writes of his demanding new junior companion.) Even when he was too little to do more than lie under it and wave at it, his fascination with its loveliness and mystery was such that I lugged around huge, pointless guilt at the great stretches of time he could be happy and content alone with only his playset for company and no Mommy in sight. Mommy could clean, Mommy could cook, Mommy could read a book and fall asleep on the floor, and Mommy felt very bad about minutes not devoted to Baby. Luckily for Baby, Mommy got over it.


Even when he needed my presence, he usually only needed that, my physical self down on the floor and then my occasional attention when he brought me some tantalizing fragment of human culture. I only needed to dump a billion intriguing bits of manufactured world on our rug and put myself on Noah's level to make him the happiest baby on the planet. I blocked off the access to the hallways and dozed, which was nice as he never slept through the night till he was about two. (Never slept well till, I think, he discovered ear plugs on his mission. Yay!) Every so often he would crawl over and bang a particularly scintillating gadget on my sleeping face so I would say, yeah, cool, huh? and he would take it back, turn it over and over, growl, chuckle. He grew up bringing me bits from everywhere he went, broken glass chunks with rainbow patina from dusty fields, wabi sabi street trash. He made me sit down to watch something on the internet, texted me fragments of silly conversations he overheard on campus, brought me moral dilemmas to wrestle over while he sat on the end of my bed at night before his dad came into the room. I think it's this lack of incidental noise, this inability to share off-hand, pocket-sized shards of beauty or tragedy or funniness that hurts me the most. I turn, still, to show him. He can't see me from China. And he's busy with a different life.
So I show the painter or my youngest girl or my oldest girl or post something on a friend's Facebook wall. But things fall flat; people can't understand why I'd send this shred of culture their way, they ask, what was that, annoyed or confused. Or worse, they don't respond. I have to work to fit my findings to specific interests if I really want feedback, like Christmas shopping all the time. I expend friendship capitol making people watch the link on YouTube right then so that I can watch them watch it. It's more than half of it, to see the response, to go there together. Noah never wanted me to get there without him or how were we going to talk about it properly? He just understood that; it wasn't a big deal.

He had a horribly dangerous walker of a sort I am told is (also) no longer made. We would take it to the printmaking studio where his dad, the painter, was working out his terminal degree. (Printmaking. Yes.) Noah would spin around on the cement floors, eyes shining at his speed, taking every corner on two wheels (they do not make walkers for babies like they used to--and then they complain the current crop of NASCAR drivers is a bit tame--well? what do they expect?), the slightly cynically obscene, black-clad, tattered, pierced-and-tattooed grad students dodging him, laughing at him, loving him. At this point he became the Bugman. Two feet, four wheels.


He sang.
In church he practiced arias and descants, strange wobbling, wailing solos exploring the edges of his range and volume. I took him out to the hall but the painter told me the songs still cut through sacrament meeting pretty clearly and I resorted to putting Noah between those inner and outer double glass doors Mormon churches often have, in that glass tank you pass through going from outside to the church foyer. He got a little sweaty but he loved it in there because he could bang too, along with the singing, and no one gave him any trouble. I just took off some of his clothes and he one-man-banded his way through church in his baby aquarium, his face blurring away behind layers of little handprints.
When we moved to Utah there were gardens and orchards and cousins and friends and he roamed his little world of grass edged with stickers (it's how we control our kids in Kanosh; take away their shoes, they can only go so far) singing and singing and singing. He would never stop singing, not even in the halls in high school where his sister offered to shoot him on sight (sound) for free if he didn't cease the caroling. By then he could ignore her on occasion, didn't have to make every single jibe into a fight. He wanted to audition for the school musical. Home schooled kid, his first weeks in school, senior year, new school in a new town. I'm sort of supportive with my kids, also, I'm not dishonest. "You do know you'll have to sing," I said. Acting was not a problem, he'd been acting since he was five and he was quietly, confidently very good, if he didn't get a part because the director thought he couldn't act, well, something had gone screwy in the universe. Which happens, we both knew that. But singing. He never really sang. "Is there a musical you even know?" I asked. Never much for musicals, Noah, but he knew 1776. "I can't help you with music," I said, we both knew this. He took care of it himself, plenty capable. And he sang, through a considerable amount of terror, The Lees of Old Virginia. And was cast as Tevya, much to our mutual surprise.

He was the most tenacious baby I've ever known. He stacked complicated constructions of toys and found objects, balancing the weight, infinitely patient. He played endlessly alone and endlessly with friends, making up worlds, spinning out games, always the last one to get tired of things. That stayed with him, like the singing, the love of speed, the fascination with the things we build with our hands. He taught himself to walk, working doggedly back and forth between chairs over and over, his little face a mass of the bruises of progress. He figured out the Lego constructions alone, studying the drawings and following the patterns years before he could read. When he learned to ride a bike he taught himself, falling off over and over, crying, gritting his teeth, bruised, scraped and squished and stubborn as hell, all alone and going to master this or die. His dad watched from a distance, agonized witness of this brutal, headlong assault at the bicycle, ready to run in if Noah fell and couldn't get up. But he did it and did it alone.


He always explored a new place, always pushed off and found the limits, the edges, the levels. I remember sitting in the dark on our porch outside, cuddling him on my lap, waiting for his dad to turn off the rainbirds and come in to the softly lit house. Noah was sitting up straight, looking all around at the dark yard and he slid suddenly off my lap and padded away across the soft, inky grass, pausing once, checking that I was still on the porch, so far away I could only see his face as a little white smudge, then he went on, around the corner of the house and into the deeper dark under the apple tree. I stopped myself, barely, from following him, held down my mother instincts under painful thinking. He couldn't go far (stickers) and nothing was there to hurt him. I told myself this was good, timely, necessary since a new sister would be born any time now. I needed to let him go alone a ways, into the soft and safe dark. And he was fine. And I was shaken, changed, left behind. A sea change, a watershed. This is how it will be, forever, now. I will sit here and he will go farther and farther away. Alone.
Ah.
Well then, I will never give him shoes and he will never go too far.

After he packed that last morning, after we had cried the night before, after I had gotten the girls out of what was their first day of school last year, we walked to the MTC. It's up the street and we were embarrassed, a little, to drive. It was hot and he walked fast with his two wheeled suitcases, declining our help. Once he looked back to see his youngest sister and myself a bit behind him and the older one a bit beyond us and then just kept walking. I don't know if he noticed the painter wasn't with us, Bri hadn't taken the clock seriously (he doesn't, he never does) and had to change quick and run to catch up. My sweet youngest child so worried her dad would miss this, her older sister miffed that Noah walked so very quickly all alone. I watched him, wondering where he was in his head. I never served a mission and even if I had, it would have been an extra, not the from-birth expectation it is for Mormon boys. What was that like, to live all your remembered life toward one event, one day and then to actually have it come? Come knocking at your door, your present, living day. Any other evening after such a day, every other evening of his whole life till this, he would have sat at the foot of my bed and talked the whole thing out, asked his dad to wait a minute if he came in before Noah was finished. As he had the night before, till two hours after midnight. I sat in bed watching him, thinking that this would be the last of these talks. He will be a man when he comes back. Do men sit and talk to their mothers so? Perhaps. I wouldn't know.
I followed him up the street in the hot thick August air. I am used to following him and his suitcase. He explores the limits, the edges and levels, decodes airports, bus and train stations, knows where we're supposed to be headed. "Here it is Mom, we go over here," and he takes off across the travertine while I'm still trying to look at the right screen, find our flight number. We're not going together, I go home, he goes on alone. This is so unreal to me. I've always been the one who leaves, the oldest girl who went first. How can he just walk away and walk away? I hold my little girl's hand tightly, she's still real. She will come home with me.
This time.

We walk into the MTC driveway. The painter has caught up with us now, we are all a bit bewildered. We don't want to take pictures (we never do and no one who does that is with us. bad planning) and we don't want to say goodbye. Noah is looking about for direction, surely someone will step up who knows. And someone does, two someones with clipboards, older men who ask for Noah's name (Elder Kershisnik) and find him on a list. "Alright, give him a hug and then Elder, you go through those doors."

This is like using a razor to remove a sliver. I always did it that way, quicker and cleaner and so much less painful, but you have to get used to it and the first time is a terrible shock. A moment to go through, not to linger, the best way out is always through and I agree with that in that I can see no other way out but through. This is something people do, I remind myself. This is what you chose to raise him to do. Hug the big shoulders, hair not silky because it's full of American Crew. Breathe enough not to faint, not to die. Tell him goodbye.

He walks quickly away, toward that door. After a minute we all notice he isn't looking back. Another minute and it gets interesting. Eden says, "He'll look back, won't he? I mean, he will. Right?" Sort of a long way for him to go and he's not looking back. The clipboards are noticing this too, looking from us to the Elder walking away and walking away. I fold my arms, waiting, wondering. Can he do this? Can he really just do this?
He really can.
He does not look back or hesitate. Wow, I think, wow, he's really going. The clipboards are watching us respectfully. "Well," one of them says as the double doors are opened by two other Elders, as they close now and he is gone, never checking to see if we were still there or not. "Well." The clipboard looks at me. "Well done. Well done."

But it's not me, it's him. The Elder.
All I ever did was allow him those shoes.


Noah's stacks, Noah's photos