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

Stories. A Fairy, Once

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread...
The Song of Wandering Aengus
W. B. Yeats

Once I thought I saw a fairy.
No, once I thought what I was looking at was a fairy, and I thought so for really a long time, as time goes. It was this time of year, just the turn from summer to fall when the mountains are rust and red and russet and pumpkin and golden and all the colors in a bonfire but below them, where the people live, only the black walnuts, boxelders and locusts have begun to show the yellow under their green. Xanthophyll, rich and glowing.

It happened because my parents had purchased a bit of real estate, a small rectangle of land mostly covered by a large square red building built of large square red sandstone blocks. It had been, in its time, the town hall, movies had been shown there, boys used to send the skinniest kid down the coal shoot to open the door from the inside so they could play basketball there. I wouldn't have done it for money, a bet, a dare or a threat. That basement is haunted and the coal room is pure evil. Tell you about that sometime. It was first a dance hall, Rebel Hall, built because the powers that be frowned on drinking at the church dances across the street. There used also to be an open-air dance floor in Kanosh, with magical colored lights and a bandstand and a snackbar, but the city tore it down and they only dance once a year now in Kanosh, in the park on the 24th of July. The main floor of the building my parents bought is one big room, two tall stories high, with a pressed tin ceiling and wood floors where the out-of-bounds lines and the painted key are wearing away beneath the basketball standards. Nearly a full court. We used to roller skate there after school in the winter when I was little. We used, sometimes, to sit around at home and talk about how we could live there, someday, build a house for us within the sandstone shell. Some of us were excited by this prospect, some were terrified and some angry; these reactions shifted by turns among as we aged and altered.
I couldn't say, now, what my parents originally, truly, wanted the building for, thought they could use it for, other than for being old and wonderfully cool and holding an almost endless amount of stuff, first just theirs, then, slowly, stuff from everyone in the family, here a little, there a little, you almost never see it come but it grows and grows. Piles and piles of stuff to skate around. An empty building with a tight roof is not conducive to right thinking, not straightforward or clean or simple for people. With enough storage you never have to own up to this table you bought for nearly nothing and which would be worth nearly something if you gave it two weeks of your life in stripping, patching and repairing. Never have to face clothing you were sure to fit into, again, someday. If you were a Mormon (and we were) you could collect food storage but never have to wrap your house around it. What if you could just keep all the things that must have meant something to all the dead people who never coped with their junk before they shed it for good? What if you had so much space, cheap space, that simple geometry was never going to force you to answer to yourself for the load you carried? Well, then you'd have what, over the years, crowded itself into what my family calls The Old Building. Piles, stacks, heaps, mounds, troves, caches, bundles, knots, accumulations, collections, messes. Things don't want to be tossed aside, they want to be kept, counted, told over, petted and planned on. They want to snuggle up against our warm human skin, wrap around our legs and arms, nuzzle where we breathe moist and regular, twine and twist through our thoughts, even if only for a moment now and then. That's enough, that will keep objects from turning to dust, from blowing away, forgotten. Children exploring backlots and outbuildings learn to be careful what they pick up; things come with snags and burrs and claws and hooks. They stick. Turn it over, check for spiders. Remember that journeys of acquisition leave foxtails in your sneakers; you can never get those out.

When I was grown and the painter settled it into his heart that he would not teach or be in other ways sensible, just paint and paint, we bought The Old Building on very easy terms from my mom and dad. The painter cleaned, cleared, scraped and seared the building and bought it to him, to his heart and to his soul. Maybe I'll think about that quest another time, about how so many people had set down things in The Old Building for a moment, only for a moment, and not one of those people wanted anyone, certainly not this painter who wasn't even an actual family member, not a Christensen at all no matter how he pronounced what he called his last name, to tell them it was time to come back on in here and take up this burden again. He persevered, he conquered and dominated and for those pains and all that exposure to hantavirus, the world's best studio he achieved, and of it gained an untold measure of painterly satisfaction. That doesn't come into this story, this story is about a fairy, but it might come into another story, another day. You can come see him in his painted glory, if you like, this Saturday, September 25th, from 1-5 in his briefly open studio. But that information has no place here.

When I saw the fairy outside, around back, it was early days yet, the building stood empty and echoed with possibility and with a gathering of otherwise homeless ghosts.

Hor. Day and night but this is wondrous strange!
Ham. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet

I was exploring.
The Old Building came with only a strip of land around it, an easement on the east of four or five feet, maybe double that on the west and a bit more along the back. At that time in back, on the south side, there was a great, dried out, disused barn. It belonged to the Turners; their lot fronted Main street, ran east to west and backed The Old Building, which fronts on Center street. I never trespassed in that barn, never a single step, which is marvelous and strange to me now that I am old and turn it over in my mind. I would write, if this were fiction, that the child I was would have overstepped boundaries, would not have felt right and easy without knowing what sort of things and places bordered my things and places. We never did, to my knowledge, not any of the sisters. I find as I review my life I'm deeply, disappointingly law abiding, it shows up again and again, then too the barn was frightening in its own right, old and somber and sad from emptiness. I left it strictly alone. It burned to the ground not so long ago, scared the painter to death, sure it was his studio, and the fire probably would taken his Old Building had its walls and roof been other than metal and stone. Stupid, bored, destructive children alone and filled with possibilities. No surprise there, no plot to speak of, not really.

I was poking around in the quiet late afternoon, just exploring the back strip of land on the first day my dad took me over there with him because now this was ours.
And I saw the fairy and the fairy saw me.
This is what I saw and how it happened.
I came around through the old knotty, bumpy boxelder trees to the quiet tangly back part and there was a bunch of junk there, like there always is behind a place people have used and used. Those back parts are like whirlpools and eddies; flotsam and leaf mold and strange large iron implements and partly burned milled lumber and rolls of fencing and baling wire and maybe a bucket and some weird plastic lids swirl around and just settle there in the rye grass, the cheat grass and the mustard. I was cataloging all those things when I realized a fairy was watching me across the back of an overturned cast iron bathtub. Seeing him (it was a him) more than froze me in place, it nearly dispatched me, deprived me of my breath and will. Both of us stared, very still for a long, long time, as time goes.
The fairy (in my mind at the time I called him an elf; I would have called something smaller, more brightly colored and winged a fairy. I've learned a thing or two since then) had his hands resting on the tub, close to his cheeks and was watching me with the part of his face that showed above the curve where the bottom of the tub would become the side. Just the top half of his face, no mouth or chin. Nose, two eyes, two hands and tiny fingers and he had on a hat, maybe ears and a little hair. He did not seem very happy and he did not move. My heart hit the inside of my chest so hard I thought it would bruise, would split. Real. He was real and he didn't go away or turn into something awful and dumb like the shirt you hung over the back of your chair when you got into bed. He kept his hands on the tub and stared and I stared and my breath burned and cut me because the fairy was real. Real. Can you understand where I was? Where I suddenly found myself? A chipped enamel kettle would have been an epic find, a square-headed nail a treasure, a pretty bit of patterned china a jewel, a chunk of etched and crazed blue or purple glass from a old broken power line insulator a charm and token to keep forever in my private box of lovelies, but instead I had walked into a real fairy. Not an arrowhead or a painted china marble or even a silver dime. A living fairy that could see me, too. Real. Looking at me in the soft, silent golden air of a day in early autumn in a backlot in Kanosh, in America. At ten I grasped the delicate irony, even the gentle indignity of the situation. Not in Cornwall, not in Japan, not in India. Just in the no man's land between Turner's barn and The Old Building. Not even Olde. Just old. American Fairy.

Such an imposition, such an invasion, but I was entitled; I had studied and believed. I lifted my right foot slowly, so slowly it jerked, as slowly as my hair was growing, and he held steady. So I set it down like glass, like a glass foot on a granite world and I was one step closer. He didn't move and he didn't turn into a combination of old ski cap and dried out cowboy boot. He remained what he was, still and watchful. I marshaled all my resources so as not to faint or scream because that would be toweringly stupid, an idiotic thing to do just then and grew six years older while I stepped without breathing, stepped like someone living in a world of honey, like the golden light slanting through the yellow boxelder trees with dust motes all floating silent and calm was really honey and not air, stepped again. He didn't run, he watched. He let me get close, one terrible, heartrending step at a time, just watched me come, dark eyes gleaming. He let me come within a foot of his tub before, between a step and another step he suddenly dissolved into plumbing parts on the bottom of the tub, looking nothing at all like the fairy I had until that moment been, well, hunting. Stalking. Believing and approaching. To claim, to have been right about, even if I could never touch, never tell. Just to know, with joy and such world-filling love but also with proof, to know with my brain rather than the heart that had known from the first moment he looked at me and for the years and years before that. He left me as alone as I will ever be.

I'm not going to hurt you, please don't not be. Unless being made a proof hurts and undoes you.

My children build fairy houses, especially the oldest and the youngest. One fall day the sisters took all the children, little ones and teenagers, to a tiny tributary of the creek in our canyon in Kanosh, to a wonderful bank under weeping trees, gnarled roots and half-buried stones and floating logs and mossy stepping stones and cress (don't eat it, no matter what anyone tells you) and they made a fairy town till it got too dark, ports and piers and islands and mansions and huts and stairs carved into the bank and paths and bridges and oak cups and tiny boats laden with end-of-summer gatherings, so much stuff, so many things. After, we went home to a fairy tea, tiny magical foods (this part was not my part, I'm not so good at this part) and we all made beautiful and frightening masks from the fiercely colored leaves we had collected, piles and mounds and troves of leaves. Those masks hung in bedrooms for years, shouting at us with their bonfire leaf eyebrows and noses. Happy things, just the top parts, no mouths or chins. My middle child asked me only a day or so ago as we walked among the golden trees, "Do you remember the leaf masks we used to make? We never do that anymore," and she sighed with longing for her little-girl days and with frustration at the people we've allowed ourselves to become. The real is that if anyone gathers the leaves and the face forms and the glue, spreads them out on the table, sits down to work, she will blow through headed for her job but she will forbid us to put anything away because she is absolutely making a mask tomorrow when she has hours of homework and dance practice and after that days of leaf mess will go by till we put all the things away and one day, later, she will suddenly say, "Did you guys make masks? Was it fun? I want to see. How come I never get to do anything?" And she will sigh at what her life has become, filled, stacked, piled and knotted with too many things she enjoys. Do you remember the things we used to do? When the real is that we did this, once. No less real, for all that.

My youngest shows me, on every walk, every hike, places. "Ooh, come over here, Mom, come see this place." I know what she means, what she looks for. A place to build a house, sheltered within an already magical, accidentally perfect spot. A place to hold the things she would bring, sticks and rocks and grass, for making houses. A house you buy to yourself, to your soul, to your heart. A Faerie place. It hurts her a little, bruises her heart, the tug of these places while her brother is so far away, too far away to build with her, to send tiny boats laden with gatherings of late summer things from his teensie upstream warehouses to her bitsy mercantile establishment further down and to receive as payment acorn cups or buttons or swirled marbles or the tiny black seeds shaken out of poppy heads.

I wonder if on a day, someday, one day, she, he, I will see a fairy, still and staring from behind a boxelder tree gone yellow in the early fall. Xanthophyll, always there under the green, under the life-giving chlorophyll. Real. Truly. As it is undeniably real, is it also enough? Enough to let be, let go, walk slowly away, glass feet on a granite world, the seen and the unseen which is believed and hoped for living together in an unexpected and accidental place. A home. It was never a question of keeping nature's first green; the leaves are always gold and green, red and orange too, when they can manage it; unhampered, undefined by the little we can see. When they grow old enough, in their dying, as they shed what have been necessary things, they unpack their hearts and we can finally, briefly, admire their flaming fierceness. I'm wanting to believe I can grow old enough to remember, claim, own, the real of what I look at, regardless of the things I cannot see. Without proof, without hurt.

Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.
E. B. White

Please, don't not be.

Noah's photo

Life. Black Powder

The storyteller is talking about hunting. He asks, "Black powder? How many of you have gone on a black powder hunt?" and I raise my hand. I don't always raise my hand when the tellers ask questions. Questions like,
"I had a friend when I was young. Any of you have friends?"
"How many of you have ever yelled at someone, been really angry?"
"Have any of you ever had a parent?"
Sorry, but nope. I know they're trying to ease into their story but, no, not gonna grace that with a response. My youngest leans over, concerned. "Mom, you have a parent. You yell. You should raise your hand," and she tugs at my arm.
I push it down. "No, honey. I don't have to be in this conversation." She worries about me. It's because where she is dutiful, loving and good, I am allergic to annoyances, to accidentally picking up obligations, like cat hair on a black sweater.
But this one's different, this is a legitimate question. This I'll answer. Turns out, if they are to be believed as they lift their hands, a surprising number of audience members hunt or have hunted with powder and shot. Or, I don't know, this is Utah, maybe it's not so surprising. My friend turns to look at me, sitting up and back, a bit, in surprise. "Black powder? Seriously?"
Well, yeah. My father had no sons, I remind him, so, of course I've hunted that way and every other way. Of course I have. Obviously. Only I suspect from the architecture of his expression that he has not hunted with powder and shot although he comes from a family of all sons, where his dad could have reveled in male hunting parties one stalking and shooting season after another all through the year. So, the black powder hunt is not a given after all, I guess. It seemed that way to me, in our house growing up.

Black powder. Seriously.

He never reproached us for being girls. He liked us. We knew he was lonely, though we didn't know why, at first, didn't know there was a difference between boys and girls. We might have been anything that wore a dress to church, while he wore a suit but that seemed more a lapse in judgment on his part than a hard and fast barrier between us. While I can't speak for the sisters, my baby opinion was that my not wearing a suit was a firm matter of preference, nearly of morality. Dresses and tights were nasty enough, well, not the dresses, I've always worn dresses of my own free will, but the tights were hellish and slips, too. Just imagine a belt and tie. Suits have all those parts. And shoes you couldn't slip on. He wore wingtips. Horrors. Though our little-girl bedroom was pink and red madness that meant nothing to us, we had not been consulted in the matter, those colors were imposed upon us and we did not feel defined thereby. I don't know how it would have worked out if we'd been asked. Blue and green, my favorites, would have caused trouble, would have screamed BOY COLORS and yellow, the nice safe gender neutral of my childhood, gave me a bad headache and a little bit of a stomach ache. (It's better now, between me and yellow, but I have to be careful. It is kind of fun, though, like there's a whole new color in the world now that I am old.) So. We didn't at first get it about not being boys because we thought we were just people. He wore a suit to church and we wore dresses like our momma and he carried a gun to work but I carried a lunch to school and the sisters were too little to do anything so they played all day and our mom cooked and sewed because she was in the house with the stove and the sewing machine handy. We were all different. Differences that might have occurred in any group, that might have been coincidental or preferential. And then, too, in the early years none of us realized we were part of a pattern worked in one color, girl on girl. It was not till later, till the fourth sister came along when I was about ten, that I really began to take it in. No boys, no sons. Not ever.

So, black powder. Seriously.

In case you don't know and want to, but just very briefly so you won't be driven to a design blog in despair, what you (probably) think of as a bullet is actually a cartridge, containing bullet (or shot), powder, and a primer (also called a cap) in one tidy package called a casing or shell. You find spent shells when you go on hikes; you use them for whistles and carry them home in your pockets because your dad reloads them. More on that later. If you put that package, that cartridge, in a gun and the package is facing the right direction when you pull the trigger the pin in the gun's hammer will connect smartly with the cap (remember I said this was simplified) causing a small explosion in the casing which hurls the dense lead part, the bullet, out the barrel of the gun and on its way to whatever end you had in mind. Or perhaps to some end you never even considered, but that would be your fault and nothing to do with either the bullet or the gun. Fortunately for us all, you cannot load a bullet (cartridge) backwards and if somehow you did, nothing could happen.
Now, in the old days, cap, shot and powder had each to be loaded separately and most carefully into the gun every time it was fired. Laboriously and painstakingly, powder had to be measured, poured down the barrel (or muzzle) of the gun, covered with a cloth, pounded into place, the bullet sent down the muzzle and pounded also, then the cap set carefully on the firing pin. That was a loaded gun. This had to be done each time a gun was fired before it could be fired again. You remember this, you read this process in Little House in the Big Woods. Originally a cartridge was a paper tube containing a measure of powder (called a round or a charge), the end of which a soldier bit off to pour into his gun. If you watch movies with cannons that shoot cannon balls you'll see this same process on a large scale. In the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan there is a gorgeous costume on display, Turkish (as I recall), the chest covered by two double bandoleers covered with hand carved wooden cartridges, each fitted with a cork held by a little string. Think how much time you'd save on the battlefield, with all that pre-measuring. Of course, you have to reload standing up straight and tall and making a marvelous target for, let's say, a guy with a slingshot (the "shot" used in a slingshot is the same word as the "shot" which is a bullet).
There you are, the history of gunpowder warfare from, like, ancient Egypt (look it up on Wiki) through roughly the American Civil War, when they started using breech loading rifles (which you could reload while lying down), and after which guns firing cartridges in the modern sense quickly became the norm. A gun requiring the old fashioned sort of labor intensive loading is commonly called a muzzle loader and the hunts dedicated to this type of gun are referred to as muzzle loader or "black powder" hunts.

OK?

That's what the storyteller was talking about, asking who'd been on a black powder hunt. DON"T YOU LOVE LEARNING THINGS? I know I do.

What sort of person, you're asking yourself, hunts like this?
And what sort of person knows this stuff?
And, why?
Your answers, in order of asking, are, my dad, his girls and I really could not tell you.

The sort of person who'd lug powder, shot and caps with him is my dad. The purist, in it for the shooting experience. Get your deer on the first shot, there won't be a second one. Or, kill the cougar or bear coming after you with that one shot. When hunting with a muzzle loader you aren't required by either the laws of the land or your own common sense to wear traffic cone orange, which no deer in its right mind ever, ever wore in nature. As with the bow hunt, on the black powder hunt you can disguise yourself as a tree, or as brush, or as a deer, and this because neither arrows nor lead shot ever hurt anybody. I mean, think about it. Examine our history. Usually bow hunters manifest in camouflage and for black powder you look like a mountain man. I think that's a big draw, the costumes. Back in the day my dad hunted all of everything (bow, muzzle loader, doe, buck, elk, moose, elephant, python, Kodiak bear, cannibal, and a bunch I've forgotten) but now you have to draw out for your hunt so he only goes once. If he's lucky. When I was small, though, there was plenty of hunt for everyone.

We all went, the sisters, one time or other. I don't think any of us ever carried a gun. They're heavy, you know, and we'd have had to take hunter's safety courses and all that nonsense and for what? I think my middle sister got her licence when she was old, I don't remember. Maybe they all did and we just never discussed it at the dinner table. Or I put it out of my mind. Really, I think most of us turned out to be girls, in the end. Certainly all the sons-in-law and (I think) all the grandsons have had licences, even Noah who I'm not sure could kill something if his life depended on it. Maybe if someone else's did, his sister's, maybe. The youngest sister. For me as a child, hunting was about keeping my dad company, about feeling he was very lonely in some far off way and wanting badly to do something other than sort of stand around aching for him about that.

My clearest memories of those hunts were of hiking, of eating the lunches he carried for us and of being told to sit and wait very quietly till he got back.

The hiking was fraught, much more so than at other times, with the awareness that while you and your dad were creeping along quietly and carefully, all around you were other people, possibly hundreds of other people, moving quietly and carefully who very much wanted to shoot something which would be dressed in brown, like you were, and which would also be moving along quietly and carefully.
I say it was more fraught than at other times because we were very well aware that in the mountains of the American west there may at any time be people creeping about who want to shoot things, maybe you. But at those other times they might be distracted, and there would not be near so many of them as in the fall of the year, when they were likely also unusually focused. So you had to be careful. For me, being careful meant keeping my dad between myself and whomever might be wanting to shoot at me and as I never knew from moment to moment where these people might be I had to shift my position frequently as we glided along. Shifting as often as I felt was necessary for safety hampered my gliding abilities and got me into trouble with my dad who wanted me to pick a spot and glide in it. And sometimes there was a little sister tossed into the mix; was she then an additional shield or a civilian requiring my aid and comfort? Striving in vain to avoid examining the huge dilemma of sheltering behind living people in the first place. Suppose I shifted at the crucial moment, triumphed and it was my dad who was shot, not me? What then? I knew how to find a stream and knew that in Utah all streams lead to people, but, for reals? That's what was going to happen? And what about the questions my mother and the police would inevitably ask regarding my position at the time of the shooting? Knotty moral conundrums I could wrestle around, distracting myself from freezing feet and fingers.

The lunches he brought remind me of outfits I see on people in the street. I often ask people (in my mind, only in my mind) what they were hoping for when they assembled those articles of clothing and how they were able to tell when they had finished. What, I ask them silently, was this supposed to have done for you, had it gone well? My little girl self felt like that about the lunches. My momma's lunches were organized around a theme, say, tuna sandwiches, and had accessories appropriate to that central idea, cut up apple perhaps, potato chips and milk. A cookie or two for after if you ate enough apple and fish. My dad's lunch choices appeared to be completely random gatherings sharing only two defining principles.
1-You could carry it without mess in your pockets.
2-You seldom or never saw this food on our table at home.
Notice that none of the considerations were
3-Little girls will eat this,
which was how I first met kippered snacks and learned hunger is not the worst thing that can happen to you, not by a long shot (archery term). The best lunch memory is of my dad carefully opening a can of Vienna sausages so that the pull-off top stayed connected on one side, making a handle. He balanced the can on the edge of the fire (always build a fire. always) so the sausages would heat up in their own juices in their own tiny pot and he could lift them from the fire and spread them on bread. I was so impressed by his cleverness, his canny way with food and fires and cans. I did not know it but I felt just like I was in a Hemingway story with Nick. Big Two-Hearted Creek. My dad was so cool. Warmed up Vienna sausage on bread was not chosen because little girls would eat it, but it carried nicely in the pocket and was certainly not something that would ever show up on our table at home.

After lunch and more gliding there always came a point when I was positioned on a rock and told to wait quietly till he came back and no matter what not to move from that spot. I'd sit on the rock and watch him gliding away, brown on brown, till I could no longer see him moving through the trees. I suspect now that I am old this was the only real hunting time on days when he was blessed with company. For me it was alone time for more philosophical reflection. Ruminations on mortality and the certainty of death, on the human tendency to worry and imagine the worst and the fruitlessness of making contingency plans, and some serious puzzling over the oddness of an obviously lonely person wanting to leave a companion and go off to be by himself. I wondered how he would ever remember where he left had me (though I doubted less after I saw his wilderness cooking skills) and adopted the technique, which I have used ever since, of setting an arbitrary deadline, of deciding when to turn worry into action. If he isn't back by the time the sun touches those trees...
Now I use it with my kids. And the painter. If he hasn't called in an hour...if the fever goes up another degree...if she comes home crying one more time...then...
I'll find the stream and follow it home.

Black powder. Seriously.

Not last weekend, because I was listening to stories last weekend, but the one before that, I took my youngest child camping. With some of the sisters and their families and my folks and my brother-in-law's folks. It's important to camp with Mike's parents so someone brings the seriously good food. On the last day they got out the rest of the eggs (they brought waaaaay too many eggs, funny thing) and shot them with a BB gun. Eggs give a tiny jump and then explode softly when shot. Silly, wasteful and very cool. Everyone was taking turns except some of us old people who were just watching and my little girl, who stoutly refused to join in. Oddly. Because, it dawned on everyone at the same time, she didn't know how to shoot and didn't want to learn in front of everyone. Not that she wouldn't have had enthusiastic teachers. I think that was the problem, too many coaches.
Now here's the thing. I felt horrified, a failure, like I do when I realize she knows almost no nursery rhymes. What's with that? How could that have happened? I don't congratulate myself when she discusses The Winter's Tale or her favorite museums in Amsterdam. Feels normal. But not knowing how to shoot? I was at a loss. She did give in, finally, after her aunt convinced her a BB gun never, ever kicks. I watched my dad watching her shoot. There had been a disagreement (elbow lifted and held out straight (an archer's prejudice) or tucked in tight (sensible)) and he stood close as her aunts taught her how to sight along the barrel at the eggs. I was behind, watching her, watching them, watching my dad stand with his hands in his pockets, letting somebody else do this, teach this. He doesn't shoot as much anymore, he doesn't see well.

Time was a gun dealer would bring a gun newly in his possession to my dad, to shoot, to break down, to give his opinion. But he won't wear glasses. Some of us think maybe he is a little vain. He watches my girl getting advice from everywhere at once. Not much from him, though he weighs in on elbow position (up).

Time was he loaded his own cartridges, tables covered with presses, casings rolling around or standing in ordered rows like soldiers, containers of shot and of powder, tiny, grainy, black spills. He could tell you, by the sound, the gun that had just been fired. Movies really bothered him. "You don't get a ricochet in the middle of a sandy desert." "That pistol wasn't used in that war." "Wrong caliber!" Grrr.
"Careful where you point that," he bellows suddenly, "I don't care whether it's loaded or not!"

Time was he would go shoot for the joy, for the exercise of his will and his wit, to blow off frustration and to be better and better where he already excelled. He stands with his hands in his pockets, thin, hunched in his shoulders. A cold wind has come up, blowing us out of our camp. My little girl is taking aim (badly) and breathing deeply. She's anxious, I wonder why. I hear him telling me to shoot between my breaths.

ping

She's smiling and asking if she can shoot again and she does, again and again. She's in love with that BB gun. Never hits an egg. Hits the watermelon they set up next, though. She's delighted. My dad looks back at me, smiling, pleased, wondering. I remember asking him, why, why shoot? Why get good at it? For war? Aren't we supposed to be spending all our time trying to be like God? So why? And him looking at me with his left eye over his left shoulder and asking back at me, you don't think God's a good shot? and blowing away the Miracle Whip bottle set up on the top of an old nasty bureau at the dump. bam smash tinkle slither

Time was he shot at man-shapes in the FBI firing range.
Time was he kept a gun under the seat of the car.
Built his ammunition. Shot with black powder. Fed us the meat he hunted off the mountain.
Time was he shot for discipline, for precision, for perfection.
He brought the watermelon. I watch him standing, watching his grandkids filling it with lead. Strange family outing. Never will be entirely sure why he brought the melon.
Time was you could only vacuum under the sofa with difficulty, what with the guns lurking there. Not like that anymore. I own a gun because of him. So does the painter. I'm fully expecting my lovely little daughter to ask for a BB gun this Christmas. Along with the pocket knife she's been begging for, along with a blow dryer and make up and glitter and fairy dress ups. He stands watching his daughters shoot, their children waiting impatiently for a turn. Stands alone. The shooting's not perfect anymore. He watches. I watch him, both of us alone.

Sit here on this rock and don't move till I come back.

Black powder. Seriously.


Noah's photos

Stories. Make your bed; Lie in it.

I love thee not; therefore pursue me not.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Sc. 1

Thinking about beds again. Still. Perhaps because, as I sleep so poorly, I experience for much of any given night the bed as a bed. Perhaps because remembering stories has brought back someone I hadn't looked at closely for a ton of time. Perhaps because in a letter a friend talked about important people, past and present.
So, a tiny story about an unmade bed and a friend.
And the necessary backstory.
Because I want us to understand him.

I watch the western sky, the sun is sinking.
The geese are flying south, it sets me thinking.
I did not miss you much, I did not suffer,
What did not kill me just made me tougher.
Sting

Rick was a debater and, lacking a harsher, brighter, sharper term, I'll call him my friend. Debaters are, in my experience, pushy, bossy people who never for a moment question whether they might be wrong or mistaken, regardless of which side of a question they argue, and Rick was born debating. I was not a debater but at the time this tiny story takes place I was on the speech team, in fact, I had a speech and debate scholarship, because of Rick. Because he bossed and pushed me onto the team, dragged me (I'm not exaggerating here, pulled and pushed and manhandled me) into Dr. Parnell's office (I love you still, Dr. Parnell) where, after recomposing himself (our journey had left us both a bit...mussed), he informed the good doctor that I desired to try for the team and would now recite a poem.
A tense, slightly surreal moment followed.
Dr. Parnell was very surprised and very polite (and a good, good person, not at all bossy or pushy and consequently hurting for talent on his team. The next year Richard Wheeler would be the coach and he would be marvelous and wonderful and bossy and pushy and have a big, successful team and I love him still, too). He put down his pen, turned a bit from his desk, steepled his fingers, smiled encouragingly and gave me his full attention. Like this was all very normal.
While I do admire a man who awards me his undivided focus, at that moment I was busy with my own focus, my internal counsel divided as to whether I should murder Rick while I was clearly not in my right mind and said murder would, by any competent jury, be excused as a crime of passion in self defense or wait till later, when though it would be a cold-blooded crime, premeditated, it would lack witnesses. A counsel divided just stands there.

It was a weird moment, tense, as I have said, and it stretched out kind of too far because I was not only angry, I had not asked for this and I was scared. Really scared to say a stupid poem for this slender, mild academic who was now looking kindly, carefully, away from the awkward, seething, mute stranger at his side and glancing politely but questioningly over at his star debater. Something? Anything? Since Rick just stood, his back against the door, arms folded, mouth closed, ostentatiously calming his breathing, giving me silent glare for silent glare, Dr. Parnell turned back to me to wait with calm hands and only slightly raised eyebrows, clearly communicating that he was a gifted teacher who lived to help young people reach their full potential, however oddly they went at it, and that he was there for me.
Whenever.

I found I couldn't hate Rick more than I wanted to like Dr, Parnell, that I couldn't scratch Rick's eyes out or burst into tears or faint on this lovely man so I just caved, collapsed, crumbled, and said the damn poem.

For that small, small act of succumbing I received in exchange all the surprised applause, admiring, sincere praise and monetary rewards a freshman girl could desire. As, I suppose, Rick had known I would. Well, probably not, on reflection, all the monetary rewards a freshman girl could desire; not all of those, no, but more than than I had seen coming in the brief, fierce struggle down the quiet hall of the old administration building to Dr. Parnell's office. Rick had not mentioned scholarships, but as Dr. Parnell happily questioned me, discovering I had been a Sterling Scholar in English, reflecting that I knew my way around spoken English, even in verse form and that there was certainly money in that, Rick gave me one firm nod. Yes. As it should be. And off they went, Rick and the doctor praising my recitation to the skies and commending each other for discovering me and plotting my imminent addition to the team, while I got to be simultaneously livid (discovery?!? hey, you guys know I'm still here, right? what am I suddenly, an object?) and secretly, terribly, pleased (hey! they like me! they really like me! and I've just become an...an..object! coool). This was precisely the way things always turned out with Rick. Huge rewards in return for what any sane person would describe as small, unimportant losses. Like being forced to audition.
It was horrible.

Horrible and every time a huge defeat, but the defeats never made any difference except for differences like this one, for example; thanks to Rick's machinations I suddenly had a full scholarship handed to me, which was HUGE since we were poor at home and it would never, in a zillion years, have occurred to me to try for one myself. I would not have thought I merited any such thing. Never would have crossed my mind. When I say it made no difference I mean it made no difference to Rick. I so, so, didn't want him to shove me onto a better place (again!), to force me into being (once more) infinitely better off, because. Because. Because I felt a deep moral obligation to resist. Afraid that if he succeeded he would think he ruled the world and, hellfire and damnation, I was not going to be a part of any world Rick ruled. Trouble was, he did rule the world, and he knew he ruled it. He would be just the same, to me, the very same, the day after he had smoothed my way at school (perhaps, perhaps, even made it possible for me to continue) as he had been the day before and would be two weeks hence. Had I triumphed in my little rebellion, preventing him giving me that desperately needed help, he then would have been, with me, the selfsame Rick of the day before. He would notice neither my gratitude nor my vexation. Monarchs do not require, thanks anyway, appreciation for improving the lives of their subjects, it's what they were born to do, but neither do they ask approval or permission for their plans. They execute; you benefit. Had I thwarted his intervention on my behalf, he, as king of the world, would have been well within his acknowledged rights to have committed me forthwith to a lunatic asylum. Not a voice would have been raised in my defense. Not one. Not, of course, that Rick would ever have told, mentioned in any way either that he helped me or that I resisted. Had I pushed him away hard enough, unbreakably stony and silently unyielding in Dr. Parnell's office, Rick would have just looked at me, then held the door open for me as we left, made pleasant conversation or not as he walked me to my dorm and disappeared from my life for a month. Or shown up the next day sitting with his feet on my grandmother's quilt, his homework spread all over my bed, ignoring me at close range. Or brought me lunch and left it on my desk. Or asked me to the Winter Ball. Or brought a truly hot date to hang out in my living room. Or none of these. Just as he would if he succeeded.

I see myself never writing fiction. Harder than I can do to wrestle someone I knew onto a (virtual) page and bind him there with words. How impossible to build a man from the ground, flesh him out to the full. Of course, I could simplify. Yes, that must be what sometimes happens. I've read those books.

Rick was not simple. One evening after a fracas (never one to back down, me) with the football-playing boyfriend of my (former) cheerleader roommate I stumbled out to the big common room, too angry even to see tables and chairs. I have a bad temper and though I'm better now, at this point in my life I believe I had several bad tempers warring even with each other. Sat with my back to the room, face to the bricks, melting, dissolving, consumed. Rick was suddenly crouching beside me, remote, curious. Asking what was wrong with me. How did he do that? Materialize like that? And how did he choose his moments? I was unable to give complete responses but could indicate I'd had a set to. Rick stood and considered me from that altitude then held out his hand. "Come on, there's someone you need to meet." Sorry, Rick, not this time, oh, so not in the mood. I didn't deign to look at him or his hand. He calmly used it to haul me up and begin dragging me. I became compliant quickly; it was embarrassing when he did that. He took me across the dark campus, humming Primary songs, and knocked at an office door (yep, we've seen this before). A small, homely, sandy haired man answered, delighted to see Rick. Rick said, "She needs to talk," and closed the door with me on the inside. The man sat down smiling, as if all this were perfectly commonplace. Perhaps it was, certainly judging from my experience Rick may have spent much of his sophomore year dragging struggling freshman girls into the offices of wonderful teachers and counselors.
This man was one, a wonderful teacher and counselor, and a father and a bishop and after he asked me what was on my mind I talked to him for two hours. It was already late when I started. I have no idea how he led any sort of life, helping people willy-nilly that way, but he saved my life, that night and many times after that night. When I finally opened the door to leave, all cried out and floating on the peace that bishop had poured into me, Rick was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, staring into the distance, waiting. He got up without a word and walked me a very little of the way home. I ran the rest alone, always terrified in the dark.

He was not nice to me. He made fun of me, cruelly. I walked into my bedroom from the bathroom, dressing for a dance in a borrowed formal, and he was just there, sitting at my desk. He looked up from his book, ignoring my spluttering and shock to look me over, asked if I would marry him, and went back to his reading. I said something hard and empty and scathing. It didn't matter. It never mattered what I said. The thing about Rick was that nothing made a dent. I know, I kicked and kicked. If you fail to leave a mark you vanish without a trace.

"I'm singing at church," he said. "Come." I went with Jane who was a year older than me and had been Rick's friend since the year before and loved him. I loved Jane. He came in, saw us, nodded, sat with other girls. Stood up to sing with boys I didn't know, making them look like children though they had returned from their missions and he had yet to go. Stood with his hand in his pocket, calm, offhand, waiting like nothing. And when they sang, he sang the solos. I guess the shock showed on my face, and he saw it. Royalty does not smirk when it is acting royally but the thing they do that is smirking is what he did. "He can sing," I said to Jane. "He can sing." She smiled at me with too-bright eyes, the special, happy sadness of a wonderful girl best friends with a man who will not love her. "Silly," she said kindly to me, "of course he can sing. How else do you think he played Danny last year?" He did? He acts? Too? I hadn't known. He had played the lead in Grease and quarrelled fiercely, continuously, with the director; the blond girl who played Sandy had been his girlfriend and wasn't anymore. I don't think he spoke to her that year. He stood in the church, singing like a miracle, like a dream. Left without talking to us.

Now you know a little about this friend. Only you don't know how silly he was, sillier than anyone could possibly be while looking for all the world like America's ambassador to France. You know how Edward-the-Vampire can get people to do things by smiling at them and leaning forward while he talks? Rick could do that for reals and he was every bit as dangerous. I don't know how to write about him smart and funny, clever and kind, making everyone in the room (especially, but not exclusively, the girls) feel like they were special and known. I can't write that stuff, I don't know how. Would I say, we all went on a hayride and Rick was there on the wagon and no one minded that he isn't in our ward and he was just so much fun! So dear! Made us laugh all evening! Even the Priesthood brethren! Helped everyone down from the wagon and complimented everyone and sat with his arm around everyone and brought them treats! What a guy! And he looks so mature for his age! There, now can you see it? I made that up, but it would be something like that. Arm around everyone. Just don't try to be the girl sitting next to him. Just don't try.

Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?
Or rather do I not in plainest truth
Tell you I do not nor I cannot love you?
Midsummer, Act II, Sc.1

He did look older than the rest of us. I marked my eighteenth birthday during the months I knew Rick. He was nineteen and not on a mission, but should have been, he told me. Should have been gone. I made him show me his driver's licence. One of the few times he really smiled at me. About me. I thought it was the moustache that made him look so much older till a day I came trudging home from class to find him reading on the (former) cheerleader roommate's bed. (You don't get plot like this at BYU.) He kept his head down while I worked through the roll of irritation and exasperation (privacy, locked doors, personal space, why bother, where is my chocolate?). Our customary ritual of greeting. Then he looked up slowly and I didn't know him because the moustache was gone and because he looked oddly...real. Exposed. Wary? Hurtable. Still immeasurably older than me, immeasurably distant, the beautiful Governor Royal of the Eastern Seaboard, beloved for his flawless management of all matters from weather to birthday presents yet pained in his glorious soul that while his books of poems were critically acclaimed, the populous had not embraced them and poetry is so edifying for a populous. Ah well, he would only be pained in secret, only show a sliver of it here, on my roommate's bed.
"You shaved," I said. "I did," he answered. "I like this better," I said and that was brave and a gift. "It'll grow back," he said.

"I don't have a partner so you're debating with me. I entered us."
Snow was hosting a speech meet and I was there to say my poem and help Dr. Parnell. That's all I was there for.
"I don't have a partner so you're debating with me. I entered us. Here's our number."

Flabbergasted is such a luscious word. Say it to yourself with concentration and lots of breath support. Webster tells me it's 18th century slang, probably from flabby and aghast. Those words were me. Fabulous. The stuff of fable. I'd never seen, never seen, a debate round. "Oh, sweetie," he said, hands tight and supportive on both my arms, "it doesn't matter what you say because I'll be speaking second. And anyway, it's too late. What are you worried about?" looking at me carefully, "You look terrific. And I'll buy you lunch."
Lunch. Hmm.
"What's the resolution?" I ask carefully.
"Mmm?" He's flipping through note cards. "Ask Gary."
Gary is Dr. Parnell, who tells me I am a lifesaver and administers emergency aid. And tells me the room number. Rick is waiting at the table in the front of the room, impatient. I say, "You didn't tell me the room number." "Hurry," he says, "you're the first speaker, remember? I know I told you that."

After, I wait to stop shaking and for Rick to talk to me. Something? Anything? He's shaking hands with the other team, who come shake hands with my shaking hands and are very nice, and now he's talking to the judges who he knows, who smile at me, and now he's gathering stuff. Nothing.
"Was it alright?" I ask.
"It was fine. Why?" He's being an idiot.
"Did I do alright?"
"You were great. We didn't forfeit the round." (That kills a team score.) "And I told you, it didn't matter what you said." He is finishing, looking at me, impassive and also curious. "You speak really well. Your thought processes are very strange. Lunch?"
Yes.

But his wallet is in his jeans pocket in his room and he has to help with tabulation but we can still get lunch if I will run and get his money. Run means run, lunch is only an hour. I excel at running in heels (after all these years science has shown how good it is for us, sprinting on our toes). And I'm hungry and he owes me.

This is the story I set out to tell, not Rick ruling the world or the speech meet or our lunch or the rest of the day or how he left school after finals or how he would call me, sometimes, looking for Jane. Just the story of me getting his wallet.

I had forgotten about his room and it set me back a bit. He and his roommate were conducting an experiment, determining what would happen if no one ever hung up clothing again. Lesser people have toyed with this same project in an unscientific and haphazard way (a badly conducted version is going on not twenty feet from where I now sit typing); these two proposed a rigorous application of the scientific method. Question, hypothesis, careful documentation. They took pictures, posted a notebook for ease in recording observations. The pile of clothing completely filled the space between the unmade beds and spilled up onto them. (Not making beds was part of this, too. Of course.) You could open the door but that was it. I mentioned, I think, how silly Rick could be, well, he had told me the jeans were on the floor between the beds but there was no longer a floor. Time was wasting and I worked fast, grabbing with my right hand and, as everything in the pile proved not to be jeans with a wallet in them, chucking stuff onto the bed at my left. I'd gone about a third of the way into the pile and was actually reaching into the back pocket of a pair of jeans for what I was fairly sure was my lunch ticket when I became aware of the most awful creeping horror. The clothing I had been piling onto the unmade bed was moving. Slowly, shifting, without apparent direction. And it started breathing, moaning a little, now moving more and moving faster. I was clawing my way through the door (with the wallet) when a gym shoe flashed out from under the crawly, tumbling mass and I saw all. Rick's roommate, indistinguishable amidst his own experiment's apparatus, had been napping in the petri dish and I had buried him under a mountain of scientific evidence.

Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit,
For I am sick when I do look on thee.
Midsummer, Act II, Sc.1

That's my little story. That's it. That's what I thought of for years, if I thought of Rick at all. The lost wallet and the haunted bed. Till I tried to put it down here, just a funny storylet, and discovered I had to explain, justify, reveal, something, anything, lest anyone assume from what I said that not hanging up his clothes summed up this person I have renamed Rick so that I could write about him without his permission. In writing we rule the world; I work without his assent, I protest to myself that I needn't justify my memories. Sometimes, trying to show you how I saw him and burdened by only the memories I have, some secret, some faded, I spun little scenes that never were, but that were as really him as anything that ever happened. He made me take all those out, stay scrupulously truthful. I felt him laughing at me for using words I cannot spell, guesses so bad spell check runs amok in a hundred false directions. He always mocked my odd vocabulary; "That would be a word you've never heard spoken, right?" and corrected the pronunciation. He scared me into caution. He really was funny. Making me take a history class held in the late afternoon he promised, "It doesn't matter which half you sleep through, the other half will be amazing." The gift of that professor was so great I was a history major for two whole terms. And I held back, here, the unbelievable stories, how he took me to a formal and spent the whole time talking to other girls, dancing with them and me sort of alongside, then the elaborate, fantastical compliments he paid me when I threw a fit about it, apparently expecting me to believe the story he spun, that the depth and danger of my charms left him no alternative. And how he turned away again. And how I carried those compliments for weeks, for a year. Stuff of fables. But I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted what I said to matter.

What is the force that binds the stars?
I wore this mask to hide my scars.
What is the power that pulls the tides?
I never could find a place to hide.
What moves the earth around the sun?
What could I do but run and run and run?
Afraid to love, afraid to fail,
A mast without a sail.
The moon's a fingernail and slowly sinking,
Another day goes by and now I'm thinking,
That this indifference was my invention
When everything I did sought your attention.
You were my compass star, you were my measure,
You were a pirate's map, a buried treasure.
If this was all correct, the last thing I'd expect,
The prosecution rests, it's time that I confessed,
I must have loved you.

Ghost Story
Sting

Meditations. By the Numbers.

Things I don't count.
Times I replay a favorite song.
Minutes spent sitting in a car talking to a friend.
Pairs of underwear and socks.
Cost of sending packages to a boy in Hong Kong.
Time lost to housework because I was dancing.
Calories from fresh fruits or veggies.
Mint leaves for garnish on 180 pieces of cake at a wedding.
The times I rake my lawn every fall.
Cost of supplies used at church.
Compliments.
Number of gifts for you as opposed to me. Unless you care.
Trips to my kids' schools.
Times I check to see if I've gotten an answer from a friend.
Favors for people I love.
Calories in a bite/slice/layer of the best wedding cake. Ever.
Coins in my change.

Things I count.
Books read.
Quail or deer or fish in a stream.
One hour of hard walking.
Beats in a song.
Times something was really not all it was cracked up to be.
Amount of food brought to a meal vs. number of people in the family.
Seconds in the space between lightening and thunder.
Weekly trips to the temple.
Kids in my care.
Actors vs. characters.
Minutes, backwards, between when I have to be there and when I will have to leave.
Items per child for Christmas stockings.
Costume changes.
Mispronunciations in movies. Especially church movies.
Favors for people who irritate me.
Good restaurants in Provo.
Bills given as change.
Dresses I think actually look good on me.
Belts, gloves, swords, boots, daggers.
Times, in a single casual conversation, someone uses a troubling word like fat or coping or paralyzed or drowning or if.
Times I think the painter isn't listening to the answer to a question he asked.

Things I cannot count.
Times I have misspelled the word sentence.
Number of words I regularly misspell.
Times, in prayer, I have spoken the words, "please help..."
Number of prayers with the words, "please help..." which have been answered.
Help from friends.
Times I have lain awake between the hours of three and five a.m.
All the perfectly beautiful walks.
Times, in a public place, I have not noticed someone who then assumed I was avoiding them.
Kisses from children.
Times in rehearsal I have said, "Do it again."
Weeds pulled.
Times I have missed mistakes even though I reread it a thousand times.
All the ways I dislike cleaning my kitchen.
The joys of a well-turned sentence.
Times I have said, "This is really good food."
Wishes made on stars, candles, dandy lion fluff, coins, wishbones, eyelashes.
Wishes I have never told lest they not come true.
The number of questions I can ask my kids to which their answer will be, "almost."

Things I must not count.
Number of times my children have answered "almost."
Times we have escaped certain death.
Times I nearly really hurt someone.
Times I was right, like I said all along.
Times I really hurt someone.
The number of times I just forgot to reread it.
Other people's blessings.
Dusty surfaces.
Chickens, unhatched.
Ways people should be helping me.
My flaws.
Good things I really could be doing.
Nights of sound, unbroken sleep.
Books I finished, anyway, to see how they would end.
Times, in conversation, I have failed a friend.
Times I think the painter isn't listening to the answer to a question he asked.

Things I don't count anymore.
To three, with my kids.
Stairs.
Kisses.
Compliments.
Days till deadlines.
Days till major holidays.
Times I have lost this weight.
My toys. Then your toys.
Times I have gained this weight.
Candles on my birthday cake.
Grey hairs before I pull them out.
Times I have finished a book and not been able to hand it to the person who needs to read it next.

Things I wish I didn't count.
Polite, kind, happy strangers.
Times certain rooms in this house have been clean.
Clean, pleasant, public restrooms in the UK.
Favors for people I dislike.
Ice cubes in Europe.
Dinner invitations.
That one sweet waiter in Paris.
Prompt, well worded responses.
Times I laugh out loud in a "comedy."
Times people have told me, "You'll adore this book; I cried and cried."

Things I should start counting.
Days till deadlines.
Days till major holidays.
Hours of sleep beginning no later than 10 p.m.
Times spent standing in lines to acquire things I may not actually want.
Money spent for services I never use.
Books checked out at any given moment.
Times someone rescues me.
Times I say "oh, sorry" when I really mean "you go think about something else now."
Trips, per year, to the dentist.
Times I can sit and be perfectly still.
Times I have talked to someone till I could neither sit up nor think straight but never run out of things to say.
Times I ate the rest of it, all of it, anyway.
Times I have finished a book and felt the world pause while I savor a perfect rightness of being.

Meditations. Not About Sleeping

When I was about five my mom taught me to make my bed by myself. A new sister was sucking up all the available energy and my mom needed more help. Also, she always liked teaching me to do stuff for myself. This trait must pass in the maternal line and she passed it to me. What would you do, how would you spell it, what is your plan, what have you tried so far, what do you think? Trying to get my kids to do it for themselves. Anyway, there I was at five, standing on the wall side of my pulled-out-from-the-wall bed, and my mom on the room side introducing me to doing this for myself. Her making the bed with forward, introduction, footnotes, commentary, afterward and bibliography; me making copious mental notes and frantic mnemonic devices. I'm doing this alone next time and forever after and who would ever have guessed there was a method, an order to it, a system, standards?

I have such a sharp little memory of those first solo days, standing at the bottom corner of my bed where I'd have to push myself between it and the wall, surveying the vast bedscape in the deep despair of someone too, too short for the task at hand. There was just so much of it and it had, somehow, I didn't remember how, become so chaotic in the night, seemingly without my cooperation or even permission. I was too short to see across the hugeness of the twin bed (called twin because the other little sister, not the new demanding one, had a bed exactly like it across the room from mine); I mean, I could see that there was another side to my bed but not all the way over the far edge. Any wandering thing of about my own size or smaller could have crouched on the yonder side in the triangle point where bed came to floor, unseen till I made my small-steps way around to push or pull whatever bedclothes layer came next in the straightening process, and if that crouching thing were a nasty thing (as seemed all too likely when I was five years old and laboring mightily all alone in my room making an enormous bed for seven hours every day) then at my approach the croucher might just scuttle, chuckling, to the next side around, keeping cunningly ahead of my small self, making no noise other than the very same soft rustling of sheets that my bed-making was making, too. Or so it seemed to me.

Traveling miles round and round acres of twin bed is what I remember most from those early days of bedmaking, toiling from one side of the bed to the other working the sheet (pull up this side, progress around the bed which has been shoved away from the wall, now pull up the other side), then the blanket, (pull on this side, journey to the bed's other side, pull, straighten, smooth), fold the sheet top over the blanket top (plod around to fold down the sheet top on the other side), haul away on the bedspread which outweighed me by about half (pull up on this side, walk, walk, pull up on the other and fold down, alllll the way around again to the far edge of the world, fold down on that side too), place the pillow, fold bedspread over pillow on this side (trek back to cover the pillow on the other side), smooth the whole surface (the size of Connecticut), push the bed back against the wall. I thought I was pretty good at it when all was said and done, as good as my mom, anyway, but the process took too much of my days and left me so winded I traditionally treated myself to a rest for a while after, lying on the floor alongside my newly neatened bed, looking carefully through the bedspread tassels to the under of my bed where so many brave belongings lived and protected me, colonists courageously holding the line, preventing any evil developing in the underscape. Thinking about it now that I am old, I'm no way sure my belongings were feeling courageous in their hearts. Bravery is all tangled up with volition and free will. My toys and clothes and trash were probably being brave the way Greek slaves thunked down in a colony on the edge of the empire and held there at sword point were brave. If you can't leave the scary hinterlands into which you've been placed, well, you've still got to raise your crops and your children and when the barbarians come a-marauding you take up the sword to defend as best you can the place where you're stuck. If your sword also protects the people living fat and happy in the heartland capitol and they call you brave and a hero, goody for them. I had set my lesser treasures in the underbed to protect me and they couldn't leave. My heroes.

Evil lurking belowdecks was a real and constant danger, and all due to those cursed thick bedspread tassels. We all, the little sister, myself and even my parents, had extreme bedspreads my grandmother sent us from Italy. The wool of a thousand wildly hairy sheep. The shipping must have been horrendous; they weighed the earth, it was like sleeping under one of those lead blankets they cuddle on you in x-ray rooms, only huge. Like the beautiful glass paperweight with the glass flower garden in its bottom that my grandparents sent from Murano, only instead of going on stacks of papers on a desk, these went on the beds to keep sheets and blankets and sisters from blowing away when strong winds swept through our house, say, on account of a carelessly opened door. Bedweights. In unimaginably far off Italy, Grandma still knew about the Santa Ana winds and prepared us accordingly. My parents' gold and white spread must have been bespoke, must have been custom made for their California king size bed. The little sister and I had spreads with big fat florals worked in blood red and its sister color, blood pink, heavily woven and ending in thick, thick tassels all around the bottom. (I needn't even mention that if people, certainly small girls, are going to brave the harsh winters of southern California they will surely require monstrous wool tapestries harvested from medieval Italian castles if they even hope to stay alive through the bitter nights. It's common knowledge.)

During daylight hours those tassels were a gift, indispensable for endless braiding practice, a life skill at which doughty orphans, enchanted princesses, sea captains' brave daughters and any other girl of merit possessing long hair or little sisters must exhibit great mastery and cunning. But at night, oh, at night any vile, bloodthirsty or vicious thingy (it needn't even be tiny, just small enough in one of its dimensions to snick into the underbed) might silently, gently slide its hands or paws or talons between and then softly around two of those puffy, bloody-pinky wool tails, push them soundlessly aside and come swaggering out like a mean teenager through a bamboo bead bedroom-door curtain (I had seen such teenagers on television) while I, far above in the dead center of my bed, held down helpless beneath the spread and all unawares in the dark, would be hard pressed to spot the beasty so I could scream before it fairly came upon me. And all the while I knew, unkindest cut of all, those same weak and silly tassels were simply withholding, by a whim of their structure, the stout nighttime protection a sensible, solid, all-the-way-to-the-floor spread (a quilt for instance, and this explains our ancestors' reliance on them) would by its very nature have provided, sweeping unbroken to the carpet on all sides of my bed, containing and confining the under ghouls behind dependable continuous fabric walls (which is why in castles they're called curtain walls (what a lot we're learning today!)). Burdened as I was managing those the treacherous tassels, self protection alone led me to encourage, nay, require aggressive underbed development and my bedroom planning and zoning committees allowed absolutely solid population density in such an at-risk area. My mom, capable in so many arenas, has an oddly difficult time grasping planning principles like these and this was a sore spot between us for years. My own children slept in beds I had built for them that have no under at all. In fact, if you look through my house what you won't see is much under. I like furniture solid all the way to the ground. Who needs dust and lost shoes and forgotten library books and spider holes and child-begotten food storage and hauntings? Under is just asking for trouble.

So are top sheets on beds. As good as the best gifts the painter has given me is the culture of the duvet, though in this house we call them by their Danish name which I'm far too indolent to try and figure out how to reproduce here. Growing up in my mother's house I never knew, never had any idea, about such things. Learning to pull up and fold down sheets at five years old, my construct of heaven had people sleeping under big soft quilts, like you do when you are lying sick on the sofa with a thermometer or when you take a nap, with nary a top sheet or woolen bedweight in sight. My mama may have sympathized but she told me, rightly, that the quilts would become dirty used in such a disrespectful manner and need near constant washing which would wear them out before their time. I bowed to this unanswerable wisdom while I lived at home but when I went to college the same grandmother who had sent the tormenting Italian tassels into my little life made me a cheerful new going-away-from-home quilt (she had taken up quilt making and transformed seamlessly from the source of night-terror producing bedweights to a maker of round-the-bed all-night protection) under which I brazenly slept with absolutely no top sheet whatever. Sizzle. And washed it accordingly. I still have that quilt, it looks like a leaf skeleton. My children sleep under duvets in the winter, quilts in the summer. Pull it up, smooth it out and it's made. The quilts do have to be washed often and no, they won't live long, they are brave heroes of our lives, buying us precious lifetime with lost years of quilt usefulness, courageous because they have to be.

But. The youngest has a tiny room right now and is sleeping against the ceiling with her desk and bureau and lounging space in an under so big it is transformed to something else all together, a room of its own. The middle one, in her new larger room, asked for the double bed she long ago unearthed dusty and rusty in a crazy shed in a deep backlot in Kanosh. She now has an under at once too small for storage and just big enough to suck up forever expensive dance shoes. The oldest sleeps across the world from us in whatever is missionary issue in Hong Kong. And this summer the painter confessed he prefers sleeping under a sheet in hot weather and I have found a quilt I like to have on the bed right now...so. Pull up and smooth, walk around allllll the way to the other side, repeat ad nauseum. The bed proportionately as large, now that I am grown and it is a king, as it ever was. I try always to remember to get the painter to help me make our bed before he leaves for the other house. It's far more than twice the work for one person to make a king sized bed than it is for two, but once it's tidy I can make the bed while he's gone with less effort than I use making it with his help. This has to do with the morning state of the unmade bed. Apparently I sleep in a bed like a letter sleeps in an envelope, which is odd, as I don't sleep either deeply or well. The painter sleeps the dreamless sleep of either the blessed or the damned, I don't know which, both are spoken of as deep, but whichever, he really messes up a bed. Here in our own house we don't mess about and bother with folding back the top sheet, just pull it straight up. A tiny rebellion. As soon the nights cool I'll get out my down comforter and sleep in heaven. Pull up, smooth, walk away.


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