Meditations. Do Unto.

Of the Remembrance of Benefits

Gesta Romanorum

There was a knight who devoted much of his time to hunting. It happened one day, as he was pursuing this diversion, that he was met by a lame lion, who showed him his foot. The knight dismounted, and drew from it a sharp thorn; and then applied an unguent to the wound, which speedily healed it.

A while after this, the king of the country hunted in the same wood, and caught that lion, and held him captive for many years.

Now, the knight, having offended the king, fled from his anger to the very forest in which he had been accustomed to hunt. There he betook himself to plunder, and spoiled and slew a multitude of travelers. But the king's sufferance was exhausted; he sent out an army, captured, and condemned him to be delivered to a fasting lion. The knight was accordingly thrown into a pit, and remained in terrified expectation of the hour when he should be devoured. But the lion, considering him attentively, and remembering his former friend, fawned upon him; and remained seven days with him destitute of food.

When this reached the ears of the king, he was struck with wonder, and directed the knight to be taken from the pit. "Friend," said he, "by what means have you been able to render the lion harmless?"

"As I once rode along the forest, my lord, that lion met me lame. I extracted from his foot a large thorn, and afterward healed the wound, and therefore he has spared me."

"Well," returned the king, "since the lion has spared you, I will for this time ratify your pardon. Study to amend your life."

The knight gave thanks to the king, and ever afterward conducted himself with all propriety. He lived to a good old age, and ended his days in peace.

My beloved, the knight is the world; the lame lion is the human race; the thorn, original sin, drawn out by baptism. The pit represents penitence, whence safety is derived.

---

Source: Gesta Romanorum, translated by Charles Swan, revised and corrected by Wynnard Hooper (London: George Bell and Sons, 1906)

*****

Some of us went to the coast, or to the beach, really only to the beach, for a few days with friends. From the beach house you could step out the backdoor, take four magical strides, fall over the sea wall, roll just a little way down the sand and be in the water. You'd never want to do that, it'd be dumb, but you could. Nearly all the days were sand and salt water, golden rainstorms and soft, soft sea air. Good things for a dried out Millard County girl.

We talked and ate and took walks and one day the painter oversaw the making of a monstrous sand worm, but mostly we did all the body boarding we could do and then some. After the first day spent almost solidly in the water I felt like I'd been in a serious car accident. Wonderful. I took a sleeping pill, which, I guess, did its best. After the second day I felt like I'd been in a serious car accident the day before. The first day had the best waves, totally worth a car accident; also worth, but only just, the wild abrasion I acquired and am sporting above my left knee. I'd have put in a picture of it here, I deeply considered it, but it would gross you out and I'm not about that. Maybe I'll post it on Facebook. To be honest, I was a little bit worried you'd think it was fake. It looks fake, or like something you'd see and say, "AaaaaH! What the-!-!-!-oh, wait, that's fake. It's fake, right? I mean, look at it. That's got to be fake," because you just so totally hope that if someone has that on their body it's fake, maybe yucky body art or some sort of dare.

I'll tell you how it happened. It was sort of a dare.
Toward evening there came a truly huge wave and my sweet youngest child, boarding for the first time, watching it mounting, growing toward us, blocking out the view of the distant islands, blocking more of the western sky than we were used to, said, "Oh. We're going to die."
And then, "I'm not going to try this one."
A tiny interior voice said to me, ooh, she's smart, not dying is smart.
I jumped on the wave.

*****

LAVINIA. I can't help you, friend. I can't tell you not to save your own life. Something willful in me wants to see you fight your way into heaven.

George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

*****

Through the wave, into the wave, I don't know, but not in front of it in an organized and manageable fashion. Too big for me, too pushy, too powerful. Broke me up completely, ate me alive. Bubbles go up, I reminded myself, blowing a little air to figure which way that was. A minute or so after I had got so I could breathe and see at the same time, we saw another big wave coming, like the one that had just messed me up. I held up my board and ran out to it. Oh. Good. I'm doing it this time. And I did.

*****
A lion roaming through the forest, got a thorn in his foot, and, meeting a shepherd, asked him to remove it. The shepherd did so, and the lion, having just surfeited himself on another shepherd, went away without harming him.

Some time afterward the shepherd was condemned on a false accusation to be cast to the lions in the amphitheater.

When they were about to devour him, one of them said, "This is the man who removed the thorn from my foot."

Hearing this, the others honorably abstained, and the claimant ate the shepherd all himself.

---

Source: Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1899)

*****

Not dying is smart and body boarding is fun and big waves are very cool. It took so much of me, staying on top of that wave, I just completely neglected my legs, lost touch, forgot to keep them lifted, ground my knee hard and serious across sixteen miles of sand. Maybe more. Salt water. Stings, you know. Examining the damage after, I found myself missing my boy Noah. He's got such a weak stomach, so easily tipped over by skin and bones and sutures and splints but he's fascinated by blood running across wet skin. And he loves to play in the waves. Eden plays hard too and if she hadn't had to stay behind in Utah, a slave to her senior year, she'd have photographed the knee with her cell phone, adding record of my arrogant carelessness to the gallery of softball, volleyball and dance injury pics she carries around with her (ooh, look, you can see the stitching on the ball in the bruise; man, look at the swelling!; oh, gross, this one's still got sand in it).

Ever since I washed, smashed up, out of the ocean and into the hot tub and from there climbed carefully into a wet suit that covered the destroyed knee, ever since I had to begin dealing with the hole I have torn in my fabric, ever since then a little, long lost memory has come tumbling over and over into my mind, like a bright bit of beach glass in the surf. The memory, over and over, and then gratitude. And also relief, huge gratitude and relief.

*****

LAVINIA. Blessing, Caesar, and forgiveness!

CAESAR (turning in some surprise at the salutation) There is no forgiveness for Christianity.

LAVINIA. I did not mean that, Caesar. I mean that WE forgive YOU.

METELLUS. An inconceivable liberty! Do you not know, woman, the Emperor can do no wrong and therefore cannot be forgiven?

LAVINIA. I expect the Emperor knows better. Anyhow, we forgive him.

THE CHRISTIANS. Amen!

CAESAR. Metellus: you see now the disadvantage of too much severity. These people have no hope; therefore they have nothing to restrain them from saying what they like to me. They are almost as impertinent as the gladiators.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

This is the memory. One summer, when I was home from school, from college, a friend from high school days showed up in Kanosh, living in a house his parents had moved away from but not sold. People do that in Kanosh, leave town, never come back, hang on to their real estate. They think they want to retire there, come back if they ever get a decent job, hide out when society goes to hell in a handbasket, sell when the market is better or after all their relatives die. Whatever. My friend was living in his parents' spare Kanosh house, working a summer job. I saw him around a couple of times, no big deal, we liked each other well enough and had always been friends of a single degree of separation; he had, for a longish while, been my best friend's boyfriend, that sort of thing. One evening that summer he took a hard, fast slide along a goodly stretch of road, still mostly wearing his motorcycle.
And went home, alone, to a spare house to recover.

*****

LAVINIA. (laughing) You know,Ferrovius, I am not always a Christian. I don't think anybody is. There are moments when I forget all about it, and something comes out quite naturally, as it did then.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

No one in Kanosh did anything for him, of course, they are not inclined to extend themselves on behalf of (comparably) healthy young adult males who really should be on missions but aren't, whose relatives are too tenuously connected to the core handful of long-time town families, boys who are not exactly troublemakers but might be, someday, maybe, maybe not. Since as the twig is bent, the tree will grow, I am firmly Kanoshian in many/most of my views on human relations, devoutly believing not only that most people mostly ought to take care of themselves, but that most of them truly, deeply would prefer to if allowed, but thank you very much. This doesn't mean I don't help lost children or stop to give directions or make cell phone calls to report crimes or hold open doors for folks who have their hands full. It does mean I would never dream of opening your door myself, just to check, just to see if you maybe could use some help for no reason other than that I suspect you may have your hands full.

*****

Androcles. No: it's very kind of you: but I feel I can't save myself that way.

The Editor. But I don't ask you to do it to save yourself: I ask you to do it to oblige me personally.

Androcles. (scrambling up in the greatest agitation) Oh, please, don't say that. That is dreadful. You mean so kindly by me that it seems quite horrible to disoblige you...But I must go into the arena with the rest. My honor, you know.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

But. I was moved with compassion for my friend. No idea why. Nothing at all romantic in our history, not even near misses, though some possible romantic something had certainly been examined, contemplated. All the kids in a small town are closely considered, willy nilly, by every adult as possible matches for every other kid in town, without regard for the personal inclinations and preferences of the actual, living kids and these imaginary pairings result in greater and lesser degrees of foreboding and/or delight among the adults (and may have been a tiny part of the reason we moved. shhh). As a victim of this conversational, parental shuffling, I had, only a few years before he spread his DNA across an intersection, actually phoned Road Rash Boy (after three days of frozen, horrified, concentrated inability to do so) and asked him to be my choice at a girls' choice dance, the only girl's choice dance I ever attended. My mother prodded me, knew best, bucked me up, drove me into it (I think she had already talked to his mother. I mean, I know she had). That calling, that asking, was without doubt the worst thing I had undergone in all my life to that point. After he said yes, after I got the phone back onto the cradle (historical reference, some of you may have to ask an old adult about that one) but before I stilled the shaking and caught all my breath, I closed my eyes and promised God that I would say yes to every boy who asked me on a date as a tribute to their incredible bravery and in memorial to the things I had just myself suffered. That promise would itself wreck a considerable amount of damage, of course, but I meant well. And the date was fine, just fine, first because nothing could possibly be as awful as the asking but also because he was really a great guy, very cute and smart and funny and unfailingly polite to adults. Which is why my mom wanted me to go out with him, I'm sure. I think I remember we were a bit bored on our date, this being in the ages before people dated in pods and myself not being much of a planner. He asked me if he could kiss me to fill some time and I found I couldn't just step into that in cold blood. Perhaps if he hadn't asked first...well. At any rate. The point of that story is, I went to the spare house offering my assistance with no prior commitment, no history save that which is common to mankind nor any blood at all between us, bad or good.

*****

THE CAPTAIN. You are right: it was silly thing to say. (In a lower tone, humane and urgent) Lavinia: do Christians know how to love?

LAVINIA. (composedly) Yes, Captain: they love even their enemies.

The Captain. Is that easy?

Lavinia. Very easy, when their enemies are as handsome as you.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

Nope. I only felt a sudden wave of terrible sorrow for him, like contemplation of dental procedures, like homesickness, like the memory or foreboding of a breakup, and was sure, positive, he had no medical supplies in that spare house. I gathered an armload of my mom's stuff and made my dad drive me over (as I had no license yet; another story). He didn't like this, my dad, me alone with a young male person in a spare house but I scoffed him into silence. Pish. What could possible happen? I'm not attracted to road rash, scabs are not sexy to me. I promised to call my dad for a ride back (as he was suddenly, singularly concerned. Under other circumstances, many, many other circumstances, I had walked lots further than that, but, you know, boys and stuff). I knocked at the door while he waited (hovered, really, but that would sound funny) in the car and thought my friend shouted something from inside; a noise, it could have been anything. I nodded and smiled to my dad in the car and confidently pushed my way in, shouldered the door right open, just as if I had been invited, just as if I had heard a come in. Dusky in his den, the light all blue from the TV. I sat down with my armload of medicines by the patient on the sofa who, having had no call upon his voice, no reason to speak since the day before, could only make a harsh strangle when he tried to yell an answer to my knock. The first thing I did for my friend, who was so thankful, undone, pitiably grateful, to see any human enter his spare house, was to help him get up so he could creep down the hall to the bathroom. It was a slow getting up, some of him was stuck to the sofa.

I applied Neosporin and strategic Bandaids and set out food and water around him and changed the channel on the TV and talked, called my dad, waited a bit awkwardly till he came, and left.

I climbed into the car with my dad, smiled to show how unharmed I still was, smiled silently out the window because my eyes and mind were filled with stills and with short movies of arms and shoulders and torn skin.
Huh, I thought in the car.

And later,
Maybe.
Maybe not.

Arms and shoulders and a boy who made no sound when I pulled off bandaids, hard and fast.

Maybe.

I went back some more times, maybe every night for as long as a week; maybe it was a short week. Till he didn't need me anymore for doctoring, only for company, and then I missed a night and now I have grown old I realize I don't know what happened to him; he left the spare house and I never saw him again.
Or thought of him. Til now.

*****

LAVINIA. Remember me for a fortnight, handsome Captain. I shall be watching you, perhaps.

THE CAPTAIN. From the skies? Do not deceive yourself, Lavinia. There is no future for you beyond the grave.

LAVINIA. What does that matter? Do you think I am only running away from the terrors of life into the comfort of heaven? If there were no future, or if the future were one of torment, I should have to go just the same. The hand of God is upon me.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

My leg is surprisingly, stupidly, painful, red and hot. It has a fever, I think. When I pack it with the herbs I have come to use on open wounds I am appalled that it...well, it kills. Really. Embarrassing, inconvenient. The pain subsides, I remind myself, and it does after longer than I want to write about. I lie back in bed, a taut, bright rivulet of pain shooting out one edge of the scrape, minuscule screaming demons riding booted and spurred up the side of my thigh. Effleurage. Deep breaths. Wait it out.

Hurt nearly always makes a memory, for me, that's why I so often write about it. It sticks, I remember those moments. I remember and remember my friend, scraped and ground to a fare-thee-well, as my mom says. He must have hurt so big, so bad, those days alone in the spare house, the blue TV evenings with no one to talk to, listening, maybe, for a girl from down the street who had not promised to come back, had not asked what else he might need, a girl who ran her hands gently over his scabs and did not speak all her thoughts. The pain will subside, I say to him in my mind, and I know that it did, after more time passed than he wanted to talk about, time that was only a couple of very long days. This is the whole point of the story, Beloved, that it was not a big deal, going to him, putting on some bandages, taking off old ones, quickly. Buying a Mountain Dew against my better judgment ( bring Dr. Pepper for the sick and afflicted, dude). I take off my bandage, quickly, and am buoyed, floated, by this memory in this moment, a fortunate and prosperous time to recall that one time when I did something, opened a door when I knew somebody had their hands full just to see if there was help I could give. I receive it back to myself, my need so much less than his but still great enough, thank you very much, for me. For now. Not dying is smart. A friend to get you off the sofa is a friend indeed. A spare house is no place like home. An armload of home medicines is saving me. And one time, long ago before I became too old, I didn't let somebody down, though I owed nothing, had made no promise. Sweet, sweet, to me, sweet.

*****

FERROVIUS. In my youth I worshipped Mars, the God of War. I turned from him to serve the Christian god; but today the Christian god forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The Christian god is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

THE EMPEROR. Very wisely said. All really sensible men agree that the prudent course is to be neither bigoted in our attachment to the old nor rash and unpractical in keeping an open mind for the new, but to make the best of both dispensations.

THE CAPTAIN. What do you say, Lavinia? Will you too be prudent?

LAVINIA (on the stair) No: I'll strive for the coming of the God who is not yet.

THE CAPTAIN. May I come and argue with you occasionally?

Shaw, Androcles

*****
When I tore open my knee in the salt water no magical blond boy arose, like a Greek god from the seafoam, to carry me to the hot tub and run after bandages and ointments (have I yet mentioned that Road Rash Boy looked like a Greek god? Because, he did, dang it, though the Greek gods were unquestionably taller. Not that I fault him in this, without doubt they were showing off) because once I had helped him, had lingered on him in my thoughts and he had lingered on me, in his turn, and awaited the day I would scrape myself badly and foolishly enough that he might come to me for the end, the summation, of our story and this, Beloved, is the whole point of the story.

In the real of my life no one arose to carry me anywhere and they'd have been summarily dismissed if they had. Because I was going to get there on my own steam (more like fumes, at that point). Because I had to say it was nothing, a small hole, an easily repaired tear. And I had to go back for a few more hours in the water. I'm a tough chick; it's what we do. And it was pretty nice that a man loaned me a wet suit to cover my hole. He was nice, too, and pretty. He did this thing at the prompting of his wife, who could recognize a thorn when she saw one. And I was grateful to her, and relieved.

It's the temptation to make, to have made, my friend into a story; to wish for the why of it, the what happened because of and also the after. It's the too great longing for those tellings where he, the magical, injured god, saves me, the broken girl, since only he can see I need repair. And happens to have the tools on hand; he carries them with him for just such a chance as this. The heart's yearning toward discernible motives, explication, denouement, reward.
As,

She nursed him and he loved her; she saw deep into his heart in his suffering and her heart softened to his. When at last he could stand unaided they were married.

No.

She nursed him and he never forgot her and when he died he left her his fortune.

She nursed him when all others abandoned him and, later, she needed a kidney and he gave her one.

They threw him to the lions and one lion recognized him, from services rendered of old, and did not eat him but honored him and did him great service.

No, wait.

He took a thorn out of the lion's foot, so later the lion took a thorn out of his foot.

Once a person helped a lion in peril, which was a brave and stupid act. The lion, sensing this person was both stupid and brave and fearing what might follow, ran away as soon as it could, frightened and not so hungry. Later the person made up stories in which people figured prominently and lions could not get along without them. And sold the stories to other people, though the lions were not buying them.

*****

The locus classicus of the story is found in the fifth book of Aulus Gellius... of which Apion himself claimed to have personally witnessed in Rome...The emperor pardons the slave on the spot, in recognition of this testimony to the power of friendship, and he is left in possession of the lion.
"Afterwards we used to see Androcles with the lion attached to a slender leash, making the rounds of the tabernae throughout the city; Androcles was given money, the lion was sprinkled with flowers, and everyone who met them anywhere exclaimed: "This is the lion, a man's friend; this is the man, a lion's doctor".

Wikipedia, Androcles and the Lion

*****
Tony Hillerman, in an essay, told of a beautiful and miraculous natural story he and a friend watched unfold. The friend said, after, "This will be a wonderful moment in a book." But Mr. Hillerman already knew, sadly, that he could never use that miracle in fiction. "No one," he lamented, "would believe it."

Real life miracles are not what stories are all about. Story miracles do not make for real life.

It's the terrible, seductive desire to belong to a story, not just to events, to come away with something of your own, something to keep. A devoted lion. A beautiful boy. Someone to gather you into their arms and soothe away ugly scrapes. Something to keep. A hearty, well done thou good and faithful, at the very least. Even if it's not what actually happened. Even if you have to make it up. A life-friend. Someone owed you because once you were better than you had to be.

*****

THE CAPTAIN. Are you then going to die for nothing?

LAVINIA. Yes: that is the wonderful thing. It is since all the stories and dreams have gone that I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories.

THE CAPTAIN. But for what?

LAVINIA. I don't know. If it were for anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I'm going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough to die for.

THE CAPTAIN. What is God?

LAVINIA. When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves.

Shaw, Androcles

*****
Once a man came upon a lion, wounded and dying in the mouth of a dank cave, a man who disregarded his own life, whether bravely or foolishly, sufficiently to render the lion service, to go on his knees before it and to climb between its very paws, one paw badly torn by a terrible thorn which the man removed, though the lion could not. The man told no one this story for though he was brave enough for the telling he was not such a fool as to expect anyone would believe. He kept the thorn, for a time, but remembered it less and less often til finally he lost both the thorn and the story.
But the lion, who recovered, never forgot.
When, later, in his extremis, the man met the lion again, he did not recognize it, but nor did the lion recognize him, for men and lions do not so much love each other that either tribe has learned to know one among hundreds of strangers. The man, knowing not how he might face bravely or foolishly a fate so appalling, simply stood before the lion and cried silently. The lion, however, whose mind was not clouded by any fear of death and rending, observed still its habit acquired in the intervening years; it approached its prey softly, gently, raising one paw and holding it out to the man for a moment, waiting. To his astonishment, the man saw upon the pad of the great paw a ragged scar, made by a terrible thorn. As he had once before, the man fell upon his knees before the lion and wept tears, hot and gushing, onto the scar, in recognition of his lost friend and in relief, for his heart told him he had, all unlooked for, regained his own life. The lion, having long ceased to wonder at the ways of men, waited kindly, breathing on the back of the man's neck, small and weak before him, and onto the man's hair where his head was bowed before the lion. The lion did the man no harm then or ever, because they were friends.

It was never a story about a boy, but about a thorn and torn fabric and what came of the mending.
Though all our pain subsides, we shall know each other by the scars.

*****

You sit there in your heartache
Waitin' on some beautiful boy to
Save you from your old ways.
You play forgiveness, watch it now,
Here he comes.
He doesn't look a thing like Jesus
But he talks like a gentleman
Like you imagined when you were young.

The Killers, When You Were Young

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

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