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

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

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

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.


Noah's photos

Meditations. Listening to Music from Boys

Winter Dance, Brian Kershisnik

I'm an incurable audience watcher. Hard core addict. Performance blossoms in rays of sustained directed focus, the built-in difference between talking to yourself and soliloquizing. I love to watch the watchers, covert audience of one, hidden for they mustn't observe my observation and all unwilling find themselves thrust into the performance. So, while my youngest child spent the afternoon trying out for the middle school ballroom team (nervous!!), I give a little bit of my time to watching the dancers and a lot to watching the instructor. Watching him watching them. I have to wonder. I'd know so much about him if I knew what he was looking for in those huge children (or are they tiny teenagers) --polish? eagerness? innate rhythm? ease? I know so little about dance, ballroom in particular, I have no way of knowing who looks good but I know a ton about the horrible difficulty of auditioning children for a project that stretches over months. Being unable to predict how they will grow and alter just between now, the end of school, and the first day they come back in August. Middle school. Hurtling along at breathtaking speed. Easier with adults, we're so...stable. And so seldom delightfully unforeseeable. I hurt for him, and admire his crazy greatness. He looks calm and pleasant. He doesn't look like his stomach aches. I'm taking care of that for him, twisting up on his behalf. I watch him closely, wondering what he is watching closely. Look from him to the dancers. Back and forth. Looking for dancers I think would be interesting to work with because in my work I can be "interested." I don't have a team, don't have to compete so I needn't care about "winning."

And there was this boy.
I'm not going to describe him in any way because while I have no idea who he is or who his people are I'm willing to bet they are alive and can read. Suffice it to say he is already on the team, was there to help out and is older than my still-in-elementary-school daughter.
Like a hundred years older. I think I never want her to be that old.
I'm not sure she ever will be.

She's sort of ageless in a too-young-for-this-world way. There's an otherness to her; she always seems to be playing the dying swan. Even as she trips over swanlike feet that have grown too big too fast. It worries her. Her older sister has always been a dancer, always sure, even though she falls over stuff just as much as the next person. Maybe more. "Am I a klutz?" the youngest asks, "Look what I did to myself. I ran into a wall. A door. A boy." Not a klutz. A water bird on dry land. She looks right when she waltzes, swooping around, head high on a slender, long neck, graceful long arms, proud, sweet face.
She also looks like a swan when she gets funky.

That'd be white. She looks white.
Not that white people can't be funky, some can and they do but some can't and when they can't they look really white. White as the driven snow.
And I don't have to say at this point really all the kids are looking awkward, one way or another. Even the obviously advanced dancers (ballroom's a big thing in Provo) still inhabit bodies changing day to day (or not, let us pause a moment to send silent sympathy to those poor, shortest boys. you remember them). Of course some will hide that better in the waltz, like my girl, while some show to better advantage bopping about and shakin' it. But no one's going to look good all the time.

But there was this boy.
Awkward and gangly too, one more pimply face in a sea of them, hair too long in precisely the way everyone's is too long or just too short. But he understands using music for dancing with girls and when he dances, everything changes.
He never partners with my daughter. He doesn't see her. I have oddly outsized feelings of gratitude about that, and, and, just a small cutting sliver of sadness for her. She doesn't notice him. She's still little, still playing at this, but when he's dancing, he's a hundred years old. It's like watching a fate dance from inside some fey story where destiny rides on the smallest, thoughtless action, take my hand and smile, and part of the spell is that all the dancers look the same while one of them is not. Not the same. Can the dancers see it? Is this the good and golden prince revealing himself? Or is he the dark swan? Nothing for the watchers to do but watch.

Or is it that he just really gets the music.

I had a boyfriend once, once, who did understand music and dancing to it. That was a revelation.

I loved to dance all my life, took dance classes whenever they were available in my little community, but barely danced at all at school dances where the boys I wanted (so badly!) to ask me apparently felt zero desire in that direction; meanwhile, I generally felt compelled to hide from the boys brave enough (or weird enough) to desire and request my company on the dance floor. My middle child is just past her junior prom, the dress that cost me a solid day of my life in the hunting is still hanging on the back of her door in its protective bag (though that's probably less because she's keeping the memory fresh than because she simply can't put it away, which after all would require moving it all of six feet to hang on the clothing rod. Must...gather...strength). That was the first fun and happy high school formal I saw from close to the inside. Boys don't count the same way. They are too nervous, dances in high school seem more defined by what they forget. Polishing their shoes, the tickets, the corsage. "Mom, do you think she'll mind?" Yes, honey, you dork, I think she might. He's a good true boy, not a prince yet, but he's a tin soldier. Steadfast. Waiting for a beautiful dancer to fly into the furnace of the future with him so he can reveal his heart to her. Or some other event not so cheesy.
I only attended one formal in high school. Senior Ball, I was in charge, I had a boyfriend in college, it was just yucky. I was worn out, we made my dress and I really liked what my mom chose but it was just too different, once again, from the dresses I didn't like that the other girls were wearing. And I started truly disliking my boyfriend that night. He had too many rules, how I should act, look, talk to him. At one point I was looking around too much, I guess, wanting to see the decorations I had made from different angles, trying to discern whether people liked them, what they thought of the refreshments, the lighting, the million choices I had made for them. He took my wandering head and yanked it down onto his shoulder (not so comfortable, he wasn't quite (ha!) tall enough) where it was supposed to be snuggling happily. I was so angry I was blind for a minute. I thought about crying but instead I just went to sleep. I was tired. In about six months I would run away to college and break off all communication. Not break up, too frightened of him, of what he'd do to me. Just dissolve, disappear.

College was different for me. Suddenly and strangely. I went to every formal, borrowed dresses, stiff dinners, pictures, the whole bit. This was what I had spent myself longing for? For this? Better were the dance classes I took every semester, jazz, tap, folkdance, everything. And when my best friend and I bummed rides to discos (remember? how old are you?) and clubs, went to every casual Friday stag dance. Those were much more fun. Dance, dance, dance. Boys, boys, boys. Fun, fun, fun. Ho hum.
But. The first time I danced with that one, one boyfriend it was as if, holding his hand, strolling casually onto the dance floor, I turned and saw him standing unexpectedly on the other side of a threshold, through an open door, a door he was holding open and keeping open (true gentleman) for me and only for me, while all the others swirled about us, unaware. And he was powerful there; once through that door we were in his kingdom. I don't know how this story might have twisted had he been at heart a dark swan. At the time I wasn't at all real enough to know anything except how much I liked him. But he wasn't false, he was a golden prince; he felt that weight and took it seriously.

Because I only have eyes for you.

Rules for dancing with boys (these never varied much from seventh grade through college, unless you fell in with an Enforcer. then he would communicate his preferences). Bop around, try to talk or not, look wherever as long as you glance at each other occasionally and don't obviously flirt with anyone else till you are actually off the floor. Slow dances, don't grab too tight. Now here's a true secret. He never looked away from me, from my eyes, from the moment we stepped onto the dance floor till we walked off. I couldn't believe it or figure out how he did it. Like something only in a book, the ending of a certain sort of book, the sort of book you have to put down from time to time and just take a quick little walk around the drab, grumpy, real world to shake yourself out and to remind yourself of things. He never stumbled or stepped on anyone and it never felt forced. I don't know what you're talking about, he said. This was what he understood you were supposed to use that music for, dancing with a girl.

Do I want my daughter to be old enough for this?
And what is this, exactly?

Dance with me,
I want to be your partner...

Wanting.
Focus.
And safety.

The instructor's teaching all the dancers a jive dance now, watching how they learn. Watching them with his back turned because he's teaching while he's watching, he has to do the steps too. I KNOW that place, that watching over the shoulder, and while he still seems remarkably calm I am thinking not till December no auditions for me till December and doing silent internal backflips of joy.

Remembering music and boys.

Only two boys ever made composite tapes for me (cassette. uh-huh). It's such a quotidian, omnipresent action now, everyone gives those to everyone else. Playlists, Pandora. What, really, is an iPod but an enormous composite creation? It may have been common then, more than I knew, but it felt very special and exotic. And it was a heck of a lot of work.

One of the tapes was horrible.

Not the songs, the songs themselves were great, far better than these souped-up eighties songs I'm hearing at this audition, though his choices for me were from the eighties, of course, and before, really good stuff, and set me firmly on the folk rock path I would follow faithfully for years, which was what they had been intended to do. That was the horrible problem. It had been made as an instructional tape, and presented as such. I needed to brush up on my listening library, deepen and broaden my exposure in order to pass muster, to hang with his crowd. And, hey, too true, I was not well educated musically. He was his whole short life ahead of me in the cool music department. This is still a failing of mine. I'm not hip, I'm READING. Busy.

Let's suppose I had done that to him with books.
"Hey dude, here's the composite LIBRARY I put together for you. You get these two or three hundred books under your belt for starters so we can converse in a civilized fashion, 'k? I'll be over here, listening to this tape."
Brother.
But I loved him and never even noticed this particular rotten manifestation till later. When I broke not up but off with him (I have this tendency to dematerialize) it was for what I would have called entirely different reasons. He said, "Have you gained weight?" I said, "What? Um, I think, I think I've been happy." He folded his arms. Started talking about my hair.
Too much wanting.
Too much focus.
On me.
No air.
Such a golden boy. He had everyone duped.

A Good Man and a Bad Man, Brian Kershisnik

The other tape. Ahh. The other tape. Not a hipster, just a rocker, even sort of a metalhead. Which made the tape he gave me all the more shocking and lovely. Unforeseen. A door he opened, for me and only for me, to let me look a little way inside.
An amazing collection of songs about how he felt. About loving people, seeing to them.
I have no idea where he got the songs. Not from his own albums. You couldn't search the net in those dark ages. He must have had to borrow stuff.
It made him embarrassed. Embarrassed but defiant. Watching me narrowly, out of the corners of his eyes, waiting to see what I would think, maybe if I would laugh or tease him (no idea why he'd think that, not me, never). He wasn't my boyfriend, exactly. That would have been too tame, too domestic. He danced with lots of girls. But toward the end of the evening he danced close by, and the last few dances were his. He had an impressive car (I mean, I don't know anything about cars either, I was impressed. he wanted me to be) and he made sure he drove me home. Once to the emergency room. Wanna know what that tape was for, before I got to take it? For playing on his car stereo, for dancing in the garage. He was sort of a bad boy, life had made him kind of hard, he was hiding a hope to find someone to take care of, to watch over. He showed it, just a little.
Wanting.
Focus.
Safety.
And, oddly, freedom.

...dancing with me, cheek to cheek.
There's nobody here, it's just you and me.

Seventh grade. She will start dancing with boys and she's absolutely got to learn to tell dark swans from princes. She can't get it from a book or learn from her sister though all that helps (her brother, now, that's a thought). It's an experiment on real people who may bleed or forget about her. Hurt her. There's one out there right now who already understands about using music for dancing with girls. It'll be magical if he decides to become a golden prince. The instructor's walking around, watching, while they go through what they've learned so far, one last time. My daughter's dancing with a boy she knows, a friend, but he's an awkward dancer, has to concentrate on his feet to avoid disaster and she doesn't want to be there, she's letting her focus slide. I can see her watching another boy, pretty and fancy, but I've pegged him for a false swan. He dances for himself, he's wearing his partner like an apricot scarf. And he keeps looking over at--what?--not mirrors, there aren't any--what then?--oh. That must be his mother. Run, baby, don't look back. He's not interested in a little swanling, anyway, he's of the opinion that he can dance and he can jive and he's chosen himself an accomplished partner with a supercilious expression and super skinny long legs and a hot hot pink short dress. Different plumage altogether. Birds of a feather. They're all watching each other and I'm watching them and the instructor walks around and around.
This isn't dancing, of course, this is a performance.
Now my little girl is thinking about the steps. She wants to get them right, to be good at this, and her focus has shifted again. To just dancing.

She might as well be alone.
Good. Maybe when she's older.

Dance with me,
I want to be your partner.

Painting, Brian Kershisnik

Meditations. Reading Out Loud to People

Singing Madonna and Child Brian Kershisnik 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burning Book Brian Kershisnik 2007

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

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

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

Asleep at a Party Brian Kershisnik 2008