Stories. Where the Flowers Bloom Forever

My grandmother's house is still there, but it isn't the same.
A plain wooden cottage,
a patch of brown lawn,
and a fence that hangs, standing and sighing,
in the Seattle rain.
Judy Collins, Secret Gardens

I went walking this morning in a gap between rainstorms. On Ash Street I swung out in an arc to avoid getting drenched by a big swath of lilac hanging, dripping, over the sidewalk and then swung myself back to smell the flowers. Pale purple, the ones most common in the places I have lived. As long as I don't put Texas or California on the list of places I have lived. So, these were the pale, softly purple lilacs that seem of all the lilacs to have best thrived where the Utah pioneers planted them. I had to approach them carefully; each tiny quatrefoil was brimming with rain. Wanton sniffing might drown me. Lilac is my favorite flower for smelling, I think, and polite, too, the bushes hold out arms filled with blossoms at just the height for most any nose. Grape hyacinth, too, mock orange, stocks and certain roses. But none of those are evocative the way lilac is evocative. And you have to pick grape hyacinth, or lie down in the grass, to smell it.

Spring time in Kanosh smells like newly turned fields and the sun on lilac bushes. And dust.

When my parents fled from San Diego to Kanosh we lived at first in a house my grandparents owned. My grandpa, born in Kanosh, planned to retire there so when Ida Cummings' house came for sale, he bought it and my parents moved into it while they looked around and decided what to do next. Ida's garden was right outside my California city child's experience, complicated and mysterious in design, lovely but hiding its beauty in overgrowth, a gardener's garden neglected after years of careful tending and running to stealthy abandon as the gardener aged. And died. Ida died and we went to live in her house till it was time for my grandparents to come there. It was summer when we came and I had no friends so I moved straight into the garden.

I hadn't read, much, yet, so I had no storybook gardens in my interior world with which to compare this new old garden. I hadn't been to Europe or looked at picture books of English cottage and kitchen gardens. In California people had a front yard and a back yard. My mom worked hard on both, I'm sure, though I only remember the back yard with any clarity. In time her yard would have become a garden, but the housing development still had a recently-scraped feel to it. This Kanosh house didn't sit in a yard; a yard is either shell-shocked land around a too-new house, or, a yard is a place in which to contain or corral stuff, not a place you nurture, nourish, and fill with intent. A yard is for cows, for lumber, for useful things like gravel and scrap metal. A yard is for a slavishly even, unnaturally green, severely domesticated grass plot and two identical bushes, one on either side of the front door. We name such a yard after the most important thing in it, the entrance to the house. Front Yard. No yards at Ida's house. Ida's baby was a garden, big and multitasking, as Utah pioneer gardens are. And it was wick. Aye, that it was.

I think, once, it might have been a masterpiece.

I drive by with strangers and wish they could see what I see,
a tangle of summer birds, flying in sunlight,
a forest of lilies,
an orchard of apricot trees.

Given such an amazing early influence some people might have felt desire stirring within them to learn about gardens of this period, which plants were readily available and which were exotic and hard won. They might have wondered how Ida kept it all watered, weeded and going while raising lots of children, acting as a pillar of both the church and community, bottling all the fruit from the orchard just west of the house, growing a vegetable garden for all of them as well as the necessary pigs, chickens, cows and horses. Without electricity or indoor plumbing. They might have at least asked Ida's descendants, still living in Kanosh, about these things. I could have talked to them at church. Sigh. Acquiring knowledge is the calling of a scholar, not a slacker, reader and dreamer, a stroller and sniffer of other people's lilacs. It may be too late for me. I just like to look at things and wonder about them in my head and then make stuff up. I don't want to look at your historical documents, thanks. Actually, I do want to look at them, but it won't occur to me to wonder if you have them and even if I knew you did, I would never, never ask out of respect for privacy. Mine.

Even slackers have their inly guarded, painfully secret passions, and I confess I lost myself completely to that garden. I will truly never love that way again.

The house was a large one, by the Kanosh standards of its time, a Gothic farmhouse with three gables across the front and porch that was also a balcony made of white painted wood which I thought very fancy, when I was little and first living there. Actually, the wood was no longer white but it once had been and enough paint chips clung to the grey wood for me to fill in the whole picture. I wondered if the family had some pretensions. I don't know, you could ask around in Kanosh. People would remember. Next door, west of Ida's and on the other side of the orchard, was a red brick house, not nearly as old, with a basement and with ceilings of normal height so it was closer to the ground and humble. I assume the Cummings owned both lots and one of their sons built his house just the next lot over. In that house was Leila.

Great-grandfather's farm is still there, but it isn't the same.
The barn is torn down and the fences are gone.
The Idaho wind blows the topsoil away every spring.

I don't know if that's how she spelled her name; that's how I spelled it in my childmind and that's the way it will be here. If you wish to have a more accurate description of Kanosh, its denizens and environs, I can direct you to a history written by my grandfather, whose favorite grandchild I was not. She lived in the little red brick house alone because her husband had died and her children were gone, so you can see how fearfully old she was, even then. Everybody was fearfully old then, especially everybody in Kanosh. I don't know where they stored all the old people in San Diego but I never saw any. In California you had to drive miles and hours to get to your grandma's house but in Kanosh you could knock on any door in town and a fair approximation of your grandma would bounce right up and open it. Leila seemed tiny and frail to me, too thin and somehow wispy. She was very small and I was going to be very big and it was as if that scale was set between the two of us when I was seven and we first met. She was pale; I could see the veins under her skin. She was pretty, I thought, with large eyes. She was gentle, so gentle, and loving and kind and quiet. These are things I never have been and I wondered mightily how she managed them. She laughed easily; it's possible she was not entirely sure of herself, but that's a very adult thing to think about. She used to laugh, no matter what you asked her, and say "Well. I don't know." Which was not true as she was old and good and knew everything. I thought her hair was long for such an old lady, down to or past her shoulders, and it was dark and stayed dark. I don't know if I touched it up with my memory or if it was touched up in some other way or if she simply retained the power of hair-colored hair, but this long dark hair made her look younger to me than I thought she could possibly be. Young and old, like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past, and with strong, strong hands, too, like the Ghost's, because she was also a gardener.

The garden I lived in was distracting and brambly, it had huge trees as tall as the tall old house, it kept secrets and memories to itself, it was dark with shade and oldness, while across the white (same sort of white as that front porch and balcony) picket fence at the edge of the orchard, Leila's garden was sunny, busy, wildly colored and factually magical. Birds shot briefly through the air in my garden and sat around on branches and roofs singing and tweeting; I know bees must have come in droves because the trees poured out fruit. In Leila's garden they lingered, reveled. Leila's garden hummed, twitched and spun with birds, butterflies and bees. She had all of her own and a chunk of everyone else's share. I would sit in the tree house or in an apple tree on my side of the pickets and watch her working and talking to herself in her garden (like a vulture child I was, yes, very like). She wore a shady sun hat (which, if you viewed her from above, covered the top parts of her face) and flowered gloves. Those were delightful to me. I admired and coveted them chastely. I wondered where on earth she had gotten them as I had never seen anything like that for sale. I made her a possessor of subtle and arcane knowledge and wished myself to someday be such a garden shopper, able to sally forth and purchase flowered cloth gloves casually, with off-hand (no pun) elegance as though to me it were a thing of every day. Such were to me the hard won secrets of the master gardener. (I still believe in the esoterism of shopping. Gnostic shopping. I await enlightenment.) Leila in her garden was an American flower fairy, insubstantial and eternal, working the craft with clippers and a trowel and I wanted to be her. My mom was the gardener who gave me my foundation, nearly all my practical understanding, but she couldn't initiate me into The Mysteries. She was already my mom so she couldn't become my fairy gardenmother. Those are the rules. You can look them up.

I still see the ghosts of the people I knew long ago.
Inside the old kitchen they bend and they sigh.
My life passed them up and the world in its way passed them by.

I visited Leila in her kitchen as often as she was in there when the fit took me. She had made us free of her house from the beginning, so long as we knocked at the door and she answered. The broad, deep bottom drawer in her kitchen she kept filled with toys that had belonged to her boys but were now for her grandchildren. My mom protested our numerous visits at first out of politeness and then against Leila's inevitable loss of privacy and freedom as we encroached and conquered but Leila protested back that she liked having us around and that we were good children. This was true. Being made welcome in people's houses is one of many honors afforded the well-behaved. There are drawbacks too, of course, but I can never remember what they are. The worn toys in her drawer were utterly unlike ours. A strange double wire handle with two arcing prongs and a red wheel on a silver spoke that rolled magically along first the bottom of the wires, then, with a flip of the wrist, along the top. One thing Leila named Slinky (I had honestly never yet seen one) and another she called Hoppy Taw. (That one I understood as soon as she started to explain and was disoriented to realize true hopscotch required equipment. Hoppy Taw went into the imaginary basket of wonders that held those flowered gloves.) I first played jacks on Leila's kitchen floor. (I think my mom felt bad about some of this, she got me my own jacks right after I came home stricken with awe at Leila's Tour of Mystical Toys of the Ancient World. Or perhaps she hoped similar toys of my own might fill my longings and afford Leila some peace. Right.) The most numinous antique toy of all Leila's kid's stuff was a rectangular box, not deep, red plastic frame, smooth white screen of sorts, stylus hanging from the side with a small metal tip. Etch-a-Sketch was written on it in a font my bones told me had been popular before my great-grandfather was born. I loved it. It seemed the sort of instrument of diversion and illusion Columbus might have smuggled onto the Santa Maria to pull out, presto and behold, when the cabin boys and crew muled and pined, fearing they would die without ever standing firm on dirt again, enclosed and enmeshed in that bottomless desert of ocean. Look, men, not out across the water but here at this box, this window. Here I can read the words of your fate, wondrous enough, but, see, now they vvvvvanish! Shazam. I used to hunch over Etch-a-Sketch on Leila's kitchen linoleum, wondering what would happen if one day it began to write on its own, message bubbling up from beneath the plastic, what I would do, what the words would say, whether I would be able to read them, what Leila would think of that. "Well. I don't know. Land, that hasn't happened for years. Hand it here."

Does Columbus seem a world away from a Kanosh garden? He wasn't. His toy, his device of enchantment and quite possibly navigational orienteering was sitting in Leila's deep drawer waiting for her grand kids, and her garden was right outside the kitchen door, probably six feet south of that drawer. A dense, deeply developed strip of mature perennials, five or six feet deep, ran between her driveway and the picket fence that bounded Ida's orchard. Another similar bed across the front of Leila's lot behind another picket fence. Vegetable garden (I little cared, then, for that) on the west. Grass, berries and fruit trees in the back sheltering between the house and a fence bisecting the lot, separating Leila's bits from what would have been her husband's part for animals and for outbuildings and pasture and just for having. Acre and a quarter. Small, densely plotted feminine garden near the house; largely and loosely masculine back lot. Mormon pioneer town.
And that was it. Not like Ida's big and imposing ruin of a place. Very small garden, really, all that riot of color and growing, that continuous bloom ("Bachelor's buttons and those are snaps. That's columbine and peony. Mother's roses. A start from that lovely dark lilac"), all Leila's art, knowledge and craft contained primarily in two small strips. How can I measure a garden from memory? How big is the world? How big does it need to be?

But most of all, it is me that has changed, and yet, still I'm the same.
That's me at the weddings, that's me at the graves,
dressed like the people who once looked so grown up and brave.

Some friends of mine who cared deeply in a very different way about gardens bought Leila's house and didn't want those flowers. They told me and my sisters we could take all we wanted. Sweet william, pinks, lady's slippers, fernleaf peony and a start of the lovely dark lilac and another, not as dark but so richly scented, growing now in the garden at Zella Allen's house which we bought, the painter and I, where the painter lives while he's painting. One day I was at another house, Dorothy Paxton's house, waiting with someone, looking at Dorothy's flower garden with a new person who had bought that old house. I saw fernleaf peony growing near the walk, not blooming yet, buds still tightly closed dark green fists, but unmistakable. "Oh," I said, "I grew up with that flower. It was in the garden when we came."
"Yes, all the flowers in here are so old fashioned. Those would be from Ida's house. All the family has the same starts in their gardens, from her. Maureen and Leila, all of them..."

I'm not listening anymore because behind my eyes I'm seeing something new, a genealogy of flowers traceable through mothers and sisters and in-laws and gardendaughters. Once you knew to look you could see where the connections, the lore and love, were carried from plot to plot, invisible ley lines, gardening paths meandering from peony to pink to peony. I'm not trying to decipher it, just watching it flow from home plot to home plot on the map of Kanosh I have carried inside my head since the summer of my eighth year. I remember on Memorial Day at the cemetary a pile of dark red rose petals on a pioneer grave, matriarch and patriarch, and ribbons of dark red petals spreading out across the grass to the graves of daughters and sons, from those graves to others further removed. Blood red streams of petals in a flower web reaching out and out from the first planting in that family's first garden in this tiny frontier town. Roses bloom almost indestructable, grape hyacinth spreads out and out, lilacs twist and thicken in their wood and hold out sprays of soft, richly scented purple to gladden and sadden passersby. I cut Leila's flowers in my garden and leave them on her grave.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.
I see willows bending,
the season is spring
and the silver blue sailing birds fly
with the sun on their wings.

Secret gardens of the heart
where the old stay young forever.



Noah's photos

Help. Familiar Angels. The First Part.

Untitled, Angels; Brian Kershisnik

deposition, n. [OFr. deposition; LL. depositio, a laying or putting down, from L. depositus, pp. of deponere, to lay or put down.]
Webster's Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged

The Son of Man hath descended below them all.
Art thou greater than he?
D&C 122: 8

The painter is working on a large canvas. It consumes and absorbs him. He works on other things, too, he always does, but this large painting is the core, the nut, the meat, of where his thought and intent are right now.

Descent from the Cross

I'm thinking and thinking, these last days and weeks, about help. Given and received. How we ask for it, or ask to give it, why we sometimes refuse, whether we would know it, for sure for sure, if we fell over it.
Into it.
For ease of thinking I debate, decide, divine, and divide help into two types.

The painting splits between two crowds, one on our earth's ground and one in its air, which hinge at a central dead and bloody body, awkwardly reclining, extended, by the efforts of the crowd on the ground who are lifting it up from below so that the legs swing forward and the whole thing, the whole composition, folds, creases, at the hands still nailed to a cross. Everybody, in the air and on the ground, looks to be holding their breath, being as careful as they know how to be. Dissolving into sorrow or stepping forward to work, to the task. Still, it doesn't look good. It looks like it's just as well he was dead for this part.

From my memories I tease out one sort of help that anyone can give.
And would.
In Manhattan, across the street and kitty corner from us, a group of people wait for a bus, among them a man in a wheelchair. My focus, my gaze, will be on these events only because I'm interested in the building behind the people. Bus pulling toward the corner; as it does the wheelchair also pulls out of the crowd and turns toward the bus. Getting in position? Going on the bus first? I don't know enough of buses or wheelchairs to properly understand what I see but in less than an instant, quicker than I can organize the frames of this little movie I'm watching, the chair stumbles, sort of staggers, maybe the wheel goes off the curb, and the chair tips, falls into the path of the bus still moving forward, still heading to stop on top of a man suddenly separate from his wheelchair, suddenly lying in the street.
I have taken the step to run, dropped my small girl's hand, drawn a great breath and lifted my other foot for the first true running step to sprint across all those lanes through all those cars. That strange moment; foot jerks and hops back and forth between air and pavement while eyes and brain hold a conference. The cease and desist order nearly sprains my ankle. Never, never make it, I'll be dead, nothing, nothing I can do... and people are coming from everywhere. So many, so fast, I don't see them come, they are acting and thinking and helping while I am saving my own self from accidentally falling headlong into the traffic kitty corner and across the street. Stopping the bus (how?), re-directing traffic, helping the man up, checking him all over, righting the wheelchair, gathering up his scattered belongings, putting him and all the waiting people on the bus, directing the bus back into traffic, picking up their own discarded possessions, walking away, getting back to whatever. Not looking back. Don't thank me, anyone would do it. Done and over, just like that. Nothing like as long as a minute. The first sort of help. All it takes is being present and human.

There are crying people in the air and on the ground who turn to each other, touch and nuzzle, reach out to stroke hair even from air to earth. The women, especially? The crowd on the ground set their teeth, their hands, their shoulders, to a task that should have been an occasion, a job that should have been a ritual of lingering and loving, fond remembrances, shared comfort in a life well and fully spent. This body should have grown up and gown old through a lifetime of stories; there should have been laughter here, too. Not grim, not hurried, not like this, quick and brutal in the gathering darkness as the sun sinks and flames behind them. The crowd in the air press as close as they are able, torn between the agony and terror of this suffering, this grieving, this dying, and the solemn weight of witnessing history twisting on its axis. The mills of God grinding, unbelievably, to a stop, silent for this moment before they turn back, begin to rumble and grind the other way. This horror is the culmination of our most desperate, private, scathing hopes. A dead man birthing our souls' delight. It's the end of the world.

In the emergency room with my first miscarriage. It's an off time, no one needing assistance, the rooms are silent, sterile, no other hurting humans to bring pathogens even by breathing. My baby is dead. Word spreads. Nurses come to hold me, to stroke my hands and hair, make sure I have enough pain killers for my body, assure me my heart will not be always broken. They enclose me, they are intimate. These are my sisters because they know. Every one of them standing around me tells me about her lost babies. Every one. We are a clan. They stand by me for hours till it is all over and they practically carry me to the car. You will be ok. It will be ok.
Second miscarriage the nurse gives me morphine. She is busy, comes and goes. I hear through the drug haze another nurse asking, "Is she bad? Is she ok?" and the answer, quick and curt. "She's fine. A miscarriage."
Third miscarriage. I am alone in my house and this is a much later term baby, someone I knew from ultrasounds who has unaccountably fled, leaving a tiny ghost in my body. A poltergeist, wrecking havoc. I push my head against the wall and whisper to God. Feel myself known and safe and surrounded by sisters who know. Hands on mine. Keep my eyes closed because I don't want to know if I can't see them. You will be ok. It will be ok.
My last child's birth. "Oh," the nurse says, reading my chart,"you're three for six. Right?" She looks up, smiles, squeezes my hand. "Me too."
This is the other sort of help; giving this help requires experience, expertize. I aim to remember this whenever God lays before me a way of suffering. This is for study, so now I know. Now I can help. Sometimes in order to be of real help it is required that we study, know intimately.

The painter talked to people who would know about how a dead body looks, how it would move if moved. He puts tools in the bottom half of the painting, among the crowd on the ground, scattered between feet, tools to use for getting large nails out of human hands and feet.

I saw a girl once, in the student health center, quiet and calm, holding one hand in the other with a napkin lying loose over the cradled hand. I was there for blood poisoning (not for the first time. It's a problem I have). When the nurse came to call me, the girl's companion stood up, nervous and fearing to be rude but worried and driven by unease. "Please, could you see my friend?" The other girl, hands lying one atop the other so oddly, demurred. "It's alright, she was here first--" but her friend cut her off, forcing assistance. "No, I think you need to look at this, first, she has a key in her hand," and lifted away the napkin. I barely had time to reflect with knee jerk irritation that blood poisoning isn't exactly a stroll through the flower show and to wonder, key in her hand? is that weird or just weird? before I saw that she did have a key in her hand. In the center. Right through. Sticking out above and below her palm. Some strange, detached, observant part of me said get a close look. Remember this, it's a central image, it will be important later. As the nurse took her quickly away, running almost while the odd girl with her odd predicament still demurred and protested the gravity of her situation, I thought what on earth are they going to do? Who helps somebody like that? I'll bet they've never seen just this thing. What tools do you use to rescue a hand in such a danger?
Not knowing keys, but knowing hands.

I saw a man in Kanosh working on his car just outside the general store, hood of the car up, head close to the engine, hand resting on the edge of the car. Saw the wind blow the hood closed, saw him jerk his head out in time, saw the hood close and the lock catch and bind through his hand, saw him trapped. Saw people coming from everywhere.
First sort of help. Be human.
Saw them trying to open the hood which stuck. Jammed.
Saw a man running to his truck parked on the next block, throwing himself around it to grab his large tool chest, saw him running, urgent and awkward, the tool chest slamming his legs and him running, gasping, back up the street past the store where we watched from the window.
What on earth, I wondered, is he going to do? Can he possibly know how to solve this? Does he have a plan? A tool for this use? This doesn't look good. I decided not to watch and walked home. I had no experience.
The second sort of help. Know what you're doing or stand out of the way.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities;
but was in all points tempted like as we are,
yet without sin.
Hebrews 4:15

The painter thought about it, talked about it. How do you get spikes out of a person and preserve the person at all? What would they have used, been thinking? Did someone start planning for this ending at the beginning? Did someone run to their shop, their shed?

Descent from the Cross.

I try to stage it in my mind. This is how I see things. Make it a play, make it concise, consistent. People are basically the same, world without end and time after time. How would they act? I push them around with my thoughts, rearrange them for maximum impact, suggest motivation. I am moving a painted figure in the foreground, rocked back into an arc, body tense with effort, his shoulder under the descending top crosspiece, bearing so much of its weight and of the man still fastened to it. There is a pry bar lying at his feet. Realization washes across me. Woman, over there. Man, here. Mother. Brother. Carpenter. Tools.
Family.

familiar, a. [ME. famylier; OFr. familier; L. familiaris, of or pertaining to a household, domestic, from familia, household, family.]
Webster

This would be a man familiar with tools. Father raised him to this work, to this task, shape, hammer, sand, cut, and maybe he's never done precisely this thing but he knows the wood, knows the nail.
Knows the man nailed to the wood.
Brother. Mother. Father. God. Family. Anyone near could lend a hand, anyone would try to help with the poor broken son. Anyone would gently support a leg, hold the weeping, stroke the hair, but hand over the pry bar to the one who knows.
It's your family who knows how to take apart wood, get the nails out of you; those who know this become family.
Anyone can call 911. We're primed, we've got this. The surgeon hands off his cell phone to take up his scalpel.
Two kinds of help.
I'm not going to think about people deciding not to be human.
I remember a neighbor, a nurse, working fiercely to save a life and never recognizing till the end the horribly sick man was his brother.
I think of a story, a friend standing between the living and dying, between fire and water, watching death make off with one of her family while the jaws of Hell stretched wide after the others. All the human people working desperately, hopelessly.
And the air around them filled with angels. Or so I have heard.
It's the end of the world, don't stand back, do what you know.
Be human.
While Walking; Brian Kershisnik

I have been aided by angels who happened on the scene, the closest people at hand when terror came.
I have been sustained by brothers and sisters, seen and unseen, who came because they had studied this pain, knew, from the inside.
I have seen people wracked by circumstance and blind chance.
I have seen people hammered by trials constructed, from the ground up, to fit them. Snug as a coffin.
I will tell you what I believe.
For succor in our most shattering, exquisite, personal trials, they don't send just anybody. Those who fly to our aid were chosen. Because they know. It is so on earth where they are seen. It is so where they are not seen.
We observe it in our lives lived on this earth's ground. Some help has to have labored, studied, suffered sufficiently that it knows what to do. This is a comfort, to me. Believe I'll take care of you like one of my own.
This is family.

And he looked round about
on them which sat about him,
and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
For whosoever shall do the will of God,
the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.
Mark 3:34-35

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

Life. Inly Ruminate the Morning's Danger

It's the night before.
They're not ready. I'm not ready. We're never ready. Maybe, maybe you're not coming?
Then again, seeing as you were invited, maybe you are.

But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dar'd
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object.

I keep stepping on steps that aren't there.
I forgot to ask the janitors to set up the chairs.
I forgot to ask someone to make programs and then when someone offered I forgot to get them the info.
I forgot I've got a pair of boots to make black. And the commissions to make because I lost the other ones somewhere.
I forgot I've got to set up lights or go without them. In the other theater my boy set us up with lights years ago, lights, speakers. I don't know how to do this. I never wanted to learn. I miss the moms who used to already know how to help me, they stepped up to hold me in place quietly, I never had to ask, to say please, only thank you, thank you. I've been spoiled, and I've enjoyed it.
I hate asking.
Hate explaining, hate remaining inflexible while holding to an invisible standard of interior excellence, hate saying no let's not worry about that thing it won't matter in the end, while begging. Hate inconveniencing. But more than, worse than hating to ask, I just forget. Forget how much easier life is with help. (he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother) How much more friendly with friends.

Step--nothing--hard down--jarred and teeth on edge.

Step.

Nothing.

This is always the way. I only even get in bed every night before the opening night so I can be prone while I'm thinking how crazy, how misguided, how arrogant, how impossible, how prideful, all night, all night. All around me people whose play this is not, who carried costumes and boxes, made swords, shopped at thrift stores, put up posters, memorized lines, helped in any way I thought to ask, all those people get them to rest. People who are not in charge, not the director. The Corrector, my nephew calls me, you know, the one who bosses us around, tells us what to do. People whose idea this was not, on whom none of this is laid, to whom it matters not, really, if all stand as greyhounds in the slip or sinfully miscarry. They will enjoy the play. (As who wouldn't enjoy listening to a twelve year old inform us Besides, their writers say,/ King Pepin, which deposed Childeric,/Did, as heir general, being descended/Of Blithhild, which was daughter to King Clothair,/ Make claim and title to the crown of France, as if it matters this very moment in real time how those deceptive French worded their slippery dispatches and how chuffed we are at having caught them in duplicity by close examination of twisted bloodlines and their own convoluted history.) But little know what watch is kept to maintain it.

In her bedroom my youngest is going over her lines, dreadful note of preparation. My middle child, no longer young enough to be delicately forced to perform in the family troupe, has appropriated my workroom, sewing madly, making poodle skirts for a dress rehearsal tomorrow, dance concert over the top of Shakespeare. I'm teaching her to copy a skirt, to sew without a pattern, not purposely teaching her to do it the night before yet somehow bequeathing an inheritance of such busyness that doing each thing in its time means doing nothing till it stands shrieking that attention must at last be paid.
But not till the very last.

They're not ready. And they won't be. But they'll be more ready after a performance. Battle-hardened.
This industrial carpet shall be our stage, these unused but oddly full classrooms our tiring house and we will try to do it as we would do it before an audience tougher than this one composed of our parents and our friends.
I miss my funny little theater in Kanosh. Funny, but mine.


There's that lovely line just before the battle, just as Montjoy enters to steal the momentum, the forward way and steam, where Henry says, You know your places. God be with you all! And that's how I wish to feel the night before, how I want it to be. You know what to do, tiny shining actors, God be with you as you do this to the full stature of your spirits, to your full humanity, as I taught you, as you believe in your secret heart you can do this. We have worked all these months to make a shape, to find a story, to learn how best to share it. On, you noblest little soldiers, be strong and of a good courage. That's what I feel I ought to be thinking as I fall peacefully asleep the night before. This should be the reward for the director, true in spirit and intent, filled from the beginning with a parent's heartscoring and unspeakable love for at least one member of this cast.
If I were writing the script, that's how I'd want it to be for the character who is me.
But the writer who is also me wouldn't be allowed to let that happen.

No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose.
I am a king that find thee; and I know

That's not how children's theater works out, at least, not in my productions. It's more like trying to shape the weather. I only know something is going to happen, all right. It always does.
I only know they can do this, not whether they will.

And so our scene must to the battle fly;
Where--O for pity--we shall much disgrace
with four or five most vile and ragged foils
(Right ill dispos'd, in brawl ridiculous)
The name of Agincourt.

There are actually not four or five ragged foils but 25 wooden ones. Pretty deadly and we try to be careful.
Five daggers.
Commissions.
Maps.
Treaty and genealogy.
Banners and standards.
Siege ladder and stretcher.
Bandages, bloody and clean.
Crowns.
Lanterns.
And the tennis balls.
He'll make your Paris Louvre shake for it


There's nothing more I can do, though all that I can do is nothing worth.
I can't show you how hard they worked, those that did. And truthfully, they didn't, all.
I can never show you how far they've come, those that traveled. Not all chose to stir, much, from where they began. But some, O, some have come far. I found out only tonight, in an electronic note from a mother, that two of the girls are terribly frightened but working through it. She's so proud of them, attributes this progress to me, wonders how I managed this.
I thought they weren't much interested, stand-offish and stiff. I treated them just like everyone else.
They made those steps alone, and me not knowing.
Brave soldiers, steely hearts.
They need to pluck comfort from my looks but my breath catches and hurts me; I'm stupid and tear up when I have to welcome their families and friends and say some empty little words about the enormity of what I have, all alone, witnessed; my heart breaks, over and over, every every time.


And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

We learn some of the ways of the sword. How to stand to shoot with the bow. How to wear large sleeves without fidgeting with them. How to represent one person differently from another. How to pay enough attention to get that line in the battle scene.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
...For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

No adults backstage. Props masters, weapons masters, fight captains, all playing lords and foot soldiers. Hang up your own costume. Keep yourselves quiet. Don't miss your entrance or block the exit.

Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,
Turning th' accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass;

We learn all those words, what they mean, why they were said. What a bow signifies. Cressy battle, the strategic importance of a port town, how armies are raised and the time that takes. Nobles are carried off on shoulders or stretchers. When you drag away the dead commoners, get them all the way off stage. Boys in the luggage, let your heads drop back, lie limp in death.

for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history

Will they change the sets? Sometimes they just don't remember for horrible long minutes of nothing. Will they smile through the tough bits in their swordplay? I keep warning them about that--

The best way first steps compare to marathons is in the miracle of this upright human, bringing all that soul to the forefront, moving and moving forward.

Who, Prologue-like, your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

O, God of battles, let it be all right.
I think --breathe-- it's going to be ok.
I hope.

Yet sit and see,
Minding true things by what their mock'ries be.

Life: Birth Days

I'm the oldest because the baby before me didn't make it all the way to birth.


I was born in the fall. But I don't remember.

* * * * *

The earliest memory I have is of being shown the sister one younger than myself. So, I would be two and a half years old. What I remember is opening my mom's bedroom door softly, knowing my mom wanted to see me. I suppose she had been gone, she must have returned, I must have been summoned. But I don't remember. The movie of my memory comes alive as I am pushing the door gently open and looking around it. My mom is sitting on her bed which is completely strewn, covered, with baby stuff. I did not recognize any individual and discrete items at the time and I can't reconstruct anything specific now. I bet there were diapers, but that's just an informed guess. Whatever was on the bed, there was a ton of it and it had been arranged as for public display. My mom did that, laid stuff out like it was going to be formally reviewed. Every year, after the frenzy of Christmas or Easter morning subsided and people had started eating their candy but before anyone could get too involved in a new book, she always made us gather everything up, take it to our rooms, make our beds and compose our gifts artistically so that guests arriving later could easily peruse our loot, not in a jumbled mass but in a pleasing collage. Books fanned out so each title showed, shirts folded and stacked like stair steps with each one visible, necklaces stretched out chains and all. It was the bed, loaded and groaning with my new sister's haul, that took my full attention when I came into the room. My mom was holding something out to me, saying "Come and see!" but I just stood at the foot of the bed staring at the stacks. "Who's is all of this?"
"It's for the new baby, come and see!"
"All of it? All of it is for the baby?" (OK, author's note here. Yes. I talked like this at two and a half. Probably at eighteen months. It's a thing in my family, the babies talk early and well.)
"Yes," my mom is saying, "don't you want to see your sister?"
I wrenched my eyes from material gain and looked.
First of all, my mom had been nursing her and that was the most awkward and unnatural thing I had ever seen. I delicately averted my eyes. Sorry everyone.
Second. I looked back, editing my field of vision, seeing only sister, nothing icky. And realized my parents had been had. Someone had pawned a terrible thing off on them and they were too crazy excited, inexperienced or just too unobservant to notice. This was nothing like any little sister I had been led to expect. You'll be able to play with her and talk to her and share your toys with her and she'll be your best friend, they had told me, laying the foundation for the coming addition to the family.
Of course I had believed them.
And formed expectations accordingly.


Two years old is not very far off the ground, but I had seen enough of life to know that the unfortunate creature lying practically naked in my mom's arms was not going to do any of those things. Ever. On the other hand, since I had not been particularly wanting a sister before this thing came, I felt no sadness or disappointment, only embarrassment for my parents. Whatever this was, it was obviously no threat to my happy little world, my serene and cushy security. I felt nothing for or about it.
I made polite conversation with my mom for a minute, agreed the thing she had was lovely and slipped away, saddened for parents who had been hoping for a sister.

* * * * *

I don't remember the next sister till she suddenly began to laugh one evening at my silly big sister antics which, up till that point, had never once been for the baby's benefit. Who would show off for a baby? It would be like performing for shoes. I remember my game had something to do with balloons, with throwing balloons up in the air and letting them bonk me in the face, over and over mindlessly and aimlessly and then she was bursting out in those bubbly, fat little chortles behind me and I remember spinning around to face a giggling baby, completely taken aback to hear her make so sensible and organized a sound as laughter, just as if she were a real person. I was even more shocked when my mom told me the baby was laughing at me, that she thought I was funny. The baby. Thinking. Unbelievable. I experimented, repeating my balloon act for this tiny new crowd. The baby shrieked. It was true. My biggest fan. I threw my balloons in earnest and the baby howled, leaning toward me and shaking, helpless with laughter, gently bonking my head with hers. I threw and threw and waxed achingly comedic. I'll never do the balloon dance again like I did it that night. The other little sister was getting in the way now, elbowing in on my successes, trying to out-balloon me but she was too young and kept getting it wrong and the baby got distracted and bored and looked away and sighed and my mom said, "Alright, now you're just silly," and it was over and everybody went to bed. But after that I knew the baby would turn into a person someday after she was done being a baby. And she got interesting to me.

I do remember, though, going to the hospital when she came, and playing outside with the other sister because children couldn't visit in the hospital. We had been taken to the hall outside the nursery, to the huge window where a nurse held up some wadded blanket and my grandma said, "See your new baby sister?" and I was wise from past experience so I was neither surprised nor saddened by the travesty. Nor interested. And then they put us outside to play while they visited my mom and that baby. The hospital had a wonderful big courtyard, wide shallow steps descending on four sides to a great sunken square in the center. At the top level in each of the corners were planters nearly as big as the central square with huge old aloes and cacti and trees and ornamental things and a broad cement boarder to run around and around. I could have stayed and played there for a hundred years. It was so fun I refused to get scared when the little sister started to wonder if Dad would ever come back because it was getting dark, streetlights coming on, the sun down behind one of the planters. I just told her he would and grabbed her hand and dragged her up and down the stairs for a while till she was happy again and not crying. Then Dad took us home and made something like food that was good and not what our mom made. We never saw one person go into or out of the hospital while we were running in the courtyard. We would have been three and five and a half, respectively.

* * * * *

The next sister I should remember from the get go, but I don't, even though I was ten when she was born. I do remember the miscarriage before her birth and the strange hopelessness of it, not that the kids wanted another sister so much, but that my mom was so sick for so long and then the baby was just dead and gone and there was nothing for all that. Nothing to hold, nothing to show. It was such a terrible emptiness and my mom was to desolate, so ripped up and there was no place for us girls to put our eyes, nothing for us to do but be good and quiet and clean the house while they were gone to the hospital. And that wasn't any use, either, because we seemed to mess it up again before they got back so my dad yelled at us softly, tired, because they really needed our help right now and couldn't we just have cleaned up? Just that? We were too sad and strange and he was too weary for us to defend ourselves because it was always the boys who died, just as they became boys, and he was too sad and lonely for them. And we were all girls. No way to get out of that, no matter how we tried, to be boys. He didn't complain, he liked us. We just didn't grow up to be sons. We never spoke to anyone or among ourselves of my mom's pregnancies till after the fourth month or so, or if we did we always appended the phrase "if it lives." I did that with my own pregnancies, because I was used to it, that's how we always did it at home. It hurt and upset my friends but it helped me with my own losses, when they came.


So I don't remember that sister being born. I remember a baby that sat on my left hip for a whole summer. I remember the next summer my mom said Take The Baby! no matter where I was going, to the cemetery, to the park, to the dam (sheesh! yikes! zowie!), to the store. The baby rode on my handlebars. She was there one time when a giant dog came after us, running along side, trying to nip her feet, so tall he only had to turn his head. I had to ram him hard with my front tire so he would go away and that made her fall off but I caught her. Mostly. But she was hurt so I had to scrub her owies on some one's lawn (grass cleans. you know.) then put her some place high up and go after the dog, riding hard to catch him, seriously ramming him a couple of times, climbing off my bike to throw rocks at him. Then I had to go back and get the baby and take her home to put on bandaids and feed her because my mom was at work. That was in the summer. In the winter that baby lived mostly with my grandma. My grandma still thinks she owns that sister.

* * * * *

The last birth day I missed because I was at college, traveling with the speech and debate team. I came home in the middle of the night and a roommate staggered out to tell me there had been a phone call, a baby had been born. So I called home, excited, thrilled, thinking they would be excited, thrilled, waiting to hear from me. They had not been waiting. They had been sleeping. Not thrilled, exactly. My dad was civil.
"But what is it? What is the baby?"
"What is it? It's a girl, of course. What else would it be?"
I didn't keep him on the phone.
There had been more miscarriages after the fourth sister. As my mom got older, it got harder and she had decided she was finished. Definitely.
Here's how she told me she was going to have another baby. I was home from college and we were washing dishes. No one else around. I was pouring out the engrossing, true, though artfully edited, history of Suzanne At College when my mother cut across one of my best sentences. "What do you think is the worst thing that could happen to me?"
A strange query, coming so abruptly in the middle of so fascinating a narrative, but engaging. I turned on it the full blaze of my recently sharpened focus and shiny new college freshman intellect. After a moment's intense mental effort I offered an elaborate scenario; house burns, total loss of worldly goods, family dies horribly, she is terribly injured but survives to endless painful procedures and a life of medical debt. I still think this is pretty good. She considered, rinsing out a glass. "No. It's worse. I'm pregnant. The baby's coming after the new year."
I would be eighteen.
"If it lives," I said.
"It'll live. Five months, now."
And it did live. It has two babies of its own.
Another baby I would only really know in the summers. Everyone thought she was mine, of course, if I happened to be the sister holding her. I was equally skewered by the humor and the horror. "She's my sister." No one believed me. It happened to whichever of the oldest three were holding her. "She's our sister." A littlest sister with nephews close enough to her in age that one of them played Petruchio to her Kate.

* * * * *

So, here's the thing. I remember happy cakes and candles and pretty gifts and pinatas and trips to the zoo but I don't remember a single birth day in my immediate, growing up family. I only remember the parties we had after. I remember cement stairs and mean dogs and piles of what weren't my presents. How can you tell, as you go, what should have been noticed, will be important to someone later? Tell me about the day I was born. Sorry, little sis, you'll have to ask your mother.

And good luck with that.



Noah's photos

Life. What We Can Do

When I was little my dad got himself a hunting dog. A papered Brittany Spaniel named The Lady Angeline. Angie. She was supposed to become this bird dog and my dad was supposed to become this bird hunter. I know he did take her out at least once because I went with them and got a tick, on the back of my neck, just at the hairline and to the left of my spine. In the soft hollow place below my skull. It was a hard little pointy bump I knew had not been a part of me when I got up that morning.

I showed my mom and she showed my dad and he diagnosed it because he had been to medical school and was a hunter. There was a lot of conferring and a call to the doctor to check on diseases. First they tried just nudging it to get out, sort of irritating it. Failing to achieve surrender, they tried coating it with oil to suffocate it. Ticks, my father informed me in response to my urgent queries, (you can suffocate if you get oil on your body?!?) breathe through their bodies, somewhere, not through their noses. Obvious, once I thought about it; its nose was buried in my scalp. Somebody, maybe the pediatrician or maybe a witch doctor my parents palled around with, told them to light a match, blow it out and put the very hot end of the match on the tick's behind. This treatment would make the tick want to back out of my head to determine what the heck was up and possibly, like Abraham, see that it was needful for it to obtain another place of residence. Apparently it was vital the tick come out of its own accord and under its own steam to insure that its head not remain with me though its body be removed, as might happen if some impetuous person tugged roughly on it with a tweezer, which some had threatened doing. Should the head be left behind (here's the part that makes me wonder if this were not advice given by a local shaman) it would continue to work away at me, sucking blood until, well. Until things got very bad. Basically, there'd be no stopping it, once it was free from the civilizing restraints of its body.

I wondered about this a great deal at the time.

If a tick could work so much more freely without its body than with it, why did it have a body in the first place? And if having your head separated from your body couldn't kill you, what on earth was going to do the job? Should my parents, with no prior tick handling skill of which I was aware, be successful in getting the thing to back willingly out of my head, was it going to be safe to release an insect unkillable into our bathroom and by extension, the rest of our house and my bedroom in particular? How was I ever going to feel safe playing outside or inside again knowing that the heads of ticks, unstoppable, could be roaming at will, seeking hairlines in which to thrive? (My mom had told me they favored the hairline.)

I was a child given more to brooding fearfully about matters of disease, monsters and the apocalypse than to just asking questions so I clamped my mouth shut and turned the whole thing over in my head, which was upside down resting on a towel folded up lots of times so that it would cushion my forehead where I was sort of standing on it leaning down on the toilet in the bathroom where the light was good.
I thought about parents and the mayhem they wrecked in the world.

Parents just did things, that was the trouble, they didn't think or stop to weigh the consequences, and look where it had gotten us.
They walked into a mess, say, throw up, and started cleaning like it was doable.
They packed up and drove all alone into the wilds following a map to a place no one had ever seen since the map got made and set up a tent, really just a house made out of clothes or sheets or something and made fire with newspaper and cooked food with just sticks and said don't put toothpaste in the tent because of bears. Goodnight, go to sleep.
They held you down and dug out your sliver. They scrubbed it with soap and rinsed it with alcohol.
They drove to Mexico even though you couldn't drink the water or eat the food, even though you might get lost or stolen and no one would ever see you again (this you knew because they told you), even though you drove past cars with all the doors open and the trunk and the seats out and the people's stuff strung out along the border crossing where the border cops had taken someone apart. "What happened to those people, Daddy? Why's their car like that?" "What? Oh, the border cops took them apart." Laughing.
They walked you across the street and put you into school where neither you nor any of your little sisters had ever been before and that was that. They expected you to stay there. And to tell them all the time how your day was and that you had learned stuff.
They bought a house; who knew how they were going to pay for it? "What if we can't pay for the house sometimes?" "What? What did you say? Oh, well then the bank takes it."

????????????

They bought a bird dog.
And they thought they could take a tick out of you with no prior medical or dangerous animal containment training whatsoever.
In the bathroom you were going to have to use in the night.
When the light would be bad.

Head down, for some time now, knees locked, legs starting to shake.
Dad says, let's try the matches. No, get the whole box.
And, even apart from everything else and the threat of wild tick heads lunging ferociously under my skin toward my brain, even aside from that, a whole box of matches, blazing, blown out and headed for my hairline is not a pleasant thought. I am so tired now, I am afraid I will just roll over my own head, perform an unintentional somersault across the toilet and slam onto the tile floor on the far side, probably snapping off the tick body and dooming myself to an eternity shared with the insatiable head. We're Mormons, we know about eternity.
Spine stiffened. Lips compressed.

You do what you have to do. When he dropped me off at the dentist to get my first tooth filled, when my dad got me out of kindergarten and dropped me at the dentist, careful to watch from the parking lot that I got into the office OK, assuring me he'd be back to pick me up when it was done, I checked myself in at the desk. What was I going to do? I had never been in a dentist's office before, but the only human in the room when I entered asked my name and I told her and she told me to wait. Till they called me. And they told me the shot wouldn't hurt much, and it didn't, much, and they told me to go back out to the waiting chairs. And after a while the lady at the desk asked if my dad was coming back and I said he said he would and after a while she told me she was sure he would be there soon and after a while he came.

When I took my youngest child to the doctor and he told me she had pneumonia he also told me that the people with this flu who had been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia were getting much, much sicker. He told me, unofficially, that he thought I should try to take care of her at home. He told me what to do, what to watch for. And I nursed her like he said, I took fierce care of my baby, only two. I did everything he had said and a whole lot more, everything I could think of or find out about and I prayed like crazy for about three days while she didn't get worse but she didn't get better but the people in the hospital got sicker and sicker. And on the fourth day she was getting better. And I had done it. And I fell right down and prayed and knew I had done just what I could do, no more, no less. So had everyone else.

What else can you do?

When I finally broke up with my charming, harming, talented smart funny abusive boyfriend and felt like I might be standing up and starting to live and finally allowed to die, both at the same time, I gathered up just enough strength to call my mom. And that was a good thing because it turned out there was something worse than the breakup. Hashing it out on the phone, being comforted, being defensive of myself, of him (!?), with my mom was worse and I got myself off the phone and that was the first step of the rest of my life.

Sometimes you're brave and sometimes you aren't smart enough to be scared. Sometimes you know what to do. Sometimes you just don't stop moving altogether and that's all you can do. Do something, my neighbor said. The amazing nurse who saved his brother's life, worked like crazy on this man, just this man in an ambulance, working all the way to Fillmore after jumping on the ambulance in Meadow, doing his job and working and working and never knowing who he was working on till he heard the name, till his brother was admitted in the emergency room. Do something, he said, telling us about working, throwing himself into saving his wife who died, anyway, young, of a heart attack after the birth of her third baby. It almost doesn't matter what you do. Do something.

I held perfectly still with my head upside down and gave my life into God's hands. I think for the first time. The dentist would be later.
It was all I could do.

Movement. Stuff. Talking. Smoke.

OK, my dad says. That's that. Do you want to see it?
I ask, is the head there? No one has mentioned it but this seems to me the obvious point, I mean, what are we talking about here? Huh? Like the baby's born and we have to inquire as to the sex?
What do you mean? my mom asks. I guess it's there, it'd be too small, really, to see. She's blind, my mom. No driving without glasses. Lucky, she says as they go off down the hall to return all the removal paraphernalia to all its rightful places, lucky it was the wrong season for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Spotted???

Relief.

Now I know they're messing with me. This is a joke. Spotted Fever? For real. Come on, five years old is too old not to see through this flimsy pretense. At least if you're going to make stuff up to freak me out, do better with the names. Spotted Fever, indeed. So all that stuff about the rogue head was just my dad trying to give me nightmares again.

But I never forgot it. Never forgot the danger of a disembodied tick head, checked my children thoroughly after every encounter with the wild. Hairlines, folds of skin. Lyme's Disease, fevers with spots. We just don't see that here, my brilliant and beloved new pediatrician tells me, rubbing her thumb gently across the great raised red disk that is not Lyme's bull's eye but a bite made by something, something out in the wilds of our yard, on my daughter's forearm. We don't see that here.
OK, we stay in Utah. Forever.

Do you want to see it? It is a small black bug, sort of spidery looking but with short legs and, of course, too few of them. It must not have had much time to suck up my blood, because it never got big. My dad has told me, while I was upside down waiting for one of his tricks to bring the tick backing out into the daylight (blinking?) that ticks on dogs and deer get so big they are like grapes, like walnuts. They can get splatted with a soft and terrible burst and a splash, leading, I suppose, to the aforementioned problems of an unbound tick head, but I no longer believe in that. My dad certainly found leisure to convey a great deal of tick lore to me in the sensitive time while I was wrong way to the world and before we knew how the tick and I would part company. A suspiciously large amount of upsetting detail. We are alone in the bathroom, my tick and I. I am young and have elf eyes. I can clearly see that still stuck onto the body is its head which is bigger than the period at the end of a sentence and I can clearly see periods even though I can't read and don't understand what you use them for. The tick is lying on a piece of toilet paper and I have the abandoned tweezers to poke it. Abraded, oily and burned of bottom, my tick, and bits are coming off. (A shiver of fear, what can a leg do, really, on its own? Do I believe? Or not?) And unquestionably dead. Even I can see that. The light in the bathroom is good. The tick lost. I won. I won by coming through the ordeal unscathed. The tick lost by coming through the ordeal dead.

What else could we do?

My mom has come back to relieve me of the tweezers and remove the headrest towel. Good job, she says, putting stuff away up high. I am nonplussed. What? For standing on my head for forty hours? For not falling over when they were putting matches in my long hair? For not voicing questions about slow, grisly death? For figuring out that they were teasing me about spotted sickness and ticks roaming free without legs and stomachs? Good job to find that tick, to notice so quickly. I don't know how long it would have taken me to realize I had a tick on me. Good for you. And she is gone to make dinner out of some tuna fish.

I turn it over in my head. What kind of people? Who doesn't notice they have a tick on them? How lame is that? My poor, malfunctioning mom. Silly. If she is so inept as that, why at this very moment...

I am frozen with revelation and with horror. At this very moment...

But, wait, there's more. What if the whole world, or even only some of it, is as inept as my mom?

But that could mean...How will I ever go back to school? Church? Play inside? Or outside?
I walk cautiously into the breakfast nook where I can climb (quietly, this is not allowed) onto the table. I can see her well from here. She's cooking. She doesn't like to do that so she doesn't notice me. I start scanning her for pointy little bumps.

What else can I do?