Life. Tricking.

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

Or maybe it's Mardi Gras.

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

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

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

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

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

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



some Halloween photos

Meditations. About Secrets

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

Do you think if you were we would tell you?

It'd be a secret.

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


Lies I tell.
Truths I will never speak.

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

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

Saved.

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

Morrissey
Sing Your Life (slightly rearranged)




Noah's photos

One, Two Three. One, Baby.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


Noah's stacks, Noah's photos

Stories. A Fairy, Once

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please, don't not be.

Noah's photo

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.


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