Alison McGhee's Blog, page 45

Something you would think but never say

Every other day or so, you drive up Irving Avenue and back again, a drive so familiar that most of the houses barely register. A few exceptions, notably the green one with the clerestory windows you've always admired.

Once, when this green house was for sale and you were walking by, you pulled one of the realtor sheets from the realtor mailbox and studied it carefully. It is a house designed by an architect with special attention paid to natural cooling. This intrigued you. You never could have afforded the house, then or now, but you still love it and gaze at it fondly every time you drive by.

If your older daughter is in the car with you, she will glance out the window toward a certain white house on a certain block of Irving Avenue. If you're alert, and you cut your eyes over her way, you will see her hand lift in the tiniest of waves and her lips move soundlessly.

If she catches you looking at her during this little ritual, she will smile. You will smile back. One of her friends lives in that house, and for years now, ever since she found out that he lived there, she has waved at his house and said "Hi, T."

At first her waves were open and big and she freely spoke the words aloud. These days, as the years pass on, no one who hadn't been there in the beginning would know about the ritual.

Maybe next year, when this daughter returns from college for the holidays, and you and she are once again driving up Irving Avenue, the "Hi, T." will be something she only thinks but no longer says.

A few weeks ago this daughter turned to you in the car and said, "I bet that fifty years from now, if I'm still living in Minneapolis, I will still be saying hello to T.'s house."

That thought made you happy.

Fifty years from now, if you are still living –which isn't likely– maybe you will still be saying "Rabbit rabbit" on the first day of every new month, the same way you do now. You wake in the middle of the night, usually in the 3 o'clock hour, and if it's the dawn of a new month, you speak those words aloud, for luck.

Some people say Rabbits Rabbits, but you have always preferred the singular.

You taught your friend Peter B. to say Rabbit Rabbit way back when, when you were both still in college. Years later you received a letter from him cursing the day he learned to say it, because, as he put it, "I'll be saying Rabbit f——- Rabbit till the day I die, and all because of you, McGhee."

That thought made you happy.

Many years ago you had a friend who taught you to say "11:11. God will appear," every time the digital clock showed 11:11. Every day since, twice a day if you're still awake for it, you say those words. Neither you nor your friend were, or are, religious in a God-like way, but still, you say the words.

Years ago your younger daughter heard you muttering the ritualistic words and inquired what you were saying. So you told her the story and taught her the words, and now she, too, is an 11:11 aficionado.

This thought makes you happy.

Your long-ago next door neighbor's mother, leaving the house after a visit, came upon you pale and exhausted in your front yard, trying to calm your firstborn, He Who Did Not Stop Crying.

"This too shall pass," she said, reaching through the picket fence to touch his head.

And it did.

Now you're thinking of your mother, who in times of stress tells you that All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

You have passed that one on to others, speaking it aloud or writing it down or merely sending it through time and space via thought waves. Some things are equally powerful whether spoken aloud or silently.

Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

The Boy

- Marie Howe

My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer:

night

white T-shirt, blue jeans — to the field at the end of the street.

Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown

with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,

and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.

He's running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.

And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him — you know

where he is — and talk to him: No reprisals.  He promised.  A small parade

of kids

in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in

spring.

And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father

will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next

month, not a word, not *pass the milk*, nothing.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk

down a sidewalk without looking back.

I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,

calling and calling his name.

–

For more information about Marie Howe, please click here.

And paced upon the mountains overhead

You get a reminder of it sometimes, when you walk by a house being built. Or when you're tearing out a wall damaged by one of last winter's ferocious ice dams. Or when your electrician friend comes to put in a new outlet in the room that has only one.

Touring a factory can do it too. A brewery, for example. The cavernous rooms, the grind and hum of machinery, the rattle of conveyor belts, the machines that fill the bottles, the giant vats of beer, the sour smell of fermentation.

Followed by the sight of perfectly packaged six-packs: brown bottles in their bright boxes, silently stacked on shelves. You see them in the store and, unless you consciously remind yourself, you forget where they came from. You don't think about the mess, the grind, the chaos of their beginning.

When the wall of the house is torn open, it's impossible to forget. Rough lathe and crumbled old plaster, newspapers from 1945 stuffed inside for insulation. Electrical cords writhing their way in twisted bundles up and down between floors.

If you hover in the room when the electrician is working on the outlet, watching and waiting, you will see sparks fly, the tiniest of fires.

This too will remind you of what is beneath the surface. All these reminders, all the time, should you choose to notice them: there is another life alongside this life.

Now you're thinking of when writing is the easiest, which is when you're not thinking. Your fingers are just tap-tapping away, and words appear on the screen and you look at them with interest, as if they were written by someone else.

Were they?

An image appears in your mind: a little bracelet made of red plastic beads next to a blue child's ring. These were the treasures that you and some of your friends in fifth grade played King of the Mountain with one brief winter week. The snow piles at the elementary school were so high that year that you dug snow caves into them, made snow roads on top of them.

You buried the jewelry and searched for it. Why this game was so entrancing you don't know, but all of you were entranced. Then came the day when the jewelry couldn't be found, and the game ended.

The thing is, though, it's still there. That red plastic bracelet, that little blue ring: they are still out there. Probably feet under the ground in the grass by the side of the red brick elementary school, but there.

All these years –almost your whole life, at this point– you have thought about them. The red bracelet. The blue ring.

Nothing goes entirely away. Some part of it stays.

Look at that small, square brown pillow with a pattern of leaves needlepointed on top. It was the first thing that caught your eye just now when you looked up. It's carefully placed by the armrest of the couch in this room. Your grandmother made that pillow.

You look at it and she immediately fills your mind. You can hear her voice. You can see her hand, arthritic fingers and ropy veins. Now she's laughing. Now she's urging more raspberry popover and ice cream on you.

Doesn't this mean that she's still here? That some part of her is still with you, like the silent, unseen electricity running its way up and down every wall of this house?

Yesterday, a lovely day when the outdoors was made indolent by the sun, you passed two girls and a boy, late teens all, sitting on a stone bench by the lake. Laughing. Tugging down the shoulders of their tanks, flexing their biceps, each insisting their muscles were the biggest.

You wanted to stop and watch them, they were so beautiful. Smooth, smooth brown skin, white teeth, dark hair tied back. You walked away from them, listening to their easy talk. You tried to picture them fifty years hence, what they would be like then, if they would still know each other, still be together.

Then you imagined the bones and blood and ligaments and arteries just under the surface of that silken skin, how it is there right now. Hidden. Invisible. Doing its silent work.That shadow world, indivisible from the outer one in which we move.

Sometimes you sense another world, a shadow world happening alongside this one. An unseen world of spirits and memories, things you once held. The world where the stories begin.

Sometimes you get a glimpse of it. The torn-open wall, a presence on the stairs, a long-lost voice come whispering into a dream. Your grandmother, and that one line in that one letter: "What a beautiful life we had."

Sometimes, falling asleep or waking up, there is the sensation of something just out of reach. A familiar stranger with you, hiding his face amidst a crowd of stars.

Poem of the Week

Signing My Name

- Alison Townsend

An artist always signs her name,

my mother said when I brought her my picture,

a puddled blur of scarlet tempera

I thought resembled a horse.

She dipped the brush for me

and watched while I stroked my name,

each letter drying, ruddy,

permanent as blood.

Later, she found an old gilt frame

for me at an auction.

We repainted it pink,

encasing the wobble-headed horse

I'd conjured as carefully

as if it were by da Vinci,

whose notebooks on art

she was reading that summer.

Even when I was six, my mother

believed in my powers, her own unsigned

pencil sketches of oaks and sugar maples

flying off the pad and disappearing,

while her French pastels hardened,

brittle as bone in their box.

Which is why, when I sign my name,

I think of my mother, all she couldn't

say, burning, in primary colors -

the great, red horse I painted

still watching over us

from the smoke-scrimmed cave of the mind,

the way it did those first years

from the sunlit wall in her kitchen.

Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

- William Stafford

There is a country to cross you will

find in the corner of your eye, in

the quick slip of your foot–air far

down, a snap that might have caught.

And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing

voice that finds its way by being

afraid. That country is there, for us,

carried as it is crossed. What you fear

will not go away: it will take you into

yourself and bless you and keep you.

That's the world, and we all live there.

Shall I Jump Now?

At twenty-five I dreamed a dream that has haunted me ever since: My mother faces me on the sloping deck of a gunmetal gray ocean liner. Perhaps it is an aircraft carrier; it has that same forbidding, ominous look. A narrow rail runs along the edge of the deck. No deck chairs, nothing to hold a body to the surface of the ship – and that slope, that slope is strange. Should you slip on that sloping deck you would careen right over the edge.

I peer over the side. Huge waves boil and heave, flinging angry spray dozens of feet in the air and still not even close to where I stand clutching the rail. If I fell overboard I would drown within seconds. No one would hear my cries. No one would even know I was gone.

Something, a sixth sense, makes me turn around. My mother stands yards away from me on the sloping deck, her arms held out for balance in the strong wind. She is smiling. She's wearing her blue velveteen bathrobe, the one that zips from ankle to neck. She's wearing her blue slippers too. She looks the way she looks first thing in the morning, when she moves about the kitchen making coffee.

She smiles at me. Her arms are held straight out to either side. She looks light and joyful.

"Shall I jump now?" she says.

Years later, I tell only one friend about my dream. I describe the blue bathrobe, the happiness in my mother's eyes.

"The blue bathrobe," says my friend. "Hmm. What does the blue bathrobe represent to you? Security? Warmth? Comfort?"

I suppose the blue bathrobe represents all those things to me, but that is not what I focus on. What I see are those arms, lifting as if to catch the wind.

When I unravel time, the furthest back I can go is this: my mother was ahead of me, climbing up brown stairs that had little bits of grey on them. I know this because I am crawling up the stairs, looking down at them inches from my nose. My mother carries a bucket. I am wearing diapers; I can feel the plastic heaviness rubbing on my legs and back. I look out through the railing on the stairs and I see the world going by and time passing, and my mother is climbing, climbing up beyond me and even though I cannot think in words yet I tell myself: Remember this.

My young mother is lovely, slim and straight, with beautiful long legs. Unruly chestnut hair frames her dark-brown eyes. She wears red lipstick. She shepherds her three small girls (our brother is not yet born) out to the bus for school, so that she can get in the car and drive to the high school where she teaches algebra and geometry. She drives to graduate school for her second master's degree. She places an X and a Q on a Scrabble triple word space; has she won again? She has won again. She weeds the garden, plants flowers, hangs the laundered clothes out on the line. She sautees zucchini in her electric skillet. She does the New York Times crossword puzzle. Castanets in hand, she dances the flamenco.

I remember her sitting at the kitchen table before her worn sewing machine, feeding lengths of flowered cotton through the presser foot and needle. She senses my presence and looks up and smiles.

"Look," she says, and holds up a sleeveless shift trimmed with cotton lace at the neck and hem. Flowers against a background of green. Red for my sister Laurel and yellow for my sister Holly. In the photo taken on Easter morning a few days later, our mother stands on the steps surrounded by her little girls, all three bathed, ribbons in their hair, wearing flowered dresses.

Years later, standing on the faded blue concrete of the porch, my mother wears her blue velveteen bathrobe and her navy velveteen slippers. She is waving goodbye to me. One arm rises and falls in a slow circular motion. She will wave until the car that is bearing me away is out of sight, rounding the curve of Route 274.

Where am I going?

Maybe I'm 16 and heading to Portugal as an exchange student.

Maybe I'm 18 and heading to college in Vermont.

Maybe I'm 20 and on my way to Taipei, Taiwan for a semester.

Maybe I'm 22 and moving to Boston.

Maybe I'm 25 and driving west, to Minneapolis.

Wherever I'm going, it's away.

My mother stands on the porch, waving and smiling until I'm all the way gone. See her now. She cups her hands around her mouth. Goodbye, she calls. Goodbye, darling girl.

"The dream," my friend says. "Why the ship? Why the ocean? What sort of journey does this represent?"

Who the hell knows, I want to say. Who the hell cares? Can't you see my mother, dammit, standing there, asking me if she should jump now?

My mother's slender hands are always in motion, her fingers long and expressive.

"I talk with my hands, don't I?" she said in astonishment, the first time she saw herself on video.

Sometimes. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't talk at all, but go still and silent, as you did when I was seven and your mother took the train up from the city to visit us.

Something was wrong and Grandma knew it. She had a sixth sense. A shift in the universe, molecules rearranging themselves six hours downstate in the New York City apartment she shared with my grandfather. Grandma picked up the telephone and called. My mother watched her. Grandma called again. And again. She paced back and forth, the telephone cord dangling as she walked. Finally Grandma called the building superintendent, and the superintendent opened the apartment door with his master key to find my grandfather dead by his own hand.

I remember driving to the city with my mother and father. I remember going up and down in an elevator, back and forth from their apartment to the street below. I remember the elevator full of boxes and bags on the way down, and empty on the way up except for me and my parents. I remember my mother's weary eyes. She was thirty-one, an age so young to me now and unfathomably adult to me then, when I was seven.

And I remember the years following, eleven years of daily 4:30 p.m. telephone calls from my mother – home with her four children, home from teaching all day – to my grandmother. My mother, steadfast companion, she who does what needs to be done.

At twenty-two I graduated from a prestigious college with a highly marketable degree in Chinese and Asian Studies, student loans and a singleminded desire to write fiction. I did not even try to find a real job. Instead, I lived in a tiny room in Boston and freelance typed to pay the bills, while rising at dawn to write my stories.

She said nothing.  She let me be, as she always has. She did not try to steer me in any particular direction, despite the fact that she longed for me to be financially secure, the way she never was as a child.

She used to visit me in Boston, in that scraping-by former life of mine that I loved so much. We roamed the streets and drank coffee and ate muffins from DeLuca's Market, sitting on the floor of my tiny chairless room. We wandered through the Public Garden and along the Esplanade by the Charles River. At night I unrolled a camping mattress onto the floor (no room for a bed) and she slept next to me. She read the short stories I typed out on my rented IBM Selectric II.

My mother stands on the sloping deck of the gray ship. Her arms are out to her sides. My heart seizes. I try to move toward her, take her winged arms in mine and lower them, but nothing happens. Dream paralysis.

"Do you suppose the dream means that she's just tired?" my friend says. "Sick of responsibility, maybe?"

My mother was a math teacher at a middle school in downstate New York when she found out she was pregnant for the first time, with the baby who would become me. She was twenty-three years old. She ran down the hall to the gym, where a pep rally was taking place, so happy that she couldn't resist telling a fellow teacher: I'm going to have a baby! I'm going to have a baby!

"Maybe," I said, "but my mother would not leave me unless she had no choice."

When I was twenty-four, the man I had abandoned my heart to died. Suicide. A friend drove me from Boston to my parents' house. It was a six-hour drive in a rattletrap car and my friend chattered to fill the silence and sometimes I bent over in the seat and pushed my forehead into the musty vinyl of the dashboard.

I remember my mother waiting with outstretched arms on the porch. I remember the ticking of the kitchen clock that marked off each fifteen-minute block of time. I remember the plate of pork chops and applesauce and bread and butter she set before me, none of which I could eat.

In a photo from that time, I sit in a bikini on a beach by my mother's favorite mountain, up in the Adirondacks. Every rib shoves itself out from my skin; I am knobs and bones and angles shivered in pain. Exhaustion in my eyes. My mother is invisible behind the camera, silent witness to her child's grief. My mother, patient companion.

My sister Laurel and I are at Laurel's house in New Hampshire, lazily flipping through one of our old high school yearbooks, cackling at what dorks we were. We come to the teachers' section and see our mother's photo in the math department.

We stop laughing.

"It was the year Grandma died," Laurel says after a while.

My mother was my age when her mother lay in a coma in a room at St. Luke's hospital in Utica, New York. The nurses told my mother that Grandma's blood pressure was dropping, and my mother sat vigil in the quiet room. At some point in the night, my mother went out to the nurse's station to lie down on their couch and try to sleep. She startled out of sleep to hear her mother calling to her in a young and happy voice.

"Daughter! Daughter!"

Thinking it was a dream, my mother went back to sleep. Half an hour later the nurse came to waken her, and said that Grandma had died.

"I have always felt that this was her way of telling me that she was fine," my mother tells me.

Who else did my mother have to see her through her grief? No sister, no brother, father long dead. All my mother had in the way of a patient companion, a witness to her sorrow, was that fleeting call from her dying mother, that young and happy voice.

Our mother in black and white smiles out from the old book, weariness in her eyes. Oh my mother, how thin you are, too thin. How young you look. The present me looks like the past you. If only I could reach into that book, into the room where you sit alone at your desk, and put my arms around you. Comfort you. Make you a plate of pork chops and applesauce. Tell you, as you have told me in the dark hours, that all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

"So our mother is off to Guatemala," Laurel tells me. "Some house project for Habitat for Humanity. Can you imagine her, pouring concrete?"

She laughs. So do I. It is entirely possible for our mother to be pouring concrete and we both know it. There is not much that is impossible to imagine our mother doing. Close your eyes and pick a day, any day, in the life of our mother. Here she is driving north to the mountain lakes, her yellow kayak in the back of her van. Playing Scrabble with a housebound elder. Teaching English as a Second Language to Bosnian refugees. Working at the local food bank, putting together a charity mailing, begging for pledges for her latest ski-a-thon, walk-a-thon, canoe-a-thon, take your pick of any and all worthy causes.

I rise in a summer dawn and steal glimpses of my children, asleep in their rooms. My youngest has taken off her pajama shirt in the night and lies on her side, hands tucked together under her chin as if in prayer.

Behold her smooth brown back, her spine a tender curve of buttons, her ribs a pair of cupped hands that hold her heart. The moment I had a baby was the moment I understood terror, my heart blown sideways with adoration and fear. How dazzling and how awful to love someone this much.

Not long ago my mother and I sat in her kitchen, talking of children, mine and hers. Dogs, mine and hers. Teaching, mine and hers. Fiction writing: mine. Projects that make the world a better place: hers.

"I could tell you anything, my darling girl," she says at one point. "You have been through the fire."

Fire, meaning the kind of loss and grief that cracks your heart. Fire, meaning joy so deep that it, too, opens your heart. Fire, meaning life, the way it stretches and hurts and raptures you, if you let it all in.

There is one fire I have not yet been through, though.

I see my mother standing on the porch in her blue velveteen bathrobe, smiling and waving, waving until I am out of sight.

And I see her standing on the sloping deck, waves hurling themselves at the smooth sides. Her arms rise up, wings in blue velveteen. Why does she sound so light of heart? No. No. But I am frozen in my dream and cannot scream.

"Maybe you're interpreting it wrong," my friend says. "Maybe what the dream is really asking you is this: are you ready to let her go?"

Soon I will wake. My throat will ache for the rest of the day. Twenty years  later, my throat still aches when the nightmare imagery conjures itself. The only real lesson the years in between have taught me about my dream is this: that when the time does come for my mother to jump, to call my name in a young and happy voice, then the enormous work of staying behind and waving, waving until she is out of sight, will be mine.

* * *

(Note: this essay originally appeared in Riding Shotgun, an anthology of women writing about their mothers. The book is available here and there and online at places like  amazon.)

Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

[image error]

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

- William Butler Yeats



I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.



And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.



I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.



–

For more information on Yeats, please click here: here.

–

Little houses made of ticky-tacky

The question must be asked: why does the container of colored blocks to the right of this paragraph keep disappearing? Not in real life, but in this entry. It's becoming a real problem, and one can only hope that by the time one presses "Publish," the blocks will still be visible. There are no guarantees, though – not in life in general, nor in this recently snapped crappy cell phone photo.

Another question which must be asked is why does one's cursor keep leaping randomly over the text which one is typing. Yes, this text, the one which you –if indeed you are out there– are reading right now. The leaping cursor is a recent problem, one which began the very moment after a new operating system was installed on this computer. Coincidence? One thinks not.

And the third and final question: is it possible, or desirable, to write a post in which one refers to oneself only as one? One shall find out.

So, the jug of colored blocks, and the provenance thereof, both of blocks and jug. Two days ago, one journeyed to a nearby city in order to sign some books at a bookstore. On the way out of said bookstore, one noticed a large box filled with clear plastic containers, attractively shaped like small fish tanks.

"FREE!!!!"

That was what the sign above the large box read. The urgency of the multiple exclamation marks caused one to smile. One stopped and perused the FREE!!!! containers. Did one need one of these containers? No, one did not. And yet one idly imagined the things that such a container might be filled with, should one bring one home anyway. Tiny plastic babies, for example. Tea candles. Chopsticks. Miniature farm animals made of painted resin. Cookies? No, not cookies.

One took a container home and placed it on the buffet by the window.

Yesterday, a cold but bright and sunny day, one spent five hours –yes, five hours– in one's car, loitering from block to block in south Minneapolis as two groups of two teenage girls each trudged door to door trying to sell the inhabitants a coupon card for $20 in order to raise funds for their lacrosse team.

Why did one volunteer to trail these girls for five hours in one's car? One does not remember. It must have had to do with a latent sense of civic duty. It certainly had nothing to do with one's saleswoman tendencies, which are pretty much nonexistent.

(Enough of this referring to oneself as "one"! How insufferable!)

No, you are not a saleswoman. At all. In fact, you were the type of Girl Scout who bought back all the cookies you were supposed to sell, just so that you would not have to do what the teenage lacrosse players are doing right now.

Why should these people be persuaded to buy a coupon card? The coupons are basically worthless. As the parent of a teenage lacrosse player, you yourself bought one, but that is only because you had to. These are the dark thoughts as you crawl from block to block, making sure that nothing bad happens to the teens as they plod onward.

You pull up alongside one team of two and roll down your window.

"Now girls," you say. "If a man wearing a bathrobe comes to the door and asks if you want to come inside and see his new puppy, what are you going to say?"

"We're going to say 'Sure, we'd love to come in!'" say the teens. "We love puppies."

You pull up alongside the other team of two.

"Now girls," you say. "If a man in his underwear comes to the door and asks you to come inside, he's got some candy for you, what are you going to say?"

"We're going to say 'Sure, we'd love to come in!'" say the teens. "We love candy."

Excellent. It seems that the teens are in good shape. You have taught them well. Surely a quick stop at the estate sale right on this very block wouldn't hurt anyone.

Out of the car and into the little house you go. It's Sunday afternoon, the half-off everything time of day for those who, like you, are well versed in estate sales. Dishes, a heavy four-pedastaled table, a folding chair, a picture of Jesus, old muffin tins and coffeemakers, you peruse them all. The non-colors of the house are beige and tan and brown and whitish.

But what is this! Two large zip-lock bags filled with brightness. Red, yellow, blue, green. This is more like it. You are a woman who loves color. No neutral tones in your house, or rather, a few neutral tones here and there in order to set off all the color.

Did the elderly woman of this little house –for estate sales are almost always about elderly women– keep these little bags of blocks around for her grandchildren? Could they possibly be left over from when her own children were little? You decide not to think about this. Estate sales are replete with sadness, when you think about it, and today is a bright and sunny day with teenage lacrosse players trudging from house to house, and you just don't want to be sad. You decide to make colored blocks in plastic bags a sign of happiness.

Should you get the blocks? What would you use them for?

You could add them to the two lidded boxes of toys that you keep in your closet for when your nephew and your near-nephew and other little friends come visiting. The blocks would make them happy. They could add them to the Jenga blocks and build tiny houses and airports and factories.

Or, you could keep the blocks for yourself. You could spill them out on your big wooden dining table, the one where you don't eat, the one where your teenage lacrosse player does her homework and where you play Bananagrams. While she does her homework, you yourself could make tiny houses and airports and factories. Wouldn't that be fun?

Yes. Yes, it would be fun. You pluck up the bags of bright wooden blocks and take them to the semi-harried woman at the card table by the door.

"How much?" you say, dangling the bags of blocks.

"$4," she says. "Which means $2, because it's half-off Sunday afternoon."

Two bucks. You walk out the door into the cold sunshine and squint down the block. Why, there are the four teenage lacrosse players. They have not been abducted by predatory men in bathrobes. They have made good choices in your absence. All is right with the world.

You put the blocks in the trunk. The four teenage lacrosse players fold themselves into your tiny car. Off you go to get some ice cream. And when you get home, why look, there is the perfect container for your new-old colored wooden blocks.

Poem of the Week, by Stanley Kunitz

The Layers

- Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written,

I am not done with my changes.

–

For more information about Stanley Kunitz, please click here.

I owe you

There are people in the world whom you owe. People you think about, and wish you'd thanked, or more than thanked, at the time, but out of shock, or because you weren't thinking straight, you didn't.

All this long time later, how can you make it up them? You can't, not to them personally. You can try to be kind, try to ease the lives of others, but that's a going-forward kind of thing. You can't go backward.

You'd like to thank those men in the rusty beater of an ancient car who saw you stuck in the middle of that snowfield between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles that blowy winter day 15 years ago, that day when your tiny car slid right off Lake Street and sailed out into the snow.

How many cars drove right past? Dozens. It is and was a busy, busy intersection. You sat behind the wheel, calming yourself, ready to get out and trudge all the way back home, from there to call a tow truck. No cell phone, back then.

Then the ancient car full of Spanish-speaking men pulled off to the side of that busy street, and all of them jumped out, running across the snow to where you were just getting out of the car. Laughing, gesturing, they pointed you back into the car, and then they massed around the car, motioning you which way to turn the wheel, and pushed you back onto Lake Street. Two of them stood in the far right lane, directing traffic around you until you could safely make it back onto the pavement.

You got out again, wanting to thank them, maybe offer them some money, something, anything, but again they laughed and motioned you back in the car. They jumped into their rusty beater and they were off, leaving you with the memory and, ever since, a wave of gratitude whenever you hear a group of men chattering in Spanish.

You'd like to go back in time, fourteen years ago now, to a public park in Hangzhou, China. You and your baby daughter in her stroller at dawn, making your way around the paths. So hot. So unbearably hot, even at dawn.

A group of women practicing fan-dancing. A group of men and women and teenagers doing tai chi. A woman, swimming alone in a greenish, rubbage-strewn pond. You and your baby daughter, taking in the sights.

From across the grass came three men, two walking and their friend in a primitive contraption that passed for a wheelchair. Made of steel, or iron, low to the ground, with creaky unstable wheels, he pushed himself along laboriously. You watched. In a way, it was a beautiful and amazing sight.

"I like your vehicle," you said in Chinese, unable to think of a better word for the thing that he was strapped into.

He looked up at you with dark, deep eyes. Raised his eyebrows.

"It's very difficult," he said.

Simple words that you have never forgotten. This man comes to you in your mind often. It's very difficult. You can hear his voice still. You can see his two friends, standing patiently beside him.

Within an hour of leaving the park you were filled with regret. "I like your vehicle"? You had money, relatively so anyway. You had passed a store the previous day that sold wheelchairs, shiny new ones, ones like Americans used.

You wish to this day that you had gotten that man a wheelchair, or given him money to buy one. It's very difficult.

Many, many years ago, someone left a basket of food outside your apartment door. This was not a pre-made, cellophane-wrapped basket of cheese and sausage. This was a basket that she had put together herself, and it came with a note.

I'm not Jewish, read the note, in part, but there's a Jewish tradition that when someone is grieving, you should leave them food. I wish I could do more.

You barely knew this woman. You had run into her a few times, was all. But she knew of the awful thing that had happened, and she went to stores and bakeries and put together that basket for you, and she wrote you that note. You brought the basket into the tiny kitchen and you put it on the table.

You owe her too, for that simple, complicated act of kindness. To this day you remember it, how she tried to comfort you when she didn't even know you.

That man on the sidewalk below as you type this, walking his dog. That boy on the skateboard, the one who must be skipping school. Your own dearest friends and family. The woman ahead of you at Rainbow Foods. The girl behind the counter at Kinko's.

You owe them all, somehow, and you will try to remember that.