Decade

As another year draws to a close, I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin. 

Ten years ago I was preparing to move back to my Michigan hometown from my college town in Tennessee. When I think of that time, my memory unravels a variegated yarn spun of daily moments compressed into vivid composites. My car's engine ticking behind me in the hospital parking ramp's oblique shadows. Scarfing down the day's unsold cafeteria fare on the winding drive up the mountain after work. Inhaling the tar scent of Incline Railway timbers on morning jogs beneath them. Mockingbird song from the Craven House's antebellum wooden porch. That one tight sun-struck curve on I-95. The breathtaking freefall into sky and city alongside Scenic Highway. Coffee steamer and barista banter blurring into white noise around my table while I scribble in my journal at Barnes & Noble. 

All of these memories and a thousand like them have a certain texture: solitary, inward, uninterrupted. They are notably devoid of technology, and contemporary me is staggered by its absence, and the consequent absence of politics and pop culture in my life at this time.  I had a company flip phone and a landline, and blogged and emailed on a big stuttering desktop. My unfolding romance livened these outdated channels with the thrill of waiting for a new email to load, of mustering guts to return the missed call blinking on the caller ID.  I kept in an oft-visited compartment in my mind the thought of my early December plane ticket to visit this guy from college I was getting to know. A decade later, a handful of songs from mixes he gave me then still usher me back to that mental chamber of possibilities that haloed my 2010 retreat with a gracious shimmer of newness and nerves. 

I packed my '87 Chevrolet Cavalier, settled my dog in the passenger seat, and drove. 

I had barely unpacked my bags in my childhood home before I was watching Jonathan's Toyota pull into sight through the snow-flecked gloom of MSP airport twilight. He squinted out a foggy windshield that his arm periodically wiped clear as he scanned the curb for the spot where I waited, shivering with cold and excitement. 

The ensuing week I toured rural and urban Minnesota on his arm. On the drive across stubbled fields to the Twineball Museum I giggled over Weird Al's "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota." We chatted, building Legos, while Nirvana played beneath the alligator wallpaper of his childhood room. I eavesdropped from the church pews while he and the Christmas choir rehearsed their carols, attuning my ear to his voice's steady strain. My city memories are slightly different, less auditory, full of vapor and shine. Watching sunlight wink off the saliva escaping from the cloud of Jonathan's breath while he performatively hocked phlegm at the Mississippi River. Fog filling my glasses as we entered the Minneapolis Art Institute, where we shyly wandered through aisles of art before descending the vast front steps an hour later into winter's enormous sparkle and dark. Jonathan's chandelier-lit company Christmas party that weekend, when the season conspired to deliver a storm that shrank attendance and made for a memorable drive downtown. I can still see the lumberjack of a man who sauntered across our headlight beams in the middle of the street, his shovel spanning his shoulders under fluffy twirls of snow as we crawled along at the speed of his boots. 

Into this setting, a flurry of firsts filled in blanks of experience I hadn't known existed. First interactions with future in-laws and friends, first telling of now familiar anecdotes, first assembling and dining on the famous family enchiladas, first group listen to Peter Gabriel through the fine living room speakers. First Broadway Pizza chair across from Jonathan, first time he debuted a surprise mustache, first twining our fingers, first worship at his side, first sips of coffee together in the white morning glare that follows a night of snows. 

Though I didn't predict that these moments, their texture at this time exquisitely new to me, would eventually become the homespun of my life, I enjoyed wrapping myself in them during my unexpected overnight at the airport that weekend, and over the blizzard-prolonged return journey, the weeks of finding my footing back in Michigan. And they did indeed become my happy quotidian: three Decembers later on a glittery winter morning Jonathan and I were married. Seven Decembers and three children later, we still live in the same large Minneapolis home that welcomed us from our honeymoon. 

Now it is 2020, and I can't relate my love story without thinking of my dad, abruptly widowed after 33 years of marriage. I find myself imagining what it would mean, after being folded year by year into intimate habitude with another, to adjust to the texture of solitude again. The hair cloth rasp of it, symbolized by sackcloth in other times. The gauntlet of significant firsts that he is always facing do not merely fill a blank of life experience, they necessarily pose a stark negative to positives that precede them. 

The loss of my mom changes the texture of my days, too, coarsening and dulling areas that once held great comfort and color. I feel I am wearing cherished memories thin by compulsively reaching for them, swathing myself and my children in them over and over.  How she loved lighting candles, bargain hunting, and the look of snow spuming off the top of the rushing trains at night. Her alto voice strong with praise beside us in the pew. How her head would tilt back when she wheezed with laughter. The way her knuckles creased around the curve of her coffee mug. How her thick graying hair ran through my braiding teenage fingers. 

As another year draws to a close, I sing this earth that wears out like a garment, and all our experiences raveled within it.  

I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin. 

Snapshot of a million times a day

An interruption-needle so long and quick to the center-brains: the word mama.

That breaks all my concentration completely mama, I.

(Sarah Vap)

Limits of utilitarianism

if men get war, then I get abortion

This line from Sarah Vap's Winter: Effulgences and Devotions has inhabited my thoughts since the afternoon when, quelling my innate prejudice--for I believe the Golden Rule extends to intellectual hospitality--I cautiously invited it in.

Vap makes a bid here for the right to gamble her future using abortion, as men do with war.  I would like to take this appeal as a launching pad to explore the reasons people contend for such tarnished prerogatives. I would like to make my case against all but a few of them. But my appraisal of means and ends will always be as persuasive as the convictions that guide it. Such conversations yield at best a gallery of irreconcilable worldviews, at worst, confusion and bitterness.

Taking that approach also bypasses two concepts which, combined, equip us to make the seemingly impossible refusal to gamble our own destiny at all. 

First: that our choices yield outcomes, but the outcomes are unpredictable. Selected in the mercurial darkness of the present, our choices exert a wayward catalyzing energy of their own upon the choices faced by others, even as the choices of others keep forming our own potentialities. If this is true, then choosing for our idea of an outcome--however innocently or even nobly intended--will always be a gamble. To choose using the currency of one or many unyielded human lives raises the stakes, often in ways we are incapable of fathoming. Arguing the prudence of such a wager is difficult, and ought to be. It does not take much imagination to see ourselves, our loved ones, on someone else's table.  

Second: that whatever else our choices beget, we will be the byproduct. When I look back at the many decisions that I have made, I see the truth about my character coming into focus. What I choose will always reveal who I am. This is where the power of volition can be harnessed towards an achievable destiny. My choices cannot incarnate my desires, but they will always incarnate my true self. 

Both these concepts offer freedom: from the futile striving to wrest outcomes out of a universe that doesn't submit to our edicts, and from the moral bewilderment that sets in as we grapple with how little our choices seem to matter. 

Wars and abortions would be much reduced if we trained ourselves and our children to understand the limits of choice, to wield its vast power appropriately. Not only because fewer people would avail themselves of these extreme prerogatives, but because more people would have the wisdom to reject the millions of small but self-disclosing moral failures that beget such extreme situations.

At the very least, such training allows us to transcend the power dynamics with which Vap herself resigns to participate. 

Sparklers - Barbara Crooker

We’re writing our names with sizzles of light

to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive,

make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side

of the lake. The rest, little a, r, one small b,

spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side

of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign:

Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy

chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing

off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny

pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth,

branding them on the air. And though my mother’s

name has been erased now, I write it, too:

a big swooping I, a little hissing s, an a that sighs

like her last breath, and then I ring

belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.

I’m remembering the feeling of getting that lit sparkler in your hand as a child, the sudden pressure you feel to use it meaningfully somehow before it’s gone, how the burning hiss of it adds audio to your urgency. You try to get a whole word out before the first letter vanishes or scratch out a sentence or you lose your head and race around the yard squiggling it wildly before it is smoke and fumes, leaving you panting and dissatisfied.

Two years ago, when we were gathered as an extended family out on the front porch lighting our own fourth of July sparklers, I remembered this poem and shared it with you, Mom. I was thinking then of your mom, my Oma, sweetly missed on these occasions. I scrawled Oma with my sparkler in the dusk, then Mom, and Abby, and a series of messy childish hearts all swirled together. It felt at once meaningful, playful, and silly.

It didn't feel like a foreshadowing, but now that memory looms portentous and strange. I would never have thought only a year later your sparkle would be out.  The smoke you left behind is recent and thick, swirling in the air, burning my nose, and stinging my eyes.

How panicked and dissatisfied I would be, if the universe was simply this: a dazzlingly chaotic Trailer Full of Sparkles, each a vivid flash that could never make the sense it should. But I believe, as you did, that this massive locked trailer full of crazy, wheeling, bouncing, glittering sparkles matters and makes sense. And I believe that each human spark will be found to have written in some glorious way, with or without trying, the same great Name that kindled it for that very purpose.

When I reflect on your life, Mom,  I love to see how vividly you wrote that Name, in all its forms, over and over again in this dark world. How you taught us all the worthiness of making that our life's obsession: to learn the names of God and write them using the light He kindled within us, with ever greater clarity and beauty.

The best part is knowing that your spark, extinguished here, is blazing eternally in the presence of the God we both love to name.

I'll keep practicing my penmanship here. See you soon!

How the sadness of
a single human life
compounds with time.

How in a generation, maybe two if we are lucky--

the way our mouths wrinkle into
laughter, the way we can't remember
which dishes go where for the
thousandth time, the way our bodies
have pulsed with rage over small
injustices, the way we cannot hold our
liquor, hold our excitement, hold our
children long enough--

everything is annihilated with the
delicate memories of our loved-ones.

-Paul Cheney

Snapshot #6

Jonathan: "What will you do when you grow up, Florence?"
Florence: "Drink beer and wine...and push buttons on my computer!"

Snapshot #4

Out of the mouth of Bubs:

"Don't you wanna pway jumping scutes upstairs with me?" (An invented name for an invented game involving plastic rings hurled skillfully at the far wall.)

"MOM! Can I hold your hand!" (in a panic whenever we are out walking)

"Here's your pwesent." (singsong voice, proffering a toy wrapped in a towel or blanket or paper)

"My shadow looks like a gwown-up!"

"Let's do our singing books, Fwowence." (each night as they begin the ritual of "singing" through the huge pile of children's books on their bedside table)

"Yeah! We're on the path of LIFE!" (shouted from his bed as I descend the staircase after commending the children for their obedience before tucking them in)

"Cheese-a-most-a-veetos!" (chanted loudly, often, and for no apparent reason)

Snapshot #3

Florence is late in her fourth year of life, my long-legged worrier, my firstborn. Her cheeks react to any exposure to sunshine, even insipid winter light, with a burst of freckles. She and her best pretend friend, Loya, have long conversations while she uses the bathroom these days, and Loya often sleeps in the bathtub, so Florence considerately scrubs the walls during her evening bath to make it nice. Her favorite toy is Baby Babette, who is often sickly, or feeling shy. When it comes to art, Florence prefers to narrate a story while she scribbles densely with various colors. If she does attempt to draw people they emerge as colorful humped ghosts with cicada eyes and, occasionally, hands.  She often murmurs, "I wish I was you, Mom" or "Mom, I wish I was baby Reid" when she sees something enviable in our behavior (checking email, doing dishes...getting a diaper changed). She is drawn to shy, reserved personalities. I think her idea of paradise is a sing-along with her favorite people, or perhaps it's the moments she and her dad sit together at the piano and play "their song" together.

Snapshots #2

After almost two full weeks away from us, Willa and Ruthie were greeted this morning by the snowmen in our front yard holding a crude cardboard Welcome Back sign taped to the handle of our red shovel. No time for breakfast until after everyone had been introduced to the Christmas toys and had an icebreaking quarrel or two over them. A new game was invented involving the three new inflated rubber cows and a colorful half-dozen of children's bowling pins. Three children would straddle their cows and, giggling and shrieking, bounce across the attic floor as fast as possible, racing toward the row of pins set up by the odd kid out. First to crash through the pins won, and surrendered his steed to the pin-setter for the next round. Later on, this wild but organized pastime devolved to the barbaric practice of catapulting the cows over the attic railing and down the steep attic stairs. By the end of the day, however, the cows were dressed adorably in infant hats and fancy scarves, a teacup beneath each snout, and consigned to comfortably watch one of the innumerable shows the older girls like to put on for whatever audience they can muster.

The day was so warm for January that we were able to spend two long stints of it outside, stockpiling and pitching snowballs, constructing snow forts, and trudging around the block and back and forth from front to back yard under the supervision of calling crows and unseasonably frisky squirrels.

Cobbling the pizzas together for our traditional Friday movie night while the older children whined and quibbled underfoot, I did not notice my youngest strewing leftover popcorn across the floors until it was too late.  Having already mopped up two large milk spills from the same party over the course of the day, I knew it was no use crying over this either.

Snapshots #1

There are two snowmen in the yard. Their eyes, blueberries squirted into finger-pokes, have stained the surrounding area a disquieting magenta. Fragments of pine needles and streaks of dirt blight the lumpy contours of their snowy dermis.

If you could have witnessed their creation, the sparkly-eyed concentration invested on them by two earnest children, you might feel the same tenderness I feel as I peek through my window curtains at their grotesque forms.