camera

they've always been pretty. i've always wanted them, but it wasn't until i lived in michigan near the original argus factory that the longing for some cameras became an almost physical presence. i bought an old argus c-3 at a thrift store and wandered around ann arbor snapping photos like i knew what i was doing. i liked the range finder. i thought it made me fancy. what i found out was that men who'd just missed going to war in ww2 would run up to me on the street nearly in tears screaming, "is that a brick?" they would start in without waiting for my answer, telling my my camera was by far the most beautiful, brilliant, perfect camera on the face of the earth and nobody better ever say otherwise. i could see in their faces they were already somewhere else, sometime else, and they would rattle on about the camera, their own version of the camera, and how it had made their lives beautiful. it happened over and over. they had grown up there, right by the factory, fallen in love in their own hometowns with this camera.

over the years the sweetie and i have collected a pile of about fifty mostly useless old still cameras and not quite a dozen movie cameras of all sorts. the ones we can scrounge film for we've used, but even the useless ones are too pretty to toss and they sit on shelves or tables, challenging me to dust them.

so when my class started a nonfiction unit i decided to do something selfish. i decided to talk about what i like, what i think is pretty, what makes me happy. we start the unit talking about a thing (any thing will do) and we talk about all the different ways to approach it. lists, diagrams, instructions, personal stories, timelines, etc. so i dragged in as many cameras as i could carry and a photo album. it is a scary thing to toss what you love out onto a bunch of fourteen year olds, especially if what you love includes photos you've taken your own self in an attempt to be "artistic" or if it involves giving them anything older than your grandma.

here's what i took:
brownie flash 620, complete with flash apparatus
polariod land camera, 800 series (it weighs a thousand pounds!)
argus a series camera, with dreamy art deco back and rounded front
polaroaid j66 land camera with color coded levers and buttons to match instructions on the back
kodak brownie 2a (early 30s)
unlabeled camera with spring-loaded bellows
kodak brownie starmatic (this is the not oldest one, right?)
kodak jr 1-a autographic (1914-1927) with "old timey" writing and a collapsing bellows
argus 75 with a shaded viewfinder
a newish wooden pinhole camera made by robert rigby and fitted with a polaroid back

nothing rare. nothing fancy. nothing very valuable to anyone but me. i put the kids in groups and put cameras on the tables. here are the rules: do not get up from your table with a camera. hold cameras by the heaviest part. do not force anything to open, close or slide. if you hurt the camera, you get me another of that kind. here are the instructions: look at them. pick them up. figure them out. if you have never watched a group of teenagers try to figure out how to cram the bellows back into the body of a 90 year old camera, you should try it. it will make your hands shake. they held the little clouded viewfinders up to their eyes and couldn't see a thing. they pushed buttons and advanced film. one of the cameras, i think the brownie 620, had film in it when i bought it and they might or might not have taken some photos and might or might not have then exposed the whole roll. either way, one group cheerfully handed me a roll of color processed c-22 film which hasn't been made since 1977. they got the backs off every camera and each time were shocked to find the spaces empty of machinery. they smelled them, felt the outsides, touched the bellows. they figured out viewfinders accidentally while passing cameras across the table to each other.

i have never had a teaching day with more questions. the how of real live cameras was too much for them. they wanted ages, dates, kinds of film. i told them about the c-3 and they want to see it. i explained the idea of a camera obscura and they are looking for a good room to make one. they want to make a classroom sized camera. i guess maybe my favorite part was telling them they could be inside a camera and watching their eyes.

we looked at a photo album all from the pinhole camera. they liked the photos just fine but wanted to see them again when they realized there's no viewfinder, no lens, no stuff. "how do you know what you're taking a picture of?" the kept asking. "you guess," i said, "and that's the nice part, that's what makes it an adventure." to my complete surprise, they agreed.

ruby

warning: this chronicles the last day of a pretty good cat (no matter what i've said elsewhere)

they say, ruby you're like a dream
not always what you seem
and though my heart may break when i awake
let it be so, i only know
ruby, it's you

they say, ruby you're like a song
you just don't know right from wrong
and in your eyes i see heartaches for me
right from the start, who stole my heart?
ruby, it's you

-ray charles

ruby was a replacement cat. a replacement for a replacement. and although she was the most beautiful kitten i'd ever seen, it was always clear she didn't intend to get close to us. she might tolerate us but it was unlikely she'd ever love us. so we spent the last nine years moving in and out of her life- putting food where she could eat it, cleaning the poop she left in return, sitting on the couch for an occasional visit from a chirping pile of fur who might accept a bit of gentle ear scratching before turning sharp claws on anything and everything in her path.

she is the focus of an earlier entry, "ruby- angel of near-death", i believe. she has always been peculiar. so when we didn't see her much tuesday or wednesday, we didn't worry. and when i sat on the couch wednesday night and and put my hand flat on a pile of steaming barf, the obvious culprit was guthrie. he looked terrified. he looked suspicious. so we watched him. he skulked around all night while max and jim slept. ruby, in absolutely normal ruby fashion, was nowhere to be seen. like every other day. like all days. so we worried over guthrie.

but this morning i heard her crying. not normal ruby behavior. the sweetie found her in a closet. she wouldn't move. not normal ruby behavior. he put her on a blanket on the floor and the other animals came up one by one to nose her and she did not destroy any of them. so we took her to the vet. she cried. she screamed. her chirping purr turned into the rattle under the dashboard of an old car. she couldn't walk. her kidneys had done something awful to her a few years ago, begun the process of shutting down but rather suddenly, after countless pokings, proddings, internal photos and scans showed nothing, they went right back to work. and so we waited for this again. for her kidneys to regain their senses. for her to recover by sheer force of will and the desire to go back out in the world and rip things apart.

instead she breathed in rattles and cried. a discussion with the vet suggested her kidneys had shut themselves down for good. she was cold. they put us in a room and brought her in wrapped in a purple towel. royal. they left us with her. the sweetie noticed her neatly trimmed claws and we smiled at her attempts to take over even without kidneys. she had needed to be subdued even at her last. we spent an hour petting her, talking to her. she had never, in all her nine years, let us do something like this. she had never been still. i told her lies. she couldn't understand them so i suppose they were more for me to hear. it's okay. everything will be just fine. ruby and i have never had the affectionate relationship i share with the other three animals so it felt strange to be able to put my face so close to her. i whispered. in my head i wanted to yell, "this is what you get for being such a standoffish jerk! we had no way to know anything was wrong and this is your fault you mean, selfish cat!" but what i said was it's okay, baby. close your eyes and rest. and i meant that, too.

it is a strange thing to be with an animal when it stops being. at least the few times i've been a part of such goings on. it is surprising how much the world does not seem to change, how much the animal is not dramatic. perhaps because we imagine our own goings as the sorts of affairs you'd see on stage, we are shocked by the quietness of it, by how much they seem not to notice us standing there crying and not knowing what to do. they do not need us there but we think they do so we stay, limp, red-eyed, to bear witness to the last thing.

and when everything stopped our vet, a very kind woman, wrapped ruby up in her royal purple towel like a small baby. she was gentle, careful. for us. to help us, i thought, because ruby was gone. but when she picked ruby up to leave, she did something odd. the towel fell a bit into ruby's face and she moved it away. i'm not sure why that was important but i'm glad she knew it was.

for those about to rock...

i tried my best to get out of it from the very start. knowing, as i do, exactly how very little i share with teenage boys in terms of musical interests, i didn't think it was a good idea. but the children said i wouldn't have to do anything. they said i'd just have to be there. this is how i, a 40 year old, tone deaf, musically ungifted teacher, ended up being the faculty sponsor for the rock club. woooooo! there are teachers at our school who teach music, who play instruments as part of work. there are others who play guitar just because they are talented. there are teachers with perfect pitch, who can hear and sing everything the way it should be. if i hummed mary had a little lamb, you wouldn't recognize the tune.

so there were meetings. and most of them were chaotic and awful. no instruments. no rock. no roll. i got bored. i started to get difficult. i thought i'd made my point in snarling drama and went on with my life assuming i'd never have to see this bunch of disorganized teenagers again. until today.

i was working with one of my ninth graders on her memoirs when they started showing up. quiet high school boys with guitars slung across their backs. small, moon faced seventh graders with stubby, caseless guitars. one little boy brought a tiny but powerful amp. it is hard to glare at serious little boys with guitars but i did my best. after about ten seconds i gave up, mostly because they were so adorable i could hardly bear it but also because i heard "smoke on the water" stomping out of one of the guitars.

by the time everything settled, there were thirteen boys, five guitars and one amp. those who could play started and those less skilled watched, completely in love. they watched everything, not just the way the fingers sat on the fretboard. these little boys watched the way the player held the guitar, the way he sat forward or leaned back, the expression on his face. because it's all part of being a rock star. cords went from guitar to guitar so that each got a chance to be loud a while but the others, the four who were playing unplugged, never seemed to mind. they helped each other, asked questions. nobody fought for an opportunity to play. the guitars passed around.

i recognized parts of "iron man" and something motorhead. there was an intense discussion about van halen. they were surprisingly good. and although the only thing i had to offer was a slow smile of recognition with each song they resurrected from my youth, they seemed willing to accept that as enough. there will be girls, soon. groupie types who will hang out and squeal. but today they were just themselves, taking each other very seriously. wild teenage boys in their natural habitat.

hot water

we drove upstate friday night. it was cold. very, very cold. but when we left the hudson valley, everything changed. no, it didn't get warmer. we watched the little digital readout on the dashboard tell us what the outside was doing and the number for the outside got lower and lower. and lower. the closer we got to the house, the closer to the minus side of things those numbers moved. and somewhere around pineville the outside shifted from the positive world to the negative world. now, i don't know how mr. fahrenheit knew that 0 degrees is the freezing point of human snot, but he did and that's why he put a zero there. sure, plenty of folks threw him over for mr. celsius and his zero at freezing (just so you know, for a while, his zero was the boiling point of water and his hundred was freezing), but something happens to a body when its snot freezes. something momentous. something that should be heralded by a specific and easy to remember number on a thermometer.

but the numbers kept going. we watched the little orange glow say -2 then -4 and finally -7. and you think that snot freezing zero is as close as you can get to death and walk away, but no. so we stepped out into -7. this is a number neither dog understood. neither had experienced in their adventurous lives anything like this. if snot freezes, how far behind is dog poop? i envisioned small dogs so low to the ground they'd be trailing poopsicles from bottoms too frozen to even know what was going on. fortunately, my imagination is slightly more dramatic than real life.

when we stepped into the 45 degree house, it was like walking into a sauna. a tropical island. a 4th floor classroom in a brooklyn high school. we built up the fire and went off to bed draped in dogs and wool blankets. the next morning all six of the degrees above zero we had were welcome. everything was just fine. we survived the night of the minus degrees (some places nearby recorded as low as -21). except... except the hot water in the downstairs bathroom did not seem to want to come out. i don't mean it was cold. usually, it is. it takes about ten minutes to warm up each time you turn it on, so we're already a little hostile to each other, the hot water tap and me. but there was nothing. all the other hot waters worked just fine, which is important because, as you might remember, the brilliant plumber who did work here before the house was ours set the upstairs toilet to run on hot water instead of cold.

but back to the downstairs hot water tap. nothing. the cold tap worked just fine. it didn't seem likely it would be frozen all by itself. the cold pipe ran right next to it. oddly, the cold pipe was scooted a few inches closer to the heat duct for the bathroom than the hot pipe. so the cold pipe was happy. i should take a minute to explain that this little bathroom, mostly a toilet, sink, door and window in a place smaller than any closet in the house is part of an addition. it and the back entryway were built later. there's no basement beneath and the crawlspace set under this little area is too small even for a badger hound to navigate. basically it's a little tiny pocket of frozen air between the frozen ground and the small bathroom. just big enough for the two pipes and the heating duct to squish in two feet or so. nothing more.

so we did what folks do in these situations. we turned on the tap. we opened the cabinet so the heat would scoot in. we even considered a space heater but there was no room to shove it in there. the sweetie checked online so we boiled water and cut up an old towel. the sweetie wrapped the angry pipe with boiling towel strips and still nothing happened. on the way back from breakfast, i asked about those plug in heaters for car engines. minutes later the sweetie came out of the hardware store, the one with the giant biting bird, carrying a clamp light. he had a plan. down in the basement there were several uncomfortable noises and he came back up looking for a board. board in hand, he returned to the world under the house. more awkward sounds, but no water. he came back up cobwebby, looking for another board. he returned to the basement wielding the light clamped onto the two boards screwed together end to end.

he returned to the surface world absolutely sure of himself. i wouldn't have been that worried except that last year there was that magnificent fountain behind our fridge when we found out about an uncapped washing machine hook up. pipes are not our enemies when they freeze. they are out enemies when they thaw. things in the walls that can get to me before i can get to them- pipes, ungrounded wires, squirrels- have become enemies, things to be vanquished. and the sweetie was right. he vanquished the frozen pipe. he is a vanquisher of enemies. which is good because i am really more a knitter of dog sweaters.

perky teacher

warning: possible sarcasm. small bit of snarkiness toward one of brooklyn's finest neighborhoods.

i feel like i might have traumatized some of bensonhurst with my last entry and evidently i came off as pessimistic to some. i don't intend to use this blog to further my own agenda with reference to bensonhurst, but i want to set a few things straight here. then we'll go back to happy scenes of whatever.

let's start with this pessimism. i would hope that anyone who would start reading an entry would finish the whole thing (though they do get boggy sometimes) and i'm pretty sure reading the whole entry yesterday would get a body right down there at the end where i talk about continuing to try to do the right thing by my students. because i do this. i look forward to going in each day and i love being in the classroom. i am many things in the classroom. loud, always. silly, mostly. bossy, when i need to be. even pissed off, which doesn't happen so often but you try spending a day being the only adult among fourteen year olds. my students call me evil (our quizzes have names like "happy happy joy joy"), crazy (i expect them to write how many pages?), gross (we're eating crickets again in a few weeks), dramatic (sometimes i fake a swoon when the noise level is overwhelming and i leap around when someone says something really interesting), smart (the kids are freaked out by all the words i know) but not a single kid in my class thinks i would ever give up on one of them. i know this because i have loudly snarled and threatened to give up on a few in the past and they smiled and patted my hand. they know it's not my choice.

the other thing i want to make clear is that dealing with issues of race, class, culture and gender will always be a struggle and i don't imagine it will ever be a pretty one. but it's a struggle i intend to take up every day until the world looks like the sort of place i would want my students to live. and it will always make folks uncomfortable when they're confronted with their own racism. so what. let them be uncomfortable. don't you think victims of their words and actions have been uncomfortable for a very long time?

hate is a really strong word, which is why i use it to talk about racist behavior. i do hate it. i hate it when my kids use "gay" as a derogatory word. i hate it when they spit on people who don't wear the same color hat they do. yes, i did say they spit on each other. and i make it as clear as i can that there's quite a list of behavior i hate, but i'm pretty sure my kids know i don't hate them. because i tell them all the time. and yes, sometimes i yell it at them.

for some synonym happiness see: abhor, despise, anathematize, abominate, contemn, curse, deprecate, detest, execrate, loathe, scorn, shun.

and i talk about the ugly stuff sometimes here because i want you who aren't teachers to know about it, know where these kids stew and ferment, know what they have to work with. because otherwise you'd think everything is swell. knowing that everything is not swell and sighing is pessimistic. knowing everything is not swell and getting loud and trying to change things is as optimistic as anything else i know. and i expect you to do something about it, too, now that you know. i'm not going to get very far standing here by myself. but it's easy. think about the things you vote for. mental health parity laws. funding for afterschool programs. think about what your religious community teaches and help shape the message it sends to kids, because you'd be surprised about how many of those folks say really nasty things about people who are "different" and how often "sin" is code for "stuff we don't do that they do". if you donate money to an organization, be sure you know how they spend it. and if you have kids, don't show them whatever ugliness you might harbor in terms of your own fears of those different from you. they won't be able to use it where they're going, anyway. and if you live in bensonhurst, i don't care who you are or what you do, you damn well better step up and take some responsibility for the children around you, yours or not. because this is your village. start raising something.

angry teacher

warning: salty teacher language, unkind teacher behavior

some days i am not entirely proud of how i handle myself in the classroom. i blame my parents. they raised me not to be a racist pig and they must have pounded it in pretty good in our relatively segregated hometown because when i hear kids screaming horrible things at each other, sometimes i actually feel sick. i react, shall we say, from the gut rather than from the head.

bensonhurst is a cauldron of racism. go ahead, somebody from bensonhurst. email me and tell me it's not true. you're wrong. because i look at your children all day (which is a hell of a lot longer than you look at them) and i've never seen a group of people more hate-filled and less aware of others. i suppose maybe if you put all their parents in a room together... when i hear other white people representing me the way children in bensonhurst do, i am ashamed. and i know i'm supposed to be graceful about it. i'm an adult. i can help them learn through my own good example. but i put my own good example out there all day every day and it is no match for the fact that they hear their own ignorant parents spouting off about how a black man ought to be killed because he's smart enough to run a country they're part of (yes, a child said this out loud in class). or that their daughters shouldn't date "spanish" boys. see, the boys they're talking about aren't from spain. they can't even get that right. some of them encourage their own children to violence against gay people because god says it's okay. if god is out there, he will do well to distance himself from these fools.

it is difficult to teach children who believe this stuff. because so much time is spent getting them to shut up about their racist, sexist, nearly nazi ideas there's little time left over for all the wonderful things. and there are so many wonderful things.

like today. today we were reviewing for their semester exam. it's a big deal. it's over everything they've done and many of them don't know what book we're reading right now. (i'm not joking about this. you think i don't have nightmares about what's going to happen to these kids after high school?) a girl in the class yelled across the room to a boy, "and what were you thinking going out with a chinese girl?" she quickly looked across the room to the lone asian girl in class and said, "no offense". now, you can be pretty sure when someone says "no offense" what they really mean is "hey, i'm getting ready to offend the crap out of you or maybe i just did offend the crap out of you but because i'm saying this you can't get mad about it. also, i'm too self-absorbed to realize i'm being an idiot and will probably say this again so look out." it's like when people say, "i'm not a racist, but...." i've never heard that statement followed by anything but racist drivel. not ever. and trust me, i get to hear it plenty. teachers at my school say it all the time. and yes, i do call them on it. it makes me exceptionally popular.

so for a second in the classroom i was diplomatic, turning to the girl and saying in my sweetest voice, "are you saying something that might be a little culturally insensitive?" see. i'm totally capable. but she looked up, waved her hand at me dismissively, and turned back to the boy across the room. "a chinese girl! seriously. what were you thinking. CHINESE!!!" and the good part of me, the teacher part of me, just sat down quietly in my brain and the part of me my dear parents raised stood up in my brain, hitched up her pants, and screamed in her big loud really angry voice, "SHUT UP AND STOP ACTING LIKE A RACIST ASSHOLE!" see, i told you i'm not always charm and suavity. at this point most things in the room stopped but the child turned to me, her face boiling, and said, "did you call me an asshole?" then this i learned from the folks, too, and i said, "no. i said you're acting like one. it's a subtle difference. you clearly missed it."that's right. i screamed at a teenager in a classroom. that's right. i said bad words. and yes, i brought to everyone's attention the fact that said child did not get what i was saying. i know who i am. i am not a diplomat. i am a monster. but we are not long on time. the children in my school are being taught at home how to hate and who to hate and they come to school and sit in six different rooms a day, focusing all that hate on anyone not like them because that's how their parents managed. that's how their parents soothed themselves about not being able to find work or losing out on some wonderful opportunity. and it is sad and i want to feel sorry for them, but there's no time for that. and i wish i could be a dove. the world needs folks like that who can draw others in with kindness. most teachers are doves. this does not appear to be my lot. i am not a dove. and i know i may never convince that child that what she said was in any way wrong. just like i can't convince co-workers who tell racist jokes that they're racist (how can i be racist? i have black friends! do you tell your black friends those jokes? no. you keep trying to tell me. because you think i am like you. i am not like you so cut it out.).

nobody confronts it at my school so the kids see that it's not just accepted at home, it's also okay in the larger world. which is why, after my initial snarling, i went on a bit about how children who felt hurt when i called them on this stuff could bring their dear sweet parents in and i'd talk to them about the piss-poor job they'd been doing raising their kids. this is not fair. it is a horrible thing to say. and it is most horrible because of the truth behind it. and the only glimmer of awareness today, the one thing that gives me hope, is that they get quiet. the discomfort in the room is something you can taste. and they should be uncomfortable. because they do know. they know it's wrong to hate people for all the reasons their parents told them. it is not easy to shed all that fear and smallness. i will never be able to raise them the way my own parents raised me, but i surely am going to try anyway.

cab

fridays i walk home. getting on a bus on friday afternoon is nearly impossible as they tend to be crammed to the top with some of the most appalling middle school children ever to walk the earth. so there's the issue of being able to squeeze just one more body on a city bus, but there's also the idea of being smashed into eight or nine reeking, shrieking children for more than an hour that just won't let me do it. it's not like this other days. just fridays. but today i am in a hurry and am carrying a heavy load of student work. it's not something i could drag four miles without doing damage to myself. so i treat myself to what i expect will be a quick trip home. i go to the car service.

it's a few blocks from school on bay parkway and i step into a cubicle that smells like a bowling alley or like my grandparents' house when i was very small. three men stand around in a space scarcely larger than a coffin, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. the smoke is thick enough to form curling wisps of blue. i tell the man behind the bulletproof glass where i want to go. he speaks past me using sounds i don't know and one of the smokers nods.

the man by the door opens it and motions me out. the one who nodded follows me and walks down the street. he doesn't say a word, just walks, sips his coffee, smokes. i follow him. we turn a corner and i can see three car service cars across the street. he stops at the curb and holds out his arm in front of me the way my mom used to in the car when there were only lap belts. i nearly run into his arm. when he's sure the street is clear, he motions me to follow. he opens the door for me. inside, there are white stickers on the back of each front seat head rest. "no smoking by order of nyc dept. of health". my skin and hair smell like they did when people still smoked in bars and pool halls. it is not an altogether awful smell.

he begins the drive the same way i walk home, a street over from the main one. the road less travelled. he asks about cross streets and says a wonderful vampiry thank you when i tell him. are the languages that close? i write a while and when i look up i have no idea where we are. bay ridge, maybe. this is the way of brooklyn, crooked, senseless, cobbled together of too many little villages. nothing connects up or runs straight. nowhere stays anywhere very long.

we go over the abandoned railroad cut and i know if i got out right there and followed it right i'd end up a few blocks from home eventually. there are signs in hebrew in the windows and on school busses. there is a catholic church complete with manger scene but the few people i see walking around are jewish. orthodox. we are hours from sundown and shabbas/shabbat. we turn a corner and zip under the elevated f train. my neighborhood. in the first block i see people from six different cultures. there is a police car with lights flashing on cortelyou, about a block from where that guy got stabbed earlier in the year. cortelyou, at least from coney island avenue to flatbush avenue, is more like a dirt bike track or some sort of off road obstacle course than a city street. we are close to my own street where we will turn left. as the delivery trucks and vans part i see it in front of us. right there in the intersection. the brittle carcass of a five foot christmas tree. it is unadorned, lying on its side. unapologetic and belligerent.

s'mores

i should have seen it coming. the original supernatural nephew did, of course, because he is, well, supernatural. he has spent the last seven years in the middle of a huge pile of adoration. the only grandchild to one grandparent set, the only nephew to two sets of aunts and uncles. and then there's the supernatural part. that adds on a bit. so life has been all gravy until this year. when the new supernatural nephew made his debut the original didn't fret. the new child had nearly strangled himself in utero. he was born looking like a spider monkey or some sort of aquatic alien. he slept most of the time. and who knew whether he had any powers or not. so the original just sat back and watched.

he was a doting big cousin. he knew had much to teach the new creature who mostly squirmed and squeaked. the adults certainly weren't supernatural so he knew he'd end up doing it all. he could mold the baby into his own sidekick. the new child adored him. but as the holidays approached he could feel it in the air. the baby's first christmas. he did not remember his own first chrismas and couldn't see what all he fuss was about, but still. christmas would be at the baby's house. fine. the new york aunt and uncle would be staying at the baby's house. fine. they could stay there a few days and... nope. all the days. all the days? whatever. it would be fine. it would be christmas.

christmas came and went and he was good. as far as he could tell, nobody knew this, of course, because they were all drooling over that baby. saying words that weren't real words. he knew real words, big words other kids his age had never met. and he used them for real, the way they were meant to be used. he was starting to get a sense of the baby's powers. the adults made faces at the new kid. the kind of faces he got in trouble for making on certain occasions. people actually picked up the child, sniffed his butt- yes, they really did- and were all sorts of joyous when the child pooped in his pants. the original supernatural pooped in a toilet like normal people. only animals and babies don't use toilets. gross.

but the original supernatural had a plan. he'd won a half pound chocolate bar at school nearly a year ago and had been saving it. he intended to have something to contribute. an event. he planned for an evening of telescope assisted stargazing at his house capped off by roasting s'mores over a campfire in his yard. all this was to take place with the brooklyn aunt and uncle the night after christmas. this, of course, means that he night after christmas started out as a tornado watch early in the morning and stayed blustery and cloudy right up until night, when it was painfully evident the stars and any nearby planets had abandoned the horrible night sky for something better. it was too windy for a bonfire. his aunt and uncle, not used to quite so many events in one day, were exhausted and figured the weather would encourage him to postpone. he was undaunted. he had a half pound chocolate bar.

so we got in the car, the uncle and i, bearing christmas peeps for the s'mores. he had graham crackers, marshmallows. he had the chocolate bar. he had a gas grill, metal skewers. he wanted to know what to do. so we set to work. he broke up the graham crackers into squares while i broke the chocolate. he put the chocolate squares on the graham crackers while i skewered a few peeps. we headed to the grill. we put the chocolate capped grahams on the top rack for slow and even chocolate melting. we each took a skewer and held our peeps to the flames. it felt the way andy and opie look when they're walking to the fishing hole. he wanted very much to use his own marshmallows for some of the s'mores and brought out the bag. mini marhsmallows, barely bigger than the skewers. but we speared the tiny things and they roasted up perfectly. pearls of flame.

we sat around the big dining room table- his dad, his mom who is also my sister, the original supernatural nephew himself, the sweetie and me. we ate s'mores and drank milk and talked about nothing in particular. if i've had better s'mores, i can't remember the time.

third baby

first, let me say i have never attempted to kill the baby of the family. but if you are dad, you may want to skip this one.

the baby was born while the middle sister and i were at home playing with a new set of blocks santa brought us a few weeks before. brightly colored plastic blocks with a hinge on one end that opened the blocks diagonally like pointy pac-men. each had a tiny rubber-plastic figure in it- animals, mostly, but i loved the blocks themselves. they could be snapped together to form diamondy snakes with scoop heads that slithered about the house. so when she came home we were impressed, but there was a house full of christmas presents and i already had this other baby who could talk.

there wasn't much to the third child as a baby. she slept and ate but because she was an easy baby mom kept taking her to the doctor, sure she was dying of quietness or stillness. she cut her teeth on the tail of an old dachshund named heidi who had gone through an imaginary pregnancy of her own while the baby was resting in our mom. all our vacation photos from her early childhood show two sisters alone on the rocky beach of lake shasta or two sisters with dad at christmas or two sisters at the ocean. we told her we left her home on these trips. she may have believed this a while. however, once when the middle child and i refused to let her follow us around, she bit her own hand and blamed it on us. she was small, four or five. after that she was asking for it.

she was born unusual, with a port-wine stain birthmark starting at one hand and spreading up into her neck, back and chest. she was red on those parts of her and when she got cold or angry, those red parts at her edges, especially her thumb, turned purple. we used this as an indicator of when to go inside during winter. we'd pull off her mitten and hold up her thumb, discussing between the two of us whether it was purple enough to call it a day. i don't recall much discussion about this but always in stories we read, a mark of some kind meant someone was a princess or was magic, so the middle sister and i focused on what was more obvious about the baby- her overwhelming desire to please others.

we could get her to do anything. the middle child and i had an ever changing "club" with the only requirement for membership being that one was not our baby sister. we poured sugar and water into old soda bottles, pretended to get drunk as we swigged down bottle after bottle. when she asked for some, we bellowed, "you're not old enough!" while waving the sugary bottles in her face. but one spring we nearly killed her. well, i nearly killed her. i say we because i know the middle child was there, as were several other neighbor kids. i was eleven or so, old enough to know better. her five or six year old self wanted to do whatever we were doing. so she had to pass a test. in our town there's a creek that splits the local baseball park from the city park and there's a cement bridge poured around a large drain pipe set down into this little creek that connects paths on one side to paths on the other. we would walk down past the fence post and its coating of blackberry bushes, through the high grass, across the little bridge and over into the park full of swings and a swimming pool.

so i stood with her on the little cement bridge which dips down over the creek and is the lowest part on both sides of the trails. other children stood there, too. and i told her to swim through the bridge pipe. it was warm enough, probably summer, and the water wasn't moving too fast, but the upstream section flowed through what was probably an eight foot section of pipe just big enough around for a five or six year old to swim through. and she did. or at least she went in. from all our past experience throwing twigs and leaves in upstream we figured she'd float out the other side in seconds. she did not. we had been cheering, but now we looked at each other without sound. we looked in the upstream end of the pipe. it was dark and we could not see her small feet. we walked to the other end, downstream, and after what seemed like years, a small blond head popped into view, covered with leaves and twigs. she seemed completely unfazed by her own near death but i made her promise she wouldn't tell our parents. a few years ago, when all three of us were living on our own and she figured it wasn't a big deal, she brought it up. our dad still has not recovered. "she's clearly not dead!" i kept telling him. this did not help at all.

yesterday she called to tell me about her own firstborn and how he had excitedly grabbed for a huge grasshopper she was holding up for him and had squished it senseless. i wanted to tell her that's the least of it. i wanted to say wait until he's five and he's got a new baby to drag around. or any time before five, really. but there's no sense worrying her. besides, if her own children are anything like her, she won't find out about most of it.

third day

let's say you forget to go on your new year's day hike up into the fine, snowy mountains. don't worry. you can choose a day, for instance the third of january, and go then. it's okay. you choose a short hike along water.

you know later there will be arkville festival. it will be cold. you trek down the block or so to the corner and walk up toward the bonfire. ten or twelve people you don't know stand around it in the 25 degree weather. you slosh through the snow over to casey joe's. there is the promise of live music, guys older than you stand around with a guitar, a bass. drums. people are milling around in bulky coats and the air is warm. you get a hot chocolate that would be free by the bonfire. you hear from the guy who runs the place that the firehouse is almost out of chicken. they had a hundred more dinners than last year he says and you remember you could only get a half chicken with no sides last year so you hurry out. lynyrd skynyrd is blasting out of speakers attached to the bike shop across from the firehouse. you get your chicken and six raffle tickets and bring your chicken back home to the howls of jim morrison.

the fireworks won't start until seven so you walk back down again and stand around a bit. joe walsh has replaced skynyrd and the doors and you are singing along even though you don't intend to. you decide to walk through town. when you get to the bridge the sky is spitting snow and you hold your camera over dry brook to see what a flash will get you from so far up. you go on to the corner and stand for a bit across from an old abandoned house you've wanted a photo of for quite some time. you pass it nearly every time you leave your own house and the camera is always with you but it is now, in the night, in the snow, waiting for fireworks that you decide to get it. you convince the sweetie to take the photo because you know it will be better than yours and it is. he snaps a few pictures of a house you've convinced yourself was central to the pakatakan artists' colony that settled here and you fully expect to see lost painters in the windows. thomas cole having tea.

you turn back and hear the first explosion. it goes down inside your bones and you can feel them spark. the sky is dark and there are little flecks of snow hovering around the orangy streetlights and then up and above the railroad tracks fire blooms all over. you stand right there on the sidewalk under the railroad crossing sign. you can see down the tracks a bit there are rail traveling vehicles but they are too snowy to recognize. the exploding keeps happening. you breathe it in. there is no other sound. happy third day of the new year! says the sweetie.

handshake

i always figured if i ever met johnny cash i would cry so hard i'd probably fall down. i grew up with that man's voice in my ears as early and as constant as anyone in my family. you get that way sometimes about things, where you know enough about someone, where you feel the prsence of someone in your life so intensely you feel like you know them and they are somehow yours, even if you've never met them. there's always a danger that someone like that, someone famous, will be less than what we think and we'll be disappointed, heartbroken. i felt like that when i saw jimmy smith at a show in syracuse years back. he was a complete jerk on stage and i felt like i knew why his baby done left him by the end of the show.

but there are some folks who are as wonderful as you imagine. i spent some time years back going to see old blues musicians with a friend who always went up to shake hands with and thank the band as they were packing up. at first i teased him about trying to get to meet famous folks but he was too serious about it to notice. he was genuinely grateful to see these old guys he had grown up with and was raised to say thank you when given a gift. when this same friend took me to see maceo parker at the haunt in ithaca, i was surprised when, after the show, a man in the parking lot reached for my hand and thanked me for stopping by. he was wearing the nicest suit i'd ever seen up close and he smelled of sweat and electricity. it took me several steps toward the car to realize maceo parker had thanked me. he thanked us all, stood out there in the parking lot in the dark shaking hands with everyone who came out of that place.

when i worked at a bookstore i met plenty of famous folks coming in to sign books or do little shows. sara weddington came to sign her book and when she asked my name i was unable to tell her. i didn't know. she looked like my high school home ec teacher. she called me honey. she patted my hand and signed my book. you hope everyone will be so gracious, but it's hard to know for sure.

so i was a little nervous about meeting the newest supernatural nephew for the first time. partly because he's a baby and babies are just weird. also because everyone in my family has been throwing around the word "perfect" a little too freely in conjunction with this particular child. it's suspicious. i have spent plenty of time around small children and frankly, they are far from perfect. they are tiny hurricanes, always spewing something and flailing and sending things flying. they are scary. he's a good baby, they kept saying. what on earth does that mean? good baby.

we arrive christmas eve at the house of the good baby. he is teething, we hear. i wait. i know what teething babies do. their heads spin around and the room is bathed in an ominous red glow as they howl at pitches that can shatter eyeballs and do damage to spinal nerves. but the room is not red and the sound that comes out of him is more like the sound of a small stream on a hillside. but he is teething, his parents say, feigning frustration at what appears to them to be cranky behavior. there is no evidence of this crankiness. cranky for a child just under one involves a face the color of a beet and wailing that sounds like strangulation. i look for the cranky. they hand me the child to hold. he has never seen me so i know he'll cry. he does not cry. he smiles. this is what he does. he smiles all the time. they had been telling me this for months and i just figured they had that hypnotic baby idiocy that happens to parents, grandparents and some aunts and uncles.

he does not cry ever. this is unsettling. we stayed in his house five days and i am absolutely certain we never heard more than a total of 73 seconds of anything that sounded like disgruntlement. in five days. he sleeps at night. he takes naps without a fuss. he eats whatever his parents feed him and eats all of it. he is not afraid of dogs or cats. he laughs a lot. and he loves any sort of interactive play. he's a good baby, his mother says, smiling. good? is she kidding? he's ridiculous. he's not even real. he really is all those things i said over the last few months- supernatural. he really can fly and email and use the phone. he can speak seventeen languages and can read twelve. it will wear off as he gets older. not the talent, but the fascination with it. with supernatural powers come difficult choices and overwhelming responsibilities. he will find perfection tedious in his teen years and will shrug it off without even noticing. but right now, today, he is unsettlingly perfect.