birthday, or how to make butter for real

it started the thursday just before, i guess, with one class of ninth graders who managed to show an interest in cat's cradle, a game mentioned in our book. not just interest, i have to explain, but fascination. and so all those pieces of yarn lying on windowsills and in defunct sink and in lockers all around the classroom suddenly tied these children up in little bundles, all crowded around a single child in each group whose fingers supported, or more often were caught up in, the web of yarn. and they were asking to get a chance to try it, then asking someone with skill to explain to them what to do. they were willing to learn something that sounded endlessly boring on paper. this is the single most important thing we've been trying to teach them all year.

they are calm and kind and gracious to one another there in class all wrapped in yarn and the other teacher in the room and i figure this is the sign we've been looking for, the sign that they can be in a room together while shaking small glass jars and probably nobody will get hurt. these are the things you need to consider when you spend your days with ninth graders. and so on friday she brings in bread and cups and napkins and i bring in butter colored roses and jams and fat cream. they are unable to get past the roses. they are suspicious of my reasoning: people should have flowers on the table when they sit down to eat. they know about the bread and roses strike. they know give us bread but give us roses, too. they know we cannot survive on bread alone. while they work on the beginnings of their stories i put the roses into the small vases i keep in the metal cabinet for just these sorts of things. floral emergencies.

when they have all done work and it is time, they put the tables together and crowd around in four groups because i can only find four empty jars. i explain to them them what we'll do while other adults in the room fill the small jars with heavy cream. the children screw lids onto the jars and begin shaking. it is more work than they expected to shake these jars. five or ten minutes is a much longer time than they were thinking it was and so they all take turns, careful not to stop shaking as they transfer the jars from one child to another.

i am vague about what will happen, just promising them butter and insisting on the constant shaking of the jars. one child calls out that their group has butter. i ask if they are sure and they nod solemnly. they are absolutely sure. we hand out plastic knives and slices of fresh bread from the neighborhood bakery and jam from the same store where the bacon chocolate waits. this is my second year making butter in class and i am surprised, just as i was last year, that they're so eager to participate. like with the cat's cradle. they sit together around the tables and pass things gently to one another. not like when they throw notebooks and pens and paperbacks across the room. more like would you like to try some of this delicious ginger peach jam? they like the butter and devour the bread with everything on it. they do not shy away from the lemon curd or the blueberry preserves.

when it is time to go they clean up and put the tables back. i tell them to take the roses and they are shocked to find them thorny and brambly when they try to pull them from the vases. real roses, not those naked longstemmed sawdust smelling things. still, they manage to separate the stems and nobody who wants roses leaves roseless. they stand around, waiting for the bell, their noses buried in the yellow petals. they are oldlady roses, small and irregularly shaped, but smelling like what rose really means. several clutch the butter-filled jars to their chests. for later. for evidence.

this is what i asked for. they wanted to know what i hoped i'd get for my birthday and i said i want to make butter. i said it because at the time i'd wanted them to shut up and do some work. and for some reason home made butter is exotic to these children, exotic enough they'll shut up and do some work if they think they'll get butter. so what i get is more than the small jars of sweet, pale butter i'd asked for. when one girl, generally loud, the kind who slaps boys hard to let them know she likes them, writes on the board thank you and then slips quietly back to her seat, i want to shout to them to look around, see themselves. i want them to know they decided to learn something new and then they paid attention and worked together and accomplished something. i want them to know the butter is the reward for how they worked and what they did. i want them to know they are okay with having butter - butter- as a reward. i want this to be one of those teachable moments where everyone gets it. i want this the way they wanted butter. so i keep my mouth shut. i don't ruin it.

the bell rings and they walk out in twos and threes, on to the last class of their friday. their voices rise up out of the stairwell, trailing behind them words about butter and roses.

adventure boat

at ten thirty am i am sitting on the upturned bottom of a fourteen foot johnboat on a grassy median in the parking lot at a large sporting goods store. to be fair, the lot belongs to a variety of large stores but this bit of grass is directly across from the door to the sporting goods store which is where this boat was resting quietly just a few minutes before. the weather is nice and i am all decked out in a blaze orange tank top and a denim skirt. my bag, a monstrosity of a straw my students insist belongs to abuelas in markets, leans against the bottom of the boat and a ball of green wool threads its way from the bag up to my knitting needles. i am waiting for the sweetie.

you see, we got up early this morning and drove the forty or so miles in to kingston with a brand new roof rack on our little subaru so we could get ourselves a boat. now, i know what you're thinking. it's ugly to live like that. we've already got a boat. but our beloved boat is tired. we carry its nine hundred pound carcass down to the reservoir every chance we get and i come away cut and bruised each time because the boat struggles so much against us. the amount of bailing we need to do suggests the decrepit thing is beginning to lose its will to float (which, at 900 pounds, was never that easy, anyway) and we would like to let it spend its twilight years at the reservoir, going out only on rare occasions. which means we need a boat.

now, it turns out the sweetie and i have, each of us, a birthday and then we each have our wedding anniversary all during the same week. this week. and we have taken to celebrating those things all rolled up together. so this morning not long past ten we stroll into the sporting goods store and stride right up to the boat we know will be able to take over for our own retiring boat. the men who work there seem a little confused at first about how to get the thing to the front of the store. one of them, a man younger than me (and an employee of a sporting goods store, no less), seems particularly overwhelmed by the task of moving the boat and has to stop and rest. now, you know i am a sympathetic person and you know i have struggled under the nine hundred pounds of boat the d.e.p. has registered in my name, but i have also lifted this new boat. by myself. with one hand. i consider asking the men if they want help but one thing i have learned is that although they might indeed want help, they will not ask me for it and will say no if i offer. so they wrestle a boat that weighs less than i do through aisles and around displays and up to the front counter. we pay and they take it out and across to the parking lot where they hoist it up onto our little subaru.

and here is where math begins to fall apart. a fourteen foot car may seem mathematically like it's capable of carrying a fourteen foot johnboat about forty miles at sixty miles per hour. but it isn't. the nose of the boat dips down in front of the windshield and may or may not be attempting to touch the hood of the car. the sides of the boat are within a half inch of sliding down over both sides of the roof rack and simply covering the car like a very dapper hat. the men from the sporting goods store suggest we rent a truck from the lumber store at the other end of the parking lot. twenty bucks, they say. not a bad deal. and so the sweetie hurries across the parking lot while i sit in a very dark car with an ominous stormcloud of a boat hovering over me, threatening to slide off into the grass at any minute.

he returns fairly quickly, truckless. the lumber store has one truck and it is out. they do not know when it will return. the sweetie, ever resourceful, finds a rental truck place that is open and asks about trucks. i remind him the boat is fourteen feet long and his mind does these magical calculations that include diagonals and imaginary numbers. we lift the boat up and put it on the median. it is light as a feather. light as air. i am in love and i sigh deeply to prove it. the sweetie hurries off to get what i know will not be a truck with fourteen feet of space in it. i sit happily on my beloved boat, working on my knitting and looking up from time to time to field questions from folks who have never seen whatever it is i am up to. when i explain to one woman why i am waiting there, she hollers back from in front of the sporting goods store, "i knew it would be a good story. i could tell."

and the sweetie returns. with a ten foot truck. we lift the boat up into the truck and the four back feet stick all the way out. the sweetie is sure, with some diagonal finesse, we can cram the whole boat right on in there. we can't. but we tie it down tight with ratcheted straps and we hop in the truck and head the fortysomething miles back toward home with four feet of boat hanging out the back of the truck like a bleached tongue. sporadically, we call the d.e.p. to see if they're open because you can't put a boat on the reservoir until it has been properly inspected, bathed and tagged by the good folks who keep an eye on the reservoir. the phone rings and rings but nobody ever answers. the sweetie finally gets someone at a different number who explains that they're not open saturdays. i know this sounds strange. that the place you get a fishing license and the place you register your boat, the place you get permission for recreation, is not open on weekends. i know. so we drive on back to the house and we unload the boat. then we drive back fortysomething miles to the truck rental place and then drive another fortysomething right on back to the house.

we put the boat in the grass. i sit in the rowing seat. the sweetie hands me my oars. the sweetie's birthday will come and go and we will not be allowed to put that boat in the water. our anniversary will fly past. on my own birthday i will have to sit in the boat on the grass and imagine rowing on the reservoir. but in a few weeks, we'll take a day off during the week. we'll drive up late the night before. we'll be the first folks waiting outside the gates at the d.e.p. (in yet another rental truck) for our boat bath and inspection. and after we put our new boat on the grassy bank right next to our old one, we'll drive the rental truck back (only twenty miles this time) and then make that same trip right back in our own car to where the boats are sitting in a cluster of other boats, still, listening to the water a few feet away. and we'll spend the day on the water, right in the middle of the week like that. extravagant and glorious. well, we are celebrating two birthdays and our marriage. and why would you marry someone if you didn't plan to have adventures together?

maryland

this is what a fine time looks like.

blueprint

we visited our maryland folks this weekend. i never really thought about what it is that makes me love them. i guess i should have known.

1. we arrive, like we have before, around midnight. we have driven all the way from the big city with a thunderstorm scrambling to keep itself ahead of us. we bring the rain, just a little, enough to make the mounds of honeysuckle growing all along the fence stretch out tendrils of sweetness. it is too dark to see the goats or the chickens but they are there in little animal houses beyond where the porch light gets. the windows are open and there are peonies and what my grandma would call pinks sitting in windows and on tables. they are crowded up next to sidewalks outside those windows, too.

i am seven or maybe nine and my sisters are in the bath but i have already bathed and am standing in homemade seersucker shorty pajamas guzzling down the last of my grandma's iced tea. i put the empty glass back on the coaster and crawl between sheets that have lived some time on a clothesline. the windows are open and crickets compete with cicadas over who will sing us to sleep. there are prayers and stuffed animals. the peonies under the window seep into the room and from time to time, when the wind feels like it, there is honeysuckle.

2. i have no business in the preparation of breakfast. but these other three, they know secrets and can tell how long something should cook before it is done. one is standing over eggs from those copper chickens outside. fresh eggs, like nothing you know about if you buy yours in a store. another, the sweetie, tends to bacon and sausage on a griddle. the third mixes up waffle batter and pours it into sizzling heart-shaped molds. and i stay still, out of the way. i tend to the dogs or put things on the table, but mostly i lean against the wall reeling from the pleasure of being in a kitchen with three cooks.

i am ten or twelve or fifteen and my mom and grandma and sisters are happily whirling around the kitchen, purposeful. there is singing. aretha franklin. patsy cline. maybe freddy fender. wasted days and wasted nights... everyone in the room sings and cooks. there are men in the other room. my dad. uncles, a grandfather or two. cigarettes and a cigar. talk of golf. talk of phones and bowling. i do not speak the language of either room but i set the table and fold paper towels and listen to how pretty everything sounds.

3. we drive with the windows down in a red station wagon on country roads with speed limits ranging from 40 to "was that a cop?". one friend drives, the sweetie fiddles with the ipod while the other friend and i can't hear anything going on in the front seat. we sing along with the music to songs from our youth and to pavement and everything in between. we sing like wild, drunken sailors and our words whip out the windows with our hair but we keep singing. when townes van zandt starts singing "pancho and lefty" we all sing a little softer, maybe out of respect for old townes and how we're not so sure whether he was pancho or lefty but it's just damned sad either way. but we put our hands out the windows, not all of us at the same time, but one or the other of us, or maybe two folks, and the wind washes over us and the songs wash over us and i don't really care where we drive off to.

it could be any time in my life. there is a truck. an old blue one. a newer orange and silver one. we are in the back of the truck, all three of us, skinny, knobby-kneed girls in calico print halter tops and cutoff shorts. we have worn sneakers out of the house but they have escaped our brown feet somewhere between the front porch and the truck. dad is driving and mom sits beside him. we are blonder this time of year than other times. the sun is in us all the time. our parents talk about parenty things there in the front seat but we hear none of it. the middle sister and i sit on the wheel wells and hold on to the side of the truck. the baby sits flat on the bed of the truck. the wind whips our hair into our eyes so we squint against it. we sing at the top of our lungs. maybe loretta lynn. maybe buck owens. maybe ruby, don't take your love to town.

4. we stop by a farm market/flea market the two friends enjoy and begin wandering around. at one booth one friend buys some lovely bird coasters. i decide to splurge and drop a buck fifty on set of bridge cards (i know nothing about bridge) because i like the goldenrod decoration and the silky tasseled pencils. we look at furniture and painting of ships. when i catch sight of a stack of books with names like all about the weather, all about the desert and all about monkeys i tell the friends to watch what happens when the sweetie comes up. he will not be able to resist them, educational books from the fifties with beautiful illustrations and serious explanations. and when i show him the stack of eleven books and ask which ones he'd like he shouts, "get them all!" and the friends smile. when he adds to the stack a world war two poster printed in 1946, they smile a little more. we are flea market people, all of us.

my dad parks the truck and we climb out over the tailgate. we walk across the street into the huge, open warehouse where vendors have set up booths selling everything, most of it worthless. this is where the middle sister gets her dolls. molly pitcher. sam clemens. clara barton. babe ruth. susan b. anthony. they are floppy dolls in historically informational boxes and she lines them up on a shelf in her bedroom. some days i buy miniatures from this same man. tiny animals or furniture for no reason i can think of now. mice with whiskers that look like eyelashes. there is always the smell of food and usedness. my dad looks at jewelry and pocket knives and tools. i could roam around this place forever.

5. we play cards. there are six of us. me, the sweetie, our two friends and a couple they know who ate dinner with us. my belly is full of red meat and there is a glass with honeyed bourbon on the table next to me. i do not have to keep score. there is a dog asleep under my feet and one at the other end of the table. there is music, always just loud enough for me to be aware it is there, a soft blanket around everything. the cards slide across the table. they snap when someone shuffles. i pick my cards up as they are dealt because i cannot wait. there is laughter over the music and at least once i laugh so hard i cannot breathe.

it is late and summer and my grandmother has put roy clark in the tape deck. the leaf is still in the table from supper and she and my grandpa sit across from each other. my parents occupy the other two chairs. they play pinochle while i use poker chips to make blueprints of the houses i will build all across the living room carpet. there is cigarette smoke and the sound of beanbag ashtrays and ice clinking and clinking. the baby sister is tired, has had enough of all this ruckus. she crawls under the table, presses her face to the cool tops of our mother's feet and goes to sleep.

4pm

the drunk man staggers, arms outstretched, a wobbly jesus down from the cross, shakes his paperbagged beer at a little girl who pays him exactly no mind, then trips, veers into the pinkplastic all-the-time yard sale. two men drape across several steps of the stoop and watch him, watch over row after row of toys so filthy no amount of bleach could redeem them. five dollars says a sign attached to a wire rack with sliding wooden beads. five dollars.

the smell of paint from the body shop across the street is heavy enough to taste. it sits on the tongue like a spoon and the fumes may well wake the dead trying so hard to rest across the street in greenwood, bordered by black iron spikes taller than a reasonable person would care to reach, keeping the dead from running amok and keeping the living from spending time in a lush quiet place any time after 4pm. but walk along those iron bars long enough and there are escape hatches. subtle little gates built into the bars, invisible unless you're looking for such a thing. they are padlocked from the inside for absolutely no rational reason. who escapes a cemetery?

little boys sit on the steps of holy name church, three at a time or four, chewing straws, squinting against the sun and the lies they tell each other. they wait, all of them in blue trousers and white shirts, for the ice cream truck that will drive by playing "turkey in the straw". the ice cream truck that neighs is one block over and so they will never know about it. but it is friday almost 4pm. they are children. they will trip each other and giggle again as they run for the truck. there will be ice cream.

lullaby

my mom never taught me to cook because she thought i was a disaster. i never had that intuitiveness to know what "some" meant in a recipe. she didn't teach me to sew because she didn't really learn herself until she made me a formal dress my senior year of high school. dad taught me to drive after mom realized that a big yellow ford ltd and jj highway and me at almost sixteen was a horrible combination.

i learned to tell a good story while sitting on the floor in any room my uncle jay might be in with my mouth shut and my ears open. i learned from one grandma the names of flowers and the way to tell quality fabric from polyester blends. i learned from another that sometimes just looking at a big wooden box full of oil paints and little bottles of linseed oil is intoxicating. dad dragged science into the house in every way imaginable, told us the names of rocks and showed us the stars. i learned the value of a good long walk from one grandpa, the value of a soft lap and butterscotch candy from another and that you will never be prepared to hear an warning about how you should never try cocaine based on the personal experience of a seventy year old from a third grandpa.

but what i did learn from my mom is that iced tea is never so good as when it is in a glass that belongs to someone else. and that if you grow mint right outside the front door, you will always have some for your glass of tea. home cooked food, no matter the fat or calorie count, is better for you than something in a box or bag or microwaveable pouch. you should always know where your children are but you should not always be looking at them. flowers in the house are important, even if they are weeds or things you picked in the park or bought for a few bucks at the grocery store. telling a group of fifth grade boys you are a witch is fine as long as you also tell them you only use your powers to help people and keep fifth grade boys in line.

mostly, though, she taught me to open my big fat mouth and say what i think. especially if i think i might have to say it alone. especially if it might make others uncomfortable. this comes up most often at school. it gets me in trouble as often as it doesn't. i make people cry. students. parents. because not all folks are comfortable with honesty and not all folks are comfortable with fairness. and at night when other people who live all twisted up inside themselves because they don't speak up are tossing and turning, wallowing in guilt at having ignored some ugliness, wallowing in what-ifs, i sleep like a baby. which is funny, i guess, because for the first two years i lived in the world i don't think i ever slept at all.

thanks, mom. i like being me. and i really like not having to cook.

the adventures of one nephew and nine questions

a few months ago i received a mysterious text message from the middle sister. something about a metal detector and our grandmother. when i looked at it a second time i figured maybe it wasn't from her at all. the original supernatural nephew has a grandmother or two. the story in the text message seemed like it would fit one of those grandmothers in particular. the one who is also my own mother. the story suggested the sender had taken a metal detector to a grandmother and had struck gold. or titanium. a whole pile of it. not a limb unscanned. i imagined my own mom sitting in a chair with the child plotting her surface on parchment with giant Xs where the metal detector beeped. imagine a gingerbread cookie covered with so many Xs you can't see the gingerbread anymore. the next message said, "it's me" and then his name in case i hadn't figured it out.

this is important. the fact that he texted me is important. he already knows a good story when he's in one. and so i did what any good aunt who sporadically writes about her nephews would do. i sent off an email right away with nine very good questions for the child to answer. questions that would help me write down his adventure from where he stood. and i emailed them on over to where the text originated. his mom. now there are things called long shots and things called risky ventures but emailing your sister with questions for your nephew usually isn't squished over into either of those categories. but i have a sister who does not listen to phone messages. primarily this is because she cannot retrieve them because she did not listen any of the ones that came before and somehow- SOMEHOW- her phone message retrieval system is clogged. fragments of voices, many of them mine, scattered all over the inside of her phone, clumping together and garbling up all that technology. this is also true of the landline she keeps in her house. this phone has a number i have not successfully used to connect to a live human voice in more than two years. there may be squirrels living in her phone for all i know.

and you're thinking, well, this is why you emailed, then. but you don't even know. i have spent years laboring under the assumption my sister lives in such a rustic community she only has access to dial up interweb. it turns out that although this is what she thinks, it is not at all true. and it is not that the computer(s) at her home are still powered by tiny gerbils on spinning wheels. no. her husband is technologically savvy (i am overstating this but i love him and know him to be computer literate so you will ignore what may be a stretching of some truth) and i am sure she owns a computer that would make mine feel self-conscious enough to wear a padded laptop case. but my sister's constant battles with user-friendly technology (as reported by reliable sources) extend even to her ability to print out a set of nine questions in a timely fashion.

so the questions were sent out again, with a menacing threat. i do not recall specifically the nature of the threat, but if it did not include a promise to leak confidential information about said sister's wild youth to her only child, it should have. and then, the day before i intended to send a third set of questions and then make good on any threats i'd promised, i got wind of tragedy at the sister household. her vehicle had been broken into and ransacked. her husband's vehicle, sitting innocently beside hers, was also attacked. now, some of you might be asking what on earth those two cars were doing sitting out there in the driveway at night. good cars. one new. one newish. cars that deserved better. you might ask why they would be sitting out there in the middle of the world all exposed like that when a few feet away a three car garage sat waiting. and i would say to you that's a mighty fine question. i'd give you my sister's email so you could ask her but you'd end up waiting years for an answer. you're welcome to call and leave her a message....

now, my sister, just like me, is at a place in her own life where she can choose to spend her money as she pleases and it pleases her to carry a nice bag. and so the car sitting unprotected in the driveway held, probably right up there in the front seat although maybe it was in a back seat, her handbag. a bag that set her back more than my 1970 chevy impala four door hardtop set back my parents in 1984. more than manhattan rent on a studio apartment. and even though the idiot crook didn't have enough sense to know it was the bag he should have kept he knew enough to take it for what might be inside and then toss it after he got the credit cards. so the purse sailed out of his car and onto a dusty roadside, carrying safe inside itself a wallet of equally stunning lineage, a set of keys to the car it was stolen from and, of course, the nine questions for the original supernatural nephew.

now we will never know what happened to the supernatural nephew and his mysterious metallic grandmother. alas, alas.

the end. probably not....

for those who would rescue cows, a letter from a fan

dear little girls,

first let me say it was wonderful to spend the afternoon with you yesterday. you probably don't remember the first time we met, not long after you both had just started breathing air. i had never in my life seen human beings as small as you and most of me was afraid to even be close to such smallness. you looked as if any slight touch could stop you from being and your parents had gone through a great deal just to get you to be at all and i did not want to mess things up. but your mom ran her hand over each soft forehead and said i could, too, and i'm glad i did. you were fuzzy then, peachlike. you looked imaginary somehow. i think maybe until you both got home from the hospital your mom and your dad worried some days maybe you were imaginary. but then when you got home i remember they realized really fast that you weren't. you tested them a little bit as i recall just to make sure they were really good at being parents. and it looks to me like once you figured out they were you relaxed that testing and settled into the work of being glorious little girls with magnificent ponytails perched on top of some very creative brains.

and we have seen each other from time to time since then but you were always small still, not quite sure what to do with people who weren't all the time in your life. so that's why i'm so glad we had tea yesterday and watched all that rain go everywhere outside and read green eggs and ham. that is a mighty fine book, by the way. i don't know if you know about the guy who wrote it but he was a smart and brave and passionate man and also a little sad, but i think it gave him some sort of joy to write books like the ones he wrote and then know someday children like you would read them and think interesting things. i think he admired the same things i admire and i thought you should know some of those things include the ability to leap off a table and land with elegance and fierceness and also the ability to share animals in a sailboat even when you're not really sure that's what you want to do. and loving books. i guess that's one of those things that in some households just goes without saying. books are like water or air. if you like books now your whole life will be more beautiful than it would have been otherwise. you will live in so many worlds some days you might get a little dizzy. but that's okay, too.

because i know how you feel about rescuing baby cows from tornado-related tree strandings i wanted to tell you about the giant cow over in andes. that's andes, new york. not andes, andes. some days we drive up the side of the mountain for sunday breakfast and before we get very far, when the land is still mostly flat near the river, we drive by a house all animaled with farm creatures. there are chickens scattered all over the yard and a few goats milling about. but on some days, the best days i guess, there is a black and white cow standing around. just standing. but what i think you would both like about this cow is that it is the giantest cow i have ever seen. now, i'm not saying i'm an expert on the situation, but i did grow up in a town full of cows and, as i mentioned yesterday, i have ridden a cow or two. and i have never seen a cow so big, not even on t.v. that cow just stands there. and i don't know that it needs rescuing. i think the people it lives with keep it from getting caught up in trees just fine, but i am pretty sure it gets bored sometimes with all those chickens underfoot. so i was thinking that when you come to visit we could drive up on the way to sunday breakfast and maybe wave to that giant cow. i don't think cows wave back, but i think we'll be able to tell it likes us.

love,
me