triptych: gifts

sometimes i write and then forget to slap the words up on the screen. these three seem to be comfortable being on the same page so here they sit, original dates right next to them so you'll know what's what- unexpected little things people gave me. i think maybe they're upside down, time-wise. you'll figure it out.

spiderman, dated 11-01-11
i first realize he is spiderman when he puts a hand on my shoulder. or maybe it's just after that when his chest muscles brush against me. this is not something i am used to from strangers but i am kneeling on the sidewalk, holding the small brown dog still so a group of children can pet him. it is always strange to watch children pet this dog on the street because he stands very still until his whole self disappears. he is a shell, silent and empty, clenching an eel in his teeth.

children do not care about this. they are used to dogs that leap and lick and nuzzle and all that evidently interferes with what the children want to do, which is pet the soft dog fur uninterrupted by the actual dog. children will pile around him and put small, sticky hands on his back, his head. he endures. they will run small hands down the length of him until parents drag them away. they will compare the textures of his different colors, will put their faces up against the softness of his ears. they will start at the bony top of his head and will walk sideways along him, dragging their fingers to his tail. some of them will pet just the tail, which refuses to move while he stands there. they will pet right over the bald spot where his fur fell out and never grew back years ago. they are grateful for his stillness.

but spiderman is the smallest in his family, the only one wearing noncivilian clothing. his mother tries to lead the children away before spiderman has squirmed his way up next to the dog. he reaches out as his mother moves forward. she hesitates, pulls her other children back. spiderman pets the dog slowly, leans against me to steady himself. this is the first time, i tell him, the dog has ever been petted by a superhero. i say it is a special occasion. the child's mother agrees. usually, she says, smiling, spiderman does not like to go near dogs. i like this one, he says,staring into the brown fur. he is so still.

light, dated 9-11-11
he asks me how we are and i tell him we're fine. we have gone from the mainland to one island and then another over two of the bridges the whole world has been watching this weekend. always potential targets, i suppose, but more likely so, according to some at least, this weekend. i have tried very hard, just like him,  this week before to avoid the papers, avoid the news on t.v., scroll quickly past webpages plastered with panic or sorrow or images i've seen a thousand times before. gratuitous suffering. fear porn.

days like these armed people paw through backpacks on public transportation with the blessing of our mayor and someone is always threatening to blow up something i will travel in, on, over or through. we are encouraged to say something if we see something, to be just afraid enough, but to go about our business like everything is normal.

but the child's other aunt has dragged her family onto a plane and flown them to washington d.c. this weekend and the realization that he cannot yet control the entire world and keep those he loves always safe is beginning to itch in the back of his head. it is unfair to hand this to him, that he should worry about so many he loves walking around in both of the cities where dark holes were left after. he is a child but he has spent the day remembering the dead and fretting over the living. he has spent his day in nebraska with a new hat he would not wear. out of respect, he tells me. because he is so far away from where he thinks things happened, so far away from where he worries something might happen again, it is what he knows he can do to put order into the chaos.

he asks if i have seen two lights in sky and i tell him i have. in fact i have seen them before. the first year i recall railing against them, not knowing how they could possibly help anyone at all. they seemed gaudy, horrible, mean. they did not restore things. they did not bring anyone back and i could not look at the loneliness of them. but this night we are driving over the manhattan bridge and there are those two lights shining up through soft rain and hissing fog. the brooklyn bridge weaves itself across the space between the lights and where we are. the city glitters in the dark, so pretty you cannot imagine anyone wishing it harm. i take one picture and then another, grainy from the night and blurry from the speed of the car. i tell him we just saw the lights, that i took a picture of them i can send him. i say they are beautiful. he knows this but lets me say it anyway. well, he says, sounding far away, i love you.

after school, dated 03-17-2011
 i do not deserve the kindness my children show me but i devour it voraciously.

some days after classes we have tutoring. my tutoring sessions are fairly informal and i have a small group that shows up every day. one child works on math, swearing under his breath the whole time. about the math. about my own evil self. another works on spelling, consistently figuring out twelve and fourteen letter words more easily than four or five letter ones. one child buzzes about the room menacing others into quizzing him on s.a.t. vocabulary words none of them can decipher the sound of. already today he is furious with me because when he asked me if he was my favorite i told him i couldn't imagine a single favorite child but that he is certainly in the pile of favorites. this is not enough. he would share the limelight with speller, probably. they are oddly protective of each other. but he is pretty sure there's no room for a third among my pile of favorites and is considering elbowing them out as soon as he figures out who they are.

they begin to wander in. one child is having trouble understanding the plot of a book he's reading. one has a question about a project due some time ago. one wants to talk about how much the book he's reading is upsetting him. the plot, the suffering and the darkness of it. this is a child who does not like to speak around other students and who likes to mumble his words so low i have to lean forward to hear. the math child is here with a poetry question. he is giddy with the knowledge he passed every class this marking period and is willing to put for a little effort in a class or two to keep that good feeling. he is even willing to write a poem.

so there is chaos. s.a.t. child is trying to explain to spelling child some sort of information about a circle and a tangent. they are at the board in front of a giant red circle, conferring in hushed voices. mumbling child is trapped in a desk whispering into the desktop while i try to figure out what is making him so upset. and math child is insisting that he has written a stanza of a poem and needs immediate assessment of said poetry with suggestions for what to do with stanza two. immediate. nobody in this group is able to be much aware of the needs of others. mostly. i turn to math child and mumbling child bristles. he works hard at not liking anyone but math child is pretty regularly oblivious to attempts to stop him from talking. so he ambles over to me and hovers, preventing mumbler from confessing some deep, dark, terrifying secret about his suffering connection to the book.

about this time spitfire comes in. she is about nothing, tallwise, but is full volume in terms of personality. she checks out the goings on of the two small clusters and situates herself between so she can chime in to either group without having to raise her voice. math child is exasperating mumbler to the point he finally snaps and spits out a brilliant suggestion to math boy who stares, open mouthed. this is the first time another student has ever suggested math child try anything except something that is physically impossible. he smiles and wanders back to pack up his things.

mumbler is confused by what just happened. he opened his mouth to say something horribly cruel and ended up saying possibly the kindest, most helpful thing he's ever said to this child he doesn't know and, as a result, absolutely despises. he smiles a little bit, too, but checks first to be sure nobody is watching, then he heads out, trusting my promises that he is strong enough to keep the book from getting loose inside his head.

this leaves s.a.t. child, spelling child and spitfire. they are crowded together at a clump of desks now, plotting something. i have been trying to convince spitfire for more than a year that she needs help with her academic work. she interprets this as an assessment of her intelligence instead of her tools. generally she gets mad, yells at me, then tells me she's not stupid. then she stomps off. i sometimes yell after her down the hall that i know she's not stupid even though sometimes she surely acts like she is. because i am graceful and dignified and always, always mature. she would be worried if i didn't yell something.

but today she brings it up. because she likes fighting with me. or maybe she wants to be sure i really care about her. or maybe she likes hearing me yell at her that i know she's not stupid. and today i have backup. so we have the argument out here in the open where s.a.t. child and speller can hear. and they weigh in. we are talking about a program i want her to be part of and s.a.t. child steps up and says, "what is wrong with you?" he tells her she'll have everything she needs to learn anything she wants, everything she needs to be smart. speller gets up, leans forward and says with a sassiness i know it is hard for her to gather up, "if you're part of the program you have connections." they both move in toward spitfire like predatory animals smelling blood. they insist half her friends are in the program and she would be a fool to keep standing there on the outside. this is all she needs. a year and a half i have been begging, pleading, whining and yelling. a year and a half. i bring this up and she smiles, says it's different coming from them.

baby daddy

the first time i saw him he was putting his fist through one of those glass panels embedded with chicken wire, the kind school stairwells had in the fifties. he shattered the glass pretty impressively but the chickenwire kept it from spilling all over the place. he cut his hand and bruised it a bit. he was mad, i heard later, at his girlfriend. i saw her in class a day or so after, tiny, eyes cast down, and she told me he has an anger problem. she smiled when she said it, shyly, like she was in awe of such power, like she was glad he'd expressed his feelings for her so well. high school girls like boys who will hit things for them.

so when i see him a few days later in the same stairwell he starts yelling at me, saying i ratted him out. evidently he got himself suspended for this impressive bit of drama in the stairwell. i tell him i don't even know his name and he continues to yell a little more, maybe to prove to me he has this anger problem i've been hearing more and more about over the weeks. but i was raised by wolves, or at least by people with a stubborn streak, so i let him yell himself out and tell him maybe he ought to go to class instead of wasting so much time standing in a stairwell that smells like broccoli farts. it really does, by the way. he is mad that he thinks this is even the tiniest bit funny and he stomps off so i will not see him smiling.  i see him.

i hear the tiny girl who smiles when she thinks about him is pregnant. she sits in one of the classes i share with another teacher. she never raises her hand. she never talks. she sits quietly and hands in papers and reads short stories and might be focused enough to get into a college if she didn't have any other challenges staring at her. she stares down at her belly a lot lately.

when i walk through the halls and stairwells between classes i sometimes encounter clumps of children, most often boys, huddled together. usually they are doing nothing more than cutting class and when i walk up, especially in the stairwells, they look sheepish and scatter. there are seven in the group i see today, sitting all together in a stairwell, reeking of something that smells like cherry cough syrup. there is much shuffling and muttering and then a few of them shoot up the stairs. one or two just stand there, smiling the sort of dumb-faced grin i hope nobody ever has to see outside a school. and then there is mr. anger management. he stands up and starts to walk away.

i motion for him to stop and mention i hear he's going to be a dad. he looks at me funny because he doesn't have the skills with inferencing to know where i might be going with this. he nods, glares. tries very hard with his glaring to remind me he has anger problems. this is what you're doing? i ask him. this is what you're doing to get ready to be a father? i can see the confusion. i'm not fighting fair. the other boys are gone and i say softly your baby deserves a good dad. this is mean. every baby deserves a good dad and not many get one and it hardly seems fair of me to expect something from a fifteen year old boy most people don't expect of thirty year old men. but it's his baby. his choice. he yells back that he's going to be a good dad. i shake my head, tell him that if the best he can do is sit in a stairwell with a bunch of losers while he ought to be learning something, he will not be a good dad. your baby deserves a better dad than this, i say.

he looks less angry, more tired. he doesn't have even a tiny idea what is happening inside this small girl he might love. he has no way to know what a baby is all about or what it will need from him. he does not know he will need to teach it things. he does not know he can easily kill a baby when he is mad and not even see it happen. but i am not really worried about that. i know his anger is an excuse. it's a way to turn his back on responsibility for things. but it won't work here. he shoves open the stairwell door and stomps through, yelling over his shoulder that he will be a good dad. he will. he knows it.

i think about what i can tell him. what he might listen to. i have to plan ahead because i only see him times like this, when i am on my way somewhere else and he is where he isn't supposed to be. he must be a little scared, even if he doesn't really know how scared to be yet. he isn't the monster he pretends to be, but he tries so hard. maybe i should be asking instead of telling. is the baby a boy or a girl? what will you name it? what color sweater do you want me to knit?

wasting time

in 8th grade he walked up to a group of older boys in the street and said something very bad in spanish. he waited for the fight to start but the boys, who were not the gang members he'd hoped they were, simply looked at him the way you'd look at a yappy puppy behind a fence. this frustrated him, as you can imagine, so he threw rocks at them. handfuls of gravel, really. they walked on down the street, talking and laughing. he was not pleased. one of the older boys came to me the next day and asked me to do something about him. they didn't want to hit the child, he said, but eventually they would have to try to teach him what nobody else had been able to. 

he was not in my class in ninth grade but i would see him regularly roaming the halls in the colors of a latino gang that had no idea he existed. he was, in ninth grade, the sort of child whose name would bring shudders of boredom from teachers. he was bad but he was not very good at it.

so this year when i see his name on my class list i feel tired. i see him more often on the back sides of empty stairwells than in his desk. he is always wearing pegged jeans three sizes too small for his stubby self. he has no idea how unpleasant this is for those who have to walk behind him up stairs. his jacket is still always that same color, the way middle aged guys will sometimes wear the colors of a sports team that never considered them.

he smiles when he sees me lately, a slow smile that tells me he won't hold a grudge if i drag him to whatever class class he should be in. i have chased him up three flights of stairs, through silent hallways and back down again. i am quick for a fortysomething knitter and he is wearing his too-tight pants belted at the knees so i smile always when i drop him of at class and he smiles right back.

but when he is in my class some days i am fed up watching him trudge into the room fifteen or twenty minutes late, hat perched cockeyed on his head, earphones blasting something awful and so loud i can hear it. he drags his hand across desks. and i am through watching him slam three or four desks aside to settle himself into his own. it is to much to watch him take ten more minutes to root around in his backpack so loudly i have to raise my voice to be heard over his rustling. because inevitably after he has done all this he will say, loudly, i don't have a pen-paper-book-handout or i need to go to the bathroom. his smile is only getting him so far.

this time of year we have the conferences, the ones where parents come around scared or angry and wait in lines for us to tell them what is wrong with their children. that's the fear, that there is something genuinely wrong, that it is their fault. it is in the evening, after the parents are home from work. they dress up, speak in overly formal, tortured sentences. i try to make myself seem less scary but it never works. the boy is here, sitting at one of the desks outside my classroom. he is here, he tells me, to help. i try not to look overly shocked in front of the parents. i do not want to seem mean. he moves from door to door, this child, checking to see if anyone needs a translator. he helps parents find the right rooms and sign in with the right teachers. he chats with them a little and puts them at ease. he is here to help.

i do not recognize this behavior, do not recognize him. when he saunters into my classroom about five minutes before it is time to go home, i ask if he's here for a conference. i am joking. he does not quite get the joke. he motions the girl standing next to him toward one of the chairs and the three of us sit down. and we have a meeting. a real one. he says he didn't realize how much of his time he'd wasted. he looks shyly over at the girl and says he can't afford to keep wasting time. the girl thinks he is magnificent sitting there in those ridiculous pants and that tedious jacket. he is serious. i tell him what i've known for a while, that he's pretty smart, that i suspect he can read a little and when he says things in class they actually make sense. he shocks me by nodding, by saying he knows. he says he likes thinking about what we read. i turn to the girl, tell her she better keep an eye on him, say she ought to expect him to be smart if she's going to be seen with him. she nods very solemnly. she smiles over at him. he failed every class he took this marking period. every single one. but he has been in every single class for a week. he's never done that before.

lightsaber, rock cycle, seventh grade

i do not know the whole story behind why there are lightsabers in the desk, but there are two. they belong to the teacher who is in this classroom most of the day and we sometimes use them as swords when we are acting out macbeth. we have been acting out macbeth the last week or so.

our floor, the english floor, is a quiet haven in the midst of wildness. except for the seventh graders. they come up once a day, on a schedule skewed 30 minutes from our own, so that they barrel through the stairwell door and come howling into the hall en masse. because they are seventh graders they have been taught to wait outside a room until their teacher arrives. there is no telling what mayhem they might accidentally get themselves into if they enter a room without supervision. so every day, midway through macbeth, this slithering mass of chaos swirls around outside the space between their door and our door. and every day i try to think of a new way to scare them into quietness without completely ruining them. annoying as they are, they're more fragile than eleventh graders. they take everything to heart. they believe me when i say things.

a few days back we are in class and the lightsabers are leaned against a wall. the seventh grade horde comes up, giggling and shoving and howling. the other teacher is in the middle of macbeth so i do what i can. i leap out into the hallway brandishing a lightsaber. this is not what i have planned. it is just what happens. there is a great squealing among the children, not enough of it from fear. mostly they think it is fantastic that a teacher is threatening to destroy them with a lightsaber. they love it enough to find it in their still-beating hearts to be quieter so that i do not have to slay them. as though this is a gift to me. although one little boy comes dangerously close to begging to be slain. begging, i tell you.

so today when i show up at a seventh grade science class to read a test about rocks for a group of students, there is some buzz and chatter. i have forgotten my adventures on the english floor, forgotten my attempts to slay an entire class of seventh graders. but they have not. in particular, one little boy has not.

oh, no! he howls, his grin crawling to the edges of his round face. are you going to chase me with a lightsaber? i look over at him, confused a little, as we walk down the hall, ten or so of them and me, headed for the library. it takes me a second to remember waving the blue lightsaber around wildly while he stood in the door to the stairwell, laughing. his eyes are the same now as then, bright puppy eyes, sparkling with hope of a lightsaber appearing during a test on rocks.

i tell them i love rocks, love tests about rocks. i tell them i absolutely love to read tests about rocks more than most things. some of these things are true and some are not. it does not always matter with seventh graders whether everything you say is true. all that matters is that you say it passionately. so i read the test passionately, questions about sedimentary, ingeous, metamorphic rocks. questions about luster, about fracturing. they do not work all at the same rate and as they finish, they head, one by one, back to their science class. but the child who recognized me earlier sits, test situated neatly under his folded hands. he is finished. i'm waiting, he says, in case something happens. and he is serious. he knows very little about me but that i'm unpredictable and my unpredictability runs to what is, to him, a magnificent scale. i have weapons from the future and i have spared his life at least once when i didn't have to. i might do it again.

diagram from the kern river courier, because it's pretty

we turn to a page with a diagram of the rock cycle on it. i think of the shower curtains we've had, the sweetie and me. the frog life cycle. the new york city transit map. the water cycle. i think of how right now i'm dying for a periodic table shower curtain, how i'd like to have a shower curtain with this rock cycle on it. but i know better than to say so. i am not stupid. what i say instead is, man, i think i'm going to have to get me a tattoo of this rock cycle. it's soooooo cool. because a tattoo is far more fierce than a shower curtain. and there are giggles. wide eyes. one girl shakes her head. the waiting child's eyes get so big i worry they will leap out of his skull. the grown up in me worries he may go home and try to make his own rock cycle tattoo with a sharpie. the teacher in me realizes this would demonstrate clear knowledge of the rock cycle, not to mention impressive spatial organization.

when it is time to go back, he says it again. you're not going to chase me with a lightsaber, are you? he says it the way little kids you've just tossed into the swimming pool ask if you're going to toss them in again as they run up to you, panting and reeking of chlorine, arms outstretched for easy throwing. maybe, i say, smiling. because who can tell with seventh graders?

well, what did you expect?

this is the prettiest thing i have for the first day of fall. it should be read out loud. with passion. especially the dog's part. go gather up a pile of folks and read it out loud right now. go on.

How To Like It
by Stephen Dobyns

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept—
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

brother

my sister made the threats first. this is how she works. she anticipates the potential foolishness of a person and just goes right ahead and threatens that if whatever she thinks might happen eventually does, someone will get a near-fatal dose of her wrath. the thing is, i know she didn't just threaten me. she threatened him, as well. i guess she figured she didn't know any two people further away from each other in every way and the possibility of the two of us killing each other must have seemed pretty high. she just wanted us both to get along. this seems funny now, considering she's generally been known for roiling things up just for the excitement.

i want to say i got into town on the bus and that he was there at that raggedy station over on second, but i can't be sure and it may have been the train. i am pretty sure my hair was long and wild and i can tell you i was wearing some sort of hippie skirt and birkenstocks. i'd stopped shaving my legs and underarms and had never quite figured out makeup. i was exactly the way she must have described me. but he was not what i expected at all. you can't always see young republican on the outside. of course, in her haste to anticipate every potential problem she'd listed what she thought might be every thing i'd hate about him and then insisted i not hate it. and as i said, i'm sure she did the same when she spoke to him through gritted teeth about me.

he took me fishing. we got up early and drove nearly an hour down to a place around noel, if i recall correctly. and we talked. about all the things she warned us she'd kill us if we talked about. politics. feminism. hunting. all of it. in addition to finding we had plenty of common ground, there was the thrill we both felt disobeying a direct order from her. i don't recall whether we caught anything but i'm pretty sure we didn't. i just know i laughed a lot at a time in my life when i hadn't been laughing much at all. and i could imagine this little sister of mine laughing a lot, too, which is really what you hope for when you think about the futures of the people you love. that they will find people who can make them laugh.

she decided she'd keep him years back, or maybe he decided he'd keep her. i suppose they decided together. but he is our family, my brother now for nearly as much of his life as he wasn't, and that is just fine by me.

happy birthday, alan.

labor day

 the delaware and ulster railroad starts out sitting up above the high curvy cut of the bush kill. it heads through town along dry brook, crosses the intersection by casey joe's, slips past the caboose with the delicious scrambled eggs, then cuddles itself up next to the east branch delaware river. the two, the river and the railroad tracks, wind through a valley the river itself has been working on for a very long time. they go all the way up, eight miles, to roxbury, passing the round barn farm market, a long, skinny lake and a pheasant farm along the way.

and so on saturday we head down the street to the train station, me, the sweetie, a friend and his four year old boy. there are women with hoop skirts waiting at the station. there are men with strange mustaches leaning against fencerails. quite a few of them have badges. all of them have hats and guns. we get our tickets at the window and we all get on the train. we, the four of us, are hatless, gunless and badgeless. the train starts with a deep breath and a leap forward. we edge past old engines and under the trees.

once the train is clear of town, once is is running along the east branch delaware, it picks up speed, stretches itself out in the fields of corn and cows and hay. some places bales are already wrapped in white plastic. we ride past joe pye weed, morning glories, ferns and swamps. the mountains sit behind everything, row after row of them dipping down to where the train will go. low stone walls crop up and run a bit along with us and then slide into the weeds and the water, then rise up again from nowhere.

in roxbury we step off the train and wander around the museum, see this place the way it was a hundred years ago, a hundred fifty. everyone in the photos looks like the mustached men and hoop skirted ladies on our train. the land in the photos hasn't changed as much. we get a snack and head back to the train. that's when the shooting starts, cracks and smoke and powdery air. when the air clears the men with badges haul off a woman in a red dress. they bustle past us into the first car of the train. she hollers to a bunch of men without badges who head up onto the train after her. we roll back toward arkville on a train full of gunfighters under a sky that's scooting down lower, closer to the tops of our heads.

the rain starts, soft and misty but cold enough we're glad to have jackets. we wave at folks in cars and on bikes as we sail through crossroads. we wave at a sandy colored cow standing alone in a field near home. a second gunfight breaks out as the train pulls into the station. the rain is heavier now, but we are back at arkville, named for that big boat, named for safety. we have stocked up on food and water at the freshtown in margaretville, so after dinner, after sitting up visiting and trying to find on weak-signaled phones any information about folks back in a city we think is under attack, we walk ourselves upstairs and go to sleep.

the fire department siren goes off at 7am but nothing has changed from where we sit. our trees are all still as branched as they were yesterday. the metal lawn furniture still sits on the porch. the sweetie heads into town to get a few things we forgot the day before and he is back a little too soon. dry brook has climbed right out of its bed and is rolling over the road, over yards and up into homes. it is creeping toward the laundromat. it has shoved itself hard up against the railroad track but the railroad track is, at least for now, shoving back, making itself into a levee for a very small part of town.

we are an island. not all on our own. the post office and fire station are with us but we are cut off from brooklyn, certainly, cut off from margaretville, a town over to the west, and fleischmanns over to the east. we do not know right away that margaretville is being swallowed by the delaware or that fleischmanns is being carried away by the bush kill. we only know that dry brook has gone out of control.  but we are on high ground. we have what we need, really. we can get by here a few days in this house, the four of us, with no problem. the power flickers from time to time but never goes out more than a few seconds. the water in the pipes runs clear. we cannot imagine how strong the water is.

the sweetie and i walk down to casey joe's, to where the work crews are watching the water get higher and come nearer the pizza place. we wander down the railroad tracks, the ones we rode on the day before. the rain is still coming down, pushing the edge of that redbrown river just a little higher. it crashes along on our left where we can see through broken trees the crumpled remains of trailers and sheds and little wood houses now halfway or more underwater. we see a neighbor who says her family is fine, then tells us about a cow pulled from the mud and water, nearly washed away. and we walk on a little more down the tracks to see that cow, the same one we waved at the day before, standing bewildered on the tracks, her owner pacing nearby. we walk back and something cracks. a building shifts into the water.

we leave monday for brooklyn. we leave three times and are turned back, sent away from a questionable bridge. we are trapped in the catskills! says the child each time we head back. we promise him we are having an adventure. finally we cross over the esopus and move toward the thruway and brooklyn. the ugly brown water and the brokenness slide back through the rearview mirror for miles. but we will drive through the dark tomorrow to get ourselves back. we do not know what will be there, will not be able to see what's left after the water has crept back where it belongs. it doesn't matter. we will wake up in the morning and we will get to work. certainly things will not ever be the same for these towns resting in these valleys but they will be what we make.

the best thing

yet another entry about how everyone loves the socially awkward dog

the small brown dog stands very still and stares straight ahead. until the woman in front of him situates herself so that he is looking at her. and then he moves. away. when he is at home, he likes nothing better than to stare balefully into the eyes of his victims but when he is here, out of doors, leashed up and eel-toothed, he will not acknowledge the existence of anyone. the woman is patient and shifts her pink phone camera a bit but all she gets is a brown blur. later, she says. she is a crossing guard and sees us every day. she has time.

the dog already has his picture pasted up a block away in the corner pharmacy, staring blankly ahead, one eye brown, one blue, red lizard clamped in a mouth that looks smiley and is why people like to look at him. he is so happy, they say, so proud. and they love what they see as joy in his predatory little face.

i do not know whether it is because it is summer or whether people who live nearby simply feel comfortable after seeing the dog so many times, feel like some part of him belongs with them, but the last week or so, the shutterbugging has gone wild. we are walking down the street, maybe wednesday. probably thursday. a man is talking to a woman toward the street side of the sidewalk, facing us. he says to her wait a minute and then he runs down the street in front of us. he sits, waiting, across the intersection, snapping photos of the small brown dog with the long orange stripedy eel. he walks along with us a bit, the giant lens of his camera upstaging the camera itself. he asks what sort of dog and then he asks his name. guthrie, i tell him. he says he was going to go get a few photos of dogs at the dog pond in the park but now he doesn't have to.

we walk a few blocks more and turn a corner, up toward the park. a woman waves her phone quickly in front of the dog's face, snaps what must be a bigfoot-like photo of him, then giggles herself away. we head back toward home and see a woman from our building, maybe the one who gives music lessons in the afternoons. she is young and smiling and asks if it would be okay to take a picture of the dog. i say certainly. the dog glares. she takes the photo and we walk around the corner and up the street together. the dog never acknowledges her existence.

the next morning we are walking home past bakeries and grocery stores and laundromats when a man stops next to us at an intersection. he laughs, fumbles with his phone. when the light changes and the dog hurls himself out into the intersection, the man walks next to us, his phone making a tiny movie of the whipping tail and swaying belly and the steady orange stripedy eel. he chats some and laughs more and smiles as he turns up his street.

then yesterday afternoon just past the dog toy store and the little cafe a man yells to us, asks if he can take a picture. the small dog freezes, looks into the distance just a few feet past the man, lets himself be captured. and now, walking back again toward where the woman this morning tried for a picture, we stop again, the dog more tired now, willing to let her take a picture, maybe two. the crossing guard with her walks us back along the block home talking to me, talking to the dog. her family has them. low dogs. we are all of us part of a cult.

and there are the people in sidewalk cafes and the construction workers sitting on stoops for lunch and hospital workers in scrubs taking a smoke break who stop conversations and meals to look at him. there are shopkeepers and waitstaff at several restaurants who stand in doorways grinning like fools when he strolls by. there are old guys sitting on benches or standing in clusters on corners who lean in, arms outstretched, and say to him in my uncle dale's voice i'm gonna get that toy! there are the people who giggle and point and wave and gasp every single day. the ones who clutch at the arms of their companions and discuss the possibilities of what it is the dog is carrying. well, i don't know but it looks like an umbrella. there is the maybe homeless, probably schizophrenic old guy on the same corner most days who stops his ranting about the evils of the world each time he sees guthrie so he can say that is a good dog. good dog he says, loud and garbled, and every time the dog leaves his own focused eelworld and looks up. i want to explain to the man how rare this is, eye contact from this dog, but he is there most days so i suspect he knows.

there are those who promise that the small brown dog is the most precious or adorable or wonderful or simply the best thing they have seen all day. every day someone says that. the best thing. really. i mean it, they say, in case i might not know what i live with. it is strange that he is unaware of them all, completely unreachable strolling down the street, pouring out all that joy without knowing a thing about it. i stroll along beside him, like flannery o'connor with her backward chicken. i am just here to assist the dog.

letter to my favorite fifth grader preparing for the first day of school

                       every two or three years i reread mark twain's great saga from start to finish finding 
                       it as fresh as when i first read it. with the spirits of huck and jim pushing me i have 
                       been up and down the mississippi many times. though i travelled on big boats 
                       rather than intimately by raft i like to believe i've caught glimpses of them. it's certain 
                       they're still there behind some island or up some creek.

                                                                              -thomas hart benton

in just a few days you will begin your first day in fifth grade and i don't know how you're feeling about it, but i hope you're excited. i know fourth grade was sort of frustrating for you. maybe you felt restless and a little bit like what you wanted wasn't quite what everyone else wanted. and i got to thinking about my own fourth grade year and i suppose i know a little bit how you feel.

my grandma claimed she met him.

i hated fourth grade. not all of it. not the part where we learned the whole history of the state of missouri and went on a field trip to the state capitol building which was, and still is, full of paintings by thomas hart benton. they are huge murals covering whole walls and they can make you cry, they're so pretty and sad and full of life and suffering. and i loved all the books i read, but mostly i read them alone. all by myself, sneaky and secret-like. because my school just didn't seem all that interested in the whole learning thing. or reading. you can ask your mom. she didn't like things too much that year, either.

i would sit there in my fourth grade class, staring out the window or drawing in my notebook or secretly reading a book resting on my knees while our teacher would drone on about subtraction. in fourth grade! not fancy subtraction with fractions or decimals or negative numbers. just regular old subtraction that i learned way back in first grade. so i felt like it would be okay to occupy myself with other things. this did not suit my teacher at all. things got really frustrating when my teacher accused me of doing something i hadn't done and then took me outside into the hall while another teacher watched our class. she brought with us into the hall a wooden paddle and she paddled me with it. i didn't cry because i was just too sad to cry. i felt like that moment was confirmation i would never fit in there, would never figure out how to be the right sort of student for sitting in a desk in that room.

you can probably guess that your nanny had a fit when she found out a teacher paddled me at school. i don't think those school people were quite prepared for someone like your nanny, who is mostly kind and gentle but will get a little wild when her children get hit with a board. and although my teacher never did anything like that again, she never really taught me much and she certainly didn't make me feel welcome there in school. and i'm wondering if maybe fourth grade is just a tough year for some folks. maybe kids like you and like me are frustrated in fourth grade because we're already ready for something new, something different. fourth grade sure can feel like a straitjacket for some people. 

that brings me to fifth grade. i walked in the first day pretty nervous. we had just moved to town and i didn't know anyone. fifth grade was completely different. we had four teachers. four! and we went from room to room for our classes the way high school kids do. each room was full of wonderful things to explore- globes, maps, models and charts. i could not imagine even for a second needing to stare out the window or sneak a book into my lap. there was so much to see and so much to do and teachers seemed to want us all to see and do so much cool stuff.

let me tell you, fifth grade teachers are different. because they teach a single subject and they're really good at it, they have fun teaching. they will answer all sorts of interesting questions and if you ask a question your teacher doesn't know the answer to, she will say, "wow! that's a really awesome question but i'm not really sure how to answer it." and then she'll suggest you all go home and try to figure out the answer yourselves and report back the next day. probably she'll show up the next day with some sort of demonstration that answers your question, just in case nobody in your class could find out. you never know. but fifth grade teachers are joyous specialists. they love learning just as much as you do and they want everyone to love learning, too.

in history we made pemmican and in math we dove right into wild fractions with mixed numbers. and my science teacher brought in a cow's heart when we were studying the circulatory system. i looked at a drawing of a human heart in my science book and was amazed that the cow's heart was so similar. because we are both mammals. we have so much about us that's the same, although cows have way cooler digestive systems. fifth grade is when you really start seeing how things are connected and the whole world starts to make more sense. and it was awesome enough then that i can remember it thirty three years later. thirty three years!

the thing that surprised me most was how much we read in english class. out loud. silently. sometimes we wrote our own stories. i tended to write about misunderstood little girls who would one day be appreciated for the very things people hated about them at the moment (especially thier uncanny ability to be right most of the time). and i was surprised that many of the stories we read from real books in fifth grade were about just that. frustrated people, many of them the same age as the girls in my stories, the same age as me. the same age you are right this very minute. and they all had to struggle, had to go through some version of fourth grade or something even more awful, through something that made them doubt themselves and feel hopeless. but then each and every one of them found a way to speak up, step up, change things.

expect a lot from fifth grade. expect a lot from your teachers. it is their job and their passion to give you everything they have and good teachers will know that. you have already realized that you love to learn new things and so you need to expect a lot from your own self, as well. everything you've done in school so far has been preparation for this year. fifth grade is the year of great exploration so wear sturdy shoes and keep your eyes peeled. go out and take on the world! i will be right here waiting to hear all about it.

building

first i ought to say i don't think brooklyn needs a big fat sports arena slammed down right in the middle of everything over on atlantic and flatbush. and i don't believe i'll see the affordable housing that's supposed to be coming with this grand new construction any more than i expect to see the cleaned up and "family-friendly"coney island gleaming with fancy new hotels snuggled up by the high rise housing projects.

big brutus and the rain (and us)

but i am a sucker for machinery, so much so that i married the sweetie at the largest electric dragline shovel still alive today. cranes and tractors and other beasts capable of moving great piles of earth or iron or steel or even trash do to my heart what little kittens do to the hearts of most folks. and because of this i've found a thousand reasons to wander past the mean-spirited construction going on at atlantic yards this summer, including today's five mile round trip trek to sahadi's for a bottle of orange flower water which, sadly, they no longer carry.

cranes in june

there is plenty to do and see along the way and the walk is pleasant, full of pretty bakeries and shops with old and rusted things. but on my orange flowerless return trip i stand a long while at the corner of fifth and flatbush to watch a crane operator drop a big checkmark-shaped piece of metal delicately in place among the other bones in this monstrosity.

the crane is one of two i can see from where i stand, tiny bodies hidden below what they've already built, their red booms stretched like the necks of hungry animals. a cable suspended from the boom point ends at what looks like a bobber you'd tie to your fishing line. the bottom is red and white stripes. the top is a blue field with white stars. at this bobber the cable becomes two cables, stretched wide to affix to the checkmark at two places, not as far from one another as i would have thought. and then hanging from either end of this piece of metal is a length of rope, each nearly as long as the metal itself.

all along the beams that have been welded together, all along the finished part of the skeleton of this arena, there are cables running maybe waist high, affixed from time to time to the beams like streetcar wires. there are men, tiny as ants, fastened into those cables close to the edge where the checkmark hangs like a feather in the sky. the men stand there under it and do not even think about what might happen if that slab of metal suddenly drops from its fastenings. i spend my first few minutes watching them thinking of nothing besides that.

the crane lowers the metal piece once and something is not quite right. the cables lift it silently back up,  swing the whole thing around, then lower it again. the men on the skeleton begin to move like flocks of birds, into two loose groups, shifting with the movement of the metal hanging above them. they move through the sky like it is where they live, which, i suppose, is mostly true. they do not once look down. and when the checkmark descends for the second time men from each group grab the ropes dangling from its sides and guide it to where it will live. from the start of that second try to the moment when metal sits up against metal is not quite five minutes.

there have been blocks in my past, wooden ones and plastic ones that snapped open and closed like alligator mouths. there have been lincoln logs and tinker toys and ring-a-ma-jigs with pieces that click together so easily a three year old could build an arena with them. and i know up close on the corner of flatbush and fifth avenue there is the noise of machinery and the yelling of those men to one another. there is that checkmark of metal hanging above their heads, more than two thousand pounds wrapped in skinny cables, but from where i am standing so far across the street it looks effortless.

drive

a 1970 chevy impala four door hardtop sedan with a v-8 engine is 18 feet of unbridled automotive fury. it is also just over six and a half feet wide. and in may of 1985 my own dear parents handed me the keys to more than 3,500 pounds of detroit steel and said happy birthday. i am telling you this so you will know that i know what i am doing. that i have known for a very long time.

however, knowing what i am doing and having a license to do it are two different things. let me tell you now you shouldn't ever let a driver's license lapse. ever.  because without one it is difficult to get a credit card. buy a house. register a rowboat with the d.e.c. fly on a plane. it is very, very difficult to convince people you are who you say you are if you have no evidence other than the word of your parents who may or may not be of questionable integrity. so when my license lapsed without warning me about what would happen i decided i was not about to stand in a million person line and take that whole driving test over again just to prove to the state i know how to do something i'm not even planning to do so they can give me a license to do it. using the man and the man's desire to keep me jumping through hoops as an excuse to avoid doing something isn't such a good idea, either. but i got myself a fancy state i.d. non-driving. for walking around and buying bourbon and it suited me fine. for a while.

but recently i've become restless as a passenger and the sweetie has been encouraging me to visit the d.m.v. to get myself legalized. so i go every time i have a day off. rosh hashanah. winter break. spring break. summer. i go to the d.m.v. at atlantic center, downloaded license application already filled out and clutched in my sweaty hands. i get in line. and no matter what time of day i go, even thirty minutes before the place opens, there are hundreds of folks already in line. and i know what you're thinking. you've seen me exaggerate before. i am not exaggerating now. i believe that before lunchtime the d.m.v. in brooklyn processes more people than the total population of my entire missouri hometown, including stringtown and oscie ora acres. before noon. so i go and i stand in line until i can't breathe, until i've forgotten my name or until the screaming of miserable children cuts through the backs of my eyes or the anger between others somewhere further up the line threatens to boil over into spitting or purse throwing. and then i trudge back home, determined to go again the next day. depending on the length of the school break, maybe even the day after that.

but because we went wild and bought ourselves a new car in the ancestral homeland a week or so ago we had to do some licensing paperwork and the sweetie was willing to take a day off and do the work upstate, where the d.m.v. is a little quieter. because unlike me, he isn't even willing to attempt to stand in one of those lines. we go to the margaretville d.m.v. together. i cannot keep the terms standing, stopping and parking straight in my head, although i know i will never put my car in front of a sign that says any of those things, just to be safe. i feel clammy. it is a long time since i've taken a test and i think it may be the first time i've ever been nervous about how i'll do. yes, i was that sort of child. we are third and fourth in line, the sweetie and me. the first man is there to license a small farm vehicle because he was yelled at by a policeman. the d.m.v. lady says there's no way to license the vehicle but the man says the cop insisted it had to be licensed. kafka. dickens. dizziness. the man, who has already apologized to us for taking up so much time, finally decides this conversation will not change and goes home. this does not bode well for my own efforts.

the next transaction is quick and then the sweetie gets started with his paperwork and i am at the counter. i have my expired walking around i.d. from the state of new york. i have a notarized copy of my birth certificate. i have read and reread the forms of identification required and i know i have what i need but i am nervous. "you need a social security card," says the lady behind the counter. now, if i knew where my social security card was, i'd hand the thing over to her, but i don't. i do know that as soon as i have a valid license, i can get a new one and i will, but that doesn't help much right now. i smile my best smile and take a deep breath and tell her i don't need the card, that i checked the state website and what i have is sufficient. and yes, i did actually say sufficient. watch cops. awkward formal language is a common response to guilt and fear. she looks me over like she can't believe i haven't gone home yet and she clicks around on her keyboard. she looks surprised, then frowns, then takes my i.d. "this is expired," she says. already at 9:15 a.m. i have made her so tired she can barely think. i tell her i know, but that it still sufficient. i know for a fact it will work for three years after the date on it. she clicks around again and mutters three years under her breath and looks at me like i ought to be ashamed of myself. i am too nervous to be ashamed. she shoves the written test across the counter and tells me to have a seat.

there are twenty five questions. i begin to think like a ninth grader with a learning disability. i figure i can probably miss seven of the questions and still have a shot at driving. i answer them slowly and carefully. the fact that, as a high school teacher, i sit through at least one drunk driving seminar per year is very helpful. i reread every question, make sure i've answered them all. i put my name at the top and stand up. when i had the test over the counter the woman asks if i'm sure i'm finished. she is sure i am not. i was pretty sure but her tone is enough to make my insides feel all silvery and cold. she takes the paper, exasperated with me beyond words. but when she turns back to me everything has changed.

she says that in all her time working for the d.m.v. she can only think of maybe one other person who aced the test. i am so rattled by the taking of the test i'm not sure what she's saying but i can tell by her smile i passed.  i mention i took the test once before when i was sixteen and that i've spent about twenty years of my life driving successfully but she is still happy and i can tell you right now i am happy, too. and yes, i am the sort of person who will text my sisters to let them know i got an A+, perfect, minus zero score on my written test. i am, indeed.

she puts me over in front of the camera and i stand there while we wait for the machine to warm up. she takes my picture and tells me when the formal permit will come in the mail. she hands me my temporary permit. she asks me if i want to see my photo to see whether i'm happy with it or whether i want another. now, this is an opportunity pretty much every single person i've ever met dreams of having. the opportunity to retake a driver's license photo. i can hear a choir of angels. i can see beams of golden light. i look at the photo on the screen. it is hideous. i look like a squirrel-cheeked crack addict. i look like a very tired drunk. it is fine, i tell her. and it really is.

burying ground

one day pretty far back, historically speaking, the good folks of the city of new york looked around and realized the wells they'd dug and the rivers and springs on their skinny island were browner and dirtier and more full of typhoid and the like than they'd been before. they'd been making do with beer and whiskey and tea, but that will only go so far. you can't have a big city without any fresh water and a city on an island in the ocean doesn't have as many choices as it might if it found itself elsewhere. so the city did what must have seemed like a reasonable thing at the time. it began a process of impounding water from on up the way, up in the mountains of the mainland where the city didn't think too many people were using it. after all, who on earth would want to live up in the middle of nowhere when they could live in a fancy city on an island? especially when you factor in all that whiskey.

impounding is basically the lassoing of water into big piles in one place for quick and easy use in another place. because water is water, these piles came about when the city built dams along parts of the upland rivers, creating spectacular snaky lakes sitting high above the valleys originally carved by those slithers of water. the first damming happened more than a hundred and fifty years ago and the most recent happened four years before i was born. the water reached up and stretched out tendrilly fingers all over the land in valleys, smoothing out the lowlands and reflecting the mountains pretty enough the city folks even began to be proud of themselves for creating a resort scene up there where there had only been cows and bears before.

but you have to know that all those lassoed and harnessed wild waters surely had little towns snuggled all up against them, dot after tiny dot along the ribbony valleys before the waters rose up. and when the city decided how tall they'd need the water to be in each valley, they took away all the towns sitting below the line they decided on. that's right. took them right off the maps. some towns relocated whole and entire up on the banks of the new water. some didn't. but at the edges of the water where the towns used to be there are signs. former site of olive. former site of arena. and before they left, the folks in all those tiny places had to dig up their buried ancestors and take them to higher ground. there are things you just don't think about until you're in the middle of them.

whole groups of dead and buried folks, alone and clustered by name, were packed up and moved from every one of those little towns. arena, brewer, cannonsville, cat hollow, duffy, edgett, granton, old arena, rock rift, rock royal,  shavertown, union grove, wakeman. the water came up and buried the land and the trees and the roads to where things used to be. and a whole bunch of those dead whose families could not be found were carted off to a hillside just north of the water, west of the shavertown bridge, settled back again by what family they had with them underground at the time, and then town by town they were replotted, remapped.

you can see the history of the valleys right there on that hillside. the names of people that have given themselves over to be the names of towns. lamb after lamb across the stones of child after child living and then quickly dying in a time when a cough could mean losing half a family. masons and farmers and soldiers from the civil war. some stones weathered away to nothing because people had been living in those valleys so long and quietly burying their dead near enough by to visit from time to time. a few stones are set into the earth facing backward to all the others in their rows. there are small plugs of cement with metal signs skewered into the ground above the empty grass in some places with names typed onto white paper encased in plastic.

and those stones, markers for boxes of dust and bones, sit there on the side of the mountain. you can stand there in the middle of all of them and look out onto that valley below. you can't see it from where you stand at the edge of the clean lawn, but just beneath those trees is that lake glittering with impounded water.

the somethingth of july

photos and video generously supplied by the baby sister. 

 it would be easiest to blame the parents because they are the ones who handed us our first explosives and the small crumbling bits of burning wand for lighting them. i do not recall when i was not allowed to set fire to wads of gunpowder wrapped in bright paper although i am sure there must have been such a time. maybe, because i am the oldest, when i was two or so. maybe three. but the middle child was born breathing brimstone and her own child is steeped in it, too. it is his birthright to throw fire into the sky.

so it is only fair that when we figure out we can make it out to the homeland for a few days, we call the child to tell him first. the sweetie asks the child about his fourth of july plans and the child goes over them halfheartedly, insisting it can't really be much without us there. now, what he means is without the sweetie. because the sweetie will strap a rocket to a styrofoam plane. he will light a whole box of ladyfingers at once. he will run out into that delicious smoke to light fuse after fuse after fuse. i hear the sweetie ask if the child thinks he could put off the fourth for a few days so we could join him. there is a scream from the other end of the phone. the sweetie has to hold the phone away from his ear and i can hear the screaming from across the room. the child will postpone the fourth of july.

i miss a call from the child while we are in maine. the message says he is hoping to do facetime on the phones so we can go with him to choose fireworks. instead, he sends a picture of himself with some sort of monstrous paper-wrapped cardboard tube. so we will know he's getting the right stuff.  his mother says he has started a countdown, how many days until we will be where he is. how many days until the sky goes sparkly.

when the smaller child hears we're coming, he puts his own spin on things. this is the child who speaks to the dog endlessly on the phone. dog language. child language. but his take on the visit is that the dog will be arriving on his own. by subway. to visit him. when he talks to me on the phone, a rarity since i am not the dog and therefore not who he really wants to talk to, he tells me he is waiting. he tells me about all the toys in his basement he is ready to share with the dog. he tells me, with great pride, about his yard, about all the grass there for the dog to pee on. he tells the dog. he tells me. he tells me to tell the dog.

my own mother starts her phone conversation asking me what her son in law will be wanting to eat. this is important. she will make anything he puts on the list. and because he lives a quasi-gluten-free lifestyle, he starts with bread pudding. because my own dear mother makes better bread pudding than anyone around. he says pineapple upside down cake. he says carrot cake. this is not just because he does not have these things at home. my mother's versions of them have ruined people for eating lesser attempts. not just my lesser attempts. the attempts of real cooks. he asks for meatloaf. my mother does not even pretend to feign interest in what i might like to eat. they will all be happy enough to see me but this is because i bring what they really want. the sweetie. the dog. the general wildness.

and so on a very hot evening some time well after the fourth, we eat a good meal where there is meat loaf on a platter and creamed peas with new potatoes in a bowl and where there is a gluten-free (and unsurprisingly delicious) pineapple upside down cake. and then we stand on the middle sister's deck, wrapped in bug spray and oppressive air, waiting. the sweetie straps the rocket to the styrofoam plane. he leans his tall self out over the corner of the deck. the middle sister lights the fuse. the smaller nephew says the single word fly. and it does. the plane slips smoothly out of the sweetie's hand trailing sparks and glides out over the yard. it hesitates just a second.  it shoots up, arcs over and turns into a shower of stars.

possum of destruction

the word possum refers to a beady-eyed, thumb-footed, stink-flavored american marsupial with no clear redeeming value. for much of my childhood i did not know that an o existed in the beginning of the word and to this day i do not know a soul who pronounces it. that o is a waste of time, just like the animal it's stuck on.

and now, our drama unfolds:

pretty new fig leaves emerging above poop-smothered ones

i head to the kitchen window because beyond it is the farm. two feet square on a third floor fire escape. the tomato plants are grumbling so excessively about water that even though the sky is threatening golf ball sized rain, i fill up my grandma's iced tea glass and head over to give them a sip. they remain wilted, ungrateful. the basil sits below the two plants, giggling that good smell out onto everything. the feathery carrots are ready to thin. the beets are still unsure about being so high up. they slide out one leaf at a time, tentative and small. the cucumbers are reaching out to the fire escape rails, plotting to take over everything with those still not yet tendrils. and my fig tree, lovely thing given to me by a favorite waitress at our favorite diner, has been putting on serious, lush leaves after a near death experience involving pigeon poop. the fig tree is the fanciest thing on the farm, the thing i love most.

stump of sorrow

i lean out to check those new ruffly leaves. i scan the farm but cannot find the tree anywhere. it is not likely the tree moved by itself and there have been no winds to speak of, nothing that would take one tree in the middle of a whole farm. there is an uncomfortable rustling among the other plants. the sullen sky squeezes two more shades of dark into itself before my eyes finally fall on the pot. and the stump. a four inch fig tree stump sticking out of the pot, sheared off clean at the skyward end. there is a frantic moment where i look around for the top of the severed tree, thinking foolishly that if i find it i can put everything back together with duct tape. or gaffer's tape. it comes in many pretty colors including, i am sure, trunk and leaf.

i cannot at first imagine what sort of monster would assassinate a baby fig tree like this but then i recall that fourth floor fire escape raccoon last month and also the rabid raccoon i saw in the park a week later. i begin to think hateful things about raccoons. i also begin to worry if somehow my plants are contaminated with rabies and how rabies might manifest itself in plants (hint: it does not. they are plants). i am imagining all sorts of ways i might meet up with and destroy this frothy mouthed murderer with the support of what i expect will be my now sentient and justice-seeking garden, when the part of my brain that actually does the real thinking taps me on the shoulder and starts listing off reasons a rabid raccoon wouldn't do this. mostly, it tells me, raccoons don't eat trees. and a rabid raccoon wouldn't be able to get all the way up to the farm. rabies makes legs into the enemy.

so i call my mother to lament the loss of my fig tree and she suggests a possum because of its hideous gnawing skills. there is some evidence to suggest she may have had past negative experiences with possums. she is very careful to mention, more than twice, that i should not approach said creature if i see it. i think a bit of how terrifying my childhood must have been for her if, more than thirty years after the fact, she still feels compelled to warn me not to touch a gnaw-mouthed slab of stink and hatefulness. and although i am careful to reassure her that i will in no manner engage any possum i might find poaching plants on my fire escape, i am already envisioning myself, looking strikingly like teddy roosevelt, engaged in a battle to the death with this freakish trainwreck of nature, north america's only marsupial, who has no business living the way he does, walking around on sidewalks, gnawing off people's fig trees when it's pretty obvious to anyone around that those fig trees are the centerpieces of people's fire escape farms.

brave sweet potato, a friend to fig trees

i am pretty sure vengeance killing of possums is not yet legal in brooklyn and i am absolutely sure that if i attempt to stage the beast's death to look like i acted in self defense i would somehow end up knocking myself off the fire escape, securing my own hideous end. so i am forced to wait, steeping in my sorrow. the sweetie and i go away for two weeks. we visit both families. i water the farm plenty before we leave even though i know what i am doing will have amounted to very little when we return. i expect nothing.

valiant possum-defying fig tree

when we get back i see the indoor lavender is withered as are the pothos scattered around the apartment. i hesitate to look out the window. it is a scene of ugliness. the cucumbers have given up their fight entirely, tiny tendrils still clutching at scorching fire escape rails. tomatoes and basil are brittle sticks, brown and ugly, smelling like nothing but a dusty car heater. there is a lone beet plant, a late growing shoot, peering up at the afternoon sky. and a fat pot of carrots is wilty but still entirely alive. i reach out to grab one of the two leafing sweet potato plants i set into the dirt of my dead fig tree. this is when i see it. a tight cluster of ruffly, dark green leaves. and they look unbearably like those little clusters of leaves on the broken trees in my own homeland. i am glad now i was too heartsick to toss out that stump of fig tree before we left but the ugliness is not over. there will be more to face. pigeons. possums. boll weevils. fire breathing robots. there is work to do.

postcards from maine

i'm trying out a new format. it's a little bit reckless. i might have got carried away.

i took about five million photos of sunsets. i am working on the theory that i can store them up for use when i am back in brooklyn and cannot see the sky unless i am standing directly in the middle of the street.

the sunsets here were relentless. we got one every single day!

sunday evening. diving platform.

monday, maybe. lance and stephanie in the kayak.

this sunset had a few islands thrown in for atmosphere.

wednesday's sunset from the window seat in our bedroom.
 

 we woke up one morning to three luna moths on the screens of the porch. they didn't say much, but they were pretty, anyway. they have those crazy yellow feather antennae that look like they would be very soft. i wouldn't mind having a room full of luna moths to walk through when i'm feeling mean.

fishing, golden oreos optional

there was some fishing from the little dock by the house. as i understand it a very old, wise, bearded fish lives under the dock. even though he swims with a cane because of tailfin arthritis, he is still the most powerful fish in the lake. the sweetie caught him once, i think, but after a pleasant chat, the two parted ways on friendly terms. one of those sunsets accidentally got into this photo. i think i mentioned they are relentless things. and they're everywhere!

what began as a quiet attempt to overcome a fear of whirlpools, lightning and lake monsters evolved into an epic battle of good over evil. or something. kayak wars: the rise of the kayak! except in the case of the sweetie, whose kayak, according to his brother, sailed along like the monitor. look it up. you'll get it when you see the pictures. it's an ironclad.

the monitor is the ship on your left.

maine is what we in missouri would call a dry state in terms of fireworks. although the sweetie and i are adorers of massive explosions, we figured the loons would be happier with a smaller scale celebration and so we decided to obey the law for a change. besides, we had a promise from a ten year old of a late fireworks extravaganza waiting for us in missouri. we played it extra safe by standing on the dock, surrounded by lake. bring on the sparklers!

here there be pirates, matey. or something

we spent an afternoon in bar harbor. there are plenty of fancy ships and tons of touristy shops. there are lobster versions of almost everything and you can get blueberries in syrup form, chocolate form, lotion form and soap form. a good shopper will find the moose helmets. there are three styles to fit all your moose needs, both nosed and nose-free.

 here you can see the mysterious ice cream lobster in its natural habitat- a sidewalk in maine. i think that may be the ice cream lobster's personal bodyguard there beside him on the right. you can't be too careful when you're an ice cream lobster, i suppose.

can you see it? it's that red light between lance and stephanie.

we are, all of us, a lighthouse adoring people. we figured the only lighthouse on mount desert island ought to be something awe inspiring. turns out it's a stubby little dachshund-ish thing painted white and stuck onto the low side of a bluff. being taller than the light is not really a challenge. secretly, though, i thought it was cute enough to hug. but i didn't. maine needs some serious lighthouse action because of its rocky coastline. in brooklyn, you could steer a ship right up onto the smooth beach. your only danger might be one of those syringe fish or condom fish that prowl the shallows around coney island. in maine, giant stabby rocks lurk just below the surface, waiting to gut any ship foolish enough to wander by. so thank you tiny lighthouse. you are a hero to all. 

sweetie on the rocks

one of grandma's sofa paintings

even though the coast isn't what most folks would call swimmable, it's pretty impressive in its rocky wildness. i am already missing it and am plotting how to get back there again for one of the next hot seasons. because in the summer, in maine, the 83 degree afternoon we had was described on every news channel in great detail as a dangerous heat wave.

our last evening together we went out to eat lobster at a local place. some of us had lobster and some of us didn't, but there was pie and cake and creme brulee at the end. and we all had what we had together. we sat out on a big porch with a view of a pretty river. afterward, a stranger offered to take a family photo. we took quite a few, but i think this one captures us best.