robot

the smaller supernatural nephew calls to talk to guthrie. these conversations are elaborate, filled with squeals and raspy breathing and small howls. the child translates what the dog says for his parents. he knows they don't know a thing about dog language. this is his third language and he slides around in it easily, hears it like it is his own.

initially, the conversation is about how the dog will visit the child and how they will go to a restaurant. i do not know how often the child has seen lady and the tramp or whether he has seen it at all, but his fascination with dogs eating in restaurants, especially restaurants serving pasta, is keen. he and the dog chat back and forth and then there's a gasp and a pause and his voice, small on the far end of the line, yells up to his parents about how the dog says the sweetie and i are getting the child a robot for his birthday. that dog is pretty smart, i tell you. i hadn't even realized we were going to get the kid a robot but dogs rarely lie and this one never does and he very clearly says we're getting a robot for the child.

so i have begun searching the interweb for robots. real ones. nonplastic ones. metal ones with sparks shooting out from behind eyes or smoke billowing from mouths. i know right off a real live vintage 1950s robot is a no no. those things are out of our price range but are also tipped with rust and razor edged. they are talcum spewing fire hazards. but reproductions of the very same beasts are brand new with smooth edges and they still have sparks shooting from their eyes. glorious. and every one of them has this big, fat warning sign right next to the ordering button: caution. collector's item only! not for small children!

now, how small is a small child? this one on the other end of the phone line will be three. he is big enough to know not to swallow a tiny loose part. he is big enough to know to find an adult if the sparking eyes should catch the drapes on fire. and if the thing should stomp itself right out a window, he would know to run downstairs to rescue it rather than to follow it out from the upper floor. but he does talk to a small dog on the phone. and they do talk an awful lot about pasta.

still, a boy cannot survive childhood without either a robot or a dog. this boy's dog is halfway across the country so i suppose he needs a robot nearby. and so far i've found at least one robot for children over four. you have to remember he is supernatural. three is how old he is on the outside. his alter ego is three. i'm sure that on the inside, the real part of him with the telepathy and the flying powers, he's at least four. maybe even five.

sojourn

the original supernatural nephew is planning to visit us. his mother calls to warn us, to prepare us, to let us know there's nothing more she can do. we have been waiting. since he was very small we have been waiting for him to be old enough to visit on his own. we didn't know him so well his first few years because of the great distance between him in missouri and us in brooklyn but we suspected he was our kind of people. we knew for sure the day of our own wedding, the sweetie's and mine. we wanted the child to be our ring bearer and we wanted him in overalls. his mother, not known for giving in when she's not inclined to, warned us of his unpredictability and impishness. she told us we better not put our real rings on any pillow we planned to give to her child. she shook her finger and narrowed her eyes. we tied the sweetie's giant gold band onto the pillow with my grandma's first ring from my grandpa and we handed it over to the grinning child.

a brother, two sisters and a friend pranced down the dirt-covered cement aisle between picnic tables in suspenders and newsboy hats and summer dresses. the child marched solemnly behind them to a banjo and a couple guitars. we stood behind him, watching him carry the pillow like a piece of glass. and when he tossed the pillow high in the air and watched it come sailing back down onto the dirty cement, we knew. one of us.

and he is ten now, able to start making some of his own decisions, able to negotiate with a clear idea what he wants and what others want. he has overcome every obstacle to this trip his parents have been able to toss out to him. he has come up with this:

1. his parents will drive out to our house in arkville and will drop him off. if things go smoothly, they'll keep the car running in the driveway and won't even get out of it. he will leap from the back seat of the car with his suitcase (an old fashioned plaid number, even if it isn't really) in his hand and will wave furiously at them and will disappear into the cool of the house where there will be lemonade and cantaloupe or maybe cookies and milk to revive him after his long trip.

2. his parents will spend the next three days elsewhere. the child is not concerned with this part. it is not his business as long as his parents are coming back in three days but not before. i am working on finding charming inns and vacation cottages in the northeast where his parents can while away their nonexistence in comfort. his parents will return after the three day period to visit a few days more with us.

3. during his parents' exile, the child will go fishing. we will take him out on the boat because he is skinny enough to displace only about as much water as the live well we sometimes carry with us. we will sit, the three of us, with poles and line that will get tangled at least once. he will want to row. he will want to pull up the anchor. he will love that some of our bass have fiery red eyes.

4. we will go hiking. he remembers going hiking with us a few years ago at kelly hollow. there was more moss than you can shake a stick at. and you can shake a stick at a pretty fair amount of moss. there were trilliums in bloom and the snowmelt had fattened up all the waterways and waterfalls. there are few things more lush than a catskills forest in spring. if it is warm enough to swim, we will take him on a hike we've been saving. three waterfalls. one swimming hole. endless blackberries.

5. he wants to go camping, although his mother says he won't even sleep on the floor in his house. we have a hiking tent and a backyard tent. we will be ready for any version of camping he wants, including putting a sheet over the bunkbeds and lighting the insides with flashlights. we are not above importing crickets and fireflies into the bedroom campsite if that is necessary.

if the carnival happens to be in town we will go. we will eat deep fried vegetables and funnel cakes and the child and the sweetie will ride rides until they think they might throw up. if there is banjo music at the farm market we will listen to it while we buy cheese. but mostly in the evenings we will sit on the porch with glasses of iced tea or lemonade, with a book or two to read until it gets too dark. we will sip our drinks and listen to the next door goats and watch the sun move so slowly we will consider that it may never even get to be completely dark. and when it does start getting dark, when the pinks and oranges are gone from the sky and all that's left is every shade of blue ever seen, we'll look for bats. i know this child. i know what is in him and i know his voice will get all whispery when he sees a bat and he will point to where it was and we, the sweetie and i, will be whispering, too, about a bat we've seen or about how there just aren't enough bats out yet but the fireflies are mighty fine. we will all whisper, not because of the bats or the fireflies or the goats, but because whispering draws everything just a little closer to you.

on the way home

it started with the guy who was fighting with his tattoo. it was a newish looking tattoo, glossy and puffy and at first i figured he was on the phone, on some sort of earpiece, telling someone about it. he was staring at it, the design on his upper arm. the right one. but there was no earpiece and he was not chatting. his teeth were gritted and his brow was furrowed. his voice was low and angry. he had the tattooed arm in the grip of his left hand and was talking to the ink the way i have seen some parents in grocery stores grip their children by spindly arms so the can hiss low in their ears. when he began to rock back and forth violently, shaking his head, i figured there would probably be a quieter train coming along soon and i could probably hop off the one with this small internal fight and catch it. his face reddened and purpled and his voice grew angrier and louder and more frantic. he'd grip the arm around the tattoo, stare at it, growl and spit words, the only intelligible ones being words i'd rather not put down here. as i stood up to get off the train, he slammed his head back against the wall of the train behind him, exasperated. he rolled his eyes as though his tattoo just would not listen to reason.

so today i am hoping for a little calm on the going home train. nothing fancy. just nobody yelling and nobody covered in their own urine and nobody in the throes of any sort of withdrawal. after all, it's a school day. i make it to my destination without any hideousness and when the doors open an eighty year old lady and i, both trying to leave the train, are nearly trampled by a horde of teenagers leaving school. now, teenagers move in herds because it makes them feel safe and because, in all fairness, it's fun to have a constant audience that sees your every move as cool. because i spend my days in the classrooms and halls of a high school i am used to having to thread my way through the morass that is a clump of teens. but one girl shoves her way onto the train and puts her hand flat on the head of the eighty year old woman in front of me and slams the woman out of the train.

the woman stumbles and staggers but because of the crush of bodies is unable to fall down. she manages to get herself onto the platform in one piece. and what do i do? well, in my infinite wisdom, armed with the knowledge that i have teacher voice and teacher presence, i turn back into the car and say- are you ready for what i said in my best teacher voice? i say you can't do things like that! that's right. even my own students who know i am a nerd would be disappointed in the lack of power behind that. there is no swearing and no threatening and no sass. in addition, it does not occur to me that some teenagers might just be impervious to teacher voice. or teacher presence. it does not occur to me that there might be a sixteen year old girl out there so bored or angry or ugly in her own mind that she could disregard my elegantly phrased response to her behavior.

but she does. in fact, she goes beyond disregarding it. she reaches her hand up and shoves me hard, back out of the train. and i am very lucky the train doors close immediately and the train rolls away because i am my father's child and have a mouth that is sometimes bigger than i am. which means i stand there on the platform yelling things the sixteen year old girl who pushed me would have responded to with unkindness had she heard any of them. i'm not proud of this. i'm just trying to tell it like it happened.

you're thinking things did not end well if i got shoved off a train and my sassy, more gloriously phrased retort never reached the ears of my foe. but when that old woman went flying off the train i was the only one who made a sound. the twenty teenagers who got on the train with little miss angry stood there, open mouthed, wide eyed. and when she pushed me, the entire train was silent. and you may see silence as complicity, as disinterest. but being a teenager is tough. tougher than anything else we ever do. and, like i said, they move en masse, with a single brain sometimes. and she heard them all silent, unwilling to participate in her ugliness. she heard them turn their backs on what she did. they told her who she was better than i ever could.

unsolicited

1. the small boy wields the shopping cart like a weapon, swerving through the wide dairy aisle with no regard for those in need of butter or yogurt. "that child," i say to the sweetie, "is a monster." the sweetie pushes our own cart over to the milk and the small boy heads straight for us, a shark, a missile. but he stops short of killing us and says loudly, "what team are you voting for?" his face is radiant and seems to float there just above his fingers clutching the cart handle. this is superbowl sunday and i know our choices. steel workers or meat packers. working class icons. there is no wrong answer.

2. the two boys stand in the back stairwell of the bus. the talker is small, small enough he could walk under my outstretched arm. the quiet one, the listener, is taller and is graced with a halo of curls that puts him a foot taller than his companion. the smaller boy is all hypotheticals. "imagine your teacher forgets tomorrow that she gave you detention today." he looks up expectantly at his friend. the unasked question hangs in the air. would you go? the taller child examines his shoes then stares out the window. he is not thinking about whether he would go or not. he is thinking about how best to say what he will say. "i'd go anyway," he says. his words roll out like he is tasting them. "my teacher might remember later. a week or two later she's remember. i'd feel guilty."

snowman

i am on the phone with my father because i have received several phone messages throughout the day reporting on his dangerous and bad behavior. now, he is no stranger to dangerous and bad behavior but his loving children have been trying, as he nears that venerable age of seventy, to rein in some of his more useless and silly bad behavior. and this is what these phone calls have been about. my sister leaves messages with these words: your father and blizzard and flip-flops and shoveling and driving in this weather.

when i confront him he pretends my sister is the sort to overreact. he tells a tale of himself in a pair of insulated hip waders going out to check the bird feeder. he calls for backup in the form of my own mother who picks up the line and says, "of course he wore the waders out later. the first time out he wore flip flops". so the stories are true.

i can see the man out in the middle of a blinding snowstorm- flip flops, jeans, t shirt, cotton hoodie, windbreaker, baseball hat. when i tell him this he protests loudly, exclaiming over these "waders" he's sporting for snowy weather. when i point out that real waders are felt bottomed and are not appropriate for snow he insists that this pair is not like that at all. they're some sort of special rugged lug-soled waders or something. they're double layer rubber so they're warm, he says. when i point out that rubber conducts cold he stammers a bit and comes up with a felt lining for these things. now, i am sure about few things in this world but i know that any waders this man bought in the great state of missouri are lined with nothing but the sweat of a lazy fisherman. it is not that he doesn't know what he wore outside. it is that he thinks i don't know him well enough to know what he wore.

i spend some time singing the praises of wool hats, fleece hats, alpaca hats. hats that cover a person's ears. hats not made of plastic mesh. he insists that the cowboys didn't wear wool hats and i tell him cowboys likely died more often from earaches and colds than from gunshots. he says they wore scarves wrapped around their heads, over their hats and he is like them, a cowboy. now i know the man has a cowboy hat or two so i rearrange my original image of him. he is standing in the yard with a bag of birdseed. he is wearing white sneakers and white tube socks. he has on a cotton hoodie, dark blue in my own image of him and over that is a maroon windbreaker sort of thing i saw him wear a great deal in my childhood. it is satiny nylon. he is wearing a light brown suede cowboy hat and the hood of the hoodie is pulled up over the back brim and its front edge is resting at the front of the crown of the cowboy hat. this, of course, pulls the nape of the hoodie up through the windbreaker, pulling the windbreaker up as well. this, in turn, exposes a small bit of skin just above his belt, his lower back. the part of a human body most vulnerable to snow and blizzard conditions. if he is not careful, this is how he will leave this mortal coil.

so i do what i know to do. i threaten to call the older grandchild, a child who worries that his dear grandfather will meet an ugly and untimely end on a lawnmower at noon in early august or in an ice and snow filled february driveway. i promise my dear father i will tell the child what he has done, all of it. the flip flops. the shoveling. the testing out of four wheel drive capabilities. i say i will encourage the child to question his grandfather's loyalty, even his love. what grandfather would play so recklessly with his own life when he knows a child counts on his existence? and this man, very soon seventy, old enough to know better, old enough to behave like he's grown, does what we all do. he makes deals. makes promises. tells things he thinks might be truths if i am willing to forget he said them. he says, "i won't do it again. i learned my lesson. i really won't. i promise". and he better be right about this because i know his grandson's phone number.