how to make a fish hat

it should be noted that members of this family are notorious for telling what presents are well in advance of a holiday, forgetting where presents have been squirreled away and using questionable shipping methods. i am guilty of all of these holiday offenses and more. just not in this story.

make another hat first. a small gray and red striped hat with matching mittens in a soft yarn called royal alpaca. while knitting the hat think about the fact that the four year old child you are making it for will love knowing the yarn for his hat is made from alpacas who wear crowns. plan to mention this when you talk to him.

send his mother (your sister) photos of the hat and mittens. send the actual hat and mittens to your own mother to put under the christmas tree because you are not able to be with your family at christmas. be happy that this small child, your nephew, will at least have a soft hat and soft mittens you made just for him.

notice in the days following christmas that the photos your sister sends you show your nephew wearing a raggedy hat and mismatched mittens when he goes outside. worry that you made his new hat and mittens too small but nobody wants to tell you. get a text from your sister saying the child is running loose like a wild, hatless beast because his aunt did not make him anything. insist that you did make a hat. and mittens. direct her attention to the photos you sent her well before christmas showing said hat and said mittens. listen to her accuse her parents, your parents, of neglectfulness. of holiday misdeeds. vow revenge.

call your parents. relate your confusion. listen to both parents insist the hat and mittens were wrapped, opened and even, at one point, tried on by the small child. vow to get to the bottom of this. determine to open up a post office box in the child's name so he can get his own packages directly. attempt, from halfway across the country, to coerce your family into telling you what they've done with the innocent hat and mittens. consider hiring a hostage negotiator. look into psychics. hear dreadful stories concocted by various family members about the likely demise of the knitted things. generally these stories end with "and she probably threw them in the trash with the wrapping paper" or "and she probably never wrapped them to begin with". listen to denials and accusations. consider whether your mother and baby sister might be in some sinister cult that despises wool. vow to overcome.

call the middle sister and plead with her to "take care of things". she is known for a certain ability to persuade and you briefly imagine the middle sister in a dark room with a single light bulb, glaring at your mother and baby sister, both sitting uncomfortably in chairs made of, alternately, very itchy wool and very sweaty, tacky synthetic yarn, confessing to their involvement in various doll deaths, clothing disappearances and neglected phone messages. hope the middle sister will get the truth out of them.

give up on the surfacing of the hat. look on hat-related knitting sites for a new pattern because you are too sad to create your own. find a fish pattern you jokingly send the baby sister. rejoice when she asks if the pattern is too difficult because the small child wants a fish hat. realize that a fish hat will probably allow the small child to more easily communicate with the new fish living in his house in a softly glowing tank. 

call to thank your various family members for losing the original hat and allowing you the opportunity to make a fish hat. try to sound snarky so they will know they are still in a little bit of trouble, but not too much.

buy some yarn at your neighborhood yarn store. show the guy at the yarn store the pattern and watch him swoon. begin knitting in your mind on the short walk home. begin knitting for real seconds after you get in the door. shove the dogs off your lap. shove the dogs off the yarn.  explain to the dogs that balls of yarn are not dog toys. take soggy yarn out of dog mouth. take soggy yarn out of dog mouth again. explain to dogs that gnawing on bamboo knitting needles is hateful. adjust your knitting so that you are able to knit with a 35 pound spider-legged dog curled up on your lap and a 15 pound stub-legged dog draped around your shoulders. knit knit knit.

take your knitting on the train. show it off to strangers. take it to work. show it off to co-workers. make a fish out of yarn. look at it. enjoy the fact that it looks like a fish. knit some fins onto the fish. flap them. look for googly eyes. feel indignant when you go into stores asking for googly eyes and are met with dead-eyed art-store employees who shrug and point to a wall with tiny googly eyes, far too small for a giant fish hat. find eyes in another local yarn store. rejoice. feel indignant again when the yarn store man at this yarn store is not nearly as excited as you are about finding giant sew-on googly eyes. sew on eyes. look at the hat. it looks even more like a fish. realize it is the first knitting project you've made in more than ten years that actually looks like what you imagined before you started.

text entire family. send photos of hat. implore someone in your family to take responsibility for delivering the hat safely to the child. hope your parents and the child's mother will not take you up on your request. rejoice when your middle sister assures you she will take care of things. put the hat in the mail. hope for the best. start another fish hat. just in case.

brooklyn

once again i realize i do not deserve the gifts these children bring every day but i take them anyway and keep them because i am selfish. and because i know a good story when i hear it.

it is one week since the storm and it is the first day the students are back at school. we are not sure what will happen, how they will be or what they will need. we are not even sure where some of our children are. i am, to be honest, a little nervous. i do not handle dramatic displays of unhappiness well and i am not a great comfort, especially to teenagers. i suppose that, in general, nobody is a great comfort to teenagers. they are inconsolable for years.

but because we are english teachers and because writing is how we believe the world works things out, my co-teachers and i start things off by having the kids open their journals. they write. they put down their stories. i tell them that is the easy part. they've been telling their stories all week without thinking about them. now is the time to record them for real. to save what they know. and they do.

but the second part is tougher. we ask them to think about their city, a city everyone in the world knows. they are not living in the city they were living in a week ago. it is a whole new place, for bad and for good. and we ask them how it is new, what they see for their city down the road. we ask how things have changed and what that means.

they write silently for a while. fifteen minutes. twenty. some of them finish and sit still. i look at them, see not quite a page written and say, very plainly, more than that happened. you have more to say. and they know it. they pick up their pens and keep writing.

we ask them, maybe twenty five minutes in, if they want to talk. they have written so they can organize their thoughts and we have found that this helps them speak more clearly. they are more confident when they have their own words and ideas sitting there in front of them.

they are ninth and tenth and eleventh graders. children who want to believe that they are adults. they speak in low voices, not shy, just softer than usual. they all want to talk at once but we remind them that they are more generous than that, that everyone's story will be heard.

one boy describes cars floating away. he watched them from his window. this is new for them. they are children of the city and have seen, at fifteen or so, more than many adults will ever see but this is the first time any of them have ever seen cars floating down the street. the way they speak is beautiful. they describe what they have seen so simply, with muted emotion. they are not in love with the violence of the storm or the chaos of what has come after. they are not what you think teenagers are.

a child explains that he's staying with family a while. there's not electricity, no heat, no water in his own home. he has been there five days now and it is difficult being in a place that is not his own, even if it is with family. he says it will be three weeks before he is back where he belongs and although i suspect it will be longer, i know enough to keep my mouth shut. he is honest. it is hard, he says. he doesn't want to spend three weeks this way. it is what he says next, though, that makes the room quiet. he has been thinking, he says. he keeps thinking there are people in the world who live like this all the time. it's a few weeks for me, but for some people, it's their whole lives, it's how they live. he knows where he is in the world and although it's not where he would like to be, he knows how much he has.


one girl describes her apartment, where all the bedrooms were underwater. her family has lost everything in those rooms. i don't know if you know about teenagers, but losing the contents of a teenager's bedroom is akin to losing one's soul. the bedroom of a teenager, terrifying to any outsider, is a holy place to them, a sanctuary. she describes the situation with a worn out voice, explaining that she, too, is staying with family. it's okay, she says. they're just things. they don't matter. she does not say this because she is a child of wealthy parents who will simply replace everything. she says it because it is something she knows to be true.

the eleventh graders do not want to talk so much about what they have seen. they want to talk about what comes next. they talk about the gas lines, the looting, the fires. they talk about the opportunities for local hardware stores and construction workers. they ask more questions. they want to know why the cyclone didn't blow down. it is so old and rickety and wooden, they say, but it is clear they are proud of their ancient roller coaster for not plunging into the sea the way roller coasters in other states seem to have done. they want to know about sharks in basements. they want to know how long. i tell them about my own town, how they are still rebuilding more than a year later. i tell them things will not be fixed quickly but they should work to fix things anyway. they do not flinch.

they do not understand why adults might rebuild where the ocean came up and destroyed but they do understand that this ugliness they have been through will give them new choices. rebuilding is not just about structures. it is about how they decide to look at what is before them. tomorrow they will be home again. it is election day and they will be, many of them, staring out of someone else's windows, watching someone else's t.v., sleeping on floors. with each class, i do not want to let them go out the door and back into whatever they will go to. i want to keep them where they are, safe for a few hours, thinking about how to move forward. but the bell rings, no matter what i want. so i tell them what i can. be safe tomorrow, i say. go out and do something useful. a week ago i wouldn't have been sure, but today i am. they will do exactly what i have asked. not because i have asked them. they will do it because they have seen, firsthand, that they are needed.

gift

things you might need if you know a twelve year old boy:
http://www.adoptashark.com/
http://www.superherosupplies.com/
http://www.howtomakevampireteeth.com/

you haven't met my doppelganger, have you? says the original supernatural nephew and i tell him maybe i have. the nephew turned twelve two days ago and we have been talking back and forth on the phone about a boy i know, another twelve year old, who is not at all happy with the way things are going all around him. he is a boy i met a few weeks back at school when he was being suspended for a variety of offenses, some of which involved saying very ugly things to quite a few people. his first words to me were leave me alone!

i spend my days with high school kids. squirrels, yes, but older squirrels. fourteen, fifteen. even a nineteen year old or two. i do not come across so many twelve year old boys in my day. i don't know what to do for such strange creatures, so i go to the source. i call the nephew. and if you know him, you already know what the conversations are like. if you don't, you probably ought to be sure you're sitting down before you read on. the original supernatural nephew is exactly that. he is not in any way regular. and that is what makes him worth knowing.

he listens to what i have to say, to my worries. he takes the call seriously. he is, after all, the only expert on twelve year old boys i know. he makes suggestions, rolls them over out loud, searching for the best ones. this is a good one. this one might be too babyish. this one will work with any twelve year old boy who feels angry or frustrated. it turns out he and the boy at my school share a love of sharks and vampires and he has plenty of suggestions about how to help the kid understand we have the same goals using what he loves as an ice breaker. and this is what i expect. i have known him for twelve years, after all. he is a smart kid to begin with and i know his capacity for kindness is endless. this is no surprise.

but the next time we talk, he asks about the boy. it turns out things have improved and i say so. but the nephew is smart enough to know the struggles of a twelve year old boy are endless and there will be good times and then more bad times and that when you are twelve, it takes work for the good times to win out. he offers more suggestions, asks about decisions adults have made on the child's behalf. he knows the world is larger than just his own choices.

on his birthday i call the nephew to wish him well and to tell him his gift, difficult to wrangle, will arrive a few days later. he listens patiently, then asks about the boy. and they are alike here, too. they are both acutely aware of the suffering of others and both want very much to fix any little bit of that they can. they are dogged in their pursuit of making things right and fair. the nephew knows what he has. not just the good parents and safe home and the piles of books and abundance of toys. he knows that he has an impressive mind and a committed heart and he knows those things together require a different sort of responsibility. he knows some people will not know to work as hard as he will to make the world better and this may sometimes frustrate him but it will not change his course because he is always looking around him and he is always thinking about what is out there.

so today when he calls to tell me he got his present we chat about it a little and he asks about the boy. i don't see the boy very often but i know things are less awful for him and i know things are still changing so that is what i say. the nephew offers things. his own things. actual objects that are his that he thinks might be of comfort to this child he does not know at all. because he knows enough about how this boy feels to want the child to have things that helped when he felt the way twelve year old boys sometimes do.

and i am so glad i called to ask his advice. not just because it has been helpful. not just because it shows me that he is thoughtful and self-aware, qualities rare among twelve year old boys. i am glad because it is a wonderful gift to hear his mind work on a problem, weigh options, offer suggestions. it is a gift to hear him think.

october

fall in the catskills

pakatakan farm market

pepacton reservoir

pepacton

cemetery

stone wall at pepacton

 

mill brook at pepacton

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return of dog candy

our good dog guthrie has spent most of the last three years dogless.

he has not complained about this one bit.

still, we've wanted him to have a brother to love and play with.

instead, we ended up with scout, as willful and nosy as her namesake. 

she is part vampire, part crocodile and part pogo stick.

guthrie waits patiently for us to send her back.

but she follows him around.

she bites him when he ignores her.

and so he tries to teach her a little about how to be a good dog,

how to catch a ball in midair,

how to be a clown.

but when they wear themselves out she scoots up next to him.

guthrie is not at all sure this is acceptable.

but i think she is beginning to grow on him.

fish on

because the original nephew's new home is just down the street from a creek and a pond, there is nothing to do but take the worms out of the fridge, coat ourselves in bug spray and take the whole family down to the water.

the sweetie, the original nephew's father and i have scouted out the area for fishability already, finding a shallow creek full of little fingernail fish and a drought-stricken pond the locals insist is full of catfish no matter what it looks like and it looks for the most part like mud. while the sweetie wisely stays on clearly marked park territory, the brother-in-law and i roam into uncharted territory and find the trail neighbors have promised goes right from the creek on up to the house. we manage to wade ourselves into a pile of chiggers somewhere on the trail and pay dearly for our recklessness. if you don't know what these beasts are, consider invisible frankenstein creatures cobbled together from ticks, fleas and mosquitoes with a little chicken pox sprinkled in. they are larval parasites. they live in colonies. if you find one, you've found hundreds. but this is a story for another day.

it is at least 95 degrees when we head out, an hour or so before dark, the parents, all three sisters, all three husbands, two little boys. the women in my family are, none of us, fisherfolk, but we are willing to sit ourselves at the edges of water and smell the evening air and watch the bats and lightning bugs while other folks try to trick fish.

there are varying levels of success in terms of the fishing, including two fat catfish caught one after the other late in the evening, the first by the sweetie and the second a minute later by the original nephew's father.  the sky gets deeper and deeper but the heat does not give in to darkness. nobody says much that late in the evening. i have been fishing many times and have come to believe that above all else, this is what fishing is.  the sound of the cicadas and the bullfrogs. the smell of the water and what's left of the day's heat. the quietness of standing there with people you know are yours and the promise of fish.

ice cream

this is the first of several adventures in the homeland.  it is not the first one that happened, just the first one i got pinned down.

if you are not from the homeland, anderson's ice cream means nothing to you, but i will tell you now that mr. john f. kennedy, among many fancy folks, thought it was good ice cream. i spent a fine part of my ice-creamy childhood summers sitting under a photo showing dennis weaver, cone in hand, laughing with a scoop-wielding ray anderson. you can't argue with john kennedy and dennis weaver.

until well after i left the homeland, anderson's lived out on main just past the giant bass at southtown and while they offered cones of soft-serve ice cream in vanilla, chocolate or swirl, you could also find just about an fancy flavor hard-packed ice cream you could want and the folks at anderson's had the ability to pack more ice cream into a cone than anywhere else. dense, dense stuff, that ice cream.

as children, we went there most with the grandparents, people whose job it was to spoil us, people who would say yes to any hot fudge sundae request. ray himself, son of the original owners, would hand over a cone, smiling, paper hatted. he always seemed thrilled to be offering up something that made people happy.

in college, we went there in clusters of ten or so when we were feeling unmoored, lost in our attempts at adult life. we'd wrap ourselves in the familiar- the huge glass windows under carnival neon lights, ray's white hat and apron, tubs of ice cream that never wavered- the same chocolatey chocolate and pistochioey pistachio my senior year of college as they were the last summer days before i went to kindergarten.

when anderson's closed more than ten years ago, i felt a tug, a little emptiness, even though i hadn't had that ice cream in a very long time. many of the anchors of my memory disappeared while i was gone away and i did not always notice at first. we are like that, all of us. raring to grow up and get out of a place, but expecting what we leave behind to stay still for us, waiting, like a photograph. we are indignant when our old world moves on, grows up, too.

so when the sisters begin sending photos of their children with ice cream and they put the word anderson's there with the photo, i am suspicious. when they say someone has taken ray's recipes and his old soda fountain and machines and has started making ice cream out at the candy house, i nearly faint. because when i say candy house the image in your head of a gingerbready little place out past town where you know elves are living and working is exactly what i mean. the place has been full of chocolate in all forms forever and huge jars of hard candy- rootbeer sticks and cherry sticks and wax tubes full of sugary colored liquid. imagine the source of all your childhood chocolate and the source of all your childhood ice cream moving in together. that's right. the sisters promise we will all go.

we walk in through the front door of the candy house in evening, when the cicadas are at their best, and the smell inside, indescribable but immediately familiar, covers everything. there are smells of chocolate and caramel and nuts and raisins and sassafras and smells i have always known but still cannot name. the smell is of candy you can't buy at a grocery store or at the mall. we walk through a side door and i am standing in a place i would have given anything to get to in my childhood. the ice cream lives in the room that used to be part of the chocolate making, glassed in for viewing. the glass, once smudged with the noseprints of thousands of children, is gone, and an ice cream counter stands where the chocolate making apparatus once waited for us. and i stand there, too, with my sisters and their husbands and the sweetie. we are right there in the chocolate factory. there, behind the low glass case, sit neat rows of ice cream tubs, chocolate, coconut, a glowing blueberry lemon, butter pecan, bubble gum.

the sisters have been telling me this ice cream is the same as they remember. they remind me one of the new owners worked at the original anderson's, that he uses the old equipment and the same ingredients the andersons fed to our grandparents, but i know how people are. they showboat. they can't help it. they will take something simple and lovely and will add to it to make it sassier. they will diminish it. so i walk the length of the counter. i look at every flavor and take my time but i know, even though i look twice, then a third time, slowly, at every tub, what i will get.

and when the man behind the counter asks me, smiling like ray, what i would like, i say i would like a coke float with vanilla ice cream. because there is little else in the world so plain in construction that is also so perfect. he hands me the tall cup heavy with ice cream and the coke foam at the top continues growing in a sparkling column after i take it so that i have to slurp the foam and slurp it again to keep it from overflowing. this is how things should be.

i scoop up some of the vanilla ice cream and the coke has already begun to turn it to crystals. we walk out into the hundred degree evening, three sisters, three husbands, and we sit at a round table filling ourselves with ice cream. and the sisters are right. it is the same ice cream. and maybe i am in college sitting on the curb at the south end of town with a pistachio cone and a skinny bunch of longhaired boys and black fingernailed girls on our way to a pool hall. mabye i am ten, holding the hand of my grandpa while he says the precious words hot fudge sundae and ray nods. maybe i am small enough to be sitting on my dad's shoulders wearing seersucker pajamas my grandma made, the only clothes wearable on such a hot night. it is all the same. i know where i am. i am home.