fourth

the small metal square on the front of the near gate, up close to the latch, says sears. there is a similar metal square on the far gate, though less rounded as i remember, stamped with montgomery ward. the fence itself and both gates come from when your own grandparents were in their heyday, home from overseas, flush with the knowledge that conserving metals and growing their own food had led to victory. these are the gates of a country confident in its boundaries. patriotic. sure. and i know generations of children have launched bottle rockets from those very gates. i know it.

and we are here to see those we love, three of them people but plenty more animals. we are here to eat and drink together, to play music or sing or just listen to it all quietly. to laugh and talk until most everyone falls asleep, still laughing and eating, each inside our own dreams. this is a holiday. a patriotic one. one where loud people plaster everything they own with images of something once sacred, now a bumper sticker or a bikini top or a beer can logo. america. king of beers. love it or leave it. or something.

but my own parents raised me to celebrate this freedom by setting fire to the sky, streaking it with screaming explosions of light, ghosts of wars our ancestors brought us through. holding lit punk to a fuse came to me about the same time as reading, maybe even a little before. the smell of gunpowder is as familiar to my nose as the smell of a real tomato or the smell of vess red pop.


we pile into the car, the sweetie and me with the maryland folks and another missouri/new york hybrid, one we all love, one who is family the way the rest of us are family. five of us in search of food and explosives. now, if you are from new york city you get your fireworks by climbing to the roof of your own (or a friend’s) apartment building to watch the city shoot a bazillion dollars worth of pretty over the river to the tune of something sousa. or maybe you buy illegal fireworks handmade by drunks in jersey, the sort that explode when your face is right there next to the fuse, taking off an eyebrow or arm. and if you buy your fireworks in missouri you wander the vastness of an abandoned supermarket, your cart – i said your cart, my friends- rattling its one sick wheel in angry rebellion against the other three up and down aisle after glittering aisle of single pieces of explosive beauty. these are places with air conditioning, some of them, and bathrooms. because you will be drooling there for a while and they want you to be comfy. you come away from a trip to get fireworks feeling dizzy and dangerous.

so i am not quite sure what to expect when we go in search of explosives. but i can tell when we pull up to the small stand, the sort you see roadside selling honey or corn, that the sweetie’s heart is unsure. he, a desert boy, had adapted well to a missouri explosives lifestyle. the cash his mind had set aside for fireworks wouldn’t even look dented if he bought everything in the stand. it is when we all five stroll up to the counter and i see his body tense that i begin to worry. packages. all packages for the most part. i don’t want to watch so i wander off toward the place next door, toward food. he buys what he can and walks in to food with the look of a teenage girl who went out with prom dress money and returned with a t shirt.

now, here’s the thing. fireworks are fireworks. i know there are differences and some, say a monkey drive or a roman candle, are more captivating than others. but the truth is setting that smoking punk to the end of a fuse, hearing the sparking just as you see the bubbling of light, is the same thrill no matter what is at the other end of the fuse. and i have always known that, which is why my own tendencies are toward bottle rockets. hundreds of tiny moments of electrified air and skin and breath.

the grill is blazing and people begin to arrive. the adults eat and drink but the small children, completely uninterested in the stillness of grown folks, rip of their clothes and run naked through a sprinkler, squealing their tiny selves into delirium. we sit in lawn chairs waiting for the sun to stop. it does not get dark for a long time. there are bats and a few fireflies and we walk over to the road with lighters and explosives and cameras and each other. most of the things we have are fountains. but these are not the fountains of our childhoods. these are celebrations of fire. these are beautiful. we light them one after another and they scream and burn and hiss and explode. we are victorious. we have lit the dark sky and everything is wrapped in
smoke and smelling of gunpowder.

the sweetie has heard stories of a sparkler bomb and although we are clearly underbudget on sparklers, we decide to make something with them anyway. there is a flurry of activity and they are wrapped in duct tape and set to rest in a bucket in the road. a lone sparkler sticks itself out above the others, a fuse. there is fire. sparkling and sizzling, baconish. it gets wilder and fierier and then it settles. the thin wires glow and hum a while longer, glowing right through the metal of the bucket. we stand around it in a circle, patriots, watching the very last bit of light.

wash, dry, fold

the wascomat signs might have been here since the fifties, both of them, one boasting the niftiness and perfection of the machines, the other a study in montgomery ward signage, directions on how to operate these newfangled celebrations of technology. and the machines, too. most of the wascomat jr machines have been washing so long the white operating instructions have been rubbed off the brown plastic front panels. there are three white ceiling fans keeping a place with 18 washers and 12 dryers surprisingly comfortable on the first day of july.

there are signs everywhere about what not to put in the machines. rugs, rubber, plastic, shoes. there is an admonition to check for nails, pins and lipstick in pockets right under the absolutely no smoking, pets or skates sign. the machines make sounds like robots or small animals.

it is an easy place to look around but it is the dryers that capture my attention. all right in a row with a dial and a coin slot. a sign above them says 6-7 min for 25 cents. the 6-7 is handwritten on paper and taped over what was probably once 10. several dial labels are worn off and have been reapplied with black sharpie and an unsure hand.

while i am waiting for the spin cycle on my wascomat washer to stop i gaze over across the tops of the dryers. how aware are you of the way a dryer functions? because i felt pretty confident i understood their heat came from electricity, through a power cord. evidently this is not always the case but i had never once considered actual combustion a part of what happened. i stare at the flickering between the top of the dryer and the small locked panel above. bright and lively orange fire flickers behind the panel. a fast-moving column of it. my slow brain gets ready to warn the world that this laundromat is catching fire but my quicker eyes scan the gaps across the tops of the other machines. tiny blazing furnaces, all around. this is how they work, the machines. i am drying my clothes with real live fire.

brigid. pele. prometheus. vesta. vulcan. laundromat. tenders of fire, all.

six fifteen

it's close to six fifteen when they walk along the outside of the park. it can be as late as six forty, though. they are two men who are maybe in their fifties or sixties, could be brothers, might be junkies with a shared habit, might even be in love. they have known one another a while and you can tell by looking they would have a hard time, each of them, without the other.

they walk from somewhere past the square, which is really a circle, and they go along the park eastish, never looking over at one another as they walk. they don't say anything. one wears a black fanny pack, maybe with keys and a wallet. the sort of thing you don't see so often on grown men in the city, men who mostly carry backpacks or messenger bags crammed with newspapers and headphones and hardcover books that weigh more than newborn children. the other wears a weight belt, a wide strip of leather with the look and color of a horse saddle. he wears this outside his clothes, outside a jacket when he wears that.

the one with the weight belt usually carries the sodas. plastic bottled cokes. three of them in a plastic grocery bag, the cokes condensing against the plastic of the bag like faces pressed against a window. they walk along the wide sidewalk, stay outside the waist high stone fence keeping the wildness of the park from spilling out into what is brooklyn. they never go in. they sit next to each other on one of the big wooden benches planted every few feet all along the outside of the park. benches large enough for homeless folks to stretch out on at night. big enough high school students avoiding going home in the afternoons can cluster around on them in groups and feel a little like they belong to something.

but today promises to be oppressive. those who know say 94, which means the thermometer outside the kitchen window will tippytoe itself right on up to 97 or so, striving for a personal best. this is city heat saved over from yesterday by all that is paved and tarred. it has stretched itself out like a lazy cat over everything, settled in and purring. suffocating already at 6:30.

today the man with the fanny pack carries the cokes. in the bag i can see five of a six pack, necks still collared in those plastic rings. the sixth one dangles from his right hand. he will open it soon enough, and all the other ones, too, guardians against dying from this heat. but for now, whether he knows it or not, there is at least some part of his brain thinking about what the bottle will sound like when he opens it. anticipating the snap as the cap twists free of its moorings. the hiss, somehow urgent and languid together. and in all that low and menacing heat, the tiny wisp of vapor escaping the opened bottle like a ghost or an angel flying home.

wild

when i was small there was no indication that dad was wild. he seemed so normal- went to work every day at the phone company, went bowling with mom and their friends, played golf with my grandpa on weekends. he sang in church when the rest of us sang and ate dinner with us at night. we sat around a table eating pot roast or pork chops or enchiladas. like we didn't have a wild dad at all. thinking back i should have seen it. we all should have seen it. i am pretty sure mom knew, even then. this may even have been why she married him. but the sisters and i, we didn't go out looking for wildness. we were born into it. and when you're born into it, there's really very little you can do but let it wash over you and just breathe it in.

maybe it was because he was expecting little boys. back as far as 1968 he might have been thinking about that, about what life would be like with a few small versions of him running around. when i arrived instead they put me in pretty dresses with ruffles and jingle bells. put bows in my hair. pulled tiny socks onto my feet with pink lace and pale flowers. and although i am sure he loved that early version of me i know some part of him waited still for a boy who would be wild.

when sitting in my underwear in a mud puddle in our dirt driveway made its way to the top of my list of pastimes, he would call to me from under that old blue truck to hand him a wrench, a screwdriver. no use wasting a perfectly good filthy child. maybe this was when things first started to change in his head. the seventies would prove to be a particularly challenging time for feminists the world over. especially for dad.

but when the second child started swimming around in mom they figured again on a boy and i'm sure he was thinking about the adventures they'd have. the wildness they'd share. when the middle sister arrived instead, i don't think he loved her even a bit less. but some part of him must have been wondering what he would ever find to do with two small girl children. so when she stopped in an aisle at the dimestore before the rows of hot wheels and could not be moved until she had some, he didn't know any better and he bought them for her.

so you have to imagine that the third pregnancy, a dangerous one by all accounts, had him thinking there's no way he could wind up with three girls. slot machine odds. this one would surely be a boy. look, having a four year old girl stare under the hood of an old ford pickup with you is nice and hearing your two year old stalking through the house emitting a low growl that would make any muscle car jealous is nice but having a little boy certainly would even things up around the house.

there's a possibility he thought of dating and bras and periods and all the terrifying things girls bring into a house, but this was so long before any of that it's likely he just thought it would be nice to have someone to blame for leaving the seat up once in a while. but when this tiny promise of fairness came out into the world through all that danger and scariness with all herself intact he was too grateful to see her breathing to remember to suffer the loss of this final opportunity for a boy.

when this third child, the runt, wanted a tool kit of her own, he must have realized he could pass on his wildness even to girls. it must have been clear by then. he spent our childhood showering us with explosives and toads and rocks and smelly dogs. these, it turns out, are not exclusively the purview of boys.

and now those wild girls are grown and dad has no choice but to face what he has done, passing on this wildness. because now there are two grandchildren, boys who represent some of the most impressive specimens of wildness known to humankind. and, just like the three girls who sometimes made the church ladies or their classmates or teachers just a little uncomfortable, those two boys are his fault. he might point to all the other dangerous ancestors those two boys have and surely there are plenty. but their wildness, which is breathtaking in its magnificence, their readiness to go out and grab the world and everything in it, is not lurking under the surface. you can find where it lives just by looking in their eyes. all of them. all of us.

ghost

i don't know how old he is but he has a ninth grade english class so maybe he's fifteen. maybe seventeen. he's only shown up three or four times to my first period class, each of those times solemn, at least an hour late. he is always quiet and i tell him i'm glad to see him, though really i don't know him well enough to say, i suppose. i cram books onto his desk like i expect him to do something with them but there is no pressure. he takes the books, looks through them, promises to come back the next day and read one but he never does.

this is why i am surprised to see him when i look up during my last period class. the four eleventh graders who have managed to hang on until now are working independently, quietly. he stands in the doorway, leaned back against the doorjamb, a babyish, baggypants version of the marlboro man. he's watching the hallway, which is short and pretty much empty. a few of my other ninth graders wander in, mill about. i am not sure why they aren't in class but they mumble something about a sub and how it's too noisy and they seem content to read quietly so i am happy to have them here. the boy standing in the doorway seems a little unsure and i yell over to him to come in and sit down. he shuffles into the room and sprawls out in one of the chairs near the board.

i offer him books. maybe he can read and maybe he can't. i don't recall seeing any proof either way and when i have asked him he just shrugs. probably not, then. i pull a table up in front of him and slap down a book full of images. i get paper and a pen and ask him to write, tell the story of the image. he looks at me a long time and bends over the paper. he carefully puts his name up in the right corner but the squished letters fall all over each other in rebellion. i go back to working with other students.

he sits at the table, flipping through the book. i tell him he can write about any picture he likes and he nods. he goes back to the book. he spends maybe ten minutes staring at one picture, then the other. he tells me he's chosen one that isn't one of the ones i first showed him. i nod. when it is almost time to go he closes the book and puts it on the shelf. he walks back over to the door and looks out into the hallway again. he leaves his paper on the table with the pen lying across it. in the upper right corner there is his angry name. and then all across the rest of the page there is nothing.

shavertown road

this is a long, meandering post. i've crammed in as many photos as i could to ease the reading.

we see the first deer on the way to breakfast tearing out of the trees and brush on the south side of 28 the way deer do sometimes, without thinking at all, without looking first, even a little bit. it comes out with about nine hundred legs clawing the pavement, scrambling to the other side with an intensity that suggests it does know the dangers of paved roads even if it doesn’t act like it. when our car hits the space where it was when we first saw it it is down the embankment on the north side and gone.

we eat breakfast at a place that serves pancakes out on the front porch and while we’re waiting a fat finch hops right up next to our table, eyes us only just a little, then leaps up with maybe a flap or two to perch nonchalantly on the edge of our table. it looks around with that little birdy head canted to odd angles all curious and glassy-eyed and when it realizes we have nothing, no food, it gets those wings going and is gone. we eat there with a handful of dogs milling around. small ones, mostly. a pudgy little white dog with spots spends some time with the sweetie and something that looks exactly like a teddy bear snuffles around near the front steps. a place that encourages pancakes and friendly dogs on the same porch is worth an occasional visit.

the next deer runs alongside us on 28 as we drive back. it is impressive and beautiful but we easily outrun it. it seems more aware than other deer of how to avoid the dangers of pavement but it is still clearly a thrillseeker.

we are taking the boat to the d.e.p. today for bathing and numbering and stickering. for legitimacy. the road is forty gently winding miles of forestiness on one side and sprawled out reservoir on the other. playground of deer. getting the boat to the d.e.p. has proved to be almost as interesting as getting it the forty miles from where we bought it to home. more rental truck circus. more grown men assuming i do not exist or cannot lift a boat. but after a lengthy and helpful conversation with the d.e.p. man about how far down to fish for what is biting now and with what bait, we decide to scout out a spot across the bridge from our retired boat, where the old road used to go down to shavertown, i suppose. the road has one of those no vehicles gates across it and the pavement is shot through with weeds and flowers. although the water is only a few feet away from the road, the trees and vines and brambles are dense enough to hide it. the sweetie is still at the car doing some sort of mr. rogers shoe shifting thing while i tromp down the road with a tiny speck of water sparkling at the end. this is when the third deer, a monstrous thing much larger than any other deer i’ve ever seen, flings itself out of the trees and brambles on the water side of the road and clears the road in a single leap, crashing into the dark foresty other side. there is no way that animal gathered up that much speed in the space between the water and the road. i yell for the sweetie, try to find the deer. what i will do if i actually do find it is not yet clear in my head, although i suppose i am thinking i will pet it a little on its soft nose and maybe hug it once if i can reach up around its neck.

we like this deer infested spot and ease the boat into its new home, nestled between other flatbottomed slowmoving boats, none even half as lovely as ours. after yet another trip back to drop of the rental truck, a journey of 280 miles (yes, that is seven separate forty mile trips) ends with the sweetie and me carrying our boat from its new home down the raggedy road and right on into the water.

and i am in love. the boat is happy here in the water. it is not moaning or sighing or taking on large quantities of water. i put the oars in the oarlocks and even though they are still too short for me to row as well as i’d like, i dip them into the water and we sail across all that glittering and sparkling surface like nothing. we eat pepperoni rolled up in provolone like cigars. we drink limeade. the sweetie feeds sawbelly after sawbelly into the clear green water. the swallows come and go, dart into their mud baskets all along the bridge, then scream out onto the water again.

we spend the evening like this, out in the middle of deep water. the sky and the water and the mountains shift with the changing light. we are out of bait fish and we are out of cheese so i row back slowly along the shore while the sweetie casts from time to time into the weedy underbellies of fallen trees. the sweetie catches a fish that comes across the water with a gaping mouth and fiery red eyes. it is too pretty to be a fish. it is also to small to take home so he sends it back to grow a bit.

we are close to the road again, the one that used to go down to shavertown, when i hear a crack in the thick trees on the bank. i assume it is a bear intent on killing us and eating our few remaining pepperonis. the sweetie is not convinced. i peer into the branches in search of gleaming teeth and deadly claws. what happens is a little red deer comes stomping out all spidery with those extra legs deer seem to have. it stands there a while staring at us while i fumble for my camera whispering to it to stay still. it is my conclusion
that deer have very poor hearing or a limited ability to put together snippets of the english language with wild gestures in any meaningful way because it slams itself back into that little stand of forest between the road and the water and leaves me with nothing but a blurry photo of its backside.

we go home without fish, without any photos of deer. we walk back out of the water along that road and put away our boat for the night. i don't know for sure if that road ever went to shavertown but that's what the bridge is called and that's the name of one of the towns down there under the water. i imagine being able to walk all the way down that road, trout and alewives swimming around me, all the way down to the little general store and school and one of those white painted wooden churches a hundred and fifty feet into a valley. they are all elusive. the fish. the deer. whatever is at the bottom of that road. it doesn't matter. the getting is nice but really it's the looking, the adventure, that fills up a life.

birthday, or how to make butter for real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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