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.

ducks

"ducks!" yells the sweetie as we pull into a parking space at the local grocery store. i would like to say my brain and body work together well enough that i hit the floor of the car as soon as i hear his voice. but no. the lack of brain/body coordination, coupled with a knowledge that the sweetie doesn't fumble his words, means i look up, expecting to see a flock of birds overhead.

i should explain that i'm no stranger to wildlife, especially large bird wildlife. i can no more explain why the thought of a duck nearby thrills me than i can explain why i like old buttons or horseradish. they are common enough but somehow worth having. we get out of the car and there on the pavement between us and the store are twenty or so fat ducks, some green headed, all orange footed. a wonderful waddling mass. and more fall from the sky all around us like those huge wet clumps of snow, landing on hidden feet then rolling forward like they're slamming on their brakes too hard. crash landings. not like when they land on water at all. or maybe exactly like that, which is why it looks so clownish on pavement.

we walk toward the front door of the store and forty ducks close in on us the way cowboys do in showdowns, wide of stance and unafraid. the sweetie holds out a hand, pretends to have food. they swarm. i worry what they will do when they find him foodless. i think of the phrase pecked to death by ducks. i'm sure it is a very slow process and i figure i can step in and rescue him if it comes to that. but there are these forty little feather covered animals here, wild things coming right out of the sky and wanting our attention. we wade through the ducks to do our little bit of shopping and i head next door to another store and then meet the sweetie outside.

i think the ducks will be waiting for me in the parking lot and am more than a little surprised they are not. they were, the sweetie tells me, but a little girl chased them all off. for a minute i think she is awful. then i think about what it must have been like to run screaming and flapping into that mess of forty ducks, how it felt when all that wind whipped up, all those bodies lifted and flew. i would have done exactly the same thing.

socks

socks are knit on big fat lion brand yarn called amazing. the color scheme, a self striping blue and gray, is called olympia. the pattern is a sock pattern i found online called "simplest sock pattern ever". and it is.

we are sitting in the vet's office, the sweetie and me. we are waiting for an x-ray of the small dog who may or may not have tangled up his skeleton on a trip through the car wash last week. he hates the car wash, hates it enough to fling his whole body, harnessed and seatbelted, furiously at the water showering against the windows. over and over. snarling. so we are waiting. the sweetie is leafing through books about dogs and i am knitting.

a woman sitting on the same long bench a space or two down from us asks me what i'm making. "pants," i tell her. "for a baby." i steel myself against the inevitable. a woman whose last foray into childbirth was long enough ago she remembers her own children as springing fullgrown from her body. size 12 husky. i wait for her to say what every single one of them says. "a human baby? that will never be big enough for a human baby. maybe it's for a dog." they say this with a snicker, the women who have had children and should know how tiny a human baby is when it first breathes. they always say this. so i tense up, waiting for her to tell me i'm wasting my time. but instead she says, cheerily, "i knit socks."

this is fantastic. i have just learned to knit socks. certainly i have made socks in the past, just like i was at the wheel of a car long before i had a driver's license. but there is a difference between doing something once and knowing how to do something. so i am particularly proud of myself and gush on about how i've just mastered the art of sock making, how much i love making them. she extends her foot a bit, pulls up a pant leg and shows a delicate, ornately stitched sock. i can tell from where i sit it is knit on the tiniest needles in the world. there are millions of stitches and endless secrets in these things. "i make all my own socks!" she says proudly. i am envious. she knows it. she is basking in the glory of the jealousy of another knitter. "i would love to make all my own socks," i say. but i am proud of myself for learning something new and i tell my secret, how i managed to tolerate all those stitches. "i love knitting them up fast so i use chunky yarn on big needles!"

and the needle drags itself across the record in an agonizing screech. she looks at me like i smell bad. she looks at me like i've said an awful word. now, for most of you this means nothing, but if you knit you know there's something called sock yarn. that's right. yarn just for making socks. it's skinny. delicate. the thickness of dental floss or the hair of an angel. think fine print in yarn form. it requires tiny needles and endless stitching. i have just admitted to filling up one of those dotted-lined big chief tablets with the scribblings of the extra fat crayons and then passing it off as a painstakingly crafted novel. i am a charlatan. i am a liar. i am not a knitter of socks. i am a shame.

but this morning early i put on my socks and then put on mary janes so the variegated yarn, the fat, fat yarn in big looping stitches, is clearly visible. i stroll proudly in to work and wave my feet around at every teacher i see. they are not knitters. they are not sock snobs or yarn snobs. and they say exactly what they should, what i want to hear. "those are awesome socks!" and no matter what that miserable woman with the tiny needles and anemic yarn says, i love my socks and will make more. simple and loopy and fat like kindergarten crayon on a big chief.

6am, 5 degrees

you think you will feel it right away. that there's a distinct and painful difference between temperatures on the fahrenheit scale with two numbers, such as 75 or 23, and temperatures with only one number. for instance, 5. you think your soul will freeze when you step into that sort of atmosphere. you think birds will shatter and fall from the sky and trees will split their limbs open from the pain of it. you think you will know.

this is not what happens at all. you step outside and the morning is just starting to push up from the ground. you can see that long strip of it at the horizon, clinging there, catching its breath before struggling all the way up. it is more difficult cold mornings for that weak paleness to accomplish anything. the five am sky is so much darker and so much heavier.

but the sun crawls up over the lip of the world a little and you are up and the small dog is running on shivering toes through the tire track in the driveway to find a space in the snow packed low enough to pee on. you are wrapped in wool, in alpaca, hat, sweater, scarf, mittens. your boots are surprisingly soundless. you wait for the cold to slither into your nose and grab you by the brain and squeeze. you wait. the dog searches for just the right spot and you realize there must be some horrible mathematical computation going on in his head figuring out where where where. seconds go by. your lungs keep breathing. you
are suspicious of this. can humans really breathe in 5 degrees and live to tell about it? you wonder about the potential for brain damage. like from breathing paint fumes. there must be a name for this. brain freeze has been taken by the slurpee/icee drinking community. you think something greek. something latin. cerebellum frigidus. this will not catch on. you know it but consider trying anyway.

instead of anything, nothing happens. the dog finally figures out his math problem and trots back toward the door. your lungs are warm and airy. your brain remains unfrozen. the sun pours out a pinky orange warmth that does not reach you but you are glad for the attempt. you have not been out long. you go inside, make some tea, sit in front of the fire. the temperature outside has dropped since you came in. 2.6. you will wait, you think, for the minus degrees.