Bravo Beaver!

Since school ended, I have been enjoying a small spot of nature everyday rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape.  Sure, I go to the same park—“the Hogbacks”—but there are so many different trails, and each one has special beauties.  I won’t try to verbally map the terrain today (that’s for some other time), but I want to share something wonderful I saw and what that sight made me think.  My dog and I climbed the main road up to the ridge that looks down over the blue lake.  Blue water allows me to use my own eyes again after I’ve squinted to avoid the too direct glare of today's sun.  Sheltered by the woods, my dog and I walked the hog’s back.  A hogback, which gives this nature area its name, is a geologic feature:  a ridge, formed by differential erosion of an outcropping, that leaves steep drop-offs on both sides of a narrow path.  The silhouette looks like the back of a creature (if not exactly a hog).  We walked the ridge, checking the vernal pools for frogs and wading in the lake.  We continued past the beech trees that have been tortured by the cutting letters of human loves, past the blooming may apples, until we intersected with another ridge.  We turned left and began to climb the second hogback for a view of another river.  Then Panda wanted to go down, down through the grass and over the moss, down and down to the brown river.  I followed him, clutching at branches to prevent myself from going down too fast.  He has a low center of gravity—almost no legs—a corgi; and I am an ungainly woman with a tendency to gather speed as I go and not worry once I start to move.  We made it, and at the bottom, the two of us go our own ways, exploring.  Panda immediately plunges into the river … brown and deep as his eyes.  Meanwhile, I wonder at all the fallen trees.  Did they all fall naturally down the slope and at such odd angles?  I take a closer look at a huge weathered stump, and I see that it was felled by a beaver.  The trunk was at least a foot in diameter, maybe wider.  The animal must have chewed away for days—love’s labor?—and once it was down, he couldn’t move it.  It was just too big.  He hadn’t planned.  He hadn’t assessed.  He wasn’t human.  He did what came naturally.  Bravo, beaver!  What heart.  Maybe he couldn’t use that great big log, but I have to believe that his labor—Love’s Labor—wasn’t lost.  It stood there as a perfect instance, to me, of poet, Robert Frost’s notion that anything we attempt in this life is actually a test of how our will pitches into commitments and then is judged for whether the original intention had been strongly spent or weakly lost.  This quality of pitching in and riding our impulses is the same whether we are working in business, school, art, science, love, or marriage—"strongly spent is synonymous with kept.”  No doubt that beaver built one heck of a dam on one of these fast-moving streams and is now enjoying the fruits of his labor in some saturated beaver meadow—if not in this woods, then in his dream of some other.  Thinking about the beaver, who was off to fresh woods and pastures new, I laughed at the way he reminded me to remind others not to be so over-concerned with calculation and assessment, but to do what comes naturally, remembering that humans, too, part of Nature instead of little gods that control it.

Bonds

Place is like a friend, you understand its past, accept it for what it is now, and have hope for it into the future. 

Before I opened an email from a friend and read this interesting observation, I had an image stuck in my mind—something I’d seen last week—that spoke to me of the human capacity to bond with an incommensurable other.  On a sunny evening, I parked my car by the new greenhouses on the East Side of Flint, and I saw a grown man rolling around in an empty lot with a puppy.  The puppy would leap and bark, and the man would toss him lightly on the emerald grass, and they’d splash together in the pools of light.  There was so much joy in the man’s face, it made me smile and laugh, too.  Come Sunday morning, I walked down Franklin through the East Side to St. Mary’s church.  I listened intently.  I sang.  But I didn’t feel much until we all stretched out our hands to sing “Our Father, Who Art in Heaven.”  Many people in this church don’t want to hold hands, but there was a different vibration coming from the old woman with the dyed red hair sitting in the pew next to me.  I reached my hand very tentatively toward her, and she reciprocated by seizing mine in a vice-like grip that was all bones and cold.  But the most amazing things happened:  after the sung prayer to “Our Father,” as priest and congregation continued to chant, “for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever,” slowly and lightly she lifted our arms until our interlocked hands were way above our heads.  Then there was an affirming squeeze before the letting go.  To be touched and raised up in that way by a complete stranger felt like a true spiritual experience.  I walked to communion, and held out my hand for the blessed bread, and knew that it was true—man does not live by bread alone—but by kindness that passes between a man and a dog, a woman and a stranger.  On the walk home, nothing looked sordid or ugly, and I saw daffodils, opened-mouthed, singing to the sun.  God’s will in the world if we could learn it, test it on our lips, would taste of praise.  Why else should the world be beautiful?  Why should the leaves look as they do, the light, the water?

Back in the hood, there was a young boy—probably seven years old—down on all fours head-butting the little but fierce, Gizmo.  I immediately thought of the way wolves hit their bodies together when they run and play.  Do animals give us back our grace by taking away self-consciousness?  I think so.  It happened again last night when I was headed to the park with my dog to see the full moon rise, when we were waylaid by a pack of children (ages 4-7):  “doggy!” they cried gleefully.  Then dropped their bikes and came tearing over, wanting to pick him up, walk him, get him a treat.  They rolled with him, and the incessant rough petting of eight small hands was better than a brush, and soon we were laughing in a cloud of Panda’s soft undercoat fur.  He rolled over on his back as if to itch it in the grass, and the kids squealed with delight.  Then the littlest boy asked, “what’s that red thing,” and his cousin said, “that’s his privacy.”  I laughed and ran off into the park which was equally full of wonders:  a racing rabbit, two mallards in the soggy center, and the moon rising round and clear.

It must be love:  this weather!  I couldn’t resist the woods today that looked so different under blue sky and bright sunlight.  I was thinking about my friend’s comparison:  “Place is like a friend … you understand its past, accept it for what it is now, and have hope for it into the future.”  Under the influence of that remark, I saw the beech trees holding onto to last year’s leaves, and the record of human loves carved in ugly letters in the bark of trees.  But what I can’t stop thinking about tonight are the new may apple plants:  tiny leaves folded in swirls around a shaft and topped with a shiny green ball (which will become the flower that forms the fruit).  I bend down to stroke them—oh, so soft, like a baby’s behind, soft as the privacy that comes before we learned the names, scientific or slang.  What is making me so happy?  Is it this place?  Is it this friend’s words?  Is it the realization that spring brings new things fully formed out of the dark vernal ponds, the dark study of years, and the darkest places in ourselves?  All I can think to do to celebrate is roll in the grass.

Vivificantem, Giver of Life

“Oh honey, just open your heart and let the words flow,” says Barbara Parker.  She’s ninety-one.  A fair-skinned and very slight African-American woman who sat in the pew behind me at St. Michael’s in Flint for years.  My phone number, scrawled on a piece of paper, fell out of her address book and she thought she'd give me a call.  When she asks about my daughter, Katya, I give her an uncensored earful.  “Just sit her down and ask her, ‘do you love me?’  And if she says yes, then say, ‘so why do you hurt me this way?  Why don’t you try to make me happy?’”  Barbara's parenting advice in a nutshell is that I need to be more firm, more assertive.  “You are too soft.”

I hang up the phone, thinking that maybe she’s right, feeling ashamed that it isn’t so easy for me.  “Who was that?”  asks my husband, looking up from whatever he is watching on television.  I tell about the conversation Barbara recommends that I have with Katya in which expectations are outlined clearly.  He looks skeptical. 

“Let the words flow.”  Inside nothing flows.  But outside this afternoon, I felt free as the spring breeze kissing the frozen mountains, walking up and down, round and round, spotting a loon on the lake just as I dropped my legs into the cold water, standing up to be splashed by a young beaver’s tail slap.  I wanted to share something of the magic of these sights, and I tried to tell them to one who could be a new friend.  My words produced merely the smallest ripple of a reply—a brief exchange with little feeling about these things.  I longed for the music of the fountains.  For the mournful wail of the loon.  “Here I am.  Where are you?”  Husband’s on t.v..  Katya’s under her blanket reading Facebook.  I’m working my way through a heavy article on the Reformation’s attempt to kill the Sacred Female, but I put the article down to dip into poetry and find these lines that capture the stark contrast between freedom and constraint, between natural and human worlds. 

Away, away, from men and towns,

To the wild wood and the downs.

To the silent wilderness

Where the soul need not repress

Its music, lest it should not find

An echo in another’s mind,

While the touch of Nature’s art

Harmonizes heart to heart.

I read these words and forgot about the lonely feeling of not being able to share the joy of a simple walk or the love I feel for my daughter.  My own mind supplied the echo.  I was the answering loon.

But I’d like to try to tell you, really tell you, if I can, what my walk was like:  It was like coming out of hibernation.  There was the initial sweet confusion of immersion as the senses try and fail to take in the sounds, sights, the light, the feel of the air.  As I moved along the trail, the thought formed that a walk is really a musical experience.  The translucent white-yellow beech leaves, dried and shivering in the wind, looked like notes on the staff of branches.  The hills, speckled with last year’s leaves, lay in the light waiting, I suspect, for all that is alive in the humus to stir and sprout.  Long before I see the dark ponds of meltwater in the crevices between the hills, I hear the chorus of frogs.  My dog stops and cocks his head to listen.  It is as exciting as the cacophony of sound an orchestra makes as it tunes up and each musician prepares to play his heart out.  Trills, croaks, cackling, chirping, humming, and the sound of a finger running along the teeth of a comb.  That is the northern leopard frog.  All the frogs are tuning up to draw mates.  Alive with sound, these creatures are sensitive to the subtlest vibrations.  I walk toward the edge of the dark water to search for skunk cabbage, and it’s almost as if some frog conductor gave the sign:  all are silent.  Do they see, feel, or hear me?  The further I walk, the more sensitive I become to my own tonal shifts.  I exult on the ridge, I search the lake’s edge, I fall into reverie on the peninsula and, as I hoist myself up onto the granite outcropping, I remember how he looked over my sunglasses and into my eyes.  Eyes seeking the response of eyes, bring out the stars, bring out the flowers.  I am solitary now, and it comes as something of a revelation that my eyes still make things happen.  New things appear everywhere I look, and the most wonderful things happen during rests.  In the heavy yellow grass along the lake with Panda, I take off my boots, unroll my wool socks.  The water is icy cold.  Perfect.  I examine my unshaved and scaly legs, and, as I stroke my own “fur,” I promise to take better care of my body.  Then, when I look up and out across the surface of the water, I see a black head in elegant profile darting from side to side.  A loon!  I can’t believe it.  Here?!  I see them all the time at home on Adirondack lakes, but we are in lower Michigan, not too far from Flint.  Maybe this place is further away than I thought.  And this loon probably landed here to rest on his flight from a faraway winter in some tropical paradise.  Come back to the peace and solitude of this little lake, looking for an echo.  He dives and disappears.  Later when I’m at the end of the lake, up high on a ridge, I lift my eyes to see the single pine tree reach for the sun and catch a glimpse of a turkey vulture riding the air.  That’s when I hear the loon call.  It’s an unmistakable wail that carries.  Oh for a voice like that!  “Honey, let the words flow.”  But if they don’t flow, the whole natural world instructs me to croak, hum, bark, screech, peep, and cry them out.  My favorite Latin word for the Holy Spirit—the Creator, the giver of life, is “vivificantem.”  And in Bach’s great Mass in B Minor, the Bass soloist, makes his voice sound like a thrush in deep woods, trilling up and down the scale, falling like water, rising like air, and he stretches that word out in no less than eleven syllables.  Somewhere in that vocalization is the engine of life. 

Forsaken

“That Flo has found a way to make her presence known,” declared my mother, speaking about a woman who she sits with for meals at her assisted-living facility.  “She calls out to people as they leave the dining room, commenting on a nice blouse or some other article of clothing.  It’s always about clothes.”  I had never thought of my mother as an anthropologist before, but listening to her describe the behavior of residents at The Home of the Good Shepherd, I started to see her as a kind of participant-observer.  But I doubt that scientists feel envy, and it was envy that I heard in Mom’s comment about Flo as if she, herself, has yet to find her own mode of self-assertion.  She’s also told me that Flo has her eye on one of the men and flirts with him in very obvious ways.  This observation, too, is as much about my mother as it is about Flo.  She’s implicitly asking me why she can’t find it in her to talk to the eligible men whose doors are marked with blue football helmets, blazoned with “Bernie,” to distinguish them from the female doors, marked with pink flowers for “Cathy.”

On Easter I picked her up early for Mass and followed close behind as she inched her walker into the back pew, reserved for the lame.  No longer does she stand or kneel but sits through the Mass hunched over.  Ushers and others asked me wordless questions with their eyes:  does she want communion?  Why don’t they ask her?  She is a person in full possession of her faculties, who deserves the decency of her fellow humans’ regard along with the body of Christ.  Communion came but almost as an afterthought as we sang the final refrain to close the hymn and the brusque priest, who I’ve heard mocking the elderly in his parish, prepared to convey God’s blessing on us. 

Although I can bow and bend, stand up and sit down, I remained seated next to my mother much of the time to share her condition.  It is what I have done since my father died and what I feel I must do still.  Church was packed with young people—everyone seemed young compared to us old people consigned to the back—and we watched the Easter parade as if from eternity.  “I don’t see Jeannette,” says my mother, as the crowds flowed by us and we waited for an opening big enough to push the metal walker into traffic.  There is one white-haired lady who fits the bill.  “No, Mom, that is her,” I say as if I’ve sighted and identified some species of rare warbler.  She is chatting with another older woman.  Last time I was at church with Mom, I flagged Jeannette down, but on Easter Sunday it wasn’t in me to gesture like a highway semaphore.  “I’m sure she’ll see us,” I say.  But she doesn’t.  She walked right down the side aisle, and neither I nor my mother did anything to make our presence known.  I couldn’t read what my mother felt, so I went ahead and felt forsaken, almost as if I were already dead.  My mother has spent much of her life talking on the phone to friends, meeting them for breakfast, playing golf with them, and I’ve often been impatient with all the chit chat.  She has talked Jeannette through her own health problems, and I suddenly wonder—what for?  As quietly as is possible, my mother moves her walker inch by inch through the vestibule, and a patronizing usher tells her in a too loud voice to “have a good day” and to “keep smiling”:  “that smile [toothless] is golden.”

On a train somewhere in China, a daughter holds her mother's head,
 preventing it from hitting against the window.

Once tucked into the car out of the cold wind neither of us spoke of the shame, but Mom wanted to drive by my brother’s house on West Mountain Road.  I’m not sure why since he was supposedly in Massachusetts for Easter, but we do, and instead of going straight home, I turn right and head up the mountain, past the unassuming white church that I’ve almost forgotten even though it’s stood there through my childhood to this very moment.  Mom seemed to enjoy the ride.  I stopped the car near the top so she could smoke a cigarette and we talked quietly about nothing important.  I like the feeling now of talking just to talk, talking to draw out the other’s voice.  Our words don’t do anything.  They exist like the breeze or the streams of meltwater.  It’s a new and pleasurable feeling--this saying things together.

Back at home in the dark kitchen, the hours passed.  We opened cupboards full of school papers with my name on them, saved from 1972.  I was nine years old, practicing penmanship and completing worksheets on Saudi Arabia.  I find a short poem my mother must have written as an example of rhyme.  It’s obvious that she spent hours working with us, taking an interest in our schoolwork, and using her voice to coax out our own.  After a while, I get to work peeling potatoes and shredding cabbage.  The timing of our dinner is arranged around the arrival of my sister, who said yesterday that she’d come over later for pie and beer.  “Leave it alone, Mom,” I said, as my mother insisted on leaving her third phone message to invite Jennifer for Easter dinner.  “You cannot make people want to see each other.  You’ve been doing it for years, and it hasn’t worked.”  I was only partially aware of feeling that my presence and my effort—like the construction paper baskets we made in school and filled with green cellophane grass—had not been good enough.  Why?  The simple meal of ham and sweet potatoes was delicious.  Why couldn’t we savor it?  Why were others always more necessary?  The meal was over too soon for my taste, but my mother placed her knife and fork down and said “just in time” as Jenny strode in the front door out of the blazing sunshine, wearing a black fur coat with her strawberry blond hair irradiated.  She presented Mom with a spring green watering can to take back to the “Home.”  The talk turned to collectibles and vintage clothes.  Jenny pulled up on her smartphone pictures of art-deco chairs bought up in Plattsburgh for her new apartment and a purple ladies’ Schwinn bike found at some abandoned clockworks on the road to Saratoga.  Like Mom, she has definite things she likes and collects.  I listened, thinking of our predilection for other peoples’ clothes.  Vintage.  “It’s always comments about clothes.”  I saw a forest of siblings dressed alike, but some grew taller and larger, clawing their way through the dark understory and vying for light.  We’re grown up, when will the competition end?  Not a shopper by nature, I sat there, marveling at their evident ability to buy things that they want.  No, that’s not quite right:  I envied their ability to want.

Through the visit, I felt as indrawn as the old people that drop their heads on their own chests and pull the wings of garments over their heads.  I’ve got to get out of this house, out of myself.  And I did get out.  On the day after Easter before the sleepers in the house awoke, I walked along the edge of Potter woods and down West Mountain Road to the church Mom and I drove past yesterday.  Made of concrete, stolid and simple, I noted that it seems to lack anything interesting or graceful.  But when I looked closer at the stained-glass windows, I was so surprised:  in the window glass were spring flowers!  Flowers instead of the usual saints, apostles and bearded churchmen.  I thought of the way flowers come up in waves:  crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, roses (much later).  Each kind has its season.  Do the daffodils come up envying the grape hyacinths?  Do they come up to make their presence known?  I don’t think so.  They abide gracefully whether anyone sees them or not, and most people tromp on the violets hidden down deep in grass busy growing.  Only poets listen when flowers whisper, and, look!, the artist who made this window created a monarch butterfly, flitting above the irises.  As I thought about the secret language of flowers, it’s the Shakespearean heroines, Ophelia and Perdita, who come into my mind.  Today I know why they chose to speak with flowers and not words.  Maddened by neglect and abandoned to loss, they couldn’t trust the currency of language, and what they had to say was too fresh, too dirty, too rooted. 

Back home in Flint, I wander through Macy’s with my daughter Katya.  Passing the perfume counter, I spray some Chanel No. 5 on my pulse points  It is one of Mom's favorites, and Katya leans in to smell me as if I’m a flower.  “Did you see the old bottle in Grandmom’s bedroom?  I found it when I was climbing over the piles.  Probably it had expired."  I tell her how I wish I’d taken it, and she replies, “I want you to have a scent that I identify only with you.  I don’t want you to smell like Grandmom.”

I will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land (Gen. 28:15)

I press my lips to her cheekbone.  Much of her face is sunken in, but I love what remains.  If thoughts are prayers, I pray that this is not the last time.  We go through our anxious exchange that’s become routine, “I love you.”  “I love you.”  “Thank you so much for everything.”  “Thank you, too.”  It’s hard to distinguish whose is the initiating voice in this call and response that is like a liturgy or a song.  “Now what are you going to do as soon as you get home?”  “I promise that I will call.”  “Good.”  I smile and wave as I walk through the door, turning back again and again.  There is a character in mythology—a poet named Orpheus—who lost his beloved to death forever just because he looked back, clinging to the sight of his wife reclaimed from the underworld, in a show of love.  Just as I’m out of sight, the call comes, “Mary Jo?”  I rush back—“Here I am!”—only to hear one more question, “did you lock the house?” 

I know I’ll miss even what I’ve come to think of as anxiety when I don’t hear her call anymore.  I wish she would ask me something significant, something important, “leave your husband and daughter and take care of me.”  “Take your profession—all your class notes and published essays—and burn them atop a mountain that I will show you.”  I need something with a biblical charge to show my love, but maybe covenant exists in the more mundane calls I receive and the reassurance I can give here on this bank and shoal of time.

My small family of three (Paul, Katya, and I) sat with her table-mates at the Home of the Good Shepherd—Nancy, May, and Flo—as they poked around the edges of their plates.  My mother didn’t touch her food which will quickly be taken as “failure to thrive” in the place she calls prison.  Paul breaks the silence, “Do the residents still have homes?  Do they talk about their lives before they came here?”  Flo, who is part Welsh and part Italian, is quick to answer, “No, that’s private, and to ask about it would be considered probing.”  Later in the car, I remind Paul that Mom says most lunches pass in silence, and he wonders aloud again whether it’s because there is shame in being consigned to this waiting room, which will be for many, their last on earth.  “I’m getting a mental hospital vibe,” said Katya when she walked, for the first time, down the corridor to Room 106, past the faux painting of two running horses, which strikes me as a mockery of those residents who are not asleep in their wheelchairs but can only self-propel with small movements of their feet, slowly, slowly.

Paul pulls the car under the carport, and I wheel her to the spot where she can stand to grasp the door handle and pull herself up, swivel around, and lift her legs into the car.  “There.  Now, where are my cigarettes?”  I place the pack of Kools in her hand, “Oh, thank God.”  Her cigarette lit, she inquires, “where to now?”, and we tell her that Paul wants to drive east along the river looking for a cemetery in the woods somewhere outside of Stillwater.  In rain turning to snow we glide, skirting the edge of the Hudson with hills covered in brown furze like an animal hide running out in undulating strides on either side.  There is a gentleness to this landscape that has been farmed since the late eighteenth century as the stones in the graveyard indicate, and part of the gentleness lies in the easy way you can cross and recross the wide river, and find, if not quite the same, a similar world on either side.  The big comparisons and allegories form in my head, but I keep them to myself.  What Mom verbalizes between courteously spaced cigarettes (so Katya doesn’t start complaining about her lungs looking like walnuts from second-hand smoke) are memories:  being lost out in this country when she and Jenny went to get apples, buying the railroad carriage lamp in the Greenwich hardware store.  I listen and keep looking at the horses standing in the sleet on the sides of hills quiet as candles.  A group of them around a trough of some kind (but not eating) regard us seriously.  “Mom,” I venture, “don’t horses want to get out of the rain?”  “No.  I don’t think it bothers them.”  We round a bend, and I see one—it must be a young one—in what I imagine to be a burst of excitement gallop up a hill, its roan rump working hard and blond mane flying.  She remembers the summer she went out to Colorado to take college courses and to ride horses (even though she’d grown up on a farm).  She remembers taking care of the horse she was assigned.  “What was its name, Mom?”  “Always.”  As if my imagination were godlike, I’d give her a new horse—let’s call him Secretariat—when he lived he won the triple-crown and she took her four little kids down to Saratoga to watch him work out, teaching us to love his combination of grace and power.  I see her on some such horse—Secretariat, Goldie, or Always—outpacing death, and fording in an easy leap the rocky stream that prevents our red SUV from going any further down the road behind a muddy farm.  “I wanna go home,” my daughter whines, “we’re out in the middle of scenic nowhere and we’ve been driving for three hours.”  She quiets after a quick stop at the Stewart’s gas station and store in Greenwich where we pee and pick up a warm container of mac n’ cheese for Katya and a cup of black coffee for Mom, who has lit up again and blowing smoke out the two-inch crack in the window. 

Car rides always were the place where I felt most at home with my mother, coming at things obliquely—horses, cows, and all kinds of curious creatures—without the stress of eyes meeting and needing the response of eyes.  On our car ride today, just like the thousands I’ve taken with her over the course of our shared life, the landscape rolled out behind and before us—the world opened up and we looked forward to what is around the next bend.  “Oh my goodness,” she says, as we approach the store that sells wood stoves in East Argyle, “that’s where we took pictures of those animals.”  The big brown cows basking in the warm sun of late February.  She remembers the cows although I'd bet dollars to donuts she doesn't remember me.  But I don’t need recognition and am not ashamed of my nothingness.  My hands were on her shoulders in the sunlight, and that is all that matters.  Wherever you go I will go.  I promised.  “Do you fear what’s to come after death,” a bold interviewer asked the intrepid traveler, Freya Stark.  “What’s to fear?  It’s just another journey.”  And while I would never say this aloud to my mother, one day along a road she’ll have to go alone, I know a barn door will open and the voice of He who knows the mountain goats’ birthtime, who opens the storehouses of snow in April to make “poor man’s fertilizer” will call, “Midge,” and she’ll go home to work right alongside Him as she did with Grampy.  For the time being, home is a Subaru Forester as cozy as the train car that rocked lazily from side to side as it inched across the Kazakh steppe, and I ate chocolate with Katya and drank cognac with Paul.  As cozy as the train car Mom remembers, filled with music, when Isaac Stern en route to a performance in St. Louis, invited Mom, her mother, and her cousin Mildred into his compartment to listen to him play his violin.

On a drive with Mom the last day of February.  Cows in East Argyle.

We stopped in this cemetery in the middle of farm fields.  It was snowing on April 3.

Latest ebay find:  Secretariat working out at Saratoga c. 1972.  It might have been the same summer I remember the long-legged chestnut beauty being led off the dirt track.  I remember my mother's awe.

Still wild, still natural.  Secretariat with his trainer.

Glow in the Dark

            It takes time to guide her up the sidewalk and to negotiate the two porch steps to get her into the house.  Outside, the day is overcast and spitting snow.  Inside, the kitchen is dark.  I am the only one of the four children who brings Mom home, and I don’t know why I need to sit at the table where I fade into the shadows.  I must be acting on a very old impulse to restore an essential configuration of home:  two women talking at a kitchen table.  She and her mother sat in a bright breakfast room, drinking endless cups of tea while yellow grosbeaks pecked at seeds on a platform window feeder in February sunshine.  Jersey was always warm and bright this time of year when the wood of the blueberry bushes flushes red (a French house roof red) that stands out against the grays and browns of winter, and the farmers know that it is time to prune.  Mom and her sister, Ruthellen, would sit together right here, at this same table, in the blue cape cod at 22 Sylvan Avenue, sipping cans of beer, puffing Kools, while they unwrapped their antique finds, looked up prices, and made lists of guys they had kissed.  I was there, too, present in the shadows, listening and watching.  I cannot give that up—not yet anyway.

            Mom plops into her chair and raises her head to peer at things around her, finds an ashtray and locates her pack of cigarettes.  We settle in to wait for the “lamp guy.”  She’d dropped off old kerosene lamps at a local antique store, The Manor, for him to fix back in September, and we’d had a terrible time pinning him down to a pick-up time.  Bit by a tick, he'd been in and out of the hospital for complications from lyme disease.  He was to have rewired three Rayo lamps (one for each daughter) as well as Mom’s brass store lamp that hung for years over the kitchen table.  When the hanging lamp broke, my brother replaced it with what to Mom’s taste was a very ugly modern fixture.  The so-called “lamp guy,” whose name is Jason, was supposed to arrive between 12-1, but the knock at the door turns out to be Dick Sullivan from two houses away.  He is a wiry birdlike upstate guy who worked for the telephone company, bearing four cartons of Kool cigarettes that he buys cheaper in New Hampshire.  As I count out the $268 dollars, I have to wonder how Mom will ever smoke her way through all these packs when her local kids don’t support her habit since it complicates their lives and the routines of the staff at the assisted living “home.”  I stir clam chowder in a pot on the stove and listen with half an ear to Dick move fluidly from memories of the cabin at Glen Lake—“the one with the carport” (the same cabin where we lived until I was four years old!)—to the difficulties of pumping out Paul Cedarstrom’s flooded cellar while my old ninth grade English teacher is vacationing in Florida.  Dick’s a good neighbor, and I like his blue eyes and bushy eyebrows, but I’m hungry.  After two hours of unrelenting storytelling, the good neighbor heads out, and Mom and I scarf down small bowls of soup.  It’s all the food we have for the time being.

            Two hours late, Jason arrives bearing lamps.  He’s bearded and soft-voiced and, for all I know, may be a genie just out of one of the lamps he’s polished to perfection.  “Oh, don’t they look beautiful?” my mother asks rhetorically, and all the frustration of waiting five months for them melts away.  Jason sets to work, patiently re-threading three sets of brass chains through the spaces in the ring that holds in balanced suspension the lamp fixture and counter-weight fitted inside a cup of brass worked to look like a big pine cone.  

There is something beautiful about a young guy who has taken time to learn how to care for and restore such delicate old lights.  I say something like that and he replies, “I just love to find old things and bring them back to life.”  As he works he tells us about his parents’ house in Hartford where he has hundreds of oil lamps hanging—some so low you have to watch your head or bump into them.  But his special love is something called “Vaseline glass.”  It is handmade glass of a yellow-green color—some pieces are mixed with cranberry—that was made with traces of uranium before the element was needed for the cold war in weapon production.  “It has lost popularity,” says our lamplighter.  His theory is that Vaseline glass looked better in an era when people lit houses with candles because then it really glows in the semi-darkness.  He pulls out his phone and shows me pictures of vases made in imitation of jack-in-the pulpits, tree trunks with twigs, and flowers with all manner of vines and tendrils, and it’s no wonder with that spring green color and the inner glow that signifies life.  Jason tells Mom and I that he grew up in Fort Edward, and he talks about missing the trails he rode bikes on when he was a kid (all gone) and the old houses he remembers on Eddy Street (gone, too).  I used to ride with Mom sometimes when she’d take Pop to work, and I remember Eddy Street as the short road that led to the mysterious gates of the paper mill beyond which I never got to go.  His father, like mine, worked at Scott Paper, but he was a jack of all trades and taught his son the mysteries of electricity, of wires crossing wires so that the current of flows uninterrupted, until it POPs.  Mom and I jump as something causes the hanging lamp to short out.  We climb over piles of junk in the cellar to get to the fuse box, and Jason finds parts of old lamps—“this looks like so much fun!"  He offers to "help" clean out the cellar in the spring but promises, short-term, to "come back tomorrow" with a bolt of the proper length and an antique medallion that matches the fixture better.  We offer him a chocolate brownie for the road, but he’s on his way through Hudson Falls to pick up Chinese take-out on the way back out to the wide open spaces of Argyle, Hartford, and his little kingdom.

            When he leaves, I’m dreaming of some paradise where houseplants winter in greenhouses, sheep wander the wan brown slopes, and pigs fatten in warm barns.  But mostly I’m thinking about the uranium glass—eyes behind clouded cataracts—moving and glowing in the dark.  Until Jason returns to finish the job, Mom and I have to do without overhead light in the kitchen.  I prepare to bake a fish dinner in the gloaming.  Peggy Tulley comes to the door with an amber ashtray that Ruthellen mailed to her house, “big enough to hold lots of butts” reads the pink sticky note on the rim of it.  Outside it’s dark ocean blue over the mountain and Peg steps inside our house where she hasn't been for decades since the bridge parties of the olden days.  Later on she says on the phone, “it’s sad that she has lived like that,” and I imagine that Peg is referring to the clutter, the pall of smoke, and the general darkness.  I think that if only I had lit the two candles on the table, then Peg might have noticed the little lamp on the threshold of stove room’s deeper darkness.  “It was probably meant to light up a train car or a ship,” Jason observed, and I feel the rocking of rail car or boat as the name "Seashore Line" pops into my head:  it's the railroad that connected Philadelphia and Atlantic City.  In candlelight, maybe Peg would have seen the Bartlett print of the rickety house and bridge over the falls at Glens Falls or the large round Indian basket with the wooden handle resting on Uncle Philip’s old high chair.  Jason noticed all these things, and I saw how they glowed.  Even without candlelight, there had been something iridescent about the memories retrieved and moments restored that afternoon in the synaptic space between mother and daughter just sitting in the dark with the lamp guy working somewhere over our heads in the comforting configuration of home.

On Mom's Side

            Shortly after my mother fell and broke her hip, I thought of Nala.  Nala was a very large black Newfoundland that followed Mom like her shadow.  At Indian Lake, when Mom would go out for a short paddle in her kayak, Nala would stand sentinel on shore, and gaze out across the water, waiting for her to return.  Because of their size, Newfoundlands are prone to hip dysplasia, and, sadly, Nala was not an exception.  After years of nursing her on aspirin and coaxing her with treats to get up and walk, Mom gave in and let her be put down.  She bought books on grieving the loss of a dog which she passed onto me when my corgi, Poppy, fell down and got up for three months of blissful posthumous life before we euthanized him.  “Can you give him the shot so that it doesn’t happen too fast?,” I asked the vet.  Why did I think a slow death was kinder?  That it would be less of a shock?  That he would drift into sleep cradled on my lap?  I cannot know what my dog felt, but I know that two hours of watching the life leave him was agonizing for me.  I’ve done my best to block the memory of that afternoon. 

Mom caught her leg on her purse strap that was hanging from a kitchen chair.  “When I fell, I heard something snap,” she recalls.  Her hip was pinned surgically and, after I’d seen her in the hospital, I came home, bought a stuffed Newfoundland on Ebay, and mailed it to the Rehab facility.  I thought Mom might find it comforting when really the connection is very sad:  I didn’t want Mom to go the way our downed dogs had gone.  I was certain that when her willpower kicked in, she would walk and even play golf again once the snow drifts dwindle and the hard, brown earth turns green.

            Ever since my mother fell, her struggle has been behind my every thought.  Along with the primary struggle to get back on her feet, she’s in an ongoing fight to reclaim her life, resisting filial demands that she just relax, stay put, and accept that The Home of the Good Shepherd is the best and safest place for her, despite the fact that they let old men sit alone crying and despite the big article in last Sunday’s New York Times that decried the lack of oversight of assisted living facilities, calling them places where the elderly are warehoused and where they die from neglect.  In Shakespeare, filial ingratitude manifests itself as inheritance hunger.  In my family, that’s not the issue.  My brother says he wants “nothing from that house” as if it had been contaminated by plague.  What is more bizarre though is the way that the adult children have begun to act out, taking every opportunity to find fault with her and vent frustration and aggression—“he laid me out in lavender”—in what, at times, appears to be a simple show of power over a vulnerable and dependent old person.  

            A few weeks ago, I had to teach a short story by the Canadian writer, Alice Munro.  The story, called “Boys and Girls,” takes place on a fox farm in rural Canada and is mainly about the production not only of fur pelts but of gendered people—boys and girls.  The story is narrated in the first person by the young girl, who seeks every way possible to bond with her father and his outdoor work and resist the drudgery of her mother’s inside work—that is, until she witnesses her father shoot an old work horse named Mack.  She is convinced that horror she feels isn’t the sentimental attachment to animals as pets: she knows that the foxes need the horse meat for food.  Nevertheless, when peeking through a knothole in the barn wall, she senses the dramatic irony of the callous men smoking and joking before they shoot an innocent creature, “searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not to be found.” 

            “Come to say goodbye to your old friend Mack?” Henry said, “Here, you give him a taste of oats.”  He poured some oats into Laird’s cupped hands and Laird went to feed Mack.  Mack’s teeth were in bad shape.  He ate very slowly, patiently shifting the oats around in his mouth, trying to find a stump of a molar to grind it on.”  “Poor old Mack,” said Henry mournfully.  “When a horse’s teeth’s gone, he’s gone.  That’s about the way.”

            Symbols in literature don’t mean anything really until they meet with a mind that’s ready to make use of them, and my mind was ready for this one.  Back in November, I’d taken Mom’s upper bridge to her dentist to have a tooth that the physical therapists had accidentally knocked out to be glued back in.  “Poor lady,” said Dr. Garrett, “her teeth are just crumbling right out of the bone.”  Maybe so.  But just like the horse in the story, Mom was getting by, and teeth or no teeth, she was still full of life.  Who decides that “when a horse’s teeth’s gone, he’s gone”?  The hired man, Henry, who makes this remark may well be searching for a way to justify the fact that he is pacifying the horse so that he’ll be easier to shoot. 

            “Mack’s thick, blackish tongue worked diligently at Laird’s hand.”  This image has troubled me.  And even though it is hard for the old horse to eat, when he’s led out in the side pasture where he’ll die, he instinctively looks for a mouthful of fresh grass.  Life seeks the means to live.  My mother, too, wants nothing more than to get outside, smoke her cigarettes, go to Mass, drive her car, and get back home where she can live life in her own way.

            “My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.”  The girl sees Mack lurch from side to side, fall, and even kick his legs for a few seconds in the air.  The children don’t believe Mack has died, but the men do.  They are all business.  Back to business.  My siblings (so it seems to me) have been all business in this matter of Mom’s care; and I’ve been frightened by their discursive detachment when what’s at stake for Mom is LIFE.  Her fight, carried out with a characteristic gentleness, has moved me toward a stand much like that taken by the girl in the story.  When the day comes for the female horse, Flora, to be shot, she rears, gallops, and runs into the meadow where the girl (also a fast runner) has a chance to shut the gate to prevent Flora’s escape.  But as she sees the horse charging madly toward her, she holds the gate open as wide as she can.  “He would know that I was not entirely on his side,” she reflects, but in the next thought commits herself and takes a stand: “I was on Flora’s side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even to her.  Just the same, I did not regret it; when she came running at me and I held the gate open, that was the only thing I could do.” 

 

A young girl's drawing of the narrator with Mack and Flora

My students and even Steve, a colleague who is an expert in Munro’s fiction, think that siding with Flora is part of the way the girl becomes a girl.  But I think her stand complicates her interpellation into gendered subjectivity.  “Nobody likes being put in a box,” said Steve in a conversation about the roles kids get slotted into in family systems.  Animals are caged.  Gender is a pen, and old age is a box, too.  Flora resists the human will to “put her out to pasture” and engineer her end.  To side with Flora means siding with and standing for life in all its forms against a utilitarian, business-like world.  Flora was old.  Flora was of no use to anyone.  There was no wild land for her to escape to.  But siding with Flora meant supporting whatever inner instinct remained to run, leap, lap, and lick.  Siding with Mom means something similar:  it means accepting her toothless grin, taking her out walking, watering all hopes that shoot up, giving her back her car keys, and letting her have the simple pleasure of a daily cigarette.  Even the guys living in group homes on my street in Flint, MI, yell from their porches where they sit and smoke from early morning to late at night.  “Nice dog.  A dog’s man’s best friend!”  Let’s not forget that Mom is still the wild girl riding her palomino, Goldie, through the peach orchards, the thoughtful aunt who picked up Tom Southard to ice skate at Totem Village (because she knew how much the little boy liked to skate), the caring mother who fed us, educated us, and raised us.  Shouldn’t we be at least as good to her as she was to Nala?

Why does everyone only see gender when the struggle is about life resisting death in a box?

I wrote this several weeks ago but decided not to post it for fear of offense, but now I think:  what have I got to lose?  I just got back from a wonderfully enjoyable week visiting Mom, and she even had a chance to practice drive my rental car (a Toyota Rav4 just like hers) in the parking lot of Our Lady of the Annunciation.  Here she is behind the wheel:  Go Catherine, Go!  She knows she isn't going to be driving on "real" roads anytime soon and needs practice, but, as she said when we ate dinner at her friend, Peggy's house, "one step at a time."