Category: Things that Happened

What is a storm? Xylem or phloem?

When lighting moves closer and we turn to go and

the lake says, no, don’t leave me I’m always

abandoned, I always remain on my own,

remanded, planted where nothing can grow.

The night is short and the clouds are low,

and where could I shelter? Nothing is right.

The water is crossed and recrossed with each thundering strike,

of a poem, of rifts in the fabric of time,

of words that unite, and recoil,

and sink to the bottom to sit in the soil,

and boil.

The neighbors asleep with the leaves in their trees standing quietly insensate to cold. The wind’s hips sway and she brushes the bushes and last fall’s remaining grasses.

Creak, down the stairs, walking backwards, toe to heel. Singing that chorus for half an hour, lying in bed without success. A tornado of images and words and sounds screeching and scraping against each other. They crack and shatter and reassemble and fly by unrecognizable.

A day is starting. A night is ending. Neither really started or stopped. Last night I went to bed and felt I had completed one more thirty-thousandth of my life, and that somehow I should be taking better stock of these fractions. The present is distant, and yesterday wanders my memory seeking an open chair.

The middle-school buses growl from one stop sign to the next, and I cover my face with a pillow. The sun goes up across the street. A yellow house bathes in the light, the rest is gray and brown and pale blue.

I would have skipped this day, last year. I’ll not miss it the next. I yearn to see the sky through languid curtains deep green and songbird-filled.

I should value every day. I should be present and grateful. But this Februaric extension I will not applaud.

I never liked the month in the first place.

1. Kids love magnets.
2. Don’t over-tickle.
3. Be wrong as often as you’re right.
4. Apologize.
5. Kids aren’t little grown-ups.
6. It’s OK. Let them try it.
7. You have no new e-mail.
8. Walk slow; they are short and curious.
9. Tantrum checklist:
   ☐ Hungry?
   ☐ Tired?
   ☐ Poop?
   ☐ No reason?
10. Leave work promptly.

I come home and her mom and brother are both sleeping. I find her in the bedroom, alone on a rainy Friday with curtains half-drawn and her bedside lamp casting quiet yellow light. Wearing a pink play apron; completely absorbed in a make-believe world. She doesn’t notice me.

She takes the news about the museum better than I expected, happily accepting the substitute of a walk in the rain to her grandmother’s house for hot chocolate and sunny-side-up eggs. To be honest I’m winging it at this point, just wanting to get out of the house so other two can sleep.

The rain is steady, but she’s unfazed and I have this gigantic blue-and-white umbrella I stole-borrowed from my first and last corporate job years ago. I think of changing shoes but … then I don’t.

Outside she tries to find a way to hold my hand and her umbrella at the same time.

I try to find a way to hold her hand and her umbrella at the same time. It’s not really possible.

We love each other and want to hold hands, but umbrellas are keeping us apart.

Those are vines, I tell her, through raindrops. They are little now but will grow big over summer, when you’ll be four and a half. But what are they called? she asks. The plants?

Vines I say. Just vines growing on the side of a retaining wall.

She stands in a puddle in pink boots and eroded dirt swirls across the sidewalk. I’m concerned about my suede shoes getting soaked around the toes despite attempts to better position the umbrellas. Two teenaged girls are walking home from school across the street, umbrellaless and barefoot, and it makes me feel very not-young and un-spontaneous.

So I make a conscious effort to not care about my suede shoes getting wet and ruined. Instead I do a poorly executed puddle jump, but even jumping now makes me feel old and heavy.

I’m distracted by a million different things, most involving dollar signs or e-mail attachments. But I’m able to recognize the beautiful serendipity of a random afternoon walk in the rain with my daughter. This was meant to be a special ‘date’ complete with a museum trip and thirteen other stops I can’t remember, but I was replacing a light switch. And it took forty-five minutes longer than I expected.

We take cover in a bus shelter. I slump against one wall and she runs back and forth. The rain falls harder and a bus approaches but I waive it off, embarrassed. She’ll happily stay here for hours, I realize, playing house or running a pretend ice-cream parlor. This is the miracle of childhood, and if there’s any shred of my youth left I should grab hold of it in my white-knuckled fists.

Why should I not want to stay here for hours living in our shared imagination? For the bills that need paying? For my spam-clogged, habit-forming inbox? Because there’s laundry to fold?

Holy shit that is depressing! Someone go find the 15-year-old me and tell him in just one lifetime’s doubling his world will dim to a boring, perfunctory shade of gray. And that when stray shafts of light manage to cut through the fog, his first impulse will be to push them away and return to his hamster wheel.

She wants to leave the bus shelter now. “This is boring,” she says.

She’s right. It was kind of boring. We flap open our umbrellas again, spraying droplets of water against the glass walls of the shelter.

We hold hands and walk off, crossing the street in search of adventure.

1. Age seven, opposite two playground boys playing keep-away with my balled-up socks. Of whom, one, I punched.

2. Fifth grade, a Tony-named boy slammed my head in a desk. His revenge for my pushing him into an emergency exit door. I cried in the principal’s office. He did not.

3. Walking to basketball practice; 10 years old. A teen-aged person I had never seen before walked up and, introduction-less, did a flying, spinning karate kick to my head. He had mistaken me for someone else.

4. At my friend Jamie’s house, eighth grade, with my friend Sid, who punched me on the top of the head after an absurdly long game of Risk. Wait, actually I’m not sure this one is real.

5. Freshman year, soccer practice. An older kid kept pushing me and finally I swung at his face without warning. I earned myself a tough reputation and gave him a bloody lip. Both quickly reverted to their prior conditions.

6. Also freshman year. I pulled down the pants and underpants of a math classmate in front of several girls to whom, I’m sure, he would have preferred, under improved circumstances, to reveal his pubescent penis. He claimed the right under an obscure legal statute to punch me on the left shoulder for two weeks, and availed himself fully of it.

7. Senior year; not a fight, but I mouthed off to a man-child whose poofy hair scraped the hallway ceilings while we bumped shoulders. For this he rewarded me with a thorough choking. During which I noticed he had a tear tattooed on his cheek. I believe he was later expelled.

8. College; practice field for the ultimate frisbee team. After some retrospectively amicable bullying, I threatened my (much, much larger) opponent with unspecified harm. This inspired not fear, but curiosity, which I finally indulged by landing a single punch into his shoulder. In my underweight, eighteen-year-old mind, this should have been enough to knock him right over, Goliath-like. Instead it nearly knocked him (and several onlookers) over with laughter.

A late April snowstorm has melted in the sun and what’s left is freezing with the moonrise. The gravel alley is pocked and mudslick despite the steady dripping of a drainpipe grate. It makes that sound whether you’re standing over it, motionless, or not.

I look down past my feet and think, well that would be a bad place to die.

Two ducks touch wings and swoop, silent, overhead. You follow them into a blur of red and white car lights at the intersection – the one you crossed when, at age seven, you were first sent on your own to buy milk at the gas station.

Someone appears in front of a house wearing a neon cycling vest backed by a flashing red light. He’s on the phone promising his dad he’ll return for dinner next week. He does this while directing the bike with one hand toward a steep hill, in dim light. I stand aside.

I walk home. Beside the front walk there are two dozen neat miniature bootprints in the snow. You can image a line of little girls in rain boots standing there, saluting you, perhaps. In fact they are all my daughter, who knows nothing of salutes.

Inside I’m told she has requested a goodnight kiss, so I shake off my coat and scarf and pad softly into her room. If I snuggle her, she says, she knows she will be able to sleep right away, so can I just snuggle her for a minute?

Who could refuse this sort of question?

Her bed is pink and narrow and short, because it’s for kids, and although I hang off of it in several directions, I find it the most comfortable place in the house. She tells me she tried to keep her eyes closed but she just can’t, and I tell her that’s ok, you can just leave them open.

I tell her that the minutes before you fall asleep – before your eyelids get too heavy – those are the best part of the day. When you can think about how everything works and just look at the ceiling. You have nothing to do, and nothing you can do, really, except wait for sleep to come. And watch the dark fill up.

I tell her I’ll always protect her and help her, no matter what happens or where she goes. I tell her I think she’s amazing. I stroke her forehead and say I can’t wait to find out what will happen in her life; what she’ll learn, who she’ll meet, where she’ll end up, how she’ll get there.

This is my daughter, lying here beneath my right arm, breathing evenly, listening to me clumsily explain how much I love her.

This is my daughter falling asleep.

Ayla’s feet tucked under her upside-down-heart-shaped butt while she kneels in the bathtub in front of the faucet, lapping up water from the cold trickle I’ve left running for her.

I ignore her for part of the bath, playing games on my phone, variously feeling guilty and justified with my behavior. I’ve been with her all day, so a break for tongue-lolling-out time is deserved. On the other hand, it’s not the first time I’ve ignored her today, for video games or other reasons.

I eventually break from the phone’s magnetic hold, like a junked car breaking away from the giant magnet that spells its doom/new-life. And I watch her talking to her rubber baby bath toy, telling it to sit and saying other things that make little sense to me.

When common sense and the clock tell me it’s time to empty the bath and get the most important human being in the world to bed, I flick down the drain switch and sing the clean up song. She doesn’t notice (or doesn’t care), and keeps on playing long after the water’s gone. Adults never hang out in empty bathtubs. Only children.

Then I hoist her up on my lap in a towel and comb her ridiculously beautiful hair for a long time, being pointlessly thorough. I enjoy looking at her, even at the back of her head, and she’s not squirming.

We read several books several times, and then I catch her stubbornly rubbing her eyes. She knows she’s tired but tries to hide it. So I scoop her up and place her in bed with three pacifiers surrounding her. She samples each one, rotating (I think) to get the freshest. I pat her back, her legs extended long behind her as she lies on her stomach, toes pointed slightly inward, her right heel swaying rhythmically.

“Song?” She says, pushing up on her forearms. It’s late August; the sun is going down earlier and earlier, leaving something like dream-light coming through the sheer white curtains. I sing until she falls asleep.

Three brown worms, soaked and bloated, writhed half-dead on the sleet-covered sidewalk. What would become of those worms? What chance, frankly, did they have?

Are there daring stories of worm survival? Homeric tales of chaotic spring floods and tortuous hours squirming on concrete deserts, searching for the way home to roots and dark earth and subterranean safety?

On this frigid spring day, as I hunched and grimaced toward my weekly tennis match, I thought, probably not. “These three worms are dead meat,” I thought.

The deaths of worms seem gruesome at first; smeared by sneakers, bisected by beaks, or simply drowned in pathetic puddles mere fractions of a centimeter deep. And then, when the weather passes and everyone is out enjoying the first warm hours of spring, baked by the sun into brittle mummification.

But our deaths are gruesome, too. And prolonged, usually, by modern medicine. And indoors, most likely, away from the light and the fresh air, however brisk this late in April.

Are there daring stories of human survival? Homeric or otherwise? Surely.

Every human story is one of daring survival, from first breath to last. Though our puddles are deeper and we are less prone to smearing.

Perhaps I underestimated them. Those worms. Maybe one would bravely bear hours of freezing drizzle while I slapped and scampered at tennis balls (for naught: I lost) and live to see the clouds break. Maybe a dozen sidewalk-goers’ random walks would miraculously eschew her. And then, spongy and addled (though brainless), she would blindly vermiculate in the lucky direction of the grass, not the street.

There she would rest a moment, marveling, tasting once more her native soil, before taking renewed strength in thoughts of loved ones, and burrowing down into the dirt.

Except I didn’t. Underestimate them. Because I came out of my match two hours later, sweaty and defeated, and saw the three of them right where I left them. Super dead. Seriously.

I took the loss better than usual, as you might imagine, since I was in a mental state of picturing deaths worse than my own. Any defeat is quite bearable, actually, compared to those sad, drowned, frozen worms.

Somehow just the possibility of their heroism – though not realized that day, still entirely plausible – buoyed me. Maybe it was the sunshine, but I got back in my car thinking not of my seven double-faults, but of resilience and determination and stoic bravery. And of loved ones

All those things and more standing between me and my own native soil, which I, too, will someday taste.