Supernova.

*** I haven't written fiction (and shown it to anyone) for a really, really, really, really long time. This is a bit of a leap for me. The Unsinkable Jennifer. ***

Last year, when the Clatterbuck boy broke his neck playing football up at the high school, a group of neighbors clustered like grapes at the end of the sidewalk up to his house. They stayed there long after word had come that he’d reached the hospital and was in stable enough condition. They stayed after dark, long past supper time. The houses all along both sides of the street dark, as if everyone had gone on vacation at the same time. The whole neighborhood looked vacant. Except the Clatterbuck’s yard.

Children, too far past hunger to care, too close to bedtime to alert their parents to they’d missed dinner, whooped and whirled across the grass, jumping the landscaping and making a mess of Mandy Clatterbuck’s carefully sculpted boxwood borders. Every once in awhile, a reeling child would pierce the din of parental concern and the trespasser would be chastised before rejoining the melee.

The next morning, it looked like a miniature cyclone, not four feet tall, had gone through Mandy’s yard and her yard only. God’s eye is sharp, his aim precise.

I don’t imagine she cared. She was scarcely there for months, while Kyle recovered. It was slow going. There was lots of therapy, but Mandy is one of those people who manages life with grace no matter what is tossed at her. Be it poison ivy or personal catastrophe, she’d breeze through with a picnic and a remedy in her pocket she just happened to pick up the other day somewhere or other. Her mother was like that too. Stalwart. Dependable. As if they were goods ordered from the L.L. Bean catalogue. It was her mother that took over her house and straightened her hedges while Mandy was away. She held birthday parties for the youngers and school-shopped for the elders. One Saturday, she reglazed all the windows on the front of the house. I imagine she did the others, as well, but I can’t say. For the rest of it, my view was obstructed.

I never will forget that night, when catastrophe turned convivial in the Clatterbuck’s driveway. My daughter wanted to go out and play with the other children, but I wouldn’t let her. I found it ghoulish. I couldn’t imagine an event more suited for quiet. Here a child had been horribly injured, helicoptered to a hospital 100 miles away, and it was time for a weenie roast in absentia in the child’s driveway. We didn’t know yet if the child lived or died. It was like the accident was a light bulb, suddenly illuminating the darkness, and the neighbors, like moths, just caught the glint of it in the distance and rushed, in plaid shorts and halter dresses, to jump in the fray.

My husband rolled his eyes at my refusal and scooped our daughter up, all sticky with popsicle, and piggybacked her over there. He didn’t see the problem. But he grew up here. In this very house. My son, he stayed with me and watched from the window.

But I’m alone here now, watching. And this time the gathering is assembled at the terminus of my own driveway. And my husband and daughter are out among them again. My daughter has lost one of her pigtails, so she looks quite wild. Somewhere, I have an impulse to try to catch her to fix it. Somewhere, I see it as beautiful and begin to smile. Somewhere, I am irritated she always manages to lose one of each matching pair of everything. Sandals. Hair bows. Socks. Somewhere, I know I stashed another pack of cigarettes back before I pretended to quit and I want to go search them out between the towels or among the sheets, but I can’t go just now.

When I was a child, my grandmother’s linen cabinet was my favorite place in the world. I don’t remember how I figured out I fit in there, probably playing hide and seek, but once I found it, I never left my grandmother’s house without stealing away to hide in there. The cool cotton beneath my cheek. The smell of laundry soap and lavender and sun. One time, I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was gone. But I woke up to an empty house and the far-off sound of someone calling my name.

It was my mother. And then my father. And then farther still, my grandparents. All from different directions and I didn’t know which way to go. It was evening and the barn swallows were cutting their precise paths through the air, grabbing up mosquitoes. And the bats appeared, with their leather wings trailing the surface of the pond down past the barn.

I was sitting on the porch when my uncle’s truck pulled up and my mother, whose face was quite wide, but whose features were arranged right in the very center of it, looked stricken, much more so than usual. I often wondered what happened, with such a large canvas, why God would choose to paint her features so close together they almost seemed to lay one atop the other.

But it was all okay because I was there. And quickly she smiled and grabbed me far too tightly and took me in the kitchen and made me cinnamon toast and told me all about how they thought I was missing, how I’d been gone such a long, long time. How Uncle Johnny was sure I’d gone down to see about the rabbits and how they waited on the porch for more than an hour and she kept saying, “Johnny, we’ve got to go see about her. She’s been gone too long.” But how nobody really got worried until Mamaw got worried. And then everybody set about to look.

But I have looked now in every cabinet and every drawer and under every bed and I cannot find my son. He is not in the basement or the attic and darkness is hanging around the corners of the doors and I still cannot find him. No one has seen him, anywhere. And my husband, travelling the neighborhood, calling his name, has acted as the beacon to the end of my driveway. And as every new gadfly appears, I know that is one more place my son is not.

We have summoned the police. We have given them recent photographs. We have watched their cars, sleek as sharks, slide through the streets on either side of our house. And I am not Mandy Clatterbuck. I have no magic picnic baskets or mail-order potions. I am horribly irregular. I’m not even sure why I am here. And my son, that strange little duck, who just seemed to appear fully formed, a grown man, in the body of an infant, is not broken. He is not waiting to be mended. There is no team of surgeons to reassure me. He is gone. There is just absence.

And I cannot lay my hand to his forehead and tell him everything is alright. And I cannot even give in to a full fit of worry because I keep just expecting him to pop up somewhere. I just keep looking at the bend in the road. I just keep watching the doors of the neighbor’s houses, waiting for them to open and him to appear. And I can laugh when he says he was only hiding somewhere and tell him that happened to me too once, when I was a child.

And telling him that story would be like a watershed for me. And we would move forward from this moment and I would be a better mother. And I would try to be what they needed more. I would comfort more. I would connect. Or at least I would try. I would try to wake up and not drift off out the window, awash in my own thoughts for an hour or more while the children wait for breakfast. I would hug them to me and ball them up tight. I would feel everything a mother should feel as it should be felt, when I should feel it. If only, just one of those doors would open, and out he would come. I would see his little round face, still sleepy, and realize he had his green shorts on, because when the police were here, I really couldn’t say.

Dear God. I would forgive everything. I would forgive every horrible thing. I would make myself supple and pliant. I would bend and find grace. I would venture out of my house to survey another’s tragedy on a mild summer evening if only it would just magically be another’s tragedy and not my own. I can’t have this kind of moment. I can’t have this happen to me.

What will I do? How can I go on from this?

I watch my husband. I have heard him explaining I am by the telephone, waiting for word. And ladies I don’t know offer to sit with me, worry I’m alone, but he reassures them I am where I need to be. But I am not. Even with today’s portability, I am a good three rings from the telephone. Maybe four. I figure kidnappers and hospitals and police detectives will allow me a few rings to answer.

And I punish myself for thinking these thoughts. He is not gone. And I am so selfish. I am so selfish. My son could be dead. He could by dying this moment and I am thinking wry thoughts about ransom and telephone etiquette. But then I say that it is only my surety that he is fine, soon to return, that allows for my sarcasm. This is what I do, constantly both berate and defend myself. And who can even answer a phone when one’s hands tremble like this?

And is this all real? All this emotion? Or am I only doing what I think I should? Am I only emulating other mothers I’ve seen on television movies about children who disappear never to return? It’s as if I’ve been humming along my whole life waiting for something to happen. And now it’s happening. And I want to go back to renegotiate the situation. But I can’t. Because God’s eye is sharp, his aim precise. And this whole plan has been planned so far in advance, without my knowing and the whole bitter lot of it has just been converging down to this moment, this wretched moment, ratcheting down and tightening until I am so very small and smaller and smaller, until I am the very universe just moments before exploding and I’ve only just realized all of this has been happening. And it all makes sense now, suddenly. And it’s clear. And here I am. I am the target, dead-center, the bullseye. And enjoy it because in the future, like stars, you’ll be finding bits of me in everything.

On the radio.

I can remember being a kid sitting by the window in my room, radio on, finger poised on the duo record/play button on my cassette recorder, waiting for one of my many favorite songs to come on so I could record them, capture lightning in a boom box, and play it back whenever I wanted. I could never quite get the whole song. My method was flawed, but it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for the task. I spent the majority of one summer (I think between 5th and 6th grades) honing my skills before ultimately settling on simply recording the end of every song and station break ready for what might be next.

I spent a lot of baby sitting money on blank tapes. So much that I probably could have just bought the majority of music I wanted, but that idea never occurred to me. Don't know whether I'm dense or just naturally thrifty. I lean toward density because despite the amount of recording I did and the number of songs I captured (Chaka...Chaka Khan...) I rarely, if ever, played back anything I taped.

Frankly, I think I just loved the radio. I loved the serendipity of it, the singular joy it brought when one of my favorite songs was played at the very moment I happened to be listening; when you had no choice, but to stop what you were doing, turn up the sound and sing really loudly because who knew when you were going to hear it again?

I still love the radio. I love NPR because I'm in my 30's and I'm supposed to, but for music, despite the proliferation of ipods and satellite and on-line on-demand music services, nothing beats a good radio station.

And good radio is really hard to find. Most radio stations gave up the love of music so necessary to ceaselessly put it on 24-hours-a-day in favor of airing a jangled auditory gee-gaw of gossip, traffic, sports and doofishness (trademark!). Nearly all radio is "talk" radio whether they embrace the moniker or not. What used to be bastions of local identity, culture, music and flair are now mostly all the products of marketeering and playlists generated based not on what people genuinely adore, but on what corporate record companies (teamed with whatever other merchandising/product tie-in/tatertot making groups) want us to buy. And well, that's just messed up.

When I was in middle school, the coolest DJ at the coolest radio station in town was my BFF's dad. He played what we liked. And I know that there were plenty of shenanigans going on (in the radio business. Would never dream of besmirching the rep of the awesome Wayne Fanning), but it was at least a bit more organic, more local, more about the listener, more human.

Satellite radio, although still made by people at some point, just seems to sterile for me to get into. When we had satellite television, we also got satellite radio by proxy. Even though I couldn't find a good radio station to save my life, I couldn't fall in love with radio on the TV. Very surgical and precise, neatly packaged in specific increment, I would never be surprised by a pea in my carrots. So specific were the genres, it would be nearly impossible to be surprised by anything beamed to my ears from on-high. And I'm the kind of girl that likes the random weed that pops up in the garden. That's where I find inspiration and why I've got wood sorrel in a pot on my porch. I'm willing to wager more imaginations are being dulled by satellite radio at this very moment than Nickelodeon.

Why aren't we willing to take any kinds of risks anymore? Why are so many of us so complacent, eating the same Lean Cuisine we could find in Terra Haute, Toronto, Texarkanna, or Taiwan, listening to the same songs we could hear broadcast in the same way worldwide as well?

There's so much to hear out there. Shouldn't we all begin by listening to as much as possible?

The good news is that some people out there are thinking and doing, not just bitching and grousing like me. In my neck of the woods, you can get local, excellent radio via WNRN. You can also listen on-line if you don't live in range. It's community supported, meaning that the listeners donate money (about that, it's coming, I swear, I'm just so poor right now, dude, for real...)to keep the station afloat, and while there are businesses that underwrite programming who get plugs every now and again, there are no commercials.

The best part of WNRN though isn't the lack of commercials or the wicked fund raiser t-shirts, it's the true love for music - all music - that pours right through the speakers and out the rolled-down windows of the car. Though primarily a modern rock station, you can hear pretty much anything a pretty much anytime. If you want a dedicated hour of bluegrass, you can hear just that at the appointed hour, but you're just as likely to hear an Old Crow Medicine Show song smushed between old-school Depeche Mode and something so new you never even heard anything like it ever before.

And the best part of all about WNRN is the responsiveness of the on-air crew. Hear something you like, but miss the station break, just give them a call. They'll tell you what it was, the album it came off of, give you a personal critique of the rest of it and wish you a heartfelt "good day!" all in about 17 seconds. And best of the best of all, if you're hearing just a little bit too much of something, say Aimee Mann whinging endlessly on about your having a lot of money, but not being able to afford the freeway, you can give them a call explaining that you will have to go find a puppy with cancer to kick if you happen to hear it one more time in a given day, and they'll take a wee break from playing it. Just for you. And just because you asked them to.

Not that I would ever have done such a thing. I personally love Aimee Mann. Really. Can't you tell? No irony there. At. All. Uh-uh. 'Til Tuesday was boss. Oh, shush. Keep it down now. Voices carry...even that shower-curtain-hook earring, dating an asshole at the opera video was right on. Who hasn't lived through that? Dude, if I could sing one to three notes max without ever moving my jaw, I'd *be* Aimee Mann myself...and gladly.

Life is bigger with real radio. Life is better, too. Why would we accept anything less? Even if we don't always like what we're hearing, it still gives us something, even if it's just the motivation to cross the room to turn it off for give or take three-and-a-half minutes. Come and join me in the magnificent joy of hearing the best song ever at 1:13 pm on a random afternoon when the mundanity of everyday tasks had gotten overwhelming and for a brief moment, the Universe turns her shining face to you, and you just have to stop what you're doing, turn up the radio and dance. Because who knows when it will come around again.

Wee peeps

Children. What good are they?

Always at your back, mouths full of something, usually fingers. Theirs or someone else's.

And what are their fingers full of?

Is it something intentional like snot or peanut butter?

Or is it an unplanned menagerie of dirt and sweat and hand sanitizer?

It's really impossible to say, isn't it? And which is better? Fingers slurped free of snot are better than fingers full of snot, right? At least marginally? Maybe?

No. I know. None are better.

There are a great many people who think the answer to Global Everything is negative population growth. Me, with my three children, I've had the word "Breeder" snarled about me by people with far too many pets.

I have.

I try to get angry about it, like David, but I can't really.

Some of us are meant to raise impossibly small dogs that run counter to any evolutionary imperative and some of us are meant to raise children (who, funnily enough, will grow up to comfort those who spent their lives raising anything small enough to fit in a teacup and also walked on a leash by running geriatric facilities with names like Papillion Acres and slogans like "You're Shit-zu can't wipe your ass, but we can!").

Maybe this isn't an appropriate topic for Father's Day. Maybe it's the most appropriate topic. Parenting is the devil's business, even God left it to someone else when it came to his own Son. So, for someone like me, who is spending the greater part of her life doing nothing other than parenting, sometimes, I get a little punchy.

Sometimes, I refuse to help my son get his arms out of his sweater. Even though he's all sweaty and as close to swearing as is possible for an eight-year-old who knows all the words, but has sense enough not to say them. Sometimes , I make him go in the grocery store with one arm going this-away and the other going that-away with a sweater holding him hostage because, well, an eight-year-old should not be befuddled by a sweater at all, should he?

And despite the looks I get from other, kinder parents, yes I do insist he help get the groceries, even if he is mostly strait-jacketed and ends up trying to kick a box of Ritz crackers into the cart because he can't use his hands.

I parent with ginger and lemon zest. Don't get caught by me doing something stupid. I will cancel a birthday party. But that's not as bad as David who threatened to cancel Christmas one year. Not the Jesus part, just the presents. I would never do that. That'd be like punishing myself.

At school once, in the lunch-line when Schuyler was in Kindergarten, I politely reminded one of her classmates not to spit on another person - me. He didn't listen and proceeded to do it again and again. Now, I am good humored and understand that children are, in fact, children and don't expect more of them than they can deliver, but only up to a point. Just as I was about to get pretty stern with the child, Schuyler popped in with, "You better listen to my mama. She won't hit you, but she will talk you down to the ground!" Never a truer thing spoken of me and how I raise my children.

I love them dearly, but daggone, it's a lot of work. A lot of thankless, repetitive, mind-numbing work. Perhaps not as much as raising show dogs, but I don't get a clicker or the benefit of hiding an old piece of chicken between my teeth for coercion. And I can't tuck my kids into a crate at night or lock them up in one in an outbuilding when I need to accomplish something or get some sleep. This now, is being written with a one-year-old playing base jumper from my shoulder over and over.

So, why now am I contemplating homeschooling the same child who can't escape a sweater instead of sending him off to fifth grade?

I dunno.

I love him?

I think he's neat?

I see him growing up into this young man and I want him to have the kind of childhood that launches one into greatness?

Even in a life free from the wardrobe-wonders that are the pull-over sweater and vest?

He's really a wonder, my Eli. He's so much like my husband and myself. And not in all the good ways, either. Even though he's still so young, I see emerging some of the same self-limiting idiosyncrasies I see in myself. I didn't realize, when he was younger, how important it was to my children to always try to be better than myself. And Eli's got a lot of self-doubt and also has my nasty habit of finding the coldest corner in the room and sitting there, so no one else has to. Like he doesn't deserve better.

I'm not really sure how homeschooling will help with that. And I'm not sure I'm not being selfish and just trying to grab at the trailing remains of his childhood and keep them for myself.

I love school. I think it's important. But frequently, with Eli, I wonder why he's having to jump through so many hoops he clearly doesn't need to. When you are spelling "Anachronistic" in 4th grade without having to look, you already know how to spell. Why spend more time on spelling? Why not do something else with that time?

Eli aced his 4th grade SOL tests, two with an emerging abcessed teeth requiring emergency surgery, and one the day after that surgery. If you can manage that, how truly challenged have you been?

But the school is still a school and has to function for the greater good of everybody. That isn't a bad thing, but for Eli, I want to try something different. Instead of always reigning him in, I want to let his throttle run wide open and see what happens.

How many people who have truly changed the world trace their different points of view back to time spent doing something different than their peers? I mean, there's Einstein and Twain and Roosevelt and Kahlo....and hundreds upon hundreds of others. It could be that their stories just haven't been written, but I've yet to hear story upon story about inmates who attributed their lives of crime to a year spent being home schooled or bedridden.

I want Eli to have the kind of break you can only get when you're a kid. I want him to dawdle and stare. I want to allow him to have the mind space to think and learn and create without limits or interruptions. I want to help him wrestle with and pin down those dogging demons I unwittingly sat on his shoulder now before they're dug in tight.

I want to give him the world. But I can't. I can only give him the opportunity to reach out and take it for himself; show him that he's worth it and worthy of it. And I'm just the person for that job, I think.

addendum.

Sitting here this morning, listening to The Pretenders, I realize I have not been entirely fair. David will argue with me about this, but I think that I do owe my father one very important thanks. Probably a great deal more, but right now, I am thinking of his record collection.
He didn't leave it for me. Rather, when he moved to NYC, he left it at my grandparents' house. There, it sat in a cabinet in the basement until I rediscovered it one day.
One of the few interactions I can remember having with my father was about Heart of Glass by Blondie. He was a big music fan and fancied himself a musician. Still does, apparently. It's not that he was any good, but he did have good taste in music. I think he had good taste in lifestyle as well. He was a young man in the early 80s, when there was so much good music, and New York City looked as glossy as it did gritty - just the right mix. And who exemplified this more than Debbie Harry? I think no one.
I don't remember how old I was, but I do remember him listening to the record in my grandparents' living room. And I remember standing in the doorway, listening. I really liked Blondie, the way a young child likes music. Like my daughter loves The Scissor Sisters, Weezer and Vampire Weekend. The lyrics of songs do not inform her life as much as they are informed by it. There are a great many things about which my 7-year-old has no idea. And those things are the topics of a great many good songs. She makes up pictures in her head to make sense of the words. I did the same thing.
I guess I was singing or something. I don't recall how it happened, but for just a moment, my father spoke to me like I was really there and like I mattered. He seemed slightly impressed. Maybe he thought I was something like him after all. I don't know. Maybe he realized we were actually related for a second and I just didn't appear from nothing to send his life skittering off track. I really can't say.
But he gave me his two Blondie albums. Maybe it's because, like any little girl trying to stand out to her father, I seemed awed a bit by him. If anything, that is probably what he liked best. Little children can make small grown people feel mightily important.
When he left for NYC, he didn't take a lot with him. There'd been this incident a few years before in which he threatened to kidnap me and never let his parents see me again if they didn't give him some money. It didn't go well for him. His parental rights were taken away, according to my mother, and I wasn't allowed to be alone in a room with him. Before that, he'd sometimes come take me to a movie. I can remember the previews of a movie I saw with him. A huge paper cup emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo spun slowly on the screen, condensation pouring down the sides. That's what I remember, Coke. More often than not, he'd not show up and I'd sit at the end of the sidewalk of our house on Fairmont Ave. and wait.
After the "threat", though, even that didn't happen anymore. It's hard to sit now and piece all of that together. It was so long ago and I was a kid. I guess I was somewhat protected from the truth, but then, my mother wields her personal truth like a cudgel and no one is immune from its blows. Probably I knew more than I should have. Probably I struggled to make sense of it. At any rate, I didn't really see him anymore after that. Except that one time in my grandparents' living room, even though he lived in an apartment in their basement, until he left for good.
I don't know why he didn't take his albums with him. He left most everything behind. Breaking free, I think. Starting completely over. Reinventing himself into a person more to his liking. There were hundreds of albums left in the basement. My grandparents' kept them forever, because they were his and one day, he might come back for them. I knew that wasn't going to happen, but I was glad they were there.
I was like a mini-archeologist, in search of some previously unknown, forgotten people, sorting through all the albums, meticulously scrutinizing every inch of cover art. The Tom Tom Club. Talking Heads. The Clash. Elvis Costello. The Pretenders. The Police. It was years before I actually took one home and listened to it. For the longest time, the records, stacked in the cabinet smelling of cardboard and Ivory Snow, existed for me in every way except the one in which they were most intended.
The music became my father to me. Although I could not picture him or hear is voice (and still can't), I could hear the voices and sounds he chose to surround himself with.
And they were good. Any port in a storm. I took what I could get.

Panzer-man, Panzer-man, Oh You

I was reading an essay yesterday that said when you are a writer, even in times of great, personal tragedy there is an awareness that whatever the event is will work its way into your writing someday. This particular article centered around the death of the author's father and how he explored the unknown portions of his father's life after his death, learning much about him, but ulitmately coming up with more questions than answers.
This reminded me of the David Sedaris story "Repeat After Me" in which his sister swears him to secrecy about a particularly embarassing personal story only to have him include it in a story later on. Whenever I am faced with difficulty, I try to remind myself that one day, this will only be a story I tell. To me, this is very encouraging. The stories I tell tell a lot about me and it is very therapeutic to put things in that context. I often try to console friends in that way, telling them that this too shall pass and be spoken of later, probably with laughter.
The more I write - some things to publish here and some things not - the more I find myself compelled to write about things that are uncomfortable. Not so much painful, but just strange. Somehow, I find the oddities of my life fascinating. I look back sometimes and think, "Wow. How the hell did I end up here?"
I did not come from a very together family. My grandparents (my father's parents when I was a child and my mother's parents as a young adult) positively informed much more of my life than either of my parents, especially my father. I have had no contact with my father for the past 18 years, at least. Before then, what interaction there was was spotty and weird. I'm pretty certain he didn't want to be a father. And that's okay. He was young - 16 -, most likely gay, and viewed me as more a rival than someone to love and take care of. I've often said that my life is much better not having had a father if he was the father I was going to get. I truly believe this to be true and it is something I realized at a very young age.
Needless to say, I don't give my father a great deal of thought. He lived in New York City. I knew that. My grandmother - his mother - loved him very much, but she was very honest about him. She used to tell me, "Jennifer, my father was a son-of-a-bitch and your father is a son-of-a-bitch, but he's my son and I love him." Her way of loving people without making excuses for them taught me how to love people unconditionally and honestly.
By and large, it is a remarkably good thing that I had very little to do with my father; that he wanted very little to do with me. Sometimes, when I watch my husband with our children, I am glad that they have a father that is so loving and devoted to them, but I rarely regret that I lacked that. Going along in my grown-up life, trying to take care of my family and myself, my house and garden, I don't spend too much time thinking about anyone in particular, certainly not my father. So, you can imagine my surprise when trying to find a cousin on Facebook, I came upon my father instead. Top of the page.
"Huh?" was my reaction, coupled with this very strange teetering feeling, like swinging back and forth in the seat perched highest on Ferris Wheel. I had very quick thoughts about a potential life with him in it, not as a father, but as an aquaintance and a friend. In his profile picture, I saw my own face. My freckles. My eyes.
I think it must have been something like finding one's birth parents after a lifetime of being adopted. I know who my family is. This man is not it, but still that spark of recognition is a powerful one.
Like, being a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge misplaced in a puzzle of some botanical gardens somewhere. It's not that that is a bad place to be, it's just that you don't fit. And even if by some random dye-cut miracle you find a spot that feels right, the architectural nature of your image is counter to the rest of the verdant landscape.I think your father makes your place in the world. I didn't have that. I made my own place, shoved myself in wherever I could manage to fit.
You see, I never really loved my father. I never really felt anything for him at all. He was just there or not there. Maybe like a fellow traveler on the bus you see every day, then you don't see them. You notice the absence, but don't really wonder why they aren't there. My parents divorced when I was two and I had a series of step-fathers that didn't really want to be my father either.
My grandfathers have always been more father to me than anyone else. My grandmothers more mother. My father's father always sought to protect me from his son. The last time I saw my father, I didn't know he was visiting. I came through the door into my grandparents' kitchen with David behind me and saw someone I didn't recognize. It
was my father, oddly enough as he never came home. My grandfather got up from his chair and inserted himself between my father and me. My father turned and went down the hallway out of sight, but my grandfather stayed there, between me and the empty spot where my father had been. Normally, we would have stayed for hours, but we left that day. It's the only time I ever left my grandparents' house without one of them saying, "Don't go." It was strange, but I can't say that I felt anything.
The next time I saw my father was not at either of my grandparent's funerals, though he did visit Virginia one other time before either of their deaths. No, the next time I saw his face, his picture fell from my grandmother's Bible, just last summer.
It was a school picture. He looked to be 8 or 9. Because he really didn't have anything to do with me, no one had ever taken me on a tour of who he was. I had never really seen pictures of him and still, I can't tell you the difference, most of the time, between a photograph oh him or my uncle as children. But this picture, it was
definitely my father. He looked exactly like my son. And in that moment, I loved him. I loved the bits in him that became bits in me and later, bits in my very own children. I loved him because my grandmother had fiercely guarded her love for him, although he tried his hardest to kill the roots of it in her heart. She loved him how
I love my children, I think. And I loved that I learned that from her through how horrible he was. It was a small price.
When I found his Facebook page, it was like standing at a doorway at the edge of an abyss. I could jump and fall and hope I landed somewhere better or I could step back, close the door and walk away. Even though I knew I should close the door, I couldn't help but linger. I got brave and did an Internet search for his name. I saw his address and telephone number, his MySpace page and even read an autobiography of himself posted somewhere. It didn't include me and painted a very different picture of his parents than the people I'd seen. That hurt my heart. And after listening to a few of his songs on MySpace, I closed the door and walked away. What could have been wasn't and never will be. The sooner I remind myself of that, the better.
It's just that every now and again I get nostalgic. And nostalgia is always made up of things that are nice. I want to walk a familiar landscape, know people that knew people I miss, be in a group that when we laugh, it all runs together because we all learned to smile from the same sets of lips. I was abandoned by my father and abandoned my mother. I am adrift. Or sometimes I feel like it.
Until I remember my husband, my two sons and my daughter and think to the future and my vision of my happiest moments to be, standing at the front door with cars filling my driveway, rubbing the flour from my hands, opening my arms to surrender more of the love that made life worth living, without thinking about everything I went without, only about all the abundance I have.

Oh, what a terrible belly-ache when all we consume is plastic and fake...

We returned from Little Rock, Arkansas last night. My sister got married this past weekend. It was a beautiful thing. When people in love truly compliment one another, it is a pleasure to see them not only realize how well they fit together, but also to see them demonstrate that understanding by getting married - which is why everyone truly in love should be able to get married. But that's a post for another day when I'm feeling rancorous.
Today, I am feeling...yucky. It took two days to get to Arkansas and another two to get back. And I don't know if you know this about us, but we are not wealthy people. This means, we can't spend $100/day on food. So, the way home was spent cobbling together cold meals eaten straight from the Kroger bag. Don't get me wrong, today's still-digesting doughnuts (burf!) will be next week's fond memory, but today, they are still digesting.
We did have two splurge meals on the trip, though. One on the way down and one on the way home. Both were eaten at landmark eating establishments in Tennessee and both we had visited before - at least parts of us had. But one was a luxury and one was crap. Dualism, shall we ever escape your two-fisted grasp?
The Loveless Cafe in Nashville is a true treat. It's been there forever and is still a place well worth stopping. The biscuits are yummy. The people are sweet. And the atmosphere is eclectic enough to be interesting without stooping to country cliche. Yes, you may find an enamelware ladle on the wall, but it belongs there. It's not just tossed up with a candle and a cracker box to evoke a place that may have been, but never really was a la Cracker Barrel.
The Loveless Cafe has parlayed its stature as a well-known down-home eatery into all kinds interesting and worthwhile ventures. There's a thriving gift shop and on-line business as well as a great many shops surrounding the cafe in what was formerly the adjacent motel. There is even a new barn built to host events. All of these are examples of how the owners of the Loveless took what they had - a reputation for good food, an empty motel and an outparcel of land - and made the most of it. They didn't raze the building and build a big new, shiny structure and start making their biscuits from a mix straight off the Sysco truck. They took their uniqueness in the industry and branded it, making their identity in the quirk rather than eliminating it.
What started out as a family selling hot meals from their own kitchen to travelers has become a multi-generational business that still shines and becomes more of itself with every year.
Brooks Shaw's Old Country Store at Casey Jones Village in Jackson, however, yeah, they didn't do that.
I don't know what that place used to be. David went there once 20 years ago and remembers it fondly, but twenty is a lot of years and the shine's done gone off that apple...and it went about 19-and-a-half years ago. It just goes to show you can instruct your employees to answer the phone, "Hey, Y'all!" but it's kind of hollow if they follow it up by being asses.
Maybe it's just the nature of a buffet that brings out the worst in both people and food. When you can get all that you can conceivably carry back to your table, people tend to hover like vultures over a splattered opossum, snapping their serving tongs, grabbing up each piece of "Cracklin' Corn Bread"...not because they are hungry, but just because it's there and they can. No food - aside from Brunswick Stew and apple butter, both cooked outstide over a flame - tastes better out of a vat.
I grew up on country cooking. Some of my fondest memories are of my granmother's pinto beans steaming in a bowl flanked by a generous brick of her cornbread. I don't know which fat tasted better, what was floating in the pot liquor or what was soaking into the bread. It's not the milieu I object to, not at all.
I love fried green tomatoes.
I love fried okra.
In fact, I love just about anything that started off green and ended battered and deep-fried.
Mashed potatoes, all the better.
Did you say navy beans? I say, "Don't forget about me."
Turnip greens? Good Lord.
And I got to eat all of those things at the Old Country Store. At least, they rather resembled those things, but they didn't really taste like them and my gut was heavy with regret. Still is. And that banana pudding...well, it sounded good and that was about all the good that could be wrung out of it.
Brooks Shaw's Old Country Store is surrounded by a make-believe village built around the legend of a man that died a tragic death in a train wreck caused by the elevation of a timetable over the value of human life. And the buffet at the Old Country Store is a further manifestation of that misalignment in priorities. There, you can eat as much as you can waddle out with still in you. And you can buy as much faux-country-store paraphrenalia as you can hold, but when you stop and really think about it, did you ever really want all that? And did you enjoy it? Did it enrich your life? Or did it just fill you with regret and flatulence?
It's one thing when David and I, barely erect after a meal, say, "Never again." But when the children, 6 and 9, echo the setiment, then you know that was a dinner gone horribly, horribly wrong.
But then, the business itself was thriving. The parking lot was full and we even waited in line to get seated. (And doesn't that just burn you up? When you wait in line for something that's just bad.) And it wasn't cheap, either. And I may be a fat girl, but I am a fat girl who eats with the skinny people. I cannot for the life of me understand how any human person could return for seconds...or thirds...or fourths. Where I was totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of food available on my one and only trip to the trough, David overheard a woman seated next to us complain to the waiter that there was "hardly anything on there" to eat.
When we left, our fellow diners, many of whom were surrounded by spent red buffet plates when we arrived, were still making the pilgrimage to the buffet and back again. And like I said, it is pretty clear to look at me that eating too much is something of which I am undeniably guilty, but damn. No one in the world needs to have five plates of "dinner" followed by every dessert.
To get to the eating area, you have to walk through the country store part of the Old Country Store. And I guess it's alright. It's full of stuff - a bunch of bulk candy and cookbooks and electrified lanterns that are made to look like they run on kerosene, children's plastic toy trains, pop guns and "hillbilly" crap.
There wasn't a thing in there that a person would actually need, which is what a real country store would have been full of. Unless you actually have a use of the bisected mug that reads, "Well, you said you only wanted a half a cup of coffee!"
It's like, in America, we've become an imitation of ourselves. We go to places with the word "Old" in the name and call it historical... as if that's how things ever were. Like the foods in the grocery store plastered with claims of the health to be aquired within, if they have to shout it so loud, that's probably because they are lying. The past was not rife with opportunities for gluttony or cheap, plastic crap from China. Food was hardwon from the soil and goods were dear, not disposable.
We fill ourselves up with bad food that should taste good if you look at all the calories, fat, salt and sugar involved, but it doesn't.We, however, are so duped we think it's tasty and end up with diabetes and heart disease. And what if we all just blew our minds a little bit and eschewed the white bread and baked our own from whole grains or made a commitment to authenticity in everything at home and abroad.
This is where Wal-Mart comes in, seductress that she is with her tantalizing prices and more-is-better philosophy. They've figured us Americans out and mass-produced a middle-class lifestyle of coordinating hand towels and soap dispensers that make those of us who are struggling financially look like we are doing alright, at least in the bathroom. And now, we're hooked on appearing wealthy with jack to back it up.
Hey, even though I didn't talk about gay marriage, it seems I got my rancor-on after all. Nice. I wrote through nap-time again and now need to vacuum around Willoughby. But that's alright. The dirt in my house is real dirt we came by honestly, the old fashioned way.
If you're out traveling Tennessee way on I40, do stop in at the Loveless Cafe. You won't regret it. The Old Country Store at Casey Jones Village? Do yourself a favor and just keep on driving. You've already been there a hundred times a hundred other places...and you didn't like it then, either.

The was that wasn't or how not to write a poingnant autobiographical essay on life.

I don't ever want to be pregnant again.
I'm sure that's not uncommon among women in their mid-30's with three children. But I really, really don't.
Truly.
I just don't think I could handle another miscarriage. After the first, I thought that God wouldn't do that to me again. My theology was a little naive because He did, if He had anything to do with it all. A third time and I might just break apart, like a glacier into the sea. There'd be a great splash behind your head and you'd whip around at the sound, wherever you happened to be, but in time to see only bubbles and slosh or air where I used to be. And it'd be many moments later, after you'd continued on for a few blocks that you'd wonder, "Wait a minute? Where's Jenny?"
But I'd just be bits awash in the warming ocean, too small to recognize, too far away to see.
Aaaah, why am I writing about this? It's that damn Sufjan Stevens David got me for Mother's Day. I love the gift. I love things that make me think and smile and cry. I just don't want to open this box. I don't want to tip it over and let all that blood and all those tears and all that sorrow spill out.
What if I can't get the lid back on? And I spend the rest of my life in some disconnected, impenetrable bubble of despair? And even if you came to pull me out like a good friend should, my ear drums gone cotton, I'd hear you talking, but my brain wouldn't be able to figure your language out. And any attempts to pull at my person would be like grabbing at noodles, trying to get yourself somewhere.
Save yourselves, I say. It's a sticky, yucky subject. I may be strapped into this carnival ride through the Tunnel of Grief, but you don't have to be. Get out while you still can. Quick, before I throw the lever.

Too late? I'm sorry. Well, at least hold on. Keep your hands and feet inside the car and somebody hand me a Kleenex, will you?

Two years after Eli and eleven months before Schuyler, we lost a baby.
Fifteen months before Willoughby, we lost a baby.

Two.
And I cried and I cried and I cried. I still cry
With the first one, I can remember just being so devastated and sitting on the sofa saying, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." over and over again. David with his arm around me, traveling his own interior landscape on which I could not focus.
I had a little cardboard jewelry box that had belonged to my grandmother. It had a soft cotton liner. The kind I remember pulling apart as a child, pretending I was God separating the clouds to see down below. We put all that remained in the box and had a burial in the back yard of the house we rented.
People, when you have a miscarriage, most people don't know what to do. Some look for fault. Some try to comfort you with the prospects of other future children. Some are resigned that "this just happens sometimes" or "it wouldn't have survived anyway" or "God's will". But because the baby was largely intangible, it's not an actual occurrence for most people.
Who knows if there was an actual baby? Maybe it was an egg with more ideas than real romance. Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe there was nothing at all.
We knew there was an actual baby. I sat and looked at the tiny, tiny twist of umbilical cord, the deflated egg sack. And I put it all in a box. And David and I put it in the ground. Maybe that little heart never struck the first beat. Maybe no steps toward autonomy were ever made. Maybe that baby could never have survived, but it was our child. Our second child.
I was simultaneously honored at having been blessed with that good fortune, even if only for a moment, and then, so devastated at having it all just ripped away. And I apologized again and again. Oh, I was so sorry. Sorry for myself. Sorry for our child. Sorry for whatever I'd done wrong to make this happen. Sorry for every thought I had about how I wasn't ready for this next child. Sorry for the selfish blockade in my heart that filled me with one part dread for every two parts joy or vice versa, depending on the day.
How is it that such relatively short periods of time have such huge impacts on what remains of our lives? I know that if that baby had lived, Schuyler would never have been born. I would not change things as they are. But in that tiny window, that still smaller, budding flower informed more of my world than scarcely anything else I can
imagine.
I thought so much about life. Eli and I found a baby robin, toppled from its nest, and rescued it, feeding it on the half hour until we could get it to a rescue volunteer. I was still bleeding from the baby I'd never hold or feed or know, digging other holes in ground looking for sustenance to pull out, rather than sorrow to put down.
And I realized then, though I've barely spoken about it since, that even though that baby wasn't with us for very long, that baby was also never hungry, never cold or alone. That baby was surrounded in love - my love - from the first divided cell to the last. And you can take your arguments about when life begins and have them at some other intellectual moment afar, because that little life we made, that I sheltered, for that brief blip in time most people don't even remember, barely a turn of the calendar, that tiny, inconsequential creation was alive. And I loved that baby and gave with everything I had. Until I was no longer relevant. And that's no different from any other child with me as a mother. I just hope next time, far in the future, it's me that goes.

And all that said, I'll take my welling eyes and my joy called Willoughby outside to put seeds in the ground. I'll watch melons swell in July and wear my regular clothes.
And another day, I'll try to sort out the rest of it. I'm not sure I'd manage more than a jumbled, keening wail. And that wouldn't make for much by reading.