in memoriam

I could tell by her approach, at dusk, that she was not quite alone. That she had... something. Her gait not as lithe, a shadow on her white chest, her steps, a little tentative.

It was a small bird, coloring to match hers. Wings sticking out of her mouth on two sides. Held gently, all things relative. (No doubt to prolong the utility of the still-living toy.)

It took some effort, but I got the bird, chased away the cat. The cat, ours. The bird, no one's.

The bird had a tiny wing wound, and a spot on her short, fragile neck where feathers were missing. I put a tiny spot of Neosporin on the wound, some vitamin E oil.

I attempted to nurse it to health. Put it in a box. With newspaper, New York Times articles referencing the disaster in the Gulf. A soft nest in one corner of paper towel. I took to calling it "her."

By morning, she seemed to be surprisingly doing well. She would hop a little, and chirp loudly, fly a short distance in the bathroom. Young, but feathered. Not a baby bird - but small bits of fluff still clung just under her wings. An adolescent that Annabeth dubbed "Fred."

While articles on the web seemed to align, faithfully telling me not to attempt to raise a small, especially wounded bird, on my own - wildlife rehab centers are closed on Memorial Day.

Annabeth was especially concerned. She didn't sleep the first night, convinced the bird would die. She said prayers, she cried, she woke up - propelled to find us two floors below - caught in an un-recountable nightmare.

I attempted to feed the bird - water, which she drank a little of; a watery cat food mixture, a tiny bit of mushy banana. She wouldn't eat. Her chirps continued, but her hops looked more enfeebled.

I was twitchy that second night. Job hunting online, unwilling - somehow - to go to bed. Eventually, I gave up. I opened the closed bathroom door, annoyed that the light had been left on. I looked in the box. She had given up, too. More thoroughly than I.

One bird. Taken by one cat. I dug a hole, chipping through Georgia clay and poorly disguised construction debris. Ten short inches down, maybe a foot. I said a quiet prayer. It was two AM.

When Annabeth wakes up, it will be June. And there will be no little bird to drive out to the rehab center - our one plan for the first day of the first full week of summer. She will cry, and I will feel responsible.

Innocent bird, gone. Guilty cat, here. It is her nature to feed on the small things, coloring matching hers. It is her wont to crouch in the grass, pounce, take, celebrate. We will love her no less, and we will mourn her next victory.

pPod

We walked to school for the last time on Tuesday. I didn't realize until probably Friday that this day was coming. Intellectually, I guess, I knew it - but I didn't KNOW it until I was doing it.

We had homemade cookies in hand, hydrangeas picked in the morning from our enthusiastic bushes. We played as we walked to school. There are always imaginings. He has been a super-hero, a friendly bear hunter. He has been looking for his dragon, or trying to outsmart a tiger (our brown striped companion, Chessie, who follows us for most of our walk.)

That morning he said, clutching the flowers, "today we are climbing Snow Mountain to go visit the Queens, with gifts." Queen Jones and Queen Woodard, teachers of pre-K. I told him, yes, gifts: flowers for Beauty and cookies for Sustenance. He repeated this to the teachers when we arrived. I couldn't have been prouder.

What I will miss, I realize now, even more than the walks, is the time that is Ours. The spaces that fill with not-so-much. When we do things - just him and me - or we don't. He helps with laundry, he pushes the vacuum... or he plays alone, talking to his toys: Playmobil pirates, Legos, odds and ends collected from siblings or McDonald's.

Today is Our last day. We'll finish Monsters - vs - Aliens and go for a walk. We'll head to the neighboring neighborhood, where they have the pond he liked to visit when he was two. We'll have a picnic. We'll talk about stuff.

He is five. He is gentle and rambunctious, busy and thoughtful. When he colors, he uses every color on every page. Puppies have purple ears and green noses and yellow tongues. Transforming robots are stripped of their menace in his hands: orange chestplates, giant pink feet.

I'll miss his conversations with Baby Patrick (they are waning, though he still holds a special place.) Eventually, he won't ask me to sing to him at night: made-up words to Brahm's Lullaby, "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" and all three verses of Rainbow Connection. He'll stop accessorizing, putting on a cape in the middle of the day for no reason. Or sunglasses, a cowboy hat, beads strung sideways across his chest.

Since infancy, he has made people laugh. They say, "I would love to be inside HIS head!"

And I have had the pleasure now, for five years, of being granted more time with him - alone - than either of the other two. I was more distracted, often working, this time. But he's been right there, happy to self-entertain and pleased to bring me in when I was available.

Through it, I have had many opportunities to glimpse inside that head. And it's nice in there. It's bright, it's colorful, and most definitely - good things are coming.

Tomorrow the other two are home, as well. We will all tumble into summer and in August, all three will head off to the same school. It will be easier having them all in one place, and it will be inspiring to watch how much he grows.

But I will miss the place where flowers and cookies seemed like all we needed.

Ending

Before we moved from Florida, we got so caught up in the leaving that I have no impression at all of our last trip to the beach. We didn't take pictures, we didn't commemorate it in any way. And yet it was the Most Sacred Thing for me. The reason, above all other reasons, for being there at all.

Things end while we are doing other things.

I certainly don't recall the last time I used a diaper on any child in my house. The last time I guided a tooth brush over tiny teeth, the last time my oldest sat on my lap during church (He is ten. 5'2" and 95 pounds. It was not recently.) You don't know the last time you breast feed a child. You don't recognize the last time you speak to someone in person, or on the phone.

Every ending is, by definition and experience, another beginning. This thing stops, that one takes its place.

Or at least, we are trained to believe this. Lyrics and hindsight seem to confirm it.

I was struck, this morning, by an artist's rendering of the Alaotra grebe, a bird, once in Madagascar. This bird was last seen in 1985.

I wondered if in his birdy thoughts, in his small bird-brain, he looked around and felt lonely. I feel certain, as he was dying, he had no idea just how alone he was. To be the very last of his species. Or maybe he died with his mate, on their small pond, their weak wings never taking them to other ponds.

Looking at the images of oil gushing into the gulf, I cannot help but wonder who else's end is now proscribed. What is going that will not be replaced? Who's lives - human and creature - are irrevocably changed, or destroyed altogether? What chain of events have been put into motion that cannot be reversed?

I cannot fathom the greed, the speciesist (like 'racist,' for species. Is there a word?) thought that says - de facto, we are better. Might = right. Oil will gush until we figure out a way to save - not the creatures, the habitats, the whole life cycles - but the oil. It is, in a word I rarely use, sinful. It defines, for me, sin.

We raise our children clumsily. Small lessons go missed, homework goes undone, days that should have order often disintegrate into chaos or murmers of mindless television. My only wish in that regard is that the things I say - my rants, my lectures, my late-night talks, stick in their back brains and form them in ways my clumsy day-to-day efforts sometimes don't.

I wish, I hope, I pray at night, that when my own Littles are big and in charge, when they are running things or working for things or doing whatever it is they choose to do to Contribute, that they know Beauty. They promote it. They know Others. They see them, and they care for them. They know Work. They seek it. They see what they have, and they are Grateful. And they recognize Wrong, and work toward Right.

Compassionate, passionate contributors. This - what is going on in the Gulf - what is happening to our beaches, marshes, lives - plant and animal and liquid - is Wrong.

I often forget to pray. I forget prayer at all. But I never forget to appreciate, and am humbled by the imbalances I see in all things. It's not quite religion, but it is a tugging sense of duty and awareness - and I go to church on Sunday in the hopes that in the hour of silence that sense will come to the fore.

Primum non nocere - The basis of the hippocratic oath. An oath, it appears, should ethically have been extended to far more than doctors. To bankers, businessmen, global energy companies.

First, do no harm.

I am praying now for this to resolve. For life to go on, for the ocean to self-correct. I am praying for the impossible. I am praying that this will not mean the End of things we cannot begin to foresee or quantify.

And I am praying for my children to pay attention, to think and see and absorb and carry forward to the next generation a sense of duty, compassion, passion, and heart-moving, soul-motivating, action-inspiring gratitude.

RIP Alaotra grebe.

Blog posts about the Gulf and this tragedy are gathered here. Stop by. Stay a while.:

Revisited

After that last post... I got many calls and comments - Facebook messages - reminding me not to be hard on myself. To cut a break. And I do. I really do. I have a fiery temper, and I am not exempt from its wrath. It is quick, though. And after the explosion, I forgive. I soothe, when necessary (and it is! When you breathe fire, there is always a lot of cleaning up after yourself later.)

I AM good at some things, and was reminded of them that same night. Late. Through the quiet. By my husband. Who I love and lean on 14 years after picking.

And the next day, yesterday, worked. Annabeth and I made cookies for her class, put an initial for each child on the front in proper preppy sorority girl lower case. There were polka dots and little cellophane bags. She wrote beautiful thank you notes for last week's birthday. On her own. Taking careful time to say the right things to convey specific gratitude. She practiced her spelling words without a complaint, taught her little brother to spell "people."

They are mostly a humble bunch, a generous bunch. They are loving, warm, affectionate. They are considerate and compassionate. They are boisterous and loud. And they are, mostly, contributors.

Patrick has forgiven me completely. I forgot the right kid that time - either of the other two might have seemed more wounded. They would have put a lot of effort into making me feel OK about it, but they would be a little sad. pPod just seemed glad to see me. He really liked his balloon, and later showed me how the big bad wolf roars.

Hours after dinner last night, Patrick threw up all in his bed. It was close to midnight, and we got him up, washed the sheets, got him in the shower and tucked him in between us. Gavin and I fell asleep to him chattering away.

This morning he had a fever, so he stayed home. Three days left of school, and he is missing one of them. He was warm and extra affectionate, laying half on me in front of morning TV. We watched Little Bill and I felt all nostalgic. I didn't realize how much I missed Lil Bill, Bobby, Alice the Great. The sweet morals slowly played out.

In my real world, where things aren't resolved in twenty minutes, there are still far more gentle spots and joyful spots and segments of lessons learned, as well as subtler daily bits that remind us what good kids we have than there is chaos, and the regrettable (though maybe not infrequent) shouting.

My thinker, Sebastian, needs someone to indulge him when it's close to midnight and he appears with some Big Question. (Why is there suffering? How do I know the world won't be destroyed while I am alive? Why doesn't God answer my prayers to have Bonus (the long-dead cat) visit me as an angel in my dreams? Will we ever move again?) He needs us to occasionally ignore the book light shining on in those same hours close to midnight. He needs to be reminded of other's expectations, and to be appropriately lauded when he shines.

My artist, Annabeth, re-imagines every piece of junk as a future craft - "don't throw that away! I can use it!" She executes craft projects with me and is still thrilled to have me at her side, doing my thing. It hurts me when she is hyper-critical of her own efforts, especially doing this thing she does best of all. (yes! Tarra, Heidi, Kymmie, Agatha, Becca, David... you are right - I think she gets it from me. And I should be gentler on my own Me.)

My actor-future-fiction-writer- man-of-action, Patrick wants attention - someone to make laugh and help him weave his elaborate stories, to encourage him to accessorize, to roar, to give tiger hugs and after baths, to let him ball up under a towel in the middle of the room and "crack out" of his dinosaur egg - to welcome that dinosaur enthusiastically, but with a little fear.

And I do all that. With a willing, engaged Big One. And we do it well.

And sometimes, I even bake cookies.

Tested

I dressed Patrick yesterday morning in his red rugby-striped shirt.

Generally, he adheres to his public-school open-to-interpretation uniform that it is only loosely followed by the pre-K set. Probably a dozen times, I have let him wear something other than the white (now white-ish) polo topper that fits requirements. On those occasions, he always picks the red-and-white. His favorite.

I dropped him and went on to other things - a breakfast meeting, then proctoring an AP test at the other school. I marveled at the relative calm of the adolescents taking that test. It was the final move of their high school careers - once that last bubble was filled in, stray marks erased, cell phone collected from me - they were gone. Off to the Rest of their Lives. And yet none seemed panicked, or even particularly plussed.

Post-testing, I collected my daughter so we could go run a quick fun errand. We lollygagged, loading our cart with sugar cookie supplies. Then we left to retrieve Patrick, who I felt had lingered too long at after-care.

We got to his school and Annabeth asked if she could go in barefoot. She had stripped off her confining running shoes. I said, well sure. Just into the cafeteria. Just picking up a brother.

I walked in a few beats behind her.

Swarms of adults. A buffet. Little boys in top hats, pastel shirts, black pants, sparkling blue bow ties. Little girls in perfect spring church dresses, floral prints.

I was confused for a flash of a second, two, three. Annabeth, beside me in her bare feet, said, "wow. What's this?"

It had been the show. The Show. The end-of-the year celebration to move them all to kindergarten. Proceeding arm-in-arm. Singing, dancing, acting. Patrick had been, apparently, the Big Bad Wolf.

And I. Had Not. Been. There. Girls in dresses. Boys in ties. Gussied parents taking pictures. Siblings in finery eating from the parent-provided potluck buffet. Patrick in his day-stained red and white rugby, dirty shorts. Running shoes. Annabeth in bare feet. Bare. Feet.

I had received notice of this event. An email. Another. Maybe even another. Each time they would come over my phone I would glance at them, intending to parse later. I thought - since one called it a graduation celebration - it was on the last day of school. Next week. I never slowed down, read. Planned. Scheduled.

Recognizing what had happened, I wandered the small crowd wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Stunned. I snapped at someone, a friend. I blathered, in shock. People intercepted and said things like "he was wonderful!" and "I think I got a picture of him" and "It's OK, someone videoed it."

I left briefly, to cry in my car. I sobbed. Pulled myself together. Returned.

To be absolutely fair to myself, Patrick didn't show any concern. Genuinely. He was bopping around with a blue balloon. He said, "It's OK, mama!" Though he expressed disappointment that he didn't get to wear the sparkly tie.

We numbly ate chicken fingers. People said "let it go." And I felt so --- inadequate.

Things have been lost lately - falling off my radar, or under it. I have been going through the motions, sometimes frantic, always preoccupied. School is out soon - and the month has been a mess of pieces and parts.

I don't do this well. I have committed to things next year - big things. I will learn again, this summer, how to use a calendar (I can't figure out when I stopped, or why the very idea of a calendar intimidates me now.)

I blew up later, at night. For imagined infractions of everyone else. But, of course, it was all about that Show. My error. My disconnect. My absent calendar. My crushing love for my youngest. Missing his last baby moment.

We are right here. At the end of the school year - a year rife with last-minute saves: permission slips, lacrosse games, trumpets, leotards. Dirvishes that whirled. Mornings that were late - and often a surprise (as in, SURPRISE! It's morning!) Right here, I am feeling ill-suited for all of it. Overwhelmed, with holes in my thoughts and holes in my day that allow for neither accomplishing nor resolving.

And before venturing to do this again, I would like, just-for-me, a test. An end of the year AP- equivalent that lets me know that I am suited well enough. That I am as good as the next guy and getting better. I would like to darken my bubbles, erase my stray marks, blow off the dust of the mistakes removed, turn in the test and move on. Matriculate. And find out mid-July if, in fact, I have received the desired four and will, after all of it, get credit for this cobbbled-together year.

And if not, I would like to take the year off. Re-group. Maybe study abroad. Come back when I am feeling more mature, and Ready.

gravity

I can remember idly wondering - in one of those short-lived, under-appreciated, pre-adolescent summer spells where "boredom" is an imagined risk, and "idle" is an actual state - if my affection for cemeteries meant I was morbid or otherwise "not right."

I would ride my bike from my grandparent's farm "all the way" to the cemetery up the road. The bike had been my mother's, or possibly belonged to a cousin who had long since moved on to other things. Grandpa and I painted it. With Rustoleum from the hardware store. A sort of semi-matte orange that showed every paintbrush stroke. He bought me a red banana seat with the deeply imbedded sparkles that seem an inverse 3-D - a sparkly depth that goes on for iridescent ever in the bright sun of Connecticut July.

I pedalled uphill to that place and was alone in a way that felt specifically mine. Not the alone that comes from sibling abandonment, or friends being thousands of miles away (our home was South, our summers were North), but the first glimpses of Alone that you choose. I would pull tangles of weeds away from some headstones.

I would wander those stones, read them. I would parse through the dates, do the math. Find some from 18-so-and-so and some, if memory serves, from 17-something. I would imagine their stories, their long-ago-lives of simplicity and unimaginable complexity - some cut short by war, commemorated by tiny flags.

When Grandpa died, I couldn't understand why his graveyard was one we had to drive to. Why it was so golfcourse-like. Grandma would bring flowers from her gardens, tend others she had planted. She would say a rosary. The honoring felt different with someone I knew - with the gravity (pun, perhaps,unavoidable) of the situation infusing those occasions with an awkwardness. I wanted to visit alone, and I wanted not to intrude.

Gavin, who has an abstract comfort with death that both a love of history and his own veteran status afford, shares my affection for cemeteries. On vacations, we visit them. He reads the headstones, looking for the oldest, the best epitaphs, the largest families buried together, the most interesting names.

We have visited his grandfather's, who had fought the good fight, finished the race (2 Timothy 4:7). We have spent hours in cemeteries in Scotland, in France. We have driven out of our way in wanderings to chase them down. We hiked barely marked paths in a National Park on spring break to find ancestral graves (and found them). And, alone in Vancouver, I caught the first glimpse of majestic mountains by veering off-course in my walk from work to my motel - through a beautiful cemetery.

Here, we live near one of Atlanta's grander 'memorial gardens.' I run there. 100+ acres, with an unparalleled view of the city. Its highest point marked by a marble couple, forever looking ever higher, with the city scape directly beneath them.

In spring, the real plants,those that threaten to overtake were it not for the constant attention of caretakers, flower. All senses are engaged as I pant along on my gimp foot, assaulted by pollen, confronted all sides by Death, and wisteria, roses, and later in the season, magnolias, all on the edges, trying to break in. And in the middle, acres of rolling manicured lawns. And the dusty, sad cheer of row upon row of fake flowers.

Aside from the occasional long-ago-planted oak, the lawns are free of actual plant life. Plastic flowers weather in vases cleverly constructed as part of the headstones. And yet, everywhere there are spigots - presumably to help you in your grave-tending.

I have had little contact with death, and have just enough religion / spirituality to say with some conviction that I do believe it hardest on the living. The serenity and beauty of the graveyards is there for them. I don't know for whom the plastic flowers fade.

I have been to funerals and their wakes - a scant eight over my lifetime, if I am counting correctly. I have seen passion and poetry, reverence and reverie, even dancing, toasts, and silver goblets. I have also witnessed air deader than the person being so respected. And at all, the coffins seemed universally ill-suited to the task. (Please. No embalming for me. If anyone's asking.)

My sister the brilliant poet wrote, while in high school, a poem about mortality to honor my (still living, at the time) grandmother that started "..'please don't put plastic flowers on my grave, ' she said. And I, unthinkingly, agreed."

Thinkingly, decades later, I agree as well - fervently, rabidly. But from wherever I am, I bet I would love a spot in a graveyard - a bench, maybe, to honor my life. Some wisteria - uncontrolled and unruly - and a few words well-chosen and carved on something more permanent than I, in a nice font.

Grow

It is spring. My favorite time of the year. Last posts were spring, too - but on the cusp of newness. Now we are in it. In Atlanta, spring is an explosion of color. Everything is in bloom at once,

and you can see pollen dancing in the sunbeam that warms the cat.

I plant things, and wonder how to do it more effectively. It is all mysterious to me - even from long lines of gardeners and farmers on both sides of my family. I like that things grow. I want to help them along... but I get distracted.

I wander the yard in no real pattern. Probably in dress clothes from a rare outing outside the house. I pull things up and then remember I own gloves and I should wear them. I yank at other things and remember I have a tool for that. I go to get the tool and see that the garage is a mess. I tackle the clutter, put the tools down on the cedar chest I really must move out of the garage and go inside to change. Whereupon I see laundry. And fold it.

Patrick commented yesterday on the grass. "It's so pretty, Momma! I love it! We have the only grass with little tiny flowers!" Today we mowed, in response.

I tried to explain to him how we distinguish weeds from desirable plants and it made no sense to him. The deeper I dove into the topic, the more it felt fascist - pulling up dandelions and clover and pretty little white flowering things with no known name. I couldn't explain myself.

When we walk to school this time of year, my favorite yards are the yards at the edges of our neighborhood. They have thousands of matured, multiplying daffodils - but also the plants of my youth. Memories emerge of lazy spring days making "salad" of dandelion leaves, violets, sour clovers, and chives. I don't recall if we ever ate the salads, but my older sister spent one spring obsessively making violet jelly from Yule Gibbons' book. She was 11 or 12 and already achieving things that never occurred to the rest of us.

Most of the yard owners manicure all that away. They trim out the magic, leave the expected - tidy and trim. Colors in controlled bursts. Flowers you are most certainly not meant to eat.

The children burst out of the house with this weather - God's weather. The sun is bright, but the air is never oppressive. People emerge to drink on their porches in the evenings, to walk the neighborhood - to generously imagine everyone is a friend.

Annabeth turns 8 next month. Something close to 1/6th my age - though it feels, in some ways, that I have known her forever. I have known her for her forever - a world where she imagines she can remember when she was "little." Spring is the right time for her, sunshine and optimism on her better days.

She received an award this week. Arts Laureate, representing the first grade in the arts assembly. She was so proud to wear the dress her grandmother made, so proud to receive an award for what is certainly the Most Important Thing. She sees patterns everywhere, comments on the color of weathered buildings. We see the artist's temperament at times, but we saw something so proud, so grown-up when she strode across the stage wearing her medal - the tallest child until the fifth grader at the end.

I turn 42 tomorrow. A weird number. It sounds sensible, established. Far more of either of those things than I am - with my charmingly weedy yard and children flung across the neighborhood. But twice 21, and certainly twice as smart as I was at that number. Which is something. And... it is spring. This will be a good year.