grey

Why flee
the middle of grey?
Stay long, remain.
Every whichway
wide vector
fog spectrum
calls blue,
your name.

The One Year

My nonexistent resume states I spent last year as a private, full-time, in-home tutor for an at-risk child. Great kid. True story, no joke. Wierd though (not him) - because we both laughed some and cried a lot, and not all at once but over the course of last calendar year. It was some year. The One Year. A gap year. A citizen service year. A home-based, child-centered, service learning year without emolument that I was supposed to feel good and fuzzy about. Not about the pace but the general path, the 'ole college try. I was doing the right thing partway wrong. The kid and I we built machines and carried numerals and burned sugar until the only elements remaining were carbon and confusion. The chemical sort. He tried to teach me and I corrected. I spoke louder and he revolted. One year of growing where he was planted and me yelling at the weeds I grew or something like that. A spiritual sowing and graduate level case study in unpaid service learning all jimmied and balled up and twisted into L-I-F-E. The pay is the learning! The privilege is the sacrifice! I totally, totally did not get it especially when what I got was - not money.

Luckily, I slept in a queen size bed tuition-free at different hours of the day and night with my host family, each member, literally. Not all at once, but sometimes. Yikes. Also I got to cook meals, toss clothes into dryers and scrub surfaces - as regularly as I wanted. Freedom baby. Cleaning products were included when I bought them. It was wonderful practice handling this hot potato yarny mess, this jimmied, rolled up life which unraveled when I tossed it, or dropped it. A ball meant for motion falls apart when thrown. Velocity and irony. And oh was I a bad sport. 

The dad was really, really nice. Handsomely nice. Wore a lot of Detroit t-shirts. The mom, like whoa, crazy amazing. Switch that, amazing crazy. Delete. Just crazy. Hair, brain. Both. I taught a lesson about prefixes as in words like antithetical. Well the mom, she was the thetical of hair and brain compounded into one word. The kids - beautiful, nutty. Smelled like peanut butter. All three of them, which includes the middle, the 7-year-old lad upon whom I bestowed my tutorial aptitude between (his) actual breakdancing and (my) actual mental breakdowns. The eldest child, a pre-tween, well she was off to a school just down the block along the traditional road, a walkable distance for the one who can follow a straight line and look both ways twice; and the third, a loud tyke of 2 with a large cranium in pajamas - he created persistent in-home opportunities for me to ninja fight and assemble hours into days and days into endless days like an Ikea universe without the allen wrench. Without The Allen Wrench! Horrid. Did I mention this? That I missed the bold print in the initial job description: Groundhog's Day but worse. Horrider-ist. 

In between, when the worst was broken up by not-the-worst or even, pretty-ok, I'd read my Bible and the Detroit Free Press, two chronicles filled with less misery than hope. Lots of words about broken rubble and raising souls. Then I remembered. Gratitude. Place. Life. Family. Love. Hope. Good. Lord. I had the best job on earth. Spinning yet on the unraveling ball but on the ball at least.       

As of late, my tutoring role has been minimized to part-time afterschool care as the middle lad has taken well to khakis and a parochial classroom. Sweet mercy me. The eldest, drop the pre- and now a tween, still walks her straight line between here and her future self. But I still remain in tact, breathing in the same house, exhaling the same laundry. Though the lad (now 8) he taught me - change is both lungs and air and more art than science. Art, as in, spontaneous breakdancing. So I got paid in free oxygen and even more so, love. That's pretty awesome. And I'm still on payroll.

Now I play with the large cranium boy and do other very important and ungraded things, and after I wipe my resume off the countertops and onto the floor -
I write. 

oh to have a memory

In love with Yeats
In darkened sleep
One grand long lyric to mind commit
A trickling song
Hums and seeps
Yet
Rhythm and the words
Flow like rainwater through 

wide broken dams,

melancholy openings, a 

sweet retreat.

If only art could 

clutch but 

letting go is sweeter. 

listen, life.

The tiny life-breath next to my soul puffs sweet
Scents of this night and childhood
I think
all that life inside those lungs
Those lungs that once lived in the belly of my life
My life
My God
What a miracle
His puffy cadence marches on
in quiet night
How many and long
My own not his
His and not my own
Mystery tells on itself in a moment when
Mystery unbecomes
To be no longer
To breathe no longer
The thought makes me cry
So I shall
Place my ear closer to his back
to retrieve the joy of listening to night and
Life

Sammy moon

When you're little, your imagination is big and wide, like the sea.

When you're little, you know plenty of big people, you just never imagine you'll be one of them.

Or that your little brothers, who are even smaller than you, will one day be big. Even bigger than you - their big sister.

I remember the August - I was nine - when I realized that I was growing up to be a grown up, and it gave me little flutters inside my belly and my heart. A curious mix of happy and wishful and a titch of sad, like a reaching feeling for something swirling backward and forward in time and all at once. I didn't have a word for how I felt. Of course now that I'm older I know - that word is called: nostalgia. I was feeling nostalgic. To stay forever little. To someday grow big.

I was feeling nostalgic, but I didn't know that word, so I went up to my room with flutters in my belly and heart and lay in my big bed and I began to do something even more curious: I began to cry. Why you ask? I hadn't a clue! But I cried and I was even more confused and just when I was about to let out a great big wail, I heard it for the first time:

Sammy moon!

It was the littlest of my two little brothers. I heard his thunderous thump-stomp-stomp footsteps up our Beech Street house stairs. The house was a hundred years old, literally. Sam - he was two. My gosh, he was only two. I heard it again. This time: closer. Sammy moon!

Wham! My door flung open, and there stood our resident short, stocky shadow, wielding a blue flashlight where'd he find that? and wearing only his diaper.

Addy-Addy! I heard shouted breathlessly coming up the stairs.

It was my other little-but-not-as-little-as-Sam brother, Joey. He would laugh and call my name like that in double time cadence, mostly when he was excited, but thinking back on it - funny as it sounds - even when he wasn't. Addy-Addy pass the cereal. Addy-Addy read this it's weird. I can still hear it, his voice searching for me. Like the time he made his first real paper airplane and he shouted Addy-Addy! Addy-Addy! just in time for me to run into the kitchen and watch his creation sail out and away through the open window toward Mr. Nolan's yellow house. We both peered down and around the mossy rocks, and just as I was about to go outside to find it, he sat back down to make another one. This one's gonna be for you Addy. It's gonna be my best one yet. Thinking about it gives me the flutters.

Addy-Addy look! Sammy made the moon! Joey cried, as if witness to the greatest show on earth. Sammy. Show Addy! Show Addy Sammy's moon!

Sam, in obedience to his big brother, began to study the curious thing. This way? No. This thing? No. Then - wait - he rolled it anxiously around both his tiny hands, remembering, now almost if he could just get this other pudgy finger on that big black circle the bottom one yes finally at last! - click.  

Sammy moon! 

He squealed in rollicking delight. On the floor! On his hand! On the ceiling! A little circle of light shrank and grew and skipped wherever his hand commanded it to go. He knew just two years of life. And now, he knew that with his clamoring hand and this heavy thing - he could make the moon. I could see he believed it. His wondrous smile and his tiny awe. It made me ask - does this all disappear when you know too much and believe too little?

Yay Sammy! Yay! Put it up there! And there! Joey jumped up and down like a circus clown, clapping and spinning in dizzy circles as if the real-life moon had actually fallen out of the sky and landed giant smack where we stood. I thought about Joey and his nature, so goofy and good. 

He was five years older than Sam, but Joey kept something I had lost. Well, almost. Earlier that summer, just after a burger dinner on the grill why don't we grill in the winter my dad woud say every summer but forget by winter - Joey appeared out of nowhere like a small madman in our backyard. I was reading Boxcar Children I'm almost positive, and enjoying a break from the clatter of dishes and the humdrum sound of mom and dad recounting their same sagas and then after lunch I ran some errands and work was fine just busy I'll be glad once this project is done - when alas there he was, jumping and hooting and clasping his hands together, over and over, over and over. I remember the splay of pink from the sunset casting his silhouette on the ground and how long his shadow looked compared to his body and wondering will Joey actually ever grow to be this big? and why yes he did. In the moment, I admit - I was only about one percent wonder and ninety-nine percent annoyannce. This solo spectacle of Joey's was disrupting my rapid advance through this masterful turbulence of Harry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny I didn't want to be orphaned but if I was I'd want to be a boxcar sibling for sure. Barely looking up I pointedly asked well more like stated and you are doing what exactly.  

He yelled something as he jumped up and away - he liked to pretend he was a ninja so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to pretend not to see him - throwing his hands above him and bringing them down like they were catching a prayer that only he could see. What? Joey. Joey. I can't hear you! I yelled louder. Muffled, I heard him say it. I SAID catching the wind! 

I rolled my eyes and sat back. For a moment I considered it, then I shook my head: no. I stood up, the sun's almost down anyway, and went back inside though that heavy back door, but just before I did, something stopped me. So imperceptible I hardly noticed it was there. But it was - there. The breeze, upon my skin. It gave me the goosebumps. Is something there, and then it's not? or is it always there, swirling around us, lit up in hidden sight, and are we just too busy to notice it? Most of us, that is.

Through the backdoor window, I could see Sam standing on a chair at the kitchen sink, soaked, as mom loaded the last of the dishes and dad shuffled through the mail, chuckling at something as swaths of water poured off the counter into a puddle at mom's feet, unbeknownst to her. Or maybe not. It passed over me again. I can only compare it to the feeling I'd get when my mom would lightly grasp one hair from across my face in the middle of our conversation never missing a word, and move it back into place. This movement, this gesture is: I see you. I notice you. Nothing about you is ever too small. 

So one by one, nearly without wanting to, my fingers curled slowly in. I looked back to see his feet off the ground, his fingers wide to the sky. His was a dance called childhood I had forgotten. Thanks Joey, I smiled, I think I recaptured the wind you just let go. I went inside to the sound of home, feeling lighter and happier and taking with me something I'd never lose.  

Sammy swung the flashlight, unbalanced, in my direction. His moon had landed right on me. Surprised, he motioned the question with his other hand: Addy moon? Addy moon? His eyes held a puzzled glint and he stood frozen in sweet smile. He was actually waiting for my answer. So I thought about the wind, and my curled fingers, and Joey's hands of prayer. I grinned at Sam and I heard myself laugh. I had forgotten why I was crying, the flutter inside me - gone. Like Joey's paper plane in quiet escape to a place we never found.

No, not Addy moon I said shaking my head. I stepped forward and reached gently to turn the flashlight around, pointing it down, to his heart. His head fell, his eyes went dim. Joey stood quietly, and I did too, waiting. Finally, his eyes moved to find that it wasn't extinguished at all but it was there upon his chest, bigger than ever.

Sammy moon!

He let out a moutainous belly laugh, and so did Joey. And actually, I did too.

So we jumped and ran through the endless sunshine of that summer day, and Sam danced his little moon around our house until the warm haze of dusk settled around us and the smell of barbeque and smoke called our hungry bellies to the table.   

And that night, mom and dad said yes when we asked them if we could stay up late and catch starry fireflies with Sam and eat popcorn on a blanket outside until the night clouds cleared and the moon came out. We laid on our backs side by side by side, our eyes peeled towards heaven, listening to each other breathing and the blending hum of katydids and crickets and the wind rustling through leaves that in a month would start to fall. 

My fingers curled in, one by one. In the folds of that dark blue quiet, I felt it laying next to me. I looked up and noticed - God had gently rolled that last small cloud eastward. 

I placed it in his small hands and helped him point it high above us, straight up, and just as the glowing sphere of light appeared - click. 

Sammy moon I turned and whispered in his ear, and he whispered it back to me sleepy, like a secret. Sammy moon his voice trailing off, halfway to the moon. Joey, on my other side, was there upon the moon already, in his dreams. I was sure of it. My eyes stayed awake, fending off tomorrow.

We each awoke in our beds to the scent of morning and the sound of pancakes, plates clattering, metal spoons, footsteps. I realized - my parents had lifted us, carried us up, laid us down, one by one, without us even knowing. I see you. I notice you. Nothing about you is ever too small. Or too big.   

Sometimes I think a memory is an invisible wind that only you can see, but this memory of Sammy moon is one that all three of us can see, because every now and then - for years since that day - we'd be driving home late at night, or eating popcorn on that soft, worn blanket - and one of us would point up and say it, and together we'd giggle and remember that day, and that night, and that greatest show on earth, when the whole world was our house and our backyard and the sounds of our family.  

The little flutter, - that funny word nostalgia - it comes and goes as you grow up. And that we did - almost imperceptibly, like a breeze. But instead of thinking that we just grew up, into bigger bodies and jobs and our own families, I like to imagine we three - my two little brothers and me - that we're really just three kids from Beech Street, still in awe and still reaching, reaching, to touch the moon. 

like a tide

inward write,
outward serve.

inward pray,
outward patience.

inward faith,
outward courage.

inward confession, 
outward forgiveness.

inward peace,
outward grace.

inward thanks,
outward joy.

inward love,
outward love.

love, love,
upward love.

empathy

Every moment prepares you for every other moment. That moment when the universe stormed and shut off the sun and the dark went click and you felt torched by hot rain in a black well, when you said I was never prepared for this and you were right. It was living not for that moment but to prepare you for this one here, this one now. The one where your eyes see - she has lost something, something she has lost in the same moment when you had muddled your mind with thoughts about the mess and the long drive and the temperature of the weather and you feel pangs of guilt and confusion of how fate works such pain like rain clouds over the wrong people. Searching, you search for your faith, it leads you not to answers but to look up. You look up and recognize the nebulous shapes to realize the fire has struck your neighbor's house and not your own, not this time. Such distance yet so close your fingers can touch, city limits touch, continents touch. You wonder how it feels to have lost something immense - a child, a dream, purpose, hope. What all vanishes when the sun clicks off. Except immeasurable despair, and almost you turn away to prepare your hands to make dinner. But can you rise long enough to stand, to reach out, to feel the feeling that she is a real person and not a camera shot of suffering. Nor story board. Nor anything except the heat and hair and skin and fabric of a real human being. You wonder if she can feel her own hands holding each other, or if all is lost. You wish you could exchange breaths, to give her a moment's relief. So there it rises. Reach deep. The swath of empty you recognize. You barely believe you can. But you know the well and that day and the darkness I was never prepared for this and somehow it calls you forward from way back there to do what you were never prepared to do except you are.

If only empathy, let it be empathy. If prayer, let it be prayer. But if it is more, let it be more.