Volcano!

Recommended Listening: Forever Young, Bob Dylan

May your heart always be joyful

May your song always be sung

Last week, as I chased Brody into my once upon a time bedroom, Muzzy, my teddy bear, looked back at me from behind the bars of the old Jenny Lind bed.  I stopped for a second, looked at my old friend and then handed her over to Bro.

Ah!  A special moment we’ll always share.  Brody took Muzzy, gave her a huge hug and the two have been inseparable ever since . . .

Actually Brody, a sensitive three year old who reacts strongly to deep voices and aggressive looking woodchucks kindly, but quickly offered her back.  Muzzy is well loved, with a flopping neck and weathered eyes that are now, gulp, pupil-less, and though not as scary as clowns, well on her way to starring in some kind of revenge of the toys B-flick. 

As the rose colored glasses that protect my childhood were pulled down ever so slightly by my son’s patented honesty, I placed Muzzy back on the bed, my face descending into a pathetic pout.  I patted my old teddy’s head, her little neck bobbing helplessly back and forth and whispered, “She was my best friend.”  Brody for his part did not hesitate with his response: “And then I came along and yelled ‘volcano!’”

Brody seems to be aware that there was a time before him, though I am pretty sure he feels it had few, if any redemptive qualities.  In Brody’s mind the world of PB, pre-Brody if you will, was a twenty-first century Dark Age, where people just sat around with pupil-less teddy bears, covered in a heavy layer of volcanic ash.

Were we aware that our teddies were scary?  Probably not.  Were we hot from the volcanic ash?  Perhaps.  [READER BEWARE: I have been informed time and time again that we do ALL OF US live next to active volcanoes (the dormant ones being not nearly as much fun)]. 

Before Brody no one ran from volcanoes, and no one understood that yogurt was and never is NEVER, NO NEVER a valid substitute for ice cream.  There was no “incredible,” just a rather ho-hum “as it is” and once in a while a “whatever.  If you’d like.”

And so in these spring days of new life and runny noses, my mind has wandered toward the countless clocked steps Brody and I have already taken together, the world Brody and I have charted. 

First the steps were mine alone, two feet, as I introduced him to a world I love deeply.  It is a green leafy world.  The world of spring and quiet mornings.  A world of heroic daffodils and hungry squirrels.

He was seven pounds, and I carried him everywhere.  Around the block we saw arrogant tiger lilies and laughing daisies, never making it past the stonewall and the cranky German Shepard before one of us had fallen asleep. 

From two feet we moved to the stroller.  Two feet, four wheels and an endless array of warm summer days.  The walks were now longer, and often consisted of the slow hum of Brody slowly falling into his afternoon nap.  “What’s up Bro?”  “Hmmmmmmmm.”  “I guess so, Bud.”  “Hmmmmmm.”

And then spring came again, before yielding to that second bright summer when four feet appeared.  In those earlier days two of the feet often stumbled: then there were four feet, two knees and two hands.  In the moments following his stumbles, we returned to two feet again, but just as every child is a miniature hero, persevering where the best of us might just give up, four feet would appear once more. 

May your hands always be busy

May your feet always be swift

And then summer comes to an end, and a new world begins.  Just as my life seems to awaken in the spring, it is one of the great ironies in this world that children seem directed toward the fall. 

In September, Brody will begin preschool.  He has met his teachers, and tells me how we will all have a great time together.  He doesn’t understand (because I have not yet told him) that I will hold his hand up to the door, and then two hands will unclasp, two hands will drop and I will have to let go.  He will probably be a bit uncertain at first, but knowing my Bro it won’t last long.  Four feet, two going one-way and two another. 

For my part, I hope that he resists time’s cynicism.  I pray that his foundation is sturdy enough to weather callous gestures and careless cruelty.  Those things in life that trip us up.  That pull us away.  That weather the perfect little self we once were so comfortable with. 

May you always be courageous

Stand upright and be strong

He is brave and kind.  He thinks the world protects ladybugs and loves Mt. Merapi.  Paradise is a place of endless volcano videos within a Monarch butterfly sanctuary.  He never follows, but loves intensely.  He dislikes names other than his own.  He fights for everything, because he believes in everything.  When I say, “Make this small,” he says, “Little boys don’t make things small.”

I probably have not corrected him as often as I should.  His words are kind and thoughtful, his actions a mirror of his expectations.  He is strong willed and independent, and though I find myself sighing more than I would like to at times, I remember those words from “Forever Young”: May your song always be sung, and the writer in me, that spark that believes that all people have a place of sincerity, that we are all poets, allows him his space to compose.   

I have asked him to listen, but I have never demanded his obedience.  Sometimes it has to be “because I said so,” but oftentimes we find our way together, Bro, his daddy and I.

The upside of this is a precocious, talkative three-year old, the downside is an at times jarring fashion sense.  Able to dress himself now, Brody takes great pride in picking out his own clothes.  I remind myself that Brody’s choices are no more concerning then when his dad dresses him, and let it go with that.  He wants colors and stars.  Polka dots (moons) and shirts with baseballs and mountains.

A wild yellow shirt arrived in the mail today, and I sighed before handing it over to the little jumping boy beside me.  "I told you it was great, momma.  Look out sun!"  He is the cinematographer of his life, and everything is Technicolor.

May you always know the truth

And see the lights surrounding you

The trillium are growing again, their little pointed leaves strong and remarkable.  Did you know that they were the first flowers to return to the ash-ravaged side of Mt. St. Helens, now almost 22 years ago this May?

I had originally thought of volcanoes as forces of destruction, and so in tune with the destructive nature of my son.  But today, thanks to Brody’s countless books on the subject, I realize that volcanoes are, in many ways, agents of healing.  As things pass, life survives--creatively, miraculously and necessarily. 

Brody came into my bedroom last week and told me that Daisy had “metamophed.”  I was confused until I saw my littlest golden walk into the room wearing the too small bee costume she had worn as a puppy.  Goldens wear humiliation well.  Her little tail was wagging, her bee wings moving back and forth as though she were ready for flight.

“Daisy’s metamophed.”

“Metamorphosis?” 

“Yup.  That’s what I said.” 

“It probably doesn’t fit her too well anymore, bud.” 

“Yup.  She’s bigger now.  I’m 38 inches.” 

“You were once 19 inches.” 

“I don’t think so.”

Life is remarkable.  It is without limits and everything has the potential to be more.  Dogs can be bumblebees, volcanoes as perfect as butterflies.  I can’t say that I am always able to see it anymore, but with each step he takes, he pulls me along beside him just a bit.  Two feet jumping, two feet running, four feet disappearing into the grass.

“And then I came along and said, ‘volcano!’”

May you build a ladder to the stars

And climb on every rung . . .

Lightning Jar

Recommended Listening: Ultraviolet, U2

Baby, baby, baby...light my way

I have loved summer for as long as I can remember.  The moment that bus sighed and the doors opened, I was free, and I crashed through summer proudly.  

I have chased through woods with Caladryl caked to my arms and legs, eaten more macaroni salad than should be allowed and burned my nose and shoulders with the best of them.  I’ve seen every Spielberg film and that includes the ones he executive produced, and even, gulp, seen some really bad musicians at Pine Knob.

Last night, too too late, Justin, Brody and I biked home from the park.  Kids across the neighborhood were already well past bedtime as we slipped peacefully in and out of traffic islands and street lamps. 

In a parade I could appreciate (sans the clowns), fireflies lit our way.  Every 5 seconds, wait for it, and then 500 lights flickering up over the road and in yards of houses well past caring. 

Perhaps I’m counting the days of my own errant childhood, gone before I could mourn it, but there is something about the summer that is always fleeting, and so Bro goes to bed late, as we chase and live in it for as long as we can.

I have made summer lists in my head.  Things we must do before August ends.  Some are sensational, but most revolve around the promise of Oreo cookies, rock music through an open window and chalk drawings on my driveway that will be lost with each shower, and rescued with each declaration of “draw me a moon, stars, planet and mac truck to get to them.”

This is Brody’s third summer.  The first is a blur of orange tiger lilies, naps and open windows.  That summer we lived on the nursery rocker.  There, before an open window, I would serenade him to sleep with a mixture of Spirituals, rock anthems and Disney show tunes. 

Those days I would nod off with him, both, perhaps, remembering a time when heartbeats were music.  When that first summer finally slipped away, Brody learned to nap on his own. The window remained open, the trees were still green, but Brody was growing up.

And then, just this last May, Brody erupted as only a two year old can, as Justin and I stood by, trying to reassure our little volcano that Lightning McQueen was lost, not gone.    

Finally, he was too tired to fight himself anymore, and I picked him up and brought him to the rocker.  We started with Danny’s Song,  “I’m so in love with you honey,” moved on to Rocket Man, and ended with Stand By Me.  His little frame sighed, as his breathing steadied and he slept. 

I could feel the tears slide down my face as the dream of summer opened its gracious arms and sent a warm breeze through his window.  I should have known, his first summer, that life moves too quickly and each moment is made memory before we can even process it has past.  But I didn’t.  I counted leaves and cardinals from open windows, and watched Star Wars marathons. 

Those few precious summer months of Brody’s beginning had slipped away not with a period, or an exclamation, but with a whisper that never let me know they had passed until that moment when they slipped back in and reminded me of what was now gone.

Brody can no longer sleep well on me.  I rock him to sleep everyday still with books and songs, but that day when he fell asleep on me as he had once before, I heard the voice of our first summer.  It was gentle: a soft light, a green blue.  And rather than chase it, I placed my little boy into his bed and patted his head as I always do.

At the end of June, Brody saw his first firefly.  He sat quietly as this new little life flew around him joyfully before finally trusting Bro enough to land on his hand.  His little light flickered on and off, as Brody ushered him into the world with the kindness only a child can muster.

And so Bro takes summer with a quiet grace, while I surge forward trying to fill my jar of lightning.  He is as much a sonata, as I am at times a thunderstorm, crashing forward from one moment to the next. 

And then I remember that three summer’s ago, I stopped and let summer carry me.  I gave in to time, and lived in my senses: love, light and moments.   Riding through a field of fireflies, each life new and precious, I remembered that summer has never lasted forever, but while it is here, it is a place of memory, of fireflies, of music and endless beginnings.    

You'll know your stars, and you'll chart new ones

Recommended Listening: Stand By Me, Ben E. King

When the night has come

And the land is dark

And the moon is the only light we'll see

No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid

Just as long as you stand, stand by me

“See Bro, one, two, three.” 

He counted them out with me and smiled, “Onion’s belt.” 

“That’s right Bro, Orion’s belt.”

I could almost sense him there with us, just as he had always promised he would be.  I was 6 when my grandpa first showed me my first constellation, the easy to find, and always constant, Orion. 

I couldn’t always find the mythic hunter’s head and arms, but I could always find his belt.  Later I would find Cassiopeia, and move on to Ursa Minor and Polaris.  But Orion is where, he said, we could each look and know that the other was right there, not far away, looking at the same point of origin in a massive, always changing sky. 

My Grandpa McGregor liked a good pipe, a sunny day to golf in and a clear night.  When I think of him I can smell his tobacco and remember his kind hands on my shoulders.  He is the culmination of many things amounting to love.  A man able to love me, and one whom it was easy to love.

I want to say that love comes easy.  It’s hard once you have it to imagine living without it, impossible even, but it comes, at least for me, powerfully easy. 

Ten years after I lost my grandpa, I had the honor of working for a kind and generous lady.  She came at just the right point in my life, and offered me her trust, her time and her dreams. 

Mr. and Mrs. Bentley hired me that summer to work in their shop as well as to plant a number of gardens for them at their home.  Mrs. Bentley loved wild flowers and boulders.  She loved trees and sunshine.  I was to be careful of everything that lived, especially the white trillium, she reminded me with the utmost sincerity. 

She was slight, with a soft voice and kind eyes, however, I don’t think anyone had ever told her she had limitations, because she recognized none of them.  I can still see her standing in the door of her shop, her face covered in the dust of the boulders she had helped a landscaping crew set around her property.  “They don’t know this land, Heather.  They were going to smash those boulders onto a patch of pink clover!”

The roots of her strength were grounded in the love she had for her parents, her husband and her children, spreading back through the land her father had loved and into the infinite.  She never told me what to believe, she reminded me how to believe.

My grandpa once told me, “you know your trees.”  He was a code breaker in the Philippines through World War II, and longed for the youthful Maples and great old Oaks of his home.  He also told me that the more trees you have, the more roads you will be free to wander.  In short, an open heart is a free one. 

This year I loved someone very deeply for twelve hours.  I dreamed of his life and the things I would share with him, and then he slipped away from me.  I had twelve hours to love him.  My littlest possibility, my baby lost before I could even hold him.

He is as difficult for me to find some nights as Pegasus, but he is as real as though I had been given a lifetime.  I wondered, for just a moment, what might have happened if I had not known.  But I turned from that question.  I loved him, and my road is longer, my way stronger.

Last night as Bro, Justin and I stared into the night sky, I thought of my many points of origin, and realized they all lay in the hands of those I have been so lucky to have loved, be it for 12 hours, 14 years, or all my life.  My hope is that I can teach my son to love openly and freely, to embrace his life with eternal gratitude, and to find his way home, whenever he needs to, through the stars his father and I have found, been given and entrusted to him.

I told him last night “you’ll know your stars, and you’ll chart new ones.”  He doesn’t yet know what I am saying, but he will find his way there: it’s as easy as “one, two, three.”

When Dreams Were Options

Recommended Listening: America, Simon and Garfunkel

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

He has a bike now, and is one step closer to the kind of independence Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac sang about as they wove folk tales for a new America.  It wasn’t an unburdened America, but it was an America where everyone could hit the road, and the highways ran purple and red with break lights and neon signs.

I watched Bro today as he climbed up onto his fluorescent green bike, with its little bell perched proud and ready on the handlebars, and thought of the time I can no longer remember, when I must have had the same sense of wonder and potential I saw in his eyes. 

These days I wake up and head straight for coffee, tired before I have begun, but once, I know, that I woke up and headed straight for the world.  Bikes were wind and air, and the world was a place not yet discovered. 

I have tried to imagine a place where not everything is accessible on my computer.  Where the world is not blown in to me on the break-neck speed of hyper-media and vacant lots are filled with trees, not mini-marts, stripped malls and ghost stories. 

If, as a child, I was aware of the infancy of this new technology centered world, I was only aware of it from behind the legs of my 6’4 dad’s green plaid bell-bottoms.  In this world everything was optional: a non-committal place I opted out of in the sheer innocence of youth.  Things existed either to take up time, or to make it, and if I was in charge it was about now.

So today Brody chooses his bike, and sees trails where there are none.  His time is dedicated to the backyard where the tree fort we have been talking about since before he could talk will soon be built.

He is a dream-maker, a romantic in the most perfect sense of the word.  

Today, for Bro, dreams are options: roads to take and days to fill.  There is a lifetime of things to discover.  


This summer he will get his own ice-cream cone, and perhaps even grill his own marshmallow.  He will look through a telescope and see the patterns of the moon.  He will light a lantern on the back patio and catch a firefly, with the sole purpose of letting it go.  And he will take off on his bike, training wheels in tow, and I will run beside him, and maybe even catch a bit of the open road, the road not taken, that I left somewhere in my long ago.

Weekend Playlist #1

Bro and I were relaxing together at our favorite market, Morgan and York, when Otis Redding came over the speakers and got Bro swaying, croissant in hand.  I have not, I admit sheepishly, listened to Redding in a very long time, and I was once more moved by the power channelled in such an unassuming melody as "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay".

Otis Redding only lived for 26 years, but the music he made in that time is irreplaceable.  I went home and dug through my old records for some other recordings to play for Bro.  This list is my dedication to Mr. Redding, and the other amazing performers who changed the way we, or least I, listen to music!

1.     I’ve Got Dreams to Remember, Otis Redding

2.     A Change is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke

3.     (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher, Jackie Wilson

4.     I’ll Take You There, The Staple Singers

5.     Midnight Train to Georgia, Gladys Knight & The Pips

6.     Into the Mystic, Van Morrison

7.     Let’s Stay Together, Al Green

8.     Lay, Lady Lay, Bob Dylan

9.     What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye

10. You Don’t Know Me, Ray Charles

11. Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding

A bookshelf in our home. A place of light and air.

Recommended Listening, Follow, by Richie Havens

And maybe you can sing to me the words I just told you,

If all the things you feel ain’t what they seem.

And don’t mind me ‘cos I ain’t nothin’ but a dream.

I have collected scores upon scores of books for Bro, though there are a choice few he has gravitated to time and time again.  Some I welcome each time we sit down. Others, admittedly, have made me wince. 

For instance, I have no idea how Thomas the Tank Engine and the Big, Big Bridge even got into our collection, but it was a big, big favorite until I hid it, or should I say, “I guess we lost it little dude.”  Justin was growing weary of Goodnight Moon before he wedged it, I mean, it got stuck irretrievably behind a big, big impenetrable shelf. 

Other than these few regrettable incidences, I have tried to offer Brody freedom in the books he chooses.  He is only two, and though freedom at this age is more conservatively defined, I believe it still has the opportunity of leading to great things.

My dad offered this freedom to me daily at the library, and I can still remember the day I came home with what is perhaps my favorite book of all time, On Beyond Zebra, by Dr. Seuss.  In this genius little tome, Seuss invites his reader to discover a world beyond the alphabet.  I can still remember how powerful the suggestion was that we could imagine more than what was so narrowly defined for us.

My favorite books as a child almost always revolved around the more.  I loved, loved, loved Winnie the Pooh.  There were no lessons to be taught in the 100 Akre Wood.  What existed was a place where the unconventional was, though civilized, blissfully dominant.  We read Winnie the Pooh through the year, yet I cannot think of it without thinking of spring, and that smell of wet leaves mingled with the awkward and glorious smell of early spring flowers.  It was everything new, and nothing grim and mundane.

Milne, like Seuss, spared his reader the necessity of learning how to be an adult, while also not laboring too much over the notion of childhood.  You could, within the pages, free yourself from thoughts of you, and escape into possibility.

In honor of the spark these books and countless others have fostered within me, I have filled Bro’s shelves with books blissfully free of shoulds, and should nots.   I spend his day telling him what he should and should not be doing, and we are both tired of this by bedtime. 

My wish is that Bro will find, in these simple stories, the hope that life is so much more than how to hold a spoon and when to leave the table.   I found this hope within literature, but if I can just offer it to him, perhaps he will be able to find it wherever life takes him.

I can still remember where I was sitting when I first picked up To Kill a Mockingbird, or the first moment I realized I could understand Shakespeare on my own.  I was free within the words.  I was as real and independent as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”

I have a shelf in Bro’s room where I have placed books precious to Justin and I; books from our past, our material Wonderland.  The shelf is strategically too high for Bro to reach, but it exists with the potential to be discovered.  On it are my copies of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows nestled beside Justin’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.  However, I did not stop there.  I placed my tattered copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream next to Kenneth Grahame, and this next to my much ruffled Dharma Bums.  Justin’s Sun Also Rises is also there, as well as his grandfather’s Odyssey.

It is a shelf of dreams and narratives.  A place of life and air. 

This morning Brody pointed to what for so long has been strange markings, and said “Brody.”  Excited, I hugged him and told him, as I do everyday, that this is a word, and that once he knows enough of these, experience will be limitless.  Today he discovered that a word can stand for something.  Many tomorrows from now he will perhaps understand that he can stand for himself.

My Soundtrack

a few of the albums Bro and I went through today

Recommended Listening: O-o-h Child, The Five Stairsteps

Some day, yeah

We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun

Some day

When the world is much brighter

In the spirit of writing about things that I know, I realized that there are really few things that I do actually know.  I can say, without a doubt, that I know my dogs are happiest when they are eating.  I know that I have probably, and at times regrettably, consumed more chocolate than the average chocolate enthusiast, and that I will almost always be late.  I lack the ability to fold a bed sheet and bring clean clothes upstairs, but I am great at spilling pasta sauce on a newly washed shirt.  I can recite poetry I have not read since high school, but will not be able to tell you the name of a person I have met already seven times before and within the last year. 

What I am finding is that measuring life by things that I know can be a bit daunting, and so today I am trying to write and think about life in terms of things that I love.  For instance, I love deleting things from my mailbox, and the way my dog looks when she is lying in the sun.  I love the sound of Bro’s voice when he is waking from a nap, and the way Justin is so resilient in the morning.

The thought came to me today as I watched my son tapping out a beat.  In that moment, I hoped that perhaps he might share the same love of music I have found to be so sustaining throughout my life.  A song, like an old friend, can remind you of a dream you once had, or the moments you wish you could relive.  For me songs come in different hues, like the sun slanted across your floor at different times during the day.

I have been fortunate to have parents who saved so many of my things from childhood.  Chief among these were my records.  I recently brought them home, and Brody and I have been going through them slowly and lovingly. 

Today we broke out Candy Land, the record, and as I played it I felt like that girl now almost 29 years ago who believed that if she just kicked her feet high enough, she might be able to finally push away from the earth and live in a world, she felt, was without limits.  

When I was young, reality was gauged by the way I felt from one moment to the next, not by any unforeseen law of science.  When the sun was out I played, and when it went away I slept.  When clouds covered it I hid inside, and when it broke through, I ran back out into its arms.  I didn’t know it was a mass of helium; I felt it was a friend.

Brody knows that I will come when he calls and hold him when he hurts.  He does not know what love as a concept is, but I think he knows its effects.  When he looks back upon this love, I hope that he remembers the songs I have offered him along the way.  I sing to him everyday at naptime, choosing from my collected songbook.  Today we started with nursery rhymes and ended with Bob Dylan. 

These songs have become the soundtrack to my life.  They are a road of hopes and dreams sustained and nurtured.  It is my genealogy.  It is a collection of songs that have been handed down to me, and ones I have found along the way.  My dad placed Rhinestone Cowboy and Folsom Prison Blues into it, and my mom is completely responsible for the show-tunes.  I don’t know what songs Brody will add to this playlist, or mix-tape perhaps, but I hope that one day Brody will look back upon this songbook, and know without question that he was loved.