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.

Free Range

Recommended Listening: I’ve Seen All Good People, Yes

Don't surround yourself with yourself,

Move on back two squares,

Send an instant karma to me,

Initial it with loving care.

I wonder, and I say this with all sincerity, if children will ever be able to appreciate the feel of sweaty summer legs on the kind of woven plastic, stick to your rump, hyper melted car interiors that once took me wherever I needed to go in the height of summertime?

The thought came to me when I was buckling Brody into his car seat today.  It is soft with stylish cow print, and it put me in the mind to ask my dad what kind of car seat my parents had once had for me. 

Upsettingly, my dad does not remember any car seats for me.  Apparently, as a baby, my parents placed me in the back of their car, and prayed that I had the where-withal to position my weight against turns, and so maintain my stability through trips, both short and long, smooth, and *gulp* bumpy.  I guess the only other alternative was strangulation by seat belt.

My mom remembers differently.  She says that she used the same seat with me that she had once used with my brother in the late 60s.  As I was born in ’76, this is also not too comforting a thought, though of course, better than nothing.

So many of my memories are centered on the family car, though none before around 4 years of age.  I had originally attributed this to being too young to remember, but now I am attributing it to concussions sustained while free range in the back of a moving vehicle . . .

Children now are to be in booster seats until 12 years of age, and don’t get me wrong, they are safer for it.  Brody is 2, and still faces backward, which I know is perhaps neurotic, though the Swedish keep their children facing backwards until 3, so at least uprooted Swedes don’t think me insane. 

My memories of the car are from the back of our old American Motor’s Eagle station wagon.  When I think of this car I think of 8-tracks and Ernie Harwell.  I also think of the carpeting in the back of the station wagon, which was so often my place. I would sit in that back area and let the sun hit my legs.  In the summer, when we were done at the pool, the rug was scratchy, and I would lay my towel down on top of it, and feel blessed. 

The back of the Eagle was a place full of Sesame Street books and McDonald’s mugs, and it was mine.  I can still recall the way the sun bounced off of my Return of the Jedi collector’s mug, and the way the stars shone as we drove home from the theatre at night.

When I look back at this time, I think of the way we all seemed to be doing the same thing, living one big collective experience.  Somewhere, in cars next to me, other kids were sitting in the back of their station wagons watching the stars and listening to Ernie Harwell.  Perhaps they had just seen ET, or The Goonies, and were filled with the wonder of summer and the harmony that we were all in this together.

I wonder if Bro will have that same nostalgia?  The late 70s and early 80s were a time when pop culture knit us together and let us believe that we were all, somehow, Jedi’s. 

As we drove home today from the market, I thought about the other kids in cars next to us.  Our collective experiences these days are much harder to nail down.  Technology and the world it has created make me think that, if Star Wars were to be made today, it would be more like Avatar, a vast, lumbering techno-drone if you will, and less like the personal Star Wars we once knew and loved. 

But perhaps we have traded something in for another?  My son will grow up in a world where the massive cultural expanse of it all will create a larger identity, and while we can never know everything, we will be richer for the chances that are given. 

So no, Bro will never know what it is like to crawl free through the back of my car, and in the grand scheme of things, this is fortunate.  Perhaps he will even remember these days because of it.  I will keep sacred the memory of what once was for my grandchildren, and embrace this new frontier that is ultimately a galaxy far-far away from the one I once rode around in.

I remember the day we said good-bye to the Eagle.  American Motors had been bought by the French, and my dad was done with station wagons.  I remember seatbelts from that time on, and FM radio.  I had the where-with-all, slight though it was, to know that something was passing.  It was of something personal, nothing grand, a dear moment that I can return to whenever I close my eyes.

Sam Lamb, or Lessons from an Aspiring Mother

Recommended Listening: Two of Us, The Beatles

You and I have memories

Longer than the road that stretches out ahead

Sam Lamb wakes up each morning, his little ears clutched tightly through my sons waking hands.  He holds on as best he can as Bro flings him from one side of his body to the other, and then begins to rake him across the side of the crib. 

Of course, it usually doesn’t end there.  When I make it upstairs, Sam is usually under Bro, as Bro looks up at me, angelic, and says, “I don’t know where Sam is.”

Brody wakes like me, and it is not a pretty picture.  There is anger and confusion, followed by anger and resolve, and Sam, much like my husband, muddles through it all as best he can.

I always take Sam out from underneath Bro, pat him on the head, and give him back to the opened hands of my son.

And so, I have come to love Sam Lamb as a member of the family.  I will not stand for throwing, kicking or standing upon Sam.  Bro is learning to use a bat, and just yesterday I took Sam out of the line of fire, patting his head gently and reassuring him that he was safe.  If someone tells me Sam stinks, I take it to heart, and when Bro asks me to kiss Sam, I plug my nose and always give the little dude a peck. 

But this is not to say that Sam and I were always on good terms.  When Bro first began to love Sam Lamb, I was terrified. 

Bro, a feisty 6 month old, hated bedtime.  One night, when Bro was in the midst of one of his fits, my husband rested Sam beside him. 

It is because of this moment and many afterwards, that I have become convinced children know exactly what to do in all situations to immediately terrify their parents.  If Bro sees something hot, it must be touched!!  If Bro sees something even remotely resembling a string, it must be wrapped around his neck!!  And if you give Bro, a baby of 6 months old with a mother still terrified of SIDS, a stuffed toy at bedtime, it must be placed over his face!!

Bro immediately grabbed Sam, placed him on his face, and fell asleep.  In a calm, and reasonable manner, I asked Justin to “get Sam the &*% off of Bro’s face!”.  Justin removed Sam, and Bro woke up, an angry Sleeping Beauty.  Promptly, and with disgust in his eyes, Brody grabbed Sam and placed him back on his face.  Eventually we would let Bro do this until we were sure he was asleep, and then as quietly as we could, we would swipe Sam away.

This continued for months, and I don’t recall sleeping well that entire time.  Eventually we outgrew our fear of SIDS, and Bro took to sucking on Sam’s ear, which was a whole new set of troubles. 

Motherhood is a loaded term for me, as I assume it is to so many, or we would never have so many books written about it.  Even now we spend our days trying to figure out who and what a good mother is. 

These days, we aren’t so much looking for the bad parent, as the ones who are just a bit off.  For example, what if you love your child with all your heart, but you clean your house with Clorox wipes that smell lemon-y fresh?  Not only are you using Clorox, and so taking away your child’s future, or at least his future on this planet, but you have chosen to use the ones with fragrance . . . !!!!! 

I admit this to you now because I think about these things constantly.  Sam is not organic, and Brody literally sucks on him night and day until he is green.  I cleaned and still clean Sam constantly, but I cannot get it back to the soft, silky and no doubt dangerous fabric that it once was. 

I used to dream of the night I first purchased Sam Lamb, all wide-eyed and optimistic.  How terribly naïve, I chided myself regularly, for being!  Sam was so soft and creamy, his coat with a fine luster.  I looked back on that day time and time again, and wondered why I had not chosen the ugly little troll lovey next to him that was organic?  I judged a book by its cover, and perhaps my son, I feared, was paying for my vanity! 

I wondered: was I, as a mother, just a bit off?  I feared going to the Mothering.com site to learn that hundreds of women did choose the troll lovey, and prayed for me, a prisoner of Sam Lamb.  That little troll haunted my dreams, his little wooden-head all blissful and absent, while my green Sam Lamb kept saying, “Don’t you wish I wasn’t 25% polyester and 'Made in China'?

The truth is, if you watch the Today Show enough, you will feel a bit off.  Everyday another doctor is on telling us what might be hurting our children.  I used to hold my breath and pray that today it was not something in my refrigerator.  And then when I made the hard decisions and tried to feel good about them, that angry Nancy Snyderman would get on and tell me I was just giving in to fear mongering. 

I am perhaps a bit wiser these days, and I owe a bit of that to Sam Lamb.  As the months passed, I came to understand that Sam had my best interest at heart, and was, in many ways, just like me.  We both fell short of the now perfect.   

I even went so far as to buy a back-up Sam, whom my husband and I lovingly called "Spam."  Brody has embraced Spam, and refers to Sam and Spam as "the Brothers".  In the theme of "best-laid plans," we now need a Spam back-up.

As I write this, Bro has woken from his nap, and is talking to Sam.  “Hello Sam.”  “This is Sam Lamb.”  “Good Sam Lamb; you are good.”

All Sam and I want is what ultimately is best for Bro.  Sam has given his ear, I have given my heart and soul, and they are the same things.  Two years ago Sam was perfect, but he was only half the lamb he is today.  I hope that one can say the same thing for me!

Of Minnesota Wind Tunnels and the People Who Pull You Through Them

Recommended Listening:  Who Knows Where the Time Goes, Judy Collins

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving

But how can they know it's time for them to go?

Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

A little known fact about me is that I have known three Minnesotan winters.

My parents dropped me off at my centrally located Minnesota college at the start of fall.  Leaves were thick and heady in autumn gold’s and red’s; the air was full of promise. 

My dad smiled proudly, patting me on the back—“such a lovely place to study!”

If I had known what was so soon to come, I might have said, “Ja sure, you can have it!”  But I didn’t and my dad drove home to Michigan that day, and let me tell you, Michigan is Copacabana to Minnesota! 

Three months from that date I locked hands with five friends as we tried desperately to get through an actual wind tunnel on a day that wind chills were measuring -90F.  In all honesty, you could only see the desperate fear in all of our eyes as we were so tightly packed into our winter survival layers, and so I guess I just hoped I was not clutching the back-end of a stranger.

There were many nights that I thought of cramming down dry ramen, rather than face that wind tunnel.  I tried to convince myself, at my most desperate, that dry ramen was like to a raw diet, and those were supposed to be wonderfully healthy!  

The main point is that I never did eat dry ramen, because no one was ever willing to let me.

I am writing this now, as the winter makes one more desperate plea for survival, because in some small way I owe Minnesota a thank you. 

Somewhere in that frozen tundra I found out what it meant to hold someone’s hand and laugh when your hair had just frozen to your forehead.  I learned that you will take many falls on thick chunks of ice, but that someone will be there to pull you up (and probably pull you back down again quite by accident!).  I learned that it takes more than one person to get through a wind tunnel, and that there are at least four people out there willing to brave it with and for you. 

As I fumble through my thirties, I look back on those days and the lessons I learned in those cold winters, and I think mostly of the love that sustained me through it all. 

So to all my family and friends, those in Minnesota and all over the world, thank you!

My Spring Playlist

Recommended Listening: When the Day is Done, The Samples

When the day is done

I hope you're still the same

I hope that nothing's changed, with you

Every year around this time I begin to remember the feel of fresh air through an open window.  I can almost envision the way a crocus looks in the cracked dry earth just outside my door.  The sun is a little bit kinder, and I am a little more apt to believe it is returning.  And then, amidst all this hoped for, I can begin to hear the soundtrack of my spring.

Music has been a dear friend to me since before I can remember, and I’m not certain music is ever so sweet as it is in the springtime. 

When I think back on spring, I remember the open window of my dorm room.  It was an old window, long and filled with charming cut glass panes.  My room was a pale blue, and in the midst of gathering quotes for yet another paper on yet another author, music found a way of freshening everything that had become dusty and aged.

On those blessed late March days, I turned so often to James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.  I loved the sounds of Blue, and could not wait to find my way back to Copperline.  Always I had to dig my way around the mess that was winter to find my spring treasures.  Winter music was always an assortment of classical and heavier, more substantial rock. 

But the spring was when I longed for the simple, graceful sound of an acoustic guitar.  I wanted nothing that could crush the petals of the crocus.  I longed for music that could float effortlessly on a spring breeze.

My spring playlist mingled with the voices of people who had once more discovered the merits of sunlight and fresh air.  Even smokers breathed easier on spring days in Ann Arbor, and I sent my playlist out to all of them. 

So today, as I prepare to believe spring is coming, I wonder what your playlist is?  I set about today to discover how mine might have evolved, but as I sat by the window playing songs on ITunes for Brody, I realized that my spring music has not changed much, if at all.  While I have added a number of musicians to my world, I have not yet welcomed many new ones into something so precious as my spring playlist. 

Spring, for all that is new, is also, for me at least, a time when I remember the past.  I remember great streams of water making their way down my driveway, and the feel of my spring jacket against my cheek.  I remember opening the window in the car and dangling my hands outside.  Spring is a precious time, and I have guarded my spring playlist in much the same way as I guard my memories, with a sentimental fragility that keeps me returning year after year.

Home

It’s sunny in LA and in the low 60s. 

It’s snowing in Ann Arbor and in the upper 20s. 

But my son doesn’t understand any of this. Time and place are things he has not yet connected with as operating separately from himself.  Time is the time we share together, and place is wherever Brody is. 

When someone leaves, he has no idea where they go, only that they are not here.  We talk about other houses, and he can point to where the neighbor children live, but he does not yet have that notion that they might be doing something at the same moment as him.

And so it was hard this morning when he woke up and wanted to see his Uncle Darren.  I told him Uncle Darren had gone, but Brody did not believe me.  He walked his little rumpled self down to the basement door, and sat with Sam Lamb, waiting for Uncle Darren. 

Eventually, he sniffled a little bit.  Uncle Darren was not coming, because Uncle Darren had to go to his house.  I tried explaining to Bro that Uncle Darren would be back, and that right now he had things to do at his home.  Bro repeated after me, “Home.” And then he looked up at me, smiling, “Uncle Darren home.”

What I had not realized is that, for Brody, place is perhaps more complex then I had originally assumed.  Home is not a place on a map, but a place where love resides. 

I touched Bro’s heart and he giggled.  “Home?”  I asked him. 

He did not answer me.  He simply walked into the living room with Sam and chased our littlest golden around laughing. 

And so Bro was right: Uncle Darren had not gone, he was home.

A New Place

Recommended Listening: Up On the Roof—the newest live recording from Carol King and James Taylor

            A few weeks ago I had my wisdom teeth pulled, and, as the moment arrived and my blood pressure skyrocketed, I tried to go to my peaceful place.  I closed my eyes and began to picture Tuscany, its soft rolling hills and glorious vineyards, its smell of fresh air and the luxury of a perpetually opened window.  Instead however, I saw a small purple face locked in a scream and little arms waving erratically in the air.   Before you start thinking Sigourney Weaver and space, I too was shocked to learn that this scene took place in our very own atmosphere.  My peaceful place had become, in short, the day my son was born.

            I think that we all have places we retreat to when the world becomes too much.  At night sometimes, when I cannot banish the anxieties of the day, I remember sitting by an open window and the feel of my old red patchwork quilt beneath my legs.  I can still hear that magic sound of the needle dropping onto my favorite record player.  I can taste my mom’s tuna fish salad and the feel of my pruned hands on long summer pool days. 

            And now there are more days to add to my bucket.  There is my wedding day, and the birth of my son, though not all my memories are so grand.  Most of them are homely like my patchwork quilt, and understand me like my favorite pair of slippers. 

            Now, when I am thinking back to those summer nights with my parents, a blanket of stars gathered above us, I can also add the first time Bro pointed out his window and saw his first star.  I can remember the time my dog Daisy and I descended upon the park after a massive snowstorm.  I can almost touch the spring crocus I now plant every year, and who never fail me. 

            Today I was watching Bro sitting in Zingermans and the pride on his face as he sat in his own chair with his own plate of food.  I wondered if this might become a peaceful place for him one day, and knew it had already become one for me.

A Moment to Restore Sanity

I am writing now to the sounds of "Bob."  "Bob is Bob."  "Uh-oh.  Bob is on the floor."  Long pause.  "Hi-lo Bob."
All this prompts me to ask, "Who is Bob?"
But perhaps I should start at the beginning.
I try to explain to my son everyday why he must take an afternoon nap.  I tell him how he will feel refreshed when he is done.  I tell him that it will help him to grow tall and strong.  I tell him we will have pizza when he is done, and pizza can only be made once a nap has been completed, because that's how the Italians do it.
And basically, he cares about none of this.  Brody cares about the sounds trains make and the way a city bus is not yellow.  He cares if the cat is in his seat, and if something is mine, why is not mine then too?
Brody owns a lot of things.  He is the venture capitalist of our household.  But the one thing he will not own, is his afternoon nap.
Today, as I was rocking and running out of songs I knew that were appropriate for a two year old, and trust me when I say that Bohemian Rhapsody is not, I finally spoke the truth to Brody.  I told him that he must take an afternoon nap so that his momma has a moment of sanity, and I think he actually got it, because he went calmly to his crib.
And perhaps this is because "Bob" was with him. "Bob" and him seem to be having a real hoot up there, while I'm down here, not resting but wondering who "Bob" could be.
And so, instead of restoring sanity, I contemplate "Bob."  And this is what it means to be a parent.