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Dave at Davestock, a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

the beach is in front of him, sunset pink over the mountains of the opposite shore. the water is glass, the beach, pebbles. old tree stumps gnarl and twist in the bonfire.

his parents’ fishing shed is visible behind him. the cottage, replete with antlers, looms on stilts across the lawn. there is an octagonal gazebo for latenight singalongs without black flies. the smokestack from the power plant looms just out of frame. there is a full moon.

from the deck of the cottage, they look out, easy and laughing, clustered, catching up.

nine years since we gathered here. the bodies shift, some of us stoutened with babies and beer. the beards grow grizzled and flecked with silver.

most of them – the guys, and a few of the women – have known each other since childhood. most moved away from here years ago: all return, though, in regular pilgrimages to parents and grandparents still rooted in this small town.

they called it Davestock, that first summer party sixteen or seventeen years ago, when most of them were twenty-ish or not much more. guitars and cases of Alpine that ensured Dave’s mother’s place as a saint in the annals of history: most of them saw beer bottle toss as a blood sport, then.

they are different, now.

or not. the lawn at the cottage Sunday morning was oddly pristine. not a trace of vomit in the pansies; even the few rogue cans and sixpacks looked anemic in the wholesome expanse of green. somebody finally wrote out all the verses to Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall. not one soul braved shrinking flesh and the misnamed Bay of Heat to skinnydip at midnight. but there were still guitars until nearly dawn. gestures, familiar. signature laughs that do not change, only deepen a squeak or two.

there is no such thing as catching up, of course. it is impossible to tell your life to me, or mine to you, not really: we none of us have ears to hear the tide that is somebody else’s reality. we parse and allude and it washes over us, and then we smile and nod and pretend we are made clean to each other. we have no business claiming to know each other over time.

your friend, the one you loved when you were a green, lost kid: that friend has shed all his cells and his eyes are crinkled now. they’ve seen a hundred things you never will. that other friend, ripped wide open by a fork in the road that was not yours to take? she is no more that girl you knew than she is a phoenix. we are each of us only aging humans who remember each other fondly: whose stories intersected once, and again.

yet we end up woven together, each making the other a little more real. shared history. i stand at the edge of the fire and watch them all and smile at Dave, who is more Dave at Davestock, suddenly, than anywhere.

i hear The Cure in my head – you make me feel like i am home again - and i warm my hands at the fire and hope they can come again next summer.
***

who are your oldest friends? do you know them, still? how?

California was mythical, even in reality.

San Diego was a whirl of sunshine and parties and fish tacos. i don’t eat fish. i almost never stay up for 24 hours dancing and talking about porn and philosophy with people i’ve never met before. i don’t often read my own words to crowds of thousands, or try to hug them all afterwards. yet i swear it happened. and Mark Twain was right, San Francisco in the summer was colder than winters i’ve spent. people had down jackets on. in August. i hadn’t believed. my unbelief is fixed, now. and i have a new sweatshirt.

one week away. one week without children. first time in more than five years.

the verdict is in: we still like each other. there is still some syncopated rhythm between us two, even when the two small drummers and the routine we all march to are removed. it is good to know. you hope, but you cannot quite know.

mind you, we spar more in their absence. more attention to give, to smooth out, to make something of. i am difficult. i work overhard at this. it may sometimes be exhausting.

(we’ve flown all night, seated in front of a very loud, entitled woman who was apparently new to the 21st century and to the concept of not sharing every. single. thought in her head at full volume with the entire. fucking. airplane. did you know that there are screens on the seatbacks? yep. she got a full tutorial which she repeated for everybody. at midnight. did you know that the seats tilt back? full tutorial on that too. she ordered a chicken sandwich at one am. turned on her light so she could dissect it for the listening pleasure of the whole plane. she didn’t eat it. her voice was a giggly caricature of middle-aged feminine faux-passivity. yes, she probably had anxiety. or mental health issues. still, it was a five hour flight and even with my earplugs in i only managed to sleep about 45 minutes. i wanted to smother her with a lipstick. Dave slept like a baby. all that to say he might have been a little wiped out.)

but we had fun. and i was surprised. it was my first BlogHer, and our first trip to California, and i thought it was possibly a ridiculous mistake to try to combine the two. but i am not one to shy from a ridiculous mistake if i can kill two birds with one stone, and ill-conceived whim or no, it rescued me from the nail-biting of having to try to find a roommate for the conference and discovering i am actually a pariah whom nobody wants to sleep with. even platonically. so, i brought Dave.

and he was game. really game, genuinely hey, i’m putting my best self out there game and hey, i am totally happy to take care of myself while you hang with your friends game and really just altogether agreeable and cool and some part of us time-travelled back years to a life we left behind a long time ago, where we were social and fey and the life of the party. he even deigned to play tourist in San Francisco and take pictures of me in cheesily mythic locales, waving at the ghosts of Jerry Garcia and Jack Kerouac. we danced, and we were flaneurs wandering city streets and we sat with old friends and laughed, and made new ones. i turned my head once, sidelong, and said hey you in a tone i haven’t used in years, and he laughed and i thought we could have a rocking good time at the old age home someday, us two.

(our cupcake cuteness courtesty of the lovely & talented Schmutzie, aka Elan Morgan).

so is it true? is joint BlogHer the key to cohabital bliss?

well kinda. BlogHer itself is everything you think it might be, and more. people will write better on that than i. it’s huge, and overwhelming, and fabulous to see people, and i’m not much for swag but i liked the BlogHer folk immensely and loved having my arms around people who’ve previously mostly been words and stories, for me.

all that would have been a pleasure on my own. i actually spent a lot of the conference on my own, because Dave’s pass was only for the evenings. so i met new people. i researched. i sat in on sessions and discussions. i had my nails painted yellow – for free – by a day hire for Tropicana. i sat backstage with the Voice of the Year women, which made me feel ten feet tall and wrapped in a hand-stitched quilt of kindness and support.

but when i stepped out onstage in front of everyone, i knew he was there.

no need to explain it later, to try to capture it. i knew his face was smiling up at me, a pillow for the quilt.

because this is the secret rule, people, the one that is the key to all public coupledom beyond the bounds of cloistered domesticity and duty. one simple thing.

your spouse needs to get that people online are real. that’s it. if you leave it to BlogHer to shove that message through an unwilling skull, you’re wasting half your weekend.

but if you ever had a love letter relationship, it’ll work. if your partner understands that connecting with people through words makes for deep ties, bring ‘im. bring ‘er. give ‘er.

it helps if he or she likes people. and is maybe your friend, as much as or more than your romantic mate. BlogHer is no space for jealousy.

it also helps if he or she is cool not knowing everybody. because even you won’t. no matter who you are.

and if he or she is cool wandering off alone sometimes, so you can connect with people as yourself and not just a member of a twosome.

and if he or she is willing to hold his or her own, and be your social equal, whatever that means for the two of you and the circles you run in, that’s the clincher. if you’re a talker or a joker or a wild party-dancer and your blog community are Just Like You and your spouse isn’t, he or she may stick out as an extra, rather than a member. there are all kinds of intersecting communities there to be part of, and they’re porous and fairly welcoming, but they are based on affinity. membership is extended, if a person can step into the roles available.

know your people. and your person. if you think they’d be a rotten fit, don’t do it to any of you: don’t go to BlogHer together.

if you need to justify your hundred internet friends to your loved one, you will have a miserable time. if you need to justify your loved one to your hundred internet friends, you will have a miserable time.

if your loved one likes the idea of meeting and expanding your circle of internet friends – and perhaps taking The Palinode hat shopping in the process – then consider a party pass and a shared room.

you may surprise yourselves.

and when you go home, to the other life, the small world where few of us are superstars, you will not have to explain anything. you will crash together back into it, neither of you owing the other. and you will think, damn, am i lucky.

hello kiddos. we missed you. we’re home. and we’re good.

my grandmother’s passport, WWII, a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

when my grandmother was not quite nineteen years old, she married a boy from the farm down the road. she was a country girl, a second daughter of four.

she did not get a honeymoon. she got a passport, expedited. a few weeks after the wedding she got on a train and went from Charlottetown, PEI, to New York City.

it was October 1942. my grandfather met her train, took her to a brownstone apartment on West 76th Street. he left the next morning, his mission and destination entirely classified. he was a spy, a communications agent for British Security Coordination. he was gone six weeks.

she had never, so my grandfather said, been off of PEI before in her life.

i found her passport yesterday afternoon, going through files in my grandfather’s basement.

i traced my fingers over her face: familiar and strange. or rather, i remember it well, but forty years older, lined, turned down at the mouth. in it. i peered in and a dozen family faces danced back at me at odd angles: my aunts, my half-sister, a cousin.

i cocked my head to one side and squinted and could see myself, for a second, diffracted. i smiled, surprised and wry and bewildered, all at once. because the girl in that photo is less than half my age, and yet my grandmother, undeniably. try holding both those things as equally true, at once. you turn into a country song.

i looked at her blouse, her jacket: probably her very best, if not the only ones she owned. i wondered what her shoes looked like, tucked away under the stool of the photography shop where that passport photo was taken. the grandmother i knew wore sensible shoes, always. but the grandmother i knew never quite had that look on her face, either. i wondered where that eagerness got to. it left no stamps in the passport to tell its story.

i kinda hope she was wearing those sexy strappy wedge sandals of the forties, the ones Shelly Winters called her Come Fuck Me shoes.

what is a passport photo for, really, if not grand shoes and grand hopes?

***

i use my own passport so little now i can barely remember where i keep it. i found it tonight, breathed a sigh of relief, realized i am six months from expiry. Dave found his. he has an extra year before he needs a renewal, because i put his last passport through the washing machine.

when we were first together, we had our passports on us nearly all the time. both of us stared out from the pages long-haired and wide-eyed: Dave held his shoulders like a rugby player and looked absolutely not at all like anyone you’d want to let into your country. still, he had twenty-some stamps. i did too. the little books were like condensed maps of the worlds we’d walked, tiny resumes, stories unto themselves.

now my passport has a single stamp in it: Heathrow, 2007. the U.S. does not stamp Canadians. when i flew to DC in April, i considered asking for a stamp, just to mark that i was there. but what can you say to a customs agent? someday, when i’ve been dead twenty-three years, i’d like someone to find this in a basement and know i was here?

we leave tomorrow, to take the kids to Dave’s parents, then on to BlogHer. i am reading. Dave is coming. both these things seem marvellously unreal to me, as does California in general.

after San Diego, we have three days in San Francisco.

in my grandfather’s basement yesterday, i found a souvenir book: Views of San Francisco. April 1945 is written on the front cover, in his handwriting: he was a member of the delegation at the first United Nations conference there. he must have brought the book home to my grandmother. she never saw the city, except through its splendidly titled black-and-white pages.

i will bring it with us.

and i am tempted, when we land, to ask the customs agent to stamp our passports.
***

what’s on your passport?
…and who wants to take me & Dave to all the cool parties in San Diego? he’s bringing his best heels.

it is everywhere, Norway and the horn of Africa and Amy Winehouse.

we are such fragile creatures, in the end. we scrabble, empty-handed, to connect. we fall like paper dolls, and we are dismayed to discover – over and over again – that death is always with us.

the ancient Stoic Seneca wrote an essay called To Marcia, On Consolation. in it he proposes that Marcia, who has lost a child, float far far up and away and imagine the world just before her entry into it. he offers her what Foucault calls “the right to a view”; the threshhold perspective from which she can see her whole journey laid out from the gods’ eye view.

in rude paraphrase, Seneca says to her, You will see stars and planets and jagged lightning, mountains and towns, the ocean, sea monsters. you will see nothing that has not tempted human audacity. but there is trial. he talks of plagues and shipwrecks, bad weather, war.…And the premature loss of those close to you, and death, maybe gentle or maybe full of pain and torture. Seneca says to Marcia, Consider and weigh carefully your choice; once you have entered this life of marvels, you must pass through these things to leave it. It is up to you to accept it on these conditions.(1)

i accept. i have stood on Marcia’s threshhold: i have chosen acceptance. but Seneca, in the art of consolation, you’re a bit of an ass.

you Stoics were trying to discipline the dismay, i think. as a guide to action, you have a point. we should not turn away from death, nor be shocked when it comes knocking too near us.

but the gods’ eye view is a sham, a trompe l’oeil. in the end, when we stare loss in the face, we look through our own eyes.

there is no language to talk of all the death in the world.

to grieve someone or something is to mark its individuality, its particularity. you cannot honour anything from a thousand miles up.
***

we sat with Daniel under the trees the other night.

his friend Carmel is dying. Carmel officiated at the marriage of Daniel and his wife Sundi, six years ago now. Sundi lost her mother when she was a teenager: it was Carmel, a nun, her mother’s friend, who stepped up and in where she could. now Carmel has cancer. now Carmel and Sundi are both a thousand miles away, or three. i am not good at distance. Carmel is seventy years old, or thereabouts. age is only a form of distance.

Daniel became our friend half a world away.

this is Daniel looking at Dave.

since Daniel moved here at the end of May, he has sat in our yard a lot of evenings. he has chopped down trees with Dave on our cottage lot. they have gone out to listen to music. they have argued, and laughed. it is a gift to have an old friend around.

this is Dave looking at Daniel.

i have only known one other Carmel in my life: Dave’s aunt, his father’s eldest sister, the matriarch, second mother to the clan. they must have been born in nearly the same year, a country apart. no connection except the random friendship of Daniel and Dave and i, and a name.

Dave’s aunt Carmel was diagnosed with cancer at the end of June. liver and pancreas, the fastest. beyond treatment. she fell into a coma Sunday night. we got the news this morning that she is gone.

if i tell you that she had the loveliest singing voice and that her eyes crinkled, it is not to flout Seneca’s counsel. accept, yes. but each of us only comes this way once. our views of each other are singular windows, one-shot deals.
***

Diane Arbus has been dead forty years today, by her own hand.

this article paints her harshly, as a voyeur and exploiter of sorts, intruding on the power relations between her and the outsiders who were her subjects. the author claims that Arbus makes us viewers complicit in a predatory act, held in sway when “our better instincts tell us to look away.”

my better instincts disagree.

Diane Arbus’ subjects were often circus geeks, drag queens, nudists, people with mental and physical disabilities: people excluded from the privileged halls of portraiture. she was their friend, for the most part, and i think it shows. she photographed them in their specificity, their one-time-only-ness: they stare back at the camera like a challenge, and leap, for me, from the screen and page, from the mundane worlds containing them.

her photos have a carnivalesque quality, it’s true. yet each subject is intensely, immensely human: it is the backdrop – the so-called ‘normal world’ and our belief in it – that Arbus skewers.

if it is unseemly and invasive to look on difference, then we back away, floating up and up until we see through the gods’ eye view, where all is blurry and less raw.

but i would rather live in Arbus’ world than Seneca’s.

and so i sit in my yard and take pictures of my friend of and my partner, while we talk of two women named Carmel, who were here.

(1). Foucault, M. (2001). The hermeneutics of the subject. New York, NY: Picador. p. 283-284.

kids, start saving your pennies for a trip to PEI, Extreme Adventure-style.

oh, you might think a Saturday afternoon of old-fashioned races with Nannie and Anne of Green Gables is rather ho-hum. you might think you’re too cool for that.

watch and learn. first, pick an ancient potato sack. get in it. line up with the afore-mentioned Anne of Green Gables and your unsuspecting Nannie. do NOT forget your sunglasses.

also, do NOT forget to begin hopping when Anne shouts GO! and everybody bounces away.

there you go. hippity hop.

now, the real key to Extreme Adventure Antique Sack-Racing is to avoid hopping in a straight line. get out in the lead ahead of Nannie, kids. then hop directly in front of her. do not worry when she knocks your hat off. you won’t be able to see, admittedly, but rest assured, Mummy is capturing it all on camera. and Nannie is quite a sight.

also rest assured poor Nannie will do anything to avoid hurting your precious self, including going down like a tonne of bricks in a decrepit sack and twisting her poor ankle.

note Anne of Green Gables hopping by in the background, barely batting an eyelash. make no mistake, kids, Stone Cold Anne is in it to win it. and who knew Nannie had such delicate ligaments?

she should be FINE by September, though. don’t worry your pretty little heads. and try not to gawk as you hop on by, kiddo, leaving poor Nannie in the dust. also, respect your elders. stop looking so gleeful.

and for heaven’s sake, don’t stick your tongue out at Nannie as you cross the finish line before her. even if Anne of Green Gables IS cheering you on.

gawd, my mother’s a good sport. and the doctors say she’ll be walking just fine before we know it. but i think next year when looking for some vacation fun we’re gonna play it safe and go with some nice go-Karts or roller coasters or something. these pastoral, old-fashioned amusements are too rich for our blood.

what are YOU doing for summer family fun?

it’s Friday night, July, and we’re in the backyard with visiting friends. a warm evening, for here, but settling into dampness as the sun slides off into deep blue.

he comes out with a sweater on, a plain grey knit crewneck, roomy and soft. mine.

one of the oldest items of clothing i still own, sleeves beginning to fray at the edges. it has a slit up the back where his father accidentally sliced it once: it was at the top of the box, the favoured one, last thing packed. we had just moved back to Canada, and Dave’s dad was eager to show off the sharpness of his Swiss Army knife.

no matter. it was a decade old, even then. it still keeps out most of the mosquitoes.

that sweater has been more places than most members of my family. i bought it by mail order when i lived north of the Arctic Circle, that first long black winter when the sun disappeared for months. my body was small but i did not know it. i ordered a large. it came big enough for two of me; the perfect sweatshirt, only dressier.

i wore it that summer, home in the Maritimes to visit, when we stopped at a friend’s cottage. my boyfriend’s buddy, younger, still in college. i hadn’t met him before. i didn’t see him again for a year. then he lived in another country for two: he grew up somewhere along the way. another year later, and our respective worlds dissolved and then collided.

there would not be another shot taken of just the two of us for five more years. but here we are, the first night we met, in July of 1996. fifteen years. a blink, or three.

there is a rock wall behind us, and water in front. you cannot see either, particularly. but i see them, as i see the one who took the photo, the one between us and the water. the one we smiled at, without guile. so much water to cross. so much left behind.

yet we still own both the sweaters that we’re wearing in this photo. Dave’s has fared worse than my own: what remains is a faded, mostly shredded collection of holes, like a child’s blankie loved too long. we still have the guitar. neither pair of jeans was long for this world.

i didn’t know, that summer night fifteen years ago, how the story turned out. it would have been too complicated to look in the eye, anyway. yet i stare at the photo looking for clues, for signs, talismans. do we fit together, like tectonic plates at right angles, waiting to be aligned? or is it all just chaos and choice and sheer luck, and hold tight to the shreds you’ve been granted? even if they do occasionally break into Whitney Houston songs in dead spite?

i don’t know. i do know that the friends who visited us this weekend would have seen a pair perhaps not so different from the two in this photo. older, yes. more distracted. but still at these odd right angles, distinct and yet easy in each others’ company. his hair is still longer than mine. there is often a drink in his hand. he holds the guitar more, lately.

i want to peer into the scree at the bottom of the magic teacup and conjure a picture fifteen years hence. gray hair, a few more pounds: that matters not. what i want you to tell me is that the picture will still look, somehow, like this one.

i will save the grey sweater, and see.
***

are there first photos of you and the one(s) you love(d)? what do they tell you of what came true?

we don’t call her princess. but when her little feet get weary in the Canada Day Parade, he treats her like one.

happy long summer weekend, North America. we’re up to our ears in real princes & princesses here in PEI. hope you’ve got your feet up just like Posey.

it is late on a Sunday night and i’m beached on the couch, weary and bloated and wracked with mild – if transient – anxiety about the state of the world and my place in it. business as usual, with hormones.

Dave Skypes me from the other room, on the other side of the French doors. we are all about intimate and romantic forms of communication in this house.

he asks if i want to learn to play a new board game.

if there is a signal that human mammals employ to suggest receptiveness to the learning of new things – like lady baboons employing their swollen behinds – i am NOT giving off even the tiniest whiff of that signal. i am, rather, giving off the Jabba the Hut signal, the one that screams STAND BACK!!! FURTHER!!! AND MAKE NO MENTION OF NEW OR COMPETITIVE OR CONFUSING ENDEAVOURS!!!

Dave is undeterred. he is thinking about board games, not about me. he enters my lair.

i give him The Look. the raised eyebrow one, the one that suggests that actually, playing a board game would be far too much for my poor beleaguered soul to bear on this particular evening and LEARNING a NEW board game would be just beyond.

a fresh hell. an affront. a dangerous game.

he is oblivious: he has board game on the brain. he is a Labrador Retriever with a stick. board game? he smiles brightly. i glare at him.

board game?
***
we played the board game, in the end. i won. it was little consolation.

once Dave has set his fancy to something, there is little one can do to curb the hurtling missile of his enthusiasm. except wait. his attention span is short, but it is mighty. like a freight train. his is an addictive personality for the passing whim.

seven or eight years ago, he bought a domain name: addictite.com. he’d coined the word in a short story he’d written not long before, when short stories were his thing: the addictite is the person who is, more or less, addicted to the process of becoming addicted. to the new. to the fresh. to the unknown. an enthusiast writ large.

then he got a new idea and…yeh…forgot about the domain.

but last weekend he resurrected it. he’d mastered the last of the three culinary goals he’d set for himself when we moved back to Canada and things like ovens and BBQs came within our reach again: turkeys, roast beef, and ribs.

we had ribs on Saturday. back ribs, the fat ones, all lip-smackin’ and good. they were glorious: you could cut ‘em with a butter knife. and now you can read about them at addictite.com, and try ‘em for yourselves.

and he can return to the recipe when the Next Big Thing comes along and makes him forget he ever met such a thing as pork.
***

The Next Big Thing, of course, never takes long.

today he wants a chainsaw. and i am afeared.

this is how it starts, people. this is yesterday, amidst the mosquitoes and overgrowth at our new cottage-land-to-be. you see that look on his face? the zoning in? the zealot’s focus? the wheels turning? yeh, that’s what it always looks like.

you can see Posey is beginning to look more like me every day. ;)

dear Internetz, this is your moment. while he still has toes. bring your chainsaws, and your protective Kevlar pants, and whatever other Village People costumes suit your fancy. or at least your advice. should a grown man with all his digits and an acre to clear buy his own chainsaw?

come quick. before he decides he needs a backhoe too.

i wake at three-something because i feel him leave the bed, and i wrest the earplugs from my ears. Posey. she has been waking regularly lately, a froth of nightmares of bats and cows. he comforts her. i am awake anyway, so i go in, pull quilts up around small chins.

we slip back into the warmth of bed. i wrap myself around his back, and try to convince my pingpong brain to ignore the fact that my biggest school presentation of the year is in a few short hours. or that i should still be reading.

we drift. i only realize i’ve fallen asleep when a child pads in an hour later and interrupts a dream. i am blurry, confused. Oscar. Oscar? strange. he crawls in beside me and i move to accommodate. his curly head fits under my chin, and sleep drags like a tugboat.

oblivi….oh shit.

he is retching, shielding his mouth with small hands.

the capacity of the parental body to go from 0 to 60 on the adrenalin-o-meter – even and especially from the desperate fog of sleep – is a blessing and a curse. it is the reason my own quilt is still vomit-free this fair morning. it is also the reason i can no longer sleep without earplugs, because my poor body has been conditioned to flood with cortisol at any bump in the night.

success. we clear the gauntlet of items-that-require-heavy-washing-or-dry-cleaning if spewed upon, and make it to the toilet. i send Dave back to bed, because when Father’s Day falls on the day before your partner’s biggest school presentation of the year and also is the first Father’s Day her father is without his father, well, you get to go bbq at your in-laws’ and that’s as fancy as your day gets.

but the gift of sleep from 4:30 to 6am? a price above rubies, right?

he can’t say i never gave him nothin’.

and yet when i find myself curled on the futon in the guest room with my clammy son, a bucket beside us, him snoring away and occasionally retching; me reading a critique of Butler and Foucault’s failure to account for the materiality of discourse by nightlight and wondering if my own guts aren’t a little iffy, my mind wanders to Dave in the next room and i remember how the light of almost-dawn used to find us still awake under oh-so-different circumstances and i send up a tiny song of mourning for what will not come again, those easy days we took for granted. and i whisper at the wall, in his direction, hey you. i remember.

and i add, i hope you are sleeping. Happy Father’s Day.
***

and this afternoon i present my thesis project in draft. a three hour meeting. wish me luck. send coffee.

when he hung the baby swing on the one branch in our backyard that could possibly be trusted with a swing, it seemed that summers yawned out ahead of us before we’d have to grapple with the fact that the playhouse – fondly referred to as the “babyhouse” since the August before Posey was born, when Dave & his dad built it by hand and Oscar appointed it the home-to-be of his incoming baby sister – sits way too close.

the trajectory of branch to baby house results in a nice resounding thwack of shoes hitting shingles. if child is safely esconced in the plastic bucket of a baby swing, all good. the fact that under the swing is a large unmoveable wooden garden box matters not. the rope is short. the child is contained. all is well.

but when the baby stretches and her big brother decides he too wants to careen through the air and thwack the baby house with his feet? on the long ropes of a big kid swing? there is possibly a safety issue in the making. there are possibly big THWACKS in the making. the prospect of falls begins to look ugly.

we bought a big kid swing anyway. sometimes you have to try something to figure it out.

there was much anticipation.  it was shortly thereafter followed by cries of great disappointment, because we discovered we were quite right, and there is nowhere safe to hang a big kid swing in our yard. the swing came down fifteen minutes after it went up.

but this is not a story about swings.

***

we had a strange afternoon, yesterday.

when it is the first truly sunny warm afternoon of the summer and you have already reduced your preschoolers to tears with the giving and taking of big-kid swings, it can be wise to cut your losses. we got out of the yard, headed to the park and took a little walk in the woods. the children were happy. they were so happy, meandering through the thin little forest paths looking for pinecones and elusive chipmunks that they totally missed the man and the woman and the baby who blew by us as we emerged near the ballfield.

i missed them too, at first. i mean, i saw them, moved a little because he was walking so quickly, but i didn’t see them, except to register that he was tall and lean and her hair was blond and the baby was wearing something white, maybe a dress. i didn’t see their faces.

but as they passed us, me last in our little trundling foursome, she called out to the baby he was carrying. something in her voice made my spine shudder.

her words were benign. she spoke the baby’s name, said Mommy’s right here, it’s okay, honey.

but the baby was not crying.

and the woman’s voice was raw adrenalin.

i suddenly realized the intensity of their pace and body language. i suddenly realized that a group of men were hustling past us, in direct pursuit. the baby looked back at us, her head resting on the shoulder of the man i assume to be her father. she was being carried away. her mother kept pace, her words soothing, her tone a raw, pleading alarm.

i looked at Dave, who had clued in earlier than i, his body tensed. my ears caught the words of one of the men passing, who was clearly speaking to 911, reporting an abduction. we paused, both of us.

the human brain can do amazing things in moments of stress, even vicarious stress. i looked at Dave and saw him through a prism of three lenses, all the space of a heartbeat.

one saw immediate and practical potentiality: he is fast. he could help.

one noted his actual – and perhaps more practical – choice of actions, and approved: he is solidly and gently ushering the children away from the spectacle.

the third lens, though, was the complicated one, the one that made my breath catch with the gravity of what i spend my days blithely ignoring. he is my children’s father and i am more vulnerable to him than to anyone else on earth.

we are a relational species, we humans, none of us an island. we are webbed to each other by choice and by circumstance. you could say that when i chose Dave, i knew him well, in all his flaws and glory. i chose him after five years of knowing him: it was by far the most deliberate choice i have made in my life. but no choice – no matter how deliberate – is ever made with full knowledge. sometimes you have to try something to figure it out.

what makes he & i so different from the two who passed us in the midst of their crisis, their unfolding judgement of Solomon?

most of us, if we are lucky, have our choices of partner or fellow parent turn out mostly benign. the people to whom we give this enormous trust may turn out to be imperfect, but still…mostly worthy. if we are lucky.

it is easy to say i trust Dave with my life. and still, staring at the retreating backs of those two parents in the woods yesterday, i was shell-shocked by the evidence of how much trust that really is, and how fragile.

we have lived through upheaval and loss and mundanity together. do i believe he will ever grab the children and run? no. nor would i. i would, genuinely, bet my life on these two facts.

it just hadn’t occurred to me before that i do so every day.

i remember realizing, in the broody angst of my teens, that traffic is an enormous dance, a game remarkable not for its occasional breakdowns and tragedies but for the massive compliance it usually manages to exact. to  we enter it daily, fastening ourselves and our loved ones into our little metal boxes, all of us more or less simultaneously performing the rituals and observances that keep us on our respective sides of the roads and the stop signs and the oncoming headlights and thus alive. on a dark road late at night, we may entertain fantasies of playing chicken, but we almost never swerve the wheel.

somewhere, yesterday, in that triad that must once have been a couple and some sort of family, whose story i do not claim to know, somebody swerved the wheel.

i stood frozen on the little path, as the father and baby and mother rounded the corner out of my sight and into the cleavage between whatever they might have been before that moment and whatever the law will leave when it is finished with them. the four men in pursuit began to run. there but for fortune, i whispered.

the police car arrived as we left the park. lights, but no siren. i hoped that meant that the men who pursued them had stopped him, that the situation was contained, that the mother’s voice no longer sounds like it did, primal and terrified.
***

our children were oblivious. we came home. we looked at pictures from the morning. Oscar noted plaintively how happy he’d looked on the big kid swing. thwack.

i agreed. he noted that he hadn’t hurt himself. i agreed. then i explained that if he did fall, or if Posey fell, it’s just not a smart place for Mummy & Daddy to have a swing like that. i explained that Daddy had committed to finding a new place for the big kid swing. he pouted.

i asked him if Daddy usually does what he promises. Oscar nodded. Posey echoed.

and then i took a deep breath and wished, that the two of them will be so easy and so lucky in their trust, all their days. that they will not swerve. that they will not be caught in anyone’s oncoming traffic.