cribchronicles.com

my boy.

we spent your last day of four home sick together yesterday. this morning you are five and the cupcakes for the preschool party are iced in blue chocolate-milk icing, a jujube dinosaur parked garishly in each.

you have a cough that will not quit, but we will go to preschool with the cupcakes no matter what. what are germs amongst cupcake kindred?

all is ready.

five, Oscar. by your next birthday, you’ll probably be reading.

you can sound out words, already, and when you print your name your “s” is more and more frequently right-side-up. you love to make things, grow things, imagine things. you hoard my empty tin cans for building robots and dinosaur pod-cars and pirate ships. you lust after Bakugan, but i am not sure you know why, not yet.

in the last few weeks all the people you draw have eyes of a matched size, two perfect circles in their face. it disconcerts me in its suddenness, that fearful symmetry. but there it is: it seems to have come to stay. your cock-eyed days are behind you, my son. welcome to the tyranny of aesthetics. don’t ever let it win, entirely.

i still don’t quite know if you are right- or left-handed, at five. your teacher is baffled. i am amused. i tell her maybe you are neither. or both, like your uncle Stephen before you.

five. the year most kids start reliably remembering things.

SCREECH. dammit. i think i missed my window.
***

there i am, meandering my way through a mother’s love letter when my legs begin to spin in thin air like Wile E. Coyote in that split second before gravity triumphs and the freefall begins.

before my fingers can even telegraph it all to the keyboard i clamp down. i am aghast.

it’s not that he will not remember, these castles and kingdoms and Jurassic days and too-early mornings. i know it and i knew it every day of these past five years even if i waited until today to acknowledge it to myself, aloud.

it’s that i waited anyway. suddenly i realize that the time is not coming back: that he will remember. that his own narratives will take over, soon…that they already are. that he will read soon. that all those last gasps of truth and nuttiness i always wanted to somehow convey to my children when they were small and helpless and believed everything i said?

i waited too long.

one day he wakes up and the dinosaurs start shooting at each other and i say, “dude, that’s violent. that’s not okay in our house.” and he says “Mom. you’re dead. bang.” and just like that, the window closes.
***

Oscar, my heart.

when you are reading, i suppose i’ll need to make some adjustments to the wishes i write down for you.

(not that someday these words won’t be all yours – yours and your sister’s. but what is here is for the someday you. not the five-year-old who makes dinosaurs into wild and ravaging pirates on a paper boat.)

this morning i told you five was magic, because five-year-olds can listen extra good. and it worked and you zipped up your coat when asked just like a little Prussian and i was shocked and grateful and terribly impressed with my own genius but here’s the secret.

i want you to be a little Prussian and i don’t want you to be a little Prussian. for the moment, in the right now, i fuss with all these manners, this making your bed, this silliness. it is my job.

but it is my job, too, to teach you that the world is heartache and beauty and worth living in. what life does, little one, is rips by you until last week and twenty years ago seem equidistant and you do. not. believe it but there it is. a fact. you won’t believe me, now. you can’t, i know.

but take pictures, Oscar, so you remember.

and here’s my advice, on life. for five-year-old pirates and fifty-year-old pirates, because i secretly hope you’ll keep a little of your swashbuckle.

the world requires more than politeness and tidy beds to be a decent place.

(ssshhh. don’t tell.)

sure, be on time. and look people in the eye, always. and say thankyou and i’m sorry. especially i’m sorry.

but don’t stop being fierce. don’t stop throwing yourself into the arms of those who love you. don’t stop being able to say, i’m scared. keep working on doing stuff even when you are scared. keep making up naughty rhymes to songs. try not to sing them in front of your Nannie.

you told me yesterday you weren’t really turning five; that you were already eighteen. and i looked at you and realized i will blink and it will be true.

but you will shine, then, like now. i know it. just don’t let them steal your shine, kid; the real pirates, the ones who try to make us all conform.

because you are amazing the way you are, and you have been from the moment five years ago when they first laid you in my arms.

i write this for the someday you, so you will know what it was i meant to tell you, all these busy, distracted, beautiful days. soon the window will close, and you will not hear me much, for years. but if you ever wonder about the sounds my mouth is making? it’s just this stuff.

it says i love you. happy birthday, Oscar boy.

love Mama

there was this line in Heave, maybe twenty-five pages in: Anne of Green Gables does the Big Time.

i read that line and exhaled a great, dramatic sigh and thought, there it is. the adolescent dream of a proper PEI girl.

the protagonist, she’s in London. a girl from the Maritimes, twenty years old and drunk as a sailor. quite profane, also high, and busy passing out in a graveyard. but in London.

when i was a sensitive foolhardy kid dying to be absolutely anywhere else on the planet but here where god and parochialism had planted me, far too big of head for the world i knew but far too small and provincial for anywhere else, i dreamed of London. i had barely been to Moncton, but i read everything about London i could get my grubby paws on. Boy George lived there. David Bowie lived there. actual straight men apparently lived there too, but they were not much on my radar when i was thirteen. i read and i hungered and i dreamed, because my horizons had suddenly outgrown Anne of Green Gables and i had no clue what came next.

had i read Heave at thirteen, i might not have needed to live it all quite so messily. but since i did, reading Heave was like finding a fictional kindred spirit.

not that Heave is meant for thirteen-year-olds, by any means. it ‘s the coming-of-age story of a quirky, singular, imaginative girl-woman, struggling to find her place in the richly cloistered, old-fashioned world of her Maritime hometown…and alternately, in the wide-open anonymous wonderland of danger and self-destruction that a city like London can be when all you have to hold you together is other people’s stories of who you are.  Heave is the story of a deeply-rooted Maritime sense of place and an even more deeply-rooted sense of culture and hierarchy and everybody in their place that anyone who has ties to this part of the world will recognize. Heave is ripe with characters, just like Rachel Lynde and Mrs. Blewitt, and with pathos, just like Matthew dying. except that its heroine, Seraphina, is very much an adult. she has a drinking problem. and a bit of a wedding problem, it turns out. she is Anne of Green Gables coming of age in the Big Time of the confusing late twentieth century, in a darkly rollicking story that is, in the end, a love letter to these small Maritime worlds that shape so much of who we are.
***

Christy Ann Conlin of Berwick Nova Scotia published Heave in 2002. a bestseller then, it made CBC’s Canada Reads Top 40 this past fall. it’s enjoying its revival quite nicely, thank you, as evidenced by the fact that three separate book clubs in Charlottetown ended up reading it this winter.

if you haven’t read it, you should. if you’re in PEI – or can hie thee hence to our pastoral province in four weeks’ time – then this post is especially for you.

next month, Christy Ann is coming to PEI. she’s doing a writer’s workshop with the PEI Writer’s Guild. she’s doing a reading from her new YA novel Dead Time at UPEI the evening of May 21st, in the illustrious company of her fellow Bluenoser Kate Inglis of sweet|salty and The Dread Crew, beautiful PEI poet Yvette Doucette, and, erm, moi. i’ll be reading from Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, in whose merciful-Jesus-it’s-a-book pages mah words are being published as we speak. i will be the one swooning, like Anne of Green Gables in the Big Time.

but. but.

book clubs make reading go round. so three book clubs were reading Heave. and members of the three clubs – one of them mine – got to talking on Twitter. somebody said, we should all get together! then somebody said, we should invite Christy Ann! then i said, let’s open it up and invite everybody!

social media, you’re fun. or i’m mad. possibly both.

i talked to Random House/Doubleday, Christy Ann’s publisher for Heave, and they kindly agreed to sponsor her trip.

i talked to D.B. Brickhouse, the newly renovated and swanked-up Off Broadway, already one of Charlottetown’s loveliest restaurants, and they generously agreed to offer their warm and lovely loft space, all exposed-beam and brick, for the event.

i talked to the PEI Writers’ Guild, and they sweetly offered up a sponsorship that will buy some nibblies for the evening.

i talked to Christy Ann, and she said she’d love to.

so. Friday, May 20th, at 8pm in the loft of D.B. Brickhouse on Charlottetown’s historic Sydney Street, an evening of good stories and good discussion and good company and probably lots of laughter and irreverence – a #citybookclub for Heave. good wine will also be for sale. all over the age of nineteen are welcomed, open arms.

please come. join us. we want to make it the book club we always wanted to go to.

and…so you can dive into the story of Seraphina Sullivan, late-twentieth century Anne of Green Gables, and get ready for this glorious soiree, we have copies of Heave for giveaway. four of them, to four commenters on this post, who will be randomly selected by my impartial yet helpful offspring this coming weekend.

all you need to do is leave me a quick story. about books, or London, or what place means to you. or whether you think Anne of Green Gables might have ended up with a substance abuse issue had she grown up a hundred years later. or what you’d like to see at a public #citybookclub. or just a nice loud I WANT ONE. whatever. all welcome. locals who can come on May 20th? especially so.

tell your friends. see you there.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire

– T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, Part I, The Burial of The Dead

April is a love letter, the worst kind. it sneaks up in flowered paper and leaves you twisted and gasping at its end. its mud holds all the carnal knowledge of dust to dust, all the endings from which beginnings start again, another year.

maybe we never bury our dead completely. dirt piles up on the graves we make, layer by forgetting layer, but dirt is fragile. the rains of April wash it loose.

it was raining, that morning five years ago when i started out.

the crib sat in the next room, an act of faith performed on our behalf. Dave’s parents had bought it and set it up for us: left alone, we might have wavered, too afraid to call down the eyes of the gods on our hubris. but it was there, sturdy and ready, covered in tinfoil to discourage the cat from nesting in it. i ran my hands up its old-fashioned spindles and caught my breath. it was an artefact of promise.

i named the blog cribchronicles.com ten days before Oscar was born. now, i blush at its domesticity. but in that moment, it felt crazy brave.

it said, this time we will bring him home.

the blog itself was Dave’s idea. he asked, and i said no, i couldn’t possibly, and then, well, maybe i could and he said yes and he set up the wordpress account and bought the domain. an act of faith. my words were bottled up and choking me, all this crocus blooming in the raw earth of April and my terror and my grief, and he saw and he opened a door and i walked through.

and so i began this witness, this love letter, five years ago today.

and now it is five years gone like *that,* another rainy morning, and i am stunned. an eye-blink. and i try to imagine this past five years without this space and i cannot, because this is one of my lilacs out of the dead land, these children, yes, but also these words and this work and this community, these friends. memory and desire.

five years in, i want to thank him. because i would not have started on my own.
***

it was raining last Friday afternoon when i met Susan in DC.

she was among the first bloggers i connected to, more than four years ago now. she wrote smart, humble, patient posts about her last baby, and her toddler, and science, and i thought, i have something to learn from her.

she discovered that summer that she had cancer. she beat that cancer, and a couple more to boot. the fight is ongoing. she writes about it. but she writes about living, mostly. mothering. being a NASA scientist, and a writer.

when i flew into DC for Theorizing the Web – which was fabulous and warrants its own post, coming soon on the theoryblog – i thought maybe i’ll go a day early. maybe i can finally meet Susan, if she’s feeling up for it.

then it was raining and i had a cold and she had scans that morning that will tell if the tumours are growing and i realized at the last minute that i’d asked too much but then my phone rang and she was there, at the hotel.

and one of the gifts of this blog is that everytime i meet someone i’ve known from here it is like meeting an old friend but this one afternoon will stand out for me for the rest of my days. because she took me on the subway into the city through the rain, the two of us without umbrellas, splashing like kids, and we went to the Library of Congress and stood under the vaulted ceilings in that temple to knowledge and the mythos of a nation and the tour guide asked us both if we were twenty-eight and we very nearly kissed him and it was like playing hooky, for a minute, from time and the rest of the world. there is an archway there with four mosaics on the ceiling, science juxtaposed with family and poetry with education, and we posed like muses in our representative corners and i felt like maybe that hall was built solely to house the two of us in that moment. or like it should have been, even if all the names on the tiles were dead men.

she stopped on the stairs. i don’t remember exactly how she said it, only that there were tears in both our eyes. i know she said the word “die” and i thought she was brave to insert it into the conversation, to breach the hull of the unspoken. i know that the afternoon light shone in on us off all that marble and gilt, and the rain outside was invisible for a moment. we read the gold plaque that testifies to the power of authorship, us two brought together by words. and i know that what i heard her say sunk deep in me and told me, in that timeless place, that words matter. that all we leave behind is what we make and share. love. legacies. lilacs out of the dead land.

something to learn, indeed.

it was a perfect April afternoon, joyful and raw and close to the bone and the soul, both. and i thank her, for bringing me, for sharing it with me.
***

Dave’s parents came again this weekend while i was gone. they brought a bed this time, a full twin bed for Oscar’s fifth birthday ten days hence. it waits in the shed for the pirate quilt to be unveiled. Posey will graduate to his toddler bed. and the crib will go, its spindles no longer needed here.

it has a drop-side and The Law tells me i should not pass it on, though it is sturdy yet. and i wonder, do i bury it? honour it? light it a pyre in the backyard?

it will be gone but its legacy will still be here, in these words. as will mine, someday.

i thank that little crib, for being true to its promise. and i thank you, for being here, these five years, for witnessing.

evening stroll, a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

in the spring light i want to promise that we will pack ourselves up every evening and step out the door.

i want to promise that we will watch the tulips come up and the grass return to the park down the street and i will remember what it feels like to swing my arms as i skip down the sidewalk trying to miss the cracks.

i want to promise. i want to turn my face up to the promise as if it were the bright sun, strong enough to hold my trust.

there are a hundred reasons i shouldn’t, i know. there are taxes, and insurance, and cheques to write and playground mud to wash away and a dishwasher to unload. and papers and posts and plans, all waiting, barely tethered. they sit on me like stones. there are worry dolls crafted of anxieties and inadequacies and the collective foibles that shape the silhouette of this small family: the deeper burdens of our particular humanness. one child hates the transition of leaving the house. the other has no fear…a categorical danger anytime she’s not strapped down. their father cannot seem to learn to keep track of his wallet, his keys. i cannot seem to learn how to keep track of both my hands at once: when i clear the table of butter knives, i am a threat to all around me. we seem a motley crew, better suited to piratehood or a monastic life or an episode of Hoarders than this daily grind of rushing from the house to the car seats, bags all packed. to do it again in the evening? madness, i whisper at myself, and curl in again on my couch. the sun hurts your eyes, i console the whisperer.

but in the fading light of after-supper, when we are four together, just moving, i forget all that. i forget that the Emperor has no clothes, that the grownups aren’t coming, that we are it and probably insufficient to the job of these small, fine, vulnerable souls. i forget. for a minute we just are and the one who hated leaving the house begins to hop and skip and i feel the muscle memory in my bones and i twitch and know we will make it to spring, again, one more time.

and so i promise. even if i lie, i promise.

from the minute they were born, they looked exactly like him.

all of them. even Finn, smallest of doppelgangers, his dark eyebrows and his tiny big toe carbon copies of his father’s.

when Oscar was a newborn in the NICU, the nurses used to joke that they couldn’t tell him apart from Dave except for size. every time Josephine smiles, her father gazes out at me, shrunken and in pigtails.

high school science class taught me that what i see when i gaze upon the faces of my children is genetics in action.

i accept that i lost that bargain, in terms of passing on anything visibly recognizable as my own. it’s not a bad thing: i have a fondness for Dave’s visage, particularly as it’s manifested in the faces of small cute people. plus they missed out on the crossed eyes and colourblindness that ought by rights have landed somewhere in their paths, legacy of my glorious gene pool. i’ll take that luck of the draw.

i need a tshirt that relieves commenters of the obligation to note the kids’ lack of resemblance to me. YES, THEY LOOK THEIR FATHER, it would proclaim. underneath, with a nice vintage salvation show wagon, See Bonnie, the Circus Geek, the Scientific Marvel: a Seething Mass of Recessive Genes!

i never believed that genes mattered much. i grew up on Anne of Green Gables, on stories of orphans and foundlings. i was raised in part by a woman whose blood relationship to me was distant, who passed on not one of her genes in this world. but she and i were kin at the heart. she loved me and taught me.

and yet sometimes i wonder about blood.

the thing Dave likes least about me, i think, is my capacity for wounded outrage. deep inside me a she-donkey lurks, eyes turned out to the world. the donkey is not suspicious; it looks for friends. it is not needy, particularly; it can live with being ignored, can live even – though not best – with hurt and conflict. it is earnest; will always seek engagement, a happy ending from all encounters. what it cannot endure is dismissal, smugness, perceived cruelty, any authoritarian refusal to engage its warm human donkey-ness. it is not jealous, and it can be equivocal about being cheated. but it is outraged by being slighted. and being subject to the indifferent whims of dehumanizing power? makes it wild and destructive and rather silly, a tempest of hooves in what looks from the outside to be a teapot.

the donkey is not especially easy to live with, i will admit. with renewed humility, as it is becoming painfully – and loudly – clear that Oscar has his own rather potent little donkey. or a herd. though he has never once – okay once, ONCE, people – seen my donkey go off, and even then in restrained-ish form.

i DO see myself in my children. not in their looks, but in their senses of themselves, their relationships to the world. their alignments, for lack of a better word, to power, to limits, to what they perceive as unfair. and i puzzle.

perhaps they learned these things from me, i intone to myself gravely. nurture. my job is nurture. and i try to tie my donkey tighter, because it is indubitably part albatross.

but i visited my grandfather last week at the hospital. he’s home again now, recovering from a mild heart attack, his much younger homecare nurse happily ensconced in the house with him in an arrangement that is neither romantic nor conventional but seems to work for them. none of my business, is my opinion. we should all have someone good to us at 91.

but last week he’d been three nights in the hospital, and there had been a night nurse on duty, an older nurse who had upset him. he alluded. i asked, pressed a little. his hands shook in punctuation and he would not meet my eyes. he knew the story was not dramatic; he tried to play it down. she put up all the rails in my bed, he said, shrugging at first. i told her i have the same bed at home, that four was dangerous. any two would be okay with me. i asked her if she’d ever seen pictures of a fire in a nursing home. he spit the words. that’s how old people die.

he is not wrong: he was a fire chief for years. she had dismissed him, threatened to tie him down. he won, and slept with only two rails up. she’d told him not to blame her if he fell and killed himself. she left.

she was not NICE, he said. that’s not right. there were tears in his eyes, and they were tears of outrage. they did not fall. his donkey is more experienced than mine.

i did not spend a lot of my childhood with my grandfather. i have never, in almost forty years of knowing him, seen him express that kind of wounded anger. but there it was, and it was like looking in a mirror.

i put my hand on his cheek and looked into his eyes, and said you’re right. that wasn’t kind. that wasn’t her place. that was MEAN.

you just need to look the hooves in the eye and accord them their dignity.

i got the head nurse’s number before i left, but he was released the next day. he squeezed my hand and i walked away, stunned at seeing what i’ve always considered this ridiculous secret part of myself on display in him. as i’d seen it in Oscar, only a day or two before. perhaps it is in all of us? or perhaps a strain that runs somewhere through my invisible, unassertive genes. i don’t know. i shook my head as i walked through the hospital, marvelling at the mysteries of us humans, of biology and nurture and blood, the unanswerable puzzle.

i think the idea of blood as thicker than water is a learned thing, one that runs through culture and often causes more hurt than good. i do not believe genes make families, not at all.

and yet i see Dave’s face on those two little creatures we shepherd through the world for a few years yet, and wonder what it is of us that our genes carry, what of ourselves runs between the generations, written in blood and bone.

sick day a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

pity him, for he is tragic, sick abed.

Dave does not, to his credit, suffer from the affliction known as “man cold.” he sneers at man cold. he has the constitution of a horse.

but today, rather like a horse, he cannot talk. he can only whinny, feebly.

he is sad.

it is very, very quiet here.

i am not still.

i cannot quiet the hamster mind that spins on its wheel. i do not know how. i never knew how. at some point there stops being anyone to blame for that but me.

neither am i in motion.

i used to walk and that counted for something, the body engaged enough to suspend the hamster, swing him around like a partner in a square dance. but it has been cold, nasty, slippery. where would i go? i think i am too busy.

i do not sweat but i pine for it a little, like i pine for the meditative stillness. my imagination oversells me and then i will not try, because my body is only a shell and i find everything physical disappointing the first twenty times. dualism. i do not believe the wall i crash into. at least the crash never disappoints.

i have developed carpal tunnel syndrome. no wonder. i forget myself, shoulders hunched up around my ears, arms akimbo on the laptop like a little troll. i notice only when the cat inserts herself between me and my screen and when i raise a hand to bat her away i realize i cannot feel her indignant nip of protest. my body is that which is demanded of. i ward it all off by disappearing into the opposite of mindfulness, even if i think i live in my mind. even if i don’t believe the mind/body divide.

unravel that, Zen masters.

i do not like driving anymore. in the turn on the roundabout when the truck pulls up in your blind spot and you realize your hand has slipped on the wheel and everything lurches and you cannot feel for a second too long whether your fingers have hold of the goddam thing or no? i do not like that.

but i like the acupuncture that comes with the carpal tunnel. the little pulse of energy, the quiet waiting. i inhabit myself, because i am afraid to move.

acupuncture i liked the first time. i was nervous: i’d been in Asia less than two weeks. i understood little. i was afraid of taking too much clothing off and appearing a flagrant exhibitionist. not that i don’t like the idea of being a flagrant exhibitionist, but i prefer most of my fantasies unenacted. the doctor – in Korea, the acupuncturists were all called doctor – had warm hands and his fingers on my spine were firm and probing, little pads of heat. i found it strangely sensual. nothing was required of me.

when we played doctor as kids, i always wanted to be the patient.

the needles slid in that first time and he left me curled over myself, fetal, in a clean white room with a clean white sheet draped over me. i waited, with no sense of anticipated time. he returned, asked me questions i didn’t understand. i smiled blankly. he smiled too. he removed the needles, then showed me a hypodermic. he injected something into my back. my legs went queasy and it occurred to me that i was thousands of miles from home in a city of 4 million people very few of whom knew i existed. it occurred to me that possibly this had all been a very bad idea.

it occurred me that since i couldn’t walk away at the moment, i might as well keep breathing. so i was still. and maybe my mind unfolded like a flower: i do not remember. i remember just that i lay there immobile and amused enough to be mostly unafraid and i drifted and i felt present and mindful to the fact of my vulnerable being, a speck on the vast white cotton sheet of the world.

he came back again and i was gratified to discover i could move my legs and then i tried to pay the receptionists ten times the amount they charged because i hadn’t quite mastered numbers yet and i didn’t want to appear cheap.

i never went back. had sex been so good the first time perhaps i’d have become a nun.

but now it is me cramped up over my umbilical screen, me lugging children across ice-covered parking lots, me plucking my shirt from the slurping mouth of the needy, kneading cat.

and my body protests. or finally i hear it. but i do not speak its language, never have. i have spent almost forty years inside a body i ignore, and it will not be ignored anymore. i suspect i could do better. i suspect there is another way to live with myself. i will take a kettlebell clinic tomorrow, just to try. but i do not get it. i do not understand what i am grasping towards. not understanding is the thing that scares me most, and so i hesitate.

i want to be still. i want to be in motion. i want to be a speck on a vast white sheet.

how? i ask you. how?
***

have any of you dealt with carpal tunnel? or kicked it to the curb? how? i have this fear that suddenly this window of connection on the world will close, because my hands will not cooperate.

have any of you figured out a way to float like a tiny speck and be still and be engaged without actually liking the idea of oh, say, exercise? or activity? i have a block here, and i own it. but i do not know how to shove it off my disembodied back.

teach me, sensei. halp.

when i was a kid, i wanted to plant a time capsule in the backyard.

i never did, which is just as well as we lived in a series of apartments and it’d be awkward to go tearing up somebody else’s lawn with a shovel just to reclaim one’s remembrances of things past.

but not all capsules are buried in the ground. some lurk in the vaults of recent obsolescence, captured on that disappeared technology our kids will never know: tape.

Dave came across this last night, courtesy of an old friend of ours from our expat days. the dress rehearsal of a one-act play called The Sure Thing, filmed in a long-gone bar that served as home and communal living room for the motley expat population of Busan, South Korea that year.

in the play, our characters were two people and two hundred: all the permutations of possibility that occur when one human encounters another in a coffee shop. every time the bell rang, we switched, landing in a different story, trying each other on for size. in the end, the characters finally fumble their way through the mystery of connection. happy ending. curtain.

like all good romantic leads, Dave & i began sleeping together during rehearsals.

he was younger, and had terrible hair. i was blonder. the video quality is bad. my acting’s worse.

the night after this video was shot, we performed the play at a poetry reading/arts extravaganza. we stayed up all night that night. he drove me to the airport at dawn, and i flew to Amsterdam.

i’d booked my ticket months before. i was only six months out of a marriage. i had oats to sow. i had no business being with Dave and i knew it: i had known him five years. we were too much alike, and oil and water at the same time. our histories were too intertwined. there were a hundred reasons, and we both agreed. nothing so trite as a happy ending.

he stood in the early morning with the sky pink behind him and he held my eyes as i walked away to the plane.

i tried hard to find a different trajectory that summer, to ring the bell and land in a different character, a different story. i kissed an American girl in Amsterdam, and a Flemish mountain climber outside a hostel in Belgium. (then i told mountain boy about how my friend Dave had been to the same hostel four years before, had sent me there with a note for Fifi the cook. i heard the words trip from my mouth and i began to realize i was in trouble). i fled to Ireland, had a hairdresser shave off all the blond fuzz of my hair until i looked like Sinead O’Connor. i kissed an Irishman in Galway: he purred in my ear that i could come sleep at his mam’s. i declined.

after six weeks, i gave up. i flew back to Korea two weeks early.

i told him in an email the first time, that summer.

i love you.

***
living is hard on love. when i watch the tape, i laugh and cringe and want to squeeze his cheeks. i know what comes after the curtain, when real life begins. i look at those two kids who felt so old and serious and reckless nearly ten years ago and i think, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, darlins. life is not only in those moments of the mystery of connection, no matter how we tried to keep it so. joy, tragedy, drudgery. more of each than i could have imagined. but still the bell has not rung on us.

i’m not sure what you’re supposed to feel when you dig up your time capsule. wistfulness, maybe? wonder?

this tape is my time capsule. what i feel is snorting laughter. and gratitude.

kisses a photo by o&poecormier on Flickr.

he leaves again today. i’ll take him to the airport.

i may even go in, buy myself a diner coffee from the little restaurant, kiss him goodbye. i like airports, even tiny ones with single gates for Arrivals and Departures.

i like the idea that i could be going anywhere. the idea beats the actual flight. sometimes it beats the trip.

the kids and i will pick him up together Wednesday evening. we will join the throng at the single Arrivals gate, and inevitably run into someone we know and chat while the passengers stream in from the cold on the tarmac. he will see us, and hug us, and maybe we will take Oscar’s picture on the giant plastic cow that greets all flights to PEI. i don’t know if we quite trust Posey on the cow yet. maybe we do.

and we will go home and small arms will cling around his neck and a chorus of two small loud voices will vie rabidly for his ears. but it will be no big deal.

in their world, it’s not the leaving that matters, it’s the coming home.

i am learning from them.
***
when i was a kid, the airport was the saddest place i ever went.

my mother and i did not fly. my father flew. in and out, once a year, from the far-away Arctic. i waited the whole calendar round for him. i had no stepfather, no surrogate relationship even with my grandfather until i was much older and he was a widower.

my parents’ divorce was simply a fact of my life. my father’s absence, though, was a hole. i needed him, or someone to be him.

he drove a motorcycle. one spring, when i was about nine, i saw a man on a bike blast past me on my walk home from school. and i thought, i KNOW that bike, that back, that leather jacket! i was sure, entirely sure, that my father had come home three months early. to surprise me. i told my mother i had seen him.

when he did not show, she was gentle with me. i was shamed, to have been seen so naked in my wanting.

but most Julys, he came. wife and children in tow, and he would show up on the bike and my mother would let him strap the helmet to my head and we would go, to a cottage or campground, sometimes for days at a time.

and then they would leave. and at the airport would come the unravelling.

had Tennessee Williams written parts for dour fifty-something women who never quite got over the fact of their eldest sons’ having buggered off on a wife and child, my grandmother Hilda would’ve been an elegant casting choice.

she wrinkled young, and i remember her mouth being mostly turned down. she was not a demonstrative person, though never unkind. i loved her, even if it does not sound it. words were hard for her, and they are hard to find to talk about her. the last years we all went to the airport together, she and my grandfather and i, she was fighting the battle that took her life the year i was 16.

but the crying started long before the cancer.

every year, we drove them to the airport. it was an Event, a car trip with my grandparents, anything with my father, six or seven of us piled into two tons of Detroit steel on a summer evening. i always forgot to be sad until we got there.

and then we would linger around the boarding gate, the gaggle of us, until my grandmother began sobbing.

i’ve never liked to let anyone cry alone. my lip would quiver and the idea of eleven and a half months without my father would stretch out ahead of me and i would feel small and abandoned and frightened he’d never come back.

maybe she did too. or maybe she felt her failure, somehow, every time he flew as far as he could get and still be in the same country. maybe she had some history of goodbyes i never knew about. but this was a woman who’d married my grandfather at eighteen, in the middle of the second World War. he was a spy. she sent him off over and over again, to untold risk. i asked him once, a couple of years ago, if she cried when he left. he said no.

i didn’t dare ask about my father and the airport, then.

she’d have died to have been caught giggling in church, and yet there we’d huddle, in the middle of that tiny airport where you always know somebody, our small domestic tragedies laid open on the tile floor.

it must’ve been a comical scene, in a way. she would resolutely discuss the weather – the summer window they’d had on the island and the Arctic winter ahead of them; cold, she would testify, imaginatively – until the very last moment. and then when it came time to hug them and let them board, some dam would loose and the weeping would overtake her and then me until we stood in the middle of the airport, she and i crying the ugly cry, my father crushed between us, probably mortified.

we are all so goddam vulnerable to the stories we end up in.

i did not know until i was older and spent more time in airports that public scenes of inconsolable devastation are more rare than my family experience led me to expect.

i did not know until i had my own children that it is okay and normal and healthy to love and need and trust fully that someone will come home to you.

that it is not the leaving that matters.

when i stand at the airport today, i will look around for the ghost of us, those ten or twelve or fourteen summer leavetakings of my childhood. i will smile kindly at my grandmother, in her tears and her sadness and her incapacity. at my younger father in his abdication and his absence.

then i will whisper fuck you, Hilda. i leave this behind.

and i will wave goodbye to Dave and look forward to him coming home.

the muse is in the mountains.

i have to make my own coffee. it’s a hard-knock life. though the laundry seems considerably less in his absence, and all the drawers stay shut just like i left them.

still. the kids sleep eventually. i miss him until the silence comes.

here’s the thing about a partner. he’s a good one. he shovels, and he parents, and he talks with me about networks  and gender and philosophy and all the other ideas that my reading these days precipitates. he’s responsible, far more than i ever expected of him. he intrigues me, and he loves me.

but i am an only child, raised with a single parent, and the older i get the more i crave the monastic silence of aloneness. it’s not that he talks all the time. we could go nights on end with a quiet nod from one computer to the other, especially when we’re writing.

it’s that i have colonized my mind with the idea of a partner.

i make my own panopticon: i won’t eat the last of the peanuts in case he notices and judges. he wouldn’t. i put the garbage out and expect that he will notice and thank me. he mightn’t. but i cast him in the role of internal judge. and i stand as his, and irritate the living shit out of myself over stupid things.

when he’s gone, i stop.

and it is peaceful in my head, and i stretch my little brain and begin to think, hmmm…perhaps we could do this better…perhaps i could change the whole way i...

and then the cat leaps into my empty lap, deeply concerned that my shirt is not currently being kneaded and chewed. she rectifies this. pronto. whilst purring and digging her claws into the soft flesh of my middle.

i pet her, then bat her away, so i can type. she’s back in seconds, her sizeable rear parked on my keyboard. she is dogged, for a cat.

when Dave is away, i cannot finish a single thought without a large fur-covered punctuation mark inserting itself into my stream of consciousness.

my faithful Clementine. she is, in her own mind, entirely mine. with her, i shall never know loneliness. or real silence. and i suppose that is a gift.

this is not the silent time of my life, i tell myself. and then i give thanks for all that is bursting at the seams of my existence.

and i eat the peanuts. every last one.
***

tell me about your solitude. is it one of the trade-offs lost in partnership, in raising children? or is it a mind-set? he doesn’t care about the peanuts. should i?