☘︎ Lucky Things ☘︎

There was a rock I used to carry in my pocket—white, rough-edged, flecked with schist. I found it in an expanse of newly spread gravel under the bushes in front of the nursing home on Henry Street. It stayed in my pocket from sixth to tenth grade. Longer maybe? Or less. Time was taffy back then—how far can one month pull as a twelve-year-old learns that death is everywhere and nothing stays the same?

            It was the eighties. There was cyanide in the Tylenol, razorblades in the Halloween candy, missing kids on the morning milk carton. There was AIDS, and the sudden absences of the laughing men from my grandmother’s dinner parties. My parents were going to a lot of funerals.

            Did I believe the stone had a power to stop all this? Stop car accidents and illness and choking deaths? Anaphylactic shock and plane crashes? Did I think without the rock in my pocket I would be less protected from cancer, from poison, from murder, from my mother dying on her way home on the subway?

            I worried about everything: infections, an accidentally swallowed olive pit, the hidden potential for the body to be its own worst enemy. I slathered every scratch with antibiotic ointment. I checked the seals on the ice cream containers, the aspirin bottles. You couldn’t joke with me about this; you couldn’t tell me that if I kept doing that then worse would happen. You’d send me right to the rock in my pocket, one side worn smooth by my thumb and the necessary amount of touches. Was it three? Seven? Nine?

            Perhaps you can imagine what it is like for a girl whose body is becoming something she can longer predict, or recognize. How the world that comfortably was is behind her now and the way forward is nothing but traps, the unknown, the unmapped. So what does she do?

            She finds a rock. She holds on to it until—finally, she doesn’t anymore. What happened to it? Did she throw it in the river? Leave it behind under a tree for someone else? Bury it in the woods by the house in the country? She cannot remember. Sometimes she thinks it will turn up, in a drawer, still there after all these years and moves.

            And did it work, that rock? Did it keep her safe?

            Does anything?

☽ An Old Dream ☾

I found the following essay, written over three years ago, buried in a linty crevice on my hard drive. It is about my father and a dream I had that he’d died unexpectedly. At the time, he was not dead. He was old, yes, and his health was not perfect, but he’d been alive at the time of the dream. Since then, he has left this earth, nearly three years to the day of the original dream.

I’ve pasted the essay here with minimal editing (although I am sure it needs a good scrub). I could have added updates and caveats, some “if only I knew then” wisdom but I didn’t want to kill the mood, as it were.

From January 28, 2018

Last night I dreamed my father was dead. My mother called with the news. “He died suddenly. I’m sorry, honey.”

            My first thought, in the dream: I guess that was the last time I’ll ever see him, thinking of the last time I saw him. Which was recently. It usually isn’t.

            In my dream, it didn’t seem odd that my mother would call; in waking life it would be very odd indeed. In the real world, it would be my stepmother, or a neighbor. Or the authorities, if he’d been left awhile and my stepmother was away, like she often was for her work.

            The second thought in my dream was sadness, which makes sense, dream or not. Real grief. Bawling. Tears. Sobbing into the phone. Thinking about calling my brothers. Planning a funeral. Thinking how the iPhone I’d just sent him would never get used and how it was supposed to be a way to stay connected.

            And then the baby started his crying waking song and the dream broke, and I woke.

            But like all dreams of loss it hung on, stayed with me as I scooped up the baby, prepared his bottle. As I took a lingering morning piss scanning my Facebook feed.

            My father died last night. But he didn’t. He didn’t die, not yet. But it made me think: He could die. He could die at any moment. He is eighty years old, for fuck’s sake.

            I mean, yes, we all could die at any moment. That’s the sword of Damocles we all pretend we’re not walking under every day as we go about our mundane tasks. Because if we stop and think about mortality, really think about it, it results in nothing but gut-churning panic.

            At least for me. Meditation will only do so much in that regard.

            But, my father is not dead. Not yet. He is, I imagine, right at this moment, puttering around his house in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. Drinking tea, maybe, and watching the birds at the feeder outside his dining room window. It’s a good window, a nice place to watch birds.

            Here in my basement Brooklyn apartment with its odd L-shaped configuration, out of our six windows, we get just one with a proper bird-watching view. And you have to stand by the bathroom door in the corner of the living room to access it, taking care that whoever is in the bathroom does not bean you in the back of the head when they emerge, looking down at the phone in their hand. Also, you have to suspend disbelief and will away the ugly diamond-shaped grid of the security bars as you stare past them in order to watch the birds. It is not a good window, or a nice place to watch birds.

            My mother also likes to look at birds out the big kitchen door of her Brooklyn house.

            So it is possible at some point during the day, at a random moment, I may be looking out my gritty, barred window, my father out his large picture, my mother through the long glass of her door, and we’re all watching birds.

            My mother would shudder in revulsion to ponder this connection: Me and your father have nothing in common. My father, who knows? He’s decided to be less bitter after all these years. He might even enjoy the thought. I think, in the only way I know how (which is cynicism run through with the hot knife of existential panic) that these are the things that merge and entwine, connect and hold us to each other, like it or not. And one day my son might be at a window somewhere in the world, watching the birds after a dream in which he learned I was dead. And he may be holding his child, or petting his cat, and he’ll think of me, glad for the moment, that I am not dead.

            At least not yet.

⚱︎ Dead Friends ⚱︎

Trip over a box enough times and eventually you will have two choices: toss it down the garbage chute or unpack it. So you decide to pull the little urns out and see if they spark joy, or in this case, brief melancholy touched with bemusement that the six-pound cat’s tin of ashes is twice the size of the heftier dog’s. You try not to think about why you have saved these things, moved with them over the years. You don’t even let yourself acknowledge that this past August you said no thanks to a portion of your newly dead father’s remains.

            So now unpacked, finally, again, what do you do with all these containers of bone dust, your dead animal friends? You find a tall shelf with a small clearing of space and shove them up there. Far enough back so no one immediately thinks to ask what they are. Not that anyone comes over these days, anyway.

            And then you pack the family, your bags and bins and pies and go to the mountains for a Thanksgiving in a tiny house around a tiny table filled with too much food. You watch your son eat turkey off the floor pretending to be a cat and you think, This is how everything should always be. You even go so far as to let yourself hope that everything might be okay.

            The eventual return to the city: the long traffic-clogged drive chasing recalculated routes, a pizza-high three-year-old yammering away from the back seat. And of course no parking on the block, so you drag the kid and ten suitcases upstairs while the husband drives around looking for a spot. You are exhausted, bone-tired, just ready for a hot shower and sleep, and there in the corner of your son’s room, the cat.

            Curled in her bed, but not quite, her head hanging over the edge…it’s enough. You’ve seen this sort of death before. You hustle the bed, the body, from the room, son tottering after asking what’s going on and you lock your newly dead cat in your bedroom and try very hard to pretend that everything is fine until your husband gets back from parking the fucking car.

            But everything isn’t fine, is it?

            The kid knows even without telling him. He races manically from room to room, screeching the tires of his toy truck, bouncing with the madness of five hours in a car seat and now home, and mom is perched on the edge of the couch, clutching a seltzer can, sniffling, and wondering why the fuck now?

            Your son finally asks where the cat is and you say she’s not here anymore, which is a lie but also not. But you can tell he is wondering what this means because he saw her in his room, he almost put his hand on her stiffening tail. So you revise and say she’s gone, that her body stopped working, that she died. He accepts this for the moment and you are grateful even though you know he will ask again, and again. And it will be your job to explain, as you add the new tin to the shelf, that this is what happens. This is what life is. And that it’s okay if he doesn’t like where any of this is going.

            Because nobody does.       

☤ Dear Son: Pandemic Edition ☤

You are yelling “no” from your crib, yelling “no” before 6 a.m. No one has even come in to tell you the day’s plans, the things for you to yell a proper “no” at and then throw your water cup, your Peppa doll, your breakfast. You’re lying there, I can see you on the monitor, lying there and yelling “no!” You are not having a nightmare, your eyes are open, you are awake. You are awake and ready to tell the day no.

            I am also awake, I’ve been awake longer than you. I get up early to have my coffee in a quiet room and think about the day before me and all the things I’d like to do but can’t, all of my own noes, all involuntary. For example, no long, leisurely stroll in the park with you this morning, to the playground or the zoo, where we might pack our lunch and eat it there with peacocks pecking crumbs from our feet.

            Another no: you can’t go to daycare, as much as I’d like to take you there, as much as I miss the morning battle over which shirt and what pants and oh my god it’s 8:45 can you please let me put on your socks? I would kill for that fight, that test of wills, because it would mean things were normal again, that you would be going to your playmates and your teachers and you would have circle time, paint pictures, and they would take you on your own long, slow walk to the park, the playground.

            And what could I do then? I could go for a run in the park, passing strangers mere inches from my elbow, the luxury of near contact. And then come home, shower, work uninterrupted in my quiet corner, do the laundry without wearing a face mask in the elevator.

            But those are boring things—mostly I imagine the day when I can plan again, for you, for us. Everything is now on hold—our summer plans, visits to friends, family. A cousin’s bar mitzvah postponed, another’s graduation gone virtual. A wedding canceled indefinitely.

            When the world opens again, my son yelling “no,” it means possibilities. It means choices can be made; it also means nothing is ever going to be the same.

            All the plans we were making before are scotched, out the window. We now need to revise our visions for the future. Kindergarten applications were looming and we are in the wrong zone for the right school. Maybe instead of moving one district over, we just move altogether—up or down, left or right, away from this, the city of my birth, the only place I have ever lived?

            We’d daydreamed about it sometimes, before, but now it seems like it’s on the Scratchpad of Possibilities. On our list of things we might or might not say no to. That is, will we decide that in light of the current dissolution of world order, the threat of pandemic disease taking everything to its knees, will I tell Brooklyn, New York, “NO!” for the first and last time?

            Will we become one of those families writing goodbye letters to a city, finding succor in less crowded, greener places? Goodbye to all that, as we take route 9, our furniture following us in its own moving truck, the cats howling in their crates, you asleep in your car seat, unaware that everything is beginning again.

            Or better, we ditch the destination altogether. Instead of the truck holding our furniture, it will hold us, it will become our home. We will live on wheels, roaming, up the coast, across, vagabonds, traveling where the safety of a moment takes us, seeing the great big country as a whole for the first time, so that you, dear son, can learn there is so much more to say “no” to than your crib, your room, this apartment, the building, the block, the street, the neighborhood, the city, the world.

            All of this can be yours. If it’s still there when it’s time.