Memento mori

Last week there was a sale at Opportunity (or Oppity-Tunery, as Henry says, which sounds straight out of Mary Poppins) House: Knick-knacks half price. I went off the rails and bought four little English cottages, 25 cents apiece. They are rather crude tourist items that pander to the most spoony Anglophilia and I am absurdly pleased with them. I put them on my dresser along with my perfume, the Korean marital ducks from Tommy, the Wandering Turtles from Carol commemorating the births of Henry and James, and the Bad Thoughts Monster Susan made me. (Because I believe a high dresser is a most important platform for maternal juju.)

This morning, Henry begged me to honor my promise to test them for lead ( and that's a whole other story) so that he could play with them. I did, and they passed, so I gave them to him to play with, carefully. He got in the crib, to protect himself from James's incursions, and laid them out this way and that, chattering.
"Here are the houses," he said. "By the cemetery."
They do look like houses that would sit by an age-old, elm-spread cemetery, but surely Henry doesn't have these associations?
"By the cemetery?" I asked.
"What is a cemetery, mama?"
"Oh, it's a place where people's bodies go after they die so the people who love them can go and be near them."
Henry began to look worried. "And then they get up?"
"Well, no, when people die they don't get up again."
Worry, worry, worry. And then he said, "But isn't Daddy old? My Dada?"
"Oh no, sweetheart, Daddy just likes to say he's an old man, when he's feeling tired, but he isn't at all. He's not old."
Which seemed to do the trick, for now.

They aren't just houses, they're finger puffets.

Moving day

Thursday was a big day on the near west side; a small limestone ranch was being moved from the vicinity of Tenth and the Bypass to a snug little spot at Eighth and Oak, a block and a half west of us, to be fixed up and sold by Bloomington Restorations Inc.'s affordable housing program. Awesome!
Although it took two and more maddening hours for Henry to agree to get dressed in the first place, once we arrived at our little neighborhood park and could see the house entangled in branches at the bottom of the hill, he was hooked.

A truck, pulling a tractor trailer, pulling a house on a flatbed! So much goodness!

Chainsaw!

I like this picture of the house's determined little face, chugging gamely up the hill in spite of the gaping hole in his temple.

The truck was actually in motion here.

The whole operation was so noisy and so thrilling that Henry needed to hold my hand for anchoring.

There it goes! We had to go home to welcome our lunch guests, but we later learned that just a block away from this point, the house got enmeshed again in branches.

James didn't care so much about all the hoopla and went home early.

The house around the corner. Henry was taken, too with the little tree trimming truck following behind, dubbing it "cute."

Another great point of interest: the naked guy who came out on his porch to snap pictures with his phone. (He was, in fact, wearing pants, but Henry was mightily curious as to why he came out "naked.")

Scything down a wayward branch.

I was amused that they had to take down the speed limit: 30 sign.

What I want

Henry showed me that a cut on his thumb he has been tracking for several days has healed, leaving just a pink mark.
"I'm fine, Mama. Look!"
I became portentous. "Do you know what Henry? That is what I want more than anything else in the whole world. For you and James to be fine."
Henry submitted to a kiss. Then he said, "But Mama, don't you want a ball of yarn?"

I, said the fly

Death has been on our minds.

Henry sees changes in his brother and speculates about the future, about the changes in store for us all. "Are you and Daddy going to get littler and littler?" he asks."Will you be like Baby James?"
"No," I say. "We only get bigger and bigger. We won't ever be babies again."
He keeps prodding.
"We'll get older and older," I say, trying to sound bright and matter-of-fact. "And one day we will die."
"I don't want you to die, Mama."
"Well, I don't want to either, but -- (big, psychologically healthy smile) -- everybody dies."
"Don't die, Mama. I don't want you to die. I don't want Dada to die." (Sometimes, lately, he tries out talking like a big kid and says "my Dad.")
"It's OK, sweetie. It will probably (I can't bring myself to omit that unreassuring word) be a long, long time from now. When we're very old."
"I don't want you to die."

Later, after Peter is home from work, Henry spontaneously tells him, "I don't want you to die." Another time, as we are standing in the kitchen doorway, he tells me confidingly, "I don't want Dada to die because I like him so very much."

Last winter, not so long after Dad died, I was walking out of the library and a little boy was standing by the door wailing, "I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy." A security guard was trying to comfort him, telling him his Daddy was on his way. The boy was beyond comfort. It was clear the boy and his father had lost each other among the bookshelves. I remember very clearly that horrible Roadrunner feeling like scrabbling in thin air when I was out in public with one of my parents and suddenly looked up to see it was a different leg or grocery cart or whatever I had attached myself too, and now I was far from home and ALL ALONE. I thought that as sick with uncomprehending sorrow as I was, for those five or ten minutes, that little boy was grieving more intensely than I.

Last evening, I was refilling the bird feeder and saw a bird lying dead in the snow in the yard. I said something about it to Mom, who was trundling the boys home from the Banneker Center, and Henry heard me.
"I want to see, Mama," he said. I let him through the gate, telling him he could look, not touch. He bent over at the waist like a Suzuki recitalist and walked in a slow circle around the bird. "What is it?" he asked.
"It's the body of a bird," I said.
"Why did it die?"
"I don't know. Maybe from the cold. Maybe it got hurt. Maybe it was very sick."
"What is going on with its eyes?"
A thin blue membrane, like inner eyelids, appeared to have closed up and met in the middle of the bird's eyes. "That's just something that happened when he died," I offered.
Henry bent down even lower.
"Maybe he will get up soon," he said after a few moments. "I think another bird will call the doctor. He's sick. He's very sick." We went inside, and Henry asked for a glass of milk and snatched a toy from James's hands.

There are overlying patterns in the way I feel and think about my dad. It is wavelike: Strong, semi-regular washes of grief come and ebb and come and ebb, sometimes stronger but generally, over time, dispersing their energy. There is also a cycle: At first it was hourly; 1 o'clock was the worst time. Then it was weekly. Tuesdays were worst.Then the 26th of each month, and now it is January again, icy and gray. Sometimes it feels as if Dad were here, hoisting himself up my front steps to pick up a box of wine he'd had shipped to my house, or to bring my pregnant self some chard and sweet potatoes from Bloomingfoods, just the other week. Other times he seems like someone I read about or heard about, not someone I knew, he is so far away. I am not dreaming about him very often. The last time I remember, he was behind a very thick pane of glass, like a cold frame, fogged over, telling me he loved me. I thought the other day: Dad has been dead for almost a year now, and then I thought that made it sound as if being dead were an experience he is having, which is often how it feels to me--but, feeling austere, I forced myself to reword it: It was almost a year ago that Dad died. I wonder whether Henry, who was barely verbal last January, and doesn't know what a year is, is under the influence of its cycles, too.

James's new hat

Hat on.

Hat off.

Anatomically incorrect

A friend of Henry's came over the other day along with her ma. As is liable to happen when preschoolers congregate, his friend ended up without the leggings and underpants she'd worn under her dress.

After they left, Henry was quick to confide what he'd noticed: "Mommy, I saw that Magda* has a Volvo under her dress. And a butt."

*Not her actual name, naturally.

Jupiter

I love the New Year holiday; it leaves Christmas in the dust, as far as I am concerned. I love the clean, clear, fresh idea of it, the monastic optimism of resolutions, the fact that its twin motifs are pleasure and reflectiveness. I have spent New Year's Eves in my life lots of different ways: eating snails & dipping my tongue into a glass of champagne at Dad's house as a child, attending very chaste co-ed sleepovers at Fiona Stoner's house in high school, dressing to the nines for a quiet night at home, howling at the moon in Bryan Park, burning the bad out of the old year with a muneca, and, most often, sleeping.

Yesterday morning I was, unexpectedly, sick with grief. I remembered that last New Year's Day was the last time I spoke to Dad when he was cogent, when I called to wish him a happy new year. What happened was so horrible, but I don't feel like stomping on the ashes of 2011. It was good to spend the evening quietly with friends: first with new friends--friends I made in 2011--and their families, surrounded by children, and then later with old friends, and Mom and Virginia. I had planned to take Henry and James home to bed before going on to Carol and Ron's house, but at the last moment decided to bring them along, and I am so glad I did.

James was awake long enough to smile & show off his brand-new knitted balaclava, then spent the next two hours sleeping with the focus of a yogi in my lap and in Mom's. Henry spent most of the time mute and hiding under a table, eating chocolate half-dollars, but just before we were ready to leave, he grew bold and went to make friends with Ron, stargazing on the back deck.

As we started driving home, Henry said to me from the back seat, "That's a good man."
"Yes," I agreed. "You mean Ron?"
"Yes," Henry said. "He just picked me right up to look." The he offered the highest praise he could come up with. "Daddy loooves Ron."
"Well," I said, "Daddy only met Ron one time. He doesn't know him very well."
"Then who lifted Daddy up to look at planets when he was a kid?"

It was good to be lifted up last night.

(This morning I encouraged Henry to tell Peter which planet Ron had held him up to see. He hesitated, then remembered: "Judith.")