An Eternity of Summer

I could swear that it was still light not too long after dinner. And a week or two before that, the sun still blazed right around that same time. The sky was not fringed in purple and rose-gold; rather, the coming night only slowly leached the sky of color, turning the pale blue into pearl grey and white. Now it's a study in blue and black, with just the barest hint of scarlet at the very edge of the west.

It's amazing to me how much I measure the turning of the year by the stream of light. The year, of course, begins to die at the height of summer. Leave it to me to find a nugget of doom even amid the hazy, lazy, hot and humid ease of summer.

As a kid, summer was endless. It stretched before us like a river, wide and deep, glinting in sunlight, pockets of green shade and never-silent, a burbling chatter that fills up all the empty space. We wheeled and floated through time, all sticky with sweat and watermelon juice and neighborhood grit. It was glorious and forever. Friendships grew thick and fast as weeds, a promise of permanence to outlast the heat of summer, to withstand the coming of crisp air and shortened days.

Summer was long days of heat that built slowly and inexorably, until it felt as if your lungs would spontaneously combust. Summer was fireworks and fireflies, a cacophony of light and sound. It was crickets and grasshoppers and tar that stuck to your shoes, gooey strands of black that formed a tenuous bridge between the road and the soles of your shoes. It was the gathering heaviness of ozone just before a thunderstorm, when the air is alive with static and wind and the heavens open with a whoosh and a rush of rain, when the temperature drops in an instant, from stifling to a delicious cool.

And we were invincible then, in those eternal days of summer: invincible, untouchable. Immortal. We were lords of summer, lords of earth and air, of backyards and hidden creeks and fields of weeds and cracked concrete. Time was measured in light and sound in those days: Out of the house when the sky was still pale and liquid blue, and the dew bent the grass and caught the sun in rainbow crystals, returning only when we heard the clarion call of some mom or sibling calling us in for dinner. 

And as soon as we had inhaled that meal--- of meat and potatoes, certainly, and salad was iceberg lettuce with tomatoes and cucumbers and home-made Thousand Island dressing--- red-fringed pink stuff made from ketchup and Miracle Whip--- never mayo, thank you very much--- after dinner was Kick the Can or Hounds and Hares or Elimination Frisbee, some game that brought the entire cadre of neighborhood kids together in a burst of competition and speed, and we would run and hide and throw and sweat and yell until it was too dark to see, until the crickets and mosquitoes and frogs and kids created a symphony of noise, and someone-- some mom, some dad, someone left behind the glory of summer, would call us in that one final time. And we came: reluctant, dragging, tired and spent, begging for just a few more minutes, a little bit longer, a little more time, pleasepleaseplease, just five minutes more, pleeeeease! We never did get a reprieve. We never got that extra five minutes. But we never stopped asking either. Every night was the first night, the first time, and possibilities were endless and hope tangible.

Even so, even in that summery land of forever, days end, night comes. Like a thief, darkness steals the light in unnoticeable snatches, and a curtain of silvery moonlight fills the sky where once the sun king reigned. We drive home in darkness. In the morning, dew laden fields become mist-shrouded, God’s breath lightly blanketing the dry gold reeds that turn slowly to deep russet and then dull brown. And suddenly, where once we leapt from sleep-tangled sheets to escape into the summer sun, we hunker down under blankets to steal five more minutes of sleep, of warmth, before school, before work, before growing up. 

When did summer become finite? When did night linger in my window just long enough for me to wake in darkness? When did driving with headlights ablaze take precedence over running madly and with stealth, under cover of darkness, to free my captive teammates from their prison in some neighborhood garage? What day, what time, what moment? I remember that hope of five minutes more, that mental stretch to claim eternity, that I-almost-have-it, I-can-almost-touch-it thing. I remember it lasting forever, but I cannot pinpoint when it was gone, and I wait impatiently for December 22, for when the light begins to linger a little longer, arrive a little sooner every day. 

In the meantime, I pull the blankets over my head while my windows frame a purple sky, claiming my five minutes more before turning on a light.

Fringes

I don't remember my childhood. At least, not in any contiguous pattern, a fluid arc of cause and effect, with beginnings and middles and ends. There is no cosmic projector whirring and spinning through dusty light, flashing a story line - neither love story nor horror film nor some tender coming of age film - on some interior screen, while I sit on a worn plush seat, a spring pushing against my thigh and the butter from my popcorn making my fingers shiny with grease, while I watch, in rapt attention.

There's not even a vague disinterest, viewing my life as if it were someone else's story I was watching from some distant, disconnected height. There's no boredom, or sadness or wistful hope. There are just huge patches of not much of anything - no dust bowl and tumbleweeds, no darkness and a keening, plaintive wind, none of those common tropes. 

No trope, and no memories, although, if you ask my mother, she'd say I just remember the bad stuff. That may be truer, if truth can have a comparative, a greater than or lesser than finality. It's not that I have no memories. It's not that I only remember The Bad Stuff, cataloging all the pains and hurts and disappointments of childhood for later review and recrimination. There was love and joy and frustration and sad and wonder and love and pain, over and over and over again. It was all the warp and weft of our family.

But I don't have those stretches, those seamless and flowing pictures of time and love. Or of pain. What I have, I realized, is picture frames - brief flashes of color and light that surprise me and take me off guard in a disjointed array.

The frames of my father are mostly small. There’s the color of his coffee – a rich caramel that steamed against the unnatural whiteness of a Styrofoam cup. There’s a feathered headdress, worn in the days before political correctness, as he and my big brother who was all of seven or eight, but he was so much bigger than I, and older, and closer to my dad, who came home from the office, tired and spent, but who could muster up just enough energy and attention to do Indian Guides with my brother, and who promised we’d do Indian Princesses when I got older.

There’s the stats book for the Little League teams he managed, first for my older brother, who started young and in the outfield – right field, the home of lost players who hadn’t yet gotten the hang of the game and so were placed there, where they could do little harm – and who got better, year after year, all the way through the Pony Leagues. He coached my younger brother the year of the locusts, whose carapaces littered the ground and made walking noisy and slightly disgusting. I kept the stats every season, even the Year of the Locusts, so that I could sit next to my father on the bench, so that I could tag along into his world of sports and sons and attention. It wasn't Indian Princesses, but it was a place near him and so I hoped that it would be enough.

There’s the frame that holds the picture of my brother, standing between my father’s legs, his hands clutching my father’s and a look of gleeful terror on his face as my father lowered him slowly. “Keep your arms stiff. I won’t drop you!” he would say to my brothers, who both couldn't wait to play this heady and terrible game of Trust, as it was called in our family parlance. A simple game – how low could you go, how close to the floor could you go, with only our father there to hold you, keep you from falling and crashing to the floor? I would watch in envious and eager anticipation for my turn, so sure that this time, please this time, I would have the courage to play, but it was always next time for me.

There is one frame, though, one small picture that is mine alone. Mine and my father’s. It is the picture of us, sitting together in shul, so close that I could feel the wool of his suit against my face and arm, sheltered by his nearness, carried gently by the drone of his voice as he prayed in a language that was at once familiar and strange, and the cadence of his chanting lulled me. He would hold me close, his arm wrapped around my shoulder and his tallit covering me. Sitting there, sheltered, I would play with the fringes of his tallit, wrap them around my fingers, stretch them until they lost their elasticity and shape. His hand would cover mine, to still my fidgeting, and it would linger there, tangled with the fringes, connecting us.

These small picture frames of love and longing come, in flashes of light and heat. When I sit with my son, so close that our shoulders bump, and my arm laces through his – because he is too tall for me to wrap it around his shoulder now – and we pray together, in a language at once ancient and new, and my tallit shelters us both, my son takes the fringes and he stretches them and tangles them and wraps them in his fingers, these fringes of love.

I return, again and again, to that small picture frame, now large enough to hold us all, to shelter my memory with love and grace.

Happy birthday, times sixteen

Six pounds, one ounce.

That's how much you weighed the day you were born. Oh - you were so tiny! And perfect. Let's not forget the perfect part. Sure: there were complications. Life is nothing but complications - some scary, some hilarious, some frustrating or tense or wondrous, or some odd combination that makes you want to dance and cry and run, all at the same time. It's all there, and we have such a very short time to teach you how to face those complications with grace.

On the day you were born, there was pain - more pain than I could ever have imagined a person could bear without dying, and yet I did. The drugs helped. and the anticipation of you, that surprised me, how much it helped. I could have sworn my fear was stronger than my hope; I was wrong. There was fear - of the unknown, of the known, and of the infinite list of "what if" that played in my head like a loud mariachi band - all brass and blaring and rhythmic thrumming. My heart raced along it's notes of flattened tin, chased by a pitocin drip.

On the day you were born, there was your father - so frightened, just as scared as I was. I, at least, was a major player in the drama of your birth. He was an extra, getting in the way of the doctors and the cords and tubes and monitors and the scalpels that emerged eventually, hours into the pain and the fear and what we had thought was drama, but turned out to be merely the lead in. He could only witness, only hold my hand through all of it, which would have been miracle enough - except, when you were finally born, when you were finally announcing your entry into the world at large with a great and glorious cry, as soon as you were cleaned and swaddled and tiny - God, so tiny! - for the first time that long day, your father left my side, rushing to hold you.

And then he danced.

He cradled you with infinite tenderness and infinite love, close to his chest, swallowing you in his huge hands, so that your head rested against his beating heart, so that you could hear its steady pounding- an electric, constant pulsing beat that was so like the one that had sustained you in me until this day of your birth - and he danced. The drama fell away then, into the wings, behind the scrim. No disappearing act; merely waiting for its next cue. He danced you in a slow circle, and the universe fell away then. Or perhaps the universe existed only in the space between the two of you, and God dwelt in the air you shared, in your breath and your touch.

He danced with you, with infinite slowness and infinite care, and he raised you high - up and out and high - as high as he could lift you, nestled so surely in his hands, and showed your face to God. And just when he was sure that you would forever know the face of God, he brought you back to his heart, and then to me. I had carried you for nine long months; now I could hold you - touch you, breathe in your newness and nearness, feel the weight of you on my arms instead of bearing down on my belly, feel the mist of your breath on my skin.

Complicated. Dramatic. Perfect, my beloved boy. Ever and always.

You no longer fit in the cradle of your father's hands. Where you used to fit, with room to spare, on a quartered baby blanket, you are now barely contained on your bed. You sprawl, tangled in a comforter, feet and arms dangling loosely over the edges. You no longer fit in the small and contained and safe-as-we-can-make-it world of your childhood. Not that your childhood is over! Not that you ever fit as comfortably and safely as we tried. There were hurts and aches. Some were healed with a kiss; some with Bactine and a bandaid, but they were relatively small and easy complications. You're straddling worlds now, balancing between the comfortable fields of boyhood and the unexplored vastness of the rest of your life, wearing seven league boots. Every step takes you farther and further into the life you are creating, into the man you are becoming.

You are not so tiny any longer. Everything about you is bigger - your heart, your dreams, your kindness. Your fear. You hurt bigger. You feel deeper. You love more. I am awed at your grace, your kindness, your anger, your stubbornness, your hope. Life is no less complicated for you today than on the day you were born. I can't shield you as I once did, my beloved boy. Let me rephrase that: as I once tried to shield you; I don't know that I ever really did, but I like to think that at least I was able to give you some comfort, perhaps take away the biting sting.

Already you are finding new paths, new hurts and heartaches that I cannot even begin to know. let alone heal. But there you are: diving in on your own, kicking through the muddied waters and breaking through to the surface every so often, gulping in air and light before diving in once more.

There is a world of wonder and joy and kindness and grace for you to explore. You will undoubtedly find broken trust and fractured promises as well. You will rage at injustice and taste the bitter wine of despair. You wear your heart on your sleeve, and it gets bruised and beaten so easily.There is no protection from the hurt. But here's the secret: with any luck, you will find the courage to look beyond that pain and find the strength already so present within you, so that you can walk through the pain to the other side.

It's such a difficult task, to find that courage, to take those steps! You've been building your own "what if" list since you could think and wonder and question and cry. Here's the thing - bad things are going to happen. No matter how still you hold yourself, willing the universe to behave, stuff happens. Sometimes the monsters under the bed are real.

You are the Captain of Happy, my beloved. You will find fellow travelers along the way - some will journey with you into the forever; some will shine a light for a moment before turning left. They will offer you gifts unimaginable, of strength and comfort and respite and love, but remember: it is you who must leap, you who has the power to soar.

Oh, my beloved bot - you are filled with such stumbling grace! You no longer fit in your childhood, or in your father's large hands. You have grown and moved past and begun to leap. You will forever fit, my darling boy, in the space of my heart. nestled, loved, forever dancing.

Happy, merry birthday.

Summer Light

It was dark when I drove home the other day. Not all that unusual, but I could swear that it was still light at that same time just a few days prior to that. And a week or two before that, the sun still blazed as I drove home. The sky was not fringed in purple and rose-gold; rather, the coming night only slowly leached the sky of color, turning the pale blue into pearl grey and white. Now it was a study in blue and black, with just the barest hint of scarlet at the very edge of the west.

It is amazing to me how much I measure the turning of the year by the stream of light. The year, of course, begins to die at the height of summer. Leave it to me to find a nugget of doom even amid the hazy, lazy, hot and humid ease of summer.

As a kid, summer was endless. It stretched before us like a river, wide and deep, glinting in sunlight, pockets of green shade and never-silent, a burbling chatter that fills up all the empty space. We wheeled and floated through time, all sticky with sweat and watermelon juice and neighborhood grit. It was glorious and forever. Friendships grew thick and fast as weeds, a promise of permanence to outlast the heat of summer, to withstand the coming of crisp air and shortened days.

Summer was long days of heat that built slowly and inexorably, until it felt as if your lungs would spontaneously combust. Summer was fireworks and fireflies, a cacophony of light and sound. It was crickets and grasshoppers and tar that stuck to your shoes, gooey strands of black that formed a tenuous bridge between the road and the soles of your shoes. It was the gathering heaviness of ozone just before a thunderstorm, when the air is alive with static and wind and the heavens open with a whoosh and a rush of rain, when the temperature drops in an instant, from stifling to a delicious cool.

And we were invincible then, in those eternal days of summer: invincible, untouchable. Immortal. We were lords of summer, lords of earth and air, of backyards and hidden creeks and fields of weeds and cracked concrete. Time was measured in light and sound in those days: Out of the house when the sky was still pale and liquid blue, and the dew bent the grass and caught the sun in rainbow crystals, returning only when we heard the clarion call of some mom or sibling calling us in for dinner. 

And as soon as we had inhaled that meal--- of meat and potatoes, certainly, and salad was iceberg lettuce with tomatoes and cucumbers and home-made Thousand Island dressing--- red-fringed pink stuff made from ketchup and Miracle Whip--- never mayo, thank you very much--- after dinner was Kick the Can or Hounds and Hares or Elimination Frisbee, some game that brought the entire cadre of neighborhood kids together in a burst of competition and speed, and we would run and hide and throw and sweat and yell until it was too dark to see, until the crickets and mosquitoes and frogs and kids created a symphony of noise, and someone-- some mom, some dad, someone left behind the glory of summer, would call us in that one final time. And we came: reluctant, dragging, tired and spent, begging for just a few more minutes, a little bit longer, a little more time, pleasepleaseplease, just five minutes more, pleeeeease! We never did get a reprieve. We never got that extra five minutes. But we never stopped asking either. Every night was the first night, the first time, and possibilities were endless and hope tangible.

Even so, even in that summery land of forever, days end, night comes. Like a thief, darkness steals the light in unnoticeable snatches, and a curtain of silvery moonlight fills the sky where once the sun king reigned. We drive home in darkness. In the morning, dew laden fields become mist-shrouded, God’s breath lightly blanketing the dry gold reeds that turn slowly to deep russet and then dull brown. And suddenly, where once we leapt from sleep-tangled sheets to escape into the summer sun, we hunker down under blankets to steal five more minutes of sleep, of warmth, before school, before work, before growing up. 

When did summer become finite? When did night linger in my window just long enough for me to wake in darkness? When did driving with headlights ablaze take precedence over running madly and with stealth, under cover of darkness, to free my captive teammates from their prison in some neighborhood garage? What day, what time, what moment? I remember that hope of five minutes more, that mental stretch to claim eternity, that I-almost-have-it, I-can-almost-touch-it thing. I remember it lasting forever, but I cannot pinpoint when it was gone, and I wait impatiently for December 22, for when the light begins to linger a little longer, arrive a little sooner every day. 

In the meantime, I pull the blankets over my head while my windows frame a purple sky, claiming my five minutes more before turning on a light.

As yet unfinished

He is taller than me now.

Not just his hair, which is big and tight-curled and easily gives him a couple of extra inches. And not just because he stretches himself out, lifting his chin and bouncing on the balls of his feet, eager to have this bit of supremacy over me. No-- he is taller because he has grown, at least a handful of inches in the last month or three.

On the day he was born, as soon as the nurses had cleaned and swaddled him, his father-- trembling with the wonder and awe of it-- held this small child who lay so trustingly in his large and calloused hands. He lifted our son high, as if to show the boy's face to God, and then slowly, with aching tenderness, he cradled our son against his heart and danced.

I can see the infant that he was, like an after-image superimposed in the air next to him, closerthanthis, as if from a too-bright flash. God, but he was small when he was born! A tiny little thing, just over six pounds and only 18 inches long, he fit so easily on his baby blanket when I folded it into fourths. He barely fits on his bed now, sprawling in his sleep to take possession of all the available surface.

From infant to adolescent in the beat of a heart, the blink of an eye. He carries the entire procession of image and experience with him: the day he took his first step; the gash on his knee when he learned, much to his surprise, about falling; first words, first friend, first loss; the daily tedium flecked with bits of exhilaration.

There have been an infinity of firsts (and seconds and thirds), he has learned some, and played some, been bored and exultant and defiant and curious. There is an eager, impatient momentum that surrounds him. He carries this all-- this life, his life-- a gathering, expectant spiral, shot through with his father's fierce joy, a celebration of love and pride. There is some of me as well: the dreamer, the seeker, the cynic.  This is the warp and weft of him, a tapestry of knotted thread.

It is complex and unfinished, just like him.

These days, the threads bear less the imprint of his father or me than of an almost thoughtless mix all his own, of twisted color and varying weights. He weaves together the comfortable and known threads of his childhood, and now, in a syncopated stutter step that becomes more sure every day--  something wholly his own: a variation on a theme, at once familiar and new, becoming a different story altogether.

It is breathtaking. Just like him.

Once upon a time, in a land that was long ago and far away, I would say "Hold my hand, baby. The street is busy. I don't want you to get hurt." He's a teenager now. He's tugging away, rushing towards the busyness of his day. Of his life. I can still feel the memory of his touch, his small hand in mine, eyes wide and a smile so sweet it could break your heart. We walked together, ambling along a winding path. We taught one another-- about patience, about God, about kindness and love.

Always love. His for me, me for him, every breath, every word, every touch-- it was, ever and always, a lesson in love: unconditional and infinite. Was it enough? Will it be enough to carry him through as he steps off onto a diverging road that only occasionally intersects with my own?

"Hold my hand, baby. I don't want you to get hurt."

He will, though. He will get hurt and be heartbroken. He will be lifted by hands not my own, and find healing and grace where I have never thought to look. He will tell his own stories, grand and glorious and filled with everything he carries with him-- his father's fierceness, his mother's dreams, his own precious threads that he discovers and creates and borrows. All of it, a knotted, twisted tapestry, as yet unfinished.

All of it-- unfinished, unfolding. His.

To my beloved boy, Nate, upon his graduation from middle school

June 2013

For Nate, on Mother's Day

He brought me a crown of twisted green stems and sudden bursts of gold.
It smelled so sweet, like summer, like wine.
Like his smile

He was sticky-fingered and glorious
King in his realm
Of wooden trains
And pumpkin ghosts
That were banished by a sorceress
Who vanquished his fears
With a kiss of stardust.

He sipped at the seasons
Tasting the air
The clouds
Feet tripping so lightly along the path
The hidden path less taken
The dusty road sheltered by leaves
The color of heartbreak gold.
He gathered wildflowers and weeds
To grace the table and litter the doorway
That he passed through
Unnoticed
To some far away place
Only a heartbeat away.

He saw visions of giants
And spies
And he tumbled through the wilderness
Accompanied by drum beat and flute song
And he found the gilded treasure
That lay hidden in shadow
Transformed by magic;
Dull and lifeless dross
Transformed back to treasure
By his pure heart.

He found treasure and brought it home,
A crown of twisted green,
Smelling of summer
And laughing, he placed it on my head
Gentle.
Solemn.
A wondrous gift,
Breaking the spell of my solitude.