[This one's for you, son.]
Bed in Summer
By Robert Louis Stevenson
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Dear Friends:
Yesterday morning, a friend’s neighbor accidentally backed over her 15-month-old son with her SUV. The child died later that day.
I don’t know how to pray in situations like this. It feels too overwhelming, too intimidating. What should I ask? Where to begin? I’m thankful that God knows the answers to both.
Please take a moment to pray for this family.
I’ve started running Ian’s bath.
I dip my fingers into the running water, and look over my shoulder. ‘Hey, Ian! C’mere!’ He runs into the bathroom, and I flick my fingers at his face. He blinks and laughs and wipes the drops of water from his eyes.
My fingers reload as Ian runs into the living room and back again, for more. He dodges the spray and runs behind my back, squeezing himself between me and the bathroom door.
He cracks his forehead on the doorknob; unforgiving brass.
Before he can blame me, his mother, or doors in general, I take Ian into my arms and rub his head. ‘Ouch! Wow, are you okay?’ He wails, ‘Noooooo!’ He doesn’t know that his imagination is in cahoots with his nervous system.
‘Hey, what a lump!’ I cup my hand over his forehead and shake my head. ‘It’s huge!’
He stops crying. ‘I wanna see!’ He stands on the toilet and preens in front of the mirror. ‘I don’t see anything.’ Mommy, who’d rushed to the door before the knob had a chance to rattle, plays her part. ‘My goodness! Look at that bump!’ She takes his head between her hands.
‘It’s so gross!’ I feel his head, the lump, moving my hands over his face and chin and ears. Ian is giggling. ‘Look at this thing!’ I set him on the floor and start to squeeze his head. ‘Maybe we should pop it!’
He waves my hands away, his voice a shaking fist. ‘I’ll pop you!’
Only Child
By D. Nurkse
1
I cradled my newborn daughter
and felt the heartbeat
pull me out of shock.
She didn’t know
what her hands were:
she folded them. I asked her
was there a place
where there was no world.
She didn’t know
what a voice was: her lips
were the shape of a nipple.
2
In the park the child says:
watch me. It will not count
unless you see. And she shows me
the cartwheel, the skip, the tumble,
the tricks performed at leisure in midair,
each unknown until it is finished.
At home she orders:
see me eat. I watch her
curl on herself, sleep;
as I try to leave the dark room
her dreaming voice commands me: watch.
3
Always we passed the seesaw
on the way to the swings
but tonight I remember
the principle of the lever,
I sit the child at one end,
I sit near the center,
the fulcrum, at once she has power
to lift me off the earth
and keep me suspended
by her tiny weight, she laughing,
I stunned at the power of the formula.
I started reading Dragonlance in junior high. Elves, dwarves, and dragons. Wizards, clerics, and barbarians. People and places with too many consonants: the Kingdom of Vizrak, Yshar of Mologon, the Sword of G’nar Fingratha. Campy and cliché, but comforting.
Romance novels for light-sensitive adolescents.
There’s a new trilogy in the series, the first book of which I started this week: The Dragons of Dwarven Depths. I set the book on our kitchen table as I made lunch this morning, and Ian found it just after he stumbled down the stairs, rubbing his eyes.
The cover is vivid, bright orange with a dwarf, a half-elf, and a kender armed for battle, and held in a fighting stance. And behind it all is a dragon, wings spread wide and wreathed in flame. These are Fantasy’s bare-chested heroes.
Ian grabbed the book and drank its cover. ‘Oh! Are there pictures?’
‘Nope, sorry kiddo.’
‘What’s it about?’ He flipped through the pages.
‘It’s…complicated.’ I went back to my tuna sandwich, and he went back to ogling the cover. Eventually he found the illustration of King Duncan’s Floating Tomb. ‘Hey, there is a picture!’
I’d forgotten. There’s always a map of something. ‘Is this where they’re going?’ He pointed to the Ruby Chamber of the Hammer.
They who? ‘Most likely.’
‘Are there dragons?’
‘Always!’
He beamed. ‘I’m going to make my fingers be their legs!’ And he walked his fingers across the map, climbing stairs and jumping chasms. ‘They found the dragon! Yay!’ A battle ensued, his fingers crashing together and scrambling across the page.
He closed the book, and walked away.
Ian and I have slowly been making our way through Winnie the Pooh. Slowly, because I’m not as dedicated as I should be, and because the chapters are longer than Ian’s attention span.
We’ve been reading in Mommy and Daddy’s bed. It’s bigger, snugglier, and can support the weight. But Kelly and I have been exercising, so now I’m willing to climb Ian’s ladder and ignore the creaks.
Last night, Rabbit was trying to discover where Christopher Robin went in the mornings, and why he went there with a Spotted and Herbaceous Backson. Ian had an arm around Mater and an arm around Chicky, and was twirling his fingers in my hair. I kept glancing at him to see if he was paying attention—Rabbit uses big words—and I’d catch him tracing outlines on the wall or looking at the stars on his ceiling or picking his nose.
But he was being quiet, which, for a three-year-old, is paying attention.
In the middle of Eeyore’s lecture to Piglet about the importance of education and the letter ‘A’, Ian put his head on my chest. I stopped paying attention to the story, too.
When we learned that Kelly was pregnant, I sold my Focus, she sold her VW Beetle. We bought a Jetta wagon. We’re not really ‘car people’, but I don’t think either of us has completely finished mourning.
I drive my mother-in-law’s former, fantastically dilapidated Geo Prism. Kelly drives this:
(Please drink responsibly.)
Good Friday
By Christina Rossetti
Am I a stone and not a sheep
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
horror of great darkness at broad noon,—
I, only I.
Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.
‘There was a new boy named Fire Diesel. He was a dragon and he makes fire. He goes home. He makes cream soda. Then he went to work. And also he plays with LEGOs. And the end!’
Ian, age 3
Despite his knack for destruction, Ian is showing signs that he sees value in things more lasting. Or at least that are harder to break.
He’ll ask to play ‘the Train Game’, which really means he wants me to put the train together so he can crash it into things. ‘Smaunch!’, he says. Except we never get that far. He’s too impatient, and doesn’t understand the delicate art of deciphering a LEGO instruction manual.
