Too Much

It’s the old man at the deli counter that gets me. I’m waiting in line today, the kids behind me clamoring for donuts and cheese slices, and I happen to glance in his direction. He has been waiting quietly, head down, feet shuffling. My eyes take it all in with a glance, and I can’t help but stare at the brown dress shoes. Worn with work-out pants that zip at the ankles, it makes a strange sight. And I wonder who is not there to help him dress.

He is eyeing the containers for the take out foods, and even now I choke up as I recall. He just looks lost, his eyes like my son gets when he loses sight of me in a crowded room.

“May I help you?” the clerk finally comes to take his order.

“I’ll have a small tub of….of Grandma’s Potato Salad.” The words a bit halting, and his eyes still kiss the floor.

“May I help you, ma’am?” another clerk calls impatiently to me, and it is obvious that I had missed the first request.

“Ham, the one on sale. I’ll have a pound please.” But my eyes are drawn back to the man at the end of the deli as he shuffles away with his small tub of potato salad and mini-loaf of Italian.

I choke up as he passes by my mounded cart of groceries.

This has certainly been the month for grief and I to tango. In the past few weeks, two local police officers have died in the line of duty: one collapsed while running, an apparent heart attack victim on a foot chase, and the other was shot in the head several times while responding to a neighborhood dispute in a nearby town. The perpetrator was angry about a discrepancy over his fish pond, clearly a reason for snuffing out a life.

My friend’s dad died last week after a long, heroic battle with cancer. Hospice was there at the end, and the entire family was present to witness their father, business partner, and confidant breathe his last.

In Cleveland, a little girl close to my son’s age was killed by her mother; the little angel spent her last days in a motel bathtub being scalded by the mother whom Social Services had recently let back into her life.

Natural disasters fill the earth. I had barely registered the devastating earthquake in Haiti before I turned my prayers to Chile after Mother Nature detonated her latest there. Snowstorms and floods continue to wreak havoc in ravaged areas.

The world is filled with vats of grief; and surprisingly, I have no choice but to turn away. I just can’t take it all in. I simply don’t have enough emotion for it all. Perhaps it is self-preservation, a stoic wonderment, an unwillingness to rock my own world. I am content with the runny noses that never leave and the crushing snubs at recess. And the hangnails. This week I even had a bleeder.

I cannot feel everything; I am not a caustic woman, (unless you ask my students of whom I demand much) but the typical grief-worthy events do not grab me. It is only those moments, uncalculated and unexpected, that find me catching my breath and dabbing my eyes.

And so it is with the man at the deli. I have no idea of his circumstances; there is no way to tell if he is lonely or at peace. But somewhere between the zippered work-out pants over dress shoes, my heart is just a bit more broken today.

The Circus is in Town

"Mommy, mommy, mom, mom, mom, mom!!!” The two year old is insistent and incessant.

“What is it honey?”

“Ummmm….I forget.”

Meanwhile, his brother is sitting in the middle of the floor looking forlorn.

“What will happen when I fall through this trapdoor?” he queries.

“What trapdoor?”

“I just know this is a trapdoor and I am about to get sucked in.”

Cut to camera three where sister is doing her homework. She bites her lip and talks out loud as she fills out her paper: plants and animals that live in ponds.

“Water scorpion, muskrat, algae, dragonfly, flatworm, roundworm, leech,” she painstakingly copies.

“Mom, what’s a basscarp?” I stop her for a quick lesson on the beauty of commas. She is not amused.

“Mom, mommy, mom, mom, mommy.” He’s at it again. “I ride stop sign.”

“No honey, you are not allowed to ride your bike to the stop sign when you are two”

“Mom I just know it. I’m going to get sucked in. Will you catch me before I fall into the floor?”

I learned how to juggle in grad school. I have half of a technical theater degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and since I am not currently blessed with enough time to play with power tools and hang light grids, the juggling is all I’ve got left.

And boy does it come in handy with three kids and their various problems on a random Thursday night. I started with balls and haven’t progressed much from there. Unless you count the kids and the myriad questions/problems/wonderments at any given moment. No knives or flares of fire for me though. I’ll leave that to the professionals. And I have to sing that circus song. Always. Or I can’t get the rhythm right. “Da, dadada da dada dad a da.” You know the one I mean.

I laugh when I think back to how much I didn’t know then. How stage managing a show seemed so difficult and all-consuming. Theatre’s got nothing on the “mom, mom, mommy” crowd.

I like this role. Don’t get me wrong. But gone are the days when I could do just one thing at a time. I no sooner get this thought into my frontal lobe when I hear the familiar refrain:

“Mom, Mo-om!!” The dramatic daughter cries when I am busy talking Marty away from his imaginary trap door. “I just got nail polish on my face.”

I look up in time to see the bright green smear covering most of her right cheek.

“Just tell them it is your pond visual aid,” I quip. "Algae."

And her perfectly placed seven year old glare tells me clearly that I have dropped the ball.

Pop Goes the World

“Mom, blow a bubble! Please! Please!”

It all started so simply, my son dancing around the living room until I did his bidding. But by now the bubbles have me. I can’t get them out of my mind. My son has a huge obsession with gum chewing and is constantly begging me to blow bubbles. He sits patiently on my lap as I chew, waiting for the bubble to expand and for his chance, if quick enough, to pop the gum all over my face.

These bubbles have taken hold, and I can’t stop. First it was soap bubbles. I love blowing bubbles, hearing the giggles of my children as they chase the soapy spheres through the yard. And as I started thinking, I remembered a night about two decades ago when I was blowing soapy bubbles outside my freshman dorm on a Saturday night. And no, I had not been drinking. It sure was fun, though, to see the looks and antics of the people who had been drinking as they chased my bubbles through the street!

My mind flits to Macbeth’s three witches and my ill-remembered “Double, double toil and trouble” as the cauldron bubbles. They were wishing a double dose of bad wishes on the man himself as they stirred their pot. I suppose it is no coincidence that I have this memory as I watch my own three little monsters stirring a pot of mud, snow, wood- chips and goop in the fire pit with their plastic golf clubs and giant sand shovels . They are out enjoying the barest, earliest moments of almost-spring and I laugh as I watch them dig through mounds of snow to find the tiniest scraps of dirt. I am sure from watching these antics that the spring’s first worm farm cannot be far behind.

And speaking of sleeping with the fishes, I can’t lose these pictures I have in my head of floating long-haired women with the last of their carbon dioxide floating as bubbles to the surface. Perhaps I have read one too many mystery stories, or maybe I am the long-haired heroine, swamped and flailing and fighting to the surface. I am accused like the witches in Salem. I always loved those odds. If you lived you were a witch and would be hung. If you died you would be proven innocent. But still you’d be dead. Sometimes that sounds pretty familiar.

Bubbles and more bubbles. The financial crisis of bubble mortgages. And now it turns out that Siberia’s frozen sea-bed is emitting fierce greenhouse gasses and bubbles that are going to advance global warming. Certainly not all child’s play around here.

Life on the bubble. That is me at this moment. Bouncing, bounding, fluttering, flooding, drowning, popping.

Sometimes Gold Can Stay

Frost knew it. Ponyboy knew it. Today my boys and I know it too. Nature’s first green really is gold. The path through the Metroparks is still covered with slushy snow. The tall trees won’t let the sunlight through to melt it quite yet. But the sun is warm and my boys are so giddy in their sweatshirts. We run. We collect sticks. We marvel at animal waste. There is so much to see in this newly unlocked world.

We follow deer tracks through the slush and see the animals themselves in the distance. It is a perfect moment. One buck has already lost his horns in anticipation of new summer growth. We spy some daffodils popping through the soil. The eldest climbs a fallen log wedged in between two older trees. He goes beyond where I can reach him with the proudest of grins. Nature is growing all around me. His little brother toddles up after him, still clutching my hand. He is no longer a baby. Frost again. They are only so an hour. This fresh day, just this side of spring, sprouts newness from many angles.

And there is a sense of history here too.

“Grandpa used to take me to the woods to gather sticks,” I tell them.

“Like these?” Marty bellows, clutching a whole arsenal in his dirty hands.

“We used to balance on logs and ride them like horses,” I remember. “We even made one our pet and named her Henrietta.”

Marty’s wide eyes show he doesn’t quite believe me. I’m sure he cannot picture his mother as a little girl. Sometimes I can barely remember it myself.

We follow the youngest on his makeshift path through the woods. He is looking for a log that is not quite so high so he can copy his big brother.

“Dis one, mommy. Dis one.” I hold his hand as he carefully crosses, his little eyebrows knit in concentration and his tongue sticking out. He is a marvel, this one. His language is unfurling like the closed buds that will open in a few short weeks. He’s grown a temper. And a sense of humor. His eyes twinkle mischievously as a matter of course. And he beams when he completes the log crossing.

Meanwhile, Marty finds another large fallen tree. He clamors aboard and straddles it with glee. I can see his antics out of the corner of my eye. Hatless cowboy wonder today, prodding and poking his imaginary horse. The horse is decaying; he nudges it with a thin branch as he plays.

“Giddy-up, Henrietta,” I hear him shout through his giggles. Sometimes gold can stay.

A Mother's Pain

The lone carton of French vanilla coffee creamer in his hand tonight broke my heart. I recognized his face walking sullenly towards me as I rounded the last row of the grocery store.

I’m always in the dairy aisle when I lose my mind. I can navigate the rest of the store, but somewhere between the 50,000 yogurt choices and light vs. fat free sour cream, I wave the white flag. Today was no different. My two-year old son had been remarkably patient, but still, he’s two. A patient two year old is a bit like a serene polar bear. An oxymoron at best. A disastrous tantrum every other time.

Pierce walked quickly, and I knew where he was going before he ever opened his mouth. He is the father of the sickest young person I have ever known. I taught her last year. I loved her smile and the shy way she painted her nails for her demonstration speech, and the way her friends flocked to her at lunchtime. But she is really sick. It started in fourth grade, an autoimmune deficiency disease so rare that the doctors can’t even figure out how to treat her. She is in ninth grade now, and even though the school year is three-quarters over, she has only attended school nine days.

She has spent the last two straight months at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, where doctors struggle to find out why she won’t stop throwing up. She has been on a feeding tube for the last three weeks. And she still can’t stop throwing up.

“Kimberly needs her coffee cream,” he says, after a mumbled hello. And its not the two year old that is crying in the dairy aisle this time. I imagine this mother, sitting powerless night after night, and it is a moment I almost can’t bear. The horror of tubes and sterility and doctor upon doctor is too much: the gourmet creamer the smallest of favors in a sea of anguish.

In a way I have walked this path. As a daughter, I have supported my father through four straight months of hospital convalescence and a series of surgeries, and helped my mother wage her battle on cancer. I know what its like to eat in hospital cafeterias and sit endlessly at bedsides and rush home to take a quick shower before the next shift begins. But as a mother, I don’t know that I could have survived the last six years, and I selfishly pray that I will never have to find out.

Where does she get the strength to breathe and smile and try when her heart is breaking and her arms are powerless? The most precious gift of all, a beautiful daughter, and no way to wrap her tight and keep her safe. This is surely any mother’s worst nightmare.

Embarrassed, I fumble to hide the antibiotic prescription that I just had filled for my daughter and her earache. It broke my heart last night to hear my daughter’s sharp cries of pain. But it was only one brief night. And the antibiotic will quickly deliver relief.

We chat for a moment more, I offer my support, and watch Pierce hurry to check out with his one item in order to join his wife at the hospital. The image of that gourmet creamer will stay with me for a long time. And I’m sure my heart will continue to break as I return to my comfortable home to hug my kids tight.

A Dream Achieved

What happens to a dream deferred, wrote Langston Hughes for all of the freshmen English students in Ohio to ponder. Does it fester? Does it burn? I remember (vaguely) learning this poem at age fourteen. And I remember years and years of teaching it to youth who never doubted that their dreams would certainly come true.

Good questions, I think. I remember always feeling so bad for the speaker. What if somebody stood in the way of his dreams? What if he never followed his passion or achieved his ultimate desires? But now I have a new question. What if he did?

What happens to a dream achieved? And likewise the dreamer? What does it mean to let loose, to reach for it, to get what you have been hoping for? I think it scares the hell out of me. Then what? What comes next? And after that?

I don’t think I’m alone in my fear. I think that is why the world is trapped on the couch watching Survivor and Seinfeld re-runs. I don’t think it is so much that we are afraid to fail as that we are afraid to succeed. Perhaps people don’t even dream anymore because then we would have something new to avoid. Better to just live vicariously through awkward singers and dancers, and even worse, runway models.

What if? What if my dreams came true? Then where would I be? Then I might have to create a new goal. Take a step (or a 5K jog) outside my comfort zone. Find something new to complain about.

We love our complacency because it is comfortable. And it does not reject us. Sometimes chasing dreams leaves us with mud on our coats and doors slammed in our faces. It makes us doubt who we are. It makes us doubt who are friends are and what our talents are.

I hate to get preachy, but really. Why don’t I just step up and hit one out of the park? Because I am scared. There are too many heavy loads for me. I feel trapped before I even start. But why?

For instance, I’ve carried around twenty or thirty extra pounds for my whole adult life. Do I really love butter that much that I can’t strive to be the best that I can physically? Do Oreos truly speak to my soul?

Or how about my (insert participle here) teaching, writing, parenting, and learning inertia? Would it be so hard to get off the couch and sign up for a class or play checkers with my kids or make a dynamite syllabus? Apparently, the answer is yes.

I end up disagreeing pretty vehemently with Hughes at the end of his piece. Does it explode? Nope. A dream deferred? What happens to that is WORSE than an explosion. A trickling, a drizzling, a fading maybe, but there is not enough passion for an explosion.

Fading is good for sunsets at the end of the day. Trickling is good for bubbling brooks traversing tiny falls. But these are not good enough for me. What happens to a dream achieved? We’ll just have to see about that.