“Each year/part of a conversation I amost had/with someone I meant to call.”

–Tim Seibles

I should have prepared better

for mid-life or beyond

even that.  One more day

standing at the edge

of something I did not see coming.

My father at 53

an old man, kneeling at the hearth

in his flannel shirt and baggy polyester pants.  His life spent

preparing for what might come, counting

every nickel and dime hoping that this time

something might add up.

 

 

 

Taking off is always the hardest, feeling the wheels leave the ground: anything is possible.

All day long I walk with a friend

through Missouri Botanical Gardens

life in bloom, ponds with day lilies, plants

with names I won’t remember and can’t

pronounce.  She has been

where I don’t want to go: children moving miles

away; how the skin

changes, how we change

within.

 

Childhood haunts with its slights, the jungle gym

rusty, the see-saw looking like at any moment it will

send a kid flying. I begin to forget what the rusted circle is called,

its bite acidic, (I remember once sucking on the rusted bar) always coming back

more gray than I remember.

People’s faces look boarded-up,

empty buildings, hiding something. They are. I

am. I close my eyes and I am a girl again,

lying flat on my back in the dark everyone gone. No.

The ice cream truck bells ring and suddenly I am eating. It’s cold and I feel

lost, dizzy with glee, fingers tingling. He takes each one and licks it. After that

I don’t remember. Is it the tilt-a-whirl? We are spinning, lying down on our backs. I kick

one skinny leg out, drag my foot in the dirt, holding on the the bar, you, holding on to me.

We’re high. This was before.

pass through my life, theirs,

every day slouched down and forgetting,

so disinterested they could be anywhere else,

anesthetized.  Caught somewhere between where they are and where

they never thought they’d be.

Every action crying out: Fuck you!  

Checked out, already

gone.

 

 

Every year at John’s mom’s house all her children would gather, bringing their children, from Nebraska, or Alabama, or someplace far away, driving all night or day in their big white vans, with their towels and suits and fireworks –all the paraphernalia that a road trip to grandma’s house on the 4th of July required.  Uncle Eddie would always come with the biggest bag of fireworks you had ever seen: first the snakes which the kids threw on the ground, laughing at the snap; the twirling sparklers; then the show, the children sitting on the hill looking up oohing and awing, the inky black night, the bursts of light –always somehow new–late late lighting up the summer sky.  For them, then, life, the day, the summer was always: Me! Me! Me! 

Emma’s legs, mosquito-bitten; me, chastising John for forgetting, her legs swelling up.  Someone else, stepping on something, the tears of something gone awry.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”:

When my daughter was born until she was about ten years old, I was lost: who was this needy thing always wanting?  I liked the idea of her, someone to give my life direction: this is who I was.  I entered into my marriage only wanting: her.  And then: She’s there.  Demanding, not doing as I wanted, taking up my time, my space, my self, sucking up who I am and was, making me into something I didn’t know I could be: that lady at the grocery store, red-faced and screaming.  Someone else.

Now, my daughter’s boyfriend in my house, taking up my space, my time, my daughter.   I watch how they are together, looking for something that tells me this is not what it should be.  They are in the kitchen making dinner, making me dinner.  They have sureness and certainty, 22, with everything before them, no concept of time passing.  10 years is forever.

She knows everything and is cold; her voice cuts, dismissive, dismissing me.

I think of moments from years ago: A summer late afternoon, Emma’s hair still wet and smelling of chorine, skin sticky with sunscreen.  On the rickety wooden bench outside of Maggie Moo’s, she wears a stretched-out blue t-shirt as a summer dress, her legs swinging in the air, her hair hanging in wet tangles around her face, eating chocolate banana ice cream with a tiny pink plastic spoon.  The hot concrete; her bare legs, mosquito-bitten.  All the long summer days after summer school, arriving at the pool at noon, blue stretching out for miles; the old lady–always– in the corner lounger, brown brown brown, lazing endlessly the afternoon away reading fashion magazines, Joan Collins novels.  People’s lives that I could peer into, trying to figure out what I was missing.  Emma and Lily danced on the hot concrete while Rene and I looked on, watching our daughters perform.

Travel pauses time, holding it still, quiet, the world holding its breath.  Maybe it is a sign to keep moving, going from place to place, taking it all in like something new, something we haven’t seen.

Here, on the patio in my back yard, in the home that still feels new, after so many years in apartments owned by someone else, I feel heavy with loss.  My grown daughter putters in my kitchen with her boyfriend, with me for the summer before going off to their own lives somewhere.  I am left sitting on the back patio sipping wine, waiting.

 

The bench’s peeling paint trills age and time,

wear; rusted legs wobble

on the crooked brick hastily laid; the wind

blusters, promising another

autumn day.

 

The lawnmower roars the neighborhood

alive.  Across the back alley the machine

spits out sticks, 8 a.m.  Gray people

awaken to their tired lives, trudging to their weekly

cleansing of sins.  Morning

Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows, somewhere

between here and there.  Years

ago my mother made her way, her own

sins bearing down: children who grew to be people

she did not know or want, wants

of their own she could not fill. The past neatly mowed, detritus

of their lives.  At two or three or four, the meeting of desires

was simple, something she could handle,

a small daughter’s hand

clutching her own, pulling her along

over perceived cracks in the sidewalk, the daily rifts

of childhood, things that could not be seen,

languishing,

left behind.

 

 

last night I dreamt

of Emma.  We were staying

in a hostel in New York

the busy thoroughfare

outside the window.

At 22, she was

lost, moving

from me.

We fight

our way through.

She demands

always, something.