Love as Wind-Tossed Paper

“I love you,” she said.
“You don’t even like me,” I said.
the recipe for the perfect argument
worth its furry
both of us wrong.

beautiful lovers,
short-lived friends—
no heart to be an enemy
but sometimes i wish

passing glance
subdued by passion spent
long ago that brought
the blindness of fools

that cannot hide us
from daylight
the not-quite lies
now illuminated, I can’t bear to see

we squint, grasping for
the word that makes us win
hollow prizes
with hands coming up empty

why won’t she listen
why can’t he hear
“If I didn’t love you…” I say.
“If you really loved me…” she says.

Midnight Drive from Nowhere

Sitting in the passenger seat of her blue Volvo 240 wagon, the wind animated her hair--hair that had lost all other life from the days of excessive heat and humidity. She was tired, wilted in the swelter. I clutched and shift into fifth gear, turned and see her happy and content.

The tassels of her deep brown locks swirled around her neck and face as disorganized as the rest of the world that had also wilted into a disarray.

We didn't mind. There comes a time in the heat wave when you just give up, realize that the starch in your shirt means nothing after a couple of minutes outside; that the potato salad might just be better left behind; that as hard as you try to protect yourself between the air conditioning of home and car or between car and work or wherever you are going.

Content with our state of disassemble, we sat wordless, headed to her home—or mine, from somewhere—I cannot remember. The destination was defined more by our momentary glances-- caught in between wafts of breeze and a passing car much more in a hurry than two lovers fine with each others' company.

Later, we would lie limp in bed, too hot to spoon, too hot to sleep, but not to hot to trace the space between us with a finger, a light touch through the heavy air.

What did we talk about? Religion, politics, the kids. The future. The past. The present.

The next morning, we wandered out the door, aimless, bearings confused by oppressive stew of weather. Maybe a shower before we found our first appointed stop, unable to tell, neither by how we felt or by memory, whether we had taken one the night before.

In this morning, I could not tell if we are happy, content, thrown back into the real world, unable to put off the facts in this start of the day. Unable to procrastinate those things that are so easy to forget in a cloud of a love. We would find that place of forgetting soon enough in each others' eyes, arms. And maybe a little bit of bravery to talk about those things, and religion, and politics, and love, and the kids, and work, and all those things that make all the questions that surround them so hard to answer.

Happy and content in our mortal, humble ignorance and relative wisdom. Happy to shift into neutral and let the rest of the world be in a hurry to solve the problems that have no answer.

Don’t Tell Me Where You’ve Been, Wanderlust Train

wanderlust love

for the train

that will wander with more lust

than i will ever be able to keep up with

and longer than i can stand to wait

for its return

from further away than i can imagine.

but its horn is a siren

that will turn my head

every time it passes my open window

even on the coldest night;

my ears will perk

in the silent frost and my

neck strains to bring them closer

to phantom sound.

and the distant click-clack

click-clack, an echo

endures from your last visit

a long row of memory

laden with other people's cargo

your burden

now mine.

i tell myself

the whistle blares for me

and not some other wanderer

whose lust could never be as strong

as the love that waits on the crystal breeze

that circles around my bed posts

through my body

and fills the empty space

that sleeps beside me.

Your Next Love Letter

Last Wednesday, I found a great Smith-Corona portable manual typewriter at Goodwill.  I was shopping for something for a trip to a chess tournament being held in St. Louis. (I can’t remember what I originally was looking for. I know I didn’t find it, whatever it was.)  It is definitely not the case that I need another item in my house. I have not the room. My son is intrigued but ambivalent, exclaiming, “For a while, there, I was thought we were caught in the world of typewriters and wood-burning guitars,” playing off a James Taylor quote he had rattling around in his very smart head. It is quite cool, a Smith-Corona Classic 12. It’s a portable, manual, vintage. It feels great. It is great.


It was almost not great. I tested it out in the store. Plunk, plunk. So many of these machines do not work, like the IBM Selectric I lucked into not long ago. Beautiful machine, but it’s electrical insides are scrambled and it knows not how to behave. This one felt great. Seemed to function great.

That is until I got it home and tried to type a word that had a K in it. The K did not work. Not a tragedy. I spent $7 and maybe I would be motivated to find someone who could repair this gem. The better idea was to try and fix it myself—a dangerous proposition, but it would be a true failing if I did not try.

I took off the metal plate on the bottom and searched the levers and hinges. Aha! The K was disconnected from its series of levers and rods. I figured out the mechanism for the failed connection, and with the help of two screwdrivers, made the reconnection. I could now write words with a K.

I now have a functioning manual typewriter. The typewriter I learned to type on was also a Smith-Corona, one of those gray, Studebaker-like, upright things that my mom had salvaged from the days when she was a student. I think I was seven or eight when I asked mom to teach me how to type. With three other kids, two of them quite small, and an outside-the-house job, She did not have a lot of time. She did the next best thing—or maybe the better thing. She sat me down at the kitchen table with her old Gregg typing manual and let me teach myself.

Years later, when I was in graduate school, I found another typewriter just like it at a yard sale.

I don’t know why I wanted that typewriter. It would be an odd way to reclaim my childhood. Regardless, the purpose it served was much different than was the allure as I passed the sale that early summer evening.

One purpose it served was saving the many recipients of my many letters from having to read my handwriting, which is still pretty illegible. The other purpose was to pound out the lingering adolescent angst that was the impetus or subject of most of the letters.

As you might remember from my first blog post “Stop Him Before He Writes (or at least tries),” I wrote about 380 personal letters one year. Many of them to a few women/girls for whom I felt enough affection to write so often, but never with the boldness to admit or hint, beyond the volume of mail they received, such affections. I would not admit because those affections were truly a transgression of what was supposed to be mere friendship or/and often with society’s color line. 

Plunk.  Thwap.  Slap. It was a wonderful sound and feel to which I worked out so many of my frustrations.  Social-political frustrations. Frustrations of internal and external religious and theological dissonance. Frustrations of what felt a lot like love in the midst of a fading adolescence.

This might be too reveling.  Did you get any of those letters from 25 years ago?

Maybe you were not in my life 25 years ago. Maybe you are not a woman. Maybe your life was safely secluded from such attentions. Maybe you did get a letter—and maybe it was not one tainted with such emotions. Maybe none of that matters. Today, as then, all of the musings may be little more than the exercise in writing it turned out to be.

Maybe none of it matters and maybe it IS nothing more than an old writing exercise—or that is all I will admit to. That and one other thing—something that may be of value to you: being so subtle and guarded with displays of affection has made me very good at figuring out if a man is interested in being your friend or if he has a crush on you. I can tell you how deeply he is into your relationship. I can pick it up, in most cases, pretty easily. Sometimes I can tell without ever meeting him. It is how I knew with certainty, even a year before he asked her out, that a classmate from long ago was interested in my friend A. It is how I knew that even though my friend C was so worried that her latest boyfriend might break up with her, that I was sure he would not, certain; I could feel it, that he knew she was the best that he would ever meet (that she was the best that most people ever meet, even if the context of relationship is not a possibility) and he would not pass on who she was. And I had never met either of them.

I can tell by the smallest kind of attention that a man pays, letters, or anything else, especially something else, because no one writes letters, especially on a typewriter. I only wish that I could be so perceptive in the dynamics of my own life.

I do not plan to write 380 letters in the next year, but somehow, the acquisition of this machine seems to fit for the day. I have urged my son to pound out a few poems on our new piece of functional furniture. What will I write? And what will you think if a piece of mail comes to your door, written on dear Smith-Corona Classic 12?

I beg you not to over-think this one, but in the mean time, I will carry the burden as I worry that no one will ever want a letter from me again.

** Leave comments at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/your-next-love-letter/

I Love You: That’s So Funny

Poop, butt and vomit jokes are one of the delights of early childhood. I don’t know how long it takes us to tire of the butt jokes. Maybe as long as it takes to accept those not-so-crude aspects of life: a common daily reality, not so odd, ironic or absurd. I am guessing that doctors Freud, Jung, Erickson and Spock have explanations, something that explains this transition from being comfortable eliminating our waste into our pants to finding the elements of that process the most hilarious idea we can conceive of on the planet.

I recall a day in grade school when every boy in the middle grades was fascinated with a turd soooo big and long it would not flush. Everyone elbowed their way to the door of the stall in the boys’ bathroom for a chance to see the spectacle as one of our teachers tried to encourage and then order all of us back to our classrooms. Urging us out of the bathroom did not, in the least, halt our exclamatory banter, filled with “Holy cows” and “Did you see that?” and eyes as big as the phenomenon we had, prior to that day, never seen.

In time, we tired, outgrew, or just forgot to laugh at unless adorned by some cleaver sophistication.

In a way, we never quite get comfortable with any of that, the body parts and the functions that go with them. There are still ways to make poop, butts and puke funny. It works in some movies for some people on some days: I guess it’s all in the timing—and maybe in not being the ones who have to clean it up: either the physical stuff or the pitiful emotional fallout that accompanies the physical mishap.

While still children, we graduate to the next order of strange and uncomfortable body parts and functions: it’s about sex. We are kids, with no or very warped contexts of this life reality and, thus, still naïve enough not to confuse this caricature of sex with love. We can conveniently not see that sex and love are things that could go together, even if we know too much about them than is healthy for a child.

Sex and love: they are funny.


Bobby and Suzie
Sittin’ in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G…

Or, “Bobby has a girlfriend! Bobby has a girlfriend!” More giggles. More embarrassment. As many denials of “Do not! DO NOT!

When do we grow out of his stage? Hopefully not too soon, because it really is something children have to grow into, spend time uncomfortable with and out of that discomfort, spend an appropriate amount of time growing, establishing their personal space, identity and sense of self the discomfort helps us grow into. The taunts work for comic relief: Little Bobby with “First comes love/then comes marriage/then comes Bobby with a baby carriage is supposed to be an uncomfortable absurdity.

Even as adults, though, we sometimes—and for some, every time– do not avoid being as unripe as Bobby. And maybe that is why it is hard to graduate out of that stage of bad humor that it follows us into the spaces and time of life when it can no longer be a silly absurdity: the places in which we live and have to care in those relationships, with those real people.

Not being that undeveloped person is hard in our “Two and a Half Men” society. Once I got past being offended and realize it is just television, a comedy, it reminded me of some of the Greek classic comedies. So absurd. Silly. Such shallow attitudes on some things that are of ultimate importance: family, sex and love—or the absence of love. Absurd. Silly.

And maybe it would be funny, if only it lasted the two and a half hours it takes to present one of those Greek comedies. But it goes on and on, week after week, day after day, rerun after rerun. And then I realize that it is not just a fiction. It’s more real than we will admit, even though the implicit admission is as plain as the popularity of the show. It is hard to deny when the show’s star repeatedly shows the real consequences of what happens when the plot of the show comes to real life. It is hard to deny when the trail of ruin left by that star shows up large—and we still want to reward him with our attention, money and an even bigger stature than we provided him before.

It leaves us, still as adults, afraid to fall in love or to let anyone know, even the target of our affections. Will people laugh at us? Will our love laugh at us? Is love a joke with which those around us are still way too comfortable? Will our love be so uncomfortable with the love that the realm of the comic will be the comfortable refuge?

If I say, “I love you,” will you say, “Oh, that’s so funny,” and laugh?

And I can laugh, too, make us both comfortable and say, “Just kidding.” Freud, Jung, Erickson and Spock have theories on this, too.  I am not sure I want to know.  Instead, we can turn on the television and learn what love is about.

(Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/i-love-you-thats-so-funny/)

love settles at the bottom of the glen

2 loves
he comes beside her
a touch on her arm
she turns
guides his center
to the seat next to her
another touch
nudge
sends them rolling quietly
down a hill


he sits
rests
turns again
they tumble into a light kiss
settle at the bottom
together
they gather
to watch
the birds fly
against
the setting sun


and i wonder
if i will ever
share such a beautiful silhouette
enjoy such a beautifully
seasoned love

frozen in/out of love

Gray day

hiding behind the brown

of a winter

i never lived

i feel frozen ground

remember how

i took for granted green

soft, supple blades

recalling that i did not

take my shoes off

in the warmer day

sun-filled, asking me to

run my toes through its hair

like only a lover would allow

and to lay down with it

another invitation i let pass

and now its caress has

grown cold and hard

mocking me naked

its blanket of snow cast aside

so late in this season

with trees who

have not dropped their leaves

in a last gasp of vanity

tomorrow, in may's solar rays

another boy

will play, walk and love

run his toes through the grass

while mine hide safe

in steady shoes

that will not tell the secret colors

of spring's thaw

E's Body

This story will start in a short bit, but first I have to explain why it is a day late and will be a page short. This weekend, I am spending my time with a handful of great writer-colleauges at a retreat mentored by the prolific fiction author Percival Everett and poet Philip Bryant. It is a great time talking—sharing with them. We are laughing our heads off and getting filled with more stories that we wish we could all write ourselves—and listening to our new friends find that we don’t have to write all these stories ourselves.

The color of the weekend tells me how pale my telling of this weeks story is, that I cannot do it justice—and that many of the things I have written here in this forum are waiting for more color, texture, flavor and sounds that will want readers to linger with the stories and hopefully share more of their own.

And I don’t know why this story came to mind—seemingly unfortunately, early in this morning. Unfortunate, only because I know it is important, especially to one friend of mine, but I do not have the mental space to give it justice today, with so many other writing projects that are filling my days, my note book and the many conversations that my co-Givens Retreat Fellow, story-telling voices are too eager to join. For most of the weekend, my mind has been somewhere else, on other issues, other things about which we must write—and I will tell you more about this experience in coming days. But at the moment, I have to get out at least the notes for this story. And maybe you will fill in the color. Maybe you will fill in the details from your own life movie. The story is not uncommon.

This is a story of my friend E who called me one summer evening, tears of hurt and anger filling the stream of rant I heard as she told me, “Can you belief what he just did?!?!” She said she was, “So mad,” and with the sounds and tones I could tell that the outstretched arms of the tallest basketball player where not long enough to show just how mad “so mad” was.

I don’t know how to tell the story and in a real sense, it is not my story to tell, or at least tell the best so that it means what it needs to mean. It seems so awkward, painfully awkward that I have trouble getting it out. It is that her boyfriend had just helped her put in a large air conditioner in her apartment. After, he said something to the effect that he should now “get his reward,” as in she should give him sex.

I was not thinking of it that way. I thought, for sure, he was just having tongue-in-cheek fun in their intimate space, a little play in that is a part of noticing the space that two lovers occupy to figure out if they will make love now, later or spend that moment in each others’ space in some other way—or spend a moment apart. It was hard to imagine that he was thinking in those terms. It was not hard for her.

And the more I listened, the more I knew I just needed to listen to her and how she felt. The more I listened, that night and in later days, I realized that maybe he really did expect sex for service.

The more I listened, the more I saw that her anger was deeper than the absurd implication that sharing her body was worth help with the air conditioner. I listened, that night and over weeks and months enough to realize that while it might not have been solely the help with the air conditioner that he was offering—that he was holding out other things: THINGS and was asking for her love, her body and sex.

He is a wealthy man. But for most of their relationship, she resisted having him buy things for her, do things for her, buy her. She was as fierce about paying attention to not setting up a dynamic where he expected sex because he paid for stuff, a dynamic that I increasingly became aware was part of his psyche. She avoided it as strongly as I avoid having woman friends do any of my cleaning, especially girlfriends… because it harkens to another dynamic that doesn’t cast the roll of women duly. (My mother may not have won the battle to get her son to do a good job taking care of his house, she, and other influential people in my life, have taught me well that it is not the job of some woman to take care of house cleaning for me.)

When I see her, some days, she is very plain looking and on others strikingly stunning—or stunningly striking—and as I say this the redundancy of either phrase is not lost on my, but the emphasis is intentional. And it should not matter and I would not mention it, because in the most critical and final analysis, it is irrelevant.

What is not irrelevant is how she feels about how she looks, how others contribute to her sense of beauty—or detract from it, and, more importantly, her sense of her own humanity. As one of the girlchildren of our society, she feels the urgency of establishing her sense of worth, power of her sexuality and the human care that needed to take care of both. She knows the passing and the intimate gazes that will evaluate her as not pretty enough just as well as they will trigger the desire to make love to her. She is aware that this gaze will often come with an attitude of male supremacist entitlement, that the few bread crumbs off his plate of power and goods are sufficient payment for what is most precious.

E is not wealthy. She is one of the millions of people in our country who are very challenged to keep health insurance. She has a resume that, while is shows fast and deep talents, puts her in line for employment that barely keeps in her tiny apartment and in a nifty but old car. Those things are important. Health. Home. Job. Money. Those are things about which she worries and things she knows she could make less of a worry with a man who would buy that security for her. For her, for all of us, that price is seen when she looks in the mirror each morning and has tells herself what she is worth.


Not sure why I am thinking about this story now. Maybe it is because I am communing with a group of articulate, smart, creative people, all of them with black bodies, all of us who know what it is like to have our bodies, our image subjected to alternately an object of hatred and desire—and often experiencing those as one in the same.

Still, this is not my story to tell. It is hers to tell with more color and truth and clarity. It is hers to tell in a way that tells me why she was mad enough to spit profanity, what it is that is so important that it is an issue of protecting ones sense of self.

She tells it in a way that reminds me that I want to be beautiful, for that to be acknowledged and to have the people in my life respond with their beauty. E tells me she knows and has to remember she’s worth a whole lot more and tells me with a melody that give it meaning. I hear her. We know.

For now, back to the task of Sisyphus.

The Eternal Paper Anniversary

The Eternal Paper Anniversary

A 5-year-old's cardboard box Valentine's day has “be mine” written all over it. This, often our first social lesson in love is such unfair pedagogy, veiled in the simple aesthetics of arts and crafts. It was said that “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten, ” where we learned that love flowed from that red and pink heart shape.

Can you recall the shock upon seeing for the first time a picture of a real heart? We learned what it really takes to keep blood and live surging through our veins and to keep us alive. But why did we not find a new course for our scissors, still cutting out the same heart shape, pasting in over our chest with a happy smile of undying immortality?

And do you recall the shock when, after all those years, when our life's love faded as surely as the red construction paper in a sun that could not compete with the coursing throbs of life's true passion? And even though we knew what the heart really looks like, we go to cut out our heart shape, like a young lover who still has not see what the heart looks like?

He said, “She is not the construction paper cutout that I married.” She said, “But I cut the edges so carefully. Why does he not like it?” I said, “I would never make that mistake. I will be sure to buy different paper and use a better pair of scissors.”

One Reason Poetry is Important

Last night, my son Sid and I went to a poetry reading. I will go blue in the face trying to explain why it was important to be there. I am glad that I did not have to explain why to Sid, that for some reason, he knew, that he would go there for more than the several out-loud laughs he had or for the treats that did not come until after the reading.


It was important to be there. It was important to learn, remember, and respond to and from those words, the ideas, the emotion. How much can we learn from poetry?

Last night's lessons: They are about poetry, art and life, and why humans need all three.

We learned that there are things that we will say in poems that we won't say to our parents, won't say if we are shy and won't say if we are pretending to be polite at the expense of telling the truth. That there are things that “people” will say in their sleep, and you can make wonderful verse by just capturing those words. We say, “people,” but in the poem, it reads true, reads “lover” or “the one I love.” Sometimes we are so shy, but how else do we learn what people say in their sleep?

I was reminded that the devil so someone who will ask you to accept a deal that he himself would never accept. And that such men will call themselves gods in order to justify their carnivorous appetite for human mortals and their love and their souls.

I was reminded of what it takes—what factors must be in place—for a grown man to take the life of a boy: how he gets to take the safety of other children and women to whom he is privileged to become too close.

I was reminded that the collection of people with whom I share last night's event is a sufficiently rare collection in that we all understood that to take things like this is wrong.


We learned that we had a place where we could talk about it, even if changing the world would require us leaving that comfortable space. We were happy to know that just as those snippets of art moved us, we, too, could move people and the world will change just a little.

And it is time to write. For all of us, it is time to write, and share. And we won't have to explain why poetry is important, because, today, even though I put them to paper, I am at a loss for words.

is this how my love grows?

tears hover
over sod lying dry
limp and brittle
in long rigid fingers
forearms of sweat

moist eyes
too little to
bring this clump of
promise
back to life

sod cutter’s mark
shows how it is so easily
pulled away
from the ground on which it was
planted

and how a grandfather’s hand whose
hubris and old
naivete
made him think it would be there
forever

muddy cheek streaks
I will not wipe them
with stained hands

that only smear the
sorrow
from its graceful trail
down my face

like a sad irrigater with
broken main and a
futile attempt to
water a field
already sewn with salt

An 11-Year-Old's Profile in Courage

It is a good collection of boys, my son Sid's Midway Stealth baseball team. Two nights ago, they lost a tough playoff game after winning their previous two. It was a season of wins and losses on the field, in the life of the team and in the lives of our families.

The biggest victory came with the biggest loss for one of Sid's teammates. It was an unparalleled profile in courage, not just for him but for all the boys.

I don't know how many times I have watched a sports telecast to hear how one of the participating athletes had recently gone through a terrible loss, loss of a parent, sibling, someone close. Commentators talk about the bravery of the athlete, how they fight through the pain and grief and continue to perform, to live. We feel for those women and men. The stories help us appreciate and admire them. At these times, we are reminded of the important things in life, that we are witnessing humanity even as we enjoy what is “only a game.”

Still, most of these athletes are, while relatively young, are not children. Sid's teammate, Patrick is 11. In the middle of the season, Patrick lost his dad to a long battle with cancer. Patrick is winning his battle with courage.

Patrick had been missing from games and practice for weeks. He was along for his father's trips across the country to visit important people in his life, saying his last good-byes.

Like a lot of us, Russ Connors shared baseball with his son, Patrick, as an act of love. We show our sons and daughters that this baseball love is about so many things of life, not just learning how to win, how to lose, or even being good at the game. It's about more than fun. It is about a list of things that is too long to share in one sitting, in one life time. It is about things that are too big for an 11-year-old to understand and bigger than many of us grownups want to contemplate.

When someone dies, someone close to us, even as adults, we are often at a loss for what to do with ourselves—with others. Somehow, as parents, we want to be able to prepare our children to do what we have trouble doing ourselves—hopefully before we pass. We want our kids to be a little braver and on a path that is more mature than the one we strode. Credit Russ, because at age 11, Patrick learned enough of this lesson in love, love for a game, but more love for his father, that on the day of his father's death, he knew what he was supposed to do.

That evening, under a solid gray overcast sky, Patrick, in full uniform stepped out of the car of a family friend, who met a couple of the coaches to formally and gently deliver Patrick and some important pieces of the story of the day.

The stories were shared with us by family friends, while Patrick and the other boys took their warm-up cuts in the batting cage and did their drills on the field. We learned about the time that Patrick spent with his dad in the last days. We learned about how they shared baseball. We learned enough to know why, even on what is likely the hardest day of his life, Patrick was playing baseball.

We are told that Patrick said, “This is where my dad would want me to be." There was little question of that. It was the place for him to be, for him, his dad, his teammates and all of us who needed that life lesson.

The Midway Stealth won that evening's game with Patrick closing out the game on the mound, pitching a great inning of relief.

After the game, coach Jay, brought the boys out to right field, as he does after each game. I don't know much of what he said. What he and coaches Allen and Jason have said in those team meetings over the course of the season has produced some lessons for the boys in how to be the important young men they have been for each other throughout the season. What he said definitely prepared the boys to be there for Patrick that night and beyond.

Days later, coach Jay organized a team presence at Russ' visitation, with the team attending together in their game jerseys. After, the coaches took them all to Dairy Queen, a due summer salve and just reward for stepping up on a difficult day—because just as life and baseball are important, treating ourselves along the way is, too.

Russ said, “Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. To live without love or joy or meaning or hope would be the far greater tragedy. And there’s the faith in resurrection to which Christians can confidently rely on.”

I think Patrick worked out some of that resurrection the night of the game. That night, he played in honor of is dad. His teammates played in honor of Patrick. The team played the rest of the season with an “RC” on their hats.

This story has made me cry only a few times. Just a few. It has made me quite proud of my son and a group of boys with whom he shared a great season of baseball. And this is one of the reasons why baseball is important. 

LEAVE COMMENTS AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/an-11-year-olds-profile-in-courage/#comments
 

We Whisper for Love

“I wonder what your parents said when they whispered,” I told her. They were in love. In a way like few other parents I knew. They were good parents, like mine. 

Growing up, I did not know our moms and dads were so rare. I did not know that the sharp words that make children hide in the corners where, in some houses, common and made the children hide their emotions and made them hide their family from the rest of the world.

Julie and I are twins of different parents, separated before conception, born at the same time into John Kennedy's America. We grew up not knowing that other parents did not bother to whisper, that in other homes, the dialogue in our parents' hush was the every-day, out loud currency that curled children's ears, pounded them until they thought it was normal and they became numb to the pang. Numb, they carried that numbness into the conversations of their adult relationships—with a slew of predictable results.

What did they say when they whispered? The things, good and bad, that kids should not hear. Things those kids will only know when they old enough to unravel the code inside of their own relationships. And out of convenience, forget that it was a truth harbored by their parents—secrets so pleasant and so unpleasant.

Things too complicated to explain, to understand, even for the grownups.

It is too complicated to understand that mom and dad are so mad at each other that they wished they did not love each other so much so that they could let out the rage whose origin they can't really understand because it is not the love. The rage is a stranger on the other side, wanting to jump in and play and make life look like mom and dad did not love each other so much.

Things too complicated to understand. Things like being in love. Like what mom and dad share that kids don't get to see—at least not on purpose and not deeper than an unconscious touch, stolen glance or tiny kiss. As kids, we are lucky to hear our parents say, “I love you,” to the other, and show it. We are lucky to not know the details of what comes after or what came before that compels them to say and show who they are to each other. We are free of that burden. Not our responsibility—even as we take on that responsibility in our own lives.

They also whispered the numbers in the checkbook ledger and the worry and the caution. At the same time, they show us a frugality that attempts to spare their children from that worry in adulthood.

They whisper the intimate illnesses of neighbors, relatives or their own, but still show us how to care for and be kind to their suffering. And to be especially nice to their kids, because they were hurting, too.

They whisper the fights of neighbors or relative—fights made of the rage that did jump to the other side—the other side of the bedroom door that is mommy and daddy space. They whisper for moms and dads whose hurt is so much that they no longer love each other and the rage escapes. And somehow, we know that we should feel for the children, even if we are afraid to absorb those scary emotions.

When they can, they whisper their own fights. The quiet tension confuses.

Julie and I could not imagine living on that other side, the side of life where no one bothers to keep parent stuff behind the bedroom doors. Or sometimes it is just so much that it cannot be contained in that small intimate space. She and I grew up in houses where we would have never thought that we would ever find ourselves saying out loud to a parent—or at least to ourselves—“How can you share that with your daughter/son?” It is not a child's burden, even an adult child.

Julie wonders about the winter of losing her father. She wonders. We wonder. Losing him, did she also lose the love he shared with her mother? What questions where left unasked?  What did he leave? He left her with with more than his memory of his childhood Cubs and the baseball glove that reminded her of why baseball is important, important even to one of the girls of John Kennedy's America, even in her great longing.

But what is the secret to that love? What is that answer? We still search for that, not knowing what questions we would or should have asked to know better. Or, in my case, what questions I am still not brave enough to ask to learn the lessons that hid behind the door. What is worse is that we sometimes forget the lessons we have already been shown, strong and good and that made our homes.

There is more to know. How to we find out? The reality of her father's passing: I know Julie's mother wished she could whisper that, but the news was so loud. Did Julie's ears curl? I still have the chance to ask, knowing I have some of the answers, knowing I am afraid of other truths. My mother, my father: they are waiting, waiting to lean over and whisper the answers in my ear. But not all of them. Because there are some things kids just should not know.

Love Lessons

My friend Linda started her blog post this week, “Mom? Dad? What are You Doing Here?”  with a quote. I will steal it. I steal it because I have something else to say about it. I steal it because, in essential ways, we are telling parallel stories, learning parallel lessons.

“Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go." — Mary Rose O’Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd)

Love must serve some purpose, but there are some types of love for which I am struggling to learn the lessons.

And what happens when those lessons of love are lost, do not get learned? Are we doomed to repeat them? I think maybe so. But we are still drawn—days to nights, drawn like a ship to a siren.

We are drawn until the lesson has run out and so has the supply of love, until the next time. How much of the lesson will we capture this time around?

For Linda, these love lessons are getting pulled into her life with her family. I have the fortune—or misfortune—to be leaning them through relationships of choice. Not such a simple choice. Drawn by the eye, mind and heart.

And I realize that these lessons are not just ones of resistance. It is not a lesson of how to control, master or submit to them. Maybe it is the task to salvage the love from them, maybe shedding some poison or lie from an apple of lore that sours the true love we have. Maybe the lesson is to realize that we are not the poison, but the poison's leaving is almost never something we can make happen by our own efforts, virtue or even the love itself. What it's not: it is not trying to fix past relationships or just our past with new relationships. Or maybe it is.

This week, I was an uninvited but timely and welcome witness to Linda confronting the poison of one of her loves. I watched a powerful woman consumed by the lies and half truths, as she likes to call them, that built her family of origin's love on shifting sands of unreality. I saw her take leave of the lesson that she has learned well, just for a brief moment, that is an emotional home on more solid ground. I saw the vessel of love crack, spilling its contents in a helpless gush for those moments, like a loss of a kind of faith that allowed Peter, so briefly, to walk on the water. I saw her fall back to the identity of the little girl who knew no other reality than the that thought the half-truths and secrets were a normal reality.

And as I watched and listened, I received a lesson of my own. About the half-truths with which I live—the ones of which I been convinced and some that I have created, or co-created by my tacit acceptance—and the “little girl” I become when I miss my own lessons and lost loves.  And even as I write this, I can see one lesson that I am avoiding.

These are lessons I will have to visit again. Will I visit them with the faith of Peter or the Peter of lost faith. I often try and keep that faith on track like someone trying to balance a bicycle by leaning one way or the other rather than by the physics of motion. This failing is easy to see watching someone else ride the bike. Not so easy to see on one's self. The bike is a lesson of the heart.

Fiction Flash: Pulling My Summer Kisses

She used to call me, minutes away from my house. Actually more like a hour after having called earlier to say she would be by in 20 minutes. She wanted to walk in all kinds of weather, usually too late at night for a good end of a day. I got in the habit of saying yes. Long walks. I would listen to her talk.

She would say that I walked fast enough, long enough legs to keep a pace that gave her the exercise she needed. She spoke as swiftly as our legs would carry us. I listened, sometimes with care, sometimes with frustration, sometimes with love, and sometimes because that is what I do.

And some days, I would not listen, wonder if I had heard it all before, wonder why she thought explaining it a second and third time would make the story different (even if the names and places were not the same), thinking that maybe I had her same problem years before and why the world had not ridden itself of it by then. I wondered if I was frustrated by her or by myself—because maybe it was just me who had not ridden myself of life's chronic impediments.

Late summer nights with my friend were easiest. Some, I still remember. Let me see. Was it that first summer night lying in the grass in the middle of the nearby college campus or another a few years later? Not sure which one to remember and which to forget.

I don't remember how she described what happened on that later summer walk. Something about the rain. Something about my arms. Something about how hard it is to let someone love her. Something about it being easier to be with someone who treated her poorly than the fear of being with someone who she might disappoint. I said nothing about my fears of the same.

That first summer walk, we lie on the grass, me wondering if I should kiss her. I am still wondering. Instead I just turned periodically to watch her gaze at the sky. I gazed at the sky, too, even though the city lights washed out the night-sky sparkle. Where do we look in those awkward moments? And somehow my mind made this moment into an episode akin to spending an entire dinner looking at a date's earring—too shy to look in the eye; too modest to be caught looking lower.

I was so much more grown up then.

I didn't know how much she wanted me to kiss her. Neither of us realized at the time how much easier life would have been if we had left that later paused walk moment as undisturbed as the first. Years later, on that rainy night, we would fall in deeper than a mere kiss. Rain. Arms. Complicated longings unnecessarily confused by conflicting emotions, sensibilities, and circumstances to avoid.

But that first night was fine the way it was, in the grass with the summer night sky. Hardly a soul crossing campus, no rolling traffic, and no singing katydids. Just the appropriately paralyzing cacophony running through our heads, our shy modesty staring at the summer night sky.

Boats

Boats? Some, I love. Others, I loathe.

Some, love-hate. Loved

the sunfish sailboat

in which I learned to sail, at Bible camp, the summer

that I had to try really hard to not be overcome

with my new teen's crush on Anne Walstrom,

who was there that summer.

I loved the simple boats

in which my father and I went fishing

on Lake Spitzer in Otter Tail County, where he

would dip the oars in the water before we set out

so that the six o'clock rowing would not squeak so much

as to wake the other people who slept on the lake--

or drive us crazy.

I like the boats that carry people I love.

I like being helpless in the middle of the water,

too far away from shores 

for any task or responsibility or worry or bother

to touch me.

I like boats, because even though metal is more dense

than water, someone discovered how to make it float—

and sink.

This is how love floats, and sinks us so fast and hard

to the bottom with its gravity from the bombardment 

because it is not just a crush.

Boats.  Some I have loved.

Always.

This One is not Hers: 1989 Golden 240 Volvo Station Wagon

I see the car. I know it is not hers. I know, because she has been gone for years—at least gone to my world.

This car—it is the same color, the same make, maybe even the same year. The Volvo station wagon: the classic 240 that I helped her find and buy. Golden. Like my Volvo station wagon, only not midnight blue, as my then six-year-old son called it. Sturdy cars, both of them.

Today, the sight of the golden oldie is stunning. Simple old car. Did I tell you I know it is not hers? Did I tell you I know she is not here, at any of the places near the car? Not at the neighboring restaurant, not waiting on my door step, not anywhere near the house.

But even at a distance, I know it is not hers. Not just because I am sure that she has, after many years, graduated to something newer. Not because it has been half a decade since we thought it desirable to talk to each other. I look at the car, and know its nuances are hers. I know they are not the car's either.

I know this from far away, but I have to look. I have to look up and down the block for her familiar figure. I have to look in the window of the restaurant. I have to look at my front and back doorstep. I have to peer through the windshield at the place where her lean silhouette and dark hair ringlets would be... if it was her.

I do not quite press my nose to the windshield. I do not quite look at the window for the telling decal. I do not need to count the blemishes and notice that they are all in the wrong places—but I almost execute all of these things, rituals, even though it is not her.

My heart sighs with relieve and longing and curiosity because it knows it is safe.

Minutes later, two young men come out of the restaurant. They get in the car: Post last-day-of-college-class treat. I see them get in and notice that it is not my seat, nor her seat that is taken by either of them. They drive away. More relief. Now I can try, fruitlessly, to forget—until next time.

Emotional Rescue

I know my father is a very emotional man. It has taken a long time to lean this, and I am still learning it. I've learned this through time, small gains in wisdom, the words of my mother and maybe from being a dad myself. His emotion shows. It shows large, but rarely on his sleeve.  You could say still waters run deep, but the river's current is swift.

There are times when you can't or don't want to show that emotion, let it direct your steps. No one knows this better than any Black man growing up and living in the United States. No one knows this better than a Black father who does not want his children infected even more deeply than the hurt of the racial politics of the sandbox. It's not easy. It is basic for survival. Sometimes, it just comes in handy.

Sometimes, it is nice to not seem so frightened when you are frightened. Sometimes, it makes sense to let everyone else think things are okay when they are not. Sometimes it makes sense to tell yourself and your body that things are okay when they are not.

One evening, at the dinner table, things were not okay. Mom was choking on a piece of meat. Panic. The four of us children sat in stunned, paralyzed terror—a tacit ohmygod, ohmygod, oh... Mom: well, she was choking.

Our hearts were racing, eyes wide, our forks still, no click or clank. Father calmly put down his utensils, got up and walked to the side of mother's chair. He helped her to rise from her chair, got behind her and performed a Heimlich maneuver.

Done, he calmly returned to his seat. So did mother. We all sat, quietly, not quite as if nothing happened, but in a quiet that filled the void of what would have been a collective hysteria.

Just as he had not jumped up like some rescuing hero, like so many men, waiting to see if the cameras where rolling or at least someone was going to identify him as the savior, he did not wait for or want any fawning gratitude or a honey-you-saved-me-my-hero-man-so-superior. He did not treat her like a child. He did not milk the trauma. Is life lessons taught him that doing so was never a good thing.

I think what he would have wanted to say is, “Kids, make SURE you chew your food properly,” but after that event, he really didn't need to.

Maybe that evening, mom and dad shared some thoughts and feelings about the evening's event. I don't know. I am sure that father made sure that it was more about digestion than “saving.” I am sure that both of them were more concerned about the four of us kids. For us kids, it was another of those false lessons that perpetuated illusions of immortality and that even the most scary things can be taken care of by mom and dad.

I know that night was not the only time in his life that my father had to double check his emotions, capturing the energy from the dire urgency while, at the same time, not letting the wildness of that energy derail the solution. He has had to do that with other emotions, as well, for the tears of sorrow and joy, holding his tongue and fists against people who have deserved more than just a tongue lashing or more than a simple slap upside the head.

He does not yell. He does not hit. He will if he has to, on the rare life occasion when such things are truly necessary. (He grew up in a neighborhood where you had to know how to fight.) I am wondering how well I have learned any of those lessons. Sometimes those lessons show more than my emotions. Once in a while, the lesson is lost, and my emotions get the better of me—but not too many people see this. People wonder why I seem so solemn.

So, as I write this, I feel like maybe I have told you more than my family wants you to know. But it is easier today to write this than to write of the events of the past two days that, for some reason, reminded me of this story, about love, anger, fear, how love defeats fear and anger, and of the limitations that our mortal selves put on the infinite capacity of love.

Maybe I can tell today's story soon. Maybe after I have lived a little more of it—or maybe today's story is short enough so that it will achieve the emotional space for telling, a space where I will not jump up in hysteria, begging for attention, a righteous hero.

The only thing I know that fits in today's string of words is that some levels of anger require a lot of love to muster, and hopefully some wisdom lets the love win.

Keep listening. When I learn today's lesson (or think I have), I'll let you know.

Chicken Along the Mason-Dixon Line

I had a deja vu moment this morning as I bit into a piece of chicken that was left over from last night's dinner.

The bite of chicken was a memory flash as brilliant as the memories invoked by our sense of smell. It was a memory from childhood and like so many, it was fond, but the realities behind it are less pleasant.

At first taste, I was brought back to a two-lane highway, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line on a very hot summer day when all of us, the whole family of six, were glad to be out of the confined quarters of the station wagon, even to be baked by the sun at the picnic table of a wayside rest.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time in my son's fourth grade class. One day, I pulled read-out-loud-to-the-class duty. The book was The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963 (Bantam, Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1995) by Christopher Paul Curtis. I read the scene of the Watsons' trip south to visit grandparents. As I read, I felt as if I were reading the story of the trips that our family took most summers of my childhood to New Orleans.

The Watsons took cold fried chicken with them. They ate out of their cooler. Not in restaurants.

Most African Americans of a certain age whose families traveled know this drill. Cold fried chicken, because it will keep for the long haul. It is cheaper than most other things that could be packed and much cheaper than buying meals on the road. On a hot summer day, with a can of soda to chase it down, it is delightful passing the lips. We didn't know—or care that other people were stopping into a local diner to be served their bite to eat.

As kids, we didn't really know that those road-side diners existed because my father was not going to bring his family into one, especially one south the the Mason-Dixon.

When we, or most other African American families, traveled, we packed provisions because there was no guarantee that we would be welcome in any establishment; that basket of chicken was vital. So were the wayside rests where we knew we could stop. Regardless of whether other people were happy we were there, they had little authority to tell us to leave.

Even today—especially today, people take for granted public accommodations. (Certain political ideologies are not keep on paying for them, those most associated with dispositions that will have little trouble being welcome at every place to eat.) Some of us know that there are just places we cannot go, are not allowed or where we must at least endure the hot glares on the backs of our necks in order to do things as simple as use a restroom or eat at a restaurant. There are places in this country that are tacitly declared off limits. Those places are closer and far more numerous than most of us, even I, are willing to admit.

Our trips to New Orleans were to visit grandma and grandpa. On most of our trips to the south, we stopped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It was close to the midway on the two-day trip to the Mississippi delta. There was a more important reason for stopping there for the night. Past this point, we were entering the American South, where we could not be sure which establishments would “have a vacancy” for US. Would mother and father be able to find a place that would welcome our patronage?

We were kids. We looked forward to the hotel stay. We looked forward to Cape Girardeau, where we knew we would get our treat, a motel stay almost as wonderful as the two or three weeks we would spend at grandma and grandpa's. The stories of danger and trepidation that lie just off the thoroughfare were just stories that were tucked neatly in a package of lore that we should not forget, cautionary tales to be heeded by little black children, but that we should not fret about, because we were just children and we were on vacation to grandma and grandpa's.

Meanwhile, my father worried, only slightly as a wise and brave protector. My mother worried, because that is the job of mothers. We set worry aside, opened the cooler and pulled out the cold fried chicken and maybe potato salad. We jumped from bed to bed until mother said, “You kids are driving me crazy,” and “Get in the tub,” and wondered when the motel staff would bring the folding bed for the younger siblings.

Soon, we would be in New Orleans. We would eat well and mostly forget how wonderful the cold chicken seemed. We would have a mountain of red soda (or cold drink, as they called it) that grandma tried to make as big as her of love that could more than fill the Gulf of Mexico. We ran around in the sweltering heat of the city, again only slightly aware of the dangers that lurked in the craziness of that place and which mother and father tucked away in their own childhood memories.

The best Valentine's story (re: comments)

There is one other important Valentine memory that I left out in "Hoping for a Letter from St. Valentine."  It is amazing what becoming hardened to social realities will do to one's memory.

One year, in high school, the student council was selling roses that people could buy for another student to express their feelings with either a white, pink or red flower.

My dear sister Charlotte, who knew that neither of us were going to get a rose from anyone, bought one for me. I think it was $2--that's in 1979 dollars. For her, that meant one day without hot lunch. It was so powerfully dear. It speaks to the connection we have that shows why she is still my best friend.

Of course, I was too big of a kid (boy) to cry--and we had enough other stuff to cry about in those days, hidden tears, but it strikes me with that emotion, today.

Thanks Barbara and Valerie P. for sharing your Valentine's stories and reminding me.

Also, here is some Valentine's Day trivia via MythBusters and thanks to Esther:

If you want to profess your undying love to your sweetheart, it's best to stick to red roses, lest she be versed in the language of flowers. Yellow roses signify friendship, dark pink roses express gratitude, and white roses are a sign of purity and reverence -- not necessarily appropriate sentiments for Valentine's Day.

There were several St. Valentines, all of which might claim influence on today's holiday. One was a priest in Rome, the second a bishop of Interamna (modern Terni, in Italy), and the third was in Africa. Little is known about any of these men. While it is possible that both of the Italian saints are meant to honored on Feb. 14, it is unclear which one, if any, inspired the romantic flavor of Saint Valentine's Day.

There are many legends about Saint Valentine -- secretly marrying young lovers, sending love notes -- but none of them can be substantiated. There were at least three different saints named Valentine, and very little is known about any of them. The church established a feast day for St. Valentine on Feb. 14 in order to "Christianize" Lupercalia, a pagan fertility festival celebrated by the ancient Romans on Feb. 15, during which men and women were paired off through a lottery. Although these pairings often led to marriage, the church did not approve and put a stop to it, but the association of the holiday with love and mating stuck.

It was also once commonly believed that Feb. 14 marked the beginning of the mating season for birds, adding to the romance of the date.