Salt on her Wounds

Everything his father didn’t tell him has blood on it

some of it his father's blood

some of it the blood of the ones his father

struck, and enough blood to want to hide it

enough blood to cover his wounds

not enough to erase ours

He leans into my bubble—whispers,

“You are my friend, right?”

he asks me to look at his hands

a rare moment of idleness

not an honest question,

“what do you see?”

With what he hopes we do not see

he slaps her backside like brand on cattle

iron left too long on flesh

with no simple answer to this

simple action, questions

sufficiently concealed under our fear

to answer, leaving him as

he peers at the stains

under his nails, transparent but opaque eyes

he, too, is afraid

to answer—or ask

of his too busy hands

whose redness drapes

the seam around her designer pockets

because she, too is afraid

to ask, answer... or feel

the blood on his hands and the salt

on her tail.

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.

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Pulling Kisses Redux: When the Words Run Out

Words tied up in secrets

Once small, innocent lies

They are muzzled

Under the penalty of false death

She asks me, “What happens to words

When all the trees have a million leaves

All the blades of grass are long and soft

All the bird’s nests are filled with hungry mouths

And song?”

We hide in plain sight in the grass

Watch the leaves rustle in the breeze

And filter the sunlit sky,

Listening to the birdsong.

Who are you

Next to me? Basking

Together in silent wonder

We think to each other, will we kiss?

Because that is the secret

We carry in our mind

Wordless poison, song of delight

It is what happens

When the words run out.

You've Got (a little) Mail: A Lesson for a Wordless Day

I wish I had something to say to you today. Words of joy, sorrow, anger, love, surprise wonder, or just anything that would make me seem smart, wise or funny. Today, and maybe everyday, I have no sense of humor. I would like to make you laugh, but “I don't know funny from nothin'.” And I doubt that anything you say, today will make me laugh.

I have no words today because I think I have used them up—at least for the moment, or at least the energy that gets them from the deep wells of my subconscious or the shallow wells that quickly evaporate. Tired of talking. Tired of keeping secrets. Tired of talking around the secrets, walking day to day with them on my back. Oh, maybe I do have words. I will carry them by myself.

Maybe I can leave you with a story that a friend shared with me some time ago, but I am just beginning to understand it in a way that is critical to my life. It might mean nothing to you right now. It may never mean anything to you, and that's okay. Still, it was planted as a seed, and its spouts have pierced the cracks in the pavement. And, in important ways, it goes with last week's post, “Love Lessons,”one about which several of you have, publicly or privately, have shared a small bit of the wisdom that helps give it meaning or perspective.

I am not a big advocate of the self-help genre, but the story shared by my friend comes from Melodis Beattie—I think. (I think she—or her followers, have a pretty good sense of humor. When I worked at the Hungry Mind Bookstore, she was scheduled to do a reading. She didn't show. Our readings coordinator was pretty worried, anxious. Phone calls where made, trying to get someone from publicity at her publisher or a publicist. The publisher made a mistake with her busy schedule. But we has a pretty big crowd waiting to see her. Laura, the readings coordinator, still quite nervous had to deliver the news that Melody was not coming. People were not upset. I think they came to see each other as much as they did the author. They kept coming up to her, saying the same phrase: “Don't own this.” It made her laugh.)

What I offer is a paraphrase and adaption, and twice removed from it's original. I would like to take credit for this or even give my friend credit for it, but it is a simple story that fits right now. The story goes like this:

A woman moves into a new house, but mail for someone else, likely the previous owner, comes. One letter. She marks it and gives it back to the letter carrier, saying they don't live here. That should take care of it.

The next day, more pieces of mail come, and she tells the carrier again. Okay.

The day after that, more pieces come. She thinks it's time to go down to the post office, with all the mail and says, “This person does not live here. You can stop delivering the mail for them.”

They acknowledge the mistake. She gets an assurance from them. Problem solved.

The next day, a ton of mail comes. There's even more mail for the person and it is choking out the space for the woman's mail. She writes a letter to the post office. And calls them. They promise her that they will take care of the problem. That it will be taken care of in the next day or two. But the mail keeps coming. It's not just filling her mail box and leaving no space for her mail, but it is taking up space in her house. 

And she continues to complain, and the post office gets tired of hearing from her, that her complaints are a problem—THAT SHE IS THE problem, and they say, again, that they have heard her and that her complaints are unnecessary.

But they acknowledged that there's a problem. But they said they were going to change it. Why do we hang on to those words?

And maybe that is why I have so few words for today. And maybe there is the joy, sorrow, anger, love, surprise wonder, or humor somewhere in here. I will laugh about it tomorrow. 

Like some of our relationships, the ones we choose, are born into, or are of happenstance or circumstance—the house is precious and we can't just let it go, but at some point, too much mail or poison has been left in it to make it work as a house and it just has to be let go. So we can live.

With love, see you next week.  And maybe by then, I will have learned this lesson a little better.

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.