What can we tolerate?

Last Wednesday, at about four in the afternoon, my daughter sent this text message to me at work. "Oh lord mom, school today was just horrible. But was fine social wise. Can I go out friday night?"

Me: "Oh baby, why was it horrible?"

My girl: "Because school just sucks. It requires you to tolerate not sleeping and then working and I cannot tolerate that."

She has been sorely sleep deprived. The tenth graders have just been slammed with work this year. They weren't kidding last year when they said it would get hard. But what makes my breath catch is the worry that my daughter is starting not to like school, which until now has been a source of fun and mastery for her.

Then I looked at the first message again. "Social wise was fine." There's hope for high school yet.

What does personal integrity dictate?

To my friends in blogworld who are artists or anyone who may have an informed opinion on this:

Is it acceptable to make a drawing that fairly closely resembles a portion of someone else's original photo, and then display that artwork? Does one have to get permission from the photographer before using for one's own purposes (which happen to be in no way monetary) the drawing inspired by the photo, or does the art belong to the maker, no matter the source? Is it enough to credit the source of inspiration? What does personal integrity dictate? And if there is a legal answer to this, what might that be?

Scorched Earth 2

So last week Wednesday, 18 people at my job were given "The Talk" and an innocuous envelope that held their severance package. As it turns out, I am not among them. But I am devastated by some of the people who were, including the woman I work most closely with, my "work spouse" of sorts. I don't really understand them letting her go. She brings talents to the table that no one else has, a head for coverlines, a way of packaging stories, and an editing style that often irritates writers for its pickiness, but that inevitably makes you think of dimensions you'd overlooked, questions you'd neglected to nail down, and always makes the piece stronger.

I counted on her as a human being, too, her calm equanimity, her quick but never cruel wit, her refusal to give in to the free-floating fear and paranoia that is a constant in my workplace. I am still in shock and denial that she's leaving. We shared the same job title and backed each other up seamlessly. Which makes me also ponder the fact that they must have put us side by side and said, Okay, which one? I wonder if they chose her because I waived my medical insurance coverage with the company, going with my husband's instead. I wonder if it came down to the fact that I cost the company less.

I feel like we're all on a conveyor belt, except none of us knows how close we are at any given point to toppling off the end of it. We can't see what's ahead, we only know that conveyor belt just keeps on rolling, and we could get to the end at any time. There are so few of us left now, and so much work to get done. I'm not afraid of working hard and I love the nature of the work I do. But the losses we've sustained could break your heart.

Sweet Dreams

I've been looking through old pictures recently, browsing through boxes and reacquainting myself with images stored on multiple CDs. The emotions these photos kick up for me are the subject of another post, another day. But I wanted to share a photo I found last night, just because it made me stop and stare at it for a long, long time.

I snapped this photo in the fall of 2000, before we moved from our old apartment. Our son had fallen asleep in our bed, and my husband was lifting him up to take him to his own bed. I saw this expression of pure and reverent love on my husband's face, and wanted to preserve it so our son, then 8 years old, could share the moment, even though he was asleep when it happened.

Here we are again

The word is that there will be layoffs at my job this week. Which means everyone is walking about with breath sucked in, uneasy questions in the silences between their words. Am I valued here? If I am let go, how will I make do? What about the people who depend on me?

A year ago, when we were last at this pass, my son used to tell me goodbye in the mornings with a line from the reality TV show Survivor (our family has watched since season one). He'd say, "Don't get voted off today, Mom." We'd laugh about it, and somehow it would make me less anxious. As he might say, God has our back.

The Big One

Happy birthday to the love of my life on the big five-oh. For the past 26 years, ever since making his acquaintance in this life, I have loved this man with my whole heart. Truly, I think I loved him before this life; meeting him was like a warm rush of recognition. I wish him everything good on this day and all days. He is worthy of that and more.

That's us the year we met, on our way to the beach in Antigua. Oh yes, he can be sublimely silly, too.

Where She Goes From Here

I'm beginning to think that most of the people I know are born in October. I find myself saying Happy Birthday to someone all month long. Today is my cousin's birthday, the one who lives in the prison of her addictions, and lately, the deepening fear of what her life will be like when her 91-year-old mother dies and she no longer has a place to live rent- and responsibility-free. I see the panic in her eyes these days. Most of the time, I ache for her, when she isn't causing an ugly commotion in the house, that is. So my prayer for her, on this her 46th birthday, is that this will be the year she climbs out of the suffocating pit of fear and self-loathing and contempt that fuels her addiction. This will be the year she decides to give rehab another try. This will be the year she leaves behind the toxic man who has affixed himself to her life so that she can provide him with money and random store bought things, and food and most of all addictive substances, all paid for by her mother. This will be the year she wakes up to her own beauty and worth. This will be the year. I pray.

Beautiful Family

The official Obama family portrait by Annie Liebovitz.

Sometimes, I feel again the way I felt on November 5, 2008, that moment of exhilaration and wonder when I woke up and realized that it was not a dream, Barack Obama had indeed been voted the 44th President of the United States. Looking at this photograph, released by the White House today, I am remembering that feeling, and it makes me smile anew.

Click on the photograph. It's definitely worth viewing large.

Daddy and Me

With my dad at Blue Waters, Antigua, after Christmas morning service, 1983.

I find, in this age of digital exactness, I am falling in love with the grainy, imperfect images taken back in the day. This was made with a Kodak instant camera, before the company discontinued it. I remember this day well. It was the morning I introduced my parents after chruch to the mother of the new man I was seeing. None of us knew yet that we would one day be related through marriage and call one another family.

Counting Breaths

This day would have been my dad's 86th birthday. The photo here was taken six months before he died at age 72. The cancer had already spread to his bones; he could no longer walk, but was not yet bedridden. We all knew his time was near, so we gathered to take pictures. I wanted my children, then ages three and one, to have something to remember him by. Turns out they didn't need the pictures. My dad's impish humor and his adoration of his grandchildren remain vivid for them.

I called my mom this morning and wished Daddy happy birthday to her. How blessed we were, we said, to have shared our lives with this great and wonderful man. They had been married for 46 years when he died. In my dad's last days, I wanted to capture the breathtaking love between them. So I wrote the piece that follows. This story was published in a magazine and anthologized a book, and is copyrighted. But I can't plagiarize myself, right?

------

It is a slow, inexorable dance. The conclusion is sure, only the interval is still in question. My father is dying. My mother refuses to lose him. Daddy has fought the internal mutiny of cells for more than a decade, and he is tired now, tired of restraining the invisible march, tired of holding his breath as the doctor shares the newest results of tissue scans, tired of yielding, again and again, to the surgeon's well-meaning knife. And he's exhausted by the way his heart aches at the lines in my mother's face, the tender grooves beside her mouth that belie the determined smile she marshals each time a visitor enters the room.

The cancer is throughout my father's body. It has penetrated the bone, infiltrated skull, ribs, pelvis, toes, and robbed his legs of their ability to propel him forward. Daddy sits in a wheelchair, gaunt, sallow, his preternaturally black hair finally going to gray. His memory skips and falters, and sometimes, in the moment that he awakens, he even thinks he can rise from his bed and walk unaided to the bathroom to perform his morning rituals. But then he tries to move his legs, lying cramped and cold under the sheets, and they betray him. Tears sting his eyes. He averts his face so that my mother won't see. For several moments, he says nothing for fear that his helplessness will cause a ripple in his voice.

I stroke his hair. "To be struck down like this..." he whispers. I just keep stroking his hair.

I worry about my mother. She's talking, walking, moving fast, obsessively focused on caring for my father from morning till night. But sometimes, her stomach knits so severely she is forced to lie still. It is the only pause she permits herself. My father watches her flurry of motion with an intimate grasp of its meaning. He is holding on, I think, waiting for her to accept that he must move on. But my mother will not give in to what she sees as defeat. God, she points out, is in their corner: Daddy will walk again. He will rebuild the muscles in his wasted legs. He will allow God's healing Spirit to storm his body and repair his wounds. He will get, if not well, then better. He cannot give up. She cannot give up.

But lately, there has been so much pain. Flaring, unendurable pain in the joints of his limbs. My mother fumbles with the medicine bottle, her twisted, arthritic fingers fighting the childproof cap. She manages to extract a huge yellow pill. She lifts my father's head, places the painkiller on his tongue and holds the water to his lips. Then she sits at his bedside, counting his breaths, praying silently for the hour it takes for the medication to take effect, for her face to grow fuzzy in his sight as merciful sleep takes hold.

Much later, when he wakes, my mother is in the kitchen preparing a meal. It is her supreme purpose to coax food into my father. She scolds and cajoles him to take feasts as large as my six-foot-two, 240-pound husband regularly consumes. My father's small frame, bird-like appetite, and nausea from the chemotherapy drugs make my mother's task difficult. He complains that he is not hungry. He rebels by pushing the food around his plate, never lifting the fork to his lips. "I am not a child!" he objects finally. "You'd think I was torturing you!" she protests. Once, watching them, I begged them not to argue. They both turned to look at me. A playful light came into my father's eyes, and my mother laughed outright. "Why do you want to begrudge us our fun?" she said. I saw Daddy's hand reach under the table to caress Mommy's knee.

Daddy's only desire, in these months of failing health, is that my mother stay near. In the mornings, when my mother tries to push out of bed to get his 6 a.m. medication and a cup of hot chocolate, he holds on to her. It is far better therapy, he insists with a flash of his old mischief, for them to lie in bed and cuddle. He chuckles as he says it, but he means it fiercely. If my mother goes out, to the grocery store or to get her hair done, my father asks me several times each hour: "Where is Mommy? Isn't she back yet?"

They have been married 46 years. Although they do not say it, they realize that the cherished 50 year mark may not be achieved. My mother will not allow melancholy. She observes that she and Daddy courted for four years before they were married. "This is our 50th year together," she tells him on the morning of their anniversary. My father's mind cavorts in the rooms of memory. His breaths grow full, his chest lifts higher. Robust recollections fill his fragile frame. His groping hand finds my mother's arthritic one and, clasping it, he brings her fingers to his lips and closes his eyes. My father sighs deeply. My mother measures his breath.

Nothing moving but the rain

I miss my son. He doesn't call, text or email. Poof. He's just gone. I know he's busy with his life, which is rich and full and lively with new people and ideas and experiences. I have to remember that I never called my parents either when I was in college. I traveled out of state, even out of country and never bothered to mention it to them. I spent weekends in the homes of people they never knew. I went to performances and parties and street fairs and art shows, exploring new neighborhoods, crashing sometimes wherever I happened to be, nights I'm sure they thought I was safe in my dorm room bed. I was completely in and of the moment. Not reckless. But meeting life with arms wide open, heart laughing, face to the sky.

This self-absorption and immediacy of experience is natural and desired when one is in college. I know this, but I can't help it. I still miss my boy.

Nothing moving but the rain. I saw this phrase in a New York Times magazine story about anxious brains. It struck me as summing up everything. It captures the sadness I feel when nothing major is actually wrong, and yet there is a hole at center of me that isn't quite caused by anything, just anxious imaginings, as ephemeral as rain. Maybe missing my son is just the best reason I can come up with for the sadness I feel today. And this too will pass. Like rain.

Happy Birthday, Nana

Today would have been my mother-in-law's 75th birthday. Here she is in one of my favorite images. This photograph captures the love and protection and 53-year-long romance between her and my father-in-law. She was a strong, prayerful, vigorous and determined soul to the end; she never quit, never let life's punches sit her down, never stopped fighting for those she drew under the umbrella of her care. But I am most taken by the gentleness in her eyes in this picture and the steadiness and contentment in his. You can still see the girl and the boy who fell deeply in love.

My husband and his siblings have been blessed to call this generous and loving woman mother and my children to call her Nana. I miss her so much.

The Farm

From second through eighth grade, my daughter spent a few weeks each year on a farm owned by her elementary school. The idea was for city kids to spend time together in the country, starting when they were too young to have any entrenched prejudices. No matter what their cultural, racial, economic, gender or familial differences in the city, in the country, they would all be equally out of their element at first, and would work together to forge a community. And they did. What a magical time they had together. Some of my daughter's classmates appear in the photograph above, taken from the farmhouse kitchen window, and the one below, on the swing. I love every one of the children. They're all 15 or 16 and in different high schools now. Finding this photo makes me want to share a piece of writing my daughter did as an English assignment last year, about her class taking leave of the farm for the last time.

Our Last Night

Eighth grade was dwindling down, and school had become just a way to spend time with the seventeen people in my class, whom I had been with since I was four, and who were all about to scatter to different parts of the city, and one even beyond, to boarding school. Work was minimal and eventually shifted into none at all, and we spent most classes sitting in the heat waiting for one thing to happen: our last farm trip.

My middle school owns a farm. Our class first went there in second grade and stayed for three days. The next year we went twice, in the fall and the spring, and stayed for a week each time. And as we got older the number of our trips turned to three times a year, fall, winter, and spring. The farm was what defined our school. Everyone loved to be there, and we especially loved being there together.

When you first drive in, you see a vast space of just green grass, with taller, prickly bushes that come to your shoulder nearer to the road. The field dips down to a forest, and then a river if you go far enough, but no one really does. Right before it slopes down, there is a fire pit and a large rock with a cliff edge on the other side. Next to that is a gravelly basketball court. About fifteen paces from there is a compost pile, of all the fruits, vegetables, egg shells, anything food-related that can decompose. All the scraps are given to the pigs, including the bacon (which we always questioned). There are usually a few flat basketballs soaking in the smelly pile, but we still used them.

If you go further down the road you pass the chicken coop. When we were younger, we loved to go in there and name the chickens and call them our pets, even though they smelled horrible. Even further down the road you can see the farm house, the barn, the tire swing, the greenhouse, and the stream. The house is painted white and on the front, facing a large field, is a porch. In the fall, the caterpillars always seemed to end up there and we always had fun peering at them, poking them or screaming at each other that they were poisonous and we were going to die. Around the other side is the deck, a wooden platform built by some previous classes, where the greenhouse is. The greenhouse is not much, mostly a place to wash off the chicken eggs, and one of the best hiding spots when we played “sardines.”

The barn is the place that smells the worst. Even so, we all loved it. When you first walk in through the thin wooden doors you get to the cows. There are about nine stalls for cows, usually we have about seven. It was our job to clean those stalls during barn chores each morning, when we scooped all the poop into a wheelbarrow, sprinkled fresh sawdust on the floor, brushed the cows, swept in front of the stall and fed the cows. After that we had to milk one of the cows, usually a massive black one, a task I was semi-frightened of because on several occasions the cow had whipped me in the face with its rough-haired tail or almost stepped on me. We had a tradition that when we named a cow, it had to be dairy -related if it was a girl, or meat-related if it was a boy. We once named a cow Big Mac, and another Milky Way.

Past the cow area, you reach the pig pens that usually have huge, rambunctious pigs jumping at you, biting holes in your sweater. Then you get to the place where you dump all the waste from the stalls. After that area, you pass by the sheep, who are startled if you make the tiniest movement towards them. They leave poop all around the farm and their pen, which was amusing until we found out it was our job to scoop the six-inch deep layer caked on to the floor.

At the farm, the swing and the stream were two of our favorite places. The swing was where we always wanted to spend our time in the first few years. It was bolted to a thick wooden plank connected to a big tree in front of the house and sometimes held several of us at once.

The stream was where we played when it was warm. We would take off crusty barn boots, put on water shoes and jump in. We would splash each other and build a dam, making a small pool in the stream that could rise as high as our thighs. This vast farm was where we spent our childhood away from the city. We dreaded the final week, and the final day, which would bring our years of farm trips to an end.

On that last trip, when we finally reached the farm after the three-hour bus ride from my school, everyone only wanted to jump into the atmosphere and enjoy it as much as possible. Throughout the whole week, that was exactly what we did. We started to explore parts of the farm that we had never really gone to before, and said our final goodbyes to everything in our heads as we walked away, leaving the fields, streams and animals behind. Then came the last night.

Everyone had been preparing for this a few weeks ahead of time. It had been a tradition for every eighth grade to paint a mural, and we thought we had the coolest idea: an open notebook. One page had pictures of us, while the other side had the funny quotes from over the years, although more than half were left out as we realized after. It was also a tradition for the class to have a bonfire on the last night. Everyone wrote a letter to the whole class and read it at the bonfire, then burned something that represented your love for the school, the farm, your class or your departure from the farm into high school. I had been emotionally preparing myself for this moment for a really long time, and I still didn’t think I was ready.

As we gathered around on the last evening, the sky turned from a bright blue, to a navy blue and then a black night. I remember the stars shining bright, brighter than they would in New York City, ever. The air was so pure up there, and that night it was cool. The farm staff started the fire, a blazing orange catching on the logs and gradually growing larger consuming all the wood in the pile. For a few minutes we all kind of just sat around, soaking up the heat and watching the fire crackle. After that, one of the farm staff stood up and talked a little about our class. Then, one by one, everyone in our class got up, read their letter or said what they had to say, and threw their object into the fire.

I stood up and read my letter, my voice breaking. When I finished, most people were crying, even people I was not expecting to cry. I then took a blue cloth hat similar to the one I wore on my first few farm trips and tossed it into the fire. It landed around the edges, almost hesitant to be left behind. I knew it was time to let go though. I spent the rest of the bonfire on the damp grass, clutching my knees, crying and saying goodbye. At a certain point I stopped crying, and so did everyone. We stood around the fire, while another teacher told us how special we were. We knew it. We knew that there would not be many other classes like us to pass through the school, none to have a bond this tight and to have such an influence on our teachers.

That night we slept in the area above the cows, the hay jump. We tried to pull an all-nighter, but none of us really did. It was absolutely freezing in the barn. The few of us who were actually awake huddled together, lying across one another’s lap. That was how I drifted into sleep. Seventeen of us huddled in our sleeping bags lightly snoring, on a bright blue tarp, the uneven wood floor digging into our backs, allergies rising from the hay. That was our last night. That was our goodbye.

The author of this reflection, at age 5, sitting on a rock bridge over the stream, in a photo taken on her very first visit to the farm.

A Man of Peace

I woke this morning to the little red light flashing on my BlackBerry. I picked it up and there was the announcement: The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 had been awarded to President Barack Obama. Excited and surprised, I told my husband, whose wry response was: "Man, a lot of people are going to be pissed." Yes, they are. But not me. I totally get it. Here's the explanation of the committee:

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

October Boys

We recently found these photos of my son and my husband, taken by a photographer friend who may not want to be named given how poorly these negatives were stored. (Sorry O!) Our boy was about eight months old when he and his dad participated in a shoot for a father's day photo essay in a local paper. Even though the color is faded and speckled, you can still see the loving interaction in these frames. I call the pictures "October boys" because both my men (and my dad, actually; and come to think of it, our photographer friend, too) were born in October.

I Hate Laundry

I hate laundry out of all proportion to the fact of it. All it is, is sorting dirty clothes, putting them in the washer, then the dryer, taking them out, folding them, putting them away. And since this is New York City and we live in an apartment building, it also means several trips up and down in the elevator to and from the laundry room. Simple enough. And yet, I feel a mountain of pent-up resentment when I'm doing laundry. Actually, what I'm really feeling is pent-up anxiety, which I interpret as resentment at the task, because, really, why should one feel anxious about doing laundry? It's not logical. I think it is actually dangerous to my family relationships. I used to hire someone to do it, but recently stopped that to save money. But you know, this might be money that is in the same category as seeing a shrink when you're seriously unbalanced. Laundry seriously unbalances me. As I said, it's not logical. It's not that my family doesn't help. They just don't do it on my schedule. They don't fold and put it away right away. It sits out on chairs and beds for awhile, challenging my sense or order, my sanity, even when neatly folded. On the other hand, if I hire someone to do it, they come in, wash, fold, iron and put away all within a few hours, and I don't have to follow up for days after to make sure everything is completed. I think my usually managed OCD is busting out of the closet on this one.

Love

Eighteen years ago today at 7.01 p.m. my son was born and our lives were deepened by love.

Afasari, Gone

Afasari lived two buildings away from ours. He used to play in the courtyard with my son and the other children in our complex. He was older than my son by 3 years, but my son was tall and Afasari was a scrawny kid, so it never really dawned that they were different ages. He was a wild child, the one always careening around the courtyard on a borrowed bike or scooter, doing wheelies and other stunts, never wearing a helmet. He was East Indian, with burnished amber skin and an unruly thatch of shiny black hair. He had two sisters who never seemed to come outside. But Afasari was always in the courtyard, sitting alone on the benches or bouncing his basketball on the asphalt. He drew the other kids out of their homes because there was always someone out there with whom to get the party started.

My most vivid memory of Afasari is not one that makes me happy to recall. My son's friend Eugene was visiting us on a playdate. He and my son were 9. Afasari was 12. The three of them were downstairs in the courtyard playing, and Afasari was being very mean to Eugene, denying him the ball, calling him names, trying to exclude him. I think he resented him as an outsider. Finally, my son had had enough of it and suggested he and Eugene go upstairs to our apartment. When they came in, I looked at the boys crestfallen expressions and asked what was wrong. They told me Afasari had been making fun of Eugene. I marched the two boys back downstairs to the courtyard, where Afasari was still bouncing the basketball. He was alone now. I went over to Afasari and told him he needed to apologize to Eugene. Stunned and chastened, he did. He was really all bravado and fake toughness and not at all beyond deferring to a mother figure. The three boys decided to resume their game.

Then, the summer he was 13, Afasari announced that he was going away. His said his mom was sending him to live with his aunt in New Jersey. His mom was a single mother who worked long hours, and she didn't like that he was alone so much. He wasn't happy about moving, but what could he do, he shrugged. That was the last I heard of him. Until this weekend.

In fact, Afasari had moved back home in his late teens. I never ran into him in the neighborhood, so I didn't know. Maybe I wouldn't have recognized him. He had grown extremely tall and was very thin, with a mustache. I probably would not have realized it was him.

Sadly, on Sunday afternoon at about 3:30 pm, right as my mom and I were getting money from the bank ATM around the corner, just after we put our son on the bus back to college, Afasari climbed to the roof of one of the 21-storey buildings in our complex and jumped.

Many people saw. My friend who lives in the building he jumped from, was in the laundry room and heard a loud thud. Loud enough to make her run outside. There she found one of her neighbors, a tiny, elderly woman, shaking and screaming, "He just jumped! He just jumped!" My friend ran to her neighbor and put her arms around her, but was careful not to look where she was pointing. Already the security guards were running to Afasari, but it was too late.

Later, I heard that he had been battling depression for years. I felt so sad that I had never known that, and that I had never seen behind the scrappy wild child to the boy who must already have been hurting inside. I wondered if that day when he was being mean to Eugene he was really wrestling with his own bad feelings, and my towering over him and insisting he apologize was just one more moment when he felt dominated, buffeted by life. I wonder if there was another way I could have handled it, or if I should even have inserted myself at all.

I don't know that anything I did could have changed anything, but I'm so sorry that I never even knew to try.

Playing with Sevita

The president and his niece Sevita during the family's Martha's Vineyard vacation last summer. Babies and children love this man. Look at the trust and delight in little Sevita's pose. (Photographed by Pete Souza on August 25, 2009)

"In the city. Be home soon."

My son arrived at around eleven o'clock on Friday night to spend the weekend with us. He took the bus down from his college in upstate New York, along with two friends both of whom live in Brooklyn. This is a picture someone took of them waiting for the bus (my boy is the one in the purple hoodie with his iPhone fixed in his hands).

He and I had an argument of sorts before he arrived. Earlier, I'd called to find out what time his bus was getting in. My husband and I had a dinner engagement and I was trying to figure out how long I could stay as I wanted to be there when my son got home (you get all the best stories when your kid has just walked in the door). He sounded extremely harried the first time I called. "Mom, I can't talk now! Later." Click.

I took several deep breaths and waited till he was supposed to be on the bus and called again. He sounded just as tightly wound. "Mom, stop asking when we'll get there! We just got on the bus. We missed the first one. Go to dinner. I have a key!"

"Are you okay?"

"No."

"What's wrong?"

"I'll tell you when I get there."

Anyone who knows me knows my mind immediately raced to a million worst case scenarios, which of course meant I had to know what was wrong right then so I could start fixing it.

"Tell me what's wrong," I insisted. "You're on a bus, you're a captive audience, tell me now."

"Mom, stop. When I get there." Click.

I knew he wanted me to think the bus had entered some tunnel and we got cut off. But I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had hung up on me. For the second time. I was furious. I tapped out an text message with all the speed my fury imparted.

"That is the second time you hung up on me. That is just rude. Don't you flipping hang up on me again."

A moment later, my phone dinged. His message: "Not in the mood. Need to stop pushing to find out wats wrg. Don't relli feel like coming home anymore."

I was crushed.

And I felt manipulated, angry, rejected. We often seem to rub each other wrong, my son and I. We are so temperamentally similar yet so far apart sometimes. He is impatient with me, and maybe he feels that I am ... too smothering? too anxious? too insistent? ... with him. In that painful moment, when all I knew was that my son no longer wanted to come home, I was keenly aware of how very patient with me my other child is, how kind she manages to be to her mother. And how difficult it must be.

Tears stinging my eyes, I tried to compose a text that would not escalate the situation.

"I'll stop pushing. I was mad and hurt. We're all looking forward to seeing you. Sorry that you seem to be upset about something. Your family is here for you even if you don't feel like talking. See you later. Love."

I made myself not fill the hours of silence that followed with another text (the bus ride from his college takes five hours). I showed our exchange of text messages to my husband when he got home and he just shook his head ruefully, veteran that he is of many past dust-ups between his wife and son.

My husband and I made ourselves pretty and went out to dinner as planned. We had a lovely time. We were on the rooftop of one of our friends' apartments, dining by candlelight, the towns of New Jersey sparkling across the Hudson River and a clear night sky overhead. One friend's college freshman son had come home for Rosh HaShanah the weekend before, and she expressed how wonderful it was to see him, how well he was doing, how reassured she was, and I was truly thrilled for her but also quietly sad about the less than auspicious beginning of our own first visit home from our college freshman son.

The chilly night eventually drove us indoors, and we soon took our leave. Walking to Broadway with my husband to catch a cab home, I heard my phone beep, indicating messages were waiting. In the taxi, I checked them and there was this from my son:

"About 2 hours away. Sry about earlier. Just a bad day and wanted to sleep. Looking forward to coming home."

And later, this: "In the city. Be home soon."

I started not to reply, but then texted, "Can't wait, son."

By the time he walked through the door, we had both forgiven each other. I knew because he greeted me first, enveloping me in a long-armed hug and holding on for long enough to communicate his apology. I held him back, communicating mine.

Then he greeted his dad, who clasped his head and shoulders in a loving man hug. After that he hugged and twirled his sister in the air and hugged his cousin, the recent college grad who's been living with us for a month now. Then he noticed the new couches. "I like 'em," he said, "but how do they sleep?" At which point he dived onto the loveseat and curled up in his usual position, head on the chair's rolled arm, knees sharply bent, and pronounced, "Really comfortable!"

He regaled us all with stories as we all gazed at him with our various expressions of adoration. My daughter sat crossed legged on the kitchen counter and just looked at him. My husband joked that he was happy to have a little company in the testosterone department, he'd been living in a "chicktopia." I reminded him how close that word was to "utopia" and we all laughed. I noted that my boy had, in six short weeks, turned into a man. A little thicker and more defined in the arms, broader in the shoulders, about an inch taller, almost level with his dad at six-foot-two. His jaw seemed more chiseled, the hair on his chin no longer just a scraggly shadow but a real clipped, neat little beard. And he seemed happy, confident and in charge of himself. A man.

As for the reason he'd been so cranky on the bus: He and his friends had missed their ride (he was racing to catch it when he hung up on me the first time) and had to walk to the bus terminal, and as a result missed the first bus and had to take the later one, then he'd been caged in behind a woman who insisted on reclining her seat practically into his lap, and she kept pushing it back, refusing to accept that his knees weren't going anywhere. He had been rushed and frustrated and fighting to keep his cool, and then I called and started pressing him. Nothing more than that. Certainly not the dire scenarios that had immediately leaped into my head, which I won't go into here, so ridiculous they were.

After we all visited for a while, some of us trooped across the courtyard to my mom's apartment building so my son could say goodnight to his grandma, who'd been waiting up for him. Then at midnight, he went out to meet up with two friends, and I went to sleep. I slept through the night, too. I didn't wake once to wonder if my boy was safe out there in the city, which stunned my husband. (I'm growing up.) And in the morning, I padded out to the kitchen to make my coffee, and there he was curled on the couch, a blanket over him, asleep in the spot he has been for so many nights over the past few years, in that very same pose.

I rubbed his head and kissed his forehead and felt so much love for him fill my chest. But I didn't wake him. I let him sleep, content just to know he was home.

Containment

My son is coming home for a visit from college this weekend. I'm so excited to see him I could practically levitate. But of course, I will contain myself. I will act merely casually happy so as not to suffocate him. A bunch of his friends at different colleges are coming into the city this weekend, too, so I'm sure this trip home is about them, not us. Nevertheless, we will find a moment to sing him happy birthday over cake and candles, as he will be 18 one week from this Sunday.

You know, when your kid goes off to college, you go into a kind of mourning. It almost like the phantom ache from a missing limb. You just hope and pray he makes smart choices, is kind to his friends, is purposeful about his studies and enjoys his life. But other than sending money, there's hardly anything more you can do.

My husband and I are also having dinner under the stars (as in, on the rooftop of our friends' apartment building) on Friday night with a bunch of friends. Our progeny are all in high school or college, pursuing their own lives with increasing degrees of independence, and we are feeling a loss of community. You can tell because when any one of us issues an invitation to get together, the rest of us happily accept.

I think we're all in transition, glimpsing the empty nest looming in our future and the need to reinvent our calendars. And we understand what this moment feels like for one another better than anyone.

Leaps, Cartwheels and Dreams

Today, our new living room furniture was delivered, a sofabed, a loveseat and an armchair to replace the broken down, torn, cracked and faded leather furniture that had lived in our house for going on ten years. I confess the battered pieces embarassed me when my children and my nieces brought friends home, even though it was those same said children who had brought the furniture to its sad condition.

Picture my son leaping onto the sofa from one side, one foot landing on the arm for an even better launch and landing. Now multiply that by hundreds of leaps in the course of a boy growing to young manhood, add somersaults and cartwheels from my daughter, always finding a sure landing on that furniture.

And of course, there's the loveseat that has been my son's preferred place to sleep throughout his high school years.

Yesterday, three men from our church came and took the old furniture away. Before they arrived, I was awash in sudden sentimentality, despite my plotting to replace those pieces for years now. A Labor Day sale finally did the trick, that and the thought of my son or my niece possibly bringing new friends home from college for Thanksgiving. Not that my children have ever cared about that broken furniture. I feel so shallow sometimes that it bothered me so much. But now, the leather loveseat which holds the invisible imprint of my son's dreams is gone, and in its place is an expresso-colored microfibre number that I hope he'll find as comfortable.

So, nothing is ever simple for me. I love the shapes of these three new pieces, but now I am wondering if I should have got the olive color instead of the expresso. I was thinking, of course, that the expresso would not show dirt, but perhaps I am in denial about the fact that my children are no longer in a phase of life when that matters. They are practically grown. Should I have gone with my first instinct in color? Then again, that would have made my living room furniture the exact same color as my mother's. Nah, expresso it is.

Top photo: My daughter when she was 9, executing one of her perfect cartwheels onto the leather couch in better days.

Second photo: My daughter, two days ago. Old habits die hard!

Everybody Hurts

Sometimes, I want to blog about all the racial antagonism going on around us, poisoning the hearts and minds of wide swaths of the nation, leading us down a very frightening path. Most of the time, I just get too depressed by it all, and settle for reading opinions and prognostications by other people instead.

Consider South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson yelling "You lie!" during President Barack Obama's health care speech last Wednesday evening. I mean, seriously. Could you show a little decorum? Obama was so passionate and on point in that speech, and all I could think was, he doesn't need a health care plan. He and his family have all the health care they will ever need. He's not doing this for himself. He's doing this for us. He could just bide his time, take the path of least resistance, keep himself safe. But he believes in this. And the idiots in Joe Wilson's camp, who show up at the town halls about health care packing pistols and parading signs that show Barack with a Hitler mustache, or with a bone through his nose, or painted like the Joker, they are the ones, ironically, who will benefit the most from reform.

But they'd rather bleed than accept the best intentions of our president, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he's Black. This is a sentiment that the Republican leaders have zeroed in on; this is the stage on which they are plotting their political resurgence. Dangerous. And sad.

Then there are the 10,000 people who descended on the Capitol this weekend, intent on opposing anything the president might have on his agenda. Glenn Beck and the 9/12 movement, whose members hoisted signs that carried such murderous slogans as, "Barack, we didn't bring our guns. THIS time." Ugh.

And there's the equally depressing view from the other side: Serena Williams losing it at the end of her match this weekend, when the line judge made a bogus call. Her foot was not on the line. But she lost her cool, really, really lost it, dropping the f-word and threatening the shove the tennis ball down the line judge's throat. Serena should know better. She should know that when John McEnroe exhibits that kind of behavior, he's just being John, a little boy stamping his feet, as in "Oh, isn't that John McEnroe just too much." But when Serena behaves that way, she's an angry, scary Black woman. I make no excuses for Serena. Yes, she was robbed. But this is America, and after she was robbed, she helped them bury her.

All the same, I did note that prior to that ugly episode, it seemed that almost the entire audience at U.S. Open was rooting for the (White) Belgian over the (Black) American. What's up with that? (Rhetorical question.)

Of course, Kanye West's antics at the Video Music Awards last night didn't do anyone any favors, not when he snatched that mike out of Taylor Swift's hands to opine that Beyonce's video "Single Ladies" should have won. And even if it had been the best video of all time as Kanye seemed to believe, fact was Taylor had won the category for "You Belong With Me" and was in the middle of her acceptance speech. Could Kanye have been any more self-aggrandizing and exhibited any less grace? Epic fail, Kanye. Everybody loses.

Update: Kanye fell emotionally silent on Jay Leno last night when asked what his late mother would have said about his VMA performance. I liked that he knew his mom would have expected better.

Because I like the light and love the girl

A Child Looks Back at 9/11

My daughter had just started second grade on September 11, 2001. She was 7 years old. Five years later, in seventh grade, when she was 12, as part of a class autobiography project, she wrote a chapter about her recollection of that day. To mark the eighth anniversary of the tragedy, I am copying that chapter here. I wish I could give my daughter all the credit she is due as I think this is a remarkable piece of writing, and of experience reexamined. But I have pledged not to name my children in this blog, so here is her memoir, uncredited.

Remembering 9/11

My friends and I had the feeling that we were on top of the world. Partly because we thought we were so mature and partly because the weather was so perfect. It was our second day in the second grade. Perfect temperature, perfect sky: bright blue and not a cloud in sight. Everything was in a happy state. It stayed that way till the warm afternoon or maybe just before lunch, but either way, outside the window you could see the sun high in the sky, proud of all the light and warmth it was producing. We were reading a book during story time and either the lower school director or the student teacher at the time called Jay, our second grade teacher, to the doorway and whispered some piece of information with a look of dismay on her face. We were completely oblivious to the conversing teachers; we just saw it as a time to chat with one another until the class resumed.

Then Jay came back, with a thoughtful look on his face, only, this was a thoughtful expression that held some dread. One by one the class seemed to settle down, sensing something, worried about what had just happened. Jay spoke in slow motion, word by word: “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.” A panicked look spread across some of the faces, those who knew what the World Trade Center was. I asked my friend Akene what had happened. He explained that the World Trade Center was the two Twin Towers. I felt destroyed. I had seen the Twin Towers in the distance my whole life. I had drawn pictures of them from the roof of Akene’s apartment two years before when Toni-Leigh, our kindergarten teacher, took us to visit the farmer’s market and we had lunch at his house nearby. It was practically impossible, those two secure structures had to remain in the sky forever, they were glued to the sky. Without them, the sky would be lonesome, even with hundreds of other skyscrapers. And besides all that, my dream had vanished. All I wanted was to be able to visit the towers, see what was actually inside, and experience the whole thing. Now they were up in smoke with a metal plane sticking out the side of it.

Jay had his hand on the top of his head pushing back his little spikes of hair and he seemed to be exploring the thoughts inside his head with alarm. He told us that parents would be picking us up or we would get home somehow, maybe by a teacher. Kids started disappearing as parents appeared. And then my dad came. I felt protected at that moment, like maybe we weren’t all going to die.

People scurried outside while hints of the beautiful day still slightly remained. I heard a deep silence in New York City. Rare, I think to this day, that all the noise, pollution of cars and people would disappear for a period of time. I would remember it though, all the way home, people walking in silence through the park next to the road on the slim sidewalk, walking to Broadway, and making our way home. I had to keep reassuring myself that we weren’t all going to die; that a plane wasn’t going to attack all of New York. I remembered how before we left school, Jay had announced there was a second plane that hit the second tower, and that he felt our parents should explain everything to us. I didn’t want to break the tense silence between me and my dad on the way home, which might as well have been between me and all of New York. I couldn’t comprehend anything going on until I got home. I just knew it must have been serious if we had to leave school.

That night, I tucked under my mom’s arm with my knees pulled into my chest, making myself a ball while she watched the news and the horrible clip of my two dreams falling apart, dying. Finally, I asked what had been on my mind the whole day, “Mommy, are we going to die too? Are the planes going to crash into our apartment too?” My mom looked somewhat horrified. But she replied in a calm voice, “No, they have no interest in us. They were trying to get back at our government. They think our government did something wrong to them."

“Oh,” I replied, but what was really on my mind was, did the people in the towers do anything wrong to them? Did the people on the planes that crashed do anything wrong to them? I was afraid to go to sleep, and I heard planes overhead all night in the dark sky, which always made me jump. I wanted to cry for the people who died. But I didn’t because I thought I needed to be strong.

A few years later, my mom showed me some of my old work she had found in a drawer in my room. It was from the pre-K or maybe it was from kindergarten. It was a story I had dictated about a picture I had drawn. I remembered it vaguely. It was about something bad that made the Twin Towers start to fall over, but the big wind came and blew it back into place. I had drawn this picture and told this story before anyone had any idea that the Twin Towers might be in danger.

Now that more years have passed, people often share their stories and experience of that day. We all remember that perfect blue morning, turned to disaster.

Seven Million Wonders

"There are no seven wonders in the eyes of a child. There are seven million." --Walt Streightiff

My daughter takes portaits of herself, as if she's trying to fathom who she is, how she appears to the world. "Your daughter is strange," she noted on seeing this picture. Strange and wonderful.

Subway Day, Coney Island Night

Sometimes, all it takes to get in the flow of your life is to say yes to an invitation.

On Friday, we closed early at work for the Labor Day weekend. It was the last weekend of freedom for my daughter and her friends, all of whom start school next Wednesday. She wanted to go to the beach. She and two friends and their mothers are creating a tradition of going to the beach on the last weekend of summer. I say creating because last year was the first time they did it, but they had so much fun they promised one another to do it every year. I love these kids, who have been my daughter's friends since they were all 5 years old, and I love their mothers, who have become dear friends of mine over the years. But I wasn't able to go on their beach outing last year; work intervened. So when my daughter begged me to join them this year, I decided nothing would stop me.

Problem was, I had to finish editing a story with a writer who is particularly painstaking and this was our last round before the story shipped. This woman is actually my favorite writer to work with. I love her work ethic and microscopic attention to content, her insistence on testing and testing and testing the voice and development and internal integrity of a piece. It matches my own preferred way of working as an editor, which is really old school in the current fast paced environment of publishing, but this writer and I have preserved a corner in which we can still work in this way. And you know what? Our stories always win awards. Every single year, we collect an small armful of plaques for the stories we worked on together.

Since we both believe this story we're working on will be another award winner, I didn't want to give it short shrift. Plus it's a heartwrenching subject (can say what here; it would be tanatamount to giving away state secrets). Suffice it to say, I was experiencing one of those moments when you're determined to do everything fully, and maybe there aren't enough minutes in the hours to make it work. But I managed to finish up and dart out at 4:30 to meet the crew on the R-train platform. We were headed to Coney Island.

I hadn't even told my husband I was going. I texted him from the subway: "On the train to Coney Island with ______." He texted back: "You're on the train??? How did that happen?!" My dislike of the subway is famous. I am known for traveling the city in yellow cabs instead. For me it's moments of meditation (inside a taxi all my own) versus moments of claustrophia and hectic-ness (inside a crowded subway car). I wrote: "My daughter asked and the company is great." He sent back: "Our daughter is really working this only child angle!"--a reference to our son being away at college and our girl having us all to herself. He added: "Have fun."

The others were laden with bathing suits and blankets and towels and snacks. All I had was my two empty hands. It didn't matter. I bought everyone bottled water on the boardwalk, and we set up on the sand near the water. Lounging on blankets, the three 15-year-olds, two girls and a boy, munched on corn on the cob and peanut butter sandwiches and fruit and boiled eggs, while their mothers settled back to catch up on our week. The conversation was easy and meandering. While the teenagers were in the water, we shared stories of crazy things we'd done in our youth, changing the subject when our children arrived back and flopped down next to us, picking it up again when they left to stroll the boardwalk.

At one point, another text came in on my phone. It was from the writer I'd worked with earlier. She wrote: "That was a great edit today." Somehow, that added to the moment I was having. It was just beautiful on the sand as the dusk came down. The air was cool and salty. In the near distance, the lights from the huge Coney Island ferris wheel were a glittering circle, and the neon from the other rides dotted the night. The moon rose full over the water, and on beach and boardwalk and pier, every type of humanity was illuminated by it.

On towards eight-thirty, the kids came back from their adventure on the boardwalk, brimming with stories of odd characters and sponteous events that had transpired there. The fell against us, each child leaning againt his or her mother, comfortable and dozing in and out of the chatter. We mothers smiled at one another as we stroked their heads, each of us aware that this breezy evening under the moon, the waves breaking hypnotically against the sand, the carnival music and lights in the distance, was special.

We tried to wait for the fireworks, which happen every Friday night in summer. By nine, the beach was crowded with locals and tourists encamped for the display. But it was delayed because of the minor league baseball game at the stadium way down the beach. Finally, near ten, we gathered up our blankets and towels and bags and headed back to the subway. Waiting on the elevated platform for the train back to the city, we suddenly saw the sky explode with blooms of color and light. The fireworks had begun, and from where we stood on the N-train platform, we had a thrilling wide-angle view. It seemed even better watching from the subway platform with other straphangers; it was more authentically New York somehow.

Afterwards, we took the train back to Manhattan, arriving home near midnight. My daughter and I jumped onto the bed, waking my husband, who had been asleep. We regaled him with stories and he teased me again about actually getting on the subway. Soon, my girl went off to check her Facebook and I drifted off to sleep. It was, all in all, a really good day.

Slipstream

I can't sort out what I'm feeling these days, but here's what's salient. 1) My son is a freshman in college. He doesn't call. I guess that means he's adjusting fine. 2) My niece, the recent college graduate, moved in with us till she can find an apartment. She got a great job at a great salary and is thrilled to finally be living in New York. 3) My mom is here, in her treehouse apartment across the way (I call it that because the tree tops brush her window in a lush display). I try to see her every day, as she's emotionally steadier when I do. But sometimes, that means turning the hours inside out to create the time. 4) My daughter is spending a lot of time with her different circles of friends. Lots of different influences there. I need to stay connected. 5) Money is more tight than it has ever been, and I am not appropriately stressed about this. 6) My being in the office 5 days a week has me losing touch with friends, and with the necessary errands of my life. I mourn for the years when I worked two days from home. How do people do their lives working till eight or nine or even later every evening? Not possible. 7) Mostly, I miss my son. And I'm brooding on the fact that I will never again have a full view of his life. Just as my parents didn't know the half, or even the quarter, of what my life was like after I left home for college. 8) Lots of feelings, all of them streaming together. Confused.

The Story of Us

No time to write much today, work and my inner life are particularly intense, but I wanted to note that my husband and I celebrated 23 years of marriage on Sunday last. We watched our grainy wedding video and marveled at how cute we both used to be, and didn't even know it. Oh my, he was handsome and swoon-worthy. And I still see that guy when I look at him now. Curiously, watching that video has fueled a deeper intimacy between us this week. I think it reminded us, in the midst of all the stress and wall to wall demands of children and elders and work, of what it felt like to be chosen. As self-indulgent and corny as that sounds, going off into the daydream of us falling in love has been the bright spot of my crazy, anxious, too-many-things-to-get-done-all-at-once week.

Beauties in the Pool

My mom (blue suit with white straps and red stripe, hair pulled back) and my aunt went swimming in my cousin's pool on a hot day in Jamaica. My brother e-mailed these snapshots to me this afternoon. My mom, by the way, is 87 years old and her baby sister, the one sporting those fly shades, is 84. These lovely ladies know how to seize the day!